It seems like in my journaling or blogging or whatever, I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about the nature of memory — the ways that it helps us, the ways that it holds us back, and the ways that it sometimes tricks us. We think we’ve had an original thought, told a clever joke, written a unique melody, but then we find out that we’ve actually just recycled something that we’ve heard or read before. Or we have the opposite experience — someone whom we’ve known for a long time recounts some story in which we’ve said or done some momentous thing, but we have no recollection of the event. Did it happen? Are they mixing their stories up, or are we? We remember the exact circumstances of the first time we met our lover, but they remember only our retelling of the moment. The fact is we can’t retain everything, so our brain is forced to pick and choose. Those of us who lament that we are “bad with names” in fact just don’t pay enough attention when people introduce themselves. I can meet someone and then minutes later not have the faintest idea what to call them, not because something in my brain fundamentally can’t retain the information, but only because I wasn’t really present when they first shook my hand.
Every once in a great while, I start reading something, only to realize after some number of pages that I’ve read the thing before, some years prior. Usually it happens with fiction that left me so unaffected as to fall right out of my head the moment I turned the last page. My mother used to be an enourmous consumer of romance novels. Of course, they were all exactly the same, and it was impossible for her to know which ones she had already read. Nonetheless, it mattered to her for some reason not to read the same one twice. (I still don’t understand why.) So she developed a system: she would go to the local library’s used book sale, buy a stack of 20 or so romance novels for 25 cents each, and as she read each one, she would leave a mark on the inside back cover to signal its completion. Whe she had read the whole stack, she would donate them all back to the library. Then, at the next book sale, she would root through the piles and pick up only those romance novels that didn’t already have the mark in them. Of course, it didn’t guarantee that she wouldn’t end up with a different copy of the same book, but it probably didn’t really matter if she did, as long as she didn’t realize it, because they were really all the same book, anyway. But the mark system satisfied her, and there were always a couple of brown grocery bags full of books lying around the house, one incoming and one outgoing. The system may persist to this day; I’m happy not to know.
In any case, I experienced one of those tricks of memory when I read the The Best of Roald Dahl. I thought it was my first time with the book in my hands. A couple of the stories sounded familiar, but then a lot of the stories are a lot alike: a seemingly meek and mild-mannered person has some grief with a less-than-meek antagonist, and in the surprise plot twist, we find out the the meek protagonist in fact has a murderous streak and someone gets killed in an unusual and grisly way. And then I came upon the story “Royal Jelly”.
The legend of the Beeboy is not well-known, and I don’t care to retell it here. Those who know it, know it, and those who don’t, don’t. Suffice to say that it’s a tag that I’ve carried with me since I was seventeen years old, an alter ego that has taken on different meanings over the years. What I didn’t know was that the origin myth was lost even to me. I remember when I started being called “Beeboy”; I remember the first drawing of the Beeboy, the sculpture of the Beeboy, the first ‘zine and the first album to be put out under the Beeboy(!) Productions label. I had honestly thought that the whole persona had been the invention of myself and a couple of friends, seventeen years ago.
And then I read “Royal Jelly”, the story of a man who feeds his malnourished child on queen bee nectar and ends up converting the infant into a fat human-insect hybrid. I gasped at the realization — I hadn’t invented the persona at all. At least, not out of my own fancy. I had absolutely read the story before, in that year when I was seventeen. I had surely borrowed the book from Bughead, who was a huge Roald Dahl fan, and who had been there for the birth of my own Beeboy myth. It was a crazy moment — this totally integral creative identity that I had been employing for nearly two decades had its birth in something that I had utterly forgotten. It was like forgetting the birth of your own child, and then coming across a photo of the event years later.
Thing is, I’m forgetting so many moments all the time. There’s just no way to know what’s important while it’s happening, which events will be life-changing and need to be filed, and which ones will end up as useless mental trivia that stick with us for no good reason. I don’t remember quite where I was sitting when I started writing this entry. Maybe someone spoke to me. Maybe I’ll meet that person again, have to be reminded of their name, try harder to tuck it away this time. Maybe that person will go on to change my life, totally alter the arc of my existence. I’ll reach back for the beginning, try to find that first moment when I met them, and it won’t be there any more. Maybe they’ll have a story about it, or maybe it will simply be lost, a story to be invented rather than recounted.
Then again, recent research suggests that the act of retrieving memories alters them during the retrieval, because they get re-associated with the context in which we recall them. Think back to where you were on September 11, 2001. If you were like most Americans, you were glued to the television. Do you remember watching footage of the first plane hitting the north tower of the World Trade Center? Seventy-three percent of the subjects in one study do. Thing is, that footage wasn’t actually aired until September 12. Which means that seventy-three percent of the subjects in the study report recalling something that didn’t actually happen. It’s just the constant review of the footage that happened in the days that followed that caused them to re-associate the memory with what they saw the day of the traumatic event. Memories, in a sense, wear out. We change them a little every time we “use” them, in a kind of mental Schrödinger’s cat scenario. Conviction is no indicator of accuracy. It’s quite possible to be entirely convicted of a version of events that rather completely clashes with reality.
So, we can try to journal and photograph everything and live with the information-retention fetish that is the modern world, data-mine our memories to create some Matrix of Truth. Or we can accept the fluidity of it all, and just try to tell good stories. I certainly do plenty of both. Given the choice, I suppose I would probably choose good stories over maximum data retention. In the world of Google, Facebook, Flickr, etc., I think the latter is probably the easier one to achieve. I can only hope that we don’t lose our collective handle on storytelling, crushed under the burden of so much recorded Truth.
It goes without saying that tastes change over time, both for individuals and for cultures. It’s hard to get high school kids into Nathaniel Hawthorne and Jane Austen, and it’s not just because high school kids lack sophistication. The language doesn’t resonate with them; the themes don’t resonate with them. And that’s OK with me. I’m no Platonist, and I don’t think that Quality is some inherent, well, quality of works of art. Art speaks to the context in which it was made, and some works have themes broad enough to span multiple contexts and so have staying power, but it’s simply a truism that Henry VIII doesn’t play the same on Broadway as it did in The Globe. That’s not Shakespeare’s fault; times change, and people have different needs. Part of Shakespeare’s greatness, no doubt, is that it still plays pretty well on Broadway because he was able to see past the troubles of his times, but I still don’t think we can utterly blame The Unwashed Masses for finding it boring.
The same is true for our personal tastes. When you’re fifteen, Catcher In The Rye rings awfully true. When you’re fifty, it’s still a good read, but it’s (hopefully) not still speaking to your current station in life. If it is, then you probably haven’t grown much. Again, the best books manage to span multiple contexts and multiple lives, but they can’t speak to everyone at all times, and it’s unreasonable to expect that they should.
When I was in my late teens and early twenties, Charles Bukowski spoke to me. I read lots — most — of his work, and I felt that it was something real. Like Holden Caulfield and Bukowski himself, I felt that so many of the literary greats were phonies, that what they created was artificial, that it had nothing to offer to me. I felt that academic literature was so much verbal masturbation, that writers like Bukowski wrote from where it was really at. To some extent, I still feel that way. Jane Austen still doesn’t speak to me. I don’t find the misery of Raymond Carver characters to be picturesque or interesting. Even The Bard himself is still hit-or-miss for me.
So when I read through Run With The Hunted, I was a little surprised to find that it was hit-or-miss for me, too. When I was younger and more angry, stories about desperate drunks seemed pretty interesting. Even if I felt like trash, there were any number of people out there way worse off than myself who were finding slices of beauty in whatever ditch they awoke. But reading that stuff now, it just seemed like repetition. Bukowski drunk, Bukowski with bad women, Bukowski feeling superior to other writers, Bukowski at the racetrack. There are still glimmers of beauty in all of it for me, but it no longer speaks to where I am. I’m not that angry, I don’t have the need to feel superior to anyone, and there isn’t much left for me to get out of Bukowski’s writing. At this point, reading his stuff is just revisiting a chapter of my life that I’m glad to be over. There isn’t anything much more for me to learn from it.
By the time I’m ninety, I’ll probably be one of those guys who just scowls at the New York Times every morning. Of course, so was Bukowski, so maybe that fits.
I had never suspected that one could judge the character of a town by the difficulty one has in obtaining a pair of underwear. It seemed like a simple enough task. In my haste to pack for a long weekend in Asheville, NC, I apparently forgot to put any underwear in my bag. I didn’t figure it out until I got up to dress in the morning, and rooted around in the backpack. What the hell? Of all the weird things I could possibly forget, why underwear? Going commando for a few days seemed plausible enough in the spring weather, except for contra dancing, when I would surely want something to keep my, er, “goods” from being battered to death on my thighs. So, no problem. Asheville is a big town, and I’ve got nothing but time. I’ll just walk downtown and buy something simple.
Two hours later, I had come up dry and confused. There were at least five stores where I could buy a hand-woven Nepalese shirt. Probably six specialty shoe stores, including a place that will measure your feet and custom-build a pair of sandals to fit them. There were four or five bookstores, three specialty chocolate shops, places to buy beads, places to buy incense, places to buy Tibetan singing bowls and organic dog biscuits. Three tea houses, four coffee roasters, a couple of skateboard shops, a hand-made drum shop, more vegetarian restaurants than there are vegetarians in the rest of North Carolina. But nowhere, nowhere to buy a pair of underwear (excepting the high-end lingerie shop, which deals in anatomies significantly different from my own). Finally, desperate, I went into Urban Outfitters. Me, in Urban Outfitters! At least they surely would carry underwear. The clerk shook her head sadly. “I’ve been in town for four days now, and I haven’t found anywhere that sells it,” she said. “But if you find any, let me know.” One of the other clerks directed me to the “General Store” as my only likely hope. It seemed like a chance. What could be more General than underwear?
I walked in, wandered around racks of fishing shirts and waterproof hats. Finally, I asked at the counter. Where could I find the underwear? Hesitatingly, the woman told me, “Well, what we have would be downstairs…” So I headed down, where there were tents, sleeping bags, kayaking supplies. It wasn’t obvious to me that there was any underwear to be had, so I asked again downstairs, thinking to myself that this was surely the most that I had spoken the word “underwear” to perfect strangers ever in my life. The downstairs clerk directed me to a clothing rack near the camping supplies. There, on a hook, were the only men’s underwear that can be purchased in Asheville, North Carolina. A single pair of quick-dry, capilene, moisture-wicking briefs with built-in fungicide and three-year warranty. Sale price: $17.99.
I decided that I could turn my existing pair inside out on alternating days. I also decided that there must be an awful lot of free-range testicles in Asheville, NC.
Which brings me, of course, to the subject of poetry. Many years ago, I thought that I knew something about poetry. I read it, wrote it, I probably even called myself a poet once or twice. Like so many things in my life back then, it was largely a vehicle for expressing discontent. I also wrote love poems and some humorous poems, but poetry was so associated with discontent for me that I put it away when I put away the discontent. I hardly acknowledged the poem for years. Not the fault of the poem, of course. I just needed time to de-couple it from teenaged angst.
So I pulled my copy of Stranger Music from my shelf as the first book of poetry that I had read in maybe a decade. I had recently rediscovered the music of Leonard Cohen, had enjoyed re-learning to play those songs, and had enjoyed the lyricism of them. There are some beautiful and lyrical moments in the poetry. But nearly always of the same type. It’s all love and loss, war and Judaism, being conquered by bad women or no women at all, and some of it is poignant. But almost none of it is just good fun. It’s all seriousness, all gravity. I wonder if Leonard Cohen could write a poem about the difficulty of obtaining a pair of underwear in Asheville, North Carolina. I wonder if I could. I can’t remember the last poem I’ve written. Plenty of songs, sure, but no poems. So I think I should try. I don’t know if the undercarriage of Asheville is the right starting point — almost certainly not — but it would be a tough thing to take too seriously, and that’s a good thing. I like love and loss and being conquered by bad women and no women at all, but it’s all been written. The freewheeling genitalia of the Western Carolina mountains have not, to my knowledge, been lauded in verse. There may be an opening for me.
Days of War, Nights of Love: CrimethInc. for Beginners
CrimethInc.
My review of Evasion was less than glowing. It just seemed like the work of a pissed-off kid with lousy social skills. So I didn’t expect anything too amazing from Days of War, Nights of Love, also from the CrimethInc. syndicate.
And so I was very pleasantly surprised. Days of War is intelligent, thoughtful, playful, provocative, and dangerous. It doesn’t preach, it doesn’t condescend, it just points the way to another world, one where corporations don’t serve the role of being moral law-givers, and where individuals don’t compartmentalize themselves away from the feelings and social structures that allow us to be human.
There’s a lot going on in Days of War, but the basic premise is this: What would you most like to be doing in all the world? Think on it, fix it in your mind. Now, ask: why aren’t you doing that thing right now? Is it because of your job? The expectations of your family? Your religion? Your sense of social propriety? Your credit card debt? Your fear that if you finally, finally gave yourself the chance to be what you want, that you’ll fail at it, and there will be nobody there to catch you? And so rather than risk disappointment or failure, we decide instead not to try. If we don’t try, we can’t fail. Instead we try to live risk-free lives, which equate to excitement-free lives. We get bored, we get fat. We buy things to mitigate the boredom, we buy doctors and health clubs to ward off the fat. And we forget how to ask:
What is my true desire?
Will your bank visit you in the hospital when you’re old? Will your boss help you plant your garden? Will your credit card company stay in bed and make love to you late on Sunday morning?
If not, then why are we giving our time, our very lives, away to those entities? Why do we accept in return petty scraps of paid holidays, two weeks vacation a year, social networking web sites that we can use on our lunchbreak to keep track of our hundreds of virtual “friends” who are also on their lunchbreaks?
Days of War is radical not so much in its politics as in its aesthetics. It resonates with a youthful manifesto that I wrote for myself when I was twenty years old, in which I made a vow that my living would be my art. My own art is not yet perfect, but a performance piece in progress, a continual unlearning, and that’s okay, necessary even. Like everyone else, I need people to remind me not to forget to ask:
It seems to me that there are two ways to create passable travel writing. The first is to do an ordinary thing, and write an extraordinary story about it. The second is to do an extraordinary thing, and then do ordinary writing about it. Of course, the ideal is to do an extraordinary thing and write an extraordinary story about it, but I think few writers manage to achieve that. Nonetheless, the other two approaches create perfectly readable travel writing that can’t help but appeal to all of the people who just do ordinary things and don’t write about them at all.
Round Ireland With a Fridge falls into the category of ordinary writing about an extraordinary journey. The premise is as simple as it is absurd: Tony Hawks accepts a bet that he can hitchhike the circumference of Ireland in a month’s time with a mini fridge. It’s no spoiler to say that the trip goes swimmingly. It’s exactly the sort of ridiculous journey that people can rally behind, and the Irish people are good about rallying behind the ridiculous, anyway. Hawks’ trip is, as one would expect, a marvelous sequence of shenanigans and a testament to the kindness of strangers with a sense of adventure.
But this wasn’t what excited me most about the book. What excited me most about the book was that fact that it wasn’t particularly well-written, but sold half a million copies. As many of you know, I’ve been working on my own book during the last few months. Some of it is well-written; most of it isn’t yet. But reading Round Ireland was confidence-boosting. I’m used to reading writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, Dante and Umberto Eco. And reading such master wordsmiths always leaves me feeling pretty inadequate as a storyteller. But Round Ireland is different. The story is great, but the writing is only fine. Not brilliant, but fine. There were plenty of parts where I thought that I would have told it differently, or would have phrased something better. And rather than that being annoying, it was exciting for me. Half a million copies. I could do this. It wasn’t magic, just dedication, discipline, and a good agent.
I’ve got two of the three. I still need to learn how to find the third, but that only after I’ve done a lot more work. For those of you keeping score at home, the current count is 33,290 words. It might be halfway done. Then half of it will end up on the editing floor to get replaced with something better. I have come to this profound conclusion: writing a book is hard. No wonder not everybody does it. In the process, I was also given this equally profound piece of advice: the difference between writers and non-writers is that writers write. Period.
So I’m trying to take that to heart, and keep at it. The problem is always that it’s also true that musicians make music, period, and these days I’m much more that than I am a writer, so it always wins over other things. The good news is that I think the only difference for me between being a writer and a musician is where I invest my time. Either way, it’s time vastly well-spent.
The Best of Roald Dahl
Round Ireland With A Fridge
But this wasn’t what excited me most about the book. What excited me most about the book was that fact that it wasn’t particularly well-written, but sold half a million copies. As many of you know, I’ve been working on my own book during the last few months. Some of it is well-written; most of it isn’t yet. But reading Round Ireland was confidence-boosting. I’m used to reading writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, Dante and Umberto Eco. And reading such master wordsmiths always leaves me feeling pretty inadequate as a storyteller. But Round Ireland is different. The story is great, but the writing is only fine. Not brilliant, but fine. There were plenty of parts where I thought that I would have told it differently, or would have phrased something better. And rather than that being annoying, it was exciting for me. Half a million copies. I could do this. It wasn’t magic, just dedication, discipline, and a good agent.