Lucinda Williams: Live from Austin, TX

Her performance here is crazy good. How have I lived in this city for five years without knowing its little minutes? I need to walk around more often, and remember what I see, because right now I walk only to and from the bus stop, and I can't even remember this morning, which was, I confess, roughly from 4:30-7:30pm. Anyway, I look forward to the Johnny Cash entry in this series, and I'm glad I saw the ACL studio for myself when David Simon visited from the east like a tall, bald, wise man bearing gifts of language. I do remember that, at least, that and what he said about Pat Riley.

2009 Australian Open men's semifinal: Nadal def. Verdasco 6-7(4) 6-4 7-6(2) 6-7(1) 6-4

Whatever the outcome Sunday in the final, Nadal played the match of his career to get there. During the five hour and fourteen minute master class--the longest in the history of this tournament--his countryman and fellow left-hander hit ninety-five winners, scrambled on defense like a burning rabbit, served with paramilitary power, and withstood the burden of an ailing body and a doubtful mind to push the best player in the world to, and beyond, his limit, and still Nadal beat him. After what proved to be the point of the tournament, Patrick McEnroe, not yet recovered from the rally, cried out, "This is absurd tennis!" Moments later, returning to that bon-mot of unreason, he described the effort of both men as "absurdly extraordinary." When the match finally did end, watching the pale, adrenaline-sick Spaniards meet at the net and embrace, I thought, this is the worst possible thing that could have happened. Now Nadal has nothing left for Federer; he can't recover in time. Then, after Brad Gilbert--even he had converted--admitted that this semifinal exceeded even the legendary Safin-Federer clash from 2005, on the same court, no less, both in quality of play (cleanness) and in depth of feeling (inventiveness), I realized that even if Nadal, by some miracle, does regain his strength in time for the final and does clinch the title, the less historically significant win over Verdasco will still mean more to him, and to me, both aesthetically and professionally, than his first hardcourt Slam championship. Titles come and go, and every year, as seasonal as the sun, someone must win. But pure tennis, the kind that refines and transcends the category to which it belongs and which, in its fulfillment, it comes to define, happens only when necessary, only when we, and the sport, and its competitors have by accident or design forgotten ourselves, our fiction, and our partisanship and accepted this great gift that we do nothing to deserve. This match wasn't just good tennis; good tennis strikes from the spark of two talents any time their mutual heat, combusted by dispute, spreads from their personal recesses to catch in the impersonal heart of the audience. This match was not good tennis; it was what good tennis is for.

It is also the reason I prefer Nadal to Federer. Every year since he first entered the Australian Open in 2005, Nadal has improved there by one round. Federer has not. Nadal has studied, worked with, and adapted to a surface entirely unsuited to his game, so that now he is, on that surface, one of the sport's strongest and most consistent players. Federer has not. Nadal privileges process over accomplishment, labor over product, action over idea, the earthly human imperfection over its remote celestial counterpart, transigent substance over intransigent form. It is true that Federer makes tennis more beautiful than it ever has been, but Nadal makes it meaningful, and that, to me, is a far more relevant and enduring distinction. I have always been a form-fetishizer; my preference for Nadal, I think, demonstrates just how convincing his game can be.

As far as I'm concerned, the tournament is already over. Sunday will come, when the master of forms will compose another formal masterwork and be appropriately praised for his prodigy. But before we all blind ourselves in its glare, we should remember that the light illuminating that work, like the spectral shadow of the moon, is reflected, an alien fire and a strange, dark intelligence. Before Nadal matured into a world-class player, Federer was a lonely brilliance, an exception. Now, because of his partnership in this rivalry, he is an interesting and historic sportsman. When he breaks the Sampras record, as he surely will, his feat will be more compelling because of, not despite, his losing record against Nadal. History has no quantitative measure; fourteen or fifty Major titles does not make the greatest player of all time. There are no greatest players, only great moments. When Federer dismantles Roddick or Blake or any other top ten player, we marvel at his ability but we don't gain anything by it. We are too far removed to relate to it in any way except reverence. Against Nadal, because it is tested, his genius means something. Those moments stay with us and become some of the many landmarks of our lives.

In some ways, this match recalls, but contravenes, the equally remarkable semifinal between Federer and Roddick, a contest as cruel and incandescent as any I've seen. Federer controlled his opponent with an authority that hinted at displeasure; he took no pleasure in the contest, only ( if he took pleasure in anything) in winning it. Federer delights in the myth that surrounds his genius, and when, as it must, that myth decays into fact, his gracious smile and gentle voice turn scornful and mean. When he lost Wimbledon, Federer, for the first time that I know of in his career, made excuses, blamed extraneous factors, and plain bitched. When bookies named Andy Murray the favorite to win the Australian Open, pointing to his recent 4-0 record against Federer, the Swiss ambassador scoffed, retorting, "Well, maybe, but I win when it counts." When Djokovic retired against Roddick earlier this week, Federer criticized, "If you aren't healthy enough to play in these conditions, go home."

There is a pettiness and egotism in Federer obscured both by the elegance of his play and by the quiet politics of his personality. Nadal is a simpler man, and a humbler one, and while it is true that competition is not a moral exercise, when formal mastery makes moral meaning irrelevant, perhaps it is we, and not the objective value of our expertise, that wants refinement. We complain, defensively, that competition is a natural and indifferent enterprise. But so is every other cruelty. We do not make appeals to natural law so readily in other, more ubiquitous forms of competition, as, for example, the competition between predator and prey, provided, of course, that the prey is a human being.

This is all very subjective, and I admit that I have my bias, but let me add, if it means anything, that after watching the Federer-Roddick semifinal I felt demoralized: the efficiency and whole impersonal business of the match made me wonder why athletics matters anyway. Seeing its excellence, I questioned its worth. That reaction seems unhealthy to me, and true, it may be idiosyncratic and probably is a kind of prejudice, but after watching Nadal and Verdasco, I felt confirmed and even inspired by their performance, not because my favorite player had won--I can say comfortably that by the end of the match, neither player had really won, and that the very idea of winning or losing no longer mattered--but because the two struggling fortunes on court had increased the scope and significance of their contest so that it included, like a literary symbol, each part of which it was representative, and I, however incidental, by the composite quality of that act participated in what I love, for although their match was nearly perfect, Nadal and Verdasco played generously, not merely perfectly, and their sympathy for the consequences of sport brought a valuable democratic ethic to their competition.

The more I think about perfection the less I value it. Because it is intolerant, as Auden mistakenly excised from his elegy, we work to transcend time, expecting that its indifference will turn to moral interest as we learn to exceed its categories. But time and limitation teach us to love deliberately, to think clearly, and to feel purposefully. What can civilize us but our end and our imperfection?

You can have your Federers and the pseudo-Apollonian rhapsodes who exalt him. I like the unpredictable element, the untuned instrument, the intuitive artist, whose panegyric is memory, not civic ceremony, and who creates for the pleasure of creation and not for the fluid value of its commerce. What the first earns by contest is victory; what the second earns by play is play, its queer, irreplaceable danger. By all objective measures, Federer is the superior player. But by all intangible virtues, Nadal is the better man, and not an inferior player by very much, or for very long. So for you, Slothrop, and whoever else favors the flawless, justifying an easy admiration for the perfect with sophistical encomia of the invisible, take notice:

It will take more than anger,

It will take patience to force

The lungs of authority

With the fine deadly powder

Ground by those with the know-how,

The precionists, like you.

Enjoy the final on Sunday, if you can rouse yourselves from sleep at 3:30am and abide Chris Fowler's insufferable commentary. If you can't, enjoy the cold mantle of perfection as Federer (probably) wins his fourteenth Major title, tying Pete Sampras's record and guaranteeing countless hours of senseless banter from industry tools like Fowler, Gilbert, and bow-tie wearing Bud Collins. At least defeat is an unspoken achievement.

Doubt

They look like victims of a Hawthorne parable. Anyway, the movie would have been better as a play, because it is a play, but even though it lacks the intimacy of a stage performance, the movie uses its remoteness to raise concerns too serious to dismiss but too difficult to dispel. And although I've seen plenty of films that are better conceived, better executed, and better received, Doubt makes competent moves and deserves its confidence, because although it conceals its truth, the film values, and does not exploit, its ambiguity. Given the subject under study, that decision not to disclose seems more responsible than elusive.

Frost/Nixon

A good movie, a respectable movie, but a better reality. I would rather stare at that memo for fifteen minutes than watch a thousand hours of adequate reproduction.

The Intelligence of Flowers (1907)

So, this:
equals this:

Which makes this book, like the Beatles, bigger than Jesus, and its author, Maurice Maeterlinck, pioneer of unwatchable symbolist drama like The Blue Bird: A Fairy Play in Six Acts, fairly worthy of worship. I can't wait to discover what strange miracle animates the souls of bees, ants, and termites, the other vital specimens argued by Maeterlinck to possess "thought without knowledge."

Barack Obama

Slothrop would like to point out that one, this man is our leader, two, he's holding a book, three, the book is open to a page other than the cover, four, despite there being another suit in this picture and a blurry cop car, this might be the sexiest picture ever taken, and five, the size of Slothrop's hard-on is longer than the list of Bush's policies which Obama has reversed or negated in the first four days!! Slothy was about to say that there are only two things missing from this shot, namely a whore on Obama's right arm and a whore on his left. But odds are he's on his way to a ranch in Nevada so nevermind.

Koko: And while we're posting photos of our favorite presidents, let me add:

And:

No matter how smooth, how bibliophiling, or how urbane, Obama will never replace Carter, who grimaced and hugged his way right the hell out of office. Nuclear peanut master, you're the best.

(For fun facts about Jimmy Carter-as-awesomeness, google "Jimmy Carter, rabbit.")

Australian Open 2009

By tomorrow, which is the day after tomorrow, in the middle of winter, which is the summer, we will have two more rounds until the tournament ends. Unlike the three other majors, which thrive on the irrelevance of history, the Australian Open has no reputation to defend, and thus no inheritance to justify. Among the snooty forums of professional tennis, only Rod Laver Arena owes its charm more to the throbbing, disorderly progress of its patrons than to the civil, pseudo-aristocratic cavil of its sponsors: it regularly scrambles the seeds until their numbers mean nothing, brings fit men and women to bouts of one hundred degree heaves, replaces spectacle--think the US Open in all its Pattonesque pageantry--with character, and as for the unities of time and place, there aren't any. While the French, British, and American slams protect their capital by the privileges of earth, air, and "here's a lot of money, so win" water, respectively, the Australian Open lets everything burn, consumes tradition, scatters sense, and comfortably means nothing; it works by fire, and as the master teachers, fire is the first element.

Think Wilander in 1988, or Agassi in 2003, or Federer whenever (not 2005). Imagine a tournament in which the man who most deserves to win, and who does win, commemorates his victory by recognizing that he should not have won--that statistical whimsy has caused his competitors to faint, or fall down, or fail, and he, the most probable of champions, must face in the final match a half-mannequin or twelve year old blind child in a wheelchair, because at the end of two weeks, only those unlucky things remain. To beat this poor mathematical person, whose defeat implicates him and his vanquisher, and us all, in the strange wonder and accomplishment of fate, is no easy or satisfying task. And by resolving to complete what no intelligence began, by consenting to his humiliation, the champion wills his way out of this underworld of inversions and miscalculations and ascends to another, very different level of athletic purgatory: the clay courts of Europe.

Upsets at the Australian Open are routine. In the early rounds, facing unpredictable young talents and unprepared for the extreme conditions, veteran players and favored seeds evaporate like so much moisture in the sun. What climate doesn't compromise, competition withers. First round matches tend to play quickly, fiercely, and violently. By the second round, when the serious moral purpose of the heat has declared itself, they become heavier, slower, less deliberate--experiments in endurance. In the third round, fatigue turns desperate, and the quality and intensity of competition suddenly spikes as the seeds realize that in order to justify this terrible human treachery they need either to win the tournament outright or to lose in the next ten minutes. Third round matches are luminous like flares and burn so singly, so splendidly, and so coldly that they feel stopped in time--matches played somewhere inside God's memory or at the end of existence. They are mysteries and calamities--grave miracles--and they pulse with a supersensory strangeness.

By the fourth round, only inertia and accident determine who advances to the quarterfinals and who goes home. Players retire, or get injured, or fake an injury, or they win. Competitive logic still works, but it works wrong.

So this morning Andy Roddick did not dismiss Novak Djokovic but he nevertheless did advance to the semifinals. In about an hour Federer will defeat Del Potro in four sets. Tomorrow night Little Ali will strip naked, skin, and cannibalize Fernando Verdasco, his putative opponent, and Rafael Nadal will avenge his semifinal loss in Madrid by overwhelming Gilles Simon, who did not beat Gael Monfils--do you follow?--and will in turn lose to--did I say lose to? I mean sent backward through time by--Joey Jo Jo Ali Tsonga. In the final, who cares, because Andy Murray lost in the fourth round to a glitch in the divine supercomputer, and the defending champion got sick and gave up. I predict Federer over Tsonga in four sets, but without Federer finally meeting Nadal in a slam hardcourt final, his fourteenth win will mean as much as all the ones after fifteen, which is zero.

So, Serena Williams goes through thanks to Azarenka's walkover. Roddick earns the right to lose to Federer yet again, who himself should have lost to a then-not-imploding Tomas Berdych. And the final match everyone expected between Murray and Federer, which Murray would have won, will not take place.

Thus the Australian Open triumphs over all other sporting events. Its rules are natural rules, and as cast in every spontaneous vital error that increases life, rules are probabilities, not laws. In Australia, tennis is not a sport but a prediction. It is a bet. And the best part about this gamble, as is true of any gamble, is the utter unmeaning of its end: whoever wins does so by chance as much as talent. Had Wilander faced a healthy Lendl or Edberg or anybody but the hometown Cash, he would have lost; had Agassi met a rested Roddick instead of diminutive teuton Rainer Schuettler, he would have lost; had Federer sparred with a real opponent instead of the untested Baghdatis, the unremarkable Gonzalez, and the perennially deflated Safin, he would have lost. A decorous style takes the Wimbledon title; at Roland Garros, victory goes to the beast of burden; and at Flushing Meadows, where everybody wants to be Donald Trump, only the playboy takes the trophy. But in Sidney, and now Melbourne, success is a lottery, and like all lotteries, the winner can be neither proud nor modest, nor merit the occasion; all he can do is stand still and be fortunate.

Good luck to all the remaining men and women except Dinara Safina, who frightens me. I wish her nothing but invisibility and good manners. And as for you, Andy Murray, prepare for a long season of letting people down until July--coincidentally the month when you start to defend your precious ranking points. Earn my respect again, you casualty.

Good night from the computer at my desk.

Slothrop: Koko has gone all fuzzy on us, most likely because his hatred of all things Swiss, including Slothrop's water bottle full of the Swiss Alps, has made him Proud (where his wit failed). So Tennis in Australia is a prediction, yes? A chance. It matters not your ranking or your fortitude, you win through a combination of merit and blessing. So, then, why this sentence: "I predict Federer over Tsonga in four sets, but without Federer finally meeting Nadal in a slam hardcourt final, his fourteenth win will mean as much as all the ones after fifteen, which is zero"? Why does everyone get to win and be lucky to have done so except Federer who, if he wins, wins only through a lower caste of luck, not worth a celebratory couplet? And why his Proud hatred of Andy Roddick, who, from where Slothrop is sitting, is the clear favorite to win because he is Tennis's Alexander Pope, especially in post-game interviews of games which he lost, especially if he lost to Federer which he won't this time around, despite Koko's insouciant dismissal. And if the inflammatory nature of the Aussie Open is as Koko claims, why the vitriol against Murray? If nothing else, should not Koko be more sympathetic (not less sympathetic) to an athlete who lost a match against the Sun?

Koko: First, if you'd read as carefully as you've written, you would have noticed that I placed Federer in the same class of player as Agassi and Wilander, two of my most obnoxiously touted supermen. My prediction favors the grand cosmological gamble rather than the tiny human element that thrives or wastes by it; deserve, Slothrop (and Little Bill), has nothing to do with it, which means, by implication, neither does its contrary. So whether the Swiss Miss wins a fourth title there or disappoints, he satisfies the Great Wheel; either opportunity fulfills its purpose, which is indifference.

Second, big opinions from a man who hasn't stayed awake until 6:30 every morning watching the live feed from Melbourne, only to shuffle dejectedly to his bed, sleep until 10:30, wake again, and take the bus down I-35 to campus in order to confuse stray souls uninterested in the tenets of national socialism or sacred neoclassical aesthetics. (At least it's an ethos!) Some of us have, and we, I expect, having witnessed the events and not merely read them as reported, judge with a greater authority than those who have not. In his match against Verdasco, Murray yielded; he did not "lose." That much was clear to me, as it was to the weeping Brad Gilbert and to the ever philosophical Cliff Drysdale. It was also clear to Verdasco, who immediately broke him and then served, successfully, for the match.

And did you watch the after-interview with Djokovic? (Of course you didn't.) He blamed his loss on everything but hobbits and bees. Unwilling to accept the fact that he was beaten by an inferior talent but a fitter body, he used every excuse he could think of to ignore the obvious: next time, try harder. Even Mary Carillo, for once, said something relevant: "I mean, he's the defending champion, and he's not even going to finish?" Besides, conditions today were hotter than yesterday (108F at 5:30pm), and Dementieva not only survived to finish her match but positively bloomed. Yesterday, under a cooler sun, Roddick looked like an oak, growing for a thousand years and impervious to time, while Djokovic shriveled like a sapling. That was his choice; he did not lose a match "against the sun" but he did, like Monfils in the fourth round, imagine a pain that he felt into existence, felt and suffered for, until it, and not he, overcame its opponent. After his match, at least, Mofils admitted that "maybe the pain was in my head."

Third, if Andy Roddick acts the pretender to any personality in that poem, it is Fungoso, not Pope, because by his candid intelligence and refusal to win anything, he almost seems doomed and noble, but not really, because he looks like a mushroom. He's clever and modish and we all enjoy his antics, but in the end, Andy makes you dandy.

Kind thoughts to Little Ali this morning, who, like Djokovic and Murray, those tender flowers, wilted in the elements. Unlike them, though, Tsonga, who's no flower but a raging industrial dicht, ran his engine all the way out, and that, my friend, makes all the difference. Organisms perish, which is their particular virtue, but machines must go, and that is theirs. Speaking of machines, in a few minutes Nadal plays the cute Simon boy from across the street, so shall we test the second half of my prediction to see if it too is baseless? We shall, and it is.

A Federer-Simon final is the sure sign of apocalypse. Why not just hand the racket to one of the ball kids and let him go a round? Sampras did it once.

Mister Lonely

It's a movie about a French Michael Jackson impersonator who meets Abraham Lincoln and James Dean and Adolf Hitler (Charlie Chaplin?) and other lost souls in a world where knowing who you are is unlikely and dangerous. Also there are flying nuns and Werner Herzog plays a bad pilot who ruins a perfectly legitimate miracle. At first the movie was bad weird and incoherent but it softened up and Slothy started feeling sympathy for all the lost souls, including himself. It's the kind of movie that isn't good at being a movie but one that lingers nicely afterwards as an idea. Harmony Korine would make an excellent painter. 

Interview With the Vampire

Slothrop watched it. That's about all he can say, except maybe to add that Tom Cruise plays a douchebag. A bus conversation with Koko, however, reminded him that Vampires are unintelligible. So take Tom Cruise and Christian Slater and Brad Bitt, add a story that doesn't make sense plus "vampires", whatever the fuck they are and make a movie that is nineteen hours long and you have this... thing.

Koko: Why are all the decadent vampires French?

Tropic Thunder

A rare movie that is entirely ludicrous, goofy, stupid, retarded (literally) and smart. I think it's something about postmodern depression and the illusion of identity and the impossibility of understanding war or something. Mostly though Slothrop focused on the funnies and Robert Downey Jr, who is and isn't who he is. Notice, too, that it doesn't say Cruise on the poster, though he played a good part as a filthy lucre Hollywood man; have you noticed the great conviction with which he plays douchebags?

Koko: Hmmmmmm, I wonder.

Le Plaisir

Slothrop's always known that whoring--either being one or soliciting one or thinking like one--is the correct answer. And this here's the proof. 

Koko's Sentimental Education

As I successfully abstain from rereading Flaubert's not so minor masterpiece, I pass the early morning hours considering what I've learned since July, when Nadal won Wimbledon, Batman embarrassed us all, and my poor body collapsed, one more detritus among the discarded Fluticasone canisters in my bathroom and the unstrung tennis rackets on my living room floor (thank you, uncorrectable, late backswing). So:

Lesson 1: An animal can degenerate into its own rabid, ancestral shadow, harness the evil energy of a thousand suns, attempt to depodify (?), uh--remove the foot from, is there a word for that--another creature harmlessly tending to its creaturely business, fail to do so, get flung across the room by a rational animal twenty times its size (me), take a second chance at the foot, go haywire on some steel bars, and then, not five minutes later, look absolutely adorable:

Well rampaged, my little Achilles; may all your scandals be satisfying.

Lesson 2: A raw onion eaten as a snack tastes better than it should. Raw garlic, on the other hand, hurts like hell and causes severe involuntary fits of swearing--an edible Tourette Syndrome.

Lesson 3: When Yeats wrote that "a terrible beauty is born," he was referring to unseasonal strawberries, not revolutionary martyrdom. I discovered this fact while weighing the relative strengths and weaknesses of fleeting fruity pleasure and immortal Irish verse.

Lesson 4a: Although I know a few things about poetry and practically nothing about prose, I enjoy good essays more than I do good poems. Interestingly, I rarely enjoy good fiction: "I think, you read something someone just invented it? Waste of time."

Lesson 4b: And therefore Charles Lamb and George Santayana are, for completely opposed reasons, my new mythmakers.

Lesson 5: Thanks to Generation Kill for turning "ninja" into an adjective, as in "that is so fucking ninja."

Lesson 6: Despite my terrifically shy ambition to get well, make sense, and be beautiful, I continue to look like the kleptomaniac Géricault painted during his tenure among the crazy-brave and plain crazy:

Mr. Sticky Hands and I are more crazy than crazy-brave. We aren't even phony-tough.

Lesson 7: Vegetables pureed and mixed with delicious fruits are still vegetables, so don't drink anything green, even if it does promise to complement barley grass with cool shit like kiwi pits and hedonism berries. Just eat the broccoli as nature intended--spitefully--and don't ruin perfectly good sugar by forcing it to fraternize with older evolutionary organisms. Plants that don't flower, be damned.

Lesson 8: In tennis there is no such thing as improvement; there is only you not understanding how you hit that shot again.

Lesson 9: Middlemarch is ninja. (See above re: ninja as an adjective.)

Lesson 10: Robert Browning wrote exactly one readable line of poetry, but it's stuck in the middle of a poem about statues or something, so don't bother.

Lesson 11: I don't like going to sleep, but I also don't like waking up. About what else can one assert both x and not x? Somewhere, seventy years ago, Karl Popper's head just exploded.

Lesson 12: It is entirely possible, and perhaps inevitable, to cherish the memory of a rabbit peeing on your lap, but only if he does so deliberately:

Happy third birthday, my darling, in three short weeks.

(Do not mistake his imminent birthday for Birthday, the dysfunctional foot-monster. As the anonymous Anglo-Saxon bard sang, næs þæt na se Godric þe ða guðe forbeah: "that was not the same Godric who earlier fled from the battle." Of course, we have no idea what happens to this new, heroic Godric, because the poem's only extant manuscript burned in a fire, leaving us with a few confused stabbings, the fleeing Godric, this new valiant Godric, his horse, and the final line distinguishing the Godrics, a line that is both tremendously stupid and also way, way too self-conscious to fit comfortably within the proto-Germanic culture of collecting wives, extorting lords, and generally not believing in Jesus. It does make the poem giddy, though, so well burned, fire, and please, be generous with the Brownings.)

Tennis With Koko: "Happiness"

While playing almost tennis with Koko today, awaiting a devastating serve, Slothrop thought of this man and this poem, titled "Happiness".

I can remember only once feeling perfectly happy.

I was eighteen, a freshman at college.

It was October, and I was sitting on the lawn

behind my dormitory, leaning against a tree,

reading a book. It must have been Sunday.

Leaves covered the grass, though the oaks and maples

were still full of color, and the sky

was that bright and absolute blue

you see in photographs of peaceful country scenes.

The musty broken smell of autumn

floated on the air, that scent like a taste,

like the idea of change. People walked past

on their way to the library, others

slept in the sun, or read their books.

Certainly I had enough to worry about.

I'd made no friends, was not in love, didn't like

my classes. But I felt just then

at ease, and then, lazily, quite

gradually, completely happy––as if that afternoon

might continue indefinitely,

and lead seamlessly into everything

that was going to be possible for me,

which I would one day call my life. No matter

what I thought about it, this would happen,

and I did not have to think about it.

I imagined staying until dark, when someone

might come by to ask what was wrong.

Yet there was nothing I needed to say,

since I had no reason for feeling what I felt,

since the landscape was like a beautiful picture

of where I was, and so, after a few hours,

I got up, without regret, and went back to my room.

This happened, although that doesn't matter

to you, who know about the truth of poems,

how I can't convince you by insisting on the real,

can't persuade you by claiming this I is me, or was.

And yet I am not trying to persuade you of anything.

There is no conclusion, no story to conclude.

And how poor, after all, how familiar

the details seem, without excitement, or surprise.

But I never felt that way again, nor do I expect

to feel that way again, so thoughtless

and solitary, so unaccountably happy.

Koko: Happiness is double faulting, and then hitting an ace out of anger. And then double faulting again.

The Veritable Small

Ah, inquisitor of structures! This week I rediscovered that unmistakable reason. Why have we forgotten the man who once explained to The New Republic that genteel traditions divide--they make the genius feel ashamed--because they offer only two actions: "You either identified yourself with the national mind and expressed it sympathetically, or you broke away from it altogether, denounced it as narrow, stupid, and oppressive, and removed yourself offendedly to Greece or to Italy, to sing of lovely sensuality or celestial justice."

George Santayana makes life gentle; we should read him, and revere him, and remember why Wallace Stevens elegized,

"It is as if in a human dignity
Two parallels become one, a perspective, of which
Men are part both in the inch and in the mile.

How easily the blown banners change to wings...
Things dark on the horizons of perception
Become accompaniments of fortune, but
Of the fortune of the spirit, beyond the eye,
Not of its sphere, and yet not far beyond,

The human end in the spirit's greatest reach,
The extreme of the known in the presence of the extreme
Of the unknown."

I too want what he wanted, what he learned from his peripatetic mentor, what we all require in the total grandeur of a total edifice,

"To join a hovering excellence, to escape
From fire and be part only of that which
Fire is the symbol: the celestial possible."

Difference

Here's a visual of movie reviews as written by the Ass Head: 

And here's a rough sketch of Slothrop's ouevre: 

So yes, readers, we might have a Sherlock Holmes in our midst, but one, he can't solve shit, and two, well, just look at him. And then fantasize about Slothrop, who don't even need to look through no magnifying glass to know Slumdog Millionaire ain't gonna make nothing wet. 

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

How long, dear readers, before the Ass-Head and his army of oppression decides he doesn't like this review either and takes it down, rendering all of its virtues quite cloistered indeed? Despite the poor review of Slumdog Millionaire, Slothrop was impressed by its energy, and colors, and that it was a film made with a lot of passion, which counts for something, still. But if watched carefully, it becomes apparent that Slumdog is mostly sentimental schlock. What's most interesting about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is that it is even more sentimental than was Slumdog Millionaire, but turns out to be the much better movie. The difference lies partly in the movie's own aspirations. Slumdog wants to be both a story and a political critique and exposé. Benjamin Button frames the story as a story, and even emphasizes in its title--"The Curious Case"-- that suspension of disbelief will be required. The good news is that the premise of aging backwards doesn't require much effort on the viewer's part since the metaphor of aging towards becoming a child again isn't too starkly different from what happens to us in life outside the cinema. It's not a subtle metaphor, but it's a good one because it helps us see our own lives more clearly. Slumdog Millionaire on the other hand compared life to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Can you see the difference? One metaphor is impossible but feels true, while the other one is unfortunately quite possible and is entirely unbelievable ("destiny" is a genuine answer to things, apparently). All of this put more simply: Benjamin Button is more honest with itself and with its viewers than was Slumdog Millionaire. And in movies which ask us to reflect on our lives, shouldn't honesty be a necessary virtue?

Koko: I enthusiastically agree, and well deployed, that bit of Coleridge.

Ass-Headed Bottom: And I just as enthusiastically disagree with Rothslop and the momentarily tame gorilla (the latter usually so wise, but this time mumbling "OK OK" and preferring an arbitrary comparison and some recycled Ridgecole to watching a movie fairly and getting straight what it's about).

   But first things first: my apologies to our entire blog-reading community for taking my unfinished Slumdog post down for almost 72 hours, along with Thropslaw's holier-than-Regis review of it. To correct the fault, please find the unfinished review now posted below, unedited. Obviously the next rhetorical step was to describe how sentimental novelists redeem their characters against all decorous odds, and how the greatest sentimental authors (Goldsmith, Sterne, MacKenzie) earned their characters such implausible, indispensable redemptions through their uncompromising prior punishment of those same characters (that is, they justified sentimentality as an inversely proportional corrective to absolute satire; in real terms this means that optimism can only be defensible after the utmost pessimism has already been entertained, a bullshitey sounding axiom I just made up but which sure sounds like the truest thing I ever wrote). In any case, the delay was due to the airlift of my folks to Dallas (an "army of oppression" by some standards, sure) and my preoccupation with making them enjoy their trip despite Dallas (an impossibility, so you can see how it retarded my blog-posting efforts). But whatevs. I felt I owed it to the Anonymous Commentator, whomever she might be, to put together a proper rebuttal to Sploogemop's ill-considered, paragraph-long smackdown of what I really do feel is an important movie. After all, this is someone whose offhand dismissal of televised popular culture might just have a little something to do with the fact that he refuses to ever watch television.

   About The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: I have not seen this movie, and thus have nothing to say for or against it. Indeed I look forward to seeing it. I will remark, however, that the less I know about a movie before I see it (or a book before I read it), the better, and thus if a title announces a suspension of disbelief I should have to discover myself upon viewing, so much the worse. But I like Brad and I like Kate and I like Hollywood, so maybe together they can save F. Scott F. from the zzzzz... of his times and milieu.

   Now, about Slumdog: it seems the principal objections Ras-al-Throp can find to this film are a) that it employs Who Wants to be a Millionaire--and not something intellectually more estimable--as its thematic/metaphorical/satirical/whatever vehicle, b) that it does not tell us anything fair or remarkable about our lives, c) that it mixed political critique with "a story" in an unpersuasive or unproductive manner, and d) that "destiny" is a bullshit answer. Is all that fair, Slop-slop? Now, I think the basis of all these objections has to do with a misapprehension of the movie: the notion that Slumdog is about our lives, and not about the lives of others and simultaneously about art. Sure, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button might be the best movie about my life ever filmed, but all the same I know that I appear only occasionally in Slumdog Millionaire, and always as an alien. I appear, for example, among the white tourists watching the opera at the Taj Mahal. You will note that I am never exactly in focus. The subjects of the movie, on the other hand--the Indian boys from the slums of Mumbai--remain in focus and steal my wallet, and really, why should they not?

   To assume, then, that the film is about Bass-Headed Autumn, or about Pop-Top, or about the Anonymous Commentator, is to assume that Who Wants to be a Millionaire is now and should always have been irrelevant. On the contrary, precisely because the movie is about the slums of Mumbai, and not about Austin and its trendy live-music scene (or about Dallas and its comfortable postapocalypticism), therefore Who Wants to be a Millionaire is an endlessly relevant organizing principle/metaphor. Let's compare Slumdog for a moment to a movie I hope Plow-Strop deems worthy: Magnolia. Now THAT's a movie about us, and the quiz-show metaphorically central to that movie is the quiz show of our childish intellectual fantasies--the hobgoblin of large and fortunate minds. I plan on going to pub-quiz sometime soon at the Trinity Hall Pub, in hopes that it can reproduce the quiz show from Magnolia, and that I can be the pants-wetting, heaven-sent prodigy destined to win it all. But all of that has nothing to do with Slumdog Millionaire, which is a different movie, requiring as its organizing concept a very different quiz show. Can you imagine the whole subcontinent of India enraptured by What Do Kids Know? Maybe. Can you imagine the whole of India enraptured by an Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Surely you can. As surely as you can imagine India being captivated by Bollywood, in symbiotic competition with Hollywood.

   And sheeeee-ott! That's another thing: this movie ain't about you and your tiny life, Slave-trope, it's about movies and how movies help us make sense of the world. Now that reality is intolerable and fantasy invincible, why should a socially conscious filmmaker not present us with a union of sentimental "story" and socio-political satire? It seems to me, anyway, having suffered through both Synecdoche, New York (which desperately needed Bollywood) and Mohabattein (which very obviously required some serious Hollywood), that the best of both fake worlds is the only real world. Dunno if you stuck around for Slumdog's credits, Thoth-plop, but maybe you watched the life-affirming Bollywood dance, where all characters meet and rejoice on the train platform? And can you tell me the director didn't earn that dance, having first sliced his characters to ribbons, having blinded children in front of us, having shown us our beloved raped, our brother lost and suicidal, having made our hero wade through the cumulative shit of the world's largest slum for a Bollywood autograph? Having offered us the tragedy of the world for the comfort of fiction? And if you don't think that's enough to earn a sentimental-ass dance, then, pray tell, what exactly would earn the director such a jig (and all tragedies, properly speaking, end with a jig)?

   And then at last there's "destiny." It is long past dinnertime, and perhaps even the intrepid Anonymous Commentator has ceased to read this endless post. Then let me end it simply by asking whether, given the slums of mourning Mumbai, whether there is any more legitimate answer to the movie's questions?

   

Ye Sentimental Law Student

In 1863, while working in Virginia City, Nevada as an underpaid newspaperman and semiprofessional liar, Mark Twain sent this brief complaint to his editors:

"I found the following letter, or Valentine, or whatever it is, lying on the summit, where it had been dropped unintentionally, I think. It was written on a sheet of legal cap, and each line was duly commenced within the red mark which traversed the sheet from top to bottom. Solon appeared to have had some trouble getting his effusion started to suit him. He had begun it, "Know all men by these presents," and scratched it out again; he had substituted, "Now at this day comes the plaintiff, by his attorney," and scratched that out also; he had tried other sentences of like character, and gone on obliterating them, until, through much sorrow and tribulation, he achieved the dedication which stands at the head of his letter, and to his entire satisfaction, I do cheerfully hope. But what a villain a man must be to blend together the beautiful language of love and the infernal phraseology of the law in one and the same sentence! I know but one of God's creatures who would be guilty of such depravity as this: I refer to the Unreliable. I believe the Unreliable to be the very lawyer's-cub who sat upon the solitary peak, all soaked with beer and sentiment, and concocted the insipid literary hash which I am talking about. The handwriting closely resembles his semi-Chinese tarantula tracks.
MARK TWAIN

SUGAR LOAF PEAK, February 14, 1863.
To the loveliness to whom these presents shall come, greeting: - This is a lovely day, my own Mary; its unencumbered sunshine reminds me of your happy face, and in imagination the same doth now appear before me. Such sights and scenes as this ever remind me, the party of the second part, of you, my Mary, the peerless party of the first part. The view from this lonely and segregated mountain peak, of this portion of what is called and known as the Creation, with all and singular the hereditaments and appurtenances thereunto appertaining and belonging, is inexpressively grand and imposing; and I gaze, and gaze, while my soul is filled with a holy delight, and my heart expands to receive thy spirit-presence, as aforesaid. Above me is the glory of the sun; around him float the messenger-clouds, ready alike to bless the earth with gentle rain, or visit it with lightning, and thunder, and destruction; far below the said sun and the messenger clouds aforesaid, lying prone upon the earth in the verge of the distant horizon, like the burnished shield of a giant, mine eyes behold a lake, which is described and set forth in maps as the Sink of Carson; nearer, in the great plain, I see the Desert, spread abroad like the mantle of a Colossus, glowing by turns, with the warm light of the sun, hereinbefore mentioned, or darkly shaded by the messenger-clouds aforesaid; flowing at right angles with said Desert, and adjacent thereto, I see the silver and sinuous thread of the river, commonly called Carson, which winds its tortuous course through the softly tinted valley, and disappears amid the gorges of the bleak and snowy mountains - a simile of man! - leaving the pleasant valley of Peace and Virtue to wander among the dark defiles of Sin, beyond the jurisdiction of the kindly beaming sun aforesaid! And about said sun, and the said clouds, and around the said mountains, and over the plain and the river aforesaid, there floats a purple glory - a yellow mist - as airy and beautiful as the bridal veil of a princess, about to be wedded according to the rites and ceremonies pertaining to, and established by, the laws or edicts of the kingdom or principality wherein she doth reside, and whereof she hath been and doth continue to be, a lawful sovereign or subject. Ah! my Mary, it is sublime! it is lovely! I have declared and made known, and by these presents do declare and make known unto you, that the view from Sugar Loaf Peak, as hereinbefore described and set forth, is the loveliest picture with which the hand of the Creator hath adorned the earth, according to the best of my knowledge and belief, so help me God.
Given under my hand, and in the spirit-presence of the bright being whose love has restored the light of hope to a soul once groping in the darkness of despair, on the day and year first above written.

(Signed) SOLON LYCURGUS.
Law Student, and Notary Public in and for the said County of Storey, and Territory of Nevada.

To MISS MARY LINKS, Virginia [and may the laws have her in their holy keeping.]"

Even Byron's best interjections come off rudely compared with Solon Lycurgus, esq.'s spontaneous retardation: "a simile of man!" And, yes, Twain actually did call his discovery "Ye Sentimental Law Student." Seven years later, he wrote an editorial titled "Unburlesquable Things," but no mention of the Solon letter appears in it, and we must conclude that to call that "insipid literary hash" a thing at all would be to elevate it to too sublime a height. May it rest forever on top of Sugar Loaf Peak, that saccharine desert earthwork.

Slumdog Millionaire

What happens when a director doesn't trust his audience (e.g. cartoonish villains-- Regis would have done a better job as the Indian Who Wants To Be A Millionaire host, as would Apu; explanatory flashback sequences; ideas like "destiny" ill-defined)? He treats them like short-attention-spanned children in need of tricks and cinematic acrobatics. If the first viewing revealed unearned sentimentality, Slothrop suspects a second viewing might reveal that the only good thing about it is M.I.A.'s music. 

Ass-Headed Bottom: Don'tcha worry, Anonymous Comment Contributer, Slothrop's just being grumpy about this one, which is strange, since his New Year's resolutions were all about being uncankered this year, snapping snapshots of happy-go-lucky peeps happily going luckily down South Congress, sniffing the glories of life, and apparently thinking about pussy a lot. Me, my only New Year's resolution--after much meditation about this world and my role in it--is to become better at doing things in the dark, without switching on the light every time I need to pee. Aim low and you just might surprise yourself.

   As for Slumdog Millionaire, I went in prepared to hate it, since I had heard from shall we say untrustworthy quarters that it was the best movie of the year. And I tried, all the way through, to despise it. Stop tweaking my heart, I would try to say, but it would drown me out with some high-energy, carefully prefabbed scene. Stop bouncing between slum and shit and torture on the one hand and love and kisses and snuggles on the other, I would silently scream! But the movie only bounced louder and more rapidly. Let me have that comfortable middle-ground I expect from films, that strange quiet-hour of "intellectual stimulation," I cried!! I wanted to feel superior to "Who Wants to be a Millionaire," since Regis always reminded me of George W. Bush (except without the effrontery to play president), and since his show was so low-brow and insulting to my chosen profession of professor, and in any case rather easier than the average pub-quiz. But as I watched Slumdog Millionaire it occurred to me that an entire subcontinent might fall in love with such a show, with its Herbert Stemples and Charles van Dorens. After all, I've never known how to account for popular taste, which is why so often I end up dismissing it, as I sip my sherry, alone. And the idea that such shows are not about entertainment but about class and caste, that's plausible too. If I prefer to pretend they're about entertainment alone, then maybe I'm not as in tune with my own society as I should be.

   In any case, I gradually realized as I watched Slumdog Millionaire that I tend to like my movies either cruel or merciful, but rarely both. That is to say that I am comfortable with a certain kind of cinematic illusion, which makes me think I'm thinking, but which is in fact just making me not feel anything. It's the same attitude I bring to literature sometimes, and it's always bullshit. Thus I was prepared to despise sentimental novels when they came around on the English-major lazy-susan. "I prefer my novels cold, hard, slicing-n-dicing, like A Hero of Our Time," I declared, not remembering anything about A Hero of our Time except for the fact that it is not sentimental. And I expected sentimental novels to be the opposite, novels that always pull back, but never harm their heroes, never bring any real and lasting suffering, and always make it all good in the end, so the reader will cheer up and re-subscribe. And what I found was that nobody suffers quite as much as the vicar of Wakefield, even if it is also true that nobody ends up luckier. What I found were complete works of fiction: innocent characters swatted around by the author like abused puppies, children starving, parents weeping, friends betraying and then hating themselves for that betrayal, and all the various ills of life. Such literary disasters seemed all the more realistic for their exaggeration

[Still in progress]

Demetri Martin Person

Demetri Martin's comedy is very much a routine; he's not a natural and you can feel the scotch-tape connections between each joke and each segment. But that doesn't matter because the show is coyly and genuinely funny and it is good to laugh and cats are stupid. I miss Mitch. 

*** Slothrop just re-read this post and boy does it suck. Here's what you need to know: Comedy is hard, Demetri Martin is really fucking funny and makes laughter frequent, and cats are not cool, even if you're trying to get laid. 

American Psycho

An alarmingly large percentage of college students major in marketing or advertising or some such satanic indiscretion. And the fruit of their labor often looks something like this:

The correct cover would look something like this: 

 Batman never looked so good and he knows it. 

The Pogues: If I Should Fall from Grace with God

Ass-Headed Bottom: This is not--thank God if He's still There--what I looked like last night. But that gentleman up there did help me get through January 1st, which was not a half-bad day all told; better than most of 2008, anyway. I'd even label it a good day had I not begun the year with the nagging suspicion that I myself had long since fallen from grace with God. Oops.

Happily, the Pogues' joyous, hilarious, incomparable 1988 album was there to sort me out, with all the drunken reels, the leering ballads, the Irish nationalism, the vaguely anti-Semitic asides (okay, granted, I'm not a huge fan of those), the palatable punk, the drunken reels, the spirited liquors, the toothless grins, the drinking up, the passing out, the throwing up, the Britain bashing, the reeling drunks, and the only great Christmas song ever written. Come to think of it, Shane, there's no way you could have fallen from grace with God if He showered this much grace on you, a mighty stream of ill-advised, wasted grace pissed against the barroom wall.

Slothrop’s List of Stuff To Do More or Less of in the next 365 Days

1. Eat more salads. And fruits. And stop being a food pussy. After a binge on Michael Pollan’s books The Omnivore’s Dilemma, The Botany of Desire, and In Defense of Food, it was revealed that Slothrop’s was not a world of food. Turns out he has been eating either in indifference or in ignorance most of his days, and if it weren’t for his quaint hobby of running around in circles quickly and repetitively, he would now be less healthy than a really fat, syphilitic cow with one leg. Most upsetting was Slothrop’s discovery that he looked at food as a means to an end, a task to be dispensed with quickly. And this without even mentioning the complete ingratitude towards the sources of his own nutrition. This is the way of a cankermuffin, and Slothrop will try to be less of one in the coming days. Also, Slothy will never step into a supermarket ever again.

2. When not busy eating who-knows-what concocted by who-knows-what-chemical-chemical equation, Slothrop was busy not looking at things. Mostly moving around and not seeing anything deeply was Slothrop’s way in 2008. It was only towards the end of the latest 365 day cycle that Slothrop came to terms with his knee’s seemingly permanent explosion. And he began to find some peace in just walking--up the street for now, fine, but walking--and looking around. But as legions of Slothrop’s fans know, he’s a gadget man and with his latest toy he plans on practicing looking more deliberately and feeling the world around him with more sensitivity, creativity, openness and pleasure. If he sees anything good and manages not to put his finger in front of the lens, he’ll share his observed and captured treasures.

3. 2008 was a sartorial disaster for Slothrop. Imagine a sad clown that couldn’t afford a decent pair of red shoes: that was Slothrop minus the imagination required to be a sad clown. The obvious solution is to make passionate love with M.I.A.--three times a week should suffice-- and steal her clothes when she’s not wearing them. Should any progeny result, Slothy will make an excellent stay at home dad while Mom sings more songs while wearing golden heels and purple leopard tights.

4. When Chris Rock said books are like Kryptonite to a nigger, Slothrop felt equally implicated. Them shits be hard. But with more fortitude and a helmet, Slothy is ready to try reading again.

5. After ten years of learning and practicing the G chord, Slothy is finally ready to take his guitar playing to the next chord, which in this case would probably be the C major. Armed with a G and C, a song should manifest itself by year’s end. It will probably be about pussy.

6. At some point, Slothy will also stop being a dissertation pussy and try to write one.

7. Speaking of pussies, Slothrop will stop making fun of the Ass-Head. Arrogance will make way for humility, and Slothrop won’t make a peep, not a one, anytime the Ass-Head doesn’t write something because he’s too busy being a sourpuss or his poor-man’s-fantasy hoodlums strikeout yet again.

8. It should be clear by now that Slothrop will also watch much more Swedish Lesbian Porn.

9. Apollo is a pussy. Therefore Dionysius will rule Slothrop’s kingdom in 2009. Which means Slothy will travel to Big Bend and will see about the Ice-Fields Parkway in Canada and investigate more transcendent substances and have orgies on a small yacht in the South Pacific. Wine will be served with every meal.

10. The concept of time, too, is for plush pussies and so Slothrop is ridding himself of his watch. When he’s late to things or doesn’t show up, it’s because he’s with Dr. Cooper, not knowing what time is.

11. Injuries are good for becoming a pussy, instantaneously, at the stroke of midnight. Since there was not a single day in 2008 where Slothrop had full uninhibited use of both his long limbs, that means there was never a day in 2008 when Slothrop wasn't a pussy. So fuck that. One day this year Slothrop will once again trot like Bambi after she first learns how to walk.