Uncomfortable Places I've Slept

 

Wildcat Mountain, Frost Valley, New York

 I’d found Wildcat Mountain years before when working at a group home that took the kids to a camp during winter. It’s a comfortable mountain full of trails and a cable bridge across a creek, bluffs, and many places to hide out, along with a huge open field. I camped there for a month in the late 80s.

My first night, I found a spot off one of the side trails, certain I wouldn’t be seen or heard. I had a secondhand tent that smelled of mold no matter what I did to it, but I’d gotten used to, if not happy with the smell. After setup I sat on a bluff over the field and watched the shadows from the trees behind me lengthen and then take over.

I was awake for a while after dark, reading Gary Snyder’s The Old Ways by battery lamp. I fell into a dreamy sleep involving Neil Young (I’d sung “After the Gold Rush” to myself while on the bluff). I was wakened by a noise. I couldn’t place it but I sat up, listening for another.

Not long to wait. Another, nearer sound came from just outside the tent. The scant moonlight allowed me to see one edge of the tent buckle, like a finger or a fist was pushing it in slowly, then suddenly withdraw. Then another sound I still couldn’t identify, and another part of the tent buckled, then just as quickly returned to place.

I didn’t dare turn on the light. I didn’t know who might have found my camp or what reason they might have to bother me, but in my imagination, it was any number of dangerous killers high on coke who happened across me and wanted, if just for fun, to frighten me.

Beside me on the floor was a survival knife I’d been given, one of those long-bladed monstrosities with which you could fillet a fish, tell the direction you were facing, unscrew the handle to access the small sawblade and fishing line, crack open a beer, and presumably fight off nefarious attackers. I slid it silently as I could from its sheath and crept slowly to the front of the tent. Other spots on the tent continued those sounds and their pushing in and letting out.

Experiences like this led me later to conclude that if you have a weapon, you’ll find a reason to use it. I unzipped the tent door, screamed as loudly as I could, and, brandishing my knife, flailed into the open,. In my mind, I was Conan facing a squadron of cannibalistic enemies. Realistically, I was a naked, shivering man with wild hair watching the fast-retreating white tails of several deer in the dim light. The noise had been their sniffing at the moldy smell and their snorting challenges at my invasion of their trail to the creek.

Uncomfortable Places I Have Slept

 

US Interstates 41, 24 and 75 Between Terre Haute, IN and Atlanta

I've decided to focus my current writing on the places I've slept in that were not comfortable, physically or otherwise. This is the most recent. Our family, my wife, her mother, and I, made a very sudden decision to move from the Midwest to Macon, GA to both avoid the cold and the Seasonal Affective Disorder from which we all suffer. This involved my retirement so I could collect social security and selling our home by Lake Michigan, packing two homes’ worth of belongings and furniture, buying a new home in Georgia, and preparing a new and more southern mindset.

I donated 900 books from my library to a friend who had opened a used bookstore in the city. We gave away hundreds of dollars in clothing, appliances, equipment, as well as throwing away a lot. At one point, we hired a company to haul away junk from our garage. We segregated what we were tossing and what we were keeping and Jayne, who was home when they came by, pointed out the corner of the garage where the toss pile sat. But they took everything, including wheelbarrows, tools, bicycles (fortunately the ones we were moving with were in the basement), even shovels and rakes. Who takes shovels and rakes?

The weeks between our decision, finding an appropriate new home and selling ours seemed very, very slow but in retrospect they went incredibly quickly, and the day we closed on the sale of our house the company moving our belongings was packed by about 3, we loaded all 11 of our dogs and cats in my wife’s larger car, signed the papers, and drove 17 hours to make it to the signing for our new home in Macon at 10 the next morning. We made it there at exactly 10.

My wife doesn’t much like it when I drive so she did most of it, sleeping only when she felt exhausted. I was crumpled in the front seat, but as I’ve proved over and over, I can sleep nearly anywhere and in any position. Once the sun went down and we’d passed through Illinois, I slept off and on with a few waking periods. The photo above shows my wife driving with one of our dogs on her lap throughout the journey. Because I had the greater freedom, I rode with 2 of our dogs on my lap, only to discover, about the time we reached the northern outskirts of Atlanta, that one of them had been incontinent in his sleep. I attended the closing on our home in a pair of pants with a long dark pee spot down the left leg, which was indicative of our new journey as possible.

The company is good

I don't remember where I got this book, but I do remember looking at it several times before actually buying it. I finished reading it last night after several years of picking it up, reading a few chapters, and putting it back down. That's often how I read novels nowadays, in short spurts that add up. 

I wasn't always impressed by the writing--too thick in places, like an overfilled pastry, where what I want is simpler, smoother--but when I was I was deeply impressed. 

<Faith spreads the blanket over the piano. At the woodpile, she balances a log on the chopping block and hoists the ax over her head, her belly pushing her off balance. Then a contraction comes and she drops the ax. Has Ray ever said the word love? Has he ever praised Faith's beauty, or has he ever held her and whispered with his lips against her hair? How could he say those things to her last night? How could he say all the things he ever said to her? 

Balancing the wood, bringing down the ax, she stops crying and gets furious. Over and over, she thinks, He has no right. She leans into the chopping, panting, fierce. The effort seems to lessen the pain. He has no right. The words fit with the rhythm of her chopping. Ugly words, from the very start. You can watch TV if you fuck me first.>

This is the author, Goldberry Long (I may have finally chosen to buy this book simply for its author's name), describing the titular character's mother, hugely pregnant with Juniper's brother Sunny Boy Blue who will, in the first sentence of the book, throw himself off a ferry on its journey between Seattle and Bainbridge Island, setting in motion the frantic, furious memories and flight of the narrator. Sunny called information from a bar on the wharf, written her number and the name Juniper Tree Burning, on the wall next to the payphone, and then thrown himself into the spray. That last sentence above is the way both she and runaway husband Ray remember as the first words he said on meeting Faith. Juniper, now living under the name Jennifer, a medical student and newly married, has a last memory of Sunny that's damaging: Sunny Boy Blue, the Backward Boy, full of cigarettes and vodka and a constant hack, kidnapped her from her own wedding for her gifts. A book of photographs and gasoline-soaked tennis balls, lit and dropped into the Rio Grande. 

Later, when she leaves her husband in a panic, Jenny kidnaps her own jilted bride, Sarah, who will become her best friend, her sparring partner, and eventually, in some ways, her salvation. Together, like some mix of Runaway Bride and Thelma and Louise, but sans the violence or abuse, they are in search of...something. It's never really clear. But the drive is picturesque and the company good.

There are issues, of course, many of them. Much of the novel is told in flashback, sometimes from Jennifer's and sometimes Juniper's perspective, while much of the present is in present tense, sometimes by Jennifer, sometimes Juniper, sometimes an insistent third person narrator. None of that is an issue, and frankly I think Long did a good job with her self-determined unreliable narrator. 

But there are questions we end up with: The above-mentioned thick writing, so winning in places, slows down the reading of the last chapters, when Jenny/Juniper is actually moving very fast and very chaotically, and I found myself skipping large patches of text to match my reading with the action. How did Sunny Blue Boy develop from terminally coughing, sickly, piss-smelling child to often drunk, chain-smoking, world-traveling, charming speaker of several languages? In addition to Sunny, Juniper's hippie parents, disappointed mother and dissolute father, show up to the ceremony and, except for figuring heavily in the flashbacks, then disappear from the narrative. Granted, the time in the present is only a few days, but she doesn't call or even think of them in the present. And Maggie, bar-owning mechanic, where does her incredible anger toward Jennifer come from? 

But here is what Long gets right. First, there's a happy ending, and novels just don't often have happy endings any longer. (No, it doesn't involve Sunny. He remains dead.) And then this, which I didn't read until after finishing the book but which explains to me why I stayed with it for years. Not a part of the narrative, but a Note From the Author tacked onto the Reading Group Guide in my edition: 

It seems to me there are many fine books about the angry young man taking his journey of self-discovery across the American landscape. There are few, however, about the angry young woman.

Now that was worth the getting through. 

 

I just like it

I've enjoyed comic books since I was a child. Hardly a revolutionary or unique statement, you can find any number of blogs and websites devoted to reading and appreciating them. You probably grew up with them too. But I have a special set of memories for the comics of the 60s and 70s, when I was most impressionable. They say the music you loved when you were 14 (David Bowie, in my case) is the music you'll love the rest of your life.

Because I read not just the comics of that period but reprints of earlier comics, strips, pulps, I enjoy the mystery around the Alan Moore League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series. The mystery comes from the sense I get reading a panel and trying to work out who is being referred to, who is being depicted, what situation is being faced. It's a little harder (and thus more thrilling) to me because most of his references are from British comics and media, which I'm not always familiar with. When I was a tween, I bought a stack of Punch magazines from the 70s, and tried understanding the references and satires of political figures. It was the progenitor of what Graydon Carter and Kurt Anderson wanted to make Spy for 80s and 90s America (and to a large degree succeeded). But what I mostly understood from Punch were the comics.

A compendium like this is wonderful for figuring out who is who, what image is being suggested, how an otherwise dissociative series of events (say, the voyages of Gulliver and the fascism of Big Brother) might lead to one another. It's as if Moore took The Avenger from the pulps, images from New Yorker cartoons, Major Hoople, Egghead, Angio Maggio, Dorothy Gale, Richard Diamond, Percy Dovetonsils, and slammed them all together in William Burroughs' Freeland. (Here too, I loved Philip Jose Farmer's Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life whose family tree of the Wold Newton universe was an early example I devoured with pleasure.)

All told, I'm sorry to see that the series is ending, but all good things of course. And this essay is a good wrap-up of the wrap-up.

We will survive

I have long thought of myself as a basically optimistic person. The ascension and glorification of the trumpian model for government has made a considerable dent in that, as does this authoritative analysis sounding contemporary civilization's death knell. But I feel that optimism reborn while reading this essay.

It's true, we do have a history as a species of resilience and adaptation in the face of near-total destruction. While it's tempting to think of the responses by the majority of a populace to allow problems to accumulate until there's nothing left to be done, there are a lot of other people who, in the author's words, "use the meager acknowledgement of our knack for survival as a launch point for innovation and change," from the development of biodomes to electric cars to more resilient crops. She's right, we aren't starting from scratch. We have thousands of years of experience to draw on to counter "fluctuations in climate that [left] humans and animals...to deal with...droughts, floods, extinctions, and collapses of entire civilizations." 

One book I read some time back serves me as a reminder of the 7th Generation Principle of the Iroquois. Morris Berman's The Twilight of American Culture reminds us that, as the Dark Ages flowed crepuscularly around whole societies and cultures to finally drag all of Europe back to a period of malignancy and savagery, there were small clumps of individuals, most of them monks of one kind or another, who carved out little niches (sometimes literally) to keep learning and acquired knowledge from disappearing. And there are earlier examples, from the Rosetta Stone to the Dead Sea Scrolls, of groups caching important works for future, less reactionary generations to find. 

This should give us positive pause, the recognition that the billions of lives on Earth are ourselves the descendents of adaptive groups. And each time we seem to have gone on to, if not always better, newer times.

Nostalgia in a box

I've been doing jigsaw puzzles lately, sometimes with my mother-in-law who turns out to enjoy them and will stay up until all hours doing them. This is one I'd bought last winter for my wife and I to do on cold nights.

It's difficult to see, but the subject is girls' adventure books of the early 20th century, and what interests me is the depth of nostalgia I found as I was putting it together. I used to read the boys' version of these when I was what we now call a tween. While I can't say I remember them well, I do remember the sense of, if not adventure, then of calm they gave me. I'm certain what both boys and girls series were intended to do was to give growing kids the sense of optimism about their future. If these misfit characters--in the above examples, The Girl Who Lost Things or The Worst Girl in the School; in my memories, Smilin' Jack and Red Ryder and Little Beaver and the Rover Boys, Paladin, even Mickey Mouse--could grow up into some sense of normalcy, defined in the novels a sense of belonging both to society at large and a smaller community of people who looked up to and appreciated the misfit, then I certainly could.

For me, these were eventually supplanted by the Whitman Big Little Books of the late 60s and early 70s, featuring more contemporary characters like Batman or Major Matt Mason or Frankenstein, Jr.

What I remember best about these series was the inclusion of death in them: the killing of a strangely behaving mouse in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., the deaths of some of The Invaders, the deaths by shootout of typical bad guys in Bonanza. These led me to the Doc Savage and The Shadow novels republished in the early 70s and a mainstay of the drugstore book racks. In them, death was a constant, both for the unwary and ultimately for the villain. Someone not paying the right attention or meddling where he didn't belong could become the victim of the machinations of an unscrupulous would-be world conqueror or petty criminal, eventually given his comeuppance by the hero.

Dick's Trump

I'll admit it, I've been overwhelmed by events to the point where it's nearly impossible to keep up. The speed with which the Trump administration is unraveling is dizzying. Every day brings with it another eye-opening, jaw-dropping revelation that the citizens of the United States actively brought ourselves under a would-be oligarchy's diktat. Our only saving grace is that it was unprepared and is led by an undisciplined sufferer of affluenza.

Make no mistake: I'm glad for that. It's to our advantage that Trump is more Berlusconi than Putin. That it will implode is a given. It may not end in the bloodless coup in which the entire crony crew and family depart on Air Force One for asylum in the Ukraine in the middle of the night with only the clothes on their backs that I hope for, but that it will end ignominiously is certain. America doesn't imprison our wealthy so we won't see that. But oh how satisfying that would be.

The end of the last year saw me reading Philip K. Dick. That Dick is a writer for the paranoid is a truism that's reached the point of pointlessness. But it's still worth remembering that, while he saw filaments of his own chaotic anger and mistook them for the culture's, they were nonetheless wide-ranging enough to be understood as cultural as well as personal.

Radio Free Albemuth is, I think, the fourth Dick novel I've read, and fits so snugly into the narrative of a President Trump to fuel suggestions not only of Dick's paranoia but his prescience. I'm hardly the first to note the similarities between Ferris Fremont, his version of Richard Nixon, and Trump, and frankly the differences are more disturbing because of what it says about the American people. While Trump's ascendence to the presidency is not as planned or controlled as Fremont's--he didn't arrive in the wake of a mandate, for instance, although his supporters were and are seeking something outside the political norm, which is a kind of unifying position (but not capable of being acted on, the equivalent of rallying behind someone holding a sign that says "Follow Me!")--the effects after he takes office are as disturbing.

No one had put a pistol to Ferris Fremont’s head. He was the pistol itself, pointed at our head. Pointed at the people who had elected him." 

Is there a better descriptor for Trump than a pistol held to the brows of his own supporters?

The heart is filled by water

I used to think of myself as a forest person. I grew up in the woods of upstate New York, and one of my first memories of sheer joy was taking off shoes and socks and wading in the the stream behind the garages and down the steep bank. The stream, a distant cousin to the stronger Agawamik Creek further north, flowed lazily along the north end of our property and it was full of crawfish and tadpoles and water skippers and picked up speed as it narrowed. It was cool and wet and in places you had to look hard through foliage to see it. That's how I saw the world then, as something where things were hidden by nature and to find them you had to look hard.

I started thinking more like what Bill Holms called a prairie person when I studied poetry with him in graduate school in Minnesota. Things were still hidden in that view, but because they were closer to the earth, often right underfoot. You didn't have to look hard, you just had to notice them. Now I live on the edge of a Great Lake, which is like a moist prairie in what things aren't hidden but you do need to notice them. I often start my barefoot walking starting with the grassy hill about a half mile from my home that runs down to the beach and then northward for a mile or two, before disappearing under a pier and the weight of local businesses.

I've written of the jolt of recognition I experienced when I realized that, in doing this, I've come to live out the dream I had for myself 30-odd years ago. I've lived in several river towns--in the east and midwest it's almost impossible not to. Lakeside living was never something I had experienced before moving here, and in the winter especially I cherish it. In the forest, nothing ever seems dead in the winter; on the prairie, everything seemed dead when covered with two feet of snow, ice, and bitter wind; here on the Lake, there is a sound of life all winter long, even when the ice shelf covers a mile and a half from the beach, the regular pulse of water coming in and going out, helping me to breathe through the winter.

What brings all this thinking on is having read Terry Tempest Williams' An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field. I hadn't read a book by nature essayists in a long while, and since I picked that up I've gone back to Gary Snyder's Practice of the Wild, an old essay collection from Anteus someone sent me decades ago, Peter Jenkins' A Walk Across America, Bill's The Heart Can be Filled Anywhere on Earth: Minneota, Minnesota, books about not only wandering around in the woods but stopping to look closely at what you're walking among and on. I expect I'll even go back to Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the one that began it all for me. I have a first edition I picked up somewhere on whim 40 years ago that is so water- and sun-logged, its sleeve long since shredded memory, whatever value there might be to it rests in what the cost to recycling the paper might be.

"Simply being present"

The past month and change has been one of deaths, some personal, some better known, some metaphorical and emotional. Thus, this seems a perfect time to post this reading from Parker Palmer's A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life.

When we sit with a dying person, we gain two critical insights into what it means to "be alone together." First, we realize that we must abandon the arrogance that often distorts our relationships--the arrogance of beleiving that we have the answer to the other person's problem. When we sit with a dying person, we understand that what is before us is not a "problem to be solved" but a mystery to be honored. As we find a way to stand respectfully on the edge of that mystery, we start to see that all of our relationships would be deepened if we could play the fixer role less frequently. 

Second, when we sit with a dying person, we realize that we must overcome the fear that often distorts our relationships--the fear that causes us to turn away when the other reveals something too vexing, painful, or ugly to bear. Death may be all of this and more. And yet we hold the dying person in our gaze, our hearts, our prayers, knowing that it would be disrespectful to avert our eyes, that the only gift we have to offer in this moment is our undivided attention.

When people sit with a dying person, they know that they are doing more than taking up space in the room. But if you ask them to describe what that "more" is, they have a hard time finding the right words. And when the words come, they are almost always some variant on "I was simply being present." 

We learn to "practice presence" when we sit with a dying person--to treat the space between us as sacred, to honor the soul and its destiny. Our honoring may be wordless or perhaps mediated by speech that the dying person cannot hear. Yet this honoring somehow keeps us connected as we bear witness to another's journey into the ultimate solitude. 

A little Friday morning reading

I've enjoyed Neil Gaiman's writing for years, and I'm interested in trying to binge-watch the new series American Gods after it's gotten good and going. (I've tried several times to binge-watch shows--The Man in the High Castle, Penny Dreadful, Dark Matter--but I couldn't watch any past the first season; they always disappointed.) Anyhow, I really liked American Gods my first reading and intend to reread it before watching the shows as I don't remember many details (and the trailers remind me I've forgotten more than I'd thought), and I want to get in on this binge-watching thing that everyone, including my wife, has been doing.

I've been reading much about how several TV shows now are especially relevent as they give insights into Life Under Trumpism, and especially American Gods and The Handmaid's Tale. But for the Gaiman book, I read a very good interview in which he says the following:

I have this mad theory about American elections. There is a reality-TV quality to them, in that they tend to go to what people think would probably be the most interesting story. “Who’s more interesting? Who’s a better story? Bob Dole or Bill Clinton? Let’s go for Clinton, it’ll be more interesting!” And there is that point where you’re going, “Okay, so is it Hillary, who still feels kind of like a rerun? Or is it Trump?” Even articulating that as a theory means that people are going to mishear what I’ve said. It will turn into a clickbait headline and people will be going, “You said that Trump was a better story!” No. I think Trump is an out-of-his-depth idiot. Who is possibly criminal. And certainly incompetent. I think that, actually, having a sane and functional right wing is a good thing. Having what we’ve got right now is a bad thing.

When the novel was written, it was written about America as a country of immigrants, of people who either came here of their own free will, or escaped here, or were brought here against their will. And what that meant — talking about the religious traditions and talking about the cultural traditions and talking about what that became. And having a lead character who was racially — and in all other ways — a melting pot. That, when I wrote the novel, didn’t seem to me to be particularly problematic, difficult, or even praiseworthy! Things that I did not think were praiseworthy or sensible included writing about indentured servants and transportation. Writing about the slave trade. Writing about a gay, Muslim salesman encountering a genie who drives a cab in New York.

I wasn’t doing it for the credit. I was doing it because it all feels right if you’re talking about America. Suddenly, Trump came in and now I’m reading articles in Vanity Fair about, “This is the most political stuff you’ve ever seen.” Well, I guess that’s all true, but it’s not like we sat down and went, We are the opposition. We simply started telling our fucking story and then the world changed. It would be like telling a pro-Jewish story in Berlin in the 1930s, and suddenly you’re looking around going, “We’re apparently doing something big and important.”

 Oddly, this theory of his comforts me, as the idea that we love a good, juicy story is a lot more appealing than that we like chaos and incomepetence. It's certainly played out at times in American electoral history (although it's important to remember we never had Presidents Bryant or Long), and if it's true it suggests that, like all the other times, most of us will get through it. Of course, some of us won't. And it's for those the rest of us must act up.

Your silence will not protect you

To say I remember Audre Lorde fondly may seem like an odd thing--her messages were intended to generate nearly every kind of feedback except fondness--but in her I had the sensation of a fellow-traveler, a black, lesbian me who could write better and had a better sense of what it was she fought. She wrote in 1977 in "The Transformation of Silence into Languge and Action":

To question or to speak...could have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change or end. Death, on the other hand, is the final silence. And that might be coming quickly now [she had been diagnosed with breast cancer and then with liver cancer], without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said, or had only betrayed myself into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for someone else’s words.

 I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.

What fascists share

If we would name the coming Trump presidency as a political entity twitching with fascistic life, then it's incumbent on us to take into account the experiences and explanations provided for us by people who actually lived through and grew up in fascistic regimes, like Umberto Eco. I love Eco's novels (or used to, I haven't taken the time to read one in at least a decade) but his primary field was semiotics, the explanation for how words and symbols mean. And it's in that vein that he tried to articulate what fascism is comprised of.

Not everyone can take the time or effort to read Eco, I know, and I am one of those lazy eggheads who can do so. I also flatter myself I can make him understandable. So here is my condensation of Eco from twenty years ago explaining Ur-Fascism, that is, what all fascisms have in common (my emphases):

1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition...[P]eople of different religions...started dreaming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history. This revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten languages...As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism. Both Fascists and Nazis worshiped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values...The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.4. ...For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.5. Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity. Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.6. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. 7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country...Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. 8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies... However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. 9. For Ur-Fascism...pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare.10. Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people of the world, the members of the party are the best among the citizens, every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party. But there cannot be patricians without plebeians....[who] are so weak as to need and deserve a ruler. 11. In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero. In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons—doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.13. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism...In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view—one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. 14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak...All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk [or reality] show.

258 candles-day 156

I belong to a Facebook page devoted to current and past Barnes and Noble booksellers and this afternoon a member from the Anchorage, Alaska, store posted that a woman came in and bought every coloring book in "the vestibule"--the large display near the cash registers--to donate to local schools. It is this sort of selfless action that makes me proud to be human.

258 candles-day 112

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: I'm not much of a Harry Potter fan. I read the first novel, enjoyed it, but never read any of the others. I've seen most of the movies here and there, or at least big parts of them. I consider them contemporary classics, although unlike Twain's definition, they are usually read. But I am a J.K. Rowling fan. Her story has been an inspiration to me, and her purposeful near-total giveaway of much of her Potter-money is what I'd call genuine spirituality. I'm not likely to pick up another of her books, but I am likely to keep her life in sight.

258 candles-days 102-109

Herein I offer my confession, that like so many others, and despite my safeguards and attempts at being different, I have caught myself arguing with friends who are more or less on the same side politically as I am, but whose choice of candidate is different and whose method of explaining why it's the superior choice involves demonizing the opposing candidate. My realization involves something like this great story Anne Lamott tells in Travelling Mercies:

She was in a wheelchair, wearing a wig to cover her baldness, weighing almost no pounds, but very serene, very alive. We were at Macy’s. I was modeling a short dress for her that I thought my boyfriend would like.

But then I asked whether it made me look big in the hips, and Pammy said, as clear and kind as a woman can be, “Annie? You really don’t have that kind of time.” 

I don't have that kind of time. None of us has that kind of time. In the immortal words of Toni Childs, Stop your fussin'.

258 candles-day 34

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: When I was on the road, libraries were often refuges for me. Even before the Internet Age, they were a place I could clean up, relax, catch up on events. I could indulge myself, which is an extravagance all of us deserve.

258 candles-day 21

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: A primer on the Growth Trap of the New, Digital Economy. 

"They promised us poetry! Where's the poetry!"

As I've mentioned before, I have been reading this book for over three decades. I finished it on the most recent New Year's Eve, just a few hours short of midnight, determined that I should not carry it around another year, or let it become four decades.

Do I recall much of the plot? No, but I don't think that matters much. What I retain is the flavor of post-war Paris, or at least as De Beauvoir and her circle experienced it. As I've also said before, I like to envision myself living the life of a commentator on what goes on in people's daily lives, noting the minutia of street and cafe life. I'm currently reading The Mauve Decade by Thomas Beers and Absolute Friends by John Le Carre, both of which provide glimpses into lives and times I couldn't otherwise know anything about, early 21st century cultural life in the case of the former, mid-century British post-colonial individual experience in the latter. I've often pointed out, to myself if no one else, the reason I read is to experience lives I couldn't otherwise.

This is the passage that, in my final days of reading The Mandarins, resonated most with me. In it I hear the sound of what it was like in those days in that place.

The Communist papers had announced the reading of a masterpiece in four acts and six scenes in which Lenoir "reconciles the demands of pure poetry with the concern for delivering a broadly human message to mankind." Julien intended to sabotage the meeting in the name of the old para-human group. In the articles written by Lenoir since his conversion, there was such a servile fanaticism, and he had put his friends and his own past on trial with such malignant zeal, that Henri was looking forward without displeasure to seeing him put in his place...
The auditorium was overflowing. The whole Communist intelligentsia was gathered together--all the old guard and many new recruits. A year earlier, many of those neophytes were indignantly denouncing the errors and faults of the Communists. And then suddenly, in November, they understood--they understood that it could help to belong to the Party. Henri went down the centre aisle in search of a seat and, as he passed, faces filled with hateful disdain. In that respect, Samazelle was right: they weren't the least appreciative of his honesty. All the year long, he had laboured mightily defending L'Espoir against the pressures of the Gaullists, had firmly taken his stand against the war in Indo-China, against the arrest of the Madagascan deputies, against the Marshall Plan. All in all, he had taken exactly the same position as theirs, but that didn't stop them from calling him a liar and a traitor. He went as far as the front rows. Scriassine looked up at him and smiled, but the young people grouped around Julien eyed Henri with hostility. He retraced his steps and sat down on a stairway in the back of the auditorium.

Eventually Lenoir reads a very dull, very conventional poetry/play that is broken up by shouting from Julien and his supporters, in which Henri joins. As he leaves the place later, he's joined by Lambert, a fixture at L'Espoir, who says, "I was hoping it would be more fun." Henri replies, "As a matter of fact, it wasn't any fun at all." The cause of writing and what it was meant to accomplish, and how, is deadly serious in this time and in this place, and even the disruption of an opposing faction is political and deadly serious. I can't say I miss that but being in the center of a situation where the reading of "a scene written in Alexandrine metre [in which a] young man was bemoaning his melancholy state...Parents, teachers, friends, each urged resignation, but he swept aside all bourgeois temptations while a chorus commented on his departure in sibylline stanzas..." That such an entertainment could overflow an auditorium, think of how seeing that must feel. I don't want to attribute it to some Gilded Literary Past in which the Word takes on divine powers--the audience is there more out of a sense of duty, some at witnessing the spectacle and some at making it a farce. But that enough people had read about it and cared enough to show up for whichever reason: Now there is something.

no place like Manny's

I've written before about my years working in bookselling, and as a result of those years I am registered with a Facebook page for booksellers. This morning, one member posted a photo of how one section of store looked after an evening with fewer staff than usual and more customers than usual, and the ensuing chaos that she came in to today. It got me to reminiscing about Manny's.


The photo above doesn't do justice to how chaotic Manny's Art Supply was. In the 80s in New Paltz, it was given better than half over to used books. There was no pretense at arranging books in order by type or author or anything. The story was, and I believe this to be true because I heard it from a seller who watched him do it, that Manny bought books by the boxload and then simply placed them, handfuls at a time, on whatever shelves had room.


Manny's was an institution before I ever arrived, and by the time I was there the front of the store was devoted to the eponymous art supplies for which every local art student and artist came. But the rear of the store was for me the real joy. Thousands and thousands and thousands of books on hundreds of shelves scattered everywhere. More thousands in piles on the floor. Poor, sometimes non-existent lighting; I remember postponing looking over an area until an afternoon when the sun would peek through the south-facing windows and illuminate the stacks.


The prices couldn't be beat. I bought my first Oxford Bible there, a hardcover (I still have it) from the 60s, for less than a dollar. My first acquisition to what would eventually become my collection of first edition counterculture books was Applegather by John Bart Gerald (or, as it was on the cover, johnbartgerald), and it was 25 cents. I now mourn the giving away of my copy and hope the recipient--a guy I met at a dance conference that same summer--appreciated it.


There was a method to looking for books. You never went in looking for something specific because there was no way to tell, if it was there, where it would be. You started at the first set of eight foot shelves horizontal to the eastern wall, of which there were four in pairs, then the shelves running against the rest of the east wall. Then you moved to the free-standing shelving front and back in the middle of the space. Then the shelves against the central pillar which held the aborted attempt to separate mass market paperbacks from everything else. Then the shelves running along the north wall, and up against the adjoining western wall, to the next room, where you did the same thing, in roughly the same order.


Along the way, you'd read the dozens of hand-written index cards thumbtacked to the ends of rows and along shelves. The cards would be jokes Manny had heard, little bits of everyday advice, comments about Frieda, his wife and business partner, or observations Manny made. Eventually you'd end at the far southern end of the shelving against the western wall which terminated abutting the counters of art papers. You could conceivably make the whole circuit in a single afternoon, but why would you want to? You couldn't do it and scan every title or open volumes at leisure and read a couple pages (or the back copy of books) to determine what you wanted to add to an ever-growing pile or, in my case, to determine you would stop there and buy this one today, knowing you'd find what you wanted sometime, not knowing at that time it was what you wanted. When you did complete the circuit, maybe weeks later, you'd start over again at the first shelf since, in the meantime Manny had bought dozens more books and slipped them in, sometimes a copy at a time, wherever he found room. Sometimes someone would get diligent or the fire marshal had visited and declared the piles couldn't remain on the floor, so there would be a new set of shelves erected and holding a number of books whose titles you'd only read vertically and now, reading them horizontally, you'd discover there was a book you'd always wanted to read, there was a title you couldn't get out of your head, there was an author you'd just heard of, maybe this was something good to start with.


Today, Manny's is cleaned up. The bookshelves are gone. Manny is dead, Frieda rarely has time to show up, and while it's owned and run by family, it isn't the same. It's run for profit now, which isn't a bad thing, of course. But it's not the same. It was a once-in-a-lifetime sort of place, one of those things you'd find at just the right moment of your life to accept and appreciate it.

80s memories

Recently, as I was filling my gas tank at one of those stations that play a little video of some gas-related "news" on a small screen so you have something to watch, I got to thinking about things we had in the 80s that, somehow, disappeared. Before they vanish completely down the memory hole I'd just like to note them.

• Gas stations playing pop music
• Brightly-colored men's clothes
• Living store mannequins
• Roller-skating grocery store clerks (it's difficult to find a reference or picture; I can't be the only one to remember them)
• Bookstores open until midnight
• Funky businesses