The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe

  Except for Hagen’s girl, the Beauty Witch. It seems like she never even gets off the bus to cop a urination. She’s sitting back in the back of the bus with nothing on, just a blanket over her lap and her legs wedged back into the corner, her and her little bare breasts, silent, looking exceedingly witch-like. Is she on or off the bus? She has taken to wearing nothing but the blanket and she sheds that when she feels like it. Maybe that is her thing and she is doing her thing and wailing with it and the bus barrels on off, heading for Houston, Texas, and she becomes Stark Naked in the great movie, one moment all conked out, but with her eyes open, staring, the next laughing and coming on, a lively Stark Naked, and they are all trying to just snap their fingers to it but now she is getting looks that have nothing to do with the fact that she has not a thing on, hell, big deal, but she is now waxing extremely freaking ESP. She keeps coming up to somebody who isn’t saying a goddamn thing and looking into his eyes with the all-embracing look of total acid understanding, our brains are one brain, so let’s visit, you and I, and you mean, but do you-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-ueeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee”—finishing off in a sailing tremulo laugh as if she has just read your brain and it is the weirdest of the weird shit ever, your brain eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee—

STARK-NAKED

in a black blanket—

Reaching out for herself,

she woke up one morning to

find herself accosted on all

sides by    LARGE

                 MEN

surrounding her threatening her

with their voices, their presence, their always

desire reaching inside herself

and touching her obscenely upon her

desire and causing her to laugh

and

         LAUGH

with the utter

ridiculousness

of it...

—but no one denied her a moment of it, neither the conked-out bug-eyed paranoia nor the manic keening coming on, nobody denied her, and she could wail, nobody tried to cool that inflamed brain that was now seeping out Stark Naked into the bouncing goddamn—stop it!—currents of the bus throgging and roaring 70 miles an hour into Texas, for it was like it had been ordained, by Kesey himself, back in San Juan Capistrano, like there was to be a reaction scale in here, from negative to positive, and no one was to rise up negative about anything, one was to go positive with everything—go with the flow—everyone’s cool was to be tested, and to shout, No, no matter what happened, was to fail. And hadn’t Kesey passed the test first of all? Hadn’t Babbs taken Gretchen Fetchin, and did he come back at either one of them uptight over that? And wasn’t it Walker who was calling La Honda from the Servicenters of America? All true, and go with the flow. And they went with the flow, the whole goddamn flow of America. The bus barrels into the superhighway toll stations and the microphones on top of the bus pick up all the clacking and ringing and the mumbling by the toll-station attendant and the brakes squeaking and the gears shifting, all the sounds of the true America that are screened out everywhere else, it all came amplified back inside the bus, while Hagen’s camera picked up the faces, the faces in Phoenix, the cops, the service-station owners, the stragglers and the strugglers of America, all laboring in their movie, and it was all captured and kept, piling up, inside the bus. Barreling across America with the microphones picking it all up, the whole roar, and microphone up top gets eerie in a great rush and then skakkkkkkkkkkkkkkk it is ripping and roaring over asphalt and thok it’s gone, no sound at all. The microphone has somehow ripped loose on top of the bus and hit the roadway and dragged along until it snapped off entirely—and Sandy can’t believe it. He keeps waiting for somebody to tell Cassady to stop and go back and get the microphone, because this was something Sandy had rigged up with great love and time, it was his thing, his part of the power—but instead they are all rapping and grokking over the sound it made—“Wowwwwwwwww! Did you—wowwwwwww”—as if they had synched into a never-before-heard thing, a unique thing, the sound of an object, a microphone, hitting the American asphalt, the open road at 70 miles an hour, like if it was all there on tape they would have the instant, the moment, of anything, anyone ripped out of the flow and hitting the Great Superhighway at 70 miles an hour—and they had it on tape—and played it back in variable lag skakkkkkk-akkk-akkkk-akkkoooooooooooo.

  oooooooooooooooooooooooooo—Stark Naked waxing weirder and weirder, huddled in the black blanket shivering, then out, bobbing wraith, her little deep red aureola bobbing in the crazed vibrations—finally they pull into Houston and head for Larry McMurtry’s house. They pull up to McMurtry’s house, in the suburbs, and the door of the house opens and out comes McMurtry, a slight, slightly wan, kindly-looking shy-looking guy, ambling out, with his little boy, his son, and Cassady opens the door of the bus so everybody can get off, and suddenly Stark Naked shrieks out: “Frankie! Frankie! Frankie! Frankie!”—this being the name of her own divorced-off little boy—and she whips off the blanket and leaps off the bus and out into the suburbs of Houston, Texas, scoops him up and presses him to her skinny breast, crying and shrieking, “Frankie! oh Frankie! my little Frankie! oh! oh! oh!”—while McMurtry doesn’t know what in the name of hell to do, reaching tentatively toward her stark-naked shoulder and saying, “Ma’am! Ma’am! Just a minute, ma’am!”— 

  —while the Pranksters, spilling out of the bus—stop. The bus is stopped. No roar, no crazed bounce or vibrations, no crazed car beams, no tapes, no microphones. Only Stark Naked, with somebody else’s little boy in her arms, is bouncing and vibrating.

  And there, amid the peaceful Houston elms on Quenby Road, it dawned on them all that this woman—which one of us even knows her?—had completed her trip. She had gone with the flow. She had gone stark raving mad.

RIP Larry McMurtry, June 3, 1936 — March 25, 2021

RSV Endnote to the Gospel of Mark

 

The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account Of Native People, Thomas King

A pervasive myth in North America supposes that Native people and Native culture are trapped in a state of stasis. Those who subscribe to it imagine that, like Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting For Godot, Natives were unable to move forward along the linear continuum of civilization, that we were waiting for someone to come along and lead us in the right direction. To free us from ourselves.

In Beckett’s play, as everyone knows, Godot never arrives. In the Native version, Europeans never leave. In some ways, I envy Vladimir and Estragon. Who knows what unfortunate turns their lives might have taken had Godot managed to land on their shores?

Off to the Side, Jim Harrison

FAMILY

Norma Olivia Walgren met Winfield Sprague Harrison in 1933 at the River Gardens, a dance hall just north of Big Rapids, Michigan, on the banks of the Muskegon River. When young we children were somewhat embarrassed to hear the story of our parents’ probably feverish collision on a summer evening early in the Great Depression. The river has to slide past until we ourselves are in love and bent on mating with the scant ability to lift our eyelids high enough to see that it happens to nearly everyone. Norma was a very strong and somewhat irascible character and remained that way until her death at eight-five. Winfield was obsessively hardworking, playful but melancholy. He must have been troubled at the time because he had worked his way through Michigan Agricultural College, graduating in 1932, but the convulsed economy only allowed him a job driving a beer truck and he was lucky to get that. I think I was twelve and we were trout fishing when he told me that I had nearly missed existing. One hot summer day on a hangover he had taken an after-lunch nap in the shade underneath the beer truck. His employer had driven by with a friend, seen his abandoned truck with its valuable cargo, and driven the truck off, a back tire slightly grazing my father’s head.

A close call with nonexistence, a vaguely stimulating idea until I think of the nonexistence of my brothers and sisters and my children. At the time, though, of first hearing the story while driving home from the Pine River, it seemed part of the carelessness of adults similar to my uncles drinking a case of beer while fishing and falling off the dock into the lake at the cabin in a semi-stupor. My father’s younger brothers, Walter and Arthur, had had a long and tough time in the South Pacific during World War II and their general behavior was never up to my mother’s high standards. My father’s side of the family was verbally witty and Walt and Artie’s talk was full of sexual badinage, some of which puzzled me at the time. Of course their wives, Audrey and Barbara, were young and you could imagine how much passion got saved up during four years in the armed services on ships with thousands of other men all mooning for home.

For a boy forced to attend church and Sunday school every week there is the fuzzy paradox of Bible lessons not jibing with what he hears and sees. One part of him feels slightly priggish about the behavior of adults. Young people seem not to know that they are going to get old, but older people know that they are not going to become young again. And the other part of the boy is sunk in his growing knowledge of the natural world and farm life where the sexual lives of dogs, cats, chickens, pigs, and cows is an open book, not to speak of the tingly warmth he feels when there’s a glance up a girl’s skirt at school or when he sees by happenstance a lovely aunt’s breast while she’s squeezing in or out of a bathing suit at the cabin. I’ve always been a bit cynical about the existence of the Oedipus complex but having a number of attractive aunts can be tough and dreamy at the same time. Your sense of wrong and right is tenuous and you drift around in a goofy haze of instinctual curiosity with your hard little weenie an almost acceptable embarrassment. At the time I was amazed at my childhood friend David Kilmer, who would heroically pursue the quest. David was a doctor’s son with an ample allowance and would bribe certain girls with a quarter for an inspection, or their somewhat retarded housemaid a couple of bucks for a peek. I recall he wasn’t the least bit fixated, spending most of the time fishing, killing frogs and turtles, repairing an Evinrude outboard, riding his bike off a gangplank at the end of their long dock under the erroneous assumption that he would truly fly through the air. It was, however, my decision to quit looking at the photos of women in his father’s medical books. A woman is included in the book only if something has gone “haywire,” we agreed, and the photos weren’t pretty.

There is a specific melancholy to hardship that accrues later as a collection of gestures, glances, and dire events. I don’t remember anyone ever saying life is hard but it was hard to a child in other puzzling ways, say at Great-uncle Nelse’s shack when we joined him in eating possum, beaver, and raccoon, and I asked my dad why Nelse ate such strange things and he said, “He came up short on beef.” I do remember Nelse embracing the keg of herring we brought him for Christmas, the salt brine soaking through the slats enough so that the wood was grainy with crystals to the touch. Nelse had been unhappily in love, rejected in his twenties, and retreated to the woods forever.

Neil Peart, Far & Away: A Prize Every Time

“I was ‘far and away’ riding my motorcycle along an american back road, skiing through the snowy Quebec woods, or lying awake in a backwater motel. The theme I was grappling with was nothing less than the Meaning of Life, and I was pretty sure I had defined it: love and respect.

Love and respect, love and respect — I have been carrying those words around with me for two years, daring to consider that perhaps they convey the real meaning of life. Beyond basic survival needs, everybody wants to be loved and respected. And neither is any good without the other. Love without respect can be as cold as pity; respect without love can be as grim as fear.

Love and respect are the values in life that most contribute to “the pursuit of happiness” — and after, they are the greatest legacy we can leave behind. It’s an elegy you’d like to hear with your own ears: “You were loved and respected."

If even one person can say that about you, it’s a worthy achievement, and if you can multiply that many times — well, that is true success.

Among materialists, a certain bumper sticker is emblematic: “He who dies with the most toys wins!”

Well, no — he or she who dies with the most love and respect wins...

Then there’s love and respect for oneself — equally hard to achieve and maintain. Most of us, deep down, are not as proud of ourselves as we might pretend, and the goal of bettering ourselves — at least partly by earning the love and respect of others — is a lifelong struggle.

Philo of Alexandria gave us that generous principle that we have somehow succeeded in mostly ignoring for 2,000 years: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

1952-2020

Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson

“What did the Jews think of this Pentecost thing?” Hiro says. “They were still running the country, right?”

“The Romans were running the country,” the Librarian says, “but there were a number of Jewish religious authorities. At this time there were three groups of Jews, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes.”

“I remember the Pharisees from Jesus Christ, Superstar. They were the ones with the deep voices always hassling Christ.”

“They were hassling him,” the Librarian says, “because they were religiously very strict. They adhered to a strong legalistic version of the religion; to them, the Law was everything. Clearly, Jesus was a threat to them because he was proposing, in effect, to do away with the Law.”

“He wanted a contract renegotiation with God.”

“That sounds like an analogy, which I am not very good at — but even if it is taken literally, it is true.”

“Who were the other two guys?”

“The Sadducees were materialists.”

“Meaning what? They drove BMWs?”

“No. Materialists in the philosophical sense. All philosophies are either monist or dualist. Monists believe that the material world is the only world — hence, materialists. Dualists believe in a binary universe, that there is a spiritual world in addition to the material world.”

“Well, as a computer geek, I have to believe in the binary universe.”

The Librarian raises his eyebrows. “How does that follow?”

“Sorry. It’s a joke. A bad pun. See, computers use binary code to represent information. So I was joking  that I have to believe in a binary universe, that I have to be a dualist.”

“How droll,” the Librarian says, not sounding very amused. “Your joke may not be without genuine merit, however. Computers rely on the one and the zero to represent all things. This distinction between something and nothing — this pivotal separation between being and non-being — is quite fundamental and underlies many Creation myths.

“Even the word ‘science’ comes from an Indo-European word meaning ‘to cut’ or ‘to separate.’ The same root led to the word ‘shit,’ which of course means to separate living flesh from nonliving waste. The same root gave us ‘scythe’ and ‘scissors’ and ‘schism,’ which have obvious connections to the concept of separation.”

“Tell me about the third group — the Essenes.”

“They lived communally and believed that physical and spiritual cleanliness were intimately connected. They were constantly bathing themselves, lying naked under the sun, purging themselves with enemas, and going to extreme lengths to make sure their food was pure and uncontaminated. They even had their own version of the gospels in which Jesus healed possessed people, not by miracles, but by driving parasites, such as tapeworm, out of the body. These parasites are considered to be synonymous with demons.”

“Interesting. I wonder what they would have thought about computer viruses?”

“Speculation is not in my ambit.”

“Speaking of which — Lagos was babbling to me about viruses and infection and something called nam-shub. What does that mean?”

“Nam-shub is a word from Sumerian. Used in Mesopotamia from roughly 2000 B.C. The oldest of all written languages.”

“Oh. So all the other languages are descended from it?”

“Actually, no,” the Librarian says. “No languages whatsoever are descended from Sumerian. It is an agglutinative tongue, meaning that it is a collection of morphemes or syllables that are grouped into words — very unusual.”

“You are saying,” Hiro says, remembering Da5id in the hospital, “that if I could hear someone speaking Sumerian, it would sound like a long stream of short syllables strung together.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Would it sound anything like glossolalia?”

“Judgment call. Ask someone real,” the Librarian says.

“Has anyone figured out what the word ‘nam-shub’ means in Sumerian?”

“Yes. A nam-shub is a speech with magical force. The closest English equivalent would be ‘incantation,’ but this has a number of incorrect connotations.”

“Did the Sumerians believe in magic?”

The Librarian shakes his head minutely. “This is the kind of seemingly precise question that is in fact very profound, and that pieces of software, such as myself, are notoriously clumsy at. Allow me to quote from Kramer, Samuel Noah, and Maier, John R. Myths of Enki, the Crafty God. New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989: ‘Religion, magic, and medicine are so completely intertwined in Mesopotamia that separating them is frustrating and perhaps futile work... [Sumerian incantations] demonstrate an intimate connection between the religious, the magical, and the esthetic so complete that any attempt to pull one away from the other will distort the whole.’”

High Weirdness, Erik Davis

Let's take, as an example, the attempted levitation of the Pentagon in 1967. A week or so before Halloween, tens of thousands of demonstrators, including New Left activists, pacifists, and hippies, massed in Washington D.C. to protest the Vietnam war. After hearing speeches on the Mall by civil rights leaders and Dr. Benjamin Spock, around 50,000 people set off towards the Pentagon. Among the crowd was what the East Village Other enumerated as “witches, warlocks, holymen, seers, prophets, mystics, saints, sorcerers, shamans, troubadours, minstrels, bards, roadmen, and madmen.” The very diversity and excess of this sacral list already tells us something: not only were spiritual practitioners present in force, but they were manifesting what historian James Webb calls an “illuminated politics.” Allen Ginsberg led Buddhist chants, Hare Krishnas danced with their ringing chimes, the New York underground folk group the Fugs led a (partly?) tongue-in-cheek exorcism, while the West Coast experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger performed hidden magickal rites without the slightest bit of irony. On the one hand, the attempted levitation of the building — which somehow also involved turning it orange — fits in with what Todd Gitlin described as the Yippie “politics of display,” of ludic and media-savvy pranks. But the levitation was not just nightly news theater; for some participants at least, it was also mass ritual magic, however carnivalesque. As such, the event became an icon for heterodox politics of consciousness that was at once oppositional, playful, and enchanted.

[Robert Anton] Wilson and [Robert] Shea capture this ontological politics in one of the great set pieces in Illuminatus!: an extended scene, set at the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968, that takes up much of the first novel of the trilogy. During the convention, the future Confrontations editor Joe Malik — who, like Wilson, was an “ex-Trotskyist, ex-engineering student, ex-liberal, ex-Catholic” — overcomes his skepticism and embraces the esoteric radicalism represented by a wild freak named Simon Moon. After his conversion, Malik “was game — for astrology, for I Ching, for LSD, for demons, for whatever Simon had to offer as an alternative to the world of sane and rational men who were sanely and rationally plotting their course toward what could only be the annihilation of the planet.”

Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies.

The Year Of Our Lord 1943, Alan Jacobs

“Under Which Lyre: A Reactionary Tract for the Times” is Auden’s most thorough account of how best to live as a poet in a technocratic world.

It is at least possible, as Edward Mendelson has suggested, that the substance of this poem, if not its light-hearted tone, was shaped by an event in the poetic world, not at all world-historical, or not apparently so, that had occurred earlier in 1946. Bennett Cerf, Auden’s publisher at Random House, had announced that he would excise from a forthcoming anthology of American poetry all poems by Ezra Pound on the grounds that Pound, who had made radio broadcasts from Italy during the war in support of Mussolini’s government, was a traitor. Auden wrote on January 29 to tell Cerf that in light of this decision he saw “no alternative for me but to sever my connection with your firm.” He made a point of insisting that he made this protest not because he admired Pound’s poems: “I do not care for them myself particularly,” but for a different reason: “Begin by banning his poems not because you object to them but because you object to him, and you will end, as the Nazis did, by slaughtering his wife and children.” And Auden truly did not believe he was exaggerating. He continued,

As you say, the war is not over. This incident is only one sign — there are other and far graver ones — that there was more truth than one would like to believe in Huey Long’s cynical observation that if fascism came to America it would be called Anti-fascism. Needless to say, I am not suggesting that you desire any such thing — but I think your very natural abhorrence of Pound’s conduct has led you to take the first step which, if not protested, will be followed by others which would horrify you.

*****

It is telling that Auden read this poem at Harvard. One of the dominant figures of American culture at that time was James Bryant Conant, a former professor of  chemistry who had become Harvard’s president in 1933. He participated enthusiastically in the techno-utopian mood of the mid-1940s and played a significant role in Washington: he was a member of the secret Interim Committee that had advised President Truman to drop atomic bombs on Japanese cities, and Auden suspected that Conant’s vote to bomb had been decisive. When back in Cambridge, Conant was striving to transform Harvard from a finishing school for cultured gentlemen into a frankly Apollonian research powerhouse focused on science and technology. In so doing, he dramatically de-emphasized the humanities, believing them to have little to contribute to the postwar Pax Americana. Some months after his visit to Harvard, Auden told Alan Ansen, “When I was delivering my Phi Beta Kappa poem in Cambridge, I met Conant for about five minutes.” In the poem, he had characterized the Hermes-Apollo dichotomy as “Falstaff the fool confronts forever / the prig Prince Hal,” and he said of Conant, “he is the real Prince Hal and gives the notion of sheer naked power.” Auden was polite to Conant, but: “‘This is the real enemy,’ I thought to myself. And I’m sure he had the same impression about me.”

Alan Jacobs, The Year Of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism In An Age Of Crisis

Ron Rosenbaum in conversation with Walter Schaber, “one of the last living survivors of the Weimar press wars.”

“What you have to remember, what people forget about that time, is that everyone was searching for a Heiland.”

“A Heiland?”

“Yes — healer, holy man. It was a time when you had healers, seers, prophets emerging all over the countryside. There were seers here, prophets there, all over.” He spoke of a certain Louis Hausser, a former champagne maker who set himself up as a prophet and called upon Germans to do penance for their sins, to heal themselves, to avert apocalyptic retribution. He spoke of a Joseph Wiesenberg in Berlin. “He claimed to heal people by laying hard white cheese on them,” and despite such dubious claims attracted a fanatic following of believers. “And then there was Hanussen the mystic and astrologer, who was in Munich with Hitler. They were all around, these people promising the messiah, all of them together created a mood from which Hitler could arise. An apocalyptic mood all over Germany. One Heiland after another, and after all the small Heilands came the big Heiland, Hitler.”

“You’re saying, then, that there was a pervasive appetite for some kind of apocalyptic figure, some kind of healer/messiah/saviour, a longing that  paved the way to accept Hitler, however strange and outlandish he seemed — in fact, because he was strange as he was?”

Yes, Schaber said, the very things that led conventional politicians and statesmen to underestimate and dismiss Hitler as outlandish and unsuitable, a hopeless outsider — that nicht natürlich strangeness, that alienness — were the very things that constituted the subterranean power of his appeal. Hitler’s other stigmata of strangeness, the apocalyptic fits, the trances, the occult, somnambulistic, mystic ravings, then — while they may have alienated some rational citizens — were perfectly attuned for the wider, deeper longing for a figure of higher irrationality, a Heiland, to rescue Germany. People who’d lost faith in conventional politics were looking for a political faith healer.

Something about this aspect of my conversation with Walter Schaber stayed with me for some time after I’d left Washington Heights. Something about the way he spoke of the longing for a Heiland led me to consider further the root in German of the word “Heiland,” holy man, healer: Heil. To consider further the deeper purpose behind the ritualized incantation of “Heil Hitler,” the all-purpose greeting, bond of solidarity, mass chant in the Hitler movement. To consider whether it might not have been designed deliberately to evoke the longing for a Heiland, for a healer, a holy man. Was that effect a deliberate creation, an example of Hitler’s conscious genius for manipulating mass psychology, or a fortuitous reflection of the preexistent unconscious longing for a Heiland it tapped into — or both? Was there always a deeper level than salutation, mere hailing, in the incantation “Heil Hitler”? A sense in which the speaker, the chanter, was imploring, urging the Führer: Heal Hitler. Heal Us Hitler. Heal Germany, Hitler. Less a salutation than a prayer.

When I asked Schaber for his reaction, as someone who lived through the awful period when “Heil Hitler” grew from the tribute of misfit sociopathic sycophants of a barbaric crank to a massive roar of near-religious national assent, he was skeptical at first. It struck him as a novel idea, “Heil Hitler” as “Heal, Hitler,” but after considering it, he told me, “I think there may be something to it.”

Explaining Hitler, Ron Rosenbaum

Leonard Cohen: the determinator, Details Magazine, July 1993

Leonard Cohen, the maestro of melancholy, answers questions on love, obsession, and despair

What’s the one thing men ought to know about women? A.B. (Berkeley, CA)
    They are deeply involved in a pattern of thought centered around the notion of commitment.

What’s the one thing women ought to know about men? T.M. (Worcester, MA)
    A man steadfastly refuses to eavesdrop on his conversation with himself.

Is there a difference between love and obsession? F.S. (Phoenix, AZ)
    It is the same difference between the Sermon on the Mount and the Crucifixion.

What do men really want? B.B. (Houston, TX)
    A square deal.

What would be the most appropriate thing for a guy to say to a girl after sex? J.H. (New York, NY)
    Thank you.

I am twenty-eight; I work and attend college. I have been single for three years and love women but have developed a strong attraction for Italian men only. I have repeated dreams about them. What should I do? J.G. (Los Angeles, CA)
    This habitual drift toward the trivial will continue to make you suffer.

Is it possible to be madly in love with more than one person at a time? M.B. (San Jose, Costa Rica)
    It is possible to be in love with more than one person at a time but not “madly in love.”

Is honesty always the best policy? G.W. (Hartford, CT)
    In my case, yes. In your case, rarely.

How can you tell if you’re in love? C.H. (Fort Lauderdale, FL)
    You dissolve your strategy for the other.

Why is having an orgasm so exhilarating? N.P. (Portland, OR)
    You stop thinking about yourself.

How can I remain friends with my former lover? R.A. (Chicago, IL)
    Move to another country.

Is it possible to achieve love without desire? S.O. (Washington, DC)
    Yes.

Are there any examples of good or healthy sexual relationships in the Bible? P.R. (Cleveland, OH)
    The patriarchs and their wives stand as shining examples of possible human marriages. The love of Jesus for Mary Magdalene continues to inspire me.

Is loneliness necessarily a sad thing? M.C. (Atlanta, GA)
    Yes, it is designed to be that way.

How long does it take to recover from a bad relationship? S.T. (Baltimore, MD)
    You never recover from a bad relationship.

I feel humiliated and exposed by my needs and my desires, even when they’re reciprocated. How can I deal with this? T.D. (London, England)
    You feel humiliated and confused anyway. Do not confuse the issue with your needs and desires.

Does there have to be democracy in sexual fantasies? I love tying up my lover, but I don’t want him to tie me up. C.H. (Middlebury, VT)
    You are already tied up.

Why do people marry? M.D. (Hudson, OH)
    I don’t know. Ask the man who owns one.

My Sky Blue Trades, Sven Birkerts

And then, one afternoon, kneeling down in a new section, I pulled out a book called The Tower Treasure, one of the very first in the Hardy Boys series. And with that began a reading obsession that lasted right into the early sixth grade. I read and reread the books — there were forty-some, I think. I borrowed them from the library, requested them as gifts, used allowance money to buy them; I even asked my mother to drop me off at the Birmingham bookshop whenever she went into town to do errands. There I would stand in place and read, knocking off forty or fifty pages at a stretch, dreading the shoulder tap that would mean it was time to go.

The Hardy Boys series gave me a complete and ongoing world — a world of danger and intrigue offset by what I now see as the cliches of cheery home life, but which then seemed the essence of what I wanted. Their town, Bayport, managed to condense the whole voluptuous larger universe, complete with gangsters, police, shady establishments, boathouses, deserted farmsteads, warehouses, train stations, wilds of all descriptions — everything, in short, required for every imaginable adventure. I entered in a state of joyous trepidation. To have one of the books under way, safely secreted on the shelf by my bed, was to have a validated ticket to immunity. Then it did not matter in the least if I was passed over for some playground team or whether my father came roaring up the driveway in one of his moods. It did not even matter that, catching sight of me propped on a pillow in my bed, he sent me out into the yard with a rake or clippers or some other instrument of manual repetition. I had only to think of my book, the marker like a signpost showing me the road back in, and I would feel safe.

My absorption into the world of Frank and Joe Hardy bled into my daily life as no reading experience has since, not quite. When I now read of others growing up with loftier excitements — those mythic schoolboys devouring their Dickens or Scott or Kipling — I feel slightly chagrined. But the fact is that I don't know if I could have hurled myself into those other imagined worlds in the same way. Part of my Hardy Boys obsession had to do with my susceptibility to renderings of American boyhoods (I also loved Penrod, Tom Sawyer, A Separate Peace). I was drawn by the mysteries, of course. But I was no less deeply compelled by the settings, the images I derived of an ideal boy-world. I loved the idea of these brothers with their lightly ribbing loyalty, their constant interactions with their buddies — “chums” — the extraordinary freedom with which they went about their complicated and endlessly exciting business. Nothing could have been more different from how I lived.

My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Up Counter In A Contrary Time, 
Sven Birkerts

A Positively Final Appearance, Alec Guinness

A refurbished Star Wars is on somewhere or everywhere. I have no intention of revisiting any galaxy. I shrivel inside each time it is mentioned. Twenty years ago, when the film was first shown, it had a freshness, also a sense of moral good and fun. Then I began to be uneasy at the influence it might be having. The bad penny first dropped in San Francisco when a sweet-faced boy of twelve told me proudly that he had seen Star Wars over a hundred times. His elegant mother nodded with approval. Looking into the boy's eyes I thought I detected little star-shells of madness beginning to form and I guessed that one day they would explode.

“I would love you to do something for me,” I said.

“Anything! Anything!” the boy said rapturously.

“You won't like what I'm going to ask you to do,” I said.

“Anything, sir, anything!”

“Well,” I said, “do you think you could promise never to see Star Wars again?”

He burst into tears. His mother drew herself up to an immense height. “What a dreadful thing to say to a child!” she barked, and dragged the poor kid away. Maybe she was right but I just hope the lad, now in his thirties, is not living in a fantasy world of secondhand, childish banalities.

A couple of weeks ago, in a Chinese restaurant, the dapper little Chinese maître D bowed low as I left and, full of Chinese smiles, said, “Sir Guin, now that Star Wars is being shown again you will be famous once more.” Oh, to be Ernest Thesiger.

The mornings, during the past few weeks, have started quite sharply and yet gently blurred in hazy sunshine. There is a very rounded cherry tree in the middle of the paddock, now in flower, but the haze softly obliterates the trunk of the tree, leaving the blossom looking as if it might be a small pinkish-white cloud that has settled with us. It spreads a feeling of calm like a blessing. I stand out of doors in my dressing-gown, gazing at it with gratitude, but know that all too soon there will be a thud of letters falling through the letter-box, including glossy photographs which no ordinary pen can sign. As often as not they have already been signed in a sprawling gilded signature by “Darth Vader” from Star Wars —“so-and-so IS Darth Vader.” Maybe — but it wasn't so-and-so's voice or face (when it was finally revealed) to the best of my remembrance. The “IS”, I suppose, is for reassurance, like clutching at something when waking from a bad dream.

Last Sunday, as Mass was finishing, a young man leaned over my shoulder and said, “My pop is a great fan of Star Wars. Will you say hello to him as you leave the church?”

I asked where his father was.

“At the back in a wheelchair,” he said.

The priest gave his blessing and the ritual words, “The Mass is over, go in peace.”

“Thanks be to God,” we chorused back, the young man adding, “And can I have your autograph?”

“Not here,” I replied rather crossly.

At the back of the church, sitting in a wheelchair, was a large, middle-aged, genial-looking man. I went up to him all smiles, like a baby-kissing politician, and exuding the sweet benevolence of a hospital-visiting princess. I took him warmly by the hand and made one or two fatuous inquiries. He suddenly said the dreaded words — “Star Wars!”

“Ugh —hugh –uh –ha –hm,” I said, but I kept up my smile.

“Obi-Wan Kenobi,” he nodded at me and, for good measure, “May the Force be with you.”

“And also with you,” I replied, to ecclesiastical merriment.

“The Man In The White Suit; that was you, wasn't it?”

“Yes, about forty-five years ago,” I replied, with a sense of relief that we might have reached saner ground; anyway terra firma. Then his face became grave and he said, “Darth Vader.” 

I backed away as quickly as possible, sketched him a valedictory wave of the hand and stumbled down the church steps into fresh air and morning sunlight. The young man pursued me. “The autograph,” he said, quite politely. But that was suddenly too much for me. “Not in front of the parishioners,” I said. Then I disappeared.

A second later I was deeply ashamed but the damage had been done. No excuse. Just sudden bloody-mindedness and panic. It's no good saying to myself, “Watch out in these declining years, things could turn nasty.” Donkey's years ago I remember seeing an elderly man in Harrods screaming and screaming at a shop assistant because she was buffing her nails. I felt sad contempt for him and it never occurred to me to mutter, “There, but for the Grace of God, go I some day in the future.”

The evening news announced that dust bowls have formed on the dry farmlands of Cornwall. Cornwall, of all places, where there used to be so many hedges.

We all need hedges, I thought. They don't have to be prickly though, like mine.

“I was world-weary, and I always complained a lot.”

Do you miss Walter when you’re writing lyrics on your own?

Yeah, for sure.

Do you two exchange ideas, and can we assume that there will be more Steely Dan?

We’ve been talking about it for a couple of years. But he’s been spending a lot of time with his family and that’s what he’s into now.

When people say they’re spending a lot of time with their family, I always think there’s some other covert reason they’re not saying.

Walter always tells me that what he likes best to do is nothing. He likes to hang.

And what do you like best?

Work.

Donald Fagen interview, 2012

Unassigned Territory, Kem Nunn

Harlan stood for several minutes at [the room's] center, in the darkness. He was trying to figure it but found he hadn't enough to go on. An affair of the heart, perhaps. Harlan had given in to an affair of the heart once. He had been eighteen years old at the time. He had run away with a neighbor's wife and they had gone to Kansas City. His father and the woman's husband had come looking for them. It was an absurd story. At least it seemed absurd to Harlan. The woman's husband wound up pulling a gun on him in their apartment. He wasn't very good with it and Harlan had taken it away from him. Then his father, who had been looking in another room downstairs, had come up and Harlan had fought his father. He could have taken his father but he hadn't.

In the end -- not the night of the fight, but in the end -- Harlan had done what his father wanted -- he had gone home. What he had found at the time was that living with the woman was doing something to him. When he had left with her he understood he was breaking a rule. But he thought it was only one rule; he had thought that he could violate one principle and yet still live by the others, and what he found was that it didn't work that way. Later he believed he had learned the truth of Paul's words when he said that God's Word was like a mirror in which a man might see not only the man he was but the man he might be, and he came to understand that the proper business of life was trying to do something about the difference. It was the revelation which had pointed him down the road he still followed. It was about keeping honest and as near as Harlan could tell, obedience to the Word was the only thing that worked.

Harlan went to an open window. The night air was cool against his face. He could see a bit of the road and above that the ridge which led to the interstate. Above the ridge the sky was filled with stars. He tried for a moment to imagine what the girl the Wheeler boy had run off with might be like. Neil Davis had described her as a common whore. The curious thing about that was, it was more or less the way Harlan's father had once described the woman Harlan had run away with. There were times when it suited him to imagine he no longer remembered the woman's name, but he did. He continued to stand at the window, to examine the huge black shape the ridge had cut from the starlit sky. The woman's name was Virginia. At one point during the summer of his eighteenth birthday she had given him a record as a present -- the Paul Whiteman recording of "I'm Coming, Virginia." It was supposed to be a joke, something she had picked up in a secondhand store. The thing turned out to be something of a collector's item, however, as it contained a cornet solo by Bix Beiderbecke and there were times now, when Harlan thought of her, when he imagined he could still hear the pure tone of Bix's horn as it filled a cheap two-room flat complete with bamboo shades and colored lights, windows open upon hot summer nights.

The woman had died some ten years later, or so Harlan had been told, in a Memphis hospital of cirrhosis of the liver -- an ugly death and what he supposed was the point of the story, what one ought to remember about the pursuit of empty pleasures. That he remembered more, that the cheap trappings of a romantic sentimentality still clung to the episode like the scent of a dime store perfume, was a nagging source of irritation. That the trappings were capable, on occasion, of generating actual tears, was worse than irritating. But then he supposed there was a point in all of that too. It had something to do with the stuff choices were made of. Though not a subject he ordinarily talked about, it was, he thought, under the circumstances, something he might take up with a certain Obadiah Wheeler, should the opportunity present itself.

True Believers, Kurt Andersen

Back in 1963 people thought they were seeing the future when Gordon Cooper spent a day in outer space circling the earth. But when I look back now at the long weekend after John Kennedy's assassination, I realize that was the big time-warped glimpse into the twenty-first century. In 1963 it was unprecedented and bizarre to have nothing but news and discussions of news events airing on all three TV channels around the clock for days on end, and to have that clip of Ruby shooting Oswald played again and again. I sit with a plastic pint of sugar-free green-tea gelato and a purring Clarence Darrow on my lap, flipping between MSNBC and CNN and FOX, driven from one to the other and back by ads for pharmaceuticals and gold. On every channel, people are talking about the latest breakdown of talks with Iran. In the last forty-five minutes, I've listened to a dozen different anchors and experts and commentators and have learned absolutely nothing I didn't know from reading the story in the newspaper this morning. For a few months last year, when I stopped watching cable news altogether, I think I felt slightly mellower and happier, like when I gave up cigarettes and Diet Coke, or when mosquito season ends. And as with cigarettes, I've come to believe cable news is slowly killing us, giving us intellectual emphysema, cancer of the mind. After all, people smoked for the better part of a century before they really knew it could be fatal.

True Believers, Kurt Andersen

Power Chord: One Man's Ear-Splitting Quest To Find His Guitar Heroes, by Thomas Scott McKenzie

"She's my shovel," Brad Gillis said when I asked about the battered Stratocaster his guitar tech had shown me on the side of the stage. It's a 1962 model that he obtained in 1979 when a friend abandoned a project to paint the guitar. It wasn't a huge acquisition at the time because the guitar player had a black Les Paul Custom that he adored. But he started customizing the Strat on a bit of a lark.

"I had a Datsun 240Z that was custom painted with red-orange paint," he said. "I had an extra can left over for touch up. I sold the car, but still had the paint. I thought, 'Shit, I'll paint this guitar in car red.' I took it to a body shop."

He then had the neck and headstock painted black, which was an unusual treatment back then. He added a Floyd Rose tremolo, changed the pickups, and made numerous other alterations.

"Whatever the hell I wanted," he said. "An extra fret, locking nuts, tuners, I changed everything. Then I started playing and I thought, 'This is a fucking great guitar.'" The instrument has never been far from his side for the last thirty years.

The interesting thing about workhorse guitars is how they are treated with both reverence and abandon by their owners. These instruments contain decades of memories, successes, and failures. They carry the scars of tens of thousands of miles on the road. They often have the dried blood of musicians caked in cracks and crevices. On his website, Steve Vai writes movingly about one of his instruments that he calls Evo:

Although Evo is just made out of wire and wood, I'm afraid of how much emotional investment I have in her. I think when you play an instrument long enough it becomes an extension of yourself in ways that run deeper than anyone may understand but you . . . For me, Evo has been the voice of my heart and seen the depth of my most depressed emotional frames of mind to my most euphoric moments of joy and divine love, and she usually gets the brunt of it all. I have cried, screamed, prayed, and bled through that instrument, and like I said, although she is only wire and wood, there is an emotional investment in her. I'm afraid at how much I love her

Musicians aren't the only ones to cherish their guitars. As fans, we invest tremendous sentimental value (and therefore, a cold hard cash value) in the instruments that produced our favorite songs -- enough value that celebrity-owned guitars fetch huge amounts at auction. Eric Clapton's Fender Stratocaster, nicknamed Blackie, brought an astounding $959,500 at a Christie's auction in 2004. Slowhand sold the instrument, along with many others from his collection, to raise money for his drug rehab program in the Caribbean. The idea of parting ways with the guitar didn't seem to bother him, at least not when compared with the good work the money would make possible. But I went out and purchased a lottery ticket, hoping to win enough to buy the guitar. My plan was to win the auction and then loan the guitar back to Clapton. It just didn't seem right -- in my mind -- that he should be without the guitar. After his passing, maybe it would come back to me or to a museum.

But in spite of the fervor with which the instruments are honored, the musicians still manage to thrash them around every night. I've seen Vai play his cherished Evo with such abandon and fury that I thought he would rip it apart onstage. It felt like watching a cheetah tear into a gazelle on Wild Kingdom.

Brad Gillis was no different with his beloved '62 Strat.

"I still beat the shit out of that guitar," he said. "I'm still playing it hard."

Mr. Gillis, with shovel.

Billy Bathgate by E.L. Doctorow: Sex Scene 2

The thing about Drew was she was not genitally direct, she wanted to kiss my ribs and my white boyish chest, she held my legs and ran her hands up and down the backs of my thighs, she caressed my ass and sucked my earlobes and my mouth, and she did all these things as if they were all that she wanted, she made small editorial sounds of approval or delectation, as a commentator to the action, little single high notes, whispers without words like remarks to herself, it was as if she was consuming me as an act of eating and drinking, and it wasn't designed to arouse me, what boy in that situation needed arousal? from the moment she stopped the car I was tumescent, and I waited for some acknowledgment from her that this was in fact part of me too but it didn't come and it didn't come and I flared through my need into an exquisite pain, I thought I would go mad, I became agitated and discovered only then her availability, that in all of this she was only waiting for me to find her absolute willingness to be still and listen to me for a change. This was so girlish of her, so surprisingly restrained and submissive, I was not artful but simply myself and this brought forth from her a conspiratorial laughter, it gave her the pleasure of generosity to have me in her, it was not an excitement but more like a happiness of having this boy in her, she wrapped her legs around my back and I rocked us up and down in the back seat of the car with my feet sticking out of the open door, and when I came she held her arms around me tight enough to stop my breath and she sobbed and kissed my face as if something terrible had happened to me, as if I had been wounded and she was, in an act of desperate compassion, trying to make it as if it had not happened.

Then I was following her stark naked through the brush into this noplace of such great green presence she had chosen arbitrarily or by happenstance, with her gift for centering the world around herself, so that it was all very beautifully central in my mind, the place to be, following her flashing white form around trees, under tangles, avoiding the whip of branches, with a brilliant chatter of communities of unseen birds telling me how late I was to have found it. And then we were going generally downward, and the ground became swampy and the air close and I found myself slapping at stings in my skin, I had wanted to catch her, tackle her and fuck her again, and she was doing this to me, taking me into furies of mosquitoes. But I came upon her squatting and ladling handfuls of mud over herself and we applied this cold mud to each other and then we walked like children into the sinking darkness of forest, hand in hand like fairy-tale children in deep and terrible trouble, as indeed we were, and then we found ourselves at this still pond as black as I had ever seen water to be and of course she waded in and bid me to follow and my God it was fetid, it was warm and scummy, my feet were in wet mats of pond weed, I treaded water to keep my feet from sinking and couldn't crawl back out fast enough but she swam on her back a few yards and then came crawling out on all fours, and she was covered with this invisible slime, her body was slimed as mine was and we lay in this mud and I punched into her and held her blond head back in the mud and pumped slime up her and we lay there rutting in this foul fen and I came and held her down and wouldn't let her move, but lay in her with her breath loud in my ear, and when I lifted my head and looked into her alarmed green eyes in their panic of loss, I grew hard again right in her and she began to move, and this time we had the time, by the third time it takes its time, and I found the primeval voice in her, like a death rattle, a shrill sexless bark, over and over again as I jammed into her, and it became tremulous a terrible crying despair, and then she screamed so shriekingly I thought something was wrong and reared to look at her, her lips were pulled back over her teeth and her green eyes dimmed as I looked in them, they had lost sight, gone flat, as if her mind had collapsed, as if time had turned in her and she had passed back into infancy and reverted through birth into nothingness, and for an instant they were no longer eyes, for an instant they were about to be eyes, the eyes of soullessness.

Yet a few moments later she was smiling and kissing me and hugging me as if I had done something dear, brought her a flower or something.

Posted here for discussion purposes, in this essay.

Billy Bathgate, by E.L. Doctorow: Sex Scene 1

Much later Rebecca and I were sitting on one of the couches and she had her legs crossed at the knees and one dirty foot swinging and her night-gown showing below the hem of her black lace dress. She was the last kid there. She raised her arms and she pulled her black hair back behind her head and did something deft back there the way girls do with their hair so that it stays the way they fix it without any visible reason to and despite the law of gravity. Maybe I was a little drunk by then, maybe we both were. Also the dancing had been warm and close. I was smoking a cigarette and she took it out of my fingers and drew on it, one puff, and blew out the smoke without inhaling and put the cigarette back in my fingers. I saw now she was wearing mascara on her eyelashes and eyelids and had on that communal red lipstick, paled somewhat since its application, and was glancing at me sideways with her foot swinging, and those eyes dark as black grapes, and her white neck draped in that torn shawl of dusty pink -- I had no warning or preparation from one moment to the next, I was swimming in a realm of intimacy, as if I had just met her, or as if I had just lost her, but surely as if I had never roof-fucked her. My mouth went dry she was so incredibly childishly beautiful. Until this moment I had been the party giver and big boss of the evening, dispensing his largesse and granting his favors. All those dances--oh I knew everyone knew I favored her on my randy forays up the fire escape, but it was athletics, I paid her, for chrissake, I must have been staring at her because she turned away and lowered her eyes, her foot going madly--all those dances I had danced with her and only her were the exacting ceremonies of possession. And this ancient witch child understood before I did that everything was now up in the heart, as if my rise in the world had lifted us to an immensity of consequence, which we were now allowed to see, like a distance ahead of us, like a horizon. They must all have understood, every fucking kid there, while I thought what I had been feeling was only a sweetly mellow good time.

So when everyone else had gone we lay for the first time together without any clothes on that same couch, everyone else asleep, even Garbage in some inner bin of his privacy. We lay in the dark cellar of dust and ash, and I was passive and on my back and Rebecca lay on top of me and cleaved herself on me letting herself down with a long intake of her breath which I felt as a cool flute of air on my neck, and slowly awkwardly she learned her rhythm upon me as I was patient to allow her to do. My hands were on her back for a while and then on her buttocks, I followed the soft down with my fingers, I knew it was as black as her hair, it went from the bottom of her spine down into the crack between her ass, and then I put my finger on her small ring of an asshole and as she raised her hips I lost it in the clamp of her hard buttocks. Her hair fell forward as she raised herself and it brushed my face, and when she lowered herself it fell around my ears, and I kissed her cheeks as she rested and I felt her lips on my neck and her hard little nipples against my chest and her wet thighs on my thighs, and then I didn't remember when it started she was making little discoveries which she voiced in private almost soundless whimperings in my ear and then she moved into some arrhythmic panic and went stiff and I felt around my cock the grasp of her inner musculature and when I reached down with my finger and touched the asshole it clamped around my fingertip and released and contracted and released in the same rhythm as her interior self was squeezing and unsqueezing my cock and I couldn't stand it anymore I arched myself into her and pulled back, raising myself and lowering myself with her dead bodyweight as vehemently as if I were on top, pretty soon going so fast she was being bounced on my chest and thighs with little grunts until she found my rhythm and went stuttering and imperfectly and finally workingly, smoothly against it, meeting me when I was to be met, leaving me when I was leaving to be left, and that was so unendurably exquisite I shot into her and held her down against me with my hands while I came pulsing up into her milkingly lovely little being as far as I could go. And she held her arms around me to get me through that, and then there was peace between us, and we lay as we were with such great trust as to require no words or kisses, but only the gentlest, slowest and most coordinate drift into sleep.

Posted here for discussion purposes, in this essay.

Paul Wells, The Longer I'm Prime Minister: Stephen Harper And Canada, 2006-

"I just said yes to everything I was ever asked to do" - John Baird

Harper knew the damage a disloyal lieutenant could do to a leader because for years that was the kind of lieutenant he’d been.

Preston Manning’s memoir of his years as Reform Party leader, Think Big, is in part a chronicle of Stephen Harper’s troublemaking years. At almost every turn, if Harper felt that Manning was making a bad decision, the young renegade felt free to agitate against his leader, whether through rebellious action or indiscreet communication. When Manning took a long time deciding whether to support the Charlottetown constitutional amendments in 1992, Harper, who was sure Manning shouldn’t, chafed at the boss’s indecision. “When these internal disagreements were eventually leaked to the media -- as such disagreements invariably are -- they gave our opponents fresh ammunition,” Manning wrote. “‘Friendly fire’ invariably attracts ‘enemy fire.’” When Manning hired Rick Anderson, a Liberal-connected Charlottetown supporter, as Reform’s national campaign director, Harper objected and was “prepared to air his objections in the media.”

In 1994 two Globe columnists, “fed by a disgruntled caucus member,” wrote columns that alleged Manning was abusing his parliamentary expense account. During the Easter break from Parliament, “Stephen Harper and several other caucus members went public with their criticism,” Manning wrote. “Even though procedures existed for handling any complaints . . . Stephen went to the media.”

There followed a special caucus meeting and several rounds of internal finger-pointing. Manning’s relations with his wife, Sandra, at whom “part of Stephen’s attack had been directed,” suffered. She felt he hadn’t done enough to defend her.

“This whole issue -- which really wasn’t about expenses at all -- was the most painful experience our family had endured to date,” Manning wrote. “What made it particularly hard to endure was that it was initiated not by an external opponent, but by one of our own.” If being a Member of Parliament meant his family would be attacked, Manning wanted no part of it. “That night, I took off my House of Commons pin -- given only to MPs -- threw it into my briefcase, and never put it on again until the day I left Parliament.”

So yeah, Harper liked Baird, because for all his pluck, the thing he resembled least was a young Stephen Harper.

Updated: Wells on Baird, today.