Walter Kirn's Blog

                                            REDWOOD TREE, BIG SUR

                                                    for Robert Stone




A tree is a needle
The rest is bark and age
It is the most immaterial of objects
Nothing but aspiration
A bridge of sighs
Yet it has benefits, it does for others
Heedlessly, without knowing,
Without plotting
Sheltering for example our sunburned heads
Granting the hunter cover
The lover too
Hauling up all our toxins to the gods
So they can be burned and returned as
Free vitality...

                                            REDWOOD TREE, BIG SUR

                                                    for Robert Stone




A tree is a needle
The rest is bark and age
It is the most immaterial of objects
Nothing but aspiration
A bridge of sighs
Yet it...

They're making a study
of what works on television.
What faces doing what, what bodies
looking how.
In the big beachfront houses on Malibu Road
those few who stay up late anymore
are working out algorithms
of a dream.
Next year you may live in their product
in their guesses
thinking you're being yourself
whatever that is
thinking the sex you're having is
your own.
You'll be eating a meal that you can't imagine now
made up of dishes you'll think are your idea.
They won't be. Nothing is really
your idea.
A study...

How Eve persuaded Adam to eat the fruit is not recorded -- he simply, gullibly, ate it -- but how Rebekah convinced her husband, Isaac, to order their son, Jacob, to avoid the despised 'daughters of Heth' and marry one of her nieces (actually, two of them) is made novelistically explicit. She tries a brand new negotiating tactic, one that will come to define her gender's fighting style in domestic dramas to this day. Rebekah warns Isaac that if she doesn't prevail in the selection of Jacob's ...

Esau has the birthright. Jacob wants it. He sees his chance when Esau stumbles home one day, famished, exhausted, and half-delirious, from a deer hunting trip intended to supply the brothers' blind old father, Isaac, with his favorite game meat.  Exploiting his brother's hunger in the manner of a heroin dealer coercing sex from a trembling female junkie (or a banker pushing a teaser-rate mortgage on a shift-worker with a child on the way) Jacob demands that Esau sign over the birthright in re...

Esau has the birthright. Jacob wants it. He sees his chance when Esau stumbles home one day, famished, exhausted, and half-delirious, from a deer hunting trip intended to supply the brothers' blind old father, Isaac, with his favorite game meat.  Exploiting his brother's hunger in the manner of a heroin dealer coercing sex from a trembling female junkie (or a banker pushing a teaser-rate mortgage on a shift-worker with a child on the way) Jacob demands that Esau sign over the birthright in re...

As decreed by the laws and customs of the times, the 'birthright' that  and elevated social status,     one of male fraternal twins that been delivered just moments  apart from Rebekah, 

Birth



Esua, t into the world has a birthright. a home one  day from a particularly tiring hunting trip meant to supply their blind old father, Isaac, with A   lukewarm gruel that most people, including most total strangers and all but the most sadistic wartime captors, would give him for free, out of common decency. Jacob ounces on the deal and which rabbis and priests to this day find unobjectionable. Astonishingly, they focus theeir disapproval on starving Esau's impulsive words, which sup...

What's all this  'birthright' business?





Esau has one. Jacob wants one. Esau is starving and trades it for a meal. Jacob keeps it.  Rebekah, his mother, smiles.  Rebekah gets ambitious and floats a scheme to further elevate her favorite son by tricking his father Isaac of the poor eyesight into thinking Isaac is really Esau and awarding Isaac Esau's blessing. Jacob begs off. Rebekah gets very pushy. Jacob caves to his  and steals the blessing. Esau catches him and rats him out. Isaac moans a...