750 Words

He fucked a cat. Then he fucked another cat. Then a cat came along and he fucked it. Then he fucked the first cat again. Then the cat fucked him. Then he and the cats fucked a dog. Then the dog fucked the cats. Then he fucked the dog alone. Then he went to the store, the grocery store and fucked everyone in it, including his grandma and his grandpa. He started in the milk aisle. He didn’t fuck the toddlers and the grade schoolers but starting at age fifteen he fucked everyone. Then he went out of the grocery store and into the parking lot and let the dogs and the cats from before out of his pickup truck and he fucked each one of them again. They were used it, so they just stood in a peaceful obedient line. Then he fucked the pickup truck. It hurt a little bit but he mostly liked it because everybody likes fucking everything to some extent. He went to the police station and fucked all the cops. The cops were like what the fuck but he fucked them all anyway. Then he went to the gazebo in the park. Nearby, there was a large bird on a wire, a pheasant, and he went up to the top of the wire, and hung from the wire without touching any of the other wires because he knew that would get him electrocuted, and then he grabbed the pheasant, who could talk and was like, “oh shit, it’s that guy again,” and he fucked the pheasant in the air hanging from the telephone wire. Then he let go and landed in a ninja crouch. These ninjas saw it and they jumped out and guess what happened? The ninja crouch was just a ruse and he fucked one of the ninjas who was like, “yeah, actually that’s not bad, that’s pretty good,” and he walked away and turned the corner, and the left-out ninjas were like, “whoa,” and then he reappeared and fucked all the ninjas because when he left he was just fucking with them. He rested for a week because occasionally you have to rest.

Then he went to Washington and developed a theme system where he’d organize his fucking patterns by theme, like only fucking certain nationalities, like all swedes one month. Or another pattern slash theme would be fucking people without them knowing it, or just blowjobs, which he felt sort of dissatisfied about and went back and fucked those people again. These are the little games you have to come up with to keep yourself motivated when you’re trying to accomplish something special.

Then it was the national badminton championships and during halftime he fucked eighteen people and then a security guard, Jane Fonda, Elijah Wood, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, yet another Alpaca, your dad, you, your mom, your sister, you uncle Craig, Pat Sajack, the skeleton of Abraham Lincoln, then he did that thing where you stretch your penis around and fuck your own self up the ass, and then he fucked Philip Roth, who LOVED it, and then he fucked Shamu 7 and Jessica Tandy at the same time. Then he cyber-fucked that exact list of people over the internet.

Then he went on this wilderness jag where, as a result, he eventually fucked every moose in Canada, all of which he filmed. That catalyzed another theme month, where he went around with a video of him fucking mooses and wolverines and shit in Canada and showed it to people and fucked all the people that were aroused by the video. That was a really cool month, he thought. He was pleased. Then his appendage fell off and he had to have it surgically reattached and he fucked the surgeon. Then he went to the oval office and the people he found there were the first ones he couldn’t bring himself to fuck.

Then, to purify himself, he went to New York and made achingly sweet love to Michiko Kakutani in her drab apartment. He felt they shared something important because she was so beautiful even when she complained about how you can’t do things justice in 750 words.

The Diminishing Returns of Critical Self Consciousness

It's probably impossible to establish a perfect justification for a particular critical method for approaching a work of literature.

Would an acceptance of this impossibility and a willingness to conduct criticism in a less formal way make it more interesting?

I've always sort of felt that the self-conscious pursuit of a perfectly virtuous and unimpeachably correct political perspective is an impediment to justice, or at least justice in this place/time/greater historical era. Literary criticism and other veins of thought, say philosophy, aren't, as systems, as dynamic and complex as physical/social/political reality, so they would seem a good field in which to spend time establishing a better foundation for the arguments and narratives they support, but there's a limit to the value we derive from examining and/or restating the context and history of our ideas.

I have no idea what that limit might be.

Picking their spots

I was at a fourth of July party today talking with someone about the MSM's weakness for the false equivalence trap. Blogger's complain about this all the time. They complain that instead of researching the facts, interpreting them rigorously, and then defending or amending them as necessary, a lot of journalists who cover politics simply repeat a talking point and then quote someone they perceive as being in opposition to the party producing the talking point and consider their job done.

Journalists who fail to do more with their reporting then a smattering of he-said, she-said are bad for the nation.

But reporters sometimes do abandon false equivalwilling to represent as fact or consensus understanding what are in truth ill-considered opinions. This was tragic in the case of the Iraq war when television reporters--there is blood on their hands whether they know it or not--didn't bother to have their producers do any research into the quality of evidence vis a vis Saddam Hussein's chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. As long as enough people in Washington or New York say something is true, the case, in the minds of these reporters, seems to be closed.

However, there are exceptions to this rule and the one I've most recently encountered is pretty infuriating. Read the passage below from "Clintons Adjust to Her Turn in His Old Role" by Patrick Healy (the article is labeled "A Political Memo") and ask yourself why it was that this report chose to abandon the he-said, she said protocol :

No matter how much he tries to blend in, Mr. Clinton is one Oscar-worthy supporting actor who can sometimes upstage his leading lady simply by breathing. The Clintons’ political stagecraft — and their goal of shifting the spotlight to her — has been a work in progress since her presidential campaign began in January. This week, her husband’s first campaign jaunt on her behalf showed him in stages of adjustment — relaxed and jokey at times, a bit unpolished at others.

Oscar worthy. Actor. Leading Lady.

This language is full of scorn and it's not a good way to talk about politicians. Not because it's necessarily inaccurate and not because they're actually extremely noble people, but because it's an extremely subjective judgment. And even if you grant it, the sort of acting that Bill Clinton does when he's campaigning cannot be distinguished from the kind of acting that all other politicians do when they are campaigning. It is also something that politicians must do.

Therefore, reporters, if they want to do something with their work besides draw a paycheck, should do their best to identify the traits and characteristics that will govern a politician's policies and decision making in whatever office they happen to be seeking.

If Bill Clinton or Hillary Clinton is performing more than another politician does that mean that we can't believe what they say? Does the reporter have information that suggests Hillary Clinton would push policy or ideology radically at odds with the policies she's pushing as a campaigner? This is the kind of "acting" by a politician that might be worth a front page (on the internet anyway) article. But that's not what we're getting in this lazy material from Patrick Healy. What we're getting is a record of one journalists gossamer impressions of the Clintons on the campaign trail tied in with some vaguely attributed gossip. And it's not as if they're insightful. Take this passage for instance:

He plays good cop and, deftly, bad cop as he tries to elevate Mrs. Clinton by praising her rivals for the Democratic nomination while at the same time putting some of them down. For instance, he has described second-tier opponents like Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico in more generous terms than her immediate foes like Senator Barack Obama of Illinois.

So Clinton criticizes Hillary's chief rivals and praises the presumptive also rans? What a scoop!

These are the insights and judgments that the New York Times sees fit to meet the public eye without the fig leaf of false equivalence. No counter quote from a Clinton admirer who says, "actually he looks me in the eye and I know he cares about what I'm saying."

Why? I can only imagine it's because they are arrogant enough to believe that when the story is about the personal and when they themselves are their sources, they have the expertise (because all humans make shallow judgments about one another) and the authority (because they know they are not deceiving us about their shallow judgments) to tell the story without defending it or qualifying it or justifying it.

They're wrong.

Journalists have a responsibility to write stories that, to the best of their knowledge are true, even when the story is about nonsense like the one quoted above.

They also have a responsibility to prioritize the material they cover.

So I don't know. Maybe Patrick Healy and his editors at the New York Times think this stuff is significant enough to outweigh other news about the Clintons, or the presidential candidates.

If that's the case, my own personal subjective assessment is that their work falls does not deserve the level of prestige that adheres to it based on their paper's illustrious name. It deserves our contempt.

Statement describing a small change in my own personal sentiment toward something

So there's a post below--which I think I might have written while drunk off a glass or glass and a half of wine--about a small passage of fiction I wrote and which I felt good about:

A line from the novel

Well, guess what?

(I just prefer that phrase as an interrogative, okay.)

I don't like it anymore. Maybe that bit at the end about her wasting away is good. And the rhythm is nice, but otherwise I diagnose that it does not, as I had previously supposed, manage to transcend the limitations of its genre. I deleted it from the pages of my novel in progress weeks ago.

Giuliani is just a dick

Bracketing out the randomness of the universe and the effect of events on the political landscape, I don't fear Guiliani in the general election. Given his troubles in the primary, he won't generate any fervor with the republican base, whose evangelical component--to grab one example out of the air--seems to be showing signs of disillusionment/fatigue with their adventures in politics, regardless of the ideology of the republican candidate.

Hillary and Obama, except in terms of rhetoric on the war, haven't made any sort of committed leftward swing, so should be ably to nimbly make the classic push toward the center in the general election. And then it seems to me that Guiliani's centrism, which he'll have to emphasize to court persuadables, will make the democratic candidate more palatable in the eyes of republicans and independants. It's not that an immoderate republican would actually vote for a dem, but that they'd be much less motivated to vote against one. Sort of like all those moron democrats who saw little difference between Gore and Bush.

More important than the above considerations, though, I would say that Rudy's primary campaign slide has less to do with his ideology and a lot to do with what people are learning about both who he is and his track record. A candidate's nature is obscured in the general election by the white noise of so many media representations, but Rudy's gaffes and his checkered past seem to me to have a flavor that punches through that veil. The rhythm of his speech is part of this. W, based on some sort of primitive instinct I think, is much cagier about not ever letting a real emotion come out. Guiliani, on the other hand, seems much more prone to feeling justified in his borishness in a way that a) he can't control and b) is personal in a way that transcends ideology.

Compared to a campaigner as blandly conservative (in approach) as Hillary Clinton, I think it would be difficult for Rudy not to come off as an erratic and generally disagreeable figure.

A line from the novel

Amy went all the way out the door and lit a cigarette and started smoking. The smoke of the burning tobacco smelled cheap and there was a thrill for her in not caring about hastening her own death in exchange for a cheap thing, like she, whatever she was, was dissipating as quickly as the smoke into the atmosphere, like she was as thin and temporary as that, but also as weightless.

Self-conscious commentary (not in the novel): Cigarette scenes as a concept, but not necessarily in the execution, frequently strike me as the result of impulses felt by inexperienced writers. It's the same thing as why teenagers smoke--there's some truly significance romance attached to it, a sign signifying something you know does not exist once you've emerged from the state of massive ignorance we, many of us anyway, and I certainly, occupy in adolescence. Another way it's a tic common too teenagers and writers just starting out is that both often don't know what they want to do with their time and feel the act of smoking a cigarette gives purpose to a moment that is, in truth, purposeless. I'm not sure that's not what's happening here, except that it does say something about Amy's character. And also I write purposeless scenes all the time, or used to back when I was writing more and sucked more, but I like this one.

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Venal Beyond Words

While reading this analysis of Adam Cohen’s NYT piece on Debra Wong Yang, and the role Harriet Myers played in her firing, it occurred to me that this pattern of populating government posts with people who will do the administrations bidding without consideration for the law, professionalism, or precedent (or common decency) explains better than anything else the laughable and politically damaging nomination of Harriet Myers to the Supreme Court. You can imagine them asking themselves, “Why not give it a try? If she gets in there, we can do anything.”

Given that the president seems so blatantly to have been using his power to get his friends off the hook for offenses of naked political corruption and is willing to drag important and noble institutions into the mud and slime in order to accomplish his childish and narrow-minded goals—I mean we’re not even talking about pushing a conservative agenda—the only just legacy for this administration (if you bracket out the tragedy of Iraq) would be universal contempt, scorn, a reputation for giving new meaning to venality.

Also, I would love to see a TPM piece speculating about what happens legally if enough evidence emerges that the administration did what they so obviously did. Say some documents emerge that the president consciously ordered the replacement of US attorneys to prevent corruption prosecutions? He’d have to be impeached, no?

If you go Clementine, a restaurant in San Francisco, you totally owe it to yourself to get the french toast

That's really all there is to say.

What saddens me

What saddens me about the attorney purge scandal is that it wasn't until Bush administration efforts to establish loyalty to republican party operatives (as distinct from republican party traditions say) as the sole criteria for evaluating people and adherence to republican party priorities the sole criteria for evaluating a theory, idea, or policy within the Justice Department that they came up against any forceful resistance.

Neither the media nor the military nor the congress resisted them. With the exception of McLatchy and a few marginalized congressmen and senators and some parts of the state department, these institutions allowed the administration and the republican party the last word on everything, WMDs, troop levels, in the run-up to the Iraq war. When Katrina happened and commentators were presented with the easiest judgement to make--that the gov't had failed in every way--they did not say so.

Only the justice department asserted loyalty to something (anything) other than the administration when the time came.

There's an irony in this, in that there's this sort of meme out there that beuracracy is terrible in a sort of metaphysical, "kafka-esque" sense, yet it was only the strength of the justice department as an institution that repelled the efforts of an administration whose political power was to some extent achieved by professing an ideology whose core tenents include the idea that government and government professionalism are almost always bad, and certainly inferior to some extent to the commen sense of ordinary citizens (forgetting for the moment that republican party leaders in the bush mold are anything but ordinary citizens).

It was the speech and actions of Republican prosecutors that brought to the fore a standard for political action that transcends even the soft-politicization of everything behind which many mindless conservative commentators are trying, or were trying, to obscure the Stalinesque abuses of political power perpetrated by the most corrupt administration in the history of the United States.

Test

Test for work.

I am chauvinist

Interesting.

I've learned that Elif Batuman is a woman. I had assumed, as the post below makes clear, that she was male.

This is not the first time I've done this. A few years ago, I spent a lot of time on the craigslist writers forum and found out that one of the people there I had assumed was male was actually female.

What do the two share? Obviously formidable intelligence. And a certain forcefulness of style.

Interesting.

Two passages

from James Woods's review of Terrorist:

1.Ahmad "is the product of a red-haired American mother, Irish by extraction, and an Egyptian exchange student whose ancestors had been baked since the time of the Pharaohs in the hot muddy fields of the overflowing Nile." (Ah, those Egyptians. This lofty genealogy is an extraordinary example of airy Orientalism, which, because the sentence combines baking and mud, clumsily manages to imply that the ancestors were somehow baked in mud. Egyptian bog people! Does Updike reread his own prose?)


2.This is preposterous, of course--Jack Levy smells of Jewishness!--but more interesting than its preposterousness is the inept way, again, in that last sentence, that Updike surrenders any pretense that he is capturing Ahmad's own manner of thinking, and just sails off, pleasing himself, wreathed in familiar silks.

Later in the review, Woods quotes some dialogue spoken by the Ahmad, the central character and it's awful. Or at least, I thought it was. Strange speech that's distractingly inhuman. Here, I'll reproduce it:

"I think recently my mother has suffered one of her romantic sorrows, for the other night she produced a flurry of interest in me, as if remembering that I was still there. But this mood of hers will pass. We have never communicated much. My father's absence stood between us, and then my faith, which I adopted before entering my teen years. She is a warm-natured woman, and were I a hospital patient I would gladly entrust myself to her care, but I think she has as little talent for motherhood as a cat. Cats let the kittens suckle for a time and then treat them as enemies. I am not yet quite grown enough to be my mother's enemy, but I am mature enough to be an object of indifference."

The posture of the first passage I quote above is that the clumsiness of Updike's writing here is obvious and indisputable. I don't think that's the case. The rhythms of the sentence are such that its easy to miss the slipperiness of meaning in the conditions in which Ahmad's ancestors were "baked." I suspect that Woods is being deliberately literal-minded here in order to feel superior to a much venerated figure. If a reviewer was generally sympathetic toward a novel, would he or she say, "Well, yes, as lovely as this book is, there are a number of distracting slip ups such as..." I suppose its possible, but I doubt it. We are quick to ignore flaws of little significance in our allies and to emphasize them in our enemies. The orientalism is the better point and it should stand on its own. Of course, Updike is more-than-seventy-year old American, so I, personally, forgive him for succumbing to an imperfect, outmoded, and racist trope when it takes as subtle and understated and literary a form as it does here.

The posture of the second passage is that ineptitude is not a relative designation that has to be elaborated and/or argued for. My feeling is that it does. I mean, I think Woods is right to say that Updike is writing over his character, but I have no trouble living with a non-impressionist translation of Ahmad's thinking. If we grant that my comfort with this technique or manner of writing is universally applicable, it hardly seems fair to characterize this moment in Updike's writing as inept. Even if we don't grant that, I think Woods would be disengenuous if he were to say that he was using the word in a narrow, literal way and withheld judgment with respect to the surrounding text. He must know that in a review, the sentence, especially when it contains a bold and confident and distinct judgment, will stand for the book, and to some extent the man.

I feel better about Woods drawing our attention to the quoted dialogue above. In that passage, someone reading the review will have a much better sense of the feeling we'll have while reading the book. In my mind, I imagine a certain detachment and lack of pizazz, a dry earnestness of purpose.

Can you not be more specific?

To an extent, I call bullshit on Elif Batuman, who, in the pages of N + 1 (I know of no better literary journal by the way), bitches at great length about various stylistic commonalities of contemporary short stories--this seen through the lens of 2005's America's Best Short Stories. Bullshit because he never really gets past a few non extensive examples in support of his generalizatoins. Although I shouldn't say bullshit. I should say something more moderate. But that's what I thought as I was reading.

Anyway, Batuman's--I have no idea who he is, but it's a really good essay, however much I disagree with the points it makes--complaints are that contemporary american short stories are so consistenly full of specificity. I have a problem with this conclusion. The problem is that specificity is, yes, ubiquitous and sort of compulsory, but that doesn't mean its worthless. I can't really speak for anyone but myself, but for whatever miniscule meaning it has, I derive consistent pleasure when a carefully chosen name in a story pricks my imagination into a non-routine mode of narrative consumption. I suppose you can fill a story with unconventional abstractions or generalities, but it would be a different beast from the sorts of short stories--short stories that tell stories--that Batuman praises in the essay. As for conventional abstractions, man, child, sadness, family, doctor, my mind just glides over them, filling in the most conventional images and meanings available in the library of television and newspaper tropes. (It's actually an interesting game to activate one's imagination in response to an abstraction, and flesh out the image on your own; of course, it's more fun when the author meets you half way.)

On the other hand, I acknowledge that the prevelance of the "specificity" technique likely drowns out its effect. Back to the original hand, though, you've got a grotesquely severe baby/bathwater problem when you bring the issue up at length in an essay whose second and third sentences are these:

And yet I think the American short story is dead form, unnaturally perpetuated, as Lukacs once wrote of the chivalric romanc, "by purely formal means, after the transcendental conditions for its existence have already been condemned by the historico-philosophical dialectic." Having exhausted the conditions for its existence, the short story continues to be propogated in America by a purely formal apparatus: by the big magazines, which, if they print fiction at all, sandwich one short story per issue between feature sand reviews; and by workshop-based programs and their attendant lilterary journals.

The essay delves in its second half into the psychology that renders the contemporary literary scene , as Batuman sees it, less good and suggests that a fear that the authentic is uninteresting leads authors to hitch their character's lives in primary, first order ways to history, as opposed, I guess you could say, history seen from television or via a pink slip. I think this is true, but isn't it inconsistent with the claim that stories should contain more of the general and less of the local then is the case?

While I'm not sure that contemporary novelists are as ashamed of their profession as Batuman suggests, I am entirely in agreement with his admonition to authors to "write with dignity, not in guilt."

In fact, its greatly encouraging to read such encouragement. But it pissed me of that the essay starts with a Seinfeldian riff on literary pet peeves that Batuman mistakes for an important part of a real problem.

*I should say also that I'm not sure this little blog post was worth writing. The act of putting together a short assesment like Batuman's pretty much guarantess that someone will have problems with it that are not unlike the problems he has with choosing Nissan over "sedan." Of course, it would be foolish to give up on the conversation for such a reason.

Excerpted from novel in progress

I know what I am and it terrifies me. My skin is a bark around my subdermal layers, a bark through which light passes and burns me. I am full of water. I am aging. My age is passing through me. The light and the air are burning me. I cannot believe in my own happiness, my happiness is as the bony branches of the oak tree scraping the window when the wind blows and I can talk about none of this. Or can I? Am I just afraid to?

My mother has rested on the toilet and shat four times today. She is ill. She is eating too many harsh foods, too many cheeses—I hear the sound of her shitting echoing through the house.

David’s dog was eating a corpse yesterday, over on Buckburn Terrace.

In the woods, in the summer, the light, everything you see, is the same for miles. I walked for four hours and the whole time the air smelled the same.

When I visited Will, when I was very young, when my skin and the organs beneath it were not as marked by the sun, we walked down a finger of land—it was more like an arm—that stretched out into the Pacific ocean for seven miles and was famous, or relatively famous, so Will’s guidebook said, for the two herds of a rare breed of Elk that lived on it, and I noticed, it was impossible not to notice, that within every one hundred yards you walked, you passed close to what must have been the average per ten feet of bits of scat—coyote? Fox?—rabbits, crows, falcons, enormous beetles, sand, strange and gnarled bushes. That might have been my first ever desolate moment. The world is full of wondrous things, but we are punished with anxiousness by our incapacity to honor its wonder, to have to speak not of what we see, but of love, and redemption, and honor, and goodness.

And the hipsters promised me nothing

I dreamt I was outside last night, on a field, in the middle of the night, during some sort of festival. There were pools of light. There were clusters of people and the air was full of smoke, shouting, laughter, distant music, and the smell of alcohol. The people were foreign to me (in a metaphysical sense--I don't know what country this was) , and rough, and I was scared. And someone a noticed me, a very tall, ugly, young man, with a jean jacket, a slight mullet, and a toady, a shorter, skinnier, version of himself. He noticed me and he accosted me. He punched me. He threatened to beat the shit out of me. I evaded him, but he pursued me. It was not a direct chase. I went from place to place and my pursuer would not embarrass himself to the point that he would actually be seen exerting himself in pursuit, but I could feel him keeping his eye out, for me. I never felt safe.

Finally, I approached a gentle, grassy slope, a log cabin outside of which had gathered a small crowd of San Francisco hipsters. San Francisco, I thought. We are of the same tribe. I'm saved.

Or something like that.

I approached them and they welcomed me in a friendly way and we made reciprocal gestures of appreciation. Then I told them about my problem. I had already noticed the tall man in the distance.

And the hipsters promised me nothing. Our bonds did not go very deep.

Oh this old thing?

I was cleaning up and peeling through an old notebook and found this poem or perhaps embryonic song lyrics that I wrote in a fit of stylistic honesty--exposing my adolescent soul and taste in order to get a thought out fluidly and unconstructedly--and found it amusing. The one bit that embarasses me is the word parlay, but I remember sort of following the rhyme and thinking, who cares anyway, if its nonsense...


Strip all language
From before your eyes
Because all you have
Is time and life
And who wants to deny
How much they press
In on you from every side
When all you have to do
Is say yes, I guess
I have to die some day
And all that's left
Is to play
With as much wit, fancy, and delight,
as you can parlay
Or perhaps
Lie down and admit
That what you see has
Lost its luster
Whatever choice you make
Will provoke no answer from above
Or inside

Coldstalgia

I was thinking on my bus ride home about how when I was a teenager or even in college my favorite thing was to walk into some warm human place out of a cold night in which I had been walking by myself. Friends inside, or maybe my parents, or a girlfriend. Nostrils numb. Woodsmell.

I do miss that.

Obviously

Obviously, the Coulter comparison texts are up. I am ambivalent. My first impression is that she was obviously drawing from the sources in question. Did she cite them? If not, she's in the wrong. But I'm not going to dig any deeper right now. If she's guilty, I imagine the blogosphere will catch fire. I realize this is sort of an inane post on a momentary thought flickering through my mind. I've created it solely to answer the one below.

Ann Coulter

What's strange about this developing Ann Coulter Plagiarizm story (besides the fact that no disputed quotations have surfaced alongside the text they copy, which, come on now, is a very basic and standard convention of the public-figure-plagiarized genre) is that her books are full of what by any reasonable standard, hell by almost any standard, except possibly I'm An Absurb Bastard Drunk Out of My Mind on Opposite Day standards, and even then I'm not sure, we could with an entirely clear confidence and ringing conviction call lies.

I guess the truth is that there's something less contestable and more read-handed about plagiarizm, the context being so easily established, but still . . . come fucking on.