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Midweek Diary Ressurection: Lit.Ed.

“All I know is I’m losing my mind,” Franny said. “I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting–it is, it is. I don’t care what anybody says.”

Franny Glass, in “Franny” (1955)

Quite a statement from a character born in the mind of a man who once strode around New York City as a poor student proclaiming to all who would listen that he would one day be the greatest author of his generation. This is of course Jerome David Salinger, who passed away at his home in Cornish, New Hampshire, on January 27th. Despite a surprisingly small body of work Salinger became a legend, perhaps as much for his attitude toward literary notoriety as for his published short-stories, novellas and his novel. The Catcher in the Rye has been as influential as any novel can be, and its repercussions in the American mindset of its time cannot be exaggerated. But what about the time after that, our time, my time? Many of my friends know only of the novel by its Danish title, Forbandede ungdom (or by Klaus Rifbjerg’s newly translated title from 2004: Griberen i rugen, a direct translation), and few have read it or even know who the author was. As a result, the death of J. D. Salinger went largely unnoticed in my social circles in Copenhagen, though American and British newspapers continue to publish stories and features about everything Salinger. It is fair to say that whatever impact Salinger’s novel had has long since been made into an integral part of American consciousness, something subtle, and apparent perhaps only when specifically looked for. He had passed into legend and out of the public’s eye, and now he has passed on. Rest in peace.

I know it’s kind of late for an obituary, and I apologize for the dark nature of this return, but remember that one of the first pieces in this column mentioned the death of Eve Sedgwick, and maybe death is an occasion for revival as well, a beginning. Everything has been kind of hectic since late last summer, and I regret not having the time and energy to do this column for the past five months. This will hopefully mark a return to form, though I dare not promise that I will be able to post something every week. As always, I will attempt to perform some daring feat of update in regards to literary and cultural stirrings in this particular corner of the world, and if nothing much is happening, well, then I’ll just ramble on a bit.

This week, returning first to our beloved New York Times’ Book section, we find and interesting review of Joe Hill’s latest, Horns. Joe Hill is the son of Stephen King, which should be interesting, albeit I’m not well read in King. His book on the art of writing, called simply On Writing, is remarkable, however, in being an inspired meditation on the craft while also being a sort of confessional autobiography. When King admits that he does not remember writing Cujo due to his cocaine and cough syrup abuse, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Let’s hope Joe Hill knows which of his father’s footsteps to follow and which ones to avoid.

Up in the Old Hotel

Speaking of authors who like(d) to binge out once in a while, LIFE has an impressive photo gallery of authors, playwrights and poets notorious for just that. There are some really beautiful photos here of people who will never be forgotten.

In reading, there is one book from these past months of silence that I would very much like to recommend. Up in the Old Hotel is the collected works of Joseph Mitchell, a staff writer for The New Yorker for more than thirty years. His pieces make for an impressive and heartfelt peek into bohemian New York City, and to a lesser degree a thorough introduction into the various fishing communities in New York State. This may not sound intensely exciting, but Mitchell’s flair with words is amazing and the writing alone will bring a smile to the face of anyone who likes good reporting and honest observation. Of special fame and interest are the two lengthier pieces on Joe Gould, eccentric would-be poet of Greenwich Village.

Finally, a quick heads up: The Oscars. Sunday night. What would have been the highlight  (Jeff Bridges singing “The Weary Kind” from Crazy Heart) apparently won’t happen, seeing as the Academy has thrown out the live musical performances. This makes for a dreary year, though it will be nice to see Bridges hop off with a deserved statue after four previous nominations. For a touching tribute to the awesome Jeff Bridges, check out this blog entry by Jeff Dowd, the inspiration for the Dude in The Big Lebowski. Other than that, all fingers crossed for The Hurt Locker come monday morning.

Stay tuned.

Drug use at the academy

The other day during a much needed lunch break a few colleagues and I got into a conversation about social drug use. What else would a group of new Ph.D. students be talking about in the dark corridors of the academy! I think I started us on our downward spiral as I was complaining that in Denmark I can’t get any, no I’m not going there, strong over-the-counter flu medicine. One needs a doctor’s prescription for anything heavier than paracetamol and you’d be unlikely to get anything in the first place for something so benign as the flu. Infections, yes. Viruses, no.

Fortunately I’ve an American friend in town who’s got a great connection for Tylenol Flu pills  (Acetaminophen, Dextromethorphan and Phenylephrine, yeah baby!) from his puertorriqueña mama back in New Jersey. I learned of his elicit drug activity while our families were spending Thanksgiving Sunday together. We don’t have Thursdays free. I felt, and looked, like death eating a cheeseburger under a bad bout of flu symptoms until popping one of those pills helped mask the pain, allowing me to get through our dinner before heading for two days of under-the-covers. Danish medicine you see, does NOT treat symptoms as my GP was quick to explain. But that’s what American medical culture is all about. Just take Tylelol as one illustration whereby they market their drugs at the level of street pushers: Feel Better During Flu Season!

That was ultimately where our discussion led to, an understanding that our two different approaches to treatment are neither “right” nor “wrong” but culturally specific to particular societies at given moments of history. That led me to recommend a terrific book I’d recently read by poet and cultural historian Jennifer Michael Hecht, The Happiness Myth.

“We think of our version of a happy life as more like physics than like pop songs; we expect the people of the next century to agree with our basic tenets—for instance, that broccoli is good for a happy life and that opium is bad—but they will not. Our rules for living are more like the history of pop songs. They make weird sense only to the people of each given time period. They aren’t true. This book shows you how past myths functioned, and likewise how our myths of today function, and thus lets you out of the trap of thinking you have to pay heed to any of them.”

I still remember when my deeply Southern Grannie temporarily stopped making us fried eggs, not because they were fried mind you, but  because “doctors now say eggs aren’t good for ya.” Remember that? Hecht’s arguments make a lot of common sense when we apply personal anecdotes like the one above and start thinking about all the silly “scientific” trends we’ve been subjected to during our own lifetimes. On a more theoretical level one can’t help but appreciate what Rorty had been screaming about. “Cultural relativist!” his critics called him. Well duh.

The entire book is worth a read whether you think you need to escape the “cultural trance behind our drug paranoia” or are simply interested in the ways societies construct their cultural norms within specific historical context. Or both! In this vein, Hecht’s chapter on drugs is a must smoke. There she locates a particular American fear of happiness, which is really a fear of unproductive happiness. And that’s were Tylelol reenters the story. That’s also why I’m home today, blogging about drugs rather than diligently at work writing course applications as I had planned. I couldn’t get a hold of my dealer! But looking out at the hopefully final snowstorm of the season I think I made a wise choice regardless.

Note: Along this vein, the always provocative Historiann recently took up a similar discussion spring-boarding from Kathleen Brown’s, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America to Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move initiative.

Illustration by Robert Arthur @ Narco Polo
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Texas Poster Art Collection at UT

In the late 1960s, Texas poster art, long an important mainstay of the state’s printmaking tradition, entered a fertile and innovative period in Austin. Drawing inspiration from the counter culture and psychedelic music movements, a new generation of Texas graphic arts designers created one-of-a-kind posters. Today their works are considered some of the finest artifacts of this music poster explosion.

The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin has digitized 400 of these extraordinary posters. Brenda Gunn, the Briscoe Center’s associate director for research and collections, said, “I thought we should expand our digitization efforts to include our extraordinary Texas Poster Collection. Our digitization team had perfected the process we needed to use, so the poster digitization project was a natural direction to take in our efforts to increase access to the Briscoe Center’s visual treasures.”

Image: Guy (De White) Juke, Devo, 1980. Texas Poster Art Collection, Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin; TPA_0102. ©Guy Juke/Briscoe Center for American History.

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Ryan Jacob Smith

"We're Totally Fucked" Second Edition Signed and numbered 2-color Edition of 100 18 X 24

@ Sophie’s

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Robert Gibbons: Senses Rising Upward

Senses Rising Upward

Upward flies our sense; thus it is a parable of
our body, a parable of elevation. - Nietzsche

Yellow-shafted flicker darts across my line of vision from thorn tree to cliff ledge

animating crown of rock face. Cold February day sighting a bird not seen in

years. Possibly resorting to those indigestible red berries starlings, mockingbirds,

& even gulls do, when half-starved. Man takes up too much World. Across the

way both Cap Victor & Nordstrength empty holds of oil. There’s an expanse to

the air today reaching east & north, demarcated at intervals by minor clouds,

enhanced by steady wind evident from tree limb to waves at sea level inducing

the hard-won balm of Freedom. Flicker may be hungry, but Free. I’m skipping

lunch, again, hungry to see as much as I can, despite the cold. Hours, days mean

a great deal to someone living in the moment, senses rising upward, keeping

resentment at bay.

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BAGnewsSALON: Haiti Aftermath (Today!)

Reuters, Carlos Barria, Jan. 30, 2010 in The Big Picture, boston.com, Feb 1, 2010

(Carlos Barria/Reuters @ The Big Picture, boston.com)

BAGnewsNotes is simply one of the most interesting communities in the online progressive landscape. Michael Shaw, a clinical psychologist by trade, not only provides daily, intelligent deconstructions of US political visual culture but has also built a dynamic community where citizens, activists, academics, political analysts and photographers all interact in creating compelling multivocal critiques of American political and media culture. One of the more ambitious projects is BAGnewsSalon, “an on-line, real-time discussion of selected images between invited guests in a live chat room on the BAGnewsNotes blog.” Later today, “counter-programming the Superbowl” (21:00 CET), the Bag is hosting its seventh Salon installment. Past Salon discussions are archived here.

Haiti Aftermath: A Look Back at the First Week

Sunday, February 7, 2010

3:00-4:30 pm EST

This BAGnewsSalon will examine a small group of images from the week following the devastating Haitian earthquake. From these pictures, we hope to consider various issues, including:

- the role, boundaries and “weighting” of the graphic and sensational

- how much the pictures presented a representative, as opposed to a generic or stereotyped view of the Haitian people

- whether the pictures might have overly skewed toward human suffering and physical devastation at the expense of, say, the general scale of the disaster, the response of Haitian authorities, the impact on different Haitian social classes, the unfolding of the relief effort, etc.

Those scheduled to participate include: professors Loret Steinberg (R.I.T.), Nathan Stormer (U. of Maine) and Fred Ritchen (NYU); photographer and BAGnewsNotes contributor Alan Chin; photographers Erin Siegel, Aric Mayer, Tim Fadek (Polaris), Chris Hondros (Getty) and Willie Davis (Veras); host Michael Shaw (publisher – BAGnewsNotes); BAGnewsSALON producer Neil Harris; and moderator Cara Finnegan (U. of Illinois).

Tim, Chris and Willie were all shooting in Haiti that week.

*******

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Victory of Death

Victory or Death, The RZA

The RZA, Victory or Death, 2010

Brilliant! Talk about contesting meta narratives. However, upon closer scrutiny of Emanuel Leutze’s original iconic work, a more complicated relationship emerges between the two pieces. “Wu-Tang Clan ain’t nothin’ ta fuck wit.”

a late winter return

I’m no longer able to hide out, holed up at my postmodern pastoral enclave. But I nearly pulled the last plug, teetering on the ledge of digital suicide. Physically and intellectually isolated, my family keeps me sane. When they aren’t driving me crazy that is.

Shifting between manic bouts of depression and elation, familiar stability and personal insecurity, I’ve been building, writing vernacular poetry with hammer and spade. But an authoritative Nordic winter finally came to Denmark this year. Immovable leeks in the hard frozen soil. Nothing to harvest, impossible to build. Salvation through my garden cottage frozen in a dream.

Stop. Don’t jump! Reconnect. The University of Copenhagen has hired me on for a three year research gig. Yesterday, Day 1 – traveled to the “big” city for meet and greet over coffee and lunch. But Copenhagen was a BIG city yesterday. Or perhaps I just felt small. As the lightning train hurled me over and under the icy Storbælt towards my destination everyone seemed so grown up and serious. Even the children.

Speeding home through the uncanny Zealand winterscape I dreamt of Spring at Mi Ranchito Triste and my Fynen Alamo under the walnut tree.

Robert Gibbons: Paris Without End

Paris Without End, the Novel

Some call this shadow I’m Brailing walls in Paris down rue Jacob night, having

satisfied both cultural & sexual curiosity, within visual pulse of the neon deus ex

machinas, reptilian instincts keen to the jazz dizzying dervishing whirlwind Id.

Again, limestone weight of Time coupled with glass desublimation of the city’s

combinatory early & late architectures, I should have died there in that shadow.

That night. But simply changed life forever. Lucky breaks a writer gets to cover

up, fashion in a different context, flesh long since having a true voice of its own.

There it is. Remember the pink Epernay sign along the alleyway way over on the

right bank where Madame was frank, & to the point, “This one, & Champagne?”

I took both. Always take both. Early repressions demand a return of taking

everything offered, & then a bit more, paying in due course. She was a beauty

from Martinique, solid as a brown wood carving by Gauguin, & just as supple in

lines: physical, aesthetic, psychic, linguistic, masochistic, painful to watch &

touch at the same Time. When I told M. Duras about her at the jazz club on

rue Saint-Benoît she was intrigued, wanting to know more with each drink, so I

embellished, for her sake. Oh, it was rough & tumble, subtle & crass, crevasses

opened & bled. For her sake, I said. When they picked me up, when they arrested

me, I didn’t protest, got what I deserved. Served my Time. Every trip to the city

only served to amass experience for the novel, which I call Paris Without End.

Named after a drawing at the Pompidou, a saga, an epic, the list of characters has

grown to hundreds; connections & disconnections multiply on every page. No

one dies. It’s not that kind of thing with plots built up for the benefit of the

reader. It’s almost a true story, almost Pagan with the pseudonymic author not

believing in Death.

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but for how long, and why?

excerpts from but for how long, and why?

When are you gonna go, Sally? When are you gonna go? You should go, I’d love it if you did. When are you gonna go? Sally. I’m going.
The rain is falling, lightly, yet everything is wet. Slowly moving downtown, having just crossed the library and planning to just continue down 5th Avenue till I get home. Christmas always ends like this, and it has gotten worse since Sally decided to stay around. Crossing 42nd, and tripping over a drunk. Another one, wet, sad. His clothes are dark, as dark as the tarmac, his bed. His feet are sprawled onto the street, covering the heavy paint on the ground that marks crossing. I know his legs are going to get crushed, yet in stead if waking him up, helping him, I walk faster, hoping I won’t be there and that I won’t have to call the ambulance. I keep walking, the rain keeps raining, fat. Down by Madison Square Park, more people, homeless. Jesus, it’s after midnight, Christmas Eve, shouldn’t these people be at the soup kitchens or the YMCA? Everything is sad, I’m not depressed, but things look and feel sad. Now coming onto Park, almost home except it doesn’t feel like home. Shouldn’t it feel like home? Is it home if it doesn’t feel like it? Many questions. Taking the elevator to the 5th floor, taking off shoes, making coffee? Why coffee? Don’t wanna sleep? Whatcha gonna do then? Huh?
This thing feels dirty, but it always does. That’s the charm, and it’s the way I like it. The grande mirror next to the window shows a young man, I guess, medium height, medium build. Besides a green robe he is wearing nothing and I realize that I am just looking at my naked body. It’s been while since I’ve just looked at me, and I look  bland. My body is too young, for my age, too unused, too inexperienced. I need scars. Emotional scars that can be seen on my body. Something painful that I’ll love. Starting to freak myself out, making another cup of coffee, I spot the napkin from tonight’s dinner, the one I’ve been clutching for, what? hours? Not days. On it is scrawled, in my beautiful handwriting, when are you gonna go sally? and that is when I decide to go. It doesn’t matter where and that’s the beauty of it. It. Is. Simple. Fuck. Go.
The decrepit clock my sister gave me after her post-grad trip to the Netherlands tells me it is just past 3 am when I decide to head out. I leave my phone behind, bringing only a finely crafted black suitcase, and the suit I am wearing. Am I gonna go, I am gonna go in style. The cab driver nods and starts driving, the sign on the back of his seat informs me that the standard fee from JFK and into the city is $45, but the journey to JFk could be anywhere from $30 to $80, and I am glad that I have chosen very early Christmas morning to make my departure. I have told no one, and I don’t care. That’s the way you do it, Sally. I’m gonna do this to show you how to do it.

The scent of food reaches me, and I notice that the area we’re in looks a bit more residential than what came before. The driver steers the cab around a massive corner and makes a fast stop at what looks like a low steel fence. He turns and gives me the eyes, while flexing his little hand towards me. When he sees my quizzical expression, he leans out the window and points a finger. I look out the side of the car and, sure enough, he is pointing at a sign saying ‘Khao San Rd.’ I smile my gratitude and give him the ten dollar bill. When I make to get out of the car he pulls me gently back in, slapping the ten dollar bill the palm of his hand, creating a pathetic wet tic-tac sound. He is begging me to notice the sad way he is treating the bill, obviously telling me that I am not paying him enough. I smile, laugh, pat him on the shoulder again, and tell him, “a deals a deal.” I get out, make my way to the back of the car to get my suitcase, and slam the hood of the trunk tight again. Thats when I hear loud yapping and complaining close to me, and before I know it the driver is thrusting the ten dollar bill into my hands and waiving people down. Looking around, I can see that a small crowd is gathering. Fuck this, I’m thinking, but then I see the cop approaching. He looks no more than my age, completely lean, skinnier than most western girls. He looks like a knife. I am clutching my suitcase while the cop engages the driver in conversation. I reach out my hand, motioning to give the driver the money, shrugging my shoulders to show that I don’t know the reason for this scene, and that I have only good intentions and want to pay the fucking driver. The cop looks at me and gives me an order. In Thai, of course. I give him my best and most bewildered look, and without thinking and with a swift move I press the ten dollar bill into the cop’s hand. He gives me a stern look, then turns and twists the driver’s arm. Before the cop has even said a word to the driver a man off the street jumps into the cab and drives away, scattering the crowd. I am standing in the same place, still clutching my suitcase, watching the cop putting strips around the driver’s wrists and strapping him on to the back of a scooter. Fuck. Everybody has seemingly lost interest in me again. Everyone except for three girls standing, or rather leaning, on the steel rails I mistook for a fence some minutes ago.

Working title.

The editor is familiar with author’s real name.

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