Category: Yo Ivanhoe

What is the one invention you couldn’t possibly live without?

Do you subscribe to the theory that if the shoehorn were to become obsolete we would see the end of the true-fitting slip-on?

When was the last time you listened to Nirvana’s “Nevermind”?

In your dreams are you most commonly flying, swimming, or naked on a schoolbus?

If there was a new planetary order that allowed humans to buy celebrities as pets, and money (and money-making potential) were no object, which celebrity would you buy?

What is the fastest you have ever driven an automobile?

Be Honest: Did you ever throw a rock at a Mormon?

If you could have one sentence tattooed on your body what would it be?

Did you ever see a giant in the supermarket, signing autographs and selling bacon?

Choose one: Ween or Queen?

Would you harpoon a whale, if given the opportunity?

If you could resurrect one dead rock star, who would it be?

If God gave you the power to eradicate a single species from the planet, which creature would you mark for extinction?

Is that the necklace the dog gave you?

Do you know the way to San Jose?

Are we almost there?

You call that a proper meal?

You call that a day?

What in God’s name is wrong with you?

Any further questions?

All last night there was never any doubt that this day was going to drag me into the harsh light and try to kick some words out of me, but I once again tried to convince myself that I was somehow made of sterner stuff than the average fellow. I wasn’t about to cough up any words until I was good and ready. I resolved to get right up and put something loud and bracing on the stereo (I eventually decided on Fu Manchu) to drown out the baying of the gray boys who I knew would already be milling out front and lobbing taunts and insults at my house.

A man can only avoid these confrontations, though, if he’s absolutely unwilling to move, and the instant I took a step out the front door (I was brazen enough to believe I could sneak away for a sandwich) they were on me. I can almost chuckle now as I recall my poor wife standing on the porch in a panic, screaming, “Scramble! Scramble, honey! Run! Improvise!”

I had no chance, not a chance in the world. Not today. Not Monday. They had me face down in the front lawn in no time at all, and the biggest of the bunch was kneeling in the small of my back while one of his toadies had a fistful of my hair and was yanking my head backwards from the wet grass.

“Say something!” the big one demanded.

“Say what?” I asked.

“Say anything,” he said.

I clenched my teeth and shook my head. “I have nothing to say.”

“Say, ‘How can I make this fruit look prettier?’”

“No,” I said, and even as I heard myself mutter the word I could feel my resolve eroding. Out of the corner of one eye I could see kids on their way back to school pausing to watch this spectacle from the sidewalk in front of my house.

“Say, ‘I’m so helpless I’m practically stone-aged.’”

I tried to once again shake my head, but the one goon was now yanking my hair at such an angle that it felt like he might break my neck.

“Just say it, honey,” my wife said from the porch. “Get it over with.”

I waited a long moment, breathing heavily, while the biggest of the gray boys increased the pressure on the small of my back.

“I’m so helpless I’m practically stone-aged,” I finally said.

That got a reaction out of the bastards, all right. They released me and leapt around my yard bumping chests and exchanging clumsy high-fives before piling back into their black Camaro with the smoked-glass windows. As I attempted to swipe away the mud and grass stains from my pants and jacket they tore off down the block and disappeared around the corner.

“Those fuckers,” I said.

My wife came over and patted me on the back. “It’s okay,” she said. “That wasn’t so bad this time. At least they didn’t get you to say, ‘How can I make this fruit look prettier?’”

In Cuba, when they have tornadoes, they kill them. When they see one coming, they start shooting it with their rifles and shotguns, and the explosions make the tornadoes disappear. When I tell people in America that they shoot tornadoes in Cuba, they don’t believe me. But I believe because I’ve seen it happen; I’ve seen the dark funnel drop out of the sky, then disappear when the men from the farms start shooting it.

—Tony O! The Trials and Triumphs of Tony Oliva, Tony Oliva with Bob Fowler. Hawthorn Books, 1973.

The knowledge of evil is an inadequate knowledge.
—Spinoza, Ethics

But the most important thing is that one can no longer be sure nowadays who is and who is not in a state of temporary insanity.

—Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

The Shatterer has come up against

you.

Man the ramparts;

Watch the road.

—The Book of Nahum, 2.1

…Something real amongst shadows.

—Socrates, Meno

…We do not dare to be philosophical.

—William Barrett, Irrational Man

There is no denying that we fear the end of things because our way of life has brought so many things to an end.

—Wendell Berry, “Discipline and Hope”

Is it not against all natural reason that God out of his mere whim deserts men, hardens them, damns them, as if He delighted in sins and in such torments of the wretched for eternity, He who is said to be of such mercy and goodness? This appears iniquitous, cruel, and intolerable in God, by which very many have been offended in all ages. And who would not be? I was myself more than once driven to the very abyss of despair so that I wished I had never been created. Love God? I hated Him!

—Martin Luther, in Roland Bainton’s Here I Stand

We fly forgotten as a dream, certainly, leaving the forgetful world behind us to trample and mar and misplace everything we have ever cared for. This is just the way of it, and it is remarkable.

—Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

…how quickly the burnt-out candles multiply.

—C.P. Cavafy, “Candles”

We are only dogs chasing cars.

—Joseph Schumpeter

Who, then, are the immortals? Those who lived a long time, those who reappear time after time, those who had more life than death, but less time than life.

—Carlos Fuentes, This I Believe

From too much love of living,

From hope and fear set free,

We thank with brief thanksgiving

Whatever gods may be

That no life lives forever;

That dead men rise up never;

That even the weariest river

Winds somewhere safe to sea.

—Swinburne, The Garden of Proserpine

When do we set sail for happiness?

—Baudelaire, Journaux Intimes

Bloom of fireworks above a black field, the idle of insects throbbing from the damp ditches. Distant petroleum carnival of light, dark steeples, and a watertower announcing the presence of a town. Is that the rattle of a snare drum from somewhere out in the fields? Tell me again what lives in that place beyond this darkness. The bonfire will signify what again? When it all goes up in flames what is it we’ll be burning?

I like this song, it reminds me of something. I can’t put my finger on it, but it involved, I’m sure, a night just like this. We were in a car, going somewhere else, or perhaps just somewhere.

Somewhere else came later, I suppose. Back then there was only this. Remember? When there was only this? It was never enough. Perhaps that was the problem. You can’t put your finger on it. I love that about you, how you can never seem to put your finger on it, and how badly you would like to put your finger on it. Things, in general, the way they don’t seem quite real to you, within reach. Graspable. The way you’re always saying Hold out hope, as if it could mean the many things it could mean. Not just a clinging to, not just something desperate, but an offering. Something extended. Something shared.

I love these quiet roads, just outside what is our life, that feeling of being lost in a still unfamiliar place, of being plunked down on another planet, looking out with dim longing and dimming wonder at the distant glow of the puzzle that will never be home. Can’t say. That’s another one of yours that I love, as if you mean it, as if there’s some mysterious proscription, as if you honestly cannot say, cannot utter whatever words might explain, whatever words might possibly make a difference.

Because –and this I choose to think and believe– those words are still forming in you, still turning over and lining up in your head, still drilling and taking shape and preparing for the long march up into the light, when they will become, magically, truth, the truth we’re going to need to turn finally and forever away from that dark, still-mysterious planet barely rising across the black, empty fields.

I’m not talking about that old world, mister. I’m trying to forget I ever lived there. All those bastards had ants in their pants, and you’d think it wouldn’t be possible to cram that many drunken jackasses in a Volvo, but you’d be sadly mistaken. I saw it all with my own eyes.

Oh, Lord, now you’ve got me started. Katie bar the door.

There used to be this punchy little Irishman who worked as a doorman in my building, and I couldn’t even tell you all the beatings that hateful devil gave me over the years. He was what I’d guess you’d call a stickler, and I had –or so he avowed– issues with compliance. You name it.

What it really boiled down to, what it always boiled down to, was that the fellow didn’t like the cut of my jib. He said as much, on more than one occasion. He’d accuse me of ‘randy couplings,’ and the absurdity of that unjust allegation can still make my blood boil. I was –and remain– a gentleman through and through.

Whatever it was I tried to carry into the building, whether briefcase or grocery sack, the Irishman would insist on ‘having a little peek in my trunk.’ There were scenes, I can assure you, that went beyond mere humiliation into the territory of violence and perversion. Just the thought of the little storage closet he had there in the lobby makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

Believe me, I saved my pennies, and when they began to take reservations for the rocket ship off that godforsaken planet I was among the first to put down a deposit. I’m happy as a clam these days until some miserable, homesick joker starts prattling on about the good old days and then –just like that– I’m right back in that storage closet with the Irishman.

Gogol’s last words: ‘A ladder, quick, a ladder!’

—Elias Canetti, The Agony of Flies

I’ve never been able to sleep like a normal person, and I literally could count the number of dreams I remember in my lifetime on one hand. This last week, however, I’ve been trying a new medication, and experiencing the sort of sleep I like to call crocodile-skimming –I feel like I’m almost completely submerged, but there’s a small part of my mind that just keeps bobbing right at the surface between consciousness and unconsciousness. I do, though, have little bursts where I actually go all the way under, and these episodes have been marked by vivid dreams, most of which I can’t remember. Last night — I’m certain influenced by something I read in the above-mentioned Canetti book– I had a dream in which I was hiding from a god who did not create humans, but rather captured them. This morning I went through the portion of the book I had read last night but could find nothing that would have obviously triggered such a dream; so maybe, in fact, it really is just a case of my unconscious mind finally –after forty years– getting a chance to strut its stuff.

Also, here’s an assortment of links that have been backing up on me. Consider it a sort of online gallery crawl:

Chris Payne: Photographer

Chicago Street Photography

Tokyo Eyes

Drive-In Theaters

Bernd and Hilla Becher
More Becher
Becher: Watertowers
More Watertowers

Jeff Brouws: Photography

Roadside Peek

Coney Island Polaroids

Squidfingers: Polaroids

Polaroids

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Polaroids

Mini Golf

Roadside Architecture

Soviet Children’s Picture Books

The Internet Pinball Database

Tom Waits’ All-Time Top Twenty (Thanks to TMFTML)

I never stop talking, even when I’m just muddling around the house by myself (which is, to be perfectly honest for a change, most of the time). I’m always spitting out words and pushing them around, hoping to carve a new language out of all the silence and empty space, or at least build something sprawling and pointless, my own Paradise Gardens, my own Watts Tower. By pounding words out of the hours I hope to give something back to the clock, even as it just keeps taking.

Thing is, of course, I don’t truly have much to say. I can’t even say “for the most part,” can’t even qualify the absence of genuine content from my ceaseless babble. Things just keep coming to me unbidden; they rise in me or drift across the planetarium of my skull. I can certainly wish for more topical revelations –or for revelations of any sort whatsoever– but I’m pretty much stuck with memories, many of which may not be actual memories at all.

For instance: right this moment, or the moment that compelled me to pause and sit down at this machine, I was recalling a boy who used to bring a giant bone to school, a bone that he would drag rattling along the row of combination locks as he shuffled down the hallway. I would see this same boy away from school, often smoking in the alley next to the Ben Franklin store, and for a period of time he had a pet bird, a bird black as a blowfly’s scalp.

That bird had the mouth of a strip-bar comedian –this was a bird that worked nothing but blue. The bird’s name was Philip, and his signature phrase was “You bet your sweet ass.” The kid hardly ever said a word, but Philip would barely let him get a word in edgewise, and he couldn’t find a good thing to say about anybody. You don’t know what it’s like to be cussed up and down and insulted until you’ve been cussed up and down and insulted by a bird.

I later heard through the grapevine that Philip eventually found religion, and went around saying “God bless you” and “Bless your pea-picking heart” and reciting the Beatitudes. It should perhaps be noted, however, that I learned of this development from a sanctimonious friend of my mother’s, and this person was not generally regarded around town as a reliable source of information. This woman nonetheless reportedly encountered the cleaned-up, born-again version of Philip at the Public Library downtown.

There may be nothing in the world so amusing as a purely rational man.

The rational man is a fellow who has not yet been able to convince himself that he’s seen a ghost. The poor bastard has repressed his memories of alien abductions and fits of religious mania. He thinks this world is round. He believes in explanations.

I wish them all a miracle, something intensely personal and inexplicable that will drive them from their comfortable refuge and send them literally out of their minds.

And I would ask them: How do you deny the devil if you won’t even take the time to hear him out now and then? How do you manage to live without aspirations of sainthood?

…on the one hand, the correct political line is demanded of the poet; on the other, one is justified in expecting his work to have quality. Such a formulation is of course unsatisfactory as long as the connection between the two factors, political line and quality, has not been perceived. Of course, the connection can be asserted dogmatically. You can declare: a work that shows the correct political tendency need show no other quality. You can also declare: a work that exhibits this correct tendency must of necessity have every other quality.

—Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” Address at the Institute for the Study of Fascism, April 27, 1934.

We are born to be awake, not to be asleep!

—Paracelsus, “Toil, A Divine Commandment”

I’ve been thinking about purely private obsession, the grip of the wholly inexplicable. The claiming desire, some fascination –sometimes kink, sometimes compulsion– that puts down roots in your young skull and stakes a permanent camp. Some ceaselessly hectoring curiosity that won’t leave you alone, and ultimately defines you and how you’ll spend (or waste) your time and what you’ll want from your life.

It’s a narrowing, and generally happens early. A box your head puts you in and won’t ever let you out of. Childhood’s brand. You will love me always. You will follow me forever, and wherever I lead. You will serve me until the end of your days.

There are a million tiny and ridiculous ways you can be sidetracked and carried away, from the narrowest path off the main trail to a pitiful, dribbling creek or the most destructive, raging cataract.

You become a hostage to who you are, to what you want, what fascinates you, what breaks you down, what holds you under; the sense you feel compelled to build, the truth you try so helplessly to construct, who you ultimately and helplessly are.

All of this, of course, by way of trying to justify –to myself, to my wife, to the great, wondering world– my unchallenged status as the King of the Party Titans. I’m sorry, honey. It’s too late to turn back now. You married a man who was put on this earth to party with a ferocity that is –thank God– beyond the comprehension of most mere mortals. And with royalty comes responsibility, which is why I feel compelled to beg off on the opera Saturday night, so that I may assume my rightful place in the plush seats of the State Theater for the Pink Floyd Laser Spectacular.