In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness

Christmas happened again (it does that), and amongst many other wonderful gifts from many wonderful people, one that stood out was a small book from my mother called You're a Genius All the Time; which is a collection of maxims that Jack Kerouac outlined in reference to writing. There are about 30 of them, but these are my personal favorites:

Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy

Submissive to everything, open, listening

Be in love with your life

Something that you feel will find its own form

Blow as deep as you want to blow

Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind the unspeakable visions of the individual

No time for poetry but exactly what is

Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog

The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye

Write in recollection and amazement for yourself

Believe in the holy contour of life

Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind

Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better

Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning

No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language, knowledge

Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it

Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form

In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness

Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better

You're a Genius all the time

This stuff hit me pretty hard, sad as it is to say. As someone who imagines herself to be a writer, I spend very little time writing; my new job at this coffee place downtown takes up a lot of my energy (I think during my interview I was a little too enthusiastic about the possibility of opening at 5:30 in the morning, but it's not so bad), and now that I have a somewhat social life, I spend my days off blustering around. Not that I'm wasting my time, quite the contrary; I've had a better Christmas season than the past two, when there was nothing to do and no one to do it with. But my New Year's resolution '09 was (I think) to publish something, and unless that Erotic Short that I wrote for that show in February was accepted, then we can count this year as un-resolved. In any case, it's inspired me to keep a writing journal, but it's been harder and harder for me to keep a clear head that would facilitate writing. In violation of my usual blog-rule of keeping my personal life out of my posts, here are some vague reasons why:

-Probably still bitter about getting my heart all broke this summer;

-Wanting to have financial independence but being unable to keep two nickels to rub together, hence too often being stressed about self-inflicted financial problems;

-Thinking that I have the best of intentions but then realizing possibly too late that I'm more selfish than I am generous;

-Having feelings I can't express for various reasons, leaving them like the bitter aftertaste of hazelnuts in my mouth;

-Being afraid of what I can't control;

-Refusing to accept that I can't control it;

-Hating myself for all of the above, and

-Causing myself undue stress, pain, and depression from all that self-hatred.

What sucks the most is that all of that crap is internalized--it isn't something that anyone else has anything to do with, and it isn't something that affects anyone else. This means that I have to take responsibility for and deal with it on my own. The horrible thing about 2009 is that, despite all the sea changes that I've experienced, it's been a grand old time for disappointments, or at least let-downs. I don't want to list them all, they'd end up being redundant, and a lot of them are either resolved or don't cause me any worry any more. But it's still weight that I've carried, and though I might be mostly relieved, a lot of the experience has left me weakened, which makes the whole internalization even worse: I can't ask anyone for help. I have to deal with it on my own.

This situation ought to be more of a challenge than a burden. I have caused or suffered all of my problems alone, I should deal with them alone, thus making me the only one who can give myself strength. I'm too good at doing the opposite; discussing my issues to the point of whining and then placing all my self-worth in the opinions that others have of me (though it isn't a peer-group thing, usually it's one or two people on whom all my happiness relies). My best friend, who is one of the people who I rely on, called this unhealthy, and I can't think of a better possible word. My refusal to rely on myself takes me too often to a perceived point of no return, and I end up drowning in myself. When I was a teenager, it was simple self-pity, but now it's self-loathing, which is more dangerous: I am the person I trust the least and fear the most.

And yes, this is all complete naval-gazing, but like I said, my problems demand such a vantage point. What I am going through is petty compared to what many others experience in their lives. There is no point where I can call what I feel sorrow. But this is all the more reason to confront it, and the perspective of "other people have it worse" changes the approach I take but it doesn't make the workload any smaller. And if I do want to, as Kerouac writes, be in love with my life, I have to find some sort of love for myself. And I can't do that simply by listing off my better qualities. I know that there are things that make me a good person. I strive to be a good person. But, as Owen Wilson said in Zoolander, I gotta straighten some shit out.

So this will be my pre-New Year's Resolution: by Friday, I will expand upon the above list of vague things that are wrong with me, and make an outline of what to do and how to approach each issue when it rears its ugly head. It's a very self-help-five-step-program way to do it, but I think that my happiness and the happiness that those I care about the most-- who are too often hurt by what I've done--is more important than my pride or my insistence on being tortured. I would rather get over myself and use that energy to be creative, and do what I'd hoped to accomplish this year. And it may have taken me a long time to figure all of this out, and it happened only because my life started to strain me more than ever, but at least it's happening. I intend to make the most of it.

Please don't whisper sweet nothings in my ear when the sound of shredding vocal cords is all I wanna hear

Hey guys, remember Desaparecidos? Probably not. The only people who remember Desaparecidos are likely just Bright Eyes fans who know the band through lead singer/lyricist/future folk monster Conor Oberst. Honestly, isn't that a little perverse? Congrats, Desaparecidos, you will always be known as "that band Conor Oberst was in that wasn't Bright Eyes, after he was/wasn't in The Faint, before he did solo stuff and way before Monsters of Folk." Tough break. When I was in my Saddle Creek Records phase (have I mentioned that before? I feel like I say it every third post), I actually liked Desaparecidos a bit; they were more awake and less thoughty than Bright Eyes, while still keeping Oberst's overwhelming defeatist angst that he carried so well in that part of the Aughts, before he was slightly miscast as our generation's Dylan.

Listening to them now, though, there are parts I snort at too easily; the overly-social lyrics ("opportunity, no it don't exist/It's the opiate of the populace"), Oberst's screaming that gets whiny so soon it just sounds like he's crying-fighting ("I don't think she likes me!"). But for what he and his band mates were doing, they did it well: almost-punk basement rock; which is what Punk should have turned into instead of getting sidetracked into New Wave (not that it was a mistake) or Grunge (which was a serious mistake).

The only ever released one album, Read Music/Speak Spanish, and it is–with the exception of the few disparages that I mentioned above–not that bad at all. You can almost feel Oberst's spit coming out the speakers as he mumble-screams about divorce and capitalism, the guitars are lo-fi enough to absorb but not be overwhelmed by, and the bass and drums sound more like they're coming up from the floor below instead of from iTunes. They play infomercials over their bridges, it's hardcore without being actually hardcore, and it's rock without having even a drop of douchewater. You could never imagine them being anywhere larger than a dive bar, and with good reason; this is the sort of music that stadiums ruin, the perfect argument against the wide open spaces of crap like Warped Tour.

It might be for this last reason that bands like Desaparecidos never really did make the big time, the music has been around for a long time, but it's hard to transport the songs out of the local venue and into anything else, and it's even harder to say of lo-fi rock that it's supposed to sound that way, especially when it can be done so poorly. But oh my dear reader, worry not. Because, after more or less forgetting that I wanted to listen to it, I listened to The Airing of Grievances, the first full-length by New Jersey's Titus Andronicus. And it is very, very good.

I don't really know that much about Titus Andronicus, so I won't pretend to figure out something biographical (everything that I mentioned above that is of that ilk is only due to my aforementioned Saddle Creek phase). I will, of course, note that in my previous post, I not only mentioned the Shakespearean play that the band took its name from, but quoted from a speech that singer Patrick Stickles himself recites at the end of the album's opener, "Fear and Loathing in Mahwah, NJ", a song which also might contain my favorite possible breakup lyric of the year: "the way we hold each other so tight would look more like a noose if held up to the light/because we betray each other in dreams every night/now let's never speak of it again, all right?"

Stickles' vocals are, as a matter of fact, closely interchangeable from Conor Oberst's baby-punk screams, but they seem to arise more out of desperation and a "fuck you" (or as he himself says, "fuck everything! Fuck me!") attitude instead of just straight up anger at the way things are, he sings with self-loathing and indulgence at the same time, shout-growling "there's nothing I've ever done I didn't learn to be ashamed of", and later, "I hope I never get my fill of pushing this boulder up this hill." And while we're on the subject of Sisyphus, I ought to point out that this album's got plenty for the tongue-in-cheek intellectual: not only does the band borrow from Shakespeare's tragedy, but Sickles also quotes from The Stranger, makes a semi-oblique reference to a W.H. Auden poem, and seems to be one of the few who can do Biblical referencing well. Go team.

Somehow The Airing of Grievances manages to be sincere and ironic, breakneck and thoughtful, angry and contemplative at the same time. And for once, it is a take on lo-fi production that I can get behind, like The Strokes' Is This It, only faster and less of a hipster. It seems to sound the way it does because that's just the best way to hear it; not because they couldn't afford better production, and not because they could afford better production but wanted to seem more indie. And, long story short, I want to see them live, it seems like I'd get bloody and like it, which is really not something that ever happens in my case. Where the audience at the Desaparecidos show bounced their knees and nodded to the beat, Titus Andronicus is more like when the Violent Femmes scream "When I say dance, you'd best dance, motherfucker!"

How do I just end this by geeking out over Shakespeare?

Though this is the Christmas season, where most people are supposed to be thinking on the greatest birth of births, here is a poem that exemplifies my hate-on for birth in general. It's one of those things that I don't like people getting romantic about. I cringe at the idea of home or natural births; when it comes time for me to have mine, I'm more than happy to get pumped full of drugs and get that child out no matter how. So long as the result is a healthy baby, I don't care how it's done.

Anyway, the poem:

We are born in a horrible blood-bathed world
(we would call it so had we seen it,)
pulled or ripped from shaven motherhood,
smelling like nothing human, if we are lucky
breathing, not covered in shit.
The world outside is too cold, it is no place
for a sensible person. Why were we so warm before?
Why live for months in a personal ocean,
needing no air or hands,
what joke was it that chose that for the prologue
and not the play?

Sliced and tied off like a tourniquet
Fresh meat ready to be rolled in bread-crumbs
before being placed in a second oven,
blind and ugly we enter the world, if we are lucky
(apparently) that is the best way to go,
asleep, as though there is nothing more to see.

They smack the air into us and it is a knife,
you know it is,
Our throats are castrated for our lungs.

Good? Bad? I kind of like it, though for some reason it makes me think of Benjamin Button a bit much, and also that whole "the luckiest man is the one who has never been born", which is just one of those philosophically pretentious cure-alls, like Absurdism. Seriously, fuck Absurdism. It is so lazy and yet still so pretentious.

Also, I've been in discussion with a friend of mine who is infinitely more knowledgeable about medical terminology than I, and apparently I'm not using the term "tourniquet" correctly, and this bothers me. I want to use the best sort of metaphor, but what is it? And why is it that every now and then the word "tourniquet" makes me think of the three Musketeers and D'Artagnan playing old fashioned doubles tennis? Does anyone else see that?

This poem will be, hopefully, an excerpt from a larger body of work that will be my take on the "Seven Ages of Man" speech that Falstaff does in Shakespeare's As You Like It. Here it is, as a refresher:

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like a furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Man, isn't that depressing? I love how the comic relief characters in Shakespeare are usually the most upsetting to read or watch. I wonder if I'll actually do seven different poems for the seven different ages. Too obvious?

There's another Shakespearean inspiration for this work. It actually comes from Titus Andronicus, which might be my favorite tragedy; it is the most fucked up of them all, and if you want to see what I mean, just watch Julie Taymor's brilliant and beautiful adaptation. Just take a gander:

See what I mean? Messed. Up. Anyway, there's this part where the deliciously evil Aaron the Moor, who is escaping Rome with his newborn infant and is captured by Lucius, who has more than enough reason to hate Aaron. Aaron is a villain, who is more or less the cause for all the terrible things that happen to the good characters (he convinces Titus to cut off his own hand just for the hell of it), so Lucius decides to hang his baby in front of him, because even the good guys are sort of monsters. Aaron, despite being damnable beyond hell, loves his son, and pleads for Lucius to spare the boy, Lucius agrees to only if Aaron confesses everything that he's done:

Lucius
Say on; and if it please me which thou speak'st,
Thy child shall live, and I will see it nourish'd.
Aaron
And if it please thee! Why, assure thee, Lucius,
'Twill vex they soul to hear what I shall speak;
For I must talk of murders, rapes, and massacres,
Acts of black night, abominable deeds,
Complots of mischief, treason, villanies
Ruthful to hear, yet piteously perform'd:
And this shall all be buried by my death,
Unless thou swear to me my child shall live.

This is so wonderful to me, you guys! The juxtaposition of Aaron being such an awful person, and yet caring only for the life of his child! When I was in England, the kids in my Shakespeare class admitted that they did not get this character at all, and I was like "GODDAMMIT HE IS SO GOOD." Long story short, I am a fucking nerd. The stuff that Aaron confesses to, though is some of the wickedest shit Will S has ever come up with. My favorite:

Oft have I digg'd up dead men from their graves,
And set them upright at their dear friends' doors,
Even when their sorrows almost were forgot;
And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,
Have with my knife carved in Roman letters,
'Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.'

Yeah, and then he's like "the only thing I hate is that I didn't get to do that a thousand more times" and then he gets buried up to his chest in sand and is like "whatever, I'll just scream at you the whole time."

So yeah, I want to write something that reflects the dichotomy of life being cruel and awful and our need for it to continue regardless. As exemplified by Aaron the Moor.

Sometimes I wish I'd just written a thesis so that I could get all this English Major talk out of my system. Vernacular, vernacular.