Thursday, January 27, 2011

Bright shiny new things

I''ll be posting over on tumblr from now on. Please follow me


hugs and smooches!
http://georgesjune.tumblr.com/

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

What we should have known

I don't believe in the narrative of my childhood. By that, I mean, I don't trust my recollections. It seems equally possible that I sprang fully formed into early adulthood as it does that I was once small and open to the possibilities of the world. Only my raging disappointments tether me to the belief that I must have once been a child. It is the only way to explain my anger. I keep thinking about SXR's brilliant line, "mourn the lost years". From mourning, it is a short hop to regret and a quick trip to things-i-wish-i-had-known-then.

I wish I had read Tropic of Cancer sooner, perhaps around age 13. And Bukowski - all of him. I am glad I fell in love with Henry David Thoreau when I did. I found Salinger at just the right time. I tried too hard with Nietzsche - it was a time when I was an acolyte in the cult of precocity. Instead of Nietzsche in college, I wish I had read Marx and Emerson. I wish someone had said to me, as a proto-freshman in college when I was a very young 17 years old, "check out the European Philosophers and if that interests you, you may find value in the lingua franca of American legal thought." It never occurred to me that there was a great tradition, equal to the French novel, an intense tradition around the law and theorizing around it. That the law celebrates precise language - the power of words. I am on the fence about Twain. I enjoyed him in school. I love him now. Vonnegut too.

Do books find you when you need them? Is there a difference between
assigned reading and found reading? What do you wish you had known?
What do you wish you had found and when?

Zipper Skin

I disconnected for a while, a week, to dip into the white hot book of days ten degrees north of the Equator. Each morning rising like mango-scented Pomona, blooming in the flame of day. I was not eager to return to the gray days of winter, the rough texture of wool socks and hard-soled shoes. I anticipated a moss-slick snow-salted wall of melancholy.

I had not taken Pacazo with me. It was too unwieldy to manage, too solid to be thrown carelessly in a canvas sack, tossed lightly on hot sand, to read with wet hands. A week without a computer, without a phone, without access, without required reading. Free to dream under the shadows of passing clouds.

If I asked my mother to select one photo of me as a child, her favorite photo, which would she choose and how long would she have to think about it? These clementines peel so easily, the skin bright and flexible, ripping easily under a thumb nail. In Costa Rica there was a cave that you could explore at low tide but at high tide it transformed into a maw of swirling chaos and noise. You could only see as far as the water would retreat. You could only hear the ocean. It occurs to me that everything can be wonderful and still no one is happy.

The weak light of winter hurts my eyes. I want to crawl into a coconut, wave my fingers at the feeding pelicans, count the devil rays as they fly into the wavy heat of the bay.