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.