PEOPLE WHO DON'T MATTER: Series Three

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

The Book of Disquiet
Fernando Pessoa (as Bernardo Soares)
Edited and translated by Richard Zenith
Penguin, 2003




In India there are bitter vegetables people eat for their health -- to ward off diabetes and counter the effects of a diet over-high in refined sugars.  When I first lived in India, I hated those vegetables.  Now I like them best of all.  “Bitter” is not always a negative adjective.  It may also restore life.  It can serve as an antidote.  There is something similar about The Book of Disquiet -- a book about failure, tedium and disconnection that is repeatedly beautiful and compelling, even life-giving.

Please excuse me for quoting a blurb.  It seems to me exactly right.  John Lancaster wrote, “In a time which celebrates fame, success, stupidity, convenience and noise, here is the perfect antidote, a hymn of praise to obscurity, failure, intelligence, difficulty and silence.”  If you, too, are spooked or nauseated by a world in which people go around trumpeting their own busyness and importance, reciting what appear to be advertisements for themselves, then this book may well feel like an antidote -- as well as a drastically more honest assessment of life, the way it actually feels, as opposed to how it is supposed to feel.

If I may give advice, I strongly recommend using this book as a “tincture”, just a few pages at a time.  I do not believe Pessoa would be offended even if you set it in the bathroom to accompany intestinal disquiets.  As Zenith points out in his introduction, reading at random is actually ideal.  I read this book over six months and was glad of its company -- but I think, if I’d sat down and tried to read through it in a week, I might have found it insufferable.  You could O.D. on ennui.  Taken slowly in small doses however, it is brilliant bitter company.

CA Conrad, Ecodeviance

CA Conrad, Ecodeviance
(Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness
Wave Books, 2014



Whenever I read CA Conrad, whose poems I find as potent and brave as anyone’s alive, I end up asking, “Who else is taking these kinds of risks?”  I read a lot of poetry.  I seem to be one of nine adults left on the planet who still subscribe to and read literary magazines.  Most of the poems I read just seem so careful, so eager to flash knowledge and earn credentials.  Not bad poems, not bad at all, just semi-dehydrated.  Impeccable and careful poems suitable for publishing in a tasteful university press volume entitled, Poems For Tenure.

Then there’s CA Conrad.  In Ecodeviance he describes an exercise wherein he approached men in suits on lunch break in Philadephia and asked them, “Excuse me sir, on a scale from 1 to 5, 1 being thin and creamy, and 5 being cottage cheese, how do you rate your semen?”  Conrad is unafraid to query businessmen, minerals or ghosts; the results are often spectacular.

As well as being precise, gorgeous and full of surprises, CA Conrad’s poems are marked by a willingness to take real risks and make respectable people uncomfortable.  Yes, please!  I want to read more poets like this!  How can we go on primly celebrating beauty in our rarefied salons and not be pissed off by the poisoning of the natural world and the murder of innocent people?  Real love does not shy away from fury.  Neither do these poems.

The poems in Ecodeviance are the results of rituals created by CA Conrad called (Soma)tics, “ritualized structures where being anything but present was next to impossible.”  The rituals serve as the source for a body of notes that then become the basis of a poem.  Each poem or set of poems in the book is presented with its ritual of origin.  (I hereby predict that these rituals will soon be so frequently imitated and assigned in Creative Writing programs that a boomlet of CA Conrad imitations will result.  This is not a bad thing.  At very least it will provide a respite from Raymond Carver imitations.)

In content and delivery, in ritual and result, Ecodeviance is a wake-up call and CA Conrad is our queer genius alarm clock.  May we heed the call.

PEOPLE WHO DON'T MATTER

Series Two: DEVOTIONS

Once, at a thirteenth-century French monastery, I collapsed of nervous exhaustion, right straight into the shrubbery, and was given a silent room in the infirmary that looked out on a flowering tree.  This actually happened once. Now I cannot help but wish for it all the time.



I made a great show of liking the dog whom I really did like.  Half Lab and half Boxer, which turns out to really work: love with a square head.  It was one of those dates that feel like an audition.  File under: defeat as self-fulfilling prophecy.  Like one of those nights when I tell myself that the next day will be all right -- if only I can sleep.  “No one likes walking on eggshells!” said my brother before I left home for 25 years.  This one’s a young man with a red beard.  He’s read both Nabokov and Gogol.  His erection is so long and so persistent that, when he needs to go somewhere, he tucks his cock into the waistband of his pants  I enjoy it if a man has one or two positive characteristics.  Any more than that is terrifying.  He was a real-live bisexual.  I named him Waistband.  As he drove me home I asked, “How is it possible that you don’t have eight boyfriends and six girlfriends?”  Waistband said, “I tend to get tired of people.”  I do not expect to hear from him again.



What a difference it would make if I could believe, for several seconds in a row, that anything in which I am involved could ever turn out well.  You know, just temporarily kind of sort of well, the variety of well prevalent on this planet.  I am oh so ready for some of that.



When I feel afraid, I remind myself that I am not without allies, saints, protectors.  I chant their holy names:  Disquiet.  Robert Walser.  Zen tales.  Tiles the Hopi painted and sold to tourists in the 1920s.  Tales of the Hasidim.  Paley, Barthelme and Davis.  Quilting contests.  No Other Life.  Juan Gris.  Excitability.  Hopscotch. Lascano Tegui, Viscount!  Harry Mathews.  Cookie Mueller.  Why Did I Ever.  “I will do this work of transformed and even distorted memory and lead this life, the one I am leading today.”  Are you aware that Clarice Lispector answers prayers?



The man says, “It’s got a button on it.  It might as well work.”  Then later, “What do we do?  I say we PeeWee Herman the shit out of it.”



These are a few notes on the challenges of living with a hyper-devotional nature.  (Another word would be ravenous.)  This is in addition to what I call being nervous!  very very dreadfully nervous in an Edgar Allan Poe sort of way.  On the plus side, I receive intense sensual pleasure from being left alone in large open spaces, including those commonly referred to as “empty”.  I can sit in a silent room and listen to the very minute sounds with the same pleasure others receive from music.  In the same way I am able to feel real visceral relief over the fact that today I will almost certainly not meet any celebrities.  With any luck I will be able to dodge both the successful and the important.  To tell the truth, I very often enjoy having my particular mind.  Most men need to have their prostate repeatedly and forcefully stimulated to receive the same pleasure I get from pencilling in-depth notes on neglected works of literature in translation.  I do admit, however, that this is not a mind well-suited to everyday living.  No.  Not so much.



Always, always I have an idea of the day I ought to be having, the way it ought to unfold, the flawless discipline of my actions (out of bed, meditate, fast walk, work) but then there is the actual day (unexplained itching, ardent thoughts about uniformed South American security personnel, email, unavoidable conversations, complaints -- and before I’ve even had a chance to brush my teeth and then I’m caught up oh yes I am) and how it unravels.  Every now and then I have the day I am supposed to be having.  Sort of a to-do list decathlon.  So many good things!  Spinach salads, bill-paying, strenuous creativity.  I have the day I am supposed to have until about 3.  By 3 I’m ready to fill the water bottle with wine and head to the baths.  Honestly it seems like the most prudent option, considering my level of agitation.  For the next three days I do nothing right whatsoever.



How about some new good habits?  For example, condoms should have an assigned place.  Condoms all the time falling from pockets, notebooks, and bags are tacky and unpleasant for everyone.  When I need a condom, I can’t find one.  Every time I’m looking for something else (for example a dollar) here’s a condom instead.  I ask myself: am I not already sufficiently ridiculous?  One of these days a condom will land in the tip jar.  I will have to decide whether or not to retrieve it.



The wish to be led to a silent white-walled room, a room looking out on the upper branches of trees, to undress in silence and bathe for a long time, to dry off and to pray, and then to be comprehensively fucked, fucked and delivered of spunk, then immediately fucked again, or maybe I fuck him the first time and the second time he fucks me, fucked and jacked off down right to the root of the spunk so that, for at least three days thereafter, it is impossible to desire anything more complicated than sandwiches.



Once I fell in love with a man I saw only one time each week.  Just four hours on Thursday.  That was it.  And there wasn’t anything you could call conversation.  Low growls, grunting, praise of various attributes.  The rest of the week we wrote each other notes.  I think it would be very easy for me to fall in love with a man who writes me notes every day.  Of course, it has to be a man with a liking for my particular look and style: accordion / basset hound hybrid with Poe-ish tendencies.  He has to be able to tolerate devotion.  Which is far less common than you might imagine.  I remember a man once told me, “Please.  Less awe.”



Sex for hyper-sensitives.  Ideally, when you take off your pants, there would be a solid hour for staring, sniffing and weeping before initiating the process which leads from nuzzling to full-blown adoration.  I would also prefer to be completely invisible but -- I understand that’s something I should probably deal with.



Few men tolerate devotion.  Not statements of it any way.  (I believe there is evidence that God, too, is annoyed.)  For one thing, devotion is intensely repetitive.  Devotion is not in a hurry to be on to the next thing.  Your left armpit alone is worthy of at least twenty minutes of my focused attention.  When you slap me on the face with your hard pink cock, that’s it, I am done.  Nothing else needs be achieved.  You can go right on slapping me like that for the next ninety minutes.  It’s all I want for Christmas.  It’s a suitable afterlife.  No wonder people find me so annoying.  I don’t blame them.  It is likely difficult to understand that, for me, everything is close and loud and bright.



Evolution, alternate theory.  Perhaps the reason there are so many stones is because so many people want to be them.  In the meantime, there’s liquor.  Liquor is a strategy for sitting in the same room as pain without wailing aloud.  The first three drinks are for relief.  After that, you are human with a head of grief, with feet of grief, with hands of grief.  A hybrid, like a basilisk.  Your letters will never be answered.  Who writes letters?  This is an example of how you have fallen out with the world.  People have moved on.  The pronouncement has already been issued.  You are not to included.



One of my aunts, ever a role model, went away to the asylum in 1964.  For a time she was diagnosed with what is called hypersexuality.  So perhaps there is a biological basis for me.  A more likely explanation is provided by a simple experiment done many years ago now.  Test subjects put their hands in a large pot of water and waited while the water was very, very slowly brought to a boil.  They were allowed to pull their hands out when they wanted, but they were told to keep their hands in the water as long as they could possibly bear it.  Test participants were each instructed to think of different things.  Those preoccupied by sexual fantasies withstood the pain the longest.  By far.  They lasted much longer than those who, for example, attempted to busy themselves with cheerfulness.

Hiromi Ito, Wild Grass on the Riverbank

Wild Grass on the Riverbank Hiromi Ito Translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles Action Books, 2014

As I read and reread this gorgeous and unnerving book, I thought of an afternoon in graduate school when I went to my adviser and confessed to him that I liked the way that poets told stories much more than the way prose writers did. He agreed with me very seriously and quietly, as though I had discovered something true, but which could not safely be discussed in public. As evidence, here is Wild Grass on the Riverbank, one of the first narrative book-length poems to be written in modern Japan. Gory and explicit, damning and redemptive in turns, this book is required reading for poets, storytellers, wanderers, rebels, and ecologists -- for anyone who aims to survive. This long poem, in 18 parts of varying lengths, is written in a combination of prose and poetry, in language that is sometimes childlike, sometimes scientific, and must have been fiendishly difficult to translate. Angles’ translation’s conveys a tremendous emotional force while giving a sense of the different registers of language through which Ito cavorts with both daring and playfulness. When I began reading this book I was pulled in first by curiosity, enjoying Ito’s wild narrative strategies and her utter willingness to convey the full messy details of life and death, neither of which is ever a closed category or final state. (For Hiromi Ito, as for Jose Saramago, death is only an interruption. It comes and goes.) As I read further, then reread, what finally impressed me most was the emotional and incantatory power of long sections like “We Live at the Riverbank” and “We Make Our Way In”, unified narrative poems that are both edgy and exultant and can suddenly flash with a force that brings to mind Alvaro de Campos or Whitman. Jeffrey Angles, increasingly well-known for his fine translations of Chimako Tada, Taruho Inagaki, and Takahashi Mutsuo, earlier published a translation of “Killing Kanako”, the book that first brought Hiromi Ito renown in Japan. In his introduction Angles refers to other books by Ito: a book of prose poetry, as well as novellas and essays. I hope very much that more of this work can be made available in English. One of the most important poets of modern Japan, Hiromi Ito has been called a “shamaness of poetry”. Exactly right. Here is poetry that is unafraid to strip bare, copulate or reek, hiss or howl. An exploration of being “naturalized” in every sense of the word: an unending series of changes, deaths, ecstasies, resistances, and transformations.

Georges Perec, Series of Spaces and Other Pieces

Series of Spaces and Other Pieces
Georges Perec
Edited and translated by John Sturrock
Penguin Classics, 2008


“How I think when I’m thinking?  How I think when I’m not thinking?”


This is the rare sort of book which may serve as a tonic.  Reading it will make you more prone to interesting thoughts.  More precise and specific thoughts.  Reading Perec, I am reminded again how vastly more exciting it is to hear about the peculiarities of Universal Decimal Classification than about a failed love affair.  (Perhaps because jilted lovers tend to speak in generalities and rarely, if ever, are inspired to keep it brief?)

To me, it seems natural and advisable to feel a little worried when people speak of experimental literature.  But Perec is one of those savants whose experiments are also a swimmingly good time.  (Who would you add to this list?  Calvino, Markson, Mathews, Cortazar, Davis, Barthelme -- who else?  Could you please add suggestions in the comments section so I know who to read?)

This book collects important works by a man who never seems to consider himself important.  He is always playing, improvising and inviting.  And it is so much fun.  His essay “Think/Classify” which points out, then demonstrates, the impossibility (and joy) of classification is one of my favorite essays of all time.  (Purists of the form will likely not consider it an essay, which is appropriately hilarious.)

What a pleasure it is to be confronted by a simple decision: if you enjoy Perec, you’ll certainly want this book.  If you are new to Perec -- and perhaps daunted by ‘LIFE: An Instruction Manual’ -- this is a brilliant and engaging introduction.  Here is found a great playful mind, ceaselessly experimenting in short snippets and flashes, a da Vinci in literary fireworks, hurrying from one invention/apparation to the next.

PEOPLE WHO DON'T MATTER

the following is a very short excerpt from a novella titled, People Who Don't Matter.  More sections, already written, will appear in the coming weeks.  Thank you.

Series One: OUT

Hello?  This sandwich is for anonymous.  To go.

Most of the people I talk to in America are homeless.  Everyone else is busy.  And important.  So important!  Everyone else is in cars.  Walking across the city, I pass from one conversation to the next.  I fit right in: scruffy beard, big dusty backpack, clothes salvaged from the gutters of 8th Avenue.  The homeless men and I have the same habit of formality, we address each other with meticulous politeness.  Ever been to a grocery where everyone uses food stamps?  People talk as if they are in church.  Walking across the 8th Avenue bridge, I catch up to David, on his way to see a friend who gives him work.  He has to use a cane to walk this morning.  The day before he missed a step while carrying a mattress, went down hard.  The guy he works for has a bottle full of 800 mg pills of Advil.  He’s dreaming of ibuprofen all the way across the bridge.  Smellies! screams a young man who has stuck his head out the window of his shiny red car.

This is for everyone who ever wished they could paste their own picture over that of the cocker spaniel on the telephone pole, right beneath the words

LOST PUPPY

Needs Medication!!!

Make it happen, he says.  All I want is to relax at the bar, but the man nearest me is shouting at his buddy beside him.  Announces he’s “got a winning concept”.  Admits that “there are very valid bad reviews in this world and they are very impactful”.  Insists “we are so much greener than them it’s not even fucking funny.”  Tells how much his life has changed now that he’s on top of the right Google searches.  Talks about “giving it your all”.  But mostly he talks about making it happen.  You’ve got to make it happen.  Make it happen!  It is obvious that I have been assigned to the wrong civilization.  Make it happen makes me think of rape.  Listen, how about this?  Is this OK?  Is it all right with everyone if I just go ahead and fail?  Would that be all right?  My attempts at self-promotion are invariably gruesome.  I do not wish to learn to speak American English, that dialect of advertising, the vehicle for becoming important.  You can win.  I abdicate.  That’s OK, isn’t it?  More for you!

Things I’ll not do.  No tennis championships for me.  No work as a foot model.  Someone else has already written Reinventing Yourself With the Duchess of York.  It is unlikely that I will ever be held up as the epitome of health mental or dental.  I should probably admit that my senatorial career has already been seriously compromised.

This will have to be the actual version now.  Not just some notes jotted down while thinking of something else.  Too cool to make an honest effort is an entirely seventh grade excuse.  You see, I had intended to become drastically smarter.  Somehow I imagined that another several dozen IQ points might just show up.  Narrative structure.  “A skill set”.  I might as well wish to become taller.  Or younger.  This is the equipment on hand.  Which is no excuse.  Think of what Matisse could do, in deep old age, with only a pair of scissors.  This person, with his limitations, his obsessions, his very limited skills.  Telling him to rack his brain, make a concerted effort, will only make everything worse.  He’ll only tell you again what he’s told you before.  All the while looking terribly sorry.  The best chance for this one is to sit quiet and receptive, without hope or ambition, like one of those enormous radio telescope dishes, listening day and night to alien variety shows.  People found them interesting, momentarily, many years ago.  Then they forgot about them.  Just the same, they go on listening.

When I walk into the changing room at the rec center, a guy is standing naked at the sink, covering his body with soap from the dispenser.  “Oh, it’s you,” he says, though I’ve never seen him before.  “They’re trying to sabotage me.  I have to walk miles and miles.  They won’t let me on the bus.  Look at how sore I got.  He lifts his balls to show me his chafed and bleeding crotch.  He walks back and forth from the shower and the sink, covering himself with soap, washing again and again.  He doesn’t own a towel.  He’s red-faced and covered with hair.  His penis seems unusually small, but that’s probably just because I’ve watched way too much porn.  He shows me his skinned knee.  He shows me his toenail coming off.  He wants me know how much everything hurts.  Later on the custodian says, “You let us know when there’s somebody like that.  We got children and old people here.”  Clearly the fact that a man is naked, drunk, and ranting is perceived as a problem.  “But he wasn’t bothering me,” I say.  It’s true.  Also it is easier to be patient with naked people.  Also I feel oddly grateful to him.  As if his losing it was a favor to me.  As if he were beserk on my behalf.  This world.  Something’s got to give.  Today he volunteered. 

What form is best-suited to saluting the momentary, the uncertain, the highly perishable?  What form is suitable for the very probable end of human civilization, for seeking to be human even now?  I have always enjoyed small plates.  But they’ve got to keep coming until you’ve had enough to eat.  

Also: because I am the one writing this, since I am ostensibly the person in charge, I am going to make the rule that is is ALWAYS all right to drink wine with this, even if you’re reading at 7:45 A.M.  (As the designated writer, I will attempt to stay sober.  In general.  More or less.)      

Is anyone else entirely haunted by the fact that who matters and who does not is decided entirely arbitrarily?  It is not even a matter of race, class or talent, though of course those things may have an effect.  It is as if you have a sign over your head that everyone can read but you.  And you either matter or you don’t.

I, too, would like to win.  I don’t claim otherwise.  After all, I’ve done all the other drugs.  Now I would like to try success.  I could spend an entire long weekend blitzed on it.  What does it feel like when a whole room full of people imagine that you are someone who matters?  Fucking hell, it has to be better than walking naked down the hall at the baths, snorting poppers in a crowd of admirers.

The principal question posed by America today, or: is it still egomania when everyone’s doing it?

In Tokyo, on the day for three minute speeches, I sat in the back of the room and took notes on my students’ performance.  The next speech that day was from the most congenial of the cheering squad, though only so-so at English.  The young woman stood at the front of the classroom, her hair and make-up just so, Audrey Hepburn everything, a fortune in shoes, clutching a crumpled sheet torn from a spiral notebook.  Louder, please!  I insisted.  She repeated herself, no louder than before,  then dove straight into her paper, clear down to the floor, where she lay sobbing in the center aisle between the desks.  I watched in astonishment.  I couldn’t believe what was happening.  Because I had imagined this scene dozens of times -- but I always assumed it would be ME doing that.  I totally failed to remember that other people were even eligible for hysteria.  It’s OK, it’s OK, it’s OK, I chanted softly and sat waiting as the other students solaced her, which they did with exquisite tenderness and patience.  I believe they felt, as I did, that the young woman had done something exceedingly gracious, a real favor to everyone. 

How did this happen actually?  How did I end up this far outside, not just left out but opposed?  When did this start?  When was wandering ordained?  Looking back, it’s obvious, though I failed to realize at the time.  I must have felt myself going out, but I didn’t know how far I was going.  I didn’t know that I was never coming back.

In the beginning I spent all day at the hospital, then went home and wrote letters detailing his health, prognosis and treatment.  This behavior was well-received and appreciated.  This was the correct use for me.  Otherwise my visibility was a source of discomfort to everyone.  I was most visible during that the unavoidable moment when each person asked, Did he give it to you?  No, I said, again and again.  No, he did not give it to me.  I do not have it.  Then whoever it was would hurry back to discussing his health, prognosis and treatment.  But not before I saw their face.  Because this was not how it was supposed to work.  I was quite officially the bad one.  I was promiscuous.  And as for him, he was the nicest man.  People have their pictures of the world.  They love them.  They’ll sacrifice anything to save them.  Thus did I become invisible after Did he give it to you?  It’s only very natural that people were unable to disguise their bewilderment at the news, their looks of confusion and, yes, disappointment.

New & Forthcoming

“Metta Meditation for Hot Male Action, or, how to practice love in sleazy bars” has been translated into Spanish. The translation is by Rico Noguchi with illustrations by Julio Granados. “Recently, At Orgies” appears in Zymbol, number 4, at newsstands now. “A Seat on the Train” is forthcoming in A Capella Zoo.

"The Myth of Single Parenthood" is forthcoming in Jonathan. “The Right Way to be Crippled and Naked” will appear in an anthology of fiction about disability created by the editors of Beauty is a Verb: The New Disability Poetics. “Naked in Sweden” has been published in the reborn international version of Minus Tides, a literary magazine based in Denman Island, Canada. The essay “Just Interesting” is online at Biostories. “Pa, Randy and the Sugarhouse Fire”, originally published in Zymbol, has been nominated for a Pushcart prize. Often I feel utterly and officially nuts to go on writing, studying, and wandering endlessly. Thank you to everyone who encourages me, who provides me with refuge, inspiration, or resources. These small successes are only possible because you aid my survival. I am very grateful.