Nuts

"There’s noise and then there is love and then there
are soldiers in Balkan nations staring across old city plazas,
gripping their guns like orchestra batons, astounded that the
limits of their fire power stops with marching orders that tell
them to direct traffic the best they can manage..."
Deke dropped the newspaper he was reading, letting it
collapse in his lap. The pages fell to the floor gracelessly,
a blur of headlines and tire store ads folding over one another.
Sam had his nose in the A through C volume of a supermarket
encyclopedia, leaning against Deke's desk. Deke put his glasses
back on and squinted and then noted that Sam's crotch was only a
rough six inches from his face, a bulge wrapped in sweaty denim
pressing against the zipper.
"You gotta hand it to those Joes in East Europe, they don't
fuck around arguing about constitutional rights, they just grab
a gun and open fire on generations of bad manners. Whattaya think
of that shit, Deke, buddy, pal???"
"Well, Sam, lemmee be as politic as I can". Deke scratched took off his cap and rubbed the top of his hairless pate, and
then removed his glasses, folding them and placing them on a
shelf behind his chair. Then he punched Sam straight in the
groin.
Sam eyes widened like bay windows in August, and he opened
his mouth to scream, but he managed only a grating, pinched
whimper the grappled for syllables and vowels with the swelling
tongue he'd just bitten... He fell to his knees and keeled over
atop the newspaper Deke dropped a minute ago.
"I think that you oughta stop coming around my business and
dog-earing my goddamned books and running your mouth like a
busted toilet. "
Sam was gasping, trying to form words, the sound dry,
brittle, breaking.
"And I'd also say that you should mind where you decide to
hang your jewels in relation to where people are sitting, do you
understand? I mean, you've been begging for a shot in the nuts
for months. If you want a blow job, why don’t you just ask?"
Sam was curled up, the newspapers were now unreadable.
"How long have I known you, Sam? Ten years, more? Dog ear my
books and giving me insights as insipid as greeting card rhymes,
all the while hanging your testicles in the faces of men and
women who'd wish you'd go away or die, mostly both."
Deke was standing over Sam. He kicked in the nuts, his foot
recoiling, his heel digging.
"YOU FUCKER, I’M GONNA GIVE YOU A PHILOSOPHY LESSON, BUT DON'T
WORRY, BECAUSE THERE IS NO HOME WORK, AND THIS IS THE FINAL
EXAM."
Deke reached under his desk and produced a tool box, from
which he removed a jar of peanut butter and roll of bagels.
"But first, I GOTTA EAT SOME FREAKIN' GOOD FOOD, YOU BET!!
Want some, Sam?"
Sam stopped moaning and stood up, brushing off his jeans.
"No Thanks, Deke, but say, can I have one of your brackish yet
frosty cans of beer?" Deke had a bagel in his mouth, which was smeared in crunchy
peanut butter. He made a grandiose gesture of the hand.
"Hell, yes, my good friend, have a beer, watch The news,
fuck your self, I DON'T CARE!!!."
"Hey, Deke, when you gonna do the e next cue?" It was Zed,
who'd just come through the front door.
"None of your goddamned business, you homophobe. I’m gonna kick
you so hard in the nuts your screams will shatter the Ipana
invisible shield. How do you like that basket of facts?"
"You're gonna have to wait, I'm getting a rip snorting blow job
in fifteen minutes."
"Then have a peanut butter bagel, you revisionist."
Sam walked back into the room with his beer. Zed looked at him,
surprised..
"Oh, you're here" said Sam "I didn't expect to see you for
another fifteen minutes."
"Fuck off, service me now "said Zed, indicating his crotch with
a telling finger.
Deke shot up from his chair again and punched Zed in the
nuts.
"I said have a peanut butter bagel! Now."
Zed's eyes widened as Sam's had done, and tears formed and
glistened at the sides of his eyes like limpid underwater jewels.
Both hands were crammed in his back pockets, and he tried to
pucker and whistle as if nothing at all had whacked in straight
in the lair.
"I'm trying to be cordial host" said Deke, chewing on a large
wad of bagel, his hand of joy wiping peanut butter up and down
the zipper of his jeans, "I want you share my bounty, and in
doing so, you consolidate the years of all of us staring at each
other watching word balloons come from each other's mouths and
then pop when the air of my shop was rendered stale and rare, you
fellows think I'm with out wit. Eat some goddamned food, you
sickly homophobic sissy. DON'T MAKE ME GET Friendly..."
Then the phone rang.
Then the sun exploded.
"Late paying the phone bill, Deke?" queried Sam, poking his
head over a cloud set against the vast tarp of endless outer
space.
"This is a nice slice of shit" Zed said,” not even a can of
beer left over. Hey Sam, gimmee one of your blues harmonicas."
Deke rested his head against a fleecy billow of mist,
holding the phone he picked up before the explosion of the sun,
considering like it were an archeological find who’s anonymous
origins taunted him. He turned it over and looked at the bottom
while Sam and Zed played Howlin'Wolf duets to the roster of stars
and solar systems spinning out of control around them.

MICHAEL JACKSON

My girlfriend and I listened to Thriller at least three times a day, it seems, while we were in graduate school, and it suffices to say that I don't care to hear the album too soon or too often. Not that I'm tired of the music. I love the memories it brings from some better times during the eighties, and I still think the songs are among best pop-rock tracks ever released. The man had his problems and gross indiscretions, and the charges of child molestation against him will, of course, fire up righteous anger against his very being--famous people seem to get away with vile things more often than the used to--Michael Jackson all the changed pop music in ways that can't be undone. I will let the musicologists make those distinctions. 

But on the matter of keeping the late singer's music fresh, I do have to say it's the same with the Beatles, as the over-saturation of their music over five decades at this point threatens to finally leech whatever spark and jump in my response; I weary of growing bored with the music of John, George, Paul and Ringo, and prefer to pick my moments when I slip on Revolver or Yesterday and Today (two of the great rock and roll guitar albums, by the way). And so it goes with Michael Jackson--bless him, dear man, a dear gifted man was a mess, conflicted with more issues than National Geographic. 

We'll be spending years parsing his life and sifting through the undercurrents of a life that was larger than life, so to speak, and yet thoroughly out of control of the life force that propelled it. The pundits, the critics, the lower level social scientists will take their place among the gossip mongers to harangue a dead man on matters of bad choices, pedophilia, gender confusion, cultural ambiguity, and certainly no consensus will be arrived at, all of which will have Jackson's music blasting as a constant soundtrack. 

I saw the Moonwalk for the first time during the fabled Motown television special. It was a marvel to behold, and to reclaim the memory, I am switching cable channels when the old videos come on, changing the radio dial when a song of his hits the rotation, locking my Jackson Five and Michael Jackson cds up for a year until the coming shit storm over his sad death blows over and I can listen to him again as a musician, not a freak and then wonder, what the hell happened to this man, who could have been so much more than even the promise we said he had early on?

Postmodernism in a default position?

The accurate statement about Modernists, in general, is that theirs wasn't a search for the single, unifying meaning, the single, capital 'Truth', but rather that human beings have a capacity of breaking old habits and developing new ways of seeing the world outside their skins. There is a notion that that writing, art, architecture, film, et al, can be used in unique ways to bring about new perceptions of the addressed world, new ideas about human experience, rather than finding the one unchanging Truth, the single metaphysical road sign.

Modernism operates, in a real and traceable sense, within the the concept of the Pluralistic Universe, addressed by William James. There are those, I believe, who've taken up the postmodern critique of a grand narrative's conceit that it can present a finalized, totalized, fixed accounting of how the world operates and use it to sneakily, very sneakily promote a kind of apolitical apathy that benefits the rich , the ambitious, the ones who want to get power and hold on to it. If our accounts of real life situations are mere reflexes we're prone to reveal as part of a constraining metaphorical system that has blinded us from the real estrangement from power, then there is no point, then , of attempting to change the way things are, the way things work. Resistance is futile.

Why bother? This is the sort of defeatist wallow an insidious force would love to see on election day: population's anger toward the System turns into cynicism, a short cut to defeatist, no-show results. A revolution is thwarted without a repressive blow being struck. There is truth out there, goes the assumption, but it's less about an absolute dogma about an underlining definition than it is about how the human personality comes to perceive and form a sense of place and belonging within it. The search for singular Truth was a vain task, noted by Eliot, Pound and others: at it's best expression, Modernism remains an invigorating vehicle , a keen investigative sense.

Postmodernism searches for fallacies, so called, but we're stuck with the old binary oppositions that deconstructionists find offensive: we cannot have a define able sense of what is false unless we give ourselves over to an idea of what it opposes, the truth, or truths, plural. By default, postmodernism continues the Modernist project for what is useful in our descriptions. An extension of Modernism, in other words.

John Barth

The Night Sea Journey from John Barth's collection Lost in the Funhouse, is a strange little allegory that plays empty when inspected. Substituting , presumably, a species of human fish for Christians and System-locked beings in general, we have a neat inversion of the collective self-denial that keeps a system working, churning.
It's a system here, a faith system pegged on the need to keep the population swimming to the unreachable Shore, that has all questions about existence channled back to the anonymous need to keep the population treading water in the dark: we get traces of a theology that once might have sounded glorious, an ideology that might have once cast the future as bright and on dryland, but the disillusionment with the process is heard, the skepticism comes forth. It becomes nothing but a process for process sake: exhaustion, which Barth has used a key term in some of his essays on the problems of fiction narrative, hear becomes the theme of things being done for their own sake, un changed to the conditions that exist at the margins of a self-perpetuation lexicon. The promise that the swimmers hold out, after the poetry of their plighted is played out, is that all will be well when they reach the shore, is revealed as bunk: it is a promise that will be kept only in the dark, when one is still blind, thrashing about.

Kim Addonizio

Taut, sensual, full of direct verbal power that does more than deliver straight talk, Kim Addonizio's poems can still turn a phrase revealing a desire to be understood and remembered. She is not afraid of being understood, but neither is she the sort to diminish an emotion's impact with over statement or too much reserve. She continually finds the right pitch in her poems, from the comic to the serious, the sleek and daring to the sublime and somber.

She isn't a poet trying to have an experience, she isn't a poet practicing her chops at the cost of letting a real thought go, she isn't a poet overwhelmed with so much "poetics" that getting to the heart of things is impossible. She grabs hold of her subject, interrogates it , contrasts it, sits it in a chair and serves it coffee to make it speak volumes. Kim Addonzio is writer.

You Don't Know What Love Is
Kim Addonizio

You don't know what love is
but you know how to raise it in me
like a dead girl winched up from a river. How to
wash off the sludge, the stench of our past.
How to start clean. This love even sits up
and blinks; amazed, she takes a few shaky steps.
Any day now she'll try to eat solid food. She'll want
to get into a fast car, one low to the ground, and drive
to some cinderblock shithole in the desert
where she can drink and get sick and then
dance in nothing but her underwear. You know
where she's headed, you know she'll wake up
with an ache she can't locate and no money
and a terrible thirst. So to hell
with your warm hands sliding inside my shirt
and your tongue down my throat
like an oxygen tube. Cover me
in black plastic. Let the mourners through.

Love

Love is one of our most compelling subjects because it seems to be a form of insanity--a state having everything with attraction and resulting behaviors that contradict any claims of human beings being rational creatures at all times. It goes against the Libertarian ideal that our minds are knowable and that self-interests , our gut-instinct for survival and sustaining our emotional/economic/spiritual niche. Love , whether one takes a biochemical approach or gives credence to providential intervention, quite handily makes most of us act like crazy people.

It's a beautiful thing, of course and indeed, and spreading the love is a hippie and Christian delight, but one cannot spread a feeling of well-being at will. Love , like accidents, like disease, like natural disaster, merely happens. It is not something that can be predicted, calibrated, inventoried on a spread sheet. And when it does happen, when someone becomes so afflicted--yes, afflicted-- the energy isn't likely to lend itself to something that will be the stuff of friendly contagion.

What's wrong with being crazy in love, to love with crazy abandon? Nothing, so long as no one gets hurt, no one dies, everyone lives happily ever after. The fact of the matter, though, is that too many black eyes, broken ribs, shattered arms and fatal knife and gunshot wounds are the result of people who were crazy in love to the point of permanently off-the-hook obsession. The downside of love is that in its most intense form it is the escalation of self-centeredness, the belief that one's gratification excludes the needs or desires of all others, even the rights of the object of one's affection--and too often the things that threaten an afflicted individual's cherished relationship is met with violence. Not a good thing.Love hurts, love kills, love nurtures, love sustains. As with anything that can inspire or make you deranged, one will often wonder after the fire and intensity have gone, after one surveys the consequences of their mad pursuit, whether such an ordeal was worth it. But self-knowledge often avails us not at all; we would all do it again, in a heart beat, in a heart beat/

Looking for a Useful Past

Guys like Pynchon and Barthelme are analogous to the Sex Pistols and the Ramones; we owe them a debt, but their art is no longer a relevant response to what is actually happening now.
--from a discussion at Salon,com's Table Talk forum

Some one you owe a stylistic debt to be always relevant to your current situation; how you respond to the precise writing problem you’re facing demands that you conjure up inspiration to solve the cul-de-sac you’ve written your way into, but that inspiration rarely happens in a vacuum.You rummage through those you’ve read, writers who’ve given you an idea or two about composing together that can get across the subtlety your thinking (the evidence of which might be, damn it all, that you haven’t the light touch after all), and forge something useful from the parts. You can also decide to forgo the effort to learn a lesson from your mentors and strike out with a new take, braving the unknown where none of your influences apply, but there we are again, in the area Harold Bloom mapped out in The Anxiety of Influence; even the most strikingly original art one can create is original precisely because younger artists is determined not to write, sculpt, paint in anyway resembling the work of the greats who’ve come before them. The irony is that is one refers to the past for inspiration even if rejection is the result. The shadow of the past and the power it contains still commands and commends us to try harder to emerge into one’s own light. This is the reason that we acknowledge what we owe.

Pynchon is certainly relevant to the current situation, and we should consider his novel Mason & Dixon: an original take on the historical novel that skews the moldy texts of mythology and history in a fresh, "made new" manner. Pynchon, along with DeLillo with his tour-de -force Underworld, are both at the center of American writing, ironic, one supposes, since we are in a time when the current fashion is to insists on the resolute lack of center, or a knowable, defining presence under the surface of things, under the disguises of material.
Pynchon and DeLillo are relevant to a that search for coherence, the unifying set of references, that might connect the world that's been made with the universe it's been constructed in. Both authors are relevant because, truthfully, the honor the notion of the Search, the Quest for defining, that is literature at it's most compelling, the books that bring generations back to the shelves looking for the titles.

The late work has only gotten stronger, broader, and more concise with the kind of rigor, style and humor; ultimately, it takes to write a literature that brings a digitized culture into the next hundred years. The things of the world we grow up quickly vanish; the language we learned to express the needs of the self in relation to another is supplanted by another species of cant, unrecognizable as to what psychic wire it's supposed to resonate with. Both writers are intrigued with systems, hierarchies of meanings, colliding matrixes of name-giving authority that makes the explicated terrain, the perfect sphere of a democratic society, a tag-team wrestling match.
Underworld is a novel of about the search by different characters for what's keen about the past, what rituals or artifacts were displaced in the rush of technology and capital flow that de-centered the world, the neighborhoods the characters grew up in. Thus, the metaphor: obsessions with throwing the used up away with the waste disposal company, the search for the symbolically Idyllic in the quest for the allegedly important baseball (along with the person-to-person myth making that accompanies it), the nun in the South Bronx searching for the intrinsic worth of the small child she sees amid the bombed out tenements she toils in, and the artist Klara in the desert trying to redefine the past by converting abandoned bombers into art objects precisely in an area when only a few are able to appreciate the redefinition.

Mao ll is DeLillo at the height of his powers, and is his best effort that confronts the fact that media saturation becomes a simulacrum of an actual environment that changes the way history is not only recorded, but simultaneously made. Potent writing, one of whose characters is a reclusive Pynchon (or DeLillo) stand in whose absence of new work or public appearance has created a presence larger than literary reputation alone could manage: if we talk about the speed at which disparate events suddenly seem to converge and become linked through the slimmest of resemblances, this is the novel to start with. Its themes and its power are echoed largely in Wallace's work. Libra, about Lee Harvey Oswald, is splendid as well, but the real masterpiece is Underworld, a complex work, a sprawl, if you must, but one with command of the extended metaphor. I think, anyway.

In all instances of this novel, there is one ultimate failure of quest after another as the characters strive to engage the recent past in someway that gives the passage some inferred meaning, a hint of sense that reduces the perceptible anxiety that the characters are all aware that they are yet another day nearer death, and finally alone in the dark, a cipher with no God to go home to. Underworld is less about what is found on the search than the reasons for the search itself: the comedy and the tragedy comes with the realization that the characters never understand that the process is what gives them definition, not the goal they seek.

Both authors wonder what went wrong, and seek the language, the metaphors, that can describe the loss, and perhaps give us pause to make sense again of the eviscerated cosmology. That both writers have stressed a quest, of sorts, at the heart of their post modern fictions nails their relevance in place. The search ultimately collapses, as it usually does in credible fictional stretches, but the relevance is that the language of the writers, of their characters in situ gives us ways to think about ourselves: it furnishes us with an imaginative vocabulary that is revitalized beyond the easy-street defeatism that lurks behind the present vogue for unearned irony