April Fools Day in Postmodernism

This is where I'm going to stay, maybe.

I'm going to Europe. I just received my Irish citizenship so that I can be a Euro Zone member and work wherever I want. Like in a month or two. I'm up and leaving. London, Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, I don't quite know yet. But I will and I'll keep you posted. Blog posted.

Meanwhile, I've been thinking about metafiction. I've been reading Portnoy's Complaint which is really great. Alexander digressively works back and forth, building suspense, dropping tidbits about his sex life and we can't wait to read more of the juicy stuff. And he very self-consciously makes note that his memories may be misconstrued:

"...Now, whether the words I hear are the words spoken is something else again. And whether what I hear I hear out of compassion for him, out of my agony over the inevitability of this horrific occurrence, his death, or out of my eager anticipation of that event, is also something else again."

Roy showed me a book by some writer whose name I can't remember but there was a metafictional part where he tells the reader that he's going to write about these characters reading a newspaper because he finds that interesting. And so the characters, both bad poets, are supposed to reflect him and things get all metamodern.

But see what I'm going to do is allow the protagonist to look out of the page and talk to the author. And that ain't no April Fools. You smell me?

Live for a Thousand Years in an Instant. Try It.

From the most recent female ephemera, remember the spirit children, the essences that united from all of our physical union and they whisper, what about us. But they drift into the atmosphere and I have done all I can.
  
Sometimes I remind myself that it doesn't matter whether you live for another three days or twenty years. For the mystic lover, three hours could be a hundred years. Remember this; I can tell you no more about it.

Repress desires and you become a hypocrite. Rumi said that.

All we have is to give and to hurry. But when we act with abandon, surrender to the life we pass through and become spirit, the way people do in love, we can be happy. Which is why people like falling in love: they are able to live a thousand years in a single instant. And most come crashing back to earth in jealousy and carnal lust. "What should we do next?" The spell is broken.

After practice you can eventually surrender to death and each life frame you live passes in slow motion.

I still can't do it, but I'm getting better. Classic literature helps.

Quixotic or Panzaic? Both in Post Postmodernism.

The great duality: the body and the mind. The ethereal and the ephemeral. High and low. I've been thinking a lot about the low recently, especially while reading a certain postmodern piece of classic literature, Molloy. Meanwhile, Portnoy's Complaint has led me to start thinking about the parent-child dynamic, and I realized that in Hot Love on the Wing poor Gabriel is trapped in the middle. Read on.

Like Sancho Panza she rebutted his criticism with the body. She ate, she laughed, and her bromides were saturated with undeniable truth. “You like what you like.” “Bad things come in threes.” And when the old man droned, they’re taking steps to preserve Bach’s original manuscripts in Leipzig, she listened interested and let him go on.

But his lean figure betrayed an inability to see things from her side. He ate like a bird and his health suffered. After a long day he was neurasthenic. He used Preparation H the way an 8-year-old used whip cream. She guffawed at sitcoms while he lined the bathroom floor with magazines. Bracelets jingling like a small animal's bell, she poured wine through the gap in her incisors. The blue TV glow cast reels in her chinked eyes. Her back hurt sometimes so she sat on the floor flushed, while he chased windmills and dreamed of glory.

Metamodernism in a New York Moment

 Imagine being in a garden terrace where American ‘90s jazz plays and the art that hangs on the walls is a menagerie of midcentury color-swerving, obviously Picasso inspired. One particular painting strikes you, this one more Fauvist: a purple blonde clutches a pearl necklace as she emerges, orange-nippled and open-mouthed, from a parlor with sitting chair. Now imagine yourself as the painter, or voyeur or whoever, sitting comfortably in another chair watching self-satisfied. This is how I felt as I ate the steak au poivre avec pomme frites. This reminded me what it was like to be in love.

And I wish I could transmit the same feeling to you – it is so luxurious, so serene. So I looked up to the sky through the swinging beech branches that clamber over the black fire escapes and brown brick apartments and stored in my memory what New York was like.

Maybe I would do better to show you in a story of my own, how it feels to be in love. But that’s so 20th century, not metamodern at all. Or is it?

Tazmanian Devilish vs. Hurricanal

Sometimes in an attempt to express myself I invent neologisms like “hurricanal,” meaning to feel like being trapped in a whirlwind. But as a colleague has pointed out, you can’t get away with just adding the suffix “al” der. Latin to any noun to make it an adjective. What would you say then I asked.

I don’t know, Tasmanian Devilish?

Of course! Because the Tasmanian Devil is so engrained into our cultural unconscious that we all know he arrives a flurry of dust from his rapid spinning.

But. What happens if I write this phrase in a certain post postmodern work of fiction, which I believe will be more closely aligned with classical styles of writing and postmodern styles of narrative than a continuation of postmodern stylization, then what will people who read it in two hundred years think? Will the image of Taz resonate as loudly with them? Or will they view it as an arcane 21st century allusion? And we all know Daniel Adler, the unpretentious does not want to seem arcane nor esoteric. 

So I will continue to use my poetic license however I deem necessary, and if an allusion to popular culture strikes me, you can bet your tootsie that people in a couple of hundred years will be able to identify. What do you think?

War: What It Is Good For

For thousands of years young men entered battle as a rite of passage. Those who lived had tempted fate and prevailed. Those who died didn’t want it badly enough.

But after WWII, in Vietnam for example, modern society made war out to be background noise, unwanted, (gasp!) dishonorable. And so today we don’t have wars, at least the way we used to. That’s why so many soldiers return with post-traumatic stress disorder – their experience is out of place with our world of Whole Foods and text messages. And this is to be lamented. In a way.

How I wish I could go to war, to fight for my country and myself and prevail and be honored. Alas, war has changed so that it is rarely face to face combat, and the horror of watching your best friend’s leg blown off by a nameless opponent is not the same as striking down a man who attempts to kill you with a lance.

The best thing about war is that it makes you happy to be alive; it allows you to further enjoy peace. And when peace is constant, or at least relatively so, in post postmodernism, many become malcontent.

Which is why I say to myself, even on rainy days, in the language of a quondam enemy: Ich bin glücklich.

Union Pool and the Reverend

Union Pool is arguably the best bar in Brooklyn. It is too crowded to really enjoy on the weekends, but every Monday the Reverend and his Love Choir break it down. Here's a little sample:

Daniel Adler's Survival Project

The smell of campfires is pleasant and if I were a woman, Matthew said, I'd be attracted to that natural smell. I agree.

Last night we went to 3rd Ward for Steven Brahms' The Survival Project. My favorites, and the centerpiece of the show were the 21 interesting photographs of all different long haired Asian men running away. I met Masa, Steven's friend, whose favorite was the one of him.

Fire is elemental to our survival. We watch it and we focus and appreciate it. Like a drug it acts on us. Immediate and instinctual, atavistic.

In the vein of the avant garde art theme, fire is survival and the warmth it provides is part of what allows humans to live, so we watch it and feel that it is a part of us and we a part of it. And toss in some corned beef with mustard and cabbage and boiled carrots and turnips and Italian sausage with red peppers over pasta with St. Andre cheese and spinach. And Jameson 12 year.  

London Recap

Daniel Adler in Claridge's Hotel.

I just created my London album on Facebook which is supposed to give you an idea of what we saw and did. Overall I was ambivalent about being home when I returned last night and saw the rats in the sewer and the loud rude Americans. On one hand this is what makes America Amurrica - the high culture and the low, but London is simply more refined. Let me try to describe it another way: in London people pass by, in New York they are next to you. Everyone wants to stand out here, there they want to be recognized. The difference is subtle and plays out in our country's love for individualism and theirs for class.

We saw an interesting play about race called Clyborne Park. It was two acts. The first was about a Chicago family that sells their house to a black family in the late '50s. The next act was about a white family moving back into the now black neighborhood and wanting to build a big house. It was uproarious. This was the climax, told by the black woman, when all the Brits, three thousand miles safe from slavery's remnants were able to think about what it means to be politically correct w/r/t blacks: What do white women and tampons have in common?
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They're both stuck up cunts.

Of course, the white male was the one saying that he's not offended by any of it, privileged bastard that he is. But then his experience may be the most relatable, because it hasn't been clouded with the experience of prejudice. Relatable, boring. Make it interesting and universal, something even the Brits can relate to.

JMW Turner and Walkabout

The Tate Britain is often overshadowed by its younger brother the Tate Modern, but JMW Turner, arguably the best British painter of the 19th century bequeathed his entire collection to this neoclassical building, which gives the Modern a run for its money.

Turner was a true Romantic. He wrote verses to accompany his paintings, didn't care  much for public opinion and ultimately prefigured modern painting with his impressionistic style. Monet was an ardent admirer, and even Cezanne's achievement of textural depth likely found its roots in the work of JMW.

I would say that if we're talking about avant-garde artists of the 19th century, Turner would have to be in the top five.

Then we biked home to our blue-doored hostel beside the British Museum to freshen up. And walked down High Holborn St. and asked where we could find good Indian. And it was.

We bought Indian beer and drank it as we walked and discovered the neoclassical Somerset house that used to house all the births and deaths and now looks good and is home to the galleries that I will blog about tomorrow.

The Spaniards at Walkabout were plenty and we danced and drank and smoked and took the tube back. I told a young man from Birmingham that I'm a writer and he said 'fair fucks' which means 'well played.'

Stonehenge, Bath, Shakespeare's Home

The cottage at Stratford-upon-Avon.

Matthew and I bought paninis and he bought a cheese and onion pasty at Victoria station. Paul the hairy-eared Irish tour guide took the head count and yelled at us for having "malodorous" food and was stern about speaking loudly but he was pleased that we were attentive to his Stonehenge and Bath lectures and softened and befriended us by day's end.

Stonehenge's sky was low and the rolling green plain spread before the north wind. There was a sense of the sacred and the artistic and the epic and the journeying nature of primitive man in the 5,000 year old megaton stones. The audio guide had a quote from the last lines of classic literature master Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles describing the sullen stones. It is silly to go to world famous sites and pose in front of them so I decided to turn this idea on its head - literally (photos on Facebook to come).

The Georgian architecture of Bath surrounded us as we spotted the locals. Matthew sought out dogs and an old couple warned him that their grey Jack Russell bit but he thought it would not and we all had a laugh when the animal snapped at his too-close fingers.

Then the Bard's home and O my brothers it was like a Meccan pilgrimmage. The Tudor cottage was still intact after years of refurbishment and Matty asked a young blonde guide whether Shakespeare had written all his plays. She said we know that he didn't write all of the later stuff including Henry VIII and I interjected - but no one reads that play anyway - and she said but we know he wrote all of the major works, i.e. Hamlet, of which the soliloquies alone are enough to guarantee a man eternal fame. And she mentioned how he took these stories from sources and reinvented them and we said yes, interesting how art is all about borrowing and reinvention and this reminds me of a certain post postmodern blog.

London and Avant Garde Art

Yesterday was our first full day in London. We took the Tube, which is very convenient and indeed rivals its New York counterpart to the South Bank. One thing about Londoners is that momentary subterranean delays don't seem to cause as much agitation as for New Yorkers.

Bourough Market gave us lunch: we shared Thai seafood green curry from one stand  and fresh arugula salad, prosciutto, tomato and bufalo muzzarella for our greens. Down the South Bank the Tate Modern holds representative works from most of the famous avant garde artists of the 20th century, including the $106 million Picasso Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust, Braque, Twombly, Bacon, Serra and many more.

We rode bikes to the hep Shoreditch neighborhood after crossing the Thames on the Millennium Bridge. Our country is late on adopting this program of park and ride, unfortunately. At Brick Lane I had lamb vindaloo and almond cream naan (pleasure shudder). Then we walked and drank, walked and drank.

Thing is London sleeps. And that changes the energy of the city slightly. But today after the National Gallery, Friday night will be crazy.

Boat Shoes Are One Step Closer

So because I'm on that grown man train, I need to ditch my Nike Dunks and get some boat shoes for the summer. That's cool, especially because not only do I not want to wear heavy black sneakers in mid-July but I don't want to wear sandals either and expose my feet to the filth of New York City streets. To achieve these boat shoes I am blogging about a company that offered them to me at a discounted rate. Now because I am young and poor and need to look good, I must do everything I can to get what I want, including selling blog posts for shoes. This helped me clean up my room back in December with a new bureau, upon which currently rests my classic literature.

I've also been thinking about track lighting which will provide me with more light in my bedroom because if you don't have sufficient lighting while reading classic literature you can strain your eyes which eventually may mean glasses.

Here's another site you can follow if you want to be in on deals about furnishings and whatnot that will allow you to live less like a starving artist and more like the normal people in society: http://www.jossandmain.com/store/myinvite/bil

I'm Going to London, Classic Literature, Etc.

Richard III, ugliest of British Kings.

Reinvest in yourself I like to say. So I bought this trip to London and tomorrow I'm leaving. In the meanwhile I've been trying to learn as much as possible about this quondam world capital, from the history of Robin Hood to Richard III, and everything in between. Late medieval English history is fascinating, especially because it is so neglected. My preparations wouldn't be complete without some classic literature so I'm reading Shakespeare's Richard III, of which I'll give you a quick coffee high history.

So there's the Lancastrian line and the York line and they're both descendants of Edward III, the famous Plantagenet, who's like the big King of the 14th century. And his spawn gets all the way through the Hundred Years War and then there's Edward IV who comes after Henry VI, who Shakespeare wrote three plays about. And Richard III was really disliked by Elizabethan England cuz he's a bad guy who murders his eloquent brothers Clarence and Edward IV. And Edward has this 12 year old son who's about to assume the throne, but Rich is like hold up, you're actually a bastard and your mom's not good enough to make you king and all his supporters are like hear hear and then he rules for two years before dying in battle on English soil (the only Brit-king to do so and the last to die in battle). Thus the tragedy.

So I'll be blogging from Londontown and if any of you have tips or want me to mention anything specifically just shout.

-Preparing for travel,
Daniel Adler

Get Meta, It's Friday

Men need sympathy from women. Like them, men are creatures of feeling and are governed by a sense of hierarchy. They don’t want to feel low so they need reassurance and if that doesn’t help then they need sympathy. I don't want love or hate, pity or anger. Sympathy is another matter. There is never enough of that.
      

She felt his look. Then he rolled on top of her cunningly and used his hands to caress the sides of her body and then lightly he kissed her neck. She remained distant, but he felt her warming. Encouraged, he pressed harder. He rolled on top of her and their mouths locked and then he rolled her on top of him. That was it.

Do you ever have thoughts that float into your mind and aren’t sure if they were dreams or reality? Or catch glimpses of your unconscious from the night before and can’t align it with what your consciousness believes? Or are you ever embarrassed by the dreams you had last night? Good. That means you’re thinking.

Maybe I’ll just write my book like this. In short paragraphs. Like tweets. That would be so original, it would have to become classic literature one day. God you’re conceited, but at least the recognition provides a nice glance into the meta nature of post postmodernism.

If That Ain't Country

There were Cadillacs and Waffle Houses and signs for the best bar-b-q and folks walking arm in arm and ten-gallon hats and  buttery grits. Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, the heart of the blues and gospel music and country music began in the American South. Is Nashville the Vienna of the 20th century? In terms of musical production, the '50s and '60s, even the '70s, were the most prolific era of music in hundreds of years. Our grandkids will know about Michael Jackson and Elvis.

Was it the nostalgia for Civil War? The lead-up to the hundredth anniversary in everyone's unconscious triggered something - hey, look how far we've come, how American we are and look what we can produce. To draw on black music was to apologize and share culture in the same way the sesquicentennial anniversary of Civil War inaugurated the first black president. Little did they know how much more they had to apologize for.

Still there is pervasive hatred here. It fires in the eyes of bourbon drinkers and diesel-burning pickups and the pell-mell of a prison yard and the slow chuff of a locomotive hiking up a mountainside and a blonde blue-eyed honey leaving for another man and the slow-roasting smoky smell of mama's brisket. That's country. The adventurous Yankee yearns to see the sweet expanse of cotton fields and rosedale blue skies and know the slow malaise of sweet tea and aristocratic white country porches and the Southern Gulf and he wants to meld his hard-poached honk into the relaxed gentlemanly whiskey-red drawl of country.

Why Hemingway is Classic Literature

I've argued elsewhere that Ernest Hemingway is among one of the best writers of classic literature. Let's take a look at why.

It was obvious that he wrote a lot. His experiences in WWI as an ambulance driver provided him with much material. His style had been crafted into a specific form, light on punctuation and heavy on conjunctions. This tendency is called polysyndeton. It is found in the King James Bible.

An example of Hemingway's usage:

"The dog kept close behind him and when David stopped the dog pressed his muzzle into the back of his knee."-An African Story

The use of the many conjunctions changes the rhythm and in this case heightens tension. Instead of pauses commanded by commas we are forced to keep reading. Hemingway reserves his punctuation for emphasis, such as in this sentence:

"But I never knew anyone else that could shoot better at ten than this boy could; not just show-off shooting, but shooting in competition with grown men and professionals."
–I Guess Everything Reminds You of Something

His semicolon is usually reserved to discuss matters of serious importance, such as violence or life and death. Commas emphasize a clause.These are good tools to remember when you are writing.