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