Daniel Silliman

Reading material

Current:
Oblivion,
by David Foster Wallace

For the year:
1. Prophecy & Apocalypticism,
by Stephen L. Cook
2. The Salmon of Doubt,
by Douglas Adams
3. Absalom, Absalom!
by William Faulkner
4. Farewell, My Lovely,
by Raymond Chandler
5. Ham on Rye,
by Charles Bukowski
6. The Inner Circle,
by T.C. Boyle
7. Breakfast at Tiffany's,
by Truman Capote
8. The Crying of Lot 49,
by Thomas Pynchon
9. The Poet,
by Michael Conely
10. As I Lay Dying,
by William Faulkner
11. Slumdog Millionaire,
by Vikas Swarup
12. 2666,
by Roberto Bolaño
13. Teaching a Stone to Talk,
by Annie Dillard
14. The Most Beautiful Woman in Town,
by Charles Bukowski
15. White Butterfly,
by Walter Mosely
16. The End of the Affair,
by Graham Greene
17. Fathers and Sons,
by Ernest Hemmingway
18. Into The Wild,
by Jon Krakauer
19. Close Range,
by Annie Proulx
20. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,
by David Foster Wallace
21. By Night in Chile,
by Roberto Bolaño
22. Killshot,
by Elmore Leonard
23. This is Water,
by David Foster Wallace
24. Public Enemies,
by Bryan Burrough
25. Breath,
by Tim Winton
26. The Savage Detectives,
by Roberto Bolaño
27. Loving Che,
by Ana Menedez
28. Ender's Game,
by Orson Scott Card
29. The Short Stories,
by Ernest Hemingway
30. Cities on the Plain,
by Cormac McCarthy
31. Charlotte's Web,
by E.B. White
32. The Selfish Gene,
by Richard Dawkins
33. Good Omen,
by Terry Pratchet & Neil Gaiman
34. Where I'm Calling From,
by Raymond Carver
35. The Armies of the Night,
by Norman Mailer
36. The Street Lawyer,
by John Grisham
37. Legacy of Ashes,
by Tim Weiner

Daniel Silliman

19.11.09
by Daniel Silliman @ 9:43 PM. : Comments 0
18.11.09
This is you Larry Flynt's first sexual experience was with a chicken. I have no idea how I know that. I have even less idea how I knew that then, when I was what, 14? It certainly wasn't from reading Hustler. I assume, thinking about it, that I must have heard it -- or more likely read it -- from one of the anti-porn pieces that cycle through Christian circles. The idea must have been to demonstrate depravity. A chicken. Now I see that I have no idea if this is true, though, and it's not an argument any more than Larry Flynt's face is an argument, but at the time I was just bothered. Just like the cut-up concubine in Judges, and angels having sex with women in Genesis, and Noah getting drunk and naked, Lot impregnating his daughters, and David collecting foreskins, there was something fleshy and sweaty, violent and unsettlingly wrong and also there was this message implicit that this is you. This depravity is in you. This is life. All of us are only this far from beastiality. The chickens we had at the time, the half dozen hens were being terrorized by an angry, angry rooster. The hens were losing feathers, and skittering around in constant panic and every time I fed them they'd squawk and squat, trembling, terrified, waiting to be mounted. In Texas, at least at the time, you could see where some men raised their birds for fighting. There were whole fields of small white lean-twos with roosters staked out, strutting around and stretching their wings, one per white triangle. It was still legal to fight them up in Oklahoma then, and there were other places too, on the plains and Eastward, over into Arkansas, where men would gather around pits and fit their birds were razor blades to fight and cut and die. The argument was it was natural. They never had any hens, or anyway only a couple, and all the rest they ate or sold off as half-grown poults to the chicken farmers that wanted eggs. Sometimes you'd see hens in the city, especially in poor parts where Mexicans and poor whites would keep them in re-purposed sheds, half-hidden in backyards except for the occasional escapee that'd be wandering up to the road, looking silly and startled. Mostly the egg men were in the country, though, and the chickens would spread out across the yard, running after roaches and pecking at dirt bugs. They'd tell you the flock was a whole social system, with a hierarchy that'd have to be reordered by fighting with every new bird. They all sold eggs, advertising with cardboard signs and selling at the same rate or only slightly higher than the grocery store. The eggs were never white, but were every other color, and sometimes you'd crack one and inside would be blood. Like a miscarriage. And sometimes, too, the eggs would not be washed and there'd be feces dried to the outside, and tufts of underbelly feathers. The farmers seemed okay with this, as if it didn't demonstrate some deep depravity, and they would say or at least, in being casual, imply that this is life. This is normal. This is us. Watching the chicken squat in terror at the shadow of the hand I'd raised to throw food, squat and squawk and tremble wide-eyed as if I might rape it, I could only think, life is not okay. by Daniel Silliman @ 9:57 AM. : Comments 0
16.11.09
by Daniel Silliman @ 4:44 PM. : Comments 0
13.11.09
McUbiquitous 6 books on God Watching strangers Young conservatives Nelson Mandela at 91 History of creationism _______ and violence Literature rehabilitates The women of bauhaus The gay animal kingdom Gladwell for dummies Interview with Ralph Nader Interview with Slovoy Zizek Interview with John Updike Talking to Sherman Alexie Malcolm Gladwell parody Sartre's hallucinated crabs Defending the passive voice Zizek on Communism's collapse No absolutism in "real politics" The rise of the power jean Party of insults and celebrity Sufjan Stevens stuck in traffic 9 notable hypochondriacs Remembering Roland Barthes Excerpt from David Plouf's new book 25 experimental typographic pictures Acerbic about the Bolano myth Thelonious Monk "played what he felt" Stasi files reveal the tragic and mundane Accidental celebrities (and what that says about us) Cookie Monster taught us how to want it When a Supreme Court Justice gets his grammar wrong Torture in the war on terror Raymond Carver and the trick question Kerouac's maudlin silliness as a movie Death penalty as a public test of character Mike Huckabee - GOP frontrunner for 2012 Chuck Klosterman is still freaked out on pop Vonnegut's early and (apparently) uncomplicated hope Robert Rines, inventor and Loch Ness hunter, dies at 87. May he rest in peace. Language death and universal English is really OK by Daniel Silliman @ 8:30 AM. : Comments 0
11.11.09
"It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind." -- Kurt Vonnegut by Daniel Silliman @ 6:42 AM. : Comments 0
8.11.09
To make a break When asked he said, of course. He said, oh sure. He said you'd have to be crazy not to be afraid, so of course he was afraid of the fire. He had a little speech he'd give, a standard set of several lines about how it was dangerous and you hoped you never had to. It usually seemed to satisfy. Floyd looked out the window at where the helicopters made their turns coming down with dangling buckets and dipped into the man-made mountain pond. They came up again, buckets swinging and sloshing, rotor blades chopping an uplift of air. He watched to where the helicopters came from the mountain, a little like ants in a black-dotted line, and he looked and there they disappeared again, going in with water to splash like a giant drop of rain. They disappeared into the smoke that smelled all sour with evergreen sap. The smoke was gray. It smudged out into the sky -- a haze, a smear, an edgeless cloud into which the helicopters were simply silhouettes and then gone into the gray. Oh sure, Floyd said, but he watched the mountain fire and his words were vacant, his mind elsewhere. When he jumped to fight the fires he felt free. When he jumped he felt clear. He would be hanging there, his hands on the parachute straps and his backpack bearing a dangling chainsaw, an ax, a shovel and some wedges, his fire blanket, water, some spare chains and wrenches and a splash of gas and oil, and he would laugh, it was so crazy, and he would laugh and laugh and feel free. He jumped through the smoke, where he couldn't see, and then came clear and landed on the other side of the fire. He flipped the mesh guard down when he landed, started the saw, clamped the ear muffs over his ears and began to run. He wore orange into the fire, walking bowlegged in the thick chaps. He felt the fire suck the air and watched it jump between the tops of trees, leap and deeply inhale, immolating everything up there. He watched as the fire reached out to flick his ear, watched as it gathered a gust in a curl and then unfurled burning bits and frags of black and flaming leaves around him, to surround him, and he held up his chain saw and ran, hopping straight-legged out in front of the fire. He ran and revved the saw, then picked a spot to make a break. He began cutting trees, toppling them in way, and he used the shovel to clear out shrubs and grass and get down to dirt. He splashed the gas into the pile and threw a match and sent a fire flaming back, a counter fire, quick and black, and he moved really fast, cutting, hacking and digging, sweat and soot stinging and streaking, and he moved, alone on the other side of the smoke, smiling like a very mad man. Now Floyd watched from the ground, from the window which looked out across a parking lot and over at the other side of the blocky, brick medical complex. From his window he could see the Emergency entrance, where the ambulances rushed up a little ramp and rushed their wheeled gurneys through automatically opening doors. Behind the complex, in the background from Floyd's window, he could see the hills, brown now in Summer, and the mountains that were always green with fir, spruce and pine. The doctor of the ward didn't ask but Floyd answered anyway, volunteering it, oh sure, repeating what he always repeated about how you hoped but this was the job and, oh sure, it was normal. The doctor didn't ask and didn't answer, but only filled out the form he had on his clipboard, which Floyd couldn't see. Then he watched the mountains until the evening, when they disappeared into dusk and the smoke could be seen no more. He watched until the dark was everything and it was filled just with the frantic ambulance light. Then he lay down on the flat, hospital bed and curled under the light, scratchy blanket, and he sang a song softly to himself. He could feel the fire on his face. He could feel it in the way each individual hair would singe and the way each bead of sweat would seem to boil in a slowly rolling streak. The fire turned his face red, burnt it like the sun. But he would swing his saw, the chain turning and tearing at brush and biting into branches, spitting out saw dust and a little oil, raggedly leaving stumps sticking up like broken thumbs. He ran to stay ahead of the fire, to keep ahead of the fire and fight it by making a clear space, open space, a safe place. When he ran, hustling always to the edge of the space he cleared, the equipment bounced on his back, banging and rattling as he ran. He watched the line of trees, as he worked, and the line of the fire, the slant of the sun and the possibility of clouds for cover. He always had to watch the wind. It was very important to pay attention to the direction of the wind. That time he didn't though, and he didn't see the fire unfurl to surround him, didn't see the burning bits of brush carried up and over to the other side, catching and connecting until the fire was all around him. He didn't notice when the wind changed, but only when he felt the heat from the wrong side, felt the air inhaled from all around. Then he unfolded the little, metallic-coated blanket they gave him the first day, and he rolled himself in it and laid on the ground. He assumed he would die. He heard the fire, from inside, and imagined it probably worse than it was, and he stayed on the ground, which was lumpy and sloped down towards his head. He was -- though he knew he shouldn't be -- happy, and free. He was smiling, under his fire blanket, and singing out loud about Jesus and the whole world he had in his hands. He sang his song until he heard the nurse in the hallway. He didn't want her to hear him. She would think he was crazy, singing songs from children's church, and if she came in he would tell her too, oh sure, you have to be scared. She stayed in the hall, though, and so he was silent, curled up in the bed, smiling and thinking about the fire. by Daniel Silliman @ 11:14 PM. : Comments 1
6.11.09
"... consented to be truly known, maybe even to the extent of not only letting the partner see the repulsive nest of moles under their left arm or the way after any sort of cold or viral infection the toenails on both feet turned a weird deep yellow for several weeks but even perhaps every once in a while sobbing in each other's arms late at night and pouring out the most ghastly private fears and thoughts of failure and impotence and terrible and thoroughgoing smallness within a grinding professional machine ... " -- David Foster Wallace by Daniel Silliman @ 11:53 PM. : Comments 0
Beer run He asked if I minded and held up the can so I'd know what he meant. The blinker on the car clicked, dry and like constant throat clearing. I said I minded. I said it so he'd know I minded and didn't think I should have to say it, so he'd feel guilty for even asking to drink in my car when really I was doing him a favor. I said, Do you have to? I said it somewhere between incredulous and condescending. I said it like I wasn't the one who'd agreed to drive my alcoholic older neighbor to the store to buy beer. He said, oh. It was a Friday. He'd gotten paid that day. Half in the bank so everything would look like it was supposed to and half in cash he could hide from the court and the order to pay child support. It was 4. We were stuck in traffic. Everybody was trying to get out. He had to be at work at 6 at the restaurant, but had asked if I'd take him to the store before he had to bike it up there, but now I knew I shouldn't have and thought, shit, I just want to be done for the day. He said, so, and paused, still holding the beer, trying to reformulate the question. He didn't put the beer back in the case, when I said it. He kept it in his lap, between his legs. He looked at it. His hands were shaking. His hands were veined purple and covered with the kind of skin that wrinkles like paper. His hands reminded me of my father's, and how mine would look when I was old. They were curled in his lap like cramps. The traffic light turned green, but the people in front of us wanted to turn left and couldn't so sat there, and we watched the traffic move in the other direction. by Daniel Silliman @ 9:46 PM. : Comments 0
2.11.09
Red Scare of the soul He sat at his desk, drinking. Thinking, drunk, he closed his eyes and felt it, reaching out and knowing, counting and marking in his mind the other desks, the hallway and hallways, the whole office and the other offices with other desks, all and each of them isolated in plots, counter plots and secret plans, the secrets and suspicions, files, office furniture and known and unknown missions a matrix in his half-sloshed mind. His toes were warm from the whiskey in his blood in circulation. He felt it. He mentally made his way through files, fingering the tabs with names in block letters listing, last and first, suspects who to the service were servants, patriots and secret heroes, and who, to the world outside of normal and suburban mothers, children and lovers, wives, ex-wives and others, were mild and mid-level bureaucrats. He was, himself, if anyone asked, an under-appreciated analyst of the agricultural cycles and epicycles of, in particular, the Cynara cardunculus, or as it was vernacularly known and always said with an an article appended, the artichoke, specifically its production and consumption in the global market with attention to competition matrices, which was why, actually, no one asked except his mother, and she was the one who still called him Jimmy. Most people and his mother would rather have it that way, this way, where they had their illusions, these hearty facades and friendly faces, innocuous offices in office parks and a confidence, casual and comfortable with contradictions and unexplained or explored connections. As long as they didn't know. But he had the files. He felt it. He had his suspicions of secrets and second motives, an intuition of movements and maneuvers in layers unseen, layers upon and within layers each more Byzantine, like a map in his mind of intelligence, intelligence, counter and counter-counter and counter intelligence again. He said to his friend Ken, when they were drinking, as they did in the dark in the afternoon, "doesn't anyone realize, doesn't anyone fathom at least if not actually know how deep, how dark and deep and evil this goes?" But of course they didn't. The question, though, was not always asked as rhetorical, at least in the early years and when the snow seemed soft or the baseball game had been good on the radio. It was always answered as rhetorical, however, as every time Ken answered, "I know, I know, I know." He always ordered another for each of them and waited until again they were alone to say, like sighing, "I know. I know." And of course he did. He very much did, though for him the conspiracy was not so dire, not so dark nor devoid of a certain pleasure. For Ken could conceive of the complex and apparently conflicting and fragmentary conspiracy his friend hypothesized and, more importantly, actually believed, as a kind of grammar game, like diagramming a nonsense sentence or writing whole Faulknerian paragraphs of completely correct and yet, paradoxically or perhaps not and actually unveiling something important or at least a point of undiscussed interest, sentences that had no meaning, such as "colorless green ideas sleeping furiously" or the one "did gyre and gimble in the wabe all mimsy were the borogoves" or, not to belabor but instead to appreciate the point being made, the other one once so popular in the Navy, when they served, with all the parts of speech constructed accurately with only alternate forms of one word, the versatile "fuck." So for him, for Ken, he knew, and was not lying to say so, but also he didn't understand. He was too cavalier for the brutal singularity, the way that Ockham's razor could feel like the slice and slight squish of an eye. He didn't understand: the theory of conspiracy was desperate, the darkness and this falling feeling were better than the alternative simplicity, the Byzantine bizarreness better than the singular, obdurate, sole and soul-fucking truth James feared. Because for James this was not an exercise of the mind. This was not intellectually entertaining and even if it had been that once it was no more. Now he felt it. It closed around him. It was a feeling of claustrophobic falling. It was a terror of forgetting. It was a thought he could not quite think, the kind one has upon waking or while wandering without a list in the supermarket, except accompanied by a choking terror, by this very real fear that forgetting meant death, or, not death, but like a ship sinking in the dark, the feeling of water already under the desk and rising up around the office chair and the stacks of paper there, and there, and there, and the room was already tilting, taking on too much, going down, dark and down, and the fear begat the panic and the panic more fear. He sat at his desk and closed his eyes and felt it. The horror rising, terror tilting. He tried to imagine in his mind the schema again of double-agents and deceptions, to connect the secrets betrayed and agents executed and map them all in another way, a way that worked, but instead he said, "how? how?" and he sat there. He sat there thinking, drunk (but now that was normal). He was the first, the first to have this Red Scare in his soul. It happened at his desk in an office park in Virginia. The conspiracy was still better though, than the truth he'd been betrayed by Ken. He had one friend. There was one mole. He took another drink and tried to make a map, a matrix of traitor cycles and epicycles that would be another answer. by Daniel Silliman @ 10:52 PM. : Comments 0
30.10.09
Tom Waits: We're all insects crawling on the shiny hood of a Cadillac Ralph Ellison: What would America be without the Negros? 4,000-year-old skeleton, buried with dagger, unearthed The secret origin of Stan Lee and the Marvel Universe The dangerous Daniel Ellsberg (& the Pentagon papers) Birther lawsuit unconstitutional, attempted overthrow The RZA on the truth shall set you free from all things 'Mermaid girl' dies at age 10. May she rest in peace. Malcolm Gladwell: Journalists must get smarter The new but not really new Malcolm Gladwell Not the Onion: Coyotes kill female folk singer E.B. White: I hate the guts of English grammar The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson 1 The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson 2 Fewer journalists to witness state executions The conservative case against gay marriage Secret service straining with rise in threats Before Ira Glass, there was Charles Kuralt Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis Elie Wiesel to speak at anti-semite event Republicans purge moderates in Florida Richard Powers and patterns of uptalk Sherman Alexie's advice: be nomadic The Rosary: bringing it down to Earth The anti-Nazi cleaning lady of Berlin Why you should read Marcel Proust Yale's intro to lit theory now online Republicans purge moderates in NY Exhibitionists living in glass house The kinder, gentler James Ellroy 10 ways to reduce incarcerations The Devil on This American Life Distance and the author photo Ad hominem Heidegger Karl Barthes and the Nazis Tom Waits talks to the CBC R. Crumb talks about God Introducing difficult books The RZA talks to the NPR Picturing the Depression Newt Gingrich's game Talking to Philip Roth Bolano for beginners Science in pictures Black super heros The last Yugoslav by Daniel Silliman @ 7:59 AM. : Comments 0
27.10.09
Notes on honest language 1. There is, it seems, an internal contradiction in the Anglicans who are considering placing themselves under the auspices of Rome, in that they are schisming for more authority. This is not the most politically or religiously critical point opposing the conservative Anglicans or their possible place in the Roman Catholic Church, but I find the contradiction interesting & maybe, in a broader way, important. Isn't it somewhat similar to the sort of radical, revolutionary things American conservatives have proposed, e.g., privatizing social security or abolishing the Department of Education, extreme & experimental things, in the name of conservatism & preserving a (fictional) traditional way of life? Perhaps the Papal authority & Catholic orthodoxy is likewise a fiction, though the fantasy of an authoritarian, straight male Church has clearly driven some people to some weird measures. It is, it seems to me, schism in the name of authority, rebellion at perceived rebellion, & methodological apostasy conceived of as opposing an apostasy. The situation, I think, is one of holding orthodoxy as more important than charity, & imagined purity & homodoxy as more valuable than love, humility & respect. But there is, maybe esp., this problem of an internal contradiction & dishonesty. 2. The assassination of a leader, it seems to me, is an assertion of control against perceived chaos, an attempt to have control over a world that the assassin thinks should be, was, & would be under his control except for X, with X being whatever forces, personal or political, have broken & breached the dam of order & which will be affected, adjusted or corrected (at least symbolically) by the assassination. It is a response of fear to chaos, then, & an extreme attempt to regain control, motivated to some large extent by the fiction that control was once had. This is also true of conspiracy theories about assassinations. 3. Why is it that certain fictions, esp. certain motivational fictions, can only function as fictions while concealing what they are? My problem w/ motivational fictions in 1. and 2., above, is not that they're not true, but that they motivate to fear & violence. From that endpoint of recognizing & rejecting the fear & violence I see how poor -- how truly, horribly poverty stricken -- these fictions actually are. Part of that poverty, it seems to me, is the claim, or, even more, the need, for these fictions to be true. There is a connection here to ideology & literalist readings, both of which must, to function, deny being fiction & conceal themselves esp. from themselves, adamantly & vigorously denying, for example, that a literalist interpretation of the Bible involves any interpretation at all. 4. There's something about technical language that "feels real." Evan Wright's work about the Marine's invading Iraq was praised for it's use of jargon, military acronyms, official names, etc., with that language connected to or even equated with authenticity & the feeling of "being there." David Foster Wallace often uses the same technique of technical writing, as for example in the short story "Mister Squishy," where he uses (or even deploys) the very technical language of marketing research to a) accurately represent the jargon-textured environment described, b) accurately represent the dense, inter-tangled, dialectical and deconstructioning reality of our, as Wallace might say, quote-unquote postmodern existence, & c) to give us, the readers, & also probably himself, the sense that the trick or manipulation of language is revealed as it's deployed (in contrast to the concealment & insistent denials of 3)) and is, therefore, esp. honest. There is a strong sense in which this works. Technical language does give this feeling of reality and "being there." This is odd, tho., when juxtaposed with the very, very strong Anglo-American anti-jargon tradition. That tradition is so strong, cf George Orwell's Politics and the English Language or what he says about language in 1984, that even rather lame, mostly meaningless & cliched restatements of the orthodox, anti-sophistication sentiment are basically immediately canonized into commandments of "good writing," such as attacks on adjectives or the vague and not very helpful directiton to rewrite what "sounds like writing." I think it's possible that there's something going on here with regards to the (unstable and probably incorrect) minimalist vs. maximalist split in American writing (where blue collar & not college educated = minimalist, e.g. Raymond Carver, John Cheever & all who follow Ernest Hemingway, while postmodern, hard-to-read & intellectual = huge, complicated works, e.g. Thomas Pynchon, Don Delillo, & everyone following Herman Melville & William Faulkner), but it also seems true that those who use technical language to achieve verisimilitude & those who don't are both worried about manipulation & dishonesty. There's a sense in which, too, I think, that the very technical and jargon-textured language feels honest right now, in particular, because of the recent American experience of being manipulated (in this case into war, torture & disregard for civil liberties) by men who pretended to be less sophisticated than they were, basically using the schtick of "good ol' country boy" & "just us folks" to move Americans to support & embrace horrible, horrible things. In "Mister Squishy," Wallce used high-powered, well-educated market researchers to explore the manipulation within manipulation within manipulation, but you could do the same thing, I think, with the language of hack lawyers & car salesman ("I ain't a big city law-yuh"). This makes me wonder if writers aren't lagging behind salesmen, & if honest language isn't badly losing to dishonest manipulations. 5. Christopher Hitchens has an interesting trick of dismissing anyone who'd have a sophisticated & complicated response to his atheism. He calls them wincing & insincere, evasive, wittering & mumbly, while praising as bold & brave & truly religious the kinds of religious people who he elsewhere describes as basically stupid, insane & evil. Richard Dawkins does this too, at some points claiming the Pope, who believes life evolved & is evolving & that this is not in contradiction with Christian faith, doesn't understand Christianity, while saying that those who are not educated enough to understand even the basics of Charles Darwin & Gregor Mendel do completely & rightly understand the Bible & all of Christian theology. This has the tone of someone insulting the goalie who can actually block goals, while praising the goalie who lets you score, but also & more importantly, it serves to legitimize the fundamentalist & least educated versions of faith, while also ensuring permanent marginalization. I assume Hitchens will not be converted during his debate tour, & also find unlikely that anyone is going to suddenly become an atheist after seeing their pastor spar with a prominent, pop atheist. Thus the result of the exercise, I think, will be that both sides can claim increased legitimacy, specifically w/ the claim "I have debated the other side," while the actual debate & ongoing conversation will be stagnant, fixed in a permanent stupidity. I think I'd like to say Hitchens is violating a version of the Principle of Charity, if I can expand the principle to say that you shouldn't just attribute to your opponents the strongest argument, but should also find the best & most sophisticated opponents for the argument you opposed. 6. The above trick of dismissing the moderate & most educated opponents & instead legitimizing & permanently marginalizing those who are more aggressive & less nuanced is also, I think, an exact description of what the Democrats & President Obama have done to conservatism this year. It's good politics (as long as the craziness is always a minority & you're not a minority in one of the local govts run by the now-raving right wing). I worry, though, that it's bad for a) the discourse (be it between Christians and atheists or American conservatives and liberals), & bad for b) the space available for intelligent & nuanced positions, & c) language that isn't captured by ideology, hackishness & partisanship, & d) all of us who believe in the Principle of Charity & want honest language. by Daniel Silliman @ 3:56 PM. : Comments 0
26.10.09
Today I become a teacher. An official, stand-in-front-of-a-college-classroom teacher. Not that I meant to. It was kind of an accident, but here it happens that I am, today, a teacher. by Daniel Silliman @ 7:11 AM. : Comments 1
23.10.09
Clear in the morning I used to park my truck towards the sun, or towards where the sun would come up, so when I walked out of the Wal-Mart in the morning at the end of my shift, the windshield would be beginning to thaw. It was cold that Winter, my senior year. There was a blizzard when I went to take the GRE and I fishtailed off the road into a field of snow. I remember I sat there shaking, afraid of what hadn't just happened, watching the vortex of these fat flakes, suddenly still, gentle and drifting, and I remember the how the heater roared, loud now that I was stopped, forcing stale air up the inside of the windshield to melt the flakes as they fell to the glass. Each one, bloated by lake effect, would for a moment be perfect. Then each would collapse upon itself, becoming a spot of water. Winters started early there, and the darkness was heavy. It never lifted and lasted from the early gray through to depressed afternoons and evenings that seemed to buckle under the weight of Winter. Winter there lasted late into the year, and Spring was just an oscillation of false hope and ice that covered everything. The mornings, though, would sometimes be clear. They had a sharpness and they hurt to breath. My eyeballs would be dry and burned from the fluorescent lights, body achy from the forklift and four hundred, five hundred boxes, but in the cold, the iced-over world would seem new, and clear, and it would be, in a way, wonderful. Going back to school from work, I used to try to avoid the janitor. He always tried to give me the gospel again. He and I were the only ones on graveyard shift and I was his mission field and he didn't believe me when I said I believed. In the mornings, though, the security guard came by on his rounds and I sat with him once, and we had coffee in the quiet before the cafeteria opened. My voice was hoarse from not sleeping and he was quiet, sitting there, but I asked him about his tattoo. It was old, fading out blue, a death head, a skull with wings. I asked him was that a tattoo, which was a stupid question, and he said yeah. I asked him was he a biker, because the skull was Hells Angels, and he was bearded and had a face that looked like battered sky. I liked him and wanted to have him talk to me. It'd been a long time since I talked to a man. We sat there and we were silent and I just wanted to say, tell me a story. I asked about the tattoo though, and he looked at his coffee, the little cup tiny in his hands, and he said that was a very long time ago. Then we were silent, and I felt like I'd offended him. I tried to say something else but he shook his head. It wasn't, he said, somewhat defiantly, something he was proud of. It was stupid and a very long time ago. I don't remember seeing him again after that. Maybe I stopped going to sit outside the cafeteria and watch the morning rush of tousled kids with crusty eyes and instead went home to shower, and sleep, and try to write a thesis. I remember the cars would be parked in the driveways, running, heaters on, warming up. I parked in the back of the parking lot, by a light pole, pointing the truck East at the optometrist and the Chinese buffet where the sun would come up about a half hour before I got off work. The frost and snow would still be on the window, but softened a little by the morning. I didn't have a scraper since I wasn't from the North and used instead an old library card that wasn't any good, anymore. I'd hold the edge at an angle, catching the edge of the glass, slicing the frost off in a big sheet. The mornings were good, though. My heater was good. When I clocked out I'd take off my apron and I'd buy a quart of orange juice with the pulp in it. I'd buy a little bacon if I'd been paid. The sun would slant up over the trees by the time I was leaving, and the morning was like a single key played on a piano in an empty room, all possibilities, interesting possibilities, and possibly even in tune. by Daniel Silliman @ 4:50 PM. : Comments 0
20.10.09
Covering Lolita Ockham's broom Lost racing pigeon In praise of the cliche The lessons of Vietnam Named after presidents Sherman Alexie laughs Ray Bradbury's painting Republicans defend rape Barack Obama the writer New biography of Dickens Video tape interrogations Dawkins' arguments evolve Americna roadside rhymes Talking to Michael Chabon A Maurice Sendak sentence Maurice Sendak's thin skin Dylan defiant & invigorating Why we watched balloon boy Obama teaches English in Japan When Joe Biden tells the truth Glenn Beck in a land of Torys Vonnegut: "Look at the Birdie" Listening to Thelonious Monk David Hockney's long road home Vonnegut on schools of writing Don't Ask, Don't Tell is done for Proposing to redesign the dollar Peter Paul Rubins, artist and spy Whither withering conservatism? Don't ask, don't tell in Hollywood Maurice Sendak rewrote the rules Richard Dawkins: I'm not strident Junot Diaz on writing and despair Jonathan Letham talks to Criterion What does balloon boy mean (x5)? Thomas Pynchon and Grand Theft Auto Bookshelves as personal expression Letham's novels for global warming Youth pastor's murder leaves questions Trying to read Hegel as if he was right Donald Barthelme's suggested reading James Joyce got tenure, not immortality Michael Chabon has an "impulse to control" Dylan does Christmas, and it's not a joke Seriously, who would bomb a Zizek lecture? Institutionalists economists win the Nobel Photographing the agriculture of East Anglia Thelonious Monk was an American original Conservative Episcopalians prepare for exodus Jonathan Letham's new novel's nervous energy The memoirs are coming, the memoirs are coming! Can young blood save Germany's Social Democrats? For Safire, grammar wasn't a front in the culture war Dylan does homage to vintage American Christmases Why does the CIA act like it's involved in an Oswald cover-up? What is it like to be in the military with gay men and women? Mad at Wes Anderson and Spike Jonze and their kids movies F.A. Hayek was a socialist & conservatives are all really Randians Jack Kerouac set to music by Benjamin Gibbard and Jay Farrar Donald Kauffman, collector fo toy cars, dies at 79. May he rest in peace. by Daniel Silliman @ 9:43 AM. : Comments 1
16.10.09
After effect It didn't happen right away, but it happened. It didn't happen when she was standing at the scene in her uniform, putting tape up around the dumpster. It didn't happen when she went door to door asking if anyone knew anything, saw anyone, asking please in Spanish and English. It didn't happen when she was typing the report. It didn't happen when she printed it out, the case a single sheet of paper with a seven-digit number, and she got a cup of coffee and saw the precinct was quiet, middle of the midnight shift, except for detectives tellings joking and the lights, which made a hum you could hear when no one was around. It wasn't even at the funeral, at the little Hispanic church where the Pentecostal pastor wore a bolo tie that was a chicken and she sat for the hour and watched the door to see if anyone would come to cry for this baby. Instead it was later. Maria named him Little Angel. She probably shouldn't have. She wouldn't have been on the case at all if she hadn't been the only officer who spoke Spanish. It was a department of white country boys, Vietnam vets and a lot of Marines, big black men and muscled women and she was the only one who was Latino or Latina. She was a patrol cop. Not a detective. If she'd been a detective she would've known not to name a child abandoned on S. Forrest. She would have known nobody, no grandmother, mother or guilty father was going to come to a discount funeral to hear the chicken preacher preach against the Virgin and the Church from his carpet-covered pulpit. She didn't know, though, so she sat in the church that used to be a nail salon while the pastor's wife, an Asian woman, played an upright piano, and she spent the whole time half-turned around to watch the glass door that didn't swing open. A reporter caller her a month after to ask if she'd found out anything or had any leads and she said no. She said it was just so sad. It wasn't even clear it was a crime but they'd wanted to do something. He made her promise to call if there was anything and she said OK, but knew she never would. She knew, too, that no one would ever ask about this again. But that's not when it happened. It was when she was almost falling asleep, when Christmas songs played on the radio, and when she was at a baseball game and everyone stood up to cheer. It was when she was in bed with someone and started to think of random things, and while she waited in lines, and before movies, and in the early morning, on patrol, when everything was very quiet. She wouldn't even think of it, or him, exactly, or be able to say what she was thinking of, but someone would say, Maria, Maria, and she couldn't talk and would be blank except that the blankness was like screaming, and she would be staring as if nothing was there. by Daniel Silliman @ 3:40 PM. : Comments 2
by Daniel Silliman @ 7:53 AM. : Comments 0
13.10.09
He’ll never see Louisiana again New interrogation tactics. But effective. Nothing rough. Instead: Feed him an explanation. Explanation = confession. Appeal to guilt. It’s always there. Find it. Wheedle it. Say: You didn’t mean to. See pictures: Infant body broken. To have been born is to be fucked with guilt. Say: You didn’t mean to. Noir in 50 words by Daniel Silliman @ 7:11 AM. : Comments 0
by Daniel Silliman @ 7:09 AM. : Comments 0
9.10.09
Women at the Texaco: Coda There were a lot of women that came to the Texaco. There were girls in dresses, jeans, school uniforms, in shorts with bikini tops. There were young moms and thickening middle-aged ones, old women, widows, nuns and some he thought might be transvestites. There were little girls who came in with their fathers. There were church women with hats. There were army women and army wives. There were women with blisters, calluses, grease on their hands. There were women who were clearly in love, and ones who talked on their cell phones, women who acted like they owned the world, and ones who looked like they were surrounded. Sometimes, when Ray watched, sitting behind the counter, everything seemed to slow down with his breath, and all the cars and people pumping gas and women stepping into the station seemed all to go too fast. They were in fast forward. When he felt like that he felt disconnected, safe in the silence but also suspended, stuck there. He was, it seemed, in his own personal wind tunnel. Sometimes he tried to talk to the women. Hello and more, patter and have a nice day. Other times he said nothing. Either way he was trying to do it right, to connect and treat everyone with respect. But when he spoke, women seemed to be startled, repelled, and when he was silent they shied away, reporting he was angry, or rude, brooding or leering. Whichever he did didn't seem right. It was always awkward. He was always awkward. Everything was oblique to him. Ray read one time about an author who couldn't write women. He wrote, it was said, as if women were only men with feminine names. Ray wondered, though, how that would be different from how women would seem if you knew what you should say. There were women who ran by the Texaco, sweaty in sports bras. There were women who smelled of fast food, their shirts stained with unfolding flowers of sweat. There were waitresses in uniforms and girls going out to party, butch women with buzz cuts and Camaros, and brown-haired, blonde-haired, red- and black-haired women always coming in and always it was off. There were Jersey girls with pancakes of make-up, baubley jewelry, and a gaudy way of chewing gum. There were Southerners, with syrupy drawls, and girls who dressed like they came from a country they made up themselves. There were women in suits. There were women who were lost, women who paid with ones, and women who were taken care of and carried credit cards that couldn't max out. There were women who handed him tracks, who gave him looks, who didn't look at him. There were women who left menstrual blood smeared in the restroom and women who, most of their lives, most of the places they went, would be remembered by men only as legs or butts or boobs -- disembodied menageries. There were women who wanted flavored cream with their coffee and certain brands of water. There was a woman who he knew dated Jerry, the drug dealer who lived down the street in an apartment upstairs. Her name, he thought but wasn't sure, rhymed with his. There was a Jamacian who came in who must have been seven-feet tall. There was a German au-pair. There was a girl with a cello in her car, her hair in braids, and a girl with braces who always bought gum with her gas. There were many women. They came in opaque parades, like a radio scanning through stations of static. by Daniel Silliman @ 9:31 AM. : Comments 0
7.10.09
A qwerty world Bibliokleptomania Tattoos in literature E.L. Doctorow and rap German book prize list Burning Man time lapse Reformed use of images John Paul Sartre in Texas Revisiting Richard Ford Donald Miller's new book When Amazon is hijacked Gore Vidal: America is rotting Dennis Hopper shot the '60s Georgia O'Keeffe's love letters What the internet has wrought Is the internet melting our brains? Bill Clinton's blue jillion anecdotes Clinton - fireman with arson hobby Bookbinders museum in SF. Calif. Dan Brown and the pirated Symbol Authenticating the Frida Kahlo trove Wishing Ahmadinejad was Jewish How Irving Kristol beget Glenn Beck Tweet and tweet until you feel real What and who Duchamp was doing The poetry of water purification plants Metaphors and the literal way we think Excerpts from the new Kurt Vonnegut Poem to celebrate a piece of punctuation Lunch with Slavoj Zizek and Billy Collins Pictures of Germany's (political) pirate party Violence, Inglorious Basterds and Christians The split at the heart of liberal foreign policy Ending the cycle of presidential love and hate Out and gay in New York in the 70s as an artist The quest for certainty in math: a new comic book Excerpt from Dawkin's The Greatest Show on Earth The Clinton Tapes a splendid political story Robert Creeley in the outfield with the Tampa Bay Rays Bukowski's most recent posthumously published poems Max Cleland tells his story: Vietnam, Walter Reed and Karl Rove Physics and photography: the Nobel and the "switch to digital" Great books, educational striving, authority and the middle brow Norwegian, Nazi, modernist writer: What happened to Knut Hamsun? William Safire, conservative columnist, dies at 79. May he rest in peace. Safire was a hack who posed as a reporter, and sometimes as eloquent Remembering William Safire for allowing others to learn to play with words British police, art, and a picture of a naked child who later became famous Gen. of Guantanamo Bay says he's sorry we lost the high ground The real damages of illusionary power of media personalities Interview with a book reviewer editor from the Wash. Post The Republican's lie machine and the killing of health care Beck vs. glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com Explaining Internet memes & viral satire to the court Trying to save God from followers and despisers James Agee's punctuation is an "aperture of awe" Deception and the history of the lie detector Unsentimental celebration of the coffee waitress What happens when we think about love or sex? German flash mobs going to the high court 3 Americans share Nobel prize for physics The problems of posthumous publication Financial incentives for political outrage Celebrating Samuel Johnson, a big man Coen brother's story Jewish, universal Work spaces: Where and how we work Working as a waitress at Oktoberfest The state of online book reviews American right waxes and wanes Is Ellroy an unchallenged racist? How not to fight in Afghanistan How the WASPs lost their sting The end of an Infinite Summer What is the book reviewers' job? Why no great Indian novel? James Wood on A.S. Byatt Dylan's Christmas spirit Needed: Neo-neo-cons Adjectives and politics Flarf = the smirk of art Teaching the N-Word It's all literature now Artists self-portraits Being Carrie Fisher R. Crumb's Genisis Grunge, a history Noir in 50 words Commune living by Daniel Silliman @ 7:41 AM. : Comments 1
5.10.09
by Daniel Silliman @ 10:32 AM. : Comments 0
Women at the Texaco 3 Ray saw her as she came across from the gas pumps, her yellow skirt like a little sail. She came through the door, it beeped, and four men turned to look at her. She had a little tattoo on her lower back. A butterfly. A flower. Something like that. Not that that was the real reason, though. They all would have looked at her anyway. She was blonde and tanned. She had on black boots that were knee high, the skirt and tattoo, and a top that looked like a corset. There were five men if you counted Ray. They watched as she went to the counter and paid. Ray looked her in the face when he gave her her change. She looked him in the face and he saw she was afraid. It was only a moment. She was silent, there was fear, and he saw the men peripherally, surrounding her. He said what he always said, automatically, in an automatic voice, and told her to have a good day now, and take care. She turned and went, and they watched her, even craning to see how she'd go. They were silent, together in that way, watching. The station was silent until she reached the door and it beeped. Then the four all spoke. The one man said damn, swearing slowly. Asked, had they seen that? One, a fat one with chips, said those were fuck-me-boots, weren't they, and they called that a tramp stamp. An older one said his daughter had a tattoo like that, a stamp was it?, but wow, ungh, it made you ache. Bet she's wildcat, said the fat one. Little blonde like that. The fourth one said hot, hot, hot, like a howl, and he turned to Ray and said he bet that was the best part of this job, all these girls. Ray didn't say anything, and looked out at the pumps. He watched the girl in the yellow skirt. She went and got into her car. Her skirt slid up some on the seat. He didn't say anything to the men or with the men, but didn't know if maybe that made it worse. Whatever he did it still seemed wrong. It still seemed like he was a part of it too. by Daniel Silliman @ 8:15 AM. : Comments 0
2.10.09
Women at the Texaco 2 He was never entirely sure he remembered her. When they said the family was going to sue, Ray didn't even know who she was. He asked what lady were they talking about. The only reason he thought he might remember was because there was one older woman that week who was snappy. He was stocking the shelves of sodas and and didn't see her, didn't see she was ready at the counter, and she told him he was very rude. She said he was exacerbating and she was insulted that he was so rude. She actually said that -- exacerbating, or maybe it was exasperating? He didn't know the difference, and she scowled. That might have been her, but he really wasn't sure. The Texaco lawyers said she bought a pack of peppermint gum and then she died. She had a bad fall on the side of the gas station. The family said a step wasn't marked. It was a question of liability. She lay there for some time, an old woman alone on the pavement, while he was inside putting up sodas and chips. No one knew how long she lay there. When someone helped her up she said she was fine, but her head was hurt and she died that night. The family wanted him to feel bad about it. The lawyers were very careful not to tell him how to feel. If he felt bad then Texaco had to settle the suit. But instead he was kind of confused, asking them to repeat parts. He looked, though they didn't ask, but he couldn't find any record of a sale of gum. by Daniel Silliman @ 7:39 AM. : Comments 1
God can be found in the thank you voice of a guy at the counter in the supermarket or the quietness of a stranger's parking lot smile or the rattle of weeds across a dry summer mohave or watching my unfettered fingers jump jump jumping across the computer keys deep in the middle of typing three hours worth of unscrubbed truth. God for me turned out to be a conscious choice a self-evoked experience just like love. -- Dan Fante He sat down on one end of the sofa, and she sat down at the other end. But it was a small sofa, and they were still sitting close to each other. They were so close he could have put out his hand and touched her knee. But he didn't. She glanced around the room and then fixed her eyes on him again. He knew he hadn't shaved and that his hair stood up. But she was his wife, and she knew everything there was to know about him. -- Raymond Carver by Daniel Silliman @ 7:06 AM. : Comments 0
30.9.09
by Daniel Silliman @ 7:32 AM. : Comments 0
Women at the Texaco 1 She was wearing what looked like a bridesmaid's dress. It was teal, with a big bow on the back. It was too simple to be something for a ball, too bright to be a cocktail dress. Her shoes were matching sea green. Her earrings were teal too, and she was crying very hard. Ray watched from the window, and she was crying while she pumped her gas. She was cold, this was Fall, and she was crying. She went to bathroom. She got herself a coffee and peeled three cups of vanilla cream and one pink packet of nutrasweet. She swept the spilled granules and torn paper into her hand and threw it away, brushing it into the trash, and she stirred her cup with a single straw. She was still crying when she came to the counter, her makeup and nose running, and he thought about not saying anything but the store was empty and he did, asking her was everything OK. She laughed like maybe he shouldn't have asked, or as if his asking was another embarrassment on a bad day, and she said yeah, she was fine. She looked at the candy bars on the shelf for some time and picked out one to go with her coffee. As she was leaving she asked Ray which turn she wanted for New Jersey. He told her, then watched her go. He didn't know if he should have asked or not. He didn't know if he'd made it worse or not. There were a lot of women who came to the Texaco, and every interaction he had seemed wrong. by Daniel Silliman @ 7:28 AM. : Comments 0
28.9.09
In between mountains He always smelled of natural cigarettes and body odor. At parties he juggled sticks he set on fire. Everyone assumed this was because he was from Europe, except at home, where he was the boy who'd gotten lost in America. He never said either way. He read Plato and Arne Naess, but erratically and idiosyncratically, and some days not at all, choosing instead to go sailing on a little tiny duck pond that was surrounded by suburban homes, spending the whole day out there, nude and burning a deep, deep red. He was older than the other students, having served some time as peace keeper. It was in Somalia, or Bosnia, Botswana, or maybe he was just stationed in Switzerland -- it made him older and took a few years but wasn't otherwise clear. It was really hard to imagine him as a peace keeper. It was really hard to imagine him as a student, or a teacher, or anythinlike that. It was hard to imagine him as anything actually. The stories about him were anecdotes that don't come together but only increased like cells endlessly dividing or as bright beads seen in sliding, symmetrical mirrors. He might have been a hippie or a neo-hippie, if anyone ever asked him to say, a Beat Buddhist, teahead of time, a person in a Pynchon novel or an anachronistic actor at Burning Man. Everyone assumed it was just that he was European, though, except at home, where with names like Swen and Olga, Andrij and Bodashka, they wondered what circus this America was. On Thanksgiving Day he drank in a bar on State Street, and he met a girl who said she was a gypsy and from a family where there were only women. She said it was ancient and always they only had girls and it was a secret world of women. He thought that was amazing and believed her and believed gypsy witches would hang out on State Street, in what was a cover band bar. He used to talk about sailing south, hitch hiking from port town to town down to Argentina, where there was a wedding, and then he'd come back up again. It wasn't clear what he was looking for. It wasn't clear what this was, or what continent should carry the adjective. Or was it older. Or newer. He wanted a vision of something of the open sea and to talk to llamas and squat on Hopi land, reading rocks. It was something of a cipher, and a cliche, if cliche can account for confusion, and he never felt like he needed to say what he was looking for or if this was just joy, or being lost. It seemed to everyone though that this was something from a world from before, like a caravan of monotheist men looking for a better land in some big-B better way, and also something new, something people always come to America to do, like the mountain man who said he wasn't lost, but said, very satisfied, he just didn't know which mountain was which for a few days. by Daniel Silliman @ 8:14 AM. : Comments 0
by Daniel Silliman @ 7:36 AM. : Comments 0
25.9.09
Aage Bohr, who explained the shape of the atomic nucleus, dies at 87. May he rest in peace. Jonathan Letham on the emotional gulf between writing a book and seeing it published. Street Fight: Political documentary on new, Obama-esque mayore of Newark Why do we still care about the Raymond Carver-Gordon Lish conflict? Nick Cave talks about his new book, The Death of Bunny Monroe Fight dirty at scrabble, a game of points, corners and frustration Ralph Nader's novel: a utopian fantasy of "super-rich" One clown continues to fight nuclear weapons across America Review of the third edition of the dictionary of the F word Religion for radicals: An interview with Terry Eagleton A disillusioned insider on the last days of G.W. Bush Self-published novel gets 23-year-old case reopened David Brooks defines racism as impossible to prove Cosby talks about The Cosby Show, 25 years later Hear James Ellroy read from Blood's a Rover on NPR James Ellroy's revisionist history roars off the page How the US should build a high-speed rail network Remembering Mary Travers of Peter, Paul & Mary Conservatives debate the value of Glenn Beck Humans hiding: camouflage as art Electric literature: Single sentence animation The business brilliance of the Netflix prize No memory for pain: John Cheever begins Kafka and absurdists makes you smarter Should Derrida be read by philosophers? Peter, Paul and Mary were my people Christopher Hitchens on Irving Kristol What I learned when I killed a chicken Slovoj Zizek's top 10 video moments Underground Berlin: a film treatment Best fiction of the millennium so far Modernistic, modular bookshelves Sick, elderly Nazi retired in Austria Does belief in evolution = atheism? Ukranian history in sand animation Fans of Twilight flock to Forks, Wash. Recording the Clinton presidency When I first met Sherlock Holmes Slow boiling a frog of a metaphor Intellectual conservatism is dead Where does evolution leave God? Karen Armstrong's case for God The inherent ambiguity of WTF James Ellroy on rewriting history Cory Booker's battle for Newark The Frankfurt School in exile A syllabus of Roberto Bolaño Remembering Irving Kristol Michael Moore's new movie Talking to Tess Gallagher Artists' passport photos 30 mosques in 30 days Commercial sculpture Talking to Dan Brown Dan Brown does DC The way we die now Airport photography James Ellroy talks Bukowski in love Ayn Rand today The rural gay Kisses by Daniel Silliman @ 8:08 AM. : Comments 0
23.9.09
Like much if it was all Everything was pretty much closed for Christmas, but he got to the gas station while it was open and had a hot dog there. He bought jerky for later and Marlboro Lights to last 'til tomorrow. The apartment was cold, but Ken slept with his coat. He hadn't had sheets on the mattress in months and the mattress was on the floor, along with most of his clothes and an ashtray he'd taken from a restaurant. The apartment was bigger than he needed now that his wife was gone. The furniture looked like wreckage from a boat. What he had was an easy chair, an empty shelf, a side table with a TV, all floating quietly around the carpet, drifting slowly until it was all bunched up in one corner where the window was. The rain was getting colder now. He went to see if there was something he could take pictures of, but ended up just driving around listening to the police scanner. There was an accident, but no one was hurt. He got one shot of a woman with an umbrella, but it wasn't sharp. They probably wouldn't run anything anyway. It'd have to be really good and even then it'd only be on the inside and not in color. Ken went in to the newspaper and it was warm and no one was there, but it was still depressing to be there on Christmas. He'd have to call his father soon. They'd be back from church soon, and he would call and say hello and great! great! yeah, everything's good. He'd say Diane said hi too, even though she didn't and he knew she probably wouldn't, but he couldn't tell his father that. He couldn't think about what his father would say and he always did anyway in his mind. He thought what his dad would say even though he was always just silent, and sad. If he said anything it would just be to say how you can tell a man's a man by the way he treats his wife and you can't be a man, you know, without the help of Jesus. Diane would be at church too, with her sister and her sister's husband now. She'd probably cry again. The husband did construction and preached at the church some Sundays. Diane had asked him once how come he wasn't like that, and what was he supposed to say? Ken could tell his dad that tomorrow would be 11 years since he stopped drinking, but he wouldn't. It didn't seem like much if it was all he'd made of his life. There wasn't anything on TV. No news except the weather. If there was news he could chase it, but there was nothing. There was a James Bond marathon on but he got bored by it. He watched the end credits of "You Only Live Twice," with Sean Connery, but then it was George Lazenby, dumb and jokey, and ha ha, this never happened to the other fellow. But there was nothing else on. There was some Chinese food left in the fridge in the break room, so he had that. The rice was pretty dry, though. He'd call his dad, he thought, when he was done with this. by Daniel Silliman @ 12:04 PM. : Comments 0
O but how many in their solitude weep aloud like me-- On the bridge over the Republican River almost in tears to know how to speak the right language-- on the frosty broad road uphill between highway embankments I search for the language that is also yours-- almost all our language has been taxed by war. -- Allen Ginsberg, Wichita Vortex Sutra by Daniel Silliman @ 7:50 AM. : Comments 0
21.9.09
by Daniel Silliman @ 4:26 PM. : Comments 0
A few words on an American rabble I wish they did seem alien. I wish I saw them and was startled, not knowing what I was seeing and assessing it immediately as freakish, strange, maybe funny and most certainly unserious. Green with two heads. Alien. Having nothing to do with me. Instead I feel like I know them. I feel responsible. I feel like a man watching his mother wander around senile, without clothes. I feel like an older brother, moved out and on, whose family is now in the news as a deprivation case, or an immigrant always feeling like he has to explain why his people are "like that." They are my people, even if I never wanted it that way. And now I'm overwhelmed by this: I couldn't protect them. I spent a good portion of last week depressed. I watched the 9/12 marchers, like I watched the birthers and the tea baggers, the town hall shouters and take-our-country backers, and I was depressed. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to sit somewhere silent, sit for a long time. I saw wave upon wave of fear, and a froth of anger. I saw paranoia, hysteria, and hatred. I saw history perverted and misinterpreted, conservatism and Christianity warped with ideology and politics and power. And mostly with fear. I saw a lot of fear, fear that foams up in panic, fear fed on whispers, fear that fuels a hysteria that knows no doubt and is raving, raving, raving. And I feel responsible. It's insane to think I could say anything, but I feel like I should have walked up to the marchers to say something, waded in to where they were making signs or stood up in some meeting before the march and said let us not succumb or be overcome with fear. I imagine it, though, and I know I would have to convince them I was them and they wouldn't recognize me, couldn't recognize me and I would want to say we must be calm, we must be charitable, we must be better but instead I would stutter listen! like the owe me that. But they don't, though. And they won't hear, and don't have too, and just because I feel some connection to them doesn't mean they don't see me as alien. Or a traitor. Maybe I'm just remembering things, the scenes of signs connecting to a past that still lingers like guilt. Maybe I made up this responsibility. No one gave it to me. Maybe I'm stuck with memories I should have disowned instead of letting them fester. A scene I remember: It's 1992. October or maybe November, Fall but before Thanksgiving. I am 11. We are in Texas. The Christians are very conservative and also apocalyptic. A woman in a denim dress says to another woman (both of them with their hair in buns and also, I think, one was holding a hoe): Well, she says at least when Clinton's in the White House maybe all the Christians could be jailed together. I remember this like a New Yorker cartoon. A single panel. One woman speaking to the other, and it's not funny, but I wonder if maybe it was intended that way. The more I consider, the stranger the statement seems. Another scene I remember: 1999. Fall again. It must of been, or maybe early winter. Washington. The convention hall is filled with guns, filled like it fills every few months for the show, guns and guns and guns and gear and flags and books, politics, and cynicism. A fear: If you sign anything, the FBI will know you were here. Most people pay with cash. A video, looped and playing endlessly in the middle of this sea of weapons, explains how to make your semi-autos fully auto. The video says it's legal if you buy it today. I remember shelves of borrowed Bircher books and the way the snow fell on unpaved roads. I remember how Rush Limbaugh sounded at noon on the radio plugged into the outlet by the light switch in the barn, the bumper music announcing lunch, cheese and tomato sandwiches wrapped in a bread bag. I think of John Quade, but can't remember his name. I look him up and see he's recently died. He was an actor who played very American villains who always seemed like men I knew: blue collar thugs, the bikers, hard hatters, the gruff and scary old white men who worked with their hands. He played a sheriff in "Roots," and a lot of Western heavies and bad guys in Clint Eastwood movies. When I knew John Quade, I was 16 or 17 and we briefly went to the same church. He was physically frightening, burly and bearded, and his skin was so pockmarked it gave the impression his face was deformed. He was scary, but so were most of the men I knew, and, like them too, he was soft spoken, mostly quiet, and maybe even humble. He was and they were gentle, loving children and wives and always too aware of how hard the world was out there, even if they were never really aware of how they helped make it that way. When I knew John Quade -- enough, anyway, to hear him talk -- he was closely associated with a group that believed "human being" was a secular and evil term, that last names were non-Christian, that there were no such thing as Civil Rights, that America was already under martial law, that joining the bar as a lawyer meant joining an anti-American conspiracy, and that names in capital letters in legal documents meant individuals were turned into corporation. He would talk about it. His speech was "Christianity and Common Law." The group was mostly self educated on old law books. Self education is a very American thing. Good and bad. It means Abraham Lincoln became president. It means public libraries in every community in the country. But it also means that in America, we have a whole subculture of people sure they've debunked Einstein. It also means creationists and people who think they have disproven the moon landings. It means conspiracy theories, with the logic of if-it-could-be-true-it-must-be-true, and hysteria, paranoia, and a misunderstanding of the differences between totalitarian regimes, a misunderstanding of what's free about the free market, and history and economics and culture all filtered through a few political points. In America, with some self education, anyone can grow up to be president, and also anyone can grow up to come up with a conspiracy about the president being illegitimate. Glenn Beck was self educated. Which might part of why he seems so familiar. He does. With his inconsistencies and self-effacement, his rhetorical moves and YOU MUST READ THIS BOOK!, even his sound effects and defensive sense of humor, he seems like someone who would have frustrated me at Thanksgivings and Bible studies. But so does Sarah Palin. I want her to seem like a freak, to seem strange and unheard of, but instead she seems like she could be one of the women I grew up around. She's somehow sheltered from reality and untouched by uncertainty, not really knowing what she says. I do know these people. They are my people, even if they don't really want it that way. And I'm embarrassed for them, and I am silently repeating please stop, please stop, no, please, please stop. It's not like any of them ever listened to me though: Not in the Bible study where I was told that Saddam Hussein was prophesied in Revelation, nor when a woman said Dr. Suess was about drugs; not when I tried to say George W. Bush wasn't conservative or that cutting welfare always means more abortions; not when the young Republicans argued the women and children of WIC were lazy and deserved no help and not when the College Republicans said conservatives should trust the president as he pushed us into war. Not when I tried to say conspiracy was unlikely, or economics was complicated, not when I tried to say ideology was a sin and the principle of charity was important. Not when I said wait a minute. Or calm down. I'm not even a conservative anymore, and haven't been in some time, so I don't know why I feel this way. Responsible. And helpless. I watch those marchers, though, hear these rantings, see the signs, and say to myself, fuck. Fuck. I should've said something to save them from themselves. by Daniel Silliman @ 10:39 AM. : Comments 1
18.9.09
It didn't feel like Indian Summer The street was silent. The stairs didn't squeak. The lights were off and no one said anything. The woman breathed, but that was all. On the phone she had said "OK" but now, here, I sat looking at her as she sat looking at her hands. We sat like that for a long time. "He was a good boy," she finally said. "You speak of him in the past tense." "Well," she said, "he is dead." Then we were silent again. by Daniel Silliman @ 4:13 PM. : Comments 0
16.9.09
The death of David Foster Wallace, one year later Republicans have been like this for awhile now Darwin film too controversial for US Christians? Culture of personal crisis has radicalized right Science was a muse to inspire romantic art Don't tell me what 9/12 means, Glen Beck The complicated heroism of Pat Tillman The best Southern non-fiction of all time The John Dingell health care legacy The best Southern novels of all time Stories of Michigan full of despair Inside an ambush in Afghanistan Derrida and speculative realism The creation of Charles Darwin German politics: Yes we yawn The 9/11 anniversary racket The truth about bestsellers Half the Sky, a manifesto Boxers before and after William Trevor talks Teleology and evolution Portnoy's Complaint at 40 Neil Patrick Harris is a magician Walt Whitman as shoot and aim Drudge's relevance faded and gone Michael Pollan reads Wendell Berry Charles Bukowski and the computer The evolution of the Origin of Species Physicist investigates Wagner's opera What's the problem with the 9/11 novels? Osama bin Laden's suggested reading list An impolite interview with Shel Silverstein E.L. Doctorow's Homer & Langley chapter 1 Listening to Lester Young, by John Ashberry A new age of literacy -- brought to you be txt The Evolution of God is Creationism for liberals The problem with all these shows with the hero cop Harun Yahya, Muslim creationist, cult leader and charlatan Dear Mr. President Bush, please take responsibility for torture How liberal can win by losing in the conservative Supreme Court Questions raised by rights group's analyst's Nazi memorabilia collection Reviewers reveal attitudes towards the midwest in reviews of Lorrie Moore by Daniel Silliman @ 8:14 AM. : Comments 0
14.9.09
What Wade would write in his letters The machine gun was mounted by the swimming pool. The sandbags were stacked there, cross-tied like bricks, and the gun was mounted up on a swivel and pointed down the hill, taking in the orchard and the road. Wade had burned all his government documents in the grill out there, squirting lighter fluid on his drivers license and social security card, birth certificate and a whole file of documentation for the taxes he'd paid. It'd been a little ritual, a declaration that he was now a free man. A Common Law Christian. Pro Se. For Himself. With all the rights and responsibilities pursuant to his own life, which was given by the Creator and not within the jurisdiction of the government or any secular, civil authority. He'd had meetings out there, too, with the group, by the pool and the grill and the gun, drinking beer and sharing news and predictions about when the new world order would come. He'd had his grandkids out there to swim in the pool, and he'd watched them run around with their swimmies on, flinging themselves screaming into the pool. He'd drink his beer and laugh at the grandkids, mad at the son-in-law who wouldn't ever come out to the family things and ignoring the one who came but lurked in the living room and always seemed scared of Wade with his beard and his mounted gun. But most of the time, when he was out there, he was by himself. He liked to watch the way the sun set over Bakersfield. The dirty city and the desert sky together made the sunset more violent, and he liked to watch the streaks of orange and the way the purple would rise up from the earth to fill the sky, the evening reddening as the bats began to fly and the machine gun was turned into a mounted silhouette. But then things changed. Times changed. He changed. The 90s ended and the new world order never came. The towers fell and everything was different. Now his grandson was serving in a tank division and Wade was insanely proud of that. He hadn't felt like that since when he was a kid and his dad told him about fighting in France in WWII. Like he was an American. In was weird how different things were now. He didn't feel like he was the last man standing anymore and it all seemed like an interlude, an odd but passing period, a little like having a car with a problem that you couldn't figure out, consuming and never-ending and also easily forgotten. His daughter was packing weekly care packages to send to Iraq, and Wade was writing letters, writing a little every afternoon. While he wrote he looked out at the pool, cluttered with leaves, and thought about how to say what he'd learned. He didn't want to sound like an old man. He was careful, pausing over his pad, looking up, out the window, and looking at the machine gun on the swivel. He didn't want to say he was embarrassed by it, but it lacked any context now. He didn't know, though, how to say what the context really was. He tried to write extremism in defense of liberty but it seemed wrong and he crossed it out. This was more like looking at a historic party hat with a propeller and trying to explain that. Except, of course, it was a machine gun he'd mounted by the pool where his grandchildren played during the longest period of prosperity in history. It was rusting there now, a relic, titled up at the sky. by Daniel Silliman @ 5:52 PM. : Comments 0
by Daniel Silliman @ 9:41 AM. : Comments 0
12.9.09
The date now known as a date that has no place in years Before it happened, before it ever happened or could have happened even, we had imagined it all in our minds. We had seen it. And known it. And it was familiar to us and like a birthday party where when the cake came and the song was being sung we knew we had known this and this song was oddly off or misremembered and was this the tune? It was strangely like last time, was it last year, but and we had this memory of birthdays before and candles and were they put out at the end? Was that how this would end? There was this image of smoke and dissipation. After it happened, after it was over and gone and never could happen again that we wouldn't connect it to this and say remember? It's just like when ____. And then we had already seen it. We had already, even if this was the first time. It was weird and like the mystery of the Mona Lisa where the real one wasn't as real as the reproductions, and it wasn't the reality but the imitatable ambiguity that was bothering us anyway with this obliqueness that was or must have somehow been in us. We had seen it and seen it and seen it all as if our seeing made it so, and so we stared on unsettled. And we started at the yolks of our eggs as they ran the next morning. by Daniel Silliman @ 1:36 AM. : Comments 1
11.9.09
by Daniel Silliman @ 8:25 PM. : Comments 1
9.9.09
"Dust stanched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair below their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and the horses lay screaming. " -- Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian One NY rest stop Rockabillies today Death of one Marine Photo of one dead Marine Nihil Unbound is now a PDF T.S. Eliot kept his day job The top 10 books on Lenin Brazil's health care system Neil Gaiman's bookshelves Talking with Richard Russo Comedians in the 70s in LA Norman Mailer, 2 years dead Recession and the arms trade The posters of American Labor American Govt: American opera James Ellroy: Beethoven fanatic Early review rips Letham's latest Full grown boy, lost in Las Vegas Looking at the fire lookout towers The tabloid right's World Net Daily Darwin slant on the Obama slogan Seeking an apology for Alan Turing The fights in the Frida Kahlo industry Reclaiming the concept of commune David Foster Wallace turned into film Another way that torture doesn't work Read an excerpt of Blood's a Rover James Ellroy talks up Blood's a Rover Graphic novel about a boy without a voice Moby Dick and the Baader Meinhof gang Spike Jonze and Where the Wild Things Are Experiments in multi-generational music Goatee: icon of the new evangelicalism Redesigned covers for Raymond Carver The business of impersonating presidents A novel about poetry that is about poetry Obama and the problem of over-correction J.M coetzee's conversation with alter egos Regrets of a former "young William Faulkner" Chess master loses game to drinking problem Nick Cave's new novel: Death of a Ladies Man Canadian's anti-Hutterite ruling misses the point Lorrie Moore's latest is a novel about lies of all kinds 20th century Amer. lit and the question of MFA programs Nick Hornby sort of celebrates the demise of record stores A movie about adult women struggling to express their gifts The Office's Jim Halpert adapts David Foster Wallace to film What a city needs: The battle between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs Between pop-up art and a visual poem, book recreates architectural space The reading list of suspected terrorists: Harry Potter, Don Quixote, Barack Obama The disappearing of a journalist's story about Russia, Chechnya, suspicious of subterfuge Incest, rape, murder, lies, fratricide, genocide, lust, bloodlust, revenge and mass murder: R. Crumb does the beginning of the Bible by Daniel Silliman @ 7:38 AM. : Comments 0