Looking Back on 2019 (Part 1)

Aztec Sun Stone seen at the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City.

The year 2019 will probably be one I always look back on as an important year in my life. While it was an extremely busy period where my work life expanded significantly and bled its way into my personal life, complex projects keeping me up nights and perplexing me on weekends trying to solve tech company conundrums, I also managed to make time to surf the waves of my passionate interests to new heights. The peak of the latter was an adventure in Mexico City where I delivered a lecture at an international literary conference (the fourth country and fifth university where I've got to share my work as an independent scholar) and visited the Avenue of the Dead in Teotihuacan. I also got to contribute to some meaningful projects, had my first piece to appear in a book (link below), made a bit of income from literary work, and opened up new avenues for 2020.

In 2019 we also got a puppy---a sweet, playful, and loyal pit-shepherd mix who has transformed my life. I'd never had a pet before, ever. Growing up, my parents hated animals. My dad only refers to dogs as "shit machines." But I've always loved dogs. Our little tank boy ROA (named after my lady's favorite street artist) is a rescue we got this past September when he was 5 months old. He's huge and he has been a handful but he's kept me grounded and brought me an abundance of joy. Dogs are the best. A new thing I've learned is that one of the most peaceful feelings in life comes from simply laying on the couch at night after a busy day and watching tv with a puppy sleeping by you. For anyone paying attention to the news in 2019, the world is sort of in shambles right now, and for people like me who dive headlong into the news for weeks at a time it can get depressing and heavy. A big, energetic, playful and sweet puppy is a perfect antidote to that. Now that I have a dog I feel like dogs are essential, that dogs belong with humans and vice versa. They're not just loving and loyal and protective and playful, they're funny. Our boy ROA, when he's super tired he sticks his head under the couch and passes out. Here I'm gonna share a bunch of pics of our new doggy that we adopted this year (his full name is ROA Haymitch Flynndrino, I also call him Tank Boy and Baby Kangaroo), then I will share some lists and expanded thoughts on the stuff I did in 2019.

In Part 1 here I'll discuss the things I wrote and the places I traveled to in 2019. In Part 2, I'll share the list of books I read this year and Part 3 I'll discuss my favorite new albums from 2019.

For the 25th Anniversary of the Almighty Wu-Tang Clan

from here.

Been needing to compile this for a little while. First, I want to share with you a few videos from this past year when the Wu-Tang Clan celebrated the 25th anniversary of their seminal LP, Enter the 36 Chambers (1993). Wu-Tang was all over the place in 2018, these are just a select few vids that stuck out for me. Then I want to briefly share my personal history as a fan of the Wu-Tang Clan starting as a kid growing up in Staten Island in the 90s, when the imprint of Wu and what they stand for became foundational building blocks for the person I have since become.

First, here is an interview with RZA at the Oriental Theater in Milwaukee from last August. RZA gets into some stuff here that I've never really heard him talk about before. Typically in Wu-Tang interviews we hear the same origin stories repeated, whereas here RZA gives some insights on identity and the eclectic array of cultures that combined to form the core elements of Wu-Tang Clan that he doesn't often get into this much detail about. (Side note: this is the first time I've heard him share this amazing factoid: that while all the early Wu-Tang LPs were crafted to sound like movies, ODB's Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version album was made in the vein of a Richard Pryor record.) I often criticize RZA's musical evolution on this blog but I've said it before and I'll say it again: my mind grows when I listen to The Abbott speak.





The Wu-Tang Clan, minus Mef and Ghostface, put on a show for NPR's "Tiny Desk Concert series" in December. It was a thrill to see them perform in this format, ad-libbing, freestyling, taking turns throwing darts, with RZA playing the role of DJ. I wish they'd do this kinda thing more often, it's fresh as could be. Since it's a live show and there are so many members, there's some noticeable discord---especially between Raekwon and RZA who've been on different wavelengths for years now---but Wu-Tang performing live is still one of the greatest shows on earth. I especially love RZA's verse at the end here (19-min mark), a typically scientific-mystic Abbott verse that sounds like a taste of his long-promised album The Cure, delivered over classical orchestra strings. "Wu-Tang is for the kids!"





In October, the entire WTC formed like Voltron for a live performance of their classic single "Protect Ya Neck" on an episode of the Jimmy Kimmel show filmed live at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Howard Gilman Opera House. It's rare to see the full collective come together and perform on a platform like this. Altogether this was a fantastic Wu-Tang showing, not in the least bit sullied by the lame audience clearly not being a typical Wu crowd.




There have been a few attempts at making a Wu-Tang documentary, none of them truly hitting the mark thus far, but this newly announced series on Showtime called "Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men" definitely looks promising. Here's the trailer:




And here's an interview with the director of the new documentary, Sacha Jenkins, who rocks a Mets ballcap and therefore shares not one but two of the greatest loves of my life. This looks like it'll be dope:

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Book Review: How Thomas Pynchon's Novel Bleeding Edge Hit Close to Home

When the miasmic shitstorm of authoritarianism and real-life Idiocracy gained full force earlier this year, I felt compelled to dive into Thomas Pynchon's novel Vineland in search of informed, anti-authoritarian entertainment and guidance. The novel mostly takes place in the year 1984 (a recent edition of Orwell's 1984 has an introduction from Pynchon) depicting Californians fleeing the militarized police state carrying out Reagan's war on drugs, with frequent flashbacks to the impact of COINTELPRO's insidious dismantling of resistance movements in the 60s. It sounds dark and bleak, but Vineland is a hilarious and uplifting adventure.

Nobody does it like Pynchon. His works feel like an essential road map for navigating our contemporary political madness. It seems every damn dumb, absurd or gross thing that unfolds in the Trumpocalyptic age begs the question of whether this is actually Thomas Pynchon's world and we're all just living in it. Even the fucking names! When I saw that the source behind a recent NSA leak was a 20-something blonde girl from Texas named Reality Leigh Winner, I thought: go home Thomas Pynchon, you're drunk!

I've been seeing tweets like this every day:

tony "the mooch" scaramucci cucks reince priebus? the new pynchon sounds 🔥

— nick laureano (@nick_laureano14) July 27, 2017

fitting that all trump associates look like they could be a pynchon character named wolf smilestein or something pic.twitter.com/HCtZRfsjw2

— john (@john__wallace) July 15, 2017

After zipping through Vineland, I was craving more Pynchon but had my own anti-authoritarian writing to do, an essay on the treatment of warfare and invasion in Finnegans Wake for the Diasporic Joyce Conference in Toronto (an experience chronicled here). Once that was completed, I took a much-needed break from Joyce to crack open Pynchon's latest novel, Bleeding Edge, and holy shit what a treat it turned out to be.

Bleeding Edge completely stunned me. Not only is it a funny and engrossing web of stories carried by characters engaged in sharp, witty dialogue, but also the setting of turn-of-the-millennium New York City spoke directly to me and my background in a way Pynchon's work never has before. More than anything else, the prime display of the master author's precisely researched rendering of setting just blew me away. Pynchon was born in 1937, a year after my dad. He's a pretty old dude. Yet the cultural milieu he recreates out of the minutia of video games, TV shows, internet culture, rap music, pro sports, etc from that 9/11 time period in Bleeding Edge (published in 2013) suggests an old man who's as with-the-times as anybody alive. He references Dragon Ball Z and Pokémon, for instance, and describes nuances of the Metal Gear Solid video games in such shocking detail that one internet reader suggested the only explanation is he must've had input from his then-teenage son. The book is littered with nuggets of culture like a character holding "a mug that reads I BELIEVE YOU HAVE MY STAPLER." (p. 77)

That mug appears in a scene with weed smoke hovering in a hacker's lair, as our protagonist Maxine Tarnow explores the dimensions of her techy friends' creation called DeepArcher, a sort of cross between virtual reality and online multiplayer games. Maxine (who Pynchon helpfully describes as a Rachel Weisz doppelgänger early in the novel) is a fraud investigator in Manhattan in the years following the dot-com bubble, hot on the trail of a shady Internet security firm called "hashslingerz," itself a sort of pun encompassing Pynchon's penchant for pot references and the term hash used for computer coding. This is a novel full of tech geeks, subversive bloggers, radical filmmakers, hackers, stoners, Mossad agents, Russian mobsters, shadow government assassins, and every other variety of spooks and weirdos. A typically Pynchonian web of colorful characters expanding so far out that I finally had to jot down a who's-who primer in the back of the book.

A book jacket blurb mentioned that, "We are all characters in Pynchon's mad world" and that starts to feel true. He creates such a broad network of characters, male and female, with all range of backgrounds and quirks, that I begin to see myself and my friends appearing in there. That's part of what is so special about Pynchon---his fiction hems fairly close to realism while always keeping things zany, off-beat, and funky with every person, place, and thing having some deliberately weird or funny name (I burst out laughing on a flight when I read of a strip club called "Joie de Beavre") so that you eventually start to view this world a little differently, noticing its inherent weirdness.

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Rest In Peace Prodigy of Mobb Deep

These dark times we've been living in of late, dominated by headlines about Russian mobsters and spies, neo-Nazis and Klan rallies, environmental disaster and predatory power structures, have also been ripe with death with the departure of powerful souls of our culture like Carrie Fisher, David Bowie, et al. The death of the rapper Prodigy of Mobb Deep last month at the age of 42 struck me sharply and I've been experiencing its resonance ever since.

Some Things I Did in 2015

Looking back on 2015, it was a pivotal year in my life. I moved on from a job where I was unhappy to a new job where I'm happier than ever. My first car finally fell apart after 12 years of lugging me and my crap around from one part of the country to another leading to my acquiring a brand new car. I turned 30 years old, officially bringing an end to the promise of my 20s. I closely followed and rooted for the New York Mets on a thrilling ride to their first pennant in 15 years. Wrote a few pieces I think are pretty solid. Started writing my first book, finished the first part of it. And, most significantly, I participated in and completed an enjoyable, challenging, collaborative creative project whose finished product I'm very proud of.

Here's a quick rundown of some of the significant things I wrote, read, watched, or listened to in 2015.

Some Things I Wrote in 2015 on Literature/History:

The Allure of Gravity's Rainbow and Its Mysterious Author

Gravity's Rainbow (Japanese cover)

A consideration of author Thomas Pynchon and his most famous novel, the intrigue of which enthralled me throughout the winter of 2014-2015. This piece was one half of a collaborative project with fellow blogger The OG from The Overweening Generalist focusing on the topic of Pynchon and Gravity's Rainbow. Part "Guide to Pynchon" part examination of Timothy Leary's love for the 20th century author's most famous novel, this was my favorite piece to write this year and the one I'm most proud of.

The Colossus of Staten Island and Other Historical Detritus

My trip back to the homeland of Staten Island, NY during the 2014 holidays inspired this discussion of a few hidden gems in SI's history. Chief among these:

In the early decades of the 20th century, there were plans to commemorate the island's rich history and recognize America's original inhabitants with a giant national monument featuring a Native American giving the peace sign, overlooking the entrance into New York Harbor. This monument was to rival the Statue of Liberty. The National Native American Memorial would have been the Colossus of Staten Island, greeting ships as they enter into New York from the Atlantic. Except it never happened.

For Bloomsday 2015

I finally got to write something about the sole extant recording of James Joyce reading from Ulysses in this short piece. More importantly, I actually got up in front of people and delivered an introductory talk on the book and did some readings from Ulysses for a pretty well attended and fun Bloomsday event at Malvern Books here in Austin last June.

FinWake ATX visits the Ransom Center
The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin that I organize had the special privilege to visit the treasure trove archives of the Harry Ransom Center this past summer for an exclusive showing of some of their most prized Joyce-related objects. It was an exciting educational experience. I wrote about some of the items we saw here.

Anastomosis
A brief meditation on the fascinating word "anastomosis," its many meanings and applications and its central importance in the message of Finnegans Wake. 


"dotter of his eyes": The Mystery of Lucia Joyce and Finnegans Wake
Examining the controversial history of Joyce's daughter Lucia and her purported influence and involvement in the creation of Finnegans Wake.

What is Finnegans Wake? A Simulacrum of the Globe (Part 1)
Taking a glimpse at the vision presented, quite convincingly, by one Joyce scholar who argues that Joyce constructed Finnegans Wake to mimic the form of our globe. This idea includes a new insight into the placement of the dozens and dozens of world languages included in the text. (Also: wait til you read Part 2, coming soon...)

Also worth mentioning here: Back in March I officially began composing what will be my first book, a monograph about Salvador Dali and James Joyce. The first part (there are three parts planned) was completed about a month ago and I'm excited with how it came out. My goal is to finish off the rest of it in 2016.

Most Significant Accomplishment of 2015:
3-Hour Musical Audiobook Adaptation of Finnegans Wake III.3 "Yawn Under Inquest" by (Peter) Quadrino (Jake) Reading (Evan) James
[recorded at Casa de Feelgood, Jan-March 2015]

I'll be lucky to ever accomplish anything remotely close to this scale again. As part of the bold experimental project to create a musical audiobook adaptation of Finnegans Wake, a group effort of people from around the world arranged by Derek Pyle called Waywords and Meansigns, I collaborated with two friends to record the 15th chapter, "reading alawd, with two ecolites" (FW 490), which amounted to a three-hour audiobook chapter with a wide array of music and effects mixed into the background. This project took three months to complete and was an extremely challenging yet thrilling enterprise, unlike anything I've ever done before or may ever do again. I've always hated the sound of my own voice, yet I find this shockingly fun and absorbing to listen to. The final product is extremely well done, a true audio experience, and I owe an immense debt of gratitude to my brilliant trio of co-creators Jake Reading, Evan James, and Melba Martinez for their efforts.

-You can hear the project by listening to Track 15 HERE.
-Read my story on the experience of creating this recording here.
-Check out an interview I did (along with the great Dutch psychonaut Steve Fly Pratt) discussing the project for RAWillumination.net. Here's a snippet:

PQ: The recording process (which took almost 3 months) confirmed a few things I'd experienced when I read the book a few years ago. For one, immersion in the text brings about a proliferation of synchronicities. It's as if the text responds to the environment. All of our names popped up in some form (there was a whole page of PQs), the text occasionally echoed something we'd talked about that night, and when we tested certain songs alongside the reading there were often extraordinary harmonies and resonances in timing and tone. The experience certainly confirmed the text's inherent musical rhythms, it really comes to life when read aloud. And last but not least, it's often said Finnegans Wake is a book for the ear but it's also a book for the mouth. You'll never utter anything like it.

(On the synchronicity tip as well: the uncanny combo of surnames in its trio of creators, "Quadrino Reading James.")

The Colossus of Staten Island and Other Historical Detritus

Who knew there was so much fascinating history to be uncovered on miserable old Staten Island? Certainly not I, whose mother spent years working for the Staten Island Historical Society. Nope, never cared.

During the Christmas holiday I spent a week back in my hometown of Staten Island. It was an eventful trip, bookended by some of the worst travel experiences I've ever had (lost luggage on each leg of the journey, thanks United!) but I ended up having a really great time. Got to witness New York City from the perspective of a visitor, which I always find to be an exciting and enlightening experience.

Wu-Tang Clan's Original (and Better) "A Better Tomorrow"

Following my ranking of the Wu-Tang Clan's catalogue of group offerings, this begins a series of posts based around the new Wu-Tang album "A Better Tomorrow" and the factors surrounding its creation and release. Stay tuned for more this week.

For the Wu-Tang Clan's 20th anniversary album, the group's de facto leader Rza intended to craft a record that dealt with the current issues affecting our world today and the dire need for positivity and change for the future. The new album is entitled A Better Tomorrow and features a title track of the same name. That track should have been a "Part 2". Unfortunately, there is no acknowledgment at all made to the group's previous song with the very same title (and similar message), "A Better Tomorrow" off the Wu-Tang Forever album. Maybe it's because the earlier track, from the Clan's peak period, is of far superior quality to anything on the new album. The original "A Better Tomorrow" manages to be sentimental and positive, while keeping it raw.

Return to Reality

Once again, despite many hours devoted to writing, I've managed to go without any blogposts for over three weeks. Been working on a few large pieces that will be posted once completed. 

I'm currently back home in New York's forgotten borough, Staten Island, and haven't had much free time in the midst of excessive relaxation, couch-slothing, and catching up with family and friends, but before the great year of 2011 is suddenly washed away I would like to share a few things.

Happy Halloween and God Bless The Dead

"Every one of those unfortunates
during the process of existence
should constantly sense and be cognizant of the inevitability of his own death as well as of the death of everyone upon whom his eyes or attention rests."
- George Gurdjieff 

That picture came from a random blogpost I came across by a writer from Argentina who wrote a very nice little analysis of James Joyce's story "The Dead." The final scene in that story is what makes it so famous, in fact, I met at least one Joyce scholar who thinks it's the greatest piece he ever wrote. Long before the enormous epic novels.

"The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached the region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out in a gray impalpable world: The solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.

"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight."

It starts to snow, interrupting his transportive trance while staring out a hotel window at night.

Over the weekend, my home city of Staten Island saw its worst October snowstorm in recorded history. The whole northeast was absolutely blasted by snow worse than ever before. Millions of people lost power, Connecticut had its worst power outage in history.

"Snowfall like blankets of death..."
is a line heard in the album that I published a review for today.

Today I learned that an old friend, a man who worked for my father for as long as I was alive, passed away at age 91. He had been sick with pneumonia for a little while. Tony Bassolino was a big man, tall and sturdy with a gruff Brooklyn accent. He'd been a Marine in World War II and then worked for many years as a New York City Sanitation worker; a lifelong garbage man. He was in his 70s and 80s when I got to know him best. Even at that age he was something like a giant bear who didn't even know he had clothes on---roughing it up with heavy, enormous, gooey bags of garbage he would get nasty slop all over himself with no regard. Often he'd be wearing some old football sweatshirt or something.

I spent a few summers working alongside him, picking up garbage all around my neighborhood and loading it into a truck to be personally delivered to a dump in Elizabeth, New Jersey. He was afraid of nothing, and shocked if I was afraid of anything, even a maggot-infested half-opened bag of old garbage. Or enormous pieces of wood or old trees covered in old rusty nails or spiders and ants. We always bonded on the trips to the garbage dump. His attention was curt and he didn't really prefer to listen to me all that much, just a few questions here and there ("heh?" he'd bark loudly when he couldn't hear me) to get him started on talking about something and I was ready to listen.

On one of those trips he let me hold the steering wheel for the truck, first time I can ever remember controlling a car in any way. On another of those trips he let me drive the truck, at age 16, for a little while on a service road. It was the first time I ever controlled a vehicle on my own. I remember being amazed at how loose the steering wheel seemed, so easy and soft to move it.

On just about every one of those trips, he'd always stop at the Burger King on Route 1 & 9 in New Jersey so I could eat breakfast (we always worked in the morning and I could never wake up early enough to eat breakfast at home). He was always very obliging, he'd just sit in the car and wait as I went and picked up french toast sticks, always the same meal. On one occasion he came in with me and ordered the same thing as me, we sat there sharing a breakfast of french toast sticks with syrup, me at 16 years old and Tony in his early 80s. It must've looked to people like I was having breakfast with my grandfather but instead he was my co-worker (and superior), he was also old enough to be my dad's father and since my dad was old enough to be my grandfather (I was conceived in his late 40s), I could've been sitting there sharing breakfast with my great grandfather.

But he was my co-worker and friend. And we were about to go down the road to an indoor dump, where I would don a little mouth-mask to guard my senses from the foul and oxygen-smothering stench of a garbage dump the size of a football field. Tony never wore a mask. And when we'd get out and quickly try to empty a truck full of garbage in under 5 minutes, he'd fling heavy pieces of scrap and garbage with a ballsy voracity and zeal unlike anything I'd ever witnessed. Towards the end of the load were always the biggest things; huge blocks of wood or brick, whatever it was he would attack it like battling a dragon or a huge whale. I remember the sight of him overtaken by an object's enormous weight one time, he looked like a sea captain hanging by the very end of his ship's mast in a vicious storm. It was so beautiful I burst out in uncontrollable joy and laughter. "Get back in the truck!" he screamed; I was in danger and not offering much help. 

When we were done he'd drive us back home, his brown-spotted bare hands bloody or dirt-strewn, his face sweaty, the radio blaring WFAN 20-20 sports. Back at home, my workday was done before 11 AM most days and I'd relax and do whatever the hell it is teenagers do on lazy summer afternoons.

I will never forget those mornings. I hope big Tony rests in peace now, the winds of time having finally eroded that sturdy temple of his.


Here are those final words of "The Dead":

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.