K-Mark

We've come to another Friday, my Puddlers. There is another round of summer movies to be had, another round of summer dresses to observe women wearing and the continued hope of periods of rain, giving way to after-rain, which might be the most pleasant time to live in a city in the summer—especially if a park and a bar and a woman in a light purple dress are nearby.

I'll be dodging the heat this weekend and listening to the new Bon Iver album, which is fantastic. I recommend you listen to it as well as I'll probably be writing about it, rain, and Cat Stevens very soon. Also, next week look for one of those sprawling epic posts that has made me famous among those who detest fame.

However, today, we have Mark Jack in what I believe is one of his most poignant and on point posts, which is saying something because I feel like he has been on a roll over the past month. So, without further ado, I give you your Friday dose of Mr. Mark Richard Jack.

In Search

Mark Jack

Sometimes it seems like there is a certain satisfaction in circling around the glories of cultural appetites, even when it might be better to avoid that kind of taste altogether, that kind of circuitous observance and thought. I feel like I ought to do less of that, that circling, and instead move straight to the page or the computer screen or whatever. But then I fear my hand’s weakness, my eyes’ unwillingness and my mind’s flightiness and I circle and circle.

So when I’m told, “You can’t just get drunk and wait to become a writer,” or something like that, I’m terribly embarrassed by all the crass assumptions I’ve been making.

But Hell.

I just finished reading Swann’s Way and, don’t worry, I’m not going to talk about it. I don’t know that I could say anything that worthwhile. It is a stunning work that has enough baggage around it without my contributions. I was talking to a friend recently who said she tried to read it but couldn’t get into it, claiming disinterest in long passages about doorknobs. I don’t remember any particularly long passage about a doorknob but if it’s in there, I want to find it and confront one of the (most likely) most beautiful descriptions of a doorknob in literary history. Read it.

Reading Proust’s long passages on memory, I am forced to confront my own problems as “presence.” I wish I could be upset about something I’d done, rather than something I continue to do, for I could look on it all, then, as my past. For so many years I have not regretted, which is perhaps to say that I have not truly remembered. Either way, while I have recognized mistakes I’ve made and disliked aspects of my previous selves, I have never wished for the opportunity to change.  I have been fairly content with myself—the smug bastard—and perhaps feared some disruption of the space-time continuum, and so never even considered things like, wanting to go back to high school and not buy that weed that got me expelled. I find myself rejecting, somewhat, that Doc Brown mentality recently, which leaves me in a shitty position. And I must admit that, while I am more inclined to it, time travel remains a fantasy.

I am actually happier, now, and in a fuller sense, than I have been for years, and it is this happiness that has made my regrets more punishing, as I have reached a place where I am beginning to feel that I deserve or at least have worked for a better life than one which consists of being taken advantage of at service industry jobs. I was interviewed on a WNYC show last fall and they tried to tell me I’m “malemployed” because I worked at a bar even though I have a B.A. That is, until they found out I majored in literature.

I think it is important to struggle with memory and reject mistakes, but not punish oneself for them in the present. I mean, we can’t be depressed because we did something shitty when we were ten, but we shouldn’t convince ourselves that the event was an integral part of a delicate narrative that has led to a person; a “me” that I am satisfied with, to a reasonable degree. Somehow, that attitude, which has been the predominant attitude of my life, is one that refuses real confrontation with oneself, either in the past or in the present, and one which, as it performs an act of avoidance also performs an act of inclusion. That is to say, we refuse to confront our mistakes so as to better establish them in convenient areas of our lives so that they are remembered as fitting, linear narratives. “Even though I shouldn’t have behaved that way,” this manner of thinking suggests, “it was integral to the self that I have become and to reject that mistake is to reject my self, which is a mistake.” Dumb bit of logic there, eh?  I mean, why shouldn’t we reject ourselves, ever. I reject the drug obsessed arrogant puissant that I was my freshman year of college. I wasted a lot of time, a lot of everyone’s time. That kid that I was was a piece of shit, and since there is no Dolorean to take me back, I cannot know that if I slapped my former self around a bit and made him get his shit together a little sooner that somehow the world would’ve ended yesterday. Also, and this is the truly unfortunate thing about the lack of a flux capacitor, I cannot slap that obnoxious piece of shit that was me around, not even a little. My one consolation is to understand that; that self is not me.

Mark

P.S. I am moving to Berkeley, CA in August. Any help with job opportunities would be awesome. Thanks.

Don't Break My Mark

It's Friday once again, my Puddlers, and I am definitely looking forward to this weekend. I'm going to keep this preamble short by just saying you should all love your friends, feel bad for victims of the terrible tornados, know that the best place to be during a tornado is underground or in a natural ditch, and that when you are up 15 points in the fourth quarter with a chance to go up 2-0 in the NBA Finals, you do not stop running your offense and rely on "hero-ball" aka throwing up three-pointers.

That's it for me this week. Now, I leave you with the one man who can do what he does—Mr. Mark Jack.

High, Low and In Between

Mark Jack

What about the fact that we speak too greedily of ourselves? Are we too readily to see in this action a dilemma? Is it possible that we too arbitrarily suggest, by identifying this action as a dilemma, an ethics imperfectly followed?

What of it all?

Moreover, who has allowed the proliferation of such a voice, such an increasingly pedagogical voice, here? (Matthew!!)

There is some strange double movement, here, of democratic specialization. Perhaps it is merely a chaos of opinions imperfectly read as such and the problem of such misreading is due to this confused space. But what space?

Much of the writing I encounter on the Internet is decent at best, but the lack of hierarchical positioning renders our navigation of worth difficult as the decent manifests itself on the same level as the heinous and the sometimes profound. My ability to traverse the information as if perusing a schizophrenic quilt, in my mind, does not perform a revolutionary re-reading of knowledge or power, but instead, relegates language to advertisement. Reading the average blog, one quickly comes across a blue, underlined phrase that, if clicked, takes the reader to yet another page with its own set of blue links to more pages, ad infinitum. Moreover, all this linkage is surrounded by unapologetic advertisements.

In addition to this one may find that most posts are merely a re-rendering of popular culture as performed by the main players into the form of journal. By inserting the presence of the I into the happenings of the day, or some new record, we are asserting both our (meaning bloggers) individuality—as personal and yet non-specialist—and our expertise—as we may suggest, by hyperlink not our knowledge, which might be imperfect, but another’s, which, though possibly imperfect, is at a remove from us, and so deniable, making our assertions as expert via un-impeachability.

So what?

I do find it both discomforting and comforting. The ease with which I, earlier today, watched a music video of Dominique Young Unique and, then, watched a video of Elaine Scarry lecturing at Cambridge is, despite the joy I find in such an ability to access information, a bit disconcerting. Perhaps I am discomforted because I cling to the old forms of access as a means to power, perhaps in my unease I reveal the reluctance with which I approach the focus of much my liberal arts education, which was to challenge such limited access, and subsequently reveal my desire to remain privileged.

What I am actually concerned with here is not that one has greater access to information—that, I think is positive—but rather that varied information is given almost equal resonance. The discussion I might have in an academic setting may carry over to the bar, and I have been delighted when it has, but in no way should we confuse the alcoholic passion of the bar discussion with the rigor of the academic. Both have their merits, but we are given cues as to how much and what kind of attention should be given in the physical world while the internet largely erases such cues, which is why, perhaps, you are here, reading this. Sorry.

The Internet seems to operate spatially and yet I do not find myself using spatial vocabulary.

I have used the word “here” many times in this post and yet, even while my assumption is that here refers to the virtual space of this blog, I can’t help but simultaneously position myself in my bedroom where I am writing this and where I would most likely read it. Here, then becomes a spatial specific word but not a site specific. The word “on” is another commonly used word, which operates in terms of a spatial metaphor. As I write this, I am on a chair, but I am also on my computer.

These are not exactly profound realizations, but I think it is important to recognize the limitations of the spatial metaphors used for the Internet. The collapse of high and low culture is not new to the Internet and, I believe, a positive thing, a sort of continuation of the modernist utopian project. However, the collapse of notions of expertise is problematic. In addition to this, the boundaries of culture and language largely remain. Google searches do not routinely return results that are pages in different languages or that were created in other countries, even if English speakers.

There is a strange geography that we are routinely exploring, and as comfortable as we become and as dependent as we become upon this world we have yet to truly confront the ethics of this space in the same way we have in the physical world.  I look forward to the explorations and the critiques.

Love,

Mark

Take Another Piece of My Mark

Happy Valentine's Day all my Puddlers. I wouldn't be here without all of your love, adoration and chocolate, so I thank you all.  I went to the Heat/Celtics game at the TD Garden in Boston this weekend, so I will give you my thoughts on that tomorrow as well as some announcements for blog content over the next two weeks. Also, this week you can expect another rambling, emotional essay that hopefully touches on something poignant.

However, today, on the day of love, I give you a post from the man who perhaps defines romance, passion, sweeping statements of drama and cavalierism, and, well, love.  Mr. Mark Jack will put you in the mood, so keep those oysters for another evening, an evening when you can't get it up.

Take it away, Mark.


Inner Resources

Mark Jack



Several versions of my failures have impressed upon me a sense, and maybe a facial tic or two, of urgent contemplation. Perhaps it is merely that my glasses are no longer properly prescribed, but I am daily caught without a thought in my head, or anywhere, or maybe I am repeatedly found stuck in those spaces just after the word where one normally considers, contemplates and hopefully understands the word. I remain stuck in a rut but not out of sync.

How much of my life is lived reflectively? How often have I written or said, “I think” or “I wonder” instead of thinking or wondering? So much wasted time and wasted space, announcing my intentions instead of just intending. I write “I think” so that I, myself, might know that I am now, in this un-capturable now, writing and thinking what will come, what will be thought by me, and do I really? do I think? or do I avoid the possibility of thought altogether by simply writing longer and longer preambles, small conciliatory clauses, apologetic phrases, employing countless conjunctions and near pointless prepositions?

Friends! I remain stalled, non-committal.

The average Egyptian lives on two dollars a day, the Economist told me, though the currency used is the Egyptian pound—small liars. I read with liberal interest. Hillary is in a bind.

Would Woody let all this pass, all this turmoil turn the world, as unnoticed as we have let it be?

I feel that I worry that I feel like Henry, maybe.

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) "Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no

Inner Resources." I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored. 

Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature, 

Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes 

as bad as Achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag 

and somehow a dog 

has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into the mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

No…

Here, in one of Berryman’s Dream Songs even boredom is announced, shouted; it is a thing, a motivating thing. I am committed, at least, to my lack. I am a floating signifier—of what!?—, an unfinished equation—to what end!? To those still reading, I can promise no conclusion, but thank you for your patience. I mean to say, that you will not be rewarded.

I have been reading Berryman’s poetry with great enthusiasm since a friend introduced him to me two years or so ago, and I find lines and stanzas and whole poems creeping into my mind now and then like some antidote to canned phrases like now and then. 

I want to venture the suggestion that we need a little more language in our lives, maybe a little more self-conscious language. We have too much un-self-conscious language in our lives and, strangely, as much irony. It seems strange to feel that we have combined irony with un-self-consciousness, but we have,, and it is strange. In fact, it cannot be irony, but rather the ironic mode in which we conceive ourselves, and that mode is employed without thought or substance too often. Or rather, it is confused with some form of knowledge authentically, or, as Paul de Man writes, “to know inauthenticity is not the same as to be authentic.”

Love,

Mark

Take a Walk in the Mark

Another week has passed, my Puddlers.  What an eventful week its been.  There is still a lot of stuff coming.  On Monday, you will get the NBA podcast I just recorded with Miles Debas and Paul Sicilian and then later in that week you will get another fantastic, long-winded column and music and literature from myself.

In the meantime, you get the man who could only bring you the material that he brings you.  A man you will save you from the banality of your thoughts and expose you to the complexities of the mundane.  There can be only one, Mr. Mark Jack.



On Methods of Disengagement


Mark Jack

There are far too many angles of conversation to be stuck into the rut of just using one or two. It is my belief that we don’t end up speaking a thing when we find ourselves so stuck to one means of conversing.   The same thing seems to hold true for moving in this world. We never end up actually travelling somewhere or reflecting our desire to move, if we continue to make the same turns and circuitous routes. The importance of the unexpected turn of phrase, or foot in this regard, is invaluable. Now, in my head so often—maybe too often—with all my thoughts structured like a conversation that can only go my way, but strangely never does, I’m making a right turn (as I walk) with little thought but to the mechanics of such a move.

And, slipping endlessly amongst these people of the world, I forget that the taxis, with their dorsal fin advertisements, are not strange dinosaurs; I forget that my tongue has been working constantly, all my life, shouting obscenities and philosophies at passersby. None of my endless language has brought me any closer to these people who swirl around, posing a confused current, leaving me with no safe, lee side. Perhaps, as we approach a greater globalization, our languages will consolidate, drenched in technology, perhaps we now experience the birth pangs of a new community. It's too early to tell. It's always too early to tell. We are in a constant state of telling ourselves that it is too early to tell. Language, maybe, is just a tool with which to create histories, thereby allowing us the relief of knowing that someday it will not be too early to tell, and excusing us from making a decision about now, now. Because of this, I am forced to wonder at all these people, squirming around, on foot, or inside those strange mechanical dinosaurs.

Yet, now here I am, suddenly, having been walking this whole thought through, on Gerry Street, walking north towards Broadway. There is not a soul around me but cat souls and rat souls I imagine. There is an overgrown, fenced-in lot half way down the block, which for all the surrounding attempts at destitution and all the assertions of halted construction, is beautifully insect and bird song filled, like some strange misplaced slice of nature loudly asserting its development of unfocused identity. The street is somewhat unnerving in its ugliness, though. On one trip down the short block or two that is the entire street, I was forced into the middle of the pockmarked road by an inexplicably huge, sidewalk-sitting pile of garbage, astir with the strange forces of putrefaction. The next day it was gone. This may not seem surprising, but this is not a street that speaks of diligence, but rather negligence, as in, where was the trash-responsible party on such a destitute un-lived on street? This kind of occurrence - a set of antagonizing forces harmonizing unexpectedly - is exactly why I have enjoyed this street. The fault in my antagonizing the forms that feed me, what my misplaced vehemence is missing is simple: it is this mysterious element of harmony.  Simple disengagement is not enough, ever. One must constantly re-engage with the words that seem so dead and over-used and re-assert their potentiality, lifting them into sentences that are like foreign land - using those words to reach some insight where previously there could be none.

I invariably think of Beckett, and his trio of novels, Molly, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, especially, in this regard. They are brilliant, but people more talented than I have said enough, and I am also reminded of a contemporary author and his bewildering use of language, Gary Lutz. I saw the man recently at a reading and discussion thing at the Center for Fiction, an obvious and overly busted old building up in the Diamond District.

It was one of the more awkward panels I’ve seen, and brilliant, particularly on the parts of Gary Lutz and John Haskell, the latter an author I was not aware of but with whom I intend to become familiar. Christine Schutt, also fantastic, was also there but mostly hid behind a nervously brooding Ben Marcus.

Gary Lutz is a sentence writer, and his stories are often vastly un-storied, but minutely communicative. By this I do not mean that he communicates only small things or in a small way, but, I mean to say, he is precise, and yet, somehow not. He has an almost prohibitive—to a reader’s understanding—understanding of English grammar and employs his understanding in the most unlooked for ways to approach a subject and/or object. His descriptions do not rely on average cues, visual or otherwise, instead opting for the unexpected modifier, writing things like, “My sisters turned out to be women who wore their hair speculatively, lavishing it forward into swells… ” I don’t think anyone is lost as to the hairstyle discussed here, and what I find exciting about Lutz’s use of “speculatively,” for instance, is that he is able to describe his sisters via a hairstyle but without necessarily only invoking what the reader will generally understand by such a styled character. That is, the narrator’s sisters are not simply characterized by having hair, lavished “forward into swells,” which speaks a great deal to the kind of people they are, but they are also people who style themselves not simply in a manner, but in a mood also. “Speculatively” modifies the way in which they wear their hair but seems to seep into a description of the hairstyle itself as well. Lutz is almost disorienting, and after reading him I find myself paying attention to language so closely, almost as if it were not my own anymore.  I pay attention to the language and it becomes something new; an object once familiar not taken for granted. Almost as though I were suddenly looking at my own hand with all the wonder that such a complex device completely at my disposal should almost always incite. Maybe a Lutz fiction and an unplanned walk a day is perfect medicine for that old conformity concern.

Gary Lutz has written a few collections of stories and I recommend them all, but the one I have in my lap as I write this is a small, “zine-like” one called Partial List of People to Bleach and as I wrote this post and thought of Lutz, I opened this little chapbook and found, “I kept waiting for someone to say something in a language that wasn’t shot.”

-Mark