SERIOUS GRAVITY (A SANITY PRIMER)

We had made our way down busy Palm Avenue towards the crosswalk. after zigzagging the usual route from busy Bandini Avenue to Tower Road to Rosewood Place. Bret was our wild-man companion - a fifth-grader with a take-no-prisoners approach to life. The local crosswalk, that most mundane of enterprises was soon to become the scene of spontaneous absurdist theater when suddenly out of nowhere came the random yelp: Hey...Hey...What do you want with us lady? -  What do I want with you? said the most predictably normal gray-haired woman by whose ever so brief guidance we measured our daily jaunt to school.  Yeah - where are you taking us? -  There's only one way kid - It's this way... -  You're not really a crossing guard are you? came the cheeky interrogative.  The slightly bemused, limping, beleaguered  woman was dwarfed by her bright yellow uniform as she held up her STOP sign - showing Brett. The other smaller kids walked by us single file in the middle of th...

  The year is 1977...We are traveling back in time to that forlorn, goofy, gritty, disenchanting, disorienting, stable, cuddly, much-maligned decade before the most recent wave of progress had swept across the land, decade of garish neon color and tupperware, decade of energy crises and foreign policy debacles, political scandals and failed assassinations, decade of ethnic pride and racial tension, fading hippie idealism and working class re-alignment, decade of divorce and singles-dating scenes, UFO's, bigfoot sightings, Bermuda Triangle, primal scream therapy,  fondue pots, blue jeans, rock concerts and Lawrence Welk show, decade of urban decay, hard hat riots and west-coast hedonism, youth culture, long hair, food fads, omnipresent television, consciousness raising, protest marches....As part of our deep dive and time travel, we are aware, for starters, of the glaring technological backwardness of this former era - a decade lacking in computer laptops, cell phones, copier m...

  I'm drifting back again to that earlier decade - sort of like inhabiting one of those flying dreams where we scan the clouds hurriedly and travel in some weird, angelic, time-lapse photographic way back to the year 1977 - the fulcrum year of my development - a year of brief hope before malaise and stagflation - standing as a wonderful marker between that "earlier time" of "before" which encompasses the 60's, 50's and 40's leading back to the War itself - and the afterlife of adulthood known to me as the 80's, 90's, 2000's up until the present now ...This decade that I have overvalued in so many ways and built-up in my nostalgic brain, but which for me because of my age and description - stands as the all-important portal...There I am again standing on the open green field, that seemingly infinite vista at Poly High School - playing catch with Ralph - and being overcome by a slew of overwhelming emotions...The fastball is coming at me b...

 A relentlessly political mind should encounter at least one instance in Life that leaves it confused and sputtering...

  Early on that day an old friend from high school, Tren, came by and we went out for an early lunch...It's all of 9:30 in the morning and I hear myself muttering I need my burrito, I need my fix of international cuisine...a Korean burrito, yes, yes, a burrito with cabbage and rice and that substitute pork they have dipped in their special hot sauce  - Dude, you don't look right is something wrong? We spoke of music and the cost of rent...I believe in food trucks...I like the stability they offer us...And so it went...back and forth like that for the next hour? How is your aunt back in Hong Kong? What about Drake and Mya?...Have you seen them?  And yes my dude and no my dude...until we arrived at the food truck at the edge of the park where privileged, chic, impoverished, well-dressed bohemians pretended to be without permanent residence- and even then I felt a pang of guilt over the name Korean burrito - Would Kim Chi wrap have been the more proper wording...Was I fetish...

 Literature creates a world with its own internal logic ...Can you simply "arrive" - dear Reader - with the sole purpose of imposing your outside logic on that imaginative world - without at any stage attempting to immerse yourself in a world and a logic that is - in part - unfamiliar to you? The question is to be asked internally - from within - what do the characters hope for or aspire to, amid the parameters defined by their world? What do they seek to do with their limited freedom? How real or illusory are the obstacles they encounter? And are their choices understandable?

  According to the new rules of fiction,  the setting of the story will be  rarified - something far asunder from your typical prime locations (London, Paris,  Rome, New York, Los Angeles, Amsterdam)...and points of view will be distributed fairly among various interlocutors... The narrator will come clean with his skewed point of view and his privileged misperceptions... or else be replaced forthwith by other narrators soon after the prologue...Thus, after too many scenes roll by there shall arise one overarching "voice of reason" to correct the perceptions of any lingering unreliable narrators....Characters will be representative of all peoples and cultures...Lesser characters shall be punished for being wealthy and short-sighted....Major characters shall make perfectly bland, enlightened conversation with one another so as not to alarm the reader or scare any horses...Traumatic scenes shall be curtailed and overshadowed by long digressions on the meaning of histor...

 There once was a utopia where -believe it or not - all citizens were declared free and equal - where women enjoyed the same rights as men, where education was free, and work communal, where the state provided for its elderly, where racism was outlawed - and fascism in all of its ugly forms was verboten - and rule by the workers for the workers was enshrined in law... All of the traditional hierarchies were overthrown condemned to the dust heap - the old rulers eliminated, the old oppressive class hounded, vilified and cast out - the backward types requisitioned, called to the cities or for military service or else left to their haggard and destitute form of agrarian subsistence...Oh the songs and posters, the artwork, the inspiring films, the news broadcasts, the daily papers - a spirit of "can-do, must-do..." in the face of  imperial threats from abroad ...a terrifyingly beautiful conformity - a state of single-mindedness - all questions answered and known by all ...yet...

  An Author depicts a main character darkly obsessed, driven by lust and hypocrisy, narrow, provincial in mindset, xenophobic, intolerant and otherwise angry, embittered with destructive tendencies and violent outbursts of temper ...Would a Reader then have reason to object saying: "I refuse to dignify this author (and their worldview) by naively inhabiting the fictional universe of such a protagonist - accepting their wretched assumptions - cheering on their sordid struggles - while forced (involuntarily) to "sympathize with" or "understand" their backward sensibilities...?" "On what basis?" responds the Author. "Because," says the Reader, "we know that "violence"  and "intolerance" and "xenophobia" - are unacceptable, cringe-worthy, and this narrative makes us complicit in its attempt to "humanize" the persons involved?" "Okay" - replies the Author - "what if we only ma...

  There is a tendency to read literature as a means to an end beyond literature. The story contains a moral that must be translated into a change of attitude - but more specifically the story is a means to knowledge of a political kind and a knowledge that takes issue with the past, with tradition itself as deeply problematic. Seen through an ideological lens - the story becomes an unintentional confession of the author's hidden biases . The narrative itself is a hopelessly skewed rendering - fraught with underlying rationales or glaring oversights regarding a particular social order... [ The author accepts in passing or else summarily fails to condemn such desiderata as:  militarism, imperialism, colonialism,  ruling elites, racism, male dominance, bourgeois triumphalism, jingoism, economic exploitation, class divisions, misogyny, marital inequities, homelessness, hunger, illiteracy . Or else - by the framing of the story-line the privileged main characters, their needs,...