You're Going to Argue with This Guy?

But I cannot believe that the expression of one’s ideas has anything to do with the making of literature. I don’t believe that ideas are a novelist’s problem. Ideas should be left to the people who have ideas—philosophers, politicians, teachers. Artists can be extremely dull in terms of what they believe, what they say, and what they do in their lives. Writers don’t think. . . . It was [William Carlos] Williams who said that "The poet’s intelligence is made manifest in his poem." If one is a writer one must work with words, and the words have to be set down in such a way that something beautiful is made.

Gilbert Sorrentino, in this interview.

What If

You don't get the full effect, no, without Lucinda's weary whisky voice, but Crusher does what he can . . .

I shudder to think
What it would mean
If the president wore pink
Or if a prostitute was queen

What would happen then
How would the world change
If thick became thin
And the world was rearranged

If the rains brought down the moon
And daylight was feared
And the sun rose too soon
And then just disappeared

If dogs became kings
And the Pope chewed gum
And hobos had wings
And God was a bum

If houses became trees
And flowers turned to stone
And there were no families
And people lived alone

If buildings started laughing
And windows cried
And feet started clapping
And out came inside

If mountains fell in slivers
And the sky began to bleed
And blood filled up the rivers
And prisoners were freed

If the stars fell apart
And the ocean dried up
And the world was one big heart
And decided to stop

If children grew up happier
And they could run with the wolves
And they never felt trapped
Or hungry or unloved

If cats walked on water
And birds had bank accounts
And we loved one another
In equal amounts

An Open Letter to a Stupid Fucking Fuckwit

Dear Stupid Fucking Fuckwit:

Fuck you. And fuck off.

For many reasons. For emailing me last night to ask when is the midterm exam in our Business Ethics for Future Assistant Managers at McDonalds class. When I wrote the date of the midterm in the syllabus. When I read the date of the midterm out loud to you and your classmates the first day of class. When I have announced the date of the midterm several times since then. When I included the date of the midterm in the sample questions I emailed you a week ago. When I announced the date of the midterm . . . I need to stop here and repeat myself: Fuck you, dear stupid fucking fuckwit . . . ok . . . When I announced the date of the midterm in our last class.

For that. And for making me have to include instructions like these on an exam given to people chronologically older than four years old:

Use a pencil to fill in the bubble on your score sheet corresponding to the correct answer for all questions in Part I. You may use a pencil or pen for Part II.

Write your answer on this page. You may use both the front and back if necessary.

Otherwise, you and your fellow fuckwitted stupid fucking fuckwits would try to write exam answers with a moldy carrot on a rock. How do you not manage to have a fork in your eye by the end of every meal? Really, I wonder.

And fuck you for fuckwittedly complaining about your quiz score on these grounds:

Like, ok, him and me [pointing at Friend Fuckwit], like, wrote the same stuff and whatever but he got a better grade, how come?

No. That is not what happened. Friend Fuckwit wrote a quiz answer that was almost but not quite entirely fuckwitted. Your quiz answer was entirely fuckwitted. Got it? No, of course you don't.

And, yes, fuck you (and fuck off) for fuckwittedly complaining about the paper assignment. Yes, the documentary we watched DID address in more detail Issue A than Issue B. And, yes, I did ask you to write about Issue B instead of Issue A. But, no, I don't want to know that you'd rather write about Issue A, you stupid fucking fuckwit. See, you're the stupid fucking fuckwit and I am the "teacher" in this "college" "course." Which means I get to craft the "assignments" and you get to "complete" them in your remarkably stupid and fuckwitted way. An important division of labor, one you'll see appear again and again in your stupid and fuckwitted life. E.g., when the manager of the Cumberland, Rhode Island, McDonalds tells you to polish the fryolator at 11 pm on a Saturday night.

In sum:

Fuck you.

Fuck off.

And read the fucking syllabus before you ask me another question.

Yours,
Professor Crusher

Not That There's An Answer

Alone on Christmas Eve in Japan

Not wanting to lose it all for poetry.
Wanting to live the living. All this year
looking on the graveyard below my apartment.
Holding myself tenderly in this marred body.
Wondering if the quiet I feel is that happiness
wise people speak of, or the modulation
that is the acquiescence to death beginning.

Jack Gilbert

Coffee Break

You walk down your street, past the party where the Portuguese kids are running around on the sidewalk, in and out between the recycling bins, working off their sugar high, and past the fancy lingerie shop, the outside of which has been painted this daring and actually quite charming pink, and past the Japanese restaurant where the chefs seem always outside and smoking and unhappy, and past the Indian place where the tiny, pretty waitress once shyly asked why you never use the straw she brings along with your Diet Coke, to the coffeehouse that just put in new chairs and the pretentiousness level of the students working/appearing there has to have a set Sunday-night record, where you get an extra shot in the cappuccino because it's going to be a late night, and you head back, noticing that your new shoes are finally breaking in, and nicely, and these old jeans of yours make you a sexy beast, at least in your own mind, and better there, yeah, than anywhere else, and the fleece pullover is softer than Lorie Stone's kiss in 8th grade when you took a break from skating and it was "Y.M.C.A" playing, and the night is inky blue and the blown-around clouds are a gray that reminds you of campfire smoke and as you fumble for your door key, somehow, campfire smoke makes you remember a girl from high school gym who changed her name midyear to Sunshine and how long her legs were and the impossibly white Nikes, and you wonder, opening the door and returning to the desk, when she finally was embarrassed by that ludicrous, lovely choice, and it became something to blush from, to joke about, to forget, and you boot up and find the file you're working in, hoping the coffee helps you finish what's due by 10 next morning, and yet you still see her, falling down in the dust of the track around the football field, turning onto her back, rolling from side to side, laughing a breathless girlish laugh in snorts and gasps, long tangled hair the color of weak coffee fallen across her face, the one you don't remember no matter how long you sit there, screensaver casting falling stars down the reflection in your glasses.

Tehillim

Crusher is fascinated by the differences between the biblical Jewish worldview, expressed in the Hebrew, and that of later translators (Jewish and Christian). This short article by Robert Alter concerning his new translation of the Psalms touches on a lot of the important ones.

And Here Is Exhibit No. 38

CONCORD, N.H. -- A Concord man is giving up the fight to reclaim a mummified baby that he said has been passed down in his family for generations.

The mummy, known to Charles Peavey's family as "Baby John," was seized by the state nearly a year ago to find out exactly how it died. There was no sign of foul play, but officials said that it could only be released to a relative.

Peavey said he was saving money to pay for a DNA test, but he has given up the fight because the test would cost nearly $1,000.

"I feel like I've been robbed, honestly and truly," Peavey said.

Police were prompted to take action when they saw a photo of the mummified infant next to a live baby, Peavey's great nephew. Peavey said that the mummy had been in the family for decades and was displayed on a bureau in his home. [Crusher: Was it also used as a Thanksgiving centerpiece?]

Family tradition holds that the infant was the illegitimate child of Peavey's great-great-uncle and a woman with whom he had an affair. But after a long fight, Peavey said he doesn't have the money to prove that the infant is related to the family.

"I called my niece and said, 'We've got to raise $900 for this,'" Peavey said. "Enough is enough. Let the attorney general's office do what they will with him."

Peavey did not show up for a hearing this week to try to get the mummy back, a decision that Assistant Attorney General Richard Head said surprised him.

"It's my understanding he no longer wants to pursue this matter, so the remains will be released to a proper funeral director," Head said.

The mummified infant will likely be buried at the Blossom Hill Cemetery in Concord, which has offered to bury it for free.

In the meantime, the mummy's memory will be kept alive with a MySpace page Peavey's niece designed. The page opens with the theme from "The Addams Family" and makes joking references to Baby John.

"It at least raised some question as to what Mr. Peavey's intention was related to the remains," Head said.

But Peavey said his intentions were to put Baby John in a cement coffin he bought with the hope that he'd some day reclaim the family heirloom.

"John was the last thing we had left connected to our past," Peavey said.

Because Peavey didn't show up for Wednesday's hearing, the judge gave him 30 more days to prove that he's related, but Peavey said he doesn't plan to appeal the decision.

Crusher took this from John Dufresne and will display the story on a bureau in his home. Crusher family legend has it that Dufresne is the illegitimate offspring of Baby John (See? He was named for his father, obviously.) and an unknown woman.

Crusher, While Misanthropic, Finds the Objects of His Ire Endlessly Fascinating

When not calling down the fires of heaven on people, Crusher finds them endlessly fascinating. Exhibit No. 37: Crusher has a second-career student in one of his classes. She's a quiet, middle-aged woman given to wearing the same kind of pantsuits--seemingly always a lime sherbet color--a librarian in Grand Prairie, Texas, might find "professional," who sits in the front row, chunky feet primly crossed under her desk, assiduously taking notes on a steno pad.

Except today. She was today a quiet, middle-aged woman sitting in the front row, chunky feet crossed primly under her desk, assiduously taking notes on a steno pad, while wearing a black t-shirt, jeans, and a fitted bandana with Harley Davidson emblazoned across the front.

Flann O'Brien: Not As Good As A Squirrel, But Still Pretty Damn Good

'Is it life?' he answered. 'I would rather be without it,' he said, 'for there is queer small utility in it. You cannot eat it or drink it or smoke it in your pipe, it does not keep the rain out and it is a poor armful in the dark if you strip it and take it to bed with you after a night of porter when you are shivering with the red passion. It is a great mistake and a thing better done without, like bed-jars and foreign bacon.'

The Third Policeman

Why Crusher Loves Squirrels

When Crusher lived in Denver, he was most happy one morning to read that the mayor's car had been destroyed by a kamikzae squirrel. See, this self-sacrificing fantastic bastard (the squirrel, not then-mayor Wellington Webb, who is merely a bastard) had gotten inside the car while it was deep in the bowels of a parking garage. And then gnawed through a key wire in the car's electrical system, causing some kind of mega-explosion that blew out everything. And Crusher saw that it was very good. Sure, the squirrel also blew itself up, but an entire expensive car went along with it.

Turns out that this squirrel is only one soldier in a very large, very powerful squirrel army. And Crusher sees that it is very good.

Squirrels: Nature's Anarchists.

And occasionally also drunken little fuckers:

Thinking About Sorrentino This Morning

He wrote these formally brilliant and harshly compassionate novels (along with much else Crusher hasn't read yet).

Chapters that could stand alone as pieces of flash fiction (decades before the form came into vogue).

Yet which cumulatively constituted these rich, complex, subtle portraits of people in the grip of their longings, their failures, their disappointments, their loves.

His characters tend to fuck themselves and one another up.

Love tends to be polluted by anger and pain.

People don't understand much, communicate less.

No one gets off easy in these stories.

No one's innocent and yet he writes about everyone tenderly, with clear-eyed forgiveness.

Not at all sentimental.

But deeply loving.

He shows, over and over again, what we need forgivenness for and how much we need that forgiveness.

Here's a good introduction.

Crusher Clings To Hopes For A Better World

Go Virus Go!

In reply to Crusher's earlier post, the ever-lovely Ms. Cup asks:

"Is it Misanthropic Monday already? I guess I need to turn my calendar page."

Yes, and that's how Crusher's day started. It got worse from there. In fact, Crusher cannot work on the novel tonight, because if Crusher did, the novel would come to a sudden and definitive conclusion:

"And G-d decided everyone is a stupid fuckhead. So G-d killed them."

Crusher doesn't care that until this point, G-d is not even a character in the novel.

Instead, Crusher is going to watch a certain movie and cheer for the virus.

How About If We Just Kill 2/3 of SUV Drivers Instead?

"Two-thirds of the world's polar bears will be gone by the middle of the century."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6986980.stm

Fuck the human fucking race. We're just not worth it.

On the other hand, lots of seals smiled while reading the morning papers.

Still, fuck us.

Because Too Many of These F*ckers Clog Up Crusher's Coffeehouse

Errata

It has come to Crusher's attention that Crusher has not included Ms. L. the Freakishly Uncool in Crusher's list of crushes. While Crusher already has instructed Crusher's legal representation to draw up papers, to be delivered to Ms. Freakishly Uncool's squadron of attorneys, that explain the matter in full detail, nonetheless Crusher wants to explain here the essential basis for that omission.

Crusher did not include Ms. Freakishly Uncool in Crusher's list of crushes for the fairly pertinent reason that Crusher does not have a crush on her. That omission is, therefore, not one of the errors implied in this post's subject line.

No, the first error lies in Crusher not also stating that Ms. Lina the Freakishly C. is . . . the epitome, the quintessence, the incarnation, the Form of lovely womanness. She is Crusher's Laura. She is Crusher's Beatrice. She is a righteous babe, in other words. No, she is the most righteous most babe. To call her one of Crusher's crushes, therefore, is to call the Sistine Chapel a hasty pencil sketch on the back of a damp beer mat.

The second error?

Opening the door this morning.

The fucking bastard fucking Lina sent to fuck up Crusher's face fucking well fucked up Crusher's face.

Fuck, that hurt.

And then that fucking bastard, after fucking well fucking up Crusher's fucking face, fucking peed on Crusher's fucking carpet.

Christ. OK. It will make her happy.

Four First Names of Crushes Crusher's Had
1. Valerie
2. Helena
3. Lorie
4. Robin

Four Pieces of Clothing Crusher Wishes Crusher Still Owned
1. The first and only leather jacket
2. Cowboy boots from 2d grade
3. That green t-shirt
4. The black wool sweater

Four Names Crusher Has Been Called at One Time or Another
1. Grammar Fucker
2. Satan
3. T
4. Crusher

Four Professions Crusher Secretly Wants to Try
1. Bread baker
2. Drummer
3. Doctor
4. Filmmaker

Four Musicians Crusher Most Wants to Go On a Date With
1. Emmylou Harris
2. Nanci Griffith
3. Lucinda Williams
4. Margo Timmins

Four Foods Crusher Would Rather Throw than Eat
1. Sheep testicles
2. Paper airplanes
3. Golden Delicious apples
4. Any other kind of testicles

Four Things Crusher Likes to Sniff
1. Old books
2. Crusher's t-shirt after working out
3. Magic markers
4. Coffee

Four People to Tag: Pointless. Not even four people read this blog. Hell, Crusher doesn't even read it.

Inflicted on Crusher by Lina. As most things are.

Fuuuuuuuck

Silence, exile, and cunning

"Believe me, the only thing a writer can ever regret is those occasions when he followed anything but the prompting of his own heart and intellect; and mind you, the applies to the smallest particular. Silence, exile, and cunning: Joyce was right."

~Shelby Foote, in a letter to Walker Percy

Crusher misses Mr. Foote being among us. He was arrogant, self-absorbed, cynical, and righteously pissed off at the stupidities and cruelties of our breed. And Mr. Foote truly didn't give a fuck what you thought. About anything.

Amen and amen.

From Gospodinov's Natural Novel

Mutual antipathy, like its opposite, has no need of excuses.

All that crap stuck in that bastard phony's razor

You're The Catcher in the Rye!

by J.D. Salinger

You are surrounded by phonies, and boy are you sick of them! In an
ongoing struggle to search for a land without phonies, you end up running away from
everything, from school to consequences. In this process, you reveal that many people
in your life have suffered torments and all you really want to do is catch them as
they fall. Perhaps using a baseball mitt. Your biggest fans are infamous
psychotics.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Crusher blames Lina for this phony quiz.

Who Needs a Stupid Fucking MFA? Not You, Not Now!

That is, if you're not interested in writing The Great Icelandic Novel. If you are, then Crusher has no idea if you need a Stupid Fucking MFA.

Go ask someone else about that. Crusher's busy.

He's Laurence Sterne, Bitches!

Horace, I know, does not recommend this fashion altogether: But that gentleman is speaking only of an epic poem or a tragedy;--(I forget which)--besides, if it were not so, I should beg Mr. Horace's pardon;--for in writing what I have set about, I shall confine myself neither to his rules, nor to any man's rules that ever lived.

Oh, and all you way cool "experimentalist" out there, sipping your double espressos and cracking open a story by Gospodinov: Anything you can come up with, Sterne and his dawg Cervantes did it first. And better than you ever will.

And now, if you'll excuse Crusher, Crusher's going to crack open Gospodinov's Natural Novel. Which is very fucking funny.

The Wars

Timothy Findley's novel describes the life and death of Robert Ross, a young officer in the Canadian army of World War I. Ross dies from wounds suffered in a fire; he was trying to rescue horses, disobeying orders to save them. Before shipping overseas to France, he trained out West. This scene occurs as Ross rides the troop train through his hometown, heading for the war.

Then he could smell the city of his birth--even though it lay about him in the dark--and he stood and he stared as he passed the fires of his father's factories, every furnace blasting red in the night. What had become of all the spires and the formal, comforting shapes of commerce he remembered--banks and shops and business palaces with flags? Where were the streets with houses ranged behind their lawns under the gentle awnings of the elms? What had happened here in so short a time that he could not recall his absence? What were all these fires--and where did his father and mother sleep beneath the pall of smoke reflecting orange and red and yellow flames? Where, in this dark, was the world he'd known and where was he being taken to so fast there wasn't even time to stop?

Yes.

"Some people underestimate how erotic it is to be understood."

Mary Rakow, The Memory Room

My Cucumbers

The Cucumbers of Praxilla
Of Sicyon

What is the best we leave behind?
Certainly love and form and ourselves.
Surely those. But it is the mornings
that are hard to relinquish, and music
and cucumbers. Rain on trees, empty
piazzas in small towns flooded with sun.
What we are busy with doesn't make us
groan ah! ah! as we will for the nights
and the cucumbers.

Jack Gilbert

* * *

Deer feeding in the field behind my house on Russ Hill Rd.

"Misguided Angel"

Roasted garlic

Light blue chambray shirt my ex gave me

The laughing Quebecois girl, washing the grass off her legs

Peregrine over Spruce Mountain

"Early Sunday Morning"

KJV

The King James Version of the Bible contains some of the most beautiful poetry and prose in the Western canon. Good shit, in other words, Crusher says. Anyone interested in cadence, flow, imagery--i.e., anyone interested in being able to read and write well--should study at least parts of this text carefully. Read it aloud, especially. So Crusher is pleased to find Mary Rakow, author of the remarkable novel The Memory Room, credit the KJV for its "literary effect" on her:

L.A. WEEKLY: Your background is primarily theological and academic -- was it literary as well?

RAKOW: It was literary only to the extent of having, since childhood, a consistent exposure to the Bible in its King James Version. I did not read fiction or poetry until my mid-40s, after I started writing.

She also rightly notes that the Bible is, in a very real sense, "experimental" literature:

L.A. WEEKLY: Surely, though, you have literary influences.

RAKOW: I am still thinking about the Bible as I knew it -- two columns side by side on the page with the numbered chapters and verses, the names of each of the books contained ä in the Bible, the table of contents. These are forms and certainly not the forms of the original texts, the scrolls. Seeing written words organized in this way probably had an effect.

Also, the Bible, without apology and without effort, combines poetry, prose, law, narrative, biography. So it feels very natural to me to have between two covers of a single book, multiple books, multiple voices and multiple forms. You have Levitical law, gospel, psalm, creation myth, the anger of the prophets, all in one book. It never occurred to me that this would be a problem or that it was new or unique or creative or anything. I wrote The Memory Room so that what was on the page embodied what I felt inside and didn't ask myself these questions.

If you're asking Crusher what to read from the KJV, and why shouldn't you be?, Crusher would urge you to start with Genesis and the Gospel of St. Luke. Then try some of the prophets (Crusher finds himself again and again reading Jeremiah and Amos, for what that's worth), the Gospel of St. Mark, and Job. The Psalms, of course. No matter what, read it aloud and slowly. Find the rhythms, let yourself be carried along by them.

Penguin Classics has a superb new edition out, which includes the Apocrypha as well as a good introduction and notes.

Many, Many Notes From Underground

And last night, with my lids pulled over me, I went on seeing as if I were an open window. Full of wind. I wasn't lying in peaceful darkness, that darkness I desired, that peace I needed. My whole head was lit with noises, yet no Sunday park could have been more lonely: thoughts tossed away, left like litter to be blown about and lost. There were long avenues of footfall, leaf flutter lacking leaf or trees, barks unreturned to their dogs.


Crusher thought Crusher wanted to say something about this passage, but no. Res ipsa loquitor.

Hi! Nice to Kill You.

Mors
Take this quiz!

As seen at Lina's highly Klimted joint.

Meerkats, Plain and Simple

So, OK, Crusher can get a little dark at times. Like, whenever Crusher is conscious.

Still and all, Crusher's world has meerkats. And that's always good.









In fact, this world Crusher shares with meerkats, pictures of John Gardner looking like a bepiped tool, and you would be a better place if we all acted more like meerkats.

So, yeah, getting started on your burrow. Crusher will be along to help.

Wittgenstein's Mistress

According to Crusher, it says a lot about America's stupid fucking culture that Mitch Albom is even allowed near any public library, much less allowed to publish "books," while David Markson's remarkable work has received no popular recognition over the last four decades. (Yes, Crusher is aware that this is an old song; all that changes are names. Fine, fine. Crusher will move on.)

There are a lot of reasons to read this novel. It's written in a fascinating, formally inventive way. The narrator is a woman named Kate, and her musings to herself are replete with historical, cultural, and artistic references. But right now what Crusher wants to emphasize is that Wittgenstein's Mistress, Crusher thinks, is about what happens when a person is, well, crushed by loneliness. Kate has come to believe she is the last person in the world. In fact, the last conscious entity in the world. She refers over and over to skies emptied of seagulls. In fact, she sets fire to pages from a book, throwing them one by one into the air at the edge of a beach in an attempt to recreate the gulls' flight. Maybe she's insane and maybe she isn't. What's important, more important than that question, is her realization at the end of the story. She is musing on the prospects of writing a novel about a woman who believes she is the last person in the world. And she says this about that character:

Although one curious thing that might sooner or later cross the woman's mind would be that she had paradoxically been practically as alone before all this happened as she was now, incidentally.

Well, this being an autobiographical novel I can categorically verify that such a thing would sooner or later cross her mind, in fact.

One manner of being alone simply being different from another manner of being alone, being all that she would finally decide that this came down to, as well.

Whether she's insane, the ending is so powerful because she realizes that the loneliness she feels now, as the last person alive, is very much like the loneliness she felt in her life before, a life in which her child died, her marriage ended, and she drifted from lover to lover, from place to place. Kate's life, that is, is simply a span of time in which connections with others are one by one dissolved.

One in which love fails.

And Crusher has to think that this is a fate we are all exposed to. Crusher's sense of things is that in any emotionally significant relationship--any relationship in which we experience longing, need, vulnerability, intimacy, tenderness, misunderstanding, loss, anger, and on and on and on (much like this sentence, Crusher knows)--is one in which people struggle, a lot of the time anyway, to create, to maintain, to recover a sense that we aren't alone.

And we're so bad at that.

Hell, most of the time, Crusher says, most of us don't even really know what the truth is about our lives or how to stay close to someone else. We're not so good at figuring that out and then there's the fact that we're also quite good at ignoring, denying, repressing, under-rug-sweeping, and just plain lying when it comes to what's really going on in our lives, what we want, what we (really, really--as S. Girls plead for us to disclose) need. Then there's communicating whatever it is we think we have a handle on to someone else and then there's their getting it, given everything they're struggling with inside, all their confusion and muddying history and longings and needs and all that.

And what's so sad, what's so fucking sad, about the human heart is this incessant wish for connection anyway.

Crusher is teaching Plato's Symposium this fall. And this dialogue just blows Crusher away every time. Not because of what Socrates says love is. Socrates . . . who the hell knows what he means by the time we're done. It's Aristophanes' speech about love. He says that human beings originally comprised "two" persons--we had two faces, four arms and four legs, etc. But Zeus was displeased with us because of our pridefulness, so he split us all in half and set us wandering for that lost part of ourselves. The pleasures of sex were given us to distract us from our deep, deep and unending loneliness. What we want most from love, according to Aristophanes, is to be "united" with our lost self, which we seek in someone else. If the gods offered to reunite us with our lost half, we would experience the greatest happiness possible:

Surely you can see that no one who received such an offer would turn it down; no one would find anything else that he wanted. Instead, everyone would think he'd found out at least what he always wanted: to come together and melt together with the one he loves, so that one person emerged from two. Why should this be so? It's because, as I said, we used to be complete wholes in our original nature, and now "Love" is the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to be complete.

But Aristophanes underlines that this offer is hypothetical only and that there's no guarantee we will ever find that wholeness:

But for the future, Love promises the greatest hope of all: If we treat the gods with due reverence, he will restore us to our original nature, and by healing us, he will make us blessed and happy.

So, we're right now in need of healing. The human condition is one of division, loneliness, longing, according to Aristophanes. And we can only hope that somehow and at some time, the gods will take pity on us and restore us.

Well, how often have you seen the gods come through on our behalf? About as often as Crusher has, probably. And Crusher doesn't know how much, through the course of a life, we really get better at connecting to someone else. Kate is fifty, she thinks, in this story, and everyone and everything has disappeared from her life. Which, Crusher guesses, is why this Philip Larkin poem also gets to him. Crusher might have Crusher's students read it when we cover Aristophanes' speech:

Talking in Bed

Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.

Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside, the wind's incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds across the sky,

And dark towns heap up on horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation

It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.

And yet.

Those moments when we feel, yeah, melted together with someone else. Can't give up wanting that, can we? At the end of the novel, Kate is lighting fires at the water's edge, recalling to herself the watchfires the Greeks lit on the beaches at Troy.

Kerouac, Fifty Years On

Here's the answer . . .



to this question:

For many young people in America, though, the name Jack Kerouac means nothing at all. In an age where youth culture is increasingly defined by consumerism, where the road trip has been replaced by the gap year, and where it is considered radical to be cool but not cool to be radical, whither Jack Kerouac and his beatific vision?

First, Crusher Wants You to Know

. . . that Crusher does more than crush. Crusher, when not crushing, also is writing a novel.

For example.

There's a lot of sadness and loss and loneliness in Crusher's novel. Crusher has to write about these things, as well as be silly and stupid a lot of the time, because if Crusher doesn't, Crusher will shoot bullets into Crusher's head as many times as necessary to make Crusher dead. This is because Crusher thinks life, outside of books like the one Crusher is writing, is filled to the brim and then some with sadness and loss and loneliness.

It's unbearable sometimes. Or at least virtually so. Crusher wonders why more people don't kill themselves, through crushing or any means really. And yet they don't.

We don't.

And for reasons Crusher doesn't understand, and doesn't want to play around with too much, writing about sadness and loss and loneliness, as well as being silly and stupid a lot of the time, makes it easier for Crusher to make it through the days given Crusher under heaven.

The big Catholic church down the street from Crusher's house is having some festival tonight. Probably related to some Christian saint or other. Mostly Portuguese-Americans go to this church. They will parade tonight through the streets of Crusher's neighborhood, following a band with a bass drum that bangs slowly. Also with trumpets, played by at least two men who have just now parked their cars across the street from Crusher's apartment. They are dark wearing pants and short-sleeve shirts that put Crusher in mind of what airline pilots wear. But they also have trumpets, and Crusher has never seen an airline pilot with any kind of brass instrument.

Or a woodwind.

Crusher doesn't mind the Christians parading through Crusher's neighborhood. More silliness and stupidity that keeps sad and lonely and lost people from killing themselves, Crusher thinks.

Or not. What the fuck does Crusher know about anyone but Crusher?

And usually not even then.