THE WORLD’S FIRST CONVERSATIONAL LITERARY MAGAZINE
the Simulocracy Edition
665 Responses to The Endless Thread 4.0
THE FICTIVE IN A SIMULOCRACY
Part One: A MAGINOT OF THE IMAGINATION
It’s probably now too much to expect that anyone will remember when Batman Xll (no, which one was it? the one with a posthumous Joker) was considered an important film. Not just by the malleable, vaguely-reactionary proletariat but also by a generation of liberalish young (and not-so-young) academic film buffs. The movie was near-perfect as a filmic embodiment of the tropes, memes, attitudes and lighting of the Bush2 reich… and the quasi-liberal North American mind just ate it up. What struck me was the constant barrage of the laudatorily-applied word “realistic” these brain-washed kids were using on a movie about a well-meaning (if conflicted), hi-tech, super-rich vigilante dressed up as an S&M bat. If you think that’s “realistic”, what do you think “real” is? What are these movies for?
How can anyone with half a watt of intelligence take them seriously in any sense other than Military (and/or as the Jungian excreta of Empire)? As narratives they are meaningless (c. 90 minutes of zero-sum power struggle); as spectacles they are pure post-Riefenstahl; as visceral experiences they over-ride common sense, disable one’s ethics and inject the Normative Cookie with radioactive steroids. A block-busting cinematic franchise is not an individual’s artistic vision: it is a billion-dollar insurgency on the battlefield of the Imagination (an air strike, say, vs the ground troops of TV).
Let’s have a look at the post-Osama, pre-Obama poster:
Subtle it ain’t; “subtle” is so early-20th century. Now let’s go back to a spot in ancient history… a few centuries in Simulocracy Time… long before the effect of the drug of the Dark Knight’s hype had worn off into a mere noise adding to all that other spent cultural back-chatter out there. Bear with me and read through this thread of Comrade Augustine trying to convince a bunch of academics that they were A) brainwashed suckers and B) infantilized brainwashed suckers, at that. Bear with me: it’s a long and epic battle…
The Raw Critic: “The Dark Knight”
Posted by Bill Benzon on 07/20/08 at 09:00 AM
I saw the two Tim Burton Batman flicks, and then the third, Batman Forever, but that’s it. In particular, I didn’t see Batman Begins which, so I’ve heard, restarted the franchise. As the summer began I was vaguely aware that another installment was on the way, but I didn’t pay much attention. I was more attuned to WALL-E, which, BTW has dropped in my estimation since I wrote about it. I read another review, did some more thinking, and it just fell apart. But I digress.
Last week it seemed that wherever I went online I’d see pictures of Heath Ledger in Joker make-up. Strange. And then the first reviews hit: The Dark Knight is the greatest thing since sliced bread! And then there’s the theme struck in the opening line of Christopher Orr’s review: “How far can an idle entertainment be bent toward art without breaking?” This film is suspended somewhere between art and entertainment, and that’s good.
I guess.
If you want a recommendation: Sure, go see it. I’m likely to see it again; I may even venture into Manhattan to see the Imax version.
Warning: Spoiler below the fold, but only one, and it’s in the next paragraph.
Comments have been closed, but I have preserved them below the fold. Why have comments been closed? Because they had little to do with the film.
But whether it’s really there betwixt art and entertainment, beats me. I’m not even sure I know what happened in the film. In particular, I don’t know when and how District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) got turned to the dark side. Once it had happened I wasn’t even sure it had happened. Did I miss something, or is the film flawed on this point? That’s something I’ll look for on a second seeing. I’ll also ponder his last act facial make-up. Seems to me I should have been disturbed, but I wasn’t. It was just, um, there. Or, not there.
And, yes, if your favorite review indicated that the film’s a parable about living with terrorism, it got that right. I’ll be pondering that one too. The final test, as it were, is especially interesting, as it seems to be right out of the Game Theory lab: See if you can guess who’s going to push the button. For, in a way, that’s what the film does, puts the audience in the driver’s seat. Of course, you don’t actually have the power to determine the film’s ending; it’s not as though everyone has a game console and the ending depends on how the members of the audience play the game. But it comes close.
Ledger is smashing as The Joker, a very different dude from the Nicholson version. Nicholson was comic-book nuts; Ledger is really nuts. A performance to ponder; he really inhabits his character, as opposed to manipulating it from the outside, as Nicholson did.
On the whole, The Dark Knight is more real, less comic-book. Real with respect to what? Ethical choice?
* * * * *
Comments
I’d like to suggest that a century from now, academics will marvel (npi) at a culture that accepted films featuring vigilantes dressed as bats, spiders, wolverines, robots and, um, hulks as adult fare… but there’s a good chance things will be even *worse* by then. Hey: it’s about a po-faced millionaire dressed up as a *bat*, people. I’m not ten years old; therefore it makes me laugh.
By Steven Augustine on 07/20/08 at 10:46 AM | Permanent link to this comment
Yes–would we were back in the 17th century, where witches, ghosts, and severed heads were what moved responsible, sober-headed adults. By tomemos on 07/20/08 at 12:56 PM | Permanent link to this comment
If it *were* the 17th century (or we were all ten years old), we’d certainly have an excuse. By Steven Augustine on 07/20/08 at 02:30 PM | Permanent link to this comment
Aw, Steven, we don’t need an ‘excuse’! By Sue G-J on 07/20/08 at 03:46 PM | Permanent link to this comment
Steven, I’m with you. I watch nothing but documentaries—about very serious issues. By Adam Kotsko on 07/20/08 at 04:52 PM | Permanent link to this comment
Hey Adam:
It’s not “seriousness” I eulogize with this thoughtful snark, it’s maturity. Also: picture me trying to imagine a budding, Left-leaning intelligentsia quite so seduced (infantilized; co-opted) by the (admittedly) slickest fascist propaganda in history: I can’t. Leni Riefenstahl called and she wants her totalitarian back-lighting back. And to think it all started with Superman! Oy… the irony! By Steven Augustine on 07/20/08 at 05:55 PM | Permanent link to this comment
If I can’t like comic books, it’s not my revolution. By tomemos on 07/20/08 at 07:04 PM | Permanent link to this comment
Adam K: “Steven, I’m with you. I watch nothing but documentaries—about very serious issues.”
But you’ve got to admit that you also read a lot of Zizek. By John Holbo on 07/20/08 at 09:33 PM | Permanent link to this comment
Yeah, John, but he’s over 13. He’s allowed. By Bill Benzon on 07/20/08 at 09:39 PM | Permanent link to this comment
Are superhero comics fascist in tone? Sure. But you have to admit it’s the cutest possible fascism that carries its own ineffectuality along with it. I mean, you can’t be too worried about the Comic Book Guy stamping on an improperly sealed Mylar bag containing a no longer mint issue #1 of Dazzler, forever.
I remember when a Bush follower was saying that we had to re-elect Bush because Bush was like the Batman and Osama was like the Joker. You see, even if Batman never actually stops the Joker, he’s still the best person to send after him. Maybe he’ll get him next time! If only that had been a more common pro-Bush argument. By Rich Puchalsky on 07/20/08 at 11:42 PM | Permanent link to this comment
On the idea that superhero comics are fascist…
Perhaps it is rather the case that democracies are not quite so democratic, that democracy provokes daydreams about a more serious and exciting kind of life than sitting in a cubicle and pushing around paperwork. Perhaps boredom and security cause people to fantasize about extraordinary individuals who are stronger, more powerful, more courageous, and more noble than the great multitude. The superhero is a descendant of the Greek heroes, the saints, and the knights of Arthurian legend. The difference is that in an age where the pursuit of money is regarded as the most important vocation, power is identified as the mark of distinction, making saintly fasting and celibacy appear rather quaint and homely, and knightly magnanimity silly and counter-productive. Brute strength and force, in their stupid objectivity, become the measure.
On the other hand, it could be said that overwhelming ambition, the desire to be extraordinary, was the major factor in the decline of Athens—Themistocles was exiled, Alcibiades defected to the Spartans, and Nicias allowed the Sicilian expedition to be wiped out because he did not want to return home to face the anger of his fellow citizens. Could comics (and films and video games) lead us to a similar outcome?
If Plutarch were alive today, he’d probably write superhero comics. By Peter Y. Paik on 07/21/08 at 02:03 AM | Permanent link to this comment
Carlyle also. By Peter Y. Paik on 07/21/08 at 03:07 AM | Permanent link to this comment
“Are superhero comics fascist in tone? Sure. But you have to admit it’s the cutest possible fascism that carries its own ineffectuality along with it.”
Are we talking about comic books? I thought we were talking about movies. Are action movies that get your heart pounding (ie, “successful” movies) “ineffectual”? Was Rambo “ineffectual”? I think we can use the same toolkit that valorizes popular entertainment as worthy of “serious” analysis in the first place to argue that consuming it (esp. as a fan) has more than a neutral impact, or even make a plausible case for its baleful (npi) influence on the Left.
Is it “ineffectual” because current conditions prove it so (eg, despite Iron Man’s blockbusting debut, the country is a Pacifist Paradise), or because to admit otherwise would be embarrassing?
My feeling is that the critical defenses are down on these things in a way that’s powerfully reminiscent of the malleable naivete of adolescence. But even I have to admit that if Leni R. had lived to direct the next Batman/Spiderman/Howard the Duck, I’d be the first in line to see it, baby. By Steven Augustine on 07/21/08 at 03:18 AM | Permanent link to this comment
Oh, no. I mainly wanted to re-tell the Bush:Batman::Osama:Joker story, not really restart the world’s most re-trodden superhero discussion topic (next up over in sci fi: was Heinlein’s Starship Troopers fascist)?
But, OK. Peter, the superhero isn’t merely a hero, isn’t merely a descendent of Greek heroes, saints, and knights. That’s because the superhero has two things they don’t have: 1) a fascist visual iconography, what with all the masks and sleek costumes and the standing dramatically against the backdrop in a way that’s difficult to describe in words but is best summed up as “fascist”; 2) a radical disconnection that lends itself well to fascism. Yes, they are “stronger, more powerful, more courageous, and more noble than the great multitude”, but they don’t actually really work with the great multitude in any way. The Greek hero showed his individual excellence while fighting alongside an army (well, a band) of Greeks. The saint served God, and in practice, at least half of them worked for the church. Knights served the king and led armies on occasion. Superheroes decide alone what they’re going to do, they don’t consult any of the people who’s lives they are affecting about it, and those people are incapable of really helping them in any case. They aren’t just physically strong, they’re moral superheroes—people are supposed to admire them personally, as symbols, and as decision-makers for the multitude, who only bad people challenge the decisions of because the superheroes are good. But they aren’t political leaders, like the famous Greek political leaders—they’re more like the Greek gods.
All of this is why the up-and-coming figure now is the nebbish, geek-identified supervillian, star of the book Soon I will Be Invincible and that Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog thing. The supervillian shares all the Romantic qualities of the superhero, without demanding implicit ratification of his decisions—especially when, as in the examples above, he never gets around to killing anybody.
Steven, didn’t Adorno write your whole line? I mean, why not go for Jazz first? By Rich Puchalsky on 07/21/08 at 09:05 AM | Permanent link to this comment
“I mean, why not go for Jazz first?”
When I see the footage of Mingus wearing black molded anatomically hypertrophied torso armor in concert I’ll consider it; until then I’ll consider his Art an adult aesthetic pleasure. Unless you have evidence that his Cadillac featured a rocket launcher: that would change everything. By Steven Augustine on 07/21/08 at 09:29 AM | Permanent link to this comment
But maybe the first line of inquiry should be: are you willing to acknowledge any boundaries drawn between “juvenile” and “adult” (as categories of worldview or behavior) or are these merely distinctions of convenience, in your opinion? By Steven Augustine on 07/21/08 at 09:39 AM | Permanent link to this comment
Three cheers for Jamie Lynn, whoever she is. At least she’s seen The Dark Knight. By Bill Benzon on 07/21/08 at 09:44 AM | Permanent link to this comment
I don’t quite get the point, Steven. Sure, there are fuzzy boundaries between juvenile and adult (although, like any binary, etc. etc.) Yes, superheroes are juvenile. But that’s what I meant by “the cutest possible fascism that carries its own ineffectuality along with it.” Adolescence is ineffectual. Yes, some people may thrill to the Batman movie in a fascist-liking kind of way. (Although your preference for movies as visceral thrillers over comic books is mere snobbery of one medium over another, unless you’re mostly concerned about the people who don’t read, not even a comic book.) But if they thrill to Batman, so what? Then they become the Comic Book Guy. By Rich Puchalsky on 07/21/08 at 10:00 AM | Permanent link to this comment
“Adolescence is ineffectual.”
But the question is: is fascist propaganda ineffectual? By Steven Augustine on 07/21/08 at 10:08 AM | Permanent link to this comment
When I read Batman comics as a kid—thankfully, I was within the permissible age range—I got the message loud and clear: all of them were promoting a virulent form of nationalism combined with corporatism, legitimated by an appeal to traditional values over against the decadence of modernity. What’s more, since I was living in the wake of World War I and the subsequent global depression, I found this message to be both deeply appealling and to be the only live option to stave off communism.
In short, Steven has totally nailed it. By Adam Kotsko on 07/21/08 at 10:21 AM | Permanent link to this comment
If the fascist propaganda gets you to idolize Winnie the Pooh, then, yeah. By Rich Puchalsky on 07/21/08 at 10:21 AM | Permanent link to this comment
“Three cheers for Jamie Lynn, whoever she is. At least she’s seen The Dark Knight.”
Bill, are you suggesting that I need to see the latest offering in the series in order to understand the template?
And, Rich: my point (which is difficult to make in the form of a dialogue, with the lag time of moderation added): a vivid symptom of a fatally degraded “Left” (and Left-leaning intelligentsia), in America, is, in my opinion, this child-like acceptance of fascist memes in entertainment so overt that even devoted fans admit to them (as above) without, at the same time, being repulsed by them.
“If the fascist propaganda gets you to idolize Winnie the Pooh, then, yeah.”
What if it renders the so-called Left essentially collaborationist and pathetically toothless in the face of Rightward expansion? By Steven Augustine on 07/21/08 at 10:28 AM | Permanent link to this comment
“What if it renders the so-called Left essentially collaborationist and pathetically toothless in the face of Rightward expansion?”
Maybe you should give me more of a hint as to how this is supposed to work, Steven. I imagine something like this:
1. Movie released: Winnie: This Time He’s Bad
2. Fans rave. “Wow, did you see that punch where Eeyore’s tail comes flying right off? We need someone like Winnie for our Maximum Leader.”
3. Academics write, hmm. What? “The Eeyore tail-flying-off scene parametrizes the cybernetic nature of the postmodern body, in which all interiority is essentially detachable. Also, fascism is cool.”
Let me offer you a counter-question to all of your Socratic ones: assuming for the sake of argument that this scheme somehow holds up, what makes you think that the “so-called Left” that you refer to ever was or ever could have been the Left? By Rich Puchalsky on 07/21/08 at 11:27 AM | Permanent link to this comment
Jezz, you know it was the left side of Dent’s face that got, um, disappeared. I wonder if that’s Frought With Meaning? By Bill Benzon on 07/21/08 at 11:41 AM | Permanent link to this comment
Or, hell, rather than wait for yet more dialogue, here’s how I see the situation. Everyone that I know on the Left is very busy right now, because the planet is in trouble environmentally. They all know that the next decade is going to be critical. So they’re, you know, working. Whether people think of Batman as Serious Art or not just isn’t a question that seems very important. The people who do think that Batman is Serious Art—as well as those who think that It’s Important That Batman Isn’t Serious Art—are pretty much irrelevant, unless of course they’re discussing this as recreation. Because, you know, art criticism is just not very important to the Left, and people who work as part of the Left don’t go into art criticism and do not bear the responsibility of being some kind of vanguard intellectual corps.
Now, personally, I love things like this. My children are 7 and 5 years old, and they inevitably get into pop culture children’s shows—since their friends watch them, even with highly restricted TV they find out about them through osmosis if by nothing else—and since I spend a lot of time with my kids, I enjoy reimaging the weird worldviews they’re presented with as adult culture. I’ve written poems featuring Bob the Builder as Gnostic demiurge who is responsible for all evil since he built the world wrongly, Thomas the Tank Engine as nihilist, bomb-throwing anarchist rebelling against the ethic of usefulness, and Oscar the Grouch being enlightened by the Buddha into seeing the entire world as trash. Now what, exactly, is wrong with this confusion of artistic categories? By Rich Puchalsky on 07/21/08 at 11:50 AM | Permanent link to this comment
Rich:
“Because, you know, art criticism is just not very important to the Left, and people who work as part of the Left don’t go into art criticism and do not bear the responsibility of being some kind of vanguard intellectual corps.”
We’re not talking about Arts Criticism (though to some extent we’re indulging in it). I’m only wondering about the connection between what I perceive as an infantilized culture and the drastic rightward shift of the culture’s host(“America”) and the fact that my parents, who were literate, Left-leaning people, wouldn’t have been caught reading a Batman comic; not because they were style-conscious but because they were busier patronizing smarter, wittier, hegemony-questioning books, plays, movies and magazines, etc (for which there was an actual market). Even the guys who produced the original Batman television series were smart enough (and liberal enough) to make it self-mocking.
My parents and their ilk helped to sap LBJ’s political will and then put Nixon out of office by being part of a larger mood (and set of values) that anathematized certain illiberal and/or unethical behaviours. Of course, they only managed to chop off the snake’s head, and the head grew back soon enough, but it was *something*, and I grew up detesting War, organized religion, and Vegas (titter) as a result. Well, all three are now cardinal values in a grim landscape of the imagination dotted with grotesques like Iron Man. I know it’s unfashionable to make this comparison; of *course* it is.
And, now, the best the Left can come up with is (rather safely) condemning Bush’s illegal adventure in Iraq long after the fact, not because it was illegal but because it didn’t *work*.
The framework has shifted. Is it your contention that powerful propaganda (whether system-directed or system-supporting) doesn’t shift culture-wide ethical frameworks? Is it your contention that you don’t vote with your dollar when you help to make fascist propaganda movies blockbusting hits; aren’t you guaranteeing more (and more extreme) of the same?
I smell boiled frog. By Steven Augustine on 07/21/08 at 12:41 PM | Permanent link to this comment
I was having fun with this for a while, but… Steven, you can claim that you’re not talking about arts criticism. But when you write “Is it your contention that powerful propaganda (whether system-directed or system-supporting) doesn’t shift culture-wide ethical frameworks?” what you’re talking about is arts criticism. Moral and political criticism, of course. I didn’t mention Adorno for no reason.
I tend to think that people who really think that Batman causes culture-wide ethical framework shifting—rather than, at most, being an example of correlation not being causation, for the seemingly good reason (to me) that Batman fans are seen as spotty adolescents, or developmentally challenged adults, by the wider culture—are more interested in describing arts critics as important than in anything else. That’s what this “a budding, Left-leaning intelligentsia quite so seduced” bit seems to me to be about. By Rich Puchalsky on 07/21/08 at 01:01 PM | Permanent link to this comment
Could this possibly be the same Steven Augustine who said that art raises no moral questions, and even (this is delicious) used the Joker as evidence of this? Summer blockbuster season really changes a man. By tomemos on 07/21/08 at 01:09 PM | Permanent link to this comment
”…when you write ‘Is it your contention that powerful propaganda (whether system-directed or system-supporting) doesn’t shift culture-wide ethical frameworks?’ what you’re talking about is arts criticism.”
I’d call it sociology, shading into politics, unless you consider Advertising an extension of Arts criticism, too. By Steven Augustine on 07/21/08 at 01:14 PM | Permanent link to this comment
If you’re looking to art as a means of fighting hegemony, you note, for example, the Falstaff is one of the most vibrant characters in Shakespeare. If you’re looking for affirmation of the existing order, you harp on the fact, for example, that Hal kicks Falstaff to the curb when he becomes king.
Reading political lessons out of literature is easy. You can even find the ones you want, every time. No doubt something’s been going on in the country ever since Lucas invented the FX action blockbuster in 77. What it is . . .
Meanwhile Jamie Lynn thinks the acting sucked, the effects sucked, and, while we’re at it, the whole Dark Knight movie sucked. By Bill Benzon on 07/21/08 at 01:18 PM | Permanent link to this comment
Tomemos:
This is certainly the Steven Augustine who considers these blockbusters to be propaganda and *not* Art; and who used the Joker as a joke. And can you not draw the distinction between a moral judgment that can’t be made against a particular character (the Joker is not a “bad” man because he’s not a man), versus the crafting of propaganda? Or do you consider Lolita to be in the same league as a Leni Riefenstahl film?
Maybe the problem is your unwillingness to draw a distinction between Art and propaganda; I’m not as inclusive as you are. By Steven Augustine on 07/21/08 at 01:22 PM | Permanent link to this comment
“Reading political lessons out of literature is easy.”
That’s precisely what I’m *not* doing; I’m adducing political effects from the popularization of fascist iconography. The “plot” (the literary vestige) in “Batman” is as relevant, in my opinion, as the “plot” in Triumph of the Will. By Steven Augustine on 07/21/08 at 01:25 PM | Permanent link to this comment
Tomemos:
Here’s the supposedly self-incriminating quote you refer to:
‘Humbert’ is a fantasy construct…you may choose to evaluate the ‘morality’ of the motives (or impact) of the author in creating the fantasy, but that’s a very different thing. What about the ‘morality’ of Wile E. Coyote’s constant attempts on the life of the innocent Roadrunner? The Joker (from Batman) isn’t evil…he’s ‘evil’.
I’m not now arguing for or against the “real” evil of the character The Joker, or Batman, or whatever comic book construct under discussion… I’m arguing the visceral impact of film-as-total-experience; and the use of popular film as powerful propaganda; and my theory that a somewhat (in my opinion) infantilized Left-leaning intelligentsia is eating the “message” of specific films (power) up, where it should be resisting the message with savage mockery and serious criticism.
The two positions are not contradictory; they zoom past each other on utterly different planes. By Steven Augustine on 07/21/08 at 01:36 PM | Permanent link to this comment
“I’d call it sociology, shading into politics, unless you consider Advertising an extension of Arts criticism, too.”
It’s about Batman, therefore it’s arts criticism, as a matter of genre. But you can call it whatever you like, really; what it still comes down to is vital importance for people who talk about (in order to savagely mock and seriously criticize) Batman. By Rich Puchalsky on 07/21/08 at 01:46 PM | Permanent link to this comment
“It’s about Batman, therefore it’s arts criticism, as a matter of genre.”
Rich, I don’t want to fall into an endless loop of gainsaying on this point, but I can’t quite get your apparent claim that discussing any effect an “artwork” has on the public is filed under “criticism”. Putting the music of (generic deathmetal band of your choice) on trial as the influence in a murder wouldn’t fall under the rubric of music crit, would it?
Anyway, I’ll back off on that one in the name of avoiding the above-mentioned loop.
Just to be clear: are we conflating Film and Literature in some of these arguments? By Steven Augustine on 07/21/08 at 01:53 PM | Permanent link to this comment
“That’s precisely what I’m *not* doing; I’m adducing political effects from the popularization of fascist iconography.”
At the level of analysis and argument in this thread, the direction of a causality is a matter of mere assertion. By Bill Benzon on 07/21/08 at 02:01 PM | Permanent link to this comment
Are we conflating Film and Literature? I thought that it was your contention that Batman never was Literature… at any rate, I’m conflating film and comics as media; if you’re going to argue that film impresses adults with gosh-wow effects, I don’t see why you shouldn’t say the same thing about children reading comic books. (Yes, I know that adults read comic books too. But children often read them.) By Rich Puchalsky on 07/21/08 at 02:04 PM | Permanent link to this comment
Bill:
I meant that “Literature” is not my concern here. I’m happy to admit to the causal flow in either (or both) directions.
Rich:
“…if you’re going to argue that film impresses adults with gosh-wow effects, I don’t see why you shouldn’t say the same thing about children reading comic books.”
I’ll take this as meaning the debate has come full circle… (laugh)…
By Steven Augustine on 07/21/08 at 02:09 PM | Permanent link to this comment
Steven, while I appreciate the role that your parents, Woodward and Bernstein Augustine, played in bringing down Nixon, I think you’re overestimating your ability to discuss a work (of art, prop, whatever) without seeing it. You say Lolita is art, not propaganda; well, I had a student who thought that Humbert was writing it to endorse Humbert’s actions. I was able to refute her, and justify the bad grade she received, by dealing with the actual content of the work. I’d love to have that debate with you about Dark Knight, but you’re not talking about the content but the costumes: by their batsuits, shall ye know them. Liberals are a superstitious, cowardly lot. By tomemos on 07/21/08 at 02:51 PM | Permanent link to this comment
Make that, “…that Nabokov was writing it to endorse Humbert’s actions.” Way to go, Tomemos. By tomemos on 07/21/08 at 02:52 PM | Permanent link to this comment
I have no idea how you think the debate has come full circle, Steven. I was saying that if you think that movie Batman has bad political effects on adults—which seems to be your thesis, although I don’t agree with it—then you pretty much have to think that comics have bad effects on children as well. In any case, I see no reason to differentiate the move Batman from the comic book Batman, in general. By Rich Puchalsky on 07/21/08 at 02:58 PM | Permanent link to this comment
Just wanted to drop a line in response to Rich Puchalsky’s statement that superheroes resemble Greek gods more than the Homeric heroes—I do agree with Rich on this point. But you might also say that there’s something kind of odd and disturbing in the movement, especially in a secular, technological age, from more human role models (Achilles, Joan of Arc, Galahad) to figures who can never die, and if they die, get their deaths retroactively undone. It’s as though mere humanity is too finite, corporeal, and demanding to titillate people.
Also, Bill, accept my apologies for posting here – for those who are interested in pursuing the fascism/superhero link, I welcome you to post under my contribution to the Reading Comics event. My post does address this point somewhat, and I’m quite eager to pursue it further. By Peter Y. Paik on 07/21/08 at 03:08 PM | Permanent link to this comment
Tomemos:
The difference between a student’s idiotic misreading of Literary Art (even HH doesn’t appear to “endorse” his own actions; being that the narration is delivered as retrospection, Humbert’s guilty grief on hearing that Lolita-free chorus of innocent voices near the end of the book shades everything preceding it), and a culture’s susceptibility to fascist propaganda, is surely a question of scale and category.
Your Woodstein joke can’t erase the fact that Richard M. Nixon was impeached for the sort of thing that G. W. Bush gets up to on his weekends, to unwind; you don’t legally remove an American President from office without the support of a vociferous swath of the populace: my parents, and my parents’ friends, and people like them, to their credit, belonged to that vociferous swath and actually saw Democracy *work* as a result of populist pressure.
Rich:
If there were no difference between filmic (or video) propaganda and print propaganda, candidates for POTUS could save millions by merely dropping pamphlets from helicopters, right?
My “full-circle” quip was about my initial comment to the effect that adults watching Batman-the-film are *all too similar* to children reading the comic. In that sense you seem to agree with me. But children buying into bullsh*t and intellectual adults buying into the *same* bullsh*t are two different things. Bullsh*t is part of every kid’s development; there’s only cause to worry if he/she doesn’t manage to outgrow it. By Steven Augustine on 07/21/08 at 05:08 PM | Permanent link to this comment
I created “The Raw Critic” rubric so that I could discuss new works – most likely films – and work through my reactions to them in public. This post has attracted no discussion of The Dark Knight, but quite a lot of discussion of fascism and superheroes. That particular discussion seems rather larger than this format can accommodate and seems pretty much to have destroyed any possibility for the type of discussion I was seeking.
For that reason I am closing the discussion down. Fascism will just have to roll on over us without further comment in this thread. By Bill Benzon on 07/21/08 at 05:56 PM | Permanent link to this comment
Addendum: this is a key comment of the thread; strange that it comes from an adversary:
Let me offer you a counter-question to all of your Socratic ones: assuming for the sake of argument that this scheme somehow holds up, what makes you think that the “so-called Left” that you refer to ever was or ever could have been the Left? By Rich Puchalsky on 07/21/08 at 11:27 AM
Thank you so much for re-posting this thread. Just as reading Mao II enriched my reading of Osama and Me and vice versa, yesterday’s viewing of the Bronzino show at the Met enriched my understanding of this Batman thread and vice versa.
This image is the point of contrast http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ho/08/eustc/ho_29.100.16.htm. Bronzino, court artist to the Medicis, arguably held an equivalent position to whoever created the graphics for the Dark Knight poster, professional valorizer of the figurative representatives of his empire. As you can read in the description but unfortunately not see so well in the online image (at least on my screen) enfolded in the draped fabric on the young man’s crotch is a grotesque mask, equal in ugliness and menace to the gargoyles on the table and chair. It’s a critique, oblique by necessity, but there for all the world to see as long as the image endures, an anachronistic visual expression of Burrough’s marks and Johnson (ypi) http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/Article/William_S._Burroughs_20th_Century_Gnostic.html, or precursor for same. I don’t know if Burroughs ever saw the painting (though it’s likely he did as it’s owned by the Met and he lived in NYC for many years), which is also distinctive for its use of the technique of imprimatura. It reminded me of my experience of seeing Vermeer’s gold-stippled fringe.
In any case, search as I may in the Dark Knight image for the wink, or the subliminal texting, I don’t see any, not in the smoke or six-pack abs or anywhere else. It seems to be offered in earnest, earnestly fascist.
Which really makes me eager to read Omega Point when it’s released. I’m prepping for it by catching up on some, not all, DeLillo. Because I’m thinking that just as Vermeer showed us how to read him in The Art of Painting, DeLillo might be offering a similar key. And it might be a confession of sorts. Or not. We shall see.
CDS Frances:
1. Fantasderful link to WSB-related material. This: “Unlike his more naïve contemporaries among the Beat literary movement, Burroughs never took his eye off the twitchy sharpshooter in the corner, the wild card in the deck known as Control.”
I’d go so far (and was going so far) as to say that Burroughs is one of the few known writers who was too knowing to be written by the Simulocracy (aka Control). Even DeLillo is, to some extent, I now feel, feeding poison chocolates to his Muse, sometimes, just because an Authoritarian Stranger handed him the box. And, as previously stated: didn’t McEwan fall so utterly for that trap that at least one novel of his, “Saturday”, is structured, as a parable, around the bullshit Blair told him about Saddam’s WMD? “Saturday” is now, on that level, rendered absurd. And that’s rather an enormous failure… a failure of the Imagination in a writer, after all. As credulous as any rube; so, too, Amis (though Amis was canny enough to keep the credulity out of his novels, largely; but his Atta portrait, in that short story he did for the NYer, is a fake of a fake dressed in the embarrassing drag of an interpretation of the Real)
2. Strictly (or Jungianly) coincidental: the Underworld character named Bronzini?
3. Nothing subliminal in the Dark Knight, is there? Not in the poster or the movie or the hype: no, the cock is flopped on the table. As I said: “subtle” is so early-20th century…
I think I’m going to make some soup today. Or perhaps that’s redundant since we’re already in it up to our chins. What does Brita always say in Mao II? “You’re dropping your chin.” Which is another way of saying chin up!
I was hoping to avoid reading Underworld but after reading CDS Edmond’s new CJW post, I realize I’m not going to be allowed that bit of indolence.
CDS Jacob is pretty good at that there poetry stuff and redeems the twee, obscurantist, self-aggrandizing assaults on the form, which you can’t swing a catblog-cat without hitting online (…or, at least he redeems them while you’re reading him)
SIMULOCRATIC HEADLINES
***ERSTWHILE SEXBOT MOCKED FOR FAILING TO BE HOLOGRAM
“Bridgitte (sic) Bardot was a media sensation and international sex symbol in the 1950s and ’60s, but you’d never recognize the 75-year-old actress-turned-animal-activist these days.” (an actual caption from an actual magazine)
***EU NOTSEES MARCH WITH THE LEGAL FASCIST FLAG
Yessuh, that’s, Uh, Ailvus in that there flag
***GANDHI AND HIS KAFFIRS
“DURBAN, South Africa – Six decades after his death Saturday, some of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s ashes were scattered off the coast of South Africa, where he was confronted by racial discrimination during a 21-year sojourn and developed some of his philosophies of peaceful resistance.”
(Is the woman in the photo, identified as Gandhi’s grand-daughter, Eli, vomiting his ashes into the water?)
(PS In giddy contravention of what I’m supposed to feel, I’d say that Bardot is more easily “recognized” in the After-picture, above, than in the Before… you fucking Simulocratic Anti-Gyno Cunts)
The Bronzino portrait, as mentioned above by CDS Frances (contrast heightened):
gargoyle crotch detail
The Vintage Quotation
“My Dream Generation would be raised to value life over property, quality of life over magnitude of production, Art over Ideology, personality over appearance, kindness over goodness, completeness over speed, comfort over wealth, sexual technique over religion, nuts over chips, zest over greed, mass-transit over automobiles, the good-smelling over the clean-smelling and the witty over the merely clever.”
The conflict between good and evil is considered to be a hollow theme by most literary scholars. After all, is this not the purview of Tolkienesque sword and sorcery epics and four-colour superhero comics? Surely no major literary figure of the twentieth century ever bothered to waste his time on such silliness.
But that’s not quite true. In the work of no other American writer do we find this theme explored in as complex and harrowing a manner as in the novels and essays of William Burroughs. At the beginning of this essay Burroughs described himself as a “Manichean.” Burroughs defined this term as follows:
The Manichean believe in an actual struggle between good and evil, which is not an eternal struggle since one of them will win in this particular area, sooner or later. Of course, with the Christians there was this tremendous inversion of values where the most awful people are thrown up as this paragon of virtue for everyone to emulate…7
The Manichean sect of Gnosticism spread across three continents over the course of eleven hundred years beginning, approximately, in CE 240. It was founded by the Persian prophet Mani, who was eventually imprisoned at the age of 61, tortured for 26 days, and assassinated. According to Dr. Hoeller, Mani is among “two of the great luminaries of the Gnostic tradition.”
Dr. Hoeller sums up Mani’s basic doctrine as follows:
In the beginning, said Mani, the kingdoms of Light and Darkness coexisted in uneasy peace. While Light had no quarrel with the existence of Darkness and would have remained content existing side-by-side with it, Darkness would have it otherwise. Darkness was in a state of agitation and wrath and decided to attack and invade the realm of light.
As the legions of Darkness approached the realm of Light, the primal light needed to defend itself. It called upon the Mother of Life to bring forth the Primal Man (a cosmic figure, not related to Adam or other human beings except in an indirect way). The Primal Man in turn had five sons, and together the six expelled the Dark forces from the kingdom of Light and pursued them onto the battlefield of the lower aeons. Unfortunately, on the battlefield the chief demons of Darkness overpowered the Primal Man and his five sons and devoured them, incorporating their luminous essence into their dark forms. This is how the first terrible intermingling of Light and Darkness occurred […].
In the course of the rescue efforts the Primal Man is freed, and he gloriously ascends to the Godhead. The souls of the human beings, however, have been left behind, along with Light particles that derive from the captivity of the Primal Man and of his sons. It is only at this point that the material world as we know it comes into being. The Earth is created as an alchemical vessel of purification and transformation where the Light can be extracted from dark matter. The Sun and the Moon are both vessels of Light that serve as vehicles to transport Light upwards out of earthly darkness.
In Burroughs’s world, evil disguises itself as good and good disguises itself as evil. The Archons are Christians and politicians and “jus’ good folk.” The Gnostics are roving bands of criminals and thieves known only to themselves as “the Johnsons.” The visionaries, the ones who have attained genuine gnosis (i.e., “knowledge”) can see through the illusions forged by control, identify the face of the enemy, and from that point begin the quest for true freedom.
These visionaries regularly employ unorthodox and seemingly “insane” methods to overthrow the hypnotic bonds of control: opiates, orgone energy, tape recorders that are used to cut up, analyse, and reconfigure the endless barrage of shallow mass media used to keep the masses docile, astral travel through time and space, hermetic magic, telepathy, etc. These are the tools of the twentieth century Gnostic in Burroughs’s revitalised Libertatia.
The goal of these latter day Gnostics is to establish an autonomous zone, a physical approximation of the pneuma, while having as much fun as possible trying to “wise up the marks,” a paraphrase of a key sentence in the third chapter of his 1964 novel Nova Express: “And you can see the marks are wising up, standing around in sullen groups and that mutter gets louder and louder.”
The Archons are represented on Earth by parasite-infected control-freaks Burroughs aptly calls “the shits”: “…my contention is that evil is quite literally a virus parasite occupying a certain brain area which we may term the RIGHT centre. The mark of a basic shit is that he has to be right.” The shits will use all the power they have on this planet in order to prevent the Johnsons from waking up the marks.
Why the fuck is there a light in the refrigerator but not in the freezer? I mean, I know they make those side to side ones that have them, but I’m talking traditional old frig/freezer combos, stacked.
Please, please answer this question. I have a bet with my dog and if he wins another one I’m going to have to reconsider living.
There are no lights in freezers for the same reason that there are no seat belts in school buses.
Back in 1954, a closeted homosexual with a buzz cut and an engineering degree sat in front of a drawing board at GE and decided to fuck the world.
Tell your dog to pay up.
Last one from me tonight. Gotta get back to Cosmopolis,,,
On Cosmopolis.
Posthumous bad on Mr. Updike for this crappy appraisal of his rival’s effort.
“But the trouble with a tale where anything can happen is that somehow nothing happens. How much should we care about the threatened assassination of a hero as unsympathetic and bizarre as Eric Packer? DeLillo has a fearless reach of empathy; in “Mao II” he tells us just what it’s like to be a Moonie, and how the homeless talk. But for what it’s like to be a young Master of the Universe read Tom Wolfe instead.” http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/03/31/030331crbo_books1?currentPage=2#ixzz0eCJLIKMv
This (below) was more helpful from David Kipen, SF Chronicle (especially thinking ahead to the words point omega, novel as gesture, but what kind? Watch the watch!)
But the best thing I read on Cosmopolis was this pith by Guess Who?:
“While I’m at it: Cosmopolis. Gee, Laura Miller, what would you have made of Gulliver’s Travels if your English teacher hadn’t warned you that the improbabilities it presented were deliberate, and not to be read literally, but in the spirit of wicked satire?”
Goodness, that blurt by Guess Who is a pill of salty perspicacity, Comrade DJ Sensei Frances… please prepare a bond worth 50 Gratitudicals for the feller and ship it out in time for Easter.
Me, I’m just in from the outer rigors of meatspace, having walked a kilometer on the frozen face of a river running through the Turkish quarter with Comrade JR. On the way to pick up Comrade JR from his office, I missed meeting the great Harun Farocki by mere minutes and, indeed, passed him (a frighteningly tall filmmaker; I’m just over 6′ and Farocki had at least five inches on me in his heels) in the courtyard as he was on his way out, in a hooded jacket and looking grizzled and in no mood for a joke. Farocki is probably the premier politico-analytic auteur to come out of the loosely-bundled German New Wave which also spawned Wenders and Herzog and he’s certainly the only one of those three who never came close to selling out (whereas Herzog sold out so utterly that I can’t decide whether this makes his early oeuvre more remarkable or a total fake). Comrade JR is Farocki’s off-and-on right-hand tech man and turned me on to the work years ago and thereby exposed me to the notion that the idea or concept of a thing could shine above and longer than its production values and render unto the material a certain immanence I pursue (in several mediums, including dish-washing) to this day.
On the subway to meet Comrade JR (and miss mr. Farocki) I was carrying the tripod I used to get footage of Berliners —so uncannily dressed like Breughels— on the frozen river. I noticed, as I always do, how self-conscious people become when I arrive in their midst carrying a tripod… as though I’m a professional (or at least serious) Lookist and perhaps they won’t measure up. I was standing near the front of the wagon, beside a little seat that folds into the wall (useful when the train is packed) and a woman with a perfectly-trimmed van dyke (npi) asked me, with a very direct look which defied me to behave as though she were beardless, if I could move a little so she might have the seat.
“Posthumous bad on Mr. Updike for this crappy appraisal of his rival’s effort.”
Updike was using the transitive property to payback David Foster Wallace, via DeLillo, for the hatchet job Wallace did on Toward the End of Time (a largely marvelous fucking book in which almost anything could happen).
CHAPTER ONE
Toward the End of Time
By JOHN UPDIKE
Alfred A. Knopf.
The Deer
FIRST SNOW: it came this year late in November. Gloria and I awoke to see a fragile white inch on the oak branches outside the bathroom windows, and on the curving driveway below, and on the circle of lawn the driveway encloses-the leaves still unraked, the grass still green. I looked into myself for a trace of childhood exhilaration at the sight and found none, just a quickened awareness of being behind in my chores and an unfocused dread of time itself, time that churns the seasons and that had brought me this new offering, this heavy new radiant day like a fresh meal brightly served in a hospital to a patient with a dwindling appetite.
And yet does the appetite for new days ever really cease? An hour later, I was exhilarated, clearing my porch and its single long granite step with my new orange plastic shovel, bought cheap and shaped like a scoop and much more silkily serviceable than the cumbersome metal snow shovels of my childhood, with their sticky surfaces and noisy bent edges. Plastic shovels are an improvement-can you believe it? The world does not only get worse. Lightweight, the shovel hurled flakes sparkling into the still air, onto the bobbing leucothoë in the border bed. There had been bloated yews there, planted by the previous owner beneath the windowsills and over the years grown to eclipse the windows and darken the living room. My wife, the dynamic Gloria, commanded men to come and tear them out and plant little bushes that in turn are getting increasingly shaggy. Nature refuses to rest.
The transient sparkles seemed for a microsecond engraved upon the air. The weathervane on the garage, a copper mallard in the act of landing-wings lifted, webbed feet spread-pointed west, into a wind too faint to be felt. The snow was too early and light to summon the plowing service (our garden-and-lawn service in its winter guise), and I hadn’t even planted the reflector stakes around the driveway; but that inch evidently intimidated the FedEx truck driver, for at some point in the quiet morning a stiff purple, orange, and white FedEx envelope appeared between the storm door and the front door without the truck’s making its way up the driveway. How did the envelope-containing some bond slips I was in no hurry for-get there? By the time I walked, in mid-afternoon, down to the mailbox, a number of trucks and cars, including one cautiously driven by my wife, had passed up and down. It was only when walking back up the hill that I was struck by-between the two broad grooves worn by tire treads-the footprints.
They were not mine. My boots have a distinctive sole, a mix of arcs and horizontals like the longitude and latitude lines on a globe. Nor could I match my stride to the other footprints-they were too far apart, though I am not short-legged, or unvigorous. But, stretch my legs as I would, I could not place my boots in the oblongs left by this other’s passing. Had a giant invaded my terrain? An angel dropped down from Heaven? The solution eventually came to me: the FedEx driver this morning, not wishing to trust his (or her; a number are women, in their policelike uniforms of gray-blue) wide truck to the upward twists of our driveway, had dismounted and raced up and back. He-no woman could have run uphill with such a stride-had cruelly felt the pressure of time.
Yet, though I had solved the mystery, the idea of a visitation by a supernatural being stayed with me, as I clumped into the house and spread the mail, the main spiritual meal of my day, upon the kitchen table. Perhaps the word is not “spiritual” but “social” or “contactual”-since my retirement from the Boston financial world I go for days without talking to anyone but my wife. I have kept a few old clients, and transactions for them and my own portfolio are frequently handled by FedEx. I once enjoyed the resources of faxing and e-mail, but when I retired I cut the wires, so to speak. I wanted to get back to nature and my own human basics before saying good-bye to everything.
My premonition of the FedEx driver as a supernatural creature was not merely an aging man’s mirage: creatures other than ourselves do exist, some of them quite large. Whales, elephants, rhinoceri, Bengal tigers, not quite extinct, though the last Siberian tigers perished in the recent war. Giraffes and moose, those towering creations, even flourish. Deer haunt our property here. Walking on our driveway, I sometimes see an especially bold doe in the woods-a big haunchy animal the dull dun color of a rabbit, holding motionless as if to blend into the shadows of the trees. The doe stares at me with a directness I might think was insolence instead of an alert wariness. Her heart must be racing. Mine is. When I say a word or make as if to fling a stone, she wheels and flees. The amount of white tail she shows is startling. Startling also are the white edges of her large round ears, which swivel like dish antennae, above the black, globular, wet eyes.
Gloria does not share my enchantment, so I do not tell her of these surreptitious encounters. She rants against these poor deer, who ate her tulip shoots in the spring and trimmed her rosebush of blooms in September. Who would imagine that deer would eat roses? My wife wants the deer killed. She gets on the telephone, searching for men with rifles or bows and arrows and an atavistic hunger for venison and the patience to stand for hours on a platform they will build in the trees; she has heard rumors of such men. So much projected effort makes me weary. My wife is a killer. She dreams at night of my death, and when she awakens, in her guilty consciousness she gives my body a hug that shatters my own desirous dreams. By daylight she pumps me full of vitamins and advice as if to prolong my life but I know her dreams’ truth: she wants me and the deer both dead.
*
More snow, in early December. This morning, as I dressed to the shimmering, straining (what are they aspiring to? what Heaven awaits at the edge of their resolved harmonies?) violins of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, I saw a deer, looking like a large dark dog, curled up on the flagpole platform at the front of the lawn, toward the sea, with its snow-dusted islands. We have a majestic view, south and southwest across Massachusetts Bay, and the sight of the reposing deer was also majestic. I must have thought I was married to some other wife, to judge from the innocent enthusiasm with which I called the deer to the attention of my own. She became galvanized, rapidly dressing and urging me to follow her downstairs while still in my pajamas. “Just put on boots and a coat,” she commanded.
Obedient, I yet thought of my years, my heart. Gloria makes my heart race, once with appetite, now with fear.
She raced to the closet under the stairs and from its hiding place there she brought her basket of my old golf balls. She keeps them to throw at the deer. When I had first protested against this waste she cited an article she had read, to the effect that golf balls lose compression within a few months of being unsealed, and balls over a year old are basically worthless. Outside we went, she in her righteous fury and shimmering mink coat, me in my pajamas and boots and old parka spouting goose down through its broken seams; but by the time we had trudged through the crusty snow around the side porch the deer, hearing us close the front door, had disappeared. “Look!” said my wife, the basket under her arm giving her the burdened, innocent air of a primitive gatherer. “Its tracks go everywhere!”
And it was true, one could see how the hungry animal, its innocence burdened only by the needs of its own sizable body, had gone from the yew bush by the rose bed to the box bush on the other side, from the box to the privet ball by the birdbath, and from the birdbath to the euonymus over by the driveway, not so far from our front door.
Among my minor conflicts with Gloria is an inability to agree which is the front of the house and which is the back: she thinks the side facing the sea should be considered the front, and I the other side, where the people park their cars and enter from the driveway. Perhaps the house has no back, but two fronts. It does not turn its back upon either visitors or the ocean breezes.
The poor graceful, bulky creature had nibbled only the merest bit from each bush, like a dieting banqueter sampling each course. I must have smiled slightly to myself-a mistake. “You don’t give a damn,” my wife told me, “but each bush would cost hundreds of dollars to replace.” Like many of us past a certain age, she says “dollars” when she means “welders,” the Massachusetts unit of currency named after a fabled pre-war governor, a rare Republican. She corrected herself. “This deer will do fifty thousand welders’ worth of damage-then see how funny you think it all is.” Whenever Gloria feels me balking, she pulls out the whip of money, knowing me to have been a poor boy, and in my well-padded retirement still tender with financial anxiety.
“Do I think it’s funny?” I asked. I doubted it. Rapacity, competition, desperation, death to other living things: the forces that make the world go around. The euonymus bush once had some powder-blue irises beneath it, but its spreading green growth, insufficiently pruned, had smothered them, even as their roots crept forward, damaging the lawn.
“Look how he kept shitting everywhere! Little puddles of shit!”
“Can’t you say something other than ‘shit’?” In our courting days I had been attracted to her way of saying “fuck” instead of a softer expression. “With deer, I think you can say ‘scat,’” I suggested. “Or ‘spoor.’”
Scornfully Gloria stared at me, not even granting me a moment’s incredulous amusement. Her face was pink in the morning cold, her ice-blue eyes vibrant beneath a bushy wool hat that, set square on her head like the hat of a wooden soldier, is oddly flattering. Symmetry, fine white teeth, and monomaniacal insistence upon her own concept of order mark her impress upon the world. Hunting and tracking and plotting an enemy’s death become her, like fur at her throat. Before we were married I, still married to another, bought her a black cashmere coat trimmed in bushy gray fox at the collar. The middle-aged saleswoman exclaimed, “How great that looks on her!”-sublimating her hope of making the sale into the simple rapture of a shared vision. It was a blessing of sorts; she connived in our adultery. I yielded up fifteen hundred dollars as painlessly as emitting a sigh.
Gloria asked sharply, “Can you tell by the tracks which way he went?”
The deer had seemed to me clearly a large doe, but to my wife, in her animus, the creature was a “he.”
For my own sanity I had to resist this inexorable, deer-pitched tilt the universe was taking on. “What does it matter? Into the woods one way or another,” I said. Some of the woods were ours, and some belonged to our neighbors.
“It’s important to know,” Gloria said. Her pale, nearly white eyes narrowed; her killer instincts widened like nostrils to include me in her suspicions of a pervasive evil. “If he had been still there, shitting all over our hedge, would you have helped me throw golf balls?”
“Probably not,” I admitted. My time on Earth is getting too short, gradually, for lies.
“Oh!” Her disgust couldn’t have been more physical if I had held one of my turds-a sample of my own scat-up to her fair pink face. “You want him to destroy everything. Just to get at me.”
“Not at all,” I protested, yet so feebly the possible truth of her assertion would continue to gall her.
“If we got a gun, would you shoot it then?”
The cold air was sifting through my pajamas. The morning Globe was down by the mailbox, waiting to be retrieved. “Probably not.” Yet I wasn’t sure. In my youth in the Berkshires, those erosion-diminished, tourist-ridden green hills, I had handled a .22 owned by a friend less impoverished than I. There had been a thrill to it-the slender weight, the acrid whiff, the long-distance effect.
She sensed this uncertainty, and pried into it the wedge of her voice. “The homeowner can, you know. Out of season or anything, as long as it’s on his property. Shoot any pest. That’s the law.”
“I’d be scared,” I told her, knowing it would sting, “to shoot a neighbor. Talk about money, honey-what a lawsuit!”
*
That night, we planned to go to bed de bonne heure, to make love. In our old age we had to carefully schedule copulations that once had occurred spontaneously, without forethought or foreboding. Before heading upstairs, she said, “Let’s look out the window, to see if the deer has come back.”
The yard was dark, with the thinnest kind of cloud-veiled moonlight. My wife saw nothing and turned to go up to bed. Once I would have given all my assets, including my body’s health and my children’s happiness, to go to bed with her, and even now it was a pleasant prospect. But, damn my eyes, I saw a black hump sticking up from the curved euonymus hedge, whose top was crusted with hardened snow. The black shadow moved-changed shape like an amoeba in the dirty water of the dark, or like some ectoplasmic visitation from a former inhabitant of our venerable house. “Honey, he’s eating the hedge,” I said softly.
My wife screamed, “He is! Do something! Damn you, don’t just stand there smiling!”
How could she know I was smiling? The living room was as dark as the front lawn with its ghostly herbivore.
“I’m calling the Pientas! It’s not too late! It’s not even eight-thirty! I’m going to borrow Charlie’s gun! We’ve got to do something, and you won’t do anything!”
The Pientas live fifteen minutes away. Louise is a Garden Club friend of Gloria’s; Charlie has that Old World-peasant mentality which loves the American right to bear arms. He owns several shotguns, for ducks mostly, and my wife, having hurled herself and her teal-blue Japanese station wagon into the dark, brought one of Charlie’s guns back with her, with a cardboard box half full of ammunition. The church bell down in the village was tolling nine. “I’ll prop it right here behind the armchair,” she said, “and we’ll keep the bullets-”
“Shells.”
“-shells on the bench in the upstairs hall. Charlie does that to keep children from putting them together.”
We were in too jangled a mood to attempt love; we read instead, and then kept waking each other up, going to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Though she is younger, her bladder is graciously weakening along with mine. It was still dark when she woke me in a voice between a tender sexual whisper and the whimper of a terrified child. “Ben! He’s eating the euonymus again! Hurry! I’ve assembled your socks and boots and overcoat.”
I had been dreaming of photographs, of life-moments that were photographs and had been placed in a marketing brochure for a mutual fund that called for them to be reduced to the size of postage stamps, though they were in full color. I couldn’t quite make them out. My children by my former marriage? Their children? I was a grandfather ten times over. I wondered about the printing costs and determined to report my reservations to Firman Frothingham, then one of my colleagues at Sibbes, Dudley, and Wise given to such unseemly wooing of the general public. As Gloria insistently woke me I realized, with a twist in my stomach, that I was retired and this brochure was not my problem. I said, hoping to smuggle out my truth-telling wrapped in a blanket of sleepiness, “I don’t want to shoot any fucking deer.”
“Not shoot him,” she pleaded, “shoot over his head, so he gets the idea we hate him. Oh please, darling, hurry!”
She rarely asked anything so heartfelt of me, not since we had managed, twenty years ago, amid many social impedimenta, to marry. With much of me still immersed in my warm, puzzling dream, I found myself outdoors in the pre-dawn murk, holding the shotgun, which I had with difficulty, drawing upon ancient boyhood memories, broken open and loaded with a Remington shell.
But by the time I got around the house, the front (or back) door opening noisily and the snow crunching at every step, the deer had vanished. A pile of fresh scat made a dark round spot on the snow by the euonymus hedge. Inside the house, her voice pathetically muffled and dwindled by the double glass of window and storm window, my wife was rapping the glass and shouting, “Shoot! Shoot!” It was like the voice of a cartoon mouse in a bell jar. Involuntarily a smile of sadistic pleasure creased my face. The peace of the gray morning-dawn just a sliver of salmon color above the lefthand, eastward side of the sea’s horizon, beneath a leaning moon-was something sacred I didn’t want to mar. And I didn’t want to shock my sleeping neighbors. We own eleven acres but from the house the land stretches in only two directions. The Kellys live just a wedge shot away, on the other side of a wide-branching beech, and the Dunhams a solid three-iron down through the woods toward the railroad tracks, and Mrs. Lubbetts in the other direction, a good drive and then perhaps a five-iron drilled straight toward the sea. I trudged around, willing to shoot over her head if the doe showed herself; but the 360-degree panorama was virginally quiet, except for the pathetic racket my wife was making inside the house, trapped and muffled in her fury of frustration. If I by some mad quantum leap of impulse wheeled and fired at the living-room window, there would have been a mess of broken glass and splintered sash but likely no clean fatality.
“You bastardly coward,” she said when I went back inside. “You didn’t do anything.”
“I didn’t want to wake up the neighbors.”
I noticed, uttering this remark, a certain oddity within myself, a displacement of empathy: I could empathize with the sleeping neighbors and the starving deer but not with my frantic wife and her helpless hedge. “That euonymus hedge,” she amplified when I voiced this perception by way of apology, “can’t run or hide; it can only stand there and be eaten.”
Just as she, I thought, was helpless to do anything but attempt to direct and motivate me: ferocious female nagging is the price men pay for our much-lamented prerogatives, the power and the mobility and the penis.
*
Julian Jaynes thinks that until about three thousand years ago men went about in a trance, taking orders direct from the gods. After my wife went off to work-she still works, in a gift shop of which she owns a third, while I languish about the house, writing these paragraphs now and then as if by dictation-I did dutifully keep a lookout for the deer. She didn’t show all day, beneath a dull sky lackadaisically spitting snow. But at dusk, walking down to the mailbox, I saw her-up by the flagpole, in the corner of my eye, the shadow of a ducking head. Did I see or imagine her alert sensitive ears and questioning stare? I scrambled up the path by the rock-face and saw her bounding away in that unhurried, possessive way that animals have, leaping to lift her legs from the crusty snow, down past the garage into the woods on this side of the railroad tracks. I write “possessive” to convey the air of spiritual adhesion to the earth, of her guiltlessly occupying the volume of space needed for her blood and innards, her musculature and fur.
Galvanized, obedient to the dictates my wife had planted in me like tiny electrodes, I ran inside and got Charlie Pienta’s gun and, my heart drumming, cocked it open and slipped in a green-jacketed cartridge of buckshot and cracked it shut. I went outside. I hadn’t walked around with a gun since I toted that borrowed (from my best friend, Billy Beckett, whose father worked in a sawmill) .22, squeezing off shots at tin cans and perching birds. One bird, at what it thought was a safe distance, dropped like a stone from its branchlet and when I went up to it I had taken off its head, clean, leaving a fluffy ball with wings and a chickadee’s dapper black and white markings.
I have no declared appetite for killing, but sensing the deer somewhere in the blue-tinted dusk, conscious of me as I was conscious of her, was more exciting than anything I had done lately, including making love to Gloria. She is still handsome, with her crown of ash-blond hair, and dresses with a beautiful trim sternness, but there is no faking that tight lean knit of a young woman’s body. Her instructions, which I was following as blindly as Assyrians in the time of Hammurabi followed Ishtar’s, had been to scare the deer with a blast.
I had the mail under one arm-bills and catalogues and a few early Christmas cards-and the gun under the other when there she was, suddenly, standing sideways in the driveway, closer to me than the chickadee had been fifty years ago. I slowly set the mail down on a bare spot (the snow melts first on the black asphalt) and then straightened and aimed the shotgun ten feet above the frozen silhouette’s back (it was a good direction, there are no neighbors that way for a quarter of a mile) and squeezed the trigger.
Nothing. The trigger felt welded fast. The safety catch was on. Trembling but not panicked, I examined the unfamiliar gun and found no catch, just the flip lever to uncock it, and at last realized I must set the hammer with my thumb. Though there was no noise, my haste and frustration must have generated a scent that communicated itself to the deer, for with a burst of astonishing easy vigor she bounded over the wall there-low on the driveway side, with an eight-foot drop on the other-and on into the deer-colored woods. I fired, blindly, into the mist of the dusky trees where she had vanished. The noise was enormous-flat, absolute-and the kick against my shoulder rude and unexpected. For what seemed a full minute there was a faint pattering in the woods, like sleet, as the buckshot settled and dry leaves detached by the blast (the oaks and beeches hang on forever) drifted to the cold, hushed earth, the forest floor whose trackable paths and branchings were sinking beneath the rising tide of darkness. My mail glimmered on the driveway like white scat.
Gloria, coming home, was thrilled to hear that I at least had fired Charlie Pienta’s gun. She kissed me with a killer’s ardor. After dinner, thus rewarded and stimulated, I checked the yard just in case, and, sure enough, against the snow I saw the deer’s hungry silhouette nibbling at the round privet bush by the birdbath. I lifted the loaded, cocked gun and fired, high, but not so high that I didn’t think that a few pellets would sting her flank. To my amazement the deer didn’t move. She just kept nuzzling the bush, chewing its outmost leaves, like a wife ignoring your most vehement arguments, having heard them before. It was only when, at last sharing my real wife’s indignation, I moved toward the deer as if to throttle her with my hands or beat her with the gun butt that the creature, with a shadowy surge of her extended head, loped off, as if awoken from a trance.
As my reward for coming over to her side against the deer, my wife offered to make love to me in any position I chose. I like it when she lies on top, doing the thrusting, and also it is bliss to fuck her from behind, with no thought of her own orgasm. But by the time we went to bed, after dinner and the network news and a glance at Channel Two, and did a little reading-Scientific American for me and for her the competition’s Christmas gift catalogues-we were both too sleepy to act upon our new rapport. Outside, in the dark, a wobbly patch of life upon the blue snow, the deer perhaps browsed, her soft blob of a nose rapturously sunk in the chilly winter greenery, her modest brain-stem steeped in some dream of a Cockaigne for herbivores.
More on the marks and the Johnsons. I don’t think this hop, skip, and a jump from the metaphorical to the literal would have necessarily surprised WSB. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/aug/02/terrorism.humanrights1
(Mohammed’s since been released from Guantanamo.)
Much as I enjoy the swipe at Senor Coetzee (and that one-nostril sniff at Thomas Bernhard), and agree as I may with MA’s plea for the fundamentality of Wit in Lit, it’s this eye-bulged jihad against cliché, and the not-super-fair dismissal of Coetzee as having “no talent” (as bumpersticker-thin as I found “Diary of a Bad Year” to be), that I can’t go with:
MA: The comic novel is dying, because comedy is anti-democratic. Comedy is a smear.
TC: Inviting you to laugh at.
MA: Yes. But that may be turning around a bit. People assume that it’s the gloomy buggers that are the serious ones—but in fact, anyone who has ever been anywhere in fiction is funny. Yet there are whole reputations built on not being funny. Who’s that German writer doesn’t even have paragraph breaks?
TC: I don’t know him, I don’t tend to read that kind of German writer.
MA: Coetzee, for instance—his whole style is predicated on transmitting absolutely no pleasure.
TC: Do you admire his books at all?
MA: No. I read one and I thought, he’s got no talent. The denial of the pleasure principle has a lot of followers. But I am completely committed to it, to pleasure.
TC: Why have people felt the need to do this to the novel: is this puritanical?
MA: Dryden said, literature is instruction and delight, and there are people who think that if they’re not getting delight then they are getting a lot of instruction, when in fact they’re not getting that either. But it has a sort of of gloomy constituency. If there is no pleasure transmitted then I’m not interested. I mean, look at them all: Dickens, George Eliot, Jane Austen, Smollet, Fielding, they’re all funny. All the good ones are funny. Richardson isn’t, and he’s no good. Dostoyevsky is funny: The Double is a scream. Tolstoy is funny by being just so wonderfully true and pure. Gogol, funny. Flaubert, funny. Dickens. All the good ones are funny.
TC: Who do you really enjoy of the younger generation of writers?
MA: I don’t read them. I read my friends: Will Self and Zadie Smith. But it’s a fantastically uneconomical way of reading, to read your youngers. No-one knows if they are any good. Only time knows that.
TC: You say that in your Preface to the War Against Cliché, one of the most distilled articulations of your literary philosophy. I’ve always had a nagging question about that, the argument that cliché can be very powerful in the short term but that in the long term it inevitably looks ridiculous…
MA: I don’t think it has any say in the short term either. These are two quotes from Coetzee. How does it go. Oh, yes. A woman is watching him closely. “She watched me like a…”
TC: “…hawk.”
MA: Next sentence. He had said these words in a “voice loud enough to wake…”
TC: “…the dead.”
MA: Consecutive sentences.
TC: Which novel is that from?
MA: Waiting for the Barbarians. You will get these people who are felt to be educational, even though, as Clive James said, a sense of humour is common sense dancing. Those who haven’t got it, a sense of humour, shouldn’t be trusted with anything. You’re amazed they can get across the road. But proclaimed humourlessness has a constituency, I don’t know why.
TC: One of the things you’ve often said is that the classic humourless form is pornography: it’s a recurring theme of your work, this idea that the pornographic is a state where irony, wit and self-knowledge are entirely absented, and this is a cultural force that can be extremely dangerous.
here’s a Coetzee sample (Disgrace):
ONE
FOR. A MAN of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well. On Thursday afternoons he drives to Green Point. Punctually at two p.m. he presses the buzzer at the entrance to Windsor Mansions, speaks his name, and enters. Waiting for him at the door of No. II3 is Soraya. He goes straight through to the bedroom, which is pleasant-smelling and softly lit, and undresses. Soraya emerges from the bathroom, drops her robe, slides into bed beside him. ‘Have you missed me?’ she asks. ‘I miss you all the time,’ he replies. He strokes her honey-brown body, unmarked by the sun; he stretches her out, kisses her breasts; they make love.
Soraya is tall and slim, with long black hair and dark, liquid eyes. Technically he is old enough to be her father; but then, technically, one can be a father at twelve. He has been on her books for over a year; he finds her entirely satisfactory. In the desert of the week Thursday has become an oasis of luxe et velupté.
In bed Soraya is not effusive. Her temperament is in fact rather quiet, quiet and docile. In her general opinions she is surprisingly moralistic. She is offended by tourists who bare their breasts (‘udders’, she calls them) on public beaches; she thinks vagabonds should be rounded up and put to work sweeping the streets. How she reconciles her opinions with her line of business he does not ask.
Because he takes pleasure in her, because his pleasure is unfailing, an affection has grown up in him for her. To some degree, he believes, this affection is reciprocated. Affection may not be love, but it is at least its cousin. Given their unpromising beginnings, they have been lucky, the two of them: he to have found her, she to have found him.
His sentiments are, he is aware, complacent, even uxorious. Nevertheless he does not cease to hold to them.
For a ninety-minute session he pays her R4oo, of which half goes to Discreet Escorts. It seems a pity that Discreet Escorts should get so much. But they own No. II3 and other flats in Windsor Mansions; in a sense they own Soraya too, this part of her, this function.
He has toyed with the idea of asking her to see him in her own time. He would like to spend an evening with her, perhaps even a whole night. But not the morning after. He knows too much about himself to subject her to a morning after, when he will be cold, surly, impatient to be alone.
That is his temperament. His temperament is not going to change, he is too old for that. His temperament is fixed, set. The skull, followed by the temperament: the two hardest parts of the body.
Follow your temperament. It is not a philosophy, he would not dignity it with that name. It is a rule, like the Rule of St Benedict. He is in good health, his mind is clear. By profession he is, or has been, a scholar, and scholarship still engages, intermittently, the core of him. He lives within his income, within his temperament, within his emotional means. Is he happy? By most measurements, yes, he believes he is. However, he has not forgotten the last chorus of Oedipus: Call no man happy until he is dead.
In the field of sex his temperament, though intense, has never been passionate. Were he to choose a totem, it would be the snake. Intercourse between Soraya and himself must be, he imagines, rather like the copulation of snakes: lengthy, absorbed, but rather abstract, rather dry, even at its hottest.
Is Soraya’s totem the snake too? No doubt with other men she becomes another woman: lu donna é mobile. Yet at the level of temperament her affinity with him can surely not be feigned. Though by occupation she is a loose woman he trusts her, within limits. During their sessions he speaks to her with a certain freedom, even on occasion unburdens himself She knows the facts of his life. She has heard the stories of his two marriages, knows about his daughter and his daughter’s ups and downs. She knows many of his opinions.
Of her life outside Windsor Mansions Soraya reveals nothing. Soraya is not her real name, that he is sure of. There are signs she has borne a child, or children. It may be that she is not a professional at all. She may work for the agency only one or two afternoons a week, and for the rest live a respectable life in the suburbs, in Rylands or Athlone. That would be unusual for a Muslim, but all things are possible these days.
About his own job he says little, not wanting to-bore her. He earns his living at the Cape Technical University, formerly Cape Town University College. Once a professor of modern languages, he has been, since Classics and Modern Languages were closed down as part of the great rationalization, adjunct professor of communications. Like all rationalized personnel, he is allowed to offer one special-field course a year, irrespective of enrolment, because that is good for morale. This year he is offering a course in the Romantic poets. For the rest he teaches Communications I0I, ‘Communication Skills’ and Communications 20I, ‘Advanced Communication Skills’.
Although he devotes hours of each day to his new discipline, he finds its first premise, as enunciated in the Communications I0I handbook, preposterous: ‘Human society has created language in order that we may communicate our thoughts, feelings and intentions to each other.’ His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.
In the course of a career stretching back a quarter of a century he has published three books, none of which has caused a stir or even a ripple: the first on opera (Boito and the Faust Legend: The Genesis of Mefistofele), the second on vision as eros (The Vision of Richard of St. Victor), the third on Wordsworth and history (Wordsworth and the Burden of the Post}.
In the past few years he has been playing with the idea of a work on Byron. At first he had thought it would be another book, another critical opus. But all his sallies at writing it have bogged down in tedium. The truth is, he is tired of criticism, tired of’ prose measured by the yard. What he wants to write is music: Byron in Italy, a meditation on love between the sexes in the form of a chamber opera.
Through his mind, while he faces his Communications classes, fit phrases, tunes, fragments of song from the unwritten work. He has never been much of a teacher; in this transformed and, to his mind, emasculated institution of learning he is more out of place than ever. But then, so are other of his colleagues from the old days, burdened with upbringings inappropriate to the tasks they are set to perform; clerks in a post-religious age.
Because he has no respect for the material he teaches, he makes no impression on his students. They look through him when he speaks, forget his name. Their indifference galls him more than he will admit. Nevertheless he fulfils to the letter his obligations toward them, their parents, and the state. Month after month he sets, collects, reads, and annotates their assignments, correcting lapses in punctuation, spelling and usage, interrogating weak arguments, appending to each paper a brief, considered critique.
He continues to teach because it provides him with a livelihood; also because it teaches him humility, brings it home to him who he is in the world. The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those who come to learn learn nothing. It is a feature of his profession on which he does not remark to Soraya. He doubts there is an irony to match it in hers.
This “anti-style” or “sub-style” works. Not for me (not in Coetzee’s case nor in Mr. Auster’s, generally), but for plenty of intelligent readers. On its own terms (unlike, again, “Diary of a Bad Year”) it works. The level of cliché is no worse than the stuff you might trade in at a party given by Uni folk. A well-read, intelligent woman might maneuver you into the corner of this hypothetical shindig and tell you a terrible tale in the melodramatic lighting of the sparkles from the ironic disco-ball and mesmerize/transfix/hook/ (pick your cliché; this very phrase, itself, of course, being a cliché) you… and do so without recourse to the elements of the finest verbal style or even access to a bottomless source of unique invention. Still, you listen.
DeLillo has an interesting perspective on humor in Point Omega–wisdom to fit in the palm of one’s hand–in a humorless book, so the point is finally unmissable.
Is that out already, CDS Frances? Where have I been?
Its pub date is 2/2 but thar it was on the front table on2/1. I’m officially off the self-imposed hook of reading Underworld. I’ve calisthenically
picked it up and down more times than I can say. Falling Man, too. They just haven’t captured me. I doubt they’d much inform my reading of PO anyway. I do wonder what, if any other texts, would. Maybe a Georgia O’Keefe painting? Or Khalil Gibran poem?
How far did you get in Underworld, CDS Frances? There is much profound beauty in that there thing (how many times have I read it myself? More than 5, certainly). His handling of the Manx Martin character, for example, is one of the profoundest applications of the technologies of writerly empathy I’ve ever read; oh, and the old widower, Marvin Lundy… the baseball fanatic who tracked and finally owned The (Bobby Thomson) Ball; the story of his Bronx-y marriage to his lady Brit is a funny-sweet marvel. It’s just in the Ur-political sense I question DeLillo’s mettle. But the beauty and core-deep humanity are there
I absolutely believe you.
I carried that book in my gut for seven years!
To be candid: I braved the distance through tundra to my favorite bookplace where they had the Point Omega in the window and, after thumbing through it, worried it might be only half-satisfying, or gnawingly unsatisfying, in the manner of The Body Artist, which felt a bit scooped-out. So I blinked and did not buy it. Maybe in a second run in a fiercer blizzard…
FROM THE JARRING HEADLINE COLLECTION
“Can Auschwitz Be Saved?”
Comrade DJ Sensei Nick (who composed and provided the sanctifying music for many of the tiny films I perpetrated), sends this serious treat:
Thank you so much, CDS Nick! Gorgeous from the smoking guns to the shot at dawn.
I thought it was just me but this winter, which has been the occasion for so many frozen walks by the partially-frozen rivers, was marked by my acute awareness of the chunking effect of the ice in the water. But I hadn’t connected it up to either the planet Neptune or the Roman God or even the human body for that matter. I’d just been looking abstractly but now I have a furious trident for the frozen sea.
(Someone should have told J.D. Salinger that the ducks in Central Park go to Chicago for the winter.)
Is the last movement a reference to Deep Shag by Luscious Jackson? Are you planning 11 more, a calendar series?
Also, CDS Steven, are there plans in the current renovation for a screening room? Maybe with an underwater egress from the pool?
To the last question, CDS Frances: I’m still pricing the velor…
THE FICTIVE IN A SIMULOCRACY
Part Two-B: Searching the River
“And to spend one’s life as a so-called “creative artist” is probably the most comfortable, cozy, and privileged life that a human being can live on this earth—the most “bourgeois” life, if one uses that phrase to describe a life so comfortable that no one living it would want to give it up. To lie in bed and watch words bump together until they become sentences is a form of hedonism, whether the words and sentences glorify society and the status quo or denounce them.”
And who would really want to jeopardize that privilege by writing anything that would go too far toward alienating the readership and cutting the privilege-generating funds off? Ie, are some of our “edge-pushing” writers being careful not to push too hard? I sometimes perceive either a failure of nerve or a failure of the imagination in writers even as great as DeLillo and I know it can’t really be the latter. I think money is always, in the end, the answer to that question. Money is an effective, indirect (or even direct, sometimes) mechanism of Control. Your best, most fearless Art will happen when you are making not a dime off of it.
There is no Artistic imperative to engage with the explicitly “political” and there is every Artistic imperative to avoid, in fact, devolving to the level of the merely topical or polemic… but… if one engages the “political” to the extent that one willingly feeds propaganda into one’s material, doesn’t the material become an extension of propaganda? When Ian McEwan wrote Saturday, arguing, in allegory, the justness of Iraq2 based solely on the “reality” that the war-wagers projected as a justification for the war, didn’t his Art become propaganda… disposable propaganda, at that?
Wallace also wrote (as we were plummeting towards Iraq2):
“[W]e can’t deny that Bush and his men, for whatever reason, are under the sway of the less peaceful side of their natures. From the first day after the World Trade Center fell, you could see in their faces that, however scary it might be to be holding the jobs they held, however heavy the responsibility might be for steering the ship of state in such troubled times, they in fact were loving it. Those faces glowed. You could see that special look that people always have when they’ve just been seized by the most purposeless of all things, a sense of purpose. This, combined with a lust for blood, makes for particularly dangerous leaders, so totally driven by their desire for the violence to start that they’re incapable of hearing any voices around them who plead for compromise or peace.”
…And the passage is rendered half-worthless because he took as his source for the “reality” he was commenting on the “dangerous leaders” themselves. The “dangerous leaders” explained the situation to Shawn (and the world) and Shawn then analyzed the behavior of the Dangerous Leaders in the context of the Situation as they described it to him: I call Cognitive Dissonance of the highest order. A man steals your wallet and tells you a lie about who stole your wallet and, later, after you manage to snatch your wallet back (with no money in it) the man tells you that the money fell into the river. And so you start searching the river.
No one can suck the air out of a room more suffocatingly than Wallace Shawn. Last time I saw him he was reading a then almost two year old Jane Mayer New Yorker article aloud (slowly and sans brio) at a PEN program at Joe’s Pub (still flogging the family brand). I almost accidentally knocked ACLU Exec Direc Anthony Romero over in my rush for the door (and oxygen!). Oh and don’t get me started on that Francine Prose woman! I’d like to lock her in a cell with Joyce Carol Oates, Cynthia Ozick and Adam Kirsch with the only distraction a tape of Waiting for Lefty playing in an interminable loop. I have a theory that Oates, Ozick and Prose (Oops!) have been allowed to have careers as a caution to other women of letters–just try it sister and you’ll get bug eyes, a huge schnozz and bad hair for your troubles.
The sword’s a-flaming! Good call clustering the whiskery Prose, Ozick, Oates and parthenogenic off-gas Kirsch in that cell… but I still have a fontanel for Wally
(Cloistering not clustering.) It’s true, it’s hard to imagine anyone but WS pulling this scene off with so much glee. He’d have to be invented.
He’s the go-to guy for “homunculus”
“You fell victim to one of the classic blunders… the most famous is: never get involved in a land-war in Asia…!”
How did I miss that the first time around?
Let’s pretend it’s summer…
Please give us a meaty beach read from the Augustine deep-freeze, CDS Steven. Anything at all. I need something really good to read!
In fact, give me five minutes and I can send you two PDFs (one is 485 pages and the second is 50 pages) of 36 stories (my favorites collected from TET and The Ept, the Ane and the Fantile): easier to read than the online versions
Wonderful! Of course I’ve read them but it’s all in the reread isn’t it, CDS Steven? I can’t thank you enough for the PDFs. That way I can print out chunks and read pages on the treadmill. It’s one thing to have a sexy new swimming suit, another to own it.
Our new favorite aphorism
Oi!
I asked him yonks ago for such a compilation for reading on the Kindle and heard nothing back!
CDS POS,
Did you send a self-addressed stamped envelope? I find that usually works well with these kind of requests.
I believe he claimed no such compilation existed, comrade.
Anyway, I’ve moved onto the oeuvre of Nigel Beale, which reads like *genius* on the Kindle.
Ha ha! Good old Beagle Beale
More to look at while treading (that’s a vintage Shepard Fairey up there, c. 1990)
(full disclosure: we have an aversion to the thuddingly-middlehack Parini… and that’s the bastard-”we”, not the “royal”)
After all, you are a smart person. You’re probably not persuaded by advertising. Everyone thinks that, and advertising is a $600 billion industry. Someone, somewhere is getting $600 billion worth of persuasion.”
ETHICS SCHMETHICS (I especially like number 7, on the list: the “pacifist” is the enemy)
Riding the tram from my favorite bookstore, in a blizzard, yesterday, to the Alexanderplatz stop, this announcement, in a sexy German female robot voice, speaking Babelfisched “English”, gave me pause:
THIS TRAIN WILL TERMINATE THERE; PLEASE CHANGE NOW
A very, very, very old story of mine, freshly exhumed…
BEATLEMANIA
Being born hopelessly poor and black and destined to be persecuted not only by the state but by my own race and family was the best thing that ever happened to me. My first four years, I took sweet milk from my mother’s dark breasts and that’s all I cared to know of the world. I didn’t even notice my mother’s appearance for the first time until the milk stopped. I discovered that the beauty of my womb-dreams was all right there; had returned in the form of her face. Gone to dust for lo these many years.
My father was a revolutionary black poster-maker of the 1960s and 1970s and his work decorated much of the Southside of Chicago. At the time I didn’t realize that it was he who was responsible for the strange images I saw on the telephone poles and derelict cars I passed on the way to school every morning in my ghetto on the outskirts of the city. Posters of black rats dressed as jazz musicians in doll-house-shotgun-shacks while white cats hissed at the windows. Across the highway was a marsh over which the sun set like the Hindenburg every evening.
This ghetto I grew up in had a name: Harriet Tubman Gardens. It was a concrete grid of identical, bunker-like units… each block was a row of ten contiguous two-story apartments at the end of which was an incinerator featuring a black iron chute that swung open to flames and a chimney that never ceased sending our poor garbage towards heaven. My mother and I lived in the sooty apartment at the end of our block; block E; and our living room wall was perpetually warm from the heat of the incinerator. We sat with our backs to this wall in winter and in summer we avoided the living room altogether. Our apartment was furnished with a massive mahogany-finish Magnavox console television with speaker grilles like arched cathedral fronts. The Magnavox was another source of heat in the winter.
Like all ghettos, Tubman Gardens had rats and roaches and stray dogs that ran in packs like would-be wolves every night. But because we were on the outskirts of the city proper, bordered on one side by an infinite marsh and the other by a wood bisected by rusted tracks and littered with ghostly old train cars and blackened pyramids of empty oil drums, we also had foxes and deer and rumors of woodland footprints in the snow every winter that were ten sizes too big to be human. The foxes would raid the yards of the old black folks who had come up directly from the Deep South and were in the habit of keeping chickens.
Most evenings we could hear a tremendous Thor-like hammer pounding ship-sized steel at the InterLake Steel Mills at the bend in a canal a few miles south. Sha-KUNG! Sha-KUNG! Sha-KUNG! And we often smelled, from the opposite direction, the livid green chemical processes of a paint factory a mile or two upwind. To the west, beyond the school playground and across a few lanes of highway, lay our vast marsh in the middle of which was a missile silo. All night long a tongue of flame blared from the top of a tall round chimney, burning off that volatile fuel.
Between the steel mills, the paint factory, the missile silo and the James Brown music blaring loudly through the wall from the neighbors, my childhood was Bosch-like. My imagination was stimulated even as the chemical odors were ostensibly stunting my growth and the constant din was breaking my concentration and the Soviet Union had our general vicinity on its first strike list in event of a nuclear war.
My mother had heavy, ornately patterned, gold-colored drapes on her bedroom window. Certain mornings shafts of sunlight would angle like brilliant swords between the slit-parted drapes and touch fire to the dust motes suspended in the shafts. I thought these microscopic twinkles were angels. Beautiful angels. And I felt love for them. I’d gaze on them for what seemed like hours and I’d improvise mumbled songs to express my adoration.
It’s possible I’d seen the movie The Song of Bernadette on television one of the many mornings I was too sick to make it to school and in my peculiar way associated these dust motes with Our Lady of Fatima. There may well have been a scene in the movie featuring a beam of sunlight striking the blessed Jennifer Jones on the forehead as she knelt in prayer. Even a child can sense the sexual connotations of a beautiful woman kneeling, chin up, lips parted, prepared to receive the incandescent raptures of adoration. Sunday mornings I’d prostrate myself on mother’s bed, chin on hands, and serenade these angels. Downstairs, mother whipped up our frontier breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon, four halves of buttered toast sliced on the diagonal and a glass of Tang, without fail, without end. I sang furtively while the delicious ghost of blue smoke of the sizzling bacon rose up the stairwell and the angels danced. The sadly beautiful Jennifer-Jones-angels in their liquid ballet in swords of sunlight drifting vast distances the scale of which I could lose myself in so easily. It wasn’t long before I was banished from this paradise.
The black day came in a bureaucrat’s banal raiment: I was sent kicking and screaming to kindergarten. I banged on our front door with little boots and little fists, demanding to be let back in, but my light-eyed father, who I hadn’t even been aware was on the premises over night, appeared in the kitchen window with a stern face, a face I feared and hated, pointing in the direction of school, mouthing go.
“Go!”
He would not let me back in. I could hear my mother pleading behind him but he held firm and I ended up making that symbolic journey of a few hundred foot steps with snot all over my face. I suppose he thought he was being heartless for my own good, and that one day, after making my way in the world, I’d thank him for it. But I’ll be damned if I’ve ever forgiven the bastard for that. I knew that not only would I be forced to spend half the day with strangers, barred from my own sweet home, but that my father would meanwhile be doing things to my astonishingly beautiful mother in my absence that I did not like. I had seen it once by pretending to be asleep, a ruse I immediately regretted. That awful pumping.
Harriet Tubman Elementary was right at the end of the street, a five minute walk away, but I managed to daydream an entire revolution. A pretty tarot card picture of a child victorious in his mother’s arms, father dead and hanging by his heels from the incinerator chimney. I dreamed it all before crossing the street and filing into the dark building. It was only later that I realized that not all of my schoolmates felt as I did about this forced march into an ugly municipal space so redolent of Lysol and chalk; the dimly lit halls and teachers who looked like janitors and janitors who looked like former pupils. Many if not most of my schoolmates were glad to be escaping home for a few hours every day. They didn’t live in a paradise like I did. And yet there I sat, banished, confused.
There were two fat white rabbits in separate cages on the window sill. Cartoony members of the alphabet were marching with pitchforks, spades, scissors and shovels in a sinister procession around the room above the chalkboard and the windows and the cloakroom and the door. Adult faces appeared intermittently at the wire-webbed shatter-proof glass of the door, directly under the big clock with its black hands; peered in and moved on. The seated circle of children I joined on thin mats after I had hung up my jacket were all thinking what I was thinking. Who knew there were so many little black people in the world?
“How many of us can already read?” asked the light-brown teacher in her feline eyeglasses. The eyeglasses were secured by a chain around her neck; was she afraid we’d steal them? Her straightened hair was limp as a hound’s black tongue. She raised her hand as if to answer her own question and I raised mine too and only one other little boy responded with a tentative half-lifting of a hand that fell back to his lap before the teacher seemed to notice. He was wearing a bulky plastic two-tone contraption on his chest like a radio connected to his left ear with two white wires.
His name was Burley Durden.
“Master Dixon,” nodded the teacher, Miss Pennyboy, beaming at me. “Anyone else?”
Years later, I will masturbate to indelible images of this narrow-waisted, pecan-colored woman. Not in her incarnation as a bourgeois Negro kindergarten-teaching supporter of Barry Goldwater gnawing on the earpiece of her eyeglasses, of course. But to an Afro’d, go-go booted Plaything Magazine image of her that I will discover on a newsstand shortly after coming of age. Miss Pennyboy reborn as a revolutionary icon.
“Burley, child, did I see you raise your hand a minute ago?”
“Not unless you was peekin’, lady,” said Burley and the whole class, including Miss Pennyboy herself, erupted with easy laughter. Comic relief is always welcome is one of Life’s lessons. We exchanged a quick look, Burley and I, as though anticipating the mischief to come. Burley closed his eyes, mouth still open, turned up the volume of his hearing aid and strained. He forced out the bell-clear tone of a fart and I crinkled my nose.
Bologna.
School was a sham and I didn’t need it was how I felt and experience soon confirmed this. Mrs Pennyboy instructed us to sit in a circle while she sat at a little brown upright piano and went about the business of teaching as she knew it, which somehow involved songs like ‘Go Tell Aunt Rhody’ and ‘The Itsy Bitsy Spider’. The spider song was a study in futility: the spider keeps climbing up the water spout, only to be washed back down to the bottom of it again by some eternal monsoon. And ‘Go Tell Aunt Rhody’, with its gruesome refrain (‘the old gray goose is dead!’), upset me.
Go tell Aunt Rhody, go tell Aunt Rhody
Go tell Aunt Rhody, the old gray goose is dead
The one she’s been saving
The one she’s been saving
The one she’s been saving
To make a feather bed
This was the stuff of nightmares set to a dirge-like tune. There were other strange songs. So many of them! Songs about farmers. Why are there no children’s songs about scientists or actresses? Songs about farmers, bakers, spiders, dells, steeples, brooks and bees, yes. Nothing about tapeworms or architects. Nothing about craters.
I had an eye, for the duration of Mrs Pennyboy’s session at her plinka-plink piano, trained on a set of red boxes in a corner of the room called ‘the play area’. On the five, brick-red boxes arranged in a row was printed a drawing of a locomotive and several box cars and a caboose, respectively. I had graphically intense fantasies about the enchanting scale-model train that was waiting for me in these boxes. I didn’t pay attention to a word Mrs. Pennyboy said or a note she played, so intent was I on imagining that train and me playing with it. When the time finally came and we were allowed to get up off that circle and toddle across the room to the play area with its wooden jigsaw puzzles and alphabet blocks and little plastic farm animals and so on, I made a bee-line for those incredible red train boxes, mystified that no one else seemed interested in monopolizing them.
Of course they were empty.
Burley had two distinguishing characteristics: he could read, and he wore something in his hair called Murray’s Pomade. The product came in a little round light-brown tin with a line drawing of a smiling black couple, with glistening domes of hair, on the lid. I’m fairly certain the pomade looked like clear shoe polish in the open tin and Burley glopped some on his standard-issue centimeter-long thatch of peppercorn hair when I picked him up on the way to school one morning. He stuck his clip-on tie on and carefully glopped the Murray’s on in the mirror atop his mother’s vanity. Burley had the sweet round guileless face of Jiminy Cricket.
“What’s that stuff?”
“It’s for my hair.”
“Why?”
“Girls like it.”
“Why?”
“’Cuz it’s like The Beatles.”
“Oh.”
The Beatles didn’t speak to me the way Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons spoke to me with their smash hit Sherry. One of my aunts or uncles had that 45 laying around my grandmother’s house as early as ’62, the year it first it came out on a Chicago label called VeeJay (to which The Beatles were signed briefly), and the song flipped a cosmic switch in my three-year-old brain. Everything astonishing in my first exposure to the song, from the intro beat, to the bass riff, to Frankie Valli’s falsetto and the dramatic key change in the middle eight, opened my wet little brain to the primordial spirituality of golden age pop, when it was still flowing from original sources that weren’t essentially distinguishable from the wellspring of the world’s oldest religion, Voodoo itself.
The funny thing being that I misheard the title lyric as ‘Jerry’ and the song made me feel like a girl. The notion of romantic love or whatever it was had nothing to do with sex but with a swoony sad dreaminess that was so passive that you had to be girl-like, as sensitive five-year-old boys often were in those days, before the hyper-masculinization of American culture commenced, to give into it. I played that song so often on my grandmother’s big old console record player (rich with the odor of antediluvian dust burning on its RCA tubes), carefully popping the curved bright red or yellow plastic swastika of the spindle adapter into the big round hole at the 45’s center, threading it on the spindle, lifting the tone arm, lowering it on the vivid disk…
Burley was way ahead of me on The Beatles trend. He even wore pointy-toed leather shoes that looked very much like Beatle boots. So it was to be expected that a strange ritual evolved during recess in kindergarten that year. When the recess bell rang at 11:45 and the fire door leading to the asphalt expanse of the playground was swung open by a very large black teacher with a sweaty fat neck constricted by a necktie in a private protest against lynchings, Burley and I, without planning anything in advance, would go running across the playground under the thrillingly overcast sky and we’d run as fast as we could in a breathless diagonal across the continent-vast blacktop expanse of the playground, a playground a platoon of soldiers could have paraded around forever, with every single girl in our class running behind us and screaming at the top of their lungs in a pitch-perfect imitation of napalm death or Beatlemania.
Thank you, CDS Steven. If only August Wilson had had your world-in-a dust-mote gifts his black history plays might’ve been less defensively Raisin in the Sun(ny) emblematic and more “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” –a more fruitful starting place.
“carefully popping the curved bright red or yellow plastic swastika of the spindle adapter into the big round hole at the 45’s center,”
You realize that even with this precise description there will be readers who will wonder at these words or skip over them entirely with no earthly idea what such a thing was. It’s like reading Darwin in The Voyage of the Beagle!
Ha ha! Honestly, I could foresee youthful headscratching over that reference, CDS Frances… consider it an inside-joke betwixt the over-40s
Why the odd spellings of Frankie Valli, kamarad?
Frankie’s finest:
‘The Ballad of Wernher von Braun’ from In His Own Write, John Lennon, 1964.
Napoleon went down into a battle riding on a horse.
General Hindenburg stood on a hill.
The Nastie Madalf Heatlump rode a Panzer.
For years now I have recorded the world’s moods to fuel our hairship. I have millions and millions of hours of recordings. My father did not rise in the world like me. I became a very famous rocket scientist. The United States of Hummerica claim ownership of this hairship in which I sit, recording. This is my mixing room where I have recorded the moods of nations forming and battles raging and very happy otters dreaming. One day you may find my recordings. They will stand out from all the rest.
It is quiet here but the recordings hold a great thunderundering.
* * * * *
General Hindenburg rides down a hill and into battle.
Madalf Heatlump goosesteps in a forest, humming.
The Beedles will perhapenstance ride underwater.
The window before my mixxxing desk forms a picture frame. I sit staring out with an odd sensation of something impending down there in the world, some new mood worth recording. My hand trembles. The face that floats outside the window is very famous and sings something about crucifixxxion that I do not understand. The face floats, then it stops. It goes from right to left and then it stops. The face floats into my mind. The hairship hums. The eyes of the floating face are turned away from me.
I wear a suit and cannot come out of my suit. I cannot come out of myself. My wife speaks but she cannot come out of herself. She is an attractive woman with a battered face. All day she goes softly about, doing the housework on our hairship. She does not know this hairship has recorded her life’s every mood. I know the moods of her childhood in Hummingburg. I know her mind’s moods. I know her fear when she first crawled into my arms.
It would be strange if I could sit here like this, while my own very famous face floated outside the window. It would be strange and beautiful if that very famous face could confront my wife, come into her presence. If the hairship could make a floating face come into the presence of any man or woman — that would be a strange and beautiful thing.
Sometimes the whole mood of this world floats as a human face in my mind. The unconscious face of the world stops and stands still before me.
I am here in this mixxxing room, as alone as ever any chappie made by Goddy-odd. I have millions and millions of hours of recordings. Someday I shall chatter to myself. Someday I shall make a recording of myself.
Excuse me, CDS POS. Yoko’s on line 5. I’m sorry to interrupt but she says it’s very, very important.
Luvly-strange and valued gene-splice, CDS Pussies of Steel… please advise how you’d like the bonny thang formatted and also any pictures you care to insert…? (and yes that tune you link-to by Frankie is minty-ace)
What’s she sayin’, comrade?
“Brighton calling.”
No pics necessary, comrade, but I’d appreciate it if you’d remove the unnecessary ‘could’ in ‘If the hairship could make a floating face could come into the presence of any man or woman’.
Cheers for the pdfs. I read The Brotherland Miracles on the Kindle last month. Stonking work but I suspect a couple more reads are called for, ye-fly-bugger-ye.
Re: TBM: It’s only half-done, Dear Pussy!
“Why the odd spellings of Frankie Valli, kamarad?”
Yipes; I must have written this thing not only during the 1990s but at 3am! (will fix and respond after dindin… just walked in, you see, bearded with hoar frost and hungry as fuck)
(The truly funny bit being that a very-close Ex of mine is long-married to an Italian feller named “Valli”)
So.
“Thank you, CDS Steven. If only August Wilson had had your world-in-a dust-mote gifts his black history plays might’ve been less defensively Raisin in the Sun(ny) emblematic and more “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” –a more fruitful starting place.”
Frankly, I’ve had that chicken-bone to pick with Wilson ever since I read an interview with the admittedly-strong writer and it turned out that he was raising his daughter to speak a limited, quasi-regional, fucked-up Pidgin English because that was her “heritage”. But it was only more her heritage than the bronze-hard, bronze-bright locutions of Frederick Douglas (and any number of 18th and 19th-century black orators/writers) if her father decided so. And why would he decide so?
It’s my belief that Wilson didn’t allow himself to face the fact that the definition of “black” he was working from was decreed by Massa. I mean, ja… black illiteracy was the Law for the duration of most of the North American Slave business (violated on pain of whippings or death) but, surely, that’s all the more reason to cast that burden aside after Emancipation? Fucked-up English is also the “heritage” of cracker-white Appalachians, too, but we don’t see gap-toothed double-negatives being valorized in school as “white English”, eh?
The phrase for it is “branded on the tongue” and Wilson willingly, under no threat of a whipping, branded his daughter. I took a secret swipe at him in the story “Eryn; Edwina” for that.
Beyond the sociology stuff, I’d like to say that “Beatlemania” goes back to my mission to pursue a stealthy kind of avant-garde strategy in writing; it’s not my thing to (for example) fuck with typography to produce unusual texts: others are better at that; my thing is to juxtapose jarring concepts or frustrate expectations or lure the reader into a sunny green field that turns out to be the bottom of a very clear pond with creepy fish in it. So, in the story under consideration, I subvert the standard Negro autobiographical tale of triumph and woe or self-realization or whatever. All of the brand-name-writers who handle this material work from near-identical templates and notice how strange it is to diverge by 50-75%.
As long as we’re on the subject: this semi-aestheticized body-pix-site I sometimes page through (where did all of these sites suddenly come from? Some of the best have managed to grade entirely away from the tacky-frat-pron which revolted and dismayed us for the first 20 years of internet) rarely shows stand-alone nude males (fine with me; I’m just thinking of the needs of some of our Comrades Lurking) and even more rare is the nude male of color, and then we get this:
vs this classic presentation of pale males on the same site
Q: are the racist antlers cool enough, as a fashion statement, for us to forgive the blatant de (or pre) -humanization of our big black cocks?
And when I was a young feller and spent my days and nights painting, mostly, I went through a period of depicting my cock in varying metaphorical shapes and colors, the variables dependent almost wholly, it now seems, upon the women I used my cock to plug into (there were 33, in all, with my Beloved the 33rd: I still know the first and last name of every one) and here was one series I did and please notice how civilized the cocks are:
Oh, I think the Comrade DJ Senseis will enjoy this video artist’s work! Especially what she does with the Zapruder footage (at the 5:07 mark).
I do like the nonviolent hypothetical POTUS-subtraction method
Comrade DJ Sensei Modern Lore! Greetings and many thanks for the tune-drop… the perfect sounds for this particular moment! Anything by the illustrious Geno up your sleeve…? (npi)
Cha-hooooooooon, Comrade Neil…
Looks like it’s a Northern Soul all-nighter down The Endless Thread…
Fookin Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaace
A noticeable improvement in the music since the professionals have stepped up to the booth. Does anyone remember that frisky old tune “Notch On Your Belt”?
Clue us in, Comrade… a search turned up zilch
I love that quasi-martial Motown stomp… what we used to call “four on the floor”
Another stompa:
With the added benefit that I’ve never heard this artiste before… I like it when it sounds as though they’re singing for their very lives
You must have some NS to drop, comrade, no?
Very Four-Tops-ish
In fact, fuck, I know it’s hardly a rare find but…
(PS and please note the similarity of the verse-phrasing to Bob Dylan’s… or vice versa)
(compare declamatory, shoutastic phraseology)
And another:
Have you read McKinney’s Magic Circles: the Beatles in Dream and History? Wonderful book but gone, baby, gone…
Indeed, indeed. Perhaps best, though, if I leave accusations of thievery to others.
Another mainstream cracker:
An astonishing streak of the purely good (would’ve preferred visuals of Jackie himself, of course, but this’ll do), CDS Pussies of Steel!
CDS Steven,
The paintings in #35 are very beautiful Questions! What are the dimensions of the canvases? Are they all erect? I know you’re an admirer of Lucien Freud and wondered if you attempted any flaccid penises as well. Have you named the paintings? Are you sure you don’t know about Emotion Lotion? Some of the colors are remarkably suggestive of the EmoLo flavors? Is the third one down on the left an homage to this painting by any chance?
CDS Frances: all homages strictly coincidental; paradoxically, each luminous member was, in fact, a FEMage and, oh no, never rendered a Freudianly limp one on canvas and rarely, in fact (cough) in life. (dimensions: 3″x5″ acrylic on masonite; all currently in the collection of the woman I described in TET 2.0, I think it was… the former-model who ended up being tabloid fodder in the UK for a scandalous affair with a famous actor… the scandal woman who, before this infamy, gave me a tiny leopard-skin-patterned pouch of copper-colored clippings from her jean-jungle: quid pro quo pro bono)
A leetle Lucian (sometimes a cigar…)
(Addendum: re: my phalli: the third-from top, L; and the second-from-top, R, are photo-shopped variations on originals; and I’ve just remembered- npi— that a much larger one of these, attached to a reclining faceless body, is-or-was in the possession of a half-Sicilian girlwoman in Stockholm whose aunt was a good friend of Italo Calvino)
FEMage or FEMtrait?
When I first moved to NYC I was in a Method Acting studio located in the West 40s on Eighth Avenue before Times Square was Disneyfied. A teenaged Uma Thurman was also in the studio, sent over from her modeling agency. In the physical warm-up, she used to roll down her spine and place her forehead on the floor inches in front of her. CDS Nick’s new novel reminded me of her liquid presence. But that’s not what I wanted to tell you. The studio was directly across from a gay art cinema and for years the movie on the marquee was the porn classic–The Young and the Hung.
“The Young and the Hung”
Ah, yes… the Sophie Scholl story…
Regarding this trope of calmly walking to your own execution, head held high…no thanks. I say make ‘em drag you kicking, screaming and, if possible, biting and drawing blood. Herniate a few of their discs on the way to the chopping block. Hell, that’s what worker’s comp is for.
My sentiments prexactly
Speaking of romance languages.
(TALES FROM THE ELIZABETHAN SIMULOCRACY?)
Remember, Comrades DJs Senseis Lurking and Explicit: Nothing is but what is not. This is lots of fun (sadly, the website I long-ago copied the 38-page document, which the following is an excerpt from, no longer appears to exist; the second essay is from the early 20th century):
The Case for Christopher Marlowe’s Authorship
of the Works attributed to William Shakespeare
Since the early 1800s Christopher Marlowe (b.1564) has been a strong contender for the authorship of “Shakespeare’s” works. The notion was first suggested by Queen Elizabeth during the wake of the Essex Rebellion, when she singled him out as the author of Richard II.
Two centuries later, scholars began to suspect something was peculiar when they noticed that Marlowe’s works supply the “missing” early works of Shakespeare, so it was suggested, anonymously, that Marlowe might have been William’s nom de plume. [1]
Once Marlowe’s life proved Marlowe’s works his own, the theory was discarded, but once it became clear Shakespeare’s biography offered no proof of his authorship (apart from the title page advertisements) the theory was revised in the reverse.
This was in 1895 when an American literary sleuth, Wilbur Gleason Zeigler, first suggested that Marlowe created the name William Shakespeare as his own pen name or nom de plume and faked his death to avoid facing pending capital charges. [2]
The rustic, informally educated actor from Stratford, replete with his illiterate family, no intellectual properties or friendships, was, according to Zeigler, pressed into service for the role of author, seven years after his own death. Like the famous lobster, it may have been Shakespeare’s finest hour, but it certainly wasn’t of his own choosing. This hiatus of seven years remains a pivotal point in the Marlowe case.
Marlovians suggest that if the actor had been suspected as Author, he’d have paid for it with his life, given the horribly suppressive conditions of the time, which arrested, tortured, maimed and murdered writers, while banning and burning their works.
So it simply isn’t likely that William Shakespeare ever, even privately, took credit for these remarkable works and indeed any Elizabethan who looked into the matter, as the Crown had, was convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that the actor wasn’t the author, as proven by the inquiry into the presentation of Richard II for the purpose of rebellion in 1601.
(It is only in the post First Folio years that readers and audiences have come to believe the actor wrote these remarkable works. Prior to the First Folio’s adds, only the ill-informed believed a connection between the writer and the player.)
Zeigler suggests Marlowe switched identities with the man scholars believe killed Marlowe, one Ingram Frizer, a serving man of Marlowe’s patron, Sir Thomas Walshingham. Zeigler’s theory eliminates the problem of where they found a body and explains why Frizer, who supposedly killed the realm’s highest mind and lifelong friend of Sir Thomas, remained in Sir Thomas Walsingham’s good graces: Frizer didn’t, he died, according to Zeigler’s account, at Deptford. It was an age that lacked forensic, Zeigler’s case remains plausible. Particularly so since none of the jurors knew Marlowe and simply accepted Frizer’s identification.
On a more conspiratorial level, Zeigler’s theory might explain why the Queen promptly pardoned Frizer and protected him with the equivalency of the British Secrets Act. The records prove she managed this by limiting any inquires into Frizer’s involvement to those raised in her own Court. This lid or requirement has prevented any official inquires for four centuries. (Other murders can be reopened at any time by local authorities as new evidence surfaces.)
Superficially it implies the Queen was in on the charade. This is not difficult to understand, since Elizabeth understood there were royal policies that could not be accomplished openly. The rub, however, is that she seems to have perceived herself as the target of Marlowe’s pen, so it is not very likely that she would have bent the law for Marlowe, even if she had fancied him once upon a time. On the other hand, she was a captive of her advisors, particularly the Cecils, and she may well have never seen “Frizer.”
In any case, the Marlowe theory lay dormant, after Zeigler’s book, for half a century, until another American literary sleuth, Calvin Hoffman, brought Marlowe’s case back to life in his book The Murder of the Man Who was Shakespeare (1955). Hoffman’s theory holds that Marlowe, already a prolific writer, merely went on writing and working under other names, including Shakespeare, after he eluded authorities who were seeking him for capital crimes by providing them with a cadaver said his. Hoffman believes Marlowe lived as an exile and sent his plays home to Sir Thomas Walsingham, and/or their mutual friend, the publisher Edward Blount.
Patrick Cheney, Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, has documented the rationale for Marlowe’s war with the establishment:
Using an Ovidian cursus…Marlowe enters the generational project of writing English nationhood. Unlike Spenser…Marlowe writes a ‘counter nationhood’—a nonpatriotic form of nationhood that subverts royal power with what Ovid calls libertas. [3]
In simpler language, Marlowe had embarked on a lifelong or “multi-generational project” geared at establishing a new type of English nationalism, namely a republican form, as he (or someone) tells us in Rape of Lucrece. Little wonder Elizabeth and her domestic junta were hot on his trail, they didn’t long for the “stage government [to] change from kings to counsels.” However “Shake-Spear” certainly did.
Importantly “Shakespeare’s” works first began to appear just weeks after Marlowe supposedly died. This remains a primary point. No work said to have been “Shakespeare’s” surfaced until after Marlowe was officially buried. Hoffman pledged to withdraw his claim if proof to the contrary ever surfaced. It hasn’t.
Unlike Zeigler, Hoffman had the works of Mendenhall to draw upon. Mendenhall first proved (1912) a stylometric relationship between Shakespeare’s works, one that did not extend to Bacon, Oxford or others. (“Stylometeric” is a modern word for measurable aspects of a writer’s style, such as the length of his words and sentences or the use of prepositions and/or common or uncommon words.)
Only Marlowe and “Shakespeare” used words that average 4.2 letters in length. This “proof” remains one of the best keys scholars have towards establishing the possibility that both writers were the same individual. If their average word size were different, it wouldn’t be very likely that they were the same writers. Moreover average word size has proven a steady indicator of authorship. Paradoxically while “Shakespeare” and Marlowe use large words, “they” use so many short one’s his average word size is smaller than many writers.
Modern canon-wide computer or “stylometric” studies have confirmed these earlier findings in all stylometric areas. Marlowe and “Shakespeare” are often closer to each other in some works than they are to themselves. (See Ule or Baker) Indeed strong evidence suggesting the author alive and well c. 1632 surfaced in the mid-eighteenth century when John Payne Collier discovered a 1632 Second Folio edited by an Elizabethan handwriting as if it were the author’s. This unique volume contains over 20,000 emendations, several thousand of which were cognitive in nature.
The British Library, or more specifically, Sir Frederic Madden, balking at the possibility that “Shakespeare” might have survived until 1632, promptly labeled the Folio’s corrections forgeries and pointed the finger at Collier. However, modern forensic examinations have exonerated Collier. [4]
Dewey Ganzel, writing in a modern biography published by Oxford’s prestigious press, Fortune & Men’s Eyes: The Career of John Payne Collier, suggested that “the defamation of John Payne Collier may have been the most successful conspiracy in literary history.” [5] At root stood the Perkins Folio and a group of broadside ballads. Together they strongly suggest Marlowe survived 1593. Documents of this nature, including the manuscript of Henry IV, had to be labeled frauds or the Shakespeare establishment might crumble. Collier, who had an impeccable reputation but slender academic credentials, was already in his seventies when he was made the Stratfordians’ first stooge. [6]
Another victim along the way was the Cambridge political historian, Lillian Winstanley, who in 1921 published a remarkable book entitled: Hamlet and the Scottish Succession. Therein Ms. Winstanley painstakingly proved “Shakespeare” had been to Scotland, knew James and intimate details concerning his family, including Arbella Stuart, his cousin, as evidenced throughout Hamlet. (In the New Variorum edition of Macbeth, a much more limited proof documents the author’s Scottish travels.)
Nevertheless, in a full page anonymous review, the Times Literary Supplement, rejected Ms. Winstanley’s thesis solely on the basis of the Stratfordian paradigm attesting to their belief that the actor had never been to Scotland, let alone known James. [7]
Towering over Hoffman stands the genius Louis Ule, whose phenomenal efforts back the modern concordances of Marlowe’s works and of the so called “Shakespeare apocrypha.” [8] Ule’s biography, Christopher Marlowe 1564 – 1607, attributes most of these works to Marlowe.
Mortimer J. Adler, who brought out the University of Chicago’s Great Books of the Western World, combined Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s plays in a single volume, its cover reading Marlowe-Shakespeare. A nice touch that has proven non confrontational.
A. D. Wraight, a long time student and scholar of Marlowe’s life, has openly joined the ranks of those who believe Marlowe survived 1593 and became Shakespeare. Her books include In Search of Christopher Marlowe, Christopher Marlowe and Edward Alleyn, The Story That the Sonnets Tell and Shakespeare: The New Evidence.
Doris Wilbert has also recently published a book on Marlowe’s post 1593 production, attributing some 250 plays to his invention, entitled: The Silent Shakespeare—Marlowe Revivified. She traces Marlowe though image clusters, subjects and locales, pointing out that Lope de Vega, bested Marlowe’s output by a factor of nearly four.
Wilbert gives considerable evidence that Marlowe continued to write in the four major veins he’d written in prior to his “official death,” i.e., plays, translations, religious tracks and poems. She also spots him in various true histories of the period.
De Vega’s life is well documented. He traveled extensively nearly reaching England during the Armada debacle and trekked Europe “countless” times. He participated in every sector of Spanish life from rich to poor, from honest to dishonest, was married, had children, was frequently in trouble for being a lover, and, not too surprisingly, spent the last twenty years of his life as a priest. In addition to writing nearly a thousand plays, five hundred of which survive, Lope left us fourteen hundred sonnets, several Byzantine novels and numerous political tracks.
Clearly Marlowe could, easily, have been the hidden poet behind Shakespeare’s works and, single-handedly, responsible for much of what Sir Roy Strong calls England’s lost renaissance.
and
WAS MARLOWE THE MAN?
Archie Webster’s original essay, published in The National Review (VOL.LXXXII, pp.81-86) dated September 1923.
(And therefore before Hotson’s discovery in 1925 of the Coroner’s Inquisition concerning Marlowe’s death.)
MORE than a generation ago the learned Professor Dowden called attention to the fact that no theory advanced by scholars explained the doubts and difficulties of the autobiographic statements made by Shakespeare in the Sonnets. While it is obvious that an explanation must exist, all commentators up to the present have been content to elucidate some of the one hundred and fifty-four sonnets and dismiss the balance as a vexata quæstio.
The sonnets purport to be a story of Shakespeare’s life from his own pen. The story conflicts with all the historic information we have of the Stratford genius, hence the difficulty of explaining it. The story is just as foreign to the history of Francis Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, the Earl of Oxford, and sundry others who have been suspected of hiding their poetic talent under the mask name of Shakespeare. It is caviar to all schools.
In many sonnets Shakespeare protests that he is absent from England against his will. His name received a brand (111), and he was a lonely outcast, disgraced in the eyes of men (29). This alleged absence is an abysmal mystery to the scholars, who know nothing of such a period of exile in the career of the Swan of Avon. As to the disgrace, the scholars surmise that the bard felt himself to be branded because he was an actor, and actors are said to have been held in very low repute in that day. This may pass as an explanation of 29 and 111, however feeble it may seem to some of us, but it collapses when applied to many other sonnets, such as, for instance, 36, in which Shakespeare wrote to the Earl of Southampton
I may not evermore acknowledge thee,
Lest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame
Nor thou with public kindness honour me,
Unless thou take that honour from thy name.
Shakespeare did acknowledge Southampton by dedicating to him publicly the poems Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece, and although the Stratford man was an actor, it did not shame or dishonour the earl, nor did the immortal bard ever dream that it would discredit Southampton to have his name thus publicly linked with that of “William Shakespeare.”
Of this the bard himself assures us, when he wrote to Southampton (81):
Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Though I, once gone, to all the world must die :
. . . .
Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
. . . .
You still shall live, such virtue hath my pen.
Having written Venus and Adonis, the bard knew that it would not disgrace his friend to dedicate it to him as the work of “William Shakespeare,” actor though Shakspere might have been. On the contrary, he asserts that it will immortalize Southampton. The bard must have known also that if it did immortalize the name of Southampton, it must, ipso facto, immortalize the name of “William Shakespeare”, signed to it as author. Therefore, when he says his own name will die with him, although his verse will live for ever, he simply gives us to understand that his own name was not “William Shakespeare,” and that he adopted this pen name in acknowledging Southampton, for the very good reason that he offers in 36: his bewailed guilt had disgraced his own name.
There is a theory that explains all of this and all the other autobiographic sonnets written by Shakespeare. In the light of this theory it is only necessary to read the sonnets from first to last in the literal sense in which they were given to us by that unrivalled genius who knew better than all other men how to express ideas in words. It is the theory that “Shakespeare’s Sonnets” were written by Christopher Marlowe, who was born the same year as the actor of Stratford, and who was, in the words of Swinburne: “The father of English tragedy and the creator of English blank verse.”
Marlowe was at Cambridge University with the young Earl of Southampton. He was accused of heresy, the blackest crime on the calendar, just a month before the name “William Shakespeare” first appeared in print, dedicating Venus and Adonis to Southampton. And in the sonnets Marlowe tells us that his bewailed guilt made it impossible to publicly acknowledge the earl without doing him shame, and that Venus and Adonis will not immortalize the name of its author.
The autobiography in the sonnets begins in 25, wherein the bard says fortune has barred him from public honours and proud titles. In 26 he says he dare not show his head where Southampton may test his loyalty and affection. He is forced to abide far from the earl, and can only visit him with his thoughts (27). He is disgraced in the eyes of men, and all alone beweeps his outcast state (29). His guilt is so great that if Southampton should reveal the name of the man who wrote Shakespeare’s poetry, even after he (the bard) is dead, it will make woe for his friend, the earl (71).
When he dies, the earl must not mourn the loss of his body, which is already the prey of worms, being dead “the coward conquest of a wretch’s knife” (74). He is dead to all the world except Southampton, and he feels that all the world is dead to him, except the earl (112). His harmful deeds have put a brand upon his name (111); but vulgar scandal stamped an impression upon his brow that resulted in his being dead to all except Southampton (112). He does not complain that he is thus neglected by all the world, because he is more than compensated by the love of his friend, the earl (112). He does not miss the external honours of court life, from which he was driven by a suborned informer, who impeached him (125).
Obviously this remarkable and tragic story of his life, from the pen of immortal Shakespeare, has no more to do with the adventures of the Stratford Will Shakspere than with the man in the moon. The story is, however, an accurate journal of the tragic life of Marlowe.
Although born the same year as Shakspere of Stratford, Marlowe’s prolific and gifted pen had completely revolutionized English drama and established heroic blank verse through the medium of such plays as Tamburlaine, Faustus, The Jew of Malta, and Edward II, before the name Shakespeare appeared upon the scene in 1593.
In that memorable year, Marlowe, at the age of 29, was recognized as the master of all English poets, the creative genius who had given English letters the heroic blank verse that all contemporary poets unhesitatingly adopted. Marlowe’s glorious morning was suddenly turned to misery and disgrace. On March 20, 1593, one Richard Cholmeley was arrested for heresy and confessed that he had been converted to “atheism” by Marlowe. This was the worst disgrace conceivable, and its usual punishment was burning at the stake.
On April 28, 1593, the name “William Shakespeare” made its first appearance in print as the author of the poem Venus and Adonis. Shakespeare dedicated this poem to the Earl of Southampton, and yet he wrote to the earl in the sonnets:
I may not evermore acknowledge thee
Lest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame.
On May 18, 1593, a warrant for Marlowe’s arrest was issued by the Privy Council, after Richard Bame, a professional spy, had filed a lengthy document with the councillors, impeaching Marlowe as a heretic. And Shakespeare wrote in sonnet 125:
Hence, thou suborned informer! a true soul,
When most impeached, stands least in thy control.
On May 20, 1593, Marlowe was arrested at the home of Sir Thomas Walsingham, Chiselhurst, to which Bame had directed the bailiffs. He was produced before the Privy Council and was granted bail.
On June 1, 1593, Marlowe was reported to have been stabbed to death by a bawdy serving-man in a lewd brawl at a Deptford inn, three miles from London. No one was arrested for the alleged killing, and no witness to the event is on record. At St. Nicholas Church, Deptford, the register records the burial of “Christopher Marlow, slain by Ffrancis Archer, the 1 of June, 1593.” But no grave in the churchyard was marked for Marlowe. And “Shakespeare,” in the autumn of life, wrote to the Earl of Southampton this remarkable reminiscence in sonnet 74:
But be contented: when that fell arrest,
Without all bail shall carry me away,
My life hath in this line some interest,
Which for memorial still with thee shall stay.
When thou reviewest this, thou dost review
The very part was consecrate to thee:
The earth can have but earth, which is his due;
My spirit is thine, the better part of me:
So, then, thou hast but lost the dregs of life,
The prey of worms, my body being dead,
The coward conquest of a wretch’s knife,
Too base of thee to be remembered.
Read in the light of Marlowe’s authorship this sonnet is clear, coherent, and an accurate statement of fact. Regarded as an emanation from the pen of the Stratford Will Shakspere, the sonnet has no meaning that any of our profound scholars have been able to discover in three centuries of study.
In this sonnet immortal Shakespeare identifies himself as Marlowe, the father of English tragedy, who was persecuted for his religious opinions, forced to feign death to escape torture at the stake, and compelled to adopt an alias in order to conceal the origin of the precious poems and dramas that he bequeathed us. That is why Shakespeare wrote his sonnets in absence. That is why he says he was a lonely outcast, forced to abide in foreign lands. That is why he dare not show his head where Southampton can prove him. Throughout the sonnets the bard tells us that disgrace has driven him from his native land and the side of his friend, Southampton. Time and again he tells us that all the world thinks he is dead, save Southampton. He says that his name must die with him, and that, if Southampton reveals his name after he is dead, it will make woe for the earl (71)
No longer mourn for me, when I am dead,
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell:
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so,
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then would make you woe.
O, if (I say), you look upon this verse,
When I perhaps compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse;
But let your love even with my life decay;
Lest the wise world should look into your moan,
And mock you with me after I am gone.
Which, of course, would be utterly ridiculous from a man of the name of Shakespeare, the most honoured and celebrated of the Elizabethan poets. But if Marlowe wrote it as a warning to Southampton that the earl is in danger of being charged as an accessory to the flight of a heretic, then it is certainly a rational, common-sense statement.
The bard who described himself in “Shakespeare’s Sonnets” cannot have been Shakspere of Stratford, Francis Bacon, the Earl of Oxford, or any other man that has been named so far, unless these sonnets are but a poet’s rage, and
The age to come would say “this poet lies.”
On the theory that Marlowe wrote the sonnets, there are no doubts and difficulties in the tragic tale. This theory makes the crooked straight and the rough places plane. It answers the vexata quæstio and proves sufficient to explain all the phenomena of the problem.
Having demonstrated the sufficiency of the Marlowe theory in the matter of the Sonnets, Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece, it remains only to determine whether this theory is necessary to explain the problem. Obviously it is necessary, unless and until some other sufficient theory is advanced, and to-day no one asserts that such another theory exists.
In this brief paper I have confined myself to a mere outline of the Marlowe theory as it applies to the sonnets and the poems dedicated to Southampton. I have not touched upon the larger question of the authorship of the forty-eight or fifty plays attributed to “Shakespeare,” ranging in quality from literary supremacy to low-grade mediocrity. I will say, however, that my examination of the plays and their histories reveals much evidence that Marlowe wrote all of the immortal plays that we are accustomed to speak of as “truly Shakespearean.” The same investigation convinces me that Will Shakspere, of Stratford, who was scarcely able to sign his name to legal instruments, was not the author of even the meanest of the apocryphal plays. His role, I think, was to contribute the use of his name and to remain out of sight and hearing of the London literati, which he seems to have done to perfection. For this he was handsomely paid by Southampton, as tradition records, and as his sudden affluence in 1597 would seem to confirm.
It is my conclusion that Marlowe, reported dead in 1593, not only lived to see the sonnets printed in 1609, but was alive to make many revisions of the plays that appeared in the first folio, 1623. Such plays as Othello (1622); King John (1591-1622); Richard III (1597-1622) and others seem to have been substantially altered and revised within the year preceding the folio of 1623. The revisions in every case (except, perhaps, Hamlet) seem to have improved the earlier work of the immortal bard, and therefore it was either the work of the immortal bard or of some genius entitled to rank with or above “Shakespeare.”
I regret that limitations of space forbid any attempt to present even an outline of the argument concerning Marlowe’s authorship of Hamlet, Lear, Othello, and the other great plays in this paper.
ARCHIE WEBSTER
This is going up to balance-off the surfeit of cock above… drawn around the same time I did the cocks. The woman depicted is a film director
A heady bricolage of penises, vaginas, Northern Soul stompers, and Elizabethan apocrypha. Where else can one find such variety?
Some top picks there P.O.S. It was your citation of ‘The Night’ which got me to thinking along these joyous lines.
Time to sprinkle a little talc and give the old footwork an outing…
The casino is dead. Long live T’Bunker!
!!!PHWOARR!!!
!!!
Magnificent.
That scene is just crying out for a Winterbottom-style feature.
The yodeling is what shifts it towards another glorious dimension, eh? And many years before digital sampling made the Duchamp-sonic-collage de rigeur, too (note all the proto-breakdancing, cossack kick-moves in the vid)
Sweet Jesus. Come On Train by Don Thomas has been appropriated by Visa. Evidently – I’ve just seen the abomination – it features in a new ad of theirs. Just when you think late capitalism has nothing left in its arsenal, the fuckers up the ante again.
The best and only revenge is to dance into a coma (conveniently collapsing backwards into one’s own bed)… which is what I intend to do. Comrades DJs Senseis More Modern Lore and Pussies of Steel, would yers shut off the fondue pots and eggnog fountains on yer ways out…?
One final pick, as requested by our esteemed host. This would be my pick from Geno Washington’s oeuvre (replete with comically ‘hip’ English intro)
Ooops I meant this.
ACES!!! (spins, clutching head, in disco boots and careens into bunk bed...)
Cargas: I’ve heard you speak about technology in contemporary fiction as a parallel to the situation of sex in Victorian fiction. Would you say a word about that?
Vonnegut: It was what I came across when I became a so-called science fiction writer, or when someone decreed that I was a science fiction writer. I did not want to be classified as one, so I wondered in what way I’d offended that I would not get credit for being a serious writer. I decided that it was because I wrote about technology and most American fine writers know nothing about technology. I’m a contemporary of Truman Capote, for instance; he very quickly gained a reputation as a literary person, and I very quickly gained a reputation as a hack.
I think one reason was that critics felt that a person could not be a serious artist and also have had a technical education — which I had. I know that English departments in universities, customarily without knowing what they’re doing, teach dread of the engineering department, the physics department and the chemistry department. And this fear, I think, is carried over into criticism. Most of our critics are products of English departments and are very suspicious of anyone who takes an interest in technology. I have an interest in technology because my father told me I could go to college only if I studied something serious.
Cargas: You mean practical?
Vonnegut: Yes, something practical. I am from a family of artists. Here I am making a living in the arts, and it has not been a rebellion. It’s as though I had taken over the family Esso station. My ancestors were all in the arts, so I’m simply making my living in the customary family way. But my father, who was a painter and an architect, was so hurt by the Depression, unable to make a living as an artist, that he thought I should having nothing to do with the arts. He warned me away from the arts because he had found them so useless as a way of producing money.
Cargas: Just to get back to that original question for a moment: You were saying that technology is absent from our novels in the same way that sex was absent from the Victorian novel.
Vonnegut: Well, I said that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.
Cargas: Previously you referred to the distinction that somebody else is obviously making between science fiction and serious literature. Do you make that distinction?
Vonnegut: There was a time when I would, and I can understand why people would make that distinction. Science fiction was very badly paid — There were many outlets for it. But it was customary to pay a penny a word, half a cent a word, and so science fiction writers, in order to make a living, had to go extremely fast. Therefore almost all science fiction stories were, and continue to be, first drafts simply because of the amount of money involved. They are not done well, usually. I would say that one science fiction story in 200 is a really good story. That one story is usually extraordinarily good — it’s as fine as anything that’s being written in the United States.
Cargas: That percentage may even apply to non-science fiction, mightn’t it?
Vonnegut: No. I think the so-called mainstream writers tend to work harder on their stories. A science fiction writer is not careful with language, usually uses quite simple language. And science fiction stories are not subtle. A mainstream writer, chances are, is more of a writer, is more obsessed with the language and will work over his material more.
Cargas: How do you classify yourself?
Vonnegut: I consider myself a mainstream writer, and I think I always was. I got classified as a science fiction writer simply because I wrote about Schenectady, New York. My first book, Player Piano, was about Schenectady. There are huge factories in Schenectady and nothing else. I and my associates were engineers and physicists and chemists and mathematicians. And when I wrote about the General Electric Company and Schenectady, it seemed a fantasy of the future to critics who had never seen the place.
Cargas: A commentary on the critics?
Vonnegut: Yes.
More from Kurt (from the above-cited interview):
Cargas: How do you regard the critics and their reception of your work? Are you being understood by them?
Vonnegut: Well, I am a critic, too. Criticism in the United States is commonly done by persons like myself. We have very few professional critics. I can really think only of those who work on the New York Times. There are a few others — Digby Diehl on the west coast. But I have reviewed perhaps a hundred books since I have been in the writing business, and on occasion I have done a very bad job. So I’m not entitled to complain if someone as shallow as I am reviews my books.
Do the critics understand me? I don’t know. There are some critics who are completely humorless. There’s a man on Newsweek who has reviewed every damn one of my books and he never sees anything funny in them. He does not understand that I am being ironical sometimes. He misses all my jokes. And I wrote him a letter and told him: really, you shouldn’t review books with jokes in them. The same man has now attacked my son’s book. So it goes on generation after generation.
The reason I have written so little is that it’s so damn hard to make jokes work. In Cat’s Cradle, for instance, there are these very short chapters. Each one of them represents one day’s work, and each one is a joke. If I were writing about a tragic situation, it wouldn’t be necessary to time it to make sure the thing works. You can’t really misfire with a tragic scene. It’s bound to be moving if the right elements are all present. But a joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it is supposed to snap.
Cargas: Can you tell when your own stuff snaps?
Vonnegut: Yeah, I can tell when a joke works. As a kid I was a jokemaker. I was the youngest member of my family, and the youngest child in any family is always a jokemaker because a joke is the only way he can enter into an adult conversation. My sister was five years older than I was, my brother was nine years older than I was, and my parents were both talkers. So at the dinner table when I was very young. I was boring to all those other people. They did not want to hear about the dumb childish news of my days. They wanted to talk about really important stuff that happened in high school or maybe in college or at work. So the only way I could get into a conversation was to say something funny. I think I must have done it accidently at first, just accidently made a pun that stopped the conversation — something of that sort. And then I found out that a joke was a way to break into an adult conversation.
I grew up at a time when comedy in this country was superb — it was the Great Depression. There were large numbers of absolutely top comedians on radio. And without intending to, I really studied them. I would listen to comedy at least an hour a night all through my youth and got very interested in how jokes worked, and what they were.
Cargas: How about now? Do you intentionally stay away from comedy because it might affect your style, or do you cultivate attention to it still?
Vonnegut: I still listen to comedy. There’s not much of that sort of comedy around. The closest thing is the reruns of Groucho Marx’s quiz show. I’ve known writers who were funny who stopped being funny, who became serious persons and could no longer make jokes. I’m thinking of Michael Frayne, the British author who wrote The Ten Men. He became a very serious person. Something happened in his head.
This may happen to me; I really don’t know what I’m going to become from now on. I’m simply along for the ride to see what happens to this body and this brain of mine. It may be that I am no longer able to joke — if that is no longer a satisfactory defense mechanism. Some people are funny and some are not. I used to be funny, and perhaps I’m not any more. There may have been so many shocks and disappointments that the defense of humor no longer works. You asked whether there are things we can’t joke about. Yes, I realize now that it’s not possible for me to make a joke about the death of John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King. It may he as I mature, as I become a middle-aged man and then an old man, that I will become rather grumpy because I’ve seen so many things that have offended me that I cannot deal with in terms of laughter.
Cargas: But the way you say that — you are observing what you’re doing — you don’t seem to have a fear of losing that ability to be funny.
Vonnegut: No. I’m simply interested in what is going to happen next. I don’t think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don’t have that feeling. I don’t have that sort of control. I’m simply becoming. I’m startled that I became a writer.
I’ve always loved that comic spirit in Vonnegut’s work. Not so much tragic gaiety as desperation going the extra mile, exerting itself for the common good (compare this with Amis who rarely gets beyond showcasing his own wit).
Oh, indeed, CDS More Modern Lore, not much comparison between Mart and Kurt (despite the fact that Mart stole the “Time’s Arrow” riff from Kurt, as we know, and then sprinkled “The Information” with Vonnegutisms)… Mart’s jokes are always lobbed high or low but outwards, away from Mart, while Kurt held very graciously on to his grenades after pulling the pin each time. Kurt always made me think of a Samuel Clemens softened, from outright scorn and disgust to tragic resignation, by an ameliorating access to the modern sex life and penicillin and great appliances.
Another thing about KV: here’s a writer (one feels) who could not be hoodwinked. An important thread running through the Thread.
JOURNAL EXCERPTS (from 2001, with reflections on the 1990s):
***(Updated periodically as I look through the old notebooks)***
8. strangers on a train
(august?)
I was thinking: the difference between terrible, mediocre, and good, is very slight. Whereas the difference between good and great is astronomical. And yet: the difference between great and meaningless is non-existent.
I was thinking this while wandering the streets to kill time. The streets and the U-Bahn.
If I were just a bit more disciplined I would rarely spend money in Berlin, because all the entertainment you’ll need is out there on the streets and in The Underground (for the price of a monthly ticket, Dm 110, which gives you thirty-one days of unlimited access). I’ve met girls on the U-Bahn, heard good music there and breezed away quite a few rainy German Sundays.
Today around five I took the line 8, richtung Hermannstrasse, at Alexanderplatz. It was one of the new trains, futuristic, bright yellow, where the individual cars are linked into one long hollow snake of a train. You can watch the tail curving from the very head, a distance of fifty to one hundred meters. When the train is packed it’s quite a sight, peering down the length of that serpent full of people. You can walk from one end to the other while the train is in motion, but you only ever see kids do this. Turkish kids, specifically. They are the kings of the U-Bahn.
I got on and took one of the few remaining seats, a little fold-down near the joint between one wagon and the next. The walls at these junctures are pleated like the bellows of an accordion. The seat faces the aisle. A gaggle of old ladies then boarded and were clumped near me, standing in the aisle, gabbing with animation and scanning for seats. I was just about to offer mine to the one nearest me when the train started, lurching forward and it sent the ladies reeling in the reciprocal direction. Two in particular were sure to have a nasty fall.
The one nearest me, a rotund lady of about seventy with a big red nose and tiny yellow teeth, wearing a flowered tent of a pink dress and a silly hat that suited her, shrieked and was sure to break a hip bone if I hadn’t reached out and grabbed her firmly by the waist, both hands squeezing. The g-force was incredible. I strained as the train accelerated and it didn’t help that her likewise-unbalanced friend was clutching her for an anchor, leaving me, in that awkward position from my seat, with double the body-mass to wrangle.
The heat of her fat warm waist in my hands was surprisingly erotic and certainly intimate… I was feeling her all the way through her dress and her slip and her corset. I knew about her what it was impossible to tell by simply looking at the thousands of other people I see on the streets and on the U-Bahn every day: that she was really alive, a living body that was busy in its long journey on this earth.
When her fleshy inertia had caught up to that of the train’s and there was no longer any danger of her falling she giggled hugely and redly and thanked me, smoothing the sides of her dress, “Danke schone!” and I said “Bitte!” and offered her my seat. Then I got off at the next stop, we two waving discreet goodbyes like separating adulterers.
12. the Stockholm syndrome
july 22nd
Crossing the Baltic in a train was a thrill. The train, an old Czech monster, was loaded into the belly of the ferry at the port in Malmo late in the evening. I watched the loading with my head stuck out of a window in the sleeper car’s corridor. Flags were snapping and rippling from various masts and flagpoles that towered and teetered around the port. Stadium lights glared. We rolled on groaning wheels into the ferry.
I stood in the corridor and watched the procedure like a kid on his first train trip. I hadn’t expected this at all. I naively expected a bridge or a tunnel. But this: a train in a ferry. I was too surprised to be afraid. I didn’t think once of all the ferry sinkings I’d read about, or seen on World News. I just stood there in the narrow corridor with my head out the window, feeling free and alive for the first time in weeks.
My compartment mate was out in the corridor with me. He was tall and thin, with the close-set eyes and beaky nose of a 40’s-era aristocrat; his mustache added to this impression; but there was something politely downtrodden, or washed-out, about him, that reeked of East German flat-bloc dweller. We communicated in a chunky goulash of English and German that suited the circumstances. We both used both languages. We never exchanged names, but made pleasant chit chat in a comradely fashion. He resembled the English actor Ralph Fiennes.
Our little sleeper compartment, equipped with dingy beds no longer than children, and with no efficient way for me to climb into my bunk without stepping on his, was a challenge that we faced together in good spirits. There was a tiny writing desk beside the curtained window that opened to reveal a sink (along with a stern warning in five non-English languages to avoid drinking the recycled water ).
We stuck our heads out of the corridor window and breathed the eggy air of the Baltic and I whispered a goodbye to Sweden and a goodbye as well to the affair that had ruined the city for me. I purged my mind of the only Swedish I’d bothered to learn (Jag pratar inte Svenska: “I don’t speak Swedish”) and we rolled into the belly of the ferry and were swallowed by it and its metallic borborygmus and the bluish odor of diesel fuel and I was glad.
It was a good crisp night. I had been sweltering from Stockholm until Malmo, stuck in a sun-baked wagon with sixty other passengers and no air conditioning. I was relieved to change at Malmo, despite the burden of having to heave my large trunk off one train and across the station, and onto the next. I left behind a Dane I’d been flirting with; a tall, young, bespectacled librarian with a razor-sharp, wheat-blonde bob and a pretty face that surprised me with the flattest profile I’d ever seen on a European. From the side she looked like a pale-haired Chinese giant. Quite beautiful.
We got off the train together and made our idle chatter, which shaded quickly into flirtatious adieu’s, when I was suddenly seized by an uncool panic because we were a hundred meters from the train and it dawned on me that I’d left my ticket on it (in a seat-pouch). I stuck her there guarding my trunk while I dashed back through the crowd along the platform towards wagon number 2, seat number 17… which killed that fledgling romance.
I was huffing and puffing when I made it back to her and we finally shook hands (tersely?) goodbye; I think she may even have been pissed. It’s hard to tell with Northern Europeans. Romance, anyway, in most cases, is a glass staircase (best unused). I have her number if I ever get curious.
But then I felt fine, as I made my connection and rolled out of Malmo while hefting my trunk onto an overhead rack with help from Ralph Fiennes. I was now on a Czech-made renovated German-owned Mitropa train, able to speak the language of the conductor and my compartment mate. I was suddenly much more comfortable. I had stopped sweating and stinking of it and I felt more in control of my destiny and the night, as I said, was crisp and clear and lit like a casino. We rolled into the ferry and could see only the industrial paint job of the belly of the ship and the rivets in its seams and stenciled specs and warnings.
I withdrew my head to avoid having it thunked by a girder we inched by and I ducked back into the sleeping compartment to have a look at a brochure that had been placed on the little desk by the window. It was a menu, and I briefly considered spending Dm 7.90 on Sechs Nürnberger Rostbratwürstchen (mit Antioxidationsmittel und Geschmackverstärker) but thought better of it.
Ralph suggested we look for the toilets on an upper deck of the ship since the toilets on a train of this type are unusable if the train isn’t in motion over open track. We waited for the orange-vested brakemen to secure the train, and for the ship to slide into the Baltic, and then we stepped out into the floodlit container along a narrow walk beside the train. Everything was painted beige or red or blac, and the ferry throbbed bone-jitteringly as the engines strained against the waves. There was nothing of the wobbly ride I had come to expect from using the little ferries that connect one neighborhood to another in Stockholm.
My bunk-mate led the way and shouldered through a heavy door that was stenciled with hieroglyphics referring to gift shops and casinos and toilets and I followed him up three or four flights of painted metal stair steps and we let ourselves in to an upper deck full of people in casual clothing, strolling back and forth on dull red carpeting. We mingled with these people; the other passengers on the ferry. Peculiar that I felt like a trespasser from steerage, since I’d crept up from the belly of the ship, when in fact I’d paid more for the ride then most of the passengers who’d boarded the ferry right there at the port. They were merely crossing the Baltic, whereas I had already covered a third of Sweden and my journey was due to continue for hours after the ferry docked in Rostock. I was headed for Berlin and had the rest of the night to go before the train was scheduled to ease into the Zoological Gardens Station at around seven in the morning.
We found the toilet and separated with politely embarrassed smiles and vented our bladders. Outside the toilet again, we shook hands (a post-penis-handling shake, mind you) and I let him return to our sleeping compartment alone. He wanted to sleep through the crossing but sleep was the last thing on my mind. I trusted him enough to let him alone for hours in that room with my backpack and trunk and most of my money and I resolved to investigate the ship. It was unlikely I’d be crossing the Baltic again in the foreseeable future, so I wanted to make the most of my little adventure. It was funny that I should be coming from a state in America that was larger than most of the countries that my fellow passengers hailed from and yet this ferry ride was my idea of a wild experience, while for them it was little more than an inconvenience of dreadful banality.
There were banks and banks of slot machines arranged along the promenade of deck seven, welded there cleverly to siphon off their coins and heal their trans-Baltic boredom with simulations of Vegas. In fact I sat there for a bit, in a row of chairs facing the slots and watched some Polish auto-worker in a pale gray track suit go from machine to machine, dumping in coins and winning jackpots. If he was a shill for the management I was the only audience to the spectacle. I remained un-tempted to gamble, so the show was wasted. I just watched him pull the levers, set off the jingles of the jackpots and slide on over to the next machine, with nothing more than raised eyebrows on his part to register the windfalls. It was either a miraculous night for him or the jackpots were paid in pennies. I suppose I should have gotten a closer look.
Never having been on an Ocean Ferry before, I must admit I was uncertain about how to behave. I’d walk right up to the smudged glass doors that opened out onto the wind-washed deck but I’d content myself with merely peering through them at the blackness that seemed to rise up in an infinitely gentle curve above the ferry. Then I’d pace the concourse, and cross a median, to the other side of the enclosed part of the ship and peer again, as tantalized by the outside as an insect in a jar. I was troubled by the paranoid fantasy that opening a set of these large double-doors would set off an alarm, but then some sloppily-dressed Russians with a moon-faced child in a slick red raincoat appeared at the glass and pushed insside through these very doors, squeezing by me, sauntering in on the carpet from the prow of the ship and setting off no (audible) alarm.
It was fantastic out there. I was in California-style shorts but bundled in a rubberized rain jacket which features a hood and it was perfect in the chilly weather of the Baltic. I had sweltered in the train from Stockholm wearing this jacket and felt like a fool to have even brought it but now I was vindicated. I was cozy and self-contained.
I had with me a British magazine… style and music and movies. I found a deck-chair beside a pair of teenage girls and settled in under the floodlights and I set about reading, or pretending to, running my fingers over the pictures but being too distracted to pay attention to the text. We were the only ones out there, the teenage girls and I. They were singing perfectly foreign little pop songs in touchingly high and imperfect voices and I couldn’t have been more delighted.
One was blonde and sweetly unremarkable and the other had her hair pinned-up and cheaply dyed a beet-red that had been some kind of proletariat statement in this part of Europe for fifteen years and I relished the naïve energy they blessed the prow of the ferry with. A thread-thin line of lights were dimly apparent on the German side of the water, looking like a hairline crack in the black flesh of the sky. The stars above us, unfortunately, were as invisible as anything at the bottom of the Baltic. But that didn’t keep me from being exhilarated. There’s nothing more depressing than an adult pretending to be wide-eyed in a counterfeit of youth but the pre-cynical naivete of the young is a rejuvenating treat… in fleeting doses. Too much of it and you feel compelled to set them straight. Their singing was just the right dose of it.
In fact I thought of another moment in which hand-made music and the night and bright lights had blended similarly to thrill me with a sense of life’s possibilities: a time in London, ten years before, when I’d been crossing Leicester square on a Saturday night and I’d happened upon a combo of bryl-creamed street musicians… a sax and an upright bass and a guy thwacking a snare drum with brushes… playing the theme from A Hard Day’s Night in 5/4 time with generously un-ironic verve. Couples in white dinner jackets and evening gowns were flowing over the cobble-stoned square in droves, with British pomp-and-shyness, and London suddenly swung for me, if only for five minutes, but what a five minutes they were.
Which, in turn, triggered other nostalgias, dragging me back even further to another night at the distance of yet another decade during which, at a tender age, I’d found myself waiting for someone (she’s married and motherly and spectacularly gray now) when some guy with slicked-back Rome-black hair and an intrepidly large nose had had the nerve, while wearing (again) a white dinner jacket, to be strumming a nylon-stringed guitar and singing Stand By Me to his patrician date, who struck me then as being trapped between the conflicting emotions of being humiliated by, and falling in love with, the gesture.
I had to admire the guitar-strumming fool. Did it work, I wonder? Did she give-in to him that night? Did they eventually marry, have children, and deteriorate together? Or was he at it again the very next Saturday, trying it out on some other debutante? I thought, I remember, as I watched him pull that preposterously corny stunt: you must learn to be fearless like him.
15. the Stockholm syndrome cont’d (june 26)
The air outside this cafe, which is a handful of stair steps down from street level (it’s like taking tea in a womb), is gray-green with the imminent force of a steaming summer deluge. The thunder is ready to bang like city-sized trash lids; cars are rushing by in the twinkling air; people darted for doorways.
I had been loping briskly along Kungsholmstrand, meaning to have a long walk today. Little boats were bobbing and knocking together like skulls in the greenish water and I was thinking how lovely it all was; those quaint old red-brick buildings with black roofs and piping, in a row along the opposite bank and the relatively sweet air and the innocently dour Swedes crunching along the gravel bank in a trickle towards me. But I saw the blackness coming up out of the east like a magician’s cape and I knew rain would come exploding from under it and scurried back up towards a main thoroughfare and found this cafe. A girl is singing along to the radio music coming over the cafe speakers. With her frail, shaky, touchingly confident voice. The song is in English and she’s glancing intermittently at me, having pegged me as American and I have to smile. Let her invent her story about me.
Horrible, silly, unmusical song.
(july 4th)
When I walked into this McDonald’s off of Kungsgatan, I walked in with a sheepish grin on my face, as though I expected the fourteen-year-old Swede in the paper hat who took my order to sneer at me and say Oh, suddenly you’re not too good for us. She very graciously withholds judgment as I plunk down my crumpled money for the product. But is this really me, doing this, I keep thinking. Or, I mean, which me is doing this? I’ve been doing lots of things I don’t usually do since landing a few weeks ago; it’s always that way when I leave the country: I’ve been staying up all night and watching sitcoms on television and taking taxi cabs for easily walkable distances too.
It’s a peculiar freedom; nothing counts here; I’m surprised that the average American tourist doesn’t go on a giddy crime spree once they get through Customs. Some do of course, but that’s usually only when they get themselves into the Third World. Sex tourism and drug smuggling. But those phony Europhiles are on their best behavior when they land their corn-fed couch-crushing asses in Yerp. Their kids…the Student Scourge… are a different matter.
The fish sandwiches I order are terrible. They taste old and breeze-dried and over-handled like I’ve been sold display models. I don’t know if that’s a poor reflection on the quality control in Sweden or a marker of the inevitable degradation of all cultural values over time, since the last occasion I was in a McDonald’s was five years ago and that was to vent my bladder, so how do I know there hasn’t been a worldwide decline in the goodness of this horrible stuff since then?
I take my tray with humble gratitude and find a well-placed seat. Walking through the maze of red plastic chairs, I think of the best seat to be found in a McDonald’s in the world, in my ignorant opinion: the left corner of the glassed-in second-floor dining room overlooking Leicester Square in London. Get a window seat on a Friday evening.
I don’t know why I feel so ashamed to be sitting here, chewing this stuff. Anyone who can see me at the moment, debasing the temple of my body at the altar of vulgarity and convenience, is here doing exactly the same thing, and they don’t even seem to think it’s bad for them in any way. If anything, they’re ingesting some nice strong Yankee Cultural DNA. So why should I be embarrassed?
I’m sitting at a sidewalk table, under a big red umbrella, watching the spectacular Swedes walk by, the aesthetic rightness and pleasure of which is balanced neatly by the gastrointestinal affront to my system I paid forty Kroner to perpetrate against myself, not to mention the parallel attack on my ears by the tinny Europop blared by the speakers mounted overhead as a complimentary torture.
( july 7th)
I’m sitting in my favorite cafe. This is the one I most often write in. And to my horror, it’s just been invaded by three American students. It’s not in the tourist part of the town, so it’s a surprise to see them here.
It’s a little cafe, with only ten tables, and they’re sitting directly across from me, distracting me with their English! As awkward as it is to be in a country where I can’t speak the language, one of my greatest pleasures happens to be the immunity to small talk I enjoy when I can’t understand a word I’m hearing. So this sudden attack of English is a drag. Over-hearing meaningless chatter is as bad as sitting next to a guy who’s smoking a cigar.
So I’m trying to sit here writing, but I can’t help listening to them complain about the airports in France, or brag about the wild time they had last night. They’re wearing the uniform: the expensive sportswear (orange nylon shorts and pocket tee shirts and trendy sandals) that you’ll see on MTV if you watch it long enough.
A few days ago I had an Existentialish Panic. Wandering through a park, following a steady stream of people who looked like they knew where they were going, I came to a stage full of strange Swedish musicians, surrounded by an amphitheater of about two thousand people.
I took a seat to the side of the stage and listened for a while (they were playing some species of avant garde jazz) and watched the crowd and suddenly it hit me that I was the only earthtoned person there. A couple of thousand people and not one brown face! Such a wall of blonde hair and pink cheeks was blinding and I suddenly felt terribly alone. I kept thinking: what am I doing here? I’m thousands of miles away from anyone who knows me. I could disappear into a hole in the sidewalk and no one would notice.
Sitting there in the middle of that pure-white crowd, I felt, just for a moment, a terror pass over and re-invent me.
16. the light bulb dumbfounded the Victorians
Sitting here in an Internet Café and writing letters; the average patron is much better at using computers and fifteen-twenty years younger than I am, an advantage that makes for capitalism’s defining joke: the technology eventually defeats the generation that creates it, wielded by the generation intended by the creators to be the technology’s ideal consumer.
Notice how television wiped out the people of my mother’s era, soon after radio had come along to mock and tease the veterans of WW1. Previous to that, the light bulb dumbfounded The Victorians: Victorians are unthinkable on brightly lit streets at night, or in the candid light of an incandescent bulb in a bedroom.
20. The Limits of The Possible
(October 14) (sharing a house with middleclass Hippies)
Last night, as ever, I peeled off my socks before climbing into bed. The socks hit the floor halfway between the left bottom corner bed post and the straight-backed chair that sits in front of the radiator (which is under the window), a spot not far from the closet. There are no closets, really, in Berlin; not as an architectural feature, anyway. They’re free-standing furniture.
So: there my beautiful black socks were, stretched out like sleepy little cats on the carpet. I climbed in bed, clicked the lights off, and before I knew it, I was being summoned all groggy and half-lidded from sleep at five in the morning, because my sweet Hippie housemates were preparing for a secondhand sale to be held at the Rathaus Schoneberg, on Belziger Strasse, a huge and ancient court house which is the German version of our idea of City Hall, except here in Berlin every major neighborhood gets its own. A___ and S___ were participating in a gigantic Flea Market to be held in the parking lot surrounding the Rathaus.
So here was A___, rooting around in the big old free-standing schrank, or closet, in my room, not far from where my socks are laid out. She comes in, roots around for clothing to sell, and leaves. I mumble a sleep-sentence to her and slip back under. Three hours later I’m up and around, and almost immediately notice that one of my nice black heavy wool socks is missing. There’s the twin, but the other is gone. And it’s clear to me what happened, so I don’t entirely panic: how likely are S___ and A___ to sell one black sock at a Flea Market, no matter how low the asking price?
Later that evening, they come back home with the boxes of the paper-back books and the sweaters-with-buttons missing and greasy oven mitts that they weren’t able to sell, grinning from ear to ear because they were nevertheless able to sell five hundred d-marks worth of third-stage junk (a packrat mentality endures here in The Capitol). I mention the missing sock to A___. I suggest the obvious scenario. I put it to her that she very possibly scooped that black sock up with whatever bundle of clothing she harvested from the closet, so close to the last spot on this Earth I saw that sock.
“No,” she says, shaking her head with a sweet smile, “It’s not possible.”
Her choice of words is remarkable.
This is a woman, a Hippie, who believes in fucking Goddesses and Wood sprites, ferchrissakes (she really does; and also that chanting in a candle-lit room with a couple of frowzy old chicks and pony-tailed coots-with-bellies will heal the Earth or in any wise affect the Earth or other people or animals). Here is just such a woman, insisting that my suggestion that she may have accidentally gotten my black sock mixed up with her secondhand clothing at five-in-the morning in a corner of a dark room very near to where the sock was last seen is… impossible.
21. A Miracle
(October 19 2001)
Early this morning I woke up to vent my bladder and saw my black sock lying there, with an aura of shamed pique, in front of the bedroom door.
23. If you can’t be a star in the heavens, be a lamp in a chamber
Arabic saying
25. Hegel
Hegel: “Die, and become what you are.”
The Categorical impulse that dismisses life as an irrelevant detail; a glitch; in an otherwise neat table of chemical properties. The Table doesn’t make sense until you factor Life out of it.
26. JJDD.
(written in 1997 about the events of 1990)
It was November in 1990, my first month in Berlin, sometime around one or two in the morning. I was in the then very-hip club called Orfeuo, run by a seven-foot tall character with a head like an Easter Island totem named E___ G___. He was purely an Ivory Coast kind of fellow, with an Idi Amin-looking Daddy who ran a disreputable (and so highly successful) club in Paris.
E___ G___ would stand at the bar with his arm around my shoulder and point me towards various girls there and tell me, in his pidgin English (the laconic fellow was illiterate in four languages) that I could have one.
“You want?” he’d say.
“I don’t think so.” I’d say, making him laugh.
After one week of hanging out at this club, and turning down dozens of Emilio’s offers (some of which were obviously relatively fresh, eager to use my thing like a gentle utensil with which to scrub the E___ G___ residue from all of their openings), I spotted a sweet-looking blonde with her hair done up in a bun; she was a Stewardess with a subsidiary of Lufthansa, as it turned out, by the name of B____.
We left the club together (E___ G___ slapping my back on the way out), drove to the de rigeur all night café called The Schwärtzes Café, took a table with a black vinyl table cloth and two low-burning candles on it and pawed each other with liberating unselfconsciousness for the better part of the remains of the evening’s morning. Being an absolute stranger in that town, I didn’t care who saw us. That’s the thing: those first few anonymous months anywhere are the best and I try to take advantage of them, because everybody starts recognizing me soon enough and then I can’t get away with anything.
B____ and I made like Romeo and Juliet for a couple of weeks, actually reading Shakespeare to each other in bed some nights and chewing face in smoke-filled cafes and developing even, already, a little litany of inside-jokes and imaginary cutesy-pie characters, like “Korny the Pit Bull”, our invisible dog, around which to culture a shaky sense of Usness. I still have a picture of B___ all got-up in some spangled dress with a gigantic number 10 taped on her back in some ridiculous Bavarian tango competition, her gold-leaf hair swept up into that cruelly immaculate bun and her breasts like the intrepid projections on the figurehead on the prow of one of those old-time ships, smiling a smile that is so obviously and sickeningly false, in retrospect, that it’s amazing that I could stomach touching her.
One night I saw who she was under all that kissable Dresden Doll porcelain. I saw that she had weird and love-hating depths. I trembled beside her and protested, instinctively, the rank rotten root of her personality that I’d been blind to those first ecstatic lip-licking nights. I said, “B____, I warn you, if you don’t quit it I’m leaving, I fucking promise, I’m leaving and I’m not coming back.”
She just laughed at me. Ha! It was two in the morning; there were inches of snow on the ground and it was still coming down at an oblique angle and I lived in a wretched little flat about three or four miles away.
I got out of B____’s bed, put on my clothes, saluted her wonderful porcelain ass and stepped out into the cold, cold slippery fucking night and walked for an hour to my miserable little unheated flat near York Strasse. I felt strong as a fucking Malamute but also miserable beyond reckoning as I kicked the mushy scabs of ice off of my goddamn sneakers in my cold kitchen which looked out across a desolate white field at a grimly-illuminated S-Bahn station where I could watch lonely figures wait for the train at odd hours of the night. There was a coal-burning oven in the only other room and I could only keep warm by leaning against it when it was burning four or five bricks which I had to purchase in 25-kilo bundles. That flat didn’t even have its own bathroom. I had to share one with the filthy rural Turks down the hall who used to take the family goat in there to texture the walls with shit (or was it just granny?). I found myself trekking downtown every morning to void my prissy bowels in the American-style WC at Burger King.
I slept fitfully that night, as they say. How I accomplished sleep at all, breaking up with my first Berlin girlfriend on such a bleak night, was in-and-of itself a triumph of self-awareness. I realized that any romantic feelings for B____ (or anyone) were willed. And willed, really, with the crude mechanism of visual and verbal repetition: we repeat the name of the beloved often; we gaze at his/her photo-booth picture, etc. State-sanctioned auto-hypnosis, in effect. What was willed can be un-willed and I un-willed it.
I was ready to start all over again the next day and so that very evening, which was a Saturday, I walked straight into Orfeuo and scanned the room for the most intimidating woman there. I saw her standing on the periphery of the dance floor, with two friends (a dumpy little couple; the male obviously secretly in love with their friend judging by the force of his glower) and approached this stranger with this fearless introduction: If you give me your phone number, I promise you won’t be sorry. Her initials were/are JJDD.
Of course we both were (sorry), later, but we also had a great time and I forgot soon enough about B___, whose mother voted for the neo-Fascist party that year.
31. Paging Carl Jung
Saturday, October 27, 2001
I decided to go on a monster walk, from the Ku’damm to somewhere in Kreuzberg. It was a very nice day… just chilly enough to wear a sweater without stinking it up with sweat. I was in a very good mood, feeling energetic and optimistic and walking at a good clip. Took a few unusual detours here and there to avoid sampling the same old streets.
Anyway, by around 1pm, after following a very convoluted path, I found myself in the neighborhood around Mehringdamm, walking up Zossener str. towards the U-Bahn. I peered in a record shop window and something (perhaps a Leonard Cohen record in the window… her parents once owned a cottage next to Cohen’s on the Island of Hydra) triggered a series of thoughts about a long-lost Ex, JJDD. The series of thoughts about her resolved to a single sentence she once spoke to me: “You should let your girlfriends do some of the work, sometimes, too,” a sentence I never understood completely. It was after we’d broken up and I knew she was referring to us, but how exactly? I kept turning over the sentence in my mind. Why I re-opened this old case for rumination I’ll never know, but I continued up Zossener Strasse, pondering JJDD’s decade-old words and looked up to see JJDD herself, who I haven’t seen since a chance encounter in 1996, walking towards me.
What are the odds against this?
*******
Last Sunday I bumped into T___ (the Film Producer for whom I am writing “Tangled Up In Red”) at the Ostbahnhoff. I had gone to the Ostbahnhoff by accident, on the wrong train and had never been before. Ugly station. I went up a flight of stairs and crossed this grisly complex to another set of tracks try to find a train back to the station I’d started from. A train pulled in, I stepped in randomly and waited for the door to shut and the train to leave. Just before the train left, T___ stepped on, standing face to face with me, before we even recognized each other: he was coming in from Leipzig. We then had lunch. This is a city of 5 million people, with the surface area of Chicago. I was as likely to bump into T___ in Berlin that way as I would have been to bump into Willie Mays standing on a street corner on Lake Shore Drive in 1972.
*******
In 1980 I was sitting in the large room/small apartment on Franklin ave, reading a book by Richard Brautigan, a passage about killing coyotes with explosive traps. Brautigan wrote out the word BOOM in caps and the very moment that my eyes read the word, a balloon that had been sitting in the closet exploded.
That same year, I was approaching the intersection where Birch Pharmacy is/was, where there is an exit ramp from the highway. I was waiting for the light, when two cars pulled alongside each other, just off the highway, also waiting for the light: the people in both cars all seemed to know each other. “Did you see that accident on the highway?” a guy in the one car shouted, with extreme excitement, to the guys in the other. Exactly one second after he shouted that, there was a stupendous collision in the intersection, right in front of their cars.
32. DeLillo
“What’s the point of waking up in the morning if you don’t try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?”
and
‘Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it’s the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. I’ve always seen myself in sentences … There’s a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer’s will to live.’
33. shyness
Is pathological male shyness in the face of female beauty Nature’s way of keeping the un-self-confident out of the gene pool?
34 (written in 1999)
She was a spectacular beauty before she got in the mother business. She was big-eyed and high-cheek-boned and petite, the color of gingerbread, with thick black hair to her waist. She was a great dancer; she was nicknamed “The Brown Bomber.” We are from a long line of race-mixing quadroons and mulattoes. African cocks and Irish pussies. Scottish tongues on Cherokee nipples. Dutch booties with speculative Creole fingers in them. She was often mistaken for an East Indian. Handsome men fought over her and my father eventually won. He couldn’t have known, at the moment of their first kiss, how eager she was to hop down from that pedestal (beauty) and she couldn’t have known how simple it was to trigger his infidelities. By the time I was five years old they were legally separated.
“Mother,” I asked one Friday night (my trans-Atlantic calls to her were always on Friday night), “How often did you and you-know-who have sex?”
I had hit on this topic as a way to divert her in an interesting direction for a change, rather than sit passively on the other end and sift through my own interior minutiae while she blathered. So: mother, how often did you and you-know-who…
“Every day,” she said. “Every day until we divorced.”
And I thought: that fool.
I also felt a bit cheated: my own beautiful wife was cold. My sex life was terrible. Being faithful, for me, meant being alone. I was hungry for some new Facts of Life to explain the paradox of my situation. I had been treated so much better as a womanizer than I was now being treated as a faithful husband! I couldn’t help noticing, over the years, that it was the noble impulse, as opposed to the selfish reflex, which was invariably punished. So when she told me about her unstinting sex life with my playboy-father I was fascinated.
“Every single day?” I asked, my voice in italics.
She laughed. “Every. Single. Day.”
But now I know, of course, with the additional wisdom of the years that have passed since that conversation, that my mother was full of shit when she said that. My father was no luckier with her then than I am now [ed.'s note: good grief, what a terrible time that was; the former Mrs Augustine is now safely ensconced in a suburb of London]. And she was of course miserable with him. She may have believed what she claimed; that they fucked every day until their divorce; but it simply isn’t true.
Between her revisionist reminiscences and her ignorance about certain fundamental facts of The Universe, along with her dependence on psychics and “experts” on television for hard information: where, really, has my mother been living all this time?
When she dies, one day, the saddest thing is this: she won’t even be leaving Reality behind when she goes. She will be lapsing into Unreality from its foyer.
35. Sorry Stevie
from April 4
It’s pretty obvious why people, in such numbers, put so much energy into personalizing the universe. Without giving it an intelligent center at which to direct your thoughts, where do you send all this grief and disappointment? Who do you beg for leniency from? Who do you blame for all of this?
I thought this while we were driving up the mountain.
The ride up here was beautiful and terrifying. “Here” is the San Jacinto mountains, where my oldest friend, JJ, lives. We started the trip well after midnight, accommodating JJ’s need to look for love in a public space on Fifth Avenue, not far from where I live, where strangers gather and commit the atrocity of free-form dance. I haven’t asked him about the kind of music they play… baggy low-fi hippie crap (the anthems of our youth), or that nihilistic march music that our casually inhuman children dance to? The one kind of music sad for one reason and the other for the opposite.
JJ lives a two hour drive away from me, up this mountain, so he justifies the long and hazardous trek (more on that soon) by wedging in this free-form dance bullshit before we make the trip each time. This little attempt at accidentally meeting the woman we’ve both been trying to meet with such far-fetched strategies for most of our lives, of course, never works. How can you work at having an accident? But that’s what this search for love is all about. And JJ seems to think that these free-form dance things are the ticket.
He pays at the door and then blends into the hopping, grinding and waltzing crowd, trying to match his hopping, grinding or waltzing movements with whatever approachable female whose breasted silhouette he can barely make out as he moves across the dance floor to pantomime his interest. Pretty silly, in a way, for a man at his age. But then again, acting monotonously unsilly at this age is the first symptom of the rapid onset of that wasting disease called Death.
I’ve been guilty of the same sad hunt, but my methods are better, I think. I may not have found Her [ed.'s note: five years after the last entry in this journal I found Her] in all of these years, but I’ve managed to enjoy quite a few finger-burning romances with very smart and nice looking women, many of whom each turned out to have something not just difficult, but downright evil, at their centers, in the end. As we all do: have the evil center, I mean. Which is the problem. And by ‘evil’ I don’t intend to mean Satanic: I mean, rather, a (often dormant) talent for nemesis. One must merely scrape the surface a bit to reveal it. But it’s the digging which frees the Jinn.
The mistake I make is an attempt at intimacy in the truest sense of the word. Most “relationships” are loose affiliations between well-acquainted strangers in the interest of selfish and obvious goals: sex, status, protection. But I’ve invented this ill-advised program of questing towards The Other’s core. Not just during the sex act, or about the sex act, either. I want to know. I take the trouble of learning the Personal Myth, the catechism of firsts and lasts and turning points and then I want to go further. The surface isn’t good enough for me. I’m always digging.
Anyway, more evidence of the hazards of Individualism. Why can’t I be like the others? Small-talk, as it turns out, is there for a reason. Developed in the laboratory of a million years of socialized hominids. Small-talk keeps the surface intact. No good in breaching that surface, I guess, except through apertures designated for the purpose.
When we started the drive towards, and then up, the mountain, it was raining, which had me worried enough. It was raining on a Friday night, so late that we were turning the corner into Saturday morning; so there was the fear of having drunk drivers to dodge; disappointed drunks fleeing the desolate light of closing time and no longer so terribly attached to the idea of living. And us out there on the road with them, two chumps with only their sobriety, and their furious wills to live (in other words: optimism!) to protect them.
JJ was talking about a pretty girl, and her friend, who he had talked to at the dance thing. The friend just out here from Massachusetts. That’s what you get from these sad little Her-hunts: the story. The story about some pretty girl; a story including a bit of Her story because being in possession of personal details shows that She actually talked to you. Maybe even that she was considering you. Briefly.
Yeah, this is what you get. Not much else. And even that’s only worth anything at all if there’s a friend to tell it to soon after, because these stories are always so thin that they don’t hold up much longer than a week. You can’t phone a friend and lead the conversation with: a week ago I talked to a pretty girl for ten minutes.
So JJ was telling me The Story while I watched the slick black road. The rain would thicken and then clear and thicken and clear in a pattern like breathing : terror and relief, terror and relief. When the rain was thickest, peering out the windshield was like staring at the sudsy window of a washing machine, but still we were traveling at the speed that I associate with road conditions of infinite visibility and perfect traction.
The headlights were splintering into nail-shaped sparks shattering on a barrier of water no further than a few feet in front of the car’s bumper. We might have been parked on the shoulder, waiting it out, except for the telltale clue of the furious hum of the road under us. And JJ would turn to me, off and on, making some chatty point while steering, reflections of rain-glimmer on his face. I was clutching my kneecaps. I was fucking terrified because I did not want to crash and die. And then I thought: is he getting a little… I don’t know… thrill from scaring me this way? The tiniest little sadistic thrill that even such an old and harmless friend can’t, in the end, resist indulging in, since so many other avenues of power were blocked so long ago? Because I know how I would behave. If something I was doing was clearly scaring someone I would stop it.
On and on we drove, climbing a deceptive slope of irrevocable ascent that soon enough transformed that menacing rain into lethal snow as we tried to hug the curves that tried to hug the breast of the mountain. Somewhere around an elevation of four thousand feet, with a dark-green serrated blade of pines, and sugar-frosted boulders, on the one side, and a fall on the other, we tried to take a curve and lost control of the physics with a sickening sense of slipping… of tearing the thin skin of control. We spun through two complete circles, elongated into the loops of a careless drunken signature as we skated side-long at fifty miles an hour across the median.
We slammed against a snow bank on the wrong side of the road, facing the wrong direction, and do you know the only thing that JJ could think of to say as we were flying, preparing for death in oncoming traffic, or over the shoulder and down the mountain, with broken necks, into the valley below?
“Sorry, Stevie.”
Perfect last words.
40. Every drop of rain turns into a grain of rice-Vietnamese saying
41. The public does not know what is possible. But we do. -Akio Morita, founder of Sony
September 11, 2001
[ed.'s note: I was duped, in my own way, by this event, at the time, but soon recovered]
A metaphysical trade dispute between corporations has erupted and then solidified into a famous image: a jet full of passengers flown deliberately into the world’s ugliest symbol. Of the two warring corporate factions (Arabic Mystic Executive vs Wasp Agnostic Executive) the Arab Executives are more charismatic, being bearded and therefore sexy in a repulsive way. The Wasp Agnostics are not sexy and universally hated, even by themselves but have the advantage of appearing to be more casual.
No one on the planet honestly wants to be dominated by either of these Killing Attitudes masquerading as Cultures, but now we all pay the price for having turned a blind eye to the antisocial and inconsiderate behavior of both corporate camps for so long. The poor, who never have the foggiest notion what hits them, will die in the greatest numbers: flaming objects will be falling out of the sky on them for years to come as a result of this commercial.
When the elephants fight, the grass is trampled, as the Vietnamese say. And they would know.
45. In Search of The Mortal Woman
proposed text for an imaginary “Personals”-type Ad
Interesting unusual mixed-race super-wit, cappuccino-colored and fit and suitably shy about his astounding genital equipment, seeks SSBCFIM (slender sane bright comfortable female indomitable mammal) who is acutely-yet-not-morbidly aware of her own mortality and therefore sees with utter clarity the sickening waste of time embodied by Society’s preoccupations: status, convenience and the spectacles of the herd. I have waited a very long time to join you so contact me immediately, before another chocolate-mousse-eating-ecstasy at midnight in a tent in the backyard of our newly-purchased house in Spain goes by without us.
46. Murder In The Aisles
The difference between an Artist and a Hack is that an Artist knows the difference between an Artist and a Hack.
49. At what point does a belief become a mental illness? November 28
Happened upon A___ in the kitchen, having a quiet moment to herself with a magazine. Out of a comment-making reflex I inquired about the magazine, which, as it turns out, is devoted to Fairies. And why not? There are magazines devoted to Guns, Hamsters, Diabetes, Stamps, etc. Why not Fairies?
This particular issue was focused on Fairy Clothing. They have somehow snapped pictures of FairyWear? I asked, mirthfully. Well, she responded in all seriousness: “People have sewn the clothing based on exact descriptions.”
51. Sherlock Holmes
Dec 11
Was standing with A___ at the S-Bahn station at Eichkamp when a pleasant-looking man with white fringe around his ears and a healthy-looking tan… he was in his late ‘fifties… tapped her on the shoulder. He looked like the owner of tobacco shop. They hugged a greeting, chatted very briefly and he was off as our train arrived, squeezing A___’s arm with affection in parting.
Sitting in the S-Bahn wagon as the train pulled out, A___ explained that the man, Thomas K_, had been her Geography teacher when she’d been fourteen years old. Wow, I said, that was quite a while ago. Yes, she answered: he’s my father’s age. He was always flirtatious with the girls in my class, she said, and then he married a girl two classes ahead of me.
I was still busy being surprised when she added, Then he married a girl one class ahead of me. She paused and embellished: his first wife was a beautiful English belly dancer.
This made me laugh. I said, How did a German Geography teacher manage to meet an English belly dancer?
She thought about it. I’m not sure, she concluded, but I remember that he always dressed like Sherlock Holmes; that kind of hat, and the cape and everything.
57.
the biggest impediment to understanding Existence is the presumption that there’s a plan behind it all. Once you’ve dispensed with that false-lead as a starting point, it’s much easier to make headway on the topic.
those girls
I sometimes remember my middle-twenties, when I was old enough to know real women but too young to know that they were. Real women, I mean. I thought they were just old teenagers at that age. Older, and less fun, but not essentially different from the teenage girls they’d recently been, which meant, I mean, not essentially different from me.
At the age of twenty five I thought that twenty-five-year-old women wanted to swing with me on swing-sets on playgrounds on foggy midnights; I thought that they still wanted me to read poetry to them, poetry I’d written for and about them, while we sat on boulders by the river, weeping at the beauty of life. That’s what I thought. I miss those days; that ignorance; those girls.
So profoundly glad to reread Eryn; Edwina this snowy morning. I would say that was a pretty loving “swipe” you took at August Wilson. I wish he could have read the story. I think you might have gotten his attention with “cheeses that would make a vulture puke.”
The reference to the recollections of the old porn star–were you yet aware of the video you posted of same–chicken or egg?
Now I’m going to reread CDS Neil’s The Road to Route One. I was shocked that it ended so soon. Now to plumb the watery depths.
CDS Frances!
A) Not a “loving” swipe, I’m afraid… neutral at best. Larf
B) The vision of the old porn star in Eryn; Edwina vs the video of the old porn star posted on TET 3.0 (I think): purest serendipity. Though I’m certain, now that we’ve seen the video, that it’s her my Writerly Superconscious was in touch with…
C) Let’s have a spirited discussion about The Road to Route One, eh? We can draft in CDS More Modern Lore and CDS Neil, both, plus other Comrades as happen by. There’s something very much Sam-Beckett-writes-a-multi-part-episode-of-The-Prisoner about it. On the one hand, these things are usually best left “unexplained” (ie, non-demystified)… but that shouldn’t stop us from asking, for example, what image CDS Neil had in his mind when it all began to condense there…
(Wait: did I mean “Beckett”… or “Pinter”…?)
Yes! But please feel free to start without me. I’m just heading down to the gym and will hope to contribute a few slick observations post-sweat.
We’re waiting for Comrade DJ Sensei Neil to swing by himself; or, perhaps, CDS More Modern Lore (his official aficionado)…? We’re going to turn the high-powered beams of technical curiosity on ‘em and offer a bucket of Gratitudicals for original material (just a line; a paragraph; an autobiography..!) to flesh TET out with.
THE FICTIVE IN A SIMULOCRACY
Part Two-C: The Passive Goebbels function
“The sexual revolution,” he says, “was the greatest social change I lived through. It was a tremendous break with the past. You could feel it in the air. You knew something was happening. It was scary and intoxicating and definitely new. Suddenly you felt all these restraints were lifting and you were wondering how you were going to navigate this.” For boys this navigation could be fraught. But “the girls had to make all the difficult choices. And the girls suffered and some of them got a bit twisted out of shape. It was a very difficult manoeuvre for them”.
Mart can be such a credulous cunt, sometimes. And, clearly, the great shift of the “sexual revolution” was not in the power-proportions of the relations between Male and Female but in the fact that, for the first time on the historical record, the Underclass were given sex lives more-or-less similar to the sex lives accessible by the Aristocracy, who have been into adultery, pedophilia, date rape and bestiality since long before Catherine the Great or Caligula, even. Suddenly, the pretty young offspring of the rubbish men and the seamstresses were not just available to be fucked-unwed, without consequence, by a Lord but also by each other.
Amis’s real concern here, he says, is to demonstrate that white Western men like himself once enjoyed supremely uncomplicated relationships with Muslim girls. Far from inciting Muslims by making big-bummed, gold-digging Gloria an apostate, he thinks the book promotes a “harmonial” view of interracial or interfaith relationships. Should he choose to, Amis would be able to say, like Keith, that he is “no stranger to Islamic talent”, having, as a young man, dated girls of Persian and Pakistani origin. His point is, “you had warm feelings for someone without being aware of religion. There we all were and it was not considered. The gulf was bridgeable and was quite frequently bridged without any ill-feeling or prejudice.
“It was only in the new century, this idea of unappeasable hostility,” he continues. “It is an absolute pillar of al-Qaedaism that we are out to destroy Islam. No we’re not. We never were. We didn’t have any feelings about Islam except that it was not us – obviously. But not that it was a threat to Christianity, or to us. There was peaceful coexistence between us that was exploded in 2001, to the astonishment of the West.”
A. Yes, those Mullahs really should be pleased that hipster infidels have been fucking (or hankering to fuck) Persian beauties up the arse since the 70s; what’s the problem?
B. Ignoring the fact, of course, that al-Qaeda is comprised of a few dozen up-for-anything-because-we’re-horny teens, a few hundred agent provocateurs and the un-acronymed branch of the CIA in charge of shaping the narrative etc.
C. “We didn’t have any feelings about Islam except that it was not us – obviously.” Don’t forget the “feelings” we had about the oil, Mart.
Is Mart being evasive or naive? This dilutes the concept of his “authority”; when I put my Imagination in a writer’s ghostly hands I need to trust that she/he is in charge of the material. Is Mart in charge of the material? A self-righteous, hyper-masculinist Ur-dick who thinks anybody who knocks his Bearded, Vaguely Levantine, Anus-Free Sky Giant deserves to have her/his throat slit is not welcome to borrow my bicycle: no. But neither is a “public intellectual” who can’t tell the difference between that, as an odious Lifestyle choice, and a Phantom Super-Target for Perpetual War straight out of the Orwell/1984 playbook. Functioning as a Passive Goebbels is not, in my opinion, part of the writerly mission statement in a post-Enlightenment Dolcetopia.
It’s a pipeline and they have to get these kids in it and reduce their options to the point where the military is their best or only bet. Our jails are filled with truants, turnstile-jumpers, teenaged HOMELESS loiterers, shoplifters, joint buyers and sellers, and the like. They bust ‘em early and often and from their vantage point, busting ‘em right at school is efficient, a good use of resources. How convenient to locate the police station nearby. This Dead Zoner who runs our city is closing 19 public high schools at last count, pushing kids into charter schools or out into the streets. It’s all about privatization. They are destroying people left and right as he picks up this city by its heels and shakes every last dime out of the public till. http://www.indypendent.org/2010/01/29/bloombergs-12-step-method/
This charade that they performed after the election that he won by ONLY 5 pecentatge points (in what world is 5% a close election?) and will therefore be more sensitive to voter concerns was absurd. At a function last month I got in Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer’s face and told him just what I thought of him for not running against Bloomberg. He could’ve won and I believe Obama signaled loud and clear that he would have helped us if there had been a viable candidate. But we ran a clown as our candidate. A clown, a man who should be delivering the weather on a local news channel AT BEST. Scott told me I was sweet to say so. I told him, you’re not hearing me if you think anything I’m saying is sweet. (His cousin was the righteous Congresswoman and activist Bella Abzug who I had the privilege of knowing and admiring. Another day I’ll write about her funeral.) I told him he put his personal financial security ahead of his duty as a public servant, that he not only missed an historic opportunity to become mayor when our city needed him most but to rescue our treasury from the fascist stranglehold. He said finally, I know, I know. What do you want me to say, I didn’t do what you said. That’s right, I told him, and the city you’re going to be Mayor over when you run and win safely will not even be recognizable. Then I lit into his sycophantic aide who started babbling about how we’re going to keep fighting the good fight and hold the mayor accountable. It’s such bullshit! My last word to Scott was that he needed a better staff, a staff to help him find his courage if he couldn’t do that for himself.
This is nothing. They’re just getting warmed up.
Terrifying clear-eyed analysis, CDS Frances. However, I can’t take either Osama or Obama seriously as anythings other than holograms: that’s my only caveat regarding your granite-solid comment.
We are quite interested in hearing about Bella.
I know. I go in and out. The flickering lights. It’s hard to let go.
Too true; we need something else to grab onto with the left hand before we relax the grip of the right…
The fixer upper. “You read the book and write your ticket.”
The good news
the meaningfully and beautifully Simulocratic, for a change (fill us in, CDS Pussies of Steel: about the sci fi novel that the movie, which this vid is based on, is based on…)
From an email to CDS Barry, regarding the academic craze for etymological arguments:
But here’s my question: what does etymology have to do with how a word is actually used to represent a deed or object in the actual world? Isn’t etymology just a path to a word’s birthplace? You can follow the path to my birthplace (LA) and, once there, you can only use that info to get a bearing on my present (Berlin) by running the path forward again and including all the points between. I’m extremely leery of this etymology trope and moreso after seeing the video interview with A___ in which he discusses the etymology of “technology” as though that has any bearing on how it’s “used” or how it should be used: I mean: that’s nonsense. People at CERN or MICROSOFT (or wherever) aren’t functioning in concert with, or against, the etymology of the word “technology”… what they’re doing is following an imperative we can only understand by tracing the history of, eg, the corporate structure/mentality and the politics of war and the sociology of “demand”, etc. Etymology is just about the weakest force in the mix. It’s a throwback to pre-alchemical Mage-maneuvers when there was so little technology that clever people looked for power in the materials at hand: words, biological fluids, images-as-symbols (the nightsky; animal entrails)…
CDS P.O. and I (during a long walk on icy roads in the dark and subsequent ride on the S-Bahn with very grim-looking co-passengers), after discussing the peculiar case of a Vietnamese restaurant with a great reputation, despite its terrible food (a great reputation due largely to the fact that its staff is actually Vietnamese vs Turkish or German), came up with the following chart, called: MONETIZE YOUR STEREOTYPE (IN GERMANY):
ETHNICITY/NATIONALITY — OPTIMAL PROFESSION
Japanese Food, Martial Arts, Hi-Tech
British Literature, Fashion
Black African Dance, Music
North American Black Dance, Music
Hindu/Indian Food, Metaphysics, Health
Turkish Food, Textile
North American White Motivational Speaker
French Wine, Philosophy
Italian Food
Thai Food, Sex
Scandinavian Furniture
Cuban Dance, Music
American Indian Nature, Health
Tibetan Holiness
Vietnamese Food
Persian Dentistry
Polish Construction
Russian Organized Crime
Greek Food
Gypsy Begging
Chinese, Korean see “Japanese”
PC REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM
A polygamist pol from SA apologizes for extramarital affair; delightful!
JOHANNESBURG – South Africa’s polygamist president has apologized to the nation after being criticized for having an extramarital affair that resulted in a daughter born in October.
Analysts had argued that the love child revelations would have little impact because South African voters overwhelmingly supported Jacob Zuma in last year’s election even though he was an unabashed polygamist who had admitted to having sex outside marriage. But Zuma has had to make two public statements on the matter, a sign he and his advisers may be worried that South Africans will hold him to higher standards now that he is president.
“The matter, though private, has been a subject of much public discussion and debate,” Zuma said in the latest statement, issued Saturday. “It has put a lot of pressure on my family and my organization, the African National Congress. I also acknowledge and understand the reaction of many South Africans.”
He added: “I deeply regret the pain that I have caused to my family, the ANC, … and South Africans in general.”
Three days earlier, Zuma confirmed a South African newspaper’s report of the affair. In that earlier statement, he expressed no regrets and criticized the media and rivals for making a political issue out of what he insisted was a private matter.
“I deeply regret the pain that I have caused to my [several wives and multiple] famil[ies]…”: priceless.
I don’t really have any explication to add regarding ‘The Road To Route One’, dear CDS, but in order to avoid any charge of sullenness or parsimony, please allow me to flypaper a little fiction onto the bunker’s hallowed walls.
This is the beginning of a novel I wrote about five years back: a comedy of errors, and rampant misanthropy, indebted to Evelyn Waugh. The working title – ‘A Very Handsome Deal’ (although I’m not particularly happy with this naming, despite its sui generis flavour).
Anyway, here’s a little levity for a Sunday afternoon…
1
Martin Hathaway made a cup of coffee, marvelling at his self reliance. He had become adept at such tasks of late as the staff at his literary agency was currently two in number, including himself, and his one employee was not much given to menial tasks. Quinta was late for work, so far by half an hour, but she would have a first rate excuse and Martin would be perfectly happy to accept it yet again. She had already earned out this lenience many times over.
While waiting for his coffee to cool, he heard the thud of the morning post and went reluctantly to inspect it. Considering the mail pile, Martin’s face assumed a look of distaste as he spread it out testily with his foot. The worst offending items were the two dozen manila envelopes of tell-tale size. Martin took a highly educated guess at what lay inside them. It was obvious to him that they contained submissions which he was supposed to read. Still employing his shoe, he came across one envelope with particularly wonky hand writing, written in sinister capitals, and kicked it away. There was no need to view its contents. They were undoubtedly the work of a thoroughly deranged mind.
Finally he bent down and picked up those two envelopes which – applying the same method of graphology – appeared to have been written by the sanest of his correspondents, then he carried them over to his desk. This desk had once bore the clutter of success: pending projects, contractual papers, cinematic options, international entreaties, letters from persons of note; now Martin caught himself littering the table-top with trivial paperwork in an effort to simulate this healthy disorder.
He opened one of the envelopes, took out its contents, considered its covering letter. The letter made its regular appeal and conveyed the spirit of the author, betraying a self-importance which would not be suppressed. It was a ‘saga’ she had written. ‘A very exciting tale which also celebrates the traditional family’. Everyone she had shown it to was convinced of its brilliance.
Martin could picture the author clearly. She was brutal, with a taste for battle, one of those dominating matriarchs – and members of a dying breed –who thought that if she could raise and rule a whole family then she could turn her hand successfully to anything else.
It turned out that she was trying to do Martin a favour, and if Martin didn’t want this favour doing, then it was Martin’s loss. In this respect, the woman was not part of a dying breed at all. This philosophy remained incredibly widespread. It was the bog-standard lunacy which he was compelled to deal with every day, and Martin was no longer able to eke out a sarcastic snort when confronted with it, having come across far too many of these puffed-up non-entities singling themselves out for praise.
Martin could think of no other profession which encountered such a large number of delusive minds as his own. No psychiatrist could possibly face this same volume of faux grandeur, and at least those quacks got to enjoy a little variation. Today Jesus Christ, tomorrow Napoleon. For Martin Hathaway, it was always the same profound error. These people thought that they could write. This had to be the most wide-scale delusion of our times. It probably claimed a third of the general public. If they did not all go so far as write up the book they had in mind, and send that book off, then they still had the germ of an idea and spoke about their fledgling project incessantly. They still expressed the desire to record it one day and enjoyed the self assurance that it would be a runaway success.
Martin remembered conceiving of a special type of asylum for these people which would net him a small fortune. He had dreamt it up with Celia Highwater in The Carlyle, below their former offices in Soho. They had both been on wonderful form that afternoon, cattily inspired (Martin could see now that those were good old days although he told himself he did not want them back). The asylum in question was to be a splendid example of private enterprise performing a public good. Either people would happily commit themselves voluntarily or else it would be left to their sons, their daughters, their parents, their spouses to do the right thing and add to the ranks of this literary madhouse.
Safely inside, there would be readings on the hour, every hour, every day, so that the inmates could happily drown each other out.
They would practise their penmanship for the benefit of autograph hunters.
There would be a Fictitious Best Sellers list pinned to every wall bearing invariable good news.
“Look, Simon, I’ve sold 25,000 copies this week. How about you?” “I’m still riding high in the non-fiction chart with my book on The History of Tea Towels.”
Ruefully now, Martin considered writing up a detailed business plan for this venture and presenting it to his bank manager. Certainly he needed something to appease that bastard as soon as possible; some viable scheme to satisfy his own considerable needs along with those of his two former wives and the three children whose schooling was bleeding him dry.
Bearing these things in mind, Martin forced himself to take a cursory look at the offering before him. With some difficulty, he reached the seventh line.
It was exceptionally unfair. No human mind was equipped to read more than twenty of these things at one sitting and retain their wits. One might chance upon a wonderful commercial prospect at the 21st attempt, and it would make no difference, for one would no longer be unable to comprehend it. Only the odds were never this good. They were, in his experience, closer to one in a million. The truly sickening thing was that this once in a million opportunity had once been Martin’s for the taking, only he had failed to grasp it.
Martin now tossed aside the pages. Although submissions were invited, it had always been the function of a young poorly paid graduate to wade through this bog of lofty pretension and execrable prose. Unfortunately, Martin could no longer afford to employ such a buffer. He had Quinta to aid him, but she was not prepared to waste her own time.
Ninety-five percent of his client list had once arisen through tip-offs, personal recommendations, and this had allowed him to avoid this rigmarole. But recently these sources had dried up. This was yet another result of the internecine struggle which had ruined his last financial year.
Martin and his former partner, Celia Highwater, were very much at war. Their partnership had ended eighteen months earlier in a spirit of vehement acrimony. Now they fought over everything and this conflict left them both rash, hasty, and prone to uncharacteristic mistakes. Each agent was so desperate that the other should not prosper that they freely endangered their own interests in the process and pursued the other’s downfall at all costs, including that of their own triumph. This bloody combat had left their relative fortunes in so precarious a state that a knockout blow was feasible on either side. It was a testament to their mutual enmity that this remained a true consolation for them both.
Martin opened the second package and picked out the covering letter. One sentence immediately caught his eye. He had seen it, or sentences like it, many times before. ‘I would describe my style of writing as being in the Tom Fraser vein’.
Martin proceeded to rip the letter into two pieces, and then four. “You Wanker,” he said calmly. “Wanker. Absolute wanker.” Although the letter bore the brunt of his disgust, it was aimed squarely at himself, as Martin was once more assailed by that appalling memory from two years ago.
His recollection always began with the vivid image of a new assistant who had been starting that very day. She was a pretty girl, fresh out of Durham University, prepared to work for peanuts in the hope of getting a start. Her name was Lea, and Martin found her particularly attractive, which was why he decided to put on quite a show, leading her over to the towering slush-pile which commandeered one corner of the large main office. “As you can see we’ve built up something of backlog. I believe some of these manuscripts predate the advent of the printing press. Let’s see what we can find, shall we?”
Martin had dug deep and plucked a manuscript at random from near the bottom of the stack, confident of finding failings in this work that he might quickly seize upon and ridicule. Instead he was struck dumb by the name and title of the piece and began to read the first few pages in silence. They were also familiar to him. One could find them inside the best selling book of the last ten years. They contained the same clunky sentences which had inexplicably gripped the public imagination and even now refused to let it go.
They belonged to ‘The Fractals of Christ’.
Martin noticed that a covering letter was still attached to the manuscript, and saw, to his absolute horror, that the letter had been addressed to himself. He had been sitting on an absolute gold mine, buried beneath the crud.
‘The Fractals of Christ’ had occupied the top of the Best Seller’s list for over a year, and even now, with another year gone by, remained in the top ten. It had been translated into languages of which Martin had had no prior knowledge. It had achieved global sales close to the 15 million mark. The film version was coming out this month, starring Leonard Talese. Martin was still not sure why all this was so. Fraser’s success remained weirder and more unsettling than anything written in his books, just as Martin’s own failure to anticipate it was the one secret that the world must never discover.
Financially speaking, Martin would have been set for the rest of his life had he taken Tom Fraser on. As well as comfortably satisfying all his outstanding commitments, and paying off his growing debts, he might have made a realistic offer for the large villa in Umbria which he’d long coveted, instead of renting it out for a fortnight every year. Christ, he could have bought up the whole bloody village with that fifteen percent. Then there was the question of what it would have done to Celia Highwater’s psyche. He imagined it delivering a knock-out blow. Hers was an incredibly resilient mind, but surely even Celia wouldn’t have recovered from that. He pictured her face each time Fraser’s name was mentioned, failing to raise a smile despite her genius for mimicry.
The sequel to ‘Fractals of Christ’ was being breathlessly awaited. Rumours abounded as to when it would be finished and appear in print; but Martin did not need to rely on these rumours any longer. As of last month, he’d been in on the know. What’s more, he had never been closer to rectifying his original mistake and bringing Fraser into the fold.
Not much was reliably known about Tom Fraser beyond the fact of his being an Englishman in his mid to late thirties. The most pervasive gossip related to the author’s precarious state of mind. Word had it that he believed in all the fantastical things of which he wrote – he was far from alone in this respect – therefore inhabiting a world of pungent conspiracies (This theory accounted for the author’s reclusive nature: communication with his publisher was conducted solely by his agent; communication with his agent was restricted to letter; and it was said that Fraser dropped the occasional dark hint as to why these measures were in place).
Martin was now in a strong position to make a bid for Tom Fraser and all the signs were promising that he could pull of this incredible coup. He would have been supremely confident of success were it not for Celia Highwater and her dangerously high levels of cunning and hostility.
Celia had been his partner for eight years. They had defected together from the firm of Charles Canton in 1996, taking with them the pick of his young talent. A good deal of that talent soon matured and as a consequence Hathaway and Highwater quickly turned into a middle sized agency of some renown, growing year on year until Spring 2005 and their vicious separation.
Since then neither of their solos venture had been half as well received, and, as a result, they had both suffered a number of costly defections. The accepted wisdom was that they had both made a big mistake in parting. Now Martin and Celia were both desperate to overturn this point of view.
Fantasderful, CDS More Modern Lore! I’m about to run out the door to meet CDS Barry, but will read when I get back (any niceties of formatting you’d like applied; bold or italic et al; please advise)…
“Tom Fraser” sounds like a nuts Gwyn Barry, CDS MML. Any more of this for us, then? Do it as a serial!
TET ADVENTURES IN MEATSPACE
CDS Barry persuaded me to attend this year’s TRANSMEDIALE by promising an official-looking laminated authority artifact to hang, by a ribbon, around my neck. I could not say “no”. The Transmediale is like the Convention for Law Enforcement Professionals or the National Dental Workers Association Convention but it’s for artists and visionaries and visionary artists instead of dentists or cops. Money and dreams of money are in the air. There are lots of panel discussions. Also, this sort of thing…
CDS Barry and I found a big round table in an upper-level lounge and had a deep, rich, funny conversation that confirmed for me that the occasion of acquiring CDS Barry’s friendship in the year c. 2000 [ed.'s note: actually, it was Aug. 22, 2001] was one of the great events of my adult life. Among the things discussed was the information (passed on to CDS Barry by an audience member after a panel discussion CDS Barry sat on) that there was once, before the British and French fucked up everything, a common Ottoman currency which unified a surprisingly vast swath of the Afro-Muslim world. And that Morocco (before Israel worked its polarizing magic) was once the home of about 4,000,000 thoroughly integrated Jews (now less than 1,000). In other words, kids Lurking and Explicit, as ever: divide and conquer. I’m hoping that CDS Barry (per the casual promise I extracted during our chat) will drop fleshier details on these subjects in a comment-post here soon.
I couldn’t imagine any panel discussion bettering our chat (the verbal lecture format is the least-efficient method for communicating ideas and information I can imagine, barring shouting commands with a bullhorn at a queue of exhausted foreigners at the airport: it’s just the most acceptable manifestation of hierarchy for the classless egalitarians of liquid democracy; where was I?)… I couldn’t imagine bettering the conversation and decided to leave and let CDS Barry schmooze after our delightful private hour or so. Word-of-mouth is the only hope for the future.
arresting subway art on the way to futuristic event
Jetsons futurism
suspiciously commercial slogan
long line of the future for suckers without laminates
CDS Barry: unhoodwinkable
Twitter will be huge in the future
CDS Barry: processing stimuli
purchased at the 2001 Space Station lounge furniture garage sale
CDS Barry: paroxysm of analytical mirth
screens still look more futuristic than any other affordable prop after all these years
So funny, I thought I’d just let myself in to play some of the records again and here I find this joy to behold.
CDS Frances, it’s fitting that this event was held at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures), with its retro-futurist panache. What I saw of the event savored strongly of 1984-as-envisioned-in-1957 (c. the year the structure went up) and seemed to predict that the future belongs to a jet-setting cadre of visionaries who will come up with increasingly-new things to do with blinking lights and video-screens.
Who knew, back in the late-60s, early-70s (when Futurism reached its pinnacle between Kubrick’s Space Odyssey and his Clockwork Orange), that the future was not a renewable resource and it was just about used up and it would soon be time to start the accelerating roll back down the concave curve of culture mountain? At least we get to pass through The Enlightenment again…
I think that’s what the skateboarders have been trying to tell us. We’re going back to the wheel.
The picture I titled “purchased at the 2001 Space Station lounge furniture garage sale” should have been titled “Futuristic green nano-guide greets a delegate to the 2010 Berlin Transmediale in 36 languages… “
Who is that comradely looking bloke in the foreground?
The one “listening to the nano-guide?” Before listening to the futuristic green nano-guide to his right (the one perched atop that futuristic concrete couch), he was talking to an actual woman (atavistic vs futuristic) to his left (out of the frame) who CDS Barry seems to know (because CDS Barry exchanged a hug with her soon after I snapped this picture).
Actually, I meant the jovial chap in profile at 3 o’clock in the frame. Is it you, CDS Steven?
Nope, he’s the unknown friend of the woman CDS Barry hugged just seconds after the snap (I was the camera-phone-wielder in every case)
(Also, I think my joke wasn’t very clear; you see, to my eye, that woman in the background of the same photo, due to a trick of perspective, looks like she’s… oh, never mind…)
That was clear. A little Thumbelina running roughshod over the furniture. (Do you look a little like him?)
Not even remotely, CDS Frances. How did this bizarre misapprehension get lodged in your noggin? (in fact, truth be told, this is a pretty unflattering pic of the poor feller; I didn’t even intend to catch him in the shot)
X-Degrees of Separation from DD:
“Point Omega is bracketed by chapters set in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where a sinister figure spends hours in daily contemplation of Douglas Gordon’s 24-Hour Psycho video installation, an “event” that slows Hitchcock’s notorious 97-minute exercise in undiluted cinematic hyperkineticism to a numbing, time-freezing crawl.”
Comrade JR had Gordon over for a dinner party last year. The Hitchcock video (non)event was Gordon’s breakthrough: before that, according to Gordon himself, he was a mere schlub with a shitty job and no prospects. Which I find hard to believe.
Wasn’t Schnabel a taxi-driver before becoming crockery king?
That may be the legend, CDS Frances, but, as we know, the un-sleek details (such as strategic cock-sucking or famous relatives) are usually left out of these much-beloved Cinderella narratives.
How many taxi drivers does it take to buy one single flat in his Palazzo Chupi?
“The emergence of artist Julian Schnabel as a mythical figure was a phenomenon of the modern art world in the 1980s. Once considered the bad boy of the New York art scene, Schnabel seemed to rise to prominence from nowhere….”
Yes, I’d hazard a guess that it was probably cock-sucking.
A Marvel: Packing So Much Cognitive Dissonance into Such a Little Space
“In the Story of O, we witness the transformation of a woman from sweet, timid and dull to a wild, sexually empowered Amazon. It is through her journey in ritualized dominance and submission that O ultimately becomes free. O is whipped, used, fucked, and thrust into supplication. She is taken to a mansion where she and other women are used by the men living there. Anytime, anyplace, these women must be available to please.”
Eric Blair and Bella Abzug are synchronously spinning in their graves. Meanwhile, to any younger Comrade Lurkers reading this: please don’t drink the urine-flavored Kool-Aid in the fancy plastic K-Mart goblet. Being turned into a disposable/beatable fucktoy is not “empowering”, despite persistent commercials to the contrary.
The genius of the Heffnerian project was in conflating extreme ends of the eugenic spectrum (Superman; Subhuman) into one germ-free, post-human package… and putting it on sale. The Playboy Bunny is both a marvel of perfection and a worthless plaything and it lives in virtual confinement on the grounds of Adolf Heffner’s camp (to be disposed of discreetly when it ceases to function properly). To paraphrase Walter Sobchak: Say what you like about the tenets of the Playboy Aesthetic, Dude, but at least it’s an Ethos! Again, Yankee know-how shows those over-earnest Nazi hicks how it’s done: you should have turned the camps into sexual theme parks, you putzes!
I was going to write about Bella’s funeral but I found it on C-Span. Former Playboy Bunny Gloria Steinem eulogized Bella and in my opinion it was Gloria’s finest hour. At the 88:13 mark (until 99:35).
On O, in graduate school someone showed a film based on Story of O in which all the parts were played by women. I hadn’t read the book or seen the original movie and was rendered pretty much dumbstruck by this alternative. But one of the audience members, a woman, said in the discussion afterward that while she’d never have been able to countenance watching the sadism if those roles had been played by men, because they were lesbian women she was untroubled. I’m still scratching my head about that one almost 20 years later.
Isn’t is strange, the movies seen outside of theaters can stick with one more? I was reminded of that when we were talking about Eraserhead, which I saw in a schoolhouse in NW Washington a few years after its theatrical release. Plus, I viewed both Last Year In Marienbad and Hiroshoma Mon Amour projected on a free standing screen in the darkened cafeteria at Washington U in St. Louis. Wouldn’t it be funny if B.G. Myers, who was a graduate student in those same years, was sitting right next to me?
Oh! And speaking of projections, remember when Cap’n Woodie called Orwell a “puritan masochist” and a “traitor to his class”? Classic putzism.
People trying to ingratiate themselves with their keepers will say almost anything
PS I learned today, from CDS Barry, that the hip new self-applied term for sell-outs (who don’t think of themselves as such, obviously) is “Anarcho-Capitalist“… the funniest oxymoron since “Feminist Porn-Star”. This is my spin on the term; CDS Barry knows a few “Anarcho-Capitalists” and I wouldn’t want any of them to punch him during a panel discussion.
“How did this bizarre misapprehension get lodged in your noggin?”
(Well, first of all too bad, because he’s really cute.) Because of Enlightenment and the Orwell quote you picked for Muster of Triviums– “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” There’s someone else’s online photo, a very special someone else, that when one enlarges and lightens it, an image of the person becomes apparent in the background. I thought that maybe you were doing something similar by degrees.
“There’s someone else’s online photo, a very special someone else, that when one enlarges and lightens it, an image of the person becomes apparent in the background…”
This song bothers me almost as much as Go Tell Aunt Rhody.
THE FICTIVE IN A SIMULOCRACY
Part Three: PR
The fiction of the state:
The Paris Review and the invisible world of American letters
By Richard Cummings
The Paris Review (PR hereafter except in quotations) has a new editor. Philip Gourevitch, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner for his book, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda and a writer for The New Yorker, has taken the posit-ion that was held by George Plimpton until his death. Gourevitch replaces Brigid Hughes, whose brief tenure ended in considerable acrimony, with the PR board announcing that her contract would not be renewed. Dismissed from the Board was her supporter, novelist and long-time PR advisory editor, Elizabeth Gaffney, whose novel, Metropolis, published by Random House, then appeared to mixed reviews. A sort of ‘Gangs of New York’ meets Little Women, it sank like a stone. One wonders if Gaffney teaches her writing students how to write bad sentences about stupid things. It’s hard to imagine that Random House would have given Gaffney a contract for this mess of a book had she not been on the board of the PR at the time.
Gourevitch has promised to revitalize the publication, continuing its tradition of publishing fiction, poetry and interviews with writers; but he also intends to emphasize non-fiction as well. With Robert Silvers of The New York Review of Books on the Board of the PR, and now with a major New Yorker writer at the helm, the concentric circle of the New York world of letters has diminished further in its insularity. But why should anyone care about a small literary magazine with a limited subscription base? And how does it manage to pay someone like Goureveich? Why does The New York Times give so much coverage to the magazine, when there are other publications of equal merit that labor on in relative obscurity? It is because the PR is special. Everyone knows that. But they don’t all know exactly why. Once, I didn’t either; but as fate it would have it, the truth would force itself on me without my making any effort to find it out. It all simply fell into my lap.
Frederic Bastiat wrote that the state was the greatest fiction, in which everyone tries to live off of everyone else. In the world of American letters (which is basically still New York) this resonates with particular force, as Maria Koenig Matth-iessen would find out. Before she married novelist Peter Matthiessen and she was still married to advertising genius, Julian Koenig (himself a master of fiction, which is what his industry purveys) Maria would constantly complain to me that she was bored and that she had once been ‘in the swim’ in the literary world of London. Stuck in Bridgehampton, she was ‘out of it’, as she put it in her crisp British accent. With her relationship with Peter Matthiessen, she left the boring and superficial world behind her for one of intellectual and artistic authenticity and stimulation. Or so she thought.
Working for McGovern
Maria and I would often meet on the train to New York, I, traipsing in to meet with agents, editors and others in the book world, in pursuit of a literary career, she to her ‘Japanese tea ceremony’ lessons, as she explained it to me, which, in actuality, were her trysts with Peter Matthiessen. Matthiessen was ruggedly handsome, a mythic literary figure, who, accord-ing to legend, had ‘founded’ the PR in the early Fifties but who had given up his glamorous life as an expatriate literary lion, to become a fisherman on eastern Long Island.
I also had migrated to the Hamptons after living in Ethiopia (I had taught at the law school of the Haile Sellassie I University), and had given up my life as a law professor to write. Because of the horrors of the Vietnam War, I got sucked into politics, working for the nomination of anti-war candidate George McGovern. At the home of wealthy liberal activist and French scholar, Domna Stanton, where I had gone to attend a planning session for the McGovern campaign, I met George Plimpton for the first time. I have a photograph of that session, that shows all of us sitting around a table, with me between Plimpton and actress Tammy Grimes. Plimpton was the editor of the PR, a charming and attractive man who exuded warmth and good humor. He became famous trying his hand at pro football and boxing with Archie Moore. His books were best sellers. I told him how I had met his father, Francis Plimpton, at a similar gathering at Marietta Tree’s town house, to support the senate campaign of Adlai Stevenson III. We hit it off and he volunteered to work for me, carrying petitions for the McGovern delegates running in the First Congressional District on Long Island. He was against the Vietnam War and was for McGovern and I needed all the help I could get. Getting the McGovern slate on the ballot, which included me as a delegate, and withstanding the inevitable challenges from the regular Democratic organization, which viewed us as dangerous insurgents, was going to be no easy task.
Plimpton did a great job. His petitions were perfect. He arrived at my house in Bridgehampton one afternoon, pulling up in his station wagon and waving them like a delighted child. ‘Great, George,’ I said. ‘This is a huge help.’ He was genuinely happy. But after the Eagleton affair it was revealed McGovern’s choice for vice president, Thomas Eagleton, had received shock treatments for depression and resigned from the ticket and McGovern’s disastrous defeat at the hands of Richard Nixon, I took my family and escaped to Barbados, to teach at the University of the West Indies. While there, I wrote an Op Ed piece called ‘Hailu and the Very Old Lion’, about an Ethiopian laborer who had moved all my furniture himself, and who had stood in front of Haile Sellassie’s pet lion as it sat on a stone fence, and laughed at it. I said the lion was old and toothless, like the Emperor himself, implying that he would not remain in power much longer, now that famine had come to Ethiopia. Charlotte Curtis, one of the last of the greats at The New York Times, accepted it and the Times published it in April of 1974, while I was still in Barbados.
To my amazement and delight, I was contacted by George Braziller, of the eponymous publishing house, and by Ned Chase, (father of Chevy) who was editor in chief at Putnam’s, and asked by both of them do a book. My agent was the gentle-manly John Schaffner, whose eccentric family reminded every-one of the Sitwells. His wife, Perdita, had, it turned out, been secretary to James Jesus Angleton, literary scholar and chief of counterintelligence at the CIA. (His deputy was the novelist, William Hood.) Ned Chase took me to the legendary Billy’s, watering hole to the literary world, and told me he was going to give me a five book contract and that I was the ‘voice of your generation’. I floated back to the train and came home with the news. Braziller came to my house and sipped iced tea as he went through my book proposal, ‘Eagles Among the Lions’. He seemed genuinely pleased, even if he did drop the manuscript. I watched with horror as the pages slipped to the floor, but he quickly gathered them up with a broad smile, shook my hand vigorously and departed. This was it. I was in. Or so I thought.
A friend in the Hamptons who had read the Op Ed piece told me I should meet Peter Matthiessen, who wrote about the same sort of things. She got me together with him and a few other writers, but he was aloof and didn’t say anything to me. I shrugged it off and concentrated on doing a book proposal for Braziller and Chase.
My proposal described how, while travelling in the north of Ethiopia, I had witnessed American troops in combat in Axum, where I had gone to see the famous obelisks. At the airport, American troops in combat fatigues swarmed all over the place, with American helicopters landing and taking off. I could make out the voice of an American pilot through the static on the airport radio saying, ‘I’ve gotta come in for more ammu-nition. I can’t fly around here without more ammunition.’
Secret war in Ethiopia
What I had witnessed was Nixon’s secret war in Ethiopia to defend Hails Sellassie from the Tigre Liberation Front and the Eritrean Liberation Front, as they both sought to overthrow the backward, feudal regime and to secede. Most of my students at the university were in the revolution, but the Americans were still behind Haile Sellassie, an important ally in the Cold War. The Horn of Africa was of considerable strategic importance, with Cold Warriors such as Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, believing the outcome of the struggle with the Soviet Union would be decided in the Ogaden. The insurgents were largely pro-Soviet, and if Ethiopia fell to the U.S.S.R., it would have a dagger at the heart of Saudi Arabia, just across the Red Sea. As an Air Force officer told me in confidence one night after a few too many beers, there had already been an uprising led by young Saudi air force officers against the Saudi royal family that American forces stationed at important bases in Ethiopia had put down.
Then, John Schaffner phoned to tell me that something strange had happened. George Braziller had rushed into his office, waving the proposal. He threw it at Schaffner, shouting, ‘I can’t do this’, and bolted out the door. Ned Chase then phoned him to tell him the deal was off, giving no reason. I paid a visit to Chase at his office to find out what had happened. He was extremely nervous and fidgeted with papers on his desk. ‘I can’t find the proposal’, he explained. ‘I think I’ve lost it. Anyway, it’s too late to do anything. I’m sorry.’
It hit me like a blow to the solar plexus. Schaffner was perplexed and found it unfathomable. He said that nothing like it had ever happened to him before in his career as an agent. ‘I don’t know what it is,’ he said to me. ‘It’s highly unusual.’ I had gambled a lot on my writing career, and now it lay in ruins. But then, Congress voted to impeach Nixon and the revolution came to Ethiopia on the night the Americans were staging a fashion show in Addis Ababa. Such was their obliviousness. Or their denial. Someone had photographed Haile Sellassie throwing meat to his pet lion, while millions of Ethiopians were starving to death. It was the ‘tipping point’ of the revo-lution. As the country went through the torture of Nixon’s downfall, Senator Fulbright uncovered a secret agreement between Nixon and Haile Sellassie, in which America pledged to come to his rescue if he were threatened by an internal insur-gency. It was completely beyond the scope of Nixon’s author-ity. But when did that ever matter to him? He had already authorized the mass, illegal spying by the CIA on Americans as the anti-war protests grew in size and force. Years later, Angus McKenzie would posthumously reveal in his book, Secrets, with knowledge obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, how the CIA had penetrated counterculture anti-war publications and shut them down. But Nixon was forced to resign, and his plans for a new Vietnam in Ethiopia were scratched, as was the infamous Huston plan, which would have effectively turned America into a police state. John Erlichman acknowledged as much. He asked me what I was doing during the Vietnam war. I told him I was working for McGovern. He looked straight at me and said, ‘You did the absolutely right thing.’ Nixon’s right-hand man, Erlichman had done time in prison, and was a sick and broken man when I met him in Atlanta. He died not long after I met him.
But with a revolutionary government in place in Addis Ababa, America abruptly did a turn around and began supporting the Eritrean secessionists, backing a new group, the Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front, the EPLF, to displace the Marxist ELF. Professor Tesfatsion Medhane, an Eritrean who teaches at the University of Bremen, has documented this in his numerous publications. He was also my Amharic teacher and one of my students when I was teaching at the Haile Sellassie I University. And with my book safely out of the way, Thomas Kenneally surfaced with his To Asmara, extolling the great virtues of the Eritreans as they struggled for their independence from tyrannical Ethiopia. (Eritrea is today a totalitarian state, while Ethiopia is, more or less, a democracy.) When asked about this switch in American policy, Henry Kissinger famously remarked, ‘America has no permanent allies, only permanent interests’. America also seemed to have a convenient way of manipulating the American publishing industry.
Fast forward a few years later, at a Christmas party at the home of Swedish artist Hans Hokanson and his wife, Barbara. With a tall Christmas tree lit with real candles, a huge roast pig, endless amounts of glug and a crowd of artists and writers, including James Rosenquist, The New Yorker cartoonist Stein-berg, and Peter Matthiessen, the place was throbbing to Jimmy Cliff. From across the room, I saw Matthiessen glaring at me. Barbara Hokanson made her way towards me, stopping in front of where I was sitting. She leaned over and in a whisper, said, ‘Peter wants me to tell you that you should feel lucky that he doesn’t let you get close to him, because he could really hurt you.’ I looked up and saw Matthiessen, still glaring at me malevolently. ‘Why would he want to hurt me?’ I asked, but Barbara had already turned and walked away. I shrugged off the incident, but filed it away in my subconscious.
After she started living with Matthiessen, Maria invited me to have lunch with her at Bobby Van’s to meet James Jones. Matthiessen was there, as well. Jones, who was gracious and cordial, was drinking grapefruit juice, on the wagon because of a heart condition. Throughout the lunch, Matthiessen sat sil-ently, occasionally giving me a strange glance. Maria was her usual gregarious self. I kept thinking how stunning she had looked at the Benson Gallery that summer, when she appeared barefoot, her hair wild, and she announced to me that she had left Julian and moved in with Peter.
After she married Matthiessen, we met on the train. She seemed different, somewhat subdued. Rather gratuitously, she said, ‘Everything is a hoax.’ ‘Everything?’ I asked, incredu-lously. ‘Everything’, she answered.
Matthiessen was CIA
My memory was jogged when, sometime later, still in the Seventies, The New York Times disclosed, without citing sources, that Matthiessen had been in the CIA and that his literary activities had been a cover for his intelligence work. ‘Was that the hoax?’ I wondered. Did his comment to Barbara Hokanson that he could really hurt me have anything to do with his institutional affiliation? Matthiessen told friends that he had left the Agency in the Fifties, but did one every really leave it? I had been active in the anti-war movement. In the days of Richard Nixon, that could spell trouble. There was the coup in Chile and the murder of Allende. After Nixon’s fall, the national security state perpetuated itself under Henry Kissinger, who stayed on under Gerald Ford as secretary of state. William Colby still headed the CIA. Nothing had really changed.
I pondered Matthiessen’s literary output. Partisans struck me as superficial and cynical and not particularly well written. At Play In The Fields of the Lord I found to be a wooden and tedious book. Far Tortuga, written in a West Indian dialect, was impossible to get through and condescending, yet it ended up on The New York Times best-seller list. The Snow Leopard I found to be pompous and utterly pretentious, but it, too, found its way onto the list. But his publisher was Farrar, Strauss and Giroux and Peter Matthiessen was a great writer, the mantra went, and the item in The New York Times faded from memory. His nature writing assignments took him to exotic places around the globe, he took up the cause, first of Caesar Chavez and then of the American Indians, and became a Buddhist monk.
The Pied Piper
It was after the publication in 1985 by Grove Press of The Pied Piper, my biography of Allard Lowenstein, that I found myself sitting next to Matthiessen’s ex-wife, Patsy Southgate, at a dinner party at the home of Gaby Lieber Rodgers, ex-wife of Jerry Lieber, half of the rock and roll team of Lieber and Stoller. Barney Rosset of the Grove Press and I had been duly vilified by Hendrik Hertzberg in The New York Review of Books, Ronald Radosh in The New York Times Book Review, and Myra McPherson, Ben Bradlee’s pit bull, in the Styles section of The Washington Post, because I had outed Lowenstein, a civil rights and anti-war activist who had served one term in Congress and had been assassinated by Dennis Sweeney in 1980, as a CIA operative and a closet gay. McPherson, after belting down three martinis in the restaurant of the Jefferson Hotel in Washington, said, ‘Richard, you can’t say these things. I am going to have to trash you. You should have put this in a novel.’ Martin Garbus, one of America’s leading civil liberties lawyers and attorney for Grove Press, asserted that the reviews had been ‘planted’ by those who wanted Lowenstein’s CIA background kept secret and were not real reviews.
Patsy Southgate had been one of the most beautiful women of her generation. A Smith student, she was a fine writer and French translator who became engaged to Peter Matthiessen, who was at Yale. After a few vodkas and glasses of wine, she opened up to me and started talking about the CIA, something people did after the publication of The Pied Piper. She told me how Matthiessen had been recruited to the CIA at Yale to serve as an intelligence officer. After she and Matthiessen were married, they first went to CIA orientation and then to Paris, where Matthiessen’s assignment was to ‘found a literary magazine’. But founding a magazine was not within Matthiessen’s ken, so he befriended expatriate Harold Humes, who had attended MIT and who was starting a new literary publication that would feature interviews with writers, fiction and reviews of restaurants and clubs. Matthiessen provided funding from Sadruddin Aga Khan, the son of the Aga Khan, who had been [the Wall Street Journal 's and CIA's] John Train’s roommate at Harvard, and who agreed to serve as the magazine’s publisher. Train became managing editor. Then Matthiessen got rid of Humes and brought in his old friend from New York, George Plimpton, who had been studying English literature at King’s College, Cambridge, to replace him. Plimpton, who had gone to Exeter and Harvard, was the son of Francis Plimpton, founder of the white shoe law firm of Debevoise, Plimpton (his partner was Eli Whitney Debevoise) who also served as counsel to the Democratic Party.
Humes was furious. After the first edition came out, he boarded the ship carrying the magazines, found them in the hold, and with a stamp he had made up, stamped them all ‘Harold Humes, Editor’. Humes, who never found out why he had lost his magazine, later went mad. Southgate, who dis-approved of what Matthiessen was doing, gave him an ultimatum. She told him that he either left the Agency, or she would leave him. He didn’t, so she did. Matthiessen’s personal behaviour didn’t endear him to her, either. She, as well as friends from Southgates’s and Matthiessen’s Paris days, took note of his dark side, and his occasional gratuitous acts of cruelty, that astonished them. Carol Southern, who was married to Terry Southern and knew Matthiesssen and Southgate in Paris, relates how Matthiessen made Southgate carry a case of wine up the stairs to their apartment while she was pregnant. On another occasion, while out driving, he deliberately drove over a turtle as it was trying to across the road. He was also stingy, as Maria Matthiessen would find out. Having given up what she described as her ‘cushy deal’ married to Julian Koenig, who with Fred Papert, had founded Koenig, Papert, the hottest advertising firm in New York in the Sixties and early Seventies, with her posh house on Ocean Road in Bridgehampton, her lavish parties and a full-time West Indian housekeeper, she had to deal with Matthiessen’s austere lifestyle in his cottage in Sagaponack, as he doled out the pennies. Eventually, she was forced to take a job working as a gofer for Carol Phillips, who had founded Clinique and who had been married to Benny Goodman.
Meanwhile, Freddy Plimpton divorced George, took up yoga and became a full-time resident of the Hamptons. It happened suddenly, with George at a loss for why she dumped him. Was it for Patsy Southgate reasons? Freddy wasn’t saying. She was a stunningly attractive woman with enormous sex appeal but unlike Plimpton, was totally averse to the socialite mentality that consumed him. It was as though he could never reconcile his liberal political beliefs and his membership in the Racquet Club. Like many upper class liberal Democrats, he seemed to lack an integrated personality. He could rail against inequality and then, participate in it without the slightest embarrassment, failing miserably to conflate his aristocratic predilections with his longing to be a bone fide member of the left.
After a period in which he was in a funk, Plimpton married Sarah, an heiress to a Minnesota mining fortune, who resembled his mother, at least physically. They also had in common that they were both from Cold Spring Harbor. Plimpton’s mother was one of the last of the great American grandes dames, a nonconformist whose social position was so secure, she was at complete ease in any situation. In this respect, she was the exact opposite of Francis Plimpton, a stiff and dour man with little or no sense of humor. At Marietta Tree’s legendary town house, where I met him, I found myself in a debate with him over Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence for Rhodesia, which violated the rights of the black majority. To my astonishment, Francis Plimpton, a supposedly liberal Democrat, who had served as an ambassador to the United Nations, supported the white racist Ian Smith and opposed the embargo placed on Rhodesia. I, on the other hand, had been commissioned by the U.C.L.A. Law Review to write an article on the illegality of the UDI, which I did, with complete conviction. After I submitted it and it was accepted, I was notified by the new editor-in-chief that it was being lifted from typeset and would not be published. America was violating the embargo because it needed the chrome for military reasons in Vietnam. But the U.C.L.A. Law Review? I had been asked to teach at U.C.L.A. Law School when I was in Ethiopia. Surely they were not part of the national security state. In any event, I got it published by the N.Y.U. Journal of International Law and Politics.
There was no arguing with Francis Plimpton, so I switched the topic to his daughter’s psychological novel she told me she was working on. But George’s mother was another matter entirely. At a party in honor of James Merrill at his glamorous duplex apartment on the Upper East Side overlooking the Hudson, she objected to the fact that there was ‘nothing to nosh on’ with the drinks. ‘George, don’t you have any pea-nuts, at least?’ she scolded him. He sheepishly confessed that he didn’t have any. At that, she grabbed my arm and we raced to the elevator, down and out onto the street. Storming along looking for a store, she finally spotted a bodega. The Puerto Rican proprietor was bewildered by her sense of urgency about the peanuts, scurrying around until he located two jars of Planters. Back in the apartment, she tore into the kitchen and reappeared with a bunch of small dishes and poured the pea-nuts into them, placing the dishes on tables in various locations. Helping herself to a fistful, she began downing them as she gulped her martini, listening benignly to Sarah complain about a new apartment building that was going up that threatened their view. Then, before we began dinner, Plimpton introduced James Merrill and Richard Howard, who was the poetry editor of the PR, and lauded Sadruddin Aga Khan as the benefactor whose generosity, as publisher, had made the PR possible. I noticed Plimpton’s mother with a wry grin on her face. Did she know something I didn’t?
What puzzles me is that when Plimpton’s memory is honored, there are accolades to his father, but never any mention of his unpretentious mother, who was clearly responsible for his buoyant and exuberant side. Louis Begley was guilty of this omission in an event at Guild Hall in East Hampton, at which Peter Matthiessen also spoke. Begley, a successful novelist and corporate lawyer, had been Francis Plimpton’s law partner, so his gratitude to the father is understandable; but George’s mother probably made him uncomfortable. Candor has a way of doing that to people.
40th anniversary
As I was leaving the party, Plimpton asked me if I was going to attend the 40th anniversary celebration of the PR in Paris, Mississippi, that he was planning, with events and parties in nearby Oxford, and, of course, fireworks. ‘Gosh, that’s a long way to go’, I said. ‘It will be worth it’, Plimpton winked. It would be, but not for the reasons Plimpton probably imagined. But PR celebrations were always major events. The one at Tony Duke’s Boys Harbor featured an array of American literary celebrities, including the two Normans, Mailer and Rush, with lavish food and drink. For a small literary magazine, it had a way of generating a considerable amount of attention. I was definitely going to Oxford, Mississippi, home to William Faulkner and Ole Miss.
I checked into the guest lodge on the campus of Ole Miss. On the walls were photographs of legendary athletes as well as the beauties who had won Miss America titles. Ole Miss had more Miss America winners than any other institution in the country and a stroll on the campus showed me why. Gorgeous, beautifully dressed and groomed young women were every-where, smiling and greeting me graciously with a polite, ‘Hello, sir’, in languid southern accents. Not for nothing had Plimpton picked this place. I caught the exhibit of PR covers by famous artists that were on display at the museum and headed over to downtown Oxford for dinner.
I found a restaurant in a hotel on the square and after a dinner of New Southern Cuisine (shrimp with grits), I sat down on a sofa in the lobby. In walked Plimpton, resplendent in a blue blazer, his white mane glorious in its disarray. He gave me a huge smile and invited me top join him and some friends for drinks later that night at a bar in Oxford.
It was the night of the Ole Miss-Tulane basketball game and the place was packed with undergraduates partying in the manic manner of the southern elite. Smoke filled the room and a zydeko band blasted away in the background. George was sitting at a table with William Styron, Willie Morris, whom I knew from Bridgehampton and his Bobby Van’s days, George’s new wife, Sarah, and the then managing editor of the PR, James Linville, whom everyone called Jamie. I sat down at the end of the table next to Linville, with Plimpton opposite me. Waiters kept bringing huge pitchers of beer. I knew that Styron was supposed to be on the wagon, but he was drinking also.
Gratuitously, Linville told me that he had read The Pied Piper. ‘The stuff about the CIA is fascinating’, he said. Then, without skipping a beat, he added. ‘Peter Matthiessen was in the CIA. The Paris Review was his cover. Peter is haunted by the CIA.’ I looked up and saw George, who was leaning over so far his chin was practically in my beer mug. He had heard every word but said nothing. Why Linville had volunteered this to me in these circumstances puzzled me. I thanked him for read-ing my book but said nothing further about the CIA. There was a forced conviviality that I found unnerving. Plimpton was somewhat cooler towards me and eyes narrowed a bit as he looked at Linville, but otherwise, he gave no indication that there was anything wrong in the slightest. We all drank and talked until it was quite late and departed.
Newsweek and the CIA
At a reception at a famous bookstore in Oxford, Plimpton recited the usual history of the PR, including the part about how, running with the bulls in Pamplona, with Sadruddin Aga Khan, he made the prince an offer he could not refuse to be the publisher. On the last night, we all gathered at a restaurant in Paris for catfish and fireworks. Plimpton avoided me, but I put that down to the fact that he was absorbed in hosting the event. I filed away in the recesses of my mind what Linville had said with the Patsy Southgate revelations and thought no more about it. I did wonder why they had told me these things. After my experience with the Lowenstein book, I had no intention of digging into people’s CIA affiliations any longer. I remem-bered how the writer Robert Sam Anson, who had worked for Newsweek, had come up to me at the John Steinbeck Book Fair at the Benson Gallery one summer after the publication of The Pied Piper and excoriated me. ‘I knew Allard Lowenstein’, he shouted as I sat at a table with copies of the book in front of me, a rather boisterous Blanche Weisen Cook directly to my left. ‘I was in the CIA. He would have told me if he had been in the CIA.’ Blanche recounted to me how she had been vilified for her Declassified Eisenhower in which she disclosed Eisenhower’s role in the CIA’s overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran and Arbenz in Guatemala, and the part played by former Luce publication executive, C. D. Jackson. as Eisenhower’s director of psychological warfare Sometime later, I was having lunch with Shana Alexander at Bobby Van’s when Anson came over to say hello to her, avoiding eye contact with me. After he left, I asked Shana if she knew that Robert Sam Anson was in the CIA. Between swallows, she casually said, ‘Robert Sam Anson was in the CIA. Lots of people at Newsweek were.’
But I did see George socially, on and off. A particularly glittering New York event at which I encountered him, was the lavish reception at the Morgan for Stephen Spender, sponsored by the American Academy of Poets. In his eighties, Spender was still leonine and handsome. After he concluded his reading, we all adjourned to a champagne reception in a spacious, candle-lit hall, where Spender held court. Plimpton, the de facto host, was effusive. He managed to be both gregarious and distant to me. It was a perfect venue for Plimpton. Spender had been the editor of Encounter, which like The PR, had been a beneficiary of CIA largesse. It was a sort of old home week.
A few years after the Linville incident, I was at an authors’ party at the home of Martin and Judy Shepard, publishers of the Permanent Press, which had published my secessionist book, Proposition 14. The novelist and playwright John Sherry, who was probably Peter Matthiessen’s closest friend and who had published Maggie’s Farm with Permanent Press, came over to me. I knew Sherry well. He was a gregarious and exuberant man, but now he was deadly serious. He told me he needed to speak with me out of earshot of the other guests, and led me to a corner of another, empty room. He informed me in hushed tones that Peter Matthiessen had confessed to him that Sadruddin Aga Khan and his foundation had never put up a penny for the PR and that all the money had come from the CIA. Sherry went on to say that, in his mind, Matthiessen, who wanted to be remembered as a novelist, was not a good one and never would be. Sherry lambasted At Play In The Fields Of The Lord, insisting that Matthiessen had no talent for writing novels, and that his good work was his nature writing. I took all of this in, knowing as I did about how the Congress for Cultural Freedom had funded publications such as the PR and Encounter, all of which Frances Stone Saunders would recount in her groundbreaking work, Who Paid The Piper?. But, while she stated that Matthiessen had been in the CIA, she had not gotten the goods on the PR. I learned later that she had gotten a letter from Matthiessen about the CIA and the PR, in which he said that the ‘CIA dumped the job on me’. I also learned later from a British scholar that the CIA had originally intended to set up art critic Clement Greenberg in Paris as the editor of a Paris edition of The Partisan Review, but dropped this option to go with Matthiessen and the PR.
Shepherd Stone, who headed the Congress for Cultural Freedom, was a snob and insisted that those who worked for him be graduates of elite American colleges and universities. Stone might well have disdained Greenberg, who was a graduate of Syracuse University and who had been an itinerant neck-tie salesman before becoming the leading booster of abstract expressionism and Jackson Pollock. Along with Barnet Newman, Greenberg had become the CIA’s favorite huckster of the avant guard, which he did as well for the benefit of the value of his own art collection. Quel fumiste, the Parisians might have said. No, Matthiessen, with his WASPy good looks and his literary pedigree (his uncle was F. O. Matthiessen, the brilliant, socially prominent left-wing literary critic at Harvard, who committed suicide before being outed as gay) was the better choice. Besides, Greenberg was Jewish (Stone, a Dartmouth graduate, was also, but he had changed his name and assimilated) and the CIA was imbued in the Fifties with the kind of anti-Semitism that was rampant at Yale, where much of the CIA recruiting had gone on.
George Plimpton was witting
Was this the end of it? What more was there to know about the PR? I wondered why Sherry had chosen to tell this to me with such a sense of urgency. Our conversation ended, we joined the other guests. But it didn’t add up. If all this were true, and I had no doubt that it was, surely George Plimpton wasn’t in the dark. He must have been ‘witting’ all along, as they say in Agency parlance. As I would find out, it was more than that.
In the fall of 2003 I received some e-mails from Daniel Gallagher, an America graduate student in Paris researching American writers who wrote novels in Paris. He had read some articles by me on the Internet (I am a columnist for Lewrockwell.com,) at least one of which which made reference to Peter Matthiessen and the PR. Becoming intrigued with my thesis that the magazine was a CIA front, he read The New York Times article from 1977 that outed Matthiessen as CIA, using his career as an author only as cover for his intelligence activities. Gallagher commented: ‘It is true. The Paris Review was a hoax, part of the CIA world-wide propaganda effort.’
Through a friend, Gallagher located James Rentchler, who at first was identified only as a retired Foreign Service officer. Gallagher agreed to approach him on my behalf with questions I had suggested. Rentchler, it turned out was extremely rich, living in Paris and writing his memoirs. The Rentchler family is from Cincinnati, heirs to a giant railroad fortune. They all went to Princeton. George Rentchler was in my class there and was a friend. James Rentchler worked in the White House for both Presidents Carter and Reagan in the National Security Council on European affairs and served as Ambassador to both Guinea and Malta. His flat, as Gallagher described it, was filled with photos of American presidents and government officials. There were ‘hundreds’ of them, according to Gallagher, who noted the presence of an official looking American flag.
Rentchler told him that he worked in the ‘cultural section organizing cultural events all over the world’. Rentchler himself brought up George Plimpton and the CIA, so Gallagher’s question about Plimpton and the CIA ‘dove-tailed so beauti-fully that his response just flowed out’. Gallagher wrote:
‘When asked if George Plimpton’s father was CIA, he said “absolutely”, he was very well connected. I then asked him about George, saying that I had not found any trace whatsoever linking him to the Agency and he smiled and said that George was “an agent of influence”, and that he travelled here, there, did this, did that, etc. “Those guys at the Congress for Cultural Freedom, George was in with all of them, he knew all those guys.” That’s what he said.’
When Gallagher asked him who else he should speak to, he referred him to Frances Stoner Saunders. Gallagher was be-mused. He wrote, ‘The Review was a total CIA propaganda machine, from 1953 right up to the last issue.’
Agents of influence for the CIA, as Tom Braden pointed out in a number of articles, were writers, editors and publishers who penetrated the culture on behalf of the CIA. They were invariably paid. That George Plimpton never took a salary from the PR was undoubtedly true. He didn’t have to.
A change of publisher
The PR was soon to have a change in publishers. Following the death of Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, Plimpton persuaded Dru Heinz to become the PR publisher. She also funds a major literary prize through the Dru Heinz Trust. At the same time, it reopened its Paris office, staffing it with novelist Harry Matth-ews, naming two editors for a new London office, this all at a time when anti-American sentiment was escalating in Europe because of the invasion of Iraq. Leading vocal critics of American policy were John LeCarré and Harold Pinter. Coincidentally, James Linville took up residence in London, sub-letting Perry Anderson’s flat. Soon after, the influential, virulently anti-war London Review of Books published Anderson’s pro-war article, ‘The Casuistries of War.’ Linville vehemently denies that this coincidence had anything to do with a change of policy at the LRB, but he acknowledges that ‘at dinner parties, and such’, he did argue against the anti-American position of British writers and intellectuals, in what he described as ‘informal debates’. While acknowledging that the CIA sought to recruit him, he insists that he rebuffed their efforts. In addition to this, an ‘anonymous donor’ purchased the PR archives for $500,000 and donated all it to the Morgan Library in New York, while Charles Ryskamp was still the director.
With all of this information at hand, I sent several e-mails to The New York Times to suggest corrections in articles it had published on the PR. After George Plimpton died, Bill Borders e-mailed me with Plimpton’s obituary, asking me what, if anything was wrong with it. I told him that Peter Matthiessen was not a founder of the PR, that Harold Humes had founded it and that Matthiessen had taken it over it at the behest of the CIA, getting rid of Humes. ‘To write about Matthiessen and The Paris Review without mentioning that it was his CIA cover is bad journalism’, I argued. ‘It omits this important aspect of The Paris Review that it was part of the propaganda effort against the Communist and Soviet influence in Europe during the Cold War.’ I went on to explain what I had learned about Plimpton. There was no response. In a recent article in The Times that the the PR had not renewed Brigid Hughes contract, the reporter described Plimpton as ‘the founding editor’ of the PR. I e-mailed Dan Okrent, the ombudsmen, to correct this error and to, once again, set out the facts of the PR. A brief correction appeared, saying only that Plimpton was not the ‘founding editor’ but rather ‘one of the founding editors’.
A deafening silence
In late fall of 2003, I went into New York to have a dinner meeting with Taki and Scott McConnell of The American Conservative to discuss my proposed article on Plimpton and the PR, to be titled, ‘An American In Paris’. The article, a lean and to the point (two pages) piece that stated all the facts, appeared in February of 2004 and produced a deafening silence. I did send it to my former agent, Tim Seldes, who had been Plimpton’s agent, and he said he found it ‘fascinating’ and that he would show it to Sarah Plimpton. She never responded, at least not directly to me. But on the way back on the Hampton Jitney to Bridgehampton from the dinner with Taki and Scott McConnell, I happened to pick up a copy of The New York Post and came across a very small article, just a couple of para-graphs, that said the Nixon administration, during the 1970s, had notified publishers that it didn’t want any books to be published on Ethiopia. It was for national security reasons. Did America have the D-notice system that prevailed in Britain, so the government could effectively censor by ‘request’ in the interests of national security? Some time later, I phoned Ned Chase, one of the editors who had asked me to do an Ethiopian book and then reneged. His wife told me he had Alzheimer’s. She was horrified by what I told her. I then wrote a letter to George Braziller telling him that I knew what had happened to the Ethiopian proposal, but that I forgave him because I didn’t know what I would have done under similar circumstances. He rang me up, suggesting that we get together for lunch.
We had lunch at Le Café Crème on Madison Avenue, a small French brasserie that was so Parisian, I thought Braziller and I should have been speaking French, as though we were in a Chabrol film. He asked after Barney Rosset. I brought up the article and George laughed. But a bit later, he said could not recall the circumstances surrounding his return of the ‘Eagles Among The Lions’ proposal to John Schaffner. He did relate that his book club, The Book Find Club, had been the victim of McCarthyism and that he ‘got wise and went into literature instead’. It was all very congenial. Afterwards, George gave me copy of a new book of his, a handsome edition of Langston Hughes’ great poem ‘Let America Be America Again’, with woodcuts by Antonio Frasconi.
The poem ends:
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath-
America will be!
An ever-living seed,
Its dream.
Lies deep in the heart of me.
We the people must redeem
Our land, the mines, the plants,
the rivers,
The mountains and the endless plain-
All, all the strength of these
Great green states
And make America again!
It was Braziller’s way of telling me that he had made compromises he didn’t want to, so he could survive, but that somehow, a better country was still possible.
Did the CIA firebomb Grove Press?
But did he know about the spying by the CIA on Grove Press, Evergreen Review and Barney Rosset and the effort it made to close down Grove? After the issue of Evergreen appeared with Paul Davis’ legendary depiction of Che Guevara on the cover, Cuban exiles firebombed the offices of Grove. Rosset insists it was done at the behest of the CIA. His CIA file would appear to bear him out. I saw Rosset’s CIA file and is gave me a chill. The boxes lined the walls of his loft. They knew all about his finances, what he was publishing, and they knew what they hated. When the strike broke out that crippled Grove Press in the early Seventies, it was organized by small unions unrelated to the publishing industry, the Furriers, Meatpackers, organizations like that. Why did they pick Grove, when it was a small, independent house with few employees? If they were starting to organize the publishing industry, it would have made more sense to do it at Random House or some other large organization with many editors. But if you thought about it, it made sense.
The unions involved in trying to break Grove were part of the AFL-CIO, and Jay Lovestone, who founded the American Communist Party but was expelled personally by Joseph Stalin, headed its international division. Barely escaping from Moscow with his life, Lovestone became a bitter enemy of the Soviet Union. Recruited to the CIA, as Ted Morgan has documented in A Covert Life, his biography of Lovestone, he took over the unions’ international office dispensing funds all over the world for anti-Soviet activities. Grove Press and Evergreen Review were under suspicion. Grove published radical books and Evergreen Review was a leading anti-Vietnam war publi-cation. It was a natural target for Lovestone, whose case officer was James Jesus Angleton. Grove survived the strike, but in a truncated version. By the time it published The Pied Piper, it needed an influx of cash, which is why Barney Rosset was finally forced to sell it to Lord Weidenfeld and Ann Getty. Evergreen Review folded entirely, so the CIA got its wish.
But I wondered how the CIA had managed to get to the publishers to tell them not to do books on Ethiopia. And then, I remembered Robie Macauley. Macauley, who had once worked for the Congress of Cultural Freedom, and allegedly was let go, became, after doing a column for Playboy, Senior Literary Editor at Houghton Mifflin. He was known for developing new fiction writers and for having a passion for fine literature. A modest, soft-spoken man, he could have passed for a vacuum cleaner salesmen, the way many CIA intelligence officers could. Because that was, in fact, what he was. At lunch with me sometime before he died, Robie quietly volunteered that all the time he had been Senior Literary Editor at Houghton Mifflin, he had run the entire CIA program in sub-Saharan Africa. That, of course, included Ethiopia. So, it was Robie who had stuck it to me. After his obituary appeared in The New York Times, listing all his literary honors, I phoned up the reporter who had written it to tell him he had left out Robie’s CIA career. There was a brief silence, after which he said, ‘We can’t put everything into an obituary.’ They had known. They were just keeping it out.
In the case of Roger Strauss, The New Yorker and Salon.com didn’t keep it out. Strauss, the founder of Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, worked for the CIA, with a secret phone in a special desk drawer to which only he had the key. With that phone he could reach his case officer in Langley. All his European acquisition editors were CIA agents. Strauss was also, rather conveniently, Peter Matthiessen’s publisher.
Before the publication of his God And Man At Yale, William Buckley wrote an article for Commonweal, in which he argued for the creation of a ‘totalitarian bureaucracy’. Buckley had been recruited to the CIA out of Yale. His case officer at the Agency was E. Howard Hunt, novelist and Watergate conspirator. Buckley co-founded The National Review with former Trotskyite, James Burnham, who also worked for the CIA. Buckley got his wish for a bureaucratic dictatorship when the National Security Act was amended in 1949. Under the direction of George Kennan, the CIA developed its covert action capability, all of which Kennan later regretted as ‘the biggest mistake of my life’, as he put it. Still, that power was abused, as the CIA engaged in illegal acts against David Ellsberg, Barney Rosset, Angus McKenzie and many others, including me, because the censoring of unwritten books is a form of unconstitutional prior restraint. This has had a power-ful effect on free expression in America, engendering timidity in the publishing world from which it has never recovered.
Now, with the enactment of the Patriot Act, these illegal activities are legal, including protective detention, with the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus suspended by impli-cation. Writing under these conditions becomes the supreme challenge in a society that George Orwell would easily have recognized. The national security state has been transformed into the police state, not unlike life under Franco in Spain, which I personally experienced. You are free to go to the beach when you want, to go shopping when you want, but the closer you get to the Third Rail of power, the greater the peril. The bloody crossroads, as Cyril Connolly called them, of literature and politics has become increasingly bloody, with the result that literary life in America has become impenetrably bland: The Lovely Bones, The Five People You Meet In Heaven, on it goes. Get with the team or shut up. Even the 9/11 novels all seem contrived and banal. An anti-Bush book by a former government employee did appear during the election, and a CIA analyst wrote a book criticizing the ‘imperial hubris’ of the administration. But after the election, Bush appointed Porter Goss to head the Agency, and he quickly purged all dissenters. Since then, it is as though an iron curtain has descended on American publishing.
Why the silence?
But why the total silence about the revelations about the PR, given that Matthiessen has told the truth to a number of people? ‘The true division of humanity’, Victor Hugo wrote in Les Miserables, ‘is between those who live in light and those who live in darkness’. And Solzhenitsyn said that the first obligation of the writer was ‘not to be part of the lie’. But, alas, much of the literary world and the media that reports on it, choose to remain in the darkness and be part of the lie because that’s what it takes to make a living in a culture of lies. And maybe, it all has to do with the PR still being a CIA operation, which is why no one will write about it as an ongoing operation, according to CIA policy. There is, in sum, considerable denial in the world of American letters, and as they say at A.A., I’m told, ‘denial is not a river in Egypt’.
George Plimpton ultimately knew the difference between the light and the darkness, which is why, before he died, he named Barney Rosset of Grove Press, as the first recipient of the Paris Review Hadada, a bronze statuette of a bird, as ‘an editor, pub-lisher or writer who has distinguished themselves in furthering the cause of contemporary literature’. But just before the 50th anniversary celebration of the PR to be held at Cipriani’s, George Plimpton died. The celebration went on any way, with an indoor fireworks display in honor of Plimpton’s honorary title of Fireworks Commissioner of New York. Garrison Keillor hosted the event. Guests were seated with literary table hosts, including Paul Auster, Rick Moody, Michael Cunningham, Lorrie Moore, John Ashbery, James Alter, Francine Prose and Kurt Vonnegut. There were readings from the PR by poet Robert Pinsky and music by David Amram, Israela Margaliat, Ilann Maazel, and the Bethune Big Band.
But the bronze statuette was not presented to Barney Rosset before the other guests. Rather, as he related it to me, he was shuffled off to a hallway, where it was quickly presented to him out of sight of everyone else. He was not even invited to the dinner. Was Robert Silvers still furious over The Pied Piper? ‘George’s last joke’, Barney quipped. Barney remembered a literary conference in Puerto Rico, where he ran into George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen and William Styron. Everyone was convivial, with the three inviting Rosset to drive with them away from the hotel to a bar where they could ‘drink in private’. But once in the car with Barney, they began pressuring him to allow Grove to be used for the publication of the works of Latin American anti-Communist writers, the way the CIA had published Ignazio Silone, Richard Wright and others in The God That Failed. Barney refused to join the secret team and they put him out of the car, obliging him to trudge the three miles in the dark back to the hotel.
Matthiessen gave evidence of being remorseful. After the disastrous legal fight with then governor of South Dakota, Bill Janklow, involving allegations in Matthiessen’s book on the American Indian Movement, In The Spirit of Crazy Horse, he almost lost his house. He developed a serious melanoma, but survived. Then he completed his Everglades trilogy, Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man’s River, and Bone by Bone, a morality tale on the evils of racism and the excesses of capitalism. The books contain some passages of exquisite prose, as if it took his confession to John Sherry for this to finally happen. As Virginia Woolfe observed about writing novels, you can’t be honest about other people unless you are honest about yourself. Matthiessen is working hard at being a different man, as if trying to honor James Baldwin’s professed goal in life: ‘To be a good writer and a decent person.’
As for myself, I still remember seeing George for the last time. I was coming back from a play, walking east on West 43rd Street, until I got to Fifth Avenue, heading for the Jitney. It was late, and the streets were dark. Then, I caught sight of him on his bike, going against the traffic, his trademark white hair in stark contrast to the shadows. I saw him raise his arm and wave to me, and I shouted into the night, ‘Hey, George!’ and waved back. He was gone.
Key Quotes
“The bloody crossroads, as Cyril Connolly called them, of literature and politics has become increasingly bloody, with the result that literary life in America has become impenetrably bland: The Lovely Bones, The Five People You Meet In Heaven, on it goes. Get with the team or shut up. Even the 9/11 novels all seem contrived and banal.”
“…Solzhenitsyn said that the first obligation of the writer was ‘not to be part of the lie’.”
Makes one wonder where PEN fits in.
I sat next to Plimpton once on a crowded Jitney on the outbound trip to East Hampton. I would only add to this description “In walked Plimpton, resplendent in a blue blazer, his white mane glorious in its disarray” dandruff cascading down his shoulders onto his unpressed chinos and scruffy Ouijans, his sour body odor wafting with each vigorous turn of the page of the New York Times he was ravishing, newspaper reading as physical sport.
Also, Pat Schroeder. Until recently the former Congresswoman was president of the Association of American Publishers. Now it’s Tom Allen, another former Congressman.
Also very interesting, the new head of the Mellon Foundation Don Randel has a distinct interest in developing the non-profit theater. Hmmmm.
Frankly, I think They’re barking up the wrong tree if they’re spending any of the trillion they’ve squirreled away on theater… larf. They should be subverting Twitter instead
CDS Frances, I think it’s Time For a Counter-Vortex, Comedic Retreat…
First as tragedy then as farce…
Excellent!
CDS Frances sends in this image of Comrade DJ Sensei Bella Abzug; note how all the people in this image have a pre-Reaganized look to them: CDS Bella doesn’t look like a CEO, the younger woman doesn’t look like a porn star, the white male doesn’t look like a cop or an MBA and the black male doesn’t look like a criminal. They look, in fact, to have common causes. Do we know any of the others, in that image, CDS Frances, beyond CDS Bella…? (what year is this, btw? 1970ish?)
CDS Steven,
The young woman is a teenaged me sitting in on a press conference arranged by my dad, circa 1972. The men are reporters from the St. Louis Post Dispatch and the Globe Democrat. Photo credit belongs to Daniel T. Magidson.
This is quite a groovy photo, I must say, CDS Frances! But now we’d like to know what the press conference was about; barring that, any other details to flesh out the era and its ambiance (from the POV of a teenage CDS Frances) would be extremely interesting.
We had the groovy imperative but the war colored everything. I’ve spent all day writing and deleting. I couldn’t find a way to describe the ambiance without sinking into sorrow but the truth is that the angst was omnipresent, even when we were defying it.
For instance, I was the popcorn girl at the Varsity Theater. Since I lived nearby I used to work the Friday night midnight show; it was easy enough for someone to run me home afterward. I don’t know how many times that year I watched City Lights, Freaks, Harold and Maude, Night of the Living Dead.
Whenever we were showing Night of the Living Dead, one of the ushers brought in a slab of cow’s liver and other assorted grayish meat chunks swimming in a pool of blood in a Tupperware container, which he kept buried in the crushed ice we had on hand for soft drinks. Right before the movie ended he’d retrieve his package, open it for display, and stand with it in the lobby as the audience filed out. The rest of us would die laughing when people invariably screamed at him and told him he was really, really sick for doing that.
No doubt Bella was in town to help elect McGovern, the anti-war candidate.
I worked at an arty-bohemian repertory cinema like the Varsity (lived around the corner from one called The Varsity, once, as well, in an apartment in a neighborhood called Dinkytown; an apartment kitty-corner to a place Bob Dylan had lived in, on Fourth Street, about twenty years prior: a great time); I worked on endless midnight showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and developed a visceral contempt for the people who would dress up for the event and work their ways, in a synchronized mass, through the litany of kitsch cues in the film. There was a hierarchy in this culture and shockingly/hilariously savage internecine power-struggles and rumor mills and Diva-turns.
Night of the Living Dead’s allegorical power has been diluted by the banal popularity of zombies since the movie came out but the key to its brilliance nestles in the fact that it’s a perfect overlay for both McCarthyism and Communism (depending on your orientation: chuckle). Despite the fact that the original starred a black protag (the remake, as well, of course, as we discussed here on TET), I think it’s an imperfect allegory for racism (which doesn’t spread like a plague or virus but tends to more of a cultural inheritance).
And then came Harold and Maude, featuring a groovy soundtrack by the guy who went on to support the Rushdie fatwa.
(UPDATE: quite luckily, I found a picture of the street I lived on during the year I lived on it: 1978. My flat was directly across from the scene pictured above. A few days ago, CDS Barry and I were crossing a bridge near Berlin’s capitol complex when a Google spy-car, with peri-panoramic camera atop, drove by; I’ll count on accessing that snapshot from the intimate data of my existence, eventually, too)
Some tillerman Cat Stevens turned out to be!
I just looked up kitty-corner versus catty-corner. I hadn’t been aware of the variation. I’ve always been in the catty-corner corner.
Additional midnight flicks: 2001 Space Odyssey (always put me to sleep at the late hour) and Bergman’s The Magic Flute. The crunch of popcorn and Mozart was just irritating.
CDS Frances, listen to this and it shall be pure Dinkytown wherever you look for several gorgeous minutes… (Positively 4th Street is more appropriate, I know, but this is the one that takes me back to being barefoot, 19-ish and standing on the grass in sunshine with my favorite lucky multi-colored guitar pick between my teeth)
I generally “like” this writer/critic (Adam Roberts), so I won’t go for his kneecaps here, but I’m baffled at the absurdity of the following comments (actually, I “like” him because I once indulged in some pleasant chit-chat with him in a comment-thread at The Valve):
“One problem with the detail is that it does not always invite belief. To be precise: mostly it does, although I don’t know Mexico, or Madrid, or Milan well enough to know whether Bolaño’s detailed accounts of those locales are spot-on or not. They feel convincing, but that might merely index my ignorance. What leads me to doubt it is England, which I do know, and which isn’t quite right, here. Pelletier and Espinoza visit London often, because Norton lives there; and even wheelchairbound Moroni comes over from time to time. But there are petty errors: ‘Pelletier and Espinoza met at the London airport and got a cab to a hotel’ [64] can’t be right (Heathrow, Gatwick or Stanstead maybe; London airport is a tiny business-class service in the east end; and I suspect that ‘the London airport’ records a vague Bolañesque sense that the metropolis is served by one big one). Robert Louis Stevenson was not ‘an English writer’ [107]. Norton’s admirer Pritchard works ‘in a town near Bournemouth’, which is possible, although ‘the school where he taught was a council school with a good number of students from immigrant families’ [70] doesn’t chime right: a Brit would say ‘state school’ not ‘council school’ (this latter is not a kind of British school); and, probably, ‘pupils’ not ‘students’ (the latter are college or university level); and I don’t believe there are any towns near Bournemouth that harbor large immigrant populations. When Norton drives her two lovers about London the streets along which they pass are all carefully named, but this reads more like a writer thumbing through a London street atlas than the way these journeys might be experienced on the ground.”
Next stop: Kafka’s Amerika. I Googled, “Kafka Amerika inaccuracies” and was led to (eg):
Lesson Learned: Be careful talking about something you haven’t experienced
“Kafka had a real interesting story. He, like so many artists, was unrecognized until after his death. Amerika was one of his few books he finished. How many times have you been seduced by a maid who got pregnant? Evidently it only has to happen once to be sent to Amerika. A land where the statue of Liberty has a sword instead of a torch and there are no docks in New York’s harbor. I am sure he researched real hard, but there was some inaccuracies. I only bring them to light because I think its funny not because I think he did a bad job. To be honest, I couldn’t make it past page 40 so I am no authority on the book, but I wouldn’t recommend it.”
“A moment of silence was observed at 9:09 a.m., on Sept. 9, 1999. This day, with its plethora of nines, was chosen to symbolize the nine months of pregnancy and marks the first international awareness day for Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD).”
2.
# Upper lip is considerably thinner than the lower lip: an inability to reciprocate in relationships.
# Thinner lower lip: an overly giving nature
# Full lips that are round: caring and sensitive
# Upper and lower lips in equal proportion: a well meaning and communicative personality
# Large lips: expensive tastes, generous, witty
# Large mouth: very vocal under pressure, needs to verbalize their issues
# Small lips tightly pursed: anal personality, generally self-centered and controlling.
# Mouth with downwardslope: discontent, difficult personality
# Mouth with upward curve: pleasant disposition, one who laughs at life.
# Narrow lips: detached, lives more or less an internalized life, never able to enjoy the pleasure of sharing deeper feelings.
3.
“Recently a friend went to an RTO office in Chennai to choose a number for his new car. He did not want the sum total of the last four digits of the registration number to add up to eight as he has this superstitious belief that ’8′ is an unlucky number for him. He was informed by the personnel at the RTO that he did not have to bother about it is as the RTO/ Government has banned the issuing of such numbers! Apparently when a new series of vehicle registration numbers is ready to be released one of the first things that is done is to block these numbers totalling to eight. These numbers will not be issued to state transport buses or other government vehicles also. Friends in Salem and Vellore said it is the same in their towns too.”
CAUTIONARY TALE-TELLERS
JFC, even at this extreme distance, Mart looks like a hastily-thawed-and-dressed corpsicle: is it the writing, the booze or the critical drubbings?
Are you sure it’s not a Duane Hanson?
Ah, but Duane Hanson’s stylistic calling-card is that the work is “life-like”..
So true. Just the other day in the Whitney I blurted out Excuse me! to one.
No danger of anyone saying “excuse me” to Mart’s husk as it’s propped on that divan, eh?
CDS Frances, thanks for sharing that evocative photo (looks like it might have been sourced from an Alan J.Pakula flick (the scene in which the murderous truth sinks in).
CDS Steven, regarding the pop at Bolano, I’ve always found that kind of forensic alacrity plain weird (it’s as if the critic is privy to a mission statement in which Roberto swore faithfully to replicate – or at least adhere to – the actual world in its every detail). There’s a type of writer – and I include Bolano in this number – whose recombination of the known universe is more wilful than slovenly. It’s a form of emphatic shorthand, after everything, and one of the ways in which he claims a dominion for hisself.
As for your cinematic flashbacks, what no Jodorowsky?
CDS MML: Re: Jodorowsky: I’m pretty sure I mention El Topo on TET 1.0 (I need to install a Search Widget in this place), but I couldn’t find any evidence that someone on YouTube had been kind enough to aggregate the “fucks” in Jodorowsky’s oeuvre. And, yeah, re: the forensic alacrity: I blame those yearly pub-tours which end (or begin) with the Martello tower…
UPDATE: I’ve inserted a “search widget” but it doesn’t search the comments, only the “posts” (which, in the very strange case of TET, is only ever the little preamble I introduce every other comment thread with)
For your comradely consideration (when time permits)…
Will absorb this after we feed our Offsprung, CDS Frances!
I think I’m having a viscerally antipathetic reaction to what I can’t help feeling is Gen-X-Hippie-Techno-Yuppie mumble-jumble, CDS Frances! Larf. I’d have liked this a wee bit better if it’d been narrated in a computer voice (vs these sing-songing young Lyndon-LaRouche-disciple-type-timbres).
What’s your take on it? What is Who saying It wants from Us?
The bit about eliminating “noise pollution” in the form of “friends and family who do too much complaining and make you feel depressed” sounds like a pretext for a Totalitarian Decorum Camp for quarantining and punishing “negativity”. Fuck me if there isn’t quite a fucking lot to legitimately “complain” about. “Embrace tranquility” in the form of a very soft boot stamping politely on an even-softer face- forever?
My take is if this isn’t Laurel Canyon, it’s Laural Canyon.
Spot-on, Comrade! (L’Oral or L’Aural…? L’Oral Canyon: What a great name for a Pron Star; is it already taken?)
Apropos Comment #91 and its follow-ups; which figure appears to be the more “life-like”…?
or
Let’s just say that if the two of them were to play a few hands of pinochle I know who my money would be riding on…
Greetings, comrades.
A proposal for a future TET team mini-project:
I’d like to fanny about with passages from Laureamont’s Maldoror like this:
and his mad stuff about breeding quarries full of lice, etc…
… and then remix them into the tracks that constitute the heaviest, weirdest fictional Beatles album imaginable: The Black Album (released early ’68 between Magical Mystery Tour and the White Album). The idea would be that Brian Wilson actually got Smile released in autumn ’67 and then the Beatles sought to surpass it with The Black Album.
I’d throw down the rough ideas for each track on TET*, and then those so inclined can chip in suggestions whenever they fancy.
* Several would allude to thon German Tausendjährigerheißluftballon, the idea being that Lennon’s mum took him to see it flood Aberdeen with blood when he was two. Full details at theadorata.com.
General musical direction for the album (but I’m very open to suggestions):
Uh, I should’ve said: this would all be done as text.
(Though if Steven wants to go and record the thing, then I’m on hand claps and finger cymbals).
I don’t know if I’d book studio time for it (during this red-eyed recession) but I’d be up for writing the chord charts and melodies, Comrade… I could send you (or post here) Lo-Fi demos… and may I suggest, considering the fact that “The Black Album” is already taken (as a title), that we call this (wait for it)… DAS WEISS ALBUM…?
Ah, okay, I hadn’t really considered doing it as music (The Black Album hadn’t been used in ’68, natch).
But would it make sense — sense in this context being somewhat relative — for the Fabs to come out with Das Weiss Album (I dig the German-ness btw) and then follow it with the White Album? The timing’s important — for various reasons, I think it has to have been released in spring ’68.
Something involving Bunker Pagoda in German would be bizarrely fitting, but maybe a little too self-pleasuring?
Das Weiss Album was never released; it was their deeply-influential, though largely unknown, meisterwerk (were you aware that Charlie Manson co-wrote many of its tracks? and that Phil Spector co-produced with Wernher von Braun? and that it came about as a result of Lennon’s brief flirtation with Norse mythology during the Hamburg years?). Capitol pulled the plug on it and buried the masters and pressured them into recording the much-more commercial, and now beloved, White Album (the experimental track “Revolution Number 9″ contains oblique references to, and even brief excerpts from, the doomed project, which consisted of 9 “angelic” songs on one disc and 9 of the opposite kind on the other…)
via WIKIPAGODIA
Ja, ja, ja. Ich bin SOLD.
This WIKIPAGODIA article is a lotus. A lotus is an article containing only a few sentences of text which is too short to provide encyclopedic coverage of a subject, but not so short as to provide no useful information, and it should be capable of expansion.
CDS Frances: by all means expand on this lotus (or is it an artichoke?)!
THE FIRST THREE PAGES OF THE PREGNANT WIDOW: A REVIEW
Back to Marty Amis. Marty should really stick to embodying Richard Tulls (in books with Keiths in them): that’s his calling. That’s the ring he’s an Ali in. I risked going out and giving money for a hardbound of The Pregnant Widow with the reasoning that it’s set, mostly, in 1970. He got three big laughs (publicly audible; on the train back from St. George’s bookshop) in the first three pages, doing Richard Tull again (“Keith Nearing” in this incarnation). In The Information (perhaps his best novel to date, IMO), Marty gives protag Richard Tull Martin Amis’ personal life and antag Gwyn Barry Martin Amis’ wealth and fame and the comedi-lyrical survey of the terrain of the decay of Richard Tull’s failing face… plus the lucky doom of his (a wreck’s) marriage to a woman who could do much better… are the book’s twin engines. The plot, we know, is just story-telling but the decay and shame stuff is on a par with Darwin’s Beagle-era descriptions of moths and beetles. A must-read for precocious 36-year-olds (esp. the ones who once were in their 20s).
The Pregnant Widow seems to be giving us more of this illuminating reportage 15-years-on in the process. The plot will either add a little or distract a little but what I’m looking forward to is hearing Marty be honest about how doomed he feels; how much he hates himself and resents the trick-package that is Life: none of the pseudo-aristocratic/Nabokovian bravado he bluffs the press with (that is not blue Russian icewater in those veins).
I’m also happy to chip-in on yr projected bootleg, CDS Sean, time and circumstance permitting.
Seeing as how Carnaval kicked off in Rio yesterday – and I won’t be on hand this year to grace the sambadromo in garish costume, a mesmerising gringo dervish of the first rank – thought I’d post this year’s enredo from my favourite school.
Stuck inside of Stockport with the Lapa blues again…What a load of shite.
Vamos Portela!
Your musical expertise would be mucho appreciated for Das Weiss Album, camarada.
Those are top, top tunes, man.
Couple more courtesy of Brasil.
Music kicks in after 40 seconds. Fucking brill this.
“by all means expand on this lotus (or is it an artichoke?)!”
This rassler makes naming things look so easy. Kinetic intelligence on display.
I “like” the non-verbal reprise. Get a room, boys.
I’ve spent a thoroughly enjoyable morning into afternoon gorging myself on The Dinner Party by Steven Augustine. (One does get hungry.) How many canonical works do you take on in this one string quartet, CDS Steven, besides most obviously The Golden Bowl? Is Salter (the name) an homage to Waldo Salt by any chance, the screenplay writer of Midnight Cowboy, because Salter and Nixon did evoke Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo for me.
There was a certain point where I said to myself he’s going to have them “say grace” and poof! in sashay Frankie and Georgette to sing God Bless the Child. When I think of the jokey way you use the word cough (see comment #41) I probably should also have seen Cough’s unexpected attendance at the DP foreshadowing the presence of what it did foreshadow.
Oh, but I do love going back through your stories once I’ve read them through and seeing at the end how it was all there at the beginning and how stories like people tell you all the important things about themselves in the initial encounter–e.g., ersatz Carpenters tunes playing in the abortionist’s waiting room.
I really do long for someone to do for your work what you did for Nicholson Baker’s in Muster of Triviums. As a matter of fact, I hereby nominate Nicholson Baker to reciprocate. He might have a master set of carving knives to do the trick–”… any meat that can’t easily be cut by these knives should not be eaten.”
Query: does shtupping derive from tupping coined perhaps by some (illicitly) Othello-reading shtetl linguist, or did your spicing the text with Yiddishisms induce that connection, or both? What does John Peale Bishop mean by “the tag-end of summer” in this poem?
The ceremony must be found
that will wed Desdemona to the huge Moor.
It is not enough
to win the approval of the Senator
or to outwit his disapproval; honest lago
can manage that: it is not enough. For then,
though she may pant again in his black arms
(his weight resilient as a Barbary stallion’s)
she will be found
when the ambassadors of the Venetian state arrive
Again smothered. These things have not been changed,
not in three hundred years.
(Tupping is still tupping
though that particular word is obsolete.
Naturally, the ritual would not be in Latin.)
For though Othello had his blood from kings
his ancestry was barbarous, his ways African,
his speech uncouth. It must be remembered
that though he valued an embroidery
three mulberries proper on a silk like silver
it was not for the subtlety of the stitches,
but for the magic in it. Whereas, Desdemona
once contrived to imitate in needlework
her father’s shield, and plucked it out
three times, to begin again, each time
with diminished colors. This is a small point
but indicative.
Desdemona was small and fair,
delicate as a grasshopper
at the tag-end of summer: a Venetian
to her noble finger tips.
O, it is not enough
that they should meet, naked, at dead of night
in a small inn on a dark canal. Procurers
less expert than lago can arrange as much.
The ceremony must be found
Traditional, with all its symbols
ancient as the metaphors in dreams;
strange, with never before heard music; continuous
until the torches deaden at the bedroom door.
CDS Frances! Your fine, fine eye is always so much more than merely appreciated! Me: I am pooped after a day of doing domicile repairs (using a ladder et al) and my brain is still in Fix-It Lizard mode and couldn’t possibly keep up in a chat about my own scribbled fancies. But I’ve always loved the image of that old black ram a-tupping. Ewe know what I mean…!
Re: Salter: funnily enough, I saw Ratso and Joe in that relationship, too, but I wasn’t aware of the screenwriter’s name: synchronicity? I’ve been using the Salter character for years; here and here you’ll find him as a child
(The description of Nixon’s physical voice was based on Berryman)
AFTER THE FIRST THREE PAGES OF THE PREGNANT WIDOW: MORE REVIEW
Early enthusiasm soon punished. The first three very funny pages are the book’s introduction (“2006- Introductory”), written in the fictive “now” (I presume) by an old wreck looking back on the 1960s; the old wreck, reflecting on his (Martin’s) old-wreckedness, is Richard-Tull-funny. The book then commences to be not very funny and weirdly a-rhythmic; there’s something wrong with Mart’s cadences in this one. At least in the first forty pages. There’s something dirgey going on in the cadence department of this book. Thus far.
Whatever age Mart is now is the age of the protag he should build the (next) next book around; he’s not particularly good doing the young (unless they are foils for the old) and he’s not good doing “women” or “Americans” or “X-which-isn’t-Martin” (unless, again, these not-Martins are all just foils for white English writer-characters of Martin’s current-at-the-time-of-writing age). He’s good at (ie: thoroughly up for) writing macho criminals (who would seem to lurk far from his experience) but that’s his fantasy life; that’s the sincerity of his dream; that’s the stuff he daydreams for pleasure. But It can’t be fun, for Mart, writing young people. And all those tall blonds with huge racks he has to fold-double and force, with his thumb, into every single book: his heart isn’t really in it… maybe that’s just contempt for the reader. Maybe Mart thinks you need the blow-up dolls (“you” being a “New Lad”, Mart’s salad days target demo).
Imagine Kirk Douglas trying to act the role of a jazz balladeer or a Queer and that’s Marty writing about young people and/or women. When he does one about a 60+ white English writer with Oedipal booze problems and a wittily-jaundiced view of the long-ago loss of his looks and fun: that will be his comeback. That will be his “The Old Devils”.
REAL IMAGINARY SCRIPTS: 2345
2345 a Film from 1977
Characters
Zarathustra Cocker: British, handsome, insane and Black
Marta Cocker: Zarathustra’s long-suffering wife
Kat 5: a futuristic singer of Metaphysical Elevator Music
Ka: enigmatic embodiment of the Soul/Imagination
It is the distant future. Computers are household appliances [show laptop], life-like robots perform dangerous and menial tasks [show street workers in orange jumpsuits], personal telecommunications are a reality [show cell phone display blinking: WIFE], entertainment is miniaturized [show Walkman], high-speed trains have replaced the airplane as the transport of choice [show high-speed Euro-rail train] and the president of the planet is an Afro-American [show newspaper front page: Obama; no date visible: it says FALL EDITION].
The film opens with a spectacular view of JFK City.
An expensive crane shot pans with dignified grandeur across the eastern horizon at daybreak.
We see the glittering maze of the military industrial entertainment complexes… the monstrous neon beauty of cloud-puncturing skydiddlers… private rivers bristling with periscopes… spiralling nodes of falling satellites and rising communication balloons like bubbles in a vat of black champagne…
… and the tarnished gold necklace of futuristic pollution as it catches the first flames of the day…
It’s 7 in the morning and I’m trying to make my way out of this flat without waking the amazing woman asleep in the next room. As to what her name is or what she considers the meaning of life, I couldn’t tell you. Will she be surprised to wake and find me absent? Possibly. Although I think it’s more likely that she’ll be relieved. At least as relieved as I’ll be if I can find my way to the door without knocking over all the empty wine bottles, or stepping on a cat. Not that I know that she keeps a cat. But there is something here that smells very powerfully of a creature who rarely gets out, defecates in a box and cleans itself by licking.
beat
Not that I mean that observation to come off all judgmental. Let’s put it this way. I think it was Goethe who said that every man carries within him the eternal image of the ideal woman he’ll never criticize…
beat
Actually, Goethe didn’t say that, I did. Where’s the fucking door in this death trap?
4_______EXT. DAY EARLY MORNING STREET SCENE________________4
Zarathustra Cocker
Walking; buoyantly
My name is Zarathustra Cocker. Dad was a classicist with a sick sense of humor. I’m a private detective who’s been hired to find a missing Game Designer. This GD is worth billions. Speculation is that he’s been kidnapped, but no ransom notes have turned up, and clues are scarce.
beat
I’m not really a detective. I’m a Vicarious Game Net Actor… a VGNA. I’ve been hired to play the role of a detective who’s been hired to find a missing GD. The money is good, I get to travel and I have lots of leisure time to pursue my various pursuits. For example, I’m somewhat of an amateur Game Designer myself.
beat
I also write little poems and little plays and I love the movies.
beat
I call them the movies.
Cut to:
Zarathustra Cocker holding a pill up for the camera’s inspection
Crafting a convincing experience in a pill is not easy. But when everything’s right, the results are amazing, like swimming through a Rembrandt while the paint is still wet. The pills induce what the company calls a benign psychotic state. It’s a two-pill process: take a pill, play the game, derive a secondary pill from your memories of playing the game. Sometimes they hire players to take the secondary pill and play a new game based on that… theoretically you could go on forever that way. The part I don’t like is the needles. They stick a needle this long [gestures] in your spine.
beat
Being a VGNA means learning to live with it.
5_______EXT. DAY AFTERNOON STREET SCENE___________________5
Zarathustra Cocker
It’s pointless talking about movies if you don’t want to talk about white females. White females are the movies. They are what movies are made of and what people want to see when they want to see movies. The ideal woman he’ll never criticize that every man carries within him the eternal image of is a white female. A white female in a movie. Not only that, but the wombs of these females are just like little cinemas.
beat
The heroine is always a white female, or an ersatz white female, and the leading man is always a coded black male. He is cool, physically aggressive under stress, fantastic in bed and as impossible to kill as a cockroach. These are all codes for black male.
beat
What the cinema is is hundreds of years of technological dreaming of black male and white female coming together. For the sake of the species, no less. It’s called exogamy. Gene hygiene. Without it the species will die off.
with urgency
There’s no time to lose.
6_______INT. NIGHT THE COCKER HOME________________________6
MARTA COCKER (ZARATHUSTRA’S WIFE):
Confronting Zarathustra at the dinner table
It’s just a ridiculous excuse to cheat on me. When did you become so terribly bored with us?
7_______EXT. DAY TRAIN STATION____________________________7
a futuristic train pulls into a station
KAT 5 gets off and makes her way through the crowd
sfx: jet engines
narrator
No one has ever met her at the train station. So she’s become very good at looking like someone who is being met at the train station. You know, that look of anticipation and then the look of recognition, of relief. Waving over the heads of the crowd from the top of the stairs in the train’s exit. Three steps down. Then she does that fast walk, smiling, pushing through the crowd along the platform, walking faster and faster.
8_______EXT. DAY CITY SCENES______________________________8
Kat 5
Into the camera, with Zarathustra Cocker lurking in background
I am Kat 5. I sing Metaphysical Elevator Music. I am signed to MEME, the world’s biggest company of Metaphysical Elevator Musics & Entertainment. MEME employs nothing but the best mediums, psychics, mind-readers, warlocks, Gypsies, Voodoo Masters, Mystic Monks and professional lyricists to bring you tomorrow’s hits from yesterday’s unknown mega-talents. A million years of musical genius that would otherwise have gone wasted, thrown away like garbage in a pauper’s grave. Melodies from the afterlife plus lyrics taken from today’s headlines equals listening pleasure.
Cut to:
Walks while singing [On-Camera]
Night falls on cold walls,
troops on the moon
cars on the strasse
like black balloons
he told you something
you won’t forget
pain is the treasure,
pleasure’s the debt
he takes you home and fucks you up and goes
before the key even falls from your hand
-You find a note by the door
-You better laugh whenever you can
Because you’re always falling for dreams you never understand
You see you’re always falling for dreams are heavier than planned
Are you an angel, rapist or fool?
Even the killer is karma’s tool
So say the wisemen, sleek in their robes
So sing the victims, smug in their holes
he takes you home and fucks you up and goes
before the key even falls from your hand
-You find a note by the door
-You better laugh whenever you can
Because you’re always falling for dreams you never understand
You see you’re always falling for dreams are heavier than planned
Zarathustra Cocker approaches Kat 5
Zarathustra Cocker
That was beautiful.
Kat 5
turning
Sorry, I can’t fuck you, I’m a professional singer of Metaphysical Elevator Music. We must always remain virgins or we lose our gift.
Zarathustra Cocker (cont’d from page 10)
Damn.
Kat 5
Maybe when I retire.
Zarathustra Cocker
Say again?
Kat 5
I’m saving up for a race change. And then I retire. And then, perhaps, you can fuck me.
Zarathustra Cocker
A race change?
Into the camera
If it’s true and such a thing is possible, it threatens the very essence of my theory.
To KAT 5 again
Would you like to have lunch?
Tagline: Taglines are easy; it’s living that’s hard
Melodies from the afterlife plus lyrics taken from today’s headlines equals listening pleasure.
Droned by Kat equals d0uu]][asl
[forgive the random typings by the budgie waddling across my keyboard]
equals pleasure indeed.
I think from now on I’ll just use d0uu]][asl as code for ‘Yet another piece of SA excellence’.
Thanks, Chum, and I’ll use “budgie”
For the new Comrades Lurking on TET (by posting this, somewhere, every six months, I stake my claim to the discovery)…
Oh, and re: Comment #84 (my theory that Clare Quilty is Dolores Haze’s biological father, for those of you familiar with Nabokov’s most lucrative book, Lolita):
…on page 239 (Putnam); Humbert catches Quilty staring at Lo from poolside… without, of course, knowing it’s Quilty:
“And as I looked at his oval nut-brown face, it dawned upon me that what I recognized him by was the reflection of my daughter’s countenance-the same beatitude and grimace but made hideous by his maleness.” (This is from the passage famous for the “bullybag” turn of phrase, by the way)
Humbert, at some point, mock-bemoans (with a tinge of self-reproach) that what he offers Lo is only a “parody of incest”. Incest floats through the book: Jean and John Farlow are first cousins. Lolita mentions incestuous classmates. There’s also a Finnegans Wake reference on page 223 (see, in this link, the entry under “children-Colors”); Finnegans Wake references, importantly, father-daughter incest.
pg 253: “…suggested for a moment that my quarry was an old friend of the family, maybe an old flame of Charlotte’s…” (in other words, setting Quilty up as someone who has fucked Charlotte as many years ago as Lolita is old, roughly)
And here’s this parody of a Who’s Who (emphasis mine, in bold):
“Quilty, Clare. American dramatist. Born in Ocean City, N.J., 1911. Educated at Columbia University. Started on a commercial career but turned to playwriting. Author of The Little Nymph, The Girl who Loved Lightning (in collaboration with Vivian Darkbloom), Dark Age, The Strange Mushroom, Fatherly Love and others. His many plays for children are notable. The Little Nymph (1940) travelled 14,000 miles and played 280 performances on the road during the winter before ending in New York. Hobbies: fast cars, photography, pets”
Nabokov was a cryptomane, as we know, and an obsessive polisher… no words or sentences or minute observations in Nabokovland are incidental. He wouldn’t have been able to resist building a final twist, into the complex of twists and echoes that form Lolita, to dawn on everyone in its full force after his death.
Other clues involve Quilty (and Lolita) admitting that Quilty “knew” Lolita’s mother before (in the film this is made more explicit; Mrs Haze dances a cha cha with Quilty and asks if he remembers her; then she whispers in his ear and he remarks, with satyromanic relish, “Really? Did I do that?”). I have to look through the book a bit more to find the rest… but there are bits about Harold Haze being Charlotte’s senior by twenty years (too old to satisfy her sexually) and a little blond brother of Lolita who died at two when she was four and did not much resemble her.
And: by the way, not once is the word “pedophilia” mentioned, but Humbert uses the word “pederosis” on pg 259.
Holy Lola! Tomorrow will be the Bunker Pagoda’s six month anniversary!
Really, CDS Frances? It’s felt like 5 years already! Time expands when you’re having fun! I’ll have to go out now and buy streamers, glitter and tin foil hats! And brand new fondue pots and a new self-cleaning turbo-chocolate fountain plus troughs… ! And Dixie cups! Lots of Dixie cups and sugar cubes…!
And games, CDS Steven. The comrades will need some amusements. I don’t know if they have the edition in Berlin but here at The Strand I think it was in the ancillary book products section (pretty much the entire first floor) they have a few Review Copy “Pin The Tail On The Cap’n” box games left. Not sure: I think I read that Dean Haspeil did the graphics (and I also heard that they’re none too flattering to the Cap’n).
They have the “slap the toop on the tonsure” version over here, CDS Frances… just as fun, really
(go on then, Comrades… click the link; it won’t bite you)
(Oh shit! This reminds me that CDS Jacob’s trial for civil disobedience commences tomorrow and I’ve yet to send him a Be Sure To Stay the Fuck Out of Jail card. Where are my manners?)
I flustered myself with all the cursing. Please delete the second yet. He doesn’t need it.
We wish CDS Jacob well!
But aren’t civil disobedience tactics deployed against the opening of a casino a little Prohibition-esque? Obviously, I’m being a Shytt here, but I think one of the terrors of democracy is that the noblest or most “correct” position is often the philosophical ghetto of a natural minority. There’s a clear distinction between getting arrested for Civil Rights (as CDS Jacob did and for which we are awe-fully grateful) and getting arrested blocking the construction of a proletariat pleasure dome.
Lots and lots of The People like gambling, wacking-off in crackling gym socks to depressing porno, eating fatty snacks with unwashed hands and sitting far too close to the Television: who are we to say “you can’t do that”? As much as I abhor Television, I would not, if I had the power to do so, ban it. I would like to see it regulated to the extent that scads more non-commercial airtime was mandated for opposing views and higher quality and kid-enriching creativity but I wouldn’t ban the rotten shit it’s already rotten with, outright: The Fucking Peoplewant it. They always wanted it. The job is not to boss but to woo.
So, I can see the democratic justice of protesting in order to demand regulations on sap-enticing pro-casino propaganda and I can see the democratic justice of a demonstration to heighten awareness and for keeping up the anti-corruption vigilance and so forth. But: again: trying to block the damn thing altogether… I have this anti-Carrie Nation reflex that won’t let me let this issue go. (Carrie, btw, despite her ideological difference, was an original Pussy of Steel: 6 feet tall and wielding a fucking hatchet, thankyouverymuch)
How wrong am I… ? (he said, cranking the steel shutters on the bunker down in preparation of the arse-kicking CDS Jacob is sure to fetch him)
I am so outa here tonight.
As you know, CDS Frances, I’m famous for thinking what I think and then actually expressing it, despite how insane/unpopular/not-nice/retarded/incomprehensible those thoughts are! Larf
It’s an honor to know you, CDS Steven. For those reasons and many more I could easily name.
CDS Frances, don’t you know I’m the “best known troll on the Internet”? Beware! Don your bio-hazard suit at the fondue bar in case I swagger in!
Now, I’ll need to get off my plaster-covered home-improvement outfit, consume mass quantities of something tasty, dandle my daughter and nuzzle my wife (I might, in fact, even try some wife-dandling) and turn my attentions TETward…
There was no real civil disobedience. The police, not us, blocked the site. It was a symbolic action. We had informed the police about what we were going to do. We were prepared to be arrested, but also prepared to leave once our point had been made.
This is not anti-gambling. a poker game in someones living room, the money never leaves the neighborhood. This set up will do zip zilch nothing for the neighborhoods but block more intelligent development of the riverfront with big-box 24-7 slot houses surrouded by the largest parking lots in the state of Pennsylvania, accompanied, as in Atlantic City (where the casinos have done nothing to increase local employment, reduce poverty, reneged on all their promises to devote part of their profits to community imporvments)… draw in the usual cluster of cash checking and pawn shop fronts. Slots depend for profit, not on the casual or occasional visitor, but on the addicted, and slots are the crack cocain of compulsive gambling–here, with a new law permitting use of credit and debit cards on site. Like cigarette corporations, they actively, aggressively work to encourage both compulsive behavior and to attract juveniles as new recruits (a recent study found that some 80% of high school students in Atlantic City had visited casinos, and more than 60% had done so with some frequency (the slots are made to resemble video games). The Sugar House site is within 100 yards of a mostly working class residential row-house neighborhood–residents of which are overwhelmingly opposed to it. It’s been forced on the community with the least political power to resist it by an unbelievable chain of corrupt officials, including most of the PA Supreme Court. The money trail here is enough to take your breath away–no matter how cynical you might be about this sort of stuff. Back door taxation so the rich and the corporations don’t have to pay their fair share–with everyone involved on the take. This has absolutely nothing in common with morality driven prohibition movements–it’s anti-corruption hitting at a precisely targeted source of income, and in doing so, exposes a whole world of related abuses of power and money. This is a 100% local grassroots movement–the people involved live in the neighborhoods being targeted who organized because their voice was being ignored and decisions were being forced from above.
Plenty of information on both Sugar House, Foxwoods, and the history of this movement. here: http://www.casinofreephila.org/
What’s the overall strategy, then, CDS Jacob? (I’m in bed in 5 minutes, so don’t take it as a response if I don’t respond for 8 hours!)
In a rush… sorry if this is a less than elegant argument… I see one point I’d meant to expand on and got diverted . About living room poker games… where money changes hands, but stays in the community. These casinos will do nothing but suck money out of the community. It’s not gambling as such that’s the problem, but highly organized predatory gambling–especially when used to raise public revenue, that’s the problem.
Another grassroots organization, Media Mobilizaion Project (I’m involved with the Arts and Culture group)… backing us.
The most important strategic element is information: making public what’s been done behind closed doors or disguised as something that’s going to benefit communities by raising revenue for the city and state.
We have strong working class neighborhood support–enough so that (choke) even Fox News gives us good coverage cause they know the people who watch them care about this. Exposing the money trail, public education on the real economics of these predatory corporations (is that a redundancy?) . The demonstrations, and the single action involving planned “civil disobedience, ” are political theater to get attention for the educational effort and to expose the corrupt wheeling and dealing behind this.
The tax-farm casinos are a tiny pin point in the galaxy of corporate corruption of civic institutions.. but they are a very specific, and therefore, very useful target. People can understand it. It’s where the the Monster is parking his butt next door where people live.
“The demonstrations, and the single action involving planned “civil disobedience, ” are political theater to get attention for the educational effort and to expose the corrupt wheeling and dealing behind this.
The tax-farm casinos are a tiny pin point in the galaxy of corporate corruption of civic institutions.. but they are a very specific, and therefore, very useful target. People can understand it. It’s where the the Monster is parking his butt next door where people live.”
These are certainly good points, CDS Jacob; is there a nascent national movement? Thousands of disgruntled people who already live in areas where casinos exist could provide ideal testimonials; the people of Atlantic City are near enough for you to physically liaise with… are there plans to coordinate on a higher level? (And that’s, of course, the level on which people start risking their lives).
(You’re probably asleep now; good luck with the trial!)
Well-done, CDS Jacob! I misunderstood the original intent; now that I Grok it, I think what you’ve done is quite cool. You and CDS Frances are… to invoke our highest, and most perfectly non-phallocratic, honor here at TET… our Pussies of Steel.
The streamers must have taken some doing, CDS Steven. (No wonder you needed that ladder!) Very M.C. Escher in effect. Glitter in the fish tank and a piñata! Is that supposed to be Nancy Pelosi? And poppers for when we do the readings–how thoughtful! I brought a Twister game, a set of vintage Tarot cards (with instructions), and assorted bruschetti. Be warned the pesto isn’t made from basil, it’s cilantro.
Fook the pesto, CDS Frances, let’s do a Zorba-dance on these poppers…!
Did someone say dancing? Of course, the vocals are great but just look at that fancy footwork.
Going with a good thing…
I’m done, comrades. Making room for the pros…
Let’s stir some weirdness in there…
and some primordial rap
cleanliness being next to pornliness
if corporations still made commercials like this i’d get a television and a desk job
Booker T is… what… 20-years-old here?
prepare to have your minds blown, Comrades
“There was even a movie house on the cusp between Golders Park and the neighborhood they all called Beverly Hills: the PARK THEATER. The Park Theater. Benny saw Goldfinger there, with his father, the week it first came out: Murcheson Père et fils were wearing suits and ties and had their shoes polished simultaneously to a ceramic gloss in the red-carpeted foyer to the men’s room. They ordered hot buttered popcorn and a jazzy fountain refreshment called a Green River. Up until that day, Benny and his father would usually hold hands through most of a ‘show”… just an old habit from Benny’s childhood… but this time they didn’t and would never again. This was going to be the first truly grown-up night at the cinema for Benny and his dad, man to man. He will never I mean never forget sitting in that packed black grandiose auditorium with his head tilted back as the curtains parted and the opening bars of Shirley Bassey’s electrifying title song stunned him and his father and the crowd… it was Shirley Bassey’s salacious sturm und drang over a montage of the flame-filled silhouette of a naked girl in repose. God-damn, thought Benny. If he’d known that the exquisitely caterwauling Miss Bassey was colored, a beautiful colored Brit… it probably would have been too much for his over-excited heart to bear.”
Another track not written or produced by Steven (unless, that is, he’s crammed in Coldcut’s career in his lunch hour) but should’ve been:
Incidentally, this is probably the most truly sad and sadly true thing I’ve read on this site:
CDS Frances sends in this image of Comrade DJ Sensei Bella Abzug; note how all the people in this image have a pre-Reaganized look to them: CDS Bella doesn’t look like a CEO, the younger woman doesn’t look like a porn star, the white male doesn’t look like a cop or an MBA and the black male doesn’t look like a criminal. They look, in fact, to have common causes.
Gut-gawd! Full-strength, CDS POS! (ed.’s note: this comment-reply function is slightly sloppy… I’m commenting, here, on the DJ Vadim video at the top of this chain of responses)
RE: The (deviliciously wicked) Tale of Miss Virginia Epitome : searching in vain for the text…
…except by this, possibly… (listen to the needles on the VU meter peg the red)…
and with this I bid Thee goodnight
(oh fookit one more…)
… can’t access my blog or gmail. Told the blog has been removed!?
Left messages on help but can’t get replies cause no email
Had posts on the Dog I’d hate to lose..
Already very depressed. I HATE fucking winter
… browser problem. It was Opera. Firefox works…
$158 heating bill for one room. Out of my $750 a month cash. After rent gas and internet cable, leaves me less than $100. If it weren’t for food ‘stamps’ I’d have to take up mugging. I do have a really stout cane… a branch from Morris Park. And there’s no shortage of deserving victims out there. If I got good enough to garner a surplus, could give the extra to homeless people…
Need a green hood…
CDS Jacob! WordPress had a technical glitch last night as I tried to post a response here… sorry about the gap; I hope you haven’t mugged any deeply-deserving Yuppies in the interval!
Thanks for rocking the midnight hour, CDS Steven. I didn’t know the Bettye Swann tune or that Candi Staton number. As for the Rufus and Chaka Khan – great track and what a truly breathtaking woman. That right there is some serious allure (and how about the wanker at the end cutting her off while she’s cooking up a storm, no doubt to extol the benefits of Ex-Lax or some such like. Shame on you, Sir!).
Allow me to follow suit with a few female vocalists. Starting off with a great production job by S.Wonder Esq.
Ah, of course… what was I thinking, CDS MML? Syreeta! And then Dusty (definitely in my pantheon; I must have 150 tracks by Comrade Springfield in my memory banks). The near-distant past is a horde of stunning Viking gold which bumpkins and their kids (ie, fans of Madonna and Beyonce) have been trodding on, unawares, for so so long…
And representing the United Kingdom…
Dusty and Tom Moulton. Peaks around the fifth minute. Turn it up!
pre-Petshop Boys Disco Dusty?!
The Veritable Classic
Fabb! Christ, someone needs to make a film to give this gem a home in the soundtrack of… what Kubrick did for classical (counter-intuitively matching it with Sci Fi), someone should do for Soul. Imagine this to a sequence of a couple of giant, gleaming androids with tiny human heads loping (in slo mo) up out of the oil-slicked surf of a post-apocalyptic Jersey shore …
Finally, one of my favourite releases off JB’s People label.
Also brill but the size of the wig gave me sympathetic angst about neck injuries. For me it’s still a tie, in this round, between the 61-year-old Shirley Bassey and the 20-something Chaka Khan, in the primordial allure department. What I find astonishing (for all its unhipness) in the latter-Bassey performance of Goldfinger is the lacquered, near-Geisha quality of every finger and lip movement; every tilt of her spine and widening of her spectacular eyes… the lost Art of narrative song-singing. The movie in her face was more thrilling than the actual film the song made famous; the formal qualities of her performance are more rigorously presented than an essay by Harold Brodkey, Comrades. She puts the Art in Artificial. If I weren’t happily married and Shirley lived next door I’d splash on the Hai Karate (I have a distinct memory of the scent: I wore it, age 10) and go knocking. I’d even cheat on Francoise Hardy for a nuzzle with Shirley. It’s time for us to reclaim the fantasy fuckability of the non-gamine Artiste, Comrades!
My candidate for all-time most adorable: Cathy O’Donnell.
I have also peered quite hard at Clémence Poésy:
My general problem with the movies is how unconvincing I find acting (eg, the bearded gits hopping about while the director hollers through a megaphone: “Hop higher, you bearded gits, this is a wedding scene! And try to look more Russian!”). That’s why I generally prefer Fellini, where the actors are mouthing numbers in the scene and the words are dubbed-in later: the acting is broken up into bearable components. Worse is the “naturalistic” acting with the banal sets and grimly-choreographed gestures, facial expressions and mark-hitting; yeah, the sight of the pretty girl(s) featured in these things is the only consolation, usually… larf! People act every moment of their actual lives and do a much better job of it than the meta-actors who are oppressed by the directions of a director.
“My candidate for all-time most adorable: Cathy O’Donnell.”
Looks like a cross between Donna Reed and Judy Davis (esp. @ 1:07). I still prefer Shirley Bassey singing “Something” in that marvelous curly wig. Or white-haired, 70-ish Francoise Hardy. A time-traveling menage-a-trop with these ladies (at those ages) would be just the thing to put hair on the chest of a seventeen-year-old yours truly! Who would you pair Ms. O’Donnell with, CDS Sean, if the technology were available and affordable? A 20-something Chaka Khan might make a piquant counter-balance…
Probably the Tuesday Weld of Lord Love a Duck:
Plus if I can have a foursome, then for the experience and wisecracks (pre-foursome, rather than after, I hope) the modern-day Amanda Peet.
Christ, look at that Hitler-spawn body-builder-thing at roughly 4 minutes into your clip…
But let’s think hard on this foursome idea…
You’re right , of course. I haven’t really thought this through. For a start I don’t especially wish to defile young Cathy. I just want to hang out her, robbing banks and gazing at her and stuff.
Plus I don’t really know the dynamics of foursomes. I’ve had a couple of threesomes, though, one of which was great and one that was so disgusting that — get this — the email in which I described it put our host right off his lunch. Or was that the grubby story of how I popped my cherry?
Amanda and Tuesday, if you’re reading: it wasn’t *me* who was disgusting in either case.
I haven’t had lunch yet so please post!
Steven can forward you the email, comrade, if he hunts his sent mail for ‘You owe me the money for my lunch, Chum! I’m not joking.’ Nah, in fact scrub that. Too hardcore for public or private airing, I’m afraid.
Here’s the track I’d like playing when me and Tuesday hit the floor:
I’m sure she’d appreciate a band called Mousie and the Traps.
I defer to your judgment in this (and pretty much all other) matters, CDS Sean.
Trust him, he speaks the Truth
CDS Jacob, I didn’t see yr latest posts until after my happy-go-lucky medley was laid down (rather than my being neglectful of them). Sorry to hear about yr present difficulties and I hope things take a better turn for you soon.
“Fabb! Christ, someone needs to make a film to give this gem a home in the soundtrack of… what Kubrick did for classical (counter-intuitively matching it with Sci Fi), someone should do for Soul. Imagine this to a sequence of a couple of giant, gleaming androids with tiny human heads loping (in slo mo) up out of the oil-slicked surf of a post-apocalyptic Jersey shore …”
I’d say you were the man for said job, CDS Steven (I actually mean that). If I was only head of development at Universal I’d be giving you the nod right now, money no object, on the basis of that one envisaged scene.
Time for me to re-print my favorite Augustinian pome about non-gamine allure and power, Comrades Lurking and Explicit
the fine arts in berlin
old von bredow and his widow in apparent
years sufficient but too
meticulous in their pleasures to ever be
grandparents, somber-slim and softly
rich as becketts, are again in the market
for a girl to cook, polish, launder, drive, pose for his
sketches and comply without kvetching with
the importunities enticed by ripening
youth. evidence of a recent
bloodtest, a signed declaration of
boyfriendlessness, sweet
breath and high
breasts to be presented in
that order at the
interview. the list of alumnae tallies a
fine-arts-in-berlin who’s who: the tooth-sculptress, the
pain artist’s muse, the longterm girlfriend of two
married antiquities dealers and the wife
of a brewery-inheriting collector of
restoration erections, plus
the headmistress of a faux-french trompe l’oeil atelier of
ill-repute. all have done well for art
students. the first in the series, the
widow herself in
1962, 18 to von Bredow’s
30: blackplumed, supple, striking
as a horsehair whip
(father a)
(cinematographer at Łódź)
(one of the chosen)
(few aryans slain by a)
(jew in that era in a)
(duel over a pupil’s)
(paramour)
she’d mix
von b’s patented lacquers, gesso/sand/re-gesso/re-sand his
grander canvasses; photograph, crate-up, ship-out each
piece of his gigantic oneiric
maps from the studio overlooking
the Lietzensee and its petit bourgeois
paths. later she even came
to finish certain works and worse
paint others ab
ovo usque ad mala whilst the maestro
napped. her man can live for what feels like years
without urges regarding the
pinkerparts of the
people. it’s the widow herself, blackwings
turned a pearly bob, cupped breasts white as
dresden pots in timebrowned
hands who relishes the
entering of that room kept sternly
lockless, its unblocked
view of three steeples, not even
knocking. an applicant/supplicant buzzes
breathless down at front, the widow sips
her salted coffee, walks
the atrium with numbered
steps, stops to stoop to pocket a
foilship of gumwrap off
the cloud-reflecting
koi pond feeling
I called Finn a cunt once (I still think he was being a bit cunty and he probably still, if he remembers the event at all, thinks he wasn’t) but I like this finely-written comment-as-an-essay-as-a-playlet he just left over at Dan’s (though, the fact of the thing’s existence; a thing which would never, in this exact form, have seen existence in the Print Realm; mitigates against its own gist):
The lot of the freelancer is a hard one indeed; a reminder that no labour-intensive-yet-poorly-paid deed goes unpunished. But if, in the early days of the Plastic Millennium, idealism is getting it in the neck from *all sorts* of directions, why not see the obvious? The world of print coverage is what it is, and, as has been pointed out repeatedly at this site, its trend toward plumbing and/or cut-backing the depths isn’t going to change. Economics dictates this as much as anything else.
But — and here’s the fine point of it — it’s difficult to discern, I mean, really truly, how the blogosphere will do better…. I mean, yes, it will do better here and there, in patches and zones, but will it do better overall, qualitatively? I don’t see that, and one reason why is I don’t see a blogosphere that’s in love with its own creative productions. Fade in on the pitiable figure of ThorAu, bent over his desktop while his eyes go and his hopes fade. What was it really all about, then, this lettered life, this life of the mind? Did he produce novels to … mainly get book-reviewing gigs? Did he become a writer to … mainly read? (And, o! The reading that sometimes was entailed; not being born on the right side of the parallel, ThorAu has had to keep up with the holy trinities of *several* national literatures: St. Munro, St. Atwood, St. Ondaatch …St. Roth, St. DeLillo, St. Deaddike … Monsignor McEwan, Abbess Mantel, Pope Amis … not to mention the zen masters of the East.)
Sure, the net offers the opportunity for more personal, more detailed criticism. However, as it does so, it still primarily aids and abets a publishing system that has become as insulated as a Tsarist bureaucracy.
ThorAu reaches for a smoke. No, he doesn’t smoke. ThorAu reaches for a healthy munchie — some raw cabbage hits the spot.
ThorAu lives his life, and writes his life and the life of those around him and those that preceded him, and all this is transcribed and dutifully saved with crematorial compactness by a hard-disk.
A friend visits.
“Was it worth it?”
“Sure. I did it for its own sake.”
“But was it what you *wanted* it to be?”
The dry, defensive laugh of the disappointed. “*Who* gets things as they *wanted them* to be?”
“But people did, a few decades ago. I mean, people — people like you, that is — were at least offered a system of selection that made some kind of sense, that had some degree of fairness to it. I mean, there was a time when publishing houses, too, *read*.”
“Publishing houses still read.”
“But no one reads the productions of the publishing houses that read. That’s the tragedy of it all. All people read nowadays is the Big Lists of the But Bigger Houses — and they don’t read … they don’t read the riff-raff, that is.”
“Maybe, then, being part of the riff-raff is what I deserved.”
“Yes, yes. But the crit-riff-raff might have at least shared their smokes — I mean, chunks of cabbage — with you those days you all huddled under bridge.”
“What bridge is that?”
“You remember, the bridge,” ThorAu’s friend insists. And at this point he points to the horizon, toward that fantastic construction that stretches from the mainland to the airport, and he says with complete and happy wonder, “the World Wide Bridge.”
Finn, stop being such a materialist. The cruel question you put to ThorAu could be just as well put to any artist, famous or not-famous, un-remunerated or pig-ass rich. No it wasn’t worth it or Yes it was: whatever. You did it. It’s done. Do you regret the doing? The breathing? The eating and fucking? Or are you glad you were here to do?
Finn Harvor is a really good interviewer.
Finn is indeed, CDS Frances… I only have qualms with Finn’s apparent bitterness over the fact that we won’t be earning Fame or Fortune (cash n’ gongs), as literary creatives, in the system as it is… when we all now have the means to be read, finally, by thousands. Why would anyone wanting money and respect choose (or give in to the calling of) The Arts? Most “successful” Artists are semi-artistic mediocrities with talent in the dark arts of self-promotion, lucky birth and/or arse-slurping/ cock-sucking: they earn their money and I don’t envy them or begrudge their getting of it. Let them agonize with it.
As a writer I want most of all to be read by at least a handful of people who “get” my Art; as a wised-up fellow, I figured out other ways to earn money (ie, prostituting my secondary talent). We now have the means of distribution… and no excuses.
Dear CDS Steven, as somebody in possession of a Plan B that is not itself without artistic merit and one which clearly runs parallel with your literary production rather than counter to it, I would say this places you in a very small minority of those writers who cannot make a living from their words (I should state at the outset, I don’t believe the question of whether or not you’ve paid your dues to reach this point – which I suspect you have – is relevant here).
When it comes to assessing writers’ ulterior motives, I see a clear moral distinction between those who desire to earn a modest living from their literary endeavours and those who would wring glory from it at any cost (including that of the work’s quality or intent) . Whilst one might very well call the first lot of people deluded, the idea that they are in some way reprehensible is not one I can condone, particularly as I continue to include myself amongst their number.
In the case of this chap Finn – who I don’t know and whose motives I can only speculate at – I’d be just as inclined to see anxiety where you see ‘bitterness,’ and to think of that anxiety as well justified as he wonders how he’s going to commit to his writing thoroughly and continue to pay the bills.
To put my own disquiet in context – In October I returned to the UK without a pot to piss in and nowhere apparent to stay and ended up living in a nascent squat in an abandoned pub on an industrial estate in Dublin because I didn’t know where else to go.
To find myself there at the age of 39 was an experience far removed from my more youthful forays into alternative living (the fact that I didn’t have any alternative no doubt compounded this sense) and certainly it lacked the piquancy which comes from an experiment one might abort at any time. In my more maudlin moments, I found myself reiterating the alleged last words of poet Jack Spicer, ‘My vocabulary did this to me.’ (although this is a highly simplistic assessment of how I came to find myself in this place, it is certainly not without cause). For the truth of the matter is that I have refused to do anything except write – by way of employ – for as long as possible, regardless of the now obvious consequences and despite earning nothing from these efforts. At the same time, I’ve continued to send this work off to various agencies in the hope of finally getting paid. In hindsight, this was not an intelligent or sustainable approach to living, however – if only for my own sanity – I must continue to think of it as in some ways noble.
Am I delighted that my work can now appear online as and when I choose and be read by literally tens of global readers? Yes. Does the fact that of these ten or so readers, four of them produce work I admire in turn, enhance my pleasure? Yes. Does the fact I can’t make 5000 Euros a year (there’s the figure for you – personally I could live Ok on that) from this writing continue to haunt me? Yes again. Especially as the prospect of reaching that goal looks likely to recede further as those publishing models which would conceivably support it go the way of the Mashed Potato, The Funky Chicken, and The Twist.
CDS AO! My only point is, really: when exactly did De Debil sit any of us down and promise that if we were really, really good, we could earn a living writing? Especially if we’re too good to write populist super-shit. How would that work?
I think an awful lot of artistic energy gets wasted with what ifs and if onlys. There’s not even any money in writing for 80% of the “published” writers (I was virtual friends with the author of a popular series out on Bloomsbury; 5 books; she couldn’t have done it without her husband’s added income). Even F. Scott Fitzgerald ended up looking back longingly to the days he could make the price of a car with a short story in the golden age of magazines; he earned chicken-feed for most of his novels.
Nearly a century later, I think it’s time to move on from that old (passively destructive) fantasy of cold-submitting an all-or-nothing manuscript, having a discerning intern pluck it from the slush pile… and… and… soon-after feeling time slow down (and the heavens open) as the editor at a major imprint makes that Cinderella call the day before your rent goes three months overdue. I say: give up the fantasy… or write populist super-shit (and make that precise sequence of moves… the correct Uni, the correct writing program, the correct agent and cock-sucking technique and, uh, oh, being in possession of a young, pretty face or a lurid childhood is also advisable).
If you’ve been a reader of Finn’s site (and I have), you’ll know that he does very interesting interviews with published and/or publishing pros on the topic of what is and isn’t getting published and when it all changed (to put it in a nutshell). And I think that’s fine but it A) indulges in the kind of nostalgia I decry above and B) cedes too much inherent (versus psychological) validity to the gate-keeping charisma of the official, paper-print artifact.
Before I learned to eek money from writing shitty pop tunes in order to pay for my compulsion to write/ create Art, I painted houses, Comrades. For twenty fucking years. I served my apprenticeship (developing an authorial toolbox and clarifying my themes), in parallel to that. I wrote in the evenings, stinking of paint. I wrote on the weekends, despite my first wife’s complaints about the sound of the “hammering”. My first wife, btw, did everything in her power to make me quite writing: she even offered to swallow! No, not even for that, says I.
The last time I picked up a paint brush for money I was 40! But the terrible arc which that endpoint describes (this is a calloused finger I type with, Comrades) didn’t discourage me from learning to write “better” (subjectively speaking) than lots of feted (fetid?) cunts who were earning okay money publishing stuff that was no better than stuff I was writing and shelving in college.
It even took twenty years to break into pop… and that was after I had made the deliberate decision to sell-out my music muse in order to feed my monkey!
(1991: a picture of my first wife, taken in the Cafe Morena about 6 months before I met her: her best wasn’t good enough to make me quit writing; I must say I got a very cool SS-Officer-type leather coat from her father, a Max Von Sydow look-a-like, which almost made the whole doomed marriage worth it)
SDC (dyslexia rules!) Ann
“between those who desire to earn a modest living from their literary endeavours and those who would wring glory from it at any cost (including that of the work’s quality or intent) .”
A false set of alternatives. One can well “desire to earn a crust,” without that becoming the motive for writing. Let’s distinguish possible reward from the motive for doing in the first place.
While I take time and effort to get my works seen and read in one form or another (I feel that as a kind of obligation to the work… its what i owe them for the pleasure and sense of accomplishment they have given me in making them (and for their fending off the Black Dog that lies in wait to tear the flesh from my bones). But learning over the years to strip myself of the wish (wish, not need) for that reward, separating the pleasure of recognition (such as it is) from the need to write, has been for the last 25 years intimately married to the task of learning to recognize and accept what is my own and no one else’s.
And ‘glory’ has nothing to do with it. To see ‘glory’ in what one does, one has to stand outside oneself and look back as through the eyes of others. There is no confirmation that can come from others. None. None that is not a will-a-the-wisp, a siren song… empty calories. Were I draped with honors and crowned with laurel and flush with happy material wealth–the confirmation for the work would be no less dependent entirely on myself, to be found nowhere but in my immersion in the process. To hope for reward is more than understandable–quite worth trying for, but to need it–to count success in any terms but that of the work itself, is a weakness.
But you are still young! You have half a lifetime left to figure this stuff out!
Jacob
“Were I draped with honors and crowned with laurel and flush with happy material wealth–the confirmation for the work would be no less dependent entirely on myself, to be found nowhere but in my immersion in the process…”
Cf: Marty Amis! larf
CDS Jacob: would you please “you are still young” me, too? No one’s done it in quite a while and I’m starting to worry…
With all due respect, CDS Jacob, I don’t think you’re ‘feeling me’ here. All I’m saying is that I would prefer to get paid for what I do so that I can keep on on doing it and that there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with such a preference, however chimerical.
Glory, as such, may not exist, but you can’t say the same for glory-hunting, which is what I was alluding to and also denigrating (Quite clearly I was not attributing this particular foible to myself (I shuck off that particular bugbear in my late twenties, thanks all the same)).
Wait: CDS AO, could you really live on 5k a year? That’s Berlin!
(Oh, and re: “as somebody in possession of a Plan B that is not itself without artistic merit”… ha! The commercial music I’ve arse-slurpped my way into is so bad you’d swallow your teeth laughing at it; some of the acts involved are very big names… in Germany. Oh, the shame and horror of it. One of the tunes I co-composed ended up in a squeeze toy in a McDonald’s Happy Meal; I once co-composed the theme song for a Dentist)
“All I’m saying is that I would prefer to get paid for what I do so that I can keep on on doing it ” .
… who wouldn’t?
But what makes you think the business of selling, keeping agents in, battling editors, managing contracts, reading proofs, doing readings and book signings — for barely enough to live on — would take less time than a part time job? Or even a full-time 9-5 job?
Vain fantasy. How can you be sure this isn’t a displaced wish for the world to give you its blessing ( Good Girl! Here’s your Daily Bread, now go forth, be free to dream and do the work of the Angels!), cause it’s about as realistic as coping a multi-million lottery ticket.
The shining lie in the store window designed to make us acutely aware of what we don’t have. A drain of emotional energy and loss of focus.
j
SA. When you cross that line there’ll be no reason to worry about it anymore.
CDS Jacob: it all started the first time a pretty girl called me “Sir”…
Here’s a case in point. There’s this young writer/blogger I think has real potential. She’s smart as a microchip whip, is respectful of her antecedents (eg La Didion, et al), seems lucid both in her concept of herself and of what she needs to build a useful toolbox.
But she also happens to be trendily beautiful and that’s the key; she’s already (at a terribly young age) interfacing with creative types who are playing in the Hipster Big Leagues. She may never write a great book, but I’ll be shocked if she doesn’t end up earning serious money in the field. Maybe lots of it. Whether or not she develops into a fully-activated Artist. And while I’ll be “disappointed” (if I’m still aware of her five or ten years from now) if she doesn’t deepen her Art, I would never (if I had the power to in some alternate reality), advise her to eschew the Hipster Big Time (which is, under a thin plating of style, vapid as the junk from the Big Time Squares) in favor of being a genuine, paid-in-full, no-shortcuts writer. Because that would mean telling her to be Poor.
That’s the way of the world, Comrades.
PAGING CARL JUNG
In fact, I just popped over to Scott McLemee’s Quick Study and found this (which he copied and pasted from someone else’ comment thread, liking the justice of it); emphasis mine:
One problem is when students and faculty think that the only way to HAVE a “life of the mind” is to go to grad school. I suggest prospective grad students start hanging out with writers and artists. In my experience, ideas that in academia are treated as revolutionary are in fact concepts that artists and writers outside academia often explored literally decades earlier (and without a PhD). Academia is indeed a fantastic place to explore the life of the mind– but it is also often conservative, derivative, and uncreative in its thinking, even among those who fancy themselves radicals.
Scholars might as well go be with the artists, for becoming a credentialed intellectual (by going to grad school) now has a high likelihood of landing people in the exact social and economic situation experienced by artists and writers — no, or very little payment for your “real” work, and little interest or even notice shown by the rest of the world. The difference is that writers and artists usually have few illusions about their moneymaking prospects, so it’s totally acceptable for artists to have “day jobs” that no other artist would ever fault them for having so that they could continue to do their work.
Academics, on the other hand, tend to be much more mainstream and narrow in what kind of moneymaking work is acceptable, and a lot more worried about social status. (What else can you say about a profession in which teaching high school, or publishing an essay in the New Yorker or a book aimed at the NPR-listening public, is seen as evidence of unseriousness and will, in all likelihood, be detrimental to your career?)
These days, though, scholars, like writers and artists, must accept that what they do, they must do for love (because no one really gives a damn about it except your peers), and persevere even if they have to work at Whole Foods during the day to do so. In the world outside academia they can find a fascinating group of people living an often far more adventurous “life of the mind” then you will find in a university. (and believe it or not, some in this group will be reading the same books you are, and have interesting things to say about them)
The cost is that such scholars will have to give up on the idea of upper-class social status, and know that mainstream academia will now consider you a loser/crank and probably never let you back in. The benefit is that you can work free of intellectually-restrictive career-ladder restraints. And that might produce work so interesting that you could become a professor someday after all — especially if/when the current academic model finally destroys itself.
CDS Steven, I clearly made that point at the outset – that I believed whatever degree of comfort or ease you’ve now achieved has been hard fought and won. Nor could I argue that this long battle did not provide grist to your mill or gain you distinct advantages over those of your contemporaries who meanwhile saw their names in print and found themselves feted. In fact those same pluses are there for me to read and enjoy.
I suppose what I’m defending is not the expectation of earning a crust from writing, and certainly not the assumption, but rather the longing. Again, I’m talking about being paid buttons here (enough for a roof and three square meals a day (forget about the car).
And, yup, 5k per annum in Berlin is certainly doable (I can think of no other city in the world where being stony broke amounts to an unofficial civil ordinance – I know there’s a lot of faux hardship amongst yr hipster types, but Berlin does also cater to the real thing).
CDS AO, what we should be doing is working on these ideas for cash:
A) Pet Bordello
B) Nightcare Centers (catering to the many Berlin parents who are into clubbing)
C) “KICK AN AUSLÄNDER (for €5)” sandwich boards
D) Sunday Morning Kebab-Vomit Cleanup Service (sub-contracted by city)
E) Freelance “This is Where the Queue Actually Starts” Ushers for bakeries and banks
Last August I staged a one-woman guerilla-style flohmarkt on the banks of the Spree over successive days (This was in Mitte, parallel with Oranienburger) by throwing a blanket onto the grass and trying to dispense with my remaining library. At one point I was approached by a number of gypsies, after a slice of my non-existent takings for the day. I laughed back at them with what can best be described as exasperation: ‘Yeh. Like I’m the one to see.’
I doubt that any of your proposed initiatives could fare any worse, CDS Steven; especially the Pet Bordello. That one’s a corker.
Well then, let’s get to it, Comrade! (We’ll need a little electric hair-trimmer thingy, first off, to cater to modern… eh… no, I can’t go through with this joke; I can’t)
Here, let’s have a look at this list, Comrades Lurking and Explicit, and see if we can all finger the two funniest bits:
2010 Average Salaries for Writers and Editors
* Acquisitions Editor: $37,000 to $57,000
* Assistant Editor: $26,000 to $40,000
* Associate Editor: 33,000 to 44,000
* Blogger: $17,000 to $38,000
* Copy Editor: $21,000 to 42,000
* Copywriter: $41,000 to $63,000
* Editor: $37,000 to $54,000
* Editorial Assistant: $24,000 to $38,000
* Editor-in-Chief: $51,000 to $95,000
* E-learning Developer: $42,000 to 75,000
* Fact Checker / Researcher: $25,000 to $37,000
* Grant Writer: $35,000 to $47,000
* Junior Copywriter: $29,000 to $44,000
* Junior Technical Writer: $31,000 to $42,000
* Legal Editor: $36,000 to $45,000
* Managing Editor: $37,000 to 49,000
* Managing Editor: $40,000 to $64,000
* Medical Copy Editor: $29,000 to 44,000
* Medical Editor: $37,000 to 52,000
* News Editor: $25,000 to 35,000
* Newspaper Reporter: $24,000 to $51,000
* Online Editor: $31,000 to $50,000
* Proofreader: $29,000 to $41,000
* Proposal Writer: $41,000 to 69,000
* Public Relations Writer: $34,000 to $46,000
* Publications Assistant: $25,000 to $37,000
* Senior Copywriter: $54,000 to $80,000
* Senior Editor: $42,000 to $66,000
* Senior Technical Writer: $56,000 to $81,000
* Speech Writer: $51,000 to $73,000
* Technical Copy Editor: $36,000 to $52,000
* Technical Editor: $36,000 to $57,000
* Technical Writer: $42,000 to $63,000
* Web Editor: $22,000 to $44,000
Well, I’ll finger the one funny bit, for starters: no mention of “novelist”
“Zero in the system.”
(Do I have to say? Don DeLillo braking it down in Libra)
Please do not fix my typo in breaking. It was inadvertent but I really like it.
Pure Zen, CDS Frances!
Poet. Retired from part time work
$750 a month, 9,000 a year cash, Social Security while it lasts.
You pay for freedom with real-life anxiety… better than being a well remunerated wage-slave.
The problem being that who you are in North America equals what you earn (or what people think you earn or what they think you have the potential to earn); the majority of the population is poor, but so many of them, living in the simulation-within-a-simulation of their own heads, behave as though they’re on the way to being rich, if not rich already. They see a rich celebrity or politician on the wall-sized flatscreen in the living room and identify powerfully with It. “The American Dream” is the perfect term for this condition.
I was once privy to an astonishing conversation on a bus on the way to the Mall of America. This was in 1995, I think; I’d just returned to The States after 5 years in Berlin (this was right before I moved to Southern California, where bus-riding is unthinkable). A middle-aged couple in the seat ahead of me were fantasizing, out loud, about what they’d do with the money if either of them won the lottery. To make a short story shorter, it didn’t take more than five minutes before they were having a vicious argument about this phantom money. A perfect metaphor.
“(We’ll need a little electric hair-trimmer thingy, first off, to cater to modern… eh… no, I can’t go through with this joke; I can’t)”
Oh come on, CDS Steven, don’t be such a…….Scaredy-Cat.
38k. That’s got to be good for a decade if I keep to Wedding….
Well-spotted, CDS AO, you win the joke prize!
…Maybe we should cannibalize the entire Augustine oeuvre under the catch-all ‘Jazzmag- Atomhund’ and flog it to the highest bidder, something like this little dear.
‘It was Zizek wot made me do it’. Admirable cheek. But I still hope her comeuppance is worthy of Struwwelpeter.
CDS MML: no, wait until I write the stuff about the year (1990) I worked in the legendary club Orfeuo … THEN plagiarize! Much more lucrative (apparently)
“But I still hope her compeuppance is worthy of Struwwelpeter.” As in a Saint Nick look-a-like dipping her in a giant pot of ink to turn her black? That would be nice.
CDS Jacob, I still think your portrayal of what I’ve said is wide of the mark (just as yr apparent equanimity in the face of artistic hardship is somewhat compromised by yr postings on Feb 18th). That said, I accept in this case I invited such a response with the tenor of my argument. Truth is, I rarely enter into these kinds of disputations – thinking it better to keep my own counsel – and should have held to this wisdom once again.
I was trying to acknowledge my self-pity rather than celebrate it, but obviously this distinction was not rendered clearly, leaving us both free to turn blue in the face arguing the toss.
Another picture of my ex-wife (on an actual postcard you could find in Berlin in the early 1990s), who never read a single word I wrote (we’re talking, to date, approx. 2,000 pages of the stuff I’ve deemed keep-worthy). Some of our Comrades Lurking are also, or have been, perhaps, Persecuted Writers in their own homes. Is there a branch of Amnesty International to deal with that? Who needs government censorship when your spouse is praying for your typewriter to fly to bits, praying a law school will conscript you, demanding more money for designer fucking outfits and even hitting you with the old Lysistrata bit… as though writing were an act of war? I hunkered down. I wasn’t a Solzhenitsyn (or his Isaac Denisovich) in a Gulag but I felt like a man in sack cloth pajamas with a twelve-digit number on his back in a windowless concrete room. How many genuine writers are thwarted/stunted/erased every year in the petit bourgeois re-education camp of marriage? The second marriage, I was blindingly lucky (and crafty: I married a semi-Bohemian classical musician this time). But the first time almost killed me. The discouragement was fucking relentless. If you are a writer of any talent and want that talent to thrive, the safest thing is to say single. These past five years as father and husband have been the happiest (and most productive) of my life… but. Again. It was luck. It could easily have gone the other way. Again.
AnnOminous,
Sometimes it’s hard to climb over the wordfence and see what’s going on the’other side.
Seems I was responding to the words and not their sense.
Who hasn’t wasted time mourning the loss of what’s not worth having in the first place?
Sort of thing makes me sit up and take notice, though, as that’s pretty much how we’re supposed to feel about ourselves and it’s so damn easy to slip under and drown in it.
Keep swimming, sister… and make sure it’s up stream. That way you always have good reason to complain!
My complaints of the 18th had nothing to do with any expectations I hold out for my writing. The business of living and writing are two different things. Writing is play… the pleasure of play. Like when I was a child–how in play, not always, but now and then, there were hours that became a world, that I’d carry to bed with me and dream on them, and then I’d have to wake up and go to fucking school.
Business, “success” and its trappings, making a living–all that shit–that’s fucking school. School is the disease. Play is the cure. Why would I want to infect my play with fucking school?
Reminds me of a poem I wrote years ago… maybe that’s where it came from… the residue of fucking school
This morning, she woke me,Death –
It’s time, she said, hands soft
as webs. They touch my own and fuse
bone to bone.
She lied. She always has.
Even as a child I’d wake like this
My mother’s kiss warm on my closed eyes,
And then I’d wake to her — Surprise! she’d say
It’s I! — spinning
Over me, her dancing hair would fly,
Would fly, would fill the room
With cinnamon and cloves, the smell
Of spices in the wind, the sound
Of sea gulls mewing on the bay.
This morning, She woke me, Death –
With eyes like silver asters
On a cloudy afternoon, the smell
Of rain, of winter coming soon.
She lies. She lies.
VINTAGE EMAILS
(from Sunday evening, January 13th, 2002)
Dear X—
Hectic nutty post-Holiday season here in Berlin (and by the way, one GOOD thing about this soul-testing period has been that I learned the reason a ‘boulevard’ is technically a divided thoroughfare…yeah I know what a weird source of joy… but, you see, it derives from the word ‘bulwark,’ because it was, in the olden days, a road that circumscribed a walled city; the interior section of the road was within the city wall, the exterior section outside… therefore those flower beds or saplings you see decorating the meridian of your average boulevard nowadays are the remnants, semantically, of a fortification’s wall…)…
Last Saturday night the phone rang and it was B__, the Russian-fluent East-Berlinerin (and owner/boss of ” ______ ” Casting Company for Television and Film) with whom I had an affair last Christmas. Apparently there was a post-film Premier Party at the “Gorgonzola,” a comfortable little bistro about five blocks away from the room I’m writing this letter in. The premier itself was at the Movie House which is on the end of the block. Would I like to come join the party before they walk over to Gorgonzola? Sure, B___ , I said.
When I got to the Movie House, I saw B___ , K___ (successful-but-hideous TV director feller), C___ (some kind of assistant director type), and S___, a would-be directoress and Swiss half-lesbian femme fatale who kinda looks like a movie star. These were the four who had made of themselves a little island of snickers and gossip. The rest of the crowd were oblivious and unknown to me. By the time I joined them, by the way, they all had a bit of a champagne buzz going. B___ came over and grabbed me territorially, K___ gave me his flounderesque smile; C___ was dyke-ishly chummy and S___, who I’ve met before, pretended to ignore me. Ha!
Get to the Gorgonzola and the FIRST thing we do is sit at a long table that has a RESERVIERT sign on it and just, you know, ignore that, since the waiter is a downstairs neighbor of B__. But, see, right before B___ called I had stuffed myself with food and drink and wanted for nothing, so I…uh…and I normally don’t do this (but the Gorgonzola is slightly pricey)…I ordered NUTHIN.
It was soon after that that the INTERNATIONAL FEMME FIGHT started. But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.
S___ is sitting on one side of this long table and B___ and I on the other. We were indulging in the half-assed fooling and cuddling that people who had an affair last Christmas and stopped, but still like each other in some way (but not romantically, or, to be blunt, B___ wants to have a kid with me and that is NOT on the agenda) do. All this secret little whispery snickery thigh-grabbing tomfoolery was getting on S___’s nerves, since she is used to being the center of attention in absolutely all situations, whether among femmes or dudes. so she started asking me about myself.
Well, the combination of her goulash of French, German and English, along with my off-and-on German and rickety French, means that I’m still not absolutely sure how the conversation got to that point, but it ended up with my remark (paraphrased here) that ‘The Universe is vast, human life is very small and almost certainly accidental, so nothing really matters that much, contrary to the needs of the Human Ego to believe otherwise… I just want to enjoy living while I can.’
It must be an immutable law that this sentiment makes people who are shit-faced drunk see red.
“Bullshit!” said S___. “This attitude is just a defense mechanism!”
“But that’s not the question,” I countered. “The question is: is it true?”
“But it’s just a defense mechanism!”
“But is it true?”
Shifting rhetorical gears, she changed her mantra to the heroic and ambiguous, “But we can fight!”
“Against what?” I asked, coolly.
Then B___ said something and sensing a softer target in B___ than in me, S___, who by now was drunker than your uncle’s date at Thanksgiving, made fun of B___’s East German accent. Whereupon B___ asked S___ about the big black freckle on her cheek.
“What?” cried S___. She stuck her finger on the spot she guessed B___ was pointing at. “No one’s ever mentioned any thing like that before…”
She was distraught. She lashed out at B___’s accent with fresh savagery. B___ turned to me and said, “I love it when foreigners who can barely speak German come to Germany and make fun of the accents of the people who were born here.”
K___ leaned my way from his spot on the other end of the table and asked me what I’d said to upset S___ so much. I shrugged and said: She asked me about my thoughts on life and I told her. What’s the big deal?
S___ goes: BECAUSE YOU SIT THERE AND GO…YOU GO…THE UNIVERSE IS SO BEEEG AND WE ARE SO LEETLE AND YOU DON’T GIVE A SHEEET! HOW CAN YOU SAY THIS?
So I go: IF SOMEBODY ASKS ME WHAT I THINK ABOUT LIFE AND I TELL THEM I EXPECT THEM TO ALLOW ME TO HAVE MY OPINION WITHOUT GETTING UPSET ABOUT IT UNLESS THEY ARE A FUCKING CHILD.
And B___ goes: AND WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU TO COME HERE WITH YOUR FUNNY FUCKING ACCENT AND…
Etc.
Then B___ kissed me on my cheek and squeezed my thigh and excused herself, climbing over me to go to the Ladies Room.
While she was gone, the Woman who had actually directed the Film that the premier had been held for came over (it was for HER party that the table we had commandeered had been reserved, by the way…cringe) and gave us each a delicious cream-filled chocolate from a gift box. I bit mine and found Marzipan, which I made myself sick of six years ago in Hamburg. I remarked on this and S___ gave me half of her delicious coconut-filled one. We exchanged a certain kind of look as I took the chocolate and bit into it.
Thank the gods B___ wasn’t there to see it.
Later,
S
The place is humming, eh Comrades Lurking and Explicit? It’s good to disagree a bit, sometimes. Good for the fictive juices. And so is the silver eggnog! Glugg it up and shut off the fondue pots on the way out (CDS Frances has the keys)… I’m off to try the sweet inutility of sleep…
“When her husband Mark Boxer, a former editor of The Sunday Times Magazine, was dying in 1988, Amis visited him at their home in west London. He not only smoked over the sick man but also overstayed his welcome, Ford said.
What most infuriated Ford was that, as she later found out, Amis had lingered because he was “filling in time before [he] caught a plane at Heathrow”.”
I can just picture that ashtray on the feller’s chest and his eyes smarting
On 20 February 1974, Dick was recovering at home from the effects of sodium pentothal, administered after the extraction of an impacted wisdom tooth. Answering the door to receive a delivery of additional painkillers, he noticed that the delivery woman was wearing a pendant displaying what he later described as the “vesicle pisces”. After her departure, Dick began experiencing strange visions of laser beams, geometric patterns, Jesus, and ancient Rome.
As the visions increased, Dick came to the remarkable conclusion that he was being contacted by some form of higher power that he referred to as Valis – an acronym for ‘Vast Active Living Intelligence System’. Struggling to comprehend what was occurring, Dick kept an extensive journal, entitled the Exegesis, which ultimately ran to 8,000 pages of religious speculation.
Over time, Dick’s odd beliefs and worldview became increasingly paranoid. He believed that Valis had specifically contacted him as part of an attempt to have President Richard M Nixon impeached, and he believed that he was being persecuted by both the FBI and the KGB.
And, as a result of seeing dark conspiracies here, there, and everywhere, Dick wrote to FBI Headquarters on 15 August 1975 requesting the declassification of his own FBI file – a file that throws a great deal of light on the man, his motivations, and his unusual beliefs.
MR SCRUGGS AND MR SMITH
Dick knew that there had to be an FBI file on his activities because, as he told the Bureau in the letter requesting access to it: “In the early ’fifties, two agents of the FBI, Mr George Scruggs and Mr George Smith, approached me.”
Undoubtedly, one of the prime reasons why Dick attracted attention from the FBI was a series of bizarre letters he penned to the Bureau in the early 1970s, in which he described his personal knowledge of an alleged underground Nazi cabal that was attempting to covertly manipulate science fiction writers to further advance its hidden cause.
And the nature of that cause was even more bizarre: to initiate a Third World War by infecting the American population with syphilis. On 28 October 1972, Dick wrote to the FBI and outlined his distinctly odd beliefs:
“I am a well-known author of science fiction novels, one of which dealt with Nazi Germany (called MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, it described an ‘alternate world’ in which the Germans and Japanese won World War Two and jointly occupied the United States).
“This novel, published in 1962 by Putnam and Co., won the Hugo Award for Best Novel of the Year and hence was widely read both here and abroad; for example, a Japanese edition printed in Tokyo ran into several editions. I bring this to your attention because several months ago I was approached by an individual who I have reason to believe belonged to a covert organization involved in politics, illegal weapons, etc., who put great pressure on me to place coded information in future novels ‘to be read by the right people here and there’, as he phrased it. I refused to do this.”
Dick then elaborated on his unusual theories:
“The reason why I am contacting you about this now is that it now appears that other science fiction writers may have been so approached by other members of this obviously Anti-American organization and may have yielded to the threats and deceitful statements such as were used on me. Therefore I would like to give you any and all information and help I can regarding this, and I ask that your nearest office contact me as soon as possible.
“I stress the urgency of this because within the last three days I have come across a well-distributed science fiction novel which contains in essence the vital material which this individual confronted with me as the basis for encoding. That novel is CAMP CONCENTRATION by Thomas Disch, which was published by Doubleday & Co.
“P.S. I would like to add: what alarms me the most is that this covert organization which approached me may be Neo-Nazi, although it did not identify itself as being such. My novels are extremely anti-Nazi. I heard only one code identification by this individual: Solarcon-6.”
‘Member back in the old days of newspapers how much fun it was to count the Ninas? Bringing some loving here today…
Well-crooned, CDS Frances! I, personally, haven’t counted a Nina (or a Nona) since Marvin checked out… thanks for reminding us. (Oh, and: coincidence?)
Apparently this is Pynchon narrating his own advert.
HARLAN ELLISON
- Saturday, August 23 2008 11:59:46 A NOD TO STEPHEN AUGUSTINE
Do you mind if I hereafter refer to you as “Saint” Augustine?
I cannot adequately express my 1) admiration for your auctorial manner … style and cogency and a handsome flow of just the right words to do the job … 2) your going-out-of-your-way to solace a semi-stranger, decency of a rare sort … and 3) the actual, ACTUAL, physical easing of my angst as I morbidly dwelt on that nasty bit’o'business for several days.
Most of the time, in this life, when we offer long distance succor, it is well-meant but in fact just the sighing of the sentiments. THIS time, kiddo, you actually scruffed me by the neck and yawnked me out of the pit. I don’t think I minded the swipes at me, because the guy can view me as he chooses … it was the references to my mom and dad, warped and wizened through his malignant personal agenda that made me want to thrash him within an inch of his life–as my mom used to say about terrible people–they ought to be thrashed within an inch of their lives.
But you, alone, no help from nobody, have done rode to the rescue, Saint Augustine. You can take THAT to the bank, as my one-time pal Bobby Blake useta say. Thanks-a-plenty!
Inter-Dimensional Varieties of Longing
1. Wilderton third person past archaic
If he opened his eyes he saw horrors real but with them shut he glimpsed infernal sideshows of the imagination. He did not believe in an immortal soul but had no doubts as to the existence of his mortal shame. One could feel shame and be of a modern disposition: it struck him that the latter engendered the former with a bitter insistence unheard of in the Old Testament. If being modern is to admit that humanity is not a flesh and bone mask behind which a purer essence exists but the measurable extent of things, he unmasked himself whenever he indulged. Behind his mask was no void but a succubus that modernity put there.
There were varieties of a novel scientific argument about an infinite regress of proto-man. He remained objectively neutral about this argument in debate but he believed it on the evidence of his own eyes, in secret, when his eyes were closed, because he saw a proto-woman (by how many thousand removes not a person, he couldn’t say) when the urge to see her, and then to act on the urge, struck, which was not less than once a day; in the morning, usually, when he was about to shave. A she-beast with matted hair and vaguely Negroid features —though in complexion white as a cave fish— perhaps a Jewess— and sweaty teats he made himself feel nearly sick imagining. Though not so sick as to stop him. To shave right after was parlous. Eating breakfast and dabbing the yellow of an egg at his chin he found blood on the napkin, a dot of it the size of a curio he once viewed through a magnifying glass in a collector’s shop on Warwick Street, an Emperor’s profile from that part of the world still suffering Emperors, the chiming of the hour on the clock his father had gotten from his father’s father interrupting the reverie.
From the head of the dining room table to the old clock which was half-way in its journey to the stroke of nine was a distance of fifty paces he was helpless against enumerating each and every time he walked it. The pleasure he took in making the number fifty-one or even fifty-two, sometimes, by his stride’s independent subterfuge, struck him as pathetic, knowing that a similar path in his father’s house had measured twice that. Yes and in his father’s father’s mansion the path had been twice and half-again more, his grandfather having housed two families, the extraneous one based on the two little men he’d got by the girl who polished the brasses and remained pretty much longer than his wife, who, in all fairness, bore him four times the number, seven of them men, the youngest of whom inherited the clock now chiming down the hall and precious little else. He touched it in passing.
The tree-tops and cloud-bottoms and spires of the university were all still there, familiar elements of an oil painting that would crumble before it ever yellowed with age. The wind that pushed him was a playful spirit and lifting a hand to steady his hat he managed also to wave at Mr. Wilderton who happened to turn, at that moment, from studying the Airship as though he’d been reading an inscription on it. He waited for a carriage to clatter past and waited again to defer to arms-linked women in blindingly bright dress and finally crossed the street to approach the hatless and stubbornly mutton-chopped figure. The affect of Wilderton’s haughty posture and obstructive position was as if the Airship were his own and that Mr. Wilderton was neither unduly proud of it as a possession nor likely to offer anyone else a ride on it. Forty yards up in brilliant blue it glinted where the sun surpassed the long morning shadows of the university, in apparent size large enough to hold several men.
“Mr. Wilderton,” he said.
“And to you,” nodded Wilderton. It was not the first time he wondered if Wilderton had trouble remembering any or all parts of his name. At best, Wilderton sometimes addressed him as “Sir”. He stuck out a hand and Wilderton took it with surprising warmth. Wilderton himself, as a figure, so lacked any hint of surprises that his every deed or gesture fairly minted them. He had once seen Wilderton stick out his tongue at a large woman’s gingham back and the image would endure to amuse him on his very deathbed, he was certain.
“I went mad on the occasion of my thirty-fifth birthday,” said Mr. Wilderton, “and ordered by catalogue a thing to be delivered by international post I suspected you’d be interested in seeing. Collected in Java. On the eve of my thirty-sixth birthday I have received notice that the package is now arrived. Do you have time, Sir?”
The package (covered in covetable stamps?) was assigned to be delivered before noon and he walked with Mr. Wilderton to the latter’s house, behind the university, on Edgeware Road. It was a forty minute walk at a stiff pace, their walking sticks flashing with an almost embarrassing unity.
2. Salome third person past demotic
Dolph Schneider wore a monk-like beard for years on account of his weak chin, but gave up the practice after hitting thirty, because the beard, he felt, made him look too old. His striking red-headed mother Salome said “Jesus thank God… finally…you look like my son again…” and hugged him and that was nearly enough to make Dolph grow the beard back. He’d almost forgotten how much self-assertion had gone into that itchy affectation in the first place. Not that he didn’t love his mother. He did he did. He knew he was lucky to have her. Things could have been worse.
Pantsless, with bruise-colored blazer draped over one arm, he yanked open his closet and squinted with suspicion at the sad things that found solace in its darkness. T-shirts on hangers; a dangling camouflage belt or two, and behind that, the material residue of his childhood dream. This stack of stuff weighed as much as Dolph did, but was three feet taller.
The strata of the stack revealed historical epochs of Dolph Schneider, starting with various flattened boxes of Milton Bradley board games at the very bottom; the visible red edge of an all too fragile Etch-A-Sketch which had lasted exactly a week in ‘79; several cracked ant farms (abandoned cities now); the wood-burning kit that one of Dolph’s innumerable ‘uncles’ had brought over, re-wrapped, the day after Christmas one year, as consolation for the fact that he would never leave his real wife and kids, Dolph guessed; the hinged wooden case of a junior biology lab (with its grisly black jars of pickled specimens, still somewhat of a nightmare factory), a thin layer of comix and coloring books, a case of water colors, a case of oil paints, a case of pastel crayon and a tower of vintage Penthouse magazines that teetered to within a few inches of the closet ceiling. The Penthouses were still subject to frequent raids and anthropological investigations.
The five-year subscription had been a birthday gift from Salome on Dolph’s thirteenth. You’re a man now and all that. Where she got the money he could only guess. Maybe they all chipped in… his ‘Uncles’. Despite the fact that even then Dolph had rightly interpreted this convention-flouting gift as a deft maneuver around a parental lecture of an embarrassingly intimate nature, he had to admit to himself that he could’ve done worse than have Salome Schneider for a mother. She could have been like home-schooled loony Tim Patchett’s mother, she of the distracted gaze and permanent I-see-Jesus-standing-right-behind-you smile. Or she could have been like Boggy’s mom: Boggy called her Stalinetta. No, Dolph’s mother was cool and everyone (except everyone’s parents) knew it. She was funky and foxy and had even tried to get Dolph to smoke pot with her. She had hoped for a kind of new family tradition to take root: pot night on Sundays in the attic with Mom.
She was always hoping that some new family tradition might take root. Dolph assumed that her palpable longing in this department was related to the fact that she had shattered every connection to actual old family traditions by moving to Southern California (‘So Cal,’ or as she later re-christened it, ‘So-so Cal’) and renouncing the Jewish faith and having him, Dolph, so far out of wedlock that he hadn’t even known his father’s name for the first twenty years of his life.
Not that Dolph regretted the fact that he hadn’t been brought up a Jew. But he had positively hated Kwanza. And those mother-son dervish classes at the YMCA (“Dervish” always sounded too much like an adjective in his opinion, and his incessant sarcastic use of ‘derv’ or ‘derving’ as a verb had contributed to Salome’s decision to cancel the non-refundable classes; she still found time to guilt him about that one, occasionally). The attempted pot tradition had come and gone the summer before Dolph left for his aimless year-and-a-half at a semi-prestigious college back East. That’s one thing that semi-prestigious colleges back East are good at: knowing when you don’t belong at them.
“Dolphy, come on, you’re kidding. You don’t… (drag; gulp)…you don’t smoke (cough)…pot? At all? Never? Aren’t you even… (drag; gulp)… curious?”
That soft July night, with so many stars visible through the propped-open attic windows and his mother’s pretty face flickering in the parchment light of a single candle that seemed to be tied by a fine string to the breeze, Dolph had wished with all of his heart that his mother would say what she really wanted to say. He was very psychic with her, Dolph was. He knew she wanted to quip about his abstinence from drugs, “Christ, Dolphy, what would your father say?” and they both would have giggled over that one and it was a giggle Dolph had sorely wanted to share with her.
But the “P.P.” (Phallo-Progenitor) was off limits. Verboten. The conversational territory of Dolph’s biological father was a scorched and salted circle of sand surrounded by razor wire in the desert of high unmentionables. Rather than making that joke about his unmentionable father, Salome had opted for the obvious and awful alternative, a sentence that had made Dolph wince so hard he’d actually pinched a ladybug-sized fart when she said it.
“Christ, Dolphy, are you a …a virgin, too?”
“ ‘Virgin’?,’ demanded Dolph. His volume increased as the sentence progressed. “Why the euphemism, Mom? I’m a pear-shaped bushy-haired semi-Jew with a weak chin, a zero-status job and 17 months of college under my belt that I’ll be paying off for the rest of my ridiculous life!”
And yes: he had been. A virgin. Back then. His surprising reaction had prompted a compassionate hug from his mother that had in turn broken his heart. Now, at nearly thirty one, things were no longer quite like that for Dolph in that department, but only just. The former state was distinguishable from the latter by twelve years and three-or-four acts of sketchy intercourse. What would his father say?
On all fours, still pantsless and fat-in-the-can and painfully aware of how he must look from behind, Dolph peered under his bed. There were terrible things to be found there in the realm from which his dreams often filtered up to him; things he’d stuffed there to forget and had forced therefore into his subconscious. Dust-bunnies, sure, and pizza boxes, of course. But bills, mostly. Unopened credit card bills. Online porno and phone sex line and tele-psychic bills. Very big bills. Any day now, in fact, he was expecting a knock on the door. Or the righteous anger of an overhead helicopter. Maybe I should have taken up pot as a habit, he thought. Maybe his mother had been right. Being unable to purchase the pot with a credit card would have kept the habit in check.
He could hear Salome bumping around downstairs in the living room, clearing a space for her weekly private lessons with the bone-thin, swarthy tango man. He lifted a stiff nest of dark, sour clothing. A sock… one of his older cashmere sex socks… tumbled off the top of the nest and rolled under his desk as though fleeing him.
“Salome,” he called down the stairs, at the top of his lungs, “have you seen the tie?” There was the hint of accusation in his voice familiar to all such living arrangements.
“Not since the funeral!” she yodeled back.
He took a breath to shout “Which funeral?” when the Hoover filled the little house with its protective roar, cutting him off. Dolph had no serious complaints about his mother because she had done the best she could do under the circumstances. She had raised him with little money and no help, banished from her family and surrounded by freaks, into the loose variation on the theme of fine-young-man that he was. The only problem he had with her, his hip young mother (47 to his 30) … the only thing that still pissed him off sometimes…
“Aha!”
He found the tie as a bookmark in a hardcover anthology of a pornographic science fiction magazine called Salome. All he had to do now was to remember how to put the damn thing on.
3. Goldilocks first person present continuous exotic
My big brother Ajax says that story about Goldilocks is a cautionary tale about race mixing. My little brother Julio just sits there staring at the television while trying to gnaw his jawbreaker in half. Ajax is the smart one. In fact, as they say in my family, he got everything and a little bit more: brains, looks and the Jungle Juice to spare. Me: I’m slow but steady and Julio is an ugly runt with no hope for a better future but Ajax, he’s something. I heard a white lunch lady call him a Colored Adonis once and what else can I say?
Julio and I are busy watching My Favorite Martian in order to combine our two favorite pleasures (jawbreakers and My Favorite Martian) and Ajax is propounding his theory. Goldilocks is a spoiled, middle-class Honkie bitch, etc.
“Ajax, man,” I say. “This is not the place.”
Ray Walston as the Martian (alias Martin O’Hara) has hypnotized a woman with his alien mind powers and is now busy re-doing her ‘do with his telekinetic finger. He’s transforming her into a Fox. I hope he kisses her this time. He never kisses anyone. It’s his show and he never gets any.
“Any what?” I always demanded before, frustrated by my ignorance, but Ajax, or Uncle Eldridge, or the kids at school, they’d just wag their fingers and say stuff like, “If you gotta ask, you shouldn’t know.”
Back to the girl on My Favorite Martian. Her shiny thick chestnut-colored hair and her Gemini nose-cone Playtex cross-your-heart titties.
It makes me think of a cut-away view of a fallopian tube that I’ve seen in Miss Bumper’s Sex Ed and Hygiene Class, so I develop a painful swelling in my groin. I’m ashamed to admit to myself that I don’t care what I do with this thing. This is the very problem that Miss Bumper warned us about recently, whacking a chalkboard diagram of erectile tissue with her pointer so hard that the rubber tip of the pointer broke off. The tip ricocheted off of Darleen McFadden’s forehead and sent her to the nurse’ office. Miss Bumper said she was faking.
I can hear Ajax and Julio’s insincere laughter and then the theme song of My Favorite Martian, all of this through the bathroom door as I lean against the tile wall, which is cool on my cheek. My back is to the mirror, but I can see it from the corner of my eye in the dim light: my back and the anxious movements, like I’m snatching sticky taffy out of my pocket.
I’m facing the worn green bar of soap on a rope that I bought for Uncle Eldridge for Christmas. It’s hanging lazy in the shower, smirking at me with a long loose curlicue of hair for a smile. On the bathtub’s rim are lined up Uncle Eldridge’s colognes and deodorants and ointments: English Leather, Brut, Canoe, Old Spice, Jade East, Right Guard and then I see stars. A tablespoon of my Jungle Juice is trickling down the tile wall, like a tiny smashed egg without the shell. Then I start laughing. I can’t help it. I am pleased.
“Ooooh! Oooohhh! Un-ka Ellll-dridge! Un-ka Elllll-dridge!” shouts Julio, from the top of the stairs, “Hamilton be laffin’ dirty in the baffroom agin!”
A year ago I nearly killed Julio by persuading him to fly from the highest point of the garage roof wearing a towel like a Superman cape. At the last minute I substituted a plain old towel from the laundry basket and was about to give him a good push when we heard the ice cream truck come rolling down the alley, doodling its scary melody. The circus music that slows down in some parts and speeds up in others like a Vincent Price movie about a crazy undead clown. Julio and I scampered down off the roof and bought a pineapple Popsicle for him (Julio only had a dime) and a Dreamsicle for me. The ice cream man was so black that I could see the reflection of my hand in his forehead as I passed him my Kennedy Half.
“Un-ka Ellllll-dridge! Un-ka Elllllllll-dridge!”
I still have the grin that’s left over from the laughter on my face, leaning cheek-first against the bathroom wall and I think: that Dreamsicle wasn’t worth it. I wish I could give it back. I wish I could reverse the march of time so that we never scrambled down off that roof to buy those ice cream bars so Julio tried to fly with that fake Superman cape instead. I’d look down from the top of the garage towards the concrete driveway and see Julio laying there like that Gumby we fucked up last Christmas plus genuine blood. I’d climb down and investigate the body and exchange the useless towel he was wearing for the Superman towel I’d switched it with and no one would suspect a thing.
“Let your big brother be, Julio Hanson…,” yells back Uncle Eldridge from the kitchen. He is making Sloppy Joes. Sloppy Joes and Fritos. And strawberry Nehi in a bottle with a straw.
What a wonderful motherfucking existence
VERBA LUXUS ( words not to use, but to hoard in a shoe box)
A
• ACAROPHILIA: Affinity for itching
• ACHLUOPHILIA: Love of darkness
• ACMEGENESIS: Orgasm
• ACOMOCLITIC: Preference for hairless genitals
• ACOUSTICOPHILIA: Arousal from sounds
• ACROPHILIA: Arousal from heights or high altitudes
• ACROTOMOPHILIA: Arousal from amputees
• ACTIRASTY: To become aroused from exposure to sun’s rays
• ACUCULLOPHALIA: Circumcision
• ACYESIS: Female sterility
• ADAMITISM: Going naked for God
• ADOLESCENTILISM: Cross-dressing or playing the role of an adolescent
• AELUROPHILIA: Deriving gratification from cats
• AGALMATOPHILIA: Attractions to statues or mannequins
• AGAMIC: Asexual; parthenogenic
• AGENOBIOSIS: Married couple who consent to live together without sex
• AGONOPHILIA: Person who is aroused by a partner pretending to struggle
• AGORAPHILIA: Arousal from open spaces or having sex in public places
• AGREXOPHILIA: Arousal from others knowing you are having sex
• AICHMOPHILIA: Love of needles and other pointed objects
• AISCHROLATREIA: Worship of filth, smut; obscenity cult
• ALBUTOPHILIA: Arousal from water
• ALGOLAGNIA: Sexual satisfaction resulting from giving or receiving pain; sadism or masochism
• ALIPHINEUR: Person using lotion to arouse a partner
• ALLOERASTY: Use of nudity of another person to arouse a partner
• ALLOPELLIA: Having orgasm from watching others engaging in sex
• ALLORGASMIA: Arousal from fantasizing about someone other than one’s partner
• ALLOTRIORASTY: Arousal from partners of other nations or races
• ALPHAMEGAMIA: Attraction to partners of another age group
• ALTOCALCIPHILIA: High heel fetish
• ALVINOLAGNIA: Stomach fetish
• AMATRIPSIS: Masturbation by rubbing labia together
• AMAUROPHILIA: Preference for a blind or blindfolded sex partner
• AMAXOPHILIA: Attraction to riding in cars and motor vehicles
• AMBISEXTROUS: Pertaining to a bisexual person
• AMELOTASIS: Attraction to absence of limb
• AMOKOSCISIA: Arousal or sexual frenzy with desire to slash or mutilate women
• AMOMAXIA: Sex in a parked car
• AMPHIEROTISM: Capacity of erotic reaction toward either sex
• AMPHIGENTIC INVERT: An individual who regularly engages in sexual activity with persons of both genders
• AMPHISEXUAL: Bisexual
• AMULIEROSIS: Result of sexual privacy
• AMYCHESIS: Act of scratching partner during sexual passion
• AMYCHOPHILIA: Deriving sexual pleasure from being scratched
• ANACLITISM: Arousal from items used as infant
• ANACREONTIC: Erotic
• ANALINCTUS: Licking the anus
• ANALINGUS: Rimming or penetration of anus with tongue
• ANASTEEMAPHILIA: Attraction to a person because of a difference in height
• ANAXIPHILIA: Act of falling in love with a loser by someone who should know better
• ANDROGYNY: Having both male and female characteristics
• ANDROGYNOPHILIA: Bisexual
• ANDROIDISM: Arousal from robots with human features
• ANDROMANIA: Nymphomania
• ANDROMINETOPHILIA: Arousal from female partner who dresses like male
• ANDROSODOMY: Anal sex with a male partner
• ANILILAGNIA: Sexual desire for older women
• ANISONOGAMIST: Attraction to either older or younger partners
• ANOCRATISM: Anal sex
• ANOMEATIA: Anal sex with a female partner
• ANOPHELORASTIA: Arousal from defiling or ravaging a partner
• ANOPHILEMIA: Kissing anus
• ANORAPTUS: Rapist who only attacks elderly women
• ANTHOLAGNIA: Arousal from smelling flowers
• ANTHROPOPHAGOLAGNIA: Rape with cannibalism
• ANTHROPOPHAGY: Pleasure derived from the ingestion of human flesh
• ANTIPUDIC: Covering one’s genitals
• ANTIOPHILIA: Fondness for floods
• APELLOUS: Circumcision
• APHALLATIA: Celibacy
• APHEPHILIA: Deriving pleasure from being touched
• APHILOPHRENIA: A feeling that one is unloved or unwanted
• APISTIA: Adultery
• APODYSOPHILIA: Feverish desire to undress
• APOTEMNOPHILIA: Person who has sexual fantasies about losing a limb
• ARACHNEPHILIA: Attraction to spiders
• ARPAGEE: A raped woman
• ARRHENOTHIGMOPHILOUS: Nymphomania
• ARSOMETRY: Anal sex
• ASCETICISM: Religious self-denial often including celibacy
• ASPHYXIAPHILIA: Arousal from lack of oxygen
• ASTHENOLAGNIA: Arousal from weakness or being humiliated
• ASTYPHIA: Impotence
• ASYNODIA: Celibacy particularly due to impotence
• AULOPHILIA: Love of flutes
• AUTAGONISTOPHILIA: Exhibitionism; arousal from exposing naked body or genitals to strangers while on stage or while being photographed
• AUTASSASSINOPHILIA: Arousal from orchestrating one’s own death by the hands of another
• AUTOEROTIC ASPHYXIA: Arousal from oxygen deprivation and sometimes risk of dying
• AUTOGYNEPHILIA: Arousal from crossdressing
• AUTOMASOCHISM: Arousal from inflicting intense sensations of pain on one’s own body
• AUTONEPIOPHILIA: Sexual attraction from dressing or being treated like an infant
• AUTOPEDERASTY: The insertion of one’s own penis into their anus
• AVERING: A boy’s begging in the nude to arouse sympathy
• AVISODOMY: Breaking the neck of a bird while penetrating it for sex
• AXILLISM: The use of the armpit for sex
B
• BATHYCOLPIAN: Possessing a large bosom
• BATRACHOPHILIA: Attraction to frogs
• BELONEPHILIA: Arousal from pins or needles
• BIASTOPHILIA: Pleasure from forcible rape of a terrified stranger
Bight-a loop or slack part in a rope; a bend in a river
•
• BLISSOM: To copulate with an ewe
• BOLLOCKS: Testicles
• BOTULINONIA: Sex with a sausage
• BROMIDROPHILIA: Arousal from bodily smells
• BRONTOPHILIA: Love of thunderstorms
C
• CALLIPYGIAN: Having shapely buttocks
• CANOPHILIA: Turned on by dogs
• CAPNOLAGNIA: Arousal from watching others smoke
• CAPONIZE: To castrate a chicken
• CATAGELOPHILIA: Love of being ridiculed
• CATAMENIA: Menstruation
• CATAMITE: A boy used in homosexual relations
• CHASMOPHILIA: Attraction to nooks, crannies, crevices, and chasms
• CHEIMAPHILIA: Deriving pleasure from cold or winter
• CHIONOPHILIA: Love of snow
• CHREMATISTOPHILIA: Arousal from being charged for sex or robbed
• CHRYSOPHILIA: Arousal from gold or golden objects
• CLAUSTROPHILIA: Love of being confined in small places
• CLIMACOPHILIA: Deriving pleasure by falling down stairs
• COMMASCULATION: Homosexuality between men
• CONCUPISCENCE: Excessive sexual desire
• CONTRECTATION: The love play preceding sexual intercourse
• CONVERTITE: A reformed prostitute
• COPROLOGY: The study of pornography
• COPROPHEMIA: Obscene language
• COPROPHILIA: A fancier of feces
• CRATOLAGNIA: Arousal from strength
• CRUROPHILIA: Sexual arousal from legs
• CYPRIAN: Lecherous
• CYPRIDOPHOBIA: Fear of getting venereal disease
• CYPRIPAREUNIA: Sexual intercourse with a prostitute
D
• DACRYPHILIA: Arousal from seeing tears in the eyes of a partner
• DASYPYGAL: Having hairy buttocks
• DENDROPHILIA: Attraction to trees
• DEOSCULATE: To kiss affectionately
• DEPUSCELATE: To lose one’s virginity
• DIGENESIS: Alternately sexual and asexual reproduction
• DIGENOUS: Bisexual
• DIOESTRUM: The time when a female animal is not in heat
• DORAPHILIA: Love of animal skins
• DOWCET: A deer’s testicle
• DYSTYCHIPHILIA: Deriving pleasure from accidents
E
• ECDEMOLAGNIA: Arousal from traveling or being away from home
• ECDYSIAST: A stripper
• EDEA: The external genitals
• ELUMBATED: Weak in the loins
• EMETOPHILIA: Arousal from vomit or vomiting
• EMMENOLOGY: The study of menstruation
• ENCEINTE: Pregnant
• ENCRATY: Abstinence
• EONISM: Transvestitism
• EPHEBOPHILIA: Compelling need for an older person to seek adolescent partners for sexual gratification
• EPICENE: Pertaining to both sexes
• EPIGAMIC: Tending to attract the opposite sex during mating season
• EPISTEMOPHILIA: Abnormal preoccupation with acquiring knowledge (This best describes me)
• EREMOPHILIA: Maniacal desire to be left alone
• ERGOPHILIA: Love of work and labor
• EROTOPHOBIA: Fear of sexual love
• EROTOPHONPHILIA: Attaining sexual satisfaction from murdering complete strangers
• ERYTHROPHILIA: Becoming aroused by blushing
• EUNUCHATE: To make a eunuch
• EVIRATION: Emasculation, castration
F
• FAM: To grope a woman
• FEMORAL COITUS: Penis-thigh sex
• FESCENNINE: Vulgar
• FISSIPARISM: Reproduction by fissioning
• FORMICOPHILIA: Enjoyment of the use of insects for sexual purposes
• FRICATRICE: A whore
• FROTTEUR: A person aroused by brushing up against clothed people in public places
• FURTLING: The use of fingers underneath cut-outs in genital areas of photos for arousal
G
• GAMIC: Sexual
• GAMOPHOBIA: Fear of marriage
• GENICON: A sexual partner imagined by one who is dissatisfied with her actual partner
• GENOPHOBIA: Fear of sex
• GERONOSEXUALITY: An attraction where the object of desire is 30 years older or more
• GERONTOPHILIA: Arousal from an older partner
• GODEMICHE: A dildo
• GOMPHIPOTHIC: Arousal by the sight of teeth
• GRAPHOLAGNIA: Maniacal interest in obscene pictures
• GRIVOISERIE: Lewd and lascivious behavior
• GUNZEL: A passive, orally oriented, male homosexual
• GYMNOPHOBIA: Fear of nudity
• GYNANDER: A female pseudo-hermaphrodite
• GYNANDRY: Hermaphroditism
• GYNOPHOBIA: Fear of women
• GYNOTIKOLOBOMASSOPHILIA: Deriving sexual pleasure by nibbling on a woman’s earlobe
H
• HAMARTOPHILIA: Love of committing sinful acts
• HAPTEPHILIA: Arousal by being touched
• HARPAXOPHILIA: Getting pleasure by robbery or being robbed
• HEAUTONTIMORUMENOS: Masochist
• HEBETIC: Happening at puberty
• HEDONOPHOBIA: Fear of pleasure
• HEMATOLAGNIA: Sexual stimulation from blood
• HEMIPENIS: One of the paired sex organs of many reptiles
• HETAERISM: Extramarital sex; communal marriage
• HOMILOPHILIA: Arousal from hearing or giving sermons
• HYMENORRHEXIS: Defloration of the hymen
• HYPNOPHILIA: Turned on by the thought of sleeping
I
• ICOLAGNIA: Arousal from contemplation of, or contact with sculptures or pictures
• INCUBUS: A male demon who has intercourse with a woman while she is sleeping
• INFANTILISM: Attraction to childhood items
• IPSISM: Masturbation
• IRRUMATION: Fellatio
• ISOPHILIC: Relating to same gender affection sans sex
• ITHYPHALLIC: Pertaining to the phallus carried in Bacchanalian festivals; lewd
J
• JOCKER: A male homosexual
K
• KAINOTOPHILIA: Getting pleasure from change
• KAKORRHAPHIOPHILIA: Arousal from failure
• KALOPSIA: Condition where things appear more beautiful than they really are (e.g. when you’re drunk)
• KENOPHILIA: Attraction to empty or open spaces
• KERAUNOPHILIA: Turned on by thunder and lightning
• KINESOPHILIA: Arousal from movement and exercise
• KLISMAPHILIA: Sexual pleasure from enemas
• KNISSOPHILIA: Attraction to incense-burning
• KOPOPHILIA: Arousal from physical or mental exhaustion
L
• LAGNOSIS: Satyriasis
• LALIOPHILIA: Arousal from public speaking
• LALOCHEZIA: Talking dirty to relieve tension
• LAPAROHYSTEROSALPINGOOOPHORECTOMY: Surgical removal of the female reproductive organs
• LEMAN: A mistress or lover
• LENOCINANT: Lewd
• LIGYROPHILIA: Turned on by loud noises
• LILAPSOPHILIA: Arousal from tornadoes
• LOBCOCK: A large, relaxed penis
• LITHOPHILIA: Attraction to stones, gravel, or mud
• LOVERTINE: Addicted to love-making
• LUPANARIAN: Lubricious, lascivious, lewd
• LYGOPHILIA: Love of darkness
• LYSSOPHILIA: Sexual arousal from becoming angry or upset
M
• MACHLAENOMANIA: Masochism in women
• MACROMASTIC: Pertaining to large breasts
• MACROPHILIA: Attraction to giants or giant creatures
• MAIESIOPHILIA: Arousal from childbirth or pregnant women
• MAMMILLATED: Having nipples
• MANIAPHILIA: Attraction to insane people
• MANUSTUPRATION: Masturbation
• MASTIGOPHILIA: Sexual gratification from punishment or being whipped; masochism
• MATUTOLAGNIA: Antemerdian sexual desire
• MAZOPHILIA: Compulsion for breasts
• MECHANOPHILIA: Turned on by machines
• MEGALOPHILIA: Arousal from large objects (not necessarily fat)
• MELISSOPHILIA: Attraction to bees
• MENACME: The menstruating part of a woman’s life
• MENOPHANIA: The onset of menstruation; false menstruation
• MENTULATE: Possessing a large penis; well-hung
• MERKIN: A pubic hair wig
• METOPOPHILIA: Turned on by a person’s face
• METROPHILIA: Arousal from poetry
• MISAPODYSIS: Hatred of undressing in front of someone
• MISEROTIA: Aversion to sex
• MIXOSCOPIA: Orgasm achieved by watching one’s beloved have sex with someone else; voyeurism
• MOLYSMOPHILIA: Attraction to dirt, filth, or contamination (see MYSOPHILIA)
• MONOECIOUS: Hermaphroditic
• MONORCHID: Having one testicle
• MULIEBRITY: Assumption of female characteristics by a male
• MULTIGRAVIDA: A woman who has been pregnant more than once
• MUSOPHILIA: Attraction to mice
• MYSOPHILIA: Love of dirt or becoming dirty
N
• NANOPHILIA: Sexual attraction to a short partner
• NARRATOPHILIA: Arousal from erotic conversations
• NASOPHILIA: Arousal from the sight, touch, licking, or sucking of a partner’s nose.
• NEANILAGNIA: A yen for nymphets
• NEBULOPHILIA: Arousal from fog
• NECROPHILIA: Sexual gratification only by having sex with the dead
• NEMOPHILIA: Love of forests
• NEOLAGNIUM: Puberty
• NEOPHILIA: Arousal from anything new
• NOSOPHILIA: Love of becoming ill
• NOTHOSONOMIA: Calling someone a bastard
• NOVERCAMANIA: Sexual attraction to one’s stepmother
• NYCTOPHILIA: Love of night
• NYMPHOLEPSY: Trance incurred by erotic daydreams
O
• OBSOLAGNIUM: Waning sexual desire due to age
• OCHLOPHILIA: Attraction to crowds
• OCNOPHILE: Someone chronically dependent on their lover
• OCULOLINCTUS: The act of licking a partner’s eyeball
• ODYNOPHILIA: Deriving pleasure from pain; masochism
• OIKOPHILIA: Attraction to one’s home
• OLFACTOPHILIA: Sexual gratification from smells
• OMBROPHILIA: Turned on by rain or being rained upon
• ONANISM: Masturbation
• OPHELIMITY: The ability to please sexually
• OPHIDIOPHILIA: Arousal from snakes
• ORNITHOPHILIA: Love of birds
• OSMOLAGNIA: Arousal caused by bodily odors, such as sweat or menses
• OSPHRESIOPHILIA: An inordinate love of smells
• OZOLAGNIA: Arousal from odors
P
• PANTOPHILIA: Arousal from just about everything imaginable
• PAPHIAN: Erotic; pertaining to illicit love
• PAPILLA: A nipple
• PARACOITA: A female sexual partner
• PARACOITUS: A male sexual partner
• PAREUNIA: Sexual intercourse
• PARTHENOLATRY: Virgin worship
• PARTHENOPHILIA: Attraction only to virgins
• PECCATOPHILIA: Arousal from sinning or having committed an imaginary crime
• PEDIOPHILIA: Attraction to dolls
• PEDOPHILIA: Sexual attraction to children
• PENIAPHILIA: Erotic fascination with poverty
• PENTHERAPHILIA: Sexual attraction to one’s mother-in-law
• PEODEIKTOPHILIA: Sexual arousal from exhibitionism
• PEOTOMY: Surgical amputation of the penis
• PESSARY: A vaginal suppository
• PHALLATION: Movement of the penis in sexual intercourse
• PHILOPHOBIA: Fear of falling in love or of being loved
• PHILOPORNIST: A lover of prostitutes
• PHRONEMOPHILIA: Turned on by the act of thinking
• PHTHIRIOPHILIA: Attraction to lice
• PHYGEPHILIA: Arousal from being a fugitive
• PICTOPHILIA: Arousal only from looking at erotic pictures
• PIZZLE: A whip made of an animal’s penis
• PLACOPHILIA: Arousal from tombstones
• PLANISTETHIC: Flat-chested
• PLUVIOPHILIA: Sexual stimulation from rain or being rained upon
• PNIGOPHILIA: Aroused from people choking
• POINEPHILIA: Turned on by punishment; masochism
• PONOPHILIA: Attraction to overwork
• PORNERASTIC: Licentious, lewd, and horny
• PORNOCRACY: A government by prostitutes
• PORNOLAGNIA: Desire for prostitutes
• POTAMOPHILIA: Arousal from streams and rivers
• PREMENACMIUM: Life before menstruation begins
• PRESBYTOREAN: An erotic poem
• PRIAPISM: Persistent and painful erection, usually the result of a disease
• PRONOVALENCE: Ability to have sexual intercourse in a prone position only
• PSELLISMOPHILIA: Becoming aroused by stuttering
• PTERIDOMANIA: An intense desire for ferns
• PTERONOPHILIA: Sexual gratification from being tickled by feathers
• PUCELAGE: Virginity
• PUNQUETTO: A prostitute
• PUTANISM: Prostitution
• PYGMALIIONISM: Falling in love with one’s creation (a la “My Fair Lady”)
• PYGOPHILIA: Aroused from buttocks
• PYROLAGNIA: Sexual stimulation from watching fires
Q
• QUADOSHKA: American Indian form of tantric sex
• QUEENING: Sitting on the side of a person’s face as a form of bondage
• QUIM: The vagina
R
• RAMMISH: Lustful and horny
• RANTALLION: One whose scrotum is longer than his penis
• RENIFLEUR: One who gets sexual pleasure from body smells
• RÉTIFISM: Foot and shoe fetishism, including using the shoe for masturbation
• RETROCOPULATION: Fornicating from behind (“Doggie position”)
• RHABDOPHILIA: Finding pleasure in being severely criticized
• RHYTIPHILIA: Arousal from facial wrinkles
• RUTTISH: Horny; in heat
S
• SACOFRICOSIS: The practice of cutting a hole in the bottom of a front pant pocket in order to masturbate in public with less risk of detection
• SAPPHISM: Lesbianism
• SCELEROPHILIA: Attraction to bad guys or unsavory characters
• SCOPTOPHILIA: Voyeurism
• SCOTOPHILIA: Turned on by darkness
• SDRUCCIOLA: Copulate
• SEPTOPHILIA: Sexual attraction to decaying matter
• SIDERODROMOPHILIA: Arousal from riding in trains
• SITOPHILIA: Deriving pleasure from eating
• SOCERAPHILIA: Excitement from one’s parents-in-law
• SOPHOPHILIA: Sexual gratification from learning
• SOROPHILIA: Attraction to one’s sister
• SPADONISM: Eunuchry
• SPECTROPHILIA: Arousal from looking at oneself in a mirror
• SPERMATOPHOBIA: Fear of semen
• SPINTRY: A male whore
• STASIVALENCE: Ability to have sexual intercourse only while standing
• STAUROPHILIA: Arousal from the cross or crucifix
• STHENOLAGNIA: Arousal from displaying strength or muscles
• STUPRATION: Rape
• STYGIOPHILIA: Deriving pleasure from thoughts of hell
• SUBAGITATION: Copulation
• SUCCUBUS: A female demon who seduces men in their sleep
• SUPINOVALENT: Able to fornicate only while lying on the back
• SYMPHOROPHILIA: Arousal by accidents or catastrophes
• SYNGENESOPHILIA: Sexual attraction to one’s relatives
T
• TAPHEPHILIA: Arousal from being buried alive
• TAPHOPHILIA: Love of funerals
• TELEOPHILIA: Affinity for religious ceremonies
• TENTIGINOUS: Lascivious
• TERATOPHILIA: Arousal from deformed or monstrous people
• THALASSOPHILIA: Love of the sea
• THASSOPHILIA: Attraction to sitting
• THREPTEROPHILIA: A fondness for female nurses
• THYGATRILAGNIA: A father’s sexual love for his daughter
• TIMOPHILIA: Arousal from gold or wealth
• TOCOPHILIA: Fondness for pregnancy and childbirth
• TONITROPHILIA: Love of thunder
• TOXIPHILIA: Attraction to poisons
• TOXOPHILIA: Love of archery
• TRAGALISM: Lust; lechery; obscenity
• TRANSFEMINATE: To change from woman to man
• TRAUMATOPHILIA: An unconscious desire to be injured
• TRIBADISM: Mutual genital-fondling between lesbians
• TRICHOPATHOPHILIA: Sexual attraction to hair
• TRIPSOLAGNIA: Arousal from having hair shampooed
U
• UNDINISM: The association of water with erotic thoughts
• URANISM: Homosexuality
• URANOPHILIA: Sexual arousal by heavenly thoughts
• UROLAGNIA: Sexual pleasure from urinating
• URTICATION: The use of nettles to create extra sensation
• UXORAVALENT: Only able to attain sex extramaritally (applied to men)
• UXOROVALENT: Able to score only with one’s wife
V
• VACCINOPHILIA: Turned on by becoming vaccinated
• VAMPIRISM: Consuming blood of a partner for arousal
• VICARPHILIA: Arousal from other people’s exciting experiences
• VINCILAGNIA: Arousal from bondage
• VIRAGINITY: Masculinity in a woman
• VIRGIN: You really need to ask?
• VIRIMIMISM: Adoption of masculinity
• VIRIPOTENT: Sexually mature
• VITRICOPHILIA: Sexual attraction to one’s stepfather
W
• WETHER: A castrated ram
• WHELP: To bear offspring
• WHIRLYGIGS: Testicles
• WITTOL: A husband who tolerates his wife’s infidelity
X
• XENODYNAMIC: Person who is only potent with strangers
• XENOPHILIA: An attraction to foreign customs, traditions, and foreigners
• XERONISUS: Inability to reach orgasm
• XYLOPHILIA: Turned on by wooden objects
Y
• YELD: Not old enough to procreate
• YLOPHILIA: Affinity for forests
• YONI WORSHIP: Worship of the female genitals
Z
• ZELOPHILIA: Sexual arousal from jealousy
• ZOOERASTIA: Sexual intercourse with an animal
• ZOOPHILIA: One who is strongly attracted to animals in a spiritual, sexual, or emotional sense
• ZWISCHENSTUFE: Arousal from a person of the same sex
The Medium Really Is the Message
I’ve read Point Omega a few times now, plus all of the critical pieces I could find online and no one has yet expressed anything remotely like my reading of the book, which is very narrow in scope and specific. I think I’ve located the problem and that the fault for all the vague musings about Chronos (not that anyone has actually used that word) or amorphous ramblings about Art (not even pointillism, just art, or conceptual art) is with the reading group guide made available by the publisher. So even though the kindly folks over at Scribner haven’t professionally engaged me to tweak the guide, I thought I’d try my hand at it. The original can be found here http://books.simonandschuster.com/Point-Omega/Don-DeLillo/9781439169957/reading_group_guide Oh, and by the way, I have no problem with the very first paragraph. I too hope “these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.”
“I want to keep our intentions small and human despite the enormous work we’ve done and the huge work we have ahead of us and I’m sitting here with a propped foot and talking endlessly about my work when I’m completely aware of Matisse and what he said, that painters must begin by cutting out their tongues.”
—Don DeLillo, Underworld
“You’ll ask me why I choose to have a weight of carrion flesh than to receive three thousand ducats? I’ll not answer that! But say it is my humour. Is it answered?”
—William Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, Act 4, Scene 1, lines 40-43
“I’ve been through the desert on a horse with no name,
It felt good to be out of the rain.
In the desert you can remember your name,
‘Cause there ain’t no one for to give you no pain.
La, la, la la la la, la la la, la, la
La, la, la la la la, la la la, la, la”
—America, A Horse With No Name
Questions for Discussion
1.
Why is there an abstracted image of binoculars on the cover of the book? What is it about binocular vision as opposed to telescopic, let’s say, or monocular vision, that is specific to the way the author wants you to look at what he has depicted? What else does the elongated figure eight lying on its side remind you of? (Don’t censor yourself!) Why is the desert scene on the front cover darker than the scene on the back cover?
2.
The book commences in the Museum of Modern Art’s installation of 24 Hour Psycho. What visual pun is immediately discernable in the iconic movie poster?
(Suggestion: Focus on the name of the star and her costume.) (Hint: It’s the name of a previous book by Don DeLillo.)
3. What point of contrast might the author be making by having the characters in the framing device (the book-ending chapters that both take place in MoMA) be unnamed? What point might the author be making in the second of such chapters by having the Anonymous male character chastise himself for not inquiring as to the name of the Anonymous female character with whom he conversed in the gallery?
4. If you were to know that Elster in Hebrew means hidden God, what significance might such an appellation given by the author of The Names connote? And if you were to learn, as we do, that Elster has written an elaborate linguistic study of the word “rendition” how might that affect your reading strategy of Point Omega?
[Should we stop? Do you need a break? Good. Yeah, I agree. Reading is fun!]
5. Jessica is the name of Elster’s daughter. What other canonical daughters either in fiction or dramatic literature might DeLillo be referencing? Could there be a thematic link between Shylock’s daughter, who steals her father’s material wealth before she elopes and Point Omega’s Jessie, who simply dematerializes, leaving her few valuables behind for her father to find? Do Shylock and Elster have anything in common other than daughters named Jessica? What other references can you find (e.g. references to revenge plays on p.34, for instance) that might bolster this connection?
6. Would you watch Finley’s documentary of Elster, if it were real? Sorry. That’s the old Scribner guide. However, it’s a really good question. Would you?
7. How many times is the word “point” used in the text? If it turned out to be 26, what might the significance of that be? What position does the letter Omega hold in the Greek alphabet? What is at the beginning? Are there any other books written by DeLillo where either of these letters are significant? And what kind of line might the points be plotted on? Would the points be spread at even intervals or clustered in frequency of occurrence similar to, for instance, constellations? How many times is point deployed as a noun, modified, singular or plural? Adjective? Verb? Can you discern a point system? Can you at least be bothered to try?
8. Compare the first paragraph of Libra (A) with that of Point Omega (B).
A. “This was the year he rode the subway to the ends of the city, two hundred miles of track. He liked to stand at the front of the first car, hands flat against the glass. The train smashed through the dark. People stood on local platforms staring nowhere, a look they’d been practicing for years. He kind of wondered, speeding past, who they really were.”
B. “There was a man standing against the north wall, barely visible. People entered in two and threes and they stood in the dark and looked at the screen and then they left. Sometimes they hardly looked past the doorway, larger groups wandering in, tourists in a daze, and they looked and shifted their weight and then they left.”
Think about the thematic similarities but stylistic differences, the scaled back feeling of the writing in Point Omega, the use of the word “weight.” How is weight measured? Do you notice other uses of the word scale or scales or scaling (scaling the rocks or cosmic scale, for instance) as you move through the text?
9. What do you make of Elster’s repeatedly expressed wish that Jessica see a big-horned sheep during her visit? Where are big-horned sheep in the eco-system? Are they thriving as a species? Do you know their history? Are they flourishing, heading for extinction? What was the desert before it was a desert? How do deserts evolve—do they get sandier, hotter, drier, more or less life-sustaining?
10. What do you make of the exceptional scene in which Elster coughs up mucus and holds it in his hand? And later Elster’s association of it with humor, which he repeats for emphasis, as humour. Is something a sick joke in Elster’s estimation? Or DeLillo’s?
11. Just before the phlegm scene, Jim is in the desert listening to the silence. “Then something made me turn my head and I had to tell myself in my astonishment what it was, a fly, buzzing near. I had to say the word to myself, fly. It had found me and come near, in all this streaming space, buzzing, and I swatted vaguely at the sound and then started back toward the dead end.” Is DeLillo obliquely referring to the iconic ending of Psycho?
12. What is the right question to ask concerning Elster’s loss in losing Jessica? Is it as immaterial as the loss of one’s fondest hopes?
Brilliant crypto-analysis, CDS Frances… but please treat us like the pampered nitwits we long to be treated as and answer your own questions for us (or we’ll have to buy the book)… lay out your gorgeous secret para-narrative for all to see, we beg of Thee!
Soon. I see I have a lot of reading to catch up on above!
You shall be our lamp in the late cave of DeLillo’s mind!
(Actually, I’m about to dump a wee bit more text, Comrades Lurking and Explicit… a sweet little bedtime tale…)
1. Learn to kiss gatekeeper arse; kiss it early and often
2. Pick the creative writing program best positioned in the school best positioned in the part of the country best positioned in the country best positioned in the hemisphere best positioned to maximize access to gatekeepers’ arses
3. Identify your Target-Audience by matching your hypothetical jacket photo with the jacket photos of successful authors already catering to said Target-Audience
4. Identify the needs of your Target-Audience by watching lots of the same Television programs your Target-Audience watches (your “style” will flow naturally from total immersion in this resource)
5. Cater to the Target-Audience’s needs by A) giving the reader the impression that he/she is The Best and that B) everything, somehow, eventually, is Gonna Be Alright (if not for the characters in your Product, then certainly for The Reader)
RAVENELLA a para-fairytale
Once upon a time, on the edge of the forest, there lived a girl who was pretty as a doll, but who had turned black in the womb as the result of a wicked spell. The poor little girl did not appear to belong to her mother at all, for her mother was blonde as straw, with skin like moonlit snow. Nor did she appear to belong to her father, who was blonde as butter, with skin as white as milk in the morning. Because of this wicked spell that had turned the child black, her parents kept her locked in a little room at the top of their simple house on the edge of the forest. The room’s only entrance was a window her father climbed in and out of, on a tall red ladder.
Every night, long after the Sun had set and the Moon had replaced the bright star in the throne of the heavens, up the red ladder her father would climb, bearing a lamp, a basket of food, and a key to the lock on the shutters. Unlocking the shutters, her father would lift his lamp to her open window and call,
“Awaken, my child, the day has begun, and all hath arisen along with the Sun!”
Whereupon the little girl received her father with great happiness, as if the day was just beginning, and the Sun was bright in the sky. She believed that the Moon was the Sun, the Night was the Day, and the supper she ate was her breakfast.
“Can we play a game now, father?” asked the little girl, after the supper she thought was her breakfast, in the night she thought was the day.
“Yes,” said her father, “But only until I win it,” and they played a game that her father was sure to quickly win.
After making certain that there was enough oil in the child’s lamp to burn until daybreak, and that she’d eaten enough to fill her belly as long as the oil would last the lamp, and that her hair was combed and her buttons were straight and the toys in her chest were not broken, her father would climb back out of the window in order to take his place in bed with his wife until early the next morning. Awakened by the first light of the Sun, he would then climb back up the ladder at dawn to tell little Ravenella the bedtime story that would put her to sleep.
The bedtime story was always the same, about a fair princess with hair as blonde as straw and skin like moonlit snow, but whose eyes could only see gold. In this story, the King decreed that all in the Kingdom be painted gold so that his daughter would finally behold its totality: the carts and their oxen, the birds in the sky and the fish in the stream and every subject young and old, man and girl, beautiful and ordinary, of the Kingdom. So the smiths melted down all of the King’s gold and made a precious paint of it. And the artisans then worked day and night to cover the Kingdom with gold. When the painting was finally done, the princess was delighted, for now she could finally behold the totality of the Kingdom. But the oxen with their carts, and the birds of the sky, and the fish in the stream, along with all the subjects of the Kingdom, including the King and Queen themselves, lay cold as coins, dead in their glittering coat of gold. The princess saw naught but the glittering dead wherever she ran to.
This bedtime story her father told her always made Ravenella weep the most beautiful tears, which shone on her black cheeks like glass beetles on velvet.
No one in the village or the forest or the greater countryside around them had any idea that such a little girl as Ravenella existed, for her supper was everyone else’s breakfast, and her bedtime story was everyone else’s morning prayer, and her night was the day they were all just waking to toil through. None but this handsome woodcutter and his beautiful wife knew of the existence of the bewitched child who was black as the birds that rule the night. Neither did the child know of the world, happy in her dreams behind the locked shutters of a room only her father could enter with the use of his tall red ladder.
One day it happened that the handsome woodcutter and his beautiful wife had another child, a child who was not bewitched. This child, a boy, was beautiful to behold, for he was fairer than his mother and father combined, with fine hair like gold, and eyes much bluer than a robin’s eggs. The handsome woodcutter and his beautiful wife were overcome with joy.
Still, every night, Ravenella’s father climbed the red ladder to her room at the top of the simple house, calling,
“Awaken, my child, the day has begun, and all hath arisen along with the Sun!”
In time the little girl grew tall, and keen of mind, for she had amused herself by thinking. She was so like a porcelain doll in her features and so innocent in her aspect and so perfect in her grace that despite her terrible blackness, she was not so hard to look at. Though none but her father had gazed upon her in as many years as there are months in each year plus one, she could inspire no emotion harsher than pity in any good soul who might glimpse her.
The exception to this rule was her own mother, the handsome woodcutter’s beautiful wife, who wished the blackened child away from the house. As Ravenella’s brother, unknown to her as she was to him, grew into the strength of his youth, the mother of both children dreaded the notion that her offspring, the first bewitched into blackness, the second blessed with an unsurpassed fairness, should ever by accident meet. Neither child must know of the existence of the other.
She put this to her husband, the handsome woodcutter. “She is old enough to live on her own. Take her into the heart of the forest until she is lost and leave her there.”
“But where shall she sleep?” asked the handsome woodcutter.
“She shall sleep on a pile of leaves like all the children of the forest,” said the beautiful wife.
“But what shall she eat?” asked the handsome woodcutter.
“She shall eat berries as black as her skin,” said the beautiful wife, “And drink water from the stream in the forest.”
Heartbroken, but unwilling to defy his wife’s wishes, the handsome woodcutter did as he was told, and climbed the red ladder that very midnight, unlocking the shutters and calling to his daughter,
“Awaken, my child, the day has begun, and all hath arisen along with the Sun!”
Hearing the sorrow in the man’s voice, the good-hearted child asked, “Father, what is it that troubles you?”
“It is time for a great journey,” said the handsome woodcutter. “In this basket we must gather your possessions, and carry them from this room, and travel to a place that your heart has never dreamed of.”
Being an obedient child, Ravenella gathered the simple possessions that her father had given her over the years. These included a silver comb, a silver mirror, and a silver cross on which to pray at her bedtime. Packing the basket with these objects, along with as much food as he could fit in it, her father helped her down the tall red ladder, and her slippered feet touched the earth for the first time in her existence.
Father bade her keep silent as the Moon itself, which she thought was the Sun, and they made their way to into the forest under cover of the night, which, of course, she thought was the day.
Far into the darkness they journeyed, and when she tired, her father made Ravenella a bed of leaves, deep in the forest beside a stream. The whisper of the water was a powerful lullaby which put the girl to sleep as the sun was rising, and the woodcutter, with a breaking heart, left his daughter in the care of her deep and innocent dreams as he began the long walk home.
The years went by, and though the poor woodcutter eventually died of his broken heart, which turned to a stone in his chest and stopped beating, his son grew strong and tall. The fair young man soon acquired a reputation as a remarkable hunter, second to none in both his bravery and the accuracy of his arrows. Not only did he stock his mother’s larder with the wild game he killed every day in the forest, but provided most of the meat for his village, and the mother and soon son grew prosperous.
Being both famous for his skill, and prosperous as a result of it, the young hunter soon enough came to the attention of the King. The King sent a courier to the house in which the hunter lived alone with his aged mother, inviting the young man to the palace. The mother of the hunter, who had once been the woodcutter’s beautiful wife, but now was old and gray, swooned with pride and delight. She knew, as did every old mother with a son in the kingdom, that the King had several daughters of a marrying age, the eldest of which was at an age to be in desperate need of a husband.
“O, to be the mother of the husband of a princess!”, thought the old woman, and she clapped her hands with joy. She dressed the young hunter in his finest garments, and sent him off in the company of the page for his audience with the King.
Just as the old woman had predicted, the King offered the handsome young man the hand of his eldest daughter in marriage, but the offer came with a twist, for it was only on the condition of the completion of a dangerous task.
“In the very deep dark of the heart of the forest,” said the King to the handsome young hunter, “there lives a witch called Ravenella, black as the birds she is named after. She is a terrible witch who has lured many a young man to his death in the stream that runs through the forest. Kill this witch, and bring me her heart as the proof that you have killed her, and the hand of the princess is yours.”
So he did.
d0uu]][asl and then some.
Any chance this is one of a series?
Har. Need you ask, Chum? Part of a larger thing I haven’t had time to finish…
(We rate your latest, too… any formatting touches you’d like? Bold? Italics…?)
DEPT. of BOILERPLATE PARADIGMATIC SKIRMISHES
“Your rules for writing
Saturday’s selection of expert [sic] advice on how to write fiction has generated a lot of interest. But we’d like to know your maxims, too”
1. Learn to kiss gatekeeper arse; kiss it early and often
2. Pick the creative writing program best positioned in the school best positioned in the part of the country best positioned in the country best positioned in the hemisphere best positioned to maximize access to gatekeepers’ arses
3. Identify your Target-Audience by matching your hypothetical jacket photo with the jacket photos of successful authors already catering to said Target Audience
4. Identify the needs of your Target-Audience by watching lots of the same Television programs your Target Audience watches (your “style” will flow naturally from total immersion in this resource)
5. Cater to the Target Audience’s needs by A) giving the reader the impression that he/she is The Best and that B) everything, somehow, eventually, is Gonna Be Alright (if not for the characters in your Product, then certainly for The Reader)
then
kolf
24 Feb 2010, 1:23AM
AugustineSteven
I’d hazard a guess that you either never finished the novel, or it wasn’t any good. Still as long as you think it was good, what use is anyone else’s opinion eh?
then
AugustineSteven
24 Feb 2010, 9:22AM
kolf:
I’ll infer from your near-pointless comment that you’re insinuating an opinion on a “novel” you couldn’t possibly have read that you’re “guessing” I’ve submitted somewhere. The first part of that (your psychic critique) takes care of itself; the second part is your retrograde, zero-imagination presumption that all writers write for A) money and/or B) the approval of some official gatekeeper. You’re wonderfully wrong on both counts.
I write mildly surrealist fiction for a small-but-supportive audience. I’ve had more than 40,000 visitors through the three sites on which my fiction is self-published (about a fourth of which were the results of mistaken porn searches); this is negligible traffic for a Cat Blog or a Porn Blog (or a Cat Porn Blog) but it’s robust for online fiction that’s advertised only by word-of-mouth. I have a total of about 650 pages of material up on these three sites and I count as my “fans” quite a few “print-published” writers and even a few “print-published” critics. Not that their tastes and opinions (the print professionals’) matter more than others’, but the point is the range of my readership.
Being that my fiction is mildly surrealist, it is a minority taste; this works out well, because my tastes are minority tastes: I’m not a fan of mid-level masscult time-killers like “Avatar” or “The Corrections” or anything on television (I haven’t a television in the house since the late-1990s). Nothing personal against eg Zadie’s, or the two-Jonathans’, tiny oeuvres, but I’ve been a reader a very long time and I was already a little bored with the standard thematic and structural conventions, of commercial Lit, in my early-20s (a very long time ago). To shift to a cinematic analogy: I prefer late-Godard to Cameron; I want to be challenged, not manipulated. The fact that The Corrections (which I read, in seat-bound desperation, on a trans-Atlantic flight, once) is considered an edge-pushing work by average readers speaks volumes (npi) about the gap between what I’m interested in and what the marketplace touts.
It’s not my opinion that a writer should pander to the casual imagination of the typical reader; it’s my opinion that a writer should lead. But the leading of imaginations involves too many anti-commercial risks to be a viable option in the profit-based job of printed entertainment.
I earn my money in a different field, which frees me to write what I choose to write, without worrying about tailoring my aesthetic goals to the tastes of any Target-Audience or middlemen intern-slush-pile-readers. I’m quite pleased with this, as a Literary Artist, and my material has been read by more readers than the material of quite a few “print-published” writers. The great majority of “print-published” writers are barely clawing out a dismal living at it, so the difference between their “professional” and my “amateur” is negligible and, really, at this point, an artifact of nostalgia.
Sneer if you want to (you’re obviously programmed to), but the options on the menu are rather broader than your reactionary response could possibly encompass. No harm done, of course: your particular prejudices are not a factor in any of my decisions.
I’m on something of a tear with looking into these reading group “guides.” Oprah has one for Coetzee’s Summertime but I couldn’t spot one for The Humbling. Your Goldilocks story above reminded of the Lenore Lapidus big fat red-hot brassiere incident in Portnoy’s Complaint. I hope Daddy won’t mind terribly much but while I was reading I substituted some of the words from the vocabulary list above in #162. For example:
“And me,” says my father, touched as he always was by my accomplishments–as much awe as envy–”I haven’t moved my bowels in a week,” just as I lurch from my perch on the toilet seat, and with the whimper of a whipped animal, deliver three drops of something barely viscous into the tiny piece of cloth where my flat-chested eighteen-year-old sister has laid her nipples, such as they are. It is my fourth acmegenesis of the day. When will I begin to come blood?”
CDS Frances, this is a nice little nano-Detournement. It fits with the cited “Goldilocks” story of the trilogy (and with the trilogy itself), as you’ve obviously spotted (npi), because they’re all about the Big O (Onanism)… cross-cultural, hyper-dimensional, inter-textual chicken-chokery. What is the functionless boon of self-administered orgasm but the greatest collateral prize in humanoid existence? “What a wonderful motherfucking existence” indeed. Yank (and buff) away, fellow humanoids!
“I’m on something of a tear with looking into these reading group “guides.”
They’re just so wonderfully infantilizing, aren’t they?
They’re worse than that–misleading and confounding, unprincipled and wanton. That this should be associated with Don DeLillo from his publisher’s Point Omega guide…How can he bear it?
“Politics can be a very divisive and emotional topic. Give your group an opportunity to discuss them with ease, with the following exercise: The first sentence of Elster’s essay is, ‘A government is a criminal enterprise.’ Have each member of the group write out their own version of this statement before the meeting, as a single sentence starting with ‘A government is,’ on plain white paper. Fold up each piece of paper and mix them together in a bowl, then draw out and discuss the different definitions. This gives people room to discuss alternative viewpoints without having to declare their own, if they feel uncomfortable doing so. “
“Politics can be a very divisive and emotional topic. Give your group an opportunity to discuss them with ease, with the following exercise…”
I hope the 5th-graders at the back of the class heard that. Do they have a publisher-supplied E-Z Study Guide for American Psycho, too?
Though I was born in Manhattan and lived in NYC until I was five, I was schooled and raised (almost razed; the cruelest things that have ever happened to me in life, things I was lucky to survive, happened to me there) in the Show Me State. Until this moment I’ve never inquired about it, but something about DeLillo’s tendency toward aphorism, his posture of pointing in his latest book, has got me thinking about it in a deeper way. http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/history/slogan.asp Is it based in defiance or ignorance, defiant ignorance, ignorant defiance, or something else entirely? Three little words pack quite the linguistic wallop. I think I prefer the official state motto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salus_populi_suprema_lex_esto
I am maximally embarrassed by my typo. Some cunning lingust made me do it.
(ed.’s note: I can’t delete this joke, despite the fact that I repaired the typo)
The Hindus speak of cunning lingams, CDS Frances, but… lingusts…?
“Though I was born in Manhattan and lived in NYC until I was five, I was schooled and raised (almost razed; the cruelest things that have ever happened to me in life, things I was lucky to survive, happened to me there) in the Show Me State.”
Didn’t Comrade Harold Brodkey survive Missouri, as well, CDS Frances, before escaping to the city that laughs at sleep?
The thing about DeLillo (who overlaps, somewhere… via Gordon Lish, maybe? with Brodkey) is: I wonder if he’s coming up hard against his attempt to say the utmost while remaining safe? To be explicit and ambiguous in the same pied pill? I felt this already with Falling Man, 88% of which could have been written without a single reference to any catastrophe greater than a bus crash. Or no, say: a grocery store robbery (to incorporate Falling Man’s squeamishly tepid male-bonding conspiracy thematics). Falling Man would, in fact, be a near-brilliant book with that extraneous world-stage stuff pulled out and the mid-life crisis/divorce material sharpened. The poker game and the fight in the mattress dept. were two of the great DeLillo set-pieces. The feint towards Realpolitik significance was too tentative to work.
Maybe if DeLillo thought he had a few hale comrades watching his front, back, sides, and head, he’d do the hokey-pokey and put his whole self in. Maybe that’s what he’s trying to suss out with this book? And please, no one will ever persuade me that The Humbling wasn’t also a testing of the waters. There is NO WAY Philip Roth is that crude. On that score, I’m a Refusenik.
Isn’t that impulse to apply the defibrillator and spark connections in readers waiting like kindling for the match, exactly what Frank Rich and Sam Tanenhaus were trying to neutralize with Rich’s false paean to Falling Man? What else is Mr. DeLillo but a heart-starting-and-stopping machine? He’s proven that more times than he’s ever needed to.
Funny, I’ve got the Brodkey Sea Battles on Dry Land from the library. And yes to Brodkey’s roots. Missouri’s where he grew his shark’s fin that allowed him to maneuver at Harvard and New York City. But of course it was kindlier then than it is now.
Sea Battles is a cherished brick in the citadel of my library, CDS Frances.
On The Humbling: I wonder if the problem wasn’t really, in the end, PR being about 30 years behind on the sex stuff. He’s out of the swim of things; the strap-on and threesome in The Humbling would have been cutting-edge if he’d put it in, say, The Professor of Desire. There’s too much pressure on him to be the NYTBR-crowd’s Swami of Swingers; I thought he’d put the fuck stuff away with Zuckerman’s exit. When the author is faking his erection and the text is counterfeiting its orgasms, what’s the point? Can’t both sides chuckle it off and regroup, in monogrammed bathrobes, over cocoa? Is Philip “seeing” anyone, now?
There’s a good chance he’s simply running out of material in the old sense of “material” (he got an awful lot of good stuff out of Claire Bloom, didn’t he? The Counterlife wouldn’t have been possible without her; Deception, too, of course. Claire Bloom and Israel. What can PR say, without corrosive irony, about Israel, these days? No one mentions that in these book reviews, you know. PR’s Israel thing is no longer possible. Operation Shylocks are no longer possible.
So, in the (probable) absence of a sexual relationship and with no access to his rich wild boyhood feelings towards Israel and being so many years down-river from the extinction of his parents and a culture-anchoring Literary Reality he once found a prince’s asylum in…
Anyway, PR knows so well that his reputation is already made (if anyone’s can be said to be) and a few fizzlers (each worth a new roof on the country house or a trip to Tuscany) can’t much hurt.
The class was taught by Gordon Lish. He’s sort of famous now, too—or he was there for a while, anyway. He was fiction editor at Esquire in the seventies. Then he was an editor at Knopf, ran prestigious writing seminars and made some kind of a stir in the publishing industry in the eighties by suing Harper’s Magazine. The books he edited were critically acclaimed stylistic bare bones masterpieces but never seemed to make much money—things by guys like Don DeLillo and Barry Hannah and Rick Bass and Raymond Carver and Harold Brodkey and Cynthia Ozick and Amy Hempel—and the five or six books he wrote himself enjoyed some critical success themselves but made even less money, which made it hard to show any actual damages when he sued Harper’s for publishing an unauthorized handout from one of his seminars. I’m not sure how it all came about.
Somewhere along the line, Gordon Lish had taken to calling himself “Captain Fiction” and charging all kinds of money to go to his seminars, and I guess it ticked him off that Harper’s went around giving away what he had to say for the price of a magazine. Nor am I altogether sure what he got out of the lawsuit, either, but I think he won. All I know for a fact is that in the spring of 1963 you could get him for free if you were under twenty-one and for seven bucks a semester if you weren’t. I got him for free myself–well, for the first semester anyway (and he was worth every nickel of it, too). The next semester I had to pay the seven bucks.
The College of San Mateo was still over at Coyote Point back then. If you’ve never heard of it and don’t feel like looking it up on a map, Coyote Point is this rocky bunch of red clay cliffs and eucalyptus trees jutting out into San Francisco Bay, just south of the airport. The classrooms were old army barracks left over from World War II. Gordon Lish stormed into one of the dilapidated Quonset huts with a leather satchel under one arm. He had his own literary magazine called Genesis West and hung out with guys like Ken Kesey and Gregory Corso. His hair was short and blond and thick; he was sort of short and blond and thick in general.
The satchel under his arm had loose papers and books sticking out around the edges, as if it couldn’t begin to contain all the wisdom he was eager to impart. His face was flushed. He was out of breath. His gray wool sport coat was rumpled. His tie was loose at the neck of a faded blue work shirt. He seemed pretty image conscious. He wrote his name on the blackboard. Big initials. Chalk chips flying here and there. I’m not an expert graphologist, by any means, but the way he screeched the “G” and the “L” across the slate made it clear that he wanted people to know he thought a lot of himself—and the way he scrawled the rest of his name showed that underneath all that initial bravado, he was as least as interested in making a buck as any self-respecting orthodontist might be. I thought that was a nice touch. If you want people to think you think a lot of yourself, you damn sure better have something to gain by it.
He thought the stuff I wrote had “merit.” He liked finding people he thought might write serious fiction someday. He was interested in…
(Whoops. I have to leave stuff out here. I got in touch with Gordon Lish through his publisher to see if I could get his permission to quote a line or two from my copy of the forty-year-old mimeographed, coffee stained syllabus he passed out to the class. He said no. I couldn’t use his quote. He declined to give me permission. Oh, well. It wasn’t that great of a quote anyway.)
…No wonder none of his books ever made any money. Not making money was his criterion for writing serious fiction. I wish Danielle Steele had been teaching the class. Gordon Lish’s dilemma was that on the one hand, he wanted to make big bucks, and on the other hand, making big bucks was anathema to the making of serious fiction. He seems to have solved it by charging all kinds of money to go to his seminars about how serious fiction shouldn’t make any money.
I was the one who got him started in the seminar business, as a matter of fact. When the second semester was over, the College of San Mateo didn’t renew his contract, so I called Lish up and talked him into continuing the class as a seminar. I had to be pretty persuasive, but he finally agreed, and for a hundred bucks each—in the form of a check made payable to the Chrysalis West Foundation—three other of his former CSM students and I all went over to his house in Burlingame and read our serious, dreary, puerile fiction out loud to each other. That was his first fiction seminar. He’s parlayed it into a moneymaking bonanza over the years.
fromGinny Good by Gerard Jones
(should anyone click the link and find themselves wondering about the far end of Gerard’s politics: I don’t, just to let you know, share them. But so what? You don’t share mine, either, for the most part, Comrades! Such is life, if we’re being frank)
“I do think The Hurt Locker is about fraternity as an ideal, but one that is becoming increasingly difficult to hold onto within the context of the U.S. military. Although the film depicts only U.S. Army soldiers and not private contractors, there is a strong sense that the film puts into question whether the technology, economy, and politics of war haven’t turned it into a radically individuating experience incapable of maintaining the types of fraternal bonds supposedly at the heart of military life. Survival is the (extremely slender) thread still connecting army life to the ideal fraternity–it becomes viscerally clear that fraternity may not be enough to save you, but it is more than enough to get you killed or wounded. That may not be the way fraternity and survival are connected in other texts, but it is still a vital connection.”
This is what Anglophone “intellectuals” (eg, Andrew Seal) write about unabashedly unabashed pro-fascisto popaganda in the early phases of the 21st century. A thrillingly toothless smile of compliance; a throat lubricated with warmest popcorn trans-fat “butter”. Insert Hegemonic War-phallus here.
Fortunately he’s not always like that excerpt. I wonder who that voice is in imitation of? In time I hope CDS Edmond will have a good effect on him. Speaking of, shouldn’t we be getting started on making some Diaper Cake decorations and other crafty centerpieces for the first of what I hope will be many Bunker Pagoda Baby Showers?
I used to have politics. But they were swamped by rage. Then I got a somewhat less fragile sort of politics. But rage soon overtook them. For a while I gave up on politics and pretended that art was enough. Art without politics proved even more fragile than politics without art. I spent hours deleting and unsubscribing to a holy and unholy assortment causes–most of which gave greater priority to begging for money than offering useful information… though maybe I was hypersensitive on that score, having no money to assuage my conscience or appease my rage.
I’m now back down to basic rage mode.
My response to almost anything I hear in the news boils down to variations of “skin em alive roll ‘em in salt and feed ‘em to the pigeons (sometimes it’s rats…never dogs… I really really like dogs)–or, castrate ‘em and force them to train orcas! (that’s the pattern: one timeless and eternal and one topical and right up to date to the latest news cycle).
This partly explains my absence in the Pagoda. If you feel you need my input, just cut and paste one or the other of those petite rants and sign my name.
Thanks, CDS Jacob! Does that carte blanche extend outside the Bunker Pagoda as well?
I suppose… if it applies to almost anything one is likely to encounter in what the media takes for the ‘real world’ and its alleged inhabitants.
REPORT TO THE COMMENTARIATET: SLIP ‘N SLIDESHOW
Comrade DJ Sensei Barry and I met yesterday, at twilight, near the base of Berlin’s famous dead communist erection (the TV Tower at Alexanderplatz) and slogged through gritty black slurpees of muddy snow. Berlin is thawing. Citizens were complaining about the freeze already two months ago (after initial, phony-child-like wonder at snow which had lingered longer than a week)… I hope they’re all happy with the melting dirty hooker-corpse of the city now.
Barry was peckish and I was not: I’d already chewed some ill-advised delicacies at a trendy place (tall sloppy-chic waitresses with boyish haircuts) in Kreuzberg just an hour before. I wanted to walk and Barry wanted to sit and chew so we walked in search of a place he could sit and chew at. We ended up here:
This continues a post-Wall tradition of basing a business entirely on a semi-non-sensical pun (exhibit A: the fish ‘n chip joint called “Fishing for Compliments”): the bistro’s called “Pan M” because they sell paninis, flat little Italian sandwiches that are almost too salty and dry to eat. We had planned, originally, on the too-trendy Dolores (quasi-Mexican), which is right next door, but we thought this might be interesting. The menu display on the wall above the counter is done up like the DEPARTURES and ARRIVALS board at the airport and the decor is 1960s-air-travel a lá Pan Am. What air travel has to do with paninis, even the owner doesn’t know. All you need is a snappy pun and a €30,000 business loan from the government. I just might open that java joint (THE SUPREME BEAN) after all…
Barry ordered his panini and we continued the conversation we’ve been having all winter: Which part of what isn’t real is important? Also, in detail:
Barry and I chuckled and whinnied over the fact that, often, in conversation with Normative Dupes (agents of Civil Inertia), one is targeted with the classic “It’s all very easy to sit back and criticize. Where are your solutions?” This gambit combines the pleasure of sanctimony with the fleeting illusion of common sense. It translates as: provide us with a feasible model for a new civilization or shut up. This is only an effective conversation-stopper until you think about it for a few seconds, since even the nastiest set of social circumstances on Earth will have to be changed incrementally, from the bottom up (top-down requires military intervention)… in time. The time-scale is generational. Change begins with a just critique.
Also: any attempts to forecast a radical new-model prototype, from thin theoretical air, which actually works (and fits) will always fail. You can’t extrapolate a frozen yogurt shop in a mall from looking at a cow. I could criticize cows’ milk for not being frozen, colorful, trendy, sugar-sweet and/or calorie-light but any self-righteous farmer who challenged me (say, 200 years ago) to come up with a feasible design for a Fro-Yo would feel as though he’d won the argument.
What is the statistic…? That every seven years the body has replaced every of its cells? You aren’t handed a brand new body at some depot every seven years: the process is one cell at a time. The flaw in this analogy being that the new body is a copy of the old one. So picture a process where every cell is replaced with a new and slightly different cell and the organism in time mutates from being an overweight, halitotic bureaucrat to a delightful fucking butterfly. There will be some awkward transitional moments, of course. And it will take a very fucking long time. We think of political chronology in four-year cycles. Think a little bigger and a lot longer. That’s what our Masters did, after all: you have to start somewhere.
Also (and this wasn’t touched on in the chat yesterday evening; I think this one came up toward the end of last year): Every time someone pulls the rhetorical gambit of chopping off my criticism of some war or other, or what-have-you, with “It’s not that simple; it’s a complex issue…” I expect them to then go ahead and explain the complexities: I’m an intelligent guy… go ahead: explain the complexities. Strangely, this has never happened, not in c. thirty years of argument.
Before meeting Comrade Barry at the base of the dead commie erection (and, btw, I’m not more of a communist than I am a capitalist: I think both systems; most systems; can work if they’re not being run by idiots and monsters; flawed social systems will auto-correct in the absence of relentless efforts to the contrary), I was in Kreuzberg, looking at this:
The vivid German frankness of those huge bloody logs of skinned corpse-flesh!
Which reminds me of this:
A pretty girl’s skeleton, coyly exposed: what kind of striptease does she have in mind? And do the butterflies represent her jitters or are they symbols of whatever comes right after she peels the meat off?
In Kreuzberg, I was hanging out with CDS JR, who debriefed me on this year’s Berlinale. He had a much-coveted total pass to the whole taco this year… too many films for one person to take in. He took in too many. His one consolation was that a film by Italian friends of his had won something and there is an anecdote with that. JR had two tickets to the sold-out showing of this buzzed-about film (“The love story between the transsexual Mary and Enzo, a Sicilian with a moustache and a heart of gold…”) and admitted to me later that, for the first time, he began to have strategic thoughts about such things. Who would it be to JR’s greatest advantage to give these tickets to? He thought long and hard and finally settled on a well-connected camera man/director who he called up and offered the boon to. The director was delighted and took his wife for a rare night out; Comrade JR thought “mission accomplished” and congratulated himself on finally learning to play the game. The next day, the connected director phoned Comrade JR and told him how much he hated this film. “What were you f____ thinking?”
Which reminds me of the other topic Comrade Barry and I touched on last night in the Pan M bistro: what’s all this good stuff we keep hearing about Democracy? Majority Rules means that in all but the most unimaginably-rare situations, the wishes of some “minority” (which can number, “hypothetically”, one hundred forty nine million in a population of 300 million; but a “minority” can also be fifty-five people in a population of seventy-two if they’re Dupes) will be oppressed. And, make no mistake about it: we will always be some majority’s minority. CDS JR learned that about his taste in films quite a while ago. Have I mentioned already that I used to phone my father at the office and complain that my mother was watching too much television?
I saw this right after bidding CDS JR adieu, en route to CDS Barry:
It says, “Lie in the field like beasts” and soon the weather will be just right.
I used this twenty-year-old, hundred-ton electrical device to get home as night fell:
Pan M is somewhat obvious but the airline theme is a clever organizing principle. If I had the entrepreneurial inclination I’d open a gyno-tapas bar called TWA T and serve a delightful array of assorted finger-food.
That was fairly masterful, CDS Frances!
Thank you, CDS Steven. I hate to but I have to tear myself away and continue reading Coetzee’s Summertime. Jim H is throwing another all you can eat buffet extravaganza at WoW and I want to get in line. Man, Coetzee’s letting it all hang out in this one!
Greetings to Jim for me, please, CDS Frances! I’m off to join Offsprung on the other computer (where she’s drawing spiders)…
It’s dizzying, so many things to consider. But seriously, can’t we chat while we work on the baby shower?
She didn’t say “Diaper Cake” enough. But I like the socialist uniform and post-Soviet hairdo!
Shouldn’t it be “Diaper Burrito“…? Larf. If CDS Edmond is anything like I was just weeks before the Grand Opening (sorry), he’s walking around with bulgy eyes, a tic and a stutter…
“Get in here, please, you,” says my mother. “Why did you flush the toilet when I told you not to?”
“I forgot.”
“What was in there that you were so fast to flush it?”
[etc.]
Fetus?
Just a wee, wee one.
The best kind
Uncheery new remix, comrades (Comrade Frances has promised to defer to me and is therefore banned from describing this as hammy):
When Wendy sneaked an electromagnet from school and brought it with her to the Standing Stones, Suds just smiled in mock wonder and threw it down the well. But a far-reaching idea was forming in his mind, merging thoughts that had long beset him. That day marked the start of Suds’ experiments.
In his hut in the woods he built a laboratory piled high with spools of wire and funnels and Bunsen burners. Metal dipped in acid conducted in the darkness, humming in a monotone. Invisible charges gathered at the circuit’s poles and then a barely perceptible prickliness coursed out into the air. Bits of apparatus woke and cried to one another in their own strange Morse code. Suds stood there among these currents smiling at the miseries locked deep inside them, so desperate to find expression and managing only these pathetic dot-dot-dashes.
‘Good clean fun, my foot!’ he roared as he sniffed his long index finger. ‘Girls,’ he said, ‘Flesh is not merely…’ He left the remark unfinished but smiled to suggest he was about to expose some major swindle. With eyes half closed he gently squeezed his circuit’s wire. As always, he seemed to have extra hands and senses on the go, his attention fixed on many spots at once. ‘I am sorry,’ he said to Wendy. ‘The space you currently occupy is vital to this attempt. Could you please move to the bunker?’ She did so and he scribbled new calculations and tweaked his wire, which seconds later hummed metallically. He ran to the poles and stared into an empty whisky bottle placed between them on its side. An oblong flash of purple emerged from one pole and entered the bottle which Suds then held aloft: ‘Behold!’ I then inhaled its fumes as he removed my clothes.
Man had not broken into Nature’s laboratory, he later told me. No, Nature had drawn man into its own machinations, using his experiments for its own uncanny ends. He briefly rubbed his circuit’s wire and Wendy screamed out in the bunker. He rubbed it again and Wendy screamed again. Then almost rubbed it but not quite, but at that moment Wendy screamed again. Then he left the wire alone but Wendy kept on screaming.
All forms of apparatus were in fact unnecessary, he cried above her noise. The bunker was now the meeting point for certain dark impulses within Nature itself, limited no longer by Suds’ ingenuity and invention. It was Nature itself that schemed and plotted and scientists like Suds and Jockey were just its temporary tools, apparatus in its lab. Our inventions were snares it had drawn us into, he said. We were merely a transit station, a brief conjunction of mesmeric currents within the womb of matter. Wendy would never tell me what happened in that bunker. It was my worst ever night with Suds.
His experiments then became a wee bit magical and show-biz. In our kitchen the chairs were carved with leaf and flower shapes and he’d only to position them in certain ways and they’d blur and flicker and start to leer — dead embarrassing — till that leering took a more definite shape and someone would cry out, ‘It’s Cal, by God. Cal there in that seat.’ And mum would squeal and clap, for Cal was indeed sat there almost, home on leave at last and letting no one get a word in.
Some of Suds’ experiments had a hint of self-parody. He’d tip a top hat and down to the hut floor would tumble a dozen fluttering chicklets, which me and Wendy would have to put out of their injured, cheeping misery. One night when we’d finished he shoved our heads inside the hut’s chimney. Compared to stamping chicklets, it felt fine and cosy, the snug core of nothingness. We remained tilted that way for a while, Suds’ hands resting on our necks.
We should bill TET as THE WORLD’S FIRST CONVERSATIONAL LITERARY MAGAZINE
(I’ve taken the liberty to illustrate your cracking text, chum… if you want an alternative image, email it to me and I’ll wedge it in! But please give us a screed on your vision and methods of Detournement! A glimpse into the Pussy of Steel that is your writing mind, mon. C’mon…)
“and then a barely perceptible prickliness coursed out into the air”
CDS Sean,
You are almost at the Augustinan QUA moment with this text. But please consider a substitute word for barely, preferably one that begins with the letter p. I hear alliteration’s cry!
Cheers, comrade.
Near alliteration on the b of barely, no?
p________ perceptible prickliness
is what I had in mind.
I shall sleep on it, Seminal Comrade
Meanwhile, let’s go exquisite:
Exquisiter than that, even, but that voice-over is like the announcer at a Russian hockey game
Here’s a (virgin) vodka and tonic for you, CDS Steven.
Perfect thing to regress towards bed by, CDS Frances. Perfect.
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing n___
Sunday, 20. January 2008
*a wolf on the underground, part one*
23:46h
with his back to the window of the
orderly flat overlooking Schiller’s golem at
Gendarmenmarkt he
writes his blog, the content of which
is all his sins, from the unconscious
nosepicking he once glanced to catch
reflected in the u-bahn’s black
glass to pulling a long one off
on the pic his memory took home
of that cigsucking schoolgirl who brushed his arm
on his way out of a news agent, Spiegel rolled tight
in its burberry crook, her platinum fringe
cinched to his fist on his
belly in the daydream later like a bobbing
light. regret floods in (sin’s twin) as the pleasure
ebbs, a grim shade shaking its head
over the shock of the copious, the
downright hale in a
drib’s stead, the heady
wipe-up job, all of it gone
into the blog. Confessions of a Pedant in the
Autumn of his Life draws a respectable
village of hits every
night, an audience delighting
in foibles so nobly limned
as to render, eg, his borgia fart
at a christening (way back when) almost
charming. logging off,
it’s out
into the warm winter’s low-ceilinged
bunker of sundown, hotel lobbies and
monocustomered coffee shops as rundown blocks
of yellow in the purpled armature of the
pauline disbursion of converted
light, the North American pursuant
of darkling maps of
homelylessness, his
curiosity’s pickily feline
lonelinesslessness on Jägerstrasse fraught
with clotting silhouettes, circumspect outbursts
of halfchatter and horny
mirth, a Geschäftsmanner invasion from
Düsseldorf platooning through, the
brotherly violence of so many
at march in a beerblind
line against the baroque blue
horizon. he sees one drop
a wallet like the pigeons’
kingsized tip; can’t wait
to write the post on
spending it
Monday, 28. January 2008
*a wolf on the underground, part two*
00:01h
the wallet is warm, ruddybrown, fleshily complex
as an arrant organ or suave soft
coprolite, baklava of the middlemanager’s
luther-ordered life, clean
as bleak boredom yet
implicit sins are packed wherein
a condom abides in a compartment beside five
photos of lost kids, the cats,
old boat, fat wife, a crescent worn through
on the royalblue foil
wrapper like islam’s caliper moon plus
three hundred eighty nine euros the first two
of which go to the purchase of a BZ screaming
“wolf sighted on the outskirts of Berlin” plus
a Ritter Sport savoring richly of
sin he’ll eat on the Underground while
reading it. underlit
as though by klieg light by
welders he descends, chewing, the
operaset of the stairsteps at the Friedrichstrasse stop to
accomplished Bach on a Slavbusker’s pearl-mullioned
accordion, the brown cascading fingers on
toccataworn keys the North American tips
with a fifty at which gypsy kicks free
of stool, stands to switch to a pumping
Lohengrin, the platform whelmed black
in overcoats, sorrel furs, hell-blue
veins, red chins, gold helms of Wagnerian
hair raked by the tunneling
winds
Friday, 1. February 2008
*a wolf on the underground, part three*
14:40h
the paper explains how the wolves are driven
from natural environs by dins and poison
of compulsion’s development, the bipedals’ greedful encroach
at epochgreen level of forest floor to force growling
dreambrothers to bound from the brush, dogshaking
oddments, needle and leaf, from toothcolored coats, noses
to the road, after time long (as the cooling of new diamonds) in
exile. a floss-haired child of Siemens’
managerial class reports being sniffed by creatures
too cool to be dogs, too rank
to be phantasms, in
their country garden, l’heure bleue, late
june, case two: retired insomniac
circumnavigating a private lake on a bike
costing twice what equivalent Romanians take
home in a year was paced
for what seemed like hours by loping blurs
so rich in odor he fainted, waking shoeless, bent-biked in
gentian.
the North American grins a glance
over his paper at a waif on the long seat facing,
gulpsniffing tears, thumbs mothwingwhite beating
handy’s stampsized keypad of vapid
lights, we fears it’s
a bad breakup with her Abelard via
texting. beside her to the right
a woman Val recognizes, her
legs entwined with a man’s who cannot be
quite twin, but co-lingual
cousin, flicking her lips with slim
tongue in
macho-feminist grace like young
South Americans, black manes fused above
marvelously lupine
brows, then oilspilled down
her shoulders, breasts, jeans folded
over the seat and his bold hands separating
her thighs in futile’s best
gesture. hidden by his paper and
coat, the old jester, made
stiff as a goat by the
rutting display, contemplates
taking what they would not freely
give, this sin
of pre-human
dimensions
[ed.'s note: a "BZ" is a Berlin newspaper not unlike "The Daily Mail" or "The Mirror" in London; a " (Der) Spiegel" is a Newsweek-like magazine; "Geschäftsmanner" is German for "businessmen" and a "Ritter Sport" is a big square German candy bar... and a "handy" is what Germans call a mobile phone]
ptosis
1
the crushing unintentionality of
the beauty of early evening clouds calls
some to high windows and others
out
2
money isn’t everything but neither is
doubt
Heard Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sands last night–fantastic. If you ever have a chance to hear either of them, drop everything and go!
There’s a brief segment of his long “Love poem” to Alan Greenspan.
Well, insincere apologies in advance, CDS Jacob, but that clip of Boykoff tickled my serial-killing gene. “Laissez-faire lips”? “Wrinkled visage”? Very poor. I’d like to score him a ten for showmanship and a three for the text, but his reading wasn’t very good, either. Nice Jarmusch-like hair, though! Meh. (Rummages through steamer trunk for duct tape, rusty awl and bottle of ether…)
I’ve never seen you turn out work that wasn’t by magnitudes better than that excerpt of Boykoff’s, so, obviously, I’m dying of curiosity: why… you know… (do you owe him money or something?)…
(And, indeed, CDS Frances: the strange little device of CDS Neil’s pome is so much finer a thing: “They room in living matter/ frenzied skylights” … is the work of a serious honer)
(In fact, I’ve looked at that Boykoff clip three times, now, in sheer disbelief at how fucking a-poetical that staggered jumble of smug punchlines really is…)
The clip wasn’t a fair sample… the poem was satirical– absurd metaphors–of course they were bad–and deliberately anti-poetic –that’s why people were laughing–what do you expect in a “Love Song to Alan Greenspan!” .. a point by point take-down of Greenspans Randian neoliberal economic theory. His voice, too… was quite effective over a long reading. That was, as I said, a long, multi-sectioned poem–such a brief clip gives no sense of the multi-level play.
.
Dunno, CDS Jacob. Sticking tiny knives in Dame Poetry’s eyes in order to preach to the choir… I’d rather hear great poetry (a selection from Moortown, say) and then a fact-filled, anti-Friedmanite lecture (by John Pilger, say), as two separate (and useful) events. I understand the social function of the Boykoff/Sands routine but I question the service it does to either Art or Dissent. As bad as I think Miranda July is (and I think she’s very bad)… no, forget that. I’d purge them all if I were The Art Stalin.
What do you think of these poems, then (which I’ll take down before the new age copyright police catch me)…? I think they betray remarkably meager gifts:
Frederick “Toots” Hibbert Meets U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in the Kingston, JA Hilton to discuss their swervingly divergent views on “Old Europe,” the fading charade of sex symbology, & the ever-unfolding handcuffery of trumped up charges
I want you to believe every word I say.
I want you to believe everything I do.
A familiar song of Jamaican
nuptials always in a foreign tongue.
Night is a sweet & dandy
numb-bodied multiplication table
a pressure dropped threat
treadmill exploding into massivity
an alphabet of promises
for your theoretical inventory.
The glimmer of a laughing trove.
The cartography of debt.
Surveillance is just a fragrance
just a silent handshake in 1983
just a de-mimeographed tragedy
of also but not additionally
of sweet & dandy pressure
drop come home to say hi.
Jules Boykoff
primer on complacency
stay in the florid calm. beyond the crisis
of a car alarm.
move on move on
escape to torpor. cashcrop
their gardens.
affect patriotism. summersault swimmingly.
say ‘oh dear.’ home your american
dream. title this poem. find closure.
lose pamphlets in the mail. in this country.
say: ‘I’d prefer to go on
being. just being
in the ceramic darkness.’
now I’ve said this
and I’m done.
Kaia Sand
Humble Opinion: where they aren’t being slapdash they are being thuddingly obvious
UPDATE: Gets worse: they’re teachers…
About the readers:
Jules Boykoff co-edits the Tangent, a zine of politics and the arts, co-curates the In Your Ear poetry series in Washington, DC, and co-hosts the radio show “Roots & Culture: Roots Reggae Music & Politicization.” His critical writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Tripwire, XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics, and Capitalism, Nature, Socialism; poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in The Poker, Pom2, Lungfull! Magazine, and Lipstick Eleven. He teaches politics and philosophy at St. Mary’s College in rural Maryland.
Born in Alaska and raised in Oregon, Kaia Sand currently lives in Southern Maryland, where she teaches at St. Mary’s College and is active in Washington, DC poetry communities. She co-curates the In Your Ear poetry with Tom Orange and Jules Boykoff. Jules, Kaia, and their brothers (Max Boykoff and Neal Sand) edit the Tangent, which began in Portland in 1997 as a zine and now straddles the coasts as a zine, pamphlet & chapbook press. Kaia has poetry forthcoming in Ecopoetics and subrosa (subrosapress.org), and a collaboration with Jules Boykoff will be in Lungfull! Magazine. Interval, her first book of poetry, was just published by Edge Books.
(in all fairness, at least Boykoff isn’t teaching poetry)
Dullsville. Next!
I borrowed Boykoff’s Hegemonic Love Potion (where that video segment was from) and have been reading it with pleasure, but let me explain my take on things poetic.
I’m not a critic. I write poems (whether that makes me a poet is not my concern. My concern is writing them—and everything else flows from that).
One can be a critic only as an outsider. One can be a critic of contemporary poetry only if one treats all poets as already dead.
I’m not dead yet.
Neither are the poets I read. Even the ones they took the liberty of burying.
Let me qualify that. I do read dead poets, and can do at least a second rate classroom imitation of a critical reading when I have to. Most of the poets I taught at St. Joe’s were dead. Not just buried. I took pleasure in reading them, and in teaching them. The kind of pleasure you take with really interesting dead stuff–you can appreciate how seductive they must have been in their day, but you’re just not going to have sex with them.
Emily Dickenson, I’m told, is buried in Amherst. I’ve been reading 20 to 30 poems a day in the morning from Johnson’s Complete Poems of … working through all 1775 poems. A regular fucking orgy. (I used to pronounce that with a hard ‘g’. Sometimes I still do. Just seems right. Organ. Orgasm)
Most of the poets I read (this is how I start my day: coffee and poetry) are still walking around and breathing the same mercury laden air I do. Have heard in person and read more than 80 poets in the last year and a half. What makes me come back to a poet, I confess, is only tangentially related to critical judgment—whether I think they’re for the ages or whatever. Like I said, that’s for critics to argue about. What interests me… no. Too cool… “interest,” academics are ‘interested’ in stuff. Bankers LOVE “interest,” the more the better. Not poets. What engages me, what excites me, what draws me to a poet… is what engages me, what excites me, what draws me toward my own poems, the ones I haven’t written yet. Poetry that opens possibilities before me that I hadn’t realized until I read them… or illuminates and sharpens ideas I’ve had in mind, that have been working to the surface but not quite emerged.
Reading and studying dead poets is a prerequisite for anyone who expects to write poetry worth reading—but then you have to go beyond that. You have start reading and hearing and seeing and smelling and rubbing your body in the poems that hang just on the far side of the of the ones already written—the poems not yet written, poems that are waiting, waiting for you (make that, waiting for ME to write).
For Boykoff and Sands—they aren’t writing stand-alone poems. They’ve written books—a diverse compilation using a variety of forms composed as a single work. In each case, the structure straddles the margins of the text There’s an exoskeleton of references, quotations from media, signs visual images (photos, drawings)… public references. The poems are responses to these public signifiers, which remain visible for the reader—both inside and outside the text. For Kaia, it’s in the form of a long walk, a circumlocution of a site in Portland, an area once used as a holding center for Japanese-Americans interred in 1942, waiting for transport to detention camps. The walk borders the Columbia River on the north with associations that go back to prehistory. Much of it is now an industrial waste with storage pods and toxic slues. She reads this with slides behind her, illustrations included in the book—and a map of the walk that you can follow as she reads.
Boykoff’s text plays off of quotations from public documents, government, media–so in each case, the interior structure of the text is a reflection and response to references that remain outside, not unlike CA Conrad and Frank Sherlock’s collaborative work: The City Real and Imagined, where they took walks through the city and wrote about what they found, a conversation with each other and with the places they visited.
A poetics of place and time.
An aesthetics that embraces the realia of provocation, allowing for free flights of imagination and reflection while sharing between reader and text, fragments of the real world, stitched and patched together–without assimilating them altogether into the text, where the text does not swallow and digest them and erase it’s sources in an idealist miasma. A poetry (and poetics) that is at once, collage, assemblage, lyrical response, and critical commentary: where politics and aesthetics are complimentary, not competitive.
That’s what I took with me from this reading—a sharpened sense of a Poetics in (not ‘of) Space and Time, a feeling of deep pleasure—for all that’s wrong with this world—to be living among such poets and such poetry—and have wakened within me a joyful lust to get on with the playful work of making poems.
CDS Jacob! I more than appreciate the rich response; I set TET up for that very purpose. To scrape a clearing out of the ether for richer, deeper, carefully-considered comments and responses. The other enrichment I seek (and seek to offer) is the possibility for intelligent people to differ, utterly, in their opinions without burning the discussion to the ground (and without the blog owner/fascist dictator shutting down the thread… been there). So, let’s glory in this opportunity to utterly differ on this matter, is what I say! My opinion does not (can not) trump yours and yours can’t cancel mine… we are in gorgeous loggerheads equilibrium! What’s more liberating than shrugging off the awful compulsion to be “right”?
(Damn fine comment! If you want any special formatting for it, or even an illustration, let me know)
a 15-MINNIT POOETREE PRIMA
decent example of “epic”:
Homage to Mistress Bradstreet
(excerpt)
by John Berryman
[1]
The Governor your husband lived so long
moved you not, restless, waiting for him? Still,
you were a patient woman.—
I seem to see you pause here still:
Sylvester, Quarles, in moments odd you pored
before a fire at, bright eyes on the Lord,
all the children still.
‘Simon …’ Simon will listen while you read a Song.
[2]
Outside the New World winters in grand dark
white air lashing high thro’ the virgin stands
foxes down foxholes sigh,
surely the English heart quails, stunned.
I doubt if Simon than this blast, that sea,
spares from his rigour for your poetry
more. We are on each other’s hands
who care. Both of our worlds unhanded us. Lie stark,
[3]
thy eyes look to me mild. Out of maize & air
your body’s made, and moves. I summon, see,
from the centuries it.
I think you won’t stay. How do we
linger, diminished, in our lovers’ air,
implausibly visible, to whom, a year,
years, over interims; or not;
to a long stranger; or not; shimmer & disappear.
decent example of “frank”:
Carson McCullers by Charles Bukowski
she died of alcoholism
wrapped in a blanket
on a deck chair
on an ocean
steamer.
all her books of
terrified loneliness
all her books about
the cruelty
of loveless love
were all that was left
of her
as the strolling vacationer
discovered her body
notified the captain
and she was quickly dispatched
to somewhere else
on the ship
as everything
continued just
as
she had written it
decent example of “frank-confessional”:
The Ballad Of The Lonely Masturbator by Anne Sexton
The end of the affair is always death.
She’s my workshop. Slippery eye,
out of the tribe of myself my breath
finds you gone. I horrify
those who stand by. I am fed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
Finger to finger, now she’s mine.
She’s not too far. She’s my encounter.
I beat her like a bell. I recline
in the bower where you used to mount her.
You borrowed me on the flowered spread.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
Take for instance this night, my love,
that every single couple puts together
with a joint overturning, beneath, above,
the abundant two on sponge and feather,
kneeling and pushing, head to head.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
I break out of my body this way,
an annoying miracle. Could I
put the dream market on display?
I am spread out. I crucify.
My little plum is what you said.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
Then my black-eyed rival came.
The lady of water, rising on the beach,
a piano at her fingertips, shame
on her lips and a flute’s speech.
And I was the knock-kneed broom instead.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
She took you the way a women takes
a bargain dress off the rack
and I broke the way a stone breaks.
I give back your books and fishing tack.
Today’s paper says that you are wed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
The boys and girls are one tonight.
They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies.
They take off shoes. They turn off the light.
The glimmering creatures are full of lies.
They are eating each other. They are overfed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
decent example of “coy-confessional”:
Composure by Charles Baudelaire
Lighten up, you bitch, stop being so bitter.
You lobbied for night. It falls. Right here.
The air, a haziness, wimples the town.
Peace for some, for the others the jitters.
With cranked-up hope, the plodding herd, most of us,
sapped silly by desire, that ruthlessness,
we bend in the traces and ask mortgage
on remorse.
Dear, dear, glum thing, let’s hold hands. Come ‘ere.
Let’s get away. Look up. There the gone years slouch
in second-hand robes on the balcony of the sky—
over the abyss Regret breaks water, smirking.
The dead sun’s gonna pass out under the bridge.
And like a mummy’s long bandage, off to the west,
listen, sweets, listen, the double-soft dark is coming on.
2 decent examples of “twee”:
(Me up at does) by ee cummings
Me up at does
out of the floor
quietly Stare
a poisoned mouse
still who alive
is asking What
have i done that
You wouldn’t have
The Pebble by Zbigniew Herbert
The pebble
is a perfect creature
equal to itself
mindful of its limits
filled exactly
with a pebbly meaning
with a scent that does not remind one of anything
does not frighten anything away does not arouse desire
its ardour and coldness
are just and full of dignity
I feel a heavy remorse
when I hold it in my hand
and its noble body
is permeated by false warmth
–Pebbles cannot be tamed
to the end they will look at us
with a calm and very clear eye
2 decent examples of “political”:
Belfast Tune by Joseph Brodsky
Here’s a girl from a dangerous town
She crops her dark hair short
so that less of her has to frown
when someone gets hurt.
She folds her memories like a parachute.
Dropped, she collects the peat
and cooks her veggies at home: they shoot
here where they eat.
Ah, there’s more sky in these parts than, say,
ground. Hence her voice’s pitch,
and her stare stains your retina like a gray
bulb when you switch
hemispheres, and her knee-length quilt
skirt’s cut to catch the squall,
I dream of her either loved or killed
because the town’s too small.
A Sight in Camp by Walt Whitman
A SIGHT in camp in the day-break grey and dim,
As from my tent I emerge so early, sleepless,
As slow I walk in the cool fresh air, the path near by the hospital
tent,
Three forms I see on stretchers lying, brought out there, untended
lying,
Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woollen blanket,
Grey and heavy blanket, folding, covering all.
Curious, I halt, and silent stand;
Then with light fingers I from the face of the nearest, the first,
just lift the blanket:
Who are you, elderly man so gaunt and grim, with well-grey’d hair,
and flesh all sunken about the eyes?
Who are you, my dear comrade? 10
Then to the second I step–And who are you, my child and darling?
Who are you, sweet boy, with cheeks yet blooming?
Then to the third–a face nor child, nor old, very calm, as of
beautiful yellow-white ivory;
Young man, I think I know you–I think this face of yours is the face
of the Christ himself;
Dead and divine, and brother of all, and here again he lies.
When CDS Steven loves you, comrades, he loves you all the way.
…the perfect fortune-cookie, CDS Frances! Don’t forget to switch off the fondue fountains on your way out…
LICENSE TO KILL
“No animal is more valuable to that operation than Tilikum, the largest orca in captivity. Captured nearly 30 years ago off Iceland, Tilikum has grown into the alpha male of captive killer whales, his value as a stud impossible to pin down. He now has been involved in the deaths of two trainers and requires a special set of handling rules, which Atchison wouldn’t specify.”
One technique to wipe out pests (like mosquitoes) in a region is to sterilize a bunch of male pests with gamma rays and release them in that region to co-opt the reproductive energies of female pests with the pointless semen (or whatever they use). And this is what the culture is doing/ has done with Artists… generating mediocre (ie sterile) Artists and flooding the region. Mediocre Artists do not inspire (inspiration being the reproductive fluid of Art) and soon the practice dies off. This is happening at the highest rate in Lit (because “everyone is a writer”; I’m quite relieved that everyone isn’t an architect or a civil engineer, as well) and faster still in the subset called Poetry (because while a bad novel still takes months to write, a bad poem may only require seconds). Fuck these Bad Poets! These fucking voracious preening LOOK AT ME, MOMMY cockunts who never got enough attention as kids and think that entry-level competency in the language plus a cool name plus the right attitude (and, should one be so lucky, nice boobs and a pretty face) are more than enough. Where’s my goddamn flaming sword? Why would any kid harboring molten kernels of real genius want to dirty her/his self with the petit-vulgarian ME-FEST that passes for Art these days? No wonder the geniuses are writing code instead! Code-writing is not guarded by an entry-level turnstile that spins with profligate ease… there is a specific non-quotidian skill (and tuitional time-investment) required and no amount of flash or cleavage will pass off binary drivel as functioning code. You can’t fake code but faking poems is wildly popular and easier every minute (as admonitory memories of actual poetry fade). Did the poems I cite, with disdain, above, take longer than ten minutes each to write? If so, the authors are retarded. Take a poll and I’ll wager my lunch money that 85% of the audience for any given live-mic poetry event is composed of people who are also writing poems (the other 15% are drag-along future-Exes); in other words, the natural (civilian) audience for poetry has been killed off and all that’s left is a self-supporting cult of people who want to “make it” as poets. Feedback-loop in the key of sterile mosquito.
This would do just as well for most of them. There was one poet I heard this year that had something extraordinary going for him. Let me see if I can find some of his stuff online.
You’re going to love this one! (Here’s his website) Ku Klux Klassics, indeed!
Good look (bring back the Afro! I mean it!) . But the “poem” fails as either A) comedy routine or B) a formal arrangement of words with the intent of producing an aesthetic, intellectual or emotional effect. And he really needs to work on his “Nixon”.
It sez this on his website:
“The poems have a first book’s trying-everything-out range, including updates of ’60s taunts (“Africa disagrees/ with subject-verb agreement”) and confessionals (“My father was an enormous man…/ His eyes were the worst kind/ Of jury – deliberate, distant, hard”) as well as encomia to favorite musicians (Bootsy Collins, Sugar Bear) and family members. But unlike most debuts, they have a fully realized line and neologistic voice, one that, along with the city that frames them, makes it all cohere beautifully. Staccato rhythms slyly combine with delayed repetitions in ways that are hard to quote, but a good many stanzas are arresting on their own: “The whole bumpnoxious,/ Dark thang stanks/ Of jivation// And Electric Spank/ Glory, glory, glory/ hallastoopid.” Other poems shift effortlessly into formal registers that give further resonances to Ellis’s knowing switches of code and to this marvelous maverick book as a whole.”
Which is exactly the kind of selling-you-mouthwash-meets-artspeak-mumbo-jumbo you’ll run into on plaques in a gallery stocked with basement-made crayon drawings by toothless black low-IQ “outsider artist” janitors beside each plaque. But the unintentionally-ironic line “The whole bumpnoxious,/ Dark thang stanks/ Of jivation// And Electric Spank/ Glory, glory, glory/ hallastoopid,” is exactly the kind of thing which condescending Euros (“Oh look, he’s kind of literate!“) applaud from performing brownskins… who recycle the same trite, post-Color-Purple sheaf of greasy, ghetto-dipped poems over and over again. When a black adult generates text at the level of accomplishment you’d expect from an intermittently-precocious white high school senior, the pale-faced cognoscenti fall over themselves to hail the tripe. Well this particular Darkie calls bullshit. String the Fey Little Far-From-Talented feller up. Comrade Dj Sensei Frances, I refuse to believe that Frederick Douglass suffered the lash to make the world safe for Bad Black Poets.
Next…?
PS Still waiting for a white poet(ess) to forge a little career by writing in Appalachian English… let’s call it “white English”… rich with bad-and-or-primitive grammar, childish misspellings and impenetrably obscure, micro-regional slang; themes to include incest, petty theft, drug-abuse, wife-beating, bestiality and so forth. Any day now…
I’ll have to see who else is available just at the moment. (This is really fun.)
Ha ha! Not enough years in the epoch, CDS Frances.
Okay. Here’s one, since I’m in a Coetzee kind of mood.
Architect
Taken by your ability to de-bone a fish
on a picnic blanket, and how you had to leave
Cape Town because it was just too painful
(all that oppression) and how you spoke–
long pauses between soft South African accented
words describing your work, what you wanted to give
to mankind. You really had me believing in us.
Until I found you in the closet, in a costume
we both agreed, wasn’t flattering.
Me like! No cutesy flim-flammery; no spaces crammed with cotton wadding; no sense of so-made-from-over-used-parts
(I think “all that oppression” is a bit of an over-egger, or lily-gilder, possibly; loses its cool there, somewhat. Pome will live with it or without, IMO, but, again: yeah. Works!)
My teacher, editor and friend–Madeleine Beckman–from her book. Dead Boyfriends (Linear Arts Books) 1998
Ach, I thought it was yours and slyly about JC himself! Larf
If you read it with the emphasis on that, as in all that jazz, it works.
For me the “it was just too painful” already has enough whiff of sarcasm about it, but, again, it doesn’t make my eye-ear bleed; I like the pome. I’m a compulsive compressor.
This video contains content from Sony Music Entertainment… and so forth. Bastards.
Sunday, 18. November 2007
*Pflicht und Neigung*
12:13h
today the north american rehearsed his imminent
december in earnest in churlish old
berlin, slippered
and robed in the sublet
kitchen, shivering a
prayer for the damned
heat. sleet flicked
the windows like
mean-spirited fine print, fall’s premonition
of winter’s predicament. Val brooded over
eggs (his humble use
of the birds’ unlived-in truth), juice,
homeopathic fad pills and Al
Camus’ American Journal, a
moody notebook
posthumously fobbed off as
lit (edited by friends)
(he’s sure they kept)
(the screwing out of it), the
whole long day ahead of him to
fritter as his divorce-diminished
bank account saw
fit, the dishes tombed amnesia-clean in
kitsch-infested cabinets to
rest. the sky became
not luminous, nearly
temperate, muddled as a
puddle reflecting it, he dressed all gray
to honor this and met
the sun’s sharp glittering
glass amidst rainsick grass at the
Gendarmenmarkt’s
benches. from which
he stared at scary
Schiller and Schiller’s musey mass
of wenches thick
at the base of his
plinth, each so cruelly
Presley-lipped, Hera-hipped and
toothsmashing stone-
breasted big and vivid enough to
lumber down suddenly shattering
a path across the pavement stones like
derailed trains to shoo
the shitty pigeons and snap
the tourists’
necks. he respects
the quasi-autistic bluntness of
the populace, for far more truth inheres
to insult than to Murrcan-style
blandishment. his third wife, from
Minneapolis, trafficked
in that language-unraveling brand of
viral euphemism; for perma-smile Liz
fat was full-figured,
crippled: mobility reduced,
and the optically challenged with their
swinging sticks and elevated
chins were never just
blind. the Germans frankly speak
of the geistig zurückgeblieben and he is sure
the fatherland’s retarded
don’t mind.
CDS Steven,
I was just over at CDS Barry’s playing his grooveshare tune. It was like rolling in clover over there. I’m heading out now, but I plan to go back later and do some one-stop shopping. Is there any reason we can’t have that same grooveshare tune widgeted over here? It’s like a shoulder massage. It makes me feel so good!
Word.press isn’t configured for such widgets, CDS Frances! You’ll have to tote your own Deathstar Vader Boombox (24 “D” batteries; 4 subwoofers) whenever you stop by
Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker is in this tradition. A favourite for multiple Oscars, her film is “better than any documentary I’ve seen on the Iraq war. It’s so real it’s scary” (Paul Chambers, CNN). Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian reckons it has “unpretentious clarity” and is “about the long and painful endgame in Iraq”, and that it “says more about the agony and wrong and tragedy of war than all those earnest well-meaning movies”.
What nonsense. This film offers a vicarious thrill through yet another standard-issue psychopath, high on violence in somebody else’s country where the deaths of a million people are consigned to cinematic oblivion. The hype around Bigelow is that she may be the first woman to win the Oscar for Best Director. How insulting that a woman is celebrated for a typically violent all-male war movie.
The accolades echo those for The Deer Hunter (1978), which critics acclaimed as “the film that could purge a nation’s guilt”! The Deer Hunter lauded those who had caused the deaths of more than three million Vietnamese, while reducing those who resisted to barbaric commie stick figures. In 2001, Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down provided a similar, if less subtle, catharsis for another “noble failure” by the US, this time in Somalia, airbrushing the heroes’ massacre of up to 10,000 Somalis.
[excerpted from Why the Oscars are a con, by John Pilger]
CDS Steven,
Do you think if I reread Ibsen’s A Doll’s House I’ll be able to find the hidden architecture in The Humbling?
CDS Frances, if anyone can redeem that book via such a method, it’s you! It’s certainly beyond my powers
Something (a tell tale heart, or tattle tale heart, maybe) has got to be under those opaque floor boards. I’m almost afraid to look in fear it will just be some infinitely empty abyss. Almost.
Oh well, that was a waste of time.
Nothing is a waste of Writerly Time, Comrade DJ Sensei Frances… you’ve just planted the seeds for work to come years hence (in you or others)…
I guess so. That book is so gross if it’s just what it is on the surface. And it makes me feel gross.
My sense was that he started it with greater ambitions and ran out of gas. That was my sense in one or two others; there were trap-doors built into Exit Ghost, for example; in his prime, when you spotted a trap door (think of the Nikki material in Sabbath’s… he keeps circling back to it and opening new doors and that’s how the texts ramify), you knew you were in for a treat. The stamina required, though! Consider the physical agony of writing with a back like that. Who can blame the old Master for sketching in stuff he just didn’t have the energy to paint?
Oh please. Think of Matisse and the cut-outs. There’s always a way to make beauty.
But was “beauty” ever PR’s goal?
I’ll ask him next time I bump into him.
Beloved Wife (and co-creator of Offsprung) is collabing with a gifted new photog
-you’ll have to imagine an image here, as the original was deleted from my account for some reason-
(don’t know why it was removed; I obscured the photog’s name but that was for security reasons… that could be it)
Is it meant to be read as a diptych?
I suppose so… only the photog knows for sure…
(these images are a response to a Faithful Comrade Lurker who made the point, emailically, that I’d posted images of my writer-persecuting Ex but none of my semi-Bohemian Beloved )
(PS: TETapocrypha: it can now be revealed that the STaugustine avatar is a photo of Beloved at the age of five, disguised as an Elizabethan magician)
Speaking of Romance. Peering at one of the half-dozen stylish, occasionally-porny, sites I peer at (a là THIS and THAT again), it occurred to me that after a decade or two of freely perusing close-up anuses, splayed (or wagging) genitals and breasts as glazed and tense with potential as Dickensian Christmas geese, maybe we’ll begin to value the non-meaty aspects of the human… the immeasurable, un-lickable stuff… the really fine and always in-peril x-qualities of temperament, intellect, soul. Maybe the surfeit of cost-free fist-fucking imagery will elevate us; maybe the Puritan Purdah we’ve burst from inflicted a paradox on us in that the Necessarily Unseen (soul et al) became confused with the Circumstantially Unseen (rectums) and fooled us into a hankering-unto-sickness-and-death for wide-open-beaver shots. When all we really craved were fleeting revelations of the other sort. It won’t be long before flapping dicks and billowing labia will seem as risque as elbows and knees and then we’ll know.
She really is your inspiration, isn’t she? What a brilliant meditation. The thing is, even in this frou-frou get up, she’s so there. It feels like she’s the one doing the looking.
Meeting her was April in Paris after December in Warsaw, CDS Frances. Lucky breaks are sometimes required.
You made your luck, CDS Steven. You were there to meet and be met. It’s so simple and so important.
Sometime, it pays to leave the Bunker…
MK Yuppie Ultra! larf. Sounds like it’s voice-overed by Divine. Instead of installing a post-hypnotic command to off a Kennedy, of course, the hermaphroditic voice is compelling us to buy echinacea.
“-you’ll have to imagine an image here, as the original was deleted from my account for some reason-”
I count my lucky stars that I saw it with my own eyes. But, I’ve been having similar computer difficulties.
Yesterday, for instance, I went over to The Quarterly Conversation and left a festooned bundle of Hamantashen decorated with eleven adorable little firecrackers in the comment section for (the apparently ill-named) Lance Olsen. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mishloach_manot In my note I mentioned Elster, not Esther, but I’m pretty sure he’d be able to make the connection being as he’s the Chairman of the Board of FC2 and all.
My hope was to affectionately blast the desert sand out of his eyes and maybe get his fingers itching to write with something other than baby spittle about Point Omega. I mean, take a forking stab at something for heavens sake. It’s been 24 hours. How long does it take to moderate an 11-line comment, and last I looked, the only one he’s got? It’s not even Purim anymore!
Give it time, I say, CDS Frances… sometimes it takes a while. I’d give it another day before complaining. On the other hand, I always “back up” longish comments I plan on leaving on Other Blogs… I’ve lost a few well-written arguments and/or observations to ether limbo on blogs that don’t tolerate the off piste or dissent. And the censorship reflex (or gene?) is powerful in some. Meanwhile, TET is the open forum of your dreams!
FAITH(in a SIMULOCRACY)
The first big break between “fact” and common sense. Kids reach the point quickly from which it’s clear that adults are just pretending with Mickey Mouse and Santa and the Easter Bunny… but the far-more-fantastical character of Jesus Christ (the Son of the Creator of the Universe, who is also, at the same time, the Creator of the Universe, who is immortal but was killed, temporarily, by bronze-age Jews in a redemption pact willed by the Creator of the Universe who, in agony while being killed, pleaded with himself to forgive the killers, his own creations, who he must have known, from the beginning of Time, would temporarily kill him; the same Creator of the Universe who sees red when anyone works on Sunday or masturbates, though, possibly, the cavemen were exempt from this proscription) is sold as FACT. Without a shred of evidence. Supported by the argument that to BELIEVE WITHOUT EVIDENCE (in this case) is HOLY.
To unquestioningly accept the word of Authority is HOLY. Being HOLY precipitates (or is precipitated by) a rapturous denial of self. And, yes: it’s demonstrable: to empty one’s head feels good. To give in, utterly, like the whelp exposing its belly to the alpha-wolf , in a perfect pose of submission, feels good. To agree that 2+2 = 5 (if and when one is commanded to) feels fucking great. Whether or not the child grows up to see through this bullshit, the initial break is there; the powerful disconnect between what logic and experience (bundled together, loosely, under the rubric Common Sense) indicates vs what Authority Commands You to Believe.
Listen: if you can get people to believe in a Bearded, Vaguely Levantine, Anus-Free Sky Giant, what couldn’t you get them to believe in? What lie appears fantastical compared to that?
A dear Comrade avers that he can’t abide “conspiracy theory”. The same Comrade was pleased, a year ago, to discover that I’m not an “Atheist” but, rather, an Agnostic… because what proof do I have that the Universe isn’t mounted on an Ur-Turtle’s back? Fuck: I don’t believe that any human agency will convince me that any particular Bearded, Vaguely-Levantine, Anus-Free Sky Giant made the Heavens and Earth (as though these two quantities are equal, eh?)… but I couldn’t argue in a court of Law that such hyper-Universal Reality is impossible. I’ve never been outside the Universe in order to get an overview. I have a hunch that the Universe isn’t floating on an Ur-Turtle’s back but that’s the extent of it. You are free to do your best to persuade me.
Said Dear Comrade applauds the rationality of my Agnosticism, but is no Agnostic himself when it comes to the infinitely-less fantastical possibility that Geopolitical Power accrues (and organizes) in secrecy; that Power thus-accrued will tend towards Evil (or amorality, in the best-case scenario), both for the sake of maintenance (and Expansion) of Power and for the straight-up Caligulan kicks. NO, regarding “conspiracy theories”, said chum is a dyed-in-the-wool Disbeliever. No time for non-mainstream News Narratives. Stealth ‘n Shenanigans may be the CIA’s tacit motto, but they’re bumblers, aren’t they? Even with a sizable chunk of the trillion-dollar War Budget at their disposal and a fairly solid Harvard-sourced brain trust and an available pool of mercenary psychopaths who think of murder as a competitive sport, plus decades of practice and all the R&D advantages of American tech, how could the NSA or CIA (et al) ever hope to pull the wool over our clever eyes? And why (with Global Dominance at stake) would they want to? Snort.
I imagine a Muslim could buttonhole said Comrade and get him to sit, respectfully, through a longish exegesis on the ins and outs of Koranic scripture. Being a reasonable man, if he had an hour to kill, I wager he’d listen; even debate various fine points; feel enriched, somehow, by lending an open ear to a fellow human brainwashed from birth to believe passionately in a creation myth that doesn’t have a shred of evidence to back it up (in the manner of all creation myths). He’d have an open mind. Comrade, if you’re reading this: is that a fair guess?
I was considering adding a comment outlining an unlikely series of coincidences involving
1. a leap by my ex ***** off a bridge right outside Shakespeare & Co;
2. DFW’s story ‘Good Old Neon’ (about suicide) from the collection Oblivion;
3. the film Before Sunset featuring DFW fan Ethan Hawke as a writer called Wallace doing a reading in Shakespeare and Co;
4. my buddy Jack meeting his ex — also called ***** — in the cinema after 9 years, just as Before Sunset was starting and just after I’d told him about my *****’s suicide attempt;
5. and various other weirdly coincidental minor stuff;
6. all of this happening, I discovered when I got home and started reading ‘Good Old Neon’, on the same day of the year that story is set, this discovery taking place, incidentally, at the *exact same time of the day* the suicide occurs in ‘Good Old Neon’.
But then I read the blog’s final paragraph and decided not to bother:
‘I cross the square, haunted by one of the messages tacked to the mirror. Hand-written by the mother of a 21-year-old bipolar man who killed himself by jumping off Brooklyn Bridge, it read: “I’ve spent the last hour trying to decide if I should end my life. If he could have discovered your bookshop, perhaps he would have survived. I want to thank you for this place and the hope it gives.” ‘
“I was considering adding a comment outlining an unlikely series of coincidences…”
Now, if those coincidences could be massaged into a coherent theory in which a shadowy instigator, with ties to all involved, would clearly benefit from the terrible result of the linked events, you’d have a credible basis for starting a murder investigation. The police work from circumstantial evidence in murder cases… involving apparent coincidences (eg, A insures B for $1,000,000; B turns up face-down in C’s swimming pool; A and C are having a secret affair, etc)… as a matter of course. Very rarely is the crime caught on videotape; very rarely does the perpetrator offer a full (and corroborated by disinterested parties) confession.
Funny how it’s become popular to ignore all that when it comes to Politics.
Nabokov rated it at no 3. in the 20th century pop charts, after Ulysses and The Metamorphosis.
Stick Thine fingers in Thine ears and warble LA LA LA all you want, Chum! Larf. Yer paradigm shift’s inevitable (though years have been known to elapse between the minting of a penny and its drop)…
In related news: I received this email recently:
Congrat..you have 1,000,000 Pounds, confirm receipt by sending your
name,address,age,tel, etc to: co.michelle@9.cn
How should I reply…?
Send the Cap’n's. Let the “rich” get richer.
***Attention Ms Beloved Augustine****And Possibly Even Sprout****Advice Desperately Needed on How To Get Steven’s Claws Out of One’s Back****And Stop Him Pecking Pecking Pecking Pecking Pecking Till He Gets the Answer He Requires****
In the meantime:
Mittel/Eastern European mid-20th century ravishing Surrealist comic genius at full throttle Nos 1 and 2:
Imagine this:
While the mob ran hither and thither in the great night, ever more lost among the starry splendours and phenomena, Father stayed furtively at home. He alone knew the secret way out of this predicament, the stage door of cosmology, and he smiled mysteriously. As uncle Edward desperately sounded the alert, stifled by rags, Father quietly put his head into the stove’s ventilator shaft. It was muffled there, and pitch black. It smelled of warm air and soot, a refuge and a harbour. Father settled down comfortably; he closed his eyes in bliss.
In that black diving bell of the house, raised above the roof in the starlit night, the dim ray of a star fell, and, bent as if in the lenses of a telescope, sprouted with light in the hearth, germinated at the bottom of the dark alembic of the chimney. Father cautiously turned the screw of his micrometer, and there in the visual field of the telescope that dreadful manifestation slowly came into view, as bright as the moon, brought within hand’s reach by magnification, its calcareous relief plastic and glowing in the silent blackness of the planetary emptiness. It was somewhat scrofulous, pockmarked — a full brother of the moon, its lost double returning after a thousand year journey to its maternal globe. My Father brought it close to his protruding eye, like a slice of Swiss cheese densely riddled with holes, pale yellow, sharply lit, covered with pimples as white as leprosy. With his hand on the screw of the micrometer, his eye brightly dazzled by the light of the eyepiece, Father cast a cold glance over the calcareous globe, and saw on its surface the convoluted picture of the illness eating away at it from the inside, the winding channels of a bookworm, tunnelling through its cheesy, maggoty surface.
Father gave a start; he realised his mistake. No, it wasn’t Swiss cheese; it was obviously a human brain, an anatomical preparation of a brain in its whole complicated structure. Father saw distinctly the edges of its layers, rolls of grey matter. Straining his eyes even more, he could even read the faint letters of inscriptions running in different directions on the convoluted map of the hemisphere. The brain seemed to have been chloroformed, deep in sleep, and smiling in its sleep. Reaching the core of that smile, Father caught a glimpse through the complicated surface picture of the essence of the phenomenon, and smiled to himself. What might we not find in our own, trusted chimney, as black as snuff, in the corner! Through the rolls of grey matter, through its minute granulation of swellings, Father perceived the distinctly visible contours of an embryo in its typical head over heels position, its tiny fists before its face, sleeping.its blissful sleep upside down in the clear water of the amnion. Father left it in that position. He rose with relief, and closed the flap of the chimney shaft.
Thus far and no further.
filmed by this mob:
No claws in yer back, Chum; just trying to goad you out of yer unwillingness to deign to even discuss the matter. To the text: is it a Detournement? Is it Schultz?
That’s pure Schulz, not particularly well translated by John Curran Davis. Or maybe it is an accurate translation and Schulz really is as wordy as that. Anyway, the Celina Wieniewska translations are always a third shorter.
It’s actually all one paragraph but I split it up for ease of online reading. It makes Borges read like Joseph Ridgwell — talking of whom, I’m not sure Delillo’s ever gonna recover from this JR takedown yesterday on GU:
‘Delillo is an overblown American windbag. Pure snoozeville. Dull man, very, very, dull…’
Here’s my (very light & very reverent) remix of that Schulz passage:
And Suds?
Well, one night as the Comet was approaching Suds left the gazing crowds and returned to his hut. As Cal went on sounding the alert, despite the kitchen rags, Suds put his head inside that chimney, dark and snug and warm. Before him he held a miscroscope. He closed his eyes in bliss.
He later felt a dot of light upon his eyelid. His eyes opened. A dim ray of the Comet’s light was falling down the chimney. Suds held out his microscope so the ray fell on its surface. He put a squinting eye to the eyepiece, carefully adjusted the focus and watched that sight come into view, pockmarked and glowing like the moon. Suds increased the magnification. Now it was a cheese full of tiny holes, glowing palest yellow and covered with white plooks as if illness was eating it away. Suds increased the magnification and felt a little ill: it was clearly a cross-section of a human brain in all its complex structure. He reduced the magnification hoping to see cheese. He rubbed his tired eyes and looked again. There was no telling what the human eye could discover inside chimneys! Through coils of grey matter and minute granulations Suds was seeing the faint contours of a human embryo blissfully asleep in amniotic fluid, head over heels, tiny fists before its face. He recognised the smile. He placed the microscope in the hearth and left the hut without a word.
For years Suds and I peeked into that miscroscope where a smiling Wendy homunculus slept its eternal sleep, bathed in milky neon — my sister filed away but not forgotten in the archive of the sky.
Thus far and no further.
…
It makes Borges read like Joseph Ridgwell — talking of whom, I’m not sure Delillo’s ever gonna recover from this JR takedown yesterday on GU: ‘Delillo is an overblown American windbag. Pure snoozeville. Dull man, very, very, dull…’
-Truth be told, I prefer Ridgwell’s oafish irascibility to the sickening celebrity-worship of that blogicle and in many of the comments in the subsequent thread. All those lower-middlebrow consumers with their glued-on grins of wonder. It’s healthier, in the end, to attack DeLillo than to worship him, if the attack is in the service of genuinely seeking the key to an aesthetic practice (and not just free-floating animus).
UPDATE: So here’s the intro para to a gob of proudly subversive, counter-DeLillo fiction from our man JR:
“A strange dislocated place located way down in southern Mexico, in the heart of Maya country, on a wild and remote stretch of coastline pounded relentlessly by the mighty Pacific Ocean. The secluded beach was home to a scattered community of ex-pats, mostly old hippies who had settled there in the early seventies, and a small yet vibrant nudist colony.”
Which is only not depressingly poor because we don’t give a damn about the state of JR’s progress as a self-described writer. But it is solidly poor universe of aesthetic practices in which, in the “heart” of somewhere, “remote stretches” of coastline are “pounded relentlessly” and the beaches are “secluded” while certain things are “small but vibrant”. The “dislocated” location barely fails to save the passage.
Yup, same Delillo blog, min.
Today’s JR pearl: ‘Education is a hinderance to becoming a writer, so drop out from all that as early as possible’
Any chance you could put the word ‘light’ after ‘He later felt a dot of ‘ in the passage above?
And yeah, the detournements are becoming less and less detourned whenever possible. It’s trickier with translations where you have to make the effort to change the phrasings (just being careful copyright-wise re the translations) but there’s a Scottish writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon admired by Comrade Edmond who I’m ripping off word for word, near enough. E.g.:
‘Right athwart her vision the haystacks in the fields shone up like great pointed pyramids a blinding moment and then vanished, and darkness complete and heavy flowed back on her again. Then the largest flash yet lit up the sky and then she saw that the local fencing was alive, the lightning running and glowing along it, a tremulous vibrant serpent that spat and glowed and hid its head and shivered again to sight, and if cats or birds stood anywhere near it they were surely finished. It was deathly still between the bursts of thunder, so still that Jan heard the grass shudder erect again a step behind her. Then as the thunder moved away — it seemed to break and roar down the rightward hill above the Manse – the lightning smote down again quite near, playing a great zig-zag over the village park. The lightning went and she began to move forward in the darkness, thinking she was going in the right direction but she couldn’t be sure. The thunder growled satisfiedly.’
Eh, mon: why not do a Detournement of this, from our Joe:
“Billy watched a lone cloud float across the horizon. The cloud was quite remarkable in its own way. Anyway just the mention of the word South America always put Billy in a dreamy frame of mind. It reminded him of revolution, Che Guevara, and carnivals.”
But why not, said Swan. His nickname was Beef. Why not what, said Carne Rand, the fucking rich boy, taking a seat. Swan said, Why does it always have to be sinister, the shadowy cabal? Why can’t it be good? Why can’t there be good cabals that are shadowy and doing good. Working on some kind of generational plan for changing the total consciousness paradigm of a civilization the way that bad people have? They’ve got their secret societies and masons and handshakes or whatever so why can’t we have ours? The unbroken line of intent thing. Right? Eight hundred years of intent is a powerful thing. Knowledge is power. Supposedly. But knowledge is only power if you withhold it, right? But what if the withholders were doing it for nice reasons for a change? Noble reasons. We could start now.
Swan continued: remember when you were joking about why can’t we bring back the Afro?
Carne smiled. That particular remark had been inspired by a particular porno.
Swan said, well, imagine. Years from now we’re out of college, successful in the careers we have chosen. Say we’re worth a few million each. No, more. Like, say, thirty to fifty million each. That’s not impossible. It’s not unreasonable to assume.
Carne tipped back in his chair with the bristly back of his shaved head in the cradle of his meaty interlocked hands and his smile size increased. Swan wanted to tell him I’m responsible for that chair if you crack the legs. It came with the dorm.
Swan said say we chose a very young black girl who shows some talent. Get her at a young age. She’s still tender and slender. We sponsor a whole lifestyle of proper diet and really fine education. Part of the deal is that she doesn’t straighten her hair. Ever. She never straightens her hair. She grows tall and fine with this stupendous Afro and a gift at singing and she’s been groomed with more, you know, I don’t know, like, a 16th century courtesan-at-Versaille-or-something… versed in many languages and playing the harpsichord or, okay, the saxophone and the fine art of conversation and what not; we’ve invested a few million into making her this renaissance kind of black chick with an IQ you could choke a horse on and, but, yes, she can sing the paint off a Cadillac. And don’t forget she’s got this stupendous fucking Afro and we buy the best songwriters and producers money can buy. Let’s call her Super Sister. We buy Super Sister a number one in the charts kind of career, essentially. And she would be this massive influence. Black girls would stop straightening their hair and eating at the kitchen of the McDonald’s plantation and they’d be taking harpsichord lessons to emulate her. Whatever. All for just a few million dollars and the invisible machinations of a shadowy cabal for good. I mean. Fuck. Why not?
Carne’s eyes were closed by now and he looked almost asleep in his chair. The smile froze nicely.
Why not indeed, he said.
2. Victor
Swan’s trip to the WC has levels to it. There are fixations about not sitting square on the seat. For one thing the horror of the flush-wave dolphin-nosing his sweet little hair-purged balls. He tries to time evacuations to coincide with home-time but from time to time there is no getting around it and it comes in public, the call, sometimes, with importunate timing. The call is a widescreen mountaintop scene of monks blowing hard on spiraling five-meter horns filled with concrete. Swan thinks I’m reading the wrong tips about diet again.
Swan excuses himself with this kind of head-bow mis-gesture to the black or mulatto executive with something somehow Japanese about her (the suit? the seal-sleek hair? the sexual haze of death she marches through?) and moves with what he thinks of as fuckworthy grace through the point de capitoned leather of the doubledoors and down the out-of-body corridor toward the light. The door to the water closet you normally need the emperor’s touchbutton code for is propped yea-open with the black or mulatto-janitor’s serf-bucket so Swan edges sort of sideways through the gap stepping over the bucket to justify entering by not actually opening or otherwise touching the actual matter of the door or the doorframe. Like an asymptote or something. He fantasizes swearing on a Bible that he did not open or touch this door. He fantasizes a baffled plainclothesmen finding no prints. He fantasizes Peter Falk giving him a sidelong glance of flummoxed admiration. The mere-mortals’ water closet is a whole flight down. And then he achieves his disappointing revelation which is that the forbidden water closet is identical to the water closet he should have traveled a whole flight down to and then comes the secondary impact of the epiphany that the difference would normally be him just not fucking being here. He is why the door is usually locked.
The body is not a machine it’s a community of machines. The gears of Swan’s shit machine are engaged and it is, of course, the end, not the beginning, of a process, an intestinal effort activated perhaps in the middle of that lecture-pretending-to-be-chit-chat from the black or mulatto with something somehow Japanese about her. The end-segment of the process becomes a process. The end of the process becomes a process in its own right with an arc and accoutrements. You can break down the stations of the cross into interlocking “stations of the cross”. The skull-white throne of Golgotha. He tries to remember those care-free college days. He visualizes a heart-breaking nautilus. Fibonacci.
…And then he will have to wipe and he will have to look at the result each time he wipes because if you don’t look you won’t know how much you’ll have to keep looking and wiping. You expunge or wrap and re-wrap the memory of the streaks and the smells and later walk into a restaurant pretending not to know or have a clue exactly how those fritters will end up. The notion that the planet is a closed-system nauseates him when he dwells on it. There are planets out there with zero shit. Swan thinks I’m getting ahead of myself here I haven’t even shit and I’m thinking about wiping.
The knees are bathed in milklight. The knees appear deceased. His knees are actually bearing weight as though he’s waiting for a starter’s pistol. He wants to groan and pant and finally give birth.
Very little of his weight is on the seat when the man they call VHR or The Master of Disaster or Death and Taxes comes in coughing. This is an entity that nobody has ever said hush to. This is a despot on the throne since before he could walk. He farts down a suit leg at the urinal shaking the leg. Swan should not be in here and withholds final delivery for fear of the telltale plop. A lush (even woodland) splash and gurgle on worn urinal candy of impossible duration is Swan’s warning to hold his plop in. The stream goes on and on for superhuman units without reaching the trickle part when VHR’s phone rings suddenly Beethoven’s Fifth so loud and stereo that Swan kind of lifts up off the seat and bangs the right elbow on the sharp-cornered high-security roll-dispenser. Blood he won’t be aware of until later as he goes over in his mind the terrifying conversation he is over-hearing that will seem to want to kill his mind as he is hearing it.
3. Elizabeth Houghton-Rand
I couldn’t fucking believe I was having a serious quote philosophical debate about whether or not to violate, abuse, torture and otherwise mortally fuck with a seventeen-year-old heiress for the sake of a political movement my comrades had as yet not quite managed to convince me even existed outside the endless late night bull-sessions we had in some white boy’s dorm-room before we’d even met her. White boy pays for the keg and and he’s suddenly what, Malcolm X? I kept kind of muttering under my breath to myself that this is really happening, guy. This is not a dream. That this shit was only an illusion to the extent that life itself is and waking up from this weirdass scenario will be impossible to achieve by any means less meaningful than death itself which is not a thought I even wanted to sneak up on. Let alone exemplify. On channel 7 news. She was passed-out on an air mattress in the fucking bathroom of Kwame and Dookie’s shabby-grandiose off-campus housing and it was not, as yet, any kind of a crime, no matter what Walter Cronkite tells you.
And then Josephus… Josephus… I remember wondering who had met that quote psycho first. Okay. He wasn’t Kwame’s friend. I asked Dookie later and Dookie said fuck no. I never knew the bumpkin existed before x-moment in time which I’m saying was scripted. With that big-assed bloody dick? Like he was seriously pulling a sword out the belly of an infidel and so forth. Like what am I seeing? Plus taking forever.
4. Josephus
Nobody stopped you from taking your dinner trays to your dormitory because you were black. You were taking your dinner trays, to your dormitory, because you were black. Nobody stopped you, from taking your dinner trays to your dormitory, because you were black. You were at Moorbury College because you were black. Your scholarship to Moorbury depended on your being black but you would not have been at Moorbury without a scholarship if you had not been black and needing a special way into a college that wouldn’t have been interested in you if you hadn’t been black. You put the tray on the bare mattress of the narrow bed in your single room and sat beside it and winced through the nasty work of escaping your snow-clogged boots while your dinner cooled. You had to remember to buy a thick rough doormat. You had wanted a thick rough doormat since the first time you saw one at the age of seventeen. As a result of that program.
You needed matches and canned ravioli for emergencies and a can opener. You would also need to buy a pillow case and sheets. Your first Student Aid check would come on Thursday which was a four-day wait. You’d been sleeping on a naked pillow on a raw mattress under a beach towel for three days in your long underwear with the heat cranked up. A sock hit the cement floor with living weight. You saw that you hadn’t clipped your toenails since the week before taking the two-day bus to Moorbury and added a toenail-clipper to the mental list. Thursday was also shrimp or steak dinner day. Tonight was cheeseburger and tater tots or home fries and fruit salad with chocolate mousse for dessert. You had three envelopes of powdered strawberry milkshake drink left in your suitcase.
You had never tasted chocolate mousse but you had heard about it. You had always assumed they set those on fire but that was another dessert. You noticed that the dark room was not very dark and even in the dark your foot looked very black and shiny because it was wet because the boots weren’t made for snow. The movie poster on the wall you faced as you peeled your other wet sock off was just out of reach. You had gotten it for free during your unusually late orientation and had not seen the film it was advertising nor heard of the actors appearing on it. They did not look famous to you.
You needed six “C” batteries for the cassette recorder you kept in the box it had come in and some more 60-minute tapes and added this to the to-buy list and reached for the dinner tray with your legs folded under. In a soft shell of doubled long-underwear you hadn’t removed in five days. You had come to your orientation two months late. Snow blown straight through the floodlight cutting across your view of the campus from the dorm room window provided the illusion the whole empty building was in motion like a majestic ship. The cafeteria was crowded and brightly loud and you had walked right out with your dinner tray, no questions asked.
You left the light off and sat on the bed eating the food you were embarrassed to admit was the best food of your life and you watched the snow. You wondered what it meant that no one had stopped you. You wondered if you had a blank check for anti-social behavior out of fear or compassion or same old disregard. Through the veil of the snow and at the other end of the very long walk dividing the icing-caked lawns lit by haloed lights at broad intervals like gas lamps from a Dickens engraving was the sharp black geometry of the new Moorbury chapel which had gone up in the 1960s. Stained glass at the core of the jarring shape caught needles of light from cars turning the corner in the distance occasionally heading for town or St. John’s to the south. The older chapel was not visible from your dormitory window and was on the older side of the campus where all the buildings were actually ivy-drenched scale-model cathedrals and you felt the unspoken sense of off-limits. You had walked over just once during your unusual two-month-late orientation to have some papers signed in an office by a woman who seemed surprised the whole time you were standing in her office in the grand old building. Surprised or ashamed. Or maybe she wanted to hug you. The tater tots were delicious. When you had bought a thick rough doormat on Thursday you would feel you had accomplished something. The first doormat you ever saw was in front of Victor Rand’s mansion.
Beautiful song. Not credited. What do they think? Songs like that don’t come along every day. They have to be nurtured and acknowledged. Hypocrites.
People who know how to earn money with Art usually plug the hole where their finer-feelings towards Art should be with the money they earn with Art.
Balm of Gilead. May they pass a yeast infection back and forth until the end of their days.
Exquisite curse. There may be money in it…
It’s crazy-making that another 24 hours have passed since I submitted my admittedly Cactaceae-y comment to The Quarterly Conversation and it’s still under mmmmmmmmooooooooooooooooooooooooodddddddddddddddddddeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaatttttttttttttttttiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiioooooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn. I don’t get it. It takes Daniel Green like a second to erase my comments if he doesn’t want to post them. It’s quick, if not painless, and at least one knows where one stands and we move on. If this goes on much longer I may propose that Scott Esposito change the name of his publication to The Quarterly Pontification or The Quarterly Obfuscation.
For me, the most indelible image in Libra is that Y carved into JFK’s chest during the autopsy investigation. Flip it and it’s a divining rod for the desert. The aqua-power of this book is so far completely untapped. What we get instead is a deluge of meaningless blather.
If I were cultural Tzarina For A Day, I would declare a do-over for all of the guys who’ve written about Point Omega, not just Glancing Lance. (I’d say Summertime too while we’re at it but Jim H. will part the red sea on that one, I’m confident.) Try again. i mean it. Let’s say the first shot was a clearing of the cobwebs and now they can get down to the serious occupation of reading.
This is from the first chapter of Point Omega:
“The sun was burning down. This is what he wanted, to feel the deep heat beating into his body, feel the body itself, reclaim the body from what he called the nausea of News and Traffic.”
What body do they think he’s talking about?
“If this goes on much longer I may propose that Scott Esposito change the name of his publication to The Quarterly Pontification or The Quarterly Obfuscation.”
The beauty of the Literary Internet is how it recapitulates (and temporally compresses) the horrors, wonders and incalculable longueurs of “Print Culture” in a frenetic little Fruit Fly experiment we can watch on our desktops from the splatter-proof safety of home. It’s taken only a few years for Virt Lit and Virt Lit-Critters to mimic, in a bottle, the circle-jerking, idea-xeroxing and gate-keeping-via-self-proclamation which Print Culture took decades (if not a couple of centuries) to perfect. Who, may we ask, is Scott Esposito? He’s never written a single sentence I found surprising, instructive or exceptionally interesting. He’s pompous enough, yes. But is pompousness enough? Someone find us a wonderful passage from the writings of Esposito…!
If you backed-up the lost comment: who cares if they won’t post it? If you didn’t: never make that mistake again, Comrade!
(And, dammit, you seem to be very subtly forcing me to get a copy of that book…)
I backed it up alright.
“For me, the most indelible image in Libra is that Y carved into JFK’s chest during the autopsy investigation. Flip it and it’s a divining rod for the desert. The aqua-power of this book is so far completely untapped. What we get instead is a deluge of meaningless blather.”
DeLillo, far more often than most big-ticket scribes, steps out of the way of his subconscious (with a flourish of his cape) and lets the bull smack hard into the page. I think the resonances you are tracing are largely the work of Don’s night mind. You are perfecting the Ouija Critique, Comrade DJ Sensei Frances and it’s way-the-fuck ahead of its time.
I know. That and a Metrocard, as they say.
I read The Abyss of Human Illusions yesterday. Heartbreaking: my heart smashed in far more than 50 pieces. Both the book (especially the preface: oh, Christopher, did you really not know?) and the fact that there was exactly one copy in the Union Square Barnes and Noble way up on the 4th floor. Whose cap is that a feather in? The thing about the Pantheon is there is no abyss. Unless you’re hovering above looking down through the oculus
Cough it up, people.
P.S. The store was in a tizzy because Spike Jonze, creator of Jackass and Jackass, the Movie, was doing an in-store “event.”
Re: the Abyss:
I’ve just read the following excerpt and what I kept thinking was: I know this text; these scenes. I’ve read these scenes literally thousands of times. I know this movie. I’ve seen this movie over and over and over again. The hardboiled Yankee reverse-Cinderella. This is one of the handful of text-templates Americans never seem to fucking tire of. But I’m tired of it. It’s like a deck of playing cards in which the only possible “surprise” is the order of the cards. Tell me why I shouldn’t be sick of it, CDS Frances…
Christ, no wonder my texts read like Mayan acrostics to most readers. People love to sing those good old songs, I suppose.
Here’s the excerpt I just read through (and whoopie-ding over the end-notes; a footnote by any other name…):
from The Abyss of Human Illusion Gilbert Sorrentino
-VI-
Most of his friends were dead or far away, staggering into the apathy and complaint of old age. He was, that is, virtually alone, his wife dead for many years, his children distantly attentive, formally so, but no more than that. When he thought of his youth he could scarcely believe that his memories had anything at all to do with the absurd life he was now living, an observation, he knew, that was far from original. Somehow, he had thought that his old age would miraculously produce finer, subtler notions of — what? — life? But he was no better, no cleverer, no more insightful than any shuffling old bastard in the street, absurdly bundled against the slightest breeze.
He didn’t know, or knew but refused to believe, that the celebrations and joys, the razzmatazz, so to speak, of his youth and young manhood, were perhaps perversely, yet precisely, what had brought him to this disquiet, this discomfort, this hidden and unacknowledged longing for oblivion. Had his youth been another sort of youth…. But it had not been, it had been his and his alone, and its clichés and blunders had led, almost sweetly, to the clichés and blunders of his senescence. Time to go and leave the world to the young, happily wallowing in the mess he’d left as a small part of their general inheritance.
-X-
He loves a girl, who, as it turns out, does not love him, and so he wastes years of his life trapped in a wretched cliché. This is, as everyone knows, the oldest of news. At the time that he met the unattainable girl, another girl, whom he treated with a distant, friendly formality, tinged with a benign contempt, adored him and would have done anything for him, had he but asked. She was, as they say, “the girl for him.” This is but more old news.
But since life is, essentially, and maddeningly, a series of mistakes, bad choices, various stupidities, accidents, and unbelieveable coincidences, everything played itself out just as it should have; although a shift this way or that in this young man’s life, an evening at a friend’s house avoided, a day at the beach cut short because of rain — anything you can dream up, the more absurd the better — would have led to wholly different results, each one of which would have played itself out precisely the way it should have. There is no way to bargain with life, for life’s meaning is, simply, itself. Perhaps this is why one society after another relentlessly invents its gods and the byzantine complexities of the religions in which those gods are enclosed forever: somebody to talk to, to cajole, to beg and bribe. That nothing helps doesn’t matter, for, most importantly, the gods can be blamed. They “work in mysterious ways.”
-XV-
The man was sexually and emotionally attracted to young mothers and had spent his adult life in pursuing and, when he could, seducing them; he’d left a lot of wreckage behind. He met a woman, the mother of two boys, seven and five, a woman who was the wife of a casual friend. They “ran off together,” as they used to say, leaving the two boys with their father, who was, not surprisingly, angry, bewildered, and, for the moment, heartbroken. The new couple soon had a child of their own, but the fact that the young woman was now the mother of her seducer’s child ruined everything for him, and he left one day in their old Ford station wagon, a sun-faded lime green monster that might well have served as a sad counter for their dead amour.
He took $147.34, all the money that was in the coffee can in the refrigerator of the wretched St. Louis apartment in which they lived, all the money that they had. Nobody who had known them in New York ever discovered why they had moved to St. Louis, and when the young woman returned, bitter and humiliated, to her husband and two older children, she never told them, except for some vague references to “teaching jobs.” Her husband, perhaps understandably, treated the new child as if he were a demanding visitor who would soon miraculously disappear. As for his wife, he thought of her as a stupid maid whom he occasionally and quite gently, he thought, raped.
-XVI-
In the winter of that year, after his post-basic training leave, he took a train to San Antonio, to report for duty at Fort Sam Houston; he would be there for three months, at the Medical Field Service School, for advanced training. On the train, he discovered that the club car was painted a pale rose; its armchairs were a soft feathery blue. A girl came in and he and she began to talk. It was very late and they were alone in the car and quite comfortable together. The train drove through the darkness, and the promise of kisses lay in every dim corner.
After a time, the girl closed her eyes to the night rushing by outside the windows, the silent night in which black demons and black wolves ran silently through the black countryside. The train crashed on through the darkness.
He leaned toward her and kissed her cheek, then her ear, then put his lips in a light spidery touch on her neck, first at her hairline, then down to the collar of her dress. How sweet she smelled.
“It feels like a spider,” she said, “so soft and light. You’d better catch it.” He took a long time finding that spider; for the little monster roamed everywhere under her clothes, everywhere.
The next morning, at sunrise, the train pulled into Dallas and she got off. He waved to her from his coach window, but she pretended not to see him. The sky was turning rose and blue.
-XX-
He died in a monstrous blooming rose of blood and fire outside of Munsan-ni, under a mortar attack. A week earlier, Chinese rounds had tracked a squad across a valley floor with relentless elegant, fussy precision, killing two and wounding two.
Before his orders had been cut for Ford Ord and FECOM, he was stationed for a brief time at Fort Meade, Maryland. A friend of his, in the Marines at Camp Lejeune, thought it might be a good idea if they met maybe in Baltimore for a weekend of disorderly drunkenness, etcetera. He said O.K., and they agreed to meet at a bar on Charles Street that they both knew. He got out to the highway on a post bus to hitch hike, in clean and starched Class-A khakis. What a soldier, standing tall!
After ten minutes, a powder-blue Cadillac Coupe de Ville rocketed to a halt just past him, and then backed up, whitewalls screaming, and he got in. The driver was going to Wilmington, and he’d take him right into fuckin’ Baltimore. He was a man of maybe fifty, sunburned and sweaty and absolutely drunk in that placid way that alcoholics know how to polish to perfection. On the seat, between his legs, was a quart of Gordon’s gin, from which he drank regularly. He’d occasionally light a Pall Mall, at which times he’d steer with one knee, smiling childishly. He maintained an average speed of about 85 to 90 miles an hour, looking at the road, or so it seemed, but now and again. At one point, the car hit a patch of gravelly sand and sailed through the summer air, quite beautifully, for some 20 yards, while the driver hooted with pleasure at, perhaps, the sight of death, grinning on the hood. But the Caddy landed gently and on they went, spared for something or other. We know why the soldier was spared, of course.
Incidentally, the driver offered the soldier a drink and a cigarette only after their unexpected flight: maybe he thought they were now true comrades.
-XXV-
In his old age, childless and thrice-divorced, with all of his old friends either dead, sick, or gone to sunbaked funereal places that were beyond his wish even to imagine them, Arthur began, one day, with no plan to speak of, to tote up, idly, to be sure, his grievances: the slights he’d endured, the insults, the petty humiliations unanswered and unavenged. He listed the unreciprocated kindnesses he’d shown others, the unanswered letters, the snubs, hurts, bad manners revealed, the advantage taken of him by those he had considered friends, or, at the least, not enemies. The project, if it may be given such a name, overwhelmed him, and he began to recover incidents, long forgotten, that he added, painstakingly and precisely, to his cruel catalogue. He felt as if driven before a wholly unexpected avalanche.
He bought a notebook, rather, an accounting ledger, and meticulously divided it into twenty-six sections, given over alphabetically to those people he had, for the most part, fished out of oblivion. Now he could enter, with great care, all that these people had, he knew, he remembered, done to him. After each name — sometimes, when he had forgotten the name that went with the now-despised face, he would simply describe the person in a mnemonic shorthand — he wrote a carefully constructed synopsis of the sneer, the slight, the shabby act or remark that he attached to the person so recalled. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Arthur pulled out of the pit lost years miseries long buried, and these would serve to illuminate others, many others, in their various darknesses. And, too, many of the wounds he felt once again were, to put it gently, imagined wounds. But they were added to his expanding lists.
His book, after a year or so, begot another, and then yet another, as his grievances grew and flowered, so that this accounting became his entire occupation. He was, if the word may be given a perverse reading, supremely content. A shabby euphoria, a Calvinist paradise.
-XXIX-
The old man knew he was dying. The doctor had come after an episode of terrible agony that he’d endured that morning, and after the briefest of looks at his patient, who twitched and writhed and rocked in pain, he said that he wanted him admitted to the hospital immediately. But the stubborn old fool refused to go in an ambulance, and the doctor, who know his catalogue of neuroses and prejudices and insanities virtually by heart, said that he’d drive him in his car, which was parked right in front of the building. “I’ll not have the horse’s ass gawms staring at me in an ambulance, by Jesus,” the old man said. “Goddamned fools and creeping Jesus Lutherans, may God damn them to hell.”
He asked the doctor to go down and wait in his car, he’d be right down, he wanted to put on some clothes, he’d be goddamned if he’d leave the house in his pajamas like some shanty Irish greenhorn. The doctor told him not to be too long, then repeated this information accompanied by a pointing and admonishing index finger, and left.
The old man put on a starched white shirt, a dark-blue tie with a small light-blue paisley figure on its ground, an Oxford grey shadow-striped suit with vest, black shoes and black silk socks, and a grey Homburg. Then he left, with his daughter, who had been standing, during the doctor’s visit, in the kitchen, looking out at the neighboring roof. She didn’t want to have this sick father, she didn’t want to have this dead father, she didn’t want to have to be alive to put up with this. But here she was; with this mean, dying old man. She was afraid and relieved that he’d probably not recover this time.
On the landing between the ground and second floor, the old man stopped, stood straight for a moment, then bent over and vomited black, grainy blood, once and then again. He wiped his mouth with his handkerchief, then inspected his shoes and trouser cuffs for stains. “You’d better clean this mess up, Skeezix,” he said, “the Scowegian will have a fit and you’ll never hear the end of it.” She went back up the stairs. “I’ll be at the hospital as soon as I get dressed,” she said, and he waved her away and, panting with the pain in his innards, continued down, cold sweat making his face shine resplendently with doom.
When she’d cleaned up the vomit, she went upstairs again, dressed, left the building, walked to the nearby hack stand, and was at the hospital in twenty minutes, to discover that he’d died in the doctor’s car. Later, back in the apartment, walking about in her slip, a private luxury that she suddenly became happily aware of, she found his watch and chain, his sterling silver pocket knife, and his wallet, with some four hundred dollars in it, on the dresser in his bedroom. She could hear his voice clear in her mind: “The hospital is nothing but a den of thieves. Worse than the goddamn firemen.” She sat down on the bed and lit one of his Lucky Strikes. “Bye-bye, Poppa,” she said.
And so on… (no need to post the whole thing)
I’m with you. So, I think, was he.
“And so he continued to do it, correcting and revising each newly made page with a feeling of weird neutrality, with a feeling that he was simply passing the time: this or solitaire — all right, this. Surely, the other old writers he still knew felt precisely this way. Did they? He surely wouldn’t ask such an impertinent question.”
What a crushingly-conservative epoch.
Dan writes:
“Given Sorrentino’s longstanding predilection to formal experiment and manipulation, already it is tempting to look for clues to the novel’s formal patterning, which might ultimately provide the key to interpreting it, in these immediate characteristics of the text. Why fifty sections?”
The “50″ is a red-herring, as numerological clues in Lit always are. Even if the number links the text to another layer of meeting, the other layer is either too thin to count, or the relationship to the original layer is too circumstantial to matter. This is a post-Elizabethan tic we should have grown out of after Joyce. Literary Numerology is a con. And, for example, does the seven (or whatever)-organs, seven (or whatever)-colors, seven (or whatever)-whatevers overlay in Ulysses really add anything to the experience for anyone other than pseudo-archeo-academics? It’s been a dead end for a century; I appreciate the Elizabethan preference for it (something to do with their sex lives/ metaphysics/politics)… but the Modernists should have put an end to it (that should have been one of their flaming-sword missions, in fact)… instead of starting it up all over again.
Ten dollars to any Comrade who can come up with an example of Literary Numerology that actually enriches the text. Ten dollars in gold.
PS: James Marcus, the owner of the above-linked blog and a truly respectable man-of-letters, sent me a package (a book, as it happens) all the way from NY, which I received yesterday… a book by a writer often-mentioned on TET. Great gift; great blogger (tasty novelist, too)
I’d agree, comrade, until we get down to 4 and below (or 5 at a push), though I’m still not sure this constitutes numerology.
It can be cool to juxtapose a chapter/passage that’s all 4 (characters, plotlines, phrases, rhythms) with one that’s all 2, say — if there’s a bloody good reason for doing so, that is.
Didn’t 42 used to feature regularly in your work? Though it seems to have been dropped of late.
I used to enjoy this maniacal Elizabethan layering stuff in Wallace but my heart and keyboard now belong to Bruno S. Far better — if you can manage it — to drop occasional pennies down the village well and let them echo, echo, echo…
Grand tunes from Comrade Frances below.
“Didn’t 42 used to feature regularly in your work? Though it seems to have been dropped of late.”
Yes, and “1977″, too. But these are tiny jokes; I’m not hoping to redeem otherwise lackluster prose with a secret numerical key which will suddenly make the reason for all the lackluster prose come together. I’m not saying to banish the numeral presence; I’m saying that “Even if the number links the text to another layer of meeting, the other layer is either too thin to count, or the relationship to the original layer is too circumstantial to matter”.
Which is totally different with the Musical and/or Visual Arts, isn’t it? Numerical values, on some level (wavelength or rhythm, say) are everything in a painting and in music. Which brings me to the false comparisons between Painting and Music and Lit; in the first two, the physical or objective contingency is everything. In Lit it counts for naught. The words on the page are merely directly symbolic of the text which is then impressionistically symbolic of the “story”. Spooky Art indeed!
But try this experiment: divide a passage into three parts. Then nine. How much difference does it really make to the text? It makes a larger difference in verse, of course, because the words are few and the meaning so concentrated. But take a page of Schultz and try numerological variations (without fucking with the actual sequence of words): by far the strongest effects obtain from word-choice and word-order; the third, next-strongest effect comes via punctuation, I’d guess.
I thought that was Daniel’s Socratic way of urging readers to focus on the chapter headings, which are stated in Roman numerals.
Number versus numeral. First things first, what is the difference between a number and a numeral? A number is an abstract concept while a numeral is a symbol used to express that number. “Three,” “3″ and “III” are all symbols used to express the same number (or the concept of “threeness”). One could say that the difference between a number and its numerals is like the difference between a person and her name.
“One could say that the difference between a number and its numerals is like the difference between a person and her name.”
Again: but how does the distinction signal a richer layer/affiliation vis-à-vis the actual text? It’s a crutch, a gimmick, a carny con. The secret numerology of the chapter headings are of peripheral concern. Nabokov wrote that famous story (about the two dead girls and their professor who misses the rainbow they send him, from the afterlife, as a signal) in which the first letter that appeared on the left margin of each line spelled out a sentence. So you spelled out the sentence: and then what? Very weak… rather juvenile… pay-off. The Religion gene is always working to deceive us when it comes to texts (and texts as relics). Eradicate the Religion gene, in fact, and you’d probably evaporate the last little puddle of audience for Lit. Which is exasperating.
Again. No disagreement. But we’ll have to see how we feel about things 25+ years hence. He has asked for his name to be remembered in The Pantheon of writers. He’s asked it by reshuffling his own deck of cards, hoping to make it come out a winning hand. It is something he felt he needed to ask for from whomever would be intelligent enough to translate his request by reading him closely, by feeling him. He was just putting it out there in as clever and direct a way as he could devise. I was touched that Comrade DJ Sensei Gilbert Sorrentino wrapped his hopes in what is essentially his own mixtape. It’s what remains. Is it enough?
Good question, CDS Frances. Re: sentence #3: I can only hope that 25 years from now, I’m not fucking with anything as essentially secondary as Literature. I hope I’ll be well enough (and so clear of mind) to be chatting with my kids, smelling flowers and taking baths in vats of warm chocolate etc. And a weekly, heart-endangering handjob from my young wife (who’ll be a dewy-eyed 60) would be nice…
(and thanks for the rigorous workout! TET now feels and smells like a late-afternoon squash court and I like it)
Wow. Last night I dreamt that my new book was released without my prior knowledge. It was presented to me by my Cousin Peter who currently works for a literary foundation and was the boy in West Side Story (the movie) who bounced the basketball in the playground. Anyway, he didn’t think much of the book and when I took a look I could see why. It was a hardback edition containing two novellas. I only caught the first title which was, “Two Cookbooks.” The glue in the binding was defective and as I turned the pages the whole thing fell apart in my hands. I didn’t like the way my cousin was wrinkling his nose as he read some passages aloud in a snooty voice and I said to him, “Stop being so sophomoric.” Then I woke up.
Your cousin inhaled divers effluvia from a young Natalie Wood…?
I don’t think she was in that scene.
As I pointed out earlier: the DeLillo quip (from Mao ll) about Novelists and Terrorists is mostly true; the former have ceded the role of leading the conversation to the latter. DeLillo’s only mistake was in not specifying that by “Terrorists” we don’t mean brown-skinned patsies.
I hesitate to mention this, and certainly don’t wish to interfere with the very interesting conversation happening upthread. But, when time permits, what might we make of this strange interlude in Coetzee’s Summertime? John and his cousin Margot are sleeping in his truck in the middle of nowhere because of a mechanical breakdown due to some botched repairs Coetzee tried to make himself. From p. 112.
“But I can see your point,” she goes on, helping him out, since he doesn’t seem able to help himself. “You are right in one sense: we have become too used to keeping our hands clean, our white hands. We should be more ready to dirty our hands. I couldn’t agree more. End of subject. Are you sleepy yet? I’m not. I have a suggestion. To pass the time, why don’t we tell each other stories?”
“You tell a story,” he says stiffly. “I don’t know any stories.”
“Tell me a story from America,” she says. “You can make it up, it doesn’t have to be true. Any story.”
“Given the existence of a personal God,” he says, “with a white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extensions who from the heights of divine apathia loves us deeply quaquaquaqua with some exceptions.”
He stops. She has not the faintest idea what e is talking about.
“Quaquaquaqua,” he says.
“I give up,” she says. He is silent. “My turn,” she says. “Here follows the story of the princess and the pea. Once upon a time there is a princess so delicate that even when she sleeps on ten piled-up feather mattresses, she is convinced she can feel a pea, one of those hard little dried peas, underneath the last mattress. She frets and frets all night –Who put a pea there? Why? –and as a result doesn’t get a wink of sleep. She comes down to breakfast looking haggard. To her parents the king and queen she complains: “I couldn’t sleep, and it’s all the fault of that accursed pea!” The king sends a serving-woman to remove the pea. The woman searches and searches but can find nothing.
“Let me hear no more of peas,” says the king to his daughter. “There is no pea. The pea is just in your imagination.”
“That night the princess reascends her mountain of feather mattresses. She tries to sleep but cannot, because of the pea, the pea that is either underneath the bottom-most mattress or else in her imagination, it does not matter which, the effect is the same. By daybreak she is so exhausted that she cannot even eat breakfast. “It’s all the pea’s fault,” she laments.
Exasperated, the king sends an entire troop of serving-women to hunt for the pea, and when they return, reporting that there is no pea, has them all beheaded. “Now are you satisfied?” he bellows at his daughter. “Now will you sleep?”
She pauses for breath. She has no idea what is going to happen next in this bedtime story, whether the princess will at last manage to fall asleep or not; yet, strangely, she is convinced that, when she opens her lips, the right words will come.
But there is no need for more words. He is asleep. Like a child, this prickly, opinionated, incompetent, ridiculous cousin of hers has fallen asleep with his head on her shoulder. Fast asleep, undoubtedly: she can feel him twitching. No peas under him.
And what of her? Who is going to tell her stories to send her off to the land of nod? Never has she felt more awake. Is this how she is going to have to spend the night: bored, fretting, bearing the weight of a somnolent male?
CDS Frances: you’re not referring to the coincidence of “Qua” and “pea” (as in “pee”) in this excerpt, are you? Larf. I always thought the Princess and the Pea story was about female ejaculation, but no one would believe me…
Must run out the door; late to meet CDS JR (not Joseph Ridgwell, btw)… back in a few hours…
Apparently J. M. Coetzee believed you with all his heart. Coincidence, my arse! When are some of these “great writers” going to get down off their self-appointed pedestals and mix it up with us? If DeLillo can answer that poor chap’s poor wifie’s plea on her husband’s behalf (yecch, sorry, but I loathe weak, whining men), and if he wants the sun to beat down on his increasingly aging but still alive body, let him get his Eye-talian arse over here and engage. I can make him feel the heat. Why do I have to speak through Scott Esposito or Lance Olsen or any of those pablum-burping jokers?
Ah, but CDS Frances, this is a very, very, very strange and remote little niche in the ether and the odds against… etc. I’d have to be the worst kind of megalomaniac to… etc. And then you’d have to question whether or not you value my fiction; or I, yours; for intrinsic values, or due to the projected, corrosive force of our totalitarian… etc.
I think it’s an unmistakable mating call, CDS Steven, as in “Good’ay mate.” You’ve had 40,000 visitors. One of them’s been from Adelaide, betcha.
Now if you say, “Karoo, Karoo, Karoo, Karoo” back, it could develop into a conversation, maybe even a literary one.
50,716 as of 21:49 CET, actually. Minuscule for Cat Blogs but not bad for a “…camouflaged treehouse on an unmapped island in the Bermuda triangle…”
Still. The odds…
CDS Steven,
I don’t mean to be high-maintenance but I’m having trouble with the new search widget. I tried searching for “confident, thick-dicked intellectual” as I wanted to read that story again and couldn’t remember which one contained that collection of words. Do you recall by any chance?
A story of mine or yours or CDS Sean’s…?
Yours, CDS Steven.
I’m sure I’ve never used that sort of phrase, CDS Frances; it’s not my style. The closest I would get to that is “neglected dick with tenure”…
Found it in The Bomb Collector. p. 416
“The confidently big-dicked intellectual.”
Aha! That’s a world of diff, then. “Thick-dicked” is just banal old pron…
“Relativism is merely nihilism without the courage of its convictions, my dear. Is bright light merely on a continuum with utter darkness? Pleasure interchangeable with pain? Aesthetics may seem to many to be a wholly subjective affair, but, I assure you, it is no more subjective a matter than biological or physical properties. There are laws. Rules.” He picked up his menu with a patient smile; he’d said what he’d said without bitterness or emphasis. Noa enjoyed his comment, in fact, and he knew it. She was reassured to see him become fully himself again. The lecturer. The stern lover. The confidently big-dicked intellectual.
(but pg. 416? That work’s just 120 pages or so, I think)
Secret Key to that text: it’s a murder mystery. My idea was to write a whole murder mystery in which the murder was completely tangential and alluded to with only a handful of clues; the murder would be the least-important part of the text, but it would be highlighted by the fact that the only un-resolved sentences in the narrative would point to a mystery that could only, in fact, be a murder. Only a very, very careful reading could unearth that. I got the idea one day when it struck me that of all the people I’ve known, casually or more-than-casually, the odds are that at least one was connected to an unsolved murder or even, his or herself, a killer. You’d never know, would you? I think life is full of them. I hate to do what DFW said never to do (refer to one’s work as “postmodern”), but…
Pagination from the PDF version you sent me last month of Selected Work. I controlled F and got to search for “The thickly confidently biggedly-dickedly intellectual.”
Aha!
I have two requests:
1. Can we please get rid of the Reply function and revert to standard blog format of one post after another? There’s a good reason why most blogs stick with the standard format and it’s this: with the Reply malarkey it is absolutely impossible for those of us not here every day to keep up with posts. If I want to read CDS Frances’ posts I have to click a link on the sidebar at the top, come six hundred posts down the thread, and then when I’ve finished reading navigate back up through six hundred posts to the top, click another link, plummet six hundred posts again, and so on. It’s daffy and odd and makes me a bit sea-sick.
2. Can we please, please, please change the wordpress theme, Steven? You’ve shown with your photography and films your eye for composition, colour, etc. Why must this splendid site have such, uh, unsplendid graphics? Graphics matter, man.
3. Thank you for your consideration and time.
We can all try to avoid using the “Reply” function but fuck if I’m going to the trouble of re-doing the formatting! Oh, Christ no, Chum. I like it fine as is. And I’m not prepared to fuck up what’s already there! (Remember: these aren’t posts, these are all just comments… that’s the point… and they may well vanish if I try a new theme…). And, yeah: this is how post-postmodernity looks, mon. I like it.
Why not just try the Preview function with the theme? That’ll tell you if there’s any formatting risk — but I doubt there’d be any problems just with switching theme. The best one I’ve seen is Redoable Lite (esp. combined with Palatino Linotype as the font).
I can see why you might not want to risk losing all the previous replies by dropping the Reply function. And yeah, I appreciate the fractal branchings, etc. But this site is not easy to navigate for less frequent visitors/posters.
Well, too bad for the feckers, then. I think an addiction to “Convenience” is the second-most corrosive force in modern life. I won’t contribute to it. Also, if the words and pix aren’t peppy enough to overcome the template’s horrors, may I suggest the baffled feckers click over to LOADED or FHM or HERE…?
(PS technically speaking: it’s the YouTube paste-ins which cause the thread to slow-load in time; we should cut down on those a wee bit)
So this is the Douglas Gordon creation myth. I picked it up again from CDS JR, with whom I sat in a little Italian place in a corner of the room where a young blond who obviously expects to be in a movie one day soon eavesdropped on our mostly-in-English conversation. Gordon attended one of CDS JR’s dinner parties last year. Gordon’s break-through piece, 24 Hour Psycho, is featured as some kind of ordering motif or free-association-launching-pad in DeLillo’s Point Omega.
Gordon had a little job as a receptionist at the Tramway, a gallery in Edinburgh. He had been to art school but seemed to have no future in art. Now, pay attention, because this is where Gordon elides, with one phrase, the turning-point-of-interest in this tale. As he put it: the gallery owner “took a liking” to him and decided to give him a show in the large space. That phrase… “took a liking”… probably mashes an awful lot of wet warm time and psycho-biological space into three crisp words. One day, Gordon is a nobody; an answerer of phones; a scribbler-on-post-its; a fetcher of coffee. Then he’s being offered his own show (or a part of a show) in a large (the gallery was/is a converted Tram station) gallery space. Relating the tale (which must, by then, already, have been lapidary with repetition) he leaves out the key bit: what does one do to get a gallery owner to “take a liking”? This is the part we all need to know. This is the part the shined-upon always leave out of the creation myth.
Gordon was offered a show and went into a panic, having nothing to show. He had a huge space to fill and nothing to fill it with. This is not a double-entendre. The first realization he had was that the space should be dark (diminishing its apparent size) and the visualization of the darkness led him to the next step in the series towards his eureka: video. Show a video in the darkness. Of what?
That weekend, he went home to his parents (as people with shit jobs will do). His anxiety had time to play with itself and breed terrors. Nothing to show! Nothing to show! It was a late Friday or Saturday night and he couldn’t sleep. The first telling of this tale, Douglas was watching Television, but, considering the fact that the FF button features in the tale, we reason it had to be a VCR that changed his life. He’s rifling through a mound of videocassettes, unable to sleep. Pops in a cassette of Hitchcock’s Psycho for the sheer why-notness of it. Watches for a while, gets bored, decides to FF to the Janet-Leigh-shower scene. DG becomes obsessed with the question of whether or not Janet flashes nipple at all and he slows down the tape…
It struck him like a phaser-blast to the art gland.
CDS JR and I first met in the late-1970s, if you can believe it. We met in a small, very liberalish, Midwestern town, both refugees from college. We were fucking the same girl, in fact, and living in a mansion that had been converted into a 20-room flophouse for Hippies.
CDS JR and I were lamenting, today, over his espresso (and my carrot-orange-ginger juice) that we didn’t have High Definition digital movie cameras back then! We’d have been minting underground masterpieces like expert welfare mothers pinching out babies. The characters we knew! The weight-lifting poet/clown who lived on the third floor and walked with a Byronic limp because one leg had remained girlish-small due to polio! The night-gowned, slightly-retarded giantess who lived in the basement behind the jacuzzi room! The robe-wearing Jesus-cult which lived in the basement for a few months! The Bolivian refugee! The painter named Tim! Suzanne Verdal dancing in the front yard! Dozens of showers in which dozens of 24 Hour Psychos might have acted out! And nothing to record it all with!
Less than a year after Lennon’s assassination (I’ll never forget CDS JR sitting alone, in long-haired silence, in a commons room in the mansion for a few hours with all the lights off, the evening we got the news; we’d just come back from a Max Roach concert), CDS JR left the country. I hadn’t the slightest idea where he’d gone. I was in my 20′s and only half-cared, for he was only a dude. I taught myself to paint and began starting (then firing) a succession of bands. I never once heard from CDS JR in nearly a decade. If the girl we had co-fucked knew something, she wasn’t saying.
Then a very powerful woman in the Art World “took a liking” to me and paid my rent for a couple of years… but I refused to sleep with her. “Refused” is too strong a word; I ignored her double-(and single)-entendres and the time she presented herself to me, wrapped only in a towel and dripping wet, post-shower, I stammered and joked (or something). She wanted to fly me to Europe; she wanted to introduce me to her buddy Andy Warhol; in the end she gave me a copy of Giovanni’s Room and forced a tongue-kiss on me on a bike path around a lake one Saturday morning before riding off forever. No more money; I, too, soon left the country. Did London for a while. Hit Berlin in November, 1990.
Less than a month after my arrival in Berlin (it was shortly before New Year’s Eve), I was walking the streets, near a flat I was subletting in the Turkish quarter, looking for a chicken to cook. I remember it was a chicken I sought because, speaking no German, I pantomimed “chicken” to various Turkish shopkeepers. One shopkeeper after another laughed at me but failed to comprehend (the body language for “chicken” is not a universal). Dejected, I was wandering down a hungry side-street when I looked up and saw CDS JR riding by on a bicycle. I recognized his back instantly.
Is it rude to say I like CDS JR’s glasses more than CDS Barry’s?
Well, what if it is…? larf
UPDATE: check out the snap of a bandanna-wearing CDS JR from 1979 (above)
VINTAGE EMAILS
From:
“A_____ ______”
To:
“the_augustine_authority@yahoo.com”
Tuesday, May 22, 2007 11:36 PM
There is a poem on your website titled, “Lake Zurich.”
I wonder, just how you got the idea for this poem? It seems so familiar, as if I experienced. Like de ja vu perhaps? Maybe that’s just how it was here in Lake Zurich; Everyone was the same, and we all pretended to be different. The question is, why would you keep your site such a secret? What are you hiding from? That’s strange, are you afraid of something or someone?
Do you reside in Lake Zurich. Moreover, is this your pen name? I’m curious, I would like to put a face to your work – See here, I’ve got a year book. It’s important that you do, course you don’t have to. I never knew there was such talent in my second hometown.
Thank you in advance – It’s curious how people stumble upon things wouldn’t you say?
Sometimes even the writer is surprised that his details are merely discovered by the least possible person in the most obvious place. Sometimes even the most cunning people are brought down before their arrogance. Don’t write as if you are above society, this will only lead you into the fact that you are stating the obvious in fruitful words. I would know, I do the same thing. Now I’ll be fair, and I’ll accept the possibility that you certainly are just a poet and coincidently your poem coincided with my life in some vague, yet fashionable way. Trouble is I don’t believe in coincidences.
I like your poetry though. Your word play is nice and I can tell you’ve been at work for some time. I admire this and I assure you that your ideas are shared. I like the fact you write with ambiguity as if you were hiding something that’s completely obvious. Maybe one day you’ll get the credit you deserve – If you know what I mean.
Warm Regards,
A fellow friend.
Did you ask this person’s permission to publish this online?
If not, I have to say your doing so (name deleted or not) makes me a little queasy.
Huh? Are you joking? Here’s my fair notice to anyone who sends threatening emails: if they’re interesting, I’ll publish them. If they’re not too threatening, I’ll very kindly obscure your name before publishing.
VINTAGE EMAILS
From:
“Steven Augustine”
To:
“D___ ____”
Monday, June 4, 2007 4:51 PM
D!
Metaphysics are fine as long as they’re not A) bearded, B) reeking of patchouli or garlic or C) expecting a cash donation. I’m entirely prepared to get groovy.
My first thoughts after reading your letter (which is as good as your letters always are and makes me feel there’s something wrong about emailing such fine material, when quill pens and parchment seem more suitable): of course! Writing is a pathology. A pathological compulsion. A very clever compulsion that generates enough benefits for the afflicted (the occasional bliss of the break-through; the grudging admiration of friends; money sometimes) that even the terribly-afflicted don’t seek a cure! Your writerly affliction is up against Existential questions about The Very Point of Writing Itself and of course there are stress fractures.
On top of which, there you are, one of the smartest people I’ve ever known (that’s the thing about the secret fraternity of the smarties, isn’t it? Instant mutual recognition. Like how I imagine gay men in 19th century London could just, you know, tell)… there you are… egghead deluxe and having to live with the fact that intellectuals are not exactly considered the belles of the ball in a hyper-capitalist framework.
Far be it from me to be an armchair witchdoctor, but of course you’re fighting something tricky there.
I moved back to The States in ’95 after living nonstop in Europe for five years. Spent some time in Minneapolis (hello to Allan at Coffee House Press! laugh), then headed to San Diego. The weather was heaven there and on many-a-day I’d nap on the beach under an enormous umbrella, book on the towel beside me, lulled by the temperate breezes and the sexy dumb mumble of the Pacific. It would have been paradise, except it was Hell and I started manifesting the effects of living in a city that clashed with overwhelming force against my somewhat effete sensibilities.
Everything was money and sex out there… money and sex and the status index. I was a visitor in many homes during my four years in San Diego and only two of these homes had a book in them. TV was the medium of discussion.
The effects I manifested: first, I broke my arm… while walking. It was a chilly day in April, I was walking along with my hands in my pockets… I stumbled over a root or something and broke my elbow. Then I began suffering from epic bouts of insomnia and a bizarre fear of low heights so profound that I couldn’t even think of using a pedestrian foot bridge or a three-level escalator in a mall! This was during the first three years.
Year four, I developed a mysterious, inexplicable and crippling back pain so virulent that four 800 milligram ibuprofens a day (200-400 milligram tablets are standard) did nothing for me and my daily walks (which were normally as long as four or five hours per) became agony-fraught hobbles to the corner and back and then even that was impossible and I was bed-ridden. The muscles in my back were in a constant state of feedback-spasm… they were cramping from the pain and the cramping was pain-generating… and the sciatic nerve got involved and knifing agonies traveled from my hip into my right leg. All this with no “cause”.
I realized: it’s San Diego! It’s killing me! I bought a ticket to Sweden. The pain halved in the first week in Sweden, halved again the next week and so on. I’ve been just fine for years, now. I got my sense of mission back, you see. Literature is considered a valid pursuit in the country in which I now live (without the question of “sales” coming into it). Which is not to say that the Germans are not a problematic people. But they invest less overt and covert energy into making writers/artists/intellectuals feel like blood-sucking losers.
A writer’s brain is a tricky thing! Mostly because it’s such a powerful machine… a Ferrari to the average Pinto. I’m not talking about IQ a là sideshows of math savants and whatnot when I talk about the power of the writerly organ. I mean in the fathom and breadth of its own keen sense of the feel of its outermost reaches. How many minds routinely send feelers to the peripheries of their own light-blown limits and bring whole sentences back? Even the greatest freakish-rare math prodigies of history merely brought numbers when they came back.
It’s a powerful thing between your ears and when it’s suffering you will hear about it.
Read harder, write deeper…
S.
[ed.'s note: as it turns out, D. had cancer]
See above for Coherence Theory of Truth masquerading as Correspondence Theory of Truth.
Elucidate!
The e-mail letter to you is not from the person your e-mail letter is addressed to. There’s an appearance of correspondence but you made a set of these two e-mails. They cohere because you stuck them together to create meaning, your sense of the truth about the art of writing.
In my dream I made a set of two novellas, one named “Two Cookbooks” and one unnamed (sounds like “Double or Nothing”). But they wouldn’t cohere, probably because something can’t cohere to nothing…?
Aha! Got it. The first email up (Comment #226) was the first of several I got from this fellow who lives (or lived in) Lake Zurich, Illinois. It took some doing to convince him that I didn’t know him or any of his friends; that I’d never lived in (or visited, or heard of, before perusing a map) Lake Zurich; that I’d made it all up. He actually physically threatened me and continued to be a menace before I was able to lay out a convincing description of the creative process. I took it as a tribute to my powers but I was also intrigued as to what the fuck this guy had been up to that my story felt like a betrayal of his private life.
The second email was a cheer-up letter to a Print-Published (on a major imprint) writer… the irony comes in the editorial insert at the end of the letter.
And how are you feeling, then, CDS Frances? Sand-encrusted toes…?
It was beautiful out there, quiet, snow on the sand in some places. I love seeing that. But while walking the miles of boardwalk I found myself still thinking about the problem (for me, anyway) of The Humbling and that beam of light on the cover that somehow penetrates the floorboards. Maybe there’s no textual key to unlocking The Humbling; maybe it itself is a key to another text? I’m thinking maybe it’s an elucidation of DeLillo’s fabulous riff about plot in Libra. Maybe it’s just (for now) a private conversation, master to master that we aren’t privy to. Anyway, I can’t seem to drop it.
Or maybe he’s muttering to himself as we writers do. You’ve mentioned Sabbath’s Theater a few times so I guess I’ll read that next. The theater for the Sabbath is the bimah, the elevated place where the Torah portion is chanted aloud. Jim Culleny had a poem earlier this week about a player piano with two spindles behind a sliding door http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/02/monday-poem-3.html that reminded me of the Torah in its ark. And when you watch the accompanying vid of Borge at the White House, there are jokes about sacrifice and keys. Torah study is all about subtext as is the theater. I know I can be too literal sometimes, like maybe if I go out to Eureka, California I’ll find my epiphany waiting for me there on a bulletin board outside the local health food store.
I love your idea in Lake Zurich about the Impression’s song Gypsy Woman being a Persian miniature. Those miniatures are meant to be collected in albums. They can seem like stand-alone texts but are more complete when read as a whole with the others in the album. What they do is illuminate how rich every single page can be. Like the pages of that amazingly rich story.
I hope you don’t mind. But I hand-delivered a copy of The Bomb Collector to Levi Bryant over at Larval Subjects. He’s got a monster compression ahead of him (283,000 words that he wants to reduce to 80,000-100,000) on The Democracy of Objects. I couldn’t think of a more fascinating and refreshing model of compression for him than that. If anyone can relish Mayan acrostics, it’s him.
Thanks so much for asking. I may go back again today.
CDS Frances: how about snapping some photos of the beach for us… or various places around Manhattan or wherever. We can put up a wee album of half-a-dozen or so? If you’re up to it, and want to send in a bit of commentary with each photo, it could be quite lovely for us
(PS: I’d read… or re-read… Operation Shylock or The Counterlife, if you’re a little done with Dirtyoldmannisms for the nonce)
Comrades,
I had a body blow yesterday (can’t possibly write about it yet). A terrible loss. So, I am headed out to walk the beach and ponder the imponderables. CDS Neil recommended what I hope will be a diverting book, so I’ll bring that along. I hope to come back with sand in my shoes and peace in my heart.
Any way we can help, please signal, CDS Frances!
Touching Base
in the mailbox yesterday:
I am promoting an amazing new music title by novelist, poet and professor Alexs Pate that makes the case that rap is the poetry born from the African American literary tradition and should be treated as such and critically analyzed as poetry is. He also thoroughly explains how listeners can “read” rap and generate a whole new discourse around this genre. “IN THE HEART OF THE BEAT: The Poetry of Rap” (The Scarecrow Press, March 2010) is an amazing read and one that could prove to be a truly controversial and edifying topic for your readers.
Please take a look at the release below and let me know if you are interested in taking a look at a review copy of “IN THE HEART OF THE BEAT” and/or in touching base with Alexs Pate to discuss the book. All best,
Adam Rifenberick
my mysterious, almost gnomic, response:
What is rap but weaponized pop? And what is pop but normative doggerel?
Pate is just a minor luminary in the Nigger Industry (like Flavor Flav, who fights the power by, eg, doing the Shameful Coon Show with Brigitte Nielsen). Pate’s job is to tell whites what they think they already know about Niggers. So is yours. Anti-status-quo Niggers are repressed; pro-status-quo Niggers are given a platform (and ecstatic blurbs from reassured whites). A perfect storm of these terrible truths is nicely embodied in the sneakily-white-supremacist Oscar-contender “Precious”.
“Rap as Literature”? If Niggers are congenitally retarded, sure. But they aren’t, you see. Please inform Mr. Pate of this.
Thanks!
Fuck off,
S
We’ve disagreed about the sneakily-white-supremacist nature or otherwise of The Wire, comrade, but have you seen the American-school-football-as-Searchlight-flick series Friday Night Lights? Pretty fucken disgusting, man.
No Television on the premises to check on that, but I did just have a peek on EweTube and was intrigued to notice that the male leads appear to be cuter than the females… is this a new trend in Murrkkan Television and if so, what does it mean? Larf (Acting and plot-lines seem to be boilerplate moronic)
UPDATE: Btw, mon, consider this: as kids watching all those WW2 flicks, there was never any contest: the only creatures cooler than the Nazis, in our pantheon… (The Nazis with their icy stares, impeccable dress sense, cool method of holding a cigarette and total apparent lack of inhibition in unleashing technological power) … were the Vampires. Because the Text of a movie is nothing compared to its Imagery… that’s how the slickest propaganda works. Likewise, film and video which purports to be “sympathetic” to the plight of blacks but which meanwhile shows blacks as violent, dirty, ignorant and in perpetual need of fairly dramatic rescue… ie, decidedly unheroic (and perhaps, even repulsive)… does the opposite for the image of the Black in the North American (and planetary) mind than what was done for the Nazis. I can show you 1,000 examples of post-Nazi, super-cool imagery (from Roy Batty to the Thin White Duke) which super-confirms the apparently natural position of the Aryan Archetype at the top of the humanoid pyramid. Show me ONE Afrocentric male image that combines intellectual mastery with heroic force of will and strength plus admirable aristocratic elegance. Because that’s what the Nazi media packet that we’ve all come to love and admire is all about (it has latterly morphed/branched into Vampire worship). Parsing the Females (blonde angel/nymph versus black servant/devil) is another conversation.
The essential argument: it’s not what a film/video says, it’s what it shows that counts. And (eg) The Wire showed us that black life is cheaper than insects. Tragic, unjust… sure… all of that. But these emotional appeals to empathy only confirm white superiority! We know, in the end, on The Wire, that the only possible Agent of Rescue (or Cure) is the White Civilization that frames the show, its premise, and the real actors/crew/writers/producers/network working on it as well as the lives of the viewers.
HAIL THE FROZEN PUSSIES OF STEEL OF ICELAND!
Here’s hoping they don’t cave in to Crypto-Friedmanite pressure like the Irish
REYKJAVIK, Iceland – Economically struggling Icelanders resentful of international pressure were expected to vote down a $5.3 billion plan Saturday to pay off Britain and Holland for the debt spawned by the collapse of an internet bank.
A “no” vote would create another obstacle on Iceland’s difficult road out of a deep recession, jeopardizing its credit rating and make it harder to access much-needed bailout money from the International Monetary Fund. It could also harm Iceland’s chances of joining the European Union.
[...]
Saturday’s referendum is expected to reject the payment of $3.5 billion to Britain and $1.8 billion to the Netherlands as compensation for funds that those governments paid to around 340,000 of their citizens with Icesave accounts. Many Icelanders object to the terms of the deal, not the idea of payment itself.
Britain and the Netherlands have been pushing hard for repayment and there have been fears that they will take a hard-line stance on Iceland’s application to join the EU and refuse to approve the start of accession talks until an Icesave deal is signed into law.
But because of Iceland’s tiny population, the deal would require each person to pay around $135 a month for eight years — the equivalent of a quarter of an average four-member family’s salary.
Many ordinary Icelanders who resent forking out the money to compensate for losses incurred by potentially wealthier foreign investors who chased the high interest rates offered by Icesave.
There’s also residual anger that Britain invoked anti-terrorist legislation to freeze the assets of Icelandic banks at the height of the crisis, prompting the worst diplomatic spat between the two countries since Cod Wars of the 1970s over fishing rights in the North Atlantic.
President Olafur R. Grimsson tapped into the public anger and used a rarely invoked power to refuse to sign the so-called Icesave bill after it was passed by parliament in December.
Since then, opinion polls have indicated that a strong majority intend to reject the plan. The Social Democrat-Left Green coalition government and the center-right opposition say the country could get better terms in negotiations with Britain and the Netherlands.
Britain and the Netherlands offered better terms last week — including a significant cut on the 5.5 percent interest rate in the original deal hammered out at the end of last year.
The British say their “best and final offer has been turned down.”
But Iceland continues to hold out for more, aware that any new deal must win substantial political and public support.
“I voted no,” said Rognvaldur Hoskuldsson, a 36-year-old machine technologist, after casting his vote Saturday morning. “We have to send a message that these countries are not going to profit from this situation.”
Although the International Monetary Fund has never explicitly linked delivery of a $4.6 billion loan to the reaching of an Icesave deal, it is committed to Iceland repaying its international debt — the months taken to reach the original Icesave deal were responsible for holding up the first tranche of IMF funds last year.
“I am going to say no on Saturday because it’s not fair and justifiable that the Icelandic nation should pay for other people’s mistakes,” said Benedikt Mewes, 33, a cashier at the National Post Office in Reykjavik.
“A ‘no’ vote would create another obstacle on Iceland’s difficult road out of a deep recession, jeopardizing its credit rating and make it harder to access much-needed bailout money from the International Monetary Fund.”-the mainstream press wags its puppety finger
Comrade DJ Sensei Nicholas Freilich (the chief composer around here) sends us this steely-cold beaut:
Hail to the chief!
Coola boola.
Before I was a Very “Important” if Initially Overlooked American Author, for about a year I wrote for a micro-local monthly pub, mostly service articles like this one. http://www.grandstreetnews.com/scripts/grand/paper/Article.asp?ArticleID=385 This is how I had the good fortune to meet Richie and his father Joseph, the proprietors of Amity Studio on Grand Street.
They offered me this window to display my book. And voila…!
(The photo-retouching service you wrote for features tamed whiffs of Joe Stalin, eh…?).
Before
After
(what did the poor apparatchik do to earn being disappeared…?)
And, re: CDS JWinterson:
“I do not want to argue here about great artists, I want to concentrate on true artists, major or minor, who are connected to the past and who themselves make a connection to the future.”
-fair enough
(The photo-retouching service you wrote for features tamed whiffs of Joe Stalin, eh…?)
Not a scruple in sight.
In the Where Are They Now Department
You know who I miss seeing around? Schopenhauer’s Bloody Knuckles. Where has he gone off to, do you suppose?
Dunno, but I clicked over to 3QD for the first time (literally) since I swore the place off , in disgust, over the mawkish Michael Jackson eulogies… and I was astonished to find the same six or seven comment-avatars, as ever, logged on the right margin! It’s like CHEERS over there! larf
TET is more like ALL IN THE FAMILY (I’m Archie, CDS Frances is Edith….)
(No, actually, this is MAUDE and CDS Frances is Bea Arthur. Are you up on your Norman Learology, Comrades Lurking…?)
Bea Arthur–the freedom of tunic dressing.
Tunics and the windblown quasi-Fro
I just read her Wiki. This was rather a wonderful compliment. She was the real deal. I like this especially:
“…No one could deliver a line or hold a take like Bea…”
It took only ten minutes of Google Time to come up with an image of a painting titled “Bea Arthur Fighting A Velociraptor”
(there’s also a pretty nice oil portrait by John Currin, but there’s the risk it’d be taken the wrong way)
Veer from raptors to rapture…
A link to a story (buried deep in my blog and temporarily posted cause it’s in circulation to a zine)
Grooven, CDS Jacob! We dig on it! If you have some time, discuss with us your specific inspiration for this text and your general working methods…
(A couple of wee blips on the Typo Radar:
“.. with her vision, that her dis-ease was nothing less that a sign and confirmation of that very calling she had so long anticipated.”
and
“He would be expecting her to see her already up and about, coffee made, breakfast on the stove.” )
I caught a couple more:
Absolute instead of Absolut
and my personal fave:
“…some kind of fairly tale…”
Freudian typos…
THE FICTIVE IN A SIMULOCRACY
part Four: the Crypto in the Simulo:
TET is a machine for digesting narratives, Comrades Lurking and Explicit. The more (and more diverse) narratives we digest, the richer the narratives we shall excrete.
One of the Great Anal Masters (G.A.M.s) of the intricate narrative straddled the fields of text and image and was not a novelist; he was Stanley Kubrick. More than the works of most Auteurs, Kubrick’s films have to be read. He never presented a throw-away; no prop or camera angle was extraneous (even continuity “errors”, as we will soon read, were deliberately informational). Comrade DJ Sensei Stanley was famous for digesting two intellectually-imposing novelists (Nabokov and Burgess) and excreting value-added narratives which overpowered the original narrative aims of these novelists (novelists are usually more naive than film directors; the structural reasons for this are obvious) but which also, almost miraculously, worked on the superficial level of crowd-pleasing entertainment. I like the image of Kubrick-the-chess-player squaring off against Nabokov-the-chess-player; the anal Burgess against the anal-er Kubrick. (One day we’ll investigate the concept of movie camera as penis/eye/womb for incubating pretty girl-homunculi… ).
Kubrick’s never-wavering theme was conspiracy.
I’m pretty good at reading A Clockwork Orange and very good at reading Lolita and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Not so good at The Shining and so-so at reading Full Metal Jacket and Paths of Glory. I’m familiar with every feature-length film in Kubrick’s canon with the exception of Barry Lyndon (I’ll get to it one day). His last, Eyes Wide Shut, gave me the most trouble. The problem being that I went into the experience with the notion that Kubrick had died before the final cut; long and intricate texts only function if we cede the author her/his Authority. Otherwise, the baffling reads as mistakes and sloppiness. An Author without Authority is impotent.
A fellow named Rob Ager has done us all the favor of really reading Eyes Wide Shut. Linking logical leaps, here and there, suffer from a lack of supporting evidence (these are usually flagged, in all such texts, with defensive phrases like, “It’s not unreasonable to assume…”) but this is a nit-picky caveat regarding a text wherein, if even just a few of the key assertions are bulls eyes, the result is an Eye-Opener. Half-way through reading Ager’s reading, I sent my prayer for forgiveness directly to Stanley’s sneering shade…
EWS operates on a completely unconventional form of narrative, which upon first viewing virtually always confuses. Like 2001: A Space Odyssey, it is designed to psychologically include the viewer within the film content whilst also including itself in the viewers own reality. In 2001 the rectangular black Monolith doubled up as an unconscious representation of the actual cinema screen (rotated 90degrees), thus sucking the audience into the film narrative so that we were symbolically pulled along the same journey as the apes and astronauts. As we shall discover here, EWS uses a similar form of hypnotic trickery.
Dream logic
The foremost unconventional story device used in EWS is dream logic – the simplest clue being that the film is loosely based upon a book called Traumnovelle, which translates as Dream Story. And this is exactly what we get while watching EWS – a story that combines the psychological traits of both dreams and reality … of being simultaneously asleep and awake … Eyes Wide Shut.
In dream logic characters or locations can take on more than one physical appearance, seemingly insignificant dialogue can carry hidden messages, thoughts and emotions can repeat themselves in transformational loops and the smallest sensory details can contain the most powerful meanings. All of these phenomena are at work in EWS.
Fractal logic
For added hypnotic effect the story uses a sort of fractal logic – or dreams that are repeated within dreams.
The clearest example of this is when Bill Harford returns home from the Somerton Mansion orgy. His wife awakens and describes a nightmare in which she also took part in an orgy. So this ritualistic sex fest was operating on at least two logical levels – Bill’s “reality” and Alice’s dream.
Another example of fractal logic is the jealousy crisis that Bill experiences after his wife confesses prior sexual fantasies about a naval officer. She did not act upon these fantasies, yet Bill’s intense reaction causes him to go on the hunt for sexual encounters with other women. Again Alice’s fantasies are merged with Bill’s “reality”.
More fractal logic can be found musically. The opening piece of music comes across as part of the score, but when Bill switches off the stereo in his bedroom we find that this music was actually part of the film content. This happens again in Dominos bedroom (he switches off the musical “score” before answering his mobile) and again when Bill witnesses the Somerton ritual – the music is actually his friend Nick playing.
The sets of the film are also fractal and dream like, with their intense colours and “simulated natural lighting”. Kubrick apparently created a new film processing technique to enrich the colours of the footage. Combined with the onslaught of coloured Xmas light props, this colour enrichment gives EWS an almost psychedelic visual style. And this “rainbow” coloured reality is mirrored in the assorted paintings that adorn the films sets. Incidentally these were painted by Kubrick’s wife Christiane.
In many instances the actual content of these artwork props are mimicking aspects of Bill’s and Alice’s reality. In Ziegler’s bathroom where Mandy lays OD’ing on a blood red sofa we see a large painting up on the wall, which is depicting an identically posed woman sprawled on a bed with blood red sheets. A couple of scenes later we see Alice laying almost naked on the blood red sheets of her bed, smoking a joint with her husband – naked woman, drugs, blood red sheets, with a bathroom in the back of the shot. The drug induced woman motif now exists in at least three contexts.
This kind of fractal logic in EWS also extends into the audiences “reality”. Cruise and Kidman play a married couple, which at the time of production was mirrored by their marriage in the real world. And this was blatantly depicted in the films marketing campaign. The main poster showed the infamous couple reflected in a silver-framed mirror – the same mirror in which they are seen engaging in foreplay after leaving the Ziegler party. This was art and reality in deliberate reflection of one another.
Mirrors
The overall experience of watching EWS is designed to act as a metaphorical mirror for audiences to sit and “reflect” upon their own reality. Consider this. Tom Cruise’s character spends much of the film seeking out sexual gratification … only to find repeated disappointment … during which he makes a terrifying discovery about the social hierarchy that he lives in. This is the exact same journey that audiences had in viewing the film. They went into cinemas expecting to feast their eyes on raunchy sex scenes … only to find repeated disappointment … during which they made a terrifying discovery about the social hierarchy they live in. So the widely believed idea that EWS was badly marketed is false. The marketing drew the attention of millions of people on the promise of sexual fantasy, but what we got was Kubrick ingeniously using the cinema screen as a symbolic mirror to show us a reflection of how perverted and decadent we have become as an entire society.
As already mentioned, the various paintings that appear throughout the movie are “reflecting” Bill and Alice’s reality. In a symbolic sense these are not paintings at all – they are painted mirrors. One of the books visible on Dominos shelf is even called Shadows On The Mirror.
Now look at the paintings on the sets of the Somerton orgy scene and in the ballroom of Zieglers party. Kubrick seems to have purposefully divided the painting props of EWS into rainbow coloured mirror metaphors on some sets and European nobility portraits in others. So what is the message here?
Well we already know that upper class European nobility types such as Sandor Szavost are in attendance at Zieglars party, but at the Somerton mansion we are presented with a crowd of anonymous masked people to puzzle over. Now considering Stanley Kubrick’s career-long distrust of wealthy and political establishments, which he took painstaking efforts to encrypt in his films, the artwork doubling up as mirrors concept could provide a direct answer as to the identities of the orgy participants. Notice how there are very few actual mirror props at Somerton. The mirrors are there, but their content is presented in painting form. The portraits are symbolic mirror images of those in attendance, unmasked and undisguised. Even as Victor Ziegler circles his pool table refusing to reveal the names of his orgy associates, we can see their portraits up on his walls. Talk about spelling it out. Ever the controversial risk taker, Kubrick was having a direct stab at nobility and right or wrong, he viewed them as decadent.
Many interpretations of EWS have taken the orgy scene as literal, as if Kubrick was announcing that these kinds of orgies actually happen in the very way that we see them at Somerton. This is possible and if that is your area of interest then you will find plenty of other reviews exploring those ideas. But my interpretation is that this ritualized orgy is a metaphor for moral decadence in high society.
The two parties
The two upper class parties of this film are actually mirrored reflections of each other. At the Zieglar party we are hypnotized by visual glamour and surface sophistication. And at Somerton these illusions are stripped away leaving the underlying greed and decadence on display.
The characters who are openly verified as having been present at Somerton are Bill Harford, Victor Ziegler, Nick Nightingale and the prostitute Mandy, all of whom were also in attendance at Zieglers party. So an important question is, was anybody else from the Ziegler party also at the orgy? Let’s take a closer look.
The two women who tried to seduce Bill at the Ziegler party were models and we learn from the newspaper article about Mandy’s death that she also was a model. So it is not unreasonable to assume that all of these models were present at both parties. The two models’ dialogue with Bill about taking him to “where the rainbow ends” is a metaphoric link to both Milich’s store “rainbow costumes” and to the Somerton mansion. The rainbow literally ends at Somerton in that this is the first indoor set of the movie that is not decorated with coloured Xmas lights. It is a revisiting of the Ziegler party, but stripped of the illusions and pretence.
As for the Dracula-esque Sandor Szavost, who tried to seduce Alice at the Ziegler party, we can imagine he would have a whale of a time at the orgy and he certainly presented as wealthy and influential enough. His dialogue offers some very nice clues. He asks Alice if she has seen Victor’s collection of renaissance bronzes and as it turns out the Somerton mansion is virtually a museum of them (the bronze statues with lamps on top). He also tells Alice “one of the charms of marriage is that it makes deception a necessity for both parties.” Note the double speak there “…deception a necessity for … both parties” (the two parties being Ziegler’s and Somerton). We can safely guess he was at the orgy.
Alice, while not being at the orgy in conventional terms, is definitely there metaphorically. She has a dream of being at an orgy that is very similar to Bill’s experience at Somerton. Also the password “Fidelio” is a Beethoven opera about a woman who rescues her husband from death in a political prison. Like in the story of Fidelio, Harford is saved at Somerton by the self sacrifice of a mysterious woman. So if we take into account the connection between Alice and Mandy depicted in the painting on Zieglers bathroom wall, then the dream logic reveals itself. The woman who saves Bill is a combination of Mandy and his own wife Alice. In fact neither Nicole Kidman nor the actress who played Mandy are credited as playing the woman who helps Bill escape. Kubrick used a completely different actress all together. She is a psychological synthesis of Alice and Mandy.
Also included in this character synthesis is the prostitute Domino who picked Bill up on a street corner. Her name itself is a giveaway. The word Domino originally referred to the black hooded cloaks worn by 17th century priests and it later became a name for certain types of Venetian masks. Domino cloaks were also worn by women as mourning veils and the word stems from the latin word Dominus, which means “lord” or “master”. This all links up with what we witness at Somerton. And what do we see hanging on the wall in Dominos bedroom? Masks of course.
For yet another clue as to Dominos symbolic presence at the orgy look at the beak-like mask of the man who takes away the female after she redeems Bill. These masks were worn by plague doctors centuries ago and the beaks were stuffed with herbs to purify the air breathed by the wearer. So why the disease metaphor? Because Domino, as we soon find out, is HIV positive. So we have three female characters, Domino, Mandy and Alice, symbolically rolled into one.
For further evidence of Alice’s symbolic presence at the orgy compare the following two shots. As Bill and Alice enter the Ziegler party they walk hand in hand along a hallway which has mirrors and a section of black and white tiled floor. Another couple are following behind them. The camera pans left with Bill and Alice until we see a stairway in the backdrop. We can see couples wandering upstairs. The Zieglers and Harfords greet each other and exchange kisses then Victor comments on how beautiful Alice looks.
Now we have the following almost mirror image shot at Somerton, minus the pretence. Bill and a naked woman hold hands as they walk along a hallway with mirrors and a section of black and white tiled floor, again with a couple following behind them. The camera backs up with Bill and his partner as they veer to our left. Then the angle changes to where it would be if it had panned left in the first place. Just like in the Ziegler shot we see a stairway in the background. A mysterious man steps in and takes the naked woman away from Bill and up the stairs.
We already know what is happening upstairs from what we saw in Zieglers party – sex, drugs, prostitution and probably wife swapping. And remember the question Alice asks Bill as they danced in the ballroom, “Why do you think Victor invites us to these things every year?” Her question is answered as soon as she and Bill wander away from each other. They are both sexually propositioned. So on a symbolic level Alice is present at the orgy and the masked men’s motives of sexually exploiting her are plain to see.
At Zieglers party women are hypnotized by the charm and social status of men like Sandor. At Somerton their status as mere sex objects is made clear by their nakedness and ritualized subservience.
At Zieglers people greet each other with false smiles, false kisses and false personas. At Somerton their false personas take on the physical form of masks, which of course cancels out smiles and reveals their kisses as ritualized gestures devoid of intimacy. The masks themselves are the kind used in Venetian masquerade balls, which have historically been a high society pastime.
Now if we take another look at the Rainbow Costume shop we find some interesting features. The mannequins are framed on the back wall by a shower of white Xmas lights just like the ones seen glittering in the backdrops of Zieglers party. The floor is carpeted by a blood red felt material just like the red carpet entrance at Somerton. As Bill enters and looks around Milich points to the figures and says “looks like life huh?” This set is acting as a transitional piece that visually combines elements from both party scenes.
We even find a drug-induced mini-orgy going on at Milich’s. His daughter whispers in Bill’s ear and, if the subtitles are accurate, says “You should wear a cloak lined with Ermine”. Ermine is an expensive type of fur traditionally worn by … take a guess … European nobility. And of course nobility love their red carpets.
The process of awakening
Virtually everything that I have so far described about EWS has an overall theme of awakening, of stripping away veils of illusion to reveal underlying truths, no matter how ugly those truths may be. To this effect EWS repeats certain ideas in transformational loops. So let’s take a sequential look at the overall story with this in mind.
On first glance of the films opening shot we see an attractive woman getting naked, but attach very little meaning to it. Look at the shot again, this time bearing in mind the concepts of dream logic and fractal logic. We see mirrors, which are a key concept throughout the entire film. We see red curtains, a lamp and pillars – features that repeat not only throughout the entire Harford residence, but also at the Somerton mansion. We also see a set of tennis rackets. Now here’s something more interesting. Alice is not wearing any underwear and after she drops her black gown to the floor she is left wearing nothing but black high heels. Where else do we see naked women in black high heels dropping their black gowns to the floor? At the Somerton ritual of course. This shot alone reveals Alice as being symbolically linked to the ritual.
We cut to the films title caption EYES WIDE SHUT and then after a brief night shot of a city street we see Bill stood in the same bedroom location. The angle is slightly different and this time we can see book shelves, another feature that repeats throughout both the Harford residence and Somerton mansion. The shoes are still under the window, but this time the lamp is gone and a red carpet has suddenly appeared in the middle of the floor. In the corner is an upright black object, perhaps a golf bag, in place of the tennis rackets. There are more of these blatant continuity errors scattered about the film, which are not typical of the perfectionist Kubrick. They could be deliberate clues that we are watching a dream story.
Bill is unable to find his wallet in his introductory shot and when Alice asks him how she looks he replies “beautiful”. She tells him he’s not even looking. Once in the hall he asks her what the babysitters name is, even though Alice just said her name “Roz” in the bathroom. We have already established that Bill neither sees nor listens as he stumbles through life.
We next get a look around the Harford apartment as they say goodnight to their daughter on their way out. We see more lamps, pillars and red carpets, but another couple of features that are familiar to Somerton are globe shaped light fittings, tall green plants and red couches. The reasons for these visual similarities with Somerton will become apparent later.
Next we have the Ziegler party sequence, which we’ve already explored in some detail. One feature I neglected to mention was the hypnotic star shaped decorations on the walls. These are unusual and have been interpreted by reviewers as everything from secret society symbols to representations of the heavens, though they equally could just be giant snow flakes. Knowing Kubrick they are probably intended to carry several meanings.
After Bill points out his old medical school buddy playing Piano he seems to take pride in telling Alice “He’s not a doctor. He dropped out.” Bill wants to say “hello” to Nick, but Alice is disinterested. She heads off to the bathroom, necking another drink along the way then waits for Bill at the bar.
Now we have Both Bill and Alice being sexually approached by strangers. We don’t actually find out if Bill was going to take up the models offer because he is called away to deal with the overdosed prostitute predicament in Ziegler’s bathroom. Ziegler, as we have seen, is married and Sandor attempts to persuade Alice to disregard her marriage. So this establishes infidelity as the norm at this glamour coated event.
After Bill attends to Mandy and she begins to recover from her overdose, we get a glimpse of Ziegler’s true nature. He can’t wait to get Mandy out of his home and is more concerned about protecting his reputation.
Meanwhile in the ballroom, despite being drunk, Alice resists the charm of Sandor and knocks him back. We then cut to an important shot. Bill approaches Alice in their bedroom. They are both naked and reflected in a mirror – the same mirror seen on the marketing poster. Alice looks uncomfortably at what she sees in the mirror and the shot fades to black. Something is bothering her.
Now we are presented with a series of shots that depict the daily routine of the Harford family. Bill orders his assistant to bring him coffee as soon as he walks in his office – later we see a painting behind his desk depicting several cups of coffee. Once again this is art reflecting his reality. Another shot shows Bill doing an examination on a naked breasted patient, which is also later depicted in a painting on Bill’s office wall. We next see Alice in her blue gown grooming their daughter Helena who is dressed in red. This blue and red colour combination is repeated many times as the film progresses, the most prominent being the red cloaked conductor of the Somerton rituals who sits upon his throne flanked by two blue cloaked figures. In this scene we also have a terrified Bill Harford stood on a red carpet, bathed in blue light. I don’t have an explanation for the significance of this repeated blue red colour scheme, but it is there. (Update: I believe the recurring colour combinations in EWS are basically used to make certain locations and scenes parallel each other. EG. The blue lighting that shines down upon Bill as he is threatened is repeated when Ziegler places his hands on Bill’s shoulders in the pool room .)
Going back to the daily routine montage, Alice and Helena groom themselves some more in the bathroom and proceed to wrap Xmas presents, but once Bill is home and sat in the living room he refuses to help Alice wrap the remaining ones.
Now we come to another important shot. Alice looks in the bathroom mirror. She is tired and again is looking at herself as if something is bothering her. Out of the cabinet she takes the “band-aid” box, which is where their cannabis is stashed. She closes the cabinet and considers herself again. What is she thinking? Well considering the argument she is about to have with her husband, my guess is that she is questioning her role in the marriage. Notice that the apartment is immaculate throughout the movie, yet there is no maid. Given Bill’s self preoccupation perhaps it is appropriate that we don’t actually get to see Alice doing any of the cleaning.
Now comes the event that sets the story in perpetual motion. Stoned out of her mind, Alice unleashes a tirade of awkward questions. Alice is dropping the veil of secrecy in their relationship and she demands that Bill does the same. Bill instead tries to maintain the illusions of marital bliss by responding with a tirade of lies, many of which he actually seems convinced of. When asked where he disappeared to in the party he tells her that Ziegler wasn’t feeling too well and that he went to attend to him. This is his first lie. She asks if he believes a man would only talk to her to try and have sex with her. He replies “I don’t think it’s quite that black and white …” his second lie. He has actually been trying to seduce her himself for the last few minutes and note that he is wearing black underwear and she is wearing white. This “not quite black and white” lie is thrown back in Bill’s face as he is later tormented by black and white thoughts of his wife having sex with another man.
During the bedroom argument Bill’s pathetic pleas of innocence continue and he even spouts the line “I would never lie to you or hurt you”. He has already lied to her repeatedly for nearly five minutes. Alice then puts forward the contention that sexual fantasies are occurring during Bill’s examinations of his female patient’s breasts and he responds with more lies. Remember that in Bill’s office we see paintings depicting coffee mugs and a naked breasted woman? In addition to this, on the wall opposite his desk, is a picture of a naked couple making love on a chair. Sexual fantasies do exist in his office.
Now comes the bombshell. Sitting beneath the window with her back against a peculiar “black and white” patterned patch of wall paper, Alice reveals her previous fantasies of having sex with a naval officer. (Update: the black and white patch behind Alice is a radiator grill commonly found in New York apartments) Bill’s lie that he is not the jealous type is scattered to the winds and this is where he begins his long and painful awakening. From here on the story is part conventional narrative and partly a manifestation of Bill and Alice’s awakening process. Remember that he is also stoned at this point.
Bill next visits Marion, the daughter of his deceased client Lou Nathanson. He is let into the apartment by a maid who he calls “Rosa”, remember that the babysitter at the Harford’s was called “Roz”. Marion reveals that she has had intense fantasies about Bill and wants to give up everything, including her fiancé, to be with him. This is a repetition of Alice’s fantasy about giving up everything to be with the naval officer. But this time around Bill is actually playing the role previously inhabited by the naval officer. When Marion’s boyfriend Carl enters the room, we see that Carl and Marion are almost a carbon copy of Bill and Alice. In true dream logic fashion, Bill is mentally exploring the dynamics of his relationship with Alice, but in a third person perspective. Perhaps he is attempting to restore his damaged ego by fantasizing about being the naval officer.
In the next scene Bill walks the streets and is insulted by a group of abusive men, who call him a homosexual. This is likely a manifestation of his feelings of lost masculinity. He is then approached and propositioned by a prostitute, Domino, and goes into her apartment. Her charming demeanour gives the experience away as a sort of unrealistic fantasy on Bill’s part, though the poverty stricken messy apartment and her statement “maid’s day off” could be part of Bill’s emerging awareness of how lucky he is both financially and in terms of his wife’s maintenance of the home. The phone call he receives from his wife as he kisses Domino is undoubtedly a manifestation of his guilt at the prospect of cheating on her. Unable to follow the experience through, he pays Domino anyway, if only to secure her admiration, then leaves.
Now Bill Wanders to the Sonata Café. On his way in a sign reads “all exits are final” and another reads “the customer is always wrong”. These statements are true for Bill in that the cafe is closed next time he visits and he wastes his money endlessly in the pursuit of sexual gratification. The reason he goes to the cafe at this point is most likely to mend his ego by hanging out with a man who he obviously perceives as lower down the social ladder. This doesn’t quite work though. Bill finds out Nick is happily married with four children, but he also finds out about the Somerton party, which according to Nick is packed with beautiful women. He acquires the password and finds out that he needs a cloak and mask to get in. In Bill’s dream logic he is attempting to restore his ego by revisiting his flattering experience with the models at the Ziegler party.
So off he goes to the Rainbow Costumes store. Now here is another blatant continuity error designed to give away the dream elements of the story. Reflected in the window as Milich approaches Bill and also seen behind Bill across the street in the reverse shot, is the Sonata café, which Bill has only just left. So why did he arrive in a taxi? Perhaps he was ripped off by the driver, who simply drove him in circles. Poor Bill just can’t read the signs. Everything Bill does on this night seems to cost him a small fortune so maybe he is beginning to realise the all powerful controlling force of money.
The stores symbolic link between the Ziegler party and Somerton orgy has already been noted, but the presentation of Milich’s daughter as a sex object is very interesting. This scene could be depicting Bill’s fear that his daughter will grow up to be seen as a sex object, just like his wife. In her white underwear and drug-induced pose Milich’s daughter looks like a younger version of Alice (who we saw stoned and posing in white underwear in the Harford bedroom). When we see the daughter again in the second half of the film she has a vacant expression and looks strangely like a Japanese doll. It’s also significant that the two Japanese men were already acquainted with Milich, just as Bill’s own so-called friend Ziegler may have had sexual agendas regarding his wife. Yet another example of EWS mirroring reality is that the costume shop owner looks very much like Guerrino Lovato, who designed all of the films masks during production.
So off bill goes to the Somerton mansion, still plagued by black and white thoughts of his wife with another man. Unlike the Ziegler party, the mansion is very difficult to gain entrance too. This is Bill’s increasing awareness of his true social status, which is much further down the ladder than he thought. The complete lack of Xmas decorations, even on the small pine trees outside the entrance, carries several meanings. It indicates that Bill is no longer seeing the tinsel wrapped illusions he saw at the Ziegler party and is thus awakening to the decadent horror of the upper class social circles that he aspires to. It is also possible that Kubrick was implying an occultist element to the ritual proceedings. Why else would they be engaging in such sordid activities, while everybody else is surrounded by Xmas decorations and celebrating the festive season?
Bill is unfamiliar with the Somerton rituals. He stands in the wrong place as he watches the choreographed proceedings, and draws the attention of a couple on the balcony. The male figure acknowledges him. Could this be Ziegler and his wife? It probably is. Note the sad expression and tear like markings on her mask. In fact the concept of female prostitutes in this scene could be Kubrick’s uncompromising revelation that those who marry for money are forever enslaved.
There are some other aspects of this ritual that do not fit as manifestations of Bill’s own psyche. The décor and music of the mansion seems to be a combination of ideas from different cultures and religions. The smoking incense ball is called a Thurible and is used in various religions, as well as in black magic rituals. The anti-clockwise movements of the priest, who is listed in the credits as Red Cloak, along with anti-clockwise camera movements, could also tie in to black magic. At one point the ceremony participants, including Red Cloak himself, bow down as if they are worshipping a deity.
The characters of EWS definitely seem to be a global crowd as well, Ziegler is an American but his name is German, Sandor was Hungarian, Milich was French and the men caught with his daughter were Japanese, and of course the leader of the ceremony, Red Cloak, is English. Nick Nightingale revealed in the Sonata café that the parties are in a different place every time, which is a clue that the orgies are held by an ongoing club and its members are spread around the country and probably the globe. Nick also states that the parties get started around 2am. Why so late? Well 3am is known to occultists as the witching hour. So perhaps those who have stated that Kubrick was attempting to expose some ongoing occultist secret society, like the Illuminati, were onto something.
It has also been suggested that the skull-like mask worn by the man on the balcony was a reference to the skull and bones secret society at Yale University and that he nods like an owl, apparently a favourite symbol of theirs. However, this is actually a specific type of Venetian mask, called a Bauta.
In terms of Bill’s awakening, the sexual exhibitionism of the orgy ties in perfectly with the Ziegler party where people show off their bodies, their financial status and their social status. We are finally delivered the sexual spectacle promised in the films marketing campaign, but instead of being aroused we are simply repulsed. The assorted figures sat watching these sexual encounters look equally bewildered.
The masked figure who spotted Bill from the balcony sends a woman to lure Bill into a trap, but Bill is pulled away by the other woman who has been trying to warn him. It’s interesting that being in a predicament that would likely scare the hell out of most people Bill is disinterested in her second warning. He is still preoccupied with the pursuit of a sexual encounter and asks her to go with him.
Now he does the absolute forbidden and tries to take off her mask. She disengages him and Bill is abruptly summoned and presented to the circle for a sort of mock interrogation.
A brief scene shows Nick Nightingale being led away, still blindfolded. This shot, more than any other at the orgy sequence, bares the strongest similarity to the Ziegler party. We see couples dancing, some naked and some clothed, but all masked. Note that this time some of the women are clothed and some of the men are naked. There are also males dancing with males and females dancing with females.
Now we cut back to Bill and his interrogation and here we get some more clues about the groups possible religious leanings. In the first shot that we see of the circular gathering staring at Bill there is an interesting mask to the right of the shot. It is a golden sun with rays emanating from it. And in other shots of this scene we can see at least one more Sun shaped mask among the crowd. The remaining masks appear to be a mixture of those used in Venetian masquerades, theatre productions and ancient religious rituals – in particular those depicting demons. A possible reference to Masonic beliefs can be found in a white and green mask, which has a protruding triangle etched onto it. The top corner of the triangle overlaps the wearers right eye, creating a Masonic pyramid-like emblem, just like the one depicted on the dollar bill. Even the colours of the mask are the same colours used in dollar bills, as if the mask is a crumpled up dollar bill with the masonic pyramid still visible. This image could well be a similar cryptic trick to Kubrick’s eye in the triangle design that was depicted on the Clockwork Orange poster. Red Cloak’s mask is also gold, a possible hint back to Egyptian belief systems.
Now let’s further explore the curious inclusion of Sun masks by jumping ahead to the shot outside Nick Nightingale’s hotel. Bill walks past a store called The Artinis Gallery. The word Artinis has two meanings. First, it is a form of small portable artwork, hence the store is a gallery. However, I have searched online for The Artinis Gallery and found no reference of it. If this store does not exist then we can only assume Kubrick fictionally created it, which brings us to the alternate meaning for this word. Artinis is the Urartian God of the Sun … and Urarta was an ancient kingdom of Armenia, the first nation in history to adopt Christianity as its state religion. An additional street sign reference to an ancient God is the word EROS, written in red neon across the street as Bill is buying entry into Milich’s costume shop. Eros is no lees than the Greek god of lust, love and intercourse. So with these references to Gods in street signs, including a sun-god, perhaps the sun masks at the orgy were a hint of the group being sun worshipers, a trait also associated with modern secret societies. Some researchers have even attributed sun worship and the constellations of the Zodiac as the core inspirations behind religious mythological stories, including those of Christianity. What is perched at the top of Red Cloak’s throne? A small, but clearly visible, Christian cross, verifying the presence of a religious belief system at the Somerton proceedings. Christianity, monarchies, sun worship, ancient religions and secret societies. As always Kubrick takes on the grandest of subject matter.
Now we have a strange jump-cut to Bill quietly entering his apartment. It has been noted by some reviewers that a couple of seconds after Bill closes his apartment door a strange light pattern crosses over his back. This is claimed to look like an eye – the hint being about the “all-seeing eye on the dollar Bill”, which is another reference to secret societies and certainly ties in with the monetary control sub-theme of EWS. Personally though, I found that the light pattern just didn’t look enough like an eye to make that interpretation convincing.
Bill strolls through his apartment after checking on his daughter Helena. He takes his hand out of his pocket and touches a door frame as he walks into the lounge. Perhaps he is trying to reassure himself that he is back in his familiar “reality”. He then hides the mask and costume.
Next we hear Alice’s dream story, which has stark parallels with Bill’s experiences at Somerton, but some key differences also. The story basically seems to be an amalgamation of many different scenes throughout the film. Here are some important observations. She talks of being naked and terrified in a deserted city. Bill later experiences this as he is followed around the deserted New York streets. She talks of being in a beautiful garden, which is depicted in the art collection of their apartment.
Next up we have a couple of fairly uneventful scenes. Bill goes to the Sonata café, which is closed, then enters a café next door and persuades a waitress to reveal where Nick has been staying. The waitress has the same classy and sexy demeanour that we see with many of the females in EWS.
Now Bill asks about Nick at the hotel. The camp desk clerk looks anxious as he tells of Nick being fearfully taken away by suited men, who also intercepted an envelope that Nick tried to pass on to the clerk.
Bill next returns the costume, minus the missing mask, to Rainbow Costumes. Milich is now obviously pimping out his daughter to the Japanese men so we can safely assume that he has been bribed, as opposed to threatened. Remember that Bill also bribed his way into Milich’s store outside of business hours.
Back to Bill’s office and we see he is still struggling more with his black and white thoughts of Alice and the naval officer than with whatever danger he might be in as a result of gate crashing the orgy. So off he goes to Somerton again. In a painfully slow scene Bill is rejected entrance to the grounds and given a second warning. An important question here is what exactly is Bill trying to do in revisiting these locations? He only returned the costume to the store after he found out that Nick Nightingale had left town. Rather than trying to unravel the conspiracy regarding his friend and the Somerton orgy, he still seems to be seeking out a sexual encounter to restore his vanity. His Eyes are still Wide Shut even though the web of lies that he lives in has been exposed so blatantly.
Now back to Bill’s apartment, where Alice is teaching math to Helena. He tells her he has to go back out and his jealousy crisis kicks in again as he watches her from the kitchen, while hearing her recite her dream of being at an orgy.
Now cut to Bill’s office, where he continues his jealousy thoughts. He calls the Nathanson residence, hoping to speak to Marion and hopefully arrange to meet her. But her fiancé Carl answers. No cigar for Bill.
So off he goes to visit Domino, who is not home and so he talks to her room mate Sally, who is a total Nicole Kidman look-alike. He tries it on with her and instead finds out Domino is HIV positive. Bill is awakening to the harsh realities associated with sexual promiscuity.
Bill then wonders the streets and is followed by a mysterious man wearing a mack. He buys a newspaper and sits in a café. As he sits we can see the newspaper front page caption “LUCKY TO BE ALIVE”, which is a direct quote from his chat to Mandy at the Ziegler party. And now we’re given one of the most important and overlooked shots in the film. We see roughly a six second shot of a newspaper article depicting what turns out to be Mandy’s death. The article caption reads “Ex-beauty queen in hotel drugs overdose”. However, if you pause the dvd and read the article then Mandy’s fate is revealed. It explains that Mandy had returned to the Florence Hotel at 4am accompanied by two men. “The staff said the two men seemed to be holding a giggling Curran as they brought her into the posh hotel”. This “giggling” statement is important. Clearly Mandy was drugged and remember that Alice was giggling in her sleep as she dreamt of the orgy – another connection between the two women. The article continues that Mandy was found unconscious in her room by hotel security and taken to hospital.
There are three severe misprints in the article, which involve lines of text repeating themselves. The first misprint reads “Amanda Curran, 30, was found unconscious in her room at the Florence hotel by security personnel after her agent asked them to check on her be … hotel by security personnel after her agent asked them to check on her be … cause he’d been unable to reach her by phone.” The second misprint reads “It was unclear if there was anyone with her at the time she ingested the drugs … her at the time she ingested the drugs.” The third misprint reads “She has many important friends in the fashion and entertainment worlds … She has many important friends in the fashion and entertainment worlds … and she believed she’d break through in the end.” These double printed statements were most likely intended by Kubrick as a way of letting us know that the three statements are lies. He is letting us know that Mandy was deliberately overdosed in the hotel and the act passed off as an accident or suicide. The description of two men taking Mandy back to the hotel also fits with what we have learned about Nick Nightingale being brought back by two men. So it’s most likely that he is dead too. (Update: If the Somerton orgy sequence was in fact a dream sequence then this newspaper article could in fact be saying that Mandy simply overdosed after Zeigler’s party, which would utterly refute the entire conspiracy interpretation of the film. I will soon write an additional chapter for this review that explores this possibility further).
The final section of the article offers more revelations. Here it is, quoted word for word. “After being hired for a series of magazine ads for a London fashion designer, Leon Vitali, rumours began circulating of an affair between the two. Soon after hiring her, Vitali empire insiders were reporting that their boss adored Curran – not for how she wore his stunning clothes in public, but for how she wowed him by taking them off in private, seductive solo performances”. The important factor here is the name Leon Vitali. He was Kubrick’s personal assistant on several films, including EWS, and here’s the clincher … he is credited in EWS as playing the role of Red Cloak. So from this article we can gather that Red Cloak had a personal fixation on Mandy Curran and it was likely he who ordered her murder.
After this we see Bill’s visit to the hospital where he takes a look at Mandy’s body. A very strange shot shows him slowly leaning toward her face for a few seconds and then pulling away. What is going through Bill’s mind at this point is a mystery. Is he in so much denial of what is happening that he finds a sudden urge to try and kiss this naked woman? Who knows.
On his way out of the hospital he is summoned to visit Ziegler. As Bill is lead to the pool room Kubrick again uses visual aesthetics to connect scenes together. The star shaped decorations are now switched off in the hall just as they were absent at Somerton. Also at Somerton he was led by a suited man to face interrogation and warning on a red carpet, with the camera arcing in circles around the proceedings. This time he is led by a suited man to face interrogation and warning in a room that is almost identical in décor to the orgy rooms of Somerton, with a red pool table symbolically standing in for the carpet. Bill and Ziegler wander back and forth around this table during their debate. (Update: An email correspondant brought to my attention that Zeigler rolls a pool ball in small circular gestures, much like Red Cloak did with the incence ball at the ritual)
Most of what Ziegler offers in terms of tying the plot together is not very revealing. We could have guessed most of these contentions even upon our first viewing of the film. Yet having examined the article about Mandy’s death in more detail and noting the misprint clues, it becomes obvious that Ziegler is lying about what happened to her. She was murdered by a forced overdose. As always, Bill is blind as a bat. He is genuinely surprised by Ziegler’s explanations, but for the first time in the whole story he actually attempts to dig below the surface by questioning Ziegler’s version of how Mandy died. Ziegler’s response to this is interesting, not in his words, but in his body language. He raises his voice, steps up the dialogue pace and points a threatening finger at Bill, ordering him to accept the false version of events. This is a repetition of Red Cloak’s finger pointing threat at Somerton. Make no mistake about it. Ziegler’s purpose here is to silence Bill one way or the other.
Now we cut to a shot of Bill’s party mask next to Alice on the pillow. Under the cold blue light we could easily presume her dead. Bill enters his apartment and does something revealing. He switches off the Xmas tree lights, symbolising that he has now accepted the reality of his world, stripped of its innocence and sugar-coated illusions.
Once in the bedroom, he sees his mask on the pillow next to Alice. He doesn’t check to make sure she is alive and so his sudden crying fit is not about her potentially having been murdered. When Alice awakens she does not respond with a barrage of questions about where the mask came from, but instead tries to comfort Bill. In fact she doesn’t even look at the mask. Apparently in the original book Traumnovelle the wife character did place the mask on the pillow, but this is Kubrick’s film and like with The Shining he has reshaped the story to his own wishes. So here is an alternate interpretation of this scene based upon the films use of dream logic. The mask on the pillow is imaginary. It is a manifestation of Bill’s sudden awareness that he has been lying to himself and his wife throughout their entire marriage. He was wearing a mask of deception even before going to Milich’s costume store.
Alice already tore off her mask when she revealed her most secret sexual fantasies to Bill. Now he must do the same. So when he sobs and says to her “I’ll tell you everything” he is not necessarily referring to Somerton. He is referring to his marriage and partnership with Alice.
Now the final scene in the toy store loses its cryptic vagueness and offers a more satisfying resolution. Bill and Alice are not discussing the dangers of being tangled up in a conspiracy. They are talking about their relationship. When Alice tells Bill that they need to “fuck” as soon as possible it is because they have never had sex without removing their masks of deception. They have used each other as sex objects just like the orgy participants at Somerton and the partner-swapping couples at Ziegler’s party. By engaging in real intimacy with their eyes wide open this marriage will be healed. In his own unique way Kubrick is giving us a happy ending.
Summary
Due to EWS’s stunning intricacy and complexity this has been by far the most difficult and time consuming film analysis I have written to date (now superseded by the unbelievable complexity of unravelling 2001: A Space Odyssey), but it has been well worth the effort.
Once we begin to notice the carefully crafted meanings in EWS’s narrative and visuals it makes perfect sense that the film is slowly paced with lingering unedited shots. The images are almost like paintings and Kubrick draws them out so that we are forced to pay attention to the symbolically potent details. This shows up modern fast-paced Hollywood films for what they really are – assembly line products that rely on over-editing to disguise their intellectual and artistic emptiness.
In a modern world that is rife with infidelity, lies, hedonism and sexual decadence Stanley is encouraging us all to throw away our masks and take a good look in the mirror. His final and most underestimated masterpiece is a call for an end to all forms of secrecy, be they personal, social or political.
Whether EWS was chopped and changed by the studios after Kubrick’s death is of little consequence. His messages still come through loud and clear for those who are willing to watch it with eyes wide open.
Bravo Stanley. RIP
Here’s my 2001-flavoured Schulz remix. I was also going to have a film called Dr Strangelove or: How I Leaned to Stop Worrying and Love the Balloon. Both are endangered now as I’m considering cutting from my book the Balloon in which this scene occurs… (which means DAS WEISS ALBUM is also endangered… fuck fuck fuck…)
‘When our Führer arrived on the world stage saluting and raving in his Boy Scout costumes,’ said the manny, ‘the planet was reaching an exciting moment in its evolution. Having exhausted their content in endless metamorphoses, the world’s old forms hung loosely and half dead, ready to flake off in a puff of wind. Such a puff might have sent the world’s map off into the stars.
‘Our Führer viewed such a possibility as a personal affront. His was a world of chancelleries and police stations and marching boots, above all a world of *soil*. And the sad thing is this dull little man tempted much of civilisation to his side. Equally dull and affronted men sighed with relief fen this demon flattened the world’s map and set his divisions loose upon it.’
There were no clouds out the windows now, only stars. The manny stood before me and said, ‘The Führer had a younger comrade with a very different cast of mind. Herr Wernher won Braun had a face and demeanour that sent all hearts racing, the Führer’s most embarrassingly so, even as he seethed with envy and plotted his comrade’s downfall.
‘Anticipating a lengthy war, he told von Braun to venture forth in 1949 on Operation Gummi-Hammer, a pointless, depressing mission which was doubtless leaked to British intelligence. In 1945 von Braun liberated the Tausendjährigerheißluftballon from its secret hangar and then in ‘46 scouted where the operation was to occur. Ignoring growing doubts about his now dead Führer and the crazy operation – fund terror campaigns in British cities by local Vagabunde –’
‘Tinks!’ I said.
‘– and touchingly still following his Führer’s orders, in ‘49 he gave his American guards the slip and with his wife flew the Balloon to ‘The Shaugh’, were waited the ambush of the Vagabunde-die-nicht-Vagabunde-waren — tinks-who-were-not-tinks.’
The craft was revving up, shuddering. The hum deepened and would not leave my head.
‘But then, oh heavenly Balloon,’ the manny went, ‘just as we neared capture and likely execution, you performed your latest and greatest magic trick, not to disappear or unexplode or reverse time but to freeze it!’
Those butterflies appeared again, fluttering through the lemon air, in and out of each other’s paths, out and in… The craft was soaring.
‘Oh my sacred vessel,’ he cried, ‘to celebrate our escape you took me for our best spin yet, expanses flashing far below us, a train of zones and climates dragged along behind you — Canada, Honduras, Nicaragua, Hipporbundia… And I saw that these were just the first places that sprang to your mind, the merest hint of all the worlds within your reach. Had you chosen Mars or Saturn or Dimension X, I know the sky would have blown open and revealed its glistening core and you would have blasted through to those points and far beyond. How you ached to show off your powers, for even Balloons have their moments of self-rapture. Oh how I love those moments!’
I was staring down at our world and at a loss for words, every thought decomposing into its ancient roots, rots, soulsoil… words losing themselves in murky meanings and stories – Adolf Hitler gnawing a tinker hide, a soaring osprey with a snake held in its beak, Norsemen in skyships carving the Blood Eagle, hewing ribs off backbones and casting warm hearts to the winds…
Von Braun rubbed my shoulder, though it was him who was shook and teary. From pink morning mists below Mexico was trying to emerge… Through throbs behind my eyes I saw Brazil open up like a galleon, sails billowing among ropes and gulls and the pulsing colours of the sky or sea. Blond tinks scrambled and dissolved among sails and clouds and other airy stuff. Eclipses of two suns… I held onto the manny. Our planet was juddering… fading…
‘Jan,’ a voice said.
Aye?
‘Do not fear this voyage. And do not forget that no single stage is all or final. Each is only a husk the spirit must shed before it reaches the next stage and ever more super-colours and super-words and super-musics…’
I’ve been here a long time ago.
‘You’ve seen everything before.’
True. I know this journey ends in the woods. A young girl walks beside me and we pass an ancient statue of the Manny Hitler and its only pal, a bat sleeping on its lap with folded wings, and then enter a clearing with weeds charred black as coal.
We sit on a wall around a pond and the girl dips her fingers in the water. On the wall’s far side a hiccupping wifie sits dressed in black. The girl shakes her head and says, ‘She’s your half dead self who blasphemed and cannot leave this place.’
I’ve posted that passage here before, haven’t I?
Don’t think so, mon! Mind if I illustrate it?
Steven, that is a pretty weird coincidence, man. That was the ticket for our first ever club night in Glasgow — absolute fiasco* but still some of the best fun I’ve had — and I have been after that illustration online for years! It was originally on the cover of Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony. Splendid Proustian rushes seeing that pic again…
*My bro still carps about the fact that at the end of the night I hid in a toilet cubicle and left him alone in the DJ booth to face the chorus of boos and catcalls and the hurled crisps and tumblers… Also remember one of our PR guys being chased down the street afterwards simply because he’d sold tickets for the event (‘Thanks a lot, ya fuckin’ cunt’)… The video breaking down and a pilled-up rave crowd being treated on the giant screen — unbeknownst to us — to an episode of Benny Hill… Learning on the job that my bro had stored all his vinyl against a radiator… picking out record after record and then hearing them make this sort of psychelic underwater sound as the vinyl warpings bopped about beneath the needle… everybody on the balcony suddenly standing around in their knickers and Y-fronts (that was quite cool, actually)… I also had very weird hair at the time, I remember, a sort of Afro affair clatted in — yup — Vaseline… A brawl between our crew and the bouncers because we refused to turn off the smoke machine… Christ, we also incentivised folk to sell tickets by offering them — wait for it — Life Membership Passes *and there was only ever that one disastrous night*… The club had the reputation for kicking out their successful promoters and stealing their clubnight’s name so we got the seriously Mafioso owners to sign a contract beforehand promising never to do the same to our night (called Eros). Seriously Mafioso owners as we traipsed out humiliated at the end of the night: ‘We PROMISE YOU we will never call any night of ours Eros…’ I think I need to find a cubicle to hang my head in shame again…
Still, the ticket was pretty cool. It was just that pic — no words or info of any kind. You were either in the know or, y’know, you weren’t.
Spooky larf…
LARFS IN THE SIMULOCRACY A
my blood ran cold, Comrades: look at the zombies laugh.
the second and final part of Wajahat Ali’s interview with novelist, poet and essayist Ishmael Reed: emphasis, in bold type, mine
ALI: Let’s talk about the media. Here are some popular examples of media content and personalities that have gone mainstream and are successful: Oprah. Will Smith. Jamie Foxx. Tyra Bank. Tyler Perry. The Wire. Barbershop. American Gangster. You’re known as a vociferous critic of mainstream media and its tendency to stereotype. So, why complain now? You guys– African Americans – have made it.
REED: The Wire– you know, David Simon [the creator of The Wire] and I have a running controversy for years. It all stems from a telephone call I made to KPFA [Pacifica radio] when he was a guest there in the 90′s on Chris Welche’s show. He was going around the country with a Black kid from the Ghetto to promote something called The Corner– it was all about Blacks as degenerates selling drugs, etc.
ALI: Was that HBO?
REED: Yes. HBO does all this kind of stuff. I called in and told Simon, “You’re using this kid.” Later I said it [was] like Buffalo Bill going around the country exhibiting Indians. He got really pissed off and went to the New York Times, where he has a supporter there named Virginia Hefferman, another Times feminist who, when it comes to Black urban Fiction, can’t tell the difference between the real and the fake; she’s his supporter. She said that George Pelecanos, David Simon, and Richard Price are the “Lords of Urban Fiction,” when the Black Holloway authors like Iceberg Slim can write circles around these guys when it comes to Urban fiction.
Simon, Price and Pelecanos’ Black characters speak like the cartoon crows in those old racist cartoons ["Heckle and Jeckle."] Henry Louis Gates knows this about “The Wire,” yet his right wing blog, The Root, carries an ad for “The Wire” today and a glowing article about this piece of crap. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is an intellectual entrepreneur all right. He condemns my work as misogynist yet supports Simon’s Neo-Nazi portrait of Black people. “The Wire” and novels by Price and Pelecanos should be submitted to the Jim Crow museum at Ferris State University– this is the website: http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/, where they can have a honored place alongside of some of Robert Crumb’s Nazi cartoons.
When I was researching my novel Reckless Eyeballing, I attended a lecture sponsored by the San Francisco Holocaust Museum, March 26,1984. The program said that the stereotypes about Jewish men in the Nazi media was similar to that about Black men in the United States. I thought, what on earth are they talking about? And then I went out and examined some of this junk, especially the cartoons in the newspaper Der Sturmer – see Julius Streicher Nazi Editor of the Notorious Anti-Semite Newspaper Der Sturmer by Randall l. Bytwerk. I was shocked. Jewish men were depicted as sexual predators, raping Aryan women. They were exhibited as flashers. Both Bellow and Phillip Roth’s books include Black flashers. Jewish men especially those immigrants from Russia were depicted as criminals. Jewish children were seen as disruptive, a threat to German school children and so on.
If any one looks at this stuff for example, you’ll find a perfect match for the way that David Mamet, David Simon, George Pelecanos, Stephen Spielberg and Richard Price portray Blacks. They are very critical in their projects about the way Black men treat women, yet none of them has produced a project critical of the way that men of their background treat women.
[...]
ALI: It’s amazing how all the best selling Urban Ghetto writers – they’re all White.
REED: Right. “The Lords of Urban Fiction.” What I can’t understand is why Blacks can’t achieve royal status when it comes to forms that they have largely created? I mean there’s a White King of Rock n’ Roll, there’s a White King of Jazz, how come we can never achieve titles of royalty in these fields we are supposed to prevail in? They held a so called Rock and Roll Hall of Fame the other night, where White judges credit people who resemble them with the invention of Rock and Roll. I didn’t even see Blacks in the audience.
There would be no Rock and Roll without Ike Turner, James Brown, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Allen Toussaint, etc. Fake ghetto books and fake ghetto music. Elvis Presley, whom they idol, is merely a karaoke makeover of James Brown and Chuck Berry.
Anyway, David Simon goes to the Jewish Weekly and said he’s made all this money, but he can’t enjoy it because of criticism by people like Ishmael Reed. He told Virginia Hefferman, I think that’s who it was, she said he said I was against him because he was a White man writing about Black people. We’ve given awards to White writers over the years, many years, who’ve written about Black life.
ALI: White writers writing about the Black experience is OK then? So, that wasn’t the problem?
REED: Of course not! He’s the one who is against White writers writing about the ghetto. Amy Alexander, who worked with Simon at The Baltimore Sun said that he got all pushed out because another White reporter was assigned to cover the ghetto. He feels it’s sort of like his gold mine where he has staked a claim and that all ghetto stories and humans are his property.
I’m not against White writers writing about Blacks as long as they are as objective as say James McPherson writing about an Irish American janitor in his brilliant short story “Gold Coast.” I use non-fiction work written by Whites in my research. It’s indispensable. That wasn’t the problem. I said that “The Wire” was a cliché! It’s like my writing a series about Jewish life and casting all of the characters as inside traders.
They never printed this discussion in the NYT, so I wrote a response to The Jewish Weekly where Simon said that he couldn’t enjoy [the loot] he’s made for showing Black as depraved individuals because of criticism by people like Ishmael Reed. To their credit, The Jewish Weekly published it. So I said he ought to do something new like write a new series about the family of a suburban, illegal arms dealer who’s bringing guns into my neighborhood.
So, the Times had a story about Simon’s ghetto informants, who, like Chandler’s slaves, provided Simon with his material, but, who, I doubt, will get a share of his royalties which must amount to millions. One was a recovering heroin addict and the other did some wretched thing like armed robbery. Their problems made the front page of the NY Times [Aug.9, 2007], of course, in what must have been one of the longest stories in the Times history! Then, they made the society page later [Aug.19,2007] because they got married and Simon was their best man.
How does the Times treat White pathology? They reported an epidemic of heroin addiction in the Philadelphia suburbs [March,20, 1995], which included emergency admissions and overdoses; these White people in the suburbs were doing heroin like it was going out of style. I counted the words: the article consisted of 200 words. “Heroin Epidemic” in the back section. Out here in California, the typical drug addict is a housewife or suburban White woman. [Reed finds a newspaper and reads from it]
“Few experts would have suspected that the biggest contributors to California’s drug abuse, death and injury toll are educated, middle-aged women living in the Central Valley and rural areas, while the fastest-declining, lowest-risk populations are urban black and Latino teenagers.” wrote Mike Males on Jan.3, 2007 in The New York Times.
Think that HBO will do a series about this? Like a “White Wire?” Richard Price, who creates projects which cast blacks as junkies and dealers, is a former cocaine addict himself. They could hire him to write it. Write about something he knows about.
ALI: I’ve read White addicts are unfortunately succumbing to Meth and prescription pills at extraordinary rates.
REED: That’s right. Another California study counted 30,000 substance abusers who are pregnant are White woman. So, The Wire paints the picture of drug addiction, drug dealing, and drug abuse as being a specifically a Black issue.
Now, I hate to say this, but I know somebody has got to say it and somebody has got to do it. I confronted Richard Price about his role in The Wire on a panel held at Ax En Provence, and his friend, I won’t mention his name– a very famous writer– and members of this New York delegation, Price’s buddies, jumped on me for pointing this out. My friend, whom I have known since the 70s, said that I was bringing up a local issue before international audience. The International Herald Tribune, which was on sale at the conference, had a full-page display ad for “The Wire.” This hateful material travels the globe. A few years ago, CNN, America’s Der Sturmer, ran a story about Black parents being so low down that they abandoned their children and the children had to eat rats. I was at a University in Wisconsin at the time and the mother of a student from South Africa called to see whether the story was true. She had seen it all the way over there. The story was untrue. The children lied. CNN never corrected the story.
Now at this French conference, I was thought of as an angry Black nationalist, when my questions to Price were polite. When Price began his career, writing terrific books like “The Wanderers,” I was one of his supporters and he has acknowledged this.
But some where along the way he decided to go for the money. I said to Price, “Why are you dealing with these people: Pelecanos and Simon? You’re a great writer. Why are you hanging out with George Pelecanos?” You read Pelecanos’ Soul Circus: it’s got Black people talking like what you hear on Klan website: Nigger Watch. I heard Pelecanos on a radio show out here and he went into all of these stereotypes about Black men that have been around for a few hundred years. So his writing about Black life is a real fox guarding the chicken coop situation.
ALI: And Pelecanos is a White guy?
REED: Yes. I recorded a episode of “The Wire,” all about Black kids selling drugs Here’s the typical line that Simon puts into the mouths of his Black characters: “Hey, I’m gonna put some whup ass on you!”
So, I told Price’s defender, famous novelist, why don’t you look at the first episode [of The Wire]– I have a recording. He came back and said, “Yes, these are White guys trying to be White Negroes who are putting Amos and Andy lines in the mouths of Black people.” He said that Price had to do it because he’s in debt. Here is Price helping Simon to diss Black people, while he has admitted to cocaine addiction himself. He could have been a great novelist. He went to Hollywood instead.
ALI: You know, you’ll get a lot of heat for this, right?
REED: Well, you know, this is something that should be brought up: why are they promoting the same images of us that were promoted against minorities in Nazi Germany and set them up for the camps?
ALI: You think there’s no self-reflection there?
REED: They don’t know their history. They’re a generation that doesn’t know their own history. I’m sure that a previous generation of Jews who published radical newspapers and journals would be critical of Simon’s projects. These were left wingers who suffered casualties in some of bloodiest strikes in American history. They were red baited, Black balled and lost their jobs. They helped to create a safety net that helped millions. They supported the drive for the emancipation of Black people. They were lawyers who went South risking their lives to defend Blacks who were victims of Jim Crow justice. They were among the first to publish great Black writers. They were writers who were Black balled in Hollywood. The Rosenbergs were executed by the government. This generation of Jews would be ashamed of people like Simon and Price. They would turn over in their graves and be disgusted at these people who are cheapening people who can’t fight back, who can’t tell their story, for money.
ALI: What are some of the other stereotypes of Jewish men in the Nazi press?
REED: It was all about Jewish men [accosting German women]: that was the favorite theme of the Nazi newspaper. That the only reason Jewish guys went to the medical profession was so they could be gynecologists to examine German women. Der Sturmer printed cartoons of Jewish men lunging at half naked German women while grinning, lecherously.
ALI: What about Henry Gates’s charge that Blacks are the last of the anti Semites?
REED: They have a funny way of showing it. When Joesph Lieberman ran for President, he was the first choice among African American voters, and when Sharpton entered the race, Lieberman was the second choice So, a comet must’ve passed the Earth and all the Blacks suddenly changed their minds! The Times promised to follow Gate’s op-ed with one about the racist attitudes of some Jews against Black people; it never appeared. If one ever appeared I’d suggest that it challenge some scriptwriters, novelists, producers and directors who are peddling Der Sturmer type portraits of Black people. I walked out on American Gangster: this evil piece of dreck. Defenders of this junk say that these movies give Black actors jobs. So did “Birth of a Nation.”
ALI: You couldn’t take it?
REED: First movie I ever walked out in my life. Remember, when they did this Fallujah type attack on the projects? When, they ran in there and blew all these Black people away in the projects? Like Fallujah or something. And, they always get a Black guy on the side of the White invaders so the scene wouldn’t appear to be so racist. This movie like “The Color Purple” and “What’s Love Got To Do With It,” were written directed and produced by White men.
ALI: However, to be fair, I read both Alice Walker and Tina Turner protested certain depictions in those movies.
REED: Right. Both Alice Walker and Tina Turner objected to the way the Black guy in Purple and the way Ike Turner were portrayed. Tina Turner said that the film was unfair to Ike. The Times called Turner an Ogre in their obituary of him and Yahoo News said that his name was synonymous with domestic violence, yet Paul McCartney’s ex says that he beat her even when she was pregnant. Turner is condemned. McCartney gets a knighthood and Starbucks.
Think that White feminists in New York will picket Starbucks like they wrote letters objecting to a dying Ike Turner’s receiving an award? I doubt it. As for “American Gangsters” about the life of a man, a despicable drug dealer, who conned Denzil Washington into believing that he was close to Bumpy Johnson, the Harlem gangster, Bumpy’s widow recently published a book saying that this character made it up and Bumpy thought of him as a jerk. The guy who wrote the script also wrote “Schindler’s List.” Think that he would [know] better than to participate in such a vile product. The producer, Ridley Scott, I think also was involved with Training Day –another evil piece with which Washington cooperated.
ALI: We’ve talked about White writers speaking for Black culture. The movie Crash, which you and I have discussed in private, won Best Picture as you know. They said this movie shows how “we have moved and can move beyond race.” When I saw that movie, I thought to myself, “I’ve never met a Persian guy like this crazy, gun wielding Persian in this movie. I’ve never met Black people who talk like this in real life.”
REED: Yeah, well, I mean they have some kind of fixed picture assigned in their mind about whom we all are, where we’re like cartoonish figures– they can label us that way. I objected to Crash– I thought it was terrible. I think Black intellectuals see too deeply. That’s the problem. It’s a cause of anxiety, because we see things differently.
My generation of writers has been prone to premature illness and death, especially the women. When Black male writers meet it’s like a session of the American Diabetic Association. Given all of the anti-Muslim propaganda that’s being disseminated by The American Nazi media, you have to be careful. It can stress you out.
As a pioneer you might feel alone. But already your example has inspired a new generation of Pakistani American writers so you won’t feel isolated. And your artistic career is supported by your parents, which is rare.
ALI: Well, we’re writers. We do what we do, and we just try our best.
So would you say Down and Out in London and Paris is necessarily classist because Orwell went to Eton?
Reed’s assumption (and yours, by implication) is that the motivation behind the making of the series is racist — a desire to wallow in and promulgate (and celebrate?) a cliche of black degradation (something Friday Night Lights is absolutely guilty of, I believe). My belief is that — like Orwell’s — it is social rage, a desire to broadcast that degradation, yes, with the eventual hope of eradicating it. I sense no glee about that degradation in The Wire whatsoever — or anything even approaching neutrality on it.
You’re citing Orwell? Comrade, you’ve missed the point by a profoundly large margin if you consider The Wire a form of reportage (and, on top of that, that it’s driven by a “social rage” to change? You can’t be so naive).
“Reed’s assumption (and yours, by implication) is that the motivation behind the making of the series is racist…”
Did you read the interview?
If anyone still wonders where so-called “black rage” comes from…
“My belief is that — like Orwell’s — it is social rage, a desire to broadcast that degradation, yes, with the eventual hope of eradicating it. I sense no glee about that degradation in The Wire whatsoever — or anything even approaching neutrality on it.”
You perceive authorial glee behind these scenes? Please explain, min. Please tell me what it is that you’re seeing in them that I’m not and that patently constitute evidence of a racist agenda. If there are US codes or whatever that I’m not seeing then I’ll stand corrected.
Is it absolutely impossible that any black artist would ever write or direct such a scene? If so, why? If not, would *they* be guilty of an anti-black agenda? Yes?: please explain. No? Why not? Again: would you say Down and Out in London and Paris is necessarily classist because Orwell went to Eton?
Is it your belief that Simon’s claims about his motives — social rage — are entirely false and are in fact the precise opposite of the reality:glee/whoops/delight/let’s-keep-’em-niggers-degraded? Remember that Simon’s books — which I’ve read — are indeed reportage.
And yes, I read the interview. So far all I’ve seen are accusations and youtube clips. My brother (he of the Eros atrocity above) is one of the highest profile anti-racism campaigners in Scotland — I doubt McNulty naivety is an issue here, certainly in a UK context. But there may be US signals I’m missing. Please enlighten me.
“So far all I’ve seen are accusations and youtube clips.”
The YouTube clips are the accusations and they are clips from The Wire. Clearly, the writers on that show are using that special social meta-psychology in which they hope to put an end to the suffering of a congenital underclass in North America by showing blacks (as young as, what: nine?) blowing each other the fuck away with cool soundbites and cool soundtracks and cool bloodpacks.
“Is it absolutely impossible that any black artist would ever write or direct such a scene? If so, why? If not, would *they* be guilty of an anti-black agenda? Yes?: please explain.”
Are you sure you read the interview? And are you not aware of my loathing for the film “Precious”, which is written and directed by blacks (and probably executive-produced by Oprah Winfrey)? You’re not aware of the fact that people of all colors sell out people of all colors for money? They do.
“Is it your belief that Simon’s claims about his motives — social rage — are entirely false…”
Oh, no. Never. I believe that if he were entirely motivated by money, he’d say so, quite bluntly, and let the chips fall where they may. I believe him to be a preternaturally honest man. And his participation in the system isn’t all about Market Share and Advertising Dollars and selling degraded images of transgressive black “manhood” to two target audiences (the lucrative white male target demo that also buys or bought Gangsta Rap and the less-lucrative but credibility-lending black audience that will emulate what it sees on the screen and therefore pave the way for even grislier Televisual Pseudo-Anthropological Field Reports of the Future). Oh, no. It’s not about that at all.
“My brother (he of the Eros atrocity above) is one of the highest profile anti-racism campaigners in Scotland — I doubt McNulty naivety is an issue here, certainly in a UK context.”
Well, as it happens, this argument isn’t about racism in Scotland.
Your argument seems to boil down to the wobbly syllogism: 1) you find The Wire entertaining 2) you’re not racist 3) The Wire, therefore, isn’t racist. This is a familiar argument but it’s not a convincing one. The first time I heard it (I kid you not) was about Birth of a Nation, in a film class and the debate which ensued was depressingly similar to the argument we’re having. It was my contention that BOA is, first of all, a piece of Racist Propaganda; several students (along with the teacher) maintained that BOA is, first of all, Art. But, then again, Porno empowers Womyn, doesn’t it?
This is the interesting (for me) bit: in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, when America was sexually repressed in a much less sophisticated way than it is now, Caucasian College Boys often focused their libidos on fantasy images of the Black Female Body (living). Now they don’t so much; with the “Sexual Revolution” (in which the White Girl Next Door became a Pole Dancer and the Daughter of the Black Maid has grown obese on McDonald’s), this lucrative demographic seems to have shifted its prurient interests toward the Black Male Body (dead). What’s it all mean?
“Reed’s assumption (and yours, by implication) is that the motivation behind the making of the series is racist — a desire to wallow in and promulgate (and celebrate?) a cliche of black degradation…”
Who says the motivation is racism? The motivation is money.
You find the tone here one of celebration/delight/more please?
Oh fuck yes indeed I do. Or are you claiming that these scenes were painstakingly blocked and lit and post-produced with infinite regret? Christ, it’s becoming apparent why the fucking Propaganda Machine is unstoppable. You don’t seem to know what you’re seeing when you look at dozens of clips of Niggers having their brains blown out. I’ll parse it for you: it’s dozens of clips of Niggers having their brains blown out.
Slightly Beyond Sick
Oh please do try to imagine an angelic-looking pre-teen white child being interviewed by a giddy white radio personality saying, “So you’re ____’s killer! What was it like being _____’s killer? Your parents must be really proud of you!” Erm no. Not quite yet. Not that it’s not coming, but the black substrata is always the vanguard in this sort of thing; the canaries-in-the-coal mine of down-angled social engineering
Coincidentally, Unconscious and/or Self-Protectingly Naive Racism is one of the ongoing topics of my Art Because being a boy from the ghetto (that’s right, Comrades Lurking and Explicit: I am a primary source; a native reporter) at a private college meant having this very same argument, several thousand times, with white fellers who really did mean me no harm (nor harm to anyone) but found it impossible to fathom the extent to which they were Not Getting It. They owned Richard Pryor albums; they thought Diana Ross was hot; they couldn’t see the problem with The Flip Wilson show…
In the linked story, the Protag is an Educated Liberal whose sex life gets its zing from Role Playing games in which he “rapes” his wife as a pseudonymous black criminal… only, funnily, as it happens, he forgets where he got the “pseudonym” from: quasi-karmic hilarity follows
THE FICTIVE IN A SIMULOCRACY: Part Five: Role Playing
“A niche market could be defined as a component that gives your business power. A niche market allows you to define whom you are marketing to. When you know who are you are marketing to it’s easy to determine where your marketing energy and dollars should be spent.”
Defining Your Nice Market, A Critical Step in Small Business Marketing by Laura Lake
One can view Sarah Siegel on “YouTube” discussing her approach to marketing. During her dispassionate recital she says that she sees a “niche dilemma,” and finds a way to solve that dilemma. Seeing that no one had supplied women with panties that were meant to be visible while wearing low cut jeans, she captured the niche and made a fortune. With five million dollars, she invested in the film Precious, which was adapted from the book Push, written by Ramona Lofton, who goes by the pen name of Sapphire, after the emasculating shrew in “Amos and Andy,” a show created by white vaudevillians Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll.
(Ms. Lofton also knows a thing or two about marketing. Noticing the need for white New York feminists to use black men as the fall guys for world misogyny, while keeping silent about the misogyny of those who share their ethnic back-ground, she joined in on the lynching of five black and Hispanic boys, “who grew up in jail.” She made money, and became famous. They were innocent!)
When Lionsgate Studio and Harvey Weinstein were quarrelling over the rights to Push, which has been marketed under the title of Precious, about a pregnant 350 pound illiterate black teenager, who has borne her father’s child and is assaulted sexually by her mother, Sarah Greenberg, speaking for Lionsgate, said that the movie would provide the studio with “a gold mine of opportunity,” which is probably true, since the image of the black male as sexual predator has created a profit center for over one hundred years and even won elections for politicians like Bush, The First.
But politicians, the KKK, Nazis, film, television, etc, had done the black male as a rapist to death. The problem for Sarah and Lionsgate and her film company Smokewood, was to solve “ the niche dilemma,” which they saw as selling a black film to white audiences (the people to whom CNN and MSNBC are referring to when they invoke the phrase “The American People.”) An article in The New York Times ,2/4/09, reported on the confusion among the investors as they fumbled about for a marketing plan.
“The studio prides itself on taking on marketing challenges, but “Push”…is one of the biggest to come along in some time, marketing experts say. African-American audiences of all demographics could wince at the film’s negative imagery. As films like “The Great Debaters” and “Miracle at St. Anna” have shown, a release labeled a black film by the marketplace — and
“Push” already has been — can be an incredibly tough sell to mainstream white audiences.
“Lionsgate already seems a little befuddled. On Monday the company initially agreed to discuss the inherent marketing challenges. A few hours later it backtracked, rejecting any marketing talk but saying executives would be happy to speak broadly about their delight in nabbing the movie. Before long that offer was also rescinded.”
Three standing ovations given Push’s test run at Sundance convinced some of the business people that although white audiences might decline to support films that show cerebral blacks, The Great Debaters, in which Denzel Washington plays the great black poet Melvin Tolson, or Spike lee’s Miracle at St. Anna, which shows heroic blacks, they would probably enjoy a film in which blacks were shown as incestors and pedophiles. White audiences continuing to give the film standing ovations and prizes and critical acclaim indicates that when Lionsgate’s co-presidents for theatrical marketing, Sarah Greenberg and Tim Palen said of Precious, “There is simply a gold mine of opportunity here, “they were on the money. It was Geoffrey Gilmore, director of the Sundance Film Festival, who enhanced the sales potential by providing the marketers led by Ms. Siegel with another selling point. In an interview he said that Push might hit “a cultural chord” because of all of the discussion about race prompted by the election of President Obama. It was after their cynical manipulative tying of a black president to their sleazy product that I wanted Sarah to change the name of her panty company from So Low to How Low.
Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck who engage in a sort of corny 1930s styled racist rhetoric could learn from Sarah. At times they look as though they’ve lost their minds and are not pleasant to look at, while a manicured, buffed Sarah, who doesn’t go lightly on the eye shadow, looks better. She is salmon colored and though middle-aged wears baby doll clothes and if you Google her name, Sarah Siegel, along with “images” you’ll find her posing in photos some of which have blacks smooching her. The Nov. 22 blog “Gawker” points to the way Limbaugh, Beck and Savage have tried to associate Obama and his administration with rape imagery. Ain’t they out of touch. Sarah Siegel has joined an innovative marketing plan that couples Obama’s name with the most extreme of sexual crimes.
This woman, who hangs out with Hollywood stars and unlike Bill O’ Reilly, an Irish American who has lost his way, knows that blacks are able to handle table utensils– she’s dined with them—might have invested in a movie that some are calling the worst depiction of black life yet done.
New York Press critic, Armond White, in a brilliant take down of the movie, compares it with Birth of a Nation. I would argue that this movie makes D.W. Griffith look like a progressive. Moreover, I’ve looked at a number of pictures that show how the Nazis depicted blacks and though Jewish and black men appear as sexual predators in many, I’ve never run across one in which minority men are shown as incest violators.
The black sexual predator is represented obsessively in the novel that inspired the bombing of the Oklahoma Federal building and the recent murder of three Pittsburgh policemen. But not even The Turner Diaries, by William Pierce stigmatizes black men as violators of the incest taboo at a time when the black male unemployment rate is 25% in some cities, 50% in New York. It took Hollywood liberals and their pathetic black front people to do that. Is there a role that black actors won’t perform? One that celebrity blacks won’t lend their names to?( If the white Oscar judges perpetrate a cruel joke by awarding this film Oscars, will the black audience members stage a walk-out even though it might mean never working in that town again?) Indeed it was Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement of the film that convinced the investors that they were on to a hot property.
The Times’ reports:
“A deal did not emerge for “Push” until about a week after the festival ended, with potential distributors balking over the price insisted upon by Cinetic Media, a New York marketing and sales company for independent film, according to two people with knowledge of how the deal came together but who were not authorized to speak publicly.
“A spokeswoman for Cinetic declined to comment, but bidders said Ms. Winfrey and Mr. Perry had been crucial to the deal’s coming together.”
Indeed, the business model for both the book, Push, by Sapphire renamed Precious, for the movie by Lionsgate, which beat Harvey Weinstein for the rights in court, was the black incest product, The Color Purple, which has been recycled so many times that comedian Paul Mooney says that he anticipates a Color Purple on ice. But even that incest film doesn’t go as far as Precious, which shows both mother and father engaged in a sexual assault on their daughter in graphic detail, Sarah Siegel’s way of solving her “niche dilemma.”
The Root is The Washington Post’s black zine, among whose bosses is Jacob Weisberg– he says that he helped to launch it and has considerable influence, like deciding who gets hired and fired. The zine’s black face is Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Since the beginning of the movie’s run The Root has provided cover for Precious probably because Gates is tight with Oprah Winfrey and wrote a kiss up book about her. (Now that Joel Dreyfuss has taken over, The Root will quit being a shameless promoter of stupid NeoCon “tough love” ideology. He is a journalist with integrity).The Root’s support for the film is at odds with the furor that has erupted among blacks across the country about this film.
Famous journalists like Jack White and Dori Maynard of the Maynard Institute say that they, like thousands of blacks, won’t even go see it. The whites who are behind this film didn’t have a black audience in mind when they drew up the business strategy for the film. Their “niche audience” got their money’s worth. The naked black-skinned man Carl, of medium built, who rapes a 350 pound daughter, who elsewhere in the film goes about flattening people with one punch, is little more than an animal. A vile prop. A person with no story and no humanity. Writer, Cecil Brown, said that Carl is the real victim of the movie during an interview with Aimee Allison, a KPFA interviewer who has brought POVs that up to now have been missing from the Pacifica Network.
Sarah’s “niche audience” is well served. The white characters are altruistic types, there to help downtrodden black people and are among those who are to be admired. They’re there to correct blacks when they make mistakes, like a white girl who shows up in a special education class out of nowhere to explain to the character Precious the difference between the word, “insect,” and “incest.” This also follows the Nazi model. Aryans were idealized; hated minorities were degenerate.
According to this film, if you’re a lucky black woman, a white man will rescue you from the clutches of evil black men, which is why white male critics are slobbering all over this film, giving it standing ovations and awards every day. Even white critics at hip places like The Rolling Stone, a place where Elvis gets credit for “changing American music.” This reminded me of Alice Walker’s appeal to white men to rescue black women, printed in a London newspaper and Steven Spielberg’s comment that when he read The Color Purple all he could do think of was rescuing Celie, the abused heroine (while he has yet to make a movie about the Celies among his ethnic group).
(The Huffington Post’s embrace of the film probably explains Arianna Huffington’s continued scolding of the president. During the week of Nov. 23, she called the president, one of the hardest working presidents in history, “lackadaisical,” which, to black people, who know the dog whistles, means lazy. Shiftless.)
The movie says that if a white knight is not around to sweep you up, maybe a fantasy light skinned boyfriend will do the job. The light skinned literacy teacher, whom the camera favors, and a firm welfare worker of the same skin tone, played by Mariah Carey, who has welfare recipients at her mercy, are among the movies positive characters, while black and brown skinned women are shown as petty, sullen, quick tempered and violent. They romp through the movie scowling and glaring at people and telling people things like “you ain’t shit.” This film includes the worst portrayal of black women I’ve ever seen, which makes The Root contributors– young black women professors- -endorsement of the film puzzling.
These are the types who are using the university curriculum to get even with their fathers and teach courses in black women’s literature, but can’t identify more than three. (The great novelist, the late Kristin Hunter Lattany, who was driven out of her college teaching job by a racist campaign [see her novel, Breaking Away] did not receive a single retrospective from these women.)
They don’t seem to read criticism by black women either. During an endorsement of Precious, one of them, writing in The Root, repeated the canard that only black men opposed The Color Purple, when the book and the movie offended some of the most prominent literary stars. Barbara Smith, Toni Morrison, Michele Wallace, and bell hooks, who described the film as “aversion therapy” for white women, are authors of scathing comments about the book and Steven Spielberg’s interpretation. Trudier Harris, next to Joyce Joyce, the most prominent of black women critics, said that she discontinued criticizing the book after retaliations from the powerful white feminist academic lobby.
Haven’t these The Root contributors read Walker’s “Stepping Into The Same River Twice” where Walker herself objects to Spielberg’s treatment of that book’s incestor, Mr.? Indeed Walker, Tina Turner and bell hooks have observed that in the hands of white male producers directors and scriptwriters, the black male characters in the texts of black women writers become even more sinister. The Root accompanied its brown nosing of the movie with a picture of Celie, played by Whoopie Goldberg ( who said that what Polanski did to that child was not “rape, rape”) holding a knife against Mr.’s neck. That scene doesn’t appear in the book. Spielberg put that knife in Celie’s hand. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. who has been appointed Commissar of African American culture said that those who criticized “The Color Purple” were “misguided.” Was he referring to Morrison? Wallace? hooks? I suspect that the whites who are behind Precious monkeyed around with the text as well. A film in which gays are superior to black male heterosexuals (“They don’t rape. They don’t sell crack.”). Next to the whites, the male who treats Precious and her dysfunctional friends with the most understanding is John John, the Gay male nurse.( Lee Daniels, the Gay “director” of the film once ran a nursing business.) In this movie Caribbean Americans are smarter than black Americans.
Oprah Winfrey is listed as the “Executive Director,” along with Tyler Perry, whose movie efforts have been described by writer Thembi Ford as “coonery.” This is the third black man as sexual predator and the second black incest film that Ms. Winfrey has either endorsed or performed in, yet, only a few titles by black male authors have been adopted by her book club. On Sunday, Nov. 23, during a phone interview with Keifer Bonvillin, author of Ruthless, an inside look at the Oprah operation, I asked him about her embrace of the black male as a sexual predator trope. He wrote:
“Last year, I published ‘Ruthless’, (a true story based on conversations I had with Oprah Winfrey’s office manager). The book detailed the unfair treatment African American men received from Oprah Winfrey and the negative stereotypical images of African American men that Oprah sent out in her films. The office manager also gave me a rare glance of Oprah Winfrey’s private life.
“This was the first time one of Oprah Winfrey’s employees spoke openly about her as they are prevented from doing so by strict confidentiality agreements. Oprah tried hard to block publication of the book. She and her attorney went so far as to have me arrested. The charges were dropped and the book was published.
“Since the publication of ‘Ruthless,’ I noticed several profound changes in the way Oprah Winfrey is doing business.
1) Oprah produced ‘The Great Debaters,’ which was the first film produced by Harpo Films (in my opinion) to not have negative stereotypical images of black men.
2) This season, Jay Z, became the first African American rap artist to perform on the Oprah Winfrey Show.
3) This season Oprah’s book club selection, ‘Say You’re One of Them,’ was written by a black man, Liwem Akpan. This was the first time in years a black man who is not one of Oprah’s friends was featured in the book club.
“I was very encouraged by what I was seeing. Then came ‘Precious!’ Like her addiction to food, Oprah does well for a little while but she just can’t help herself.”
Another reason that Ms. Winfrey supports the film is because she endorses the policy points the movie makes about welfare recipients. Precious is encouraged to take a job as home care worker for $2.00 per hour. Throughout the movie, poor women are guided to Work Fare. The movie almost becomes a commercial for the program. The policy message is that welfare recipients are black women who wish to avoid work, who use their time having sex with their daughters, watching television and dining on pig leavings. They don’t intervene when their boyfriends rape their children (even the grandmother refuses to intervene). Oprah’s attitude toward welfare recipients was described by Pat Gowens, editor of “Mother Warriors Voice.” She said that “Oprah Winfrey” is “someone who reinforces the U.S. war on the poor and unequivocally supports white male supremacy.” She writes about what happened to welfare mothers who were invited to appear on her show after threatening to picket the TV megastar.
“For 30 minutes before the show, Oprah’s cheerleader worked the audience into a frenzy of hatred against moms on welfare. When the show started, Welfare Warriors member Linda, an Italian American mom with 3 children, was sandwiched between two women who attacked and pitied her. The African American mom on her right claimed to have overcome her ‘sick dependence on welfare’ and bragged about cheating on welfare and allegedly living like a queen. The white woman on her left was not a mom but had once received food stamps. Both women aggressively condemned Linda for receiving welfare. Throughout the show Oprah alternated between attacking Linda and allowing panel and audience members to attack her. Poor Linda had been prepared to discuss the economic realities of mother work, the failures of both the U.S. workforce and the child support system, and the Welfare Warriors’ mission to create a Government Guaranteed Child Support program (Family Allowance) like those in Europe. But instead Linda was forced to defend her entire life, while Oprah repeatedly demanded, ‘How long have you been on welfare?’
“Later we complained to Oprah and her producer about the false promises they had used to lure us onto the show. (We had engaged in extensive negotiations prior to agreeing to appear. We said yes only after they agreed to discuss welfare reform, not our personal lives.) The producer shoved an Oprah cup (our pay) into our hands and pushed us out the door, angrily denying their treachery.
“By the time we arrived home, we had received calls from moms on both coasts warning us about the promos Oprah was using to advertise her show: ‘They call themselves welfare warriors and they refuse to work. See Oprah at 4:00.’”
Well, as my great grandmother often said, “If you dig a ditch for someone, dig two.” Kitty Kelley, winner of a PEN Oakland Award for censorship has an Oprah biography due from Crown. This might be Oprah’s ditch. The publication of this book is the real reason why Oprah is quitting her show. Kelley has never been sued for libel and her book about the Bush family was so hot ( and useful) that the Bush Klan succeeded in shutting it down with the help of Bush 1st’s golf caddy, NBC’s Matt Lauer. Editors of The New York Times Magazine section hold the same position about welfare recipients as Oprah.
I stopped reading The New York Times Magazine years ago weary of its parade of flesh eating black cannibals, lazy and shiftless welfare mothers. (The Times’ coverage of Africa could be written by Edgar Rice Burroughs.) It is a section of the newspaper where Daniel Moynihan is treated as some kind of Celtic god. This is the guy who accused unmarried black mothers of “speciation.”
A book promoted by the magazine in which all of the crack addicts were black and in which one photo showed a black crack addict, a mother, fellating a John while a baby was strapped to her back even offended Brent Staples, a black member of the editorial board. That crack is a black drug, exclusively, is just another media hoax meant to entertain whites of the kind that dates to the very beginning of the American mass media.
So I wasn’t surprised that the magazine section featured a spread about “Precious” featuring Gabourey Sidibe, the 350 pound actor in the title role, on the cover, certainly an act of black exploitation. However the interviewer, gossip writer Lynn Hirschberg, did perform a service by catching Lee Daniels, the “director” of Precious in a couple of exaggerations. In an effort to follow the marketing plan, the title of the article was “The Audacity of Precious,” after Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope” subtitled “Is America Ready For A Movie About An Obese Harlem Girl Raped And Impregnated By Her Abusive Father?” Lionsgate spent big bucks to advertise the movie in the Times.
During Lynn Hirschberg’s interview with Daniels, he claims that he directed Monster’s Ball, about a black woman so dimwitted that she begins a relationship with her husband’s white executioner (though as a porn movie it was superior to Co-Ed Confidential). The husband was played by Sean Puffy Combs.
Turns out that Daniels didn’t direct the film. It was directed by Marc Forster, a white director. So, did Daniels direct “Precious” or is he really playing the flak catcher for this heinous project like Oprah Winfrey and Perry? When he went on the set to exercise his role as “director” did the white people who own the movie and provide the crew for this film call security? Hard to say.
He also said that he grew up in the ghetto. His aunt disputes this. The Times has printed no less than four articles all of which have either praised Precious, or gave those who defend the movie the most lines. Two were written by A.O. Scott, who said that this movie about fictional characters was part of a “national conversation about race.” This is the problem with films like “Precious.” White critics like A.O. Scott, who hog all the criticism space as black, Hispanic, and Asian American journalists are being fired in droves, get a chance to pick and choose which cultural products that will ignite a discussion about race usually ones that show blacks as depraved individuals, individuals that are used to blame black men and in this case black women, collectively. He suggests that based upon a movie adapted from a fiction, all black males are incest violators, the kind of group libel aimed at the brothers when Gloria Steinem said that The Color Purple told the truth about black men.
Why didn’t Dexter, Paris Trout or Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out Of Carolina, begin “a national conversation,” about race? Ted Turner tried to suppress Bastard Out Of Carolina, this white incest film and only through the intervention of Anjelica Huston was the film aired. Turner pronounced it too graphic to be shown on his network CNN, which poses blacks as degenerates 24/7. In several states, Bastard has been banned from classrooms and school libraries.
Also, why doesn’t the Times open its Jim Crow Op Ed page so that a member of Precious’s target, black men, as a class, could respond to this smear, this hate crime as entertainment, this Neo Nazi porn and filth. There are hundreds of black male intellectuals (yes, black men are more than athletes, criminals and entertainers) who would take up the challenge. But the Op Ed page is only open to one black writer, consistently–Orlando Patterson–, who, like the ‘20s writer Claude McKay, is the kind of Jamaican who has nothing but contempt for African Americans.
Sapphire (Ramona Lofton), who wrote the novel Push, also has a biography like Daniel’s that shifts about. First she told Dinitia Smith of the Times (July 2, 1996) that Precious was an actual person. “She lives there,” she said, “pointing at a dowdy building over a check cashing store.” Don’t you think that if such a person existed that Lionsgate would include her in its marketing plan so ubiquitous that an ad for this film appears on my email screen when I sign in at AOL. It figures that AOL’s expert on black culture and politics is DNesh D’Souza .Their coverage of black culture is limited to black NFL and NBA athletes who get into trouble outside of strip clubs.
Part of the packaging of both the novel and the film has been to cash in the culture of recovery. Sapphire says that she was a former prostitute and a victim of incest (Lee Daniels does his pity party routine during the Times’ interview). She also said that she is a recovering lesbian. In 1986, she began to “remember things.” “An incident of violent sexual abuse “ when she was “3 or 4.” Her father, an Army Sergeant, denied her claim. He died in 1990. (Lee Daniels also “remembered” abuse by his father. I wonder what his aunt would say.)
Her “remembering things,” and being inspired by two other profitable black incest products led Alfred Knopf to give her a $500,000 advance for two books one of which, entitled “American Dreams” included a poem called “Wild Thing,” which blamed the rape of a Central Park Jogger on black boys.
As Steven Spielberg put the knife in Celie’s hand, Sapphire put a rock and pipe into the hands of boys who spent their youth in jail for a crime that they didn’t commit. She has her narrator say: “ I bring the rock down/ on her head/sounds dull & flat/like the time I busted/the kitten’s head/the blood is real and red/my dick rises.” She has one of the defendants,Yusef Salaam, participating in the rape.“Yosef slams her/ across the face with a pipe.” Yusef Salaam served 5 and ½ years. Do you think that Sapphire might make up to Mr. Salaam for destroying his reputation in a book for which she received $500,000. And what about Naomi Wolfe and other millionaire feminists whose agitation helped to convict these innocent kids. Maybe they can join Sapphire in setting up a trust fund for these victims who grew up in Jail. And what about Linda Fairstein? She got rich, too.
Called a “Zealot, Crusader, and Megalomaniac,” Linda Fairstein, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Sex Crimes Unit, often shown as an “ultra-blond” in an “air-brushed” photo, saw prosecuting these children as a step toward fame and fortune. In the words of Rivka Gerwirtz Little, author of “Ash-Blond Ambition, Prosecutor Linda Fairstein May Have Tried Too Hard” (Village Voice,11/19/02) they were convicted as a result of the zealousness of the ambitious prosecutor, the Jim Crow media, which found them guilty and contributed to the hysteria surrounding the case ,and by New York feminists, black and white. (Donald Trump wanted the children to get the death penalty.) Little writes,
“The men in all of these cases, who were convicted despite the existence of exculpatory evidence, still see Fairstein and her minions as either zealots or headline seekers, pursuing verdicts that would appease the outraged public. Oliver Jovanovic thinks Fairstein was also making literary hay from her cases.
“Jovanovic, the Columbia University microbiology Ph.D. candidate dubbed the ‘cybersex’ attacker, who was convicted and sentenced to 15 years to life in prison for kidnapping and sexually torturing a Barnard undergraduate ‘had his own run in with Fairstein.’ After he served nearly two years of his prison term, an appeals court overturned his conviction in 1999, again saying that crucial evidence was withheld during the trial that could have shown Jovanovic and his accuser had a consensual sadomasochistic relationship, or that she simply fabricated the story. Morgenthau dismissed the case before a pending retrial in 2001.”
“Each time one of these cases occurred, her books probably went flying off the shelves,” says Jovanovic.
“She used what happened in that unit to make money, and that is wrong she earned, according to The New York Times, $2.5 million in sales by 1999.”
Little also questioned the rush to judgment of feminists in the case in her, “How Feminists Faltered on the Central Park Jogger Case” (Village Voice, 10/15/02)
“Feminists who rallied on the courthouse stairs outside the 1990 trial of five African American and Latino youth accused in the Infamous rape and beating of the 28-year-old Central Park jogger made It painfully clear-there was a choice to make: gender or race. With flimsy evidence and an almost immediate indictment by the public, advocates for the teens believed they were easy lynch victims and demanded further Investigation and fair trials. But to some feminists, bringing up ‘the race issue’ muddled the case and detracted from the bottom-line issue-violence against women and justice for the victim.
“Thirteen years after the teens were convicted, DNA evidence and a confession to the crime by Matias Reyes, a convicted rapist behind bars, indicate a strong possibility that the five accused-who walked into prison as boys and emerged years later as men-would have been a worthy cause for any left activist group to champion. In the jogger case, no one even considered their five mothers a cause for feminists, though with little money or proper representation, they saw their sons railroaded, and the media portrayed them as out-of-control ghetto mamas.” The young men, who went to prison as children, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kharey Wise, and Yusef Salaam, received from 5 ½ to 13 years.
Because of his defense of the poem “Wild Thing” by Sapphire (Ramona Lofton), printed in a literary journal, the Portable Lower East Side, which “was a graphic depiction of the thoughts of a participant in the rape and beating of a Central Park jogger,” according to The Washington Post, John Frohnmayer, was fired as head of the National Endowment of the Arts. During an appearance before the National Press Club, he warned that “the political battle over the NEA [was] part of a broader cultural war and invoked the specter of the Nazis’ takeover of Europe to underscore his point.” Another technique the Nazis used, whether Frohnmayer knows it, was to blame their enemies for crimes they didn’t commit like the burning of the Reichstag, which is what happened in the Central Park Case. The “wilders,” it turned out were innocent. When Little called to ask feminists who judged the children guilty, when no forensic evidence tied them to the rape, and after Matias Reyes confessed to the crime (his semen matched that collected from the jogger) only one would respond. Susan Brownmiller, who libeled all black men as rapists in her book, Against Our Will, was a holdout.
She said that regardless of the scientific evidence pointing away from the guilt of the five, she still believed that they were guilty. I wonder was Sapphire called. I wonder how she feels about her poem. I wonder whether we would have found out if Katie Couric had given her the kind of grilling that she gave Sarah Palin. One of the reasons that Bryant Gumbel left NBC was that Couric was chosen to interview O.J. Simpson instead of him.
Sapphire, who helped to set up these children ,the way that she and her cynical backers like Sarah Siegel, whose depiction of black men is worse than those found in American Renaissance magazine, have set up black men. In Precious the out of control ghetto mama whom they market is played by Monique. Carl, her husband, who commits the unspeakable, is Sapphire and Sarah Siegel’s “Wild Thing.”
I asked D. Scott Miller, a writer for the San Francisco Bay Guardian his take on the different biographies of Ramona Lofton. He said,
“I would say that her bio has been shortened and extended when it’s convenient.
“Here’s the opening of her Amazon Bio:
‘Sapphire was born in 1950 and spent her first twelve years on army bases in California and Texas. As a teenager she lived in South Philadelphia and Los Angeles. She graduated from City College in New York and received an MFA from Brooklyn College. From 1983 to 1993 she lived in Harlem, where she taught reading and writing to teenagers and adults. She lives in New York City.’
“Here’s the opening of her bio post-push, but pre-Precious:
‘Ramona Lofton, better known to her readers as Sapphire, was born in 1950 in Fort Ord California. On the surface, her family was characterized as normal and middle class. Her father was an army sergeant and her mother was a member of the Women’s Army Corps. As a child, Sapphire’s family relocated several time to various cities, states, and countries. When she was only 13 years old, Sapphire’s mother became the victim of “alcoholism and eventually departed from her life. Her mother died in 1983. In that same year, her brother, who was then homeless was killed in a public park.’
“I would not say that she is lying, or even stretching the truth. But I see a difference. Don’t know which one she’s using right now.”
I wasn’t surprised that NPR’s Terry Gross would become part of the film’s promotion. I stopped listening to her years ago because she seemed to have a thing about casting all black men as sexual predators.
She once maneuvered a famous black writer into directing her wrath against her father toward all black men and when a woman from South Africa was brought on to discuss the rapes occurring in that country, Gross asked whether rape in that country was interracial. The woman answered that white men rape too, which seemed to come as a surprise to Ms. Gross. When whatever is bothering Ms. Gross about black men gains entry in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, maybe the editors will name it after her. Gross’s Syndrome. Or maybe she and Ms. Brownmiller can flip a coin.
I only tuned into Ms. Gross’s interview with Daniels because poet Al Young called and asked me to do so. It was instructive. The NPR airwaves were full of giggles as they carried on their dialogue. At one point, she asked whether violence among blacks is cultural. He said that it was hereditary, thereby signing on to about two centuries of quack race “science” and a Neo-Nazi line promoted by the Times’ Sam Robert’s who once wrote that blacks were “prone” to violence and by the Op Ed pages’ token black contributor, Orlando Patterson, who wrote recently as though violence is black.
This in a country where the National Rifle Association owns or intimidates every politician but Michael Bloomberg; where one hundred million guns are available and where accidental deaths by gunshots in white homes dwarfs those occurring in the inner city, which is not to excuse such deaths, which lead to high homicide rates.
One of the reasons is that the police, white and suburban, have a poor record of solving urban crimes and as a result of NAFTA, thousands have joined the underground economy (in Oakland ,where I live, only 37% of homicides are solved; in nearby Danville, an affluent city, when a white youth’s murder resulted from a drug transaction gone wrong, 11 detectives were assigned to the case, and the killer was caught the next day).
Daniels and Gross’s discussion about the black violence gene occurred at a time when The National Association of Black Journalists was criticizing NPR for its firing of black personnel. And so when the Times and the producers of Precious are profiting from stereotypes that reach back to the Enlightenment, they receive an endorsement from NPR whose “Ghetto 101,” produced by the late Ellen Willis, was one of the most offensive of black pathology ratings boosters and money makers. Violence?
The white majority has given mandates to policies that have resulted in the murders of millions of people since World War II.
While white male critics are campaigning feverishly to land one of two Oscars for Precious, the dissent from some black critics has been blistering. Most notably Armond White who, as a result of his review printed in The New York Press has become a folk hero among young black cyberspace intellectuals of the kind who are making a comeback after about twenty years of the left and right establishments laying black intellectuals on us who sing from the song book as they. One of those who praised White’s review printed in The New York Press, was Kofi Natambu the brilliant young editor of The Panopticon Review. I asked him what he thought was behind Precious:
“The withering contempt and sheer malice for black people (and especially black men) that this film represents and embodies is an integral part of a very disturbing and destructive trend among a number of cultural hustlers, thieves, and conmen and women in film, literature, theatre, and the music industry that is being vigorously promoted and marketed by white corporations and Madison Avenue. It’s no coincidence that the increasingly casual and overt racism that is routinely displayed in advertising and the media generally is working hand in glove with the contemptible and venal likes of artistic pimps and prostitutes like Lee Daniels, Tyler Perry, and Oprah Winfrey. This development has been dismissing, marginalizing, and destroying the impact and influence of genuine African American artists in all the arts now since the mid ’90s and has in the past decade reached its vicious apex in the heinous “work” of such black retrograde and reactionary assholes as the people producing and directing this film. Remember Percival Everett’s brilliant novel from 2001 called “Erasure?” Remember his devastating critique of this nexus of white racism and black minstrel confidence schemes in his rendering of the phony black author (who sounds a LOT like Sapphire!) called ‘My Pafology?’ as now this is what this ugly marriage between the white corporate media and Uncle Tom/Aunt Thomasina minstrelism has come to in the modern world. If something is not done to stem this tide it’s only going to get worse and soon.
“My Pafology indeed.”
Armond White wrote:
“Winfrey, Perry and Daniels make an unholy triumvirate. They come together at some intersection of race exploitation and opportunism. These two media titans—plus one shrewd pathology pimp—use Precious to rework Booker T. Washington’s early 20th-century manifesto Up From Slavery into extreme drama for the new millennium: Up From Incest, Child Abuse, Teenage Pregnancy, Poverty and AIDS. Regardless of its narrative details about class and gender, Precious is an orgy of prurience. All the terrible, depressing (not uplifting) things that happen to 16year-old Precious recall that memorable All About Eve line, “Everything but the bloodhounds nipping at her rear-end.’”
As a result of his dissent A.O. Scott dismissed Armond White as “a contrarian” which means that his conclusions about the film differed from those of white critics. The late Tillie Olson, a genuine progressive, had it right when she pointed out, sagaciously, in The New York Time’s Magazine, that many whites engage in a perverse voyeurism when viewing black culture.
They want to peek behind the curtains of black life to seek confirmation that all of the myths they’ve heard about black life are true. Richard Wright said that “The Negro is America’s metaphor.” More like America’s anti-depressant. People who are miserable in their own lives getting off by consuming black depravity, a big business. The audience at the 2:00 matinee that I attended was 90% white, the marketer’s “niche” audience. Not only did I have to swallow this seedy material for the purpose of entering this review in my forthcoming book, Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media, subtitled The Return of the Nigger Breakers, but was assaulted by two offensive previews: Clint Eastwood’s movie about Nelson Mandela and Disney’s The Princess and the Frog, a black Princess this time, which, judging from the trailers, will be a remake of Song of the South. In the film, Iku (“eniti ile re mbe lagbedemeji aiye on orun”), the top- hatted mythological figure from the Yoruba religion is depicted as evil (in the film he is Doctor Facilier, “A schemer, a conjurer and a sorcerer of sorts”) ,and a follower of Oshun, a water spirit, with thousands of followers in this hemisphere, is caricatured, in the movie. In the movie her name is Mama Odie. It’s bad enough that Oprah endorses the stupid and mindless Precious but then she has to go perform for Disney. A project that demeans African Religion. And has already criticized by some blacks for the black Princess lacking a black male love interest. The Daily Mail reported on 18th March 2009
“With America’s first African-American president in the White House, Disney is counting on an African-American princess to be a big hit in Hollywood.
“But even though The Princess and the Frog isn’t released until later this year, it is already stirring up controversy.
“For while Princess Tiana and many in the cartoon cast are black – the prince is not.
“Which has led some critics to complain that Disney has ducked the opportunity for a fairytale ending for a black prince and princess.”
Both directors and all of the screen writers for this movie are white men. I recommend that they and Oprah read William Bascom”s “ Sixteen
Cowries, Yoruba Divination From Africa To The New World.”
This kind of ridiculing of black culture is nothing new for Disney. In a 1932 cartoon Mickey and Minnie were pitted against “fierce niggers.”
The opinions of black movie goers about Precious probably concur with those of White and Courtland Milloy. Courtland Milloy of The Washington Post wrote:
“I watched the movie at a theater in Alexandria where showtimes are nearly around the clock, from 10:15 a.m. to 12:15 a.m. The audience was mostly black women and teenagers. When the lights came up, all of the moviegoers appeared sullen and depressed that I attended.”
Milloy continued:
“After escaping the abuse of her home life, Precious ends up in a halfway house. She is still functionally illiterate and has two babies to care for, one with Down syndrome.
“Strangest of all, many reviewers felt the movie ended on a high note. Time, for instance, wrote that Precious “makes an utterly believable and electrifying rise from an urban abyss of ignorance and neglect.
“Excuse me, the movie ends with the girl walking the streets, babies in her arms, having just learned that her father has died of AIDS — but not before infecting her.”
As a weak justification, and following the prompting of Geoffrey Gilmore, Lee Daniels told the Times interviewer that he was mindful that the movie contained stereotypes but that was ok because we have a black president, which must thrill the birthers, the tea baggers, those who create posters in which Obama appears as witchdoctor, a Muslim and the joker. On Nov.23 some wingnut put up a picture of Michelle Obama as a monkey at Goggle. The haters of the Obama must really feel in vogue thanks to Daniels.
Another part of the pitch is that the men in the film could be men of any ethnic group a sales pitch used by Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage for her theatrical products, praised by some the same types who are crazy about Precious. Atlanta Constitution columnist Cynthia Tucker received a Pulitzer for referring to black men as “idle” and “bestial” and they awarded Janet Cooke one for making up a story about black parents who were so rotten that they made heroin available to an eight year old, over the objection of a black panelist who smelled a fraud.Three great playwrights, Adrienne Kennedy, Ed Bullins and Amiri Baraka have never received a Pulitzer. These black men on the screen or on the stage doing terrible things to women could be Bosnians so the line goes.
In her interview with Daniels, Lynn Hirschberg said something similar: “Precious is a stand-in for anyone — black, white, male, female — who has ever been devalued or underestimated.”
To which Milloy answered:
“Let’s see: I lose my job, so I take in a movie about a serially abused black girl and I go, ‘Oh, swell, she’s standing in for me.’
“Maybe there is something to the notion that when human pathology is given a black face, white people don’t have to feel so bad about their own. At least somebody’s happy.
“Sexual abuse is certainly an equal-opportunity crime, with black and white women similarly affected. But only exaggerated black depravity seems to resonate so forcefully in the imagination.”
Will the “niche” audience for which this movie is intended ever become weary of the brothers being symbol of universal male misogyny? The face on the bull’s-eye at which disgruntled feminists from all ethnic groups aim their arrows, women who are scared to challenge the misogyny practiced by males who share their background? Judging from the box office receipts, maybe not. As of Nov. 22, three weeks after the debut of the film, box office receipts totaled a gross of $21,277,521.
What is the solution offered by the people behind this film for the millions of blacks who are suffering from a depression during white America’s recession? After a hurried flurry of images belonging to Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Shirley Chisholm, Precious becomes redeemed by semi-literacy and black pride. The film’s true ending occurs when Precious and her mother engage in furious battle; the black pride part seems forced. After the mother/ daughter battle, the movie lingers like a wounded animal that nobody has the nerve to put out of its misery. Even more dreadful was somebody’s idea to tack on one of these trite sistuh solidarity songs.
What else do the film makers recommend that the underclass do, people who in the movie go into stores and rob and down a whole bucket of fried chicken, an image borrowed from The Birth of a Nation? Go to church and get sterilized which is the subtle Eugenics message that appears on a sign, “Spay and Neuter Your Pets,” as Precious and her two children travel to their new apartment.
According to Stefan Kuhl in his book, The Nazi Connection, Eugenics, American Racism and German National Socialism sterilization is an idea that the Germans borrowed from the United States as a way of ending the reproduction of unwanted groups. People who possess a violence gene?
In the mid-seventies, the late Chester Himes predicted that the Establishment was trying to start a war between black men and women. They succeed by treating both groups as opposing sports teams. And so while Armond White has been denounced by defenders of the movie, many of them women, and whites who consider him “contrarian,” the woman who put up the money, Sarah Siegel, has chosen to remain in the background. None of the exchanges I’ve read even mention her name. While the print and blog war over Precious rages on, she relaxes in her mansion, counting the profits from her Gold Mine of Opportunity: Precious; which is to blacks what Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ was to Jews.
Finally, who will market the next black movie that white audiences will pay to see? MSNBC has been drawing a lot of laughs from the same demographic by running a story about a black man who has been arrested twice for having intercourse with a horse and infecting the horse. Even the token progressives on MSNBC favor this story. I’ll bet somebody is working on the screenplay and the niche marketing for the film. Sarah, you listening?
This terrible news that came to me the other day was about my friend Lisa Jordan—a giver, a grower of bonsais, she made her own soap, she macrameed dream catchers, she pressed leaves in rice paper notebooks, she’d make “coins” out of clay with her own insignias and mottos. One time we gave some to Richie Havens at a concert and he was so pleased he gave her an open-mouthed smile, which was intimate because he was missing teeth, but he didn’t hold back. I’m still waiting to hear the circumstances of her death, but just the fact of it has laid me low. We used to hang out in the ceramics studio together in high school. I had no talent in that department; I just liked being there. But Lisa did, and you have to imagine her then—six-feet tall, lithe-limbed, short red curly hair, green eyes, a perfectly bowed mouth—she was an extraordinary beauty, graceful, catlike, she went on to become a Vogue model in Paris. In Paris!
I would sit on the stool at the high metal table working at my little slab and coil pots but she’d be at the wheel. Comrades, she could throw fifty pounds of clay! She was the only girl who could. She’d put her whole body into the effort, her feet pumping the pedal to make the wheel turn faster, her long arms pulling the form up, hands smashing it back down, umpteen times, until she felt it was as it should be. At a certain point she couldn’t stay seated and she would rise up and kind of half hover over the wheel, the whole length of one arm up to her armpit inside the massive urn.
Ach, that is terrible, CDS Frances. Any more stories about her? Any images of her work?
Thank you so much for that offer, CDS Steven. This is all I can manage right now. The past tense is so wrong for her.
I understand, CDS Frances! Whenever you’re ready to, we’ll present-tense her on TET. You’re the writer to pull it off. Do an Orpheus.
THE FICTIVE IN A SIMULOCRACY: Part Five: Role Playing
Item #2:
from
Understanding
the F-Word
David McGowan
American Fascism and
the Politics of Illusion
from chapter one
The first step towards understanding what we are as a nation (though not as a people), and what we stand for, is to clearly define exactly what fascism is. To do so, I can think of no better authority to turn to than the Webster’s New World Dictionary, apparently the self-proclaimed wordsmiths of the New World Order, which offers the following definition:
fascism: a system of government characterized by rigid one-party dictatorship, forcible suppression of opposition, private economic enterprise under centralized government control, belligerent nationalism, racism, and militarism, etc.
It should be readily apparent that some aspects of this definition, most notably the notion of private economic enterprise, bear an uncomfortable similarity to the American ‘democratic’ system. Luckily, though, the people at Webster’s realize that changing times sometimes require changing definitions.
In truth, the definition above is not the current one offered by Websters, but is taken from an ancient 1980 edition of the New World Dictionary, hardly relevant to today’s modern world. A more recent variation, taken from the 1990 edition, shows that a not-so-subtle change has occurred in the definition of, if not the practice of, fascism:
fascism: a system of government characterized by dictatorship, belligerent nationalism and racism, militarism, etc.
Gone now is that whole unpleasantness about private economic enterprise that might have, perhaps, struck a little too close to home. So we can all sleep well knowing that even as the country creeps ever closer to overt fascism, Webster’s will thoughtfully rewrite the dictionary so that we may maintain a comfortable distance between ourselves and the dreaded f-word…
Now some may argue that this tendency to rewrite the dictionary – to rewrite history if you will – is in-and-of itself indicative of fascism. While a perfectly reasonable argument, a much better case can be made that America is indeed a fascist state by comparing actual conditions in the U.S. today with Webster’s authoritative definition.
from chapter three
[ed.'s note: need we point out the necessity of substituting the current Demoblican President, where relevant, for the one that was in office when this piece was written...?]
The One-Party State?
The commercial press, in another of its brazen hypocritical proclamations, points with pride to the fact that it is free because it upholds a free system in which there are two political parties. But there is probably not one member of the A.N.P.A. (American Newspaper Publishers Association) who does not know that the Republican and Democratic parties both feed out of the same bag provided by the monied system, and that the same persons frequently subscribe funds to both major parties … They know this very well, and they also know very well that the press has never given honest news coverage to the formation, platform and campaign of any third party which was independent enough not to feed on the same money.
-George Seldes, Facts and Fascism, 1943
First of all, we all know that America is not a one-party state; it’s a two-party state. Or maybe three, if you count Ross Perot’s Reform Party, though precisely what it is about the current system that they intend to ‘reform’ is not exactly clear.
What should be abundantly clear to any clear-headed American by this time is that there is absolutely no substantive difference between the two major political parties in this country. This has been noted with increasing frequency by various writers, who have dubbed the emerging one-size-fits-all party the Republicrats.
It is my belief, in fact, that the Republican and Democratic Parties do not actually exist. And the notion that the U.S. federal government operates as some sort of give-and-take between the Democratic/liberal agenda, and the Republican/conservative agenda, is pure fantasy.
This is not to suggest that among the people in this nation who consider themselves Democrats and Republicans there are no legitimate differences of opinion. Most certainly there are. But I am suggesting that at the highest levels of government, where the agenda setting power lies, there is no such thing as a Democratic agenda and a Republican agenda – there is only the agenda, and the only debate is over how rapidly the agenda can be implemented while still maintaining the illusion of democracy.
And make no mistake about it, maintaining the illusion is of paramount importance. That is why it is essential that prominent men with virtually identical ideologies must pretend to be political rivals and to deeply despise one another. The bitter bipartisanship that ripples through Washington on a regular basis assures us that differing viewpoints are being heard, and that at least some of those in Washington represent our point of view.
Indeed, were it not for the relentless attacks upon Bill Clinton by the rabid right-wingers that have dogged him since his taking office, how would we even know that Clinton was a liberal? You would certainly be hard pressed to ascertain that fact from the record of his administration.
Oh sure, he fooled us at first. We all saw how hip he was blowing his sax on Arsenio’s late night show and dancing to Fleetwood Mac at his inauguration. We all heard him deny that he inhaled, though of course we all knew that he had. And we all heard about how he had protested the Vietnam War, on foreign soil no less. Hell, this guy was so liberal he was practically guilty of treason.
And we had hope in the early days of his administration as he set about as though he were going to reform health care and address the issue of gays in the military. But then a funny thing happened. After faltering on both of these issues, the Clinton administration quickly set about implementing the most reactionary agenda of any president in modern history.
In fact, Clinton has instituted ‘reforms’ that remained mere wet dreams for his Republican predecessors, including the decimation of the welfare system. He has done more to militarize the nation’s police forces than any president in history. By the time he leaves office, the number of Americans incarcerated will have nearly doubled.
The use of the death penalty has skyrocketed during his tenure, with its use expanded to cover more crimes, and with appeals of death penalty cases severely limited. His time in office has also seen the country increasingly execute juvenile offenders, and to increasingly incarcerate minors as adults.
Privatization of prisons, a movement that was just taking baby steps under the Reagan and Bush administrations, has flourished under Clinton. So too has the use of inmate labor by private corporations as a form of ersatz slave labor.
The sales of arms to foreign regimes – already at a high level during the Bush administration – doubled in Clinton’s first year in office alone. And the militarization of foreign policy has far surpassed what the belligerent Bush team was able to achieve. In one seven month period, the Clinton White House conducted aerial bombing assaults against no fewer than four sovereign nations: Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan, and the Sudan. All of these were conducted in rather flagrant disregard for international law.
Clinton has also – aside from conducting a full scale war of his own in Yugoslavia – continued George Bush’s punitive war against Iraq. By the time he leaves office, well over a million Iraqis will have died on his watch, considerably more than were killed in the initial air war by his predecessor.
In Haiti and Somalia as well, Clinton has shown a willingness, an eagerness even, to use military force. He has also presided over an unprecedented erosion of the judicial system and a vast undermining of privacy rights. Social spending has become almost non-existent and the Dow Jones has become the only relevant economic indicator.
Clinton has also been an unapologetic backer of globalization. Whether it’s NAFTA or GATT or the WTO, this administration has never met a free trade bill or organization it didn’t like. Wealth has been concentrated during Clinton’s tenure on a scale never before seen in history, as the gap between rich and poor widens with each passing week.
As for the enforcement of anti-trust legislation, forget it. The show trial of Microsoft notwithstanding, this administration has allowed the biggest mergers in history, with each year continuing to set new records, most recently with the joining of Time-Warner and AOL. Environmental protections? None to be seen. Labor standards and protections? Not likely.
The truth about the record of this administration is that any Republican on earth would be delighted to leave office with such a legacy. Clinton has without a doubt been the best friend in Washington that the ‘conservatives’ could have ever hoped for. Which brings up the obvious question of why so many of them have such an apparent disdain for the man.
The first answer which came to mind when pondering this question was that they were just jealous of Bill for being a better Republican than they were. And then, as if suddenly struck by a divine insight, it came to me. I now know the answer to the question of why the conservatives in Washington hate Bill Clinton.
The answer is that there is no answer to that question because it is not a valid question. It is not a valid question because it is based on a false premise. For the dirty little secret is that the right-wingers don’t hate Bill Clinton. They love the guy. And why shouldn’t they? He has, after all, pursued ‘their’ agenda, and done so with nary a whimper of protest from the American left.
But why then, the question is begged, has the Republican Right done everything in its power to discredit, embarrass, and bring about the early demise of this administration? Because, strange as it may initially sound, that is precisely why Clinton has been so successful in pursuing such a reactionary agenda.
The truth of the matter is that without the constant broadsides launched at the White House, Clinton would have long ago ceased to pass for anything remotely resembling a liberal. Those of the political left who initially supported the new administration would have quickly abandoned the course it chose to follow. The only reason that Clinton has held the support of these factions, as well as of more mainstream Democrats for that matter, is precisely because of the constant attacks.
After all, the reasoning goes, if he is so thoroughly despised by the most intolerant right-wing extremists on Capitol Hill, then surely he must be a liberal. At the very least, one is left to conclude, he is the lesser of two evils, and any enemy of those guys must surely be an ally of mine.
And so this president has held the support of centrists and leftists alike, even as he has waged acts of war around the world, gutted domestic spending, given no more than lip service to social issues, and facilitated the rise of the prosecutorial police state. Even those who seriously question the policies of Clinton have surmised that things could only be worse with a Republican in the White House.
This may well be a false notion. The truth could very well be that we have fared considerably worse with a ‘Democrat.’ For it is precisely because Clinton is perceived as such that he has ‘succeeded’ in areas in which his Republican predecessors had failed. A Republican president, for instance, would not have been able to destroy the welfare state without invoking the wrath of the American people.
Neither would he be able to routinely wage acts of war, seemingly on a whim. Lefties are instinctively on alert for such shenanigans by Republican presidents. But when a ‘liberal’ embarks on such missions, we tend to give him the benefit of the doubt. Even when that liberal is actually a conservative Republican.
In retrospect, we should have known something was amiss right away. A rather odd, but seemingly trivial aspect of the 1992 presidential campaign that brought Clinton to power should have signaled to America that something wasn’t quite right about the American political landscape.
The event referred to actually occurred after the close of the campaign, when the bright lights were mostly turned away. This was when Clinton’s campaign manager, James Carville, and Bush’s campaign manager, Mary Matalin – who had just conducted a no-holds barred, anything goes, win-at-all-costs mudfest – decided to cap off the campaign by getting married.
Nothing unusual about that, right? We all know that opposites attract. Even when those opposites have just devoted a considerable amount of energy to, by appearances anyway, completely destroying the reputations and careers of the other’s candidate and campaign team. Even when those opposites are allegedly fiercely opposed to the other’s ideology and have absolutely no respect for the integrity of the other’s mission.
It does seem just a bit odd, however, that two such opposites would even have the opportunity to attract one another in the course of such a vicious campaign. How is it even possible that they could have interacted on a level that would have fostered a personal, let alone an intimate, relationship?
Unless, that is, the adversarial nature of this particular campaign, and of political campaigns in general, was largely an illusion – a sham foisted on the people to foster the perception that the American political system is based on deep divisions between competing political parties and ideologies.
This is precisely why nearly all political campaigns for major office in this country quickly degenerate into mud-slinging contests. In truth, this is the only way that the illusion of diversity can be maintained. The issues are rarely discussed because, quite frankly, there is nothing to discuss.
All of the ‘major party’ candidates are in agreement on all the issues of any real significance. They cannot differentiate between themselves and create the illusion of a meaningful choice to voters by discussing issues on which they all agree, and so they agree to disagree on a few largely inconsequential issues, and throw up a smokescreen of salacious allegations.
In this way, it is hoped, the voting public will be deceived into believing that they are being offered a legitimate choice between competing ideologies. For surely there must be marked differences between these men, or why else would they hate each other so?
The truth is that they hate one another only in the sense that ‘professional’ wrestlers hate their rivals. I hate to be the one to pull the curtain back on the wizard, but it’s all for show, folks. When the lights go up and the curtain drops down, they’re all friends again.
In the case of the aforementioned 1992 election contest between George Bush and Bill Clinton, for example, abundant evidence has been presented by researchers that suggests that the two bitter ‘rivals’ had a rather cozy relationship extending back to Clinton’s days as governor of Arkansas.
It seems that the good governor was considerate enough to allow his state to be used as a base for George and Ollie’s illegal Contra operations. From an airfield in Mena, Arkansas weapons were flown out of the country and drugs were flown back in. This, of course, required the full knowledge and protection of the governor’s office. Especially when the Contra team began flying recruits in for training in a covert training camp.
These types of operations tend to involve a lot of cash, and this one was no exception. Some of this naturally found its way into the hands of the governor. Luckily the Rose Law Firm, where his wife and good friends Web Hubbell and Vince Foster happened to work, were very good at laundering these types of soiled profits.
But Bill Clinton earned more than just some extra cash from his complicity in this sordid affair. More importantly, he also gained important connections to George Bush and his inner circle, and very likely earned the right to pose as the Democratic candidate in the 1992 election.
Bill Clinton’s role in that election campaign, essentially, was as an insurance policy for the Bush camp. Clinton was propped up as the ‘Democratic’ alternative to Bush, in the event that the electorate sought a more ‘liberal’ alternative to the then current administration.
In reality, the choice faced by voters in the 1992 election was between the real George Bush, and the George Bush surrogate named Bill Clinton. The only change in the agenda seems to have been an acceleration in the erosion of democratic rights under the cover of a ‘liberal’ administration.
I am not suggesting here, mind you, that the 1992 election was unusual, in the sense that there was something that set it apart from other presidential elections. Or from most gubernatorial and Congressional elections, for that matter. I’m actually suggesting that they are all pretty much of a sham.
That’s why it shouldn’t have surprised anyone to see President Clinton, following his 2000 State of the Union address, walking arm-in-arm with former Klansman Strom Thurmand and glad-handing some of the most openly fascistic elements of the U.S. government, men who had just the year before been all but calling for his public execution.
And it also shouldn’t surprise anyone when the losers in any given primary campaign predictably endorse and embrace the candidacy of the party front-runner, even when those same losers had previously denounced their party rival as the spawn of Satan. They all know that it’s just a game and that all will be forgiven.
Of course the press will feign amazement over how quickly the bitter divisions have been mended, but they too know how the game is played, they just don’t want to spoil the fun for the rest of us. So they play along, and try to paint as stark a contrast between the opposing candidates as they can.
The Most Creepily Humorous Thing I’ve Read in a Week
There are two things that seperate “us” from “you people.” The first is that we acknowledge the importance and understanding that all men actualize out of instinct andself-interest. The second is that we have more frontal white matter. You know, that stuff that seperates homosapien sapiens from apes? Your activism will hardly prevent evolution unless of course you think you can bring back the witch burnings and crusade against us. I don’t forsee that for you.
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6 lol // Mar 24, 2009 at 5:01 pm
Also, your paintbrush.exe anti-devil logo is absolutely hilarious. No, really…it is.
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7 swivelchair // Mar 24, 2009 at 8:00 pm
lol, thank you for your comments.
Readers: Usual disclaimer, I have no idea who is for real and who isn’t.
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16 anonypath? // May 30, 2009 at 5:33 pm
I’m curious about your stance on sociopathy, particularly the notion that its presence is like life itself: present or totally absent. I’ve considered for some time now that I may be a sociopath, but I don’t believe I deserve the demonization you’re preaching here. I don’t experience love, compassion, or genuine remorse for anything I’ve done, and I’m never satisfied with anything I have; however, I don’t go around causing problems for other people, either. I was just about to lie about the reason I hold back, without even really realizing it (it’s hard not to), but since this is anonymous, I’ll do my best to speak frankly. I want to be liked, and I want to be trusted. It’s only logical that at some point, somewhere, somehow, someone will pick up on a lie or subconsciously realize that I’m trying to manipulate them. It won’t take long before a) nobody likes or trusts me or b) I’m spending 90% of my energy trying to maintain appearances. In the end, I find it’s far more reasonable to follow a hard set of ethics guided by logic alone, lying only about things that don’t affect others. Nobody knows, for example, that I really don’t give a damn about them–only what they can do for me. Generally speaking, though, I ensure that they gain far more out of our interactions that I do. What’s so bad about that? Why do I deserve to have a crusade against me, hmm? The only time I could see myself getting out of line is if I had absolute power, and even then, the drive for social acceptance would likely dictate that my facade remain intact.
I do believe there are different levels of sociopathy, if I am indeed what you’d call a sociopath. I know a few others who have no control over their actions aside from, as you said, trying to keep themselves from getting caught. Everything they do reeks of a plot or scheme.
Me… I’m just trying to live my life. For the most part.
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17 Myers // Jun 2, 2009 at 6:43 am
I find it amusing that you associate us with demonic entities. I, myself, do not associate with such irrational notions of angels and demons, but I suppose it is your choice of logo.
On a more serious note, I find your libel to be quite deliberately hate-filled. I’m impressed, to say the least. Never has a “normal” so blatantly asserted one’s authority. Or tried to. Usually the movement against sociopaths is nothing but skewed attempts at warning the general public. You, on the other hand, empower the “innocent” bystanders with knowledge. Then encourage them with some lowly attempt of defiance.
Unfortunately, you cannot make us simply disappear, especially with those futile efforts. Intelligent sociopaths are genetically predisposed to a position of power. It is simply survival of the fittest at work. How are you going to rival that?
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18 aeschenkarnos // Jun 4, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Myers: “Unfortunately, you cannot make us simply disappear, especially with those futile efforts. Intelligent sociopaths are genetically predisposed to a position of power. It is simply survival of the fittest at work. How are you going to rival that?”
We’re going to rival it thus: (a) you’re not particularly intelligent as a group, yours is more a kind of predatorial cunning than real intelligence: you’ve learned to pull levers quickly and get a lot of cookies, but you don’t actually *understand* anything much; (b) on that point, evolution doesn’t work that way, there is no winner to the game of evolution, no ideal strategy, there is only survival.
Whenever Strategy A (eg, cheating) gets ahead to the point where those who pursue it become common, strategies predatorial on Strategy A (eg, cheat-hunting) and strategies hostile to Strategy A (eg, shunning) become more viable.
Further to the matter of your intelligence, simplistic black-and-white explanations and magical thinking are typical of sociopaths. To understand how something *actually works* requires a level of caring about truth, a willingness to change ideas, and humility before the facts that sociopaths simply do not have. Sociopaths tend to latch onto whatever explanations aggrandize themselves and demonize and/or disempower others, and ride them all the way to hell. They don’t think about anything they don’t *need* to think about, as their minds are largely occupied with thinking about fear and greed. They interpret criticism of their ideas as damage to their egos. Explanations they came up with themselves are triply sticky in their minds.
Politics and religion are full of sociopaths, authoritarian and conservative politics especially, whether left-wing or right-wing from an economic point of view. Who else can so blithely disregard harm done to others in order to benefit themselves?
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19 Myers // Jun 4, 2009 at 3:00 pm
I think you misunderstood me. I was not implying that sociopaths as a group are intelligent. I was rather stating the fact that certain sociopaths as individuals are intelligent.
And, as a person clinically diagnosed with ASPD, I am quite capable of understanding things in depth.
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20 asociopath // Jun 16, 2009 at 6:24 am
I’ve been diagnosed as a sociopath for about 20 years, as Myers has said, I find it almost impossible to have empathy for other people, I’m quite fond of animals though. As a result, I watch my interactions with people carefully, and act out an elaborate facade that nicely fakes that of a caring well adjusted individual. I don’t do anyone any harm, I don’t care about you enough to do you any harm, and I behave normally because it makes my life easier. Why would you wish to launch a pogrom against me? Are there any other minority groups you dislike? As for your logo, there’s another symbol used quite recently as a banner for the elimination of demonised minorities. A swastika.
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21 silence is golden // Jun 28, 2009 at 11:05 pm
Well, that just about shut everyone the hell up!
I love having the last word. Does that make me a sociopath? I don’t give a shit what you all think. I guess that pretty much makes it official. Cheers!
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22 jloome // Jul 1, 2009 at 12:43 pm
With due respect to the two sociopaths posting here puzzled as to why they would be singled out, most of your ilk don’t have your sense of self-awareness. They would never rationalize that they may lose popularity or status by acting outside the norms. While most sociopaths can exhibit some baseline fear with respect to losing personal status or property, most aren’t intelligent enough to weight that against impulse.
That’s why people fear sociopaths; the ones of average intelligence, below-average intelligence or even above-average intelligence are still typically willing to take chances that hurt others to benefit themselves.
On top of that, there are numerous conditions and psychoses that sociopaths themselves can suffer, including an addiction to studying and absorbing emotional extremes. Many a sociopathic serial killer has admitted half the thrill came from seeing extremes of emotion that his lack of empathy and remorse guaranteed he or she would never be able to experience.
That’s why. If either of you have any sense, you’ll commit yourselves to long-term care. Of course, we all know that doesn’t gibe as logical to either of you, because it’s not in your best interests, so I’ll just have to hope you’re both hit by a bus or something before you start doing serious harm.
Incidentally, it may well be that you both suffer from an extreme narcissistic personalisty disorder, and not actual sociopathy.
Most true sociopaths exhibit violent tendencies as children that push them out of the mainstream, and while the idea of undiscovered sociopaths flocking into white collar positions makes for good science fiction, it doesn’t jibe with statistical norms when it comes to intelligence and the studied behaviour of young sociopaths.
So if both of you feel truly nothing for anyone but yourselves, and yet are also self-aware, you’re rare.
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23 Myers // Jul 14, 2009 at 4:33 pm
Rare indeed. I was forcibly admitted into a psychiatric ward when I was thirteen, that’s how I know. And I’m perfectly capable of controlling my impulses.
Sure, we pull a few scams here or there. Maybe subject a few people to a rather unfortunate situation. As far as I’m concerned, they shouldn’t have been so susceptible to deception.
Furthermore, it’s absurd to claim sociopaths are the only persons capable of deceiving.
You need not fear me, but, instead, your own stupidity.
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34 a_self_aware_sociopath // Jan 23, 2010 at 6:28 am
LOL, unlike some of my ilk that have posted here previously, I find this all to be deliciously funny. You do realize that there is no set definition of a sociopath and that trained professionals routinely misdiagnose cases of sociopathy; sometimes declaring non-sociopaths to be so and at other times declaring real sociopaths not to be so.
This means, in effect, that you are creating a movement that can basically be wielded against anyone you don’t like, by simply declaring them a “sociopath”. Exactly like the “War on Terror” that can be used to do anything to anyone as long as you declare your victim to be a “terrorist”.
Its quite brilliant really and surely the product of someone not overly burdened with a conscience. LOL, I wish I had thought of it first, this would be the ideal avenue for a creative sociopath to hurt lots of people, something I can surely appreciate. Good show, sir.
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35 Annie // Jan 23, 2010 at 6:47 am
a_self_aware_sociopath…??? Of all the things I don’t know…this one I know… the sociopath would also have an extreme case of narcissism as the two seem to go together. He or she wouldn’t even consider strolling the sights of sociopath and narcissism and the devastation they leave in their wake. They don’t see an issue with anything they do…NOT EVER
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36 a_self_aware_sociopath // Jan 23, 2010 at 12:22 pm
Ahhh, poor little Annie, did someone play with you once?
Affording you the pretension of knowing all about sociopaths, perhaps it didn’t occur to you that going online to look at the the incessant whimpering of those too weak to handle demanding relationships might be amusing.
This page in particular is just hilarious, usually I don’t comment, but in this case I just had to as it is just too good. In fact I’d wager the fellow launching the campaign is probably a sociopath in his own right, because as I said previously, this is certainly something I could set up and have all sorts of fun with. Not even mentioning that it is perfect bait to lure in the wounded members of the herd – the prey that has escaped once before – who are already injured and thus easier to take a second time. The funny thing is, I could come back here next month in a different guise and you’d never know unless I let you. :)
POISSON PEN
(over at the Guardian)
Will any other novelists ‘pull a Roth’?
Can we expect any other writer approaching old age hope to defy the odds as Philip Roth did with his American trilogy?
AugustineSteven
9 Mar 2010, 3:21PM
Will Self is a witty feller with a decently-stocked imagination and not much brilliance as a writer; at his best he wobbles, in circles, on the borrowed crutch of Martin Amis’ style. If he “pulls a Roth” it will be in the sense that he writes The Humbling.
If Amis “pulls a Roth” it will mean that he shags one.
A wee hiatus as I’m being kept very busy by the gold-scaled serpent of cash, again, Comrades Lurking and Explicit… keeping these fondue pots brim-full costs money! Until soon, enjoy these phone-pictures I took of Horses & Ice cream and many other things on a brisk walk this week…
I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream! (as they say). Hurry back with coffers stuffed to the gills.
“Anyone who interprets [Nazism] merely as a political movement knows almost nothing about it. It is more than religion; it is the determination to create a new man.”
Adolf Hitler
On June 26th of this year, the successful completion of the mapping of the human genome was triumphantly announced. The media were nearly universal in heaping praise on this alleged scientific milestone. This was just as true for the ‘progressive’ press as it was for the more mainstream media outlets. For instance, the World Socialist Web Site – one of the most uncompromisingly leftist of news sources – gushed that:
“The publication of the rough draft of the completed sequence of the human genome on June 26 was an outstanding scientific achievement, the outcome of an international collaboration spanning a decade and involving hundreds of scientists. The researchers used the most advanced sequencing machines and analysed the resulting data with the aid of powerful computers …
The elaboration of the human genome sequence is a major step in demystifying the evolution of the human species and the workings of the human body. Aided by technology, such scientific discoveries puncture the clouds of superstition that surround human existence and weaken the grip of religion over the minds of men and women.”
Seemingly the only critical voice among the mindless back-slappers of the U.S. media belonged to Robert Lederman, columnist for the Greenwich Village Gazette. In an insightful column featured on the Konformist web site, Lederman noted that:
“Probably the single greatest irony in the human genome issue is the idea being marketed to the public that this scientific advance will lead to the average person enjoying a much longer and healthier life. In light of governmental resistance to preventing corporate pollution of the environment, developing renewable sources of energy, banning the use of toxic chemicals and insecticides or protecting the food supply from contamination, can we really expect that this technology will be used to extend human life generally?
“Politicians claim there is an imminent crisis facing the social security system right now. How much worse will that crisis be if tens of millions of Americans who might otherwise have died in their sixties and seventies from chronic disease live into their nineties and beyond? Be assured that those in control have no intention of allowing this to happen.
“The far likelier scenario is that for the very wealthy there will indeed be new and miraculous medical treatments to prolong and enhance life. For the vast majority however, this new technology will only be used to further limit their freedom and privacy while creating a caste system based on genetics that fundamentally changes the way society is structured.”
Lederman’s concerns are well founded. What the rest of the media seem to have overlooked, deliberately or out of ignorance, is that the Human Genome Project did not arise in a vacuum. Rather, it is but the latest step in a ‘scientific’ progression spanning at least the last 150 years. The aforementioned World Socialist Web Site appeared to acknowledge this in their coverage of the much-heralded event:
“In 1838 Matthias Jakob Schleiden and Theodor Schwann discovered the cell as the fundamental unit of life. In 1859 Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, which elaborated a mechanism of evolution and set a coherent framework for all the biological sciences. In 1865 the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel developed the foundations of modern genetics. T.H. Morgan in 1910 determined that genes are organised along chromosomes. In 1942 researchers established that genes are made of DNA, a chemical found in the cell nucleus. In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick elaborated the structure of DNA. In 1973 Stanley Cohen and Herbert Brown invented genetic engineering by transplanting a gene between bacteria, and in 1990 the Human Genome Project began.”
The only problem with this capsule history of the events leading up to the cracking of the genetic code is that it is woefully incomplete. So incomplete, in fact, that it completely obscures the goals being pursued by those who would claim to be working for the betterment of human civilization. This is to be expected of course when the coverage is coming from the corporate mass-media, though one expects a little better from the ‘alternative’ press. To see just how far off the mark this historical narrative actually is, it is instructive to review a few key events that do not appear in the timeline above.
In 1869, British psychologist Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, published the first major document of the modern eugenics movement – Hereditary Genius – in which he made the observation that: “The average intellectual standard of the negro is some two grades below our own.” Galton proposed that a system of arranged marriages between men of distinction and women of wealth would ultimately yield a ‘gifted’ race. He based this theory on the observation that the most prominent members of British society tended to also have prominent parents (no shit, Frank? How’d you ever figure that out?). Two years later, the exalted Charles Darwin published Descent of Man – his follow-up to Origin of Species – in which he frequently quoted from his cousin’s racist screed.
Charles Darwin had not, by the way, coined the term ‘survival of the fittest’ in his earlier work. That concept was first proposed by Thomas Malthus as a purely economic principal, and one that was designed – not coincidentally – to justify the rise of the capitalist state. Darwin had taken that principal and transformed it into an irrefutable natural law, justifying decades later the victory of a flabby, naked minion of Satan on the TV ‘game’ show Survivor. Scoffed Engels:
“The whole Darwinist teaching of the struggle for existence is simply a transference from society to living nature of … the bourgeois doctrine of competition together with Malthus’ theory of population … the same theories are transferred back again from organic nature into history and it is now claimed that their validity as eternal laws of human society has been proved.”
In 1875, “coolies, convicts, and prostitutes” were declared “undesirable” aliens and excluded by newly drafted laws from immigrating to the shores of America. The next year, John Harvey Kellogg became the superintendent of the Western Health Reform Institute, changing its name to the Battle Creek Sanitarium. Under Kellogg’s directorship, the sanitarium began experimenting with “health foods,” closely paralleling the Lebensreform movement in Germany. Lebensreform sanitariums promoted a back-to-nature ideology that espoused health foods, vegetarianism, abstention from alcohol and tobacco, and homeopathy. Kellogg would remain at Battle Creek as director until 1943, a span of sixty-seven years.
In 1882, “lunatics and idiots” joined “coolies, convicts, and prostitutes” on the list of unwanted immigrants, though numerous lunatics and idiots already living here were allowed to stay and retain their positions within the U.S. government. The following year, Galton published his next manifesto – Human Faculty – in which he introduced the world to the term “eugenics.” In 1895, Dr. Alfred Ploetz – an esteemed German eugenics researcher – published The Excellence of Our Race and the Protection of the Weak, which not surprisingly was far more concerned with the extermination of the weak than with their protection.
Six years later, in 1901, John D. Rockefeller founded the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, which quickly became a funding conduit for eugenics research. Two years later, the list of undesirable immigrants became a little longer as “epileptics and insane persons” were added. The next year, The Carnegie Institution of Washington established a research center under the directorship of Harvard-educated eugenicist Charles Benedict Davenport, with additional funding from Mary Harriman – the widow of railroad magnate Edward H. Harriman. Meanwhile, Davenport’s counterpart in Germany – Dr. Ploetz – founded the German Society for Racial Hygiene and a ‘scientific’ journal – the Archive for Racial and Social Biology. Davenport would serve as the director of genetics for the Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Springs Harbor in Long Island, New York until 1934.
In 1906, the city of San Francisco ordered the segregation of all Japanese, Chinese, and Korean children in a separate school, where they could be kept a safe distance from the genetically superior white children. Elsewhere in the world, Cyril Burt – a future leading light of the eugenics movement – graduated from Oxford University and traveled to Germany to study for the next two years. The next year, the state of Indiana passed the world’s first compulsory sterilization laws, applicable to all “confirmed criminals, idiots, rapists and imbeciles” in state institutions. Meanwhile, “imbeciles and feeble-minded persons” were added to the still growing list of persons excluded under U.S. immigration laws. It obviously wasn’t a good year for imbeciles.
1910 proved to be a busy year for the eugenics crowd. The Harriman family financed the building of the Eugenics Record Office as a branch of London’s Galton National Laboratory, with additional financial assistance coming from John D. Rockefeller; Davenport was appointed director. This same year, reputed anti-fascist Winston Churchill was appointed Home Secretary of the UK (the British equivalent of Secretary of State), and secretly proposed the sterilization of 100,000 “mental degenerates.” Cyril Burt busied himself with revising U.S. IQ tests for use in the UK, while John Kellogg began delivering speeches on “race degeneracy.”
The next year, Davenport published Heredity in Relation to Eugenics. In the UK, Galton died and a Eugenics Chair was established at the University of London as per his will. In 1912, the University of London hosted the First International Congress of Eugenics, presided over by Major Leonard Darwin, the son of Charles; vice-presidents prominently in attendance included Winston Churchill, Dr. Alfred Ploetz, Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, and Alexander Graham Bell. Meanwhile, eminent psychologist Henry Goddard was having a busy year: he published The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble Mindedness, and also administered IQ tests to immigrants at Ellis Island and found that 83% of Jews, 80% of Hungarians, 79% of Italians, and 87% of the Russians wanting to enter the country were feeble minded; there’s no telling how many of them were coolies or imbeciles.
Professor Goddard also believed that criminals could be identified by certain physical characteristics, and that the solution was “to sterilize them, allow them to perform only lowly jobs, confine them to ghettos, discourage them from marrying outside their race, and create a pure, American, superior intelligence to control them.” His ideas would later have a profound influence on Dr. David Ewen Cameron, whose CIA and Rockefeller-funded medical torture experiments in Canada would become among the most notorious of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA projects.
In 1913, Rockefeller established the Rockefeller Foundation, which would serve as yet another source of funding for the eugenics movement. By this time, twelve U.S. states had compulsory sterilization laws on the books. The next year, Battle Creek, Michigan hosted the First National Congress on Race Betterment – sponsored by John Harvey Kellogg – which proposed that 5.76 million Americans be sterilized. Eugenics was by now being taught at Universities around the country, including Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, Wisconsin, Northwestern, and Clark. In 1915, Michigan hosted the Second National Conference on Race Betterment, again sponsored by John Harvey Kellogg.
The next year, Stanford University professor of psychology Lewis M. Terman published the Stanford-Binet IQ tests, while declaring that: “If we would preserve our state for a class of people worthy to possess it, we would prevent, as far as possible, the propagation of mental degenerates.” In 1920, Alfred Hoche and Karl Binding published The Release of the Destruction of Life Devoid of Value, advocating “euthanasia” for mentally defective and mentally ill persons. By this time, twenty-four other states had joined Indiana in passing compulsory sterilization laws.
In 1921, New York hosted the Second International Congress of Eugenics, sponsored by a committee that included Herbert Hoover and the presidents of Clark University, Smith College and the Carnegie Institution. Also this year, president Warren G. Harding approved the Immigration Restriction Act, establishing a quota system, and Margaret Sanger published an article entitled “The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda” in the journal Birth Control Review. Sanger was concerned that “the fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken classes, should not be held up for emulation to the mentally and physically fit though less fertile parents of the educated and well-to-do classes. On the contrary, the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over fertility of the mentally and physically defective …”
The next year, H.H. Laughlin published the “Model Eugenical Sterilization Law,” declaring all of the following categories of persons as being subject to mandatory sterilization: feeble-minded; insane; criminalistic; epileptic; inebriate; diseased; blind and seriously vision impaired; deformed and crippled; and dependent (orphans, homeless persons, tramps, and paupers). This law would serve as the blueprint for several U.S. state sterilization laws as well as for Nazi Germany’s infamous 1933 eugenics law. This same year, the American Eugenics Society was founded on the proposition that the wealth and social position of the upper classes was justified by their superior genetic endowment.
In 1923, native fascist Henry Ford published The International Jew; The World’s Foremost Problem, the title of which pretty much speaks for itself. Elsewhere in the country, Carl Brigham – a key figure in the development of IQ tests and the driving force behind the SAT – published The Study of American Intelligence, declaring that: “our figures, then, would rather tend to disprove the popular belief that the Jew is intelligent,” and “The decline of American intelligence will be more rapid than the decline of the intelligence of European national groups owing to the presence here of the Negro.” In Germany, Adolf Hitler allegedly dictated – from a jail cell – the first draft of the virulently racist and anti-Semitic Mein Kampf, which singled out Henry Ford for praise.
The following year, the Johnson-Reed act (aka the Immigration Act of 1924) eliminated Asian immigration and set stringent quotas on Southern and Eastern European immigration. In 1925, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes – writing the majority opinion in Buck v. Bell – stated: “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind,” language that closely mirrored that of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. In the UK this year, Cyril Burt – who specialized in twin studies (first suggested by Galton) and who would later become one of the founding fathers of Mensa – published The Young Delinquent.
In 1928, Battle Creek, Michigan hosted the Third National Conference on Race Betterment, once again sponsored by John Harvey Kellogg. In 1930, the director of the Department of Heredity at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Genealogy and Demography – Dr. Ernst Rudin – visited the United States, where he was warmly received. Rudin walked away with a large grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to finance his research, which would occupy an entire floor at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Elsewhere, W.K. Kellogg established the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to provide funding for efforts at “social improvement.”
By 1931, twenty-seven U.S. states had sterilization laws, and John Kellogg had opened the Miami-Battle Creek Sanitarium in Miami Springs, Florida with himself appointed as medical director. This year also saw an indeterminate number of Puerto Ricans deliberately infected with cancer by the Rockefeller Institute, killing thirteen. Pathologist Cornelius Rhoades, who ran the study, would later be placed in charge of two chemical warfare projects and granted a seat on the Atomic Energy Commission.
1932 saw New York’s American Museum of Natural History host the Third International Congress of Eugenics, at which the sterilization of fourteen million Americans was called for. The gathering was dedicated to Mary Harriman, the mother of Averell Harriman – partner at the Wall Street powerhouse Brown Brothers/Harriman along with Prescott Bush and Herbert Walker. The Hamburg-Amerika Shipping Line – a wholly owned subsidiary of Brown Brothers/Harriman that would in 1942 be seized by the U.S. Alien Property Custodian under authority of the Trading with the Enemy Act – provided transportation to America for a sizable number of Nazis to attend the conference. Included among them was Dr. Rudin, who was unanimously elected president of the International Federation of Eugenics Societies.
The following year, Hitler enacted the Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseases in Posterity, drafted by Dr. Rudin and patterned directly after H.H. Laughlin’s 1922 model. Also in 1933, Germany’s Journal of Psychotherapy – edited by fascist psychiatrist Carl Jung – published an article by Dr. M.H. Goering (a cousin of Hermann), urging psychotherapists to make “a serious scientific study of Adolf Hitler’s fundamental work Mein Kampf, and to recognize it as a basic work.”
In 1935, Nazi Germany instituted the Law for the Protection of the Genetic Health of the German People, which mandated medical examinations prior to marriage. Also begun this year was a selective human breeding program known as Lebensborn – under the direction of Hitler’s rabidly fascist SS Chief, Heinrich Himmler – which all SS men were obligated to join. By 1946, some 11,000 of ‘Hitler’s Children’ would be created on breeding farms. In nearby England, Cyril Burt published The Subnormal Mind.
On the distant shores of America, Dr. Alexis Carrel – a Nobel laureate and a close associate of native fascist and anti-Semite Charles Augustus Lindbergh – published Man, the Unknown, declaring: “There remains the unsolved problem of the immense number of defectives and criminals. They are an enormous burden for the part of the population that has remained normal … In Germany, the government has taken energetic measures against the multiplication of inferior types, the insane and criminals … Perhaps prisons should be abolished. They could be replaced by smaller and less expensive institutions. The conditioning of petty criminals with the whip, or some more scientific procedure, followed by a short stay in hospital, would probably suffice to insure order. Those who have [committed more serious crimes] should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasia institutions supplied with proper gasses. A similar treatment could be advantageously applied to the insane, guilty of criminal acts. Modern society should not hesitate to organize itself with reference to the normal individual.”
In 1937, Cyril Burt published yet another eugenically minded tome, which he titled The Backward Child. This year was also notable for the establishment of the Pioneer Fund, yet another thinly veiled cover for the funding of eugenics research. As late as 1989, the organization would state in its charter that its express purpose was to finance “study into the problems of human race betterment.”
With the outbreak of World War II, the genocidal agenda behind the rapidly proliferating eugenics foundations was revealed to the world, and the movement had to temporarily retreat to the fetid swamps and sewers from which it had emerged. It wasn’t dead, however, but was merely “forced to reinvent itself under various fronts,” as columnist Robert Lederer has noted. After the war, psychiatrist Edwin Katzen-ellenbogen – a former member of the faculty at Harvard – was convicted of war crimes that he had committed as a ‘doctor’ at Buchenwald concentration camp; during his trial in Dachau, he proudly testified that he had drafted the sterilization law for the governor of New Jersey.
Around 1948, Mensa was formed – the first international organization for the intellectually ‘gifted.’ Its first president was preeminent eugenicist Cyril Burt, who had been named the president of the British Psychological Society in 1942 and had become the first psychologist to be knighted in 1946. Another founding father was Victor Serebriakoff, a White Russian émigré recruited by British and American intelligence services, who was credited with greatly expanding membership in the organization, instituting the IQ test as a prerequisite of membership, and establishing American Mensa. Yet another founder, and the man who claimed to have come up with the idea for Mensa, was Dr. Lance Ware, a biochemist who had worked during World War II at Porton Down, Britain’s ultra-secret biological and chemical warfare facility.
1948 was also the year that Franz Kallman, who had been an associate of Ernst Rudin, founded a new eugenics institute, dubbed the American Society of Human Genetics. Around this same time, Dr. Otmar von Verschuer, who had served as the mentor of the notorious Josef Mengele, founded the Institute of Human Genetics in Munster. The next year, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Quaker Oats company fed a group of ‘retarded’ boys in Massachusetts radioactive cereal; John Kellogg would have been proud.
In 1950, Cyril Burt published the results of some of his twin studies, purportedly showing data that supported his eugenics views. His studies claimed to prove that poverty was due to the intellectual inferiority of the working class. In 1952, John Foster Dulles – who along with brother Allen had been an attorney for Brown Brothers/Harriman and numerous other Nazi enterprises (including I.G. Farben), as well as being a long-time intelligence asset – established the Population Council in conjunction with John D. Rockefeller III. Tens of millions of dollars of Rockefeller grant money were pumped in as the American Eugenics Society moved its headquarters into the offices of – and assumed the name of – the newly created Population Council.
In 1960, Reginald Gates, a member of the American Eugenics Society, began publishing Mankind Quarterly, a fountain of thinly veiled racist propaganda. On the Advisory Council of the periodical sat none other than Charles Galton Darwin. Another adviser, as well as a member of the Eugenics Society, was Dr. von Verschuer.
By 1967, Nobel prize winner William Shockley was rewriting history with his conclusion that: “The lesson to be drawn from Nazi history is the value of free speech, not that eugenics is intolerable.” Also this year, three psychosurgeons – Vernon H. Marks, Frank R. Ervin, and William H. Sweet – published a letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association in which they theorized that brain disease was responsible for rising levels of urban violence and the black uprisings that were rocking America’s cities.
The National Institute of Mental Health promptly awarded the trio $500,000 to investigate the use of psychosurgery on violence prone individuals. The next year, James Dewey Watson – co-discoverer of the molecular structure of DNA – began serving as the director of the Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory of Quantitative Biology. Twenty years later, he would lend his expertise to the Human Genome Project.
1972 found Shockley delivering an address before the American Psychological Association in which he called for a program in which welfare recipients would be paid $1,000 for each IQ point below 100 if they would submit to voluntary sterilization. In 1976, Cyril Burt’s research was denounced and declared a fraud. London’s Sunday Times reported that his two ‘field investigators’ and ‘co-authors’ were complete fabrications; Burt himself had authored articles for fifteen years under assumed names praising his own work and attacking his critics. He was posthumously declared guilty of fraud by the British Psychological Society.
In 1978, another eugenically minded foundation – the Manhattan Institute – was founded by future CIA Director William Casey, who sixteen years prior had co-founded another New York City ‘think tank’ with Prescott Bush. The primary corporate sponsor was the Rockefeller-controlled Chase Manhattan Bank; others included Citicorp, Time Warner, Proctor & Gamble, Bristol-Meyers, Squibb, CIGNA and Lilly. The next year, the Repository for Germinal Choice was set up in Escondido, California to make available the sperm of Nobel prize winners and other ‘intelligent’ people for selective breeding. Ads were run in Mensa publications and Shockley became one of the first donors.
1982 saw the first of the new breed of Hitler’s Children spawned from sperm obtained from the Repository for Germinal Choice. In 1989, George Bush – the son of Prescott Bush and the grandson of Herbert Walker – became the 41st president of the United States. The very next year, the Human Genome Project was launched by James Watson at Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York.
In 1992, the impeccably pedigreed Pamela Churchill Harriman held a fund raiser at her Middleburg, Virginia estate and collected three million dollars for the campaign of Bill Clinton, born William Jefferson Blythe IV. The next year, Rhodes scholar and Oxford alumnus Bill Clinton became the 42nd president, and Pamela Harriman became his Ambassador to France. The next year, a new manifesto for the modern-day eugenics crowd was published: The Bell Curve. The book was sponsored by the Pioneer Fund, a major supporter and source of funding for the Manhattan Institute; the Institute itself held a luncheon to honor the book and its authors.
In November of 2000, Watson delivered a speech at the University of California at Berkeley that outraged many of those in attendance. Among other undocumented claims, Watson suggested that there exist biochemical links between skin color and sexual activity. And so it goes as the eugenics movement continues to flourish under cover of scientific jargon.
That the Human Genome Project (HGP) is in fact yet another front for the eugenics movement can be easily discerned from a visit to the program’s web site. There you will find that the hauntingly familiar goals of the project include “earlier detection of genetic predisposition to disease” and “reduc(ing) the likelihood of heritable mutations.” In other words, one goal is the systematic elimination of all the ‘bad’ genes that have slipped into the national pool.
Another goal of the project is the creation of “pharmacogenomics ‘custom drugs’.” Translated into English, this means drugs that are specifically tailored to differentially affect various genetic (racial) types; drugs, that is, that could easily be wielded as ethnically specific biowarfare agents. The development of such weapons has been an explicit goal of the U.S. military for at least a quarter-century. In 1975, an American military manual candidly noted that:
“It is theoretically possible to develop so-called ‘ethnic chemical weapons,’ which would be designed to exploit naturally occurring differences in vulnerability among specific population groups. Thus, such a weapon would be capable of incapacitating or killing a selected enemy population to a significantly greater extent than the population of friendly forces.”
Strangely enough, in the years since those words were written “at least 30 previously unknown disease agents have been identified,” according to our very own Central Intelligence Agency. Many of these – including AIDS, Ebola, and the Four Corners Virus – without question show a distinct preference for certain ethnic groups that have long been targets of depopulation campaigns. Interestingly, the HGP touts as another of its benefits the potential for “protection from biological and chemical warfare.” Of course, as the U.S. government itself has acknowledged on numerous occasions, research into the protection from biowarfare requires concomitant research into the conductance of biowarfare; the two are, in practice, inseparable.
Meanwhile, Mensa – which claims disingenuously to hold no opinions and promote no agenda – continues by all appearances to function as an intelligence front, including serving at times as a mouthpiece for the eugenics movement. One of the organization’s SIG’s (Special Interest Groups) is titled – simply enough – Eugenics, and the pages of various Mensa publications are known to this day to host ‘intellectual’ discussions of the benefits of eugenics policies. Perhaps nowhere is the true agenda of the organization more readily apparent than in the list of ‘intellectual links’ posted on the website of the Los Angeles chapter. Just for fun, scroll through the list and see how many of the links lead to CIA fronts, as well as to the agency itself. My personal favorite? The “CIA Kid’s Page” as a resource for children.
“From their beginnings the movements overlapped. Scientific management, intelligence testing, applied psychology, mental hygiene, and eugenics became fashionable together and were often espoused by the same people … Throughout the West, the erosion of older structures of class and authority, and the claims and challenges of new classes and ethnic groups, stimulated the work of the phrenologists, the testers of intelligence, the eugenicists, and the analysts of deviance – Lombroso, Binet, Madison Grant, and, in the first half of the twentieth century, Cyril Burt, Edward L. Thorndike, H.M. Goddard, Lewis M. Terman, and Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck; but it was in America – necessarily in America, that most democratic, ‘classless,’ and ethnically pluralistic society – where they became most influential.” Peter Schrag Mind Control, Pantheon, 1978
[The author of this piece wishes it known that he is of white European ancestry and - according to his driver's license - is blessed with blond hair and blue eyes. He has no physical deformities and is even a member of Mensa. He is, in other words, of the finest Aryan genetic stock.]
References:
Abate, Tom “Nobel Winner’s Theories Raise Uproar in Berkeley,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 13, 2000
Chaiken, Anton and Webster Tarpley George Bush: An Unauthorized Biography, http://www.tarpley.net/bushb.htm
Chase, Allan The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism, University of Illinois Press, 1980
Chorover, Stephan L. From Genesis to Genocide, MIT Press, 1983
Gaglioti, Frank “The Human Genome Project: Science, Society and Superstition,” the World Socialist Web Site
Gannon, John C. (Chairman, National Intelligence Council) “The Global Infectious Disease Threat and Its Implications for the United States,” January 2000, http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/nie/report/nie99-17d.html
Harris, Robert and Jeremy Paxman A Higher Form of Killing, Hill and Wang, 1982
Lapon, Lenny Mass Murderers in White Coats, Psychiatric Genocide Research Institute, 1986
Lederman, Robert “The Human Genome Project and Eugenics,” The Konformist
Lederman, Robert “Giuliani, the Manhattan Institute, and Eugenics: The Ugly Truth Behind ‘Quality of Life,’” The Konformist
Lifton, Robert Jay The Nazi Doctors, Basic Books, 1986
Ogden, Christopher “Pamela Harriman: Her Brilliant Career,” Time, February 17, 1997
Schrag, Peter Mind Control, Pantheon, 1978
Stannard, David E. American Holocaust, Oxford University Press, 1992
Thomas, Gordon Journey Into Madness, Bantam Books, 1989
Vankin, Jonathan and John Whalen The 60 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time, Citadel, 1996
Williams, Carol J. “Breeding to Further the Reich,” Los Angeles Times, January 21, 2000
L.A. Mentary, Victor Serebriakoff Memorial Issue, Volume 38, Number 3, March 2000
Encyclopaedia Britannica, http://www.britannica.com
A&E Biography “Charles and Anne Lindbergh: Alone Together,” April 2, 2000
The Human Genome Project Web Site
(still wrapped up in working with Sadvertizers, secretly, on a shitty pop song for wide national release… only for the money, rest assured… plus wrapping up the short film I worked on in parallel to the shitty pop song as a sort of preemptive cure for masscult-induced contraction of the mindstuff)
is that what the Barking Dog is missing… porno offensiveness? Hits have fallen way off.
Less poetry, more reviews of New Yorker stories. Not porn exactly… but parallel..
CDS Jacob, I’ve noticed a dearth of images of naked beauties with Afros online… you could fill that niche…
Back to Lorrie Moore: why did Dan ever have such high hopes for her? She was only ever (in the bits I’ve read) screwball-glib. She seems to have gotten her style from movies starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacClaine; this excerpt is from Anagrams:
GERARD MAINES LIVED ACROSS THE HALL from a woman named Benna, who four minutes into any conversation always managed to say the word penis. He was not a prude, but, nonetheless, it made him wince. He worked with children all day, taught a kind of aerobics to pre-schoolers, and the most extreme language he was likely to hear seemed to him to be in code, in acronyms, or maybe even in German–boo-boo, finky, peenick–words that were difficult to figure out even in context, and words, therefore, from which he felt quite safe. He suspected it was not unlike people he knew who hated operas in translation. “Believe me,” they would explain, “you just don’t want to know what they’re saying.”
Today they were talking about families.
“Fathers and sons,” she said, “they’re like governments: always having sword fights with their penises.”
“Really,” said Gerard, sitting at her kitchen table, gulping at near-beer for breakfast. He palmed his beard like a man trying to decide.
“But what do I know.” She smiled and shrugged. “I grew up in a trailer. It’s not like a real family with a house.” This was her excuse for everything, her own self-deprecating refrain; she’d grown up in a trailer in upstate New York and was therefore unqualified to pronounce on any of the subjects she continued to pronounce on.
Gerard had his own line of self-excuse: “I was a retard in my father’s play.”
“A retard in your father’s play?”
“Yes,” he said, realizing that faced with the large questions of life and not finding large answers, one must then settle for makeshift, little answers, just as on any given day a person must at least eat something, even if it was not marvelous and huge. “He wrote plays in our town. Then he did the casting and directing. It was harder to venture out through the rest of life after that.”
“How awful for you,” said Benna, pouring more near-beer into both their glasses.
“Yes,” he said. He loved her very much.
Benna was a nightclub singer. Four nights a week she put on a black mini-dress and what she wearily called her Joan-Crawford-catch-me-have-me shoes, and went off to sing at the various cocktail lounges around Fitchville. Sometimes Gerard would go see her and drink too much. In the spotlight up front she seemed to him hopelessly beautiful, a star, her glass jewelry launching quasars into the audience, her laughter rumbling into the mike. He’d watch other men fall in love with her; he knew the fatuous gaze, the free drinks sent over between songs–he’d done that himself. Sometimes he would stay for all three sets and buy her a hamburger afterward or just give her a ride home. Other times, when it was crowded, he would leave her to her fans–the businessmen with loosened neckties, the local teenage girls who idolized her, the very musicians she hired to play with her–and would go home and sit in his bathroom, in his bone-dry tub, with his clothes on, waiting. The way their apartments were laid out, their bathrooms shared a wall, and Gerard could sit in his own tub and await her two-in-the-morning return, hear her enter her bathroom, hear her pee, hear the ruckle of the toilet-paper roll, the metal-sprung flush, the sliding shower door, the squirt, spray, hiss of the water. Sometimes he would call to her through the tiles. She would turn off the shower and yell, “Gerard, are you talking to me?”
“Yes, I’m talking to you. No. I’m talking to Zero Mostel.”
“Listen, I’m tired. I’m going to bed.”
Once she came home at three in the morning, completely drunk, and knocked on his door. When he opened it, she was slumped against the frame, eyes closed, shoes in hand. “Gerard,” she drawled, thrusting her shoes at him, “will you make love to me?” and then she sank to the floor and passed out.
Tee fucking hee.
How will he react to the commenter? Personally, I hope he enjoys himself. Why shouldn’t he get his arse, and every other part of him, kissed?
And please don’t be putting down The Apartment, CDS Steven. CDS Billy Wilder deserves more.
Oh, The Apartment is great. But, you know; the lit, I mean, is a copy of a copy of a copy…
(in fact, here’s my Snarktastic entry in the Chick Lit Sweepstakes; anyone interested in the movie rights? An ideally-condensed epic for the modern age )
THE COCKTAIL CRAZE HAD COME AND GONE but Tallulah was still drinking highballs. Poorly-made highballs at that. Jude’s Perrier was invariably flat. Worse: he was a whiskey-stinter. But the highball, of course, was meant to be symbolic, like the ties and the wingtips… they weren’t apparel, they were personality traits. But whose, wondered Tallulah. She knew she was being unfair. Being unfair was fun.
“How’s your drink?” over-the-shouldered Jude as he backed out of the walk-in with a tray. As ever, when it came to dinner parties at Jude’s, Tallulah was embarrassingly early. “To your liking?”
“Mad for it,” she said. She forced it down in two gulps when Jude wasn’t looking. Plenty of opportunity, she thought, with highballed rue, for Jude rarely looked. His eyes were always on a label or a screen when it came to talking to her. She could just picture him studying the instructions on a box of condoms with that cute little eyebrow thing he’d been doing since Fred MacMurray at 3am on Thanksgiving on cable in The Apartment. The Night of Platonic Cuddles. The problem being that Jude was now firmly into Shirley MacClaine after God had seemed to answer Tallulah’s prayers by putting him off of Ava Gardner. Well, at least Shirley was in her ballpark.
“These have to sit at room temperature for an hour, still,” said Jude, putting the tray on the Doritos-shaped coffee table in front of her. Was he being cruel? Was she really an hour too early? Imagine a pool-blue Dorito.
Tallulah had blown her new-i-pod money in a girl-hating salon on a points-for-trying attempt at being Blondie, hoping to drag Jude from the lounge era to New Wave, bypassing disco entirely. And he hadn’t, apparently, noticed. The platinum fringe hasn’t hooked him but the anal will. Even (or especially) if Jude was, as Tallulah suspected, a closet-case. Well, wasn’t everyone?
Depends on how nice your closet is, thought Tallulah. Hers featured Hanson memorabilia. If 2012 was really the year of the Apocalypse, she already knew how she’d be spending it.
She held up her highball glass and Jude dutifully refilled it, making eye-contact for nearly a millisecond. But oh what a millisecond. She started thinking of the pint of ice cream she’d been saving for the promotion she’d never get. Deep in her freezer like a serial killer’s first tit. Right behind the goddamn piece of her little sister’s wedding cake. Piano lessons at ten, swimming trophies at fifteen, marry the boss at twenty. Bitch.
A pint of Rocky Road or a night of anal, wondered Tallulah, and she realized that modern life was full of difficult choices her mother would have been able to navigate without even thinking. She downed the third highball while Jude read her t-shirt.
Don’t leave us hanging!! What did it say on the t-shirt?
I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until they make the movie, CDS Frances. I’ve signed a very strict non-disclosure agreement…
“My all time bad book is, I have to say, Ulysses, I managed thirty pages and then gave up. I’ve heard that there is an edition with proper grammar and punctuation introduced, so if I came across this one I might give it another go. Closely followed by a book by Don DeLillo. It seemed to be a description of an interminable baseball game.”
Just once I’d like to read a GUblogicle addressing the fact that just as good readers are ill-served by mediocre or crappy writers, great books… etc.
It takes nearly as deep a fund of curiosity, imagination and understanding of the capabilities of language to read a great book as to write one. To find a book perplexing (which is a very different matter from knowing exactly why it doesn’t work and being able to articulate a just critique) is fine. But any old cartoon off the street can grab and swing a Stradivarius like it’s a ping pong paddle and mock the thing for not making music. Proving exactly eff-all.
Also, somewhere during the average education in literature (or Art appreciation), I do wish “teachers” would put some energy into making the point that an artifact can fail to please our personal tastes and yet, still, not need to be condemned as sssshite. There are plenty of books/paintings/pieces of music I don’t enjoy but which are still, to my eyes/ears, works of Art meriting attention.
Everything doesn’t have to be reduced to the Vapid Consumer Binary of thumbs-up vs thumbs-down. Knowing that is the first step on the winding road away from Yob Farm.
*
FALSE FLAGS of CHICK LIT
A long-time Comrade Lurker (a second-degree Lurker who pre-dates TET and sends approx. three emails a year) has castigated me with jokey bravado for what he/she (I’m protecting his identity) sees as my atrocious decision to try my hand at Chick Lit (see comment #258). I’m not sure if the Comrade was joking (he/she hasn’t responded to my response yet) but I was joking. I was mocking Chick Lit with that passage above… showing how easy it is to work from that template (invent a few characters from thin air; give the characters zeitgeisty tastes/jobs; install quippy dialog; don’t stint on the good-looks and/or materialism; make all the stupid little fuckers “want something”). I was not hoping for a book contract.
However…
I have an idea. A Chick Lit serial novel! A lusty po-mo mockulebration of Chick Lit. New installments every week (or more often)… unless/until I run out of time/interest.
Next Monday: Chapter Two of TALLULAH, JUDE
Dedicate it to Tama Janowitz who started it all.
Good ole hair-twisting, gum-popping Tama! Did La Paglia steal from La Janowitz, or vice-versa, with the pandering youthiness tics?
That is such an incisive question! I’d like to pose it directly to them and have them answer.
Recently, my husband asked me to write about our split-up and post it somewhere on the web, so that when he meets new women and they ask him what happened he can just refer them to a URL (infer what you will about how sick of this relationship he is). It’s not something I would entertain doing but it’s so chick/dick litty I thought it worth mentioning.
Always welcome to post the data here, of course, CDS Frances! Larf
So, as previously mentioned, I spent the weekend earning money, working on a piece of music that will go into commercial release for the Yuletide season. That’s right: for the Sadvertizers, the season has already begun. And the piece of music I was forced to work on is such a sub-middlin’ chunk of talentlessness that I kept flying into internal mini-rages as I contemplated it. The actual working on it was quick. It was the contemplating that ruined my weekend. The leather-eared cocksuckers I work with (don’t worry, they won’t read this: they’re not even aware of the fact that I write… I keep the magisteria segregated) drive another bamboo splinter under Euterpe’s fingernails whenever they break out the Pro Tools. If I told you what they earn, every ear, you’d storm the Bastille all over again, Comrades.
To save myself, I generated a tiny ingot of Lo Fi counter-pop, a video featuring a pop singer I first worked with more than five years ago and who is now a mother and prefers to remain nameless. Backing band: Albino Wino Plus One
Isaac Asimov
take this golden blade from out the eyeball of desire
you say beauty fades but I say lonely is a fire
take her thunderhead of hair and take that marble ass
all i know is what i feel, a penis made of glass some sideburns and a blazer
a laser and a pipe
suspect i am a superbrain
suspect i be the type
to go traveling, traveling
at the speed of nothing
go traveling, traveling
with a map of loss
go traveling, traveling
at the speed of nothing
go traveling, traveling
don’t need a boss
to jack off like Isaac Asimov, blast off like Isaac Asimov
fuck this unnecessary fixation on the real
do you need to eat your teeth to taste what you can’t feel?
fuck your philosophically bleak hegemony
mental simulation on the face is all i need some sideburns and a blazer
a laser and a pipe
suspect i am a superbrain
suspect i be the type
to go traveling, traveling
at the speed of nothing
go traveling, traveling
with a map of loss
go traveling, traveling
at the speed of nothing
go traveling, traveling
don’t need a boss
to jack off like Isaac Asimov, blast off like Isaac Asimov
Wouldn’t Isaac Asimov be tickled by almost everything we’ve written on TET? I saw in his Wikipedia entry that he also wrote joke books. My all-time favorite joke is the one about the close-knit community that has assigned all of the jokes they regularly tell numbers. So that all they have to do is call out “49!” or “17!” and everyone cracks up, or groans, or whatever. It’s a good one.
This video (which I won’t post until I can figure out a way to improve the upload quality) is a number “8!”
For some crazy reason it got me thinking about the hilarious scene in My Favorite Year when Peter O’Toole goes to dinner at Mark Linn Baker’s mother’s apartment played by Lanie Kazan. (From memory) Lainie answers the door in her fancy but ill-fitting wedding gown and says to O’Toole, “Welcome to my humble chapeau.” And then, “Like my dress? I only wore it once!”
Oy, syntax. Lainie played the mother, not the apartment.
A) It continues to amaze me that the mere mention of “Peter O’Toole” doesn’t cripple anyone, within hearing, with fits of naughty mirth. Imagine an actress calling herself “Pussy O’Snatch”…
B) CDS Edmond is blowing a beautiful, 39-minute Coltrane solo on Bach motifs in this text. I dig it bigly, man; the repeated riffs and themes which permute, ramify, circle back on themselves. Here’s as much of an excerpt I dare post before Edmond sues us…
He watched as his wife waited at the far curb of the grassy meridian in the middle of the loop for a shuttle bus to pass, she had made it to the far curb of the meridian but not all the way across the loop before the bus had pulled out and now she had briefly to wait, her hand on the satchel that held her laptop, she held it against her canted hip even though the strap of the satchel was slung on her shoulder. Even from this distance he could see that she stood with her hip canted in that way she characteristically stood, a way that he liked, and the shadow of the hotel was at her feet on the trimmed lawn of the meridian, and the sun glinted off her sunglasses and gleamed on her bare shoulder next to the satchel-strap, waiting for the shuttle-bus to rumble by she looked more relaxed than he felt, even from this distance relaxed yet poised there at the edge of the central meridian with her open-toed shoes in the shadow of the hotel. Another shuttle-bus had already pulled into the loop but it was stopping in front of the first hotel, whereas his wife was heading for the third hotel. With her laptop satchel she went into the entrance of the third hotel as the people from the shuttle-bus began moving with their luggage to the entrance of the first hotel. The shuttle-buses brought a steady stream of passengers from the Charles de Gaulle airport who had been bumped from their flights, along with the smaller number of those who had volunteered to take other flights, he reasoned. After his wife had disappeared with her laptop-satchel into the third hotel he had retreated from the window to the hotel bed, from window to bed in this small hotel room the hardly Napoleonic retreat of a single step, where he reclined on the bedspread and continued to reason.
Like your jazz counterpoint analogy. Have taken this up on The Dog, comparing this to what I been attempting in my poems.
Grooven, CDS Jacob!
Caldwell’s story holds both figuration and reasoning to a disciplined subjection to physical detail, where my poem loses it… drifting off into chains of daydreaming associations. In each case, the controlling aesthetic idea takes the impossibility of unmediated perception as a given, and goes about generating structures around the interwoven elements: perceived object/action, associative context, and explanation.
Fine stuff. I’d read an expanded article on all this with real interest if ever you had the time to dig even further (and illustrate the argument with more of your work and even other examples)
Comrade MC, whenever you choose tidbits of my stuff to quote you display a positive talent for zeroing in on my favorite bits. In this case, though, I know it’s because of the wavelength we’re both on: uxoriousness. So I’m so glad you enjoyed my little tribute to my wi… er, I mean my hero’s wife, with the shadow of the hotel “at her feet” (where everything, of course, in proper fealty, belongs).
Although I’m mighty fond too of the “hardly Napoleonic retreat.”
I like the jazz & fugue analogies as well, but I can’t claim to have had musical structures in mind while writing — I’m musically illiterate; it is truly my artistic-cultural weak spot. If I was holding to any principle of composition, it was on an analogy to the visual arts, to painting — to make everything “one surface,” to break down or dissolve so-called “interiority” by affording it no privileged status over ‘mere’ description, and in fact subordinating it to the contours and angles of the landscape (something comrade Jacob totally, totally nailed in his very kind remarks on it).
Now let’s go kidnap some editors.
“If I was holding to any principle of composition, it was on an analogy to the visual arts, to painting — to make everything “one surface,” to break down or dissolve so-called “interiority” by affording it no privileged status over ‘mere’ description…”
Interestingly enough, CDS Edmond, it appears that Comrade DJ Sensei Stanley Kubrick was up to something similar on the screen; read Comment #237 and you’ll find a fellow named Rob Ager reading Kubrick and pointing out (among other things) that the transition from the artificial real of “waking consciousness”, on his screen, to artificial Night Mind (dreams, daydreams, or hallucinations), and back again, was so subtly flagged that the great majority of the audience has never, after all these years, noticed that, eg, the shooting of Full Metal Jacket’s colorfully abusive Drill Sergeant (in the head, yet: get it?) by Private Pyle… was a dream. Likewise, famous sequences, presented as “reality” in The Shining, were dreams; the movie was a rondo of dreams between Danny and Jack (who were, on another level, the same character). It’s all (unless you look carefully) presented on the same plane… the text isn’t a signal, it’s a con. Likewise in conventional fiction: the cues that signal “this part is the Real Now; this part is stream of consciousness; this part is dream”… are cons that only work with the faux-innocent complicity of the reading audience (who I often picture as children, or cave men, around a primeval campfire, listening to Stephen King).
If the Author doesn’t rely on these old cons, paradoxically, She/He heightens the reality of the reader-as-someone-reading… grants Her/His role as a problem-solving intellect in real Real Time, playing a very conscious game (the opposite of escapism)… paying the reader a massive compliment in the process.
Like Kubrick (has any other artist except Shakespeare gotten so famous making these amazing High-Low Sandwiches?), who has millions of fans, yet worked, clearly, for only a few hundred very close readers.
“…(something comrade Jacob totally, totally nailed in his very kind remarks on it).”
It occurred to me that astute readers who can also write about their readings perform an essential duty much like what DeLillo wrote in Libra about the role of the Bay of Pigs Scouting Party who were enjoined to “mark the beach with landing lights for those coming behind you.”
And on the perils of misperception (where all is depthless surface), he advised:
“The seaweed in reconnaissance photos turned out to be coral reef that interfered with the landings.”
I’m happily busy with the much-more pleasant task of helping my Beloved with some musical concepts for a television appearance she’ll be making in a few weeks; nicer than the odious weekend Sadvertizing chore… and a perfect alibi for my spotty appearances on TET, for now…
We (royal we) love your collaborations but you’re going to have a tough time surpassing Loozaland. If you have time though, I’m working up a new slogan. T-shirt or fortune cookie?:
There are occasions in life when meeting someone halfway means going the whole distance.
T-shirt, fortune cookie, voice-over, post card, Biblical aphorism, point number three in a 12-point relationship aid, magic 8 ball and/or I-Ching reading… the commercial possibilities are endless, CDS Frances!
Sounds like I’ve got a winner. Thank you and thanks to Cleanth Brooks! And I only read the first line of Well Wrought Urn.
As I’ve query-stated before: what better way to separate a human mind from its faculties of reason (and trust in the truth of its own observations) than religion? Here’s a grand old narrative from Comrade DJ Sensei Maria Monk to bolster our opinion…
In these days, the Airport is the perfect metaphor for the-world-as-external-imposition; back then, it was the Convent…
CHAPTER XVI
Treatment of young Infants in At Convent–Talking in Sleep–Amusements–Ceremonies at the public interment of deceased Nuns–Sudden disappearance of the Old Superior–Introduction of the new one–Superstition–Alarm of a Nun–Difficulty of Communication with other Nuns.
IT will be recollected, that I was informed immediately after receiving the veil, that infants were occasionally murdered in the Convent. I was one day in the nuns’ private sick-room, when I had a opportunity, unsought for, of witnessing deeds of such a nature. It was, perhaps, a month after the death of Saint Francis. Two little twin babes, the children of Sainte Catharine, were brought to a priest, who was in the room, for baptism. I was present while the ceremony was performed, with the Superior and several of the old nuns, whose names I never knew, they being called Ma tente, Aunt.
The priests took turns in attending to confession and catechism in the Convent, usually three months at a time, though sometimes longer periods. The priest then on duty was Father Larkin. He is a good-looking European, and has a brother who is a professor in the college. He baptized, and then put oil upon the heads of the infants, as is the custom after baptism. They were then taken; one after another, by one of the old nuns, in the presence of us all. She pressed her hand upon the mouth and nose of the first, so tight that it could not breathe, and in a few minutes, when the hand was removed, it was dead. She then took the other, and treated it in the same way. No sound was heard, and both the children were corpses. The greatest indifference was shown by all present during this operation; for all, as I well knew, were long accustomed to such scenes. The little bodies were then taken into the cellar, thrown into the pit I have mentioned, and covered with a quantity of lime.
I afterward saw another new-born infant treated in the same manner, in the same place: but the actors in the scene I choose not to name, nor the circumstances, as every thing connected with it is of a peculiarly trying and painful nature to my own feelings.
These were the only instances of infanticide I witnessed; and it seemed to be merely owing to accident that I was then present. So far as I know, there were no pains taken to preserve secrecy on this subject; that is, I saw no attempt made to keep any of the inmates of the Convent in ignorance of the murder of children. On the contrary, others were told, as well as myself, on their first admission, as veiled nuns, that all infants born in the place were baptized and killed, without loss of time; and I had been called to witness the murder of the three just mentioned, only because I happened to be in the room at the time.
That others were killed in the same manner during my stay in the nunnery, I am well assured. How many there were I cannot tell, and having taken no account of those I heard of, I cannot speak with precision; I believe, however, that I learnt through nuns, that at least eighteen or twenty infants were smothered, and secretly buried in the cellar, while I was a nun.
One of the effects of the weariness of our bodies and minds, was our proneness to talk in our sleep. It was both ludicrous and painful to hear the nuns repeat their prayers in the course of the night, as they frequently did in their dreams. Required to keep our minds continually on the stretch, both in watching our conduct, in remembering the rules and our prayers, under the fear of the consequences of any neglect, when we closed our eyes in sleep, we often went over again the scenes of the day; and it was no uncommon thing for me to hear a nun repeat one or two of our long exercises in the dead of night. Sometimes, by the time she had finished, another, in a different part of the room, would happen to take a similar turn, and commence a similar recitation; and I have known cases in which several such unconscious exercises were performed, all within an hour or two.
We had now and then a recreation-day, when we were relieved from our customary labour, and from all prayers except those for morning and evening, and the short ones said at every striking of the clock. The greater part of our time was then occupied with different games, particularly backgammon and drafts, and in such conversation as did not relate to our past lives, and the outside of the Convent. Sometimes, however, our sports would be interrupted on such days by the entrance of one of the priests, who would come in and propose that his fete, the birthday of his patron saint, should be kept by “the saints.” We saints!
Several nuns died at different times while I was in the Convent; how many I cannot say, but there was a considerable number: I might rather say, many in proportion to the number in the nunnery. The proportion of deaths I am sure was very large. There were always some in the nuns’ sick-rooms, and several interments took place in the chapel. When a Black nun is dead, the corpse is dressed as if living, and placed in the chapel in a sitting posture; within the railing round the altar, with a book in the hand, as if reading. Persons are then freely admitted from the street, and some of them kneel and pray before it. No particular notoriety is given, I believe, to this exhibition out of the Convent; but such a case usually excites some attention.
The living nuns are required to say prayers for the delivery of their deceased sister from purgatory, being informed, as in all other such cases, that if she is not there, and has no need of our intercession, our prayers are in no danger of being thrown away, as they will be set down to the account of some of our departed friends, or at least to that of the souls which have no acquaintances to pray for them.
It was customary for us occasionally to kneel before a dead nun thus seated in the chapel, and I have often performed that task. It was always painful, for the ghastly countenance being seen whenever I raised my eyes, and the feeling that the position and dress were entirely opposed to every idea of propriety in such a case, always made me melancholy.
The Superior sometimes left the Convent, and was absent for an hour, or several hours, at a time, but we never knew of it until she had returned, and were not informed where she had been. I one day had reason to presume that she had recently paid a visit to the priests’ farm, though I had not direct evidence that such was the fact. The priests’ farm is a fine tract of land belonging to the Seminary, a little distance from the city, near the Lachine road, with a large old-fashioned edifice upon it. I happened to be in the Superior’s room on the day alluded to, when she made some remark on the plainness and poverty of her furniture. I replied, that she was not proud, and could not be dissatisfied on that account; she answered–
“No; but if I was, how much superior is the furniture at the priests’ farm! the poorest room there is furnished better than the best of mine.”
I was one day mending the fire in the Superior’s room, when a priest was conversing with her on the scarcity of money; and I heard him say, that very little money was received by the priests for prayers, but that the principal part came with penances and absolutions.
One of the most remarkable and unaccountable things that happened in the Convent, was the disappearance of the old Superior. She had performed her customary part during the day, and had acted and appeared just as usual. She had shown no symptoms of ill health, met with no particular difficulty in conducting business, and no agitation, anxiety, or gloom, had been noticed in her conduct. We had no reason to suppose that during that day she had expected any thing particular to occur, any more than the rest of us. After the close of our customary labours and evening lecture, she dismissed us to retire to bed, exactly in her usual manner. The next morning the bell rang, we sprang from our bed, hurried on our clothes as usual, and proceeded to the community-room in double line, to commence the morning exercises. There, to our surprise, we found Bishop Lartigue; but the Superior was nowhere to be seen. The Bishop soon addressed us, instead of her, and informed us, that a lady near him, whom he presented to us, was now the Superior of the Convent, and enjoined upon us the same respect and obedience which we had paid to her predecessor.
The lady he introduced to us was one of our oldest nuns, Saint Du***, a very large, fleshy woman, with swelled limbs, which rendered her very slow in walking, and often gave her great distress. Not a word was dropped from which we could conjecture the cause of this change, nor of the fate of the old Superior. I took the first opportunity to inquire of one of the nuns, whom I dared talk to, what had become of her; but I found them as ignorant as myself, though suspicious that she had been murdered by the orders of the Bishop. Never did I obtain any light on her mysterious disappearance. I am confident, however, that if the Bishop wished to get rid of her privately and by foul means, he had ample opportunities and power at his command. Jane Ray, as usual, could not allow such an occurrence to pass by without intimating her own suspicions more plainly than any other of the nuns would have dared to do. She spoke out one day, in the community-room, and said, “I’m going to have a candle burnt in the cellar for my old Superior.”
“Hush, Jane Ray!” exclaimed some of the nuns, you’ll be punished.”
“My mother used to tell me,” replied Jane, “never to be afraid of the face of man.”
It cannot be thought strange that we were superstitious. Some were more easily terrified than others, by unaccountable sights and sounds: but all of us believed in the power and occasional appearance of spirits, and were ready to look for them at almost any time. I have seen several instances of alarm caused by such superstition, and have experienced it myself more than once. I was one day sitting mending aprons beside one of the old nuns, in a community-room, while the litanies were repeating; as I was very easy to laugh, Saint Ignace, or Agnes, came in, walked up to her with much agitation, and began to whisper in her ear. She usually talked but little, and that made me more curious to know what was the matter with her. I overheard her say to the old nun, in much alarm, that in the cellar, from which she had just returned, she had heard the most dreadful groans that ever came from any being. This was enough to give me uneasiness. I could not account for the appearance of an evil spirit in any part of the Convent, for I had been assured that the only one ever known there, was that of the nun who had died with an unconfessed sin, and that others were kept at a distance by the holy water that was rather profusely used in different parts of the nunnery. Still, I presumed that the sounds heard by Saint Ignace must have proceeded from some devil, and I felt great dread at the thought of visiting the cellar again. I determined to seek further information of the terrified nun; but when I addressed her on the subject, at recreation-time, the first opportunity I could find, she replied, that I was always trying to make her break silence, and walked off to another group in the room, so that I could obtain no satisfaction.
It is remarkable that in our nunnery, we were almost entirely cut off from the means of knowing any thing, even of each other. There were many nuns whom I know nothing of to this day, after having been in the same rooms with them every day and night for many months. There was a nun, whom I supposed to be in the Convent, and whom I was anxious to learn something about from the time of my entrance as a novice; but I never was able to learn any thing concerning her, not even whether she was in the nunnery or not, whether alive or dead. She was the daughter of a rich family, residing at Point aux Trembles, of whom I had heard my mother speak before I entered the Convent. The name of her family I think was Lafayette, and she was thought to be from Europe. She was known to have taken the black veil; but as I was not acquainted with the name of the Saint she had assumed, and I could not describe her in “the world,” all my inquiries and observations proved entirely in vain.
I had heard before my entrance into the Convent, that one of the nuns had made her escape from it during the last war, and once inquired about her to the Superior. She admitted that such was the fact but I was never able to learn any particulars concerning her name, origin, or manner of escape.
DIFFICULT TEXTS
There are short stories on my fiction-site that have had thousands of readers; stories that have had hundreds of readers; some that have only had a few dozen. This post is about a few that have had less than ten readers! Some of these rarely-reads are my precious favorites. I pull them upstairs, blinking and damp, from the basement, sometimes. As a good father, I think they deserve an occasional airing, on Armistice Day or the 5th of July, say…
Top 5 Patricides of Midville, Illinois
With apologies to Ambrose Bierce
5.
Lucius Nathaniel Calvin. “Luke” or “Lucy” to his friends. Good-looking boy with innocent sour milk breath. Dutifully unspectacular student. Never show-offy with hand-raising in class or sinister in the sophistication of his cheating. Reasonably popular within the limits of rural terms of popularity, which hinge on things like prowess with a hunting rifle. Unrealistically blue-eyed, farm-tall, short-lipped, with veiny hands and close-cropped, pale-wheat hair which he kept in a Cesarean haircut that only a perfect-eared boy would dare to. The grainy photograph showing up in all the papers on the same day was from his yearbook, of course. The kind of smile that everyone of a certain age knows is put on to mock the cheap-suited yearbook photographer.
Jennifer Paine. Jennifer Paine would later call Lucius, in all the interviews, on regional TV and local radio and for all the Midville newspapers, her fiance. Lucius’ maternal grandmother (with whom Lucius had lived the first five years of his life, after his mother’s exit and before his father had gotten his accounting firm “off the ground”) claimed she’d heard of no such plans. She’d never said this in interviews for she was never interviewed. She always said it in a room featuring a television or radio on which Jennifer Paine was being interviewed, whether or not there were others in the room at the time. Lucius had caught his grandmother talking to the television before. “Dream on,” she’d say. Or: “As if.”
The kick of a rifle should increase with the size of the animal hit. The kick of the rifle should hurt. Then it would be fair.
Once, Luke said that the sky is a river.
“What?”
“The sky. It looks like a river, doesn’t it? It’s like the sky is a river and we’re stuck on the bottom of a cloud looking down on the river and we could fall in it if we don’t hold on.”
Jennifer squeezed Luke’s hand. He recognized the gesture of concern. Her other hand was palm-up on the sharp tips of fresh-cut grass and her eyes were shut. “I guess.”
“No, seriously. Try.”
“Try what?”
“Try and see it that way.”
“But why?”
“Because you’ll love it.”
“I guess I’ve heard that argument before.”
Lucius laughed. He loved it when she acknowledged their iffy sex life. They were using pregnancy as a method of birth control.
A bullet is also a message.
Civilians were still finding silver blobby or feathery black fragments from the space shuttle in their driveways and swimming pools. Portrait-sized flakes of ash were scattered across flat roofs. Jennifer Paine loved Mike and the Mechanics and Lucius Nathaniel Calvin did not.
4.
Oh My Papa.
A big hit for Eddie Fisher. 1954. A very big hit. Fisher was of Russian Jewish descent but came off to many of his many fans as Italian. Being Italian had gone from acceptable to dreamy overnight and everybody wanted to know one and nobody knew why. What they called those dark good looks, which are always accompanied by a swagger. He thought he had it made. Died and went to Acceptance heaven. Fisher had a variety show called Coke Time with Eddie Fisher.
The unconscious smile on the old man’s flickering face as he stands in the doorway, angled against the jamb. Like, he doesn’t want to dignify that red-baiting network by sitting on the divan and taking the entertainment it offers like everyone else, as a responsible member of the audience. No, he’s making a statement, which, at this rate, it’ll take Ike approximately six thousand years to get the ambivalent message. But Debbie Reynolds is a different story. That he’ll watch. Eddie and Debbie duet.
-It wasn’t six million Jews, it was six thousand. It’s not six billion years, it’s six thousand. Is this a coincidence?
Three distinct strains of local rumor about Fisher that year (as though Midville has a plausible connection to either Hollywood or Tin Pan Alley) merge into one and hit Abraham Winters’ son with the force of an iron fastball to the temple on the suntorched baseball diamond he first hears it on, standing at first base with the kid who’d got there by bunting. The not-green grass of the diamond is patchy. The kid has a classic bowl haircut that reminds him of 1950. Maturity is measured in rectal thermometers. He caught himself thinking the word Ralston-Purina without anything attached to it.
“Hear about Fisher?”
“Hear what about Fisher?”
“You seriously don’t know?”
“Seriously what?”
“Eddie’s a Hebrew queer who sucks colored cock like it’s going out of style. Pass it on.”
“You’re so full of shit your eyes stink.”
“Oh yeah? My uncle’s seen the pictures.”
“You’re uncle’s a drunk.”
“So’s yours.”
There’s a line drive straight over the only other half-Jew on Winters’ team so he never gets the chance to finish the argument. Home is a very long walk away for the losers.
“If you looked any more like Eddie Fisher than you already do, your father would smell a rat.”
“Don’t say that, ma.”
“I thought you liked it?”
“Eddie Fisher’s a queer.”
His mother slapped him. Slapped Robert Algood Winters, Caucasian, 5′6″, brown eyes, 125 pounds, fifteen years old in December. Nicknamed Howdy Doody by the arresting officer. Apprehended in flight to Matoon.
The old man is shouldering the doorjamb in a plaid suit with the tie loose watching Channing Pollock saw a lady in half on Sullivan with a look on his face like he’s picking up tips. Like he’s matriculating. One hand balances a paper plate that’s way too shifty and bent and hot with baked beans while loud drunk relatives cavort in the gazebo. Speedy Gonzalez jokes and everything they imply, including the aunt with the bristle chin whom nobody can remember which relative by birth she used to associate with before he died and to ask now would seem insensitive. But the old man is mesmerized. Looks like Ray Milland in the cyanide-blue Sullivan light. The ghost-beacon that is midcentury television, guiding lost souls through the ether. The Ray Milland of interstate feedgrain sales. We’re talking about a magician that the old man quotes like a Winston Churchill.
-Happiness: a way station between too little and too much-Channing Pollock.
-No man in the world has more courage than the man who can stop after eating one peanut-Channing Pollock.
There were two main medical theories about masturbation and neither was flattering.You were either a homo or a werewolf. He had a two-handed technique that made him look like he was committing hari kari with a turkey neck. His father would curse under the window before trying to yank-start the lawnmower again. His bedroom walls would mottle with waltzing late-afternoon clock-gears of leaf shadow and he couldn’t help thinking of them as Jew walls; Jew leaves; the roar of the motor. Robert first learned the adult theory of the word pussy back in the fateful Thanksgiving of ‘53. This sparked an increase in the annual productivity of his jerk-off factory by an impressive 51% percent.
There’s a street in Midville, east of his house, with a colored on it.
The old man lectures him that he never touched his own self once before marrying your mother.
Midville isn’t even a proper name, but a description, as a teacher informed him, sadistically, because Midville is half-way between Decatur and Matoon. Mr. Schieble. Feeble Schieble. Is Robert a name or a description? She lives in a split-level with a two-car garage and her polio husband with two young unisex offspring, pretending to be Italian, doing that pinchy hand-gesture, but you can see the Mulatto of her at the end of every summer, when her skin is just a little too brown and the humidity of August brings the frizz back up in all the tawny hair bunched under the scarf and he pictures her on her knees in a pearl necklace and zip else, sticky as butterscotch, blowing Eddie Fisher and boom the earth moves and Robert sees stars and his junk hits the ceiling. He has trained himself in the art of not groaning. His mother’s Episcopalian, meaning he is not a Jew, an explanation he has polished to terse perfection in the relentless rehashing. Maybe Mrs. Schieble is an Octoroon, speaking of Robert’s favorite kind of cookie, a brand new unopened box of which on the dresser awaits him. 500 million sperm cells in the average healthy white male emission. 100 million on the ceiling alone. He does Jackie Gleason doing Reggie Van Gleason III, the imitation everybody says he should get paid money doing, saying, What do you think, old boy, shall we go another round?
The old man suddenly bangs the door open.
His Schwinn can do ten, fifteen miles per hour, easy, just cruising downhill towards the reservoir. He’s standing up on the pedals like a walk on the wind with a song at the top of his lungs and furious black smoke like a thunderstorm bottled up in the house behind him. But no more songs by Eddie Fisher.
3.
I look you and everything forgiveness. You are unbelievable beautiful. I feel like wrecks compare myself but I’m think you choose me for be most beautiful also. I do not dare for looks in mirror to whispering of sentence for staring you with sleep for whispering loud to hear this make me strong. This is hope my letter is tell you.
Life is such in Europe city to require every for what my strength is. I know is choice of me with go was make to go is true. I for snapped him finger one by one to daring try is stop me leave for everything. What a terror is for getting on such plane! But so many terror are unbelievable thrilling. For terror you are comfortable make to misery live. So for consider blessings to what city for people say way of talk with uncomfortable stay to stay. So smell of walking sidewalk with careful not bumping not notice for people I’m walk here. So stay is food smell for make is remember carnival or such childhood of fair from childhood is happen. This fair in a longest driving city was far long going. I from do not think of fairs now more.
Sometimes I wonder so panics what you think when look me. For always fears I say with do wrong thing to see what loving turns with pity. Loving what impatient become is something else. I wonder such times if not for transitional emotion, love. Unstable by definition, connecting deeper more useful states like fear, disinterest, hatred? I mean maybe you can’t hate something until you have loved it first and maybe the capacity for hating something is so important that love had to be invented in order to making hate work?
You can tell your mother almost have go for college. She know is Somerset Maugham or Upton Sinclair or also Saki. She know is Pride and Prejudice for. As you can also tell she unbelievable mess. Remember you get the good and the bad with everyone. But look at you so perfect, beautiful, innocent, deserve everything good. I am looking at your slightly parted lips with that rosy space between them so unbelievable small like ghost of the finest watch-part. It’s like you are truly powered by some new kind of energy better than sunlight glowing through your cheeks and eyelids and the tips of your hair and warms your sweet breath. Or it’s like you’re made of this energy and I cannot believe it came out of me. They always called that the miracle of life that I finally understand, after thinking this was just flower talk for many years but I know it now something so pure can come out of a body so stained and dirty with a dark bubble of pain from this dirty body’s bloody mess.
I feel that you angelic is masterpiece of geometer to look at the spiral of the wax of its ear and the small fat fruit of each balled fist unfold in a flower. Exactly its dreams probably are made still of the numbers more of the one than words that are something more envy to because the life of its mother is words and nothing but. My dreams are words always mumbled or scream but remembering I used dream for mostly in smells. For remembering the smell of a man’s aftershave could make me sicker than dogs. I’d go in and out of the house with a handkerchief deliberately soiled with chicken s–-t covering my nose when he’s shaving. I don’t want to complain in this letter but I have had rashes you could read in the dark by plus problems of the lower body most doctors would kill to look at. And these are just a few of things I overcame to becoming your mother.
Today when you found your own seat on the tram and sat a little ways apart from me swinging your feet looking back to wave, I was so proud and crushed, darling. It made me so hopeful for future and for worrying. I thought about how today it’s your own seat on the tram, tomorrow it’s you talking with people I don’t know and bringing questions home with you. It all depends on how much I’ve unbelievable lie to you, which is not a lie for fun but for safety and pride and caring. This letter is my answer for one of those questions. I’m still not sure how I’m going to writing this.
You don’t have a father, but you will know that already, by the time you’re read this. Oh, and you’ll probably never know the sensation I just felt after writing the last dependent clause of previous sentence. It’s like seeing one’s name on a list of the dead. I’m write this from the other side of my extinction, in a way, since (and I guess it’s spookily significant that I was always unbelievable affected by plot devices like this in second-rate novels and third-rate films) I’ll have made the necessary arrangements that you’ll be reading this letter only after receiving whatever possessions you’ll inherit in the event of my etc. Well, corny as that sentence is, I just can’t bringing myself to write it all out.
Back to the thing about you have no father. That’s just the way it is, darling. I guess there’s a good chance I’ve already discussed this part with you (by the time you read this), but, in case the topic never came up, or I never had the nerve to be straight about the situation to your face: I wouldn’t recognize the man who inseminated me with you if my life depended on it. If your life depended on it, I’d make unbelievable effort, but, no. All I wanted was you, and I needed a man’s help to make for happen.
He was very good looking and intelligent enough (we chatted for quite a spell at the touristy bar I picked him up in because I wanted to make sure). It was a Friday night, warm out, crowds on a sidewalk. We held hands on the way to his hotel room, which is more important to me, now that I think back on it, than you can possible imagine. I’m sure he’s the father, because I’ve only had sexual intercourse with two men in my life and the second man followed the first by gap of fifteen years.
You’ve never seen America and there is a good chance we will never go there together. Maybe you’ll go on your own one day. It’s hard to believe that I wouldn’t have discussed Midville with you but truly it’s obvious that my method will be for balance your happiness with the truth for shift and evolve as you grow older depending where your interests develop and so forth, so, if it turns out that I’ve decided to inventing the city of your mother’s (me) birth and childhood I’m sorry. The truth is the place I’m from is called Midville in the state of Illinois which is know as part of the Midwestern part of the United States of America.
If I’ve invented my own exciting childhood in an urban metropolis for you, with rich parents and exotic friends: no. None of that is real and I hope I haven’t going too unbelievable far overboard to give you a mother with past you can to proud of. Again, I am very sorry if that was the case. The only difference between a working farm and the place I grew up on was that the place I grew up on was not working. I always felt I had a certain right to be bitter about the thriftshop clothing and chewed-on hand-me-down toys (shipped in crates from superior cousins I never met) but I always thought also even as unbelievable kid: what you expecting? The country’s ten times bigger than it was in the days that a farm was a livelihood… something more than the perfect place for the head of a family for hang himself. But your grandfather never hung himself.
No, he didn’t. But you’re going ask of me, one day, about your grandparents, and whatever story I will have made up to tell you when you ask, this letter is the final truthful answer.
2.
“What a coincidence.”
“No such thing, my friend.”
“This is the last place I’d expect…”
“Paging Carl Jung… “
“A real live Midvillian. Pinch me, I’m dreaming. Remember the Dairy Queen? Everyone called it the Hairy Queen…?”
“I do indeed.”
“Bastards tore it down. What. Fifteen years ago. It’s a Planned Parenthood now. There’s an irony for you. When was the last time you were in Midville, anyway?”
“Don’t ask.”
“Honey, you wouldn’t recognize it. Even got ourselves a gang problem these days.”
“Inevitable clash of hierarchies.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“Country clubs, Al-Qaeda, the Black Panthers, Catholic Church, the military… they’re all hierarchies. That’s the first thing you get wherever two human beings or more shall gather together is a hierarchy.”
“Interesting.”
“That’s what people say when something isn’t.”
“Isn’t what?”
“Interesting.”
“No, seriously. Tell me more.”
“Well. You find yourself at the bottom of one hierarchy, what you do, any self-respecting ego, he invents one he can be at the top of. Say you’re some towel-head with a 5th-century education who couldn’t get laid if his life depended on it…”
“Ouch.”
“You invent, or situate yourself within, a hierarchy in which towel-heads…”
“Not the most politically correct member of the frequent-flyer club, are you?”
“Oh, I can do better than that.”
“I’ll bet you can. Let’s go back to your little hierarchy theory for a sec.”
“Okay.”
“Are we a hierarchy?”
“Unless I’m missing something.”
“Who’s on top?”
“I guess I’m thinking what it would be like to put my cock in your mouth.”
“You smooth-talking devil.”
“That’s me.”
“Hey, what’s the rush?”
“You only live once.”
“A grab the gusto kind of thing.”
“Life is short, my cock is long.”
“Vita brevis, cockus longus.”
“You’ve been to college, I see.”
“Auto-didact.”
“Impressive.”
“That’s exactly what people say…”
“When something isn’t. Touché. You never answered my question.”
“I don’t recall it was phrased in the form of one.”
“Can I fuck the shit out of your ass?”
“My, we’re saucy this morning.”
“It’s been at least an hour since I jerked off. Look, I’m shaking. Hold me?”
“Poor baby.”
“If you let me fuck you in the ass, I’ll let you clean the sweet shit off my cock with your tongue.”
“And people say the art of conversation is dead.”
“Now you’re being evasive.”
“Not evasive. You just haven’t closed the deal yet, honey.”
“You’re a treasure with a rusty lock.”
“Getting colder.”
“Are you allergic to beautiful dick?”
“I think I hear my mother calling.”
“Hey, it’s called a layover.“
“Check please.”
“Okay, okay. Have you ever heard of the name Paul Michael Swanson before?”
“Rings a bell. Are you telling me you’re a celebrity?”
1.
The country was wooded everywhere except at the bottom of the valley to the northward, where there was a small natural meadow, through which flowed a stream scarcely visible from the valley’s rim. This open ground looked hardly larger than an ordinary door-yard, but was really several acres in extent. Its green was more vivid than that of the inclosing forest. The configuration of the valley, indeed, was such that from this point of observation it seemed entirely shut in, and one could but have wondered how the road which found a way out of it had found a way into it, and whence came and whither went the waters of the stream that parted the meadow below.
Ambrose knelt on the bank of the stream, weighting his father’s poor pockets with stones. His father, Mordecai, inclined a torn face away from the boy’s activity as though shamed by it, despite all evidence, such as the blood caked everywhere and the bone of his skull exposed white as chipped flint, that his cares on this earth were now settled. Mordecai still clutched the hawthorn switch he’d meant for the beating of Ambrose, and Ambrose still clutched, between his teeth as he grunted in his efforts, the blade he’d used to forestall forever the beating. That the sun still flamed and birds still sang and nearby squirrels even frolicked, despite the terrible scene of not an hour’s coldness they’d all been witness to, helped Ambrose to nurture a grievance against the callousness of nature and the perceived insignificance of nature’s darkest bastard, which is man.
The Steven Augustine Experience, Ladies and Gentlemen, in a fricking nutshell. I’m working on the colorful pie-chart to indicate the proportions of Searing, Jaw-Dropping, Joy-Jumping, Belly-Laughing, Nightmare Feeding, Smartest Boy in the Class, Lover-Man, …etc. Until I get back, here’s Don DeLillo in Libra with the Amen to the prayer you hadn’t yet written:
“To share in nature is the oldest human truth.”
Ah, toinx, Comrade DJ Sensei Frances… I knew that text would find a good home in a great mind one day… I just knew it. Meanwhile: what do you think of Bela Lugosi’s version of Our Saviour (image for Comment #266)? Beats that corny old apocrypha about DaVinci’s Last Supper model for Jesus/Judas hands down, I think…
A sly image selection but my choice for holy family is…
Xmas ’68 will always mean, for me, “Everyday People” (the song is a compositional miracle, too, if I recall correctly; I think it’s just two chords throughout)
RNDM NOTES 3
1. What “we” haven’t caught up with is the Real World Business Principle that real deaths (or murders) are automatically factored into the calculations behind any important deal. We cling to our innocence (“conspiracy theory” resistance is one manifestation of this clinging). The fact is, when Y (projected possible profits) is greater-than-or-equal-to Z (negative fall-out from human deaths as a result of the transaction), X-number-of-people will die unnatural deaths. This isn’t News. Pop Stars beware: it’s just good business: at some point (earlier than you think), you become more valuable dead than…
2. to love is not the same as to hate not having
3. pain is evolution’s way of preventing us from eating ourselves
4. the basic unit of meaning is not the word but the sentence
5. let’s call “torture” something new: Sensational Coercion; doesn’t that feel better?
6. politics is the dark art of alleviating the masses of the responsibility of claiming full knowledge of the evil done on their behalf
7. age is the wittiest response to beauty
“4. the basic unit of meaning is not the word but the sentence”
The sentence is the basic instrument of tyranny.
Anecdotal antidote. Anti-sentences. Trojan Horse sense IED tenses: explode in the mind. User wear beware. Go naked
Rind = poison. Peel. Consume what is hidden. Discard with extreme prejudice.
The Author is a Tyrant, CDS Jacob! We just hope She/He’s good company while He/She is ordering us around in our minds! larf
What’s the point of writing, if not to imbue every sentence written with the power to inspire mistrust of sentences in particular and language in general?
Think of the middle school English teacher…. primary erectors of the barriers of class and propagandists of its signs and symbols… which, in enforced ignorance of linguistics, they insist on calling the ‘rules of grammar,’
Language is not our friend.
I don’t think I’d blame language for all that, CDS Jacob; isn’t it the old case of using fire to burn down the village… or make lunch… depending on one’s mood/skill/personality type…?
Italo Calvino’s T-Zero (and his Cosmicomics), for example, were formative texts that strengthened the connection between my Night Mind and my Artistic Will… long before I could put that into words (I read these as a teen). And he used (albeit translated) sentences; these sentences were nothing but good and still, to this day, inspire a trust for the Artist that I deny to the Herd Authoritarians (politicians, CEO’s, movie stars, etc). I trust my eyes and I also read with them and employ powers of discrimination; to mistrust everything is not much different from trusting everything. I trust (or mistrust) until otherwise notified by a check-list of signal conditions.
I don’t write to make anyone distrust the sentence; I don’t propose my sentences as facts. It’s Art; I strive for a certain balance of elements that pleases me when the mix is right or leaves me feeling dissatisfied when it’s all wrong.
Also: think of which middle school English teacher? They aren’t all wearing the same red satin robes; I’m sure a precious few are handing kids pretty sturdy toolboxes; the vast majority of the rest are just glorified security guards struggling to keep the class room body-count down while the pupils receive instruction from the Ubiquitous Fasco-Pop soaking through the walls, floor, ceiling.
Language is not my friend, it’s one of my favorite Games, the Garden I play it in and the Body I use to play it with. Not to mention the Ball!
(fuckme lookat thetime… nighty night!)
Don’t you get it? Language IS the conspiracy and the conspirator. Impregnates us with received formulations that reproduce the established norms even when we think we’re opposing them. You think you invented the language you use!?
Ha! you’re but the vehicle, the means by which the germ reproduces itself.
CDS Jacob, I don’t think Dick Cheney is a blood-sucking, chicken-fucking, skull-munching cretin-mogul as a result of being possessed by the sinister rules of English grammar. If our powers of discrimination aren’t capable of drawing a line between Dick Cheney and James Joyce, what good are they?
When I was nine-ish, the game we seemed to like to play at the most was running bases. Two bases, a kid on each base throwing one ball between them, plus one runner going back and forth, trying to beat the ball or be tagged, over and over again, forever (or until supper). It started off simple enough but, in time, variations developed. Next thing you know, we were doing running bases with a stingray bike. The rules became quite baroque, allowing for various exceptions, discretions, penalties and clemencies. The point of the rules was that they were a framework which made it easy for us to play together. Now, had our little running bases society become a tradition of thirty generations’ duration, including billions of participants, one could imagine A) how even-more baroque the rules would have grown in time and B) how disgruntled some members of our descendant generations would be about the fact that they hadn’t made the original rules. Still: there’d be nothing sinister, in and of itself, about the fact of the existence of these rules.
Also: what would you propose in lieu of language? Telepathy is so unreliable!
What do I propose?
Silence?
Impossible. There is no cure. Two points… probably as close as I can come to being reasonable.
Every word an individual believes to have originated out his/her self is a vehicle of delusion, for what issues forth has equally… almost surely more than equally.. been ingested and regurgitated from a linguistic and cultural pool as broad and deep as the history of our babbling species, the effects of which return to that pool in the form of consequences, almost all unforeseen and beyond the control of the speaker.
The second only semi-rational point I would make… is to understand that, like Blake with his Muse–language will serve us… rather than we it, in a degree strictly proportionate to our mistrust of its powers, a mistrust that follows our recognition that it is never an instrument we can claim to own or control or bend to what we believe (deluded creatures that we are) to be our purpose and will. We speak, and others speak through us; they are numberless, and we do not know who they are or to what end we are being used.
I have relatively greater trust in the language of art precisely because it is a scam, and doesn’t require me to believe otherwise to grant me the pleasure of removing me from the stream and redepositing me more deeply disturbed than I was before the encounter.
What I’ve written here stands as demonstration of the pathologically seductive power of language, and my helplessness in the grip of its powers… so much so that I find I’m in thrall of the sound of the words in my head and will, against all reason, likely copy and paste them–or some variant thereof–onto the back of the Dog.
No way I’ll be able to unpack this before dinner, CDS Jacob! Later.. later…
Now this is just too funny. I’m no fan of Zadie “Hothouse Flower” Smith (she once wrote that I should be ashamed of myself, after all), but Adam “Neocon” Kirsch has just done a job on Zadie with the same set of daggers (or mallets) Zadie used on James Wood (in revenge for his job on her ) last year. Was it last year? Or 2008? I can’t remember: it’s not important… it’s just fun.
Joseph O’Neill’s square, Anthony-Minghella-film of a novel (“Netherland”) and Tom McCarthy’s “Remainder” were, again, the pawns/effigies/banners flown/deflowered virgins avenged on the field of honor. Kirsch, in this essay, both A) snatches the enemy flag and makes a giddy dash with it for the Neocons (or post-Bellovians) and B) seems to want it known that his dark sport is cooler, less ruffled (more schooled) and sweats less than Zadie’s (which was surely the longest example of score-settling “staircase wit”… I couldn’t be bothered to double-check the French… published in print that year). And not a mention of James Wood! Well, except this citation of the coded reference in Zadie’s prior attack:
In both ways, Smith casts Remainder as the bonfire of Netherland’s vanities: “it means … to shake the novel out of its present complacency. It clears away a little of the deadwood, offering a glimpse of an alternate road down which the novel might, with difficulty, travel forward.”
Delicious. But it’s all just a little too fey and clammy, isn’t it? Moths fighting in an emptied-out, king-sized, worryingly-streaked Vaseline jar. Another cautionary tale about needing to have an actual Life for the Literature to illuminate, kids! Get out; go for walks; take Karate lessons; fuck somebody attractive…
A compositional miracle indeed. I’m going to die laughing.
Actually, I wasn’t Snarking on that one: listen to the rich variety of melodies Sly wrings out of those two simple chords. It’s a masterclass in economy!
Oh, I know! I regularly wear my Sly Stone discs out for that very reason. I meant the composition of the last chunk of TET. It’s a thing of beauty (and absolutely hilarious in its thematic juxtapositions, as marked by the images).
Aha! I was being deliciously dense, CDS Frances! Larf. This blood feud that Cap’n Woody started… how long will it last? I expect the next shot to be fired will happen anytime from 3 weeks from now until the end of the year, but, for the twist, the one wielding the pistol should be one of Zadie’s chums. Or what if Cap’n Woody is divorced by then and his Ex does it? Wouldn’t that freshen up the franchise…?
You can be deliciously whatever you wish, CDS Steven, especially now that you’ve made the centerfold over at TRE. But before your head swells to a Zadie-like circumference (polite throat clearing) isn’t this Chick-Lit Monday?
Did you turn off the spell check function?
[ed.'s note: nope; I can't turn it off on your PC... as far as I know]
Actually, it’s a brand spanking new ‘puter. Maybe that’s why. I’ll work on the fine tuning but until then maybe Sprout could give me a spare o for deliciously. Chocolate or jelly ring, please.
[ed.'s note: will you settle for a cheerio?]
ChickLit Monday‘s got a ways to go before it’s over, CDS Frances. As it is (I am not joking now), I’ve just donned a pair of my daughter’s tights (as rabbit ears) … because she made me. Later… later…
PLEASE STOP THINKING that the nape of Jude’s neck looks like a to-die-for bikini wax, she thought, digging a fifty-five-dollar Korean press-on nail-job into her sweaty palm as punishment. It always struck her as suspicious that the nail-ladies wore masks at work while the customers didn’t. Jude presented a stare-at choice of his nape or his muffin-top (as he worked on getting the fire lit) and the muffin-top was just too much like a chubby fallen popstar’s limo-exiting Brazilian to contemplate without problems. The trouble being that both of Jude’s simulated vaginae looked more presentable, to her, than her own. Was there a way to phrase that as a question to a Hipster Advice Column that wouldn’t sound like trying too hard?
“Here’s to trying too hard!”
“Eh?” said Jude. It was a distracted “eh”. Not quite irritated.
“Oh nothing.”
The fireplace was the center-piece of Jude’s fastidiously swinging lair and the fact that he was only now bothering to get it lit for the dinner party was another terrible clue that Tallulah was so early that she was still, technically, late for things that had happened the day before. It was obvious to her that it was obvious to Jude that she’d started preparing for the evening’s event (eg, trying to grow longer legs, bigger boobs and thicker hair… while also, as a precaution, applying and removing several versions of makeup) while kids from two-parent homes in daycare were still taking their spa-like aprés-lunch naps. Finished with the whole process (and perhaps a noticeable 15% more in-the-running as a result) before most of the pan-handlers she knew by gait were even out of their packing crates, she’d watched the clock for hours until a little voice chided, Don’t be silly, you’re too old to be playing games! Go on over to Jude’s right now, he’ll be glad to see you! You’ll have a couple of minutes alone together to connect before the other guests arrive! This is how grown-ups do it!
Well, thanks, “little voice”, she thought, for she was kind of certain that Jude’s little voice was now adorably mocking her. She could only hope Jude’s little voice didn’t belong to his penis. Did it matter what his brain thought? Not until after he ejaculates, interjected Tallulah’s little voice, who, somehow, almost impressively, had found the fucking nerve to comment.
Tallulah set her chronically-drained glass on the big blue Dorito with strained precision: it felt a little like landing a helicopter in a video game. Tallulah had simulated being shit-faced drunk so many times (to avoid facing the fact that she was fooling around with some guy she’d never fool around with if she weren’t shit-faced drunk) that she couldn’t tell if the distant buzz in her brain was genuinely chemical in origin or a conditioned reflex. Not that she and Jude were even close to fooling around or that she’d need to be shit-faced drunk to do it if they were. Evolution probably couldn’t tell the difference between approved penis and penis it took three showers to forget. Evolution, she decided, is a retard.
“Eh?” said Jude.
Half a minute of mild exertion later, he twisted on his haunches and showed her a ruddy right cheek that was adorably dimpled with a self-mocking smile. Was there a Guinness category called world’s shortest Rock Hudson look-a-like?
“Lu, hey, um, are you any good with fires?”
Before she could say The Former Miss Monica Lewinsky, Tallulah was down on all fours, beside Jude, peering at a neat little mess of twigs and charred Kleenex (and balled up pages of what she could only hope was not The Washington Post) at the base of a pyramid of beautifully presented logs, pretending to be interested in an expert fashion. They were, Tallulah and Jude, only, at most, three Twister-moves away from amateur bliss.
Obviously, it was then that the doorbell rang.
I’m not sure this is the best use of our time. Just because we can do something doesn’t always mean we should.
Well, at least no one can accuse us of circle-jerking on TET, CDS Frances! Larf! Skip the bluddy thing if it exasperates you, but I’ve got my own unsettling obsessions to address here…
To continue the conversation from CDS Jacob’s comment at the tail-end of Comment #268:
“What do I propose?
Silence?
Impossible. There is no cure. Two points… probably as close as I can come to being reasonable.
Every word an individual believes to have originated out his/her self is a vehicle of delusion, for what issues forth has equally… almost surely more than equally.. been ingested and regurgitated from a linguistic and cultural pool as broad and deep as the history of our babbling species, the effects of which return to that pool in the form of consequences, almost all unforeseen and beyond the control of the speaker.
The second only semi-rational point I would make… is to understand that, like Blake with his Muse–language will serve us… rather than we it, in a degree strictly proportionate to our mistrust of its powers, a mistrust that follows our recognition that it is never an instrument we can claim to own or control or bend to what we believe (deluded creatures that we are) to be our purpose and will. We speak, and others speak through us; they are numberless, and we do not know who they are or to what end we are being used.
I have relatively greater trust in the language of art precisely because it is a scam, and doesn’t require me to believe otherwise to grant me the pleasure of removing me from the stream and redepositing me more deeply disturbed than I was before the encounter.
What I’ve written here stands as demonstration of the pathologically seductive power of language, and my helplessness in the grip of its powers… so much so that I find I’m in thrall of the sound of the words in my head and will, against all reason, likely copy and paste them–or some variant thereof–onto the back of the Dog.”
1. Well, sure… if Language/Literature were still at a hypothetical stage. But like anything the totality of all human cultures have used (in some form) with unbroken continuity since before recorded history, the dynamic, liquid, and ongoing vitality of actual usage overwhelms any concept/theory you might try to match it against… moreso, in this case, because the theory is expressed within the system/structure the theory addresses. There’s more philosophical traction to be gotten, I think, in simple, local, ad hoc observation of usage. Eg: book critiques. Field recordings of neighborhood slang.
It’s not a question of if books, or the neighborhood slang, “work” for their users; it’s a question of what the users use them for. You can make the claim that two locals having a chat in the doorway of the neighborhood grocery store are indulging in a “vehicle of delusion”, but they would shrug and get on with the chat, using Language in a robust way that overwhelmed the abstract intricacies of your argument. The question becomes: are you asking relevant questions/ making relevant claims about their chat (or how one of them reads or writes a book later that evening)? Maybe the question is not how “Every word an individual believes to have originated out his/her self is a vehicle of delusion” but, rather, “what are these people doing when they talk about an episode of Star Trek on a Friday evening after dinner?” Are they doing more than talking about Star Trek, or less than talking about Star Trek?
In any scope much larger than that, the discussion runs up against the limit of the facts that A) it’s impossible to compare a Language-driven Human Culture to a Human Culture that does entirely without Language (for more than one reason: 1: no such Culture exists and 2: such a Culture would be unable to communicate the subjective values required to make a complete comparison in such an inherently subjective experiment/discussion) and B) again: in using Language to address the Limits of Language, you remove the Limits of Language artificially, by sinking an atomic model (your argument/research paper) of an unimaginably large system (LANGUAGE) within the total version of itself: from the structural perspective of the artifact of your argument, LANGUAGE is a system of infinities. What can’t you find/prove/disprove in LANGUAGE as a creature of/in LANGUAGE?
Ie: (a lá Gödel; I cite Gödel loosely) You can stand outside a watermelon to do a pretty scientific job of describing it. But you can’t stand outside of LANGUAGE. Making qualifying statements about Language involves the same inherent problems that attempting to make qualifying statements about The Universe entail. “It’s a young Universe.” Compared to what? “The odds of life in the Universe are slim.” Compared to what other Universe? And so on. We can talk forever at the level… signifying… only that we’re talking forever. My concerns are all on an earthier level.
I find it most helpful to my overall project, as an Artist, when I limit my concerns to specific sentences within specific paragraphs… with a tacit sense of where I stand with regard to the time/place/memories-behind wherever I’m writing. I don’t need to mention “people” in this formula because the Language is, essentially, made of people. That sums it up for me.
2. “I have relatively greater trust in the language of art precisely because it is a scam…” To know whether something is a scam or not, we have to have a look at the claims it makes (or that are made for it). What claims do the language of art (or Language as Art) make? There are plenty who make claims for it (and some of those claims, a lá Cap’n Woody’s, are scammy): shouldn’t that be a case-by-case investigation?
What you say makes sense. But doesn’t relieve my mistrust.
“scam”… as in: I’m not asked to trust it. Question never arises.
Not about what anything is about
About what’s in and wants out. And how much of what it’s in is not in ‘me’ Or of me. We are corroded conduits. Everything we can call our own we owe to the corrosion, Flakes of rust and corruption–the stuff of individuation.
All flows through but never washes clean. That’s our hope.
And why there is no hope.
I grow increasingly bored with ‘reason.’ Or rather, with my pathetic need for it. Nursing this rational dependency.
If I were
serious about poetry I’d take a vow of silence. Not another word from my mouth. Not another word on the page. Only what might be offered as poetry. Cease to exist as self. What’s not the poem–expendable. Suicide by poetry.
But I’m not.
[ed.'s note: I like the Zen-nishness of this and don't want to fuck it up with last-word-iness... but no response might seem like a particularly ominous response... so I appear here to say I'm not here]
“Or what if Cap’n Woody is divorced by then and his Ex does it? Wouldn’t that freshen up the franchise…?”
My gut tells me that C.D.M. won’t go so far as to divorce him. Once one has cultivated the taste for scholastic stink, I would imagine it’s trickier than one thinks to “go back.” She’ll probably just sublimate (see mercuric chloride), and clever novelist that she supposes she is, will pour it all into a heavily-veiled and high-toned Tome Apposite James.
When I was a young actress this was one of my two audition monologues. It’s excerpted from Marty Martin’s play, “Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein” (Vintage Books, NY 1980) [Punctuation and tabs as published.]
Well if you make a painting of a violin and you leave out the violin someone will inevitably call it ugly. But if it is the absence of the violin that makes it a painting of a violin then something interesting has been accomplished. A violin is just a violin unless someone plays it or paints it it is just a thing but if you play it it becomes a feeling and if you paint it it becomes a feeling too it ceases to be a thing then a painting is never the thing it is a painting of it is a feeling about that thing and so a painting of a violin without a violin in it can still be a painting of a violin and even a good one it may not be traditional but it is true nonetheless and unlike Leo I was not interested in principles of art it was his interest in them that held him back. One was always aware with Leo’s creations of his meticulously studied techniques there is no question about that but he always quit always gave in before he was through before he achieved that feeling because he was afraid that in the end it would not be there and that is generally the case with quattrocento art experts who know so much about how a painting is painted that they misplace the ability to comprehend why. A child with a piece of chalk and a blackboard is a kind of Sistine Chapel in a way the cave men did it on the walls of their caves and although it was not Rembrandt it was art theirs was art now that is not nonsense.
Formatting of the tabs didn’t hold. Everywhere you think there should be some white space, there is.
THE FICTIVE IN A SIMULOCRACY
Part One: A MAGINOT OF THE IMAGINATION
It’s probably now too much to expect that anyone will remember when Batman Xll (no, which one was it? the one with a posthumous Joker) was considered an important film. Not just by the malleable, vaguely-reactionary proletariat but also by a generation of liberalish young (and not-so-young) academic film buffs. The movie was near-perfect as a filmic embodiment of the tropes, memes, attitudes and lighting of the Bush2 reich… and the quasi-liberal North American mind just ate it up. What struck me was the constant barrage of the laudatorily-applied word “realistic” these brain-washed kids were using on a movie about a well-meaning (if conflicted), hi-tech, super-rich vigilante dressed up as an S&M bat. If you think that’s “realistic”, what do you think “real” is? What are these movies for?
How can anyone with half a watt of intelligence take them seriously in any sense other than Military (and/or as the Jungian excreta of Empire)? As narratives they are meaningless (c. 90 minutes of zero-sum power struggle); as spectacles they are pure post-Riefenstahl; as visceral experiences they over-ride common sense, disable one’s ethics and inject the Normative Cookie with radioactive steroids. A block-busting cinematic franchise is not an individual’s artistic vision: it is a billion-dollar insurgency on the battlefield of the Imagination (an air strike, say, vs the ground troops of TV).
Let’s have a look at the post-Osama, pre-Obama poster:
Subtle it ain’t; “subtle” is so early-20th century. Now let’s go back to a spot in ancient history… a few centuries in Simulocracy Time… long before the effect of the drug of the Dark Knight’s hype had worn off into a mere noise adding to all that other spent cultural back-chatter out there. Bear with me and read through this thread of Comrade Augustine trying to convince a bunch of academics that they were A) brainwashed suckers and B) infantilized brainwashed suckers, at that. Bear with me: it’s a long and epic battle…
Addendum: this is a key comment of the thread; strange that it comes from an adversary:
Thank you so much for re-posting this thread. Just as reading Mao II enriched my reading of Osama and Me and vice versa, yesterday’s viewing of the Bronzino show at the Met enriched my understanding of this Batman thread and vice versa.
This image is the point of contrast http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ho/08/eustc/ho_29.100.16.htm. Bronzino, court artist to the Medicis, arguably held an equivalent position to whoever created the graphics for the Dark Knight poster, professional valorizer of the figurative representatives of his empire. As you can read in the description but unfortunately not see so well in the online image (at least on my screen) enfolded in the draped fabric on the young man’s crotch is a grotesque mask, equal in ugliness and menace to the gargoyles on the table and chair. It’s a critique, oblique by necessity, but there for all the world to see as long as the image endures, an anachronistic visual expression of Burrough’s marks and Johnson (ypi) http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/Article/William_S._Burroughs_20th_Century_Gnostic.html, or precursor for same. I don’t know if Burroughs ever saw the painting (though it’s likely he did as it’s owned by the Met and he lived in NYC for many years), which is also distinctive for its use of the technique of imprimatura. It reminded me of my experience of seeing Vermeer’s gold-stippled fringe.
In any case, search as I may in the Dark Knight image for the wink, or the subliminal texting, I don’t see any, not in the smoke or six-pack abs or anywhere else. It seems to be offered in earnest, earnestly fascist.
Which really makes me eager to read Omega Point when it’s released. I’m prepping for it by catching up on some, not all, DeLillo. Because I’m thinking that just as Vermeer showed us how to read him in The Art of Painting, DeLillo might be offering a similar key. And it might be a confession of sorts. Or not. We shall see.
CDS Frances:
1. Fantasderful link to WSB-related material. This: “Unlike his more naïve contemporaries among the Beat literary movement, Burroughs never took his eye off the twitchy sharpshooter in the corner, the wild card in the deck known as Control.”
I’d go so far (and was going so far) as to say that Burroughs is one of the few known writers who was too knowing to be written by the Simulocracy (aka Control). Even DeLillo is, to some extent, I now feel, feeding poison chocolates to his Muse, sometimes, just because an Authoritarian Stranger handed him the box. And, as previously stated: didn’t McEwan fall so utterly for that trap that at least one novel of his, “Saturday”, is structured, as a parable, around the bullshit Blair told him about Saddam’s WMD? “Saturday” is now, on that level, rendered absurd. And that’s rather an enormous failure… a failure of the Imagination in a writer, after all. As credulous as any rube; so, too, Amis (though Amis was canny enough to keep the credulity out of his novels, largely; but his Atta portrait, in that short story he did for the NYer, is a fake of a fake dressed in the embarrassing drag of an interpretation of the Real)
2. Strictly (or Jungianly) coincidental: the Underworld character named Bronzini?
3. Nothing subliminal in the Dark Knight, is there? Not in the poster or the movie or the hype: no, the cock is flopped on the table. As I said: “subtle” is so early-20th century…
“Fantasderful link to WSB material.”
It’s via TRE from Secondary Sources here. http://noggs.typepad.com/secondary_sources/
I think I’m going to make some soup today. Or perhaps that’s redundant since we’re already in it up to our chins. What does Brita always say in Mao II? “You’re dropping your chin.” Which is another way of saying chin up!
I was hoping to avoid reading Underworld but after reading CDS Edmond’s new CJW post, I realize I’m not going to be allowed that bit of indolence.
You guys are hard taskmasters.
That CDS Edmond is a MEEN MUTHA
And CDS Jacob (meaner still) has got our back. http://issuu.com/conversationpoetry/docs/cpq10?mode=embed&layout=http://skin.issuu.com/v/light/layout.xml&showFlipBtn=true Pages 21-23.
CDS Jacob is pretty good at that there poetry stuff and redeems the twee, obscurantist, self-aggrandizing assaults on the form, which you can’t swing a catblog-cat without hitting online (…or, at least he redeems them while you’re reading him)
***ERSTWHILE SEXBOT MOCKED FOR FAILING TO BE HOLOGRAM
“Bridgitte (sic) Bardot was a media sensation and international sex symbol in the 1950s and ’60s, but you’d never recognize the 75-year-old actress-turned-animal-activist these days.” (an actual caption from an actual magazine)
***EU NOTSEES MARCH WITH THE LEGAL FASCIST FLAG
Yessuh, that’s, Uh, Ailvus in that there flag
***GANDHI AND HIS KAFFIRS
“DURBAN, South Africa – Six decades after his death Saturday, some of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s ashes were scattered off the coast of South Africa, where he was confronted by racial discrimination during a 21-year sojourn and developed some of his philosophies of peaceful resistance.”
But they fail to mention this:
“Gandhi lived in South Africa for roughly twenty one years from 1893 to 1914. In 1906, he joined the military with a rank of Sergeant-Major and actively participated in the war against the blacks. Gandhi’s racist ideas are also evident in his writings of these periods.”
(Is the woman in the photo, identified as Gandhi’s grand-daughter, Eli, vomiting his ashes into the water?)
(PS In giddy contravention of what I’m supposed to feel, I’d say that Bardot is more easily “recognized” in the After-picture, above, than in the Before… you fucking Simulocratic Anti-Gyno Cunts)
The Bronzino portrait, as mentioned above by CDS Frances (contrast heightened):
gargoyle crotch detail
The Vintage Quotation
Dept. of Catchy New Acronyms
Another too-pertinent excerpt from the WSB-related link CDS Frances provides (via Dan Green):
WISDOM BREAK
Last one from me tonight. Gotta get back to Cosmopolis,,,
On Cosmopolis.
Posthumous bad on Mr. Updike for this crappy appraisal of his rival’s effort.
“But the trouble with a tale where anything can happen is that somehow nothing happens. How much should we care about the threatened assassination of a hero as unsympathetic and bizarre as Eric Packer? DeLillo has a fearless reach of empathy; in “Mao II” he tells us just what it’s like to be a Moonie, and how the homeless talk. But for what it’s like to be a young Master of the Universe read Tom Wolfe instead.” http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/03/31/030331crbo_books1?currentPage=2#ixzz0eCJLIKMv
This (below) was more helpful from David Kipen, SF Chronicle (especially thinking ahead to the words point omega, novel as gesture, but what kind? Watch the watch!)
“It’s there when DeLillo describes one of Packer’s subalterns ‘moving in a wolverine lope,’ or when he writes of a gunshot wound, ‘It was all scald and flash.’ He wantonly nouns his verbs, relying on finesse instead of suffixes. With DeLillo, parts of speech are only ever suggestions.” http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/03/30/RV173930.DTL#ixzz0eCLN0UIL
Kakutani, no comment, she’s just out of it; but is Walter Kirn stupid, venal, or both?
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/13/books/long-day-s-journey-into-haircut.html
Signs of intelligent life in the universe.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3593402/Tracked-in-zeptoseconds.html
But the best thing I read on Cosmopolis was this pith by Guess Who?:
“While I’m at it: Cosmopolis. Gee, Laura Miller, what would you have made of Gulliver’s Travels if your English teacher hadn’t warned you that the improbabilities it presented were deliberate, and not to be read literally, but in the spirit of wicked satire?”
Goodness, that blurt by Guess Who is a pill of salty perspicacity, Comrade DJ Sensei Frances… please prepare a bond worth 50 Gratitudicals for the feller and ship it out in time for Easter.
Me, I’m just in from the outer rigors of meatspace, having walked a kilometer on the frozen face of a river running through the Turkish quarter with Comrade JR. On the way to pick up Comrade JR from his office, I missed meeting the great Harun Farocki by mere minutes and, indeed, passed him (a frighteningly tall filmmaker; I’m just over 6′ and Farocki had at least five inches on me in his heels) in the courtyard as he was on his way out, in a hooded jacket and looking grizzled and in no mood for a joke. Farocki is probably the premier politico-analytic auteur to come out of the loosely-bundled German New Wave which also spawned Wenders and Herzog and he’s certainly the only one of those three who never came close to selling out (whereas Herzog sold out so utterly that I can’t decide whether this makes his early oeuvre more remarkable or a total fake). Comrade JR is Farocki’s off-and-on right-hand tech man and turned me on to the work years ago and thereby exposed me to the notion that the idea or concept of a thing could shine above and longer than its production values and render unto the material a certain immanence I pursue (in several mediums, including dish-washing) to this day.
On the subway to meet Comrade JR (and miss mr. Farocki) I was carrying the tripod I used to get footage of Berliners —so uncannily dressed like Breughels— on the frozen river. I noticed, as I always do, how self-conscious people become when I arrive in their midst carrying a tripod… as though I’m a professional (or at least serious) Lookist and perhaps they won’t measure up. I was standing near the front of the wagon, beside a little seat that folds into the wall (useful when the train is packed) and a woman with a perfectly-trimmed van dyke (npi) asked me, with a very direct look which defied me to behave as though she were beardless, if I could move a little so she might have the seat.
“Posthumous bad on Mr. Updike for this crappy appraisal of his rival’s effort.”
Updike was using the transitive property to payback David Foster Wallace, via DeLillo, for the hatchet job Wallace did on Toward the End of Time (a largely marvelous fucking book in which almost anything could happen).
More on the marks and the Johnsons. I don’t think this hop, skip, and a jump from the metaphorical to the literal would have necessarily surprised WSB. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/aug/02/terrorism.humanrights1
(Mohammed’s since been released from Guantanamo.)
Kafka would plotz
http://www.nthword.com/issue5/entrancing_by_Edmond_Caldwell.php
+plus
Nice to see a lit site with half-decent graphics for a fucking change.
If yer referring to CDS Edmond’s Rembrandtishly side-lit face (above) I heartily agree, CDS POS
THE FICTIVE IN A SIMULOCRACY
Part Two A: Interlude
Who’s knocking gli due putti off the adorable throne?
These kids are not only post-Racial but pretty close to post-Gender, too. That’s the bit I like (I’m just not a fan of epileptimelismatics)
LITCRITTERS
Much as I enjoy the swipe at Senor Coetzee (and that one-nostril sniff at Thomas Bernhard), and agree as I may with MA’s plea for the fundamentality of Wit in Lit, it’s this eye-bulged jihad against cliché, and the not-super-fair dismissal of Coetzee as having “no talent” (as bumpersticker-thin as I found “Diary of a Bad Year” to be), that I can’t go with:
here’s a Coetzee sample (Disgrace):
This “anti-style” or “sub-style” works. Not for me (not in Coetzee’s case nor in Mr. Auster’s, generally), but for plenty of intelligent readers. On its own terms (unlike, again, “Diary of a Bad Year”) it works. The level of cliché is no worse than the stuff you might trade in at a party given by Uni folk. A well-read, intelligent woman might maneuver you into the corner of this hypothetical shindig and tell you a terrible tale in the melodramatic lighting of the sparkles from the ironic disco-ball and mesmerize/transfix/hook/ (pick your cliché; this very phrase, itself, of course, being a cliché) you… and do so without recourse to the elements of the finest verbal style or even access to a bottomless source of unique invention. Still, you listen.
DeLillo has an interesting perspective on humor in Point Omega–wisdom to fit in the palm of one’s hand–in a humorless book, so the point is finally unmissable.
Is that out already, CDS Frances? Where have I been?
Its pub date is 2/2 but thar it was on the front table on2/1. I’m officially off the self-imposed hook of reading Underworld. I’ve calisthenically
picked it up and down more times than I can say. Falling Man, too. They just haven’t captured me. I doubt they’d much inform my reading of PO anyway. I do wonder what, if any other texts, would. Maybe a Georgia O’Keefe painting? Or Khalil Gibran poem?
How far did you get in Underworld, CDS Frances? There is much profound beauty in that there thing (how many times have I read it myself? More than 5, certainly). His handling of the Manx Martin character, for example, is one of the profoundest applications of the technologies of writerly empathy I’ve ever read; oh, and the old widower, Marvin Lundy… the baseball fanatic who tracked and finally owned The (Bobby Thomson) Ball; the story of his Bronx-y marriage to his lady Brit is a funny-sweet marvel. It’s just in the Ur-political sense I question DeLillo’s mettle. But the beauty and core-deep humanity are there
I absolutely believe you.
I carried that book in my gut for seven years!
To be candid: I braved the distance through tundra to my favorite bookplace where they had the Point Omega in the window and, after thumbing through it, worried it might be only half-satisfying, or gnawingly unsatisfying, in the manner of The Body Artist, which felt a bit scooped-out. So I blinked and did not buy it. Maybe in a second run in a fiercer blizzard…
FROM THE JARRING HEADLINE COLLECTION
“Can Auschwitz Be Saved?”
Comrade DJ Sensei Nick (who composed and provided the sanctifying music for many of the tiny films I perpetrated), sends this serious treat:
Thank you so much, CDS Nick! Gorgeous from the smoking guns to the shot at dawn.
I thought it was just me but this winter, which has been the occasion for so many frozen walks by the partially-frozen rivers, was marked by my acute awareness of the chunking effect of the ice in the water. But I hadn’t connected it up to either the planet Neptune or the Roman God or even the human body for that matter. I’d just been looking abstractly but now I have a furious trident for the frozen sea.
(Someone should have told J.D. Salinger that the ducks in Central Park go to Chicago for the winter.)
Is the last movement a reference to Deep Shag by Luscious Jackson? Are you planning 11 more, a calendar series?
Also, CDS Steven, are there plans in the current renovation for a screening room? Maybe with an underwater egress from the pool?
To the last question, CDS Frances: I’m still pricing the velor…
THE FICTIVE IN A SIMULOCRACY
Part Two-B: Searching the River
-Wallace Shawn via
And who would really want to jeopardize that privilege by writing anything that would go too far toward alienating the readership and cutting the privilege-generating funds off? Ie, are some of our “edge-pushing” writers being careful not to push too hard? I sometimes perceive either a failure of nerve or a failure of the imagination in writers even as great as DeLillo and I know it can’t really be the latter. I think money is always, in the end, the answer to that question. Money is an effective, indirect (or even direct, sometimes) mechanism of Control. Your best, most fearless Art will happen when you are making not a dime off of it.
There is no Artistic imperative to engage with the explicitly “political” and there is every Artistic imperative to avoid, in fact, devolving to the level of the merely topical or polemic… but… if one engages the “political” to the extent that one willingly feeds propaganda into one’s material, doesn’t the material become an extension of propaganda? When Ian McEwan wrote Saturday, arguing, in allegory, the justness of Iraq2 based solely on the “reality” that the war-wagers projected as a justification for the war, didn’t his Art become propaganda… disposable propaganda, at that?
Wallace also wrote (as we were plummeting towards Iraq2):
…And the passage is rendered half-worthless because he took as his source for the “reality” he was commenting on the “dangerous leaders” themselves. The “dangerous leaders” explained the situation to Shawn (and the world) and Shawn then analyzed the behavior of the Dangerous Leaders in the context of the Situation as they described it to him: I call Cognitive Dissonance of the highest order. A man steals your wallet and tells you a lie about who stole your wallet and, later, after you manage to snatch your wallet back (with no money in it) the man tells you that the money fell into the river. And so you start searching the river.
No one can suck the air out of a room more suffocatingly than Wallace Shawn. Last time I saw him he was reading a then almost two year old Jane Mayer New Yorker article aloud (slowly and sans brio) at a PEN program at Joe’s Pub (still flogging the family brand). I almost accidentally knocked ACLU Exec Direc Anthony Romero over in my rush for the door (and oxygen!). Oh and don’t get me started on that Francine Prose woman! I’d like to lock her in a cell with Joyce Carol Oates, Cynthia Ozick and Adam Kirsch with the only distraction a tape of Waiting for Lefty playing in an interminable loop. I have a theory that Oates, Ozick and Prose (Oops!) have been allowed to have careers as a caution to other women of letters–just try it sister and you’ll get bug eyes, a huge schnozz and bad hair for your troubles.
The sword’s a-flaming! Good call clustering the whiskery Prose, Ozick, Oates and parthenogenic off-gas Kirsch in that cell… but I still have a fontanel for Wally
(Cloistering not clustering.) It’s true, it’s hard to imagine anyone but WS pulling this scene off with so much glee. He’d have to be invented.
He’s the go-to guy for “homunculus”
“You fell victim to one of the classic blunders… the most famous is: never get involved in a land-war in Asia…!”
How did I miss that the first time around?
Let’s pretend it’s summer…
Please give us a meaty beach read from the Augustine deep-freeze, CDS Steven. Anything at all. I need something really good to read!
Have you read The Dinner Party or Virginia Don’t, yet, CDS Frances? Those are strange long meats…
Yes, and Three Conversations… I like that one and it’s longish
In fact, give me five minutes and I can send you two PDFs (one is 485 pages and the second is 50 pages) of 36 stories (my favorites collected from TET and The Ept, the Ane and the Fantile): easier to read than the online versions
Wonderful! Of course I’ve read them but it’s all in the reread isn’t it, CDS Steven? I can’t thank you enough for the PDFs. That way I can print out chunks and read pages on the treadmill. It’s one thing to have a sexy new swimming suit, another to own it.
Our new favorite aphorism
Oi!
I asked him yonks ago for such a compilation for reading on the Kindle and heard nothing back!
CDS POS,
Did you send a self-addressed stamped envelope? I find that usually works well with these kind of requests.
I believe he claimed no such compilation existed, comrade.
Anyway, I’ve moved onto the oeuvre of Nigel Beale, which reads like *genius* on the Kindle.
Ha ha! Good old Beagle Beale
More to look at while treading (that’s a vintage Shepard Fairey up there, c. 1990)
More Berlin
There’s the type who clamors to be first in a comment thread; my secret joy is being only
(full disclosure: we have an aversion to the thuddingly-middlehack Parini… and that’s the bastard-”we”, not the “royal”)
— Max Barry via
Now exchange the word “advertising” with the word propagan…
LESS THAN HUMAN promoted as “super human”
ETHICS SCHMETHICS (I especially like number 7, on the list: the “pacifist” is the enemy)
Riding the tram from my favorite bookstore, in a blizzard, yesterday, to the Alexanderplatz stop, this announcement, in a sexy German female robot voice, speaking Babelfisched “English”, gave me pause:
THIS TRAIN WILL TERMINATE THERE; PLEASE CHANGE NOW
A very, very, very old story of mine, freshly exhumed…
BEATLEMANIA
Being born hopelessly poor and black and destined to be persecuted not only by the state but by my own race and family was the best thing that ever happened to me. My first four years, I took sweet milk from my mother’s dark breasts and that’s all I cared to know of the world. I didn’t even notice my mother’s appearance for the first time until the milk stopped. I discovered that the beauty of my womb-dreams was all right there; had returned in the form of her face. Gone to dust for lo these many years.
My father was a revolutionary black poster-maker of the 1960s and 1970s and his work decorated much of the Southside of Chicago. At the time I didn’t realize that it was he who was responsible for the strange images I saw on the telephone poles and derelict cars I passed on the way to school every morning in my ghetto on the outskirts of the city. Posters of black rats dressed as jazz musicians in doll-house-shotgun-shacks while white cats hissed at the windows. Across the highway was a marsh over which the sun set like the Hindenburg every evening.
This ghetto I grew up in had a name: Harriet Tubman Gardens. It was a concrete grid of identical, bunker-like units… each block was a row of ten contiguous two-story apartments at the end of which was an incinerator featuring a black iron chute that swung open to flames and a chimney that never ceased sending our poor garbage towards heaven. My mother and I lived in the sooty apartment at the end of our block; block E; and our living room wall was perpetually warm from the heat of the incinerator. We sat with our backs to this wall in winter and in summer we avoided the living room altogether. Our apartment was furnished with a massive mahogany-finish Magnavox console television with speaker grilles like arched cathedral fronts. The Magnavox was another source of heat in the winter.
Like all ghettos, Tubman Gardens had rats and roaches and stray dogs that ran in packs like would-be wolves every night. But because we were on the outskirts of the city proper, bordered on one side by an infinite marsh and the other by a wood bisected by rusted tracks and littered with ghostly old train cars and blackened pyramids of empty oil drums, we also had foxes and deer and rumors of woodland footprints in the snow every winter that were ten sizes too big to be human. The foxes would raid the yards of the old black folks who had come up directly from the Deep South and were in the habit of keeping chickens.
Most evenings we could hear a tremendous Thor-like hammer pounding ship-sized steel at the InterLake Steel Mills at the bend in a canal a few miles south. Sha-KUNG! Sha-KUNG! Sha-KUNG! And we often smelled, from the opposite direction, the livid green chemical processes of a paint factory a mile or two upwind. To the west, beyond the school playground and across a few lanes of highway, lay our vast marsh in the middle of which was a missile silo. All night long a tongue of flame blared from the top of a tall round chimney, burning off that volatile fuel.
Between the steel mills, the paint factory, the missile silo and the James Brown music blaring loudly through the wall from the neighbors, my childhood was Bosch-like. My imagination was stimulated even as the chemical odors were ostensibly stunting my growth and the constant din was breaking my concentration and the Soviet Union had our general vicinity on its first strike list in event of a nuclear war.
My mother had heavy, ornately patterned, gold-colored drapes on her bedroom window. Certain mornings shafts of sunlight would angle like brilliant swords between the slit-parted drapes and touch fire to the dust motes suspended in the shafts. I thought these microscopic twinkles were angels. Beautiful angels. And I felt love for them. I’d gaze on them for what seemed like hours and I’d improvise mumbled songs to express my adoration.
It’s possible I’d seen the movie The Song of Bernadette on television one of the many mornings I was too sick to make it to school and in my peculiar way associated these dust motes with Our Lady of Fatima. There may well have been a scene in the movie featuring a beam of sunlight striking the blessed Jennifer Jones on the forehead as she knelt in prayer. Even a child can sense the sexual connotations of a beautiful woman kneeling, chin up, lips parted, prepared to receive the incandescent raptures of adoration. Sunday mornings I’d prostrate myself on mother’s bed, chin on hands, and serenade these angels. Downstairs, mother whipped up our frontier breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon, four halves of buttered toast sliced on the diagonal and a glass of Tang, without fail, without end. I sang furtively while the delicious ghost of blue smoke of the sizzling bacon rose up the stairwell and the angels danced. The sadly beautiful Jennifer-Jones-angels in their liquid ballet in swords of sunlight drifting vast distances the scale of which I could lose myself in so easily. It wasn’t long before I was banished from this paradise.
The black day came in a bureaucrat’s banal raiment: I was sent kicking and screaming to kindergarten. I banged on our front door with little boots and little fists, demanding to be let back in, but my light-eyed father, who I hadn’t even been aware was on the premises over night, appeared in the kitchen window with a stern face, a face I feared and hated, pointing in the direction of school, mouthing go.
“Go!”
He would not let me back in. I could hear my mother pleading behind him but he held firm and I ended up making that symbolic journey of a few hundred foot steps with snot all over my face. I suppose he thought he was being heartless for my own good, and that one day, after making my way in the world, I’d thank him for it. But I’ll be damned if I’ve ever forgiven the bastard for that. I knew that not only would I be forced to spend half the day with strangers, barred from my own sweet home, but that my father would meanwhile be doing things to my astonishingly beautiful mother in my absence that I did not like. I had seen it once by pretending to be asleep, a ruse I immediately regretted. That awful pumping.
Harriet Tubman Elementary was right at the end of the street, a five minute walk away, but I managed to daydream an entire revolution. A pretty tarot card picture of a child victorious in his mother’s arms, father dead and hanging by his heels from the incinerator chimney. I dreamed it all before crossing the street and filing into the dark building. It was only later that I realized that not all of my schoolmates felt as I did about this forced march into an ugly municipal space so redolent of Lysol and chalk; the dimly lit halls and teachers who looked like janitors and janitors who looked like former pupils. Many if not most of my schoolmates were glad to be escaping home for a few hours every day. They didn’t live in a paradise like I did. And yet there I sat, banished, confused.
There were two fat white rabbits in separate cages on the window sill. Cartoony members of the alphabet were marching with pitchforks, spades, scissors and shovels in a sinister procession around the room above the chalkboard and the windows and the cloakroom and the door. Adult faces appeared intermittently at the wire-webbed shatter-proof glass of the door, directly under the big clock with its black hands; peered in and moved on. The seated circle of children I joined on thin mats after I had hung up my jacket were all thinking what I was thinking. Who knew there were so many little black people in the world?
“How many of us can already read?” asked the light-brown teacher in her feline eyeglasses. The eyeglasses were secured by a chain around her neck; was she afraid we’d steal them? Her straightened hair was limp as a hound’s black tongue. She raised her hand as if to answer her own question and I raised mine too and only one other little boy responded with a tentative half-lifting of a hand that fell back to his lap before the teacher seemed to notice. He was wearing a bulky plastic two-tone contraption on his chest like a radio connected to his left ear with two white wires.
His name was Burley Durden.
“Master Dixon,” nodded the teacher, Miss Pennyboy, beaming at me. “Anyone else?”
Years later, I will masturbate to indelible images of this narrow-waisted, pecan-colored woman. Not in her incarnation as a bourgeois Negro kindergarten-teaching supporter of Barry Goldwater gnawing on the earpiece of her eyeglasses, of course. But to an Afro’d, go-go booted Plaything Magazine image of her that I will discover on a newsstand shortly after coming of age. Miss Pennyboy reborn as a revolutionary icon.
“Burley, child, did I see you raise your hand a minute ago?”
“Not unless you was peekin’, lady,” said Burley and the whole class, including Miss Pennyboy herself, erupted with easy laughter. Comic relief is always welcome is one of Life’s lessons. We exchanged a quick look, Burley and I, as though anticipating the mischief to come. Burley closed his eyes, mouth still open, turned up the volume of his hearing aid and strained. He forced out the bell-clear tone of a fart and I crinkled my nose.
Bologna.
School was a sham and I didn’t need it was how I felt and experience soon confirmed this. Mrs Pennyboy instructed us to sit in a circle while she sat at a little brown upright piano and went about the business of teaching as she knew it, which somehow involved songs like ‘Go Tell Aunt Rhody’ and ‘The Itsy Bitsy Spider’. The spider song was a study in futility: the spider keeps climbing up the water spout, only to be washed back down to the bottom of it again by some eternal monsoon. And ‘Go Tell Aunt Rhody’, with its gruesome refrain (‘the old gray goose is dead!’), upset me.
Go tell Aunt Rhody, go tell Aunt Rhody
Go tell Aunt Rhody, the old gray goose is dead
The one she’s been saving
The one she’s been saving
The one she’s been saving
To make a feather bed
This was the stuff of nightmares set to a dirge-like tune. There were other strange songs. So many of them! Songs about farmers. Why are there no children’s songs about scientists or actresses? Songs about farmers, bakers, spiders, dells, steeples, brooks and bees, yes. Nothing about tapeworms or architects. Nothing about craters.
I had an eye, for the duration of Mrs Pennyboy’s session at her plinka-plink piano, trained on a set of red boxes in a corner of the room called ‘the play area’. On the five, brick-red boxes arranged in a row was printed a drawing of a locomotive and several box cars and a caboose, respectively. I had graphically intense fantasies about the enchanting scale-model train that was waiting for me in these boxes. I didn’t pay attention to a word Mrs. Pennyboy said or a note she played, so intent was I on imagining that train and me playing with it. When the time finally came and we were allowed to get up off that circle and toddle across the room to the play area with its wooden jigsaw puzzles and alphabet blocks and little plastic farm animals and so on, I made a bee-line for those incredible red train boxes, mystified that no one else seemed interested in monopolizing them.
Of course they were empty.
Burley had two distinguishing characteristics: he could read, and he wore something in his hair called Murray’s Pomade. The product came in a little round light-brown tin with a line drawing of a smiling black couple, with glistening domes of hair, on the lid. I’m fairly certain the pomade looked like clear shoe polish in the open tin and Burley glopped some on his standard-issue centimeter-long thatch of peppercorn hair when I picked him up on the way to school one morning. He stuck his clip-on tie on and carefully glopped the Murray’s on in the mirror atop his mother’s vanity. Burley had the sweet round guileless face of Jiminy Cricket.
“What’s that stuff?”
“It’s for my hair.”
“Why?”
“Girls like it.”
“Why?”
“’Cuz it’s like The Beatles.”
“Oh.”
The Beatles didn’t speak to me the way Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons spoke to me with their smash hit Sherry. One of my aunts or uncles had that 45 laying around my grandmother’s house as early as ’62, the year it first it came out on a Chicago label called VeeJay (to which The Beatles were signed briefly), and the song flipped a cosmic switch in my three-year-old brain. Everything astonishing in my first exposure to the song, from the intro beat, to the bass riff, to Frankie Valli’s falsetto and the dramatic key change in the middle eight, opened my wet little brain to the primordial spirituality of golden age pop, when it was still flowing from original sources that weren’t essentially distinguishable from the wellspring of the world’s oldest religion, Voodoo itself.
The funny thing being that I misheard the title lyric as ‘Jerry’ and the song made me feel like a girl. The notion of romantic love or whatever it was had nothing to do with sex but with a swoony sad dreaminess that was so passive that you had to be girl-like, as sensitive five-year-old boys often were in those days, before the hyper-masculinization of American culture commenced, to give into it. I played that song so often on my grandmother’s big old console record player (rich with the odor of antediluvian dust burning on its RCA tubes), carefully popping the curved bright red or yellow plastic swastika of the spindle adapter into the big round hole at the 45’s center, threading it on the spindle, lifting the tone arm, lowering it on the vivid disk…
Burley was way ahead of me on The Beatles trend. He even wore pointy-toed leather shoes that looked very much like Beatle boots. So it was to be expected that a strange ritual evolved during recess in kindergarten that year. When the recess bell rang at 11:45 and the fire door leading to the asphalt expanse of the playground was swung open by a very large black teacher with a sweaty fat neck constricted by a necktie in a private protest against lynchings, Burley and I, without planning anything in advance, would go running across the playground under the thrillingly overcast sky and we’d run as fast as we could in a breathless diagonal across the continent-vast blacktop expanse of the playground, a playground a platoon of soldiers could have paraded around forever, with every single girl in our class running behind us and screaming at the top of their lungs in a pitch-perfect imitation of napalm death or Beatlemania.
Thank you, CDS Steven. If only August Wilson had had your world-in-a dust-mote gifts his black history plays might’ve been less defensively Raisin in the Sun(ny) emblematic and more “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” –a more fruitful starting place.
“carefully popping the curved bright red or yellow plastic swastika of the spindle adapter into the big round hole at the 45’s center,”
You realize that even with this precise description there will be readers who will wonder at these words or skip over them entirely with no earthly idea what such a thing was. It’s like reading Darwin in The Voyage of the Beagle!
Ha ha! Honestly, I could foresee youthful headscratching over that reference, CDS Frances… consider it an inside-joke betwixt the over-40s
Why the odd spellings of Frankie Valli, kamarad?
Frankie’s finest:
Excuse me, CDS POS. Yoko’s on line 5. I’m sorry to interrupt but she says it’s very, very important.
Luvly-strange and valued gene-splice, CDS Pussies of Steel… please advise how you’d like the bonny thang formatted and also any pictures you care to insert…? (and yes that tune you link-to by Frankie is minty-ace)
What’s she sayin’, comrade?
“Brighton calling.”
No pics necessary, comrade, but I’d appreciate it if you’d remove the unnecessary ‘could’ in ‘If the hairship could make a floating face could come into the presence of any man or woman’.
Cheers for the pdfs. I read The Brotherland Miracles on the Kindle last month. Stonking work but I suspect a couple more reads are called for, ye-fly-bugger-ye.
Re: TBM: It’s only half-done, Dear Pussy!
“Why the odd spellings of Frankie Valli, kamarad?”
Yipes; I must have written this thing not only during the 1990s but at 3am! (will fix and respond after dindin… just walked in, you see, bearded with hoar frost and hungry as fuck)
(The truly funny bit being that a very-close Ex of mine is long-married to an Italian feller named “Valli”)
So.
Frankly, I’ve had that chicken-bone to pick with Wilson ever since I read an interview with the admittedly-strong writer and it turned out that he was raising his daughter to speak a limited, quasi-regional, fucked-up Pidgin English because that was her “heritage”. But it was only more her heritage than the bronze-hard, bronze-bright locutions of Frederick Douglas (and any number of 18th and 19th-century black orators/writers) if her father decided so. And why would he decide so?
It’s my belief that Wilson didn’t allow himself to face the fact that the definition of “black” he was working from was decreed by Massa. I mean, ja… black illiteracy was the Law for the duration of most of the North American Slave business (violated on pain of whippings or death) but, surely, that’s all the more reason to cast that burden aside after Emancipation? Fucked-up English is also the “heritage” of cracker-white Appalachians, too, but we don’t see gap-toothed double-negatives being valorized in school as “white English”, eh?
The phrase for it is “branded on the tongue” and Wilson willingly, under no threat of a whipping, branded his daughter. I took a secret swipe at him in the story “Eryn; Edwina” for that.
Beyond the sociology stuff, I’d like to say that “Beatlemania” goes back to my mission to pursue a stealthy kind of avant-garde strategy in writing; it’s not my thing to (for example) fuck with typography to produce unusual texts: others are better at that; my thing is to juxtapose jarring concepts or frustrate expectations or lure the reader into a sunny green field that turns out to be the bottom of a very clear pond with creepy fish in it. So, in the story under consideration, I subvert the standard Negro autobiographical tale of triumph and woe or self-realization or whatever. All of the brand-name-writers who handle this material work from near-identical templates and notice how strange it is to diverge by 50-75%.
As long as we’re on the subject: this semi-aestheticized body-pix-site I sometimes page through (where did all of these sites suddenly come from? Some of the best have managed to grade entirely away from the tacky-frat-pron which revolted and dismayed us for the first 20 years of internet) rarely shows stand-alone nude males (fine with me; I’m just thinking of the needs of some of our Comrades Lurking) and even more rare is the nude male of color, and then we get this:
vs this classic presentation of pale males on the same site
Q: are the racist antlers cool enough, as a fashion statement, for us to forgive the blatant de (or pre) -humanization of our big black cocks?
And when I was a young feller and spent my days and nights painting, mostly, I went through a period of depicting my cock in varying metaphorical shapes and colors, the variables dependent almost wholly, it now seems, upon the women I used my cock to plug into (there were 33, in all, with my Beloved the 33rd: I still know the first and last name of every one) and here was one series I did and please notice how civilized the cocks are:
and more
VERY GOOD FAF
YOU WILL BE CONFUSED
Oh, I think the Comrade DJ Senseis will enjoy this video artist’s work! Especially what she does with the Zapruder footage (at the 5:07 mark).
I do like the nonviolent hypothetical POTUS-subtraction method
Comrade DJ Sensei Modern Lore! Greetings and many thanks for the tune-drop… the perfect sounds for this particular moment! Anything by the illustrious Geno up your sleeve…? (npi)
Cha-hooooooooon, Comrade Neil…
Looks like it’s a Northern Soul all-nighter down The Endless Thread…
Fookin Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaace
A noticeable improvement in the music since the professionals have stepped up to the booth. Does anyone remember that frisky old tune “Notch On Your Belt”?
Clue us in, Comrade… a search turned up zilch
I love that quasi-martial Motown stomp… what we used to call “four on the floor”
Another stompa:
With the added benefit that I’ve never heard this artiste before… I like it when it sounds as though they’re singing for their very lives
You must have some NS to drop, comrade, no?
Very Four-Tops-ish
In fact, fuck, I know it’s hardly a rare find but…
(PS and please note the similarity of the verse-phrasing to Bob Dylan’s… or vice versa)
(compare declamatory, shoutastic phraseology)
And another:
Have you read McKinney’s Magic Circles: the Beatles in Dream and History? Wonderful book but gone, baby, gone…
http://www.amazon.ca/gp/reader/067401202X/ref=sib_dp_pt/175-3309080-4983235#reader-page
Ah, Martha, of course!
Indeed, indeed. Perhaps best, though, if I leave accusations of thievery to others.
Another mainstream cracker:
An astonishing streak of the purely good (would’ve preferred visuals of Jackie himself, of course, but this’ll do), CDS Pussies of Steel!
CDS Steven,
The paintings in #35 are very beautiful Questions! What are the dimensions of the canvases? Are they all erect? I know you’re an admirer of Lucien Freud and wondered if you attempted any flaccid penises as well. Have you named the paintings? Are you sure you don’t know about Emotion Lotion? Some of the colors are remarkably suggestive of the EmoLo flavors? Is the third one down on the left an homage to this painting by any chance?
CDS Frances: all homages strictly coincidental; paradoxically, each luminous member was, in fact, a FEMage and, oh no, never rendered a Freudianly limp one on canvas and rarely, in fact (cough) in life. (dimensions: 3″x5″ acrylic on masonite; all currently in the collection of the woman I described in TET 2.0, I think it was… the former-model who ended up being tabloid fodder in the UK for a scandalous affair with a famous actor… the scandal woman who, before this infamy, gave me a tiny leopard-skin-patterned pouch of copper-colored clippings from her jean-jungle: quid pro quo pro bono)
A leetle Lucian (sometimes a cigar…)
(Addendum: re: my phalli: the third-from top, L; and the second-from-top, R, are photo-shopped variations on originals; and I’ve just remembered- npi— that a much larger one of these, attached to a reclining faceless body, is-or-was in the possession of a half-Sicilian girlwoman in Stockholm whose aunt was a good friend of Italo Calvino)
FEMage or FEMtrait?
When I first moved to NYC I was in a Method Acting studio located in the West 40s on Eighth Avenue before Times Square was Disneyfied. A teenaged Uma Thurman was also in the studio, sent over from her modeling agency. In the physical warm-up, she used to roll down her spine and place her forehead on the floor inches in front of her. CDS Nick’s new novel reminded me of her liquid presence. But that’s not what I wanted to tell you. The studio was directly across from a gay art cinema and for years the movie on the marquee was the porn classic–The Young and the Hung.
“The Young and the Hung”
Ah, yes… the Sophie Scholl story…
Regarding this trope of calmly walking to your own execution, head held high…no thanks. I say make ‘em drag you kicking, screaming and, if possible, biting and drawing blood. Herniate a few of their discs on the way to the chopping block. Hell, that’s what worker’s comp is for.
My sentiments prexactly
Speaking of romance languages.
(TALES FROM THE ELIZABETHAN SIMULOCRACY?)
Remember, Comrades DJs Senseis Lurking and Explicit: Nothing is but what is not. This is lots of fun (sadly, the website I long-ago copied the 38-page document, which the following is an excerpt from, no longer appears to exist; the second essay is from the early 20th century):
and
WAS MARLOWE THE MAN?
Archie Webster’s original essay, published in The National Review (VOL.LXXXII, pp.81-86) dated September 1923.
(And therefore before Hotson’s discovery in 1925 of the Coroner’s Inquisition concerning Marlowe’s death.)
This is going up to balance-off the surfeit of cock above… drawn around the same time I did the cocks. The woman depicted is a film director
A heady bricolage of penises, vaginas, Northern Soul stompers, and Elizabethan apocrypha. Where else can one find such variety?
Some top picks there P.O.S. It was your citation of ‘The Night’ which got me to thinking along these joyous lines.
Time to sprinkle a little talc and give the old footwork an outing…
The casino is dead. Long live T’Bunker!
Magnificent.
That scene is just crying out for a Winterbottom-style feature.
The yodeling is what shifts it towards another glorious dimension, eh? And many years before digital sampling made the Duchamp-sonic-collage de rigeur, too (note all the proto-breakdancing, cossack kick-moves in the vid)
Sweet Jesus. Come On Train by Don Thomas has been appropriated by Visa. Evidently – I’ve just seen the abomination – it features in a new ad of theirs. Just when you think late capitalism has nothing left in its arsenal, the fuckers up the ante again.
The best and only revenge is to dance into a coma (conveniently collapsing backwards into one’s own bed)… which is what I intend to do. Comrades DJs Senseis More Modern Lore and Pussies of Steel, would yers shut off the fondue pots and eggnog fountains on yer ways out…?
One final pick, as requested by our esteemed host. This would be my pick from Geno Washington’s oeuvre (replete with comically ‘hip’ English intro)
Ooops I meant this.
ACES!!! (spins, clutching head, in disco boots and careens into bunk bed...)
Something with Kurt (via Dan Green’s thoughtful aggregation of interview links, first brought to our attention by CDS Frances):
More from Kurt (from the above-cited interview):
I’ve always loved that comic spirit in Vonnegut’s work. Not so much tragic gaiety as desperation going the extra mile, exerting itself for the common good (compare this with Amis who rarely gets beyond showcasing his own wit).
Oh, indeed, CDS More Modern Lore, not much comparison between Mart and Kurt (despite the fact that Mart stole the “Time’s Arrow” riff from Kurt, as we know, and then sprinkled “The Information” with Vonnegutisms)… Mart’s jokes are always lobbed high or low but outwards, away from Mart, while Kurt held very graciously on to his grenades after pulling the pin each time. Kurt always made me think of a Samuel Clemens softened, from outright scorn and disgust to tragic resignation, by an ameliorating access to the modern sex life and penicillin and great appliances.
Another thing about KV: here’s a writer (one feels) who could not be hoodwinked. An important thread running through the Thread.
JOURNAL EXCERPTS (from 2001, with reflections on the 1990s):
***(Updated periodically as I look through the old notebooks)***
http://www.27bslash6.com/ikea.html
and
http://www.27bslash6.com/p2p.html
Better than Annie Hall
So profoundly glad to reread Eryn; Edwina this snowy morning. I would say that was a pretty loving “swipe” you took at August Wilson. I wish he could have read the story. I think you might have gotten his attention with “cheeses that would make a vulture puke.”
The reference to the recollections of the old porn star–were you yet aware of the video you posted of same–chicken or egg?
Now I’m going to reread CDS Neil’s The Road to Route One. I was shocked that it ended so soon. Now to plumb the watery depths.
CDS Frances!
A) Not a “loving” swipe, I’m afraid… neutral at best. Larf
B) The vision of the old porn star in Eryn; Edwina vs the video of the old porn star posted on TET 3.0 (I think): purest serendipity. Though I’m certain, now that we’ve seen the video, that it’s her my Writerly Superconscious was in touch with…
C) Let’s have a spirited discussion about The Road to Route One, eh? We can draft in CDS More Modern Lore and CDS Neil, both, plus other Comrades as happen by. There’s something very much Sam-Beckett-writes-a-multi-part-episode-of-The-Prisoner about it. On the one hand, these things are usually best left “unexplained” (ie, non-demystified)… but that shouldn’t stop us from asking, for example, what image CDS Neil had in his mind when it all began to condense there…
(Wait: did I mean “Beckett”… or “Pinter”…?)
Yes! But please feel free to start without me. I’m just heading down to the gym and will hope to contribute a few slick observations post-sweat.
We’re waiting for Comrade DJ Sensei Neil to swing by himself; or, perhaps, CDS More Modern Lore (his official aficionado)…? We’re going to turn the high-powered beams of technical curiosity on ‘em and offer a bucket of Gratitudicals for original material (just a line; a paragraph; an autobiography..!) to flesh TET out with.
THE FICTIVE IN A SIMULOCRACY
Part Two-C: The Passive Goebbels function
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/7134959/Martin-Amis-Women-have-got-too-much-power-for-their-own-good.html
Mart can be such a credulous cunt, sometimes. And, clearly, the great shift of the “sexual revolution” was not in the power-proportions of the relations between Male and Female but in the fact that, for the first time on the historical record, the Underclass were given sex lives more-or-less similar to the sex lives accessible by the Aristocracy, who have been into adultery, pedophilia, date rape and bestiality since long before Catherine the Great or Caligula, even. Suddenly, the pretty young offspring of the rubbish men and the seamstresses were not just available to be fucked-unwed, without consequence, by a Lord but also by each other.
A. Yes, those Mullahs really should be pleased that hipster infidels have been fucking (or hankering to fuck) Persian beauties up the arse since the 70s; what’s the problem?
B. Ignoring the fact, of course, that al-Qaeda is comprised of a few dozen up-for-anything-because-we’re-horny teens, a few hundred agent provocateurs and the un-acronymed branch of the CIA in charge of shaping the narrative etc.
C. “We didn’t have any feelings about Islam except that it was not us – obviously.” Don’t forget the “feelings” we had about the oil, Mart.
Is Mart being evasive or naive? This dilutes the concept of his “authority”; when I put my Imagination in a writer’s ghostly hands I need to trust that she/he is in charge of the material. Is Mart in charge of the material? A self-righteous, hyper-masculinist Ur-dick who thinks anybody who knocks his Bearded, Vaguely Levantine, Anus-Free Sky Giant deserves to have her/his throat slit is not welcome to borrow my bicycle: no. But neither is a “public intellectual” who can’t tell the difference between that, as an odious Lifestyle choice, and a Phantom Super-Target for Perpetual War straight out of the Orwell/1984 playbook. Functioning as a Passive Goebbels is not, in my opinion, part of the writerly mission statement in a post-Enlightenment Dolcetopia.
In a Simulocracy, on the other hand: 2+2 = 5.
The bad news: Your Country is Mentally, Spiritually and Structurally iLL
It’s a pipeline and they have to get these kids in it and reduce their options to the point where the military is their best or only bet. Our jails are filled with truants, turnstile-jumpers, teenaged HOMELESS loiterers, shoplifters, joint buyers and sellers, and the like. They bust ‘em early and often and from their vantage point, busting ‘em right at school is efficient, a good use of resources. How convenient to locate the police station nearby. This Dead Zoner who runs our city is closing 19 public high schools at last count, pushing kids into charter schools or out into the streets. It’s all about privatization. They are destroying people left and right as he picks up this city by its heels and shakes every last dime out of the public till. http://www.indypendent.org/2010/01/29/bloombergs-12-step-method/
This charade that they performed after the election that he won by ONLY 5 pecentatge points (in what world is 5% a close election?) and will therefore be more sensitive to voter concerns was absurd. At a function last month I got in Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer’s face and told him just what I thought of him for not running against Bloomberg. He could’ve won and I believe Obama signaled loud and clear that he would have helped us if there had been a viable candidate. But we ran a clown as our candidate. A clown, a man who should be delivering the weather on a local news channel AT BEST. Scott told me I was sweet to say so. I told him, you’re not hearing me if you think anything I’m saying is sweet. (His cousin was the righteous Congresswoman and activist Bella Abzug who I had the privilege of knowing and admiring. Another day I’ll write about her funeral.) I told him he put his personal financial security ahead of his duty as a public servant, that he not only missed an historic opportunity to become mayor when our city needed him most but to rescue our treasury from the fascist stranglehold. He said finally, I know, I know. What do you want me to say, I didn’t do what you said. That’s right, I told him, and the city you’re going to be Mayor over when you run and win safely will not even be recognizable. Then I lit into his sycophantic aide who started babbling about how we’re going to keep fighting the good fight and hold the mayor accountable. It’s such bullshit! My last word to Scott was that he needed a better staff, a staff to help him find his courage if he couldn’t do that for himself.
This is nothing. They’re just getting warmed up.
Terrifying clear-eyed analysis, CDS Frances. However, I can’t take either Osama or Obama seriously as anythings other than holograms: that’s my only caveat regarding your granite-solid comment.
We are quite interested in hearing about Bella.
I know. I go in and out. The flickering lights. It’s hard to let go.
Too true; we need something else to grab onto with the left hand before we relax the grip of the right…
We can grab this: a great interview (despite BM’s praise of the awful “Henderson”: larf) via Dan Green’s useful interview resource
The fixer upper. “You read the book and write your ticket.”
The good news
the meaningfully and beautifully Simulocratic, for a change (fill us in, CDS Pussies of Steel: about the sci fi novel that the movie, which this vid is based on, is based on…)
From an email to CDS Barry, regarding the academic craze for etymological arguments:
CDS P.O. and I (during a long walk on icy roads in the dark and subsequent ride on the S-Bahn with very grim-looking co-passengers), after discussing the peculiar case of a Vietnamese restaurant with a great reputation, despite its terrible food (a great reputation due largely to the fact that its staff is actually Vietnamese vs Turkish or German), came up with the following chart, called: MONETIZE YOUR STEREOTYPE (IN GERMANY):
ETHNICITY/NATIONALITY — OPTIMAL PROFESSION
Japanese Food, Martial Arts, Hi-Tech
British Literature, Fashion
Black African Dance, Music
North American Black Dance, Music
Hindu/Indian Food, Metaphysics, Health
Turkish Food, Textile
North American White Motivational Speaker
French Wine, Philosophy
Italian Food
Thai Food, Sex
Scandinavian Furniture
Cuban Dance, Music
American Indian Nature, Health
Tibetan Holiness
Vietnamese Food
Persian Dentistry
Polish Construction
Russian Organized Crime
Greek Food
Gypsy Begging
Chinese, Korean see “Japanese”
PC REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM
A polygamist pol from SA apologizes for extramarital affair; delightful!
“I deeply regret the pain that I have caused to my [several wives and multiple] famil[ies]…”: priceless.
I don’t really have any explication to add regarding ‘The Road To Route One’, dear CDS, but in order to avoid any charge of sullenness or parsimony, please allow me to flypaper a little fiction onto the bunker’s hallowed walls.
This is the beginning of a novel I wrote about five years back: a comedy of errors, and rampant misanthropy, indebted to Evelyn Waugh. The working title – ‘A Very Handsome Deal’ (although I’m not particularly happy with this naming, despite its sui generis flavour).
Anyway, here’s a little levity for a Sunday afternoon…
Fantasderful, CDS More Modern Lore! I’m about to run out the door to meet CDS Barry, but will read when I get back (any niceties of formatting you’d like applied; bold or italic et al; please advise)…
“Tom Fraser” sounds like a nuts Gwyn Barry, CDS MML. Any more of this for us, then? Do it as a serial!
TET ADVENTURES IN MEATSPACE
arresting subway art on the way to futuristic event
Jetsons futurism
suspiciously commercial slogan
long line of the future for suckers without laminates
CDS Barry: unhoodwinkable
Twitter will be huge in the future
CDS Barry: processing stimuli
purchased at the 2001 Space Station lounge furniture garage sale
CDS Barry: paroxysm of analytical mirth
screens still look more futuristic than any other affordable prop after all these years
CDS Barry and long-term collaborator Senegalese Artist Mansour Ciss
futuristic bus ride home
So funny, I thought I’d just let myself in to play some of the records again and here I find this joy to behold.
CDS Frances, it’s fitting that this event was held at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures), with its retro-futurist panache. What I saw of the event savored strongly of 1984-as-envisioned-in-1957 (c. the year the structure went up) and seemed to predict that the future belongs to a jet-setting cadre of visionaries who will come up with increasingly-new things to do with blinking lights and video-screens.
Who knew, back in the late-60s, early-70s (when Futurism reached its pinnacle between Kubrick’s Space Odyssey and his Clockwork Orange), that the future was not a renewable resource and it was just about used up and it would soon be time to start the accelerating roll back down the concave curve of culture mountain? At least we get to pass through The Enlightenment again…
I think that’s what the skateboarders have been trying to tell us. We’re going back to the wheel.
The picture I titled “purchased at the 2001 Space Station lounge furniture garage sale” should have been titled “Futuristic green nano-guide greets a delegate to the 2010 Berlin Transmediale in 36 languages… “
Who is that comradely looking bloke in the foreground?
The one “listening to the nano-guide?” Before listening to the futuristic green nano-guide to his right (the one perched atop that futuristic concrete couch), he was talking to an actual woman (atavistic vs futuristic) to his left (out of the frame) who CDS Barry seems to know (because CDS Barry exchanged a hug with her soon after I snapped this picture).
Actually, I meant the jovial chap in profile at 3 o’clock in the frame. Is it you, CDS Steven?
Nope, he’s the unknown friend of the woman CDS Barry hugged just seconds after the snap (I was the camera-phone-wielder in every case)
(Also, I think my joke wasn’t very clear; you see, to my eye, that woman in the background of the same photo, due to a trick of perspective, looks like she’s… oh, never mind…)
That was clear. A little Thumbelina running roughshod over the furniture. (Do you look a little like him?)
Not even remotely, CDS Frances. How did this bizarre misapprehension get lodged in your noggin? (in fact, truth be told, this is a pretty unflattering pic of the poor feller; I didn’t even intend to catch him in the shot)
X-Degrees of Separation from DD:
“Point Omega is bracketed by chapters set in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where a sinister figure spends hours in daily contemplation of Douglas Gordon’s 24-Hour Psycho video installation, an “event” that slows Hitchcock’s notorious 97-minute exercise in undiluted cinematic hyperkineticism to a numbing, time-freezing crawl.”
Comrade JR had Gordon over for a dinner party last year. The Hitchcock video (non)event was Gordon’s breakthrough: before that, according to Gordon himself, he was a mere schlub with a shitty job and no prospects. Which I find hard to believe.
Wasn’t Schnabel a taxi-driver before becoming crockery king?
That may be the legend, CDS Frances, but, as we know, the un-sleek details (such as strategic cock-sucking or famous relatives) are usually left out of these much-beloved Cinderella narratives.
How many taxi drivers does it take to buy one single flat in his Palazzo Chupi?
http://curbed.com/tags/julian-schnabel
Yes, I’d hazard a guess that it was probably cock-sucking.
A Marvel: Packing So Much Cognitive Dissonance into Such a Little Space
via
Eric Blair and Bella Abzug are synchronously spinning in their graves. Meanwhile, to any younger Comrade Lurkers reading this: please don’t drink the urine-flavored Kool-Aid in the fancy plastic K-Mart goblet. Being turned into a disposable/beatable fucktoy is not “empowering”, despite persistent commercials to the contrary.
As I wrote in a related comment (about two years ago, in another comment thread):
I was going to write about Bella’s funeral but I found it on C-Span. Former Playboy Bunny Gloria Steinem eulogized Bella and in my opinion it was Gloria’s finest hour. At the 88:13 mark (until 99:35).
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/id/140790
On O, in graduate school someone showed a film based on Story of O in which all the parts were played by women. I hadn’t read the book or seen the original movie and was rendered pretty much dumbstruck by this alternative. But one of the audience members, a woman, said in the discussion afterward that while she’d never have been able to countenance watching the sadism if those roles had been played by men, because they were lesbian women she was untroubled. I’m still scratching my head about that one almost 20 years later.
Isn’t is strange, the movies seen outside of theaters can stick with one more? I was reminded of that when we were talking about Eraserhead, which I saw in a schoolhouse in NW Washington a few years after its theatrical release. Plus, I viewed both Last Year In Marienbad and Hiroshoma Mon Amour projected on a free standing screen in the darkened cafeteria at Washington U in St. Louis. Wouldn’t it be funny if B.G. Myers, who was a graduate student in those same years, was sitting right next to me?
Oh! And speaking of projections, remember when Cap’n Woodie called Orwell a “puritan masochist” and a “traitor to his class”? Classic putzism.
People trying to ingratiate themselves with their keepers will say almost anything
PS I learned today, from CDS Barry, that the hip new self-applied term for sell-outs (who don’t think of themselves as such, obviously) is “Anarcho-Capitalist“… the funniest oxymoron since “Feminist Porn-Star”. This is my spin on the term; CDS Barry knows a few “Anarcho-Capitalists” and I wouldn’t want any of them to punch him during a panel discussion.
“How did this bizarre misapprehension get lodged in your noggin?”
(Well, first of all too bad, because he’s really cute.) Because of Enlightenment and the Orwell quote you picked for Muster of Triviums– “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” There’s someone else’s online photo, a very special someone else, that when one enlarges and lightens it, an image of the person becomes apparent in the background. I thought that maybe you were doing something similar by degrees.
“There’s someone else’s online photo, a very special someone else, that when one enlarges and lightens it, an image of the person becomes apparent in the background…”
First, “District 9″… now This
This song bothers me almost as much as Go Tell Aunt Rhody.
THE FICTIVE IN A SIMULOCRACY
Part Three: PR
Key Quotes
“The bloody crossroads, as Cyril Connolly called them, of literature and politics has become increasingly bloody, with the result that literary life in America has become impenetrably bland: The Lovely Bones, The Five People You Meet In Heaven, on it goes. Get with the team or shut up. Even the 9/11 novels all seem contrived and banal.”
“…Solzhenitsyn said that the first obligation of the writer was ‘not to be part of the lie’.”
Makes one wonder where PEN fits in.
I sat next to Plimpton once on a crowded Jitney on the outbound trip to East Hampton. I would only add to this description “In walked Plimpton, resplendent in a blue blazer, his white mane glorious in its disarray” dandruff cascading down his shoulders onto his unpressed chinos and scruffy Ouijans, his sour body odor wafting with each vigorous turn of the page of the New York Times he was ravishing, newspaper reading as physical sport.
Also, Pat Schroeder. Until recently the former Congresswoman was president of the Association of American Publishers. Now it’s Tom Allen, another former Congressman.
Also very interesting, the new head of the Mellon Foundation Don Randel has a distinct interest in developing the non-profit theater. Hmmmm.
Frankly, I think They’re barking up the wrong tree if they’re spending any of the trillion they’ve squirreled away on theater… larf. They should be subverting Twitter instead
CDS Frances, I think it’s Time For a Counter-Vortex, Comedic Retreat…
First as tragedy then as farce…
Excellent!
CDS Frances sends in this image of Comrade DJ Sensei Bella Abzug; note how all the people in this image have a pre-Reaganized look to them: CDS Bella doesn’t look like a CEO, the younger woman doesn’t look like a porn star, the white male doesn’t look like a cop or an MBA and the black male doesn’t look like a criminal. They look, in fact, to have common causes. Do we know any of the others, in that image, CDS Frances, beyond CDS Bella…? (what year is this, btw? 1970ish?)
CDS Steven,
The young woman is a teenaged me sitting in on a press conference arranged by my dad, circa 1972. The men are reporters from the St. Louis Post Dispatch and the Globe Democrat. Photo credit belongs to Daniel T. Magidson.
This is quite a groovy photo, I must say, CDS Frances! But now we’d like to know what the press conference was about; barring that, any other details to flesh out the era and its ambiance (from the POV of a teenage CDS Frances) would be extremely interesting.
We had the groovy imperative but the war colored everything. I’ve spent all day writing and deleting. I couldn’t find a way to describe the ambiance without sinking into sorrow but the truth is that the angst was omnipresent, even when we were defying it.
For instance, I was the popcorn girl at the Varsity Theater. Since I lived nearby I used to work the Friday night midnight show; it was easy enough for someone to run me home afterward. I don’t know how many times that year I watched City Lights, Freaks, Harold and Maude, Night of the Living Dead.
Whenever we were showing Night of the Living Dead, one of the ushers brought in a slab of cow’s liver and other assorted grayish meat chunks swimming in a pool of blood in a Tupperware container, which he kept buried in the crushed ice we had on hand for soft drinks. Right before the movie ended he’d retrieve his package, open it for display, and stand with it in the lobby as the audience filed out. The rest of us would die laughing when people invariably screamed at him and told him he was really, really sick for doing that.
No doubt Bella was in town to help elect McGovern, the anti-war candidate.
I worked at an arty-bohemian repertory cinema like the Varsity (lived around the corner from one called The Varsity, once, as well, in an apartment in a neighborhood called Dinkytown; an apartment kitty-corner to a place Bob Dylan had lived in, on Fourth Street, about twenty years prior: a great time); I worked on endless midnight showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and developed a visceral contempt for the people who would dress up for the event and work their ways, in a synchronized mass, through the litany of kitsch cues in the film. There was a hierarchy in this culture and shockingly/hilariously savage internecine power-struggles and rumor mills and Diva-turns.
Night of the Living Dead’s allegorical power has been diluted by the banal popularity of zombies since the movie came out but the key to its brilliance nestles in the fact that it’s a perfect overlay for both McCarthyism and Communism (depending on your orientation: chuckle). Despite the fact that the original starred a black protag (the remake, as well, of course, as we discussed here on TET), I think it’s an imperfect allegory for racism (which doesn’t spread like a plague or virus but tends to more of a cultural inheritance).
And then came Harold and Maude, featuring a groovy soundtrack by the guy who went on to support the Rushdie fatwa.
(UPDATE: quite luckily, I found a picture of the street I lived on during the year I lived on it: 1978. My flat was directly across from the scene pictured above. A few days ago, CDS Barry and I were crossing a bridge near Berlin’s capitol complex when a Google spy-car, with peri-panoramic camera atop, drove by; I’ll count on accessing that snapshot from the intimate data of my existence, eventually, too)
Some tillerman Cat Stevens turned out to be!
I just looked up kitty-corner versus catty-corner. I hadn’t been aware of the variation. I’ve always been in the catty-corner corner.
Additional midnight flicks: 2001 Space Odyssey (always put me to sleep at the late hour) and Bergman’s The Magic Flute. The crunch of popcorn and Mozart was just irritating.
We’ve got a little Ozu festival going on right now. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasujir%C5%8D_Ozu
Even with the mounds of snow it’s anything but Dinkytown here.
CDS Frances, listen to this and it shall be pure Dinkytown wherever you look for several gorgeous minutes… (Positively 4th Street is more appropriate, I know, but this is the one that takes me back to being barefoot, 19-ish and standing on the grass in sunshine with my favorite lucky multi-colored guitar pick between my teeth)
Charmer! It worked. Thank you.
From CDS Barry:
Davos Annual Meeting 2010 – ADM CEO Patricia Woertz
Hochgeladen von WorldEconomicForum. – Nachrichtenvideos aus der ganzen Welt.
I generally “like” this writer/critic (Adam Roberts), so I won’t go for his kneecaps here, but I’m baffled at the absurdity of the following comments (actually, I “like” him because I once indulged in some pleasant chit-chat with him in a comment-thread at The Valve):
Next stop: Kafka’s Amerika. I Googled, “Kafka Amerika inaccuracies” and was led to (eg):
Comparative Dramaturgy. This:
vs
vs
vs
vs
vs
and, finally
When a Futurist dies the Past expands a little
Modern Life and Witchcraft
CAUTIONARY TALE-TELLERS
JFC, even at this extreme distance, Mart looks like a hastily-thawed-and-dressed corpsicle: is it the writing, the booze or the critical drubbings?
Are you sure it’s not a Duane Hanson?
Ah, but Duane Hanson’s stylistic calling-card is that the work is “life-like”..
So true. Just the other day in the Whitney I blurted out Excuse me! to one.
No danger of anyone saying “excuse me” to Mart’s husk as it’s propped on that divan, eh?
CDS Frances, thanks for sharing that evocative photo (looks like it might have been sourced from an Alan J.Pakula flick (the scene in which the murderous truth sinks in).
CDS Steven, regarding the pop at Bolano, I’ve always found that kind of forensic alacrity plain weird (it’s as if the critic is privy to a mission statement in which Roberto swore faithfully to replicate – or at least adhere to – the actual world in its every detail). There’s a type of writer – and I include Bolano in this number – whose recombination of the known universe is more wilful than slovenly. It’s a form of emphatic shorthand, after everything, and one of the ways in which he claims a dominion for hisself.
As for your cinematic flashbacks, what no Jodorowsky?
CDS MML: Re: Jodorowsky: I’m pretty sure I mention El Topo on TET 1.0 (I need to install a Search Widget in this place), but I couldn’t find any evidence that someone on YouTube had been kind enough to aggregate the “fucks” in Jodorowsky’s oeuvre. And, yeah, re: the forensic alacrity: I blame those yearly pub-tours which end (or begin) with the Martello tower…
UPDATE: I’ve inserted a “search widget” but it doesn’t search the comments, only the “posts” (which, in the very strange case of TET, is only ever the little preamble I introduce every other comment thread with)
For your comradely consideration (when time permits)…
Will absorb this after we feed our Offsprung, CDS Frances!
I think I’m having a viscerally antipathetic reaction to what I can’t help feeling is Gen-X-Hippie-Techno-Yuppie mumble-jumble, CDS Frances! Larf. I’d have liked this a wee bit better if it’d been narrated in a computer voice (vs these sing-songing young Lyndon-LaRouche-disciple-type-timbres).
What’s your take on it? What is Who saying It wants from Us?
The bit about eliminating “noise pollution” in the form of “friends and family who do too much complaining and make you feel depressed” sounds like a pretext for a Totalitarian Decorum Camp for quarantining and punishing “negativity”. Fuck me if there isn’t quite a fucking lot to legitimately “complain” about. “Embrace tranquility” in the form of a very soft boot stamping politely on an even-softer face- forever?
My take is if this isn’t Laurel Canyon, it’s Laural Canyon.
Spot-on, Comrade! (L’Oral or L’Aural…? L’Oral Canyon: What a great name for a Pron Star; is it already taken?)
Apropos Comment #91 and its follow-ups; which figure appears to be the more “life-like”…?
or
Let’s just say that if the two of them were to play a few hands of pinochle I know who my money would be riding on…
Greetings, comrades.
A proposal for a future TET team mini-project:
I’d like to fanny about with passages from Laureamont’s Maldoror like this:
http://kisa.ca/maldoror/2-13.php
and his mad stuff about breeding quarries full of lice, etc…
… and then remix them into the tracks that constitute the heaviest, weirdest fictional Beatles album imaginable: The Black Album (released early ’68 between Magical Mystery Tour and the White Album). The idea would be that Brian Wilson actually got Smile released in autumn ’67 and then the Beatles sought to surpass it with The Black Album.
I’d throw down the rough ideas for each track on TET*, and then those so inclined can chip in suggestions whenever they fancy.
* Several would allude to thon German Tausendjährigerheißluftballon, the idea being that Lennon’s mum took him to see it flood Aberdeen with blood when he was two. Full details at theadorata.com.
General musical direction for the album (but I’m very open to suggestions):
Uh, I should’ve said: this would all be done as text.
(Though if Steven wants to go and record the thing, then I’m on hand claps and finger cymbals).
I don’t know if I’d book studio time for it (during this red-eyed recession) but I’d be up for writing the chord charts and melodies, Comrade… I could send you (or post here) Lo-Fi demos… and may I suggest, considering the fact that “The Black Album” is already taken (as a title), that we call this (wait for it)… DAS WEISS ALBUM…?
Ah, okay, I hadn’t really considered doing it as music (The Black Album hadn’t been used in ’68, natch).
But would it make sense — sense in this context being somewhat relative — for the Fabs to come out with Das Weiss Album (I dig the German-ness btw) and then follow it with the White Album? The timing’s important — for various reasons, I think it has to have been released in spring ’68.
Something involving Bunker Pagoda in German would be bizarrely fitting, but maybe a little too self-pleasuring?
via WIKIPAGODIA
Ja, ja, ja. Ich bin SOLD.
This WIKIPAGODIA article is a lotus. A lotus is an article containing only a few sentences of text which is too short to provide encyclopedic coverage of a subject, but not so short as to provide no useful information, and it should be capable of expansion.
CDS Frances: by all means expand on this lotus (or is it an artichoke?)!
THE FIRST THREE PAGES OF THE PREGNANT WIDOW: A REVIEW
Back to Marty Amis. Marty should really stick to embodying Richard Tulls (in books with Keiths in them): that’s his calling. That’s the ring he’s an Ali in. I risked going out and giving money for a hardbound of The Pregnant Widow with the reasoning that it’s set, mostly, in 1970. He got three big laughs (publicly audible; on the train back from St. George’s bookshop) in the first three pages, doing Richard Tull again (“Keith Nearing” in this incarnation). In The Information (perhaps his best novel to date, IMO), Marty gives protag Richard Tull Martin Amis’ personal life and antag Gwyn Barry Martin Amis’ wealth and fame and the comedi-lyrical survey of the terrain of the decay of Richard Tull’s failing face… plus the lucky doom of his (a wreck’s) marriage to a woman who could do much better… are the book’s twin engines. The plot, we know, is just story-telling but the decay and shame stuff is on a par with Darwin’s Beagle-era descriptions of moths and beetles. A must-read for precocious 36-year-olds (esp. the ones who once were in their 20s).
The Pregnant Widow seems to be giving us more of this illuminating reportage 15-years-on in the process. The plot will either add a little or distract a little but what I’m looking forward to is hearing Marty be honest about how doomed he feels; how much he hates himself and resents the trick-package that is Life: none of the pseudo-aristocratic/Nabokovian bravado he bluffs the press with (that is not blue Russian icewater in those veins).
I’m also happy to chip-in on yr projected bootleg, CDS Sean, time and circumstance permitting.
Seeing as how Carnaval kicked off in Rio yesterday – and I won’t be on hand this year to grace the sambadromo in garish costume, a mesmerising gringo dervish of the first rank – thought I’d post this year’s enredo from my favourite school.
Stuck inside of Stockport with the Lapa blues again…What a load of shite.
Vamos Portela!
Your musical expertise would be mucho appreciated for Das Weiss Album, camarada.
Those are top, top tunes, man.
Couple more courtesy of Brasil.
Music kicks in after 40 seconds. Fucking brill this.
“by all means expand on this lotus (or is it an artichoke?)!”
This rassler makes naming things look so easy. Kinetic intelligence on display.
I “like” the non-verbal reprise. Get a room, boys.
I’ve spent a thoroughly enjoyable morning into afternoon gorging myself on The Dinner Party by Steven Augustine. (One does get hungry.) How many canonical works do you take on in this one string quartet, CDS Steven, besides most obviously The Golden Bowl? Is Salter (the name) an homage to Waldo Salt by any chance, the screenplay writer of Midnight Cowboy, because Salter and Nixon did evoke Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo for me.
There was a certain point where I said to myself he’s going to have them “say grace” and poof! in sashay Frankie and Georgette to sing God Bless the Child. When I think of the jokey way you use the word cough (see comment #41) I probably should also have seen Cough’s unexpected attendance at the DP foreshadowing the presence of what it did foreshadow.
Oh, but I do love going back through your stories once I’ve read them through and seeing at the end how it was all there at the beginning and how stories like people tell you all the important things about themselves in the initial encounter–e.g., ersatz Carpenters tunes playing in the abortionist’s waiting room.
I really do long for someone to do for your work what you did for Nicholson Baker’s in Muster of Triviums. As a matter of fact, I hereby nominate Nicholson Baker to reciprocate. He might have a master set of carving knives to do the trick–”… any meat that can’t easily be cut by these knives should not be eaten.”
Query: does shtupping derive from tupping coined perhaps by some (illicitly) Othello-reading shtetl linguist, or did your spicing the text with Yiddishisms induce that connection, or both? What does John Peale Bishop mean by “the tag-end of summer” in this poem?
The ceremony must be found
that will wed Desdemona to the huge Moor.
It is not enough
to win the approval of the Senator
or to outwit his disapproval; honest lago
can manage that: it is not enough. For then,
though she may pant again in his black arms
(his weight resilient as a Barbary stallion’s)
she will be found
when the ambassadors of the Venetian state arrive
Again smothered. These things have not been changed,
not in three hundred years.
(Tupping is still tupping
though that particular word is obsolete.
Naturally, the ritual would not be in Latin.)
For though Othello had his blood from kings
his ancestry was barbarous, his ways African,
his speech uncouth. It must be remembered
that though he valued an embroidery
three mulberries proper on a silk like silver
it was not for the subtlety of the stitches,
but for the magic in it. Whereas, Desdemona
once contrived to imitate in needlework
her father’s shield, and plucked it out
three times, to begin again, each time
with diminished colors. This is a small point
but indicative.
Desdemona was small and fair,
delicate as a grasshopper
at the tag-end of summer: a Venetian
to her noble finger tips.
O, it is not enough
that they should meet, naked, at dead of night
in a small inn on a dark canal. Procurers
less expert than lago can arrange as much.
The ceremony must be found
Traditional, with all its symbols
ancient as the metaphors in dreams;
strange, with never before heard music; continuous
until the torches deaden at the bedroom door.
CDS Frances! Your fine, fine eye is always so much more than merely appreciated! Me: I am pooped after a day of doing domicile repairs (using a ladder et al) and my brain is still in Fix-It Lizard mode and couldn’t possibly keep up in a chat about my own scribbled fancies. But I’ve always loved the image of that old black ram a-tupping. Ewe know what I mean…!
Re: Salter: funnily enough, I saw Ratso and Joe in that relationship, too, but I wasn’t aware of the screenwriter’s name: synchronicity? I’ve been using the Salter character for years; here and here you’ll find him as a child
(The description of Nixon’s physical voice was based on Berryman)
AFTER THE FIRST THREE PAGES OF THE PREGNANT WIDOW: MORE REVIEW
Early enthusiasm soon punished. The first three very funny pages are the book’s introduction (“2006- Introductory”), written in the fictive “now” (I presume) by an old wreck looking back on the 1960s; the old wreck, reflecting on his (Martin’s) old-wreckedness, is Richard-Tull-funny. The book then commences to be not very funny and weirdly a-rhythmic; there’s something wrong with Mart’s cadences in this one. At least in the first forty pages. There’s something dirgey going on in the cadence department of this book. Thus far.
Whatever age Mart is now is the age of the protag he should build the (next) next book around; he’s not particularly good doing the young (unless they are foils for the old) and he’s not good doing “women” or “Americans” or “X-which-isn’t-Martin” (unless, again, these not-Martins are all just foils for white English writer-characters of Martin’s current-at-the-time-of-writing age). He’s good at (ie: thoroughly up for) writing macho criminals (who would seem to lurk far from his experience) but that’s his fantasy life; that’s the sincerity of his dream; that’s the stuff he daydreams for pleasure. But It can’t be fun, for Mart, writing young people. And all those tall blonds with huge racks he has to fold-double and force, with his thumb, into every single book: his heart isn’t really in it… maybe that’s just contempt for the reader. Maybe Mart thinks you need the blow-up dolls (“you” being a “New Lad”, Mart’s salad days target demo).
Imagine Kirk Douglas trying to act the role of a jazz balladeer or a Queer and that’s Marty writing about young people and/or women. When he does one about a 60+ white English writer with Oedipal booze problems and a wittily-jaundiced view of the long-ago loss of his looks and fun: that will be his comeback. That will be his “The Old Devils”.
REAL IMAGINARY SCRIPTS: 2345
2345
a Film from 1977
Characters
Zarathustra Cocker: British, handsome, insane and Black
Marta Cocker: Zarathustra’s long-suffering wife
Kat 5: a futuristic singer of Metaphysical Elevator Music
Ka: enigmatic embodiment of the Soul/Imagination
2345
FADE IN
1_____EXT. DAY/NIGHT MONTAGE_____________________________1
sfx: Metaphysical Elevator Music
narrator
It is the distant future. Computers are household appliances [show laptop], life-like robots perform dangerous and menial tasks [show street workers in orange jumpsuits], personal telecommunications are a reality [show cell phone display blinking: WIFE], entertainment is miniaturized [show Walkman], high-speed trains have replaced the airplane as the transport of choice [show high-speed Euro-rail train] and the president of the planet is an Afro-American [show newspaper front page: Obama; no date visible: it says FALL EDITION].
[Fade to black]
2_______BLACKOUT__________________________________________2
[super]
sfx: the wind
The film opens with a spectacular view of JFK City.
An expensive crane shot pans with dignified grandeur across the eastern horizon at daybreak.
We see the glittering maze of the military industrial entertainment complexes… the monstrous neon beauty of cloud-puncturing skydiddlers… private rivers bristling with periscopes… spiralling nodes of falling satellites and rising communication balloons like bubbles in a vat of black champagne…
… and the tarnished gold necklace of futuristic pollution as it catches the first flames of the day…
….fade to black…
[it is already black]
3_______BLACKOUT_________________________________________3
Zarathustra Cocker
VO in a whisper
It’s 7 in the morning and I’m trying to make my way out of this flat without waking the amazing woman asleep in the next room. As to what her name is or what she considers the meaning of life, I couldn’t tell you. Will she be surprised to wake and find me absent? Possibly. Although I think it’s more likely that she’ll be relieved. At least as relieved as I’ll be if I can find my way to the door without knocking over all the empty wine bottles, or stepping on a cat. Not that I know that she keeps a cat. But there is something here that smells very powerfully of a creature who rarely gets out, defecates in a box and cleans itself by licking.
beat
Not that I mean that observation to come off all judgmental. Let’s put it this way. I think it was Goethe who said that every man carries within him the eternal image of the ideal woman he’ll never criticize…
beat
Actually, Goethe didn’t say that, I did. Where’s the fucking door in this death trap?
4_______EXT. DAY EARLY MORNING STREET SCENE________________4
Zarathustra Cocker
Walking; buoyantly
My name is Zarathustra Cocker. Dad was a classicist with a sick sense of humor. I’m a private detective who’s been hired to find a missing Game Designer. This GD is worth billions. Speculation is that he’s been kidnapped, but no ransom notes have turned up, and clues are scarce.
beat
I’m not really a detective. I’m a Vicarious Game Net Actor… a VGNA. I’ve been hired to play the role of a detective who’s been hired to find a missing GD. The money is good, I get to travel and I have lots of leisure time to pursue my various pursuits. For example, I’m somewhat of an amateur Game Designer myself.
beat
I also write little poems and little plays and I love the movies.
beat
I call them the movies.
Cut to:
Zarathustra Cocker holding a pill up for the camera’s inspection
Crafting a convincing experience in a pill is not easy. But when everything’s right, the results are amazing, like swimming through a Rembrandt while the paint is still wet. The pills induce what the company calls a benign psychotic state. It’s a two-pill process: take a pill, play the game, derive a secondary pill from your memories of playing the game. Sometimes they hire players to take the secondary pill and play a new game based on that… theoretically you could go on forever that way. The part I don’t like is the needles. They stick a needle this long [gestures] in your spine.
beat
Being a VGNA means learning to live with it.
5_______EXT. DAY AFTERNOON STREET SCENE___________________5
Zarathustra Cocker
It’s pointless talking about movies if you don’t want to talk about white females. White females are the movies. They are what movies are made of and what people want to see when they want to see movies. The ideal woman he’ll never criticize that every man carries within him the eternal image of is a white female. A white female in a movie. Not only that, but the wombs of these females are just like little cinemas.
beat
The heroine is always a white female, or an ersatz white female, and the leading man is always a coded black male. He is cool, physically aggressive under stress, fantastic in bed and as impossible to kill as a cockroach. These are all codes for black male.
beat
What the cinema is is hundreds of years of technological dreaming of black male and white female coming together. For the sake of the species, no less. It’s called exogamy. Gene hygiene. Without it the species will die off.
with urgency
There’s no time to lose.
6_______INT. NIGHT THE COCKER HOME________________________6
MARTA COCKER (ZARATHUSTRA’S WIFE):
Confronting Zarathustra at the dinner table
It’s just a ridiculous excuse to cheat on me. When did you become so terribly bored with us?
7_______EXT. DAY TRAIN STATION____________________________7
a futuristic train pulls into a station
KAT 5 gets off and makes her way through the crowd
sfx: jet engines
narrator
No one has ever met her at the train station. So she’s become very good at looking like someone who is being met at the train station. You know, that look of anticipation and then the look of recognition, of relief. Waving over the heads of the crowd from the top of the stairs in the train’s exit. Three steps down. Then she does that fast walk, smiling, pushing through the crowd along the platform, walking faster and faster.
8_______EXT. DAY CITY SCENES______________________________8
Kat 5
Into the camera, with Zarathustra Cocker lurking in background
I am Kat 5. I sing Metaphysical Elevator Music. I am signed to MEME, the world’s biggest company of Metaphysical Elevator Musics & Entertainment. MEME employs nothing but the best mediums, psychics, mind-readers, warlocks, Gypsies, Voodoo Masters, Mystic Monks and professional lyricists to bring you tomorrow’s hits from yesterday’s unknown mega-talents. A million years of musical genius that would otherwise have gone wasted, thrown away like garbage in a pauper’s grave. Melodies from the afterlife plus lyrics taken from today’s headlines equals listening pleasure.
Cut to:
Walks while singing [On-Camera]
Night falls on cold walls,
troops on the moon
cars on the strasse
like black balloons
he told you something
you won’t forget
pain is the treasure,
pleasure’s the debt
he takes you home and fucks you up and goes
before the key even falls from your hand
-You find a note by the door
-You better laugh whenever you can
Because you’re always falling for dreams you never understand
You see you’re always falling for dreams are heavier than planned
Are you an angel, rapist or fool?
Even the killer is karma’s tool
So say the wisemen, sleek in their robes
So sing the victims, smug in their holes
he takes you home and fucks you up and goes
before the key even falls from your hand
-You find a note by the door
-You better laugh whenever you can
Because you’re always falling for dreams you never understand
You see you’re always falling for dreams are heavier than planned
Zarathustra Cocker approaches Kat 5
Zarathustra Cocker
That was beautiful.
Kat 5
turning
Sorry, I can’t fuck you, I’m a professional singer of Metaphysical Elevator Music. We must always remain virgins or we lose our gift.
Zarathustra Cocker (cont’d from page 10)
Damn.
Kat 5
Maybe when I retire.
Zarathustra Cocker
Say again?
Kat 5
I’m saving up for a race change. And then I retire. And then, perhaps, you can fuck me.
Zarathustra Cocker
A race change?
Into the camera
If it’s true and such a thing is possible, it threatens the very essence of my theory.
To KAT 5 again
Would you like to have lunch?
Tagline: Taglines are easy; it’s living that’s hard
Melodies from the afterlife plus lyrics taken from today’s headlines equals listening pleasure.
Droned by Kat equals d0uu]][asl
[forgive the random typings by the budgie waddling across my keyboard]
equals pleasure indeed.
I think from now on I’ll just use d0uu]][asl as code for ‘Yet another piece of SA excellence’.
Thanks, Chum, and I’ll use “budgie”
For the new Comrades Lurking on TET (by posting this, somewhere, every six months, I stake my claim to the discovery)…
Holy Lola! Tomorrow will be the Bunker Pagoda’s six month anniversary!
Really, CDS Frances? It’s felt like 5 years already! Time expands when you’re having fun! I’ll have to go out now and buy streamers, glitter and tin foil hats! And brand new fondue pots and a new self-cleaning turbo-chocolate fountain plus troughs… ! And Dixie cups! Lots of Dixie cups and sugar cubes…!
And games, CDS Steven. The comrades will need some amusements. I don’t know if they have the edition in Berlin but here at The Strand I think it was in the ancillary book products section (pretty much the entire first floor) they have a few Review Copy “Pin The Tail On The Cap’n” box games left. Not sure: I think I read that Dean Haspeil did the graphics (and I also heard that they’re none too flattering to the Cap’n).
They have the “slap the toop on the tonsure” version over here, CDS Frances… just as fun, really
(S)PERMUTATIONAL JUSTICE
(go on then, Comrades… click the link; it won’t bite you)
(Oh shit! This reminds me that CDS Jacob’s trial for civil disobedience commences tomorrow and I’ve yet to send him a Be Sure To Stay the Fuck Out of Jail card. Where are my manners?)
I flustered myself with all the cursing. Please delete the second yet. He doesn’t need it.
We wish CDS Jacob well!
But aren’t civil disobedience tactics deployed against the opening of a casino a little Prohibition-esque? Obviously, I’m being a Shytt here, but I think one of the terrors of democracy is that the noblest or most “correct” position is often the philosophical ghetto of a natural minority. There’s a clear distinction between getting arrested for Civil Rights (as CDS Jacob did and for which we are awe-fully grateful) and getting arrested blocking the construction of a proletariat pleasure dome.
Lots and lots of The People like gambling, wacking-off in crackling gym socks to depressing porno, eating fatty snacks with unwashed hands and sitting far too close to the Television: who are we to say “you can’t do that”? As much as I abhor Television, I would not, if I had the power to do so, ban it. I would like to see it regulated to the extent that scads more non-commercial airtime was mandated for opposing views and higher quality and kid-enriching creativity but I wouldn’t ban the rotten shit it’s already rotten with, outright: The Fucking People want it. They always wanted it. The job is not to boss but to woo.
So, I can see the democratic justice of protesting in order to demand regulations on sap-enticing pro-casino propaganda and I can see the democratic justice of a demonstration to heighten awareness and for keeping up the anti-corruption vigilance and so forth. But: again: trying to block the damn thing altogether… I have this anti-Carrie Nation reflex that won’t let me let this issue go. (Carrie, btw, despite her ideological difference, was an original Pussy of Steel: 6 feet tall and wielding a fucking hatchet, thankyouverymuch)
How wrong am I… ? (he said, cranking the steel shutters on the bunker down in preparation of the arse-kicking CDS Jacob is sure to fetch him)
I am so outa here tonight.
As you know, CDS Frances, I’m famous for thinking what I think and then actually expressing it, despite how insane/unpopular/not-nice/retarded/incomprehensible those thoughts are! Larf
It’s an honor to know you, CDS Steven. For those reasons and many more I could easily name.
CDS Frances, don’t you know I’m the “best known troll on the Internet”? Beware! Don your bio-hazard suit at the fondue bar in case I swagger in!
Now, I’ll need to get off my plaster-covered home-improvement outfit, consume mass quantities of something tasty, dandle my daughter and nuzzle my wife (I might, in fact, even try some wife-dandling) and turn my attentions TETward…
There was no real civil disobedience. The police, not us, blocked the site. It was a symbolic action. We had informed the police about what we were going to do. We were prepared to be arrested, but also prepared to leave once our point had been made.
This is not anti-gambling. a poker game in someones living room, the money never leaves the neighborhood. This set up will do zip zilch nothing for the neighborhoods but block more intelligent development of the riverfront with big-box 24-7 slot houses surrouded by the largest parking lots in the state of Pennsylvania, accompanied, as in Atlantic City (where the casinos have done nothing to increase local employment, reduce poverty, reneged on all their promises to devote part of their profits to community imporvments)… draw in the usual cluster of cash checking and pawn shop fronts. Slots depend for profit, not on the casual or occasional visitor, but on the addicted, and slots are the crack cocain of compulsive gambling–here, with a new law permitting use of credit and debit cards on site. Like cigarette corporations, they actively, aggressively work to encourage both compulsive behavior and to attract juveniles as new recruits (a recent study found that some 80% of high school students in Atlantic City had visited casinos, and more than 60% had done so with some frequency (the slots are made to resemble video games). The Sugar House site is within 100 yards of a mostly working class residential row-house neighborhood–residents of which are overwhelmingly opposed to it. It’s been forced on the community with the least political power to resist it by an unbelievable chain of corrupt officials, including most of the PA Supreme Court. The money trail here is enough to take your breath away–no matter how cynical you might be about this sort of stuff. Back door taxation so the rich and the corporations don’t have to pay their fair share–with everyone involved on the take. This has absolutely nothing in common with morality driven prohibition movements–it’s anti-corruption hitting at a precisely targeted source of income, and in doing so, exposes a whole world of related abuses of power and money. This is a 100% local grassroots movement–the people involved live in the neighborhoods being targeted who organized because their voice was being ignored and decisions were being forced from above.
Plenty of information on both Sugar House, Foxwoods, and the history of this movement. here: http://www.casinofreephila.org/
What’s the overall strategy, then, CDS Jacob? (I’m in bed in 5 minutes, so don’t take it as a response if I don’t respond for 8 hours!)
In a rush… sorry if this is a less than elegant argument… I see one point I’d meant to expand on and got diverted . About living room poker games… where money changes hands, but stays in the community. These casinos will do nothing but suck money out of the community. It’s not gambling as such that’s the problem, but highly organized predatory gambling–especially when used to raise public revenue, that’s the problem.
Another grassroots organization, Media Mobilizaion Project (I’m involved with the Arts and Culture group)… backing us.
http://mediamobilizing.org/
The most important strategic element is information: making public what’s been done behind closed doors or disguised as something that’s going to benefit communities by raising revenue for the city and state.
We have strong working class neighborhood support–enough so that (choke) even Fox News gives us good coverage cause they know the people who watch them care about this. Exposing the money trail, public education on the real economics of these predatory corporations (is that a redundancy?) . The demonstrations, and the single action involving planned “civil disobedience, ” are political theater to get attention for the educational effort and to expose the corrupt wheeling and dealing behind this.
The tax-farm casinos are a tiny pin point in the galaxy of corporate corruption of civic institutions.. but they are a very specific, and therefore, very useful target. People can understand it. It’s where the the Monster is parking his butt next door where people live.
These are certainly good points, CDS Jacob; is there a nascent national movement? Thousands of disgruntled people who already live in areas where casinos exist could provide ideal testimonials; the people of Atlantic City are near enough for you to physically liaise with… are there plans to coordinate on a higher level? (And that’s, of course, the level on which people start risking their lives).
(You’re probably asleep now; good luck with the trial!)
Report on the Trial
http://jacobrussellsbarkingdog.blogspot.com/2010/02/casino-free-philly-trial-today-we-won.html
Well-done, CDS Jacob! I misunderstood the original intent; now that I Grok it, I think what you’ve done is quite cool. You and CDS Frances are… to invoke our highest, and most perfectly non-phallocratic, honor here at TET… our Pussies of Steel.
The streamers must have taken some doing, CDS Steven. (No wonder you needed that ladder!) Very M.C. Escher in effect. Glitter in the fish tank and a piñata! Is that supposed to be Nancy Pelosi? And poppers for when we do the readings–how thoughtful! I brought a Twister game, a set of vintage Tarot cards (with instructions), and assorted bruschetti. Be warned the pesto isn’t made from basil, it’s cilantro.
Fook the pesto, CDS Frances, let’s do a Zorba-dance on these poppers…!
Did someone say dancing? Of course, the vocals are great but just look at that fancy footwork.
Going with a good thing…
I’m done, comrades. Making room for the pros…
Let’s stir some weirdness in there…
and some primordial rap
cleanliness being next to pornliness
if corporations still made commercials like this i’d get a television and a desk job
Booker T is… what… 20-years-old here?
prepare to have your minds blown, Comrades
“There was even a movie house on the cusp between Golders Park and the neighborhood they all called Beverly Hills: the PARK THEATER. The Park Theater. Benny saw Goldfinger there, with his father, the week it first came out: Murcheson Père et fils were wearing suits and ties and had their shoes polished simultaneously to a ceramic gloss in the red-carpeted foyer to the men’s room. They ordered hot buttered popcorn and a jazzy fountain refreshment called a Green River. Up until that day, Benny and his father would usually hold hands through most of a ‘show”… just an old habit from Benny’s childhood… but this time they didn’t and would never again. This was going to be the first truly grown-up night at the cinema for Benny and his dad, man to man. He will never I mean never forget sitting in that packed black grandiose auditorium with his head tilted back as the curtains parted and the opening bars of Shirley Bassey’s electrifying title song stunned him and his father and the crowd… it was Shirley Bassey’s salacious sturm und drang over a montage of the flame-filled silhouette of a naked girl in repose. God-damn, thought Benny. If he’d known that the exquisitely caterwauling Miss Bassey was colored, a beautiful colored Brit… it probably would have been too much for his over-excited heart to bear.”
sideburns time; fuck the 21st century
unlikely to be surpassed
Agreed.
Pussies of Steel:
http://www.audiotube.com/file/2118-coldcut-noahs-toilet.html
Another track not written or produced by Steven (unless, that is, he’s crammed in Coldcut’s career in his lunch hour) but should’ve been:
Incidentally, this is probably the most truly sad and sadly true thing I’ve read on this site:
CDS Frances sends in this image of Comrade DJ Sensei Bella Abzug; note how all the people in this image have a pre-Reaganized look to them: CDS Bella doesn’t look like a CEO, the younger woman doesn’t look like a porn star, the white male doesn’t look like a cop or an MBA and the black male doesn’t look like a criminal. They look, in fact, to have common causes.
Gut-gawd! Full-strength, CDS POS! (ed.’s note: this comment-reply function is slightly sloppy… I’m commenting, here, on the DJ Vadim video at the top of this chain of responses)
RE: The (deviliciously wicked) Tale of Miss Virginia Epitome : searching in vain for the text…
…except by this, possibly… (listen to the needles on the VU meter peg the red)…
and with this I bid Thee goodnight
(oh fookit one more…)
… can’t access my blog or gmail. Told the blog has been removed!?
Left messages on help but can’t get replies cause no email
Had posts on the Dog I’d hate to lose..
Already very depressed. I HATE fucking winter
… browser problem. It was Opera. Firefox works…
$158 heating bill for one room. Out of my $750 a month cash. After rent gas and internet cable, leaves me less than $100. If it weren’t for food ‘stamps’ I’d have to take up mugging. I do have a really stout cane… a branch from Morris Park. And there’s no shortage of deserving victims out there. If I got good enough to garner a surplus, could give the extra to homeless people…
Need a green hood…
CDS Jacob! WordPress had a technical glitch last night as I tried to post a response here… sorry about the gap; I hope you haven’t mugged any deeply-deserving Yuppies in the interval!
Thanks for rocking the midnight hour, CDS Steven. I didn’t know the Bettye Swann tune or that Candi Staton number. As for the Rufus and Chaka Khan – great track and what a truly breathtaking woman. That right there is some serious allure (and how about the wanker at the end cutting her off while she’s cooking up a storm, no doubt to extol the benefits of Ex-Lax or some such like. Shame on you, Sir!).
Allow me to follow suit with a few female vocalists. Starting off with a great production job by S.Wonder Esq.
Ah, of course… what was I thinking, CDS MML? Syreeta! And then Dusty (definitely in my pantheon; I must have 150 tracks by Comrade Springfield in my memory banks). The near-distant past is a horde of stunning Viking gold which bumpkins and their kids (ie, fans of Madonna and Beyonce) have been trodding on, unawares, for so so long…
And representing the United Kingdom…
Dusty and Tom Moulton. Peaks around the fifth minute. Turn it up!
pre-Petshop Boys Disco Dusty?!
The Veritable Classic
Fabb! Christ, someone needs to make a film to give this gem a home in the soundtrack of… what Kubrick did for classical (counter-intuitively matching it with Sci Fi), someone should do for Soul. Imagine this to a sequence of a couple of giant, gleaming androids with tiny human heads loping (in slo mo) up out of the oil-slicked surf of a post-apocalyptic Jersey shore …
Finally, one of my favourite releases off JB’s People label.
Also brill but the size of the wig gave me sympathetic angst about neck injuries. For me it’s still a tie, in this round, between the 61-year-old Shirley Bassey and the 20-something Chaka Khan, in the primordial allure department. What I find astonishing (for all its unhipness) in the latter-Bassey performance of Goldfinger is the lacquered, near-Geisha quality of every finger and lip movement; every tilt of her spine and widening of her spectacular eyes… the lost Art of narrative song-singing. The movie in her face was more thrilling than the actual film the song made famous; the formal qualities of her performance are more rigorously presented than an essay by Harold Brodkey, Comrades. She puts the Art in Artificial. If I weren’t happily married and Shirley lived next door I’d splash on the Hai Karate (I have a distinct memory of the scent: I wore it, age 10) and go knocking. I’d even cheat on Francoise Hardy for a nuzzle with Shirley. It’s time for us to reclaim the fantasy fuckability of the non-gamine Artiste, Comrades!
My candidate for all-time most adorable: Cathy O’Donnell.
I have also peered quite hard at Clémence Poésy:
My general problem with the movies is how unconvincing I find acting (eg, the bearded gits hopping about while the director hollers through a megaphone: “Hop higher, you bearded gits, this is a wedding scene! And try to look more Russian!”). That’s why I generally prefer Fellini, where the actors are mouthing numbers in the scene and the words are dubbed-in later: the acting is broken up into bearable components. Worse is the “naturalistic” acting with the banal sets and grimly-choreographed gestures, facial expressions and mark-hitting; yeah, the sight of the pretty girl(s) featured in these things is the only consolation, usually… larf! People act every moment of their actual lives and do a much better job of it than the meta-actors who are oppressed by the directions of a director.
“My candidate for all-time most adorable: Cathy O’Donnell.”
Looks like a cross between Donna Reed and Judy Davis (esp. @ 1:07). I still prefer Shirley Bassey singing “Something” in that marvelous curly wig. Or white-haired, 70-ish Francoise Hardy. A time-traveling menage-a-trop with these ladies (at those ages) would be just the thing to put hair on the chest of a seventeen-year-old yours truly! Who would you pair Ms. O’Donnell with, CDS Sean, if the technology were available and affordable? A 20-something Chaka Khan might make a piquant counter-balance…
Probably the Tuesday Weld of Lord Love a Duck:
Plus if I can have a foursome, then for the experience and wisecracks (pre-foursome, rather than after, I hope) the modern-day Amanda Peet.
Christ, look at that Hitler-spawn body-builder-thing at roughly 4 minutes into your clip…
But let’s think hard on this foursome idea…
You’re right , of course. I haven’t really thought this through. For a start I don’t especially wish to defile young Cathy. I just want to hang out her, robbing banks and gazing at her and stuff.
Plus I don’t really know the dynamics of foursomes. I’ve had a couple of threesomes, though, one of which was great and one that was so disgusting that — get this — the email in which I described it put our host right off his lunch. Or was that the grubby story of how I popped my cherry?
Amanda and Tuesday, if you’re reading: it wasn’t *me* who was disgusting in either case.
I haven’t had lunch yet so please post!
Steven can forward you the email, comrade, if he hunts his sent mail for ‘You owe me the money for my lunch, Chum! I’m not joking.’ Nah, in fact scrub that. Too hardcore for public or private airing, I’m afraid.
Here’s the track I’d like playing when me and Tuesday hit the floor:
I’m sure she’d appreciate a band called Mousie and the Traps.
I defer to your judgment in this (and pretty much all other) matters, CDS Sean.
Trust him, he speaks the Truth
CDS Jacob, I didn’t see yr latest posts until after my happy-go-lucky medley was laid down (rather than my being neglectful of them). Sorry to hear about yr present difficulties and I hope things take a better turn for you soon.
“Fabb! Christ, someone needs to make a film to give this gem a home in the soundtrack of… what Kubrick did for classical (counter-intuitively matching it with Sci Fi), someone should do for Soul. Imagine this to a sequence of a couple of giant, gleaming androids with tiny human heads loping (in slo mo) up out of the oil-slicked surf of a post-apocalyptic Jersey shore …”
I’d say you were the man for said job, CDS Steven (I actually mean that). If I was only head of development at Universal I’d be giving you the nod right now, money no object, on the basis of that one envisaged scene.
Me or the fella who did that Sims video of “Love Child” (above): Lo Fi gold!
Time for me to re-print my favorite Augustinian pome about non-gamine allure and power, Comrades Lurking and Explicit
the fine arts in berlin
old von bredow and his widow in apparent
years sufficient but too
meticulous in their pleasures to ever be
grandparents, somber-slim and softly
rich as becketts, are again in the market
for a girl to cook, polish, launder, drive, pose for his
sketches and comply without kvetching with
the importunities enticed by ripening
youth. evidence of a recent
bloodtest, a signed declaration of
boyfriendlessness, sweet
breath and high
breasts to be presented in
that order at the
interview. the list of alumnae tallies a
fine-arts-in-berlin who’s who: the tooth-sculptress, the
pain artist’s muse, the longterm girlfriend of two
married antiquities dealers and the wife
of a brewery-inheriting collector of
restoration erections, plus
the headmistress of a faux-french trompe l’oeil atelier of
ill-repute. all have done well for art
students. the first in the series, the
widow herself in
1962, 18 to von Bredow’s
30: blackplumed, supple, striking
as a horsehair whip
(father a)
(cinematographer at Łódź)
(one of the chosen)
(few aryans slain by a)
(jew in that era in a)
(duel over a pupil’s)
(paramour)
she’d mix
von b’s patented lacquers, gesso/sand/re-gesso/re-sand his
grander canvasses; photograph, crate-up, ship-out each
piece of his gigantic oneiric
maps from the studio overlooking
the Lietzensee and its petit bourgeois
paths. later she even came
to finish certain works and worse
paint others ab
ovo usque ad mala whilst the maestro
napped. her man can live for what feels like years
without urges regarding the
pinkerparts of the
people. it’s the widow herself, blackwings
turned a pearly bob, cupped breasts white as
dresden pots in timebrowned
hands who relishes the
entering of that room kept sternly
lockless, its unblocked
view of three steeples, not even
knocking. an applicant/supplicant buzzes
breathless down at front, the widow sips
her salted coffee, walks
the atrium with numbered
steps, stops to stoop to pocket a
foilship of gumwrap off
the cloud-reflecting
koi pond feeling
deathless
(image via )
I called Finn a cunt once (I still think he was being a bit cunty and he probably still, if he remembers the event at all, thinks he wasn’t) but I like this finely-written comment-as-an-essay-as-a-playlet he just left over at Dan’s (though, the fact of the thing’s existence; a thing which would never, in this exact form, have seen existence in the Print Realm; mitigates against its own gist):
Finn, stop being such a materialist. The cruel question you put to ThorAu could be just as well put to any artist, famous or not-famous, un-remunerated or pig-ass rich. No it wasn’t worth it or Yes it was: whatever. You did it. It’s done. Do you regret the doing? The breathing? The eating and fucking? Or are you glad you were here to do?
Finn Harvor is a really good interviewer.
Finn is indeed, CDS Frances… I only have qualms with Finn’s apparent bitterness over the fact that we won’t be earning Fame or Fortune (cash n’ gongs), as literary creatives, in the system as it is… when we all now have the means to be read, finally, by thousands. Why would anyone wanting money and respect choose (or give in to the calling of) The Arts? Most “successful” Artists are semi-artistic mediocrities with talent in the dark arts of self-promotion, lucky birth and/or arse-slurping/ cock-sucking: they earn their money and I don’t envy them or begrudge their getting of it. Let them agonize with it.
As a writer I want most of all to be read by at least a handful of people who “get” my Art; as a wised-up fellow, I figured out other ways to earn money (ie, prostituting my secondary talent). We now have the means of distribution… and no excuses.
Dear CDS Steven, as somebody in possession of a Plan B that is not itself without artistic merit and one which clearly runs parallel with your literary production rather than counter to it, I would say this places you in a very small minority of those writers who cannot make a living from their words (I should state at the outset, I don’t believe the question of whether or not you’ve paid your dues to reach this point – which I suspect you have – is relevant here).
When it comes to assessing writers’ ulterior motives, I see a clear moral distinction between those who desire to earn a modest living from their literary endeavours and those who would wring glory from it at any cost (including that of the work’s quality or intent) . Whilst one might very well call the first lot of people deluded, the idea that they are in some way reprehensible is not one I can condone, particularly as I continue to include myself amongst their number.
In the case of this chap Finn – who I don’t know and whose motives I can only speculate at – I’d be just as inclined to see anxiety where you see ‘bitterness,’ and to think of that anxiety as well justified as he wonders how he’s going to commit to his writing thoroughly and continue to pay the bills.
To put my own disquiet in context – In October I returned to the UK without a pot to piss in and nowhere apparent to stay and ended up living in a nascent squat in an abandoned pub on an industrial estate in Dublin because I didn’t know where else to go.
To find myself there at the age of 39 was an experience far removed from my more youthful forays into alternative living (the fact that I didn’t have any alternative no doubt compounded this sense) and certainly it lacked the piquancy which comes from an experiment one might abort at any time. In my more maudlin moments, I found myself reiterating the alleged last words of poet Jack Spicer, ‘My vocabulary did this to me.’ (although this is a highly simplistic assessment of how I came to find myself in this place, it is certainly not without cause). For the truth of the matter is that I have refused to do anything except write – by way of employ – for as long as possible, regardless of the now obvious consequences and despite earning nothing from these efforts. At the same time, I’ve continued to send this work off to various agencies in the hope of finally getting paid. In hindsight, this was not an intelligent or sustainable approach to living, however – if only for my own sanity – I must continue to think of it as in some ways noble.
Am I delighted that my work can now appear online as and when I choose and be read by literally tens of global readers? Yes. Does the fact that of these ten or so readers, four of them produce work I admire in turn, enhance my pleasure? Yes. Does the fact I can’t make 5000 Euros a year (there’s the figure for you – personally I could live Ok on that) from this writing continue to haunt me? Yes again. Especially as the prospect of reaching that goal looks likely to recede further as those publishing models which would conceivably support it go the way of the Mashed Potato, The Funky Chicken, and The Twist.
CDS AO! My only point is, really: when exactly did De Debil sit any of us down and promise that if we were really, really good, we could earn a living writing? Especially if we’re too good to write populist super-shit. How would that work?
I think an awful lot of artistic energy gets wasted with what ifs and if onlys. There’s not even any money in writing for 80% of the “published” writers (I was virtual friends with the author of a popular series out on Bloomsbury; 5 books; she couldn’t have done it without her husband’s added income). Even F. Scott Fitzgerald ended up looking back longingly to the days he could make the price of a car with a short story in the golden age of magazines; he earned chicken-feed for most of his novels.
Nearly a century later, I think it’s time to move on from that old (passively destructive) fantasy of cold-submitting an all-or-nothing manuscript, having a discerning intern pluck it from the slush pile… and… and… soon-after feeling time slow down (and the heavens open) as the editor at a major imprint makes that Cinderella call the day before your rent goes three months overdue. I say: give up the fantasy… or write populist super-shit (and make that precise sequence of moves… the correct Uni, the correct writing program, the correct agent and cock-sucking technique and, uh, oh, being in possession of a young, pretty face or a lurid childhood is also advisable).
If you’ve been a reader of Finn’s site (and I have), you’ll know that he does very interesting interviews with published and/or publishing pros on the topic of what is and isn’t getting published and when it all changed (to put it in a nutshell). And I think that’s fine but it A) indulges in the kind of nostalgia I decry above and B) cedes too much inherent (versus psychological) validity to the gate-keeping charisma of the official, paper-print artifact.
Before I learned to eek money from writing shitty pop tunes in order to pay for my compulsion to write/ create Art, I painted houses, Comrades. For twenty fucking years. I served my apprenticeship (developing an authorial toolbox and clarifying my themes), in parallel to that. I wrote in the evenings, stinking of paint. I wrote on the weekends, despite my first wife’s complaints about the sound of the “hammering”. My first wife, btw, did everything in her power to make me quite writing: she even offered to swallow! No, not even for that, says I.
The last time I picked up a paint brush for money I was 40! But the terrible arc which that endpoint describes (this is a calloused finger I type with, Comrades) didn’t discourage me from learning to write “better” (subjectively speaking) than lots of feted (fetid?) cunts who were earning okay money publishing stuff that was no better than stuff I was writing and shelving in college.
It even took twenty years to break into pop… and that was after I had made the deliberate decision to sell-out my music muse in order to feed my monkey!
(1991: a picture of my first wife, taken in the Cafe Morena about 6 months before I met her: her best wasn’t good enough to make me quit writing; I must say I got a very cool SS-Officer-type leather coat from her father, a Max Von Sydow look-a-like, which almost made the whole doomed marriage worth it)
SDC (dyslexia rules!) Ann
“between those who desire to earn a modest living from their literary endeavours and those who would wring glory from it at any cost (including that of the work’s quality or intent) .”
A false set of alternatives. One can well “desire to earn a crust,” without that becoming the motive for writing. Let’s distinguish possible reward from the motive for doing in the first place.
While I take time and effort to get my works seen and read in one form or another (I feel that as a kind of obligation to the work… its what i owe them for the pleasure and sense of accomplishment they have given me in making them (and for their fending off the Black Dog that lies in wait to tear the flesh from my bones). But learning over the years to strip myself of the wish (wish, not need) for that reward, separating the pleasure of recognition (such as it is) from the need to write, has been for the last 25 years intimately married to the task of learning to recognize and accept what is my own and no one else’s.
And ‘glory’ has nothing to do with it. To see ‘glory’ in what one does, one has to stand outside oneself and look back as through the eyes of others. There is no confirmation that can come from others. None. None that is not a will-a-the-wisp, a siren song… empty calories. Were I draped with honors and crowned with laurel and flush with happy material wealth–the confirmation for the work would be no less dependent entirely on myself, to be found nowhere but in my immersion in the process. To hope for reward is more than understandable–quite worth trying for, but to need it–to count success in any terms but that of the work itself, is a weakness.
But you are still young! You have half a lifetime left to figure this stuff out!
Jacob
“Were I draped with honors and crowned with laurel and flush with happy material wealth–the confirmation for the work would be no less dependent entirely on myself, to be found nowhere but in my immersion in the process…”
Cf: Marty Amis! larf
CDS Jacob: would you please “you are still young” me, too? No one’s done it in quite a while and I’m starting to worry…
With all due respect, CDS Jacob, I don’t think you’re ‘feeling me’ here. All I’m saying is that I would prefer to get paid for what I do so that I can keep on on doing it and that there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with such a preference, however chimerical.
Glory, as such, may not exist, but you can’t say the same for glory-hunting, which is what I was alluding to and also denigrating (Quite clearly I was not attributing this particular foible to myself (I shuck off that particular bugbear in my late twenties, thanks all the same)).
Wait: CDS AO, could you really live on 5k a year? That’s Berlin!
(Oh, and re: “as somebody in possession of a Plan B that is not itself without artistic merit”… ha! The commercial music I’ve arse-slurpped my way into is so bad you’d swallow your teeth laughing at it; some of the acts involved are very big names… in Germany. Oh, the shame and horror of it. One of the tunes I co-composed ended up in a squeeze toy in a McDonald’s Happy Meal; I once co-composed the theme song for a Dentist)
“All I’m saying is that I would prefer to get paid for what I do so that I can keep on on doing it ” .
… who wouldn’t?
But what makes you think the business of selling, keeping agents in, battling editors, managing contracts, reading proofs, doing readings and book signings — for barely enough to live on — would take less time than a part time job? Or even a full-time 9-5 job?
Vain fantasy. How can you be sure this isn’t a displaced wish for the world to give you its blessing ( Good Girl! Here’s your Daily Bread, now go forth, be free to dream and do the work of the Angels!), cause it’s about as realistic as coping a multi-million lottery ticket.
The shining lie in the store window designed to make us acutely aware of what we don’t have. A drain of emotional energy and loss of focus.
j
SA. When you cross that line there’ll be no reason to worry about it anymore.
CDS Jacob: it all started the first time a pretty girl called me “Sir”…
Here’s a case in point. There’s this young writer/blogger I think has real potential. She’s smart as a microchip whip, is respectful of her antecedents (eg La Didion, et al), seems lucid both in her concept of herself and of what she needs to build a useful toolbox.
But she also happens to be trendily beautiful and that’s the key; she’s already (at a terribly young age) interfacing with creative types who are playing in the Hipster Big Leagues. She may never write a great book, but I’ll be shocked if she doesn’t end up earning serious money in the field. Maybe lots of it. Whether or not she develops into a fully-activated Artist. And while I’ll be “disappointed” (if I’m still aware of her five or ten years from now) if she doesn’t deepen her Art, I would never (if I had the power to in some alternate reality), advise her to eschew the Hipster Big Time (which is, under a thin plating of style, vapid as the junk from the Big Time Squares) in favor of being a genuine, paid-in-full, no-shortcuts writer. Because that would mean telling her to be Poor.
That’s the way of the world, Comrades.
PAGING CARL JUNG
In fact, I just popped over to Scott McLemee’s Quick Study and found this (which he copied and pasted from someone else’ comment thread, liking the justice of it); emphasis mine:
CDS Steven, I clearly made that point at the outset – that I believed whatever degree of comfort or ease you’ve now achieved has been hard fought and won. Nor could I argue that this long battle did not provide grist to your mill or gain you distinct advantages over those of your contemporaries who meanwhile saw their names in print and found themselves feted. In fact those same pluses are there for me to read and enjoy.
I suppose what I’m defending is not the expectation of earning a crust from writing, and certainly not the assumption, but rather the longing. Again, I’m talking about being paid buttons here (enough for a roof and three square meals a day (forget about the car).
And, yup, 5k per annum in Berlin is certainly doable (I can think of no other city in the world where being stony broke amounts to an unofficial civil ordinance – I know there’s a lot of faux hardship amongst yr hipster types, but Berlin does also cater to the real thing).
CDS AO, what we should be doing is working on these ideas for cash:
A) Pet Bordello
B) Nightcare Centers (catering to the many Berlin parents who are into clubbing)
C) “KICK AN AUSLÄNDER (for €5)” sandwich boards
D) Sunday Morning Kebab-Vomit Cleanup Service (sub-contracted by city)
E) Freelance “This is Where the Queue Actually Starts” Ushers for bakeries and banks
Last August I staged a one-woman guerilla-style flohmarkt on the banks of the Spree over successive days (This was in Mitte, parallel with Oranienburger) by throwing a blanket onto the grass and trying to dispense with my remaining library. At one point I was approached by a number of gypsies, after a slice of my non-existent takings for the day. I laughed back at them with what can best be described as exasperation: ‘Yeh. Like I’m the one to see.’
I doubt that any of your proposed initiatives could fare any worse, CDS Steven; especially the Pet Bordello. That one’s a corker.
Well then, let’s get to it, Comrade! (We’ll need a little electric hair-trimmer thingy, first off, to cater to modern… eh… no, I can’t go through with this joke; I can’t)
Here, let’s have a look at this list, Comrades Lurking and Explicit, and see if we can all finger the two funniest bits:
Well, I’ll finger the one funny bit, for starters: no mention of “novelist”
“Zero in the system.”
(Do I have to say? Don DeLillo braking it down in Libra)
Please do not fix my typo in breaking. It was inadvertent but I really like it.
Pure Zen, CDS Frances!
Poet. Retired from part time work
$750 a month, 9,000 a year cash, Social Security while it lasts.
You pay for freedom with real-life anxiety… better than being a well remunerated wage-slave.
The problem being that who you are in North America equals what you earn (or what people think you earn or what they think you have the potential to earn); the majority of the population is poor, but so many of them, living in the simulation-within-a-simulation of their own heads, behave as though they’re on the way to being rich, if not rich already. They see a rich celebrity or politician on the wall-sized flatscreen in the living room and identify powerfully with It. “The American Dream” is the perfect term for this condition.
I was once privy to an astonishing conversation on a bus on the way to the Mall of America. This was in 1995, I think; I’d just returned to The States after 5 years in Berlin (this was right before I moved to Southern California, where bus-riding is unthinkable). A middle-aged couple in the seat ahead of me were fantasizing, out loud, about what they’d do with the money if either of them won the lottery. To make a short story shorter, it didn’t take more than five minutes before they were having a vicious argument about this phantom money. A perfect metaphor.
“(We’ll need a little electric hair-trimmer thingy, first off, to cater to modern… eh… no, I can’t go through with this joke; I can’t)”
Oh come on, CDS Steven, don’t be such a…….Scaredy-Cat.
38k. That’s got to be good for a decade if I keep to Wedding….
Well-spotted, CDS AO, you win the joke prize!
…Maybe we should cannibalize the entire Augustine oeuvre under the catch-all ‘Jazzmag- Atomhund’ and flog it to the highest bidder, something like this little dear.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/publish-and-be-damned-young-writers-ego-dramatically-punctured-1904037.html
‘It was Zizek wot made me do it’. Admirable cheek. But I still hope her comeuppance is worthy of Struwwelpeter.
CDS MML: no, wait until I write the stuff about the year (1990) I worked in the legendary club Orfeuo … THEN plagiarize! Much more lucrative (apparently)
“But I still hope her compeuppance is worthy of Struwwelpeter.” As in a Saint Nick look-a-like dipping her in a giant pot of ink to turn her black? That would be nice.
CDS Jacob, I still think your portrayal of what I’ve said is wide of the mark (just as yr apparent equanimity in the face of artistic hardship is somewhat compromised by yr postings on Feb 18th). That said, I accept in this case I invited such a response with the tenor of my argument. Truth is, I rarely enter into these kinds of disputations – thinking it better to keep my own counsel – and should have held to this wisdom once again.
I was trying to acknowledge my self-pity rather than celebrate it, but obviously this distinction was not rendered clearly, leaving us both free to turn blue in the face arguing the toss.
Another picture of my ex-wife (on an actual postcard you could find in Berlin in the early 1990s), who never read a single word I wrote (we’re talking, to date, approx. 2,000 pages of the stuff I’ve deemed keep-worthy). Some of our Comrades Lurking are also, or have been, perhaps, Persecuted Writers in their own homes. Is there a branch of Amnesty International to deal with that? Who needs government censorship when your spouse is praying for your typewriter to fly to bits, praying a law school will conscript you, demanding more money for designer fucking outfits and even hitting you with the old Lysistrata bit… as though writing were an act of war? I hunkered down. I wasn’t a Solzhenitsyn (or his Isaac Denisovich) in a Gulag but I felt like a man in sack cloth pajamas with a twelve-digit number on his back in a windowless concrete room. How many genuine writers are thwarted/stunted/erased every year in the petit bourgeois re-education camp of marriage? The second marriage, I was blindingly lucky (and crafty: I married a semi-Bohemian classical musician this time). But the first time almost killed me. The discouragement was fucking relentless. If you are a writer of any talent and want that talent to thrive, the safest thing is to say single. These past five years as father and husband have been the happiest (and most productive) of my life… but. Again. It was luck. It could easily have gone the other way. Again.
AnnOminous,
Sometimes it’s hard to climb over the wordfence and see what’s going on the’other side.
Seems I was responding to the words and not their sense.
Who hasn’t wasted time mourning the loss of what’s not worth having in the first place?
Sort of thing makes me sit up and take notice, though, as that’s pretty much how we’re supposed to feel about ourselves and it’s so damn easy to slip under and drown in it.
Keep swimming, sister… and make sure it’s up stream. That way you always have good reason to complain!
My complaints of the 18th had nothing to do with any expectations I hold out for my writing. The business of living and writing are two different things. Writing is play… the pleasure of play. Like when I was a child–how in play, not always, but now and then, there were hours that became a world, that I’d carry to bed with me and dream on them, and then I’d have to wake up and go to fucking school.
Business, “success” and its trappings, making a living–all that shit–that’s fucking school. School is the disease. Play is the cure. Why would I want to infect my play with fucking school?
Reminds me of a poem I wrote years ago… maybe that’s where it came from… the residue of fucking school
This morning, she woke me,Death –
It’s time, she said, hands soft
as webs. They touch my own and fuse
bone to bone.
She lied. She always has.
Even as a child I’d wake like this
My mother’s kiss warm on my closed eyes,
And then I’d wake to her — Surprise! she’d say
It’s I! — spinning
Over me, her dancing hair would fly,
Would fly, would fill the room
With cinnamon and cloves, the smell
Of spices in the wind, the sound
Of sea gulls mewing on the bay.
This morning, She woke me, Death –
With eyes like silver asters
On a cloudy afternoon, the smell
Of rain, of winter coming soon.
She lies. She lies.
VINTAGE EMAILS
(from Sunday evening, January 13th, 2002)
The place is humming, eh Comrades Lurking and Explicit? It’s good to disagree a bit, sometimes. Good for the fictive juices. And so is the silver eggnog! Glugg it up and shut off the fondue pots on the way out (CDS Frances has the keys)… I’m off to try the sweet inutility of sleep…
Good-For-a-Larf Mart
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article7034958.ece
I can just picture that ashtray on the feller’s chest and his eyes smarting
SIMULOCRATIC FEEDBACK LOOP (IN THE KEY OF FEMALE MOSQUITO)
‘Member back in the old days of newspapers how much fun it was to count the Ninas? Bringing some loving here today…
Well-crooned, CDS Frances! I, personally, haven’t counted a Nina (or a Nona) since Marvin checked out… thanks for reminding us. (Oh, and: coincidence?)
Apparently this is Pynchon narrating his own advert.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/mpd/permalink/m23ORCW6SUU8EM
In the future, everyone’s feelings will be hurt by the Internet for 15 minutes
TESTIMONIALS FROM THE VAULT IN MOUNT IMPROBABLE
VERBA LUXUS ( words not to use, but to hoard in a shoe box)
A
• ACAROPHILIA: Affinity for itching
• ACHLUOPHILIA: Love of darkness
• ACMEGENESIS: Orgasm
• ACOMOCLITIC: Preference for hairless genitals
• ACOUSTICOPHILIA: Arousal from sounds
• ACROPHILIA: Arousal from heights or high altitudes
• ACROTOMOPHILIA: Arousal from amputees
• ACTIRASTY: To become aroused from exposure to sun’s rays
• ACUCULLOPHALIA: Circumcision
• ACYESIS: Female sterility
• ADAMITISM: Going naked for God
• ADOLESCENTILISM: Cross-dressing or playing the role of an adolescent
• AELUROPHILIA: Deriving gratification from cats
• AGALMATOPHILIA: Attractions to statues or mannequins
• AGAMIC: Asexual; parthenogenic
• AGENOBIOSIS: Married couple who consent to live together without sex
• AGONOPHILIA: Person who is aroused by a partner pretending to struggle
• AGORAPHILIA: Arousal from open spaces or having sex in public places
• AGREXOPHILIA: Arousal from others knowing you are having sex
• AICHMOPHILIA: Love of needles and other pointed objects
• AISCHROLATREIA: Worship of filth, smut; obscenity cult
• ALBUTOPHILIA: Arousal from water
• ALGOLAGNIA: Sexual satisfaction resulting from giving or receiving pain; sadism or masochism
• ALIPHINEUR: Person using lotion to arouse a partner
• ALLOERASTY: Use of nudity of another person to arouse a partner
• ALLOPELLIA: Having orgasm from watching others engaging in sex
• ALLORGASMIA: Arousal from fantasizing about someone other than one’s partner
• ALLOTRIORASTY: Arousal from partners of other nations or races
• ALPHAMEGAMIA: Attraction to partners of another age group
• ALTOCALCIPHILIA: High heel fetish
• ALVINOLAGNIA: Stomach fetish
• AMATRIPSIS: Masturbation by rubbing labia together
• AMAUROPHILIA: Preference for a blind or blindfolded sex partner
• AMAXOPHILIA: Attraction to riding in cars and motor vehicles
• AMBISEXTROUS: Pertaining to a bisexual person
• AMELOTASIS: Attraction to absence of limb
• AMOKOSCISIA: Arousal or sexual frenzy with desire to slash or mutilate women
• AMOMAXIA: Sex in a parked car
• AMPHIEROTISM: Capacity of erotic reaction toward either sex
• AMPHIGENTIC INVERT: An individual who regularly engages in sexual activity with persons of both genders
• AMPHISEXUAL: Bisexual
• AMULIEROSIS: Result of sexual privacy
• AMYCHESIS: Act of scratching partner during sexual passion
• AMYCHOPHILIA: Deriving sexual pleasure from being scratched
• ANACLITISM: Arousal from items used as infant
• ANACREONTIC: Erotic
• ANALINCTUS: Licking the anus
• ANALINGUS: Rimming or penetration of anus with tongue
• ANASTEEMAPHILIA: Attraction to a person because of a difference in height
• ANAXIPHILIA: Act of falling in love with a loser by someone who should know better
• ANDROGYNY: Having both male and female characteristics
• ANDROGYNOPHILIA: Bisexual
• ANDROIDISM: Arousal from robots with human features
• ANDROMANIA: Nymphomania
• ANDROMINETOPHILIA: Arousal from female partner who dresses like male
• ANDROSODOMY: Anal sex with a male partner
• ANILILAGNIA: Sexual desire for older women
• ANISONOGAMIST: Attraction to either older or younger partners
• ANOCRATISM: Anal sex
• ANOMEATIA: Anal sex with a female partner
• ANOPHELORASTIA: Arousal from defiling or ravaging a partner
• ANOPHILEMIA: Kissing anus
• ANORAPTUS: Rapist who only attacks elderly women
• ANTHOLAGNIA: Arousal from smelling flowers
• ANTHROPOPHAGOLAGNIA: Rape with cannibalism
• ANTHROPOPHAGY: Pleasure derived from the ingestion of human flesh
• ANTIPUDIC: Covering one’s genitals
• ANTIOPHILIA: Fondness for floods
• APELLOUS: Circumcision
• APHALLATIA: Celibacy
• APHEPHILIA: Deriving pleasure from being touched
• APHILOPHRENIA: A feeling that one is unloved or unwanted
• APISTIA: Adultery
• APODYSOPHILIA: Feverish desire to undress
• APOTEMNOPHILIA: Person who has sexual fantasies about losing a limb
• ARACHNEPHILIA: Attraction to spiders
• ARPAGEE: A raped woman
• ARRHENOTHIGMOPHILOUS: Nymphomania
• ARSOMETRY: Anal sex
• ASCETICISM: Religious self-denial often including celibacy
• ASPHYXIAPHILIA: Arousal from lack of oxygen
• ASTHENOLAGNIA: Arousal from weakness or being humiliated
• ASTYPHIA: Impotence
• ASYNODIA: Celibacy particularly due to impotence
• AULOPHILIA: Love of flutes
• AUTAGONISTOPHILIA: Exhibitionism; arousal from exposing naked body or genitals to strangers while on stage or while being photographed
• AUTASSASSINOPHILIA: Arousal from orchestrating one’s own death by the hands of another
• AUTOEROTIC ASPHYXIA: Arousal from oxygen deprivation and sometimes risk of dying
• AUTOGYNEPHILIA: Arousal from crossdressing
• AUTOMASOCHISM: Arousal from inflicting intense sensations of pain on one’s own body
• AUTONEPIOPHILIA: Sexual attraction from dressing or being treated like an infant
• AUTOPEDERASTY: The insertion of one’s own penis into their anus
• AVERING: A boy’s begging in the nude to arouse sympathy
• AVISODOMY: Breaking the neck of a bird while penetrating it for sex
• AXILLISM: The use of the armpit for sex
B
• BATHYCOLPIAN: Possessing a large bosom
• BATRACHOPHILIA: Attraction to frogs
• BELONEPHILIA: Arousal from pins or needles
• BIASTOPHILIA: Pleasure from forcible rape of a terrified stranger
Bight-a loop or slack part in a rope; a bend in a river
•
• BLISSOM: To copulate with an ewe
• BOLLOCKS: Testicles
• BOTULINONIA: Sex with a sausage
• BROMIDROPHILIA: Arousal from bodily smells
• BRONTOPHILIA: Love of thunderstorms
C
• CALLIPYGIAN: Having shapely buttocks
• CANOPHILIA: Turned on by dogs
• CAPNOLAGNIA: Arousal from watching others smoke
• CAPONIZE: To castrate a chicken
• CATAGELOPHILIA: Love of being ridiculed
• CATAMENIA: Menstruation
• CATAMITE: A boy used in homosexual relations
• CHASMOPHILIA: Attraction to nooks, crannies, crevices, and chasms
• CHEIMAPHILIA: Deriving pleasure from cold or winter
• CHIONOPHILIA: Love of snow
• CHREMATISTOPHILIA: Arousal from being charged for sex or robbed
• CHRYSOPHILIA: Arousal from gold or golden objects
• CLAUSTROPHILIA: Love of being confined in small places
• CLIMACOPHILIA: Deriving pleasure by falling down stairs
• COMMASCULATION: Homosexuality between men
• CONCUPISCENCE: Excessive sexual desire
• CONTRECTATION: The love play preceding sexual intercourse
• CONVERTITE: A reformed prostitute
• COPROLOGY: The study of pornography
• COPROPHEMIA: Obscene language
• COPROPHILIA: A fancier of feces
• CRATOLAGNIA: Arousal from strength
• CRUROPHILIA: Sexual arousal from legs
• CYPRIAN: Lecherous
• CYPRIDOPHOBIA: Fear of getting venereal disease
• CYPRIPAREUNIA: Sexual intercourse with a prostitute
D
• DACRYPHILIA: Arousal from seeing tears in the eyes of a partner
• DASYPYGAL: Having hairy buttocks
• DENDROPHILIA: Attraction to trees
• DEOSCULATE: To kiss affectionately
• DEPUSCELATE: To lose one’s virginity
• DIGENESIS: Alternately sexual and asexual reproduction
• DIGENOUS: Bisexual
• DIOESTRUM: The time when a female animal is not in heat
• DORAPHILIA: Love of animal skins
• DOWCET: A deer’s testicle
• DYSTYCHIPHILIA: Deriving pleasure from accidents
E
• ECDEMOLAGNIA: Arousal from traveling or being away from home
• ECDYSIAST: A stripper
• EDEA: The external genitals
• ELUMBATED: Weak in the loins
• EMETOPHILIA: Arousal from vomit or vomiting
• EMMENOLOGY: The study of menstruation
• ENCEINTE: Pregnant
• ENCRATY: Abstinence
• EONISM: Transvestitism
• EPHEBOPHILIA: Compelling need for an older person to seek adolescent partners for sexual gratification
• EPICENE: Pertaining to both sexes
• EPIGAMIC: Tending to attract the opposite sex during mating season
• EPISTEMOPHILIA: Abnormal preoccupation with acquiring knowledge (This best describes me)
• EREMOPHILIA: Maniacal desire to be left alone
• ERGOPHILIA: Love of work and labor
• EROTOPHOBIA: Fear of sexual love
• EROTOPHONPHILIA: Attaining sexual satisfaction from murdering complete strangers
• ERYTHROPHILIA: Becoming aroused by blushing
• EUNUCHATE: To make a eunuch
• EVIRATION: Emasculation, castration
F
• FAM: To grope a woman
• FEMORAL COITUS: Penis-thigh sex
• FESCENNINE: Vulgar
• FISSIPARISM: Reproduction by fissioning
• FORMICOPHILIA: Enjoyment of the use of insects for sexual purposes
• FRICATRICE: A whore
• FROTTEUR: A person aroused by brushing up against clothed people in public places
• FURTLING: The use of fingers underneath cut-outs in genital areas of photos for arousal
G
• GAMIC: Sexual
• GAMOPHOBIA: Fear of marriage
• GENICON: A sexual partner imagined by one who is dissatisfied with her actual partner
• GENOPHOBIA: Fear of sex
• GERONOSEXUALITY: An attraction where the object of desire is 30 years older or more
• GERONTOPHILIA: Arousal from an older partner
• GODEMICHE: A dildo
• GOMPHIPOTHIC: Arousal by the sight of teeth
• GRAPHOLAGNIA: Maniacal interest in obscene pictures
• GRIVOISERIE: Lewd and lascivious behavior
• GUNZEL: A passive, orally oriented, male homosexual
• GYMNOPHOBIA: Fear of nudity
• GYNANDER: A female pseudo-hermaphrodite
• GYNANDRY: Hermaphroditism
• GYNOPHOBIA: Fear of women
• GYNOTIKOLOBOMASSOPHILIA: Deriving sexual pleasure by nibbling on a woman’s earlobe
H
• HAMARTOPHILIA: Love of committing sinful acts
• HAPTEPHILIA: Arousal by being touched
• HARPAXOPHILIA: Getting pleasure by robbery or being robbed
• HEAUTONTIMORUMENOS: Masochist
• HEBETIC: Happening at puberty
• HEDONOPHOBIA: Fear of pleasure
• HEMATOLAGNIA: Sexual stimulation from blood
• HEMIPENIS: One of the paired sex organs of many reptiles
• HETAERISM: Extramarital sex; communal marriage
• HOMILOPHILIA: Arousal from hearing or giving sermons
• HYMENORRHEXIS: Defloration of the hymen
• HYPNOPHILIA: Turned on by the thought of sleeping
I
• ICOLAGNIA: Arousal from contemplation of, or contact with sculptures or pictures
• INCUBUS: A male demon who has intercourse with a woman while she is sleeping
• INFANTILISM: Attraction to childhood items
• IPSISM: Masturbation
• IRRUMATION: Fellatio
• ISOPHILIC: Relating to same gender affection sans sex
• ITHYPHALLIC: Pertaining to the phallus carried in Bacchanalian festivals; lewd
J
• JOCKER: A male homosexual
K
• KAINOTOPHILIA: Getting pleasure from change
• KAKORRHAPHIOPHILIA: Arousal from failure
• KALOPSIA: Condition where things appear more beautiful than they really are (e.g. when you’re drunk)
• KENOPHILIA: Attraction to empty or open spaces
• KERAUNOPHILIA: Turned on by thunder and lightning
• KINESOPHILIA: Arousal from movement and exercise
• KLISMAPHILIA: Sexual pleasure from enemas
• KNISSOPHILIA: Attraction to incense-burning
• KOPOPHILIA: Arousal from physical or mental exhaustion
L
• LAGNOSIS: Satyriasis
• LALIOPHILIA: Arousal from public speaking
• LALOCHEZIA: Talking dirty to relieve tension
• LAPAROHYSTEROSALPINGOOOPHORECTOMY: Surgical removal of the female reproductive organs
• LEMAN: A mistress or lover
• LENOCINANT: Lewd
• LIGYROPHILIA: Turned on by loud noises
• LILAPSOPHILIA: Arousal from tornadoes
• LOBCOCK: A large, relaxed penis
• LITHOPHILIA: Attraction to stones, gravel, or mud
• LOVERTINE: Addicted to love-making
• LUPANARIAN: Lubricious, lascivious, lewd
• LYGOPHILIA: Love of darkness
• LYSSOPHILIA: Sexual arousal from becoming angry or upset
M
• MACHLAENOMANIA: Masochism in women
• MACROMASTIC: Pertaining to large breasts
• MACROPHILIA: Attraction to giants or giant creatures
• MAIESIOPHILIA: Arousal from childbirth or pregnant women
• MAMMILLATED: Having nipples
• MANIAPHILIA: Attraction to insane people
• MANUSTUPRATION: Masturbation
• MASTIGOPHILIA: Sexual gratification from punishment or being whipped; masochism
• MATUTOLAGNIA: Antemerdian sexual desire
• MAZOPHILIA: Compulsion for breasts
• MECHANOPHILIA: Turned on by machines
• MEGALOPHILIA: Arousal from large objects (not necessarily fat)
• MELISSOPHILIA: Attraction to bees
• MENACME: The menstruating part of a woman’s life
• MENOPHANIA: The onset of menstruation; false menstruation
• MENTULATE: Possessing a large penis; well-hung
• MERKIN: A pubic hair wig
• METOPOPHILIA: Turned on by a person’s face
• METROPHILIA: Arousal from poetry
• MISAPODYSIS: Hatred of undressing in front of someone
• MISEROTIA: Aversion to sex
• MIXOSCOPIA: Orgasm achieved by watching one’s beloved have sex with someone else; voyeurism
• MOLYSMOPHILIA: Attraction to dirt, filth, or contamination (see MYSOPHILIA)
• MONOECIOUS: Hermaphroditic
• MONORCHID: Having one testicle
• MULIEBRITY: Assumption of female characteristics by a male
• MULTIGRAVIDA: A woman who has been pregnant more than once
• MUSOPHILIA: Attraction to mice
• MYSOPHILIA: Love of dirt or becoming dirty
N
• NANOPHILIA: Sexual attraction to a short partner
• NARRATOPHILIA: Arousal from erotic conversations
• NASOPHILIA: Arousal from the sight, touch, licking, or sucking of a partner’s nose.
• NEANILAGNIA: A yen for nymphets
• NEBULOPHILIA: Arousal from fog
• NECROPHILIA: Sexual gratification only by having sex with the dead
• NEMOPHILIA: Love of forests
• NEOLAGNIUM: Puberty
• NEOPHILIA: Arousal from anything new
• NOSOPHILIA: Love of becoming ill
• NOTHOSONOMIA: Calling someone a bastard
• NOVERCAMANIA: Sexual attraction to one’s stepmother
• NYCTOPHILIA: Love of night
• NYMPHOLEPSY: Trance incurred by erotic daydreams
O
• OBSOLAGNIUM: Waning sexual desire due to age
• OCHLOPHILIA: Attraction to crowds
• OCNOPHILE: Someone chronically dependent on their lover
• OCULOLINCTUS: The act of licking a partner’s eyeball
• ODYNOPHILIA: Deriving pleasure from pain; masochism
• OIKOPHILIA: Attraction to one’s home
• OLFACTOPHILIA: Sexual gratification from smells
• OMBROPHILIA: Turned on by rain or being rained upon
• ONANISM: Masturbation
• OPHELIMITY: The ability to please sexually
• OPHIDIOPHILIA: Arousal from snakes
• ORNITHOPHILIA: Love of birds
• OSMOLAGNIA: Arousal caused by bodily odors, such as sweat or menses
• OSPHRESIOPHILIA: An inordinate love of smells
• OZOLAGNIA: Arousal from odors
P
• PANTOPHILIA: Arousal from just about everything imaginable
• PAPHIAN: Erotic; pertaining to illicit love
• PAPILLA: A nipple
• PARACOITA: A female sexual partner
• PARACOITUS: A male sexual partner
• PAREUNIA: Sexual intercourse
• PARTHENOLATRY: Virgin worship
• PARTHENOPHILIA: Attraction only to virgins
• PECCATOPHILIA: Arousal from sinning or having committed an imaginary crime
• PEDIOPHILIA: Attraction to dolls
• PEDOPHILIA: Sexual attraction to children
• PENIAPHILIA: Erotic fascination with poverty
• PENTHERAPHILIA: Sexual attraction to one’s mother-in-law
• PEODEIKTOPHILIA: Sexual arousal from exhibitionism
• PEOTOMY: Surgical amputation of the penis
• PESSARY: A vaginal suppository
• PHALLATION: Movement of the penis in sexual intercourse
• PHILOPHOBIA: Fear of falling in love or of being loved
• PHILOPORNIST: A lover of prostitutes
• PHRONEMOPHILIA: Turned on by the act of thinking
• PHTHIRIOPHILIA: Attraction to lice
• PHYGEPHILIA: Arousal from being a fugitive
• PICTOPHILIA: Arousal only from looking at erotic pictures
• PIZZLE: A whip made of an animal’s penis
• PLACOPHILIA: Arousal from tombstones
• PLANISTETHIC: Flat-chested
• PLUVIOPHILIA: Sexual stimulation from rain or being rained upon
• PNIGOPHILIA: Aroused from people choking
• POINEPHILIA: Turned on by punishment; masochism
• PONOPHILIA: Attraction to overwork
• PORNERASTIC: Licentious, lewd, and horny
• PORNOCRACY: A government by prostitutes
• PORNOLAGNIA: Desire for prostitutes
• POTAMOPHILIA: Arousal from streams and rivers
• PREMENACMIUM: Life before menstruation begins
• PRESBYTOREAN: An erotic poem
• PRIAPISM: Persistent and painful erection, usually the result of a disease
• PRONOVALENCE: Ability to have sexual intercourse in a prone position only
• PSELLISMOPHILIA: Becoming aroused by stuttering
• PTERIDOMANIA: An intense desire for ferns
• PTERONOPHILIA: Sexual gratification from being tickled by feathers
• PUCELAGE: Virginity
• PUNQUETTO: A prostitute
• PUTANISM: Prostitution
• PYGMALIIONISM: Falling in love with one’s creation (a la “My Fair Lady”)
• PYGOPHILIA: Aroused from buttocks
• PYROLAGNIA: Sexual stimulation from watching fires
Q
• QUADOSHKA: American Indian form of tantric sex
• QUEENING: Sitting on the side of a person’s face as a form of bondage
• QUIM: The vagina
R
• RAMMISH: Lustful and horny
• RANTALLION: One whose scrotum is longer than his penis
• RENIFLEUR: One who gets sexual pleasure from body smells
• RÉTIFISM: Foot and shoe fetishism, including using the shoe for masturbation
• RETROCOPULATION: Fornicating from behind (“Doggie position”)
• RHABDOPHILIA: Finding pleasure in being severely criticized
• RHYTIPHILIA: Arousal from facial wrinkles
• RUTTISH: Horny; in heat
S
• SACOFRICOSIS: The practice of cutting a hole in the bottom of a front pant pocket in order to masturbate in public with less risk of detection
• SAPPHISM: Lesbianism
• SCELEROPHILIA: Attraction to bad guys or unsavory characters
• SCOPTOPHILIA: Voyeurism
• SCOTOPHILIA: Turned on by darkness
• SDRUCCIOLA: Copulate
• SEPTOPHILIA: Sexual attraction to decaying matter
• SIDERODROMOPHILIA: Arousal from riding in trains
• SITOPHILIA: Deriving pleasure from eating
• SOCERAPHILIA: Excitement from one’s parents-in-law
• SOPHOPHILIA: Sexual gratification from learning
• SOROPHILIA: Attraction to one’s sister
• SPADONISM: Eunuchry
• SPECTROPHILIA: Arousal from looking at oneself in a mirror
• SPERMATOPHOBIA: Fear of semen
• SPINTRY: A male whore
• STASIVALENCE: Ability to have sexual intercourse only while standing
• STAUROPHILIA: Arousal from the cross or crucifix
• STHENOLAGNIA: Arousal from displaying strength or muscles
• STUPRATION: Rape
• STYGIOPHILIA: Deriving pleasure from thoughts of hell
• SUBAGITATION: Copulation
• SUCCUBUS: A female demon who seduces men in their sleep
• SUPINOVALENT: Able to fornicate only while lying on the back
• SYMPHOROPHILIA: Arousal by accidents or catastrophes
• SYNGENESOPHILIA: Sexual attraction to one’s relatives
T
• TAPHEPHILIA: Arousal from being buried alive
• TAPHOPHILIA: Love of funerals
• TELEOPHILIA: Affinity for religious ceremonies
• TENTIGINOUS: Lascivious
• TERATOPHILIA: Arousal from deformed or monstrous people
• THALASSOPHILIA: Love of the sea
• THASSOPHILIA: Attraction to sitting
• THREPTEROPHILIA: A fondness for female nurses
• THYGATRILAGNIA: A father’s sexual love for his daughter
• TIMOPHILIA: Arousal from gold or wealth
• TOCOPHILIA: Fondness for pregnancy and childbirth
• TONITROPHILIA: Love of thunder
• TOXIPHILIA: Attraction to poisons
• TOXOPHILIA: Love of archery
• TRAGALISM: Lust; lechery; obscenity
• TRANSFEMINATE: To change from woman to man
• TRAUMATOPHILIA: An unconscious desire to be injured
• TRIBADISM: Mutual genital-fondling between lesbians
• TRICHOPATHOPHILIA: Sexual attraction to hair
• TRIPSOLAGNIA: Arousal from having hair shampooed
U
• UNDINISM: The association of water with erotic thoughts
• URANISM: Homosexuality
• URANOPHILIA: Sexual arousal by heavenly thoughts
• UROLAGNIA: Sexual pleasure from urinating
• URTICATION: The use of nettles to create extra sensation
• UXORAVALENT: Only able to attain sex extramaritally (applied to men)
• UXOROVALENT: Able to score only with one’s wife
V
• VACCINOPHILIA: Turned on by becoming vaccinated
• VAMPIRISM: Consuming blood of a partner for arousal
• VICARPHILIA: Arousal from other people’s exciting experiences
• VINCILAGNIA: Arousal from bondage
• VIRAGINITY: Masculinity in a woman
• VIRGIN: You really need to ask?
• VIRIMIMISM: Adoption of masculinity
• VIRIPOTENT: Sexually mature
• VITRICOPHILIA: Sexual attraction to one’s stepfather
W
• WETHER: A castrated ram
• WHELP: To bear offspring
• WHIRLYGIGS: Testicles
• WITTOL: A husband who tolerates his wife’s infidelity
X
• XENODYNAMIC: Person who is only potent with strangers
• XENOPHILIA: An attraction to foreign customs, traditions, and foreigners
• XERONISUS: Inability to reach orgasm
• XYLOPHILIA: Turned on by wooden objects
Y
• YELD: Not old enough to procreate
• YLOPHILIA: Affinity for forests
• YONI WORSHIP: Worship of the female genitals
Z
• ZELOPHILIA: Sexual arousal from jealousy
• ZOOERASTIA: Sexual intercourse with an animal
• ZOOPHILIA: One who is strongly attracted to animals in a spiritual, sexual, or emotional sense
• ZWISCHENSTUFE: Arousal from a person of the same sex
The Medium Really Is the Message
I’ve read Point Omega a few times now, plus all of the critical pieces I could find online and no one has yet expressed anything remotely like my reading of the book, which is very narrow in scope and specific. I think I’ve located the problem and that the fault for all the vague musings about Chronos (not that anyone has actually used that word) or amorphous ramblings about Art (not even pointillism, just art, or conceptual art) is with the reading group guide made available by the publisher. So even though the kindly folks over at Scribner haven’t professionally engaged me to tweak the guide, I thought I’d try my hand at it. The original can be found here http://books.simonandschuster.com/Point-Omega/Don-DeLillo/9781439169957/reading_group_guide Oh, and by the way, I have no problem with the very first paragraph. I too hope “these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.”
Introduction and some quotes
Do you know who Don DeLillo is? At the very least please read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_DeLillo
And these (courtesy of TRE’s Secondary Sources):
Binelli, Mark. “Intensity of a Plot.” Guernica Magazine, 2007. (http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/373/intensity_of_a_plot/)
Chenetier, Marc and Happe, Francois. “An Interview with Don DeLillo.” Revue Francaise D’Etudes Americaines, 1999. (http://www.cairn.info/load_pdf.php?ID_ARTICLE=RFEA_087_0102)
“I want to keep our intentions small and human despite the enormous work we’ve done and the huge work we have ahead of us and I’m sitting here with a propped foot and talking endlessly about my work when I’m completely aware of Matisse and what he said, that painters must begin by cutting out their tongues.”
—Don DeLillo, Underworld
“You’ll ask me why I choose to have a weight of carrion flesh than to receive three thousand ducats? I’ll not answer that! But say it is my humour. Is it answered?”
—William Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, Act 4, Scene 1, lines 40-43
“I’ve been through the desert on a horse with no name,
It felt good to be out of the rain.
In the desert you can remember your name,
‘Cause there ain’t no one for to give you no pain.
La, la, la la la la, la la la, la, la
La, la, la la la la, la la la, la, la”
—America, A Horse With No Name
Questions for Discussion
1.
Why is there an abstracted image of binoculars on the cover of the book? What is it about binocular vision as opposed to telescopic, let’s say, or monocular vision, that is specific to the way the author wants you to look at what he has depicted? What else does the elongated figure eight lying on its side remind you of? (Don’t censor yourself!) Why is the desert scene on the front cover darker than the scene on the back cover?
2.
The book commences in the Museum of Modern Art’s installation of 24 Hour Psycho. What visual pun is immediately discernable in the iconic movie poster?
(Suggestion: Focus on the name of the star and her costume.) (Hint: It’s the name of a previous book by Don DeLillo.)
3. What point of contrast might the author be making by having the characters in the framing device (the book-ending chapters that both take place in MoMA) be unnamed? What point might the author be making in the second of such chapters by having the Anonymous male character chastise himself for not inquiring as to the name of the Anonymous female character with whom he conversed in the gallery?
4. If you were to know that Elster in Hebrew means hidden God, what significance might such an appellation given by the author of The Names connote? And if you were to learn, as we do, that Elster has written an elaborate linguistic study of the word “rendition” how might that affect your reading strategy of Point Omega?
[Should we stop? Do you need a break? Good. Yeah, I agree. Reading is fun!]
5. Jessica is the name of Elster’s daughter. What other canonical daughters either in fiction or dramatic literature might DeLillo be referencing? Could there be a thematic link between Shylock’s daughter, who steals her father’s material wealth before she elopes and Point Omega’s Jessie, who simply dematerializes, leaving her few valuables behind for her father to find? Do Shylock and Elster have anything in common other than daughters named Jessica? What other references can you find (e.g. references to revenge plays on p.34, for instance) that might bolster this connection?
6. Would you watch Finley’s documentary of Elster, if it were real? Sorry. That’s the old Scribner guide. However, it’s a really good question. Would you?
7. How many times is the word “point” used in the text? If it turned out to be 26, what might the significance of that be? What position does the letter Omega hold in the Greek alphabet? What is at the beginning? Are there any other books written by DeLillo where either of these letters are significant? And what kind of line might the points be plotted on? Would the points be spread at even intervals or clustered in frequency of occurrence similar to, for instance, constellations? How many times is point deployed as a noun, modified, singular or plural? Adjective? Verb? Can you discern a point system? Can you at least be bothered to try?
8. Compare the first paragraph of Libra (A) with that of Point Omega (B).
A. “This was the year he rode the subway to the ends of the city, two hundred miles of track. He liked to stand at the front of the first car, hands flat against the glass. The train smashed through the dark. People stood on local platforms staring nowhere, a look they’d been practicing for years. He kind of wondered, speeding past, who they really were.”
B. “There was a man standing against the north wall, barely visible. People entered in two and threes and they stood in the dark and looked at the screen and then they left. Sometimes they hardly looked past the doorway, larger groups wandering in, tourists in a daze, and they looked and shifted their weight and then they left.”
Think about the thematic similarities but stylistic differences, the scaled back feeling of the writing in Point Omega, the use of the word “weight.” How is weight measured? Do you notice other uses of the word scale or scales or scaling (scaling the rocks or cosmic scale, for instance) as you move through the text?
9. What do you make of Elster’s repeatedly expressed wish that Jessica see a big-horned sheep during her visit? Where are big-horned sheep in the eco-system? Are they thriving as a species? Do you know their history? Are they flourishing, heading for extinction? What was the desert before it was a desert? How do deserts evolve—do they get sandier, hotter, drier, more or less life-sustaining?
10. What do you make of the exceptional scene in which Elster coughs up mucus and holds it in his hand? And later Elster’s association of it with humor, which he repeats for emphasis, as humour. Is something a sick joke in Elster’s estimation? Or DeLillo’s?
11. Just before the phlegm scene, Jim is in the desert listening to the silence. “Then something made me turn my head and I had to tell myself in my astonishment what it was, a fly, buzzing near. I had to say the word to myself, fly. It had found me and come near, in all this streaming space, buzzing, and I swatted vaguely at the sound and then started back toward the dead end.” Is DeLillo obliquely referring to the iconic ending of Psycho?
12. What is the right question to ask concerning Elster’s loss in losing Jessica? Is it as immaterial as the loss of one’s fondest hopes?
Brilliant crypto-analysis, CDS Frances… but please treat us like the pampered nitwits we long to be treated as and answer your own questions for us (or we’ll have to buy the book)… lay out your gorgeous secret para-narrative for all to see, we beg of Thee!
Soon. I see I have a lot of reading to catch up on above!
You shall be our lamp in the late cave of DeLillo’s mind!
(Actually, I’m about to dump a wee bit more text, Comrades Lurking and Explicit… a sweet little bedtime tale…)
Hey, btw, Comrades, have you seen my RULES FOR WRITING?
RAVENELLA
a para-fairytale
d0uu]][asl and then some.
Any chance this is one of a series?
Har. Need you ask, Chum? Part of a larger thing I haven’t had time to finish…
(We rate your latest, too… any formatting touches you’d like? Bold? Italics…?)
DEPT. of BOILERPLATE PARADIGMATIC SKIRMISHES
“Your rules for writing
Saturday’s selection of expert [sic] advice on how to write fiction has generated a lot of interest. But we’d like to know your maxims, too”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/feb/23/your-rules-for-writing?showallcomments=true#end-of-comments
then
then
I’m on something of a tear with looking into these reading group “guides.” Oprah has one for Coetzee’s Summertime but I couldn’t spot one for The Humbling. Your Goldilocks story above reminded of the Lenore Lapidus big fat red-hot brassiere incident in Portnoy’s Complaint. I hope Daddy won’t mind terribly much but while I was reading I substituted some of the words from the vocabulary list above in #162. For example:
“And me,” says my father, touched as he always was by my accomplishments–as much awe as envy–”I haven’t moved my bowels in a week,” just as I lurch from my perch on the toilet seat, and with the whimper of a whipped animal, deliver three drops of something barely viscous into the tiny piece of cloth where my flat-chested eighteen-year-old sister has laid her nipples, such as they are. It is my fourth acmegenesis of the day. When will I begin to come blood?”
CDS Frances, this is a nice little nano-Detournement. It fits with the cited “Goldilocks” story of the trilogy (and with the trilogy itself), as you’ve obviously spotted (npi), because they’re all about the Big O (Onanism)… cross-cultural, hyper-dimensional, inter-textual chicken-chokery. What is the functionless boon of self-administered orgasm but the greatest collateral prize in humanoid existence? “What a wonderful motherfucking existence” indeed. Yank (and buff) away, fellow humanoids!
“I’m on something of a tear with looking into these reading group “guides.”
They’re just so wonderfully infantilizing, aren’t they?
They’re worse than that–misleading and confounding, unprincipled and wanton. That this should be associated with Don DeLillo from his publisher’s Point Omega guide…How can he bear it?
“Politics can be a very divisive and emotional topic. Give your group an opportunity to discuss them with ease, with the following exercise: The first sentence of Elster’s essay is, ‘A government is a criminal enterprise.’ Have each member of the group write out their own version of this statement before the meeting, as a single sentence starting with ‘A government is,’ on plain white paper. Fold up each piece of paper and mix them together in a bowl, then draw out and discuss the different definitions. This gives people room to discuss alternative viewpoints without having to declare their own, if they feel uncomfortable doing so. “
“Politics can be a very divisive and emotional topic. Give your group an opportunity to discuss them with ease, with the following exercise…”
I hope the 5th-graders at the back of the class heard that. Do they have a publisher-supplied E-Z Study Guide for American Psycho, too?
SHOW TELLING DON’T TELL SHOWING
Though I was born in Manhattan and lived in NYC until I was five, I was schooled and raised (almost razed; the cruelest things that have ever happened to me in life, things I was lucky to survive, happened to me there) in the Show Me State. Until this moment I’ve never inquired about it, but something about DeLillo’s tendency toward aphorism, his posture of pointing in his latest book, has got me thinking about it in a deeper way.
http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/history/slogan.asp Is it based in defiance or ignorance, defiant ignorance, ignorant defiance, or something else entirely? Three little words pack quite the linguistic wallop. I think I prefer the official state motto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salus_populi_suprema_lex_esto
I am maximally embarrassed by my typo. Some cunning lingust made me do it.
(ed.’s note: I can’t delete this joke, despite the fact that I repaired the typo)
The Hindus speak of cunning lingams, CDS Frances, but… lingusts…?
“Though I was born in Manhattan and lived in NYC until I was five, I was schooled and raised (almost razed; the cruelest things that have ever happened to me in life, things I was lucky to survive, happened to me there) in the Show Me State.”
Didn’t Comrade Harold Brodkey survive Missouri, as well, CDS Frances, before escaping to the city that laughs at sleep?
The thing about DeLillo (who overlaps, somewhere… via Gordon Lish, maybe? with Brodkey) is: I wonder if he’s coming up hard against his attempt to say the utmost while remaining safe? To be explicit and ambiguous in the same pied pill? I felt this already with Falling Man, 88% of which could have been written without a single reference to any catastrophe greater than a bus crash. Or no, say: a grocery store robbery (to incorporate Falling Man’s squeamishly tepid male-bonding conspiracy thematics). Falling Man would, in fact, be a near-brilliant book with that extraneous world-stage stuff pulled out and the mid-life crisis/divorce material sharpened. The poker game and the fight in the mattress dept. were two of the great DeLillo set-pieces. The feint towards Realpolitik significance was too tentative to work.
Maybe if DeLillo thought he had a few hale comrades watching his front, back, sides, and head, he’d do the hokey-pokey and put his whole self in. Maybe that’s what he’s trying to suss out with this book? And please, no one will ever persuade me that The Humbling wasn’t also a testing of the waters. There is NO WAY Philip Roth is that crude. On that score, I’m a Refusenik.
Isn’t that impulse to apply the defibrillator and spark connections in readers waiting like kindling for the match, exactly what Frank Rich and Sam Tanenhaus were trying to neutralize with Rich’s false paean to Falling Man? What else is Mr. DeLillo but a heart-starting-and-stopping machine? He’s proven that more times than he’s ever needed to.
Funny, I’ve got the Brodkey Sea Battles on Dry Land from the library. And yes to Brodkey’s roots. Missouri’s where he grew his shark’s fin that allowed him to maneuver at Harvard and New York City. But of course it was kindlier then than it is now.
Sea Battles is a cherished brick in the citadel of my library, CDS Frances.
On The Humbling: I wonder if the problem wasn’t really, in the end, PR being about 30 years behind on the sex stuff. He’s out of the swim of things; the strap-on and threesome in The Humbling would have been cutting-edge if he’d put it in, say, The Professor of Desire. There’s too much pressure on him to be the NYTBR-crowd’s Swami of Swingers; I thought he’d put the fuck stuff away with Zuckerman’s exit. When the author is faking his erection and the text is counterfeiting its orgasms, what’s the point? Can’t both sides chuckle it off and regroup, in monogrammed bathrobes, over cocoa? Is Philip “seeing” anyone, now?
There’s a good chance he’s simply running out of material in the old sense of “material” (he got an awful lot of good stuff out of Claire Bloom, didn’t he? The Counterlife wouldn’t have been possible without her; Deception, too, of course. Claire Bloom and Israel. What can PR say, without corrosive irony, about Israel, these days? No one mentions that in these book reviews, you know. PR’s Israel thing is no longer possible. Operation Shylocks are no longer possible.
So, in the (probable) absence of a sexual relationship and with no access to his rich wild boyhood feelings towards Israel and being so many years down-river from the extinction of his parents and a culture-anchoring Literary Reality he once found a prince’s asylum in…
Anyway, PR knows so well that his reputation is already made (if anyone’s can be said to be) and a few fizzlers (each worth a new roof on the country house or a trip to Tuscany) can’t much hurt.
Funny, I was just Googling for a better (rarer) picture of Harold Brodkey and came upon this passage from a fine novel by an old virtual friend of mine:
from Ginny Good by Gerard Jones
(should anyone click the link and find themselves wondering about the far end of Gerard’s politics: I don’t, just to let you know, share them. But so what? You don’t share mine, either, for the most part, Comrades! Such is life, if we’re being frank)
This is what Anglophone “intellectuals” (eg, Andrew Seal) write about unabashedly unabashed pro-fascisto popaganda in the early phases of the 21st century. A thrillingly toothless smile of compliance; a throat lubricated with warmest popcorn trans-fat “butter”. Insert Hegemonic War-phallus here.
Fortunately he’s not always like that excerpt. I wonder who that voice is in imitation of? In time I hope CDS Edmond will have a good effect on him. Speaking of, shouldn’t we be getting started on making some Diaper Cake decorations and other crafty centerpieces for the first of what I hope will be many Bunker Pagoda Baby Showers?
I used to have politics. But they were swamped by rage. Then I got a somewhat less fragile sort of politics. But rage soon overtook them. For a while I gave up on politics and pretended that art was enough. Art without politics proved even more fragile than politics without art. I spent hours deleting and unsubscribing to a holy and unholy assortment causes–most of which gave greater priority to begging for money than offering useful information… though maybe I was hypersensitive on that score, having no money to assuage my conscience or appease my rage.
I’m now back down to basic rage mode.
My response to almost anything I hear in the news boils down to variations of “skin em alive roll ‘em in salt and feed ‘em to the pigeons (sometimes it’s rats…never dogs… I really really like dogs)–or, castrate ‘em and force them to train orcas! (that’s the pattern: one timeless and eternal and one topical and right up to date to the latest news cycle).
This partly explains my absence in the Pagoda. If you feel you need my input, just cut and paste one or the other of those petite rants and sign my name.
Thanks, CDS Jacob! Does that carte blanche extend outside the Bunker Pagoda as well?
I suppose… if it applies to almost anything one is likely to encounter in what the media takes for the ‘real world’ and its alleged inhabitants.
REPORT TO THE COMMENTARIATET: SLIP ‘N SLIDESHOW
Comrade DJ Sensei Barry and I met yesterday, at twilight, near the base of Berlin’s famous dead communist erection (the TV Tower at Alexanderplatz) and slogged through gritty black slurpees of muddy snow. Berlin is thawing. Citizens were complaining about the freeze already two months ago (after initial, phony-child-like wonder at snow which had lingered longer than a week)… I hope they’re all happy with the melting dirty hooker-corpse of the city now.
Barry was peckish and I was not: I’d already chewed some ill-advised delicacies at a trendy place (tall sloppy-chic waitresses with boyish haircuts) in Kreuzberg just an hour before. I wanted to walk and Barry wanted to sit and chew so we walked in search of a place he could sit and chew at. We ended up here:
This continues a post-Wall tradition of basing a business entirely on a semi-non-sensical pun (exhibit A: the fish ‘n chip joint called “Fishing for Compliments”): the bistro’s called “Pan M” because they sell paninis, flat little Italian sandwiches that are almost too salty and dry to eat. We had planned, originally, on the too-trendy Dolores (quasi-Mexican), which is right next door, but we thought this might be interesting. The menu display on the wall above the counter is done up like the DEPARTURES and ARRIVALS board at the airport and the decor is 1960s-air-travel a lá Pan Am. What air travel has to do with paninis, even the owner doesn’t know. All you need is a snappy pun and a €30,000 business loan from the government. I just might open that java joint (THE SUPREME BEAN) after all…
Barry ordered his panini and we continued the conversation we’ve been having all winter: Which part of what isn’t real is important? Also, in detail:
Barry and I chuckled and whinnied over the fact that, often, in conversation with Normative Dupes (agents of Civil Inertia), one is targeted with the classic “It’s all very easy to sit back and criticize. Where are your solutions?” This gambit combines the pleasure of sanctimony with the fleeting illusion of common sense. It translates as: provide us with a feasible model for a new civilization or shut up. This is only an effective conversation-stopper until you think about it for a few seconds, since even the nastiest set of social circumstances on Earth will have to be changed incrementally, from the bottom up (top-down requires military intervention)… in time. The time-scale is generational. Change begins with a just critique.
Also: any attempts to forecast a radical new-model prototype, from thin theoretical air, which actually works (and fits) will always fail. You can’t extrapolate a frozen yogurt shop in a mall from looking at a cow. I could criticize cows’ milk for not being frozen, colorful, trendy, sugar-sweet and/or calorie-light but any self-righteous farmer who challenged me (say, 200 years ago) to come up with a feasible design for a Fro-Yo would feel as though he’d won the argument.
What is the statistic…? That every seven years the body has replaced every of its cells? You aren’t handed a brand new body at some depot every seven years: the process is one cell at a time. The flaw in this analogy being that the new body is a copy of the old one. So picture a process where every cell is replaced with a new and slightly different cell and the organism in time mutates from being an overweight, halitotic bureaucrat to a delightful fucking butterfly. There will be some awkward transitional moments, of course. And it will take a very fucking long time. We think of political chronology in four-year cycles. Think a little bigger and a lot longer. That’s what our Masters did, after all: you have to start somewhere.
Also (and this wasn’t touched on in the chat yesterday evening; I think this one came up toward the end of last year): Every time someone pulls the rhetorical gambit of chopping off my criticism of some war or other, or what-have-you, with “It’s not that simple; it’s a complex issue…” I expect them to then go ahead and explain the complexities: I’m an intelligent guy… go ahead: explain the complexities. Strangely, this has never happened, not in c. thirty years of argument.
Before meeting Comrade Barry at the base of the dead commie erection (and, btw, I’m not more of a communist than I am a capitalist: I think both systems; most systems; can work if they’re not being run by idiots and monsters; flawed social systems will auto-correct in the absence of relentless efforts to the contrary), I was in Kreuzberg, looking at this:
The vivid German frankness of those huge bloody logs of skinned corpse-flesh!
Which reminds me of this:
A pretty girl’s skeleton, coyly exposed: what kind of striptease does she have in mind? And do the butterflies represent her jitters or are they symbols of whatever comes right after she peels the meat off?
In Kreuzberg, I was hanging out with CDS JR, who debriefed me on this year’s Berlinale. He had a much-coveted total pass to the whole taco this year… too many films for one person to take in. He took in too many. His one consolation was that a film by Italian friends of his had won something and there is an anecdote with that. JR had two tickets to the sold-out showing of this buzzed-about film (“The love story between the transsexual Mary and Enzo, a Sicilian with a moustache and a heart of gold…”) and admitted to me later that, for the first time, he began to have strategic thoughts about such things. Who would it be to JR’s greatest advantage to give these tickets to? He thought long and hard and finally settled on a well-connected camera man/director who he called up and offered the boon to. The director was delighted and took his wife for a rare night out; Comrade JR thought “mission accomplished” and congratulated himself on finally learning to play the game. The next day, the connected director phoned Comrade JR and told him how much he hated this film. “What were you f____ thinking?”
Which reminds me of the other topic Comrade Barry and I touched on last night in the Pan M bistro: what’s all this good stuff we keep hearing about Democracy? Majority Rules means that in all but the most unimaginably-rare situations, the wishes of some “minority” (which can number, “hypothetically”, one hundred forty nine million in a population of 300 million; but a “minority” can also be fifty-five people in a population of seventy-two if they’re Dupes) will be oppressed. And, make no mistake about it: we will always be some majority’s minority. CDS JR learned that about his taste in films quite a while ago. Have I mentioned already that I used to phone my father at the office and complain that my mother was watching too much television?
I saw this right after bidding CDS JR adieu, en route to CDS Barry:
It says, “Lie in the field like beasts” and soon the weather will be just right.
I used this twenty-year-old, hundred-ton electrical device to get home as night fell:
Pan M is somewhat obvious but the airline theme is a clever organizing principle. If I had the entrepreneurial inclination I’d open a gyno-tapas bar called TWA T and serve a delightful array of assorted finger-food.
That was fairly masterful, CDS Frances!
Thank you, CDS Steven. I hate to but I have to tear myself away and continue reading Coetzee’s Summertime. Jim H is throwing another all you can eat buffet extravaganza at WoW and I want to get in line. Man, Coetzee’s letting it all hang out in this one!
Greetings to Jim for me, please, CDS Frances! I’m off to join Offsprung on the other computer (where she’s drawing spiders)…
It’s dizzying, so many things to consider. But seriously, can’t we chat while we work on the baby shower?
She didn’t say “Diaper Cake” enough. But I like the socialist uniform and post-Soviet hairdo!
Shouldn’t it be “Diaper Burrito“…? Larf. If CDS Edmond is anything like I was just weeks before the Grand Opening (sorry), he’s walking around with bulgy eyes, a tic and a stutter…
“Get in here, please, you,” says my mother. “Why did you flush the toilet when I told you not to?”
“I forgot.”
“What was in there that you were so fast to flush it?”
[etc.]
Fetus?
Just a wee, wee one.
The best kind
Uncheery new remix, comrades (Comrade Frances has promised to defer to me and is therefore banned from describing this as hammy):
We should bill TET as THE WORLD’S FIRST CONVERSATIONAL LITERARY MAGAZINE
(I’ve taken the liberty to illustrate your cracking text, chum… if you want an alternative image, email it to me and I’ll wedge it in! But please give us a screed on your vision and methods of Detournement! A glimpse into the Pussy of Steel that is your writing mind, mon. C’mon…)
“and then a barely perceptible prickliness coursed out into the air”
CDS Sean,
You are almost at the Augustinan QUA moment with this text. But please consider a substitute word for barely, preferably one that begins with the letter p. I hear alliteration’s cry!
Cheers, comrade.
Near alliteration on the b of barely, no?
p________ perceptible prickliness
is what I had in mind.
I shall sleep on it, Seminal Comrade
Meanwhile, let’s go exquisite:
Exquisiter than that, even, but that voice-over is like the announcer at a Russian hockey game
Here’s a (virgin) vodka and tonic for you, CDS Steven.
Perfect thing to regress towards bed by, CDS Frances. Perfect.
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing n___
[ed.'s note: a "BZ" is a Berlin newspaper not unlike "The Daily Mail" or "The Mirror" in London; a " (Der) Spiegel" is a Newsweek-like magazine; "Geschäftsmanner" is German for "businessmen" and a "Ritter Sport" is a big square German candy bar... and a "handy" is what Germans call a mobile phone]
ptosis
1
the crushing unintentionality of
the beauty of early evening clouds calls
some to high windows and others
out
2
money isn’t everything but neither is
doubt
Heard Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sands last night–fantastic. If you ever have a chance to hear either of them, drop everything and go!
There’s a brief segment of his long “Love poem” to Alan Greenspan.
http://nyebeachwritersseries.blogspot.com/2009/09/jules-boykoff.html
Someone had to write it. I’ll take this one by CDS Neil Addison over it any day.
http://flyingpigfoldingchair.blogspot.com/
Well, insincere apologies in advance, CDS Jacob, but that clip of Boykoff tickled my serial-killing gene. “Laissez-faire lips”? “Wrinkled visage”? Very poor. I’d like to score him a ten for showmanship and a three for the text, but his reading wasn’t very good, either. Nice Jarmusch-like hair, though! Meh. (Rummages through steamer trunk for duct tape, rusty awl and bottle of ether…)
I’ve never seen you turn out work that wasn’t by magnitudes better than that excerpt of Boykoff’s, so, obviously, I’m dying of curiosity: why… you know… (do you owe him money or something?)…
(And, indeed, CDS Frances: the strange little device of CDS Neil’s pome is so much finer a thing: “They room in living matter/ frenzied skylights” … is the work of a serious honer)
(In fact, I’ve looked at that Boykoff clip three times, now, in sheer disbelief at how fucking a-poetical that staggered jumble of smug punchlines really is…)
The clip wasn’t a fair sample… the poem was satirical– absurd metaphors–of course they were bad–and deliberately anti-poetic –that’s why people were laughing–what do you expect in a “Love Song to Alan Greenspan!” .. a point by point take-down of Greenspans Randian neoliberal economic theory. His voice, too… was quite effective over a long reading. That was, as I said, a long, multi-sectioned poem–such a brief clip gives no sense of the multi-level play.
.
Dunno, CDS Jacob. Sticking tiny knives in Dame Poetry’s eyes in order to preach to the choir… I’d rather hear great poetry (a selection from Moortown, say) and then a fact-filled, anti-Friedmanite lecture (by John Pilger, say), as two separate (and useful) events. I understand the social function of the Boykoff/Sands routine but I question the service it does to either Art or Dissent. As bad as I think Miranda July is (and I think she’s very bad)… no, forget that. I’d purge them all if I were The Art Stalin.
What do you think of these poems, then (which I’ll take down before the new age copyright police catch me)…? I think they betray remarkably meager gifts:
Humble Opinion: where they aren’t being slapdash they are being thuddingly obvious
UPDATE: Gets worse: they’re teachers…
(in all fairness, at least Boykoff isn’t teaching poetry)
Dullsville. Next!
I borrowed Boykoff’s Hegemonic Love Potion (where that video segment was from) and have been reading it with pleasure, but let me explain my take on things poetic.
I’m not a critic. I write poems (whether that makes me a poet is not my concern. My concern is writing them—and everything else flows from that).
One can be a critic only as an outsider. One can be a critic of contemporary poetry only if one treats all poets as already dead.
I’m not dead yet.
Neither are the poets I read. Even the ones they took the liberty of burying.
Let me qualify that. I do read dead poets, and can do at least a second rate classroom imitation of a critical reading when I have to. Most of the poets I taught at St. Joe’s were dead. Not just buried. I took pleasure in reading them, and in teaching them. The kind of pleasure you take with really interesting dead stuff–you can appreciate how seductive they must have been in their day, but you’re just not going to have sex with them.
Emily Dickenson, I’m told, is buried in Amherst. I’ve been reading 20 to 30 poems a day in the morning from Johnson’s Complete Poems of … working through all 1775 poems. A regular fucking orgy. (I used to pronounce that with a hard ‘g’. Sometimes I still do. Just seems right. Organ. Orgasm)
Most of the poets I read (this is how I start my day: coffee and poetry) are still walking around and breathing the same mercury laden air I do. Have heard in person and read more than 80 poets in the last year and a half. What makes me come back to a poet, I confess, is only tangentially related to critical judgment—whether I think they’re for the ages or whatever. Like I said, that’s for critics to argue about. What interests me… no. Too cool… “interest,” academics are ‘interested’ in stuff. Bankers LOVE “interest,” the more the better. Not poets. What engages me, what excites me, what draws me to a poet… is what engages me, what excites me, what draws me toward my own poems, the ones I haven’t written yet. Poetry that opens possibilities before me that I hadn’t realized until I read them… or illuminates and sharpens ideas I’ve had in mind, that have been working to the surface but not quite emerged.
Reading and studying dead poets is a prerequisite for anyone who expects to write poetry worth reading—but then you have to go beyond that. You have start reading and hearing and seeing and smelling and rubbing your body in the poems that hang just on the far side of the of the ones already written—the poems not yet written, poems that are waiting, waiting for you (make that, waiting for ME to write).
For Boykoff and Sands—they aren’t writing stand-alone poems. They’ve written books—a diverse compilation using a variety of forms composed as a single work. In each case, the structure straddles the margins of the text There’s an exoskeleton of references, quotations from media, signs visual images (photos, drawings)… public references. The poems are responses to these public signifiers, which remain visible for the reader—both inside and outside the text. For Kaia, it’s in the form of a long walk, a circumlocution of a site in Portland, an area once used as a holding center for Japanese-Americans interred in 1942, waiting for transport to detention camps. The walk borders the Columbia River on the north with associations that go back to prehistory. Much of it is now an industrial waste with storage pods and toxic slues. She reads this with slides behind her, illustrations included in the book—and a map of the walk that you can follow as she reads.
Boykoff’s text plays off of quotations from public documents, government, media–so in each case, the interior structure of the text is a reflection and response to references that remain outside, not unlike CA Conrad and Frank Sherlock’s collaborative work: The City Real and Imagined, where they took walks through the city and wrote about what they found, a conversation with each other and with the places they visited.
A poetics of place and time.
An aesthetics that embraces the realia of provocation, allowing for free flights of imagination and reflection while sharing between reader and text, fragments of the real world, stitched and patched together–without assimilating them altogether into the text, where the text does not swallow and digest them and erase it’s sources in an idealist miasma. A poetry (and poetics) that is at once, collage, assemblage, lyrical response, and critical commentary: where politics and aesthetics are complimentary, not competitive.
That’s what I took with me from this reading—a sharpened sense of a Poetics in (not ‘of) Space and Time, a feeling of deep pleasure—for all that’s wrong with this world—to be living among such poets and such poetry—and have wakened within me a joyful lust to get on with the playful work of making poems.
CDS Jacob! I more than appreciate the rich response; I set TET up for that very purpose. To scrape a clearing out of the ether for richer, deeper, carefully-considered comments and responses. The other enrichment I seek (and seek to offer) is the possibility for intelligent people to differ, utterly, in their opinions without burning the discussion to the ground (and without the blog owner/fascist dictator shutting down the thread… been there). So, let’s glory in this opportunity to utterly differ on this matter, is what I say! My opinion does not (can not) trump yours and yours can’t cancel mine… we are in gorgeous loggerheads equilibrium! What’s more liberating than shrugging off the awful compulsion to be “right”?
(Damn fine comment! If you want any special formatting for it, or even an illustration, let me know)
a 15-MINNIT POOETREE PRIMA
decent example of “epic”:
decent example of “frank”:
decent example of “frank-confessional”:
decent example of “coy-confessional”:
2 decent examples of “twee”:
2 decent examples of “political”:
When CDS Steven loves you, comrades, he loves you all the way.
…the perfect fortune-cookie, CDS Frances! Don’t forget to switch off the fondue fountains on your way out…
LICENSE TO KILL
One technique to wipe out pests (like mosquitoes) in a region is to sterilize a bunch of male pests with gamma rays and release them in that region to co-opt the reproductive energies of female pests with the pointless semen (or whatever they use). And this is what the culture is doing/ has done with Artists… generating mediocre (ie sterile) Artists and flooding the region. Mediocre Artists do not inspire (inspiration being the reproductive fluid of Art) and soon the practice dies off. This is happening at the highest rate in Lit (because “everyone is a writer”; I’m quite relieved that everyone isn’t an architect or a civil engineer, as well) and faster still in the subset called Poetry (because while a bad novel still takes months to write, a bad poem may only require seconds). Fuck these Bad Poets! These fucking voracious preening LOOK AT ME, MOMMY cockunts who never got enough attention as kids and think that entry-level competency in the language plus a cool name plus the right attitude (and, should one be so lucky, nice boobs and a pretty face) are more than enough. Where’s my goddamn flaming sword? Why would any kid harboring molten kernels of real genius want to dirty her/his self with the petit-vulgarian ME-FEST that passes for Art these days? No wonder the geniuses are writing code instead! Code-writing is not guarded by an entry-level turnstile that spins with profligate ease… there is a specific non-quotidian skill (and tuitional time-investment) required and no amount of flash or cleavage will pass off binary drivel as functioning code. You can’t fake code but faking poems is wildly popular and easier every minute (as admonitory memories of actual poetry fade). Did the poems I cite, with disdain, above, take longer than ten minutes each to write? If so, the authors are retarded. Take a poll and I’ll wager my lunch money that 85% of the audience for any given live-mic poetry event is composed of people who are also writing poems (the other 15% are drag-along future-Exes); in other words, the natural (civilian) audience for poetry has been killed off and all that’s left is a self-supporting cult of people who want to “make it” as poets. Feedback-loop in the key of sterile mosquito.
(photo via)
http://www.madlibs.org/cgi-bin/madlib?rigby.ml2
This would do just as well for most of them. There was one poet I heard this year that had something extraordinary going for him. Let me see if I can find some of his stuff online.
You’re going to love this one! (Here’s his website) Ku Klux Klassics, indeed!
Here’s the website: http://www.tsellis.com/index.html
Good look (bring back the Afro! I mean it!) . But the “poem” fails as either A) comedy routine or B) a formal arrangement of words with the intent of producing an aesthetic, intellectual or emotional effect. And he really needs to work on his “Nixon”.
It sez this on his website:
Which is exactly the kind of selling-you-mouthwash-meets-artspeak-mumbo-jumbo you’ll run into on plaques in a gallery stocked with basement-made crayon drawings by toothless black low-IQ “outsider artist” janitors beside each plaque. But the unintentionally-ironic line “The whole bumpnoxious,/ Dark thang stanks/ Of jivation// And Electric Spank/ Glory, glory, glory/ hallastoopid,” is exactly the kind of thing which condescending Euros (“Oh look, he’s kind of literate!“) applaud from performing brownskins… who recycle the same trite, post-Color-Purple sheaf of greasy, ghetto-dipped poems over and over again. When a black adult generates text at the level of accomplishment you’d expect from an intermittently-precocious white high school senior, the pale-faced cognoscenti fall over themselves to hail the tripe. Well this particular Darkie calls bullshit. String the Fey Little Far-From-Talented feller up. Comrade Dj Sensei Frances, I refuse to believe that Frederick Douglass suffered the lash to make the world safe for Bad Black Poets.
Next…?
PS Still waiting for a white poet(ess) to forge a little career by writing in Appalachian English… let’s call it “white English”… rich with bad-and-or-primitive grammar, childish misspellings and impenetrably obscure, micro-regional slang; themes to include incest, petty theft, drug-abuse, wife-beating, bestiality and so forth. Any day now…
I’ll have to see who else is available just at the moment. (This is really fun.)
Ha ha! Not enough years in the epoch, CDS Frances.
Okay. Here’s one, since I’m in a Coetzee kind of mood.
Me like! No cutesy flim-flammery; no spaces crammed with cotton wadding; no sense of so-made-from-over-used-parts
(I think “all that oppression” is a bit of an over-egger, or lily-gilder, possibly; loses its cool there, somewhat. Pome will live with it or without, IMO, but, again: yeah. Works!)
My teacher, editor and friend–Madeleine Beckman–from her book. Dead Boyfriends (Linear Arts Books) 1998
Ach, I thought it was yours and slyly about JC himself! Larf
If you read it with the emphasis on that, as in all that jazz, it works.
For me the “it was just too painful” already has enough whiff of sarcasm about it, but, again, it doesn’t make my eye-ear bleed; I like the pome. I’m a compulsive compressor.
This video contains content from Sony Music Entertainment… and so forth. Bastards.
more on pooetree
CDS Steven,
I was just over at CDS Barry’s playing his grooveshare tune. It was like rolling in clover over there. I’m heading out now, but I plan to go back later and do some one-stop shopping. Is there any reason we can’t have that same grooveshare tune widgeted over here? It’s like a shoulder massage. It makes me feel so good!
Word.press isn’t configured for such widgets, CDS Frances! You’ll have to tote your own Deathstar Vader Boombox (24 “D” batteries; 4 subwoofers) whenever you stop by
http://www.newstatesman.com/film/2010/02/pilger-iraq-oscar-american-war
CDS Steven,
Do you think if I reread Ibsen’s A Doll’s House I’ll be able to find the hidden architecture in The Humbling?
CDS Frances, if anyone can redeem that book via such a method, it’s you! It’s certainly beyond my powers
Something (a tell tale heart, or tattle tale heart, maybe) has got to be under those opaque floor boards. I’m almost afraid to look in fear it will just be some infinitely empty abyss. Almost.
Oh well, that was a waste of time.
Nothing is a waste of Writerly Time, Comrade DJ Sensei Frances… you’ve just planted the seeds for work to come years hence (in you or others)…
I guess so. That book is so gross if it’s just what it is on the surface. And it makes me feel gross.
My sense was that he started it with greater ambitions and ran out of gas. That was my sense in one or two others; there were trap-doors built into Exit Ghost, for example; in his prime, when you spotted a trap door (think of the Nikki material in Sabbath’s… he keeps circling back to it and opening new doors and that’s how the texts ramify), you knew you were in for a treat. The stamina required, though! Consider the physical agony of writing with a back like that. Who can blame the old Master for sketching in stuff he just didn’t have the energy to paint?
Oh please. Think of Matisse and the cut-outs. There’s always a way to make beauty.
But was “beauty” ever PR’s goal?
I’ll ask him next time I bump into him.
Beloved Wife (and co-creator of Offsprung) is collabing with a gifted new photog
-you’ll have to imagine an image here, as the original was deleted from my account for some reason-
(don’t know why it was removed; I obscured the photog’s name but that was for security reasons… that could be it)
Is it meant to be read as a diptych?
I suppose so… only the photog knows for sure…
(these images are a response to a Faithful Comrade Lurker who made the point, emailically, that I’d posted images of my writer-persecuting Ex but none of my semi-Bohemian Beloved )
(PS: TETapocrypha: it can now be revealed that the STaugustine avatar is a photo of Beloved at the age of five, disguised as an Elizabethan magician)
Speaking of Romance. Peering at one of the half-dozen stylish, occasionally-porny, sites I peer at (a là THIS and THAT again), it occurred to me that after a decade or two of freely perusing close-up anuses, splayed (or wagging) genitals and breasts as glazed and tense with potential as Dickensian Christmas geese, maybe we’ll begin to value the non-meaty aspects of the human… the immeasurable, un-lickable stuff… the really fine and always in-peril x-qualities of temperament, intellect, soul. Maybe the surfeit of cost-free fist-fucking imagery will elevate us; maybe the Puritan Purdah we’ve burst from inflicted a paradox on us in that the Necessarily Unseen (soul et al) became confused with the Circumstantially Unseen (rectums) and fooled us into a hankering-unto-sickness-and-death for wide-open-beaver shots. When all we really craved were fleeting revelations of the other sort. It won’t be long before flapping dicks and billowing labia will seem as risque as elbows and knees and then we’ll know.
She really is your inspiration, isn’t she? What a brilliant meditation. The thing is, even in this frou-frou get up, she’s so there. It feels like she’s the one doing the looking.
Meeting her was April in Paris after December in Warsaw, CDS Frances. Lucky breaks are sometimes required.
You made your luck, CDS Steven. You were there to meet and be met. It’s so simple and so important.
Sometime, it pays to leave the Bunker…
MK Yuppie Ultra! larf. Sounds like it’s voice-overed by Divine. Instead of installing a post-hypnotic command to off a Kennedy, of course, the hermaphroditic voice is compelling us to buy echinacea.
“-you’ll have to imagine an image here, as the original was deleted from my account for some reason-”
I count my lucky stars that I saw it with my own eyes. But, I’ve been having similar computer difficulties.
Yesterday, for instance, I went over to The Quarterly Conversation and left a festooned bundle of Hamantashen decorated with eleven adorable little firecrackers in the comment section for (the apparently ill-named) Lance Olsen. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mishloach_manot In my note I mentioned Elster, not Esther, but I’m pretty sure he’d be able to make the connection being as he’s the Chairman of the Board of FC2 and all.
My hope was to affectionately blast the desert sand out of his eyes and maybe get his fingers itching to write with something other than baby spittle about Point Omega. I mean, take a forking stab at something for heavens sake. It’s been 24 hours. How long does it take to moderate an 11-line comment, and last I looked, the only one he’s got? It’s not even Purim anymore!
Give it time, I say, CDS Frances… sometimes it takes a while. I’d give it another day before complaining. On the other hand, I always “back up” longish comments I plan on leaving on Other Blogs… I’ve lost a few well-written arguments and/or observations to ether limbo on blogs that don’t tolerate the off piste or dissent. And the censorship reflex (or gene?) is powerful in some. Meanwhile, TET is the open forum of your dreams!
FAITH (in a SIMULOCRACY)
The first big break between “fact” and common sense. Kids reach the point quickly from which it’s clear that adults are just pretending with Mickey Mouse and Santa and the Easter Bunny… but the far-more-fantastical character of Jesus Christ (the Son of the Creator of the Universe, who is also, at the same time, the Creator of the Universe, who is immortal but was killed, temporarily, by bronze-age Jews in a redemption pact willed by the Creator of the Universe who, in agony while being killed, pleaded with himself to forgive the killers, his own creations, who he must have known, from the beginning of Time, would temporarily kill him; the same Creator of the Universe who sees red when anyone works on Sunday or masturbates, though, possibly, the cavemen were exempt from this proscription) is sold as FACT. Without a shred of evidence. Supported by the argument that to BELIEVE WITHOUT EVIDENCE (in this case) is HOLY.
To unquestioningly accept the word of Authority is HOLY. Being HOLY precipitates (or is precipitated by) a rapturous denial of self. And, yes: it’s demonstrable: to empty one’s head feels good. To give in, utterly, like the whelp exposing its belly to the alpha-wolf , in a perfect pose of submission, feels good. To agree that 2+2 = 5 (if and when one is commanded to) feels fucking great. Whether or not the child grows up to see through this bullshit, the initial break is there; the powerful disconnect between what logic and experience (bundled together, loosely, under the rubric Common Sense) indicates vs what Authority Commands You to Believe.
Listen: if you can get people to believe in a Bearded, Vaguely Levantine, Anus-Free Sky Giant, what couldn’t you get them to believe in? What lie appears fantastical compared to that?
A dear Comrade avers that he can’t abide “conspiracy theory”. The same Comrade was pleased, a year ago, to discover that I’m not an “Atheist” but, rather, an Agnostic… because what proof do I have that the Universe isn’t mounted on an Ur-Turtle’s back? Fuck: I don’t believe that any human agency will convince me that any particular Bearded, Vaguely-Levantine, Anus-Free Sky Giant made the Heavens and Earth (as though these two quantities are equal, eh?)… but I couldn’t argue in a court of Law that such hyper-Universal Reality is impossible. I’ve never been outside the Universe in order to get an overview. I have a hunch that the Universe isn’t floating on an Ur-Turtle’s back but that’s the extent of it. You are free to do your best to persuade me.
Said Dear Comrade applauds the rationality of my Agnosticism, but is no Agnostic himself when it comes to the infinitely-less fantastical possibility that Geopolitical Power accrues (and organizes) in secrecy; that Power thus-accrued will tend towards Evil (or amorality, in the best-case scenario), both for the sake of maintenance (and Expansion) of Power and for the straight-up Caligulan kicks. NO, regarding “conspiracy theories”, said chum is a dyed-in-the-wool Disbeliever. No time for non-mainstream News Narratives. Stealth ‘n Shenanigans may be the CIA’s tacit motto, but they’re bumblers, aren’t they? Even with a sizable chunk of the trillion-dollar War Budget at their disposal and a fairly solid Harvard-sourced brain trust and an available pool of mercenary psychopaths who think of murder as a competitive sport, plus decades of practice and all the R&D advantages of American tech, how could the NSA or CIA (et al) ever hope to pull the wool over our clever eyes? And why (with Global Dominance at stake) would they want to? Snort.
I imagine a Muslim could buttonhole said Comrade and get him to sit, respectfully, through a longish exegesis on the ins and outs of Koranic scripture. Being a reasonable man, if he had an hour to kill, I wager he’d listen; even debate various fine points; feel enriched, somehow, by lending an open ear to a fellow human brainwashed from birth to believe passionately in a creation myth that doesn’t have a shred of evidence to back it up (in the manner of all creation myths). He’d have an open mind. Comrade, if you’re reading this: is that a fair guess?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/mar/02/shakespeare-and-company-bookshop
I was considering adding a comment outlining an unlikely series of coincidences involving
1. a leap by my ex ***** off a bridge right outside Shakespeare & Co;
2. DFW’s story ‘Good Old Neon’ (about suicide) from the collection Oblivion;
3. the film Before Sunset featuring DFW fan Ethan Hawke as a writer called Wallace doing a reading in Shakespeare and Co;
4. my buddy Jack meeting his ex — also called ***** — in the cinema after 9 years, just as Before Sunset was starting and just after I’d told him about my *****’s suicide attempt;
5. and various other weirdly coincidental minor stuff;
6. all of this happening, I discovered when I got home and started reading ‘Good Old Neon’, on the same day of the year that story is set, this discovery taking place, incidentally, at the *exact same time of the day* the suicide occurs in ‘Good Old Neon’.
But then I read the blog’s final paragraph and decided not to bother:
‘I cross the square, haunted by one of the messages tacked to the mirror. Hand-written by the mother of a 21-year-old bipolar man who killed himself by jumping off Brooklyn Bridge, it read: “I’ve spent the last hour trying to decide if I should end my life. If he could have discovered your bookshop, perhaps he would have survived. I want to thank you for this place and the hope it gives.” ‘
“I was considering adding a comment outlining an unlikely series of coincidences…”
Now, if those coincidences could be massaged into a coherent theory in which a shadowy instigator, with ties to all involved, would clearly benefit from the terrible result of the linked events, you’d have a credible basis for starting a murder investigation. The police work from circumstantial evidence in murder cases… involving apparent coincidences (eg, A insures B for $1,000,000; B turns up face-down in C’s swimming pool; A and C are having a secret affair, etc)… as a matter of course. Very rarely is the crime caught on videotape; very rarely does the perpetrator offer a full (and corroborated by disinterested parties) confession.
Funny how it’s become popular to ignore all that when it comes to Politics.
Tops Dusty’s version, I suggest:
Ever had a look at this, comrade?:
http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/classics/russian/modern/bely.htm
Nabokov rated it at no 3. in the 20th century pop charts, after Ulysses and The Metamorphosis.
Stick Thine fingers in Thine ears and warble LA LA LA all you want, Chum! Larf. Yer paradigm shift’s inevitable (though years have been known to elapse between the minting of a penny and its drop)…
In related news: I received this email recently:
How should I reply…?
Send the Cap’n's. Let the “rich” get richer.
***Attention Ms Beloved Augustine****And Possibly Even Sprout****Advice Desperately Needed on How To Get Steven’s Claws Out of One’s Back****And Stop Him Pecking Pecking Pecking Pecking Pecking Till He Gets the Answer He Requires****
In the meantime:
Mittel/Eastern European mid-20th century ravishing Surrealist comic genius at full throttle Nos 1 and 2:
Imagine this:
While the mob ran hither and thither in the great night, ever more lost among the starry splendours and phenomena, Father stayed furtively at home. He alone knew the secret way out of this predicament, the stage door of cosmology, and he smiled mysteriously. As uncle Edward desperately sounded the alert, stifled by rags, Father quietly put his head into the stove’s ventilator shaft. It was muffled there, and pitch black. It smelled of warm air and soot, a refuge and a harbour. Father settled down comfortably; he closed his eyes in bliss.
In that black diving bell of the house, raised above the roof in the starlit night, the dim ray of a star fell, and, bent as if in the lenses of a telescope, sprouted with light in the hearth, germinated at the bottom of the dark alembic of the chimney. Father cautiously turned the screw of his micrometer, and there in the visual field of the telescope that dreadful manifestation slowly came into view, as bright as the moon, brought within hand’s reach by magnification, its calcareous relief plastic and glowing in the silent blackness of the planetary emptiness. It was somewhat scrofulous, pockmarked — a full brother of the moon, its lost double returning after a thousand year journey to its maternal globe. My Father brought it close to his protruding eye, like a slice of Swiss cheese densely riddled with holes, pale yellow, sharply lit, covered with pimples as white as leprosy. With his hand on the screw of the micrometer, his eye brightly dazzled by the light of the eyepiece, Father cast a cold glance over the calcareous globe, and saw on its surface the convoluted picture of the illness eating away at it from the inside, the winding channels of a bookworm, tunnelling through its cheesy, maggoty surface.
Father gave a start; he realised his mistake. No, it wasn’t Swiss cheese; it was obviously a human brain, an anatomical preparation of a brain in its whole complicated structure. Father saw distinctly the edges of its layers, rolls of grey matter. Straining his eyes even more, he could even read the faint letters of inscriptions running in different directions on the convoluted map of the hemisphere. The brain seemed to have been chloroformed, deep in sleep, and smiling in its sleep. Reaching the core of that smile, Father caught a glimpse through the complicated surface picture of the essence of the phenomenon, and smiled to himself. What might we not find in our own, trusted chimney, as black as snuff, in the corner! Through the rolls of grey matter, through its minute granulation of swellings, Father perceived the distinctly visible contours of an embryo in its typical head over heels position, its tiny fists before its face, sleeping.its blissful sleep upside down in the clear water of the amnion. Father left it in that position. He rose with relief, and closed the flap of the chimney shaft.
Thus far and no further.
filmed by this mob:
No claws in yer back, Chum; just trying to goad you out of yer unwillingness to deign to even discuss the matter. To the text: is it a Detournement? Is it Schultz?
That’s pure Schulz, not particularly well translated by John Curran Davis. Or maybe it is an accurate translation and Schulz really is as wordy as that. Anyway, the Celina Wieniewska translations are always a third shorter.
It’s actually all one paragraph but I split it up for ease of online reading. It makes Borges read like Joseph Ridgwell — talking of whom, I’m not sure Delillo’s ever gonna recover from this JR takedown yesterday on GU:
‘Delillo is an overblown American windbag. Pure snoozeville. Dull man, very, very, dull…’
Here’s my (very light & very reverent) remix of that Schulz passage:
-Truth be told, I prefer Ridgwell’s oafish irascibility to the sickening celebrity-worship of that blogicle and in many of the comments in the subsequent thread. All those lower-middlebrow consumers with their glued-on grins of wonder. It’s healthier, in the end, to attack DeLillo than to worship him, if the attack is in the service of genuinely seeking the key to an aesthetic practice (and not just free-floating animus).
(Or maybe that’s another GUblog atrocity I’m thinking of; the one called “Thinkwriting about Don DeLillo“)
Yes… nicely gentle remix!
UPDATE: So here’s the intro para to a gob of proudly subversive, counter-DeLillo fiction from our man JR:
Which is only not depressingly poor because we don’t give a damn about the state of JR’s progress as a self-described writer. But it is solidly poor universe of aesthetic practices in which, in the “heart” of somewhere, “remote stretches” of coastline are “pounded relentlessly” and the beaches are “secluded” while certain things are “small but vibrant”. The “dislocated” location barely fails to save the passage.
Yup, same Delillo blog, min.
Today’s JR pearl: ‘Education is a hinderance to becoming a writer, so drop out from all that as early as possible’
Any chance you could put the word ‘light’ after ‘He later felt a dot of ‘ in the passage above?
And yeah, the detournements are becoming less and less detourned whenever possible. It’s trickier with translations where you have to make the effort to change the phrasings (just being careful copyright-wise re the translations) but there’s a Scottish writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon admired by Comrade Edmond who I’m ripping off word for word, near enough. E.g.:
‘Right athwart her vision the haystacks in the fields shone up like great pointed pyramids a blinding moment and then vanished, and darkness complete and heavy flowed back on her again. Then the largest flash yet lit up the sky and then she saw that the local fencing was alive, the lightning running and glowing along it, a tremulous vibrant serpent that spat and glowed and hid its head and shivered again to sight, and if cats or birds stood anywhere near it they were surely finished. It was deathly still between the bursts of thunder, so still that Jan heard the grass shudder erect again a step behind her. Then as the thunder moved away — it seemed to break and roar down the rightward hill above the Manse – the lightning smote down again quite near, playing a great zig-zag over the village park. The lightning went and she began to move forward in the darkness, thinking she was going in the right direction but she couldn’t be sure. The thunder growled satisfiedly.’
Eh, mon: why not do a Detournement of this, from our Joe:
“Billy watched a lone cloud float across the horizon. The cloud was quite remarkable in its own way. Anyway just the mention of the word South America always put Billy in a dreamy frame of mind. It reminded him of revolution, Che Guevara, and carnivals.”
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/angel-beach/
Righto:
the heart-breaking nautilus
a poem
1. Swan
But why not, said Swan. His nickname was Beef. Why not what, said Carne Rand, the fucking rich boy, taking a seat. Swan said, Why does it always have to be sinister, the shadowy cabal? Why can’t it be good? Why can’t there be good cabals that are shadowy and doing good. Working on some kind of generational plan for changing the total consciousness paradigm of a civilization the way that bad people have? They’ve got their secret societies and masons and handshakes or whatever so why can’t we have ours? The unbroken line of intent thing. Right? Eight hundred years of intent is a powerful thing. Knowledge is power. Supposedly. But knowledge is only power if you withhold it, right? But what if the withholders were doing it for nice reasons for a change? Noble reasons. We could start now.
Swan continued: remember when you were joking about why can’t we bring back the Afro?
Carne smiled. That particular remark had been inspired by a particular porno.
Swan said, well, imagine. Years from now we’re out of college, successful in the careers we have chosen. Say we’re worth a few million each. No, more. Like, say, thirty to fifty million each. That’s not impossible. It’s not unreasonable to assume.
Carne tipped back in his chair with the bristly back of his shaved head in the cradle of his meaty interlocked hands and his smile size increased. Swan wanted to tell him I’m responsible for that chair if you crack the legs. It came with the dorm.
Swan said say we chose a very young black girl who shows some talent. Get her at a young age. She’s still tender and slender. We sponsor a whole lifestyle of proper diet and really fine education. Part of the deal is that she doesn’t straighten her hair. Ever. She never straightens her hair. She grows tall and fine with this stupendous Afro and a gift at singing and she’s been groomed with more, you know, I don’t know, like, a 16th century courtesan-at-Versaille-or-something… versed in many languages and playing the harpsichord or, okay, the saxophone and the fine art of conversation and what not; we’ve invested a few million into making her this renaissance kind of black chick with an IQ you could choke a horse on and, but, yes, she can sing the paint off a Cadillac. And don’t forget she’s got this stupendous fucking Afro and we buy the best songwriters and producers money can buy. Let’s call her Super Sister. We buy Super Sister a number one in the charts kind of career, essentially. And she would be this massive influence. Black girls would stop straightening their hair and eating at the kitchen of the McDonald’s plantation and they’d be taking harpsichord lessons to emulate her. Whatever. All for just a few million dollars and the invisible machinations of a shadowy cabal for good. I mean. Fuck. Why not?
Carne’s eyes were closed by now and he looked almost asleep in his chair. The smile froze nicely.
Why not indeed, he said.
2. Victor
Swan’s trip to the WC has levels to it. There are fixations about not sitting square on the seat. For one thing the horror of the flush-wave dolphin-nosing his sweet little hair-purged balls. He tries to time evacuations to coincide with home-time but from time to time there is no getting around it and it comes in public, the call, sometimes, with importunate timing. The call is a widescreen mountaintop scene of monks blowing hard on spiraling five-meter horns filled with concrete. Swan thinks I’m reading the wrong tips about diet again.
Swan excuses himself with this kind of head-bow mis-gesture to the black or mulatto executive with something somehow Japanese about her (the suit? the seal-sleek hair? the sexual haze of death she marches through?) and moves with what he thinks of as fuckworthy grace through the point de capitoned leather of the doubledoors and down the out-of-body corridor toward the light. The door to the water closet you normally need the emperor’s touchbutton code for is propped yea-open with the black or mulatto-janitor’s serf-bucket so Swan edges sort of sideways through the gap stepping over the bucket to justify entering by not actually opening or otherwise touching the actual matter of the door or the doorframe. Like an asymptote or something. He fantasizes swearing on a Bible that he did not open or touch this door. He fantasizes a baffled plainclothesmen finding no prints. He fantasizes Peter Falk giving him a sidelong glance of flummoxed admiration. The mere-mortals’ water closet is a whole flight down. And then he achieves his disappointing revelation which is that the forbidden water closet is identical to the water closet he should have traveled a whole flight down to and then comes the secondary impact of the epiphany that the difference would normally be him just not fucking being here. He is why the door is usually locked.
The body is not a machine it’s a community of machines. The gears of Swan’s shit machine are engaged and it is, of course, the end, not the beginning, of a process, an intestinal effort activated perhaps in the middle of that lecture-pretending-to-be-chit-chat from the black or mulatto with something somehow Japanese about her. The end-segment of the process becomes a process. The end of the process becomes a process in its own right with an arc and accoutrements. You can break down the stations of the cross into interlocking “stations of the cross”. The skull-white throne of Golgotha. He tries to remember those care-free college days. He visualizes a heart-breaking nautilus. Fibonacci.
…And then he will have to wipe and he will have to look at the result each time he wipes because if you don’t look you won’t know how much you’ll have to keep looking and wiping. You expunge or wrap and re-wrap the memory of the streaks and the smells and later walk into a restaurant pretending not to know or have a clue exactly how those fritters will end up. The notion that the planet is a closed-system nauseates him when he dwells on it. There are planets out there with zero shit. Swan thinks I’m getting ahead of myself here I haven’t even shit and I’m thinking about wiping.
The knees are bathed in milklight. The knees appear deceased. His knees are actually bearing weight as though he’s waiting for a starter’s pistol. He wants to groan and pant and finally give birth.
Very little of his weight is on the seat when the man they call VHR or The Master of Disaster or Death and Taxes comes in coughing. This is an entity that nobody has ever said hush to. This is a despot on the throne since before he could walk. He farts down a suit leg at the urinal shaking the leg. Swan should not be in here and withholds final delivery for fear of the telltale plop. A lush (even woodland) splash and gurgle on worn urinal candy of impossible duration is Swan’s warning to hold his plop in. The stream goes on and on for superhuman units without reaching the trickle part when VHR’s phone rings suddenly Beethoven’s Fifth so loud and stereo that Swan kind of lifts up off the seat and bangs the right elbow on the sharp-cornered high-security roll-dispenser. Blood he won’t be aware of until later as he goes over in his mind the terrifying conversation he is over-hearing that will seem to want to kill his mind as he is hearing it.
3. Elizabeth Houghton-Rand
I couldn’t fucking believe I was having a serious quote philosophical debate about whether or not to violate, abuse, torture and otherwise mortally fuck with a seventeen-year-old heiress for the sake of a political movement my comrades had as yet not quite managed to convince me even existed outside the endless late night bull-sessions we had in some white boy’s dorm-room before we’d even met her. White boy pays for the keg and and he’s suddenly what, Malcolm X? I kept kind of muttering under my breath to myself that this is really happening, guy. This is not a dream. That this shit was only an illusion to the extent that life itself is and waking up from this weirdass scenario will be impossible to achieve by any means less meaningful than death itself which is not a thought I even wanted to sneak up on. Let alone exemplify. On channel 7 news. She was passed-out on an air mattress in the fucking bathroom of Kwame and Dookie’s shabby-grandiose off-campus housing and it was not, as yet, any kind of a crime, no matter what Walter Cronkite tells you.
And then Josephus… Josephus… I remember wondering who had met that quote psycho first. Okay. He wasn’t Kwame’s friend. I asked Dookie later and Dookie said fuck no. I never knew the bumpkin existed before x-moment in time which I’m saying was scripted. With that big-assed bloody dick? Like he was seriously pulling a sword out the belly of an infidel and so forth. Like what am I seeing? Plus taking forever.
4. Josephus
Nobody stopped you from taking your dinner trays to your dormitory because you were black. You were taking your dinner trays, to your dormitory, because you were black. Nobody stopped you, from taking your dinner trays to your dormitory, because you were black. You were at Moorbury College because you were black. Your scholarship to Moorbury depended on your being black but you would not have been at Moorbury without a scholarship if you had not been black and needing a special way into a college that wouldn’t have been interested in you if you hadn’t been black. You put the tray on the bare mattress of the narrow bed in your single room and sat beside it and winced through the nasty work of escaping your snow-clogged boots while your dinner cooled. You had to remember to buy a thick rough doormat. You had wanted a thick rough doormat since the first time you saw one at the age of seventeen. As a result of that program.
You needed matches and canned ravioli for emergencies and a can opener. You would also need to buy a pillow case and sheets. Your first Student Aid check would come on Thursday which was a four-day wait. You’d been sleeping on a naked pillow on a raw mattress under a beach towel for three days in your long underwear with the heat cranked up. A sock hit the cement floor with living weight. You saw that you hadn’t clipped your toenails since the week before taking the two-day bus to Moorbury and added a toenail-clipper to the mental list. Thursday was also shrimp or steak dinner day. Tonight was cheeseburger and tater tots or home fries and fruit salad with chocolate mousse for dessert. You had three envelopes of powdered strawberry milkshake drink left in your suitcase.
You had never tasted chocolate mousse but you had heard about it. You had always assumed they set those on fire but that was another dessert. You noticed that the dark room was not very dark and even in the dark your foot looked very black and shiny because it was wet because the boots weren’t made for snow. The movie poster on the wall you faced as you peeled your other wet sock off was just out of reach. You had gotten it for free during your unusually late orientation and had not seen the film it was advertising nor heard of the actors appearing on it. They did not look famous to you.
You needed six “C” batteries for the cassette recorder you kept in the box it had come in and some more 60-minute tapes and added this to the to-buy list and reached for the dinner tray with your legs folded under. In a soft shell of doubled long-underwear you hadn’t removed in five days. You had come to your orientation two months late. Snow blown straight through the floodlight cutting across your view of the campus from the dorm room window provided the illusion the whole empty building was in motion like a majestic ship. The cafeteria was crowded and brightly loud and you had walked right out with your dinner tray, no questions asked.
You left the light off and sat on the bed eating the food you were embarrassed to admit was the best food of your life and you watched the snow. You wondered what it meant that no one had stopped you. You wondered if you had a blank check for anti-social behavior out of fear or compassion or same old disregard. Through the veil of the snow and at the other end of the very long walk dividing the icing-caked lawns lit by haloed lights at broad intervals like gas lamps from a Dickens engraving was the sharp black geometry of the new Moorbury chapel which had gone up in the 1960s. Stained glass at the core of the jarring shape caught needles of light from cars turning the corner in the distance occasionally heading for town or St. John’s to the south. The older chapel was not visible from your dormitory window and was on the older side of the campus where all the buildings were actually ivy-drenched scale-model cathedrals and you felt the unspoken sense of off-limits. You had walked over just once during your unusual two-month-late orientation to have some papers signed in an office by a woman who seemed surprised the whole time you were standing in her office in the grand old building. Surprised or ashamed. Or maybe she wanted to hug you. The tater tots were delicious. When you had bought a thick rough doormat on Thursday you would feel you had accomplished something. The first doormat you ever saw was in front of Victor Rand’s mansion.
THE CONTENT AND OVERALL AESTHETIC ARE RATHER ATROCIOUS BUT IT’S AN INTRIGUING MODEL
Beautiful song. Not credited. What do they think? Songs like that don’t come along every day. They have to be nurtured and acknowledged. Hypocrites.
People who know how to earn money with Art usually plug the hole where their finer-feelings towards Art should be with the money they earn with Art.
Balm of Gilead. May they pass a yeast infection back and forth until the end of their days.
Exquisite curse. There may be money in it…
It’s crazy-making that another 24 hours have passed since I submitted my admittedly Cactaceae-y comment to The Quarterly Conversation and it’s still under mmmmmmmmooooooooooooooooooooooooodddddddddddddddddddeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaatttttttttttttttttiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiioooooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn. I don’t get it. It takes Daniel Green like a second to erase my comments if he doesn’t want to post them. It’s quick, if not painless, and at least one knows where one stands and we move on. If this goes on much longer I may propose that Scott Esposito change the name of his publication to The Quarterly Pontification or The Quarterly Obfuscation.
For me, the most indelible image in Libra is that Y carved into JFK’s chest during the autopsy investigation. Flip it and it’s a divining rod for the desert. The aqua-power of this book is so far completely untapped. What we get instead is a deluge of meaningless blather.
If I were cultural Tzarina For A Day, I would declare a do-over for all of the guys who’ve written about Point Omega, not just Glancing Lance. (I’d say Summertime too while we’re at it but Jim H. will part the red sea on that one, I’m confident.) Try again. i mean it. Let’s say the first shot was a clearing of the cobwebs and now they can get down to the serious occupation of reading.
This is from the first chapter of Point Omega:
“The sun was burning down. This is what he wanted, to feel the deep heat beating into his body, feel the body itself, reclaim the body from what he called the nausea of News and Traffic.”
What body do they think he’s talking about?
“If this goes on much longer I may propose that Scott Esposito change the name of his publication to The Quarterly Pontification or The Quarterly Obfuscation.”
The beauty of the Literary Internet is how it recapitulates (and temporally compresses) the horrors, wonders and incalculable longueurs of “Print Culture” in a frenetic little Fruit Fly experiment we can watch on our desktops from the splatter-proof safety of home. It’s taken only a few years for Virt Lit and Virt Lit-Critters to mimic, in a bottle, the circle-jerking, idea-xeroxing and gate-keeping-via-self-proclamation which Print Culture took decades (if not a couple of centuries) to perfect. Who, may we ask, is Scott Esposito? He’s never written a single sentence I found surprising, instructive or exceptionally interesting. He’s pompous enough, yes. But is pompousness enough? Someone find us a wonderful passage from the writings of Esposito…!
If you backed-up the lost comment: who cares if they won’t post it? If you didn’t: never make that mistake again, Comrade!
(And, dammit, you seem to be very subtly forcing me to get a copy of that book…)
I backed it up alright.
“For me, the most indelible image in Libra is that Y carved into JFK’s chest during the autopsy investigation. Flip it and it’s a divining rod for the desert. The aqua-power of this book is so far completely untapped. What we get instead is a deluge of meaningless blather.”
DeLillo, far more often than most big-ticket scribes, steps out of the way of his subconscious (with a flourish of his cape) and lets the bull smack hard into the page. I think the resonances you are tracing are largely the work of Don’s night mind. You are perfecting the Ouija Critique, Comrade DJ Sensei Frances and it’s way-the-fuck ahead of its time.
I know. That and a Metrocard, as they say.
I read The Abyss of Human Illusions yesterday. Heartbreaking: my heart smashed in far more than 50 pieces. Both the book (especially the preface: oh, Christopher, did you really not know?) and the fact that there was exactly one copy in the Union Square Barnes and Noble way up on the 4th floor. Whose cap is that a feather in? The thing about the Pantheon is there is no abyss. Unless you’re hovering above looking down through the oculus
Cough it up, people.
P.S. The store was in a tizzy because Spike Jonze, creator of Jackass and Jackass, the Movie, was doing an in-store “event.”
Re: the Abyss:
I’ve just read the following excerpt and what I kept thinking was: I know this text; these scenes. I’ve read these scenes literally thousands of times. I know this movie. I’ve seen this movie over and over and over again. The hardboiled Yankee reverse-Cinderella. This is one of the handful of text-templates Americans never seem to fucking tire of. But I’m tired of it. It’s like a deck of playing cards in which the only possible “surprise” is the order of the cards. Tell me why I shouldn’t be sick of it, CDS Frances…
Christ, no wonder my texts read like Mayan acrostics to most readers. People love to sing those good old songs, I suppose.
Here’s the excerpt I just read through (and whoopie-ding over the end-notes; a footnote by any other name…):
And so on… (no need to post the whole thing)
I’m with you. So, I think, was he.
“And so he continued to do it, correcting and revising each newly made page with a feeling of weird neutrality, with a feeling that he was simply passing the time: this or solitaire — all right, this. Surely, the other old writers he still knew felt precisely this way. Did they? He surely wouldn’t ask such an impertinent question.”
What a crushingly-conservative epoch.
Dan writes:
“Given Sorrentino’s longstanding predilection to formal experiment and manipulation, already it is tempting to look for clues to the novel’s formal patterning, which might ultimately provide the key to interpreting it, in these immediate characteristics of the text. Why fifty sections?”
The “50″ is a red-herring, as numerological clues in Lit always are. Even if the number links the text to another layer of meeting, the other layer is either too thin to count, or the relationship to the original layer is too circumstantial to matter. This is a post-Elizabethan tic we should have grown out of after Joyce. Literary Numerology is a con. And, for example, does the seven (or whatever)-organs, seven (or whatever)-colors, seven (or whatever)-whatevers overlay in Ulysses really add anything to the experience for anyone other than pseudo-archeo-academics? It’s been a dead end for a century; I appreciate the Elizabethan preference for it (something to do with their sex lives/ metaphysics/politics)… but the Modernists should have put an end to it (that should have been one of their flaming-sword missions, in fact)… instead of starting it up all over again.
Ten dollars to any Comrade who can come up with an example of Literary Numerology that actually enriches the text. Ten dollars in gold.
UPDATE: this is, in fact, a very old bugbear for yourstruly
PS: James Marcus, the owner of the above-linked blog and a truly respectable man-of-letters, sent me a package (a book, as it happens) all the way from NY, which I received yesterday… a book by a writer often-mentioned on TET. Great gift; great blogger (tasty novelist, too)
I’d agree, comrade, until we get down to 4 and below (or 5 at a push), though I’m still not sure this constitutes numerology.
It can be cool to juxtapose a chapter/passage that’s all 4 (characters, plotlines, phrases, rhythms) with one that’s all 2, say — if there’s a bloody good reason for doing so, that is.
Didn’t 42 used to feature regularly in your work? Though it seems to have been dropped of late.
I used to enjoy this maniacal Elizabethan layering stuff in Wallace but my heart and keyboard now belong to Bruno S. Far better — if you can manage it — to drop occasional pennies down the village well and let them echo, echo, echo…
Grand tunes from Comrade Frances below.
“Didn’t 42 used to feature regularly in your work? Though it seems to have been dropped of late.”
Yes, and “1977″, too. But these are tiny jokes; I’m not hoping to redeem otherwise lackluster prose with a secret numerical key which will suddenly make the reason for all the lackluster prose come together. I’m not saying to banish the numeral presence; I’m saying that “Even if the number links the text to another layer of meeting, the other layer is either too thin to count, or the relationship to the original layer is too circumstantial to matter”.
Which is totally different with the Musical and/or Visual Arts, isn’t it? Numerical values, on some level (wavelength or rhythm, say) are everything in a painting and in music. Which brings me to the false comparisons between Painting and Music and Lit; in the first two, the physical or objective contingency is everything. In Lit it counts for naught. The words on the page are merely directly symbolic of the text which is then impressionistically symbolic of the “story”. Spooky Art indeed!
But try this experiment: divide a passage into three parts. Then nine. How much difference does it really make to the text? It makes a larger difference in verse, of course, because the words are few and the meaning so concentrated. But take a page of Schultz and try numerological variations (without fucking with the actual sequence of words): by far the strongest effects obtain from word-choice and word-order; the third, next-strongest effect comes via punctuation, I’d guess.
I thought that was Daniel’s Socratic way of urging readers to focus on the chapter headings, which are stated in Roman numerals.
From http://www.dailywritingtips.com/10-rules-for-writing-numbers-and-numerals/
“One could say that the difference between a number and its numerals is like the difference between a person and her name.”
Again: but how does the distinction signal a richer layer/affiliation vis-à-vis the actual text? It’s a crutch, a gimmick, a carny con. The secret numerology of the chapter headings are of peripheral concern. Nabokov wrote that famous story (about the two dead girls and their professor who misses the rainbow they send him, from the afterlife, as a signal) in which the first letter that appeared on the left margin of each line spelled out a sentence. So you spelled out the sentence: and then what? Very weak… rather juvenile… pay-off. The Religion gene is always working to deceive us when it comes to texts (and texts as relics). Eradicate the Religion gene, in fact, and you’d probably evaporate the last little puddle of audience for Lit. Which is exasperating.
Again. No disagreement. But we’ll have to see how we feel about things 25+ years hence. He has asked for his name to be remembered in The Pantheon of writers. He’s asked it by reshuffling his own deck of cards, hoping to make it come out a winning hand. It is something he felt he needed to ask for from whomever would be intelligent enough to translate his request by reading him closely, by feeling him. He was just putting it out there in as clever and direct a way as he could devise. I was touched that Comrade DJ Sensei Gilbert Sorrentino wrapped his hopes in what is essentially his own mixtape. It’s what remains. Is it enough?
Good question, CDS Frances. Re: sentence #3: I can only hope that 25 years from now, I’m not fucking with anything as essentially secondary as Literature. I hope I’ll be well enough (and so clear of mind) to be chatting with my kids, smelling flowers and taking baths in vats of warm chocolate etc. And a weekly, heart-endangering handjob from my young wife (who’ll be a dewy-eyed 60) would be nice…
(and thanks for the rigorous workout! TET now feels and smells like a late-afternoon squash court and I like it)
Wow. Last night I dreamt that my new book was released without my prior knowledge. It was presented to me by my Cousin Peter who currently works for a literary foundation and was the boy in West Side Story (the movie) who bounced the basketball in the playground. Anyway, he didn’t think much of the book and when I took a look I could see why. It was a hardback edition containing two novellas. I only caught the first title which was, “Two Cookbooks.” The glue in the binding was defective and as I turned the pages the whole thing fell apart in my hands. I didn’t like the way my cousin was wrinkling his nose as he read some passages aloud in a snooty voice and I said to him, “Stop being so sophomoric.” Then I woke up.
Your cousin inhaled divers effluvia from a young Natalie Wood…?
I don’t think she was in that scene.
As I pointed out earlier: the DeLillo quip (from Mao ll) about Novelists and Terrorists is mostly true; the former have ceded the role of leading the conversation to the latter. DeLillo’s only mistake was in not specifying that by “Terrorists” we don’t mean brown-skinned patsies.
I hesitate to mention this, and certainly don’t wish to interfere with the very interesting conversation happening upthread. But, when time permits, what might we make of this strange interlude in Coetzee’s Summertime? John and his cousin Margot are sleeping in his truck in the middle of nowhere because of a mechanical breakdown due to some botched repairs Coetzee tried to make himself. From p. 112.
CDS Frances: you’re not referring to the coincidence of “Qua” and “pea” (as in “pee”) in this excerpt, are you? Larf. I always thought the Princess and the Pea story was about female ejaculation, but no one would believe me…
Must run out the door; late to meet CDS JR (not Joseph Ridgwell, btw)… back in a few hours…
Apparently J. M. Coetzee believed you with all his heart. Coincidence, my arse! When are some of these “great writers” going to get down off their self-appointed pedestals and mix it up with us? If DeLillo can answer that poor chap’s poor wifie’s plea on her husband’s behalf (yecch, sorry, but I loathe weak, whining men), and if he wants the sun to beat down on his increasingly aging but still alive body, let him get his Eye-talian arse over here and engage. I can make him feel the heat. Why do I have to speak through Scott Esposito or Lance Olsen or any of those pablum-burping jokers?
Ah, but CDS Frances, this is a very, very, very strange and remote little niche in the ether and the odds against… etc. I’d have to be the worst kind of megalomaniac to… etc. And then you’d have to question whether or not you value my fiction; or I, yours; for intrinsic values, or due to the projected, corrosive force of our totalitarian… etc.
I think it’s an unmistakable mating call, CDS Steven, as in “Good’ay mate.” You’ve had 40,000 visitors. One of them’s been from Adelaide, betcha.
Now if you say, “Karoo, Karoo, Karoo, Karoo” back, it could develop into a conversation, maybe even a literary one.
50,716 as of 21:49 CET, actually. Minuscule for Cat Blogs but not bad for a “…camouflaged treehouse on an unmapped island in the Bermuda triangle…”
Still. The odds…
CDS Steven,
I don’t mean to be high-maintenance but I’m having trouble with the new search widget. I tried searching for “confident, thick-dicked intellectual” as I wanted to read that story again and couldn’t remember which one contained that collection of words. Do you recall by any chance?
A story of mine or yours or CDS Sean’s…?
Yours, CDS Steven.
I’m sure I’ve never used that sort of phrase, CDS Frances; it’s not my style. The closest I would get to that is “neglected dick with tenure”…
Found it in The Bomb Collector. p. 416
“The confidently big-dicked intellectual.”
Aha! That’s a world of diff, then. “Thick-dicked” is just banal old pron…
(but pg. 416? That work’s just 120 pages or so, I think)
Secret Key to that text: it’s a murder mystery. My idea was to write a whole murder mystery in which the murder was completely tangential and alluded to with only a handful of clues; the murder would be the least-important part of the text, but it would be highlighted by the fact that the only un-resolved sentences in the narrative would point to a mystery that could only, in fact, be a murder. Only a very, very careful reading could unearth that. I got the idea one day when it struck me that of all the people I’ve known, casually or more-than-casually, the odds are that at least one was connected to an unsolved murder or even, his or herself, a killer. You’d never know, would you? I think life is full of them. I hate to do what DFW said never to do (refer to one’s work as “postmodern”), but…
Pagination from the PDF version you sent me last month of Selected Work. I controlled F and got to search for “The thickly confidently biggedly-dickedly intellectual.”
Aha!
I have two requests:
1. Can we please get rid of the Reply function and revert to standard blog format of one post after another? There’s a good reason why most blogs stick with the standard format and it’s this: with the Reply malarkey it is absolutely impossible for those of us not here every day to keep up with posts. If I want to read CDS Frances’ posts I have to click a link on the sidebar at the top, come six hundred posts down the thread, and then when I’ve finished reading navigate back up through six hundred posts to the top, click another link, plummet six hundred posts again, and so on. It’s daffy and odd and makes me a bit sea-sick.
2. Can we please, please, please change the wordpress theme, Steven? You’ve shown with your photography and films your eye for composition, colour, etc. Why must this splendid site have such, uh, unsplendid graphics? Graphics matter, man.
3. Thank you for your consideration and time.
We can all try to avoid using the “Reply” function but fuck if I’m going to the trouble of re-doing the formatting! Oh, Christ no, Chum. I like it fine as is. And I’m not prepared to fuck up what’s already there! (Remember: these aren’t posts, these are all just comments… that’s the point… and they may well vanish if I try a new theme…). And, yeah: this is how post-postmodernity looks, mon. I like it.
Why not just try the Preview function with the theme? That’ll tell you if there’s any formatting risk — but I doubt there’d be any problems just with switching theme. The best one I’ve seen is Redoable Lite (esp. combined with Palatino Linotype as the font).
I can see why you might not want to risk losing all the previous replies by dropping the Reply function. And yeah, I appreciate the fractal branchings, etc. But this site is not easy to navigate for less frequent visitors/posters.
Well, too bad for the feckers, then. I think an addiction to “Convenience” is the second-most corrosive force in modern life. I won’t contribute to it. Also, if the words and pix aren’t peppy enough to overcome the template’s horrors, may I suggest the baffled feckers click over to LOADED or FHM or HERE…?
(PS technically speaking: it’s the YouTube paste-ins which cause the thread to slow-load in time; we should cut down on those a wee bit)
So this is the Douglas Gordon creation myth. I picked it up again from CDS JR, with whom I sat in a little Italian place in a corner of the room where a young blond who obviously expects to be in a movie one day soon eavesdropped on our mostly-in-English conversation. Gordon attended one of CDS JR’s dinner parties last year. Gordon’s break-through piece, 24 Hour Psycho, is featured as some kind of ordering motif or free-association-launching-pad in DeLillo’s Point Omega.
Gordon had a little job as a receptionist at the Tramway, a gallery in Edinburgh. He had been to art school but seemed to have no future in art. Now, pay attention, because this is where Gordon elides, with one phrase, the turning-point-of-interest in this tale. As he put it: the gallery owner “took a liking” to him and decided to give him a show in the large space. That phrase… “took a liking”… probably mashes an awful lot of wet warm time and psycho-biological space into three crisp words. One day, Gordon is a nobody; an answerer of phones; a scribbler-on-post-its; a fetcher of coffee. Then he’s being offered his own show (or a part of a show) in a large (the gallery was/is a converted Tram station) gallery space. Relating the tale (which must, by then, already, have been lapidary with repetition) he leaves out the key bit: what does one do to get a gallery owner to “take a liking”? This is the part we all need to know. This is the part the shined-upon always leave out of the creation myth.
Gordon was offered a show and went into a panic, having nothing to show. He had a huge space to fill and nothing to fill it with. This is not a double-entendre. The first realization he had was that the space should be dark (diminishing its apparent size) and the visualization of the darkness led him to the next step in the series towards his eureka: video. Show a video in the darkness. Of what?
That weekend, he went home to his parents (as people with shit jobs will do). His anxiety had time to play with itself and breed terrors. Nothing to show! Nothing to show! It was a late Friday or Saturday night and he couldn’t sleep. The first telling of this tale, Douglas was watching Television, but, considering the fact that the FF button features in the tale, we reason it had to be a VCR that changed his life. He’s rifling through a mound of videocassettes, unable to sleep. Pops in a cassette of Hitchcock’s Psycho for the sheer why-notness of it. Watches for a while, gets bored, decides to FF to the Janet-Leigh-shower scene. DG becomes obsessed with the question of whether or not Janet flashes nipple at all and he slows down the tape…
It struck him like a phaser-blast to the art gland.
CDS JR and I first met in the late-1970s, if you can believe it. We met in a small, very liberalish, Midwestern town, both refugees from college. We were fucking the same girl, in fact, and living in a mansion that had been converted into a 20-room flophouse for Hippies.
CDS JR and I were lamenting, today, over his espresso (and my carrot-orange-ginger juice) that we didn’t have High Definition digital movie cameras back then! We’d have been minting underground masterpieces like expert welfare mothers pinching out babies. The characters we knew! The weight-lifting poet/clown who lived on the third floor and walked with a Byronic limp because one leg had remained girlish-small due to polio! The night-gowned, slightly-retarded giantess who lived in the basement behind the jacuzzi room! The robe-wearing Jesus-cult which lived in the basement for a few months! The Bolivian refugee! The painter named Tim! Suzanne Verdal dancing in the front yard! Dozens of showers in which dozens of 24 Hour Psychos might have acted out! And nothing to record it all with!
Less than a year after Lennon’s assassination (I’ll never forget CDS JR sitting alone, in long-haired silence, in a commons room in the mansion for a few hours with all the lights off, the evening we got the news; we’d just come back from a Max Roach concert), CDS JR left the country. I hadn’t the slightest idea where he’d gone. I was in my 20′s and only half-cared, for he was only a dude. I taught myself to paint and began starting (then firing) a succession of bands. I never once heard from CDS JR in nearly a decade. If the girl we had co-fucked knew something, she wasn’t saying.
Then a very powerful woman in the Art World “took a liking” to me and paid my rent for a couple of years… but I refused to sleep with her. “Refused” is too strong a word; I ignored her double-(and single)-entendres and the time she presented herself to me, wrapped only in a towel and dripping wet, post-shower, I stammered and joked (or something). She wanted to fly me to Europe; she wanted to introduce me to her buddy Andy Warhol; in the end she gave me a copy of Giovanni’s Room and forced a tongue-kiss on me on a bike path around a lake one Saturday morning before riding off forever. No more money; I, too, soon left the country. Did London for a while. Hit Berlin in November, 1990.
Less than a month after my arrival in Berlin (it was shortly before New Year’s Eve), I was walking the streets, near a flat I was subletting in the Turkish quarter, looking for a chicken to cook. I remember it was a chicken I sought because, speaking no German, I pantomimed “chicken” to various Turkish shopkeepers. One shopkeeper after another laughed at me but failed to comprehend (the body language for “chicken” is not a universal). Dejected, I was wandering down a hungry side-street when I looked up and saw CDS JR riding by on a bicycle. I recognized his back instantly.
Is it rude to say I like CDS JR’s glasses more than CDS Barry’s?
Well, what if it is…? larf
UPDATE: check out the snap of a bandanna-wearing CDS JR from 1979 (above)
VINTAGE EMAILS
Did you ask this person’s permission to publish this online?
If not, I have to say your doing so (name deleted or not) makes me a little queasy.
Huh? Are you joking? Here’s my fair notice to anyone who sends threatening emails: if they’re interesting, I’ll publish them. If they’re not too threatening, I’ll very kindly obscure your name before publishing.
VINTAGE EMAILS
[ed.'s note: as it turns out, D. had cancer]
See above for Coherence Theory of Truth masquerading as Correspondence Theory of Truth.
Elucidate!
The e-mail letter to you is not from the person your e-mail letter is addressed to. There’s an appearance of correspondence but you made a set of these two e-mails. They cohere because you stuck them together to create meaning, your sense of the truth about the art of writing.
In my dream I made a set of two novellas, one named “Two Cookbooks” and one unnamed (sounds like “Double or Nothing”). But they wouldn’t cohere, probably because something can’t cohere to nothing…?
Aha! Got it. The first email up (Comment #226) was the first of several I got from this fellow who lives (or lived in) Lake Zurich, Illinois. It took some doing to convince him that I didn’t know him or any of his friends; that I’d never lived in (or visited, or heard of, before perusing a map) Lake Zurich; that I’d made it all up. He actually physically threatened me and continued to be a menace before I was able to lay out a convincing description of the creative process. I took it as a tribute to my powers but I was also intrigued as to what the fuck this guy had been up to that my story felt like a betrayal of his private life.
The second email was a cheer-up letter to a Print-Published (on a major imprint) writer… the irony comes in the editorial insert at the end of the letter.
And how are you feeling, then, CDS Frances? Sand-encrusted toes…?
It was beautiful out there, quiet, snow on the sand in some places. I love seeing that. But while walking the miles of boardwalk I found myself still thinking about the problem (for me, anyway) of The Humbling and that beam of light on the cover that somehow penetrates the floorboards. Maybe there’s no textual key to unlocking The Humbling; maybe it itself is a key to another text? I’m thinking maybe it’s an elucidation of DeLillo’s fabulous riff about plot in Libra. Maybe it’s just (for now) a private conversation, master to master that we aren’t privy to. Anyway, I can’t seem to drop it.
Or maybe he’s muttering to himself as we writers do. You’ve mentioned Sabbath’s Theater a few times so I guess I’ll read that next. The theater for the Sabbath is the bimah, the elevated place where the Torah portion is chanted aloud. Jim Culleny had a poem earlier this week about a player piano with two spindles behind a sliding door http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/02/monday-poem-3.html that reminded me of the Torah in its ark. And when you watch the accompanying vid of Borge at the White House, there are jokes about sacrifice and keys. Torah study is all about subtext as is the theater. I know I can be too literal sometimes, like maybe if I go out to Eureka, California I’ll find my epiphany waiting for me there on a bulletin board outside the local health food store.
I love your idea in Lake Zurich about the Impression’s song Gypsy Woman being a Persian miniature. Those miniatures are meant to be collected in albums. They can seem like stand-alone texts but are more complete when read as a whole with the others in the album. What they do is illuminate how rich every single page can be. Like the pages of that amazingly rich story.
I hope you don’t mind. But I hand-delivered a copy of The Bomb Collector to Levi Bryant over at Larval Subjects. He’s got a monster compression ahead of him (283,000 words that he wants to reduce to 80,000-100,000) on The Democracy of Objects. I couldn’t think of a more fascinating and refreshing model of compression for him than that. If anyone can relish Mayan acrostics, it’s him.
Thanks so much for asking. I may go back again today.
CDS Frances: how about snapping some photos of the beach for us… or various places around Manhattan or wherever. We can put up a wee album of half-a-dozen or so? If you’re up to it, and want to send in a bit of commentary with each photo, it could be quite lovely for us
(PS: I’d read… or re-read… Operation Shylock or The Counterlife, if you’re a little done with Dirtyoldmannisms for the nonce)
Comrades,
I had a body blow yesterday (can’t possibly write about it yet). A terrible loss. So, I am headed out to walk the beach and ponder the imponderables. CDS Neil recommended what I hope will be a diverting book, so I’ll bring that along. I hope to come back with sand in my shoes and peace in my heart.
Any way we can help, please signal, CDS Frances!
Touching Base
in the mailbox yesterday:
my mysterious, almost gnomic, response:
We’ve disagreed about the sneakily-white-supremacist nature or otherwise of The Wire, comrade, but have you seen the American-school-football-as-Searchlight-flick series Friday Night Lights? Pretty fucken disgusting, man.
No Television on the premises to check on that, but I did just have a peek on EweTube and was intrigued to notice that the male leads appear to be cuter than the females… is this a new trend in Murrkkan Television and if so, what does it mean? Larf (Acting and plot-lines seem to be boilerplate moronic)
HAIL THE FROZEN PUSSIES OF STEEL OF ICELAND!
Here’s hoping they don’t cave in to Crypto-Friedmanite pressure like the Irish
“A ‘no’ vote would create another obstacle on Iceland’s difficult road out of a deep recession, jeopardizing its credit rating and make it harder to access much-needed bailout money from the International Monetary Fund.”-the mainstream press wags its puppety finger
Comrade DJ Sensei Nicholas Freilich (the chief composer around here) sends us this steely-cold beaut:
Hail to the chief!
Coola boola.
I like this! [ed.'s note: But what's an "ECT"?]
(The photo-retouching service you wrote for features tamed whiffs of Joe Stalin, eh…?).
Before
After
(what did the poor apparatchik do to earn being disappeared…?)
And, re: CDS JWinterson:
-fair enough
(The photo-retouching service you wrote for features tamed whiffs of Joe Stalin, eh…?)
Not a scruple in sight.
In the Where Are They Now Department
You know who I miss seeing around? Schopenhauer’s Bloody Knuckles. Where has he gone off to, do you suppose?
Dunno, but I clicked over to 3QD for the first time (literally) since I swore the place off , in disgust, over the mawkish Michael Jackson eulogies… and I was astonished to find the same six or seven comment-avatars, as ever, logged on the right margin! It’s like CHEERS over there! larf
TET is more like ALL IN THE FAMILY (I’m Archie, CDS Frances is Edith….)
(No, actually, this is MAUDE and CDS Frances is Bea Arthur. Are you up on your Norman Learology, Comrades Lurking…?)
Bea Arthur–the freedom of tunic dressing.
Tunics and the windblown quasi-Fro
I just read her Wiki. This was rather a wonderful compliment. She was the real deal. I like this especially:
“…No one could deliver a line or hold a take like Bea…”
Veer from raptors to rapture…
A link to a story (buried deep in my blog and temporarily posted cause it’s in circulation to a zine)
for your reading (pleasure ?)
Peaceable Kingdom
http://jacobrussellsbarkingdog.blogspot.com/2010/01/poem-rejected-200-times.html
Grooven, CDS Jacob! We dig on it! If you have some time, discuss with us your specific inspiration for this text and your general working methods…
I caught a couple more:
Absolute instead of Absolut
and my personal fave:
“…some kind of fairly tale…”
Freudian typos…
THE FICTIVE IN A SIMULOCRACY
part Four: the Crypto in the Simulo:
TET is a machine for digesting narratives, Comrades Lurking and Explicit. The more (and more diverse) narratives we digest, the richer the narratives we shall excrete.
One of the Great Anal Masters (G.A.M.s) of the intricate narrative straddled the fields of text and image and was not a novelist; he was Stanley Kubrick. More than the works of most Auteurs, Kubrick’s films have to be read. He never presented a throw-away; no prop or camera angle was extraneous (even continuity “errors”, as we will soon read, were deliberately informational). Comrade DJ Sensei Stanley was famous for digesting two intellectually-imposing novelists (Nabokov and Burgess) and excreting value-added narratives which overpowered the original narrative aims of these novelists (novelists are usually more naive than film directors; the structural reasons for this are obvious) but which also, almost miraculously, worked on the superficial level of crowd-pleasing entertainment. I like the image of Kubrick-the-chess-player squaring off against Nabokov-the-chess-player; the anal Burgess against the anal-er Kubrick. (One day we’ll investigate the concept of movie camera as penis/eye/womb for incubating pretty girl-homunculi… ).
Kubrick’s never-wavering theme was conspiracy.
I’m pretty good at reading A Clockwork Orange and very good at reading Lolita and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Not so good at The Shining and so-so at reading Full Metal Jacket and Paths of Glory. I’m familiar with every feature-length film in Kubrick’s canon with the exception of Barry Lyndon (I’ll get to it one day). His last, Eyes Wide Shut, gave me the most trouble. The problem being that I went into the experience with the notion that Kubrick had died before the final cut; long and intricate texts only function if we cede the author her/his Authority. Otherwise, the baffling reads as mistakes and sloppiness. An Author without Authority is impotent.
A fellow named Rob Ager has done us all the favor of really reading Eyes Wide Shut. Linking logical leaps, here and there, suffer from a lack of supporting evidence (these are usually flagged, in all such texts, with defensive phrases like, “It’s not unreasonable to assume…”) but this is a nit-picky caveat regarding a text wherein, if even just a few of the key assertions are bulls eyes, the result is an Eye-Opener. Half-way through reading Ager’s reading, I sent my prayer for forgiveness directly to Stanley’s sneering shade…
Here’s my 2001-flavoured Schulz remix. I was also going to have a film called Dr Strangelove or: How I Leaned to Stop Worrying and Love the Balloon. Both are endangered now as I’m considering cutting from my book the Balloon in which this scene occurs… (which means DAS WEISS ALBUM is also endangered… fuck fuck fuck…)
I’ve posted that passage here before, haven’t I?
Don’t think so, mon! Mind if I illustrate it?
Steven, that is a pretty weird coincidence, man. That was the ticket for our first ever club night in Glasgow — absolute fiasco* but still some of the best fun I’ve had — and I have been after that illustration online for years! It was originally on the cover of Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony. Splendid Proustian rushes seeing that pic again…
*My bro still carps about the fact that at the end of the night I hid in a toilet cubicle and left him alone in the DJ booth to face the chorus of boos and catcalls and the hurled crisps and tumblers… Also remember one of our PR guys being chased down the street afterwards simply because he’d sold tickets for the event (‘Thanks a lot, ya fuckin’ cunt’)… The video breaking down and a pilled-up rave crowd being treated on the giant screen — unbeknownst to us — to an episode of Benny Hill… Learning on the job that my bro had stored all his vinyl against a radiator… picking out record after record and then hearing them make this sort of psychelic underwater sound as the vinyl warpings bopped about beneath the needle… everybody on the balcony suddenly standing around in their knickers and Y-fronts (that was quite cool, actually)… I also had very weird hair at the time, I remember, a sort of Afro affair clatted in — yup — Vaseline… A brawl between our crew and the bouncers because we refused to turn off the smoke machine… Christ, we also incentivised folk to sell tickets by offering them — wait for it — Life Membership Passes *and there was only ever that one disastrous night*… The club had the reputation for kicking out their successful promoters and stealing their clubnight’s name so we got the seriously Mafioso owners to sign a contract beforehand promising never to do the same to our night (called Eros). Seriously Mafioso owners as we traipsed out humiliated at the end of the night: ‘We PROMISE YOU we will never call any night of ours Eros…’ I think I need to find a cubicle to hang my head in shame again…
Still, the ticket was pretty cool. It was just that pic — no words or info of any kind. You were either in the know or, y’know, you weren’t.
Spooky larf…
LARFS IN THE SIMULOCRACY A
my blood ran cold, Comrades: look at the zombies laugh.
LARFS IN THE SIMULOCRACY B
SPEAKING OF THE FRIGGING WIRE: let’s read another opinion on it
the second and final part of Wajahat Ali’s interview with novelist, poet and essayist Ishmael Reed: emphasis, in bold type, mine
So would you say Down and Out in London and Paris is necessarily classist because Orwell went to Eton?
Reed’s assumption (and yours, by implication) is that the motivation behind the making of the series is racist — a desire to wallow in and promulgate (and celebrate?) a cliche of black degradation (something Friday Night Lights is absolutely guilty of, I believe). My belief is that — like Orwell’s — it is social rage, a desire to broadcast that degradation, yes, with the eventual hope of eradicating it. I sense no glee about that degradation in The Wire whatsoever — or anything even approaching neutrality on it.
You’re citing Orwell? Comrade, you’ve missed the point by a profoundly large margin if you consider The Wire a form of reportage (and, on top of that, that it’s driven by a “social rage” to change? You can’t be so naive).
“Reed’s assumption (and yours, by implication) is that the motivation behind the making of the series is racist…”
Did you read the interview?
If anyone still wonders where so-called “black rage” comes from…
“My belief is that — like Orwell’s — it is social rage, a desire to broadcast that degradation, yes, with the eventual hope of eradicating it. I sense no glee about that degradation in The Wire whatsoever — or anything even approaching neutrality on it.”
You perceive authorial glee behind these scenes? Please explain, min. Please tell me what it is that you’re seeing in them that I’m not and that patently constitute evidence of a racist agenda. If there are US codes or whatever that I’m not seeing then I’ll stand corrected.
Is it absolutely impossible that any black artist would ever write or direct such a scene? If so, why? If not, would *they* be guilty of an anti-black agenda? Yes?: please explain. No? Why not? Again: would you say Down and Out in London and Paris is necessarily classist because Orwell went to Eton?
Is it your belief that Simon’s claims about his motives — social rage — are entirely false and are in fact the precise opposite of the reality:glee/whoops/delight/let’s-keep-’em-niggers-degraded? Remember that Simon’s books — which I’ve read — are indeed reportage.
And yes, I read the interview. So far all I’ve seen are accusations and youtube clips. My brother (he of the Eros atrocity above) is one of the highest profile anti-racism campaigners in Scotland — I doubt McNulty naivety is an issue here, certainly in a UK context. But there may be US signals I’m missing. Please enlighten me.
“So far all I’ve seen are accusations and youtube clips.”
The YouTube clips are the accusations and they are clips from The Wire. Clearly, the writers on that show are using that special social meta-psychology in which they hope to put an end to the suffering of a congenital underclass in North America by showing blacks (as young as, what: nine?) blowing each other the fuck away with cool soundbites and cool soundtracks and cool bloodpacks.
“Is it absolutely impossible that any black artist would ever write or direct such a scene? If so, why? If not, would *they* be guilty of an anti-black agenda? Yes?: please explain.”
Are you sure you read the interview? And are you not aware of my loathing for the film “Precious”, which is written and directed by blacks (and probably executive-produced by Oprah Winfrey)? You’re not aware of the fact that people of all colors sell out people of all colors for money? They do.
“Is it your belief that Simon’s claims about his motives — social rage — are entirely false…”
Oh, no. Never. I believe that if he were entirely motivated by money, he’d say so, quite bluntly, and let the chips fall where they may. I believe him to be a preternaturally honest man. And his participation in the system isn’t all about Market Share and Advertising Dollars and selling degraded images of transgressive black “manhood” to two target audiences (the lucrative white male target demo that also buys or bought Gangsta Rap and the less-lucrative but credibility-lending black audience that will emulate what it sees on the screen and therefore pave the way for even grislier Televisual Pseudo-Anthropological Field Reports of the Future). Oh, no. It’s not about that at all.
“My brother (he of the Eros atrocity above) is one of the highest profile anti-racism campaigners in Scotland — I doubt McNulty naivety is an issue here, certainly in a UK context.”
Well, as it happens, this argument isn’t about racism in Scotland.
Your argument seems to boil down to the wobbly syllogism: 1) you find The Wire entertaining 2) you’re not racist 3) The Wire, therefore, isn’t racist. This is a familiar argument but it’s not a convincing one. The first time I heard it (I kid you not) was about Birth of a Nation, in a film class and the debate which ensued was depressingly similar to the argument we’re having. It was my contention that BOA is, first of all, a piece of Racist Propaganda; several students (along with the teacher) maintained that BOA is, first of all, Art. But, then again, Porno empowers Womyn, doesn’t it?
This is the interesting (for me) bit: in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, when America was sexually repressed in a much less sophisticated way than it is now, Caucasian College Boys often focused their libidos on fantasy images of the Black Female Body (living). Now they don’t so much; with the “Sexual Revolution” (in which the White Girl Next Door became a Pole Dancer and the Daughter of the Black Maid has grown obese on McDonald’s), this lucrative demographic seems to have shifted its prurient interests toward the Black Male Body (dead). What’s it all mean?
“Reed’s assumption (and yours, by implication) is that the motivation behind the making of the series is racist — a desire to wallow in and promulgate (and celebrate?) a cliche of black degradation…”
Who says the motivation is racism? The motivation is money.
You find the tone here one of celebration/delight/more please?
Oh fuck yes indeed I do. Or are you claiming that these scenes were painstakingly blocked and lit and post-produced with infinite regret? Christ, it’s becoming apparent why the fucking Propaganda Machine is unstoppable. You don’t seem to know what you’re seeing when you look at dozens of clips of Niggers having their brains blown out. I’ll parse it for you: it’s dozens of clips of Niggers having their brains blown out.
Slightly Beyond Sick
Oh please do try to imagine an angelic-looking pre-teen white child being interviewed by a giddy white radio personality saying, “So you’re ____’s killer! What was it like being _____’s killer? Your parents must be really proud of you!” Erm no. Not quite yet. Not that it’s not coming, but the black substrata is always the vanguard in this sort of thing; the canaries-in-the-coal mine of down-angled social engineering
Coincidentally, Unconscious and/or Self-Protectingly Naive Racism is one of the ongoing topics of my Art Because being a boy from the ghetto (that’s right, Comrades Lurking and Explicit: I am a primary source; a native reporter) at a private college meant having this very same argument, several thousand times, with white fellers who really did mean me no harm (nor harm to anyone) but found it impossible to fathom the extent to which they were Not Getting It. They owned Richard Pryor albums; they thought Diana Ross was hot; they couldn’t see the problem with The Flip Wilson show…
In the linked story, the Protag is an Educated Liberal whose sex life gets its zing from Role Playing games in which he “rapes” his wife as a pseudonymous black criminal… only, funnily, as it happens, he forgets where he got the “pseudonym” from: quasi-karmic hilarity follows
THE FICTIVE IN A SIMULOCRACY: Part Five: Role Playing
image by Nick Veasey
ITEM #1:
This terrible news that came to me the other day was about my friend Lisa Jordan—a giver, a grower of bonsais, she made her own soap, she macrameed dream catchers, she pressed leaves in rice paper notebooks, she’d make “coins” out of clay with her own insignias and mottos. One time we gave some to Richie Havens at a concert and he was so pleased he gave her an open-mouthed smile, which was intimate because he was missing teeth, but he didn’t hold back. I’m still waiting to hear the circumstances of her death, but just the fact of it has laid me low. We used to hang out in the ceramics studio together in high school. I had no talent in that department; I just liked being there. But Lisa did, and you have to imagine her then—six-feet tall, lithe-limbed, short red curly hair, green eyes, a perfectly bowed mouth—she was an extraordinary beauty, graceful, catlike, she went on to become a Vogue model in Paris. In Paris!
I would sit on the stool at the high metal table working at my little slab and coil pots but she’d be at the wheel. Comrades, she could throw fifty pounds of clay! She was the only girl who could. She’d put her whole body into the effort, her feet pumping the pedal to make the wheel turn faster, her long arms pulling the form up, hands smashing it back down, umpteen times, until she felt it was as it should be. At a certain point she couldn’t stay seated and she would rise up and kind of half hover over the wheel, the whole length of one arm up to her armpit inside the massive urn.
Ach, that is terrible, CDS Frances. Any more stories about her? Any images of her work?
Thank you so much for that offer, CDS Steven. This is all I can manage right now. The past tense is so wrong for her.
I understand, CDS Frances! Whenever you’re ready to, we’ll present-tense her on TET. You’re the writer to pull it off. Do an Orpheus.
THE FICTIVE IN A SIMULOCRACY: Part Five: Role Playing
Item #2:
from
Understanding
the F-Word
David McGowan
American Fascism and
the Politics of Illusion
from chapter one
from chapter three
[ed.'s note: need we point out the necessity of substituting the current Demoblican President, where relevant, for the one that was in office when this piece was written...?]
The Most Creepily Humorous Thing I’ve Read in a Week
A guy speaks out against Sociopathy on his blog… and the Sociopaths comment:
POISSON PEN
(over at the Guardian)
A wee hiatus as I’m being kept very busy by the gold-scaled serpent of cash, again, Comrades Lurking and Explicit… keeping these fondue pots brim-full costs money! Until soon, enjoy these phone-pictures I took of Horses & Ice cream and many other things on a brisk walk this week…
I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream! (as they say). Hurry back with coffers stuffed to the gills.
(until then, here’s something rather good to chew on…)
So many of the Photo Blogs Lurch Towards El Cheapo Porno-Aesthetic Offensiveness to Keep the Hits Up but This One remains Pleasing, Comrades
(still wrapped up in working with Sadvertizers, secretly, on a shitty pop song for wide national release… only for the money, rest assured… plus wrapping up the short film I worked on in parallel to the shitty pop song as a sort of preemptive cure for masscult-induced contraction of the mindstuff)
is that what the Barking Dog is missing… porno offensiveness? Hits have fallen way off.
Less poetry, more reviews of New Yorker stories. Not porn exactly… but parallel..
CDS Jacob, I’ve noticed a dearth of images of naked beauties with Afros online… you could fill that niche…
I don’t mean to brag on him but… http://noggs.typepad.com/the_reading_experience/2010/03/a-sad-decline.html
How many birds did he kill with that one (is templatic a word?) stone?
CDS Frances, Let’s see how Dan reacts to the arse-kissing square who just dropped by in the comments, hoping for a positive review (she better hope he doesn’t catch the irritating book-trailer, with the irritating hipsta-ironic Sinatra song, on her shill-blog; maybe he’ll like the risotto recipe)…
Back to Lorrie Moore: why did Dan ever have such high hopes for her? She was only ever (in the bits I’ve read) screwball-glib. She seems to have gotten her style from movies starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacClaine; this excerpt is from Anagrams:
Tee fucking hee.
How will he react to the commenter? Personally, I hope he enjoys himself. Why shouldn’t he get his arse, and every other part of him, kissed?
And please don’t be putting down The Apartment, CDS Steven. CDS Billy Wilder deserves more.
Oh, The Apartment is great. But, you know; the lit, I mean, is a copy of a copy of a copy…
(in fact, here’s my Snarktastic entry in the Chick Lit Sweepstakes; anyone interested in the movie rights? An ideally-condensed epic for the modern age )
(CHAPTER TWO HERE)
(CHAPTER THREE HERE)
(CHAPTER FOUR HERE)
TALLULAH, JUDE: A NOVEL IDEA
CHAPTER ONE
Don’t leave us hanging!! What did it say on the t-shirt?
I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until they make the movie, CDS Frances. I’ve signed a very strict non-disclosure agreement…
Damn, damn, damn!
(fiendish mercantile laughter)
AT IT AGAIN (and on the Ides of March, too)
FALSE FLAGS of CHICK LIT
A long-time Comrade Lurker (a second-degree Lurker who pre-dates TET and sends approx. three emails a year) has castigated me with jokey bravado for what he/she (I’m protecting his identity) sees as my atrocious decision to try my hand at Chick Lit (see comment #258). I’m not sure if the Comrade was joking (he/she hasn’t responded to my response yet) but I was joking. I was mocking Chick Lit with that passage above… showing how easy it is to work from that template (invent a few characters from thin air; give the characters zeitgeisty tastes/jobs; install quippy dialog; don’t stint on the good-looks and/or materialism; make all the stupid little fuckers “want something”). I was not hoping for a book contract.
However…
I have an idea. A Chick Lit serial novel! A lusty po-mo mockulebration of Chick Lit. New installments every week (or more often)… unless/until I run out of time/interest.
Next Monday: Chapter Two of TALLULAH, JUDE
Dedicate it to Tama Janowitz who started it all.
Good ole hair-twisting, gum-popping Tama! Did La Paglia steal from La Janowitz, or vice-versa, with the pandering youthiness tics?
That is such an incisive question! I’d like to pose it directly to them and have them answer.
Recently, my husband asked me to write about our split-up and post it somewhere on the web, so that when he meets new women and they ask him what happened he can just refer them to a URL (infer what you will about how sick of this relationship he is). It’s not something I would entertain doing but it’s so chick/dick litty I thought it worth mentioning.
Always welcome to post the data here, of course, CDS Frances! Larf
So, as previously mentioned, I spent the weekend earning money, working on a piece of music that will go into commercial release for the Yuletide season. That’s right: for the Sadvertizers, the season has already begun. And the piece of music I was forced to work on is such a sub-middlin’ chunk of talentlessness that I kept flying into internal mini-rages as I contemplated it. The actual working on it was quick. It was the contemplating that ruined my weekend. The leather-eared cocksuckers I work with (don’t worry, they won’t read this: they’re not even aware of the fact that I write… I keep the magisteria segregated) drive another bamboo splinter under Euterpe’s fingernails whenever they break out the Pro Tools. If I told you what they earn, every ear, you’d storm the Bastille all over again, Comrades.
To save myself, I generated a tiny ingot of Lo Fi counter-pop, a video featuring a pop singer I first worked with more than five years ago and who is now a mother and prefers to remain nameless. Backing band: Albino Wino Plus One
Wouldn’t Isaac Asimov be tickled by almost everything we’ve written on TET? I saw in his Wikipedia entry that he also wrote joke books. My all-time favorite joke is the one about the close-knit community that has assigned all of the jokes they regularly tell numbers. So that all they have to do is call out “49!” or “17!” and everyone cracks up, or groans, or whatever. It’s a good one.
This video (which I won’t post until I can figure out a way to improve the upload quality) is a number “8!”
CDS Edmond’s star is shining again. http://www.harpandaltar.com/interior.php?t=s&i=7&p=45&e=73
For some crazy reason it got me thinking about the hilarious scene in My Favorite Year when Peter O’Toole goes to dinner at Mark Linn Baker’s mother’s apartment played by Lanie Kazan. (From memory) Lainie answers the door in her fancy but ill-fitting wedding gown and says to O’Toole, “Welcome to my humble chapeau.” And then, “Like my dress? I only wore it once!”
Oy, syntax. Lainie played the mother, not the apartment.
A) It continues to amaze me that the mere mention of “Peter O’Toole” doesn’t cripple anyone, within hearing, with fits of naughty mirth. Imagine an actress calling herself “Pussy O’Snatch”…
B) CDS Edmond is blowing a beautiful, 39-minute Coltrane solo on Bach motifs in this text. I dig it bigly, man; the repeated riffs and themes which permute, ramify, circle back on themselves. Here’s as much of an excerpt I dare post before Edmond sues us…
Like your jazz counterpoint analogy. Have taken this up on The Dog, comparing this to what I been attempting in my poems.
Grooven, CDS Jacob!
Fine stuff. I’d read an expanded article on all this with real interest if ever you had the time to dig even further (and illustrate the argument with more of your work and even other examples)
Comrade MC, whenever you choose tidbits of my stuff to quote you display a positive talent for zeroing in on my favorite bits. In this case, though, I know it’s because of the wavelength we’re both on: uxoriousness. So I’m so glad you enjoyed my little tribute to my wi… er, I mean my hero’s wife, with the shadow of the hotel “at her feet” (where everything, of course, in proper fealty, belongs).
Although I’m mighty fond too of the “hardly Napoleonic retreat.”
I like the jazz & fugue analogies as well, but I can’t claim to have had musical structures in mind while writing — I’m musically illiterate; it is truly my artistic-cultural weak spot. If I was holding to any principle of composition, it was on an analogy to the visual arts, to painting — to make everything “one surface,” to break down or dissolve so-called “interiority” by affording it no privileged status over ‘mere’ description, and in fact subordinating it to the contours and angles of the landscape (something comrade Jacob totally, totally nailed in his very kind remarks on it).
Now let’s go kidnap some editors.
“If I was holding to any principle of composition, it was on an analogy to the visual arts, to painting — to make everything “one surface,” to break down or dissolve so-called “interiority” by affording it no privileged status over ‘mere’ description…”
Interestingly enough, CDS Edmond, it appears that Comrade DJ Sensei Stanley Kubrick was up to something similar on the screen; read Comment #237 and you’ll find a fellow named Rob Ager reading Kubrick and pointing out (among other things) that the transition from the artificial real of “waking consciousness”, on his screen, to artificial Night Mind (dreams, daydreams, or hallucinations), and back again, was so subtly flagged that the great majority of the audience has never, after all these years, noticed that, eg, the shooting of Full Metal Jacket’s colorfully abusive Drill Sergeant (in the head, yet: get it?) by Private Pyle… was a dream. Likewise, famous sequences, presented as “reality” in The Shining, were dreams; the movie was a rondo of dreams between Danny and Jack (who were, on another level, the same character). It’s all (unless you look carefully) presented on the same plane… the text isn’t a signal, it’s a con. Likewise in conventional fiction: the cues that signal “this part is the Real Now; this part is stream of consciousness; this part is dream”… are cons that only work with the faux-innocent complicity of the reading audience (who I often picture as children, or cave men, around a primeval campfire, listening to Stephen King).
If the Author doesn’t rely on these old cons, paradoxically, She/He heightens the reality of the reader-as-someone-reading… grants Her/His role as a problem-solving intellect in real Real Time, playing a very conscious game (the opposite of escapism)… paying the reader a massive compliment in the process.
Like Kubrick (has any other artist except Shakespeare gotten so famous making these amazing High-Low Sandwiches?), who has millions of fans, yet worked, clearly, for only a few hundred very close readers.
“…(something comrade Jacob totally, totally nailed in his very kind remarks on it).”
It occurred to me that astute readers who can also write about their readings perform an essential duty much like what DeLillo wrote in Libra about the role of the Bay of Pigs Scouting Party who were enjoined to “mark the beach with landing lights for those coming behind you.”
And on the perils of misperception (where all is depthless surface), he advised:
“The seaweed in reconnaissance photos turned out to be coral reef that interfered with the landings.”
I’m happily busy with the much-more pleasant task of helping my Beloved with some musical concepts for a television appearance she’ll be making in a few weeks; nicer than the odious weekend Sadvertizing chore… and a perfect alibi for my spotty appearances on TET, for now…
We (royal we) love your collaborations but you’re going to have a tough time surpassing Loozaland. If you have time though, I’m working up a new slogan. T-shirt or fortune cookie?:
There are occasions in life when meeting someone halfway means going the whole distance.
T-shirt, fortune cookie, voice-over, post card, Biblical aphorism, point number three in a 12-point relationship aid, magic 8 ball and/or I-Ching reading… the commercial possibilities are endless, CDS Frances!
Sounds like I’ve got a winner. Thank you and thanks to Cleanth Brooks! And I only read the first line of Well Wrought Urn.
As I’ve query-stated before: what better way to separate a human mind from its faculties of reason (and trust in the truth of its own observations) than religion? Here’s a grand old narrative from Comrade DJ Sensei Maria Monk to bolster our opinion…
In these days, the Airport is the perfect metaphor for the-world-as-external-imposition; back then, it was the Convent…
DIFFICULT TEXTS
There are short stories on my fiction-site that have had thousands of readers; stories that have had hundreds of readers; some that have only had a few dozen. This post is about a few that have had less than ten readers! Some of these rarely-reads are my precious favorites. I pull them upstairs, blinking and damp, from the basement, sometimes. As a good father, I think they deserve an occasional airing, on Armistice Day or the 5th of July, say…
Top 5 Patricides of Midville, Illinois
With apologies to Ambrose Bierce
5.
Lucius Nathaniel Calvin. “Luke” or “Lucy” to his friends. Good-looking boy with innocent sour milk breath. Dutifully unspectacular student. Never show-offy with hand-raising in class or sinister in the sophistication of his cheating. Reasonably popular within the limits of rural terms of popularity, which hinge on things like prowess with a hunting rifle. Unrealistically blue-eyed, farm-tall, short-lipped, with veiny hands and close-cropped, pale-wheat hair which he kept in a Cesarean haircut that only a perfect-eared boy would dare to. The grainy photograph showing up in all the papers on the same day was from his yearbook, of course. The kind of smile that everyone of a certain age knows is put on to mock the cheap-suited yearbook photographer.
Jennifer Paine. Jennifer Paine would later call Lucius, in all the interviews, on regional TV and local radio and for all the Midville newspapers, her fiance. Lucius’ maternal grandmother (with whom Lucius had lived the first five years of his life, after his mother’s exit and before his father had gotten his accounting firm “off the ground”) claimed she’d heard of no such plans. She’d never said this in interviews for she was never interviewed. She always said it in a room featuring a television or radio on which Jennifer Paine was being interviewed, whether or not there were others in the room at the time. Lucius had caught his grandmother talking to the television before. “Dream on,” she’d say. Or: “As if.”
The kick of a rifle should increase with the size of the animal hit. The kick of the rifle should hurt. Then it would be fair.
Once, Luke said that the sky is a river.
“What?”
“The sky. It looks like a river, doesn’t it? It’s like the sky is a river and we’re stuck on the bottom of a cloud looking down on the river and we could fall in it if we don’t hold on.”
Jennifer squeezed Luke’s hand. He recognized the gesture of concern. Her other hand was palm-up on the sharp tips of fresh-cut grass and her eyes were shut. “I guess.”
“No, seriously. Try.”
“Try what?”
“Try and see it that way.”
“But why?”
“Because you’ll love it.”
“I guess I’ve heard that argument before.”
Lucius laughed. He loved it when she acknowledged their iffy sex life. They were using pregnancy as a method of birth control.
A bullet is also a message.
Civilians were still finding silver blobby or feathery black fragments from the space shuttle in their driveways and swimming pools. Portrait-sized flakes of ash were scattered across flat roofs. Jennifer Paine loved Mike and the Mechanics and Lucius Nathaniel Calvin did not.
4.
Oh My Papa.
A big hit for Eddie Fisher. 1954. A very big hit. Fisher was of Russian Jewish descent but came off to many of his many fans as Italian. Being Italian had gone from acceptable to dreamy overnight and everybody wanted to know one and nobody knew why. What they called those dark good looks, which are always accompanied by a swagger. He thought he had it made. Died and went to Acceptance heaven. Fisher had a variety show called Coke Time with Eddie Fisher.
The unconscious smile on the old man’s flickering face as he stands in the doorway, angled against the jamb. Like, he doesn’t want to dignify that red-baiting network by sitting on the divan and taking the entertainment it offers like everyone else, as a responsible member of the audience. No, he’s making a statement, which, at this rate, it’ll take Ike approximately six thousand years to get the ambivalent message. But Debbie Reynolds is a different story. That he’ll watch. Eddie and Debbie duet.
-It wasn’t six million Jews, it was six thousand. It’s not six billion years, it’s six thousand. Is this a coincidence?
Three distinct strains of local rumor about Fisher that year (as though Midville has a plausible connection to either Hollywood or Tin Pan Alley) merge into one and hit Abraham Winters’ son with the force of an iron fastball to the temple on the suntorched baseball diamond he first hears it on, standing at first base with the kid who’d got there by bunting. The not-green grass of the diamond is patchy. The kid has a classic bowl haircut that reminds him of 1950. Maturity is measured in rectal thermometers. He caught himself thinking the word Ralston-Purina without anything attached to it.
“Hear about Fisher?”
“Hear what about Fisher?”
“You seriously don’t know?”
“Seriously what?”
“Eddie’s a Hebrew queer who sucks colored cock like it’s going out of style. Pass it on.”
“You’re so full of shit your eyes stink.”
“Oh yeah? My uncle’s seen the pictures.”
“You’re uncle’s a drunk.”
“So’s yours.”
There’s a line drive straight over the only other half-Jew on Winters’ team so he never gets the chance to finish the argument. Home is a very long walk away for the losers.
“If you looked any more like Eddie Fisher than you already do, your father would smell a rat.”
“Don’t say that, ma.”
“I thought you liked it?”
“Eddie Fisher’s a queer.”
His mother slapped him. Slapped Robert Algood Winters, Caucasian, 5′6″, brown eyes, 125 pounds, fifteen years old in December. Nicknamed Howdy Doody by the arresting officer. Apprehended in flight to Matoon.
The old man is shouldering the doorjamb in a plaid suit with the tie loose watching Channing Pollock saw a lady in half on Sullivan with a look on his face like he’s picking up tips. Like he’s matriculating. One hand balances a paper plate that’s way too shifty and bent and hot with baked beans while loud drunk relatives cavort in the gazebo. Speedy Gonzalez jokes and everything they imply, including the aunt with the bristle chin whom nobody can remember which relative by birth she used to associate with before he died and to ask now would seem insensitive. But the old man is mesmerized. Looks like Ray Milland in the cyanide-blue Sullivan light. The ghost-beacon that is midcentury television, guiding lost souls through the ether. The Ray Milland of interstate feedgrain sales. We’re talking about a magician that the old man quotes like a Winston Churchill.
-Happiness: a way station between too little and too much-Channing Pollock.
-No man in the world has more courage than the man who can stop after eating one peanut-Channing Pollock.
There were two main medical theories about masturbation and neither was flattering.You were either a homo or a werewolf. He had a two-handed technique that made him look like he was committing hari kari with a turkey neck. His father would curse under the window before trying to yank-start the lawnmower again. His bedroom walls would mottle with waltzing late-afternoon clock-gears of leaf shadow and he couldn’t help thinking of them as Jew walls; Jew leaves; the roar of the motor. Robert first learned the adult theory of the word pussy back in the fateful Thanksgiving of ‘53. This sparked an increase in the annual productivity of his jerk-off factory by an impressive 51% percent.
There’s a street in Midville, east of his house, with a colored on it.
The old man lectures him that he never touched his own self once before marrying your mother.
Midville isn’t even a proper name, but a description, as a teacher informed him, sadistically, because Midville is half-way between Decatur and Matoon. Mr. Schieble. Feeble Schieble. Is Robert a name or a description? She lives in a split-level with a two-car garage and her polio husband with two young unisex offspring, pretending to be Italian, doing that pinchy hand-gesture, but you can see the Mulatto of her at the end of every summer, when her skin is just a little too brown and the humidity of August brings the frizz back up in all the tawny hair bunched under the scarf and he pictures her on her knees in a pearl necklace and zip else, sticky as butterscotch, blowing Eddie Fisher and boom the earth moves and Robert sees stars and his junk hits the ceiling. He has trained himself in the art of not groaning. His mother’s Episcopalian, meaning he is not a Jew, an explanation he has polished to terse perfection in the relentless rehashing. Maybe Mrs. Schieble is an Octoroon, speaking of Robert’s favorite kind of cookie, a brand new unopened box of which on the dresser awaits him. 500 million sperm cells in the average healthy white male emission. 100 million on the ceiling alone. He does Jackie Gleason doing Reggie Van Gleason III, the imitation everybody says he should get paid money doing, saying, What do you think, old boy, shall we go another round?
The old man suddenly bangs the door open.
His Schwinn can do ten, fifteen miles per hour, easy, just cruising downhill towards the reservoir. He’s standing up on the pedals like a walk on the wind with a song at the top of his lungs and furious black smoke like a thunderstorm bottled up in the house behind him. But no more songs by Eddie Fisher.
3.
I look you and everything forgiveness. You are unbelievable beautiful. I feel like wrecks compare myself but I’m think you choose me for be most beautiful also. I do not dare for looks in mirror to whispering of sentence for staring you with sleep for whispering loud to hear this make me strong. This is hope my letter is tell you.
Life is such in Europe city to require every for what my strength is. I know is choice of me with go was make to go is true. I for snapped him finger one by one to daring try is stop me leave for everything. What a terror is for getting on such plane! But so many terror are unbelievable thrilling. For terror you are comfortable make to misery live. So for consider blessings to what city for people say way of talk with uncomfortable stay to stay. So smell of walking sidewalk with careful not bumping not notice for people I’m walk here. So stay is food smell for make is remember carnival or such childhood of fair from childhood is happen. This fair in a longest driving city was far long going. I from do not think of fairs now more.
Sometimes I wonder so panics what you think when look me. For always fears I say with do wrong thing to see what loving turns with pity. Loving what impatient become is something else. I wonder such times if not for transitional emotion, love. Unstable by definition, connecting deeper more useful states like fear, disinterest, hatred? I mean maybe you can’t hate something until you have loved it first and maybe the capacity for hating something is so important that love had to be invented in order to making hate work?
You can tell your mother almost have go for college. She know is Somerset Maugham or Upton Sinclair or also Saki. She know is Pride and Prejudice for. As you can also tell she unbelievable mess. Remember you get the good and the bad with everyone. But look at you so perfect, beautiful, innocent, deserve everything good. I am looking at your slightly parted lips with that rosy space between them so unbelievable small like ghost of the finest watch-part. It’s like you are truly powered by some new kind of energy better than sunlight glowing through your cheeks and eyelids and the tips of your hair and warms your sweet breath. Or it’s like you’re made of this energy and I cannot believe it came out of me. They always called that the miracle of life that I finally understand, after thinking this was just flower talk for many years but I know it now something so pure can come out of a body so stained and dirty with a dark bubble of pain from this dirty body’s bloody mess.
I feel that you angelic is masterpiece of geometer to look at the spiral of the wax of its ear and the small fat fruit of each balled fist unfold in a flower. Exactly its dreams probably are made still of the numbers more of the one than words that are something more envy to because the life of its mother is words and nothing but. My dreams are words always mumbled or scream but remembering I used dream for mostly in smells. For remembering the smell of a man’s aftershave could make me sicker than dogs. I’d go in and out of the house with a handkerchief deliberately soiled with chicken s–-t covering my nose when he’s shaving. I don’t want to complain in this letter but I have had rashes you could read in the dark by plus problems of the lower body most doctors would kill to look at. And these are just a few of things I overcame to becoming your mother.
Today when you found your own seat on the tram and sat a little ways apart from me swinging your feet looking back to wave, I was so proud and crushed, darling. It made me so hopeful for future and for worrying. I thought about how today it’s your own seat on the tram, tomorrow it’s you talking with people I don’t know and bringing questions home with you. It all depends on how much I’ve unbelievable lie to you, which is not a lie for fun but for safety and pride and caring. This letter is my answer for one of those questions. I’m still not sure how I’m going to writing this.
You don’t have a father, but you will know that already, by the time you’re read this. Oh, and you’ll probably never know the sensation I just felt after writing the last dependent clause of previous sentence. It’s like seeing one’s name on a list of the dead. I’m write this from the other side of my extinction, in a way, since (and I guess it’s spookily significant that I was always unbelievable affected by plot devices like this in second-rate novels and third-rate films) I’ll have made the necessary arrangements that you’ll be reading this letter only after receiving whatever possessions you’ll inherit in the event of my etc. Well, corny as that sentence is, I just can’t bringing myself to write it all out.
Back to the thing about you have no father. That’s just the way it is, darling. I guess there’s a good chance I’ve already discussed this part with you (by the time you read this), but, in case the topic never came up, or I never had the nerve to be straight about the situation to your face: I wouldn’t recognize the man who inseminated me with you if my life depended on it. If your life depended on it, I’d make unbelievable effort, but, no. All I wanted was you, and I needed a man’s help to make for happen.
He was very good looking and intelligent enough (we chatted for quite a spell at the touristy bar I picked him up in because I wanted to make sure). It was a Friday night, warm out, crowds on a sidewalk. We held hands on the way to his hotel room, which is more important to me, now that I think back on it, than you can possible imagine. I’m sure he’s the father, because I’ve only had sexual intercourse with two men in my life and the second man followed the first by gap of fifteen years.
You’ve never seen America and there is a good chance we will never go there together. Maybe you’ll go on your own one day. It’s hard to believe that I wouldn’t have discussed Midville with you but truly it’s obvious that my method will be for balance your happiness with the truth for shift and evolve as you grow older depending where your interests develop and so forth, so, if it turns out that I’ve decided to inventing the city of your mother’s (me) birth and childhood I’m sorry. The truth is the place I’m from is called Midville in the state of Illinois which is know as part of the Midwestern part of the United States of America.
If I’ve invented my own exciting childhood in an urban metropolis for you, with rich parents and exotic friends: no. None of that is real and I hope I haven’t going too unbelievable far overboard to give you a mother with past you can to proud of. Again, I am very sorry if that was the case. The only difference between a working farm and the place I grew up on was that the place I grew up on was not working. I always felt I had a certain right to be bitter about the thriftshop clothing and chewed-on hand-me-down toys (shipped in crates from superior cousins I never met) but I always thought also even as unbelievable kid: what you expecting? The country’s ten times bigger than it was in the days that a farm was a livelihood… something more than the perfect place for the head of a family for hang himself. But your grandfather never hung himself.
No, he didn’t. But you’re going ask of me, one day, about your grandparents, and whatever story I will have made up to tell you when you ask, this letter is the final truthful answer.
2.
“What a coincidence.”
“No such thing, my friend.”
“This is the last place I’d expect…”
“Paging Carl Jung… “
“A real live Midvillian. Pinch me, I’m dreaming. Remember the Dairy Queen? Everyone called it the Hairy Queen…?”
“I do indeed.”
“Bastards tore it down. What. Fifteen years ago. It’s a Planned Parenthood now. There’s an irony for you. When was the last time you were in Midville, anyway?”
“Don’t ask.”
“Honey, you wouldn’t recognize it. Even got ourselves a gang problem these days.”
“Inevitable clash of hierarchies.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“Country clubs, Al-Qaeda, the Black Panthers, Catholic Church, the military… they’re all hierarchies. That’s the first thing you get wherever two human beings or more shall gather together is a hierarchy.”
“Interesting.”
“That’s what people say when something isn’t.”
“Isn’t what?”
“Interesting.”
“No, seriously. Tell me more.”
“Well. You find yourself at the bottom of one hierarchy, what you do, any self-respecting ego, he invents one he can be at the top of. Say you’re some towel-head with a 5th-century education who couldn’t get laid if his life depended on it…”
“Ouch.”
“You invent, or situate yourself within, a hierarchy in which towel-heads…”
“Not the most politically correct member of the frequent-flyer club, are you?”
“Oh, I can do better than that.”
“I’ll bet you can. Let’s go back to your little hierarchy theory for a sec.”
“Okay.”
“Are we a hierarchy?”
“Unless I’m missing something.”
“Who’s on top?”
“I guess I’m thinking what it would be like to put my cock in your mouth.”
“You smooth-talking devil.”
“That’s me.”
“Hey, what’s the rush?”
“You only live once.”
“A grab the gusto kind of thing.”
“Life is short, my cock is long.”
“Vita brevis, cockus longus.”
“You’ve been to college, I see.”
“Auto-didact.”
“Impressive.”
“That’s exactly what people say…”
“When something isn’t. Touché. You never answered my question.”
“I don’t recall it was phrased in the form of one.”
“Can I fuck the shit out of your ass?”
“My, we’re saucy this morning.”
“It’s been at least an hour since I jerked off. Look, I’m shaking. Hold me?”
“Poor baby.”
“If you let me fuck you in the ass, I’ll let you clean the sweet shit off my cock with your tongue.”
“And people say the art of conversation is dead.”
“Now you’re being evasive.”
“Not evasive. You just haven’t closed the deal yet, honey.”
“You’re a treasure with a rusty lock.”
“Getting colder.”
“Are you allergic to beautiful dick?”
“I think I hear my mother calling.”
“Hey, it’s called a layover.“
“Check please.”
“Okay, okay. Have you ever heard of the name Paul Michael Swanson before?”
“Rings a bell. Are you telling me you’re a celebrity?”
1.
The country was wooded everywhere except at the bottom of the valley to the northward, where there was a small natural meadow, through which flowed a stream scarcely visible from the valley’s rim. This open ground looked hardly larger than an ordinary door-yard, but was really several acres in extent. Its green was more vivid than that of the inclosing forest. The configuration of the valley, indeed, was such that from this point of observation it seemed entirely shut in, and one could but have wondered how the road which found a way out of it had found a way into it, and whence came and whither went the waters of the stream that parted the meadow below.
Ambrose knelt on the bank of the stream, weighting his father’s poor pockets with stones. His father, Mordecai, inclined a torn face away from the boy’s activity as though shamed by it, despite all evidence, such as the blood caked everywhere and the bone of his skull exposed white as chipped flint, that his cares on this earth were now settled. Mordecai still clutched the hawthorn switch he’d meant for the beating of Ambrose, and Ambrose still clutched, between his teeth as he grunted in his efforts, the blade he’d used to forestall forever the beating. That the sun still flamed and birds still sang and nearby squirrels even frolicked, despite the terrible scene of not an hour’s coldness they’d all been witness to, helped Ambrose to nurture a grievance against the callousness of nature and the perceived insignificance of nature’s darkest bastard, which is man.
The Steven Augustine Experience, Ladies and Gentlemen, in a fricking nutshell. I’m working on the colorful pie-chart to indicate the proportions of Searing, Jaw-Dropping, Joy-Jumping, Belly-Laughing, Nightmare Feeding, Smartest Boy in the Class, Lover-Man, …etc. Until I get back, here’s Don DeLillo in Libra with the Amen to the prayer you hadn’t yet written:
“To share in nature is the oldest human truth.”
Ah, toinx, Comrade DJ Sensei Frances… I knew that text would find a good home in a great mind one day… I just knew it. Meanwhile: what do you think of Bela Lugosi’s version of Our Saviour (image for Comment #266)? Beats that corny old apocrypha about DaVinci’s Last Supper model for Jesus/Judas hands down, I think…
A sly image selection but my choice for holy family is…
Xmas ’68 will always mean, for me, “Everyday People” (the song is a compositional miracle, too, if I recall correctly; I think it’s just two chords throughout)
RNDM NOTES 3
1. What “we” haven’t caught up with is the Real World Business Principle that real deaths (or murders) are automatically factored into the calculations behind any important deal. We cling to our innocence (“conspiracy theory” resistance is one manifestation of this clinging). The fact is, when Y (projected possible profits) is greater-than-or-equal-to Z (negative fall-out from human deaths as a result of the transaction), X-number-of-people will die unnatural deaths. This isn’t News. Pop Stars beware: it’s just good business: at some point (earlier than you think), you become more valuable dead than…
2. to love is not the same as to hate not having
3. pain is evolution’s way of preventing us from eating ourselves
4. the basic unit of meaning is not the word but the sentence
5. let’s call “torture” something new: Sensational Coercion; doesn’t that feel better?
6. politics is the dark art of alleviating the masses of the responsibility of claiming full knowledge of the evil done on their behalf
7. age is the wittiest response to beauty
“4. the basic unit of meaning is not the word but the sentence”
The sentence is the basic instrument of tyranny.
Anecdotal antidote. Anti-sentences. Trojan Horse sense IED tenses: explode in the mind. User wear beware. Go naked
Rind = poison. Peel. Consume what is hidden. Discard with extreme prejudice.
The Author is a Tyrant, CDS Jacob! We just hope She/He’s good company while He/She is ordering us around in our minds! larf
What’s the point of writing, if not to imbue every sentence written with the power to inspire mistrust of sentences in particular and language in general?
Think of the middle school English teacher…. primary erectors of the barriers of class and propagandists of its signs and symbols… which, in enforced ignorance of linguistics, they insist on calling the ‘rules of grammar,’
Language is not our friend.
I don’t think I’d blame language for all that, CDS Jacob; isn’t it the old case of using fire to burn down the village… or make lunch… depending on one’s mood/skill/personality type…?
Italo Calvino’s T-Zero (and his Cosmicomics), for example, were formative texts that strengthened the connection between my Night Mind and my Artistic Will… long before I could put that into words (I read these as a teen). And he used (albeit translated) sentences; these sentences were nothing but good and still, to this day, inspire a trust for the Artist that I deny to the Herd Authoritarians (politicians, CEO’s, movie stars, etc). I trust my eyes and I also read with them and employ powers of discrimination; to mistrust everything is not much different from trusting everything. I trust (or mistrust) until otherwise notified by a check-list of signal conditions.
I don’t write to make anyone distrust the sentence; I don’t propose my sentences as facts. It’s Art; I strive for a certain balance of elements that pleases me when the mix is right or leaves me feeling dissatisfied when it’s all wrong.
Also: think of which middle school English teacher? They aren’t all wearing the same red satin robes; I’m sure a precious few are handing kids pretty sturdy toolboxes; the vast majority of the rest are just glorified security guards struggling to keep the class room body-count down while the pupils receive instruction from the Ubiquitous Fasco-Pop soaking through the walls, floor, ceiling.
Language is not my friend, it’s one of my favorite Games, the Garden I play it in and the Body I use to play it with. Not to mention the Ball!
Don’t you get it? Language IS the conspiracy and the conspirator. Impregnates us with received formulations that reproduce the established norms even when we think we’re opposing them. You think you invented the language you use!?
Ha! you’re but the vehicle, the means by which the germ reproduces itself.
CDS Jacob, I don’t think Dick Cheney is a blood-sucking, chicken-fucking, skull-munching cretin-mogul as a result of being possessed by the sinister rules of English grammar. If our powers of discrimination aren’t capable of drawing a line between Dick Cheney and James Joyce, what good are they?
When I was nine-ish, the game we seemed to like to play at the most was running bases. Two bases, a kid on each base throwing one ball between them, plus one runner going back and forth, trying to beat the ball or be tagged, over and over again, forever (or until supper). It started off simple enough but, in time, variations developed. Next thing you know, we were doing running bases with a stingray bike. The rules became quite baroque, allowing for various exceptions, discretions, penalties and clemencies. The point of the rules was that they were a framework which made it easy for us to play together. Now, had our little running bases society become a tradition of thirty generations’ duration, including billions of participants, one could imagine A) how even-more baroque the rules would have grown in time and B) how disgruntled some members of our descendant generations would be about the fact that they hadn’t made the original rules. Still: there’d be nothing sinister, in and of itself, about the fact of the existence of these rules.
Also: what would you propose in lieu of language? Telepathy is so unreliable!
What do I propose?
Silence?
Impossible. There is no cure. Two points… probably as close as I can come to being reasonable.
Every word an individual believes to have originated out his/her self is a vehicle of delusion, for what issues forth has equally… almost surely more than equally.. been ingested and regurgitated from a linguistic and cultural pool as broad and deep as the history of our babbling species, the effects of which return to that pool in the form of consequences, almost all unforeseen and beyond the control of the speaker.
The second only semi-rational point I would make… is to understand that, like Blake with his Muse–language will serve us… rather than we it, in a degree strictly proportionate to our mistrust of its powers, a mistrust that follows our recognition that it is never an instrument we can claim to own or control or bend to what we believe (deluded creatures that we are) to be our purpose and will. We speak, and others speak through us; they are numberless, and we do not know who they are or to what end we are being used.
I have relatively greater trust in the language of art precisely because it is a scam, and doesn’t require me to believe otherwise to grant me the pleasure of removing me from the stream and redepositing me more deeply disturbed than I was before the encounter.
What I’ve written here stands as demonstration of the pathologically seductive power of language, and my helplessness in the grip of its powers… so much so that I find I’m in thrall of the sound of the words in my head and will, against all reason, likely copy and paste them–or some variant thereof–onto the back of the Dog.
No way I’ll be able to unpack this before dinner, CDS Jacob! Later.. later…
And Bunny Wilson Yawns in His Grave
Now this is just too funny. I’m no fan of Zadie “Hothouse Flower” Smith (she once wrote that I should be ashamed of myself, after all), but Adam “Neocon” Kirsch has just done a job on Zadie with the same set of daggers (or mallets) Zadie used on James Wood (in revenge for his job on her ) last year. Was it last year? Or 2008? I can’t remember: it’s not important… it’s just fun.
Joseph O’Neill’s square, Anthony-Minghella-film of a novel (“Netherland”) and Tom McCarthy’s “Remainder” were, again, the pawns/effigies/banners flown/deflowered virgins avenged on the field of honor. Kirsch, in this essay, both A) snatches the enemy flag and makes a giddy dash with it for the Neocons (or post-Bellovians) and B) seems to want it known that his dark sport is cooler, less ruffled (more schooled) and sweats less than Zadie’s (which was surely the longest example of score-settling “staircase wit”… I couldn’t be bothered to double-check the French… published in print that year). And not a mention of James Wood! Well, except this citation of the coded reference in Zadie’s prior attack:
Delicious. But it’s all just a little too fey and clammy, isn’t it? Moths fighting in an emptied-out, king-sized, worryingly-streaked Vaseline jar. Another cautionary tale about needing to have an actual Life for the Literature to illuminate, kids! Get out; go for walks; take Karate lessons; fuck somebody attractive…
A compositional miracle indeed. I’m going to die laughing.
Actually, I wasn’t Snarking on that one: listen to the rich variety of melodies Sly wrings out of those two simple chords. It’s a masterclass in economy!
Oh, I know! I regularly wear my Sly Stone discs out for that very reason. I meant the composition of the last chunk of TET. It’s a thing of beauty (and absolutely hilarious in its thematic juxtapositions, as marked by the images).
Aha! I was being deliciously dense, CDS Frances! Larf. This blood feud that Cap’n Woody started… how long will it last? I expect the next shot to be fired will happen anytime from 3 weeks from now until the end of the year, but, for the twist, the one wielding the pistol should be one of Zadie’s chums. Or what if Cap’n Woody is divorced by then and his Ex does it? Wouldn’t that freshen up the franchise…?
You can be deliciously whatever you wish, CDS Steven, especially now that you’ve made the centerfold over at TRE. But before your head swells to a Zadie-like circumference (polite throat clearing) isn’t this Chick-Lit Monday?
Did you turn off the spell check function?
[ed.'s note: nope; I can't turn it off on your PC... as far as I know]
Actually, it’s a brand spanking new ‘puter. Maybe that’s why. I’ll work on the fine tuning but until then maybe Sprout could give me a spare o for deliciously. Chocolate or jelly ring, please.
[ed.'s note: will you settle for a cheerio?]
ChickLit Monday‘s got a ways to go before it’s over, CDS Frances. As it is (I am not joking now), I’ve just donned a pair of my daughter’s tights (as rabbit ears) … because she made me. Later… later…
TALLULAH, JUDE: A NOVEL IDEA
(CHAPTER ONE: HERE)
(CHAPTER THREE HERE)
(CHAPTER FOUR HERE)
I’m not sure this is the best use of our time. Just because we can do something doesn’t always mean we should.
Well, at least no one can accuse us of circle-jerking on TET, CDS Frances! Larf! Skip the bluddy thing if it exasperates you, but I’ve got my own unsettling obsessions to address here…
To continue the conversation from CDS Jacob’s comment at the tail-end of Comment #268:
1. Well, sure… if Language/Literature were still at a hypothetical stage. But like anything the totality of all human cultures have used (in some form) with unbroken continuity since before recorded history, the dynamic, liquid, and ongoing vitality of actual usage overwhelms any concept/theory you might try to match it against… moreso, in this case, because the theory is expressed within the system/structure the theory addresses. There’s more philosophical traction to be gotten, I think, in simple, local, ad hoc observation of usage. Eg: book critiques. Field recordings of neighborhood slang.
It’s not a question of if books, or the neighborhood slang, “work” for their users; it’s a question of what the users use them for. You can make the claim that two locals having a chat in the doorway of the neighborhood grocery store are indulging in a “vehicle of delusion”, but they would shrug and get on with the chat, using Language in a robust way that overwhelmed the abstract intricacies of your argument. The question becomes: are you asking relevant questions/ making relevant claims about their chat (or how one of them reads or writes a book later that evening)? Maybe the question is not how “Every word an individual believes to have originated out his/her self is a vehicle of delusion” but, rather, “what are these people doing when they talk about an episode of Star Trek on a Friday evening after dinner?” Are they doing more than talking about Star Trek, or less than talking about Star Trek?
In any scope much larger than that, the discussion runs up against the limit of the facts that A) it’s impossible to compare a Language-driven Human Culture to a Human Culture that does entirely without Language (for more than one reason: 1: no such Culture exists and 2: such a Culture would be unable to communicate the subjective values required to make a complete comparison in such an inherently subjective experiment/discussion) and B) again: in using Language to address the Limits of Language, you remove the Limits of Language artificially, by sinking an atomic model (your argument/research paper) of an unimaginably large system (LANGUAGE) within the total version of itself: from the structural perspective of the artifact of your argument, LANGUAGE is a system of infinities. What can’t you find/prove/disprove in LANGUAGE as a creature of/in LANGUAGE?
Ie: (a lá Gödel; I cite Gödel loosely) You can stand outside a watermelon to do a pretty scientific job of describing it. But you can’t stand outside of LANGUAGE. Making qualifying statements about Language involves the same inherent problems that attempting to make qualifying statements about The Universe entail. “It’s a young Universe.” Compared to what? “The odds of life in the Universe are slim.” Compared to what other Universe? And so on. We can talk forever at the level… signifying… only that we’re talking forever. My concerns are all on an earthier level.
I find it most helpful to my overall project, as an Artist, when I limit my concerns to specific sentences within specific paragraphs… with a tacit sense of where I stand with regard to the time/place/memories-behind wherever I’m writing. I don’t need to mention “people” in this formula because the Language is, essentially, made of people. That sums it up for me.
2. “I have relatively greater trust in the language of art precisely because it is a scam…” To know whether something is a scam or not, we have to have a look at the claims it makes (or that are made for it). What claims do the language of art (or Language as Art) make? There are plenty who make claims for it (and some of those claims, a lá Cap’n Woody’s, are scammy): shouldn’t that be a case-by-case investigation?
What you say makes sense. But doesn’t relieve my mistrust.
“scam”… as in: I’m not asked to trust it. Question never arises.
Not about what anything is about
About what’s in and wants out. And how much of what it’s in is not in ‘me’ Or of me. We are corroded conduits. Everything we can call our own we owe to the corrosion, Flakes of rust and corruption–the stuff of individuation.
All flows through but never washes clean. That’s our hope.
And why there is no hope.
I grow increasingly bored with ‘reason.’ Or rather, with my pathetic need for it. Nursing this rational dependency.
If I were
serious about poetry I’d take a vow of silence. Not another word from my mouth. Not another word on the page. Only what might be offered as poetry. Cease to exist as self. What’s not the poem–expendable. Suicide by poetry.
But I’m not.
[ed.'s note: I like the Zen-nishness of this and don't want to fuck it up with last-word-iness... but no response might seem like a particularly ominous response... so I appear here to say I'm not here]
“Or what if Cap’n Woody is divorced by then and his Ex does it? Wouldn’t that freshen up the franchise…?”
My gut tells me that C.D.M. won’t go so far as to divorce him. Once one has cultivated the taste for scholastic stink, I would imagine it’s trickier than one thinks to “go back.” She’ll probably just sublimate (see mercuric chloride), and clever novelist that she supposes she is, will pour it all into a heavily-veiled and high-toned Tome Apposite James.
When I was a young actress this was one of my two audition monologues. It’s excerpted from Marty Martin’s play, “Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein” (Vintage Books, NY 1980) [Punctuation and tabs as published.]
Well if you make a painting of a violin and you leave out the violin someone will inevitably call it ugly. But if it is the absence of the violin that makes it a painting of a violin then something interesting has been accomplished. A violin is just a violin unless someone plays it or paints it it is just a thing but if you play it it becomes a feeling and if you paint it it becomes a feeling too it ceases to be a thing then a painting is never the thing it is a painting of it is a feeling about that thing and so a painting of a violin without a violin in it can still be a painting of a violin and even a good one it may not be traditional but it is true nonetheless and unlike Leo I was not interested in principles of art it was his interest in them that held him back. One was always aware with Leo’s creations of his meticulously studied techniques there is no question about that but he always quit always gave in before he was through before he achieved that feeling because he was afraid that in the end it would not be there and that is generally the case with quattrocento art experts who know so much about how a painting is painted that they misplace the ability to comprehend why. A child with a piece of chalk and a blackboard is a kind of Sistine Chapel in a way the cave men did it on the walls of their caves and although it was not Rembrandt it was art theirs was art now that is not nonsense.
Formatting of the tabs didn’t hold. Everywhere you think there should be some white space, there is.
http://wings.buffalo.edu/english/faculty/conte/syllabi/377/Frank_O%27Hara.html