There’s little hope. Although I heard Eileen Myles writes a big novel. I often return to them in moments of world fury. In the opening essay from The Importance of Being Iceland, Myles talks about how music can “circulate melancholy” more effectively than writing. When I was 25, Jeff Tweedy told me I wanted
a good life
with a nose for things
fresh wind and bright sky
to enjoy my suffering
so that’s what I aimed for. And that’s what I got.
I keep seeing religious people. The Amish on a casino bus. The Sunday suits in the Naf Naf Grill. A man stops me outside Buffalo Exchange and asks, “are you Jewish?” I used to think, I’m only culturally Jewish? Now I think, I’m Jewish ungenosideickally?? There’s this billboard on I-55 that says, Cultural Jews got sent to the gas chambers, too. La-dee-da.
Outside the police station, a huddle of migrants. Casualties of Operation Lone Star. The older kids compare scooters, the babies wear candy cane jammies a month early. The parishioners cook the food. The lines get longer. The mayor has to do something. With good works, without weapons, Chicago fights the war brought to us by Catholic Charities of San Antonio.
A tart espresso from a suburban coffee bar. The Persian and/or Israeli girls I lusted over in the Best Buy walk out with a TV on a dolly. I stood behind Chromebooks to get a better view of their outstretched necks, gold earrings, furry purses, the heavy sweats tucked into Uggs. The daughters of Zion are haughty, the prophet Isaiah wrote, and the Lord will discover their secret parts. The scribes probably got hard every time they recopied those words. I know I do.
Out here in Niles, all is mall. I could start 200,000 wars. The local businesses shed hours, raise prices, clean Uggs. The diner says OPEN on its curbside sign, as if to remind customers and also the staff. Niles reminds me of “Hot Rotten Grass Smell,” the opening track on Wednesday’s Rat Saw God, and this Hopperesque lyric of Karly Hartzman’s:
neon sign at the nail salon
turned off
and the streetlights
turned on.
I get back in the car singing a different song. The song that drove her crazy in 8th grade.
At the playground, I’m thinking about Billy Woods and his kid, the last verse on Maps. Woods sings, of his child, “Anything at all could happen to him.” There’s another Woods verse, in this warm vein, on the new Armand Hammer:
I write when my baby's asleep
I sit in the room in the dark
I listen to him breathe
I walk 'em to school, then the park
Hold they little hands when we cross the street
I think about my brothers that's long gone and this was all they ever dreamed
People I lost to COVID-19 but it ain't do a thing to the fiends.
I chat with a Dad whose wife is boring, and he’s also boring, and I don’t remember their names but I remember his wife’s extreme bob. What did the children do before they had these leaves to roll around in? I’m only good with the names of people I love. One day I’ll forget those, too. If I learned how to pronounce Fyodor Dostoevsky, I can learn how to pronounce…
In Washington D.C., residents are stealing toilet paper. This is the closest drugstore to the Catholic University of America, where this week, at the Novitate conference, intellectuals fulfill their contractual desire to discuss René Girard. The bill says, We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, the title of the new Armand Hammer. I wonder if any of the Novitate participants will end up at this black CVS and scurry back to the white light of Catholic University plenaries, to speak coldly about desire.
Our D.C. hosts, like most petite Romans we know, work for the bomb makers. They tell us this neighborhood is killing trees to build townhouses that start in the low $800s. The death of the trees fucks with the runoff from the storms, Kate says, giving us grape leaves, and the storms worsen every year. Kate’s into trees. Her cheeks the color of the Japanese maples that stretch over our courtyards back home. Because of the Israel-Hamas war, Kate isn’t quite speaking to her parents. Or her sisters. Or maybe even herself. Betsy and Kate met on Birthright. I like to think they kissed the same Egyptian dragster.
In the Naf Naf Grill, Diana tells me all the “stuff in the Middle East” made her want to watch Schindler’s List. The “stuff in the Middle East,” I say, picking sumac onions out of my falafel bowl, makes me want to watch Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac. Particularly the scene when Charlotte Gainsbourg wraps herself in Saran to stop masturbating. When I see Netanyahu, well, at first, he looks exactly like Putin. At first, he looks like Patrick Bateman, when he kills the child at the zoo, because Bateman, like Netanyahu, is “unable to maintain a credible public persona.” At first, he looks like Charlotte Gainsbourg masturbating herself out of plastic. At first, he looks like Yul Brynner’s hardened heart. At first, he looks like the toilet paper when it’s still got a little bit of shit on it. At first, he looks like Biden’s unwaxed floss with little bits of hot dog in it. I watch The Godfather. Find a shrink-wrapped copy at Rattleback Records, the Coppola restoration. Biden and his cronies are like Don Zaluchi in the meeting of the five families. They want to “control war as a business. Keep it respectable. We would keep the [drug] traffic,” Zaluchi says, “in the dark people, the coloreds. They're animals anyway, so let them lose their souls.”
A date with Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour. I photograph Betsy and Leo in front of a spray of pink and purple balloons. I say, three separate drink cups. I say, the popcorn already has butter on it. I’m cold because I’m still sick. Unproductive coughs.
In the theater, Leo whispers in my ear, “Is Taylor Swift still alive?” How easy it would be to take my child’s life. How quickly he would disappear. Taylor Swift, though, will not disappear. Then again she’s a woman. Anything could happen to her. She’s one of Bob Dylan’s “six-time losers” hanging around Matthew Gasda’s theater. She’s Gasda’s “Big five novelist with a forthcoming debut (typically less daring than her conversation).” Or, as Swift herself puts that, “the jokes weren’t funny I took the money.” Even at this late date, running across the stage. A goddess of forms and surfaces. Like the star in Ariana Reines’s poem, “Mistral”:
Don’t you see
That between the people who want
To be machines and the machines
That want to be people women
Are still, still at this late date
Running?
On the plane back from D.C., I’ll read Sam Kriss’s laborious (in the sense of, “requiring considerable effort and time”) article about René Girard. I like to read Harper’s on planes because the altitude makes me dumb. I’m a frequent flyer. I’m a lifelong subscriber.
To Harper’s, Christian Lorentzen posts a letter from Rome. He informs us, “Nothing matters.” Another Catskills Gaza one-liner. On the ground, I read his pitchy (in the Myles sense that “writing for pay is a little ‘pitchy’”) piece on Don DeLillo. The Bookforum pages, soaked in Canh Chua Tom broth, lay flat on our kitchen island. What is the systems novel? Is it polytheism? “The war over the appropriation of Jerusalem is today’s world war,” wrote the prophet Derrida. “It is taking place everywhere, it is the world, it is the singular figure of the world’s ‘out of joint’-ness today. The three messianic religions embroiled in rivalry are directly or indirectly mobilizing all the powers in the world and the entire world order for the ruthless war they are waging against one another.” Leo sees the picture of Don DeLillo in a pink button-down and asks, “Daddy, is that’s you?”
In the intro to Pathetic Literature, Myles writes that art is something with “secondary meaning.” We locate that meaning at the National Gallery, when I open the roof patio door and Betsy spots Katharina Fritsch’s Hahn/Cock. How could she miss this ginormous blue chicken. It reminds her of her father, who died suddenly. She breaks down for what feels like an hour. Enough time for me to run out of cold breath making sure Leo doesn’t break anything by Robert Indiana. Katharina Fritsch couldn’t have known her chicken would offer my wife the release she’d been searching for all morning. In the art game, you can’t distribute “secondary meaning” evenly, and every player rolls for broke.
Walking in Bowmanville, at an unemployed hour of afternoon, the child’s dress reminds me of some modern wing painter. The blues could be Kandinsky, the powdery reds Belle and Sebastian. The child gathers orange and gold leaves in a silver kitchen colander. The grandmother says, “Hello.” The thought enters my head that I can steal this child, murder this grandmother, kill the child, too, bury it by the Metra tracks. Nobody’ll find me. Circulate melancholy. It’s genre fiction baby killers get caught.
“Killing Child at Zoo” comes later in American Psycho. Patrick Bateman, “unable to maintain a credible public persona,” is sleeping in “twenty-minute intervals” after eating one of his impossible foods, a salad with “foie gras vinegar.” He heads to the Central Park zoo. The surrounding buildings, like Trump Plaza and the AT&T building, “heighten its unnaturalness.” After calling a bathroom attendant the n-word, Bateman sees a mother breastfeeding, which “awakens something awful in me.”
He perks up when he spots the child. Offers him a cookie. “But before the child can answer, my sudden lack of care crests into a massive wave of fury and I pull the knife out of my pocket and I stab him quickly, in the neck.” When the child’s mother, “homely, Jewish-looking, overweight,” finds her dying son, she makes a sound Bateman, if not Ellis, “cannot describe,” and this monotheistic sound is the sound in my head as I spare the grandmother and child.
Bateman reasons it away, typical for him, in one of American Psycho’s Victorian moments of accountability.
Though I am satisfied at first by my actions, I’m suddenly jolted with a mournful despair at how useless, how extraordinarily painless, it is to take a child’s life. This thing before me, small and twisted and bloody, has no real history, no worthwhile past, nothing is really lost. It’s so much worse (and more pleasurable) taking the life of someone who has hit his or her prime, who has the beginnings of a full history, a spouse, a network of friends, a career, whose death will upset far more people whose capacity for grief is limitless than a child’s would, perhaps ruin many more lives than just the meaningless, puny death of this boy.
In The Missing of the Somme, Geoff Dyer and chums do a car tour of the Western Front. They eat. Drink. Make jokes about Wilfred Owen poems. It rains. It’s cold. In Ypres, they stay in an “expensive cheap hotel” with “towels the size of napkins, burn marks on the dresser.” Dyer quotes the writer Stephen Graham, writing about the post-war Ypres of the 1920s, when “death and the ruins completely outweighed the living. It is easy to imagine someone who had no insoluble ties killing himself here, drawn to the lodestone of death. There is a pull from the other world, a drag on the heart and spirit.”
I could kill myself in Gaza. Are there reasonable flights? At first, Netanyahu kills comedy, like Kramer saying the n-word umpteen times. There were many words that you could not stand to hear,” Hemingway wrote of World War I, “and finally only the names of places had dignity.” To native English speakers, who rarely suffer but protest much, Gaza is a graffiti-sounding word, like Even or Once or demise stylized as Dmise. I saw Dmise above a Chinatown garbage can. At least we can pronounce Gaza, unlike Ypres.
No matter what Leo hits, I let him run the bases, get his home run. Then I get my chance at bat. But when I run around the bases, Leo just stands at 3rd base, waiting for me to come home. Before I can, he tags me out.
“I think my strategy is better than yours,” he says on the walk home. This is the first time I hear him use the word strategy and one of my thoughts is, post your child’s revelations online, like Don DeLillo wearing his pink shirt.
I press Leo on his strategy. “Well, Daddy, your strategy is just, chase me. But you never catch up. My strategy is, stand and wait to get you out. My strategy is better than yours.” So my child does understand war.
Suddenly Zionist friends who moved to Townhouse, California. When will the suffering cease? The husband and I saw Father John Misty once. When Misty sang “Total Entertainment Forever,” which begins
bedding Taylor Swift
every night inside the Oculus Rift
after mister and the missus
finish dinner and the dishes,
in Milwaukee, I felt the absence of the horns that play on the studio album. My friend didn’t. Not all of us circulate the same melancholy. Still, I miss him. I miss those abandoned futures.