Incomplete thoughts
garnished with evidence of the
Writing Archive June-Aug2002: link
Writing Archive July-Oct 2002: link
Writing Archive Late 2002: link
Current:
Jan 12, 2005
I may not support this war, but by pushing down on this accelerator, I'm supporting this war. Michael Ventura circa 1991
The Michael Ventura that wrote the above line is dead. The current Michael Ventura can be still read at http://www.austinchronicle.com/features. In contrast, today he would write that same sentiment in this manner:
You may not support this war, but when you fill up your tank, you're supporting this war.
I want to stress the differences between those two statements, which basically say the same thing but address the reader from different mindsets.
As a sidebar, mindsets , or as I like to call them these days "my frame of mind" have been dominating my current thought landscape. It's a photographers metaphor, what you crop and what you include in your frame. Anyhow, back to the differences....
Circa 1991 I was pushing down an accelerator alongside Mr. Ventura, therefore with his statement, Ventura had made me one of his peers, we were partners in this crime of life. With the rest of his essay we crossed America and the dialog he had with himself , he would end up having with me.
The second statement is typical of his current writing. Granted he may be exposing someone's hypocrisy, but the essay becomes a sermon and not a dialog. I could go on and on about how sermon writing shuts me down.
As always, I drag in Alan Watts, but in this case with reason..... Watts is constantly exposing the relationship between the guru and disciple. That relationship carries over to the relationship between God and Man and, in a sense, any teacher/student relationship. For Watts, all those relationships are manufactured, primarily by the student, or at least it is by choice of the student that the relationship exists. But that choice is lost when someone writes from the position of a guru, and with Ventura's current writing I have to force myself into the position of a student. Don't get me wrong, I am student, and I always will be, if only never to have to look at the world with the attitude of one who has seen it all. Age makes this difficult, and thus old writers like Ventura turn out the way they do.
For it is hard to look at my tedious day as Heraclites did, crossing it over
and over again, for the first time.
Jan 28, 2005
There is in me, a writer who would simply plop out a bunch of footnotes to a bibliography and not write a sentence. The desire comes from a stance of wanting to be original, or more accurately an insecurity that the thought I'm about to scribble has already been written more eloquently for me, or better yet, for YOU. Anyhow the style would be akin to an exaggerated form of Borges. Wouldn't that be cool ?...... Eggy would be come an extreme form of Borges. I like that..... Lesee, I could gouge out my eyes.......
snap snap snap snap . oh yeah.... ummmmm where was I..?...Ahem SO....
One of the requirements to the writer of pure footnotes, is an impeccable memory (Funes comes to mind) therefore it would be a memory not so hampered by drink as mine. The main problem with memory is that it also hampers happiness. Anyone who drinks is in complete grips with this fact.
There is a quip that says "If you drink to forget, then pay in advance", this should be correlated in to my writing, as in:
Write before you drink, Egg. Sip....
Memory shot I have recently combed pages of several Lyotard books vainly looking for pages I had read years ago, one of the few introductory chapters before Lyotard would bring in Kant and his writing went into a philosophical haze that my limited education could not pierce. I cannot therefore submit the following with any sort of quotable authority, but I remember reading it, and more than once. So trust me.....
It is in one of those earlier chapters that Lyotard describes the ancient Greeks metaphor for conveying an idea to someone else. They likened the process to a teacher helping a student in crossing a river with a strong current. The current being too strong, in fact, for the student to even attempt, the crossing . The teacher's task then was to cross the river for the student, describing the process, anticipating questions and even try to anticipate exposures to flaws in the teachers own argument. I suppose it's a metaphor for the Greek dialectic process, but I can't find it anywhere.
Sidebar:
Didn't the greeks have great physical metaphors? Ahhhhhth the golden age when language was crisp and clean and metaphors didn't waver far from the shores of nature.. BUT now, in this dark age with the metalepsis just coming out of our ears. All those filthy metaphors piling on top of each other ,a gooey pastry dough layering so deep and so fast, you need to be a Johnathan Livingston Seagull just to keep from being Apocalypse Now'd to death...
Sidebar Over:
Next week, I want to bring in Buddhism's antipodal position on this Greek method.... and if that ain't kinky I don't know what is......
As a final note. I would like to add that this is not a divided nation for any reason. It is not because the president's or religious groups policies are one way or another. It is because the method of communication that is being used on us is sensationalistic, and it's meant to create deep rifts, and alienate people from one another. This is an attempt in eliminating communication between "We the People". And when YOU an I don't communicate we don't build a consensus, we feel isolated and the power is removed from our voices. This is one of the reasons that I try to explore methods of communication, of rhetoric so to speak, obviously in a very informal method. And if you don't know , there are formal courses in this topic offered at Berkeley and such, and Lyotard and Kant are taught in force.
To bring it full round I should simply be footnoting a student in one of those courses and sparing you the informalities.
Feb 22,2005
I was first introduced to Hunter S. Thomson, by what might be called a friend. He was someone that slept on my dorm room couch, and didn't pay rent. He wasn't even a student, although he was out of high school. He just slept there to have the college experience and not really have to go to school. He got away with it. The other 3 people who helped pay the rent allowed him to stay, because he washed the dishes and kept the place tidy. If you ever look at the kitchen of a guys dorm room, it's important to understand that these guys' have had mommies cleaning up after for them for 18 years , so you tolerate a guy who sleeps on the couch and keeps the kitchen under wraps.
Fear and Loathing came way of this couch character, I doubt he ever even read the book, and just saw Where the Buffalo Roam. Nonetheless, Hunter S. Thompson, never appealed to me. Maybe it was all the drugs he consumed that I never took , and never would, maybe it was all the guns, maybe it was the fact this guy who recommended it to me was living on my couch.
There is an attitude that exist in the realm of the human personality that disgusts me, and it is best described as smugness. It is the reigning attitude in Richard Ford's "The Sportswriter" and that's why I hated it so. So in a sense it's the worst book that influenced me a whole bunch. The crappy book introduced me to the sports page, and to the sports writer. Sports writers in this declining period of the roman empire, are some of the best. Because in this country, reporting what is happening between the emperor and the puppet senate is no longer of worth, so we might as well look at the spectacle happening in coliseum.
It is in this arena when I tripped over Hunter again 15 years later, on ESPN Page 2, reading up on football, and gambling, I immediately knew there was a kinship.
His vehement hate for the government and establishment. His love of whiskey. His tendency to call friends at 3:30 .am. Knowing what it was to win, knowing especially what it was to lose, to be wrong. He was a non-writers writer, and this important only because I have spent most of my life trying to be a writer. I have now his books I still have never read to look forward to.
Amazingly his death has been ruled a suicide. Deep down I have my doubts only because I feel he still had a lot left to say.
In my case, though, there will be no doubts.
Mahalo
Oct 31, 2005
I was riding bike today, feeling the cold air pierce through my clothing, I had the odd consciousness of trying to take it all in: the cold, the wind, the clear sky....... It was one of those rare nights when I felt like feeling. Like a drunk who's carelessly sober one day looking around and taking in the striking beauty of a brick. Suddenly, I understood Freud as he realized that the libido was not the driving force behind human activity, but that in the end run, we desire to feel nothing. As a desire, libido is there to be quenched like thirst or hunger.
Like a thief searching his memory for an alibi, I jump to justify my drinking. And seemingly it works out....
I drink to combat my natural inhibition to feel. Or to put in non-negative terms , to combat my tendency towards comfort. Oddly enough I see those around me who don't drink, seeking comfort in the accumulation of things. They want expensive cars, 600 thread count sheets, heaters , vacations in the Rivera ....
I can only imagine, for the sake of justice, or perhaps to hedge off suicide, that nirvana can even be found in the washing of a dish.. But I doubt it. The fact that I want it there, means it won't be, and furthermore, it won't be in drink, nor in sailing around the world, nor in the raising of two beautiful daughters.
Mar 20, 2006
Ruben traces his opinion at 3:20a.m.
my friend believes some semblance of the past remains
something there to keep an old dream alive
it's not gone
but it's unrecognizable now
and to see it requires
a new perspective
but for him
i would trim
about face
in disgrace
i was only here to help
and somehow got hurt
My friend believes
In the goodness found in remote corners
Convinced of badness in his center.
Away to the side
Flirt with beauty,
but the ball doesn't drop
Emptiness abounds