Next Time

I learned to roll cigarettes from my father, and a Romanian girl I taught to shoot. Delia, the International Super-Spy, who rolls the tightest cigarettes I’ve ever seen. I’m not so good at it. I lack practice, I smoke cigarettes so rarely. But tonight, I am a whole host of bad habits.
I drag hard on the cold butt, trying to liven its dead ash, so I can “monkey fuck” the one I just rolled. With no such luck, I hunt for a lighter.
I draw heavily, thick smoke rising from above the lighters flame. I drop the tool, letting it slip from the stiff fingers of my right hand. The hand aches, and fights at being opened. I force it closed again, sore tendons arguing, swelling. I need to climb easier, next time. Next time, I need to not roll cigarettes sloppily and smoke them too fast. I need to not mix whiskey in my coffee, stealing sips straight from the flask mouth. Next time. But for tonight, I am willing host to all of my bad habits. I relish in the nicotine, the alcohol, and playing my aching right hand across the keyboard. It cannot close, or hold weight, but it can lift cigarettes and write. And that’s good enough for now. I’ll worry about the rest in the morning.

War, Cormac McCarthy and Speculative Fiction

Broke, running out of coffee and whiskey (not to mention food), and not feeling like going in to work leaves me in a random mood today. I feel rushed and pressed to do a lot of things, all on my mind at once. Yet I sit at my desk, in my broken backed chair and pursue utter randomness, looking for Black Swans.
Really, I was trying to find a Cormac McCarthy quote to use in a discussion, and it somehow led into an expanding gyre of the random. So, I'm running with it.

"It makes no difference what men think of war [...] War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner." Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian is, without a doubt, my least favorite McCarthy novel. At least of those I have read (I have yet to read The Crossing, The Sunset Limited, Outer Dark, Cities of the Plain or The Orchard Keeper). I am not turned off by the violence, or the despairing philosophies, or any of the rest that so many others find repugnant about the book. I simply think McCarthy has done better. Blood Meridian is revisionist, a nice way of saying its historical accuracy is precisely dick, and compared to McCarthy's masterpieces such as Suttree and The Road, poorly written. It lacks the subtlety in extremes of those two novels. While they deal with extreme, and violent, situations and the wreck and ruin of human lives, Suttree and The Road do so with understatement, and the literary equivalent of negative space. The unsaid. offers little subtlety in its extremes, reveling in the violence, and base vulgarities of nearly every character. I understand the idea, the portrayal of human natures desired, but I simply find Blood Meridian to be inelegant all around. Even in Child of God, which lacks some of the subtlety of later McCarthy, there was an elegance to the handling of such extremes. I am continually mystified at people who cant get over Blood Meridian - Its just not that good. And don't even get me started on people who want to think it is an accurate historical portrayal.
With all that said, however, it has some gems in a handful of lines. And bad McCarthy is still better than a lot of other writers best. The line about war, as said by the character of the Judge, is one I have always liked.

While looking for that quote, I came across another interesting perspective on McCarthy, in particular his Pulitzer winning The Road.
I am an unabashed fan of The Road, and have recommended it to most everyone I know. Some who've taken me up on it liked it, others did not as is the way with anything. I think it is one of the best works of literary fiction I've ever read, truly a master work. But beyond that, I've thought since it first came out, that it was a bold move in literary fiction, as it is essentially speculative fiction. Science fiction, speculative fiction, SciFi, Sciffy, call it what you will, is a dirty term in literary circles. Like fantasy (thud and blunder), it is an area regarded by the literati as populated by hacks, and poor use of language, and all the other cardinal sins against literature. And, to some extent, they are right - There is a lot of really terrible speculative fiction. But there is a lot of really good speculative fiction, and plenty of writers who are far more literary and skilled at their crafting of language than a lot of the icons of literature. I personally think there are more fundamentally important works of science fiction, than there are of (at least modern) literary fiction. Perhaps only made more so by the fact that, the engineers, the scientists, the builders of our world read science fiction/speculative fiction. Their bliss, their flights of fancy, and the reflections of their hopes, dreams, failures, and losses, are all in speculative fiction. These are the people who build our world. Yet to many literati, their voices and concerns are low and vulgar, they are the unwashed rabble.
And someone, at least, has the balls to point all this out: Dipping Their Toes in the Genre Pool

I need to read A Canticle of Leibowitz again. It is a fantastic book. I was thrilled last fall when I saw it was among the required reading for a popular course at New Mexico Tech. Seeing numerous students carrying it around, dog earing pages, and talking about it was fantastic.

Once More, The Sound of Guns...

I've actually tried to avoid gun blogging. I don't want to be a "gun blogger", something I've always found limiting, even if only in the eyes of others. It is inevitable however. It has to come up. I am a strong supporter of the right to keep and bear arms. Skill at arms is integral to my philosophy of a "neo-bohemian" lifestyle. In my little "Uber Mensch 2.0" ideal, being handy with a gun is as essential as the ability to read, write, drink coffee and wear trendy hats.
Cute oversimplifications aside, I like the guns. The guns are an important part of my life, and my social consciousness. Unfortunately, this turns a lot of people off, people who otherwise agree and identify with me and vice versa. A lot of my politics and philosophies are currently quite popular with a set who abhor the idea of guns and gun owners, much less an active pursuit of firearms use as a skill for saving lives. This is something I've learned to live with, and try to do what I can to change one person at a time. Usually, I don't have very high expectations, but from time to time a surprise comes along from an unexpected corner.
Such an unexpected corner was this article in High Country News: Why We All Need the Democrats to Abandon Gun Control

Its a good article. Do I think its spot on? No. But I think the ideals of that article would be a good place to start.
My only real criticism is that I think it is a mistake to look to the Heller decision as the end all be all of Right to Keep & Bear Arms legislation. Heller, while a real victory for RKBA, left some holes that we must be aware of, and be ready to fight. That said, in the context of the HCN article, and its target audience, Heller as a benchmark makes a lot of sense.

There will be more, in coming days/weeks/months. Somewhere in my head there is an epic post about guns, in general. As well as a lot more. One entry at a time, though.

The Night is Cold

Somewhere a smooth tongued idealist is lying, working a trade of expensive words and pretty mental pictures, while I am lost in a cold, window rolled down at 3AM world. Illuminated, a sickly dance club pattern, of street lights cut sharply by the cop in the rearview mirror.
And I lie, inelegantly, and painting no pictures and go on home where I want, without much conviction, a distraction of nicotine or alcohol, in lieu of what I'd really rather have. The shape, smell and softness to which I'd rather loose myself. Heedless of all the burdens, cleaving myself to another, instead of aching, tired and angry with the pitiful company of dissatisfaction.
I am tired of the game, of the hunters and hunted and all their many confusions. Of watching those I love breaking themselves on foolish turns of tongue, and misunderstanding. I want nothing of that, the more I watch it play out, unless it takes me by surprise. I have a great taste for the prey, but little taste for the hunting.
I want a kill. Quick, and probably bloody in the end, but ruthless and heedless of greater need beyond my own, and the immediate. I want not worrying about the money, or who its going to shatter in the end, as we drink and laugh and fall, rich with mirth in our base natures and loose to alcohol, glorying in abandonment of anything more serious.
Yet I am a poor killer. My tongue is cursed with honesty, and I cannot find a balance between ruthless desire, and gentility that works in my favor. I am not the liar, the convincer of warm and trustworthy ideals that everyone knows are just a pretense for the dirty, rough crudeness that's really being dealt.
And I am going to bed unsatisfied. Splashed with the blood of hunters, and without the soft, warm, dark haired and olive skinned satisfaction of coming out on top with prey.
I know this will be good for me. In twenty years I will know how wrong I was, how jaded and cynical I really wasn't and everything it cost me to think differently. But tonight? Tonight it is cold, and I have no higher minded intentions, and no desire for stability or anything but self indulgent destruction.

I Get High on a Bottle of Rye, the Coyote He Gets Drunk on the Moon

I went to school for a few years when I was a kid, before I decided I'd had enough of that kind of fun and convinced my parents to homeschool. School entailed a 45 mile drive over dirt roads to get to the little town of Magdalena. School started at 8:00 AM, and ran until 4:00 pm, four days a week. This meant getting up before the sun, shivering in the cold to help my folks build fires and get breakfast on the table, and then saddling up the old Ford, using the hand-pump to fill the gas tanks from 50 gallon drums, back when gas was cheap, and a wet-line off the propane tank to fill the conversion tank in the bed. The sun was usually just breaking the Ladrone peak when we hit the outer gate, finally threatening the last glimmer of stars on the western horizon.
It was a long cold drive, and one that often didn't get completed. Snow packed into draws, filling them feet deep and impassible even to four-wheel drive. Rain washed the gullies across the road, and filled the lows with engine choking water, which soaked into foot deep mud. And in a big rain, the Rio Salado would rise from a thin salty creek to a raging demon, sixty feet across, of muddy water racing for the Rio Grande miles to the east, completely obliterating either of the small fords on the old county road. But, success or not, it was almost always a good drive, and truth be told, I rarely lamented those days I didn't get to go to school.
My dad, he was the one who usually drove, would always play music or sing old cowboy songs on the drive. I don't remember a lot of the cassettes he played, but I do remember one. It was in a scuffed case, scratches partially obscuring the liner photo of a cowboy in a vest and a big black hat sitting with his guitar in front of a sunset sky. The album was Ian Tyson's I Outgrew the Wagon. I really don't remember taking a lot of note of the songs on it then - The song I liked the best, then, of Tysons was The Coyote and the Cowboy, which was on another record - But I remember liking the music, and the liking continued.
I grew up different. I've said it before, and will continue to say it. Growing up on a working cattle ranch in the 90's is far from the common experience. More kids, I imagine, grew up in Volkswagens driving around the country with their pot smoking parents. Driving 45 miles to reach the paved road just outside town that lead to school, depending on wood fired heat in a half century old adobe, actually knowing the meaning of words like riatta, tapaderos, hackamore, morral, these were not part of the common experience of my generation. Nor was listening to Ian Tyson, because no one who didn't understand those things, would understand that music.
Tyson got his start as a folky. He wrote what has been one of the most prolific folk songs of all time, Four Strong Winds, which has been covered by damn near everybody, and was part of one of the most successful folk duo's of the era, Ian and Sylvia (with Sylvia Tyson [nee Fricker], his now ex-wife). According to some, he was even the man who introduced Bob Dylan to marijuana. And when his marriage fell apart, and the folk thing didn't work anymore, he made good on a long-standing threat and bought a ranch not far from Alberta, turning to what he had always dreamed of - Cowboying. Pretty soon in addition to running the T-Bar-Y, he was playing in a few local joints, some of his old standbys, but more old cowboy songs, and a few new ones.
Now, there is a difference between cowboy music and country music - Always has been, and always will be. Most country, despite use of the word on occasion, has little to do with cowboyography, or the cowboy way of life. More to do with farming than ranching, and far more to do with honky-tonks, fast women, fast cars, and southern rural life, than either. Cowboy music is different - It is the music of a unique group of people, doing a unique thing, in a unique place. And in the 20th century, and its successor, more rare than unique. And very very few voices ever captured it. Even fewer captured it in a way that identified not just with the classic cowboy, but the cowboy of today, that rare, and frankly flighty, individual hell bent on eking a living out of being a'horse and chasing the wild bovine. Ian Tyson has been one of those rare voices.
Tyson released two solo albums in the seventies, Ol' Eon, a far more folk sounding album, and 1978's One Jump Ahead of the Devil, leaning more to cowboy music trends, and featuring his hit Half Mile of Hell, from the sountrack to the film of the same name (about the infamous chuckwagon race at the annual Calgary Stampede). Other than that, and some TV work, he was mostly quiet, and spent his time ranching and playing the occasional live show.
In 1983 he recorded an album, in his living room, called Old Corrals and Sagebrush, that was intended mostly for friends and family. It wasn't long before someone heard it, and Tyson was staring down the barrel of a contract again. The album wasn't a big seller, but it started something. In the intervening years Tyson has released nine more albums. My favorite of these would have to be 1996's All The Good'Uns, although they all have a fairly strong place in my heart.
Tyson is, like most of the best, and truest, artists, not a man without demons. He has been almost unhesitating to be self-critical in his work, and many of his best songs reflect his depressions, entanglements with alcohol and women, and what its cost him. There are few truly happy Ian Tyson songs. He lives in a world filled with ghosts, and for good reason - His world, the world of those who understand what he sings, is desolate, and only sparsely populated with the living.
I met Ian Tyson once, when I was a kid, after a live show. He was drunk, quite literally stinking drunk, and extremely obnoxious. I am pretty sure his behavior that night, towards me particularly, cost him a manager (an author who'd become friends of my family while researching a cowboy cookbook). And to tell the truth? It never really bothered me. I've been around drunks, and obnoxious ones, often enough, and had been even by then, that beyond that evening it didn't really phase me. I am still quite fond of my autographed copy of All The Good'uns.
Tyson's last two albums haven't done as much for me as his older work, but they are still good, and speak truth (and a few entertaining lies) about a lifestyle most will only encounter through fictions of far greater proportions. His voice now, in his mid seventies, sounds weaker and reedier than ever before, but only as might be expected. If anything, he's earned it. Carrying a rare truth, about a hard and harsh world, is never easy work, and anyone who makes it to be an old man has earned his weariness. A unfair, and painfully incomplete, payment for a job well done, but nothing less than such a man might expect, and certainly nothing he's not used to.
Someday, in the not too far future, we'll lose Ian to that great unknown, when his circle is through, and he'll be another ghost on a great range already so full of them. And eventually his music will probably be forgotten. But for now, for those of us who still understand, at least a little bit, there is none better, and none other.

"We will ride to the end, on the wings of the wind, until we're home, and our circle is through. May the children read, may they understand, what is of true value, so the truth may be known. The glory of god, and the dark side of man. The one thing, they must ride on alone. And may they stay, where the river runs through, the range and the sky, buckskin and blue. May they ride to the end, on the winds of the wind, till their home and their circle is through..." 'Til the Circle is Through, Ian Tyson

A Voice from the Borderland

I can hardly find the volume knob on my desktop speakers for all the beer bottles on my desk. Only two of them from tonight, though a third to join them sounds good, and maybe I should clean, but that will come later. Not tonight. I turn the knob, lower than I'd like fearing the high twangs of spanish guitar will wake my roommate.
I first heard of Tom Russell via pursuit of the music of Ian Tyson (there's another entry entirely to itself there). Russell has done good work with Tyson's material, but I've almost always preferred the original. The name however has been familiar, though I've never sought out his work for its own sake, so when I came across his blog a couple months back, I tagged it in my favorites and have returned to read it occasionally. Occasionally in recent weeks has been something more akin to often, checking for each new entry. Tonight, after reading a little, I decided it was time for music, and turned to YouTube to track the man down. Its not going to be everyone's cup of tea, but its certainly mine.
Russell has a distinct voice, in his songwriting, in his blogging, and I can only assume in his published writing which I may need to track down.

At any rate, I've added his link to my blogroll at right, for those interested. Its worth a look.

Preventing Utopia

Personally, I'm interested in keeping other people from building Utopia, because the more you believe you can create heaven on earth the more likely you are to set up guillotines in the public square to hasten the process. -- James Lileks

I haven't a clue who James Lileks actually is. I've never, to my recollections, heard of him before I read this tonight and he may be some kind of a monster, but this is a fantastic quote.
Struggle is what has defined everything. Without it, what would we have? What onus for evolution would there be? There would be great, bland, nothingness.