#157

These Derrida essays are fucking savory. They're the sort of thing I would have unhinged my jaw and swallowed in a single sitting when I was younger, comprehending but not fully understanding, before grabbing the next thing off the shelf. Devouring and devouring, never sleeping. I chew a little more now. Once I was a python that had eaten an elephant. Don't know what I am now, but the way I am receiving these essays make me feel like I might have digested something.

This makes me outrageously suspicious of myself. It is essential to never, never relax into feeling like you have anything figured out.

*

On a related note, I wished to clarify that my last statement in yesterday's post was not meant to be a a condemnation of existence. Not a moaning or a groaning. Simply a noting.

My feelings about the vortex are complicated, but overall, I would rather be here than not. Ecstasy > Agony, even at my most agonized and bereft. My feelings about the center are that it is a gift. The essays have been validating these feelings with every word and also the title of the collection*, which is why I picked it up in the first place. 

--JL

*The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida (Secrets of European Responsibility; Beyond:Giving for the Taking, Teaching and Learning to Give, Death; Whom to Give to (Knowing Not to Know); Tout autre est tout autre)

#129

How we keep going is all the miraculous proof that I need. Serious talk.

That we as a species have not instigated total nuclear annihilation--that we did not blow ourselves to perdition the minute that was an option--on top of each individual shouldering their trauma and exhaustion and the innumerable burdens of existence and stepping forward to fight the battle that is life is so overwhelmingly outrageously laughably against the odds, even for one day, that it is mathematically a miracle.

Mathematics themselves count as a miracle too, though. 

*

Drew three pictures last night. Did what I said I would do. 

The miracles we make ourselves are valid, too. To approach blankness and fill it with yourself--the performance of miracles. Everyone has this within them; even a creature like Charles Manson can make art that earns its name. That is a miracle, like it or not.

Nobody said miracles are always good things however you frame them, or that they're ever simple.

Universe doesn't have to be good to be miraculous. 

*

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once said that he believed increasingly in spite of, and not because of, the miracles. I haven't read his books yet, just about him, some quotes, very superficial. Think about what I've seen quite a lot, though. Getting ready. Reading is a process I take seriously; my priorities and decisions may seem violently changeable and wildly chaotic, but this is misleading. I set myself a program, through which I allow a rich seam of chaos to run, so that I never stagnate, and to which time is subordinate, not determinate. Waiting for fruits to ripen while I ride the wind and account for what it brings me. 

Discipline is not the same as control.

*

Anyhow, I am proud of everybody reading this for having survived to make it this far.

Fucking life! That shit is killing us, amirite?

*

Today I cooked some bomb scrambled eggs. Those fuckers got treated correctly every step of the way. 

Let me tell you something: eggs are a miracle. Think about an egg for a minute. Remember that an egg is how you got your start, and that when you eat eggs you are eating giant versions of the cell that you once were.

Stirred up some big cells in a hot pan and ate 'em right up. Yum yum! Man, they were decent. I honored their sacrifice to the best of my ability.


--JL

#115

History is some crazy stuff. These histories of Showa Japan have got my fever going. Next I think I shall dive into Thucydides' The Peloponnesian War, or perhaps shorten the step and read The River of Lost Footsteps by Thant Myint-U. I've been meaning to get to J.M. Barrie's History of Europe for some months and this book by Robert Levin called A Geography of Time for a couple years now. 

Yeah, I think I'm ready for a long, manic nonfiction jag.

Some point this year though, The Decameron. Last summer as we drove many hours the narcissist ex and I listened to a CD lecture course on the Black Death by Purdue professor Dr. Dorsey Armstrong, who I wished wouldn't try to be funny and maybe states some of her opinionated interpretations as fact but who overall delivers a knockout, very well thought data brick on that crazy ole plague. She talked about Boccaccio a great deal, which I loved. Been meaning to get into it with him.

*

Fernando Pessoa is a great writer and his images and moods and ideas are good, everything is in place and I like the book, but I'm not making much headway in The Book of Disquiet because it lends itself so marvelously to being drunk in small sips over a long period in whatever page order you please. Also I find myself rereading a passage I've already completed by accident and finding it a different animal than it was before, sentences in a different order than I had thought, words I had missed, meanings askew or multiplied or shifted slightly in tone; the tome seems ensorcelled, slippery with mist, its particles constantly rearranging themselves in a swirl of smoke. 


--JL

#102

It is difficult to remember for some reason, though further back my memories are clearer, almost overwhelming. I remember the two books from which I learnt my letters and colors simultaneously, as well as the objects and fonts employed in this grasping of the symbol, I remember the feel of sitting in my mother's lap and the look of her fingers as she turned the page. Later than that, but still earlier than when I am trying to remember, there is the full, deep, rich memory of first encyclopedia I ever read, a Spanish translation of The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Animals, some edition that was up to speed in the late eighties. The current American edition is what I own these days; the old book was lost in some move. No matter; I remember it with such a clarity that I really have no idea why I bothered replacing it. If I close my eyes, I can see the same illustrations with my child's eyes, sharper and clearer than mine today, richer in color and detail, larger and realer. Certain memory is more than capable trouncing the present moment.


What I am having trouble remembering is the very first novel I ever read. 


*


A friend of mine insists we have the Devil to thank for the written word; would that it were so simple. Of course he is being deliberately provocative and knows full well that this is not quite so; neither can I deny him.


*


On the inside covers or blank pages of the books I have owned the longest I can find examples of my handwriting from when I was three or when I was five; my name, correctly spelled and easy to read but the letters composed of mostly wobbly angles and crumpled curves. I had good handwriting, actually the beginnings of promising penmanship, for a magic span sometime when I was nine. Then it crossed over into hurried sloppiness, still beautiful on occasion, but never neat or truly correct or consistent. 


*


The novel would have had to be in English, but the problem is, it may have come from a library, and not my own collection. I can be fairly sure the International School I first attended did not supply it; like the rest of my very early childhood books, the tomes I selected at that very first, most sacred (to me, the whole place was a temple to Neo-Americo-Brittanic flat-affect employment of right angles using bright primary colors cheer if there ever was one, truly a cradle of the projected global civilization*) library were still largely children's books, even the ones in novel form, like The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett and The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster, both cornerstones of my heart. Well, moreso Phantom Tollbooth. I could read that bad boy seven times in a row and come back for more. One of the best books ever.


Memories of my first collection of short stories are easy; the first, a most precious trove which holds great power to this day, was A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh, illustrated by Ernest H. Shepard. That was followed by Kipling's Jungle Book, and various collections of children's versions of Aesop's Fables and Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur. Also, The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame,  Peter Pan, by J.M. Barrie, some others in that vein. I recall also from the age of five through six beginning to read a whole raft of young adult books and children's novels, Animorphs by K.A. Applegate, the Dragon of the Lost Sea series by Laurence Yep (fuckin Boneless King is still one of the scariest things to me), Jerry Spinelli books, Star Wars books, L'Engle's Time Cycle which I have mentioned, the Chronicles of Narnia by Lewis, Patricia Wrede, Louis Sachar, Charles Dickens, Avi, Lois Lowry, Garth Nix, Brian Jacques, Jane Yolen, random stuff, starting to crawl into the adult territory sometimes. Some of these books I would collect for myself, some I would check out of the library up to eight times over the course of two years.


*


Treasure Island. That counts, I'm sure, it was Kipling that brought it to mind, and I read Kipling very early, perhaps four. Robert Louis Stevenson, a grown-up enough book. It's for young people. A novel nonetheless.


Ah, but if we're going to quibble over definitions like that, the first novel must indeed be The Phantom Tollbooth, which I did already mention and I might also need to throw in Roald Dahl's Matilda, being as which came first is a detail lost to memory. I believe. I'll try to remember.

Said goodbye to my childhood in a new way, at the age of eleven, with Stephen King's Bag of Bones, shortly followed by To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, and then, irrevocably, One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez, possibly my very favorite novel, certainly one of the most important to me. 


Stories which disrupted my childhood badly were written by Franz Kafka. Yikes, dude!  


Of course, there is the first book, the Book from which I would have heard my first written word, spoken aloud. Doesn't quite count, probably. Did not read that myself until a bit later, before I turned ten, and, uncharacteristically, I did not reread it until last year. It was fucking fire. Rad book, please do try it no matter how you feel about people who use it as a weapon.


On that note, The Brothers Karamazov deserves to stand amongst among the greatest works of art ever produced, and is certainly one of the greatest novels ever written, as Fyodor Dostoevsky stands in the very front ranks of novelists. I just felt like saying that. If you have only read it once, please! should you only read one book twice in your whole lifetime, let it be this one.


*


That same friend of mine, a white dude, while acknowledging my delicious ethnic ambiguity, does not let me forget that I am basically a white dude, even literally a white dude. Like the other thing, I don't quite agree, but can't say he's at all wrong.


*


Guess some people would say that the above would be my colonized mindset, abetting my oppressor. That's a whole thing to get into, but to be concise: no. Not accurate. 


Another time.



--JL


*by which I mean what I understood as I read the very acclaimed book People, by Peter Spier at the age of three, along with Dr. Seuss and Maurice Sendak, Japanese and African folktales, classic British children's literature and nursery rhymes, Eastern European fairy stories, Greek and Russian fables, all these new favorites I was continually discovering in that beautiful little children's library up a mountain in Venezuela where the English books all hid, my first aperture into a wider, vaster world: that this planet is more compassed by a kinship than it is fragmented by a sundering.

#90

Wooooo boy, what a day! Got up at four, and at five sharp I set myself to a walkabout and but for two ten-minute rests, a short while up a tree, and fifteen minutes warming up with a cup of soup, I was constantly stepping. One step after another, and I did not cross my home threshold till some time after the clock rang three of the evening. Pretty great first walk of the new year, I give it an A plus. I would hazard that I made around thirty miles.

*

You'd think I'd have more than that. I generated a lot of ideas, yes, but I'm a little tired--not beat, not like I am after the usual walks on top a shift dealio, and I do work tomorrow. I feel like reading. I'm gonna read. What have I read since I last talked about books? A bunch of Shigeru Mizuki's Gege No Kitaro stories, this graphic novel by this dude LRNZ called Golem, two books of Roald Dahl's short stories (this "best of" dealio Hyperion put out which took from a bunch of his other collections and also my childhood friend The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More), Lightsabers, by Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta, part of the Young Jedi Knights Series (I am working hard on rebuilding my collection of these books, as well as my collection of Animorphs, the top shareholders in Stuff I Regret Giving To Charity, I Mean Not Really But, Hell, Kind Of Sometimes LLC.), 

Just started reading The Dark Is Rising Sequence, by Susan Cooper. I am three-quarters done with the first one; mad respect for the game so far. I especially and extremely love the attention to detail, thoroughness, and I instinctively honor a person who knows how not to rush a good story or push the characters in it out of themselves in order to rudely advance plot. This is a too-common weakness, but it is absent here, as are basically all the common weaknesses. 

I have known about and been meaning to read and not reading these books for a full seventeen years now. The way some things keep slipping away from one is nothing short of unconscionable.

*

You may have noticed that aside from a "serious" novel or three here and there I've been reading what some might call middling fare, heavy on the Young Adult. To this I can only say that YA is and has most often been where the muhfuckin fire be at, so ditch, bitch.

Also that I have been recalibrating from some serious life shifts and stuff like that is very grounding and nourishing, and finally that serious readers elevate that upon which they cast their eyes as much as the reverse; I read what some might call pap, or pulp, or pornography, or hack-work, and I use these terms for certain kinds of writing myself--but much more sparingly than most. 

Truth is a lot of books are very good, more than a million tons of them, even though people like to act like only a few every year are and probably about fifty all through history are really great or whatever. 

No. No. This is not a good way to think. There is more great writing than you will be able to read in your lifetime. Most of it, the vast majority of it, people will try to make you feel stupid for enjoying, or act smarter than you because they have memorized hardcore lessons about five or six great books and think that means they don't need to read anymore.

They can't change how great it is, though. They do not have that power.

Anyhow, I do read like, Faulkner or whatever, too. I know about Hamlet's whole deal and blah-de-blah-de-bloo-bah.

Just not hitting that grade of stuff a lot right now.


--JL

#86

Read a book by Terry Pratchett! It had been a very long time. I read a few at a formative age, but I guess Kurt Vonnegut sort of took over that conceptual reading space. If I had to pick a culprit. The truth is I read one I didn't much care for, thought I'd have a break, and never thought to return. But this one, Hogfather, was both excellent--truly, magnificent and pretty much genius--and seasonally appropriate. 

Before that, I had quite abandoned Susan Sontag, carried away as has been my wont since age eight by Madeleine L'Engle's incredible powers. We all have a literary mother. My Mother brought me the Time Quartet after a trip back to the U.S., and put them in my hands, saying she had a feeling I would like them. It really was a feeling, too. She knew nothing whatsoever about them, had never heard of them, saw them on the shelf while looking for a gift for me and felt those would be good, not only good, but Good. Moms, man. I thanked her, privately feeling that she was almost ridiculously and perhaps even mockingly mistaken; the books looked weird, and also soft in some way beyond the pastel palettes and gentle linework of the covers. They were shelved and went unread for some months, but I read at such a pace in those days that they were all I had uncracked, and thus I deigned to read the first sentence of Wrinkle, which, (famously) of all the possible sentences in the wide, wide world of sports, went "It was a dark and stormy night." 

That second sentence, though. Immediately assuages any sense of betrayal. From there, relentlessly, it's nothing but one of the finest artistic achievements ever, straight-up one of the best books of all time. All of them are. I weep to read them. Nakedly, messily, ecstatically, sorrow breaking me open and joy tearing me apart.

*

You know what? That opening line still kills and I'm never really mad to see it. Charles Schultz used it all the time and it was always good. Just, when I was a little kid, I was for real considerably snobbier than I am now. Pretty embarrassing. Reading a lot is my main thing and and on that turf, I could be unkind. Have been unkind. Could still be unkind, if cornered. Tigers, leopards, spots and stripes, scorpions and their stingers, you know.

For example: don't ever try to have an argument with me about a book you haven't read, or bring a book you haven't read into a argument. I'll find you out quick--I make it a point to admit outright if I have not read a book, since anyone who tries to make you feel bad for not reading a book is straight-up bullying you and I don't give a fuck what bullies think of me--I will call you out on the spot, and I won't let you walk away feeling good about yourself. I don't care about what you haven't read at all, I don't care if you don't read stop signs, but pulling that shit is the stuff of cravens, jackasses, and again, bullies.

It can never be said enough: all that a bully is good for is being defeated. It is up to everyone else to grow strong enough to defeat bullies, and if necessary, strong enough to protect, help, and support those who for some reason or another are particularly vulnerable to bullies. In addition, bullies come in all shapes and forms, and everyone has it in them to protect someone from some bully in a way best conferred to their own suite of talents and abilities--some bullies are even thus engaged, for life is rarely as simple, cut, and dried as we like to declaim. Support systems and coping mechanisms; complex, layered. 

However, bullies are always welcome to get their miserable lives right, and until then, all they deserve is defeat, frustration, and the obdurate, mute hatred of the universe.

What they generally get is something else. 

I've always had a strong personal sense that everything shakes out in the end, though; even, in unseen ways, minute by minute and hour and by hour. Imbalance is part of a larger balance and all that. Inborn subjective comforts are a lucky thing, existence-wise. Bolstered, if you are lucky, by exceptional books.

Good night!


--JL

#76

Read China Men, by Maxine Hong Kingston, which was so good I feel like purchasing a case wholesale and hawking them on the corner, breathlessly enumerating the qualities of the text and the brilliance of its author as mothers drag their children to the opposite side of the street. I've bought five copies of James Baldwin's No Name in the Street just to press it on people; this is a similar feeling. Now I am reading Against Interpretation, a collection of critical essays by Susan Sontag, and rereading A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle, at the same time. 

With some collections of short stuff like essays or short fiction I like to read one of the collected works, switch to another book for a while, usually something familiar, then read the next one, and so on back and forth for a bit.

There! That should satisfy those of you who come here mainly to find out what I'm reading and what I've been reading. You're my kind of strange, you underground hip-hop classics. You funkadelic cogitators. You and me, we groove to sympathetic currents, hooking crossed thought pinkies to keep a little anchored in this byzantine swirl of a world.

*

Yesterday, as part of a tone joke, I wrote out that I agreed to work an extra shift this week. I hadn't done that really. This morning, on my second day off in a row--a weekend I had claimed not to need but which, after a six-day work week, I had warmed to--I was asked if it would be at all possible to please come in and cover a shift. Naturally I agreed. I almost always say yes. Arguably I am too open to the universe. Anyway, bonus punchline and buttress to yesterday's post. That's like, twelve percent of your packet of pre-sliced cheese for free! Yeah, think of it that way.

It's not really an extra shift, though. I get a different day off instead.  

*

No more today! 

Wait. It is long past time that I came out as absolutely loathing to death the galling lampoonery about "ancient aliens" on the History channel. Watching Action Bronson watching it with guests as everybody gets super high is something else altogether, but the base metal is just so reactive to me that it's still not great for my blood pressure or tooth enamel. 

Wait!

Action Bronson seems like a wonderful man. That link is a trash bucket; turn on all your blockers and privacy shrouds before you click it. Perhaps worth it? Maybe you don't give a fuck. That's healthy. I like strange people, strange things, and strange occurrences, all for strange reasons.

Aw, here's the first thing. God, 2016 feels like another lifetime. I think the show itself is available on Hulu. 

To people from the future: Hulu is an inappropriately and insipidly titled internet video content streaming service, one of many. Because there was a red one, there had to be a green one. 

That's a real thing companies bank on. Just as with Autozone and O'Reilly's. Some people switch back and forth or play one against the other, but there are permared customers and permagreen customers. A matter of bedrock reliance. Same with CVS and Walgreens, except of course there it is red vs. blue, just as with Coke and Pepsi; though in both these cases, the blue team keeps a little red for their logo, red being activating and attractive to the human eye in general. All the most popular logos have red. Red and white is the broadest hitter. 

I hope some future person has to annotate that whole paragraph, but that's ridiculous optimism. The hyperintelligent cockroaches that discover hard evidence of real, factual human beings in the archaeological record will celebrate their monumental achievement by cracking a bunch of cold coca-colas back at base camp. 

THIS BLOG RESPECTS TRADEMARKS AND SHIT OK NO MORE TODAY FOR REAL for real

--JL

#71

Iron John was way, way better than I thought it would be. There is present an element that is a little too much in the vein of that detestable New-Age Pseudo-Hermeneutic Ur-Fascist nonsense to be taken seriously, but for the most part, it was a much more serious and intelligent and nourishing and correct book than I could have hoped. It was given me years ago, and the time was just right to finally read it.

This often happens; I'll lay a book by, consider reading it many times over the years, listen to the little voice inside that says "not quite yet, no, pick another.". Then I read it, the day comes, and I know that the moment was exactly ripe, that the knowledge would have saved me much time and trouble but I would not have been receptive to it, would not take it in as fully and perhaps even have abandoned it. It comes with rereading too; that sense of returning to familiar ground just when your feet most needed to be there.

By and by I shall want to write about some of the stuff that book presented me with. Also, about virtue. In the coming days, I shall bring these things forth. For today, my routine is disturbed, and I must away, hoping the disturbance does not reverberate the string of my life overmuch. It is difficult enough to resemble a tuned state even without these vagaries.

--JL

#38

Well, I didn't have anything interesting to say this morning, I guess. Not to this blog, anyway. I said a bunch of interesting things to the people I interacted with throughout the day. That's how I live.

Nothing interesting to tell you, blog, except that my whim led me to J.R.R. Tolkien's translation of Beowulf (including many accompanying materials of great interest to me), and not whatever I said I would read yesterday. I already forgot, and regret nothing. When I'm reading a book, my focus is complete. I have an idea of the next one, even the next few, usually, but nothing is ever guaranteed. I follow my gut. When it comes to reading, the appetite is always correct. Now I believe I will read The Monsters and The Critics, also by Tolkien.  

I would say that J.R.R. Tolkien is my favorite writer, but that would not even remotely begin to cover the situation here. Just...don't even dream of fucking stepping to me. I'll eat your hot guts on a Sunday morning. I'll burn your name from the histories and the registers of names, and I will bury you broken and unmarked in a grave of pure salt. 

*

I wish I weren't on the computer this late. I love computers, but they're totally bad for you. Sucks shit. Part of me also hates computers, hates them to hell. It is a complex relationship, as are the bulk of relationships.

I closed a kitchen tonight, and tomorrow I will get up to open it again, and then I will work until it is time for me to close it, and then I will wake up to open it once more. Then I'll rest.

I'm thinkin' day off tomorrow from the ole bloggo, but who knows? I don't know anything.


--JL

#37

It's predictable, but I often read a lot of ole Stevie King during the fall. Sometimes I read Tolkien instead, though, so it gets pushed to midwinter or the dead of summer. Some years I don't hit Stevie up at all, and some years I just read a few here and there at random points throughout the year. This year basically as soon as it turned October I reread The Dark Half for the first time. Now I'm rereading The Dead Zone for the first time. Then I think I will reread Lisey's Story for the first time, and then I will pick one of the collections of shorter works to reread for the hundredth or so time. The Stephen King book I have read the most times is Cujo. I have read that book about seventy hundred thousand times. I really have no idea why; there are lots of other books of his I like even better. I guess Cujo is just really well-put-together, very taut, just enough color, everything very real and correctly placed, little or nothing wasted, all the characters superbly alive. 

I think Stephen King is a very, very good writer. 

I don't really like the weekend very much, I have found. After high school it lost its fundamental significance, so I prefer having free time when people are working, and having an excuse not to do stuff on the weekends. But there's usually less work on weekends, and work that is too easy drives me bonkers.

Sunday morning's an alright time. Maybe I'll write something more meaningful then. 

--JL