“Didn’t we do this already?”
— Bill Murray, Groundhog Day
The Manifesto Conference began with predictable hullabaloo. Order was called for when there was no need to call for order; chaos was celebrated under mundane auspices, i.e., moving the dishes to the refrigerator and the food to the cabinets; and equivocators, they, ah, hmm —
It was a great festival of scholarly incoherence, and it intended to stay that way.
The goal of the conference was to issue one joint manifesto or statement on behalf of all artistic movements represented by the end of the fifth and final day. Interspersed between negotiations led by representatives would be talks and seminars, recruiting drives, and white-tie evening receptions.
Here are highlights of the itinerary — which I just found, crumpled, in my suitcase, flopped out half-asleep on my bed —
Day 1:
Talks and Seminars:
So Many Balooga Bones!: Raffi as Forensic Scientist
The Society to Take Fitzgerald Out of His Books
The Society to Promote Specious Understanding of the Sciences in a Novel
The Committee to Uglify Italy
The team was a bundle of different footing: Markos had never been to Paris, where the conference was being held, Frankie had an Uncle who lived here that he was desperate to avoid, and George had an apartment on Rue de la Harpe that was currently on loan to a pair of students raising a field of wheat on the roof -– the “Buzzcut,” he called it. I once asked him if he ever worried about the ghosts of baseball players emerging from it and falling to the streets below. He did not.
We checked into a hotel on Avenue Gabriel. George wanted to see the back-and-forth staggered placement of the buildings marking an earlier architectural era. He knew they were there, but spent most of the time wondering out loud where they were, these attempts at street-widening that only ended up making the buildings look like they were trying to duck a punch.
Our rooms overlooked Le Laurent, the Champs d’Elysses hummed behind a wave-meets-the-shore arc of green, the whole air and space of the city fortified by a backbone of elegance that couldn’t be broken by a year-long car crash, half-a-dozen chiropractors sharing the same mental hall of agreement that the best way to train for their job was to run a magnet in endless aggressive circles around a compass (read: in this case, the needle is the spine, not the Peripherique, which -– I have to say — was just begging to be submerged underneath a circular, Frederick Law Olmstead-styled park, paving the way to sink the city/suburb divide beneath something large enough to attract the interest of insiders and hasten the city-bound march of outsiders, and lighten the visual load of those with apartment towers perched above the blasted circle), or that disappointed film of tourists -– Japanese or otherwise -– heading back home due to that ever-present case of “Paris Syndrome,” the up of expectation and the supposed down of “What is this before me?”
Rooftop windows of the quartier de Santier. Chambres de bonne. Green and crackly. Littered chimneys – as if the metaphorical bull entered the metaphorical shop and all the pots had leapt to the roofs in fright. The back and forth swing of the garden railings along the Canal St. Martin. A ten-year old with a Marseille jersey playing keepy-up alongside a father with a folded paper, saying, “Pas dans La Seine. Pas dans La Saine.” I mean, the nerve of such a question. There were old “trunk of fig trees” smoking away on upturned fish crates while the ghost of Chicot -– as white as Pierrot -– countermanded orders made by King Henri III (“On with his head. His Majesty meant to say … on with his head.”) There was The Social Club and Nouveau Casino -– and a string of female DJ’s from Dublin were supposed to come this weekend, too, though I doubt I’m the age to appreciate it anymore – and the scrum of Bostonians turning to every other tourist bus and shouting, “Quick! Say, ‘Quack-quack!’”
For a while, he thought it was a kind of friendship he had with Frankie, Thom, Markos, myself and the rest –- and in a sense, it was: the friendship of the adventure, the event.
What planks of comradeship could he stand upon when the storms of circumstance had finished blowing through? The blue and empty sky. That’s what Prospero’s Cave was for, though — to get a book and a beer and think about the world. The storm was not George himself, mind, but since he and the storm were at times indistinguishable, the thought was that friendship attached to the event meant friendship attached to the man. It confused him. It confused his subordinates. He needed a beer.
Not that he didn’t mind being in charge. As Sorensen said comparing Lyndon Johnson’s staff with Kennedy’s: it was never about the paranoia of power. If it was the right job, being in charge could be fun -– and was. To facilitate creation without discouraging pride of ownership. To orchestrate a group with -– he should’ve been a songwriter -– an alley-oop.
Purists. It was often the first word invoked by George at the beginning of a thoroughgoing spiel. They were not aligned with the real newspapers. They were not aligned with the slightly more real newspapers. No breakaway roguery. They were professionals. He’d often turn to the kid with the mail cart, here -– “Do you hear that? Professionals!” “Who?” –- and then continue. Group retention had been an issue in the past, but that was behind them now. It was an “all-in-one” house: no corporate expectation of growth in a “flat” market, no hacking away at careerists because of their previous sales numbers –- just work.
Markos had been making the case for his brother to join the team, and in the spirit of professionalism, I’d commissioned a neighbor to take care of it. (“We’re neighbors,” he had said. “You don’t need to use the word ‘commission.’”) I bought the guy’s plane ticket and I fixed him up with a decent room. It seemed like a worthwhile bit of weirdness to indulge. I’d once hired the guy who ran the cart outside my building to come up to a meeting with Norwegian investors and pretend to be someone with venture capital already tied up in Narrational Musings. He ate hot dogs the entire time. I didn’t even ask him to change.
The kid’s name was Timoteo. He didn’t look anything like Markos. In fact, he looked like Chicharito with a beard. While most of Timoteo’s friends in Campeche, Mexico went to Oxford Street, Portland, and that other San Francisco to the north to test their English in the dictionary-free wild, Timoteo opted for the south of Spain – the home base was Chipiona, near Cadiz, thrilling at the orange trees lining the streets and less than thrilled to meet vacationing Americans who called him “Tomato,” taking in the buildings that –- much to his irritation –- he couldn’t place. They were too new to be Asturian pre-Romanesque, and they weren’t colorful enough to be analogously likened to azulejos. He liked them, but he was just developing a verbal rash as to what they were.
Chipiona is the place of time, he told his friends as he left. Chipiona es el pueblo de tiempo. He missed some things, for sure. His father would come home from work, usually shouting something like, “Si textiles hechos de París, un pancho de primera clase que me hacen el hombre más rico de México.” There was the walk along 180 and the Gulf, roses leaning over the wall of a passing house to gum the roof of a parked car, the impromptu wedding thrown together on the Puerto de Arribo’s sand lot at the last minute, the harbormaster joyfully giving in to the affair after a half hour of complaints and calling over his brother’s band who proudly announced that they did not know a single word to a single song by Los Tigres, and then tried to sing them, anyway.
My neighbor’s name was Gerard Gimbley. A lawyer born near the Ardtornish Estate in Lochaline, Scotland, he was now working on a book about the evolution of English Common Law from the Middle Ages to the 19th century after he had let through a succession of Cornish game-hen-changers into his office’s maw -– simple errors that gummed up the whole works and left him ‘cordially invited’ to take a year’s leave.
His first strike occurred when he passed someone from a U.S. satellite office filming a commercial in their law library in their central branch in Islington and heard the man say, “Have you been in an accident and need someone to help you determine whether or not Section 13B of the Restatement of Torts falls within the purview of the 9th Circuit? Then do we have a law firm for you.” He started to giggle. People shushed him, the ‘actor’ glared, and Gimbley continued. He couldn’t help it.
The second and final strike came when a visiting MP tipped to be the next Home Secretary came by the office, and when the receptionist asked if there was anything in the archive the Minister wanted to take a look, the man thought for a moment, then announced:
“I’ll have an Act of Parliament.”
Without thinking, Gimbley replied, “A second home?”
Gimbley later told me that the drive to the airport was almost entirely uneventful save Timoteo’s dead-to-rights impression of Jimmy Carter, doing what Timoteo called “Jimmy Carter Boasts”, i.e.,
- “I have cooked more varieties of pea soup than any other President in history. The only other President to come close was William Howard Taft. He had 54. I have 59. It would’ve been 60, but I gave one of those recipes to the Shah and he lost it. (Then, wistfully.) I’d like to get that recipe back. Anyway: what kind of soups were they? Well, there was pea-shooter soup, where you shot your peas into the soup and then ate it; there was pea-knuckle soup, where you covered your soup with a deck of playing cards and tried to find the bowl underneath; and then there was Pea-Wee Herman soup, which –- if you took it into a movie theater –- looked like a bow-tie.”
- “I have never met a clown that I couldn’t make cry.”
And that was it. He was quiet the rest of the ride, keeping only his forehead to the window to watch the New York City skyline pass and a orange soccer ball to his chest, which – at different points – he called The Great Orange Egg, The Cruyff Ball, and the Ballon d’Orange.
Frontier F.C. and the People’s Republic of Cambridge: two new soccer teams to shoulder-rush their way into the MLS. He hadn’t decided where he wanted the first. Perhaps Cheyenne could use a soccer team, though anything west of the Rockies would do. This was George’s secret kitty – envelopes initialed and stored away in a filing cabinet in a back room layered with old game posters from Madison Square Garden that a janitor had collected after years of working there, giving the subsequent extras over to the office – and having accumulated excess pay the way Joe DiMaggio accumulated sick leave with the only nieces and nephews that could have lined up at the familial dole cue living in Belgium, this was where he wanted to see it go.
George practiced sideways runs in the coffee room when he didn’t bring a ball into the office, giving each leg a turn on the back foot. He often thought of scarves flocking into the city for a match. He had two prototype scarves, and he was the only one who wore them in the winter. There was a long up-hill battle ahead – to launch and grow a sport within a country. It seemed that no one else had even heard of La Liga or the EPL until Markos came along. He was fine with that. When he put on his scarf, he felt something like -– well, never mind what he felt like. The whiff of Tom Baker was enough.
*
The Key West Haussmann Hall was what the conference called home. Translated, it read: “Qui est Haussmann?” –- and it had the visual chops to warrant such a question, too. After the mint-colored windows marking the exterior gave way to the atrium, the sign-in tables, the friendly trash-talk, things like, “If you write The Magicians, you’re not allowed to call Jonathan Franzen a ‘Great American Novelist’” or sights like a man walking by us with a canvas on his back being followed by another flailing a brush, the former saying, “Monsieur, je vole cette peinteure, ici. Vous pouvez s’arreter” with the latter barking, “Mais je n’ai pas fini! Je n’ai pas fini!” the interior dissolved into an above-the-shop patchwork of woodwork that lacked unity and design.
The first talk I’m a participant of is called, “What Is ‘Is’?” It’s introduced much as you’d expect.
“What is ‘Is?’”
“You mean, being?”
“But, you see, here is where it gets interesting: ‘is’ is also a transitive verb.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” I mutter, loud enough for the other panelists to hear.
The spill into the exterior hall was considerable after the talk. No one wanted to indulge the building’s fetid interior any longer than they had to.
At first I thought: frustration. A kick of frustration strong enough to clear a soot-filled chimney in one fell swoop. But –-
Memory wandered around the room during these moments, guests at a private reception, leaning over to peer at objects, as silent as they would be at a gallery opening were it not for my trick of being able to tie all these together, to broker these handshakes of identity, and as simple a thing as it is — with six billion people on the planet and counting, this accumulation, this seven continent chess squaring itself in reverse down a long and sliding tube until it’s just you and me, my desperate unknown love, this pulling and dragging of melodies into treble clefs and beyond: all I can say is that this is the most daring and adventurous of lives.
Day 2:
Talks and Seminars:
Dostoyevsky For Kids: Why “Serious Writers” Like Him So Much
“Semper Fi! Semper Fi! Semper Fi!: The Secret Military Life of Thoreau.”
Para-Olympic Confessionals: What’s Missing From Their Lives
Why Does Harold Bloom Always Seem to Have A Headache?
Even though I was an Adlai Stevenson lookalike –- an out-and-out ringer, in point of fact –- I was still capable of stuff that could make bow ties spin. I could grow and shrink my hair just on the basis of how I stared myself down in the mirror every morning. (“Next stop on the Lookalike Express, Pep Guardiola. Have your tickets ready for the conductor. Be sure to take all your bags and personal effects with you.”)
Breaking the winter of indifference upon the New Orleans spring trumpets of my memory, my self, and my knees was not beyond my purview.
Day 3:
Talks and Seminars:
Implicit Hemingway Titles (A Stoppable Hunger, It’s Not Like Venus de Milo Needed Those Anyway)
Why A Disciplined Game of Calvinball is Necessary
How to Be A Better Enigma (Possibly Canceled)
The Future of the Novel
The Professor rose, and — frequently gesturing with the glasses he’d removed from his schnozzer — began.
“Good evening, delegates, representatives, and members of the public. My name is Simon Olimaga. So glad so many of you were able to make it. My talk tonight is entitled The Future of the Novel, and —”
A voice cut across the room.
“You want to know the future of the novel? Why not ask someone who’s been there? About the novel.”
A man walked out, and he was dressed so: tin foil sneakers, nine ties, an African explorer’s hat he kept raising on and off his head, as if –- I thought -– he were descending a staircase in an invisible musical.
Olimaga was at a loss for words, as were the security guards, as their word depended on his.
Olimaga stammered. “I …”
“What’s the matter? Don’t believe I’m from the future? Think I’m a protester? This will settle things. Look at this.” The man threw a baseball to himself and caught it.
The Professor balked. “What did that just —?”
On the opposite end of the stage, a baseball player emerged and threw a ball at the Professor –- only the ball wasn’t there. There was nothing in his hand. The ballplayer cursed and left.
Olimaga turned round. “So you’re from the future. Tell us about the novel.”
“Well, it hasn’t changed much. Margaret Atwood has a bionic arm. Children have brain-damaged robots for pets.”
“Anything else?”
“The most pressing question of all —”
“Who are you?”
“Indeed. Who am I?”
“A TTB.”
“A what?”
“A Time Traveling Bodyguard.”
“A —”
“I’ll explain.”
The Time Traveling Bodyguards were founded (in closed-door and public square sessions) soon after the invention of time travel, as no laws had yet been passed to deal with any tampering, and it looked like none would be soon. While it was quickly established that there ought be plant guards, river guards, air flow guards, the correct placement of trash guards, and the like, someone looking after something else to make sure it was where it ought to be tomorrow — as math couldn’t account for all forms of responsibility — guarding people remained the organization’s primary (and most complicated) concern.
The human TTBs were there to keep the tourists out and the paradoxes to a minimum. They worked from the scientists outward and the artists inward — vice versa, too — trying to build a map of patterns (in time, any form of cartography is crucial and worthwhile), and they managed to get things done, but when we think of words, we think of grenades of geometry — we’ve made progress, someone exclaims, and then, boom.
At first the TTBs exploited the minor amounts of time-travel we already had in the world of quantum theory — ions popping in and out of existence, and the like. Scientists would try grouping incidents of this together to try and transport larger objects back and forth, but that had its limitations and embarrassing peccadilloes, including sending an early draft of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court back to medieval times — though, thankfully, it was not found by man or beast.
And in the act itself – when they transported an object from one spot to another, they could not help but notice the spike in anti-matter and the lightning flash that followed. So they adapted the anti-matter to act like something of a smoke bomb. When someone or something moved from one time to another, it gave the appearance of doing so in an abject fit of ‘nothing.’
Amidst shouts of having the bearded lady come out to take a bow, “Why not bring Rupert Murdoch out to polish up the journalistic integrity of this Weekly World Charade?” and more, Olimaga couldn’t resist not knowing what the future of the novel contained and emptied the stage with the TTB in a blink.
*
Markos and Timoteo stared at the tri-corner cardboard as delegates and representatives went left and right behind his back after being let out of the “Balooga Bones!” seminar. Timoteo’s hand held the ball on his left hip. “The glue,” Timoteo said, pointing up at the sign. “The glue is coming off your science fair project.”
The men at the placard: Nat Sheekman, crumpling together bits of aluminum together and having a go at balancing them on his head; Arthur Perrin, who was standing at attention alongside the project, ready to have a go at being the comparable science museum/art museum tour guide; Torque Zubeck, trying to fold the newspaper he was reading for a seventh fold; and there was Jean-Pierre Boosflug, a meticulously groomed Frenchman, groomed in the style of the full-domed actors from the 60’s and 70’s, who had a business card that bore only his first name.
Markos raised his hand. “Here’s a question: by traveling through time, is your presence the key bodyguard component alone?”
Sheekman –- clearly caffeinated –- took the aluminum off his head and rubbed the right side of his face.
“What day is today?”
Timoteo raises his eyebrows. “Day? It’s Monday.”
“The first day of the conference?”
Perrin grimaced. “Sorry about the lobster, then.”
Perrin looked to his friends for confirmation.
“Is there a lobster?”
Blank faces. He turned back to Markos.
“Well –- sorry about a possible lobster. Maybe.”
*
The TTB’s are responsible for the preservation of slang. It’s only natural for them to talk about “giving someone the shave,” “banging the bricks,” margy-bargy, toyi-toyi, falling “arsy yarsey,” driving breezers all over town, preserving “Ireland Bog Latin,” feeding a dero, downing a handle, and suffering from tall poppy syndrome when they’ve lived in all time-corners of the globe.
Under a tree and above a blanket in Ulva Island, New Zealand was where the TTBs were taking their breaks when they wanted to escape the crowds.
“Perrin!” Sheekman cried. “This is a surprise. What’s the what?”
“Guys, you won’t believe what just happened; or, rather, you won’t believe what happened during a specifi —”
“We get it, we get it. Tell us.”
“Well, I was hanging around the Crusades, and we were on our way to Israel, and the army decides to lay siege to a castle. Well, the army in the castle sneaks out in the middle of the night, which means the only thing left in the castle is a bunch — which is the technical term for it, by the way — of pigs. A bunch o’ pigs. But, so, anyway: the army outside doesn’t know that, and they spend the next few days trying to starve a few hundred pigs, yelling curses and threats at a few hundred pigs, bombarding a few hundred pigs, and when they finally decide to mount an attack? Oh my, oh my.”
A flock of geese landed on the picnic field like a sudden onset of commas at the corner of a page. A snow-like flurry of commas. Quick charcoal sketches. The metaphor was there, damn it. “Welcome, friends!” Sal — a fellow TTB — called, going over to offer them some of his lunch. “And where have you come from? Any mountains I know?”
“You want to hear a joke?” Arthur asked.
“We should be watching the park.”
“Let me tell you a joke.”
“Fine.”
“185 Pumpkins walk into a bar. The bartender says, I’m sorry, we don’t serve 185 pumpkins, here. The pumpkins say, Come on, man! We just wanted to get smashed.”
“Not bad.”
“Do you want to go listen to some Beats?”
“I should get back to the conference.”
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure. Some of the usual.”
“Right. We have so much usual.”
Day 4:
tao lin asks to be appointed to a high-ranking government post so he can rename local walmarts after dogs he used to live with or hear about or pass on the street on his way to work
Remind Me Why Sam Johnson Was So Quotable, Again?
Why You Shouldn’t Accept H.P. Lovecraft’s Invitation Back to His Apartment (Hint: It’s a Vast, Monolithic Ruin.)
Day 5
Joyce’s Book of the Sea; or, “Rage: the pince-nez man wandering about the battlefield with a book.”
A Public Listing of Kind Of Disturbing Book Dedications (“Daddy loves you — and you make Daddy very angry, too.” )
I can’t speak well or eloquently of hotel-based ennui. I enjoy exterior spaces too much, how each object out there defines or compliments the space around it – the petal to the field. When I think of hotels, I couldn’t care less — though I am here, so as not to disappoint: I am surrounded by a painting, a bed, a light, and I have to get outside. I have to get out of here.
I ring up Markos and Frankie and they both agree to meet me in the lobby before we set out in search of a drink or a Tapas bar. Part of me is almost willing to hop on train after to train to get some more geographically honest Tapas.
On the way out, we meet a man who introduces himself as Sal, and asks if we’d be interested in joining any of the following on the list. These are the names on it (ones that need explication will be explained):
List of Artistic Movements Represented at the Conference
Neo-Onanism, a.k.a., Polonious Kissingerism
The Abdicators — Metafictionists who write themselves out of the story so they can go lead a happy life, and boy, are they happy.
The Anti-Irony Anti-Ironists (If That’s Our Real Name)
The Weathermen (“A spectre is haunting Europe — in the form of rains and thundershowers lasting through the weekend.”)
OuLiPo (Ouvrir de Literature Potentialle)
Quietudes (Though Our Hand is Everywhere)
The Proposal to Form A Society To Encourage and Promote Stable Mental Health While Writing a Manifesto Manifesto
The Crack Novelists (“Have they been translated into English yet?” “I don’t know. Well, come to think of it, no, they haven’t.”)
Not My Language — Non-native speakers proudly barreling through a foreign tongue and publishing the result in an eponymous quartlery, i.e., poems titled “Your Teeth Fall Out Like Rainbows, Yes?”)
“What’re these?” Markos asks.
“Lists of artistic movements,” Sal says. “Want to sign up for any?”
“Not right now.”
“Solipist.”
“Aw, c’mon. Play nice.”
“Nice? I’ll show you nice. See you tomorrow. At work. Where both of us shall be.”
He walks away back to his table.
“Don’t talk to him,” I say.
“He works for us?” Markos asks.
“Yeah, don’t worry about him.” Frankie says.
“He’s a Timeliest.”
Markos looks confused. “A what?”
The Timeliests are all helter-skelter about their clocks. If they ever keep any, they’re not your usual 12-point, analog, or digital pieces of work. Timeliest watches are round globes kept in the coat pocket that one can spin and spin and never quite see where the edge ends.
The Timeliest Manifesto runs so:
(1) TIME IS IRRELEVANT; USE WHATEVER PIECE OF HUMAN HISTORY YOU WANT.
Timeliests are allowed to drop off certain maps.
Time ambles, gallops, trots, and stands still. It’s easy to speed ahead to the exhausted point of the equation, the Timeliests write — that time travel can be ‘used up,’ that limitless is ultimately limited, and there’s a void of purgatorial condemnation for those involved.
But there is freedom — there is always freedom — and the argument of perspective of someone looking at all of time has incalculable value. Think of the Doctor in Doctor Who.
(2) DON’T LITTER.
Just don’t, okay?
In firm opposition to The Timeliests is the Reinventionists, a curiously American trend, and a thoroughly Imperialistic sentence. I’ve only seen it in New York, heard about it only in the confines of this office, but the ontological life of labels burns faster than a cigarette rolled in kerosene. It spreads and annuls itself in one hot, hot sweep. And here we have the tension between the acceptance of labels as a safe enough guide to clear passages through the perceived morass of what’s continually reclassified into the future as “modern life” and the potential abdication of responsibility, where the emotions and the rhythms of conversation prove to be the ground of a daily teleology.
The Reinventionist Manifesto was taped to our doors and the faces of the Timeliests as they slept in the middle of the night.
The Reinventionist Manifesto is comprised of a few points:
(1) NEVER SAY SOMETHING IS DEAD UNLESS YOU’RE WILLING TO REINVENT IT AGAIN.
This is the big one. The life-affirmer. The simultaneous call to arms and challenge. (Out, out, ye Civic Servants!) “We’re sick and tired of seeing X pronounced dead,” their text begins, “disposing of films, novels, music, political figures, social movements, and even entire cities in an asinine invocation of yesteryear as a backward way of puffing up your chest.”
As Chris Mancuzo put it, Reinventionism is not kitsch, Reinventionism is not retro-styling, Reinventionism is not novelty; Reinventionism is not nostalgia. Reinventionism is a rolling and perpetual recontextualization of all recontextualizations. Never repeat yourself: follow surprise, freedom, the makings and breakings of connectivity. “A constant state of becoming,” Dylan writes. Do it again and again, like scales on an instrument, until your piano is filled with flames. The kind of honky-tonk that makes people run for their lives — because of their lives. Barcelona grisa to Barcelona viva. Katrina’s New Orleans to New Orleans’ New Orleans. Paris occupe a Paris libere. Lyrics on the piano sheet nothing but “mudita, mudita” — an ecstasy of influence. (Comedians, for some reason, love this one.)
Why stop? The Reinventionists ask. If rock and roll is dead, make new rock and roll; if sincerity is dead, make new sincerity; same goes for irony, too. If there’s a “desert of the real,” grab your plants and take aim at the ground.
If Earth were a lightbulb and every single artisan circled the switch, this was the making of the light.
(2) ART IS A CROWD, ART IS YOUR FRIENDS.
Look at The Beats, the New Wavers, Les Mardistes, Emerson and his crowd, Virginia Woolf and hers, Byron and his …
If anything comes close to ridding us of this curiously American solipism, where Vonnegut constantly invoked the village that raises the child, Gopnik talked about the Parisians who constantly checked in on you (which would add another notch to Kieslowski’s Bleu), and veterans spoke of the emphasis they remember put on community instead of competition, it is this.
Friends are lifeblood disguised as tonic; they are homes-to-be; they are Harpo and Chico Marx; they are Grace Kelley acting like Bill Shatner; they roll knock-knock jokes down Beacon Hill in a hamster ball, realize too late that they only brought along one hamster ball, and so to finish the knock-knock joke, the hamster ball has to travel up the hill again; they tell you Pa and Woody Guthrie are fighting a cyclone over the hill and they need all the extra fists they can get; they somehow end up in a car next to yours on a highway several states from home, waving, windows down, and the two of you have a pleasant conversation at sixty-five miles per hour (“Lovely day for a stroll, isn’t it?” “I guess you could call it that”); it’s what sends you out of a subway overhang into the pouring rain into a convenience store to buy up armfuls of umbrellas, dash back to the subway and hand them out to the waiting, huddled crowds, then make your way back into the rain to see it stop a minute later and leave you falling over from laughter at the sight; and it’s the thing that sends men riding on horseback from Quincy off to Philadelphia, well-grounded and well-prepared.
And crowds? Why do you think Neruda caused near riots in Chile? Or the applause that came through when Dylan used to sing ‘Even the President of the United States sometimes must stand naked?’ That movies are funnier are opening night than they are on the second? Or Sartre wrote the Manifesto of the 121? Amiri Baraka caused that stir with his Who? Who? Who? Who? That Fred Rogers was there program after program, year after year? Because they enjoyed the sound of their mouths slowly secreting tea-cups? The Reinventionists think not.
(3) NOTHINGNESS = CHOOSE YOUR OWN FLOATING SIGNIFIERS.
When’s the last time audience hands caught the artist bird?
(4) SOME PEOPLE INVOKE LANGUAGE AS A RITUAL, OTHERS LIVE IT.
Basic Saussurian/Wittgenstenian stuff, here. Invocation has less heart than we would like: “This is a class about Existentialism. When we talk about the word ‘Existentialism,’ what do we mean?” This kind of vocation has a kind of heart. Or — maybe not exactly that, but this is closer: invocation is a problem because it lacks generous complicity; it’s the “At the sound of the beep, the time will be twelve-o’clock” approach to the brain.
Instead, it is about keeping the entropy-bound, masked (and remasked) men and women close to the blood flow and circulation.
People carry with them thousands of fa-la-la song fragments, stories, and if they’ve been to one city again and again, memories layering and overlapping the other to such an extent the man or woman remembering can see themselves running around every corner; formulas parting and breaking into parcels tree branches framing tree branches in a recession that reminds me of standing between two mirrors — learn these. All these things — not what people have, or keep, but what they keep to move, or what moves them. This is what we mean. Take the time to learn your language games.
(5) ATTENTION MUST NOT ONLY BE PAID TO “THIS” MAN, OR “SUCH A” MAN, BUT EVERY MAN.
Call and response. What’s going on in North Kivu? Zanzibar? Lebanon? Burkina Faso? Lesotho? Iran? Who’s adopted the Grameen Bank model, and where? How can we optimize the GDP across class strata? Question and answer.
Don’t let the crooks come back. Don’t let the mapless fall into a pit. Open Dedalus’ nightmare-entrapped eyes. Memorize two or three stories off the list of under-reported stories for the year. Don’t let anyone tell you how you should balance your reality and your imagination, as both were and already are obvious.
Come up with a Columbus-like rhyme for Leif Erikson. Write down all the fancy names in Missouri (Climax Springs, Pumpkin Center, Murdered by an Axe, Village of Four.) Don’t swim to Long Island. Line up at the Liar’s Bench in Nashville, Indiana to wait your turn. Continue to disparage Baltimore’s oysters, just for tradition’s sake. Watch Montana’s mines end up in Detroit’s catalytic converters. Run the rat-maze to avoid seven simultaneous lightning storms three-cup montying above your head in the deserts of Arizona. Ready your beards, Whitmen-in-waiting. Sing of the salty breeze that blows through the Commonwealth. Check under the seat cushions twice more than usual of the airplanes belonging to the local airman who raises the occasional mountain lion. Ask the Pigeon Man of Lincoln Square what sort of stories he tells his friends as they formed a fluttering coat around his body. Some will sit quietly on a park bench because of the day, light, and breeze, and the floating, skyline searchlight affect it has on the mind. The mobocratic spirit! All this is to say: We are here. We must be here. We can be nowhere else.
In short: there are national narratives. Lay claim.
*
George adjusted his belt. Frankie, Markos, George and I were winding down the evening in my room.
“When we get back,” George said, “we’re going to start bringing kids to work.”
I was the first to balk. “What?”
“Kids?” Markos asked.
“Our own?” Frankie said.
“If we don’t have any …,” Markos said, “Do we have to make some?”
George shot Markos a look, then turned his gaze back to the rest.
“Neighborhood kids. To teach.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“No. We need to start thinking about the next generation of writers. I’ve compiled a list of possible classes, and I just want to pass that around now.”
“Great,” I said. “It’ll be like herding boiling water.”
*
Today some twin bores — twins only in the fact that no one could stand them — Simurgh and Markos — took us down to the Met. I’m ten with a copy of Kafka in hand and all the college-age waitresses keep flirting with me because it’s something they’re reading themselves strikes them as just the right sort of incongruity but I like the turns of phrase he sets spinning on the page so I keep it (going and going) and am amused.
When we got back they lead me around the office and some of them look like telemarketers (though not Telemachus markers or Telemachus Makers, nor Markers to Make us or U.S., and on and on), all with headphones, shoes that’d been keyed down the sole, and parts of the desks stacked with VHS tapes to a wobbling height, tapes they kept calling Antecedent Tapes — I pass kids, too, kids my age, and listen in to what they have to say: “My parents say I’m going to grow up to become the Pope.” ”I play marbles with a hand full of live bees.” ”Where’s the future? I have something I want to tell it.”
