Saul Bellow

\

Bernard Malamud

Leonard Michaels

Allen Ginsberg

Isaac Asimov

Grace Paley

Philip Roth

Harold Brodkey

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

Stan Lee

Stanley Elkin

Norman Mailer

There Will Be Blood

No Country For Old Men

Mulholland Drive

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy

Spirited Away

Dancer In The Dark

Synecdoche, New York

Waking Life

The Brown Bunny

Mister Lonely

Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2

The Dark Knight

Vicki Cristina Barcelona

Sideways

The Royal Tenenbaums

City of God

Children of Men

The Wrestler

Please Note: This list is completely incomplete.  Most of it is just off of the top of our heads, on a semi-sunny winter day here in the Willamette Valley.  Was our morning coffee good?  It was, but we drank it all and now we’re running out of ideas, so the list ends here.  Was there going to be another list?  There was.  We had intended to do a Top Jewish Authors list for Hanukkah.  We’re a little late on that.  But we’re going to provide it anyway, and soon!  We hope you enjoyed the above list and all the lists that we make here at the Daily Miltonian, and we’ll see you next time.  Excelsior!

The Mark Spencer Hotel (Formerly The Nortonia Hotel)

Our pipes froze, our water got shut off, and our landlord put us up at the affordable hotel of our choice.  We chose the Mark Spencer Hotel, in wonderful downtown Portland.  Reasons: near work and transportation, mere blocks from our favorite cluster of Portland food carts (our favorite pad kee mao, our favorite burrito, our favorite Vietnamese curry, our favorite macchiato, our favorite falafel, our favorite tofu sandwich).  Also: they’re like little studios, these rooms, with a place to heat up that frozen pizza, or a freezer to keep the pizza frozen, your call.  Plus a fridge, to keep cool your bottles of local stout, which are consumed with said heated pizza, while Wayne’s World is viewed on the free cable television.

Jawbox’s Idea Of A Reunion

Having been broken up since 1997, they decide not to tour, or play their friends birthday party, or record a new album, opting instead to perform one song on Jimmy Kimmel.  And that’s it.  And not only play one song, but play Savory and play it so well as to remind us that yeah, fuck it, what a crazy noise-gnarled weird and more importantly important band, and also to remind us that the Nineties are now nearly over ten years ago, and we need them now more than ever before.

Lapping the Cat

Our cat, Streaky the Supercat, loves to go outside.  But he doesn’t just go outside.  He owns outside.  Like a protective watch dog, he patrols, sentinel style, the back yard, the sidewalks, the entire perimeter.  But furthermore he likes to be lapped.  Do you have a friendly cat, in your neighborhood, who tends to be on patrol but if greeted by the site of you instead decides to meep, follow, roll on his back, and follow some more?  Does he follow you to the bus stop on frosty mornings and you have to say no, no, go home, you can’t ride the bus with me?  If so, what your cat needs is a good lapping.  Here is how you lap your cat:  first, exit the house, with the cat.  The cat will do what a cat does, run, jump over a bush, hide under a car.  Walk to the end of the block. When you arrive, take a left, and begin circling the block on which your house (and the cats house) is located.  Note how the cat is following you.  It will use cars for shelter.  It will sneak beneath bushes.  But the cat is on your tail.  Jog a little.  The cat will speed up to try and catch up.  This is good for your cat as it provides valuable exercise.  Turn left again, now on the North Side of your block.  If there are long open stretches without parked cars to hide beneath, speed up, because the cat will want to run this stretch as fast as it can.  Note how you too are now getting some valuable exercise.  Turn left once more.  Final stretch.  Run the fastest.  The cat will outpace you, zipping lithely past your ankles, but this is fine.  Last left turn.  Oh look, you’re home.  Note the cat, already waiting for you on the porch.  The cat is out of breath.  You are out of breath.  Everyone got a work out, everyone had some fun.  Let the cat back in, your job is done: you have successfully lapped the cat.

Fort Saint Davids: Please introduce yourself.

Erik Bader: Hello. My name is Erik Bader

FSD: So what’s this all about?

EB: Pretty simple, really.  Take a minute to scroll down past this post to the one below it.  See that one?  The kinda outta breath/yet totally calm piece about, well, how the last ten years weren’t as good as they shoulda been?

FSD: Saw it already.  A friend of mine reposted a link to it on their Facebook page, and someone else I know re-Tweeted it, and it showed up as a link on a popular blog that I often check while no one is watching me at work.

EB: Exactly.  The thing is everywhere.  It has — as we say in the non-industry — legs.  We’re proud of it, all of us here at the Daily Miltonian, but more exciting to us is not the prospect of all those new, awesome, wonderful, and possibly even brilliant or beautiful new readers reading that post but rather the prospect of them reading this post and all the posts that will follow in the years to come.

FSD: New readers are awesome.

EB: THOUSANDS of new readers, if the WordPress stats don’t lie.

FSD: And they don’t.

EB: Indeed.

FSD: So this interview, therefore, is a kind of introduction to what we do, here, at the Miltonian, yes?

EB: Exactly.  So onward, then, with the questions.

FSD: Who writes the Daily Miltonian and how would you describe him/her.

EB: I write the Daily Miltonian.  There have been, on occasion, other writers (Crooks, Matthew K, Loren Hunt, Kelly White, MCP, Legend of Street Dog, Father Gibbs, Matt Schwartz, Josh Carr, Brady Russell, uh, who else?  Buncha folks) but mostly it’s just me, on my little laptop computer, here in a hollow in a city in a valley in the Pacific Northwest.  Sometimes with a cat in my lap, and often with a cup of hot coffee by my side.  See, observe as I stop typing and wave at you, the reader.  Did you see it?  I said hi!

FSD: That’s how you would describe yourself?

EB: I’m not very good at describing myself.

FSD: Yes you are.

EB: Is this the first time you, Fort Saint Davids, have interviewed me?

FSD: No.  I interviewed you way back at the end of the Summer of 2006 in the hell-outta-print first and only issue of Fort Saint Davids Fanzine.  Half a year later, the blog/online magazine/divinely motivated style had a kind of meta-meltdown and began asking itself questions about itself.  Viz. this interview where you are interviewed by the Daily Miltonian.

EB: Oh right.  Handy links, those.

FSD: New readers should read them.  New readers should probably read the entire contents of the Daily Miltonian, in order.

EB: It’s one helluva story.

FSD: That’s what we’ve always been trying to do with this, right?  We’re not like selling a product or reporting directly on any kind of, um, culture.  Put your revolver down.

EB: Sorry.

FSD: S’ok.  Where was I.  Oh yeah.  We’re just trying to tell a story.  Share a story.  Like literally share it, so you get some of the story as well, meaning it’s also yours.

EB: Is that what –?  And yet, yeah, that’s one fairly good way of putting it.  It’s like, I was watching the first few parts of this W&K documentary on he Portland music scene the other day called, unfriendlyish enough, Don’t Move Here. And as much as I had the obligatory admiration for a.) it’s about where  I live and b.) the energy! the energy! I still got that weird, uncomfortable sorta anxiety that documentaries like this always give me.

FSD: Give me another example.

EB: The Space 1026 documentary.

FSD: What is it about these sorts of documentaries that give you a kind of weird anxiety.

EB: I’m always like, who are they for?  Who is supposed to watch this and what are they supposed to feel when they do?  Why do they exist?  Because they’re never really “documenting”, like you would document an archeological dig or an undersea journey or something.  It’s just people, on a screen, telling me, the viewer they don’t know, just how awesome their shit is.  Is there something wrong with that?  No way of course not!  It’s  just that I feel…weird…sometimes, sitting there, in my room, watching a screen on which people are showing me how much they love their friends, how much shit they are doing, and how awesome it makes them feel.

FSD: This is where we tell the reader: the Daily Miltonian is dedicated to sharing its world with you without ever making you feel weird, uncomfortable, uncool, excluded, or like a piece of shit.

EB: Furthermore, we intend to make you feel good about yourself, the world you inhabit, the shit you’re up to, the people you roll with, and the food you eat.

FSD: Not like a loner weirdo who accomplished nothing and has made no mark on history and thus will never be remembered by generations hence.

EB: Or like some crummy nobody that nobody wants to chill with.

FSD: Or like you “missed out” on anything.

EB: Because you didn’t.  Remember that.  Any time you see someone doing something, remember that when they were doing that one thing, you were busy doing that other thing, which is something no one can ever do if they’re doing something else.  Everyone gets 24 hours in a day, and if you’re awake you’re missing sleep and if you’re sleeping you’re missing being awake, which is why you get to do both.

FSD: Exactly.

EB: Exactly.

FSD: So do you want to talk about your projects, Erik? Now that the readers know you are not out to wreck their day with your projects or beat them over the head with your projects? Or bludgeon them? Or make them feel lame or unproductive?

EB: OK.  Currently I am writing a novel called The New American Novel.  Did you like the post below this one?  It’s pretty much a distillation of what I am trying to say, vibe on, and do in The New American Novel.  Meaning, if you liked that, you’ll certainly like this.

FSD: What about the iTunes project.

EB: I’m also currently reading my first novel, The Pilot and the Panda, which I wrote from 1998 to 2001, in a digital audio format which is available for free from the iTunes store.  Just go to the iTunes store and search for “Fort Saint Davids” and it’ll show up.  Make sure to subscribe, it’s free and you’ll always get the episodes when they come out.  There are currently four, so you have time to catch up.  Listen to it on your way to work in the morning.  It’ll keep you company.

FSD: And readings?

EB: I have been putting on a series of literary events here in Portland, Oregon, three so far.  They have all been really great, and the people who come out to them love them.  I think the main reason is a.) it’s just good literature, no guy on a banjo or a slam poet or a DJ.  And b.) there’s an intermission, which is important because it means you don’t have to shut the fuck up for two hours like at most readings.  You get a break, just like if you were seeing 2001 in a theater or attending a really good play or an opera.  You can get another drink, have a smoke, say hi to your friends, or just go outside and do a cartwheel.  The choice is yours.

This was our last one. And here’s the New Jersey themed one that we did before that.  Both of these links will give you a good idea of what we’re up to!

FSD: This got long. Should we wrap it up and maybe talk again soon?

EB: That sounds good, Fort Saint Davids.  Thanks for chatting with me.

FSD: Any time, Erik! Be well. And welcome, new readers, to our camp.

EB: Yeah seriously: welcome.  Glad you could make it, and we’ll be seeing you soon.

Today’s photographs were: Broadway in the Rain, The Christmas Tree in Pioneer Square, and Josh Carr on Division.  All shot in Portland during the month of November, 2009.

The twin realities are this: on September 11th, 2001, every single member of my generation plugged in a computer and started staring at a screen and no one has turned it off or looked away since.   What followed is eight years of the worst American politics since Richard Nixon and a decade where absolutely nothing new happened.  No new genres, no new styles, no new forms, ideas, anything.  There were new versions of things that had already happened.  There are a thousand depressing and brain-damaging reasons why everything is different and everything is exactly the same but when Lewis Lapham said that in the advent of the Internet that “history would be flatlined” he was right.  The Beatles have new albums out, Nabokov’s final novel was published, Nirvana just released a live DVD, and the other day I got a big compliment on a sweater I bought in 1996.

Look don’t get me wrong: I’m not in a bad mood.  I had a pretty boss morning, this morning: an incredibly cold commute by foot and MAX to work, for sure, but bolstered with a piping hot cup of Stumptown and a digital copy of Mississippi Records “The Way Up The Hill: 20 Gospel Hits from the 70’s” singin’ praise through my headphones.  At work I got to unwrap a copy of the Sunday Times from its blue plastic sheath — what an awful thing, in 2009!  The plastic wrapper, the home delivery by truck, the sacrificed trees to make pulp: all things that lots of folks can easily convince you are terrible, terrible stuff.  And yet there it is, that glorious feeling, a big-ass Sunday Times to unfold and flip through, browse, dig, absorb…ah…Sunday. If there were ever a more appropriate day for — now don’t reach for your revolver just yet – but yeah I gotta say it: tradition, maaaan.

Still, it’d a decade that bothered me, and not just for all that bad music and bad politics: every decade has that.  What bothers me is the missed opportunity, and the displacement of the values that matter.  I don’t mean frackin’ family values or religious values or political values, I mean who’s yr fav’rite band in the whole wide world?  Who’s America’s greatest author?  Who is the world’s mightiest painter?  Which composer do we value the most?  It’s been a long, long ass time since anyone could agree on an answer for any of these questions, and lately you’ll be hard pressed to find any answer at all.  These days best you might get is “Wait, the greatest what?  Ok hold on [type type type] let me look it up.”

The equation is leaps in technology = falls in culture.  The more you interact with that keyboard and click with that mouse the less you’re going to be doing pretty much anything else.  And “They” — come now, you haven’t gotten so pragmatic, sober, and informed that you no longer believe in “They”, right? — “They” have taken note of this.  Let’s clear the paranoia up first: “They” are just the geniuses of capitalism.  They are those who made the most money.  A lot of Them are You, now, as you read this Blog, looking for the thing that I am telling the people that you can tell the people that you can sell back to the people, and so forth.  Right then.

Maybe the World’s Greatest Band was just what they were selling you, but ever since you started stealing it with your computer they started watching you, sitting there in your chair staring at that screen, and they asked themselves, what kind of screen is the most stared upon screen in all of the world, throughout all of history?  That’s easy: the mirror.  And they found new ways of getting you to look at yourself, your JPEG, your avatar, your profile, your website, your live journal, and they are continuing to find ways to make money off of the assured fact that you will continue to do this because who doesn’t look into a mirror every day before they leave the house?  Except now you can check your mirror while waiting for the bus, while riding the bus, while walking to work from the bus — and you can even check it at work just like you are doing so right now. You’re the greatest painter, the greatest poet, the greatest cellist, the greatest bassoonist, the greatest basketball player ever to live.  Why pay money for someone else’s product, the inferior one?  Pay for yourself, the greatest there ever was and ever will be.

I don’t have a lot of answers just yet — I don’t have a “Best Of” list either but I am incredibly surprised that I’m not  seeing this sort of thing everywhere with what — three weeks left in the decade?  Honestly, does anyone even know its ending?  Compare this to December, 1989, 99…where’s that sense of the “new”?  New is something you track on Macrumors.com, perhaps, or is it announced on Twitter first?  Ok, Ok, I know, I sound grumpy, but I am telling you I am not.  I am hopeful.  What do I want for this upcoming decade?  I do want a Greatest American Author.  I want a music we can Agree on.  I want “change” that actually changes.  I want us to be a whole lot happier than we were for the last ten years.  Or angrier.  Yeah or maybe much angrier.  But goddammit I want us to feel shit.  I don’t want anyone to curb their enthusiasm.  You don’t need a pill to pretend it’s not wrong.  Maybe it is wrong.  But there’s nothing wrong with feeling that.

The Age of Feelings.  I mean holy crap, can you even imagine?

Misty misty morning here in the City of Roses, low visibility and hushed sound.  The mist ate so much sound it made my crappy iPod headphones sound like Bose Noise Cancellers.  That’s one of the prime joys of peripatetic music-listening: the way the environment can change the music completely.  Just two nights ago, bundled up against the chill night air and on my way to the grocery story, I walked through a moist blast of fabric softener air mixed with a perfume that was caught inside the air and suspended thanks to the cold.  The perfume was one of those simple trendy and cheap guys circa 1994 (Not CK1 or CKB but pretty durn close) and honestly the olfactory one-two-punch hit me like a Proustian Madeleine and literally transformed the iPod into a yellow plastic Sony Walkman “Sport” containing a dubbed Jawbox cassette.

(Someone recently complained about the lack of captions on the photographs here on the Miltonian, so we’ve been trying to include a little more information.  The one up top is from Philadelphia, Old City in particular, standing outside this spot that used to be Revival way back when.  What was the other venue it was.  Um.  Upstages, I think.  I remember seeing Lungfish there way back then.  Yep.)  The 2nd photograph is downtown Portland, just a few nights ago.  Hence the Christmasy vibe.  And below?  That’s also downtown Portland, just walking around in the winter sunshine.)

It’s no secret that we’re completely batshit crazy here about Mississippi Records.  If we were only allowed to buy records from one label, no question this would be the label.  In fact, these days, it pretty much is the only label we buy our records from, well, at least the new ones.  And the tapes.  Dear God in Heaven, the tapes.  We’re getting The Anxiety now, just thinking about the record store, shrouded in fog, and the little shelf where they keep the new tapes, and we’re wondering: are there new tapes?  Will we get there fast enough to buy them, own them, keep them, listen to them, cherish them, share them?  Keep Calm.  Don’t Panic.  Breath deep.  Phew.  One of the recent ones discussed upcoming tapes.  A Goth Tape.  A 3rd volume of the Kinks.  The metal one which we got.  That’s right.  The metal one.  The title?  Satan is Real. We also recently picked up a “mystery” tape, likely not from MR, but by a friend.  All spy music.  Like no joke put the tape on and POW you’re a spy, you’re a secret age, a double agent, hell maybe even a triple agent!  It’s that real, and it’s that good.  These tapes are playing on our cassette deck at the Lodge at any time, at all times.  Doing the dishes, listening to the tapes.  Reading the newspaper, listening to the tapes.  Playing the Xbox 360, volume down, tape volume up.  Listening to the tapes!

Speaking of the Kinks, why didn’t you tell us about Muswell Hillbillies? Were you hiding this from us?  Have they hidden it from you?  No one seems to talk about this record, but maybe that’s because it never mattered more than in December 2009, the last days of the First Decade of the 21st century.  We don’t have the wax version of this yet, but we’re looking.  Let us know if you see it in a bin somewhere and the price is right!  You could come over and we’d play the record and make popcorn in a pan.  We’ll doctor the popcorn with nutritional yeast and Spike seasoning and a little bit of cayenne pepper.  Oh yes we would.  With sparkling water, touch of lime.  Of course if it’s way too misty/cold out we can scratch all that and just hit the hot cocoa.  You feel me.  [Above photo: SE Portland].

Northern Liberties Rooftop, half-built home, near the horse stables (which are guarded by a stable cat and a stable dog, both friendly).  Street explorations.  Good companions.  November nights.  Philadelphia.

Schwartz, faux-verwhelmed by Soho crowds.

Wild Al, @ the Room in Soho..  Amazing service, conversation, vibe, beer, and 90’s heavy soundtrack including Sebadoh and the Lilys.  We’re never really looking for much more than that.

Though rare circa 2009, there are still scattered places in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, that still hold the same flavor and sense of nebulous American magic and longing that informed much of my 2001 novel The Pilot and the Panda. One would think it would take an informed guide and perhaps even a detailed map to find such places any more in the overdeveloped spiritual wreckage of said town, but Mary instinctively snapped the above photo from the window of our speeding rental car, which leads one to believe that all it takes is a big heart and open eyes to see what so many in this country wish we hadn’t.

City Hall, Philadelphia.  Such a visual staple of everyday Philadelphia life, as a resident you would never think to snap a photo of the post-masonic wonder that Walt Whitman described as “silent, weird, beautiful”, but coming home to it again, well, by golly there it is.  Amazing to see after a decade long cleaning effort the grime has already returned, in all manners of speaking.

In the spirit of  the completely appalling micro-genre “80’s Desert” and the more recently unearthed/re-classified “80’s Rapesax” comes the latest entry into the Daily Miltonian’s list of beyondo-offensive-”Huh?-level Linnaean taxonomic 80’s-specific  scientific musico-classifications : 80’s Oriental.   The following clutch of videos, which covers bases everywhere from the prime offender (Bowie’s “China Girl”) to actual pop food (McDonald’s “Shanghai” Chicken Nuggets), will go further than any words written here will allow.  Between the Gobi Desert and a haunted fog of smoke from a greasy neon-lit Tokyo grate, somewhere deep in the heart of the 1980’s, presented to you, our patient reader, with the fullness  of our confusion, a deep sense of wrong, an seriously indignant feeling of offense, and  all of our completely disgusted delight.

We’re back.  Airport travels, Turnpike travails, Manhattan streets and Philadelphia meets, we went from there to back again and now back: again.  We were home, now welcome us home.

We’ve done this, documented this, written about this before. (Here’s another set of images and thoughts, from last year.  Memories, all of them, and potent ones at that.  Drink deep.) It’s always a rush, returning to where it all started, and then returning to where it’s all happening now.  Except it’s happening there too.  It’s everywhere, we’re everywhere, and all at once, it seems, is the problem.  Or is it the solution?  We propose: to write about this, these conflicted (and harmonized) thoughts and feelings, the baseball toss between two coasts, the see-saw between polar-opposites that attract and repel, push and pull, heave and ho, and so on ad infinitum.

As we gather our thoughts, ruminate upon them on gray-drizzle Oregon walks and cloud-burst coastal drives, sipped over strong ales and considered among home-cooked meals, we’ll get back to you, our loyal friend, our reader, about where we stand, what we think, and how we feel, regarding the emotions and impressions and exaltations and confusions and — life, really, is what we mean to say, we’ll let you know about life, this life, the only one we experience and the only one we truly know.  That’s why you’re still with us, right?  That’s why you’re reading, yes?  To gain insight on a life that perhaps will shed some light on yours.  That’s what’s some call art, many call communication, but around here we tend to refer to it as love.

With love,

Fort Saint Davids

Carrie Miller was, and still is, a character from my second novel, True Jersey: Volume One.  Among many other things she’s an artist who tends to find herself writing more art proposals than actually making art.  This situation is further compounded by the fact that her proposals are often for things that tend to be impossible to make, or just not feasible in the eyes of potential art grant writers.  As the writing of True Jersey: Volume Two (tentatively entitled Driveway to Driveway) is indefinitely on hold as I work on my current project The New American Novel (and also let’s face it it’s hard getting up the motivation to write a sequel to your own still-unpublished novel), I will offer here, on occasion, some of Carrie’s latest proposals.  The Daily Miltonian encourages any artist worth their salt to go through and make these projects a reality.  We only ask that you mention Carrie Miller’s name, as well as your friends from the Daily Miltonian.

Gimme Shelter

A mediation on the use and/or misuse of urban “space” in art galleries, Gimme Shelter is a completely “public” art show (“for the public by the public”) without security or even a receptionist.  Instead, the galleries doors will be open 24 hours a day for the duration of the exhibit for open artistic use.  Because there will be no “definition” of what constitutes an “artist”, and there will be no pressure or forthright encouragement for the “artist” to actually “make art”, it is my supposition that the “Open Gallery” will find itself instead a de facto shelter for the local homeless, who will not in any way be dissuaded from taking shelter in the gallery for the duration of the exhibit.

Radroach!

As a part of the “Grafreeti” series of Free and Legal graffiti art projects (i.e. “dust tags” by finger on dirty windows, art on discarded objects/paper plates/furniture), Radroach! takes the idea even further by creating a completely legal form of public art that can actually invade the viewer’s home, thus releasing art from the confines of its “controlled” gallery milieu and returning it to a place where it can once again shock and surprise.  “Grafreeti” art in the form of sticker tags will be applied to the back of local urban cockroaches.  The viewer will be confronted by an ACTUAL form of street art, as the art is transported via roach down legitimate city streets and into places where art is rarely found, i.e. sewers and other forms of city infrastructure.  The luckiest of viewers will be able to find the art inside their home as the roaches can be found invading cupboards, bathrooms, and beds.  Participants are encouraged to leave out crumbs and other enticing forms of food to attract the art into their homes, a much more honest kind of transaction and transport than dealing with the traditional art dealer and gallery.

iPhotos

iPhotos is a series of digitally projected photo albums culled from the iPhoto files found on the hard drives of ten (10) randomly selected owners of Apple Macintosh laptop owners.  Viewers are encouraged to explore the digital photograph albums using the iPhoto program found on the laptops installed within the exhibit, and the impressions they take away from the full experience of these ten completely unconnected sets are theirs and theirs only.