Thursday, November 29, 2007

Some prose, for a change.

Flicking It.

My dad tells stories of being thirteen years old, sitting at the family dinner table, after eating, his parents and his sisters and him, all smoking, all flicking the butts into the kitchen sink to burn out. There are pictures of him from the early seventies, outdoors or indoors, outside the middle school he taught at, inside the law school he went to, arm around my then-twenty-something mother or not – but always with a cigarette dangling from his lips, a too-skinny, Jewish, afroed, hippie James Dean wearing too-tight corduroy pants. A decade later, he sometimes appears in home movies, my infant sister in one arm, the other draped over the side of a couch or a chair, index and middle fingers straddling a lit cigarette; more often, though, he’s behind the camera, revealed only by his voice awkwardly commanding the action in front of him (Open the one with the green bow now. Wait. Now give your brother a hug. Ok, now blow them out.) and the wafts of smoke that occasionally drift into the shot.

It wasn’t until my middle school years that his smoking became a problem. He’d fallen ill, had left his office downtown, and was home almost all the time, spending much of the day and night in the home office that for so long had been so under-used. After a few months, the carpet and fabric-covered desk chair and wood desk—none expensive, but previously like-new—all had their own small, sort-of-circular burns. (The strands of earth-toned Berber carpet melted down into rounded pellets the size and shape of the smallest kernels of corn at the narrow end of the cob. Desk burns were the most intriguing: the burn would begin as a circle, but then would follow the grain of the wood, giving it tendrils, like an artist’s rendition of a live flame, inching onward. Burns on the chair just became holes in the fabric, revealing the yellow foam padding beneath. On the weekends, late at night, when I used the computer in his office to chat online with my friends, I’d poke at the holes in the chair, and rub my toes on the now-massaging Berber kernels, and stare at the smoky shapes inscribed on the desk.) But the burns weren’t the problem. It was all the smoking. All the additional smoking in the house. Aside from a few early morning and before-bed smokes, his two-and-a-half-packs-a-day habit had always been satisfied elsewhere. Now yellow tar flavored and colored our lives. Our clothes smelled—his office was next to the laundry room—and wallpaper, heating vents, and electrical outlets were various shades of nicotined ocher, and ashtrays and half-smoked butts floating in glasses of flat, watery Coke became fixtures in the kitchen and family room. My sister, no longer an infant in his arms but a defiant 16-year-old we all somewhat-lovingly called “The Queen,” demanded changes. The door to his office had to remain closed even when he wasn’t smoking, the window had to remain open when he was; when she was home, he had to smoke outside; and even when she wasn’t, he could only smoke in two rooms. So it was that my dad, just when he started spending time at home, was confined to his office and his bathroom.

As middle school turned to high school for me, my dad’s health finally improved – despite his smoking, as his doctors still chronically inform him. With his new lease on life, he embraced the cliché. Freed from home, he was unconfined, and he became a fixture at every somewhat local restaurant with a bar where smoking was allowed. He rarely ate alone (His being a regular, his being friendly with restaurant owners and bartenders and waitresses—though I’m a regular nowhere, my friends tell me now that I am similarly flirtatious with waitresses—is something I associate with other women. I’ve been to suburban bars with him where waiters, who apparently have never seen my dad without a female companion, assume we have a third who is yet to arrive – where my dad can order “the usual,” and actually get his meat cooked extra well done like he likes it. Recently, during one of my breaks from law school, he took me and my mother to one of these mostly-nighttime places for lunch. “Al, how you doin?” the bartender called out, as my dad—who was only ever “Al” with archetypal Chicagoans—directed the hostess to the table he wanted. I winced a bit at his ease, wondering whether anyone could tell that this one was my mother.), he sometimes didn’t come home, and eventually he moved out of the house.

But once, I must have been about thirteen, I remember sitting with him in that old office, as I occasionally did, reading on the couch, fingering the thinning brown fabric with its once-white, yellowed flowers when I wasn’t turning pages. My sister must have been home because he asked me to go out on the porch with him while he smoked. I did, and as we stood there, watching our neighbors play with their kids in the cul-de-sac, he gave me a cigarette and told me to put it in my mouth and let it hang there. “Just for kicks,” he said. I took it between my two first fingers and brought it to my lips, licking them first in hesitation. How the outer paper of the filter stuck to my lower lip surprised me, and I finally understood the magic behind my dad’s ability to talk with a cigarette in his mouth, the lit end flapping up and down with his words. As air came through the filter, I tasted the tobacco – sharp and a bit sweet, it somehow tasted like it needed to be burned. Not liking its rawness, I took it from my mouth, again between two fingers, as he always did. “How do you flick them?” I asked him. He brought his cigarette to his mouth and left it there, and then took the unlit one from my hand. He started to show me how to position it with my forefinger and thumb, but “You really need to do it with a butt,” he said, handing it back to me. I took it, thinking at first that he was actually going to have me smoke it, but he didn’t want me to light it; he wouldn’t have let me had I wanted to. He took a long drag from his, and then stubbed it out on the underside of the porch railing and handed me the butt. He showed me again how to hold it, figuring out how to translate his righty orientation to my left-handedness. With the butt in place, he let go, as though it were a bicycle seat and I was ready to pedal on my own. I flicked it. Down at my shoes. “Pick it up,” he laughed, “You’ll get it. Like this,” he said, flicking the air.

(When he left home, his office was once again unused for a year or so, until the house sold to a divorcee with four kids, who no doubt covered the Berber kernels with furniture when his office became the fourth bedroom we had never needed. His desk chair, with its holes, remained with my mother for years, until I took it from her for a new apartment post-college, and subsequently left it with my roommate, who has since thrown it out – because of the holes. The desk is now in my dad’s new home office—his business was disrupted too badly by his illness to ever allow a move back to the city—and it has fresh burns, from his same old Winston Ultra-Lights, and his girlfriend's Marlboros (the two of them quit together occasionally, and they start up again in equal measure), reaching out through the wood’s grain and cracks in the varnish. Out of habit, I suppose, he still opens the window in the office when he’s smoking, and, out of forgetfulness, I suppose, he leaves it perpetually open – so, like his old office in our old house, though the warm smell of cigarettes is always present, the room is forever either too hot or too cold.)

With something similar in mind, I think, after the last exam of my first semester of law school, standing in the still unfamiliar sun of a California December, I bummed a smoke from a classmate. He was surprised that I asked, and again when I didn’t cough as the smoke flooded my lungs and tickled through my nasal passages. Looking at me, a shot glass of whiskey (provided by the sympathetic second-year students) in my right hand and a lit cigarette dangling between the forefingers of my left, he joked, “Not a very California image.” Still expecting a cough, he paused. And, filling his otherwise unfulfilled pause, as I let the smoke leak back out through my mouth and nose, and rolled the cigarette slowly between my thumb and forefinger, I said, “I have my father to thank.”

Friday, November 09, 2007

A lil poem. From me to you.

This is from last April, though I added a line tonight. Any guesses which one?

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Extra Sents.

When I write--more frequently with essays, but also with poems--I often have leftovers. Phrases and sentences that I can't find a place for, but which I don't want to delete forever. So the Documents folder of my computer is riddled with files containing the abbreviated phrase "extra sents" -- words that remain, useless. What follows is a sampling, connected.

The novel is a collection of tales that, as a whole, tells a story of upheaval.
Truth exists only in the present; the past cannot speak for itself. This, at first, seems rather trite and the reader rushes past it in search of a more inventive thought. She wants to bring the two ends of the dichotomy together and tie them in a knot, but this does not take seriously the distinctions between persons -- in the “Occasional Strings Attached” way. (An admonition just vague enough to make me think.) This self-interrogation turned supplication is a last-ditch effort to follow a path set out for him by prescriptions from a childhood that has literally fragmented into tangents in a classroom: What starts a wildfire but a single burning bush? (But with this question, he asks not of his classroom but of his neck. (That’s not a confession. Just something I’ve been told.))

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Brand spanking new (what a weird phrase).

So I was playing with old pictures. Then came this. Took a while to finish-- wasn't sure where it was going. But I think I like where it ended up. Enjoy or not!

* * * * *

Thursday, July 05, 2007

Venting.

The people at the Tribune seem to have wanted to give my blogalogue adversary the final word over there: They have yet to post the response I sent in a week ago. But I shall not be defeated. I have other ways of reaching the mas...well...the seven of you, anyway.

Here is the blogalogue as it stands.


And. Here is what the Tribune should have posted last week:

Laurie,

Once again, you have twisted my words and offered nothing substantive in response. It's clear at this point that this discussion is going nowhere. At every turn it seems I have to untangle my words from the spinning you've put them through.

So, one last time: My concern is not that you don't offer "reasoned" argument; my concern is that your reasoning is punctuated with alarmist analogies and all the rest of the devices I mentioned previously.

I am left to assume that you offer such things in place of substance -- like, say, the first principles you still apparently refuse to reveal. I appreciate your suggestions for relevant reading (charitably, I'll assume away your condescension), and I'll add those books and authors to my ever-growing list.

But, though I understand it might take a book to describe and support a first principle in detail, I must say I'd find it odd if you couldn't also simply state yours succinctly -- so odd, in fact, that I must assume you could, but won't.

So whether I find your ideas intellectually and ethically bankrupt is for now, to my dismay (and despite the words you've put in my mouth), an open question.

And apparently, by your design, it will remain so until other authors explain you for you.

Until then, then,

Peace.

Jordan Blumenthal
Chicago, IL

UPDATE: Apparently sending the response in again did the trick. It is now posted on the Tribune blog. Same link as above.

Friday, June 29, 2007

Linking.

Confession: I've recently been blogging elsewhere. I thought, in the interest of consolidation (sort of), I should link here to that blog. It's the Chicago Tribune "Voice of the People" blog that exists, as far as I can tell, for the purpose of responding to letters to the editor. Which is what my posts were. Responses. Essays, you might say. So do not expect poetry (though I like to think they have a certain flare).

About two weeks ago, a woman from my hometown wrote a letter to the editor in response to an op-ed piece that denounced our military's "Don't ask, Don't tell" policy regarding gay soldiers. You'll find her letter if you scroll to the top of the page. Then, to read the responses in order, scroll all the way to the bottom and read upward. Scattered throughout, you'll find three back-and-forth response rounds between me and her (if you care to look, that is).

A change of pace from what I generally offer here, but I thought it might be of interest. It is to me, anyway.

Here's the link.

Enjoy. (Or not.) And feel free to comment -- there or here.

UPDATE: My blogalogue adversary fired another volley (though the ammunition seemed to be blanks). I've sent in my response, but judging from past experience I don't think it will be posted until sometime Monday. Keep checking there or here for updates (if you care) (if you really care, I'll email you my response) (if I know you) (or if I don't, actually).

Thursday, June 07, 2007

Finally.

The deodorant thing isn't working. Something's not right. It keeps getting detoured and sidetracked and broken down and then chased around by maniacal cannibals in the woods (anyone see Wrong Turn? Eliza Dushku? Anyone? Anyone? Buehler?). But I'll keep at it.

To tide you over. Since I know I've had oh so many of you at the edges of your seats for so long. Something old. From sophomore spring. But with a new title.

Enjoy. (Or not. Up to you.)

Saturday, April 21, 2007

An aperitif.

Something about deodorant will be forthcoming soon.

But in the meantime: something old. Circa 2002. And revisited a bit since then.

And. As the style is not entirely my own. I should note: This stems from a writing prompt -- an imitation of the short shorts of Thomas Bernhard's Voice Imitator.

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

As commissioned, but untitled.

I'm not sure how to present this.

Except to say. I'm pretty certain this will not be its final draft. But I'm also pretty certain its final draft won't come anytime soon. Its roots are too many, I'm too attached to its petals, and its metaphors got mixed up and missed the boat.

Feel free to comment.

Feel free to suggest titles, too -- I'm leaning toward "Upon imagining several lived moments, and others."


Saturday, April 14, 2007

A tribute [, which takes precedence].

Thanks to those who responded to the last post. The highest vote-getter was number 6. And whatever comes of those words will be here next. But for now...

I took a fiction workshop in college. We did writing exercises in class. For one session, the instructor had us bring in our favorite book. The exercise that week was simply to copy out, word for word, its opening page. And then to continue on our own, to see where that took us.

What follows is the first page of a favorite book from a favorite author. It also happens to be the entire first chapter. See where it takes you.

*****

THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED

Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.

Jonah--John--if I had been a Sam, I would have been a Jonah still--not because I have been unlucky for others, but because somebody or something has compelled me to be certain places at certain times, without fail. Conveyances and motives, both conventional and bizarre, have been provided. And, according to plan, at each appointed second, at each appointed place this Jonah was there.

Listen:

When I was a younger man--two wives ago, 250,000 cigarettes ago, 3,000 quarts of booze ago...

When I was a much younger man, I began to collect material for a book to be called The Day the World Ended.

The book was to be factual.

The book was to be an account of what important Americans had done on the day when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.

It was to be a Christian book. I was a Christian then.

I am a Bokononist now.

I would have been a Bokononist then, if there had been anyone to teach me the bittersweet lies of Bokonon. But Bokononism was unknown beyond the gravel beaches and coral knives that ring this little island in the Caribbean Sea, the Republic of San Lorenzo.

We Bokononists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon, and the instrument, the kan-kan, that brought me into my own particular karass was the book I never finished, the book to be called The Day the World Ended.

*****

So it goes.

And.

If the accident will, freethinker.

Saturday, March 31, 2007

Audience participation.

So. I have this list. It's a list of things I want to write about. Briefly. Like blog posts. Some of them fit together and some of them don't.

I also have another list of sorts. It's more like a collection. A collection of fragments. Bits worth revisiting.

I've included some items from both lists below.

I know there are only a few of you out there who read this blog at all regularly. But I wonder if you might comment on which you'd like to see expanded. And then I'll do my best to oblige.

So, here, then, is my offering.


(1) Deoderant.
(2) The number '9.'
(3) I dream, on occasion, of tragedy. [a beginning to something, i think]
(4) The concept of 'play.'
(5) The word 'interesting.'
(6) we sat with a crossword and/ she inked words i was unsure of--/ soon, i took the pen from her and/ as my correction marred the puzzle/ she said: you can still make me cry sometimes.
[an ending to something, i think]
(7) The letter 'e.'
(8) Milk.


And with that, I await responses. Do your damnedest.

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Getting this out there.







I'm interested in religion. I think it's important to try to understand religious worldviews -- philosophically, because they purport to solve conundrums; psychologically, because they so often seem to satisfy a deep human need; and pragmatically, because so many people subscribe to them.

I find discussions of religion thought-provoking and exciting. Sometimes to the point of my friends' nausea. Or their irritation, depending on the friend. Because during those conversations, I tend to criticize modern, monotheistic religion.

But on occasion, the conversation continues until I reveal myself to be not entirely dismissive of modern monotheism. And it is, inevitably, at that point that my friend will sit back and say: Wait...Explain to me what you think. And though I try, I never satisfy myself; so I imagine there is no way my friend could be satisfied.

So. Here. I try to explain my thoughts on religion. Some of them at least. A very few of them, really. But here it is.

I find modern, monotheistic religion to be too unreasonable. I find it to be too unchanging. I find it to be too dogmatic. I find it to be too often intolerant.

I realize I'm painting with enormously broad strokes at the moment. I realize there are modern monotheistic religions that are more and less tolerant, more and less flexible, more and less adaptive, more and less self-critical.

Still, I'm not sure even the best modern monotheism has to offer is enough.

I realize, too, the virtues of many modern monotheistic religions. I acknowledge their positive moral teachings. I acknowledge the good work many people do in the names of their gods and their faiths.

Still, I'm not sure even the aggregate of the good produced is enough.

Enough, of course, to tip the balance away from the bad. And that is not a cheap shot. I'm not only referring to the Crusades, or the asinine hatred of gay people, or the horror of so-called honor killings. Those things were and are terrible.

But I mean to implicate something deeper. Something prior. Worldview. Think: What precipitates these terrible ends?

It is, it seems to me, a question of first principles. But, surprisingly, not so much what they are (because, to an important degree, that reality seems a function of what follows this next semicolon); rather, where we set out to look for them. Where we should look for them.

So. Where? Well. I am unwilling to submit to a single book; a single tradition; a single set of normative statements written millenia ago; the edicts of a single set of ordained anybodies; or the fiats of any one man, no matter how infallible he claims to be. I will not be colonized by the conquistadors of any "one true god."

But if monotheism is imperialism in religion, as has been said, then is polytheism liberation? An open polytheistic system, maybe? Paganism? It seems somewhat appealing. Wicca? Attractive in some respects. Hinduism? Buddhism? They have their moments as well.

Perhaps liberation is pantheism. It seems nice in many ways.

Perhaps an adamant agnosticism -- not doubt incorporated into faith, as is sometimes prescribed for monotheists with desires to be tolerant; but doubt as faith, faith in doubt.

Perhaps simple atheism.

Ultimately, I'm drawn to deontology, but not deities. Not for belief. For guidance, perhaps. But from all of them, every one, everyone's.

Religious teachings, moral philosophy and ethics, psychology and history, politics and friends, sight and conversation, novels and poems and paintings -- these can provide me my first principles. I will do my best to hash them out -- right and wrong, duty and responsibility and justice, interpersonal values. I will do my best to resolve my conflicts. And if occasionally, momentarily, I contradict myself -- then very well. I am large, as it's been said: I contain multitudes.

And for the "why are we here, and what happens when we aren't anymore" questions that seem of such importance to modern monotheists: I suppose I just don't much care about the answers. Or, more accurately, I think the questions are silly.

As I meet more and more people who truly enjoy working with numbers, the idea that there is one fundamental meaning of life seems less and less probable. Why are we here? The answer has to be limitless. If the governing metaphor of first principles is a common foundation, then the meaning of my life is what I build upon that base, and what I want to build but do not. And the meaning of your life is what you choose to build.

Our individual piles of bricks take shape over time. And while each hopefully gains a clarity of design and a desirable uniqueness, it cannot but be true that our edifices are strengthened and enhanced through interconnection.

And finally, then, it is interconnection that makes the second question silly, its answer obvious. What happens when we are no longer here? Other people remember us -- what we did, what we didn't do, what we said, what we never told, and how we made them feel.

Sunday, January 21, 2007

A brief throwback post.

Apparently the porn industry, innovative as always, is dealing with high definition issues sooner than is Hollywood. And HDTV is proving to be something of a mixed blessing for these leviathans of lust (giants of the jerkoff? pharaohs of facials? titans of tinsel tassles?).

Opponents suggest high definition porn might not be what the doctor ordered (presumably on pay-per-view). Regular definition might be more flattering, these people suggest. (These are, I would think, the same pooh-poohers of authenticity who insist on turning the lights off.)

Proponents argue the high definition images allow viewers to feel even more a part of the action. (Notably, this is really the same argument made for HD Hollywood movies and HD sports broadcasts. Has a bit of a different feel to it here though.)

Still, even the champions of HD don't want pure reality. Using makeup, plastic surgery, new camera angles, and editing software (as well as the occasional switching of positions), these forward-looking (there's a joke there somewhere) porn magnates are taking regular purchasers of hard-core pornography closer to sex than they've ever been before (or, for many of them, ever will be), without losing the desired idealism to reality's highly-defined imperfections.

But as technology continues to improve, the cellulite and pimple problems will get worse. It will be up to these pioneers of...let's just leave it at pioneers...it will be up to them to make sure society's porn remains palatable.

In other news, a Cambodian woman has been reunited with her father after getting lost in the jungle at age eight and living as a wild animal for nineteen years. He identified her by her scars. And a man in Minneapolis has for the moment survived a sixteen-story fall out of a hotel window that ended with what I must assume was a hard landing on a first-floor overhang.

I suppose we all have our little problems.