Madam's Organ and the Fat Rasta Chick

Last night Matthew and I went to a popular party district in D.C., Adams Morgan. We arrived early, around nine, and surveyed the strip for the right joint. I had always seen Madam's Organ when I was younger, envious of those old enough to enjoy the nightlife, and so we did an about face at the end of the road and walked back to see what all the fuss is about.

Inside was a host of taxydermied  animals: bears, falcons,  boars, a marlin, upside down deer,  even a lion's head with raging paws. Matthew and I discussed life's travails for an hour until the blues band came on the stage. The  soprano/baritone saxophonist and electric guitarist killed it. At one point, maybe after "Roadhouse Blues," just two beers deep, I stood before them, eyes closed, taking the moment. When I opened them again, there was  an open circle of about a foot around me. I  would have had less room if I had been maniacally dancing. 

They had quarter pie slices at Alberto's, which were "well seasoned" according to the myopic, double-chinned, red natty dreaded chick whose face I apprehended from about five inches away to ask whether the pizza was good. And Matthew wanted to go to  Pizza Mart across the street...Ha!  When we sat down to eat, Matthew asked her  "a serious question:" "Which do you prefer, relationships or financial success?" And she answered that with the way her parents treated her because of her hair and her friends still there for her no matter what, and her mother still supporting her, and her husband and her baby, obviously relationships. She didn't invite us to smoke a blunt.

When she went next door to the Rasta club, and we walked to the empanada joint with the kick-ass hot sauce, we marinated on her and her answer.
 Tourisitically,
Daniel Adler

Arcimboldo, Chester Dale and Post Postmodernism

 Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-93) was  a painter at the court of  Ferdinand I  in Vienna , and later for Maximilan  II and Rudolf II when  the Hapsburg court moved to Prague due to religious reasons.  His work is easily recognizable for its use of fruits, vegetables and flower depicting human faces. Scientifically correct, these paintings were likely in vogue at the time, and do not represent a crazed artist's work.

Currently Washington D.C. has the first ever Arcimboldo exhbit in the U.S. at the National Gallery, one of my favorite museums.

We drove past the White House, where Obama was nursing his stitches. The exhibit was great. My favorite was "Water" (right).

You can see the crab that makes the breast, the ray that is a cheek, and my favorite, the baby seal that comprises the forehead (so cute). These depictions were definitive of the era's concern with natural wonders, or wunderkammer.

There was also an exhibit of all the works acquired by stock broker Chester Dale. At the end of a large collections of Picassos, Matisses, Renoirs, Monets, Manets, and tons more was a portrait of the man done by Dali.

Isn't this weird? It really struck me as one of those portraits definitive of an epoch. Look at what Dale's wearing, that black poodle. This is a 20th century painting. Makes me think of how people in post postmodernism will remember last century.

The Best Gravy Recipe

Among the contenders for best Thanksgiving side are stuffing, gravy, and cranberry sauce. I can limit it to these three because of their importance to the rest of the meal. White meat, when cooked with the entire turkey is often dry. It is best to break off the legs of the turkey and allow them to cook for longer than the breast. The white meat is made supremely dank with cranberry sauce or gravy. Gravy doesn't need starch; you can just spatula the turkey gravy recipe from drippings back and forth in the pan until it gels. If you don't have the twenty or so minutes, add some flour at the end. The necessity for gravy with mashed potatoes, and  the way it increases the savoriness of my turkey and stuffing, it is, I must conclude, the most important Thanksgiving side.

I don't know about you, but I don't dig it when my cranberry sauce gets all up in my mashed potatoes. The Thanksgiving mush, as little Matthew says, is a good thing for him, but I like keeping my turkey away from my mash. De gustibus, I suppose.

I understand the importance of a fine gravy - a weak one has ruined many a Thanksgiving - but my personal favorite is stuffing. Stuffing is only had at Thanksgiving, at least in my family. A dry stuffing can only sometimes be saved with a dank gravy. You can mix it with any of the other sides, such as sweet potatoes, and chances are it will taste better. It is one of the most versatile dishes, and because I only see it once a year, it's my favorite.

Daniel Adler's View on Verb Subject Agreement

I take issue with writers who have trouble keeping their subjects parallel with their verbs. Granted I do it too sometimes when I'm sloppy, but there are more specific problems I'd like to address. For example, I know it’s common practice these days to say “that band are playing tonight.” How about when referring to people we keep it plural, but when referring to the singular nature of “the band,” we go singular?

Part of what helps keep my subject-verb agreements straight is proofreading. I’m not going to go on and on about the merits of re-reading what you’ve written, because as every writer knows, it’s almost more important to edit than to write, but I will suggest that some of you writers read the Times’ After Deadline column, which I find to be a nice take on good and bad journalism. It’s fascinating how bad some of the writing is, not to sound pretentious and say that I'm better than most of the journalists on the staff, but you’d think that as a writer for the New York Times, you’d know to say “a couple of hundred.”

-Humbly,
Daniel Adler

Postmodernism Began in 1968

Today we’re going to talk about what came before post postmodernism: postmodernism. Postmodernism began around 1968, due to shifting values in the United States and in Europe. A generation had settled down to have children since WWII, and the Baby Boomers were coming of age. Vietnam and the ascension of America as the pre-eminent global power brought to the zeitgeist a self-concerned, slightly ironic viewpoint. The power of corporations became recognized and the idea that power corrupts absolutely was reinforced after Watergate, perhaps the height of the historical movement.

In literature, we can examine postmodernism in the works of Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Samuel Beckett, Kurt Vonnegut, and David Foster Wallace, all of whom experiment with notions of assortment and conglomeration in terms of plot, content, and character. In the visual arts, Warhol’s “Marilyn” is the best known example. Postmodern art works on the premise that it can be reproduced with variation to evoke emotion – even when those emotions are base, as in the case of the pervasive ennui,  shock, and irony  we find in many postmodern works.

I’ve written that we’re emerging from the throes of postmodernism today, and that very soon we can expect to see the beginnings of a new movement. Perhaps it will be in 2011, when the seventh billion person is born. Perhaps it will be in 2012, before the putative end of the world. Or perhaps it could take another ten years or more. Although with all that’s changed recently, I doubt it will take that long.

English in Post Postmodernism

English is changing in post postmodernism. I have speculated that internet keywords are the way people are trending into speech. Dropping (or adding) the apostrophe to plural nouns will become increasingly frequent. Prepositional usage will become less relevant. And of course we will start to adapt new foreign words into our language. My new friend Sushrut used the word “Kalyug” when we were discussing what it means to live in our era. It approximately means “century.”

The reason English is the one global language is that it borrows words from other languages and bastardizes them to make them its own. German attempts to retain the original pronunciation. “Department,” for example, they pronounce, “de-par-mon,” and of course, sound rather silly (when unpracticed) moving from their guttural throat clenching pronunciation, to the light mellifluous French pronunciation.

I can’t wait to start using Indian and Chinese words (the latter will probably take more time due to the difficulties of transliteration). Look for more Spanish pronunciation and less use of English’s more difficult tenses, i.e. simple past substituted for the pluperfect. Not to say that this will happen overnight, or even over the next fifty years, but eventually, colloquial English speakers will get weird looks, as we do today when we casually use the subjunctive.
Foresightedly,
Daniel Adler

Winter in Post Postmodernism

Can you feel the winter? It’s approaching and everyone knows it. I’m a big believer in the idea our lives are governed by the seasons. After all, it was the determining factor in how our ancestors lived and farmed. That’s why we feel like we have so much to do during the spring, during the sowing, and right now, before it gets really cold, everyone gets a little crazy preparing for the holidays (the reap). Black Friday, for example, is a circuitous proof of this point.

I’m actually kind of afraid of winter this year. I dread January’s bleak nights. The cold wind will be bitter on the industrial truck route I take to work before I start to sweat. But in the darkness of the evenings, and my reluctance to leave my apartment, I will write prodigiously.

But I’m also excited and somewhat anxious about 2011, that weird odd year when we become more comfortable in this decade and get a little closer to the end of the world. Don’t expect any major breakthroughs next year; I bet it will be a year of expectation. Scoff, do you? The cultural unconscious is a powerful thing.

Propitiously,
Daniel Adler

Ode to Work

Recently I’ve been thinking about work. Not just work, but reconciling public opinion and the drive to get ahead in the rat race with my own intuition and creative drive. And I’ve realized that they don’t have to be necessarily reconciled. All it takes is work.

If you are a young writer who wants to get published, you may be thinking about how to direct your efforts to appeal to said publisher. Or on the other hand, you may think about how you don’t care if you’re going to be published – you want to create art for art’s sake.

I know the answer. It comes from deep in the smithy of the artist’s soul. All you have to do is listen to yourself and understand how much more work you have ahead of you. What you’ve done so far is the tip of the iceberg. Underneath, your unconscious, intuition, and drive to duty must be revealed. And the only way to do that is to work. Ravenously, savagely hard. You are a shitty writer, I tell myself. The hundreds of hours you spent working on your novel so far have been a preface to the work on it you have yet to do. I now understand why many writers in the past have burned entire manuscripts.

So please, just shut up and keep working.
Entreatingly,
Daniel Adler

The Hipster's Diminishing Cultural Capital

A review of the new book “Whiter Shades of Pale” has me lamenting the continuous barrage of self definition and satirical placement white people love. The author of “Stuff White People Like” may have a point in mocking his fellow whitey, but in a way, isn’t he perpetuating the system? White people love to feel guilty about being white. An essay in the New York Times discussing “the hipster,” examines how this has occurred.

De gustibus non est disputandum, or, concerning matters of taste there is no dispute. The hipster and the modern white person show that there is. Elevation of one and suppression of another is what being human is about, but what if, instead of feeling a sense of superiority or political correctness, we could simply observe and appreciate the average lower-class and the aging middle class hipster, in the same non-disparaging way?
  
We know that there are levels of quality in everything, but to justify our knowledge of quality over others is the mark of Bourdieu’s “cultural capital.” We want to prove to ourselves that we deserve what we have because of what we know, and that those below us economically must know less. In fact, they know about different things, or perhaps have learned the same things in a different way. True artists  should be able to appreciate all kinds of people and ideas without condescending or pretending, or even feeling layers of guilt for political incorrectness. That should replace the ironical self-consciousness of postmodernism.

The Power of the Metaphor

Ah, the power of the metaphor. I love metaphors – they are so much less fickle than similes, which require a prefatory ‘like’ or ‘as’. And the inherent symbolic comparison strike the reader as much more powerful.

Giambattista Vico believed that each era of humanity has a linguistic equivalent. The divine age, associated with the Ancient world, was when man found himself in nature and used metaphor to explain natural occurrences, the lightning bolt of Zeus for example. The heroic age of feudalism  was one of metonymy, which were supported by figures in charge, like the baron and king, representative of their estate and the serfs over whom they ruled. And finally the democratic age is one of irony – the barbarism of reflection eventually leading back into the poetic age of the divine, a.k.a. post postmodernism.

Yes, I’d like to believe that the age of irony is at a close and that we will soon return to a simpler Golden Age, when words were more symbolic than literal. But listen to me blabbing on about metaphor. Here's a good one: my girlfriend is mad at me and said that my words were like spears piercing into her flesh. Makes me sound like a killer, right?
-Pondering,
Daniel Adler

The Universal vs. The Cliche

Last night we watched some experimental music at Brooklyn Fire Proof East, and began discussing what makes the cliche a universal. The former is boring, the number one no-no in writing, the latter, genius. But where's the line drawn?

I find that when listening to music for example, when I'm expecting a rhyme that doesn't occur, like "keeps lingering on" with "love that's strong" instead of "waiting for so long," there is a glimpse at the universal.

In short, the cliche satisfies our expectations, or as David Foster Wallace would say, "massages our egos" while the universal gets at the same ideas by disappointing them, pleasurably, or in the case of films like "Blue Velvet," unpleasurably.

But you aren't satisfied with that.

A lot of it comes down to phrasing. In writing, even word order can make a big difference. But original comparisons, like instead of being shot by cupid's arrow, being stung by the sting ray of love, can help us to achieve a universal emotion in unique terms.

Have any other ideas? Let me know.

Inquiringly,
Daniel Adler

Can We Call Brooklyn Its Own City Again?

Brooklyn has recently been drawing literary agents and basketball teams to its friendly confines. The Nets won’t be called the New York Nets, they’re going to be the Brooklyn Nets. Last night I met a biker from Denver on my way home and welcomed him, telling him that this is the best city in the world (I meant Brooklyn, nothing against Manhattan). That said, is it fair to treat Brooklyn as its own city?

Oakland and San Franscisco, Baltimore and DC, Brooklyn and New York –can we put the last pair in this group? Until 1898 Brooklyn was its own city. The Economist calls it Manhattan’s Left Bank, but for the past decade Brooklyn has regained its status as a city worth living in. The development of North Brooklyn especially has added to this, as Williamsburg has taken Manhattan’s Lower East Side and East Village spillover, and reclaimed the young artists and creatives as their own.

Part of this is due to the increased safety of the city – downtown Manhattan is no longer “rough;” unless you live in deep Bushwick, you don’t have to worry about walking home late at night. So I’m advocating Brooklyn not just as a sister city, but as it's own city. Manhattanites have to really just how uncool it would be if it didn't have the creative center of the universe a mile away. After all, with almost 2.5 million people, Brooklyn would be the sixth largest city in the country on its own. That’s pretty cool.

 Excitedly,
Daniel Adler

Sonnet for the Fields

The sonnet is the truest form of poetry known to man, and it's not going anywhere in post postmodernism.

In the cold winter of our heart’s content

It was easy to forget rosy spring.

Green eyed jealousy’s missiles were not sent

Before a storm came under love’s warm wing.

To  think the vinous juice of love runs dry

Because clouds cluster over fertile plains

Is to forget casks in winter’s supply,

And deny fallow fields will sprout again.

Autumn’s glow brings fears of colder winters:

And old men study grey skies on porches,

Speculating over the harvest’s yield;

Study, focus, fail to see small splinters

And as you gallop your hobbyhorses

Horizonal sun breaks onto the field.

I’m not the first man to be a damn fool

Ruminating on the future is cruel.

-Daniel Adler

The Sylvia Plath Effect

Stuck inside my head with the thinking about the future blues again. Ohh, you’ve written this before - too many artists have succumbed that way. You need to back out of your own mind again. Think about Shakespeare, think about whatever it is you have to to take your mind off of what it is your thinking about. Then get back to me.

Write it down. Get it all out of your mind. Free the stuff bubbling within you. Talk to your best friend. An outside perspective will help you keep reality and illusion separate.

List of famous artists that couldn’t stop thinking and succumbed to the Sylvia Plath effect:
Ernest Hemingway
David Foster Wallace
Syvia Plath
Vincent Van Gogh
Ashile Gorky
Frida Kahlo
Mark Rothko

Not that I’m in any way close to killing myself. It’s just that if you don’t take a step back, outside of your own head every once in a while, either your personal life suffers, or your art suffers. Sometimes both, but usually the conflation between the two suggests you put more eggs into one basket. Deep breaths. Relief.

New York City: 21st Century Cultural Center of the World

I recently let my good friend Gio Serrano read a bit of my book. He gave me meaningful feedback about the form that it will take, which I will get to eventually, and we did the bohemian thing at Swallow Cafe all Saturday afternoon. What I immedately understood was that I needed to omit, or at least rewrite my description of New York. "Cliche," he said, "What makes it your New York? The reader knows all about Broadway and the Statue of Liberty."

I just read this essay about what makes New York the cultural center of the world. In part, it is its outward-lookingness. New Yorkers are constantly aware not of what is going on in the other parts of the United States -lord knows we’re the center of it all anyway - but the rest of the world. That very notion is manifest in  the hundreds of enclaves of immigrants we retain. And in the same way Paris retained its status as world capital for perhaps a hundred years after the beginning of its decline, it's apparent that New York will do the same for its ability to attract people not as a great place to live, but as a great place to do what you want.

New Yorkers live in New York because of the options, they want to be part of something bigger. And it is a big city with tons of culture, restaurants, and bars. You can have whatever you want in New York, right next door to what you would never want. In that sense, New York is the most international city in the world.

Any ideas on how to treat this notion in my book?

Hapax Legomenon, David Byrne, and Hemingway's Love

Hapax legomenon. I learned this phrase the other day. It is an instance of a word occurring once in a language, the work of an author, or a single text. It’s a very pretentious phrase but one that has great import for writers. This fact has been motivating me to keep writing: 44% of Melville’s words in Moby Dick are hapax legomena. That means that almost half of the seven hundred pages contain words  that sonofabitch never used again in the book. I guess that's what happens when you are a scribner for eight hours a day; you write one of the best books of all time. I'm scribing six hours a day, maybe mine will be half as good.

I’ve been going a little bit crazy lately, just a tad. I think I’m going to start wearing oversized suits more, for one, and living deeper in my brain, for another, with only David Byrne to help me stop making sense.

I finished For Whom the Bell Tolls the other night. It moved me to tears. Some books you know you’re going to love as soon as you start reading them and you don’t want them to end. Some books are good, and get better in your memory when you’ve finished them. Some books are a drag and you want to be done with them already. This book I knew I was going to love, found myself wishing it was over at times, and then at the end felt it to be justifiably his masterpiece. It made me better understand the importance of loving life.

Yours forever and always,
Daniel Adler

Food in Daniel Adler's Kustlerroman

  It's incredible how food can show love and reveal a person’s character. “Oh you don't eat meat?” We probably won't be good friends. It's nothing personal against vegetarians or vegans, but it's a major difference in paradigm. How when we have canines made for ripping into meat can you shun it as if it's unnatural? I'm sure you have a good answer. But better yet, how can we enjoy a meal together when you are eating a meal without the weight, the chutzpah of mine?  Give me a meat-eating, spicy food loving girl any day of the week. She's adventurous, likes a bit of pain, and knows about tolerance.

Being lactose intolerant or having celiac disease I could probably forgive, but I'd still look at you a little funny. When people are picky though, that's when I know that we can't be friends. Once I went out with a girl who said she didn't like eggs. You don't like eggs? Then how are you going to make them for me in the morning?  After our first date I walked her home, and knew that this would never materialize, even though I stayed with her for more than two months. I should have listened to my gut. Always listen to your gut.

Personally I'm not a fan of celery. But recently it's been growing on me. In dips or soups, you know. I'll eat anything because I'm adventurous and I like different flavors, consistencies, textures. People bond over food, and rightly so. What else can you ingest and release? Drinks, check. Smoke, check. That's it.

Daniel Adler's Blog is Too Pretentious

 Recently people have been calling Daniel Adler's blog pretentious, which I, and I’m sure you too, dear reader, have trouble believing. This vastly overused word needs some clarification.

It has two primary definitions. The first is: making claim to distinction or importance, esp. undeservedly. I know that I know nothing. I am not published. I am a fledgling artist working on a book, like millions of other people out there. I am especially unimportant. So although I hope to be great one day, a hope that is necessary for any writer to rise from the muck, I try to keep my blog free of the tone of pretension. I’m sorry if it sometimes seeps through.

The second definition is: having or creating a deceptive outer appearance of great worth; ostentatious. This blog layout is relatively simple. It is worth only what you take from it. Comments about how I use an RSS feed to generate traffic from facebook to my blog, and my linking to my website as pretentious are not worthy, because those are simply good SEO practices and do not stem from an ulterior motive of ostentation. An internet presence is important if I want to be read, especially by more than just an online audience, no offense. It is not pretension.

In any case, my friends, any feeback is good feedback, so please, keep it coming. Btw, the meta-ness of this blog, and my usage of the word meta, is kind of pretentious.

Horseshoe Staches And Childhood Laundromat Intimacies

I shaved myself a horseshoe mustache. It differs from a fu manchu mustache in that the latter has shaved sides so that the lip hairs hang wispily down, whereas mine grows along the sides of the mouth as well. That part of the mustache is the "pipes." It is excellent and I proudly wore it to the Bushwick Mega Laundromat. Sometimes I forget that it is on my face and I am surprised at the looks I get from people and then I remember, that’s right, they think I’m an asshole.

Which is why I was so surprised when last night, I had a moment with a little girl. I noticed her noticing me, and glanced up from reading. She quickly looked away and I went back to reading. Back down, little girl. I’m a mean mother with a horseshoe mustache. Then to my surprise, the little one crawled onto the seat next to me and there she sat, nervous and scared. Yes, that’s right. But I'm really a nice guy underneath the stache and she knew that; she scampered away after a few moments.

When I moved my laundry to the dryer, she came up to me in her little black pea coat with her ponytail rising from the top of her head, and what did she do, but offer me candy. Dumdum, Tootsie Rolls or Grape Trident. “Thank you,” I exclaimed, “that is so nice of you!” I said fingering a couple of pieces of gum as I tried to take one. “You can have more than one, it’s okay,” she said insouciantly. “That’s very kind, but I’ll just have one. Thanks.” And Daniel Adler never saw her again.

Swallow Cafe

The beloved Archive closed, I saw a glow of activity behind the mesh-grilled windows. Can it be, I thought? It has reopened? Yes, it had indeed. A rather tall, baby-faced, dark eyed man with curly pomaded hair - the owner - told me that it is called the Swallow. "Now, don't be dirty," he cautioned. "No way, I love to swallow a big shot of espresso," I said, noting the rise in my voice's volume. Everyone paused, unsure of my sanity. "Alright, well I look forward to seeing you." We shook hands and I walked next door to have a chicken shawarma.

I went to this party where a cat sat on the bed, and I, loving cats joined it. It sat up, its legs spread-eagled, and bobbing it's head, began to peck at my hand to smell me. what the fuck is wrong with this cat. Its black fur was thick and soft and silky and he was affectionate, letting me stroke his thick neck. I asked a dude named Orion who had funky braids what was wrong with the cat. "He has cerebral palsy." I looked at the cat, its limbs tucked underneath itself. "See how he's doing that? We say that he's baking a loaf."


Tonight is Halloween. I'm going to be a lion. I am sitting at the Swallow, after being satisfied with their macchiato. The decor is more spartan, rustic, European. I am sitting at the back of the cafe in an old movie theatre seat next to an exposed bulb floor lamp. Hanging light bulbs provide industrial light. It is a better fit for us than the Archive, which was old and dirty with worn seats and cushions and baristas who were of a more underground ilk. These baristas are better at making coffee and the red Marzocco machine has white ovular lights that glow like a spaceship. Yes, Daniel Adler likes the Swallow.

Halloween Word Search: A Poem

Autumn's Sonnet

Kiss me under the golden linden trees.
High, heavy, they reached to the ochre sky,
Their ribbed arches a cathedral of leaves.
Remember those consummate lips pass by.
Now the leaves have fallen, brown, crackled, dry;
 The hyperborean night, no release.
 Wings of this darkling thrush do not south fly –
Do the lindens bear it with greater ease?
Spring will come and shroud winter, Autumn’s bloom,
 The ripe gourds gone, an Old Man in their place.
Left to freeze, the harvest met its cold doom
And love’s last sigh lingered without a trace.
Next fall’s bejeweling and fattening sun, 
Will shine on plump, ripened fruit,  not so young.
-Daniel Adler

Twain, Tolstoy and Austen, Oh My!

The literature world is abuzz with news. Mark Twain’s autobiography is finally going to be released after 100 years of waiting. I’ve been reading a lot of his pithy one-liners: “Adverbs are the enemy of the verb;” “Travel is fatal to prejudice” and admiring them for their brevity and truth. Hemingway greatly admired the man, and said that “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. “ Twain's style was without verbosity and decoration, which is why I’m unsettled by the half million words in the soon to be three volumes of the manuscript published by the University of California. I was so excited to read it, but now, knowing that it’s longer than War and Peace, I’m neutral.

Speaking of War and Peace, I’ve reached the 1,000 page mark! And Tolstoy also died exactly 100 years ago today. Rest his soul.

And in other literary news, Jane Austen, who was supposed to have turned out finished masterpieces, was actually found to have had an editor. Gasp! It doesn’t diminish her status as a great writer, though; it seems most of the edits were spelling, and punctuation. The editor also said you can use some more speech tags (he said, she said, which Austen famously omitted, noting that she didn’t write for “dull elves”). How post postmodern of her.

Matthew Sliced My Papaya Last Night

Matthew made squid spaghetti last night.

But after dinner he sliced open a papaya. I had blogged about this fruit (it is extraordinarily good for you, maybe even better than any other fruit with its loads of fiber, folate, lycopene, and Vitamins A and C) and eaten papaya sorbet before, but I had never tried it. Using our green handled cheap, sharp knife, he split the long fruit into quarters. Julie tried a seed, which in fact is edible, but she said that after the sweet chewiness, it was bitter, and spit it out. Its grapefruit –colored flesh glistened. It was ripe.

Matthew said to squeeze lime on it; he had done this before, but I wanted to try the fruit in its purity. I took a slice and cut back the skin, which was maybe a millimeter thick, revealing a wet pink square. As I bit into it, juices oozed. I moved over to the garbage can, and then the sink so as not to drip on the floor.

Silently we sucked at the skin like monkeys, filling ourselves with the powerhouse fruit. The word Matthew used to describe the papaya was 'ancestral.' "Is it your new favorite fruit?" he asked. “No,” I said shaking my head. But I certainly won’t turn it down when it’s offered.

A Disquisition on Tradition and Post Postmodernism

It occurred to me while riding my bike this morning that ever since the 20th century, artists have had an additional level of self-consciousness. What I mean is that at the crux of postmodernism was the notion of breaking from tradition because it had all been done before. And while artists have always viewed themselves as successors to a tradition, the naming of the era in which they live is a relatively modern development. John Keats wasn’t aspiring to define Romanticism with “To Autumn.” Especially in the fine arts, movements like Bauhaus and Fluxus offered manifestoes that differentiated their artistic practices from the norm. That never happened before Modernism.  

In Ancient Rome, there was no artistic movement called originalism. They simply referred to the art of the Greeks as their precursors, and the Greeks referred to the Etruscans. Today, my very attempt at using post postmodernism as one of the keywords for my blog is an example of the way artists deal directly with tradition. Today we are increasingly aware of the tradition. Paradoxically, however, tradition has become increasingly hazy as the canon has been restructured over the past 30 years. Also, contemporary writers who have received approbation may view themselves as inheritors to the writings of Mailer, Roth and Updike. That’s okay, but only time will decide the best of the best.

For our current era of what is not yet named, but which I think of as Millenialism (using post postmodernism because that’s what people search for, and that’s why it’s in all the titles of my posts) it is about striking a balance of new and old. We must remember the best works of yesterday and read the best authors of today, of whom I cannot yet fairly inventory.  Let’s not get all James Joyce avant garde art on the readers, but don’t make it Dan Brown easy. It’s all about striking a balance.

Friends in Post Postmodernism

One night Gabriel wanted to introduce John to Buckley. He invited John over on a Friday while he and Buckley were getting high. When his old best friend and his new friend shook hands, it was with that momentary satisfaction and solid grip that two people make when they're sizing each other up. They relaxed, drank, started to talk about themselves, and then about women. Buckley, proud teller of stories, began his story first.

"At school one night in February, there was a little dance party my brothers and I had in our frat house. There was this girl there, who I had been thinking about for a while named Melissa. She had cocoa colored skin and kind of frizzy caramel hair and a tight little body and huge titties. So me and my brothers are all dancing to the Talking Heads, and she and I are grinding on the floor and she can feel that I'm into her. So I grabbed her titty and she was like "Jack, not here! Let's go somewhere else!" I don't know why, but we went into the bathroom. And we're kissing and sucking and I try to pull down my pants and she's like 'Jack Buckley, I am not giving you head in the bathroom.' That didn't stop me from taking her shirt off and watching those big titties spill out." Here the rising tension of the story led Gabriel to lean in. John looked all the cooler with a little smile on his face, waiting for the punchline. "They hung down to her belly button man, they were so big. So I picked one up and started sucking on it and slapping it around and she was loving it, but I was a little drunk so when I started playing on her titties, I started saying all this stupid shit like, "Bingo bongo." Here the friends chuckled as specks of spittle lined the corners of Buckley's mouth. "And finally, I slapped 'em together and said "Jambalaya titties!" He giggled at his own ludicrousness.

"Then this kid starts knocking on the door really hard, and I have a feeling it's J.T., one of the brothers who  gets the drunkest, and he's banging and screaming "Lemme in." So Melissa has had enough of me by this point and she hears this kid and she wants to get out. She encases her bongos and then walks out with me pawing at her asking for more. But as soon as she's out J.T. hiccups some vomit right onto the floor and gets it all over her shoes. He runs into the bathroom and we hear his lurching and grunting." Here Buckley giggled vehemently, satisfied in his recollection. "And after that I never saw Melissa again!"

Gabriel, used to Buckley's stories, laughed along with him, but John only smiled. Gabriel's old friend was kind of an idiot, he thought. For him, women were business, and you didn't discuss business matters during play hours.
      
Gabriel told the story of the fat girl he fucked, looking to John for reassurance. But when John's turn came, he just smiled and looked at his phone, checking the time. He said that after that drink they should get ready to go.

 Buckley and John were nice enough to each other, and Buckley tried to converse with him, but John only smiled and answered his questions. It was clear that they were of a different ilk. Gabriel noticed this, and when John found a woman at the bar, he fell back on his old friend. Buckley had more tact than to discuss John openly, but Gabriel could tell that he was glad John had left.

It is interesting that humans always break down into twos or threes when in a larger group. Like electrons finding their right orbit, they know what is most stable. Gabriel thought that he, Buckley, and John would be able to go out together and have a grand time, but it began to make sense to him that it's best to keep different groups of friends separate.