In the effort to be less ‘gay’ and less ‘reclusive,’ I’m ‘rebranding’ with a new blog written by ‘Matthew Gallaway’, which not coincidentally is the name I’ve used for my novel The Metropolis Case, which will most likely publish at some point in 2k10. I hope you’ll join me there! Please let me know if you love/hate the new design, or if you have any technical difficulties with feeds/subscriptions/linkage. Hope to see u soon — miss u! xoxo TGR

Today I finally read the New Yorker article about David Foster Wallace, which was by turns inspiring and depressing; inspiring because (and this is hardly a surprise) he seemed to genuinely believe in fiction as a means to reflect/analyze/transform currents of our society, and depressing because of his unending doubt about everything from his ability to write a compelling novel to his own mental health, which was apparently precarious for many many years before he finally committed suicide.

His unfinished novel, which will be published next year, supposedly examines boredom as a potentially transcendent force in modern society; it’s set in an IRS office in Illinois, and describes a group of tax auditors, some of whom are better able to deal with the mind-numbing tedium of their work than others. Ultimately, it sounds like DFW was unable to resolve — or at least to his own satisfaction — the fundamental dilemma of how to make a novel about boredom not boring.

Whatever the merits of the novel, it seems that he was touching on an important theme in our culture; seriously, are there not days when the meaningless implications of everything you do at work becomes such a towering wave of ennui that you wonder how you can possibly live another minute, even if by most measures you have a job that is ‘interesting’ and ‘valuable’ and possibly even ‘lucrative’? (In this post, ‘work’ may/may not be a metaphor for ‘life.’) And do you — as DFW postulates — resign yourself to these waves? Do you quit fighting and simply allow them to pass through you so that you emerge on the other side more ‘mindful’ and able to ‘live in the moment,’ so that perhaps you can find gratification in composing say, an elegant e-mail to a senior VP or finally figuring out a mathematical function on a spreadsheet or even participating in a ‘team project’? Ultimately, it seems to me that the issue DFW confronted was (in two parts): 1) ‘how do we stop thinking, when thinking is so painful?’ (or, via Huysmans via Pascal: ‘The soul is pained by all things it thinks upon’) and 2) if we do stop thinking, can we still feel ‘meaningful’ or ‘human’ in modern society, and not like ‘just another corporate drone’?

In this post, there are four photographs: three of them contain an airplane, which may/may not be a metaphor for our desire to ‘leave our lives behind,’ whereas the one picture without may/may not represent the desire to contemplate that which we have seen so many times before with the (irrational/sustaining/instinctual) hope that we will find something there that we have never seen before.

Though undeniably bright, there is a stark quality to the March sun that makes the phlox (and the sempervivum) seem — oddly — both luminous and bedraggled.

The silver veins of the surrounding rocks add to this quality, and for a second I dreamed I was in the mountains of _____. Sometimes I wonder if I will ever visit a desert/mountain/rain forest and think: this place looks so familiar, I have seen it in a small garden in Washington Heights.

In this post, the garden is a metaphor for the city, while the plants and rocks are elements of the past that we may or may not recognize until we see them in the present (possibly while lost, driving around in the most labyrinthian sections of Queens/Riverdale/Lower East Side circa 1988).

Today the sky was windswept, which reminds of when I first moved to New York City and me and my friend Mike were walking around the Lower East Side one night — it was definitely winter — and we saw what could only be described as a tumbleweed that blew across the intersection, not far from where we stood with our mouths agape. We were both big fans of the Meat Puppets, of course, and as we continued on our way, we discussed the song “Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds,” from the first Meat Puppets LP, a song I just learned — via Google — is a cover of a traditional folk song. Not that we would have cared about this at the time: we were only interested in the past so far as it extended back no more than ten-fifteen years (which seemed like a long time then), i.e., to the glory days of SST Records.

If this — to see a tumbleweed in Manhattan — happened now (assuming the entire LES hadn’t been transformed into an upscale shopping mall), we would no doubt have taken a photograph or video of it and posted it for everyone to see, but for us it became a memory that we shared and was one of those goofy jokes/events that I suppose — once you share enough of them — forms the foundation of any friendship. For years after we would say to each other, “do you remember that time we saw a tumbleweed?” (This was no doubt annoying to those who missed out or refused to believe such an improbable truth.)

Perhaps one casualty of ‘the Facebook age’ is a sort of passive destruction of any part of the present not documented with some kind of photographic (or via e-mail) textual reference; it’s almost like we don’t have to worry as much about filtering things out in our daily existence, because we can always do it later. I’m no less guilty of this, of course; I didn’t keep a journal on my recent trip to Europe, because I literally took a thousand photographs and will rely on those in the event I want to remember something.

Once I saw a tumbleweed blowing across the windswept streets of downtown Manhattan.

Because I didn’t take a photograph of this, it may or may not have happened.

Like fewer and fewer events in the modern age, you’ll just have to take my word for it.

When we are born, our souls are encased in ice.

At some point, some of this ice might thaw, leaving us exposed in ways both good and bad.

It would be naive to think that anyone could emerge from this without some damage, although this too might be considered beautiful when viewed in a certain light.

Through the fourth part of 2666, Roberto Bolano’s epic treatment of many things, we were extremely forgiving of the many tangents and digressions that permeate the work; not only were we impressed by the obvious genius of the writer, but we marveled at his ability to seamlessly move between the lyrical, the clinical, the suspenseful, the psychological, the satirical and the philosophical.  Although we had a few complaints — the pervasively unredeemed homophobia, the fact that many and possibly all of the characters felt like constructs of ideas as opposed to living entities — we never lost patience with Bolaño; his world was lush and full of compelling contradictions, we wanted to know more about the hundreds of murders in his fictional city of Santa Teresa and how the mysterious German author from the first part — Benno von Archimboldi — would or would not figure into them.

Sadly however, the fifth part doesn’t deliver much more than extreme tedium, to the point where we begin to question our initial love for the book as a whole. Language that once seemed magical now comes off as indulgent and often masturbatory (not coincidentally a tired theme here), every plot twist feels like a chiche, and worst of all, the more we learn about the decreasingly mysterious author — Archimboldi — the less we care about him. Although we see a few characters from the earlier parts, there is no sense of evolution or really any insight (from a reading perspective) into why this part could not have come first or second or third.

Ultimately, the problem can be traced back to the structure of the book; in the first four parts, the tension builds and builds as Bolaño teases and hints at the mystery — and in some cases — conspiracy surrounding the deaths of the women in Mexico. No matter where he goes, we want to know more! But when he leaves this electric setting for the mundane upbringing — albeit with a liberal sprinkling of exceedingly wooden symbols, e.g., as a child, he preferred to remain underwater — of Archimboldi, we feel deflated and long for the mystery and strength of the previous parts.

In a few pages at the end of the book that practically weep with a sense of obligation, Bolano “ties things up,” but again we are past wanting to confirm what has become obvious and mundane.

It’s the same feeling we get watching a teevee series — the X-Files is a particularly apt example in this regard — that reaches its peak in a shadowy but compelling aura of mystery, but one we realize has passed as it soldiers on in mediocrity for several more seasons before finally being killed off.

Perhaps Bolaño should have ended 2666 after the fourth part, when our interest was at its height and we burned with questions burned about its outcome; as it turned out, this last part gained nothing and cost much, so that we ultimately close the cover with a sense of disappointment. We still strongly recommend that everyone read this novel, but with the understanding that sometimes questions are better posed than answered.

The 2666 Review Roundup:
The Part About the Critics
The Part About Amalfitano
The Part About Fate
The Part About the Crimes

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THE CHAOS DETECTIVE is a teevee series for the internet. “City of Dreams” is a five-part episode set in Europe. Future episodes will be located in New York City.

City of Dreams (Part 1)

City of Dreams (Part 2)

City of Dreams (Part 3)

City of Dreams (Part 4)

It would be a fallacy to argue that my location here in the shadows of the riverbank

in the company of another man about whom I knew next to nothing

was anything less than conscious.

I couldn’t say if the vision I saw was of the past or the future but I no longer cared

I took a step forward and then another, ignoring the chorus of screams in my head.

I approached the Russian, who stood up as if he had been expecting me. “Do I know you?” he asked.

I shook my head ambiguously. “I’m not sure,” I replied.

“Follow me,” he said and together we walked up the stairs into the infinite fog of the Parisian night.

In the fourth book of 2666, we are presented with something of an encyclopedia of the literally thousands of crimes (99 percent of them against women) that occur in Bolano’s fictional border city of Santa Teresa — modeled on the real Juarez — over a period of perhaps ten years, with an emphasis on those who were tortured, raped, mutilated (sometimes but not always in the same horrible way) and murdered, and whose bodies were most often found in the desert or an illegal dump or a remote ravine or ditch.

For the most part, Bolano describes these murders in the distant, clinical tone of a medical report — or sometime the more hard-boiled prose of a detective novel — and gives a short summary of the investigative follow-up, which invariably dissolves into the case being “shelved” for all of the usual reasons (apathy, no clues, lost evidence, no resources, horrible bureaucracy, possible cover-ups). But even as the mounting atrocity of the events described threatens to paralyze us, there is enough nuance and lyrical beauty to the prose, so that we are like a victim beaten down and increasingly horrified that these murders could continue for so long, with so little apparent repercussion to those committing them.

Which of course begs the question of who in fact is committing them, and here Bolano also has an amazing ability to draw us into the many different possibilities, while identifying none as dispositive. There are drug dealers and pimps and rich capitalists — the factory owners who hire these women — who may or may not be involved; there is a creepy “gringo” who “seems like” a serial killer and may or may not be orchestrating kidnappings/murders from a prison, even after he’s arrested; there are government officials who may or may not be in league with the drug dealers and pimps and capitalists; there are the police, whose baseline level of misogyny is so high as to be completely demoralizing as they laugh about all the different ways a woman can be raped; there are men in general in this society, who are brought up to view women as subhumans, and there are women who for whatever reason become enmeshed with these men; above all else, there is capitalism and money, which trumps even the most violent of crimes.

Bolano gives us all of this and more, so that by the end, we have no choice but to indict society, i.e., ourselves, because while Santa Teresa (and Mexico) may or may not be a special case, it’s clearly less (of a special case) than more. In essence, it’s hard to emerge from this book without a conviction that we are all guilty of these horrible acts.

It could probably be argued that Bolano’s reflection of reality in this regard is a little too realistic for purposes of a novel; is it really necessary to introduce us to so many characters and leave their stories unresolved? Ultimately it didn’t bother us, because underneath the brutality his work resonates with a compassion for the murdered women — or women in general — that leads us as readers to care about what he’s describing, even if we know — like in real life — so little of it will lead anywhere.

One question we continue to ask is exactly where Bolano stands with regard to the gays. Although Bolano (unlike 98 percent of U.S novelists, who obv prefer to ignore the issue completely) is to be commended for weaving — what? an awareness, a motif — a presence through the text — e.g., “[a]s you’re well aware,” says one character about Mexico, “this is a macho country full of faggots” — it cannot be doubted that 2666 is pervasively homophobic to the extent that virtually every character — from university professors to blue-collar cops to outspoken feminists — when offered even the slightest opportunity uses it to express nothing but disdain for limp-wristed faggots or fudge packers or whatever else. (There are also brutally violent prison scenes of men raping each other — and worse.) While we admire the truthful tone of this hateful treatment of faggots in Bolano’s work, so far we’ve felt none of the compassion he shows for women; it leaves us a little wistful, knowing that in this fictional world — like the real one — we are somehow even worse off than the hundreds of desperate whores left to rot in the desert and be picked apart by the vultures.

The 2666 Review Roundup:
The Part About the Critics
The Part About Amalfitano
The Part About Fate
The Part About Archimboldi

Click through for “hi-quality” on YouTube or watch on Facebook.

Stay tuned for the fifth and final installment of “City of Dreams.”

THE CHAOS DETECTIVE

City of Dreams (Part 1)

City of Dreams (Part 2)

City of Dreams (Part 3)

Ohai! We thought we’d play a lil game in which we pull quotes from three pieces about the exurbs, two written in 2k4 by David Brooks in The Times — “Take a Ride to Exurbia“  on the opinion page and “Our Sprawling, Supersize Utopia” in the magazine — and the other — “In Florida, Despair and Foreclosure” — published today (i.e., 2k9) in The Times. Try to guess when the quotes were written, and by whom — click through for answers! (Note: there’s one trick question — guess which one it is.)

I came out with a book on the booming exurbs – places like the I-4 corridor in central Florida and Henderson, Nev. These are the places where George Bush racked up the amazing vote totals that allowed him to retain the presidency.

Early last year, garage sales and estate auctions became more common in Lehigh Acres as families sold what they could to survive.

I’m so impressed by Karl Rove. As a group of Times reporters demonstrated in Sunday’s paper, the Republicans achieved huge turnout gains in exurbs like the ones in central Florida.

Home prices have collapsed, and many houses built during the housing bubble have been foreclosed or abandoned.

[C]riticisms don’t get suburbia right. They don’t get America right. The criticisms tend to come enshrouded in predictions of decline or cultural catastrophe. Yet somehow imperial decline never comes, and the social catastrophe never materializes.

Hunger has become a growing problem.

[P]eople move to exurbs because they want some order in their lives. They leave places with arduous commutes, backbreaking mortgages, broken families and stressed social structures and they head for towns with ample living space, intact families, child-friendly public culture and intensely enforced social equality.

[I]t went from housing market boomtown to its current landscape of abandoned developments and struggling businesses. No one seemed interested in buying whole houses, and foreclosures soon gave way to empty homes that became magnets for crime.

[T]here is this spot you can get to where all tensions will melt, all time pressures will be relieved and happiness can be realized.

Signs of trouble were ignored. “Sometimes houses would sell three or four times in a few months, and no one would move in.”

Get out into the sprawl, into that other conversation. Take your time. It’s a new world out there.

Panic is a powerful headwind.

Poets, pundits, philosophers and politicians, take note! This is not the story of nations or other one-hit wonders, nor is it the story of religion, for which so many millions have died in futile anger and delusion. It is certainly not the history of capital, although this too has been a scourge; no, friends, these are distractions from the real story, which is the slow but relentless rise of the city. Incomprehensible beauty and despair! Inexplicable dissonance and distortion! Inalterable repudiation of all political philosophers and religious zealots who would explain our existence without acknowledging the seething allure of the trains and tunnels, the buildings and bridges of this endlessly mutating labyrinth into which we must cast ourselves to find civilized life! How sorry and sad — which is to say, irrelevant — are the candidates — which is to say, all of them — who fail to discuss the implications of this truth; how tiresome the critics and commentators who obscure it with egocentric jargon about freedom and community. Is it not immediately obvious who among them has or has not walked the streets, and not only in the tedious safety of the day but in the more barren and remote hours of the night, when we are possessed by creaking gates, distant gunshots and — most of all — the pounding, subterranean space we learn to call our heart?

[All pix except the GWB by Chip Litherland for The New York Times]