blistermilk-blog1 - Tumblr blog

[blistermilk-blog1]

[blistermilk-blog1]

Escondido, 1999

I worked for a season in a strip mall in Escondido. I was editing and revising and formatting books. I would arrive early in the morning and stay late at night. I was there all the time the summer of 1999.

I lived in a house with three guys, two of whom were seminary students at Westminster Theological Seminary. The other, Gregory, was a natural born philosopher; we hit it off immediately. He picked me up from the bus station (my living situation was, loosely speaking, "arranged" by my employer, to whom I owed money) and our conversation started there, the type of talk that is harder to come by these days. Even though we disagreed on many subjects, and often these were not superficial but very deep disagreements, we were instant kin.

The other guys did not spend a lot of time hanging out, though I remember one of them, whose name escapes me, who was fond of Thomas Merton and talked to me about him often. He also recommended to me George Elliot's "Middlemarch," which I have still not read.

The house was a bachelor's pad. It was mostly clean, but the bathroom was abhorrent. That is all there is to say.

Someone owned a stereo and I played a lot of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Ben Harper and Cake, depending on my mood.

I dated two women in the summer of 1999 in Escondido. Kristi, who I knew in Bible College in Twin Peaks, and I "hung out" briefly. And I met a Filipina girl from San Diego who drove over several times to hang out with me and things got heavy fast, and ended just as quickly. I do not remember her name, but I do remember that she liked it when I played Ben Harper.

I was intrigued by Magic Eye books.

I did not own a car. I usually walked to and from work, a few miles, or on occasion rode a bicycle. It was not my bike. I do not remember at all whose bike it was.

At night I stayed at the office and turned out the lights. I wrote. I averaged about one short story a week that summer. And I wrote book reviews for epinions.com and made enough cash to eventually take a trip to St. Louis on a whim. But that was later. I met people on epinions like David Abrams, who was then known as Grouch, but is now known as the author of Fobbit and Brave Deeds, who sent me some photocopied stories by other authors and discussed RIchard Ford with me. And Letitia Trent, who exchanged poetry with me, and now publishes poetry and novels, such as Echo Lake and Almost Dark. I met about a dozen fine people on that pre-social media site, a precursor to social media, with whom I am still in sporadic contact nearly twenty years later.

I averaged about one short story a week that summer. I was in the late stages of recovering from a brutal, heartbreaking divorce in 1997, a marriage that lasted six months, my first love. My stories played on the themes that arose from that difficult period, mixed with imitation of the somewhat hypermasculine writers I admired then, the "dirty realists," which included Carver and Cheever and all the rest.

I discovered Haruki Murakami in Escondido in the summer of 1999. And RIchard Yates. And Ann Beattie. And Iris Murdoch. And many others. It was a wild compact summer, and I read constantly. I recall even reading Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" in a fervent week while walking my bike to work. And exploring Kierkegaard. And Bertrand Russell. Where did I find the energy?

I heard the new song, "Yellow" by Coldplay and thought they were trying to sound like U2, and criticized them for being derivative, but secretly liked the song.

One day when I was alone at the house, a young Marine based in San Diego showed up looking for my roommate, who was not there. Apparently, even though I did not know him, I sufficed, and he and I spent a couple of hours, drinking beers and bullshitting. My life of hedonism was in full force.

At the office, the adjacent business was run by Mexican immigrants, and I made friends with them. They were worried about keeping their business open, and because I was at the office all the time sitting at a computer, probably thought I was somebody important, or someone with money. I was neither. The guy offered me some coffee and brought me into the labyrinth of their office space, dark rooms filled with stuff. They reupholstered furniture. Very private looking spaces. We walked through several rooms and came to a small kitchenette with a coffee pot. "You can come in and make yourself coffee anytime," he told me.

I tried to explain to him that I was like everyone else, struggling to get by, and not in any kind of position to help him financially. He talked about his fears of having to go back to Mexico. I felt for him, and listened. That's all I had for him, unfortunately.

Another day a man pushing seventy stopped by to sell me a shower head. He was extremely skilled at the craft of salesmanship. Why would I want a showerhead? He was magic. His hands moved gracefully as he presented the showerhead to me, and his speech was hypnotic and hard to resist. The show alone, I believed, was worth the $30, so I paid him cash then and there, and he left, satisfied. Not sure what happened to the showerhead, though.

So much more happened. But I did not stay. Within the next year I traveled and worked in St. Louis, Huntington, West Virginia, Albuquerque, Calistoga, CA, and finally, Lawrence, Kansas.

[blistermilk-blog1]

A Small Defense of Prayer

I wholeheartedly agree that giving one's "thoughts and prayers" during a moment of tragedy is a glib, even insulting, move when one does not behave in accordance with the objective. My namesake, James, who was the brother of Jesus, wrote stingingly about those who met beggars at their door with, "God bless you!" but did nothing to alleviate their need. That empty platitudes are in fact empty is no surprise -- James said they were dead. For me, though, as a single thought among many one might have regarding prayer, there is a great benefit to prayer for others that moves hand in hand with one's behavior. It's true that one's behavior can be a prayer. Giving attention to people who otherwise might be invisible or ignored can be prayer. But I am not even thinking of this. I am thinking of prayer as a refuge, a home in my own humanity. I could not possibly give attention -- which is the working root of love -- to as many other people as I would like, so I can only meet them one on one, and the person who is before me I can give my attention to and "pray" for them through the way that I treat them. But that's quantitative and for all practical purposes, endless. I think of the story about Jesus being overwhelmed by the people pressing against him, by his fame, and fleeing from them. He didn't do this because he didn't like people, or because he was an introvert or anything like that. He fled in order to pray. It occurs to me that there is a kind of prayer, a meditation, through which I might embrace the source of my own being, and my own being is not who I am as an individual, but who we are as a diverse, wild, colorful array of people, embedded in all of nature, including all life and even matter itself. So when I pray in that way, which I sometimes do, and connect with the mystery of being, I never pray by myself, but my prayers are wrapped up in the prayers of everyone who prays, and these prayers are for all of life and all of nature, including matter. So it seems that when I pray in this way, I embrace my own humanity, and in that embrace, I also am able to embrace in a qualitative way everyone, and even nature, including all the animals and plants and life, and matter, the whole cosmos. But this isn't a mystical thing, at least not in the way people think that things can be mystical. It's really a practical thing to pray in accord with one's intent and one's behaviors, wordlessly maybe, or not. It feels to me like action and behaviors without this kind of spiritual connection transmutes into nothing more than an even fight, a match between mutually ambiguous enemies, and ultimately doesn't serve any real purpose. So yeah, this is just a simple thought on prayer, and why maybe we shouldn't dismiss it just because it is often egregiously misused.

[blistermilk-blog1]

A Review of Justine Bateman’s “Fame”

Justine Bateman, the actor who played “Mallory” on the television show “Family Ties” in the 80s and 90s, was never really on my register.  I remember the show, of course. Justine Bateman, the actor (who is also a director, writer and digital media guru) wasn’t someone I ever thought about. Recently, I was considering putting together a website to serve a specific target, and while doing online research came across her Tumblr in which she blogs about going back to school as an older student, which is something I also did. Hm, I think.  I saw she had just published a book on fame, which interests me, so I bought the audio version and listened to it while doing mundane tasks at work.

Bateman’s book, “Fame: The Hijacking of Reality,” is a compelling personal essay.  I won’t call it a memoir because she apparently dislikes memoirs. I am guessing this is her disclaimer; she is not writing this book as an act of self-indulgence (she never says this, but I think memoirs are often wonderful and tend to love them so I am trying to give her an excuse for her hatred of them). And it does not come across this way -- as an act of self-indulgence. She describes what it is like to be really famous, and then to see fame decline.

Her narrative didn’t really get my attention until she mentioned Rene Girard. I have long loved Girard’s work, though I think some of it is flawed. His notion of mimetic desire is intriguing.  I’m not sure it fully explains the ephemeral quality of “fame,” but it goes a long way in describing some of the ways in which fame is socially constructed because that’s what fame is, a social construct.  Social constructs are powerful.  It’s almost impossible for most people to not identify with their gender, for instance. Or their race. But I digress, which is why this is not really a review. It’s more of a response, I guess.

Bateman’s writing really takes off when she describes her reaction to some people on an online bulletin board who attack her appearance, people who are apparently surprised that she did not forever remain twenty years old. That section is worth the price of the book itself because it demystifies some of the cloud of gauze, the charisma, surrounding fame. And it was moving.

Bateman also provides some anecdotes about the challenges of fame, people coming up to her, people threatening her, the mania of fame, people treating her almost as if she is a saint with unmerited trust, and the shock and strangeness of what happens when it declines. The book has a lot in it about identity, which I think is extremely intriguing.

I think there are a couple of ways to understand the dynamic of fame, and this is where I more or less respond to the subject rather than specifically to the book. First, the thing which Bateman describes as the “sheathe” of fame, the being on, the charge, is not something totally exclusive to celebrities. It’s charisma. It operates in love affairs, as well as in any kind of culture where status becomes possible. In that measure, I consider fame to be a social construct that is acquired rather than intrinsic to identity.  

If you juxtapose fame with something like gender, you might understand both in a new way. As Judith Butler says, we perform gender, but we don’t set the constraints of what gender is, or the expectations of others who contribute to our performance.  Don’t let the idea of gender as a social construction fool you into thinking it isn’t something that is extremely powerful. We perform fame as well, both the person who is famous and those of us who are not. We do it unconsciously. We accept it as a reified substance in much the same way that we accept gender. People assume gender is a part of nature, that men are masculine and women are feminine, and that both words have very specific meanings that denote very specific characteristics. We tend to reify fame as well and to attribute fame to nature, rather than to social construction.

Bateman describes how this impacted her identity, her sense of self. She knew that fame is an act and that there are rules to follow, but then felt some confusion about who she was actually, who her true self is. This is a very compelling part of her narrative.

Secondly, in psychoanalysis, there is the tendency to project the unconscious aspects of our selves onto others. Usually we hear this described as projecting our bad characteristics onto other people as a method of diffusion. If you come across someone who endlessly annoys you who you really don’t like, chances are that you are reacting to characteristics you see in that person that are really your own traits. But we also project the positive attributes of ourselves of which we are unaware onto others, which I think plays a huge role in the construction of celebrity and fame. It isn’t just that we want what the celebrity has, as Girard says, but we are what we see in the celebrity, and the construction of fame is a way people collectively seek to find themselves. It really does serve a sort of spiritual function, which is why the cult of celebrity in the United States might be seen as at least a quasi-religious institution. People want to be near fame because what they are looking for is their whole selves, albeit through a finite channel which will never be able to supply what they are looking for. If this results in some identity conflicts for the famous person, who thereby becomes confused about who they themselves are, while tragic it is no surprise.

We are left with the irony of the celebrity as the weird sort of positive scapegoat, fame a dynamic of both mimetic desire and projection in all of its stages: at its height where the person is lauded and treated like a god, and in its decline where stigmatization occurs (mentioned by Bateman), and in its dethronement, where the famous person is no longer treated as an object of worship, but still remains in the periphery of the collective memory.

This might explain at least partially why some people delight in bashing famous actors when they see them do things that normal humans do, such as grow older or gain some weight rather than remain in the perpetuity of film or video that their characters inhabit, or in cases other than Bateman’s behave in some kind of flawed but human manner.

I did a search of Justine Bateman’s name to see what other more serious reviewers were saying about this book, and came across a clip of her when she was very young, maybe seventeen. In the clip, the guy interviewing her asks her what it is like to be famous, or something along those lines. She seems abashed, and laughs, embarrassed possibly by the reality, but denies that she is famous simply by saying, “famous?” As the epilogue to hearing her book read to me, it felt kinda poignant.

[blistermilk-blog1]

Halloween

My daughter told me she wanted to be a werewolf for Halloween, and pointed me to the website with the ears, tail and paws that would create her costume. Her mom suggested a mask, but she rejected that immediately. "I don't want to be a scary werewolf!" she said. She wore it to school, but it rained incessantly all day, so she did not go trick-or-treating. She is apparently fine with that, and still happy. Her temperament is sometimes shocking.

++

I recall taking my kids trick-or-treating once in Lawrence, Kansas, and one of the fathers we met on the sidewalk seemed overly-interested in where everybody lived. He wanted to be sure no poor people were invading his neighborhood. I just told him where we lived, which wasn't far but was not the same neighborhood, technically, and he just said, "huh" and kind of sneered. I guess he was doing Halloween as an outraged, socially inept Facebook persona.

++

My mom spent hours when I was in the fifth grade constructing costumes for my brother and me. She must have purchased a lot of aluminum foil because the end result was a complete cylon costume that fit over the entire body. (Cylons were the bad android guys from the original Battlestar Galactica.) That's the only costume I really remember from childhood, which is odd, but probably because my mom put such effort into it, and it was successful and different from the other costumes kids were wearing, and I wore it proudly to school and that night trick-or-treating. That was possibly the last year I went trick-or-treating as well.

++

I saw some guy posting about how it's actually Reformation Day, as if he has pinned the true thing down -- never mind All Saints Day, or even before that, possibly the pagan Samhain. It doesn't matter, dude. Anyone seeking to discredit a present custom based on its origins is committing the genetic fallacy. And in any case, being a bit frightened on purpose, dressing up to be someone we are not and putting on an act, and perhaps inculcating a bit of superficial morbidity is not all that different than celebrating the Reformation; it seems to me like its just a technical distinction.

[blistermilk-blog1]

Vanity

Just recalled a therapist I saw a few years ago. When I told him I was taking classes for poetry, he started to tell me about his own project. It was often with this guy that the tables would turn and he would talk about himself while I listened. I am not sure how aware he was of it. He worked in prisons for most of his life.

When he talked about the poetry he had written my eyes glazed over. I could feel it happening. I tried to look interested. His major issue with me was that he could not read me. He claimed I had little affect. He warned I shouldn't try to fake emotion on account of him.

He said he sent his poems to a contest and that he won something, and was invited to attend a ceremony to claim his award. There was also some kind of payment involved -- him paying them not the other way around. "It might have been a scam," he allowed. But he looked hopeful, like he wanted me to say, "oh no. Probably not. That kind of thing doesn't happen." But I did not say that.

I said something along the lines of, "hm. who knows," while thinking, yes. It was definitely a scam.

We had this same conversation at least three times. When he started telling me about his poetry, I knew where it was leading. I listened anyway, or tried to listen. His poems were about birds. He might have wanted me to ask to see them, but I refrained.

When I was fourteen years old, I entered a poetry contest, and it was a scam. I had some inclination at the time, but had been sending out manuscripts for three long years with self-addressed stamped envelopes (SASE).

Usually, I did not include enough postage, but somehow my thick envelopes always reached their publisher, and the rejection slips always reached me. They probably knew me at the post office.

Most of it was science fiction. The poem that was accepted for the American Poetry Anthology had a science fictiony ring to it. It rhymed. My seventh grade teacher had taught me how to count syllables. I decided to count it as an acceptance amid all the rejection.

I do not remember exactly how much they wanted me to pay for the privilege of winning their contest. It may have been sixty dollars. I do recall thinking I could come up with the money somehow. I still have that feeling at times when I am broke and I need money. It's there to be had if I can just figure out how to get at it. My brain goes into gear. I tell my mother about some of the plots. She says, if you want us to pay for the book, we will do it. A gift.

My parents send the money to the scammer, whose advertisement I probably found in Writer's Digest magazine alongside articles by Lawrence Block and various other hacks.

My mom takes a photo of me. I try to look dreamy as I think a fourteen year old who writes poetry should look. I unfocus my eyes. In the photo, I look peculiarly unintelligent, perhaps impaired. My hair is curly and unkempt. I am smiling. I look happy despite my learning disability. Or maybe in spite of it. "Are you sure you want to use this picture?" my mom asks. I am insistent.

When the book arrives, it is thick with the vanity of hundreds of people. I open it up and read a poem randomly and know instantly that everything is worthless, and that my parents have wasted their money. I do not second guess this. Even at age fourteen, I know.

Someone has written, "Abe Lincoln was a good old man/if he can't do it, no one can." This is not my poem, but it appears in the same pages. Numerous people have their biographies published. Mine is short. It says I am fourteen and a freshman in high school, and that I write science fiction, fantasy and comedy.

Other people have paid for long descriptions of their ambitions and dreams, their other vanity prizes, their jobs, the names of their children. Lives of the poets, eight hundred pages in three columns of small print filled with dreck.

I never mentioned any of this to my therapist. My brother, when he was in college and in a frat house, submitted poems to various publishers. He tells me his poems were all romantic, based on his various relationships, and that almost all of the rejection slips he received mocked him for writing and submitting poetry fit for a style five hundred years ago.

When he graduated from Oregon State University and applied at Boston College, he did not include any poems, but his transcript included a class that he took just for the credits: Intro to Dentistry. All of his other classes were in philosophy, economics and finance. He graduated with a double major, one in International Economics and the other, I forget. He was a founding member of the Republican Club at OSU. He received a rejection for grad school from Boston College with a handwritten scrawl in the margins: "You've got to be kidding, right?"

He was accepted at Fordham University. He gave up on poetry and became an economist, and has published numerous papers I can't make heads or tails of, and now brags that he is a millionaire. I stuck with poetry and con artists and the dreamy look and am lucky to have enough every paycheck to pay for coffee.

[blistermilk-blog1]

Confession

More than twenty years ago I took a wrong turn after dropping my brother off at college in Corvallis, Oregon, and wound up driving through slick, cold, snow and ice-covered roads in the mountains of Oregon, utterly lost. Other than me, there was no traffic as evening approached because my car -- a boat, a large Chevy Malibu Classic -- spun completely around in three-hundred and sixty degree slides at least twice. After it was dark, the snow falling, I discovered a lodge and pulled up into the parking lot, hoping to get directions and to use the bathroom. The person who greeted me was extremely rude, would not offer directions, and refused to let me use the bathroom. I am surprised at my memory of my response and of how my situation made me feel both isolated and somehow free to act without consequences. I urinated on the walkway outside the door to the lodge before getting back into my car and navigating my way onward.

[blistermilk-blog1]

Writing

Like many children, I started writing before I knew how. I scribbled loops and slashes across a page, not knowing the alphabet, in an attempt to construct sentences. I did not care what the sentences said, nor do I think I had any pretense to care. Writing was the thing. Since I seemed so avid, other people encouraged me. For parents and teachers to encourage writing is acceptable. When my daughter talked about how she wanted to be a rock star, our response was less enthusiastic. And before that, when she was two, and said that when she grew up she wanted to just sit at home and drink coffee, we just laughed. Then again, when I was in my teens and my parents were no longer whimsically asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up, but seriously asking me what the hell was I planning, I told them I wanted to be a pimp. When that exasperated them, I later changed my answer to "an electrical impulse." I recall my mom saying, "you want to be an electrical impulse? I don't even know what that means." When my dad angrily pressed me, mostly because of my failing grades and my exit from high school (my parents thought I dropped out, but I actually earned an equivalency to graduation by taking a test), I confessed to wanting to be a writer. He tore that down, and said it was unrealistic, a dream, and told me I was a pseudo-intellectual who would probably dig ditches for a living. There is nothing wrong with digging ditches for a living, but I got the gist; his nickname for me for years was "shit-for-brains." What better recourse is there for a pseudo-intellectual kid with shit for brains than to become a pimp, and if that fails, pursue electrical impulsion as plan b? Granted, I was rebellious. I walked out of high school classes and went home when I got bored, which was often. I dressed up with suit and tie and wore heavy makeup like David Bowie to all-day detention (called, as if I lived in an Orwell novel, the "motivation center"), carrying my briefcase along with me. And throughout it all, the tumult of growing up privileged in a middle-class suburb somehow isolated from any urb, an island of suburbia, I continued to write, first on my typewriter, then on my dad's Apple IIe, and always in my spiral-bound notebook. I'd pound out fifty, sixty typewritten pages a day when I wasn't occupied with other things. Then, I got saved, and that was a distraction and a destruction that lasted for years, decades. Religion is often the antithesis to creativity. But I'm not inclined at the moment to follow that trail, having already arrived at its apex and been digested by the waiting beast. I write less now, and am less overtly rebellious now. I'm still not as smart as I'd like to be, but I know enough to realize that perhaps I missed my calling. I should have taken up the gloves. I could've been a contender.