Blowing the Wogs Out of the Water

I found myself cheering on the Indian Navy as it sunk a pirate ship during the piracy crisis of late '08 (never mind that the boat turned out to be a Thai fishing vessel) and thinking about how much it would cost to put Blackwater guys with RPGs on every ship or to simply slap a 5" gun turret on the freighters. About blowing the kaffirs out of the water and sending them scurrying back to shore. And then I think about why I'm so eager to take the fight to these Red Sea raiders, these brown buccaneers. Isn't it a form of racism? Is there anything that makes us different from stuffy peers on a London club in the 1900s, puffing and fulminating about the brazen wogs (Sepoys, Boxers, Afghans, Zulus) and how what they need is the taste of good English iron to put them in their place?

Could it be that with our own empire crumbling, the industrialized world going to hell in a handbasket, the American economy settling into its own dust, that we approach the piracy problem with a special verve? Like the tyrannical schoolyard bully with the abusive father and the alcoholic mother?

A bad political haircut.



From an aesthetic standpoint, Communism was without a doubt the least appealing political system, like, ever. Other than the Russian Constructivists, whose stylistic forays never quite meshed with the industrial and social imperatives of the moment and fell into disfavor, the style of Communism -- Socialist Realism -- was always a bad look. Cloaking the aspirations and esprit of whole societies the way a big, badly made, ill-fitting suit hides a good physique, social realism gave Communist countries a shambolic image redolent of old potatoes, body odor and stale cheese. The Soviet bloc style was the aesthetic projection of a sodden, Orwellian reality: what future you will have will be without joy.

A friend has just returned from Hungary, where all the Soviet-era statuary that littered Budapest were gathered up and stuck in Szobobark ("Memento Park"), a desolate spot on the far edge of the city, where they moulder and tarnish and collect bird droppings, unseen by all but the most crusty, die-hard, party loyalists.....beribboned old functionaries looking up at Lenin and gumming silently in a thin, late afternoon snow.

Heed the Call of Vigorous Commerce!

What is it about the Victorian broadside that so pleases me? Is it simply nostalgia? Portly, vested, mutton-chopped America in the Guilded Age, relentlessly optimistic and vigorous in pursuit of its Manifest Destiny? Or perhaps the self-assured, hearth-fire coziness of the British Empire? Sherlock Holmes on the case, the Hindoos subdued, the labouring classes mindful of their place?

Or is it instead the sheer hysteria of the medium? Overblown, stentorian exhortations and adumbrations - "LIFT HIGH THE SHINING CUP OF ENTERPRISE FOR ALL TO SIP!" "SMALL INFRACTIONS, SEVERELY PUNISHED!! A DEFENESTRATION OF PETTY THIEVES IN THE STRAND A FORTNIGHT HENCE!" A zillion different fonts try to outpoint and outserif each other.


It resonates with my own, overwrought rhetoric. And if I only could, I would post each blog entry in 15 different wood type styles, each one redolent of horse urine, sagebrush, cool granite banks and the sweet cedar of freshly-built gallows.

Surrealist Journalism - A Post-Structuralist Critique and Meta-Textual Dialogue

[Mark wrote:]

Interesting, funny, disturbing and strange. Morbid yet opaque. Piquant yet clairvoyant.

Here is my assessment:

1. It’s an ’88.

2. I have bad posture?

3. My eyes are dead ? ? Gee...thanks.

4. I have latent violence? Well yes I guess I do, but it’s only about scum, assholes and criminals.

5. The front is seats are cloth, not vinyl, and there are two seats. Yours and mine.

6. The impression I have of your brother is that he’s a heartless, soulless, uneducated, cigarette-smoking proto-serial killer. Is that accurate?

7. Have you ever thought of writing surrealist fiction?

[Doug wrote:]

No, the actual Mark was not slouching, nor were his eyes dead. The actual Mark has little if anything to do with our story. The Mark of the story, however, is a cold, hard man, a man of action, a man who drives a cop car and has seen the bad side of the world. He is a man qualified to cut through the crap. He calls life as he sees it, and he sees it with clear, hard eyes. The rose tint wore off long ago.

His slouch is a statement -- a strategy. Cigarettes, while implied, were at no point stated.

The Dodge Diplomat of the story is an '86 with vinyl bench seats. And the Doug of the story (wait, he is never named, let us call him the model narrator) may end up in the back seat, behind the prisoner grille. Which, by the way, the Diplomat of the story will have.

Anyone who knows you will think this is funny, anyone who doesn't will think you are world-wise, impressive -- and dangerous. Umberto Eco will write an essay about "The Layers of Mark". A course on Mark Gorney vis á vis Mark Gorney: Sémiotiques Syncrétiques will be taught at Université Toulouse.

In Which I Am Advised to Embrace my Inner Lightweight

So my brother and I are driving across the Golden Gate Bridge the other day in his 1986 Dodge Diplomat police cruiser. He drives it with the slouched, knowing crustiness of a detective who's seen far too much in his years on the force. Because he's a world music publicist.

For my part I've spent the whole of our trip up to Napa and the whole of the way back talking about my Novel, or rather Problems with my Novel, or rather Reasons Why I Can't Conceive of Starting to Think About Writing my Novel. In a thousand sentences launched with a screwed up face and "See, the thing is...." I have talked about Structural and Metaphoric Subtlety, and Biblical Mythos, and the Hero's Journey, and a gazillion other tricks the Real Writer has in his bag, none of which I feel I have, all of which make me a Fraud, a Hack, a Fake. I just write about Stuff. And if I have anything to say about the human condition, any compelling and nuanced psychological insights to fold within the subtext, it will be entirely of the reader's invention. I have no subtext, I whine. When I write, see, it is what it is...and that's all.

My brother scans the road with dead eyes as we pass between the Art Deco towers. The thick, red cables dip down, swoop up. His fingers touch the wheel with the latent violence that only a life in world music publicity can culture.

"Look," he says to me, "have you ever said anything profound in your entire life?"

"Uh, well.....no."

"So what makes you think you could put anything profound into a book?? Just write, for Christ's sake. Jesus."

The South Tower looms over me. I roll my head and look out at the Pacific.

Dude. The rest of my life is opening up to me in a sweeping vista that, were I not on the vinyl bench seat of a police car, would stagger.

He's right. I'm like....a dolt.

I don't have anything in particular to say.

And....that's all right!



Coming tomorrow -- my first novel.

Wickedly Forbidden.

The 300HP Dodge Charger Hemi Police Special. My next car? Fuel economy is certainly not its strong point...and yet...as we near the time when our society will come to a sparking, grinding halt, there is something even more alluring about power for its own sake. The carnality of poor mileage....the almost sexual temptation to be crushed hard against your seat by the throbbing power of eight thick cylinders with hemispherical heads....but then, when your precious petroleum fluids have drained away, oh, the post-accelerative depression.....

On breasts.

Wonderful things. I don't know that I'm a breast man, per se -- the legs, posterior, hands and ankles all must be factored in -- ankles perhaps the real litmus test -- but the breasts have their heft in the equation. And then there is the whole breast-buttock ratio to consider, as well as the chunk-in-the-trunk zaftigity that tends to accompany a pair of real, screaming gazongas. Real here meaning natural -- and so comes the topic of structural augmentation. Jane Anybody desperate to attain an epic, globular status worthy of a south Indian temple frieze or perhaps a '57 Chrysler's bumper. But I need to recuse myself. Breast implants paid for my education, braces, and shoes, Dad being a plastic surgeon. I'll just say this -- in my first job, as a filing clerk in his office, I encountered an implant lying on the counter like a tumescent water balloon, with all the lateral slurdge attendant to its unfettered state. And...well, that kind of took the bloom off the rose right there.

On choosing a Jewish identity rather than that other thing.

Well, a Gentile friend says I'm Jewish, dammit, and I'm not going to argue with her. I always wanted to be something, growing up nothing. And why not Jewish? I'd be proud to be a Real Jew. The Jews have the lion's share of the great violinists, biochemists, movie moguls and tough generals with eye patches. I'll go with that. Anyway, it's easier to be a Jew without having anything to do with the religion, per se. Saying someone's a Jew is tantamount to saying they're Irish. That is, just as you don't have to do anything except wake up and there you are, blang, red hair and a tendency towards gab, fistfights and alcoholism, being a Jew doesn't mean you have to stand up and be counted in temple at High Holy Days to prove it. Whereas being a Christian, well, that implies a proactive, participatory religiousity, does it not? Along with an evangelical fervor and a slow-talking, high-waisted, neatly-combed, somewhat Talibanistic zeal for cultural censure.