And On "Super Sad True Love Story"

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(originally published in the Rockford Independent Press)

“Shteyngart melds romance and terrifying satire in Super Sad True Love Story”

by BENJAMIN TAYLOR

Having built a reputation as one of the nation’s foremost and sharpest-witted comic satirists in his previous novels The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan, Gary Shteyngart seems an unlikely candidate to author the most frightening novel of the past decade.

Super Sad True Love Story, however, seems a likely candidate for the distinction, though – true to its title – Super Sad True Love Story explores a complex relationship with compassion as it terrifies.

Super Sad True Love Story takes place in a radically-altered America sometime in the 2020s. The dollar has lost practically all its value, and only currency pegged to the Chinese yuan has any value. The US military is bogged down in a military adventure in Venezuela. Secretary of Defense Rubinstein (in an echo perhaps of 1984’s Emmanuel Goldstein) has created a sprawling bureaucracy known as the American Restoration Authority which functions as a sort of secret police. Global corporations pretty much run the show, and they’ve gotten bigger, leading to monstrosities like UnitedContinentalDeltamerican Airlines. The protagonists’ parents flip back and forth between FoxLiberty-Prime and FoxLiberty-Ultra. In other words, it’s pretty fucking bleak.

Even more horrifying, though usually in a comical way, is the manner in which social mores have changed in this new and improved America. Practically everyone, young and old alike, is plugged in constantly to their äppärät – the nightmarish device smart phones have evolved into. Most text-based elements of the world have become obsolete, and people use their äppäräti to”stream,” and to monitor the worthiness of everyone around them. That’s another terrifying element of Super Sad True Love Story – the disappearance of privacy as a concept and social media have reached their logical end, and individuals can be “scanned” to discover practically any personal information, income, credit, “fuckability” and personality, the latter two of which have a point rating system based on others’ opinions. Everyone monitors everyone else at all times. Who needs Big Brother?

And it’s in this world that the reader is introduced to Lenny Abramov, a 39-year old anachronism of sorts – he apologizes on one occasion for still owning books – who works in the Indefinite Life Extension division for a conglomerate. Returning to the United States after a year in Rome, Lenny is desperately in love with Eunice Park, a 24-year old daughter of Korean immigrants he had met in Rome, where she was studying. Lenny – himself a second-generation American and invariably described in reviews as “schlubby” – moves uneasily through this hyper-youth-and-status-oriented world, longing to be a High Net Worth Individual in order to afford the services of his employer to appear younger while mentally quoting Chekhov and reading to Eunice The Unbearable Lightness of Being. He is sweet in a place where men and women in the same room are ranked by hotness, bumbling in his earnest affections in a time when prep schoolers attend “Assertiveness Class.”

At first sight, he’s also a complete mismatch for Eunice, who’s slight and “super-hot,” as one of her friends reminds her several times. She, like most of her generation, has a bad spending habit and a predilection for skimpy clothing. As Lenny notes, she’s also, however, in her own way, damaged goods. She’s at a point many 24-year olds can relate to – done with school, sort of considering law school and halfheartedly looking for work while not really knowing at all what the hell she wants to do. Her relationship with her family is complicated. Her mother is very stereotypically (almost too stereotypically) first-generation Korean – stay-at-home, very religious, and devoted to the strict social values of her homeland, while her father is an alcoholic podiatrist.

Yet the relationship that develops between the two is genuine, and the care Eunice develops for Lenny unaffected. Lenny’s fear of mortality finds solace in Eunice’s youthful vivacity, while Eunice’s detachment and need for affection are overcome by Lenny. To Shteyngart’s great credit, the relationship is as authentically-portrayed as it could be possibly be – certainly no easy task against the backdrop of bombastic satire. The counterpoint the ultimately-doomed love story provides to the decadence and tragedy of fin de siècle America is both bittersweet and poignant.

The stories of Eunice and Lenny, interestingly, are told from the first-person perspective, the two alternating narration in their respective diaries – Lenny, true to form, writing lyrically with pen and paper, Eunice in various posts to friends and family on her GlobalTeens account (the social network of choice) and peppered with the argot of the young and disaffected.

Super Sad True Love Story is sphincter-looseningly terrifying primarily because it does what great satire always does – describe something outrageous in order to illuminate the present. The mindless consumerism, obsession with image, plutocracy, Orwellian media discourse, and reactionary politics that populate Lenny and Eunice’s New York is the world we inhabit, and that will scare the shit out of any thinking person who reads Super Sad True Love Story. The genuine and wistful experience of actual connection between two human beings who had doubted its possibility, however, reminds the reader of the universality of being a piece of thinking, feeling, lonely and longing meat. That’s Shteyngart’s accomplishment in Super Sad True Love Story, and it’s a significant one.

Some Thoughts on 80s "bad-boys" Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney

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“The Californication version of American literary history”

(Originally published in the Rockford Independent Press)

By BENJAMIN TAYLOR

So I’m normally going to use this space to highlight the amazing work our stellar crop of contemporary fictionists do, and will do so again in the next issue. Lately, however – and pursuant to a personal project – I’ve found myself lingering lovingly on the age-20ish works of Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis. And I will readily admit, I loathe Ellis with a passion verging on mania, but Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction are undeniably magnetic and – at least to this 20something born in the 80s – represent my impression of the decade better than anything John Hughes ever filmed (though may he RIP). Pretty sure only Heathers even comes close.

And Bright Lights, Big City remains the novel Hunter S. Thompson would have written had he not burned himself out and had he been U-30 in the 80s. Precise, evocative, frankly brilliant writing that just captures everything it must have been to have been young in New York in that era. And yes, I freely admit to romanticizing the idea of the drug-addled, promiscuous, quite insane writer wreaking havoc on him/herself and everyone he/she knows. But Bright Lights, Big City is authentically brilliant.

McInerney I only encountered a couple years ago, working at an indie outside of Boston when he published his (too-soon) retrospective short story collection How It Ended. Picking that book up and reading about the unnamed narrator (whom it is safe to assume, is Jay McInerney) in the story “It’s 6 A.M. Do You Know Where You Are?” – the first and best-penned chapter of Bright Lights, Big City – was akin to being 17 and randomly coming across Fear and Loathing and Bob Dylan. Just electric.

Less Than Zero offers a similar experience – one of those novels you come across at a certain age and think to yourself “holy shit, I didn’t know you could do this with fiction.” Yet where McInerney’s characters – in the purview of Bright Lights, Big City for the purpose of this column, but I think applicable to his characters broadly – are tragically flawed in the Hank Moody sense, where you pretend to avert your eyes from the trainwreck, yet sympathize deeply with the flaw part, Ellis’s are just nihilistic in the most straightforward definition possible.

Clay, the narrator of Less Than Zero, is an unmitigated ass. His attitude toward copious quantities of coke – similar to the narrator of Bright Lights, Big City – is, to keep it understated, liberal, and his attitude toward women is that they’re walking holes into which he will do everything in his power to insert himself. For McInerney, the desire to fuck anything that moves is no different – yet the narrator of Bright Lights, Big City feels deeply the loss of Amanda. He recognizes that he fucked things up, but actually feels. Clay’s attitude toward Blair, for instance, is that she has a vagina.

This is an extremely important distinction between Ellis and McInerney, and illustrates how thin the line between asshole with a pen and “bad-boy” writer is. McInerney deals with actual people, flawed to the extreme, yes, but believable, and people with whom even the casual reader can identify with in some sense. There’s a sense of universality about his work, which resonates – yes, the 80s are over, and to quote Eric Stoltz as Lance, “coke is fucking dead as… dead,” but the damaged fuck-up capable of real emotion is a character who’s been with us since Odysseus. Ellis’s characters are familiar as well, just never that interesting. Yes they’re “depraved,” but with reference to an era most of us are unfamiliar with, and are unimpressed by. They fuck, snort, use each other, blow cash on blow, etc. etc. etc. It just isn’t compelling once the shock value becomes dated.

I mentioned Hunter S. Thompson earlier and for a reason – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a book that centers on extreme drug use and otherwise insane behaviors, but is a book about the end of an era. The peak of Thompson’s writing – in that book, any others, and any article with the possible exception of the Derby piece – comes in the passage where he’s sitting at his typewriter, thinking about San Francisco and the 60s – “that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...” McInerney perfectly captures that elegiac lost idealism; all Ellis can do is wank off about his fantasized version of it. With Ellis, there’s no passion, because there’s no belief in anything but the pleasure of the moment. And no, it’s not ironic – he’s made quite a successful career out of nihilism. His recent sequel to Less Than Zero, Imperial Bedrooms, just reconfirms that. Yes, the few-standard-deviations-from-your-typical-Midwestern-family behavior is a draw, but Thompson and McInerney get at the human being shit. Ellis, I’m sure, fancies himself quite an aficionado of assholes – the human shit, though? Negatory.

While Armageddon Rages

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A stop on the deck with some basil-infused lemonade, some tuna ceviche, and a good read (Henderson the Rain King in this case) on a golden summer day redeem so much. Rockford, Ill. takes its fair share of shit (much of it deserved), but on a perfect July day, this is the most perfect place in the world to be outside.

On The Bright Side

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I've read David Foster Wallace, Dostoevsky, Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, Pynchon (enough to get a commemorative tattoo), Barthelme; I've listened to Sonic Youth, Broken Social Scene, and Bob Dylan live -- I've had the fortune to hear stunning albums by Arcade Fire, Bon Iver, and gems by The Smiths, Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd. Seen works by Jaspers, Rauschenberg, Twombly, Richter. Brilliant films from everyone from David Simon to the Coen brothers. We live in an era of extreme riches. I wish I could honor it as it's due, but as aforementioned, time constrains that ambition.

Juliana Richer Daily

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Belatedly posted, but here's the transcript of an interview I had recently with one of my favorite musical artists out there, and one who's destined for big things, Juliana Richer Daily. Check her music out, because she's that good. Originally published in the Rockford Independent Press.

This is a relatively faithful transcript of a phone interview with the extremely talented Juliana Richer Daily, 22, conducted by the Rockford Independent Press’s Benjamin Taylor, who is not a musician in the least. Daily is a graduate student at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. Her work is available on iTunes, amazon.com, and at her website, julianaricherdaily.com

Q: When/how did you get started?

I’ve been playing piano since I was four, I just started playing. I did that for 11 years, did the whole Mozart/Chopin classical business. I had a guitar in high school, but I only got as far as really basic chords and easy songs to play. I went abroad my junior year in college to Copenhagen, brought a guitar with me, had a lot of extra time, and just started playing. I love music period and just made the effort to learn how to play guitar. I’m not an expert – I can’t shred or anything – I picked it up as a means of accompanying myself while I sing. I took to it, had a blast with it, and started writing my own material.

As far as singing goes, I’ve always liked singing to myself, but I’ve never had any voice lessons – in high school I was never that into music, I wasn’t in chorus or in band – I was more into painting and visual art. I’ve always been sort of shy about singing – I started playing open mikes at Cornell, and when I got back from being abroad, I started playing more live, and it was just sort of a personal thing, but once I started performing, I just loved it. My voice is the only instrument I have actual control over – the guitar is just sort of a sidekick.

Q: Who are your most important influences? Like the artists/songs who gave you that “holy shit” moment?

I listened to a lot of my parents’ music – Joni Mitchell, Dylan. I love Josh Ritter and dream about being the female equivalent of his sound – I really like Florence and the Machine and that kind of folky sound. I want to marry the music I listen to into something fuller that says something. I’m kind of struggling with what direction to go from here, actually – songwriting is kind of difficult for me, it kind of comes out in fits and spurts – once I can work with a band and other musicians who can help pull my vision out of me, I think my sound will work out.

Q: Touring – what are your intentions?

I played here in Ithaca and in the city a few times. I don’t have a definite plan, but I’m definitely going to head down to New York for a few years, and get a “real job.” I have these two degrees I want to make good on – if the music thing doesn’t work out, I’d like to have a career path to fall back on. I’m definitely going to take the music thing seriously when I’m down there. I have a couple friends who have some studio space, and are involved in production. So ideally for a year or two, I’ll hold down the real job and do music on the side until it works out, hopefully. And I don’t want it to be on the side – my biggest fear is that it’ll be a hobby. Just trying to take a realistic approach. I really want to try and do this for real, I’ll be kicking myself for the rest of my life if I don’t make a real effort to do this. I want to travel and play, and I know it doesn’t happen overnight, but it’s what I want most to do.

Q: What are you listening to now? Your covers range pretty far, from Dylan to Jeff Buckley to Dr. Dre/Bruno Mars. What’s the best show you’ve caught of late?

In the last month and a half, I’ve been listening to a lot of new albums that have dropped lately. So many good albums -- The new Fleet Foxes [Helplessness Blues] and Bon Iver [Self-Titled]. The new Cults album [self-titled].

Josh Ritter, Mumford & Sons – just to mention two I have on heavy rotation. I listen to a pretty broad spectrum of music and musicians.

As far as the best show recently, I’ve been working so much on this thesis that I haven’t caught as many as I’d like. I caught the Flaming Lips here, and they were pretty epic. I have plans to go to the Newport Folk Festival again, but it’s close to my thesis deadline, so unfortunately, whether or not I make it down will depend on where the thesis is at.

Q: So the music industry – like pretty much every creative endeavor – has changed a shit ton in the past even five years. You’ve been on top of this through your YouTube videos (how I came across your work), twitter, myspace, etc. How do you think this new landscape affects up and coming artists like yourself? Where do you think the music industry is going and how does it change things for young artists like yourself?

I think that it’s really cool that anyone in the world who has an internet connection and a means to record has access to an audience. I think it’s an amazing thing that you don’t need to have corporate production pumping money into your project to get an audience – anyone who can record can make a name for themselves. You can listen to the brainchild of any musician out there – anyone and everyone who wants to try and make it can try and make it. On the other hand, you’re competing with hundreds of thousands of musicians out there -- you’re one more of any other artists out there.

Yet from a listener’s perspective, it’s amazing – I can listen to any number of artists out there and watch their journey. I just celebrated my two-year anniversary on YouTube, and it’s funny to see how I’ve grown as an artist since then. The landscape is an interesting animal to wrestle with. As far as exposure goes, it’s great – that’s why I give my covers out for free – it’s an awesome gateway to get my music out there.

There’s no end to exploring concepts and developing as a musician – that’s my favorite thing about music – it evolves all the time. The musician I am now will likely not be the musician I am a year from now.

Q: Word – how do you feel about someone like Rebecca Black blowing up in the “YouTube era” when a much more talented singer like yourself doesn’t have that kind of instant exposure?

As far as someone like Rebecca Black goes – it’s a little frustrating, but I’m not trying to aspire to that kind of thing. YouTube is by no means grassroots, I like that this has been a growing experience, and my listeners have gotten to get to know me, and there’s not one video that’s blown up. I don’t know that my music is ready to be heard at that level. Personally, I have a lot of growing to do as an artist, I’m glad this journey has been a gradual thing.

On one level, it’s a bit frustrating, but at the same time, it’s part of the experience to let it take shape, and to let my listeners get to know me. I know as a listener, we all like to be part of the discovery of an artist. So the Rebecca Black thing just isn’t where I want to be.

Q: Band? On your last post on your website you mentioned looking for a band/moving away somewhat from acoustic – where do you see yourself going?

Getting a band together at Cornell is tough – people are so busy, and during breaks people scatter, and after graduation it’s even harder. It never really took shape here, and I’m still figuring out music and just wasn’t ready. I don’t really know what direction I’m going to go in artistically – those tracks were my first real stab at songwriting. I know I have some work to do as a writer, and I definitely think I want to have a much fuller sound.

Q: LP?

I’ll be releasing another EP later this year. I’m working with a European production company and pressing a vinyl collection of 3 EPs. I didn’t have any physicals released of my work, so I’m excited.

Frankly though, I want to release this stuff and move on from it. As I said, these tracks were my first foray into songwriting, but it’s not the end all and be all of where I want to be as a musician – I’d like to move on and explore different things. I don’t know that any of the songs I have out right now will come together as a full album – I didn’t write them with an album concept in mind.

I absolutely love when albums tell a story as an album, and it grows with you as you listen. Each album can tell a different story, there’s a rise and fall and movement in them. There’s something great and unique about sitting down and exploring an entire album, and you can get a full sense of where the artist is going. There’s definitely merit to having some standout singles, but I love to sit down and listen to an entire album. Letting yourself just hang out with that music I love.

Q: How’s your injury healing? [Daily suffered a fractured spine in January 2011 as a result of a snowboarding accident]

I’m doing all right, I’m not back 100%, but as far as breaking your back goes, I’m doing all right. I’m titanium-reinforced now, which is pretty cool. Doing a lot of swimming, biking. I’m grateful the accident didn’t turn out a different way.

Ben: Thanks so much, Juliana!

04.12.12: Way belatedly updated to change "skiboarding," which, as Juliana helpfully informed me does not exist.

This is All Sorts of Awesome

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Maybe since I just tore through this show, but this is amazingly good:

On a Cultural Embarrassment of Riches

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the fact that our current age suffers from an embarrassment of riches in terms of culture -- broadly defined to include everything from food to sport to literature to tv to architecture, et al -- and that it's literally impossible to consume everything worthwhile remains something that infuriates and confuses me. the most gratifying experience short of sex is watching/reading/eating/listening to something that makes you just appreciate how talented its creator is, and to think to yourself "this is fucking good." yet the number of cultural artifacts that elicit that response -- in my mind at least, and perhaps that's a function of maturing, but I think fairly objectively true contemporarily -- seem to keep growing. It's simply not possible to fulfill the cultural obligations to which I feel obliged. I haven't watched Breaking Bad, nor have I read Being and Event, though I feel deeply that I must do both, and I want to. I haven't listened to Lil Wayne or played Call of Duty. I haven't tried to cook a soufflé yet. I know jack shit about wine or spirits (beer, on the other hand, I am well-versed in). These are things I need and want to know about, I just don't know where to find the time. I can barely manage to keep up with literature and politics, my two supposed fields of expertise.

On the one hand, this makes me dizzy with happiness -- I feel so privileged to live in this era, have access to so much information, and to know people who care about their interests and pursue them with passion, skill, patience, and a willingness to learn. On the other hand, it can be overwhelming. On days when I let myself read all the blogs I'd like to read, listen to the music I'd like to listen to, watch the shows I need to catch up on, check out the visual art blogs that represent the artists I whose work I most enjoy, stock up on recipes and restaurant fantasies, there's no time at all to read books, make music, think, write, or cook. It's a conundrum.

There's no point to this post, other than observation, but I'd be interested to hear if anyone else suffers from the sort of anxiety I do at not being able to experience as much cultural excellence as I'd like/need.

Marriage Equality in Illinois

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The past few days have gotten me fired up about this, and with friends I know and friends I haven't met yet, we're going to make marriage equality happen in Illinois. Setting up a website this week, @equalityIL or marriageequalityIL@gmail.com until then. Also at my usual haunts. This is going to happen.

To Kos-ers

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Thanks so much for all the thoughtful comments party people!

On the difference between "same-sex marriage" and "marriage equality"

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This is going to be fairly brief, but I hope raises an important point. There is a substantial difference between referring to yesterday's epic win in New York as a victory for "same-sex marriage" and referring to it as a victory for "marriage equality."

Politics operates around language -- "conservatives" and members of the Republican party typically realize this better than progressives do. Excessive use of scare quotes, I realize, but concepts like the "war on terror," which never was a war and rarely focused on actual radicals intent on committing acts of terrorism was and has been an extremely powerful political concept focused almost entirely on a phrase that captures the imagination in a compelling way. Language games get tricky -- those of us who get physically ill when encountering the concept of "framing" understand this quite well. Yet, as icky as it may be, framing is critically important (even if vaguely Orwellian) when trying to make a political point or to advance an issue through the political process.

There is no actual distinction between "same-sex marriage" and "marriage equality" -- both terms refer to a legislative or judicial removal of the restriction prevalent now in 44 states that prohibits two individuals of the same gender to enact a legal procedure by which they are permanently linked (unless later dissolved) and enjoy the rights and benefits that state allows to two individuals who make that decision. The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), of course, denies those rights and benefits to any same-gender couple federally, regardless of state law.

Yet, there is a distinction -- and an important one -- between those terms. "Same-sex marriage," again, is functionally no different from "marriage equality," yet marriage equality presents the entire point of the LGBT rights movement in its essential form, and in a way "same-sex marriage" doesn't. The point being equality. Same-sex marriage isn't a special right that should be afforded to a defined and differentiated class of individuals. It's the same fundamental and equal right states and the federal government afford to opposite-sex couples willing to accord their relationship a legal status. It's the right to formalize love and commitment. I assume most of us here, and most progressives in general, recognize that gender is entirely incidental when it comes to that point -- marriage being a legal recognition of two individuals' commitment to one another.

So let's call it for what it is -- marriage equality. And civil rights. Words do matter, and this fight -- despite last night's amazing victory -- is far from over. It's only getting started, and as always, the power of bigotry is strong and mobilized. This is a battle worth picking, and language matters.

(Cross-posted at Daily Kos)

Unanticipated Irony...

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My last post was one congratulating (now former) Rep. Anthony Weiner...

Rep. Weiner Gets Righteous on Medicare for All

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Couldn't find a way to embed this, but um. This is exactly how to talk about Medicare and universal health care in general. Well played sir.

About Time

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Knew this would happen eventually (the moral arc of the universe does bend toward justice, after all), but I'm surprised it happened so soon: a majority of Americans favor same-sex marriage with all the rights and privileges accorded to heterosexual married couples. Yes we the fuck can!

Spoils From the Weekend

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Getting rained out of a Cubs game can have its benefits. To wit: I wound up hanging out in Wicker Park with a good friend of mine who -- despite being warned -- allowed me to wander unsupervised in a record store and a used bookstore. Picked up Slanted & Enchanted and Signals, Calls, and Marches on vinyl, and hit the mother lode at Myopic Books (which is one of the best-curated and best-organized used book stores I've ever been in) on N. Milwaukee. Bright Lights, Big City; V.; Falconer (which I've been trying to find cheap for a while now); No Logo; and The Adventures of Augie March -- all of which came to under $30. Very exciting!

Prom Advice from a Second-Grader

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This is all sorts of awesome (h/t sexgenderbody)

New Review Coming Soon

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I'm sort of on deadline for most of today since I sort of left writing this until deadline became a determining factor in daily scheduling since I'm sort of a horrific procrastinator but... I'll be reviewing Jennifer Egan's much-decorated (Pulitzer, National Book Critics' Circle Award, LA Times Fiction Prize) novel A Visit From the Goon Squad. I'll post it up here once it's published.

Next up will be Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife, which I'm really excited to read, especially after reading Charles Simic's glowing review in the NYRB. I'm also insanely jealous of her, but that's another issue for another time.

Note to Self

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Don't plan a trip to Madison on the day of University of Wisconsin's commencement. FML.

Levin Wins NYPL Young Lions Award for The Instructions

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Congratulations to Adam Levin, who just won the New York Public Library Young Lions Award for fiction for his sprawling novel The Instructions. Congrats also to McSweeney's for publishing it, and to The Rumpus, for making it a book club selection. Looks like I'll be picking this up finally (and belatedly).

Best. Correction. Ever.

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The New York Times realizes that it is not wise to fuck with Tolkien fans.

Five Questions Never to Ask at a Reading

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Emily St. John Mandel, author of the wonderful Last Night in Montreal and The Singer's Gun (which I haven't gotten to yet), lists the five questions that you, under no circumstances, should ask at a reading. My bookseller experience definitely confirms number four -- oh what I would have given for Cyclops-style laser vision on some occasions.

(h/t @TheMillions via @TheRumpus)

"Rodin's Debutante"

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My review of Ward Just's Rodin's Debutante is up at Bookslut -- check it out =D

Game Ones

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Well holy shit, never expected that of the Grizz -- Randolph and Gasol just pounding the paint, Randolph (in the least likely though accurate comparison I can come up with of late) looking like prime Hakeem, and their D just taking ruthless advantage of OKC's mistakes. Still think OKC comes away with the series, but damn, it might just be a series. I figured Memphis would take one at home maybe, but this might be serious.

As for Boston-Miami, I still don't buy Miami not slipping up and gifting Boston a game. They've done it enough times this season to expect one out of seven. And that series must go to seven -- David Stern will ensure it if the teams don't, and I think Boston, even Perk-less, just spreads the floor better and has so many more options. Rondo putting up 30-15-21 in the last three games of the Knicks series scares the living shit out of me, because I shoot about as well as he does usually, as a 5'6" white guy with no discernible athletic talent and whose last remotely competitive ballgame was at age ten.

But D-Wade and LeBron together can stop any team from any era dead in its tracks when they play like they did today. D-Wade was just on fire, and they're both such good passers that probability alone dictates that the one can find the other at key moments -- you can't double team them both. And Bosh, who's finally remembered how to shoot, and though not up to KG-Pierce-Allen "Big Three" status, can still do damage. I still don't think "The Heatles" can withstand a seven-gamer with Boston, but Game one definitely made Miami look hella good. There's no way they can deal with playoff intensity at the Garden, but they don't need to. Question is, can Boston grab one in Miami? I think they do, but both this series and the Memphis-OKC one are going to be great to witness. No pun intended.

God I love basketball, and this really is already the most memorable playoffs of my 26-year span -- every series, every game just wire-to-wire crazy, big shot after big shot, a 1 losing to an 8, and we're one day into round two.

Heat-Celtics

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Sooooo excited. So many subplots and genuine hatred of each other. Can Pierce renew his '09/'10 playoff domination of LeBron? Can Ray carry on being just stupidly clutch? Can LeBron show up for a seminal playoff series? Can Spoelstra out-coach Doc?

This series reminds me so much of those Knicks-Heat series from the late '90s, where you just knew every game (as has been generally true of pretty much all playoff games this entire NBA post-season) would come down to the last shot, all of which would involve extreme physicality between two teams who really fucking hated each other.

I think C's in seven, and still think the Bulls aren't ready for the sort of pressure they're about to walk into, just praying the C's get winded and the Bulls can dispatch Atlanta quickly enough to let Boozer get some rest and let Thibs do what he does.

So... The Pale King

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First off, is excellent, completely at the level of Infinite Jest, and just another testament to the endless brilliance of our late DFW.

The book has been written about endlessly, and I'm not even going to bother linking various reviews or career retrospectives, because they are legion and easily findable.

I will, however, link to Maria Bustillos' excellent article about how DFW endured his own tragically brief life. It affords insights into the inner world of the greatest writer of the last fifty years that were previously unknown, or at least never so well stated.

The Pale King is about mind-numbing boredom. DMV boredom. World of Warcraft boredom. IRS boredom. I.E., doing something effortlessly and entirely mundane from which the new-car smell has long evaporated, but doing it and doing it well because that's what, at the moment, you must do. You do it well because you expect nothing better of yourself. DFW called this true heroism. I don't know that I agree with him. Maybe enough of the young (R)omantic remains that I believe in the association between heroism and transcendence. It is, however, noble.

What DFW does in The Pale King, as in all his work, is be human in a way so few of us allow ourselves to be. Face it, we live in the weirdest era in the history of humanity, where privacy has altogether and permanently disappeared, in which media in all forms is literally ubiquitous, in which more people have more rights and more access to the tools to demand those rights than ever before, and in which giant private interests have more money and more access than ever to restrict those rights. It's a strange fucking world. Wallace, to a credit I think is entirely underappreciated, saw all of this coming in his seminal and just plain brilliant 1993 essay "E Unibus Pluram" (collected in "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again,") in which he argued that the pervasiveness of television -- but by extension all visual media -- did far more than just influence us all as consumers, voters, parents etc., but actually changed the way we experienced reality. Now, look at permeation (let's call it) of visual media in 1993 versus that in 2011. There's just no comparable scale.

The point about Wallace's humanity is that he saw all of that, horrified no doubt, and made the most difficult artistic move: he swam against the tide. For all the critical talk about Infinite Jest's "hyperactive surrealism," the thrust of the book is in favor of sincerity. Hal decays because he can't grasp that; Gately moves on because he can. The Pale King comes at the same problem from a different angle -- for all the metafictional candy canes and psychics, the book is about acceptance, both of the inevitable flaws of others and of circumstances that... to use a corporate phrase, are what they are. Niebuhr's "Serenity Prayer" may seem trite, but what Wallace taught us, and what we all should know is that it's more than likely a path to a good life. I suppose in that sense, the characters in The Pale King are heroic, in the sense that they accept their fate and try not to overcome it, but to make a good life from it.

Break Up the Grizz

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4-2 over 4-time champ San Antonio, and only the second 8-seed to down a 1 in the 7-game first-round era. I think the Warriors beating the Mavs in 2007 was more exciting, but this Grizz team is definitely more impressive, considering that this may well have been the Spurs' last legit chance for another ring. Duncan -- one of the greatest power forwards ever to play the game -- Parker, great scorer but seemingly antiquated in the Rose-Rondo-Paul-Westbrook era, and Ginobili -- another great scorer who's going to be leading this team in the near future -- are poised perhaps for their Alamo next year. Duncan has, at best, one season left in him. George Hill can be a star, but can't get the minutes with Parker ahead of him. Tiago Splitter and Gary Neal are good role players, but that's all. This Spurs group has, at best, one more chance for another ring.

This is one of the cool things about the NBA -- great teams just seem to fall and rise in twos and threes. The Thunder, Blazers, and yes, the Grizz, are the future of the West, while San Antonio, the Lakers, the Mavs, and in the East the C's at least seem destined within the next year or, at the latest, two, for reasons of age, to regress. In the East, the future belongs to Orlando [if it can find another scorer not named Dwight, who's looking more and more like a potential Patrick Ewing -- dominant big without enough help, and dependent enough on spotty outside shooters to invest in past-their-prime guards (see turkoglu, hedo, arenas, gilbert, starks, john)], Miami (genuinely terrifying because LeBron and Wade are really that good, and LeBron can do a 40, 8, and 8 pretty much whenever he wants -- cap space will be their issue for the next several years though), and a young Chicago team that has a head coach who knows what the fuck he's doing despite one regular season's experience, a point guard in Derrick Rose who's not yet the best player in the NBA (that distinction goes to Kevin Durant, imho), but at 22 a 25 and 8 guy who would give up essential body parts to win (This fact also scares me, but as a fan I'd take a player who will do whatever it possibly can take to win over someone scared to be injured.) Paired with a Luol who seems to remember what winning feels like/takes and a 26-year old Joakim Noah, that team is going to be around for at least eight years.

The Celtics, if they can survive Miami (which I think they can), are still the team to beat. Because as much as I want to punch him (as a Bulls fan), Rajon Rondo is the best distributor in the league not named Chris Paul. And Chris Paul doesn't get to pass to Paul Pierce, KG, and Ray Allen -- the latter of whom remains the most frightening late-game shooter in the league, and clutch in the David Ortiz/Landon Donovan category. Pierce's jump shot isn't quite as ugly as Noah's free throw, but it's managed to work for quite some time now. And even at 34-almost-35, KG's athleticism and just... well... no better word for it than insane... intensity can outdo the rest of the field this year.

This post was about the Grizz though, and though I don't think they'll get past OKC, it's worth recognizing what they accomplished. The Spurs have a pedigree -- the Dirk-led (though I admire Dirk and think he could play into his 40s with that mid-range fadeaway) Mavs haven't won rings, much less four of them, have been to the Finals once, and though perennially contenders just can't pull it off. The Spurs on the other hand are 4-0 in the Finals, humiliated an electrifying Suns team three times in four years. What the Zach fucking Randolph-led Grizz did to a 61-win Spurs team is just incredible.

What a playoffs already, and the second round hasn't even started.

Authorial Interjection part the first: No, I didn't mention the Lakers, mostly because I despise Kobe, think Lamar's frivolous, and Pau's soft. Derek Fisher is an assassin, but I really just want to pretend the Lake Show is a poorly-rated reality show.

Also didn't mention how much I admire Steve Nash for sticking it out with the Suns when it was plain and clear that team was going nowhere in the stacked West, and how much I desperately want him to win a championship. He's 37 and still making opposing teams look silly... while passing to Gortat, an I-don't-even-pretend-to-give-a-shit-anymore Vince Carter and Grant Hill, who also deserves at least a shot at a title.

New Stuff

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Started working on a new short story today, and really am excited about where it's going. Been sort of languishing in a creative funk of late, and it's just so great to be working on something new that you know, given the patience, will not be destined for the circular file. Now just to work and work on that patience part.

On the Cultural Relevance of Susan Boyle

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Susan Boyle on "Britain's Got Talent" -- subsequent success and co-optation by the music industry tabled for the moment -- is probably the most uplifting media event the world has seen in the last several years. I might be biased, since "Les Mis" was the first musical I ever listened to, saw, and remains seminal for me as a person. And yet -- the fact that this middle-aged woman could walk out there with the confidence she had, to the complete disbelief of Piers, Amanda, and Simon who, very much in reflection of the sort of world in which we live, dismissed her immediately solely on the basis of her appearance -- is irrefutably a poignant rejoinder against the sort of jaded cynicism that I and so many among my generation affect.

Because the fact of the matter is -- and this seems to be so rare among at least the disaffected 20-somethings to whose cohort I too often belong -- that was a moment that couldn't be... cynicized. When she belted out the lyric "I had a dream my life could be/So different from this hell I'm living," that wasn't a jaded, polished singer just rehearsing lines. That was a woman who's lived something similar to Fantine's hell singing her heart. It's heartbreaking to watch and insanely inspiring. More importantly, it's completely genuine. There is zero in the way of shit that is affected during that entire performance.

What Susan Boyle did and has since done is confirm the essential human-ness of we humans. What makes us who we are, at our best, is an ability to be naive. Naturally, this ability, too, has been exploited, parodized et al many many times over the brief course of our history. Irony has sort of become its own religion among my generation, but it shouldn't be. Sincerity, the capability to feel and feel deeply -- these are what make us who we are, and are not to be fucked around with. It's rare that a media blockbuster affords the chance to celebrate that sort of innocence, nowadays at least. The Daily Show, 30 Rock, Colbert, Parks and Rec -- all trade (quite brilliantly) in professional cynicism. Yet, I can't watch this video without getting all verklempt, and for a good reason -- this may sound odd, but Susan Boyle provides an antidote to cynicism, and a desperately needed one.

Interjection first: Susan's version was likely the most inspiring, but Ruthie Henshall kicked the living hell out of that song, to a degree I, as a decidedly non-musician of any sort, can only wonder at: http://bit.ly/Y3RvP

Interjection the second: /clearlywatchinglesmisyoutube videos but holy fuck Lea Salonga is so talented.

Nine Types of Light

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New TV on the Radio album = very good. Return to Cookie Mountain remains the album of theirs that stopped me in my tracks and was the iPod reboot of choice once takeoff was done. In 2006, at least. Nine Types seems a little bit more pop accessible than Dear Science, which was inevitable. The entire album is... down? Every track seems elegiac, which is probably appropriate for this strange era in which we live -- and TV on the Radio has, to their credit, been on top of what America didn't know it felt, though it felt it deeply.

"Will Do" is a genuine pop hit. My inner elitist recoiled a bit when (I think it was) Stan Levy referenced it on SportsCenter the other night, but it's a fantastic song and deserves some popular play. This band is too good to keep locked up in the skinny jeans and ironic or not moustaches crowd. I'm sort of adamant about this -- if you have a moustache and you're under thirty, chances are you're an insecure douche. "Will Do" seems genuine, some sort of plea from a wounded heart capable of actual feeling and actual pain.

That aside, "Return to Cookie Mountain" with its opening refrain of "I was a lover before this war" and "Dear Science" are most likely the best musical perspectives on this extremely weird era from say 2003-2011 in which my generation has come of age. Come of age meaning that we understand pop culture and what it means, we understand politics and the shell game it is, and we understand that money is fungible and is at the end of the day what separates the skins from the shirts. It's a fucking strange era to be youngish in.

All of that aside, and take this for the first record review it is -- Nine Types of Light is good.

Elif Batuman on writing

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Awesome essay by Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed (which is an excellent book), about the life of a young writer, how it feels to be caught for the first time in the whirlwind of having published a bestseller, and asking Jonathan Franzen for weed at the National Book Critics Circle awards.

The Mortenson Debacle

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I have to admit, I haven't been following the growing furor over what 60 Minutes and Jon Krakauer allege to be severe factual errors and downright fabrications in Mortenson's super-mega-best-selling... humanitarian memoir (?) Three Cups of Tea that closely, nor have I actually read the book. So I don't really have much to say about the specifics of the case -- although Krakauer's 78-page expose is available as a .pdf at Byliner Magazine (I'm going to try to squeeze it in at some point this evening).

What I do find interesting about the whole thing, though, is 1) how eerily it resembles the James Frey fiasco a few years back with regard to his "memoir" of recovery from drug and alcohol addiction A Million Little Pieces; 2) how the social ritual of fame/fall from grace/mea culpae/rehabilitation/resumption of fame (hell, even Frey is publishing again) is so ingrained into our entertainment culture (and yes, this book counts as an artifact of entertainment culture); and 3) the desperation of the publishing industry to find the next big thing to shoot to the top of the bestseller list -- no matter how implausible the story -- so long as it's a page-turner, and tells a story that is (pick an adjective) heartwarming, uplifting, inspirational, profound, etc. Side thought: do publishers ever vet "too good to be true" stories?

Of those, I think 2) is probably the most interesting, as it's a phenomenon that seems never to die. Every time one of these stories comes along, the entertainment media falls all over itself to shame the individual responsible, knowing full well what course the story will take, and exactly how efficiently they'll be able to make bank off it. It's a pattern of exploitation exploiting exploitation -- in this case, media (amplified more than ever by its "social" variety) exploiting Mortenson's exploitation of his sources, audience, publisher, and donors in order to create this lurid spiral of publicity that will end up serving both the media and -- in the end, provided he plays by the rules -- Mortenson, while sucking the rest of us into a simulacrum of an ethical lesson about artistic integrity. Entertainment propagates entertainment all under the guise of a misplaced moralism. The media gets paid, Mortenson doesn't really suffer anything in the end, and the rest of us get to chatter about each step of the process, from downfall to renewal.

The real "lesson," if there is one, is to take one's art (broadly defined) seriously enough to practice it with integrity in the first place.

Addendum: It's also worth mentioning that Krakauer went on 60 Minutes last night with an already-prepared 78-page article ready to be posted the next day. Even the accusers are complicit in the publicity game. (h/t Kathleen Schmidt @bookgirl96 for pointing this out)

Michael Sheehan on The Pale King

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Michael Sheehan [who knows what he's talking about (I never know what to do with multiple links when there aren't enough to match each word... "knows" and "about" seemed the two most authoritative choices) when it comes to DFW] has a really good and thoughtful review of The Pale King up at The Rumpus.

Hopefully, if I can accomplish at least a few of the things I have in store for today, my reward will be cracking it open tonight. It's sitting there with that king of clubs on the cover staring at me.

Anne Frank Discovers Her Clitoris and Who Knew?

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I had heard vaguely that the version of The Diary of Anne Frank that we all read in eighth grade had been censored, but I really didn't know in what way, or what content had been expurgated in the name of upright American values.

Turns out -- and go figure -- the excised sections include a passage in which she contemplates her genitals and discovers her clitoris. This would seem to be a normal process for any fifteen-year old, and although it's entirely unsurprising that moralists terrified of sex would censor that passage, and it helps humanize a young girl who for many has become a sort of reified personification of the struggle between "innocence" and evil.

Citizen Radio

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Just discovered these guys, but if you're in the market for a free and people-powered progressive radio program, check out Citizen Radio. It's produced by Allison Kilkenny and Jamie Kilstein, who are both hilarious and incisively insightful (I just wanted to go for the rare "i" alliteration). Trying to figure out where I'm going to find room for them in my daily media binge, but it'll definitely happen. They get cool guests like Rachel Maddow, Matt Taibbi, Amy Goodman, et al. Woot!

People Power

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Headed to Madison atm to protest Scott Walker's assault on public workers. Quick point though -- the right's assault is on the concept of publicality itself -- their idea, utopia even, is one in which corporations hand down the terms always already. Egypt was a setback, Bahrain, Tunisia, Libya, can be blamed on brown people. Individuals asserting their rights is not okay. Revolutions must be monitored and controlled -- the people might fuck up and assert their own rights. And if that, god help us.

Short point on Egypt and the Need for Independent Media in the USA

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I'll keep this brief, since I think most of the wonderful individuals active in this community are well aware of the desperate need in the United States for non-corporate media. But having been glued to the amazing coverage by Al-Jazeera English and Democracy Now! pretty much for the last two weeks, it's a point that I can't emphasize enough.

Al-Jazeera English, currently available in Ohio, Burlington, VT, and Washington, DC is an invaluable resource for anyone seeking to understand the Middle East on its own terms -- something which cannot be stressed enough, given the Islamophobia that currently permeates our political culture, and, by extension, the stenographers of that culture which get their paychecks from the mainstream media. As brilliant as Richard Engel's reportage has been from that region, and as cogent and incisive (as always) Rachel's commentary has been on the last two weeks in Egypt, nothing can top reportage and commentary that come from individuals steeped in the history and culture of that region. Frankly, the only reason Al-Jazeera English isn't more widely available in the U.S. is due to direct and unabashed Islamophobia among our more listened-to "pundits."

It's no secret that Americans are, in general, woefully underinformed of the histories, cultures, and mores of the rest of the world. Empire has its privileges, after all, and the prism through which the rest of the world is reflected to us on our terms is one of them, I guess. But the world is changing -- it always has been, and to keep our heads in a hole is no longer acceptable. Keith Olbermann's move to Current TV is exciting and most welcome -- Current is an independent channel that simply goes places and reports events in ways no mainstream channel does. I distinctly remember watching their report on the anti-gay bill in Uganda, and learning more in that hour than I had from any other mainstream media source, TV, radio, or print.

And finally, the members of this community really should support the heroic work that Amy Goodman, Sharif Abdel Kouddous, and Anjali Kamat have done covering this crisis for Democracy Now! Democracy Now! presents what's best and most important about independent media in this country -- listener-supported, fact-based news that does not fear the powerful or those with vested interests -- a courage that corporate media, by definition, cannot display. Their coverage of the events in Egypt has been thorough, fair, and frankly, riveting. Kouddous is an Egyptian, and was on the ground on January 26th, one day after the protests began against the Mubarak regime. Not a corporate media transplant trying to catch up on facts and flavors particular to those events, but someone who, though he left Egypt when he was three, knows that country and that region inside out. Goodman is simply the best journalist out there -- listen to her every day, and the amount of information you will learn about the world is just staggering.

In all -- and again, this isn't a surprise to DailyKos members -- the best information available comes from independent media. Support them, follow them, because journalism is in danger, and its continued relevance is no less evident than it was in Addison's England.

Request Al-Jazeera English in your town here.

Support Democracy Now! here.

The Christian Taliban

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Digby is right on so many things, it feels criminal to link just to this post, but her point that extremist Christianity in this nation has as its primary goals well, quite a bit similar to other authoritarian religious extremists around the globe. The term "Christian Taliban," while hyperbolic, is out of bounds if and only if the extreme wing of evangelical Christianity shares nothing or very little in common with Islamists in Afghanistan. That test is not met.

This Will Not Save Them

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Via the New York Times, this will not save publishers. What matters isn't the "accessibilty"or the "convenience" of the e-reader. What matters is the compelling nature of the story. The entire e-reader business remains a scam designed to prop up the top-down nature of corporate rights when it comes to creative licenses. Narnia is enchanting at 10 regardless of the format -- it's the story, not the licensing format.

The Shell Economy and Crisis Theory

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Came across this excellent essay by Benjamin Kunkel of n+1 on the London Review of Books blog, reviewing Marxist scholar David Harvey's two most recent books, The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism and A Companion to Marx's 'Capital.' I haven't read any Harvey, though I'm certainly going to check him out after reading this essay. Harvey, formally trained in geography, has become a leading scholar of "crisis theory," which examines turbulence, instability, and ultimately, well, crisis in the global economy through the prism of Marx's critique of capitalism as laid out in Das Kapital and the Grundrisse.

My familiarity with Das Kapital is basic, but Kunkel's main point -- that mainstream and even "progressive" accounts of the economic crisis of the last three years rarely cross the left boundary demarcated by economic Keynesianism and political left liberalism -- is trenchant and telling. Now it seems to me that there are any number of reasons for this -- in the American media, at least, the rightward shift of media and politics in general occasioned by corporate monopoly over the main media channels -- but the question is relevant. We hear the crisis framed in technocratic terms, according to which regulations were lax, oversight dysfunctional when present, individual incentives misaligned with corporate/social incentives, etc. But we rarely hear any question of whether or not the crisis was not a dysfunction of capitalism, but rather a feature. I'm skeptical as to whether that conversation can take place in the United States outside of explicitly socialist channels on the fringe, but perhaps it's time to ask those questions again.

Nabokov right after all

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This is pretty rad -- Nabokov is one of my favorite writers in any language, and his passion for butterflies is well-documented... but who knew that he developed a theory to explain the evolution of an entire class of butterfly species, and that more than 30 years after his death, contemporary genetics has vindicated him? Nazdarovya, Vladimir.

SOTU

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And... whiff. On the whole, Obama's rhetoric is good as always. He's invariably eloquent, but this entire frame of "winning" and "losing" misses the point. It's not a matter of beating a 22-year-old Beijing University with the hammer of a 22-year-old Columbia University student. When he talks about bringing electricity to rural areas and creating jobs that didn't exist before... those were active government programs. Anything like the TVA that would be proposed today would give the entire right a collective heart attack... not that it didn't then, but at least FDR had the cojones to point out that the collective good benefits by the arbiter of the collective good -- yeah, the G-word.

The broader point though, is that you can't talk up high-speed rail in terms of "competitiveness" when you have governors in major states responding to extremists to veto such projects. You can't credibly discuss lowering corporate tax rates when you've kept the top rate solid and whine about the deficit. It's just not credible.

Then again, that would require rationality in these here United States, and we know that's not happening any time soon.

SOTU

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here comes the immigration thang, good shot for a relevant, non-centrist, non-boilerplate point. just say it, barack -- building a fence is stupid and a waste of money. just say it, pleeeeease.

K Hill's

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who doesn't love a dictator in his 80s? go ahead and legitimate that regime. http://bit.ly/ihObtX

New Green Revolution?

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Mobarak going down to dispossessed Egyptians would be the world's headline. This is worth watching.

And now Egypt

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Holy shit, this might just be a transformational moment in the Middle East -- not one engineered by Condi, mind you, but based on genuine populist outrage. I tweeted this earlier, but that's at least 3 regimes that have been threatened/brought to their knees by new technology. Not to fellate social media -- it is and remains a matter of profit -- but wow. This would not have happened 15 years ago in a different era.

Great Interview with Feingold

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Plenty of folks more eloquent than I have discussed the fact -- and frankly, it's a fact -- that we're living in the second Gilded Age. This great interview from ThinkProgress highlights an interview with former Wisconsin Senator and progressive hero Russ Feingold. Check it out.

courage

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Your Moment of Zen

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Erie, PA; on a billboard advertising a fireworks store:

"Pepper spray & stun guns
Sugar-free fudge."

So

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It goes without saying that my most recent post (since deleted) was beyond the pale. Your dear blogger is in an interesting bind at the moment; updates will at some point ensue.

So...

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At what point do people find things to enjoy? Like, is there a switch to turn on where you wake up and look forward to anything? If so, please let me know.

Notes from Inside III

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The second thing you notice on the psych ward is the alteration in the passage of time. This is hardly my insight -- Thomas Mann explored the strange slipping of time in an institution to perfection in The Magic Mountain (which I definitely will need to read again in light of recent circumstances). The hours drag on, and every time you check the clock you find that only half the minutes you thought had passed actually did. Your life breaks down into hour-long increments, punctuated by mealtimes and medication. Breakfast is served at 7:30, and you wake up and stagger groggily toward the common room. You grab your tray from the metal box on wheels and try to find a seat near the people you know are somewhat sane. You fill your menu out at breakfast for the next day, and while the food isn't as bad as you might have expected, it's hardly fantastic. You learn quickly that you can add items and change quantities, so that my tray each morning comes laden with three covered plastic cups of extraordinarily weak coffee.

It's pretty much a given that there will be an incident at breakfast. It's more or less inevitable, mealtime being the only times during the day when the entire population is gathered in one space. This morning, it was Stephanie, she of the suspected wet brain, who set off this sweet elderly African-American woman who rightfully had had enough of poorly-coded racism. See, one of the schizophrenics had an outburst yesterday in which she repeatedly yelled "nigger" at the staff, which is about 70% African-American. I believe she also called them "gorillas," at least before the sedation hit in. In any case, Cassandra -- the elderly woman -- was really on edge wrt overt racism, and so when Stephanie started ranting about "the blacks" and how you can't trust them, a deeply-buried rage in Cassandra roared to life, and she threw her fully-laden breakfast tray at Stephanie, and when she missed, she picked up the tray and tried again. Naturally, both parties were separated and ushered in to different rooms, yet the incident was fairly typical of the increased pressure and tension that accompany a full house. More typically Carolyn (about whom more later) will start on a rant and at some point her scattershot will touch someone's exposed nerve, and then shit goes down. You learn to tune most of this out.

Carolyn is pretty much the queen crazy, bipolar with psychosis and delusions. She's by far the least-liked person on the ward, and this holds true for patients and staff. Carolyn is 38, and has spent most of her adult life in and out of psych wards, mental hospitals, and group homes. In many cases, such a life trajectory owes in large part to poverty and the appalling fraying of the American social safety net. Individuals who express mental illness at a young age often are victims of inadequate living situations, abusive parents, parents who abuse drugs and alcohol, neglect, and left to the mercy of Departments of Mental Health that are woefully underfunded, inadequately staffed, and a part of no politician's stump speech. The mentally ill remain largely invisible in America.

Carolyn, on the other hand, comes from a well-off family of Russian-Jewish immigrants. Her father is a well-respected psychiatrist (ironically enough) in New Jersey, and she was raised in suburban comfort, educated at good schools, has a college degree. Not that her relative luck in the family lottery makes her case any more tragic than the hundreds of thousands of less fortunate individuals who fall into the black hole of the mental health system, but it does add an interesting wrinkle. From what I could gather, Carolyn grew up in suburban New Jersey before moving to Boston in her late adolescence. She graduated from Lesley University with a degree in human services, and apparently that's when things began to fall apart.

Before getting into her story -- or at least what of it I could piece together -- it's really important to explain the sort of psychosocial milieu in which Carolyn spends her days, and will in all likelihood spend the remainder of her days. It's important to preface all of this with the fact that Carolyn is an extremely kind person, and has an extremely kind heart; the circumstances of her illness conspire to mask that kindness and to isolate her when she craves human contact. It requires, first of all, a staggering amount of patience to hold a conversation with her. She sits forward in her chair when she speaks and gesticulates wildly, all while emitting a garbled logorrheic stream of consciousness. It doesn't take more than a minute or so to realize the obvious paranoid and delusional ideation underpinning most of what she says. She'll tell you that she's putting together an operation, and that the nurses and counselors are bad people who need to be taken down. She's going to send in the black belts and they'll bleed so, but the FBI and CIA are watching her every move, and have put her in here to prevent her from carrying out her global mission. When I came back here for my second stint, she was certain that I was FBI because I was back. They've assaulted her with chemical weapons, so she won't take her medication, because the nurses work for Dick Cheney, who is the real president and who has been offended highly by her protestation against his regime in Harvard Square, and by her calling George Bush "George Tush." Similarly the chemical weapons have invaded her group home, and her face and lips burned and the skin on her feet rotted. She has access to special software, which, if you choose not to be on her team, will monitor your every move and can immolate you instantaneously should you act unethically. She's in love with a man named Dan Crowley, who, as far as I can tell, doesn't exist, but apparently is the most gorgeous man in the world as well as a legendary musician who can change his face to look like anyone. He's secretly written every hit pop song of the last 20 years, and is the shadowy figure behind the entire operation. But she also refers to pretty much every male under 40 (yours truly included) as "gorgeous" and makes vaguely sexual overtures that become quickly uncomfortable. She wouldn't believe that I'm gay because "someone so gorgeous just couldn't be. It's not fair" (lawlz). She suffers from tremendous delusions of grandeur. She believes herself to be a virtuoso piano player and composer, but when she sits down at the piano, the sound that results is best described as aleatory. She believes that she is a gifted designer, even though her "designs" amount to random blotches of paint on t-shirts under a thick coat of glitter. The other day her room had to be steam cleaned because she had managed to cover half the floor in paint and glitter. Similiarly she thinks of herself as a fashionista and model, though her style amounts to one of her paint-splattered t-shirts over zebra print leggings with flip flops, and her body type is best described as spherical. If she gets agitated, she'll tell you that you're headed to an internment camp where you'll eat carcasses until your carcass is eaten, and that they'll test new chemical weapons on you and zap you. But there are flying cars and flying houses ready for you if you play, and it's all about playing. She at times mouths bits and pieces of Christianity, but one doubts that faith plays much of a role in her life, or that she has the cognitive equipment to understand faith. Which is not to say that she's dumb, because that's very much not the case -- she has an impressive vocabulary and a wide body of knowledge. I imagine she was once a very intelligent person with a bright future.

And that's part of what makes Carolyn's story so tragic in an almost Shakespearean way -- there's a great deal there beneath the surface that her illness, the drugs used to treat it, and other drugs more recreational in nature have so mangled and garbled that only this manically paranoid word salad remains. From what I could gather, her illness began to present in her adolescence. She received treatment, which was apparently inadequate, and was medicated through her early 20s and college. I guess her condition seemed to worsen in her mid-20s, because she was incapable of providing any semblance of chronology for the last decade or so. She's used crystal meth on and off. She's been a prostitute and has slept in Harvard Square for weeks at a time. She's been in and out of psych wards like this one, has amassed over $30,000 in credit card debt, and lived in section VIII housing on disability payments, because her illness precluded the possibility of working. She has worked, however -- in a kitchen remodeling store, in a shoe store, as a waitress. One gets the sense that her Dan Crowley was a boyfriend sometime in her early-mid-20s, maybe the first time she fell in love. Maybe it was a brief and tumultuous affair, maybe the one stable long-term relationship she's had, but the impression is that his memory has winnowed its way so deeply into her psyche as to color many aspects of her psychoses. Her group home situation is terrifying to her -- the housemaster is cruel and uncaring, several of her other housemates sociopathic. Her parents have cut her off entirely. They won't return her calls or help her financially, and she can't get her own apartment. If she can't recover here and return to her group home, she'll be headed to one of the state mental hospitals to be institutionalized. During our conversation, she repeated over and over that she just wants to have a life, she wants to fall in love, she wants a life like anyone else.

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Have a longer post on the third part of the curve, but got derailed by a conversation about approaching Christianity from an eschatological perspective, which led into conspiracy theories and other good things. Yay Ativan!

Freedom!

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I will be discharged tomorrow! Headed into an outpatient program tailored to LGBTs and looking forward to an excellent weekend.

Notes from Inside, II

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So a very important thing with the bipolar/schizophrenic/drug-addled crowd is that they are mostly harmless. This could be because their meds render their bodies sluggish and oils their brains with glue. It could also be because, despite even their most violent-sounding outbursts, the Pavlovian reflex to four-point restraints and additional sedation keeps them one step shy of actual violence. The outbursts, however, can be quite disturbing, frightening even if you're new to the ward. Once you've encountered a few psychotic rants, you begin to pick up the general rhythms and frayed webs of association that can lead from doctors to the CIA to chemical weapons to omnipresent software. Yep. A schizophrenic outburst from R. would be typical -- a situation in which he staggers into the common room and announces to anyone who will listen that the voice of God speaks through him and that the world is ending soon. Eschatology seems a major theme in many such outbursts. As are conspiracies involving various covert agencies and operatives, not to mention violence, often horrific, often involving necrophagy and other unsavory practices.

An example (which may be disturbing to some) from a particularly troubled woman in her early 30s (this from earlier today; sedation with haloperidol was required to shut her up): "I fuck children in the river of blood. Because I'm a pedophile? Because I like having sex with children? Stay away from me! Stay away from me!" Granted, I have no idea whether or not the above is true, and I highly doubt it, but it's a pretty good example of the sort of utterance to which one quickly becomes accustomed here.

But a little research will turn up countless examples of the particular phobias, obsessions, and stomach-turning imagery that turn up in schizophrenic thinking and verbalization. Elyn Saks' memoir The Center Cannot Hold is a powerful look at the manner in which schizophrenia tears and twists even the most brilliant minds into menacing and unfamiliar shapes, and I highly recommend it. John Wray's recent novel Lowboy, though fictional, is an arresting detective story centered around a schizophrenic 16-year old who's escaped from his hospital in New York City.

I had intended to write more on this subject, but the day went by more quickly than I had expected. I'm in much higher spirits; the new medication is helping immensely, and I've been fortunate enough to spend time with some really wonderful individuals here, some of whom I will definitely be seeing on the outside.

Notes from Inside

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Probably the first thing you notice on a psych ward is that the category of "crazy" spans an entire continuum from severely-depressed-but-otherwise-rational-and-somewhat-functional to suffering-from-irreversible-dementia. It seems that this continuum presents as a bell curve, with a small number of basically "okay" individuals at the far left end, a few of those tragically lost and gone forever at the far right end, and the majority distributed in between. In general, the "okay" individuals tend to stick together for obvious reasons, but probably also to validate their own sanity to themselves. They talk, joke, laugh, play games, and try hard to conceal whatever emotional greyness led them here in the first place. They're no more or less damaged than anyone else, but can either mask their pain or have had a genuine reappraisal of their whole scene. They (or I should say "we," since I rightly or wrongly count myself as a member of this group) congregate for the most part in the common room, where meals are eaten, meetings are held, and staggering quantities of TV are consumed. (I watched eight episodes of House on Friday, for instance). This room serves a double purpose for these folks. Of course it provides the basic and still functioning need for socialization, and this group seems genuinely to be interested in the lives and woes of the others, their laughter never forced, their affection and camaraderie never feigned. On the other hand, however, I think that we use the common room as a sort of safety net. It's easy when you're a generally affable person to surround yourself with similar people in a common place where you can tune out your brain to the Kardashians or Monday Night Football. It's far more difficult to confront yourself nakedly in the harsh light of long-ignored truths.

The folks in the middle part of the curve tend to come and go as befits their mental and emotional state; at times they sleep through the entire day without encountering another person on the ward except their "team" (more on this in a bit). Or they just can't handle being around others. For some, this is due to physical difficulty -- complications with new medication or drug withdrawal. Others are too mired in their own hurt, and require a sort of tortured solitude in which to sort through their scattered emotions and understand their battered psyches. When they shuffle through the halls, faces tight and drawn, they radiate the depth of their ache. Their silence is chilling really, and no matter how badly you want to crack them open and show them some light tucked away in a forgotten place, there are just some people you know better than to approach. Others in the middle flutter around the margins, drawn like moths to what they perceive as light. They'll come into the common room and sit to the side, laughing nervously or venturing a comment on a joke or a discussion about whether or not you'd let Tom Brady have his way with you (this was an actual conversation). They're visible but withdrawn, "around," but not really there.

Often the individuals in the middle part of the curve are older -- seasoned veterans when it comes to institutions and psychotropic drugs. To a younger observer, their situations are both heartbreakingly tragic and troubling. What to make of the gentleman in his 60s who hasn't said a word the entire time you've been here? He's like a ghost, a bearded ghost who sort of haunts the hallway, and you can tell he's been through some shit in his time, but what happened to him at this point in his life to bring him back here? (You've learned this is hardly his first time). What kind of infinite sadness causes life to break down so many times at a point where identity has been negotiated, decisions made, major life experiences conquered and celebrated? But then there's the woman in her 40s who does nothing but laugh, whose ataxic staggerings and stumblings into your chair has already caused two coffee burns, and whose slurred queries re: AA meetings make you wonder if maybe she isn't here because of an acute emotional crisis, but rather a solid case of Wernicke-Korsakoff.

The third subset is without question the most tragic. These guys are the ones who aren't coming back. They're entirely enclosed within their illness or the ravaged remnants of a decades-long addiction. You generally try to steer clear of these folks, or at the very least, interact with them while exercising extreme caution with the awareness that there's a pretty good chance that the conversation will veer off into a succession of disturbing non sequiturs. For which reason, this crowd tends to function as entertainment-cum-antagonist-in-chief. The one exception I've come across here is a 19-year old kid whom we shall call R. R. is one of the most gentle and kind individuals I think I've ever met. R., however, suffers from advanced schizophrenia, and has been put in four-point restraints three times since I've been here. The meds he's taking to keep him from flying apart keep him heavy-lidded and sedated. He plods through the unit and speaks slowly when he speaks at all. He sleeps 16 hours a day. This is unspeakably sad.

The others that comprise this group consist pretty much of your garden variety schizophrenics, bipolar individuals, and addled former drug addicts. There is naturally some blurring of these boundaries. We'll pick it up there tomorrow.

Update

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So for the time being, let's just say that I'm okay and fully appreciate the outpouring of love and support. You guys are awesome.

The past ten years have been dark times for me, the past year darker, recent months darkest, and the past few weeks the absolute nadir of my existence. Without going into details, I can tell you that I'm safe, and that I think things will get better from here. What I've realized during this, my most recent hospitalization, is that the impetus to change oneself radically cannot come externally. Medications, therapy, hospitalization, overdoses, withdrawal (which thankfully isn't something I've had to deal with) -- no matter how shocking to the psyche or body, none are enough to push oneself forward unless one wants to move. Without some internal spark that demands life, you're just not going to be able to do it.

So for now, I'm working on that spark.

New Things

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Out of a 4 1/2 year long relationship, out of the closet, freshly inked, and moved into a new place as of Wednesday. New things abound. I find myself in the sort of nostalgic introspective mood which washed over my late teen years and early twenties, but which has been largely absent for the past few years. You know, that sense that time is ebbing away and that things in your life about which you feel like you should care deeply but can't quite keep moving in cardinalish directions away from whatever sense of self you've salvaged?

So yeah, new beginnings and what not. It's strange being in this place. I feel the clock starting to count down on my youth, and I can't say I've really ever allowed myself to experience it. The careless vulnerability, impulsivity, hope. I lack these things in my life, and yet they're what I'm told defines "youth."

I really can't quantify or qualify anything at this point. I find myself aching for something real with the concomitant knowledge that real emotion is probably beyond anything I'm capable of at the moment. It's funny and yet profoundly sad, as I watch friends and lovers find their mates and fall in love, that I can't even conceive of an emotional connection to another human being. It seems so naive and unreachable. The idea almost seems laughable, and the reality something which I dare not even consider. Emo? Perhaps. It's never fun to find oneself in the familiar position of feeling unconnected to everything.

Farewell Allston

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Digging the Suburbs

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In the interest of resurrecting this site (for the nth time, I guess), let me just say that I am completely addicted to Arcade Fire's new album The Suburbs. So much so that I find myself agreeing with Pitchfork... which doesn't exactly happen every day. I don't really have the tools to do like a full review/critique, so let's just say that it hits all the right places without a single throwaway track. I'm in love.

They Hate Us for Our Freedom

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Right.

Back?

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Well. I'm back? Let's talk about cool shit together. 

25 years since Bhopal

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Cause chemical innovation can never fail!

Oops.

Yes, that.

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Personal sorrow is a trite thing. Let us think of our brothers and sisters whose lives just became forfeit. Let us think of our LGBT brothers and sisters, the equality of whom our president and the New York state legislature continue to deny. Let us think of the innocent Afghans and Pakistanis and young Americans who will pay for our imperial ambitions.

Let us consider a world without American war. Let us consider that world and let us act upon its promise. We will fight for peace, equality, and justice. If we can't fight for that, then this generation is bankrupt and hopeless. The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.

Escalation Fail

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It doesn't take a rocket scientist to conclude that Obama escalating in Afghanistan is teh stoopid. I mean if you're all about alienating your base and repeating the mistakes of a certain Democratic president who pushed sweeping social change but whose mandate was undermined by a certain unwinnable war...

Anyway, see my take on the whole failure at the Kos.

But really, if Obama wants our support, he should really sorta figure out that that Iraq thing was sort of a mess. And killed 4k of our little cohort. I understand that the defense dept. & co. need to make their profit, but erm... we don't really want to send more of our friends and loved ones to die without cause. That's so Bush Admin.

A constructive aside

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erm... Fuck Joe Lieberman

Velvet Underground Reunion... sort of...

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Okay so John Cale won't be there and Sterling Morrison is dead, but Lou Reed, Maureen Tucker, and Doug Yule will sit down for a chat at the New York Public Library on Dec. 8. Should be interesting, to say the least.

It Must be Tough Being Rich

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You know, with all those kindergarten admissions tests and all...

Meanwhile, unemployment in Michigan is 15.1%.

Glad the Times has its priorities straight.

What Happened to Innocent Until Proven Guilty?

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I understand the need to prove to the media that you have a Big Swingin Dick, but erm... what's the point of trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in civilian court if the president and attorney general declare him guilty before the trial? I don't think there's a whole lot of doubt on that issue, but in this country, you're not guilty until a jury convicts you. And if Obama and Holder aren't willing to stand by that, this is nothing more than a show trial.

Ada Annotated

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This is really cool -- a fully-annotated text of Vladimir Nabokov's Ada, or Ardor (my favorite of his works!). It's stunning to find out on how many levels that man was operating. It's one thing to know that an author is making allusions you don't get -- with him, it makes one feel remarkably underread to discover just how many allusions are being made that you don't even realize.

LRB Again

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Just noticed that, in celebration of the big three-oh, the current issue is fully free and available at their site. But you should subscribe anyway.

Fair and Balanced

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Two gubernatorial losses in an off-year mean the END of the Obama Presidency and the dismantling of the fascist-communist-socialist-nudist-Maoist-Nazi state.

Two gubernatorial losses in an off-year mean nothing at all -- provided we're talking about G Dubs. (9/11, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11...)

The LRB Turns 30

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The Financial Times has a really good history/celebration of the London Review of Books, on occasion of its 30th anniversary.

On a lighter note, I just discovered that this book -- a greatest hits of the lewd, bizarre, and hilarious personal ads at the back of the LRB -- exists, and am most pleased.

Instant Classic Smackdown

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Check out Jessica Crispin (whom I adore) on Jonathan Safran Foer's new nonfiction book Eating Animals. Any post that begins with "I am trying so hard to be nice to ___," is sure to be a winner.

To be fair, I actually have never read anything by Jonathan Safran Foer and don't necessarily share her opinion. It was just too funny not to share.

IMPAC Dublin Award

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So the long list for the IMPAC/Dublin literary award was released yesterday, and no, I'm not going to list all 153 titles. But my local public library made three good selections: Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture, Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies, and Richard Price's Lush Life.

The list by nominating library is pretty interesting too -- like the St. John's Library in Newfoundland nominating Blackstrap Hawco: said to be about a Newfoundland family. No parochialism there.

Queen of the Right

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Despite the stumble by Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman in NY-23 yesterday, the poewr of Palin doesn't seem to be diminished in the least. Check out this leaked memo from Mark Kirk, a downstate Illinois Republican who's running for the Senate seat currently occupied by Roland Burris, and who has some work to do with the hard right that currently runs what's left of the Republican Party. From the Washington Post:

After noting that Palin will be in Chicago later this month to appear on "Oprah", Kirk writes that "the Chicago media will focus on one key issue: Does Gov[ernor] Palin oppose Congressman Mark Kirk's bid to take the Obama Senate seat for the Republicans?"

Kirk goes on to write that he is hoping for something "quick and decisive" from Palin about the race, perhaps to the effect of: "Voters in Illinois have a key opportunity to take Barack Obama's Senate seat. Congressman Kirk is the lead candidate to do that."

As depressing as yesterday was, at least we have a year of Republican all-out Civil War to look forward to. That's worth some popcorn, at least.

Must Be a Slow News Day

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Associated Press hard at work.

Too Close to Call

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Apparently it's too close to call tonight in Maine. Open Left has an updated live blog -- looks like we're down between 0.5 and 1.5% with no absentee ballots counted. This might be a long process, and I'm trying not to be too dejected about it.

At least Bill Owens has a fighting chance in NY-23, it seems.

Election Night

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Fuck, McDonell AND Christie.

If No in Maine fails, I'm not sure how I'm possibly going to get up tomorrow morning. At least there's the incipient civil war in the Republican party to get some chuckles out of, but it's scant comfort tonight.

Nearly Half of U.S. Children will be on Food Stamps at some Point

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USA! USA!

Publishing & E-Publishing

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Barnes & Noble recently released the Nook -- its new e-reader -- as a direct competitor to Amazon's Kindle. The folks at Wired are pretty excited about it and its shiny new features, which you can read all about in their review. I'm one of those cranky young men who will never be caught dead with an e-reader so long as I live (and have the option of dead tree). My opposition to them is mostly personal -- I enjoy the sensual experience of holding a physical book, turning its pages, feeling the grain of the paper, scribbling notes in the margins, underlining here and there. For the books I love best (or which came with a paper assignment), you can trace the dialogue I had with the author, characters, and/or ideas through those marginalia and exclamations of approval or puzzlement. I like having a desk cluttered with books in various states of completion. I love having bookshelves stocked with color and inviting leisurely perusal. For me, an e-book is anathema to the experience of reading, which encompasses far more than the text.

Which is not to say that I think e-readers are the end of the world. I think it's likely that e-literature (or whatever you want to call it) is going to become much more popular, but I highly doubt that it will eliminate the dead tree model. E-readers and bookstores will probably end up in some sort of uneasy coexistence. I just think it's too early (as a book "traditionalist") to freak out about the end of print, just as it's too early for the futurists (for lack of a better term) to gloat about the inevitablity of virtual print.

I bring this up in response to a really thoughtful and fascinating post by Two Dollar Radio's publisher Eric Obenauf over at The Rumpus about the difference between the two models. As good as Obenauf's essay is, the comment section opens up a wide-ranging discussion about the role of the artist in contemporary society, the monetary value of art versus its personal and aesthetic value, and what the future of publishing will signify for writers' art and wallets. Stephen Elliott, Brian Spears, Andrew Altschul and other writers and Rumpus editors join the fray. Definitely worth a full read!

Oh Dear Heavens

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Politicians sometimes use naughty language!

I'm sure this deeply-researched analysis will help stave off print media's looming demise.

Attn: Sens. Lieberman, Landrieu, Lincoln et al

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There are, uh, real people who will be affected by your bought-and-paid-for wankery. DougJ's rant pretty much nails the sick world in which our oligarchy sips its martinis:

I realize that if you’re poor in this country, then everything is your fault. If you take out a loan you shouldn’t have taken out, it’s proof that you’re too much of an idiot to handle money, whereas when rich people are fleeced by Bernie Madoff it’s proof that Madoff is a super-genius monster. If you’re hit by a stray bullet, you were probably in a gang. If you’re sick, it’s because you smoke and you’re overweight. And whatever trouble you have getting a job, it’s all because of your genetically determined low IQ. And if you weren’t poor, overweight, genetically deficient and so on you wouldn’t have trouble getting disqualified because of preconditions and you’d never get scammed by bogus insurance outfits.

In Which the New York Times Book Section References Us...

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Major slacking on my part around here apparently hasn't stopped someone from noticing us. I just about fell off my chair when I read this article in the New York Times about Electric Literature. Check out the second paragraph:

In its first two issues, this year, the magazine showcased some of the country’s best writers — Michael Cunningham, Colson Whitehead, Lydia Davis, Jim Shepard — and created the kind of buzz that is a marketer’s dream. With a debut issue in June and an autumn issue out last week, each consisting of five stories, the magazine has racked up complimentary reviews everywhere from The Washington Post to a blogger on Destructive Anachronism, who wrote, “High quality content + innovative marketing + multimedia could just equal the new model for literature, post-print.

Guess that's some kind of sign I should take this more seriously. I'm pretty humbled and kind of stunned. Thanks Felicia Lee, whomever you are!