Dharma Bum

And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in.

—Haruki Murakami



"I believe that all anyone really wants in this life is to sit in peace and eat a sandwich."

Tina Fey.

Today

"To the as-yet unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.

I have caught life. I have come down with life. I was a wisp of undifferentiated nothingness, and then a little peephole opened quite suddenly. Light and sound poured in. Voices began to describe me and my surroundings. Nothing they said could be appealed.

They never shut up."

- Kurt Vonnegut

Au Revoir

It's a little after 11pm in Paris. Tomorrow morning we fly back to California. I always spend the last day in Paris trying to take it all in, wondering if I'll be back. I hope so. It's been a great trip.

Lot's of change on deck after I get back. More on that later.

Au Revoir.

Derrida

This is what one of those cranky old French postmodern dudes looks like. Notice anything absent but implicit?

Good Therapy

Following is a wonderful piece by David Foster Wallace. Just change fiction to therapy and he captures my position in narrative practice. Often I have found myself in conversation with socio-politically aware folks wondering, where's the possibility here? How do I take that into the room with me? These conversations tend to be heavy on the dark worldview, light on the hope or possibility. Foster Wallace captures it beautifully when he says; ..do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? ...the definition of good art (therapy?) would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness... Call me a sucker, I still believe in the magical. Rest of the quote follows..

If what’s always distinguished bad writing— flat characters, a narrative world that’s clichéd and not recognizably human, etc.— is also a description of today’s world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then [Bret Easton] Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.

— David Foster Wallace

Dispatch

Paris: Conversation is important here. Passed by several cafe's. Lovers, friends, ideas, not a "smart" phone in sight.

I left my phone in the room today. It wasn't missed.