Tag: Yo Ivanhoe

I’m headed out to Montana to read and take some pictures.

Here are the CDs that travel with me wherever I go, whenever I go someplace that qualifies as somewhere else:

Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music

Creedence Clearwater Revival, Willie and the Poor Boys

Minutemen, Double Nickels On The Dime

Louis Armstong, The Hot Fives

Kinks, Something Else

Van Morrison, Astral Weeks

Rolling Stones, Exile On Main Street

Bob Dylan, Basement Tapes

Fela, The Best of Fela Kuti

Yo La Tengo, Fakebook and Painful

Tom Waits, Rain Dogs and Mule Variations

Byrds, Sweetheart of the Rodeo

Pogues, Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash

My Bloody Valentine, Loveless

Goodbye Babylon

The Clean, Compilation

Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs

Duke Ellington, The Blanton-Webster Band

Velvet Underground, Loaded

Big Star, Third

Neil Young, Decade

Rochereau and Franco, Omana Wapi

LaBradford, Mi Media Naranja

Ramones, All the Stuff

Charles Mingus, Mingus Ah Um

James Brown, Live at the Apollo

Replacements, Pleased to Meet Me and Let it Be

Johnny Cash, Love, God and Murder

Clash, London Calling

Count Basie, Atomic Basie

Wire, Pink Flag

Husker Du, New Day Rising

Stevie Wonder, Talking Book

Dave Godin’s Deep Soul Treasures From the Vaults, Volume One

Chuck Berry, The Great Twenty-Eight

Tommy Keane, Based on Happy Times

Steve Earle, I’m Alright and Transcendental Blues

Sonic Youth, Daydream Nation

Lounge Lizards, Voice of Chunk

Elmore James, King of the Slide Guitar

Rod Stewart, Every Picture Tells a Story

Def Jam Music Group, 10th Year Anniversary

East River Pipe, The Gasoline Age

Red House Painters, Ocean Beach

King Sunny Ade, The Best of the Classic Years

Culture, Two Sevens Clash

X, More Fun in the New World

The Handsome Family, Twilight

Nick Drake, Way to Blue

Mekons, Rock ‘n’ Roll

Nick Lowe, Party of One

NRBQ, At Yankee Stadium

Hank Williams, Forty Greatest Hits

Harry Nilsson, Personal Best

Ornette Coleman, Dancing In Your Head

Pretenders, Singles

Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, L.A.M.F.

PJ Harvey, Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea

The Goldwax Story, Volume One

Elvis Costello, Get Happy

Guided By Voices, Do the Collapse

Warren Zevon, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead

Charley Patton, Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues

Guitar Paradise of East Africa

Dusty Springfield, Dusty in Memphis

Louvin Brothers, When I Stop Dreaming

Skip James, The Complete Early Recordings

Basehead, Play With Toys

Alejandro Escovedo, Gravity

In the recurring dream

my mother stands

in her bridal gown

under the burning lilac,

with Bernard Shaw and Bertie

Russell kissing her hands;

the house behind her is in ruins;

she is wearing an owl’s face

and makes barking noises.

Her minatory finger points.

I pass through the cardboard doorway

askew in the field

and peer down a well

where an albino walrus huffs.

He has the gentlest eyes.

If the dirt keeps sifting in,

staining the water yellow,

why should I be blamed?

Never try to explain.

That single Model A

sputtering up the grade

unfurled a highway behind

where the tanks maneuver,

revolving their turrets.

In a murderous time

the heart breaks and breaks

and lives by breaking.

It is necessary to go

through dark and deeper dark

and not to turn.

I am looking for the trail.

Where is my testing-tree?

Give me back my stones!

–Stanley Kunitz, from The Testing-Tree

He would get up from his bed each morning in the long hours after midnight, confused, sour with his inability to sleep, insomnia the curse of his life, stretching all the way back to when he was a boy and was still excited to imagine all the wonders and revelations he might miss every night when he closed his eyes. It never once occurred to him then that sleep might offer wonders of its own.

Into his middle years he had no recollection of ever having dreamed. A dream to him was a metaphor for the things people wished for in vain.

He was no longer quite so excited to be up and wandering the dark rooms of his house at three a.m. The wee hours had long since lost whatever charms they might once have offered. Every one of his sleepless nights would follow him into the day like an abusive shadow. He was unfit for anything that the rest of the world might have considered a normal life. That sort of thing –and he could no longer even imagine what ‘that sort of thing’ might entail– was apparently no longer in the cards. He was stuck with Mahler and Schubert and Ben Webster and Schopenhauer and three a.m. Not to mention mornings of blind, stupored misery hunched over the daily newspaper and pouring caffeine down his throat, desperately trying to goad his blood, head, and heart into some passable impersonation of a conscious and functioning human being.

He’d begun to notice a sadness in himself that he was certain hadn’t been there before, this dull, muffled ache that started just behind his eyes and gradually worked its way down into his legs. This represented a fundamental change in the character of his exhaustion. For most of his life his sleeplessness, as well as its hangover effects, had been marked by a confused, agitated buzz, a sort of hyper-consciousness. His body would be worn out, he would feel sluggish and disoriented, but his brain would continue to stir up its usual ceaseless production of static and sparks. It was like being sleepless and exhausted in a great, teeming city, with stimulus above and around him on all sides.

In his mid-thirties things started to change. He supposed that years of nocturnal living and around-the-clock consciousness of one sort or another had done serious damage to his mind. The nights would now pass in a muddled crawl. The analogy was no longer a teeming city, but rather a long, dark road in the country, the city and the old amusements of his insomnia reduced to a distant, impressionistic spectacle on the far horizon. The carnival had gone black, and he was left with the more abstract entertainments of the planetarium, the dark astral clutter of his skull.

Many a man has cherished for years as his hobby some vague shadow of an idea, too meaningless to be positively false; he has, nevertheless, passionately loved it, has made it his companion by day and by night, and has given to it his strength and his life, leaving all other occupations for its sake, and in short has lived with it and for it, until it has become, as it were, flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone; and then he has waked up some bright morning to find it gone, clean vanished away like the beautiful Melusina of the fable, and the essence of life gone with it.

—Charles Pierce, Selected Works

It was an evening which, by some mysterious combination of failing light, and the smell of an unrecognized plant brings back to some men a sense of childhood, and of future hope; and to others the sense of something which has been lost and nearly forgotten.

–Graham Greene, The Honorary Counsul

That’s bullshit, and you know it’s bullshit. I put that shovel next to the porch and now it’s gone. I made a special trip to Home Depot to buy that damn shovel, and I think you can well imagine how difficult such an excursion was for me. I hate the very thought of places filled to the rafters with tools and all sorts of other inexplicable nonsense that makes me feel utterly useless as a man.

I can’t dig a hole if I don’t have a shovel. And if I don’t dig a hole I have no place to put the words. If I don’t have a hole in which to bury the words I have no reason in the world to produce the words, and so the words have no purpose and just pile up around me until I can’t even get out of bed in the morning.

Jesus, this place is murky. I feel like I’m living in an aquarium, and not a large one, either. No, it’s more like I’m living in a filthy aquarium in a Chinese restaurant, treading water while slimy eels swim lazy laps around me.

I’m not shitting you, people, maybe you live here, maybe you know what I’m talking about: All it ever does is rain. There’s a moment in every day when I feel like I’m going to fall right off the planet and into the darkness beyond the clouds, where the stars are like little farmhouses strung out across the great, empty country of the sky.

After a time the beggars just sort of receded and became a peripheral blur in my daily routine, the traffic I had to navigate each day on my way to work. There were almost no cars in my part of town. A number of people had beat-up motor scooters or bicycles, but the narrow maze of dusty streets and terraces broken up by steep steps was largely impassable by automobile.

I don’t know how long it took me to get used to the beggars, or at least to learn to not really see them. Not long, to be appallingly honest. Even as on some level, of course, you never got entirely used to the daily swarm of children, old women, and various categories of broken men. But if you let their presence bother you as much as it should have bothered you, you wouldn’t have survived long in that place.

Whenever a group of foreign workers would get together we’d inevitably find ourselves talking about the beggars in ways that were shamefully abstract, as if they were pests –mosquitos, perhaps, or pigeons. Some nuisance you needed a strategy to cope with. This sort of strategic distance was necessary, I suppose, for practical, day-to-day survival in that country. Your compassion and mercy needed to be generalized and concentrated on the big picture, which was something that never really seemed to come into clear focus; if anything, in fact, it seemed to be continually receding to the horizon and growing smaller and more hopelessly fuzzed all the time. Still, we all agreed that it did us –or them– no good to give the beggars money or buy their useless trinkets.

I still remember one particular boy I would encounter every day, folded up like a large cricket on a dirty mat on the sidewalk, his emaciated legs bent behind him at impossible angles. “See me,” he would call out in a croaking, damaged tenor. “Look at me.”

I recall giving him what amounted to perhaps fifty cents one morning, and I was upbraided by one of my supervisors –a young Frenchwoman– all the way to the office.

It’s strange, I haven’t found myself thinking about those people for years now, and for quite a long time, I believe, I had succeeded in not thinking of them as people at all.

It’s probably something of a red flag when your barber has a Superman logo tattooed on his forearm. And this is probably not the sort of monologue you want to hear from some guy while he’s cutting your hair:

I’m not shitting you, I’m at the end of my fucking rope here. I know damn well that people look at me when I keep shaking my head like crazy, but it’s like I’m trying to erase something from my brain, you know? Like my brain is a fucking Etch-A-Sketch. Seriously, you wouldn’t believe some of the bullshit I’ve been through. My ex-wife has put me through the wringer, I shit you not. You’d think I was made of money. Hello? Did I happen to mention when I married you that I was a fucking barber? I’m pretty sure I did.

I had a guy in here earlier, and when I told him that I was at the end of my fucking rope, he says, “Well, from the looks of things, I don’t suppose you’re lying.” So, okay, it’s that obvious, okay? I’m not a guy who can keep shit bottled up inside. Like I always told the old lady, “What you see is what you get. I’m not hiding anything.”

I’m serious, though, everywhere I turn it seems like there’s a brick wall waiting for me, and the punks in my neighborhood have spray-painted the word “Fuck” in big red letters right across that brick wall. It’s like every day I wake up from one nightmare and slip right into another. The same shitty food, day after day. The same fucking undercover deadbeats shuffling by my house, the same bogus utility truck parked at the curb out front, the guy behind the wheel pretending to read a newspaper.

You think I don’t know what’s going on? Do these people really think I’m that fucking stupid? I ask my next-door neighbor if he’s ever seen anybody suspicious-looking lurking around in my backyard when I’m not around, and he gets all nervous and says he hasn’t seen a thing. Then, a couple nights later, I notice a small red light in the dark window of his bedroom, clearly the battery lights of a video camera that’s pointed right at me.

I’ll let you in on a little secret: I’m this close —this fucking close [gripping a fistful of my hair with one hand, he shoves his scissors in front of my eyes and executes one quick, aggressive snip]– to snapping.

Remember when you imagined stars on the roof of your mouth, and stood in the river in the rain, naked and mooing, your head and palms raised significantly (or so you imagined)? You desperately wanted something momentous to wash over you; to be claimed by something outside yourself, even as you were almost utterly incapable of feeling the presence of anything outside yourself.

I’m sure you have no idea now why you wrapped your feet in aluminum foil.

Still, how could you forget all that time you spent falling, those days when you just let it all go, your whole self, surprisingly heavy, a sinker dragging all the world’s earnest bobbers right down with you? Twice, at least, you thought yourself done for and drowned, and in those moments there was just this vague glimpse of sadness mixed with regret, almost like the last fragments of an evaporating dream.

Remember the lights and the way everything smeared, blurred, and swerved away from you for a while? In the distance, sometimes, you imagined a fire tower, then a lighthouse, then a tiny chapel deep in the woods and dimly illuminated like a jack-o’-lantern, then finally a graveyard down a long gravel road somewhere in the country. The thin ones, your desperate companions reduced to nothing but haunted eyes and bones, they were so dangerous, and you were perhaps the most dangerous of all.

Can’t you even remember anymore how you were saved? Isn’t that one memory you should have held on to with –as some would say– dear life?

—Dan Corrigan, Bud Blanchard, Motivational Speaker. Omaha, Nebraska, 1978.

…he does not notice that he has reached the age of forty-five; then suddenly he realizes that all the time he has been acting and making a fool of himself, but it is now too late to change his way of life. Once in his sleep he suddenly hears like the report of a gun the words: ‘What are you doing?’–and he starts up all in a sweat.

–Chekhov, Notebooks

But the sadder and more troubled they were, the more they yearned for omnipotence. The really troubled ones believed they had it.

–Ross MacDonald, The Zebra-Striped Hearse

I’m not going to lie to you. I could sit here and throw words at you until the cows come home, but who the hell really wants the cows to come home or even pretends to understand what that phrase means? I don’t suppose it means a damn thing to anybody, including farmers. Do cows really run away from home? And, supposing they do, would you actually sit around waiting for them to come home? I’d think you’d probably have to go looking for them, and if it was up to me I doubt that I’d bother. I’d say the hell with the delinquent cows. Let somebody else stun them, slit their throats, and hack them up into meat.

I guess I’m feeling pretty much the same way about words right now.

I’ll burn this life down and climb on a plane for Iceland. My new life might be waiting for me there. Or I might pack my bags and light out for a village in Peru. Maybe I’ll head to Boise. That might be the place of answers and inspiration.

Or, no, I’ll go someplace warm where there are palm trees and I can live right around the corner from a 7-11 and a tattoo parlor. Every morning I’ll walk over to the 7-11 in my flip-flops for a Big Gulp, a chili dog, and a game of pinball, and then I’ll go up the street to get some more ink drilled into my flesh. I’ll have a map of the world tattooed around the circumference of my torso, just like a globe, very detailed and colorful, complete with ornate compass roses and the whole fucking works.

I’ll never wear a shirt if I can help it. I’m thinking there’ll be a driving range or a batting cage somewhere in the vicinity where I can go every afternoon and hit balls until my hands bleed. I’ll become a fucking hitting machine. There for damn sure will be a barbecue joint in the neighborhood, and a bar with a decent jukebox. I’m thinking this might be Tempe, maybe, or Orlando.

I’ve got nothing against living in a trailer, just so long as I can have a dog and people leave me the fuck alone. I don’t give a rat’s ass if I never look at a television again in my life. At night I’ll work on my screenplay, and when I turn out the lights I’ll stretch out on the bed and gently trace with my fingers all my broken dreams across the continents and deserts and oceans of my body.

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.