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[...] I, too, can almost imagine a dialogue, an ongoing symposium latently emerging among the drone operating personnel, the way blossoms from a tree planted in a sheltered courtyard, with sun coming only from the west, bloom late, only as afternoon light lengthens.
unexpectedly pretty
Peter! I see you. Through the thin walls of my ground-floor studio, through glazed windows covered on the outside with steel lattice to keep out burglars and birds, I see you emerging onto the front lawn on a fresh spring morning in Massachusetts, as a robin pecks for worms and a squirrel scampers out of an open garbage bin. I watch you descend the steps of an eggshell-painted porch, blue-trimmed, a sturdy two-and-a-half-story wood-frame house behind you, in a city once known as the cradle of American industrial ingenuity. I hear things, too, the accompanying drone — the persistent aural kind — of a nearby handheld power drill — although this might be coming from the room next to mine. You’ve left your wife inside amid the green-striped Ikea sheets. In unbuttoned, breast milk–stained plaid flannels, she nurses the baby. A moment ago, you brought her a bowl of Great Grains cereal with soy milk and a mug of coffee, caught her gratitude in a softening of her cornflower-blue eyes and a sudden renewed attention to her appearance as she brushed away hay-colored bangs and covered an exposed, engorged breast, which gesture you took for an apology: “It won’t always be like this.” And now you are thinking, as you often do upon climbing into your leased, blue, bird-dropping bespattered Kia, of Kant of Königsberg and his daily walk around the city’s square, rain or shine, always at the same time. The phrase “Call of Duty” comes to mind and you wonder how it is that a popular computer game in which you shoot Nazis could be named in a way to resemble a Kantian first principle. As you mechanically ease the car out of the driveway, looking both ways down your one-way street, and set out toward your morning class, you think, “What is philosophy if not the ‘Call of Duty.’” It might be funny to title a chapter of your book with that phrase.
kinda weird but he's a hell of a writer
Our addictions are a part of our modernity and a response to modernity, a choice to surrender. Addictions are also attitudes; at first a fact of the body, they become a perspective on the world. We still don’t know why, when given the chance, a rat willingly doses itself to death with nicotine. But if I were a lab rat I would smoke too. If addiction or the oral-compulsive character were truly destiny, why not simply embrace it? “Enjoy your symptom!”—as the Lacanians say—with the hope that a particular object of desire will, some day, fail to satisfy the primal urge. On that day, we will be free, for an instant, to choose the next thing we wish to dominate our lives.
amazing
For Richard Klein, author of Cigarettes Are Sublime, a book written with an odd intellectual boosterism about all aspects of smoking, the cigarette transforms anxiety at the overwhelming sense of impending death—your own or someone else’s—into a manageable death by bits and pieces:
By smoking a cigarette, ingesting a certain quantity of nicotine, the organism is hastening its death, is producing in itself more noxious effects than if it endured the discomfort of anxiety. But the death it is hastening is its own death; it substitutes its own path toward death for the process over which it otherwise had no control. Using cigarettes to master anxiety may be understood as preferring a certain form of dying over an intolerable form of living.
Travelers, however, like the poor, are not people whose lives are “insufficiently structured,” as Franzen would have it. Their lives are structured from above. The poor are also time-poor. They own their time as little as they own anything else. They are waiting in line to cash checks, or in front of an employment office, or at soup kitchens. Much of their lives are spent waiting, not for handouts but for real opportunities commensurate with their potential. Cigarettes are there to offer consolation and a feeling of choice amid the monotony, to transform waiting into hanging out. For people lucky enough to have a job, the smoke break becomes a momentary transgression against the time clock. It’s a little protest against time management which those on the side of time management, the managerial classes, cannot really share. For such people, including writers like Franzen, smoking is either an affectation, a form of reverse snobbery, or done out of a deep sense of estrangement from one’s own regulatory impulses. It’s this alienation from self-discipline in the very discipline of smoking that makes it an antibourgeois drug, and while writers may be lower class financially, they are virtual aristocrats of time.
Paul Auster, a writer who has built a large work out of coincidence, catches this side of smoking perfectly in the script for the movie Smoke. A series of events and improbable friendships arise out of random meetings in the smoke shop, presided over by Harvey Keitel’s salesman, Augie.2 Black, white, rich, poor, man, woman, smokers have the smoker’s code and the smoker’s bond. It’s a basic form of solidarity and one of the few left. Someone asks you for a cigarette, you give it willingly: a light, no problem. From there anything can happen, or nothing else. It’s a rare moment of sharing among strangers, an almost ancient form of hospitality in the inhospitable culture of great modern cities.
I should say that, at the time and for many years after, I received almost nothing from this class. I remembered almost nothing, consciously, that Bloom said about all the poems we’d read. My marginalia is incomprehensible and almost worthless; the notebook long since lost in an attic. Only when I’d completely freed myself from academia and abandoned all hope of an academic career, even an academic life, did I return to those poems, again not even consciously, and find not just pleasure in them but meaning, which is also too earnest and defined a word to say what I discovered. And then in those moments I don’t hear Bloom’s voice at all, but I’m aware that the — pleasure is too soft a word — insight I receive from, say, Wallace Stevens’s “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” or John Ashbery’s “Soonest Mended” takes place in a Bloomian universe: gnostic, agonistic, a beauty with terror in it, clashing structures and strange cohabitations, a poem as a play in as many acts as the poet needs.
If you got the Bloom experience at the right time of your life, as a poet or a person who loves poetry, then he could be perfect. At a crisis moment for such a person, he might also be terrible. There is something to be said for teaching that has no “deliverables,” for which the only answer to the evaluator’s question about what was learned is: “Ask me in five years, then again in ten, then in twenty.” In 1998, I had vague feelings for poetry that I didn’t know were at odds with the academic persona I was trying to cultivate. I put poems into meaning machines linked to my ambition and ground them into dust. Years later, once I’d relinquished the need to definitively interpret anything in such a way that it could be professionally recognized and circulated, in ways that credited the originality and rigor of my interpretations, the poems came back to me as poetry and I could hear them: sometimes as poems that did not transcend themselves; sometimes as individuals marked, as we are, by others living and dead.