January 2009
19 posts
Hello, goodbye
Is everyone really so busy? I hear it all the time. I’m so busy, I’m swamped, I’m running around. And so I feel disproportionately still. I sympathize with the feeling of running out of time, but rarely would I be described as busy, even I suppose, when I am. I wonder: do they just say they are busy? Or are they actually busy? One never knows whether to take the...
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BY JOEL GUNZ
What is your mother’s maiden name?
What is your older sister’s favorite Monopoly game piece?
Who did your paternal grandfather vote for in the 1956 presidential election?
Why did you choose a liberal-arts degree when your entire family urged you to go into finance?
In what year did you begin working on your novel?
How many weeks away was graduation when you dropped out of...
Chasin' that neon rainbow, livin' that honky tonk...
My fascination with Alan Jackson persists. His music continues to inspire me, and in the next moment, make me feel deranged (for feeling inspired by it). He’s all wrong, and so right. Prepare to be repelled, but get past the initial reaction, and it’s magic.
I first met Alan in the fourth grade, on Go-Texan day. Usually we sqaure-danced (the most fun thing you’ll ever do,...
Reference
“What do you think about most?” the girl asks the librarian.
“Being someone else,” the librarian answers. “I imagine being someone else, maybe anyone else. Just not me.”
“You don’t seem so bad,” says the girl.
“I’m not,” the librarian says, “I’m just not much.”
“Do you have too many...
“I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness...”
– Carson McCullers
Bones, fur and rocks
How is childhood abandon best translated into adulthood? Is it possible to experience the sensation of running through an empty natural science museum at midnight, through a darkened mineral hall, past the dinosaur bones and taxidermy, with a security guard at your tail, ever again? Will I ever feel this emotion again, even if I were to re-create the experience? Nostalgia aside.
Absence
Sun on the edges of leaves,
patterns of distant pleasure,
all that it meant
now gathered together.
Days all was away
and the clouds were far off
and the sky was heaven itself,
one wanted to stay
alone forever perhaps
where no one was,
and here again it is
still where it was.
- Robert Creeley
via Alex
Dream: Instead of grad school, I decided to go to “water-park” school, which consisted of going to an empty water park with 5 other people I had apparently been to water-park school with the previous summer but had no recollection of. I wasn’t sure if this meant I was becoming a lifeguard or what. We sat around in a pool for awhile and talked. Then at one point we were on the...
1930
From an obituary of D.H. Lawrence, by Catherine Carswell: “In the face of formidable initial disadvantages and life-long delicacy, poverty that lasted for three quarters of his life and hostility that survives his death, he did nothing that he did not really want to do, and all that he most wanted to do he did. He went all over the world, he owned a ranch, he lived in the most beautiful...
Here's an idea
Instead of this, show me the rooms of people whose dreams are risks. There’s nothing bold about declarations of freedom from minds who’ve been handed the luxury of creating. The creative mind is necessarily the more interesting mind only when it’s challenged, when its dreams are endangered.
Extra, extra
Israeli troops are launching attacks on Gaza, my sister is two weeks from giving birth, rural Afghans play a game called Buzkashi in which horsemen battle over the body of a gutted, headless goat, Al Franken is leading in the Minnesota senate recount, Maria de Jesus, the world’s oldest person, aged 115 years, died today in Portugal, and I place a TV dinner in the microwave, walk to the...
After years
Today, from a distance, I saw you walking away, and without a sound the glittering face of a glacier slid into the sea. An ancient oak fell in the Cumberlands, holding only a handful of leaves, and an old woman scattering corn to her chickens looked up for an instant. At the other side of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times the size of our own sun exploded and vanished, leaving a small green spot...
Lately
Muck, sluck, trudge, drudge, crumudge.
Situational awareness
“As a former actor and model, and a business man in my previous life, I’m talking to you Texan to Texan, no bullshit. There’s a lot of bullshit in LA.”
“Yeah.”
“So the apartment, it is what it is.”