New Blog: On Politics and Parenting

My friend David Kersh has started a new blog called On Politics and Parenting. This makes me very happy. David is an excellent writer and one of the most thoughtful, intelligent and honorable people I know. It's great to have him putting his work up on the web.

Even if you think you're not interested in politics or parenting, I suggest you give his blog a read. David's mind and heart are too vast to be contained by those subjects alone. For example, I've already learned about a Brazilian film called God is Brazilian, which shows up in the middle of David's open letter to, well, God. Among other things, David has a great sense of humor.

And if you are interested in politics and parenting, well, I can't imagine you'll ever find a better blog.

Best of luck, amigo mio!

ZONE - Year One

I just realized this afternoon that I've been blogging for over a year now. My first post was dated August 29, 2006. (No one left a comment. . . . It's so cold out in cyberspace sometimes.)

At the time, I thought I would write about all kinds of things, and came up with the ambitious subtitle: "improvisations on literature : music : film : the spiritual : the political : the ridiculous." Looking back over the previous year, I see very little about literature, some on music, a lot on film, not much about the spiritual, some on the political and . . . well, the whole thing is rather "ridiculous," isn't it?

It's strange that I haven't written much on literature and spirituality, considering that these have been the two most important journeys of my life. Maybe, to quote 10CC, "it's just a silly phase I'm going through."

Maybe not. It's been a while since I've finished a novel. I read a bit of poetry here and there, but not nearly as much as I used to. Haven't been writing much of my own work. I do, however, have a poetry reading coming up this Sunday in Manhattan, with jazz musicians (!) - a longtime dream fulfilled. I'm looking forward to that. I even managed to come up with a new piece. But, all in all, literature seems to have fallen off my radar a bit. Perhaps I burned out after spending most of my energy over the previous seven years editing an international bilingual literary magazine, putting readings together, translating, writing grants, hosting events, etc. Je ne sais pas.

It's not like blogging has been easy and caused me to forsake the sweat and toil of poetry. I still find this the hardest writing I've ever done in some ways. My respect for good journalists, bloggers, and film reviewers has gone up immensely in the last year.

Anyway, just some musings. . . .

I have no idea idea where this blogging thing will go. I'm still struggling to find a certain voice in this somewhat strange format that demands both immediacy and thoughtfulness at the same time. My Dada Iraq post may have been the closest I've come to how I imagined this project. But that's life, no? Instead, I wind up writing weird reviews about obscure William Holden films. I didn't see that one coming.

The best part has been meeting and/or conversing with other people in the wide open spaces of our digital universe. My gift on this one-year blogging anniversary is all of you who've taken the time to read my posts and comment on them here or elsewhere. So thanks, Liam, Jeff, Crystal, Schertzer, Steve, Paul, Lawrence, and everyone else.

And most of all, to my muse (musette?) - Alexandra. La Reina de mi vida.

Meanwhile, here's a very profound and introspective song from my childhood to celebrate ONE. (OMG, I want those pants!)

Onward through the fog . . . .

Guillaume le fou

Blogger Without Borders

No-Good Blogging Elves

I hired a bunch of undocumented elves to keep up my blog over the holidays, and I see that nothing has been done here.

Or: La Reina and I were abducted while watching re-runs of The X-Files. David Duchovny was on the mother-ship, and he turned out to be the leader of the replicants! We just escaped a few days ago, and I've been listening to Eric Dolphy for 72-hours straight, trying to get my head back on straight. Literally. They seem to have done some experiments, and my head was tilted at a weird angle, so that it was really hard to blog.

Or: I ate too much Lasagna on Christmas Day and fell into a deep, deep sleep from which I've just awoken. (As a matter of fact, the Christmas tree is still up and gleefully lit, and I'm listening to the Sinatra Christmas Album.)

(That's really scary, isn't it?)

Or: The New York Jets playoff loss to the New England Fascist Baby-Killing Grandmother-Hating Un-American Culturally-Backwards Fur-Wearing SUV-Driving Britney-Spears-Loving "Patriots" upset me so much that I've been unable to blog.

Or: The troop surge has depressed me so much that I can hardly lift my fingers to tap in a few lines on my blog, knowing all efforts to try and stop the madness are useless. (Even so, contact your congresspeople and tell them how you feel.)

(About the troop surge, I mean, not how you feel about life in general.)

Or: My New Year's Resolution to not blog unless I had something really inspired and unique to say was going hunky-dora until a few minutes ago, when it all fell apart in a desperate urge to use the phrase "hunky-dora," which, BTW, goes back to at least the 1860s, when it was used a lot in New York newspapers of the day. (Along with the phrase "deadheads," which, at that time, referred to people who weaseled their way into concerts and shows without paying, i.e., the media.)

Or: The precarious balance between my incredible laziness and my sick but powerful need for attention was out of whack for a while. But I'm okay now.

Hope everyone had a great holiday season.

Maybe in 2007, I'll even come up with something worthwhile to blog about!






















Gratuitous and totally unnecessary photograph of Brigitte Bardot.

A Serious Look at Official Silly Blogging Day

After 15 months of intense preparation, I was ready to launch a triple-threat blog post today on Jean-Paul Sartre's Being & Nothingness, Martin Heidegger's Being & Time, and Thomas Wright Waller's Time & Nothingness, but then Liam went and declared this Official Silly Blogging Day, so all of my research (including an interview with the last remaining existentialist in the Northern Hemisphere, one Mrs. Humphrey Dingledorff, 93, of Chastise, Mo.) went out the window, the window of opportunity only open between 8:37 am this morning and 6:14 this evening. Thanks a lot, Liam.

But out of deference to Liam, and because I think he's on to something serious with Official Silly Blogging Day, and because I want to use all the cool "Generate-your-own-sign" things he led me to on his blog, I'll abandon my 15-month research project and adapt to the present situation.

What I can offer is a kind of abbreviated analysis of these three historical and life-changing tomes:

1) Being & Nothingness - Jean-Paul's version of To Be or Not To Be rocks. Or at least that's what I've heard. I haven't actually read it yet. But I was going to. Really.

2) Being & Time - Marty's masterpiece is a fairly thick paperback, if I may say so myself. It's right there on the shelf, between The Raymond Chandler Omnibus and Julio Cortázar's Around the Day in 80 Worlds, which is a wonderful book that my wife picked up for me at the Strand Bookstore in New York on her way back to Madrid several years ago. Cortázar seriously rocked. Really. Especially Cronopios and Famas. And Blow-Up, of course, which Antonioni made into a film in the 1960s that was in English and had some British dude in it, even though the story was written by an Argentine who lived in Paris and the director was an Italian. Go figure. But what can I say of Being & Time? Well, it looks pretty daunting. I own it. I've even picked it up a few times and thumbed through the pages. And once, after drinking too much, I actually opened it up and read the first page. Six times, to be exact. I think it's probably an important work.

3) Time & Nothingness - I’m on a little firmer ground here. The famous 20th century American philosopher Thomas Wright Waller (better known as “Fats” Waller) gave the world this classic work (better known as “Loafin’ Time) in 1935, at the height of, uh, well, the 1930s. He takes a penetrating look at time and its complex relationship to nothingness. He confronts these two themes head-on, as it were. Part spiritual tract, part philosophical meditation, and part swing masterpiece. He lays it on the line for us:

I just love this lazy way of living
Honey, don't you know, doing nothing ain't no sin
If it is, I hope that I'm forgiven
'Cause I've got nothing to do and I've got all day to do it in.

That’s pretty much it in a nutshell, isn’t it? Doing nothing is NOT a sin. (Notice the skillful use of the triple negative.) But if it IS a sin (notice how he shows doubt and certainty at the same time), I hope that G-d, in his infinite mercy and love of swing jazz, offers me forgiveness. What is jazz all about in the end if it isn’t about time? How time can stretch and bend and generally be more fluid in than we’re normally accustomed to in our everyday lives. Jazz says, “Be-bop, re-bop,” which we can interpret as, “Slow down, buddy, and smell the roses.” Connections here to Taoism and Buddhism. Life is going by pretty fast, but if you enter jazz (i.e., spiritual living), you can move at a different pace and observe things more closely. You can live in harmony with everything around you, which is all interconnected anyway and gets tangled up in your pajama legs at night. It’s not a sin if you sit on your G-d given derriere and listen to Fats Waller. Or better, if you turn out the lights and lay on the floor with someone you love and listen to Lester Young playing “Blue Lester.” Think I’m joking? Charles Simic, one of our greatest contemporary American poets commented on this phenomenon in his personal notebook:

The closeness of two people listening together to music they both love. There’s no more perfect union. I remember a summer evening, a good bottle of white wine and Helen and I listening to Prez play “Blue Lester.” We were so attentive, as only those who have heard a piece a hundred times can be, so this time it seemed the piece lasted forever.

The recording of “Blue Lester,” which lasts 3 minutes and 22 seconds in our limited space-time world, seemed to last forever. Because it does. Lester is still playing his tenor saxophone, and Fats Waller is still singing “I’ve got nothing to do and I’ve got all day to do it in,” and Cortázar is still writing his beautifully funny stories, and Siddartha Gautama’s still sitting under his tree, and I’m still writing this silly entry on Official Silly Blogging Day and will be even after I stop.