Tis that time of year when solitude creeps in and can’t be kicked out. The warm fuzzies of holiday parties, exchanges of knacks and knicks, downings of buttered rums and unbuttered, crapulently spiced seasonal beers—all these do little stave off the feeling that the short cold days are not on your side, and that all your fellows, as wonderful as they may be, are ultimately kept secret and distant from you by an unseen wall of selfish cells, spent time, differing routines, and twisting, unrelenting private thoughts.

Teh winter, ZOMG, is here.

And yet that’s no reason to despair. We have a dude named Maria to help us through, for he has written many dope verses about the human spirit, its singularity and lonesomeness, and how it can interact with other spirits—like a chipper terrier at a sometimes-empty dog run (only, you know, a terrier made all ectoplasmic and goopy-divine and whatnot).

Kick back, and let Maria (Rainer _____ von Rilke) jam on human interactions, and why sometimes a little winter of the spirit is a good thang:

It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.

For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

A person isn’t who they are during the last conversation you had with them—they’re who they’ve been throughout your whole relationship.

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

There are no classes in life for beginners. Right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.

Word.

Related and also worth considering is this Gordon Marino essay on the difference between depression and despair. According to Marino, Kierkegaard defines despair as a self’s inability to live as… itself. Anybody, even a happy person, can know a deep sense of despair. Simply, if you can’t be content being you, and being stuck alone being you, then winning the lottery and impressing millions of people mean nothing.

Perhaps some people—the lucky few, the Lamas, the Buddhas, the Neil Youngs—just know who they are, straight up, no fakery. Most of us, however, are locked in a battle with ourselves, autumnal cannibals. We are our own uncharted hinterlands. We know less, we worry, as we learn about ourselves, and the dead of night jumps on us like a cat, forcing us awake with a start: Who am I? (Think Jackie Chan now.) What do I want?

Recently, in my solitude, I have just barely limned in dreams the edges of my spirit. I have seen the holy mountain, as it were—but I have astigmatism, and my glasses were nowhere in sight.

The following is the totality of my understanding of my own spirit, as of this night, Tuesday, December the First, MMIX:

• Want: [ ], blue mint birds, books written, everyone clapping, rapping music, shaving more excellently, solitude is like Rilke, cat will be flying, winter is making cat turn invisible-white and make noise from horns mysterious to grow on its brain-head, plus all the beer at the bar really red wine and I am not even drinking it.

• Do not want: books writing, making bad verse recordings, shavings bump, solitude is like Beavis and Butthead in later years when first member of duo passes due to lung cancer (very sad never aired episode), winter is not ending, cat is awake even though I am thrown all of Roma library at him until he is bleeding Gibbon, plus never anything to drink but beer.

1. The heart, the linguam, the earth’s core, the tongue.
2. The eyes, the ears, the arms, the legs, the jaws, the twins.
3. The true eyes, the witches, the French knights-vigilante, the Trinity.
4. The dog’s legs, the inner planets, Death in Asia, the seasons and the winds.
5. The starfish’s arms, the fingers, the toes, the senses.
6. The monk’s dots, 111th the Beast’s mark, the true senses.
7. The Seas, the Deadly Sins, the Dwarves, the Virtues.

I’ve been mining the archives, sorting old papers, smudged, marked up copies of dead stories, ghost-poems, unsent thoughts on friends’ sleeping novels. Dust in the nose, a note I wrote to myself two years ago to watch for spiders.

I like lists and poems mortared up from lists. Lists ask us to link together any number of items, however strange, and to withhold our questions until the end. Lists beg us to logically concatenate a bunch of crazy bullshit, then to sum up that concatenation—to find the stolen topaz dropped in the outhouse muck.

1. The snake eats you.
2. The snake dies of indigestion.
3. The snake is a wheel of fire.

This last exemplary list is very important to the moral fate of humanity. I wrote it during the dark Bush years, before my lists were tamed by city-dwelling, rent-paying, and drink. Then, my lists grew like wild hawthorn, crêpe-white jonquils, the dry whirling fruits of a starving Prospect Park ailanthus, or the horns on gray, shag-coated goats. This last list grew backwards through logic, shedding its brains as it went like some Greek king off his rocker. It is named “The Order of Evils.”

1. Strangling Wholpins
2. The Pursuit of the Worthless
3. Squatting Over the Qur’ān
4. Literary Bugbears
5. “More is Less”
6. Cell Phone-Pas
7. Dixie Cups of Tequila
8. Onion Dip Gone Bad
9. Movie-Dinosaur Sound “FX”
10. School of Writhing Autistic Sharks
11. The Cantaloupe
12. Karl Rove
13. Saying Anything Barbarous

My brother G, an iPhone enthusiast, sent me an email the other day regarding a service call he’d made to AT&T Wireless. The email went, my emphasis:

word of the day… i learned from AT&T CUSTOMER SERVICE REP

frustrational, synonymous (i think) with frustrating… as in “i know that is frustrational…”

wow…

I enjoy pointless faux-Latin suffixes, and I enjoy words/signs that perform the very acts they mean to capture abstractly. The word frustrational is, albeit only mildly, actually frustrating.

I was not sure, after reading G’s email, that I’d ever feel frustrationalized, even if I knew I’d often feel frustrated. But I still laughed and copied the word into my mental florilegium, somewhere between frotteur and fulvous.

I then spent some hours editing the Atlas Obscura, an online encyclopedia of naturally or historically wondrous places and collections of curiosities.

If you’re headed out of town and want to see something besides yet another Denny’s water closet, search the Atlas. Waterfall of primordial blood? Check. Garden of poisonous plants? Sure. Living bridges made of massive entwined roots? Why not.

The Atlas is relaxing to edit and inspiring to read. Its entries are almost entirely inoffensive. They widen the world without challenging it. They are written to inform. Nothing about the project is harsh by design; the Atlas, like other moderated wikis, appeals to a broad audience.

So I was naturally surprised and even frustrationalized when the New Yorker, a once-notable journal of centrist politics, mediocre fiction, and blurry inscrutable cartoons about cat-psychiatrists and men trapped on desert islands with various supernumerary household appliances, published on its website this bizarre and seemingly off-topic review of a new patch of internet esoterica that I not only enjoy reading but actually edit.

The review is neither scathing nor adoring. The reviewer says she/he is “not immune” to the Atlas’ charms. But then the reviewer refuses to engage with the site on its own terms. The reviewer claims the Atlas is branded as a “club or society,” which isn’t true: The Atlas describes itself only as a “compendium” and “collaborative project.”

Inaccurate reporting aside, the tone of the review is off. Why does the reviewer mention Wes Anderson, for example? To my knowledge, Mr. Anderson makes twee, fantastical movies about immature man-boys of the type often played by the Wilson brothers. I like his movies, sure, and he does mention exotic, faraway places like Texas, but he’s hardly cornered the market on “exotic” or historical art.  (And the Atlas isn’t fiction. It’s nerd love pur sang. It’s an encyclo-freakin-pedia!)

The use of the name “Wes Anderson” in a review of a project undertaken by young scholars feels to me not like a valid jab at privileged knowitalls, but like a flailing attempt on the part of the New Yorker to participate in the discourse of hip. Their review of the decidedly non-twee Atlas reminds me of some technophobic friends’ scathing opinions of Twitter, a site these friends have never actually visited.

It’s not surprising that the fear of the unknown should follow us from the newsprint era into the era of the all-connective Web. Too, it’s not weird that the New Yorker should worry about its relevance. Frankly, it may not be especially relevant. It has clout; it frequently publishes good writing. But lots of magazines and sites publish good writing. Increasingly, clout is going to run downhill, from the dinosaurs to the more adaptable mammals of the publishing world.

I’m just surprised that the New Yorker would try to engage the world of cool, hip, twee, [insert adjective you think the New Yorker thinks is synonymous with "cool"] via a tactic so blatant. Like the chubby boy in fourth grade who can only let the pretty girl know he “like” likes her by spitting on her Bedazzled jeans-jacket, the New Yorker finds a cooler, younger site and wants to do… something… to/with/for it. But it ultimately proves a mite lost, unsure how to use its cultural clout and toward what end.

The Atlas has, in its first few weeks of life, garnered hundreds of followers from around the world, not to mention good reviews from Time and Metro. No doubt the New Yorker will continue to flail and look lost. I don’t need to extrude my syllogistic inklings very far to feel good about my own generation’s efforts to write well, explore the world, and perhaps - just perhaps - make it a little less of an old-white-dude-with-a-monocle kind of a place.

And it went something like this. (Thanks to my brother G for the recommendation. I love true history. And cussin’, oathin’, &c.)

In other news, I have updated my own Vividly Unimagined Irrealities index.

In still other news, Pink Tentacle wins this week’s Honourable Badge Of Merit for his coverage of the strange and often powerful popular arts of Japan. If only I had the time, manpower, and paint to turn my own rice paddies into giant two-dimensional samurai…

At which show one may enjoy five-dollar all-thee-can-imbibe sangria and beer.

This event will be all ~10 kinds of fun (+/- 1 standard margin of error of fun), not to mention the first Heavy Jamal show in a year, featuring songs never before heard by the public.

Sangria Dance Party ft. the Mangoose and Heavy Jamal
Friday, April 24 at 8:30 p.m.
293 Monroe St. #3, Brooklyn

PS - the HJ show starts after the Pomp & Circumstance party, if you are going to that (as I am).

PS2 - The penguins are coming to destroy us. Be warned.

The other night my brother G and I caught up with some ex-coworkers whom we hadn’t seen in a long time. One, M, is a development officer at a major theater. Her husband, J, is a lawyer. M and J could ask about my job—”How is your writing going? Are you writing?”—but I found it impossible to ask the reverse without resorting to instant jargon: “How is your developmenting? Are you still lawyering?”

True, M could be said to be “developing” something, but that’s not really what a development officer does, I think. She probably raises money, markets theater, supervises benefits, mails donors, &c. Likewise, a lawyer might teach law, practice law, write law, argue law—but he doesn’t just law, nakedly. He don’t be “lawing around,” like some knucklehead.

It strikes me as strange that we English-speakers face a paucity of verbs for what we do, despite our cultural preoccupation with trade and class. At least, for all its loneliness, eye-strain, and half-mad symbolizing, “writing” is a straightforward, verby sort of thing to do. (”Signing” and “texting” are fun as well.)

I guess the only other verbing I’d put on the same plane as writing (which needs neither adverb—”singing clearly“—nor object—”drinking wine“) is an ur-simple, ubiquitous jargon-artifact of the early, Wild West days of online gaming:

“How’s your pwning been recently?”

(”Oh, same old. Many newbs 2 pwn, never enuff thyme.”)