The great chicken factories

Café Panis, February

2012-02-12T10:57:00.000-08:00

They do a good business at the Café Panis, even the tourists can tell. Like a lesson in geometry, perfect circles of dark and polished wood populate the area near the bar, while perfect squares line the walls and long bench seats, all of them crowded with leaning, lounging people. The ceiling is recessed with a wide ellipse that has been covered with decorative ivy in bas relief. On this bitter day in mid-February, we have all come just to be near each other, to sit amid the incessant murmur of strangers -- families, friends, cluster of spontaneous acquaintance -- as they embark on explanations, grope to conclusions, listen, laugh and strive not to lose their train of thought. Near the bank of windows two middle-aged women whose hair is equally blond, roots equally dark, make-up equally heavy, eat lunch without taking their coats off, exclaiming over the quantity of the lettuce and the temperature of the soup, which is very hot. One calls the waiter sweetie, and I like her for that.

I am studying Latin with a 6th grade primer to write better sentences. Desperation, it appears, has its morbid roots in hope. Desiderium, the glossary defines as both desire and regret -- a single feeling aimed toward either the future or the past. Whitney Houston was found dead in a hotel room yesterday -- the Beverly Hills Hilton. She was 48. I had not thought about her or her drug problem in years. The herbal tea exhausted, a waitress asks if I can move to a table toward the back, to make way for another party. I do, and everyone's glad about it. Another thanks me in passing, without so much as turning her head, as she swaggers officiously toward the cash register. It's a busy day at Panis. hardly a table unoccupied, and a party of six has just piled in through the glass doors and velvet curtains, their eyes bright with relief. Like us they came for refuge from the solid chill outside that is freezing chins and cheeks and convincing passersby of the merits and wisdom of wearing longjohns.
There is a man on the sidewalk who did not come in. He stands in the light of the windows, his breath pouring into the cold air and breaking into tendrils that vanish quickly in the evening dark.

les mots et les choses

2012-02-12T10:51:00.000-08:00

Look around you, then write what you see.

Words exist apart from things, but serve to replicate them in a rough mirror, a mirror that itself calls things to life, places them in a greater order, lodges them in memory. Words are handles by which the mind can grasp the world, and for that reason should be chosen carefully.

Eurodisney

2011-07-17T08:48:00.000-07:00

is not large, but we were lost there yesterday. the paths curve and tunnel through strange agglomerations of forest and city -- potemkin villages of fun. i traveled across the ocean from my home, a mining town out west, to see frontierland, and hear the triumphant chords of bonanza's theme song. four hours of jangle, to a discordant sound track, as i tried to find my boyhood amid the press and noise. the park was an admirable exercise in crowd control, staffed by europe's mocking youth, some of them beautiful enough to dress as cartoon heroine's. the light parade at the end of each day is billed as an event where les rêves deviennent réalité, which made me think we needed a new word - rêvalité - to signify this mix of fakery and boredom, which so excites the minds of children.

what's good about goat cheese

2009-04-14T03:45:00.000-07:00

What's good about goat cheese is improved by what's good about bread. And what's good about goat cheese and bread is improved by what's good about raw ham. But what's good about goat cheese, bread and raw ham is not so good the second time, and even less good the third. This is the law of diminishing returns as taught by perfessors of economics and my breakfast agrees.

a few words from david foster wallace

2008-10-24T12:03:00.000-07:00

David Foster Wallace covered McCain2000 and taught me many things from beyond the grave:

Always pay attention to the techs on the bus.
The establishment has an interest in alienating voters.
To alienate voters it slings mud.
Post-mud, all the people who wanted to believe in somebody can’t believe in anybody any more.
At which point the base does what it’s told and votes the incumbent back in while this nation’s youth and age are at home watching gullivision.
The media collaborate in this boondoggle. Wallace calls the top reporters following McCain around the 12 monkies.
They collaborate because they want readers, and readers want excitement, and excitement means the race has to be close, even if it shouldn’t be.
Repeat every four years. Monkies, enjoy your promotions.

A few thoughts on writing fiction

2008-06-05T06:21:00.000-07:00

1) Love is one vehicle of the imagination. It is curious to know the other, it is by nature a reaching out, and fiction is that gesture multiplied many times. Writing in that generous spirit requires spiritual growth on the part of the author, and may cultivate same in the reader. Examples of this style: Marilynne Robinson, Charlotte Brontë, Louisa May Alcott.

2) Fiction needs both presence and reserve; it must reveal and conceal to awaken the imagination. What is given are the symptoms of a symptomatic world -- in this sense, the novel equals neurosis. It is that reserve, that holding back which allows the reader to recreate the life on the page.

Anthony Lane, in a movie review, describes this also as the quality of stars:

"You cannot simply shift a load of television actors onto a movie screen and expect them to command its greater expanse; only one in a thousand will be able to summon that mysterious confluence of presence and reserve on which stardom relies—the will both to offer oneself to the camera and yet to keep back the hidden, unguessable sources of that self."

3) Symptoms are cyclic, in motion, out of balance. Each sentence implies not just a cause but a future in germ. The reader, with the characters, is thrown forward even as he explains to himself the past. Trajectory of Janus.

Who wants to play gulag?

2007-07-07T13:20:00.000-07:00

Stalin among children, in the same museum.

Hunger- we have the Fuehrer to thank

2007-07-07T13:16:00.000-07:00

Graffiti in a phonebook, dating from wartime Germany, enshrined by the Soviets in Moscow.

a picture of helen dying

2007-07-05T16:08:00.000-07:00

between daughter and great-grandson.

this is just paris

2007-07-05T15:36:00.000-07:00

germinet salvatorem

2007-07-05T15:27:00.000-07:00

Anselm Kiefer did a show at the Grand Palais. Pretty big, pretty astonishing. Everyone was taking pictures because they could. Kiefer does a lot of ruins, but once in a while, he lets the ruins settle and be soil.
The Latin written across the top (some is cut off) reads: [aperiatur terra], et germinet salvatorem rorate caeli desuper et pluant iustum [nubes]. Used in the Catholic liturgy. The Oxford Study Bible translates it thus: Rain righteousness, you heavens/let the skies pour it down/let the earth open for it/that salvation may flourish (Is. 45:8).

for when everyone has to go

2007-07-05T15:12:00.000-07:00

On the way to school, there was a collection of toilets, and a repair van.

the old country

2007-07-05T15:10:00.000-07:00

I used to go to school here. This is February. When I stepped out onto the playground to take more pictures, the schoolkids wouldn't come out. They were scared that I had been sent by an estranged parent to spirit them away, or maybe just gather evidence for a lawsuit. It was good to be home.

Prometheus strangling the vulture II

2007-06-30T07:00:00.000-07:00

This is by a guy named Jacques Lipshitz. Born in Lithuania to a French first name and a Jewish last one. Sculpture seen in the garden of the Whitney, which has an collection of art in the open air.

In Minneapolis

2007-06-30T06:56:00.000-07:00

they have cool signs.

home for the homeless

2007-06-30T06:52:00.000-07:00

Same place, pretty much, just right around the corner. Someone's been littering in the little brick building, even though it's all barred up.

tires by the tracks

2007-06-30T06:49:00.000-07:00

I saw these in the town where I was born, right next to a garage and not too far from the railroad yard.

Metaphor of a Minotaur

2007-06-07T14:29:00.000-07:00

Isn't it true that the Minotaur is nothing other than our selves, the joining of human and animal, which we must hide in a labyrinth because it represents some abominable desire? We hide it and yet it demands, and gets, its sacrifice, however indirectly. Our Minotaur, whose human parts we empathize with, whose animal parts we reject, is only as mortal as we are. Theseus will not come.

On names

2007-06-06T06:46:00.001-07:00

Donald Barthelme wrote the immortal words "the great chicken factories" in his immortal novel Paradise, published in 1986. Putnam's released it and the Dalkey Archive has picked it up. I bought it for $12.95.

Paranoia and its discontents

2007-06-06T06:42:00.001-07:00

The worst thing about paranoia is that you can't let people know you're paranoid, because they will look at you funny. You must therefore confirm or refute your suspicions by secret means. Sometimes your best friend, for these purposes, will be a fellow paranoiac, if the person is not already under direct suspicion -- other times this is not the case.

Take my wife, for example: either she is cheating on me or she is not cheating on me. Impossible to ask, although in an ideal world she would be the best and most authoritative source in such inquiries. However, the topic itself compromises her, whether she is innocent or not. I must turn, therefore, to my best friend (no, not box wine), to resolve the issue.

But immediately a problem emerges. Greg knows both my wife and me, and has been a friend to both. If he knows something, it will be because my wife placed her confidence in him as a friend. I am asking him to betray that confidence. If he betrays her, he is less trustworthy in my eyes. And if he knows something already, but has said nothing, then he has already betrayed me, and no matter how forthcoming he is now he cannot efface that.

If he refuses to help, I will resent it. So Greg is in situation, as am I.

Joan Didion and the dead

2007-06-06T06:32:00.000-07:00

Didion's last book was hyped to death precisely because it was about death, which is supposed to sober and soften up the readership. But death is nothing new. Nor sickness nor loss of loved. While such narratives are necessary, they are unlikely in their content to be groundbreaking. All that remains for her then is her tone, some novel angle, but she did not create the first or find the second. And that, because she is complacent. She has confused her own voice with that of authority, and any attempt at autobiography, like The Year of Magical Thinking, becomes an exercise in name-dropping. But names drop like turds and stink like them, too. Literati and celebrities have known and consoled Didion -- what does it matter?