Warmer weather...

I can't stop listening to El Perro Del Mar's "God Knows (You Gotta Give to Get)," I like that, when a particular song is exactly what's necessary.

Wanted to run today, but never got around to it, it's been tough lately. It seems like there a million small things I want to do but never quite get to. Started reading Zazie in the Metro but the translation was terrible and distracting. So it might be time to go back to David Mitchell. I already feel like re-reading Cloud Atlas again, maybe just parts of it. I'd like to read his new one as well, and I promised myself I'd re-read Murakami this summer as well. And then there's Dumas and everybody else to re-read and read as well. Greene.

Sometimes I think about the stories we make up and I feel so good about what we seem to want, how we make all these beautiful structures of thought out of instinct and earth. It always leads pretty directly to the Greatest Lake and hope for faith.

I heard from a friend that Farley Granger has just published his memoirs and was at the Music Box the other day. I would love to read those too. That scene in Strangers on a Train shot through the glasses, so, so good. And the tennis scene. And Jimmy Stewart and him in Rope are so good, a really underrated Hitchcock, that one.

It's been a good year, all in all. I can't complain.

Asides and Quick Thoughts

Perfect weather, days of it. It's hard not to think of them as gifts. I haven't been up to much in Chicago, but it's the calm in the storm these days.

The Cubs need this day off, it comes at a good time, rare that happens - but they were winding down and playing listlessly the last couple games, good pitching can do that, but Yesmeiro Petit is not exactly good pitching. I mean, from a major league standpoint. I'm sure he could put me back on the bench with a few pitches. Sometimes I think about that when I'm getting down on a player, these guys are pretty amazing at what they do, the least competent of them is more competent than anybody in the current administration at the job they do. I would take Caesar Izzzturis at his job over Mr. Bush at his job.

That's another thing that's been bothering me actually, this respect for office that's everywhere. I was reading this story about some Administration slob who was at a cook-out with Dick "Dick" Cheney, and Cheney approached him and said "Happy Birthday, how you feeling?" And the guy responded with something along the lines of "well, my hangover finally cleared up" or the like. And Cheney just kind of walked away and the guy worried about this for two days, thinking "I just told the Vice President I have a hangover, how stupid!"

Why?

Who the fuck is he? And I would ask the same question if I liked the man. And I despise him. But he's just another citizen, an equal. If he can't handle hearing about hangovers because he's too high up, then that goes against everything. There is no higher up. Not in this country. We needed a real revolution, a French one. I know that a lot has been argued about how radical the American Revolution really was, with Gordon Wood and others arguing it was really, really radical, and others like Zinn pointing out that the Revolution was co-opted pretty quickly by the wealth in this country who limited its growth. I used to side more with the Woods argument, but I've been coming over to this Zinn argument more and more as I watch and think about how slavish some people are about rank in this country. I think it's one of the reasons that calls for social justice in this country, for instance in New Orleans, end up being so muted. We might hear them, but there's no threat underneath them, there's no sense that anybody should fear those at the bottom. I think government has to first, respect the people it represents, and second, fear them. This administration, and I think no administration in a long time has feared the people and the last few, going back to Reagan, have not respected the people either.

I wonder if people really suffer that other people suffer? Clearly the bastards don't, and they were elected twice.

I read the final Harry Potter, finished it around six in the morning on Sunday. There were some intense moments - at a few junctures I had to walk around while I read it, and a couple times I had to put it down for a few minutes. There's a lot of talking about J.K. Rowlings prose style being a bit of a weakness. I think that might have been true in a few spots here and there earlier, but has been less and less the case going forward. And who cares anyway? If I want style, should I suffer through the boredom and lack of life that is Henry James? Style can be a crutch and a weakness just as easily as the reverse. And who draws more perfect characters right now, outside of Murakami? She traced archetypes out of archetypes, and that's not a small accomplishment. I'm going to re-read some Murakami and then go back to the Rowlings books. Maybe after a Graham Greene novel that I've been meaning to read as well. Graham Greene has become one of my favorites over the last couple years: there was a soul.

It's afternoon now, the cats are sprawled out on window sills and the couch; there's a breeze that falls about the room and the sun traces shapes through the curtains which rise and fall occasionally, like breath.

Leaving New York For A Spell...

Back to Chicago after a blizzard of activity. Today I took at a dead run, and by the time I got to the teashop at nine, all I wanted to do was sprawl. Rudy was late and so I sat there and stared at all the people and thought about all the different things going on in this one little room. Then, after about three seconds, I let my mind go blank.

The day started at the school. I'd left my keys in the classroom the day before, which was dumb, school keys just sitting there for anybody to take. Luckily they were in a desk drawer I'd thrown them into while I was looking for some transcripts so no wayward and bored summer school student broke into my room to gain free-reign over the school. How dumb can I be though?

Very.

Forgetful too. I'm always losing words when talking to the studenten, talking to anybody. My brain is way ahead and I have to go back and find a word from the sentence before, that's what it feels like. In reality, I'm probably just distracted easily.

That (the keys-problem) slowed me down. I met Rudy at Times Square at two to deal with some certification issues and while waiting for him I saw this little girl get hit by a car. Really hit. Some idiot was gunning through 42nd and 7th, not the intersection to make an ambering yellow. The girl's father charged the guy and there was all kinds of insanity ensuing, meanwhile this homeless guy was trying to start a conversation with me about the book I had in my hand in preparation of asking for a dollar, which I did not have. Odd, a little girl sprawled out like that and right there another person thinking about getting a dollar, but need is need though I had nothing to give. Though I suppose the father was thinking murder, the mother stood over the girl and both were screaming over all the noise.

Tomorrow I have to get up early, run over to 12th and University, grab a van, bring it back, load it up and drive to Chicago then unload it and blissfully afterwards, sleep. But that's tomorrow still.

Walked all over New York today - down to Delancey and up to Tompkins Square Park, across to 3rd Avenue and then up to Union Square, then back to 1st Avenue and then home from Bedford. The hipsters were out, there'd been kickball at McCarren and everybody looked beautiful and slightly flushed.

Cleaned out a bit more of my room, put a bunch of my books in boxes to store down in Rudy's classroom, I loved looking at the titles and seeing how all these random books brought in on random Tuesdays and Fridays throughout the year ended up spelling out the classes I had taught. There's a summer school teacher there, and the room lacks the crispness it has when I have it. Sure the desk is empty, not cluttered and spilling over with papers and books and half-forgotten ideas for activities planned halfway, but the rest of the classroom, which I pride on it's neatness when I'm there looks kind of lazy and unfettered. It's not so bad I guess, who wants to have to deal with all that nonsense in summer. It makes me happy though, I feel like my room only unfolds into itself with me there.

I should sleep - six hours and then a long, long, long day.

I miss New York, and feel sad about missing out of seeing some people one last time. It's weird to not know if I'm coming back. I try not to take those things too seriously. Good-byes are usually overrated. If it is good-bye. I think the real good-byes are the best stories that you tell later.

New York is a kind of bible, everywhere pages and words grow out of pavement and metal. And life hangs over you and runs underneath you and pulses past you so that you are always caught up in the narrative that spills out everywhere around you. It gets so that waiting is the worst thing in the world to do, it's unbearable to think that New York happens without you, but comforting too, it's so easy to fall back into the stream which is really an ocean.

Just back from New Orleans in Brooklyn briefly...

Turtles of New Orleans


Perfect weather today so it was a walk across the Williamsburg Bridge. I had a blister from New Orleans and all the walking there that re-opened, but whatever, it was too beautiful to care about things like that. Sometimes it looked like it might rain, but it never did and there was a perfect breeze while I watched a couple of freighters crawl up the East River. Next week I'll be back in Chicago for awhile.

New Orleans was amazing, and my favorite part was probably watching a thunderstorm come in across the Mississippi River. I love how the air feels right before a thunderstorm like that, and I love watching the river get all choppy and feel how everything, including the crickets - mostly anyway - go quiet.

Saw Harry Potter and was completely disappointed. The director couldn't direct and the writer couldn't write. Total let-down. Life went on - afterwards I had pecan pie that somebody holy made.

My writing is disjointed today - I have a million little things to do and catch up on before I leave for Chicago, so I feel like I should be getting to that stuff - but it's almost three a.m., maybe I just want to sleep?

Earlier today I saw Interview and it was pretty thought-provoking but I didn't like the last twenty minutes or so - they tacked on all this useless stuff that detracted from what was really the core of the idea of the film in order to make a point that was pretty whatever. Too bad, that.

I saw it at the Sunshine though, and I like it there - they have amazing chocolate bars from the Chocolate Bar on 13th and 8th...today I had the Chocolate & Key-Lime while I watched the movie. It was heavenly with the popcorn. So dinner was sparse.

Just finally read the Washington Post's series "Angler" on Dick "Dick" Cheney - typical but still horrifying. Sometimes I actually feel grief when I consider the American political system and the government it's destroying. And then I end up worrying about the earth. Something beyond amendments and freedoms being destroyed.

There were these awesome turtles in New Orleans - one of them, the guy that took care of them told me, he'd rescued at a Greyhound bus station: a kid was just beating on the shell trying to break it to see what would happen to the turtle and he just went and grabbed the turtle from the kid. For some reason I imagine a dusty field and a wooden and peeled paint station with people wiping their brows and looking down a broken road for the late bus, a hassled mother and an act of redemption, perhaps "For The Widows In Paradise, For The Fatherless In Ypsilanti" by Sufjan Stevens plays in the background. Those turtles were the best.


The porch at the Maison De Ville where the bed felt like a cloud.


I was all about walking and looking at trees.


I end up always taking too many pictures of trees...

Late at night...

And I'm wondering where I'll be in two months.

Sometimes I worry about this, other times it doesn't seem real: the idea I could actually leave New York.

Today, walking, watching the sun fade into softness against the brown brick on 12th Street, I just thought there is no place so beautiful. But then I think about the rents and I just get annoyed.

Excited to be back in Chicago in a couple weeks, the idea of sitting back in Wrigley and watching mediocre baseball appeals strongly to the core of my being. That and re-reading Gide. I don't know why, but the urge to read Gide is strong these days. Him and Celine. All the French really. All the way back. Why the French? I think I've always liked French literature more than the average person. I remember first reading Zola, I couldn't believe somebody could write so boldly, this depiction of naked want really stunned me. Camus I owe eternal thanks to, he is the most beautiful soul to me. And Celine writes perfectly. I remember his writing like somebody told it to me. Dumas is a different kind of Shakespeare to me. And the poets are out of this world. I'll never forget first reading Mallarme, poetry took a different shape for me. I don't want to delve right now, because I need to sleep a little bit, but Gide was the first to make me want to see the desert.

The John Hopkins University

What a piece of shit.

Fouad Ajami, a professor (and he has won prizes! They love to give each other prizes!) at the esteemed university I once thought seriously of attending, has written a piece for the Wall Street Journal attracting some attention in which he says of Bush's approach to morality: "the one defining mark of [his] moral outlook is the distinction [he is able to make(?)] between friend and foe," which really only illuminates how difficult it is to find something nice to say about Bush. Being able to tell the difference between friend and foe is something we expect of our five year olds, something we hope our presidents have managed long ago. As well, the action of marking friend and foe is only the beginning of a process to determine proper action and context of action for the self. In the Bush presidency, marking friend and marking foe involves a process that has typically led to great corruption and great heartache. We are not talking about Churchill here. Instead we are talking of roses for politically connected corporations and endless ache for others.

Now Ajami was writing this piece earlier and calling for Bush to pardon Libby. His piece, pedantic, insipid and superficial, went beyond straining the bonds of credulity however and entered the realms of the insultingly delusional. He wrote:

In "The Soldier's Creed," there is a particularly compelling principle: "I will never leave a fallen comrade." This is a cherished belief, and it has been so since soldiers and chroniclers and philosophers thought about wars and great, common endeavors. Across time and space, cultures, each in its own way, have given voice to this most basic of beliefs. They have done it, we know, to give heart to those who embark on a common mission, to give them confidence that they will not be given up under duress. A process that yields up Scooter Libby to a zealous prosecutor is justice gone awry.

How does one have the audacity or just the sheer stupidity to compare Scooter Libby to a soldier right now? How is he comparable? When soldiers in Iraq fall are they wearing custom tailored suits while being advised on their movements by lawyers who bill thousands of dollars an hour? Is the consequence of their falling an easy stretch in a minimum security jail? In another tack, was it a war that the White House was fighting in order to convince the American public that attacking a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 or any terrorism directed against the United States was the right move to make even as we invaded another more culpable foe? If it was then war, then are we accusing the Bush presidency, by application of this logic, of bringing civil war to the United States? An odd and idiotic defense of the indefensible.

Getting caught up in this part of his article is to miss the point elsewhere that this fool who has a koosh job in a comfortable university (a university started in much more a spirit of challenging established authorities when it was begun about 130 years ago which has clearly lost its way on that score) believes that Libby has sacrificed something out of a nobility of spirit in choosing to reveal the identity of a secret United States agent and obstruct the justice of the United States in the pursuit of a flawed and tragic policy that has not revealed anything of any nobility at all, but has just allowed the rotten fruits of this administration to smell more strongly in the light of the larger stage of war than they would have if Bush was simply giving the environment away (another thing he excels at).

Why do we suffer these fools so docilely?

How does Professor Ajami have a job when he so publicly reveals not just his ignorance, but an appalling lack of reason, intelligence or any sense whatsoever of a political philosophy that contains insight, distinction or foresight? He is an apologist. A flunky. Increasingly, our system of higher education rewards morons like this while the more original thinkers are included out of a process out of fear that those more original thinkers will reveal these flunkies for what they are: dangerous fools with no more right to pontificate and teach than the dogs they resemble.

So a big "Go Fuck Yourself" to The John Hopkins University and the lapdogs they hire for this pathetic and dangerous administration.