Warp 9, Mr. Sulu

With roughly seven weeks to go before I hop onboard a plane to traverse the Atlantic, I find time doing a disappearing act. I wake up and the day is gone. Without a job to keep me anchored, I float about, taskless, alone. I never realized how much a routine kept me fixated on doing things.

Without a job, though, time ceases to matter. It’s no longer a fixed commodity, no longer kept track of. A completely open plate, so to speak, but why run for home when there is the entire field to discover?

Not that I have been doing much in the way of discovery. Being jobless also implies being penniless. And being penniless leaves new opportunities to be consumeristic commodities spaced out far and between.

Things that were once done with steadfast regularity – reading and writing – have temporarily fallen to the wayside. I have watched more television in the last 4 months than I have in the previous 4 years (House marathons, anyone? Or The Travel Channel’s No Reservations w/ Anthony Bourdain?) combined. Yet I don’t feel so insipid or brainless or lazy. After all, I won’t even own a TV overseas. There’s just this calm complacency lately – that of doing a bit of everything and nothing – which has been a wonderful placebo for the mind.

 

Neglect

Turn off your mind, relax, and float down stream…

 

A review: “Embryoyo” by Dean Young

Goodreads David has a shelf of books that are “pants crapping awesome.” If I too had a shelf that went by that name, this book by Dean Young would fit on there nicely. What a wonderful collection of poems.

Superlatively speaking, this is by far the most exciting and playful voice in the contemporary world of poetry. It’s kind of like going fishing with that cool uncle who wears Hawaiian shirts and sandals, drinks Mojitos, and has a voice that lulls you into a stupor with eccentric notes and an earned wisdom. I am by no means incredibly well-versed in poetry–I’ve done the Golden Oldies of the Romantics, some Frost, the requisite Dickenson, Wallace Stevens, Neruda, etc–but this struck me as so unique and conversational that I don’t even have a reference point to compare. Metaphorically, each poem felt like it was a stone skipping across a pond–and then it sinks in.

The phrasing is immaculate, the word choice is precise, but Dean Young has no problem throwing a few banana peels onto the poetic highway to have you running to your dictionary to add a new word to your vocab in order to impress your friends at the Piña Colada cookout or weekend float trip.

The topics he covers are the stuff I eat up like butterscotch-flavored Snack Packs: mortality, the nature and role of art, searching for meaning and significance in an impossibly huge (93+ billion light year) universe, finding joy in the seemingly mundane, circumventing melancholia, intelligence, introspection, Eureka! moments, sarcasm, cultural criticism, the music of life, and your usual carpe diem stuff.

And I will end this review with one of my favorite excerpts:

A feeling.
States of feeling, unlike states of the upper midwest,
are difficult to name.
This is why music was invented
which caused a whole new slew of feelings
and is why since,
people have had more feelings then they know what to do with
so you can see it sorta backfired
like a fire extinguisher that turns out to be a flamethrower.

 

Gone fishin’

Tomorrow morning, my father and I are departing for Bull Shoals, Arkansas for a long-planned and much-delayed fishing trip.

There are three things that will be prominent during the 3-day sojourn:

1) two 30 pack cases of Busch beer

2) 1/5 of Black Label Johnny Walker whiskey

3) sunburn

 

Prague

Yesterday I purchased my plane ticket to Prague. I depart for the Old World on July 29th. The excitement is slowly building. My imagination does funny things when it goes into anticipation mode. My dreams have become more vivid lately, and more absurd.

About a week ago, one dream thrusted me into an imaginary Frank Zappa music video, which then morphed into my presence in the Addams Family household. Bizarre is the only sufficient word to describe the experience.

Last night, I envisioned a girl I loved balloon up like Violet Beauregarde after she reached the blueberry portion of her bubblegum meal. I am also having dreams of places, as of now shapeless and without color, but growing walls and pigments.

It feels like a shuttle countdown is happening in a way, a rocket-fueled blast into, what, the future? Away from family, friends, a loyal and loving dog, familiarity, comfort, oh, and unemployment. What will I find abroad?

 

Animal Collective – “Summertime Clothes” on Letterman 5/7/09 (TheAudioPerv.com)

Pretty self-explanatory. Took place last night on Letterman. Cool lighting, strange interpretive dancing, and bodacious music, yo.

more about "Animal Collective – "Summertime Cloth…", posted with vodpod

 

A review: Sideways Stories From Wayside School

All this week I thought about how to do a creative review of this book in the same sort of way Louis Sachar wrote the 30 mini-stories within, but sadly my creativity has been on the lam lately and hasn’t returned home yet. But even if I did manage to muster something up, it would still pale in comparison to the – dare I say – magical world Sachar imbued with life.

I bought this for my 8-year-old niece for Christmas last year based on Montambo’s recommendation, and she loved it. For my benefit, it seems, she left the book here to read whenever she comes to visit every other weekend. Well, a few days ago it was a particularly nice and warm sunny day, so I took these Sideways Stories out in the backyard with me while the dog frolicked about and barked at stuff I can’t see. And though it’s just a “children’s book,” I read all one hundred some odd pages in one sitting. Because it’s that good.

So Wayside School is 30 stories tall and Mrs. Gorf turns students into apples. Sure, Mauricia can’t taste Mauricia-flavored ice cream, but every else loves Mauricia-flavored ice cream. OK, Sammy is a dead rat wearing lots of layers of raincoats, and Mrs. Zarves and the 19th story do not exist, but that’s fine! Really! School set in a supernatural setting has never felt more real and human as it does here. I close my eyes and imagine pulling on girl’s pigtails, playing kickball at recess, or getting Matthew written on the board when I got in trouble. I remember my 6th grade teacher Mr. Bohnensteihl’s mustache, his Jeopardy-like Mr. B’s Brain Strain (of which I was victorious!), and the way he’d put both his hands in his back pant’s pockets while he stood up at the blackboard. Ah, memories.

But even without this nostalgia I have of adolescent fun and learning, Sideways Stories remains remarkable and clever, stories that celebrate “weirdness” and strive to connect with the experiences so many children have. I wish I had read it as a kid…

 

blank

I have been experiencing a prolonged blankness in writing, privately and professionally, in addition to adding material to this free-form blog. Some people might call it writer’s block, but that’s not really accurate. I just haven’t had that burning desire to write, the urge to write. I’ve felt that urge before, and I know I’ll feel it again, so I refuse to worry about it. For the moment, I’m enjoying doing other things while I still can. I keep busy taking walks with the dog, spending time with my friends and family, and flirting with a certain someone. Earlier this week I repaired my bicycle, a Cannondale road bike. I adjusted the brakes and replaced the bike tubes, gave it a good cleaning. I don’t know why I ever stopped riding in the first place. It’s been a couple of years and I love to ride. I will be leaving for Europe in a few months, Prague to be exact, and that will be a completely new experience for me. A stranger in a strange land. Good times.

 

Chuck E Cheese character groped breast

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/stlouiscitycounty/story/3FFCDD1429C9F006862575A80082D391?OpenDocument

Read all about it.

I mean, isn’t that just perfect? A fixture of Midwest childhood shenanigans, filled with games, a crappy mouse character and his crappy friends, pizza and more, involved in sexual harrassment litigation. I heart America.

 

Yasunari Kawabata’s “Snow Country”

I probably should have read this book in the middle of January when the cold still hurt and the wind had a vindictive personality. Reading a book that takes place in the heart of Japan’s Snow Country just doesn’t have quite the same zest when you’re reading it outside on a sunny day with the dog at your feet and garage rock is playing on the stereo. It was an unfortunate incongruity.

That said, by my count this is the fourth novel in a row I have read by an author that killed himself. The others were David Foster Wallace, Hunter S. Thompson, Yukio Mishima, and now, Yasunari Kawabata… I’ll be honest, I did not see many connecting threads, which leaves the mystery of self-death still very much a looming, unanswerable question.

I think had this book not picked up steam there at the end I would have rated it only 3 stars. There is a lingering melancholy that permeates the pages of this book, a sense of everyone’s life being a waste. I’ve read the phrase “decaying beauty” in reference to it and that’s appropriate too. Kawabata must be one of those ‘glass half-empty’ kind of guys.

Love has never seemed quite so empty and unrequited as it does here. The essential plot is laid out on the back cover: a rich, married Tokyo man travels to a hot springs resort in the desolate and beautiful snow country where he meets Komako, a young geisha. They strike up a relationship of sorts in that she loves him and he spends most of his time thinking about how she loves him. He’s basically your prototypical empathetic armchair lover, uncommitted and unattached, and will never change. The course of their relationship unfolds from there.

A lot of masterful description goes into the scenery of this sheer cold and snowy isolation. Look up ‘snow country’ on wikipedia and you’ll see pictures of these hot springs resorts and the images Kawabata draws are brought to life. The descriptions of beauty, cold, warmth, snow, slipperiness, and lastly, fire, appear to be placeholders for the feelings of the characters. There is no direct insight into them, and their interactions are filled with oblique dialogues that- like so many of our real life conversations – say much, but mean very little. Kawabata leaves us to fill in many blanks in this sad, unresolved story.

It is a worthy challenge and a good read, but for a reader like me, Snow Country left me feeling cold. And it’s spring–I don’t want to feel like that anymore.