The one. The only....

new yorked

Well, actually, I unsubscribed from the New Yorker when not only could I not access the digital archives, despite subscribing to it on my Kindle, I also couldn't get one answer to about ten (plaintive, not rude!) emails directed to various customer service departments asking how to get access (I did get one canned response: "You need to subscribe!" Uh, thanks). At least I won't have to sit through any more John McPhee articles (I had to read Oranges in grad school, and detested it).

Everything is Everything

Dead Souls

"You should have seen the catch we had! What a great big sturgeon got into the net! What big crucian carp, what enormous mirror carp!"

"It's annoying just listening to you. Why are you always so cheerful?"

"And why should I be depressed, for heaven's sake!" said his host.

"Why be depressed? Because things are depressing."

"You don't eat enough, that's all. Why don't you try to have a good dinner. Depression's only been invented recently: nobody used to be depressed before."

"Oh stop boasting. Are you saying you've never been depressed?"

"Never! I don't know what it is and I don't have the time for it. You wake up in the morning and the chef is already there and you have to order dinner. Then there's tea, then the farm manager, then you go fishing, and then it's dinnertime. You hardly have time for a snooze after dinner and the chef is back, you have to order supper. How do you find the time for depression?"

...."Believe me....that sometimes I'd like to have something to worry about just for a change, but I don't even have anyone who annoys me. I'm depressed, that's all."

- Gogol, Dead Souls (tr. Donald Rayfield)

top albums

Top albums for week ending 7-6.

Dar Williams - You Will Ride With Me Tonight

'What price Chillingborough now?'

- Wanted to check I had the Paul Scott quote below right and Googled it - I don't quite know where my huge copy of the Raj Quartet is, the thick thin-paged closely-printed anthology I dragged with me in my suitcase from New Mexico to Washington State in 1999 - and got sucked RIGHT back in to Guy Perron's narration, nearly all of it on Google Books, Rowan describing his interrogation of Hari Kumar/Harry Coomer....feeling again the kind of inner shudder you do with greatness. All you can do is marvel.

'however disagreeable'

No: I intend no introspection. I mark Henry James's sentence: Observe perpetually. Observe the oncome of age. Observe greed. Observe my own despondency. By that means it becomes serviceable. Or so I hope. I insist upon spending this time to the best advantage. I will go down with my colours flying. This I see verges on introspection; but doesn't quite fall in.

- Virginia Woolf, last full entry in her diary, Saturday 8 March 1941

Footnote: "Cf. 'Henry James' in Desmond MacCarthy's Portraits (1931), p. 155: 'He had been describing to me the spiral of depression which a recent nervous illness had compelled him....to descend...."But it has been good....for my genius." Then he added, "Never cease to watch whatever happens to you."'"

(cf. also Paul Scott, in the Raj Quartet: "And no experience, however disagreeable, is ever wasted.")

"Phenomenal" indeed. The song was inspired by "one of the most haunted places in America," Laura Gibson said in an interview, the Hot Lake Hotel (once the "Mayo Clinic of the West"), where the official video was shot. (West Coast ghost stories are the best ghost stories.)

"beauty will save the world"

The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.

- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

"motherfucker"

The New Yorker appears to have finally crawled up its own asshole and died, arising thereby to a kind of shitless heaven, by having its lead feature be....an endless feature on writing for the New Yorker by New Yorker feature writer John McPhee, the gist of which seems to be, he's John McPhee and we're not. (You might well ask why I still subscribe to the thing, then: I do so digitally in order to have access to the online archives, in which there are stories and articles which are actually good. Or, at least, not all by John McPhee, which amounts to the same thing.)

(He also quotes Woolf entirely out of context and makes her sound stupid. Bah.)

"everyone dances"

Holy shit, it's back!

....also yikes, Blogger has really changed its post interface since I've been here.

hiatus

This blog is on hiatus til I figure out what I want to do with it. (Sentimentally, I don't want to leave Blogspot, since I had my first blog here back in 00!....altho apparently it's lower than Wordpress.)

for years I thought this was just a rumour

'The Cramps, punks, Californian mental patients. The concert of a nembutol delirium. The lines blur, everyone dances.'

'For there is nothing lost, that may be found, if sought.'

Alan Rickman reading Spenser? SWOON.

What though the sea with waues continuall
Doe eate the earth, it is no more at all:
Ne is the earth the lesse, or loseth ought,
For whatsoeuer from one place doth fall,
Is with the tide vnto an other brought:
For there is nothing lost, that may be found, if sought.

-- The Faerie Queene

Now I also have: mp3s of Alan Rickman acting in radio plays of The Seagull and A Trick To Catch the Old One, AND about FIFTEEN HOURS of him reading Return of the Native. SCORE.

(As I said later to a friend of mine: "The big plus is it's fifteen hours of Alan Rickman reading....and the big minus is, it's fifteen hours of Alan Rickman reading Thomas Hardy.")

Joyce, eat your little Irish heart out

It was bright and sunny. A fine rain had been falling all the morning, and now it had not long cleared up. The iron roofs, the flags of the roads, the flints of the pavements, the wheels and leather, the brass and the tinplate of the carriages--all glistened brightly in the May sunshine. It was three o'clock, and the very liveliest time in the streets.

As she sat in a corner of the comfortable carriage, that hardly swayed on its supple springs, while the grays trotted swiftly, in the midst of the unceasing rattle of wheels and the changing impressions in the pure air, Anna ran over the events of the last days, and she saw her position quite differently from how it had seemed at home. Now the thought of death seemed no longer so terrible and so clear to her, and death itself no longer seemed so inevitable. Now she blamed herself for the humiliation to which she had lowered herself. "I entreat him to forgive me. I have given in to him. I have owned myself in fault. What for? Can't I live without him?" And leaving unanswered the question how she was going to live without him, she fell to reading the signs on the shops. "Office and warehouse. Dental surgeon.
Yes, I'll tell Dolly all about it. She doesn't like Vronsky. I shall be sick and ashamed, but I'll tell her. She loves me, and I'll follow her advice. I won't give in to him; I won't let him train me as he pleases. Filippov, bun shop. They say they send their dough to Petersburg. The Moscow water is so good for it. Ah, the springs at Mitishtchen, and the pancakes!"

And she remembered how, long, long ago, when she was a girl of seventeen, she had gone with her aunt to Troitsa. "Riding, too. Was that really me, with red hands? How much that seemed to me then splendid and out of reach has become worthless, while what I had then has gone out of my reach forever! Could I ever have believed then that I could come to such humiliation? How conceited and self-satisfied he will be when he gets my note! But I will show him.... How horrid that paint smells! Why is it they're always painting and building? _Modes et robes,_" she read. A man bowed to her. It was Annushka's husband. "Our parasites"; she remembered how Vronsky had said that. "Our? Why our? What's so awful is that one can't tear up the past by its roots. One can't tear it out, but one can hide one's memory of it. And I'll hide it." And then she thought of her past with Alexey Alexandrovitch, of how she had blotted the memory of it out of her life. "Dolly will think I'm leaving my second husband, and so I certainly must be in the wrong. As if I cared to be right! I can't help it!" she said, and she wanted to cry. But at once she fell to wondering what those two girls could be smiling about. "Love, most likely. They don't know how dreary it is, how low.... The boulevard and the children. Three boys running, playing at horses. Seryozha! And I'm losing everything and not getting him back. Yes, I'm losing everything, if he doesn't return. Perhaps he was late for the train and has come back by now. Longing for humiliation again!" she said to herself. "No, I'll go to Dolly, and say straight out to her, I'm unhappy, I deserve this, I'm to blame, but still I'm unhappy, help me. These horses, this carriage--how loathsome I am to myself in this carriage--all his; but I won't see them again."

Thinking over the words in which she would tell Dolly, and mentally working her heart up to great bitterness, Anna went upstairs.

-- tr Garnett

'Gatz'

I would seriously. seriously. seriously. kill to see this. It's my favourite book ever (well, along with Out of Africa and Great Expectations and Jane Eyre and Augustine's Confessions and 1984 and Tender is the Night and Villette and Voyage in the Dark, but you get the idea).

A Novel ‘Gatsby’: Stamina Required

By BEN BRANTLEY

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — What happens between a novel and a consenting reader is usually a deeply personal activity, occurring behind the closed doors of individual minds. It is arguably more intimate and subjective than sex. And if someone asked you, “Want to watch me read a book for the next six or seven hours?” you would probably — and wisely — decline.

Yet this is the invitation being extended by Elevator Repair Service’s “Gatz,” at the American Repertory Theater here through Sunday. And to turn down the offer would be to miss one of the most exciting and improbable accomplishments in theater in recent years.

“Gatz” is a word-for-word presentation of the entire text of “The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel and a work that has never been successfully translated to the screen. Occupying roughly six hours of performance time (not counting two intermissions and a dinner break), “Gatz” has no period sets or costumes, and no full-fleshed interpretations of any of the book’s characters. You could even say that although the show has a terrific 13-member ensemble, there is only one real character in “Gatz.” That’s you, dear reader.

Set in a shabby business office of indeterminate professional purpose, this remarkable play follows the seduction of one man (Scott Shepherd) by one novel. And it’s as thorough an evocation as any work of art I’ve encountered of how a book can so take over your life that you start to see everything through its sensibility.

“Gatz” was one of three productions I caught here last weekend (all presented by the American Repertory Theater) that are trying to redefine the relationship between plays and audiences, erasing distance and blurring genres....“Gatz” is the least literally interactive. Directed by John Collins and first produced in Brussels in 2006 (with a New York run expected this fall), it does not seek to destroy physically the wall between audience and actors....Yet for me “Gatz” was the most transporting, traveling to an ineffable place that theater is not expected to inhabit: the corridor between written words and a reader’s perception of them.

The road to Fitzgerald’s poetically imagined fictional universe begins in the land of the flatly prosaic. Louisa Thompson’s ingeniously dismal, realistic set creates an urban work space where nothing looks clean and everything — including the office’s one computer — appears to be secondhand. It is here that one of the employees (Mr. Shepherd) discovers a battered paperback copy of “The Great Gatsby.”

He begins to read it aloud to himself, with no particular flair or ardor. Other people drift in and out, delivering mail and picking up the phone (though you can never make out what they say) or just goofing off, as Mr. Shepherd continues to read. And little by little, his fellow office workers become the characters described by Nick Carraway, the novel’s narrator. That includes Nick’s mysterious, party-giving Long Island neighbor, Jay Gatsby, and Daisy Buchanan, the girl with the voice of money.

A couple of years ago I had seen and much admired Elevator Repair Service’s “Sound and the Fury (April Seventh, 1928),” which brought the complete text of a chapter of that Faulkner novel to theatrical life. That was a piece for connoisseurs of experimental theater and experimental fictional narrative.

“Gatz” is much more accessible (as is Fitzgerald’s novel, compared with Faulkner’s). But it is also richer and more subtle in its ultimate achievement. Throughout the show, the relationship between what is read and its context keeps shifting, with the real world finally giving way entirely to the fictive one. This is achieved partly through the sound design of Ben Williams, wherein traffic noises melt into the sounds of chirping crickets or jazz orchestras, and Mark Barton’s superb transformative lighting.

But the most astonishing metamorphosis is that undergone by the cast, whose interpretations of Fitzgerald’s creations go from quotation-mark-framed stiffness or jokiness into a style that is compellingly sincere without ever being purely naturalistic. Mr. Shepherd, in a performance of symphonic calibration, progresses from detached curiosity to intense engagement to an emotional fluency that allows him to discard the book altogether and recite from memory.

By the end, he has become Nick Carraway. So have you. And as can happen when you’re caught up in a book, you’re surprised to discover that so many hours have passed, and that you’re still inside your own body, a bit stiffened from sitting for so long.

-- New York Times

Nitpick (yes I am that kind of person): Daisy doesn't have 'the voice of money.' Her voice is FULL of money. It might seem an overly picky distinction, but not to Fitzgerald:

"She's got an indiscreet voice," I remarked.
"It's full of -- " I hesitated.
"Her voice is full of money," he said suddenly.
That was it. I'd never understood before. It was full of money -- that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it....high in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl....


"Did you ever see an amusement park?"
"No, Father."
"Well, go and see an amusement park." The priest waved his hand vaguely. "It's a thing like a fair, only much more glittering. Go to one at night and stand a little way off from it in a dark place--under dark trees. You'll see a big wheel made of lights turning in the air, and a long slide shooting boats down into the water. A band playing somewhere, and a smell of peanuts--and everything will twinkle. But it won't remind you of anything, you see. It will all just hang out there in the night like a colored balloon--like a big yellow lantern on a pole."
Father Schwartz frowned as he suddenly thought of something.
"But don't get up close," he warned Rudolph, "because if you do you'll only feel the heat and the sweat and the life."

-- "Absolution" (supposedly a discarded prologue to an early version of The Great Gatsby)

Celestial Eyes -- from Metamorphosis to Masterpiece, by Charles Scribner III

Anthony Lane on "The Red Shoes"

Photograph from Red Shoes verdoux post.

By popular demand, “The Red Shoes” is returning for another run at Film Forum, beginning February 19th. New York has always been kind to the movie, which, to the dismay of its creators, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, faltered and flopped when it opened on British screens in 1948. Salvation arrived in the form of the Bijou Theatre, at Broadway and Forty-fifth Street, where the film showed for more than two years. Ballet-crazy children—or “half the little girls in America,” as Powell put it—were an important sector of that audience, and I trust that some of them, now in their limber seventies, will head downtown to reforge an old acquaintance.

What will they find? A blindingly rich and refulgent print, digitally restored by the Film Foundation and the U.C.L.A. Film and Television Archive. I’ve seen the same version on DVD, but watching “The Red Shoes,” whatever the quality, on the small screen is like drinking champagne, whatever the vintage, through a plastic straw. The movie should fill one’s vision no less comprehensively than a sunset, and Powell, like Turner before him—another hearty, romantic Englishman, whose eye gloried unashamedly in a given world—knew that reds, even at their most flaming, are never the whole story of a sunset. Consider Boris Lermontov (the incomparable Anton Walbrook), the impresario of a ballet company, who strolls into breakfast in a full-length gown of verdigris and gold. No Chinese emperor was more resplendently arrayed. As for the cigarette that he holds out, half smoked, to be taken and deposited by his valet, a whole civilization—urbane, authoritative, preposterous, and doomed—resides in that single gesture.

The film is a legend built on a legend. Lermontov, having acquired a new prima ballerina, Vicky Paige (Moira Shearer), plus a new composer, Craster (Marius Goring), mounts a production of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Red Shoes,” in which a woman is danced to death by her own footwear. We see that work in its entirety, and the abandon with which it is sprung from the prison of the auditorium, into an unfeasible freedom of space, glances back to the opening scenes of Olivier’s “Henry V” (1944) and forward to “An American in Paris” (1951). Yet this is not, in the end, a film about ballet; it is a hymn to the risks of investing all that you are, and have, in the fugue and fury of the imaginative act. Look at Vicky as she dances solo, to a crummy gramophone, in a tiny London theatre on a rainy afternoon. She is not yet a star, but Lermontov has come to observe her; we see first his face, watching fiercely, and then hers, staring back—a milk-white death mask, filling the frame, with red and black dashes swooping from the corners of her eyes, and lips gleaming like the poisoned apple in “Snow White.” It is the most striking closeup in the history of cinema: not for Powell the yearning of Garbo, or the perplexity that Bergman found in Liv Ullmann, but a sudden, bright ecstasy that verges on the demonic, and more than enough, you might think, to scare those girls of 1948 out of their tutus. “The Red Shoes” is both suitable for children and beyond their ken: it treats art not as sedative or diversionary but as hard and supercharged, quite lethal to the danceless rhythms that most of our lives obey. No wonder Britain, still rationed in color, food, and feeling in the wake of an exhausting war, could not cope with what the movie proposed. Catch it here now, and you will not just be seeing an old film made new; you will have your vision restored.

-- Anthony Lane, New Yorker

Red Shoes Criterion Collection page - Red Shoes Powell and Pressburger page

We had all been told for ten years to go out and die for freedom and democracy, for this and for that, and now the war was over, The Red Shoes told us to go and die for Art.

Photograph from Cornel Lucas Collection.

Sophie Marceau as Anna Karenina (1997)

Greta Garbo as Anna Karenina

'Alla Tarasova as Anna Karenina in 1937'

'Tatiana Samoilova as Anna in the 1967 Soviet screen version of Tolstoy's novel'

and so, IT BEGINS

Anna Karenina GoodReads schedule

Our reading/discussion schedule will be:

Day to begin discussion
1/06/2010 Part One 1-34 134pp. 1/25/2010
1/13/2010 Part Two 1-35 141 pp. 1/26/2010
1/20/2010 Part Three 1-32 136 pp. 1/28/2010
1/27/2010 Part Four 1-23 94 pp. 1/29/2010
--------------------------
2/03/2010 Part Five 1-33 130 pp. 2/06/2010
2/10/2010 Part Six 1-32 134 pp. 2/07/2010
2/17/2010 Part Seven 1-31 112 pp. 2/08/2010
2/24/2010 Part Eight 1-19 55 pp. 2/08/2010

(argh so far behind already....)

spotted in the wild

While we were buying a new toilet plunger at the big QFC down on Broadway (the things you tell the internet) I scoped out the book table, because I scope out book displays everywhere I go -- QFC, airport, drugstore, it doesn't matter. Walked out with a copy of Elizabeth Gilbert's Committed (I KNOW, MISTAKE, I KNOW) but more to the point, saw a stack of Middlemarch in among the "books" by Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck and Leslie Rule and crap like The Time Traveller's Wife and Revolutionary Road. I was so tickled I got T to take a picture for me.

'Enigmas'

"Enigmas," Pablo Neruda

You've asked me what the lobster is weaving there with his golden feet?
I reply, the ocean knows this.
You say, what is the ascidia waiting for in its transparent bell? What is it waiting for?
I tell you it is waiting for time, like you.
You ask me whom the Macrocystis alga hugs in its arms?
Study, study it, at a certain hour, in a certain sea I know.
You question me about the wicked tusk of the narwhal,
and I reply by describing
how the sea unicorn with the harpoon in it dies.
You enquire about the kingfisher's feathers,
which tremble in the pure springs of the southern tides?
Or you've found in the cards a new question touching on the crystal architecture
of the sea anemone, and you'll deal that to me now?
You want to understand the electric nature of the ocean spines?
The armored stalactite that breaks as it walks?
The hook of the angler fish, the music stretched out
in the deep places like a thread in the water?

I want to tell you the ocean knows this, that life in its jewel boxes
is endless as the sand, impossible to count, pure,
and among the blood-colored grapes time has made the petal
hard and shiny, made the jellyfish full of light
and untied its knot, letting its musical threads fall
from a horn of plenty made of infinite mother-of-pearl.

I am nothing but the empty net which has gone on ahead
of human eyes, dead in those darknesses,
of fingers accustomed to the triangle, longitudes
on the timid globe of an orange.

I walked around as you do, investigating the endless star,
and in my net, during the night, I woke up naked,
the only thing caught, a fish trapped inside the wind.

-- tr. Robert Bly

are cats womany?

Wow, apparently Lutz Widmaier, of the New York Times, read this bit of immortal dreck:

The photo on the cover of “The Talented Miss Highsmith” depicts the young, sultry author of “Strangers on a Train” holding one of her pet cats. There’s no question which is the more spookily feline-looking creature.



AHAHAHA.

(It's based on a photograph by F. J. Goodman. She doesn't look that feline and unapproachable to me, more hesitant and....almost scared? But all women are feline, at least in cliched writing.)




(The illustration accompanies Jeanette Winterson's review of the new batshit 'biography' of Highsmith, which sounds just about as bad as the author's previous batshit 'biography' of Dolly Wilde.)

-- Also, while googling for that picture, I found A TOPLESS PHTOOGRAPH OF PATRICIA HIGHSMITH ON THE INTERNET. WHAT. I do not WANT to see my favourite authors topless!....altho she looked pretty good. (NO, you perverts, I'm NOT linking. Google for yourself if you want to see Tom Ripley's alter ego in the altogether.) Have one of her at her typewriter instead:



Her notebooks (this is a page from Strangers on a Train I think).

A.S. Byatt, The Shadow of The Sun (1964)

I just love this book so, so much. How much? and Why? Listen and I will tell you:

Then he went through into the kitchen, where Caroline was rolling out pastry on a cool, rose-veined marble slab.

She was singing to herself, withdrawn. When alone she had a private life in which she sang Mozart at Glyndebourne; each morning, over the cooking or the dishes, she would re-enact her triumph, from the arrival of the elegant audience, to whose dresses she added a new rose, a new shawl, every day, to the final aria and rapt silence which followed it. She was not too pleased to be called back from her stage, and would not be interrupted in mid phrase. She motioned to Henry to be silent, and sang calmly and tunefully to the end of her passage, whilst he paced the kitchen from door to door, and then she made him a little inclination of the head, as though he should applaud, and said, 'Well, what is it?'

I mean, how can you not love that? Utterly? If you don't, I don't want to know you.


Also, I adore A.S. Byatt because she fucking hates Harry Potter, just like I do. Yes, yes I do.

The Complete Review - A.S. Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination - A.S. Byatt at biblio.com

'God bless the man who yields to temptation'

Music is my boyfriend, music is what keeps me going, and I miss writing about it, so lucky intratubez, here you go.

God bless the man who stumbles
God bless the man who falls
God bless the man who yields to temptation

God bless the woman who suffers
God bless the woman who weeps
God bless the children trying her patience

Trouble getting over it
Is what you're in for, so pour yourself another
'Cause it'll take a steady pair of hands

I've had this song on repeat ever since first hearing it, in one of those so-lame-it-must-be-true coincidences, hanging out in that modern secular West Door of the therapist's waiting room (KEXP was piped in and my therp was late). I had no idea who was singing it (yes, I really am that out of any and all cultural loops) and just scribbled down snatched approximations of the lyrics, enchanted, in my day planner so I could Google them later at home.

God bless the house divided
God bless the weeds in the wheat
God bless the lamp lit under a bushel

I discovered hell to be the poison in the well
So I tried to warn the others of the curse
But then my body turned on me
I dreamt that for eternity
My family would burn
Then I awoke, with a wicked thirst

By my baby's yellow bed
I kissed her forehead and rubbed her little tummy
Wondering if she'd soon despise the smell
Of the booze on my breath like her mom

The line that of course snagged my attention, as a recovering alcoholic (seven years sober now, since 1 April 2002), was God bless the man who yields to temptation.... I plugged that in and it brought up not just the lyrics and who wrote them (like everyone else who did time in the nineties I have three or four Pedro the Lion CDs, mea culpa) but also a Stereogum interview snippet:

"Bless This Mess" covers a lot of territory -- dysfunctional families, alcoholism, mirrors, forgiveness, history. What inspired it?

The song is largely autobiographical. So any narrative in the song reflects actual events. Though I may have embellished a bit. But the main lyrical gimmick is sort of a self-conscious and hopeful interpretation of the Beatitudes, which I have an uneasy relationship with as the narrative tends to illustrate.

God's blessing a number of things in the song, good and bad. It ends with "God bless the history that doesn't repeat." It's intended to be hopeful?

It's only in hindsight I'm able to evaluate why I wrote a lyric or what it might mean. At the time I'm usually just scrambling to write words that I like and that feel good to sing. But now that I have some distance ... in my mind historically, when God's blessing is invoked by someone saying "God bless this" or "God bless that" it's an expression of humility and need combined with some amount of optimism about the outcome of their situation. But the way that I've seen it used more recently ("God Bless America") tends to express pride and a sense of superiority with the always underlying themes of manifest destiny. And I think that's bullshit. So yes, I do feel like it's hopeful.

When I first sobered up, I clung to some popularized-Zen paperbacks because it felt like they were all that was between me and a very very dark road going off three miles left of nowhere. A therapist had recommended Thich Nhat Hanh's The Miracle of Mindfulness to me earlier, but I'd been too drunk and lost to read it. I don't remember if I read about this exercise in that book or another one, but it's something I remember and try to carry out to this day: bless everything you see. The idea is you look around and bless every single object in your visual field. Right now, I can: bless my desk, bless my computer keyboard on which I'm typing these words, bless the books on the desk which I can read and distract myself with because it's 1:43 in the morning and why am I still the hell up, bless the floor and the walls around me which create shelter for my books and computer and me, and so on. Doing this can humble and focus you in a startling way.

In early sobriety, I thought this was one of the most dumbshit things I had ever had the misfortune to hear about, but I was desperate, so I gave it a try. I was walking to an AA meeting (in which I told this story about fifteen minutes later) across the UW campus. Bless the pretty stone buildings, bless the sunshine, bless the blue sky, bless the flowers....okay, this was going well. I felt a renewed appreciation for everything around me and my clarity of vision, my sobriety, that was letting me see it. Then I turned a corner and saw a table full of Young Republicans snagging innocent coeds passing by and handing out various slickly printed folders, attempting to infect others with the contagion of ignorance and fear. Fucking fuck. But, in all my admittedly limited and hasty reading about Buddhism up til then, there was nothing that said 'Bless everyone and everything, except the people you really disagree with.' So I gritted my teeth. Bless the Young Republicans.... I can't say it was terribly sincere, but at least I said it.

Through a darkened mirror
I have seen my own reflection
And it makes me want to be a better man
After another drink

God bless the man at the crossroads
God bless the woman who still can't sleep
God bless the history that doesn't repeat

That kind of wry wisdom is what leapt out of the slyly funky, almost bouncy, sound of the song at me: bless even what looks blasted, because it's all we have. During the session, my therapist actually held up a sign she'd made out of a page from her clipboard, writing on it sidewise in large capital letters: IT CAN NEVER BE FIXED. / IT CAN GET BETTER. Those two thoughts aren't actually diametrically opposed; they just look like it. Or no, maybe they are diametrically opposed; the only way it can ever get better is to admit that it can't ever be fixed.

I can't ever go back to not being an alcoholic. That damage can't be undone. I can't even say that I'll be sober the rest of my life (that is purely just asking for trouble). I can say that I'm sober right now, that I'll be sober until I go to bed and that's my job every day. All I have to do is stay sober every day, all through the day, until I go to bed. That is better; that's the definition of getting better right there. That is my way of blessing everything I see.

We are all weeds in the wheat. We are all that tableful of Young Republicans. We are all dark reflections, seen darkly. We can't ever be fixed. But we can get better.