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A text of forgetting

by Matthew Stadler

The Cascades train, never really leaving, forever arriving, makes its stately progress north, lumbering along some old track briefly left idle by the freight company that owns it. A Japanese man in the café car drinks at the table across from me, a Budweiser, ho-humming at the sideways advances of this regional express, a lonely snail to the hail of bullets that speeds along back home. It makes no difference to any of us. The train takes the same pace as everything here — this place without speed or slowness, where every passage is, and forever has been, at once instantaneous and interminable. “Off like a herd of turtles,” says the engineer as we lurch to a stop by a bridge.

I’m making deviled eggs. The café car sells a bargain tuna salad that includes a hard boiled egg. Harvesting the condiments — squeeze of mustard, dash of salt and pepper, bit of mayonnaise, relish and soy, just because they have it — I devil the egg and set it atop the pert mound of tuna salad. I would describe the view but it is dark outside, 6 pm on a winter night, and this whole very scenic route will be dark for the however many hours (who cares anyway) it will take before we arrive in Seattle.

Driving a car would be a nightmare on the eight-lane ribbon of interstate that threads this place together, I-5, forever congested and boring and gray. I have pounded my head on steering wheels to stay awake through that 2 or 3 or 5 hour drive. It is a stupor like TV. I see hippies have started a “bio-diesel” bus run that stops only in Olympia (and Portland and Seattle), a geeky short bus featuring reading lights and card tables and games for kids. I suppose I’ll try that some day. But I love the careless irresponsibility of the train.

“Ladies and gentleman, as you sit in your seats gazing out into the darkness, think back 150 years to the age of the pioneers, when intrepid wagon trains made their way across the mountains and into the embryo city of Portland.” The engineer is filling time again. “We at Amtrak want you to experience the same journey, at the same pace…” His audience in the café car is drunk and content and laughs. We have enough food and liquor to feed everyone, at least until morning.

Let me inventory the car. There’s a table of blondes who brought their own champagne. The conductor scolded them when the cork popped and said that “personal alcohol isn’t allowed.” The blondes pouted; he told them to share it and he would turn a blind eye. (I’m the only one who took a glass.) A hooded teen beside them nurses at the teat of a laptop, his face close, puffy headphones over his ears, eyes flickering with light. At the next table a man is reading Bataille, marking it up heavily. It’s The Accursed Share; I believe he’s reading the chapter on the potlatch. An older couple is playing cards, nursing Manhattans from plastic cups, two each, but that’s because the lines are long. Three of us are writing, or doing grown-up things, on our laptops. Those blondes are getting louder, laughing like its Friday.

We’re a rocket out of the 19th century. And then Santa Claus bursts on the scene.

EXTERNAL TEXTS:

“Parisian Newspapers” short prose by Robert Walser

The Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878 - 1956) wrote the austere comic novel Jakob Van Gunten and many brilliant pieces of short fiction, most notably, “The Walk.” The short piece copied here was typical of his best writing, which was often ill-fit for publication because it failed to fulfill genre expectations.

“Media Hot and Cold” from Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan

This highly influential analysis of media as a shaping force of culture was published in 1964, two years after Raymond Williams’s Communications. It’s Canadian author became a counter-cultural celebrity. The worth of his theories was obscured by his celebrity, but has recently come into focus with the ascendancy of digital media.

“The Culture Industry” from The Dialectic of Enlightenment by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer.

This canonical text by two principal writers of the Frankfurt School was written in exile, in New York, in 1944. The Frankfurt School, in the wake of the horrors of WW II, tried to rescue the rational humanism of the Enlightenment through a Marxist-influenced analysis of contemporary culture that came to be called “cultural theory.” This is one of its central documents.

“Plain Editions,” from Published In Paris by Hugh Ford

This anecdotal history of Gertrude Stein’s attempts to publish her work or get others to do so sheds light on the dilemmas still faced by authors today. She made smart choices to insure the long life of her work and to cultivate an audience for it..

“History,” (from Communications) by Raymond Williams

Raymond Williams was a Marxist literary historian who wrote this small book for the BBC in 1961. Born working class, he used what came to be called “critical theory” as a pragmatic political tool for people of all classes and backgrounds.

“From Parchment to Printing Press” by Ronald Deibert.

This is chapter two of this Canadian political scientist’s 1997 history of material media, Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia. Deibert is a critic of Marshall McLuhan who studies the way communications media have shaped the world political order.

“Interior (with Jane)” by Frank O’Hara

Frank O’Hara, who died drunk on the beach in the middle of a summer night (run over by a dune buggy), was as important for his social restlessness, tireless gossip, and keen eye for painting, as he was for his poetry. He wrote this poem in 1951, for the painter, Jane Freidlicher.

“At the Rim of the Fucking Paradigm,” by Frances Stark

This short diatribe about the comedy and pleasures of self-invented culture by an important contemporary artist in Los Angeles was