Whaddya think?

http://killingthebuddha.com/



Blake and Kirk:



Potentially day-making news: the editor of the crazily-named publication linked above just contacted me asking if I would publish http://offwithourheads.blogspot.com/2010/07/typical-american-impulse-or-well-pray.html in their magazine. She found it through Stephen Prothero, the religion writer, who is Dan Prothero's brother, who is Lavinia Spalding's boytoy, and we all know who Lavinia is, besides being my facebook friend and, therefore, one of the readers of a slightly-edited re-posting of this essay on FB a few days ago and she was not put off by my tendency to write extremely cumbersome sentences.

Wondering what people do when approached like this? Do I pant yesyesyes while humping her leg, or do I play hard to get, or do I say, sure, let's talk about it, or do I do research and find out how much I can ask for money-wise, or do I say, eh, I dunno, maybe your magazine is not Granta or the Paris Review or even Paris Match and all that and maybe I don't want to consort with the likes of you Buddhakillers, slam?

Whatchathink?

Generosity

Somewhere out in the zero-degree night, let's say on the edge of a smallish shabby town, there is a man drinking and quailing at the thought of having to go to work tomorrow. He operates a backhoe. He freezes his ass off all day every day in his backhoe. His back hurts. He does not love his wife and she sure does not love him. His kids are never around. He has cable now, and he loves ballgames. He wishes, hard, that he could just stay in his chair in his warm house with his TV and his bourbon and be assured that the bills would be paid. He really wants to stay this way. I want him to have what he wants. If I could, I'd give him a garage full of money and booze so he could just sit there at ease, knowing more or less what tomorrow will bring.

Got My Head Cracked. Twice.

Over the last 7 days of driving to Tucson and back with three teenaged girls and a fiancee, through mostly horrible driving weather, with awkward and probably septic living conditions and sickening expenses, with socially-charged visits and a big family reunion with a Mormon wedding in the middle, etc etc etc I have spent considerable time getting my head busted by two equally imponderable things about which at the end of the day neither I nor anyone else has much revealing to say:

1. To live at the very edge of the cash and credit economy, dipping into it when convenient or necessary, but largely isolated from its tidal surges and arbitrariness and impersonal procrustean exigencies, etc. is a very, very hard thing to do. Just thinking about HOW to actually do it is to step right up to the void. Fucking terrifying. I mean, the reason we HAVE this cash and credit economy in the first place is that we crave security so much that we are willing to trade our lives for it. To sidestep security is to step into the void, where any bloody thing can happen and few people can help.

2. The west, the canyons and mountains and deserts and forests, in fresh snow at zero degrees is so beautiful that I can stay in a state of almost continual rapture while rolling through it, even with three whinging kids and lots of popcorn underfoot and tailgaters and ominous state police cars and coal-fired power plants and dams and the Navajo reservation, and the incredibly ticky-tacky shit we people build, which sounds like a litany of disgust, but really I was in a state of almost continual rapture from Salt Lake City to Tucson and back.

So, there you have it: the two Mysteries: human nature and nature nature. Busts my fuckin' head!

XOV.

He Posted My Comment

What Wood Did to Bolaño

http://contrajameswood.blogspot.com/2009/01/gutless-realism-james-woods-housebroken.html

Magniloquence. Courtliness.

This essay does a good job of locating my unease with James Wood's reviews of Roberto Bolaño.

Perfume Review: Salvador Dali pour Homme

Salvador Dali pour Homme smells just like the mythical Babylonian beast, forget its name, that was supposed to be unwashed bull from the waist up and overripe persimmon from the waist down. He could neither walk nor roll and so tragically took his own life by chain-smoking and wearing too much Halston Z-14. With our modern knowledge of mythical composite creatures, I like to believe that he could now be saved. Alas, we are too late, and all we can do is write copiously and resolve, particularly at this blessed time of year, to be kind to our loved ones, to dumb beasts, and to people who smell weird.

This Little Girl. Roma, I Guess

What was it like? When you're a filmmaker you're always late for someplace else when the real shot shows up. There's never enough money or time. It's cold or it's hot; I'm late; no one will hold still or they won't keep doing what they were just doing that was actually interesting, and then something shows up in shit light or smiles at me, right there, and I don't see it because the film is already about something else.

The girl was about 12. Or maybe older and just small. There was food there and everything but all the people were small and hard, and looked older than they were, although I had no way of knowing how old they were. But even the children looked old. Not old with time but stamped with age to which time only needed to be added. The Roma aren't like the Czechs who age into good-humored cynics, or the Americans who age into surprised children. There always seems to be some chance that an American might escape mortality. On film they mostly look busy or surprised.

The gypsy camp was an ugly maze and I was late and lost. Men kept hitting on me, asking if I would take them home to America. I live in London, I said. Take me to London they said. And then this one little girl. She had very dark eyes, and it struck me enough to check what I was seeing without the camera. Although when it's bright like that the world disappears for a moment anyway when your eye leaves the camera. But it was impossible to see anything but shy darkness in her eyes. I mean their invisibility was palpable. And I couldn't look away. You can see how the shot wobbles. There.

And then I realized that we had surprised each other--my rush and her tears--she was weeping. They were all dusty, and the tears left channels of girlish skin down one cheek that spread to one side of her Roman nose as she wiped her face with her knuckles. We were hurrying away from each other the whole time but we did this dance, which I mostly got on film. She was hurrying back to conceal her tears, and I was hurrying to be wrong about what my film was about.

'Are you crying? Why are you crying?'
She looked away and looked back which was a kind of answer. I think she meant that I wouldn't understand, or that's what I imagined. On the film, she looks away and when she looks back she has decided that her eyes will be less opaque. She looks into the lens and the autofocus flickers and then she is gone again.
'Why are you crying?' I ask, and she shrugs. And then, "What is your name?"
'What is your name?" she says, and her voice is small, only the voice of girl, although very husky.
'Pavla.' And then, 'What is your name.' Now coaxing, which she likes, and smiles.
'Pavla?'
'What's wrong?' again. And she looked at me blackly and answered in some language I assume was Roma. I couldn't understand, of course. I speak English and Czech and some Russian but no Roma, of course, if that's what it was.
She said whatever it was again, looking at me as though it were impossible to say it in any other language.
She shrugged and--although it doesn't seem to show up on the screen--through the lens her face was a child's face and her eyes were green.