Kalamazoo tornado, May 13, 1980
Thursday, November 04, 2004
A middle-aged lady comes into the bookstore looking as if she had just spent a night in a damp room with a flour sack over her head. Everyone sort of looks that way. She's one of these admirable older New York women, middle-class, accented, and dressed in an inexpensive but nice-looking coat and a delicate earth-toned scarf, presumably bought after close reference to a scale opposing budgets versus necessary luxuries. "It's a terrible day, she says. Out there they hate us, they hate New York. 9-11? 'Couldnt've happened to a nicer people...'" She shakes her head. I tell her I'm from the Midwest, but from Michigan. "Oh really, how did Michigan come out," she asks. "Blue? Good for them, but just barely, I bet. They hate us. They think we're Sodom and Gommorah, don't they?"
I was at a bar until 3:00 in the morning watching images of Ohio swim around on the television screen, moving from white to red to blue, pulling back to show the state in context, surrounded by its midwestern neighbors, then going into deep focus and breaking it down county by county, deep blue veins creeping from Toledo and Cleveland into the red backwater counties. Coming from a state as recognizable as a hand, I always get a little seasick looking at the shapeless states, those conservative little blobs of geographic spit. Last night, it was worse. After a while, when it started to not look so good for Kerry, I just waited to see how Michigan would turn out. I couldn't believe it could remain undecided for so long, That was a real blow. Around the time Wolf Blitzer said, "This is unpecedented! CNN has just declared Ohio a green state! Ohio is too close to call!" I went home.
If there's anything like an authentic culture left in America I don't want anything to do with it, because it probably involves dreadlocks.
If you thought George Orwell's line in 1984, the one about the future being a boot smashing a human face for all eternity, was pretty good, wait till you start reading his essays. He wrote this on the eve of World War 2:
Just woke up from a strange dream:
Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is a book about magicians reviving the tradition and practice of magic in England during the early 19th Century. It's fun. It references everything from Chretien de Troyes to Jane Austen to Tolkein and Stephen King. It's one of these books like The Mysterious Island or The Lord of The Rings--it's fun because you can geek out on the details.
This was sent a little bit ago:
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I try to explain that the religious nutjobs are in the minority, that otherwise reasonable people are just afraid of the future and that the Midwest isn't a bizarre alternate universe where the bodies of sex offenders are nailed to telephone poles on the way into town. But New Yorkers have as little perspective on the Midwest as Midwesterners have on New York. I feel as if I've stepped into an example in a High School Poli-Sci class, wherein a Republic is compared to a Direct Democracy using the example of a 51 per cent majority "despotically" ruling over a 49 per cent minority. Is that what neocon liberalism means? Direct Democracy and the whittling away of the Republic's rule of law and protection of minority rights? Directly voting, for instance, on whether or not gays have such rights? It seems as if the only minority protections up for debate are left to corporations.
New Yorkers are in a terrible position right now, and I can't help but feel their indignation. New York has the double burden of being distrusted by America and of being its most visible representative, the most obvious site, so it's said, of the next terrorism attack. Bush being in power increases the chance of that attack happening while guaranteeing that anti-terrorism funds are going to be diverted out of New York and into Iraq and those solidly Republican states that obviously don't need them. New York is caught in the middle of a religious war it wants nothing to do with. It forsees some wattle-throated old Christian matron safely ensconced in the middle of some Montanan nowhere, clucking her tongue at an image on Fox news of a smoking crater in the center of midtown Manhattan and chalking it all up to "God's Plan."
The central problem is that everywhere things are seen in terms of red and blue, one extremity vs. another. Everyone thinks they're in a zombie movie, of sorts--the last centrist left on the planet, besieges by single-minded bloodthirsty mobs. Whatshisface would have voted for Kerry, but all those privileged college hippies with papier-mache Bush heads made him think he was a bomb-throwing liberal. In New York, Bush supporters are universally snake-handling maniacs clapping their hands and weeping with joy at the prospect of the final war versus the Muslims and homosexuals. It's this suspicion that paints us all and draws us into a corner. Was this well-dressed Manhattanite I was talking to a wine-and-cheese eating sex-obsessed liberal? Is some mother in Indiana who's nervous about the state of the world, wary of the fact that Kerry looks indecisive, a morbid fag-bashing hatemonger? The answer is yes--if there's another option in American life, we have no time to see it.
Anyway, I tell the lady, "Life sucks, huh?" For now, she says.
10:56 AM
10:29 AM
Bob Dylan has always exuded a Emersonian/Whitmanesque vibe which has made him the hero of rock critics who have never had the patience to actually read Emerson or Whitman. Reading Dylan's Chronicles, it becomes apparent that Dylan did have that kind of patience, in a off-the-cuff, Cliff's Notes sort of way. I don't mean to be condescending. It turns out that Dylan does have a pretty engaging style in his memoir, except that his theme is one which is at odds with the ideals of the American writers he proposes himself as heir to (and boy, does he). Whitman was self-obssesed, sure, but wanted that self corrupted and subsumed into a swarming impure America with no ideal other than a common humanity. Dylan is obssesed with authenticity and purity. Even his best moments, the moments in which he blew the folk purists minds, are counched in terms of the strictest self-centered, obnoxious authenticity. I found myself having to put down Chronicles to pick up Hammer of the Gods, the famous bio of Led Zeppelin. Two representative quotes, you tell me which pretentious statement of bombast you'd rather align yourself with:
"I was never any more than what I was--a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze...Eventually different anachronisms were thrust upon me...Legend, Icon, Enigma (Buddha in European Clothes was my favorite)--stuff like that, but that was all right. These titles were placid and harmless, threadbare, easy to get around with them. Prophet, Messiah, Savior--those are tough ones."
"The televisions went next. Watching a big color TV exploding on pavement from a great hieght was a favorite Zeppelin pastime. The previous year at an old battle-ground, the Edgewater Inn in Seattle, Led Zeppelin had thrown all their televisions into the sea below. As Peter Grant was paying the bill, the hotel manager wistfully remarked that he had always wanted to chuck a TV out the window himself. 'Have one on us,' roared Grant, and peeled off another 500 dollar bill. The manager went right upstairs and heaved a big Motorola off the balcony."
10:48 PM
"Reading Mr Malcolm Muggeridge's brilliant and depressing book, The Thirties, I thought of a rather cruel trick I once played on a wasp. He was sucking jam on my plate, and I cut him in half. He paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny strem of jam trickled out of his severed esophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him. It is the same with modern man. The thing that has been cut away is his soul, and there was a period--twenty years, perhaps--during which he did not notice it."
2:54 PM
Those who went to school did so by lottery. Some went later and some went earlier, based on a test you'd been taking your entire life, watched and graded by an oligarchy of the omnipotent. I went at the age of 31. The first thing that was determined for me when I got to the city-sized and bleach-white mediterranean campus was who I'd be married to and where I'd live.
The house was full of painters and carpenters when I got there and I got the impression that they hadn't done well on their tests. The plastic tents they worked beneath looked depressingly well lived in. They were all much younger than me and looked at me as if I were an old man, with bewildered resentment. As they watched me, I grew equally resentful. A bunch of nu-metal creeps, I thought.
The wife chosen for me was amiable but dull. I considered myself fortunate that the house chosen for me was on a street lined with fast food restaurants, stretching out to the horizon.
My wife and I had an omnipotent kid. He was constantly losing his temper, calling for his dinnerin languages neither my wife nor I could understand.
One night I attempted to escape from the house, from my family. The world loooked huge and I was struck down to my knees with an agorophobic sledgehammer, equal parts guilt and terror. Then I woke up.
5:26 AM
This is a recommendation. I suppose I could put it in a different way. In an equation where fantasy fiction equals hip hop, if J. K. Rowling is to Puff Daddy as George R. R. Martin is to Aesop Rock, then Susanna Clarke is Outkast. Which is to say it's a crowd pleaser. It's all things to all people. You'd have to have autism not to like Hey Ya. The same thing with Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.
I'm about halfway through the book, and I've been looking for references to America. So far there have been two. I relate them to you here as an example of how fun and geeky-times this book can get. The first is when Jonathan Strange goes to visit the mad King George to see if he can cure him, against the wishes of his caretakers, by using magic. In the room where the king is kept there are three doors. The King thinks that one of them leads to America. As it turns out, the door leads to an escape from the castle-asylum where he is being kept, and lots of adventures happen when they use it. Okay. In the second reference to America, Jonathan Strange moves the city of Brussels to the Black Hills of what will someday be called South Dakota, in an effort to confuse the French during the second Napoleonic campaign, c. 1815. (This leads to a footnote in which "Man-Afraid-of-the-Water explained that in some nearby hills lived a tribe called the Half-Finished People. They had been created very suddenly one summer, but their Creator had only given them one of the skills men needed to live: that of fighting. All other skills they lacked; they did not know how to hunt buffalo or antelope, how to tame horses or how to make houses for themselves. They could not even understand each other since their crazy Creator had given them four or five different languages.")
Anyway, this is one of the rare books where I'm happy it's on the bestseller lists right now. It deserves it.
Oh yeah, and then there are the presidential debates. Kerry wins.
11:37 PM
"You say that it's over, baby
You say that it's over now
but still you hang around, oh come on
won't you move over.
You know that I need a man.
YOU KNOW THAT I NEED A MAN,
but when I ask you to you just tell me,
"There may be a time."
Please don't you do this to me.
PLEASE don't you do it to me, now.
You take the love I offer...
Honey, let me be.]
This is all written by Janis Joplin, but like a teenager I sing angrily it to your web site. Which is all but gone. I miss it."
Allrightallready...It's back. This will be fun.
(Oh, and Janis Joplin doesn't hold a candle to Howard Tate, by the way. The origibal Get It While You Can is a rocker.)
1:11 PM
Greg Purcell |
purcell at noslander dot com | hosted by Blogger
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