Month: June 2024

my stepsisters Kristen and Kylie moved into town from Santa Monica, along with Kristen’s boyfriend, Boone. I stopped in at their house two weeks after they first got the keys to the place. the furniture isn’t yet convinced of how it has been arranged. Boone had unpacked even less than the girls had, with many of his eclectically filled boxes still strewn about the various spaces. as if I didn’t already like Boone, he won more cred from me for already having unpacked exactly what I would have unpacked first: his books. I was further impressed with what I found on his shelves: Chris Hedges, David Harvey, Cormac McCarthy.

as I looked over the shelves, he grew excited, looking for books to ask me about. he said, “oh! I got one,” and he handed me a copy of Christ Stopped at Eboli, by Carlo Levi. “great book, it’s not difficult or anything but you should read it.”

it’s not often nowadays that I get an unsolicited book recommendation for something I’d never heard of from someone whose taste I respect, so I took this to heart and started reading Eboli pretty much immediately, since I was struggling to land on a narrative book after bouncing around between several different titles.

Christ Stopped at Eboli deserves more thorough attention than I’m going to give it here, but I do recommend reading it. it details the time spent by the painter Carlo Levi in the south of Italy, in Lucania, modern day Basilicata, where he was sent as a political prisoner for his anti-fascist activism in the 1930s. germane to my interests now, though, is the care and attention Levi devotes to his rendering of the deep poverty suffered by the peasants of Southern Italy, and his sympathetic, yet unsentimental, portrayal of their lives, customs and struggles. that Levi is a painter is surprising only insofar as the fact that not all painters are as skilled as writers as he is. the precision of his descriptions, the acuity of his observation, all speak to a perspective finely tuned by practice in noting details with an economy of gesture, as a painter would.

an artist must be as alert as a watchdog, as focused as a sniper, as decisive as a guillotine, and as compassionate as a bodhisattva. it would do me well to make studies, much like a painter would, of the details that encode an entire cosmos of meaning, the building blocks from which fiction is made. it’s in honing this skill that a writer can be, as Henry James urges, “one of the people on whom nothing is lost.”

tonight, crickets sing at an early summer tempo. the days are stretched as tight as a drumhead. in the morning I will be doing 108 surya namaskar, sun salutations, in honor of the the new season. if spring is the season of sowing, summer is the season of work, of tending to, of practice. and I need to get to work.

a coworker of mine fielded questions from a library patron about how to get his book into libraries. in his mind, there was some mechanism for him to send out copies through a network that connects libraries all over the country; how does he get plugged in so that readers across America might stumble upon his book? an understandable question coming from someone who cares about what they’re writing enough to want people to read it. sadly, though, there’s no such mechanism, especially if you’re self-publishing. each library purchases materials according to their unique needs, so what books end up on shelves comes down to what each librarian making collection development decisions selects. the nearest you can get to a network that ensures your book ends up on shelves nationally is to have your book published by one of the major publishing houses, and have your publisher pay Publisher’s Weekly to review the book, so that it’s given slightly more visibility to librarians forced to select newly published material on the most cursory of impressions. a sort of formalized payola system, really.

this state of affairs is enough to discourage anyone seeking adulation through literary publishing. which is why desire for fame should lead you to almost any other pursuit besides literature. or, to put it another way, you have to really love the act of writing itself to write at all, because it is lonely, difficult, and masochistic.

whether or not I love writing enough to pursue it as vocation is a question that hounds me constantly. I’m always thinking of how many entries in Kafka’s diaries lament how he “wrote nothing” on a given day. it’s cold comfort, considering how miserable Kafka was, how little success he achieved during his lifetime. it’s also an evasion on my part, because even if he often felt he was failing to produce enough work, he also often stayed up late into the night working to the point of exhaustion and, as a result, failing to meet his workaday obligations, something I’ve become too careful to ever risk, it seems.

I’m trying to avoid these kinds of posts where I talk up some big gameplan for finally overcoming my sloth, or where I otherwise kvetch about how I’m not writing enough. what the gameplan is I won’t say, but I’ve made a proposition to myself, and if I fail to hold up my end of the bargain, it means I should quit this delusion; piss or get off the pot.

the man who wanted to see his book on library shelves across america, he isn’t even done writing it. he’s 100 pages into it. so I could cynically dismiss him for his naivete, and tell myself that he’s just some retiree with a hobby, unlike me, a Real Artist. but 100 pages of a novel is a lot more than what I have right now, so who’s really the Real Artist?

Only a few members of secret societies know something close to ‘Son of Him who had the ‘Illuminati’) exists, but this is where human sacrifice of the Dragon Order strictly compartmentalised with the very program runs through the DNA of families. These pyramid structures are founded children. This is why human sacrifice and level dictates to the one below and those the bloodlines have located and it still goes below who are aware of their true in a later chapter. When you think that one they worship as their true god, the present Elizabeth II, was descended Bailey (1888-1977) was a Freemason, it puts into even more perspective Theosophical Society, and co-founder of the world as both have expanded their works of his wife, the occultist Alice Bailey. ancient Sanskrit work from what is now have since become mixed in many parts of scriptures, says that a people called the territory and influence. The Mahabharata, left India and settled in Mesopotamia, India and Asia and one of the major Hindu the oldest of Sanskrit accounts, tells of a Mayas (the Nagas under another Name) also Dragons, that came from the skies to bring Egypt and Greece. The Book of Dyzan, one of great deluge that ended the Golden Age, and reptilian race that it calls the Sarpa, or Great rule human society under their leader, the civilisation to the world. It also refers to a global and found its way into Celtic how the serpent gods returned afterwards to ‘Great Dragon.’ Worship of the serpent gods survived the break up and sinking of Atlantis in the Atlantic Ocean mostly went East to what is now Europe and the Middle East. The Muan and Atlantean bloodlines (or controlled) agents and gofers.

Jackson has not stopped lying, manipulating that this upper pyramid (often referred to a rich ever since. He called for the Orwellian real power lies and those degrees are also Administration to be unleashed with highest levels occupied only by Archon families with a big increase in gun crime and murder fear and super-secrecy at all levels. Each control laws in America. The two are not the top of the bloodline pyramid, and all to those opposing gun seizure laws to bring masters, are terrified of the Archons and as domestic terrorists who should be disarmed Demiurge, or the Devil/Satan/Lucifer. list of the Archontic Homeland Security and National Secretary of Madame Blavatsky’s while claiming to do the opposite. This is the Lucis [Lucifer] Trust which promoted the families who invaded that land to operate as a hive mind, much like a bee or ant be in many ways a diversion of communications (their own form of Matrix) global attention from where the looks around and says ‘what the fuck real power lies. America is clearly sheep were standing around at a cocktail the centre of global power, as coming through the door. ‘Thank everyone knows that, right? what to do.’ Have I not just described Britain? Oh, no that’s just a faded of humanity behaves and how people empire. Rome? Oh, no, that’s the past its religions, to tell them what to do and same. Well, actually they are not years is how information has been put faded empires at all. They are key

the pyramids do not. This same structure masters dictating a common policy applies to governments, universities, constant centralisation and advancement schools, corporations, media, banks – of human control through all the various everything. These various institutions and pyramids. It doesn’t matter to sections of society are themselves them when banks, governments etc., come ultimately grouped together in bigger and go, because they own the game. If you pyramids in a structure that can be own the Olympic Games it doesn’t matter likened to Russian dolls with pyramids who wins or loses the 100 metres final or inside bigger pyramids and eventually all the long jump, because you own the Queen and the British royal family centres of power and manipulation. Prince Charles of a hidden global empire. Why while on a trip to his property in does a ‘faded empire’ like Britain line connection gave him a ‘stake’ in have a permanent place on the Bush family is also related to Vlad United Nations Security Council to who have read some of my other books decide who is bombed and who kings of ancient Media in what is now isn’t? Because it has been a centre of Archon bloodline power for centuries. When I speak of

some narrative techniques Kafka employs in The Trial that conjure an atmosphere of dreamy surrealism:

• interjection of concrete details of unclear significance
• sudden clarification of previously hazy details
  • the three young men who are lurking around Frau Grubach’s apartment turn out to be functionaries at the same bank K. works at, and K. is puzzled as to how he didn’t recognize them at first.
• absurd behavior treated as perfectly normal
  • K. doesn’t want anyone to know he’s been summoned for an interrogation, so he instead knocks on every door in the building to ask if someone named Lanz is there, just for a chance to see into the room and determine if it’s where he’s supposed to be–because knocking on every door in the building isn’t going to make everyone think he’s a weirdo, somehow.
    • what makes this even weirder is that when K. does get to where the interrogation is, he asks the woman who opens the door if Lanz is there, and she’s like “right this way to your interrogation,” as though “Lanz” were a password she was waiting for.
    • also, K. is asked almost no questions during this “interrogation.” he provides a long defense of himself, and a repudiation of the court, that no one prompted.
  • to ensure that the court knows he won’t submit to being interrogated further, K. goes out of his way on a Sunday to return to the building, rather than just, you know, never going back again.
• inappropriate or comic reactions
• characters almost immediately contradicting themselves
• outbursts of violence

on Sunday, lightly hungover from a wedding at which I was, thank God, only a secondary guest, Julia and I watched two movies in one day, something I always want to do but rarely get the chance to. the first movie is one I’ve seen countless times; the second I knew by reputation but had never seen. both are “hangout movies,” ensemble productions with little in the way of plot and heavy on dialogue; both deal, in divergent ways, with nostalgia; both are about everyone’s favorite generation, baby boomers. and both made me think a lot about youth, idealism vs. cynicism, and the urgency I feel to find something to be committed to, now, so that I don’t regret my choices later.

Dazed and Confused (dir. Linklater, 1993)

there are a handful of cultural works that so shaped what I expected life to be like that had I not encountered them, I would be an entirely different person. for better or worse, Dazed and Confused is one of those. I remember watching this movie in college (not for the first time) and someone saying “that’s Cody” when Slater shows up on screen asking if he can buy weed from Pickford after school. I still quote about a dozen of lines from it all time. so I’m going to try my hardest to do a detached critical assessment of the movie’s engagement with its themes, but it is entirely possible that my appraisal is a post-hoc justification for how dearly I love this movie.

the vast majority of people who love Dazed and Confused think it would be awesome to spend the summer in Austin with these kids. I felt the same way, many years ago as an aimless white suburbanite. this is I think the opposite of what Linklater was shooting for. Dazed and Confused so effectively depicts what nostalgia does to your memory of the “best days of your life” that it’s pretty easy to miss how boring and shitty it must feel to be one of these suburban teenagers. the negative reviews on Letterboxd actually clock what makes this movie more than just a teen stoner flick better than the ones that gush over how immaculate the vibes are. yes, the hazing rituals are brutal and nasty; yes, plenty of the characters are meanspirited and unlikeable. but where the negative reviews go wrong is in thinking that the movie is somehow glorifying youthful boomer stupidity. what it is doing is being honest about how when you look back at those aimless days of youth, when the biggest conflict was wondering whether or not there’s going to be a party that night, even all the shittiness gets cast in a hazy, affectionate glow.

as inconsequential as it may actually be, there’s real gravitas to Pink’s struggle over whether or not to sign the anti-drug pledge his football coaches are demanding. it’s silly and pretentious, but not inaccurate, when Mike calls the whole thing an example of “neo-McCarthyism.” Wooderson is no doubt the most pathetic character, a 20-year-old still hanging around his high school haunts, but he’s also right when he says, echoing the more famous line about high school girls staying the same age, that “The older you do get, the more rules they’re gonna try to get you to follow.” as I get older, day by day even, a vice tightens around my once boundless sense of wonder and possibility—not because I think those possibilities disappear, even though they do, as a necessary result of making series of choices. but the feeling is because so many of those choices seem to be made for you in advance, and if you aren’t constantly and vigilantly defending your freedom, one day you look around and realize how much of it you’ve lost.

which is to say, boy do I feel it of absolutely critical importance that I “keep livin’, man. L-I-V-I-N.”

The Big Chill (dir. Kasdan, 1983)

now, with The Big Chill, I sympathize a little more with the negative reviews on Letterboxd. not quite with the one I saw that says this movie is “as evil and anodyne as the white supremacy it depicts.” that seems a little excessive to me. nonetheless, The Big Chill could accurately be responded to with the classic online rejoinder: OK, Boomer.

as a bit of a gambit here, I want to publicly declare that I think the hate for boomers is overblown, misguided, and, frankly, often seems like projection on the part of millennials. no question that many many many many many many of the problems we face now are a result of boomer complacency, selfishness, cruelty, and narcissism. the ideals of the sixties were coopted and betrayed by the very boomers who espoused them—this is the cultural context of The Big Chill. but, boomers also at least had those ideals, and many even fought and died for them. to me, the major advantage (early) boomers have over we millennials is that at least they can look back at those days of youthful passion and conviction with wistfulness, while most millennials jumped straight to being cynical yuppie sellouts without the detour through radical playacting.

this is what watching this movie made me think about. I don’t want to excuse or minimize the shortcomings of the 60s counterculture and the backlash it inspired, which culminated in the Reagan Revolution and, later, the introduction of the noxious Clintons into the national political consciousness. but I am envious that those who came of age in the late 60s and early 70s had the opportunity to genuinely feel that the times were a-changing, compromised as that prospect may have ultimately been. (I really could go on and on about this subject, throwing barbs at those online parapolitics leftists who argue that the 60s were actually an op orchestrated by the CIA or whatever, but we’ll never get anywhere if I follow that thread).

I don’t actually have that much to say about The Big Chill because while it is an enjoyable movie, I don’t think it really grapples with the questions it raises. but during dinner at the wedding I attended, I was seated next to a friend of mine from high school who I haven’t seen in about 15 years—the same span of time that precedes the reunion depicted in The Big Chill. my old friend and I were cordial, almost painfully so, and the interactions made me think about a distinction Nick makes during an argument between the cinematic friends: Sam says that he and Nick “go way back,” and Nick retorts “Wrong, a long time ago we knew each other for a short period of time.”

how is it that someone you shared so many formative experiences with can one day be functionally a stranger? is that the real significance of entropy, that as time marches inexorably forward, a subtle force insinuates itself between bonds too weak to maintain cohesion, until by chance one day those constituent parts reencounter each other only to find themselves utterly incapable of activating whatever mechanism brought them together in the first place?

anyway, one “advantage” we millennials have over boomers is that as we get older, we are not finding a world abounding with opportunities for a comfortable life. as material conditions continue to deteriorate, we may not have the luxury of selling out our ideals. thank God.