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Daniel Silliman
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| 17.7.09 |
The apartment on Susquehanna Street
She had three kids in the apartment, and they were like rocks in a dryer. Mommy-mommy, they said, mommy-mommy, and they smashed and clanged with their voices, and smashed and clanged from one side of the apartment to the other, and they smashed and clanged and smashed and clanged and they were always moving, always full of energy and problems and crying and shouting, and they were always mommy-mommy, mommy-mommy.
She wanted to scream, What!, but she knew that made her a bad mother.
The oldest girl would shriek with laughter, and then go into a sullen storm, all without warning. The youngest girl would sing, silly songs, songs she didn't know were about sex and musicals with la la las, steps and swinging arms. The son, the middle one, the chubby one who reminded her of her, was gaining weight and falling behind in school. He wouldn't say anything, shy even in his own home, always seemingly waiting for something, and his introvertedness was the silent opposite of his sisters' drama. He wouldn't say anything until suddenly he would ask a question, an insanely hard question, like why is euthanasia wrong if you're going to go to heaven, and why do women menstruate, and why did God create a universe of mostly empty space? She would open her mouth and not know the answer, not know how to answer, and close then her mouth again. She wished she could stop the world for his questions, but then the phone would ring and and the oldest daughter would shriek, Give it to me!, and a bill would be overdue. The bill collector would sound so calm, so like a man, and she would be worried and the worry was like a scream that followed a scream that followed a scream. And then she knocked dish from the dirty counter and it broke all over the floor. The garbage was starting to smell and there were gnats and mommy-mommy, mommy-mommy, and did she know what was for dinner?
She liked to close her eyes and imagine the wheels of a plane leaving the ground. She liked that moment. That was her place, the place she could go in her mind: when the engine was too loud and drowned out all the other sounds with its roar, when she would be thrust back into her chair as the plane went faster and faster and then, there, the wheels would leave the ground, up and off and free, and she would close her eyes and imagine that moment, that moment of beauty.
The closest she got was some nights, late at night, sitting in the living room of the apartment in the dark, drinking sherry and watching the traffic on Susquehanna Street. She would try to write then, try to remember how she had written, but nothing would come out like she wanted.
by Daniel Silliman @
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| 15.7.09 |
Bottle digging
Typography and prayer
The Oregon of the mind
The best movie trailers
Potlucks with a purpose
The audacity of the Pope
What it means to be butch
Being Hemmingway's wife
Shop class and self-reliance
You are not a bible character
Ten particularly curious fetishes
Learning to write and live from Camus
Michael Chabon on manhood for amateurs
Great books that aren't worth reading
A Review of The Walkable City
Apollo-mission-inspired songs
New Grahm Greene to be serialized
Aaron Belz: Poetry's next wave is hybrid
John Calvin and American Exceptionalism
Barack Obama and the American void
Supreme Court moving rightward
Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son on film
Early days of Guantanamo Bay were chaos
Culture snobs in an age of tech snobbery
Reburbia: Competition to redesign the suburbs
Right still claiming McCarthyism vindication
Graham Green and America's best intentions
30 years after Jimmy Carter's Malaise Speech
Dutch Calvinism gets boost from economic crisis
McNamara's still-warm-body stomped all over
Abbas Kiarostami: an excellent film director from Iran
Bill Clinton backs same-sex marriage (now he does)
War crimes lies, lies, lies, Liberia's Charles Taylor says
Shephard Fairey and the fight over intellectual property rights
What happens when an idie girl rebuilds her own house in New Orleans
Consumer culture, where we find meaning, e-bay and art: Significant Objects
Baseball's double play: a work of art, a hymn of praise, very nearly a miracle
Roberto Bolano's phobias and nightmares and thematic connection with The Wire
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"He said there was probably some pyramid lying buried under our land. I remember that my father turned his eyes from the road to look at him. Pyramids? Yes, he said, deep underground there must be lots of pyramids. My father didn't say anything. From the darkness of the backseat, I asked him why he thought that. He didn't answer. Then we started to talk about other things but I kept wondering why he'd said that about my father's stony plot of land and much later, when I'd lost touch with him, each time I went back to the barren place I thought about the buried pyramid, about the one time I'd seen him riding over the tops of the pyramids, and I imagined him in the hut, when he was left alone and sat there smoking."
-- Roberto Bolaño, the Savage Detectives
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| 13.7.09 |
The puberty tree
The ax had a little glue bead on the edge of the head, covering the edge of the blade. The head of the ax was blue, metal blue, and the glue was this rubbery gum over the shaved-sharp edge, but he cut it with a knife and peeled it off in a long, leathery strip that was like skin. And then there it was. The ax. The heavy blade head with a silver, sliver edge. It had heft, a heaviness and force, a seriousness that was the seriousness of men and work, work and tools and danger, duty and things that had to be done.
Charlie hefted it in his hands. The ax felt good. His hands were big for fourteen and he wrapped them around the hickory handle and held it.
He hefted it one, two, three and he swung it and sunk it into a tree. The tree was right beside the house his parents rented and he sunk the ax into the wood and it went in easy. It sunk in solid with a solid sound and there was a gash of yellow-white wood. He grabbed the ax back from the cut and up and swung it and sunk it in again. The ax made a sound like a clicking tongue. Charlie made a sound from down deep in his diaphragm, like hnyuh, hnyuh. There was a rhythm to it and he liked it and it felt good and he felt like he got it: hnyuh and sunk, click and hnyuh and sunk and click and hnyuh and sunk. He got it, and he cut down the tree.
He knew how to cut down a tree because he had read about it. He didn't have permission and no one was watching, no one was showing him how but he knew how because he had read about it. His parents had hippie books on folk arts and the old timers and being back-to-the-land, even though they were and always would be suburban people who had just played at living in the country. They had a garden and a compost pile, but bought their meat in cellophane and their heat was electricity from the city. But Charlie'd read those books they had. He'd read too about the Texans and Tennesseans who'd cleared land and the pioneers with their cabins of cut and notched logs. Lincoln cut logs like this and so did Davy Crockett and he'd never seen a man do this, actually, but he'd read about it. Then he went and bought an ax at Sears and tried to do it too.
He hacked a triangle of wood on the one side, on the side where he wanted the tree to fall. The front notch was the way the tree would fall, facing away from the house, and the back notch was the one that would weaken the tree until it tipped over. He chopped and the chips scattered around on the ground, little shavery ones and slivery ones and big ones which looked like deformed slices of cake. He was surprised to see the tree was bleeding, the sap sticky, sugary and leaking out of yellow flesh of the heat of the tree, from the lines between the growth rings. He was surprised to smell the tree, to smell the wood and the wound and sap and surprised at how it smelled unlike the leaves and unlike the wood he'd worked in shop, but not unlike as much as more, like this was the way wood really smelled and everything else was only an approximation, an imitation, a reproduction of this experience here.
The handle was starting to be slick with sweat. Blisters were being raised on his palms. He kept at the rhythm of it, not counting it off but finding it with his breath, with his exhales and hnyuh and the sound of the ax head's big bites. He was good at this. He felt good with this. He was sweating and the salt smell was mixing with the wood and it was good and he felt like this is what it felt like for Lincoln, for Boone building the fort, and for the pioneers. He felt this was what it's like for men.
Charlie took a minute and breathed. His breath felt better than before. He bounced the butt of the ax against his shin and saw his work and was proud. Then he went around to the other side of the tree and hoisted his ax up and swung it, hacking out his back notch. He chipped out the bark, which was brown and then slippery green underneath. Then he sunk into the wood, the pulpy heart of the tree, the notch narrower now. He worked slower now, breathing heavier and stopping to try to wipe the sweat out of his eyes. He noticed the sun now, and now there was an ache he hadn't felt before, and his hands were red and raw. He tried to swing harder, going huuh! with every hit. Every hit took a little longer and he slowed and slowed, taking breaks to breath and then, determined and sweaty and grim, taking up the ax again and trying to make each hack enough to tip the tree. He took the ax again, his hands hurting and his arms too and he swung, following through, and then he heard the crack.
It was a sound down deep. There was sound a like a crack, a heavy creak of an opening door, like something solid gapped guttural, a yaw, and then there was stillness and nothing. Charlie could feel the sweat in his ears. He wasn't even sure he'd heard it -- a sound, what sound? -- like maybe it was just a pause of the wind or the shifting shoulders of continental plates, or a popping in his ears. Then he heard the wind. A flutter. And for the first time he looked up at the top of the tree. He looked up to see all the leaves shivered and all the tree-top weight was over the house, over the house and leaning, leaning and shuttering and then the whole tree screeched, like yawwwwwwrrrragh! and it all came at him, over backwards, crashing into the house.
Charlie crawled out from under the toppled tree, out from beneath the busted-up branches and bits of broken house. He was shaking, surprised and scared by the seriousness, and he was dragging his brand-new ax behind him.
by Daniel Silliman @
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by Daniel Silliman @
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| 10.7.09 |
What he said
He didn't have a problem with niggers. He didn't have nothing against them. Nothing, he said and he shrugged. He wasn't a racist, he said, and he said it so you'd know that sometimes people thought he was, but that was wrong, and he resented that. He wasn't like that. He wasn't a racist and he didn't have a problem with niggers or nobody who didn't have a problem with him, and people only thought that anyway 'cause they were prejudiced, assuming he was something 'cause of how he looked.
Jimmie looked like white trash. He had long hair that wasn't washed and a fu manchu. He lit his cigarettes with a lighter with a picture of a naked lady on it. He had a couple of missing teeth, like maybe from a fight, and he spent his nights in the bars around Waco. During the days he'd take work through the temp agency, place called ManPower, and he'd get jobs unloading trucks and doing piece work or cleaning jobs where something'd exploded or yard work. Which was how he ended up working for my dad one year before Christmas. He was wearing two flannel coats and cramming leaves into these black garbage bags and smoking and just talking.
He didn't have a problem with niggers, he said. He wasn't a racist. He would have one over to the house, if he could. Wouldn't bother him. He couldn't though because of his dog. The dog was a racist and she didn't like niggers, so he couldn't have them over. She was a pit bull, brindle-colored dog he'd had since she was little. She was a sweet, sweet bitch. She loved children and everything. She wasn't dangerous. Wasn't mean. Wouldn't hurt nobody, except she just didn't like the niggers and would always try to tear the shit out of them.
"What did you say to make him tell you that?" my dad asked. "Why would he tell you that?" I said I didn't know, it was just what he said.
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| 8.7.09 |
by Daniel Silliman @
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The plan
He would wait until the highway was flooded with cars. When they were all escaping, panicking, the drivers honking and swearing and steaming and all backed up northbound. He would wait until then, until right before the full force of the storm bore down, right before, when the palm trees were bent over, almost breaking down and blown away and everything not nailed down was being thrown inland. And then he'd go.
He'd go south.
Everybody else would be going north, running away, and the news helicopter would be up there in the rain shooting live this line of cars crammed in with their lights on wipers whipping at the lashing storm and they'd see him: the one lone car speeding South.
He might just be the Heating & AC man, but he had a plan.
He left the weather channel on the whole season, watching the tropical storms and the warm pressure pockets and waiting for a really good hurricane to hit. His truck was already packed. He could go in a minute.
He'd wear his wet suit on the drive down. He'd drive without stopping. He'd eat the sandwiches he'd have in a cooler and he'd drink the Diet Coke he'd packed. He would speed down there and get there when it was perfect. Completely empty. Towns and houses and streets, all empty. The beaches as empty as anywhere in the whole country. The houses all abandoned, the yards all unwatched. A lot of times the storm wouldn't even hit and he would have 12 hours, maybe 24 or even 30, where there was nothing and no one but him. And if it did come he was ready. He'd have his SCUBA gear and two air tanks. All checked and packed.
He'd get there and it'd all be perfect. He'd have his waterproof binder of all the maps he'd made of all the shipwrecks, pirate hideaways and explorer's expeditions and conquistador trips criss-crossing Florida and he'd have his shovel and his SearchMaster Pro II metal detector with the extra-depth detection and the headphones. And he'd go treasure hunting. People would probably see him one of these days when they do the news of the hurricane coming, seem him speeding South or out on the beach in his wet suit, searching for what he knew was there, and then he'd disappear and no one would ever hear from him again.
Yeah, thought the Heating & AC man, they'd never hear from me again, and then he cut open the box of his brand-new, bubble-wrapped, mail-ordered metal detector.
by Daniel Silliman @
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| 6.7.09 |
A reappraisal of David Foster Wallace
(revised)
Postmodernism, as I understand it and in the most succinct explanation I know, has three parts. First, the idea that oppositions are inherently unstable. It's not just that binaries divide the world wrongly, but that they collapse, and the "bad term" has always infected the "good term" of the opposition, the judge is always guilty of the crimes he condemns, and before you can honestly a speck in my brother's eye, you need to attend to the log in your own eye. For me, this very quickly connects to ethics, and it's probably the most important thing I learned in college. Second, postmodernism involves the idea that meaning comes out of relation. This is where conservatives and fundamentalists get upset, because the second point involves the lowercasing of the word "truth" and seems, in their understanding, to mean that everything is relative. But, then, the only explanation of the Trinity I have heard that wasn't madness or meaningless used exactly this idea, and it's actually a pretty harmless point about how language and meaning work. Third is hyperconsciousness. This is the idea that everything is constructed, interpreted, etc. This is Paul de Man's statement that resistance to theory is itself a theory, and the idea that there is no such thing as a literal reading, a plain and obvious meaning, or a non-liturgical liturgy.
The third part, I think, is where I start to dislike people and things that are "postmodernist." There is a pretty prevalent understanding or practice of that hyperconsciousness that is basically snark and sarcasm, posing and stunts to prove some sort of sophistication. One form of this is Seinfeld. Another is the tendency of McSweeney's, I think, and in the '90s and on you had this whole class of young male writers who took the dickishness of the Norman Mailer generation and made it their own. They had an array of tricks, all of which had this "look at me Ma, no hands!" quality.
Initially, this was my impression of David Foster Wallace. The footnotes, the language games, the huge novel, the comparison to Pynchon, the titles -- all of it added up trick writer. A smart guy doing stunts to prove how smart, how sophisticated and hyperconscious he was. I don't normally hate things just because they're popular, but even his tripartite name seemed like a trick, another demonstration of how cool he was.
OK, probably I don't like this idea of writing because it is cool, with a nerdish version of the trickishness that defines hip, and I am not cool, and I am not even not cool in the way that is cool. I am not and never will be as "pop" as these writers with this tendency, instead being inflicted with what my uncle once called the "Sillimans' tendency to terminal seriousness." But also, and I don't think this is just an excuse for my lameness, I think making yourself cool is the wrong reason to write. It wastes the only thing valuable about writing. Being cool is good reason to play the guitar or go out for track or dye your hair black, but it's a horrible reason to write. There's a whole category of these writers, including Mailer and James Frey, maybe Nick Hornby (but certainly his characters), some of the creative non-fictionists and all the McSweeney-esques. It's also, I think, the language of addicts of certain sorts of therapy, the language that compulsively reshuffles the world and reframes everything around the solipsistic self, justifying everything, making everything self-focused and showing absolutely no understanding of others and no empathy at all. These writers start writing as a way to reimagine themselves as cool, as not losers, but when they do this, they abandon honesty. If the point of writing is connection and literature gives us that sense that we are not alone, then this tendency, this practice of hyperconsciousness as a self-aggrandizing performance, aggressively misses the point. It's basically the equivalent of extended, repulsively repeated solos by the old guy in long hair and leather pants who still thinks he'll be a rock star and everyone wants to sleep with him.
The opposite idea is Lester Bangs as played by Philip Seymour Hoffman: "We are uncool ... women will always be a problem for guys like us ... but the only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone when you're uncool."
So I avoided David Foster Wallace until, sometime around his death, I happened upon the commencement address he gave to Kenyon College. Right from the opening, "If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I'd advise you to go ahead, because I'm sure going to. In fact I'm gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket]," it was uncool. It was the opposite of the McSweeney-Mailer model. It was the opposite of my initial impression and of his reputation too, except that he would use this hyperconsciousness, but he used it against itself. He would use it, but not as a stunt, but as a strategy to break down the distance of the hyperconsciousness, being honest and sharing uncoolness. He takes recourse to the distance, acknowledging it, as we all were already there, if we'd admit it, and then he makes it vanish, connecting with us. In the second paragraph of the speech, right after the opening joke, he says:
"This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ['thing'] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning."
The genius here, I think, is not just that David Foster Wallace manages to escape the hyperconsciousness, but that he treats it as a pre-existing condition and treats it, like it's this sort of contemporary mental disorder. He said at Kenyon, "It is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now)." It's like someone saying, oh, you hear that voice, that sometimes-sarcastic and always-meta voice hyperconsciouslessly commenting on everything? Me too. And then he, at least sometimes, solves it through this recognition. I didn't really realize what was going on, at first, and i probably dismissed the fantasticness of the speech as one-of from an indisputably smart guy, but then had to radically reconsider Jon Baskin's piece in The Point. Baskin, thankfully, explained what was going on in terms I could understand:
"[Wallace] would borrow from [Ludwig Wittgenstein] not only themes—solipsism, language, meaning—but also the theoretical bulwark for a literature that was simultaneously challenging and therapeutic in the Wittgensteinian sense. The therapy was necessary and even urgent for a readership which, Wallace believed, had internalized not only postmodernism’s theoretical prejudices but also its involute habits of thought. The millennial subject was addicted to the same pathologies he was desperate to escape; nowhere was this more evident than in the difficulty literary critics had in responding meaningfully to Wallace’s books. What Wallace wanted to “share” most was a way out. But he would start with his readers, in the middle. The maze of contemporary thinking would have to be dismantled from within."
So, David Foster Wallace treats this hyperconsciousness -- this practice of the third part of postmodernism -- as the problem, a very basic problem and one we're all, now, born into. Instead of throwing a party in it or celebrating it, he tries to take it apart and treat it. I had to go back to the Kenyon speech to see, oh yeah, that is what he's doing. Baskin does a good job at showing how this move works in some of the short pieces, especially the ones where Wallace uses the themes and language of therapy. I picked up Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (the only Wallace I could find in English in the local German bookstore) and was convinced that Baskin's thesis holds up. Wallace does have this way where he uses a trick and the trick shows the reader how the reader has already been doing this, this stupid stunt, and then, at least sometimes, Wallace's trick dismantles itself. If it were a magic illusion, it would be one where the audience grew incredibly claustrophobic and felt trapped, but then realized this wasn't an illusion at all, but the reality all along, and then the claustrophobic illusion/reality would tear a hole in itself, offering a vision of the freedom that had been an illusion but is now a reality.
I'm especially impressed by this when Wallace writes in the "look at me, Ma, meta-meta!" style, but then the trick falls apart in his hands and the meta-meta-meta part is the author confessing to the reader that this isn't working and how worried he is that this isn't going to ever get to the reveal where suddenly you see and instead he's just going to be this writer who's stuck in his own sophistication. Wallace does this in the last part of "Octet," in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. The piece is a series of pop quizzes, which basically means they come off like they're written by Chuck Klosterman, which means they sound like they're meant as filler for a magazine that's not-quite-porn and is subscribed to entirely by boys who want to know what to buy and wear to be sophisticated, assured, confident and hip, which is to say college kids who are always going to be insufferable. But then, in the last part of the piece, Wallace starts out "You are, unfortunately, a fiction writer," and proceeds to wrap himself (and us) up in this bit of trick writing, until he's despairing, and he tries to add another layer of sophistication by using the meta to admit to meta, and then he and we arrive at this place where there's nothing left but honesty. "Even under the most charitable interpretation," Wallace writes, "it's going to look desperate. Possibly pathetic. At any rate it's not going to make you look wise or secure or accomplished or any of the things readers want to pretend they believe the literary artist who wrote what they're reading is when they sit down to try to escape the isoluble flux of themselves ... it's going to make you look fundamentally lost and confused and frightened and unsure ...."
This is actually exactly how Wallace appears all the time. At a reading, he interrupts a story from Consider the Lobster about how pathetic he is to tell the audience that, actually, there's another whole level of how really uncool he is. When he's interviewed by Charlie Rose, he gets nervous and stutters "I'm sorry that I'm essentially stuttering," and the effect isn't endearing or cute. It doesn't make him look like a, quote, normal guy. It is pathetic and overly self-conscious -- and also honest. This is especially so when you watch the interview alongside, say, Bob Dylan's worse interviews, where he's really mean-spirited, or alongside the the exercises in arrogance, ego and aggressiveness that are the Norman Mailer talking (Mailer is, obviously, shorthand for a whole set of things I aggressively don't like and, I think it should be clear, he is shorthand for a whole set of shitty things I'm afraid might really be true about me). Wallace, though, does this entirely other thing, which involves a sort of recognition, an admission, which marks it as a pre-existing problem, and I think it works to make a way out. He's not reveling in the snark, the sophisticated tricks and the "look at me, Ma, meta-meta!", but is, instead, at work on a major ethical project. Why, he wants to know, is it so hard to break out of our own heads and disgusting self-centeredness. And how do we do it?
One of his answers, obviously, was suicide. And that's his great failure, a really shitty personal end and a shitty acceptance of the idea it's just simply not possible to get out of our own self-centeredness. But David Foster Wallace has another answer -- I think a really amazing one, the right one and the correct ethical conclusion for postmodernism parts one, two and three. This answer pervades his work. It's all through there: In the footnotes and the language games, the hugeness of his novel and even the titles he chooses. There's an answer there, and it's made me do a reappraisal. Because it's an answer I need.
"It's a matter of my choosing," David Foster Wallace said, "to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self ... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day."
by Daniel Silliman @
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| 4.7.09 |
Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love
-- Walt Whitman, America
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| 3.7.09 |
Reclaiming the tumble-down
There wasn't much light. The electricity had been shut off and the windows were covered with cracked plywood, but we could see the pig shit on the floor. We could still see it.
The house was a squat house, sitting on an acre of dried-up mud. Its white paint skin was puckered. It was either built like a pig, with the main part like a big pig on her side, suckling these little add-ons and out buildings, or else the house's association with swine was just too strong to see anything else.
"I think the previous people had pigs," the real estate lady said. "They left without cleaning."
The real estate lady wore her hair dyed and done up, her make-up and her pants suit were both high pink. She would be our land lord, the owner's rep., if we rented, and she always talked very clearly, very slowly, talking with a smile.
She had said this would be perfect for us. Perfect. And now she seemed surprised, but also like she thought maybe this was perfect. It was near the highway, with easy enough access to town and yet still out here, in the country, among the farms. Couldn't hurt this with four kids, or chickens and goats, and there were sheds and barns for workshops and animals and whatever it was we did. And if we saw through the tumble-down look, through the stiff smell and the leaks in the roof, thought through to where we'd put up a tin roof and pull up the carpets, it could be good.
She would never live here, though. And you could tell that. This place was for trash. It was there, underneath: she would never live here and neither would anybody she knew.
But we considered it. We looked at the fences, falling down, and evaluated the trees. We mentally dug up the mud and brought in better dirt and planted grass and a garden and a line of pecans. We opened the windows and let in air, tore out the carpets and put in wood. We drowned the whole thing in lysol and scrubbed and imagined what it would look like then. We painted and re-roofed, rehung doors and added insulation and a wood stove. We baked bread in the kitchen, in our minds, and made dinner and set a long table. We added art to the walls, and old farm implements, and we filled the sheds with tools.
We stood there, and considered reclaiming the tumble-down, resurrecting it from trash, and seeing what it could be. Cockroaches covered a kitchen wall, the carpets stank and mouldered, and the house slumped sideways into the mud, but we looked and we thought, what's possible?
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"Their faces were purple and their eyes were blazing. They never stopped screaming."
-- Tom Walters, a Mason City, Iowa bank guard, describing how he remembered the Dillinger gang.
Gays, blacks, Bayard Rustin and the queering of democracy
Letham on PK Dick's last 3 novels and the 'theology of paranoia'
Wilco: Gracefully coming to terms with what they can't control
Alexis Arguello, boxer and politician, dies at 56. Rest in peace.
Dempsy Travis, former NAACP head, dies at 89. Rest in peace.
What's the difference between film history and advertising?
E.L. Doctorow on the world's most famous packrats
Shouting fire: stories from the edge of free speech
Breaking levees: Returning the swamp to swamp
Jeff Sharlett: The apocalypse is always now
Arabs and the semiotics of Guantanamo
Why fewer murders get solved these days
Interview with Wall-E endtitle artists
Wal-mart takes a progressive turn
Can flarf ever be taken seriously?
Diagraming an Obama sentence
Ant colony takes over the world
Naked GA GOP mayor arrested
Anticipated fiction of 2009 - 10
Iggy Pop matures, sings classics
Michael Jackson: Freak like me
Addicted to origin stories
The gay generation gap
Nonsense infographics
The Futurists are 100
Amazing origami
Counting crime
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| 1.7.09 |
America as an idea
When I was 9, my father and mother moved us from Northern California to Central Texas. I don't know that I entirely understood what we were doing, at the time, but I knew we were leaving, lacking something, and we were going looking for it. We drove, a van and a moving truck, a family of six, across the American Southwest on a holiday weekend when the roads were packed. We crossed the hottest parts of the desert at night.
I remember bouncing around in the big truck, watching the teeming streams of people. I remember there were partying students, girls in short shorts and guys without shirts, and there were men with boats, men with horse trailers, men with families. There were truck drivers, I remember, and RVers and old bikers, and everyone was on the road that weekend. I remember my dad, lit-up by the green light of the Hertz-Penske dash, drinking cola from the big bottle and telling me about every car he'd ever had and every job he'd had and every move he'd made, keeping himself awake with his stories and opening a world for me.
This was, I think, my first idea of America as a country: a place where people are moving, looking for what they want.
by Daniel Silliman @
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by Daniel Silliman @
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| 29.6.09 |
Mad Farmers
"So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor ...
"Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns."
-- Wendell Berry
"In the 1960s, a group of businessmen bought 16,000 acres of swampy bottomland along the Ouachita River in northern Louisiana and built miles of levee around it. They bulldozed its oak and cypress trees and, when the land dried out, turned it into a soybean farm.
Now two brothers who grew up nearby are undoing all that work. In what experts are calling the biggest levee-busting operation ever in North America, the brothers plan to return the muddy river to its ancient floodplain, coaxing back plants and animals that flourished there when President Thomas Jefferson first had the land surveyed in 1804."
-- The New York Times
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To be open
An anecdote: When I was at the newspaper, I did an interview with a man who wrote about UFOs and abductions, conspiracy and paranormal theories. We talked about his philosophy of science. While interviewing him, I had this incredible sense of liberation, and I remembered why I loved journalism. Or, more, why it is good for me. In college, in politics, philosophy and theology, I would have had to engage this man as a combatant. I wouldn’t have convinced him or changed him, of course, but I would have argued with him and disagreed with him. I would have had to take a position and fight him. I would have fought him and would have tried to eviscerate him, not just making a point but making it so he was humiliated, frustrated, feeling like a little boy who pissed himself during recess.
I would have done this because I am mean, because I was afraid it would be done to me, and because I believed the rightness of my idea was so assuredly right it justified everything. I would have done this in the name of an abstraction.
As a journalist, though, the rightness or wrongness of what he thought was irrelevant, and I was just interested in his story, and what he thought, and all I needed to do was hear him. I gave up fighting and felt free. I wanted to hear him, and know him, and understand him. I wanted to tell his story, whatever it was.
He had a smooth head, a Voice-of-God voice and shiny eyes; he believed he had secret knowledge, but he was willing to share it with me. He said he thought the world was weirder than we were usually willing to admit. He said we had to be open, and I said I agreed.
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| 26.6.09 |
He could not tell it in any other way 1
It was so biblical: the burning heap in the plain. The car skeleton burned black, but was not consumed. It burned, smoking greasy, billowing like a bridge into the sky. The smoke stretched all the way along the highway where we drove, and we drove and watched it. The sky was blue and blank. The road shimmered straight, boiling with mirages. The ground, as we came down the last line of New Mexico mountains and drove into the desert plain, seemed to be a vacant endlessness, seemed like this indelible emptiness, like it would always look like an eye without a pupil.
We saw the smoke and saw the backed-up line of cars. We stopped, idling in the line, in the exhaust and sun. We watched the sky and it was so biblical, and it was without meaning. Once, everyone we had known knew they had heard the words of God. God had spoken to all the men and women of the fellowship, all the men in shirt-sleeves and plaid and the women in denim and dresses. He had spoken to them and moved them, taught them to talk in tongues and prophecies, condemnations and ordered instructions. But now we didn't believe that. And we were leaving there. And even if they had all heard the voice they thought they'd heard, how would they know or could they know how to tell it from lust and desire, anxiety, self-preservation and selfishness, guilt, dread and all the confused and crowded impulses that don't even have names? How would anyone know the difference between God talking and random things, meaningless and horrible things happening? Even if God wanted to talk to us, who are we to think we'd understand? Even if He said our names, said them slowly and softly, how could we hear that?
So we were leaving. We drove through weedy Texas flatland and we saw the Grand Canyon again. We went into New Mexico and saw the road side stands advertising turquoise and teepees. We saw the brick pyramids in the park, imitations of older ones which were once understood as saying something. We drove that road West and we came down into the desert and saw the burning car. All the paint was peeled from the car, the tires gone and upholstery gone and the gray shell burned and burned. We watched it, watching without interpretation. It was a freak accident. It was randomness and nature and natural violence, and if God could speak, wouldn't it sound like this? It meant nothing, but it looked like the message of a speechless, frustrated God, frustrated and angry at being unable to express Himself. It was like what an all-powerful something would say if He wanted to say something and didn't know how and so now there was fire and smoke, an image with force but not meaning, violence but no signification.
We watched it, driving slow by the biblical burning wreck in the desert, and then as we watched it started to hail.
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'The Detective uses crime scene tape for a bookmark': Newspaper blackout poems
Cheever and O'Conner, 'The Swimmer' and 'A Good Man is Hard to Find'
Partying with Johnny Depp (profile as access jaunt and status flaunt)
Hitchens on Fairlie and the idea of the 'gentlemen delinquent'
The 'secret' history of getting high in America
'Park theory' and New York's newest park
Balko on criminal justice and civil rights
The conventions of stripper memoirs
Ray Bradbury and the love of libraries
The spiritual profile of gay Americans
A summer of David Foster Wallace 1 & 2
Stoned wallabies making crop circles
Man-crushing all over 'Bill' Buckley
Obama to face death penalty cases
Michael Jackson is dead. Rest in peace.
Michael Jackson was commerce's slave
'We thought Mike would save us all'
The end of American rest stops (?)
The misidentified 'face of freedom'
Zizek's lectures on Communism
Leon Trotsky's exile and last days
Trolls are a danger to democracy
Denis Johnson's 'Nobody Move'
Why Martin Heidegger matters
George Orwell's tobacco habit
Francis Ford Coppala at 70
Martin Paar's photography
A guide to films from Iran
Living with Martin Amis
Cheever's The Swimmer
Islam and the pirates
Writing about sex
Reviewing Wilco
Lincoln's youth
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The shark ethic prevails
He sat at the table alone.
He sat at the table alone at the party, surrounded by other people's empty glasses, and he thought about smashing things. He thought the glass would smash nicely. It would crush in his hand. He thought he could take that tall glass there and smash it, swing like a hammer into the table and feel the blood and break, the sharp singing shatter. The rim at the bottom would roll jagged away. No one was talking any more. Everyone was shouting, shouting, shouting out responses to shouts they couldn't hear. He thought he could crush the chair he was sitting in, crumple the legs, and he could grab the table from the end and slam it down so the joints popped and cracked and the thick wood would splinter. He thought he could throw something as hard as he could at the wall and it would hit and explode, broken pieces blowing out everywhere, a flower of glass in the air.
He didn't know why he came to these things. He always thought he'd feel better, feel connected or interested or anyway less alone. And instead it was this. This stupid rage, sitting at an empty table with destructive fantasies and dirty dishes.
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| 24.6.09 |
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I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
-- Allen Ginsberg, America
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| 22.6.09 |
A commitment
His SWAT shirt sleeves were rolled up to show the tattoos. The were mean tattoos. Police tattoos. They were tribal tattoos twisted up his massive muscled arms, barbs and thorns and thrusting pricks meant to look scary when he kicked down your door.
He carried himself like a wrestler. He inhaled through his mouth, always tensed in his shoulders and knees. He flexed his chest when he breathed.
The duplex door was bent back. Busted open. One hinge was wrenched back, the metal twisted and discolored from the yank of the force of the big SWAT bust. The other hinge was ripped, screws sprung off and wood splintered, door jam stripped naked. Inside the carpet was dirty, rusty brown. The couch was sagging and gray and the blinds were broken and the walls were all dingy except for a spot where a picture wasn't hanging any more. The room was the color of a dirty leak. Six or seven kilos of saran-wrapped weed were sitting on a card table, each one looking lumpy, like a rectangle with tumors.
The SWAT kid stood guard. He had a semi-auto machine gun in his hands and a big belt, military style, with another gun and hand cuffs, a radio, ammo and a flash light that looked like an arm and a fist. He looked like a cop who liked to kick down doors, and you didn't get tattoos like that if you wanted to rise in the ranks and one day run the department. This was a commitment to muscle, a calling to be meat, to be brutish, big and brawling and SWAT forever. His head was shaved. His head was massive: He was massive, filling the broken duplex door as he breathed and flexed his chest.
"Captain" he said. He called it out. "Captain!" he said, and his voice was high and accented like silk, "did you see those puppies in back? What's gonna happen to them, Captain? Can I take one of them puppies?"
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The first of a series of old men carved in pine. Dimensions roughly 2 x 4 x 8.5 inches. Carved completely by hand with two knives and a gouge. Full view here.
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| 19.6.09 |
For the Hopwood Memorial
The first time we went to Hopwood together, we walked through a field, following a little path from her apartment and cutting through the tall grass. The grass was completely wet with dew. With each step we shook the overgrown weeds, knocking down every drop until our pant legs were soaked when we got to the church.
Standing at the stairs, outside the church that morning, I didn’t want to go in. Dew-wet pants seemed like a good enough reason. Surely the people of Hopwood wouldn’t welcome some stranger with wet legs dripping on their floors. Of course it wasn’t the pants, really; that was an excuse. Truth was, I was afraid. I was, emotionally, lost in the tall grass.
We were just starting to date then. We were starting to see if our two worlds could come together. Both of us were pretty nervous, that first time, afraid of rejection and judgment, of finding ourselves pushed apart, isolated, unwelcomed. She was worried he would hate the Christian Church, and the people she loved, and would hold some social blunder or stylistic statement against them, and against her. I was afraid that the church wouldn’t welcome me, with my questions, doubts and distrusts, that I wouldn’t be the kind of Christian they wanted, or that she wanted either. So we stood there, at the door, totally terrified. And then we heard the people singing.
That might have been the Sunday when Tim Ross talked about “thin places,” places where heaven is close to earth, where not much separates the one realm from the other. He said the church is a thin places, where worlds can be joined. It might have actually been another Sunday when he said that, but we remember it as that first one where we came together, because even with the opening hymn, heaven broke through.
When we came out of the weeds and opened the doors that morning we found a people singing, a warm people, a welcoming people. We found a people who, instead of pushing people apart, pull them in, saying “come, be a part of us.” We found a people who aren’t naturally united coming together as one people in this very thin place: professors and students; intellectuals and laborers; innovators and traditionalists; those who love simplicity and those who love liturgy; natives and transplants and foreigners. Hopwood became a thin place for our two worlds. Divisions that had existed ceased to be real, when we went to Hopwood. Differences disappeared, grace reigned, love dwelled, and we both opened up, like the big doors at the front of the church on Sunday morning.
This is just our story, another anecdote in a long history, but we can’t help thinking it gets to the truth about Hopwood. Every memory we have serves the same point: Hopwood brings worlds together. It is a place where we are close to God because we are close to each other. We remember Tim was surprised to find he’d quoted Wendell Berry four times in one sermon, remember Jana singing, remember Cheryl crying when she talked about the students of Spain. We remember Robert Sheilds’ communion meditations, and of course James’ prayers. We remember these things and all of them repeat the point. Hopwood is a place where love is lived, where the Kingdom comes as we welcome each other. Hopwood is a place where you can come out of the tall grass and open up and hear the singing.
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Why 'Ulysses?
Winton's Breath
Joe Klein in Iran
Obama and Rawls
Copycat book titles
Free John Hinkley?
Poetry's life of grime
Man liberated by typo
Remembering Trilling
The garden as protest
Flannery & the peabiddies
What's next in El Salvador?
Advertising sex in London
Free books: an experiment
Twitter and the revolution
Poetry and politics in Iran
Dear Pixar, from all the girls
Increase of apocalyptic aggression
Harold Bloom reads Blood Meridian
The newsweeklies attempt to evolve
A real history of Soviet spies in America
John Paul George and Ringo archetypes
Is the internet good for writing? Is college?
University's cutting their German programs
Concerns about street photography
Worlds' most fascinating tunnel networks
Cormac McCarthy's career-long obsession
Author as brand and book cover blandness
The director, the CIA, the past and the way forward
Authors and characters they'd like to take to the beach
McCarthy's Blood Meridian a "dark mirror of the Bible"
St. Augustine's enduring significance and the Beatles and Bono
Dan Baum's short career at the New Yorker (an essay in tweets)
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| 17.6.09 |
... Fr Antonio, a little old priest with a falcon called Rodrigo, who didn't hunt pigeons, partly because Fr Antonio was now too old to accompany the raptor on his forays, and party because, after an initial period of enthusiasm, the priest had begun to have doubts about using such an expeditive method to be rid of birds which, in spite of their shitting, were God's creatures too.
-- Roberto Bolaño, By Night in Chile
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by Daniel Silliman @
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| 15.6.09 |
They are stuttering the name of God
He shouts and paces the space on the English street, stomping and shouting and waving the red-bound Bible and pacing like something is about to break loose. People turn to watch him, this wild man who calls up metaphors of animals and anger, and he shouts to them and at them and tries to get them to hear.
"This," he shouts. "This! This, this is Sodom and Gamorrah!"
The St. Martin's market is mad. Cultures are clashing there and the people are surging and swarming over the streets and the stairs, the squares and the stalls and the mall. On one end refugees are performing outside the art museum, singing "Aye yay, aye yay" and beating on drums while goth kids gather like debris in the park where the grass is gone. Down the street a man plays a horn while another man plays another horn and a drunk man dances with a sash that says "cancer research." A street performer juggles. A woman smokes with her daughter. A bobbie eats yogurt and an old man talks too loud on his phone. In the underground stalls a 300-pound woman sells sex-fantasy wear, a woman in a burka shops for high heels and there's Indian silk for sale and Iranian rugs, a pile of probably pilfered watches and cell phones and hats and Bob Marley's face on a bong. A bookseller sells romances out of shoe boxes. An English couple with faces each 100 years old shout out a seller's song which sounds like it's ancient and like it was just invented today: She shout-sings "12 eggs, very large eggs -- ONLY A PO-ouND!" and he shouts in an upswing "oh my gOSH!" She shouts and waits a beat and he shouts an answer and then she shouts again:
12 eggs! Very large eggs!
ONLY A PO-ouND!
-- oh my gOSH!
12 eggs! Very large eggs!
ONLY A PO-ouND!
-- oh my gOSH!
In a book store coffee shop a girl reads psychology notes and looks out a glass window -- an archingly sleek and modern glass window with the message TRANSPARENCY! MODERNITY! CATHEDRALIC UNDERSTANDING! -- and out that glass window is a very old church that looks like a fortress, complete with stone parapet spires. At another table at the coffee shop a girl starts a story that's supposed to be funny and it starts "so last night I had a one night stand and this morning when I woke up I just let go a fart."
Outside the preacher paces and shouts, paces and repeats his sound-byte sermons and says "worship the most-high God! Worship the most-high God! Worship the most-high God -- this, this, this is Sodom and Gomorrah!"
That's probably not the perfect city to pick to compare to when you're preaching in a city center, because there were no preachers sent to the cities in the plain. There were angles there, but no message, no preacher, no salvation coming and no order to repent. In Sodom and Gomorrah in the scripture, God decides to destroy and then he does. There's a man who wants to save the cities in the story and he makes a bet with God, but he loses his bet on goodness and God wins and gets the destruction he wanted. He wastes the city with salt and falling fire. This man, though, this preacher in Birmingham preaching Sodom and Gomorrah and saying SodomanGomorrah like it's one word in his West Indies accent, he believes we can still repent. He still believes in grace and hearing, salvation and turning and kingdom coming and peace and so he preaches out of a hope, even if it's hidden by the faces he makes and self-righteous sound of shouting.
He'd probably do better to compare the city to Ninevah. In Ninevah one prophet said God is full of anger, and great in power, and will by no means clear the guilty, and another said, Who knoweth whether God will not turn and repent, and turn away from his fierce anger, that we not perish? In Ninevah, the prophets didn't always know what they were saying. The prophets were sometimes surprised. The prophets were often mad, pacing and waving, stamping and acting like animals about to break, floods about to rampage, the holy spirit about to speak. In Ninevah, the prophets didn't bet on the goodness of mankind, but they preached and they hopeed in spite of themselves. They never expected the reception of grace, the open embrace of peace and love, justice and forgiveness, goodness and understanding, and they were sometimes surprised. They stumbled to say what it was they wanted to say about God, stuttered to say he was righteous and far away, far above all others and all powerful and knowing and mighty and above all the things of men and beastial things and above other kinds of kings and gods. They spent a lot of time trying to say what it was they wanted to say about God. They yawped and hooted, trying to say. They bawked and howled, cawed and cockadoodle-dooed. They didn't always know what it meant.
In Sodom and Gomorrah the cities were silent and doomed, laying in the plain, vulnerable and in the way and no one there tries to say anything about God. In Ninevah, there's chatter and tumult and people talking and trying to say. Sometimes they say it like "blood." Sometimes like "love." So the pacing preacher would have been better to compare Birmingham to Ninevah, if he was going to pick a city out of the prophets. In Birmingham he is shouting out about the most-high God and another man is up on a step ladder taking questions about God. His Bible is flopped open and young men in sunglasses and polo shirts and young men in mohawks and big boots challenge him, saying to their friends "ask him this, ask him this." A soft-eyed West Indian is wandering around saying the spirit was moving, saying how it is moving and he didn't believe it until it moved through him. In Birmingham people are trying to say. They are stuttering the name of God there. They are taking it in their mouths, like the Eucharist. They taste it on their tongue and they taste something more, some unarticulated more. A Muslim man sits at a table with books offering answers and he sit there with a quiet, long-day smile. His books say they have 96 answers about Islam and offer solutions and explanations for how Muhammed was proven a prophet by the Jewish and Christian bibles. A black Muslim with newspapers pursues black men and women while they are shopping, pushing the papers on them, leaning in earnestly to say why they ought to understand and how they ought to understand the rightness and the righteousness of God. In Birmingham a Marxist man is shouting out about a con, calling on the working class to come together and really see, and that is the stammer of the name of God too. The refugees sing "aye yay, aye yay" and a wide-eyed, red-eyed man blows a trumpet to the tune of All the Saints, accompanied by recording on a little plastic speaker.
The Saint Martin's market is mad. Groups of girls wander around in unexplained costumes of fairies and princesses. Old men make jokes which are probably meant to be obscene but which don't make any sense anymore. People, non-stop, get their picture taken next to a misshappen bull. A man with a funny-looking head sells balloons and a farm girl, looking saggy and bored, sells cherries. An withered Iranian man watches his hats like they might walk away and another man eats a mango and another says "let's go, come on, lets go." On the stairs in the street by the church people stand and talk and sit and smoke and walk, endlessly streaming both ways. Inside the mall the escalators endlessly cycle on all three floors, the left side down and then up and then down and the right side up and then down and then up. Each side is stuffed with people, lines of people, never-ending amounts of people passing through the center of the city. The people move in groups and clumps and the metaphors that come to mind are mostly of water, floods and streams and waves, swells and spills and seas, but especially floods, with the people covering everything, walking everywhere, filling the spaces up to the edges and over too. The people overwhelming. The people deafening. The people masses moving without apparent order, their motion like swelling and sound a sweeping a swirl a roar of words.
And maybe the question for the preaching man is what does he say in the face of this, this facelessness and this feeling of flooding, this human race endlessly pacing by him as he tries to say something, tries to talk into the push of people so overwhelming they can't be characterized except by recourse to metaphors of floods and faceless washes. And what do you say? What do you say if you're selling shoes or eggs, coffee or an old church, sex fantasies or God, politics or any answers at all? Even God sometimes stutters and stammers at this. In Ninevah, God said, Behold, I am against thee, and he called himself the Jehovah of armies. He said I will uncover thy skirts upon thy face, and I will show the nations thy nakedness and defile you. And also in Ninevah, God also repented of his armies, his dreams of destruction and rape, his rage and his promises of shit and shame. He repented and said, I sayeth I love these people, I forgive and give grace and I care about them, even though I don't know them. But, as the prophet said in the ancient seaport city, who knows what God will say. We can only say what we will say, as we try to articulate and answer these faces, as we pace up and down in the square or wander around down there, in Birmingham, at St. Martin's, watching and saying "this, this, this ..."
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| 11.6.09 |
27
by Daniel Silliman @
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| 10.6.09 |
The architecture of private spaces
1. After the polls closed he didn't answer the phone. He sat in the dark in the big house, the brick house on an acre-and-a-half of uncut fescue, a ranch-style house with high ceilings and hallways without pictures and empty, echoy rooms, and he listened to the phone as it rang and then stopped, rang again and rang and then stopped. The next day he didn't go to work.
2. He wore hawaiian shirts and a mustache and he collected antiques for his vacation home, finding them and buying them on his ever-lengthening lunch breaks and storing them in his editor's office, in there with the stacks of newspapers and the broken TV, the old computer, the slumping manila files, and the artwork which was never hung on the wall. He never said anything about his personal life, but he acted like a man in exile.
3. He realized it while shifting into fifth, while settling into a stretch of interstate, while the road's hum in the hollow cab switched to a lower pitch (the pitch of a raspy kazoo). He hadn't talked to anyone in three days.
4. In the hotel room above the conference hall, above the big ball room where christian kids sang songs and above the pool where fat kids swam and girls walked in new swim suits and where there would be a baptism later, he looked out the window at the snow and he said he couldn't do it, couldn't do it, couldn't make it work. She said his name and said, look at me. I need you to look at me.
5. He carved duck heads and attached them to wooden golf clubs, so the head of the club was the body of the duck. He called them putters. He didn't think they were cute anymore and he'd tell you he hated them, but he had 20, 25 of them carved, a flock of the fat ducks on a shelf.
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All human activity is a cry for forgiveness -- Karl Barth
Infrastructure for souls
An ant under a microscope
Tom Waits talks about LA
Tom Waits collaborates with tapes for Dylan
Treating bookshelves as art
A soundtrack for Cormac McCarthy
Malcolm Gladwell, the outsider
The case for a journalism of frustration
Mythic image of the century: car crash
Biography of Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Conservatives win in European election
A fence of bees, defense against elephants
Writerly advice, like, "write about a real boy."
Labour Party a tragedy of shakespearian proportions
Iggy Pop on French lit and death's prelude
How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll
Architecture and theory of public spaces
Gideon Strauss: What do US Evangelicals need?
The self-destructing Labour Party -- a history of the story
Military spending increases with "war on terror" justification
Let the rich bury the rich. All I can do is destroy their language.
Anxiety and influence and designing books for David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace and the escape from fraudulence and despair
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| 8.6.09 |
Counting soup cans
He opened a can of soup and fed it to his children. He split it between them. They ate it and afterwards he put the spoons and the bowls, the can opener and the dirty can in the sink. He let them sit in the cold water.
The trailer was dark. The winter was cold like a ringing in your ears, and Alan brooded. He was a burly man, with a beard and a face for a scowl. He said nothing for days. He watched his dump truck, idle outside, costing him money every day, money he couldn't pay until there was work.
He opened the soup and set the empty can on the counter, next to the others, the cans in a row. His wife bought the expensive soup, the good stuff with the famous name and the commercials where children all laugh and smile and the world is very warm. He didn't think they could afford the soup and wondered what it added up to, these cans, lined up empty, bright paper torn at the edge where the opener bit and ripped.
He couldn't say he couldn't afford the soup. Rent was due on the fifth.
He stayed in the trailer for days, in the dark of that winter. Inside, he felt clenched up. He felt like he was so cold inside he could take only shallow breaths. The silence rang like something dying in his ear. He cut open a can, another soup can, and divided it with a spoon.
The soup company said it was fraud that made the man poison his children. He lost his truck, while waiting for trial. The trailer was repossessed too. His wife went back to Ohio. Even if they'd considered giving him bail, he would have had nowhere to go.
When they sentenced him, on the 14th floor of the federal building, in a room of honey-colored wood and bold blue carpet, the verdict worked out to a hundred years for every can of soup.
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| 5.6.09 |
Attempt to surrender
He would like to be a saint or at least a buddha. He would like to be kenotic, empty of everything and still inside and at peace. He would like to give up, give up, give up the illusions he has anything he could hang on to, or any power over anything, any control. He would like to let it go, lose, be a loser like Jesus, and just get off this merry-go-round.
One time, he remembers, and this was really like his coming of age, the moment when it happened, he embarrassed his dad. He didn't mean to, but he did. What he did was he beat him. They were arguing, father and son, son who was too much like his father. They were having an argument and he made this move where the logic clicked and his dad was suddenly floundering, powerless, gracelessly foundering like a fat cow. His father's face went red. His father seemed to suddenly swell with anger and then explode, impotent, over everything. He watched the old man rage. The old man old now, in this red-faced sputter, demanding respect and other things which can't be demanded. He watched, silent inside his own head, zen still like a weed which knows no fear of a storm, and as he watched he thought, this man is powerless, but he didn't know it until now.
He watched a lot of men, growing up: Old men; working men; men with authority and without it; men who felt powerful and confident and spoke with a timbre of assumed triumph, and also men who rattled with fear and feelings of failure, who were racked by paranoia, conspiracy and suspicion. He saw a monk who spent his meditation time thinking about monastery politics, a drunk who was always ashamed, a rock star who wouldn't call his brother and another man, a business owner, who always wished he was the man his father was, because his father didn't care. He met these men and saw these men and he thought, all of them are afraid. All of them are afraid they're powerless and afraid they'll be found out, afraid they'll find out they're really fools, foolish and angry, lashing out without any effect, all their efforts running down the gutter and swirling into a drain. He watched them, growing up, and he thought about it and thought, it would be better just to admit you had no power.
He thought he would like to just surrender, to be a buddha about it. He thought he'd like to give up, like the martyrs who just accepted and said, so I lose, so I die, so this is how it is. He thought if he could do that, then he wouldn't be angry anymore, and he would be okay. He thought would like to be okay.
Then he heard an old woman say sharply, "Young man! Young man! I said I wanted paper bags!" The conveyor belt, engine grinding and burning, was backed up with groceries.
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by Daniel Silliman @
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| 3.6.09 |
"For [Ludwig] Wittgenstein, the point of the philosophical “conversation” was to address confusions intrinsic to his reader’s language and way of life. Rather than one 'philosophical method,' he advanced in the Investigations a variety of techniques for addressing various confusions, 'like different therapies.'
"[David Foster] Wallace attempted to enact such a conversation in his art. He would borrow from the Investigations not only themes—solipsism, language, meaning—but also the theoretical bulwark for a literature that was simultaneously challenging and therapeutic in the Wittgensteinian sense. The therapy was necessary and even urgent for a readership which, Wallace believed, had internalized not only postmodernism’s theoretical prejudices but also its involute habits of thought. The millennial subject was addicted to the same pathologies he was desperate to escape; nowhere was this more evident than in the difficulty literary critics had in responding meaningfully to Wallace’s books. What Wallace wanted to 'share' most was a way out. But he would start with his readers, in the middle. The maze of contemporary thinking would have to be dismantled from within."
-- Jon Baskin, on David Foster Wallace's attempts to escape and be a human being.
by Daniel Silliman @
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Accident man
He couldn't draw people. He could draw cars, though, and anything geometric. Captain Cash liked cars and he drew cars and crashes. He would draw them with circles and squares, rectangles, triangles, and oblongs. He liked to graph the simple shapes onto the accident reports. When Captain Cash was called out to a scene -- midnight on the highway, dusk on a backroad, Friday evening at a red light or Saturday across a median -- he'd measure everything and draw it all. He'd sit in his cruiser with the dome light on and he'd graph it all out.
He was a lanky old man with long teeth, big hands and glasses exaggerating his eyes. He had a country way of shouting. He'd get excited and say "ha!" really loud. Sometimes he'd get excited by accidents, especially if something strange happened, like a little Honda was cut in half by a speeding BMW, or a pickup hit a sedan and bounced and hit both sides of a bridge and flipped exactly like a pool ball in a trick shot. He'd get excited. He'd say, "look at that!" And the other officers at the scene always avoided him. The commanding officers looked at him, ecstatic over the wreckage, and they would think there was something really wrong with him. He got off on accidents; it was unsettling. The younger officers always thought of the captain as someone who was sick from all his years on the job, gone loopy and morbid with all the crashes he'd seen. Captain Cash was just a little too gleeful or giddy or something, standing there with his accident graph, grinning and saying "see this?" So they avoided him. It was like he didn't know accidents were awful, but of course he did, it was just that of all the accidents that make up life, these were the ones where he could calculate everything, shout "ha!" and say, "see?" It wasn't that he liked the mess, but that here, at these scenes, he could be in control.
Captain Cash didn't set out to be an accident man. But he liked accidents, liked understanding them, and he was never very good with people. He couldn't handle confusion, ambiguity and feelings. He needed the explanations of points of impact, mass and speed and malfunction. For him, anything that wasn't physics was "operator error," and fault was always officially assigned.
He'd show up at the scene, any scene that was serious, and he'd measure everything, fill out the report and make an accurate accident map. He'd show driver one and driver two, who was where and what went wrong. He'd put in the details for the report for the files and he'd draw it all. All the chaos, all the physics of rubber smearing on the road and metal twisting into metal, the science of glass smashed, pieces flung, plastic cracked and air bags exploded, all of it he graphed with simple shapes. All of it he understood. All of it he measured, recorded and calculated. He'd start with the simple shapes and make all of it make sense. He couldn't draw people though, so he'd draw stick figures to show where they were when they died.
by Daniel Silliman @
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| 1.6.09 |
MOST people don't relate to hyenas. You say "hyenas" to them and they give you a long stare, as if you're talking about a mythical beast -- which it practically is nowadays. The more enlightened might remember the old nature shows where the hyenas gang-pile a corpse or disembowel the newborn wildebeest and devour it in ragged bloody lumps before the awareness has left its eyes, but that's all they remember, the ugliness and the death.
-- TC Boyle, A Friend of the Earth
Sam Maloof, famed California woodworker, dies at age 93. May he rest in peace.
How the US exiled every single inhabitant of Diego Garcia
Ralph Nader appeals to disaffected Republicans
Mayor quits for gay illegal immigrant he loves
Steve Earle's tribute to Townes Van Zandt
Fr. Ron's street memorial for the murdered
Liberal arts kids going to work on farms
The case for working with your hands
Family who stunts for James Bond
The ancient history of house cats
Cleverness of rooks rivals chimps
UK's New Labour Party falls apart
Design-wise, America's fucked
Cornel West's blues philosophy
Can Palahniuk's fans be right?
FBI infiltrates protest group I
FBI infiltrates protest group II
Biking in Los Angeles
Learning to eat alone
Movie pee breaks
Bee truck rolls
Detroit: Garden City
L.A. alley gardening
Waging nonviolence
Heineken's weird map
Where is Bill Clinton now?
Autopsies of the war dead
Those creepy windmills
Alphabet forms
Correction
Illustrated letters
Donald Duck in Deutschland
Wikipedia spying on N. Korea
Orwell's struggle to write 1984
Spanish Civil War vets get citizenship
Sand sculpture competition in Moscow
In Neil Gaiman's hiddlegy-piddledy mind
Merkel 'turned down' job as communist spy
Communist spy fired shot that mobilized German leftists, moved nation left
Amos Elon, Israeli author and essayist, dies at 82. May he rest in peace.
by Daniel Silliman @
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| 29.5.09 |
by Daniel Silliman @
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| 28.5.09 |
Pocket full of worms
(revised)
The old man carried the worms in his pocket, while he puttered around, and sometimes he'd think of experiments for them. He'd stick his hand in his pocket, in the dirt there, and feel them, wiggling and waiting for experiments.
People worried about the old man, Mr. Darwin, the distinguished Victorian with the stately beard and reputation. He was acting strange. He was acting like a boy. He was always like that, a little, with the barnacles and the tests with the fermenting barrels of salt water, but those had been important. There had been a theory, a bid idea, something important, and this was just a ball of naked, wiggly worms. He kept them in his pocket.
He'd walk around with his worms and come up with silly, stupid tests. "Can worms hear?" he would wonder, and then he'd test it. He put them on top of a piano while his daughter was playing. She played, pounding away at her assigned scales, and he watched the worms closely, trying to see if they responded in any way. "Can you hear?" he would say, and his daughter would give him a look. He paid a kid from down the street to blow a whistle at the worms, and the little boy whistled and whistled as shrill as he could, wanting to earn his money, but the worms didn't seem to do anything. The old man put them under an upsidedown tub and paid the boy again to hit it with a spoon while he watched the worms. The boy was very excited by this, but he told the old man that the worms couldn't hear because they didn't have ears. But the old man said, "what if they have very small ears?" The boy never forgot that. He thought the old man was doddering, obviously, and everyone said so and worried about it, but the boy liked him a lot and always remembered that you didn't know if maybe the world is full of little tiny ears.
The old man did this for several years, and he even wrote a little book about worms. The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms: With Observations on their Habits. He just thought it was interesting. It wasn't a very important book, but a couple of people read it and were interested in worms and that made him happy. That was the last book he wrote before he died.
---
The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, by David Quammen
by Daniel Silliman @
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| 25.5.09 |
Left there
The cigarette sat smoking on the ground long after the bus had gone. It rolled into a crack and smoked on. There was no one on the corner, but the cigarette sent up spirals of smoke.
It smelled like someone was smoking, when the next crowd came and waited for the next bus, but no one had a cigarette and the smell seemed to come from nowhere. The cigarette burnt down to the filter, spiral of saltpeter carrying the burn all the way down, and then it scorched the filter, puffing out a final puff as the brown paper curled black.
It was like a clue no one cared about, to a mystery interesting no one.
by Daniel Silliman @
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by Daniel Silliman @
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| 22.5.09 |
The pity dollar
His nickname was ironic, in the humorless way big men are called Tiny, and angry, brawling men are Pinky. It wasn't funny, but a little cruel. He was called Hammer, but he was indecisive. He stuttered through decisions, second-guessing everything he did, always saying he didn't know, always hesitating, always a man who'd learned through long experience to bet against himself.
Hammer spent ten years in college, taking the deferments to avoid the draft. After ten years, he had a degree in art. He was a sculptor, creating modernist abstractions out of steel and melted plastic, but he never really believed it. He stopped soon after school, without really realizing he was stopping.
He got married. He had three sons. All of them were more confident than he was. He joined a Calvinist church, where men were manly men who believed in tough theology, in hell and cigars, and he was intimidated by this brawny God. His wife left him when he was 56, and he didn't know why, but he knew he had failed, and he often cried.
He had no skills, no trade, so he always worked for other men and for corporations. He was a shipping clerk for a warehouse, until the warehouse closed. He unloaded trucks, pulled weeds, and stocked Christmas toys from midnight to 8 while corporate-approved holiday music played on repeat every hour. He worked at Waffle House, at the grill, and listed that as management experience on job applications. He couldn't find work for six months, so his wife went to work for a financial planner. She made more money than he'd ever made and that's how she left him.
One of the men from the church gave him work pouring concrete. The men there drove oversized trucks and he had a 12-year-old Saturn. He made $13 an hour, which was one more than the kid who was working to save money for college. The kid was studying physics and he tried to read what the kid was reading, but he couldn't understand it. He said he went to college too and the kid said what did he do in college and he said he mostly dragged it out, for the deferments. He regretted it now. Maybe war would have been good for him. When he found out what the kid was making, only a dollar's difference, he went to his car and cried.
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THE OLD MAN had the damnedest curl to his hat brim, a tight roll on the right where his doffing or donning hand gripped it and a wavering downslope on the left like a shed roof. You could recognize him two miles away. He wore it at the table listening to the woman's stories about Tin Head, steadily emptying his glass until he was nine-times-nine drunk, his ganstery face loosening, the crushed rodeo nose and scar-crossed eyebrows, the stub ear dissolving as he drank. Now he must be dead fifty years or more, buried in the mailman sweater.
-- Annie Proulx, The Half-Skinned Steer
Pun competition
Expat = creative
Faux photoshop
Pope a poor pilgrim
Drawing with creases
Bike cities in America
Dying to climb Mt. Everest
Wes Anderson's pantheon
The Wes Anderson problem
What we eat when we're alone
Conservatives should care about transit
Photographing the world economy
Annie Proulx is uncomfortable at home
Red desert breaks Annie Proulx's heart
The intersection of Christianity and anarchism
When the Berlin wall came down (personal narrative)
CA Conrad: Elvis caught my soul in the air like a rose between his teeth
Sid Laverents, master of homemade films, dies at 100. Rest in peace.
Robin Blaserr, New American Poet, dies at 83. Rest in peace.
Daniel Carasso, yogurt pioneer, dies at 103. Rest in peace.
Elmore Leonard, 83, on writing: It's working out. It's fun.
Indigenous cinema & visual langauges
The West, the photos & the myths
Rise of the black hipsters
Axe chic (for $550)
Death penalty map
China's new sex theme park
The terrorist who may not exist
Internet revolution in Guatemala
Video from the grave sends country into crisis
A NY apartment with a criminal past
Abandoned train tracks as new NY City park
by Daniel Silliman @
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| 20.5.09 |
Interruptions and acts of God
The water rolled down the hill from the hotel, blackening the gutter. Bits of burnt trash were carried along. The water ran past the rubber boots and rubber truck tires, down the pavement in sheets, down the hill past the people who cried, and the water was black with soot and burnt belongs.
After the preacher was finished preaching, but before the bodies were buried, the man stood up. He wore black and white, with a bow tie, and he was the first to the microphone. He was the first to testify, even though he didn't know the dead, and didn't know anyone there. He was the first to talk, even though he was a stranger, and hadn't said amen. He came with neither affirmations nor consolations, neither heaven proclamations nor Jesus deliverations. He didn't even speak in that style. Instead he stood up, went first, and said As-Salaam-Alaikum.
Leaves withered away from the flames, shrinking into themselves, twisting and turning yellow, then black. The heat made the air look like melting glass. The fire sucked in sound.
The muslim man said he brought the greetings of a God they knew, but did not recognize, a prophet they had heard of, but never heard. He was sorry to interrupt, he said, but he was there for the prophet and that God. He said he was there to tell them there was an answer to this emptiness. He said if they felt abandoned, if they felt the preacher's words were hollow, and if Jesus was gone now, lost now, if the church seemed meaningless and heaven was apparently empty, then he wanted them to know that the Nation of Islam was there.
The preacher didn't look at the muslim man while he talked and the congregation looked down, nobody meeting anybody's eyes, as if he was just somebody's aunt, expected to do this, harmless but always saying something hysterical. Outside, camera men talked about other TV stations they'd worked for and hearse drivers hid in back, sneaking cigarettes and being careful to look somber.
The hotel was left a heap, a slumping hulk on the hill, its burnt timbers in silhouette a broken, splintered spine. The trees smelled like smoke even after the smoke had all blown away. The smell stayed for days, until the people wondered if they only imagined it lingering, hanging there like resentment.
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| 18.5.09 |
"[W]ith such clarity as I have, I must say I am not a Christian. For the situation as I see it is that in spite of the abyss of nonsense in which we are caught, we shall all alike be saved."
-- Soeren Kirkegaard, as quoted by John Updike in "The Fork"
"Is the Christian situation so desperate that the primary task of the contemporary theologian is one of creating a fortress of faith which is unapproachable by the world?"
-- Thomas J.J. Altizer, in Towards a New Christianity
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| 15.5.09 |
Leaving no mark
1. He disappeared down the canyon, into the desert one last time. He had taken the name of a sea captain, which was odd for someone who liked to get lost in places where there wasn't water, but he called himself NEMO and it is thought that he drowned in one of the floods that flushed the gorges that spring.
He left the name NEMO carved into the sandstone. He left it near the hieroglyphic panels of stories we can't read any more, near the old stone stairs which were cut a hundred years ago but are never used now. He left it even though he was searching for anonymity, was rejecting civilization and history and was trying to get lost. Even though he was looking for the unmarked face of the desert, that austere and beautiful place where the emptiness unfolds as peace, he put knife to stone and left his new name. He succumbed to the impulse of foxes pissing on fence posts, the obsession of Kilroy claiming his past presence, the desperation of past presidents writing memoirs. He tired to assert something against the absence that is always about to engulf us, and he left the name of a sea captain carved into a rock wall in the wilderness.
Within a few years it had washed away.
2. She would say she was married 12 times. She would say she had had 22 children by those men and by her several lovers. She didn't even try to make the stories believable. She said she lived on a boat, in a tree house, in a teepee, with a gun collector, a bomb maker, and an owl and a goose and a judge. Her story was different every time.
She taught in the prison where the men were sent for violent crimes. She taught reading, and writing stories, and the men would ask her for her stories and so she made up fake ones. She said she was a lumber jack, before she was a prison teacher, and a whaler, a welder, and a sewage treatment technician. She made herself into a mother or a man, but never into anything which might be even slightly sexual. She didn't want to give them anything that they could use against her, or anything they could use to threaten her. She didn't want them to find her, or know how to find her, or even be able to look her up in a phonebook when they got out. These were violent men and she wanted to teach them, but didn't want to be known. So she gave them stories which were inconsistent and contradictory, cover stories which were obviously lies, but which which worked anyway.
Sometimes, when the men got out, they would think about her, and realize they couldn't even remember her name.
3. We learned to skip rocks at the Russian River. I think we were there for a long weekend, but the circumstances seem vague to me now. We were throwing the rocks into the water under the bridge, my younger brother and sister and me, and we were competing for the farthest throw and biggest splash. We lobbed them in, like pop flies, and threw them overhand as far as we could into the current.
It was idle. And aggressive. And every time I threw a rock it would hit, and splash, but then the splash was over and I needed to do it again.
Down the bank, where it was sandy, teenagers in bathing suits were swimming and flirting. There was a line at the concessions stand, and ice coolers and castles were spread out across the sand, little kids screaming and running and adults sitting and tanning on towels in the sun. There was an evangelistic skit where a woman in jean cutoffs got down on her knees to pray to Jesus, but no one watched except the little kids and all of them stayed back a little so they could run away if things got weird. We moved away from the people, though, into the shade of the bridge. We were antisocial siblings, silently bonded and bombing the river with rocks.
Our mom asked what we were doing and then she showed us how to skip stones. You throw it sideways, she said, you find a flat rock and you spin it so it skips. It doesn't splash. And somehow that more satisfying. I did this the rest of the day, even after my brother and sister went away down the beach, practicing this skill. I found flat rocks and I threw them this way, letting the stones slip, spinning, skipping without making a mark, each one almost silent, one, two, three and four, even five skips out into the water. They barely touched the surface and then they disappeared.
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Can Cy Twombly be trusted?
The end of East Germany
JJ Abrams and the magic of mystery
Obama's culture war strategy
Foreign policy in film
Palestinian literature festival
Theory, practice & poor philosophy
Interrogating torture & crimes of state
The light at the end of religion's dark tunnel
Communities w/o cars in Germany
Perry Coarlsby: The end of things
Frank Film & videopoetry
Cubist spaces & the art of eyes
Biography isn't history
Baseball in 150 words
Bonnie & Clyde still big
Talking to Palahuniuk
Blind photographers
McDonalds' Murders
The new nuke porn
Newspaper guilt
Lost letters
by Daniel Silliman @
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| 13.5.09 |
The first time I met my wife
I met my wife three years ago. I did not know her name until later. I don't think she introduced herself, but maybe she did. I did not know her name until after, when I asked, Who was that? and was told that's Beth, and she reads.
When I first met her she was wearing an apron with funny frills, which I didn't know were meant to be funny. I didn't see it was a joke. She had short curly hair and a new tattoo. The tattoo said: simple. She was happy and she was making bread. She was smiling and she was leaving.
She was leaving for seminary, leaving the house where I met her and also leaving the state, but she didn't leave immediately. Two days later she was back and she was sitting on the porch with a Thomas Merton book and an open journal and I said hello, which was pointless because she was leaving. But I did anyway. I said do you mind? and she said she didn't.
Latter, when we were engaged, when I would kiss that tattoo and she would try to get me to say when I first knew that I loved her, she'd say she wasn't really writing in her journal that day. She'd say she was drawing a little picture of a bug.
You should have told me, I'd say, then I would have known I loved you right then.
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