Why I Write Better When I am Homeless

Writing is probably good for you.
Even with a due date.

When homeless I am uprooted. But I have money in my pocket.
Why do I write better? Because it is something to do to fill in the emptiness. When Maslow's needs are met I think we are less prone to be creative. It is the pang of hunger and thirst that spurs us on to aesthetic heights.

The hungry artist is the short-lived artist but his art is intense. I think Arthur Rimbaud was such an artist. He wrote until he exhausted himself. He wrote first then ate later. Even then it was not so much as a need but visceral. A part of creativity. His eating became his aesthetic.

I cannot be an Arthur Rimbaud. I enjoy creature comforts. Take-out. Lunch on a subway bench. A gin and tonic after work.
They do not make me more creative. I could say something pretentious like the life of the middle class intellectual deadens my creative sense. But that sounds wrong. I am a creator because I am a middle class intellectual. And I am not even sure if that label fits me. A lost boy is perhaps a better descriptor. A stranger in a strange land. A man who happens to have a degree who happens to teach Plato, Aristotle, Virginia Woolf and Camus to community college students in Brooklyn, New York.

I am a man who loves the color of apples. But I like stiletto heels as well. I like the religious ritual of going to the movie theater on a Thursday evening after work. I eat lightly buttered popcorn with the same laconic motivation of receiving the holy eucharist on my tongue. The darkened theater and the womb-like cavity of stadium seating — where there is always less people and more space feels like an experience of daily Mass.

Aesthetic Thursday: Max Beckmann, Beginning

"Beginning" Max Beckmann, 1949, oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Triptychs
The piece "Beginning" is a triptych which means it is a single work composed of three panels. Triptychs were originally intended for religious art. Since the work is composed of three separate panels, once installed in a church or home, the priest could open or close the panel depending on the day of observance. Beckmann chooses the traditional triptych style, not for religious purposes but to depict pivotal events in a boy's adolescent development.

The Central Panel
The central panel depicts a boy on a white horse, a woman wearing blue stockings lying on a divan (smoking a hookah?), a cat hangs on the ceiling (reminds me of Puss in Boots).

Left Panel
An organ grinder, an angel, a boy with a crown.

Right Panel
Boys with laconic gazes, a teacher disciplines a pupil, a boy displays his pornographic magazine to other students.

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Poem: A Monk Reads at Table

image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

at table reading,
our minds most likely a cacophony
of invective, misery, and lower back pain.

There is silence. — 
Usually amid the drone of listless
hagiographies,
— put an asparagus spear in your
mouth —

the tables are urchin gray; the reader enjoys
whispering
for
eating in silence is all we can ever do

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Repost: The Relationship of Truth and Relativism by Marian Larman, O.S.B.

I came across this essay in my personal files. It is written by Marian Larman, a Benedictine priest who taught philosophy. This essay has a personal import for me. Larman wrote it during the last year of his life. He had retired as pastor of a small church in Saint Benedict, Louisiana. Because of declining health, he moved into the infirmary at the monastery where I was a monk. On some mornings I would visit the infirmary. Two parakeets inhabited a birdcage in the solarium, a rectangular room that allowed in plenty of sunlight. Father Marian would sit in the solarium reading a newspaper or a newly acquired book on Saint Thomas Aquinas. While an ardent Thomist, he did not hold to the belief that there we through faith we have access to an overarching truth. There may be an absolute truth but finite beings are limited to what we can know. We would have quiet conversations sometimes. I mainly listened as he told me about his ideas. Father Augustine, who took care of the infirmary allowed Father Marian to write in the infirmary. He acquired a small manual typewriter on which he wrote the following essay. While he equates truth to adequation in the following piece, a position I find difficult to swallow, since I have difficulty with the concept of absolute truth (especially in regards to theology), the following essay is a fine example of a Thomist attempting to square his views with relativism and the charge that all is merely subjective and everyone has their own version of truth (or, the verso, all is objective and all there is absolute truth). I have simply typed his essay as it appeared in the typewritten manuscript.

Who Are Your Reading Mentors?

Bonnie Bess Wood and Frank Levy, Innovators in Reading

I take it for granted that I am a life-long reader. Yet I must stop and consider the people who inspired me to be a reader for life. Yes, the public library played its part, but also individual persons as well. One was indeed a librarian, but the other was her husband. Here is my story about Frank and Bonnie: 

       I met Bonnie and Frank the Summer I was thirteen years old. Bonnie was the interim library director at the local branch public library near my home. I would spend afternoons at the library as a volunteer page. Bonnie noticed me reading in between the stacks and instead of chastising me for not shelving books, began a relationship of reading with me that has lasted into my adult years. She chose for me to read Chronicles of Narnia, Dante's Inferno, Count of Monte Cristo, and John Steinbeck's Acts of King Arthur when I was reading only Stephen King novels. "If you like bologna, it is good, but it's still bologna," Bonnie told me. "You're only on this earth for a finite amount of time, so you can choose to eat either bologna sandwiches or filet mignon. The choice is yours." I kept on reading Stephen King and John Grishman, but I would also read from the list of Pulitzer Prize novels or National Book Award winners that Bonnie introduced me to as a librarian. Bonnie's rationale reflected a commitment to literature that privileged quality over fluff, but also gave the reader the freedom of choice.
    At the time I met Bonnie and Frank, they were building their nascent Children's Summer Theater company, Stories in Motion and were experimenting with various methods of presenting literature and film as a living narrative. Frank had been hired by the public library as a professional storyteller and lecturer. In one story, Flutterby the Butterfly, Bonnie performed the part of Flutterby, dancing through the audience dressed in a costume she herself had designed and created, while Frank told the story with physical expression and inclusion of the child audience. I played the lepidopterist who is unable to catch Flutterby in his net. Bonnie created costumes and masks which Frank used to bring to life living "stories in motion."
    Reading was promoted for its own sake in the novel presentation of the narrative as a performance for the love of the story. The simple idea was to perform and involve young people in the telling of a story as a way to encourage interest in literature. After a performance of Flutterby, children would approach the librarian for books on butterflies. Or, after a performance at a public school where Frank performed the role of the pianist Chopin in full costume and in character, librarians and teachers could more easily encourage their students to read about Chopin or about classical music. Stories in Motion encouraged reading by performing literature in public places to elicit from the audience a response to read in turn, as a pleasurable aesthetic, and not merely for the satisfaction of a mark or an obligation.
    I think the success of Stories in Motion lies in the collaborative efforts of its creators. As a librarian, Bonnie brings to the project years of experience working in school and university libraries. Also, she is a researcher. She researches possible stories, mines their literary history, and works with Frank to create the story from an existing database of World Literature, whether it be a story about Purim, or background information on Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. Frank takes Bonnie's raw research and finds in a story the essential plot points and presents the story theatrically and totally committed to the essence of the literature in its purest form. Like Odysseus telling the story of his ten-year journey home from Troy, Frank marks the importance of literature in its ability to be told.
    Stories in Motion stories are told from the rich treasure trove of out-of-copyright literature, namely the classics, which belong to the common trust. This means, for example, they do not produce the Disney version of Little Mermaid, but Hans Christian Andersen's original. Ariel, not obedient to the rules of the spell that has transformed her into a human, loses her prince and turns into sea foam at the story's fatal end. Children are indoctrinated by Disney's version which casts Ariel as a comic character who wins her prince and lives happily ever after. Stories in Motion takes a risk by telling the original tale; a risk that involves convincing parents and children that Little Mermaid is a tragic tale where all is not resolved nicely in the end. The risk is losing the interest of the children who prefer the Disneyfication of the tale, and may not be willing, at least at first, to be exposed to the original telling. At the end of the day, the risk of upsetting a child who wishes to play the part of Ariel, so she can wed a fictional prince, is overcome by giving this same child access to a piece of literature that is true to its literary history. The child in a Stories in Motion production learns organically that a story can either be tragic or comic, that a story has a narrative history of its own as well as constitutive of a cultural literacy that the child would otherwise be bereft of if she had only been fed the commercialization of literature that privileges what is marketable over a commitment to literature itself, for its own sake.
    The vision of Stories in Motion is creative and opposed to the mainstream commodification of storytelling. The plays are scaled down to the bare essentials of theater aesthetics. A Stories in Motion stage is bare. No unnecessary props or elaborate eye-candy adorn the proscenium, save for a simple background suggestive of the theme. Also, when Frank adapts a classic piece of literature for performance by a group of young people, he scales down the script to preserve the muscle of the story. By re-imaging classic stories, such as Wizard of Oz, the Arthurian legend, Pinocchio, or Wind in the Willows, to name a few recent productions, Stories in Motion remains a completely kid-driven production. A child controls lights, sound, and works backstage. Young people work with choreographers and assist in directing. The cast is composed of 100-150 children. Every actor in the cast has at least one speaking role and very seldom is only one child the star of the show. The muscle of the show is in the purity of the narrative but also the individual actors and stage workers who learn collaborative learning skills in putting a play together in one to three weeks for public performance. The vision of Stories in Motion includes both the preservation of literature and the instilling in young people the necessary life skill of teamwork.
    I had the privilege as a high school drama teacher to produce a Stories in Motion adaptation for myself. With my group of thirty high school students, we produced Sword in the Stone, an adaptation from Sir Thomas Mallory's book Le Morte D'Arthur. Directing a Stories in Motion play gave me the opportunity to produce a novel way to present literature. The metaphor of generativity is not lost on me. Having bestowed on me as a child a love of literature for its own sake, and a commitment to literature in general, it was with pathos that I directed the Stories of Motion adaptation of the Arthurian legend. I took what was given to me as a child by Bonnie and Frank and was able in turn to present it to my own students. By doing Sword in the Stone, I wanted to introduce my students to the Arthurian legend in a way that was theatrical but at the same time expose them to an important cultural and literary tale. At first, my students were not interested in Arthur as a play to perform, but once we read through the Stories in Motion script, I could see that my students saw the play as an opportunity for self-expression. They learned the legend of Arthur intuitively and theatrically, asking me questions about Uther Pendragon and the Mist People, the May Party, Morgan La Fay, and the importance of the sword in the stone as a metaphor for coming-of-age. In the end, through a unique presentation of literature, my students found themselves not only as drama students but purveyors of literature, without recourse to the traditional methods of teaching literature in American high schools.
    It is with this exposition that I recommend Ms. Bonnie Bess Wood and Mr. Frank Levy, co-creators of Stories in Motion, as verifiable innovators in reading. 

Thank you, Bonnie and Frank.

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image credit: storiesinmotion

Thomas J. Watson Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Another quiet place to read and study in Manhattan

Interior, The Watson Library, image: the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Probably not as obvious an option for quiet study space as the Rose Main Reading room at the New York Public Library, but the Metropolitan Museum of Art hosts the Watson Library, a quiet space hidden amidst the buzzing interior of the Met on fifth avenue adjacent to Central Park. Access to this space is available to anyone with a research interest in Art History. (Hint: just say you are interested in researching art history and you're in. They won't grill you for proof of serious research intent).

While the mission of the library privileges use by museum researchers, the library is not foreclosed to seekers of quiet reading and study space in New York City. To obtain access to the library one has to state an area of research interest and present a photo ID, and fill out a registration form. Once supplied with a proper library card, one does not need to pay admission to the museum to use the library. Simply present yourself at the information desk to gain access. All bags must be checked-in prior to entrance. 

The library is a closed stacks library so if a book is needed from the library’s collection, the call number must be recorded and a patron can page the book at the circulation desk. For simple quiet space, a place to read or to study, the Watson library is superb. The setting is heavily academic and very quiet, so do not expect comfy overstuffed chairs or vibrant colors. This is a no-frills place to read and to catch up on one’s knowledge of Mondrian or Picasso.

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Further Information:
Where: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10028, First Floor
Public Hours: Weekdays: Monday–Friday 10 am–5:15 pm; book retrieval until 3:30 pm. 

Directions: Subway: 4,5,6 to 86th St.; A,B,C to 86th street (and walk across the park)
Contact: Watson Library Contact Form  
Telephone: 212-650-2312

Poets House, Lower Manhattan

Why go to Poets house?

Poets House boasts 50,000 volumes of poetry in an open, eco-friendly environment that affords a view of the Hudson River and the Statue of Liberty. Founded by the American poet Stanley Kunitz, the space is ideal for reading, studying, and writing. Expect books. No public computer terminals. The computer terminals are for catalog access only. You can either read your own book or a poetry book available from the shelf. There are even typewriters available for the budding writer to practice her craft. There is a room specially reserved for quiet in the back. It has couches!

I go on Saturdays sometimes. The last time I went they served free wine and beer!

Best for poets and writers or people who want to be inspired creatively. A very inviting space. The staff is especially courteous.

Where: 10 River Terrace,  Lower Manhattan, Battery Park City
Hours: Tuesday–Friday, 11am–7pm, Saturday, 11am–6pm | Children's Room: Saturday, 11am–5pm
Contact: www.poetshouse.org info@poethouse.org  (212) 431-7920
Directions: Subway: 1, 2, 3, A, C, or E to Chambers St., or the R to Cortlandt St. (northbound only)

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Lance: A Fragment Poem

Wrapped in a green

T-shirt, I try to ollie — 
Is that a name?
Skateboards, he says.
It’s a move, dad —
Low riding jeans
I want to dress how
I want to dress
Do you think I'm shallow?

Water towers tower; we talk like men
when you are thirteen
You’re not as much a man
As you would want to be in your
Mind’s eye
Don't have it figured
Out?
You ain’t right
In the head

When do you first realize
What love is? Is it when:

He stirred the coffee with
A Donald the Duck spoon
Staring intently at the newspaper
As if to read it?

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Diagram of Two Sonnet Forms

In this post, I present a diagram of two popular sonnet forms.

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When Seeing the Devil is Not a Matter of Good Versus Evil

I Saw the Devil
(2010) Directed by Jee-woon Kim
Starring Byung-hun Lee, Min-sik Choi and Gook-hwan Jeon

    It was an incongruous pairing for me this weekend: Jim Hensen's muppets and a Korean film depicting gory revenge. After previewing Hensen's charming eight minute exploration on resisting time (at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria), my buddy Airplane and I took in the last film showing offered in the museum's theater. I Saw The Devil is most certainly not a sight for Miss Piggy. Or for Kermit.
    If one takes Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment to the next level it might be close to this movie. At the outset I knew it would be bloody and disturbing. The first few minutes is a graphic abduction and beheading of the protagonist's fiancé.
    Protagonist may be too strong of a word. The film calls into question the concept of villain and hero. The narrative runs revenge style. Man kills man's love so man seeks out to destroy man. The movie takes us on this horrific journey but twists it to the extent that at the end we are not sure who is good or who is bad.
    Neither apologetic nor dogmatic, director Jee-woon Kim's impeccably filmed story of sadism and torture is not a movie for the faint of heart. Hoping to rest on a human ending, this tale ends with questions disturbingly left unanswered about man's inhumanity to man.
    Revenge is bad is the film's mantra. The typical good versus evil movie usually ends with evil overturned by  the good. Not this movie. [spoiler alert] While evil does get vanquished by the plot's end, so does good.
    It seems to me after a couple of hours of maiming, blood lust, and chopped up corpses, all we are left with is the question why?
    The gist seems to be a Chinatown addendum where the path down the rabbit hole leads to only one place: a seizing, inescapable void.

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Image credit: filmdeviant

Aesthetic Thursday: City Hall Station

City Hall Station, IRT Lexington Avenue Line

(Image credit: John-Paul Palescandolo, Fred Guenther)

Take the Local 6 Train

If you take the local 6 train in Manhattan to its southern terminus at Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall station, don't get off the train even though it's the last stop. Stay on the train. More than likely you will be the only one in the car. The train will start up again and venture forward through the tunnel. What you may not know is that the local tracks at this station form a loop. 

The Remains of the First New York City Subway Station

Along the route are the remains of the former City Hall Station. It was the inaugural station of the city's first underground transportation system. As the train loops around, you will be able to see it — and if you are lucky the train may stop, or slow down enough, to get a good glimpse of the station's architecture. The station was built in 1904 and served the New York City subway system's IRT line until 1945 — when it was shuttered to make way for new trains that could not fit the older station's tight curve. The station had become redundant and has laid dormant for seventy-five years. 

Imagining a Turn-of-the-Century Gem Come to Life

Unlike other abandoned stations in the system, the City Hall station has remained protected from graffiti vandalism. Seeing the station while riding the loop is not as good as seeing it on foot, inside the station, with the lights turned on, but for a moment imagine the once touted travertine-tiled ceiling are aglow with the gas-lit chandeliers that once filled the space with illumination. When the New York City subway first opened back in 1905, it originally went from City Hall to what is now Grand Central station, but it turned west along what is now the 42nd Street shuttle, and at Times Square the line ran north, where it eventually meandered to Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. I imagine I am one of those original straphangers, paying the five-cent fare, wearing a black coat, a top hat, white collared shirt — the same get-up one notices if you happen to like looking at men's attire from the turn-of-the-century.

What's your favorite subway station? What makes it your favorite?

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Jacques Derrida in the News

For fun and laughs, I like to search "Jacques Derrida" in the Google News search engine to see if the posthumous philosopher has made any recent headlines.

I found something today!

He is referenced in a New York Observer article by Jonathan Liu on architecture and performativity (07/12/2011):

The talk about architecture as performance must conjure up the 1980s and deconstruction:

Meanwhile, Peter Eisenman spent the 1980s conceptualizing deconstructivist architecture with Jacques Derrida and the naughties building a stadium for the Arizona Cardinals.

Does this stadium look "deconstructed" to you?

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Lemme know what you think in the comments below.

Book Review: A Thief, A Girl, A Moral

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Something Missing
Book Review:
Something Missing: A Novel
by Matthew Dicks
Broadway Books © 2009
304 pages

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    Matthew Dicks’s first novel begins with the careful machinations of a professional thief cataloging the contents of a person’s refrigerator: “A gallon of milk, long since expired, cold cuts, opened jars of jam, tomato sauce, a carton of eggs, and, in the door, what Martin had predicted: salad dressing.” After the first hundred pages, I felt like I was reliving the book The Boy Who Could Not Stop Washing. We quickly learn that the protagonist, Martin Railback, is an anti-social, neurotic sophisticated thief. He thinks nothing of taking a person's liquid plumber but agonizes over a dropped toothbrush in a toilet. Crazy guy that Martin Railback.
     Martin has a cleanly strategic work week that includes breaking into the homes of at least a dozen homes a week stealing stuff. He stakes out the homes of upper middle class home dwellers in Connecticut who would make for good unsuspecting victims of his kleptomania. No single people. No children. No people with roomies. Only married couple without children. He systematically absconds objects people will least likely notice to go missing. Martin is no ordinary thief. For example, he has been stealing Liquid Plumber and Parmesan Peppercorn salad dressing from the Pearls for a decade, along with the occasional pearl necklace or bowl hidden in a dusty corner of the house. Martin goes through great pains to determine whether an item will go missing or not. I don't want to adumbrate his meticulous steps he undergoes to determine whether an item is steal-able or not. It is ammusingly exhausting and Dicks does a fine job of bringing us into Martin's world.
       The odd thing about Martin is that he not only steals from people; he is a first class creeper. He notices his clients’ (the name he gives his victims) idiosyncrasies, the kinds of toothbrushes they use, whether or not they lift the toilet seat when they go to the bathroom, even the contents of their journals, e-mails, and grocery lists. Martin is the ultimate voyeur, which makes him creepy in most people’s estimation. Dicks attempts to make him likable, even adorable at times. I found myself hoping he would not get caught as a thief when in one scene he is trapped inside a client’s home when they arrive before he can make an exit.
    The novel reads at a quick pace. The first quarter of the book introduces you to Martin’s burglar lifestyle and gives background to how he became the kind of person he is. We quickly learn his anti-social habits. He has a crush on the waitress at the diner he frequents for breakfast but he never asks her out on a date. He has one true friend, Jeff, who does not know of his daily break-ins into people’s homes. He lives in his deceased mother’s house where he stores the objects he steals behind refrigerator panels and inside sofas. He doubles on Ebay as a chic Northeastern woman who has a penchant for handbags. In one of the novel’s funnier moments, we learn how Martin uses Ebay to sell off his client’s unmissable stuff.
    Right away we are led to believe that Martin is not an ordinary thief. I did not find myself hating him for his thievery simply because he seemed to steal only out of a sense of odd moral principles. He never stole items from his clients that they would miss. In this regard the novel seems to be a criticism of middle class America. Martin’s clients are people who work many hours a week, have amassed a large amount of cash, buy plenty of things, but do not have the time to enjoy what they buy. The Steinway piano that sits in the living room unplayed without an open music book, or the wood burning stove that no one uses, or the extra set of diamond ear rings that go unnoticed. The novel appears to be saying that Martin steals out of a high moral standard. As if his thievery suggests the hypocrisy of a middle class that buys stuff that could be used to support others (and they would not notice the loss). But Dicks never brings the novel to moral indictment of the upper middle class. We only know that Martin does not care for dogs, the very rich (because they do notice when their stuff goes missing), and general disarray. In fact instead of moral disdain, Martin acquires a bizarre intimacy with his clients even though he has never met them.
    The novel encourages us to root Martin on in his search for intimacy and love. Not finding the love of his life with the diner gal, Martin seems destined to find love with a client, or at least we are led to think so. I won't spoil the plot but suffice it to say this book enters boy meets girl territory. Why begin a novel that promises to be a critical rapprochement with American middle class values with the formula of a brazen romance. I wanted more class struggle and less amour between burglaries.
    the best scenes are the voyeur moments Martin has with his clients. He seems more at ease with the migh-have been moments in his life than real in your face person-to-person encounters. Dicks wants his Martin Railback to be both a quriky neurotic and a lovable boy next door. I don't completely buy it. In perhaps the most moving passage from the novel, Martin overhears a client speak of the sadness she feels of never having received a single rose from her husband. Martin crafts an anonymous letter to the husband suggesting he buy his wife a rose tomorrow. At this point the novel shifts in timbre from film noir espionage to the reverse of Gyges’s Ring. Instead of doing the immoral act when no one is looking. Martin turns out to be the hero who does the good despite the fact that he breaks the law for his day job. I thought the novel presented the character of Martin as too glib and neatly OCD. It never seemed to me that Martin ever questioned the rightness or wrongness of things in a searching, palpable way. His neuroticisms easily aroused him to make a quick buck from his svelte thieving as well as create delusions about his relationship to his clients.
     The novel kept me in its quasi-ethical grip until about three quarters through. By the last hundred or so pages I felt the author had become too self-aggrandizing and his character appeared to don hero wings without sufficiently revealing what made him tick. The book ends too neatly on the premise of another book to follow.

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No, Lady Gaga Is Not Friends with Marxist Philosopher Slavoj Žižek - Entertainment - The Atlantic Wire

I just had to post this on the blog:

No, Lady Gaga Is Not Friends with Marxist Philosopher Slavoj Žižek - Entertainment - The Atlantic Wire

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Video Repost: Jacques Derrida in 1 Minute

By putting emphasis on Derrida as a literary theorist, I must say this bloke does a pretty damn good job of expounding on Deconstruction in a nutshell. 


P.S.: The last ten-second analysis of Lord of the Rings in both structuralist / deconstructive terms is entertaining.

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