Category: Yo Ivanhoe

Since I was a child I’ve enjoyed end-of-the-world fiction based, however irresponsibly, on Biblical prophecy. There’s always been a good deal of this sort of thing around, but of late there’s been a splashy and satisfying surfeit of the stuff, and lots of other folks have been climbing on board the Glory Train.

I guess I’d describe the genre as solid meat-and-potatoes fare. It’s pretty entertaining for the most part, and also food for thought for those who might be so inclined.

The end of the world has fascinated me since I first started having apocalyptic dreams and visions while in elementary school. I’ve always hoped that I’ll be alive when the world does eventually end, or at least for the clear beginning of the End Times as outlined in the Bible. Depending on your perspective, of course, I suppose you could argue that the beginning of the end is already here. I know plenty of people would like to believe that we’re living through the End Times right now, but I remain skeptical.

Natural disasters and human atrocities have been around forever, it seems to me, and I guess I’m holding out hope for some clearer and more spectacular indication of Divine Wrath.

As I said, when I was younger and could still occasionally get a good night’s sleep, I used to routinely have dreams about the end of the world, and delighted in recounting these visions in great detail to my mother at the breakfast table. She eventually became so alarmed by the graphic particulars of my stories that she sent me to a psychiatrist, a serious man who refused to believe my contention that these dreams constituted not nightmares, but rather supreme entertainments.

You were talking about disinclination. Let’s explore that idea further, if we may.

No, sorry, I thought I made it plenty fucking clear that I’m feeling disinclined.

Well, perhaps then you might tell me a bit more about your travels in Saudi Arabia.

I’m afraid you’ve once again mistaken me for another patient. I’ve never given Saudia Arabia so much as a thought, let along traveled there. I’ve no doubt I’d find the place repellent –nothing personal. A great deal of sand, if I’m not mistaken? Camels? Not the sort of exotica that appeals to me, I’m afraid. I have similar reservations about Asia.

(The doctor consults his watch –a slow, deliberate gesture– and commences to drumming impatiently on a clipboard with his pen.)

You’ll certainly agree that nothing productive can come of this if we sit here night after night talking about absolutely nothing. Perhaps by mutual agreement we might put an end to these sessions, or –and this would be refreshing– you might tell me what it is you hope to accomplish by spending this time each evening. (He glances again at his watch.) It’s four o’clock in the morning, actually, and I don’t suppose I need to tell you that it is not generally my habit to keep such unorthodox practice hours, particularly when the patient is so reticent and entirely devoid of insight or even interest regarding his own predicament. Could I please ask you to turn down that music? How can you possibly think when you’ve got that gloomy racket pounding away?

I’ve written previously about my love of indexes (or indices, if you’re so inclined), and my huge admiration for the people who make a living compiling these things. Many of these folks clearly have a perverse sense of humor and the souls of poets. Some of them are perhaps batshit crazy.

Check out the decidedly odd and obviously personal agendas at work in some of the examples cited in that previous piece and I think you’ll see what I mean.

I continue to scan the indexes of books for additional wonders, and I now have a pretty fat collection of utterly useless but nonetheless personally entertaining material. Eventually I’ll go to the trouble of posting some more of it here, but in the meantime I’ve stumbled across an index that is a pure and deliberate work of art.

Lisa Robertson’s Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office of Soft Architecture was one of my favorite books from last year, even though I read it late in December and so didn’t have a chance to include it on my end-of-the-year list of highlights. Robertson’s a hugely entertaining and aphoristic writer, a poet with a terrific eye, abnormal curiosity, and a gift for rambling far afield. Her prose style is sort of like Walter Benjamin meets Jane Bowles meets Djuna Barnes meets Anne Carson. She drives her words in and out of incredibly dense thickets, and yet time and again her paragraphs arrive abruptly at these unexpected vistas that leave you stunned.

Strangely enough, the first time I read the book I hadn’t even noticed the index, which was compiled by Stacy Dorris. I discovered this icing on the cake the other night when I picked up Occasional Work and was looking for a quote.

Here are some examples from Dorris’s index:

“Hey Cobweb,”, 237; Babylonian doilies, 13; Chili preferred, 92; Dandering here, 236; fountains that want us to act like knowledge, 58; frost-tolerant hermaphrodites seem capable of swallowing barns, 125; leaps the frame with a sack of narcissus bulbs, 104; mauveness, 15, 217; pie, 126; Placating foods appear, 241; primal shack-envy, 182; roofliness, 15, 96, 110, 177, 179, 181, 183, 277; scumble, 142; their nylon halos, 259; toilette ghosted, 27; We ate the cheese, 237; what a wall is without being a wall, 163.

I was put in this world to march, but one leg’s longer than the other, my boots are too tight, and I walk with a limp that gets more pronounced by the day.

Still, those were my early orders: March. And I am a man who follows orders, if not instructions. Instructions, it seems to me, are a good deal more complicated than orders. I spend so much time thinking about my feet that I have a difficult time following instructions beyond the first few sketchy details, and the inevitable confusion that results often as not gets me a savage whipping.

I’m one of the simple ones, a marcher plain and simple. Every once in a while they’ll ask me to carry something, or to lug something along as I march, but even these requests are best made in the form of a blunt, concise demand. I actually prefer if they just shove things into my arms or saddle me like a mule. I don’t need to know what it is I’m carrying or where it is I’m carrying it to.

When they holler at me to stop, I stop, and when they relieve me of my burden I just assume we’ve arrived somewhere. It doesn’t pay to look around or get too curious in my line of work. Marching is hard enough work as it is, emotionally and physically taxing work, particularly with my infirmities, and I generally have my hands full with the dust and the complaints of my body.

I also wouldn’t say we’re particularly well fed, although I don’t really have any frame of reference for that allegation, so perhaps I’m being unjust.

When the day comes that you simply can’t march anymore –and it’s inevitable, of course, and can arrive unexpectedly– they whallop you over the head and leave you by the side of the road. I’ve seen it a thousand times, but I have no clear idea of what happens to you after that. Some of the marchers claim that Sisters come along the road with wagons and haul the survivors of the cudgeling back to the convent to work in the orchards. Others allege that the unfortunate wretches are carried away by body snatchers and sold to the vivisectionists for ale money. It’s also possible, I’ve had reason to imagine while I’m curled up on the soggy earth at night, that the fallen marchers are simply fed upon by black birds and wild dogs.

Sometimes I feel like the days are a floor I’m crawling across, blind, with a dead flower in my mouth, trying to find my way to the other side, which is here, and a few body lengths into the darkness beyond here. It’s a slow business, often bruising.

Where did the flower come from? And where do I think I’m taking it? To the graveyard out back? As if the day were a desolate old country church?

I don’t know what you’re talking about. Try to speak more plainly. Please make an effort.

Often, I’ll admit, I don’t know what I’m saying –what I’m saying, or even if I want to say. I’m not really looking for words; I’m merely asking for them. I’m not even in a position to ask nicely. I’m afraid I’m going to have to demand them. Civilized discourse is out of the question. I’m in no position to argue. I’m not going to fucking reason with you. I didn’t come here tonight to entertain you, either. If you’re looking for something in the way of a bedtime story you’re shit out of luck. All I know how to do is not tell stories.

Words are nothing but beasts of burden which I must lash across the fields. When I am in no position to drive them –which is more and more often the case– they must drag me. I ask almost nothing of them anymore but that they drag me to the bottom of the day. Even our trek across the muddy fields is a charade. The fields are fallow. We are up to absolutely nothing.

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged – the same house, the same people – and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.

–Vladimir Nabokov, from Speak Memory, via Whiskey River

This is always such a bittersweet night for me, as I curl up in my recliner before the fireplace with the last volume of poetry of the season and a glass of eggnog. Tomorrow, alas, all the verse will be packed away, the poetry decorations taken down, and the Caedmon Recordings of Poets will be returned to storage for another year. If tradition holds, my wife will give “Edna St. Vincent Millay Reading From Her Poetry” (Caedmon TC 1123) one final spin, and together we will intone along with “Elegy.”

That’s always such a beautiful moment. This year, I’ve no doubt, it will be almost heartbreaking. The month seemed to fly by so swiftly, as we lost ourselves in the festive whirl of poetry readings, office parties, and neighborhood open houses. I try not to let the commercialization of National Poetry Month bother me. But as much as I might think I can simply block out the giant and frequently crass NPM displays at the Barnes and Noble and in the local malls (not to mention the garish advertising supplements for the small presses that tumble from the morning papers each day), I can’t deny that I am occasionally saddened. And I do sense that something important is being lost in our too eager complicity with the retail industry’s headlong rush to make a buck on the season.

I know how important this month is for the continuing survival of bookstores, particularly those independents still hanging on by a thread. I understand that National Poetry Month and the sales it generates can be single-handedly responsible for keeping many of these smaller stores afloat. Yet I think that in the compressed frenzy of the month we too often lose sight of the fact that poetry is best mulled and savored in intimate gatherings, in the privacy of our homes, or in solitude.

I am saddened as well when I hear of school poetry pageants being cancelled over complaints from conservative parents. What kind of a message are we sending to our children when we tell them there is something wrong with a celebration of the great universal spirit which finds its voice most powerfully in poetry?

Tonight, however, as I raise a quiet toast to the waning moments of National Poetry Month, I shall try to push such gloomy thoughts from my mind, and I will share with you one final bit of verse to tide you over until next April:

I’d rather, I can tell you flat,

When for Parnassus bound,

Have authored “Casey at the Bat,”

Than the odes of Ezra Pound.

–Robert Service

–The day of Samuel Beckett’s Funeral. December 26, 1989. Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris. The Spam hat was my own humble offering.

This is just the book to give your sister if she’s a loud, dirty, boozy girl.

–Dylan Thomas’s blurb on the front dustwrapper of the 1966 first American edition of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (Walker and Company)

These days the downtrodden God-Bless-You boys work the stoplight medians along Washington and Broadway in shifts. There’s a guy with a cardboard sign on every median and corner at the intersection, some days six guys holding down every possible point of access to motorists. There’s also always a gaggle of characters waiting on the sidelines, so to speak, sitting along the concrete freeway barrier and on the bus stop benches. It’s like pick-up basketball for the homeless.

You tend to see the same characters every day. I suspect they all use each other’s signs. “Stranded,” one says, and nothing else. There’s the standard, “Homeless. Please Help. God Bless.” And, “Homeless Veteran. God Bless America.”

I also saw this virtuous variant last week: “I’m Trying To Get Back On My Feet.”

“Three Children In Texas” seemed to strike an odd note, and I was uncertain whether the appropriate reaction was sympathy or scorn. I do feel sympathy, or rather compassion, for all of them, especially now that there seem to be more of them everyday. My rule of thumb is that if I encounter one of them at a red light I give him a buck, and they have always been unfailingly polite.

A couple days ago, in the rain, I saw a motorist hand one of them a pizza box through a car window, and yesterday, as I waited at the stoplight there was a guy who was holding an entirely blank piece of cardboard.

“What’s your sign say?” I asked.

“You know what it says,” he said, without the slightest hint of hostility. He was, of course, absolutely right.

I’ve gone by a lot of different names over the years, every one of them, I’m sure, transparently phoney. I now recognize that I was laboring under some fairly serious delusions, and harbored the misguided notion that these names I’d choose –and choose carefully, I might add– demonstrated a certain flair. What they actually were, these names of mine, were red flags, and only served to cast underserved suspicion on my behavior and motives.

You might remember me from the period when I was representing myself as Corporal Bryce Chaparral, and was trying to make a living as an auctioneer here in the Twin Cities. I later tried my hand as a private detective in Sioux City, under the name Aristide LeRoc. I went so far as to take out an expensive advertisement in the yellow pages, and tried to speak with an accent that I imagined sounded suitably French, or at least French-Canadian. I paid a good deal of attention to my grooming in those days, and walked with a cane. Irregardless of my qualifications –or lack thereof– I discovered that there was little market for a private detective in Sioux City. I did manage to pick up the occasional insurance job, which generally involved trying to capture video footage of people with purported disabilities taking out their garbage.

For a brief period I was also a black jack dealer at a casino in Oklahoma (as Lance Waterhouse), but nothing came of it. I have no idea what I thought might come of it, but I certainly never imagined I’d have to pawn virtually everything I owned, including a Civil War chess set I’d inherited from my father.

You might be surprised by how easy it is to become anyone you want, at least in strictly bureaucratic terms, especially when people don’t much care who you are. It is more difficult, I’ve discovered, to truly become someone, to make up your mind, as if the mind were a bed, or a bedtime story.

Make believe –there’s another useful (and useless) analogy. Also: Wishful thinking.

You can’t just go to Home Depot and buy an ax to break up the frozen sea within you, if, in fact, you sense there is a frozen sea within you. I liked to think there was, once upon a time, if only because it seemed like a convenient explanation for certain troubling aspects of my personality.

I won’t go into that, though. Live and learn, I guess, which is just something I’ll say because it’s something people say.

I’m sorry, I can’t imagine. I just cannot imagine. I was thinking last night how my head felt like one of those snow globes where the little confetti blizzard never settles and the quaint miniature village never emerges from the storm. It almost broke my heart, but then I got to thinking…Oh, good lord, I can’t for the life of me remember what I got to thinking. It’s entirely slipped my mind.

—James Dankert

I need some new links. I love most of the folks over there in the column to the left, but they’re all pretty much holdovers from my old site, and I’ve noticed lately that some of them are no longer active –a lot of them, actually, which I’m sure is a reflection of the often frustrating disparity between labor and reward that dooms so many excellent internet galleries or ‘zines.

I’ve often pointed out how much I despise the term “blog.” I’m no longer quite sure why, other than that it means too many different things, and is a homely word. Lately, of course, blogs have made all sorts of news, most of which I’ve paid little or no attention to. When what people call the mainstream media starts talking about blogs, they’re virtually always talking about the Rock ’em-Sock ’em Robots world of political blogs. Many such sites are virtuous and even indispensable (i.e. Cursor, Daily Kos, Wonkette, and This Modern World), but though we may all be first and foremost political animals, however helplessly, I’m afraid I lack the spine to absorb the constant (daily, hourly, minute by minute) reminders of what wretched and ineffectual creatures human beings can be.

I’ll beat you to the punch: I’m fully aware that this thing (see lengthy official title above) is one more such reminder, albeit a reminder in the abstract, wearing the threadbare clothes of the microcosmic, the prosaic, the down-on-his-luck sidewalk fire breather or the bedraggled and gibbering organ grinder. I’m down in the basement building ships in bottles while upstairs my family starves from malnutrition and neglect.

I love people who build ships in bottles, though. I love, and am entertained by, too many things, even if there never seem to be enough of them to keep me entertained. I’m easily bored, and the internet is easily boring. I don’t have the slightest idea how to go looking for the things that might keep me entertained. In a perfect world I would have a curatorial office in a giant warehouse somewhere –a building that would be equal parts natural history and science museum, art gallery, rag and bone shop, and library– and I would have a team of interns and assistants who would come to my office each day laden with items of interest for my inspection. These people would understand that I am severely deficient in attention, attracted to all manner of peculiarity, and an incurable dilettante.

I don’t live in that perfect world, but I’ve never stopped dreaming of it. And, strangely enough, people do come to me –not each day, but often enough– laden with the sort of odd and beautiful wonders that sustain me in what feels more and more like a vigil. I’m always waiting for something more, connections, voices or objects that stir something in me, minor miracles, visits from entertaining madmen and oracles; I’m always hoping that when I open an atlas I will find its pages teeming with new countries, strange roads, entire worlds of the wholly unfamiliar. Every time I crack the pages of a dictionary my secret wish is that all the words will suddenly be transformed into a language understood by no one on the planet but me and a small group of my closest associates.

I’ve said before that my goal as a child was to create my own set of encyclopedias comprised entirely of entries on everything that had ever, however momentarily, claimed my attention, made my head spin, or given me a feeling of wonder or joy. Things that give me happiness literally make me leap around; when I am delighted my response is to try to leap as far from the surface of this planet as I possibly can, and when I am extremely delighted I can hurl myself again and again –straight up or, occasionally, at forty-five degree angles– into the air. I suppose I’m attempting to fly, or to “slip the surly bonds of earth,” as Ronald Reagan once said, cribbing the words of a dead World War II Canadian airman.

You can make me leap by sending along sites that might be of interest to me (and, certainly, to you), or that you think would make worthy additions to my list of links. I’m going to go through there sometime soon and reluctantly prune away all the dead branches. If you haven’t taken the time to explore what’s over there, I’d recommend that you do so. There are lots of people and places there that make me happy on a regular basis, people and places like Big Happy Funhouse, letting loose with the leptard, Life in the Present, Paul Collins, The Minor Fall, The Major Lift, wood s lot, Glubibulga, and Word Shadows.

Just today I discovered two more sites that I’ll be adding to my encyclopedia: the wonderful Village Eclair, and my pal Peter Schilling’s latest venture (a remodeled version of a lamented former venture), The Bug. Violet Horvath at Village Eclair has a voice that sounds like the sort of disembodied voices that comfort me at four a.m., and Peter would almost certainly be one of my associates in that museum of my dreams.

I should also mention that this site is merely an offshore subsidiary of the magazine I write for, The Rake. It’s a pretty damn good magazine, I think, and you should make a point of checking it out and letting me (or us) know how you think it could be better.