Dream Dumpage
Two nights ago, woke up just after I had discovered (written on a wall?) a four line or perhaps four couplet poem that was so intensely beautiful that it put me on the edge of tears. Came fully awake, the poem drifting away as I sought to hold on to the end, at least. Couldn’t, although I kept the sense of it. My guess now is that the dream logic imparted some impossibly few words with some impossibly loaded meaning. Anyway, as close as I can get to recreating the final couplet is this:
Who of us, with flowers newly blossomed
Would rather cut them down than see them tended?
*****
Last night, long involved rambling thing that took place mostly at a picnic. A large yellow awning was erected to block the sunlight (making me think that I must have had this dream just as the sunlight began to come through the blinds). Someone suggested that any color shade was OK when in the sun, but this one stayed fiercely yellow. The conversation turned to artistic and athletic agents. My brother suggested that maybe some agents make decisions for their clients based on rolling dice like a game master, which would explain why many of their decisions seem so awful. I went to get some vodka over at the concession stand. A military plane circled overhead sounding several sonic booms and then crashed somewhere off in the distance.
“ Look, man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? ”
David Foster Wallace, quoted in the wonderful article about his life and work in The New Yorker. [extreme spoiler warning applies. the article discusses both The Broom of the System’s and Infinite Jest’s plots at length, and includes the final lines from both novels. you have been warned.]
Now, I worry about this. I worry that this is what I am doing when I write plays, and when I write fiction. That I am simply adding noise to noise, that I am with ironic distance pointing at the world as it burns, having a good laugh and cracking a few stress-relieving jokes, but doing nothing to actually put out the fire. What a shame, what a shame that would be.
This could easily turn into a treatise on why I think it’s worth the work and time and pain and trouble and pennilessness to produce fiction in the first place. And I should probably write that someday, but I only have 46 minutes and you probably wouldn’t want to read it anyway.
In the meantime, I’ll just say that I agree. It’s not enough to point. It’s never enough to just point.
“ ‘I would not kill even a Bishop. I would not kill a proprietor of any kind. I would make them work each day as we have worked in the fields and as we work in the mountains with the timber, all the rest of their lives. So they would see what man is born to. That they should sleep where we sleep. That they should eat as we eat. But above all that they should work. Thus they would learn.’
‘And they would survive to enslave thee again.’
‘To kill them teaches nothing,’ Anselmo said. ‘You cannot exterminate them because from their seed comes more with greater hatred. Prison is nothing. Prison only makes hatred. That our enemies should learn.’ ”
E. Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
“ 1. That which exists has value.
2. Except for that which is intended to harm or destroy. ”
The Spoken Word
I had been planning to write an essay about how Obama co-opts the language of simplicity to discuss complexity, thereby sounding like Bush while thinking like, er, an adult, but Garth at The Millions beat me to it. And did it way better than I would have. So read this.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Listen to me tell a story about Moravia. This week on Podia.
Open Letter to President Obama
Dear Mr. President,
This week, your Justice Department invoked former President George W. Bush’s horrifying “state secrets” powers to continue the government’s policies of “extraordinary rendition.” This is disgraceful.
Just three weeks ago, you said “we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.” And we do, sir. Please put an end to these illegal and atrocious mockeries of justice. We are better than this.
Thank you very much.
Yours sincerely,
David J. McGee
*****
It ain’t much, but the White House comments system only gives one 500 characters to work with. Please email the President. He works for us. He acts in our name.
The Perils of Pet Ownership
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me:
hi!
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Larke:
hold on
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cat just fell in the trash
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me:
blogged.
The start of something.
(found in my notebook, scribbled down yesteryear, originally intended to be the beginning of something longer, which thing is now on the back-burner as more pressing deadlines loom)
When it began, it was in such small ways that nobody took notice. A small crack appeared in a wall, and all of the usual culprits were blamed: poor workmanship, deterioration with age, sudden shift in humidity. Children playing in the fields jumped over a ditch, and couldn’t reach the other side, though they had always been able to jump across before. A stone bridge that had always been there was suddenly absent one day, and not a trace of it could be found, which caused no end of frustration to those who counted upon it. But it must have been just one of those things for which no reason is ever found. These things are few and far between, and their odd occurrences become the stuff of legend. So the old bridge as certain to be remembered in late-night stories that children would whisper to unsettle each other, and to prove that they were brave. The Tale of the Missing Bridge, it would be called. And certainly that’s the way things would have gone if it had been the only oddity that summer. But when the children ran to the river the next day to see the place where the bridge had been, they discovered that not only was there no bridge, there was also no river. No river-bed. No trace left of there ever having been one. The hills that had marked the land on the other side of the river were now just in front of them, mere steps away. That night, tales were told in the inn by distant travelers, that the missing river was only one strange happening in a world where such happenings were becoming increasingly common. Where a mountain had been one day, there was now a pit that appeared to have no bottom. Healthy forests were overnight turned to barren, empty places. There were far fewer stars in the sky now than ever before, and if anybody stared at them with enough concentration, it was clear that more disappeared every night.
The world was falling apart.
