Knifethrust of Thought

Madness as Sanity, Reality as Madness: These were popular terms in the nineteen-seventies, a time when the twinning of opposites seemed profoundly philosophical and concepts such as these were intensely meaningful to someone with an armful of horse.

Speaking of Gore Vidal, he didn’t look like a wretched old Queen until he started launching the little bee bees that are all he has remaining from his blunderbuss days as the pinup girl of Marxian polemics.  Oddly enough, I met him in 1990 at a fundraiser during his surreal—it could have been directed by Fellini—Senatorial campaign in California, and he never looked me in the eye, though all I said to him was, “How are you?”  On the other hand, his sulky lips and aristocratic jaw worked perpetually as though he’d got some peanut particles lodged inside the crevices of his teeth.  Aha, I thought.  A man who’s not comfortable with his masquerade.  (When they asked me, “What about the money?”, on my way out, I replied, “I’m the wrong flavor, friend.  I bleed red.  I was just here to see the bon vivant and litterateur, not the hard-charging candidate.”)

I was a phenomenon of rather far-fetched notability when I was thirteen: a pubescent white boy residing in a middling suburb of a fair-to-middling city in the South in the early 1950s whose ardently embraced role model, hero and highest god was the ever-laughing black musician and performer Louis Armstrong, the self-taught (musically and every other way) son of a prostitute plying the night-side of New Orleans, the greatest musical improviser since Beethoven, the most important figure in American music in the 20^th century (rivaled probably only by Stravinsky in the world), a cultural revolutionary, a marijuana devotee and laxative-consumer extraordinaire. So what did I know, right?  Well I knew this: What I loved about Satchmo as a young teen, and I do mean loved, I later confirmed to be the sine qua non of the greatest art man produces—-the joyous making of something new, brilliant and affecting from the nondescript raw materials of everyday existence.  Pops’ bucket didn’t have a hole in it.

Hollywood celebrities who “make statements on politics” resemble fart-cushions.

Now It Can Be Revealed: Al Gore is the very first animatronic replica of a human being to have been publicly circulated as an autonomous personage.  We may from this vantage point detect that the genius of the experiment lay in releasing it/ him into the realm of politics during the Age of Media.

Al Gore is to politics as Paulie Shore is to movies and as Anna Nicole Smith is to television—surreal nonentities who inspire the kind of whickering laughter we produce when we can’t believe our eyes.

Ambitions of the Young. I: Listening to some young people talk about their “plans”—to become rock stars, movie stars, CEOs, media magnates, big-bucks athletes, television celebrities—I am reminded of those late-night infomercials which purport to show you how to make millions and millions of dollars in a matter of hours: “First you buy downtown Cincinnati….”  The target audience doesn’t know enough to grasp the flagrant absurdities of palaver like this, because they’ve never considered what their dreams entail.  “I didn’t want to ‘be a writer,’” said William Faulkner.  “I wanted to write.”

I think Julia Child is a deity.  She once replied to an unhappy talk-show caller who contended that a prominent restaurant overcharged for its food: “My dear, it’s not how much it costs that counts.  It’s whether it’s worth it.”  To a carping health faddist on the same talk-show, Julia delivered herself of this rejoinder with the whiz-bang clangor of a meat-cleaver splitting ribs: “I like my beef as bloody as I can damn well get it!”

Huge personal anguish: Today (12/19/02) I’m forced to see my prose for what it is: puerile, inadequate, inept, anemic, bathetic, vapid and clumsy-booted.  I have just finished reading a column—the first of his I’ve seen—by James Lileks.  If I used a pen to write with, I’d break it.  As it is, I can’t destroy the thinkbox, because it belongs to my daughter.  I’ll have to suffer my humiliation before its mooted, mocking visage.

Narrative fantasy (think Hitchcock in this case) needs two things indispensably: brilliant artifice and an evocation of emotions conveyed in a way that grounds them in the psyche.  Without the former, our emotions are insufficiently objectified; they remain amorphous and are not successfully culminated, exorcized and plainly viewed in the aftermath.  Without the latter, the artifice sticks out like a brittle, skeletal, slapped-together construct reminding us of a Tinker Toy windmill, pathetic and silly and all the more so as the plot continues permutating pointlessly, irritating us more than anything else (cf. Minority Report).  We never assent to such a narrative because it never jibes with our interior sense of what comprises psychic reality.  In tandem, however, the universal emotions and the expressive artifice support and energize each other, making for a slam-bang ride on the toboggan run known as Galloping Dementia.

E(instein)=m(ind)c(ontrol) squared

Vladimir Nabokov had a hell of an idea.  I’ll reconstruct what I believe to be his thinking: If I could just get the brain, or rather the mind, out of the way, I could light the sensibility up like a Christmas tree and take the reader’s emotions on a real sleigh ride.  But the mind imposes patterns of its own stemming from its expectations and preconceptions.  Those puerile patterns interfere with my patterns—and thus with my ability to strike directly at the heart.  How might I divert and occupy the mind so I can work my sorcery? I know what I can do.  I’ll give the mind some intellectual games to keep busy with, and I will make them so devilishly complex—what with puns, word games, brain teasers and the most obscure references imaginable—that the donkey of all organs will become oblivious of what’s going on in the rest of the person.  Surely V.N. was the greatest fiction writer of the second half of the 20^th century.

Harrison Ford resembles an actor the way a sign painter resembles Michelangelo.

Defenders of the mainstream press often ask this Killer Question: “If we’re so liberal, why did we give President Clinton such a hard time?”  But the question doesn’t meet the critic’s point.  The only thing a news organization fears worse than not being politically correct is missing out on a scandal.  In journalism, the feeding frenzy trumps everything.  Not only that, but the Clintons have levitated into Celebrity, another show-stopping “news” category.

Humor is often cruel, as in, “Canada is America Lite.”  But cruel humor is often merciful, as in, “He’s so dumb the new ‘smart’ virus rejected him.”  Then again, some cruel humor just sucks horribly, as in George Carlin.

Watch a man pick up a baseball and heft it in his hand, peering at it.  You are looking at a Proustian Moment.

Bill Clinton is a man the way a rotted plank is timber.  He was a President the way a mound of dung is Mount Rushmore.

What would you do if you spotted Roseanne Barr, Joan Rivers, Barbara Walters, Sally Jesse Raphael and Rosie O’Donnell having cocktails at their favorite watering hole?  Flush it.

Annals of the Fine Art of Rearranging Flesh:

Michael Jackson: the artificial lamb.  Cher: They told her she could live as many as eighty years in her present reincarnation, but she misunderstood.  She thought they said that she could have as many as eighty reincarnations in her present life.  Elizabeth Taylor: Wipe that smile off your forehead, Liz.  Barbara Wah Wah: Do you have a Pekinese, lady, or was that you trying to say something?  Zsa Zsa Gabor: Yes, what kind of foundation do you recommend applying to spackling? Joan Rivers: Smile, dear, and start another avalanche

I spotted John Updike in Washington’s National Airport one day during the Nineteen Eighties.  A man who bears a likeness to the character Punchinello in Commedia dell’arte, the illustrious author acted (as Punch himself was wont to do) like a being from a different dimension of reality.  Exhibiting “writer’s preoccupation” in full panoply, he really was trying to conduct himself normally while spontaneously spinning out his graceful yet incisive sentences in their eye-beguiling variety of constructions, all the while displaying an occluded gaze despite the throngs of passengers and a facial activity that mimicked itchy mastication, though he would give a start when somebody jostled him, halting abruptly to peer at the jostler as though the latter were an animated clothes bag while the skirt of his overcoat flounced about his knees.  God was that a great sight.  Updike is one of America’s national treasures as far as I’m concerned, and yet observing the writer I was reminded of no one so much as Holden Caulfield.