I don't even know what I'm going to call this post...

    I'm starting to work for Obama again. Or rather, "I'm starting to work for our President again." Last night I got an email asking for help with the campaign, but I couldn't find an event to go to in this county, so-- get this-- I signed up to host one.
    Actually, I'm looking forward to it. There is something exhilerating about a task where you have to figure out what needs to be done and assign  yourself to do it. Being your own boss. All that good stuff. I gave the lobby of the hotel I live in as the location of the community meeting I'm hosting and sent out all the invitations and only today did I proceed to ask my landlord. You'd be amazed at how easily she said yes, but I don't want to give the impression she's a pushover. I think she just felt honored the Democrats would care how people in my hotel vote.
    Anyway, for those of you who want to go and who will be in the Santa Cruz California area May twelfth, my email is tconger@cruzio.com or you can log in at barackobama.com and find your way that way.
    There is something strangely alienating about life and the world as a whole. Things are easy as long as someone's telling you what to do and you have them to complain about with your friends and family, but when you make up your mind to live on barely any money and be your own boss it just does weird things to your relationships. For one thing, it's really embarassing how often I call my father and stepmother-- like, almost every day each. You'd think you'd have more to say when  you talk to your friends, but so often it all gets  lost in vagueness because you've built it for yourself out of nothing. There's no good guy or bad guy. Anyway. you'll probably see me posting a lot more often as if anyone were even reading it all. No offense, please, to those who do read this. I just find my life is really perfect except I'm really lonely. I never thought I'd want to "quit my day job."

Commentary on "The Windows" by 19th C. poet Stephane Mallarme

    "The Windows" is just one poem in a collection called "Du Parnasse Contemporain" and the translation is by Anthony Hartley and was published in 1963 by Penguin. This essay is copyright by Tim Conger as of 2/20/12.
     I want to meticulously avoid biography in writing about Mallarme's poetry, howver tempting it may be, except where he wrote to a friend that his new poetic method was to "Paint-- Not the thing-- but the effect that it produces." Perhaps another writer might find that instruction strangely freeing. "The Windows" definitely reads like he applied his method on it, or at least the first nine or so times I read it, but eventually I see where adjectives find their nouns and adverbs find their verbs and adjectives. But the Dionysian twister of it is kind of fun in the meantime:

            Tired of the dreary hospital and of the stale incense rising in the banal whiteness of the curtains towards the vast crucifix weary of the empty wall, the dying man cunningly straightens his old back,
           drags himself and, less to warm his decay than to see sunlight on the stones, goes to flatten his white hairs and the bones of his thin face at the windows which a bright lovely sunbeam wishes to bronze.
            And his mouth, feverish and starving for the blue sky, just as in its youth it went to breathe in its treasure, a virginal skin of long ago! dirties with a long bitter kiss the warm golden panes.

                                    (Stanzas I--III)

   Combinations of words that particulary work for me abound here, but I want to quote a few lines as I recite the poem. This may  be copyright infringement, but it is in the interest of promoting and reviewing the poem: "...less to warm his decay than to see sunshine on the stones...at the windows which a bright lovely sunbeam wishes to bronze."  This is the first of a number of lines Mallarme comes up with that summon for me an old self of mine, stuck in a hospital for psychosis or pneumonia or both, that speaks at me through the voice of Mallarme and says, "Bring down the wall a little."

              He lives intoxicated, forgetting the horror of the holy oils, the tisanes, the clock and compulsory bed, the cough; and when evening bleeds among the tiles his eye, on the horizon choked with  light,
            sees golden galleys, beautiful as swans, sleeping on a river of purple and perfumes, rocking the rich, tawny lightning of their lines in a vast indifference laden with memory!
            So seized by disgust of man and his hard soul, wallowing in happiness where only the appetites eat, and persisting in the search for this filth to offer to his wife suckkling her little ones,

                                                      (Stanzas IV--VI)

  Sorry about ending in the middle of a train of thought, but it's hard not to wwith Mallarme! The longing for sunshine and the fantasy of the ships is most poignant and familiar to me, having gone nearly bonkers from a hyperactive imagination whenever I'm detained against my will. "Purple and perfumes" is a good example of taking something immediately aroound you and turning it into a hallucination, where what is most unfamiliar to me and most terrifying at all is the image of being rubbed with holy oils in the hospital in case you die when no one can come to your bedside! That's not one I've experienced yet, nor hopefully ever! What is most familiar to me of all, sad to say, is "wallowing in happiness where only his appetites eat." /you  know, I'm reading right now in a book some theologians who said that when a holy person dies, only the soul dies, while God continues to perform good deeds. through them. Appetites eating int eh place of the comfortable person would bespeak a very different spiritual condition. But I can't say I don't feel that way all the time.


                      I flee, and I cling to all the casements from whence one turns one's shoulder to life, and, blessedly, in their glass washed with eternal dews gilded by Infinity's chaste morning,
               I look at myself and see myself as an angel! and I die, and I love-- whether the glass be art or mysticism-- to be reborn, wearing my dream like a diadem,  in the earlier heaven where Beauty flowers!
               But alas! the world below is master! its obsession comes to disgust me sometimes even in thid certain shelter,   And Stupidity's impure vomiting forces me to stop my nose in face of the blue sky.

                                      (Stanzas VII--IX)


       I can see the word "art" as in "art or mysticism" being used in more thanone sense in the poem; one the one hand, art is simply the making of false things-- on another,we have for the past few centuries become accustomed tot hinking of art as evidence of spiritual transcendence. But isn't that "making graven images?" And does Stephane Mallarme really care if it is? I think he's trying to show what compromises of self a hospital stay of any kind makes necessary.

                  Is there a way, O Self familiar with bitterness, to break the crystal insulted by the monster and to escape; with  my two featherless wings-- At the risk of falling throughout eternity?

                               (Stanza X, last stanza)


   I feel he's speaking personally to me-- call it "paranoid criticism"-- perhaps he's speaking to you, too, if you've ever wanted to time travel when you've been cooped up inside all day. /Stephane Mallarme, I hear and touch you back. If you absolutely must shoot at Athur Rimbaud, don't.
     Stephane Mallarme was something of a mentalist. He was skilled at remembering in tranquility traumatic thoughts and sensations from his own life that he knew other people woulod identify strongly with. Even if you don't relate to all of it, or any of it, you don't know that he's shot and missed, but if he hits the mark, you say, "How did he know?" I can easily relate to everything he says about being in the hospital except that hospitals don't use holy oils any more. And indeed, so can anyone who's ever been in a hospital and wanted to be OUT. Not everyone would cop to being a vehicle for one's own appetites, but I see it in everyone just as much or more than I see it in myself. But it is an easy mentalist trick to make people feel that a message is meant for them personally if you insult or criticize them. In my case, the detail of the vomiting hits the mark, too, where it wouldn't with another person, but Mallarme may have only been referring to another patient in the bed next to his. Sooner or later a mentalist has to hazard a few details that he has noway of knowing whether they connect to the audience's experience or not.  I myself easily fall for that trick. And then Mallarme finishes with a threat, "How do we break the crystal?" To us, it seems like he's talking about the computer, but he may have only meant-- besides the window in the hospital--  the glass of a crystal ball for scrying. It may also be that computers are designed with glass as they are only because, our technology grew out of an association with crystal balls for scrying. But that's just me trying some mentalism of my own and not because I actually think it's possible to make a machine out of tea leaves or yarrow stalks. /Every artist and every writer is a kind of mentaalist and I am using this essay as an act of mentalism, too. Perhaps, to "paint-- /not the thing-- but the effect that it produces" would serve to enhance the creation of these hypnotic effects as well as being all we really know about life and the world we experience.



          

Valentine's Day, 2012

    I don't mean this so much as a review/advertisement ffor Valentine's Day, though I might have a lot to say about it. Mainly what I'm writing about is a terrific conversation I had tonight on the bus with someone I had never met and probably will never see again, but would really like to. I was at the busstop and she asked if I was waiting for the 71 bus and I said "yes" and she said, "Oh, good." So, People, if you want to know how to start a conversation with someone at the busstop, that is a polite way of doing it. I asked if she was going to the college and she said, "Yeah, I'm with the college." I asked, "As a worker or as a student." and she said she was in the first year of getting her degree. I said the looked older than twenty-one, which seemed to offend her slightly, but it didn't shut her down and she said she was going back for her secondd degree. Her first one was in communications and this one is in radiology. I said that seemed great because with expertise in both fields if someone comes in to the lab and isn't making a lot of sense she can use her background in communications to try to figure it out and not just assume stuff. She said the other application is if  someone thinks they have psychiatric issues, but actually they've got a skull fracture. The conversation already seemed positive enough that I began to ask her about people around here I could see if I  suffered blows to the head around the same time as I had changes in my psychiatric history, but mainly we were just having a conversation and I told her my current md is really great and would assuredly help me get tests if I asked him for them. So then she began to ask me what my diagnosis is just for her own education and I told her in this case I'd be happy to tell her. Then we got on the bus and her bus pass was  out of date and I almost offered to pay for her ride because it was kind of an important conversation all of a sudden. We sat down and she asked me what triggers my illness. I complimented her on asking exactly the right question and I said, "Birth." It was kind of my show for a while because it's hard for any of us to get out of  helper/helpee mode once that dynamic has started but what distinguished her was the boldness of her questions and at the same time the empathy. At one point she teased me that the medications I take give me a liquid lobotomy, though I knew she was just flirting, which made me feel comfortable talking about all the most crazy cosmic stuff I could think of. We did a lot of smiling and laughing. I told her my theory that I don't know whether anything is real or not, but that I know I prefer reality over hallucination. She asked, reasonably enough, "What is reality?" and I said, "I have no idea, but I'd like to think I'd know it if I saw it."I told her I'm not that sure she wasn't a hallucination, which she seemed to think was funny. By the time we got to her stop I felt so close to her it didn't seem odd she was clutching my hands and squeezing them and I hers. She said her name was Kim and I said "Kim and Tim." I didn't feel like asking for her phone number unless I run into her a second time (which I certainly hope I do,) but  it's nice to connect with someone so strongly on Valentine's Day. Also, tonight was a romantic night, but I could well understand these things are time sensitive and I wouldn't assume I could kiss her hand the next time I see her where if I had done it tonight she probably would have been delighted.

Smasheltooth Flossing (a second draft)

"Smasheltooth Flossing" on blogger is my favorite besides my own. It's brilliantly written and she's going to have to help me figure out how to get graphics on my page, too, because her graphics are great. Mostly she writes diary entries or accounts of dreams and it looks like-- as is true with me, too-- her dreams are saturated with even more wisdom than her waking ego. I really like the dream account of meeting a member of her favorite hiphop band and then getting in a fight with  her boyfriend over him telling people her secrets. In fact, I felt it necessary to ask her permission before letting other people know about her blog, but she was thrilled I wanted too so I think if people can take seriously what should be taken seriously and take with a grain of salt what should be taken with a grain of salt. What I mean is, a lot  of her blog is very bawdy, like mine sometimes can be, and just as I wouldn't want a stranger coming up to me in public and asking me about orange jumpsuits, it's probably better not to interrogate Smashel about her teeth. But I really like her blog  a lot and recommend it to people who like brilliant and yet funny and apparently vulnerable writing. I'd like to say  more about what you'll find there , but false  modesty is stopping me. I feel funny discussing my friends' issues about their teeth on google.
    I wrote something about Smashel's blog here yesterday, but felt I needed to change it for whatever reason.

In Defense of Seeking Extremely Mediated Experience

   When I first was in college in 1983 I had known I wanted to "be a writer" since I was nine years old. But I received a warning through a book by John Gardner called "On Becoming a Writer" at that time. He recalls how he witnessed a gruesome highway accident at one point and was trying to come "to the rescue," but the whole time he was peeling away metal and freeing body parts he kept thinking to himself, "I've got to remember what I'm thinking...I've got to remember  what I'm feeling..." According to him, he had programmed himself so much to think like a writer that he couldn't experience anything at face value any more. He says, "Don't let this happen to you." Mostly I look at things through a very different lens, but something I saw yesterday reminded me of his warning.
    Recently my brother Greg shared with me a speech on the internet  from someone named Slavoj Zizek at an Occupy New York event. I really liked the speech and so yesterday I was looking at clips about him on You Tube for something to comment on in my blog. I found most of the clips pretty mediocre, but I thought it might just be me, which, of course, it is. Then i noticed comments below the film window and one of the comments was, "Why are you watching a facsimile of a film about Slavoj Zizek?" I'm busted again. But I've also been thinking since that happened and I think that's what the comment-writer wanted. I think I have an answer to his question and I think you want to know what it is.
    Why do I seek stimuli so I can blog about stimuli? First of all, we live in a world where most people spend all their free time online and I just can't  fight that particular trend any more, because I can't stand the loneliness. Second of all, I decided it finally matters to me to publish my writing and blogging is a way of doing it that feels less nepotistic to me than the journals and magazines. All I have to do is get people to read my blog myself. Of course, there's no one else to filter out my bad writing from getting on the net, but maybe I wouldn't want that anyway. As to the content of the blog, I took an art history class at Cabrillo College a little while ago in Aptos CA and I felt I had unfinished business when the class was over. I really loved writing a paragraph or so each about all these different random pieces of art or package culture: in fact I stole this blog's whole concept from "Approaches to Understanding Visual Culture" by Malcolm Barnard, which was one of the main textbooks for the class. I felt I still had lots and lots of art I wanted to comment on. Mostly I use what he would call a very casual hermeneutic analysis: what is "God" telling me through this experience? I'm pretending you want to know.
    And now for reason #3: my defense of seeking to experience the world only through extremely mediated experience. Marshall McCluhan says some people prefer to experience art and life though "hot" media, like painting, sculpture, poetry, theatre and architecture, while others prefer "cool" media, like fiction, philosophy, photography and cinema, though what goes in what category is a matter for debate. I feel like a little of both, like I like to experience "hot" experiences through the filter of a "cool" medium, or even a facsimile of a facsimile of one. I think if you've read books on he ancient Egyptians, Chinese or Mayas you'd agree a greeting from beyond the grave can shake off thousands of years of gunk and grab you just as vigorously as if you heard it firsthand today. Part of what I'm dealing with in responding to the question in the comment is precisely such an unmediated experience. Hermeneutics-- which comes from the name of theGreek god Hermes-- means precisely that, that no matter how you remove the message from the receiver, it just adds that much more force to the message when the signal is finally received and recognized, and nothing can stop it from being recognized if the receiver is receptive to it at that moment. The advantage of experiencing art as well as life is that I interpret events in my life as God or the Devil attempting to convey a message to me, but if I try to tell you about it, you might disagree about what God is telling me, so that I might become isolated. However, if I write about what God is telling me through art, you can believe me that "God" is telling me that without having to believe he or she is saying that to you or anyone else. Therefore, if you judge me for it, it's just your problem unless I'm somehow making you listen to me. Anyway, for those of us who write, writing is really hard and I think looking to experience pleasant things in a pleasant way so you can write pleasantly about it is perfectly all right and I contest that everyone who writes does that anyway, whether we're too jaded to admit it or not.

Superbowl Forty-Six

    This year's superbowl was the first I ever watched willingly, and I even went out of my way to see it, begging my girlfriend's daughter to let us come over and watch it at her house and I was willing to bring snacks and gatorade and beer. There's been kind of a lot of disruption in all our lives lately and so the ritual of having the game on was kind of healing for me and--I think-- for them, too, though I drank too much beer and after the game I got upset over some trifle and demanded to be driven to the bus stop to go home. Certainly somebody drinking too much on superbowl Sunday doesn't raise many eyebrows. But, man, every single ad during the game was about beer. As if I didn't feel stupid enough.
    I was glad New York won, because two weeks ago they beat San Francisco, so it helps me to feel like "we" had a tough adversary. Also, I kind of identified with Eli Manning two weeks ago when he kept looking so afraid of the ball, and still he kept on playing. For those of us who know nothing of football, Manning was the quarterback for New York, so he had to run or pass every play as long as New York had the ball. Last week I got this bean bag toy of Spongebob Squarepants wearing a 49er's uniform and looking really mad because he didn't get to go to the superbowl and I absolutely love it. I forgot to bring it to the game, though.
    As for football itself, I wish it weren't played so dirty, but I think I don't dispprove of it any more. I finally outgrew all my resentment from being a weakling in school and I guess people going to all this trouble to slam into each other and get paid for it, if they're lucky, is kind of cool, though maybe I'll try watching baseball this year, too. Sometimes football seems kind of sublime to me, even if people do look mad and get in fights on the field. You have to hand it to anyone who will put themselves at stake so much physically, though I almost decided I didn't want to watch anymore two weeks ago when that man  got so hurt on the field they brought out the stretcher. Luckily he was able to walk off the field, but I hope he's okay. There's an anarcho- capitalist philosophy called Agonism that I don't agree with, but some of it I do, like the theory and beauty of competition generally. I think on a small scale, like where romantic love is at stake, I really love the struggle of it all a lot and can be something of a jerk. Sorry. Likewise sports.

Thrive

I just watched the video, "Thrive", for the first time without the sound on and realize that's not the best way to watch it, but thought I'd write a reaction--preferably without saying anything that would take away the experience of watching it from someone who hasn't seen it yet.
It's funny how you get these recommendations in the internet world where someone tells you to look at something and doesn't tell you anything about it and it takes a certain amount of courage or foolhardiness to actually go to those sites, because you quickly find you really have no idea what you'll find. That is certainly my experience with "Thrive." But I am glad I looked at it and want to go back to the site when I've got my ear buds working again. I want to share it with others (unlike my experience with the work of Zach Galifianakis) but am quite far from clicking buttons on Thrive's site and maybe accidentally giving a bunch of grease monkeys access to my sites through some kind of back door. Funny what you have to protect yourself from these days.
I do recommend watching "Thrive", but qualify that I didn't watch it with the sound on. I want to go back to the site again when I've got sound.

Two Videos by OK Go

I've seen two of this band's videos and each is more amazing than the other. The first shows them in street clothes dancing on aerobics machines with a choreography and litheness that would make Olivia Newton John and Britney Spears weep with lust or envy or something. It's not the sort of art that inspires novices to create more art, though, so I'm kind of going to give it short shrift in my review, because my primary interest in writing has always been as a writing teacher. OK Go's next video, though, gives a lot more to write and talk about; they filled a warehouse with a contraption the size of an old IBM mainframe built out of odds and ends and functional parts of preexistent machines that is meant to deliver golf balls short distances in time to the song the video is meant to promote. My brother Greg, who showed me the video, says this kind of "better mousetrap" type machine is called a Rube Goldberg device after a mathematician who theorized about these things that had been in the culture of comic strips and dormitories and so on before him.
  OK Go has done an amazing job of varying the kinds of motion and materials in the operation of the machine and always times the motion of the golf balls subjectively with the pace of the music. Moreover, the machine is not without continuous surprising elements that come into play specifically at transitions and surprises in the music. This is an amazing video. Unfortuneately, it made it completely impossible to think about or remember the song. But the whole day after I saw this video I was riding the bus from Berkeley back home to Watsonville and thinking how much the history of the world's civilizations is really a history of the world's cities and how like a Rube Goldberg device it all is! I thought of how I've found myself in the course of my life riding desperately on some flying piece of flotsam through space and trying to come up with some kind of cover story to make sense of it all if the wrong person asks me why I'm living a certain way or doing a certain thing or how it is the castle I'm living in stays in the air. How like the famous Hieronymous Bosch tryptych it all is(!), particularly like his vision of Hell. Do you know(?), last night I heard a soul band named Velvet Wraith on the radio and it made me feel terrified and happy at the same time, because it is nice to know someone else has seen them, even if my memory of seeing them the first time was one of the most unhappy times in my life. I have a little more stuff to say about the video still, so let me say as an aside that although the counsel of my more Christian family members is a great solace to me, I disagree with them on the vital point of a person having what seems to be visions of Hell while alive being always a bad thing and still that doesn't make me a Satan worshipper. I believe these experiences do a fine job of advertising their opposite, and aren't given to people who aren't very kind and good people already, but that experiences of Hell are themselves also better than no contact with God at all. If you don't know what I was talking about, forget it, it can ruin your life. Just basically a lot of alchemy and religion and stuff.
  Wow! Suffice it to say, OK Go's second video does a much better job of inspiring me to create on my own! On a much less demented note, it is my professional opinion, as it is with other writers and teachers of writing, that it can be a good sign if you want to be a writer and don't know if you have "The Right Stuff," if you start off writing the letters of the Roman alphabet, but by the middle you're writing in Gaelic and Hebrew. One might almost call it "Frankenstein Syndrome." In fact, I think that's its name. You think of a plot, make an outline, start telling your story, but then you start hearing your characters telling you, "I wouldn't do that,,I'd do this." By the end of your story, it resembles a Rube Goldberg machine unless you can clean it up and pretend you wanted it to be that way, but some people leave the original shape of the branches in the wood, like me. It's a school of writing, I guess, or more than one.