On Pastiche

Every city has at least two faces. One face is the city as it appears to the walker in the street. The other is the city as it is seen as a whole.

From the pedestrian's view, Bangkok is a tangle, a wonderfully complex maze of side streets and markets, canals and footbridges, artisans' shops and wooden houses. It is a massive city of small-scale neighborhoods.

But from a taxi speeding along the Don Mueang Expressway an entirely different Bangkok is revealed. It becomes so obviously flat, constructed on a baking plain near the mouth of the Chao Phraya River. It is a flatness that only deltas can have, and as such it fits the same topographic profile as Venice, Alexandria, and New Orleans. The skyscrapers are the induced delusion of verticality in an estuarine city.

And from this vantage, the city becomes a horror. The endless flatness is punctuated here and there by cheaply built apartment blocks, painted egg-yolk yellow and swimming pool-tile blue, the residents' laundry hanging from balconies, window frames rusted. And from every angle, unbelievably high electric pylons march diagonally across the landscape, before becoming obscured in the smog-hazed distance.

The same back alleys that strike the walker as so full of life-- corner stores and kids playing football in the street, groups of middle-aged men idling their way through the Sunday afternoon over a case of beer-- are revealed as dusty, cinder-block canyons of identical shophouses, planned in vast, oblong developments delineated by plastic-choked canals that have long since ceased to irrigate the rice fields.

It is Brasilia in reverse. In the absence of grand-scale modernist planning, we have a city that, while often lovable and homey on the ground, is an amoebic blob from the bird's eye. Even the Buddhist temples, contributors of rooflines that give Bangkok an exoticism to the Western tourist, reveal their sameness. The constantly repeated three-tiered red roofs remind me of nothing more than a thousand Pizza Huts.

The concrete apartment blocks, the squat office buildings, the carbon-copy townhouses might be ugly, sure, but at least they are functional. I don't find them bothersome per se. What are truly contemptible are the countless, manifold attempts at imitation, especially the wholesale copying of historic Western architectural styles.

You see every piece of pastiche nightmare, again, from the freeway. The cityscape bristles with primary-colored mansard roofs, with concrete arches that attempt to replicate Tuscany or Provence, the chintzy Mediterranean villa McMansions of the gated communities of the north suburbs, the velvety baroque sleaze of the towering bordellos on Ratchadaphisek Road, the cast-off Roman colonnades and Ionic capitals, the faux-brick imitations of London dockyards, the toy windmills and aluminum red barns stolen from the set of Green Acres. Robert Venturi and his giggling, self-fellating architectural compatriots suggested that we "learn from Las Vegas." In an absolute and willful ignorance of cultural, environmental, and utilitarian considerations, the commercial builders of Bangkok have learned with the diligence of Confucian scholars.

What might be equally horrifying is when Bangkok commercial architecture makes attempts to replicate past Thai forms with hyper-industrial materials. A particularly hideous and familiar example is found in the false rustic-brick fronts with simulated peeling paint at Asiatique. I'd also point to any number of steroidal rice barns-- complete with buffalo horns and rusted plows-- that serve as music venues.

Now one could argue that this sort of adaptation and imitation isn't new. Human behavior can probably be summed up as bricolage, and syncretic aesthetic sensibilities have developed all around the world. In Bangkok specifically, one can look at the shophouses of Chinatown, built with features adapted from the Portuguese. Or the Grand Palace, with its deeply Thai roofline grafted onto a Georgian structure.

But those old buildings were built to last. The new Bangkok commercial architecture looks painfully cheap and throw-away and plastic. The architectural detritus gives the metropolis the appearance of a toy city built by a massive toddler, easy to destroy and easy to replace.

It should be no surprise that these structures are deeply prone to the flooding and typhoons that mark the season cycle, and those built in the early '90s are already ravaged. Whitewashed cornices and concrete Cupids become streaked with acid rain, taking on the look of worn-down styrofoam stacked high, encasing greasy, sliding-sash windows. Inevitably, all of these buildings will crack like Playskool furniture left out in muddy front yards, sun-faded, leering over the surrounding belts of slums, saying nothing to the citizen-observer quite so much as "fuck you, Bangkok."

Art historians, have, over the course of the past couple of centuries, tended to smile at what we now regard as monstrosities, think of them as the kitschy artifacts of a more innocent era-- and maybe even find a strain of beauty in them. Despite my serious doubts about whether these structures will be so lucky, or even survive (think of all the imploded Vegas casinos), I have no power over what future observers will think of when they look out at the skyline of the new Bangkok. So I point my eyes forward, take a sip of my coffee, and do my best to laugh rather than despair.

The Fate of Mes Aynak

Within a couple of months, in all likelihood, a few pieces of construction equipment will climb a highland track in a remote area to the east of Kabul. They will begin to scratch away at the earth, dislocating stones and drilling deep bores, piercing the vast reserve of sulfide minerals at the heart of the mountain range.

Two thousand years ago, this was an intersection of beliefs, a point on the transit route between the empires of the East and the West. Through these dusty passes came caravans loaded with silk and cinnamon, ultramarine and celadon.

Now it is a remote nowhere on the fringe of human dominion. Above here are the vertiginously high Spin Ghar Mountains. Irrigation systems provide enough snowmelt for agriculture, and, in a province where only a fifth of adults can read or write, the local people's existence relies on what they can extract from a lunar landscape.

Here are the old monasteries of Mes Aynak. As at other archaeological sites the world over, new layers are constantly being found, cities atop cities, a new town always superseding a predecessor. Here were Chinese and Persians and Punjabis and Greeks, Zoroastrians and Shiites and Nestorians, and the countless peoples and faiths that have long been forgotten, their practices unrecorded, their deities beyond memory.

What remains is the Buddhist city, an arrangement of temples and wells and steles. Once, this area was ruled by King Menander, who sat in a throne hall asking the Buddhist sage Nagasena about consciousness and perception. Faithfully adopting the tenets of this new religion, he commissioned the building of stupas with Grecian columns and Corinthian capitals. The Buddha statues of his kingdom possessed the same straight noses and impassive curled lips of the Olympian gods as rendered by Praxiteles.

And as the city fell out of use, it became a simple campsite. Countless armies warred over control of the region, as progressive waves of Mauryas, Parthians, Sassanids, and Mongols marched through, only to be followed later by Brits and Soviets and Americans. It's hard not to think of this area as a cursed place: a lovely mountaintop garden torn apart by the demons of history.

Yet it survived. Unlike the Buddhas of Bamiyan further west, it was never targeted for destruction by the Taliban. Their troops camped here, on the run from the Northern Alliance.

But its destruction is imminent, not because of the old reasons of ideology or religion or feudalism, but for reasons of simple economics in a neoliberal era. With global copper prices quintupling in value over the past decade, and with Afghanistan becoming just stable enough to pillage, the mining companies are moving in, and within six months, the arches and friezes too, will pass into memory.

The mining industry refers to this area as part of the Tethyan Eurasian Mineral Belt, named for the prehistoric ocean that was dried as magma from the mantle of the earth surged to the surface. The ocean, in turn was named for the titaness Tethys, who, in legend gave birth to the rivers of the world. Even the history of a name passes from myth into geology into engineering into business.

There's been some sound and fury in the West about the site's destruction. Online petitions have been drafted, which, as with virtually all Internet-based activism, are exercises in self-congratulation. Global mining syndicates continue their pillage, and the Afghan elites who run the country from their condos in Dubai continue to line their pockets. A Kickstarter fund has been started to fund a documentary film about the site and the project. But that, at the end of the day, will probably be some very lovely footage of a site that will have already ceased to exist-- a rather more intellectual equivalent of a snuff film.

The Anglo-American news media is at pains to point out that the company with the contract to mine the copper reserves at Mes Aynak is, of course, a Chinese company, thereby absolving the profligate consumers in the NATO member states of any guilt.

Every article and every campaign, the above paragraphs included, are alienated experiences predicated on a deeply abstract relationship to the site of Mes Aynak. Somehow we want to identify with these temples will almost certainly never visit. Regardless of all of the entirely good reasons we want to preserve a piece of history-- archaeological knowledge, aesthetic virtue, preservation of the cultural heritage of a third-world nation-- much of our desire is something ineffable. It's that beyond the logic of capital that seems to dictate and delimit our daily life, we still aspire to some difficult virtue that lies just beyond a distant horizon.

The Human Condition at Poipet

For all of the exoticism advertised by the Tourism Authority of Thailand, the baking plains of East Central Thailand remind me far more of Arkansas or Tennessee more than the sun-dappled beaches one sees on billboards. This is the Thailand of scrapyards and used car lots, hand-painted signs directing motorists to stop for coffee or noodles, Coca-Cola billboards, and bonfires burning in gravel lots with solitary huts of plywood and tin rusting in the corner. In the distance, the worn-down nubbins of old mountain ranges emerge from the level plain, eaten away at by millions of monsoon seasons, countless mudslides, and the humidity that transforms the ancient granites and metaconglomerates into quartz fragments and vermilion-colored silicate mud.

The highway terminates at the syphilitic border settlement of Aranya Prathet. Beyond is the Cambodian city of Poipet, a casino town just a few hours from Bangkok. In the wastelands around the border, you can feel the ghostly presence of the countless Khmer Rouge refugees who once streamed across the border in the late 1970s, and Aranya Prathet, with its desultory town square and squalid market, seems a testament to the cruelty and ugliness of old wars.

I get out my pen and notebook in the buffet in a lightless casino basement, which is as depressing and tawdry as a lightless casino basement in a Cambodian border town sounds. The food here has a sickly, sugary, fatty quality to it-- rubbery, greasy eggs, croissants that leave oil slicks on the roof of your mouth, gristly, gray pork-- that mirrors the activities going on outside the buffet gate.

Upstairs, 50 year old Thai women in jewel tones, all of them looking like they're participating in an Imelda Marcos lookalike contest, affix themselves to video poker and roulette wheels that rotate electronically under glass like pies at a diner. This isn't Las Vegas or Macau or Monte Carlo or even Atlantic City. This is the equivalent of those bleak Mississippi and Illinois towns that look to legalized gambling as a way to rebuild their devastated, post-industrial communities.

All, here, is luxury. Or rather, "luxury," ease, cheap entertainment: low-stakes gambling, gaudy stained-glass chandeliers that look stolen from the bar of an Applebee's, sugary cocktails, sour-faced hostesses, stages festooned with lavender bunting, and grotesque singers in the Wayne Newton mode, hair thinning, with the overfed yet sickly look common to decaying third-tier celebrities and Henry VIII.

A casino is made all the more disgusting by the sheer earnestness of it, its plainspoken and hard-nosed attitude, Nevadan decadence on top of Chinese cynicism and wreathed with Southeast Asian bourgeois kitsch. Why yes, the architecture seems to say, we want your pension money. The great race to build bigger and more high-tech casino resorts in Vegas throughout the '80s and '90s built greater and greater temples to Mammon. But in Poipet, they don't even bother to cover up the corrugated ceiling-- this is a temple to, at most, the 99 baht sale.

But, at the end of the day, what makes Poipet more horrifying than its American equivalents it that it is a Southern casino town transported to the third world, staffed by refugees and surrounded by filthy-faced Khmer children picking up trash and hawking cheap plastic trinkets, looking sad and stoic. Beyond the green zone of entertainment venues, the surrounding landscape of Cambodia's Banteay Meanchey Province is littered with landmines and inhabited by some of the poorest, most exploitable people on the Asian continent.

This is the face of modern fascism. The fascist architecture that marks Poipet isn't the grand scale neoclassicism of Albert Speer, but rather the hearty gemütlichkeit of fake Bavarian cottages, the plastic imitations of a mythic past-- look no further than the stabbing concrete attempt at an Angkorian gate that marks the entrance to Cambodia. Inside the hulking entertainment palaces, the middle classes ensconce themselves in the fantasy of affluence. Outside, a peasant girl, her face smeared with red clay dust, stares into the smoke from the trash heap, and watches as it obscures the rising evening star.

The Desire for Something Else

It lies back in there somewhere, deep in the recesses of early memory. The sweet smell of an attic, the cardboard boxes with the outdated logos of various American conglomerates and long-defunct department stores, and the endless piles of old magazines.

In the detritus of industrial America, I knew I would find something, some answer, some key. It was a belief I was never able to articulate, but that always lurked in my consciousness, like the feeling of looking out on an empty yard and not being able to recall where one last saw light of this quality, this hue.

So I looked through the magazines. Certain places evoked an immense exoticism: the scented jungles of Southeast Asia, vast, snowy islands in Northern Canada, the windswept steppes of Central Asia. Places at the margins of what we deem to be "civilization," where the experiences of positivism fray. They remained vast territories where death came from the primordial landscape, where human life still occurs in strict tandem with the season cycle and where animist myth still holds greater credence than the laws of planetary motion.

And there was my lifelong love of the map-- a beautiful tool that has been eclipsed by the admittedly more precise and useful version offered by Google. Maps of my own era were fine, but I was more interested in the earlier versions: maps with odd corners of Africa and Australia still marked "unexplored"; maps of old American entities long since passed into obscurity, the Lincoln Highway and the Gulf, Mobile, & Ohio Railroad, Western outpost towns with names like Aladdin, Wyoming and Kremlin, Montana; the old nations and cities that conjured up a more romantic era of travel-- Cochin China and Austrian Galicia, Danzig and Adrianople-- and those sepia-postcard spellings like Roumania and Tokio.

It wasn't so much that I was nostalgic for another era, but, as I grew older, more that I wanted to radically negate my surroundings. The more standard breed of teenage nerd stuck to Dungeons and Dragons or Final Fantasy VII or whatever, but I had an 1898 atlas prefaced by the stern face of President William McKinley.

But of course, this vision has little to do with the exigencies of real travel. Those hours spent with maps and photos have nothing to do with the hardship, the occasional bouts of sickness, the insectarium cheap hotel rooms, the occasional scams and cons, the terminal boredom of long waits at rundown train stations, the ugly habit of fat package tourists being waited upon by native servants, the even uglier habit of young backpackers looking to drink rum-and-Cokes on every continent and still have the gall to call it enlightening, and the awful recognition that you are probably not much better yourself.

***

I was sitting in a nowhere zone somewhere in Nong Khai Province. Red mud and intermittent rain and the butts of cheap Thai cigarettes stomped into the dirt. We were waiting for the border to open, in the humid pre-dawn. It was too dark and I was much too tired to read. I tried to fill the mindless void, but ultimately was alone to confront it.

But times like that are good for reflection, when you're far form home and wondering how you got there, how the hell it is that you've arrived in this godforsaken place on what was once the front line of the Cold War, where now there are groups of men sitting silently in the dark, smoking and staring.

I cycle back through my memory, through the chain of events that led me to this one specific place. And inevitably I arrived back in that attic, back to the thoughts of a blonde-headed kid in snowbound Iowa who saw a picture of a Papuan perched in a treehouse above the rainforest and wondered if, some day, he might sit there.

Notes from the Outpost of Sangkhlaburi

I had some vacation time, so I'd gone up into the mountains around Sangkhlaburi. It's a remote place, four hours' bus ride from its own provincial capital.

Getting off the bus you feel like you're in a true outpost, all wooden buildings and steep streets without order and design. Beyond the lights of the town are the vast forests of the Dawna and Tenasserim Mountains, and beyond them, the war-torn states of Lower Burma.

Three memos written in my notebook at a cafe:

1. I'm sleeping so much here-- the weather saps one's energy with its schizophrenia, cold rain alternating with blistering heat. Everything is thick, humid, moreso even than Bangkok. The entire town seems stifling and waterlogged, prone to immense fungal growth.

2. And there's something sinister about its locale next to the Vajiralongkorn Reservoir, the old town submerged under the new. In the dry season, the ruins of the old temple emerge, but in the monsoon, everything remains hidden. The water immediately below my room is dense with lake weeds. I imagine trying to swim in the murk, my legs swept at by sinuous underwater greenery, like ghosts trying to pull me down into the gloomy depths.

3. I climb to the grand pagoda that looks out over the reservoir and find it devoid of worshippers. Statues representing the days of the week scattered around the edges of the central tower, out of order, mixed up, left to gather dust or perhaps never finished. At the base, a few rough-hewn wooden figures have gathered the gifts of devotees: a silver-leafed tree (the old symbol of fiefdom in the Siamese Empire), candles of many-colored wax, bottles of syrup-sweet red soda, and a pale statuette looking remarkably like a Buddhist Virgin Mary.

Sangkhlaburi is a tourist town on one level, but it is also a purgatory, a transit point. It is a town of unfulfilled dreams and failed developments, an inheritor of all of the ugliness that has happened in this region-- imperialism both local and European, colonialism, economic conquest, displacement, forced migration, socialist purges, capitalist destruction, holy war, tribal battling, and the general shittiness of mankind.

This is a town of milling orphans and teak houses clinging precipitously to mountain slopes, occupied by nationalities on the run. The red sarong of a girl indicates her Mon ethnicity-- a people who once commanded vast swaths of present-day Myanmar and Thailand, but have now been consigned to remote backwaters, their ancient language and script fast becoming relics. There are the Karen, fractured by 70 years of civil war, the longest internal war on the planet. Saddest of all are the Indo-Burmese, refugees from an unremembered nation. Their ancestors were the indentured labor of the British Raj, were slaughtered in the Rangoon race riots of 1930, were purged as collaborators after the Ne Win military coup in 1962.

And there are the countless women with hollow eyes and missing teeth, carrying massive loads on their backs and puffing cheroots in the rain. Their clothing comprises a set of signs and symbols as emblematic as national flags, but unreadable by I, the Westerner, the tourist.

And yet it's a lovely place, a remarkably lovely one at that. The mountains here are a prehistoric boundary, a seam at the meeting point of the Indian, Eurasian, and Sunda plates. It is a border both geological and cultural, separating two old warring empires. Humanity's use of the hills is transient. The mountains stand as impassive as the Buddhas of the temples they contain.

The Aesthetics of Desolation

Growing up, my parents had filled the childhood home with art books of every description, laid out on coffee tables and stacked on bookshelves. I never really drew a line between these and my picture books. As a child, there was something remarkably rapturous about each one, a transcendence that could only be expressed by Magritte or Klee or whoever.

Every book on my parents' shelf seemed like it had the potential to be a portal into another world. But the art books were so immediate in their impact on my mind. Here was the world of events that all took place in one time period, or one rough color scheme, or with certain recurring motifs, certain types of people, certain reappearing names for people and places. Each painter wasn't so much a real person, but a self-contained universe.

As I grew older and was able to put these names into some larger context, some narrative of art history, my raw feelings about these artists still lingered. Even as I attempted to describe one artist as the bridge from one school of painting to another, I would still have the residue of an old bias for or against them: the way that their painting looked, re-printed in a coffee table book with worn corners, spread out on the warped hardwood of my bedroom floor, in the light of a quiet summer afternoon.

It was thus that I rediscovered Andrew Wyeth, a painter so often derided for his sentimentalism. In the era of gestural abstraction and grand-scale minimalist sculpture, he was an unapologetic realist working in the vein of Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer. In the era of Vietnam and Watergate, he painted rural American scenes that seemed to stray altogether too close to the most repulsive forms of right-wing nativism, regardless of the technical and compositional talent he admittedly possessed.

But this analysis is superficial. Beyond the content of the paintings-- a woman in an old-fashioned black dress, a farmyard-- Wyeth seems to actually be cutting far under their surface. Every house is full of long, skeptical shadows, every lace curtain is yellowed with filth, every white wall looks scratched at, the paint cracked. The ordinary people he paints have mottled skin and chipped teeth, uneven stubble and ill-fitting, stained clothes. Even his spring flowers are muddy and trodden-upon.



And yet there is this sense of longing. The painting for which he is most renowned, while seemingly a charming rural scene is, deceptively, a depiction of the isolation of a girl whose legs are withered from polio, her face obscured.



It was a vision that struck a chord with me. The photographs I took as a kid with a disposable camera were all of closed-down factories and windswept prairies. I'm not sure which I encountered first-- Wyeth's impression of the world around him, or my own sense of rural desolation, but the two fed each other. In the art book I remember so well-- beige binding, gold lettering on the side-- there seemed to be some kind of solution. It was prism for all the uncertainty I felt around me, refracting raw feelings into a cogent, visual representation.

Of the countless attempts to locate a precise theory of aesthetics, all have failed. The old purposes of art-- religious genuflection, an expression of transcendental human experience, a search for the essential meaning of art or one specific type of art, a Marxist exposition of the dialectic of class struggle-- all seem like fool's errands. The metrics we use to determine our appreciation of art-- technical quality, sheer visual passion, conceptual truth-- are all deeply flawed.

Self-described postmodernists often advocate a sort of artistic anarchism, declaring that anything goes. On the opposite end of the epistemological spectrum, evolutionary psychologists and their ilk claim that we have a specific evolved aesthetic sense that dictates our perceptions of beauty and truth. My own personal perspective seems to be that the postmodernist approach more aptly describes contemporary art as well as more traditional forms, but both positions seem equally flawed, equally lonely, and equally likely to produce terrible art, whether that terrible art is Damien Hirst in the case of the former or shopworn romanticism in the case of the latter.

Schopenhauer claimed that art is a pure experience which we use to insulate ourselves from the horror of being. And, at the end of the day, when I walk into a museum, that's all I really hope for. My perspective may be informed by my awareness of culture, history, biography, ritual, religion, technics, mathematics, and composition, but my primal hope is that, for a few hours within the gallery, I can set myself straight with whatever is beyond its walls.

10 Stories I'll Never Write

I keep a file on my computer called "Miscellaneous Writings." Initially, I envisioned this as a seedbed for ideas I would have later on. But it increasingly developed into a repository for ideas that would never come to fruition-- an infinitely expandable library of half-conceived thoughts, interesting ideas that could never lend themselves to a compelling narrative, brief sketches, quips and bons mots, short reviews of books by Tanizaki Junichiro, Cesare Pavese, Susan Sontag.

A significant numbers of the ideas contained here came to me in dreams. Typically, they seem utterly lucid and brilliant in the early morning haze. By the time I'm on the train to work, I realize just how shit they are. These are interspersed throughout the list, but don't expect me to reveal which stories they actually are.

Other stories were inspired by very specific experiences-- listening to one song, or reading one short story, or watching one movie. These sorts of experiences yield a great creative outflow within a few hours of the actual experience, but fail to have any real staying power-- they are mere images, fragments of dialogue, and settings.

Like all junk drawers, it grows in complexity and mystery while rarely yielding anything of value. So consider the following to be the steel washers, gummy electrical tape (bought for a home improvement project 5 years ago), expired coupons, and wheat pennies of my literary pretensions.

1. The story of the unspoken feelings between two old friends, told entirely through emoticons.

2. A day in the life of a professor of animal languages at a major American research university, rooted in the parlor-game absurdity of so much contemporary analytical philosophy.

3. A variation of the Canterbury Tales retold in the bar of a seedy budget motel on the Pennsylvania Turnpike (called, of course, the Canterbury), with the pardoner as a gay antique dealer, the wife of Bath as a soccer mom, the clerk as a broke grad student, etc.

4. Close biographies and micro-level stories from one single Seattle neighborhood over the course of 100 years, using a fake (but potentially real) coffee table book of oral histories of said neighborhood. This coffee table book will be attractively priced at $29.99, and available at the Made in Washington Store in Pike Place Market.

5. The story of the last two weeks of someone's life as told through items in his or her garbage bin. This person has just committed suicide, or been hit by a car, or something equally dramatic.

6. A documentation of the presence of the map of a city that may or may not exist as it occurs, seemingly at random, through sketches in the margins of notebooks, frost crystals on icy windows, and other meeting points of intention, causality, and stochasticity.

7. Story opening: "Amy and Liz were at a bar in Pioneer Square drinking Diet Cuba Libres after work on Thursday." Where it goes from here, I don't know.

8. An observation: when I look at black and white photos from the early 20th Century, everything looks like it should be depicted in black and white. When I look at color photos taken in the same years, everything looks like a BBC costume drama. The story will be the analysis of color (one color, or maybe a class of colors, or maybe the entire spectrum) as it wanes and waxes over the course of centuries.

9. A postal worker begins reading other people's letters. He develops whole mythologies about who they are, what they do, but is ultimately overwhelmed by the stupidity and the venality of the people around him. He documents his own failures in a book he calls The Book of Disappointments, consisting of letters, bills, and other ephemera, followed by his commentary on them. The story follows the postal worker as he writes the book, including some of the letters and some of the commentary.

10. Two young men watch the Beijing Olympics in a house in some anonymous part of the West Coast, eating nachos. It's one of those houses with sheets for curtains that has the aura of a permanent hangover. An argument over something unknown and unknowable begins between the host and his girlfriend. The other is left alone in the livingroom, watching North Korean gymnasts.

By committing these ideas to the never-to-be-written, I am fully consigning them to their fate. Even if I am struck, for some reason, to continue writing one of these stories, my own stubbornness will almost doubtless preclude the urge to write them.

Italo Calvino wrote, in the introduction to If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, the story of all the books we'll never read that stare down at us, glumly, from their shelves at the bookstore. As more and more books are published year in and year out, this list expands indefinitely. My own to-read list expands at an exponential rate, and I am quite comfortable with the fact that I will die before ever reading a great many of these books.

Likewise, it is useful to take account of the things we'll never write. I won't call them books-- they are the ideas that must be disposed of before we can compose the things we want the world to see. Consider this short piece to be my salute to all the dross that we dispose of as we write, all the half-formed ideas that must be tossed aside in the creation of something greater.