Planet of the Blind

We saw this over at Lance Mannion and couldn’t resist posting it here. Seems like Cinema Verite to me…

Back in September of 2006 Deborah Tall and I read nonfiction together at Hobart & William Smith Colleges. Deborah’s new book, a memoir entitled A Family of Strangers was just “out” from Sarabande Press and my book Eavesdropping had just been released by W.W. Norton. At the time Deborah was experiencing the final stages of her long fight with breast cancer and she had only a few weeks to live. Nary a day goes by that I don’t think of her. She kept me in the writing game during a dark period of my life when I was unemployed and largely unpublished. She saw the evident possibilities in what I was trying to accomplish with my first book Planet of the Blind. And she taught me by example: write every day.

When Wallace Stevens wrote: “The world is ugly and the people are sad” he was speaking in a specialized tense, “The Stevensian pluperfect” on behalf of an ordinary evening in New Haven. One must write against the heavy current.

This morning rain is crossing the farm fields of Iowa. It sweeps along the river valley and behind it the thunder can be heard like a tricky tempo in a work by Sibelius.

Something is coming. Better roll up the windows of the car.

Deborah would say it’s a perfect time to write.

S.K.

A friend of mine who I’ll call “X” because he’s a responsible, decent, upright fellow and what happened to him can’t be helped, this friend, this reliable observer went into a Sam’s Club mega-store in Cedar Rapids, Iowa where he saw a sign advertising “Jersey Willows” and when he observed the product (as it were) he saw that they were “Pussy Willows” plain as day. X wondered if “Jersey Willow” was a synonym for Pussy Willow and he looked it up. There is no such thing as the “Jersey Willow” though there are some retirement homes in the Garden State called “Willow View” and the like.

X speculated that some customer wheeling a cart overburdened with toilet paper and frozen meatballs complained about the dear Pussy Willow. One wonders how that conversation might have unfolded.

X looked on the national Sam’s Club website and saw that Pussy Willows are listed as an item you can purchase if you are so inclined. There was no mention of the Jersey Willow.

What would James Bond say?

S.K.

There’s an important new post by Amanda Marcotte about the increase in child poverty in the U.S. and the concomitant justificatory rhetoric of rightward types. Digby reports on the perfervid Heritage Foundation response, namely that an increase in some 500,000 homeless children is just propaganda from lefties for more government spending. Quick! Get William Blake on the phone! Is this a holy thing to see? Wasn’t this a Christian nation at least five minutes ago? Please, can’t we have the dunking stool for such pronouncers? Oy! A half a million new homeless kids. Maybe they’ll dance a fairy jig by the light of the moon and the wee people will take care of them? Get the leprechauns on the line!

Meanwhile they’re moving apace in New Jersey to get rid of the library for the blind. Governor Chirtie imagines that the elimination of books for the blind (meaning the elderly, children, veterans, people with physical disabilities, etc.) will save the state the cost of two and a half librarians and a lightbulb. Now that’s a bargain!

There was a moment when the film maker Woody Allen understood that he was not going to be sufficiently funny anymore. There’s a scene in his film “Stardust Memories” in which a UFO appears and extra-terrestrials tell Allen that he ought to give up on serious film making and return to his earlier funny movies. The joke is of course all about the Id, that base of consciousness and drive that animates western people. The humor is that we can know precisely what’s wrong with us and still somehow be helpless in the face of it. Knowing this won’t set you free no matter what Oprah Winfrey might say. Irony won’t save you either. If you know you’re failing and you proceed to fail anyway and somehow you know the reason why this was inevitable you are a tragic figure according to Aristotle. If you choose to find this funny you are dabbling in high comedy and the difference between this and tragedy is simply a matter of degree.

I choose a third way. I believe in the social compact. Really I do. 

S.K.

It's raining in Iowa City, so how about a little Irish song?

"Wisdom and Dreams"

I pray that I ever be weaving
An intellectual tune,
But weaving it out of threads
From the distaff of the moon.

Wisdom and dreams are one,
For dreams are the flowers ablow,
And Wisdom the fruit of the garden:
God planted him long ago.

W.B. Yeats

I was never one of those admirers of William Safire’s columns largely because I couldn’t forgive his paleo-Victorian defense of English against the unmannered and unlettered hordes. If you were to grill me, put sodium pentathol in my Ovaltine, pepper in my tea, I’d reveal a fondness for neologisms and street slang. There, I’ve done it without coercion. I’m impatient to get on with the point.

That being my favorite new term: the dopamine squirt. Matt Richtel’s article in today’s NY Times detailing how overloaded techno-charged citizens are becoming addicted to their fight or flee neurological “squirts” is well worth reading. But subject aside, its the juicy precision, the faux eros of the term that I love. The dopamine squirt! God yes! Apparently, according to Richter’s article, Americans can’t concentrate anymore because they’ve got the dopamine squirts! One wonders if the passersby see? Do they surmise that the itinerant i-Phone toting monster talking like a lottery seller has the squirts? “Oh the poor bastard! Dripping, unconscious eternal weather vane.”

Me? I have the squirts but good. O what abstractions these mortals are, til they leak…

S.K.

S.K.      

No one wants to hear your shit—but remember that day in Helsinki when the kid (still a teenager) thought you were personally responsible for Viet Nam? (You told him you were.)

Or remember thinking there’d be a day for standing up straight with your head clear, liberated at last?

Look! I am pushing a large, black wool ball down a dark corridor!

This is a dance for the poets in my nation. (The poets with their green suspenders, cartoon flash lights and customized angels…)

Your head clear, liberated at last…

Poetry is not being renewed. I hate to sound like Kenneth Rexroth but have you noticed they’re killing all the young people?

My lines limp rather much the way the blues always do.

Remember thinking you’d live to achieve a double minded smile?

S.K.

The following post comes to us from our west coast bureau chief who is moving (gulp!) to Marquette, Michigan where her partner Zac has taken a job in the university’s philosophy department. Andrea Scarpino will now be our rust belt correspondent. Oy! Watch out Jim Harrison! There’s a new poet in them thar parts!

S.K.

First Impressions (four days apartment hunting in Marquette)

The Apartment (we didn’t rent)

Up a set of rusting iron stairs dubiously tacked to an outside wall of the brick building, the door to the apartment was locked with a push-button key code. The landlord had told us the key code so that we could look inside the apartment, but the code wasn’t working. The door was still locked. Finally, the landlord called and told us we could walk through the hair salon on the other side of the street in order to access the apartment. So we did: through the back door of the hair salon, the apartment unfolded, an old office space with industrial carpet and one long hallway off of which each room opened with a glass-inset door. Former tenants had duct taped flattened cardboard boxes over the panes of glass for some privacy. The kitchen: a plywood table (counter space), and a large plastic industrial tub sitting on cement blocks (the sink). On the way out through the door to the hair salon, Zac noticed the apartment and the salon seemed to share the same bathroom.

The Apartment (we did rent)

Downtown, the top floor of a three-story building, wood floors, nice woodwork, big open windows. Three bedrooms, an airy living room. The building currently seems to have roof shingles for siding, but the landlord has big plans for an overhaul, and we’ll be just a few buildings down from a grocery co-op, bakery, Mediterranean restaurant, coffee shop that roasts its own beans.

Snow

Wikipedia says Marquette receives 144 inches of snow annually. Our first day in Marquette, a sign said 200 inches and a resident told us 240. Day two, we were told 280. Our last day, Zac’s mission was to get someone to tell us 300 inches. Late into our last night, a retired philosophy professor leaned over and said, Some years, I think we get 300 inches of snow.

Gossip

We stopped in the local department store to look at its winter clothing offerings. The owner introduced himself to us, as did a salesperson with whom we spoke for a while, told him we were moving into town, talked about California. Then we continued on our walk. A few buildings down, we stopped into a bank with beautiful architecture. As we strolled the inside looking at metal work and gold light fixtures, a man’s voice said, They’re moving here from Los Angeles. The salesman from the department store stood talking with the bank tellers, pointed at us. We smiled sheepishly. They waved.

The Philosophers

Our last night in town, after finally securing an apartment and going for a lovely hike, we decided to have a drink and some dinner at the oldest hotel in Marquette. The top floor is a bar with glass windows that overlook Lake Superior. A storm moved in rustling the trees below. I drank a martini, the bar’s specialty. And then, the retiring philosopher whom Zac is replacing walked in with his wife. We chatted, invited them to join us for dinner. An hour later, another retiring philosopher walked in with his wife for an after-dinner drink. We pulled up two more chairs, laughed at the coincidence. An hour later, a philosopher who will be Zac’s colleague walked in by herself, joined us for a drink. And then, a few minutes later, a philosopher who retired last year, also walked in, pulled up a chair.

Here is our friend and frequent contributor reading new poems in Los Angeles not long ago. Kudos to Andrea for giving such a great poetry reading In L.A. where the real arts are those of Pegassus. Art for Arts Sake Indeed!

S.K.

In a coffee joint in Vermont the kid behind the counter wore a black tee shirt that said: “We Don’t Have Friends, We Have Sources”.  I didn’t ask him about it. I suspected he wanted me to. There are people who button their jackets askew on purpose. There are people who deliberately drive with one headlight off. I don’t care for such people. They have always seemed loopy to me, like a turtle tied by one leg and hanging from a branch.

Exchanging friends for sources is however a thing any one of us can do. Tyrants always do it, news reporters must do it. Office gossips and Tweeters can’t help themselves.

If you trade in your friends for sources you are no longer responsible for the feelings of others. You become an accomplice to something darker than your own ennui. You allow yourself to feel independent of the human mess.

I suppose that at bottom I’m the type of man who distrusts general distrust. Cultivated misanthropy is like a photograph poorly altered. The effect doesn’t stand up. It takes too much work to admit the thing.

If you can’t have friends get a turtle.

Even J. Edgar Hoover had a dog.

Even Hoover had Clyde Tolson.

Friends may make modest demands but sources will blackmail you.

S.K.