Wax Banks

Still the cutest.

A Monster Calls (Patrick Ness, 2011).

I read this 'YA novel' in a single 90-minute gulp before bed last night. It's lovely and I very much enjoyed it (thanks Norah). I'll note, almost as an afterthought (I forget things like this), that the illustrations are a dark delight.

[SPOILERS FOLLOW for a story worth reading unspoiled.]

* * *

I feel churlish picking on Ness for this, but the climax is frustrating, and throws an uncomfortable light on the rest of the book. A Monster Calls is, after all, about a single mother dying, and her son Conor's complex ambivalence about her impending death -- he knows she won't survive her cancer and his dark secret is that he wants it to be over even so. In his recurring nightmare, his secret, (he thinks) he can save his mother from falling to her death, but he lets her go -- he lets her die. The climax of the book is Ness's rendering of Conor's nightmare, and his confession to the Monster that he wishes for the dying to end, for death to come.

But.

The words 'die' and 'death' don't appear in the book. The words 'It's not your fault' do, of course. This strikes me as an evasion, and a mistake.

Ness retreats from his (strong) rendering of Conor's limited perspective only to make speeches through the Monster, and that's a mistake too. What's missing from the book is a clear picture of what the other characters are going through; after all, that's the thing that no teenage reader is going to understand on his own, but it's the real story, even the cosmic one: Conor's isn't the only life here, but it's the only one Ness focuses on.

The story is divided between somewhat didactic (and in one instance weirdly tonally mismeasured) scenes at Conor's school, somewhat incomplete scenes with Conor's father and grandmother (a fascinating character who deserves, but doesn't get, a moment of revelation comparable to Conor's), and the Monster's evocative stories, which are the best part of the book. Indeed, the novel is a little stiff until the Monster tells his first tale; Ness takes obvious pleasure in the Monster's Entish voice, and the tales themselves are evocative and meaningfully ambivalent.

Each of the three tales contains more wisdom than the novel as a whole, I think -- if that's even possible.

After my own mother died I spent a long time -- years -- seeking comfort and withdrawing from the world, which is knowledge (which is experience). My 'healing process' was slowed by my own insistence, and various people's ready agreement, that it was in fact a discrete process, and that its focus was pain or suffering.

People die. Death isn't special. There's no one to blame; blame is a fiction. It's comfort.

What I needed, in order to 'heal,' was knowledge: to realize that I wasn't the center of the 'story,' that it had no center. My mom's death was pointless. Yours will be too.

Conor's grandmother buries her only daughter. Conor's dad isn't there for his ex-wife's death. These stories are as much a part of Conor's life as his own suffering.

Why do we comfort ourselves by fixating on our pain, when pain is part of something larger? Why are we quick to narrow our vision at those moments of deepest transformation?

I don't think my 'youth' was or is a good excuse for my selfishness.

* * *

These things I'm saying feel ugly even as I say them. Conor is a kid and his story is meant to provide solace for young people trying to understand the emptiness of death. But I can't help thinking that the truth of dying -- its physicality, its inevitability, its nothingness, how small a thing death is -- isn't a problem to be solved. It is the solution. The problem, I've come to believe, is that we make other people's deaths about us, and avoid the mounting evidence that nothing in the world is about us. Not even mom dying. Especially not that.

It seems to me that A Monster Calls is part of a true story, but by its partiality it implies something false. The stories it doesn't tell, the ones Ness skillfully alludes to in the Monster's tales and the grandmother's story but is unwilling, for some reason, to tell outright...those stories belong in this book too. I wish they were here.

French parents are superior? But then what exactly do French parents produce?

My wonderful wife forwarded me this WSJ excerpt from Pamela Druckerman's forthcoming anti-Chua text, Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting. The broad argument: French parents are more comfortable setting boundaries for their children, so everything is better there.

Except, of course, it's not. From the article:

Rest assured, I certainly don't suffer from a pro-France bias. Au contraire, I'm not even sure that I like living here. I certainly don't want my kids growing up to become sniffy Parisians.

There are a lot of things wrong with Druckerman's article: the bourgeois myopia, the cheesy stereotyping of American parents, the pathetic cod-Gladwellian namechecking (she brings on Walter Mischel, inventor of the 'marshmallow test,' to assert that he's never studied French children but his 'impression' is the same as hers(!!)), and especially Druckerman's dead stupid one-sentence dismissal of the deeply entrenched differences in governmental support of childrearing families between France and the U.S.

She even talks (elsewhere in the book) about how awesome it is that French women put on less weight when pregnant than American women do. Of all the tired-ass clichés...

But the deepest problem with the piece is in the paragraph I quoted -- or rather, the question it raises and doesn't even try to answer: if Druckerman doesn't want to raise French kids who turn someday into Frenchmen, why does she have such a hard-on for French parenting? Where does she think Frenchmen come from, exactly?

Turns out the answer is hidden at the end of the piece, and it's got precious little to do with her children:

After about 10 minutes, Leo stopped trying to leave altogether. He seemed to forget about the gate and just played in the sandbox with the other kids. Soon Frédérique and I were chatting, with our legs stretched out in front of us. I was shocked that Leo suddenly viewed me as an authority figure.

What Druckerman wants, of course, is just this: to be seen differently; to sit around chatting her legs stretched out in front of her. To not be 'just' a mom. The real Pamela Druckerman is the woman having a chat at the playground, after all.

What she envies is that French parents -- the ones she sits around chatting with at playgrounds, anyhow -- feel no guilt about putting themselves first.

How do you say 'Fuck off, Seymour, mommy needs her merlot now' in French, I wonder?

A moment for Sasha Laxton.

'Gender-neutral' parenting -- i.e. a posture and policy of nonintervention in a child's experiments with social roles -- is a reasonable practice, or set of practices; at the minimum it can serve as a counterweight to the pathological limitations on sex roles found in (American) adult society. I have no great problem with gender roles as such; insofar as they're social/cultural conventions which amplify sex-linked traits and behaviours, I feel I should act neutrally toward them too. And defend against any intrusion on what I see as best practices, of course -- even if I surrender in the end.

I have a replica WWII GI's map case in olive canvas with a stiff cardboard back; it's the most convenient shoulder bag I've ever had. I refer to it as my purse, and get the occasional strange look for doing so. But it's a pretty butch bag all the same. I take this as a very very very small example of acknowledging the usual boundaries, tweaking them a bit, and going about my business such that my own convenience and comfort are kept high, even if productivity remains at a minimum. I also acknowledge that I get a giggle out of calling it a purse -- but I also explain, more often than is necessary, the super-masculine origins of the bag. Perhaps this is overcompensation in two opposing directions: an unstable equilibrium. Well, I'm not perfect. You?

Sasha Laxton is a five-year-old male. His parents claim to have kept his sex secret for five years. Now he's entered school, and they've publicly revealed that 'he's a boy.'

Here's a picture. Here's a TIME story about some backlash. Here's a quote from Sasha's mother:

“Stereotypes seem fundamentally stupid. Why would you want to slot people into boxes?” Laxton told her local news outlet, Cambridge News. “It affects what they wear and what they can play with, and that shapes the kind of person that they become.”

I'm sure Laxton has done a lot of thinking about the nature of her/their experiment. I don't wish to engage in amateur psychology. And I do understand the progressive passion for replacement gender norms which are more just, or perhaps just differently unjust, than the ones we've got going today. So I want to point out two small things:

• This is not 'gender-free' or indeed 'gender-neutral' parenting. It is indeed explicitly interventionist in a ploddingly conventional way:

  Sasha dresses in clothes he likes -- be it a hand-me-downs from his sister or his brother. The big no-no's are hyper-masculine outfits like skull-print shirts and cargo pants. In one photo, sent to friends and family, Sasha's dressed in a shiny pink girl's swimsuit. "Children like sparkly things," says Beck. "And if someone thought Sasha was a girl because he was wearing a pink swimming costume, then what effect would that have?"

  Good idea, bad idea, doesn't matter: whatever her experiment was meant to accomplish in the beginning, she's cocked it up. Sasha knows what 'hyper-masculine' clothes are -- 'skull-print shirts and cargo pants.' Which of course 'affects what [he wears] and what [he] can play with, and that shapes the kind of person that [he becomes.' His parents -- by all press accounts his mom -- gave him a totally run-of-the-mill gender stereotype as a reference point and said YOU MAY NOT BE THAT. Good choice, bad choice, doesn't matter: now the kid thinks 'avoiding stereotypes' means not wearing traditional boys' clothing.

  The hypocrisy is important. The kid won't be five forever, and someday he'll learn about stereotypes and gender roles and the nature of sexual difference from someone other than his mom and dad. He'll still carry big lessons about the joy of not worrying whether you're doing what everyone else is -- but he'll also carry a lesson, bigger than it may seem at first, about choosing the right stereotypes to please the grownups who made him think he could choose freely...

• Look here:

  So is she hoping that dressing Sasha in pink will change anything? “Yes. If it just made one person think: ‘No, I won’t put that frilly dress on her because it’s a bit silly’ or: ‘Yeah, if he really likes that doll, then that’s OK,’ then that would be really brilliant.

  “All I want to do is make people think a bit.”

  And will she mind if Sasha grows up to be a butch rugby player or, indeed, a hairdresser?

  “I just want him to fulfil his potential, and I wouldn’t push him in any direction,” says Beck.

  “As long as he has good relationships and good friends, then nothing else matters, does it? What’s more important than being happy, and making other people happy? It’s all that matters.” [my emphasis --wa]

  Whatever sentiments Beck is trying to express, these quotes make me...uneasy, to say the very least. I hope you see why: the emphasis on (other) people 'think[ing] a bit,' the weird equation of not pushing a child with 'fulfilling his potential,' the silly idea that frilly dresses are themselves inherently silly -- like cargo pants and skull shirts, presumably, only Sasha seems to be encouraged to wear the dresses and forbidden from wearing the other stuff. (I'll note too that the not-so-faintly condescending tone of the interview just pisses me off.)

The interview isn't about Sasha, it's about Beck Laxton -- just as the furor over Amy Chua's frankly abusive parenting style (like her contemptibly self-serving bestselling account of it) was all about Amy Chua. Fine, fine, that's the media for you.

But consider: if Beck Laxton had taken any other approach to gender norms, and been this self-righteous about it, and given such incoherent justification to the press, and picked such weirdly specific issues to take a stand about ('ruched sleeves and scalloped collar?' seriously?), but not in the name of 'gender stereotypes' -- how would you receive the article? Would her politics be more interesting and important than, say, her hypocrisy?

That said: why is the media covering the story? Whose side are the news media always on?

Lost some steam here, sorry.

Oh Sunday.

Pain of the past in its pastness. Today I'm thinking about...I don't know what. Nothing really. In the car with Feliks sleeping in the backseat and inside the apartment (a few feet away) Agi and the organizer lady, Erin, just a couple years out of college, are getting the place ready for deleading. I miss my parents. My mom is nine years dead. My dad is old, alive, warm, slowing down, far away, a good man I've never known quite how to emulate. He feels in a language I don't know. Mystery to me since I was young though I've long known I was meant (meant!) to come up like him, good and strong and sure. A straight-backed man bent only by time and care. He hasn't lied or wormed his way around, ever. Nothing to hide. He is a good man and I worry that we've never understood each other; or not worry: I mourn. Early to be mourning. He is a living man and good and true, wants nothing but love for his sons. But I fall into the solecism -- or I mean solipsism, I guess -- of mourning.

Meanwhile we're all sick. I feel old. But small and young -- old, I mean, before my time, unearned. Which is to say weak. I mean I'm sorry I've never undertaken to make myself into the strong straightforward man I was to have been. Wheels spinning against inner wheels. I have to go indirect to get to things. To what I think I want (am 'meant') to say.

I got a fine education but I suppose it's done now, in the formal sense. Though learning continues thank god. My brother asked me, back in middle school or high school, to exchange books with him. I suggested 'Dune' and he gave me 'A Tale of Two Cities.' More than 15 years ago. And I never did read it. Never did read a single word of Dickens in my whole life.

All the ways I've hidden from my family. Meeting them always far less than halfway.

Hitchens died at the Anderson center in Houston. My mom went there for examinations when she first found out -- was finding out? was living with the discovery that? -- she had cancer. Today we go to a bed & breakfast up the street where we'll stay for a few days. Then to see my in-laws near Denver. The apartment will be full of poison dust for a few days. I wrote maybe 47,000 words worth of a new manuscript in November. I had to stop writing just before the 30th, and haven't taken it up since.

I'm never able to talk about my family, or death, or my friends, or even just time's passage, without talking too about writing.

It is not my job, I realize. It's how I think. Wasn't always but there you have it.

I don't know what I did before I wrote.

I might have a job for spring semester after all. Then we'll be able to afford day care for Feliks. I'm unusually well-suited to this job and would be happy to have it. All the more reason for things not to work out: I haven't earned that kind of happiness, have I? It's a 'writing job': actually, I'd be teaching writing to bright technically-minded college students. Almost a dream.

I am preoccupied with the people I've been.

I never say 'men.'

Well what sort of man am I. Sitting here in the car sickly, my boy is sleeping in the backseat. I don't know that I respect myself. I used to piss in the kitchen sink so as not to wake our son walking up the stairs. After a while it stopped being a problem -- walking noise I mean -- but I took a while longer to stop pissing in the sink. I'd gotten used to it. So much easier than going all the way to the bathroom upstairs. Now we live in a one-story apartment and the floor outside the bedroom is squeaky all over again, but I've unlearned my shortcut. I thought of it as generous. But I walk on by him now and feel civilized pissing in the toilet. I didn't used to think of it as any big thing. Maybe that's a small win. For me, I guess? Or Western civilization?

I quite like it, you know. The West. Absolutely devastating to authentic self-knowledge, but it's alright.

This week my brother finally disposed of a gigantic sombrero he bought in Texas. He took a long train trip with my mom. I was in college, or maybe grad school. Perhaps they were going to the Anderson center even then. Maybe she was given a schedule at that time, pertaining to the order in which her internal organs would be crippled and destroyed by cancer. First your DNA turns against you, as I understand it, babbling in a new language, mutated -- apoptosis undone too -- so that the logomaniacal babble can no longer be stopped even by death; and your immortal cells band together and grow into a tight-knit community which eats you. Maybe they put the schedule on a nicely-formatted spreadsheet for my mom to peruse while she died by degrees. Your colon, charmingly, to begin; and later on your lungs. Quiet your beautiful voice and steal your cultured appetite. All your learning. No sleep and no rest. Forget how to read. Here is a sombrero for your boy to wear at the train station while carrying all the suitcases. He looks so small surrounded by those bags and you will die long before your time.

Your eldest son will not watch every moment of your collapse and disintegration because he will be 'living it up' in Boston. Too far to quickly drive. Please do not again ask what he plans to do with his graduate degree in video games. He will later fly home on a 'bereavement fare,' though, saving a substantial amount of money on that one-way plane ticket. The world revolves around a dying star. He isn't thrifty but he's not the fool he seems. He'll know he's failed.

If I could only tell you how much I hate myself for not being part of my mom's last years on earth, for not working to preserve and restore and join our shared family body. If I could quiet down long enough to breathe in simple facts like All Things Pass.

The first time I meditated I nearly cried at the realization that I wasn't alone in the office building where I sat. Think of that so tiny thing. That it could mean so much to a man. Not to be alone in a city of millions!

I could be a better friend to my brother. Really I could. We disagree on so much. I told him to 'piss off' two days ago on the phone and he hung up on me. No talking since.

I guess I'm saying this to him. Hello Come back. Or to her, I guess. Come back hello I love you in spite of myself.

A few words about writer-me.

My name is Wally. I generally post online as Wax Banks. It is a college nickname.

I am 32 years old. I live in Cambridge. I have been married for three+ years.

My full-time job is taking care of our son. He is a toddler.

Prior to shifting to full-time parenthood, I was a writer, editor, and occasional teacher and tutor.

I write. Many of my developed skills are writing-related. Since I finished graduate school I have produced a very large, very scattered body of work, which I sometimes forget to think of as 'work.' But it is that, and I am proud of some of the products and much of the process.

I have written essays, short stories, novels, screenplays, novel-length mock self-help books, monstrous collections of intertwined short fictions, and of course 'blog posts' - the latter a category large enough to encompass almost all the others, though I usually stick to essayish bits here.

When I have been able to commit myself to it I have preferred to spend all day writing, but that is of course impossible at present. I have been partly successful at overcoming my resentments about enormous changes that parenthood has made in my life. Being a father is the best, the happiest, the hardest thing I have ever done, and the joy it brings me far outweighs the frustration I feel at not being able to focus on writing.

Though I have not been paid for writing or editing since last year, I still tend to think of myself as 'writing for a living,' and I hope to return to making money with my work in the near future.

I am a father, a husband, and a writer, in that order. I am happy with this state of things; it is a conversation.

Library.

Twaddler/toppler: morning notes starring our 11-and-a-half-month-old baby, Feliks.

• I lie on the ground pretending to be unconscious because I'm a good and caring father. He crawls over to me and begins to poke me in the face with one of his wooden drumsticks. I get up before he has a chance to begin whacking me on the skull.
• He mounts a low Amazon.com box in order to climb to a slightly higher one; falling backward off the low box, he lands on one knee, then rises up en pointe (without the benefit of e.g. ballet shoes or professional dance training) and executes a sly leaping maneuver to get back on the low box. I grab him before he has a chance to mount the coffee table and destroy all our possessions.
• I challenge him to a duel, i.e. I grab one of his drumsticks and start whacking the drumstick he's holding. At first he is confused by the obvious stupidity of this activity. Then he shifts his drumstick from right hand to left and closes on me with a series of attacks learned from the master Thibault. I am driven back nearly to the edge of the Cliffs before realizing I can, in fact, simply reach over and pick him up or crush him like a grape. Sobered, exhilarated, flushed with battle, I surrender manfully.
• Places his drumstick gets caught during his solitaire game of 'Whack the puree-pouch lid around on the ground, hockey-puck-style, with my drumsticks while dad watches': his diaper, my underpants leg, folds in the blanket, eddies in the spacetime continuum.
• My, that is an enormous quantity of vomit, isn't it.
• My friend Farhad once proposed to write a rock opera setting the water-stealing backstory of Chinatown in outer space. Among the songs he listed 'Love Song of a Dying Robot.' What he does not know is that I've actually written and even recorded several versions of the song (and other songs from the cycle, including 'Space Ace' and a variety of asteroid-miner shanties) in the intervening years. I've never been happy with any of it. Sample lines:

  it takes these words ten minutes to reach you
  a million miles away
  longer still when you were in my arms
  dear, that's why today
  feels much like yesterday

  and of course

  oh, row, the sailor sings
  of polycarbon starship wings
  oh, row, the solar winds
  carry me across the galaxy

  now i'm going nowhere
  
  but there's nowhere else that i would rather be

  That sort of thing.

• We listen to parts of DJ Shadow's Endtroducing... and Feliks's actions take on a somewhat louche character. He plays with his outlandish Sassy foam-grippy-rattle-ball object, possibly the most psychedelic/seizure-inducing item I have ever seen in real earth life, with a kind of fin de siècle dissipation, as if biding time in the unlit corner of some cabaret waiting for the secret police to cancel not just the performance nor the fun, but the very idea of progress or continuance; as if aware that he can't stay a twaddler/toppler forever. His cynicism, if that's what it is, is elliptical. Or is it resolve? Or does he need a diaper change? I put on some Duran Duran to lighten the mood but it all feels very, very several-years-too-late...
• He attempts to climb onto the futon/couch. Mercifully, it's too high for him. He contents himself instead playing with my hospital ID bracelet, which I take away because it's probably the single least sanitary object in this impressively unsanitary apartment. Then he reaches for the nightmare toy, about which I will say nothing more at this time in case it reads my blog and decides, in retaliation, to steal my eyes while I sleep.
• He engages in good old fill'n'spill behaviour with his colour/shape blocks, with a twist - he only pulls the blocks out of their little pail in matching pairs (two orange stars, two green squares, two red triangles). I encourage this racist behaviour because of how I was brought up, in a rural area.
• Yay! Stackers!
• Yay! Affectlessly throwing all the stackers over the side of the playpen over and over and over again!
• I would do anything for him. Indeed, I suspect I will: the scariest thing about parenthood, which is to say in the right light the most joyful, is that twenty or forty years from now I'll remember sacrifices and transformations that today, 20 August 2011 in Cambridge, I couldn't possibly have imagined. I have no idea what he's becoming. I have no idea what I'm becoming.

  Meanwhile my wife catches up on sleep just offstage, which she desperately needs because as hard as I feel like I work, she works ten times harder, dies a thousand times when our son cries, is lifted up and lifts me up with each stumbling advance or strange detour he takes. She is the molten core; she's his light, and mine.

• Duran Duran do not have a limitless supply of great songs.

Full of grace.

Soon I will be 95—

That is if I’m still alive.

I ask my friend who is 98,

“What do you think of our inevitable fate?”

He smiles and turns away.

“I think of life,” I hear him say.

--Kirk Douglas

Love and market corrections.

Seeking last night to explain my seeming negativity in response to friends' recounting of their newfound romantic/domestic hopes, I hit upon the following imperfect analogy:

The day-to-day hopefulness of people (particularly young people) in love relates to the systemic health of a relationship, its sustainability and integrity, the way the Dow Jones Industrial Average relates to the underlying strength of and productivity of the nation's economy: i.e. pretty much not at all.

When we're in love or just in hope - when we're pulling for a relationship to be something new and healthy, disregarding years of precedent because This Time Things Are Different - we tend to react strongly to daylong improvements, week-to-week healthy signs, small symbolic gestures or moments. Committed (at least rhetorically) to 'living in the now' or 'for the moment,' we devote ourselves in fact to the next moment, the promise of something swell just around the corner. We give full voice to our hopes and fears and think of ourselves as being at the center of something monumental.

But the Dow Jones has never been higher than when the American economy was going tits-up even as Wall Street raked in record profits; which is to say the soaring stock markets and financial-sector profits of the 90's were a lie agreed upon, a single number more reassuring than the many sets of complicated numbers recording the collapse of the industrial economy and the hollowing-out of the USA's basic material productivity. If you watch the day-to-day movement of the market you'll start seeing 'green shoots' and 'bear markets' even when the fundamentals are unchanged.

Romance is fun and trivially easy but you build your life on the fundamentals. 'He bought me a diamond ring' and 'The sex is great' and 'She's so awesome, she makes me forget my troubles' are single-day market upticks. But the market isn't the economy, as America's small investors have learned over and over to their chagrin these last 20 years. There are plenty of fundamental indicators, ready reflections of the true order of things, if you know where to look:

'Are you kidding me? We can't talk about that kind of thing.'

'At this point I've just given up. He won't clean the bedroom and I'm tired of asking.'

'He can be a real asshole sometimes, but I know that's not the real him.'

'What with the wedding planning and all, we just haven't had time to sit down and have the "do we want kids someday?" talk. I'm sure there'll be time later.'

* * *

The scary thing about a 'market correction' isn't just the vertigo of watching our money disappear hour by hour, it's the realization that the state of the market didn't actually reflect the state of the business concerns it ostensibly followed. Precipitous systemwide drops in stock prices theoretically increase the accuracy of the representation that is 'stock price,' bringing share prices in line with the actual economic prospects of their respective companies. And when prices creep up again, we call it a 'recovery' - and allow ourselves to live in/for the map while disregarding the territory.

Funnily enough, no one refers to stock market increases as 'corrections.'

* * *

Object/representation mismatches are big trouble in relationships. To address them after the fact is painful (the 'market correction,' so to speak). They are easily prevented, though, when both parties in a relationship work hard to foster an environment in which open, honest communication is the norm, and neither party is expected to perform reassurance solely to palliate the other.

I had other stuff to say but I'm feverish, dehydrated, dog tired, and unable to follow my own writing. This will have to do! HOPE THAT HELPS!!

(bliss is body)

our ~11-month-old son got his first musical instruments today: a marching drum and a little wooden xylophone. at first he just wanted to bang things with the sticks and mallets, which was a joy in itself. seeing him control his environment, even in that small way, is pure pleasure for a parent.

then he and i got into some mallet/stick trading game - he would play with one of each, then i'd trade him a stick for a mallet, and we went back and forth that way for a while. agi was reading her book ('ancient bodies, modern lives') and beaming at us every once in a while, as was her father, feliks's grandfather, who is a painter/sculptor when not working as a thin films engineer, and who obviously wants the kid to turn out a foolish artist. (am i projecting?)

then feliks started drumming on the drum.

i think that's the widest smile i've smiled in a long time. absolute bliss. he was more adroit with his left hand than with his right, surprisingly(?) - tapping in natural rhythm atop the drumskin, hitting just off-center, then sweeping the stick around to rattle on the rim.

i know it's not 'music' to him; on the other hand i'm not sure my own music is 'music' in any essential sense. it's feeling, aurally encoded; echoes of some innerworld, or sense-mapping of a possible world yet to fall into mere physicality.

each day of parenthood is another invitation to tumble laughing into the family-body, the triple-helix that is our own memory-making being. feliks can't know how happy he makes me, not yet; because 'happy' isn't for him a separate category. it's just one way of being. he needn't 'think' about it. but surely he feels it - surely he feels deeply those moments of joyful becoming. feeling deeper than thought.

i don't know what i know, but what i feel is that growing with my son and my wife, being welcomed into the greater body (welcoming all of us each in turn; dissolving), is the truest feeling i know, the most fulfilled. not 'best'; that language is inadequate.

i think: i hope he loves music. i wonder whether he'll love making music as i do, will hear and see it all day. i remember the look in my then-future-wife's eyes as a beloved song rumbled out across a dancefloor (my god it was) nearly a decade ago; she was the music, momentarily. her body a melody line. i hardly knew her then. she was then for me a lovely idea, arm's length: 'Woman' or something. now we have a chance to be one body. it is bliss. we are bliss.

Playtime.

Why

Why ruin our eyes with TV, let's design freeways after dinner tonight.
--Bob Kaufman, 'Blues for Hal Waters'

Whatsthatnow?

(buttons-buttoned)

It's cold in the outside but warm upon the inside, is the problem. My son is in the backseat, his baby seat, in a bear suit - with adorable little bear footies and everything, and ears - and the sun doesn't reach him directly, but it does warm the air. Me, on the other hand, it absolutely bludgeons. I feel it as a physical force on my chest, even when I park in the (when-I-got-here-it-was) shade. Creeps around the corner of the building, I imagine, and just jumps on me like a night-mare. (Do you know that the 'mare' in 'nightmare' isn't a horse, it's a hag?) F. likes the engine's rumble but I don't know how to compensate for the ventilator-leakage (hot air) or the sun breath-stealing on my several-layered chest - I mean F. is pretty far back, around the seat-corner in his canopied shade-within-our-shade, so mightn't it get cold back there long before I notice any chill? This is what worries me: not only can I accurately judge his situation solely according to my own standards, the 'real world' for him follows some entirely other set of standards that I can't even begin to grasp.

The point being, I keep shutting off the engine for a while to let the car cool (and stop slow-murdering every living thing within inhaling distance of the exhaust pipe), but that curtails the sleepening rumble, and my baby stirs, Christ; then the emphysematic ignition-cough threatens to rupture sleep too (I am an idiot), but is 'apartment-warm' the right setting for the heater? Won't it be 'basement-chilly' in the backseat, the baby seat? Well, doesn't the baby seat have its own thermal effects too? Anyhow Hot is too hot and Cool is obviously cold, a pointless deception. And the sun, the sun (I missed you all winter, I always do, I can't admit it though) just abuses me all the while. I bet I get a sunburn all the way through my t-shirt and thermal, right there on my man-tits. What a laugh! See? Being a parent is all about the good times.

Diaper.

[removed by the author, sorry...]

Amy Chua addendum.

Another astonishing passage from the book:

Florence [Chua's mother-in-law] and I got along great for years—she introduced me to the world of modern art, and I used to love accompanying her to museum and gallery events—but we started having conflicts after Sophia was born. In fact, it was through butting heads with Florence that I first became aware of some of the deep differences between Chinese and (at least one variant of) Western parenting. Above all, Florence had taste. She was a connoisseur of art, food, and wine. She liked luxurious fabrics and dark chocolate. Whenever we returned from travels, she always asked the girls about the colors and smells they’d encountered. Another thing Florence had definite taste about was childhood. She believed that childhood should be full of spontaneity, freedom, discovery, and experience.

At Crystal Lake, Florence felt that her granddaughters should be able to swim, walk, and explore wherever they pleased. By contrast, I told them that if they stepped off our front porch, kidnappers would get them. I also told them that the deep parts of the lake had ferocious biting fish. I may have gone overboard, but sometimes being carefree means being careless. Once when Florence was babysitting for us at the lake, I came home to find two-year-old Sophia running around outside by herself with a pair of garden shears as large was she was. I snatched them furiously away. “She was going to cut some wildflowers,” Florence said wistfully.

The truth is I’m not good at enjoying life. It’s not one of my strengths. I keep a lot of to-do lists and hate massages and Caribbean vacations. Florence saw childhood as something fleeting to be enjoyed. I saw childhood as a training period, a time to build character and invest for the future. Florence always wanted just one full day to spend with each girl—she begged me for that. But I never had a full day for them to spare. The girls barely had time as it was to do their homework, speak Chinese with their tutor, and practice their instruments. [my emphasis --wa.]

* * *

The book is not ultimately about Amy Chua's 'parenting style.' It's definitely not a parenting manual. It's about her very serious emotional trauma, the nature of which she does not (intentionally) explore at all, and her resultant behavioral/emotional deformities (paranoia, lying, egotism, lack of impulse control, emotional abusiveness, etc.). That's why reading her book is so uncomfortable. She is not an idiot; apparently she's quite intelligent. Her inability to distinguish between analytical intelligence and actual social health is not the mark of a bad mother; it's the mark of a serious handicap.

Amy Chua.

Two passages from her book-length apology for herself, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. First:

“I don’t want to give a toast,” was Lulu’s response.

I pulled out the big guns. I threatened everything I could think of. I bribed her. I tried to inspire her. I tried to shame her. I offered to help her write it. I jacked up the stakes and gave her an ultimatum, knowing it was a pivotal battle.

When the party came, Sophia delivered a minimasterpiece. At sixteen, standing 5’ 8” in her heels, she had become a stunning girl with a sly wit. In her toast, she captured her father perfectly, gently poking fun but ultimately lionizing him. Afterward, my friend Alexis came up to me. “Sophia is just unbelievable.”

I nodded. “She gave a great toast.”

“Absolutely . . . but that’s not what I meant,” said Alexis. “I don’t know if people really get Sophia. She’s totally her own person. Yet she always manages to do your family proud. And that Lulu is just adorable.”

I hadn’t found Lulu adorable at all. During Sophia’s toast, Lulu stood next to her sister, smiling affably. But she had written nothing, and she refused to say a single word.

I had lost. It was the first time. Through all the turbulence and warfare in our household, I’d never lost before, at least not on something important.

This act of defiance and disrespect infuriated me. My anger simmered for a while, then I unleashed my full wrath. “You’ve dishonored this family—and yourself,” I said to Lulu. “You’re going to have to live with your mistake for the rest of your life.”

Lulu snapped back, “You’re a show-off. It’s all about you. You already have one daughter who does everything you want. Why do you need me?”

And:

There’s another huge difference between dog raising and Chinese parenting. Dog raising is easy. It requires patience, love, and possibly an initial investment of training time. By contrast, Chinese parenting is one of the most difficult things I can think of. You have to be hated sometimes by someone you love and who hopefully loves you, and there’s just no letting up, no point at which it suddenly becomes easy. Just the opposite, Chinese parenting—at least if you’re trying to do it in America, where all odds are against you—is a never-ending uphill battle, requiring a 24-7 time commitment, resilience, and guile.You have to be able to swallow pride and change tactics at any moment. And you have to be creative.

Last year, for instance, I had some students over for an end-of-the-semester party, one of my favorite things to do. “You’re so nice to your students,” Sophia and Lulu are always saying. “They have no idea what you’re really like. They all think you’re nurturing and supportive.” The girls are actually right about that. I treat my law students (especially the ones with strict Asian parents) the exact opposite of the way I treat my kids.

* * *

These passages are not even close to the most unintentionally nauseous material in the book. 'Unintentionally' is the key word here. The book is perversely enjoyable, but probably not for the reasons Chua would like: the narrator is a raving narcissist, an unabashed hypocrite (she obsesses about her children's insufficient 'Chineseness,' criticizes Western men who 'fetishize exoticism' in music and in women - yet never for an instant considers forcing any musical instrument on her youngest daughter except...the violin), a woefully failed cultural analyst, an elbow-in-the-ribs 'ironic' racist, and - crucially - able to point out the absolute unnaturalness of her supposed Chinese conception of the child as 'an extension of the parent' without possessing any understanding of what that means to the child. It's meant to be family comedy, but the book keeps veering into twisted non-apology apology; in the Coda, Chua has her children congratulating her on what a great mother she's been. (Yes: the same Lulu who correctly calls out Chua's narcissism in the first excerpt then turns around to stroke her ego at book's end. This is called an 'editorial stance,' readers.)

The prose is funny in places, but it's not 'comic' writing; that is to say, you're never laughing with the book, but rather in spite of (literally 'spitefully at') Chua herself, who no doubt wants to appear to be in on the joke but seems to lack some basic critical faculty that would allow such a thing. She depicts her own acts of cruelty and overweening egotism with an eerie affectlessness that she apparently tries to pass off as 'irony.' Chua is hugely, contemptibly wrong about children's interests and dedication (have you ever seen a kid play a video game, or work on a model train, or work up an elaborate fantasy story? they're the hardest workers in the world if they're not subjected to abuse), but her book is canted such that you'd never know what lives her children have other than the one she's living for them. The book is framed disingenuously as her own 'coming to realization' story, and she speaks sincerely of her own 'pain' at 'allowing' her children to be human beings rather than her own ego-functions, yet her chapter-long 'realization' is unreadably cute nonsense, and her 'pain' differs from every other parent's only in Chua's delusion of specialness (and aloneness, sadly).

I feel sorry for her, but not in the way the book's third part clearly intends - that is, I don't feel pity for an ostensibly-intelligent person who can't allow her children to emancipate themselves (and lacks the ability to understand the basic nature of jazz or gamelan). And I don't feel bad for someone who's ordered her entire self-conception around banally racist images like the titular Tiger Mother. (She's not kidding when she babbles about 'Chinese' and 'Western' parenting styles; her descriptions of both have the 'truth' of racist jokes, but are inadequate as analysis. Surprise!) I feel sorry for someone who takes the emotional abuse she suffered as a child and passes it on to her own children.

And I feel sorry for Chua's husband Jed, who appears in the book only when required, i.e. (1) as a semi-important part of Chua's all-important backstory; (2) to commute from North Carolina to New Haven so that Chua can have an academic job while 'parenting full-time'; (3) to point out that Chua's being a self-obsessed asshole, which she invariably ignores; (4) to ratify her choices by allowing himself to be steamrolled; (5) and this:

[A]part from intervening occasionally to defuse blowups, Jed always took my side in front of the girls. From the beginning, we’d had a united-front strategy, and despite his misgivings, Jed didn’t go back on it. Instead, he tried his best to bring balance to the family, making us go on family biking trips, teaching the girls how to play poker and pool, reading them science fiction, Shakespeare, and Dickens.

In other words: Jed allowed the girls to experience pleasure outside of a pleasing-authority context, and this - Battle Hymn of the Jewish Father - merits exactly one sentence of Chua's attention. She only has one kind word for his contribution to the children - and in that case she specifically praises...his DNA.

Long story short: Chua is exactly like every other status-obsessed rich asshole in this country, and she's obsessed with her own racial identity because it gives her a way to understand her own emotional dysfunction, which otherwise she apparently can't understand. Her 'ironic' treatment of her life story is a function not of presentation style but of simple incomprehension; the book gestures at self-consciousness like it's supposed to (this is America, after all), but ultimately she can't allow it to do anything but serve what I can't help thinking is its secret purpose: to justify Amy Chua's hypocritical cruelty toward her daughters. The myopia of the book is its most important feature for the long term: it stands as a testament to the contemptible smallness of the East Coast elite's imagination and ambition.

Congrats, Amy Chua: you did all you were capable of.

Ruminative!!!!

Shartiste!!!!

Dooce. I wanted to not post this, but apparently I also wanted the other thing more. So!! DOOCE.

I can't recall getting even five minutes' enjoyment or enlightenment out of dooce.com. Perhaps there's something wrong with me. She is evidently quite well-off because of her enormous readership (one million Twitter followers, really?), but as a 'literary' artifact or publication I can't say it holds any appeal or value for me. Maybe you Just Had/Have To Be There? Or to be Going Through Stuff With Her?

Maybe you have to be able to peer into the personal diary of a woman whose fetishistic furniture photography reveals that she stores a recent paperback of Infinite Jest on the spotless white shelf she set aside 'to stash [her] collection of decor magazines,' to look at that and say, I dunno, 'I guess that's life in a six-bedroom?' But I can't seem to bring myself to say it, except of course that I just did. [Also oh my god she uses the phrase 'vintage deer antlers,' kill me.]

It's not important, I know. But now I can't go back to not knowing that yet another someone was getting rich off this kind of thing:

So he pulled up my record from five years ago, glanced back at me, looked back at his computer, and that's when I involuntarily blurted out, "I wrote a book about my experience in the hospital." Maybe to let him know that I was serious? That here I was dumb enough to try and do this whole thing again? And he immediately whipped his head around and said, "You're THAT woman?"

Yes. Indeed. THAT woman. The woman who writes about poop and hemorrhoids and stitches in her vagina YES DEAR GOD THAT'S ME. Listen, my Republican, Mormon, gun-owning father read my book and he still loves me! That counts for something, right? I guess his wife had heard about my book, and when she was describing it to him he knew immediately that I had to have been someone he treated because of the speed with which I healed. He treats postpartum depression very differently than most doctors, and his patients usually see results instantly. And that is exactly what happened with me in the hospital five years ago, I took a cocktail of meds and within two hours I felt like a different person.

So we did a lot of talking, and since he's been treating women for this very condition for over 30 years I did a lot of listening and learning. The odds were completely stacked against me, and he said that if I had been gearing up and treating the possibility of this in my third trimester I might have been able to avoid it. But since I didn't it was time to attack it now. So he made a minor tweak to my meds and asked me to come back and see him in two weeks, and I am not even kidding, I felt better that night. In fact, better does not do what I was feeling justice. I felt free.

So what about breastfeeding? That's what you're all wondering, I know, and this is what I'm going to say: he thinks that what I'm taking is perfectly safe to take while breastfeeding. He's prescribed it before to women who are breastfeeding and everything has been perfectly fine. No, I'm not going to talk about what I'm taking because one, it's no one's business, and two, I don't care that you think I'm poisoning my baby. I also think that anyone going through this needs to consult their own doctor and make an informed, personal decision about their individual situation. And then go on and live a better, happier life.

I've boldfaced the bit that turned my stomach, in case you were wondering. I hit that sentence and realized that this person's Internet fame has come, not from 'honesty' as I understand it, but from something a bit less admirable. It's not the 'no one's business' sentence on its own that's bothersome, because one's cocktail of yummy psychotropics isn't a priori anyone else's business. Rather, it's the willingness to make a very minor media spectacle out of the people around her for a decade (Happy Ten Years!) coupled with an unpleasantly professional image-management approach - making ad dollars off your blog posts about your depression, then specifically cutting off your discussion at a crucial information point (Which Depression Meds Actually Work and Are Safe?) because, unlike your glee at seeing your baby shit on your mother, that piece of information is not worth sharing.

Plus it's weird to insist, over and over and over, that talking about hemorrhoids is scandalous!!! - to make a big deal out of your own sense of your own transgressiveness - and then publish an endless stream of carefully-photoshopped images of your family online, y'know? At a certain point it all starts to seem not so much 'confession' or 'candor' as 'broadcasting.'

The amazon.com page for her memoir mentions her 'trademark wit,' but 'wit' isn't the word.

There is nothing scandalous about dooce.com. It's...well, it's not much. I mean it's an extraordinary amount of not much. Maybe that's exactly what people want. Ten years is a long time to keep that up, and I salute her.

Balls!!!!

Andrew Rilstone: still a marvel.

This is a couple of years old, but I just read it, and it is extraordinary:

there was me and Shaun and Jeffrey and Roger and Martin and green graph paper from the back of a maths books and a knight and a wizard and some skeletons and a spider and on the lowest level there was a small black dragon and when it finally died they all cheered and I was the referee

It's not about that, or not just that. It's us. Have a look.

Unordered assorted fives.

Representative not definitive.

BOOKS: Mimesis, Against the Day, Riddley Walker, The Cheese and the Worms, The Great Outdoor Fight.

DISCS: Surrealistic Pillow, Inspiration Information, And Their Refinement of the Decline, Tango: Zero Hour, 6/14/00 @ Fukuoka.

TUNES: Running the World, Freedom 90, The Loneliness of a Tower Crane Driver, Let's Take a Walk, He's Gone.

DISHES: picadillo, cremita, com chien, malai kofta, tortles.

PENCILS: Milch, Wallace, Whedon, Mamet, Crowley.

GAMES: Golgo 13, Dominion, Final Fantasy, Civilization, Top Secret/S.I.

FLICKS: The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Spirited Away, Serenity, Monsoon Wedding, Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

LINES: Please don't make me redundant; You want me to be...explicit?; ...the sun flung spangles, dancing coins; They are in love. Fuck the war; Well, people kept ringing the bell!

SPOTS: coming into Boston on 90 going 100, El Morro, in the car in the rain, nighttime on Beacon Hill with headphones and bourbon, downstairs at Harvard Book Store.

DAYS: watching In the Mood for Love with her, 'We have a son,' lying down amid attentive hush everything music after midnight 8/16/98, that day at the Arboretum, Christmas '89 at a Motel 6 in Kentucky unwrapping the Nintendo.

SCENES: Swearengen runs to defend Alma, Willow finds out about Xander and Faith, Poor Grendel's had an accident, Fats tells Mingus good-bye, with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

ENDINGS: Southland Tales, Fight Club, OK Computer, Billy Breathes, The Wasp Factory.

NOW: find socks, get him into the bear suit, pick her up at work, figure out dinner, carry on as if everything is possible and nothing but perhaps learning is compulsory which it is and it isn't if you catch my meaning do you catch it are you with me we have come through it is always I believe in can we go on into love yes we can yes we can.

Is that baby's first tooth?

Why yes it is! Happy 6 months, little one.

Does this mean our sleep schedules are about to get 200% more awesome?

Why yes it does!

Thanks, ya goddamn chucklehead.

Shouldn't be about computer programs, should be about the baby, but it's about computer programs.

Spent the day trying to write, failing to read, being kicked repeatedly and gleefully in the balls by LaTeX's fontspec package, and - oh yes, taking care of my rapidly developing son, who turns six months old tomorrow. Christ, such a long time. Tired as I am, I kept thinking today that the LaTeX bits were the worst. Maybe they were; after all, the worst moments with Feliks are still a damn sight better for the soul than staring at .log files trying to figure out why, when something like this is allowed to exist, folks are still able to convince themselves that God is real:

<to be read again> 
                   \bool_1_2:w 
l.5 \setmainfont{AGaramondPro-Regular}
                                      
The control sequence marked <to be read again> should
not appear between \csname and \endcsname.

./fontspec-test.tex:5: Missing number, treated as zero.

<to be read again> 

                   \bool_ 

l.5 \setmainfont{AGaramondPro-Regular}

                                      

A number should have been here; I inserted `0'.

(If you can't figure out why I needed to see a number,

look up `weird error' in the index to The TeXbook.)

Yes, that really is the error log text. Isn't community-developed software charming? Also, notice that 'weird error' is wrapped up in TeX-input-style 'smart quotes.' That's class, right there.

In the end the TeX Live Utility.app was allowed to do its overcompensatory macho thing, updating every package in grabbing distance, and that did nothing, NOTHING, CHRIST!, but then I rebooted and everything was fine. Same baby, same terrible weather, same decaffeinated coffee, but now XeTeX in its guise as XeLaTeX is able to just get on with the business of Garamonding my files, peace be upon all of us, amen.

Exhaustion.

At the point of exhaustion - having spent the day just on the respectable side of teary hysteria, after a near-sleepless night - I ask if Agi can start the baby's bedtime rituals without me. 'Of course,' she says. 'I can use the crib (to keep him in temporarily).' She starts up the stairs. This reminds me of something. I call up after her, 'We played in the crib today.' She makes a noise of pleasant surprise.

At the end of a day's despair and confusion, the mere thought that I might have done something right is a new wound, and I do cry, a little. As usual, the possibility that I'm not the terrible person I imagine myself to be is too much to bear: too big, too new.

Fatherhood has called for the abandonment of nearly every idea I've ever had about myself 'as a person.' Letting go of my precious self-conception is the hardest thing I've ever done; merely keeping a defenseless infant alive seems trivial by comparison, not least because it is literally the most natural thing in the world.

Soccer.

'Proper football,' rather. Dad brought me up cheering for his hometown team: Manchester United. I played year-round until I reached high school...which had no team at all. Missed it so much I took up refereeing (with dad; bliss). The game is so fluid, unadorned - elemental effort and pinpoint precision, but civilized. Like writing about love. Cheering for England against the Germans in the 1990 World Cup semifinal (repeatedly, on VHS) was one of the greatest/worst experiences of my young life. The American game lacks its pastoral simplicity: two tribes, simple rules, simple goals, a ball, a brisk jog, time.

Two things about Ta-Nehisi Coates.

[Started this a little more than a year ago. Added two sentences today and here it is. I've nothing to add today.]

1) He is a spectacular writer and an admirably honest man.

1.5) Even better: he's gonna be even better someday.

2) This -

My Moms once busted my lip after I tried to literally look down on her. I was 13 and had recently grown taller than her, and thus thought I could intimidate her. Heh. I was left singing that old Ice Cube riff, "With a right-left, right-left your toothless\And then you say godddamn they ruthless." My Moms came up in the projects and used to walk miles to school, and miles to church. She spent her summers in the country down on the Eastern Shore. She was raised by Negroes who did not play, and she took the lesson.

This is hard for a lot of people to hear, but in my family, in my neighborhood, and in my community this is what part of what parenting meant. If you weren't feeling the edge of the sword on your ass, then you were responding to the possibility of it. One thing I learned, while touring for my book, was that a lot of people consider this to be child abuse. It really was news to me and ultimately unthinkable. Almost everyone I'd ever known had come up the same way. My book editor would joke, while reading, the manuscript about his grandmother coming up from the South and making him go search for a switch. In Harlem.

Which isn't to say I, or people who came up like me, are without a critique. I smacked my son's hand until he was four. And then spanked him until he was seven. Most of this was about him sucking his teeth at his mother, or some such. We're done with that now, and at least in my presence, he doesn't exhibit that kind of disrespect. When he's staying with my people in Baltimore he doesn't earn any immunity, and he's subject to the same threat of the sword as his cousins. I get the argument against corporal punishment. But there's something elemental in me, that recoils at modern parenting. I was on the train the other day and watched a kid repeatedly say to his father, "Daddy, you're a jerk." Wow. I confess that my immediate thought was, "that kid need his ass whipped."

- is fucked. Not the fact of hitting kids, which is complicated, but the affectionate internalization of this circular logic of violence. Or, no: not violence but bad, stupid pedagogy. Hitting kids is the bluntest teaching method imaginable, and for that reason it's useful in some situations ('Don't touch that very dangerous thing!') and absolutely wrong in some situations ('Don't try to make me feel small in order to get what you want; it will not work'). Spanking and hand-slapping are largely symbolic violent acts - I remember most spanking as a warning rather than a punishment - and I understand why they're useful. Shorthand! (Literally.) But motherfuckers do not put the switch to a child because they're interested in communication - and so they hurt the child's chances of growing into an adult who is interested in (and skilled at) communication. Sometimes it turns out OK (cf. Ta-Nehisi Coates?).

Mostly it doesn't.

What Coates calls 'elemental' is 'habitual.' That's something worth pursuing later, maybe?

Writing.

I'm decent at it. Last summer I wrote nearly every day, all day. Bliss. Since Feliks's arrival I've had time, lacked will, clarity. Long reads are taxing, never mind deep writes. My wife supports my obsession; her faith staggers me. I work(ed) harder at writing, however fruit(ful/less)ly, than almost everyone I know. It dissolves me. Two thousand words in, I'm gone, 'ideas' are gone; what's left is music. Word-music is lifeblood. I distrust affectless expression, hence my character(!) troubles? I usually hate my reader(s)' favourites; vice versa. My weblog is so important to me I should kill it. Someday. Someday.

I can't tell whether this is a nuanced distinction.

Investing your time and investing yourself (your Self) are not the same thing. I spent a lot of time at Houghton Mifflin over 13 months but was never invested in the company, nor even in the work I was doing, really. I've spent a good deal less time with Feliks but am infinitely more invested in his happiness and wellbeing. I'll stake my own happiness on his.

Comparatively trivial analogue: lots of gamers invest years of their lives in, say, roleplaying campaigns - without having an emotional stake in the fictional events themselves. The investment of time is colossal but the events remain trivial, irrelevant, almost entirely affectless (effect-less too, in narrative terms). Immersive dramatic play is very different from long-term resource management projects, which many (e.g.) D&D campaigns seem to turn into.

The good time you're having with your buddies, on the other hand, is an actual good time. No need to shy away from that.

I just biked over to 1369, bought a cup of decaf (it's late), closed my eyes, and got lost in the 12/28/10 'Harry Hood.' Bliss. The dissolution, however brief, of Self. You just have to give away the thing you mistakenly think necessary - control, identity - in order to reveal, or perhaps be revealed by or to, that which is truly essential. Transcendence is an effect you generate, not a quality you possess. Someone's got to give.

Of course.

"Empathy can't be taught, but it can be caught." --Mary Gordon

Not as cute as the baby pictures, I know.

- - - THE PROUD PAPA - - -






NOTE 'CHARMING' FACIAL ASYMMETRY,
COLOSSAL NOSE (THANKS MOM),
WEIRD LEFT EYEBROW,
BLISSFUL HAPPINESS (THANKS FELIKS),
COOL/LAZY STUBBLE

Samuel Chompers 'goes bumbo,' is a total Smiley Bones, yawns a bit melodramatically, regards the camera with mature acceptance in his guise as Cuterson, and (in the final instance) has obviously been Photoshopped.

\usepackage{bravery}

Wrangling with LaTeX is a mind-altering experience. I have no idea how or why the program decides to generate indices and cross-references only some of the time; nor is it clear to me how it differentiates between varieties of whitespace, nor how it can be so scrupulous about intra-line spacing and so inappropriately casual about orphaned lines. LaTeX clearly has opinions, and promises clean algorithmic/deterministic responses to user actions, but there appears to be some kind of Magical Indirection layer between .tex and .pdf - if the eventual output of the alchemical process weren't heartbreakingly beautiful it wouldn't be worth it. It's too much like parenting as I understand it: you encourage the creature to grow, to take what you've provided and transform it however it sees fit, but the hands-off waiting and watching do harrow the soul...the final sacrifice is a switch-flip, your identity shifting from 'creator' to 'spectator,' or even 'fan.' I want it to be 'friend,' but worry that it's impossible. I've never been my parents' friend. Wouldn't know how. They are immanent and I'm just the Eye that takes them in. I wonder what LaTeX's opinion is of me. I haven't yet wondered what it thinks of the writing. No point. What You Say Is What You Get. That's one variety of justice.

light is growing brighter now

Here's a best guess for the moment: 'life-affirming' songs don't report on increased self-confidence, they offer it to the listener. Music on record is about the 16-year-old hunched up next to her stereo in the middle of the night with a furrowed brow trying for the tenth or thousandth time to make out the lyrics to a song that she'll someday cry at the mere memory of; if she wakes her parents everything will fall apart; in exchange for her devotion it's not enough to give her 'something of yourself,' you have to give her everything. She doesn't have to earn it. Emptying yourself and living for a moment with (and in) her heart rather than your own is how you earn the right to keep carrying on as you do. You're not making a record of yourself or your 'art' - you're giving her a chance to mark the time that is her life. All you can offer is a gift. She'll give you so much and more. You have to believe that. I mean 'understand.' I mean 'believe.'

Jurrasic Park: Cambridge.

While nursing, my wife asks whether I could tell which part of the baby's most recent crying jag was the 'hunger cry.' 'Sure,' I say, and I imitate his high-pitched cawing. She sits for a moment in silence - surprised and impressed. It is a very accurate imitation. I am pleased with myself.

'Did I just make your other breast fill in with that sound?' I ask.

'No,' she responds, 'I think you just made some pterodactyl's breast fill in somewhere.'

I remain pleased with myself.

I believe the children are our future...

My wife notices that I'm biting my nails. She tells me (gently) to stop. She then reflects on her own vile compulsion - picking at her lower lip. She indicates the recumbent child with a nod, and says, 'With the two of us as role models, do you think he's gonna tear off his face with his own hands and his hands with his own face?'

A moment of silence. She then expands and clarifies her point:

'Mutually-assured destruction.'

A moment for the Rock'n'Play.

Our Newborn Rock'n'Play Sleeper from Fisher-Price was quite a handy thing during Feliks's first three weeks. He preferred it to the crib - still does - and it does seem to work, as advertised, to cut down on reflux, spitting up, and the like. The zealous evangelist who sold us on the thing at Babies'R'Us was not an angel, but she may perhaps have been some anthropoid coalescence of the very concept of good fortune, or at least a member of some forward-thinking Fisher-Price streetside sales team.

But Let Me Tell You! The product pictures at Amazon all show the R'n'P in one of two settings -

1) a sparsely-appointed modern home with bland brown carpet

2) a THX-1138-style dimensionless white hellscape

- neither of which shows off the single greatest feature of the R'n'P, which manifests only when the dread device is set up on a hardwood floor. The mild miracle is this: when Feliks, or some vastly less interesting and intellectually capable baby, starts flicking his/her legs and generally making a ruckus during those less blessedly quiet bits of the sleep cycle, the Rock'n'Play - so long as you have used your brain and set it up on the wooden floor, rather than some indulgent swatch of carpet or sinister chamber for 'conditioning' Robert Duvall - I say I say the R'n'P will basically rock under its own power until the end of time given just a single baby-strength kick, thrash, or feeble 'worship me I am baby' arm-raising gesture. Its design is cold genius. 'And I even like the colour.'

The Rock'n'Play really is in the running for 'best $50 we've spent on the kid,' just like the non-angel predicted, but it wasn't until last night that I could hear, inbetween our (by every measure) already terrifyingly powerful and wily son's gasps and wheezes, the first chords and notes of the rising song of American Independence from Foreign Oil - the promise of limitless clean energy fulfilled by a pastel-coloured perpetual motion machine, and all we had to do was emancipate ourselves from the amazon.com product photos and move the stupid thing off the carpet for once.

I pass on this wisdom to you, Reader(s), hoping someone will lemme know (quid pro quo) whether it's possible to wipe down a newly-beshittened baby scrotum without stretching it out like a sheet of Saran Wrap. It gives me nightmares. If only he could direct that stuff downward like a civilized man.

Beauty.

 

Pronunciation guide.

Feliks = 'FEH-leaks,' a bit like a two-syllable smearing of 'deli' and 'delicatessen.'

Note also that 'FEH leaks' is a fair description of the past couple days around here.

Pssssssst!!!!

Say hello to my son, Feliks Edgar Holland.

Feliks will probably say hello (or 'hello world') in a few months.

[Update: Less sleep-deprived spelling, now fiksed.]

Sidebar re: my misanthropy and childishness.

My brother Phil points out that my blog is full of (1) swearing and (2) complaints about how horrible everyone/everything is. I don't think that's quite 'fair,' and have responded to his complaint by pointing out (nyah nyah nyah) all those times I've had nice things to say about someone/something, but 'nyah nyah nyah' kind of undercuts my credibility, and he's right about the swearing. I point out that it's style and he points out that it's still swearing and complaining.

Always nice, chatting with Phil.

I don't know whether I'm capable of changing the way I write here, which is to say I'm not sure I really really want to. Or want to more than I don't. But I like the idea of finding ways to get better at the things I love. And, sidebar, my little brother's pretty smart. So.

Well, so what. Well. So we'll see. As ever. we will see.

Stress-testing the Moby (and, in my wife's words, 'our own fucking competence').

$20, used! Such a deal. And in a rare fabric pattern to boot...

Miss you brother.

a choice maybe you didn't know you were making. but if you had known the rules. is that even possible? they're always in flux. what if you could have fixed them, set your circumstances in concrete? is that what 'understanding' really is? slowing things down enough that they no longer resemble life, and become simply knowledge? or is understanding the grass blades across the pads of your fingertips as you skim the surface of things, simultaneous awareness? is it simply needing no extra time? is understanding parallelism only? opening all channels, linking them in time and obliterating space? is that what happened when you died? did the spin of things slow down enough for you see it all at once, sinking? did you forget to count your breaths? did you fall out of rhythm briefly, and stacked chords dissolve, and did you become background to the motion of everything? when you died did everyone in the universe become aware of you for an instant? did you fit yourself to every imaginable human shape, the contours of every soul you entered? are we only flesh? i know you -

what is a game but 'life reduced,' alterlife, alteraction, a ritual of transformation? but then what's all this fallen fading shit if not a game, rules unwritten? i like to think this selves-in-contact can be, can be, can be PLAY. if not necessarily 'play fair.' did some unseeable flow (of possibility) catch you out of time, spin you down? is there a state neither light nor dark that obtains and compounds, there, below our feet where you went? as far as we could go or know there was only flesh. i think you knew something else, its size and impossible shape resistant to yes or no. i think you lied all the time hoping to establish some new order, for and from yourself. did you lie to me? i think you must have, incessantly, happily, but can't for the life of me remember. no rapture of return. no answer back from your new now hiding place. stupid nameless. i'm shaking now. it poured after you went, bludgeoning rain, deafening. we looked all over the place. you had vanished into deep water. i am so angry at you for dying as you did, artlessly, without witness. leaving only rain in lieu of a lesson. you would have been drunk too, as i was. you would have enjoyed the rain no doubt. 'naw, naw, naw,' you liked to say, head shaking and a broad smile, meaning of course 'yes.' even having no idea what you meant or intended (or did i and we?) there was never any doubt, in your presence.

only forward, and next, and multiply, and undertake, and fucking go.

you must be satisfied with how this all turned out, notwithstanding the obvious. you must feel like one death is as good as another if it bears you forward into consequence. i can't imagine you being embarrassed about the rain, or silence, or not getting laid that weekend. is one thing as good as another? i don't think so but you're the one who would know, having found a way - at the last - to relate to all things, if only in avoidance. to untouch the universe. what an intimate feeling, to reside solely in yourself. you can almost see the attraction. what would in that instant possess a person to do such a terrible, terrible thing as (in quiet) end.

--8 september 2009

Brother and me, c.1999?

Jesny.

Our friends Jenny and Jesse got married recently (the Santa Fe trip). Here's the deal on the day:

I regret failing to capture Jenny's extraordinarily pink shoes. (Pink is his colour, orange hers.) Nonetheless the image makes clear the happy couple's casual magnificence. Their transformation into some sort of neon chimera continues apace, as does our recovery from the Santa Fe diet.

This is how things went once they got going:

Congratulations, months after the fact, and best of luck to Jesny!

Fetus don't fail me now!

Preg Pilgrims' Progress

Despair.

Unbearable illogic. Mom died I didn't, or I wish 'writing' without 'to write.' Blankness and coerced quiet. (I can't sit still.) Egotistical failure: despair. Hell is sharing nothing. I feel wrong, not wronged. I see myself as incompatible with everything: not sad, just empty. Not living right, failing someone, not even knowing whom. 'Shouldn't I have published a novel by now?' while shopping, or before sleep. Warring with your ideal self you can't win. Self-hatred is idolatry and it blinds you. Hell is recognizing my own narcissism, senses gone dead quiet, thoughts out of sync: ideas given form, eating me.

(for C.L.)

Disappointment.

Things change; the past is gone. Sex is just sex. Ideas lack checkboxes indicating correctness. No one's grading this. I was to have been _____ but _____ (life is merely inescapably life). Thought I'd be done by now. The very thing: I'm an adult, 'doing adulthood' just fine, still thinking some developmental stage awaits. If not stages, how will I know...? Dunno what I've been preparing for these years. 'Next' (abstractly)? Tragedy? 'Disappointment Artist': maddened and ground to a diamond's precise hardness (and cold), turning laser to light, writing even in stone. You could dig it. Don't you want that?

(for C.L.)