the communications circuit, or why i've settled for poetry

if only there were more time; i would read every book i recommended and write every poem i envisioned. alas, time sublimates. assignments pile high, and quotidian demands weigh heavily on the shoulders of the poet-critic. one day i swear i will memorize the 'rime of the ancient mariner' and the next i am buried beneath 6 feet of dickens without a shovel or much hope of venturing beyond some serialized horizon.

the constant pressure of my education is always at odds with my abnormally short attention span (which prefers to flit from one scintillating passage to another, never quite consuming the whole of a text). in the hopes of surviving as a scholar, i've developed a couple strategies to combat my attention-deficit tendencies; i study poems rather than novels. it is far more manageable to parse out fifty lines of a complete poem than to connect fifty pages of some epic novel to the other 340 pages i have yet to read. yes, poems are practical, satisfying. they serve as some of the few aesthetic objects that i believe the human mind can fully internalize without neglecting contradictions or details. this is not to say studying poetry is easy; rather, it allows me the luxury of proceeding with the utmost precision in my analysis of a poet's art.

what about novels, you might ask? yes, i read novels too, although i rarely finish them in a timely manner. i like novels. i do; but i so often find them unmanageable, hard to wrap my head around entirely. for this reason, i make loved ones read novels for me. thus far, my dad has been the primary victim of my novel-foisting. every year since i was about 10 years old, i've picked out two or three books that i'd consider reading, wrapped them in shiny paper and given them to my dad for christmas. when choosing books for my dad, i typically aim to pick out what i believe will be the longest or most tedious reads. see, my dad has an EPIC attention span. what i have in intense creative bursts, he has in an unstoppable intellectual drive that can only be interrupted by the need for food or sleep. while i doze off after 100 pages of reading just about anything, my dad devours long, difficult novels like a tween reading twilight. i've seen him sit down and read crime and punishment AND the aenied in one sitting. i kid you not. while i'm not so sure my dad has come up with brilliant readings of any of the hundreds of classics that are always in and out of his book shelves, i trust him to be an impeccable reader for content, and for that reason, i have made him my trusted novel-minion.

this past christmas, in the hope of picking a novel that might confound my dad for at least a little while, i swiped roberto bolano's fat-ass 2666 off a shelf at keplers. this behemoth of a 'novel' clocks in at 898 pages of translated genius. the last of bolano's works, 2666 was his race against impending liver failure which amounted in 4 1/2 sections of a story loosely revolving around a writer, some murders, love and grief. i haven't read it, but my dad is on his third lap through the beast. he claims its pretty good, but he also has very little to say about it when i ask him for a detailed synopsis or preliminary analysis. my dad likes to say that "he hasn't been trained to produce criticism, leave him alone" or "you do it" (naturally, i don't leave him alone and hold him captive on the phone until he gives me what i consider to be an at least somewhat satisfying reading).

thus far, however, my dad and my conversations about 2666 have been swimming around in unproductive circles. first of all, i need to read this book before i make any claims about it that should be taken seriously; that being said, i think the fact that neither me (based on my dad's observations) nor my dad can come up with meaningful or explanatory criticism suggests that something interesting is going on with the novel.

if there is anything prof. H.S. has taught me, it's that you can't judge a book by its content or its cover or its editorial apparatus, at least not on its own. as thomas r. adams and nicolas barker so eloquently propose in their essay "a new model for the study of the book," multiple factors besides the author and reader must be taken into consideration when seeking critical approaches to texts. they call these factors "the communications circuit" which they believe consists of a sort of circle of influenced starting with an author, moving to a publisher, then to printer, and to booksellers, not to forget the external influences of the historic/political context.





from the lovely diagram they include in their essay, adams and barker map out how they see various factors affecting what a text is and how it might be interpreted.

how might all this be relevant to bolano, then? well, i've been doing a lot of work with posthumously published texts lately (particularly those of mr. gerard manley hopkins), and i've come to see that more often than not these texts are riddled with ontological complexity (i.e. they exist in multiple--and often contradictory--forms, sort of like resonance structures for chemical compounds). bolano's 2666 was posthumously published in 2004 by "editorial anagrama". in some of the notes included with the text, a reader finds that bolano originally thought 2666 might be multiple novels rather than one large work. despite these authorial intentions, his publisher went ahead and released bolano's edited manuscript as a whole work, which has received lots of critical acclaim and is no disappointment to bolano-lovers... i can't help but wonder, though, how much of a hand bolano's editors, publishers, and translators had in shaping his originally 1100 page manuscript into the 900 page text we read in the English-speaking world. the fact that my dad (and i) is so stumped as to how to fit bolano's text into his understanding of the world makes me think that along the way of releasing bolano's text to the world, some one messed up... and either added too much or left out something that readers may have needed to hold onto. i still need to read the book... but i wish i could have a look at bolano's original type-script, the marks his editors left on it, and the notes of the translator before i read the full text and come to any conclusions about it.

to read a novel well, to read it as an complex construction of influences and revisions, is a life-consuming project, and so i stick to poetry, but i think i might take 2666 for a spin this summer, and if you, dear reader, should consider doing the same, i challenge you to think about the problems that destabilize its existence as a 'text.'

monday morning synesthetics

yellow, red, blue

as a sort of celebration for the incredibly rich plum performance the SSO afforded me friday night, i offer you a taste of something my beloved kandinsky wrote on color and art:

"When I was thirteen or fourteen, I bought a paintbox with oil paints from money slowly saved up. The feeling I had at the time--or better: the experience of the color coming out of the tube--is with me to this day. A pressure of the fingers--and jubilant, joyous, thoughtful, dreamy, self-absorbed, with deep seriousness, with bubbling roguishness, with the sigh of liberation, with sensitive unstableness of balance came one after another these unique beings we call colors--each alive in and for itself, independent life and ready and willing at every moment to submit to new combinations, to mix among themselves and create endless series of new worlds. Some lie there as if already exhausted, weakened, petrified, as dead forces and living memories of bygone possibilities, not decreed by fate. As in struggle, as in battle, fresh forces pour out of the tube, young forces replacing the old. In the middle of the palette is a world of the remnants of colors already used, which wander far from this source in their necessary embodiments on the canvas. Here is a world which, derived from the desires of pictures already painted, was also determined and created through accidents, through the puzzling play of forces alien to the artist. And I owe much to these accidents--they have taught me more than any teacher or master. Many any hour I studied them with love and admiration. The palette, which consists of the elements mentioned, which is itself a "work"--and often more beautiful than many another work--should be valued for the pleasures which it offers. It sometimes seemed to me that the brush, which with unyielding will tore pieces from this living color creation, evoked a musical sound in this tearing process. Sometimes I heard a hissing of the colors as they were bleeding. It was like an experience that one could hear in the secret kitchen of the alchemist, cloaked in mystery.

"I learned to battle with the canvas, to come to know it as being resisting my wish, and to bend it forcibly to this wish. At first it stands there like a pure, chaste virgin with clear gaze and heavenly joy--this pure canvas which itself is as beautiful as a painting. And then comes the willful brush which first here, then there, gradually conquers it with all the energy peculiar to it, like a European colonist, who pushes into the wild nature, hitherto untouched, using axe, spade, hammer, and saw to shape it to his wishes. I have gradually learned not to see the resistant white of the canvas, to notice it only for instants (as a control), instead of seeing in it the tones that are to replace it--thus one thing slowly followed another.

"Painting is a thundering collision of different worlds, intended to create a new world in and from the struggle with one another, a new world which is the work of art. Each work originates just as does the cosmos--through catastrophes which out of the chaotic din of instruments ultimately create a symphony, the music of spheres. The creation of works of art is the creation of the world."

-Vasily Kandinsky, "Reminiscences," 1913

this is me giving you the "talk"

i know i promised an entry about cereal, but that is going to have to wait for this important public service announcement -


in his recent article in the ny times on "sharing details," brad stone writes about the disregard many young people are showing for their personal privacy by publishing intimate details about their lives on sites like twitter. i have mixed feelings about twitter. when i occasionally sign on, i love seeing L.O'N.'s updates and i appreciate the 'data deluge' of arts information that the feeds i follow spew. for the most part, though, unless you're really witty or i have a crush on you, i probably don't care about when or whether you ate a huge-ass bowl of cereal. one of my good friends, C.L. had a nice sort of parodist approach to "google-buzz," google's over-kill attempt at over-sharing information. this friend 'buzzed' by writing detailed descriptions of his surroundings every time he passed gas (this is the same friend who got massive amounts of hate mail for suggesting that j.k. rowling be used as a hostage for terrorists who needed leverage). he no doubt got the point the across that there are some things that don't need to be shared.

even though i really have nothing to hide, i think there is something to be said about leaving a little mystery in the world by keeping some secrets. that being said, i'd like to formally and publicly release my not-so-big "secret" that i always have a hard time bringing up because, like me, it's a little awkward.

you know how when you were applying to colleges you hated all those kids who had "overcome" setbacks like cancer or were deaf or blind but still wildly successful? those kids had the perfect material for writing samples that show silly things like "personal growth" or "resilience." my high school English teacher, teary-eyed, read my personal statement out loud in front of my entire class. upon finishing the essay with her own personal round of applause, i knew i had become one of "those kids." my good friend T. spoke up, "mrs. kasper, we all know ellen writes good, but don't you think its kinda.. well... useless to read something none of us could possibly write about?" he was right. unless any of my classmates could entitle their essays "i have belly buttons on my face"-- or something to that rather ridiculous effect, chances are they couldn't really approximate what i had to say.

at the homecoming football game this fall, i sat down next to a very inebriated M.W. who introduced me to one of her friends. this friend, who was also quite drunk decided that tickling me was a good idea (unfortunately for him, it's prett hard to successfully tickle me). i sat un-phased by his bizarre flirtations until he started trying to pull off one of my shoes at which point i kicked him (woops?). this dude was persistent though, and as he bent down trying desperately to unlace my shoe, M.W. whispered in my ear, "let him take it off and then scare him!!!" this was a brilliant idea.

when i decided to go along with M's suggestion, this guy successfully removed my shoe and began to oddly tug at my foot. the universe dished him a huge plate of justice when on one of his harder tugs, my foot went flying into the air and onto the seat beside him. he screamed (falsetto style) as M and i let loose wave upon wave of uncontrolled laughter. this is probably one of the crueler practical jokes i've pulled, but this dude was asking for it. if you mess with me, you're inevitably going to mess with my foot, and my foot is very very serious business.

i entitled the main essay i wrote (as a sort of cheap shot) to get into stanford, "i have three feet." it's blunt, it was more or less true at the time and, honestly, wouldn't you be a little curious if someone promised a sort of "freak-show" in essay form? in the essay i wrote about my transition from not having a prosthetic (and thus not really being able to wear anything but really ugly misshapen shoes) to getting my 'third foot' senior year of high school. i won't get into the details of it here, because that's not what this post is about. this post is about making public, once and for all, that what i have of a left foot isn't really a foot. i want you all to know that now so that i don't end up horrifying you the way i did to that poor (yet totally deserving) guy at the football game.

most of my close friends already know about the foot thing, so i guess most of you readers aren't going to be the least bit surprised. it's always a little awkward to tell new people though, especially when i'm dating them. you imagine the scenario: "oh hey random guy i think is hot, let's make out! and, by the way, that lifeless plastic-y thing at the end of my leg, that's a prosthetic. surprise!!!"

inevitably such a situation arises or i have to awkwardly bring up feet in conversation.

neither of these options, as you could imagine, is particularly appealing.

hence, this is me giving you the talk. some things should be made easily accessible and openly public. while i'd never post my credit card number on my blog or tell the whole world (through a tweet) when i have to pee, i like the idea of taking an element of awkward surprise out of my life; because in this world there's already plenty of awkward to go around.

rock out with your lock out

long story short, i'm a shit show.

...

what? you want details?


as most of you dear readers know, i can't keep track of anything material. over the course of my years at stanford i've lost 3 bikes, a bajillion pairs of cheap sunglasses, one nice pair of real glasses, a couch, a fancy office chair and at least one set of keys. i am fully aware that my absent-minded tendencies are damaging, and i sometimes go to great lengths to mitigate their effects. sometimes, when i know i have to try especially hard to remember something, i (literally) put a post-it note with whatever it is i have to remember on my face. this is usually an effective, albeit self-degrading, strategy.

unfortunately, however, most of the time i'm not particularly proactive about remembering little things. yesterday when i was saying bye to J., i managed to exit my apartment without my keys. lucky for me, N. was still up and after a convoluted process of reaching her, i re-entered my apartment relatively unscathed.

during the fifteen minutes or so that i sat atop the concrete staircase leading up to my apartment, i thought back to the many significantly worse lock outs i'd endured over the past few years. one lock-out i'll never forget happened midway through my term at oxford. N. and i were lucky enough to have a room with an almost-adjoining bathroom, so when i went to shower, i typically didn't bring a change of clothes with me. naturally, this proved disastrous when i forgot my keys. sopping wet and struggling to keep myself covered with an under-sized british towel, i peaked out from door stops and tried to inconspicuously attract the attention of someone who could either clothe me or get me back in my room. it took a good 30 minutes of stealthy-near-naked, "help me's" before J.K. came to my rescue (as she always did that quarter) and offered me clothes.
the oxford near-naked lock-out, believe it or not, is not the worst nor the most awkward of my lock-out stories. the worst, i'd have to say happened last spring the night of stanford's most infamous party: exotic erotic.
because there aren't nearly enough excuses to dress like a ho on a day to day basis, i tried to take advantage of the opportunity exotic erotic afforded me. don't worry, innocent reader, i was wearing plenty of clothes. those clothes just happened to be a little black slip... after meeting up with S.A. and Ja.B. after the haus mitt special dinner (and downing, in less than a minute, a vodka-vodka-vodka cranberry), a group of us headed over to 680 to partake in the craziness of the party. as always, the party was really crowded and sweaty. in a drunken, and somewhat ill-planned attempt to escape the masses of exposed skin, Ja.B, S.A., and i decided to meet up with D.S. at what he claimed would be a happy bonfire get-together.
when we approached the fire pit near lake lag, however, were were greeted by a crowd of PA highschoolers dressed up in fake bling. apparently D.S.'s baby brother decided to invite all of pali-high. after being hit on my under-aged boys wearing oversized, plastic-metallic dollar signs, it dawned on me that i was still wearing my rather scandalous attire (no wonder the 16 year olds were talking to me). upon realizing my shame, i demanded to go home to bob.
once i got back to my room in bob, i happily took of my heels, put on some flip-flops and headed to the bathroom to brush my teeth (still wearing only the slip). when i returned to my room, my door was closed, and when i reached to open it, i discovered that it was locked. again, wearing far too little clothes, i crouched beside my locked room trying to think of a plan on how to get back inside. it was 4am, and no one in the house was around. as the alcohol wore off, i realized it was freaking cold. after pacing around the halls in bob for an hour or so, i decided the only proper solution was to break into my own car to sleep, which i did. when i got up the next morning, i realized i'd have to walk back through my house, past lots of judgmental stares, wearing only my slip. i did so, and was still locked out (now that's what i call a walk of shame). one way or another, i eventually got back inside my room and lived happily ever after (with clothes)
remembering moments like these makes me think i should have some sort of electronic implant that functions as a key to whatever buildings or cars i need to use. when N. let me in last night, she shook her head, unsurprised by yet another instance of my shit-showiness. one can only hope that someday such technologies as implantable keys come to the rescue of poor, forgetful souls like me.

i hate 'fragment'

i know that as a student of English literature, i should embrace the paradoxes that provide the scaffolding for life as we know it. generally, i can accept that life is all flux and yet things never change. i will admit that someone can say too little by saying too much. one thing i am unwilling to accept, however, is that fragments, created as such, should be taken seriously as aesthetic objects.

perhaps i should elaborate on what i mean by 'seriously,' because surely we encounter fragmented art on a day to day basis. eliot's 'wasteland' is basically a hodge podge of fragments from the original typescript pound tore to pieces, and we take it seriously. we certainly take what verses remain from sappho seriously. eliot and sappho represent two alternate poles of the spectrum in which i perceive 'fragments' as existing. eliot's "fragment" is read as being a complete aesthetic work rather than a part of a whole. most critics set aside the ontology of the poem as a sort of secondary concern when it comes to interpretations. i suppose, then, what i mean by 'take seriously' is 'to see the potential for solid and largely explanatory interpretations'.

sappho's verse, on the other hand, comes to us in bits and pieces of lines found quoted in other sources. the sapphic fragments have a 'partial' existence because the full body of sappho's work is apparently inaccessible. time did away with lots of it, not sappho herself.

the reason i'm thinking about all this is because it really pisses me off that i have to think about 'kubla khan' as being a "fragment". i don't care that coleridge claims that his writing is interrupted and that he only relates a small portion of his dream vision. he's full of shit. let's take a brief look at the final stanza of the poem:

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she play'd,	40
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me,
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,	45
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!	50
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

if the final lines of this poem don't sound like a sort of ending, i don't know what does. the whole notion of something being 'intentionally fragmented' just seems impossible to me. either something is whole or it is not. there is no in between, and when it comes to interpreting a fragment, i think a reader finds himself drowning in endless hermeneutic possibilities.

the other people in my romanticism class don't seem to be phased by the idea of an 'intentional fragment'... but it really really bothers me. and i want to know what you, my beloved readers, think on the subject. i will happily reward you with provocative tales about my always tantalizing life in the post to come; look forward to hearing about happy donuts, dog walking and my inability to settle down with just one nice cereal.

sexual equality in the 12th century

Rinaldo di Montalbano had it right:

"If the same ardour, if an equal fire
Draws and compels two people ever more
To the sweet consummation of desire
(Which many ignoramuses deplore)
Why should a woman by a fate so dire
Be punished who has done what men a score
Of times will do and never be blamed
Nay, rather, will be praised for it and famed?"

Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, ix: 66

It doesn't take much to please me, but finding instances of proto-feminism and sexual progressiveness in a 16th-century epic totally makes my day.

the early morning herald

When we first moved into Rains, Ellen and I would wake up to the sound of this incredibly ominous recording. There was something seriously off about those disjointed brass notes, and when I first heard it, I was convinced that it was some sort of herald of the apocalypse. It was all the more disturbing because I might just be the deepest sleeper on earth, having slept through earthquakes, fire alarms, intoxicated people throwing up in my room (to name a few); so for me to wake up to the sound of this recording must have meant that it was something from another world.

I mentioned it to our other roommate, A., and she revealed that it was a taco truck.

N: "taco truck?"
A: "Yeah, when I worked in the area, that truck would drive by our workplace every morning"
N: (thinking) "who the fuck eats tacos at 9am?"

The more compelling question, though, is why on earth don't we have an ice cream truck drive by every morning? We live right across the street from an elementary school! At any rate, I guess it's marginally more exciting to live on the same route as the apocalyptic taco truck.

on meyer library

Meyer gets shat on a lot by people who like "pretty" and "awe-inspiring" study spots. Sure, I like to get my literary groove on in beautiful rooms. I'll never forget my time at Hopkins Marine Station in Monterey, where I got to study in this stunning little library. Or when I had the opportunity to study abroad at Oxford and spent many hours wistfully staring at the interiors of Gothic buildings while pitting my laptop's wireless abilities against medieval rules and regulations. Meyer, too, is special, not because it is extraordinarily ugly when compared to other libraries, but because I've invested so much of my undergraduate self into it.

I've lost count of the number of times I watched the sun rise while in Meyer, or the moments of recognition I'd shared with my fellow students, whose names I never knew but whose faces were as familiar to me as the people who lived in my dorms. Last year, I spent so much time in Meyer with Emily and these two hapless grad students who we never formally met, that we constructed fantasies about them: Wolverine's Brother and Greasy-Haired Guy, the former thus called because he looked frighteningly similar to the actor who played Wolverine's brother alongside Hugh Jackman in the X-Men sequel, and the latter because he, well, didn't seem to wash his hair very often.

These guys were hilarious. They were in Meyer all the time. I'd walk in to print a paper at 4:45pm, and they'd be there. I'd come back after my 10pm nap to start another paper, and they'd still be there. I'd walk back to my dorm (after failing to finish my paper) at 4am and oh yes, they'd be there. There were fleeting moments in which I saw them outside Meyer, and usually in these rare occasions they'd be sprinting across campus with a coffee cup or pizza box in hand, daring to step outside Meyer's boundaries only to refuel themselves. The greatest moment of encounter happened after graduation, when I watched the video of our commencement ceremony some months after the fact, and managed to spot them in the Master's procession. I was so ecstatic that I sent the video and screenshots to Emily, and we proceeded to have a 10-letter e-mail exchange almost entirely in capital letters, expressing our joy and admiration for our distant study buddies.

Meyer might be a grey, mammoth, earthquake-insecure structure of hideous proportions, but I'm convinced that it is a place of fate and kismet connections.

(actually, if that were the case, i would have found my goddamn husband already and i wouldn't have to worry so much about finding a goddamn job that'll sponsor goddamn international students. fuck this kismet shit.)

...And now, back to our regular programming.

the messages in bottles

PY always inspires me. today her inspiration came in the form of shiny glass objects, namely glass bottles. in one of our typical g-chat conversations, she asked me, "is it weird that this site is exciting to me?" she proceeded to paste a link to a site for "specialty bottles". my first reaction was one of confusion. why on earth would PY be looking to purchase specialty bottles? (this i still do not know); however, this confusion was rapidly supplanted by a fascination with the austere contours of the empty bottles. my mind hummed with memories of sorting through heavy bottles of hydrochloric acid, carefully dripping unknown compounds into tiny class flasks then stirring these flasks vigorously. there was so much potential in every glass bottle in the lab. potential energy, for starters, but potential for chemical reaction, for danger and surprise. each glass bottle in the chemical hood contained some unique compound that performed miracles when used properly.

last summer my parents were digging up the roots of a dead liquid amber tree in my backyard back home. they spend a lot of time gardening. i think it's a sort of restless urge to maintain a god-like control over something organic. in any case, they are often surprised at just how little control they have over the land they till. as my mom beat at the rotting, dirt-caked roots with a shovel, she heard the sharp crack of hard surfaces converging. at first, she thought she'd hit a rock; however, when she bent over to move this pesky rock out of the way of her work, she saw that no rock but a dirty yellow bottle peaked through the ground near the remnants of the tree. being the artist-archeologist-anthropologist that she is at heart, my mom shouted to my dad, "chris, get over here. we have excavation to do!"

rather than extricating the decayed tree roots, my mom and dad proceeded to carefully "excavate" four glass bottles of varying sizes. two of them resembled the first yellow glass container my mom struck, however their sizes varied slightly. the other was a rather large cylindrical glass bottle with very clear indentations that read, "CLOROX." after a few google searches, my dad concluded that they had stumbled upon what was once a pile of trash in the 1920's that perhaps the day laborers (who lived in my house then) threw out haphazardly.

these glass bottles have lived happily upon the window sill above my mom's kitchen sink since that summer day. when i was home over winter break. however, while sitting undisturbed one of them (for no apparent reason) shattered into hundreds of tiny pieces. now there are only three fragile artifacts of some forgotten act of carelessness, and believe you me, my parents adore these ruins of bottles.

in her award winning short story "entitled" PY introduces an ethereal character she names katie who collects rather unusual things in glass bottles. PY describes the story's central character, tyler, encountering katie's collection, writing,

They walked to her apartment, where she kept entire shelves lined with bottles in her bedroom. Tyler held his finger up against their cool smooth surfaces as he felt the entire rainbow of emotions. Katie had it all, everything from love and peace to anger, anxiety, and grief.

katie goes on to give tyler a fleeting taste of happiness:

“Go on,” she reassured him. He closed his eyes and opened his mouth. “You should know by now,” she whispered as the warmth spread over his tongue, “happiness is fleeting.”

He swallowed, and then, as its giddiness tickled down the back of his throat, Tyler was filled with an immense joy he had not felt in a long time. The warmth bubbled in his heart, and sang through his body, coursing through his veins.

Katie’s eyes flicked to her bottles. “But I,” she said, in a slowly escalating voice, “I’ve found a way to make it last. To save up for when times get rough.”

Tyler didn’t want to think about the end of happiness. He fell back on the bed with a content sigh and raised his hands, staring up at their new pinkness wondrously as he wiggled his fingers.

besides getting at some of the deeper themes involving the complexity of human emotions, i think PY's story illuminates what exactly is so fascinating about an empty glass bottle. katie fills her bottles with the most impossibly enticing substances. her collection of "noncollectable" substances serves as a reminder of the sort of infinite possibilities for collection and retention we find in an empty bottle. bottles serve immediately utilitarian purposes for containing such things as perfume or detergent, but they also can house mysterious elixirs or lost messages. the potentiality of the empty glass bottle is overwhelming and, thus, such a seemingly odd online shop for 'specialty bottles' makes perfect commercial (and aesthetic) sense to me.

a not-so-close reading of michael robbins' "lust for life"

lust for life -- (as seen in the 4/12/2010 copy of the new yorker p.39)

the elephants ate each other then they dreamed
of eating elephants till their captors came
to feed them. then they died. my meth lab
tends to explode. i move to a new one
like a hermit crab. i give the gift of gab.

the truth gets me hard. song selection
is key. the idiot swedes do a number on me.
they invent refrigeration and sleep in shifts.
i'm tired of being compared to britney spears.
she's so pretty. i'm covered in petroglyphs.

that sorcerer bewitched my penis!
i'm speed and space, an aztec princess.
the truth makes me hurl, the truth's a mistake.
john milton jumps out of my birthday cake.

the psyched mohican oils the beaver.
fruit stripe gum soon loses flavor.
everything's flammable. everything's flash.
postmen like doctors and doctors like cash.

***

"lust for life" reminds me, first of all, of the results of a program my dad wrote as an undergrad called 'the random story generator'. after inputting a variety of words and phrases and setting up potential grammatical structures into which these words might fall, the program generates some marginally comprehensible combination of words that sounds a little like a story. one such story reads as follows:


"A raisin said, father will have robbed plasticly by the time the maximum penalties have switched on near a bush. Unfortunately for the father, the clock caressed a dinner. A comet fell into the earth and killed the windy food. A comet fell into the earth and killed the eastern bed. Bronko said, I think we are all goin...g to have to see about our own maximum penalties! The room fell to the couch but it was too much and they all laughed purely.
"Buddha you! You gogon," said the sister phallicly.
Because of the motorcycle to a readout the only daughter will not have sons.
A sister said, "Lunch will have punched famously by the time the rooms have turned on the container"
"Qqquaq you! You prosrustean," said the woman phallicly.
Then the couch blew up and everyone died."

end digression.

now, i don't mean to imply that robbins' poem is of the narrative variety. there really isn't much of a 'narrative' to a randomly generated story in the first place. rather i think that the poem's aleatoric combos of unpredictable-predictable rhymes and common slogans feels like the sort of babble me and my roommate let loose when we've had one (or two) too many tequila shots... and really only a computer that creates an amalgamation of neurological hiccups could possibly recreate such inanity. am i saying this poem in computer generated? perhaps... what i really think is that michael robbins is a robot.

to be more precise, i think michael robbins' speaker is a robot: a spam filtering, lyric regurgitating, culture diarrheaing bot of obnoxiousness.

the only indication the reader gets that this psycho-bot has a non-random-culture-commenting agenda is the fact that it repeatedly speaks of the truth, which he says, "gets me hard," "makes me hurl," and "is a mistake." he goes on to elucidate a number of 'truisms' about gum, doctors, and combustible materials... none of which seem particularly true to yours truly. going off the title 'lust for life,' along with references to getting hard and an enchanted penis, the reader senses a sort of frantic and uprooted sexual urgency. roland barthes describes the seminar as a place of erotic contact. if he gets to jump to such touchy conclusions, then so do i. i say that the polyphony of popular culture and literature, particularly among my group of friends (well-read stanford students), lives as a body of promiscuous knowledge, so cheap and dirty that even good ol' john milton can jump out of a birthday cake, scantily clad and ready to sing about fruit of disobedience.

the 'truth' or 'knowledge' robbins represents in his poem is a self-destructive, fleeting sort of thing that no one can keep up with because of the vast quantity and minimal quality of the information involved (i.e. the bizarre quote from p!nk's "don't let me get me" "i'm tired of being compared to britney spears"). the speaker 'covered in petroglyphs' is intentionally indecipherable because the body of knowledge gained from any internet search yields endless and often contradictory 'facts' of life.

let's be serious though, if some robot were required to churn out a poem written in warped approximations of pentameter and this robot were fed data from the mind, inbox, or blog of the average English grad student (particularly one from stanford's first year cohort & their m.a. counterparts), michael robbins' "lust for life" would be one of millions^millions of combinations of possible results. living inside the mind of an English grad student is a sexy, indefinite-reference-inducing experience (i would know) which may or may not frequently approximate a state of maniacal lust for the endless juxtapositions of words that make up this post-postmodern life.

then again, the speaker is probably just on meth.

lesson one

a dog said that he was going to learn to read. the other dogs said he could learn to bark but he could not learn to read. they did not know that dog, if he said he was going to learn to read, he would learn to read. he might be drowned dead in water but if he said that he was going to learn to read he was going to learn to read.

he never was drowned in water not dead drowned and he never did learn to read. are there any children like that. one two three. are there any children like that. four five six. are there any children like that. seven eight nine are there any children like that.

ten. yes there are ten children like that and each one of the ten had a dog like that. ten dogs like that and ten children like that, and the dogs and the children played tit for tat but there was no learning to read in that, not even if they each one of them was fat, fat just like that.

next to this was a hare and next to the hare was a bird a daily bird. a daily bird is just a third of an ordinary bird, a daily bird being just a third was likely heard and when he was heard well was it reading he heard, yes he heard them trying to learn to read the ten dogs and the ten children and as he the bird was a daily bird, and a daily bird is a third of a bird, i will get together ten daily birds and see who learns to read first ten children ten dogs or ten daily birds.

the first dog who tried to learn to read not the one who said he was going to learn to read that one did not need to have ten dogs to learn to read, he was the one dog who had it as a great need to learn to read. but would he learn to read. who can tell, a bell learns to read, why not a dog, why not, the dog had tears in his eyes why not. a dog. but the first dog who really tried to learn to read he was a saint bernard a big dog so big that if he opened his mouth it was a big word. saying a word even a big word is not the same as reading that word. oh no said the daily bird no indeed it is not, not knot.

just notice if you say not know, how do you know if you do not know how to read, which knot has a knot, and which has not a knot. so you see you have to learn to read. the daily bird knew what was what.

courtesy of 'the gertrude stein first reader'

a short story review

I'm a huge fan of Haruki Murakami. His integration of the bizarre in everyday life - especially in his short stories - always leaves me in a state of craving for something I can't quite put my finger on. Somehow I think it's related to the translation into English from Japanese, which lends a sense of peculiar grace to the narrative. It's incredibly expressive yet a little secretive at the same time.

I stopped by the library and checked out a copy of The Elephant Vanishes, a short story collection of his that I hadn't yet read. I thumbed through the collection and stopped at "The Second Bakery Attack," not only because I'm food-obsessed, but also because it reminded me of this incredible short story by Italo Calvino (another favourite!) where a gang of urchins decides to rob a cake shop and is foiled when one of the boys, starving and overwhelmed by the decadence of the cakes surrounding him, loses control and spirals into a battle against time as he tries to devour as many of the cakes as possible. Man against cakes - it's pretty heartbreaking, man.

"The Second Bakery Attack" also plays with this theme of hunger and desperation against time. It's 2am and the protagonist and wife are both woken up by agonising hunger. With nothing in their fridge except for butter, shrivelled onions and beer, the couple reluctantly settles on the beers to fill their ravenous bellies. The protagonist remembers a time when years ago, he and his friend had decided to attack - "not rob" - a bakery. In a bizarre twist, the protagonist and his friend are given a choice by the baker: they can have as much bread as they want if the boys will sit through an entire recording of Wagner's overtures, to which they agree. They put their knives away, listen to two overtures, and per agreement, walk out with armfuls of bread.

His wife ultimately decides that their crippling hunger is a curse brought about by her husband's bakery attack, so she convinces him that in order to lift the curse, they have to attack another bakery. They get in their car and drive around Tokyo, and find that the hour yields very few late night food options - except for McDonald's.

"We're going to take that McDonald's," she said, as coolly as if she were announcing what we would have for dinner.
"McDonald's is not a bakery," I pointed out to her.
"It's like a bakery," she said. "Sometimes you have to compromise. Let's go."

So they end up pulling a heist at Mickey D's and walk away with thirty Big Macs, a fraction of which manages to quell their unrelenting hunger. They get Cokes, too, but the wife pays for them because they're "stealing bread, nothing else" while apologetically maintaining that they would have attacked a bakery instead, if they had found one open at the hour.

Something about the spontaneity of intense hunger (a common occurrence with yours truly) and the freakish banality of "attacking" a McDonald's spoke to me, left me searching as always after reading Murakami (not that I had the sudden urge to play stickup at McD's... though E. and I did end up going there immediately after to grab lawfully paid-for dinner, not gonna lie). I suppose it speaks volumes about my life that I could relate so intensely to the trauma of having an empty fridge, or to filling a gaping stomach with alcohol. "The Second Bakery Attack" is funny, and lacks the loneliness that haunts Murakami's other works, but the force of craving and desperation is well played.