The Problem With David Copperfield

It's tied up too neatly. David starts out as an autobiographical character for Dickens, a revolt against his archetypal heroes, but by the end of the book becomes the packaged "everything's okay-I'm happy despite all life's shortcomings" kind of romantic 19th century character. Keep in mind that it took Dickens another ten years to write Great Expectations, a story which ends up not nearly as well tied together, which is arguably why it's better.

We are able to envision characters like Mr. Micawber, the unctious Uriah Heep, and Little Dora all too well, but by the end of the story we hardly feel like we know David. As Shaw noted, we know nothing of his political leanings, his unconscious desires or anything that is not universal. For the particular we must turn to secondary characters.

The masterpiece David Copperfield is imperfect, similar in the imperfections of Great Expectations: how it takes too long to dissuade Pip to leave Estella. But can we fault Dickens for this? I laughed, cried, learned new words, and generally enjoyed David Copperfield. The only faults I find I must try to correct in my own work. That's why I read all these works of classic literature.

Here's to post postmodernism!

Rumi, Negative Capability and Eastern Classic Literature

I'm reading Rumi's "The Book of Love," a classic literature text worth reading. It isn't so much about the sexual love you immediately thought of upon reading the title, but rather the love for life, on which I pride myself for having.

Not to sound like an arrogant asshole, but you know, the channeling of emotion, the appreciation of highs, lows, ups, downs, all that goodness and beauty.

The Eastern and Western notions of love are different. The former is based on sobriety, receptiveness and clarity; the latter, longing, desire and drunkenness. We need both, but in Western classic literature, the drunk-with-longing is more heavily emphasized. When the Eastern makes an appearance, it's love for a flower or a bumble-bee. I'd say that Keats comes closest to achieving them both simultaneously in terms of sexual love, which makes sense if you think about his definition of negative capability.

So I'm going to try to follow in his footsteps and write about a new love beyond all as I write my kunstlerroman. The key is not to sound so damn self-absorbed. Or maybe to sound self-absorbed but alleviate it with a time-gap perspective, of say, ten years. Good luck you 22-year old snot nose. Yeah, like that.

On the Road Again

In that time the road smelled like gasoline and french fries at the gas stations and Circle K's. When you rolled your window down and stuck your head out beside the cars whooshed past, it was hard to get a whiff.  The speed made breathing difficult. Your nostrils couldn't accept all the air at once.

 Slower, on a scenic route, it smelled of heather and pine, trampled needles and early summer sun; open expanses and vast prairie, corn and that wide blue air scent unfound in metropolitan avenues; hot macadam and brown grasses, hay casks and descending evening. It smelled like youth, life and everything that mattered.

When you saw the green signs with white pimply lettering that read Sioux City 364 and you longed to be there already, find your room and settle down for the night, you tempered it by remembering that you still have to stop for lunch. Hundreds of miles of open grassland, red rim-rocks, striated purples, a propitious hawk overhead - so different from yesterday's scenery. What's next?

    The chickenscratchy sound of distance-drowned radio led to the seek button and when they heard a good classic country or rock'n'roll song, they'd press it again to let it stop and play. It was a good station and they'd sing along:
   
"On the road again
    Goin places that I've never been
    Seein' things that I may never see again
    And I can't wait to get on the road again"

Until it ended sadly and they hoped to recognize another. They kept it there until a commercial break, when they seeked again, and remembered that one, in case there were only three or four radio stations within a hundred square miles. If there were no other songs they recognized, they returned abashedly, and prayed for another good one.

Love and Neil Young

In life we all just want to be loved. There are times when we think we love someone more than anyone else, although it is the eros doing this. (Funny, how Cupid the messenger of love and the word cupidity, meaning avarice, have the same root). We love our parents and our siblings and our friends just as much, if not more. Try to quantify your love, puny human.

But when we find the eros, it burns brighter and faster and so we want to love harder, more than the agape or the storge. In the end, it only dies faster. Suspend your thought. Let go. Live it fully. This will be the truest love you can express. And everyone will feel it.

Why is Neil Young so good? He combines aspects of folk and rock that make him soft and melodic, yet rugged and hard. He balances extremes well, though he is best when he's in the middle. He is like the lovechild of Bob Dylan and Led Zeppelin, especially in his Crazy Horse days.



Play the mouth harp, if you want to take up an instrument and can't dedicate the time to the guitar.

Free Associative Post Postmodern Descriptions

 My friends are naming their dog Prince Chicken Sandwich Can't Be Asked Jackson and that's the condensed version. But this allows you to call the dog any of the above, or whatever the fuck you want.

So you can basically call anything you want, anything you want. Let me provide an example:

"Morning moved like a pearl-gray tide across the fields and up the hill-flanks, flowing rapidly down into the soluble dark." (Look Homeward, Angel, 144).

How great is that? Soluble means able to be dissolved, and yes dark is able to be dissolved. But you know this dude had this word shoot into his head and was like, "That dark is soluble. The morning is pearl-gray." And it was so.

We've reached the height of postmodernism, when you can incorporate whatever you want to achieve absurdity or high seriousness. So if you want to describe your dog, the first thing that comes to mind is as good as any.

You can call the dawn whatever you want. Let's try. The orchid blue morning broke suddenly like a storm-washed crescent over the slop-bricked town. Pretty shitty, right? But at least you get a vague idea of what I'm talking about, the reality I'm trying to define. Outdo me, please. That is the beauty of this post postmodernism thing.

How Many Words Are In The English Language?

Uriah Heep, the subject of  Mr. Micawber's bombastic denunciation.

There are over a million words, or lexemes, in the English language. Including scientific nomenclature, that figure could easily be doubled. Shakespeare, master of classic literature, had a vocabulary of about 40,000 words. The average person knows about 10,000.

There are only going to be more, too. Is this a good thing? I like to think so. English is one of the few languages that absorbs words wherever it can get them. We can express whatever we want with our indisposable store of new words. They come into existence all the time, thanks to the Internet, although they also falling out of use just as fast.

Google's word cache project, the Ngram viewer, allows you to track the usage of any word over the past five hundred years, according to about 15% (and growing) of the world's literature.

I'll leave you with a quote from David Copperfield, which may influence your ideas about whether or not it is a good thing that English has such a broad lexicon:

"We talk about the tyranny of words, but we like to tyrannise over them too; we are fond of having a large superfluous establishment of words to wait upon us on great occasions; we think it looks important; and sounds well...And as individuals get into trouble by making too great a show of liveries, or as slaves when they are too numerous rise against their masters, so I think I could mention a nation that has got into many great difficulties, and will get into many greater, from maintaining too large a retinue of words."-754

Snow in Bushwick: Memento Mori

This was written during the last snow storm. Just before I went to bed, I looked outside, felt the snow falling, wanted to describe the serene peace, and scribbled these few ideas. Unfortunately, the original was mangled with run-ons and repeated words. So I feebly tried to fix it in time for the latest fall. 

When it snows it is perfectly silent because the storm blankets the sounds of planes, cars, and even the wind. The high orange glow of lamp posts illumines speckled sheets of bright lavender-white sky.

Bushwick looks older now; scalloped roof eaves are limned in white. Brick chimneys remember the nineteenth century, before snow plows, when a snow day meant staying at home and tending to the wife and child, building the fire. You go to the pen and slice open a hog's belly, feel the rich warm blood spill over your hands, and know the family will be well fed during the impasse.

Dead leaves hang limply from still branches. Steel mesh fences with the twisted pointed tips look soft and still-lived. The dead remember the snow, how it falls and buries their silent tombstones, drowning their names and quiet calls. We'll all go their way.

The Mole People

As he scribbled the last flourish of his name, Gabriel asked, "Jimmy, what's with that man with the sunglasses?"

Jimmy looked up from the clipboard, stared ahead, and looked at Gabriel, "You mean, Nehamaseh? With the black beanie?" Gabriel nodded. "He's been in and out of here for about ten years. He's had a hard life, man." Gabriel wondered if his foreign-sounding name had contributed to its difficulty.

"Okay, see you tomorrow."

"Bye-bye, Gabriel."It didn't occur immediately to Gabriel that the man with the sunglasses was crazy, but when the man didn't show up the next day, the thought crossed his mind. That night he told Stella about him.

"He's probably crazy, Gabriel," she said, hanging her head and shaking it quickly. "It's sad. Sometimes, you have to thank God, and say a prayer that you're not one of the four who have problems. Mother of Gaw-awd, between them and the mole people."

"Mole people? What do you mean?"
She was surprised. "You don't know about them? They live underground in the subway!"
"What?"
"Yea-ah! There are thousands of them, and they use the sewer system and have underground cities. A lot of them are demented and incapable."
"So they live underground?"
"Yes!" she said, half-exasperated, eyes wide. "They're the mole people! They can't see the sun or they'll go blind."

He wondered if this were another of his mother's superstitions.

-Wondering myself,
Daniel Adler

A Retrospection

Jimmy was the guy in charge. Whenever he alluded to the luck of the draw or the devil's cares, he smiled to reveal a gap where his front left incisor once had been. His skin was naturally orange. He had a broad nose and flat black hair.

He directed Gabriel to stack the wooden chairs on the tables in order to sweep the floors, then chop the brown-speckled vegetables that made him think about O' Donnell's pristine green peppers and long ridged carrots.

At 5:30, the food was ready, and the homeless people lined up. They were gray, black, brown, white, orange, yellow, etc. Their clothing hung limp and dirty on their hollowed bones. Scents of barreled whisky, vomit, urine, (feces?), and other bodily fluids clung to the air. Their bandaged dirty fingers caused you, unknowingly, to stare. Their hair hung scraggly by their crusty-downed cheeks. Gabriel thought disgustedly that there was no way to help them; they had done this to themselves.

After they finished their dinners, they had to stand in line if they wanted seconds, so that everyone would have their turn. Most got seconds; some got thirds. Those who left immediately after were probably drifters, floating wherever they could get a hot meal.

-Ironically,
Daniel Adler

Black Swan

Saw Black Swan last night, which was good. Very emotionally difficult. I left with a cramp, which lasted for about an hour and was only helped by a shot of Buffalo Trace whiskey and some jalapeno potato chips and a pint a Yuengling.

Perhaps it would have been easier to stomach if my ex-girlfriend weren't a ballerina, but that, unfortunately, is not what this post is about.

Natalie Portman did a fine job acting in the film. She will likely win Best Actress at the Oscars. The only point I didn't believe she was a real ballerina was when she told her mom that she got the lead role as the Swan Queen. She did, as Gio described, her facial contractions - smile, to lesser smile, to bigger smile, etc.

Other than that she was stunning. And while at times the relationship between mother and daughter was mawkish, it was so in a good way. We all can relate to the mawkishness. In the same way we shudder at her self-mutilation.

Ugh, I think about it and the stomach tumor bulges.
For a more in depth review, click to learn about Brooklyn.

Foxwoods Casino

Casino buffets are taken very seriously by older folks especially. They fill their plates with shellfish and suck the shrimp and the mussels, discarding the skins aside with their chomped corn cobs. I treat it as a farce - eat and sample everything I can for $17.95. Hot coffee, orange juice, iced water, corn beef hash, French toast with candied pecans and spinach salad with baby tomatoes and cucumbers and red onion marinated in olive oil and vinegar and soft serve ice cream with walnuts and vanilla sauce; fresh turkey with gravy and eggs and teriyaki green beans and cheeze blintzes, biscuits and white gravy. I sample, leaving food on my plates wantonly before surveying the other stations.

We danced at The Scorpion nightclub after resting our jackets in a booth we weren't allowed to sit in because they were reserved for the bald 40-year olds who bought huge containers of sectioned mixed Grey Goose drinks, like a giant slurpee, with orange juice on one side and coke on the other, all in order to attract the heel-wearing, black-dressed, attractive, bored, Italian-looking girls.

It (the casino) is like an amusement park for adults. Middle-aged women ran to escalators; we smoked freely and openly ashed on the carpets; the roulette table encouraged rapid betting and when the ball fell on 8 black, hundreds of chips were collected and a stack of six - the winning six- remained. The dealer ushered the stacks in a wash into the chip hole and with the sound of cicadas clicking they filtered into an underground chip-sorting room (so I like to imagine).

Cities

The cliffs of Lima, Peru.

The centuries built made men die. The brick, the steel, the warmth, the bitter wind, the snow creased into the manhole filling the stitches, blackened and filthy in the crevices. Yellow lights glow underneath red and white. There is motion everywhere, the cars, people, planes with blinking red and white lights high above all pass. Even where it is still movement is near. People are within brick hovels, stories high. There is emptiness in this plan made by them, hundreds of years of them. It is the fullest of life anywhere could be.

These cities are all different. Sprawl, with used leg-extending child pushing mothers in line the link-chained swing sets clink, with moist hills unburdened by cement behind them and orange painted trucks rattle; with hotels with skinny pools and gold embrasures, with vistas of the ants beneath unknowing they're being watches, and coopered oak water barrels, cobbled ground, and snaky rivers like gray eyes. Bathers plash in the reeds in man-made lakes underneath white-mooned skies. The chocked heavy cliffs fumble over gray interminable, implacable scrollwork of ocean. 

Cruelly
-Daniel Adler

Gerundizing in Post Postmodernism

The latest trend in post postmodern language is gerundizing, or making a noun a verb. Julie's example was, "Hey are you guys Bostoning this weekend?"

But you don't have to gerundize necessarily - the larger trend is that nouns are becoming verbs. Take the word "reference."  It is gaining momentum as a verb instead of a noun. How often do you hear people talk about the reference section in the library. Forget the word "cite."

Indeed, gerundizing makes English that much easier. As Thomas Jefferson said, why use two words when one will do?

It is also popular to shuffle between tenses and styles, not necessarily incorporating and alluding to different brands, people and ideas, but instead to different styles in order to express different trains of thought. Let's say a character wants to experiment with drugs. It's very effective for a post postmodern writer to imitate the exploration of subjectivity used by modernist writers to simulate his experience while high.

Or perhaps the protagonist is remembering his youth: a self-conscious remembrance in the postmodern style would do well in such an occasion. Post postmodern writers have all this history from which to borrow, and as such, can move fluidly from one style to the other.  

-Prophetically,
Daniel Adler

Adventures in Post Postmodernism

An excerpt from the first great novel of post postmodernism:

The West for desire, the East for home. American adventure smells like gasoline and cheap perfume. Adventure is an event that is out of the ordinary, without necessarily being extraordinary, according to Sartre. I like this definition. Travel is the easiest way to obtain adventure. The experience is undoubtedly out of the ordinary - you are paying for a break from the ordinary, and when you take the trip it is a story, always a story.

But then, when you're on the way home, you get that feeling, maybe anxiousness, maybe homesickness, and you don't want to be in between home and travel; you want to be either/or. And when you arrive home you are different because you have had a new adventure, an experience that you have never had before. That allows you to understand that every experience is new, every fucking second is a variation, not a repetition, and that in each life-glimmer there is potential, however minute, for adventure.

You glimpse this upon your return, and you tell your friends your stories, and you feel proud to have had such daring experiences, such startling breaks from reality, and everyone enjoys hearing about these adventures, because they allow us to move away from the monotony of our forgetfulness. But pretty soon you get back to work, and the routine takes hold of you by the neck, and tucks you tightly so that you forget about possibility. And even though work is a kind of adventure, it quickly becomes the routine we crave.

Bushwick and Swallow Cafe

This is where I do a lot of writing. I watch Gio flirt with Sam(antha), who clearly likes him. She is pretty popular in the community, being a barista and all. But there's something about the way she smiles when she talks to him that makes it clear.

I once saw her at the Post bike shop. Her wheel was badly out of true, and the dredded dudes rejected her; to fix the wheel wouldn't be worth it.

This is my bohemia, where they will remember the seedlings of post postmodernism, or metamodernism, sprouted. Out of the nine laptop users in the badly named Swallow Cafe (Sam said that there's no chance they'll change the name), seven have Macs; there is some throbbing-beated lo-fi jangly female singing music playing; and the dishwasher whirs soothingly.

If the Halsey stop is the newest edge of gentrification, then Morgantown will soon be Bedford. Once they build those condos that are slated to go up, just north of McKibbin on Bogart, this place is going to be prime real estate. It would be nice to be able to afford to live there by the time they're built.

Bushwick rats. I should get back to reading some classic literature.

The Halsey Stop, Bushwick

Deep in the heart of Bushwick lies the Halsey stop. It is on the edge of three huge cemeteries: the Mt. Judah, the Trinity and the Knollwood Park. It is where gentrification has yet to spread. On Eldert St., where MTV is supposed to be going in a few months, for God knows what, is probably the new McKibbin lofts. Here, the folks are into partying, living cheaply or just plain being in the cut.

My homie Matt Cross lives here. He is a superb guitarist, but what sets him apart from the hundreds of other guitar-shredders is his lyrics. He would be the lovechild of Tom Waits and Bob Dylan, musically. 

So we were at his beautiful apartment/condo/dorm and we went to the third floor to see this dude named Rahul, who seems to be pretty cool and intelligent, due to the Financial Fortunes book that he had on his shelf, and the bottle of Medoc he was sipping, after the cork disintegrated and he had to push it into the bottle to pour some wine; and this huge black dude, who was probably six foot and weighed three hundred pounds, but had the highest sweetest falsetto, and who sweated profusely when he picked up and cradled a large-bottomed pink Zoo York-sweatpants-wearing girl in his lap. He asked me if I wanted to be his driver, since he couldn't drive after six 'o'clock after crashing into a schoolbus while picking up a spilled tube of Percosets.

Anyway, if you ever get a chance to go to the Halsey stop in Bushwick, do it. And check out Matt's next show.

Moliere's Don Juan

To read this play as anything more than a moral lesson is tempting, though improper. What is to be examined, instead, is its incorporation of genres and themes; its use of wit, paradox, and repartee. The comedy of manners, the morality play, and the opera buffa all funciton together to create a character who is comical in his naivete. We wait for his hypocrisy to be condemned to hellfire and damnation, and ultimately, are rewarded.

But Sganarelle's question at the end of the play ("But who will pay my wages?) when lamenting the loss of his master suggests that the harm has already been done. Dona Elvira turns to the convent, her family never exacts revenge, and Sganarelle is left to brave the world without hiding behind his master.  The remaining characters are urged closer to God through Don Juan's damnation.

In the 17th century, Louis XIV's Paris had seen the influence of the church wane, and the possibility for social satire emerge. Here is where Moliere's true genius shines, for as Don Juan says, "It's only commonsense to take advantages of the weaknesses of mankind, and adjust one's behavior to fit in with the vices of one's age." Moliere's ability to condemn the traits most prevalent in an age (namely, hypocrisy and pretentiousness) is worthy of emulation. My question is what are the vices inherent in post postmodernism?

Thomas Wolfe's Modernism

Thomas Wolfe is a badass writer. Although he wrote Look Homeward, Angel at the height of the modernist movement, in 1928, he employs various postmodern techniques. For example, upon his birth he manages to remove some of the self-indulgence of writing a bildungsroman by asking the reader if you are familiar with what had happened during the course of history up until that moment.

He goes on to list a number of current, as well as ancient, events in order to both minimize the effect of his birth as another common circumstance, while aggrandizing it in a list of notable historical occurrences. In this series of postmodern paragraphs, he moves from second person to first and eventually back to third. The modernist techniques are most apparent when he attempts to probe different consciousnesses. He soon thereafter describes how he, as a little baby, thought:

"He had not even names for the objects around him: he probably defined them for himself by some jargon, reinforced by some mangling of the speech that roared about him, to which he listened intently day after day, realizing that his first escape must come through language."

So now I plan my own escape, again, through language.

Metamodernism in Literature

My friend Thomas Gibney knows the meaning of post postmodernism. He's living in Hong Kong right now, and has just launched his website. He has written four short stories that allow you, the reader, to guide him to the story's ends.

This example of avant-garde art, especially the interactivity, is what our moment is all about. The internet allows us to access a much vaster amount of information than we ever previously have. Not to make our moment sound so important, but it shares many similarities to the time when the printing press changed the world. The repercussions from this groundswell are just beginning to be felt, mostly in the business world (Facebook's alignment with Goldman Sachs) but also in the poliltical arena (the Obama grassroots youth movement that helped him win office two years ago).

We are all so preoccupied with updates and ways to stay connected that literature has inevitably begun to feel it too. The blog, for one, is a great example. The best blogs are pitstops on the internet highway. Jump here, answer some idiot's response about global warming; go here, drop a link to this funny site you found; retweet it and like it on Facebook, check out your friend's post of a viral video, etc.

So the metamodernism is everywhere. Thomas' work is a good way to understand it.

Look Out Kid, Metrosexuals

Look out kid, it's something you did. A man in a coon skin cap wants eleven dollar bills, you only got ten.

Look out kid, don't matter what you did.

Bob Dylan - Subterranean Homesick Blues (Official Music Video). Watch more top selected videos about: Bob Dylan

Look out kid, you gon' get hit.

Look out kid, they keep it all hid.

Look out kid, you gon' get lit.

Look out kid, you gonna hit it big.

Look out kid, you're wearing sandals he's wearin flip-flops, walk forward, turn back look how his hips pop.

Look out kid, is it something you did?

Look out kid, you're gonna keep writing free verse Bob Dylan lyrics until someone turns his nose up and recognizes what's up.

Is  the term "metrosexual" passe? I wish I knew how to make accents in my typing strategy, but alas. We were talking about it in the (I've really wanted to link to) The McKibbin Lofts and couldn't decide. I think the incorporation of new "buzzwords" into the lexicon allows for fewer to be retained, and a more prevalent slang. So that if you wrote colloquially, it would become more difficult to read in a hundred years, and I wonder if that's a good thing or a bad thing. What do you think? Please comment in my Disqus box, no one ever does.

The Poolshark

Pool is a game of precision and force. I wish I were a poolshark with a fedora who walked into bars with a pool cue in a leather strap hung over my shoulder. And I lay down a dollar in quarters on the side of the table and say "Who's got next?"

The break is important. You gotta throw your shoulder into it. Sure the rack matters, but a weak break won't sink nothin'. So when I walk into the Wreck Room, with the fugly hipsters sitting at the bar donning their biking caps with flipped brims and Chrome backpacks with scribbled-in notebooks hanging out, I hang my coat, walk to the unused pool table, and roll the two cues to see which is straighter and will shoot better.

I hold the pool cue vertically so it stands on the floor. I walk around the table when my partner makes a shot, so he can have a clear view. And after I make mine I circle the crooked green felt confidently and know which ball I'm going to shoot. The orange five ball in the corner pocket and it sure ain't a straight line. So I line up off center, ease the cue back and forth back and forth through my curled forefinger and thumb hole, and knock it...

In?

Post Postmodernism Manifesto

If all movements are reactions, then it's clear that post postmodernism is a reaction to postmodernism. As such it will move away from the banal, the free form, and the ironic. It will relish the sublime, the subjectively universal, and the English Poets.  In short, it will participate in the tradition of classic literature.

My friend L.N. is working on his dissertation at Harvard, and in the meanwhile is creating a book of poems entitled "The Cold Wisdom of Northern Europe." It will be a collection of imaginative translations and adaptations from Old English and Old Norse, with poems expanding upon scenes in Beowulf, Bede, the Edda, etc (a companion volume, entitled "The Hot Blood of the Mediterranean," with poems from Latin and Greek, will come out in 2012). Here's a taste.

THUS SPOKE ODIN:

Deigning one day to descend from above
Odin came before the Folk.
The people pressed him for wisdom pure
And this is what he spoke:

“Your dearest friends will dearly die
Your cattle will die too.
Your crops, your crown, all will crumble
All will die, even you.

I know one thing that does not die
One thing not doomed by death;
One thing alone that will live
As long as men have breath:

The reputation of the renowned dead!
This will perish never.
Strong through song and saga long
A man’s fame lives forever.

He who holds this in his head
Will sure live wise and well;
But the fool who fast forgets it
Will be consigned to hell.”

This poem is based, by the way, on four lines from the Old Norse poem Havamal, which is a wisdom poem put into the mouth of Odin. The four lines are as follows:

"Friends die, cattle die,
You yourself will die.
I know one thing that does not die,
The reputation of the dead."