Austerity for Prosperity: are we all Greeks?

Injustice, swift, erect, and unconfin’d,
Sweeps the wide earth, and tramples o’er mankind -Homer, The Illiad

In these first few busy weeks of an especially busy new year, there is much domestic news to occupy our attention. The Giants won the Superbowl, a big-time celebrity passed away, the Republican primary season is getting less weird but much more contentious, and as I write this the Grammy’s are still being awarded to musicians whose collective ego and star quality has its own gravitational pull. How can we afford to look away from these things?

But it bears keeping in mind there are other events in the wider world that have implications everywhere, even in the United States. If you have been watching the international news or visiting any major news website then you will have seen the pictures of an Athens aflame, streets full of protesters (some media estimating 80,000 people in Athens alone) and vandals taking out their anger against the newly-passed austerity measures. Some of these measures include cutting 15,000 jobs and lowering the minimum wage for workers in the public sector 20% to 600 Euro per month. You can find more details about the figures the Greek people are upset about here.

Greek lawmakers have threatened their country with austerity measures for the last couple of years, suggesting it as a fix to a financial crisis that has hit Greece harder than any other European nation except for Iceland. The Greeks are deep in debt, to the tune of some 330 billion Euro, which is over 10% of its gross domestic product. That’s a lot of gyros to pay back, my friend. In order to receive additional bailouts and keep Greece afloat for a little while longer so that it can make changes in its economy, the eurozone bloc banks have demanded that parliament enact some kind of measures to ensure that these loans can be repaid. But Greece’s solution to this demand is a negative sum game; cutting programs that support workers and unemployed citizens—the lifeblood and treasure of all nations—will not spur growth, which will be the only actual solution to Greece’s problem.

The sad economic state of affairs in this small European country is made worse by the fact that citizens are well used to minimum standards of social services. I can see that if you have internalized your given wage as a right and not a contingent benefit, you would be as enraged as a petulant Greek deity if the government, in one fell swoop, came and took that right away from you. Such feelings of entitlement make spending cuts tricky because a large portion of taxes go towards social welfare and standards policies. And when the citizens of Greece turn around and see that there are still many among them, including lawmakers, who enjoy great wealth and luxury despite the purported lack of funds, perhaps throwing a Molotov cocktail at a movie theatre seems like something you should put on your CV.

Adding more fuel to the fire (pun intended) is the fact that the country must also cut 325 million Euro in “structural expenditure”. As if infrastructure weren’t crumbling enough, now there seems little hope for any kinds of massive projects of the sort that could spur on the economic growth that the nation needs to get out of the slump.

Because the stakes here are very high (if Greece doesn’t take these measures and defaults on the debt owed to eurozone banks, they risk being ousted from the monetary union, potentially going back to using Drachmas instead of Euros) the lawmakers are not happy with taking such measures. But there seems to be a lack of creativity here as well. Maybe the inertia is due to this panicked situation, where we just freeze like deer in the headlights and fail to make a radical decision because it seems “too risky”. Maybe it has just been too long since this European nation had to kick-start its economy with so little gas left in the tank. Maybe there are no ideas to implement because there are no resources to implement them.

Greece’s decision to make such austerity cuts does have an impact in the U.S. and around the world. It is not so much that Greece’s economic woes will affect the globe, but that their method of dealing with inflated debt-to-GDP ratio will invite similar kinds of cuts in other, much more productive countries. Some politicians in America fear inflation like the plague (cue the Ron Paul circus calliope) and maybe for good reason. The U.S. actually has a higher debt-to-GDP ratio than Greece at around 10.6%! However, the status of America on the world stage, the extremely high level of productivity and the potential for future recovery and stabilization sets it apart from Greece. It pays to be a behemoth when negotiating loan repayments. (By the way, you can find a lot of information about the differences between the U.S. and European/Greek situations on this excellent website.)

At any rate, the key to getting back in the game, to competing with growing Asian markets and with the world does not lie in cutting programs. Although they cost money, social programs (many of the ones that are perennially on the chopping block for some members of Congress) allow citizens to continue functioning financially so that they can contribute to the economy. Endowments and grants for the Arts and for education are crucial to allowing those creative individuals with new and innovative ideas to build something and change the market, a market that often has little room for radical change because of the undue leverage they currently wield in the political sphere, and frankly because of their enormity. Cutting health care or, god forbid, social security would just leave hospitals to foot the bill and any preventive care, which is much cheaper to implement, would be replaced with emergency procedures because patients didn’t have to money to see a doctor. These costs will be incumbent on the taxpayers.

The markets are wonderful and lead to growth through competition in normal times. But we are in difficult times, deep down in that valley of despair. When you have bitten off much more than you can chew, the solution is to drink something, not to pull out some of your teeth. If you will pardon that bizarre metaphor, I’m saying that austerity measures, unless absolutely necessary (as perhaps they are now in the case of under-the-gun Greece), are no anodyne for the economic problems we face. We need more jobs. What about government projects like bridges, roads and railways? We need those things badly and the auxiliary benefits, the centrifugal effects on growth and innovation, are probably more than we imagine.

How might we afford to begin some of those projects? Well, if we can juuuuust inch our way past that stubborn wall of opposition to taxes and limiting military expenditure; if we can show how public services and government-funded projects—not to mention socialized healthcare and controversial measures like free birth control for women and free sterilized needles for drug users (not to equate the two in any way, hehe)—are inherently rational from a practical perspective, will be wholly in our best interest and will achieve the results we seek if by non-conventional means; if we can show that using moral and religious platitudes to inform public policy has not been beneficial to a people since the time of Moses; if we can use data in all the forms available to appeal to people’s minds, not condescend or neglect all opposition that is raised, then we can perhaps have the kind of debate that will lead us in the direction to making such faraway dreams a reality.

Of course, it’s hard to be optimistic in this environment. Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum quibble amongst themselves while constantly using liberals as a foil. The leading candidates for the highest office in the nation are so preoccupied with appealing to the lowest common denominator in America that they don’t feel the need to really qualify some crazy claims that they have made about our current President, Barrack Obama. (The food-stamps President remark comes to mind.) And so many people fall in with simplistic theories and with candidates because of poisonous political memes that have no basis in fact. The solution to this much deeper problem of finding the truth, of separating fact from horse crap…well, that could take some doing.

In the meantime there is always the present. They say there’s no time like it. We can at least use the present to throw around ideas for what’s wrong and how to fix it. And at the very least we can enjoy what we have in life because, as the Greeks are showing us—nothing is for certain; nothing good is free.

Whitney Houston dead at 48

I read the news about Whitney Houston's death today, clued on by someone's Facebook post--seems to be the most common way to find out about crucial news these days. My first reaction was one of vague shock, quickly followed by a resigned thought of "Oh. Well that figures."

Then I began to think about the circumstances of her life, the circumstances of her death. And I started to wonder whether anyone could have done something to prevent this, whether it would have even been publicized if someone had intervened and saved her from her self-destructive actions. And it occurred to me that not only would no one have heard about it, but that no one would have cared.

I realize I am now jumping to the conclusion that drugs were somehow involved, that she was probably using at least recently if not doing them at the time of her death (which presumably led to a heart attack or stroke). But it's sort of beside the point what her recent actions were. What strikes me is what the reaction of the public was when she was running her humiliating public course of drugged-out rampage a few years back, jeopardizing her health, family and reputation.

As we have with so many icons of our culture who steered themselves onto ugly and dramatic paths, we vilified and mocked a Whitney Houston who was in the throes of crack addiction. We parodied her in sketch shows and panned her on internet threads. We gossiped about her wretched life with Bobby, about her ruined vocal chords, about the hell their kids must be living in at home. And though some friends and family surely tried to help, to stage interventions and stop the madness that was consuming these talented performers, any such efforts failed to entice the press or the public. It was the mess itself that drew the flies.

The element that makes this tragedy all the more stage-worthy is the fact of the real-time audience in attendance, laughing and crying at the heroine, but never with her. But most of all, delighting in the sheer thrill of the spectacle, demanding more and more pain and degrading behavior to consume and judge and chat about with friends.

Whether it is true artists like Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston and Mel Gibson, or sensations of moderate talent like Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan, Americans love to watch celebrities gaffe, screw up, make a mess of their lives, fall from the lofty pedestals we've built for them to stand on. This is not to judge or wag a finger--the gods know I'm just as guilty. It must be something ingrained in the DNA of our culture, and it bears looking at if only for the sake of maintaining some kind of sane picture of who we idolize and why. If not for ourselves then for future ages.

We tend to create infallible heroes to worship, faultless specimens of morality like athletes Tiger Woods and Michael Phelps. Then when they err the error seems heinous, unforgivable. But after all, whose fault was it to believe that any person is ever morally beyond reproach.

What comes as perhaps the biggest shock then is when these heroes and idols finally succumb. When they leave this world and lose the ability to fuck up or to be congratulated or to speak on their own behalf about their choices and their personal philosophies. And amid the emotional outpourings of bereaved admirers--some of whom must be shame-faced at being a part of the greedy court of public opinion--we search for those great achievements this person has accomplished among the rubble of their reputation. So it is with Whitney Houston.

My own humble memory of Ms. Houston is sweet and positive, detailed, infused with the nostalgia of my childhood-self sitting in the backseat of my mom's red Dodge Caravan with my brother, listening to the "top 100 hits" station as we drove around running errands on Saturday afternoon. There wasn't anyone we would rather hear come on the radio than Whitney singing one from the early years. (Usually it was an upbeat number like "I Wanna Dance with Somebody" or "How Will I Know?") Inevitably, Mom would lose all inhibition and shout out the vocals as if she herself had won the Grammy for recording it:

"...And when the night falls
my lonely heart calllllls!
IIIIIII wanna dance with somebody!
I wanna feel the HEAT with someboday (yeahya)!
Ohhhh I wanna dance with somebody!
With somebody who loooves me!"

And the van would fill with laughter as my brother and I made fun of her for letting go all decorum and really feeling the soul of the music. This is was the crux of Houston's artistry, a bi-product of any musician's artistry--creating beautiful moments for music listeners. And she did this by singing like no one else has before or since. Her presence shall indeed be missed.

The Foreign Teacher

Between the pupil's desk
And the teacher's realm all lined with books
There is a no-man's land
Filled with half-lid eyes and baleful looks
The pupil dares not cross it
The teacher plans a daring offer

Extending words of peace
In hope to guide to students to him
A simple question rings
To charm the jaded hands to action
One lovely girl she sings
A lame response to a boring question
"Who else will give a shot?"
Heads turn about for a second victim

"Mr. Halstead, then, why not."
The heads now turn in one direction
The boy (who's more a man)
Looks up from the screen he's got his mind on
Balls up his burly hand
And stands alert to some distant scion

His eyes show lack of presence
His true domain: crushing opponents
But somewhere from the depths
A distant chime of heaven's mercy
The bell rings out three times
And pupils are spared the teacher's query

When I walked into school yesterday morning I had a big smile on my face and a warm feeling in my heart. The sun was shining, streets were full of mirth, the birds….well, there aren’t any birds in Korea, but if there were they certainly would have been singing along to the chorus of life all around me. Why was I so excited on this morning? Could it be that I reveled in the satisfaction, the sheer pleasure this job gave me? I mean, I work all day in roomfuls of people who aren’t old enough to drink coffee on a regular basis. Children are so naïve and innocent that teaching them should be a considered a chance to mold the future of the world. To help stop the constant flow of assholes that populate this planet and begin to add to the chronic asshole epidemic, incidentally, around the time they are old enough to start enjoying coffee. So it must have been this deep sense of responsibility that brightened my morning, no?

In fact, the reason for my elation was two-fold: a) It was Friday; and 2) It was Graduation Day. Now, graduating from elementary school is certainly a rite of passage (especially for those students who peak around the third year of middle school) and I should have been full of joy at seeing my little pupils move onto the next stage of life to fulfill their dreams. To unfurl their delicate wings and fly into whichever bold direction they so choose. To see them swinging their arms in joy and singing K-pop tunes in the hallways in jubilation for the triumph they had won over primary school. I should have been, but I wasn’t. Instead I was happy that I didn’t have any classes so that I could spend the rest of my morning and afternoon reveling in freedom from work.

I have been a public school teacher in Korea for some two-and-a-half years now. That time has felt truncated, compressed, probably because of the novelty of being in a new hemisphere and among a different culture (for my first year), adjusting to realities and getting over the “honeymoon” phase and learning to live a mundane life in Asia (my second year) and getting older (always). And of course there have been the occasional overseas and overland journeys to keep my eyes and ears from self-destructing due to the sameness of city life here. But one thing that I have failed to fully reckon with during my time here is the impact that my job as an [attempted] educator of students has had on my character, on my personality and outlook on life, and on my assessment of the passing of time.

Marcel Proust said of time (among many things Proust said about time), that time “which we have at our disposal every day is elastic, the passions we feel expand it, those that inspire us contract it, and habit fills what remains.” To which of these categories does our time spent teaching belong? I know many who would agree that, at least here in Korea, to teach English in a public school (I can’t speak for private schools), entails a great gift be bestowed upon us-—the gift of downtime.

We can use our downtime for pretty much anything, and rarely is it for anything teaching related. But what about our time in the classroom? We spend at least twenty hours every week in direct contact with groups of adolescents and pre-adolescents. Most of it (one hopes) is pure in its teaching-learning essence. That is, the games and activities we construct, the questions we ask and responses students give, the social interaction with students as a single unit, in a small group or as individuals—we want these moments to be pure transmissions of knowledge, of understanding, or perhaps of an increase in confidence for the learners, even if the content is somewhat lost. Our roles as teachers can therefore be expanded to that of guiders or guardians; we guide students to have faith in themselves; we guard them against an environment that is overly punitive and stifling of creativity. So if we can really achieve this kind of flow at any moment, we are in fact expanding our time, making it worth more to us, and transcending the job title and position written on our contracts.

Of course, this magical educational theory and self-congratulation is all well and good. But do we really internalize such moments? How do they affect us as people and how do we view ourselves in relation to this role?

From many of the comments posted on Facebook and in ESL forums by native English teachers in Korea (and other countries in which foreigners are teaching English), I get the sense that many of us have great relationships with our students, a few less with our co-teachers, and still others with nobody and nothing whatsoever, life in Korea being just a kimchi-colored shitstain on their otherwise brilliant and eminent existences back in South Africa or the United States or whatever utopia they come from. These wildly different attitudes about being a teacher make me think that it is a profession not everyone is fit for, and that what we pour into our roles as educators is equal to the pleasure we will derive from our students and co-workers. If you loathe going to school every day on principle, you will most likely miss out on the time-expanding experiences that come out of meaningful interaction.

Culture does play a role in this dynamic as well, no doubt about that. And if the culture feels hostile to you, you might feel hostile to the culture, driving down the level of satisfaction you can get from your job. I wonder if this has been the case with me. Not that I see or ever saw Korea as hostile to me personally. But I did and do find it somewhat alienating, myself being an “other” in this land of “our country”, “our language”, “our culture”, “our Korea”. I was part of “them”, not part of “us”. The effect this had on my performance at work at times was closer to one of fatalism or apathy. If a class in my middle school sucked really hard, I might just chalk it up to students’ disrespect towards “the silly foreign guy”.

Hey, it seemed plausible enough. After all, how often does a Westerner (a white- or black- or other-clearly-non-Northeast-Asian-skinned person) hear the words “외국인이다!” (there’s a foreigner!) whispered or shouted by children (or the occasional adult) behind our backs or directly in from of us, sometimes accompanied by a pointed index finger in our direction, as if we were some sort of curiosity in a random street freak show. Or how many times do we endure Koreans coming up to us out of nowhere and reciting, “Hello, how are you? I’m fine! My name is Kim Nam Suk! Nice to meet you!”, before giggling and running away with their friends? I’m not suggesting these are wholly negative experiences. But they do contribute to our notion that Koreans see us as “weird”.

To be sure, these are really general and somewhat superficial observations about being a foreign teacher in Korea. If you are part of a school team that embraces and includes you, then your experience will most likely be positive. And if you believe in what you are doing as a teacher, that even the littlest bit of good achieved validates your presence in the classroom and in this country, then you might certainly develop a beautiful symbiotic relationship with your students, where they need you to guide them to new waters and you need them to feel like you have a job that you can feel proud of. After all, the downtime we have after our classes are over for the day will more than likely be used for reflection and self-assessment. We want to find out if our day in the classroom meant anything to us at all. If it is worthy of reflecting upon.

I think the next time I go to school so happy as I was on graduation day will be the first day of spring classes, when I get yet another chance to find that flow that I so often take for granted or overlook. When I can reach or inspire one little boy, one little girl in the germinal stages of learning a new language to give their best effort, knowing that I will be giving mine.

I am curious to hear thoughts of other teachers, of English or other areas, in Korea or anywhere else. What are your overall attitudes about teaching?

in media res

"I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning." -Peter DeVries

As I began to write I suddenly became aware of a gulf inside me. Something was missing. What time was it? What day, what month? Had I really been gone so long, lost in such delusions of mundane reality that I had forgotten to check a clock or a calendar? No, that is preposterous. The working man always knows what time it is. What day. What date and which clients are on the roster.

But seeing as I had no clients and no roster of any kind I sippose I could not claim to be a part of this workaday crowd, no matter how many days I worked. Or how many hours per day. I suppose it wasn’t ever really work. Just time passing while I did things they paid me for. What is work, anyhow?

The sun had risen and set many times, the minutes ticked away, the cows bawled, the kettle boiled, and yet here was I, staring off into a void. Perhaps at the gulf that had now formed in my head. A chasm that contained no thoughts. Well, perhaps thoughts of some kind from some far off places, but no thoughts that I could pull out and drag into my kitchen and clean and gut and eat and enjoy. No sir. There was nothing in my head.

A few days before, I had come up with the idea of writing a log. The log was to be real meta, real introspective and self-reflective and clinical and, well, ugly and boring I suppose. But mostly it was to be about how I don’t do what I really want to do. Now for many of you this may sound paradoxical. How does someone not do what he wants to do? Well, there are many ways. Do you think bears would LIKE to spend all that time catching salmon in their mouths when they could save much more time and energy by building a fishery, a sort of coop to collect all the fish for the collective? Of course, some bear would need to be put in charge. This might cause friction, as we have seen in countless allegories about animals doing human things….

Okay so what about politicians—do you really imagine they WANT to run for office? No. They are called forth, summoned to present their unique gifts of oral flatulence to great body politiques. Sometimes it is God who does the calling. Most times it is people with unfathomable sums of money,

So in this way I suppose it is quite right that we don’t always or ever do what we want.

As interesting as bears certainly are, the topic for my log was, erm, NOT interesting. Yes, that’s the right expression. It lacked interest. That is to say, the readers would lack the interest to read it. Basically it was about not writing but wanting to write. And then the subsequent dreams about that failure to write. The blog was, will, might be titled “Eating Spiders”.

The idea of consuming arachnids as it relates to not-writing comes from, perhaps ironically, a blog entry I found about the significance of dreams. Now, I don’t generally believe in any of that mumbo jumbo about interpretation of things. Interpretation of dreams, bones, stars, cars, reality shows, literature—it’s all the same to me. Except literature of course, which should always be interpreted, and in the appropriate, academically-governed way. However, my skepticism notwithstanding, what I read astounded me. When I happened to pass over a section about spiders, there popped up several subheadings dealing with different ways in which spiders figured into the dream. “Spiders in your room”, “spiders in your pants”, “spiders eating YOU” (only in Soviet Russia, as they say), “spiders crawling on your face” (but what if you are about to eat them?), and finally, fatally, “eating spiders”.

To cut to the chase, the gypsy dream anatomy specialist claimed that it is very common to dream about eating spiders, especially for artists and writers who have not been as productive as they feel they should. Bingo. Wowie wow wee wow. If this wasn’t some kind of wake up call, well then, it might have been a dream. I guess I’ll never know. But it resonated somewhere in my pre-frontal cortex nonetheless, and the sin wave traveled back to my occipital bun and rattled it around for a bit before finally coming to rest on my brain stem. After my leg stopped twitching and I regained motor functioning, the truth of the matter really, truly started to sink in: I am a writer who needs to write but….doesn’t.

So to start this off in the middle, let’s just simply ask the question about writing and creativity, “What is need?” What does it mean for us to “need” something versus want it or desire it? We all know of Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. But it seems to be that the slices of the pyramid usually stop being true “needs” (in the sense of survival) about one-third of the way up. Food, water, shelter, a bit of attention. A dearth of anything else wouldn’t be the death of us, would it?

Of course, the pyramid continues up to psychosocial needs, social needs, self-satisfying needs, ego-quenching needs, arrogant needs, Cheetohs-munching needs, and finally, sitting alone at the top like a lonely reflection at the head of a pin, the holy grail of humanness: the attainment of self-actualization.

It goes without saying that this table is outdated, and there have been dozens and dozens of changes and new tables and charts and graphs and diagrams and continuums created to measure needs. But the takeaway message from this is that there IS no baseline for need. There is not even an ideal amount of needs-meeting that will bring Satisfaction with a capital “S”. There IS no “meta-happiness” that can be measured on any scale extant or yet to be devised. So how do we know what we need?

I certainly don’t claim to know. The simple answer is that it is contingent upon what we want. If we WANT “y” then we usually NEED “x” to satisfy it. This is obvious, but perhaps it can move us to new ground. For example, if what we desperately want is money, then we need to develop the tools to make money or possibly a scheme to bring in money. If we strongly desire fame then we first need to decide if we’ll settle for infamy and, barring that compromise, pick a domain and work hard to earn a spot somewhere in the pantheon of the eminent and famous.

Likewise, if what we desire more than anything is to create something good and memorable and lasting, something that is beyond ourselves and that might possibly shape the world for the better if only in some very small way, then what we need is a whole host of tools and regimens, mantras and goals, valuations and schedules. Many of us wannabes find the mere mention of these necessities a kind of air-raid siren bearing down upon us, for they are too many to contemplate without our being in the middle of the work already. Without knowing that you know what you are doing how can you do what you need to do?

So what do we do, we eaters-of-spiders-in-dreams? It is not enough to create theoretical tables of tools and outlines of attack plans and adages of hard work and a nickel and a million other drops of bullshit in the pond. No, want calls for action and nothing else. The action will be auto-catalyzing, will generate momentum to combat the brutal force of entropy, the path-of-least-resistance mindset that denies so many their creative torches to take to the dark alleys and scream poetry at the naked sky. And action often demands collaboration, consultation, collusion, conspiracy. And all these things are needed. But for the artist what is required fundamentally, to cease consumption of those bitter arachnids, is self-reflection and tenacity. But enough with the “-tions”. We need to begin in the middle of things so that we can work it out for ourselves. This blog is my attempt to do that in media res.

Back with avenge ants!

Sooooo, it was some three years ago that I created a blog out of the perceived need to have someplace to write that was quasi-public. I don't know what prompted this desire. I suppose the slow, rising realization that I wanted to write. To be a writer. To write enough and in the right kinds of venues that I might be considered a writer.

Well, to my chagrin I learned that I didn't (yet) qualify. You see, writers aren't so "meta" when they produce. They generally focus of things of substance and don't refer to the writing that's being written all the time. This is the mark of an amatuer--or perhaps a saboteur. Well, at least someone who doesn't have it all down quite yet.

The last couple of months in my life have felt like crossroads to me. Of course, this isn't the first time I've had this feeling. But being in a foreign, having a relationship, playing in a band, doing a job I don't want to continue doing for year--it all adds up to a big question mark. And that question is "who the fuck am I?"

Reading a book on creativity recently (entitled "Creativity" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) has given my profound insight into the nature of creative people, people who change domains, invent things, put out a lot of work. Essentially, creative people are those people who are inherently dedicated to their art, craft, domain, career. They are not motivated by external rewards like money or fame, although these things can be sweet. They are not deterred by unfortunate events or by criticisms or sickness. Their work is THE driving force in their lives and they live it as such.

To be such a person, it seems, is not a choice. They seem different from the rest of us, besieged by a dedication so ardent that society almost always views them as strange, odd, bizarre. The fruits of their labors are the product of years upon years of hard work, learning the rules of the domain, swimming in the waters of the field and then, as if by some radical coup de grace, rebelling against these rules and creating new things--new ways of playing, new avenues of exploration, new rules about the structures of things. We tend to consider these people "geniuses". But we should not be tricked into thinking that these individuals exceed us in intellect. In fact they succeed most everyone else in Will.

Knowing what I now know about how creative people operate--that they spend most of their time thinking and working, focused on problems; that they don't waste time on unproductive things; that they are hard-working and tenacious; that they are usually brilliant at least--it feels that for me to make a mark in any domain is like pulling down the sky. It can't be done. But the ingredients are so seductively simple--hard work, energy, love. And knowing what I know about the radical Will-- that we all are endowed with any attitude we choose to view life with, which implies that our actions can change as well--I am instilled with hope that, with Will and action I may achieve truly great things.

I have started a regimen of exercise, diet, study, practice, and focused writing which I am still working to perfect. But the point is that the work will never end and one must love the work one does. We don't wake up every day hoping to see the beautiful sunset at the end. In the same way, we shouldn't live life hanging on past achievements or future promises. All that matters is luxuriating in the moment, and this includes work. If my attitude towards work becomes one that is positive, if I'm confident that what I am engaged in is leading to what I want....But even that is a perilous thought!! If I am engaged in it, is IS what I want. If I am not sure about the outcome, that shouldn't matter. The confidence of a creative person is omnipresent, omnipotent. It pervades the activities they do.

And as I write this I get a sense of strength and know that, if I write tomorrow and the next day and the next day and the next, I develop a positive feedback loop that can bring me to the place of artistry I seek. To not succumb to idleness or entropy, to not sit around when there is beautiful work to be done, marks to be etched upon the walls of life, this is the fiat I hear in my head these days.

So I say I am back, but in truth I was never here before. This is new ground, a new day, and a more compelling voice that speaks to me and tells me what I need to do with my time, with my life.

Review of "Hopscotch" by Julio Cortazar

I really would like to do a review on the magnificent book I finished yesterday, “Hopscotch”, by Julio Cortazar. The problem is that I am really not sure how to go about doing it. Sure, I could read a dozen other reviews, of the same book or another one equally intellectual. I could try to find some formal thread or technique that might encapsulate the best and worst about the novel and give great detail to my verdict. I could set it up and take my time so that it is ready for display, to be read and admired by hundreds, or at least to persuade a few to pick it up and give it a go. The problem with this route is that I might copy another reviewer's musings on the characters or the landscape, or even plagiarize the expressions the other reviewers use (how does one avoid doing that anyway?). Or maybe the effect I am looking for is more of a personal satisfaction that I can write about such a erudite work, such a monstrosity of prose and intellect and philosophical meanderings and moral surface-skimming, and the wonder if and fear that I cannot do the book justice, to be some stupid formalistic and vapid write-up that really catches some of the finer set pieces but misses the resonance of the novel’s sign wave. So I’ll just try, and only for myself, and only with a half-effort. It’s a difficult book for my first review after all.

Hopscotch is the story of a purposefully displaced intellectual. Horacio Oliveira, who spends the majority of his time seeking out answers to our moral questions through pure intellectual exercise. The novel is split into two main books. In the first book, we find Oliveira in Paris, essentially jobless, a bohemian who surrounds himself with somewhat like-minded bohemians, forming what they refer to as “The Club”. Their aim is to get lost in endless streams of consciousness, so long as they lack heaviness or too much attachment to the “real world.” Amidst a constant backdrop of 1950’s jazz music and enshrouded in a haze of cigarette smoke, the diverse group of seekers—among them a painter, a writer, and a couple of philosophers—find themselves in a pleasurable routine of academic parley, moving from the significance of ancient Chinese torture rituals to the formal and/or content constraints of literature throughout time, to the moral lassitude that seems to beset several of the more abstract-minded characters. Among this group there is one beloved member who does not quite fit in, Lucia. The hostess of the Club’s meetings (to the ire of her crazy old upstairs neighbor) and Oliveira’s lover, she plays a central role in the group’s proceedings but is unable to participate much of the time due to her severe lack of knowledge of much of the work the group references in its discussions. She is the victim of much high-browed snubbing in the form of sighs and condescending explanations from the other members, and as a result she has a much better relationship with each of the characters individually then with them as a unified force. For all her failings as an intellectual, she is clearly the most concrete, grounded and filled with common sense of anyone in the group. She also has a son named Rocamadour.

Much of the first book involves in great detail the discussions of the group—the jazz records flip from one to the next, the philosophy and smoke and calls for mate and rum and other alcohol on top of the music. Also described in great detail is the passionate and somewhat sordid relationship between Oliveira and Lucia, whom Oliveira refers to as La Maga. Both originally came from South America (Oliveira from Argentina and La Maga from Uruguay), but they ended up in Paris for different reasons. Him out of some Bohemian drive to dissect the universe and society. Her because it is simply where she washed up and decided to stay. This dichotomy of intellectual quest and materialist existence is a constant theme between the two lovers, yet the raw sexual passion that they share together is seemingly transcendent.

Oliveira eventually moves in with La Maga and their apartment becomes quite crowded with books, records and the like. The situation seems tolerable enough, until La Maga’s young son moves in with them owing to some contingent circumstances with the child’s father. Oliveira is quite displeased with this situation and acts petulant towards La Maga, complaining in an indirect way by pointing out the lack of space and acting nauseated every time the boy cries or needs to be changed. The strain finally comes to a head one night and he threatens to leave the house. They argue for hours until he finally picks up and leaves the apartment. Having no idea where to go or what to do, he wanders the streets of Paris in search of himself, contemplating his feelings (or lack of feelings) towards La Maga. Eventually he finds a piano concert debut in some small out of the way performance hall and decides to see. The scene becomes surreal and the crowd eventually dwindles down until he is the only one left in the audience. He tries his best to cheer up the crestfallen performer by shouting “bravo” and inviting her to go on a walk with him. He seems to be happy, even satisfied emotionally for a short time while walking with the pianist, and he imagines himself in a cozy apartment with she and her husband, drinking wine and having pleasant, human conversation next to the fire. However, the night ends in disaster and humiliation for Oliveira, due to some unfortunate misunderstanding.

Meanwhile, back at the apartment, Oliveira’s rival in the Club, a shady and arrogant man called Ossip Gregorovious, is at La Maga’s apartment consoling her. He is obviously in love with her, but she feels no reciprocal interest towards him. After a long discussion between the two of them, Oliveira suddenly returns to the apartment, soaking wet and miserable, angry and suspicious to find them together. The three of them chat for awhile (again, in dense philosophical quips, intellectual bursts). At some point in the night he sees Rocamadour sleeping in the corner of an adjacent room and brushes his fingers against his head. He realizes the child is dead but doesn’t want to alert La Maga for fear of her overreaction. Soon thereafter, the rest of the group begins showing up at the house and the night carries on per usual, only the news of the child’s death winds its way around everyone in the group, all except La Maga. When she discovers that the child is dead, she is inconsolable.

Later, there is a wake for the small boy which all of the Club members attend except for Oliveira, who feels his presence would not be welcome. When he returns to La Maga’s apartment a few days later, he discovers Ossip is living there and the house has been stripped bare of its possessions—she has taken everything. However, Oliveira discovers a sentimental note addressed to Rocamadour in the drawer of a desk. He knows, however, it is addressed to him. This signals the end of his dealings with the Club. He wanders around the streets once more and finds a familiar vagrant lady with whom he shares a bottle of wine and talks to for some time. Eventually they both get drunk and she performs a sex act on him. However, the police show up as this is taking place and haul him off in the patrol wagon. This is the end of book one.

The second book sees Oliveira returned to Argentina by ship. We meet two new essential characters, Traveler and Talita, his wife. Both are involved in the circus, though Talita is trained as a pharmacist. Oliveira and Traveler were close friends before his departure to Paris and so they are both somewhat happy to see each other, though slightly resentful in their own way because of their current situation. Oliveira ends up moving into an apartment directly across from the couple and eventually disrupts their lives. Oliveira ends up working first as a traveling salesman of fabric, then working in the circus with Traveler, and ultimately finding a position in an mental institution which the pair take stewardship of as a business venture after their stint in the circus comes to a close. The latter part of the novel chronicles the adventures and reconciliation of the three characters, and ultimately of Oliveira’s mental breakdown as he begins to have hallucinations of La Maga (who has disappeared from the novel after book one) and yearnings for things from his life in Paris. (Wow, that synopsis was a bit lengthy!)

In addition to the two main books, there are also about one hundred short chapters at the end of the novel, mostly fragments—poems, found poetry, marginalia, notes from the fictitious author Morelli, newspaper clippings, etc. Thus, the novel can be read in two ways. One way is to read straight through Chapter 1-Chapter 56 without going to any of the random passages in the back. The other way to read it—and which I believe makes the title of the novel an appropriate one—is to follow the prescribed chapter order given by the author. In this way, the reader finds himself bouncing back and forth, physically flipping through the pages and finding the given chapter, and moving from linear narrative to fragment of life, to intellectual crumb or fixation, or even to intriguing-yet-derivative plot points.

I should first say unequivocally that, on the whole, I really loved this novel. I was astounded by the beauty of the language, by the erudition of the author, by the novelty of some of the sentence and story forms. Every word, every sentence, character expression, description, basically every passage in the novel, felt newly minted, not like anything that was written before anywhere else. I realize that using different words throughout the whole novel—the lexicon here is ENORMOUS and I would recommend both a dictionary and some kind of cultural guidebook (internet) to anyone serious about following all the references; it surpasses “Ulysses” or works by Huxley in its references to history, literature, music, pop culture, mythology, etc—but it does make for a unique reading experience. It’s as if the characters are constantly having breakthroughs, seeing things from a different vantage, even if the vantage has been taken by someone else before.

“Hopscotch” is a book about a lot of things, but essentially about ways of being towards the world, towards fellow humans, towards oneself, towards art and literature, towards society. Oliveira’s character is the embodiment of overt intellectualism, a mind that is abstract and flexible but which cannot really grasp human feeling or common sense. He can quote any poet but knows not about what poets write. He finds his opposite in La Maga, a somewhat off-center woman with more than enough common sense and emotion, but with a whimsical notion of life, one that eschews intellectualism even as she herself tries to become more familiar with the academic names and ideas bandied about in the Club. Even though their relationship is lustful and enjoyable, he is adamant that they not be in love, that he be allowed to be “free”. But free from what? It is not exactly commitment that Oliveira is afraid of, but of lowering his guard and becoming someone who is not in pursuit of that highest intellectual ideal. Ironically, he seems to have no understanding of what he is searching for as he grabs at thousands of diffuse or interconnected straws. He finds no real peer within the Club, even though they are the most elite group of thinkers (speaking about potential) one can imagine. When he’s challenged with one argument, he turns it on its head and calls for the opposite. He claims to be searching even for a moral key by being amoral. He seems to want himself to be a representative of an ideal or argument.

His quest leads him to a sort of desperation, on the verge of which he discovers himself capable of human emotions, but he appears to be afraid of these emotions. For example, when he is wandering the streets thinking of La Maga he becomes frustrated at some of the sentimental misgivings he has about leaving, about their past, about her situation. Later, when he accompanies the pianist in the rain and is fantasizing about drinking wine by the fire, he seems sad and upset that his humble and human desire cannot come to pass. But then a slap on the face from the scandalized pianist sends him right back into his standard stoic mood. He rebukes himself for these feelings and says “I must be getting soft in my old age.”

Later in the novel, when Oliveira is reunited with his old friend Traveler, he doesn’t display affection but recognizes a brotherly connection between them. Traveler has everything the Oliveira cannot have—a wife, love, common sense about responsibilities and obligations. At this point in his saga, Oliveira seems to have reached the end of his rope, and because he has somewhere deep down a desire which he can’t justify by his abstractions, he begins to hallucinate about reality, to see Talita as he wants her to be, that is, as La Maga. Because he has no way to resolve this despair intellectually, he goes a bit crazy.

I have to admit that much of this novel was probably lost on me, though I tried by best to concentrate and commit. There was just an overwhelming amount of references, of linguistic gymnastics, of modernist and surrealist and beat style that, although constantly entertaining and beautiful in their own way, made it difficult to focus on the “plot” or even on the theme of the novel. If I had to venture some a guess as to the conflicts in the novel, I would say that there is intellectualism versus material and emotional connection to the world; modern man’s attempt to achieve a feeling of significance amongst an ocean of cultural, historic, and scientific achievements; an individual’s ability to reconcile his ideals with the concrete reality of life; a compelling and painful need to examine the world metaphysically, to arrive at an answer through questions which might be the wrong ones, but which we keep asking because we don’t know what the right ones are.

There are several formal and stylistic elements that pervade the novel. One that has been mentioned a lot and which informs the writing of a lot of artists of this generation is that of jazz. From Allen Ginsberg to Jackson Pollock, artists drew inspiration from the improvised nature of jazz; from the stream of consciousness that pours out seemingly chaotically but which eventually has some kind of meaning, meaning that can be determined if one pays attention. “Hopscotch” is peppered heavily with jazz, with leaps from one character’s mind to another, with segues from one line of discussion or thought to another. And the beauty of Cortazar’s writing is that it is all done effortlessly, as if that’s how the composition were intended to be played exactly. It is inspiring to read a novel that feels so intellectual yet so expressive. The lines ooze poetry and excitement, perhaps naïveté, but never apathy. It isn’t an apathetic generation or group, but perhaps a cynical one, that chooses to spend it’s evenings getting winedrunk and listening to jazz, discussing things they know they’ll never resolve but discussing the same. It is a kind of mental vigor on display, if that means “action” is deferred or not attempted at all. But it is not a wasted group of minds, no matter how devastating the consequences of their actions might be. These are not Gatsby’s West Eggers—they are bohemians with ONLY mental excursion at their disposal and they put it to full use.

Among the other stylistic effects present is one that occurs in other Latin American writers of this period, although it’s more of a genre: magical realism, a way of writing without complete adherence to physical or biological laws. It is on display here as characters can make amazing leaps of reality without explanation. Unlike realist novels, there is no need to give every detail about HOW something occurred; that’s not so important. For example, the surreal fact of the disappearing crowd in the performance hall in book one, though outlandish and a bit magical, is less important than its effect on Oliveira’s humanity. Also, the latter part of book two has some odd scenes which are not explained—how does the couple come to acquire the mental institution? Why does a pharmacist work in the circus? It is surreal. How does Oliveira’s mental breakdown precipitate exactly? We are not given these details. In that regard, the real “magic” here is not in having characters defy gravity, but in omitting the explanation of some incredible facts and moving from one action to the next, from one event to the next as if we are jumping on lily pads. In that respect, Cortazar’s narration is less like Dostoevsky and more like Kafka—things just “are” that way.

In sum, the novel is brilliant; a collage of short stories fused into a cohesive narrative which is carried by the sheer elegant brilliance of its language if by nothing else. The plot is not the heart of the artichoke. Rather, it is the feel of the mate on the back of our Oliveira’s throat, the satisfaction and searching and captivating set pieces, which make this one of the best books I’ve yet read.

Outside my apartment and wondering what to do

Every moment in life is a choice—to be or not to be; to do or not to do; to grasp at a shimmering straw or let the wind carry it away from you forever; to smoke the last drag of a cigarette or to throw it to the ground and move on to another task; to bask in Love and Wonder or to disappear into Wonder’s oblivion; to write this word or that; to forget to write anything at all; to break your legs or your heart in a dance which compels you, or to not be compelled to dance; to stare at the sky or to stare at the ground; to be or not to be; to do or not to do. Every indivisible moment in Eternity is Will. And yet it is at once Destiny.