character limit

A humble request.

Before you invite me to zoom, ask whether it could be a phone call.

Before you call me, ask whether it could be a text.

Before you text me, ask whether a DM would be better.

Before you slide into my DMs, ask whether email might be more considerate, in this case.

Before you send an email, do you really need the post office to survive?

Before you mail me a letter finally, ask yourself,

How treacherous are our words?

Despairing, come to where I am; take my face in your hands.

parental Realpolitik

En route to school today: According to my second grader, the worst thing about the president is that he puts his name prominently on buildings and "wants to name all the streets with his name."

"He doesn't know," she continues, "that everyone dies."
"Or at least," I offer, "he doesn't seem to care about anyone but himself."
A pause, then: "I can't wait until Donald Trump dies," she says, not without animosity.

Friends, I did not try to chasten her sentiment or provide some platitude about ill will. I honored the feeling of an other – her – made space for it in the morning air. Fight me.

normalicy and Ausnahmezustand

     VIII

     The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are "still" possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.

—Benjamin, On the Concept of History (1940)†

On October 16, 1996, Carolyn Forché gave a reading at my alma mater. By then I was two months gone, living in New York, but a certain friend secured a cassette recording for me and an autographed copy of Forché's indispensable The Angel of History. Over time, and repeated listenings, I adopted as my own an interstitial moment in the reading, appropriated even its diction and syntax, and sowed it in my mind like a land mine. And over the years, I would dig it out and gently unwrap it on the bar where I was drinking, say, and discussing the issues of the day with a friend.

Here is Forché's set-up:

Wisława Szymborska just won the Nobel Prize for Literature. She's 73 years old. She's one of the few women to win it. It's very nice that she won it. It would be nice if all of us could learn how to say her name, but it's hard, you know. She's in here; I'm very proud to say that Wisława Szymborska is in Against Forgetting. Because the Communists thought that her writing was too obscure – and morbid, they said – so they banned her. And I will read you a poem of hers so you can judge for yourself if you think that it's too obscure.

Here is her charge –
 which I recall with unreal lucidity bursting in my brain as Amerika responded to 9/11
  and as media endlessly circled the idea of A Return To Normalcy
   (and as I debated whether "normalcy" was even a word),
    and which flashed up again this summer while discussing the US presidential election with friends in Berlin,
     and which flits up in the Now, again, in the wake of 11/9:

We like to think that if we are alive someday in a time of great moral crisis, that we would hide people, that we would be in the resistance, that we would make sure that people weren't killed, that we would be...that we would act morally and in conscience. We also suppose in our imaginations that we would survive. We always think that we would be one of the ones to make it through.

So we like to think, except, if we cannot contemplate the negative, too, then it's not thinking. "Wisława Szymborska has something to say about that," Forché continues, "and about the coincidence and happenstance and real fate of that. And this is her poem called 'Any Case'" (and this is the translation, by Grazyna Drabik and Sharon Olds, that Forché included in Against Forgetting and read that night, in 1996).

I should really get around to digitizing that Forché reading. Before night falls.

am Tor

Ich sitze.

As I have often done in the morning after dropping das Kind off at camp, I am at a table outside the Spätkauf, sipping espresso and sunning my face before beginning my work for the day. Up rolls an elderly man – sweatpants, old windbreaker, sandals with socks (natürlich). Rolls because he is using a walker with wheels and a handbrake. And because the door into the Späti is a big step up from sidewalk level, he parks there, just at the threshold, and shouts in his morning greeting. The man inside asks him what he would like. It appears they have done this before.

"Fünf Sterni und fünf Kindl!" comes the reply.

The shopkeeper spryly comes out from behind the Kasse, takes the beers from the fridge, and places them into the wire basket fixed to the front of the man's walker. Money is exchanged, farewells also. And then, with a creek and the tinkle of glass bottles – a uniquely Berlin tintinnabulum – the elderly man wheels off over the paving stones in the direction of the Schlesisches Tor. After pausing briefly to chat with another man, he continues his slow progress toward...home?

It is 9:30 in the morning.

maw

The half-crazy super is sorting the garbage as I'm coming back into the building and waylays me with an obscenity-heavy disquisition on the garbage and recycling iniquities of the other superintendents on the block. The lecture is so intricate that, in the final analysis, I'm unable to figure out whether he supports a regime of recycling, with its rules and sorting requirements, or not. I gather, at least, that "in the 70s" the building's waste bags were impossibly heavy, bulging with every kind of thing. I also gather that the sanitation patrol people exercise their fining powers with vengeful pettiness. The super lauds their efforts for the most part, even as he expresses bitter resignation at the fact of their powers. But in the case of a fellow super – "a fucking idiot" who argued with a sanitation patrolman, who then radioed an NYPD car and lied to the real cops about "the idiot" having put hands on him – my guy's attitude turns to bitter hatred of the authorities.

Later in our "conversation," he describes a woman who liked to dump her household garbage in the public basket on the corner. A sanitation patrolman patiently stakes out the location, then catches her redhanded one morning and writes the ticket. With a shake of his head, the super stabs the air with his voice like a dull knife: "100 bucks!"

"Well," I circumspect, "the city has to make money somehow."

"No. This city is never satisfied. Not in a million years."

little by little and then all at once

The narrator in Murakami's first novel, Hear the Wind Sing –

There was a time when everyone wanted to be cool.

     Toward the end of high school, I decided to express only half of what I was really feeling. I can't recall the initial reason, but for the next several years this was how I behaved. At which point I discovered that I had turned into a person incapable of expressing more than half of what he felt.

– reminds me that, to conclude my high school graduation speech, with the unusually tall co-valedictorian, Alethea, towering over and beside me (she is a judge now?), I quoted McClintic Sphere:

Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it: keep cool, but care.

Madame Bovary, c'est moi.

"What word would you use," the psychoanalyst asks while my eyes seek the canyon of Manhattan towers visible from her window, "to characterize the feeling in all these things you've been describing?" Me: "Elegiac."

     Since I respect you, let me tell you a secret.
     As a cow devours grass, so literary themes are devoured; devices fray and crumble.
     A writer cannot be a ploughman: he is a nomad, constantly moving with his wife and herd to greener pastures.

After ripping through the first section, Juan García Madero's journal from November 2 to December 31, 1975, it took me months to fall back into the The Savage Detectives. Then, momentum: I take the last third or so of the novel in great gulps, mostly on the 1, nearly missing my stop every time, accompanied by a rising, heaving disillusionment at not having lived like a visceral realist or an infrarealist — hard-boiled. Bolaño didn't believe in exile, "especially when the word exile is set beside the word literature."

The momentum carried me headlong into Cole's Open City, which I had begun in Berlin and abandoned in a kind of panic, like catching a glimpse of yourself reflected at an unexpected angle in the bus window against which you've been resting your head; and for a moment you forget where you were going in the first place. This time I finish. The two, The Savage Detectives and Open City, pass through each other in Liberia, as though a minor character in Arturo Belano's travels there has wound up in a Queens detention center: Saidu telling his story though plexiglass to Julius. Now I fret that there is something equally despicable in my past that I have secreted away, even from myself, and that the therapist will uncover soon.

Directly on the heels of Open City, Zoo, or Letters Not about Love completed what now feels like a coincidental symphony — through Shklovsky's compressed exile in Berlin, a mental or spiritual breakdown between the lines of an epistolary novel that, like The Savage Detectives, ranges freely and idiosyncratically over a literary tradition and its recent politics. For both RBA and VBS, detection and the detective novel were special keys, but for opening what door? while Julius wanders to know himself, like the lunatic quoted by Benjamin: "I travel to know my geography."

...Moving diagonally like a knight, I have intersected your life, Alya, and you know how that was and how it is; but you turn up in my book like Isaac at the fire built by Abraham.

If ever a lady doth-protested too much, it was me writing dustily on the board clack tsssh click that the characters in the novels we will be reading this semester are not people; do not (for you cannot) identify. Drops the chalk into the tray.

"other people's houses

nutella and fresh pasta
sex toys
junk drawers
and the birds chirping incredibly loudly in the overgrown courtyard of our new building"

the ring of _____, and the sting of it

Can the fish resist the water? Does it?

It is very clear that the extreme reduction of the family unit is a necessary development in late capitalist economy. The extended family, which functions so well in agrarian-based economies, becomes an anachronism in an economy with a capacity for industrial farming. The situation becomes worse when the extended family is placed in the context of national/global economy; then it actually stops functioning efficiently from the perspective of power vectors, and becomes a detriment to corporate goals. Allowing the extended family to continue offers individuals participating in that institution a social and economic power base which gives them the opportunity to refuse corporate culture. In addition, it creates a social process that has the potential to be more satisfying than participation in consumption processes. Individual loyalty to an institution (i.e., the extended family) that potentially contradicts or negates capitalist imperatives of production and consumption is simply not a possibility that can be allowed to continue. In an effort to eliminate this social possibility, capitalist economy has configured itself to make entrance to or maintenance of middle-class status dependent upon accepting the nuclear family as the model of choice. People are financially rewarded for showing an allegiance to participation in the production and consumption processes, over and above participation in extended family processes.

The process of socializing individuals into nuclear units begins with the education process. Children are immediately taught that “success” in life depends on a division of labor, and on separation from other family members; i.e., the adults work, while the children train in school to enter the workforce. At the end of secondary education, they are fully adjusted to the idea that it is time to leave home to join the workforce, or to attend university. In the US, this process of separation begins almost immediately, because over the past 30 years, production rates have increasingly intensified, while real wages have decreased, thus requiring both parents to work if they want to maintain middle-class status. Children are placed in daycare until it is time for them to attend school. Hence, domestic togetherness in the middle-class family has nearly ceased, and children spend more time with their socializers — education services and mass media — than with “significant others.”

The reward for power vectors in promoting this variety of family structure is twofold: First, since people are generally denied social possibilities outside of rationalized contexts, a profound alienation emerges. The only cures offered by capitalist society for this condition are “satisfaction” through success at work, or through acquisition of consumer goods. Second, the geographic mobility necessary for the efficient deployment of the upper echelons of the workforce is assured. People go where their employers send them without a second thought. Whether individuals are near their family or friends is of secondary importance; maintaining class rank (and more and more, simply to remain employed) is of primary importance.

The nuclear family guarantees both the physical and the ideological replication of the workforce; however, in terms of eugenic development, it offers even more. The nuclear family offers a specific set of concerns that complement voluntary eugenics. Since the middle-class nuclear family is generally small, thereby increasing the chances of total familial erasure, its members express a profound concern for reproduction. The extended family is also just as concerned with familial reproduction; the difference between the two, however, is that while the extended family is content with the quantity reproduced as a safeguard of familial survival, the nuclear family is concerned with the “quality” of reproduction. Quality, in this case, is dictated by capitalist demands. Quality means the extent to which a child will be successful, i.e., will be able to obtain a good job in order to maintain or heighten class rank. What nuclear family parents lose in nonrational association with their child, they gain in rationalized association. They can send the child to good schools. They can provide the child with health care. They can offer the child a safe and secure environment in which to mature. The reason parents want to provide their children with these “advantages” is so the child will give society he/r best economic performance. In this thoroughly rationalized situation, quality of life is equated with economic performance. The perception is that the better the child performs economically in later life, the better s/he will be able to satisfy he/rself within the structures of production and consumption, and the greater the probability that s/he will be upwardly mobile.

Once the structural conditions of the economy of desire and the nuclear family are in place, which in turn lead to equating quality of life (perhaps even social survival) with economic performance by parents obsessed with their own genetic and/or cultural replication, the environment is ripe for voluntary eugenics — a situation which [Frederick] Osborn was certain would come to pass. If parents are offered goods and services which will give their few offspring a greater opportunity for success, would they not purchase them? Osborn thought that they would, and he believed that these goods and services would include services which would genetically engineer the child to insure he/r better economic performance. He predicted that parents would want to participate in the design of their children to help them to adapt economically and socially — eugenic participation would be a sign of benevolence. To be sure, once eugenics is perceived as a means to empower the child and the parent, it loses its monstrous overtones, and becomes another part of everyday life medical procedure. Capitalism will achieve its goals of genetic ideological inscription, while at the same time realizing tremendous profits for providing the service.*

* Critical Art Ensemble, "Eugenics: The Second Wave," Flesh Machine: Cyborgs, Designer Babies, Eugenic Consciousness (NY: Autonomedia, 1998) 122-25. I added the link inline above to the Frederick Henry Osborn Papers.

Herbst II: "Leaves Turn Inside You"

"Only in October / now it's nearly over / maybe in November / if you can remember / when it rains it feels like shame / remind yourself after work / to find a new city to blame / lock yourself in the house / sometimes / you'll laugh / so hard / you'll cry / only in October / now it's nearly over / maybe in November / if you can remember / broken teeth for months it seems / like you like hell / weekend comes and now you feel / like your after life / sometimes / you'll laugh / so hard / you'll cry" —Unwound, "October All Over"


I didn't smell fall arrive in 2012. Unlike every other autumn that I can remember, that sudden undercurrent of crisp rot in the air,—I missed it somehow this year, that smell that madeleines one's mind directly into the cycle of all falls, always fall, the season of live-in decay. Cycles are forever; we are not, even with respect to ourselves.

(For me, fall has been the only season that I experience as a season, as recurrence. Winter is a time to get through, but it never feels like a déjà vu. Spring is filled with clichéd potential but never provides the temporal gap for reflection. Summer is so preoccupied with right-here-right-now that the past and present dissolve. And fall falls on us like a ravenous but patient vulture. We will always be dying our one death, which lasts forever.)

Maybe I was clinging too tightly to the rhythms of this summer's summer, when we forgive ourselves for our need for pleasure and revel in doing nothing. Lists of things that "must be done" bleach in the sun; by Labor Day, we cannot recall what was so pressing about all those things.

Indeed, it's been many, many years since the autumn that I am living in has not followed a very hot and muggy August. By contrast, fall was barely welcome this year: it brought no relief because, apart from a pair of truly warm days, the summer's summer, there was no heat in Berlin from which to be relieved.—Which is to say that fall wasn't even negatively determined this time around.

But if this is the first fall that arrived without my catching its scent, then perhaps I have finally been freed of the after-effect of so many years of school. Above all, autumn has always smelled like the first semester of a new school year, even long after I had stopped going. This is the year, then, when that ghostly feeling released its grasp, finally, belatedly, but does this also mean that I am ready to return?

Or, as Unwound sang in another song from 2001, "The future was invented back when you thought you were human, and now it's only getting better every day that we forget."

collapsed

Frequent moves, small shared apartments, the pursuit of simplicity: there were reasons, but.

The process through which my music player, news sources, mail, and writing instrument all came to reside in a single device/interface has been nothing short of a personal disaster.

I really believe this.

Once, as They say, it was a boombox, electric typewriter, handwritten letters, printed newspapers. (And He rested on the seventh day.)

Stereos of varying sophistication and power came and went, but they were always Their Own Thing. The old typewriter was swapped for an unwieldy 386; later I acquired a b/w laptop incapable of connecting to the Net – a glorified typewriter, then. Along the way, indeed, the Internet "arrived," and correspondence shifted to email mostly; but I always had to access the Net from school or work, i.e. not from the hinky little laptop on my main desk at home.

On the eve of September 11, I received a used freebie, an old beige Power Mac G3, and in a single stroke, music, the Net (meaning news and correspondence, mainly, but plenty else as well), and "word processing" were collapsed into this one satanic Ding with/in which I have lived for more than a decade.

Now I endlessly flit from activity to activity – choosing music, checking for new mail, tapping a sentence here, or there, social network sites, oh, God, checking for new mail – never able to hover sufficiently over a single project to produce anything except exhaustion and a sense of Lost Time.

"das Bild der erstarrten Unruhe"

When he was out drinking he had the sense that, for a night, a moment, one drink more, he was able to climb off the endless roll of butcher paper that he was running on -- forced to sketch the figures of his life frantically, flip-book-like, a cartoon strip running ahead in him that he could not stop to revise but that rolled on and on, while he scrambled in inky black and white to keep his footing -- and into a broad canvas, rich in color and static and enframed, as though time were suddenly forced to hover like an elegant composition by an Italian master, and within the stillness and hardened, scalloped brush strokes, there was, there, tension and drama, a tension and drama that, to him, were consistent with the temporality of being drunk, which is to say, for a night: immortal as a skyscraper, a chain smoker, a crack in the concrete through which a painted flower creeps. And he thought that if he could only manage to transmit this sense of time into writing, to communicate it to someone, that he would somehow, in the mutual recognition he hoped would follow, achieve, without alcohol, that tantalizing state of energized, buzzing motionless time. The sun slants through the open window, a bee bumps against the ceiling, “nobody will ever die.”