This afternoon my dad had a pretty massive bike accident and broke his hip and his femur. After my mom called with the news, I wandered around the apartment for a few hours, picking things up and putting them back down without remembering what I intended to do with them in the first place. The soccer captain, two hours home after a business trip to an adjoining state, tried to draw me back to reality by getting me to show him some old photos, but I couldn’t concentrate. He went home while I was soaking in my third shower. Finally I knocked on Greg’s door to ask what he thought I should do. Greg very sensibly pointed out that since I couldn’t manage to get closed toe shoes on, I probably ought to just go home and be with my dad instead of trying to work.

Consequently, I spent the late afternoon and evening on long stretches of Texas highway loving tiny towns with bold and arrogant names: West, Corsicana, Italy, Ennis–towns that lack the New Mexican panache, I mourned, of Los Lunes, Quemado, Belen. I saw about 8 moving vans wending their way from Indiana and Tennessee and Minnesota to wherever home was becoming and thought about my own impending journey (before my dad broke his hip, I found an apartment this morning–it’s all really happening), I saw herds of people on the ground watching flocks of bats taking off out into the deepening pink sky, I listened to my entire extant Tori Amos catalogue and remembered how much I LOVE her, I drove into orange heat lightning splitting the horizon into jagged halves.

My parents are aging and becoming fragile–my mother the lovelorn, the heartbroken, my father the stooping old man. I don’t know what to make of it.

For the Un, in response to this afternoon’s email. Because manning up means admitting you’re weak, sometimes.

What is dangerous about the imagination is its power to prevent the mind from encountering head on the notion of limit. The imagination tends to consecrate, sanctify, and privatize experience. We speak of capturing the imagination and the idea of possession is always present in it. Reciprocally we say that a work of art has ‘captured the spirit’ of something. This is because the painter has imposed upon imagination the idea of limit which is provided by work. Left unbridled, imagination leads away from the truth. It brings out old thoughts, old grievances to mull over or new fantasies to play with and in returning to them, desires to dominate them. This is always a false solution. Not to think of something—supreme faculty.

Simone Weil

from Centuries

Mexico

We shit in a hole, got sand in our teeth, fought army ants in our sleep. Remember? I got so sick you had to cut my meat: pale cubes tough as dice. Then you got sick and I went swimming. That was wrong. But didn’t I bring you a bucket of purple starfish, fetch fresh water from the cenote, kiss your griddle forehead? No. Those are lies. Sorry I told so many. You wanted to fuck and I kept pinching the yellow candle out. Sorry about the dark. Sorry I filled your head with eggs. Sorry I wasn’t really sleepy.

Amaryllis

To say, Yes, I lied, but consider my position, send three spiders in a matchbox. Rubies and juniper are apologies. Sign your name with blue ink if you want another chance, green for ambivalence, red if you’ve torn your mouth from its hinges. A bird’s nest warns that desire obeys only itself. Twine says shame. You love her, but love yourself more? Wrap a magnet in newspaper. Abalone means We must resign ourselves to fate, paintbrushes There is much I cannot understand. Cotton is astonishment. And if you know you must speak, but not how or where to begin? Amaryllis.

Joel Brouwer

fmstanley at crimson dot ua dot edu

FANCY!

PS The captain of the soccer team thinks college is lame and I should ditch it and get a job at his dad’s dealership so we can get married and buy a house in Coppell and a baby car. I pretty much want to clock him, even though he’s a great kisser.

So okay, I feel like a fraud sometimes?

I’m not real intimately acquainted with the “senioritis” concept because I dropped out of high school and drifted around for a couple of years, picking up 21 hours a semester at community college to ameliorate crippling Denver-induced boredom, then haphazardly applied to undergrad institutions and wound up at my college, with my major, by complete and merciful (also incredibly hasty–like in the space of 3 weeks) accident. I never took the SAT, agonized over a list of dream schools and safety schools, wrung my hands over essays, strutted and preened over acceptance letters and then spent a torporous summer waiting for my life to start, scooping ice cream at Baskin Robbins and making out with a guy who wouldn’t give me the time of day in high school.

Well, you know, until now?

Which: HA HA! ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT!

But listen. Sometimes I am sitting in my shitty little car at a stoplight and I’ll look around at all the drivers in late model vehicles around me, drivers who are my age, drivers, I can extrapolate, with car notes and obligations that keep them up at night, drivers in baby cars, drivers who have to hold down jobs so they can make payments on that 4/2.5 they bought in Coppell two years ago. With the wall-to-wall carpeting and the 2-car&c. And I go, what the fuck am I doing?

In another year this shitty car I am sitting in is going to give (these days I like to call her New Orleans. Too soon?) and I won’t ever have the money or the credit to get another, so I’ll get a bicycle. I think this, and I think: I am crossing a rubicon into a lifestyle almost everyone around me doesn’t subscribe to. I refuse to get involved with material things because—what? I take consolation from ideas?

This morning I wanted to know how much money I could make if I decided to go into publishing out of grad school. You know, just to see! And I looked up “pay scale” because I couldn’t remember the word “salary” because I have spent my summer doing the adult equivalent of scooping ice cream and making out with the captain of the soccer team and in the fall I am leaving to complete some unfathomable, quixotic mission for which I feel very poorly personally and spiritually equipped and even though I don’t want stuff there is no promise of stuff at the end of this, no obvious reward save the dubious self-assurance that I am Smarter Than You when it comes to Inscrutable Stuff No One Cares About (Hi Jonathan Lethem!) and I dunno—I think I am just having a totally-advisable moment’s hesitation right before I go off and do The Rest of My Life.

To be fair, the thought I think right after “You can’t remember the word SALARY? YOU ARE A FRAUD” is “You really need to get to Alabama yesterday.” Six, one half dozen, etc. So whatever.

Part of the explanation for our own lit’s thematic poverty obviously includes our century and situation. The good old modernists, among their other accomplishments, elevated aesthetics to the level of ethics—maybe even metaphysics—and Serious Novels after Joyce tend to be valued and studied mainly for their formal ingenuity. Such is the modernist legacy that we now presume as a matter of course that “serious” literature will be aesthetically distanced from real lived life. Add to this the requirement of textual self-consciousness imposed by postmodernism and literary theory, and it’s probably fair to say that Dostoevsky et al were free of certain cultural expectations that severely constrain our own novelists’ ability to be “serious”.
But it’s just as fair to observe that Dostoevsky operated under cultural constraints of his own: a repressive government, state censorship, and especially the popularity of post-Enlightenment European thought, much of which went directly against beliefs he held dear and wanted to write about. For me, the really striking, inspiring thing about Dostoevsky isn’t just that he was a genius; he was also brave. He never stopped worrying about his literary reputation, but also never stopped promulgating unfashionable stuff in which he believed.
David Foster Wallace

Hungry Ghost

“Can I tell you something?” the sister of one of our regulars was drunk, and had just inserted herself unceremoniously into a conversation Paul and I were having about the unspoken visual language of comic books.
“Uhh, sure.”
“Yeah. All that? All that…talking? You’re thinking too hard. Just READ the BOOK.” I scrutinized her, then decided to dismiss her comments as those of the very drunk and unintentionally offensive. God knows I’ve done it a time or two. Or seven. “REALLY. I read that book. A few years ago. The book. You know…with the roach…and the asshole.” We kind of looked at her blankly for a few minutes, and finally Paul ventured in a small voice,
“Naked Lunch?”
“YES!”
“That book is hard,” I agreed.
“Uh, whatever. The point is, you don’t have to think so hard. They’re gonna make a movie.”
Now I was a little bristly. Deciding to put her in her place, I said, “Yeah, but this is what I DO. I’m a poet and I’m going to get an MFA in the fall.”
“Well, that’s stupid.” I snorted at her pronouncement. “REALLY! I was a poet. When I was sixteen. And it was all so dramatic! And everything happened to ME! And you know what? I’m a banker now. I’m a banker.”
“Okay, well I’m a poet.”
“Well, that’s stupid, like I said. Do you know that no one READS poetry? No one CARES what you have to say. What else do you do?” I looked at her blankly. “Do you do anything else? I mean, I know you’re a bartender.”
“I read. I take care of my pets. My friends. My family.” She was not buying it. “I’m a very smart girl,” I ventured, quietly.
“You are going to regret this choice. You are going to be on your death bed and you’re going to say ‘I shouldn’t have done that’, but it’s fine, because in ten years you’ll be a banker too. I was just like you.”
And then I turned to Abey and started a conversation about Rem Koolhaas, and later I drove home fuming. The end.

From “Centuries”

Proposal

Now, while radios crackle my latest victims’ names and the colors their blood made on the sidewalk — cabernet, eggplant, mud — say yes. In the middle of the list. Would you be more comfortable strolling out behind the slaughterhouse? Shall we take another stumble through the burn ward? Here’s a note from my parole board and a snapshot of my Dumpster. Here’s a list of my prescriptions in order of importance. Now while tornadoes screw the city, now half-drowned in sobs, now as I tear our last dollar to confetti. Toss off your drink and dress. Look at me. Say yes.

Wedding

My sisters Mary and Martha taught me to dance like a ladder while my mother sang a song called Sell Me Money. My mother will come back in the end. Martha lacquered her face with strawberry jam; Mary unfolded the towels. When I regained self-consciousness they were pushing me down the corridor like a stalled car and I’d gone wrong in my pants. I wanted to nail the apples back onto the tree but couldn’t find a hammer. I chopped out my mouth but nights I still hear it, down at the dump, telling dirty stories to eggshells. My mother.

Joel Brouwer

From “The Transparency of Evil”

All “transparency” immediately raises the question of its opposite, secrecy. This is an alternative that is in no way of the order of morality, of good and evil: there is what is secret and what is generally known, which is a different sort of distinction. Certain things will never be put on open view; they are shared in secrecy as part of a type of exchange that is different from the one that involves visibility. When everything tends towards the visible, as is the case in our world, what becomes of the things that were once kept secret? They become occult, clandestine, maleficent: what was merely secret — or, in other words, given to be exchanged in secrecy — becomes evil and must be abolished, exterminated. But these things cannot be destroyed: in a certain sense, secrecy is indestructible. It will then be diabolized, and come out through the very instruments used to eliminate it. Its energy is full of evil, the energy that comes from the non-unification of things — good being defined as the unification of things in a totalized world.

Jean Baudrillard