#315

Finished A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which left me most determined to reread Ulysses once I'm done with all this Murakami. On that front, the instant I had completed the above text, I pulled out The Elephant Vanishes, swallowed it whole, finished it last night, and this morning I read South of the Border, West of the Sun to completion and began Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. Once I've put that one to bed, it'll be 1Q84, then First Person Singular, and then the rereading will begin: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, The Strange Library, Wind/Pinball, Norwegian Wood, After Dark, Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and then maybe Killing Commendatore--but I'm not sure about that last one. It's a definite possibility. Then, as I say, Ulysses, perhaps Dubliners, then as much Ursula K. Le Guin as I can cram in before the new year. Once that happens, I shall alternate nonfiction with poetry until I run out of fuel, though I seriously need to read at least fifty and perhaps more than one hundred nonfiction books next year, so help me. When I have exhausted myself, I will reread all my Kurt Vonnegut books, which happens to be all of them--except his Letters, and that one little book which is his first short story and his last short story. Don't think those have to count. I have everything else, from Sirens of Titan to Timequake, including Canary in a Cat House, one of my very rarest books.

ANYHOW THAT'S THE PLAN, and God may laugh but there it is. We have no choice but to lay it out sometimes, and risk being a cosmic punchline. Well, more of a cosmic punchline than we already are. 

*

Ever since I was quite young, I have conceived of a piece of spacetime after death in which it's just you, free of your body but still your own self, and a calculable, comfortable manifestation of the Almighty--an old man, a giant cat, a floating radiant crystal; whatever you want, I guess--who "sits" down with you--I always picture a brown leather couch--and goes over your lifetime stats, gives you a director's commentary, and lets you in on every joke you've ever been to small and too limited by perspective to see or appreciate. Then, after this blow-by-blow of your lifetime, seen from enough new angles that it would take a few lifetimes to see--the next thing, of who knows how many things. Or life again, exactly the same! Or the loop is instantaneous. Or it's the next life, as someone or something completely different. Or it's all something completely different. Having been encoded with a premium Catholic programming early in life, I've also always thought and felt there must be some kind of Last Battle, before some timeless time of perfect peace and bliss preceding the end of the universe and the beginning of another, infinite universes stretched out before and behind us, or the same universe again infinitely. 

All we know for sure is that death is coming! Maybe tomorrow. Maybe later today. Maybe sometime further off, but coming to meet you surer than anything else in this world.

*

Very much would like to put out a book this December and a couple more early in 2023, but we will see! I have most unwisely made such promises before, and that has only caused me personal anguish when unable to deliver. This book, for example, would contain the play I said I would publish over two years ago, finally done, but too short to stand alone. Also some essays, and difficult-to-categorize piece of poetry. If it can be called poetry.

*

On that note, I have actual work to do. Enough horsing around, dear reader. 

Enough.

--JL

#314

Got a bunch of books. Also have been reading a bunch of books, though, not as many as I would like. Finished rereading all my Tolkien, then reread Laurence Yep's excellent Dragon of the Lost Sea cycle, which I had not done since I was a wee sprat--used to check 'em out of my local library branch over and over. Think I've mentioned that. Then I read Prince Ombra, another book I had not read since in a long time. I read this one once, when I was eleven, maybe twelve, at my best friend's insistence. Didn't remember all of it with my customary clarity, but a few scenes have stuck with me through the many years, and the work as a whole was more formative and influential than I would ever have guessed. An amazing book. I mean seriously, that book is truly something. Read After the Quake and Kafka on the Shore, and am currently almost done with James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, borrowed from my mom at her insistence. Apparently Mr. Stephen Dedalus reminded her of her own firstborn (yours truly). I cannot deny certain affinities--even echoes. After that, the plan is to read a bunch more Murakami, reread Ulysses and perhaps more Joyce--probably just Dubliners, dunno if I want to get into Finnegan's Wake till next year, and at least a bit of Le Guin before I hit the nonfiction again.

There's really a lot of nonfiction I've been meaning to get to: a book about diamonds, a book about the Wars of the Roses, a book about metahistory, a book about Jerusalem, a book about math; books about a whole bunch of fuckin shit. Too many books, not enough time or money. Why, why won't the government pay to me to read like a madman every day? Can they not grasp my potential value as an intelligence asset? Fools! Squanderers!!! Just fucking make me a spot, feds!

Uh, speaking of books, I've grabbed too many this month and should have tabulated them, but didn't. Because of these factors, the following list may not be exhaustive, and I shouldn't--damn it, won't!--get more new books at the very least till well into next year. 

We'll see how that goes.

*

The Very Eric Carle Treasury, Eric Carle

Tono Monogatari, Shigeru Mizuki

The Cricket in Times Square, George Seldon

The Rescuers, Margery Sharp

Black Zodiac, Charles Wright

What Have I Ever Lost by Dying?, Robert Bly

Memoirs, Dreams, Reflections, C.G. Jung

Love That Dog, Sophie Creech

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, Kafka on the Shore, First Person Singular, Haruki Murakami

The Trumpet of the Swan, E.B. White

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain (not strictly necessary, since I own a complete collected works of his, but whatever. Maybe a gift someday after read it, or before, who cares)

Early Christian Lives, a bunch of people (Penguin Classics, publishers)

The Universe Within: The Deep History of the Human Body, Neil Shubin

Life in Ancient Egypt, Adolf Erman, transl. H.M. Tirad, introduction by Jon Manchip White

After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre

The Templars and the Grail: Knights of the Quest, Karen Ralls

The Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar: Solving the Oak Island Mystery, Steven Sora

Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic, Ingrid D. Rowland (Really extremely excited to read this)

The Long Valley, John Steinbeck

Squire, Sarah Alfageeh and Nadia Shammas

DEAS...and Other Imaginings: Ten Spiritual Folktales for Children, Valerie Tarico

The World According to Garp, John Irving

Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, Elvis Costello

The Abolitionist's Handbook, Patrice Cullors

Birds, Tim Flach (this was a wedding anniversary present from Ezra and it is supremely magnificent)

Fairy Tale, Stephen King

Principles of Isotope Geology, second edition, Gunter Faure 

The Complete Practical Guide to Pet and Aviary Birds, David Alderton

Nobody Knows My Name, James Baldwin

The House at Pooh Corner, A.A. Milne

*

Cool ok that's all I got time for MAY NOVEMBER BE A VERITABLE BLITZ OF PRODUCTION PRASE GOD

--JL

#313

Among my very early memories is running around the little vacation home complex my mother's side of the family used to have on the coastal city of Puerto La Cruz. There was the swimming pool where I learned to swim, in which I cracked my chin so hard once on one of the submerged hubcap lights that I thought my little face had started to split in two. Stung like a hornet got me, silver bubbles rose with my screams shivering inside them, blood billowed into the water, and to this day, my beard won't grow on that little line where the gash was, though it's smooth and unmarked when shaved. On a separate occasion, I scraped most of the skin off my knee, enough that there was a little eyelet of white beaded with crimson glaring out of the oozing, flowing pink when my mom wiped it before disinfecting it. I yelled and fought and begged her to leave it, to no avail. My father, too, shed blood there; once went for a run and returned dripping sweat all over and with blood running down his shin from his own injured knee. Sitting by him on the front steps, I asked why come it didn't hurt him; in my own experience, bleeding that much meant you were having an experience that demanded unwilling tears and venting the sensation by dint of screaming. He told me that when you get older, you get used to pain, that it doesn't mean as much as when you're little. 

I have grown more like my father, as one does. For example, I was never the most powerful or technically adept wrestler; though strong and skilled enough to matter, my true advantages were my quickness and the fact that no one could ever hurt me badly enough to easily turn me into meat. Whatever they did to me, I kept fighting, shoving pain aside. Once I took a spill from a moving motor scooter (well, three separate times) and smashed the living hell out of my right knee, losing a bunch of skin there and on my arms and elbows. My knee and various connected muscles and tendons were quite damaged and forever changed by this incident, but I did not go to hospital--I walked it off that day and for weeks and months afterwards. Cleaned and took care of my own wounds, and took care of my own leg my own way. 

Guess this tangent is just to say that to age in a body is, in a sense, to grow numb; to become ever more inured. 

What I was actually getting at when I started writing is that the complex concierge's daughter, a lithe dark girl with jet-black eyes, was about my age, and we used to run around together sometimes. Early on, when we were about three or getting near four, she told me she had to go poop. I said I'd wait for her right where we were standing, on the grass on the side of one of the buildings, and she said she didn't want to go home. She skinned her underwear down and off under her skirt, squatted where she stood, and took the biggest shit, proportionally, that I have ever seen anyone take in my entire life. It was bigger around than her arm and almost as long. 

Though I had no problem, intellectually, understanding what had happened, and her reasoning, though quite alien to mine own (in my mind, shitting outside of a toilet was something done only while camping, and only when your parent was with you to help you bury it), was sound enough--"when you gotta go, you gotta go" is a tautology every human understands--I found myself astonished, abandoned by my faculties. I told her that her poop was the biggest one I'd ever seen, and she ran away, underwear clutched in her fist. Later, I went out to look at it again and found it crawling with flies. The grass was so incredibly green, the scat such a dark and vivid brown, the flies as black and gleaming as madness itself. Don't know if anyone found it before we left for home. Don't remember hanging out with her again.

Only three years later, the neighborhood bully in my section of the university housing complex we lived in when we first moved to the United States, a huge-boned hefty red-haired girl a few years older than I was, urinated in front of me in a secluded little grove of pines behind and in between a couple of the buildings, fenced off from the street and obscured from the view of passersby in the courtyard in front of the buildings. She made me stay in the grove, and by all accounts didn't let me watch, telling me to be her lookout; though she suggested that a boy who saw a girl pee was destined to marry her, implying that if I looked over my shoulder I would be sealing a form of accord with her.

"Did you peek?" She asked, after zipping up.

"No. Can we get out of here."

"Yeah, stupid. Get away from me, ok? You're such a stupid little kid."

*

No idea whatsoever what it is about me that brought these incidents on. I was but a lad, and still don't fully grasp what was happening, to be honest. I've never remembered this kind of thing during talk therapy; they did me no harm and did not foster in me any kinks or deep-seated dissatisfactions or dissonant confusions. I believe they merely make up a part of the tapestry of my memory that displays a profound mystification with what other people want and how they express their desire for it. Also that shit just happens, and nobody can stop it.

--JL

#312

Speaking of music, a thing that happened even since last time I wrote at length about The Mountain Goats--not so long ago--is that they put out yet another new album, Bleed Out. It's a very good album. Like, way better than I expected it to be given the pace of release lately. Not all the time, but too often, when artists put out work at an increased rate, it goes hand in hand with a certain compromise in quality. This record is as crazy good as Dark in Here, which really says a great deal. The last three albums could any one of them and as a group of three be the very best they've ever made, though I might say that about many groups of three of their albums. Anyhow, my favorite tracks off Bleed Out, for the nonce: "Bones Don't Rust", "Guys on Every Corner", "Incandescent Ruins", "Bleed Out", and a couple more though I'm not ready to say which. Have to listen to it some more, though I have listened to it quite a bit.

In point of fact, I'm doing a project I haven't done in several years now, which is smacking all the extant Mountain Goats music I can get onto a single playlist and listening to the whole thing on shuffle. It's going fair smoothly; I've had problems in the past with the device losing its place or playing something else without my telling it so. This current phone and current build of iTunes/"Music"/whatever is treating me ok, though, and am a few hours into a 28-hours-plus endeavor.

Since I mostly listen to music in the car, trips to and from work or over to see my parents are the main avenue. Need to listen to the phone try its best all alone or use a bluetooth speaker, since the car won't play CD's or tapes or fucking anything except the radio, and not very well. The van does whatever you could want, but I leave driving that to Ezra. In the kitchen, while doing dishes or cooking, I listen to a CD on our shiny blue boombox. It's got a Spinosaurus sticker and a Psittacosaurus sticker on it. 

*

Believe it or not, I still haven't got around to completing Paradise Lost. Part of the way through Steppenwolf and Los Años Extraordinarios, but I put all of that on hold to reread all of George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire stuff--Fire and Blood, The World of Ice and Fire, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, and the main ASoIaF series. 

That other stuff is still on hold at the moment because I'm rereading all my J.R.R. Tolkien; wrapped up The Silmarillion, Beren and Lúthien, and The Children of Húrin, finishing up Unfinished Tales, then when that's done, on to The Fall of Gondolin, the appendices to The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings itself for last.

Frankly, I'll try to finish the other stuff, but probably what will happen is once I'm finished with the Tolkien I will read my new Haruki Murakami books, and then maybe probably reread all the other ones I have and maybe buy some more I don't have and read those. It's just what I'm feeling. We'll see. After that I'm thinking about Ursula K. Le Guin. Or a bunch of science/history/philosophy books. We'll see. That's far ahead. You never know. We will just have to see.

*

Ok cool whatever BYE

--JL

#311

Hey! Look! I'm still alive! Motherfuckers reading this must be beside themselves, all shitting and pissing uncontrollably with overweening joy that I have deigned to type a word into a text field. 

You're all most welcome. One of the cats is asleep on my lap, so I don't wanna get up, plus I'm all finished with clicking around internet for now, and lack the critical wherewithal to work on actual material--what by all rights I ought to be doing with this time. So here I am.

Actually, I've tried to work on the next post a great many times and have sunk effort into three or four separate drafts--something I try not to do, for the very good reason that drafting kills my momentum in this space stone dead. Gotta rattle off the piece and smash the publish button in one go; that's how it's done and that's how to do it. But here I am, with thousands of words all backed up in the ether and nothing fit to show for it. 

In lieu of any of that, I'll just knock off some random shit, like I'm supposed to, as is my god-granted right, in accordance with my artistic mission.

*

For the longest time I've meant to mention how much I like the band World's End Girlfriend. Now I have! Fuck YES! It's finally happened! They are a really fucking good band. Here's a list of some of the bands/artists I've gotten into in the last couple of years that, for one reason or another, I fail or forget to mention anything about:

• World's End Girlfriend
• Magic Sword
• Le Matos
• Lera Lynn
• Iannis Xenakis
• Sidney Gish
• Jeff Rosenstock
• Fantastic Negrito 
• Rainbow Kitten Surprise

Here's an appended list of artists/bands I've gotten back into or appreciated in a new way:

• The Fiery Furnaces
• Wolves in the Throne Room
• Caribou
• Tegan and Sara
• Architecture in Helsinki
• Arcade Fire
• Broken Social Scene

*

Bought of bunch of Haruki Murakami books, and they should arrive at my house today. While buying my own books (I am still the main purchaser of my own books, but I hardly expect more than that in my lifetime or beyond), I decided I wanted a treat from the giant logistics company that wasn't just my own stuff or ten-pound bags of prunes.

Haruki Murakami is one of those dudes that's so famous in the English latitudes, like Hayao Miyazaki, that I would feel weird writing out his name in the correct order. This bothers me, but I can't do much about it.

*

Don't know why the spacing between paragraphs sometimes seems off on the posts. Why would a setting change without being changed? Why do I bother asking? I'll just do my best to fix it later, if I'm doing the wrong thing, aesthetically, now. It barely matters, except that it drives me fucking bugshit.

*

EAT THAT BITCHES TOTALLY A FUCKIN POST 

IT TOTALLY FUCKIN HAPPENED
ROCK N FUCKIN ROOOOOOOLLLLLLLLLLLL

--JL

p.s. the Murakami books I got were:

The Elephant Vanishes

After the Quake

South of the Border, West of the Sun

p.p.s. I also got this book that I haven't read since my old best friend lent it to me when we were kids. Prince Ombra, by Roderick MacLeish. I remember this book being a fuckin' trip. It didn't arrive till well after the other books in the order, and I plumb forgot I'd bought it. Nice surprise.

#310

 How 'bout some memories? Why not, right? 

*

Couple beers in and I'm spinning off a yarn, threaded silver with witticism. My audience--at the time, my girlfriend and my best friend--are laughing hard enough to cry and gasp, but I do not relent for even a second--the sight spurs me. I take it up a notch. At the time, under the prevailing conditions, this requires zero effort. Pausing briefly only to swig from my dark brown bottle of stout, I lean forward, pull faces, gesture ridiculously. Keeping up the patter, lighting up a cigarette. Their faces are red, they lean back in their chairs to clear the way for breath to reenter their lungs as it may, they beg me to stop between gales of laughter, but I have a goal in mind, a shining line to kill it with, and there is no deterring me. It's all worth it when I get there. Worth it in every sense, for everyone, most of all me, and I relish in it, the power of being able to sustain the verbal dervish that eludes me so completely when sober. 

By the time I'm five beers in, I don't say much. Eight beers in, done talking for the night. Just sit there, drunk. Just sit, while they talk incomprehensibly around me, my ears choked with thoughts made of dark fire, thoughts overburdened with incommunicable meaning. We've had our fun. Now it's dark. And it will get darker, each time, until the end of the line, until life heaves itself into a new configuration for all of us.

Now, these days, can't remember a word of what I said. Dunno what even the hell I was talking about. My best friend hasn't reached out or answered my attempts at contact in over ten years. My ex-girlfriend is even more reclusive than I am; an accomplishment that lives closer to the humorless truth involved in the jokes I tell about myself--hermit, shut-in, non-participant in society. Am I to blame for this state of affairs? Largely, perhaps entirely.

Was it really worth it, all of it, the nights around that wooden table laden with poisons, gritty with ash? All that came of that rough and drunken circle? Though I couldn't defend it materially, I have to believe that it is so. There is no other choice in life.

*

Smoking a cigarette late, late at night by my door, on the tiny wooden platform up the slippery wooden steps. The lower floor and basement of the house behind me is unoccupied; no one uses the front door. I use the back, which opens on a stairway up the second floor, where I live alone. Worn down from work, eyes stinging from too much reading and too little sleeping, hunched over beneath the weight of my leather jacket, I reflect that I have possibly never been as lonely. The feeling makes me smile. The realization makes me savor the thought of it, the suffering in it I have always been more or less immune to in the past. I have changed, I realize. I have become more human.

*

A friend and I had breakfast at the nicest diner in town and went down to the river to talk. We choose a couple bridges to suspend ourselves over the water on, let it pull itself and everything that can settle on its tension beneath us. We go down to the shoreline and balance on the mossy stones. I take my shoes and socks off and wade in till the water rises to the middle of my calves, the current lazy, the water almost as warm as my skin, the minnows nibbling, the sun searing down like a laser and the cool swooping in like a savior with the patchy clouds.

We talked about her memories of her trip around the world. She told me about roaming around Australia, about getting by in Russia. A boy she fucked in Barcelona, a sweetness that turned dangerous and had to be escaped. This was a pattern with her, the sweet, sensible masks that boys she fell for disposed of down the line. She told me about some dreams she had in Japan, a psychic she saw in Tokyo, how she came to realize reincarnation was real, remembered some of her past lives. A time when she was her sister's mother. 

She is dead, now. May her next life break the circle. May our lives all break the circle. Or not. Whatever the will of God may be. May we see one another again, beyond this strange and shadowed veil. If it is not to be, may she find the peace and satisfaction that so often eluded her in her body's time scrambling on the surface of the earth.

*

More like this soon? Maybe something completely different?

Only! Time! Will! Tell!

--JL

#309

Library was having a bag sale to...celebrate? Commemorate? Capitalize on moving their archives to a new location. Pick your favorite "c". My whim dictated that this particular sale spell an end to my not getting that many books, at least not all at once, and I have come up with a haul as in the days of yore. So yes sir, two bags full sir--of books! Not bad at all for ten bucks flat. Bag sales are very thrilling that way.

Let's do a list, like we love to do. We love lists here at Factually Pointless, and believe me, I decide to not show more lists than I post. Always wantin' to list shit up ins, folks. Always.

Anyway. 

The Best American Short Stories 2014, ed. Jennifer Egan

Balkan Ghosts, by Robert D. Kaplan

The Founding Fish, by John McPhee

Glastonbury, by Donna Fletcher Crow

Beauty Is a Wound, by Eka Kurniawan

The Well and the Mine, by Gin Phillips, introduced by Fannie Flagg

García Márquez en Cartagena-Sus Inicios Literarios, by Jorge García Usta

Europe 1880-1945, by J.M. Roberts, Silver Library edition

John Adams, by David McCullough

A Slight Trick of the Mind, by Mitch Cullum

The Realm of Fiction: 61 Short Stories, ed. James B. Hall

The Solace Is Not the Lullaby, by Jill Osier, foreword by Carl Philips

Blood & Iron-From Bismarck to Hitler/the Von Moltke Family's Impact on German History, by Otto Friedrich

Families of the World-Family Life At the Close of the 20th Century/East East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific, by Hélène Tremblay

Alarms & Diversions, by James Thurber

Moral Voices/Moral Selves-Carol Gilligan and Feminist Moral Theory, by Susan J. Hekman

Three Girls From Bronzeville, by Dawn Turner

The Art of Fiction-Notes on Craft for Young Writers, by John Gardner

All Loves Excelling, by Josiah Bunting III

Words, Thoughts, and Theories, by Alison Gopnick and Andrew N. Meltzoff

Writers Reading At Sweetwaters-An Anthology of Poetry and Prose, ed. by Chris Lord and Esther Hurwitz

Leone Leoni, by George Sand

The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space, by Douglas Trevor

A Little Chatter, by Terry Connell

Middle-Earth, by Henri Cole

In All This Rain, by John Stone

Tell Me a Riddle, by Tillie Olsen

Semantics-A New Outline, by F.R Palmer

Idylls of the King, by Alfred Lord Tennyson

Pocho, by José Antonio Villarreal

Typee, by Herman Melville, afterword by Harrison Hayford

The King Must Die, by Mary Renault

The Reader's Companion to American History, ed. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty

I also grabbed a spare copy of Tristram Shandy and a Dover thrift edition of Kafka's Metamorphoses (plus those near-ubiquitous Other Stories) just to lend them out when so inspired, or perhaps serve as a pair of the foundation stones for a Little Free Library of our own, on our yard. We'll see.

*

Cool! Man, what a complete waste of fucking time. Hope this blog gets good again soon. Got a feeling something might actually happen this week. Just a tingle in the fingers, perhaps--maybe--some sparks in the back of the mind. 

Again, we'll see.

--JL