Stevenson Missing and Presumed Dead

Mr. Stevenson's whereabouts are unknown at this time.

All inquiries about his collection of literary works can be forwarded to The Driv'ler: www.drivler.blogspot.com

Long live Tom Kafafian

Unfortunately, my latest Tom Kafafian post hasn't made it to the number 1 spot. In fact, it has dropped away from the first page of results.

Good news, though: Brian/monstro has #2 and #3 on the list!

A Pickled Signifier

Despite my recent exhortation, nothing new from the peanut gallery these past couple days.

Am still half-cocked and loaded.

Today’s drink of choice: Hennessy Cognac.

Tom Kafafian Tom Kafafian Tom Kafafian

Today, when attempting to see if my man Tom Kafafian[1],[2] has posted any new blog entries, I found out that, at least on msn.com, searching for "tom kafafian" will yield MY blog post about Tom Kafafian before Tom's home page! In the interest of becoming the foremost Tom Kafafian aficionado (by the way, that's Tom Kafafian, not Tom Kavavian or Tom Kafavian or Tom Kavafian), I'd like to push myself even higher up the list. Therefore:

Tom Kafafian
Tom Kafafian
Tom Kafafian
Tom Kafafian
Tom Kafafian
Tom Kafafian
Not Tom Kavavian or Tom Kafavian or Tom Kavafian, but...
Tom Kafafian.

I've reprinted my initial reactions to Tom Kafafian's website below. My comments were originally posted in response to monstro's irate rant about the Tom Kafafian WinAmp Skin (see also monstro's illuminating follow-up, "Kafafian spelled backwards is devil"). What is the Tom Kafafian WinAmp Skin, you ask? Well, apparently the Tom Kafafian WinAmp Skin redirects web browsers to Tom Kafafian's home page, whether the WinAmp listener wants to go or not.

My initial commentary:

Having for some time now been an aspirant in the Order of Kafafian, I was excited to get Brian’s tip on the Kafafian Winamp skin. The website (www.tomkafafian.com) offers all that the neophyte to Kafafian lore could want: pics of Tom’s gratuitous bangs, his album cover art, setlists for concerts you’ll never see, and did I mention his fabulous bangs? It’s hard to decide on a favorite part of this website, but if pressed, I would have to go with the “Tom’s Hand-written lyrics and artwork” section, which attempts to prove the following things:

1. Tom’s lyrics were not, in fact, written by a supercomputer, but by a real man, with real feelings and real bangs, on real lined paper.
2. That anyone, regardless of preference in musical style, can carefully study the lyrics to Tom’s “At the Station” and begin signing Tom’s checks in no time.

Besides the lyrics, one gets to see the inner workings of Tom’s mind through all the stick-figures and scribblework adorning the lyrics. After seeing the artwork, particularly that on “Circles,” Tom takes a place in my heart right next to Stevie from Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Agent,” another diligent artist expressing similar breadth of intellectual pursuit.

If you live in the NY/NJ area, don’t bother to go to the website: you’ll be able to pick out Tom on the L.I.E. According to the “Bio” section, Tom writes most of his music while driving. Given that we already know that he writes lyrics by hand and includes doodling in the lyric-writing process, you’ll most likely see Tom on the motorway, veering wildly and “trading paint” with other cars while exploring the depths of the human soul. When his car rams into yours, please yell that Jason sends his love.

Since writing this, my fascination with Tom Kafafian hasn't ebbed one bit.

This morning's drink of choice

What am I drinking with my cereal this morning? A 21 year-old MacAllan (Highland) oak-finished.

Haven't changed my underwear in three days, but still not sloppy enough to drink blended.

So how is the weather? (a few notes from where I am)

It’s been getting colder around these parts. Chilling, in fact.

And I’ve been drinking.

A lot.

Every day, Ruthie talks less, comforts less, breathes less. She’s retreating into herself. The lotus blossoms that so recently grew in her footsteps have been replaced by brambles. And my melancholy has reduced me, like a homeless signifier, to talking to myself in empty metaphors and similes.

This could be what has pushed me to start heavily drinking. Or, it may be the result of the alcohol. I'm not really sure at this point. I put 25 years of whisky down my gullet yesterday. That makes 120 years in the last week. I can vaguely remember reading Samuel Johnson with Wilbur last week, but now our company is Bukowski. Like the poet Alvaro de Campos and his opium, I’ve fallen into shit poetry “as into a ditch.” And worse, the shit poetry has fallen into me like a burning gutful of whisky. Wilbur seems alarmed at my sudden looseness, but he’s also strangely gleeful. I suspect he thinks that I’ve finally been stripped of my pretensions by this maddening solitude. I suspect he’s right.

A note:

A few days ago, during a solid Irish drunk, I heard off-key singing: “If I should call you up, invest a dime/ And you say you belong to me and ease my mind/ Imagine how the world could be, so very fine..” It took me awhile to identify the tune as the Turtles classic, “Happy Together.” It took me longer to identify the singing as my own.

A note:

I don’t think I’ve seen Kellie all week. Ruthie makes sure that she and Kellie remove to another part of the house at my approach, retreating and locking doors between us.

A note:

I plugged the phone back in the other day. Almost immediately, it rang. I picked it up and belted out my Turtles song at the top of my lungs. After regaling my anonymous caller a few times, I decided to take my act on the road. Ruthie had seen fit to hide my keys from me.

A note:

Two days ago, after witnessing Wilbur’s clueless reading of even a Bukowski poem, I threw a pen at him. That is, I threw a pen at Wilbur. Unfortunately, I’ve never had Bukowski within range. But you can bet that if I did, I’d give the old barfly the pen-throwing of his life. Anyways, I was so drunk that I telegraphed the whole throwing action, making it far too easy for him to dodge it. He quietly leaned over, picked up the pen, and said,

“A Montblanc Boheme Gold Citrin.”

Unimpressed by what may have been Wilbur’s single greatest show of polite learning thus far, I said, “smart ass,” and looked around for something larger and more expensive to throw at him.

A few minutes later, while Wilbur was picking the shards of a Lino Tagliapietra banjo-shaped handblown glass vase out of his hair, I collapsed a bit, wept a bit, and told him that he was my best—and only—friend. It seemed the right thing to do.

One side-effect of all this drinking is the wretched imposition of truthfulness. Another side-effect followed on the heels of this will to verity: the compulsion to narrate the most painful and embarrassing experiences of my life. While I halfheartedly cleaned his wounds and the floor, I poured out stories of my illustrious residence in some of California’s finer mental hospitals, my history with my bastard of a stepfather, and even the story of how I got my groove back. And I drank. Finally, as my tales were almost at an end and as the room began to sway, I got up to wrap gauze around Wilbur’s still-bleeding head. Looking down, my bleary eyes seemed to see green goop oozing from his skull. I vomited upon his head and shoulders. It seemed the right thing to do.

A note:

Even after all this, he came back yesterday. Such a puppy.

An exhortation:

So, gentle readers, consider this drunken jag an opportunity to ask me for any narrative and not be denied. For the moment, I am your bloated, bloodshot Sherezehade. I am naked, I am unabashed, and am drinking myself out of the recognition that my crest has fallen.

For Avram: I exist.

I've been so gone, I'm Mr. Gone

Yes, I know that I've been mighty quiet this last week. Just poking my head out of the hole to tell you all that I'm still alive, and that you should check out FictionBlogs (a directory of weblogs devoted to creative writing).

“What if Socrates was guilty?” I thought, and said:

I was born on a day God was sick.

Wilbur interrupted me: “God don’t get sick. Ain’t that why he’s god?” I ignored this, and reiterated:

I was born on a day
God was sick.

Everyone knows that I live,
That I’m bad, and they don’t know
About the December of that January.
For I was born on a day
God was sick.

There’s an emptiness
In my metaphysical air
That no one’s going to touch:
The cloister of a silence
That spoke with its tongue on fire.
I was born on a day God was sick.

Brother, listen, listen…
Okay now. And don’t let me go away
Without taking along Decembers,
Without leaving Januaries.
For I was born on a day
God was sick.

Everyone knows that I live
That I chew…And they don’t know
Why in my poems,
A dark disgust of coffin,
Rasp frayed wind
Unraveled from the Sphynx,
The great questioner of the Desert.
Everyone know…And they don’t know
That the Light is consumptive,
And the Shadow fat…
And they don’t know the Mystery sums it up…
That it is the hump
Musical and sad that in the distance denounces
The meridian passage from the limits to the Limits.

I was born on a day
God was sick,
Grave.

I finished the last lines of the Vallejo's "Last Words" and proffered some readings on Decembers and Januaries, on limits and Limit, then pulled out those somewhat dusty, pedestrian arguments and tried to freshen them up for Wilbur's sake:

JS: “I think that Vallejo knows that God doesn’t get sick, at least like you or me. Or, lately, just me. What do you think he means by this?”

WW: “That God was sick in some other way when this Vallejo guy was born.”

JS: “Yes, and what might be implied by God getting sick in other ways?”

WW: “Not sure I get your question there, Mr. Stevenson.”

JS: “If God doesn’t cough, and God doesn’t sneeze, and God doesn’t run a temperature, what kind of sick might we be talking about?”

WW: “Sick in the head?”

JS: “Yes, I think that’s a start. What would it mean, then, to know that God was sick in the head when he created YOU?”

WW: “Yer walkin’ a fine line here, Mr. Stevenson.”

JS: “No, Vallejo is walking; we’re just trying to trace his footsteps.”

WW: “I’m not sure I like where he’s walkin’.”

JS: “Well, I’ll put it this way: do you think you’re a worthwhile being in God’s universe? Do you think you’re worthy in God’s eyes?”

WW: “Well, I haven’t put much thought into it…but I reckon so.”

JS: “Okay, then. Look around you. Look at all the things I have: fine china, antique furniture, that exquisite lamp there, my silverware—remember when I had you practice setting a proper table the other day? That was fine, heavy, real silver silverware, wasn’t it?”

WW: “Yessir, it was.”

JS: “And think of my wealth: I showed you my portfolios the other day, didn’t I?”

WW: “Yessir, and quite a lot of money you got.”

JS: “Why is it that I, a devout Athiest, have so much, and you have so little?”

WW: “My momma used to say that the bible preaches ‘blessed are the meek.’”

JS: “Yes, but the bible neglects to mention that I could bulldoze your shack and pay a judge to look the other way while I build a shopping mall over your corpse. How blessed would you be then?”
`
WW: “Not very.”

JS: “So I ask again, is it fair that I have so much, and you have so very little? Is it fair that other Christians have so much, and you have so little?”

WW: “Don’t reckon so, Mr. Stevenson.”

JS: “Another poet, Alexander Pope, once wrote, “WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT. I suppose that, even if God is sick, he’s still right. He’s the definition--the reference standard--for ‘right,’ isn’t he? And if he’s always right, and life often seems so wrong, doesn’t that mean that your torturous life has little to recommend itself to his favor?

WW: “Again, I’m not exactly sure what you’re getting at, but I reckon so.” [here I was glad I hadn’t given him any of my books on biblical hermeneutics]

JS: “What I’m getting at, Wilbur, is that maybe you were born on a day God was sick. Maybe I was, too.”