Fort of Sand

I’m Not Going to Post Again for Awhile...

2010-05-23T13:40:00.000-07:00

...and when I do it will probably be on a different blog. I'll let you know.

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2010-05-20T00:00:00-07:00

The 30 Standard Facebook Profile Photo Styles
word

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2010-04-29T00:00:00-07:00

The Ruins of Detroit

The First Time I Heard Pablo Neruda Read

2010-04-27T13:57:00.000-07:00

True story related to some of the stuff I was talking about earlier.

to Tristan Van Maren

“Russian-bound tea was famous for the smell of the many campfires it would absorb along the way.”
—from a description of the history of Lapsang Souchong tea

You were reading aloud
out of a book with a cover marbled
to feature smoke strings blue
as cans of American Spirit.

There was glass and gin on the table,
thinner than water, uncapped,
frequent and expressive with limes,
languid with reek like low tide,
all its power to evoke
leaking air-ward like gas fumes
as if from the careful blue bubble of soft heat
that—two summers back—brought
my dehydrated meals to a boil.

Fog used to adhere to my beaches in those mornings
the way that night it stuck
to the point of your cigarette
and grew tepid as the kelp-colored tea
while you read on distracted
from the business of dying.

Tea and gin and cigarettes,
all warm in their ways:
air scriggled white like driftwood
or taiga redolent in each sip.

And the sea…which has always been mine…
was true and present as echo
in his voice,
and his voice in yours.

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2010-04-28T00:00:00-07:00

The Devil's Dictionary

Summer Reading

2010-04-25T21:03:00.000-07:00

In the past around this time of year I’ve posted ridiculously long lists of books that ideally I would like to spend the summer reading. Last summer I got about three books into my list before I started Infinite Jest…the rest of the summer was history. As much as I would like to spend this summer re-reading that book, I think a few more years will have to pass before I can justify that. Meanwhile here are the books I’m really excited about:

Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Repeatedly suggested by a friend. I’m currently seventy pages in but finals are preventing me from getting any further. So far it’s brilliant.

Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity by David Foster Wallace
My first major sojourn into D.F.W.’s non-fiction. Stoked.

Dubliners by James Joyce
Will have to suffice until I can muster the balls to crack Ulysses.

Suttree by Cormac McCarthy
The only one of McCarthy’s ten novels I haven’t read yet. I hear it’s wicked good.

Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book by Walker Percy
I’ve somehow lived over twenty years without knowing about Percy. Reading the preface to this book would have been enough to convince me, even if it didn’t come recommended by a friend.

As you can see, a number of these were referred to me by friends. So if you’re someone whose taste in books I trust (I think you know who you are) I’d appreciate any additional suggestions. This also might end up being the summer I get back to and finish Alan Watts’ The Way of the Zen. (P.S. Yes, I know I still need to read Anna Karenina…we’ll see.)

Fifteen Miles North of Forks

2010-04-20T21:09:00.000-07:00

One of maybe two poems I’ve written in as many months. I’ve been focusing on short-stories (at the insistence of the muses), but for some reason I’m more cautious about publishing them here, maybe because I feel that they’re where my future lies.
This poem comes from my love of Washington's Olympic Peninsula coupled with the good memories I have of the small coastal town of Forks (where I used to vacation with my family, long before Twilight, and where I have since spent memorable time with a good friend). While in Michigan, the piney taste of gin coupled with Pablo Neruda’s poems about the sea have had to suffice in lieu of actual pines and ocean.

Humid pines prickle and fidget
against the breeze sweeping
crows’ black husks
to the power lines’ edge.

Crickets shuck themselves in the second-
growth logging swath wildflowers,
invisible as heat around stumps old
and naked and white-hot as driftwood.

A rabbit the color of dust tosses
itself away from the road’s white-
stitched seam, under a sky
sky-blue above the itchy pines.

On a Ferry Leaving Seattle [Revisited]

2010-04-20T21:04:00.000-07:00

This made it into the (rather shitty, this semester) Hillsdale student literary publication, the Tower Light. Although I enjoy a lot of the metaphors and similes I used in this piece, I’m not over-joyed with it, mainly because I feel I should have used a simpler form (e.g. not force single sentences to span entire stanzas). But it is what it is...until I decide to revisit it again.

Chalked horizon,
polluted by the perfection
of occasional clouds,
cups the geometry of a sail-boat’s
honed double-triangle
and a conic, slumping buoy.

Ribbon of fog-glazed shore
shoulders the purposeful weight of the sea
where needles of old piers
knit small bays
to hills combed with pines.

Except for the wake, rough with bubbles
like lines of old shaving cream,
the ponderous vessel could be
circumscribing a dusty blackboard.

Less like moving in a cloud
then traveling the interior of a pearl:
everything white or trying to be.

Large waves crack smiles smacking
of a china cup’s enameled crinkle.

The smell of rain drowning pacific salt.

Antichrist

2010-04-17T22:03:00.000-07:00

It seems every critic has the same reaction to Antichrist that the three friends I watched it with did: “It was definitely a well-made movie, but it went unnecessarily over the top just to provoke a reaction.”
I’m tempted to leave those critical reviews lie, since I don’t see what’s inherently wrong with such an assertion, after all the purpose of art is to provoke responses in the audience. But since I understand what the critics and my friends actually mean when they say that, I feel the need to present the contrary view. What is meant is that Lars von Trier crossed the line with his depictions of sex and violence (which are admittedly by far the most hard core I have ever seen), and did so simply to shock audiences and so create hype for the film. I, of course, disagree.
I don’t think it is possible to make the case from von Trier’s work that he is a gratuitous, shock-seeking director. If and when the next installment of the Hostel franchise comes to theaters painfully near to you, there’ll be no question about what its intended value is: shock induced by giving audiences visuals of the most horrific torture sequences Eli Roth can dream up. You’ll know this because Roth has a reputation (and obvious goal) with the previous films in the Hostel saga. Although Antichrist isn’t part of a series, the body of a director’s work still reveals the filmmaker’s overall goals, and von Trier is no exception. Although I’m no expert—and have sadly only seen a few of his movies (most notably Dogville and Dancer in the Dark)—von Trier’s M.O. seems to be to present unconventional situations through unconventional film mediums (a filmed stage play in the case of Dogville, a musical in the case of Dancer in the Dark, a chaptered layout [complete with prologue and epilogue] in the case of Antichrist), and yet hand his audiences devastatingly intrusive (and often complex) personal questions about what it means to be human, social, happy, American, grieving etc. Antichrist is not—as Danish critic Claus Christensen said—“a master director’s failed work.” There is nothing here that departs from von Trier’s unstated (but obvious) goals as a director. To say he is merely trying to shock audiences is to not only to take the easy wait out, but also means devaluing or ignoring a career of unprecedentedly brilliant movies, of which Antichrist is the most recent installment.
Those who criticize Antichrist don’t just show an ignorance of von Trier’s work in general, but shallowly fail to grasp (or at least fail to address) the beautiful symbolism and flawlessly consistent story that is the movie. Once one glimpses (and glimpse is all I have been able to do, because when it comes to movies like Antichrist I don’t know what I don’t know and all but the most obvious symbols and metaphors slip past me) the depth of rich meaning this movie has and tries to impart, the incidents of sex and violence (and sexual violence [and the emotions that must follow from such graphic portrayals]) fall into place as calculated to drive the story and function as its important elements. The movie is about sex, so of course graphic sexual events will figure prominently. Such scenes are the furthest they could possibly be from random or uncalculated.
The most common objection to such scenes—and one I’ve heard all my life of milder movies—is “we all know what’s going on [e.g. when two people are in bed], it doesn’t have to be so graphically portrayed.” A blanket statement like that is completely useless as far as paradigm setting. The nature of portrayals of things like violence and sex is completely contingent upon the work of art that gives them context. In some movies (e.g. some moments in No Country for Old Men) violence that occurs off screen is more chilling than any of the portrayed carnage, but that is not necessarily always the case. Antichrist is a commentary on the connections between sin and spirituality and such things as male and female sexuality/sexual expression/roles/psyche/dominance (hence the accusations that the film wallows in misogyny). Human genitalia are the point of this movie, and whenever they’re onscreen you can be damn sure something really important is happening. I also suspect that von Trier is making a parallel and related point about the boundaries audiences are or are not willing to cross in what they watch (see Funny Games).
Antichrist doesn’t deserve the kind of review I’ve written. No one should have to defend such an obviously brilliant movie. It deserves a book or at least a good article dedicated to exploring its themes and symbolism, as well as the relationship von Trier’s crippling depression had to the film. Unfortunately I’m not qualified to write such a piece, so I’ll be content to say that while I loved the movie and will add it to my film collection at the earliest opportunity, I can only think of perhaps three out of all my friends that I will recommend it to.

Bourbon

2010-04-07T18:19:00.000-07:00

from Walker Percy’s brief and excellent essay comes a quote on health versus aesthetic…

What, after all, is the use of not having cancer, cirrhosis, and such, if a man comes home from work every day at five-thirty to the exurbs of Montclair or Memphis and there is the grass growing and the little family looking not quite at him but just past the side of his head, and there’s Cronkite on the tube and the smell of pot roast in the living room, and inside the house and outside in the pretty exurb has settled the noxious particles and the sadness of the old dying Western world, and him thinking: “Jesus, is this it? Listening to Cronkite and the grass growing?”

…and a delicious-sounding Mint Julep recipe

Put half an inch of sugar in the bottom of the glass and merely dampen it with water. Next, very quickly—and here is the trick in the procedure—crush your ice, actually powder it, preferably with a wooden mallet, so quickly that it remains dry, and, slipping two sprigs of fresh mint against the inside of the glass, cram the ice in right to the brim, packing it with your hand. Finally, fill the glass, which apparently has no room left for anything else, with Bourbon, the older the better, and grate a bit of nutmeg on the top. The glass will frost immediately. Then settle back in your chair for half an hour of cumulative bliss.

"The Catcher in the Rye" Bugged Hell Out of Me

2010-04-04T11:01:00.000-07:00

In honor of Salinger’s recent bucket kicking. See also The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs.

I hate this book. I really do. I mean that. The stupid bastard is just a moron. He just sits there and shoots the bull, for Chrissake. I just read it for the Hell of it. Most of the people in my family are smart, if you want to know the truth, they read good books. I don’t. I really don’t. I mean, I read some good books, I really do. But I mostly read books like this one that this moron wrote. I don’t like to read books like that, I like really good books, I don’t like books with phonies in them, those books just kill me. This guy who wrote this book just shot the bull. I think he was a phony and all. I mean that. It’s not that it was bad, exactly. What it is was, it was a book where he just shot the bull, that’s all. I hate stuff like that. It makes me so depressed. It really does. It bugs Hell out of me. I mean that. I guess I wasn’t in the mood for it. You really have to be in the right mood for stuff like that. I know it doesn’t matter, but it makes me really depressed.

Why I Don't Go to Church

2010-04-04T10:46:00.000-07:00

When I got to college and stopped going to church Christians around me and back home gave me disapproving glances (which I still get, hence this post). My main excuse initially was that Sunday was one of my two days to sleep in. (I would like to make it clear that I still view this as a totally valid excuse: in the Christian tradition Sunday is a day of rest, made for man not man for it. I think, of any day of the week, it is the one day we should not be required to get up early for any reason.)
Since I can always listen to sermons online (and better sermons than I would hear in church), the only really meaningful argument I have heard as to why I should go to church is that it is a place for believers to fellowship. This assertion seems biblically based, since Christians are instructed not to forsake fellowshipping with one another, but the New Testament model of fellowship looks a hell of a lot different from ours. The early Christians never went to church. They met in homes, informally, in the evenings and around meals. They had no pastors and took turns sharing. They read the (as yet un-canonized) letters of Paul as well as the Old Testament.
If you can’t meet believers anywhere else, you should definitely go to church. Once you meet believers there you should start meeting those same believers elsewhere (in your home, in their homes, at coffee shops) and stop going to church. When I got to college I had the good fortune to meet believers outside of church, and I don’t go to church now because I fellowship with these believers almost every single day. My friends of all denominations are well-equipped to interact with me of matters of faith. They are the kind of intellectually rigorous folks whom I have rarely met inside church doors. The increasing load of questions and doubts I’ve had about scripture and God can be addressed by what amounts to a panel of friends comprised of Protestants and Catholics able to cite poetry and philosophy as well as the Bible and the church fathers.
Since I was little I’ve gone to church to hear sermons about how “church is not a building, it’s a community of believers.” It’s become pretty obvious to me that the pastors preaching those sermons and the congregations listening to them don’t believe that at all, because now that I treat that statement like it’s true I take shit for it.

The Midwest

2010-03-25T20:29:00.001-07:00

[a rapidly-typed and lightly edited short story or short story fragment which I fear smacks too much of David Foster Wallace (who’s novel The Broom of the System I have been reading, hence the epigraph), but which proves I am have not wholly abandoned the idea of posting my longer and (in my opinion) better work online (although my increasing fears about theft of my work may lead me, in the near future, to lock my blog down and make it visible only upon request [which I am reluctant to do lest I lose readership])]

“Both in the middle and on the fringe. The physical heart, and the cultural extremity. Corn, a steadily waning complex of heavy industry, and sports.”
—The Broom of the System
David Foster Wallace

In Ohio you can watch your dog running away for like a day it’s so flat.
—classmate of mine in an English seminar in college in Michigan

Welcome to the Midwest—Beer Belly of America
—title of a March 9, 2010 post on the Chicago Sun-Times blog Shiny Objects

Dray, Wisconsin is populated with 3,312 hybrids of soul and body [almost all of whom lean heavily toward the body side of things], according the painful exactitude of Wikipedia, the same source where you can find out that Leinenkugel beers—brewed and bottled in nearby Chippewa Falls—are locally referred to as Leinies, something I can personally attest to be absolute [insert either “horse” or “bull” or even more unconventional animal, the unconventionality of which would probably add psychological weight to the utter absurdity of the statement that Leinenkugels are known locally as Leinies] shit.
The town was founded by Eleazar Drey, Jew, failed 19th century New York poet, amateur geneticist, researcher of American Indian folklore and firm believer therein, who while heading west came to believe [due to some odd combination of mistranslated Indian myth, Freudian regurgitation of erroneously recalled and subconsciously drained (as in, drained by his subconscious when he wasn’t aware, like someone drinking your last Leinenkugel without your permission but leaving the empty bottle) memories of the Joseph Smith story, and probably equally Freudianly-fucked up and equally subconsciously reverse peristalsized impressions from his boyhood synagogue] that God [or someone along those lines] was going to return here, to this spot in Wisconsin, sometime during Drey’s lifetime.
As the years wore on and God failed to return and Drey’s congregation [mainly comprised of poor locals, pioneers who ran out of money, and a few “sanctified” Indians] grew increasingly inbred, Drey himself switched obsessions and maniacally undertook the breeding and genetic “enhancement” [ha!] of the Populus deltoids [Eastern Cottonwood]. He succeeded in breeding what is now locally referred to [although there’s no way in hell you’ll find this on Wikipedia] as a Denimwood, an extremely hardy and resistant strain of ye olde Populus deltoids, who’s “cotton” is pale blue in color. Due to the fire that claimed Drey’s life and home, his notebooks [being an 1800s man he was naturally in possession of not a few “notebooks”] have vanished [with one exception]. Had they ever been discovered it would no doubt become clear to the people of Dray [and the world] exactly what linked, in Drey’s mind, the breeding of cottonwoods and the arrival of God. [It is my view that the two were inviolately un-linked, and that Drey undertook the breeding of the trees solely in order to have an excuse to spend years locked away in a greenhouse away from his increasingly impatient and increasingly retarded (never a good combination) followers (and quite possibly also to divert his own mind from misunderstood or erroneous prophecy)]. All that to say, if the Midwest is the beer belly of this great land, and the forests of Wisconsin are its inaptly named happy trail, then Dray in August is undoubtedly the sweaty, denim-colored-lint-collecting belly button.
The silver-screen worthy crowd of mentally/physically handicapped religious fanatics who encamped [in exponentially deteriorating modes of primitive dwelling, with horrific implements that chagrin-inducingly blurred the line between “tool” and “weapon”] around Drey’s home, expired quite soon after he did [in said mysterious (though supposedly [and ironically] lightning-induced fire)], and left the area bare-ass desolate except for the charred remains of Drey’s home [which, being the most civilized structure around, even its ashes remained visible longer than pretty much anything else nearby], and the heat-warped but unbroken and ash-abutting greenhouse.
The area was re-discovered some sixty years later by a weary/illiterate immigrant/pioneer of German extraction. This individual came upon the greenhouse and found within [the door to the greenhouse remained operable, despite the fact that the fire had made of the structure something that basically resembled a ribbed bubble], a notebook of Dreyian verse [which had survived not only the fire, but his New York days of editorial rejection]. This book, accompanied by the completely-out-of-context greenhouse which [I’ve already said, though not in so many words] looked like a sphere sunk partway into the ground, and the quite obviously un-human bones scattered about, prompted the illiterate [this “second founder” was so illiterate he never even communicated his name to anyone in a meaningful-enough way to have it written down and remembered] to have a “spiritual” revelation. Obviously [to him] the embedded sphere was of the same class of flying object as those viewed by Ezekiel. Illiterate immigrants having been, at that time, broadly trained in the use of the Bible and not much else, including their brains, the man deduced that the biblically-associated “wheel” or “chariot” had crashed to earth and the celestial beings riding within had disembarked, only to rapidly meet with some inexplicable end. The burned and scarred rocks scattered around seemed to bear out this theory, which meant [of course] that the book in the lowly immigrants’ hands was some kind of holy book or new revelation, which the angels had presumably been rushing to the publisher when their flaming chariot crashed.
Drey was, at this point in its history, in danger of becoming a haven for the religiously unstable once again. Fortunately, the world had advanced to a sufficient degree that those seeking scientific [as well as those seeking spiritual] enlightenment were attracted by the tripartite mystery of the glass sphere, the blue cottonwoods, and the distended bones. The immigrant can be thanked, however, for [well, of course for discovering the spot, without which there would be no town, so actually never mind] founding the Church of the Dregian Revelation [the almost homonimal relationship between “Dregian” and “dragon” has—at various times throughout the town’s history—sparked fundamentalist Christians with apocalyptic specialties to mistrust the Church to the point of wishing it egregious harm], for being the original misspeller of the town’s name, and for [inadvertently] bringing the spot to scientific attention. [The town has yielded some surprisingly interesting scientific results related to possibilities within cottonwood and human gene pools, and has become something of a pilgrimage destination for young, recently married acolytes of the Church of the Doctoral Thesis].
The final point of dubious value/interest to anyone not born in Dray [and some who were/are] is the inspiration the founder’s Christian [haha, because he was a Jew] name [which means “God is my help”] lent to the town’s motto, which is hand painted below the Welcome To sign on the highway: God Help Us.

2010-03-21T16:13:00.000-07:00

Simony

2010-03-16T19:56:00.000-07:00

For the past few weeks Parsimony, David Troupes’ book of poetry, has been keeping me company in the fifty minutes between English 102 and Intro to Philosophy. Probably lacking a little polish in places (both in form and phraseology), it’s overall a great read, mostly because of his semi-regular use of astoundingly evocative phrases. e.g.

No. Not many paths up the same mountain.
A hundred
mountains. Ten
thousand

paths. And each with its final
meal, its sip of cloud, its savor of ozone,
its clean
crumb of wind.

other excerpts
other poetry-esque bits

People are most important when you take them for granted

2010-03-14T22:11:00.001-07:00

to a small handful of people
you know who you are

“Someone you get sober with is like someone you were in Vietnam with.”
—Mary Karr (about David Foster Wallace)

People are most important when you take them for granted. When the room is dark for the movie and you can’t see them on the other couch. When you feel like it isn’t the end of the world whether they are in the car with you or not—or at the restaurant with you or not—because of course you have other friends there too. When it’s standard for them to be between your arms for an afternoon or an evening or a night.
You never really love someone you’re not used to. And when they’re gone you don’t miss big events like road trips or great sex or gourmet dinners.
When they’re gone you miss little shit like
Them dicking around on their guitar. The two of you tying your shoes together to go out. Knowing they’re thinking the same thing you are about how damn-ass fucking cold it is out here and why the fuck won’t this lighter work.
They’re someone to eat oranges and watch South Park with. They’re someone you don’t have to ask to read your poetry, because they want to. They’re someone you can borrow laundry money from. Someone who makes fun of you for doing a shitty job parallel parking. Someone who you already know what they think about politics and religion and relationships. Someone who makes fun of the way you laugh. Someone to sleep in the same room with for a few months or most of your life.
There’re always people to get drunk with, the person you’re hungover with is the important one.

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2010-03-14T00:00:00-08:00

The Complete Works of Taylor Swift

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2010-03-10T00:00:00-08:00

Burdens of Broken Souls Diminish Under Grandeur on Flickr

The Pale King

2010-03-08T12:41:00.000-08:00

I’m continuing to have mixed feelings about the publishing of David Foster Wallace’s third—incomplete at the time of his suicide—novel. Allegedly the novel is about boredom, though this is no doubt as great an oversimplification as it would be to say Wallace’s 1,000+ page Infinite Jest is about drugs or depression or tennis or entertainment. Despite my reluctance to acknowledge a book that I can’t believe Wallace would have wanted published in its current form, I am planning on reading it and have been prowling around the internet searching for a release date. The best I’ve been able to come up with has been a handful of 2009 articles that say the book will be released “next year,” a few intriguing excerpts, and the following quote written by Wallace somewhere on or around the original manuscript, which seems to explain something of his intentions:

“Bliss—a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.”

These Two Quotes Should Be the Epigraph to Something (Like an Autobiography or Ye Olde Semi-Autobiographical-First-Novel)

2010-02-28T14:01:00.000-08:00

“Now, then, what can a decent man talk about with the greatest pleasure?
Answer: about himself.
Well, then, I too will talk about myself.”
—Notes from Underground
Fyodor Dostoevsky

“I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.”
—Walden
Henry David Thoreau

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2010-02-24T00:00:00-08:00

INFINITE JEST

2010-02-18T16:35:00.000-08:00

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2010-02-18T00:00:00-08:00

List of colors - Wikipedia

Top Ten Google Suggestions for "How Do I"

2010-02-16T13:12:00.000-08:00

Hickey

2010-02-16T13:02:00.000-08:00

Proof I love
more than myself,
since in a mirror
I can only kiss my lips?

Or something binding,
related to property or will:
my signature
at the bottom of your throat?

The Camel

2010-02-07T11:34:00.000-08:00

(a re-done/better version of this guy)

Small liquid blue
on the chalk
sky, wavering tiny
as a mirage’s corner

and beginning to
sink, mammoth-like,
in a black nest
of heady tar.

I Like You

2010-01-24T17:46:00.000-08:00

I like the way you take the little, white, crimped and scalloped crescent of Orbit out of your mouth and set it in the ashes so it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the ash-tray you keep here, and I like the shape of your taut breast as you stretch out your arm in front of the lamp when you set the gum aside. I like that you chew it almost noiselessly and try to keep your jaws from moving and don’t want to make a big deal about this. I like that you asked me once if it covered up the taste of the cigarettes, and I like that I didn’t need to lie to you.
I like that you eat brie and get your vegetables at a local farm and know how to cook organic spices, but are allergic to alcohol and drink diet Pepsi with everything.
I like how you get out of breath during sex because you smoke too much.
I like your hair in the places you let it grow.
I like that you journal.
I don’t like your untidy bathroom or the tattoo on your hip or the picture of you and your fiancé on Facebook.

Chapter VII

2010-01-08T14:30:00.000-08:00

from Hemingway’s In Our Time

While the bombardment was knocking the trench to pieces at Fossalta, he lay very flat and sweated and prayed oh jesus christ get me out of here. Dear jesus please get me out. Christ please please please christ. If you’ll only keep me from getting killed I’ll do anything you say. I believe in you and I’ll tell every one in the world that you are the only one that matters. Please please dear jesus. The shelling moved further up the line. We went to work on the trench and in the morning the sun came up and the day was hot and muggy and cheerful and quiet. The next night back at Mestre he did not tell the girl he went upstairs with at the Villa Rossa about Jesus. And he never told anybody.

A Serious Man

2009-12-26T16:46:00.000-08:00

Like all good storytellers, the Coen Brothers can not only tell a variety of different stories, but are adept at using distinctly appropriate styles for each. The words “stark,” “raw” and “real” have been overused by those describing their 2007 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, but with good reason: the movie fits those adjectives.
A Serious Man is a different story told in a completely different way. The movie is slightly awkward, painfully (and—in true Coen style—sometimes darkly) humorous, and surprisingly relatable.
The best comparison I can think of is to the work of David Foster Wallace—this film reminded me of something he would write. As a result, those not acquainted or comfortable with post-modern storytelling may be pissed and confused at the end of this movie. I left it completely satisfied. A Serious Man is definitely the best film I’ve seen this year.

East of Eden

2009-12-15T15:08:00.000-08:00

I fell in love with Steinbeck when I read Of Mice and Men in high school and cried like a baby afterward. Since then I’ve read his The Moon is Down, In Dubious Battle, Travels with Charley and Burning Bright. East of Eden is the most recent novel I read, after hearing that it was utterly amazing. While I was carrying it around campus people would see me with it and remark how much they love it. To be honest, I find myself both disappointed in this work specifically, and increasingly weary of Steinbeck in general.
My first hint of dissatisfaction with him came when I read Travels with Charley over the summer. That book is far too short to do justice to the author’s journey across America, and my most common complaint was that Steinbeck tried to look at and describe situations and trends instead of individual people and occurrences. Even a sweeping description of a city is too broad. The same is true in East of Eden.
Steinbeck is capable of good character development (and he had his work cut out for him in this novel, which spans three generations and several families), but he too often tries to boil his characters down to some bland essence. Caleb alone is complex and multifaceted, and Abra is the only one who surprised me. For the rest of the characters, Steinbeck endlessly repeats flat descriptions (Aron is always “good,” Samuel is always “joyful and dreaming,” Cathy is always “missing something”).
I hesitate to accuse such an esteemed author of indulging in the melodramatic, but I was disappointed to find sporadic lapses into same throughout the book. Even more common is stilted dialogue that feels intensely unrealistic. There’s breadth here, but little depth.
I would have to re-read some of his books (Of Mice and Men and The Moon is Down are favorites of mine) in order to find out whether these trends run through all his novels, but I think I would have enjoyed East of Eden exponentially more if Steinbeck had stuck to one of the most basic principles of literature (and life): show, don’t tell.

Jazz Duet

2009-12-14T15:55:00.000-08:00

After receiving some good advice on editing from a senior here on campus, I got this poem published in the Fall 2009 issue of Tower Light, Hillsdale’s student literary magazine. (original)

The maestro washes his hands in the piano
(like Pontius Pilate)
where the keys are soft bars of white soap
white bars of soft soap
soap bars of soft white
are beveled slim fingers of black chocolate.

A man dances with a saxophone,
his fingers tangled along its shining loop,
making it say things rhyming with orange
that fill the wine glasses,
spilling something new
into Screwdriver ice.

Somewhere a drum ticks softly.
A cymbal rustles like a mouse in the wall.
The men’s shoes are all careful black mirrors.
The sax cat-calls to the sparkling women
who wear languid rings
on their slow fingers.

Chapter 12

2009-12-08T19:40:00.000-08:00

from Steinbeck’s East of Eden

You can see how this book has reached a great boundary that was called 1900. Another hundred years were ground up and churned, and what had happened was all muddied by the way folks wanted it to be—more rich and meaningful the farther back it was. In the books of some memories it was the best time that ever sloshed over the world—the old time, the gay time, sweet and simple, as though time were young and fearless. Old men who didn’t know whether they were going to stagger over the boundary of the century looked forward to it with distaste. For the world was changing, and sweetness gone, and virtue too. Worry had crept on a corroding world, and what was lost—good manners, ease and beauty? Ladies were not ladies any more, and you couldn’t trust a gentleman’s word.
There was a time when people kept their fly buttons fastened. And man’s freedom was boiling off. And even childhood was no good any more—not the way it was. No worry then but how to find a good stone, not round exactly but flattened and water-shaped, to use in a sling pouch cut from a discarded shoe. Where did all the good stones go, and all the simplicity?
A man’s mind vagued up a little, for how can you remember the feel of pleasure or pain of choking emotion? You can remember only that you had them. An elder man might truly recall through water the delicate doctor-testing of little girls, but such a man forgets, and wants to, the acid emotion eating at the spleen so that a boy had to put his face flat down in the young wild oats and drum his fists against the ground and sob “Christ! Christ!” Such a man might say, and did, “What’s that damned kid lying out there in the grass for? He’ll catch a cold.”
Oh, strawberries don’t taste as they used to and the thighs of women have lost their clutch!
And some men eased themselves like setting hens into the nest of death.
History was secreted in the glands of a million historians. We must get out of this banged-up century, some said, out of this cheating, murderous century of riot and secret death, of scrabbling for public lands and damn well getting them by any means at all.
Think back, recall our little nation fringing the oceans, torn with complexities, too big for its britches. Just got going when the British took us on again. We beat them, but it didn’t do us much good. What we had was a burned White House and ten thousand widows on the public pension list.
Then the soldiers went to Mexico and it was a kind of painful picnic. Nobody knows why you go to a picnic to be uncomfortable when it is so easy and pleasant to eat at home. The Mexican War did two good things though. We got a lot of western land, damn near doubled our size, and besides that it was training ground for generals, so that when the sad self-murder settled on us the leaders knew the techniques for making it properly horrible.
And then the arguments:
Can you keep a slave?
Well if you bought him in good faith, why not?
Next they’ll be saying a man can’t have a horse. Who is it wants to take my property?
And there we were, like a man scratching at his own face and bleeding into his own beard.
Well, that was over and we got slowly up off the bloody ground and started westward.
There came boom and bust, bankruptcy, depression.
Great public thieves came along and picked the pockets of everyone who had a pocket.
To hell with that rotten century!
Let’s get it over and the door closed shut on it! Let’s close it like a book and go on reading! New chapter, new life. A man will have clean hands once we get the lid slammed shut on that stinking century. It’s a fair thing ahead. There’s no rot on this clean new hundred years. It’s not stacked, and any bastard who deals seconds from this new deck of years—why, we’ll crucify him head down over a privy.
Oh, but strawberries will never taste so good again and the thighs of women have lost their clutch!