My Limitations Amaze Me

My alarm went off this morning at 6. That is because I set it to go off at 6, even though it is a Sunday.

I had no actual intention of getting up for good at 6. There are some people that enjoy early rising; I am not one. I will sap every last minute of rolling around in bed until I am forced out by hunger or the demands of having a job. This is one of the reasons I don't have a pet.

But nevertheless, I set my alarm for 6 a.m. Because I had bought plants. I have, in my new apartment, a little semi-enclosed area that has some dirt in it, bordering the normal entrance-way/mini-patio. And for whatever reason, I was kind of semi-obsessed with the idea of planting things in that area.

Everybody reading this knows, or can imagine, that I am not what one would call a skilled gardener. Plants wither and die under my care. Even the hardiest of plants. Even when I take my job as plant owner seriously, which I mostly don't. But it is one of my areas of perennial optimism.

Which, actually, I consider a good thing. It may be a little sad for the plants, which die, and it's probably a waste of money and time, but it would also, I believe, be a little sad were I to abandon the dream of plant cultivation altogether, as fit only for a better, stronger breed of humanity than myself.

Anyway, hope sprang eternal and a week ago I went to the gardening center and bought some plants, and some soil, and a little trowel, and a little plant food. Then I got a visit from a friend who actually can keep plants alive and she suggested that I get, in addition, a pitchfork and some starter food.

So then followed a half-depressing/half-childish pleasure-inducing interval of drying to dig holes in the dry cracked soil around my patio. That moment where you realize the extent to which you don't know what you're doing. A kind of furtive burying of the plants in the ground.

Anyway, so my friend who knows about plants told me that for the first week I should be drenching these plants every morning as early as possible. Yesterday I failed to do so, so today I was going to wake up at 6, stagger out, water, return to bed.

And I didn't, because I just turned the alarm off and went back to sleep. Anyway, it just reminded me how strange it is to be alive, to have these things that you want to do, that aren't, on their face, so difficult to do, and yet be continually not doing them when you wanted to, or not doing them in the way you wanted to. How can that be true -- how can it have been too difficult for me to wake up at 6 a.m. to water my plants?

It was, though, and it's not as though I feel particularly bad about it either. Just surprised, mostly.

INXS

There are a lot of things that Noko Marie's most recent post makes me want to say, things about the urge toward some kind of condensation of all your past experiences into one compact burst of pure montage-style-striving-for-perfection, otherwise known as nostalgia. But I'm too punch-drunk and dazed to say those things now.

So let me raise this instead: why do I find excess, in and of itself, fun? Because I do. That kind of drastic listing to one side, rather than the other -- I like that. To the extent that there are certain bad habits I never toyed with, it mostly has to do with knowledge of my own propensity for drastic measures.

Example. When I get sick, here, to the extent I can, is what I do/did: I cancel any and all appointments and obligations. I drink a gallon of Gatorade. And I sleep for 24 hours straight. I was 23 years old before it even dawned on me that other people dealt with sickness differently. Other people, I gradually realized, took things slower. They did not cancel everything. They drank more fluids, but they didn't go all nuts. They ate normal meals.

I experimented with this, and realized that yes, I could have a cold, and still live a mostly normal life. It was a stunning realization. And, also, being sick became a lot less fun. Who wants to be sick if it's just like normal life only feeling crummier? Whereas being sick in that super-dramatic "I'm dying of consumption kind of way" struck me as, in some way, enjoyable.

I'm not exactly sure what to make of all that.

Marilyn Manson Lives In My Neighborhood

I don't actually know where Marilyn Manson lives.

But I was at Borders the other night buying The Long Hard Road Out of Hell by Marilyn Manson and Neil Strauss. I was buying it not because of any profound love for the music of Marilyn Manson, but because I've been going through a mini-phase of reading rock bios. I like rock bios like I like riding the bus. You learn that people out there are leading these lives that are unimaginably different from yours and it expands your sense of possibility which is nice when the world starts to get a little claustrophobic.

Anyway, I'm buying this book, along with some other books, and the Borders clerk said, "One of my customers was just talking about him." I said "Oh, really?" He said yeah, that this customer claimed to have seen Marilyn Manson at the Arclight Cinema (where, according to the website, movie lovers belong). And I laugh, because although US magazine tells me every week that Stars Are Just Like Us, I still find it funny to imagine Marilyn Manson at the Arclight Cinemas, buying his $8 coffee and maybe some of that tasty caramel corn.

And then the clerk says that the guy was a tourist and maybe just confused one of the standard issue Hollywood types for Marilyn Manson. I said maybe.

Gorbachev is appearing in Louis Vuitton ads these days. The new Tom Ford perfume ads are, at least to my eye, genuinely shocking. (It is a measure of my shock that the previous link was not to the pictures. Link via Jezebel .)

All of this has a strange apocalyptic feel to it. Marilyn Manson hangs out at the movie theater near my house. Or maybe the people who hang out at the movie theater near my house are identical to Marilyn Manson when seen by the naked eye. Former Communist leaders advertise luxury luggage by adopting fake spy poses. And people are using sex to sell things.

Moralism, Nihilism, Whatever.

I just read the Bret Easton Ellis book The Informers. It's pretty good, not, it seems to me, one of his best, but I like some of the other ones a lot. Like his other books, it presents a dark sort of picture of the world we're living in.

It was written in 1994, but I'm just getting around to reading it now, in the middle of a mini-obsession with Ellis. This started when I read Lunar Park last summer and felt inexplicably connected to the narrator (as I mentioned in my previous post, Dear X: U R My Favrite Riter).

As the Wikipedia page on Ellis says concisely and correctly, "He has called himself a moralist, although he has often been pegged as a nihilist. His characters are young, generally vacuous people, who are aware of their depravity but choose to enjoy it."

I see how Ellis might think of himself as a moralist: he is depicting what is obviously a fucked-up world, and saying how fucked-up it is.

But it's easy to see, too, why some readers aren't quite buying it, and insist on calling him a nihilist. Yes, the characters "choose to enjoy it." But it seems that the author chooses for the reader to enjoy it, too. The author himself seems to be enjoying it, kind of a lot.

The descriptions of violence, of drug-induced euphorias, of sexual cravings, of empty-minded sexual satisfactions are lovingly rendered and seductive. They're exciting, and written so intimately they make you feel you're right there feeling the same things.

It seems readers are enoying it. It would be hard to believe that these books are so popular in spite of the lovingly-rendered violence and depravity rather than because of it. And of course, Ellis is most popular not with moralizers but with those skating on the edge of the very world he describes.

I must confess: I kind of love it. Even as I'm appreciating the moralizing. I'm having just the reaction I figure is intended.

Even granting the seriousness of the moralizing, ambiguity like this is common: some art experience meant to comment critically on X presents X in such a way as to suck us into a kind of involvement. We wallow in it even as we appreciate the commentary. We're complicitous.

There are obvious reasons to worry that there's something bad about this, especially in straightforward cases like violence or cruelty. Feeding even a minimal appetite for these things seems wrong. Some readers may have more than a minimal appetite, which may be awakened and encouraged. Popularity lends a kind of legitimacy to what is depicted. And, as is often suggested (and was suggested in the digital-unicorn-rape discussion), there's always the possibility that participating in various pleasures in the imagination will make one more likely to participate in them for real.

But this isn't the whole story, and I think there are reasons to tolerate and even encourage such ambiguous artisitic experience.

First, people are really really easily bored. Pretty much all serious thinking has to be dressed up for excitement in some way if more than ten people are going to participate.

Second, people do have mixed impulses, and part of why we love art is for the way it reveals us to ourselves. Expressing and encountering dangerous aspects of human nature in literature is a way of domesticating it, bringing it into the realm of things we think and talk about rather than the dark realm of impulses no one ever acknowledges.

But mostly, in the literature case, depravity in a novel clearly need not function to represent depravity in real life in any literal way. It can mean anything. It can be better than literal representation. Let me explain.

In an August 5th New York Times interview (now behind the pay wall, damn!), the novelist Mary Gordon says of the current literary scene, "I think coldness is chic among writers, and particularly ironic coldness. What is absolutely not allowable is sadness. People will do anything rather than acknowledge that they are sad."

She may be right that more sadness in novels would be somehow better. But personally, I can hardly bear to read a sad novel. It's not about acknowledging; sad books just make me too fucking sad.

One time I read a George Eliot novel, I think it was The Mill on the Floss, and I felt like killing myself.

For people like me, anger, vitriol, even cruelty, can be ways of engaging with the dark unhappy parts of life without being overwhelmed with sadness. And if a book is funny, this is especially true. You can experience what is scary, horrible, depressing, and feel angry, outraged, puzzled, amused, and generally life-affirmed, rather than life-defeated.


I actually felt totally life-affirmed reading Lunar Park, even though it's an absurdly bleak portrait of modern life. Even at the time, I thought, "how strange." But it has something to do with what I have described here: the presentation of what is awful in a seductive and complex way.

Maybe. Or maybe I'm just an unusually fucked-up person.