Notice to Quit

to MLM

1. I ride around every where in this little place on my bicycle, which demonstrates what a little town it is and that I’m a little fit. I was telling a pastry chef at a party how Poe died –I know, it's horrible when no one knows and you have to break it to them, and I’m old, so horribly old, now that I no longer really enjoy myself, or get drunk, but instead start helping people find their glasses with a little flashlight I carry –I know. Anyway, there’s nothing much to say about the party except that before going I had written your initials on the back of my hand –no, not to hit anyone, but because I carried a message for you.

2. But I couldn’t deliver the message right away because it was a long bike ride and I was a little tipsy, what with helping everybody.

3. I had also run out of ex-girlfriends to call when you’re slightly tipsy from helping everybody at four in the morning. Well, I haven’t really run out, but most of them either call too often or not often enough to be bothered at this hour for that kind of phone call; which is to say that I’ve either called them when I was slightly tipsy from helping everybody at four in the morning too often, or not often enough.

4. What would say is: I have belatedly discovered I am the same height as Nietzsche.

5. You know what this means.

6. So I spent a good week and a half becoming infatuated with Wagner’s music so as to better break-up with Wagner.

7. Falling asleep was a real problem.

8. When you think about it, Wagner basically invented disco.

9. In Tony Palmer’s ten hour Wagner, Wagner at Bayreuth struggles, as always, with his production, with money, with his unbaptised conductor, with his unfinished festpielhaus, and most of all with his orchestra that he has stuck in a giant dungeon oven (this is a German word) beneath the stage whose violins are melting in the subterranean heat. The twilight of the gods is hard to organize. As he is wandering through the vast empty tuning darkness of the stage, a man calls him over. “An instrument to replace the orchestra,” he says. It is an accordion.

“Come here, Richter,” says Wagner “this may be the end of the world.”

10. The world can basically be divided into Wagnerites and Anti-Wagnerites, with the exception of those who are both or neither.

11. Mahler gets classed as a Wagnerite.

12. Mahler’s wife, Alma Mahler went on to date Walter Gropius, Franz Werfel and Oskar Kokoschka.

13. Her first kiss was from Gustav Klimt.

14. Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

15. Kokoschka was really obsessed with Alma. That’s her in Bride of the Wind.

16. I saw this painting as a child in my Junior Brittanica.

17. When Alma left Kokoschka, Kokoschka became so obsessed with her he had a life -sized doll made to look like her by the Munich doll maker Hermine Moos.

18. The doll does not look so good in pictures.

19. Kokoschka liked it well enough. It was said he took it to the opera.

20. Kokoschka explicitly denied this.

21. Of course, this is a man who slept with a life-sized doll.

22. I slept with a mannequin for a while.

23. The thing you learn about sleeping with a mannequin is that everybody who comes to visit you tweaks or punches the doll sadistically. You end up dressing the doll, overdressing it, really, in the most outrageous costumes.

24. All this is part of our way of compensating and revenging ourselves on the doll’s lack of animation.

25. I was just going through my virtual mail and

26. You’ve written some great letters. Like when you wrote about saying “Spasibo” to the Sbarro guy.

27. Nobody writes anymore.

28. Or –they write too much.

29. I’m a whore and I’ll reuse parts of this in my writing and get by, by dedicating it to you.

30. With your kind permission.

31. I miss you.

32. Here is your message:

33. I am going back.

34. Where?

35. To Chicago.

36. To the U of C.

37. Yes, to graduate.

38. I know.

39. I know.

40. I don’t believe it either. In fact, that’s why I have to go. I started to become suspicious myself. I started to think it was a cover story. I asked around. I thought: what do I really know about this guy?

41. I always have my acceptance speech ready. Last words aren’t important, in fact they’re usually kind of brief. The acceptance speech, by definition, has a lot of people standing around and somehow it’s really important, even if you’ve got a pretty solid grip on the award. It’s like when you or someone says “I love you” or “is it safe?” The next few seconds are going to make a difference for somebody. So in my acceptance speech I was going to acknowledge just how circuitous my path had been and thank my many kind friends and indulgent instructors –the people who had believed in me.

42. Only this time I have to add something: I also am deeply indebted to really didn’t. I decided to return because one friend noted to another friend that I was on a leave of absence. The other friend replied: when’s he gonna give up that fantasy?

43. I was so pissed off I wrote the dean right away.

44. It was Superman and Batman. Yes, super friends.

45. Superman had said as much to me, but not so directly. We talk late at night on the phone. I talk about Chicago. He talks about Krypton. Sometimes I get him to try and remember, because he’s very different when he talks about Krypton. Not like Superman, and not like Clark. A guy from another world, but who’s never been there. “My freaking super dog Krypto is more Kryptonian than I am” he said. I try to get him to talk about the spires and those spinning things, the sound of the white nights, the overture of the oldest stars. He yelled at me once: “You don’t get it, do you? It doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter if Krypton was, or if it is, or if I even could go back in time! All these freaking crystals with my Mom and Dad –it doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter if it lives in this real miniature city with real miniature Kryptonians I keep on my frickin’ desk! Krypton is just a fantasy to me! Superman is just a stupid hobby. I’m freaking Clark Kent already! I live in Metropolis! I owe forty-six thousand dollars in student loans! There’s not a single person I respect that I see every day, least of all myself. I’m cursed with a work ethic and X-ray vision. I would blow my fucking head off, but guess what –whereas every supervillian –and I mean all of them -have figured out a way to kill Superman –Nobody has the slightest clue how to kill Clark Kent!” He had just fought with the Insect Queen again. He was probably still drenched in webs, poor guy.

46. I wasn’t angry at Batman for what he said. It was the greatest favor anyone could have done me.

47. You know where you stand with Batman.

48. That Batman, he has problems.

49. Part of my problem is that I really hate going anywhere or doing anything. My fondest daydreams fill me with dread. Deep down, I even really dread going to Disney World.

50. I lost my nerve. Someday I fear I’ll lose my nerve to go to Disney World. Then what will I do?

51. The other thing that I always think of –actually, it’s something I start to feel, is that the minute anything changes, the minute I start a new relationship or travel, when I start to live, I think of what’s her name.

52. You know who I’m talking about.

53. And I can feel myself getting an alcoholic-like thirst –oh, not for drink.

54. For laughter.


and to my many friends, skeptics, belivers and agnostics alike

TURN #71: WEEK 57; WORDS: 62,826
NEXT BY 26 JULY 2006

My Lines From My Porno Movie

pruient pics by crookedletter



-Go and tell your Master that his Masters are here.

-You will pay for this impudence.

-May I introduce my friend, Baron Skin-Eater?

-Good, good.

-Why, hello! Your mommy and daddy aren’t home, are they?

-Yes, I’d like it if you came next Thursday.

-I’d like to open a new bank account, please.

-Oh, about six weeks.

-Get whatever you want on your half.

-Good, good.

-Strip them. Arouse the Mongoloid.

-Oh, nothing much, how about you?

-Strapado: S-T-R-A-P-A-D-O

-Yes, you may borrow it.

-Okay. I am going now.

-One Adult and one Senior Citizen’s Discount please.

-Yes, I would like butter. A lot of butter.

-Good, good.




TURN #70: WEEK 56; WORDS: 61,456
NEXT BY 19 JULY 2006

On Love and Jealousy

a typical writing sample from Los Angeles



Jealousy is the most misunderstood of the human passions, wrongly thought to be a perversion of love. Rather, as Hegel observes, whereas animals want and negate things directly like cattle grazing in a field, it is most human to want what others want, especially if only because others want it. More things are done out of jealousy and revenge than out of love. This is because, despite optimistic and well-meaning testimonials to the contrary, love is actually quite scarce. I know, I know, it is taken as a piece of elemental wisdom in our day, as our General Relativity, the principle of equivalence that the love you take is equal to the love you make. However, unlike General Relativity, this turns out to be an article of mere faith, that is, like all aspects of what is called faith, a piece of wishful thinking no different from other forms of denial, which is why people get so desperately angry when it is challenged.



From a Restricted to a General Economy: The Scarcity of Love

In actuality, even the briefest examination of the economics of love and affection reveals that not only is there not enough love to go around, but that there never will be. There are only a finite number of people capable of expressing love. Likewise, there are only so many people who are really lovable (if you doubt this, you are either more fortunate, or more self-deceived). There is a wholly antithetical line of thinking that says that everyone (or even everything) is capable of love and deserves love. We imagine this infinite capacity for love, as we might infinite possibilities. But let’s face it: have you ever been to a video store? It’s hard enough to rent something worth watching. Yes, you can say to yourself, but given an infinite number of people and an infinite amount of time, surely every film is worth watching. But an infinite amount of time and people is precisely what this world lacks, and even then when the last fundamental particles in the universe are too far away and too cold to interact, even then, the assembled bundle called Secret Window will not be worth watching and will receive no thumbs up in a thumbless universe. Most feature films last only eighty minutes or so; some relationships are known to go on even longer.

So mutatis mutandis there is not enough love to go around. Love has to express itself somehow, in looks, in glances, and preferably in expensive gifts and sexual extravagance, and these things are finite resources deployed by finite people: this is why the more love you give, the less love you have. People sometimes mistakenly think that their love comes back to them with interest; in actuality it is habit that accumulates but this is the subject of another essay entirely. Parents often tell their children they love their children equally. If you have a sibling, you know this is simply not true. The history of siblings from Cain and Abel onwards demonstrates this. Parents are probably where the whole unlikely adage that everyone deserves love idea got started. God is often imagined to be some sort of ultimate parent with infinite patience, time and resources to love everybody. His behavior, however, seems to indicate that either he hasn’t or doesn’t. If parents want to be honest to their children, they will say that they love each in their own way, which is to say, some more than others and others only at their parole hearing. In the absence of God, if every human being were capable and worthy of love, then after 500,000 years of humanity, by now things should have sorted themselves out in to some sort of symmetrical steady state and everyone should love and feel love: this is clearly not the case.

If this simple math and honest theology does not convince you, I would suggest you make an honest and frank examination of your own experiences and see it is not horribly, awfully, inconveniently and incontrovertibly true that there never was enough love to go around. And never will be, for whereas there are only plans to make more and more people, there are no plans to make them any more lovable. Indeed, the more people there are, the less lovable any of them can be. Nobody in the Black Hole of Calcutta was heard to exclaim: “I love people!” (N.B. This is why “people who need people are the luckiest people in the world” -because there are so many of them).

The universal human convention of kinship demonstrates the scarcity of love, as does the contractual form called monogamy, a direct and long standing refutation of the notion that “if you love someone, you should set them free.” Indeed, it is not enough to love someone and have them roped into some sort of long-term contract to regularly dispense with said love. Ideally, you also have some sort of back-up. These are generally people you have no real respect for whatsoever and are hence readily available and emotionally inexpensive. These are the people you turn to should your primary love resource fail, in the event you’ve done something stupid, like set them free. True, they don’t really have the same oomph as the loved one, but they will serve you well in your times of need as some sort of human shield against the elements, and as someone who has somehow become immured to your complaining and whining which is what happens when love is interrupted. These highly disposable and interchangeable people are known as “lifelong friends.”



Jealousy is the Human Condition

So, given that love does and must exist in a condition of scarcity, the default, the most likely, the most common human experience -what you might as well call the human condition itself, is jealousy. It is logical to feel jealous: the love you once has is now going to someone else. There is less love for you and less love in general because you’re just going to feel sorry for yourself.

Architectonically, there are only three logical possibilities that define how jealous you will be and what you will be jealous about. But first, it is sometimes possible that one should be rejected by the loved one in favour of nothing. Though logically it should really be the most upsetting, since it effectively indicates that nothing is preferable to one’s company, somehow people are never jealous of nothing, perhaps because we are all half negation anyway, but it does not constitute jealousy and hence falls outside our discussion.



First Possibility: Dumped for An Equal

The most one can hope for in jealousy is that one is dumped for someone much like oneself that one actually likes and respects. This is flattering and the least deranging to our sensibilities and feeds our narcissism. Céline wisely observed that in the end what makes a person lovable is their love or need for not us, but the whole class of people like us, in Céline’s case his girl’s love for dirty Frenchmen. This blessed case of being dumped for the better man, that is, someone exactly like ourselves is naturally limited in its cases, chiefly occurring where there are good friends, clones, identical twins, time travelers and other freaks of nature. It is accordingly quite rare.



Second Possibility: Dumped for An Insect

The second and most common case is that one is dumped for some sort of completely inferior insect. This would seem to be almost universally the case, not for the least of which reasons being one of the few saving graces of our existence is our ability to lie to ourselves (see faith and denial, above). Indeed, if we are at all healthy, we will be saying to ourselves, “I cannot imagine what she sees in my identical clone, he’s a total loser.”

In some cases, regrettably, one’s successor is authentically quite inferior. This is infuriating and all-too common. It leads to all kinds of wishful thinking that has little to recommend for it, aggravating one’s natural desires to run other people’s lives (“she’s wasting her time with that jerk”) with one’s own capacity of neediness and self-pity, an unbeatably unpleasant and pernicious condition that usually can only be resolved by the violent death of some if not all of the parties involved, (particularly if the new person is, in fact, an old person, one’s immediate predecessor: this has a disquieting effect of essentially repudiating whatever love feelings and experiences one has had with loved one. One might as well put one’s picture in a frame and join a candlelight vigil for one has become “disappeared”, a non person vanished in non events).




Final Possibility: Dumped For a Superior

As unpleasant as this is, it is not nearly as unpleasant as when one’s successor is authentically more worthy, more evolved and superior to oneself and more pleasing to the loved one in ways that one could not. If the successor, in particular, possesses qualities that the the individual himself lacks -and the individual knows it, then the presence of the new person and the formerly unattainable mutual happiness of that person and the loved one goes from being a mere repudiation and critique of the love relationship to being a referendum on that person himself, a critique of their very existence. Then, not only has one lost, but one has lost because one is authentically not worthy, for things one has always struggled to be, but failed. Worse, this last case is totally indistinguishable from the second.

Worst of all, in reality, every case is more or less this third case, for the new person is capable of something one is not; engaging the loved one.




absit iniuria verbis



TURN #69: WEEK 55; WORDS: 61,348

NEXT BY 12 JULY 2006

The Reader

spectacular photography by crookedletter


'er lasst sicht nicht lessen'

-Poe

Unable and powerless to circumvent my miseries, daunted, discouraged and unable to face reality alone, I sought refuge in the companionship of others. Wretched and unloved, despising of myself as the object of anyone’s attentions or affections, I knew not where to go, where I would be accepted. I had always enjoyed the quiet company of books and so it occurred to me that a librarian or bookseller, someone literate and studious, might, if anyone understand and favour me.

How many times had I seen her and how many times had we met? That is the peril of the library: there is always something to read, and so our encounters were always avoidant and half mumbled, my eyes in the books I had come to her to borrow: but gentle, gentle. And do not think dear reader, because I never said anything, that I did not give her more than a passing thought, for I thought of her a great deal, often and vividly as only the shy can, to where I could honesly say that she filled my world, at least the part of my world I had left fallow and open for something other than unrelieved solitude, and though I waited, and waited so long and distantly, do not imagine further that everything that came, did not come pregnant on that first glance, that very first glance, surreptitiously behind the camouflage of Jane’s Guide to All Armoured Vehicles which I was perusing in the hopes of recognizing a silhouette from a disturbing and recurring dream I had been having. No, I was never not keenly aware of her, though I walked, as all true library patrons walked, in my readerly sleep and seemed to peruse only shelves; indeed, I would often reconoiter around the display of books of local interest (which held no interest for me) in the hopes of obtaining the merest telescopic glimspe of her fair and sedulous face serene over the horizon of her counter.

She was graceful, she was slender, she was like a slight blonde, bespectacled moth by an itty bitty book light. She too, always had a book, but an easy a gracious smile as she dutifully and silently received each patron. We had perhaps exchanged fewer than a dozen words or phatic sounds over the course of our acquaintance, if it could be even called that. But readers, they live between pages, that are to say in their heads, and there, there –what had I not imagined between us?



Paradoxically, in order to woo her I kept having to check out books I had already read or owned and knew quite well. This made for some illogical chit-chat: “Yes, it’s a wonderful book and I already have several copies at home." Which was impressive, in a way, but nonsensical.



Our first assignation went, on the whole, rather well. I was not at all disconcerted to note that she had brought a book, though when she read it at dinner, I feared for her eyes: “There’s never enough lighting in these places.” I said. “How is your book?” I asked, to which a received a not unfriendly, readerly, shrugging ruffling gesture, that, though cordial, did not seem to have any communicative content, other than acknowledgment. After some subtle moments, I inquired after the book’s author and what else they had written, but this and other simple conversational openings seemed to serve only to distract her from her reading. Not wanting to hinder her, I wisely kept my menu throughout the meal, so that I, too, would be reading, that we would be reading together: fortunately, I had picked a fine restaurant, which, in addition to having lengthy descriptions of desserts, also featured an extensive and diverting wine list with many evocative foreign titles. By the end of the coffee service, she finished her chapter and was ready to leave. It had been a pleasant evening over all for her: the food had been agreeable enough, I supposed, and the reading engrossing. I asked if we could meet again, to which she unequivocally replied “Sure”.

For our second rendez-vous, I suggested a reading -a tactical misjudgment on my part, for she despises being read to, which she feels spoils the whole beauty of reading. Even worse, of course, are audio books, or film adaptations of books. I ask her what she is reading now. “The same book” she replies. It is by no means a small book, with fine type, but it seems she is getting along with it. It might very well help if I knew at least what kind of book it was, but our conversations never seem to get around to it.

One day, over coffee I discover that she enjoys fiction as much as non-fiction. Actually, this is an inference, but based on much quiet observation. Further, subject matter does not seems to matter; she is either a polymath, or indiscriminate. Good, bad, it is all reading. I finally understood this went we went out to the country together. Her eyes lingered over the entirety of the ticket, to its finest print on the limits of its liability. She is never bored, as long as there is something to read. Or she is always bored.

Reading, which is how most often I see her, her eyes are almost as though closed, as though she is sleeping; this readily sonnambulance is somehow intimate. Or it is the opposite of intimacy. Her face expresses little and when it does, it is brief and perishable; not knowing what it is she reads I do not know to what she reacts, if it is at the text, at the author, or something from her own life of which I know nothing. Only her little eyes dart back and forth with regularity, like ants going from one end of a leaf to another.



Of her family I know nothing. Of her education I know nothing. Of her past I know nothing. Of her experiences I know nothing. Of her loves and hopes, I know nothing. Of her pets I know nothing. An unbroken and unspoken "Shhh" separates us; the wall of the book. Of her hobbies I know she likes: reading.



Our relationship, though in some ways quite singular, is modern and we do end up in bed, as she will allow me to nibble on her neck so long as I do not read over her shoulder. This act is quite rewarding in itself as she is quite lovely, having a librarian's graceful build, though somewhere in the act I become concerned with how what is happening now compares to what she has read, if it is drawn from all sorts of different sources, Anäis Nin's diaries and Penthouse Forum, the Susie Bright and D.H. Lawrence. Henry Miller. This throws me off my game.

Afterward I regard her lovingly in the soft light of her little itty bitty book light.



Eventually, I reached that point that many lovers do reach, of needing to declare my love, whether it is a matter of Venus's true conscience or simply one of protracted frustration, boredom and curiosity. The singularity of my beloved, though, gives me an opportunity of unique fortune and genius: I will write her a love letter, knowing with certainty that she will read it. A problem presents itself: what will be the style?

Knowing not her tastes in reading, but only that she reads, I chose logically to pursue an encyclopadetic approach to the whole subject and create a passable pastiche of all the songs, sonnets, diatribes, Platonic dialogues, billet doux and epistletory historical novels that mankind has had mind to pen over the history of writing. It was an ambitious project, but the thought of a substantial and authoritative tome to capture her attention was appealing. Here I would express not only my own tender delicate feelings, but the love feelings, tender and delicate or otherwise, of every human being that had recourse to written symbols and were available to my survey. To be sure, this took some time, but as our relationship wasn't going anywhere and I had no competing interests, I applied myself readily and the project proceeded apace. The results were not unlike a cross between Moby-Dick, Hobbes' Leviathan and Pound's Cantos, a certain over emphasis on classical allusion owing the fact that of the various languages learned to compose the letter, Greek was the most dearly acquired. Yet, in all my learning and footnotes, I still felt like a child, in this matter of the heart, wanting so dearly for her to read it. The letter was written in an equivocal, agonistic way, one paragraph declaiming the nature of love was immediately followed by another anti-thetical to it, unified only as much as men's hearts have been, in the use of the word "love" and more particularly in my love of the reader.

Having delivered it to her doorstep in a finely bound copy printed at my expense, I waited a calculated number of days (knowing by now well her approximate parsing speed) and dropped in at the library to casually ask if she had read my letter, to which she unequivocally replied: "Yes."

It was later, but not much later, that I finally grasped my doom. Of all the readers I might have found, jealous readers, careless readers, readers who bring their own crypto-political platforms to bear, readers who skip to the end -it was my fate to receive this one, the reader, the great silent unknowable majority, the unknown eye that copy editors watch out for, the inaudible voice of posterity. This is the mystery reader that sits and receives the unprepared essays that we write in our dreams, a reader so unreal and impersonal it might as well be my own death. The reader who reads, but who cannot be read.



Accepting of my fate and the fate of all human communication, I resolved to consign myself to being a fellow solitaire, a companion only in sharing the same reading room in a quiet turned chair, less like a book to a book or cat to a reader than a dreamer among the millions who dream, with all their soul, each night, alone.




“Read any good books lately?”

"Yes."





Not you, dear reader -shh!

TURN #68: WEEK 54; WORDS: 59,727

NEXT BY 5 JULY 2006