Berlin --> Prague, 2001

I chain smoked Marlboro Reds and drank coffee to take the edge off a hangover that made it impossible to sleep. Through the window of the cafe car, I watched Southeastern Germany's forest and factories pass by. The train got into Prague over seven years ago, but part of me remains on board, looking at the nuclear reactors in the Czech countryside.

Hitchens zings Franken, Stewart, and Colbert

Al Franken, Stephen Colbert, and Jon Stewart have egos the size of a planet, but Hitchens' review of their books hopefully hurt a little.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200910/satire

[Their material] certainly works very well with audiences who laugh not because they find something to be funny, but to confirm that they are—and who can doubt it?—cool enough to “get” the joke.

...

Stewart, too, has something of a fat-target problem, and seems partly unaware of this problem’s source in his own need to please an audience that has a limited range of reference. In Naked Pictures of Famous People, when he decides to lampoon Larry King—who in any context is a barn-door-size target—he still manages to make the attack too broad. There’s no slight nudge, but a huge dig in the ribs. It needs to be “Adolf Hitler: The Larry King Interview.” And Hitler has to be a guest who has been helped by therapy to become more of a people person. Here’s his opening reply to King’s welcome to the show.

HITLER: (biting into a bagel) First of all, Larry, I don’t know what I was so afraid of. These are delicious!!!

At whose expense, I wonder, are those three (count them!) exclamation marks? Who is afraid that who will miss what point?

...

But [Franken who has a powerful wit] is barely even funny when funny is all he is trying to be. See if the following causes you to smile. It’s taken from his inaugural address, on page 223 of Why Not Me?

As the Mandingo buck, Mede, says in the movie after he has been brought to James Mason’s plantation to be used as breeding stock, “Massa, it beez wrong to sell a nigger like a plow horse.” He’s right. It does beez wrong. It beez very wrong. These words are as true today as when Ken Norton said them twenty-six short years ago. And I am here today to say that it was wrong to hunt escaped slaves down on horseback; it was wrong to boil slaves alive; and it was wrong to sell a black woman merely because her breasts had grown too droopy.

Jeepers. Of course the “irony” is that the passage is supposed to make you cringe a bit, but this crucially lowered and degraded definition of what is ironic is accidentally confessed a touch later on in the same book, when Franken is writing in his own voice:

“Ironic distance” is not [Al] Gore’s problem. Not that he doesn’t have a well-developed sense of irony. He actually has a terrific sense of humor.

See, there’s your problem. A sense of irony is to be carefully, indeed strictly, distinguished from the possession of a funny bone. Irony is not air-quote finger-marks, as if to say “Just kidding” when in fact one is not quite kidding. (Does anyone ever say “Just kidding” when in fact only kidding?) Bathos is not irony, though Franken and Stewart and Colbert seem unaware of this. Irony usually partakes of some element of the unintended consequence.

Franken's comments about slavery are funny because a presidential candidate who made insensitive comments about race would destroy his career. The humor lies in the discrepancy between how you expect a pol to talk about race and how Franken's send-up of a pol talks about race. This discrepancy is not irony; it is absurd humor. But Franken reveals that he thinks absurd humor and irony are the same thing when he says that Al Gore's sense of ironic distance is proven by his terrific sense of humor.

Chicago Half Marathon

I wanted to complete the 13.1 mile course at a pace between 8:00 and 8:30 per mile. I kept to an 8:00 per mile pace over the first 8 miles. After I slowed down to slam Gatorade at an aid station past mile 8, my quadriceps felt leaden and my pace slowed. I finished in 1:50:21, for a pace of 8:25 per mile, placing 286th out of 1,116 male runners aged 30-34.

I biked 17 miles to get to the race. I would have run a little faster had I driven.

For two weeks before the race a lower back injury prevented me from running with completely upright posture. I was hungover during the last long run I did. Until the muscle fatigue dominated my consciousness, I relished the absence of pain caused by a hangover or back injury.

Local bands were situated every couple of miles along the course. Around mile 10 three Asian guys and a white drummer were playing proggy metal. A mile later a pretty girl with an acoustic band was covering Waterfalls by TLC. Michael Jackson's best stuff was being played on sound systems all over the course. The music made me want to spend energy even though I was dog tired.

The Fermata

Nicholson Baker's novel, The Fermata, is the fictional autobiography of a man, Arno Strine, who can stop time for the rest of the world, while he continues to act and think. He mainly uses his power to drop into the Fermata (or enter the Fold or instigate an Estoppel) to undress women and gratify himself with their stationary bodies.

The best fiction is tragic; it depicts human suffering or the impossibility of fulfillment while conveying the beauty and nobility of human life. The Fermata is devoid of the tragic. Arno's physical suffering is limited to a passing case of carpal tunnel syndrome and a busted lip. He is immune to psychological pain and utterly content with his lot in life.

The quality of Arno's writing and subjects he addresses leave no doubt that he is a genius. If a genius could stop time, wouldn't he use that power to advance the political causes he supports or remake the world according to his ideals? Arno pauses time only to undress women and figure out people's names when he runs into acquaintances who recognize him. In the one larger ambition he mentions, he drops into the Fold to undress the inhabitants of a small town, and turns time on with their clothes piled up in the town square. (Chapter 13). In response to the criticism that he perverts time frivolously, he says, "What else [is] there in the world besides masturbation? Nothing." (Chapter 8). It's a good comeback.

The happiness of the book runs against the grain of my character, but it's an undeniably great piece of fiction. Baker is a virtuosic writer. His writing is informal but intricate and atomically precise. Effort is necessary to parse his best descriptions, but the effort is rewarded when the image created by the writing comes into focus. Baker's description of the french braid of the woman who has caught Arno's eye packs a big payoff:

It is arranged in what I think is called a French braid. Each of the solid clumps of her hair feeds into the overall solidity of the braid, and the whole structure is plaited as part of her head, like a set of glossy external vertebrae. I'm impressed that women are able to arrange this sort of complicated figure, without too many stray strands, without help, in the morning, by feel. Women are much more in touch with the backs of themselves than men are: they can reach higher up on their back, and do so daily to unfasten bras; they can clip and braid their hair; they can keep their rearward blouse-tails smoothly tucked into their skirts. They give thought to how the edges of their underpants look through their pocketless pants from the back. ("Panties" is a word to be avoided, I feel.) But French braids, in which three sporting dolphins dip smoothly under one another and surface in a continuous elegant entrainment, are the most beautiful and impressive results of this sense of dorsal space. As soon as I saw Joyce's braid I knew that it was time to stop time. I needed to feel her solid braid, and her head beneath it, in my palm. (Chapter 1).

An account of towels spinning in a washing machine exhausts the reader before giving up its reward:

At its peak speed, the basket of a clothes-washer turns at something like six hundred revolutions per minute. Towels, which are ordinarily the very soul of magnanimous absorbency, are at six hundred r.p.m. compressed into loutish, wedge-shaped chunks of raw textility, apotheoses of waddedness, their folds so conclusively superimposed, and their thousands of gently torqued turf-tassels so expunged, or exsponged, of reserve capacity, that I feel, after the last steady pints of blue-gray water have pulsed from the exit hose and the loud tick from within the machine signals some final disengagement of its transmission, and the spinning slows and stops, as if I am tossing boneless hams or (in the case of washcloths) little steaks into the dryer, rather than potential exhibits in a fabric-softener testimonial. (Chapter 7).

Just after starting the autobiography, Arno articulates the main challenge that writing poses for me (aside from coming up with something interesting to say):

it is just as hard to write during a Fermation as it is in real time. You still must dole out all the things you have to say one by one, when what you want of course is to say them all at once. But I am going to give it a try. (Chapter 1).

I thought that brilliant writers were spared the urge to write everything at once and that setting their thoughts down one at a time came naturally for them. That that is not the case increases my resolve to try to write well.

Arno stops time to write erotica (or "rot" as he calls it) which he conceals so that attractive women will stumble upon it (and become aroused by it, he hopes) when he turns time back on. The rot is hilariously over-the-top. While he is sunbathing in his backyard on a towel, before discovering that he can stop time by pushing his glasses up his nose, he fights the urge to masturbate:

I knew that I was almost ready to turn over on my back, and I knew that if I turned over on my back my bathing suit would come off a minute later (and who cared if anyone saw me--I wanted people to see me! ...), and once my my bathing suit was off, my Juiceman would writhe and elongate against my thigh until, in attempting to rise and make a drunken statement, it would lose its balance and fall heavily back against my hip bone, where it would writhe some more. (Chapter 8).

The money shot at the end of the first piece of rot is unforgettable. The female character, Marian the Librarian, has mounted a dildo to the floor of a delivery truck and fucks it as the truck bounces over a country road while the driver looks on ecstatically:

The UPS man had his head cranked around and was watching her crammed crotch, pop-eyed. He made a vowelly groan and lifted his butt clear off the seat. "Oh, here it comes!" he said. With a final upward fist-stroke, his squat thick dick blew a united parcel of peckerpaste all over the sleeve of his uniform. "Ooh, yeah babe. Ooh yeah."

During Arno's second work of rot, Marian the Librarian persuades a teenaged girl to take a shit while the girl sucks off her boyfriend in Marian's garden:

Sylvie moaned again. Her asshole domed and opened wider, and a big dark hard dickshape began to push its way straight out. Marian held the napkin underneath. "Oh yeah. Keep pushing baby. Push it all out." She felt the weight drop in her hand and immediately folded the napkin over it and sprayed Sylvie clean.

While catching and disposing of the turd, Marian is squatting over an antique platter to which was mounted a dildo inserted into Marian's anus. El oh el.

Arno has weighty things to say about consciousness. He believes that a force like the centrifugal force is necessary to draw a coherent identity out of the chaos of memories and desires that make up a human being's mental experiences. His analogy has overtones of cognitive science. Each person's "I" is a top level process that runs above and mediates between all the other conscious and unconscious routines in the brain.

in order to write my life properly I need the entire receptacle of my consciousness spun, as the ultracentrifuge's rotor spins its vials of biological freight, fast enough to conquer diffusion and impose some artificial order. I need to dangle in a severe vacuum from a one-tenth-inch-thick length of piano wire ..., while a xenon lamp flashes some unforgiving wavelength over my memory sample, rotating sixty times faster than the washing machine in my basement did--I want all of the semi-remembered images of half-dressed women, all these fragments of my voyeuristic history, that still remain in messy colloidal suspension to fly around at the speed of insight until they are compelled to file themselves away once and for all into neat radial gradients of macromolecular uniformity, like layered cocktails or fancy multicolored creations in Jell-O.

I happen to know, from a three-week assignment in the research department of Kilmer Pharmaceuticals ..., that biochemists routinely use the centrifuge ... to spin down, or "pellet," lengths of DNA in order to purify or clean them. And everything in the mind--that final triumph of protein chemistry--is likewise in helpless motion, afloat, diffuse, impure, unwilling to commit to precipitation: only an artificially induced pensive force of hundreds of thousands of gravities can spin down some intelligible fraction of one's true past self, one's frustratingly polydisperse personality, into a pellet of print.

Baker does not explicitly complete the analogy between the centrifugal force that pulls water out of laundry and makes DNA pellet and the force that allows Arno to spin down his past into a coherent narrative. In the reality of the reader, Baker himself is the spinning force that creates Arno's narrative. In the world of the book, what is the force turning Arno's past into a narrative? I think it is Arno's consciousness. The book is a celebration of the mind.

Mad Drunken Americans in the Mighty Land

Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road during a three week Benzedrine spree when he was 34 in 1956. He'd made several unsuccessful earlier attempts at realizing the novel. This time he taped together ten 12 foot rolls of tracing paper so that he wouldn't have to break the momentum of his "kickwriting" in order to change sheets.

He wrote frenetic, repetitive descriptions as if he was typing the words as soon as they entered his overclocked mind. He translated into syllables the notes of the tenor sax solos he heard in bee bop clubs. The story and the writing style constantly refer to jazz.

I expected I would disdain On the Road because I dislike improvisation. I decided to read it only because Kerouac influenced artists I admire, like Hunter S. Thompson and Ben Gibbard. I had a pleasant expectation of discovering a self-indulgent, badly written work that would prove the Beats were a bunch of pretentious clowns.

So I was surprised to find that On the Road is a huge amount of fun. It contains hauntingly beautiful descriptions of the American landscape. Kerouac's writing gives the land its actual scale. The reader feels like he is on the terrain that Kerouac describes, as in this passage about raucous drinkers in a Colorado mining town:

Great laughter rang from all sides. I wondered what the Spirit of the Mountain was thinking, and looked up and saw jackpines in the moon, and saw ghosts of old miners, and wondered about it. In the whole eastern dark wall of the Divide this night there was silence and the whisper of the wind, except in the ravine where we roared; and on the other side of the Divide was the great Western Slope, and the big plateau that went to Steamboat Springs, and dropped, and led you to the western Colorado desert and the Utah desert; all in darkness now as we fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess--across the night, eastward over the Plains, where somewhere an old man with white hair was probably walking toward us with the Word, and would arrive any minute and make us silent. (Part One, Chapter 8).

He relates the heft of the North American land mass in just a few lines:

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all the raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast ... I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty. (Part Five).

The main characters, Sal Paradise, who is Kerouac's alter ego, and Dean Moriarty, who is actually Neal Cassady, are admirable. Their energy never flags. They never complain. They constantly remind the reader that life should be celebrated.

Bitterness, recriminations, advice, morality, sadness--everything was behind him, and ahead of him was the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being. (Part Three, Chapter 3).

Kerouac said, "All is mind." I think he believed that the physical world was a veil for the true reality that consisted of consciousness. He regarded his hero, Dean Moriarty, as God's angel, and saw himself as a lesser one. This spiritual outlook is incongruous when considered alongside Kerouac's alcoholism. He drank as hard as a body can drink. Sudden abdominal hemorrhaging killed him when he was 46.