Seeking in all the wrong places.

The thing I hate about library books sometimes is having to give them back. The thing that comforts me is the thought of someone else checking them out. Which brings me to Denis Johnson. Reading Seek, a collection of long pieces of journalism, he reminds me of Joan Didion, in that he goes for people and stories outside the mainstream. He rocks the New-Journo style too, so straightforward that the full horror of the situation at hand (as in Liberia) comes upon you suddenly, crushingly.

His fiction is the same way: Jesus’ Son, Angels, Resuscitation of a Hanged Man all skirt along the margins, this last maybe most of all. It’s about a man who moves from the Midwest to Provincetown after a failed suicide attempt, picks up a shady detective job, falls in love with a lesbian and slowly grows more and more delusional until he finally dresses in drag, steals a boat and tries to shoot the Archbishop. Disorienting in the deepest sense. (Incidentally, if you liked The Crying of Lot 49, you might like this too. Except where Pynchon leaves things murky, Johnson’s guy is clearly making connections where there are none, is clearly insane.)

The disconcerting thing for me is that I never fully settled into it the way I did with Jesus’ Son or Angels. A lot of the instability in both of these, I think, came from the outside, and here it’s all internal. It’s not that he takes us over unfamiliar terrain — he brings us to the center of an earthquake, some beautiful backwoods country no one’s ever heard of swallowing itself up.

 

The Facts Behind Us

I’m only halfway through all the Denis Johnson, I’m done with Seek and the Veil, leaving two to go, breaking to read Edward Wood’s Worshipping the Myths of World War II. It would be easy to dismiss his ideas if his impressive range of knowledge and research – not to mention his personal experiences – didn’t  give him more credibility than anyone else I’ve read on the subject.

My first bike ride since high school happens like this: Sam and I are smoking outside the LoDo store, which I just closed. And he’s saying can’t I just take the bus and meet him at the bar? He doesn’t want to walk, he wants to ride. And I’m giving in, and some kid says, hey, do you want this bike? It’s been here for like 3 days. No lock, no rear brake, no helmet, no back reflector. A little too much slack on the chain when I downshift.

I’d forgotten how good it feels.

So there’s this book by Yann Martel. Four of his early stories. Named for the first one, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios. It’s about a 19-year-old boy, in the mid-80s, dying of the random AIDS he got from a Mexican blood transfusion. From the point of view of his college friend, who visits in the hospital and they make up stories to pass the time. And the friend holds it together pretty well while the kid’s getting worse and worse, until one day he comes to visit and the kid’s gone blind. And the friend, whose life is not ending, loses it.

And later I almost say it. If I were you I’d leave him to rot. I have every right and no right. Instead, we tell each other stories, to pass the time until forever.

 

My Melancholic Baby: The Sandman + a beautiful dress for an ugly place.

So a bunch of ILLs that I had given up on all came in at once and it’s like a Denis Johnson buffet: The Veil, Seek, Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly. And I’m so overwhelmed, because I’ve just finished Don’t Panic (Neil Gaiman’s book on Douglas Adams) and I’m just about to start on Volume 9 of The Sandman, and there’s no way I can stop until it’s done.

And I don’t. The thing about Neil Gaiman is that he’s constantly making all these literary/mythological/philosophical allusions, like, “Look chap, this isn’t just another silly comic book — I’ve read Marlowe, and I’m bloody serious here.” But the thing about me is that I don’t care because he’s not just shit-talking. Yeah I love the baby gargoyle and the image of Delirium walking a goldfish that acts more like a balloon. I love Lucien and his library of books that never were. But mostly I love that Gaiman somehow created a world where Cain and Loki and Morpheus coexist, that his world is big enough and complex enough for it all to make perfect sense.

And Don’t Panic? Well it’s mostly about HHGTG, secondarily about Adams himself, and calling it by its stuffy-sounding technical name (”literary biography”) doesn’t quite do it justice. Gaiman doesn’t try to imitate Adams’ humor, but he kind of overlaps in places. The weirdness is in the perspective, I think — the first edition was finished before Adams’ death, but it’s been updated since then. It’s not a standout work of literary genius or anything, but it entertained me and satisfied my curiosity, especially about Hitchhiker’s early years. There’s plenty of trivia, and little bits of scripts that never made it and so forth to geek out over.

And I step outside at the exact wrong moment, it’s not just rain now it’s fucking hailing too, it’s about 100 feet from my backdoor to Bender’s and I still get soaked, it’s a Friday night but the place is dead and by the time George and Phil come get me I’m almost completely drunk.

Between storms is blazing sunlight, at least on one side of the street, and she’s talking about Before This Happened and I come so close. I can’t tell if it’s me from the inside, or the sunlight, that burning feeling and I say no, it’s always been like this, the difference is that we hadn’t known it. He is two people, maybe. It’s all I say, this little bit of honesty and I think maybe Sandman is doing other things, too.

And I buy  a round-trip ticket and a gold dress. August can’t be far enough away and I make it to the cafe just in time before it starts again, the rain and the hail that are washing summer down the sewer before I’ve even looked up long enough to recognize it.

 

Knock me down, summer’s edge.

Busy-ness. Half the day at the real job, then straight downtown to the bookstore for the night all this past week. We go to the new place straight off one night and we’re fucking around with the tape measure in all this empty space, all these decorating books filling my head with patterns, colors, possibilities. Then Blaise calls because he’s in Queens and he sounds alone and very far away.  The most honest thing I could’ve said was, it’s just a little farther east, say a prayer and break all the windows. Instead I pass him along to Sam.

On the patio by Lancer, you can tell it’s happy hour because it’s a weeknight and the bartender is the only one drunk and because we decide nothing’s going to get to us for now. Then moving. Then Red Rocks. Me and Sam and some beer and finding a trail off the pavement to listen to Iron and Wine and all I’m thinking, really, is I’m glad I’m here, it’s been a year already and I can choose now what to remember.

One of the librarians has me helping pick titles for the book club, I got lucky the first time with The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and now she thinks I’ve got a knack. Maybe I do. So I figured I’d better read it. One of those popular, “literary” novels, on the whole not bad. It could give a bunch of people with nothing else in common a lot to talk about and even the characters I didn’t like amused me. One of those things that sucks you in so even though you know what’s going to happen, you keep going anyway because you really want to see what it looks like. (And yes, okay, I take back what I said about Stoker’s monopoly on epist0latory novels.) Scouting the area on wikipedia makes me want to see it for myself, but for now I don’t really want to be anywhere else.

 

The May bug.

And of course what I do, he tells me he’s got work to do, let’s go down by the river, and so I’m sitting on the rocks and it doesn’t really rain after all and in Boulder I feel surrounded by something huge and protective. And I’m reading Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon, and he’s just the right amount of Dahl and O. Henry somehow, refreshing and unsettling and addictive and, and. I realize all he’s doing is drawing. Me. The night before, I brought him a book of Norse myths I found at work, knowing he’d get a kick out of the illustrations. He started reading it. I mean out loud. I hadn’t felt so calm in weeks, it was bound to end sometime, I was bound to wake up and walk out sometime.

Wasn’t I? I mean the thing I love about Sam is that we crash and burn at the same time. That I’m bursting laughing before I realize what I’m doing and “Oh god, I’m sorry, that’s not really funny. . . Shit, I’m sorry. It’s really not,” still suppressing giggles and he doesn’t even give a shit. That he should’ve been laughing at me and he didn’t.

So again. I fall into what loves me back via Thomas Moore’s The Style of Connectedness. Flip around GR, rediscover things I’ve got bookmarked. The only pencilmark that’s anywhere is an arrow, and all it’s doing is pointing to this one short paragraph:

>>Feedback, smile-to-smile, adjustments, waverings: what it damps out to is we will never know each other. Beaming, strangers, la-la-la, off to listen to the end of a man we both loved and we’re strangers at the films, condemned to separate rows, aisles, exits, homegoings.<<

What’s so special about this thing, anyway, that my dialogue with it’s outlasted four relationships. I’m starting to think it understands me better, on grounds of the one thing we have in common. I mean, it’s painstakingly open but so fucking convoluted you can’t even tell, for godsake and who has the patience. (Open it, speak it, the evening stars and the weight of all these histories.) I mean lies and wishes are the same thing and all it ever did was take me in and give me what I need.

 

Dave Cullen v. Everest, + Sleeptalking Shakespeare

Well, not exactly. I read Dave Cullen’s book in about two days. It’s being compared to In Cold Blood and Helter Skelter (both of which I read three and four years ago, respectively), but that doesn’t do it for me. I sound like I’m way the hell off in left field saying how much he reminds me of Jon Krakauer but look: Columbine and Into Thin Air were both about a lot of people dying for a really stupid reason. Or one big nonsensical underlying cause that’s not a reason at all, and then lots of little reasons thrown in: minor lapses in judgment or failures in the chains of command or terrible coincidence.

Still with me? Okay. Both are extremely talented writers in their own right, and both are compassionately (and respectfully, as much as it’s possible) meticulous. They know the best way to honor the dead is to tell as much of the truth as they can find, as clearly as possible. And it’s more than that. Cullen even had me feeling sympathy for a woman who modeled herself an Upstanding Christian while working for Lockheed Martin. I guess part of the reason I like Cullen so much is because he doesn’t even hint at this glaring contradiction. Either he’s way too classy or he didn’t even notice (hard to believe, considering how observant and thorough he is otherwise), but either way we can infer the same thing: that shit is not the point. He got someone like me to step back and say, “okay man, you’re right. I’m still with you,” and keep reading.

Anyway, Cullen’s also written for just about every top-shelf news publication I read regularly, and he’s been reporting on Columbine since the day it happened. He knows more about it than anyone and he’s trying to explain. Probably the worst thing is that the more he explains the who, what, and how, the more you realize there is no why. This brings me back to Krakauer also, because mountains and snowstorms don’t follow human logic, and because the climbers’ reasons were all some sloppily personalized version of because it’s there, which is no reason at all. What Cullen comes away with isn’t any better, and it’s not for lack of trying. Helter Skelter and Into Thin Air both fucked with my sleeping patterns. I tried to approach Columbine as a piece of local history but it turned out to be one more thing that almost broke me.

Sometime later I’m standing at the foot of the bed taking my jeans off, my fingers still cold from the air outside and he sits up and looks at me. Wants to know, are you sleeping? Yes, I say. Oh, you are? I’m sleepwalking, I say. Sleeptalking. And he slumps back down, pulling the blanket up around his shoulders, still saying things, but nonsense this time. He talked to me all night and he doesn’t remember a thing.

I think I might pick up War and Peace again. Tolstoy, he says. Wants to know if it’s any good. It’s surprisingly easy to outline the basic structure of the thing. He’s pretty cool, I say, even if he hated Shakespeare for no good reason. (See: Orwell’s essay on Tolstoy in All Art is Propaganda – it’s fairly pissy, even for him.) Apparently the reason they call Shakespeare a thief isn’t what I thought it was, because Blaise says Much Ado About Nothing was originally a Turkish folk tale, that there are a bunch like that, taken from African and Eastern parables and stories and of course the British general public didn’t know any better at the time. Or I guess for a long time after.

I have the Complete Works lying around somewhere. Wonder if wikipedia would be of any use. When I said the word “history” to the MLIS chair, this is what I meant. Fernando Baez is what I meant.

That’s why he doesn’t talk much during the day, he says all he needs at night and I’m wondering if that’s why he doesn’t know the right things to say when I kind of wish that goddamn it someone would. I’m wondering why it took me so long to realize what a crazy academic I am, and how much trouble I’m really in.

 

Anarchy and the Wallflower.

I think maybe you can get insomnia from some people the way cats can give you allergies. How else do you explain?

Probably it’s after midnight and I’m up watching the Twilight Zone, the most comfortable spot on the couch but my back’s all crooked. I really want to move, realign myself except he’s got his head in my lap, snoring like some kind of small furry animal. That passed-out kind of heavy, and what can I do. Sit awhile, gently fucking up his hair, feeling like there isn’t anything left to think about.

The day before was orientation for accepted students at DU. So exciting I don’t even care about adding to my loans.  One of the professors is apparently crazy about indexing. My people, at last.

Into the For Beginners series lately. Sure the editing and design is kind of lousy and Marcos Mayer launches some new and terrible assault against the correct usage of commas on every other page of the Anarchism book, but overall they’re interesting. This is the stuff I never would have passed a class on during undergrad: Plato, Structuralism and Poststructuralism. But both of these are awesome. Plato actually covers Socrates through Aristotle, and Ancient Greek history as well – so you get the basics of all the teachings plus context. The Structuralism, etc. is pretty much for breakaway semi-intellectual urban rednecks like myself, who’ve read enough of Orwell’s essays to appreciate the ways the structure of a language can influence/limit thought but didn’t know how to correctly pronounce Claude Levi-Strauss’ name.

Which brought me to Anarchism. The thing that annoys me about this one (aside from the rampant crimes against grammar) is the tone. I mean, it’s not a school of thought clearly broken down by era and philosopher, with theories and main arguments outlined against just enough historical context to ground you. It’s more like an adventure novel with Anarchy as the hero. Of course the bits about Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are especially appealing, but the tone is just preachy enough to bother me.

Still. One of the regulars came over to me the other day at work to show me The Perks of Being a Wallflower, ask if I’d read it. Now I’m thinking of what Charlie’s teacher told him about reading Ayn Rand: be a filter. So I guess I just have to be a filter with this one. And add TPOBAW to the list of books I need, my old copy’s so long gone I’m not even sure what happened to it, or when. But I was excited to talk about it, and now I wish I had it to flip through. Because the other thing about the boy on the couch is that sometimes he makes me wish I was a fucking existentialist or something, but I know enough to know I’m not wired that way, and to be grateful for it.

 

He Said, I Said.

I gave up about halfway through Which Brings Me to You with a mixture of boredom and annoyance. The setup is kind of flimsy and awkward and the actual letters themselves are pretty whiny and predictable. (And honestly. Unless you’re Bram fucking Stoker, what are you doing writing an epistolatory novel anyway.)

Partly it’s hard to believe anyone would remember such minute details about so many different relationships so long after they’re over. Partly it’s too heavy on the posturing, reliably unreliable. But the relationships themselves, too, all seem to follow the same pattern, and once you pick up on it it’s hard to care what happens next.

The other thing: It’s the only novel I’ve read in a very long time that allowed me to be conscious of the fact that it’s a novel while I’m reading it. It’s not a story you get caught up in, it’s not something that surprised or even angered me.

Of course I’m biased. Partly I’m disapointed because I remember My Life in Heavy Metal being amazing. Also the level of detail just reminded me how little of the same I’ve managed to retain myself, and partly forced me to consider the parallels (real or imaginary) between WBMTY and what I’m doing here. The difference, I think, is I’m mostly just trying to answer the question, what does literature really have to do with my life? What can it offer me, and what can I offer it? (That, and I’m not getting paid/famous off this crap.)

And speaking of offerings. Blaise had been showing me his drawings so a couple of weeks ago I showed him my stories. Trippy, I think he said. He found a small book I was making for a friend in NY. Through a fortunate overlap of a misunderstanding of my intentions, and the fact that such is his natural state, he sketched a few things on the front and back covers and along the margins. So this is how zines get started. Or at least that’s how this one did.

 

The inevitable passing of time and descent into chaos.

So Nathan brought over two wonderful things on account of my birthday. One was The Big Lebowski, which I’d never seen. The other was real (read: Russian) vodka. I’m not even touching the rest here, it’s impossible to follow a linear path. I’ll say instead it’s taking a while to heal.

And anyway more important probably is Fernando Baez’s, you know, nearly godlike brilliance and all. I found A Universal History of the Destruction of Books shelving general history at Tattered Cover months ago. Would flip through it, reading random bits and pieces afterhours or waiting for Sam or whatever. A few weeks ago I got the library to buy a copy (my personal mission seems to have become expanding the lit and poetry sections. . .). It should be right at the top of the list for anyone interested in literary history — or military history, or human cultural history in general, for that matter. It’s not all Grand Inquisitions and Nazi bonfires, though of course that’s part of it. It covers the entire history of recorded language and all manner of destruction: accidental fires, wars, natural disasters, instances of books allowed to disappear because of irrelevance or unpopularity, authors destroying their own work (or, as in Kafka and Nabokov’s cases, requesting it be destroyed, only to be blessedly ignored).

Baez is meticulous, apolitical, and not at all the dry academic. He’s the director of the National Library of Venezuela, he went to Iraq after the looting in an official-type capacity to assess the devastation. Needless to say he’s incredibly well-educated about literary history, but there’s something more going on. I mean what he’s really doing is bearing witness to, and reminding us of, the large-scale loss of human memory and culture that’s essentially been happening as long as we’ve been trying to develop, record, hang onto it. The more you think about it the more unsettling it is, really. Because the only way to stop failing is to stop trying at all. We can’t remember everything. Or record all our memories. Or save all the records. Never. It’s just not the way the universe works and it never will be. And this kind of loss is happening continuously, in a million small ways. I mean Alexandria burned and no one remembers why or exactly what was lost, or if it was really a fire at all. And in another few days the bruises will be totally gone and eventually I’ll forget how I got them, the exact yellow, that they were even there.

 

Poetry, and poetry.

Due to certain amounts of turmoil in NY, I’m not really capable of focusing on anything heavier than The Graveyard Book these past couple of weeks (and yes, it’s adorable and kinda fairy-tale moralistic and still got some kick and some depth, it’s not a childish children’s book, it’s wonderful). Finding myself flitting around an unusual amount of poetry. Mark Haddon is surprising: kind of dense, kind of twisted, kind of funny. I’d flipped through the first few pages of A Spot of Bother one slow night on the register awhile back, appreciated his humor, his general moods and outlook. So when I realized I had nothing to read on the way home from the library one afternoon I rooted around the 811’s and came up with The Talking Horse and The Sad Girl and The Village Under the Sea, and also Howl and Other Poems, which is of course a whole different kind of heavy, if a bit blunted by time. . . (There’s an edition of the original draft, too, which I’d be interested in seeing, some other day, when things are clearer and I’m in a mood to focus.)

Anyway. One posthumous collection of Bukowski’s and also Paul Guest’s most recent had both been staying barely but consistently out of my reach for months. I found Notes for My Body Double (one of Guest’s earlier collections) at Denver Public and wasn’t blown away. But the potential in it made me more determined to find his newest, and I got my library to actually buy My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge. It finally came in today.

This man made my jaw drop open on public transportation, gave me what I call the Nabokov Syndrome: that thing when you suddenly realize your lips are moving, because prayer’s as close as you’ll ever get. It’s above all about frustration. (He was paralyzed from a bike accident at age 12.) Telescoping swiftly, knowingly, from the unknown vastness and overwhelming possibility of the stars into his very specific, very sharp claustrophobia and rage and helplessness. And yeah, he’s pretty hilarious, too, in his unguarded honesty. Even after I flip to the back halfway through to glance at his photo I picture him as some kind of glorious giant.