I resent it terribly, the dismally singular way it feels to read Evelyn Waugh. In the spaces between the narrative he will take these pauses, aching and hypnotic and elegant, and in each one it feels like my body is drawing in this brume of incredulous, weeping gratitude for everything beautiful in the world, and it is as close to church as I can come. How in the hell anyone so repulsively British could write anything so perfectly arresting, I can tell you I find it perfectly irritating.

And, as he lay, he looked across the hall to the row of women; scarcely observing them, his eyes passed from one rapt face to another, until in the lowest place but highest by a handbreadth, Helena raised hers to meet them. They gazed at one another, unknowing, seperate, then running together like drops of condensed steam on the ewer, pausing, bulging one against the other, until, suddenly, they were one and ran down in a single minute cascade. Helena trotted on and Constantius bestrode her in triumph.

Constantius had done something unprecedented and unpremeditated, something for which his talents were ill suited; he had fallen in love.

- from Evelyn Waugh’s Helena

Love letters. I wrote this in my diary (indeed, a diary, on graph paper [un]fittingly,) just above my historical summary of Night of the Long Knives. Brains are so predictable.

I have never quite got over the fact that “acting” for a man — and I’m afraid still do you think, that a really, proper man — is sissified and vaguely ridiculous. I will do this film with Ponti and Loren out of sheer cupidity–desire for money. I will unquestionably do many more. But my heart, unlike yours, is not in it. The French have a word for it, what I am and it is called “manque,” meaning a failure of desire.

…I am everything “manque.” An actor manque, a philosopher manque, a writer manque, and consequently an intolerable bore. (Not manque, I’m afraid.)

Sentiment, being nothing but a fleeting bubble in an effervescent heart, is often best articulated by art.

That’s all art is good for anyway, I’m sure. And one of the best feelings in the world is to see the people you love in your life succeed and be recognized for exactly what is inside of them, and yet made even sweeter when they’re extended the opportunities to unfold into something even bigger and true-er than they already are. So the only way I can put this is by telling you that inside, I’m doing the Snoopy dance.

It is so fucking cool that my girl Kartina is a special commentator on Roger Ebert’s new series, Ebert Presents at the Movies. And yo, you wanna know how cool she is? Fucking Richard Brody is like pointing at her and saying, yeah yeah they’re all pretty good but this one, this one is real fucking good. This is the one you’re keeping an eye on.

If there’s a last word on anything cool, it’s Richard Brody.

When I saw that big mention, I send her a message that says, “!!!!!!!!! RICHARD BRODY OMG,” followed by the addendum “O.” “M.” “F.” “G.” in four successive texts. She writes back to me, “Saturn is entering retrograde,” or something stupid. How annoying are artists?

This is my favorite joke of all time. I have tried to articulate its exact beauty dozens of times, but I cannot. If someone were to ask me the point of anything, everything, I’d say it would all just boil down to this.

If the art you make is not in this tradition, don’t you some day have to ask yourself why you bother with it at all?

I try not to be corny too often, but I am. My heart is corny. So is yours. Stop being so clever. Who likes clever? What do you mean by it, all that cleverness? You want the rest of us with a crick in our necks, trying to get a look at you way up there, up there in the clever clouds?

(My grandmother will always introduce her best insults with, “I’ve got news for you,” which is what I want to write right now, but frankly it just does not pack the same punch on a screen.)

Anyway, I think I was going to say something about the only way to not be depressed is to bully yourself into gratitude for like, everything, at every second, in every direction, for all of time. I guess the summary is enough. I also wish the idea of keeping a “gratitude journal” did not embarrass me even when I am alone, tucked away in an apartment with just a dog and a cat, both of whom do not care to read much.

My favorite radio show host, for example, is always going wild over the fact of us walking on the moon. And when he does, I too am like holy fuck. We have walked on the fucking moon. There is a moon. That some one has walked on. There is gravity. Gravity is such a mindfuck. There are tides that have something to do with this moon that we’ve walked on by some mechanism I can’t quite bother to understand. The ocean is outer space. Et al, on and on.

Alternately:

It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live. There is but one reasonable explanation of it. The intellect is stunned by the shock, and but gropingly gathers the meaning of the words. The power to realize their fall import is mercifully wanting. The mind has a dumb sense of vast loss—that is all. It will take mind and memory months, and possibly years, to gather together the details, and thus learn and know the whole extent of the loss. A man’s house burns down. The smoking wreckage represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and pleasant associations. By and by, as the days and weeks go on, first he misses this, then that, then the other thing. And, when he casts about for it, he finds that it was in that house. Always it is an essential—there was but one of its kind. It cannot be replaced. It was in that house. It is irrevocably lost. He did not realize that it was an essential when he had it; he only discovers it now when he finds himself balked, hampered, by its absence. It will be years before the tale of lost essentials is complete, and not till then can he truly know the magnitude of his disaster.

- from Mark Twain’s The Death of My Wife

Do you know why I don’t care about political commentary or criticism anymore? It is because an estimated 96% of anyone who might listen to whatever you have wasted your time articulating, at heart, starts with this grain of ‘truth’ before deciding upon any other:

I know [because] that was the case with me.

Well then case closed, I guess.

Not to have a ‘Mac Attack, but like Lindsay was saying, “What Makes You Think You’re the One?” Maybe it’s the legacy of “the personal is political,” but it’s silly to pin this endemic human failure, a deep stupidity that was never born and will never die, on the moment it was finally turned into a war cry. That wasn’t really what had been meant anyway, that’s just what it would eventually unfold itself to be. It makes everything boring. It is soooooo boring. It is a void of curiosity. It is so fucking boring.

Honestly, a song does not get better than this. I mean this is the apex of human achievement. ILU, Mr. Fine Wine. I mean love love. Since I was in miniature, messing with the big mysterious wheel on the tuner my pops had handed on down to me.

(Seriously. This man made me, and he has now too broken me.)

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I have a lot to say about this article subtitled, “Roger Ebert and the Decline of Film Criticism,” but it all boils down to this:

What is genius? What makes a person truly valuable and luminous in this world?

For me, genius is at heart a generosity. It is the mind that can process a whirlwind and pass it on to you in a whisper.

The basic cartoon of genius around here is probably Einstein, for instance. I’m looking at my copy of “The World As I See It” right now. Why him?

Here’s why.

“My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware that for any organization to reach its goals, one man must do the thinking and directing and generally bear the responsibility. But the led must not be coerced, they must be able to choose their leader. In my opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of low morality… The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man… I am satisfied with the mystery of life’s eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence — as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.”

I think anybody who has an attachment to nuance and the mechanisms of experience (I guess we can call that poetics) will always struggle with the real, quantifiable relevance of theory. Its efficacy in general. If you’re still reading this, 20 to 1 you’ve got a sermon in your head that’s been rehearsed no less than four zillion times–and goddamn, you and me both are flat tired of it. I think we can leave it at this: you’re right and you have the right to exist.

But don’t ever forget your humility. You are only part of a machine. A goddamn leviathan, maybe. But you’re nothing without every other tooth of every little pinion working every single gear.

I almost never see things from the same angle cinematically as Roger Ebert. But from the very moment I began to understand the profundity of the written word, I thought to myself, “That’s a man doing something important.” And, as I’ve been lucky enough to ripen in both the pre and post-internet world, there isn’t so much levity anymore in my sense that he’s the last Great American Journalist we’ve got; no pretense, big-hearted, and full of grace.

Holy shit, Todd Rundgren’s official website and the ensuing absurdity of the explosive flash montage that is deliberately way too fucking long is the best thing I’ve ever been assaulted with on the internet.

Somehow related in my own head, an elegant and sinuous reading of the color black by Paul Le Farge in Cabinet, well expressed by a Robert Flud illustration which very much took me. Below, the 1617 Utriusque Cosmi Maioris scilicet et Minoris Metaphysica, Physica, atque Technica Historia (The Metaphysical, Physical, and Technical History of the Two Worlds, Namely the Greater and the Lesser).

I’m not sure if there are too many other people who share this, but my favorite records are almost universally too painful to listen to with any sense of casualty. Same with poems, art, certainly novels or narratives or poetry. When I must, I revisit them. It is the compulsion of must which makes them the most dear, but it’s not particularly pleasurable.  It’s frankly nothing like that; it’s something closer to bloodletting.

There have been a couple brief moments where I have tried to make music with other people whom I admired.  They were always incredible both technically and intellectually and I was always crippled by my own embarrassingly inept attempts to contribute.  Unfortunately, I may have a mush mouth, but I could never manage keep it shut despite knowing nothing more about music than that I like it; there were two songs I loved so much, I got real ornery about covering them no matter how ill the tribute turned out.  The songs were so excruciatingly true and raw, even the most unmusical asshole couldn’t mangle them too bad.  One was Shellac’s ‘Prayer to God,’ and the other was a Townes Van Zandt track.

I just now read somewhere it was his favorite, which I cannot help but feel like a silly validated little goose.

But like I was saying, Townes.  It’s been almost 4 years since I could even take in one of his records the whole way through.  It makes me laugh at myself and the way I can so neurotically squirrel away anything I write or make out of shame when the only thing that’s ever mattered to me in art is truth, earnestness, urgency, compulsion–in a way, a real ugliness.

I feel no connection to slick or neat or hidden or any deliberate sensibility of control.  Ugliness, being the antithesis of what’s exalted, has always felt to me too grossly human for glamour. For that reason, this song feels like a knife in the gut.

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Waking At 3am, William Stafford

Even in the cave of the night when you
wake and are free and lonely,
neglected by others, discarded, loved only
by what doesn’t matter–even in that
big room no one can see,
you push with your eyes till forever
comes in its twisted figure eight
and lies down in your head.

You think water in the river;
you think slower than the tide in
the grain of the wood; you become
a secret storehouse that saves the country,
so open and foolish and empty.

You look over all that the darkness
ripples across. More than has ever
been found comforts you. You open your
eyes in a vault that unlocks as fast
and as far as your thought can run.
A great snug wall goes around everything,
has always been there, will always
remain. It is a good world to be
lost in. It comforts you. It is
all right. And you sleep.

I allegedly feel things very intensely. Everything. Touch. Smell. Total arrest at the foot of agonizing beauty. This is codified by all of Western medicine, which makes me feel somehow like a liar and a cheat and steeped in a theatrical self-deception in which I am somehow attuned to the connective gossamer threads of experience in ways that you will never have the painful pleasure of getting to see

You know what’s funny? I’m never sure if I know the plain meaning of loneliness. The way other people talk about it, it’s like some shock to what they thought they knew about nothing, it’s like they forget this is exactly how they came into the world and exactly how they’ll go out.

Do you know what is better than any fagdog shoegaze band ever? It is 1974 Christine Mcvie. A duck walked into her kitchen in 2004.

Deal with it.

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(that was my favorite sweatshirt when I was a kid.)

I had to read this three times to understand how I understood it implicitly on my first try.

Crush, Ada Limón

Maybe my limbs are made
mostly for decoration,
like the way I feel about
persimmons. You can’t
really eat them. Or you
wouldn’t want to. If you grab
the soft skin with your fist
it somehow feels funny,
like you’ve been here
before and uncomfortable,
too, like you’d rather
squish it between your teeth
impatiently, before spitting
the soft parts back up
to linger on the tongue like
burnt sugar or guilt.
For starters, it was all
an accident, you cut
the right branch
and a sort of light
woke up underneath,
and the inedible fruit
grew dark and needy.
Think crucial hanging.
Think crayon orange.
There is one low, leaning
heart-shaped globe left
and dearest, can you
tell, I am trying
to love you less.

The best thing about getting sliced and peeled like a mango has been getting to lay back, take some pills and listen to records. Admittedly, there isn’t much fun in pills when you’re actually in excruciating pain, but every now and then you’ll catch a nice wave that feels like you’ve just laid down in a field of poppies.

But who gets to sit down and just listen to records anymore?

Anyway, sometimes a man becomes a cartoon. It’s hard to listen to anything a cartoon says with any great earnestness because he’s a fucking cartoon. Cartoons are not austere and do not speak with authority, they make a scrobbly clattering sounds when they run.

Aaron Neville–let’s not mince words–at some point turned himself into a cartoon. It’s hard to remember sometimes that cartoon as like, the left ventricle of the heart of deep soul.

Aside from the obviously singular and iconic vocals, the songwriting is just so…unexpectedly tender and personal. There are details decorating the story he’s telling at perfect intervals, so you know this is his, but never does it manage to make the emotional space in the song feel small or like you’re a tourist of heartache. Whereas lots of Detroit soul in partic, but 60′s and 70′s era soul in general, feels powerful but admittedly uncommitted (unless we’re talking about an Ike Turner production, says me), Aaron Neville is like shaking his head at you with two light beers in honor of your commiseration and before you know it it’s 4am and you guys are leaning up against each other swaying, palms on foreheads, turning to each other every two minutes and saying, “I just don’t know what the fuck happened, man.”

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Listen to the way he says “sip of your own medicine.” It’s just so good.

LEGITIMATELY THE FUNNIEST THING IN THE WORLD

Also, while you watch please cast your mind to that scene in Miller’s Crossing.

At least once every day, I’m thinking about Dorothy Parker. This week I’m also thinking about Cheever. Reading a man’s biography will have that affect. Very well crafted biography, by the way.

Naturally, I’m also flipping back and forth between his stories on the side and I’m just effervescent with the thrill of all this subcutaneous nuance. Earnestly. Though I’m never sure if it’s a good or bad thing to know the exact circumstances in a writer’s life that informs his work.

It’s so funny to me hearing about writers who didn’t hate every word they ever said. Cheever was one of those whose gift was simply fact. He wrote quickly and then sent it off to sea without too much terror, reasoning that a good story moved along like a brisk walk or something and it was his lack of preciousness which imparted that same quality in his work. f u.

Something dark in me says, “How nice that must be for you.” Of course, then I should understand how his self-loathing was just anatomically different than mine; I’ve got the brain and he’s got the crotch. And when I think about it that way, I even feel a drip of gratitude for my condition.

Did you catch that? How I just likened myself to Cheever? Normally I’d do anything to obscure that lack of humility, but it’s fun to try ‘writing like a man.’ Hopefully my hubris, should I really let it soak up some sunlight over this experiment, is more Cheevy and less Kerouac. Though I guess this is quite literally “typing, not writing.”

Anyway, Dotty and John. There is a lot of silence in their stories, the heavy kind, but they’re very different, these silences. Dot has this surging ache running just under the surface like little capillaries. The shape of her words makes me think of a fit man with a clean shave and a white undershirt, but the way they feel to read is like watching from across the street a man chase after a bus. He runs after it waving, frantic enough to manage only gestures and no shouting, abruptly losing his clip as the thing turns a corner up ahead. (That is Kartina‘s ‘saddest thing,’ and it is sooo good.)

Elsewhere, the Cheev exists in a universe where everyone must anesthetize themselves away from the yawning void of an aesthetic life lived mediocrely. The world ends when some consequence of their mechanized inattention comes to head. Bummers, all around.

Obviously, they both loved Flaubert. That’s something if you do not implicitly understand, I cannot explain to you why.

I was thinking about this because of the enormous similarities between Parker’s “Mr. Dumont” and Cheever’s “The Five-Forty-Eight.” I have to admit to you that their central character, whatever kind of limpid, impassive devil this is, is not someone I think I’ve ever met in person. On the other hand, I’m the only person I know with health insurance and that’s because my parents pay for it out of love and terror. It’s possible that I’ve just never toured their natural habitat of adulthood. Or, alternately, he represents a stark coldness you will sometimes get startled by in some people, people who appear to be deeply loved by those around them. The kind of man who does not appreciate complexity.

I am exhausted by the incessant, noisy drunk-talk inside my own head, though. This is the sort of boring vanity that muscles all practical thought out of its way, so I am unhappy giving it any more space or time. The point is this: if Dorothy Parker had allowed herself the certainty which she envied in the men who surrounded her, would she have haunted us with her gravity the same way Cheever does?

Wouldn’t you like to know?

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Today you may call me DeLilah, I’m feeling like the midnight dj. What are your favorite love songs? I think I’m always being swept up by various ones whether en flagrante delicto or not, but there are two that always make me die in their simplicity, the way they feel open and mysterious and to the gills with all that maudlin, wistful awe that will elevate any corny love song into the sublime. “Oh Yoko” and “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” if you were wondering. I’m not so adventurous after all, eh?

And then there’s poetry. I do this thing. I don’t especially like this thing I do, but I do it. I save poems. I keep the ones I love the most to myself and I give them away in secret. They’re reserved for deliberate moments and deliberate people. I’m sure it’s some sort of vanity. I guess it’s a particularly flattering light you catch when you’ve aided in the discovery of something great.

So, knowing that, this is my favorite(favoritefavorite) love poem. It’s not an obscure one, maybe you’ve read it before. It’ll kill you all over again. Keep it only half a secret.

Mon Semblable, Stephen Dunn

I like things my way
every chance I get.
A limit doesn’t exist

when it comes to that.
But please, don’t confuse
what I say with honesty.

Isn’t honesty the open yawn
the unimaginable love
more than truth?

Anonymous among strangers
I look for those
with hidden wings,

and for scars
that those who once had wings
can’t hide.

Though I know it’s unfair,
I reveal myself
one mask at a time.

Does this appeal to you,
such slow disclosures,
a lifetime perhaps

of almost knowing one another?
I would hope you, too,
would hold something back,

and that you’d always want
whatever unequal share
you had style enough to get.

Altruism is for those
who can’t endure their desires.
There’s a world

as ambiguous as a moan,
a pleasure moan
our earnest neighbors

might think a crime.
It’s where we could live.
I’ll say I love you,

which will lead, of course,
to disappointment,
but those words unsaid

poison every next moment.
I will try to disappoint you
better than anyone ever has.