Five Failed Sonnets, FWIW

1.



The lover wants what he does not have.

You know those squirrel-proof bird feeders?

The lover is like a squirrel: have

You seen his eyes? His focus? His ears

Cocked forward, his tiny brain mighty

In concentration, devising a way

to get those seeds? What he wants is right

There but he is confounded, stuck, may

Never figure it out. Something like

A miracle, an act of God, a

Eureka moment, a lightning strike

Is what he needs. He can't hold still, stay

away, or ask for help. This is a prize

He cannot share. He would rather die.



2.



All our desire is poised on an axis

Of paradox, lack and ownership

Its poles, lust and death its steep taxes,

Love and hate in circular orbit,

Strangeness and familiarity,

Familiarity and strangeness,

Round and round with the regularity

Of our backs' heaving under duress.

We pray, ask for help. This is the prize

We cannot share. We never arrive.



3.



In the City of God we built His house

To house His absence. And we filled the

Empty spaces of our hearts with busts

Of heroes, memorials to the

Dead, and monuments to the utterly,

Unutterably lost and insolvent.

We filled the bland domestic quarters

House by house, with grudging affection,

Needing the walls and roofs, but doubting

Their security. We checked out our

Neighbor's wife in the market counting

her coins, her skirt handprinted with flour.

Help her carry that home. Don't be shy.

You'll walk her home but never arrive.



4.



This place is a mere crossroads, a pile

Of coincidence, an eddy in

The torrent of commerce. Some square miles

Of zones of uses held in position

By regulatory agencies

Beholden to the insurance and

Underwriting industries, finance

Interests; and the soulless strip malls and

Secure compounds are from elsewhere, or,

At best, from nowhere, from some ether

Of algorithmic blind groping after

Profit, multiplying to the last sure

Decimal the civic futures sold short

For private gain, a vast edgeless space,

A res publica without a face.

5.

Around the squalid center, [a pit

of pestilential poverty, too

intractable to fix, too unfit

for investment or civic ado],

spread the compounds of the like-minded,

those whose politics are hog-tied, bought

and sold, whose speculation reminded

Pound of lost pride in good craft, whose

Neuroses play out in spas and bedrooms

and restaurants and spasms of lust in

the glow of monitors and dread and

anxiety and sadness too remote

for drugs to fix. They fill their houses,

vast and cheap, with their longing and they

turn up the volume, hold it barely together

with the tight twine of indignation.

On a Hunch at a Tangent

Dearest K.,

I am writing to ask you put your thinker to use and help me fill in the following narrative hole: I have let's say 12 characters in a small town called Kolob, Utah. It's the kind of place you have to choose to be, not the kind of place you stop to get gas or take a telemarketing job. People are drawn here by what draws people along, but these are mostly people who are more powerfully drawn than others, or who are such fuckups out there in the culture that they go looking for something else. What draws them is a sense that things could be better, that something is missing, etc. Some find some satisfaction for a while in religion, or sex, or love, or alcohol, or working with their hands, or leading wayward under-age thugs around the desert, or some combination of these things, but they are still drawn on, always with the sense that they might get to the center of things. So how do I dramatize this unseen-but-sensed center? I've had the vague idea that these people end up in the canyon, but what is the story that propels them there? I mean, I don't think I can have all of them, especially the rancher Ferral Young, just up and follow their hunches until they end up in the canyon. Maybe the hippies would do that. There's got to be some kind of backbone or direction, or something going on that organizes what would otherwise be a bunch of first-person ramblings about feelings, which I can't abide writing. Bolano has the quest of the Savage Detectives for Cesarea Tinajero, which almost seems like an excuse of a plot, the real action being in the daily scrapes along the way; Mathiessen has the overwhelming fact of E.J.Watson's tragedy, to which everything points like to Achilles' death. Tolkien has that Wagner rip-off ring squeezing through the chinks in the ramparts of evil. I gotta have something, even though what I suspect is at the center is nothing except our human nature that can't abide stasis or a vacuum.

Ferral Young, Young Ranch, Pierce County, Utah, January 2.

I never had no trouble with them boys from down at the yurts. They's always been respectful and mostly we don't see them when they come through. First time they come up to the house I stayed half behind the door because not often do people come this far in and with their buckskins and beards and darned sandals and big knives I had no idea what to expect. I always got the .30-30 leaning there and I wanted it in reach when them four come knocking, but pretty soon they put me at ease -not so much as I invited them in, but so's I took a step out on the porch and we talked ok. They introduced themselves all by first name, which here we do not do to strangers, so I made a point of calling myself Mr. Young, being older and unacquainted. Anyways, they was real polite, and all they wanted was my permission to walk through to the tanks at the top of the canyon. Unless you got a helicopter, you're not getting there except through my land, less you walk maybe five days off of 144 around back of Black Bear Mesa, which they was hoping to avoid. I told them to watch for my one grumpy angus bull out there in the junipers and big cats at the tanks and let them go. I never been all the way out there without a rifle and horseback, but if they wanted to walk in sandals and carry just the knives that was their business and not mine.

Irregardless, it blew hard that night so's I had to get up and wire down the cowshed roof and out there in the wind and cold I got to thinking about them boys and headed out after breakfast to see where they'd got to and if they was ok. I go to church most Sundays, but tell you what: riding out in the pines of a clear morning sipping coffee, seeing that there's maybe enough grass to get the cattle through the winter is where I most feel the Holy Ghost. Coffee's not what the bishop wants me drinking, but it sure helps put me in the mood for winter riding.

I rode out maybe two hours, out to where the pines stop, and the whole way I was flushing mulies and cows. Cows looked pretty good for January. Out at the first spring I found where they camped, up on the ledge away from the cow mess. They had swept up their fire, which I appreciated, and left the place as it was except for a stack of juniper. I figured they was ok. I don't know what motivates them boys to sleep on the ground in winter. Me, I had to when I was cowboying before 144 was paved, but I couldn't wait to get out of that line of work and back in a warm bed. The way I see it, some people grow up with all the comforts and later need to prove they can put up with the hardship. If you lived in hardship when you was young, you grew a taste for comfort later, not having to prove nothing to yourself or others. Or maybe they like being out of a sunny morning as much as I do, but they don't have neither horse nor coffee.

Right after they paved 144 is when them two New Yorkers bought the upper half of the Wilson ranch and put up the first yurt. They was the first new arrivals except Vermillion brides in Kolob in our whole history, going back 140 years. All these years we been swapping young Kolob girls for young Vermillion girls, so's these two towns have a look all our own, like one big family. Old Lyman, Radar's daddy, brought home a French girl after the war, but she didn't last long and took the baby, so it's been pretty much just Kolob and Vermillion out here below the mountain swapping brides. Then along come the New Yorkers with their money and their yurt, and Wilsons unload that good-for-nothing scrubland for cash, and suddenly we have some new blood, but as outsider as they come: them long-haired boys had no place here, really, though we was ready enough for them so long's they behaved. We joked that the only people's ever moved into Kolob since Brigham Young sent us here way back is long-haired: all them Vermillion brides and now these two pansies. But face to face most of us was cordial, and mostly let them alone.

When them boys first really got a good welcome here was when we had one of our big blizzards, maybe in '90 or so and the Lymans were out doing late roundup and two of their boys got snowed in out to Flat Top. It got so my pond froze to the bottom, only time it ever did that, so it was cold as sin, too cold for skinny boys out all night. We got about a dozen of us together and rode out when the moon came up, and it wasn't ten minutes before my feet was frozen past pain and I was shivering like a aspen. That's when them two New Yorkers jogged by us in the snow looking like old-time Piutes in their skins and blankets. We all thought we'd have to rescure them, too, after finding the Lyman boys, but what happened later that night corrected some miscomprehensions of ours: them two tracked the boys down to a wash we never went in because a ledge kept the cows out, got a big fire going, blanketed their horses, and then jogged right back out and found us and led us back to the boys, who were warm and asleep when we got there. We are a self-taking-care-of people and we take some real unspoken pride in not needing help, but we had to admit these long-haired New Yorkers was tough and smart and knew how to move in the woods and weather, and from then on I kept them in high regard though I did wish they'd stop play-acting the Piute and join the rest of us white ranchers where they belonged. Anyways, it was a good introduction for us to people not from below the mountain, and I think we'll get along fine even though they look like Piute hippies and live in yurts and talk like goddamned college boys, excuse my French.

The Ballad of Bacchus Rosenberg: The Movie

First of all, I want to honor Mr. Rosenberg who is our first reader who isn't family. You are reading this stuff, yeah? We've both read Infinite Jest and gotten tanked up and weepy and recited the last few lines about how the tide was way out, so we're on the level. And nearly come to blows about the relative tragedy (yes, they can so) of authorial suicides and whether Bolano counts or not. Let's don't get me started, shall we?

At any rate. This is just a place-holder for now but I think I can interest some big names in recording various versions of this. It would be a sort of history of 20th C American music. I want Brian Wilson and Richard Simons to do a dreamy surf version (a la "In My Room") and I'm pretty sure Jagger will want to do the disco version.

And if when the time comes to seal this venture, we can all three--you, me and V. (and James Wood can come if you think he can manage not to be a prima donna)--we'll (I'm pioneering this form of recursive long-sentence grammar that assumes short term memory problems in the reader, by which I don't mean you, although you're our only one of those) engage, to seal the venture, in some sort of ad hoc New Age ritual that involves us being reborn from the desert of David Foster Wallace's something-or-other, which even if we can't figure out what it is, we'll be in an actual desert (V. has one) and so that'll pretty much cover the bases, in terms of ineluctable-concept-trumping-brute-physical-reality wise. That is, the half-assedness (sometimes, alleged) of my thinking will be neither here nor there once we're in the desert. Be assured of this.

We're going to need your input (and your John Hancock on a few pro-forma forms) re: the movie trailer. I'm excited.

[Image: John Bellushi as Bacchus in Bob Guccione's quixotic made-for-TV children's version of the classic holiday story. I still have the lunch box.]

Not Tonight, Sweety

I had grand plans for today's post, but while I was cutting firewood I spilled a gallon of gasoline and 2-stroke oil in my backpack, and then I got home and a deer was stuck in the chicken fence and when I freed her she kicked my arm with her pointy little hoof so's I can barely type, and then Bret came over and we drank large glasses of his latest vodka contraption, and now we're going to take my gasoline-smelling one-armed self up to the restaurant for a pork shop. That's all I have to say about the state of my soul and our democracy today. Thank heaven we live in such a place as will give a man the chance to smell like this, get injured like this, and end the day like this, is all I can say. Thankee!

Romans in Sturdy Denim

Marketing is mostly bunkum. Politics is mostly marketing, at least during an election season. And if you are interested in the invisible substrate of our collective assumptions--many of which we individually doubt--then nearly everything is political. So how is it that even if we don't see the world the way that we are told Joe the Plumber sees it, we still feel limited in some way by what Joe will supposedly swallow? Fictitious weathervanes of public opinion. Was it ever thus? At any rate, advertising, mythologizing, self-narration, romancing, bullying, pep-talking, vogueing, bunkum--these are sister muses. Especially in an age as persuaded by the rhetoric of images as our own.

V recently commented on my feeling located vis a vis all this American stuff. And the troof of course is that I'm no more located than him. We have equal rights to America, and similar scruples about the ethics of authenticy, about the misappropriation of images by marketers. And maybe a similar body memory of the sting when we're reminded that we might be wearing plaid or whatever, we might be out in the same heat working for the same shit wage, but we're still college boys. I spent a summer in California heat moving scrap metal and used car batteries that had accumulated for years in the inferno of the narrow alley between two corrogated metal warehouses. Coming in overheated and with my clothes coming to pieces from the battery acid, and the old guys who worked there year around just laughed at me, never allowed me the honor of being one of them, even insofar as I was doing a job even they weren't willing to do because I had to have the money. And I suppose even so I wasn't one of them. But why, exactly?

Their suspicion is not without cause, of course. Think of the "Tea Party" "movement" with its familiar Reagan era rhetoric of an evangelical Christian national founding and a monolithic set of "American values". This is a fantasy of the American past. Americans have always been deeply divided; the Union was always tenuous; our present sea to shining sea thing would have been unthinkable to anyone at the Constitutional Convention. If you don't believe me, o Koch brothers, read the handsome two volume Library of America record of the proceedings. Interesting and scary stuff.

And the Tea Partiers are not alone in their more or less deliberate revisions of the past. Both sides do it. We all do it. "Revisionism", though,--and the quotation marks are buzzing like flies, here, as they always do around this fecund poop--is just one way of slinging it. How about "reinvention"? How about "self-interested reinvention"? How about "interested but historically responsible reinvention as one important mode of problem solving"? How about that?

Levi's and L.L. Bean have both recently taken an interest in their own past. And in the case of Levi's in particular, their past has real significance as an image of what is worth repeating in the American past. This despite a history of exploiting other peoples' ideas and labor and distorting their own history in various ways. Levi's hired an in-house historian, Lynn Downey, in 1989, and the brand has wheeled out variations on old designs, some of them very good, and made their archives available to the public. The fact remains that you can buy two pairs of sturdy denim jeans, which Levi's actually does make, and they will, with reasonable care, get you through several years of multi-purpose use. The popularity of such practical clothing, and the fact that in the West at any rate, you can wear them most places without being discourteous to your hosts, says something good--to my mind, anyway--about one aspect of our national values. It's a strange brand of populism that is so fearful about manipulations of the market by "socialism" but shows no interest in manipulations of the market by corporations. It is also perhaps a strange brand of populism that characterizes the poor as subject to a kind of hereditary illness, and seems--in its public rhetoric, anyway-- to have a hard time imagining that the poor could share the pleasures of work. Work clothes made of sturdy denim that show the line of the body, allow free movement and are reinforced at stress points with steel rivets? That's not a bad start for a populist platform.

Of course it's marketing for Levi's, and they have no particular scruples about where populism ends and bunkum resumes. Their ads are beautiful lifestyle marketing, like so much marketing. But look at this recent ad--short film, really--and this one which uses what is probably a wax cylinder recording of Whitman deliberately reciting four lines of 'America', his voice holding you so close to the four-beat rhythms of the lines that you feel his hairy chest, the cross-tie scratchings of the cylinder clipping through camera frames like a train.

I hate business writing, so bold-face-emphatic and easy-to-summarize, but I recently heard this thing that might actually be true: "A leaders hire A people; B leaders hire C people." So who are you willing to invite into your self-interested reinventions with you? How much of their voice and vision will you let in? Do they get to speak, or will you merely take a couple names in vain? Is this Levis' ad marketing--speech--that dares to enter the room with something truly anarchic and physical? Something like American Eros? To me it is.

V. in Palm Springs Wearing a Worsted Wool Set of Tails From 1946, and Deluding that He Has a Platter to Carry, If He Remembers Correctly

And that's a ca. 1972 orange silk bandanna/cravat that unfortunately ended up getting sucked right off my neck and into the drain of the hot tub. Pity. It looked swanky. The glasses I don't know who they belonged to. Not me. That was one helluva party, tell you what.

Mr. Wood Inspires Strong Feelings

One Man's Recession is Another's Bright New Beginning

About six months after my taxes were due and I still didn't have work I just realized one day that I didn't really want any and that I could unburden myself of the whole mess pretty easily. I'd been more and more feeling that will to divest myself of my stuff and the many complications of being a citizen, a father, and a business owner. Along with many other Americans, but really feeling alone, I was just tired of struggling month after month, year after year, to keep up with the mortgage, and all that struggle hadn't really amounted to much: minuscule equity in an unfinished house, worth less in this market than I owed on it; a houseful of furniture I rarely had time to sit on; enough kitchen gear to run a restaurant; piles and piles of stuff I never used, just taking up space. So sitting there that day I looked around and just felt crushed by all the stuff. I started listing my expenses in my notebook: mortgage and insurance and child-support payments totalled more each month than I was making. I had also come to hate my career, which had started in ambition and hope and quickly become bogged in soliciting regulatory agencies on behalf of my neurotic clients, fighting for every dollar, and only rarely finding any creative or intellectual enjoyment. I crossed the mortgage off the list, then my business insurance, then half my child support, then all but the minimum car insurance. I hadn't made a claim on my health insurance in years, so I scratched that off the list, too. I kept paring it down, and every time I crossed out an expense I felt lighter, until I was humming with an energy and elation I hadn't felt since I got my feet under me after my wife left. I felt young and alive, actually giddy. I started putting bits of blue tape on things I wanted to keep. Maybe one in five books, my favorite chair, the desk I'd made back when I was creative, my carving tools. It quickly became clear that this pruning job had some half-formed idea behind it, and as I thought, it became clear that I wasn't going to live in this house anymore. When I went to bed that night I lay awake for a long while picturing what would come next. I pictured driving a few pickup-truck loads of my belongings down to Kolob to my lady-friend's house. With this in mind, I saw that several of the things I'd put tape on wouldn't fit in her space and would be redundant, so I got up and pulled the tape off those things.

The next morning I woke up just as energized. I didn't even stop for coffee. I started moving the keeper stuff to the front door, piling it up across the living room by truckload. By supper time I had three truckloads, and had set aside many things that had once felt precious. Everything else I just left where it was. I ate a bit, and then loaded the truck and headed south in the dark. Sometimes a man's got to act alone, without discussion, without compromise, so I hadn't talked with my lady-friend, Blanche. I just showed up there in the middle of the night and surprised her. I had assumed she'd be happy about my sudden un-announced move, and she was. We stayed up for a while and giggled about it, but when she wanted to ask the obvious questions I said I was too tired and we went to bed. Over the next few days I got all the keeper stuff down to her house, and left most of it on pallets under tarps in her driveway while we figured out what would go where.

During the long drives back and forth I started feeling like a fool. There's no radio or cell phone for hours each way, so I had plenty of time to think and question my judgment, and my mania had pretty well worn off, so my mind was crowded with doubt and long lists of complications. I was telling myself why all of this was folly, why none of this would work. Mostly, I thought about the kids up in Salt Lake, and how this might seem to them like another abandonment. But I did finish my move. That last time in Salt Lake, I tidied the house, filled a few more boxes with things I might miss too much, and made a few posterboard signs advertising the house and its contents for the payoff amount of my mortgage. These I posted on my lawn and on the corners. I got no calls that day.

That night I picked up the kids from their mom's and took them out for pizza. I said I had some big news for them, and I told them what I'd done. It was tense with one of them, but the other two seemed excited, happily supportive. The other had become wary of my shenanigans in recent years, and she wouldn't meet my eyes and got silent. I tried not to present it as a done deal, but when we walked in the house and they saw it half-bare and clean, a little echo-y, they started seeing how serious I was. I can't tell you that the following days were entirely easy. Recriminations began in earnest when I pushed a pile of boxes from the liquor store into their room and told them to start packing their stuff to take to their mom's. Seeing their room all bare after years' accumulation of their girlish stuff caused me to suddenly choke up, and I felt the sentimental gravity of this big change.

By the end of the weekend we were moved out. We left enough stuff that a small family could move in and bring only their clothes and food and be pretty comfortable. I received a call from a company that manages estate sales. I didn't like their terms, but I relented on the condition that they have everything cleaned out within the week. Even twenty cents on the dollar left me with a fair-sized check. I cashed it, and withdrew the rest of my accounts as cash. Fifteen years of work, and I walked away with a few thousand dollars. But I did have the sense of walking into a new life of relative freedom. I imagined that my new freedom was a mix of the hopefulness and unencumbered enthusiasm of childhood with the skills, wisdom, and perspective of adulthood, and I was aware that these two rarely come together. Usually, a person growing up trades hope and playfulness for security, only to gradually learn that security is an illusion. To learn this and to act on it, to throw yourself back into the world after years of self-imposed solitary confinement, is a bracing and enlivening experience. You get to keep your accumulated learning while shrugging off the anchor of domestic culture. We're naked apes, so we can't dispense with domesticity altogether, but it is a revelation to know that you get to choose how domesticated you're going to be. It's as easy as letting go of your heavy luggage, shrugging the kinks out of your neck, and heading off to where your curiosity directs.

James Wood: Pros and Cons; a potentially collaborative post which if it works like I envisage will be of greater consequence to lit than James Wood

When I met James Wood he made me call him Morning, which man was I embarrassed when I saw through his cruel hoax, and then he whined until I drove him around to look for malt liquor and he puked on his tux in my mini-van and then fell out by the pool while I was inside trying to make his jacket pass the whoooo-sheesh test, and lay there bleeding from a head wound half the blessed night and damn near froze to death before the paper boy found him.

Io Sono L'Amore Orange Preoccupation Pumpkin Pie

Zest of one orange in the crust
2 cups squashed up roasted pumpkin
1 1/2 cups of half & half
4 oblong chicken eggs
1/8 t each of allspice, nutmeg, clove & cayenne
(Nota bene: as you add the cayenne, briefly imagine one daughter saying that she just likes pumpkin pie regular, and another daughter asking why do things have to get different, and then put in)
1 t of ground ginger.
Then in the whipped cream: ground fresh ginger, crystalized ginger cut up real small, the zest of another orange, powdered shug, and a passing afterthought of vanilla. (Things are getting less precise by this point.)

Serve with Belgian ale or a squinch of whiskey or do what you think best.

The Pumpkin Pie I Want

Butter crust. Roasted pumpkin, so a little bit smoky. Nutmeg and allspice and maybe a little black pepper in the filling. And a tiny bit of cayenne for warmth.
Thick very orange glaze with orange zest and candied ginger. Or maybe the candied ginger is in the clotted cream served over it. Please please make me this.