He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you

but he thinks
this is a lie, so he says in the end
you’re dead, nothing can hurt you
which seems to him
a more promising beginning, more true.

I just came across this essay by George Saunders explaining a brand of moral determinism which I’ve been considering for the longest. Give it a read, and keep in mind what he says towards the end about the chickens. It’s not about excusing people for their crimes, or stripping people of their accomplishments. It’s more, I think, about realizing that nobody asked to be born in the first place… which isn’t as negative as it sounds, I swear.

Or maybe it is, I don’t know.

Here’s some of the assigned readings from the contemporary poetry course I took in my last semester (which, by the way, just ended). They are .pdf files, and you’ll have to rotate some of them in order to read comfortably.

Rita Dove – Parsley

“we lie down screaming as rain punches through
and we come up green.”

“Poe eschews the art house in favor of American Pie 2. Bravo,
Poe intones after a fart joke, Bravisimo. Poe is pelted with
Milk Duds, dissolves into his seat, leaving in his place an
empty bucket of popcorn and a tiny origami swan.”

“But given the kind of agitation I feel
when I think of what I used to simply take as mine
I plainly lack the gift of
Dividing memories of home from the house itself”

“a solitary drop of rain contained in an icicle:
a single cancerous cell & every grain of sand, realigned
until a footprint appears.”

“How many times I have noticed
My heart a dead metaphor
Cut up and dumped in the frozen lake”

“Before the Law,” a parable by Franz Kafka

BEFORE THE LAW stands a doorkeeper. To this doorkeeper there comes a man from the country and prays for admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot grant admittance at the moment. The man thinks it over and then asks if he will be allowed in later. “It is possible,” says the doorkeeper, “but not at the moment.” Since the gate stands open, as usual, and the doorkeeper steps to one side, the man stoops to peer through the gateway into the interior. Observing that, the doorkeeper laughs and says: “If you are so drawn to it, just try to go in despite my veto. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the least of the doorkeepers. From hall to hall there is one doorkeeper after another, each more powerful than the last. The third doorkeeper is already so terrible that even I cannot bear to look at him.” These are difficulties the man from the country has not expected; the Law, he thinks, should surely be accessible at all times and to everyone, but as he now takes a closer look at the doorkeeper in his fur coat, with his big sharp nose and long, thin, black Tartar beard, he decides that it is better to wait until he gets permission to enter. The doorkeeper gives him a stool and lets him sit down at one side of the door. There he sits for days and years. He makes many attempts to be admitted, and wearies the doorkeeper by his importunity. The doorkeeper frequently has little interviews with him, asking him questions about his home and many other things, but the questions are put indifferently, as great lords put them, and always finish with the statement that he cannot be let in yet. The man, who has furnished himself with many things for his journey, sacrifices all he has, however valuable, to bribe the doorkeeper. The doorkeeper accepts everything, but always with the remark: “I am only taking it to keep you from thinking you have omitted anything.” During these many years the man fixes his attention almost continuously on the doorkeeper. He forgets the other doorkeepers, and this first one seems to him the sole obstacle preventing access to the Law. He curses his bad luck, in his early years boldly and loudly; later, as he grows old, he only grumbles to himself. He becomes childish, and since in his yearlong contemplation of the doorkeeper he has come to know even the fleas in his fur collar, he begs the fleas as well to help him and to change the doorkeeper’s mind. At length his eyesight begins to fail, and he does not know whether the world is really darker or whether his eyes are only deceiving him. Yet in his darkness he is now aware of a radiance that streams inextinguishably from the gateway of the Law. Now he has not very long to live. Before he dies, all his experiences in these long years gather themselves in his head to one point, a question he has not yet asked the doorkeeper. He waves him nearer, since he can no longer raise his stiffening body. The doorkeeper has to bend low toward him, for the difference in height between them has altered much to the man’s disadvantage. “What do you want to know now?” asks the doorkeeper; “you are insatiable.” “Everyone strives to reach the Law,” says the man, “so how does it happen that for all these many years no one but myself has ever begged for admittance?” The doorkeeper recognizes that the man has reached his end, and, to let his failing senses catch the words, roars in his ear: “No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it.”

I’ve done a very good job of reading nearly every single thing assigned to me this semester, even the stuff I knew was going to be terrible. And there was some terrible shit this semester. Thanks to internet technology, my professors have been scrambling to use electronic dissemination of materials in their curriculum so that they score perfectly on that part of their student evaluations and get their precious tenure. The by product is I get to share some gems among this semester’s syllabus, mostly excerpts from larger works. These are all PDF files.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
This is the first chapter of a very interconnected book about a “precocious” 11-year-old New York boy whose father die in the WTC on 9/11, intertwined with the story of his grandparents’ strange relationship and experiences during the allied bombing of Dresden. He’s a know-it-all, almost autistic in his idiosyncrasies and desire to know and do nearly everything. In this excerpt he invents a limousine as long as a human life, writes to Stephen Hawking about a possible apprenticeship, and refers to a vagina as a “VJ”. [read it]

In Persuasion Nation by George Saunders
A short story. Basically, the characters (human or otherwise) in television commercials occupy their own world and have their own awareness. A war breaks out between those who are abused in commercials for the sake of the products being endorsed and those who do the abusing. For instance, imagine the Trix rabbit outside of the commercials you see him in, forever compelled to fulfill an almost sexual desire for the forbidden fruitshaped wheat cereal, unable to understand where this desire comes from, let alone fight the urge to again subvert the cruel dictatorship the children hold over his precious desire. That doesn’t actually happen, but it’s a bit like that. [read it]

The Public Burning by Robert Coover
This is the strangest and best of the three I think. Something between a metaphor and a fantasy involving historical and folk figures, this chapter from the book involved Richard Nixon finding himself suddenly in front of a crowd of onlookers with his pants around his ankles, his ass red with lipstick, vigorously masturbating over the body of Ethel Rosenberg. I think the rest of the book explain the situation logically, but it works perfectly on it’s own. I really need to buy this book. [read it]

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