Esther Press

Through my readings on the once-local, pre-Chico-area Indian tribe, the Mechoopda Maidu, I came across the Yuki tribe. The part that keeps sticking out for me about the Yuki was the method by which they counted things on their hands. They didn't touch their fingers to count things out, like many people do, but instead they counted things out by using the spaces between the fingers.

*

Speaking of fingers, my finger comes into play at the very end of this video that I shot of the summit of Lassen Peak, which I climbed today.



And here's a video clip, also from today, for the person who asked me what a fumarole was some months back:

[NOTE: This is not directed at the fine person who added me today on Facebook. Thank you.]

I feel like I need to explain something about my involvement with Facebook and Goodreads. I "signed up" to them, involuntarily, because "friends" of mine, who are up-to-date with these things, are actively on these places. I then get an email from the site, asking if I am indeed the friend that this friend implicates me as. What am I going to say? "No! She's not my friend!" This is where these sites get you. They prey on your need to be liked by your friends. Who needs that? In any case, this is really just part one of my explanation, and the tedious part, really. The second part is mainly about my huge ego, in that when new people request to Add Me as a Friend they can plainly see that I have done nothing to Add Friends, and that, by implication, I am rather, um, friend-light, shall we say. This bothers me greatly. I have friends, really! Please believe me Facebookians/Goodreadians! I am just lazy in this way. It also explains why I have some people listed as "friends" who I have never met, or even know in any way. There's one woman from Asia, for instance, that asked me to be her Friend. I thought for a couple seconds, and then said to myself, Why not?, and clicked CONFIRM.

Mount Shasta Training update. It was my goal at Christmas 2007 to lose enough weight and to get into shape that I would be able to climb Mount Shasta by June. It seems to be working. I had planned on getting down to 165 pounds by the time of the climb, which is in a few weeks. I'm currently 168 pounds. I've dropped 32 pounds since Christmas.

Yesterday, I ran 5 miles in 46:30 minutes. That's not anything to write home about, or really even to post about, but it was the first time that I went that long, and I felt surprisingly good after it.

My training schedule has been pretty much running Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. On one of the weekend days, I will hike with a 30 pound pack somewhere. I need to spend some time in the next two weeks in some elevation with the pack. It's difficult enough to breathe in elevation without the weight on one's back, so I am curious to see how I feel and react when it's on.

I have never spent money on myself to such a degree as this foray into mountaineering has exacted on me. It's rather repulsive to me, really, but it is something that I want to do, and so one must have the proper gear. It has taken months of price-checking, deal-finding, to get the gear. This is a basic list of things--but I didn't buy these items from these places, just linking for pictures:

Hot Chillys MTF3000 Top Base Layer
Hot Chillys MTF3000 Bottom Base Layer--about the same prices

Marmot Oracle Pants with Bibs--paid $99, not $140

Wigwam Outdoor Socks

Arc'Teryx Gamma MX softshell--paid $170, not $299

Sierra Designs puffy, can't locate picture on web, but bought for $125 at local store, on sale; one day later saw it online for $69.00. Couldn't return it because of sale. The only item that I've overpaid for.

Arc'Teryx Bora 80 backpack, did not pay $375, but $100 to a guy selling it on craigslist. I could re-sell this pack for $225-250.

North Face Gore-tex gloves, paid $50, were 30% off at local store. Can't locate picture on web.

Julbo Sherpa mountaineering sunglasses, paid $44 locally.

Black Diamond LED headlight, paid $30 locally.

North Face The Cat's Meow mummy sleeping bag, paid $110 online.

ThermaRest Self-Inflating Mattress, paid $50 online.

The tent and ice-axe will be provided by the guide company. The two-day summit tour is $425. This price includes instructions on self-arrest, making camp, cooking, safety, the $30 park fee, all meals, and the use of a tent, which would've cost $150-200 by itself. This is where my stimulus money went. Plus, I'm paying to have people to go with me, as I couldn't find anyone locally. Without that, I simply wouldn't be going, period.

Finally, I will rent my mountaineering boots and crampons at The Fifth Season in Mount Shasta City. $26 and $16, respetively.

Well, my stomach cannot let that Hillary comeuppance last very long, without posting this unbelievable tripe that Obama spread out for the Nation a few months back, which all the unanalytical press fell for like they were being kissed by baby Jesus. In the above video, we hear the Reverend Obama and his "Yes, We Can" grease. In it, you will hear him link his presidential bid, his political coming-of-age, his Promise, if you will, and his followers, to that of not one, but ALL of the following:

1. The founding of the United States. The creed written into the founding documents.

2. The lives of slaves and abolitionists.

3. By all immigrants and pioneers.

4. By all the organized workers, by all the women who reached out to vote (the suffragists). He then humorously elides the consequences of "the pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wildnerness." That wildnerness would be filled with those pesky Native Americans. Remarkably, Obama doesn't hug them here as well.

5. He continues by wrapping himself up in JFK and putting a man on the moon.

6. To all that Martin Luther King stood for. Without batting an eye.

7. He then trails off into patter about Opportunity and Prosperity.

8. Ending with a wince-inducing combination of pratfalling false humility: "We have been told..."We have been warned..."

*

In conclusion, then, Barack Obama, a multimillionaire lawyer with an Ivy League degree, actually is insisting to his supporters that his Coming was "just like" what came to be America, and the horrible lives of the slaves, and "just like" all those pioneers working unbelievably strenuous jobs on farms, clearing the fields, tilling it, etc.; his life and Coming is "just like" putting a man on the moon; it's "just like" Martin Luther King's life, and so on.

The gargutuan sense of ego displayed in this speech is nearly staggering to even comprehend. Yet, there they are, cheering for their Obama, their Father, their Flag, their Man on the Moon.

In a hopefully passing phase of magnificence, I will post this email comeuppance supplied by an erstwhile Obamaniac, sometimes referred to as my friend, Viscount the Upbraider:

I hope in your efforts to police spurious and overly grand analogies, you make sure to mention HRC's full-throated demands that FL and MI count, even though she previously agreed that FL and MI should not count:

"In the speech, Clinton--summoning as much passion and moral fervor as she has mustered at any point in the campaign--demanded that the Florida and Michigan delegations be seated at the Democratic National Convention. She compared her cause to abolition and women's suffrage. And--perhaps even more outrageous to those of us who have lived through the last eight years but weren't around for Seneca Falls--she said the Democratic Party and Barack Obama were reenacting the Republican effort to prevent the Florida recount in 2000."--The New Republic

*

I am already re-considering Ralph Nader again, for the againth time.

Anne Boyer
The Romance of Happy Workers
Coffee House Press
2008
90 pages
Softcover
$16.00


Ever since Flarf™ burst onto the writing scene in all of its socio-paranoid, inter-reflective glory, the highpitched, pop-cultural, and desperate utterances of a world gone mad have been Rorshached back at us, with little mercy, with little ironic winks, and loud, vulgar Guignolian effects. It has since moved onto a Style of Writing and should, at some point, find its way into an updated version of The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, completely processed, noted, and homogenized, like organoleptic butter.

Flarf probably couldn’t be happier if this would happen, as it is an artfom of authorial identity deconstruction, ultimately. Flarf yearns to be everything, and so conjoins its authors—the anonymous Google-based authors’s snippets and the Flarf authors own—into one. The premise is a kind of intentional authorial suicide, of traditional I-ness drowning out in plurality, into the totality of I and Thou-ness. The author’s identity/identities—if this/these is/are even actual—has/have died into a meta-world of collage artist, of assembler. Yet, there is an inner ruse to the whole thing, because while the content is a site of plurality (many authors), it is still, like all things written, a construct of one, unless it’s a joint construction.

Every few months, there will be a new sighting of Flarf, like the Missing Link crossing the highway, and someone will say, “Flarf is not Dead, I just saw it, crossing a highway.” Flarf is actually alive-dead, at this point, hanging out in a kind of Marienbad. But the people involved from the beginning, in the middle, at the end, have continued writing, thankfully, and in any case, with some still writing based on cut-and-pastes from Google searches, others moving on to a combination of classic Flarf conventions and newer experiments, others have abandoned it, and so on.

The Romance of Happy Workers is Anne Boyer’s first full book of poetry—she has some chapbooks. Boyer’s poetry is continually other—it moves into new words, new horizons, each one left behind for alive-dead. Metaphors pile up into drifts of semblances, into a maze of associations, until one just takes her word for things. The poetry’s basic philosophical frame is that of change, of flux, of disappearance-reappearance. Here, for instance, is the beginning of her poem, “Lob”:

Stand fast. Grief is a gondola, a compulsive
label, a root canal—not a question of a single

switch at the center of things, but billions
of neurons, endorphins, titans rubbing
their wings. Let the monster wander. See a movie.

*

Here “grief” is, singly, at least five things all at once: a gondola, a compulsive label, and a root canal; it’s also “not a question of a single/ switch at the center of things”; and it’s “billions of neurons, endorphins, [and] titans rubbing/ their wings.” The question, of course, becomes, what does one do with all of this information? Does one process each claim, check it out against the others? How is grief like a root canal? How is it both a compulsive label and yet billions of titans rubbing their wings? Should we care?

My guess is that we shouldn’t—at least not as claims. Boyer has her eyes set on other things. This is poetry of experience, of wonder, of exuberance, of immersion in textual adventure. The author herself often ends up in historical relationships, jarred from chronology, asking questions directly of Spanish conquistador Cabeza de Vaca, like where his head might be, or mentioning to him, in a breathlessly comical turn, that she’s read Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. In another poem, “The Romance of Happy Workers,” she straddles Woody Guthrie on a Bolshevik mattress, listens to his “propagandas,” however badly he might smell of pomegranates.

The book displays a heavy interest in history, philosophy, art, and the literary, with a poem involving Keats (“Ode O”), another poem, “A Reader for Those Who Do Not Live in Cities,” made up entirely of lines by Carl Sandburg and Bertolt Brecht, while others are dedicated to fellow writers. The contents of poems refer to El Cid, to Linnaeus, John Locke, Goya, Vermeer, and Hercules. However, these olden figures will be in a mash-up environment of Iowa and Kansas, where Harvester, John Deere, and Pioneer farm equipment dot the horizons. The local becomes universal, and vice-versa, all over again.

One would imagine, given the timewarping, that it would be quite difficult for the poems to be taken seriously, as something more than stunts, but they do achieve this through a palpable drive/passion/power/etc. that acts as the underlying convincing agent. The reader “goes along with” Boyer because she’s certain in tone, because she repeats her convictions, because she gets to the messier, powerful places of lust and violence that govern us, and she’s entertaining along the way. This is not an easy thing to do.

While I have made much of the brasher aspects of the book, there is also significant space given over to touching pieces, free of sentimentality, but not of feeling, like “Sunsets Off.” Here it is in its entirety:

Nothing, too, is a subject:
dusk regulating the blankery.
Fill in the nightish sky with ardent,
fill in the metaphorical smell.

The horizon leaves the same
impression as runway: jet but air.
I wake to a grain bin, the end is near:
jimson and ditchweed, hog and trough.

The first beer can is making
high hopes out of everything.
No wheat is safe from chaff of this,
hullwrecked in Hugoton, thinking of sod.

*

There is a stately confidence to the piece, right from the opening declaration and through the hope for more, for something other to be (note the double “fill in”). The author obviously wishes to be somewhere else, letting us know humorously that the sight of a grain bin is a signal that the end is near. (One can hear Berryman’s “Life, friends, is boring” somewhere beyond the ditchweed.) We note the careful sonic arrangement of “hog and trough,” and the gleeful delay after “making,” and the ringing –ing rhyme with “everything.” This is poetry of what’s in front of one, so to speak, when the texts and historical connections drop away, and one is left with one’s factual life and factual circumstances. Robert Creeley made a career of writing “states of mind/states of mind in states of place” pieces like this one, and they were somehow, amazingly, never boring. Like Creeley’s seemingly simple pieces, Boyer’s “Nothing” above is definitely “something.”

We must not end things here, though, because there is another element of the book that needs mentioning—Boyer’s playfulness. This playfulness can exist in the forms of plot, with our heroine, for instance, dining on quince paste with Woody Guthrie, or by humorously refashioning one of her pieces as similar to an Ezra Pound broadcast (“Poundcast”), or at the most rudimentary level of phrasing, with such oddities as those that fill in her poem, “You Will Want Like Cowboys,” which begins:

I will want like splinters,
astonished spit, also like alphabets and minnows.

You will want at smallness,
also squirreling across the wire.

Wantings in the wilderness!
What did you think,

words?

*

The words themselves convulse, break apart, sidestep, loosen, run away feverishly in many poems, but mostly they want to be counted, like the humor wants to be counted, like the adventure does, like the silos do, like the nods to Marx do, like the palpable Desire does. Boyer’s poetry challenges us to not sit still, to not allow for the familiar to lose its mystery, and to be in the world, which includes her poetry, as in the beginning of the final poem “Valediction Forbidding Apocalypse,” where she says:

Dear tiny autumn of lizards,
dear pigs in attic marble,
dear pit/ quarry/ basement,
dear rock, dear stone, dear flesh:

remarkable this world
drowned anyway—a mass
transiently—this product
of the porous

This video clip was taken on 9-3-07, on the true summit of Lassen Peak, which I refer to as Mount Lassen in the clip. The summit is at 10,457 ft. The "Lis" I refer to at the end is my wife, Lisa. I may be going to Lassen again this weekend in preparation for climbing Mt. Shasta in less than a month.

Obama's "dignity," his concerted effort of portraying himself as well-mannered, with social graces, has been cultivated as a form for political advantage. It has worked so strongly with voters due to the horrendously insensitive brutalism of George Bush and his domestic and foreign policies (that'd be everything). Americans have no doubt been aware for a few years at least that they are not popular around the world, and this environment has made it personally appealing to many Obama supporters to rectify the "image" of the United States. Obama has stepped in with his preacher voice, his syrupy nonsense of illogical class connections, and has provided a positive face for this problem. It has worked well, because I don't think Americans care so much about the reasons for the world's hatred, as long as the image is prettied up. Surface cleaning, if you will. You'll remember that Obama has voted for continuing the Iraq war every time he's had a chance, which is one of many reasons why the world is disgusted with the U.S. But as long as you're "likeable," that's all that matters.

Today marks 10 years sober. It's quite difficult for me to think that 10 years have passed since I was getting drunk nightly, but there it is.

Being born and raised in Wisconsin positioned me quite substantially in becoming an alcoholic--that seems quite plain to me. Wisconsin is routinely the state with the highest binge-drinkers in the country. It also is the state with the fewest sober people. Of course, these end up being excuses for one's own personal decisions, but the drinking environment, the atmosphere, in Wisconsin is a thing onto itself. I've lived in New York and California now, and these states are extremely mild in drinking atmospheres by comparison. In Wisconsin, it's always right around the corner. The topic is seemingly always in the air. When I was a drinker, I never noticed it; but now I see and hear it all the time.

My own iniation into the ritual of drinking began certainly and basically with being in the room of drinkers, of my family and relatives, all of whom drank to greater and lesser degrees. (The only relative who didn't drink was a recovering alcoholic). This normalized the experience. Further on, I would be given the task of fetching beers for relatives and neighbors, and therefore positioning myself as alcohol delivery person. It moved from a part of the environment to being directly in my hands. I would give these bottles to people I knew and who were friendly to me. It thus seemed to be no problem. Alcohol must be friendly as well, logic implies, if friends and neighbors liked it.

I was also distinctly raised in a German-American household. (We're also a little British and French, but the community was 95% German). Germans like to drink; it's a certain part of the culture. This culture was transported to America, to the heartland, where I grew up. I had my first sip of beer when I was quite young, probably around six or seven. I didn't drink a full beer, though, I don't think, until I was probably 10 or 11 years old. I remember getting drunk with a friend in his father's homemade wine cellar on the 4th of July, my birthday. We emerged from it, stumbling, grabbed the sparklers from our parents, and went running around on the sloping backyard hill. I remember falling down continually, and also the stray light effect of the sparklers.

High school was just a four-year drinking party, full of constant drinking and driving, blackouts, pillow vomit, headaches, parties, sullenness, sexual frustration, depression, addiction to allergy medicines (I liked feeling spaced out), virulent sarcasm, and general distancing from people. It was no surprise then when I was ticketed by the police for drinking on school property during halftime of a girl's volleyball game (another excuse to drink). The news quickly ran up to the school section, and then I had to inform my folks. All of this landed me in an eight-week course for problem drinking. I just laughed it off, unlistening to all the sobering news and statistics. The teachers who led the course must not have been amused--I'm sure they weren't being paid much to run the courses.

What followed was really just more of the same, only more alcohol was needed. I didn't realize, for instance, that I was actually having blackouts, though, until I quit drinking. It just seemed quite normal to not remember anything but compressed seconds--perhaps non-consecutive seconds--from the night before. I ended up with a frayed head eventually, which seems, of course, "normal," because the alcoholic isn't ready to say to him/herself that he/she isn't well. So, frayed head, full of disjunction, full of paranoia, full of suspicion, full of shit, with cowardly sarcasm in tow. Hi, how are you?

Attending the graduate program in creative writing at Syracuse University just continued the same behavior, with the added benefit of being around some people just like me. It was like heaven, at least for awhile. But my alcoholism was really growing by leaps and bounds during this period, which came to involve drinking and getting drunk nightly, a pack and a half cigarette smoking habit, one memorable night where I was afraid to actually walk down a flight of stairs, inexcuseable behavior with women, considerable blackouts, and so on. I began to worry a lot about my sanity--this, unfortunately, isn't a joke.

During my second year at Syracuse, I met a professor who was a recovering alcoholic. He took over for a professor who had gotten ill over the winter break. Little did I know then, but this chance encounter helped change my life. At first I couldn't stand listening to him talk in bits about his sober life. It pretty much drove me nuts, to be honest. But because I was enrolled in the course, I had to sit and listen to him. He would talk about poetry mostly, but there would be side areas of his own personal life that would come through. After a few weeks, I began to like him more and more, and my initial defensiveness fell away. I would end up taking six courses with this professor, and he eventually became a good friend outside of class.

There were many more struggles to come from simply putting the bottle down, and several times I've said to my wife that if I knew life would be so difficult after putting down the bottle, I probably never would have. But most other days I'm fine, and thankful.

Hillary's landslide victory in West Virginia really only points out the extreme obvious--that she can win the centrist voters, the Reagan Dems. She's proven that again and again. Obama simply doesn't play to them--there's more than a sense that he's fairly uncomfortable being around those who aren't in his tax bracket; these people are used only for airy abstractions of brotherhood/sisterhood. Hillary is wealthier, in fact, than Obama, but she doesn't seem to be. That seem is all the difference with the middle voters. He's too fluid in his movements, too thin, too in-shape, too "above it all," too polished. I think people don't trust that--they sense there's something false about it all, an image of perfection, an image of severe circumspection, while at the same time being an act of severe circumspection. His preacher tone was a later arrival to the full act, as we learned recently. Hillary comes off as less distant from her roots, I feel. There's something quite middlebrow about her, though she has the same Ivy League background as Obama, and I feel this middlebrowness, too, is something that a majority of people can relate to. The well-educated editors of newspapers and those on television don't seem to understand the group of voters outside of their direct sense of "how things should be." This is especially true, I feel, of the well-educated Obama crowd, especially the youthful end, in that they feel that their interests are everyone's interests. They're simply not.

The battle will not be for how many of the pseudo-liberal Starbucks crowd will vote--they're just a measly percentage of the vote--but how many of the Reagan Dems will vote and who they will vote for. Recent presidential history will tell anyone this is where the game is always played. Kerry, Gore, Dukakis, Mondale--all interested in gaining liberals. All losers. I'll cut Gore a break, though. Clinton, in 1992 and 96--moved toward the middle, wooing the Reagan Dems. He won. Bush plays the card of "compassionate conservative" and is helped to win in 2000. In 2004, he's at the height of his warmonger power, sliming everything in Fear and Terrorism and Patriotism, that he wins again, though barely. Kerry was quickly dispatched as liberal waffler, which wasn't true, but he didn't put up a fight about it.

At this moment, I see nothing in Obama that tells me that he's going after the centrists, and I think this will prove his undoing. If McCain can keep himself in check, if he can manage his campaign well enough, I see him prevailing. Now, perhaps the war or the economy will worsen even more, and he will be tied, rightly, to Bush--this may do enough work by itself to unsettle the Reagan Dems to vote against BushMcCain, but it won't be a positive vote for Obama; it'll be a negative vote against BushMcCain.

I voted for Nader in 2000 and Kerry in 2004. I knew the first was a pipedream, but I didn't think the second would be. I was wrong. I should've seen it coming. All of you Obama supporters, if you're diehards, you should be pressing your candidate to talk to the middle, to the centrists. That will get him elected. It's why I've been advocating for Hillary here on Esther, with her warts and all, because I feel she does do that, and this will play a bigger role in the general elections where the winner takes all of the states he or she wins.

What's not clear from that last video is the drop "over the edge." The drop is the 6th highest in the United States--Feather Falls falls 640 feet. Here's a long view of it from the web:



In the video I am standing right where it goes over the canyon wall.

In case there's someone still late to the party in understanding the mediocracy's decision to elect Obama, here's that veritable bi-partisan source, John Zogby, of the frequently-used Zogby polls. My favorite even-handed remark by this polling agency CEO:

"Finally, Obama's got his groove back."

Zogby--A Name you can distrust.

*

In other news, it's interesting that the news this past week has been on how well Clinton is defeated. The AP had one today on the once-annointed now falling, the New York Times much the same, etc. Nowhere in the major press is there any mention of Hillary's huge leads in West Virginia and Kentucky. If there is any mention, it's about Oregon, you see, where Obama is clinging to a lead. Spin, spin, spin. Kool-Aid, Kool-Aid, Kool-Aid.

PORTISHEAD--first five songs from the new album, Third.

1: Silence



2: Hunter



3: Nylon Smile



4: The Rip



5: We Carry On

Where are all the white, centrist voters--the huge majority of the voting population--going to go in the Fall? This is where the votes are, as sad as that is. It would be great if the country were filled with radical leftists seeking to end capitalism, but it's not. It's a country of middle-of-the roaders who often can't decide until the minute before voting. Middle-left Hillary knows this, Middle-right McCain knows this. I really don't get the sense that Obama gets this. I get the sense that Obama thinks he can will all of these middle-of-the roaders magically to his way of thinking with his fairytales of poor people singing kumbaya with the wealthy, with the blacks breaking bread with the whites, etc. It's a fairytale he repeated the other night once again in North Carolina. It's a fairytale because there are very real differences between a poor person's life and a wealthy person's life. Wealthy people live in gated communities for reasons. To keep the poor out. It's been that way for thousands of years. But it sounds nice to believe in that nonsense. There are very real, deep-seated and serious racial injustices that this country has created and has continued creating. We're founded on working poor military blood and slave labor. It's honorable to say one must overcome these obstacles in florid speeches, but there are more real-world necessities needed for that to happen. Bush became a "compassionate conservative" for a reason in 2000. He wanted to hide his reptilian Republican brain from the middle-left, which he did well enough to win (with some help from associates in the Florida elections committee and the US Supreme Court). Bill Clinton did the same thing in 1992 and 1996. Moved to the middle during the campaign. If Obama does not move to the middle during the campaign, I fully expect McCain to win, as horrible as that will be.

Notes on Cloverfield--

Annoyingly hip, educated young adults of the upper middle class, partying at going-away celebration for Rob, the new vicepresident of a place in Japan.

Explosion.

Moderate panic ensues. Hand-held camera previously used to archive bankrupt sentiments to Rob, now meant to give "real-time" feel, gritty realism.

Running out onto the streets. Pretty people we're supposed to care about.

30 minutes in: NYC still seemingly uninhabited by anyone less than 25 years old.

Looting ensues in electronic store in background. Black people stealing things. White person--the camera guy, Hud--explains to Rob, another white person, that the already-being-looted store is not open. This is not a joke. Class manners. Underlying message, Rob, white person, "steals" necessary batteries for cellphone, while black people steal unnecessary televisions.

Movie is a fever dream of 9/11 components.

"Sephora" appears on wall. Sephora means slumbering sea demon, aptly. Overly aptly.

Camera guy does not put camera down for any reason, thankfully for the director.

For the sake of the plot, Rob--the lead--must re-enter the heart of the Beast where Death and Destruction loom, because he MUST save the woman that he had a one-night fling with, though he didn't plan on seeing her again--never called her back, etc--because he'd be in Japan shortly. Now, though, when a national catastrophe strikes, he decides it's a good time to re-evaluate. HE MUST SAVE HER!

36 minutes in: Why can't the military shoot the cameraman? Please.

36:34--By all means, keep hanging onto the camera. The movie depends on it.

38:00--Call from concerned Mom of Rob. Domestic Caucasian Horror!

40:00--Nokia product placement

41:00--Rob's dirt on his face has mysteriously vanished. Must have washed up.

45:00--Handy metal rod appears in pitch black train tunnel. Luckily it appeared just as the demons were biting them. Perhaps the director handed it to her to speed things up.

47:00--Romance building?

48:00--Mountain Dew product placement. Conveniently all the lights are on in the subway.

50:00--The military does not remove camera as the four hip upper middle class young adults move through the triage center. They're free to film. It's common to film military command centers, being the message.

51:00--"I'm not jeopardizing this operation or my men." This is almost perfect.

51:00--Pathetic, spoiled rich kid pleading with military to save a member of his Class.

52:00--The blue suit Hazmat people appear. Remove the sullen one of the four. Thank you. One down, three to go.

53:00--They've been evacuating the entire midtown of Manhattan for about an hour now, but one military man decides to let our three people--one thankfully with a camera--back into it. This is realism, remember. Hand-held camera, etc.

55:00--Good idea to try to use elevators when much of the city is already without power, and that small thing of being under attack. Can one of the Hazmat people come for the camera guy?

57:00--Our young rescuers conveniently locate a twisted bridge of metal pipes to ford the buildings. About the crossing, camera guy says, "I'll document it."

58:00--Camera guy choking up before crossing, turns camera on himself and says, "If this is the last scene you see, it means I've died." We could only be so lucky.

59:00--Nearing apartment of one-night fling.

60:00--"Oh, my God! Oh, my God!"

(Unable to continue note-taking.)

Recently, we watched Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. The plot unfolds in an annoying back and forth manner, from before the accident to after. It's become a standard issue plot arranger for the past twenty years especially--except the arrangement needs a viewer to actually care about the chain of events that occurred before the after. The style causes a viewer to spend more time with the film than a straight narrative because there's less immediate information. It nearly broke my heart to see the great Albert Finney in such a tottering role. I had just watched his Saturday Night and Sunday Morning the week prior and was blown away.

*

Something in the above reminded me of what I had been thinking about yesterday. I was thinking about how much I would like to read an avant-garde/experimental writer/poet writing honest criticism of other avant-garde/experimental writers/poets. I don't mean to suggest that one should tear another down for sport, but to actually test the writing's thinking out, to not just sit there and say, "Oh, it's great--it's experimental writing." I mention this, because I almost always get this feeling of disappointment when I'm reading, for instance, the man from Philly's reviews, especially of his friends. The reviews write themselves under the simplest of grids--I know the person, they've published with the same presses, etc.

If one does criticize sacred poetry cows, one then almost always--and quickly--gets lumped into an awful lot of reactionaries, of people truly disinterested in experimentation or, really, just writing in general. This is a false move with bad mojo. I believe it takes more kindness, more subtlety, more honesty, to explain why an experimental piece doesn't "work" for one, than to just champion the work blindly because of various attendant, non-textual issues (who they are, where they went to school, who they know, etc.) An adult should be able to speak to another adult and explain what's bothering them--and this should include experimental writing and experimental writers. But be kind.

Nothing Moments is having a book launch and reading
at Printed Matter In New York.

It is on June 7th from 5-7pm. Please come if you are
around or forward the info to New York Friends.

Annie Buckley, Mark Kamine, Jamie Schwartz, and Lynne
Tillman will be reading that evening. It should be a
really fun event!

Thank you all,
Nothing Moments

Printed Matter
195 10th Ave
New York, NY 10011
(212) 925-0464
www.printedmatter.org

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I will be reading from my collection Work Book (Nothing Moments, 2007) sometime this summer in Berkeley/San Francisco/Oakland. Details to come.

Not all literary magazines need to have plans, but I tend to like them more when they do. I like literary magazines that have focus, that stand for something, anything, that have specific interests and reasons for those interests. One magazine that fills that bill is Antennae, edited by Jesse Seldess. I reviewed Antennae several years ago--you can go here, if you care to--and my admiration of it hasn't changed. I just received an email letting me know that Antennae is now online, with pdfs of the older issues now available. Here's the link.

To continue. I had a fairly terrible December, mentally, as I usually do, and because of this my interest in most things evaporated. I began to eat too many of the chocolates that kept appearing at work, as our customers dropped off end-of-the-year gifts. The Coop where I shop put expensive, luxurious candy bars on sale for the entire month, and I really couldn't stop myself from buying them. I even told one of the cashiers to please ask their manager to take them off sale. I traveled back to Wisconsin for Christmas, and more fattening food was ever present. And more candy. I should explain, I guess, that since I gave up alcohol and cigarettes ten years ago, sugar has been the key battle. That's actually very common with recovering alcoholics, though. In any case, my weight went up, up, up. I stood on my parent's scale at some point and looked down to see that, for the first time, I had crossed over to 200 pounds exactly. I was immediately disgusted with myself. I resolved that I would get back into shape when I got home to Chico.

At this point, my main goal was to get rid of the weight. I still had the idea of climbing Mt. Shasta in the back of my mind, but I couldn't exactly believe in myself at that point. So I started jogging, right away, in the beginning of January. I followed this jogging plan. I had never jogged before in my life. The beginning sessions were gruelling, even though they seemed easy enough on paper. Little by little, my lungs started helping out more. The coughing jags ended. I was feeling a bit better, and I was watching what I was eating. Slowly, over the next months, I began to lose weight. (I'm currently 172 pounds. I haven't weighed that in ten years.)

As I began losing weight, I felt my desire to climb Shasta come back as well. I began to get motivated all over again. My main problem was, of course, finding someone to climb the mountain with me. I joined two national hiking forums and asked questions, but no one seemed to be climbing Shasta this summer. Some had climbed it a year ago, some were planning it, but no one currently. I did and didn't want to climb it alone. My natural inclination in most things is to do things by myself--I have always been self-reliant, and I like that quality in others. Mt. Shasta, though, was a different animal. It was highly recommeded, nearly commanded, that you don't climb Shasta solo, and as much I usually ignore such warnings--warnings are for other people--my gut was telling me that it would be wise, this time, to follow the program.

I began to put out the word at work about my interest in climbing Shasta, and this led to some contacts, which didn't amount to any actual climbing partners, but it felt like things were progressing all the same. It was good to just let the interest circle around.

I can no longer remember all the chain of events, but one day I decided to go to a local sporting goods store with a large supply of top-end mountaineering equipment. I began talking with the young salesperson about my interest, and he told me that he had climbed Shasta, and told me that a co-worker of his actually was a climbing guide for a company that provided guided climbs of Shasta. He wasn't there at the time, but I made a mental note to come in when he was there.

MORE TO COME

As I've said before here, I first planned to climb Mount Shasta after climbing Lassen Peak, which is 10,457 ft high, and actually an active volcano. One does not climb all 10,457 feet of it, of course, as the parking lot at the base of it is already at 8000 feet. Lassen Peak is part of the Cascade Range that extends all the way up into Canada. Mt. St. Helens is part of this same range. In fact, Mt. St. Helens and Lassen Peak are the only two volcanoes in the Range to have erupted in the last century.

Mount Shasta is the second-highest peak in the Cascade Range, at 14,187 ft. (The highest peak is Mt. Rainier in Washington state at 14,411 ft.) Unlike Lassen Peak, one does start at a lower altitude, with a total elevation gain of 7,300 ft.

At the time of climbing Lassen, I thought, rather foolishly, that I might just drive up some weekend in September or October and climb Mt. Shasta as well. And this very stupidity is why people should read books. There was, really, no chance of my making the summit of Mt. Shasta at that point--mainly because I didn't know how strenuous a climb it was, nor that only advanced climbers climb in those later months (the main climbing season is April through early July), nor that it would require me being in much better shape than I was, nor that I would have to have much more serious mountaineering gear, and so on. My sheer ignorance of the matter was vast. I barely knew what a crampon was.

The first break in my ignorance arrived with the very good book, Climbing Mount Shasta, written by Steve Lewis. Lewis takes one through the entire ordeal, from preparation, to summit, and descent. Along the way, new words arrive: belay, scree, self-arrest, etc.

Shortly after reading the book, I begin to investigate various online mountaineering stores, but still in an intermittant manner, as Lewis's book did put a scare into me about the dangers of climbing Mount Shasta, especially alone. People do die on the mountain, broken bones occur, various, serious altitude-related illnesses, like HAPE, can happen, and so on. I begin to doubt myself. My interest wanes but doesn't disappear. I watch Mount Everest films from Netflix, amazed at the infamous Ice Fields, which lie just at the start of the climb, above Base Camp. The area is crisscrossed with wide crevasses that require, at times, multiple ladders to be tied together with rope and lain over the abysses. The climber then walks on the rungs with crampons (!), while the ladders bounce from the weight. I would read, later on, that these ice fields and crevasses are crossed multiple times in the acclimitization period. Of course, Mount Shasta is NOT Mount Everest. Mount Everest is twice as high. But I was doing a proper job of scaring myself silly by inference.

MORE TO COME