#317

This is one of those posts written on the cusp of something, a border post, overlooking uncharted lands. Often, these posts are the final post before the blank, terrifying void of a hiatus, but pray with me, dear reader: this cusp is different. This cusp, this cusp right here? This is the cusp of heretofore unprecedented productivity, the cusp of rich, thick, ambrosial bounty.

When it was time for me, as a newly minted adult, to attend a four-year college, well, I didn't feel like doing that. What I wanted to do was ingest a bunch of drugs, drink till I went fucking blind, and smoke enough cigarettes to sound like Tom Waits. Wanted to work and earn only enough to pay a small rent and support my habits, at a restaurant or other food place so that I could mostly eat for free, and write. Also, play music on my bass guitar.

Also, die. This last wish went unexpressed, but was really the head of the pack. Funny how psychology works.

Over ten years and many adventures later, it is time to concede and accept that I did not die, and that the many reasons I gave and feelings I felt that prevented me from continuing my education and taking up a post in society that befits a whole and balanced individual were fabricated from that tempestuous mix of bloated arrogance, particular traumas, and corrosive self-hate that defined my tender youth. However, life has worked upon me, and I am a different man, a man that has been to the brink, back to the beginning, and ready for a new adventure. So on Monday, I go back to school, at the community college, and later, when I am done, I will secure work as a teacher. My feeling is that my experiences and skillsets will serve me very well in this endeavor, to which I feel unmistakably called.

Indeed, having withstood what I have withstood, and dealt with what I have dealt with, the idea of being derailed in my academic endeavors by what once derailed me is laughable. Once, I stopped attending a class because the teacher didn't deal with a student in a way I felt the situation called for. This other student stole about twenty minutes of class time from the rest of us because she could not see, and had to be informed, how understanding Nietzsche was supposed to help her with her business degree*. She hijacked the class, coarsely and witlessly, I might add, which incensed me greatly. After the allotted time had passed, I wanted to talk to the teacher about why that had been allowed. The man fled from me, literally, avoiding my eye, brushing past me, and exiting the building at such a rapid clip that I would have had to jog to catch up. Before this, I had liked and respected this teacher enough to have quite a bit of enthusiasm for his class. 

That's it. No more. An autodidact is all that I can be. It's all that I ought to be. I will not be taught by that kind of coward, I told myself, and left school; forever, I thought. 

Don't get me wrong; I love and live for being an autodidact. My only reservation about this process as I embark upon it is a reduction in the time I will have to pursue my own academic interest wholly unencumbered by outside demands from an actual academy. But on the balance, I believe it will only serve me to double my demands. No longer do I fear I lack the bandwidth to pursue my own interests and others at the same time. My time in the service industry and other brute workforces has taught me otherwise. Disengaging myself from various social and material pressures unique to the young and drug-addled has also broadened my perspectives tremendously.

For example, I have come to understand various hows and whys as related to that teacher allowing that sincerely idiotic individual to do as she did, and his subsequent ignominious behavior. It's not how I hope to comport myself if similarly tested, but yeah, I get it. We all have rights, and boundaries, and rights to our boundaries, and this creates untenable situations sometimes. So it goes.

Guess another basic worry is money and will we have enough, but that's never bothered me too much. This attitude, I believe, has kept me relatively unwrinkled and spry in the step, albeit light in the wallet, so I shall continue with this policy and hope it continues to serve me in more or less tolerable stead.

--JL

*this avenue of inquiry still repulses me viscerally. Fuck you, lady. Fuck you and may you have failed yourself utterly.

#316

Perhaps it is to become a tradition, or at any rate, a yearly condition of this blog that I will fall off posting around November through to January. Anyway, it happened, for no real reason other than that it did. Also, it is very cold in my bookroom/writing office, as it is basically a converted attic space, lacking ventilation and not amply insulated. At any rate, we forge onwards. Brave 2023, we greet ye!

*

Largely, I hewed to my word concerning my reading plans--plans whose layout and execution are doubtless the main reason anyone reads this blog. Completed Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, as planned, and read 1Q84 and First Person Singular, as planned, but could not bring myself to let it rest there and subsequently acquired and read Men Without Women, Colorless Tsuruku Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, (at this point there was a brief pause on the Murakami and I read Shigeru Mizuki's Tono Monogatari while waiting for more books to come in the mail) and Sputnik Sweetheart. Also acquired A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance, but have not read those yet, nor reread Ulysses.

Primarily this shortcoming is due to the glut of video games I downed in the months of November and December, as well as a great cacophony of films and television programs. Watched Sopranos for like, what, the ninth time? Also, The Many Saints of Newark, for the second time. Exhaustive detailing is more work than with books, which is part of why I talk about it less, but here is merely a sampling of the rest of the backlog: Boardwalk Empire, The Irishman, Strange World, Amsterdam (if I gave Moving Picture Awards, like some asshole Academy, this would be my best picture for this year, I think, though it's not easy to be definitive about this, given human limitations on time and attention, and also, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery would certainly be a contender as well), Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities, American Splendor, and a whole bunch more. All kindsa stuff.

Videogames, though. Notably, Pokémon Violet/Scarlet versions dropped, and I sank thirty hours into the former in a single intensive weekend. I beat it and completed its Pokédex in record time, a very enjoyable endeavor. Also picked up Sonic Frontiers (probably the best Sonic game made in about twenty years, as far as I'm concerned), Super Mario Odyssey, NieR: Automata - The End of YoRHa Edition, Pokémon Shining Pearl, Death's Door, Disgaea 5, Cuphead, and Fire Emblem: Three Houses. I played all of these and more to varying degrees, eating up a lot of time I might have reasonably devoted to reading and writing, but it was fucking great and I regret nothing, a life practice I recommend to everyone, applying to everything they do. 

Remorse and regret are different things, by the way. Remorse is fine. Not that I feel any over playing video games. Remorse is reserved for hurting people, indecencies, so forth.

Remorse is a natural and noble reaction to a past made up of imperfect choices, a side effect of our paltry, laughable consciousness. Regret is an affront to God's perfect universe, a seductive trap that keeps us enmeshed in samsara's gravid loop.

Something to consider for the new year.

*

So! Today I set out on this year's literary journey with Alison Weir's The Wars of the Roses. Thought it best to finish all the Murakami after I complete my planned task for 2023, and then, in that distant future, we will see what comes next. Pretty great so far; it really does read like Game of Thrones! Life is so wild.

Feels good to be back in the nonfiction section. Gonna read the shit out of my books this year, dear reader, all my nonfiction and poetry and comics, and I'm gonna tell you all about it. Might have to hit the library or secure more poetry and comics in order to properly alternate between them and my nonfiction, but that'll just be even more fun. Plus, we'll see what else happens. A whole blank slate to piss and shit all over! Ahh, the illusory yet very real grace of elliptical orbits.

--JL

#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.