December 16, 2016

My relationship to New York City—home—is and has always been about my relationship to yearning.


Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York
Edited by Sari Botton

It's been a year.

2016: an emotional, rollercoaster, depressing sh*tstorm of a year. Filled with needed revelations.

In many ways, I've been preparing to leave New York for some time. In my reads alone, what's resonated with me most over the past couple of years have been brave voices encouraging similar bravery of their readers; the fearless pursuit of one's full potential. I never want to feel as lonely, as depressed or as disappointed as I did earlier this year. A number of circumstances made it easier for me to take the leap. Timing. I decided it was no longer worth denying myself purpose, happiness, clarity and good vibes. I want to be better in a myriad of ways and I found I could no longer in the city.


It was not easy to leave. Once I came to terms with my wants and needs, and, subsequently, my impending move, I became so sentimentalwith simple moments inspiring tears. Walking down Broadway in Astoria as the sun set. The embrace of late summer's warmth. I'll never forget that golden light: the way it illuminated the buildings and the path home through twilight. A vision of beauty and grit. The best borough. I love New York fiercely, rep Queens 'till I die, and I hope to return someday and not too late. There's so much I was sad to leave behind. But I wondered whether other places could become part of my fabric, too.


---

Some of my favorite words about New York documented in this blog have been written by E.B. White, Patti Smith, David Carr (I'm a little tired of the fight). I didn't love this compilation, but here are some passages I liked:

"Leaving home does something to your sense of identity. Either you become more of that place than you ever were while you lived there, or your identity calcifies around the rejection of this place. It is challenging to inhabit the space between these two positions. All of these perspectives on the same place. It's dizzying. " (p. 131)
- Losing New York by Lauren Elkin

"To talk about New York--living there, aspiring to live there, having lived thereis to talk about currency. Not privilege and not money, mind you; money is simple. Money is straightforward. Money can give you choices, options. Privilege skews how you see yourself and others, fucks with our head. Currency is something else. Currency is terrifically complex. Money and privilege can make you comfortable, but only currency gives you real power. You can't buy currency; it eludes plenty of rich, entitled people. Beauty, originality, fearlessness: these are some of the currencies of New York." (pp. 138-9)
- Currency by Elisa Albert

"There is that ache of not having another place in the world where I might ever feel so alive and alone, invisible while visible, ever again. Alone in exactly the right kind of way. My relationship to New York Cityhomeis and has always been about my relationship to yearning. But this is what I understand about leaving New York: I have to leave, or I will never be able to restore my own capacity to write about home." (p. 235)
- Captive by Dana Kinstler


June 26, 2016

Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.



East of Eden
By John Steinbeck

A child may ask, "What is the world's story about?" And a grown man or woman may wonder, "What way will the world go? How does it end, and while we're at it, what's the story about?"
I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened or inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught--in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too--in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well--or ill?
Herodotus, in the Persian War, tells a story of how Croesus, the richest and most-favored king of his time, asked Solon the Athenian a leading question. He would not have asked it if he had not been worried about the answer. "Who," he asked, "is the luckiest person in the world?" He must have been eaten with doubt and hungry for reassurance. Solon told him of three lucky people in old times. And Croesus more than likely did not listen, so anxious was he about himself. And when Solon did not mention him, Croesus was forced to say, "Do you not consider me lucky?"
Solon did not hesitate in his answer. "How can I tell?" he said. "You aren't dead yet."
And his answer must have haunted Croesus dismally as his luck disappeared, and his wealth and his kingdom. And as he was being burned on a tall fire, he may have thought of it and perhaps wished he had not asked or not been answered.
And in our time, when a man dies--if he has had wealth and influence and power and all the vestments that arouse envy, and after the living take stock of the dead man's property and his eminence and works and monuments--the question is still there: Was his life good or was it evil?--which is another way of putting Croesus's question. Envies are gone, and the measuring stick is: "Was he loved or was he hated? Is his death felt as a loss or does a kind of joy come of it?"
I remember clearly the deaths of three men. One was the richest man of the century, who, having clawed his way to wealth through the souls and bodies of men, spent many years trying to buy back the love he forfeited and by that process performed great service to the world, and perhaps, had much more than balanced the evils of his rise. I was on a ship when he died. The news was posted on the bulletin board, and nearly everyone received the news with pleasure. Several said, "Thank God that son of a bitch is dead."
Then there was a man, smart as Satan, who, lacking some perception of human dignity and knowing all too well every aspect of human weakness and wickedness, used his special knowledge to warp men, to buy men, to bribe and threaten and seduce until he found himself in a position of great power. He clothed his motives in the names of virtue, and I have wondered whether he ever knew that no gift will ever buy back a man's love when you have removed his self-love. A bribed man can only hate his briber. When this man died the nation rang with praise and, just beneath, with gladness that he was dead.
There was a third man, who perhaps made many errors in performance but whose effective life was devoted to making men brave and dignified and good in a time when they were poor and frightened and when ugly forces were loose in the world to utilize their fears. This man was hated by the few. When he died the people burst into tears in the streets and their minds wailed, "What can we do now? How can we go on without him?"
In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.
We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil most constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is."
(Chapter 34, pp. 413-5)

"I have no bent toward gods. But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul."


East of Eden
By John Steinbeck

Someone on Goodreads described this novel as "delicious," and I think that's pretty aptit is rich in story, description, humanityand it satiated my literary appetite, if you will. The last sentences gave me a jolt and made me cry. Steinbeck is officially a favorite.

I should add my grandfather, a Lee, arrived to San Francisco from China in 1948 so I felt an extra closeness to this character and excerpt somehow. I could picture abuelo as a member of this association, ha. He might've stayed instead of going to the Dominican Republic and, well, how different everything would be. I'm not sure whether Steinbeck did this on purpose, but so fitting that this should appear exactly halfway through the story:

"I told you I was getting more Chinese. Well, to go on, I went to San Francisco to the headquarters of our family association. Do you know about them? Our great families have centers where any member can get help or give it. The Lee family is very large. It takes care of its own."
"I have heard of them," said Samuel.
"You mean Chinee hatchet man fightee Tong war over slave girl?"
"I guess so."
"It's a little different from that, really," said Lee. "I went there because in our family there are a number of ancient reverend gentlemen who are great scholars. They are thinkers in exactness. A man may spend many years pondering a sentence of the scholar you call Confucius. I thought there might be experts in meaning who could advise me.
"They are fine old men. They smoke their two pipes of opium in the afternoon and it rests and sharpens them, and they sit through the night and their minds are wonderful. I guess no other people have been able to use opium well."
Lee dampened his tongue in the black brew. "I respectfully submitted my problem to one of these sages, read him the story, and told him what I understood from it. The next night four of them met and called me in. We discussed the story all night long."
Lee laughed. "I guess it's funny," he said. "I know I wouldn't dare tell it to many people. Can you imagine four old gentlemen, the youngest is over ninety now, taking on the study of Hebrew? They engaged a learned rabbi. They took to the study as though they were children. Exercise books, grammar, vocabulary, simple sentences. You should see Hebrew written in Chinese ink with a brush! The right to left didn't bother them as much as it would you, since we write up to down. Oh, they were perfectionists! They went to the root of the matter."
"And you?" said Samuel.
"I went along with them, marveling at the beauty of their proud clean brains. I began to love my race, and for the first time I wanted to be Chinese. Every two weeks I went to a meeting with them, and in my room here I covered pages with writing. I bought every known Hebrew dictionary. But the old gentlemen were always ahead of me. It wasn't long before they were ahead of our rabbi; he brought a colleague in. Mr. Hamilton, you should have sat through some of those nights of argument and discussion. The questions, the inspection, oh, the lovely thinking--the beautiful thinking.
"After two years we felt that we could approach your sixteen verses of the fourth chapter of Genesis. My old gentlemen felt that these words were very important too--'Thou shalt' and 'Do thou.' And htis was the gold from our mining: 'Thou mayest.' 'Thou mayest rule over sin.' The old gentlemen smiled and nodded and felt the years were well spent. It brought them out of their Chinese shells too, and right now they are studying Greek."
Samuel said, "It's a fantastic story. And I've tried to follow and maybe I've missed somewhere. Why is this word so important?"
Lee's hand shook as he filled the delicate cups. He drank his down in one gulp. "Don't you see?" he cried. "The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in 'Thou shalt,' meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel--'Thou mayest'-- that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on the man. For if 'Thou mayest'--it is also true that 'Thou mayest not.' Don't you see?"
"Yes, I see. I do see. But you do not believe this is divine law. Why do you feel its importance?"
"Ah!" said Lee. "I've wanted to tell you this for a long time. I even anticipated your questions and I am well prepared. Any writing which has influenced the thinking and the lives of innumerable people is important. Now, there are many millions in their sects and churches who feel the order, 'Do thou,' and throw their weight into obedience. And there are millions more who feel predestination in 'Thou shalt.' Nothing they may do can interfere with what will be. But 'Thou mayest'! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win." Lee's voice was a chant of triumph.
Adam said, "Do you believe that, Lee?"
"Yes, I do. Yes, I do.  It is easy out of laziness, out of weakness, to throw oneself into the lap of deity, saying, 'I couldn't help it; the way was set.' But think of the glory of the choice! That makes a man a man. A cat has no choice, a bee must make honey. There's no godliness there. And do you know, those old gentlemen who were sliding gently down to death are too interested to die now?"
Adam said, "Do you mean these Chinese men believe the Old Testament?"
Lee said, "These old men believe a true story, and they know a true story when they hear it. They are critics of truth. They know that these sixteen verses are a history of humankind in any age or culture or race. They do not believe a man writes fifteen and three-quarter verses of truth and tells a lie with one verb. Confucius tells men how they should live to have good and successful lives. But this--this is a ladder to climb to the stars." Lee's eyes shone. "You can never lose that. It cuts the feet from under weakness and cowardliness and laziness."
Adam said, "I don't see how you could cook and raise the boys and take care of me and still do all this."
"Neither do I," said Lee. "But I take my two pipes in the afternoon, no more and no less, like the elders. And I feel that I am a man. And I feel that a man is a very important thing--maybe more important than a star. This is not theology. I have no bent toward gods. But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed--because 'Thou mayest.'"
(pp. 302-4)

"I was thinking about that time when Sam Hamilton and you and I had a long discussion about a word," said Adam. "What was that word?"
"Now I see. The word was timshel."
"Timshel--and you said--"
"I said that word carried a man's greatness if he wanted to take advantage of it."
"I remember Sam Hamilton felt good about it."
"It set him free," said Lee. "It gave him the right to be a man, separate from every other man."
"That's lonely."
"All great and precious things are lonely."
"What is the word again?"
"Timshel--thou mayest."
(pp. 522-3)

June 15, 2016

"Couldn't a world be built around accepted truth? Couldn't some pains and insanities be rooted out if the causes were known?"

East of Eden
By John Steinbeck

My heart is heavy and this feels apt somehow.

"I think I can," Lee answered Samuel. "I think this is the best-known story in the world because it is everybody's story. I think it is the symbol story of the human soul. I'm feeling my way now--don't jump on me if I'm not clear. The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt--and there is the story of mankind. I think that if rejection could be amputated, the human would not be what he is. Maybe there would be fewer crazy people. I am sure in myself there would not be many jails. It is all there--the start, the beginning. One child, refused the love he craves, kicks the cat and hides his secret guilt; and another steals so that money will make him loved; and a third conquers the world--and always the guilt and revenge and more guilt. The human is the only guilty animal. Now wait! Therefore I think this old and terrible story is important because it is a chart of the soul--the secret, rejected, guilty soul. Mr Trask, you said you did not kill your brother and then you remembered something. I don't want to know what it was, but was it very apart from Cain and Abel? And what do you think of my Oriental patter, Mr. Hamilton? You know I am no more Oriental than you are."
Samuel had leaned his elbows on the table and his hands covered his eyes and his forehead. "I want to think," he said. "Damn you, I want to think. I'll want to take this off alone where I can pick it apart and see. Maybe you've tumbled a world for me. And I don't know what I can build in my world's place."
Lee said softly, "Couldn't a world be built around accepted truth? Couldn't some pains and insanities be rooted out if the causes were known?"
"I don't know, damn you. You've disturbed my pretty universe. You've taken a contentious game and made an answer of it. Let me alone--let me think! Your damned bitch is having pups in my brain already. Oh, I wonder what my Tom will think of this! He'll cradle it in the palm of his mind. He'll turn it slow in his brain like a roast of pork before the fire. Adam, come out now. You've been long enough in whatever memory it was."
Adam started. He sighed deeply. "Isn't it too simple?" he asked. "I'm always afraid of simple things."
"It isn't simple at all," said Lee. "It's desperately complicated. But at the end there's light."
(pp. 270-1)

June 05, 2016

And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.


East of Eden
By John Steinbeck

"Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then--the glory--so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man's importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.
I don't know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused.
At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?
Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.
And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions, forced direction, and the stunning hammerblows of conditioning, the free, roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken.
And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one thing which can by inspection destroy a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost."
(p. 131-2; Chapter 13.1)

His mind plunged like a colt in a happy pasture, and when later the world put up fences he plunged against the wire, and when the final stockade surrounded him, he plunged right through it and out.


East of Eden
By John Steinbeck

"Tom, the third son, was most like his father. He was born in fury and he lived in lightning. Tom came headlong into life. He was a giant in joy and enthusiasms. He didn't discover the world and its people, he created them. When he read his father's books, he was the first. He lived in a world shining and fresh and as uninspected as Eden on the sixth day. His mind plunged like a colt in a happy pasture, and when later the world put up fences he plunged against the wire, and when the final stockade surrounded him, he plunged right through it and out. And as he was capable of giant joy, so did he harbor huge sorrow, so that when his dog died the world ended.
Tom was as inventive as his father but he was bolder. He would try things his father would not dare. Also, he had a large concupiscence to put the spurs in his flanks, and this Samuel did not have. Perhaps it was his driving sexual need that made him remain a bachelor. It was a very moral family he was born into. It might be that his dreams and his longing, and his outlets for that matter, made him feel unworthy, drove him sometimes whining into the hills. Tom was a nice mixture of savagery and gentleness. He worked inhumanly, only to lose in effort his crushing impulses."
(p. 40)


March 05, 2016

I've been mistaken for being everything except what I am: Dominican.



Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
By Raquel Cepeda

I identified strongly with Raquel Cepeda's mission of self-discovery. I'm Dominican-American too and aware of my family's complex makeup but there is so much more to know. I would love to take a genetic test & have my family members do the same. My grandfather immigrated to the Dominican Republic from China in the 1940s, but I know very little about my maternal grandmother's or my paternal grandparents' family histories. Family Tree DNA, the genetic genealogy company Cepeda used to discover her ancestral roots, is based in Houston. I hope to connect next time I'm in town to visit my mama.

"I've always been intrigued by the concept of race, especially in my own community and immediate family, where it's been a source of contention for as long as I can remember. The United States has the second highest Latino population in the world, second only to Mexico. And still, the media--they lump us all together into one generic clod--doesn't get us either. Are Latino-Americans white? Black? Other? Illegal aliens from Mars? Or are we the very face of America?
Some see Latinos as the embodiment of this young country's cultural melting pot. And though Mexicans have been residing here since before the arrival of the first Europeans, many of our fellow Americans view Latinos as public enemies. What our parents see isn't necessarily what we first- and second-generation American-born Latinos see when looking at ourselves in the mirror. According to the 2010 census, over half of all Latinos here identified as being solely white, and about a third checked "Some Other Race." I was one of the three million, or 6 percent, who reported being of multiple races. I guess it all depends on whom you ask and when you ask. Race, I've learned, is in the eye of the beholder.
I don't look all the way white or all the way Black; I look like someone who's a bit of both and then some--an Other. In Europe, people have mistaken me for Andalusian, Turkish, Brazilian, and North African. In North and West Africa, I've been asked if I'm of Arabic or Amazigh descent. In New York, Los Angeles, and Miami, it varies: Israeli or Sephardic, Palestinian, Moroccan, biracial Black and white American, Brazilian, and so on. I've been mistaken for being everything except what I am: Dominican. My own racial ambiguity has been a topic of conversation since I was a teenager. Blending in has filled the pages in my book of life with misadventures and the kind of culturally enriching experiences that make me feel, truly, like a world citizen."
(pp. xiv-xv)

This caught my attention because I have O positive blood:
"In the 1950s, before ancestral DNA testing, researchers studied a fairly new popular Taino settlement in the northeast, originally founded by Enrique, one of the last caciques of the colonial period. They saw high percentages of blood types found in Indigenous-Native-Americans: O positive, with no Rh-negative factor, like Dad. In the '70s, they studied dental records that proved Indigenous retention in the same village: shovel-shaped incisors in thirty-three out of seventy-four people, also characteristic of Native-Americans and their Asian ancestors.
In 2006, a national haplogroup-A mitochondrial DNA survey on the island examined hair root samples taken from sites throughout the Dominican Republic. The results indicated that the northern, central, and eastern regions of the country had the highest percentage of Amerindian ancestry. Haplogroups B and C obtained higher frequencies in the east, and one of only two samples taken in the west belonged to haplogroup A. When further analyses were conducted on the haplogroup A samples, nine lineages were identified in the Dominican Republic: three post-Columbian and six pre-Columbian.
Studies with healthier population samples should be undertaken because the Dominican Republic currently has a population of over ten million people. If more studies are done, more pre-Columbian history--silenced due to genocide by Academia and European chroniclers--will reveal a rich and diverse narrative."
(p. 221)

January 24, 2016

The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.


The Fire Next Time
by James Baldwin

“The treatment accorded the Negro during the Second World War marks, for me, a turning point in the Negro’s relation to America. To put it briefly, and somewhat too simply, a certain hope died, a certain respect for white Americans faded. One began to pity them, or to hate them. You must put yourself in the skin of a man who is wearing the uniform of his country, is a candidate for death in its defense, and who is called a “nigger” by his comrades-in-arms and his officers; who is almost always given the hardest, ugliest, most menial work to do; who knows that the white G.I. has informed the Europeans that he is subhuman (so much for the American male’s security); who does not dance at the U.S.O. the night white soldiers dance there, and does not drink in the same bars white soldiers drink in; and who watches German prisoners of war being treated by Americans with more human dignity than he has ever received at their hands. And who, at the same time, as a human being, is freer in a strange land than he has ever been at home. Home! The very word begins to have a despairing and diabolical ring. You must consider what happens to this citizen, after all he has endured, when he returns—home: search, in his shoes for a job, for a place to live; ride, in his skin, on segregated buses; see, with his eyes, the signs saying “White” and “Colored,” and especially the signs that say “White Ladies” and “Colored Women”; look into the eyes of his wife; look into the eyes of his son; listen, with his ears, to political speeches, North and South; imagine yourself being told to “wait.” And all this is happening in the richest and freest country in the world, and in the middle of the twentieth century. The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.”
(pp. 54-5)

“It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be. One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself—that is to say, risking oneself. If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving. And, after all, one can give freedom only by setting someone free.”
(p. 86)

“Time and time and time again, the people discover that they have merely betrayed themselves into the hands of yet another Pharaoh, who, since he was necessary to put the broken country  together, will not let them go. Perhaps, people being the conundrums that they are, and having so little desire to shoulder the burden of their lives, this is what will always happen. But at the bottom of my heart I do not believe this. I think that people can be better than that, and I know that people can be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.”
(pp. 90-1)

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—out to decide, indeed to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us. But white Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them. And this is also why the presence of the Negro in this country can bring about its destruction. It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant—birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so—and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change. I speak of change not on the surface but in the depths—change in the sense of renewal. But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not—safety, for example, or money, or power. One clings then to chimeras, by which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope—the entire possibility—of freedom disappears.”

(pp. 91-2)

January 22, 2016

One week ago today.

I stood face to face with Patti Smith as we both remained temporarily stuck in the crowded aisle of the Ziegfeld just as HBO's VINYL premiere was about to start. Work for me: ushering people in the theater this portion of the night. I was on my way up and she down & hundreds of people around us were trying to find their places. I couldn't believe it. Hardly do I get starstruck but my mind raced in the two minutes before the crowd dissipated and left me without an excuse to stand in her way. I write this because one week later, I am still kicking myself for not mustering up the courage to express my admiration. Given my revelation about her work the past year, it felt surreal that she should be right there in that moment. But I could say nothing of substance. Instead, the only words that came out of my mouth were, "Can I help you find your seat?" She was fine, thanks.

Unfortunately, this is a way less cool retelling of a celebrity encounter compared to the ones Patti had while she was young.

January 19, 2016

Take no one's word for anything, including mine--but trust your experience.


The Fire Next Time
By James Baldwin

This first excerpt is from A Letter to My Nephew, but the entire letter, here, is exceptional.

"Take no one's word for anything, including mine--but trust your experience. Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go. The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear. Please try to be clear, dear James, through the storm which rages about your youthful head today, about the reality which lies behind the words acceptance and integration. There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it."
(p. 8)

"There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be "accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this--which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never--the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed."
(pp. 21-2)

"White Americans do not understand the depths out of which such an ironic tenacity comes, but they suspect that the force is sensual, and they are terrified of sensuality and do not any longer understand it. The word "sensual" is not intended to bring to mind quivering dusky maidens or priapic black studs. I am referring to something much simpler and much less fanciful. To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it."
(pp. 42-3)

"It is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being (and let us not ask whether this is possible; I think we must believe that it is possible) must first divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church. If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him."
(p. 47)

January 03, 2016

We all remember the parts of the past that allow us to meet the future.


The Night of The Gun
By David Carr

Zipped through this one without ever writing a page number or notation--that's how engrossed I found myself--but I skimmed through to find the passages that lingered with me days after.

David Carr will be dead one year next month. These passages of course don't encapsulate the memoir: his drug and alcohol addiction, raising his two twin daughters, his journalism career(s). I am so impressed by his ability to delve so deeply into the fog & pull out the truest version he could of his life. I knew him best for his work at The New York Times, and am saddened he's no longer here.

Memory is a theme I'm drawn to time and time again:

"Shakespeare describes memory as the warder of the brain, but it is also its courtesan. We all remember the parts of the past that allow us to meet the future. The prototypes of the lie--white, grievous, practical--make themselves known when memory is called to answer. Memory usually answers back with bullshit. Everyone likes a good story, especially the one who is telling it, and the historical facts are generally sullied in the process. All men mean well, and clearly most people who set out to tell the truth do not lie on purpose. How is it, then, that every warm bar stool contains a hero, a star of his own epic, who is the sum of his amazing stories?"
(p. 23)

"Memory is the one part of the brain's capacity that seems to be able to bring time to heel, make it pause for examination, and, in many cases, be reconfigured to suit the needs of that new moment. Long before TiVo, humans have been prone to selecting, editing, and fast-forwarding the highlights of their lives. Even if every good intention is on hand, it is difficult if not impossible to convey the emotional content of past events because of their ineffability. Even in an arch me-as-told-to-me paradigm, the past recedes, inexorably supplanted by the present.
Memory remains an act of perception, albeit perception dulled by time, but it is also about making a little movie. Remembering is an affirmative act--recalling those events that made you you is saying who you are. I am not this book, but this book is me.
Episodic and semantic memory each lie in different ways, but each is eventually deployed in service of completing a story. Stories are how we explain ourselves to each other with the remorseless truth always somewhere between the lines of what is told. In this way, memory becomes not a faculty but a coconspirator, a tool for constructing the self that we show the world."
(p. 183)

All words can be meaningful:

"Eden House was brimming with slogans. This was the main one: "The answer to life is learning to live." We would say that, loudly and with a great deal of emotion, at the conclusion of each group meeting.
This is the point where the knowing, irony-infused author laughs along with his readers about his time among the aphorisms, how he was once so gullible and needy that he drank deeply of such weak and fruity Kool-Aid. That's some other book. Slogans saved my life. All of them--the dumb ones, the preachy ones, the imperatives, the cliches, the injunctives, the gooey, Godly ones, the shameless, witless ones.
I lustily chanted some of those slogans and lived by others. There is nothing ironic about being a crackhead and a drunk, or recovery from same. Low-bottom addiction is its own burlesque, a theater of the absurd that needs no snarky annotation. Unless a person is willing to be terminally, frantically earnest, all hope is lost."
(pp. 192-3)

Because I love love & when people unabashedly express it***:

"Everything right about her was wrong for me. I had generally gone out with women who had a lot of dark hair falling into their faces, bee-stung lips, and remarkable leather jackets, with more tattoos than jewelry. As my friend Eddie once observed, "The women you date don't just look bitchy. They are." This Danish-Icelandic-Norwegian-Irish girl had worked in the U.S. Senate for a Republican, had her own house in South Minneapolis, and was just coming off a sales job and getting ready to go to grad school to become a teacher. Not. My. Type.
My kind, though."
(p. 312)

New York:

"When I moved to New York, I asked my pal Amanda how she thought I'd like it. "It's a fight. And if you want the fight, it's great. And if you don't want the fight, it sucks."
I liked the fight. Unlike Washington and Los Angeles, where people rise and fall based on some secret chart, New York is a place where the wiring diagram is very visible and fundamentally, oddly, just. If you are good at what you do, work hard, and don't back down, you can make a place to stand on the island.
The trick of enjoying New York is not to be so busy grinding your way to the center of the earth that you fail to notice the sparkle of the place, a scale and a kind of wonder that put all human endeavors in their proper place."
(pp. 336-7)

Life:

"I now inhabit a life I don't deserve, but we all walk this earth feeling we are frauds. The trick is to be grateful and hope the caper doesn't end any time soon."
(p. 382)




***In ways that are not cheesy or corny, but poetic and true.