A young kid laid a copy of Kitchen Confidential on the bookshop counter. He had an Adam’s apple the size of a rodent moving in his neck. It was sharp like a blade. I looked away from it and took in the book. “There’s a new movie…” I said, flicking my eyes up to his face. He said “yeah, we just came from there,” and I noticed a shy pretty girl standing behind his back. I held the book in both hands and I felt old. The kids are just learning who - or what - Anthony Bourdain was. There’s a mental shunting that happens when you realize what-you-take-for-granted isn’t how-everybody-knows-the-world. It feels like the sound a jackhammer makes. It is the physical destruction of a thought. It’s loud and metallic.

I myself came to Bourdain late in some ways, and wary in others. I didn’t own a television so I never watched any of his shows. I read him and cursed his gorgeous sentences. There was always a little recoil: who did this guy think he was, claiming intimacy with the kinds of people I knew, but really dismissing the actual people? Did he or his readers believe that sarcasm is a kind of intelligence? I know how dangerous and ultimately sad extremities can be, and was always a little pissed that he romanticized them. I was bemused that people as a whole so adored the man; I knew a dozen bipolar, charismatic as fuck, pavement chomping and windingly selfish men. While I felt their sexy, I also knew them to be pricks. While he was making t.v. and food and cultural history, I was eating oysters at an afterparty in Soho. Then I threw them up in the gutter. While he and Obama sat on plastic stools in Vietnam, hunched over and relishing a bowl of something, I was eating guinea pig in the Ecuadorean Andes. It might be pure hot resentful jealousy: he made it as a dude who tasted the world and wrote everything down. I didn’t.

The pang of jealousy is that he was so good. He was good and he was right: Chicken McNuggets are the most disgusting food on the planet. Life is rock and roll. It’s delicious and strange. I’m glad the kids might learn their world of influencers, travel, and food comes from a reality that existed long before they were born. When Bourdain died, I was just barely sober in the midwest. I didn’t mourn him much at all. I was busy grieving the gorgeous, scorched suicides and overdoses I knew personally. I was scalded by the fact that I myself was still alive. Which makes the jealousy thing complicated: who really had it better, Bourdain or me?

I was curious to see how much of the pang, if any, would come through in the bio-pic. I knew that the reason for the film - and a newly released book last holiday season, quickly followed by a new edition of Kitchen Confidential with Bourdain’s own notes included - is financial before it is culturally relevant. Bourdain had a kid. She’s an adult now, and his estate won’t be enough for her to live on unless they poke his ghost into solvency. A second movie is already in the works. Appreciation borders so closely on exploitation we tend to get muddled.

All this to preface, and admit my prejudice, going in to see the movie itself.

The movie was alright. It wasn’t amazing. It wasn’t bad. Dominic Sessa did an incredible job: his broody slouch and his rhythms of speech were perfect. The soundtrack’s nod to and adaptation of pop punk was just delicious: the sound of my own heart. It feels right to have Antonio Banderas play the exquisitely cultured, principled, humane introduction to all that life can be: life is salt drawn from the ocean, ketchup made from scratch, tuna caught that one night from a pitching boat. Banderas is the perfect foil to the intoxicating, sex king, cruel other path played by Leo Woodall. The actual navigating of those choices, this who am I going to be in my life, was a little reductive.

The facetiousness of young adulthood and young artistry were good: he’s an arrogant prick about his own vocabulary. He knew what a bildungsroman was, but he thought it was pronounced buildings roman. It’s almost sweet. The word for coming of age story becomes the film’s story.

His fixation on the word ‘providence’ was compelling, beginning with the character’s skewed interpretation as being ‘when god finally starts paying attention to you’. The questionable meaning of providence - luck, talent, deservingness, destiny, doom - is ambient. The pitch point of the entire film for me wasn’t when he burned the restaurant down or first got high or applied to culinary school, but the first time that word comes up in a college bar. His friend, who only has this one half glimpsed appearance in the entire film, placed and discarded as somebody who can hear Tony’s self-righteous definition, says ‘that sounds scary’. To have god pay particular attention to you is scary, turns out. We know that to be true: we’re watching the film and we know that Bourdain ends up hanging himself. Later in the movie, the love interest Nancy says she’s come to understand what the word means; she says it’s ‘the protective attentions of god’. Between those lurching interpretations of the human condition and success we get an honesty. An open question about what happened to a man named Anthony Bourdain.

The young Tony simply couldn’t stop himself. He bald faced lied and followed his first lie with bolder lies and he went on, always more personally grandiose and it being somebody else’s fault. He was selfish every goddamned step along the way, while saying it was about the girl or about the food or about the writing. This is utterly realistic. It’s real of Bourdain, but not only Bourdain: that’s how addicts are, often before they get addicted to whatever substance or adrenyln rush happens to be their poison. The substance itself is irrelevant. While the facts of young Bourdain’s life rather loose and creatively rendered in the film, that truth stings.

When faced with any kind of consequence, the character can only feel sorry for himself. His real anger at the world isn’t its true unfairness, it’s that nobody noticed him. When he burns down the restaurant, which is the livelihood, life savings, and final dream of the very man who picked him up off the street, he doesn’t feel remorse. He feels cheated. He thinks “fuck you, then,” doubles down, and decides to rob the guy too. The young prick grabs not one but two women by the arm in a way that, if you’ve been there, you know all about.

I liked all that. I appreciated the delicacy with which the writers, and probably the surviving family, publicly reckon with the man’s bullshit. I was sensitivity pricked, I admit it, when this young kid hears the story of a chef who killed himself. “Why?” The kid asks. He is baffled. “The fish he ordered didn’t arrive on time.” And that’s it. The character is, as we all ultimately are, baffled by the cogent illogic of suicide and utterly blind to his own fate.

I wonder if people will catch that at all. I wonder about the kid who’s about to read those sentences for the first time in his life, something more than the hackneyed quotes denuded and slapped onto internet memes and jousts of bastardly opinion. The kid will be enamored, and inspired, and feel a wild desire to hunt down the pretty grit of humanity and the incredible tastes of the world. I don’t really mind because we should all be lusty about life. We should be offended when we’re given slop. We should recoil at fast food nightmares and stupidity for leadership and fear of our neighbors as either normal or sane. It’s shit stupid insane.

We should all get a good feel for our own hunger and wrestle with destiny a bit.

I am tired and I am busy and a good part of me wished to wait and write something more perfect at some other time. But that betrays the point. An imperfect missive will convey, on a wing, a more vital reality.

But I am obnoxiously tired. I do the little, daily things. There is a yoga pose called Savasana that is often the final posture of a practice, where you just lie on the floor for minutes at a time. It’s a false thing to say savasana always ends a practice, or that it must happen at the end. But it’s pretty common, for lots of reasons. This morning I reached that pose like a dying thing washed up to shore. Wrecked. And stunned and sore. The window was open to the inky dawn. I heard the rattling of a shopping cart down an alleyway, and the crickets screaming away in every direction. You must make the cake, I kept thinking, though I didn’t want to move, and knowing that when I did finally move the avalanche of ordinary, necessary things would turn cake making into a time pressed chore rather than the joy it was a year ago, when I worked from home.

It’s rather like the difference between seeing a picture of a painting on the internet, or even in a book, and standing right in front of it. It was a month or so back when we saw the German art and politics exhibit, but several of the paintings continue to haunt me. This haunting is a kind of joy. In a sense, the paintings live with me long after I’ve been with them. Or maybe I live with them.

I heard someone speaking of reading classics, of the daunted expressions that come from folks who haven’t done or don’t do it, and she was explaining that it’s not intensity or time or intellectual rigor as you’d expect; it’s a page or two while chewing your toast in the morning, or while waiting at the doctor’s office, a scene or chapter instead of streaming a show at night. “You just live with it (whatever text) for a while.”

This kind of reading - or baking - is different than reading to accomplish a book, or get through a list. Personally, it involves a lot of re-reading, mulling, finding adjacent things or books and art and thing a ma bobs that are wholly things in and of themselves, but enrich my understanding of the text I’m reading. And the various thing a ma bobs. And it enriches me. I know other folks who keep reading journals, take notes, or have a commonplace book where they write down particular passages. “The unexpected thing is,” said one commonplacer, “I find myself going back to read the notebooks, so that I’m both re-reading passages of the book but I’m also revisiting my own experience of the book. and having a second or third experience of my own experience.” She wiped the crumbs of a scone from her lips with a paper napkin, put her bag on her lap and opened its top to rummage for her phone. “It all ends up being very non-linear.”

“What are you doing?” G asked, walking through the living room and throwing the day’s things into his briefcase. I was crosslegged on the couch, my journal in my lap, writing what was obviously the same line over and over again.

“Memorizing a poem.” I said.

“Why?” he asked, wondered if I was writing my own poems, and I looked at the wall and made a scoffing noise. “I’m protecting my mind,” I said.

Then we talked about memorization tactics, he a former actor and me a, well, somebody who memorizes stuff for no obvious reason. He talked of going back and forth between reading and reciting a line, always out loud. He was intrigued by my writing a line with repetition. I kept screwing up a phrase, projecting my own ‘the’ when the poet had written ‘a’. To correct myself, I was writing it over and over again. But I also do what he mentioned: reading at pace, out loud, while looking at the page. Then closing my eyes or looking away and trying to say exactly the same thing over again. Three words. Then adding the next phrase. Tomorrow repeating and possibly adding another line.

Back on the idea of mind protection, he asked if I meant something about cognitive capacity and aging. I mentioned a co-worker who has taken up studying chess on Duolingo for that express purpose, but that while keeping our wits about us is real, and we aren’t getting any younger, it isn’t what I mean. I mean sane. My ability to like my job at all is because I protect my mind. It is an awful job. Jobs are terrible things. Life is full of terrible, inconvenient, uncomfortable and wasteful things. And so I run my body through contortions every morning, and lay on the floor listening to the morning and my own heartbeat, and I make cakes and I memorize poems.

It’s a completely silly and useless notion, this decision to memorize a few poems. While walking the dog, I decided that leaves don’t truly rustle until mid-August. The light is longer and thinner, but still obviously less than July if you’re paying attention. It angles and casts shadows. The greens have a yellow. I remembered a line of Gerard Manly Hopkins, and that I was a teenager who memorized poems but that I stopped when I grew up, and something in the rustle and the quality of how deeply I still know those poems made me feel the whole of the intervening decades like a fact, so I decided I wanted to memorize a few more. I took a week to memorize a Shakespeare sonnet. In two days I basically had it, but after a week the poem was changed: it was charged, unforgettable, utterly alive and undeniable. I then went on to a George Herbert, and then Keats, and then Shelly. I hardly know what this amounts to, but wondered what it would feel like to memorize a poem a week for a year. To keep 52 poems, 52 poets, a thousand thousand perfected phrases on the tip of my tongue while I punch in and out of my shifts, or as I read the horrible news, or while I brush my teeth.

I read a novel’s description of art, and ordinary moments, as occasionally experienced as having a kind of low voltage glow. A halo or radiance, right from the get go, such that you knew this thing would go on meaning and being a part of you for the rest of your life. You knew, by that glow, that it was and would continue to be important, even though its real meaning at the time was ungraspable. Maybe it was a painting, but sometimes it is a person’s face and you’re falling in love with them. This was in Stephen Mackley’s Ohio, which is a terrible in the good way novel about Ohio. I’m reading it because I decided, along with the poems, that I wanted to read a bunch of literature of the midwest. I’d reread Willa Cather because a local theatre was putting on My Antonia for the 250th anniversary of the country, and the current sociopolitical pang of immigration. I meant to go see the play, I wanted to, but never found the time. Instead I read the producer saying in interview that the influence a single person can play on others, for years to come, is at the heart of the story. And then I wondered about midwestern novels, which at first blush seem non-existent and on second seem nostalgic. White picket fences, white communities, pioneers blah blah blah. In fact these books are difficult, and beautiful. They deal with race and family and war and locality, rumors and small towns and the land and the factories, drug addiction and poverty and wealth and farms. Finding a place and losing it. These books are lacerating me. Stephen Mackley’s is awful. It hurts. Several reviews say there is nothing redeeming about it, but Stephen King loved it. I rather love it, too. So I’ve got this list of midwestern novels to read in my pocket of dozens of things to read. Some will be re-reading and others will be new to me. But right away, two or three novels in, what I realized was that these are incredible novels, though they aren’t well known. They might have won a prize fifteen years ago, even a notable prize like a pulitzer. But generally speaking, they are overlooked. They are neither canon nor are they commercially popular. I suddenly realized the importance, not of the Great American Novel, but of a Good one.

The relationship between art and politics, or art and something like AI, is neither good or bad. It isn’t always true and it can’t not be true. Artists will be engaging with the problems of their age whether or not any particular problem is explicit to their plot or style or intent or belief or it isn’t. Maybe those things provide the context, but they are not the content of Art. And even if they are explicit, if it is a Good bit of art the problems won’t come across as the content: what really matters will be the glow. There will be a regardlessness of the context such that the art’s power remains itself. For example, we see impressionist paintings and feel something of their power, their soothing, their subtle light and tree and face. But we generally know nothing of the actual context, which was horrible. In the 70 years following the French Revolution, France had lurched like a violent drunk from a republic to an empire to a bloody dictatorship to a restored monarchy, back to a constitutional monarchy, to a second republic, and then a second empire with rebellious, seething, republican citizens frothing in the corners. The folks we think of as impressionists - Monet with his water lilies, Cassat and Morisot with the mothers and children, Renoir with his parties and private moments, Degas with his ballerinas - had lived through barricaded streets and besieged cities. They served as soldiers and nurses. They’d all had friends die and watched their city blaze with arson, the air popping with the gunfire of mass executions. This context of the Impressionist movement is lost on most of us; it certainly enriches our understanding if we learn about it, but the power of the art itself transcends the explicit moment. Their simplicity is profound.

The cult of small things mattering isn’t what I mean. That’s frivolity. It’s stupid rank consumerism. The glow of small things is not in their smallness, but in their goodness. Their rightness.

The painting I keep thinking of from the German art and politics show was done in 1933 by Curt Querner. It is simple, too. It is harsh and it’s stark. You see the self-portrayed man almost in full standing position, and almost from the side, but his face is turned toward you with insouciance. It scowls. There is an intensity to the precision and craftsmanship, the realism of it all: the button on the pocket of his trousers is so perfect you can remember the obviousness of buttons, the bones of his hand and the coil of his ear are so accurate and human your own ears burn and hands fidget. The colors are muted, but powerful. The browns, the shades of black and red and gray, convey a felt immediacy and an unexpected tone of tenderness. We’re looking at an attic, through a half open door, at a private space. The man in the portrait holds a sprig of stinging nettle. And he’s looking right at you. I cannot forget the small, movement like grasping of that nettle.

Querner was a working class man, raised to be a locksmith and working in factories. He was a passionate member of the communist party. Needing a cheap place to live and paint, Querner lived in the proletarian district of Dresden, and he looked out his window at an employment office every single day. Every day he watched the displacements and elegiac loneliness of common workers out of work, and soldiers maimed but forgotten by their country, and children who didn’t have enough to eat. He’d gone to a meeting of local communists at a bowling alley one night, and the meeting was violently raided by police. 9 were shot in the moment, and 11 were seriously injured. After the raid, Querner went home and painted this painting. He had to do it in secret, because the police were surveilling him, and he kept it in the attic. He kept the painting in the attic for the entirety of his life. It was purchased from his widow by a museum several years after his death. The painting was probably kept in the very attic we see behind him in the painting. Somehow, Querner articulates the difficulty of navigating human and political life with a starkness, and it is the starkness that conveys both love and pain. He conveys the trouble and the anger without needing to draw it all out, nor does he resort to overt emotionalism.

Querner himself wrote: “As a painter, there are ways to get ahead, through ruthless egoism towards society - something like licking ass and doing such nice things. Or one can go through life as a simple, straightforward guy, being an opponent of this society, rejecting it, transforming it, building a painting with simple means - that is the path I have chosen. It is the more difficult.”

Of this particular painting, which he never showed and never sold, Quener believed he had achieved a work that could hang next to past masters. To a friend, he wrote ‘It has an aftertaste that not everyone likes. But that makes it a perfectly good picture. I am more attached to it than to anything else.”

Glow, aftertaste, whatever. It is a joy, but a hard one. I made the cake and I’ve muttered the poems.

Of course, it would be dangerous to scribble Post Its while driving. I pull over, generally. Mostly.

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In summer, people flock.

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I wonder why I haven’t written about Dante’s purgatory, and I’m finishing (finit!) my teaching and Patanjali’s yoga sutra-s with something called dharma megha samadhi. Dharma megha samadhi translates to a nebulous and unfixed thing nobody can agree about. Dharma megha samadhi is the End of Y…

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A recurring thing I do at the bookshop is re-organize a section. There is something corporate about this: directions come down from Home Office that are intended to keep individual stores recognizably homogenous. This is perhaps more in the way of not letting things get out of control than it is about conformity. …

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Is a roadtrip any different than a pilgrimage?

We recently flew to Tucson, Arizona to meet up with my parents. We were there to help them drive back home to Minnesota. By the time we arrived, my father was hurt and he wasn’t supposed to drive. He had been riding his e-bike. Only moments before toppling, which broke a rib and some bones in his hand a…

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Obviously, much like

Proust, a person could read Dante over and over again forever. Proust is concerned with the nature of memory; recollection has a smell, a music, a technology, a feeling. The feeling of memory is not nostalgia, I’d argue, because nos…

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The wind first seems balmy, but once it’s dark the wind snarls and grows fangs. The sky begins to drop ice from what was merely fog but in such a way you aren’t sure: is it sleeting? No. Yes. Damn it. You fall asleep and then in the morning there is snow on top of everything. All morning you feel a Scandi…

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Go back to your wisdom - Virgil to Dante, Purgatorio canto 6

Good morning.

I’m considering hell. I should capitalize to give the full thrust of harsh church: I do mean Hell.

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The incomings.
The outgoings – how would you take up now
The clench of that struggle?

Wurthering Heights, Ted Hughes

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I muttered something about how, left in our own little rooms, we’ll inevitably become insects. It’s happening to so many of us.

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We could lambast his apathy. We could marvel at his brilliant articulation of the perceived conflict between history and personal life. Genera…

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I haven’t looked at my email inbox in two weeks. I haven’t had time. Things have been too awful. Something was bound to give and I’m glad it was the email. What gives has not been my sanity, my sense of hope, nor my relationships. It hasn’t been my temper. I h…

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A second (sic) attempt: state the truth.

An ICE agent murdered someone. The murder occurred on the street, in broad day light, in a residential community. The murdered woman was young, a volunteer observ…

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