hi. ive been in japan for the past few months, exchanging emails with my dad every couple weeks. if you can stomach the insiders and the needlessly aureate language you might enjoy them. prepare to find out that my pretentiousness stems at least partially from genetics, and also to find out that my name isnt actually glen if youre new here or something.
ALSO if you're unsure if this is worth a read consider that my dad is enthusiastic about 4chan, poetry, punk, carpentry, and quantum physics
no shoutouts, no hugging, no learning. love you guys forever~
From: me
To: dad
Sent: Tuesday, April 24, 2012 1:28:28 PM
Subject: a (book about a) whale ship was my yale college and my harvard
billy
safe and sound in tokyo. been here a few days. the transition from veritable palace to four foot by eight foot hotel room is as comforting as it is humbling. i was in seoul for a week staying with a friend who's teaching english. dominique, lorna and glenn's other son, also lives in seoul and we hit it off expertly. his honesty about his distaste for the toronto relatives was relieving and made me feel at home. it is worth noting too that every single family member i have met out here has expressed a genuine desire to meet you. i'll keep things brief so i can talk about more with you over the phone (the voice is mightier than the virtual pen).
i start work at the busiest american apparel in tokyo in a couple days, and im apartment hunting like a real grown up. you'll be pleased to know that the frugality you've instilled in me has served me well. i was staying in a hotel for 25 dollars a night but downgraded to a hotel for 22 a night. i fear nothing more than i fear luxury. humourously enough, the night i made the switch i stumbled upon the teachings of diogenes, who forsook everything and lived in a bathtub in athens. you're probably familiar with him, but a couple points stood out.
he only owned a robe and a bowl, and after watching a boy drink water from a stream using only his hands, diogenes destroyed his bowl, embarrassed that he hadnt done so before.
alexander the great once approached diogenes and asked if there was anything he could do for the cynic, and diogenes said 'you can remove yourself from my sunlight'. alexander, apparently pleased, responded 'if i were not alexander, then i should wish to be diogenes'.
even more serendipitous is that he coined the word cosmopolitan. kosmopolites, citizen of the world.
i'll give you a call when i get the chance. hope everything is well, sorry i didn't fly home to shovel.
love, marcus
Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2012 05:15:51 -0700
From: dad
Subject: let's hit reply so we'll have a record of all these (and no, i haven't turned gay)
To: me
tootus
great to hear from you.
i was talking about you the other night, cuz someone was on their way to thailand, and i mentioned that my son was just there. this girl asked how old my son was, and since she wasn't "reproductively salient" (great term i just read for pictures of hot girls they show to men in psych experiments) i told her. which led to questions about my own age. 'formulated, sprawling on a pin', i answered. to which a guy replied- fuck, i'd pay money to look like you at 51. comfort, but cold.
re diogenes, don't forget his looking for an honest man bit, which had to be a piss-take, what with the lamp in the daytime and all that. i never knew that the barrel he lived in was actually a tub. when i heard it as a kid, i always thought it meant he wore a barrel, eschewing clothing, like some mountain dew drinking hillbilly.
nice antireification with your subject header- referencing the book rather than the line. it took me a while to sort it all out, and realize that it was kinda profound, and not just clever. reify is one of those concepts, like tautology or the infield-fly rule, that i have a hard time keeping straight- and not just in a hard to define as a word way, but to keep untwisted. (and i'm only fuckin' with ya about the infield-fly rule, cuz it sounded good. i know that shit like the back of my hand.)
gotcha about the nutshell. maybe your apartment will be bigger. and speaking of bigger. i was talking to dolan. him (he?) and his brother have this friend who's 6'3" and 220 lbs. nice guy, loves to drink but turns complete asshole at beer #6. john's brother mentioned that this guy's thinking about going to seoul to teach english. john said- oh oh. joh's brother said- nah, it should be ok, they're used to guys getting hammered in south korea. to which john replied- they're used to 5 foot 3 guys getting hammered.
congrats on the job. its going to be fun being the subject of a lot of cultural assumptions on the part of the customers and native staff- canadian in american apparel, literally and literally, might get too involved, explanation wise.
what's up with the koopar (sp?)- remind her of evan if she hasn't got her ticket yet.
and now a bit of chastisement. i opened something from student loans, thinking it was an income tax form. imagine my surprise when it was a final notice for a payment. fuck, boy. who buys a thousand dollars woth of shoes when they still owe two thousand in loans? and who skips out of the country on a gov'ment loan? jesus.
that's all. deal with it, or they might not let you back in... and you owe me the $311 that i paid them.
i'm reading that book that pete got about the hare krishnas (locals in west virginia refer to them as hairy critters, which i'd never heard before, and is pretty funny). sheeeeeaaaaaat (that's one of the character's in the wire's signature lines). as if any religion is any more wacky than any other, but homer's admonition to apu sure applies.
(i just put that in so my note wouldn't end on a big downer. you know i'm really quite proud of you. write when you can, and call when you want. and be a sweet boy.)
LOVE
fred
From: me
To: dad
Sent: Tuesday, May 1, 2012 12:13:46 PM
Subject: hey, i said i was frugal, i didn't say i was good with money
i'm sorry you had to clean up after me. that was one of those things i wanted to mention to you when i brought up anxiety, but, for whatever bad reason, didn't. it's just something that i avoided for way too long and it got to the point where whenever i thought about it or about school in general i panicked, so instead of doing the right thing and dealing with it, i just put it off more. you've heard it all before. i don't know why i do shit like that. for what it's worth, i do and did have the money, and it's not that i didn't pay because it would bankrupt me or anything. my reason is probably worse, but accuracy in all things. i'm waiting on an email from the website about my username and password, but it's been over 24 hours so i'm starting to wonder. you didn't happen to take down that information in the interest of prudence, did you? regardless, $311 + $120. noted, and thank you. as for virgin, i definitely paid my last bill, so i'll have to look into that further.
i heard a line recently that stuck with me. i was watching a bit of standup by dara obriain, witty irish comedian with a scientific background, stocky bald guy on QI. he was lambasting holistic medicine and debunking common defenses of it, which led to "'oh but the chinese are so wise, they have the same word for "crisis" and "opportunity".' yes, well, they also have the same word for 'china' and 'tibet', and it's 'china', so fuck them." that was almost worth having to employ the 'a third layer of quotes goes back to regular quotation marks' rule.
i found the lamp in the daytime bit a little corny. it's too bill maher for my tastes. though of course, cliches weren't cliches yet thousands of years ago. oh, i got my apartment. sharing with a quiet asian canadian and a japanese girl whom i haven't met, in the neighborhood shimokitazawa. it's 79000 yen per month after utilities, which is extremely cheap for the area (should be more like a hundred thousand). still ridiculously costly of course, but i couldn't pass it up. it's a happening neighborhood, vintage shops and cafes everywhere, and the apartment is between an art house cinema and a restaurant that is a trailer. it's also a ten minute bike ride to shibuya and my work. i also get 10000 yen per month from work for transportation, so that's an ersatz rent reduction if i'm biking. i just recently set up a profile on some teaching sites, students can browse them and come to you. pretty nifty, and it's an easy 2000-4000 yen per hour. if with that and american apparel i still have to dip into my savings to pay the bills, i'll either move elsewhere or ask glenn for a job (which he offered). budgeting is kind of fun when, should you fail, you aren't instantly homeless or without sustenance.
work is interesting. only had one shift this week since the full time guy i'm replacing doesn't leave until tomorrow. same shit, different environment. truly a microcosm of life in general. i worry that i may become somewhat of a novelty in whatever circle of friends i find myself in, but i try not to dwell on that, as it forces me to consider that i might be somewhat of a novelty to my friends back home in a way i don't yet realize. somewhat redolent of one of the few good lines in 1q84: one of the main characters is reading about the gilyaks to a mystical teenage girl (every murakami novel has some attractive teenage medium, not that i'm complaining). he mentions that even with the advent of roads, the gilyaks sill trekked through the taiga. she asks why they didn't rethink their route when given a new option, and the main character replies 'because then they would be forced to rethink other things'.
i don't know a whole lot about the krishnas. interestingly, there was a fairly prominent krishna hardcore movement in the 80s. lots of krishnacore bands, and a few lead singers from other prominent punk bands were followers. and oh god, the drunk businessmen in seoul put the ones here to shame, probably because over there you can get drunk off a dollar and a half bottle of soju. glad to hear you were talking to dolan though, give him a hearty hello. coupar is coming mid june, and staying for a few weeks. also i got a cheap laptop off tokyo craigslist, so if you're technologically capable of downloading skype (i believe in you) we can video chat and save on phone bills.
read a really engaging novella recently, the nebula-nominated 'the man who ended history: a documentary'. stumbled upon it after spooky late night browsing of information regarding unit 731, the japanese army unity responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of chinese through everything from human vivisection to being injected with horse urine. anyway, the story has an interesting idea on quasi-time travel. given that looking deep into space is looking back in time:
'the best telescopes we have today can see as far back as about 13 billion years ago. if you strap one of those to a rocket moving away from the earth at a speed that's faster than light--a detail that i'll get to in a minute--and point the telescope back at the earth, you'll see the history of humanity unfold before you in reverse.'
http://kenliu.name/binary/liu_the_man_who_ended_history.pdf
if you can tolerate reading on a screen/reading what is essentially a glorified short story
'not just clever' is all that i aspire to be
marcus
ps: re your age, you should have asked him how much
Date: Sat, 5 May 2012 06:48:00 -0700
From: dad
Subject: and, being good for nothing else, be wise
To: me
glad to see you didn't think making this a long chain was too gay. fuck bandwidth...
best of /b/, from yesterday:
guy was saying that he was going to have to have an eye removed and replaced with a matching prosthetic, but he also wanted to get a cool looking one for wearing to clubs and/or freaking people out. after a few boring and predictable responses involving terminators and marbles, this guy posted- leave it empty and get a spider that you train to crawl around inside the socket.
here's a pretty good article about 4chan (it took me a while to figure out that you click the big plus sign to get going):
http://canopycanopycanopy.com/15/anonymity_as_culture__case_studies
and a great phrase that i came across on lit:
http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=20000118
that's just some random 4chan stuff i wanted to share...
about your last note. i checked and no, there's no user name or password in the papers- i just paid it at the bank, like a regular bill.
i fully understand the anxiety related to dealing with stuff, and though it pains me that some of my...difficulties...may have rubbed off on you, the fact that you are living halfway around the world, and not passed out drunk there, bodes well. we'll put aside the banal, yet quite sensible, advice that it is way better to deal with things in a more timely manner- "present fears are less than horrible imaginings", and all that.
a distinction i try to make when dealing with things (and remember that by distinction i mean useless justification (BAN ME PLEASE)ry- as in kundera describing vertigo as the intoxication of the weak): remember dolan's and mine line about the guy who ignores the funny sound his car is making?- and that's how a $5 problems becomes a $50 problem.
i try to keep those kinds of things from happening. but if something is already a $500 problem, i might indulge a little...
" 'not just clever' is all that i aspire to be" the line that is the subject header has always been one of my favourites. fittingly, its from a group of poems written as a sort of instruction to his son:
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/debauchee.html
(its real title uses maim'd- i don't know why this one, and several others, changes it to disabled. maybe it has something to do with someone taking an arrow to the knee- sorry, but that was made of win.)
i'll check out that novella. the realization that when we look out we are always looking back is a bit discomfitting- remember lot's wife. even on smaller scales, we can only see things as they were, not as they are, reducing all investigation (and maybe experience?) to history- and again, remember lot's wife.
the idea is used as a major plot device in my all time favourite sci-fi series, Exordium (titles deserve capitalization, esp that one). ships can jump out FTL to a distance that permits them to intercept the light waves and see what happened that they missed.
but a quibble, from a guy who hasn't read your story. you wouldn't see things happen in reverse. light waves propogate in concentric circles, like ripples in a pond as the common analogy has it (they actually form a cone, but light cones get really confusing really fast). the light from what happens first leaves first and so arrives first, so i don't see where the reversal comes in.
about your place in your circle of friends- what's that adage from poker? if you can't spot the fish at the table, then its you :) i told you i often wondered about my relation with neal, and a bit now with pete, in that they both knew so many assholes, and leaving me where, exactly.
(i really am of two minds about emoticons. they certainly have a utility beyond their coolness- but so, arguably, do fannypacks and i never wore one o dem. when i first started writing emails, i would do something like (insert appropriate emoticon here), trying to be all ironic and shit.
i really think that our emotional spectrum is one of the most poorly plumbed depths. maybe in the future we will be more adept at expressing them- better able to count the ways, as it were, but a more quantified approach is probably not the enumeration shakespeare was looking for. how do i love thee? 43, 27 and a bit of 254 doesn't quite have the right ring about it.)
cool about the apartment- you're living with peers for the first time, and i am once again without one...
i watched drive a couple of weeks ago. fuck. not only have we gone post narrative, but now i have to deal with post dialogue. i really didn't love the film as soon as it ended, but it has grown on me on reflection. i always said that i wanted to be like castillo, crocket and tubb's boss on miami vice- the strong, silent type who could chastize them with a glance- but i could never keep my fucking mouth shut. and at first, the drive-er seemed to be playing it like that. but then less, and less, and less and it started to bug me, until i realized that i was watching the first autistic badass in the history of the movies, so i could take it like that.
and about the jacket. aside from all the knights in white satin schmaltz, did you catch the reference he made to the fable of the scorpion and the frog? so he's not a badass killer wearing his totem for the world to see. he's the unfortunate frog carrying the scorpion on his back, about to be killed for his efforts. or something.
and about the jacket. have you seen this?:
http://cdn.chud.com/2/27/27d24702_drive1.jpeg
loved the murakami quote. (i knew what the taiga was, but had to google gilyak.) its interesting, though a little disheartening, when those kinds of observations are made by others, about others. but its really upsetting when people make those kinds of observations by themselves, about themselves, and do it so lightly. like a women calling herself a bitch, or a man an asshole, and almost being sort of proud of it.
or that guy on my forum who i like(ed?) and exchanged emails with. i made a dig at some of the other forum members, and asked what he thought of them. to which he replied- i don't like to ask myself those kinds of questions about people, because it would lead to other questions about other people, and that would make me uncomfortable. well, boo hoo.
funny that you should mention that quote in your email, cuz i had been thinking about that stuff a bit lately. (the examined life, and trying to keep one's compromises down to a dull roar, for, and from, a dull crowd. and all that.) leaving me with the self-rightousness of the lonely, i guess. something between "i strove with none, for none were worth my strife" and "when did the heats that my veins fill, add one more to the plaguey bill". its a small comfort to realize that all of the hurts i have caused have been of a personal, rather than istitutional, nature. kinda like the story of the mathematician, hardy i think it was. he was proud of the fact that all of his work had absolutely no practical value. but the joke was on him. he was a number theorist, which has proved to be at the heart of cryptography. which, in this digital age has proved invaluable, and the abuse of which has proved most threatening to the cushy life of a cambridge don. (rereading, i realize that the preceeding bit is a bit of a mess. but i'll leave it for now, cuz i think it sounds good...)
oh yeah. billy bragg is confirmed for bluesfest. how's that for a test of my generational fortitude? there's a big kerfuffle about this years show, cuz they're putting an electro spin (ha) on it, with skrillex headlining one night. (just to keep up with things, i once tried to listen to one of his songs picked at random on youtube. i honestly couldn't make it more than a minute in, and we both know how dimly my discretion bulb shines sometimes.)
well, that's all for now. hope there's enough fatherly wisdom in this for you to carry on with, 'cuz i know you couldn't get along (get along, get along) in this wide world without it (insert smiley face here).
love.
From: me
To: dad
Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2012 10:40:01 AM
Subject: a universe constrained by its premise
i'm a little ashamed at not having thought of that spider thing myself, that's the kind of idea you could put on a resume.
there's something fey about articles about the internet on the internet. NORP reminds me of a nickname my manager had for one of the guys at work. SMPC, or, sex maniac pervert criminal. the redundancy makes it extra abradant. they were old friends but i could tell said friendship's bonds were tested each time the nickname was spoken. (for bonus points, i learned that nickname is an example of article/noun osmosis. 'an ickname' became 'a nickname', much like how 'a norange' became 'an orange'.)
inwit as a word is beautiful, if not eerily doublespeakesque. it's a rescue boat for the -wit suffix in a sea of nitwits, dimwits, and halfwits.
nothing 'rubbed off on [me]' like that, dad. you always got your shit done, and if you ever didn't, you damn well fooled me. it's not some kind of monkey see monkey do thing. genetics might play a role, but even so, i think we can agree that patrocliny is in my best interests. i pass the buck when i shouldn't sometimes, but you know just how infinite i think the powers of self.
wish i hadn't lent skyrim to a friend before coming down here, you deserve to at least experience the sorrowful origins of 'arrow to the knee'. if you want to see something grotesque, youtube 'skyrim randy savage'. someone made a hack supplanting dragons with randy savage, and suffice to say undulating necks don't lend well to flesh tones.
that poem rings a few bells. you've either showed it to me before or spoke a few lines. 'urge you to blows' is a wonderful phrase ('as i rained blows upon him, i thought, surely there's a better way' - the birth of festivus). 'whether the boy fucked you, or i the boy' reminds me of something i read recently. remember in 300 when leonidas derides the athenians as boy-lovers? i always just assumed that was erroneous, an attempt to hypermasculinize the spartans and paint the athenians as erudite pussies (was torn between that and pussy erudites). turns out he was right, though. while the spartans were of course man-lovers, they had severe qualms with boyfuckery.
just read about lot's wife. who'd have thought throwing your virgin daughters to a pack of voracious sodomites would be brooked so easily, but looking back on a doomed city is grounds for some smiting. then again, it's probably a parable, and should be taken with a pillar of salt... and very interesting on the light stuff. if only the nebula awards had a 'speak now or forever hold your peace' thing, you could burst in and start rectifying.
i loathe emoticons if only because they fling me back into an earlier version of myself. you never got/had to experience msn, so they're still clinquant to you. one older guy on a forum i used to go to would write things like <s> after a sentence, to imply smiling. apparently it's a decades-old relic from the usenet era. true internet history. i've got some japanese people on facebook now, and my western brain is struggling to interpret the hieroglyphs they use as emoticons. http://www.japaneseemoticons.net/all-japanese-emoticons/ this might help with your emotional spelunking.
i'm glad you caught the aspergers in drive. for me, the highlight of the movie is just how visibly and audibly uncomfortable he is when he tells that guy off in the diner. i would argue that he's at once the frog with the scorpion on its back, and the scorpion itself, proudly wearing its emblem on his jacket. the soundtrack is just beautiful (but that might just be because i never got/had to experience the 80s, and its sounds are still clinquant to me). speaking of aspergers, that image is fucking horrifying.
we've all got our plaguey bills, both allegorically and literally. i've always been of the opinion that thinking too hard about hurt just begets more hurt, but you know that i'm also of the opinion that more are worth your strife than you think. my current struggle is coming to terms with the fact that, through attempting to obviate touristism (worse than tourism) and overelation from novelty, i'm not quite as excited about life out here as i wish i was. i love it, but much in the same way i loved life back home. maybe this is that ahappiness thing that buddhism is all about.
japanese social nuances and mores are really interesting. -san is the equivalent of mr or ms, -chan is for young girls and -kun for young boys. -sama is reserved for customers and gods, which is both hilarious and tragic. there's this ridiculous and occasionally exploited law that states that if someone has built a structure on your property that causes minimal interference with your rights, and it would be costly to remove said structure, you're not allowed to request its removal. there's an obsession with harmony, and the worker bee attitude instilled in children helps to promulgate this. there's tremendous racism towards both chinese and koreans, which is i guess the expected residue of the attempts to rationalize the subjugation of said groups. there's some weird compartmentalization going on there, though, since the japanese are enamoured with chinese culture to the point where the former's culture is bordering on a facsimile of the latter's in some ways.
i was reading about the yakuza, and one of their rackets is called 'sokaiya'. they buy enough shares in a company to gain access to the shareholder meetings, at which they either threaten to embarrass the company or actually embarrass the company until they're paid to leave. another one of their tricks is to print thousands of magazines detailing the (often untrue) dirty secrets of a company, then coerce the company into buying the prints for an inflated price before they make it to the public. the sokaiya are so ubiquitous that a lot of companies plan ahead and budget for them. it really is the ultimate antidote to runaway capitalism. i'm mystified and impressed by how the yakuza make absolutely no attempts to be clandestine. also, as if the whole finger chopping thing could get any cooler, it turns out that the digit on the ring finger that is extirpated is pivotal in properly gripping a samurai sword, thereby making the transgressor more of a burden on his comrades.
the language is fascinating. japanese is rife with lexical ambiguity, which i guess helps with social harmony by masking hostility to an extent. never has 'it is impossible to say just what i mean!' rung so true. it's incredibly precise in some ways, though, with each verb having 4 different forms depending on who you're talking to. there's blunt/rude, casual, polite (the most common), and honorific. the language isn't vague so much as it is masterfully indirect. much of speaking politely involves bushbeating and literally affixing 'humbly' to the beginning of verbs. 'no' is considered impolite in some settings, so instead you say something that translates to 'it will be difficult' or 'i am unsure'. even more turbid, the way to say 'i have to do x' is to literally say 'if i dont do x, it will not become'. 'it' in this case means something like 'life' or 'what is supposed to happen'. the future will fail to be. this also applies to commands: instead of saying 'you have to walk this way' you say 'if you dont walk this way, it will not become'. even requests are indirect. if you're asking to use the bathroom, saying 'can i use the bathroom?' can be rude, so you say 'i want to use the bathroom, but...' and then you let them invite you to do it. i'm assuming that shit like this doesn't apply to most casual social settings.
something pretty cool: the term 'baka' means 'stupid', or 'idiot', and the kanji for it is the kanji for the words ba (horse) and ka (deer). my favourite explanation for this (as ryan north says, the best part about etymology is that usually nobody really knows, so whoever has the best story wins) comes from a story dating back to the chinese qin dynasty. at an imperial gathering, a prominent official, zhao gao, brought forth a deer and called it a horse. the king disagreed, of course, and assumed zhao was just being an idiot, and 'baka' was born. in reality, though, zhao was considering treason but was unsure if he would have any support, and this was how he was testing the waters. some other officials agreed with the king, but some agreed with zhao. zhao then surreptitiously had all the officials who agreed with the king killed. that's where the chinese idiom for deception 'calling a deer a horse' comes from.
i was reading a bit about the permian-triassic extinction event, wherein 95% of all aquatic and 70% of terrestrial species went extinct. more importantly, though, it has bar none the greatest nickname (ickname) of anything ever: 'the great dying'.
bluesfest is neat, but it's no 'warp tour'. in other music news, did you hear that the lead singer of against me! has come out as transgendered?
i rewatched the matrix trilogy recently. let's just say i forgot how fantastic the first film is. though one neat tidbit that i didn't pick up on before that merits a mention: while neo is 'the one', smith's multiplicity towards the end effectively makes him 'the many'.
protecting my ring finger at all costs
love, marcus
Date: Sun, 27 May 2012 17:46:57 -0700
From: dad
Subject: still haven't finished the kitchen... it, and i, are constrained by our premise
To: me
hey my boy.
took me a while to start on getting back to you...
just finished that novella you linked. quite enjoyed the premise, but felt like it was not a historical period i would focus on. (i knew a little about that unit, and know more since googling. but so sleazy how they were never prosecuted in return for their ill-gotten knowledge. like the line in the right stuff when the americans learn that the russians got to space first with sputnik, and the guy says- but i thought our germans were better than their germans.)
it seems kinda weird to me when writers come up with these neat ideas, and then kinda waste them (to my mind) on a somewhat-less-than-worthy subject. like those quizzes where people are asked what 3 historical personages would you have for dinner, and someone replies marilyn monroe or bobby orr. but i guess all subjects are subjective.
i really liked the line that went something like- just because all narratives are constructed doesn't mean that they are all untruthful.
it took me a while to get started reading cuz i really do hate, or maybe only resent, reading what others recommend. mary got me a novel for my birthday, and i was reluctant to pick it up, but it turned out to be a keeper, so mary can stay a keeper, and so can you.
we are often so gaurded with our free will. kyla got sick when her new boyfriend, soon to be live-in, was up here visiting, and she wondered at it, saying she never got sick. and i said- its just your autonomy trying to make a point.
two things i noticed about your last note.
your vocabulary is getting better than mine. knock it off.
and. there was absolutely nothing in it about anything that you had done. all the country of the mind. although that delights me no end on one level, it also troubles me a bit, being so insular. but you are on an island, so. now i ain't saying its a bad thing, and quite enjoyed yeats using it as a reproach
You, that have not lived in thought but deed,
Can have the purity of a natural force,
But I, whose virtues are the definitions
Of the analytic mind, can neither close
The eye of the mind nor keep my tongue from speech.
but i'm worried you're not getting out enough. just kidding. but its hard to live vicariously through one's children when you don't know what they're doing. and that whole huginn and muninn, or don juan's lizards, thing.
i myself have been quite busy doing interesting things with fascinating people, as you can imagine. if you count building planters and laying patio stones in the hot sun for kyla's friend angela with her clean junkie boyfriend. (did i ever tell you that story? angela was perusing the craig's list personals, and came across an ad something like this- "underemployed muscian looking for love. i can hardly pay for myself, and could never pay for you, but we'll have fun." and thought it would be a good idea to reply... the guy ain't my cuppa tea, but he should be my fucking hero.
it was pete's idea to try and watch john carter. we made it about 20 minutes, 15 just being hopeful. did you hear the story? (i mean the story of the movie. all you need to know about the story of the story is that mars is called barsoom.) it was originally titled john carter of mars, like the series written a hundred years ago by the tarzan guy. but disney had just had a bomb with mars needs moms, so it was decreed that there would be no more movies with mars in the title. but it was still a huge bomb, and the head of the studio got fired, so there is some justice.
and speaking of movies that no one will touch, last night we watched mel gibson's latest, get the gringo. it was pretty cool, but none of us had even heard of it. it came out this year, but they are really downplaying it domestically, hoping to do ok in foreign lands (you know, where foreigners come from, says doughboy in boyz n the hood. why the z and the lone n, but no a in the?).
i also liked anonymous, the recent movie about oxford-as-shakespeare-by-way-of-jonson. it was quite well done, and sets up a plausible, even compelling though ridiculous, case.
and speaking of anonymous. i just started infinite jest, /lit/'s favourite book. i like it so far, but its a boat anchor. over a thousand pages with 3 and 4 page paragraphs. i'm trying not to think about what i'll do when my three weeks are up. i won't be able to renew, cuz there's always someone waiting in the queue (boy does that word look funny, even to me who spells lots of things funny).
and did you read /b/'s four hundred millionth get? (BAN ME PLEASE)s tongue my anus. (sorry to have to write that, but it was.) sometimes life is perfect. the art is in figuring out if its perfectly good or perfectly bad.
and not to leave off on that note, speaking of art there was a great line in the movie. jonson complains that the plays are too political, and the earl of oxford says- all art is political, or else it would just be decoration. and all artists have something to say, or they would be cobblers.
be a sweet boy.
oh yeah, where the fuck can i download some music? i need some more. even though i think i can't listen to the national front disco one more time, i can.
From: me
To: dad
Sent: Wednesday, June 6, 2012 2:16:11 PM
Subject: better to be all theory no action than all action no theory
yeats is at the forefront of my psyche now for an interesting reason. there was a song i heard about four years ago, and it was, from what impression the few searing seconds gave me, one of the most beautiful things i'd ever heard. i ended up forgetting what few lyrics i deciphered before being able to google it, and after many fruitless hours searching (when will i be able to search google by humming into my microphone? this is even more pressing than the groceries/good looks whim) it hit me that i would never hear the song again, doomed to a life of songlessness as i whiled my weary way to death. then, the other day at work, someone's ipod was on and i got this heavy feeling in my chest. the hunt was over. the ahab in my subconscious was at once defeater and defeated, and all was right with the world. seagreen serenade, by silver apples (from 'the song of wandering aengus', what a great title).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7gmhvMVO20
shame about the stupid video, but the fact that music like this was being made 45 years ago buttresses the whole 'cyclical time' argument pretty hard.
i read (well, not exactly) this book/comic called 'la ou vont nos peres' (lacking in some presumably pivotal accents). in english it's known as 'the arrival', but the translation for the french title is something haunting like 'where our fathers go' or 'where our fathers are'. it's a fantastical, dialogue-free look at immigration. wasn't that impressive in message nor in message-carrying husk, but the title is something that will stick with me for a while.
funny you mention national front disco, that song only recently clicked with me as being one of the best things morrissey has ever done. it was probably the hundredth time i'd heard it, and some artistic acumen burgeoned from within and i had to stop what i was doing for a second. it's funny, i was reading about the drama surrounding its ostensibly racist lyrics, and morrissey's response to it was basically 'were it not so great a song, nobody would be picking it apart like this'. oh, moz. as for where to download music, from what i can tell mediafire is still sort of around, you just have to use a recondite method to access its goodies. google search the album the way you normally would, then click on the 'filestube' link. from there you should see a mediafire link, click (you may have to click on a few seperate things but it's all rather intuitive) and you'll eventually get to the mediafire page for the album you want.
i witnessed that 'get', and the immediate reactions were hilarious. oldschoolers claiming that it evinced the 'summerization' of the site, apparently unaware that it was the sort of thing you would have seen five years ago. rose tinted monitors. re: the boyfriend, remember in seinfeld when george starts doing the opposite of what his brain tells him to do? 'my name is george. im unemployed, and i live with my parents'
my friend ashley, the canadian girl i stayed with in seoul, is staying with me until alex arrives on the 14th. my apartment, the revolving door of white girls; i wonder if my roommates will be able to tell them apart. i was having fun at first, but she blurs the line between vim and vacuousness, and nothing desexualizes a pretty girl like glaring philistinism.
forgive my lack of experiential anecdotes. thoughts into words is a whole step easier than experiences into thoughts into words. furthermore, life out here is much more realistic than it was in sunny southeast asia. that was a surreal vacation and this is 'just' life in tokyo. life is a network of 'heres' and 'theres', and singapore was still a 'there' because i hadn't actually set up a life. starting work in tokyo quickly turned it into a 'here'. nothing strips the world of its whimsy like applying for a bank account. thankfully, i haven't succumbed to any grass is always greener bullshit. in a little over a month i've witnessed the birth and death of numerous fashion trends, eaten a two dollar apple, ingratiated myself with the hard-partying PR manager of american apparel japan, accidentally told a girl she looked 'delicious' in the outfit she was wearing, and watched horrid old men perform karaoke only to perform marginally more horrid karaoke afterwards, which felt wrong in a way that i haven't yet lexicalized. like in synecdoche, new york, where phillip seymour hoffman goes to the ophthalmologist (i tend to avoid using words whose spellings i had to google because it feels like cheating, but there's no synonym i can use to escape), who tells him to go to a neurologist, saying 'the eyes are part of the brain.' hoffman goes 'that doesnt seem right', and the doctor replies 'like morally correct? or right as in accurate?'
infinite jest looks interesting. if you can handle the gimmick of ergodic literature, house of leaves is worth a read. speaking of gimmicks, i went to see a lee bul exhibit at a big art gallery, and it felt good to recognize most of the installations. my favourite thing about her is that i absolutely hate some of her stuff, which lets me believe that i have a more finely honed aesthetic sense than i actually do. check out her piece 'infinity partition', mise en abyme of the future. my favourite of hers is 'after bruno taut: beware the sweetness of things' whose painfully overwrought title introduced me to bruno taut himself. for a man who looks like the picture of dorian gray if dorian gray were gandhi, he had some cool ideas.
duncan got in touch with me. he extended an offer to go stay with him in vancouver after this pan-asian adventure is wrapped up. i think i'd like to do that. i'm still not sure how i feel about 'family' (in quotation marks because it means family that isn't you) starting to play a role in my life. to acknowledge the emotional well-being it fosters is to admit that i haven't exactly ascended beyond it in the way i thought i did. it's complicated, i guess. it's funny, you've made quite the impression on every family member i've met, and lorna seems to think you're some kind of superhero; never underestimate the powers of son as envoy.
here i am in seoul: http://i.imgur.com/zjfhu.jpg
happy you remembered the ravens' names
love, marcus
ps, if i can be honest with you, those are only the second most ridiculous pants i've purchased since coming to asia.
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2012 16:59:47 -0700
From: dad
Subject: its pants
To: me
/...son as envoy./ got me thinking of jesus' line about (false) prophets- ye shall know them by their fruits. considering the way you've turned out, i musta done something right. except for those slacks. and the drop the soap poster in the background. ("pants" has been a term of derision in the uk for a while now, and adrian and i use it. google the subject and read the first article.)
but i gotta say. that song was worse and the band was more worse. its funny how divergent our musical tastes are, sometimes. and though i loves me some WBY, angus was never my favourite. i'm not enamoured with his bucolic/days-of-yore old men, except for the nine bean rows will i plant there fellow. i much prefer his angry old man, as in "why should old men not be mad" and "if she'd but turn her head, you'd know the folly of being comforted" and of course "when you are old...". i always get the last lines confused with blake's "can wisdom be put in a silver rod, or love in a golden bowl". you'd think i'd be more careful with my plate.
the national front disco always struck me as surprisingly anti-rascist, coming from morrissey. ("this alarming man" as NME called him, for such lines as 'its hard enough when you belong here' from bengali in platforms and 'we are the last true british people in the world' from whatever.) but its always been a fav, esp cuz it has boy in it. its always fun to objectify loved ones, but girls never seem to appreciate it so much.
and now my musical confession. i heard this song on the radio, and really liked it, so went home and looked on the station playlist to find it was blue jeans by lana del rey. well, well. the gangster nancy sinatra. i had heard of her, but ignored it because of all the hype. but then i youtubed the video, and watched it like 10 times over the next few days. now i'll be honest and say that her looks don't put me off- except for her lips, esp if they're fake, which she denies. but i think she's lying, and that bugs me.
but i find all the hatin' boringly predictable. she writes her own stuff, shoots footage for her videos, i like her voice and vocal stylings (usually) and she reinvented (discovered?) herself after a previous attempt didn't fly. and as one of the youtube comments puts it- people who don't like this song have never been in love. (insert smiley face here.) people who do like it still hold basic sexrole stereotyping as their romantic ideal, like me.
i cut my hair pretty short about a month ago- as i tell people when they say it looks good- yeah, it shows off my face. but i always wanted to try the clippers. so last night i tried them with the longest attachment, and nothing really happened, so i moved to the middle, and still no go. so on went the smallest comb thingy. well, lest just say that the use of any new tool requires practise.
you know how sometimes an absolute disregard for appearance is so indicative of mental instability? (and not just amongst the homeless. think twins, men dressed by their wives and most sports fans.) i look a little like if travis bickle hung around with the jackass guys. but not quite. no need for a toque. i just need to trim those errant tufts that are so...proclamitory.
and yes, my hair is thinning at the front. the tragedy of it all. the expression should have been- apres mon cheveux, les deluge.
but on a fashion high note, i scored a nearly new pair of blundstones at value village for $12.99. they mustn't have know what they were, because they usually jack up the price of brand names or good shit. army boots there are 25 bucks. but i must confess they are the chisel toe model, so a little morecarnaby st. so the hunter gatherer in me is happy. but i can't remember the last time i owned four pairs of shoes.
now that summer's here, i really want to do something about the scars on my arm- long sleeves and no swimming is getting old.
(a couple of weeks ago, when it was really hot, pete went swimming at his brother's with sherri and olga, her smokin' polish friend in her bikini. and he didn't invite me. so know he is known as 'bad friend'. and he doesn't even know about my arm.)
i've been researching scar revision plastic surgery, but its probably not covered by ohip, unless i go in with my new haircut as proof of mental defect. so i've been thinking tattoo. i was considering just getting them filled in and straightened out with black ink (or check out white ink). or maybe trying to incorporate them into some kind of design, like maybe a bamboo grove? a big old iconic portrait of marx as a cover up would prolly be easiest. but i was saving him for my neck. oh well. check out this interpretation:
http://images5.fanpop.com/image/photos/28300000/karl-marx-karl-marx-28396608-288-343.jpg
or maybe i could commission the moby dick guy to design something...
any thoughts?
just asking that question. talk about places my father has been. the book i always associated with johnny was 'lies my father told me'. but ain't french great? (how magnanimous of me.) like proust's reserche de temp perdu. usually translated as remembrance of things past. but its got a double double,cuz perdu can also mean lost and reserche can also mean looking for.
as to your questioning of family. (uncle dunky!) that's a biggie. and its funny, cuz in the recovery movement (roll eyes), the phrase used, somewhatderogatorily, is family of origin. i like it as a modifier- but only in the sense that it puts them in a diminished place. not in the usual bullshit sense that it distinguishes them from all of the other wonderful people in your life that you have created this other great family of affinity with. "we're like family" is one of those great shots accross the bow warning of anguish to come. in the same way a lot of people reject atheism because it allows them to accept a god so horrible it allows them to act out likeways- a lot of people call you family so they can fuck you over the way good families do. as the title of coupland's book has it, all families are psycotic.
but in a poor play on words, you could adopt origin of family, not just because i like to think that it all started with me, in that eric ericson sense, but that i expect happy from you and your progeny.
infinite jest is a trip. its like moby dick in that the use of language informs so much more than the story. where the author uses words like colours to paint, rather than bricks to build. (not that there's anything wrong with prose as a blunt instrument. after all, its hard to throw paint through a window.)
and speaking of blunt instruments, remember this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIuOWv-mLP4
i think you'd quite like IJ, and enjoy reading it- an often not so subtle distinction. its some heavy lifting, oftimes annoyingly so. but its one of those full immersion experiences, like the baptism homer saves bart from, not one of those pussy little water-sprinkled-on-the-forehead ones like i got. (oooh, i just got an email from the library that the new gunslinger novel is waiting for me, so maybe i can wait to jest to renew.)
again like that novella, a bit annoying to me when the narrative doesn't seem to live up to the talent or intent. like johnsons 'a visit to the outerhebrides'. say where? but there's a great line in tom stoppard's travesties. a girl is working for james joyce doing research. and her father says something like- what great work could ever come from references to homer's odyssey and the dublin street directory of 1904. or something like that.
i get what you're saying about the quotidian, wherever it happens to be. i rented a big saw to cut some patio stones. i'd never used one before. the first five cuts were super cool. the next 25 were just cutting concrete. and more heavy lifting.
i did angela's patio. some timber planters and 200 slabs in the hot sun. i got some colour, even a red neck. her (an)hero boyfriend was helping, and she hired this kid to move the slabs and the gravel from the front to the back, so that was nice. as i've been telling people, despite my marxist bent/bentmarxism, its a little disturbing how much i enjoy telling people what to do.
he was a black kid from burundi (ouch) named tresor. peter, the bf, had been regaling me with prison stories. i asked him how a guy named treasure would fair in the can. he laughed and said: "probably not very well." unless it was some boy-named-sue type shit.
i'm now doing the shed, which she changed the size of after the perimeter/foundation was laid out, fucking up my massing. but i think i can save the design, and its gonna be pretty cool. and if the neighbour likes it, he wants one too, and his will be even cooler. perfect for an idea i have for a very thin roof profile, which wouldn't have worked with angela's, which is kinda too heavy.
she asked if i could put a window in the shed, and i said no. she asked why, and i said because it would be dishonest.
but she's really nice. insists that i eat lunch there, and leaves us food for when she's at work. the other day it was mousaka. i told her i really appreciated it and she laughed and said i'm greek, and there's always food in this house, and people eat it. and she's quite the cook, despite the crazy salad with her meat.
there's this cool infill project on gladstone i've been following, and the other night i drove there to catch up. the construction fencing was gone, so i got out of the truck and was looking through the front window. the guy doing it lives next door , and came out to check me out. thought it might be a little awkward, as in dog-siccing, but he was friendly and we chatted a bit. i had to go and he invited me to come by during the day when they were working to see the inside. so cool. (as i joked to kyla, i didn't tell him i had to go to pick her up at the bus station [her flight to and fro{m} montrealwas way cheaper]. i didn't want to him to know i hung out with those kind of people.) that sentence breaks my personal record for most parenthetical.
never knew the term was mise en abyme. in 'the shadow of the torturer' series, they travel between worlds by standing between mirrors, somehow. its a little closer to fantasy (egad) than i usually like, so i guess its allowed to be a little soft. but its cool that the idea of iteration is supposed to berepetition towards some (expected?) result, and that would certainly qualify.
saw the koopar this morning. she told me there was no way she was carrying a crew-sized box of cap'n crunch half way around the world, so i had to think of something else.
i'll send this off before she gets there, so you have time to think about my tattoo.
L
From: me
To: dad
Sent: Sunday, July 15, 2012 1:02:52 PM
Subject: many moons later
all settled. i forgot to mention earlier, but i moved, hence the lack of internet. acquiring a connection here is tortuous, even with a translator at my hip to keep me in the loop. there are two different companies you have to contact: one that installs the fiberoptic cables, and another that actually provides the internet service. these two entities apparently disagree on things quite frequently, which makes the whole process drag on. why have the two sides not coalesced? 'culture', of course.
as for the new place, no roommates, better location, cheaper rent. the catch is that someone was murdered there fifteen years ago. capitalizing on superstition like this, i feel like the church. spending three weeks in a haunted apartment sans internet, the self shrivels in some ways and bloats in others. thankfully alex was around to dispense weird reminders of former realities, otherwise i'd be lost in an eerie tokyo mist. i got lot of writing done, and i powered through radix after giving it a much deserved second chance. it is an absolutely incredible book (though it's no light), but i'm confused as to how you can laud something that so aggressively blurs any distinction between scifi and fantasy. clarke's law about sufficiently advanced technology, and all that. sometimes i feel like my raison d'etre is to make you question your hatreds.
having alex here was a very important thing for me because it affirmed what was coterminously fear and hope: i could never be with her. the lens through which she views the world is one that i am thankful i cannot fathom. furthermore, i need a girl more within my sphere of influence. she's got her art-soaked opinions and i've got mine. not to say it was a sour month, though. we saw and did beautiful things in beautiful places. and we mocked the lesser whites. it left me with the sneaking suspicion that, after having two people with whom i've grown semi-resentful of stay with me, maybe i'm the problem. this was quelled by a hearty 'nahhhhhh', a la 'asshole' (i opted not to write 'denis leary's asshole' for obvious reasons).
a big thanks for the gift! though i don't think the money changer was that impressed with your handiwork, what with the asian obsession with the sacrosanct physicality of legal tender and all. i must confess, though: i did not in fact spend it on fun. i purchased curtains and an iron from muji. adulthood is nothing more than a dull ache. speaking of muji, i still need a bike and i'm thinking of getting this one:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_T8-29P47tFE/SNRIaQUITyI/AAAAAAAACe8/y9MTy-Y8gu0/s400/bike.JPG
it's about as much as any other bike i'd be able to find barring some extreme craigslist serendipity. plus, it's off-white and minimalistic, like yours truly.
work is a bit of a drag, and i'm cutting down on it to spend more time wrangling english tutees. while tutoring i make close to four times what i do at AA, which allows for a less ascetic lifestyle and significantly more freedom (horrible, horrible freedom). and i quite like playing the pedagog, especially to people more accomplished than i am. speaking of accomplishments, i'm going to climb mt fuji next week. my desire for thought-engendering altitudes supersedes my fear of all things that go on postcards.
aside from the internet bullshit, i got my first real taste of farcical japanese bureaucracy recently. while trying to collect my bank card from the bank (they never mailed it to me despite saying that they would; what they mailed instead was a letter in japanese stating that my card was ready for pickup, which i of course failed to decipher), upon presenting my passport and foreigner card proxy (it takes a month or so for the card to be given physical form, so they give you a piece of paper which is supposed to act as a surrogate) i was told that the latter wasn't suitable identification to pick up the card. it was, however, suitable enough to allow me to change my address with the bank and get them to mail the card to me, and to withdraw money manually from the teller. they would not physically give me the card, though. protocol is the enemy of thought.
re faith no more, have you ever heard mondo cane? it's mike patton doing italian pop songs from the 50s. he also did a great album with gorillaz' dan the automator. the project was called lovage, and the album, 'music to make love to your old lady by', had a cover featuring a contemplative dan nakamura, oozing elan, sitting at a table topped with flowers and a pistol. it was a spinoff of his project with prince paul, 'handsome boy modeling school', which itself was a quasi-spinoff of a surreal, short-lived sitcom called 'get a life' featuring chris elliot. we are living in the best of all possible worlds, i think.
funny you mention in search of lost time. when i first arrived in tokyo, i spent three nights in a budget inn that i stayed at on my previous trip here, four long years ago. the room's scent triggered a proustian memory so jarring that i was flung back into my nineteen year old self for a few seconds. suffice to say it was warm in some ways and unpleasant in others.
i'm envious of your ability to share that whole tradesman's camaraderie thing. when i encounter people who share my passions my initial reaction is usually to think them dilettantes. that patio sounds hellish (200 slabs in the hot sun/i fought the law and the law won), but you would not believe the heat and humidity over here. i am in a state of permanent stickiness. apparently august is even worse. thankfully alex brought me some old spice, as antiperspirant is literally not available here. it would be a shame to duck out of a working holiday visa early citing 'selfstink' as the reason.
that pr manager who's smitten with me posted a photo of me on facebook, and afterwards i received a friend request from a friend of his whose name i didn't recognize. i accepted, and i noticed that he had photos of himself hanging out with terry richardson, which surprised me. his name is luis venegas, and his wikipedia entry is no stub; that is some prolix shit. anyway, he 'liked' a few of my photos. i'm too unnerved by how gay-centric his stuff is to bother following up, but i'm flattered, at least.
i don't understand how you can accept that complete disregard for appearance is tantamount to insanity while championing its partial disregard with such alacrity ('life is just so easy with twenty of the same black shirt!'). as for your tattoo, a bamboo grove would be great if done very subtly. i still think a giant black rectangle would be the best, though. and nice score with the boots, but it was probably less value village's mistake and more the universe balancing things out--remember that when i left the house, so too did six pairs of footwear.
i could write volumes about what i liked in radix, but i'll just quote a (rather lengthy) passage. when corby is probing sumner's memories:
'it was a childhood memory of a horse with a red ear and a white diamond on his nose. sumner was about seven, and his father had taken him to one of the riding camps on the northern fringe of mcclure. it was a day's outing, meant to break the tedium of a long, unexpected winter--the first and last winter sumner had ever experienced. riding tall and brave in the saddle of the small horse, a strange thing happened. the heat of the animal and its dark, muscular odor gripped the boy and excited, in the deepest part of him, an unfamiliar urge: he wanted to hurt this shaggy, liquid-eyed thing. leaves in its mane, the cold mist in its breath--somehow, he would make it hurt.
when they came to a frozen pond, he tried to take the horse across it. as soon as he rode it onto the pond, the ice cracked, and the horse fell. afterwards, his father and the owner of the horse took a rifle, a can of gasoline, and went out to the pond. hearing the shot and watching the smoke rise above the trees, sumner knew what he had done--but he didn't know why.
corby understood. that day, as he pulled back from sumner's mind, the boy's voice lingering--"i don't know"--he took with him an image. a memory of a child in a field among burdocks of frozen grass. it was dusk, and black tattered clouds were blowing through a gray sky above a line of cold lakes. against a bare tree's hanging silence, mist shivering its thin branches, he stood staring at a dark bulk on the ice. corby shuddered, because he knew the boy would spend the rest of his life standing there.'
when i first read that i had to put the book down and go for a long walk.
'a man for whom all destinations are temporary'
l
m
(ps, you used to call me smallthing, didnt you? when i saw it i was filled with a rosy nostalgia)
From: dad
Subject: rosebud...
Sent: July-23-12 11:44:39 AM
To: me
it will be hard to top an email with allusions to the haunting evocation of the madeleine, and professions of selfstink. but i'll try.
but first indulge some venting on my part.
it was so nice to get your email, cuz i just had my feelings hurt real bad, and was feeling kind of blue. and kind of six (years old).
pete's been being a bit of a bitch lately. but nothing that i couldn't handle with a light-handed rebuff, like with the song email i sent you. or on fri night, when he almost got bounced from the dominion for stiffing the bartender. when we left, he was going on about how he was never going back, and how he was going to tell all his friends and the dom's business would suffer. and i just said- yeah, like your sharp reproaches of stephen harper have adversely affected the conservatives in the polls.
but the next morning they were supposed to call and tell me the location of a birthday party for a (sorta) mutual friend (i say they cuz i talked to sherri and pete jointly and severally, as the lawyers say). i got up and made a cheesecake and waited. and they never called.
sherri was really pissed about the night before, so i figured they got in a big fight and decided not to go. or broke up. or were wiped out in a terrorist attack- what other reason could there be?
but i heard later that they just went without me. and i just feel like shit. and it was at a beach, so once again no olga in a bikini...
[and i can't figure out which is worse. if they did it on purpose or if they just forgot. not to turn this into a (total) baww thread, but i read this recently (paraphrase)- when you hurt people they start to love you a little less. that's what careless words do. they make people love you a little less.
at neal's funeral, amidst all the bullshit and bullshit, i turned to joy and lulu and said- sometimes i wish i was a real boy. but then i see things like this, and i'm glad i'm not.
i'm (trying) not to be all butthurt about it. but i don't have a lot of friends to lose. and i'm not really good at pretending that even one of a thousand cuts doesn't leave a mark.
and it's not just any attendant emotional turmoil. but it offends intellectually. the way that i'm-not-religious-but-i'm-very-spiritual people (mary,lulu) or people of certain political leanings (pete) can be so unaware of the way their own actions refute any awareness of the numinous or calls for social justice.]
the saturday boy, on a saturday no less.
and speaking of which- i went to go see the bard of barking at bluesfest. i was right up at the metal barricade, maybe 8 ft from himself. and he opened with the world turned upside down. but then he started talking, and like when any socialist opens his mouth, it sorta went downhill. and i'm not just being flippant. he said that he'd come to the realization that cynicism was the real problem, not capitalism or globalisation, and everybody cheered. if i was a heckler, i would have shouted out- i'm pretty sure it's still capitalism, billy.
one of the reasons i went (alone, cuz pete talked sherri out of going with me, no shit) was because i read the review of the previous night's show in mtl, and the set list. he did tank park salute, which i've never seen live, and would have been worth the 55 bucks alone.
(did i tell you this one? sean went to go see the dead kennedys back in the day. someone objected to the ticket price, and graffittied, right on the front of the venue- 10 bucks puts jello in a limo.)
at the mtl show, someone castigated billy for living in a big house (by the sea, in dorsett, with a consevative mp, no less). he said he'd be in the merch tent after the show, signing his new ep and answering any questions about layout and square footage.
and he redid that bit about his wife and his son and turn-it-down. even used it as the intro to milkman again. so there seems to be a bit of going through the motions, regardful of how beloved those motions might be.
and he never got to tank park salute. oh well.
i like the bike. but if you're going to get one with a basket (*cough*), why not go full cargo retard:
http://www.xtracycle.com/platform
its not a very good pic. i saw one last year and it was super cool. and it would prolly go over really well on the crowded streets of tokyo.
speaking of bikes, let me tell you of my further adventures in scavenging. a couple of weeks ago. picking pete up in the morning on monday, there was a portable air conditioner near his house. and near an outdoor plug. works perfectly and almost brand new. $400 retail (but who's counting? me.). thursday night, walking home from the market, saw a barbq. walked right to my truck and went back and grabbed it, with cops and people everywhere. just pulled in behind the gate and went to bed. checked it out the next morning. top o the line napoleon, all cast iron. really well made, but a few years old. $800 retail, saw one used on kijiji for 400. and then saturday, so still the same week...
went to one of sifu's properties that needs some work to advise madeleine (speaking of proust...). years ago there was a tenant with a cool bike, but he moved out two years ago. but the bike was still in the backyard. just plain told madeleine that i loved it, and that i never asked for anything but i wanted that bike. she smiled and said- pls take it marc, you deserve it. so now its at a shop getting a tune-up:
http://cdn.twospoke.com/forum/attachments/f30/4335d1312048652-need-help-finding-set-back-seat-post-electra-townie-bike.jpg
hope to get my aroebic capacity above "kitten" by the end of the summer. (got the bike out of the shop. been around the block a couple of times- ha! 21 speeds are nice.)
so maybe i'll just drive around in my truck looking for shit. i've always wanted to be a monger. i'd even settle for fish, but much prefer iron.
that sounds cool about mt. fuji. and that suicide forest nearby is supposed to be worth the trip... its funny that you're going there. when i was telling mary that your emails lacked the prosaic, i put it this way- i sent him to japan to tell me about mt fuji, not moby dick.
and don't worry about the postcardyness of it all. contrary to crowley's assertion vis a vis napoleon and the pyramids- sometimes it's ok to let the eyes of 40 centuries look down upon you.
mary says you should try to get to the moss garden temple in kyoto. it looks beautiful. and its freakin' moss, which rates above succulents for its lack of babies-are-useless flowers.
to your point about seein' me hatin', and rollin' (i know i mixed that around, but it was too good to pass up). not all of my predjudices involve an attendant hypocrisy. one can still be vain working a restrictive(d) pallette of choice. (set theory is still rich, even without the axiom of choice, but it closes the door on the reiman hypothese...)
and for all its groo-voor-yishness, radix is far from fantasy.
but ain't it grand? i'm so glad you gave it another chance. the guy whose trapped on the beach for 1200 years. talk about heraclitus by way of siddhartha (another book to add to your list). and the eth, and the white pillar and the black pillar and, and, and...
and no, i called you smallboy. (small tear...)
another you should read is excession- by iain m. banks. one of my favourite writers, and one of my favourite scifi books.
about my arm. its been so hot that i've been wearing short sleeves, and only giving a bit less of a fuck. and i kind of like a couple of the scars. so i was leaning towards leaving them and getting the other ones filled in as black lines. so i fucked around with a sharpie (nothing a black magic marker wouldn't fix). but the overall image they evoke bugs me. so back to square one. well, square two or three, hopefully.
did i ever show you this image from this website?:
http://www.contrariwise.org/2010/05/28/i-go-back-to-may-1937/#comments
(i love that poem)
if you look over the website, its sorta surprising how unwilling people are to acknowledge the commonality of art and literature, seeming to relate to it only on this deeply personal level. its graven, almost...
her tattoo i quite like though, perhaps more the idea than the execution- the shape of it doesn't really grab me.
amongst the sea (of ink) of so-it-goeses and prufrockianisms and regressions* like the little prince and the lorax, it stands out. with merit. not like some of the more seeming obsure-for-the-sake-of-obscure ones.
*i'm trying to find a word or phrase that describes the culture's warm embrace of all things childish. the most egregious being that they discontinued this great chocolate pie at loblaws, and replaced it with a s'more one (smore like a l'ess). infantalism, aside from going too far back, has that creepy fetish conotation. and adolescentisation just doesn't roll off the tongue.
here's a poem that i've always loved, that you don't see a lot, considering its beauty and provenance. that i would get tattooed on that patch of my arm, if only i had considered to do the layout a little better...
Among the Multitude
by Walt Whitman
(1819-1892)
Among the men and women the multitude,
I perceive one picking me out by secret and divine signs,
Acknowledging none else, not parent, wife, husband, brother, child,
any nearer than I am,
Some are baffled, but that one is not--that one knows me.
Ah lover and perfect equal,
I meant that you should discover me so by faint indirections,
And I when I meet you mean to discover you by the like in you.
so maybe it will just end up as your idea of the monoblock. i can tell people its the TMA from 2001.
and what are you writing? send me some if you want. i still think about that little play you wrote, and would like a copy of that. you have a cognitive assonance that deserves expression, and a facility with language that allows it. (adulthood is just a dull ache being the latest example, and art-soaked a great turn of phrase.)
too bad those gay guys only want you for your mind...
(and terry richardson?- yeah, he'll rape ya.)
here's another poem. some guy just asked on my forum for help with a project for burning man. they have to build this pergola with prayer wheels, that is part of this huge temple that others are making, and setting fire to at the end. all the jarheads were like- hunh? so i commented that it wasn't a "some men just want to watch the world burn" kinda thing, more like a heraclitean (there he is again- twice in the same email) fire from the title of this poem. its one of my favourites, even though hopkins was a priest. the last two lines are perfect. and its why i'd like to be called jack:
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89). Poems. 1918.
That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection
CLOUD-PUFFBALL, torn tufts, tossed pillows ' flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs ' they throng; they glitter in marches.
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, ' wherever an elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle in long ' lashes lace, lance, and pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous ' ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
Of yestertempest’s creases; in pool and rut peel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed ' dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks ' treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, ' nature’s bonfire burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest ' to her, her clearest-selvèd spark
Man, how fast his firedint, ' his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned. O pity and indig ' nation! Manshape, that shone
Sheer off, disseveral, a star, ' death blots black out; nor mark
Is any of him at all so stark
But vastness blurs and time ' beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart’s-clarion! Away grief’s gasping, ' joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. ' Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; ' world’s wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, ' since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ' patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.
and now back to the whitman. it's too bad about the koopar- a father could do way worse- but its good that you were able to confirm your conflicting worldviews. i'm not going to tell you that there is one out there for you. for me there were three, and i'm a little tired of waiting for the fourth. i think we have to be a little bit more active in our perception of the other. (in the sense of active as opposed to passive remote sensing. the idea being that one can send out a signal to signal one's presence, rather than just gather signals that just happen to come our way. "give me a ping, vasilli. one ping only, please.") or just buy one from thailand.
one of the reasons i dumped claire was that wanting something has a certain purity, but wanting something else is corruption. but now, even wanting, like that guy said about the examined life, ain't so hot.
and did i tell you i saw claire about a month ago, walking in the market. i waved to her and she just turned away. oh well. ("it never could be easy to be three thousand miles from kesey") and then last week i saw this chick coming out of loblaws, and claire was right beside her. it was alaina. they didn't see me and walked away. she's tall and blond and pretty and it made me feel good. it turned shitty with her and liam- well, it turned to nothing, which is one of the worst kinds of shitty. but at least i never turned my back on them.
i started putting the kitchen cabinets together and realized i need to get the table made so i can figure out how it will all fit together. and i think i'm going to go with a different design for the uppers. (i've been thinking about this for a while. but at least the ikea kitchen event has come around again, for any returns. a whole retail cycle, and most of the cabs are still in their boxes...)
beyween my tattoo and the kitchen i'm even more of a quivering mass of indecision than usual. but joey is coming to stay while joy is on vacation, so i'll have to get the cabs in the kitchen to make room for the beast.
that's all for now. even i get a little tired of myself, after a while...
dear love from your dear old.
ALSO if you're unsure if this is worth a read consider that my dad is enthusiastic about 4chan, poetry, punk, carpentry, and quantum physics
no shoutouts, no hugging, no learning. love you guys forever~
From: me
To: dad
Sent: Tuesday, April 24, 2012 1:28:28 PM
Subject: a (book about a) whale ship was my yale college and my harvard
billy
safe and sound in tokyo. been here a few days. the transition from veritable palace to four foot by eight foot hotel room is as comforting as it is humbling. i was in seoul for a week staying with a friend who's teaching english. dominique, lorna and glenn's other son, also lives in seoul and we hit it off expertly. his honesty about his distaste for the toronto relatives was relieving and made me feel at home. it is worth noting too that every single family member i have met out here has expressed a genuine desire to meet you. i'll keep things brief so i can talk about more with you over the phone (the voice is mightier than the virtual pen).
i start work at the busiest american apparel in tokyo in a couple days, and im apartment hunting like a real grown up. you'll be pleased to know that the frugality you've instilled in me has served me well. i was staying in a hotel for 25 dollars a night but downgraded to a hotel for 22 a night. i fear nothing more than i fear luxury. humourously enough, the night i made the switch i stumbled upon the teachings of diogenes, who forsook everything and lived in a bathtub in athens. you're probably familiar with him, but a couple points stood out.
he only owned a robe and a bowl, and after watching a boy drink water from a stream using only his hands, diogenes destroyed his bowl, embarrassed that he hadnt done so before.
alexander the great once approached diogenes and asked if there was anything he could do for the cynic, and diogenes said 'you can remove yourself from my sunlight'. alexander, apparently pleased, responded 'if i were not alexander, then i should wish to be diogenes'.
even more serendipitous is that he coined the word cosmopolitan. kosmopolites, citizen of the world.
i'll give you a call when i get the chance. hope everything is well, sorry i didn't fly home to shovel.
love, marcus
Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2012 05:15:51 -0700
From: dad
Subject: let's hit reply so we'll have a record of all these (and no, i haven't turned gay)
To: me
tootus
great to hear from you.
i was talking about you the other night, cuz someone was on their way to thailand, and i mentioned that my son was just there. this girl asked how old my son was, and since she wasn't "reproductively salient" (great term i just read for pictures of hot girls they show to men in psych experiments) i told her. which led to questions about my own age. 'formulated, sprawling on a pin', i answered. to which a guy replied- fuck, i'd pay money to look like you at 51. comfort, but cold.
re diogenes, don't forget his looking for an honest man bit, which had to be a piss-take, what with the lamp in the daytime and all that. i never knew that the barrel he lived in was actually a tub. when i heard it as a kid, i always thought it meant he wore a barrel, eschewing clothing, like some mountain dew drinking hillbilly.
nice antireification with your subject header- referencing the book rather than the line. it took me a while to sort it all out, and realize that it was kinda profound, and not just clever. reify is one of those concepts, like tautology or the infield-fly rule, that i have a hard time keeping straight- and not just in a hard to define as a word way, but to keep untwisted. (and i'm only fuckin' with ya about the infield-fly rule, cuz it sounded good. i know that shit like the back of my hand.)
gotcha about the nutshell. maybe your apartment will be bigger. and speaking of bigger. i was talking to dolan. him (he?) and his brother have this friend who's 6'3" and 220 lbs. nice guy, loves to drink but turns complete asshole at beer #6. john's brother mentioned that this guy's thinking about going to seoul to teach english. john said- oh oh. joh's brother said- nah, it should be ok, they're used to guys getting hammered in south korea. to which john replied- they're used to 5 foot 3 guys getting hammered.
congrats on the job. its going to be fun being the subject of a lot of cultural assumptions on the part of the customers and native staff- canadian in american apparel, literally and literally, might get too involved, explanation wise.
what's up with the koopar (sp?)- remind her of evan if she hasn't got her ticket yet.
and now a bit of chastisement. i opened something from student loans, thinking it was an income tax form. imagine my surprise when it was a final notice for a payment. fuck, boy. who buys a thousand dollars woth of shoes when they still owe two thousand in loans? and who skips out of the country on a gov'ment loan? jesus.
that's all. deal with it, or they might not let you back in... and you owe me the $311 that i paid them.
i'm reading that book that pete got about the hare krishnas (locals in west virginia refer to them as hairy critters, which i'd never heard before, and is pretty funny). sheeeeeaaaaaat (that's one of the character's in the wire's signature lines). as if any religion is any more wacky than any other, but homer's admonition to apu sure applies.
(i just put that in so my note wouldn't end on a big downer. you know i'm really quite proud of you. write when you can, and call when you want. and be a sweet boy.)
LOVE
fred
From: me
To: dad
Sent: Tuesday, May 1, 2012 12:13:46 PM
Subject: hey, i said i was frugal, i didn't say i was good with money
i'm sorry you had to clean up after me. that was one of those things i wanted to mention to you when i brought up anxiety, but, for whatever bad reason, didn't. it's just something that i avoided for way too long and it got to the point where whenever i thought about it or about school in general i panicked, so instead of doing the right thing and dealing with it, i just put it off more. you've heard it all before. i don't know why i do shit like that. for what it's worth, i do and did have the money, and it's not that i didn't pay because it would bankrupt me or anything. my reason is probably worse, but accuracy in all things. i'm waiting on an email from the website about my username and password, but it's been over 24 hours so i'm starting to wonder. you didn't happen to take down that information in the interest of prudence, did you? regardless, $311 + $120. noted, and thank you. as for virgin, i definitely paid my last bill, so i'll have to look into that further.
i heard a line recently that stuck with me. i was watching a bit of standup by dara obriain, witty irish comedian with a scientific background, stocky bald guy on QI. he was lambasting holistic medicine and debunking common defenses of it, which led to "'oh but the chinese are so wise, they have the same word for "crisis" and "opportunity".' yes, well, they also have the same word for 'china' and 'tibet', and it's 'china', so fuck them." that was almost worth having to employ the 'a third layer of quotes goes back to regular quotation marks' rule.
i found the lamp in the daytime bit a little corny. it's too bill maher for my tastes. though of course, cliches weren't cliches yet thousands of years ago. oh, i got my apartment. sharing with a quiet asian canadian and a japanese girl whom i haven't met, in the neighborhood shimokitazawa. it's 79000 yen per month after utilities, which is extremely cheap for the area (should be more like a hundred thousand). still ridiculously costly of course, but i couldn't pass it up. it's a happening neighborhood, vintage shops and cafes everywhere, and the apartment is between an art house cinema and a restaurant that is a trailer. it's also a ten minute bike ride to shibuya and my work. i also get 10000 yen per month from work for transportation, so that's an ersatz rent reduction if i'm biking. i just recently set up a profile on some teaching sites, students can browse them and come to you. pretty nifty, and it's an easy 2000-4000 yen per hour. if with that and american apparel i still have to dip into my savings to pay the bills, i'll either move elsewhere or ask glenn for a job (which he offered). budgeting is kind of fun when, should you fail, you aren't instantly homeless or without sustenance.
work is interesting. only had one shift this week since the full time guy i'm replacing doesn't leave until tomorrow. same shit, different environment. truly a microcosm of life in general. i worry that i may become somewhat of a novelty in whatever circle of friends i find myself in, but i try not to dwell on that, as it forces me to consider that i might be somewhat of a novelty to my friends back home in a way i don't yet realize. somewhat redolent of one of the few good lines in 1q84: one of the main characters is reading about the gilyaks to a mystical teenage girl (every murakami novel has some attractive teenage medium, not that i'm complaining). he mentions that even with the advent of roads, the gilyaks sill trekked through the taiga. she asks why they didn't rethink their route when given a new option, and the main character replies 'because then they would be forced to rethink other things'.
i don't know a whole lot about the krishnas. interestingly, there was a fairly prominent krishna hardcore movement in the 80s. lots of krishnacore bands, and a few lead singers from other prominent punk bands were followers. and oh god, the drunk businessmen in seoul put the ones here to shame, probably because over there you can get drunk off a dollar and a half bottle of soju. glad to hear you were talking to dolan though, give him a hearty hello. coupar is coming mid june, and staying for a few weeks. also i got a cheap laptop off tokyo craigslist, so if you're technologically capable of downloading skype (i believe in you) we can video chat and save on phone bills.
read a really engaging novella recently, the nebula-nominated 'the man who ended history: a documentary'. stumbled upon it after spooky late night browsing of information regarding unit 731, the japanese army unity responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of chinese through everything from human vivisection to being injected with horse urine. anyway, the story has an interesting idea on quasi-time travel. given that looking deep into space is looking back in time:
'the best telescopes we have today can see as far back as about 13 billion years ago. if you strap one of those to a rocket moving away from the earth at a speed that's faster than light--a detail that i'll get to in a minute--and point the telescope back at the earth, you'll see the history of humanity unfold before you in reverse.'
http://kenliu.name/binary/liu_the_man_who_ended_history.pdf
if you can tolerate reading on a screen/reading what is essentially a glorified short story
'not just clever' is all that i aspire to be
marcus
ps: re your age, you should have asked him how much
Date: Sat, 5 May 2012 06:48:00 -0700
From: dad
Subject: and, being good for nothing else, be wise
To: me
glad to see you didn't think making this a long chain was too gay. fuck bandwidth...
best of /b/, from yesterday:
guy was saying that he was going to have to have an eye removed and replaced with a matching prosthetic, but he also wanted to get a cool looking one for wearing to clubs and/or freaking people out. after a few boring and predictable responses involving terminators and marbles, this guy posted- leave it empty and get a spider that you train to crawl around inside the socket.
here's a pretty good article about 4chan (it took me a while to figure out that you click the big plus sign to get going):
http://canopycanopycanopy.com/15/anonymity_as_culture__case_studies
and a great phrase that i came across on lit:
http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=20000118
that's just some random 4chan stuff i wanted to share...
about your last note. i checked and no, there's no user name or password in the papers- i just paid it at the bank, like a regular bill.
i fully understand the anxiety related to dealing with stuff, and though it pains me that some of my...difficulties...may have rubbed off on you, the fact that you are living halfway around the world, and not passed out drunk there, bodes well. we'll put aside the banal, yet quite sensible, advice that it is way better to deal with things in a more timely manner- "present fears are less than horrible imaginings", and all that.
a distinction i try to make when dealing with things (and remember that by distinction i mean useless justification (BAN ME PLEASE)ry- as in kundera describing vertigo as the intoxication of the weak): remember dolan's and mine line about the guy who ignores the funny sound his car is making?- and that's how a $5 problems becomes a $50 problem.
i try to keep those kinds of things from happening. but if something is already a $500 problem, i might indulge a little...
" 'not just clever' is all that i aspire to be" the line that is the subject header has always been one of my favourites. fittingly, its from a group of poems written as a sort of instruction to his son:
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/debauchee.html
(its real title uses maim'd- i don't know why this one, and several others, changes it to disabled. maybe it has something to do with someone taking an arrow to the knee- sorry, but that was made of win.)
i'll check out that novella. the realization that when we look out we are always looking back is a bit discomfitting- remember lot's wife. even on smaller scales, we can only see things as they were, not as they are, reducing all investigation (and maybe experience?) to history- and again, remember lot's wife.
the idea is used as a major plot device in my all time favourite sci-fi series, Exordium (titles deserve capitalization, esp that one). ships can jump out FTL to a distance that permits them to intercept the light waves and see what happened that they missed.
but a quibble, from a guy who hasn't read your story. you wouldn't see things happen in reverse. light waves propogate in concentric circles, like ripples in a pond as the common analogy has it (they actually form a cone, but light cones get really confusing really fast). the light from what happens first leaves first and so arrives first, so i don't see where the reversal comes in.
about your place in your circle of friends- what's that adage from poker? if you can't spot the fish at the table, then its you :) i told you i often wondered about my relation with neal, and a bit now with pete, in that they both knew so many assholes, and leaving me where, exactly.
(i really am of two minds about emoticons. they certainly have a utility beyond their coolness- but so, arguably, do fannypacks and i never wore one o dem. when i first started writing emails, i would do something like (insert appropriate emoticon here), trying to be all ironic and shit.
i really think that our emotional spectrum is one of the most poorly plumbed depths. maybe in the future we will be more adept at expressing them- better able to count the ways, as it were, but a more quantified approach is probably not the enumeration shakespeare was looking for. how do i love thee? 43, 27 and a bit of 254 doesn't quite have the right ring about it.)
cool about the apartment- you're living with peers for the first time, and i am once again without one...
i watched drive a couple of weeks ago. fuck. not only have we gone post narrative, but now i have to deal with post dialogue. i really didn't love the film as soon as it ended, but it has grown on me on reflection. i always said that i wanted to be like castillo, crocket and tubb's boss on miami vice- the strong, silent type who could chastize them with a glance- but i could never keep my fucking mouth shut. and at first, the drive-er seemed to be playing it like that. but then less, and less, and less and it started to bug me, until i realized that i was watching the first autistic badass in the history of the movies, so i could take it like that.
and about the jacket. aside from all the knights in white satin schmaltz, did you catch the reference he made to the fable of the scorpion and the frog? so he's not a badass killer wearing his totem for the world to see. he's the unfortunate frog carrying the scorpion on his back, about to be killed for his efforts. or something.
and about the jacket. have you seen this?:
http://cdn.chud.com/2/27/27d24702_drive1.jpeg
loved the murakami quote. (i knew what the taiga was, but had to google gilyak.) its interesting, though a little disheartening, when those kinds of observations are made by others, about others. but its really upsetting when people make those kinds of observations by themselves, about themselves, and do it so lightly. like a women calling herself a bitch, or a man an asshole, and almost being sort of proud of it.
or that guy on my forum who i like(ed?) and exchanged emails with. i made a dig at some of the other forum members, and asked what he thought of them. to which he replied- i don't like to ask myself those kinds of questions about people, because it would lead to other questions about other people, and that would make me uncomfortable. well, boo hoo.
funny that you should mention that quote in your email, cuz i had been thinking about that stuff a bit lately. (the examined life, and trying to keep one's compromises down to a dull roar, for, and from, a dull crowd. and all that.) leaving me with the self-rightousness of the lonely, i guess. something between "i strove with none, for none were worth my strife" and "when did the heats that my veins fill, add one more to the plaguey bill". its a small comfort to realize that all of the hurts i have caused have been of a personal, rather than istitutional, nature. kinda like the story of the mathematician, hardy i think it was. he was proud of the fact that all of his work had absolutely no practical value. but the joke was on him. he was a number theorist, which has proved to be at the heart of cryptography. which, in this digital age has proved invaluable, and the abuse of which has proved most threatening to the cushy life of a cambridge don. (rereading, i realize that the preceeding bit is a bit of a mess. but i'll leave it for now, cuz i think it sounds good...)
oh yeah. billy bragg is confirmed for bluesfest. how's that for a test of my generational fortitude? there's a big kerfuffle about this years show, cuz they're putting an electro spin (ha) on it, with skrillex headlining one night. (just to keep up with things, i once tried to listen to one of his songs picked at random on youtube. i honestly couldn't make it more than a minute in, and we both know how dimly my discretion bulb shines sometimes.)
well, that's all for now. hope there's enough fatherly wisdom in this for you to carry on with, 'cuz i know you couldn't get along (get along, get along) in this wide world without it (insert smiley face here).
love.
From: me
To: dad
Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2012 10:40:01 AM
Subject: a universe constrained by its premise
i'm a little ashamed at not having thought of that spider thing myself, that's the kind of idea you could put on a resume.
there's something fey about articles about the internet on the internet. NORP reminds me of a nickname my manager had for one of the guys at work. SMPC, or, sex maniac pervert criminal. the redundancy makes it extra abradant. they were old friends but i could tell said friendship's bonds were tested each time the nickname was spoken. (for bonus points, i learned that nickname is an example of article/noun osmosis. 'an ickname' became 'a nickname', much like how 'a norange' became 'an orange'.)
inwit as a word is beautiful, if not eerily doublespeakesque. it's a rescue boat for the -wit suffix in a sea of nitwits, dimwits, and halfwits.
nothing 'rubbed off on [me]' like that, dad. you always got your shit done, and if you ever didn't, you damn well fooled me. it's not some kind of monkey see monkey do thing. genetics might play a role, but even so, i think we can agree that patrocliny is in my best interests. i pass the buck when i shouldn't sometimes, but you know just how infinite i think the powers of self.
wish i hadn't lent skyrim to a friend before coming down here, you deserve to at least experience the sorrowful origins of 'arrow to the knee'. if you want to see something grotesque, youtube 'skyrim randy savage'. someone made a hack supplanting dragons with randy savage, and suffice to say undulating necks don't lend well to flesh tones.
that poem rings a few bells. you've either showed it to me before or spoke a few lines. 'urge you to blows' is a wonderful phrase ('as i rained blows upon him, i thought, surely there's a better way' - the birth of festivus). 'whether the boy fucked you, or i the boy' reminds me of something i read recently. remember in 300 when leonidas derides the athenians as boy-lovers? i always just assumed that was erroneous, an attempt to hypermasculinize the spartans and paint the athenians as erudite pussies (was torn between that and pussy erudites). turns out he was right, though. while the spartans were of course man-lovers, they had severe qualms with boyfuckery.
just read about lot's wife. who'd have thought throwing your virgin daughters to a pack of voracious sodomites would be brooked so easily, but looking back on a doomed city is grounds for some smiting. then again, it's probably a parable, and should be taken with a pillar of salt... and very interesting on the light stuff. if only the nebula awards had a 'speak now or forever hold your peace' thing, you could burst in and start rectifying.
i loathe emoticons if only because they fling me back into an earlier version of myself. you never got/had to experience msn, so they're still clinquant to you. one older guy on a forum i used to go to would write things like <s> after a sentence, to imply smiling. apparently it's a decades-old relic from the usenet era. true internet history. i've got some japanese people on facebook now, and my western brain is struggling to interpret the hieroglyphs they use as emoticons. http://www.japaneseemoticons.net/all-japanese-emoticons/ this might help with your emotional spelunking.
i'm glad you caught the aspergers in drive. for me, the highlight of the movie is just how visibly and audibly uncomfortable he is when he tells that guy off in the diner. i would argue that he's at once the frog with the scorpion on its back, and the scorpion itself, proudly wearing its emblem on his jacket. the soundtrack is just beautiful (but that might just be because i never got/had to experience the 80s, and its sounds are still clinquant to me). speaking of aspergers, that image is fucking horrifying.
we've all got our plaguey bills, both allegorically and literally. i've always been of the opinion that thinking too hard about hurt just begets more hurt, but you know that i'm also of the opinion that more are worth your strife than you think. my current struggle is coming to terms with the fact that, through attempting to obviate touristism (worse than tourism) and overelation from novelty, i'm not quite as excited about life out here as i wish i was. i love it, but much in the same way i loved life back home. maybe this is that ahappiness thing that buddhism is all about.
japanese social nuances and mores are really interesting. -san is the equivalent of mr or ms, -chan is for young girls and -kun for young boys. -sama is reserved for customers and gods, which is both hilarious and tragic. there's this ridiculous and occasionally exploited law that states that if someone has built a structure on your property that causes minimal interference with your rights, and it would be costly to remove said structure, you're not allowed to request its removal. there's an obsession with harmony, and the worker bee attitude instilled in children helps to promulgate this. there's tremendous racism towards both chinese and koreans, which is i guess the expected residue of the attempts to rationalize the subjugation of said groups. there's some weird compartmentalization going on there, though, since the japanese are enamoured with chinese culture to the point where the former's culture is bordering on a facsimile of the latter's in some ways.
i was reading about the yakuza, and one of their rackets is called 'sokaiya'. they buy enough shares in a company to gain access to the shareholder meetings, at which they either threaten to embarrass the company or actually embarrass the company until they're paid to leave. another one of their tricks is to print thousands of magazines detailing the (often untrue) dirty secrets of a company, then coerce the company into buying the prints for an inflated price before they make it to the public. the sokaiya are so ubiquitous that a lot of companies plan ahead and budget for them. it really is the ultimate antidote to runaway capitalism. i'm mystified and impressed by how the yakuza make absolutely no attempts to be clandestine. also, as if the whole finger chopping thing could get any cooler, it turns out that the digit on the ring finger that is extirpated is pivotal in properly gripping a samurai sword, thereby making the transgressor more of a burden on his comrades.
the language is fascinating. japanese is rife with lexical ambiguity, which i guess helps with social harmony by masking hostility to an extent. never has 'it is impossible to say just what i mean!' rung so true. it's incredibly precise in some ways, though, with each verb having 4 different forms depending on who you're talking to. there's blunt/rude, casual, polite (the most common), and honorific. the language isn't vague so much as it is masterfully indirect. much of speaking politely involves bushbeating and literally affixing 'humbly' to the beginning of verbs. 'no' is considered impolite in some settings, so instead you say something that translates to 'it will be difficult' or 'i am unsure'. even more turbid, the way to say 'i have to do x' is to literally say 'if i dont do x, it will not become'. 'it' in this case means something like 'life' or 'what is supposed to happen'. the future will fail to be. this also applies to commands: instead of saying 'you have to walk this way' you say 'if you dont walk this way, it will not become'. even requests are indirect. if you're asking to use the bathroom, saying 'can i use the bathroom?' can be rude, so you say 'i want to use the bathroom, but...' and then you let them invite you to do it. i'm assuming that shit like this doesn't apply to most casual social settings.
something pretty cool: the term 'baka' means 'stupid', or 'idiot', and the kanji for it is the kanji for the words ba (horse) and ka (deer). my favourite explanation for this (as ryan north says, the best part about etymology is that usually nobody really knows, so whoever has the best story wins) comes from a story dating back to the chinese qin dynasty. at an imperial gathering, a prominent official, zhao gao, brought forth a deer and called it a horse. the king disagreed, of course, and assumed zhao was just being an idiot, and 'baka' was born. in reality, though, zhao was considering treason but was unsure if he would have any support, and this was how he was testing the waters. some other officials agreed with the king, but some agreed with zhao. zhao then surreptitiously had all the officials who agreed with the king killed. that's where the chinese idiom for deception 'calling a deer a horse' comes from.
i was reading a bit about the permian-triassic extinction event, wherein 95% of all aquatic and 70% of terrestrial species went extinct. more importantly, though, it has bar none the greatest nickname (ickname) of anything ever: 'the great dying'.
bluesfest is neat, but it's no 'warp tour'. in other music news, did you hear that the lead singer of against me! has come out as transgendered?
i rewatched the matrix trilogy recently. let's just say i forgot how fantastic the first film is. though one neat tidbit that i didn't pick up on before that merits a mention: while neo is 'the one', smith's multiplicity towards the end effectively makes him 'the many'.
protecting my ring finger at all costs
love, marcus
Date: Sun, 27 May 2012 17:46:57 -0700
From: dad
Subject: still haven't finished the kitchen... it, and i, are constrained by our premise
To: me
hey my boy.
took me a while to start on getting back to you...
just finished that novella you linked. quite enjoyed the premise, but felt like it was not a historical period i would focus on. (i knew a little about that unit, and know more since googling. but so sleazy how they were never prosecuted in return for their ill-gotten knowledge. like the line in the right stuff when the americans learn that the russians got to space first with sputnik, and the guy says- but i thought our germans were better than their germans.)
it seems kinda weird to me when writers come up with these neat ideas, and then kinda waste them (to my mind) on a somewhat-less-than-worthy subject. like those quizzes where people are asked what 3 historical personages would you have for dinner, and someone replies marilyn monroe or bobby orr. but i guess all subjects are subjective.
i really liked the line that went something like- just because all narratives are constructed doesn't mean that they are all untruthful.
it took me a while to get started reading cuz i really do hate, or maybe only resent, reading what others recommend. mary got me a novel for my birthday, and i was reluctant to pick it up, but it turned out to be a keeper, so mary can stay a keeper, and so can you.
we are often so gaurded with our free will. kyla got sick when her new boyfriend, soon to be live-in, was up here visiting, and she wondered at it, saying she never got sick. and i said- its just your autonomy trying to make a point.
two things i noticed about your last note.
your vocabulary is getting better than mine. knock it off.
and. there was absolutely nothing in it about anything that you had done. all the country of the mind. although that delights me no end on one level, it also troubles me a bit, being so insular. but you are on an island, so. now i ain't saying its a bad thing, and quite enjoyed yeats using it as a reproach
You, that have not lived in thought but deed,
Can have the purity of a natural force,
But I, whose virtues are the definitions
Of the analytic mind, can neither close
The eye of the mind nor keep my tongue from speech.
but i'm worried you're not getting out enough. just kidding. but its hard to live vicariously through one's children when you don't know what they're doing. and that whole huginn and muninn, or don juan's lizards, thing.
i myself have been quite busy doing interesting things with fascinating people, as you can imagine. if you count building planters and laying patio stones in the hot sun for kyla's friend angela with her clean junkie boyfriend. (did i ever tell you that story? angela was perusing the craig's list personals, and came across an ad something like this- "underemployed muscian looking for love. i can hardly pay for myself, and could never pay for you, but we'll have fun." and thought it would be a good idea to reply... the guy ain't my cuppa tea, but he should be my fucking hero.
it was pete's idea to try and watch john carter. we made it about 20 minutes, 15 just being hopeful. did you hear the story? (i mean the story of the movie. all you need to know about the story of the story is that mars is called barsoom.) it was originally titled john carter of mars, like the series written a hundred years ago by the tarzan guy. but disney had just had a bomb with mars needs moms, so it was decreed that there would be no more movies with mars in the title. but it was still a huge bomb, and the head of the studio got fired, so there is some justice.
and speaking of movies that no one will touch, last night we watched mel gibson's latest, get the gringo. it was pretty cool, but none of us had even heard of it. it came out this year, but they are really downplaying it domestically, hoping to do ok in foreign lands (you know, where foreigners come from, says doughboy in boyz n the hood. why the z and the lone n, but no a in the?).
i also liked anonymous, the recent movie about oxford-as-shakespeare-by-way-of-jonson. it was quite well done, and sets up a plausible, even compelling though ridiculous, case.
and speaking of anonymous. i just started infinite jest, /lit/'s favourite book. i like it so far, but its a boat anchor. over a thousand pages with 3 and 4 page paragraphs. i'm trying not to think about what i'll do when my three weeks are up. i won't be able to renew, cuz there's always someone waiting in the queue (boy does that word look funny, even to me who spells lots of things funny).
and did you read /b/'s four hundred millionth get? (BAN ME PLEASE)s tongue my anus. (sorry to have to write that, but it was.) sometimes life is perfect. the art is in figuring out if its perfectly good or perfectly bad.
and not to leave off on that note, speaking of art there was a great line in the movie. jonson complains that the plays are too political, and the earl of oxford says- all art is political, or else it would just be decoration. and all artists have something to say, or they would be cobblers.
be a sweet boy.
oh yeah, where the fuck can i download some music? i need some more. even though i think i can't listen to the national front disco one more time, i can.
From: me
To: dad
Sent: Wednesday, June 6, 2012 2:16:11 PM
Subject: better to be all theory no action than all action no theory
yeats is at the forefront of my psyche now for an interesting reason. there was a song i heard about four years ago, and it was, from what impression the few searing seconds gave me, one of the most beautiful things i'd ever heard. i ended up forgetting what few lyrics i deciphered before being able to google it, and after many fruitless hours searching (when will i be able to search google by humming into my microphone? this is even more pressing than the groceries/good looks whim) it hit me that i would never hear the song again, doomed to a life of songlessness as i whiled my weary way to death. then, the other day at work, someone's ipod was on and i got this heavy feeling in my chest. the hunt was over. the ahab in my subconscious was at once defeater and defeated, and all was right with the world. seagreen serenade, by silver apples (from 'the song of wandering aengus', what a great title).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7gmhvMVO20
shame about the stupid video, but the fact that music like this was being made 45 years ago buttresses the whole 'cyclical time' argument pretty hard.
i read (well, not exactly) this book/comic called 'la ou vont nos peres' (lacking in some presumably pivotal accents). in english it's known as 'the arrival', but the translation for the french title is something haunting like 'where our fathers go' or 'where our fathers are'. it's a fantastical, dialogue-free look at immigration. wasn't that impressive in message nor in message-carrying husk, but the title is something that will stick with me for a while.
funny you mention national front disco, that song only recently clicked with me as being one of the best things morrissey has ever done. it was probably the hundredth time i'd heard it, and some artistic acumen burgeoned from within and i had to stop what i was doing for a second. it's funny, i was reading about the drama surrounding its ostensibly racist lyrics, and morrissey's response to it was basically 'were it not so great a song, nobody would be picking it apart like this'. oh, moz. as for where to download music, from what i can tell mediafire is still sort of around, you just have to use a recondite method to access its goodies. google search the album the way you normally would, then click on the 'filestube' link. from there you should see a mediafire link, click (you may have to click on a few seperate things but it's all rather intuitive) and you'll eventually get to the mediafire page for the album you want.
i witnessed that 'get', and the immediate reactions were hilarious. oldschoolers claiming that it evinced the 'summerization' of the site, apparently unaware that it was the sort of thing you would have seen five years ago. rose tinted monitors. re: the boyfriend, remember in seinfeld when george starts doing the opposite of what his brain tells him to do? 'my name is george. im unemployed, and i live with my parents'
my friend ashley, the canadian girl i stayed with in seoul, is staying with me until alex arrives on the 14th. my apartment, the revolving door of white girls; i wonder if my roommates will be able to tell them apart. i was having fun at first, but she blurs the line between vim and vacuousness, and nothing desexualizes a pretty girl like glaring philistinism.
forgive my lack of experiential anecdotes. thoughts into words is a whole step easier than experiences into thoughts into words. furthermore, life out here is much more realistic than it was in sunny southeast asia. that was a surreal vacation and this is 'just' life in tokyo. life is a network of 'heres' and 'theres', and singapore was still a 'there' because i hadn't actually set up a life. starting work in tokyo quickly turned it into a 'here'. nothing strips the world of its whimsy like applying for a bank account. thankfully, i haven't succumbed to any grass is always greener bullshit. in a little over a month i've witnessed the birth and death of numerous fashion trends, eaten a two dollar apple, ingratiated myself with the hard-partying PR manager of american apparel japan, accidentally told a girl she looked 'delicious' in the outfit she was wearing, and watched horrid old men perform karaoke only to perform marginally more horrid karaoke afterwards, which felt wrong in a way that i haven't yet lexicalized. like in synecdoche, new york, where phillip seymour hoffman goes to the ophthalmologist (i tend to avoid using words whose spellings i had to google because it feels like cheating, but there's no synonym i can use to escape), who tells him to go to a neurologist, saying 'the eyes are part of the brain.' hoffman goes 'that doesnt seem right', and the doctor replies 'like morally correct? or right as in accurate?'
infinite jest looks interesting. if you can handle the gimmick of ergodic literature, house of leaves is worth a read. speaking of gimmicks, i went to see a lee bul exhibit at a big art gallery, and it felt good to recognize most of the installations. my favourite thing about her is that i absolutely hate some of her stuff, which lets me believe that i have a more finely honed aesthetic sense than i actually do. check out her piece 'infinity partition', mise en abyme of the future. my favourite of hers is 'after bruno taut: beware the sweetness of things' whose painfully overwrought title introduced me to bruno taut himself. for a man who looks like the picture of dorian gray if dorian gray were gandhi, he had some cool ideas.
duncan got in touch with me. he extended an offer to go stay with him in vancouver after this pan-asian adventure is wrapped up. i think i'd like to do that. i'm still not sure how i feel about 'family' (in quotation marks because it means family that isn't you) starting to play a role in my life. to acknowledge the emotional well-being it fosters is to admit that i haven't exactly ascended beyond it in the way i thought i did. it's complicated, i guess. it's funny, you've made quite the impression on every family member i've met, and lorna seems to think you're some kind of superhero; never underestimate the powers of son as envoy.
here i am in seoul: http://i.imgur.com/zjfhu.jpg
happy you remembered the ravens' names
love, marcus
ps, if i can be honest with you, those are only the second most ridiculous pants i've purchased since coming to asia.
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2012 16:59:47 -0700
From: dad
Subject: its pants
To: me
/...son as envoy./ got me thinking of jesus' line about (false) prophets- ye shall know them by their fruits. considering the way you've turned out, i musta done something right. except for those slacks. and the drop the soap poster in the background. ("pants" has been a term of derision in the uk for a while now, and adrian and i use it. google the subject and read the first article.)
but i gotta say. that song was worse and the band was more worse. its funny how divergent our musical tastes are, sometimes. and though i loves me some WBY, angus was never my favourite. i'm not enamoured with his bucolic/days-of-yore old men, except for the nine bean rows will i plant there fellow. i much prefer his angry old man, as in "why should old men not be mad" and "if she'd but turn her head, you'd know the folly of being comforted" and of course "when you are old...". i always get the last lines confused with blake's "can wisdom be put in a silver rod, or love in a golden bowl". you'd think i'd be more careful with my plate.
the national front disco always struck me as surprisingly anti-rascist, coming from morrissey. ("this alarming man" as NME called him, for such lines as 'its hard enough when you belong here' from bengali in platforms and 'we are the last true british people in the world' from whatever.) but its always been a fav, esp cuz it has boy in it. its always fun to objectify loved ones, but girls never seem to appreciate it so much.
and now my musical confession. i heard this song on the radio, and really liked it, so went home and looked on the station playlist to find it was blue jeans by lana del rey. well, well. the gangster nancy sinatra. i had heard of her, but ignored it because of all the hype. but then i youtubed the video, and watched it like 10 times over the next few days. now i'll be honest and say that her looks don't put me off- except for her lips, esp if they're fake, which she denies. but i think she's lying, and that bugs me.
but i find all the hatin' boringly predictable. she writes her own stuff, shoots footage for her videos, i like her voice and vocal stylings (usually) and she reinvented (discovered?) herself after a previous attempt didn't fly. and as one of the youtube comments puts it- people who don't like this song have never been in love. (insert smiley face here.) people who do like it still hold basic sexrole stereotyping as their romantic ideal, like me.
i cut my hair pretty short about a month ago- as i tell people when they say it looks good- yeah, it shows off my face. but i always wanted to try the clippers. so last night i tried them with the longest attachment, and nothing really happened, so i moved to the middle, and still no go. so on went the smallest comb thingy. well, lest just say that the use of any new tool requires practise.
you know how sometimes an absolute disregard for appearance is so indicative of mental instability? (and not just amongst the homeless. think twins, men dressed by their wives and most sports fans.) i look a little like if travis bickle hung around with the jackass guys. but not quite. no need for a toque. i just need to trim those errant tufts that are so...proclamitory.
and yes, my hair is thinning at the front. the tragedy of it all. the expression should have been- apres mon cheveux, les deluge.
but on a fashion high note, i scored a nearly new pair of blundstones at value village for $12.99. they mustn't have know what they were, because they usually jack up the price of brand names or good shit. army boots there are 25 bucks. but i must confess they are the chisel toe model, so a little morecarnaby st. so the hunter gatherer in me is happy. but i can't remember the last time i owned four pairs of shoes.
now that summer's here, i really want to do something about the scars on my arm- long sleeves and no swimming is getting old.
(a couple of weeks ago, when it was really hot, pete went swimming at his brother's with sherri and olga, her smokin' polish friend in her bikini. and he didn't invite me. so know he is known as 'bad friend'. and he doesn't even know about my arm.)
i've been researching scar revision plastic surgery, but its probably not covered by ohip, unless i go in with my new haircut as proof of mental defect. so i've been thinking tattoo. i was considering just getting them filled in and straightened out with black ink (or check out white ink). or maybe trying to incorporate them into some kind of design, like maybe a bamboo grove? a big old iconic portrait of marx as a cover up would prolly be easiest. but i was saving him for my neck. oh well. check out this interpretation:
http://images5.fanpop.com/image/photos/28300000/karl-marx-karl-marx-28396608-288-343.jpg
or maybe i could commission the moby dick guy to design something...
any thoughts?
just asking that question. talk about places my father has been. the book i always associated with johnny was 'lies my father told me'. but ain't french great? (how magnanimous of me.) like proust's reserche de temp perdu. usually translated as remembrance of things past. but its got a double double,cuz perdu can also mean lost and reserche can also mean looking for.
as to your questioning of family. (uncle dunky!) that's a biggie. and its funny, cuz in the recovery movement (roll eyes), the phrase used, somewhatderogatorily, is family of origin. i like it as a modifier- but only in the sense that it puts them in a diminished place. not in the usual bullshit sense that it distinguishes them from all of the other wonderful people in your life that you have created this other great family of affinity with. "we're like family" is one of those great shots accross the bow warning of anguish to come. in the same way a lot of people reject atheism because it allows them to accept a god so horrible it allows them to act out likeways- a lot of people call you family so they can fuck you over the way good families do. as the title of coupland's book has it, all families are psycotic.
but in a poor play on words, you could adopt origin of family, not just because i like to think that it all started with me, in that eric ericson sense, but that i expect happy from you and your progeny.
infinite jest is a trip. its like moby dick in that the use of language informs so much more than the story. where the author uses words like colours to paint, rather than bricks to build. (not that there's anything wrong with prose as a blunt instrument. after all, its hard to throw paint through a window.)
and speaking of blunt instruments, remember this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIuOWv-mLP4
i think you'd quite like IJ, and enjoy reading it- an often not so subtle distinction. its some heavy lifting, oftimes annoyingly so. but its one of those full immersion experiences, like the baptism homer saves bart from, not one of those pussy little water-sprinkled-on-the-forehead ones like i got. (oooh, i just got an email from the library that the new gunslinger novel is waiting for me, so maybe i can wait to jest to renew.)
again like that novella, a bit annoying to me when the narrative doesn't seem to live up to the talent or intent. like johnsons 'a visit to the outerhebrides'. say where? but there's a great line in tom stoppard's travesties. a girl is working for james joyce doing research. and her father says something like- what great work could ever come from references to homer's odyssey and the dublin street directory of 1904. or something like that.
i get what you're saying about the quotidian, wherever it happens to be. i rented a big saw to cut some patio stones. i'd never used one before. the first five cuts were super cool. the next 25 were just cutting concrete. and more heavy lifting.
i did angela's patio. some timber planters and 200 slabs in the hot sun. i got some colour, even a red neck. her (an)hero boyfriend was helping, and she hired this kid to move the slabs and the gravel from the front to the back, so that was nice. as i've been telling people, despite my marxist bent/bentmarxism, its a little disturbing how much i enjoy telling people what to do.
he was a black kid from burundi (ouch) named tresor. peter, the bf, had been regaling me with prison stories. i asked him how a guy named treasure would fair in the can. he laughed and said: "probably not very well." unless it was some boy-named-sue type shit.
i'm now doing the shed, which she changed the size of after the perimeter/foundation was laid out, fucking up my massing. but i think i can save the design, and its gonna be pretty cool. and if the neighbour likes it, he wants one too, and his will be even cooler. perfect for an idea i have for a very thin roof profile, which wouldn't have worked with angela's, which is kinda too heavy.
she asked if i could put a window in the shed, and i said no. she asked why, and i said because it would be dishonest.
but she's really nice. insists that i eat lunch there, and leaves us food for when she's at work. the other day it was mousaka. i told her i really appreciated it and she laughed and said i'm greek, and there's always food in this house, and people eat it. and she's quite the cook, despite the crazy salad with her meat.
there's this cool infill project on gladstone i've been following, and the other night i drove there to catch up. the construction fencing was gone, so i got out of the truck and was looking through the front window. the guy doing it lives next door , and came out to check me out. thought it might be a little awkward, as in dog-siccing, but he was friendly and we chatted a bit. i had to go and he invited me to come by during the day when they were working to see the inside. so cool. (as i joked to kyla, i didn't tell him i had to go to pick her up at the bus station [her flight to and fro{m} montrealwas way cheaper]. i didn't want to him to know i hung out with those kind of people.) that sentence breaks my personal record for most parenthetical.
never knew the term was mise en abyme. in 'the shadow of the torturer' series, they travel between worlds by standing between mirrors, somehow. its a little closer to fantasy (egad) than i usually like, so i guess its allowed to be a little soft. but its cool that the idea of iteration is supposed to berepetition towards some (expected?) result, and that would certainly qualify.
saw the koopar this morning. she told me there was no way she was carrying a crew-sized box of cap'n crunch half way around the world, so i had to think of something else.
i'll send this off before she gets there, so you have time to think about my tattoo.
L
From: me
To: dad
Sent: Sunday, July 15, 2012 1:02:52 PM
Subject: many moons later
all settled. i forgot to mention earlier, but i moved, hence the lack of internet. acquiring a connection here is tortuous, even with a translator at my hip to keep me in the loop. there are two different companies you have to contact: one that installs the fiberoptic cables, and another that actually provides the internet service. these two entities apparently disagree on things quite frequently, which makes the whole process drag on. why have the two sides not coalesced? 'culture', of course.
as for the new place, no roommates, better location, cheaper rent. the catch is that someone was murdered there fifteen years ago. capitalizing on superstition like this, i feel like the church. spending three weeks in a haunted apartment sans internet, the self shrivels in some ways and bloats in others. thankfully alex was around to dispense weird reminders of former realities, otherwise i'd be lost in an eerie tokyo mist. i got lot of writing done, and i powered through radix after giving it a much deserved second chance. it is an absolutely incredible book (though it's no light), but i'm confused as to how you can laud something that so aggressively blurs any distinction between scifi and fantasy. clarke's law about sufficiently advanced technology, and all that. sometimes i feel like my raison d'etre is to make you question your hatreds.
having alex here was a very important thing for me because it affirmed what was coterminously fear and hope: i could never be with her. the lens through which she views the world is one that i am thankful i cannot fathom. furthermore, i need a girl more within my sphere of influence. she's got her art-soaked opinions and i've got mine. not to say it was a sour month, though. we saw and did beautiful things in beautiful places. and we mocked the lesser whites. it left me with the sneaking suspicion that, after having two people with whom i've grown semi-resentful of stay with me, maybe i'm the problem. this was quelled by a hearty 'nahhhhhh', a la 'asshole' (i opted not to write 'denis leary's asshole' for obvious reasons).
a big thanks for the gift! though i don't think the money changer was that impressed with your handiwork, what with the asian obsession with the sacrosanct physicality of legal tender and all. i must confess, though: i did not in fact spend it on fun. i purchased curtains and an iron from muji. adulthood is nothing more than a dull ache. speaking of muji, i still need a bike and i'm thinking of getting this one:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_T8-29P47tFE/SNRIaQUITyI/AAAAAAAACe8/y9MTy-Y8gu0/s400/bike.JPG
it's about as much as any other bike i'd be able to find barring some extreme craigslist serendipity. plus, it's off-white and minimalistic, like yours truly.
work is a bit of a drag, and i'm cutting down on it to spend more time wrangling english tutees. while tutoring i make close to four times what i do at AA, which allows for a less ascetic lifestyle and significantly more freedom (horrible, horrible freedom). and i quite like playing the pedagog, especially to people more accomplished than i am. speaking of accomplishments, i'm going to climb mt fuji next week. my desire for thought-engendering altitudes supersedes my fear of all things that go on postcards.
aside from the internet bullshit, i got my first real taste of farcical japanese bureaucracy recently. while trying to collect my bank card from the bank (they never mailed it to me despite saying that they would; what they mailed instead was a letter in japanese stating that my card was ready for pickup, which i of course failed to decipher), upon presenting my passport and foreigner card proxy (it takes a month or so for the card to be given physical form, so they give you a piece of paper which is supposed to act as a surrogate) i was told that the latter wasn't suitable identification to pick up the card. it was, however, suitable enough to allow me to change my address with the bank and get them to mail the card to me, and to withdraw money manually from the teller. they would not physically give me the card, though. protocol is the enemy of thought.
re faith no more, have you ever heard mondo cane? it's mike patton doing italian pop songs from the 50s. he also did a great album with gorillaz' dan the automator. the project was called lovage, and the album, 'music to make love to your old lady by', had a cover featuring a contemplative dan nakamura, oozing elan, sitting at a table topped with flowers and a pistol. it was a spinoff of his project with prince paul, 'handsome boy modeling school', which itself was a quasi-spinoff of a surreal, short-lived sitcom called 'get a life' featuring chris elliot. we are living in the best of all possible worlds, i think.
funny you mention in search of lost time. when i first arrived in tokyo, i spent three nights in a budget inn that i stayed at on my previous trip here, four long years ago. the room's scent triggered a proustian memory so jarring that i was flung back into my nineteen year old self for a few seconds. suffice to say it was warm in some ways and unpleasant in others.
i'm envious of your ability to share that whole tradesman's camaraderie thing. when i encounter people who share my passions my initial reaction is usually to think them dilettantes. that patio sounds hellish (200 slabs in the hot sun/i fought the law and the law won), but you would not believe the heat and humidity over here. i am in a state of permanent stickiness. apparently august is even worse. thankfully alex brought me some old spice, as antiperspirant is literally not available here. it would be a shame to duck out of a working holiday visa early citing 'selfstink' as the reason.
that pr manager who's smitten with me posted a photo of me on facebook, and afterwards i received a friend request from a friend of his whose name i didn't recognize. i accepted, and i noticed that he had photos of himself hanging out with terry richardson, which surprised me. his name is luis venegas, and his wikipedia entry is no stub; that is some prolix shit. anyway, he 'liked' a few of my photos. i'm too unnerved by how gay-centric his stuff is to bother following up, but i'm flattered, at least.
i don't understand how you can accept that complete disregard for appearance is tantamount to insanity while championing its partial disregard with such alacrity ('life is just so easy with twenty of the same black shirt!'). as for your tattoo, a bamboo grove would be great if done very subtly. i still think a giant black rectangle would be the best, though. and nice score with the boots, but it was probably less value village's mistake and more the universe balancing things out--remember that when i left the house, so too did six pairs of footwear.
i could write volumes about what i liked in radix, but i'll just quote a (rather lengthy) passage. when corby is probing sumner's memories:
'it was a childhood memory of a horse with a red ear and a white diamond on his nose. sumner was about seven, and his father had taken him to one of the riding camps on the northern fringe of mcclure. it was a day's outing, meant to break the tedium of a long, unexpected winter--the first and last winter sumner had ever experienced. riding tall and brave in the saddle of the small horse, a strange thing happened. the heat of the animal and its dark, muscular odor gripped the boy and excited, in the deepest part of him, an unfamiliar urge: he wanted to hurt this shaggy, liquid-eyed thing. leaves in its mane, the cold mist in its breath--somehow, he would make it hurt.
when they came to a frozen pond, he tried to take the horse across it. as soon as he rode it onto the pond, the ice cracked, and the horse fell. afterwards, his father and the owner of the horse took a rifle, a can of gasoline, and went out to the pond. hearing the shot and watching the smoke rise above the trees, sumner knew what he had done--but he didn't know why.
corby understood. that day, as he pulled back from sumner's mind, the boy's voice lingering--"i don't know"--he took with him an image. a memory of a child in a field among burdocks of frozen grass. it was dusk, and black tattered clouds were blowing through a gray sky above a line of cold lakes. against a bare tree's hanging silence, mist shivering its thin branches, he stood staring at a dark bulk on the ice. corby shuddered, because he knew the boy would spend the rest of his life standing there.'
when i first read that i had to put the book down and go for a long walk.
'a man for whom all destinations are temporary'
l
m
(ps, you used to call me smallthing, didnt you? when i saw it i was filled with a rosy nostalgia)
From: dad
Subject: rosebud...
Sent: July-23-12 11:44:39 AM
To: me
it will be hard to top an email with allusions to the haunting evocation of the madeleine, and professions of selfstink. but i'll try.
but first indulge some venting on my part.
it was so nice to get your email, cuz i just had my feelings hurt real bad, and was feeling kind of blue. and kind of six (years old).
pete's been being a bit of a bitch lately. but nothing that i couldn't handle with a light-handed rebuff, like with the song email i sent you. or on fri night, when he almost got bounced from the dominion for stiffing the bartender. when we left, he was going on about how he was never going back, and how he was going to tell all his friends and the dom's business would suffer. and i just said- yeah, like your sharp reproaches of stephen harper have adversely affected the conservatives in the polls.
but the next morning they were supposed to call and tell me the location of a birthday party for a (sorta) mutual friend (i say they cuz i talked to sherri and pete jointly and severally, as the lawyers say). i got up and made a cheesecake and waited. and they never called.
sherri was really pissed about the night before, so i figured they got in a big fight and decided not to go. or broke up. or were wiped out in a terrorist attack- what other reason could there be?
but i heard later that they just went without me. and i just feel like shit. and it was at a beach, so once again no olga in a bikini...
[and i can't figure out which is worse. if they did it on purpose or if they just forgot. not to turn this into a (total) baww thread, but i read this recently (paraphrase)- when you hurt people they start to love you a little less. that's what careless words do. they make people love you a little less.
at neal's funeral, amidst all the bullshit and bullshit, i turned to joy and lulu and said- sometimes i wish i was a real boy. but then i see things like this, and i'm glad i'm not.
i'm (trying) not to be all butthurt about it. but i don't have a lot of friends to lose. and i'm not really good at pretending that even one of a thousand cuts doesn't leave a mark.
and it's not just any attendant emotional turmoil. but it offends intellectually. the way that i'm-not-religious-but-i'm-very-spiritual people (mary,lulu) or people of certain political leanings (pete) can be so unaware of the way their own actions refute any awareness of the numinous or calls for social justice.]
the saturday boy, on a saturday no less.
and speaking of which- i went to go see the bard of barking at bluesfest. i was right up at the metal barricade, maybe 8 ft from himself. and he opened with the world turned upside down. but then he started talking, and like when any socialist opens his mouth, it sorta went downhill. and i'm not just being flippant. he said that he'd come to the realization that cynicism was the real problem, not capitalism or globalisation, and everybody cheered. if i was a heckler, i would have shouted out- i'm pretty sure it's still capitalism, billy.
one of the reasons i went (alone, cuz pete talked sherri out of going with me, no shit) was because i read the review of the previous night's show in mtl, and the set list. he did tank park salute, which i've never seen live, and would have been worth the 55 bucks alone.
(did i tell you this one? sean went to go see the dead kennedys back in the day. someone objected to the ticket price, and graffittied, right on the front of the venue- 10 bucks puts jello in a limo.)
at the mtl show, someone castigated billy for living in a big house (by the sea, in dorsett, with a consevative mp, no less). he said he'd be in the merch tent after the show, signing his new ep and answering any questions about layout and square footage.
and he redid that bit about his wife and his son and turn-it-down. even used it as the intro to milkman again. so there seems to be a bit of going through the motions, regardful of how beloved those motions might be.
and he never got to tank park salute. oh well.
i like the bike. but if you're going to get one with a basket (*cough*), why not go full cargo retard:
http://www.xtracycle.com/platform
its not a very good pic. i saw one last year and it was super cool. and it would prolly go over really well on the crowded streets of tokyo.
speaking of bikes, let me tell you of my further adventures in scavenging. a couple of weeks ago. picking pete up in the morning on monday, there was a portable air conditioner near his house. and near an outdoor plug. works perfectly and almost brand new. $400 retail (but who's counting? me.). thursday night, walking home from the market, saw a barbq. walked right to my truck and went back and grabbed it, with cops and people everywhere. just pulled in behind the gate and went to bed. checked it out the next morning. top o the line napoleon, all cast iron. really well made, but a few years old. $800 retail, saw one used on kijiji for 400. and then saturday, so still the same week...
went to one of sifu's properties that needs some work to advise madeleine (speaking of proust...). years ago there was a tenant with a cool bike, but he moved out two years ago. but the bike was still in the backyard. just plain told madeleine that i loved it, and that i never asked for anything but i wanted that bike. she smiled and said- pls take it marc, you deserve it. so now its at a shop getting a tune-up:
http://cdn.twospoke.com/forum/attachments/f30/4335d1312048652-need-help-finding-set-back-seat-post-electra-townie-bike.jpg
hope to get my aroebic capacity above "kitten" by the end of the summer. (got the bike out of the shop. been around the block a couple of times- ha! 21 speeds are nice.)
so maybe i'll just drive around in my truck looking for shit. i've always wanted to be a monger. i'd even settle for fish, but much prefer iron.
that sounds cool about mt. fuji. and that suicide forest nearby is supposed to be worth the trip... its funny that you're going there. when i was telling mary that your emails lacked the prosaic, i put it this way- i sent him to japan to tell me about mt fuji, not moby dick.
and don't worry about the postcardyness of it all. contrary to crowley's assertion vis a vis napoleon and the pyramids- sometimes it's ok to let the eyes of 40 centuries look down upon you.
mary says you should try to get to the moss garden temple in kyoto. it looks beautiful. and its freakin' moss, which rates above succulents for its lack of babies-are-useless flowers.
to your point about seein' me hatin', and rollin' (i know i mixed that around, but it was too good to pass up). not all of my predjudices involve an attendant hypocrisy. one can still be vain working a restrictive(d) pallette of choice. (set theory is still rich, even without the axiom of choice, but it closes the door on the reiman hypothese...)
and for all its groo-voor-yishness, radix is far from fantasy.
but ain't it grand? i'm so glad you gave it another chance. the guy whose trapped on the beach for 1200 years. talk about heraclitus by way of siddhartha (another book to add to your list). and the eth, and the white pillar and the black pillar and, and, and...
and no, i called you smallboy. (small tear...)
another you should read is excession- by iain m. banks. one of my favourite writers, and one of my favourite scifi books.
about my arm. its been so hot that i've been wearing short sleeves, and only giving a bit less of a fuck. and i kind of like a couple of the scars. so i was leaning towards leaving them and getting the other ones filled in as black lines. so i fucked around with a sharpie (nothing a black magic marker wouldn't fix). but the overall image they evoke bugs me. so back to square one. well, square two or three, hopefully.
did i ever show you this image from this website?:
http://www.contrariwise.org/2010/05/28/i-go-back-to-may-1937/#comments
(i love that poem)
if you look over the website, its sorta surprising how unwilling people are to acknowledge the commonality of art and literature, seeming to relate to it only on this deeply personal level. its graven, almost...
her tattoo i quite like though, perhaps more the idea than the execution- the shape of it doesn't really grab me.
amongst the sea (of ink) of so-it-goeses and prufrockianisms and regressions* like the little prince and the lorax, it stands out. with merit. not like some of the more seeming obsure-for-the-sake-of-obscure ones.
*i'm trying to find a word or phrase that describes the culture's warm embrace of all things childish. the most egregious being that they discontinued this great chocolate pie at loblaws, and replaced it with a s'more one (smore like a l'ess). infantalism, aside from going too far back, has that creepy fetish conotation. and adolescentisation just doesn't roll off the tongue.
here's a poem that i've always loved, that you don't see a lot, considering its beauty and provenance. that i would get tattooed on that patch of my arm, if only i had considered to do the layout a little better...
Among the Multitude
by Walt Whitman
(1819-1892)
Among the men and women the multitude,
I perceive one picking me out by secret and divine signs,
Acknowledging none else, not parent, wife, husband, brother, child,
any nearer than I am,
Some are baffled, but that one is not--that one knows me.
Ah lover and perfect equal,
I meant that you should discover me so by faint indirections,
And I when I meet you mean to discover you by the like in you.
so maybe it will just end up as your idea of the monoblock. i can tell people its the TMA from 2001.
and what are you writing? send me some if you want. i still think about that little play you wrote, and would like a copy of that. you have a cognitive assonance that deserves expression, and a facility with language that allows it. (adulthood is just a dull ache being the latest example, and art-soaked a great turn of phrase.)
too bad those gay guys only want you for your mind...
(and terry richardson?- yeah, he'll rape ya.)
here's another poem. some guy just asked on my forum for help with a project for burning man. they have to build this pergola with prayer wheels, that is part of this huge temple that others are making, and setting fire to at the end. all the jarheads were like- hunh? so i commented that it wasn't a "some men just want to watch the world burn" kinda thing, more like a heraclitean (there he is again- twice in the same email) fire from the title of this poem. its one of my favourites, even though hopkins was a priest. the last two lines are perfect. and its why i'd like to be called jack:
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89). Poems. 1918.
That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection
CLOUD-PUFFBALL, torn tufts, tossed pillows ' flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs ' they throng; they glitter in marches.
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, ' wherever an elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle in long ' lashes lace, lance, and pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous ' ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
Of yestertempest’s creases; in pool and rut peel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed ' dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks ' treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, ' nature’s bonfire burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest ' to her, her clearest-selvèd spark
Man, how fast his firedint, ' his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned. O pity and indig ' nation! Manshape, that shone
Sheer off, disseveral, a star, ' death blots black out; nor mark
Is any of him at all so stark
But vastness blurs and time ' beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart’s-clarion! Away grief’s gasping, ' joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. ' Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; ' world’s wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, ' since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ' patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.
and now back to the whitman. it's too bad about the koopar- a father could do way worse- but its good that you were able to confirm your conflicting worldviews. i'm not going to tell you that there is one out there for you. for me there were three, and i'm a little tired of waiting for the fourth. i think we have to be a little bit more active in our perception of the other. (in the sense of active as opposed to passive remote sensing. the idea being that one can send out a signal to signal one's presence, rather than just gather signals that just happen to come our way. "give me a ping, vasilli. one ping only, please.") or just buy one from thailand.
one of the reasons i dumped claire was that wanting something has a certain purity, but wanting something else is corruption. but now, even wanting, like that guy said about the examined life, ain't so hot.
and did i tell you i saw claire about a month ago, walking in the market. i waved to her and she just turned away. oh well. ("it never could be easy to be three thousand miles from kesey") and then last week i saw this chick coming out of loblaws, and claire was right beside her. it was alaina. they didn't see me and walked away. she's tall and blond and pretty and it made me feel good. it turned shitty with her and liam- well, it turned to nothing, which is one of the worst kinds of shitty. but at least i never turned my back on them.
i started putting the kitchen cabinets together and realized i need to get the table made so i can figure out how it will all fit together. and i think i'm going to go with a different design for the uppers. (i've been thinking about this for a while. but at least the ikea kitchen event has come around again, for any returns. a whole retail cycle, and most of the cabs are still in their boxes...)
beyween my tattoo and the kitchen i'm even more of a quivering mass of indecision than usual. but joey is coming to stay while joy is on vacation, so i'll have to get the cabs in the kitchen to make room for the beast.
that's all for now. even i get a little tired of myself, after a while...
dear love from your dear old.
