Diabetes and Distance

My problem in writing about experiences with diabetes lies with my complete lack of distance from diabetes itself. The daily routines are ritual: Multiple pokings of fingers, followed by measurement of blood-sugar; fussing over what to eat; dosing measurement and injection of insulin. What else can I expect from a chronic disease? Chronic, Khronos. Time. Diabetes is a disease set to time, like music, almost like jazz, but without the slightest pleasure or enjoyment derived from listening to it. The erratic beat persists either a few short years (for those diabetics unconcerned about the forthcoming destruction sugar will wreak upon their body) or a lifetime (for those stubborn, survivalist diabetics such as myself). There is never a moment of distance. I am always aware of this condition, the way a teenaged boy seems always aware of sex. The human body and temperament (regardless of the latter's nature) function poorly together when required to maintain manual control of blood-sugar levels. I cannot escape the center of the thing itself. I cannot escape to the periphery and look in upon it as an outside observer. I cannot see it with "a stranger's eye and a stranger's severity".

McGlynn

David McGlynn's essay Hydrophobia, at the Missouri Review.

Time For a New Post

Look at this picture. It's frightening, is it not? Just in time for Halloween, too. I have a small pile of books to get rid of. Among them is Descartes, a text called Teaching Grammar in Context, and A Teacher's Guide to African American English.

Now that I have finished the Comps, I actually want to read more poetry. The flow has resumed. Studying is one of the most loathesome and malignant activities one can undertake. I rank studying just below washing dishes and just above cleaning the litterbox.

Yes, I am a weblog. But where has everyone gone? No one has updated me in nearly a month. A month! Am I to be cast aside, forgotten, abandoned like 95% of all weblogs eventually are? Is this my fate? Answer me, please! Someone.

I am . . .

I am a professional monkey-juggler.
I am a sideways boxer.
I am a pathetic excuse for a hairpiece.
I am turning around.
I am a spanking machine.
I am bound by a code of honor.
I am a king cobra.
I am a little man atop a rook on a chessboard.
I am a queen. A queen!
I am a broken link.
I am Ron Hansen.
I am a silverback gorilla.
I am disproportionately authentic.
I am a malingerer.
I am a six-armed potato-person.

Fuckups

I am typing this post on a replacement computer. The computer I've had almost four years went raspberry. It was only the latest of problems and interruptions. The yellowjackets, far from defeated, ignored their eviction notice for a time. The landlord hired a professional fumigator, who said that maintenance guy did nothing to destroy the Queen and did not adequately plug the entrance to their hive. Professional fumigator inserted bombs and plugged the hive with a wad of this yellow shit like styrofoam. I've been swatting stragglers ever since. My swatter has eight notches in it and I feel like an ace. The computer, the original point before my digression, had begun to distort the image on any monitor plugged into it. The computer still works but is difficult to work with.

The band Anal Cunt has a song called "Technology's Gay". I agree.

Armstrong, Monotony, Yellowjacketness

What's with the dullness on campus nowadays? Monotony! Why do I feel sometimes like I'm back in junior high school? Has anyone else noticed this phenomenon?

On an unrelated note, the Yellowjacket invaders have been squelched:

These buggers (the lower right picture, Vespinae) were living in a tiny opening where the air conditioner's power cable ran through a wall from outside. They began using my office for conference calls. They have been evicted by force. Their hole, plugged. Two more nests, one in the front yard and one in the back, have also been eradicated. Maintenance guy poured gasoline down their nest-holes. I would have chosen a less noxious method, but they got too comfortable here. It's in poor taste for a neighbor to take one's hospitality for granted.

Buy Buy Buy

Wow. People are actually buying my old, and rather useless, Dungeons & Dragons books off Amazon. Perhaps it helps that I have been pricing them significantly lower than anyone else. I am amused that I have deflated the price of many of these books: other sellers with the same material have been coming along and lowering their prices too. When that happens I just lower my prices even more. I'm the Wal-Mart of out-of-print gaming books.

No Accounting For This

Strewn about my office in various slidover piles are one-hundred-twenty-three Dungeons & Dragons books which, until today, had been sleeping in boxes in the closet. I threw away one box along with some of its contents because they were damp to the touch and smelled icky. The rest I have piled and sorted, catalogued, and eventually will sell or give away. Some I will keep. Most I will not. It's satisfying to throw away things I have held onto for so long. Who needs all these books, anyway? Nobody. I have no use for them. Few who play Dungeons & Dragons even have use for them. The books have nostalgic value, but little practical value and almost nil monetary value. (You almost can't give them away, like genre paperbacks.) I have itchy toes and hot ears. A strange phenomenon, Reynaud's. The capillaries in my fingers and toes (and ears and cheeks on occasion) constrict involuntarily in response to changes of temperature and mood. When the capillaries relax, however, the inrush of blood brightens the skin and it feels hot. But if you were to touch one of my burning ears, it would not feel hot to you. The human body is such a strange contraption. I am currently reading Richard J. Evans' The Third Reich at War, the final volume of a three-volume work detailing the rise and eventual downfall of the National Socialists in Germany. This historical work is amazingly easy to read; the research is meticulous; the sources, which include scholarly works, war- and holocaust-survivor's memoirs, soldier's diaries, archived memos and reports, intelligence service records, sermons, and many others, detail the German war machine through so many different lenses that the statistics and passive voice one generally finds in books on history become invisible. Reading Evans' work is not a struggle but an engaging and unabashed presentation without embellishment or opinion to cloud the view of a terrible moment in history. I'd better stop. I keep coughing up adjectives.

Addendum: List Time

I forgot to add to my list the James Taylor concert we saw courtesy of free tickets from my mother. A lady seated in the row behind us stood frequently to gyrate and at one point she announced that she "would drink his bathwater."

List Time

Old men retired from moshpits and whatnot, sitting around the fire and reminiscing about bygone days, have aroused a mild desire to list all the bands and live music I've been bothered to witness at the risk of my own health and safety over the years. The list shall form as names float up into mind.

Coal Chamber (twice)
Ozzy Osbourne (five times)
Black Sabbath (thrice)
Neurosis (once)
Marilyn Manson (once)
Rob Zombie (twice)
Tool (once)
Soulfly (twice)
Motorhead (once)
The Melvins (once)
In Flames (once)
Arch Enemy (once)
Nile (once)
Napalm Death (twice)
Hatebreed (twice)
Agnostic Front (once)
Diecast (once)
Gizmachi (once)
The Berzerker (once)
Pantera (twice)
Type O Negative (once)
Superjoint Ritual (twice)
Slayer (once)
Mudvayne (twice)
Black Label Society (twice)
Fear Factory (thrice)
Strapping Young Lad (twice)
Insane Clown Posse (once)
Slipknot (twice)
Static-X (thrice)
Suicide Silence (once)
Bury Your Dead (once)
Assassin of Youth (four or five times)
Slitheryn (once)
Union Underground (once)
13 Days (once)
Machine Head (once)
Downset (once)
Taproot (twice)
Vision of Disorder (once)
Limp Bizkit (once)
Sevendust (once)
System of a Down (twice)
Incubus (once)
Snot (once)
Ultraspank (once)
Deftones (once)
Primus (once)
Godsmack (once)
Hed PE (once)
Puya (once)
Methods of Mayhem (once)
Kittie (once)
Disturbed (once)
Slaves on Dope (once)
Pitchshifter (once)
Crazy Town (once)
Godhead (once)
Mushroomhead (once)
Avenged Sevenfold (once)
The Black Dahlia Murder (once)
Testament (once)
Full Blown Chaos (once)
Biohazard (once)
Dark Tranquility (once)
2 Live Crew (once)

Bands, Boobs, Bushy Beards

We went to a concert last night, the first we’ve been to in a long time. We saw Black Label Society, Static-X, Mudvayne, Suicide Silence, Bury Your Dead, and an accompanying freakshow called Hellzapoppin (a midget with hands for arms; an Australian crystal ball manipulator; an old fellow called the Torture King, who ran wire through his arms and other muscular tissue; and Betty Bloomers, a striptease sword swallower whose nipples were taped over).

I know that many people dislike heavy metal music. Dislike may be too mild a word for some. Regardless, one must love heavy metal in some capacity in order to tolerate it. There are those who simply enjoy pumping the devil horns in the air, slam-dancing, screaming obscene slogans, and jerking their head back and forth or in a violent circle. Then there are those who have grown past all that and just love the music. And of course, there are those who are insane enough to try to make a living as heavy metal musicians. The latter category loves heavy metal more than any of the others. To be a heavy metal musician is like being a poet: you will not make any money doing something you love to do. Yet they do it anyway.

I fall into the middle category. Moshpit days are well behind me. I don’t want to be slammed to a concrete floor by a dozen or more hairless three-hundred pound gorillas swimming in circles through the sweat haze. I just want to enjoy the music the way it’s meant to be enjoyed. The epileptic strobelights. The dull cigarette fog over everything. The air thick with the taste of beer. The bass pummeling through the core of your body. Such volume as one would find on a runway at O’Hare. The great buildup of energy that binds a group of four or five musicians to hundreds of drunk and sweaty young people for thirty minutes, goading one another on, feeding off the ruckus.

The concert was great. Zakk Wylde can play a guitar with all the effort involved in picking one’s teeth. The bass player of Suicide Silence resembled Clisbee in some of his more pained expressions, though I have a hard time picturing Clisbee bent-and-squat with an electric bass, swinging his hair and his entire head in great revolutions at 245 bpm. The singer of Mudvayne performed several songs whilst encased in a furry bear suit which I imagine was an entirely unpleasant experience. At least one member of each band had a beard of considerable bushiness.

I didn’t much like the Alltel Center though. Everything seemed choreographed to begin and to end at an early, reasonable, respectable Mankato hour (eleven p.m.).

So that’s part of how I spent my summer.

Updated: Books

What books were available have been laid claim to. The rest shall appear at the Blue Earth County Library on the paperback exchange shelf. I am quite fond of the paperback exchange. Sometimes you just can't give books away because nobody wants them. I don't know what happens to the books I leave at the library but I can only assume that people snatch them. Most of the books I find there are romance paperbacks, mass-market westerns, and the like. I leave literary journals, quality works by quality authors, hardback novels; books, I hope, that people are eager to find and eager to read.

In his essay "Hermes Goes to College" (Upstreet #4), Michael Martone advocates Stealing Things In: making your own books and leaving them in libraries, airports, cafes; in short, any place where lots of people might find your book, pick it up, and take it. And why not? "I point out to [my students], that they have to distribute their books as well, that libraries and bookstores have elaborate apparati to prevent you from stealing a book out of their stacks but they have nothing to guard against you stealing your work into the bookstore or the library. And that's what they do, shelving their own work or leaving it to be shelved, allowing the librarian to affix the catalog number, enter it into inventory."

Now, one problem I'll soon have is what to do with my glut of role-playing game books. I know I can sell some of them; I will keep some of them as well; but the rest, you almost can't give some of them away. Any ideas?

Waiting on Rejections

I have become accustomed to editors rejecting my work. I don’t mind. I don’t blame them. Sometimes the work just isn't good enough. There’s always a better story or ten or a hundred ahead of mine in the queue. What I haven’t grasped yet is the wait to receive the rejection. Here’s why.
The longest wait I’ve had so far has been about three months (generic review X). The shortest wait I’ve had has been about twenty hours (generic magazine Y). It took generic review X three months to reject one story; generic magazine Y rejected not only that same story but a second one, with a personalized note for the second, in about twenty hours. Both journals are not among the littlest guys; each has been around a while, has a significant presence, and is accessible via such sites as Duotrope and the CLMP.

Among the easiest things in the world to do is to read the first dozen lines of a story from a slushpile, see that said story is (incomprehensible / syntactically sloppy / a first draft / hackneyed / insert various other flaws here), and reject it. A dozen manuscript lines might take about 30 seconds to read, another two seconds to sneer at, and another ten seconds to secure in the NO pile (or shunt to the NO folder in a database). Let’s say a story a minute. A determined editor who knows how to read and knows what a quality story looks like could eliminate fifty stories in an hour; one-hundred stories in two hours. (No excuses. It could be done.)

I know that generic magazine Y did read, in full, the second story that I submitted; the personal rejection letter proves it. Someone took a lot of time and energy to reject me very quickly, and made sure to let me know they did.

What are the discrepancies between one journal’s sloth and another journal’s celerity? Some requirement to read the entire body of each story? Quotas? The use of graduate student labor? Volunteerism? Intrajournal politics and disagreement? Can anyone explain this, or am I pondering something entirely disagreeable that no human being should ever think about?

Legos Again

[This is an update of an earlier post, "Happy Boom Day".] I ended up buying my daughter two Lego sets. One is a basic set of blocks, which comes in a blue plastic box with a lid, wherein the tiny, cat-attracting Legos may be safely stored so as to prevent loss, or "shrinkage" as Wal-Mart calls loss (I have worked at Wal-Mart, in produce, and I hope never to work at any Wal-Mart ever again, but I digress). The second set is part of Lego’s "City" milieu; essentially, sets that, when put together, form a functioning Lego city. I bought a set of people. They include a deliveryman with a hand-truck; a woman with a ghetto blaster; a uniformed policeman with a megaphone, white hat, walkie-talkie, and a mustache; and one fellow who I can describe only as being a liberal arts professor, given the appearance of his hair, sweater vest, neck tie, full beard, and a briefcase. The city people set also comes with a traffic signal, three road signs, a park bench, and a fireplug (all of the latter must be assembled). It’s delightful! We’ve had great fun swapping the people’s hair. The professor wears the woman’s hair (which I assume is "Princess Hair") and she wears the professor’s hair ("Prince Hair"?). A bit later, Liz bought yet a third Lego set, a Front-End Loader, which comes with another Legoman. This one is a construction worker in an orange jumpsuit. He has a rough beard and a sly expression. He resembles an escaped prisoner. The Front-End Loader kicks ass. You can scoop things with it; namely, a pile of small Lego bricks. Thus far I have built many Lego vehicles of questionable utility. They generally have oversized tires and as many lights and funnels and tubelike devices attached to them as I can add.

Habits

I am awash in bad habits. Sometimes I eat too much. This can elevate my blood-sugar. High blood-sugar makes me sleepy. I’ve been sleeping too much lately. Not tomorrow though. Tomorrow I refill another prescription for long-acting Vyvanse (12-hour speed). I have gone without these pills for more than a week. Withdrawl symptoms reinforce bad habits, it’s true. I have read a lot this past week. (Reading is a bad habit sometimes.) I finished Moby-Dick, along with two books of non-fiction (Methland and The Curve of Binding Energy). I’ve been growing a beard. A spider lives in the downstairs bathroom. We’ve finally replaced the van: now we own a 2008 Chevy Malibu. It’s a good car. Why have I read so much non-fiction this summer? Look at my list: Five books of non-fiction, one book of philosophy, two story collections, and but a single novel (albeit a goddamn great big novel). On a lighter note, one of the nestling robins I mentioned in a recent post did survive the opossum attack. I found the nestling at the bottom of one of the basement window wells and scooped it out. The parents were dive-bombing at the time. Baby birds are so ugly. It pooped when I tried to pick it up.

Close-Reading: “A Day in the Open” by Jane Bowles

This summer I have been close-reading stories in preparation for the comprehensive exams in October. Right now my attention has been drawn into "A Day in the Open" by Jane Bowles. If you have read the short fiction of Joy Williams, you would already have passing familiarity with Bowles’ work.

[NOTE: The following analysis, like much of the extraneous work I do, is to-date incomplete. You have been warned.]

The first time I read "A Day in the Open"–—I’ll admit it, I had no idea what to make of the story. It tells about a day in the lives of two prostitutes, Julia and Inez. Over the course of twelve pages, Julia and Inez wake up; their pimp tells them to get ready; Señor Ramirez picks them up, and he drives them out to the country for a picnic. That is the story at in its briefest summation.

A cursory reading might leave you confused, helpless to understand, much like reading Joy Williams for the first time. Thus, the miracle of close-reading. Read the opening paragraph:

In the outskirts of the capital there was a low white house, very much like
the other houses around it. The street on which it stood was not paved, as this
was a poor section of the city. The door of this particular house, very new and
studded with nails, was bolted inside and out. A large room, furnished with some
modern chromium chairs, a bar, and an electric record machine, opened onto the
empty patio. A fat little Indian boy was seated in one of the chairs, listening
to the tume Good Night, Sweetheart, which he had just chosen. It was playing at
full volume and the little boy was staring very seriously ahead of him at the
machine. This was one of the houses owned and run by Señor Kurten, who was half
Spanish and half German.

The narrator tells us all we need to know about the setting: a low white house like the other houses around it, in the outskirts of the capital, on an unpaved street. The house is low-profile; it blends in, skirts around the center of power, policy, government, control, etc. The unpaved street suffices to make clear the poverty–—the narrator’s open reminder of this fact serves to emphasize the poverty.

The house is easily overlooked, yet the narrator moves in closer, caught, if you will, by the door, ‘very new and studded with nails...bolted inside and out.’ Why a new door? Why studded with nails? For what reasons would the owner of this house keep people from coming in or going out? The narrator takes us closer still, inside the house: ‘A large room...chromium chairs, a bar, an electric record machine, opened onto an empty patio.’ Such furniture as chromium chairs would be expensive and rather hard to break. The bar, record player, and patio suggest that parties occur in this house; people come here to drink and to dance–—if they can get inside, like an exclusive club. Then we see the first character: A fat little Indian boy, seated in one of the chairs, listening to Good Night, Sweetheart at full volume. He is ‘staring very seriously ahead of him at the machine.’

The boy is the only character in the room. Obviously he does not belong there. Who does he belong to though? Is he fascinated by the electric record machine by merit of its novelty? Or is it the song that holds him rapt? I don’t really know, nor do I think it matters: I don’t need to know. The house, its location, the door bolted inside and out, the room with the bar, the chairs, all of this implies a deeper, if not darker subtext. If the title of the story can be of any help by this point, it is helping us realize some irony is at play.

So then what do we make of the last sentence of the opening paragraph? ‘This was one of the houses owned and run by Señor Kurten, who was half Spanish and half German.’ Señor (Spanish) Kurten (German). One house, of many very much like it. Owned: the house is property. Run: the house is a business. What sort of business would Señor Kurten run in an inconspicuous house that is bolted inside and out?

The details tell us "whorehouse" or "brothel". But again, I’ll admit, I did not pick up on this the first time through. The details glided past under my eyes, but they kept me reading. Further along, the characters behave so strangely, and are described in such unusual terms, that I had no choice but to continue reading the story:

It was a gray afternoon. In one of the bedrooms Julia and Inez had just
awakened. Julia was small and monkey-like. She was appealing only because of her
extraordinarily large and luminous eyes. Inez was tall and high-breasted. Her
head was a bit too small for her body and her eyes were too close together. She
wore her hair in stiff waves.
Julia was moaning on her bed.
"My stomach is
worse today," she said to Inez. "Come over and feel it. The lump on the right
side is bigger." She twisted her head on the pillow and sighed. Inez was staring
sternly into space.
"No," she said to Julia. "I cannot bear to feel that
lump. Santa María! With something like that inside me I should go wild." She
made a wry face and shuddered.
"You must not feel it if you do not want to,"
said Julia drowsily. Inez poured herself some guaro. She was a heavy drinker but
her vitality remained unimpaired, although her skin often broke out in pimples.
She ate violet lozenges to cover the smell of liquor on her breath and often
popped six or seven of them into her mouth at once. Being full of enterprise she
often made more money outside the whorehouse than she did at her regular
job.
Julia was Mexican and a great favorite with the men, who enjoyed feeling
that they were endangering her very life by going to bed with her.

What do these details tell us? 1: Julia and Inez are getting up in the afternoon. 2: Julia appears quite fragile and delicate, almost innocent enough to seem like a baby; but no, she is not that innocent, more an object of pity, so she is like a monkey instead (it is easier to hurt a monkey than it is to hurt a baby). 3: Inez has an unsettling, alien appearance, the way her face and head are described; that she is ‘high-breasted’ suggests that she has not had any children. 3: Julia is either truly ill or she merely believes she is ill; she has some sort of ‘lump’ on her stomach. 4: Inez finds Julia’s lump repugnant, repellant, perhaps disgusting; ‘staring sternly into space’ implies she is thinking about this while Julia asks to come feel the lump. 5: Julia will not force Inez to feel the lump. 6: Inez drinks habitually, perhaps for coping; pimples would make her a bit less attractive than she already was; her attempts to hide her drinking make it even more evident; her regular job is in fact at the whorehouse, but she does something outside the whorehouse (we don’t know exactly what) in order to earn more money, which implies secrecy on Inez’s part.

The brief final paragraph above, about Julia, says quite a lot about her (considering information revealed later in the scene). She is not one to ‘refuse anyone anything’. The men like her so much because they can do things to her that perhaps other prostitutes (such as Inez) would never allow. The frailty of Julia’s appearance seems to reinforce the idea: ‘small and monkey-like.’ The men (read: johns) see her as less a human and more an animal. Easier to hurt a monkey than a baby, as I said.

Note also the repetition that Bowles uses. In the paragraph about Inez’s habits, the word ‘often’ appears three times. The initial physical descriptions of Julia and Inez are reported; the tone is passive, statement-of-fact. Different characters are staring forward in a similar manner. As the two women share a bedroom (physical space), they share space in paragraphs, over and over again. They are crowded together, dialogue-and-action, into paragraphs, as if neither can even have their own textual space.

.....

Forthcoming

I know some things are forthcoming. "Heart" and "Adderall". Plus some other stuff. I'll get on it soon.

We understand what "forthcoming" means. But you never hear it spoken as non-participial: "to forthcome". Come forth, yes; but never forthcome! Why not? Eventually we'd get used to saying it: I forthcame. Okay, it does sound dirty. Never mind.

Someone Always Has it Rougher Than You

Until tonight there was a robins' nest high in the bushes in back of the house. But not high enough. At about 11:00 p.m. we heard chicks crying out. You never hear songbirds' nestlings at night unless something is trying to eat them. I went out with the flashlight. The oppossum was fully involved in the nest and not in the slightest intimidated by me. It ate two-and-a-half chicks and left one-and-a-half for me to find. I'm glad I'm not a bird. I'd hate to have to fuck around with hungry predators like oppossums, skunks, racoons, etc.

In the aftermath I took some pictures, like a forensics analyst at the scene of a crime. I won't post them here. Nobody wants to look at that.

Prophesy, Writing on the Wall, Permission Granted, Egg Sac

It's coming . . .

Sidewalk chalk has a remarkable lifespan.

This, however, did not survive.

She's hanging out in my office. That is an egg sac. Doesn't "egg sac" sound kind of gross? Icky? Egg sac.