It's all about language

Since arriving in Vietnam in late August, I haven't really been writing much. That's all starting to change. I have a project in mind. It's sort of about my dad. It's sort of about visions, the macroscopic and microscopic, the psychedelic and the cosmic. My dad is kind of that way, an oddball quasi-mystical, geek, bicyclist, environmentalist, and a nurse. It's sort of about dads in general. It's also about language. My relationship with language is inherited from my father in a weird way. I am an English teacher and my profession before that was working with books. I am immersed in language. Language is a slippery thing that I sometimes feel ill-equipped to use. Teaching people to use my native language has been interesting lesson. So much of our language functions on the level of intuition and automation. Even in writing we rely on the automatic to propel the phrase and the paragraph forward. It is when you begin to dissect your language, to break it into components, grammatical structures, and theoretical movements, that things start to get interesting. While teaching, I rarely get the opportunity to push students into this level. Usually, we are working on the basic units of pronunciation, meaning, usage, vocabulary building, that sort of thing. So I'm sitting here and I wonder, fuck, how do I teach someone how to use this thing that I use intuitively? As a native speaker, a writer, and a reader, there is all of this stuff that I can draw from in order to express myself. How do I teach someone that? I don't know.

But anyway, now that I'm writing again, life seems to have a purpose or at the very least a direction. I am also writing lists. Things like "10 things I want to accomplish by 2011" and "Things I want to do in Vietnam before leaving Vietnam" and "Possible places to go after Vietnam." My lists include things like: Taiwan, learn Vietnamese (học tiếng Việt), write a book, get better at the guitar, fall in or out of love.

"I haven't been thinking about you at all lately"

My first chapbook is coming out soon from Books and Bookshelves in San Francisco. I'm not sure how soon. Maybe a month? Maybe two? But, the point is soon you'll be able to pick one up in San Francisco at Books and Bookshelves. This chapbook is short. It has some funny little poems in it. It's conflicted about itself. I originally wrote these poems in 2006 after I broke up with a girl. She wrote me an email that said "I haven't been thinking about you at all lately" and I turned that into a poem because that's what you do when ex-girlfriends write you emails. Also, I actually really liked the way that sounded. It's a weird thing to write to someone, but it makes sense in a way. It's strange to think about all of the time between then and now that has elapsed. The poems in this book aren't really about her but they are about desire and disappointment and objects and other stuff.

My friend Shannon did the cover. I like her art a lot. She does a lot of great work with paper cut outs and snake forms and painting on top of photos. Someday more people will know about her. She also blogged about doing the cover for this chapbook so I'm blogging about it as well. Blogging is weird. It's kind of like talking to no one. I have a blog and I'm afraid to use it. I have a Twitter and I'm really afraid to use it.

Anyway, at some point in time you'll be able to buy this. You should buy it. It will be five dollars and it will last you for years and years. This chapbook will give you some insight into some of my imagined feelings and thoughts. Or maybe it will just make you think that you have insights into my imagined feelings and thoughts. Also, I'm leaving the country in six days.

Three Love Letters by Fernando Pessoa

The following love letters were written by Fernando Pessoa to Ophelia Queiroz from 1920 to 1929.


Fernando Pessoa is best known for his heteronyms: invented authors complete with distinct literary styles, influences, histories, and personalities. For more information on the various heteronyms please check out The Prose of Fernando Pessoa, the internet, several collections of poetry, and The Book of Disquiet. For now, I am not interested in focusing on the history, theory, or thinking surrounding the analysis of Pessoa's work (which was done largely in obscurity, the bulk of his writing was unpublished and found in a trunk after his death), rather, I wanted to look at these love letters as a possible literary form. Wait. Not even that. As a literary performance. I'm not sure if I'm making myself clear. These letters are fascinating in that they can hardly be called love letters in the typical fashion. It almost seems that Pessoa is using the love letter as thing to bounce off of. He is at times angry, confused, perverse, self eviscerating, and when he speaks of love it seems as if he were employing a gesture and not expressing an emotion. Richard Zenith writes "[he] sometimes seems to be drunk, often claims to be mad and reads like a man who's groping -- but not for Ophelia Queiroz."

I have typed out three letters from a book called The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa edited and translated by Richard Zenith. This text is reproduced here without permission of the publishers.

I picked three letters from the collection that I liked for various reasons. They are jealous, strange, angry, dramatic, and also fun to read or at least I think so. The first begins following a letter Ophelia wrote Fernando asking him to declare his intentions regarding her. Enjoy.

***

1 March 1920

Ophelia:

You could have shown me your contempt, or at least your supreme indifference, without the see-through masquerade of such a lengthy treatise and without your written "reason," which are as insincere was they are unconvincing. You could have just told me. This way I understand you no less, but it hurts me more.
It's only natural that you're very fond of the young man who's been chasing you, so why should I hold it against you if you prefer him to me? You're entitled to prefer whom you want and are under no obligation, as I see it, to love me. And there's certainly no need (unless it's for your own amusement) to pretend you do.

Those who really love don't write letters that read like lawyers' petitions. Love doesn't examine things so closely, and it doesn't treat others like defendants on trial.

Why can't you be frank with me? Why must you torment a man who never did any harm to you (or to anybody else) and whose sad and solitary life is already a heavy enough burden to bear, without someone adding to it by giving him false hopes and declaring feigned affections? What do you get out of it besides the dubious pleasure of making fun of me?

I realize that all this is comical, and that the most comical part of it is me.

I myself would think it was funny, if I didn't love you so much, and if I had the time to think of anything besides the suffering you enjoy inflicting on me, although I've done nothing to deserve it except love you, which doesn't seem to me like reason enough. At any rate ...
Here's the "written document" you requested. The notary Eugenio Silva can validate my signature.

Fernando Pessoa

5 April 1920

Dear naughty little Baby:

Here I am at home* alone, except for the intellectual who's hanging paper on the walls (as if he could hang it on the floor or ceiling!), and he doesn't count. As promised, I'm going to write my Baby, if only to tell her that she's a very bad girl except in one thing, the art of pretending, and in that she's a master.

By the way --- although I'm writing you, I'm not thinking about you. I'm thinking about how I miss the days when I used to hunt pigeons, which is something you obviously have nothing to do with ...

We had a nice walk today, don't you think? You were in a good mood, I was in a good mood, and the day was in a good mood. (My friend A.A. Crosse was not in a good mood. But his health is okay -- one pound sterling of health for now, which is enough to keep him from catching cold.)
You're probably wondering why my handwriting's so strange. For two reasons. The first is that this paper (all I have at the moment) is extremely smooth, and so my pen glides right over it. The second is that I found, here in the apartment, some splendid Port, a bottle of which I opened, and I've already drunk half. The third reason is that there are only two reasons, and hence no third reason at all. (Alvaro de Campos, Engineer.)

When can we be somewhere together, darling -- just the two of us? My mouth feels odd from having gone so long without any kisses ... Little Baby who sits on my lap! Little Baby who gives me love bites! Little Baby who ... (and then Baby's bad and hits me ...). I called you "body of sweet temptations," and that's what you'll always be, but far away from me.

Come here, Baby. Come over to Nininho.* Come into Nininho's arms. Put your tiny mouth against Nininho's mouth ... Come ... I'm so lonely, so lonely for kisses ...

If only I could be certain that you really miss me. It would at least be some consolation. But you probably think less about me than about that boy who's chasing you, not to mention D.A.F. and the bookkeeper of C.D.&C.!* Naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty ... !!!!

What you need is a good spanking.

So long: I'm going to lay my head down in a bucket, to relax my mind. That's what all great men do, at least all great men who have: 1) a mind, 2) a head, and 3) a bucket in which to stick their head.

A kiss, just one, that lasts as long as the world, from your always very own

Fernando (Nininho)

9 October 1929

Terrible Baby:

I like your letters, which are sweet, and I like you, because you're sweet too. And you're candy, and you're a wasp, and you're honey, which comes from bees and not wasps, and everything's just fine, and Baby should always write me, even when I don't, which is always, and I'm sad, and I'm crazy, and no one likes me, and why should they, and that's exactly right, and everything goes back to the beginning, and I think I'll call you today, and I'd like to kiss you precisely and voraciously on the lips, and to eat your lips and whatever little kisses you're hiding there, and to lean on your shoulder and slide into the softness of your little doves, and to beg your pardon, and the pardon to be make-believe, and to do it over and over and period until I start again, and why do you like a scoundrel and a troll and a fat slob with a face like a gas meter and the expression of someone who's not there but in the toilet next door, and indeed, and finally, and I'm going to stop because I'm insane and I always have been, it's from birth, which is to say ever since I was born, and I wish Baby were my doll so I could do like a child, taking off her clothes, and I've reached the end of the page, and this doesn't seem like it could be written by a human being but it was written by me.

Fernando

Jacob's Manifesto

Hi. My name is Jacob. Sometimes people call me Jake. On occasion, people call me Mr. Evans. Sometimes, they just refer to me as, You or Dude or Bro. The point is what's in a name or a pronoun anyway?

So, I guess a couple of weeks ago I got an invite to contribute to Manifesto Zine and so I've been writing a manifesto. I didn't know what to call it, so I'm just calling it Jacob's Manifesto. Is that stupid? I don't know. Sometimes writing is kind of like talking to yourself. Anyway, here is some of my rough manifesto writing.

1. Manifestos are supposed to be declarative, but there are too many doubts to declare anything. Besides what can one say with any real level of confidence in this day and age? One could say the following with some certainty. This is Jacob's Manifesto. Jacob is a man. Jacob usually writes, but on occasion he also eats, sleeps, shits, fucks, and dates neurotic women. One day Jacob will be dead and the problems of relevancy or readership will not matter, if indeed they ever did.
2. It's sometimes really hard to walk down the street as a human being. One must imagine that dogs do not have this same problem.
3. Ask yourself, what isn't human? Make a detailed list of your findings. Make a concerted effort to not be any of those things. It is not enough to say, be human.
4. Even though one doubts and nothing is certain, it's still important to have opinions and beliefs. They help lend narrative and meaning to what would otherwise seem to be a random and possibly meaningless existence. That being said, be careful about what you believe. Sometimes, a belief says more about you than it does about the actual world.
5. Also, go fuck yourself.
6. Most things in this world are worth loving. Unfortunately, one spends the majority of one's life loving things that are not worth loving.
7. Broken glass is more beautiful on the street at night than it is on the kitchen floor.
8. It is a commonly held misconception that focusing on one's career is a virtue. This contradicts a primary truth of existence: we all die and we all die sooner than we want.
9. Having facial hair is not a lifestyle choice, it's actually a product of testosterone. This has been a great cause for contention and confusion as of late.
10. No matter what happens, don't fuck your roommate.
11. Eat some raw foods, some cooked, and some fermented.
12. I can't stress this enough, just as suburbanization was toxic for America, so is gentrification. Moving to a city and then proceeding to transform it into a sterile mini-mall full is hardly the answer. Pushing the lower and middle classes into the suburban wasteland created by American industry and fed into by the great white flight, does not solve the problems of class inequality, crime created by the needless prohibition against drugs, or the lack of education and social services for all but the elite.
13. Everything is fiction. You are living a story. You are living in someone else's story and you live on after death as a story to be told, remembered, and retold. The only thing that's true is the observable and the repeatable. 1+1=2. Everything else is fiction, even that which resembles the truth.

Los Angeles is big.

Los Angeles is big. It seems to go on forever. I wonder, if I walked every street and every alleyway in this city, how long would it take me? How many pairs of shows would I wear out? What would my map look like as I traced one end to the next? Would I discover the borders to this place? Does it even end? If I crawled along the freeway through the weeds and vacant lots how long would it take then? Baudrillard said that Los Angeles is less real than Disneyland. That makes me chuckle, but is it true? The other night, or some night, or one night, I rode my bike up to Griffith Park Observatory. You could see the whole city from there or part of it. Even from the top of the mountain you only get a small piece and even that small piece is as big as a small ocean, or a country in some part of the world. The other day, or some day, or one day, I rode my bike from Echo Park to the ocean. I rode along a bike path to the ocean for miles and miles. It took all day to do a complete loop. We rode for forty miles, in bike lanes, gutters, along concrete washes, through traffic being buzzed by busses and SUVs, along famous streets and famous intersections full of tourists and tourists busses, and everywhere I looked there were houses and shops and office buildings and people waiting outside. Los Angeles is big. It is a place that seems like it doesn't actually exist in the way that other cities exist. The car mediates all experiences here. The tedium, the waiting, the traffic, the assholes, the freeways, all of them plugged into the car. As a nondriver, it's a weird place to be.

What's that smell?

Do you ever walk through the city (which city?) and wonder what that smell is? Is that garbage? Rotten food? Human excrement? Do you ever wander through the city (which one?) and think that it can't be long until something big happens?

The 229-mph woman

The fastest woman motorcycle record is 229 mph.

The fastest woman on Earth, and arguably the best female athlete in the world, Marion Jones can outrun just about anyone on the track.

The Fastest Woman Alive whirls us through her adventurous life in dramatic and touching scenes giving us a picture of this quintessential American who began her life in hopeless circumstances, seized her dream, and achieved more than anyone imagined was possible.

The fastest woman in drag.

Who is the fastest woman in the world?

One Big Weekend

About a month ago, a friend wrote me an email that ended with the question, "How was your weekend?"

I responded with something like, "My life is now one big weekend."