THE THRILL IS GONE

So you’d think that having escaped the shores bordering the rubble of the American prospect, I could be wistful; or at least laughing maniacally about the burnt carnage at my back.  But no, I am Lot’s wife scaling the hill that leads away from Sodom, neck craning, mouth full of salt.

Many nuances and barometers of causality have been employed to gauge the disappointment descending like a toxic mist since the last presidential election.  It can be summarized in a name:  “Timothy Geithner.”  We really don’t have to reach much further back into the cupboard than that.  Sigh.  Heavy fucking sigh.

I’d like to say that my continued interest is self-protective. (When the U.S. economy goes swirling down the tube, so go us all.  The beauty of this lush German city won’t save me from that.)  But it’s more than the practicalities.  It is also playing out the Chinese curse of living in interesting times.  Political addiction serves up a hot dish of distraction, and you never have to wait long for the next course.  It is a spectacle with few pauses.  It is porn on drugs.

I continue to hope that with time, I will care less and less.  The American empire must inevitably fall, and it looks to be well on its way.  But tha’ts not life.  John Lennon said it best:  “Life is what happens when you’re not reading the Huffington Post.”

The Guitar Lesson

So here was the wreckage the day before expatriation.  And a few nights were spent sleepless ignoring that trenchant buddhist parable to remedy problems only as they occur — not after or before.

My innards palpitated, my spine rattled at the idea that the airline personnel would insist on checking my guitar into a certain death.

The guitar itself, on the other hand, carelessly enjoyed its own particular celebrity as I hoisted it from airport to airport in my staggered trek from Asheville to Charlotte to Munich to Hamburg.  It giggled and cooed, much like a small child, at the endearments passed to it from drawling southern baggage handlers to teutonic-inflected stewardesses.  I did the heavy lifting;  the 6-string wonder merely basked.  But my child made it safely.

Let that be a lesson to us.  On many levels.  As lessons are wont to be.

THE PARKING LOT AND BEYOND–

Most of what I saw in Tokyo was a stretch of newly asphalted, black parking lot that lay just beyond my doorstep as a kind of “benignly menacing” symbol for my time there.  After a hard day’s teaching I could pass through the sliding glass doors that backed my place (allowing the noonday sun in inevitably at 4 a.m., until I started pulling the thick curtain close), I could haul my liquor, ashtray and smokes to the concrete stoop that always imprinted concrete dust on my ass.  And look out on the parking lot.

“How was Japan?” is the question.  Like asking, “How’s life?” in all it’s generalities without the expectation of an answer lacking in all specificity.  So, how is life?  It is a complex issue.   How is Japan?  Equally so.  Especially when my Japan revolved so much on this expansive rectangle that was the completely purposeless parking area.

I did get out sometimes.  Mostly by train, and that is its own subculture.  Everything that makes a train a moving amalgam of anonymity, myth, and romantic icon was in place as it should have been.  Or why else have the train mythos?  The furtive looks from the fair sex, the drunkenness, the missed and shrugged-off opportunities, and sometimes the dullness made dull by an absence of opportunity.  Public transportation is a society in microcosm, but that is a master’s thesis and cannot be contained herein.

To be continued…

East and then…

I need to write some words SOON about turning Japanese-ah.  Suffice it to say that it was less “spiritual” than the pictures suggest.  Alas.

Interim

We dissected the long living room with a freestanding (meaning a little backless number) floor-to-ceiling bookshelf.  I can now recline and look off into the a space that spans Albee to Zoraster.  Words far-reaching from fiction to philosophy, and encapsulate the bent prism of conscious time.  And they fill, bound though they are, like slaves on a ship, the nothing that was there before.

So my living room becomes a metaphor for the universe.  An empty space that shoves into the room a way to kill its own void.  But at least my humble living room serves the humble pupose of universal allegory.

This is the interim.  Off to Japan which should silence these ramblings a good long while.

Aces Down

One of my favorite lines from Leonard Cohen, and he’s written a lot of great lines, is:  “He was just a dealer looking for a card so high and wild that he’d never have to deal another.”  Well, true enough.  Hence the lottery tickets and everyone’s jump at his fifteen minutes.

And not to jumble too many literary references into a sack, I often think of Harper Lee.  Of To Kill a Mockingbird fame.  And that’s it.  She wrote one classic novel — To Kill a Mockingbird.  Turned into a film.  Taught in high school.  And, crassly, a mint in the making.  She drew the illusive card.  Talent and luck conspired in her case.   Wealth and a soft fame were her rewards.

This causes the eye to cast askance to see what other proof could be lent to this mythology, though beliefs need no evidence.  John Kennedy Toole with Confederacy of Dunces.  His suicide prevented subsequent work, but if he had been published in his time he might well have sat back in the swamps of Louisiana resting drunkenly on his laurels.

And all the other scribblers in ink who could have leaned back on the singular volume.  There is Salinger with Catcher in the Rye.  Kerouac with On the Road.  Hell, Shakespeare with Hamlet.  The artists accomplished much outside these seminal works (Franny and Zooey, Dharma Bums, King Lear…) but didn’t have to.  Genius strikes more than once.  But doesn’t have to.

But back to Leonard Cohen.  A word slave, just like we like to see them.  Toiling in the tower of words.  His card eventually came with Hallelujah by way of Jeff Buckley’s cover in the film Shrek.  But Mr. Cohen is in the twilight of age.  Thankfully, Hallelujah is not his best song.  That means we are given better access to other works.  And luckily we are not deprived of the gratuitous excesses of other artists, even though they reached the pinnacle of success.

Except for, of course, John Toole and Harper Lee. ” I am just a dealer looking for a card so high and wild that I’ll never have to deal another.  I am just some Joseph looking for a manger…”

Beyond Latin Scripture

This is ammonia; you can tell from its aseptic nasal sting.  A janitorial cleansing has come this way.  The myths and the teachers of myth have worked their urine into a lather and so we have deterged in the only method left to us.  This is the cleft chin dangling from broken jaw all stuttering lips wet with froth struggling with the language of love.  And this is the kept secret, for it is all that is left for the keeping.

Haggard, indeed

So no shock to the pudding (cuz that’s where the proof is)  that the dear annointed-by-god proselytizer Ted Haggard is in some more dip.  The only book all child molesters have read is the Holy Bible, preferably in the King James Version.  There’s a pleasure in shame, I guess…

But on a another note within the same sonata is:

David Clohessy, national director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests — which has largely focused on the Catholic sexual abuse scandal but also speaks out on cases involving Protestant clergy — said the new disclosures about Haggard are more disturbing because they involves a church volunteer.”Technically, legally, they were both adults,” Clohessy said. “Psychologically and emotionally, Haggard was dramatically more powerful. … By definition, any sexual contact between a congregant and minister is inherently abusive and manipulative.”

By definition?  What’s he on about?  The “congregant” has already been abused and manipulated by religion itself.  If the figure proclaiming to be the messiah’s voicebox wants to hanky-panky in the church’s school’s lunchroom kitchen, and you think the pulpit is celebrity, and doing it with a greasy haired preacher over a tub of cole slaw is fulfilling God’s will, then you are not much of a victim in this scenario.

This is a classic case of victimhood.  Hey, preachers, leave them kids alone.  But yahoos in their mid-twenties to early nineties, if you believe that the man in the polyester suit abused his authority—- you have bigger questions to answer.

Just Business

The publishing industry is not getting a government bailout.  We are soon going to be left with Mr. Harry Potter and Twilight because that will be all that is economically feasible in the foreseeable future.  News on the subject deals mostly with the layoffs at the big houses.  But sadly, I am keyed to the fact that reading is a “luxury” not a necessity (like an SUV with heated seats and an anus tickler).  So off to the wolves with the lot of it.

If a small press is doomed to rely on the miserly disposable income of the errant English major holding down a service-industry job, then my only tiny consolation for non-publishment will be the State of Things.  But further than that, woe unto us all.  Luckily, there is still lots of literature that sits on shelves in used bookstores that could consume many lifetimes of reading.  But that is speaking altruistically.  I’m not accustomed to speaking altruistically.

Selfishly speaking, I’m fucked.  I need an editor to luxuriate in temporal expanse, a glass of Merlot perched nearby, to see my qualities outweighing my flaws.  Not nail-bite over saleability of the article at hand.  While I didn’t realistically harbor the expectation of getting published in the next five lifetimes, this is a blow.

We are in survival mode now.  Panic borne by fantasy or reality still has its affect.  The written word has already undergone countless assaults.  This is just another tear on the coffin.  I don’t want to write the obituary for literature nor do I want it to be written at all.  But my pessimist’s ear hears the drum beats sounding louder and louder.

A matter of Who.

Watching that perennial classic How the Grinch Stole Christmas, my curmudgeonly heart found itself cheering for the green creep. Not because his hostility to the residents of Whoville was a noble sentiment, but because of the fiction that is Whoville. (I relate most to the sled-pulling dog who wants to applaud the goodness of Whovillians but is tethered to a wicked master. But that is aside.)
The modern Grinch would be righteously at war with the not-so-well-meaning oafs based here in reality that pretend at a postcard representation of human good will but are corrupt to the core. A trampling or two at Who-Mart, for instance, might set a sharp example.   A fine test would be to sweep away their materialist trappings and see if a “hand to grasp” would really be enough.
[There are, of course, no blacks or immigrants in Whoville. No homeless. Like a Republican's wet dream except for the oil wells, the closeted gay sex, politicians on the take, and the killing of people in other villes to protect WhoJesus.]
And why do we have ol’ grinchy sweeping in at the end to give them the booty when they might have learned a good and just lesson by its absence? We must ponder who is the engine for good in this tale.
Or maybe my heart is two sizes too small…