Listening to Being There for the First time in a long time really loud on my ipod camera phone

DISC TWO OF WILCO'S BEING THERE
This morning I taught the first two thirds of a day of Kindergarten—actually it was yesterday when, in the morning, I also taught two thirds of a day of kindergarten—and, as I walked down Bardin Road to the strip mall at the corner with Williams for lunch, checked my cell phone and got a message from my brother—Do yourself a favor and listen to Being There! Loud!—and I responded at this A.M. enthusiasm (this is an unintentional reference [I swear!] to, A.M., the first Wilco album that preceded Being There): In the morning time? and What will the neighbors think! and he text messaged back (which doesn't sound quite right to me because "text messaging" to me means hitting actual keys over and over again to turn an a to b to a c, etc. and my brother has a new touch screen kind of device that Mike Daisey told us certain inaccurate truths about last year that we were able to ignore because there were certain inaccuracies about the truths) anytime! and then fuck em.  And then I "wrote" back (because I also now have one of those devices that doesn't old-fashioned-ly text message) Also I could put it on my new iPod camera phone and blare it whenever and then, because he usually works at this time, Have you been blessed w/ a day off? and he said No and messaged me a smily face that was not smiling but instead screaming with eyes closed and waterfalls of tears streaming down its yellow circle non-smily face.

Since I have begun this "essay" (or account of a brief text exchange between my brother and me while he was at work and I was on my lunch break substitute teaching kindergarten for the first of two days in a row) I have listened to the first five songs on the second disc of a copy of Being There that my friend Jaymee found and removed from the area with the CDs and stereo in Campagno's Market & Deli in Monterey, California where she made sandwiches for active members of the military and civilians who like really big sandwiches, off and on, from 2001 until 2006.  The CD was removed in 2002 (due to some quick wikipedia fact-checking, and some consequent serious pinwheeling issues, track seven is finishing and I fear time is slipping away), when I got super-excited about Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, the fourth Wilco album, and couldn't stop talking about it (an album I was so partial to—one of the few payoffs for the half-decade Rolling Stone subscription I devoured from age 13 on until I had grown [word choice very intentional] to dismiss and resent it—that I insisted that what I do the first time I smoked pot by myself was to listen to that really loud, which is interesting because, as wikipedia informs us [pinwheeling...] The first conceptions of material for the album came during a particularly stressful time in Tweedy's life. Tweedy had recently quit smoking marijuana,...also I made a great friend who has the same name as me because I saw I am trying to break your heart, the movie about that album at the independent movie theater he worked at)—because it didn't seem like it belonged to anybody and had been in the CD/stereo area of the sandwich shop "forever," and for some reason it was a cardboard "CD advance" version, which turned out to not be at all different.   I listened to it all the fucking time.  And why this classic of '90s post-Parsons country rock psychedelia—and a "CD advance" version at that—ended up abandoned at the Compagno's Market and Deli just outside the Taylor Gate entrance to the Defense Language Institute of Monterey, and why I happened to have a best friend who lived down the street and for some reason got a job at the age of 15 making sandwiches who decided to pilfer me this bit of media remains to me one of the great minor miracles that have made my life worth living.

Another wikipedia fact, one that seems slightly incongruous and wholly depressing:  Valve Corporation used Someone Else's Song as a basis for one of the opening themes in their first-person shooter game Team Fortress 2.

*    *    * I am in, what I am deciding to be, a moment of indecision.  The second CD of the album has finished and the first one did not work in the CD player—above my desk in my parents' garage—that for all of my adolescence was in my room, on which I played, I am estimating right now, between the first five albums—my friend Vicky bought me A.M. and the third, Summerteeth, to continue this theme that the benevolent forces of reality put Wilco's music into my life; and A Ghost is Born, which I bought the day it came out, was essentially the soundtrack of the end of my childhood—in excess of three non-stop month's worth of Wilco, a conservative estimate.  I have chosen simply just to replay CD two as I think about this and the first song has ended.  Its title comes from the notion that "there is no sunken treasure, rumored to be," a weird sort of non-teleological thinking that, in our forward motion into the past, there is no reward beyond that of the journey.  "Music is my saviour, but I was maimed by rock and roll," the song ends. "I was tamed by rock and roll."

And then a reprise, a reprise that always haunted me, the less commercial more abstract version of the single that I didn't really remember, but I remember in the background of a non-existent memory somewhere in the nineties, sometime after I turned 11 and before the 20th century ended.  It was two minutes and thirty-five seconds of their biggest hit.  I just googled the video...pinwheeling...youtube-geico ad...and they take their instruments on a plane as Jeff Tweedy lip-syncs the song and carries a snowboard used for skydiving purposes (I just read it is called "skysurfing"), and then they pretend to play their instruments on the plane, and then in mid-air, as Jeff Tweedy continues to lip-sync, and I can't really tell if there are doubles or if there is a green screen involved it just looks like they are falling through air with guitars, a snare drum, etc.  Although it is incredibly late-'90s-Dawson's Creek-cheesy I am having a hard time not liking it a lot, but I never saw it, I can safely say.  The mystery remains...when did I hear this song?

Question: though the record is very loose, most songs produced in a day, the band is at the top its game—why do betray their professionalism with the inclusion of bits of studio banter, laughter, etc.?  Why does genius seemingly reside in the ability to capture feeling before rehearsal squeezes out the realness, and why does it fall apart at a certain point when it seems too improvised and off the cuff?  Why does it seem to serve the artist in this moment more than the listener/viewer/reader?  I think it has something to do with dreams.  I want to hear songs about dreams as a concept, about people's actual dreams, about life influenced by dreams, about dreams as a metaphor for aspirations.  But never do I want to hear a slick, overly-produced, written for pop singer of the moment song about dreams. There are two songs with "Dreams" in the title on this record, and one is called "Dreamer in My Dreams," and the album is a huge discussion of longing and hoping and aspiring, songs directed towards successful singers, or about aspiring singers, and the lyrics, otherwise, are surreal and the abstract instrumentation floats, and one song's words read like a haiku with the lines repeated centered around the quadrupled line "Why would you wanna live in this world," with a variation in its last phrasing, "Why wouldn't you wanna live in this world?"  Maybe at a certain point, when you've been playing music and smoking weed for what feels like forever, and you have your first kid and your band gets kind of successful, but not really, you realize you don't need your cannabinoid shortcut to surrealism anymore and it becomes even weirder to stop smoking pot.  I wouldn't know.  I don't mean to answer the question.  "I've got blisters on my fingers!" is the best moment of "Helter Skelter" in this aesthetic I am describing, which is that of a double album which the Beatles' "white" album is, btw.

I am back to the last song, a free-for-all barnburner, as much as a Wilco song can be, and Jeff Tweedy sings one about himself in the third person, the aforementioned "dreamer in my dreams":

There's a blister on his brain
that's driving him insane
'cause all good things gotta go
well there's a child on the way
it could be any day,
but how his life will change him, that we don't know.

The song ends with, I think, Jay Bennett saying "That's it" and then slamming a piano shut with lots of giggles.

I am going to get a beer and figure out how to listen to the first CD.

DISC TWO OF WILCO'S BEING THERE
While I just listened to disc two twice in a row and could probably listen to it again, I always found the first half more captivating, putting "Misunderstood" on half a dozen mixtapes, and "Hotel Arizona" on half a dozen more.  And the actual single and not its reprise is on it. And this time when I put it in my teenage bedroom's CD player it played, and I turned it up loud and wrote the next paragraph.

I just had a minor epiphany while listening to "Misunderstood," the album's first song about why this song is so captivating still, or, more interestingly, why it is more captivating than it ever was: Jeff Tweedy was me and my brother's age, just a couple years older than I am now, when he wrote the album, more specifically he was my age when he started writing songs for it and my brother's age (actually two months older) when it came out, and—while it is about all of those important rock and roll anti-authoritarian the world is not what it seems messages that one so easily falls in love with at the age of 16—it is more accurately about being on the verge of 30 and not knowing what exactly to do with all of these truths that were taught to us by a culture that gave more virtue to drug use and drinking than churchgoing and just about everything else that one is quote unquote supposed to do.  I just thought he was kidding when he sang in "Monday": "Well, I cut class, in school, yeah, but now I know I made a mistake, I made a big mistake," because it just sounds so hokey and Jeff Tweedy couldn't have made a mistake, he made some of the most important albums of my generation, or, I guess, his generation, or whatever.  I just finished a biography of David Foster Wallace and he cynically refers to a famous artist's occupation as "polishing the statue," which, if the statue is of a drug addict, or a genius, or a mentally unstable person, can be a harrowing, and literally unhealthy, image to maintain.  But if that's what the kids want it's what the kids want.

But "Monday" is a weak song, it's back to back with the single version of the single, which seem out of place on an album the rest of which sounds like a later Wilco album—abstract, cohesive, artistic, often really dissonant and borderline self-serving, but never quite.  For the first time during this experience I am going stop typing and actually just listen and think, a good idea, for a change...

"What's the world got in store for you now" is a rhetorical question on several levels.

I think Wilco played "Hotel Arizona" when I saw them in 2005 when they played with Jim O'Rourke, still in support of A Ghost is Born, I don't quite remember.  It would have tied a lot together for me if they did.  But then not really cause this epic number's post-crescendo conclusion is

I guess, all this history's just a mystery to me
One more worried whisper right in my ear.

*    *    *
(That would be a great way to end an album, or this essay, but it goes on with an on the road missing you love song, because the band was still a country-based pop band, accessible, on the brink of the avant-garde.  The work with Billy Bragg finishing unfinished Woody Guthrie songs solidified their place as rock and roll intellectuals, and Summerteeth went backwards a little bit with songs that were a little too bubblegum, and studio production that was too traditional and safe, though the songs were good.  The sonic surrealism reaches a new peak with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and the band as it was, as it began with Being There [with Jay Bennett], ceased to be, which is right when I caught on and watched the documentary of that band falling apart and losing its label only to have a subsidiary of that label rebuy the album that its parent company already paid for, and my friend who has the same name as me got the movie poster from his work when the film left and gave it to me and it hung on my wall for the rest of my adolescence.)

Living to Live

I have Seth Cohen (The O.C.) to thank for introducing me to Chuck Klosterman. I spotted him reading Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs during an episode of The O.C., and the title of the book intrigued me so much that I had to hunt it down.

—Review by deargreenplace of Killing Yourself to Live, 

by Chuck Klosterman, on the revish.com

I have been on a trip for over ten days and have done little writing beyond that done on postcards, and I have been reading personal essays/autobiographical novellas with near exclusivity.  For example, I began Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace on the train stretch between Reno, Nevada and Salt Lake City, Utah, read 200 pages on flights from St. Louis to Chicago and from Chicago to Helsinki and from Helsinki to Berlin, and I have one essay remaining as I sit backward facing in a train en route—from Berlin—to Amsterdam, in a seat that may belong to a disgruntled Dutchman across the aisle.   My girlfriend/traveling companion is not sure of the meaning of an encounter that transpired while I was asleep involving the Dutchman's arrival, glance at his ticket and then my seat, and subsequent perpetual scowl.

*     *     *

I began this trip with a personalized variety of self-psychoanalysis by which I aimed to make it a journey of emotional healing and self-understanding, which, I suppose, with the rare intentionally self-destructive benders (Nicholas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas comes to mind), is how most people, if pressed, would describe a trip of their own making—I read William Styron's Darkness Visible, subtitled "A Memoir of Madness," from the origin of the California Zephyr in Emeryville on the San Francisco Bay east through Sacramento, finishing in Gold Country.  It was reassuring to have the symptoms of a long-developing depression—much due to the logistical anxieties of this trip—validated, and therefore to be cognizant of them through this validation, and to know what I experienced, was experiencing, and habitually experience is a minute shade of the debilitating effects of Styron's illness, and the depression afflicting so many others, and that whatever was pre-trip nerves was, so to speak, left behind.  Awareness with movement with anticipation with honest eloquent writing shuttled me like a train to a healthier place.  

*     *     *

A month before I left, my father and I caught up on what we respectively had read while he was on a road trip with my mom for over a month.  In the months before that trip I had shared with him two collections of pop culture essays by Chuck Klosterman that I had enjoyed, inspiring my father to raid amazon of another book of essays, two Klosterman novels—which didn't particularly interest me—and a road trip memoir that he insisted I read, to "let [him] know what [I] think," but that I should wait to read it on the train, in transit as he had done, for reasons that one may consider appropriate, dismiss as "cute," or may ascribe to the stoner synchronicity of playing Dark Side of the Moon while watching the Wizard of Oz muted, or throwing the radio in the bath when "White Rabbit" peaks, for examples.  He was also going to postpone lending me Consider the Lobster, in this case just to spend more time with it—he seemed particularly taken by DFW's ingenious explication of the famously impossible to understand Wittgenstein in a footnote to an essay about a new dictionary of English usage. I believe in synchronicity—as you can tell my father does as well—and I will constantly plan and interpret the media I consume in relation to its consumption, and the contexts that circle that consumption.   The process is constantly edifying and—at my most idealistic—the key to accidental insight, the sort of left-field logic or unexpected parallel that creates new and constructive ideas.  At my most cynical such "insight" is the deluded justification of a constant no-attention-span need to be doing at least two things at once, the consequence of too much self-indulgent art and too much cannabis sativa taken in—sometimes—at once.  Needless to say the project of this reading appealed to me greatly: CK drives around the country visiting memorials to rock and roll deaths as I take the train across these great states.  He mentions, as a detail that my dad thought I would enjoy, that he narrows down his CD collection to 600 essentials he would need for the drive.  I brought my walkman and emptied out my 16-cassette book of Oral Roberts reading The Old Testament and filled it with 16 essential tapes.   Surely this was to be a positive experience for everything involved, textual, human, and otherwise.  

*     *     *

About a month has passed since I first began this essay on that train in my notebook, and I have yet to break my streak in autobiography consumption.  I have visited a friend in Spain and read Hemingway's great non-fiction tome on bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon, and re-connected with my father's side of the family in England, and borrowed from my youngest cousin and read Orwell's memoir of an over-educated jobless tramp, Down and Out in Paris and London.  I have just returned from visiting the middle cousin in London (though Orwell was still in Paris in the book) and am at my aunt's country house outside of Droitwich as I write this.  It is actually being shown to a prospective buyer presently and I am forced to conclude that I have not contributed to the property value as I type away in the dining room, and try to finish the story begun a month ago, lived a week before that.

*     *     *

The first parallel between these three books—just to clarify Darkness Visible by William Styron, Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace, and the Klosterman book—is, well, I guess I should start with the presence of the narrator/author as character in the story, but also, stand-in for the reader.  We are to trust our author as we would our own selves in a given situation.  This is perhaps the difficulty in switching from the radically empathetic authors Styron and Wallace to the unflinchingly unfeeling narrative persona of Klosterman, which brings me to the parallel I initially intended to address at the start of this paragraph (a paragraph which saw the return of my aunt, the realtor, the prospective buyer and her son back into the room, a moment of eye contact with the 4-year old little English boy who proceeded to sprint out of the room): the treatment of the superficiality of Los Angeles.  David Foster Wallace begins the book (or the editor of the book opted to begin) with a 50-page, exhaustive account of—simultaneously—the Adult Video News Awards for achievement in pornography, the pornography industry, the media surrounding the pornography industry, and what it entails to be a member of the media covering the AVN awards.   The depth of Wallace's humanity is not explicit, but rather a visceral flip-side to the frank objectification and commodification of the greatest expression of love and intimacy humans have.   DFW treats his subjects fairly, quotes them accurately, backs up any detail with facts and context, with such rigor that what is initially just superficial (porn and its stars) becomes hideous in the extent to which the culture surrounding it has become autonomous with its own bureaucracy, media and logic.   Nowhere is judgment ever cast; nowhere does DFW take an implied position of superiority (I am composing this in the blogger platform which does not seem to have a means to footnote certain phrasings that need clarification, unfortunately, which I have let slide until the present moment when I feel the need to note that I do not have a copy of the essay in front of me [I left it in Berlin to collect at the end of my trip], I did not take notes on it as I read it, and I generally concede it is poor practice to use words like "nowhere" in serious literary discussion— I am thus admitting to and partaking in a particular brand of writing that values feelings and memories over the scholastic church of close reading and citation).

I read this essay in the hours before arriving in Salt Lake City in the middle of the night, anticipating a quick visit with two friends who agreed to stop at the train station, and the morning after, when it turned out the train was 3 hours late.  At a certain point I read Klosterman's discussion of why he did not want to go to LA in his trip (he is visiting the sites of famous deaths in the history of American rock and roll, or, as he puts it in perhaps the most cringe-inducing line I have read in a book, "going to get his death on"), although it has some notable rock and roll deaths, which I can't presently share because he did not end up going there and you can google them just as well as I can.  Instead he presents a scene out of an imaginary screenplay that typifies his feelings about the failings of Los Angeles, its culture, and its people (again, I do not have my father's copy in front of me [this time it is in St. Louis to be collected further along the return stage of the hero's journey] and I am more or less describing the memories of my feelings about the work in question.  Abysmal scholarship, I know).  

*     *     *

Klosterman and DFW essentially get to the same point: LA is superficial and the people who live there and buy into it suffer from a certain lack of humanity as a consequence; both pieces of writing (the bit of screenplay dialogue and the DFW essay, which is titled, by the way, in the book, "Big Red Son," and, in Premier magazine in 1998, "Neither Adult Nor Entertainment") have a slightly detached outsider view on the situation and present it as ridiculous.  The difference is Klosterman has invented this unbelievable and absurd situation as an exaggeration of stereotypes, whereas DFW is documenting an unbelievable and absurd situation that is a greater exaggeration of stereotypes than one can imagine who is not privy to the San Fernando world of pornography.  The waiter trying to get into the media world of LA is a flat invention of Klosterman, and we believe in the authenticity of Klosterman because he finds conversing with the stereotype trying, so trying that the scene ends as he "jams a steak knife into his own heart...twice...not unlike singer-songwriter Elliott Smith."

*     *     *

Despite depression’s eclectic reach, it has demonstrated with fair convincingness that artistic types (especially poets) are particularly vulnerable to the disorder—which in its graver, clinical manifestation takes upward of 20 percent of its victims by way of suicide. Just a few of these fallen artists, all modern, make up a sad but scintillant roll call: Hart Crane, Vincent Van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, Arshile Gorky, Cesare Pavese, Romain Gary, Sylvia Plath, Mark Rothko, John Berryman, Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Diane Arbus, Tadeusz Borowski, Paul Celan, Anne Sexton, Sergei Esenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky—the list goes on. 

—William Styron, Darkness Visible

The sets of circumstances that make me feel the way I do about the conclusion of Klosterman's self-satisfied SoCal commentary are very particular to me, so I shouldn't suppose everybody should shudder as deeply as I did upon first reading it (which is different from the cringing at the tackiness of "going to get my death on" or the treatise that follows in the next chapter on why Radiohead's Kid A predicted September 11th).   I found myself on the train restraining myself from querying aloud if he really thought his character, sitting beside a pool sipping on a coke, having lost patience with the waiter was really equatable with the pain that Elliott Smith was confronting in the moments before he killed himself.  I was getting over-excited obviously.  This disjoint is the source of the humor of the passage, the same disjoint that runs through the entire book: Klosterman voyages to and stands on the graves of people who felt and expressed feeling in art and he proceeds to fail to feel and express feeling about it in the book; and that's what passes for clever; and if I complain about it I don't get it?   He generally doesn't take the thing very seriously.  He prefers to put his thought and feeling into diatribes, for example, comparing the great loves of his life to members of KISS.  The eye-rolling you may be able sense in my words is anticipated by Klosterman and he seems to prefer to relish in his superficiality and his chauvinism as opposed to rationalize it, or take a critical, self-aware approach to it, and he even references someone like myself, a member of the blog community, buying his book and taking the piss out of it, again a paraphrase: the book and I remain an ocean a part.

*     *     *

I heard the news that Elliott Smith died at recess, between 2nd and 3rd periods, toward the end of my last year of high school when my friend Amy asked if I had heard.  I said I had not and she informed me "he stabbed himself in the fucking chest."  It was an intense image, to say the least, to carry with you for the rest of the school day, but I happened also to have an intense affinity for the man.  Either/Or was one of my favorite albums; and I came of age to a mix tape that had "Miss Misery" as an emotional highlight—I brought this mix tape on the train, as it turned out. I first understood Existentialism, roughly, through his line "You can do what you want to whenever you want to / you know it doesn't mean a thing: big nothing."  

Celebrities die.  It is always sad, but not always unexpected.  It was amazing that Johnny Cash lived as long as he did.  I hadn't studied Derrida before he died, so I wasn't as deeply affected.  It was, of course, very sad when George died.  However, suicide is an unfathomable atrocity and the pain that leads to it and the pain it causes, while incomparable to each other, are each indescribable.  

When David Foster Wallace killed himself I was finishing my last semester of college.  I heard the news while listening to Fresh Air and heard his voice for the first time in a replayed interview.  I didn't really know who he was. I checked out Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and read it in my free time.  I graduated in December and the ceremony was cancelled due to a sudden snow storm which, in Portland, Oregon, has a tendency to halt things like graduation ceremonies.  What became known as "This is Water," DFW's commencement speech in 2005 at Kenyon College became my own de facto commencement speech, and he has since been a focal point of my post-academic life, and a source of a great melancholy in that every profound identification I make with his work and with the author behind it makes me feel the loss more.  

After high school I lived at my parents' house and saved money for an extensive trip: I was to drive my grandmother's car to Whidbey Island, Washington from Salinas, California, visiting my brother and a dozen friends along the way, leave it there for her, return to Oregon, somehow, fly to visit a friend in Massachusetts, fly to London to spend Christmas with my family, and then travel with my brother to Madrid and back.  On October 19, 2004 Elliott Smith's unfinished album about all of the deep dark places his soul was when he died was posthumously released, and I bought it that day while visiting my brother in Arcata and listened to it over and over.  I made a tape of the CD to play in the tape deck I had velcroed to the dashboard.  I made a great friend based in part on the shared enthusiasm we had for the album.  Interestingly, bear with me, Joanna Bolme helped finish the album after Smith's death, and she was on tour with Stephen Malkmus in 2005 when DFW spoke to Kenyon college, when I saw her in person (with my new friend and my brother) at the Fillmore and my brother shouted and got her attention.  And, on the off chance you find that interesting, it might interest you to know that the friend I was visiting in Massachusetts went to Hampshire College, Elliott Smith's alma mater.  By the way, I have never seen Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I have just had the scene paraphrased for me about throwing the radio into the bathtub when "White Rabbit" peaks.

*     *     *

"Consider the Lobster," the essay from which the book gets its name, is, in essence, about tourism.  I am, in essence, a tourist.  While I am staying with friends and family, travelling at a leisurely pace, and trying to participate in real things, the label is not easy to escape, however much I would like to.  The essay describes a lobster festival in Maine, though, as is his wont, DFW comes from a compassionate perspective.  It becomes fairly disgusting to center a massive celebration around the act of boiling hundreds of creatures alive.  I am easier to persuade of the morals or this, as I am a vegetarian; but it is undeniable to deny the fact of it.  The biggest grain of truth comes, in true DFW fashion, in a footnote, really, in a metaphor at the end of a footnote.  What is said is that attending such phenomena, which the locals leave to the tourists to do, is like pouncing on something that is already dead, killing it further.  I am from Monterey, California, and around the time of my birth Monterey declared itself dead, put the bell jar on, and invited the world to witness what it was.  I can empathize with DFW's point, and the metaphor is that we flock as tourists to prey on the dead thing at the shore as a lobster bottomfeeds (the book is still in Berlin!) on the dead protein scattered on the beach, though of course on the water side of the beach.  

I believe everything I have endeavored to say has been said, apart from the conclusion about why I find Chuck Klosterman's work so offensive, which I still don't care to do because, like I said, it is so tautological, he describes it himself in his book, but, in his mind, transcends it by doing so.  The question for me is how do I tell my own story, taking a trip 8 years later, on the other side of my twenties, which has such similar contours, with not just Elliott Smith's unfinished, haunting swan song as its soundtrack, but the entirety of my past, and how do I continue to take this trip as both an empathetic human and a consuming tourist, and where do I end up at the end of it?  What has changed, if anything, in eight years, besides receiving a bachelor's degree, and what solace can I find in the credo that This Is Water, when it wasn't enough for David Foster Wallace?   And why should I have spent five hours typing up this essay on my vacation between lunch and teatime instead of, what, drinking cocoa and watching the rain come down?  There are, of course, many positive answers to this, deeply personal to me, but it is teatime and I have typed enough for a day of vacation.

Should Mr. Shaw-Kitch Shave his Mustache?

An M&Ms

I turned on the television today and there was an M&Ms commercial  on.  It featured Ms. Brown, the bespectacled attractive all-chocolate M&M, on a lunch al fresco date with a handsome man with, what seems like, a generic European accent.  The narrative of the commercial seems to suggest  he is younger, but how old does an M&M get?  A man in his twenties is, I assume, ancient to the average M&M.  They were having a fight about the superficiality of his love for her because he said that she looked "delicious today."  She rolls her eyes and says "Honestly.  Sometimes I think you only like me because I'm and M&M's."  I always thought that a bag of M&M's contained M&M after delicious M&M, and that's still what makes linguistic sense to me.   As in, "try at least one coconut M&M.  You will be pleasantly surprised." And plural: "I just ate a whole bag of peanut M&Ms for lunch."  Would the plural of an M&Ms be pronounced em-an-em-zis?

I now know that Forrest Mars, Sr. patented the candy coated chocolates after "a visit to Spain during the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s.  He'd encountered soldiers eating pellets of chocolate encased in a hard sugary coating which prevented them from melting.  And I know that Mars teamed up with the son of the president of Hershey's (a strategic move in chocolate ration World War Two America), Bruce Murrie, and that M. & M.'s pill-sized taste explosions were given exclusively to the military during the war.  My apologies to anybody who read the wikipedia page and realizes how much uncited direct quotation was involved there.  But aren't I just using the agreed upon best descriptors for the fact of the matter if its from wikipedia?  Wikipedia called them pellets after citing the Old Newark Memories site without quotes because pellets is the perfect word.  

This notion, however, goes contrary to the point I am trying to make: it is, obviously, in fact "an M&M's,"however, that sounds fucking ridiculous and, no matter how much I learn facts about the candy-covered chocolate pellets I will never say that.

John Stewart

California Bloodlines Side A

If you google “John Stewart” to find out more about the recording artist after you purchase one of his records secondhand for 89 cents because it’s called “California Bloodlines” and you are Californian, google will give you results relating to the host of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, assuming that you were misspelling his name and meaning to look him up, and that you did not care about the prolific folk singer-songwriter.  I did google "John Stewart" which showed results instead for "Jon Stewart."  I did not ask to search instead, as I had initially intended, for "John Stewart," so I have grown acquainted with the recording artist exclusively through record stores.

I am moving out of my house a week from tomorrow and one of my projects has been to listen to all of the John Stewart records I have acquired and decide which I want to keep.

I certainly shall keep California Bloodlines for I find it to be a generally listenable record with moments of originality and excellence.  For this reason I bought The Phoenix Concerts (1974), a double live LP, when I saw it for $1.89 at the same record store, and why I bought respective 1970, ’72, and ’73 recordings Willard, Sunstorm, and Cannons in the Rain, all of which I have listened to in passing no more than once.

Looking through my other records, deciding which ones to keep, I noticed that John Stewart was the third that made the Kingston Trio one more than a duo.  He was the one without a cleft chin.

California Bloodlines Side B

The lyrics and ambience of the songs on California Bloodlines describe a rich connection between the history of western settlement and the present (or at least then present) American reality.  The eponymous first song on the record tells of a state’s identity as the veins and arteries of the singer, a history literally pulsing through his flesh.  “Mother Country” is a spoken storytold song about a newspaper article in the San Francisco Chronicle and the reanimation through Stewart’s imagination of turn of the 20th century life—”Why, they were just a lot of people doing the best they could,” he put it simply.

What interests me about this mode of research, and accessing of media in general, is that it is unmediated by present-day modes of either media or commerce—all five of my LPs, all six records, cost less than a beer at the bar, either in the local record store bargain bin or from the not-for-profit thrift store; and I listed to them without the internet, cable, subscribing only to electricity.  

When I googled “John Stewart” I did not clarify that I had meant John Stewart, that I did not misspell the name of my intended search result.  If I did clarify I don’t remember, because all I know—or at least consciously remember—I just know from these records, and at a certain point I decided I would leave it at that, I would comprehend him exclusively through the mode of his early ‘70s hey-day—I would set them on the turn table, plop a needle on them, and tap my toe while reading the inserts.  And, as you may have guessed, catalogue the experience as it happened in a vaguely avant-garde personal essay about the privilege and power of certain modes of media over others.

Willard A

“And this song is a lie.”

—John Stewart, “Never Goin’ Back”

I started with California Bloodlines because I could not find a date on it, and I bought it first, so I assumed this coincidence to mean enough that I should listen to it first.  At least the familiarity I had with it would lend to an accessible introduction, perhaps.  Perhaps the sentimentality that I hold for my state and all croons directed towards it would shine through the opening words.  

In the insert to Willard John Stewart looks like a bohemian boyscott, his hair 1965 Beatles length, neckerchiefed, in the studio, in one photo contemplating, in another laughing, then mugging, next boyishly smiling, strumming, a talent plucked from the glow of the campfire, or perhaps the festival at harvest, entertaining the dust bowl era farmers seen in the old photograph on the back of the record.

A degree of theatricality—perhaps even schtick—is in the music and performances of the Kingston Trio and their era (not as bad as their contemporary Lawrence Welk and his kitschfest variety show), an artificiality that Christopher Guest and company made great light of in A Mighty Wind.  John Stewart does not put on voices or play characters in his songs; instead he is an era-less, eternal troubadour, passing through the world of the West and its railroad tracks and highways, through its fields and mountains, and telling its story as though it could be either 1972 or 1892.

“The Dakota sky made me feel like the river / runnin’ free, runnin’ free,” and he has a “belly full of Tennessee” just two songs before, and before the side is over he is “back in Pomona,” a song dedicated to the iconography of blacksmithing and the county fair—the LA County Fair, as it turns out.  We also learn in an astericks that “Ginny us slang for racehorse groom.”

Willard B

Just as California Bloodlines starts its first side with “California Bloodlines,” Willard starts side B with “Willard,” a song that—while not bad—tries way too hard.  PErhaps it is impossible write a good song that begins, “Willard, he’s a loner / living by the railroad track.”  However, there lies a great virtue in singing a ballad with complete sincerity, and indeed I quite enjoy the schmaltz of the chorus because it is so unpretentious with none of the self-satisfaction with which you can hear Paul McCartney sing his 3rd person ballads.

And his mamma knows that he was once a child.Mamma she was the first one to hear us cry.And my mamma knows that I was once a child.Could it be we’re all just Willard in disguise?

I was struggling to imprint ink into my notebook while sitting on the sofa, listening to Side 1, so I grabbed John Stewart’s double live album to write on, thus solving the problem.

“All American Girl,” Side 2, track 3, hints at the potentially fascist message of John Stewart’s music—the “All American Girl” is “a blue-eyed blonde,” queen of our country’s history, a white history narrated by Stewart and populated by his ancestors—a simpler, old-fashioned, bucolic world that seems to resemble the vision of Thomas Kinkade more than my own.  The song that just finished declared “that across the hill from Placerville the wind sure can set you free.” Thomas Kinkade is from Placerville; those same winds that bore him into this world and set him free.

The song playing now is called “Great White Cathedrals” and begins, “Was it you all along, good Jesus?”  Has pop culture justly blacklisted a retrograde songwriter who ignored the revolutions of the ‘60s and instead embodied a conservative persona based on Woody Guthrie, the great troubadour leftist of the 20th Century?  His songs don’t have outright political messages like Guthrie’s or an actual conservative songwriter like George Jones (whose record Good Ol’ Bible I did decide to get rid of).  The resolution of “All American Girl” is “she knows she has changed from the dreams that haunt her in her bed.”  That is unsettling in a timeless way, and interesting beyond most of whatever dated anachronism pop culture considers to be the great ouvre of American music.

“Marshall Wind” brings me all the way back.  It speaks to me directly and personally, he shouts out “‘Get back, JoJo,’ that’s what Paul said,” in a climax self-consciously evoking that of “Hey, Jude,” for the geography is mine—Paul knows nothing about Tucson, much less California grass—the song is mine; it is not New York’s, not England’s, not Nashville’s.  Highway 1 runs through my hometown, and “Til the day was done on highway one / Dancing off the bottle was the Sunday sun.”

Sunstorm Side B*

Spoken word, “this was a story about Haley’s Comet,” increasing crescendo as a man tells of going on the roof of his parents’ motel in Lexington, Kentucky to see Haley’s Comet, it hung over the neighbor’s barn, the same song form as “Mother Country,” storytelling with repetitive background music as verse to the sung chorus, in this case, to a tune that is reminiscent to the theme from “Reading Rainbow”:

Kentucky lightshine 

well it fall from the sky 

Kentucky lightshine 

Stranger in the sky.

Now that I suddenly find myself to be a John Stewart scholar, I find this song engrossing—Haley’s Comet represents the decades that pass between each generation’s great flares, and makes us think of the first great frontier writer Mark Twain who came and went with the comet.  While “Mother Country” is charmingly cheesy in its hopeless nostalgia, “An Account of Haley’s Comet” is not good, though admirable its unique vision and originality of form.

Inside the record is a photo of John Stewart with his family, his son wearing a San Francisco ‘49ers shirt that says “I’m a niner.”  Here follows a series of rhetorical questions based on what, to me, is an obvious duplicity in being both a literal ‘49ers football fan and being an actual inhabitant in a society created by literal ‘49ers:

Did he realize that years later a budding California scholar would analyze that his father has made a living appropriating an aesthetic born of the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill and the rush of 1849 and the millions of people that followed in the coming century, and that he had inherited that tradition like the affinities for the local football team?  Did it occur to those who made the record?  And, if so, was it on purpose?

There is also a picture of John S. Stewart, John Stewart’s dad, smoking a pipe.  It turns out the “Account of Haley’s Comet” was his dad’s story, recorded in San Rafael on a Sony TC-110 stereo cassette machine.”  I feel like a jerk now for panning it as a terrible song to start a record because it’s actually a great, touching tribute to his father, and the first song on Side B.

*When looking for the name of the song I realized I had started with side B, which is also where “Mother Country” lands on California Bloodlines, which leads me to believe that it was released around the same time as Sunstorm.

Sunstorm Side A

My oh my how times does fly 

Makes you want to lay right down and die.

John Stewart has written a song called “Big Joe” about a truck driver, and “Joe” about a songwriter whose unnamed girl shines for him.  I am listening to a song called “Cheyenne” right now.  “Big Joe” was on an album called Willard, which features the song “Willard.”  John Stewart, the singer of the proper noun.  I just learned the song/album “Sunstorm”/Sunstorm comes from the line “Livin’ in an Oklahoma loner’s sunstorm.”  Filling out a fictional song with “real” people’s names and the names of real places can lend specificity to abstract concepts, personality to fictional people, like coloring in the lines with something familiar.  This is a trope immortalized also in near-contemporaries Paul McCartney and Jimmy Buffet, “Eleanor Rigby” and “Margaritaville,” for example.

The side finishes with “Arkansas Breakout.” It’s a fucking barnburner.  

Like the Wheels of a train  

you must run run run from the rain. 

Like the Wheels of a train  

you must run run run from the pain.

Cannons in the Rain Side A

As I take my first bathroom break, still listening through the walls, it strikes me that I am enacting a fairly disrespectful piece of pseudo-literary criticism—writing about a work as I experience it—all consideration, perception, and appreciation occurring as I describe my own interaction with half a dozen circles of plastic I saved from the trash.  Better than nothing.

John Stewart is divided in time on Cannons in the Rain—on the cover is Stewart as a maroon/sepia-hued wheat-chaff-chewing civil war era young man, and the back shows a window with two curtains, one slightly pulled and attached to the peeling wallpapered wall, revealing hints of foliage outside, an arcadian scene abandoned by time.  Inside the record in the third “center photo” he is a 1970s Aviator-bespectacled country crooner at an outdoor concert, labelled by a badge on his breast pocket that reads “performer.”

The first song is another in the genre of romanticizing a frontier local and its rough and tumble past.  Now it is “Durango.” Without a doubt “Take me down to Mexico” is a worthless cliché; but, unlike the James Taylor version (“Mexico”), the song is listenable. 

Cannons in the Rain B

Each song on the record is dedicated to a different person or group of persons. Most intriguingly “Anna on a Memory” is “for Coyote.”

“Armstrong,” which begins side B, is the first song not about (mid)western white folks doin’ what they do:

Black boy in Chicago 

Playing in the street 

Not enough to wear 

not enough to eat.

It’s a song, as it turns out, about not-white people around the world watching the moon landing on TV, that is observing white people occupying a space that is not theirs, much like westward expansion and the flag plantings in Texas, California, etc. Glorious government-funded destiny.  This song is “for Scott Carpenter and John Glenn.”  Neil Armstrong died last night.  Lance Armstrong stopped lying about his steroid use.

The last verse of the song ties the moon to Eden:

And I wonder if a long time ago 

Somewhere in the universe 

They watched a man named Adam 

Walk upon the Earth.

In terms of topicality, droughts on the plains are certainly timeless, here is this great line from “Wind dies down”: 

How’s your river flowin’ this week? 

It’s as dry as the scar on a cowboys cheek.

Title track is dedicated to Mom and Dad.  I don’t get it:

How could you go, Virginia 

And play that drifter’s game 

He sold to you the thunder 

was cannons in the rain.

Is Virginia the state, or a woman?  Is it about the Civil War, or just getting duped by a man?  Is it simply an elegant abstraction of the hopeless quixotic visions ( “Your Don Quixote’s windmills / were giants in his eyes.”), falling into the romantic trap of aggrandizing your situation and falling for the liars who play into your fantasy?  Is that not what is happening here right now with myself?  I am re-experiencing nostalgia through old vinyl records, living in Monterey in an insulated past-worshipping void; but John Stewart makes it noble, he reinforces my romanticized black hole, because if there was thunder, if there were windmills, they would be something else—all that remains are the stories of our history that echo through my living room like cannons in the rain.

The Phoenix Concerts Side A

A live album can help with context when you don’t know a group very well.  We learn which songs were most relevant to the audience at the time, and which hold special significance to the creator of the song.  Comparing the tracks to those of the records to which I have just listened it is apparent that some songs I have not heard; I do not own the complete John Stewart ouvre, I am afraid. Also I do not know if any are old Kingston Trio hits, though I doubt it, as he is the sole songwriter in the credits.

“You Can’t Look Back” sounds like an accidental retelling of the Orpheus myth.

For “the Pirates of Stone County Road” he creates the quintessential post WWII family room image of listening to I Love a Mystery! et al and getting lost in your imagination’s play with the sounds of the radio—which is exactly what the radio renaissance is about, what I am saying with this essay!  An ever-accelerating proliferation of media is destroying personal imagination, individual experience with a work of art, the popular consciousness, everybody’s lowest common denominator first reaction becomes our mediator with art, politics reality.  The world and its media cloak interest me not.  Life is elsewhere.

“All of the characters in the shows can come to life in your mind exactly as you wanted them.  Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear.”

It is 2012 and I am listened to a 1974 live record in which the singer brings people back to 1950 to sing a song about pirates.  I wrote down from Walden today

But lo! Men have become the tools of their tools!

The Phoenix Concerts Side B

I don’t understand why double albums have A/D and B/C records instead of A/B and C/D records, because you have to switch records twice to listen in order; but that is how they make records.

Today I went to my friend Chad’s English class.  They had prepared questions on sustainability and were split into 3 groups who rotated between conversations with myself and two other experts in English.  I was hungover and the day was a surreal struggle.  I rode my bicycle, brought my copy of Walden, and wore my best thrift store outfit.  I brought a package of cookies that I realized had “kosher fish gelatin,” as both an offering and a prop for my vegetarianism.  “10 dollar outfit!” one student exclaimed when I told the thrift story of my jacket, trousers and shoes.

I wanted to explain the instability of American consumption for consumption’s sake, not for the sake of sustainability—consumption as reuse, as elections to maintain sustainable infrastructure, consuming to sustain, not to waste.

The Phoenix Concerts Side C

For me it is greater than just physical—I believe in ideas that last, that withstand the passage of generations with their integrity.  The capitalist power structures dictate a process of fad and rejection, a burst of commerce and a run-off of waste.  The sixties did something exciting because the youth-marketed commodity of rock and roll was appropriated by musicians with integrity, and commerce and art became one—anything more commercial eventually became waste (for a comprehensive Linda Ronstadt collection of half a dozen LPs find 10 dollars and visit a few places that sell used records), and anything more art becomes a fetish object (one time I saw a copy of Two Virgins and, needless to say, I was very excited).  The Kingston Trio is not very interesting, nor is Judy Collins, nor is John Denver, nor are all the other boring mainstream folk acts of the ‘60s.  But is it possible that there, in that trio, contributing the baritone notes to the harmony, the one without a baby’s bottom chin, was the most important and quintessentially Californian singer-songwriter of the 20th century?

As I listen to John Stewart sing “California Bloodlines” live in Phoenix in 1974 on my record player a week before I move out of my house, I cannot help but feel a little sentimental.  I am making the great transition between country music tropes, leaving home for the road—instead of being in my place, I am that place, carrying it with me, and sharing it with whoever cares to ask.

There’s California Bloodlines in my heartAnd a California heartbeat in my soul.

It’s inevitable getting nostalgic for what you still have when you are going through the conscious acts of preparing to let it go.  It’s a process of deciding what of this life you have lived is and will remain you—what you decide to keep and what must be let go.

The Phoenix Concerts Side D

I have decided I am going to keep all of the records.

I know a man name E.A. Stewart 

He spelled it S-T-U-A-R-T 

And he had some of the finest horses you’ve ever seen

 Today on Science Friday they did a Neil Armstrong tribute and played a version of "Armstrong" different than the one I had heard.   When I just googled "Armstrong John Stewart" this cover version was the first result:

This was the third: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-december-2-2009/lance-armstrong

To anyone who has never commuted by bicycle

I should first note that I have not ridden my bicycle for exactly a week since its chain snapped at the top of the hill between Nepenthe and Big Sur.  A spoke also snapped and it should be fixed within the week.  I have since come into control of a car that I borrowed a few days later that I needed for a commute to Salinas.  Its owner is legally not allowed to drive so it is indefinitely in front of my house.  A few days later I began my one month borrowing of my father's Prius while he is on vacation with my mom.

I am sharing this information to show that I am not sanctimonious nor completely averse to driving cars.

That said, I get a greater understanding of car drivers when I am driving a car, which brings me to the first issue I would like to address in this PSA:

1. When you accelerate into a red light it triples the number of times that I have to ride my bike with a death machine inches to my left.   You pass me as you accelerate into a red light, I pass you as you stop at the red light, and then you pass me again as you accelerate into the next red light.

Last night I remember thinking while watching the Beatles Anthology 1 that I had an important thought for an essay that I wanted to write, but that it was such a big breakthrough I would remember it when I sat down to write the essay.  Today I tried to remember what it was.

I decided it was one of two possibilities:

Possibility a (for an essay on the Beatles)—That the Beatles embody a positive interpretation of the Metamorphosis, that Gregor Samsa flies in the end from his room and becomes an existentialist beat hero, joins with the man on the flying pie who tells John that they should become the Beatles with an A.  I had listened to the David Rakoff tribute This American Life 3 times over the weekend and had been thinking of the Dr. Seuss/Gregor Samsa piece.

Possibility b (for this essay)—That the one time that I bussed a table that had 5 full water glasses and brought them back to the kitchen and said "¿Porque piden más aqua si lo quieren?" frustrated that not only was water wasted, but that I had to carry 5 full glasses of water on a tray, and Carlos said, in slight jest, "hay que proteger el medio ambiente," and I asked if that's why he rides a bike.  Obviously, he has no driver's license and can't afford a car if he did.

The second possibility reached greater development as I went to sleep and formed it into a metaphor for the entitled mindset that goes into not refusing water you will not drink and also accelerating into red lights: you are not responsible for what goes on around you: you are not responsible for the energy that makes your car go: you do not pour or bus the water: you can go days without serving yourself anything or using your own energy for locomotion, so why take responsibility for it?

I am sure I am very frustrating to other cars, especially to all of the sports car-driving tourists who have been in town for Concourse d'elegance this week because I do not accelerate into red lights while driving my father's Prius.  I can see the consumption in the car's control panel so I know if I go 0-60 on a slight hill in 5 seconds I will get 30 miles to the gallon.  However, if I do it in 15 seconds and accelerate using the hill I will get 100 miles to the gallon.  So I do that latter, the Porsche passes me, merges in front of me, and I meet it at the stop light 10 seconds later.

Accelerating into red lights is a metaphor for the mass dependence upon machines that I witness on the roads; it is also bothersome to myself as a bicyclist concerned for his saftey.

2. When you arrive at a stop sign before I do please go first.  I don't want to come to a full stop at a stop sign, but I have to if a car is there.  You are not doing me a favor by letting me go first.  You are forcing me to lose all my momentum, put my foot down, and start from a stop with you, the good fucking samaritan spectating.

3. When you, I hope, check to see if a car is coming before opening your door, consider that a bicycle is another possible object traveling 25 miles an hour a foot from your car.

4. Please don't shout out your window "get a car."  I do not want a car.

My Scholastic Failure

a photo I found in 

a book of photos of Australia.  

I have since framed it,

unframed it temporarily,

and scanned it.

In a sense my application to graduate school was the inevitable culmination of my life’s narrative.  As all toddlers do I developed the basic skills of a scholar, allowing me to thrive in kindergarten and elementary school.  I read Goosebumps instead of playing outside for all of 3rd grade.  I applied to the Monterey Academy of Oceanographic Sciences in 8th grade, putting me on a successful academic track, and I graduated with a 4.17 weighted GPA and acceptance into several fine institutions.  I received a BA in English four odd years later.   And three years later I applied to the PhD programs in English Literature at UCs Berkeley and Santa Cruz.  What is inevitable cannot always happen by itself; often what’s inevitable can never actually occur.

In another sense, however, applying to to go back to school was the final ritual in a massive institutional timeline of distraction after distraction from what I ultimately have decided to be my life; and by that ("my life") I mean a process managed on my own terms, based on my own goals, directed by my own affinities, accelerated by my own talents, tapered by my own inabilities.  

For the last three years I have worked in elementary schools, first as a substitute teacher, and met dozens and dozens of 6-year-old inmates fresh into society’s citizen-making system.  In my interaction with these uncompromised individuals, walled fountains of idiosyncrasy, I have learned much about school, childhood, and where the two meet, those 17 academic years that tie my recently-graduated self to these kindergartners.

I recently remembered in 1st grade when we put on a play about the pilgrim’s arrival in America, I was given the task during the stormy passage of the Mayflower to flip the lights on and off to simulate lightning.  As I came to know classes I realized that there would only be 1 or 2 students that I would give permission to flip the lights on and off; and I therefore learned what it meant to be that kid—as I child I was the quietest most obedient kid in the class.  I sort of always knew this, but I guess I never thought about what that objectively entailed, that why I acted why I did and what I did was so definitely this.  I was the kid who liked school, did well, and was rewarded.

On the last day of 3rd grade I was the second kid in class to get ice cream because I read in excess of 2 hours a day after school.   My brother would come into my room and beg me to play outside with him and the neighbor children and I would continue to sit on by bed throne across the room from my desk opting for continued dominion over my own reality.  By some incomprehensible feat of dedication Priscilla Yen succeeding in reading twice as much as me.  The reading logs of the 30-student class in sum did not even equal mine.  She may have tripled my log.  As I remember it wasn’t even close.

My second job in primary education was as a proctor for the mandatory English test for students whose parents marked that Spanish was spoken at home, even if English was also checked.  I interviewed 5 year olds two weeks into kindergarten asking them to point to (I am not allowed to discuss the specifics of the test; I do not know how binding this is 3 years later; but just conjure typical testing imagery and you’ll have the idea).  One young man said simply to me, in response to the first question, pero, Señor, yo no hablo inglés.  Luckily I was allowed to call off the test at that point.  However, when a student managed a single correct response in English we had to go through the whole painful charade.

I could tell already some of them would not like school, and they had in excess of a decade left.  I worked the month of May two years later with a group of 60 young scholars about to enter kindergarten.  One mother asked me if I had any suggestions on the first moment that she and her daughter would be separated, how to create it, manage it, make it something that would happen for the first time and then happen nearly every day of the rest of their lives.  I did not pretend to have any advice.  I was an expert on the alphabet, but not this.

I qualified my post-graduate education-industry experience as a learning experience for my Statement of History Statement for UC Berkeley, so as to justify just what exactly I’ve been doing with myself since I graduated, how working with marginalized youngsters gave me a meaningful perspective on the world:

These lessons have infused all reading that I now do; I approach situations with a new empathy and appreciation for what I may contribute; I see movies differently, seeking to understand how the film critiques or contributes to the current power structure; I wonder how an article or a billboard closes or opens opportunities for the struggling.  And such lessons always bring me back to the Steinbeck books I have been reading my whole life.  I always could quote, “Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can’t eat, I’ll be there,” but I never really understood it, because I was never really there.  But now I have been and I do not plan to drop out like the preacher of Grapes of Wrath and reappear as an instigator in times of injustice.  I aspire to contribute to UC Berkeley’s institutionalization of social justice and profound questioning of the ways we have been living, describing and studying our world and its literature. 

As I reread these paragraphs now I can pick apart all the mistakes: how can I see the same thing in one situation in a situation that is completely different, and why tie it to the biggest and easiest cliche to come from Steinbeck's pen?    What bullshit was I attending to instead of committing myself to applying to graduate school, applying myself to commit to graduate school? Part of me believes that I set myself up to fail.  I didn’t really want to go and I dropped clues in my Statements of Purpose, hinting that I wanted to deconstruct writing so broadly and in so many contexts that this very application was both literary theory and literature at the same time.  As I read it now it sounds like a sick joke on myself and anyone else who decided—and failed—to live in the world of letters. 

At the end of my second year of college I seemed to be radiating literary inquiry to the point where a stranger asked me in all sincerity to co-author his memoir.  Within a nine-month period I had taken five literature classes, to the detriment of my general education performance, and found myself wholly immersed in literary theory and works from Chaucer to Dostoyevsky to Billy Collins, often in the same moment.  I presented a paper at my first conference, 2007’s Northwest Undergraduate Conference on Literature at the University of Portland, and won fifty dollars and a certificate for best all-around essay.  It was at this moment, the beginning of summer vacation, that a homeless man named Ed made my acquaintance and enlisted me in his project. I often felt I was assisting Ed with nothing more than a glass of water or a brief respite on the porch, yet we both played into each others' myths.  I was the young scholar who could see the literary depth in our dialogue; and he was Jack Kerouac, the spontaneous, drunken storyteller, whose language dripped with experience.   By the time the work reached a sort of conclusion, through layering my first-person account of our process with his stories told from memory and transcribed by me, Ed was evicted from the park where we would meet and I had moved from the neighborhood.  I never saw him again.  

Reading Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy at the suggestion of my adviser at the time, during a summer meeting on this project, gave me first-hand insight into the relationship between power and storytelling.  It put into all-too-real clarity the work of Roland Barthes and other theorists that I had read all semester long in my Literary Theory class. This experience inspired me to reach a point where my research, my writing, and my influence could affect the way we conceive phenomena as natural instead of historical.  Ed’s predicament is not an inevitable result of civilization moving forward; it is the consequence of an imperfect and usury development.  I could see so clearly the interrelationship between the language of our humble experiment and the larger social phenomenon of Native American disenfranchisement in Portland, Oregon, but I could not share it; I was not able to make others see.  I still apply my rigorous academic training to the social facts around me.   Presently, I am writing on the uneasy relationship between the history of Pacific Grove and its “Feast of Lanterns” summer celebration.   

Even now I don’t really know what I am proposing—expanding literature and its study to the most everyday, unliterary narrative phenomena that appears, from a homeless man’s stream of conscious recollections to a small town yellowface pageant in the place where I presently live.  Literary anthropology?  I then go into this surreal high school beauty pageant: 

In 1906—the year after the first “Feast”—an act of probable arson drove out Pacific Grove’s Chinese population.  Meanwhile, the yearly ceremony continues to appropriate much of Chinese culture, presenting a fascinating disjunction between these two stories that says much about power and storytelling.    Gerry Low-Sabado, an outspoken activist and direct descendent of the Chinese fishing village, with whom I have been communicating, only recently learned of her heritage, as her family’s story and language was lost in the process of assimilation.  The “Feast” revolves around a dramatized tableau, a “Chinese myth” (that actually has English origins), begging literary study in the way Roland Barthes’ Mythologies did.   Such collisions of literature and cultural mythmaking are precisely what interest me.

The “modes of writing, or of representations,” that may “serve as a support of mythical speech” extend past the “written discourse…photography, cinema, reporting, sport, shows, publicity” of Barthes’ Mythologies.  New “modes of writing” and “representation” continuously appear, with languages distinct to each; sit-coms, tweets, stories on This American Life, and small town festivals are composed of literary tropes and will continue to influence literary thought.  I am thrilled to be a student of language, and its most literarily significant manifestations, at such an exciting time; and I am especially eager to apply to a program that explores the relationship between the evolutions of literary technology and form.

Application statements of purpose are a very phony genre of writing; at the same time they are the most direct and sincere account of exactly what we think, believe and desire to accomplish at our most idealistic and positive.  I have taken out a bit here because it is very specific about why this department would suit my ambitions and hopes; so it is both boring and sad.

I recently had the fortuitous experience of reading Frederick Tuten's Tin Tin in the New World and Tom McCarthy's Tin Tin and the Secret of Literature. The former is an imaginative collision of the characters of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain with those of Hergé's Tin Tin universe, and what transpires when they meet in Machu Pichu; and the latter is a rigorous study of the literariness of the comic strip, and its expression of the concurrent ideas occurring in the 20th-century literary theory. The only thing that would excite me more than to study the overlap of all of the texts involved would be to design and teach a class on the accomplishments of Mann, Hergé, Tuten, and McCarthy individually and in conjunction.   Such a contextualization would shed insight on the extent to which a work critiques and discusses its narrative, or the extent to which it is  “the type of speech chosen by history,” as Roland Barthes refers to myth, a formed charged with “giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency seem eternal.”  Hergé and the “Feast of Lanterns,” by means of comic strip and theater, make history “natural” and “eternal.” Hergé’s fascist tendencies in his earlier strips and his collaboration with the Nazis during occupation are forgiven and forgotten as he re-writes Tin Tin as an allegory for liberalism; and “Feast of Lanterns” updates itself, phases out full Chinese make-up, and ignores explicit reference to a Chinese presence in the town’s history.

The work with Ed, however, was never able to interact dynamically with society’s language of mythmaking.  I shared the text we created with my creative fiction professor Pauls Toutonghi and we tweaked it to some sort of clarity.  Ultimately, he said, it was too short for a book and too long for an article.  After I graduated I self-published Tom and I—what Ed always wanted to call it, Tom was his brother—as a contribution to my friend’s art space.    With the help of UC Santa Cruz, my future contributions will be more focused and have more of an impact.

I went to UC Santa Cruz in December, not to get to know the department, or stroll the grounds, or pick the brains of current graduate students.  To apply to Berkeley (but not Santa Cruz) I had to take the subject test of the GRE for English.  

The September before I had to take the general exam at a testing agency in San Jose.  I had been to one already to qualify to substitute teach, in a strip mall office building off the 101, I think.  I did fantastic on the math section, but just barely passed the writing.  

From the beginning I resented the GRE with an intensity that often manifested itself physically.  I was taking the general test the week after my girlfriend moved to Los Angeles; and therefore any preparation I did for the test was time I was not spending with her, also not working, also not relaxing, also not imagining, etc.   Helping her move while working full-time and not having a car and worrying about a test I knew I was not prepared for was, simply put, very stressful for me.  On the weekday I woke up at my parent’s house (so I could borrow my father’s Prius to drive to San Jose to take the GRE) my mother woke up early to make me coffee so I could be on my way by 6:15 to make it there by 8:30.  

When I plan to drive to the airport in San Jose I allow an hour.  But this was morning weekday rush hour, a place I'd never been to, and important to my future.  I gave myself over 2 hours.  It was like I was 17 again waking up early for the SATs.  My life depended on four hours spent in a classroom where I was to learn only the stress and fear that standardized tests can create, especially when admission is based upon them.

There's a dreadful ironic circle about realizing that the exact terribleness about the thing is exactly why you don't really want to be doing it, having to do it anyway for the bigger reasons, and then dealing with the terribleness in question, repeat.  Needless to say when I was on California 85 not moving in 5 lanes of traffic, still an unknown distance from the testing center at 8:20—when I could not reach anybody on the phone number given to me on my official testing center print out, when I began crying and literally shouting out of desperation, frustration, failure, and deep sadness all at once, alone in my father's prius—I was not going through the pre-test morning rituals they drill into your head from 3rd grade.

That November I, again, borrowed my fathers' prius to drive early one Saturday to UC Santa Cruz.  The radio spoke of the first Penn State football game without Joe Pa, the first game after the wake of the now-revealed abuse, the first game in the least innocent time for higher education that I have known in my lifetime.  It was early for a Saturday, but I was able to dedicate my full attention to the day's Saturday's Weekend Edition on NPR.  I had a lot of perspective on this football game.

Eventually I found what was literally named "Classroom Unit 2," after some arbitrary tooling through the forest.  I just looked for all of the other people who looked like they were just a little bit too old to be in college.  There was an ant line of them going to and from the building, for apparently, unbeknownst to us, cellular phones were not allowed in the testing room.  I luckily learned this in the parking lot and was not forced to walk all the way there with my phone and walk all the way back. 

I sat and waited in Classroom Unit 1 with everyone else who did what they were told, that is to arrive half an hour early for no reason and wait for the last person to show up, nearly an hour later, before we could begin to begin.  Of course we were not allowed to have anything, so I had nothing.  I sat there and overheard conversations between people who knew each other.  

I heard a conversation between Mathematics students, current UCSC students talking about the statistics of the situation.  How many people were taking the Biochemistry, Cell and Molecular Biology test (it turns out mostly everyone), how many the Psychology (a few), how many Literature in English (this of course I was curious about—which of these strangers were both my colleagues and competition?  Who was going for one of the 30 spots I had applied to in two schools?  There turned out to be three others), how many were Biology students?  How many people would end up going to graduate school?, etc.

I started to wonder how each discipline would approach this situation.  Would the psychology student think of social psychology studies on behavior and control? Were they studying the factors that make us pay to be in this situation where we submit our time, money, and selves to strangers for no immediately obvious reason?  Like the Stanford prison experiment we were new to these roles, the proctors had other jobs 99.9 percent of the time, and I did not take standardized tests 99.9 percent of the time, yet here we were, fulfilling these strange duties that are scripted for us.

Did the biologists think about their breakfast and the play between nutrition and synapses?

The answer to what a literature student would think about this scene, what author encapsulates the literary meaning present, is obvious: Kafka.  I was not Andrew Shaw-Kitch; I was ASK, going from one surreal bureaucratic nightmare to the next because I am vaguely aware that this will make me happy, that this is what I need to do.  I needed to go to Classroom Unit 2 at UCSC to take the GRE subject test, and wait in Classroom Unit 1 until I was called to wait in line, wait in line, go to my assigned seat segregated from the other English students, open my test booklet at the designated moment, etc.

Toward the end of my undergraduate experience I went to an information session about graduate school.  Several professors gave advice, anecdotes, and information about the applications and the experience itself.  One professor who spent 9 years on her PhD spoke of a woman with whom she studied who was still working on her dissertation.  The professor had worked for 5 years at my school after finishing her program.  I did the math: 14 years and counting as a graduate student.  4 years undergraduate. 6 years secondary.  7 years elementary.  31 years as a student.  That is a lot of faith that institutional scholasticism is the thing that will fulfill you, through which you will be the person you want to be.

It took me three years away from school to have the brick and ivy illusion seep back into my consciousness.  This inaction, statistically, already invalidated my seriousness.  I was not committed.   I was not a candidate willing to give all of myself to their institution, trusting them to reward me with a new tweed-coated self that could gesticulate passionately while discussing Keats, and change young lives for the better.  

Anyway, I already had a tweed coat.  I already gesticulated passionately while discussing Keats.  And when Bright Star opened at the movie theater I worked at, and I stood at the door waiting for the theater to be cleaned, I happily gave context to the folks waiting at the front of the line about which letters to Fannie Braun or Keats' sister were being referenced in the film, how the film played with his life and poetry and poetical theories to form a unique mold of the three.  I quoted Keats and changed their viewing experience for the better.  And then I tore their tickets.  And then I would clean the theaters at the next cycle because nobody should be forced to do door twice in one shift.