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.

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.

Deal with it.

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

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.

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.”

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

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

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?

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.