New Microfiction

A good friend since the fewest of years has written a terrific short piece that’s up at Staccato. I hope you take a look; you’ll be happy you did.

Cubism v. Kandinsky’s Abstract Expressionism, DFW, and De Certeau (JR)

The best intellectual moments I’ve had come from a mixing of disciplines. Maybe the first times I really felt this is freshman year of college, taking English Literature courses, Economics, third-year Calculus, and a seminar on the last 100 years in Germany. Keith Gessen recently mentioned the parallel development of literature in a piece on DFW, “In the 1920s you have your Russian modernists and your Anglo-American modernists and German modernists, and they’re all very much alike but that makes sense because they knew each other and all read the same books, but you’ll also, if you look, find Bulgarian modernists and Portuguese modernists, and so on.” What’s always fascinated me is the zeitgeist carries across disciplines as well — modernism, for example, doesn’t just refer to thematically unlinked movements in different disciplines; modernism is a term that gets at something essential underlying intellectual pursuits from math to literature to philosophy to economics.

Reading Books Underground (JR)

With the end of school mid-May, the start of summer employment, and my move to Brooklyn, I’ve been doing more of my reading underground. Specifically, in trains. Instead of feverish — if sporadic — two-hundred page evenings of devotion, I now wade through books as the tortoise, not the hare. Reading on trains, twice a day, on average 34 minutes per trip, has altered the texture of daily life, the ways I experience New York. Instead of being a slave to The Savage Detectives, I cohabitate with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and 2666. Fewer late nights in the living room on the couch, having been kicked out of the bedroom by my employed girlfriend, unable to not keep following Arturo Belano and our collective fate of obscurity, (or worse, happenstance notoriety) through Mexico, Europe, and South America, the atmosphere occasionally ruptured by poltergeists driving death-laden semis, shaking the apartment.

Even askance glances at other commuters are changed. My aesthetics heightened to some absurd transcendent level where it feels like I understand the totality of everyone around me, their inner sum from their appearance. Or maybe I don’t feel I understand anything at all, but merely take in the passengers’ appearances in a hungry, superficial visual chomp. I smile. Even if it’s illusion, I laugh at all of us. Or at least that’s what 2666 has done to me.

Rellenar las ausencias

Rellenar las ausencias

You are the nighttime devil’s semis
burning down the warehouse road
crashing through potholes in dropped toolbox cacophony
echoes off walls,
clanging.

I know it’s your
poltergeist locomotion
death driving a furnace
fueled by suicide
driven to death.
Obsession pushes my head under water.
A junkyard dog mutters nightmares lodged in his throat.
The harbinger left.
I wait.

-JR

The Park Is Open!

Washington Square Park opened again either today or yesterday. It was odd to have a whole in the middle of the area. Standing in the middle of the park, finally, this part of town between Broadway and 6th Avenue makes a little more sense to me.

Here’s a not-so-great photo and poem to commemorate the occasion. Perhaps a form of rellenar las ausencias.

Obama wins Ohio!

We finally go blue!

Celebrating our president-elect live from the Renaissance hotel in Columbus.

Election Day

Get out there to vote. Your blogger is out in Ohio making sure votes count in franklin county. You may remember franklin county from four years ago when long lines and faulty machines disenfranchised voters in democratic precincts. Not this time. We’ve got 4500 lawyers in Ohio to stop it.

Should be a big party downtown in Columbus celebrating a victory tomorrow night. Perhaps another iphone post tomorrow night from the celebration.

Amara and Emma ask you to vote for Obama.

We Miss You, Dave

Everyone at No Record has been bummed out and questioning a whole lot of things since hearing last weekend of Dave’s (aka, David Foster Wallace) death. My remembrance of him as a teacher is up over at n+1 here. Benjamin Kunkel has thoughtful words on how DFW opened up possibilities and gave us hope: “[Infinite Jest] confirmed what before was mostly a set of willful, abstract premises: literature can matter as much now as ever; the age is no bar to greatness; even this world before our eyes can be represented in a novel.”

I’ve been sorting through a whole ton of DFW-related material on the internet. And there’s a lot out there. Harper’s has put up all of DFW’s articles for free here. I’ve remembered best Dave and his voice and mannerisms through audio and video of him. Here is his interview with Charlie Rose from over ten years ago. NPR’s Fresh Air finally released online part of his interview from shortly after Infinite Jest came out. Also good are his Bookworm interviews.

Finally, I’ve really enjoyed reading what people have said on the Pomona College website and on McSweeney’s. Pomona College Professor John Seery wrote his tribute in The Huffington Post. The personal anecdotes have reminded me to laugh about Dave.

Spend Your Twenties in New York

A couple weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending with fellow No Record Press bloggers Dave Feinstein and Sarah Todd a reading by Keith Gessen and Charles Bock at New York’s Bowery Poetry Club. Dave and I met at the next-door Irish bar in time for happy hour and made it just that. The bartender briefly lost my credit card, resulting in a round of Jameson on the house.

We made it next door and paid our seven dollars. Then, like a drunken sorority girl studying in Milan, I bought nearly everything in sight (thanks for the loan, Maayan!). The difficulty and expense of obtaining books in Manila had prohibited me from taking advantage of the MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK RELEASE OF THE YEAR, which was something of a player in the earlier drama posted here, The Spectacle of Keith Gessen and Emily Gould (and Part II). In addition to All The Sad Young Literary Men, I also picked up the n+1 booklet “What We Should Have Known”, which promises to tell me about what I should have known six years ago: that I’m seven years behind the curve and never again to be in front of the eight ball.

Vietnamese Buddhism and Religious Freedom

I’ve just had an article published by Tricycle: The Buddhist Review about the lack of religious freedom in Vietnam for Buddhists (and many other religions and sects). The counterpoint is the different forms of resistance offered by the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam and Thich Nhat Hanh. The Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam, banned for decades by the Vietnamese government, is something of a thorn in the side of the Vietnamese government for their willingness to risk their personal security in order to practice a deeply meaningful form of Buddhism that expresses commitment to others.

The very popular Thich Nhat Hanh has in the past few years staged numerous teachings in Vietnam, marking a return to his homeland from which he was exiled decades ago. The Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam criticized his return, saying it would lend an aura of approval to the Vietnamese government’s restrictive religious policies. The state-controlled media in Vietnam depicted his return in just this way. Read the article here.