Prior to settling into my recent season of doctors and campaigning for Obama, I was on extended holiday in the American Rocky Mountains. Being Otherwise Engaged on multiple fronts is the reason for the lack of posts to this blog and also accounts for a recent sense of intercut reality. The past few months have smudged together in interesting and surreal ways: impressions of myself holding a kind of meta clipboard containing hybrid medical/political/revision questions (Does your family have any history of internal bleeding while convincing uncommitted voters to go Democratic in a perhaps-too-confusing and staccato flashback sequence?). That sort of thing. The culmination of this oddly recombinant period was waking up in the recovery room demanding assurances that (a) Obama was still president-elect and (b) fucking Chapter Seven remained finalized . . .

But back to the vacation: It worked liked a charm--much-needed distance was inserted between me and the book (especially fucking Chapter Seven); despite appearances, I actually feel recharged, though slightly worse-for-wear.

And since I can already sense the uncomfortable shifting, you have my word that this isn’t the preamble to an endless sharing of holiday snaps (As you can see, this picture of the Rockies is slightly bluer and less hazy than the previous vista of mountains--but a lot grayer and more distant than the range in the next shot). Rather, I’d like to explore a variant of that Arthur Conan Doyle passage about a mute canine:

"Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?" 

"To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time." 

"The dog did nothing in the night-time." 

"That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.

In my case, the curious, attention-worthy incident is the non-inspirational nature of--er--nature: All the splendor had absolutely no affect on my writing. There was, of course, the obligatory amount of Wonder, Scale and Taking-of-Breath. As a civilian, I respond to nature (though I suspect in a more clinical way than most people), but as an artist, well, not so much. However, this still seems too cagey, so know this: In terms of art, I’m completely disinterested in the natural world.

With the exception of Turner, my appreciation of painted landscapes is entirely technical; minus my fascination with brushstrokes, composition and light, Monet haystacks would die in their amped-up attempts to Make Us Notice The Literal And Spiritual Benefits Of Rural Life In A Way That We Would Otherwise Entirely Miss (And So Thank You, Claude). I remain unmoved by landscapes in the same way I patiently wait for Springsteen songs about The Myriad Aspects of Blue-Collar Life That We Would Otherwise Entirely Miss (And So Thank You, Bruce) to finally end. In each instance, the very obvious has been made epically intense. And, because of the narrowing affect of the obviousness, it’s also about mind-numbing redundancy. (Pop Quiz 1: Explain how “Thunder Road” is in anyway different from”Born To Run” with the exception of tighter focus. Pop Quiz 2: Thematically differentiate three of Monet’s haystack paintings. See what I mean?)

My disinterest in Artistic Nature extends to other disciplines. In most cases, I’d rather saw off my leg with a dull butter knife than read pastoral poetry. Again, it’s the sheer predictability--despite all the passionate attempts to find the new, surprising and oddball detail-cum-angle. I get it--mainly because I got it: a long time ago, reading 400-year-old poetry. Nature is Big. I am Small. Natural Metaphors for What Is Churning In My Soul are somehow more resonant for being externalized (though no one really explains why nature-as-mirror is inherently better than self-examination). Nature is Authentic, whereas Civilization Is Artifice. 

(Full disclosure: I have been a hypocritical enabler. At one point, I critiqued some pastoral poetry as a politely down-played but huge favor. What I still remember is the dumbfounded respect of the writer--as if it took special intelligence to discern that, yes, geologic time was being used as a metaphor for a relationship; that, um, Things Change Just Like In Nature. Whatever. My critique was in no way brain surgery, and yet I was deemed Yoda-like for the “insights.” However, the real reason for my carefully chosen, seemingly Zen-like advice had much more to do with me being too polite to explore the author’s psychological reasons for projecting personal feelings onto geological forces. The resulting deflection, disguise and avoidance produced the opposite of truth, which, I finally realized, had been the unconscious intent of the pieces.)

For me, nature-based art is inescapably hackneyed in terms of theme; the metaphoric natural world has been stripped-mined of meaning. Which places it in the same relationship to me as the Blues--so rigorously ritualized in both form and topic that any relatively recent stuff can only be significant in terms of bravura performance. (And, as I learned in my season critiquing pastoral poetry, talented nature poets are as rare as Glenn Gould caliber pianists--journeyman versification of cliched beaches/clouds/flocks of birds/rain/waving grass is as deadening as a cocktail-lounge piano player vamping his way through predictable pop standards.)

All this is a very circuitous way of saying that I inserted myself in the Rocky Mountains to get away from my writing, and not for inspiration. Artistically, I thrive in big cities and interstitial neighborhoods: Fringe-dwelling urban neurotics--my inescapable tribe--give me the ideas and energy that make the words flow. 

In this Age of Palin, where “elitist” is the new sneering code word for being smart--dismissive of intelligence in the same way “faggot” denigrates gays-- Blue-Collar Authenticity is all the rage. And, being noble savagery with a new coat of political paint, Blue-Collar Authenticity is especially shrill if the Proudly Uninformed also happen to live near equally Authentic Nature (cough--Alaska--cough). My problem is that I don’t see authenticity in the leading of a patently “low-information” life, and the Rockies are no more or less authentic than Manhattan. (And with a scotch in me, I’ll probably confide that Manhattan is actually more impressive, being the product of human aspiration and design rather then entropy and tectonic plates.)

I also went on a walkabout through the mountains because I’ve been forcing myself to do things I otherwise wouldn’t: Ranked absolutely on my personal Things To Do Before I Die list, the Rockies don’t even figure in the top 100. Which made them a perfect choice because they were sufficiently outside both my desire and comfort zone to be perversely intriguing.

Which leads to the dodgy matter of productive masochism--the Rockies were also chosen to address my incapacitating fear of heights; the kind of terror that can literally freeze me in place and screw my eyes shut. However, limping across the tundra above the timberline at the edges of precipices is in itself still giving me nightmares. Thus, despite my intentions, the trip’s takeaway did not have the edifying, arc-to-a-moral of after-school specials: I in no way mastered my fear of heights. After-the-fact and much closer to sea-level, I can see no benefit in the experience. I’m still as neurotic about heights, but now also struggling not to become completely agoraphobic. So much for self-improvement . . .

The more successfully diverting parts of my journey mostly had to do with the region’s wildlife. Episodes with bear, mountain lions, elk, and moose were satisfying encounters with the Other Than, and, being on foot, were also dangerous enough to underscore my view of Nature as brutal entropy in glamorous drag; a serial killer with a deceptively charming surface. For me, Nature is Tony Perkins in a lushly Technicolor version of Psycho (to best convey all those sunsets)--really nice right up until you step into the shower.  Just like mountain lions are majestically nice right up until you find yourself surrounded by scat embedded with feathers, smell the ammonia waves of cat piss and slowly--very slowly--look up (do not turn your back, do not crouch and do not run) . . . 

Not that there’s anything wrong with this. Perkins the Mountain Lion is merely doing (or attempting to do) what Perkins does. Perkins has an admirable purity going for him: Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim, Perkins gotta eat me (though mind the iPhone, Perkins; I waited in line too long for it to end up embedded in tomorrow’s scat). Perkins’ big-cat life is a perfectly straight through-line from his jaws to the pulsing carotid in my neck. He is without nuance--just like the natural world that surrounds him.

And here, at last, is what I like about Nature: Its lack of agendas. Paradoxically, however, this is also why I have no artistic use for it: Going hand-in-hand with my preference for large cities is a fascination with humanity’s bedecked selfishness. Perkins doesn’t have a string of divorces behind him, and to rationalize them, he’s not reading Smart Predators, Stupid Choices; Perkins has no passive carefully wrapped around his tooth-and-claw aggression; Perkins doesn’t network or politick; Perkins doesn’t manipulate, he merely pounces if the opportunity presents itself; and in the twilight of his big-cat years, Perkins will be guiltless about his savage, red-meat life--there will be no mid-life crisis and, thank god, he will not reimagine himself as a vegetarian. All this makes me want to hang-out with Perkins (albeit at a safer distance), but not write about him.

Each of us is our own spin doctor--we have a deep need to remain the hero of our respective lives, and so we’re constantly riding the gain of self-serving rationalization. Our life-narratives are naturally sloppy things because lurking just below the careful civility and sociality is a Perkins-esque through-line that passes from desire to possession, and it severs anything caught in the middle--particularly the through-lines of others. Happiness; stability; lifestyle; love; material things; spiritual satisfaction; validity; freedom; the perfect job; the perfect family; brain-melting sex: Take your pick--each ultimately arrays itself along the line between desire and possession. Though we will never admit it, there’s often a single degree of separation between us and the mountain lion--we’ve merely learned to lie to others and ourselves. 

Be it ever so grim, this is what I write about--our endless streams of often conflicting self-narratives and our endless patching of the frequent holes in their logic and decency. Hero-as-martyr, hero-as-victim, hero-without-a-choice, hero-annointed by destiny: After-the-fact and by necessity, there are many ways to explain the unavoidable and often subtle carnage we cause--the feathers in the scat we leave behind. Marianne Faithfull once sang, ‘Beyond a certain age, every artist works with injury,’ and I’m inclined to agree with her.

I’ve never believed in objectivity, even as child; I’m simply not wired that way. But as I’ve grown older, even the idea of varying degrees of tarnished truth seem increasingly less likely. Perhaps it’s simply occupational disease, given the daily struggle with my book, but I’ve come to see that we’re all just our latest self-revisions, the momentary sum of our constantly morphing delusions. Let’s put this another way: Though I ought to know better, I sometimes introduce new material in these late revisions of the novel--and doing so forces me to pour through the earlier sections, tweaking for continuity or consistency in metaphors. Like a stage magician, I work backwards from the latest effect. And, I think, this is what we all do with our lives--it’s the real function of memory, which is why recollection is the central subject and driver of the book. We are constantly adjusting the past to account for the present; the only parameters being preservation of personal continuity and our status as indisputable hero of the our respective stories. 

And so, yes, when it came to taking a break from the book, I temporarily inserted myself into an agenda-less world. See it as a much needed exile from my material. A day spent tagging along with a herd of elk didn’t resolve into fire-illuminated, furious scribbling in a Moleskine. Remarkably, it didn’t even result in many photographs--probably fewer than 30 shots for my entire time in the Rockies. Being artistically unmoved by Nature doesn’t preclude briefly intense and intimate interactions, but they’re inherently fleeting and intensely private; pulling out a camera usually felt as out-of-place as it would be during lovemaking. Roy Batty says this in Blade Runner:

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time . . . like tears in rain . . . Time to die.

Roy’s last-moment epiphany is an understanding that memory is both self-defining and ephemeral; a cupped handful of experience that inevitably slips through the fingers and back into the coursing stream of reality. And this is pretty much how I felt about all those sunsets, waterfalls and mist-filled valleys: You people wouldn’t believe what I saw; their significance is too personal to be pixelated as a digital image. Better to allow them to slip back into the rush of time . . . 

I have a first-cup-of-coffee tradition that I try to observe every morning: The search for a delaying tactic to keep me from entering Writing Mode; something that prevents me from wading waist-deep back into The Book while my caffeine level is optimized. Today I decided it was of utmost importance that iGoogle, Popurls and Inquisitor for Safari match each other--as in each service being the same shade of gray. Before any further manuscript revisions were possible, it suddenly seemed somehow reasonable that a cross-service, monochromatic harmony had to be established. I figured this would buy me at least 30 minutes before I had to start channelling The Author--and I was right. (Since I've been writing the book, I've discovered in myself a hitherto unrealized-but-inspired talent for delaying tactics. Who knew? And so yes, matching my Google home page to both my news aggregator and expanded function search pop-up seemed whacked even to me--thrilling so, in fact; the sort of behavior that would cause friends to cross to the other side of the street on mere suspicion of the project.)

Anyway, after some geeky dicking about with the appearance preferences of Popurls, chromatic parity was established with Inquisitor. Which meant that I'd only need to find a complementary gray theme for Google and my sad little plan for temporary desktop domination would be realized. Mwah-ha-ha. Or something like that--whatever a procrastinating, bush-league Dr. Evil might say in similar circumstances. Thus I zipped up to the Google theme directories where I eventually settled on Chroma Pencil Lead as the gray that would make writing once again possible.

But that's not what this post is about; it's just writerly backstory. I already know I'm eccentric, so there's no need to solicit your feedback concerning my various tics. Rather, I want to share what I stumbled across during my latest instance of Putting Off Writing: A Sarah Palin theme for Google, the major portal to the world's assembled knowledge and opinion. Here, have a look:

(If I were you, I'd want more proof this isn't some kind of joke, so please take a moment and visit the theme in virtual situ.)

My cat has become impressively adept at miming WTF? and in this case, I second that emotion. The massive cognitive dissonance of linking Palin (a) to knowledge of, well, any kind, and (b) to inherently divergent opinions is best conveyed by this simple thought experiment: Imagine Fred Flintstone and Dino as mascots for Cincinnati University's School of Paleontology. Like Gloria Foster said in The Matrix, 'it bakes your noodle . . .'

Full disclosure: I just took down my Obama lawn sign; I'd left it up for a full post-election week as a sort of motionless victory dance. However, my horror at the Palin Google theme has little to do with politics or partisanship. Palin, the the Far Right's Mean-Girl Chauncey Gardner, has declared war on The Smart--here carefully defined not as the opposite of Dumb, but, rather, as the rejection of Willful Ignorance. (Or, in the manner of "Low Information," that appalling, politically correct description of those who won't pull themselves away from television reality shows, let's simply say that Smart can seen as the state of being "Informed.") And so it follows that Smartness transcends political party. Which explains why Christopher Hitchens, Colin Powell, Andrew Sullivan, Chris Buckley, et al fled in horror from Rick Davis' Eliza Doolittle. She might as well have farted at a dinner party--which, come to think of it, she metaphorically did. Repeatedly and at all sorts of gatherings. This is also why, even though she's been sent packing back to Alaska (interesting expression, that, in the context of the  $200,000 worth of costuming), the Smart continue to bang on her as if she were Chuck Barris' gong. Which explains why I'm here in the front of the line, happily clutching my
mallet . . .

But back to the point: The Palin Google theme. After I spot-treated the stains on my shirt from the coffee that shot out of my nose when I first came upon it, I admit I was confused. Truth is, I still am. How exactly is one to understand this theme? Is it meant to be taken literally? Is the user of iGoogle supposed to acknowledge Palin's oddly blank smile even as he or she searches for quantum mechanics or atheism or--ulp--evolution? Is a user of Google (which also delivers a constant stream of complex "mainstream media" news) really expected to accept that the Magic Eight Ball of politicians (Unclear, Ask Again Later--when I have new index cards) has somehow morphed into the Cassandra of Search (Here are the top two monographs on the Constitutional definition of the vice presidency)?

"Ironic" is my default setting, it's nothing I can help. So I'm always thrown by its potential absence. However, the only way I can make sense of the Palin Google theme is to see it as a web designer's ongoing joke. As what the first art director of Wired once called a "mind grenade." But in this instance, the brilliance is that the conceptual grenade keeps exploding with each new search--be it smart or stupid. The coffee-out-the-nose thing happens whether I ask Sarah about the latest advances in astrophysics or speaking in tongues, albeit for different reasons. In other words, pretty much like my reactions to her answers during the
campaign . . .

There's a handful of recording artists who never disappoint--well, make that almost never--and Lucinda Williams is long-time a member of this exclusive club. Since her self-titled third album, she's never let me down. Even when the roots contingent bitched about West, I appreciated what she was doing and admired how she pushed past the genre stances that had endeared her to fans. And, given the polarizing affect of West, the country-rock regrouping of Little Honey, Williams latest release, is its least surprising attribute. In a way, it recalls World Without Tears--a similar retreat into the tried and true after her more experimental Essence. But where World Without Tears left Williams' considerable songwriting talents intact, she arrives at Little Honey without the baggage that's provided the inspiration for her best work.

There's a fine EP buried in Little Honey--but unfortunately, there's also that other 40 minutes of music . . . The songs neatly fall into four categories: Lucinda In Love, Lucinda Dispensing Advice To Other Pop Stars, Lucinda Classics Old and New, and, well, a Lucinda/Elvis Costello comedy routine. Even though it physically hurts to admit this, the problem is that most of the new material is the stuff of B-sides and bonus tracks.

The quality of the Lucinda-In-Love material suggests that Paul McCartney was right all those years ago--it's a world filled with love songs that are indisputably silly. And while I'm pleased for Lucinda these days, there's good reason why great art rarely (if ever) flows from Being Happy. Because Happy has few nuances and it also lacks drama--which is bad news if you're trying to write four-minute lyrical narratives that evolve across their verses and recontextualized choruses.

The tracks where Lucinda Dispenses Pop-Star Advice are problematic in two ways: First, she's not exactly the poster girl for smart music-business moves, and second, apart from silly love songs, is there anything more boring than dispatches from the echo chamber of rock stardom? "Running On Empty," "Tenth Avenue Freeze Out," "How Do You Sleep?"--we get it. Fame Has A Price, aka It Hasn't Been Easy. I'm never sure what to make of this type of song, because beneath the graphic, salacious details, lurks all the complexity of a Lifetime Network movie. The brilliance of Amy Winehouse's "Rehab" is her undermining of self-pity--which is why Little Honey will never displace Back To Black at the top of my frequent-play list.

"Jailhouse Tears," the Lucinda-And-Elvis Standup Routine, amuses on the first two or three listenings, after which the song begins to irritate in the manner of any novelty number (even if you appreciate the implicit Tammy-and-George joke).

The good news is that the remaining songs keep Little Honey from totally disappointing. They comprise a powerful, virtual EP anchored by the heartbreaking "If Wishes Were Horses." There's also the infectious, radio-ready "Real Love," the somber "Heaven Blues," and "Tears of Joy"--the one silly love song that transcends itself. 

Another plus is the paradoxical fact that Little Honey is a near-perfect set of recordings: the live-in-studio production is superlative, the band's playing is spectacular and William's vocals are among her best. The impressively austere black-and-white art direction is also excellent. If only the lyrics consistently rose to the level of the production, performances and package.

The final problem of Little Honey is its numbing length. Most classic, vinyl-age pop records weighed-in at somewhere between 34 to 42 minutes. And just as the three- to five-minute capacity of the 45 codified length expectations for singles, 40-something minutes still seems "right" for a set of studio pop songs, even in a digital age. A version of Little Honey less self-indulgently long would have eliminated the water-treading redundancy of "Little Rock Star," "Rarity" and "It's a Long Way To the Top:" At 42 minutes, chances are are good that only one of the three would ended up in the collection. Pop Darwinism would have rightly eliminated the weaker two. (Similarly, the ratio of love songs would also have been beneficially pruned.)

But despite all this criticism, I suspect that Little Honey will easily out-sell the more adventurous and experimental West. Which is a shame, since Williams will be encouraged to write even sillier love songs, more navel-gazing rock-star ballads and--worst of all--commit comedy again. And me, well, I'd rather have gone farther down the path that produced "Are You Alright?" and "Learning How To Live," instead of having to brace myself for Lu and El doing a twangy cover of "I Got You Babe" while broadly winking at one another. To paraphrase something else from West, 'I don't want to wrap my head around that . . .'