7995. THINGS ARE DIFFERENT NOW, #13

13. MARK TWAIN, SORTA'

I remember a while back writing of

Mark Twain saying, 'I remember

everything; even stuff that didn't

happen.' It was funny, pithy, a

nice quote. It gets the point across,

too  -  of his folksy stage-show

manner. You see, long before there

was an entertainment industry, the

likes of today's, with talk shows,

late night, media extravaganzas and

all that, someone like Mark Twain

used to just travel around, endlessly,

hall to hall, and do these revelry-ish

stage shows. He'd have a 'persona':

The folksy, wise-cracking, addled,

juniper-brained, almost slightly

drunk Uncle Cracker stuff. The old

steam-boat Mississippi River guy

who had changed his name, 'long

time back, to the nautical 'Mark

Twain,' (a river-depth chain term)

from the usual Samuel Clemens.

It all worked. His routines, over

and over, went on, developed a

little as they traveled, got changed

and fine-tuned, cleaned up, or not,

depending on the audience and

town he was about to face. This

world-wide traveling show was

mostly done alone, but sometimes

in tandem with a banjo player, or

someone in blackface, or a guide  -

some sort of joke foil. The idea

back then, the excitement was,

that 'coming to your town soon' -

live, staged entertainment. For all

those people out in the hinterlands

and the little parts of America, and

growing little cities too, Mark Twain,

the oral Mark Twain, performing, was

a really big deal. Like a nightly newscast

for the little guy  -  information, facts,

people stories, entertainment, music,

jokes, song and dance, goofy mistakes,

ribald jokes and cracks about things.

He made millions from these tours in

his day; pissed a lot of it away too  -

bad investments, stock losses, bad

investments, and bad inventions too,

and then  -  tired of it all he may be  -

he'd have to begin another one, to

recoup lost funds. One time, he just

went flat broke by backing some

letterpress printer guy's 'new'

invention that failed; some modern

typesetting machinery. There was

another quote I read somewhere too,

it might not have been by him, but

I liked it, even if it wasn't. 'He's

nostalgic, but not for anything that

ever really 'happened.'

-

It's all a lot like today's world for

me: I just don't any longer 'get it',

and never did. Everything's a bit

foggy and the only things that make

sense to me are my own stories. They're

real, all stuff that I lived. So, I don't

know that 'stories' is the right word,

but I don't care anymore. I go through

a mental file cabinet (now there's an

old reference too) and find slips of

paper, pieces of note. And anyway,

my head's, a lot of it anyway, still

on that corner of Bleecker and

MacDougal. And that's OK by me,

especially now, because there's no

place I'd much rather be. It's a

portal for me to step into some

other resonance. The streets say

they're the same, by name, by title.

But the look is all shot and gone,

things are all dead, often not often

even replaced, just there languishing

in a dead heap. The stickers for

today's world are on them, but

nothing I know of. (Here, let me

prove a point : 'the 5th Wave is

a typical example of the kind of

dopey junk that passes for literature

among today's unsophisticated teens,

who know everything about J. K.

Rowling and nothing at all about

Jane Austen. They must write book

reports from Classics Illustrated

comics...teenagers clinging to cell

phones and bottled water whose lives

are whipped into shape when they are

forced into unisex boot camps to defend

themselves against the alien invasion.'

Thanks, Rex Reed). The past.

Remembering stuff. You can take

anything you ever want, and twist it

all up and roll it all over, but it's still

the particle-matter of you. That much

can't be gotten away from. I know ghosts

and images when I see them, and I

don't hide from anything any longer.

-

You know how people now live virtual

world stuff  -  kinky, nutty, crazy, sexy,

violent. Fake. Let me emphasis that one.

Fake. Like bullshit disease in the head.

People wasting time, freaking out over

their God-given time on Earth and then

just wasting it. That's OK, I guess, if

that's what you want to do, and if you

just don't care, and if you really don't

have a God to answer to. Life's a real

paradox, so find your own way to deal

with it. But there's something else, over

you, and It doesn't forget either, and It

remembers things too, things that never

even occurred. It gets nostalgic, but not

for anything that really happened. I

never before called the God concept

'It'. Pretty weird.

-

Really difficult, in this looking back, not

to see the vast differences. Let's go back

to Jim Tomberg again. He and I, we lived

a real world : we ate and drank and did

our stuff, knowing full well that whatever

we touched was tangible reality, in our

grasp and possessed of all the potential

we could draw out of it. Things were

still defined. Jim was in some tight

situations, a few fights, all the sorts

of things that had repercussions and

ripples in the real world. We weren't

yet dealing with ephemera, nor the

more deep sort of intellectual and time

travel I later found myself in. I don't

know what any of that ever did to Jim.

He's gone, and I don't knew where to

or to what. For all I know he's got 6

kids and a farm in Utah. That'd be like

him. We never dealt with cultural

stuff, ever as we saw the world falling

away : the banal ascendancy of TV,

the fragmentation of public discourse,

electronic or otherwise. Communication

meant books and letters, maybe a

telephone, connected onto a wall and

screwed into place, wired and with a

cord. Where could you go with that,

and who'd ever want to? I know Jim

would have just rather'd to order a

drink, and be done. There was a time

when Life wasn't much  -  a pretty

much fixed narrative in which characters

played their parts and said their lines

while they did their work. The nutty

ones, the fringe characters, they were

always there, with their inventions,

their discoveries, the crazy ones

daring to sail around the world and

back (I don't think that makes any

real sense, but I like it). The world

was still a physical concept,

something with rocks and lumber

and fixed parameters. For myself,

I found ways, over the years, to just

become invisible  -  it took a long time,

and it was probably useless too. I look

about as invisible as a fire, but that too

helps. People just keep away. I found

that if you just stop playing the game,

none of all that matters. I don't need it,

and it don't need me  -  to parody the old

7-up slogan, 'You Like It! It Likes you!'

Yeah, there's the 1960's for you.

Nowadays, I'd rather run over a crowd

with a steamroller than be part of one.

And I certainly don't want no soda

liking me.

-

But anyway, that's the distance, and 

I've gone it, if you can say that before

the distance is over. The distance is 

actually always stretching before you, 

so you can't really achieve it. Once 

you do, it's done, and so are you, in 

those matters. Now, I walk along 

10th Street and I see the little markers 

and things they've put on all these

doors of old, dead famous writers and 

anarchists and revolutionaries and

all that, here and elsewhere; nearly every
street has something. Mark Twain. 
Eleanor Roosevelt. Emma Goldman. 
Sinclair Lewis. It all just goes on. I mean,

what's the point of all that : showing 

a marker on the house and doorway

of some revolutionary this or that

whom you've had arrested, imprisoned,

executed, or killed. Beats me. I've heard

about historical revisionism, but let's

examine this, maybe just a little more.

Hell, there should be a door-knocker 

or something at least, on 8West8th, just

for me and Jim being there. 'Renegade

brigands, fond of wine, women, and

song, who, in their long career towards

nothing at all, managed to cajole, scar,

stupefy, anger and confuse thousands.'