Poker Dreams

Spike is learning to speak American.
The Admiral refrained from spilling news of his political interactions at East Bend.
TW brought gifts, tequila to be precise.
Frisco or Hurricane learned how to pass rather than bet.
JD continues to improve his homebrew.
PG blabbed on about the end of time, high school special ed classes, and movies.

1) I dreamed last night that Jon Stewart of the Daily Show was helping me deliver very heavy newspapers (with double inserts).  We were delivering on foot to a rural, but heavily populated, area. People were sleeping nearby, outside I guess.  At one place we were stuffing in papers, a man woke up and grabbed me by the throat, thinking we were intruders, I guess.  I happened to be holding a heavy hardbound book (suddenly, we were no longer distributing newspapers but something like school yearbooks that weighed 20 pounds -- my fortieth high school reunion is next year, maybe that's it).  I slammed the book into the head of the man choking me -- whap!  whap!  whap what whap! -- without feeling any emotion like fear or even concern.  He fell down and Jon Stewart and I took off down what had become a little pathway with tight corners.  It was similar to the narrow stairway from the basement behind the altar at East Bend Mennonite Church. It may no longer even exist, but it is the pathway one takes to wash feet after communion or to approach the altar to get married.  It is kind of a cold place, smelling of concrete or school glue.  Jon proceeded on, but I ducked into a closet.  The man I'd knocked down got up, chased past the closet, and pursued Stewart. He came back and looked for something just outside the closet.  I closed my eyes so he wouldn't see me. 

2) Some grouping of hippies in a rural area were living in the towns and villages and railways.  I took off on my own to explore.  I was riding a yellow motorcycle, going down alleys and following road signs and down roads being repaired by work crews.  I asked one of the workers if this chopped up asphalt resulted in a road, even a dirt road, down the way.  The boss, a skinny old man with a tie, came up to me and started to beat on me.  I just wanted to drive down the road.  I refused to be angry.  I said I would sue him and waited for the lawyer to come, right there.  She did, and shook her head at the antics of this guy -- who may have been the town mayor or a big corporation CEO -- and wished I'd just let it drop.  Next thing I knew, I had discovered an old abandoned castle in a corner of the town.  It was empty inside.  Johnny Brandon and two girls -- maybe Laurel and Nancy -- were there as well as a bunch of cool hippy friends.  Even the Grateful Dead were there.  It was a big castle.  I kept saying and doing the most embarrassing things, winning none of the cool hippy chicks, whereas Johnny knew all the ways to get the chicks.  I think I was trying to to be funny, but wasn't.  Johnny kept trying to tell me something.  Something was wrong with me, but I didn't care.  Something came flying through the air -- like a big football sized rubber bullet -- and hit me in the head.

So there you have it, I am a closeted violent socially inept misfit with a paper route and a little yellow motorcycle.

Now, as for poker, Frisco or Hurricane returned and lost even more money. Spike had a turn of fortune and zoomed from out of the red into third place.  Everybody is again in the black.  TW had the good sense to win with a straight flush only when PG had left the room. 

The same winning and losing hands kept manifesting themselves.  Although the composition of the players (and even the table) had changed, the hands were the same.  It was like a dream.  Next week, we may even know the cards we are being dealt before we get them.

Since PG and JD continue to debate the method of the anarchy round, perhaps it would help to state the three components of anarchy (according to Eric Anglada):

1) No domination of one over the other
2) Continual questioning of authority
3) Mutual aid

Maybe that didn't help after all.

Question (after contemplating Richard Powers' book The Echo Maker -- http://lastgoodname.blogspot.com/2006/12/is-there-echo-in-here.html):

Is all sense of identity an illusion?  You are the Man of the Year.
--
Even baseline normality has about it something hallucinatory. -- Richard Powers, THE ECHO MAKER

Is there an echo in here?

I finished reading THE ECHO MAKER last night, so I can get back to tackling Pynchon's AGAINST THE DAY.  It has been strange to have been tangled up in these personalities, having Richard Powers at our book group, seeing Powers discuss Pynchon at an academic discussion, hearing Powers laugh with Terry Gross on "Fresh Air" about "the unreliable narrator," the flurry of national publicity, the seeming shift in personality taken on by Powers in promoting this National Book Award winning book, reading a critic compare Powers to Melville, naming my cats Melville, recently reading Melville's THE CONFIDENCE MAN...  But I digress.

It would be almost a joke to call Powers a "genius" at this point, given that the premise of the book is precisely an explosion of the fixity of personality or identity at all.  We are no more than birds, following ancient genetic maps.

(I think Powers looks like Stephen King, a similar horsey gaze, a gawky burden of walking in an oversize frame.  Certainly, they must be evil twins.)

I'm not sure I liked the book entirely.  It lacks a kind of sentimentality and closure that pleases me, like ATONEMENT or MIDDLESEX or even Powers' previous book, THE TIME OF OUR SINGING.  That had a nice Rosebud-style wrap-up.  This one?  Not so much.  The mystery story concludes all right, but I wouldn't say it does so neatly. The details of the mystery, the things the characters were trying to discover -- the car crash, its mysterious causes, the disturbing anonymous note, the allure of the attending nurse -- are all red herrings, in a way.  Powers is after a bigger mystery than one man's strange psychological breakdown. He's probing the mystery of identity itself and concluding that, as Jimi Hendrix so aptly sang, "Awwww, there's ain't no life nowhere."  Including that of the doctor.  Including that of the author.  Including that of the reader.  I liked the conceit of referring to an organizing principle in the universe, aka God, as The Tour Director.

Now I see, even as I'm writing this, below my typing, is the the phase I plucked out of the book to be a signature line on my email.  I believe it is well chosen, encapsulating the book, a book that rather defies that effort of encapsulation.

I can't say I envy Powers and his abilities.  I do wonder how it feels to cart all those ideas around in one's head.  Given that I face distractions and demands of family and friends on a constant basis, it is no wonder that Powers took a year off without speaking while he was living in Long Island.  And it is no wonder that I rely upon the wee hours of the morning and the solitude of rural driving -- dreading to receive calls on my cell phone -- in the afternoon.  Greta Garbo had it right.

It's rather fun to read about the Silver Bullet bar (where I promise I have never been), Mary Ann's diner, or the clack of red plastic hardbound magazines at the library, all items Powers lifted conveniently from his Urbana environment.  I had to wonder if he was choosing the names for fun or facility or a free pass to the Silver Bullet.  I'm not sure where he lives, but I think it's within blocks of where I do.  I wonder if he's listed in the UI directory.  Maybe I'll copy him this post.

Then, too, I had to think of Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO -- with the main character named Marian Crane, the stuffed birds surrounding Norman Bates, the isolated landscape, the loss of identity, the psychological "expert" giving the theories of the day which now sound so archaic as to be laughable.  Will THE ECHO MAKER's science also be creaky in another fifty years?

Or Michaelangelo Antonioni's THE PASSENGER, in which the conscious swapping of identity is the movie's premise and the conclusion is so much the same -- a man lying on a bed, a man no one recognizes, he may be dead or alive, he himself cannot say...

It is a shame to say Powers is a genius, although I do think the book is something of an inspiration for writers, because it seems as if he takes no credit for his work.  He can't, or at least he knows he shouldn't.  The work just comes through him, through research, through work, as everything always does, thanks to the Tour Director.  Which is why I sit here, year after year, watching my fingers move on the keyboard, waiting, a bird brain going through the motions, always surprised at what comes out.
--
Even baseline normality has about it something hallucinatory. -- Richard Powers, THE ECHO MAKER

Repentance is due

Wes, Royal, and Mike:

This is the fifth and final (I hope) preface to the book I have been writing, or undertaking to write, for the past year, It is 4:56 in the morning. It is dark and quiet and I am alone upstairs typing. I no sooner had typed the first sentence in this preface when I heard a car driving down Wood Street, tires making a slick sound on the wet pavement, and then the driver tossed out today's New York Times wrapped in a plastic bag. It plopped on our sidewalk and called to me.

I am going to have to resist the temptation to go downstairs and bring up that newspaper, resist reading the news and arts of the world while drinking my second cup of coffee, resist dissolving in fresh ideas and information as the dawn breaks.

That would be my pleasure and I will not resist long. I do this every day because I am addicted to the New York Times. I will give in soon because, even in relation to my addictions, I sinfully practice nonresistance.

You all play a part in this book, you are characters, your names will not be disguised and yet, the book will be a work of imagination. I can only imagine what and how you think and that has been the source of fascination and fury for me since the war began.

For the past several years, in letters and conversations, I have tried to unlock your thinking, particularly in regard to your religious beliefs, your firm dogma, and in regard to the war in Iraq. If you were members of any other mainstream Protestant denomination, your minds would have been easier to approach. But as you all confess to being Mennonite, the puzzle of your logic becomes unfathomable, inchoate, even mystical.

Somehow, you have managed to evolve into holding a schizophrenic relation to the world. When it suits you, as regards involvement with this tragic war, you claim to belong to a spiritual world, your hands spotless of Iraqi blood. Hiding behind the Mennonite pacifist tradition, you plead exemption and, worse, you prevent others from speaking out against the war and torture. Yet you support the political rule. You encouraged the continuation of your own privilege, your own comforts, your lack of sacrifice. To keep yourself exempt from involvement, you voted in favor of those who relished war.

Dad, who finally figured out (more or less) how to use email, wrote me yesterday the following:

Greg, you do an injustice to us when you imply that we approved of our going to war. ;also, you condemn yourself when you say the things about Royal that you do. The mark of a Christian is to love each other, and your attitude and commennts re: Royal certainly do not exhibit love. Nor do your newspaper articles. We rarely hear Limbaugh, nor do we hardly ever listin to the radio outside of programs on Great News radio. Enjoy Mark & Carrie in the morning,and MUSIC ON WGNJ . I CERTAINLY DON'T APPROVE OF THINGS THE BURNS' PROMOTE, BUT TRY TO GLEAN GOOD THAT IS AVAILABLE. I DON'T AGREE WITH THEIR MILITARY STAND, BUT NEITHER DO I CONDEMN THEM TO THE POINT THAT I CANNOT GLEAN THE GOOD THEY HAVE, AFTER ALL, THE BIBLE MESSAGE. IS LOVE NOT ONLY AS REGARDS NON-RESISTANCE ETC, but in everyday living. I think much of the Mennonite church, particularly Goshen College, has gotten so carried away with their Anabaptist stand, ( which many other churches also are, without the Non-resistance stand), that they miss the total message of Christs LOVE a nd redemption. Enough for now. As you can see, I inadvertently hiot the capital button, when capitalization was'nt needede. Enough for now. Do LOVE you. Dad

I have read and re-read this letter many times. In truth, I don't understand why one can't discern the good in the New York Times, in Frank Rich (he’s Jewish, I know), in the news of the world, why one can't “glean good that is available” on National Public Radio and the BBC and not just what one sees and hears from Great News Radio, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and Pat Robertson.

I'm getting antsy to go downstairs and pick up that newspaper, so I'll stop. It's not that I don't understand your rationalization for support for George W. Bush (or your disdain for his predecessor, William Jefferson Clinton). I fear I understand all too well. You don't want to practice sacrifice or risk being criticized by others. You don't want to relinquish your material comfort. You pore over the Bible to find ways to sanctify your way of life, to see yourselves as righteous in your support of the decidedly unrighteous and greedily wealthy.

Dad wrote that love is key to Christ's message. But he misconstrues a key element, because Christ called for us to love our enemies, not just those of a like mind, not just those of the same race, or religion, or practices.

East Bend, like George W. Bush, like Rush Limbaugh, like Fox News, carefully chooses and defines enemies. You don't call them an "axis of evil" necessarily, but you create them and you fear them just the same. You may give lip service to loving Muslims and gay people and socialist democratic rulers and the poor and the addicted, but you think you must change them and convert them first, convert them into being like yourselves, to having your values, your comforts. You don't wash their feet. You don't invite them into open dialogue. You don't negotiate with your enemies. It would be too much work for you. You are too busy or old.

Some Mennonites do, though. Some Mennonites go out of their way to get into harm's way, without demanding allegiance to a dogma. When Goshen College opens dialogue with Muslims or gays, East Bend has condemned such action. East Bend strikes out with its self-righteous sword.

The newspaper is winning out. I'm going downstairs now. I'm making another pot of coffee. The dawn has not yet broken. Sometimes I think it never will.

If, however, you have changed your mind in recent months about the war and torture put forth by this President that God permitted to power, history will not be changed. An honest apology is in order, which is just another way of my saying to you, repentance is due.

The dance sequence in Clerks 2

Lord of the Rings in Clerks 2

Poker, December 7, 2006

It is all a blur of chocolate "chips" and Chinese peanut butter to me.  People sat in the wrong places and wore the wrong hats.  The Admiral dealt me three 6's during a hand of baseball, but I folded without revealing it.  Apocalypto. Spike had a good night.  TW did too, as he edged into second place.  It's 6:30 a.m.  I am uninspired.  I dreamed something forlorn about children growing up.  I have been practicing Transcendental Meditation since about 1972.  Yesterday, I sort of wished I'd been taught by the Maharishi himself, but then I remembered that I did indeed see the Maharishi at the Illinois Institute of Technology on a flower-strewn stage and he giggled a lot.  I think Timothy Leary was there, too.  Actually, I think may have gone to see Leary and got the Maharishi as a freebie.  I'm sure I have the details wrong but I'm not about to research it.  I do remember my hitchhiking trip to South America with some degree of detail, country by country, step by step, dialect by dialect.  The world has changed.  There is nothing left to discover, nothing left unspoiled, untainted by commercial enterprise, unplundered and virginal.  I do know that a game of Between the Sheets was played and that JD, taking the moral high ground against games of chance, stood it out.  The rest of the suckers, mostly me, fell into the vortex of carnival hopes and wagered their various chips.  Green ones were used.   We learned what "all in" means in betting.  Mary Cheney is pregnant.  The Bush twins are running naked in Argentina hotel hallways.  The Refusal to Invent.  The Definition of Anarchy: No Dominating Power, Mutual Aid, and the third thing... ?  Lee will know.  Tolstoy wrote his famous essay, The Kingdom of God is Within You.  You can look it up on Wikipedia.  It's 6:40 a.m.  My meditation will last 12-15 minutes.  Then I'll have another cup of coffee.  Although I am writing a very long and complicated book called "The Nineteenth Century," I may put the research and writing on pause for Christmas preparation. I haven't practiced Christmas in three years.  The book is about money.  The book is about East Bend.  I wish I could visit the Nineteenth Century.  You don't need money to get there.  It may be something yet unspoiled, untainted.  They didn't even have Coca Cola.  Time travel is possible.  The third rule of anarchy?  Might be love. Apocalypto starts today. 

Ernie Introduces Domino Rally (1995)

Thirty seconds blank intro.

I really shouldn't be doing this

I really shouldn't be doing this, given that today I start subbing again, in just a few hours -- with a middle school behavior disordered class, they were desperate -- and the other writing I have to do is again being shoved under the bed.  I swear, I am Jonah, seeking any excuse to do anything other than that which I am "supposed" to do.  But this Pynchon thing was too near to me, too close to home, too synchronicitous (no idea if that's a word) and felicitous and I had no choice.

The lecture/discussion combined all the elements and personalities that have preoccupied me for many months (plus the question of race), in particular the writing of 19th century authors Melville and Poe and the writing of Thomas Pynchon.  For the academics, seeking the true authorial voice was the quest.  Is everything we write autobiography?  Apparently so.  For myself, that's a part of it; I see the exercise of both writing and reading as a means of transcending one's self.  Of getting high by getting lost, to be blunt.  As Eminem sang, Lose yourself in the music in the moment.  Richard Powers explored questions of "ventriloquism" and "focal distance" (I lost count of the times he used that particular phrase) and Professor Gordon Hunter concluded that Pynchon's new book, in particular, achieved so many voices -- boyhood adventure novel, Raymond Chandler, James Bond, even the simulation of Pynchon's own "popular" literary voice -- that he actually eliminated himself, the writer's voice, from the book altogether, achieving an autobiography that consisted entirely of collections of other narratives and narrative styles, so like me, my life of film narratives and art, and my current writing project ("The Nineteenth Century") that I trembled a little bit.  The speaker's thought may have seemed profound at the time he said it to the assembled group of about thirty, except for the fact that one member of the audience pointed out that, in fact, hadn't it been the case for well over 100 years, that the unreliable narrator, the disappearing author, was already consciously part of literary effort well before modernism, easily visible in T.S. Eliot, and way before postmodernism.

Me, I just like making myself dizzy.

All those reclusive writers, I want to be like them, I want to turn down invitations to parties, although I want to be asked to parties and then apologize with my regrets, and I want to deny interviews to the News-Gazette when they come asking, and I do want them to ask.  Things I am doing instead of writing -- planning a free taxi service for local Latinos, legal or illegal, since they (or what is clearly just the tip of the platano) are always out there riding their bikes or walking in the wee hours to substandard working conditions in kitchens of cockroach infested restaurants.  I could speak Spanish with them and scrape away the English from my consciousness for a time, escape the understanding of my first language, the crossword puzzle multiplicity that forces a between the lines reading, it's all Freud's fault, or maybe it has something to do with body language, can one unlearn a language?, and I could again perhaps, or so I imagine, know the joy of the unvarnished word, where the streets have no name.  I also could avoid writing by substitute teaching, work that I can take or leave at my discretion, they can call me at dawn to offer me a classroom and I can say, Sorry, I have to write this morning, or rather, I have to procrastinate from my writing.

Is Thomas Pynchon paranoid?  I have fantasies of receiving a phone call from him.  I don't even bother to imagine why he might be calling.  Maybe just to ask me a question about computers.   I am so glad Against the Day is set at the turn of the Twentieth Century, so far at least, although I've only read about 100 pages (as much as had the one speaker at the lecture/discussion; the other two speakers clearly had not yet ordered their copies and were ashamed to admit so).  I don't know why that historical time is significant, but I sense it is. Sometimes I think it's all been downhill since the 19th century.  As Woody Allen says of Manhattan (in a sentiment that I entirely share about the city as well), "I have romanticized it all out of proportion."

I have to trick myself into writing.  I have to convince myself that I am not writing, that I'm only playing around, exercising, dreaming.  If I actually sit down to write the project planned, the subject at hand, something in me rebels and I choose to write a sonnet or haiku or a letter to the editor of the News-Gazette.  I procrastinate and flee, like Jonah.  Jonah, like Melville, ran away to sea.  I get the feeling of doing something, the feeling of writing, but not actually writing what I was supposed to be writing.  I am so anti-authoritarian that I even rebel against my own plans, my own self-imposed instructions.  This has been the state of things my entire life.

I would be more reclusive -- like Richard Powers or David Foster Wallace, both area boys, but neither in a league with Pynchon -- if it were possible, but I have family obligations, and church obligations, and "work" obligations.  This could become the third preface to the book I am writing.  All these little semi-retirement projects with which I fill my time placate (with simulation) my sense of creativity.  Having a vasectomy years ago also may have been a Jonah-like escape from the call to be a writer, because somewhere in my consciousness I recognized that it was the perfect excuse for failure.  How could I produce authentic work if I had been sterilized?  Didn't Norman Mailer make some claim to that effect?  (I have rationalized this away over the years by the fact that my body still manufactures sperm; it is only the delivery system that has been blocked.  Parallels between production and publication may be drawn at thee reader's whim.)

Where was I? 

Oh, yes.  The real thrill at the Pynchon lecture/discussion was when one of the speakers, I think it was the lecturer Luc Herman, a visiting professor from Belgium who gave the focal message on "Thomas Pynchon: Race and Unreliable Narrative," casually tossed out references to Benito Cereno and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (without naming authors Herman Melville and Edgar Allen Poe).  I'm not an academic by any means, but those two novels are so sly, so subversive about voice, about race, that even Pynchon really has nothing over them.  It's all recycled.  If I knew how to speak Academic and could have peppered my question with words like "extradiagetic" and "intradiagetic" and "homodiagetic," I'd have asked a question about The Confidence Man.  Where's the voice in that Melville boondoggle anyway?  Everybody's just trying to get high, by any verbal means necessary.

By the way, getting to the lecture/discussion was not easy.  First, I had to rush back to Urbana from delivering newspapers, leaving my sub on her first day to finish a third of the route on her own, hitting rush hour on campus in the rain, trying to find the unfamiliar building, parking three different places, putting my dwindling number of coins in the various meters and running up to see the numbers on the buildings, only to find out that I was blocks away, desperate to urinate from having been driving and drinking cold coffee for three hours while delivering bagged newspapers to rural farmhouses and watching the portable DVD player, The Wire, Season One, Disk Four, Episodes Ten and Eleven, fending off phone calls from Lee and Miles, who were squabbling over a fake ID Lee had found in the bedroom, trying to negotiate an anger-free resolution (which, in retrospect, turned out successfully), finally, taking out an old, empty generic V-8 plastic jar from the back seat to unzip myself and urinate into as I drove to the third and final parking place, traffic all around me, parking, worrying about whether I had put enough money in the meter or remembered to lock the car, so that somebody might steal the DVD player while I was in the lecture, and seeing that my sub tried to call just as I was leaving the car, but ignoring her, and so forth.

I don't think I was dressed properly for the lecture/discussion, since I was still wearing my delivery clothes, but no one seemed to mind.  There was no discernible dress code.  And I left before the discussion was entirely finished.  But I did enjoy it, especially the information about Pynchon's early writings, his references to race that reflected attitudes in 1957, the references to Kerouac and Norman Mailer's The White Negro, and then I came home, meditated, read a few pages, cancelled poker because of inclement weather, and scratched the heads of three kittens while watching Ugly Betty, Grey's Anatomy, Men in Trees, and -- at the same time -- watching the rest of the episode of The Wire on the portable DVD player on my lap during commercials and eating unearthly rich cookies that Lee made and the fresh-baked bread that I had baked upon arriving home from the lecture.  I had forgotten about the risen dough, but the loaf turned out perfectly regardless.  Lee knitted.