I checked the view count earlier today and apparently Free Darko linked to my ridiculous Burl Ives/Free Darko fiction. Heh.
Blogging's a funny business: One day you're blogging about some gibberish that passes through your head as randomly as a cloud in a dream over the sycamore tress, the next day (or year) you are sanctimoniously defending these same opinions in an overwrought second blog that attests to the consistency of your identity, the solemn consideration with which you decided to pit a quite-popular blogger who pairs basketball and critical theory against a legendary folk singer known for his off-beat characters that encapsulate the futility and the cynical artistry of the aristrocratic American gentry in a satirical screed against the former which, unbeknownst to me at the time, actually fails miserably to make this juxtaposition correctly, damns my narrator (the third character) of mental violence and sadomasochistic machismo, and ends up giving a feeble and "badass" adolescent-hero-figure voice to the legitimately impenentrable and difficult vocal genius Burl Ives. Yes, blogging's a funny business indeed. Yeah, blogging will certainly teach your grandmother to suck eggs, alright.
Listen, Nathan, I'm gonna have to cut this entry short: Y'all cain't see it, but Alex's eyes rolled back, a-bleedin' like a sieve, and he started speaking in tongues that I ain't ever heard in my time on Earth and even.. well, the other place, heh. I guess it's all that Borges fella he's been a-readin'. It infected him like the damn hell plague back in '86, heh. I told him all that porin' over authors damn-nigh sixteen hours a day would hurt his eyes, but he didn't believe me. You should see him, Nathan. It's gruesome. But he'll be alright, else I wouldn't be a-finna chucklin' later with him. I'm pouring some salt from his damn martini over the eyes, yes sir, I guess something from a martini can actually have a damn effect. I'd some bad problems with the drinkin' once before, but that was nothing to do with a damn martini which damned if it does a damn thing. Yeah, there, he's waking up. Just needed some salt from a martini in his eyes. Imagine that, I say, imagine that. Eh heh heh eh heh, I say, eh heh.
Alright, I'm back. Where was I. Yeah, okay, so apparently I didn't write the last paragraph. I wonder why that is. Huh. Oh, okay. Yeah, Burl, that's more like Foghorn Leghorn near the end, not the wise but emotionally distant patriarch of Tennessee Williams in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof". That's not realistic monologue, and some of the worst dialect writing this Earth has ever seen. That said, if you really want, I could go back to "The Big Country" and look at the shotgun scene again, but really, I feel like I've internalized everything you wanted to tell me, Burl, even if I can't immediately imitate you. I mean, I'm not obsessed, I just watched your films and listened to any damn album I could get my hands on! What more can I say? But yeah, no, that's never happened before where you took over like that. And right in the middle of a blog entry. Huh. It's weird.
But you know what? Internalizing half of Burl Ives sends you somewhere entirely new, perhaps into visions, perhaps into tongues, perhaps into song. Sure, you counter, internalizing half of Burl Ives might merely be reconfirming some of your opinions, and you might only be awakening a common spiritual lineage between the two of you, the half of Burl Ives that lives inside you. But even here is an awakening, and that's my point: there has to be some kind of change. No one is born like Burl Ives, or educated to be like Burl Ives. He's like one of the great philosophers. It takes a society and a statistical fluke and some arid mountains of private suffering to develop such a one. A birth, an education, a family, a stark moment and a stark hour of suffering against the backdrop of something affirmative and distinct from suffering, that is what is needed to make a Burl Ives. No one but Burl Ives can be Burl Ives and therefore, to internalize Burl Ives is to make yourself essentially different from who you were, either more generic or more singular, but in terms of becoming Burl Ives, you have only climbed a great distance up an infinitely high mountain. It's an endless journey, no matter how much time you are willing to devote to the task, because while you can understand his every word, you can't, even theoretically, grasp what it means without fundamentally altering your essence. And your essence, while seeming sort of nebulous and hand-wavy as a term, is something that contains your past, your present, and all your possible futures as soon as it touches down onto where you are placed. Perhaps that's a good enough definition of essence, right there.
And maybe this thought experiment of internalizing Burl Ives reveals precisely my problem with Shoals, the thought experiment that first hallucinated the juxtaposition and conflict in the first place. Internalizing half of Shoals, as all his readers who are bloggers have done to some greater or lesser fraction, does nothing except to alter these people to be bloggers that are exactly halfway between themselves and Shoals, a smooth, if multidimensional, continuum of selves. It doesn't change their essence. They could stop reading Shoals and they would go back exactly to the way they were in a timeframe that could be practically predicted by a psychologist and a statistician working. If one could read his thoughts and consider (in a sort of eternity) the whole of Shoals, one could completely internalize him without changing one iota of one's essence. (Personally, I'd probably be a bit cattier, snippier, and better and more apt at comparing something to Avon Barksdale) No possible futures have been altered when you read him. You go on with your life, having accepted his theories, beliefs, and characterizations, or having rejected them. The columns don't provoke enlightenment or its more disturbing cousins so much as they provoke a palatable cross between meditation and gossip which is ephemereal and shallow and able to be (and often is) undone by Shoals himself with another later column of similar aspect. It's mostly longform small talk, whether the subject is fashion, the "We Believe" Warriors, or racism in America.
Now, there's nothing wrong with this, and in the book of life perhaps I'm hardly "deep" in this way, either (I've probably made 10 posts on Richard Jefferson, for God's sake). But God, I just wish there was something more there, Shoals. Give us the "unspeakably injured" moments a little more often. Write for your readers the atomic bombs inside the skulls of the fifties that have been turned into banal commodities on album covers. Let the hedgehog out and prick your audience with more than the occasional annoyance of disagreement. Let the three image form become a montage that changes a randomly selected image on Free Darko imperceptibly, every hour on the hour. Buy into one of those Godawful artistic manifestos of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, namedrop all its adherents, and then pretend you have never heard of any of them in a week. Make alterations to the basketball court and see which ones alter your pick for MVP. Then, really shock us, Shoals. Really take your way of looking at things and take it as far as it can go. The pen doesn't have to end at the bottom of the page. Look at Amar'e. He let the ink from his pen continue on to stain and reappropriate his skin, becoming who he is, in all his falseness, banality, and something ridiculously approximating truth. Amar'e is someone that a misguided teenager could aspire to be, and make some big mistakes. Play basketball with a phrenological head and then write as if the head had been your own. Free Free Darko. Make yourself (if only as an artist) someone that is impossible to internalize and irresistable to attempt. Climb the writer's mountain, strive for the infinite top and give us the impossible views, instead of setting up palatable base camps with reasonable views. Hold on, just a moment, heh. I have to wake my friend Alex with some salt from this martini.
Okay, I'm back. What did I miss? Oh, God, stark idealization of Shoals, what are you doing there? God damn it, first Burl Ives and now this. Yeah, I don't agree with all of that, for sure, and I think that this piece is even odder and problematic than the last one. Something that starts a fire in the soul can't just be extinguished but with another Molotov, I guess. Hmm, I think...I'm going to post this, take a nice little nap, wake up and explore the Ios-Fira trail real early tomorrow. 9 miles or something, I think. But yeah, sorry about this piece. I don't know why I'm having these visions! Such strange water in Santorini! I guess it didn't help that I ate an entire pizza and some baklava with 1.5 liters of water in one sitting, either~. Uh...I guess Day 17's a wrap! Heh.
--Alex
Blogging's a funny business: One day you're blogging about some gibberish that passes through your head as randomly as a cloud in a dream over the sycamore tress, the next day (or year) you are sanctimoniously defending these same opinions in an overwrought second blog that attests to the consistency of your identity, the solemn consideration with which you decided to pit a quite-popular blogger who pairs basketball and critical theory against a legendary folk singer known for his off-beat characters that encapsulate the futility and the cynical artistry of the aristrocratic American gentry in a satirical screed against the former which, unbeknownst to me at the time, actually fails miserably to make this juxtaposition correctly, damns my narrator (the third character) of mental violence and sadomasochistic machismo, and ends up giving a feeble and "badass" adolescent-hero-figure voice to the legitimately impenentrable and difficult vocal genius Burl Ives. Yes, blogging's a funny business indeed. Yeah, blogging will certainly teach your grandmother to suck eggs, alright.
Listen, Nathan, I'm gonna have to cut this entry short: Y'all cain't see it, but Alex's eyes rolled back, a-bleedin' like a sieve, and he started speaking in tongues that I ain't ever heard in my time on Earth and even.. well, the other place, heh. I guess it's all that Borges fella he's been a-readin'. It infected him like the damn hell plague back in '86, heh. I told him all that porin' over authors damn-nigh sixteen hours a day would hurt his eyes, but he didn't believe me. You should see him, Nathan. It's gruesome. But he'll be alright, else I wouldn't be a-finna chucklin' later with him. I'm pouring some salt from his damn martini over the eyes, yes sir, I guess something from a martini can actually have a damn effect. I'd some bad problems with the drinkin' once before, but that was nothing to do with a damn martini which damned if it does a damn thing. Yeah, there, he's waking up. Just needed some salt from a martini in his eyes. Imagine that, I say, imagine that. Eh heh heh eh heh, I say, eh heh.
Alright, I'm back. Where was I. Yeah, okay, so apparently I didn't write the last paragraph. I wonder why that is. Huh. Oh, okay. Yeah, Burl, that's more like Foghorn Leghorn near the end, not the wise but emotionally distant patriarch of Tennessee Williams in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof". That's not realistic monologue, and some of the worst dialect writing this Earth has ever seen. That said, if you really want, I could go back to "The Big Country" and look at the shotgun scene again, but really, I feel like I've internalized everything you wanted to tell me, Burl, even if I can't immediately imitate you. I mean, I'm not obsessed, I just watched your films and listened to any damn album I could get my hands on! What more can I say? But yeah, no, that's never happened before where you took over like that. And right in the middle of a blog entry. Huh. It's weird.
But you know what? Internalizing half of Burl Ives sends you somewhere entirely new, perhaps into visions, perhaps into tongues, perhaps into song. Sure, you counter, internalizing half of Burl Ives might merely be reconfirming some of your opinions, and you might only be awakening a common spiritual lineage between the two of you, the half of Burl Ives that lives inside you. But even here is an awakening, and that's my point: there has to be some kind of change. No one is born like Burl Ives, or educated to be like Burl Ives. He's like one of the great philosophers. It takes a society and a statistical fluke and some arid mountains of private suffering to develop such a one. A birth, an education, a family, a stark moment and a stark hour of suffering against the backdrop of something affirmative and distinct from suffering, that is what is needed to make a Burl Ives. No one but Burl Ives can be Burl Ives and therefore, to internalize Burl Ives is to make yourself essentially different from who you were, either more generic or more singular, but in terms of becoming Burl Ives, you have only climbed a great distance up an infinitely high mountain. It's an endless journey, no matter how much time you are willing to devote to the task, because while you can understand his every word, you can't, even theoretically, grasp what it means without fundamentally altering your essence. And your essence, while seeming sort of nebulous and hand-wavy as a term, is something that contains your past, your present, and all your possible futures as soon as it touches down onto where you are placed. Perhaps that's a good enough definition of essence, right there.
And maybe this thought experiment of internalizing Burl Ives reveals precisely my problem with Shoals, the thought experiment that first hallucinated the juxtaposition and conflict in the first place. Internalizing half of Shoals, as all his readers who are bloggers have done to some greater or lesser fraction, does nothing except to alter these people to be bloggers that are exactly halfway between themselves and Shoals, a smooth, if multidimensional, continuum of selves. It doesn't change their essence. They could stop reading Shoals and they would go back exactly to the way they were in a timeframe that could be practically predicted by a psychologist and a statistician working. If one could read his thoughts and consider (in a sort of eternity) the whole of Shoals, one could completely internalize him without changing one iota of one's essence. (Personally, I'd probably be a bit cattier, snippier, and better and more apt at comparing something to Avon Barksdale) No possible futures have been altered when you read him. You go on with your life, having accepted his theories, beliefs, and characterizations, or having rejected them. The columns don't provoke enlightenment or its more disturbing cousins so much as they provoke a palatable cross between meditation and gossip which is ephemereal and shallow and able to be (and often is) undone by Shoals himself with another later column of similar aspect. It's mostly longform small talk, whether the subject is fashion, the "We Believe" Warriors, or racism in America.
Now, there's nothing wrong with this, and in the book of life perhaps I'm hardly "deep" in this way, either (I've probably made 10 posts on Richard Jefferson, for God's sake). But God, I just wish there was something more there, Shoals. Give us the "unspeakably injured" moments a little more often. Write for your readers the atomic bombs inside the skulls of the fifties that have been turned into banal commodities on album covers. Let the hedgehog out and prick your audience with more than the occasional annoyance of disagreement. Let the three image form become a montage that changes a randomly selected image on Free Darko imperceptibly, every hour on the hour. Buy into one of those Godawful artistic manifestos of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, namedrop all its adherents, and then pretend you have never heard of any of them in a week. Make alterations to the basketball court and see which ones alter your pick for MVP. Then, really shock us, Shoals. Really take your way of looking at things and take it as far as it can go. The pen doesn't have to end at the bottom of the page. Look at Amar'e. He let the ink from his pen continue on to stain and reappropriate his skin, becoming who he is, in all his falseness, banality, and something ridiculously approximating truth. Amar'e is someone that a misguided teenager could aspire to be, and make some big mistakes. Play basketball with a phrenological head and then write as if the head had been your own. Free Free Darko. Make yourself (if only as an artist) someone that is impossible to internalize and irresistable to attempt. Climb the writer's mountain, strive for the infinite top and give us the impossible views, instead of setting up palatable base camps with reasonable views. Hold on, just a moment, heh. I have to wake my friend Alex with some salt from this martini.
Okay, I'm back. What did I miss? Oh, God, stark idealization of Shoals, what are you doing there? God damn it, first Burl Ives and now this. Yeah, I don't agree with all of that, for sure, and I think that this piece is even odder and problematic than the last one. Something that starts a fire in the soul can't just be extinguished but with another Molotov, I guess. Hmm, I think...I'm going to post this, take a nice little nap, wake up and explore the Ios-Fira trail real early tomorrow. 9 miles or something, I think. But yeah, sorry about this piece. I don't know why I'm having these visions! Such strange water in Santorini! I guess it didn't help that I ate an entire pizza and some baklava with 1.5 liters of water in one sitting, either~. Uh...I guess Day 17's a wrap! Heh.
--Alex
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