Bayonne Rayon Saturday, September 06, 2003

I took a shower, I got dressed, I bought groceries, I ate lunch--so I must be awake, right? Guess again! I feel sandy and sleepy on an otherwise glorious day. One of us is out of step, me or the weather.

Meanwhile, a Percy book brings on a Percy moment. From Love in the Ruins. A psychiatrist treating a patient.

But today he's got a new idea. If I'd been as sharp-witted and alert to small clues as a good psychiatrist should be, I should have guessed from the way his eye kept straying to my big bottom drawer. Here I keep my samples. The untreatable maladies of any age, reader, may be ascertained from the free samples a doctor receives. My desk drawer contains hundreds of suppositories, thousands of pills for treating terror, and dozens of rayon "training" organs for relieving male impotence.

None of these things works very well.

In short, my patient asked--for the first time and in a halting, scarcely audible voice--to be fitted with a rayon organ.

If he could not "achieve an adequate response" himself, he said--why doesn't he say "make love"--he could at least see that his wife did.

Again we cast an eye toward my bottom drawer, which did in fact contain a regular arsenal of male organs, the best of which are for some reason manufactured in Bayonne, New Jersey.

Hip hop hooray! We're famous. Of course, this is Percy's sci-fi novel, so I don't know if he's making that up. I'd investigate but am about to collapse from ennui and terror.

@ 1:31:00 PM, ,

Al Bowlly's in Heaven Friday, September 05, 2003

A long, slow day, mostly spent staring into the penetrating eyes of Mario Altomare. On the record sleeve he's wearing a "Wild Ones" cap and a turtleneck (although his neck is bathed in the shadows of his Dick Tracy jaw), and a floral ascot is hanging insouciantly over his left shoulder. His right hand is holding up his cheek, and he's gazing out of frame with a look that would cause any woman who met his eyes to immaculately conceive. Altogether, the kind of guy I wanted desperately to resemble in creative-writing classes.

Flanking Mario are a wooden Maltese cross, which a friend brought back from the Vatican, and a framed photo-collage of Three Stooges stickers, which another good pal made for me long ago, and which proved sturdy enough to survive the bombings. (Not so lucky was another cherished item, a framed photo from a New York Mets program, with the caption: 'Statistics Cannot Measure Tim Bogar's True Value.'") Then there's the computer, a dwarfish black Dell, and then a present from my loverly nieces: a decorated photo of Mrs. Wrong Turn Journal at our wedding in the hinterlands. Somebody left a vase in the corner of the cube, and I've got a stack of scrap paper piling up that I'm never going to take home. My sister also gave me some great transitioning gifts when I took this job--erasers, a mini Zen garden, tiny inspirational texts. I keep my wife's transitioning gift on my desk at home: a Pooh lunchbox.

I've also resumed doodling. I keep blank paper by the phone and draw weird little faces, usually starting with the nose. Most of them look schlumpy, in the Jack Lemmon fashion, or are frowning keenly out of frame. At some point I expect them to be entered into evidence.

Just learned a friend at work has prostate cancer. Treatable; he's going in for surgery soon. His wife, meanwhile is laid up, also suffering from cancer. He's one of those people I never really take time to be grateful for, a big, friendly guy with a walrus moustache who used to write parodies of famous magazines; now he's in corporate communications. All the best to him.

@ 5:05:00 PM, ,

Release the Mutants

Maybe we can try the Salvation Navy instead. A guy arrived at the house from their land forces and refused to take the furniture we had on offer. Apparently he doesn't like old furniture, or cats. So we remain cluttered, at least for a few more days.

A scary moment: I think I've gotten to the end of music, at least for a while. I've always gone through periods where I can't think of a single song I want to hear, where it seems like I've listened to everything a thousand times. It's like chewing gum: After three bites, you're just doing it to move your jaw. Usually I go out and buy an armload of new stuff in hopes of surprising myself back into interest. The last time this happened, a few months ago, I decided jangly electric folk was dead and I needed a diet of pop standards. I tried that, and discovered some diamonds the size of my fist; but already it all sounds used up, just like jangly electric folk. That was the point of the iPod, to juxtapose, to manufacture surprise. e.g., by this point Emmylou Harris bores me up a wall, but maybe if her song came on just after some Tierney Sutton scatting, I'd hear them both in a new way.

If anything, the opposite has happened. I've become less patient with individual songs because I know there are four thousand others waiting in the queue and one of them has to be better than this. As for juxtaposition, yeah, it was cute to hear "That's Entertainment!" right after "The Great Valerio" that one time, but I could do better with a mix tape.

So I'm at the end of music. I think I won't fight it. I just won't listen for a while and see what happens: Maybe it'll come back, like an appetite. If I were in the right frame of mind, I guess I could blame this on corporate homogenization etc., but I don't think that's the case. I think I expect too much from music, as I sometimes expect too much from people or from jobs (or even, I guess, myself). It shouldn't surprise me when I get to the bottom of the glass.

This leads me to another thrilling discovery. I realized this morning that the blog is occupying most of my creative energy these days. I could be writing the Secret Thing, I could be king of infinite space, etc. But it occurred to me that I've felt that way about every last project I've started in the past few years. If I weren't editing this book, or writing this short story, or figuring out these stats, or driving to work, or making lunch, I could be doing something that would knock the world off its foundation.

Maybe I'm onto something. More later.

@ 9:40:00 AM, ,

Come Ye Back, You British Soldier Thursday, September 04, 2003

I've just had an argument over at another blog about what makes good sci-fi. I would argue this is a step in the right direction:

The Earth is suddenly under attack by monsters, earthquakes and ray beams. Scientists observe as the dormant volcano Mount Devil opens up and Princess Dragon Mom and her army of mutant creatures emerge. One of the scientists, Rayma, volunteers for an experiment in which he is implanted with electronics and becomes the powerful Infra Man with super-strength, incredible martial arts abilities, x-ray vision and built-in ray beams and rockets. As Infra-Man he sets out to take on Princess Dragon Mom and her army.

I draw a contrast between this movie and "Solaris," which is about Big Themes of love and loss. Confirming its high seriousness is the repeated appearance of George Clooney's ass; he'd never get naked for, say, "Ocean's 11." But this is Art, OK? To put this all in very Percy terms, Solaris spends the time creating a fictional alien world, invites us to get lost there...and then presents us with exactly the same boring problems we went to the alien world to avoid! e.g. Let's say some obsessive clumps his vacation time in an entire month at the end of 2002, to forget about work entirely, to do things he can't do ordinarily, such as go to movies in the daytime. He goes to see Solaris. And what does he get? A movie about a guy who finds work unsatisfying and can't escape from his routine and bad relationships! Whereas if he sees Inframan, he gets the story of a guy transformed into something better, something different, something interesting, for Chrissakes.

I realize this is a facile analysis; I recognize the other factors at play here. But it seems to me "realism," in the sense that "Solaris" is a naturalistic movie ostensibly dealing with real concerns, is the enemy of joy. Joy is not the point of art, of course, nor is it escape. But why create art that mires us in the very things we turn to art to transcend?

Assumptions, assumptions. Meanwhile, while the words come gushing here, they're down to a trickle over in the Secret Thing department. What am I trying to transcend with the Secret Thing? And why does it keep feeling like the thing I'm trying to escape? Or, more broadly, why does every Secret Thing I start feel that way in the end?

Maybe it's got something to do with the "secret" part. I'll dream about it. Nighty night.

@ 11:19:00 PM, ,

All the Moths Adore 'em

Panic sets in. I woke up at 6 am and realized: I haven't read enough books. I haven't written enough. I haven't burned off enough calories. I haven't spent enough time with my friends or my family or my wife. And I have maybe three good hours a day to do all this.

I was too tired to type this in last night:

Three o'clock and suddenly awake amid the smell of dreams and of the years come back and peopled and blown away again like smoke. A young man am I, twenty nine, but I am as full of dreams as an ancient. At night the years come back and perch around my bed like ghosts.

My mother made up a cot in my corner of the porch. It is a good place, with the swamp all around and the piles stirring with every lap of water.

But, good as it is, my old place is used up (places get used by rotatory and repetitive use) and when I awake, I awake in the grip of everydayness. Everydayness is the enemy. No search is possible. Perhaps there was a time when everydayness was not too strong and one could break its grip by brute strength. Now nothing breaks it--but disaster.

...

REMEMBER TOMORROW
Starting point for search:

It no longer avails to start with creatures and prove God.

Yet it is impossible to rule God out.

The only possible starting point: the strange fact of one's own invincible apathy--that if the proofs were proved and God presented himself, nothing would be changed. Here is the strangest fact of all.

Abraham saw signs of God and believed. Now the only sign is that all the signs in the world make no difference. Is this God's ironic revenge? But I am on to him.

Dr. Percy, natch. This comes from one of the bleakest pages of "The Moviegoer," where the hero, Binx, reveals the full face of his despair. But as I type it over I'm laughing. I think: They haven't won yet. Not when thoughts like this are possible.

Still: Can you organize time like an apartment? More important, will my mortgage broker extend my rate lock until I finish my existential crisis?

Winners to announce:

Best Comment Ever about this blog goes to everybody's favorite uncle, who said last night: "Gee, Rob, you sure go to church a lot."

Best Novelty Present Ever goes to King Bowser and Princess Dragon Mom for a 45-rpm record -- autographed! -- by one Mario Altomare, whose thigh-parting eyes are gazing at me even as I type; in contradistinction to the devotional image of the Madonna and Child on the obverse side of the sleeve. If you want a copy, it is available from "Ape Records" of New York, or Bacciolina's Rosary Den, 37 Patterson Plank Road, Seacaucus.

This beats the previous Best Novelty Present Ever, a copy of "El Porompompero" by Latino triple-threat Manolo Escobar. I still have the record, but I lost the guy who gave it to me.

@ 8:44:00 AM, ,

Tossing the Dwarf Wednesday, September 03, 2003

Not much to report. A fun evening with friends. During the afternoon a fellow editor dashed the work I'd done so far on the Secret Thing: It doesn't make economic or political sense. So screw realism, I'll add aliens. Story of my life.

Goodnight, Binx Bolling, wherever you are.

@ 11:27:00 PM, ,

Sweatin' to the Signposts

It occurs to me what Dr. Percy would say about my treadmill troubles. Of course you can walk five miles during a blackout. Or head uptown on a lazy afternoon with nothing better to do. They're situations built for seeking, and besides the point of the walk isn't exercise. This in contrast to waking up hours early and staring down a piece of alien technology that is demanding I remove myself from the world and make myself uncomfortable while doing it. It's the difference, in other words, between a canned experience and something spontaneous. So how to be spontaneous? Maybe somebody could throw stuff at my head while I exercised. ("What's the difference between an orgone box and a Skinner box?" "With a Skinner box, somebody's standing on the outside sticking swords through it." --exhcange with a friend, circa 1992)

Also, I once broke my finger in a NordicTrack.

@ 11:03:00 AM, ,

We Was the Nazz

Another cold, wet morning, which I enlivened by nearly dropping dead on my treadmill. I walked from Exchange Place to Bayonne without breaking pace; I used to make it from Battery Park to the Upper West Side in a cool hour. But spending forty-five minutes on a walkie machine nearly kills me. After about two minutes I literally can't stand up straight, and I get the urge to take a breather every five minutes after that. Maybe it's boredom; maybe I need a TV in front of me, like in all those Fahrenheit 451 health clubs. Maybe the bars are too low, or the treadmill is too small; maybe the ceiling's too close to the top of my idiot head. At any rate, it makes for an odd morning, but excellent blogging.

Dread today: I don't have a story yet. This means I get to wait for one. Maaaaaybe something good; maaaaaaaybe something bad. But whichever it is, it'll come just as I've gotten used to having nothing to do and am writing an important paragraph about how "Brandy, You're a Fine Girl" came on my iPod this morning and it reminded me of the apotheosis of St. Stephen of Hungary. Or how Keith Emerson's lyrics were terrible, even though Greg Lake was the lyricist for the band, as a friend smugly pointed out after yesterday's posting. (Dude: Can you still keep your balance? Can you live on a knife-edge?)

A joyful stretch of "Moviegoer" this morning. If I were a "real" blogger, like Andrew Sullivan, I'd start a book club and make you all join. ("Maybe I'll make my OWN dead pool--and put you in it!" --Clint Eastwood, in the last Dirty Harry movie) At any rate, just a snippet today:

By some schedule of proprieties known to her, she did not become my date until she left her rooming house where she put on a boy's shirt and black knee britches. Her roommate watched us from an upper window. "Wave to Joyce," Sharon commands me. Joyce is leaning on the sill, a brown-haired girl in a leather jacket. She has the voluptuous look of roommates left alone.

A good day with the Secret Thing yesterday. I made up a bad guy to go with the good guy. Now everybody's all fixed up!

@ 8:52:00 AM, ,

Unreal City Tuesday, September 02, 2003

I knew I'd ruin it. From "The Glass Key":

He got his hat and coat and went to the front door. Long oyster-colored lines of rain slanted down into China Street. He smiled and addressed the rain under his breath: "Come down, you little darlings, thirty-two hundred and fifty dollars' worth of you."

I don't love Dash like I used to. He was a jerk, as was his girlfriend, and his style seems emptier now than it used to.

Walker, on the other hand, does not disappoint.

For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead.

It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can. At such times it seems that the conversation is spoken by automatons who have no choice in what they say. I hear myself or someone else saying things like: "In my opinion the Russian people are a great people but--" or "Yes, what you say about the hypocrisy of the North is unquestionably true. However--" and I think to myself: this is death. Lately it is all I can do to carry on such everyday conversations, because my cheek has developed a tendency to twitch of its own accord.

The news business, in a nutshell.

Secret Things to attend to. More later.

@ 10:03:00 PM, ,

September in the Rain

A wet start to a gray week. Dashiell Hammett has a line about "clam-colored rain" that I'm going to spoil if I quote it from memory, but believe me it fits. I only made a few pages' progress into "The Moviegoer," and got the poor paperback soaked besides.

The alarm went off twice. My wife said something funny when I turned it off, but I don't remember it now. I decided I'd do my constitutional outside today, then realized it was raining too hard for that. So I ended up in the office half an hour earlier than I expected, with soaked socks and a profound feeling of fatness below my shoulders. The wet denim doesn't help.

On the other hand, I found myself reeling off a couple of nifty paragraphs for the Secret Thing. I find that I get attached to details; if I can toss in some interesting colorful fact about a character or a setting it often turns into the main point of the story (or at least provides a extra current of narrative). The whole of my last book came about because, in the ur-draft of it, the main character mentioned that he'd talked to a Hungarian gangster named Attila Speck. As soon as I wrote the name, which came out of thin air, I knew I'd have to come up with something for Speck to do. The more I noodled on him, the more I realized that I actually wanted to write about him, not the ostensible hero. Hence the novel that's now careering between every resentful editorial assistant in New York.

At any rate, I found a little bit of narrative to make the Secret Thing interesting. It's a very technical project, lots of background information to write up, which doesn't leave a lot of room for narrative flights. But I decided this section would have a hero, and his name would be Fosdick Dumont Hapworthy, and he had been paralyzed while an anchor fell on him during the dedication of a yacht. That made me love all the dull events clustered around Fosdick (but not enough to finish detailing them instead of blogging).

I need more time. Where does it come from? Maybe my scientist buddy, whose birthday is today, could explain.

@ 10:45:00 AM, ,

I'm Glad You Asked Monday, September 01, 2003

In answer to a posting below, a little bird suggested that the celebrity I most resemble but hate is Vin Scelsa; Vin Scelsa being a deejay at a local public-radio station who plays lots of music I like and scrutinizes it at terrifying length. I can see what the birdie is getting at but I don't really dislike Vin Scelsa. In high school, he was my first introduction to a host of wonderful musicians, filmmakers and writers, like Leonard Cohen and Wim Wenders, when my idea of highbrow lyrics was Keith Emerson and "Rollerball" was an art movie. He was the first deejay I listened to religiously; I have a fond, but maybe inaccurate, memory of him interviewing Paul Simon for a full four hours after "Graceland" came out.

If there were ever an aesthete, it's Vin. He loves music, loves to talk about it and scour it for nuance. He reads whole chapters of favorite books on the air. He talks about his life and the art that moves him. In other words, he blogs without typing.

I guess I just decided I was too cool for Vin. He is not an ironic or abrasive aesthete, like the coneheads at Aintitcoolnews, or Kevin Smith, or Quentin Tarantino. He loves the music he plays and puts his heart out there in presenting it to you. ("Don't wear your heart out on your sleeve/When your remarks are off the cuff"--Elvis Costello)

But there came a point in my life where I stopped feeling earnest about Leonard Cohen and Wim Wenders; where "Wings of Desire" stopped being a piece of art that spoke to me in a way that nothing else in the world did, and became a very talky, very plodding middlebrow art movie. In other words, it all seemed very lame all of a sudden, and I couldn't believe he was going out on a limb for it.

That's not fair of me. Vin gave me a lot, and maybe I owe him another chance. (If I can listen to Jonathan Schwartz, I can listen to Vin.) As you can see here, I can still be earnest about art. The stuff I love, I love desperately, and I want everybody else to know about it. (Doesn't this paragraph from Evelyn Waugh change everything you know about literature and make you want to go out and be a Catholic????) And maybe us beautiful losers needs to stick together.

A friend of mine just asked me what "signposts" are. Every time I try to paraphrase this I get lost. So let me go straight to the source, Dr. Percy himself:

The old modern age has ended. We live in a post-modern as well as a post-Christian age which as yet has no name.

It is post-Christian in the sense that people no longer understand themselves, as they understood themselves for some fifteen hundred years, as ensouled creatures under God, born to trouble, and whose salvation depends upon the entrance of God into history as Jesus Christ.

It is post-modern because the Age of Enlightenment with its vision of man as a rational creature, naturally good and part of the cosmos, which itself is understandable by natural science--this age has also ended. It ended with the catastrophes of the twentieth century.

The present age is demented. It is possessed by a sense of dislocation, a loss of personal identity, an alternating sentimentality and rage which, in an individual patient, could be characterized as dementia.

As the century draws to a close, it does not yet have a name, but it can be described.

It is the most scientifically advanced, savage, democratic, inhuman, sentimental, murderous century in human history.

I will give it a name which at least describes what it does. I would call it the age of the theorist-consumer. All denizens of the age tend to be one or the other or both.

Darwin, Newton and Freud were theorists. They pursued truth more or less successfully by theory--from which, however, they themselves were exempt. You will look in vain in Darwin's Origin of the Species for an explanation of Darwin's behavior in writing Origin of the Species. Marx and Stalin, Nietzsche and Hitler were also theorists. When theory is applied, not to matter or beasts, but to man, the consequence is that millions of men can be eliminated without compunction or even much interest. Survivors of both Hitler's Holocaust and Stalin's terror reporter that their oppressors were not "horrible" or "diabolical" but seemed, on the contrary, quite ordinary, even bored by their actions, as if it were all in a day's work.

....

This is the age of theory and consumption, yet not everyone is satisfied by theorizing and consuming.

The common mark of the theorist and the consumer is that neither knows who he is or what he wants outside of theorizing and consuming.

This is so because the theorist is not encompassed by his theory. One's self is always a leftover from one's theory.

For even if one becomes passionately convinced of Freudian theory or Marxist theory at three o'clock of a Wednesday afternoon, what does one do with oneself at four o'clock?

The consumer, who thought he knew what he wanted--the consumption of the goods and services of scientific theory--is not in fact satisfied, even when the services offered are such techniques as "personal growth," "emotional maturity," "consciouness-raising" and suchlike.

The face of the denizen of the present age who has come to the end of theory and consumption and "personal growth" is the face of sadness and anxiety.

Such a denizen can become so frustrated, bored and enraged that he resorts to violence, violence upon himself (drugs, suicide) or upon others (murder, war).

Or such a denizen may discover that he is open to a search for signs, some sign other than theorizing or consumption.

....

One sign is one's self. No matter how powerful the theory, whether psychological or political, one's self is always a leftover. Indeed, the self may be defined as that portion of the person which cannot be encompassed by theory, not even a theory of the self. This is so because, even if one agrees with the theory, what does one do then? Accordingly, the self finds itself ever more conspicuously without a place in the modern world, which is perfectly understood by theorizing. The face of the self in the very age which was designed for the self's understanding of all things and to please the self through the consumption of goods and services--the face of the self is the face of fear and sadness, because it does not know who it is or where it belongs.

The only other sign in the world which cannot be encompassed by theory is the Jews, their unique history, their suffering and achievements, what they started (both Judaism and Christianity), and their presence in the here and now.

...

The great paradox of the Western world is that even though it was in the Judeo-Christian West that modern science arose and flourished, it is Judeo-Christianity which the present-day scientific set of mind finds the most offensive among the world's religions.

---

The paradox can be resolved in only two ways.

One is that both the Jewish and the Christian claims are untrue, are in fact nonsense, and that the scientific mind-set is correct.

The other is that the scientific method is correct as far as it goes, but the theoretical mind-set, which assigns significance to single things and events only insofar as they are exemplars of theory or items for consumption, is in fact an inflation of a method of knowing and is unwarranted.

To bracket this, a quote from a source that my questioning buddy knows very well:

My search kept me at home; I sat before the TV set in my living room. I sat; I waited; I watched; I kept myself awake. As we had been told, originally, long ago, to do; I kept my commission.

And one more, from the lovely Sam Phillips, who dedicated this song to Dr. Percy (and who wrote another song about his novel "The Last Gentleman"):

i got myself so tightly wound i couldn't breathe
i could feel the fire burning underneath

i wanted to get lost and love the questions there
beauty and the truth i could breathe like air
then i finally found the signposts in a strange land

logic dances you from here to there not very far
making sense can't tell where you are

This is all a mouthful, I realize, so here's a personal story. I went back to the Church because I had a wonderful life but felt absolutely miserable in it. I had a wonderful girlfriend, a great job, a boss you dream about, a novel under my belt and a great writing career (theoretically) ahead of me, but more often than not I woke up cringing from the world. People told me I should be happy, on the theory that a person who has all the things I had ought to be happy. One good relationship plus one good career plus good health equals happy. The only thing not included in the equation is the variable; yours truly.

That's what Percy is saying. All the theories that govern our modern world are great as describing how grand masses of people and particles ought to behave. But they don't say a thing about how individual human beings ought to. This was a role religion used to fill; but as we all know God is dead, and nothing has taken his place in the zeitgeist. ("I thought you were dead." "Yeah, I get that a lot." --exchange from "Alien IV.") Signposts are what remind us that we live under imperfect theories. Being sad when you ought to be happy is a big one.

That's also the hidden theme of the Secret Thing. But don't tell anybody, OK?

@ 10:39:00 PM, ,

Even Signposts Get the Blues

A terribly lazy day. I woke up past ten, feeling drugged; I should've either slept till dinnertime or gotten my usual five hours. Then I puttered around with the Secret Thing--not a knockout piece of work just yet but you've got to start somewhere--and cleaned out a bunch of scrap paper. Why do I still have ten-year-old checkbooks?

We spent some time shuffling around Ikea, came home for an early dinner, then just collapsed. There are days when that works; today it didn't. I felt like I was going off work cold turkey and feeling withdrawal symptoms. Probably a lack of good exercise. Maybe I'll take a stroll.

Not much of a post. Something better later, I promise.

@ 8:32:00 PM, ,

Solid Gold Question Mark Twenty Feet Tall

Generally a glorious day. I decided I was going to call the new priest Father Pineapple, which made me feel very pleased with myself; now all I need is a nickname for the creepy aquiline deacon, who looks something like a hairdo model in a bad barber shop. Deacon Leer? Deacon Beard? Or something that reflects the supremely irritating affect he uses when he reads the Gospel, or God help us, a sermon: Instead of reading naturally, he puts long pauses between words to emphasize them, then rushes out whole verses in one breath. And he says "Jesus" as if it had six esses on the end and his hernia snapped after the first syllable. Any week now, I expect him to start scatting.

So I daydreamed through most of the service, as I do more and more often lately. As we all know, intent counts in church, just like on "Law & Order"; but for all the time I spend thinking about guys in spacesuits kicking down doors or enumerating the songs I want to scan into my iPod or rehearsing grievances from the past week, something happens to me when it comes time for the Creed and Communion. The fantasias are my imperfect faith and my fault; the few moments that I'm free from those imagings are, I think, my reward for the neutron of faith I do have bouncing around my heart.

I continued my Sunday school with Dr. Percy and "The Moviegoer." I needed a snuggle with American prose after getting tied down and bronskied by Evelyn Waugh; and the doctor does not disappoint. His style isn't within an ocean of Evelyn's, but he's a writer of ideas, and they never, never, never fail him. Every page has a paragraph worth quoting. If you want to know what I go on and on about, signposts and whatever, pick up this one. Some samples:

Everything is upside-down for me. What are generally to be the best time are for me the worst times, and that worst of times [in the war] was one of the best. My shoulder didn't hurt but it was pressed hard against the ground as if somebody sat on me. Six inches from my nose a dung beetle was scratching around under the leaves. As I watched, there awoke in me an immense curiosity. I was onto something. I vowed that if I ever got out of this fix, I would pursue the search. Naturally, as soon as I recovered and got home, I forgot about it. But this morning, when I got up, I dressed as usual and began as usual to put my belongings into my pockets: wallet, notebook (for writing down occasional thoughts), pencil, keys, handkerchief, pocket slide rule (for calculating percentage returns on principal). They looked both unfamiliar and at the same time full of clues. I stood in the center of the room and gazed at the little pile, sighting through a hole made by thumb and forefinger. What was unfamiliar about them was that I could see them. They might have belonged to someone else. A man can look at this little pile on his bureau for thirty years and never once see it. It is as invisible as his own hand. Once I saw it, however, the search became possible. I bathed, shaved, dressed carefully, and sat at my desk and poked through the little pile in search of a clue just as the detective on television pokes through the dead man's possessions, using his pencil as a poker.

And later:

What is the nature of the search? you ask. ... The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. This morning, for example, I felt as though I had come to myself on a strange island. And what does such a castaway do? Why, he pokes around the neighborhood and he doesn't miss a trick. ... What do you seek--God? you ask with a smile. .... I cannot even answer this, the simplest and most basic of all questions: Am I, in my search, a hundred miles ahead of my fellow Americans or a hundred miles behind them? That is to say: Have 98% of Americans already found what I seek or are they so sunk in everydayness that not even the possibility of a search has occurred to them?

Bang bang bang, he does not stop, page after page after page. He is not a poet; he is not Waugh. He wrote a handful of novels and a couple books of philosophy. But the paragraphs above, from his first novel, are the beginning of probably the most monumental literary undertaking of the past century. He diagnoses a disease that we all suffer from but are too sick to see. What's the cure? The search. And what's waiting at the end. But I won't spoil it for you.

An excellent smoothie, a sufficient sandwich, and a movie with good buddies. The Film Forum again, this time for "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three." From the opening theme, I knew we were in excellent hands; funky, percussive, Lalo Schifrinesque; every time you hear it a Noo Yawk cop gets his wings. And what a city we get to see! Streets full of V-8s, everyone's got a moustache and a ratty hairdo, the mayor's a John Lindsay feeb, the cops are louts, the TA is a shabby mess run by loudmouths...and, yes, the Twin Towers put in an appearance, looming behind the FDR Drive. A pair of Walter Matthau buildings, big and unlovely and indispensable. God rest ye.

That was my father's city: run by older guys with white shirts, brown sweaters and red tempers; guys who would blow their stack and say impolitic things and damn the consequences. Indeed, their lines got belly laughs like you wouldn't believe, from a mixed crowd: We've arrived at a point where we get as much of a vicarious thrill out of hearing somebody say "fruitcake" without fear as we do watching a gunfight or car chase.

To be sure, it's wrong to romanticize those guys as the last generation of straight shooters before political correctness defanged us all. Many of them just didn't earn their bluster. They run the city in "Pelham"; but they're not doing a hell of a lot with it. The offices are shabby, everybody's got his feet up on the desk and looks hung over. A city of clock-watchers and seat-warmers.

My father, I am quick to note, was one of the good ones. He is a gentleman, a quiet, polite guy who I have seen lose his temper maybe twice in his life. Moreover, he is good at what he does. One of the most enlightening, and humbling, moments in my life was going to his retirement party and seeing the esteem and love his co-workers had for him.

And for clarity's sake: I am not one of those guys who thinks New York has become Disneyfied, and that we need to restore the city's integrity by bringing back graffiti and peep shows and stocking the Port Authority with a new generation of Jodie Fosters. Anybody who thinks this city needs more problems is out of his mind.

I was just about to run, and now I see Charles Bronson is dead. Another tough guy from a lost city. I hope Heaven is full of punks for him to waste.

@ 12:10:00 AM, ,

Lower Your Debt, rob@wrongturnjournal.com Sunday, August 31, 2003

Hello to our new affiliates in Staten Island and Denver. To sum up last night's ramblings: Art is beauty, truth is eternal and "The Man With the Golden Arm" is a hateful piece of shit. Today, endings and beginnings.

No more Waugh! I finished up "Sword of Honour" where I'd started it--on a light rail to Bayonne. Many, many stunning moments; some passages so surprising and sad I had to put the book down to digest them. But he leaves us with a smile and even a bit of hope. That old softie.

Some standout passages:

He walked to the old town, where he found a dilapidated romanesque church where a priest was hearing confessions. Guy waited, took his turn and at length said: "Father, I wish to die."

"Yes. How many times?"

"Almost all the time."

The obscure figure behind the grill leant nearer. "What was it you wished to do?"

"To die."

"Yes. You have attempted suicide?"

"No."

"Of what, then, are you accusing yourself? To wish to die is quite usual today. It may even be a very good disposition. You do not accuse yourself of despair?"

"No, Father; presumption. I am not fit to die."

"There is no sin there. This is a mere scruple. Make an act of contrition for all the unrepented sins of your past life."

After the absolution he said: "You are a foreigner?"

"Yes."

"Can you spare a few cigarettes?"

Then there's this exchange:

"He want to know," explained Bakic, "English-American anti-fascist songs. He want words and music so the girls can learn them."

"I don't know any," said Guy.

"He want to know what songs you teach your soldiers?"

"We don't teach them any. Sometimes they sing about drink, 'Roll out the barrel' and 'Show me the way to go home.'"

"He says not those songs. We are having such songs also under the fascists. All stopped now. He says Commissar orders American songs to honour American general."

"American songs are all about love."

"He says love is not anti-fascist."

There's more great stuff I want to share, but I also want to tell some stories of my own and, dammit, typing is hard. So back to Dante's wood...

After spending a week too wiped out to even consider it, I caught "Robin Hood" at the Film Forum this afternoon. Stood in line in front of cranky folks of a certain age. One of them kept checking the door to see if the staff had unlocked it; then, one minute before the scheduled opening time, rapped on the glass and barked, "COME ON!" I tried to coax a sympathetic shrug out of the people behind me, but they weren't going for it.

A lot of kids in the theater, a lot of teenaged sons and fortysomething papas. I wished for a moment I'd brought my own father to see it, then realized what poor company I would have been. I wanted to read before the movie started and run for the Path when it was over.

And, boy, did it take its time being over. I was hot to see it largely because of a breathless review a friend wrote a long time ago: the dialogue's witty and literate, the action never lets up, and so forth. I had seen it a dozen times as a kid, and again in college, and loved it every time. (For some reason the line "He won't be so insolent when his neck is stretched" stuck with me all those years.)

This time...maybe I was tired, maybe I was still tasting gall from a lousy week, but the whole thing seemed garish and flat at the same time. There's no story as such, just a bunch of set pieces very loosely strung together; the acting is astonishingly bad, dear old Claude Rains in particular; and the action just doesn't arrive. It's all hints and pantomime; it doesn't feel exciting, it doesn't feel dangerous.

Worst yet, I found myself rooting for Basil Rathbone, Prince John's flunky. Errol Flynn is impossible to take seriously, and it's absolutely unthinkable that he's helping the downtrodden out of the goodness of his heart. He wants love; he wants attention; he wants a forest full of mirrors he can look into. Basil might be a bit of a tight-ass, and he bet on the wrong horse, but he's basically an upstanding guy. If Errol Flynn took the time to show Basil a collection of hard-up Saxons (instead of putting the make on Olivia deHaviland), I'm sure his noblesse oblige would've kicked in. Claude Rains is a genuinely bad guy; Basil, all he needs is some prompting. Besides, I have sympathy for him; according to a friend who ought to know, Basil was a much better fencer than Errol Flynn but kept having to throw fights because the Nazi son of a bitch was the one with the marquee name.

I came home dissatisfied, only to discover a couple of friendly elves had been at work. A gal pal, as the tabloids would say, came over and helped my wife reorganize. This is no small thing. Mi esposa has a wonderful eye for design (dare I say queer eye?) and has great ideas for turning our heap of miscellany into a home; but neither of us ever seem to have the energy to carry out our plans. I've refused to hire a cleaning service, which she wants, out of embarrassment--basically, the same reason I didn't want to see a doctor about my morbid obesity until I'd lost a few pounds.

Hence the gal pal. A whirlwind! The kitchen was whiter than a Kubrick set, and it was cured of clutter; no more pots stacked on top of cabinets, no more muffin tins that voted for Ed Koch. They abandoned a generation of cutlery and actually cracked the wedding packages. They found the Stinky Thing that had haunted the toaster cabinet for weeks (a stick of ginger inky with rot). They made it all work.

And the living room! They moved couches, set our disused table by the window, swept up a cardigan's worth of cat hair. And the back-room office! Bookcases butt-bumped across the room, a futon scrapped, a plan resolved. That's right--our house has a plan now. Here's to rural electrification!

So we had dinner around our newly sited table, sat in our newly decluttered living room, and had a great chat. (Gal pal's husband, a dear old buddy of mine, had arrived earlier.) A lot of great stuff got said, mostly by the buddies, who are patient, kind and funny beyond anything I deserve. (My wife, of course, has accumulated enough good grace for a lifetime of this kind of treatment. I haven't done much since I gave up my bus seat, unprompted, at age eight.)

The thing that stuck with me: The gal pal, trying to snap me out of indulgent despondency, laid out the good things in my life. One of the items on her list was faith. I had never thought about it in those terms before, as something I have that people would want. A friend of mine once asked, since the Yankees are world-beaters and the Mets are world-beaten, who exactly are Mets fans? The best I could manage was, people from Queens and people with irrational loyalties. That, I guess, is how I've seen my faith. I don't know why I wear the orange and blue cap, but I know I'm never going to switch to pinstripes. Four World Series is wonderful; but they ain't worth one Mookie grounder.

What was it I said about Rosanne Cash? Dragging God down to her own dopey level? And I'm probably going to sleep through church tomorrow, too.

Thanks to the gal pal and boy wonder, for all their hard work today and everything else they said, which shall remain unblogged. Thanks to my wife, my little lares et penates. And go get 'em, Basil, wherever you are. This concludes our broadcast day.

@ 1:29:00 AM, ,