It is hot, and I am busy.

Heyo. I’m not dead, I swear. It’s just that things have been eating up all of my time, like the Portland Zine Symposium, which happened last weekend, and it was awesome and exhausting and informative, and now it is over, thank god. My roommate and I stayed up to do a 24-hour zine the weekend before, holed up in a comics store near our house with a dozen or so other zinesters, and the rest of the week I played catch up on my sleep and tried to coordinate all the donations that were coming in for the symposium and get the programs made and help the organizers move things around and drop things off and fold and staple and copy, and yes. 

It is strange to live in a city with other zinesters, where it is a part of the culture and you can go to a place to see lots of people making zines everyday. Weird to meet the people behind the distros and zines that I’ve been reading/ordering from for years. Zine kids aren’t usually that used to talking with people in social settings. We are much better at writing down our words and then editing them and sharing them, and so zine symposiums/fairs/conventions are normally fairly awkward events, but I find it sort of endearing and awesome.

And so zines have taken over my life, although I haven’t written a new one in awhile, and I am sort of ready to do that maybe, once things calm down and this heat wave passes, and all the things that are new in my life have sort of lost a little bit of their sheen and I can turn my attention elsewhere.

And if you’re wondering how I’m doing with Infinite Jest, let’s just say that I have a long ways to go to catch up. Aie.

Nothing new

I was just sitting here when it all of a sudden occurred to me that I have a blog I’ve been neglecting for awhile. And then I looked back at my last entry, which was a full twenty days ago. That has to be a record.

In my defense, I’ve been traveling quite a bit, and I haven’t been at home in about 2.5 weeks now, so things have been a little hectic. I haven’t really been reading, either, although I’ve been trying to get a head start on Infinite Jest so that I can keep up with the infinite summer people as they read the book. I’m on page 105 now, which is sad, sad, sad, considering how long ago I started.

Alas. It is what it is. And I have nothing more to say. I will update later, perhaps when I do have something more substantial to report. In the meantime, it’s summer. Drink a beer or a ginger ale, and go sit out on the porch for a bit.

I knew true love and I knew passion

OK, so reading isn’t really priority #1 around here anymore, and neither is writing, come to think of it, but I did manage to finish a book today, which was a light read, if not depressing. It’s the autobiography of The Eel’s lead singer/songwriter Mark Oliver Everett, known as E. 

It’s called Things the Grandchildren Should Know, and it’s not particularly well-written. It sort of reminded me of a zine, in a way, and I doubt the thing would have ever been published if he weren’t so famous. But nonetheless, it’s sort of inspiring to hear him talk about the way that music helped him survive a pretty turbulent life. 

E has a rough childhood, a practically nonexistent relationship with his father who he eventually comes home to find dead, a sister who eventually commits suicide, and a mother who gets cancer. By the end of the book, he is the only member left of his immediate family, and he claims that his drive to produce music was the one passion he had that kept him alive and going. Listening to his songs through this lens makes them a little more amazing to me, and it is certainly humbling to think of how lonely it must be to have the people who were there to witness your childhood, raise you, take care of you, and help you develop into an adult all die before you are middle-aged. I can’t really imagine.

One thing I will say about E is that his intentions, at least portrayed in his book, certainly seem pure. Although he does bask somewhat in “fame” for awhile, he eventually realizes that’s not what he wants, and for many of his albums, he fights to maintain creative control over what he puts out. In fact, he ends up getting ditched over and over by managers and record labels because of his desired autonomy over his music. 

Anyhow, I’m heading back to the east coast for about in month in TWO DAYS, and I have about five thousand things to do before I leave, which is sort of stressing me out. I think I’m going to only take one  book back with me: David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. It’s a hefty book to haul a grand total of 6,000 miles, but I’m pretty sure it’s time.

For the foreseeable future anyway

I’m not really sure what phase I’ve entered here with my reading, but I’ve wandered off the literature path lately, and that’s OK with me. I just finished reading There Are No Children Here, by Alex Kotlowitz. It’s a nonfiction book about two children growing up in one of the Chicago housing projects in the 80s. And as you might expect, it’s terribly heartbreaking and sad. It was also engaging and super easy to read. The subject matter was dark and gave me nightmares a few times, but it was told clearly and succinctly. I really admire Alex Kotlowitz and his style of journalism. I’d like to read a few more of his books. And as a sidenote, I do feel that watching The Wire made it easier to understand what was going on in this book. 

It’s incredible to me how dangerous poverty can be, how dangerous it can be to live in these United States. We are supposedly a first-world country, and yet some of our citizens, our youngest citizens, live in conditions that are both traumatic and horrifying. There are places in this country where children witness murder on a regular basis. Where death and oppression are rampant from a young age. And there are very few resources out there to help do anything to make the situation better. It blows my mind the amount of courage, stamina, and resolve it takes just to grow up in a situation like the one described in this book.

Anyhow, I’m onto another easy-to-read book now called Things the Grandchildren Should Know by Mark Oliver Everett, the lead singer/songwriter for The Eels. I just read the first chapter, and it’s fast and reads like a zine. It’s a light read, something to kill the time before I get to what I’d really like to do this summer…. which is this. It’s an online book club that is hoping to get through David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest this summer. We will see. 

Also on my reading list: a re-read of Mrs. Dalloway. C’est tout.

On beauty and growing up

I’ve been reading Zadie Smith’s On Beauty for the past few days, and I finished it last night, and I loved it. And I’ve been dreading writing this post because I don’t really know why I loved it so much. It was just one of those books that pulls you into the story so fast and makes you feel like you’re hovering over the lives of the people involved for the length of time that the book goes on, and it’s engaging and funny and sad, and then it’s over. 

The book is basically a novel about a family whose father is a professor at a prestigious university. His wife isn’t so much an intellectual, but a strong, confident woman who is admired and embraced by the academic community. They have three kids—the oldest is a born-again Christian son, the middle child is an ambitious, intellectual perfectionist daughter, and the youngest is a charismatic teenager who denies his upper middle class upbringing, claiming instead to have grown up in the rougher parts of Boston to fit in with a group of Haitian protestors he befriends.

There are love affairs and academic squabbles and struggles to find racial and cultural identities. There are arguments between liberals and conservatives, artists and intellectuals, cynics and idealists. There are multiple ruminations on beauty and all its various forms, limitations, expectations. It’s the story of people, with problems, who see them but can’t really do anything about it. And the people who love them anyway. It’s about family dynamics and what it means to be a brother, sister, mother, father. It is an exploration of life through the microcosm of one family, and for awhile you, the reader, feel that you are one of them, the Belseys, navigating your way through a not-so-clear future in various stages of development. There are bits and pieces that are subtle and brief, but ring true to my experience, and so it goes. I’m still not sure I completely understand the ending, and there’s a lot here to unpack and break down, but I’m not sure I’m ready to do that yet. 

I do know, though, that there are scenes depicted in this novel, reactions to situations, quotations, that will stick with me as I grow up, trying to figure it out.

Debriefed

I finished Beloved yesterday, drinking coffee on our porch which is now covered in plants before my roommates woke up. It is a book to be savored, not rushed through, and I’m glad I was able to take the time to do that. As a sidenote, I realized that I never mentioned that I read Hard-Boiled Wonderland And the End of the World by Haruki Murakami. I put a hold on it awhile ago and when it came in, I picked it up and forgot about it for weeks. I ended up having to read the book in about three days before it was due back to the library, and so I don’t have much to say about it. It didn’t make that much of an impact on me, and I kept confusing it with Briefing for a Descent into Hell because both books involved detailed observations of otherworldly beasts, strangely enough. It was part sci-fi, part fantasy, and I thought it did raise some interesting questions about the way that people operate and how the soul is both our saving grace and our downfall. 

Yadda yadda, back to Beloved. Beyond the sentences and the way the novel is constructed, so that we are given pieces of information slowly, from all different perspectives, the entire story being masterfully withheld from us for most of the book, the ideas that tie the book together are complicated and extreme. Many of the characters, especially Sethe struggle to find a way to live in their present-day lives after experiencing some of the most tragic, heartbreaking injustices imaginable. Middle ground is hard to reach.

I can’t really do this book justice here without breaking it down completely, following the themes through, which I don’t have time to do, so I’ll just tell you this. Mother’s day is on Sunday, and I’ve been thinking quite a bit about what it means to be a mother, and a parent in general. In the novel, Sethe struggles with what this means in a life where she is prevented from being a mother. She grows up without a mother and has no way of knowing what a mother should be, which she readily admits while giving birth to her baby Denver. And of course, the event that hangs at the crux of this whole novel—when Sethe kills her baby Beloved by cutting her throat with a handsaw in order to keep her from being recaptured by the white men—is ultimately an act of love. A mother’s wish for her child to be safe, protected from the hardships she has known her whole life. 

This idea of making the world better for our children, giving them opportunities that we didn’t have, helping them succeed is something universal and powerful. It’s deeply rooted in stories like these from This American Life, here and here.

There’s something else I wanted to say, about identity. The way that we see the characters in the book discovering themselves, in life-altering ways that don’t happen when people know freedom their whole lives. When Baby Suggs, Sethe’s mother-in-law, is bought freedom by her son Halle and is given a house of her own, it is only then, gardening in her yard that she first has a sense of identity. Of herself as her self. And this is after she has lived almost her whole life. It’s something that Denver also experiences late, when she is eighteen. Although Denver is born free, she is also chained by the love of her mother, who warns her of the evils outside of their house, scaring Denver into staying put until desperation forces her out. 

Love taken to an extreme is dangerous, and when terrible, cruel things happen, the reactions to them are often terrible and cruel as well, often unintentionally. 

I want to write more, about Paul D and his ability to make women cry. About Stamp Paid and his decision to tell Paul D about Sethe’s past. About the community of freed slaves that forms to support those with the heaviest stories to tell and the capability of that group for forgiveness, acceptance, to bend their minds towards understanding even in the most tragic of circumstances. I’d like to write about Beloved, how she is full of anger and hatred and how she is the one completely destructive character in the novel, and about Amy, who helps Sethe deliver her baby and tends her wounds when she is dying in the woods. But of course, there’s no time. So I will just say to you, read this book. It’s one of the books that makes you question why you should ever write another word because really, when novels like this already exist, what’s the point? 

And if you’ve already read the book and want to hear Toni Morrison talk about it, here’s an mp3 of a BBC podcast where she does just that. Very interesting.

Re-reading, re-remembering

Beloved is a masterpiece. Every single page amazes me. I open it up for a second, not planning to read and fifteen minutes later I realize I’m still sitting there, enraptured with her words, the sentences strung together, the painful images playing out in my head. It’s absorbing in a way that few books are, and soulful. It’s a combination of poetry and prose, it mixes the concrete with the abstract, it reveals the plot in a carefully stitched together patchwork of memories. It switches from one character’s point-of-view to the other naturally, seamlessly, picking up where it left off without feeling fragmented. Each chapter starts with a sentence, strong and revealing. Here, I’ll show you some:

Denver’s secrets were sweet.

Rainwater held on to pine needles for dear life and Beloved could not take her eyes off Sethe.

and my personal favorite:

Beloved was shining and Paul D didn’t like it.

Gorgeous, right?

Beloved was shining and Paul D didn’t like it. Women did what strawberry plants did before they shot out their thin vines: the quality of the green changed. Then the vine threads came, then the buds. By the time the white petals died and the mint-colored berry poked out, the leaf shine was gilded tight and waxy. That’s how Beloved looked—gilded and shining.

This book is simultaneously a horror story, a suspense novel, a historical narrative, a biography. It’s a sublime combination of the supernatural and the real, in a way that is completely believable and totally chilling. It’s painful to read, but impossible to put down. In the foreword, Morrison writes

I wanted the reader to be kidnapped, thrown ruthlessly into an alien environment as the first step into a shared experience with the book’s population—just as the characters were snatched from one place to another, from any place to any other, without preparation or defense.

Bravo.

This is my second time through this book. The first was a few years back, over a New Year’s vacation spent cleaning out and fixing a flooded condo with my dad. The second time through is just as much, if not more, enjoyable, and I am taking my time with this, savoring the words, letting them simmer, and still being blown away page after page. Toni Morrison is a genius. Genius, genius.

Briefing for a Descent into Hell

I believe in Plato’s forms like I believe in god. Which is to say they are one in the same, except explained maybe a different way. Language isn’t perfect, which is why I think there are so many philosophies, so many religions, all essentially trying to nail down the same thing. Something that can’t be explained in words, something that can’t be embodied by people, something higher and more pure than anything that can exist in reality. I believe in ideals. I believe in working to reach them, although I don’t believe we can ever truly reach them fully. But I believe that lots of us try, and lots of us get really really close. Some closer than others. Many of us misguided. Lots of us striving to those ideals in one aspect of our lives while completely failing in other, unattended parts of our lives.

So why am I waxing philosophical with you today? I finished Doris Lessing’s Briefing for a Descent Into Hell this weekend. And it relates so well to so many of the things I think about and conversations I’ve had recently about the problems with language, both spiritually, as well as applied to the real world; the differences between people’s realities and what makes one more legitimate than another; the problems that arise from systems, in general; as well as the idea of evolution, breaking through a level of consciousness to something higher.

A few years ago, I had a very strange conversation with someone on the phone. He was one of those people who I think about too much for the amount of time that I knew him. Someone who came in and out of my life pretty quickly, but whose words made a huge impact on me, and which ring even more true the more I look back on them. Anyway, he and I had a frenzied conversation late one night, wherein he told me that the revolution was coming. That the Internet generation was full of an energy which far surpassed that of our own, which falls somewhere before the full-blown Internet generation and Generation X. He talked about an explosion of art, music, and creative energy generated by coming of age during a pointless war, in an age where the Internet was radically changing the way people communicate, work, live, create. 

Then he said something that I’ve thought about for a long time, and I will never forget. He said, “Generation X silenced their prophets.” Simple, but it’s something that sticks in my head and repeats. Silenced prophets. So many of them are. I think about one of the stories I heard on This American Life about a father whose young daughter asks him about Jesus and why we celebrate Christmas. He explains to her that Jesus came with a message, to love everyone, treat people with kindness, withhold judgment. And for preaching that message, he was killed. Later that year, the same child asks about Martin Luther King, and the father explained to her that he believed, and preached, that all people were created equally. “Like Jesus?” the child asks. “Yes,” says the father. “Did they kill him, too?” she asks. It’s true.

Are we silencing our prophets? When they come with radical messages, messages that make us uncomfortable and force us to examine our actions, snap us out of our daily lives, do we listen? Or do we instead try and make them fit into the system that has already been created? Do we write-off what they say because of other factors—how they dress, how they’re living, what other people think of them?

This is the problem with living in a system, where everyone is expected to, and I would even say needs to, conform to certain ways of living. There are rules here, and I’m not saying they’re not needed or important. They are, indeed, for the safety and well-being and happiness of others. But those rules inevitably shut out those who don’t conform to them, for better or for worse. By virtue of doing what’s best for the majority, we inevitably shaft those who live on the fringe, in whatever way. 

One of my roommates’ job is to help those whose reality is so separated from that which we normally call “reality” fit into this world. She is charged with getting to know them well enough to line up the skills they possess with the needs of the society in which they live. She doesn’t talk about her job much, but what I’ve gathered from the few conversations we’ve had about it is that it’s exceedingly difficult. Working with those who do not see reality the way we see it, and working with those who are deeply entrenched in this society, and trying to make the two mesh seems like an impossible task. “It definitely makes me question what’s real and what’s not,” she tells me. And “I’ve realized I need to be very careful about the vocabulary I use to describe this population,” she says. The unemployment rate for those who are labeled as mentally ill is 80 percent. Eighty percent. And for employers, by virtue of what they’re doing, employing someone who is limited in what they can do and may take extra time to train or work with is a loss of profit. It’s hard for a business owner to reconcile that with the advantage of employing someone who needs a job. Not to mention now, when there’s an influx of overly qualified workers hungry for jobs.

Last week I watched Time Bandits for the first time, which is a film by Terry Gilliam, who also did Brazil, which is a Brave New World, 1984-esque film. Time Bandits is less serious, although it has some of the same themes, but it’s mostly about a map that gives you the capability of time traveling. The map was originally created by The Supreme Being but fell into the hands of his minions, who then take the map and use it in order to steal treasure from various kings and other people of power. The Evil Genius, who desperately wants possession of the map, eventually lures the group into his palace by promises of the greatest treasure of all time, despite the warnings and hesitations of the boy who joins the group. He is the only one who wants to use the map for a purpose other than stealing money. He is perfectly content to use the map to learn about the history of the world, meet historical figures, live in different time periods and places. Among the biggest lessons I took away from the film was that money is the problem. And yet we have not been able to craft a society that de-values or de-emphasizes money on a wide-scale successfully. Why is that?

Perhaps it is not money that is the problem, though. Maybe it would be more precise to say greed. Is that something we can ever break away from? Will we ever be able to quell the feeling that we need to hoard our money and possessions? The urge to hold on tightly to those things so that we can ultimately buy our freedom and happiness? 

Maybe I’m off topic now, but I just feel that in many ways, our lives are constant struggles between two goals. One is to live the best we can—justly, ethically, morally, working to make the world a better place. And the other is to develop skills to succeed in the society you are born into. Sometimes those two goals are the same, and they often intersect in various ways. But they are not completely in line for many of us. To commit fully to one of those goals is to turn your back on the other. And so the balancing act continues. We do the best we can with what we have, which is the maxim that plays in my head on a daily basis. 

Is there a way to synch those two goals up, so that no one has to make that choice? And if someone does come up with a way, will we actually have the foresight to listen? I am not very optimistic.

And although it feels like I’ve written nothing about this book, I feel like this is one of the most accurate portrayals I’ve written of what it was like to read this novel. Long, lofty, full of questions.

Quick Quote

Page 167, Doris Lessing’s Briefing for a Descent Into Hell

Sometimes when you read a book or story, the words are dead, you struggle to end it or put it down, your attention is distracted. Another time, with exactly the same book or story, it is full of meaning, every sentence or phrase or even word seems to vibrate with messages and ideas, reading is like being pumped full of adrenalin.

so scattered

OK, so I’ve been gone for awhile, and I’m sorry. I keep thinking I should update, and then I get busy with other things, and it’s not that I haven’t been reading, it’s just that what I’ve been reading has been so scattered that I don’t really know what to say.

I walked into a thrift store today that was fairly close to my house but definitely far enough outside of Portland to not cater to the pretentious hipsters who frequent all the thrift stores within the city proper. It was a straight-up thrift store, with shelves of electronics, their cords wrapped in packing tape, racks of oversized misshapen sweaters, unattended kids running through the aisles, playing with the toys. It was one of the first times since I moved to Portland that I felt like I was back in Virginia.

Anyway, they had a fairly sizable book section, which was divided into fiction and nonfiction. Except instead of just saying “fiction” and “nonfiction,” the signs said “not true stories” and “true stories,” which just tickled me to no end. Is that even true? I’m not sure.

At any rate, I bought a book by William Least Heat-Moon for no reason except that I haven’t heard his name in a very long time, and it’s such an interesting one, you know? Also, in the 2 books for $1 bin, I found a leather-bound copy of Kafka’s The Trial, and other stories, which made me think about one morning after our radio show when Stephen and I sat in the basement of the library, and he told me I needed to read The Trial, and so I did. Which in turn reminded me of the day he read The Lorax to me and demanded that I only look at the pictures because otherwise what was the point of him reading it out loud to me? Hah. I miss college sometimes. I definitely miss the naps I used to take in that library.

I’ve been trying to write recently, for issue 5 of aubade. It’s hard, though, and nothing is coming out right. I think the more I think about it and the more I force myself to write, even when I know that I’m going to completely scrap it in the end, the easier it will get. I want to have a draft before I leave for the east coast. Otherwise I just don’t see it getting finished in time for the Portland Zine Symposium. Which is the end of July, by the way. Are you coming?

I’ve been reading lots of zines, but don’t feel like giving you my reviews. I picked up the newest Mishap, which included a note from Ryan that made me laugh. It said “Portland?! You crazy nut. See you at the zine symposium!” I am excited about that. I also read the latest Big Hands, which is one of the better zines out there, in my opinion. It’s also one of the most nihilistic, cynical, and bleak zines I’ve ever read. It’s sort of hard for me to identify sometimes with it, but I appreciate what he’s saying, and how he says it.

I read a zine that is maybe my new favorite called No More Bum Mers. It blew my mind, the writing was incredible. I have been meaning to write him a long letter about it, but haven’t been able to find the words to tell him why I loved it so much yet. I need to re-read it and see where I am.

One more thing: I’ve been listening to lots more This American Life. Oh, Ira. Will I ever be over you?