Something Untitled to Live For

Book Description
Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.

With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.

The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.

As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them.

Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.

Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.

--Thomas Pynchon

About the Author
Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Slow Learner, a collection of short stories, Vineland and, most recently, Mason and Dixon. He received the National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.

Fatboy Slim - Weapon of Choice

We need levity. We need Chris Walken.

BIG SCREEN TV

He perdido los zapatos.
Nothing new in this house.
'20 years of schooling --> day shift.'
Or, better,
No hay nada.

Nada menos a house filled with so much
A vulturous mosaic
Tarkovsky influence in Mexican cinema
that you have forever
to sift it out
Time to find the missing shoes.

The children come
And go
The house is quiet, empty,
And they never leave,
Ever, either.

It is the best of quantum mechanics
Waves and particles
Bouncing in stillness.

To speak words
That communicate too well
Despite all failed attempts
To color the meanings

Soy acostumbrado de ser desnudo.

And there is a shelter
En la lengua
In the tongue.

If I can shift into a new idiom
y lose el viejo

Swim in a new baby voice
And perder the old one

At least temporarily.

Always writing now
Like the Stone Reader said,
"I think like a writer; that's all that matters."

My collection of neo-Nietzcheisms
Wittgenstein (and I have the right, the simple do, we do)

'So past enlightenment' --> New Yorker cartoon monks

What I was getting to:
Wife goes to technology store.
Doesn't like Is not impressed A ella no importa
The CDL HDV plasma LCD 50 52 56 64

It's relative. Sizeism.
We have everything we need.
The children are out.
The barn comforts.
I wonder about my prostate, a little.

Now, the Mexican movie:
Japón.

This Blog is Private

According to this report, most blogs are limited in readership by design and 37 percent are used as personal journals.  

Survey of the Blogosphere Finds 12 Million Voices

By FELICIA R. LEE

Published: July 20, 2006

Bloggers are a mostly young, racially diverse group of people who have never been published anywhere else and who most often use cyberspace to talk about their personal lives, according to a report on blogging released yesterday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

The report also said that 8 percent of Internet users, or about 12 million American adults, keep a blog, and that 39 percent of Internet users, or about 57 million American adults, read blogs.

The report, called "Bloggers: A Portrait of the Internet's New Storytellers," relied on two telephone surveys conducted over the last year. The first survey, taken from July 2005 to February 2006, asked in-depth questions of 233 people, who were a nationally representative sample of bloggers. The survey's margin of error was plus or minus 7 percent.

Additionally, from November 2005 to April 2006, 7,012 adults (including 4,753 Internet users) were surveyed by telephone. That survey had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percent for the Internet users and 2 percent for the entire group.

Amanda Lenhart, the senior research specialist for the project, said that while the number of bloggers surveyed was not large, only 4 percent of all Americans have blogs.

So far it appears that most bloggers view blogging as a hobby that they share with a few people, Ms. Lenhart said. "The new voices are being read in relatively limited spheres,'' she said.

Among the report's findings was that while many well-known blogs are political in nature, 37 percent of bloggers use them as personal journals. Among other popular topics were politics and government (11 percent), entertainment (7 percent), sports (6 percent) and general news and current events (5 percent). Only 34 percent of bloggers considered blogging a form of journalism, and most were heavy Internet users.

Private Public

Mark,

Living in L.A., you're probably more of a phone guy.  I'm trying unsuccessfully to hide out in the cornfields and have always been an antisocial lunatic (apparently), which makes e-mail so convenient.

I appreciated getting the call last night, I guess, although it made me and my wife feel bad, so I guess we're even now.  And I feel sorry to have upset you.  I am sensitive to the fact that you are a real person, that you have feelings.

I don' t know Courtney at all and I know only the most superficially about the circumstances of her work and friendship with you and I heard that it ended badly.  I related that information to the hints and superficial allusions in the notes for your play.

I didn't like "Rantoul and Die," but what I disliked most of all was the fact that the entire community seemed to entirely uncritical and worshipful towards it.  It's that kind of "our team" attitude that rubs me wrong.  Someone wrote to the list saying how she had known you as a child, or was your cousin,  and wanted to get in touch with you, or something like that...  On the other hand, Groucho and I have trouble belonging to any club that would have us.

I like to be praised as much as the next guy, if not more.  But being a known personality wears one down.  Been there.  It makes one long for the pleasures of anonymity. 

I aspire to continue to aspire, to be a genuine amateur.
I aspire to write a sonnet today.
I aspire to refrain from ever getting rich.  At this I am so far amazingly successful.
I aspire to learn to love.
I aspire to be patient.
I aspire to thankfulness and abundance.
I aspire to parenthood.  At this I have barely progressed beyond the procreation stage.
I aspire to acceptance and creativity, but if my efforts remain invisible to the world at large, that's probably better. 

I am writing two novels and procrastinating prolifically.  My wife is legally blind.  We live in third world conditions.  I have never been able to hold a job.  If I have neckties, they must be on the floor of my closet.  I go to Guatemala, Mexico, or Colombia for dental and medical treatment.  We don't have health insurance.  There are wild animals in our back yard.  America is over, lost in dreams of money.

The necessary materializes.  Whatever God there is, provides.  My roof no longer leaks, at least not as much.  I have five or six cars and don't know why.  There is a mountain of mulch in the driveway of the abandoned house next door.

What did you think of the movie and/or play The Dying Gaul?  That is my image of life in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles. If I imposed that image, that idea of your life, unfairly upon your own aspirations, I apologize.

Now the question is, do I simultaneously post this to the Last Good Name?  I think I shall.  Isn't it odd how that makes a difference, how making something public changes things?

--
"I have no idea what I am talking about.  I am trapped in this body and I can't get out." -- Thom Yorke, Radiohead

It's Dada, baby

I identified personally with Johnny Depp in "The Libertine," the movie about the manslut of 17th century England.

"You won't like me," he declares at the beginning.

But I did, sort of.

Can my own feelings be hurt?

I guess so. I just got a phone call from a Hollywood tv producer, a former resident of C-U. He called me "little man" and "lunatic," implying that this was the consensus of the entire town, which it probably is by now after all, and he called my children "fucked up."

"That's all I know about you," he said. "You're a lunatic and your children are fucked up."

A few paragraphs later in the conversation he said he respected my world view, he read "my stuff," my letters to the editor.

I couldn't hate the man. I regretted I'd even known a secret or two from his own past, a skeleton in his closet.

I'm not sure how to feel, other than constricted and a little bit censored. How indiscreet of me was it to speak an opinion, even on a blog I assumed was not widely traveled? Dare I submit this to the blog I once anticipated was merely my own diary, my magic mirror?

Right now, I'm maintaining another blog, Scout Loves Bubbles, that is also not for public consumption.

Maybe our conversation will continue. The door was left open. I wish I'd never alluded to things I knew about his past. It just shows that "defending" one's self (in this case, by speaking too much) is rarely good or productive policy. Everything just accelerates, tit becomes tat, who went first against whom, and the next World War continues to brew on many fronts, each with a logo by Starbucks.

Doesn't everybody know by now that New York is all Dada at the moment?

Hell

"A place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself."  George Bernard Shaw

Compare to

"Maybe everyone is too rich. I have noticed that there is no dissatisfaction like that of the rich. Feed a man, clothe him, put him in a good house, and he will die of despair."  John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Damocles

Doom is always possible.  Death will come.  Maybe even prison.  Whatever fears will be.  But the sword can be evaded.  Continue sending tales of black gay girl cookie eaters.  Observations and visions of the world as an Eden resurfacing by melting ice.  I need them.  You need them, walking your tightrope between the two towers, even though those erections are built only of light, four years ago.  The string theory puts us everywhere at once.  I am in Manhattan.  You are in Turkey Run.  Even as we speak.  Send requests to me, your favorite radio station.  I will comply.  Be a top.  Demand movies and music from me.  Love to William.

Considering the lilies,

Cha Cha

TURKEY RUN, by Cha Cha and William

Critters and Bush

The bird -- a tiny wren, I think -- lives in his nest in the newspaper tube at one of my customer's houses in the woods.  I greet her every day. The first day she flew into the window of my car, but since she has hopped to the edge of the tube, eyed me, then flown away.  I place the paper gingerly at the edge of the tube, not to disturb the nest.  Yesterday I saw babies, heads upraised, nestled hungrily.  Nothing like disturbing someone's lunch.

Last night at 3 a.m., Lee comes screaming about a raccoon in the bathroom.  He had broken through a screen window upstairs, gone downstairs, and proceeded to eat the kittens' food.  We spent an hour or more removing screen windows, placing ladders outside the window, opening cans of salmon, shooing with a broom, to no avail.  I repaired the upstairs screen (where the raccoon's brother waited outside, inches from my nose, and watched) and managed to do other odd jobs.  We waited. We sat outside and ate cereal.  We called the police.  We fell asleep.  When the police arrived around 5, the raccoon had just left.

Earlier last night, when I came out of the store, I found a red truck parked next to my Prius.  The bumper stickers on the truck read "My Son Is in the U.S. Army," "Support Our Troops," and a couple of Cubs and Bears stickers.  I checked to see if they had bashed in the back of my car, which has the sole bumper sticker, "Impeach," but the car was fine.  Then I noticed in the back window of the truck was a hand-lettered sign, "Buck Fush."  Maybe they parked next to me on purpose.  I felt encouraged all the way home.  I listened to T. Rex. I turned it up loud.

ahora

que pensaba en la piscina esta mañana? no recuerdo. un pensamiento sobre este blog, seguro. quizas fue que debo escribir algo, tanto como entendi el español mejor que puedo, pero algo, aunque esta compremetido esta espacio... quizas nadie lo vea, que esta bien. porque lo que voy a escribir es privado. voy a usar el espacio aqui para tener las notas sobre los dos libros que esto escribiendo y lo voy a usar como una maquina de escribir, no computadora, sin la potencial de cambiar... voy en una direccion directa. no miro atras.

the movie The Libertine. I identified with the character, his excesses, his ability to thrive without the acceptance of others. i recall someone telling me -- scott, i think -- that he had never met someone who cared so little what others thought of himself. the movie didn't judge really, and reason versus faith argument wasn't sentimental, the movie wasn't sentimental at all. i think i may watch it again. it was more thoughtful -- and relevant to the way we live -- than most people were willing to credit it with. plus, there were these scenes of the period theatre. i should make a collection of such scenes, such movies, from Finding Neverland to Topsy Turvy to the morality play scenes in The Reckoning.

It has been two months since I pursued The Nineteenth Century and kept a record of the goal of watching 1001 movies in 2006. I have certainly watched movies; i wonder if i can catch up.

only if i withdraw and unplug from the many internet distractions

an inconvenient truth

I go days, weeks, months sometimes without writing.  I used to call it procrastinating.  If I squint, I convince myself that it is fomentation, a necessary respite. 

Am I retired?  From what?  I never had a career.  Now, I have the kind of job that people claim in their retirement, to augment their pensions.  If I don't have a pension, is this still a retirement job?  Or is it my job? 

Somebody asked me after AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH last night what I did here in Urbana.  I didn't know what to say.  This has been the pattern of my entire life. Someone else asked me if I was going to review the movie for the newspaper.  I love it when they say they read my reviews.  (Their concept of time must be even more askew than mine.)

Can I say I swing in a hammock in a downtown neighborhood in Urbana?  Is that a good answer?

Psychological