Daniel Adler's Internet Warehouse is The Internet Warehouse

Guys, I moved. Blogger just doesn't get the respect from Google I need. When you Google search my name, you'll see that it's now at the bottom of the page, at number 9. I used to be number 6. This is one reason I'm moving to Wordpress.

Another is I want to change the format of my blog. I want you to be able to contribute and so it will now be The Internet Warehouse. Feel free to email me at danielryanadler@gmail.com if you want to submit. In the meanwhile, all of my content from Daniel Adler's Internet Warehouse is up on Wordpress at DanielRyanAdler.com. This will be better for my personal SEO and it will be more professional - cleaner and sexier. My personal site, DanielTheWriter.com is still up and running. Thanks for understanding and I'll see you soon.

Rembrandt and Classic Literature: Finnegan's Wake, The Unnamable

He painted this at 25.

Yesterday I went to the Frick to see the Rembrandt and School exhibit. Rembrandt was a master by the time he was 25. If I had to choose one painting from the Frick to have in my home, it would be the Hans Holbein of Sir Thomas More. The thing about this museum is that it has representative works by most of the masters of Western art.

Now I'm sitting at Barnes & Noble (an activity which will become historical within a few years after all the bricks and mortar bookstores close) reading Finnegan's Wake. Very unlike Rembrandt stylistically. It's like Joyce was just talking out loud for six hundred pages, messing around, and he wrote it all down. Except it took him seventeen years.

Meanwhile I'm almost done with Beckett's The Unnamable, from his prose contribution to classic literature, Three Novels. When you run across three page sentences, it's easy to see the influence of the elder on the younger. The intensity's there, but I tellya, it can get tiresome after a while. That doesn't mean I won't incorporate those stylistic tendencies, especially into a passage I call the big city feeling, which my old man has helped me with writing. I find these techniques very good for building tension, in the same way a Woody Allen joke does.

General Advice in the Manner of Kenneth Koch

I have an immense collection of tennis balls. I had misplaced them a couple of years ago and now my great uncle, fine man that he is, has returned them to me. All covered in the same wiry green hairs. Some have black marks from being beaten on the court, though they remain neon. I have thousands.

So my uncle believes. In reality, I am a terrible tennis player. I used to play when I was in sixth grade, but the best thing that came from that was my all white K-Swiss sneakers I wore throughout Middle School. 

Don't play tennis in the rain. And when you invest in a nice pair of tennis shoes with light soles, make sure that they are fashionable enough to wear off the tennis court. Tennis is a very difficult game, more athletic than golf, although in golf you can watch the trees bounce in the wind. 

I dreamed (which is the proper way to spell it, rather than the British version, dreamt, the  version I learned when  younger because my mother is Irish) that I went to a club filled with many people, many women. At eleven o' clock all of the people stopped to watch the latest TV show and I woke up before it ended. 

Today I seek a book of classic literature, poetry, from the late Kenneth Koch, my favorite poet of the second half of the 20th century. 

The Pale King and Post Postmodernism

We wait. Wait for moments where we’re no longer waiting, like when we’re having sex or are on vacation. And this goes on for about 80 years until we wait to die.

How do we combat self-imposed boredom? We think. And we feel. We think so much because we feel so deeply. And that’s how most people live. Waiting for about 95% and 5% living. There may  be occasional balances but for the most part it is skewed thusly.

A 50/50 balance is hard. Very hard. I can’t even imagine 100% living – maybe that’s what Buddha and Jesus did? It requires practice and meditation. When we find ourselves waiting and living in the waiting, this is called excitement. But excitement can quickly build expectations, which when disappointed mean that you lived maybe for a while, but prematurely returned to waiting.

This is what The Pale King seems to be about, according to Lev Grossman’s review. Which is why it sounds so good. DFW couldn’t deal with waiting anymore. But he knew about the imbalance. Infinite Jest documents it with the aid of postmodern gewgaws, which make it the postmodern novel, but which also detract from the human side of the novel. It aligns more closelywith the ironic farce postmodernism esteems. Perhaps The Pale King is one of first true forays into post postmodernism. I’ll let you know.

The O.G.s of Bushwick

Bushwick is cracking lately. Arancini Bros. has killer rice balls next to Wreck Room, The Morgan’s soft opening this weekend was a success, and Cafe Gia on Irving and a row of other little restaurants may make Irving St. the ideal walk in the neighborhood.

Morgantown is like a college campus. It is literally a small town, except without a mayor, although we nominate Cat Agonis, for her vast knowledge of New York, and in order to help promote her forthcoming genre-blurring novel, Chicken on the Hudson.

All these people be coming outta the woodwork and new hordes of youngsters be moving in. Just wait till summer. Hell, just wait till next year. I’m going to be an O.G. of Bushwick pretty soon. 

All these new joints in town make it seem like we never have to leave. And we don’t, really. Because our thriving arts culture is at the heart of it all. Those who know about Bushwick have the vague idea that it is semi-desirable. Boy, they have no idea.

Portnoy's Complaint: A Review

This book is outrageously funny, obscene, and smart. I learned about twenty new Yiddish words. Roth most closely mirrors my techniques of post postmodernism. And he gets to the heart of human psychology.

It is a classic, a masterpiece of postmodern literature in its digressive, rambling style, a modern Tristram Shandy. And it is the same kind of novel I am writing. Except that mine is not going to be as Jewish, understandably. Nor will it be as ironic.

For irony was inimical to postmodernism, due to the sense of prevailing closure at the end of last century. Today things are a touch more Romantic, in the Shakespearean sense of fairy tale and magic, rather than the 19th century sense of childhood purity and sublimity (though that applies too). The self-deprecation in the story is part of why the self-consciousness is so effective. It isn't until the story's last few pages when Portnoy gets to hear the truth of what he and the society he grew up in really are about. And to compound the narrator's pathetic nature, his flaws are told by a Sabra.

So check it out, I'm sure you'll enjoy it, if not for the postmodern narrative style, then for the masturbation scenes.

I'm Gonna Love Like Jesus

 I've been thinking a lot about love lately. Both the personal microtial sense of man and woman, or friend and friend, and about the macro level of loving all of humanity. Like Jesus.

I'm gonna be like Jesus. If I can love like an ubermensch and give my love to everyone, let it flow from my arms when I walk down the street, or into a cafe, or when I encounter the stares of a full subway car, I will become incredibly powerful. Just letting everyone feel my energy, know that I love them, no matter their color, size or even how the look at me, just meet their energy with unconditional love, the way you'd love your parents or your best friend, shoot it at them, so that they know they can tell me their problems if they wanted to - that is how I will love.

I mean that's the way Jesus did and people still follow his practices two thousand years later. He was the best lover who ever was. As Matthew pointed out, that's what Christianity implies when they say that God is in you. That's why Catholics eat the body and drink the blood of their savior, to get closer to him.

It's going to take practice. Lots of practice. But like writing, I'll get better the more I do it.

Infinite Jest is The Postmodern Novel

Half of Daniel Adler's college thesis was that Gravity's Rainbow is the postmodern novel. In 1973, it epitomized a new form and style. Its allusiveness was sporadic and overwhelming and Pynchon's understanding of life and ability to form stories remains admirable.

But when all is said and done, Pynchon was born in 1937. He grew up during WWII and the end of the modernist movement. The War was of a different era.

DFW on the other hand, born in 1962, was raised during the mind-numbing suburban expansion of the 1970s. He saw the "Me generation" rise, flower, and die. And Infinite Jest is a tribute to the future of the world he knew.

With the publishing of The Pale King, DFW's career is over. We can begin to evaluate him with regard to the masters. Fifteen years have passed since the publishing of Infinite Jest, enough time to think about how its grandiose muscles have flexed even harder since his suicide.

The footnotes are what make this book representative of postmodernism. Gravity's Rainbow is dazzling, but easy to misunderstand and get lost in. Infinite Jest is incredibly dense and packed with information. All of the allusions are explained in incredible detail. With the existence of the internet, DFW was able to include all the research and simulate how future earthlings would acquire information.

How long until DFW shows up on college sylllabi?

Subjectivism

By now you should be familiar with all my different modernisms: postmodernism, post postmodernism, metamodernism, etc. And while these all have bearing upon my work, I think it's most important to articulate that my work is about one person. Hot Love on the Wing explores one subjectivity.

Whereas modernism was about exploring different subjectivities objectively, and postmodernism was all about rejecting the possibility of such a thing, this new movement is all about the individual.

Why do we all Tweet whatever we're doing, update our Facebook status, let our friends know where we are on Foursquare, blog on Blogspot? To get noticed. To be understood and accepted.

We're all curating our online experience to each other. Whoever is most popular, has the most friends, followers, is the coolest. Even capitalism is in on it when businesses are vying for Twitter followers. But ultimately it's about you.

The number of memoirs published has blown up thanks to e-publishing. Why? Because everyone who has a story is now able to share it.

This technology is so new that the repercussions of this are difficult to fathom. But you can bet your bippy they're going to start showing over this decade. Don't believe me? In Egypt they joke that “Nasser was killed by poison, Sadat by a bullet and Mubarak by Facebook.” Just wait.

How to Get Back to Bushwick

Utica Ave., more than 3 miles of this.

Under a Florentine sky I saddle my beast and we ride into the early dusk. She is slow to get going but responsive to stop. I've had to take care of her often lately; I ride her hard.

Yesterday she had a broken spoke so I took her to Larry's Bike Shop down on Flatbush Ave. It took a while to fix and true the wheel, so that by the time I was ready to roll I had scoped the map and devised an alternate route home - up Utica Ave.

Lined with auto stores and flat fix shops, I was doing just fine when I heard a nasty hiss. Too good to be true. I laughed at what the fates had dealt, walked, tried to get on a bus, was denied.

I was the only white person on the streets, which is fine by me, but the closest subway was about a mile an a half east. How to get home to Bushwick? About to take a cab, I asked a nice woman and her son if they knew of a car service.

They told me to get my bike fixed at a shop right there, next to the yellow store. A dude who rode a teal fixie with a rainbow colored chain named Duiight, d-double-i-g-h-t,  laughed at me for not having a spare and said, you gonna learn ow to patcha tube today. But the tube wasn't all - the tire itself had popped too, and he cut a piece of rubber to brace the wheel to make it work "that much mo' bet-ta'." I thanked him, now I won't even have to get it fixed. He laughed, you will, he said.

I'm calling Duiight this weekend to get my baby remodeled - front free wheel fixed. Ooooeee!!

The Deviant

You lay coddled in her arms and she in yours. And when she tilted her chin back to expose her neck there it was, curled comfortable under her chin hanging a breeze-space below: a black hair. Half an inch long.

Imagine my disgust. To see that my woman, granted her left breast wasn't as good as her right, drooped a little and wasn't quite as perky as its sister, but that my woman should have an actual flaw - this was enough to make me think.

She had that hair under her chain. Like a gnat in the buttermilk. When I projected on my happiness with her in twenty years, the hair was a reminder that I could do better. This woman was not gorgeous. She was flawed. Added to her mental issues was this physical reminder. But if I could have taught myself to live with and love it, instead of being desiring and human... have you ever met an Enlightened person anyway? I've never been to Tibet, but I have a suspicion no one since Buddha has been perfectly happy and undesiring as an ascetic. Suppress and repress your unconscious (the wanting part of the self) to the point where you've convinced yourself that you're happy? Is that even possible?

I've tried not wanting, and it's just so...boring.

If variety is the spice of life won't we want to go through as many different kinds of happiness as possible? I wanted to go to Peru and Iran and taste all kinds of different flavored pussy. Just the possibility of being with other, more attractive women was enough to make me want to destroy relative happiness once I attained it. Or maybe I sought a reason to destroy it because I was scared I'd fuck it up eventually. Or maybe it was the hair I couldn't stand. Or the fact that she didn't seem to know about it (and Lord knows I couldn't tell her).

Because when we're young and there are so many possibilities to have what we haven't, to throw it all away on commitment is the ultimate.

April in Bushwick

La la la la. April Fool's. I'm staying here.

I just love Bushwick so much. In the McKibbin lofts there are glass entry doors. People are moving in - a new generation of hipsters who are able to mock their elders of two and three years ago. One of the repeated tags on the roof is "They exist. They gave me my iPad."

At 3rd Ward last night there were many attractive women at the Preyground exhibit. The art has a very animalistic feel and was filmed in different regions of our grand country. #Americuh.

And have the soote April raines yfallen.