Posts by admin

It’s a bit strange to find yourself mugged by a record album. At a certain age, that is. Young, it’s normal. But that obsessive, slightly sweaty, adolescent quality that goes along with getting a song stuck in the cerebral cortex in a way that feels like infatuation—that’s unexpected. And yet here I am under the sway of one Polly Jean Harvey and the record she released earlier this year: Let England Shake. My embarrassment doesn’t end there: I’ve been vaguely aware of P.J. for a couple of decades without ever really listening, so not only am I a sudden fan, I’m a late fan. It could hardly get worse. (Though in my own defense, Let England Shake hasn’t made that big a splash in the US market—nothing like Adele. I can’t imagine why.)

Faced with the incomprehensible—on so many levels—I turned to old behavior. Yes, just as I did ‘back in the day’ when I fell in love with a record, I went to Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, the place where teens can let the nation know what they’re thinking about ‘pop’ music. It was good to be back in old Studio B. Dick must have remembered me from way back when, because I was hustled right up on the bandstand, where, preliminaries over, Dick took me through the paces of the old ritual:

Dick: What makes this record special?
Me: Lyrics and beats, Dick!
Dick: Can you dance to it?
Me: Absolutely!
Kamagra is basically an inhibitor that acts on this point and this levitra cialis viagra can be a great help. Another form of child anxiety is generalized panic attacks which many children are suffering. discount levitra You may take lowest price viagra the other forms of Kamagra for the ED sufferers and their healthy sexual life via It is a common fact that without strong volume of ejaculation, sexual pleasure is impossible, nor it is likely to impregnate a woman. With increasing incidence of impotency, commander cialis davidfraymusic.com medical experts are in extensive research of inventing oral ED treatments. Dick: It reminds you of?
Me: Best record since Sgt. Pepper. Or maybe Trout Mask Replica. Anyway, also Early Velvet and Lou Reed of Dirty Blvd.
Dick: [slight puzzlement noted] Ah, great. Best lyric?
Me: So many, Dick. How about: ‘Goddamn Europeans/Take me back to beautiful England/And the gray damp filthiness/Of ages and battered books/And fog rolling down behind mountains/On the graveyards and dead sea captains.’
Dick: [puzzlement increasing] Yeah. Okay. Overall thoughts?
Me: An examination limning the role of violence in producing culture, nationhood, the self in the tradition of Macbeth—a work almost entirely unique in the history of pop culture rich in reference that ranges from Gallipoli and the Great War to Iraq, from Pound to Eddie Cochran.
Dick: [frozen smile, suddenly brightening into something genuine] Time for a commercial break!

The station at 7th Avenue, Brooklyn

I was at the 7th Avenue stop of the Q train in Brooklyn, on my way to Manhattan. The weather was good that day, the station mild and pleasant and almost entirely deserted, probably because a train had passed through recently.

My Q train strategy: walk to the front of the platform (more chance for a seat there). So I’m heading in that direction about thirty feet from the end, and then I see something moving on the concrete before me, something small and definitely ugly and yet clearly alive, about the size of a grown man’s hand. I stop dead. What gives the moment its strangeness is that at first I can’t tell what it is. (I think: a bird, a squirrel, a rat—in the subway, naturally you think: rat.) A living thing is here where it shouldn’t be, not down in the tracks, but here where we wait for the train, and what I feel then is the very specific fear of contamination.

My first reaction is to back away, but I’m also curious, and so I step forward cautiously. And then I know: it’s a rat, after all—but so thin and desiccated as to be hardly recognizable, its coat sparse, patches of livid pink showing through, bleak eyes staring, dark and empty.

It’s trying to walk but keeps listing badly to one side.

I suppose it’s an odd thing to say, but until this moment, I’ve never considered what it must be like for a rat to face death—not abstractly, that is, but actually. And yet here it is, the dying animal’s eyes somehow alert (and yet still lusterless and empty) with something like puzzlement. And I understand that what I’m witnessing is the animal response to the intransigence and failure of the body.

Some of the causes for premature ejaculation include eager to enjoy sex, guilt feelings, anxiety, thyroid problems, depression, stress, over excitation after watching an erotic movie or on seeing a beautiful female and weak nerves and cheap viagra overnight hormonal misbalance. Organic dysfunction dysfunction associated with with viagra pill for woman hormone imbalances changes that females move via. The prostate is one of the male intercourse hormone androgenic hormone or levitra 20mg testosterone. So, all the companies can lowest price for levitra produce the drug. And so here I stand, trying to decide whether I need to do anything—report this to the stationmaster? But what would he do? More people are gathering on the platform. I sense them behind me, and glance quickly back in that surreptitious manner of the subway. I have the feeling that everybody is aware of the animal lying there just beyond me, but they’re also trying to ignore it.

But now someone else has come closer. I turn my head (again, that quick, hooded look)—and see a woman perhaps in her late thirties. She has that somewhat pinched or strained appearance of people who have been in the city a long time, perhaps living alone and working some unglamorous job steadily and punctually. (It’s just a feeling I have—for all I know she may be a glamorous but dressed down magazine editor.) Then a moment unfolds between us, the urban ritual, in which two people consider whether to say something to one another and then decide not to.

We stand like that, watching the rat trying to drag itself off somewhere but unable to do so, while the rat watches us, or seems to, but without any real interest, its attention focused entirely on trying to make its awkward body function right.

At some point I become aware that the woman standing near me has opened her bag and is poking around inside it, and then I realize that she’s removed a small container. It’s transparent plastic, and so I see at once that it’s filled with dry cat food. Perhaps our eyes skip past one another’s again. But then she steps forward, closer to the rat—far closer than I would have dared to—and taps a few pellets of the cat food onto the concrete in front of the animal. She steps back to her former position. Our eyes may have met again, but again neither of us says anything. I have the feeling that almost everyone on the platform has noticed what she’s done. Then the grinding sound of a train enters the station, pushing a wind down the length of the tube. The rat begins to nibble on the dried pellets, but listlessly, as though it’s a purely mechanical reaction.

Then the train comes to a stop, the doors slide open, and everyone steps inside—the woman with the cat food has disappeared into another car. The doors slide shut, we’re sealed inside, and we begin to move, and then I catch one last glimpse of the rat with its little storehouse of food as the train enters the tunnel.

Cover art for The Pale King

Clear statement of purpose: this is not exactly a review of The Pale King, David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel. So what is then? A few words, thoughts, reactions, sentiments, ruminations that taken together, I think, may give a taste of what the novel has to offer.

•

Strange way to start a review to point out that a quote mark might be missing at ‘To tell the truth…’ on page 500. A ridiculous observation, no? And yet I couldn’t help thinking when I noticed it that even this inconsequential moment hints at the sadness that lives at the edge of every sentence of The Pale King. David Foster Wallace’s suicide in 2008 has closed off the possibility that his novel will ever be finished, or that the minor typographical error on page 500 will ever be corrected by him. And knowing his legendary fussiness about all things grammatical, you know he would have.

•

The all-encompassing sadness mentioned above attaches to the novel’s beautiful sentences, of which there are more than can be counted, because each one harbors the loss of all that might have come after. That possibility gone for him of writing the sentence beyond the current one that is the hope of all writers; that tomorrow the combination of words that finds its way to the page will just destroy everything that went before it.

•

Sadness, sure, sure, sure. But the book is so funny, so often. The humor is at times slapstick and obvious, which is great and a DFW signature, but in other cases, it’s more subtle, jokes within jokes, or jokes about jokes. I’ll give one example that may contain a mix of these formats (though this is always risky because you won’t necessarily see the humor, especially out of context). This happens on page 241, when an important character, who has already been shown to be more than a little eccentric and maybe compulsively attentive, is going to an appointment after an epic Chicago snowstorm:

Now what I love about this is how the character rushes to the umbrella in the snowdrift and not only begins digging but actually shouts to see if its owner is buried in the snow. I love the deadpan. But I quoted more than was needed because I also love the lead-in: how his eyes are closed, the sounds he hears, the nice double hyphens: lit-up blood-red—there’s probably a term in rhetoric for that—the fathers’ old hats on the snowmen, and only then the umbrella, the crisis—that begins with the blood-red in there.

•

Adam Kirsch of The New Republic didn’t much care for the chapters in which a character named David Wallace shows up and becomes a part of the story. (I’ll link but it’s behind a paywall.) This David Wallace has just been suspended from his prestigious Eastern college for having written essays for pay for rich lazy students, returning in disgrace to his home in the Midwest to take a temporary job at an IRS processing center. DFW of course was never suspended from Amherst, where he wrote theses in both English and philosophy, both of which were published, and is remembered as one of the most extraordinary students in the school’s history. But I thought these fake memoir scenes were really funny. First of all, there’s the “Author’s Foreword,” inserted at Chapter 9, in which David Wallace advances an almost Kafkaesque set of elaborately flawed arguments to prove that the memoir really is a memoir and not fiction, including an account of Byzantine discussions that supposedly took place with the legal department of his publisher. The point of it all is to prove that the standard disclaimer on the book’s copyright page (‘The characters and events in this book are fictitious,’ etc.) was canceled out by the author’s foreword in Chapter 9, a logical impossibility—the disclaimer comes first, and so any effort to disclaim the disclaimer later must then be ‘fictitious’—but the absurdity only makes the ridiculous elaboration of the argument all the more enjoyable. Funnier still, for me, is the description of David Wallace’s bus trip to the town where the IRS processing center is located. Anyone who has ever taken a cross-country bus ride will recognize the lunacy barely held at bay within the bus compartment—perfectly and comically evoked.

•

Much of the novel takes place in the 1970s, a time in which I was present, though perhaps not fully accounted for. (I’m an older guy. Nice way of saying.) Anyway, I found myself thinking there might be a number of anachronisms in the novel regarding this period. For instance, on page 190 mention is made of everyone wearing Timberlands. Another sentence (I’ve lost where) speaks of Docksiders and Timberlands. Okay. Maybe so. I can only report that I don’t remember Timberlands being such a major force in that epoch. Docksiders yes. And something called Earth Shoes. Indeed I was the owner of (one) pair of Earth Shoes, which had a specially lowered heel supposedly conducive to happiness and peace. I am aware that having owned (even one pair of) Earth Shoes will expose me to ridicule among the young—if word ever gets out. So look, maybe everybody was wearing Timberlands, alright? Maybe I just missed the boat. It’s true—I missed many boats. But until I see some hard evidence to the contrary, I’m just not buying it.

Another example (though not necessarily of an anachronism, per se, so much as an interesting assertion about colloquial usage): on page 426, in a chapter in which two characters discuss the ’60s and its cultural referents, one character uses the word ‘groovy,’ and the other responds, “That’s just it. Nobody really said groovy. People who said groovy, or called you man were just playing out some fantasy they’d seen on CBS reports.” I don’t believe this to be quite accurate. Though it’s true groovy was not frequently used in the ’60s and early ’70s, certainly not so much as ‘far out,’ which for a time threatened the language development of an entire generation (and yet how odd it’s died out so utterly and completely), people did say groovy from time to time, and perhaps because there was a certain danger in using it, a certain approach to something inauthentic or even kitschy, its use was reserved for occasions of, one might even say, moment, or at least the word developed a special power as a result.

I’ll report a single use of it in this sense. At the end of my freshman year of college I was in love with a girl (and you can imagine what this means for a 19-year-old, a combination of sexual brio and confused overlapping incoherent longings acting together as a kind of meteor set loose in the naïve body over which no control, propulsive, almost insensate, a nearer approach to unconsciousness, etc.) who had been the girlfriend of my roommate for much of my freshman year. They had recently broken up, but I had been in love with her (see qualification above) for months. On a particular night we somehow ended up together, hanging out

The contested sidewalk today ...

My neighborhood has been undergoing some changes lately, which puts me in mind of an incident that occurred a few years ago that was certainly a harbinger of that change, if not the moment of its ushering in.

I should tell you first about a fellow who lived three doors down, whose house I walked past each morning on my way to work. He was a retired gardener—a fact I didn’t learn from him; he never spoke to me or even acknowledged my existence. He exuded an aura of curmudgeonliness, hard-won and carefully cultivated. I learned about his past from another more talkative neighbor. Anyway it made sense. The retired gardener kept a meticulously neat garden in his little patch of front yard: a quince tree (we only lost it when the tornado came through Brooklyn last fall), a lawn he kept trimmed with a hand-push mower, and several bushes lining the low fence, which he cut in topiary shapes. It was the topiary touch that really gave him away as a gardener. Curmudgeon he may have been, but it’s hard to hold a grievance against someone who keeps a garden the way he did.

At a certain point a new neighbor moved into my building. He was a big fellow with a square head, and like our neighbor down the street not what you’d call a friendly person. When he was having trouble getting cable installed, he greeted a suggestion I made with one of those stony stares that makes you quite certain that even if his feet were on fire you wouldn’t loan him a glass of water. I filed him away in that cabinet marked ‘inconsequential’ and went about my business, though I might’ve noticed a few weeks later that he had gotten himself a dog, a German Shepherd, if I remember rightly, with mournful woebegone eyes.

Meanwhile the neighbor down the street was beginning to behave in a slightly more eccentric fashion. For a couple of weeks as I passed his house on the way to work, I’d see him sprinkling water out of a can onto the sidewalk in front of his property. I remember thinking this was a bit much. Though he from time to time rinsed the walk with a garden hose, this latest move looked like preparation to give his sidewalk a daily scrub—well, the fellow’s proclivity for neatness was becoming a mania. This went on, as I said, for two weeks, until one morning as I walked by his place, he spoke to me for the first time. “Do you know the fellow in your building with the dog?” Now I’ve lived in New York long enough to avoid even the most benign guilt-by-association gambit. Plus I didn’t much care for my co-tenant. So I quickly denied any but a passing knowledge of him—pretty much the truth anyway. I think that’s all that was said; at least it’s all I remember. I walked away more puzzled than ever.

It wasn’t until a few days later that the mystery was cleared up. I was talking to my gregarious neighbor, an interesting guy in his own right: he worked on cars parked in the street and did odd jobs around the neighborhood. But he also rented a tiny storefront around the corner where he had set up an impromptu art gallery for his paintings. Though I more than once stopped to look at these efforts in the dusty display window, I can’t now summon them up, try as I might. I do remember them having great sincerity. But the gallery had few visitors. I remember going outside one summer night and finding him standing on the sidewalk, his eyes shining. A mockingbird was delivering an endless series of whoops and whistles from a light pole just down the street. “A nightingale,” he said “I could just sit here and listen all night.” It was he who enlightened me about my neighbor’s mysterious question. My co-tenant had been walking his dog to the sidewalk in front of the retired gardener’s house where the dog would urinate, much to the retired gardener’s outrage. To put an end to what he saw as this gross violation, he began sprinkling a mixture of pepper and water on the sidewalk in front of his place.

This might have been the end of the story—the dog of the mournful countenance might simply have found a new place to water his surroundings, except that somehow my apartment building mate realized what the old fellow was doing. He threatened to call the police—or perhaps he did. It wasn’t entirely clear. But this I do know: the retired gardener was worried. His question to me—and breaking his vow of silence must have cost him—was meant to gather intelligence and perhaps ward off the danger he saw marching toward him. The exact details of the final act in the drama are veiled to me. I could only see the results: end of pepper water; more or less disappearance of both parties from view. The little stage there at the end of the block, a patch of uneven Brooklyn sidewalk, had been entirely abandoned, or so it seemed, by the principals in the drama.
thought about this levitra without prescription But now there are some effective medications available to increase sperm count naturally. Abused women in marital therapy reach out wanting to know, “How much is too much?” Most often cialis sales australia the adults face the problem. One of the natural ways to enhance the strength generic viagra rx of tissues and increase its flexibility. Potent herbs in this herbal pill increase secretion of testosterone and boost blood flow to the reproductive women viagra australia organs and make them stronger so that reproductive system in males and induce natural energy.

•

One way of looking at this neighborhood vignette is as a minor comedy about foolishly feuding neighbors. Part of me saw it in exactly that way. But I also know there’s a falseness to that enchantment. The retired gardener was an African-American man who had lived on the block for years when the block’s residents were almost all African-Americans. The man with the German Shepherd was white, a recent arrival at what might have been the inflection point for the neighborhood’s “gentrification.” (When my wife and I—both white—moved in several years before this episode, we could tell ourselves we were just living in a diverse neighborhood, our preference, and perhaps even feel good about that; it was easy to pretend we were not part of the gentrifying process. Though of course we were simply an earlier phase of it.)

The trouble with stories is that you never know for sure what they mean, or what they hide. Perhaps the War of the Sidewalk really was just a story about characters in the neighborhood and no more. But I have my suspicions that what happened on the block is another story altogether. For if I think about it, my (white) co-tenant never did seem comfortable in his new surroundings, so much so that at the time I remember vaguely thinking that he had gotten the dog to reduce this discomfort—that he had bought the dog of the woebegone eyes as protection. He then got into a conflict with an irascible (black) neighbor and then (at least) threatened to call the police.

Perhaps he had no awareness how threatening this move would be to our neighbor. Our neighbor, rightly or wrongly—and this argument is one that still ripples with uncomfortable regularity across our society from sea to shining sea—sensed where the weight of the law would finally settle. Perhaps he even sensed that he was at least partly objectively in the wrong, but his deeper fear, and I’m quite sure it was fear he was feeling, lay in his belief that the police called in by the white man down the street would finally be an instrument of white power. And so there he was: an old man feeling powerless and stewing in his juices. Meanwhile, it’s worth pointing out that it was likely no picnic for my dog-owning neighbor either. If his fears were of the kind I think they were—admittedly I’m speculating—then he no doubt had to live with his own (certainly biased) fears of retaliation. I suspect his moving away from the neighborhood soon after had everything to do with this.

As for the old man, perhaps it was only a coincidence, but a few weeks later he suffered a health setback, perhaps a stroke. He managed to hang onto the house for a time, but soon moved out. The talkative neighbor said he went to assisted-living in the Bronx. The house was soon sold, remodeled from top to bottom, and a young family of professionals moved in. The topiary bushes were removed. The quince tree, as I mentioned, was uprooted in the tornado a year later.

Many changes have followed. The non-registered halal butcher shop around the corner on Washington Avenue where some guys were selling goat meat out of iced-down coolers has been replaced by a high-end cake shop. On the corner of Washington, the rather curious and obviously quixotic enterprise run by a guy who was trying to create some kind of local alternative to Mailboxes, Etc. has been replaced by an antique boutique. Gone too is my nightingale listening friend—his art gallery first shuttered, then converted into a yoga studio, now vacant. The neighborhood has not lost all of its diversity—this is Brooklyn after all. But it’s lost something amid the proliferation of Thai and Sushi restaurants, what used to be called Internet cafés, and actually trendy bars. There are now some days in the neighborhood when the number of hipsters per square foot is approaching the density at which nuclear combustion occurs.

The grimly dark account of political murder and betrayal involving Guatemala’s ruling classes in the April 4 issue of the New Yorker (which you can read here) started me thinking about my own time in Guatemala as a freelance reporter on assignment for the Dallas Morning News in the fall of 1982. (I was in many ways the classic freelance journalist: callow, inexperienced, but curious and full of zeal—and also like the classic freelancer, full of parasites. I arrived in Guatemala city flying in from Honduras with a case of amoebic dysentery picked up in the Honduran Mosquitia region.) There’s much I could say about my circumstances, about how I wound up in Guatemala, about my reporting trip itself, which was not going well. But rather than creating a memoir of that time, I would like to use this space to recall with as little embellishment as possible, and as well as I can after so many years, a particular afternoon during my month-long stay in the country that would seem to bear on the New Yorker’s depiction of current conditions there, and especially on the country’s long and tragic civil war—the so-called dirty war—that consumed the final decades of the last century.

I had arrived in Guatemala at an unusual moment in the country’s ongoing civil disturbances. A military officer named Rios Montt had seized power in a coup seven months before and had announced a series of reforms. And in fact, by most accounts violence in Guatemala City, the capital, had fallen. The year before there had been frequent bombings and political murders in the city each month. But critics argued that the government was continuing to wage a brutal war in the countryside against leftist guerrillas and by extension against the native Indian peoples of those regions. This war had long been criticized as the pretext for a brutal land grab against these native communities. Rios Montt denied this, and his critics were of two minds about the denial: one group believed he was simply lying; he was a figurehead who found a way to smooth over the rough edges of the previous regime while continuing its vicious practices. The other group believed Rios Montt to be a kind of naïf in Guatemalan politics, a true believer who thought his reforms were taking hold even as they were being undermined by the Army, which despite his provenance in its ranks, ignored his orders and carried on the dirty war without his knowledge.

Rios Montt’s situation was complicated by religion. In an almost entirely Catholic country, he was an evangelical Christian and a member of an American evangelical church based in California. This church had an impressive compound in Guatemala City, and it was the belief of at least some Guatemalans as well as US observers that the church officers had undue influence on Rios Montt and were even perhaps functioning as a shadow government.

As you can see, there are already two possible shadow governments: the army operating out of Rios Montt’s control, and the American church operating as the force behind his throne. This idea of governing forces operating in shadowy impossible-to-pin-down ways is a primary feature of contemporary Guatemalan politics, as depicted in the New Yorker article. It’s well worth pointing out—and basic fairness dictates this point being made—that Guatemala has made significant progress since the time of the military dictatorship of Montt, and in the eyes of many observers is closer to being a functioning democracy than at any time in recent memory. Yet it’s also true that in both Guatemalas—the contemporary one and the one of Rios Montt’s time—every theory of motive is made murky, as the actual disposition of power lies veiled and hidden.

I made arrangements at a certain point to visit the countryside outside Guatemala City with the idea, no doubt naïve, of trying to find out what was really going on. I traveled, if memory serves, with a British journalist I had met and perhaps another reporter whose background I don’t remember, to San Martín Jilotepeque, a town about 30 miles northwest of Guatemala City, on a bright early fall day. The town had been devastated by the 1976 earthquake that killed more than 20,000 people in Guatemala. Going beyond the main town required permission from the Army—which had involved a good deal of hoop jumping to secure—and an army escort, because the region we were heading into was considered an area of open conflict with the leftist guerrillas who had been fighting the government since the 1960s. The government at this time had set up a series of zones that were supposed to be modeled on the rural pacification program employed in Vietnam, in which the army protected villagers from the leftist by relocating them into model communities. We rendezvoused with an army patrol that would be driving into the rural pacification zone. A young lieutenant was in charge of this patrol, and I concluded, I think rightly, that he was one of the officers who had been placed in a new command as part of Rios Montt’s effort to reform the army. We made the trip standing in the rear of the open army truck with a squad of Guatemalan soldiers.

We arrived in a tiny village after a drive through increasingly dense mountain terrain—I remember this drive as somewhat tense, though perhaps it was only tense for me; certainly the soldiers seemed bored enough. The village was tucked deeply in the folds of the brilliant undulating green mountains of Guatemala’s Central Highlands. In one sense we were driving into the kind of mystical mountain village that American tourists dream of visiting: women in brilliantly colored woven skirts were washing clothing in a stream; wisps of clouds touched the nearby