the log

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Saturday, October 26, 2002  11:22 AM   The Sweaty Bits! The Wilderness of Monkeying-Around! "Quiet," to quote the front cover of the book I'm currently re-reading for class, "has its own set of problems." There was this girl I was monkeying around with for a little bit, this after not monkeying around for a long, long time, partly because I am pretty quiet, don't drive, and am not, no matter how hard you squint, Antonio Banderas. Also, I was kind of a heavy drinker for a long time -- a heavy drinker and a bit of a sloth, which resulted in getting really fat and the almost total cessation of monkeying around in parties (and when there was monkeying around it was the really drunken type, where the girl or I or both would walk away sour and hungover and full of horrible thoughts about how low, how incredibly low we must have sunk). So after I stopped drinking and started working out the thought of hooking up did not enter my mind. I was mostly just working out, reading, writing, watching knotty foreign movies (more Goddard than you can shake a stick at), and getting my act together. Which it pretty much is all together, the act. But it was a pretty quiet act. And an act that, in all honesty, didn't really even conceive of the remote possibility of monkey-business, let alone monkey-business with a cutie. Or, if we are to be accurate and boastful about this, (and we should be): a hottie. Anyway, it pretty much faded off after two weeks, but they were pretty damn wonderful, these two weeks, and evidence that the universe is skewed enough to dispense rewards where none are deserved, not really. The other thing about the monkey-business is that it reminded me of how everything else we do is really just a stand-in for monkeying around, for connecting with people (which yes, I know, is more than just surface, skin-deep, whatever: there's a lot to be said for plain objective beauty), and that most of what we do or write o read or paint or whatever works as stand-ins for this very simple thing, this very basic thing. That these stand-ins are wonderful. That they can move us. But that in the end they're just stand-ins. Literature is a great way to relate to the world -- the experiencing of experience, as Barth puts it. But the experiencing of experience in print is a poor substitute for actual experience. There were of course a few flaky moments. Moments of total flipping out. Moments where certain CDs were put in the boombox and played -- CDs containing songs of total dejection and melancholy, which are actually fun unless you're actually a little dejected and melancholy, in which, for God's sake, man, play some Monkees or something. Jesus. But flaky moments nonwithstanding, this whole monkeying-around after not monkeying-around for so long was pretty damn wonderful. And the aftereffects, whether it's because I no longer drink (hence maybe less histrionics?) or have grown a bit or whatever, are not as bad as remembered: there's no bitterness, no anger, no regret. There might have been a day or two where I might have felt like a safe fell on me. But it was a cartoon safe -- you shuffled out from underneath, accordioned out ala Wile E. Coyote. At worst there's a bit of fatigue, and not much of that. Mostly it's just this deep afterglow of contentment, this little warm core of gratitude. If you're kind of skimming this and have gotten to the end and missed out on the point, here it is: Monkey around! It's good for you! (As to how to achieve monkeying-around, I am pretty much in the dark. There's the Vonnegut advice, which I have followed, and which may be actually helpful: Smile a lot and wear nice clothes. Also, work out. Also, don't try too hard (don't try to impress, don't try to be someone you're not, don't be all smarmy and sleazy about it). Also, don't worry too much about monkeying-around or not monkeying-around. Just enjoy it when it happens.) Saturday, October 19, 2002  12:28 PM   Fight Music for High School Kids Here's a nonstory by yours truly: Treatment. Henry Darger is real, a great artist and also disturbing. Also real is Jandek, who is disturbing if nothing else. In sort of related news, I found a copy of the Marshall Mathers LP on my way to work. It's scratched up but plays fine, and it's damn good. Who knew? OK. Everybody knew. I'm two years behind. Also: Beck's Seachange is a bruiser of an album about the emotional after-effects of monkeying around. Anyone who has ever monkeyed around will dig it. I can imagine Boswell listening to it while recovering from the delights of London. Saturday, October 12, 2002  2:09 PM   Time Out I've spent the better part of today typing revisions to a short novel I wrote four months ago. I like it for not other reason than it is the first time I've consciously drawn on film. It's a really messed up take on Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, with the narrator in a kind of timeless limbo, as a kind of Beast shackled to computer from whence he recounts his experiences. I had not realized while composing it how much of it hinged on solitude -- much of the narrator's complications stem from his conviction that everything he has will be taken away (it is, else where's the fun? he loses the girl and has to find her in a forest, and there is a rose involved, and ala Cocteau there are sentient limbs everywhere, but you also have mechanical birds, and a Hyundai Excel floating on a river, and a few scenes filched from Lynch), but also on how this fear both magnifies and dampens his enjoying the present or the past. The novel takes place in an eternal present. Time has stopped. No one goes anywhere. What the narrator recalls took place before the end of time, and much of the melancholy of the narrative comes from knowing that the mutable's no longer there. That there's no then anymore. So all I'm saying is I'm happy with this twisted little fable, and happier still that I avoided writing, "Once upon a time," which I don't see how I managed not to. Here's one motto for the novel that was briefly considered when writing it, reconsidered when revising, and finally dismissed: Time is like a river made up of the events which happen, and a violent stream; for as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place, and this will be carried away too. Not in the running but actually apropos would have been this snippet from a Nabokov-L discussion: He was perpetually stricken by the ineluctable passage of time, the evanescence of which so often thwarted his enjoyment of any given moment. In the end, I went with something that had nothing to do with time. Saturday, October 05, 2002  2:46 PM   Sad Professor Most of these narratives share several important features. The passionate intellectual is usually arrogant, for one thing, operating under the delusion that his mastery of the life of the mind encompasses mastery of the unrulier life of regions lower down. This fatal mistake is almost always the root of the intellectual's undoing. In the end, these stories are about hubris as much as they are about passion, and their chief purpose is to provide a series of entertainingly humiliating correctives to the professor's inflated sense of self. All true, all true. What one could add -- regardless of whether one is under the thrall or not (one is, at the moment) -- is that it is far better to fall -- far better to accept this unruliness and to accept that one will most likely spaz out, and that one will be simultaneously be quite at home in one's skin one moment and quite willing to crawl out of it the next. That one can't go through with it without a good deal of slapstick, and tripping at every other step, and falling into trap doors set up by one's worse self. Here's the thing: relax, let it all happen, see what happens, enjoy it while it lasts, and be very grateful for the kindness of women.

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