Sunset in a Trailer Park - Attempt at a Daily Poem #1

posting a daily poem as an attempt to break me of the habit of sharing excerpts of my perfectly perfect novel which is going so well that everyone is falling over themselves with praise for whatever of it they read....

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 Montana, springdale, columbus, mint, catalina, winnebago, ultralite, carbon, flagstaff, cougar, apex

Did any of these people vote Hillary?

Fishers, teenage girls in sweatshirts with gymshorts, kids biking next to the water without helmets, all there to see the reflection of the setting sun on the bay.

Their own personal Battery Park. A slice of Red America living like Blue America, chasing the American sublime within their budget on Bethany Bay, near the summer home of a president they loathe.

Near them their bosses hold the beach mansions where you see the best views, watching Fox News along with the sunset while their employees fish between surfings of townhall.com

The road to the mansions has a Dead End sign.

The seagulls chirp and shit all through it like the assholes they are.

On the way out you see a beautiful forty-something walking her terrier and Maltese in biking gear; giant nerd glasses and a pixie cut.

If we can make it here, we'll make it anywhere.

Why I Went to Israel

 

Fall 2005 to so summer 2006:

One interpretation is that I was teetering on a nervous breakdown after college and had no idea what to do with my life so I went on the first artist's program I could find and checked out for a year to delay adulthood.

Issue solved.

The other reason is that I was looking for something very specific that I could not find anywhere but Israel.

It had very little to do with the propaganda I'd heard every day of my life about how Israel was our Jewish home. It had everything to do with the personal anecdotes I heard. the land where Yiddish speakers could go to the store without getting beaten up or mugged, where old Germans could still go to the opera without worrying they'd be banned from it, where young Israelis were free to innovate and travel to an extent no Americans do, where a dozen languages were spoken in the streets, where democracy was kept alive in a region where democracy was the exception, where existential issues were discussed in a place where existence can't be taken for granted.

I never fit in Baltimore: Jewish Baltimore or urban. In Pikesville, Baltimore's 90% Jewish neighborhood, everybody's crazy and thinks themselves sane. In urban Baltimore everybody's sane and thinks themselves crazy. Both places think themselves the acme of liberal tolerance in diametrically opposite ways, and nobody is truly free to be themselves unless themselves fits in a truly narrow rubric. I felt much more free to be eccentric lil' me in DC, a city where freedom comes at a price nobody can afford.

In Israel, I sought out a place where a Jew is free to be a Jew who can't stand being Jewish. Nobody has as much contempt for religious superstitions as secular Israelis, who head to the beach on Rosh Hashana and picnic on Yom Kippur. I sought out a place a cultured person is free to be as pretentious as he likes without worrying that the European smart set's tolerance for Jews and Americans is next to nil unless they top Europeans in badmouthing both the US and Israel--an impossible task because nobody hates either the US or Israel quite like rich European socialists whose entire lifestyle is based on the benefits they most derive from the US and Jews.

The stories I heard about Israel made it seem a place where an underachieving Jewish boy from Baltimore was more free to practice the best values of both the US and the EU than anywhere in the physical places. I pictured a life in a small, beautiful country where everything I valued was possible: a place that valued used books in multiple languages and local art exhibits, local pop musicians and American box office hits. A place where the bars stayed open till 5 when the afterhours started, good physical shape was built into the lifestyle and the best restaurants weren't too expensive (my how things change...). A place where history could always be studied and the present always makes new history. A place where ideas and actions were virtually the same thing. Every country has its ideals, but Israel seemed closest to mine.

And tragically, I found in Israel just about everything looked for, and what a fucking price you pay for it.

Israelis have so many options that they have no idea what to do with them, and they are the most miserable people on earth: rude, arrogant, constantly aware of their dangerous existences and international pariahdom, which gives them chips on their shoulders as big as Jacob's older sons against Joseph. It's a whole country existing on history's biggest faultline, and it simultaneously makes them free and enslaved. It is precisely the rudeness of Israelis which creates the endless dynamism of the society. It's a place where people hold nothing back, and as such, the aggression creates a greenhouse of innovation and progress that I've never seen in any other place except the similarly aggressive New York.

I went in with huge plans and went out heartbroken--not socially or romantically, heartbroken for the life I hoped was possible and would never have.

Israel is a country just like any other country, and yet it isn't. Israel is the proof that living your dreams isn't any better than not living them. Some ideal worlds are real, but they're always disappointing. Whether Israel lives or dies, Jews will always live with the gates up, and living the dream may not be worth the price.

Is the threat to Israeli democracy the natural byproduct of how Israel treats Palestinians? Is Israeli democracy threatened because liberal Jews have collaborated with conservative Jews in making Israel too free from accountability? Is Israel worth defending anymore? I have no idea, and to a certain extent it doesn't matter. It is what it is, and it experiences the same right-wing authoritarianism that threatens every first world democracy on the planet, only Israel's further along.

As Mark Twain said: Jews are like everybody else, only moreso, so whatever happens to Israel first is what will happen elsewhere. If the most militarily trained society on earth has a civil war, expect that here next. If Israel is unable to preserve its borders and ill-intentioned native peoples come pouring into Israel sponsoring their violence with legitimate grievances, expect that here next. And however doubtful, if Israel again shows that liberals and conservatives can overcome unbridgeable gulfs to still live in peace, expect that here next.

Israel is the freest and the most chained place on earth. It's everything we are but to the nth degree. They are the guinea pigs for every historical trend that comes to you next. It has all the glories and agonies you have, it's simultaneously the most livable and unlivable place on earth. It's evidence that the impossible is always possible.

So maybe they'll pull it out and democracy can still thrive, even with its existence threatened as it always is. Any rational projection says that Israel is fucked right now in a hundred different ways; but in a hundred different ways, Israel is the impossible nation. It is a place where nobody sane would ever want to live, and yet life goes on.

I am endlessly fascinated by Israel, but I find it an endlessly frustrating place. I think that's precisely what it's supposed to be.

Why write a book nobody will read

I'm writing a book. Unless tastes change dramatically, everybody's going to hate it. The more I write, the more abstract it gets. Every idea I have makes it ever more off the wall, more difficult to market, more difficult to comprehend, more difficult to read. With every new idea, the reader has to do tons more work, while I, the writer, am just lucky to have ideas.

I have no idea how to write a book. I just think of whatever I can then throw word-darts at a board that may miss the bullseye by a factor of yards. The ideas are all in my brain, and yet the moment the ideas hit the page, they become fragmented. The nerve and confidence leaves the page, and all that's left is the kind of fragmented story that bores the shit out of everybody but academics.

My editor tells me 'be more considerate to the reader.' I have no idea how to do that. Everything that comes out in these essays with relative clarity becomes incredibly avant-garde when they come out as fiction. Nobody will want to read this. I write it to please me, if one can even call it pleasure. I have no audience and too little to do with my life. If I'm not creative, my mind will leave me.

And yet I have no idea if I truly have an audience for these essays either. Perhaps most people respond to them out of a sense of pity or well-meaningness, but the fact that I seem to have readers means I can imagine the sort of reader I want to read this and communicate to them. I want readers who are 'friends', not 'fans.' I hope, at least, that readers struggling with their lives or watching others struggle can read essays like mine and feel a little less lonely.

"The book", however, has only an editor and a few friends whom I irregularly ask to read, all of whom give me contradictory feedback. So this book has no ideal reader, just a flotsam of a thousand ideas conceived during a period when I was at my craziest, felt as though I was getting ideas from the ether, and imagined myself a kind of mystic who could inspire the world. But really, this novel is just following the basic record of what happened over 4000 years of (Jewish) history. What happened in history is sufficiently dramatic that if you do this right, you just need the barest framing devices and you can bring thousands of characters to life - or at least a better writer than me can....

I've worked on this giant book for well over ten years and started over at least six or seven times. Where are the ideas derived? They're derived from a clearly fucked up subconscious, a subconscious explosive enough that it's gone through periods of my life controlling my conscious mind. I have a terrible suspicion that the few who read it sometimes think I write from my personal life, but it's these essays where I put my personal thoughts - they are literally where I organize the conscious self in battle with a subconscious that takes parts of my brain over for years at a time. I once tried what's now called 'autofiction' (presumably "autobiographical fiction" takes too long to type). In two different versions of this book, it produced one good 90% autobiographical story about a family row over Pesach, and one time that I tried to write in a voice that was clearly my father's, but both times, the quality died a quick death and I put the auto into storage.

Fiction is a place of the subconscious. The mind can only take dictation, not be dictated to. The subconscious is ever appeased only temporarily before it demands more attention lest it explode with obsessive and sometimes delusional thoughts. Thoughts from my own life do not come intentionally from the personal, and any potential resemblance would serve no didactic purpose. They are random brainwaves from a brain that is particularly beset with the noise of random brainwaves.

Like the music I wrote that few people listen to, the fiction I write is the product of a subconscious. This subconscious may not be particularly interesting, but it is mine, all too close to my conscious mind, and ever blackmails me with threats unless I give it space for conscious release.

The last few weeks I've managed to calm down the unconscious thoughts imbuing my brain with terror much more than I have in... years?

Nobody likes to accept that they've been through trauma, particularly because when one explains what's traumatic to others they may well not agree that it was. But whether the many 'triggers' were trauma or not, living in this head is frequently traumatic, and all the moreso if you force yourself to consider that everything the head believes may be correct. Once you let yourself think of these thoughts as a very deep sort of mental abrasion, perhaps one can truly begin the process of clearing one's head of an enormous mental load that no one should have to bear.

Will greater peace calm the subconscious or free it to be more creative and outrageous? I don't know, but what I do know is that it's still here, and I'm doing everything I can to give it a proper place that lets it explode to the outside rather than letting it continue trying to implode this head.

I don't know what my future holds. Hopefully I'm in the second half of my worst physical health crisis for a long while, and when your body is dysfunctional, you can't afford to get too depressed or anxious. It can kill you, and I want to complete this book nobody will read. Whether anybody does, the record that I did something with my life, however tawdry, and will be there for anyone who wants the challenge. I hope, I pray, that one day I'll have readers to appreciate me for what I've done, what I've written, and the blood it took to make me write. But even if not, at least I know there is a record of what I've done, and even if I'm writing a stupid book, I will have tried my best to create something worth living a life for.

Amen

Why Sondheim is Our Best Artist

 Watch Pacific Overtures: THIS is a musical???

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQ546PASgHI

I've written about Sondheim so many times that I'm loathe to write about him again, but like Shakespeare and Mozart, he insists on himself, and the work is genuinely so great that he invites comparison. If such a comparison seems grandiose, it is.

What artist in American history can compare to the most titanic giants of the arts? Is there a single novelist who can? Is there a single novelist who gives us the full gamut of the American character in all its hundreds of manifestations? Just one? You can't just do it in one book, it can only be done over an entire career. Our greatest novelists, the Faulkners, the Henry James's, the Cathers and Bellows and McCarthys and Morrisons, they all return time after time to the same few themes and character types. Perhaps only Mark Twain can be said to reach that kind of diversity, and while I don't have reading that wide, I don't think anyone is making claims that grandiose for any novel of his but Huck Finn. As for film directors, we have more greats than any other country. But who has Sondheim's diversity? Whether from personal or business limitations, is there any golden age studio great who was allowed to stretch to that kind of infinite diversity of utterance which one would think a great American artist should particularly reach in this melting pot of a country? Certainly no studio director I can think of could do it. The three real candidates? Spielberg, Scorsese, and Altman. Spielberg is so much better than his critics condescend to rate him as, but no, he's not an artist of infinite reach any more than Verdi or Victor Hugo. He has such a diverse output full of completely different sorts of characters and situations, but it's true, he nonetheless does go all too often for the easy sentiments, the simplistic message, the escapist thrills. Scorsese alike is far more diverse than his New York machismo reputation, but he has a few modes and obsessions to which he always returns: New York machismo, sexual inadequacy in the face of beauty, Catholic suffering and God's silence. I want to see a parallel universe Scorsese where made as many historical pictures as Spielberg - but where Spielberg made so many movies about 20th century history, Scorsese's are about the longer history of religion: Scorsese on the crusades, Scorsese on the Protestant-Catholic wars, Scorsese about early Christians trying to convert pagans and Jews. Those were the movies from him we needed most. Altman, frankly the truest artist of the three, was a commendably risky artist, infinite in his aspirations, baroque in his complexity, who risked everything on every movie and could be as risible as he was great. His greatest movie: Nashville, might be the greatest movie ever made in this country. Others like Short Cuts and McCabe & Mrs. Miller, MASH, Thieves Like Us, California Split, might add up to the truest exploration this country ever got in fiction. But I think everybody agrees that Altman could also be as bad as he was good. Such are the risks you take when you're a real artist feeling your way against a system that routes for your failure.

Sondheim was not that. He was an artist who got every major break and was taught how to create great musical theater by the father of adolescent best friend from the earliest age: Oscar Hammerstein himself. He knew just about everything there was to know about making theater by the time he was in his early thirties, and simply had to put pen to paper thereafter.

So I went last Sunday to see a very good - nevertheless inadequate - production of Sweeney Todd - Stephen Sondheim's most overrated musical.

Even Sondheim at his most overrated is still just that extraordinary. Even Sweeney Todd is, ultimately, a better work of theater than it can ever be performed. You need a Sweeney who can inspire the terror of an uncaged lion and simultaneously be vulnerable enough to inspire our pity. It is a literally impossible part. The actor was in no danger of capturing any facet of Sweeney's character to the point of obscuring other facets, that is perhaps a strength.

Just as it might be better to read Shakespeare among friends to avoid the disappointment of an inadequate staging, perhaps it's best to hear Sondheim's musicals in concert or played through a score at home, where you can think of his musicals as cantatas, or 'passion' plays. So unreachable are the heights of Assassins or Pacific Overtures that perhaps they're simply impossible to mount on stage.

Two of the greatest productions I ever saw of Sondheim didn't even try. When a director named John Doyle mounted Sweeney Todd (which I saw live) and Company (which I saw on youtube), the concept was as small as possible. No real staging, no orchestra, just the actors singing, and when they weren't singing, they simply played the instruments to accompany the other actors. Only in Shakespeare and Mozart have I ever seen theater so raw and intense and moving. Not even the Greeks got here, and yet these productions felt profoundly Greek - more a sacred rite than a theater production, and yet they too were utterly contemporary - funny, street wise, erudite and warmly friendly.

As I said, I've written about Sondheim far too much in relation to so many other deserving creators. But Sondheim is one of the very few artists who cannot possibly be overrated. Even in his non-American musicals, every single American type can be found within its pages from the highest to the lowest, the smartest and most sublime to the stupidest. Like Shakespeare with England, or Verdi with Italy, even when the setting isn't America, he's talking about America. Sweeney Todd was really about New York, and Sweeney was created and produced in the wake of the Summer of Sam.

He is the one creator in America who truly bridges that divide between the classical and the popular - never throwing out the lessons of old Europe even as he sees the incontrovertible need to move on to a new world, a demotic world, in which the concerns of the low matter just as much as the high.

Movies may be the American artform, but if Sondheim is not our answer to Shakespeare, then movies are still waiting for the American Shakespeare. No American has ever presented America the way Sondheim has, and no creator has ever, perhaps can ever, presented to us the United States of America as it truly is.

Slow Dancing to Ellington

Lately on Friday nights I go alone to a swing dance ballroom in one of downtown Baltimore's dicier neighborhoods to recapture my lost youth of 1938. It's a surprisingly diverse crowd, but certain demographics are clear. The female dancers are mostly beautiful and intelligent young women, many of whom drive from hours away to be there, while the male dancers are mostly the sad old men I'd prefer to avoid becoming.

For better or worse I hurt my back as I danced on Friday, so I ended up not able to dance except during the slow songs, and I found myself just listening to big band standards in a ballroom full of fantastic dancers, exactly the way this music was supposed to be listened to.

The experience is like a time warp from a different America - no matter how modern the shirts, you watch people dance to Ellington and Basie and you feel the exuberance of a country in its prime, with so much optimism for its future that how could this roar of energy not conquer the world?

Like so much great classical music, however much or little you like it, you haven't really given any piece of music a chance until you've heard it live. And no matter how white the band, when you hear Ellington's music, the sound picture with live dynamics and cleared away from all its compression and hiss, you realize that this is music as vital as anything in Haydn.

I use the Haydn metaphor deliberately. Like Ellington, Haydn thought of himself as a workman, not a genius, providing entertainment for a social order he dared not critique. And yet from his unique perch, he could innovate as many ornamentations of meaning as anything in Byzantium.

Like Stravinsky, Ellington is meant to be danced to, but like Stravinsky, the music works just as well as pure music. There are so many innovative chords in Ellington's music that I wonder if music theory has ever come up with names for some of his progressions. You can listen nearly as well without the context of dance, and yet the dancers makes it an entirely different experience.

All music can, I think, be divided into four elemental categories: song, dance, conversation, and painting. All music has qualities of all four, but while Ellington's music is primarily of the dance, when you hear a slow song like Mood Indigo, you feel as though you are in the middle of a sung painting.

And as I slow danced with a far too pretty woman I felt as though I was something intrusive about our intimacy. So beautiful was the music that I felt as though I should never dance a song that beautiful with someone whom you're not on intimate terms with. I remembered dancing to it in my college dorm room with a girl I had an on-again-off-again thing with - mostly off. She treated me like crap, but at least I have good memories like that.

Ellington has that dual meaning which only great art has. He's obviously had his many uses in moments of seduction, and yet works like Mood Indigo and I've Got It Bad speak just as well to loneliness and heartbreak. You go to things like this hoping to meet 'somebody,' and of course, there's nobody there. The sensible people 'your' age are busy at home with their kids, the 'insensible' are still getting drunk, and after 40, bars can be a profoundly sad place.

So I found myself sitting at a table alone, and yet again, listening to great music with just myself for company, and regretting it less than I thought I would.

Two Good Books: The Handmaid's Tale and The Dean's December

It's a little insane to write about these two books, but they're both near-masterpieces published in the mid-80s and have even more to say to us today than they ever did in their own time. One defines the spirit of our time and one is the zeitgeist's literal opposite. If you say anything uncomfortable about The Handmaid's Tale, you're in trouble. If you say anything nice about late Bellow, you're in trouble. So let's get to it (sticks up middle finger).

Nobody needs to champion The Handmaid's Tale. It's one of my lifetime's most beloved works of literary fiction (if 'beloved' is something you can call it). I still haven't seen the series, but the novel is one of fiction's most claustrophobic visions. As you probably know, it's about women whose options are completely restricted to reproduction or illegal whoredom. The only escape is a still worse place - a place of internment which seems uncannily like the death camps.

The Handmaid's Tale is not just a political pamphlet against fundamentalist Christianity, misogyny, and toxic masculinity. It's a vision of the world that is at once distant and very, very familiar. In the Trump era, it speaks to our fears of what fundamentalist Christianity may become, and we fear it because of so many times already when Christians were like this. But the more difficult truth of The Handmaid's Tale is we fear it because we see it today, and the place we see it is Islamic countries, where being a woman is a dystopia so far beyond anything seen by recent American eyes. The fact remains, there are people whom we're trained to view with sympathy who are the least sympathetic people on earth. If you want to know what life is like in those countries: read The Handmaid's Tale.

The problem of The Handmaid's Tale, if its a problem, is the condemnation it omits. Not the male characters, though the men of this book are viewed with weird sympathy. The missing condemnation is fellow travelers around the world who excuse these fundamentalists because their own goals align with fundamentalist Christianity. In the real world, they're the same Western conservatives who view Putin with sympathy. They're Middle Eastern Muslims, they're even Chinese communists. What they all hate is Western liberalism, Western secularism, Western permissiveness, and however fundamentalist this fictional Christian regime, there are a billion people at least who'd say 'their heart is in the right place.'

How do we know? Because their opposite numbers say the same about Western colonialism, and have justified any amount of totalitarian rule in the name of ending modern imperialism. It's even in my lifetime that Soviet backed dictators killed their countrymen with a speed only the Belgians could match. To be sure, there were individual American-backed dictators just as bad as any Soviet, but statistics don't lie: the Soviets were worse.

This is half the point of The Dean's December - the half which takes place in Bucharest. We think we have it bad, but 'they' have it worse. The plot is pretty simple: a man goes with his wife to her country of origin to visit her dying mother who did everything to get her girl to America. The bureaucrats prevent the daughter from seeing her, the mother dies, hundreds come to her funeral and treat her as a hero because she did similarly heroic things for them. Her funeral becomes a silent protest against the Caucescu regime: the only protest which can't be censored.

Was Caucescu's Romania as terrible as Gilead? Of course not. Romania wasn't even as terrible as America-backed dictatorships like Congo and Indonesia, but Romania is a real place and Gilead is not. Communist Romania was a tyranny of fear that your own relatives could put you in prison; your own friends, your own spouses and children. Betrayal in Eastern Europe was a fact of life, and everyone lived in terror of saying the wrong thing in front of the wrong intimate, all of whom might ruin their lives. And if you knew who your informant was, you simply had to welcome them and treat them as though particularly beloved, else as revenge they could even lie to the government about what you said or did.

But there are people in America who have it just as bad. This is The Dean's December's other half. It's not 'us,' the privileged readers of literary fiction, it's the murdered, many of whose last moments are full of horror and pain we can neither endure nor imagine. The murdered in America are a whole class of people: over a half-million in the last 50 years. These don't count soldiers or police. This is just the stark fact of American life, perhaps the starkest. We respond with horror to mass shootings and police killings, yet to every other type of murder we're conspicuously silent. To solve murder we like to say that soft power is the key, social work is the key, education is the key, better housing is the key; but the truth is, we don't know that. All we know is that gun death kills 30,000 people every year, and there are only two solutions everybody knows kinda work.

One is the force nobody wants to countenance: hard power. Police work. Police presence. Police enforcement. Police force. We can insist on higher standards of policing and still understand that police work is one of the cornerstones of any functioning society. If you want better policing, treat police officers more respectfully, not less. Pay them more. Be nice to them. Stop treating them like the enemy and stop making their change of tactics a higher priority than stopping murder itself. The alternative, we already see, is more murder, more injustice, more danger. Any policeman smart enough to get other options is leaving the job, knowing that their lives are that much more endangered for lack of tactics available to them and no new tactics put in their place. Replacing them will be exactly the corrupt lowlives we want off the beat.

The other solution is that 'thing' nobody thinks is important but defines everything: culture. Everybody says that culture isn't important when the other side makes the argument, then uses it without apology when it's their side who makes the argument. Culture matters. Everybody agrees so long as it's their culture.

But culture only works when included is a culture of agreement and compromise. A culture where people have the same motives is a culture where people get protected. The three sides of American life all have to concede enormous things. The right has to value education, the left has to value policing, and the center has to fund them both. It's all well and good for Republicans to look back to the mid-20th century when we had the world's entire economy and taxes for the highest earners at 94% (marginal), but they willfully misunderstand the circumstances which enabled it. it's nice to dream of the socialist paradises of Scandinavia without realizing that they're only possible with a racially homogenous population of a few million people and some defense money from the US so they can spend everything on social programs. The minute a few Muslims come over, northern Europeans start sounding like Nazis. The minute they need their defense needs taken care of, all that European contempt for us melts into American flags again.

Bellow is one of the greatest writers of the 20th century and in his home country he languishes forgotten - more remembered in Europe than he's been here for twenty years. What Bellow represented was the mid-20th century liberal consensus, and because that's what he represents, his books are uniquely unsuitable for our time because of the unpleasant truths that come with him. He was an American liberal bordering on socialist who almost met with Trotsky in Mexico (the day of Trotsky's assassination), and then turned neoconservative in the wake of late-century urban decay.

Like so many of us, his great strengths were his weaknesses. And Bellow's great insight is that culture is what saves us, and that by letting go of the aspirations to middle class American white picket fences with good public schools, we succumbed to a nihilism from which we still haven't freed ourselves. With that insight came a disrespect for people who did not share his concept of culture; and his worst book, Mr. Sammler's Planet, has an unforgivable scene of breathtaking racism.

But the solution, as always, comes from meeting in the center, and its to the center that we have to look. But which center? A liberal center or a libertarian center? One cares enough to fund schools and police, the other doesn't care. So if you want better, the center has to be liberal, not libertarian, not conservative nor moderate. By managing this compromise, centrists cannot compromise on their own behavior. The 'well-meaning' center can't just sit back and stay affluent, they have to raise taxes through the roof and pay for education, social programs, defense, and policing to the quantity of hundreds of billions each. Either you share the wealth, or you consign a society to dystopia.

I don't know how to end this one.