McCain's Six-pack

"Joe the Plumber," the imaginary American John McCain invoked repeatedly in last night's debate, is a poorly disguised euphemism for another, more familiar euphemism. The fact that John McCain's stand-in for every American is a beer-guzzling schmo from Nowheresville, who doesn't understand sentences with more than one dependent clause, is disturbing and insulting enough. Watching him in last night's debate made me feel that he was trying to apologize for - at the same time that he was trying to erase - the fact that he is a rich guy who will stay rich, and I am (each of us is, really) a poor guy forever holding a greasy wrench; to say that actually he admired you and I precisely because we do all the ugly things that he never has to do; to demonstrate that somehow this class drama he was inserting us into didn't at all invalidate his patronizing pander.

But...a plumber?

In John McCain's America, you and I are just people who fix the thing he shits in.

The Unintended Gift

The episode of Bruckner's coin, related in the previous post, reminded me of a similar story I heard about the coronation of Napoleon Bonaparte:
For his coronation as emperor of France, Napoleon ordered a crown to be made of pure gold, in the shape of one of those laurel wreaths given to athletic champions in ancient times. The artist Jean-Baptiste Isabey, who designed the garments for the ceremony, presented the crown to the emperor at his coronation, but as he did, a single gold leaf broke off the wreath. Napoleon gave the leaf to Isabey, who preserved it in the cover of a snuff box for the rest of his life.

Life Under Glass

In high school I attended a Boston Symphony Orchestra rehearsal of a symphony by Anton Bruckner. The writer of the orchestra's program notes usually gave a brief introduction to these rehearsals. "Bruckner takes his time with themes," the lecturer advised before this rehearsal, "but once you accept the leisurely pace, it's easy to enjoy the motifs as they unfold."

I've been reminded of this lecture and Bruckner's seemingly endless, meandering exposition while re-reading W.G. Sebald's novel, The Rings of Saturn. Where Bruckner's meanderings are harmonic, Sebald's lead from one seemingly unrelated subject to another: Thomas Browne; the herring fishermen of Lowestoft on England's southeast shore; the Chinese dowager empress Tz'u-hsi; the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne; slave laborers in the Congo - all pass before the reader in a distant, slowly metamorphosing pageant. One is almost surprised Bruckner does not make his appearance at some point in the procession.

Sebald calls up again and again an image of life frozen in observation throughout The Rings of Saturn, like one of the recurring themes in Bruckner's symphony. Tz'u-hsi stands ensconced behind the windows of her palace, Sebald recounts, and sees the workers in the distant fields and gardens as though they were flies trapped in a jamjar. A visitor at Swinburne's dinner table can not escape the feeling that the aging poet greatly resembles some strange bug, patiently munching its food beneath a glass case. The narrator gazes from the window of an airplane over Europe at the infinite creations of man below him and is met with a great, lifeless stillness, as if recognizing an ever-expanding bee colony only by the honeycombs they had built.

These scenes put me in mind of a painting I always found disturbing when encountered in grade-school books: Joseph Wright of Derby's Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, painted in 1768. The canvas was meant to depict the revelation of Enlightenment science. But seen today, the bird fluttering beneath the glass might stand for the passing away of that very society of which it is the victim: a society entranced by an experimental science still in its half-theatrical infancy.

Of course, Sebald presents the motif of life caught behind glass in the very first (long) paragraph of the book, when the convalescing narrator peers at dusk from his hospital window and recognizes nothing alive or familiar in the maze of the city below him. But as with Bruckner, the theme must be encountered several times before its importance is appreciated.

Bruckner, reputedly a simple man who enjoyed few things better than a glass of beer, once expressed his thankfulness to the conductor Hans Richter during a rehearsal of the Fourth Symphony by earnestly pressing a coin into his hand, onstage, immediately after the the baton was dropped. "Drink a glass to my health," the composer entreated. Richter wore the coin on his watch chain for the rest of his life.
The coin was a Maria Theresa thaler, named after the Austrian empress who died in 1780. Amazingly, the thaler has been in continuous circulation since its first minting in 1741. At various times it was used as currency as far afield as the United States, Ethiopia, and India, and is still used in the Middle East, recalling in its strange endurance the coins found in ancient burial sites as described by Thomas Browne in his Urn Burial, and which, as Sebald relates, preserved in Browne's view something of the undying soul of the humans who made them.

From the Correspondence of the Author

"Dear [editor/girlfriend/trusted high-school buddy],

or maybe

Hey [editor/gf/trusted hs bf]!

The [story/article/novel] is going well, thanks for asking. Did you get a chance to read that excerpt I sent you? I think it gives a good idea of what I want to do with the whole thing.

My only concern is the tone, or maybe the word choice. Or diction. Basically I'm unsure of the VOICE here. Why the short, choppy sentences? Why the repetition??

This is how everybody writes now. Why do I have to write that way? It's so AMERICAN. It's so H.S. Thompson. Isn't there something else?

What happened to long sentences, unpacked metaphors, density, elegance, linearity?What happened to invisible European form? What happened to NOT writing yourself into everything you write? Why do we always have to be destroying the [short story/essay/novel] form? It keeps coming back, doesn't it?

Anyway I am not a paranoid schizophrenic, so I don't think I should have to write like one. Why is everyone (editor, girlfriend, trusted HS BF) trying to make me write like a paranoid schizophrenic?

If you do not receive an immediate response to this email, it is because I am off sharpening a quill pen somewhere.

Best,

A.J.D.

or maybe

later,

a"

Propellers of Inspiration

My fan is very old. It may be from the 1960s or 50s, or earlier. Where modern fans employ elaborate grates to keep even a pen from reaching through to the moving blades, my fan has only four squiggly metal abstractions of protectors. The squiggles seem intended to suggest the motion (which one can't quite see while the fan is on--which is whenever I'm home, in the summer) of the blades behind them. Having been bred on modern fans, it now appears inevitable that at some point I would misinterpret the interpretive protectors and injure myself on this machine designed to ease my discomfort. And this is precisely what I did, about five minutes ago, while trying to move the fan. (For anyone who thinks this post departs from the usual subjects of the blog, I would argue that, to the extent this blog has a subject, it is always, secretly, about me moving things around my apartment.) I sliced the tip of the middle finder on my left hand, which makes this post more difficult than any other post I've written. Needless to say, I did not turn the fan off before trying to move it.
A few days ago, I read in Bookforum that Nicholson Baker is coming out with a new book about the lead-up to World War II, how the war could have been avoided, and, in Baker's view, why it should have been. The book is called Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization. Put another way, Baker's book is about how our misreading (in his view) of certain signs lead to (in his view) an avoidable, mechanized shedding of human blood.
I had to read another book by Nicholson Baker for a writing class in my final year of college. To the extent that this blog has an initial inspiration, it is that class. The book was The Mezzanine, whose central theme (as much as it has one) is "the constancy of shine on the edges of moving objects," especially "propellers or desk fans." The narrator announces his obsession on the novel's very first page (in a footnote): "I love [how fans] will glint steadily in certain places in the grayness of their rotation; the curve of each fan blade picks up the light for an instant on the circuit and then hands it off to its successor."
I seem to stand at a strange intersection between these two books of Baker's. Hopefully my finger will not find itself at a similar intersection between the blades of my fan anytime soon.

Living With Boxes (Three Metaphors)

I. (It's Not The) End of the World

[Invitation for a party that never happened]

"A long time ago, when we were young and naive and the winking lights of Bushwick Avenue filled our sight long after the bodegas were closed, this is how we viewed our (then-new) neighborhood. The walls of our building were unfinished and the nearest movie store didn't even carry Herzog's Nosferatu. Looking back, I wonder at how we survived those first harrowing weeks. But survive we did. One could even say (thought the evidence is dubious) that, for a time, we thrived. Alas, we thrive no longer. So we move on, inevitably dispersing the empire eastward. And in our process of ceasing to thrive we learned that, in fact, this not The End of the World."

II. Packing

I found a place a few stops further on the subway, on the border between Bushwick, in Brooklyn, and Ridgewood, in Queens. I packed my books in liquor boxes. That looks like a very sharp metaphor, so I will leave it alone for the moment, to avoid injuring myself.
During a recent trip out of town I met a dog with the singular name of Arrow. Her singularity increased in my view when I found she was named after the dog Arrow in the movie The Point. The movie tells a bedtime story about a town where everyone is born with a point--literally--on their head. When a boy without a point is born in the town, he is banished (along with the faithful Arrow) to the wastes of the Pointless Forest, and told not to return until he has one.

Anyone who has seen The Point knows its story balances on the idea that one man's Pointless Forest is another man's Ridgewood, Queens. I thought about that, and packed my books into liquor boxes.

III. Arrival

For the past year, a page ripped from a German magazine hung above my desk. It says "Andreus Leikaufs Bilder handeln nich vom Boxen und vom Jazz auch nicht." I don't know what this means. Above the text is an image of a green and black painting of a desk. Inscribed in the middle of the desk are the words "NOW WORK!" When I took the page down from the wall I found a cockroach had made its home on the wall behind it.

A burnished recognition

I was polishing my shoes tonight (they had gotten stained and scuffed after a rainy weekend in Montreal) when I noticed I had uncovered the figure of a smiling face in the bottom of the polish tin. I decided it must be a sign.

I went to Montreal to visit a friend from high school. In middle school, before we were friends, the two of us were teammates in Odyssey of the Mind. By the first round of local competitions my teammates and I had convinced ourselves we would go to the final round, taking various signs and omens as evidence. For instance, in The Simpsons' episode that aired the night before we competed, the cartoon family travelled to Australia; the final round of competitions was to take place in Australia. Our team never made it past the first round of competition, despite the potency of the signs.
When I finished polishing my shoes I put the lid with the picture of the kiwi bird back on the tin. By that time I had rubbed away the shining, smiling face; I am still confident it was a sign.