I fell asleep for a bit this afternoon and dreamed that I got a call from my agent. James Franco had requested me personally to teach him bird calls, specifically California shore bird calls, which apparently were my specialty. I was skeptical, not sure I could deal with a dilettante trying to learn in a week what had taken me my entire birding career, but I took the job. When I arrived, James Franco was sitting on a metal chair in a poorly lit concrete bunker, in an orange t‑shirt and brown pants, whistling like a lunatic. Uncertain if I should interrupt, I started to set up my playback system, which involved reel-to-reel tape recorders, a Super‑8 movie screen, and cockpit headsets. Franco stopped me. He didn’t want to learn how to identify birds by their calls, he said. He wanted to learn to whistle like the birds. I told him that wasn’t my thing, and he said, “David, we have to learn to speak to the birds. They’re never going to learn how to speak to us.”
Dreamy
What does it mean when you dream you’re at a gallery opening watching a video installation of Madonna in a nightgown and tear-stained make-up slapping a young, blond, naked Alec Baldwin with a gun ? (One monitor is a wide shot loop, one a wide slo-mo, one a close-up of the pistol nipping Alec’s stamen.)
Asking for a friend.
The Odds Are Not In My Favor
I started running today. I’m not a gambler, but gun to my head, I’d say the odds that I continue running in the coming days are as close to 0 as as my ass is to the ground. Oh, wait that’s my stomach. “So you’re saying I still have a chance…”
Not really. I’m 54. I haven’t run in 15 years. I’m whatever word comes after “morbidly” in the obese continuüm. (My vote goes to “Morbid-Pro”.) Also, I hate running, and I have an arthritic knee, flat feet, and neuropathy.
So, I’m kinda hotshit, is what I’m saying.
Tonight I ran like this : one minute run, then one minute rest. Repeat that seven times. The good news ? On the last rep, I actually ran two blocks before I gassed out.
The other good news is I have done this before. When I was in my early 30s I decided to start running. I was in terrible shape then too, and I started the same way, increasing the time by one minute every week and slowly decreasing the walking. And it worked. I was running three miles a day in two months. At one point, I was up to seven miles a day.
So I know this can work, which doesn’t mean it will. Especially when I don’t really care if I can run seven miles. Or three. I just want to be able to run and hike as easily as I ride a bike.
Because as out of shape as I am when it comes to running, I have surprisingly decent cycling conditioning. After not riding for three months (thanks to the holy trinity of crappiness : illness, weather, and illness), I got on my bike and was back to riding 15 – 20 miles on my lunch hour rides in a few days. I want to balance things out : glutes and quads, not one or the other.
Plus my cycling goals now are so time consuming. 100 miles a week, 50 mile rides once a week, 2500 feet of climbing a week, etc. That’s hours of riding, which I would love to do, but I don’t really have the time. To reach a huge running milestone, all I have to do is run twelve minutes without walking. One mile. If I could do that, I’d call the Queen and take her to lunch — it would be a bigger accomplishment than riding a century.
It’s not going to happen, but I’m posting this just in case.
A Brief Life of Bruno Schulz
As a boy in a part of Poland that is now part of Ukraine, Bruno fed sugar granules to houseflies so they’d have enough strength to survive the winters. Later, he wanted to be an artist. He went to college, but he was shy and thought little of himself, so he had nothing. Some friends pitied him and found him a job as a school teacher. He didn’t like teaching, but his students remembered him as an awkward man who nevertheless transfixed them with stories every day from bell to bell.
He wrote stories as well, but he didn’t think they were good enough to publish. Nonetheless, in 1933, at age 41, he traveled to Warsaw with the hope that Madame Nalkowska would help him. As a favor to a friend, she agreed to give him ten minutes of her time and let him read a few pages of his collection to her. She kept the manuscript for the day and phoned him that evening to say she would be honored to help him publish his collection, The Cinnamon Shops. Five short years later, he received the Golden Laurel Award from the Polish Academy of Literature.
In 1941, the Germans forced the Jews of Drohobycz into the Ghetto. Schulz escaped the camps, however, when an SS Officer, Felix Landau, admired his work and retained him to paint murals in his home. Landau had a violent rivalry with another SS Officer, Karl Gunther ; one day, Gunther walked up and shot Shulz dead, saying, “There, I’ve shot your personal Jew.”
[This is a distillation of David Grossman’s fine “The Age of Genius” from the June 8 2009 issue of The New Yorker]
The Real Work
It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work,
and when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
– Wendell Berry
Something from Anthony Burgess
We probably have no duty to like Beethoven or hate Coca-Cola, but it is at least conceivable that we have a duty to distrust the state. Thoreau wrote of the duty of civil disobedience ; Whitman said, “Resist much, obey little.” With those liberals, and with many others, disobedience is a good thing in itself. In small social entities — English parishes, Swiss cantons — the machine that governs can sometimes be identified with the community that is governed. But when the social entity grows large, becomes a megalopolis, a state, a federation, the governing machine becomes remote, impersonal, even inhuman. It takes money from us for purposes we do not seem to sanction ; it treats us as abstract statistics ; it controls an army ; it supports a police force whose function does not always appear to be protective.
– From The New Yorker, June 2012
The Long Goodbye
I copied this poster for Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye from a tweet by Cassian Elwes. It’s one of my favorite films, an irreverent adapataion of Raymond Chandler’s novel. The poster is by Jack Davis, the great MAD Magazine cartoonist. I like how the poster uses the MAD format to make itself hip and to poke fun at itself at the same time. The movie itself has none of this snarky comic tone, but it doesn’t matter. The poster captures the film and the era perfectly.
Mr. Ha
Mr. Ha drowned in his shower. Just an inch of water, but that’s all it takes, I guess. He died for a while and now he talks in a loud whisper like he just got strangled. He can’t stop clearing his throat even when he’s just sitting behind his desk watching us. He makes us write these things called do jons when we piss him off, so we’re basically always writing. I was the first one to figure out if I coughed he’d clear his throat like it was on fire. Sarai was worried he’d kick me out, but as soon he started to calm down, I’d cough again, and he never said anything — probably because he couldn’t remember our names anymore.
And he’s a real Korean now. He whispers with an accent that he moved here from Seoul after his wife died, that he’s sorry for his bad English, but he believes “Humanities very much a universal language.” He says things like, “This is not time for talking. This is time to write your dojeon”. I don’t think that means anything, unless he learned Korean when he was dead. Mr. Ha grew up here. There’s a picture him in the gym running track that says “Toby Ha, class of 86, gets last laugh, victory, at CIF.” His wife is Ms. Snyder. She teaches Biology and drives him home after school.
We finished Da Vinci and Michelangelo, and we were starting Kepler and Caravaggio, but now Mr. Ha wants us to forget all of it. Forget the Great Vowel Shift. Forget the Magna Carta. He say history is a ladder — we’re not supposed to memorize it, we’re supposed to step on it. I don’t know why the school doesn’t kill this shitshow, but they don’t. Maybe they just don’t want to deal.
Today he asked, “Is anybody here original?”. His voice sounded different. We all raised our hands. Well, I didn’t. “A hundred percent original?” Sarai looked at me. She heard it too.
He stepped out from his desk and walked to my seat.
“Why not original?” he said.
“Nothing new under the sun,” I said.
I wasn’t used to him being so close. His arms were pale and slick, his eyes were wet — from being drowned ? Or is he still drowning ? “Very funny. New dojeon,” he said, still looking down at me.
“Write something nobody has ever written before.”
“Just him?” asked Sarai.
He turned to Sarai. “Everybody dojeon.”
He didn’t go back to his desk. That was a first. He walked up and down the rows while we wrote. When he was on the other side of the room, I coughed, but nothing happened. Grady and Eddie laughed, so I did it again, and this time he turned around and looked at me. He put his hand over his mouth and said something. Yasmine moved her chair at the same time so I couldn’t hear, but it sounded like “douchebag.”
When time was up, we put our do jons on his desk. Usually he’d put them in his bag to mark up at home, or he’d grade them while we read. But, another first, he started to read them out loud. And they sucked, so they made him super ragey. Flecks of spit popped from his lips like little fireworks.
“Which is Sarai?” She raised her hand. He read : “The same time every night, I turn into a monster. Hungry for solitude, while my parents argued over dinner, I get up and run to my room where I can eat the dark until I’m full.”
He dropped his hands to his side and turned his head, slow, like a kaiju rising out of the sea. Yasmine said it was sexy. Eddie said he never thought about being alone like you could eat it. It didn’t matter. We’d always be wrong.
“’The same time every night?’ That not original,” Mr. Ha said. “What time ? Why vague ? It’s oatmeal on a baby’s lap. Time not important. Dinner important. Hate parents important. ‘Hungry for solitude?’ I’m hungry for originality. Why you feed me oatmeal on a baby’s lap?” Sarai looked down at her lap. “You should say, ’I explode from my chair and stumble down the hall like someone threw a harpoon into my chest and is reeling me into my room.”
“She doesn’t hate the parents,” Sarai said.
He scanned her page again and then looked up at her. “Yes she does. Which is Gordon?”
I stood up, scraping my chair on the floor. “I am, Sir”. Everybody laughed. Mr. Ha smiled too. That threw me off.
“Pa rubbed his caldera with his big right hand and gave me smile to hide the hot lava about spew out of his face. By the time he hit me, his pyroclastic hatred had cooled into pahoehoe fists that had no trouble leaving their mark.”
“Holy shit,” said Grady. Shut the fuck up, Grady.
Sarai said, “Gordon, that’s so…” Don’t say anything, please.
“Boring,” finished Ha. “Everybody say anger is like a volcano. Big deal. We erupt in bed. We erupt with grief. We erupt with joy. Got it. Humans are big flesh volcanoes. So what ? I don’t know this father, I just know the writer doesn’t know the father either.”
I wanted to shove my pen in his ear and hammer it out the other side. Motherfucker.
“That’s not what I wrote,” I said.
Mr. Ha looked at my page. “You are Gordon?”
“You know I am. That’s the old version. You told me to rewrite it.”
“I can’t remember.” Mr. Ha looked through his pages. Sarai was giving me a look. Didn’t she know I was doing this for her ?
“Are you serious ? That was my only copy.” I sat back down with a loud cough. Mr. Ha cleared his throat.
”Okay. Tell me what you changed.”
“How am I supposed to remember that?”
“You remember.”
I stood up again. I remember everything.
“My father gave away his rage like a monkey slings shit. I could see it coming, but I could never get out of the way.”
Voices from Chernobyl : The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich
My rating : 5 of 5 stars
Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize for this and her other books, but don’t let that stop you from reading this breathtaking collection. It’s as if Chekov and Gogol and Dostoevsky had a three way, and their love child died in the bloom of her youth while song birds, drunk on vodka-infused berries nabbed from a bowl by her bedside, sang dirges that melded with her fitful, fluttering soul into an ether that filled the lungs of these men and women laid waste by Chernobyl. Everybody here is lost, forgotten, sacrificed, forlorn, but they are so goddamned alive. When was the last time you had to stop reading a passage for a minute because it was so great you didn’t want it to end ? That happened over and over. The scope and depth of all it is overwhelming, and since I finished it tonight, I haven’t begun to put it in a critical context. But I’m a little drunk on the melancholy.
Dalva by Jim Harrison
My rating : 5 of 5 stars
Admittedly I began the book with a little dread. I just finished Wolf, Harrison’s first novel and one I’d first read in graduate school in 1988. I have carried a high opinion of Harrison ever since, but now I had to wonder why ? What I liked about it at 26 left me cold at 53, so I was prepared for a similar reaction to Dalva, especially since Harrison would be writing in the first person as a woman, and I’d happily wash out early.
But Dalva is a marvel — both the book and the character. Dalva is in her mid-40s and living in Santa Monica and working as a social worker when we meet her. But as the novel unfolds, we realize this barely her at all : Part Sioux, Dalva is the great-granddaughter of a famed missionary and horticulturist who was more of a convert to the Sioux than a converter. He took a young Sioux wife and managed to find himself in the middle of much of the terrible destruction of the Sioux and their way of life at the hands of the United States military. He also had a great deal of land. As such, Dalva is not only rich with history, she’s plain rich ; when she returns to her family home in Northern Nebraska to search for the son she had with her 16 year old Sioux boyfriend, she brings along Michael, an alcoholic professor and her sometime lover, who has been granted the opportunity to read & publish Great-Grandfather Northridge’s personal letters.
Harrison lets Dalva narrate the first and second third of the book, while Michael takes over in the middle. Harrison also includes long passages from Northridge’s journals, so what starts out as a disarmingly prim and undistinguished story is actually the opposite. Harrison writes beautifully as Dalva as she navigates her life today and as she recalls the events of the past forty years that have formed her ; while Michael is a comical, annoying academic, Harrison still invests him with a wry wit, pathos, and some surprising insight about Dalva and her family. Northridge’s letters are a mixture of 19th century benevolent naiveté and a more modern scientific doggedness. These three streams of voice and time become a fast and loud river that is as much about the Sioux and their destruction as it is about Dalva and her sorrows and solace.