A wilted tip from a head of lettuce, with six spines down the length of a lumpy, pockmarked, bulbous, vaguely pyramidal surface, round at the bottom and then coming to a point, the yellow green of dried grass at the bottom fading to white toward the tip, dull and waxy skin, wavy, as unpredictably formed as the bottom of the ocean. This is the gourd on the table next to me. A cross between an avocado and vomit. Like a miniature spaceship sent to harbinger the coming of the Great Old Ones. A seed pod for the forest of suicides. A three-dimensional record of everything in the universe, readable only by a race of aliens with a sense of perception I can't describe in language. A melted marshmallow that gained sentience and is forming itself into the object of its fondest desire, a starfish. A bad omen. Corporealized moonlight. The magical item sacrificed in the creation of the new album by The Fall. A carving made by a squid to represent its god. What's left of a prehistoric mountain that's been chiseled down by erosion until it is nearly nothing. Butterfly wings captured by a camera that records emotion as well as light.

Want to see it?

America

Anne and I just spent an hour and a half looking around Eastport for a bar or restaurant that was both playing the American League Championship Series and had open seats. They were all full on this crisp autumn Friday night, the Irish pub, the steakhouse, the boat-themed bar, the pizza parlor, the ribs restaurant. Who are these people going to bars just because it's Friday? I know, I know--almost everybody. But Greg is not almost everybody. I was going to see the game, because I don't have a television. They were there to feel people all around them, be seen in their fashionably stupid club clothes, drink watery domestic beers and eat like primitive humans. Can you tell that I don't like these people? Oh, and also, someone's ass was in my damn seat. I don't know which seat was mine, but somebody else's ass was in it. No justice.

Then, because we failed to find any place to watch the game, we went shopping for groceries. (That's logical, right?) And since we were hungry, and it's been more than a week since we shopped, we got a lot of food. Like, a lot of food. How much food? A lot of goddamn food. $175 worth, to be exact.

Our shopping list probably accounted for a fourth of that. It was great fun, though. We just went from one aisle to the next like a ship of fools, loading the cart with sale items and all those things we were hungry for, all the things we would have been eating had we found an open bar seat with a television playing the ALCS. I have long been a sucker for retail therapy. Kay Duffy once saw me shopping for books and CDs at the library--this is many years back now--and said, "you're like a girl, aren't you? You shop when you're sad." Yes, I do shop when I'm sad. I don't think it makes sense to say this makes me like a girl because, well, which one?

But anyway, this was the first time shopping for groceries has ever had the same therapeutic value for me. Usually I feel anxious in the grocery store, never knowing what to get, always feeling like I can never think of the things I want when it's one in the morning and I need something to get me through another 100 lines of translating; when it's a cold weekday and I want something hot for lunch; when there's no plan for dinner and nothing in the house is fresh.

But this time, I thought of all the things.

Granola bars on sale? Sure, let's get two boxes of them. We got three bags of Utz potato chips, and five boxes of cereal. Beans were on sale, ten cents less per can than they are even at Trader Joe's, so we got six cans. I got wheat germ and yogurt, like Xhuliana once offered me when I stopped by her apartment at 3 a.m. on New Year's. I've never eaten pork and beans before, but that sounds good, I'll get a can of that. Hot dogs two for one! Ballpark franks aren't the best, but would that really bother me as long as there are hot dogs? Bread flour on sale! Celeste frozen pizzas ten for $10! What about those mixed nuts, do those look good? Sure, let's get two pounds of them. And ooh, caramels and apples! And some pumpkin spice tea!

I think I'll send the receipt to Eric in Berlin. I'll write on it, "America, fuck yeah."

Now we're home, and the game is over and was just archived on mlb tv, and we're going to have home-made "chicken wings" made with chicken breast, and we've already had a Celeste pizza each. Sometimes life is good.

Hopelessness Vs. Shame

Still a world out there, I suppose. I have been doing a (very) little personal writing lately, but for the most part I still haven't acted on an obvious realization: I will only do all those things I wish I did (writing, learning another instrument, getting on a reasonable sleep schedule, seeing friends) if I . . . do them. If, instead, I sleep until 2 p.m. and then read baseball analysis for three hours, books for another two, do a translation job, and then watch a baseball game, I won't do those other things.

Yes, amazing, I know.

I just always feel like reading is fun, and those other thing are work. And since my ambition has steadily shrunk as my twenties wear on, I have less and less impulse to do work to achieve goals. I keep thinking that since I'm mortal, accomplishments are of very limited meaning--to me or others. I don't know. I guess the world would be a very, very slightly richer place if I put in more effort and made a more productive use of all this leisure I've lucked in to. But the difference seems beyond subtle to me, beyond infinitesimal and into the realm of . . . no, actually infinitesimal covers it.

But at the same time, I feel like I can't keep going through life not doing anything. I can't keep wasting days, floating through time, looking up every now and again to see that I still haven't moved. I feel like I might as well not live if I'm going to live like that. This isn't to say that I'm feeling suicidal--merely that I don't know how I'll be able to live with myself, not that I won't be able to.

So I guess what I'm saying here is we're about to witness an evenly matched battle between hopelessness and shame. If you're going to watch, you'll have to be extraordinarily patient. I take my time with the best of them.

So there we were around 9 p.m. in the shoulder off of I-25, headed north, just before mile marker 240, with a flat tire and no cell phone. People used to deal with situations like this at call boxes along the side of the highway. Now they're mostly gone. Maybe New Mexico never had call boxes, I don't know.

Now the way to deal with this situation is get out of the car and wave your hands at passing drivers until someone stops and lets you use their cell phone to call a tow truck. That's just what your intrepid Greg did, only I didn't have to stand and wave, for my car was equipped with a cardboard sun blocker one side of which is stamped with a sign that reads "Emergency -- Please Call Police". The wind must have thought this sign was just the thing for its summer wardrobe, because it kept trying to rip it from my hands. Anne had to come out of the car and help me hold on.

There the two of us stood, facing on-coming traffic just a foot away from the road with a faded sign telling people to call the police, waving at the drivers as they passed as though we were trying to alert them to the fine parking opportunities in the desert lot to our left. Indeed, the parking was free, with convenient access to the scrub brush and jackrabbit warrens, but I guess nobody wanted to go there on this fine night. For ten minutes, car after car whipped past our charming tableau. They probably we were their entertainment on the road to Santa Fe. I bet they're still laughing at us now.

Finally, though, a sedan pulled over, and Anne and I walked over to tell the driver what had happened. The driver was a middle-aged woman with pushed-back hair, loose clothes and beads hanging from her rear-view mirror. She told us it was a good thing we had the sign and were waving, because once she had seen a man just standing by his car and she had passed him. Then just afterward, she had had a flat tire, and the same man stopped to help her. He had said, "why should I help you when you didn't stop for me?" Evidently he had gotten help from a tow truck, maybe with his battery or something.

Anyway, she gave me her old-style candy bar sized phone and I called AAA, bending down by her flashing turn signal to read the number on the card. Luckily, I was standing right next to the mile marker, so I knew just where we were stopped. The phone rang, and then went dead as though the call had failed. But then there was a loud double beep, silence, and finally a AAA representative came on, mid-sentence. She was hard to understand, and she didn't sound especially reassuring, but she said someone would be there in about forty-five minutes. They asked for my number, and I explained that my phone was dead and I wouldn't be reachable as I was calling from another person's phone. So now we just had to wait.

I gave the phone back to the woman, who was telling Anne about other times she had helped people by the side of the road. I thanked her, and she drove off.

Anne and I got back into the car and told each other stories to pass the time. The time sure did pass. Forty-five minutes, an hour, an hour and a half, and still no driver. What else was there to do? We got the sign back out, stood by the side of the road again, waved again. The wait wasn't so long this time. A blue Civic soon pulled over, and two college-age girls got out. Their car smelled of incense, and they looked like they were maybe out for a trip to a knitting club but had gotten lost. Blue jeans, sneakers, long brown hair, glasses, concerned faces. One of them, the larger one, gave me her cell phone, an old style just like the woman who had stopped earlier. My guess is that people with smart phones don't pull over to help people. People with smart phones don't do anything helpful, I bet.

I made the call a second time, only I was diverted to AAA of Portland. The recorded message was much easier to hear, and more logically sequenced. The man who came on sounded like he actually cared. His voice was pleasant, he used monosyllabic words, and he was going to solve my problem if at all possible . . . which, as it turns out, it wasn't. "Oh, New Mexico. Sorry. Let me transfer you to the New Mexico branch."

The phone rang again, went dead again. A few seconds later, the loud double beep. The man who came on sounded like maybe his mouth was full of slowly dissolving flour. I explained my problem, and he said, "Wait, mile 240? We sent the driver to mile 140."

"I'm standing right by the sign," I said. "It's 240."

"Well, we'll get that fixed for you, sir. We'll contact the driver and tell him to turn around. He passed you already, so it will take a little longer. He'll be there in about an hour."

As you can imagine, this just instilled me with confidence. I gave the phone back, and heard the end of the girls' conversation with Anne. They were indeed driving to Santa Fe from Portland, but I didn't catch why. I suggested they go back to Portland and thanked them, and we returned to the car to wait.

We had a few more stories to tell each other as the hour approached midnight and one day approached the next, but we were interrupted when a car pulled up behind us. I got out and saw it wasn't the tow truck, but rather a highway patrol car. The officer told me to wait back inside my car. He sat in his driver's seat, door open, looking up my license plate number I guess. Then he came over and I explained why I was pulled over by the side of the highway with my hazard lights on. Not that he asked.

"Oh, I'm sorry, " he said. "Say, you didn't happen to see anybody walking around out here, did you?"

"Just me, and the people who stopped to help."

"Oh, well, I got a call about suspicious men walking to meet each other by the side of the highway. You didn't see them?"

"No, sorry."

"Well, okay. Do you need any help?"

"We have a tow truck coming, I hope."

"Okay. Well, I'll be back in about an hour, so if you're still here, I'll get you some help."

"Thank you."

He drove off. And half an hour later, the tow truck finally came. The driver, whom I will call Loki, came out wiping his eyes and sniffing. He looked about 19 years old, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, with styled blond hair. He looked at my tire, said it was beyond repair; checked my spare tire, which had been destroyed the last time I got a flat and thoughtfully put back in the trunk without my being told that it was now unusable; and asked where I wanted to be towed.

"Santa Fe? Shit. My friends told me I should come out here. They said I should have just stayed home. Santa Fe. Well, I can take you to Santa Fe, but I'd have to charge you. About $79 dollars. Or I could take you to Bernalillo, for about $7, and you could could get a hotel. The price would be about the same for you. I'd recommend Bernalillo."

I thought about it while he filled out a job sheet. "Bernalillo is probably better."

"Okay then. I tried to call you guys, but I got a woman. She was all like, 'They're still there?' I guess you've been out here a while, huh?"

"Jesus. I told them that wasn't my phone."

"Yeah. Also, they told me you were at mile 140. I saw you here, though, and assumed they'd gotten it wrong."

"Yeah, I called back and they said they would change the number. Goddam."

"Well, I'm glad you weren't at mile 140. That would have taken forever. Let's go." He hooked my car up to his truck and told me driving it up there wouldn't hurt the tire. I was, of course, extremely reassured. Then he hopped into my car and drove it up onto the ramp. Anne and I got into the cab, and Loki pulled to the left, onto the division strip. "Usually I'd take an exit and turn around, but shit, no one's out here now anyway. Sorry for cursing, by the way. I'm not supposed to curse on the job. I've been up for a two days. I drank like 20 Rock Stars in a row tonight, and I'm gonna be up until Tuesday. My girl wants to go out on Tuesday, but I'm just gonna tell her to forget it and sleep for two days."

He pulled onto the other side of the highway and flipped on his CD player. The music was a descendant of rap-rock, like Korn but even worse. "I'm not supposed to play this stuff on a job, but I'm gonna fall asleep without it." The first song was about some mix of drugs and sex. No, really. "Aw, this one sucks," Loki said, and skipped to the next track, a ballad sort of number about some sort of mix of drugs and sex. It began to rain. He read a text message (on his smart phone), started writing one back and said, "Hee hee, it's raining and I'm speeding and texting at the same time. Perfectly safe."

Soon Loki took an exit for Bernalillo, and as he came off the ramp approaching a stop sign, he said, "see that stop sign there?"

"Yeah?"

"You were supposed to say no!" He went through it without stopping and soon turned onto a small Bernalillo highway. A pickup truck wouldn't let him in, and he shouted, "Come on, fucker, I'm merging here! Jesus."

Finally, he dropped us at a hotel, and in the parking lot he decided he wouldn't charge us, because didn't want to fill out the paperwork. He backed my car down so I could pull into an empty space, but before I had gotten into the car, a van pulled up and took the space. "Stupid," he said, whether at me or at the van driver, I don't know. Then he got back into his tow truck and roared into the night.

Anne and I got a room, and walked to a tire shop the next morning to replace the flat. As soon as it was ready, we drove to Santa Fe and made it to the library just half an hour after I was supposed to open the place. Not bad, all things considered.

I've made a list of things to write about, and I'm going to try to write a blog a day about them.

Back at the end of July, Anne and I drove down to Albuquerque to watch an Isotopes game on a Friday night. Friday was my one day off from the library over the summer. I worked six days a week, and the only reason I didn't work on Friday was because the library closed early enough that one of the full-time librarians just added a little extra to her shift rather than have me come in for two hours just to lock up.

We had been planning to go to a game all week, and I wanted to look up the players on the two teams to see their stories and their statistics, but of course I neglected to do it until the day of the game. I wanted printouts of the statistics, because there was no way I was going to remember who everybody is. I kind of think of baseball players as existing in more senses than one. They are people, born at a certain time in a certain place, with faces and accents and body types and personalities; and they are a corporeal form of their numbers, incarnations of their triple slash line. When a batter comes to the plate, I find it much more enjoyable to watch if I know who they and the pitcher are at least in this second sense, and if I know about them as people, well, even better.

Anyway, the printer in the house was running out of ink, and I didn't want to drive up to the St. John's library, which is in the other direction from the highway. Instead, Anne and I went to the public library by the house, the one that has the same feeling walking in as a public pool I went to growing up. The parking lot is stretched along a low brown-brick building with tall, reflective black windows. The strips of land by the curbs are full of clumpy grass, maybe a few bulb flowers and prickly bushes. There are posters on the outside walls near the entrance that must have been printed in the mid-seventies, and there's a shady courtyard between the library and an attached building that nobody's ever in.

I printed out the stat pages, read a few stories about each of the players, learned who was a prospect and who had been in the minors for fifteen years, and then we left. On the way out I saw a man who frequently used the public computers at the St. John's library, a man with scruffy dark gray hair and a big mustache, always smiling, always dressed in light-colored office clothes. He saw me and smiled, and I waved at him. Why do I mention this? It was the first time I had ever seen someone I met in the library, outside of the library, and I'd been working there for four years. I kind of imagined the non-college library patrons as being generated by the atoms in the air around the doors every time they came in, and then going back to the earth when they left. So no, they exist, they have homes and families, they shop and go other places around town, even if they are the weirdest collection of people outside a circus that I'll ever see. Just if you were wondering.

We drove to Albuquerque then, just as the sun was settling down after dinner with a nice drink and checking to see if anything was on television. We paid the parking lot attendant his $5, walked to the stadium to buy our tickets, found our seats just to the right of the left-hand batter's box about ten rows up. The game started, and the Isotopes pitcher--one of the only genuine prospects on the team, a 24-year-old named John Ely--proceeded to give up more hits than a boxer with no hands. With only one out, the Iowa Cubs just kept circling the bases like bears in captivity. Ely's ERA for this game so far was 108. (Seriously.) Then suddenly from a spotless sky, rain began pouring down, as though the sun had finished its drink, and then eight-thousand more, and finally it had to rush to the toilet to . . .

Anyway, the tarp came out, ten people running to spread it across the field, rolling the base for the largest Ho-Ho in existence. We were not under a roof, so we got up and went to the concession stands. The rain came down like somebody was pouring the entire ocean from a gigantic helicopter above the stadium. We stood in place next to a hundred other people, filling the walkways and the stairs, moving over the few inches available to us as people passed by, turning one way and then another trying to find a little more space.

We were standing near a beer stand where a group of ten people were chatting and laughing as though they were at a barbecue party. Every so often one of them would throw up his arms, a beer bottle in one hand, and shout, "ehhhhh!" And the whole group would follow his lead and let out a cheery "ehhhhh!"

The rain fell. The public announcer tried to say something but the speakers sounded like they'd maybe been colonized by ants. The stadium played rain-themed songs like "Who'll Stop the Rain?" and "Thunderstruck", and then they played them all again. "Ehhhhhhhh!" People shouted to each other to meet them by the ice cream stand. One woman told another how she had been planning to take her jacket but her husband made fun of her, and she was going to tell him, "See?"

Then the rain stopped, and the grounds crew ran around between the two dugouts with giant brooms, pushing the collected water down a set of stairs and presumably toward a drain. The big screen showed the Loony Toons baseball clip where Bugs Bunny single-handedly beats a team that looks like it's made up of Chicago gang thugs, pitching and then running to catch it himself, playing all nine fielding positions, making the final out by racing across town to the top of the Empire State Building to catch the furthest-hit ball of all time.

An hour went by this way, and then finally the P.A. came on, and it was possible to understand him. The ants had cleared out because of the rain, I guess. "The umpires have canceled the game due to unsafe field conditions. As it says on the back of your ticket, since this was not a complete game, you can take your ticket to the box office to receive a ticket of equal value for a later game." We went to the box office, got tickets for the following Friday, and started driving home. About ten minutes later, we heard a squeaking sound, then a staccato rumble, and the car became difficult to control. Anne pulled onto the shoulder, keeping an admirable sense of calm despite never having had this experience before. I went around to the side of the car, and of course found a flat tire.

My cell phone, meanwhile, was back at the house, charging. I'll continue this story tomorrow.

Fifth of July and two neighbors are setting off fireworks, the loud kind, sounds like a gun fight in a parking garage, two people ducking around the concrete pillars, pop pop pop, pop pop! The occasional rocket launcher, oil drums exploding, shotgun blasts. I can't see any of them. so maybe there really is small-arms warfare going on out there.

Elliott Skinner, tutor emeritus, just came in to the library to pick up some inter-library loans.

"How are you?" he said.

"Good, how are you?"

"I'm fine."

He stood for a second, just looking at me, so I felt like I had to say something else. "I was never good at answering that question."

"Which one, 'How are you?'"

"Yes, that one."

"It's such a common question, you know. You just figure out something to say in advance."

"Nobody ever told me that," I said. This is true.

"Nobody? Yeah, sure, maybe you make a little list, like 'okay,' or 'whatever', and you just go through it." He thought for a few seconds, and then started telling me a story, as he does every time he come in.

"One time, when I was in graduate school at Princeton--maybe I told you this story already, but--Richard Rorty was walking down the quad, and I saw a friend of mine coming onto the quad from the street. They were about to walk up to each other, and I saw Rorty--who was extremely shy--looking around trying to find some way to avoid meeting him. But my friend kept getting closer, and finally he was right there. And he said, 'Hello, Professor Rorty. How are you?' And Rorty stood there, going 'ahh', and my friend walked on. Half a minute later, Rorty was still standing there frozen, hand to his mouth, like he was thinking of what to say. So, you know, you're in okay company."

Then he walked over to the chairs to look at his new books.

Listening to music from 1966 all day and translating, translating . . .

Revolver, The Who Sell Out, Aftermath, Face to Face, Blonde on Blonde . . .

and translating, translating . . .

250 lines in one day is too much. Leonard knows it.

Close-in day at the library. It feels more like last call. A few people were straggling up until 11:30 but they've pretty much stopped now. The piles of books on the counter that I remember from years past aren't there. There's no chaos, no noise, no stressed student workers, no people carrying in fifty books to return at once. The library is shutting down with a whimper. The only witness is the crazy-looking old woman who's started coming in this year, with gray hair like a decaying beehive or, perhaps even better, like a cloud of dirty smoke that follows wherever she goes. She has a face that has been flattened by life, every last bit of life and hope squeezed out. She walks like a Romero zombie in her loose-fitting early 20th century clothes and gigantic plastic glasses, shambling like a lost soul at a bus station that closed down years ago. And now I blow out the candle, and the semester is over.

Every so often I come face to face with the fact that I'm not all that fond of literature, at least not most of what is considered high literature. Case in point:

I read an essay that made me rethink my distaste for audio books. Previously, it had occurred to me that all my driving was just killing my reading time. I took classes at UNM for the 2009 fall semester, so for the last few months I've been driving to Albuquerque three mornings a week. Until now I had been listening to my poor overlooked CDs, but I was starting to feel the loss of time more acutely, and audio books are an obvious way to try using the down-time that driving requires. The essay convinced me to give it a try. "The audio book performance will influence my interpretation, but I can abstract from the performance interpretation to form my own interpretation, i.e., understanding and appreciation, of the work." So I decided to try it out, but the only audio books available to me easily were those in the St. John's library. As you can imagine, these aren't the kind you'd typically want to listen to during a drive. I passed up Herodotus, Dostoyevsky, Homer, etc. and decided on Dubliners. At least it's fiction and was written in English, the earliest story not much more than a hundred years ago.

I have read Dubliners, but long enough ago that I didn't remember almost any of the stories. Back then I had a sense that it was simply important to read. I don't really feel that now, but I have a generally positive opinion of Joyce.

And so I started. I felt distaste for the reader's voice, but as the essay suggested, it was a relatively trivial matter without much influence on my ultimate interpretation.

And that brings me back to the point with which I began: I don't like interpreting literature. The reasons are made more apparent than usual with Dubliners. I have nearly no aptitude for figuring out stories, on every level. I don't know what part of a story is supposed to be vague; I don't feel at all secure guessing at what I'm supposed to understand from things that are left vague; and I just don't enjoy trying. I have a hard time supplying what is missing, in literature and in life. I can't read between the lines any better than I can read Navajo. I find almost any level of vagueness displeasing and unsettling.

I feel quite the opposite when I read criticism of literature, summaries, and other people's interpretations (as long as they seem plausible). It makes no difference to me if it's Wikipedia entries, short essays intended to help students, or scholarly interpretations, I like it all even if I like some better than others. Reading literature itself is unnerving and often baffling experience. Reading about literature: now that I find fun.

Dubliners is anything but straightforward, and is carefully constructed to require interpretation, as are almost all modern texts. They are generally praised for this feature, and praised the more for being especially hard to understand (or "ambiguous" or "open to interpretation"). Whenever I read something like that I realize that I just don't like it.

In short, I am a philistine when it comes to literature. I am also, unfortunately, unable to accept this as saying anything but bad things about me.

There are perhaps two ways of describing teaching and learning in an appropriate
manner. The one is that of begetting and conceiving. The word of the teacher
acts as the form which in-forms the material of the learner's soul, in-forms the
capability this soul has, and transforms it into a knowing soul. This is, on the
whole, the Aristotelian view. The process of learning and teaching is a
generative one, and a great deal depends not only on the activity and
effectiveness of the teacher's word, but also on the receptivity and
potentiality of the learner's soul. The other way of describing teaching and
learning is that of soliciting and gaining insight from within. Through
questioning and arguing the teacher compels the learner to pull out of himself,
as it were, something slumbering in him at all times. This is, on the whole, the
Socratic and Platonic view. Here again a great deal depends on the quality of
the teacher's questions and on the quality of the learner's soul. But just as
questioning has its place in the Aristotelian scheme, begetting is an important
element in Socrates' practice. Learning from books, by images, through
associations, and whatever other ways of learning may be mentioned, falls easily
into the patterns of those two fundamental views. I doubt whether modern
psychologies of learning have added anything to them.

-Jacob Klein, On Liberal Education, a lecture delivered March 25, 1965

If I've ever read anything more tragically stupid, I'm sure I read it in another St. John's lecture.

Yes indeed, nothing better than looking over old emails at work to delete ones I don't need and realizing that I am occasionally a damn fine writer. Every so often I look up from my stupor of days and investigate my life, and I realize that I've lost the impulse to write. It never seemed like a big deal when I had it. I'd write long blog posts and emails and journal entries, and I was always pulling out my pocket notebook to write something down, but I very rarely wrote stories. Since that was my benchmark of being a writer, I didn't think I was doing anything worthwhile. Now I look back at how frequently I wrote in my late teens and early twenties and I wonder what the hell happened.

When I started this blog, I saw it as my responsibility to publish things in it, almost like I had been hired to write a daily column for a newspaper. My deadline was midnight every night. I could take vacations without getting prior approval, but it was on the understanding that I might lose my two or three readers.

I later learned that (a few) other people read my blog at various points but never left comments, so I didn't know it at the time. If anybody I don't know personally has read my blog, I still don't know it. Over time, though, I must have lost all of my readers, mostly to my own neglect.

I meet very few new people these days, and I've fallen out of touch with most of the old ones. I became friends with library students the first two years I was a supervisor, but in the third year, I really haven't. I don't feel a desire to hang out with people in my German class, and even if I did, they live in Albuquerque. And I get tired and misanthropic in most social settings involving more than one other person.

Writing is a famously solitary action, but that clearly isn't the whole story. Without a sense of audience, I often have no urge to write. The more time I spend alone, the less time I spend thinking and, of course, the less I have to describe anyway.

Also, I guess, as I get older I'm continuously losing my engagement with the world. My curiosity is mostly intact, but I primarily focus it on things that other people have written. I get little sense of wonder from encountering new things in the world, and indeed very little seems genuinely new. I often seemed to have an unlimited desire (but very limited ability) to observe and probe people, the way they think and speak and dress and move, the bizarre shapes their relationships with each other take, the mystery of personality. I thought about it often, but to little effect. I've been thinking about it less and less, and I don't know why it is that I no longer become fascinated with people any more.

I can still get plenty annoyed with people, though. As I type this, someone in the preceptorial that meets in the study room attached to the library is polluting my ears with his overwrought, high-pitched, percussive laughter. The sound is like an evil clown in a Saturday morning cartoon, only it has a genuine lunatic quality that cartoons can't match. I wonder if it isn't the student Anne dubbed "hyena boy".

So there, I've met my digital quota for the month. Here's hoping I keep it up tomorrow.

Last night I dreamt that M. Night Shyamalan had died in a plane crash, or perhaps it was from a horrible disease. What a tragedy it would be if we lost the worst Hollywood filmmaker of the present era (if not ever), and thus all the terrible movies he'll produce in the future. It is a great relief to check google news and find that the top Shyamalan hits are still about this historically important director being invited to the White House as a guest at the state dinner for Manmohan Singh.

fumbling toward ecstacy

Epicenters of hamhock faces:

Sports Center
Boston, MA
ex-members of Saturday Night Live
high school sports coaches
reporters for Men's Fitness
County Kerry
John Kerry
Kerry O'Malley's brother Mike O'Malley
Martine Kerry O'Michael O'Malley
McDonalds in Ohio
Ted Mc'O'Hamhock Shyamalan Kennedy
within twenty minutes of any cornfield
and, I'm sure, also in Heaven

Anybody still reading? Read these two paragraphs from the Daily Howler about how poorly people understand the way the media and the government work in the U.S.:

Like Henneberger, Simon described a strange dual system. One side gets to yell objections—the more absurd the better. The other side is somehow required to make an impossibly complex presentation. One side is required to yell two words. The other side has to tick off long list of complex points.

To our ear, Simon and Henneberger were each describing a political system they can’t quite explain. One side gets to yell crazy things—and the other side is required to make intensely detailed presentations! And yet, the side which yells the crazy things is the side which constantly wins! It’s almost like a dream from Kafka—a dream our side can’t quite explain. Then too, we thought of a passage from Wittgenstein: “We feel as if we had to repair a torn spider’s web with our fingers.”

From: http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh082609.shtml

The following sentence appeared in an email from Conference Services about carpet being installed in the library:

Please do not “get in the way” of the crew when you stop by as we need them to get done with this project.

Can anyone tell me what she thought she was doing with the quotation marks? I really want to know. I'm strongly tempted to reply to the email and ask.

The world contracted again.

In the library, I came across a book from 1956 that was put together as an attempt to re-establish English political philosophy (since it was an English editor, who characteristically refers to none but the most significant philosophers outside England but will discusses minor British names at equal length). It's fascinating in a small way, since it contains thoughts on political philosophy which are recent enough to be recognizable, but far enough in the past that it examines subjects which are now taken for granted. The preface, for example, deplores the fact that English philosophy (from Russell through Ryle) killed the three-hundred-year-long tradition of political philosophers writing in English, who "concern[ed] themselves with political and social relationships at the widest possible level of generality." This tradition is dead, and it outright says that the Logical Positivists killed it. And also the Marxists and the social scientists, the first because they were incorrigable relativists who looked at political theories as necessarily contingent, the second because they thought politics were too important to leave to the philosophers.

Topics in the book include an examination of the possibility of multiple moralities as opposed to a single, rationally decidable answer to every moral question; the grounds for the theory of natural rights; whether or not such a thing as the general will exists; and the philosophical justification of punishment. These topics are all discussed in contemporary writing, but I never see the premises so clearly laid out as they are in older texts, where they were still fresh. There's also an earnestness and sophistication of literary style in the old writing that is generally lacking today, alongside of a naiveté--charitably, a willingness to be naive when necessary.

It's not a book I want to read straight through, but I guess I'm glad it's in the library.

I'm currently looking through Insound, trying to find things to buy and shifting between two poles. The first pole is thinking that I have the money and I would like to support Insound, the bands I like, and the physical music industry in general. The second pole is thinking, what am I, a capitalist cheerleader?

I feel nostalgic for the early years of this decade, when I spent hours every day downloading music, renaming the files and putting them in neatly ordered folders, driving to Sound Garden in Baltimore and buying a hundred dollars of CDs, alphabetizing the new purchases on my shelf, setting up a record player in my room and moving up half my parents' old LP collection, adding new LP purchases, finding bands to shop for, asking friends what I should buy, looking at all the album art and reading band interviews and dreaming of product . . . and sometimes listening to it, too.

But even the nostalgia is compromised by thoughts of how silly it all is. I look back on it and it now seems to me that I was trying to break through the album covers and into a fantasy world, a place where the music of the spheres was "I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One" and the shifting landscape took on the shapes of indie album art, populated by sixties rockers in their youth who lounged in the fuzzy pastel-green hills and climbed the rotating, swirly discs of color.

I don't ever feel like I'm in this world anymore. I think I'd still want to live in it, but I know that if I ever get there it won't be through buying lots of records.

In the early days of music downloads, I only got albums rather than just the songs I knew, and I burned everything onto CD. I even made cases, getting blank CD cases from Office Depot, downloading the album art and printing it out or making my own covers if art wasn't available. I would listen to music at the computer too, but if I wanted to play it in my room, I needed it on CD.

It was only much later that I got a digital music player, and I brought it to work with me every day, but I also brought a CD player and switched between the two.

For my freshman year of college, I bought a large CD tower and I brought every CD I owned into my dorm room, along with a large CD book full of burned discs, having finally decided that I decided could do without CD cases for most of my burned albums. My collection had grown by Sophomore year, but because of limited space I went without cases and just used the book. Then I took a year off from school and lived in Los Angeles, with few possessions at first but, even though I had no income, a steadily growing music collection. For Junior year I took a move that was radical for me, bringing no music players to Santa Fe but a turntable, a portable Discman and a pair of head phones. As a result, I almost never listened to music in my room even though I kept buying a bunch of CDs online almost every month.

Skipping ahead to my move to Santa Fe in 2006, even though I knew I would be living there for a long time and almost certainly never moving back in with my parents, I left most of my CDs behind in Maryland to save space in the car. I had an 80 GB iPod, and Anne had another 20 GB or so I could fill on her laptop, and so finally in 2006, almost a decade after I became aware of mp3s, I went mostly digital. With vinyl. It's apparently a very common combination these days for people who identify as music fans--CDs are mostly pointless when digital music is so easy to get and listen to and carry around, but people are unwilling to cut ties to music in physical form, or perhaps even just a representation of music in its physical form.

And I'm somewhat there with them, but that part of myself is currently losing the argument with what I guess is a saner and wiser Greg who says, "screw you, hipster. Go find a crumbling urban loft with bad central heating to worship your physical representation of music in."

Not that I have anything against following that hypnotizing vinyl with your eyes as it spins on its metal axis until you feel like you've stepped inside the music like it was some pulsing fun house, holding your breath as it coils and coils, tick tick tick up the big roller coaster climb, so high you can see the ocean from up there, and hey, so that's what the world looks like from outside the atmosphere! And then the release finally comes, your and it breaks your heart with joy.

And also, if there weren't such a thing as album covers, a dimension of band identity would be lost, illustrators would have one fewer way to build a reputation and sell their art, and people like Anne would have no way of choosing music to listen to when browsing a store*. And still, after all these years, I have almost never fallen in love with a band and added them to the music library in my head just by downloading their songs. (Here's to The Bees--known as Band of Bees in the U.S.--for being the first and so far the only one.)

There's another reason I still feel like buying music as well, which is that there's a difference between getting a CD put out by Sony or BMG or Colombia, and buying it from a band, an independent label, or Insound. If I ever put out a book or an album or whatever other physical result of creative effort, I know I'd want people to buy it. I want a world in which artists don't need day jobs, as long as they can find an audience who likes them; I want a world in which people who spend all their time thinking about music can make a living selling it; and in the modern capitalist system, the only way that can happen is if people buy recordings and band merchandise, and go to shows.

But at the same time, I also want a world in which everybody has access to health care, education is extremely well-funded or free, nations aren't divided between masters on the one hand and the slave-producing societies on the other, and nobody gets killed for money, ideology, drugs, or prestige. Buying music isn't going to accomplish any of those things. It isn't even going to get me to my bougie world between the grooves. So I think I'll trim down that Insound shopping cart, or even sit on it for a while.

*I'm not making fun of this practice. Honestly. It is kind of an interesting phenomenon, though, and it probably has something to say about the physical representation of music.

I just received a book of German philosophy through interlibrary loan; I knew at the time I was filling out the request form that I couldn't possibly want it once it arrived. The book is by an 18th century thinker named Salomon Maimon. Last names were rare for Eastern European Jews of that time, but he picked one to fit in better among German philosophical circles; he chose this name because of his respect for Maimonides. The book, Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie, is Maimon's comments on Kant's first Critique, which I'm still interested in even though six years ago I would have scorned someone who continued focusing on program authors in a non-academic setting. I requested Maimon because I read in a book on the history of philosophy that Kant said in a letter, “none of my critics understood me and the main questions as well as Herr Maimon does.”

When I first graduated, I decided to put off more school for a while, and ended up getting married and having to put off school for longer while Anne gets her undergraduate degree. For the first year after graduation, when I read philosophy (which was rare) I read somewhat contemporary work like Deleuze and Alasdair MacIntyre. Mostly I read novels and news. In the years that followed, every so often I got into a phase where I obsessed about a single subject and read about it all the time, for months: early English plays, biological anthropology, Flaubert, Roman history, the French Revolution. Inevitably, my interest would fade before I had read everything I'd planned to read. The reason is that every time I become interested in something, I keep pushing it back further and further. The interest in plays started as an interest in Shakespeare, but I just kept looking for more context, and I had to consciously stop myself from learning Old English. I read about ten old plays (including "Everyman" and the so-called "Mystery Plays") before I gave up. The interest in Roman history started as an attempt to read Gibbons, and I decided to look at his sources first; I read some Livy and Polybius, but never got past the first chapter of Decline and Fall.

Currently I seem to be approaching the end of an interest in contemporary philosophy, and I've done particularly poorly this time. I pushed back to (of course) the roots of contemporary philosophy, first making a big reading list of philosophers to at least skim (initially starting with Leibniz), then I decided to fill in the reading list with stuff I hadn't heard of, so I checked out a history of modern philosophy . . . and then another . . . and then five more . . . and then even got a book about histories of philosophy, like the history of the historiography of philosophy, but I still haven't read anything written in the 20th century except Austin's How To Do Things With Words, Derrida's Limited, Inc., and several journal pieces about the conflict between Derrida and Searle found therein. I've also read a number of journal articles written by Analytic philosophers, some about the limitations of Analytic philosophy, others about the limitations of certain Continental philosophers, still more about the origin of the perceived divide into these two oddly designated branches.

I still don't know what I would focus on in grad school, but maybe it would be philosophy after all. But no--no, that would be just too horrible. Even Comp Lit would be better than that.

And yet, here's this book with its pleasingly flexible spine and its corrugated green cover--I've never seen a cover like this, with the texture of finely ribbed corduroy that makes my finger vibrate when I run my nail over it. I can't read it without looking up thirty words per page, but I'll probably get through a good bit of it nevertheless. It fills me with more dread than pleasure to see it, and I even expect the contents to be boring, and yet I couldn't resist at least glancing at it. And what does that say about me?