What to Read While You're Not Watching the Inauguration.

As your friend who dropped of society to read more, I believe that I have located the perfect book to read while you are NOT watching the Inauguration. (Naturally my highest respect goes to those persons who will be so busy being disruptive and speaking out for human and earthly justice they may not have a chance to read unless they land in jail.) In case you need a book to accompany your non-viewing of the election -- I’ve got you covered. I decided that such a book must be utterly all-American, display the highest values, contain of massive dose of courage in the face of impossible obstacles, and must also be as compelling to read as a thriller because -- who has an attention span nowadays? This is all so fucking scary. Good news, I got it, this nerd knows just the right all-American book. Now is the time to read or reread, ‘Lakota Woman’, the autobiography that Mary Crow Dog wrote with Richard Erdoes. Here is a big dose of the clarity, love and ferocity we’re going to need to survive. A deep bow to all the women who will be marching, protesting, shouting and fighting in the days to come. ‘Lakota Woman’ opens with a Cheyenne proverb: “A nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground.”

Lesson FOURTEEN : Root

from AN ADVANCED COURSE IN BEING LOST

If Jackson Pollock tore the door off the men’s room in the Cedar 

it was something he just did and was interesting, not an annoyance.

-- Frank O’Hara

My father made a Root Beer Float expressly so he could throw it at me.  It was entirely obvious and pre-set.  And still I stuck around.  The moment I appeared on the porch he started up with the speeches.  “If you are going to work on the farm you have to trust me 100%” he said, as he sipped just the very tiniest bit of his float.  He then moved on to chronicle his great kindness, as well as why it was entirely necessary for me to affirm this to him, to tell him, right then and there, that he was a very kind person and everyone thought so.  And even then, knowing precisely what was coming, I still went ahead and said, No.
      What’s in a name?  8 generations ago, my ancestor, in Switzerland, a lusty, hard-working, not over-bright farmhand by the name of Konrad Everything, fell in love with the governor’s daughter, a buxom, red-haired lass, likewise lusty, with a tendency toward authoritarianism and the bottle.  Her father, the tremendously dignified Governor Deserve, disapproved -- but by then Mary was already 3 months along.  Without informing anyone, with only 2 sets of clothes and a vast amount of liquor, the forebearers of my grand family, the Deserve-Everythings, sailed toward America, a significant portion of which, they were already sure, was totally rightfully theirs.
     Sharing is regarded as an abomination in my family.  It’s absolutely the worst-case scenario.  My family prides itself on its generosity and they can tell you precisely how horrible every single instance of it has been for them, clear back to the second cousins from Hawaii who stayed for a week in the Eighties.  The rule is, the more you have, the more you need, the less you have to give.  I promise this makes perfect sense when you’re white people.   
     As well as acute opioid withdrawal, my elderly father suffers from early dementia.  This is a highly controversial statement.  People inside the family disagree strong with the word dementia.  People outside the family disagree strongly with the word early.
     The lost relatives are untallied.  No doubt plenty died of drink.  A few stepped off cliffs, met the Misfit on the highway.  Others, surely, found better misfits, other forests, unobtrusively flourished, doodled on the margins. 
     The best I ever managed was to say to my father, when he’d had 2 Oxy and a bottle of wine, “Basically there are 2 of you.  1 of you is held hostage by the other and he suffers along with the rest of us.”
     Pathetic story: when I was 18 I got a one-way ticket to the city still known as Bombay.  I believed that if I stayed away long enough my family would miss me and when I returned at last they’d be happy to see me.  I believed they’d defrost in my absence.  (I warned you this was a pathetic story.)  Riding on buses through Andhra Pradesh, watching toddy wallahs collect pots from the tops of the palms, I imagined my family making room for me at last.  And I remember arriving home after  8½ months, drinking Nestea on the back porch of the farmhouse, wearing a long headscarf I hoped would be exotic, thinking, Well so much for that.  I’d been home less than an hour.  There wasn’t ever going to be a thaw.  My plan had entirely failed.  Meanwhile, I had discovered that there was a world.

Lesson THIRTEEN : Pickleback

from AN ADVANCED COURSE IN BEING LOST


My father, the Pumpkin King.  I am moving his boxes for the umpteenth, as he directs, calls me names, throws things.  Coming around the corner to find a squirrel feasting in his cereal bowl. Letting the King give me orders, call me, again, a worthless motherfucker, not saying anything.  Letting him return to his breakfast, not saying anything.
      After 2 nights of rain the grass is still dead but it no longer crackles.  The pumpkins, now, will do something and the pears, too, are less tragic.  The apples honestly don’t look that bad to me -- OK, the Empire and the Winter Banana.  But nobody cares about Winter Banana.  Still, I talked to Cool Petah and Cool Petah says we’re in trouble and he would know, I wouldn’t.  Petah says the Delicious, Red and Golden both, are totally utterly toast. 
      Catching Cool Petah, original picker, on the corner of the soda aisle at Shaw’s, which is pretty much the only time you’ll ever see him with a shirt on.  Petah doesn’t drink anymore, doesn’t smoke (OK, just pot) but he’s got a thing for generic cola, which has given him a little paunch but he’s still the fastest picker, even after 39 years of work.  Lucky me, now I don’t have to haul my milk jug across suburbia and through the woods to get back to the bunkhouse.  Cool Petah gives me a ride his eternal beater car, where riding shotgun is reserved for his old German Shepherd who has decided, providentially, just this year, age 10, to stop biting people, or at least to only bite people on special occasions.  Even Petah, ever-cool, is sad about my mad old father.  Cool Petah says, Has he nevah heard about FORGIVENESS?

Thing is, it’s only ever interesting 

if it feels like a transmission.

The record matters only if

it’s a record of transmissions.

(only if it’s overheard)

(only if it appears as a dream)     

     Dan, deviant bunkhead, dearly loved, introduces me to a cocktail which corresponds.  Called a pickleback.  A generous shot of bourbon followed by a shot of pickle juice.  Both more or less equal and plenty of both.  Bourbon!  Pickle juice!  Like mowing down a Civil War re-enactment with a party bus.  Except nobody dies.  Not immediately.  It is kind of astonishing that Dan is able to sustain the belief that this is some kind of health drink.  Needless to say, I am highly in favor of the pickleback (it contains liquor) and also I find it a great support to my work in this, The Pickleback School of Literature.  It is a cocktail which is exemplary, which is illustrative: this is what it takes, nowadays, just to feel a little something.  

Books for Dark Times: NAKED LUNCH

William Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

Edited by James Grauerholz and Barry Miles
Grove Press, 1959 
(Restored text, 2001)

In the middle Nineties, I was a student in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute.  Thus I have a considerable allergy to Beat literature, to which I was over-exposed.  Reading through Penguin’s anthology of Beat Literature, I often roll my eyes.  Kerouac, for example, I find unreadable.  Speaking therefore as a cynical, jaded, and negative person, I have to admit that some pieces of Beat literature really are all they’re cracked up to be.  Kaddish, for example.  And Naked Lunch.

A few days after the election of Donald Trump, I picked it up again.  I admit that I just wanted to escape the nightmarish headlines and take refuge in surreal phantasmagoria.  To my astonishment, I discovered the book had totally changed in the 20 years since I’d read it last.  It isn’t outlandish any more.  It seems like a handbook to the way we live now, in the shadow of the Trump administration.  Above all, it is very PRACTICAL book, full of tips and pointers.  I might as well be reading the Boy Scouts Handbook.

As a young groupie, I remember hearing Allen Ginsberg say that having sex with Burroughs was like having sex with a reptile.  Well, he WRITES like a reptile too, but what maybe didn’t work so well in the sheets is ecstatic on the page.  Like Jane and Paul Bowles, he still makes our current, self-proclaimed, avant-garde look tame.  A riotous book.  (Who writes riotously now?  Could you send me a list?)  

I drink more coffee than is strictly speaking sane and I admit I had a “Woo-woo” moment when I thought, “Burroughs is a prophet!  This book was written for right exactly now!”  But, now that I’ve calmed down, somewhat, I reckon it must seem so because Burroughs is willing to take a deep, long look at human evil, and evidently evil takes similar forms, age after age. 

Woo-woo aside, it IS entertaining and satisfying to keep notes as you read as to on which page various members of the Trump Administration first appear.  Imagine what Burroughs would have made of our current cast of villains, how he would have dissected them, delighted in them, savaged them.  Even their names: imagine what Burroughs would think of “Trump”, of “Cruz”, of “Pence”, of “Kellyanne Conway”!  (I’d swear Kellyanne Conway is already the name of a Burroughs’ character -- I just can’t quite find her.)

Naked Lunch is a handbook for right now, as we do our best to come to grips with human evil and survive -- or to NOT survive, but to be entertained in the meantime.  Because it is an incredibly funny book and even now it makes so much else seem cowardly.  Here’s your Handbook To Life Under The Trump Administration.  May we somehow keep our bright queer hearts intact.  I urge you, however, do NOT follow his advice about yohimbe being “the ultimate aphrodisiac”.  That stuff is totally misery-making, even if it does give you a boner.  And, of course, please: NEVER experiment with nutmeg.

Lesson TWENTY-TWO : Flip-book

from AN ADVANCED COURSE IN BEING LOST

Nonlinear.  Discontinuous.  
Collage-like.  An assemblage.  
As is already more than self-evident.

-- David Markson, Vanishing Point

Not much more than the time I pretend to do something.  Really just shower, get dressed to start trembling.  This mammal, so far beyond its capacity.  Not quite able to construct a person.  If I take the train no one is left.  But even before that.
     A flip-book of monsters, I have in mind.  How I loved those as a child!  Making monsters came naturally.  The head of an eagle, a bear’s torso, jockey shorts, and the legs of a flamingo!
     I’m going to be regarded as a genius after my death.  It’s just this intermediate period that’s hard.
     Of the 8 Worldly Dharmas, which are to be abandoned, one is fear of insignificance.  Usually it’s translated as ill-repute, but the former seems a far better translation, particularly nowadays.
     The knowledge that Zsa Zsa Gabor spent at least the last 5 of her 99 years in a state of profound dementia, fed by a tube in her stomach, unable to hear, speak, or see, with no awareness of what she had been, with no idea she had been famous.
     Aware of the desire to fall even further out of the world.  I would especially like to go a number of months without ever once seeing the news.  I would like important people to die without my knowing.  Is this wish ethically defensible?  I would have to be doing something important.  What is the chance of my ever doing something important during the entire remainder of my life?  (It’d have to be inadvertent, obviously.)  But if I am reliably negligible, does it matter if I read the news?  I would especially like to spend many weeks turning the Bible-thin pages of The Library of America, copying out sentences, and making diligent use of the cloth bookmark.  I believe it is all right to revel in the canon.  The canon remains almost entirely unknown. 
     A genius of average intelligence -- or just slightly below.  Who saw because he could not help seeing, who said because he could not help saying.  A teller of the very most obvious secrets, known by pets and by house plants, known even by people flying in airplanes overhead.  As a successfully-extruded member of my family, I can attest that it is the very most obvious secrets, which absolutely everyone knows, that get you in trouble.  Also, as for my fame, I ought to avoid undue excitement, as we are at the very end of us, oh tragedy, such relief, and civilization will survive me only just very slightly.  Therefore: I write for posterity.  All 12 minutes of it. 

Lesson TWENTY-THREE : Pet

from AN ADVANCED COURSE IN BEING LOST

. . . certainly I said I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to do to get rich.

-- Gertrude Stein, 

Everybody’s Autobiography

Having carefully observed the lives of my successful, responsible, well-to-do friends, I have determined that the very most sensible thing for me to do -- I mean, amongst those things that I can actually manage -- is to apply for a position as one of their pets.  Naturally, I’d prefer to succeed as an artist, but people don’t love artists that much.  Not like they love their Labradoodle.  This became clear to me one day while speaking to a friend who seemed to me a standard member of the struggling middle-class, when I heard her tally her monthly budget and realized that the expenses of her elderly collie far exceeded my own.  (Another great thing about me is I can take myself for walks!)  It is true that I’m not so cute anymore and not reliably agreeable but -- think of how many people cherish nasty cats!  Although I recognize there are arenas wherein I cannot compete with a Golden Retriever, I hope to make up for what I lack in adorability with oral sex and copy-editing.  Also, one more time, please keep in mind: I am cheaper.
     To friends who might seek to help me, thanks but no thanks.  The point is not pride (which is famously negotiable) as it is the simple fact that right now I am only mildly to moderately desperate.  I humbly request that you take firm hold of your goodwill, wrap it in plastic or put it in a security envelope and stow it someplace safe, preferably fireproof, as it seems certain that I will be having need of it later.  For this you have, as ever, my everlasting thanks.  Many deep bows.
     Respectfully yrs., etc.