There is somewhere in the Polaroid library of time a similar shot of my friend's TRS-80 right after we looked at our grades on the school board computer from his living room.
Whenever I think about Bob Dylan's Christian years, I think about this story told about my paternal grandfather. His only daughter was a church type - her daughter, my cousin, ended up being part of some runaway's traveling gospel mission that got a segment on 60 Minutes done about them for sitting on kids that acted up. My aunt married the town drunk. In an act of Christian charity, she transformed him, they built a church and then a school and were together pillars of the community. Somebody asked my grandfather if he was proud of what she'd done, saved a wretch like he, made a good and honest man out of him. My grandfather looked at the guy and snorted, "Humph. I liked him better as a drunk."
A day of sad sacks and horns forlorn, not simply because it is Monday or that I have been "left behind" with all the same people that were here before (None of you? Not a one...?) or there are deadlines or the receding of the will or anything bigger than the schism between a man alone and orchestra, surrounding him like eyes peering from a darkened wood as the fire gives way to smoke. Sinatra understood that. Peter Gabriel understood that. It's hard to know if the guy from Benni Hemm Hemm understands because he sings in Icelandic but it is said that he has 300+ musicians in his band. This is via the self-explantory Icelandic Bands that Are Not Sigur Rós, though, truthfully, most bands I've picked up on via have their similarities beyond singing in faerie language.
Speaking of Iceland, I was talking to a friend about a Vanity Fair article that painted a touching portrait of that pesky banking crisis foisted upon them by the English. It's been rolled up into a book about the recession. Sounds fun! Read it at the pool! My favorite part is that Iceland is powered by large geothermal vents and instead of hot water heaters, there are a series of cooling apparati the water goes through and every once in a while, during maintenance of the system, some poor Icelandic bastard gets scalded to death in his shower.
We have this shower curtain that is a world map, and eye level is Iceland and Mitteleuropa except in reverse, like from inside, as if I'm in the vents. I've noticed that Norway has a thin strip of land essentially locking Sweeden and Finland from the North Atlantic, reaching finger all the way around the icy wastes to touch tentacles with Mother Russia.
I'm sure it's a holdover from the blubber cartels and is now the oil cartels and will be whatever they can find next.
Simon Joyner, "I Will Find You" from The Lousy Dance.
My old friend Joe turned me on to the rough-hewn schizoid Apocalypticana of Jay Bolotin, whose songcraft will tickle your Dylan and Waits fancies and then claw through your thin skin, past your flimsy ribs and stick a dirty finger in your heart holes. Good stuff.
Jay Bolotin, "It's All In That"
I'm still reading What is the What, reading this by Édouard Levé who wrote and then committed Suicide, and something else entirely I read yesterday made me want to listen to Three-Penny Opera so here I go. What white teeth you have, Monday!
Today I received a letter from a reader, forwarded to me from a magazine. Not trying to be too precious about it, but (to me, anyway) this just doesn't happen, or hasn't until now. I don't even know how much stamps are anymore.
The Beatles, Abbey Road David Eggers, What is the What
And you know what is a good book? What is the What is what. The epic scope and carefully played dialect of the Sudanese "lost boy" narrator is predictably a punch to the gut, but the structural aspects, the frames within frames within frames, framing the undepicatible horrors in such piercing detail is stunning. I'd been less than completely convinced of Mr. Eggers' staggering genius up until this point but now I believe. You could say I am one that believes. What's the word I'm looking for? Whatever it is, I can't wait to read Zeitoun now.
I'm reading What via Overdrive from the East Baton Rouge Parish Library, the circuitous means by which one checks out eBooks. The reader app is not the Swiss clock that is Kindle, it doesn't even play around with leaf-flippy page transitions but then it's not a book. It's something else that contains what a book also contains.
Plus, it expands what I like about libraries, not that they necessarily work well, or how you think they should work, but simply that they do work. They got a system. I've been thinking a lot about digital means - the justification for getting this here device on which I'm laboriously pecking out the HTML since Blogger's rich text editor is Flash which doesn't work on the iPad. It's a snake failing to get a good bite on its own tail, looking for a different means for self-digestion. I've been thinking I should write a book about that, which is the kind of thing one does when one has a real, right there book to finish.
You know what is a good album? Abbey Road is what. It has everything, even a song I kinda hate. ("I Want You") I like when an album I love has a song I hate. It's a bit of grit around which forms a pearl.
Philip Glass as ragtime and back makes so much sense, like you could make one of those useless offhand generalizations about Minimalism that people who make such things make - "It's all ragtime!" and wipe your hand clean of the matter. By the way, the iPad + DocumentsToGo + GoogleDocs is an excellent writing/editing tool, even better at it than I expected.
+ coffee + copyedited manuscript + stupid bag + stupid book + glad to be finished with this part + excited to finish the next part + + +
I woke up this morning with "At Last" in my head this morning because of, one assumes, the following reasons:
The Rapture. At last! People will stop playing Devil's advocate because for those of us left, he will have won the case.
My buddy Dave is getting married to a swell girl this weekend and I cannot imagine that this song will not somehow be played at the reception. It just played at the coffee shop, like just now.
I cannot get the Reigning Sound's version of "Stormy Weather" out of my head. It is so perfect a cover of the tiredest of staples that it has shifted the bias I have against covers in to a favorable category. Really, the song is like if the Archies broke up over Jughead's hamburger and milkshake addiction having grown so out of control, and ol' Jug hit rock bottom for a while, grew a beard, maybe even did a bunch of moody folk albums about how he can't have hamburgers any mo' and then remembered that rock 'n' roll is juicier than any hamburger and thicker than any milkshake because it is about the one you love, one way, targeted, missile heat sensor style and he loaded up with whatever was at hand and fired and hit! What I'm saying is: I can't quite picture "At Last" in the Sound's Greg Cartwright's fragile warble because it might be too much to bear. It'd be like looking back at Sodom as you flee. Pillar of salt.
There is a very specific book milestone that will be reached today, hell or high water, and we are in possession of both of those here along the sinful duodenum of the Mississippi.
Another even more specific milestone, one that will harrow this manuscript from the hell of my anxious grasp, will take place in a week's time.
The river, the drums, the bad Chinese food and the view from the Union.
The power's out at the office. The phrase implies so much: 1) power is an entity that has a presence, 2) there is just one power, 3) our dependence on power is greater than we think, 4) the second power is gone, we might as well be gone, 5) regret is a default impulse that fills in a negative space much in the way nature abhors a vacuum and how the laws of thermodynamics are all about how the second there is a place for things (power) to go, it goes there. It is its intrinsic nature to go rushing in there, 6) more specifically, when the power's out, you are suddenly flooded with regret about what you could've been doing - I could be finishing that thing I was supposed to do if the power was on. The absence of power is the most convenient excuse in the world. 7) the duplicity of the apostrophe: is it the obvious that the power is out or a more insidious implication that power's presence is a thing it wields, uses, withholds, utilizes to ultimately create more power?
I am as in love with this device in the precise amount that I suspected I would but maybe not in the ways. The iPad is a consumer product first and foremost, the issue about which most software developer types grouse and much as I might want to distance myself from that sometimes, I'm one of them, and thus one is pushed into Using a Thing As It Is Designed, a sensible request any object would ask of its utilizer. I look to my devices to be Star Trek tricorders, Batman utility belts, Swiss Army knives - little all-purposes that support the multiple-purposed engagement with the multiverse and this thing is that and it isn't. It is really more the bohemian love pad about which Mr Johansen croons.
You know the cockroach traffic in here
It's got me drinkin' too much beer
But it ain't any worse than any major town
OK, it's not like that at all; I really wanted an excuse to put the words "cockroach traffic" out there, and really, the David Johansen in my mind's sleazy, druggy eye would pronounce it as "cockaroach" - it would be terrible and wonderful; I'd be all, you aren't really like that, a you? Do you really say "cockaroach"? Probably, for a while, as it suits his purposes. David Johansen is the rock 'n' roll embodiment of adaption - becoming a woman, a blues singer, a Springsteen-esque streetcar, a monstrously popular novelty act - whatever for which the situation calls. He supersedes arch-chameleon David Bowie in that David Bowie stole the idea from David Johansen, or maybe that make Bowie even better for it.
Anyway, this device is making me reassess how I do things, how I use things. Flipboard turns the dull shopping list party-line of Facebook and Twitter and RSS into a shimmering magazine, on the fly. It's genius in its design, turning cockaroach traffic into a bohemian love pad where you want to invite everyone to bask in that which you bask.
I checked out an eBook from our eLibrary (Eggers' What is the What - I think I have assimilation problems... I never watched a compatriot get eaten by a lion while escaping genocidal armies) using Overdrive which makes perfect sense except it doesn't. Why are there limited copies, a waiting list, old world library ideas at play here? Money, I'm sure, which like religion (which is itself a kind of money) ruins everything. It reveals my bohemian love pad to have papr walls, the glitter covering up the particle board. I love libraries because they roll with mind-bending bureaucracy and still manage to be leaf-end useful.
I just had a tête-á-tête (weirdly, the iWorld has reintroduced the diacritical back into the accessible from the realm of obselesene into which it was largely cast by the Internet) with the IT folks (great irony in the fact that I am one) about getting a new desk phone which I do not even want. My clunky old one with the bell somehow lets the dial tone run when you answer. I like to think it is some sort of quantum aberration happening every time the little electric bell rings, which is sweet and quaint in a Brazil way but sucks in a phone way. It has now resulted in a olde skule CF of multi-platform communiqués and people stopping by the office to tell me what their system-generated email said about my not getting a phone and I wanna go - yeah, yeah, sorry I asked. (I always am, which is why I never ask) Look, you ever listen to David Johansen? But that would spiral off another Universe of Talk before I can get anything done in this one. Cockaroach traffic.
Love you baby and
Drivin' you crazy
Is all I want to do
You act so bad
You drive me mad
You make-a me bad
In my Bohemian love pad
