“Žižek calls this the ‘double-cynical wager’, that if someone acts like what they are, then people will expect them not to be that.” -Dave Semple
March 20, 2010
I just want to take a moment to say I’m really hurt by the recent and false allegations of insensitivity and misconduct. I feel fortunate to work with so many extraordinary people each and every day. I’ve always been considerate and respectful of the people I photograph and I view what I do as a real collaboration between myself and the people in front of the camera. To everyone who has embraced and supported me and my work, I am so grateful. Thank you, it means a lot.
Terry
(to keep this post from becoming meaningless when the photos are all deleted: the image was/is naked Terry, seen from behind, straddling a model’s face while snapping a pic… presumably with his cock quite close to her mouth)
I told him I had my period so I wanted to keep my underwear on, and he asked me to take my tampon out for him to play with. “I love tampons!” he said, in that psychotically upbeat way that temporarily convinces so many girls that what’s fun for Uncle Terry is fun for them. (I can just imagine him chirping, “Why don’t you wear these fairy wings while I fuck you in the ass? Wouldn’t that be like, so fun?” to some attenuated girl fresh off the boat from Eastern Europe. Either the man’s totally delusional, or he gets off on the fact that many of these things are not, in fact, very much fun for the girls.) I politely declined his offer to make tea out of my bloody cunt plug. It was then that he decided to just get naked.
Before I could say “whoa, whoa, whoa!” dude was wearing only his tattoos and waggling the biggest dick I’d ever seen dangerously close to my unclothed person (granted, I hadn’t seen very many yet). “Why don’t you take some pictures of me?” he asked. Um, sure.
It gets worse. “I’m not sure how he maneuvered me over to the couch, but at some point he strongly suggested I touch his terrifying penis,” writes Peck.
This is where I zoom out on the situation. I can remember doing this stuff, but even at the time, it was sort of like watching someone else do it, someone who couldn’t possibly be me because I would never touch a creepy photographer’s penis. The only explanation I can come up with is that he was so darn friendly and happy about it all, and his assistants were so stoked on it as well, that I didn’t want to be the killjoy in the room. My new fake friends would’ve been bummed if I’d said no.
I must have said something about finals, because he told me, “if you make me come, you get an A.” So I did! Pretty fast, I might add. All over my left hand. His assistant handed me a towel.
The pictures were published in Purple, the magazine run by Richardson’s friend, the influential editor Olivier Zahm. Peck was supposed to receive payment in the form of a signed print, but she was too disgusted with what had happened at Richardson’s studio to return to pick it up. (For the record, Peck hardly seems bitter about it: “If you’re reading this, Terry, and want to prove you really are a nice guy after all, I’m over it now and wouldn’t mind collecting that print.”)
(this post is somewhat of an experimental tolerance-comparison between photobucket and tiny pic; tiny pic seems to have an in-house delete-monkey with an itchy trigger-finger and it deletes certain images as soon as I post them; curiously, images are more likely to get axed if they’ve been adjusted for size. The bottom-most image is hosted on photobucket. Let’s see which, if either, lasts. Censor-Monkeys, if you’re reading this: a note as to whether the material is being axed due to copyright issues, or issues of sexual content, would be fucking helpful…)
UPDATE: and photobucket wins (for now)
Mary Gaitskill, Mary Gaitskill.
Oh, and btw, my other monologue was Rosalie from John Guare’s “Landscape of the Body.”
Ach, you got in (down there) before I could think of a Merle Jeter joke, CDS Frances!
It’s a vibe. Ride it.
(Speaking of. I might be close to cracking The Humbling. I’m out on a rather far flung limb but I might be able to crawl back in shortly. I just have to (gag me) finish reading James Wood’s Book Against God.)
Better than wearing a hair shirt, one supposes!
Or doing a Zorba dance while wearing one.
What a coptic remark…
Grazie lei!
There is a Do Not Miss Part 2 to this one.
I wonder if CDS Barry likes the choreography on this one…?
The Hippest Squares of the Era! I like Laura’s version best (I’ve got it here somewhere in the archives…). What’s the connec with CDS Barry, btw? I’m going to ‘surry down and cover his Art Exhibition this week, I think… camera-phone in hand…
CDS Steven,
I don’t think I’ve mentioned this, but Laura Nyro’s father was our piano tuner when I lived on E. 81st near Central Park and The Met. He’d come to tune my sister’s baby grand and then he’d always take in an exhibit at the museum afterward. I always watched him while he worked; he was devoted to the care of pianos. You can hear that when she plays. If you have her version I’d love to have a listen!
Great little vignette. I will find Laura’s version and send it, CDS Frances! Give us a moment…
[ed.'s note: zinyer inbox]
“What’s the connec with CDS Barry, btw? I’m going to ’surry down and cover his Art Exhibition this week, I think… camera-phone in hand…”
Way back in TET 1.0 when we posted our top ten lists, CDS Barry commented on the Wendy Wild Pyramid Club vid that he enjoyed the choreography, which made me instantly fond of CDS Barry. You see, Wendy has since died of breast cancer and I have nothing but beautiful memories of her. In fact, I was a guest at her wedding to Rudy Protrudi at The Dive, a Halloween-themed costumed affair that I really must write about one of these days. Possibly the most fabulous party I have ever attended (and I have been to some amazingly fabulous parties in my life). Wendy wore a white mini dress and sang the wedding song with the band, which was Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit.
One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small…
Aha! Wheels within wheels! Gorgeous (and tragic) anecdote.
“In fact, I was a guest at her wedding to Rudy Protrudi at The Dive, a Halloween-themed costumed affair that I really must write about one of these days.”
This one isn’t really difficult but it’s on an obscure corner of my fiction site. Yes, and CDS Frances’ dragon cartoon link (along with just hearing Laura Nyro’s version of Eli’s Coming) put me in mind of it, suddenly. So out of the cellar (rubbing its unchained wrists) it comes…
THE GRADUATE
Miriam with the curly blonde hair that when you looked closer was full of white and gray. Her point being that everyone knew she had two college-age offspring from a previous marriage. Who would she be fooling with a dye job? Robert didn’t want to seem timid or dull in Miriam Wallace’s eyes.
Robert had first met Miriam during the Christmas season after his twenty-second birthday, the Christmas he flew back to Philly from Minneapolis to tell his parents he wouldn’t be going to graduate school. Turbulence on the flight had strengthened his resolve. Turbulence and his rotten stomach. His bachelors degree would have to be enough. He’d told his father that he needed time to consider his options and his mother, from the next room, the kitchen, had shouted, ‘Your options to fail?’
They drove, not slowly, the twelve blocks from Wayne Avenue to the Wallace house in Mount Airy on streets so icy and some so steep that Robert had a hopeful premonition that they would all die silent and angry in a grisly wreck. His mother angry at his father for his father’s laissez-faire attitude to discipline as Robert was growing up; his father angry at his mother for attaching so much weight to the opinions and judgments of outsiders; Robert angry at both of them for his existence and, more pressingly, the churning guts courtesy of the evening’s outcome. Robert’s mother’s technique of what his father called ‘analytical sarcasm’ was devastating and had left Robert longing for the corrective violence of a bowel-puncturing crash. The fatal relief of it. They drove by five illuminated black Santas in a row without comment.
Robert’s vision of an impact had been so vivid that it felt like a dream of the afterlife when they all found themselves on the Wallace’s dark front porch fifteen minutes later, kicking clots of snow off their heels as if they meant to demolish the building. Miriam Wallace answered the door in a ball gown with that bemused look of hers. She didn’t know Dot or Alan terribly well and Robert seemed new to her, though it’s possible that she’d petted him once at a bar-b-cue when he was child.
‘Vampirella,’ said Robert’s mother under her breath as they followed Miriam into the living room. Miriam Wallace was tall, leathery, svelte. She had boyishly short curly blonde hair and definition in her biceps and an ass in the shiny dark material of her low-cut backless gown like a wet plum.
Forty minutes prior to their arrival at the Christmas party, right before Robert’s confession that he was ditching the notion of grad school altogether, Robert’s father had confessed, with Chablis breath, that he and Robert’s mother had been ‘fairly dedicated swingers’ in the ‘70s. And that Victor Wallace had been among the discreet circle of friends who had taken their Updike too seriously. Nineteen seventy four. His father said further that Victor, an architect, had fellated him and that the man sported a goatee in those days that looked like an Irish au pair’s fussy pussy. The women seemed to have been more interested in seeing Alan’s cock in Victor’s mouth than in each other and weeks later Robert’s mother was still making his father wash his penis with Phisohex before relations. Robert’s father said Victor had coughed the semen out into his cupped hands with his back to everyone, and then he handed Robert a glass of Chablis and said, winking, ‘This isn’t freaking you out, son, is it?’ Beaming.
‘No dad. It’s just that I have something I need to tell you.’
The swinging had lasted no longer than the whole country’s appetite for Scrabble and fondue. When Victor’s first wife Marnie, who was such a ‘cutie’ that Robert’s father had endured Victor’s ‘finicky’ blow job just to ‘get at her,’ died of breast cancer, the two families of former swingers used the funeral as a watershed; an excuse to wipe the slate clean. The surviving adults behaved as though the swinging had never happened. As though Victor had never tasted Alan’s semen or that Marnie and Dot had never awkwardly petted and kissed or had intercourse on numerous occasions with each other’s husband while the others watched and sometimes photographed it. They only socialized still at all because pointedly not to socialize would have been a tacit reminder of the unspoken. There stood Robert’s family on the Wallace porch on Christmas Eve, alive and brooding.
Miriam Wallace had paid no particular attention to Robert at her Christmas party for the first hour or so after he’d arrived. As Robert put it, in her arms in a rented bed a year later, it seemed as though it was an idea that ‘kinda sorta creeped up’ on her. Miriam said no, it wasn’t that. She’d had a lot on her mind that night. Her husband Victor, also responding to whatever nostalgia trigger a combination of mulled wine, Christmas, and the anticipatory angst of seeing old friends after a gap of years can create, had bragged to her about the swinging, too. With the notable twist that in his version of the confession, Victor hadn’t been the one coughing the semen out. Though Miriam stopped short of adding this detail when the topic came up. Let the boy keep his illusions. There is no kinder sentiment.
They were three assignations into the intermittent affair and spring had arrived in the form of green lawns appearing through block-long scabs of slush. More dangerous driving conditions; a self-conscious, rhythmless slow dance behind the drawn curtains of the motel window. Afterward, Miriam, up on one elbow in bed, tracing random arabesques on Robert’s hairless chest with the finger of a much younger woman, told him, ‘You can’t imagine how jealous I was. It was bad enough that pictures of Marnie were still up all over the house, fifteen years after she’d died. Some of her clothes were still in the guest room closet, for god’s sake.’ She said, ‘Then I have to find out that Victor fucked Dot and Alan and this experience he shared with his dead wife the titless saint? Give me a break.’
As Miriam described it, Victor, clutching a wineglass with one hand and tugging the waist of his wife’s gown with the other, had pulled her into his study while friends and a token neighbor or two were singing along teary-eyed to a scratchy Joni Mitchell album in the living room. The scratches and skips on the record are the sound of our wrinkles, Miriam remembered thinking. That’s when Victor made the confession, producing a manila envelope of faded Polaroids from the back of a locked desk drawer for proof.
‘He was so proud of himself I wanted to slap him.’
The sun was setting in the curtains. Miriam and Robert had known each other for over a year. It struck Robert as his eyes darted from Miriam’s heaped clothing on the chair nearest the bed… to her fur-trimmed coat on the door… to that Panzer-like purse on top of the television and the lipsticked water glass beside it… that she had made the room her own. That is, although Robert had chosen the motel himself and made the reservation and would soon pay for the room with tip money it felt like they were trysting in Miriam’s boudoir. He felt bound by the rules of decorum imposed by being her guest. He couldn’t just get up and switch on a light, for example, or take a piss without asking. The mere thought of voiding his bowels in the motel toilet… her motel toilet… was beyond the pale. He wondered if this was something she was good at, taking over a space, and was it just her or tall, attractive, adulterous wives in general. And yet, he reflected: ironically, she is the guest of her husband’s dead first wife in her own home.
Miriam squeezed the hollows in Robert’s cheeks together in a way uncannily like his mother had done when he was a boy and she was a happier, more playful person and said, ‘You better not be thinking this is anything like a scene from The Graduate, buster.’
‘What?’
‘The Graduate. You better not…’
‘The graduate? Which graduate? Who?’
‘The film. Dustin Hoffman! You…’
‘Who?’
‘Simon and Garfunkle!’
‘Simon and what?’
‘Jesus fucking Christ.’
Miriam said nothing for a long time during which Robert could actually hear his Swatch watch ticking on the counter beside the sink in the bathroom. He thought: there are people who could pass gas in front of an attractive woman and laugh it off with a joke and people who’d rather hold it in for hours of discomfort and I am of the latter group. Although I admire the former. Life must be so much easier for them. He stole a glance at Miriam whose hands were covering her face. He came to understand that she was crying. He tried to imagine what the rest of his life would feel like if he let one fly beside Miriam under these circumstances. Hot and hissing and green like absinthe… the poltergeist of a rotten egg. His actual insides, exposed to the open room and her judgment.
‘Miriam.’
‘No.’
‘Miriam. No what?’
He pulled her hands away from her face and he flinched: she wasn’t crying, she was laughing with mirthless glee like a deaf child torturing a cat. She rolled off the bed and fetched her purse and got her cigarettes and lit a Kretek and sat with her back to him. She puffed like it was a thinking tool or a method of divination. She turned to squint and said ‘Okay, the problem is this.’ More puffing.
‘An older married woman having relations with the young son of her husband’s friends, there’s plenty to hide. But in our case, ja? My husband encourages this. He asks for details afterward. We’re just doing it in this motel room to give us the illusion that we’re indulging in an illicit thrill.’ Puff.
‘We could be doing this at home and Victor would be reading the New York Times downstairs in the fricking breakfast nook. Or washing the dishes. And he’d call up the back stairs and ask if anyone wants an herbal tea. He’d serve us on a breakfast tray complete with linen napkins. How erotic is that?’
‘What we do isn’t erotic?’
‘You think it is.’
‘I always assumed that anything anyone did with my erect penis was erotic.’
She turned her back to him again and blew out an empty blue thought-balloon of smoke. Robert passed wind and waited.
“What we see is not what there is. The wave function really exists, but we don’t see it when we look; we see things as if they were in particular ordinary classical configurations.”
Conspiracy arguments amount to an accumulation of the observed: never questioning the relationship between observation and reality in itself, merely shuffling the observational deck and drawing conclusions from a rearranged, but equally flawed set of “facts.”
The mistrust of the conspiracy theorists is superficial. They work with naively childish notions of both ‘reason’ and how to test (and to distinguish) received notions from reality–merely offering alternative versions for those received notions… by default, no more creative than looking at a mirror image and thinking the spacial or sequential reversal amounts to a reimagining of the origninal…when it is but a reorginization of the same. A profound failure of imagination, not it’s confirmation.
Tried to post this on SAugisntine’s Bunker… but got a comments closed at the end, and couldn’t find where this was still open. So come join me here. I’m open comments too.
I responded:
Jacob, the comments are open at TET 5.0 now… we close off each thread as it becomes too slow-loading, then open a new one.
“The mistrust of the conspiracy theorists is superficial. They work with naively childish notions of both ‘reason’ and how to test (and to distinguish) received notions from reality–merely offering alternative versions for those received notions…”
The term “conspiracy theorist” means what, exactly? A group of people who are all of equal intelligence, mental stability, educational level, social standing, family background, professional accomplishment, and so forth, whose experiences (in politics, corporate systems, engineering, etc) are identically scant and whose powers of deductive reasoning are inferior to your own?
I don’t understand the concept. Were the people who insisted that Nixon step-down after Watergate “conspiracy theorists”? What about the people who blew the whistle on Ken Lay of Enron? Were the people who asserted Voter Fraud in Florida (especially) in 2000, “conspiracy theorists”? Is any judge who finds for the plaintive* in a case against organized crime a “conspiracy theorist”? I’m interested in the nuanced argument that can explain… for example… how the Official, Mainstream, Non-Forbidden theory of the attacks on The Pentagon and The World Trade Center in 2001 *isn’t* a “conspiracy theory”. Surely, in *every* version of theory about those events, a “conspiracy” is at the heart of the theory. No? If not: explain.
The term is empty jargon with a purely political function. You can’t build a nuanced argument around a piece of junk sloganeering. The term is an an ad hominem used to shut-down debate. What is your personal interest in shutting down debate?
And how does a “wave function” apply to, eg, Richard Nixon?
Happy, which edition of the Philistine’s Catch Phrase Handbook are you using again…?
I invite you to go through the thread and try to find a single comment of yours that almost represents a cogent/interesting/worth-the-pixels remark about Poetry, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath or any even vaguely-related topic. Not a single one, is there?
The Internet is a useful technology for research and communication, but it’s also a bottomless source of free-floating animus. If you want to sign up to be one of my haters, you’ll have to get in line… you’re fairly naive to think you’re the first envy-riddled idiot with a DAILY MIRROR-inspired vocabulary who tried to make me cry! Larf
My hero!
Nothing like the glorious flame wars of old, of course, but a poignant little reenactment…
Sorry. I was just washing the Aquaphor and critical dark matter off my weighty green strap-on. You’re so right about past times! Cue up the Bruce Springsteen. (Larf!)
Actually, there are genuine shocks to be found in this GUblog debate.
A commenter (of our acquaintance at TET, who happens to be an able UK-based poet) writes:
goldgathers
24 Mar 2010, 4:05PM
Contributor
Steven, your Ted quotes neatly illustrate a number of my technical problems with his writing. A tractor is and does none of these things; the poem is a hotch-potch of anthropomorphic fallacy. There was some debate here recently re WCW’s “no ideas but in things”; Ted is full of “no things but in ideas”. For a poet famed for his supposed power of observation, his things are lost in a fog of ideation; his tractor fails, for me, as a poem, because it is untrue, poetically, as untrue in its own way as the “self-pitying me-me whining” that , as smp says, characterises much of his wife’s ouvre. In fact, I’ve never got the either/or dichotomy that the Plath v Hughes debate elicits; they strike me as two sides of the one coin. But hey, these things are matters of taste, no?
I still can’t wrap my noggin around that one. I responded:
AugustineSteven
24 Mar 2010, 5:15PM
GG:
“A tractor is and does none of these things; the poem is a hotch-potch of anthropomorphic fallacy. There was some debate here recently re WCW’s “no ideas but in things”; Ted is full of “no things but in ideas”. For a poet famed for his supposed power of observation, his things are lost in a fog of ideation; his tractor fails, for me, as a poem, because it is untrue, poetically…”
I dunno. Strikes me that if you read the cited lines (or the poem itself), the “anthropomorphic fallacies” turn out to be dramatic metaphors for the narrator’s perceptions/sensations of the object (and conditions) he’s dealing with. Doing without the “like” and “as” and “in the manner of” flags of simile is a formal choice that A) compresses the text nicely (I value concision in poetry) B) makes the sensual aspects of the metaphors more visceral/direct. To argue against the dramatic (fantastical) appearance of these metaphors as if they are falsifications of Tractor Truth seems unnecessarily Fundamentalist re: a medium (Poetry) that draws so heavily not only on Observation but on the Imagination. There’s a word for the textual form that’s all Observation and (little or) no Imagination: Journalism.
It seems, in the end, that you’re accusing Hughes’ Poetry of being too… poetic? But that can’t be true. Because you’re a Poet, too.
“But hey, these things are matters of taste, no?”
Taste and, possibly, ideology…?
“A tractor is and does none of these things…” goes right on the TET t-shirt! Christ, there’s almost a whiff of Woody to it…
I’m getting so I can smell him through Vicks-coated nostrils, that symp-tom.
I think it’s our clue that Cap’n Woody is just another manifestation of the Fundamentalist Zeitgeist; it’s a mistake to picture him as the source of it in Lit. You’d think this sort of thing would be the reaction to a prior period of decadence, but we’re still knee-deep in the decadence. I must admit that it very nearly saddens me that the near-Comrade who authored that anti-poetic “A tractor is and does none of these things…” argument can’t, apparently, appreciate something like 2nd gl(ance) @ a Jag (title obscured to avoid prosecution by the copyright hawks watching the net):
2nd gl(ance) by – Mr. H
Skinful of bowl, he bowls them,
The hip going in and out of joint, dropping the spine
With the urgency of his hurry
Like a cat going along under thrown stones, under cover,
Glancing sideways, running
Under his spine. A terrible, stump-legged waddle
Like a thick Aztec disemboweller,
Club-swinging, trying to grind some square
Socket between his hind legs round,
Carrying his head like a brazier of spilling embers,
And the black bit of his mouth, he takes it
Between his back teeth, he has to wear his skin out,
He swipes a lap at the water-trough as he turns,
Swivelling the ball of his heel on the polished spot,
Showing his belly like a butterfly
At every stride he has to turn a corner
In himself and correct it. His head
Is like the worn down stump of another whole jaguar,
His body is just the engine shoving it forward,
Lifting the air up and shoving on under,
The weight of his fangs hanging the mouth open,
Bottom jaw combing the ground. A gorged look,
Gangster, club-tail lumped along behind gracelessly,
He’s wearing himself to heavy ovals,
Muttering some mantrah, some drum-song of murder
To keep his rage brightening, making his skin
Intolerable, spurred by the rosettes, the cain-brands,
Wearing the spots from the inside,
Rounding some revenge. Going like a prayer-wheel,
The head dragging forward, the body keeping up,
The hind legs lagging. He coils, he flourishes
The blackjack tail as if looking for a target,
Hurrying through the underworld, soundless.
Yes, indeed, it’s not some fey, minimalist ramble a sad old fuck of a reader can project his/her diary of regret upon… for that’s surely what most poetry is expected to do for us as we age and so that is the poet’s crime here (there’s also the fact that talent is always prosecuted). It’s a work that ignores us. It stands aloof in its well-made beauty. I would, too.
That’s peppy.
I was just re-reading the Guardian obit about Nicholas Hughes (little more than a year since his suicide). And this may explain the aloofness.
“A 2004 paper explored why larger fish swim upstream in the turbulence of midstream rather than in the quieter waters near the banks: ‘Large fish swim further from the bank to avoid wave drag, the resistance associated with the generation of surface waves when swimming close to the surface,’ he wrote.”
However, Margaret Drabble should have her mouth washed out with soap for this grotesque misandric flourish:
“Her son tried to survive her, escaping to Alaska, pursuing the wild fish through the icy rivers, but in the end he swam back up stream to the terrible birth and death place. Plath was heroic, in her struggles to create light and art from darkness, and so, I must and need to feel, was he.”
That’s been gnawing at me this whole year. I am purged.
“…that symp-tom.”
Oh Lord! Remember that Yahwevian break I plaintively entreated Daddy for? There it is–love and syllables! Philip Roth gave it to me, after all. As surely as he stood over me while I typed. If you think about it–in this last round of books Sorrentino, Roth, Coetzee and DeLillo–have given us everything we need to be victorious. Our fathers did not disinherit us; they do care for us as we care for them. What’s more, they are with us, and for us. What more do we need to go Into the breech with every confidence?!
This is beyond my conceptual abilities to fathom, CDS Frances! My limits lie chiefly in the fact that I think of great writers as hairy meatbags like the rest of us, possessing powers no greater than the ability to choose and sequence words with an unerring eye towards making them seem like more than they are. It’s a spooky power but not supernatural! Roth and DeLillo shit and snore and pick at their scabs according to the natural law we all commune in; and Coetzee isn’t even a genius. The spirit you call on when you slam into that breech is your own, CDS Frances! The spirit is mighty and non-transferable: books nourish it but it is already there to be nourished. But what do I know?
CDS Steven,
You should know me by now. I always have to put “it” (whatever it is) where I can see it on someone else before I can go to the coat check and give them the claim ticket for my own wrap. I don’t think that’s uncommon, which is why I’m willing to risk exposing the process, faulty as it seems. It’s like when you take Beloved’s avatar with you when you enter the fray. She’s with you, so guaranteed you’re going to be your best self. If I need to take them with me right now, I take them. If it’s a trick of the mind, who cares? What isn’t? I don’t go anywhere alone anymore. Not by choice anyway.
Aha! Well-explained and now filed in my memory banks: like George Foreman taking a St. Francis medal into the ring…
Yeah, thanks for saying that. And it’s WHY I fight too.
The fighting is good. In this the Era of Vegging, esp.
I see your tantalizing carrot down below. I’m thinking about it. Deeply.
undertakings
1. 70-80
the undertaker’s a
potent figure in the cosmology of the
negro neighborhood, standing
somewhere between baron samedi and
charon and paul in the
hodgepodge of religious myth infusing
negro blood since after the flood and before
the fall (that’s)
(a.d.1492)
(and 1864, resp.,)
(y’all). every
sweatbox baptist
storefront hall with
crosses soaped on
steamed-up street level
windows and a
drumkit near the
pulpit and all, has one
square-jawed well-dressed man to which
the heart-stopped sisters will
report, slack jaw’d and black-tit
naked as a last
resort: maybelle splayed on the
stainless steel
table; nelly with his
trochar in her
belly; to be
sewn and bewigged and
bought back by
kin folk like
dolls
in ’75 it came to
philly to live, to seek asylum from its
run-down origins. its
grandmother’s sister and its
grandmother’s sister’s husband and a family friend ran
a funeral home on penn street and
took it in. the first nude girl he saw his age was
dead; he found himself at
10pm in homes smelling richly
frugal chicken dinners, pulling
ageless men by ankles from broke
beds. which had the effect
of making sylvia plath seem
so much less than serious; just
hysterical instead: to think some
grape-dark skin came
off in your hands and the
sheets were stiff with
black shit shat in perishing by some
poverty-ravished nigger and the orangey blood he
shudderingly bled, gluing the sheets to
his fingers, back of his head, then who-the-fuck must care
what sylvia’s god-damned daddy
did or
said?
was the year of paperback friendships and
other people’s next of
kin; philly the gothic backdrop; the prussian ghosts and
hoagie shops and sinisterly ubiquitous willie penn and his
sternly integrated
quaker friends and the sound back then:
doo wop’s residue and
gamble and huff and negro chapel requiems with
the white album thrown in as his
imagination’s only
alternative, bedroom lit
like an aquarium by the
atlantic light of the fm dial, (all four sides played)
(entire one night) (he nodded off and dreamed)
(four bodies in the)
(chapel were)
(brit and white); and the smells. the
odor of life in
’75, old spice and
formaldehyde, herbal lotion on hand milking
new penis dreams in strawberry incense from
headshop and
vaseline on anus of
the sister of his
friend, the tooth-white boy-thin girl who
quoted sylvia post-
coitally, wiping herself matter-
of-factly while
grinning. he shyly showed her
poems tapped on
onionskin and she provided
mocking encouragement, her
poems being better but
beginning good she’d never
be great: beginning poor he
had to compensate; she gave him
poems to over-take; she
cut the sex off when
he did
2. 80-90
ws’ was a creepy curse; emily’s reads
“called back” (or)
(reimbursed) and he at 30 to
kill a three-day weekend plots his
own stone verse in
draft after draft of
epitaph while
drinking/ smirking (plus the stinking)
(vcr’s not)
(working)
the avenue’s a patent leather belt, the
rain-bearded air and welted
windows and the wetted shingle
smells, he tilts on
shaker back-legs (oblique revenge against)
(his woman’s wealth), tingling
and sneezing in the screen door and shaking
in memorial day breezes like
a mortal sparkling of the
“self”, naked in its skin:
he liked to play “what if?” and
after that, “if, then”
(not bad but flashy and)
(oblique: an epitaph should)
(make immediate sense)
(discreetly)
the apartment’s dark, outside is filled
with the crash and patter and soak
of weather and million sparks of
high-beam lights that
wick and shatter; guide incessant
cars together, a
sluice-along procession at
the dignified velocity of
the blind or
the wise or
the tarrying ride
to a burial rite, about the star of which
the wry might bitch
he did and didn’t
make it. naked
as an upper-case A in the
doorway (the busted shaker)
(foal-legs cracked) (sits in shock)
as he stands, bottle-grips the
hard-necked muse and crafts his
auto-epitaphs
Here lies Joe, Still
Black, (too glib, then)
Not Quite Called but
Fallen Back.
peering, he can see their bed along a vacant line of sight
through three small rooms to the front of the flat in bleary light.
beside the bed, a nightstand on which a bottle of great beauty (he)
(drank the stuff inside but) (she was too snooty)
is sodomized by a candle she claimed to like. above the bed
those middlebrow diplomas: vincent’s squiggles of his final field; a
steel-framed print of arbus dunces,
their quaintly stunted poses
(and by the way)
(middle-brow means)
(not knowing but knowing about the work of)
(immanuel kant or)
(reading one umberto eco once)
(or finding anything written or spoken)
(by some british bloke so very)
(serious or terribly)
(funny) (or better yet saying)
(vagina in place of that)
(lower-or-higher-brow chestnut)
(cunt)
he stepped out on the landing over akimbo shaker, exiting the flat like
a simple objet d’art crafted from glue and a
stack of shadows by some gifted
nigger-maker (don’t forget he’s still)
(naked as blood in a)
(beaker) so
down the back stairs towards
garbage can and garden, the
shimmering steps in sizzling
darkness, he’s never felt
so typical in
life: a truly nigger thing to
do alright, to
lurk with no intention but
hiding
(he remembers reading)
(an issue of psychology today about some wasps’)
(stigmatic bleeding)
(and on pg. 23 a treatise on the syndrome plaguing weedy)
(men, who, reaching 33)
(fretfully compare themselves to christ)
(troubled by what little they’d each achieved by the time)
(said son of man had floor-planned the futures of)
(belfast and rome and)
(inspired modern anti-semitix and militarized the womb while)
(finding time to)
(gerrymander palestine)
(in eponymous millennia to come)
(but, dig: they once asked coltrane’s cousin)
(didjall think the brother would amount to sumpin?)
(and she said no)
(nobody thought anybody was going to be anything)
(and that’s exactly right)
(any nigger’s epitaph)
(could only be)
i tried
Possibly peppier still.
It’s no masterpiece like Comrade DJ Sensei Ted’s but it gets some kind of job done, CDS Frances.
Meanwhile, I like this comment in that otherwise largely dreary, belligerent, finger-sniffing thread about Ted:
SwordsDes
25 Mar 2010, 12:55PM
Hello medea999.
. i think you raise valid points about Hughes’s ‘gift’ for exploring the ‘primal’ and understanding just what he came from, what inspired him and the kind of instincts and interests that were to accompany him throughout his life.
TED HUGHES
Like poems, the landscape comes alive in death,
in your poems the rabbits blood in evening sun
has wobbled to set for Plath’s moon.
Alive behind these fine poems
there must have been a powerful loneliness
that crept like some great darkness,
like the thought fox with his clever eye.
You are he thought-fox trying to escape the cage
of disturbing consequences, or feminist rage,
ready to pounce on these platitudes of prey,
Sylvia a victim of that day.
Now innocent too poets are,
with all our deep and hidden hearts
like all true Lovers of the arts.
Now I know who these women are,
How they hold their heads at night
and sought a reclusive soul for light.
(After the death of Ted Hughes)
James Anthony Kelly
~
Kelly is a Kerry poet I met on February 14 2005, in the Focus homeless charity canteen on Eustace Street, Temple Bar. A ‘penny lunch’ place offering a choice of two dishes made with only the freshest of ingredients. One euro eighty and eighty five cent for a desert, 30 cent for a pot of tea. The philospohy being to help the poor avail of at least one nutritious meal a day
There are penny lunch canteens in most large towns in Ireland medea999, a residual effect of the famine or – ‘great hunger’: A holocaust seared into the national psyche that caused half the population to die or emigrate – it is the one cultural bind most Irish share – a sort of unconscious collective reason why, in this country, no matter how far down the socio-economic ladder one goes, human connection seems always there, between the highest and the lowest in the land.
However in the Ireland I first met Kelly in, five years ago at the height of the boom, most would rather pay 15 times the price we did, for an inferior quality lunch, rather than dine with fellow citizens on their uppers: understandably I suppose as most were wealthy then. But being a regular there, meant one was aware always of the less well off, and naturally, being amongst them, had to view and treat them as humanly as one does oneself. Compassion and understanding for those at the bottom of our heap, was never lost – a common touch if you will.
And James Kelly is very much the human and compassionate poet: one of the last wandering bards, he traverses all over the country, here and there – flitting fro and to the weekly summer fairs selling his poetry chapbooks, supporting himself as a poet on his own terms and only on the island could such a poetic individual exist, it is tempting to think. A legend amongst his own kind and yet all but unknown outside of Ireland, one of the best, a mesmeric Kerry accent of human birdsong. Like Yeats.
I’d heard of him as one does an urban legend, from the poets I was meeting at the open mics in Dublin when I first arrived in summer 2004, and wondered would we ever meet. It was apt we did on Valentines day, as I was in Focus having lunch on this the first day of trying to sell some love poems on the street, direct to the public.
I printed the one love poem I had, on flock-gold 90mg A4 paper that cost ten cent a sheet, rolled round one and a half inch plastic pipe, and sealed with a wax impress of the letter O – a novelty – solely for the sheer heck of seeing what would happen when it was just me, the public and my poetic ware: Two euro a rolled up piece of gold-flock 90mg paper – a two thousand percent return on my venture into poetry as business. The goal to truthly proclaim to the people at poem.uk I was competing with, that each unit of my poetry yielded the return of this magnitude medea999.
I introduced myself to Kelly and we swapped our wares: He gave me a chapbook and I gave him one of the rolled up poems, and I read the chapbook during the afternoon seeling session – one of the most underrated contemporary poets around. Completely off the radar, yet more real than ten of Magma’s regular best.
I stationed myself in a disused doorway of Bewleys on Westmoreland Street and waited, selling a fair few over the course of the next few days, and writing the one below for a guard, who commissioned me to compose one for his girlfriend with red hair who I had not seen: Karen. The style came out of reading Kelly at the time I wrote it, on Essex Street, over an hour or two.
Your curled red hair like sun-flame
Streaming through the ether
Of a February day, has captured
Every moment of the time it took
For love to ripen and the suddenness
With which I fell for you
Sensuous butterfly
Who makes my spirit quicken
To the music of the thorn bush
And the cherry blossom, sung
In spring to the lilting beat
Of a love-song singing – Karen.
I spent two or three days, sitting in a foldaway chair, gazing out and averaged thirty euro return a day, from less than two euro investment.
The comment will be deleted soon because the poster is a boogieman over at the GUblogs for his flamboyant irascibility. Better the flamboyant irascibility than the bog-standard cocktail of tall-tree-gnawing, chauvinistic regionalism and obsessional class-anxiety-hostility that characterizes most of the “discussions about literature” thereabouts.
I’ve just returned from an Opening at the Daad
Gallery. Picture a gigantic lesbian dressed in black
with some Indian symbol painted on her forehead,
singing loudly/badly a self composed Shubert-esque
piece about her hospitalized girlfriend. I can imagine
exactly what/who put her girlfriend in the hospital.
I retreated to the balcony of the room,where there
was still a bit of oxygen (you know how much Europeans
smoke…) and to put a bit of space between me and the
unusually ugly audience. Looking down onto the street,
I watched two prostitutes, one of them 6 ft. tall with
white leather boots that went up to her breasts. As
the lesbian inside shrieked louder, the hooker gazed
up to me on the balcony, and I shrugged my shoulders,
“!?!”
Then I noticed in the adjoining room of the
gallery there was another balcony next to mine, where
an impish woman was doing a “performance”
or what was more like a human installation. She was
sitting quietly on a ladder, a helmet on her head with
a long metal spike attached to it. A thunderstorm was
coming. I guess she was calling herself The Human
Lightning Rod, but it was at that point so undramatic,
that I think nobody even knew she was out there.
VINTAGE EMAIL
Doctor Steven’s Cure For Anomie, Distemper, and Vaginal Lethargy
Tuesday, September 14, 1999 7:16 PM
Dear _____:
Step 1: GET AWAY FROM THE TEEVEE! The teevee is not
your friend. The teevee is your nemesis. Repeat after
me: NEMESIS. The teevee says LOOK AT THESE SILLY-CONED
HOOKER-LIKE BLEACHED-BLONDE MALL CHICKS WITH
DOUBLE-DIGIT IQs AND DOUBLE-D CHESTS! THEY ARE GOOD!
THEY ARE DESIRABLE! The teevee says THE WORLD OF
HAPPINESS AND EXCITEMENT IS TWENTY-SOMETHING AND
WHITE! The teevee says ALL PROBLEMS OF NORMAL PEOPLE
ARE RESOLVED IN THIRTY MINUTES (counting in the
commercial breaks). The teevee is an evil
self-creating consciousness that panders to the basest
desires and fantasies of its Host Culture as a matter
of survival. TEEVEE SHOULD BE FORBIDDEN FOR ANYONE
UNDER THE AGE OF SEVENTY FIVE, AND IF THAT’S
UNFEASIBLE, IT SHOULD AT LEAST BE FORBIDDEN FOR NEW
MOTHERS. So: stick your tongue out at the Poopy Box
and say you don’t wanna play!
step2: Anyone who is REALLY suffering from a loss of
libido wouldn’t complain about the loss of it! A
libido-less personality just wouldn’t give a
shit…you wouldn’t experience it as a loss, but as a
neutral response to the notion of sex. It wouldn’t
bother you. In fact, you’d probably be relieved to be
free of all those desires and impulses IF YOU REALLY
WERE FREE OF THEM. What you’ve REALLY lost is the
ability to SATISFY your libido. Which means your
NARCISSISM, which is at the core of whopping orgasms,
has been diluted, diffused, disoriented, disassociated
or otherwise seriously fucked with. Probably, in part,
because a large chunk of you recently CAME OUT of you
and set up shop as a separate entity, so Narcissism
mutated into Selfless Mother Love, and set up a
conflict. How can you love D___ endlessly and
selflessly and without limit, and still love yourself
as much as you ought to, at the same time? Also, can a
Good Mom be a flaming Narcissus? No! The trick is to
forget all that Selfless junk and learn to love him
SELFISHLY (you won’t need to back off on that until
he’s old enough to need more space). Right now you can
be a greedy gloaty Creatress of your Baby-thing and
see him as little more than a snapped-off piece of
your extruded self… which is exactly what he is (at
least for a little while longer). Glory and gloat in
his perfection, luxuriate in the arrogance of being
his Creatress, and rediscover your Narcissism. Once
you get your Narcissism back, your Sex Life will
follow.
I think you gave your friend really wonderful advice. In the alternative, you could have suggested she get a Smith-Corona portable typewriter and take it to a cafe to “click and clack away!” as CDS Jacob put it recently. I bet you my next paycheck of gratitudicals that some wet and wild Winslet wannabe offers to pass him the Wite-Out before his first java refill, especially if she glances over his shoulder and sees the word “grackles” typed there. He’s got me thinking of investing in some castanets. Lighter to carry.
And then coconuts to simulate the steed-based exit
FINGER IN YOUR I
I suppose this part of TET 5.0 is the POETRY section. There are themes I feel compelled to illuminate in the ruddy clouds of this skirmish. Why is the vast majority of the pyramid of poetry of the past 30 years a hot dump of utter shit ?
Ego. I’m up against it, quite often, professionally (in the music world): hacks who shrink the world to the fit of their Egos rather than stretching to accommodate a world full of elements beyond their current ken. Prosecute the talented; reward the fair-to-middlin’, cultivate the terms under which you may reasonably crown Thyself.
This is what I mean: the modern definition of “Poetry” as whatever a given Ego is, itself, capable of. If YOU couldn’t have written it, it isn’t POETRY. Lauding the mediocre means endorsing ones modest accomplishments; ones meager talents; to damn the talented is to protect the needy Self. When did people stop praising the extraordinary? When did they stop praising wonders they, themselves, were incapable of? When they shrank into bitter smugness. Maybe capitalism (that unrelentingly cruel and unfair beauty contest) battered them that far. Maybe I understand. I wonder if I can forgive? Not within hearing of some sweaty, low-IQ, fumble-word “poetry slam”.
Some time ago, the near-Comrade I’m debating (at the GUblog on Hughes) posted a link (among others) to a “poet” responsible for the following:
I understand the question
we are both very mixed
in exchange,
the correct version
again and again
i feel dodging
closer
half hear
cannot answer
less bound
surprisingly clear
know how,
know that
word by word
we’re on our own
lovely day on
the hills i’m
glad we were
all there
This, he links to. Ted Hughes he pooh-poohs. This coy little bowl of alphabet soup. This, you call poetry? The sort of narcisso-scribble the awful huckster Silliman will praise. It takes more talent to pick a horse’s nose with pliers than to type this gunk! Why laud it?
Because it threatens not. One may easily out-write it. It’s an adolescent’s maneuver… teenage girls did it when I was a teenage boy and easily baffled: slyly praise the looks of a homely girl! I didn’t get it then. I get it now.
It’s fine when teenage girls do it.
I’m sick to my stomach. There isn’t enough friendship between myself and the near-Comrade I have a problem with, in all this, to protect him from my apprehension that he is contributing to the grindingly inexorable fucking-up of Poetry for his own Selfish needs.
Addendum: the dabbler who wrote the above-cited “poem” endorses the following on his page, writing “Here’s one from Uncertain Time which has been particularly with me this past year”:
GRACKLES
Words, words.
The tumult
to live where
you would be
loved.
The waters
rising.
Only ten or twenty million people (schooled in the proper attitude) are capable of producing that, eh? Well, as I wrote, on March 9, 2009, before happening upon that gem:
(Try mentioning grackles the next time you write a POOUHM… it always works. Esp. good as a HAIKU’S title or in a CONCRETE POOUHM shaped like grackles).
And: another great post from Desmond Swords on the topic (in response to my posting of the Hughes Jag pome):
*
SwordsDes
25 Mar 2010, 6:15PM
Thanks very much Augustine. I’d not read this before and it is very effective. The combinations fulfill Horace’s maxim of plain words combined startlingly into a kick of Anglo Saxon Old and Middle English words, spiky, rough,
A gorged look,
Gangster, club-tail lumped along behind gracelessly,
He’s wearing himself to heavy ovals,
The various two, three and four word combinations – in the seventeen or so here – parenthesized ‘gorged look gangster’ (for example) ran-through Google, returns only two links, both to the original poem – one for the collection it appears in and the other interestingly enough – for a magazine in America – The New Yorker – where it was published on the 25 March 1967 edition – 43 years ago today, thirteen years after he wrote it in 1954 as a 24 year old when – according to one freind who wrote to Plath around that time – ‘the biggest seducer in Cambridge’ – was fresher still than many, erm… contemporary poems – ‘club-tail lumped’ – again, six returns, each one linking to the poem.
We don’t need to spin the rest through, because it is obvious:
Muttering some mantrah, some drum-song of murder
To keep his rage brightening, making his skin
Intolerable, spurred by the rosettes, the cain-brands,
Wearing the spots from the inside,
Rounding some revenge. Going like a prayer-wheel.
…the individual constituent parts – words – combine and create some greater poetic whole, and it is easy to see why an ultra-modernist would get up in arms about the poeticity levels being too much for them. Hughes’s freind Seamus Heaney attracts a similar kind of creative resentment from those less inclined to hear on the same inner chord, what poetry in this very talented man from Mytholmroyd, there was when he was an arch young ham chisseling his bit of home ground in the fenlands South and East of Hebden Bridge and Heptonstall where Plath’s grave is – in the Upper Calder Valley.
A poetically spartan spots where desolation and the big-sky, a modest prop of rolling moor and crag – offer the the orthodox modernists plenty of purchase to within: Geraladine Monk andMaggie O’Sullivan, both write out-of this topography and Jacob Polly the Cumbrian poet straddles the same Brigante realm of space and timelesssness of an alliterative rivetting thwack and thistle of Yorkshire leaning east. Liminally Hughes’ was – at birth – closer to Rochdale and Oldham, than where he moved to in South Yorkshire at seven, forty miles east to Mexborough.
Plath when she first met Hughes, quoted him his own poetry, and was inspired by this poem to compose her own, in response:
Pursuit
There is a panther stalks me down:
One day I’ll have my death of him;
His greed has set the woods aflame,
He prowls more lordly than the sun.
Most soft, most suavely glides that step,
Advancing always at my back;
From gaunt hemlock, rooks croak havoc:
The hunt is on, and sprung the trap.
Flayed by thorns I trek the rocks,
Haggard through the hot white noon.
Along the red network of his veins
What fires run, what craving wakes.
This is a quarter of it and we can immediately spot that both are very talented young ****’s who know it.
*
AugustineSteven
25 Mar 2010, 6:55PM
Novel, DS, isn’t it? Praise for an actual poem by Ted Hughes in a comment thread for a GU blogical about Ted Hughes. Let’s start a trend.
METAPHORPHYSICS, METAMORPHYSICALLY
Reading and writing are the only Arts I know of which are also, at the basic level, quotidian. People don’t sketch, sculpt or compose music as a matter of course as they tick-off the must-do boxes of the day’s unavoidable chores. There’s lots of confusion, then, between the entry-level activities and their manifestations as Art. It doesn’t help that the levels of accomplishment between crudest practitioner and the furthest, finest opposite on the scale are not infinite but divided by the rough number of the total literate population of earth, past, present, future.
I often press the point, when the old controversy comes up, that Sylvia Plath died before she could mature as a poet. She gassed herself when she was thirty. Her poems were fine, of course… she’s Sylvia Plath and I note the accomplishment. We’ve probably lost the sense of the thrill of newness her kind of confessional poem presented when it hit the scene. But the technology froze at the level of a certain kind of precociousness whereas Hughes’ technology developed (they will always be compared; it’s inevitable; what I don’t like is that Plath usually wins the comparison because Hughes, you know, was a cad). He reached another order of competency that few readers appear to be sensitive to. The special ability is evident in the poem I cite in a comment above. This line; look:
And the black bit of his mouth, he takes it
Between his back teeth
There’s nothing in Plath like this. Hughes has crushed the physical world to a weird plane where a void becomes an object and he has mastered Nature into being a creature that takes this transformed void into its mouth as if by instinct. The words have taken on a near-frightening power to remake physics, Nature and the normal hierarchy of object and perception, in the reader’s mind. Our sense of the basic is subtly breached and Hughes is in control of far more than his emotions or his recall. It’s there, again, in the poem, when he has the cat running under its own spine: an impossibly lyrical disjointing of a thing’s place and moment from itself. It’s a dangerous stereotype, given Hughes’ absurdly toxic biography, to cast him as any kind of brute but the force of his craft is brutal. Hughes the brute wizard of metaphorphysics. The visual equivalent is Cubism, of course, but the paradox is that Cubism is less dynamic, with no dimensional element of Time, and, compared to Hughes’ deformations, it is quaint. Picture a Hughes poem as a Cinematic Cubism, then, but one with a tactile component. Hughes took Cubism further with a much more brutal violation of the “real” or the “natural” than Picasso could muster (it’s hard not to point to the fact that Hughes’ mythos out-brutes Picasso’s as well). The next contender in the reality-smashing sweepstakes will have to be CERN.
Plath didn’t live to grow beyond a polite relationship with her words and the objects she matched them to. She’s famous for passages like this (I’m avoiding titles here to hide this talk from the copyright hawks):
White
Godiva, I unpeel —-
Dead hands, dead stringencies.
And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child’s cry
Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,
The dew that flies,
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning.
It’s beautiful enough but Plath hasn’t forced us into a new relationship with the world (and its natural laws) here; she has certainly not forced us into a new relationship with our relationship with the world. Godivas are white, hands can be dead, seas do glitter and it’s not much of a stretch to picture anything melting into a wall. Children cry, eyes can be red. We already know this world; it’s just a matter of now knowing Plath’s emotional state regarding it. We may sympathize or be shocked or depressed but we will not finish this poem with a new sense of the hierarchy of perception, word, object. Plath never reached the point of daring to breach the walls between these dimensions; dying and folding her actual death into the subsequent sense of her oeuvre was as close as she got to reaching it.
Here’s Hughes manipulating the animal to exaggerate an effect that will embody the animal, and animality itself, for us, in a way that polite observation couldn’t:
trying to grind some square
Socket between his hind legs round
Hughes hasn’t smashed timespace flat to the dimension of the page in this particular example but he is utterly this animal’s god. You can’t be an entry-level reader and catch this point.
Your point about longevity and mastery is well-taken. Why not compare big cat to big katze, then? (Some echoes of Narcissus here too.)
His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.
As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly—, An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.
OR
A ghost, though invisible, still is like a place
your sight can knock on, echoing; but here
within this thick black pelt, your strongest gaze
will be absorbed and utterly disappear:
just as a raving madman, when nothing else
can ease him, charges into his dark night
howling, pounds on the padded wall, and feels
the rage being taken in and pacified.
She seems to hide all looks that have ever fallen
into her, so that, like an audience,
she can look them over, menacing and sullen,
and curl to sleep with them. But all at once
as if awakened, she turns her face to yours;
and with a shock, you see yourself, tiny,
inside the golden amber of her eyeballs
suspended, like a prehistoric fly.
But can she type?
Cubism quaint? Hmmmmmmm. The decorative stuff where elements of the real world appear in the form of pattern and collage are certainly quaint but the first phase with very little colour or recognisable forms is well hard. Brutal as you’d put it.
I’ve not read enough Hughes to compare – your defence of him elsewhere and my partner’s response to the Birthday Letters suggest he’s not someone who can be wafted away easily but his word-world is a very recognisable world by dint of its words.Whereas those early Braques and Picassos are like looking at something with your glasses smeared in mud. Charlie Parker would be a musical equivalent of Cubism – melodies taken apart and replayed in an determinedly “ugly” fashion.
“…his word-world is a very recognisable world by dint of its words…”
To which I’d say: just as much as the paint-world of Picasso’s Cubism is a world “recognizable” by dint of being made of brown paint and canvas! I always thought of Charlie Parker as a sepia-tone Kandinsky, btw. Back to Picasso: he was the visual obsession of my teen years (I read the Roland Penrose and was it Francoise Gilot’s autobiog? over and over) before I moved on to Modigliani and from “Dedo” (“Je suis Juif!”) to Schiele. And as I got older I saw Pablo as the original Modern Pop Star (proto-Madonna), changing his styles with uncanny timing to keep the market fresh. The only phase I still don’t care for is the stuff most likely to go on Get Well cards: the Rose, the Blue, the Saltimbanques. I like his Marie Therese onanie calendar-pages but I’m probably the only one you know who likes his Late stuff most of all. I don’t think he was trying to sell anything with those. Desmoiselles (and The Musicians and, perhaps, Screaming Head with Lightbulb) were the last great edge-pushing grunts before Don Pablo went into money-minting as a fulltime operation. Remember how Hockney tried to bring Cubism back? I was hoping he would and then I realized… after seeing Hockney’s (and David Byrne’s) Polaroid Cubism that the idea was already maximally squeezed when Pablo was still in those cool overalls and Braque was his “wife”. And then Ted came along…
If I post again (!!! ) I’ll use my real name as above. Too cubist otherwise
Comrade Ed, Old Chum! Glad to see you here. My journey began hours ago, when I promised my daughter a walk into the first warm day of the year (always heralded by the concentrated waft of thawed dogstuff; in this case a very long Winter’s worth) to go buy a “little toy” (I was thinking of a water pistol) and ended up, not more than fifteen minutes ago, lugging home a fully-functional farm, about a quarter of the size of a Fussball table… I will get back to you after dinner (in a few hours)…
I’m not proud of it but I am now reading The Book Against God, and one of the little tricks I’ve devised to keep pushing through the mire is to antidotally read other pieces–a chapter of T-BAG, a something else enlivening and spiritually rejuvenating. So how funny is it that on this Rilke Friday I quite randomly selected Sarah at Five-ish, which is set in Vienna. http://staugustinian.wordpress.com/category/why-not-try-sarah-is-five-ish/
Gruss Gott!
Gott… don’t remind me, CDS Frances… the most terrifying waiters in the world!
Christ: I just got that one… T-BAG?
As our adventure in Tedland (from Terry World to Tedland: from midlife crisis to afterlife’s flame wars) draws to a close, this parting shot: surely the most idiotic and anti-poetry statement to make it into a comment thread about poetry in a long, long time; is this creature writing from a bar stool with very loud Dexy’s Midnight Runners in the background?
pinkroom
26 Mar 2010, 4:04PM
Hi mm
Cabalist to cabalist, might I (smugly) congratulate you upon the following insight into “Second glance…”
This grafting of human emotions on to animals is objectionable: it diminishes the animal itself, which ought to be allowed an existence beyond the human.
It was this aspect I seemed to recall bugging me when I first encountered Hughes at Gasworks High. He was very much the new cheese when those “Voices” anthologies came out and his me – aty, simile-laden verse always came next to some beautiful picture of a big cat, bird or whatever and I found the poems, at best, a bit distraction. Oddly enough the only one I liked was The Thought Fox because there was no real fox.
I thought Gold’uns observation about Graves, to whom I might add Lawrence, was an interesting one. I always get just a bit twitchy when bookish, white guys start comparing their “elite” spirits with top predators… eagles, panthers, wolves and whatnot. Ditto their Aztec or Gangsta fantasies. It seldom ends well.
Let the animals be.
Did she really write “let the animals be”…?
It was Melton Mowbray and not pinkroom who posted first the bizzare claim that the – ‘grafting of human emotions on to animals is objectionable and diminishes the animal itself, which ought to be allowed an existence beyond the human.’
Not that I have any problem with him and her believing this: No, what makes me smirk is the fact of them being anonymous and – for whatever reason – after two years, we know the two people writing this, as only mm and PR. If they dropped dead tomorrow we would never know, or like Cynical Steve, find out only after their life ends, what their real names are. At least old Cynicals dared give his first name to us. These two do not, and yet demand equal treatment.
Something that has long challenged me is this notion that the default ‘anonymous’ position online is somehow a right and we should all just treat each other as we would if we knew one another’s real identity. It’s OK for a while but after a short time the insidious falsity bugs me. It took a couple of years to work it out, flyting with the numerous made-up names online, eventually getting past it and coming to see – that when a person you do not know the name of, who answers questions that in real life would elicit a simple answer like John Janice, Madelaine or Jock – refuse – for whatever reason – to reveal who they really are, I twitch and think – why?
They can present all the reasoned argument they want, and I have had this debate before several years back, with anonymous people who claim it to be a human right almost, to remain anonymous doggerelists writing stuff of the same poetic quality they trash in other, non-anonymous poets. When they start raving:
‘ ..it’s a disgrace to the animal world, that pretender-poet-dreamer-creative intellect daring to cloth a jaguar with their shit words and write this fucking rubbish – unlike the doggerel I, anonymous in Brighton, bitter on the isle of dogs – composes.
Two and more years I’ve known these two and they have often tried to patronize me, but is not the truth, they are anonymous for a reason – because they are victims of the very cultural force they try to articulate as the one shaping, making, being that Britishness at the heart of the poetry they talk of as though… I dunno, but pink and melton will always remain anonymous bitters reading people like me, and until they wake up and stop falling for the bullshit that they can’t reveal who they are because the people in charge of their country, ‘my’ fucking England – instruct ‘em to.
Tossers.
Greetings, Comrade DJ Sensei Des!
Well, I do, in fact, understand Anonymity on the Net… I’ve been physically threatened many times since the late-’90s and if I weren’t built like a bouncer (Comrades who know me in meatspace know I’m not a fragile reed and resemble my literary voice not at all) I’d be circumspect about offending lunatics online. I don’t need to know who’s writing a comment; I’d just prefer that the comment be interesting and not eye-woundingly stupid. And then there’s Pig Ignorance on a barstool with its tongue up Shirty Boor’s arse…
As I wrote in a relevant email today:
“I rarely post at the GUblogs because of the overwhelming Yobbism (and petite Yobbism).”
It was worth it , in the end, because a few posters (you included) actually had interesting comments to make. That’s the beauty of comment threads: the Yobboes can’t shout you down as they would in a pub.
Please comment again and as long-windedly and often as you’d like (we’re not threatened by ideas over here and we do NOT delete comments), chum. We’re not precious about the pixel use.
Fuck The Kunts,
S
UPDATE: I see from the GUblog Hughes thread that Melton is trying to massage this into a turf war between myself and POLITELY HOMICIDAL, just because I referred to his doggerel, and to Pinkroom’s doggerel, as doggerel. Good old shit-stirring 101. I have no problem with others at that blog (besides that unknown fucker HenryLoydMoon, who took a swipe at me before I even knew his avatar existed: who the fuck is he?): a few of them over there actually have talent (and I have said so). I like Al, I like Mishari (much to Des’ and Suze’s understandable chagrin: he was beastly to them, but I can be beastly, too)… I won’t go down the list. This is my clarification, shit-stirrers. On the matter of Billy: that gets complicated. That “tractor” remark of his will take some time getting over… it does (as anyone who knows me knows) epitomize the kind of randomly proscriptive bullshit I happen to think is…etc.
I know our ‘name’ makes no difference and means nothing when it comes to writing quality we get from the portion of wit where Letters flower into blooms of eloquence.
Last year I ended up on the Poetry Foundation of America’s blog Harriet, and spent a summer of love spamming with two other mad-possessed by imbas poetic dreamers, being contemporary critical show-boats whose pizzaz and snazz stopped traffic, cut ‘the cloth and talk of honest men’ (as Kerry poet James Kelly has it) into small square silences, block of time caesuras in the posting of and halting because – what we wrote achieved the goal of being read, not skimmed over. And it was there I learnt – from a poster I knew only as the pseudonym Tom Brady, discovering after Brady’s the Beckham of America – that all my tussles with myself about being denied the common right of a name in print, was all misplaced and but the imaginative paranoia of a blogger with ideas above his station.
This was because ‘Brady’ was writing and starring as the best text in what passed for critical debate there. I spent weeks tracking down his writing and came across three years of Tom Brady and Monday Love, The Earl of Devon and a handful of other nom de guerres ‘Brady’ had been performing under, online in American poetry chat sites, most of which had banned him for being a spammer. Unlike me, he never made a spelling mistake and his thoughts were well ordered, rational and his itch Edgar Allen Poe – which all talk eventually turned toward.
I saw that he and Christopher Woodman, the other poster in our three way summer of takeover love, had been up to exactly the same thing as me, but in America.
‘Brady’ was writing by far the best stuff in the cut and thrust atmosphere of Harriet 09, and after two months of us three running amok, acting, being passionate, reaching toward the itch and slowly attaining what poetic capacity the good Lord, God, Creator, Cosmic Consciousness Co-Ordinator put in made us be – spirituality – all there it was in the four month affair when we made Harriet and it took off as a blog.
Travis Nichols, the editor of it, after two months, wrote to me a mail I immediately suspected was written not by a force of ‘best wishes’ he signed it off with, but by that old devil called humanly competitive jealousy and a general pissing off of him by some windy spammers who weren’t playing the game and turning with how he thought the world of poetry should. He flagged up the fact some ‘changes’ were being introduced for the benefit and blah blah blah of the ‘members’, and I wrote back a two page assault denouncing him, but didn’t send, opting instead for the double bluff.
‘Of course Travis, that’s no problem, thank you very much for giving me an opportunity to talk at Harriet.
Sincerely,
And Woodman, a seventy year old ex Harvard Oxford English lecturer, with a life and wife in Thailand, whose own itch to speak was because he got ripped of by Joan Houlihan and was agitating for the fixed manuscript competition coteries to be exposed – succumbed and wrote back, polite, passionately and fell into Trav’s trap,. who promptly put him on moderation, his strategy to take us out one by one as it was only me, Woodman and ‘Brady’ who Trav wrote to.
The upshot was he introduced a recommendation icon of ‘thumbs’ up or down and after seven clicks negative, the post was hidden from view. It was clear we were really doing his head in but because we were clearly real about our love for ditties, he had to go the long route instead of just saying **** off.
The cat and mouse continued all summer and on 1 September, with a new cohort of bloggers coming onto Harriet, he just zapped our accounts, no pre-warning, explanation or owt, just the statement – you win, I lose, can’t compete intellectually so **** off, I’ve had enough it’s nothing to do with poetry and everything to do with controlling how we act, what we say, all the phony shit.
‘Brady’ taught me the best doesn’t need a name as they are just as/is, and he set up a blog called Scarriet to take the fight back to Harriet, and I found out his real name is Tom Graves, and with Woodman and Alan Cordle of Foetry fame, who is AmPo’s (don share‘s word) bête noire for exposing Jorie Graham when she awarded her fiance a poetry prize – I am the token Euro in that mix.
I got back on Harriet undercover and am having great fun, my rounds now set, a sad spammer, shit poet, doggerelist and after many many names, know too ‘anonymous’ is the best.
The anonymous debate is not black and white, I know that now Augustine you **** [ed.'s note: you mean "cunt"! larf] and can see why people would be wary of being themselves in the face of anonymous loons ranting violent shit, but when it comes to literature and Letters, the majority of people, surely if they are sincerely commenting in a regular spot on blogosphere, hope after time to connect as human beings and will reach a time when they feel comfortable and ‘come out’ from behind the curtain of anonymity and end up as real as they are in daily life – ideally – yes – no?
I didn’t feel comfortable using my own name on the poetry thread for a short while. Originally i had got on the guardian as myself Desmond Swords, but in 2005 during the British election, the posting rights were removed on the orders of some editor who’s name escapes me now, a bloke, and that was that. A small insignificant thing, but it meant I could not appear as myself, because some bloke in his thirties who didn’t like my ‘tone’ decided to excise it from his workplace, masquerading as a democratic space where the carey sharies gather and agree how human and loving we are – mocking anyone not like us, not pukka, stiff-uppers, doing it for a mention off Sarah, Shirley, Charlotte and the rest of the well paid feminist star opinionated intellectuals and editors, who serve the bourgeoisie: Shift, outface, fuck off the cobwebs of con, grift and nonsense idea any of this can be measured – the truth is poetry just is, and it don’t matter of you’re spamming in supermax to an audience of no-one, or a millionaire down-pat mid-road duffer – we all come and go the same way – in between is all just conversation, be happy, have a laugh, joy and sorrow turn your cauldron and really Stevie my pleasant colleague, no one gives a **** but you and me, us, the two is all it takes to be united, oneself and ‘other’ – a million made up names – sorry to be the bearer of bad news but your poems have been rejected from the competition because some jealous soppy cunt is less honest, fair and free than us who keep the flame of liberty within, burning as a tree -
hugs
des.
[ed.'s note: this is rich stuff, Des and I want to edit the wee typos and illustrate it and serve it proper; I'll take a good long intelligent rant about lived life and ideas tested over smug ignorant posing any day; I think you'll find Comrade DJ Sensei Frances supporting your work as well. Just don't be too precious if I fix the typos and do scream if I illustrate your text with images you can't warm to]
Hey, I like Al, and know he likes me, it’s just a shame what happened with him and sue, but now, enough time has passed and we have a laugh about it, unless sue gets into a particularly delusional bout of victimhood and is looking for any old shite excuse to rail against the force of fate.
There are seven billion in the world and at least a billion will think we are cunts, but the truth is, our poetry does the talking and I know Al has a thing about me because he always links to the video of me in Mayo, 11.59 on the clock of drunkeness, twenty minutes later it was lights out, pissed as arseholes and awoke the following day in a field on the fringe of Kiltimagh, a spiritual occasion, it was the first time I had seen myself recite, after seven years in and I thought, hey, I look alright and it’s strange, all the blokes hate it but the women don’t.
I wonder what that means?
ha ha ha ha ha
Take no notice of me, only spamming. I like pink being honest, but melton has always loathed me, this anonymous middle aged bloke on the isle of white, who never posts more than a one liner, like his ‘expert’ god Billy Mills, too consumed with the success of others and defining themself against the few like Hughes and Heaney who have a gift and develop it. There is a reason the Red Wheelbarrow needs acres of supporting documentation and holy critical blather to elevate it into being a honey-gold object from the mouth of a Paterson Parnassus Apollo [ed.'s note: one supposes a wheelbarrow "is and does all of these things"]. It looks easy to write and so people like Mills and MM and pinkroom can leave their bars of excellence lower than the 13C fili-bard Fionn O Daly say, or any of the thousands from the 1200 year British tradition it is easier to block out and pretend never happened because to look at it properly is a ten year slog, not a toss and go of spontaneous poetry on poster poems.
The other thing that makes me titter is Crown and the poster poets anthology, already a year late, making me think, well, that’s the truth of UK po-biz, the words of the actors not worth a fig, and I am just glad to be happy and working, writing through the bones, making up hoodoo, telling porkies, being a performer, trying to attain one’s poetic potential, with the anonymous poet-bloggers who sprung from the bourgeoisie.
“Crown and the poster poets anthology…”
Opting out of that was instantaneous and the easiest decision I’ve ever had to make (next to removing a tack from my foot).
oops, should be Godfrey. Fionn O Daly, one of the top three in the 1200 year tradition who died in 1387.
CDS Frances, please come mingle with the guests!
I shall, thank you! I was just freshening up after my reading experience before I joined the guests.
Aha. Decontam….
Ah! Bob! Nice.
Ohhhh, how I needed that. Thank you, CDS Desmond.
Norman Rush unveiled. Sucker punch. I swear to God, I did not see that one coming. And it hurts! It hurts bad.
NORMAN RUSH’S STAR RISING
Well, here’s some straightforward propagenda from Normative Rush (Christ, we of Uncle Sam Co. need our constant affirmations, don’t we?)
He couldn’t generate the right metaphor for amazing 1989. He had an image of something like a metal claw sunk into half the planet suddenly disarticulating, but that was a weak image. Or it could be like this, he thought: You have a goliath of an enemy dressed in armor about to smite you who sits down suddenly and looks faint and when you open up his armor you find only his face is normal, the rest is sickly, mummified, and then he dies in front of you and it’s all over.
The armored mummy was Ronald Reagan, of course, but who’s counting? And the “right metaphor”, Norm, was Punch ‘n Judy
Cap’n Woody writes, over at The Millions:
Congratulations to this [crypto-rightwing] blog for promoting Norman Rush’s work — he is the most neglected major writer in America. Like Garth Hallberg, I definitely hear echoes of Bellow…
a blogger writes:
I found all that CIA stuff fascinating, naturally … it wouldn’t surprise me if Norman Rush had been somehow “in intelligence” – but that’s neither here nor there.
From The Millions (surely it’s time to change that to The Billions, by now?):
Of course this should be higher up the list, but it’s good to find it listed in any case. I chose a passage from Mortals to be read at my wedding; yes perverse and yes pretentious, maybe, but where else do you turn for love in this language?
Or the idea was to so charge her life with his appreciation that some morning she would sit up and say What the fuck is going on with us, I am so happy. The idea was to let this single flower bloom until it was something monstrous, like an item in a Max Ernst collage, something that fills the room and the occupant says Oh, this is you, this is you, my beloved friend, my love, now I see, something along those lines. He was going to float her in love and she would be like those paper flowers that open up. Water rising around her. She didn’t know about him that he could get an erection just thinking in passing about her and that on one occasion…
Rush’s talent is obscene, which means, I suppose, that he’s the right man for an obscene job. Christ, what a book.
Yeah, check out that “love of language”. It, erm, coruscates off the flippin’ page. And, oohh, daring, he mentions a Woody
Form the horse’s Norm himself:
Africa and pacifism: it’s morally right to try to moderate the violence of governments — anywhere. But sanctions as an alternative to violence against repressive regimes have not worked well, nor has the pacifist program of creating a snowballing of possible social strategies other than war.
We’re going to prevail on CDS Barry to come in here and talk about Africa to counter Rush’s self-serving, disingenuous bilge. Beware the Yankee B’wana (redundant, I know) who makes Africa his subject, Comrades…
UPDATE:
But, wait, Christ, how could I miss this? Cap’n Woody’s appearance at The Billions was a covert operation in the Cold War between Woody ‘n Zadie. The Billions shopkeeper wrote the following and so Woody rushed in with that above-cited, vote-buying pat on the head:
James Wood may posit two novelistic bloodlines, extending from Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, and Zadie Smith may see two paths going forward, but to stand before the Barnes & Noble fiction tables circa 2009 is to be asked to choose among thrillers and literary fiction, psychological novels and novels of ideas, novels driven by plot and novels driven by language, novels hailed for their imagination and those hailed for their accuracy.
Woody sneaking around in darkest 21st Century Litblogglandia is not terribly unlike Uncle Sam in Africa c. 1965, seducing/bullying banana republic converts against the Russkies. Not that Zadie is a superpower, but this won’t be the first time that Cap’n Woody’s vanity led him to a category error, or an error of proportions
Thanks very much FM and Augustine.
Your alert-to presence and flow, seeking self-control in Letters – who knows – what energies real love and what’s y’all luvvie – readers – muse – and trick pantomimed, folly left ‘n right, scratch ‘n sniff the yes – no question an existential outsider-us posits of Stevie baby.
The utmost sensitivity and awareness of bullshit-to-beauty-ratio. odds of any one directorial two to three whole going on to one wish turned towardness, during a second quarter of the 2010 UK po-biz surprise – AmPo all Carey sharey faery from a land of air and sinner, tripping craic into what awaits when we’re no longer ‘ere but.. none here to present and address, redress our apologia – philosophy of seeking wisdom through freindship – Love poised facing inward-anonymously and producing quality the FB verse, discernment be not thee, they base of fawns one can expect, as/is England’s own boring tossers, who agree and suck for one in the prescribed manner befitting: Me baby Lancashabru, not yr Foney UK scene: No Am Po travisty Harriet, Sina Torregian – Sotère Queyras and a host of Silliman simulacra shares being all same-as.. arghh, don’t let one get ******* started on those ****s.
~
It is late. It is great. I feel like a whole new solar system for lunch, don’t touch that wad, it’s a Lancashababru you worked so jolly hard to hear – reach that combination of Letters, you must be a poetry failure and freak of natural justice, placebo of rain and snooker-snuggle muggins smuggling things into our possession, refrain from talk and lie through yer teeth too much, get caught you’ll pretend, you know that ‘don’t you fwend’ wah, wah and art of noise, in 1988 with Echo and the Bunnymen – semi-invisible in Canada and hard-core fans, clustered in middle age unionizing, reunioning and splitting up, awakening, flourishing and perishing, always McCullough the Liverpool Lip, Angelina Jolie manque once she come along with Liam and Noel, when the pose dissolved and Ian is found being too cool for school, in middle years, relying on props and potions of the ever baggying yore – useless in the face of prettier less aged competitors, Ian’s trajectory through the cultural rank at UK central-heights in nova superb avenue, tumbled down with one short shout – more roar by the Gallaghers into a face of their fan-base magic from Lancashababru spirit that rips it up and starts again, teardrop explodes, aztec camera, two fucking weeks on that **** Frame… who wrote the songs a whole world love, Roddy F’s the name – Scottish troubador, orator and king of the pop-chart he was resident in, a resident who went to just what made him, a one man of song singing still at the Komedia in Brighton and very very legendary – just like you and me (well not me, but the real musicians reading among you will know what I mean), at least – dearest billion favourite readers, toybands and a trillion terra faers, ghostly clan of cloak and brick, we’re gonna run, we’re gonna hide, we’re gonna tear down these rules that hold us to be, only to be with me, only to be with you, have we tried every toyband and through the scene only to be back again here with you Steven and Frances.
Any time you wanna ****, just post the vidz, backchanel@foxnewbs and I can add in the inter-dimensional graphic via the thought-portal Stephen King operates as the worlds worst Ron Silliman tribute to toyband routine – cheering y’all oop in the Lancashababratastic pop-swindle Frances and Augustine, facebook legend is it…not Augustine the great and Stevie the Brave, we who fought in many an unread campaign know, cured what itch at the weigh-in gates of God’s, was his own Boston persuader, Clint, Clint Kong – do not approach the states, in black and white
out of the frame
Normal Norman unveiling soccer skill – when you were Ian Rush, did Madeson the Brave and younger ‘Rushie’ – play for L – I – V – E – R – P – Double Oh El – Liverpool FC…during their heyday nineteen seventies and eighties decades, Liverpool dominating relentlessly – a cultural flux and existential duende effecting the societal ‘imbas’ – psychic-jazz – jubilationary force for positive good – and bad – in NW Britoons, sailor, every normal liverpudlian citizen and ‘scouser’ – (liverpool inhabitants’ ubiquitous islands’ wide-nickname) was a de facto soccer fan and tosser
obsessed with a **** city’s team:
Everton FC fans – on the other hand, could not perform – as their rival team across the Stanley Park that divides these two teams, one red the ‘other’ blue – with imbas sufficient to float higher full time as a joke..
Only joking Travis Nichols you pleasant **** [ed.'s note: Des: wish you'd you write "cunt" instead, I find **** upsetting] (we’re really thick on facebook) I know you are very different and individual, poet who knows it isn’t difficult to be a **** on Harriet today – very effin easy, very bleeding squeezie, flippin up jolly again miss, gosh, only Ron to tell it straight this week, on his **** blog no one reads, not like mine, not like me and my two FUCKIN thousand fans on facebook – well – facebook, myspace personal e-mail address list of the hundred or two one has – as perfomers and people in poetry today – been intimate with in print: Who have received a personal e-mail from aye in one’s capacity as a scouse-manque tosser telling it like it aint – luv.
Unlike Sonaldo the silly mon ronning you deaf to five on for a see-through humanity, and caring senior sharey presence who carved his own ‘tone’ out of being heard loud and very clear, in every single region of the English speaking poetry world-community not here, not now and very very fractured, all over the place, anemically astray, lacking power, vigor, vitality, or colorfulness; listless; weak: and out of shape – that’s me – UK po-biz, here to serve: Me first Lancashababru, i’m afraid.
‘If the tea-party Mad Hatters think that the socious today looks bizarrely non-white, non-male & non-straight, wait till they look at it circa 2020 or 2050. But between now & then, we can anticipate that this same cluster of conservative – or at least reactionary – values will only get more upset, more hyperbolic, more dislodged from reality, more extreme, and definitely more dangerous.’
This be by Your Ronstar, was the stand up piece from a true in form AmPo Laureate of the online era – you know who I mean, don’t you? The name is effortlessly irrelevant because the **** is known by sight and sound in all of cyberville – along a brooding and incredibly intelligent carey sharey network here at work where we love full-on full time 26/7 American all-rounder vibe: Superlatives for Ron’s one person and mind, could stretch to fourteen books of ultra-critically engaged, sazzy, snazzy, fresh air of hope about Silliman the Cool bespectabled bumbler tumbling his own merry way, very much Ron – always he’ll have a one true boast to flyte: Number One baby.
Maybe fall in love and use the magick aye to unlock her past, remove Dolly’s husband from the frame of our potential everlasting bliss, me and she who I do as Michael J Fox in Back To The Future, but with less oomph, more just me and Dolly singing Country, teaching the abc of a two-room shack in Louisville Kentucky, where the Champ was born: who came home to no parade and yet will tell the most poetic tale of all, refused an order at his local life-long diner, and a scene developing out of that, into which several colorful characters introduce themselves into a nineteen yr old Champ – and tell him to go fuck off, or die – presenting to a stranger and our boxing god natural human law suggests, should have been fixing Ali’s auto with their motorbicycle abilities, but didn’t because….
Ron is on and on again- relentlesly like Liverpool and Everton – scouser manque: Me, I was that Manque – we found the role paid off our capacity as ****S banned not by Tuatha Dé Danann rules, but by the peoples of the goddess Lancashabru – the tuatha de dannan – at least – if ay want – behaving intimately with me and Self in print dearest luvvies Frances and Steven – c’mon and sing an old sad song by one of Sevierville’s finest poets, Parton – Dolly Tennessee – who got me falling in love with her, when she sings at the height of her bloom, alas for me not a dabbler in Lancashababra but Lanacashababru, one was not in possession of a key to experiencing the past as present, in a Matrix game where I get to go back in time and meet Dolly.
I’ll need some time to tuck into this transmission!
Well I am probably the only lover of late Picasso that YOU know. Particularly a late series of about 500 drawings where an impotent old Pablo P looks on as Raphael and his partner get it on.
But in that early period of Cubism I can’t see how or why he made the pictorial choices he did – I’m perfectly capable of imagining my way into a variety of artist’s decision making processes but that period remains genuinely mysterious. I’ve read the books, the critiques but they still remain elusive.
Which is the point I was trying to make with Hughes whose language is comprehensible and makes strong connections with its subject in a way that is recognisable albeit surprising too.
As long as we don’t take on Steiner’s corny sexual perversions, we’re fine, Comrade Ed!
I always thought Cubism was A) logical extension of Cezanne B) rejection of the “mainstream” academy painting holding sway. The rejection game (ie, Revolution) is a key motif of how many generations, now? As a youngish man (it was mostly men; not being sexist, being an acute social critic) your only chance at the jackpot of outsider fame is a Johnny Rotten thing. There’s almost always a manifesto involved, too. Cubism was probably as far as they could march from Watteau. Oh: I forgot to sprinkle the whole formula with African ju ju fetishes…
I don’t separate pop from politics and you have to marvel at the line of zig-zagging (permitted) revolutionary descent connecting Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky, Breton, Burroughs, Berry, Coltrane, Godard, Rotten, Cobain…
(and the muted parallel history of quashed female revolutionaries a lá Brooks, Barnes, Holiday, Derbyshire, Mitchell, Bley, Tharp…)
(PS I was always baffled by the condescension heaped on Late Period Pablo)
(PPS the Revolutionaries cited are all the obvious suspects because Obscure Revolutionary is oxymoronic in pop)
Delia Derbyshire. If memory serves me correctly ( and it usually doesn’t ) she might have done the sound for mid-period 70′sDr. Who.
whilst idling flicking channels about 10 years ago I happened on an episode. It was like a rubber monster costume party in a church hall ( perhaps George Steiner was dressed up in the background) l was with an improvised music festival happening next door. Normally the music fits the action in SOME way but not here. I suspect it was Delia at the controls. The guy who does our sound ( Matt Wand ) is a big aficionado of her work.
Check this out, CDS Edward… you’d swear it’s Portishead… but she beats them by 25 years…
I’m sure we’ve done Delia on TET already but let’s do her again
Bear with me, Comrades Lurking and Explicit. There’s a steady trickle of traffic to an old essay of mine called THE BARREN GOVERNESS and the format-limitations on the site I keep this essay on frustrate me. I’m going to re-post the damned thing here (with long-text-clarifying “block quote” technology) and those of you familiar with it… scroll by… scroll by…
There’s another reason to post this here: this Issue of TET, with its generic title of 5.0, is the FLAME WAR Issue (just as TET 4.0 was the Simulocracy Issue). If the second-half of the 20th Century was about Cold War, the opening phase of the 21st Century is given to Flame War: the propaganda (popagenda/propergander) battles that were restricted to OP Eds and Talk Shows in the 1960s and 1970s and became Talk Radio call-in debacles in the 1990s has erupted into all-out, cross-platform guerrilla warfare in the “noughties” as FLAME WAR. Kinda Rich vs Kinda Poor, Largely Black vs Largely White, Smart vs Dumb, ‘Lil Wayne Devotee vs Fiddy Fanatic, Nice Fascist vs Mean Fascist… and every possible permutation therefrom. It’s not so much Hearts and Minds as Possessions and Imaginations to be won.
The Barren Governess: The James Wood Snafu Published May 24, 2008 Litcritters , disinterested score-settling , vanities and veritas
Tags: Add new tag, James Wood, reality
James Wood, noted literary and film critic, has, apparently, written an email critical of comments I’ve made about his critical approach (Mr. Wood’s email is appended to following document):
“I also see no reason to doubt that the email is genuine.”
With all due respect (and being somewhat involved) I see at least two:
1) Are we to believe that Wood is naive enough to have been duped by a relatively unknown Litblogger into scoring points against another relatively unknown Litblogger in a petty *flame war*? Does Wood, with no small fund of credibility at stake, go dashing into flamewars, or wherever bloggers have the temerity to disagree with him (in otherwise courtly language, I might add) , fighting battles for Litbloggers running blogs boasting content on a level he’d otherwise sneer at? Strains credulity.
Occam’s Razor would indicate a hoax, though I’m far from claiming that James Wood is not human enough to have done something pointless.
2) The tone and quality of the letter itself: is this document really the work of (arguably) America’s foremost literary critic? Michiko K., sure: I could see her writing something like this (before an added pass or two through the vernacularizer). But *James Wood*?
Before I go into that email, here are the two comments (unedited) I posted on Nigel Beale’s blog, when I still believed it was a casual blog and not a creepy space rigged for unintentionally amusing revenge:
**********
Nigel:
(Thanks for the heads-up about this post; I was right on the verge of foreswearing blog-comment-jousting for a few days to get some work done and there’s a good chance I would have missed this until it showed up the next time I self-Googled-larf).
So…you quote Uncle Jimmy thus:
“Everything flows from the real including the beautiful deformations of the real; it is realism that allows surrealism, magic realism, fantasy dream and so on,” but no, fiction is real only “when its readers validate (my italics) its reality.”
First off, Wood’s use of the word “reality” is meaningless (and therefore useless). Even if I’m in a coma and imagining all this and you’re a blue donkey in a rakish cap, Nigel, that’s “reality”-based, as it flows from my mind which is as real as anything else in the universe. Is there *anything* that can be imagined that doesn’t refer to “reality” in some way? Are “unreal” thoughts even possible?
Therefore, please, can you (or Uncle Jimmy), establish a meaningful distinction between that which is “real”, and that which is not? Of course you can’t (and, if you can, you win a prize, since Nietzsche couldn’t do it and neither could Plato). So, out goes Uncle Jimmy’s decorative argument (he’s good at those).
I’ll have to trust brainy old hands at novel-writing, such as DeLillo, Updike and Kundera, to know exactly how far to go in framing a character’s “reality” (and thereby delighting the keyed-to-it reader in doing so) over the opinion of a clever little critic who’s managed, thus far, to write one mediocre novel. If Wood has superior knowledge of the novel’s proper “reality”-range and general mechanics, why couldn’t he put it to practical use and write a masterpiece of a novel?
But common-sense questions like that are glossed over, because there’s not quite enough razzle-dazzle in using common-sense, is there?
—second comment (submitted within a few minutes of the first)–
PS
Uncle Jimmy tries to explain why Wolfe’s use of the Wood-prescribed character-appropriate-stream-of-consciousness-voice doesn’t work when Wolfe tries it: ‘Everyone is scrawled with the same inner graffiti,’ he says, rendering Wolfe’s characters flat, indistinguishable from each other…” And that’s utter nonsense.
I’m no Wolfe advocate (I find his novels, as you know, too much like what everyone would be writing if they obeyed Uncle Jimmy), but Wood either hasn’t read more than ten pages of a Wolfe novel (try “Man in Full”) , or he’s indulging in a little bad-faith, theory-supporting truth-twisting, because one thing Wolfe does *well* is character-particularizing. “Charlie Croker” and “Peepgas” and “Roger Too-White” and “Conrad”, et al, are vividly constructed, with a craft-fair-doll-maker’s attention to detail.
Which is the heart and limitation of Wolfe’s minor art (minor art is useful, too, of course: consider porcelain-making vs Cubism): his novels “say” pretty much what they appear to be saying at first glance by generating characters it’s very difficult to misunderstand doing things it’s very difficult to misinterpret. Hard to imagine re-reading a Wolfe novel (after chucking it in the airport waste bin) because you “get it” the first time through.
I’ve been through “Underworld” gods-knows-how-many times and the intellectual pleasure remains fresh *because* I haven’t nailed the thing down yet. Ditto “Sabbath’s Theater” and “Libra”and “Vineland” and so on.
Same with great movies: is Marcello, in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, a shallow arse, a trapped artist, a victim of or collaborator-in his subculture? Is the movie a paean to a certain kind of postwar, wistfully decadent beauty, or a savage attack on it? Is it about plenty or deprivation? I’ve seen it 30 times, probably, and will see it again. Versus some well-intentioned movie (with absolutely unambiguous themes and characters) like “Shine” or “Ray” or “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” for which once is enough, thanks.
I’m saying that Uncle Jimmy is a middlebrow theorist using highbrow language to communicate his theories, and, aesthetically, he’s sort of a “The Talented Mr. Ripley” kind of guy. He has no real idea what to make of Godard, Fellini, Cassavetes, Visconti, Pasolini, et al (to extend the metaphor) and his *inability to grasp* the aesthetic becomes a (defensive) mission statement.
Wood’s disavowal of Wolfe is pretty funny, really, and an important forensic clue (a bit like, you know, closeted politicians who Gay-bash).
(I certainly hope I’ve given you your money’s worth, Nigel!)
**********
Well, those were the comments. I’d like to draw the jury’s attention to A) the casual tone (ie, I was not writing an essay for a lit journal, I was leaving a profanity-free comment on a litblog) and, B) the importance of the “cinema metaphor” to the overall point of the comments (ie, not very) and, C) the importance of Wood’s use of the word “reality” in the quote my comments took exception to… and (as a treat), D) the amount of “ignorance” on display in my comments (we’ll come back to that one).
So.
If that Augustine-excoriating email really was from James Wood (and not concocted by one of Nigel Beale’s more literate friends), it shows an amazing grasp of flamewar technology (while falling somewhat short on metrics of good-faith and reason): the first thing “Wood” does, in his “rebuttal”, is avoid the *heart* of my criticism and go right for what he must have considered my comment’s softspot: that jokey metaphor about his taste in film.
Clearly, the metaphor was *really* about his taste in literature, which I consider to veer a wee towards the conservative. I don’t give a damn whether James Wood has seen “120 Days of Sodom” 1,000 times and knows all the dialogue by heart and dresses for the occasion; what I was, rather obviously, expressing was my sense that novels that flout naturalistic effects (unnaturally), doing away with old-fashioned sops like “moral” along the way, seem to zoom right over his head (or between his legs). Again (and again and again): I cite his (imo) wrong-headed dismissal of DeLillo’s preternaturally witty, sobbingly-beautiful “Underworld” as an example of one gap in his literary sensors large enough to fly an 827-page masterpiece through.
I treasure “Underworld”, Wood doesn’t. Is one of us wrong? Sadly, no. Is one of us a(n) (apparent) “square”…? Well…
When I pegged Wood for a “Talented Mr. Ripley” fan, I didn’t mean it literally (how the hell would I know, and why would I want to?): I was rendering visual my estimation of his literary taste-range (which I even have the plutonium balls to suggest was very possibly confirmed in his recent review of “Netherland” for the New Yorker).
“Wood” goes to extraordinary lengths (was he charging Nigel by the letter?) to attack my “ignorance” of his bona fides as a lover of cinema… pointlessly. But, again: that was the most convenient portal of entry (flamewar 101: flamewar is a war of attrition: never attack an argument’s strong points).
Whereas the crux of my argument was/is Wood’s use of the word “reality” (both in the quote I originally nutmegged on Nigel’s blog, and in general, in what I’ve read of his), Mr. “Wood” deals with *that* with a flamer’s aplomb:
“I don’t want to argue with Steven Augustine about reality, because that is a wilderness of mirrors…”
Ah. Well. Hmmm. Now that James Wood has gotten *that* out of the way, he can get to the shocking matter of my blog-type “ignorance” about his taste in films!
Inconvenient for me, of course, because that was the core of my point, no? His profligate use of the word “reality”.
“James Wood” doesn’t want to “argue” with Steven Augustine about Wood’s inaccurate estimation of Tom Wolfe’s ability to craft characters, either, obviously, but that’s small beer.
Again, here’s Wood on “reality”:
“Everything flows from the real including the beautiful deformations of the real; it is realism that allows surrealism, magic realism, fantasy dream and so on,” but no, fiction is real only “when its readers validate its reality.”
It’s Samurai-bold of Mr. “Wood” to try getting away with sweeping my quibble with his use of the word “reality” under the rug. And to invoke Vladimir “When I hear the word Reality I reach for my fountainpen” Nabokov in the same “reality”-asseverative email, piling irony upon irony, is giddy-making stuff.
When he (or someone) circles back to the matter of “reality”, later in the email, it’s not to address my criticism of the above (twice-cited) quote.
When “Wood” writes (in this email), “Decomposition like this happens to any long -lived and successful style, surely; so the writer’s — or critic’s, or reader’s — task is then to search for the irreducible, the superfluous, the margin of gratuity, the element in a style which cannot be easily reproduced and reduced,”…
…This is nicely put, but it hinges on the same sort of phantom crux (unless the “irreducible, the superfluous, the margin of gratuity” are standardized, from mind to mind, or measurable as pi) that his (for me) offending riff about “reality” does. The rather obvious flaw such a gilded argument dazzles us out of noticing is its presumption that everyone being exposed to this “long-lived” style, has the same degree of wear-and-tear on his/her readerly cherry; the same long log of literary experiences; the same mandarin burden of education to overcome in the gleaning of readerly pleasure.
Wood (or “Wood”) is a master of building rhetorical Alhambras like these on philosophical soap bubbles such as the word “reality”.
I’ve never stared, gaga, at a lavalamp in my life, but whenever Wood mints proscriptions about how far a novelist is allowed to wander from “reality” before the silvery cord of the reader’s attention/credulity/infatuation snaps, I’m forced to put on my worst Cam-side, Russian accent and demand, “Whose reality?” (or, “Who’s reality?”)
Is it “ignorant” of me to express this opinion? I haven’t read *all* of Wood (that’d be a peculiar thing to do, being that I’m neither a fan, nor immortal) but I have read, closely, whatever of his that I have bothered to comment on.
If I know little about Wood, Wood knows *nothing* of me (beyond the damning clue that I don’t hold *his* judgment of the books I treasure over mine) so his wounded plea, “It’s the ignorance I so dislike, sanctioned by that online free-for-all in which quick judgments, based on the thinnest acquaintanceship with the subject’s work, can be prodigally posted,” has rather a hollow ring to it, and a boomeranging echo: what *does* he know of me, or what I’ve read of what he’s written? Is Mr. Wood claiming clairvoyance as a second talent?
His signal flare of a salvo against “Hysterical Realism” (that word again) was my (contemporaneous) introduction to his work; I found it just in some bits and absurd in others and largely irritating.
I’ve read, dunno, two dozen essays, reviews, interviews and profiles? (If Wood is offering to hire me to write a carefully-researched, corrective overview, we can discuss the terms; otherwise, I think my various comments, over the years, are not the worst a Wood fan-or-critic could’ve stumbled upon. Actually, there’s one comment, in particular, I thought was rather good… taking him to task for his apparent lack of a viable sense of humor…perhaps I can provide the link later?)
Anyway: that’s rather a precious pose for a critic to strike, I’d say, if “Wood” (or Wood) is claiming that I’m “ignorant” (in more than the literal sense) because I haven’t read *all* of his work, and have no right to express strong opinions on what I *have* read until I purchase the lot (which may be a brilliant marketing technique…)
If he did, in fact, write all that.
Stranger things, as we know too well, have happened. The email was a disturbing graft of the imperious on the vulnerable, if he *did* author it. I’m still not sure if I’d be delighted if it were authentic.
Mr. Wood’s apparent email:
I don’t want to argue with Steven Augustine about reality, because that is a wilderness of mirrors, but it might be sensible to try to counter his absurd idea that I am a “Mr Ripley” or “Beautiful Mind” kind of guy rather than a Fellini or Cassavetes kind of guy. It’s the ignorance I so dislike, sanctioned by that online free-for-all in which quick judgments, based on the thinnest acquaintanceship with the subject’s work, can be prodigally posted. Augustine may not know that one of my early pieces (1996) for “The New Republic “was an attack on a film called “Leaving Las Vegas,” starring Nicolas Cage, which seemed to me the worst kind of sentimental kitsch dressed up as art film sophistication. (Cage spends a lot of time swigging gin from a bottle, while standing in the shower — this to show that he is… an ALCOHOLIC. Sting provides a weepy soundtrack, as I remember.) I used the favored Nabokovian term “poshlost” to attack the film, and explicitly lamented that there were not more real avant-gardists like John Cassavetes now around! David Denby, who had liked the Cage film, wrote to TNR to defend it.
In “How Fiction Works,” there is exactly one reference to one filmmaker: it is an adulatory reference to Antonioni’s “L’eclisse” (in the chapter on character, paragraph # 63). In the chapter on realism at the end of that book, there appear two paragraphs, 115 and 116. I am talking about how realism has become
“a kind of invisible rule book, whereby we no longer notice its artificialities. One reason for this is economic. Commercial realism has cornered the market, has become the most powerful brand in fiction. We must expect that this brand will be economically reproduced, over and over again. That is why the complaint that realism is no more than a grammar or set of rules that obscures life is generally a better description of Le Carre or P.D.James than it is of Flaubert or George Eliot or Isherwood: when a style decomposes, flattens itself down into a genre, then indeed it does become a set of mannerisms and often pretty lifeless techniques.
The efficiency of the thriller genre takes just what it needs from the much less efficient Flaubert or Isherwood, and throws away most of what made those writers truly alive. And of course, the most economically privileged genre of this kind of largely lifeless ‘realism’ is commercial cinema, through which most people nowadays receive their idea of what constitutes a ‘realistic’ narrative.”
By commercial cinema, I precisely mean something like “The Talented Mr Ripley” or “Shine,” or films that people try to palm off as indie-ish, like “Little Miss Sunshine, ” or “Juno.”
In the next graf, I go on to say:
“Decomposition like this happens to any long -lived and successful style, surely; so the writer’s — or critic’s, or reader’s — task is then to search for the irreducible, the superfluous, the margin of gratuity, the element in a style which cannot be easily reproduced and reduced.”
It is perfectly possible to agree with Roland Barthes that realism is a set of codes and conventions (for all writing is a set of such codes, after all) and
still try to defend that element in fiction — what I call “lifeness” — that eludes the nerveless grip of code. This is a defence both of that evanescence called ‘reality’ and of the artifice that makes it — and makes it up — and there is no contradiction in this doubleness: we read fiction with two eyes, as it were, one world-directed and one text-directed.
The review I just wrote about Joseph O’Neill’s superb novel,”Netherland,” in “The New Yorker,” praises the novel both for its deep and wise interest in life and lives, and for its high degree of artifice and style. That doubleness is entirely in keeping with my attacks on people like Tom Wolfe, John Irving, the more formulaic elements of John Updike, and so on, and in keeping with my praise, in essays and reviews, of writers like Cormac McCarthy (when he is not trying to write a genre thriller like “No Country for Old Men”), Saul Bellow, Roberto Bolano, Muriel Spark, Jose Saramago, W.G. Sebald, Philip Roth, Alan Hollinghurst, Milan Kundera, Norman Rush, V.S. Naipaul, Edward P. Jones, Michel Houellebecq, Anne Enright, David Means, Peter Carey, J.M. Coetzee, Bohumil Hrabal, Harold Brodkey (I was an early and pretty isolated English champion of Brodkey’s), not to mention earlier writers like Henry Green, Italo Svevo, Giovanni Verga, Knut Hamsun, J.F. Powers, and many others.
Most of these essays are collected, in two books, and may easily be consulted before being tempted to comment on them.One may not agree with that critical project, but to claim that it simply yearns for the innocent days of 19th-century realism, or that it is really a fifth columnist’s attempt to glorify the babyish writing of a Tom Wolfe, is simply not to have read a word I have ever written, however fast the eyeballs have been scanning various literary websites, with their alluring ‘excerpts’ from some recent review or essay of mine.
****selected further comments on James Wood, from my archives****
1.
Kundera’s “The Curtain”, as a whole, is a must-read, from a seasoned practitioner of the Art. There’s certainly a qualitative difference between knowledge-in-doing and extrapolated knowledge via careful observation (especially when that which is under observation is neither object nor action; something which only “exists”, uniquely, in every observer’s mind, and therefore exceedingly difficult to describe with broad authority).
It’s immediately after the closing sentence of the book’s “Die Weltliteratur” chapter that Kundera brings us the wisdom of the “most prestigious French critic of his time”, a finger-wagging admonition to Gustave Flaubert to “console and give ease to the reader” by a “picture of goodness”… a familiar trope from the long history of proscriptive aid on offer from critic to novelist. We can assume that M. Sainte-Beuve was only trying to be helpful, of course, but, long after both gentlemen are dead, do we regret that M. Sainte-Beuve didn’t have a stronger influence on Flaubert’s art?
(I was once informed, as evidence of the critic’s relative importance, that Samuel Johnson had lived long beyond his era in influence; to which I’d say: Mr. Johnson is not famous, chiefly, for the justice of particular critiques, whatever he thought of them at the time. )
Is it unfair to compare literary critics to barren governesses who scowl, roll their eyes, and snatch at the sleeves of their charges? In many cases, yes. A literary critic who *illuminates* the text under consideration (placing it in a context with its antecedents, for example), and does so in a way that’s a pleasure to read, is most welcome. A critic who measures the distance between a text’s apparent goal and its actual accomplishment, on the text’s own terms (in good faith) can be very interesting (whether or not we agree).
A literary critic who takes on the role of sermonizing cleric, or hanging judge, dismissing writers/ oeuvres/ styles whole, baffles us. What is the critic’s goal, in such cases? To persuade the readers who have already enjoyed the work of said writer to repent of their pleasure? To persuade said writer (despite long success, in some cases) to become a different sort of writer? To persuade an entire school of writing (even in such cases as the school is concocted by the critic) to conform to righter modes of expression? Or is such activity the possible symptom of a critic suffering from divided purposes… or the poison of overweening ambition?
There is no “perfect” work of Art; there is no “objective” form of Art criticism: neither end of that continuum is a Science. Even the finest criticism is glorified opinion of an entirely unstable nature, and even the most detailed taxonomy is not, by default, a body of knowledge (since anyone can describe anything in any terms they please).
Approaching a text, a reader (critic and non-critic both) brings his/her psychology to the table; her/his affinities and prejudices. A truly useful critic of fiction must be *open* to the work at hand; must be ready to “like” it… this is why, although the most shreddingly negative critiques are more fun, it’s the generally positive reviews that will prove to be most illuminating. “Liking” a novel, a critic is more likely to “get it”. A novel is a subtle emanation. To be even slightly closed to its effort is to miss a certain amount; even all of it, possibly. And then we’re in the territory of “bad faith”.
Negative reviews of *particular books* can be useful, if they steer a reader, who trusts the opinion of the reviewer, away from wasting time and money on that book; especially if that reviewer “gets” that writer and merely finds the latest effort(s) lacking. Fair enough.
Excoriating a writer/ oeuvre/ style, in even the most scholarly terms, is fine between friends, or in the form of intellectual debate, but as a “service” to those interested in literature, it’s less than useful: it’s bizarre (or simply careerist?).
I don’t, as a rule, like Westerns. I could write a scholarly, 15,000 word, anti-Western treatise. And to what end? Such broadly proscriptive “criticism” misapprehends, in a cardinal way, the purpose of novel writing; the purpose of novel *reading*. As an unknown I’m silly to do so; as a famous critic, I’d be slaying imaginary dragons for an audience who *fears*, or resents, imaginary dragons. Fine, as a performance; as entertainment. But as an addition to the overall bulk of Western knowledge? No.
Further, it astounds me that anyone can be so uninterested in (or ignorant about) human nature as *not* to see a Salieri Effect at play in some of the notable gems of the form, however dressed up, in flowing robes, they may be.
I wrote, in an email, once, to someone who was less than receptive to my wit (larf) at the time: “It dawned on me long ago that the overall practise of literature is less a repository of ideas than a web of affinities.”
I stand by that observation.
and
2.
Bearing in mind that even the finest literary criticism is lapidary opinion, I’m always amazed/amused/horrified/baffled (depending on the time of day) at the way in which Wood’s writings are capable of shutting down the critical faculties of his diehard fans. I suppose it’s the ecstasy of abnegation we seek in most religions.
Wood comes out with a book of essays, called, not “Thoughts on Fiction” or “How Does Fiction Work?” but “How Fiction Works”… fairly confident from a fellow with one so-so (and touchingly schematic) novel in his fiction bibliography. Common sense (an undervalued commodity among intellectuals, as we know) indicates the need for skepticism.
Which is not to say that I don’t enjoy Wood’s work, which can always be trusted to entertain, and often educate us, and sometimes even honor his charter to provide a good-faith reading of the text. I only wish he’d stop trying to be James Clerk Maxwell, or Gregor Mendel, or a Martin Luther as gene-spliced with either of the other two: it doesn’t work. Despite that, I’ll pick up his latest, at some point, and enjoy quite a bit of it, no doubt.
Here’s a good example of Wood’s wobbly logic, and his willingness to fudge an argument to flatter his prejudices (or, worse, retro-engineer an argument from a preferred conclusion), from a recent interview with Birnbaum:
“JW: And I said it was one of those jokes that I never, ever find funny. One of the sheep-shagging jokes. And I say to her, ‘Why is it that bestiality jokes are never funny?’ And the joke by the way was something like this: A man goes into a Scottish bar—I mean it’s not an unfunny joke—there is a guy in a kilt who is drinking heavily at the bar. And he is clearly distressed. The stranger says to the man in the kilt, ‘Why are you drinking so many whiskeys? What’s wrong?’ And he says, ‘See that pier out there? I built that. I built that pier with my own hands, and they don’t call me McKenzie the Pier Builder. See that boat out there? I built that boat with my own hands. They don’t call me McKenzie the Boat Builder. And this very inn that we are sitting in, this tavern, I built it, stone by stone. But they don’t call me McKenzie the Tavern Builder. And yet you mess around once with a sheep and….’ It’s not unfunny. It’s pretty funny. But I said to my wife, ‘Why aren’t bestiality jokes, I mean, they are not really funny?’ And she rightly said, ‘They pretend to be realistic but they are not actually realistic. And that’s because no one has every actually met anyone who fucked a sheep.’ So they are actually fantastical. In a way this feeds into the hysterical realism thing. ”
Fadging the proposition as a metaphor for the Wood-concocted school of “Hysterical Realism”, he argues that the failure of bestiality jokes to make us laugh is categorical. Early on, Wood admits the joke is “…not unfunny. It’s pretty funny”… and proceeds to explain why it’s not “really” funny. As we all know, of course, “pretty funny” and “really funny” aren’t far enough apart on the spectrum of mirth to insulate Wood from a possible contradiction there. Is this type of joke funny, or not? If it’s funny at all (i.e., if “Hysterical Realism” succeeds, ever), the argument is already rather lame.
From there, Wood goes on to tell the joke in question… poorly enough to put his sense of humor under suspicion, at the very least, or to cause us to suspect that he needs, very much, for this joke to be unfunny, despite itself.
And what conclusion does Mr. Wood reach? For that, he consults with his wife (a practice that might go a long way towards explaining certain consistent flaws in Wood’s product), who informs us that bestiality jokes aren’t funny (hubby’s initial concession aside) because “They pretend to be realistic but they are not actually realistic. And that’s because no one has every actually met anyone who fucked a sheep.”
Which is demonstrable nonsense (ambiguity intentional). When I laugh at a joke about a penguin, a donkey and a Bush voter, it’s not because I’ve forgotten that penguins and donkeys can’t talk, rarely enter bars, and never, therefore, offer to buy low-IQ American Presidents drinks.
No one I know has ever met someone who actually had a parrot that caused a plumber to have a heart-attack, either; yet, the first time I heard that joke, I laughed. I’ve also laughed at jokes about martians, ghosts, God(s), talking fetuses, time-travelers, Linda McCartney (sorry), Napoleon, Julius Caesar… the list of the “unrealistic” goes on and on.
Bestiality jokes may well be an apt metaphor for “Hysterical Realism”, but not in a way that serves Wood’s purpose; quite the contrary. The above excerpt is a man telling us that he doesn’t like a certain kind of joke, although he’s not quite clear on “why”; he’s not even claiming such jokes aren’t funny, he only makes clear the fact that he doesn’t like them. Meanwhile, rather a lot of other people would disagree with him. Case closed.
An apt meta-metaphor, if you will.
I can only add to all that, that after all *my* years of reading, it strikes me that the difference between the great and the merely good, is, invariably wit… a sense of humor. The genius stuff has it, the other stuff doesn’t. Trouble is, one must *have* one in order to detect and appreciate it in others.
(Cough)
How come you never mentioned this blog before, Mr. I’m-so-enigmatic Augustine? Hiding your light under a bushel is an iffy strategy at best. I’ll put up a link to this, if you don’t mind.
Grooven, Sah! Link on! (For any Comrade Lurking or Explicit who tries to parse the postmodern politics of these feuds and affiliations: good luck, sucka… life is complicated)
It is annoying. Over the last year or so, I’ve often thought ‘Gee, I wish Steven were more prolific. I really enjoy his writing’. And here you were the whole time, writing away, beyond my ken. Did your vow to ‘love, honour and keep posted’ mean nothing, then, you cruel deceiver? For shame…
Well, there is the small matter of 600+ pages of fiction on my primary site, fella… and 200-or-so pages of very old (some like 20 years old) fiction in the attic… and a frigging serialized novel I haven’t had time to look to recently…
(Actually, that “attic” is pretty hard to negotiate, Comrades… the old fiction, which is more mainstreamy than what I do now, is largely buried there; I just managed to unearth this deposit)
I must say there was a time (long since past) when this line from the “deposit” gave me pause:
“Sometimes I frankly dread my own black gifts of persuasion.”
(PS I’ve just re-read the second story on that link for the first time, all the way through, in a decade; I don’t know where it came from. Not to my taste but mysteriously interesting. What was I on back then?)
In The It Takes One To Know One Department
It reminded me of what you wrote in Muster of Triviums about Wells’ Time Machine:
Wells was writing on a millennial cusp without quite knowing it: the technological difference between 1900 and 2000 was arguably greater than that between 1900 and everything that came before it: it was as though Wells’ creative intelligence was a candle flame being tugged by the woosh of an exponential curve on the other side of a shut, but imperfectly sealed, door. And the jig his flame was doing unsettled him.
e
f
[ed's note: we're trying out the new Ouija App here at TET but there are still a few bugs...]
I have totally run amok. Here’s what I meant to say.
I’m not sure if I appreciate Mike Myers’ penis being rammed down my throat at this time in the evening.
re: Mr. Woods. I’ve never understood why some critics narrow their definitions as to what CAN be good to such a degree that nothing other than their favourite 3 authors ( or possibly themselves ) can actually be any good. Those who don’t conform to these arbitrary rules are criticised for what they don’t do and probably never set out to do in the first place.
Welcome to The Puritans 2.0, Comrade Ed: The Olde World Odor
FOUND NARRATIVE (subgenre: delicious)
tinlaurelledandhardy
26 Mar 2010, 11:05AM
I think some men are just vain and bragging about their adultery; my husband had a lot of affairs but always, always denied it to the last skirt, so it was his word against evidence. Not being the jealous kind, I put my faith in him. I will always have a soft spot in my heart for him because of this his attitude. He was raised by his auntie and the Jesuits.
What comes to mind is a story told by a Thai girl, a neighbor of mine. She once was a nanny with a family from one of the Gulf States. Her job was to nanny one of the sons, always attend to him and keep him safe in spite of his own clownish foolishness. At any time of day he told her to come and spread her legs so he could smell her **** . She said that every time she saw his little head down there, the image of her knee striking upwards flew through her brain and the fear to actually do it, made her sweat all over. I have no idea what became of him.
Some men are womanizers because they can and women love them, some are just bored, is my guess. Adultery, on the other hand, is not necessarily womanizing.
Don’t look at me, chief. I never had a Thai nanny…
I cannot claim to know his oeuvre, and even less to understand his purported importance in the literary affairs of the Nation.
The TV has been on in the background all night on the SPIEGEL channel with its habitual Saturday parade of films about Hitler and the Nazis. First there was one about Eva Braun and Hitler’s retreat at Obersalzburg, with lots of film and photographs shot by Eva Braun of the ordinary life up there. Mostly sunbathing and skinny dipping (the ladies of the Reich were left alone a lot), by the end of the war every body is smoking and drinking despite Adi’s disapproval of such.
Next was/is a long documentary about Nuremberg. Robert Jackson is on now admitting that the trial is not really about condemning criminals, but “administering preventive justice with a view toward forestalling repetition of these crimes against peace…”
here (around 5 minutes) :
which brings me back to Norman Rush. When I read the interview here,
he sounded just like your average well-meaning dupe, even with a couple of endearing left-aromatic pretenses, does not diverge from the imperial view, that only White Christianity holds aloft the torch of world peace (which of course is a messianic world empire). He wasn’t particularly articulate or insightful. Yet oblivious of the high esteem some hold of him, I imagined him nothing much more than your average fusty waylaid old Peace Corps pro. But once I became aware of his repute, I looked again:
“Obviously, all scrutiny of the contributions of colonialism, and indigenous kleptocracy, to the lack of economic development of post-independence Africa takes place with an awareness that they have been imposed on societies existing in environments that have been, it is being argued persuasively, inhospitable to human prosperity.”
Pot calling kettle black here, I mean, where is there no indigenous kleptocracy? Aren’t we seeing that globalization was just that? I always liked this article
although it can go libertarian as much as it sustains the earnest true believer in universal principles of human justice.
in this sense, the second part of this Rush quote really raised a brow.
“…they have been imposed on societies existing in environments that have been, it is being argued persuasively, inhospitable to human prosperity.”
Yes globalized development schemes (neo-colonialism) have been imposed on these societies riven and shattered by generations of European divide-and-conquer old-school colonialism. Rush writes (in Mortals) with righteous annoyance about how the Native Africans cheat around all the rules and systems well meaning dominant races attempt to impose on them. No-one would dare write with such a tone about how American slaves defied their masters to congregate and elaborate ways they maintained their own humanity.
The defiance of arbitrary and unfair rules is fundamentally emancipatory. What must irritate Rush about the Africans is that they do not use their intelligence to prop up his sorry patronizing agenda. “inhospitable to human prosperity” indeed! Code words for inhospitable to globalization, which is a code word for I takee you givee. Give the Africans a chance Mr Rush, stop trying to help them so much.
He admits, in America he would be nothing, only in Africa he could be a crabby plantation massa, sipping sarsaparilla and self-righteously overwrought (overwriting) about his petty little bourgeois life’s petty little travails.
“here (around 5 minutes)”
EXCERPT from Norman “Abnormally Normative” Rush’s MORTALS (I think SPOOKS would have been a much better title)
I. Unrest
Paradise
At least whatever was wrong was recent, Ray kept telling himself, he realized. Because he’d just done it again, turning in to Kgari Close, seeing his house ahead of him, their house. Whatever was going on with Iris was different from what had gone on in earlier episodes, minor episodes coming under the heading of adjusting to Africa. This was worse because what was going on was so hard to read. He needed to keep in mind that knowing something was going wrong at an early point was always half the battle. And he knew how to stop things in their tracks. In fact that was his field, or one of them. Anyway, he was home. He loved this house.
He paused at his gate. All the houses on the close, in fact all the houses in the extension, were identical, but, for Africa, sumptuous. They were Type III houses built by the government for allocation to the upper civil service and significant expatriates like agency heads and chiefs of mission. The rooms were giant, as Iris had put it when they moved in. Throughout the extension the properties were walled and gated on the street side and separated internally from one another by wire-mesh perimeter fencing that had to be constantly monitored and kept in repair because there was a network of footpaths through the area that the Batswana insisted on using to get from Bontleng or the squatter settlements to their day jobs or for visits with friends or family living in the servants’ quarters each Type III house came with. The quarters were cubicles set well apart from the main houses, which had possibly been a mistake because it made monitoring the flux of lodgers and visitors that much harder. If the quarters had been connected to the main houses there might be less thousand clowns activity in them, although you’d lose yet another piece of your own privacy. The perimeter fences were constantly developing holes so that the paths could keep functioning as they had before the extension was built, and it was a fact that their African neighbors were consistently more lax than the expatriates who lived there about keeping the wire fences fixed up.
The houses stood on generous plots and there was nothing wrong with a Type III house. They were single-story cinderblock oblongs faced with cement stucco. Their house was salt-white inside and out. Every third house in the extension was painted tan. The floors were poured concrete. He’d had to push Iris into the house the first time they inspected it because she thought the floors were wet, they were waxed and buffed to such an insane lustre. They had the best plot on Kgari Close, the largest, at the apex of the horseshoe the close made. They had six rooms. He would admit that their moderne type furniture was on the ungainly and garish side. It was from South Africa. It seemed to be made for very large human beings. On the other hand it was provided free by the government of Botswana. Their bed was firm, and was vast. The corrugated iron roof, painted red to suggest terracotta tile, was a mistake, but only in the hottest part of the year, like now, when it converted the unshaded parts of the house into ovens, to which the answer was the airconditioners they had in their bedroom and living room, at least, at opposite ends of the house, except that unfortunately Iris saw herself as acquiring virtue by abstaining from using them exactly when the justification for using them was greatest. She always denied her attitude had anything to do with solidarity with Dimakatso and the other servants in the neighborhood out in their hot cubicles or with the un-airconditioned population in general, but he thought otherwise. She claimed it was because the airconditioners made too much noise for her. She was very sensitive to noise. Also she could be willful. For example, everything in the house could be locked up—regular closets, linen closets, cupboards, cabinets. The assumption was that you were going to be stolen from. The drill everywhere else was that the maid came to you to get the key when something had to be procured, and brought the key back to you afterward. But Iris kept everything unlocked even though their first maid had complained about it because she was worried that if anything went missing she’d be blamed. So nothing was locked, which was fine, she always did what she wanted. What was wrong now? He was tired of it.
Sometimes the yardman opened the gate, but usually it was the watchman, who came on duty at five. He overlapped the yardman’s tour by half an hour or so, but the yardman could be anywhere, doing anything, including napping someplace. The watchman would normally be at his post under the thorn tree to the right of the gate, sitting on a camp stool and having a cup of Joko tea and eating the very decent leftovers Iris provided—a chop, chicken thighs, and the sweets without which no meal is complete, to a Motswana. On weekends it could happen that there wasn’t much for lunch and he would think about the procession of chops and drumsticks that had gone out the kitchen door to Fikile that week, but he’d never complained about it. The watchman was coming. Ray liked Fikile, a short, energetic man in his forties. He wore the military jacket and service cap the Waygard Company supplied, but with them he wore heavy black woolen dress slacks too long for him and rolled up into tubes at his ankles. His ankles were bare. He was wearing shoes so cheap the leather of the vamp gathered up like the neck of a sack where the laces were drawn tight. They exchanged greetings and Fikile opened the gate. Ray walked into the yard. It was possible Fikile was illiterate. When he’d first come to work for them he’d always seemed to have reading matter with him, and then Ray had noticed that it was the same worn copy of Dikgang that they were seeing day after day. Then he had stopped bringing anything at all to read. Ray’s theory was that having the newspaper with him had been for the purpose of making a good impression and that now that Fikile knew they liked him and were going to keep him he was excused from having to pretend he could read. His English was minimal. Naturally Iris wanted to do something, but she felt blocked because to ask him if in fact he could read or not, after he’d clearly gone out of his way to give the impression he could, might insult him. Ray suspected that behind her agitation over Fikile was a short story she’d broken her heart reading in which one of the wretched of the earth is tricked into thinking he can learn to read by staring at a mystical diagram and repeating a nonsense mantra he has paid some charlatan his last nickel for. And to hand Fikile some piece of reading matter of their own, in Setswana or English, would seem like a test. Iris seemed to want her fiction to be excruciating. But that was the way she was and he was sorry he’d asked, when she’d given up right away on something light he’d recommended, probably Tom Sharpe, Isn’t it excruciating enough for you? He was always on the lookout for decent books for her, but being in Africa made it difficult and she made it difficult because she was cursed with good literary taste. She knew good writing from bad.
Here they had everything. He looked around. There were two discs of grayish struggling lawn flanking the flagstone path to the house where it diverged from the driveway leading to the garage. They were being kept alive by hand-watering. Someday the drought would be over and they could use the hosepipe again. Except for flowerbeds and the grass areas, the yard was bare red sand textured like a Holland rusk. The sand was raked every day in deliberate, sinuous patterns. He liked that. There were five palm trees spaced around the house, which he liked except when dead fronds dropped and banged on the roof at all hours. He loved his neighbors, and especially his immediate neighbors, for their lack of interest in him. One was the widow of the leader of an out-of-power Zambian political faction the Botswana government was partial to. Mrs. Timono was an actively furtive person. His other immediate neighbor, the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Education, was never at home. It was nice that no one had ever wondered, at least in his presence, why someone who was supposed to only be the head of the English Department at St. James College had been assigned housing in Kgari Close. He thought that was because the housing allocation process was known to be mysterious, and also simply because they’d been there so long. And he had been careful to let it be understood around that they were paying a serious premium for the house, which they could manage because Iris had received a small inheritance, lalala.
It was fun to put one of their uncomfortable metal lawn chairs in the center of one of the microlawns and sit there in the imperfect, lacy shade of the thorn trees. The trunks of the trees in the yard were properly limewashed to protect them from termites, except for the palms, which had some natural resistance. There was a crate by the wall to stand on in the event something interesting seemed to be going on in the street. His wall was pink. He even liked the street itself. He liked the broad, clean, faintly convex roadway and the astringent odor given off by the gum trees planted along it. If he’d kept on teaching in the U.S. they might well have ended up in a university town someplace in the Southwest that looked pretty much like this part of Gaborone.
It always made him happy when the gate clicked shut behind him. Paradise was from the Persian for walled garden, probably the first fact anybody tackling Milton learns.
He thought, I ask them, What do you think the word paradise means? and they say various things. Their definitions of paradise are so modest: They reveal themselves: They begin to think about it: Odd that nobody in Gaborone knows what paradise means except me and my students and Iris. He lingered on the stoop. It was time to go in. If he waited Iris might stop whatever she was doing and come to let him in. If he waited the entire lower sky to the west would turn burnt orange. Ray liked working in the heat, being conscious of it. It was tonic for him, for some reason. Fikile was wondering why he wasn’t going in, by now. You get a slight continuous feeling of virtue from working in the heat, on a level with wearing wristweights all day, he thought. He should go in. The best heat was now, in December. The west was solid orange and the peak of the sky was apple green. Woodsmoke drifting from cooking fires in Bontleng and Old Naledi would color the air for the next couple of hours, fading in and out, never overpowering, more a perfume, to him. Fikile would start toward him in a minute if he didn’t go in. I would have been nothing in America, Ray thought. When he imagined what he might have been if they hadn’t come to Africa it was painful. Not that Iris would credit any scenario in which his qualities went unused and unrewarded. She adhered to the great man theory of marriage. She loved him. Coming to Africa had been essential, but he had to be alone in knowing it and knowing why. That was the deal. It was unfair that something was going wrong with her just at the moment you might say all the moving parts in the machinery of his life were in order. He could walk to work. His health was fine, his weight was perfect. He thought, I love Africa, but not like the idiots who come over here and say Boy! Women with mountains of sticks on their heads. Look, an ostrich crossing the road!
Nothing is more useless than dwelling on grievances, he reminded himself, feeling himself about to twitch in that direction. He’d earned the right to some satisfaction. The easy part of his life had begun unannounced like a dream two years ago and he had a right to enjoy it. No one could know about it, obviously, but he was living in a state of triumph, and had been ever since Russia and all its works blew apart overnight. Before that he had been part of a war. What he was in now was more like a parade. Of course nobody knew who he was, except for Iris who had to know generally. She had no details. But when somebody wrote The Decline and Fall of the Russian Empire and Everything Connected with It he would be there between the lines. He couldn’t generate the right metaphor for amazing 1989. He had an image of something like a metal claw sunk into half the planet suddenly disarticulating, but that was a weak image. Or it could be like this, he thought: You have a goliath of an enemy dressed in armor about to smite you who sits down suddenly and looks faint and when you open up his armor you find only his face is normal, the rest is sickly, mummified, and then he dies in front of you and it’s all over.
This moment was what Iris was suddenly taking away.
The event was too huge for any image he had been able to come up with. It would take someone as great as Milton to come up with the appropriate image right off the bat. He felt he had no time to think, lately. Iris was full of mental homework for him to do that he didn’t want to do, such as answering the question of why they had been so attracted to one another when they met—but it had to be aside from the purely physical reasons she knew he was going to overemphasize.
He stood in the foyer. No one was around. He heard the kitchen door close. That was Dimakatso leaving for the day.
He entered the chill bronze gloom of the living room, where the airconditioner was laboring for his benefit, obviously, since no one else was on hand and the room looked as though no one had made use of it that day. He walked over to the main double window. The louvers of the blinds were tilted downward, almost to the closed position. All the windows in the house were barred and tightly screened. He was fanatical about the screens. There was malaria nearby. He was the force behind both of them continuing to take chloroquine. Iris got worse headaches from the chloroquine than he did, so he understood why she resisted him.
There was still no one.
But I’m fine, he thought, trying not to relive a moment from the walk home that had made him feel fragile. Near the school was a rundown property whose occupants kept a goat. The goat had run up purposively to the fence as Ray came by and for an instant Ray had thought something monstrous was happening, because the goat’s tongue seemed to be a foot long. He’d been frightened until he’d realized that it was only a goat eating a kneesock. Iris could be asleep. He would look for her, softly.
This is The Hurt Locker of domestic dramas, then. The narrator isn’t Norman Rush, of course: it’s just fiction. But we are thinking the narrator’s thoughts. Whatever the book presents is judged against the solid metrics of the narrator’s worldview/personality… which seems, on the basis of this excerpt, to be pitched in the direction of the lovably irascible, no-nonsense B’wana. We can tell this by the meta-joke about the narrator’s taste in fiction: “Iris seemed to want her fiction to be excruciating. But that was the way she was and he was sorry he’d asked, when she’d given up right away on something light he’d recommended, probably Tom Sharpe, Isn’t it excruciating enough for you?” We see, immediately, that his wife is intelligent… too intelligent, probably… but lacking in common sense. The narrator’s no-nonsense view of fiction as a “light” pastime means that we can trust his opinion on things. His type builds dams and bridges. His type solves problems created by A) Nature B) the Other Types.
“He was fanatical about the screens. There was malaria nearby. He was the force behind both of them continuing to take chloroquine.” The no-nonsense narrator is the only thing between death and a livable-but-tightly-controlled Life. We will side with his opinion on everything, even when he is wrong. And he will have to be wrong about something and later admit to it: this will reinforce our trust in the narrator and in Norman Rush, too. Coetzee, in his more Leftish way, uses the same technique. A flawed narrator who isn’t too vain to admit his flaws earns our trust and identification: he is, paradoxically, perfect.
“He had an image of something like a metal claw sunk into half the planet suddenly disarticulating…” Aha: the metal claw sunk into most of the planet isn’t nominally American? No, it was Russian, and now it’s gone (and who even bothers to thank him for it?): a no-nonsense reading of The End of History which the narrator, our trusted guide, confirms for us. The planet is rife with war, however, even after the red claw’s disarticulation: History is Over but we’re still dreaming it. It seems so real.
“Nothing is more useless than dwelling on grievances, he reminded himself, feeling himself about to twitch in that direction. He’d earned the right to some satisfaction.” Or, as Donald Rumsfeld says: get over it! The stiff-upper-lip of British Empire in a sleeker, folksier, Yankee-er format. We see Bruce Willis’ self-mocking, lopsided smirk. The white-man’s-burden smirk. What’s not to admire in these guys? What a seductive avatar to lead us through a normative narrative with.
“Of course nobody knew who he was, except for Iris who had to know generally. She had no details. But when somebody wrote The Decline and Fall of the Russian Empire and Everything Connected with It he would be there between the lines.” Aha: Secret Agent. Cool.
“On weekends it could happen that there wasn’t much for lunch and he would think about the procession of chops and drumsticks that had gone out the kitchen door to Fikile that week, but he’d never complained about it.” He is a good man, the narrator. But the Africans are thieves. He understands that poverty drives them to it.
“Ray suspected that behind her agitation over Fikile was a short story she’d broken her heart reading in which one of the wretched of the earth is tricked into thinking he can learn to read by staring at a mystical diagram and repeating a nonsense mantra he has paid some charlatan his last nickel for.” He understands that Africans are poor because they are simple.
“He overlapped the yardman’s tour by half an hour or so, but the yardman could be anywhere, doing anything, including napping someplace.” Simple and lazy.
“This moment [his self-satisfaction after saving the planet from the Russian claw] was what Iris was suddenly taking away.” Women!
“The corrugated iron roof, painted red to suggest terracotta tile, was a mistake, but only in the hottest part of the year, like now, when it converted the unshaded parts of the house into ovens, to which the answer was the airconditioners they had in their bedroom and living room, at least, at opposite ends of the house, except that unfortunately Iris saw herself as acquiring virtue by abstaining from using them exactly when the justification for using them was greatest. She always denied her attitude had anything to do with solidarity with Dimakatso and the other servants in the neighborhood out in their hot cubicles or with the un-airconditioned population in general, but he thought otherwise. She claimed it was because the airconditioners made too much noise for her. She was very sensitive to noise.” There is something wrong with the way women think, too. White women and black Africans: there’s some connection. The white man is on his own.
Not only the Hurt Locker – the excerpt you quote is like Mills&Boon from a male perspective.
Does his chest swell in the way that M&B heroine’s cleavages do in other passages in the book? If not the author should consider such a device for his next piece it’ll fill up a few paragraphs if nothing else.
To all of you who have read this so I don’t have to – the excerpts were enough even without the filter of your views. Thank you!
Comrade Ed, the Foremost Neocon Literary Critic of the Milky Way Galaxy rates this normative bilge highly, you know. Get with the program. Are you Old Europe or what? Third Reich or Fourth? Look in the mirror and ask yourself.
I’m either post-Herriman or as thick as a post.
See you in The Camps, sucka!
Have only seen the trailer clips for the Hurt Locker too. I rather enjoyed the agitation of dirt by bomb shock-wave clips. If the rest of the film were like that and created a sort of Jean Genet fixation/fetishisation on banal objects as a way of measuring day to day life then one could argue its merits against its political stance. But I suspect it’s the usual US jingo-ism with faceless Ay-rabs and the agitated dirt is, as it were, a smoke-screen to cover business as usual.
Spots-on (sic), CDS Ed. What I like is how this odiously simple-minded propaganda flick is lauded as “suspenseful”. It’s about a bomb-disposal crew, you stupid cunts… one would have to be the second-least able son-of-cousin-fuckers on Earth to fumble that one, eh? (the first least-able being Bush2′s director in the 9/11: First Blood… This Time It’s Simulated kindergarten scene)
nutshell resume: “This is ideology at its purest: the focus on the perpetrator’s traumatic experience enables us to obliterate the entire ethico-political background of the conflict.”
its getting like the Bushes and Clintons at the Academy, now we are supposed to get excited about the competition between Camoron and his ex-wife.
This reminds me of how easy it is to run a supposed critique of (eg) “Gone with the Wind” without ever mentioning slaves; the standard melodrama in the *false foreground* mops up all the attention while the “background” (the context and the point) delivers the message (which remains unmolested by analysis). Next: a critique of “Jud Süß” that doesn’t mention… you know… “all that”.
By StevenAugustine on 02/25/10 at 06:02 AM | Permanent link to this comment
Not that anyone responded: their asses were glued to the sticky seats. (Comrade DJ Sensei Ben sack-punches THL, too; I just don’t get why he recommends The Valve on the topic. CDS Ben, if you should read this anytime soon…?
The fun thing about that Žižek review is the moment when Žižek’s evil clone, “Zunenshine”, jumps in and takes over in the Comment Thread; Žižek’s left-hand sock puppet starts talking to the right and in no uncertain terms:
The fact that the film uses the experiences of individual soldiers as opposed to a larger exposition of militaristic campaigns means that as viewers, we (The Academy) are still locked in the Imaginary stage of direct identification. Instead of confronting the causes and effects of the war as interpreted by the ‘global community’ (the Symbolic order), we can safely reside within the innocent perspective of a soldier who is spared answering the question of ‘why’ (causes of war, expected outcome of the war, etc.), as he must concentrate all his efforts on the more pragmatic ‘how’ (to disarm bombs, to save lives, etc.).
Comrades, by all that is holy, if James Wood ever publishes another “novel” and I for whatever perverse reasons feel compelled to read it, I want you to take appropriate action. Let this be your guide.
I thought you were going to give us the “jumping in the shit-trough” scene… (didn’t Stalin’s son do just that, btw?)
Believe me, I looked. But then, there’s something about a clean shot to the front lobe that has its undeniable appeal. So funny that I came at him with “wily” and “edifying.” I wouldn’t blame him for having assumed that I had previously read him. How to explain that that vocabulary reached me before the stain of the T-BAG on my soul? I am, as we all are, (even if you have personally steered clear) diminished for its existence.
You know who I would give my eye teeth to have dissect an excerpt, any excerpt, as you’ve done for that bum Rush? This fine lady. http://www.bu.edu/psych/faculty/charris/ If there were a Cabal for the Good as you once mused, I’d like to have her on the Steering Committee.
Running out the door on a family outing, Frances… this comment deserves energetic attention and it will get some in a couple of hours!
Perfect timing, because I am due at the Bialystoker Nursing Home to pick up a free annual package of Passover groceries for my neighbor Sylvia who is now sadly too frail to collect it herself.
Life is marvelous. I sang Hatikvah and scored a bottle of Borscht for my neighborliness!
[ed.'s note: good portents all around: this won't be a week to fear]
Those Caldwells are the Nick and Nora of TET, CDS Frances. Adding the imminent Offspringers, they are a Cabal unto themselves (we can only hope it’s for good; Catherine looks very good but Edmond looks… hmmm… suavely naughty and just ever-so-slightly … dissipated…). Clearly, Comrade Catherine is one of us already:
“In my cross-cultural research, I am the originator (with Ayse Aycicegi) of the Personality-Culture Clash hypothesis. We propose that mental health is facilitated by having a personality in tune with cultural values.”
Invert that and you’ve modeled Simulocracy Value Judgments to a “t”
“So funny that I came at him with “wily” and “edifying.” I wouldn’t blame him for having assumed that I had previously read him. ”
Explain this please, CDS Frances. Did you catch him at an in-store appearance at Walmart…?
Many years ago, (I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now) when Dan-Dan edified Cappy on How Fiction Works over at Open Letters Monthly, I left a comment, I think it was my first lit-blog comment ever, saying that Wood was a wily thinker and a clever man (which, needless to say, I did not mean as compliments).
And then, when under Fyodor’s tuition we gang-raped him at TRE, I wrote that I thought the thrashing he received would be edifying. (And I sincerely think it was, but alas and alack for him, too little, far too late.) These two words–wily and edifying (there are others but these two especially) are so central to the relationship between Bunting Père et Fil in T-BAG. (Please don’t make me touch the book again to search for page numbers.)
It’s all so very ept, ane and fantile, in all the best possible senses, all at once!
Aha! I remember both milestones well.
I read the first two chapters of T-BAG and because no one was blackmailing me to read further, I couldn’t. I remember thinking: this fellow has no idea how to compel A Reader to go from one sentence to the next. None. It was like dancing with some rhythmless, humorless and deeply needy fucker who’d had free cha-cha lessons that very morning…
As I posted, long ago, on that semi-cunt Bitchelmore’s site (remember, this is the FLAME WAR edition of TET):
Sunday, March 16, 2008 Steven Augustine said…
It’s my precognitive sense (larf) that Wood, in years to come, will cringe about this youthfully asseverative title he cooked up… *How Fiction Works* … during this era so absolutely rotten with sham certainties. Which will, in fact, be his only saving grace: that *everybody* was doing it.
Otherwise: please. How patently absurd. How *whose* fiction works, for whom, *when*?
“Harry slid backwards down the splintery banister in his flimsy shortpants, despite mother’s warning, screaming by the time he reached bottom.”
How does that sentence work? Depends on whether you’ve ever had a wooden splinter pierce a testicle (sensual empathy), or if you’ve never heard of “splinters” (and don’t get it) or if you’re slightly cruel by nature (rendering it funny) or are kind (in which case it’s sad) or have a hyperactive toddler at home (you see the scene quite vividly and sympathize and enter the scene imaginatively, thinking of tweezers) or are a rather judgmental sort with no children, an immaculate house and a splinter-free banister (in which case the boy was asking for it and the narrative has a satisfyingly moral outcome, though it doesn’t particularly move you).
A work of fiction (as product) doesn’t even *exist* until it enters a mind beyond that of the author’s: unless every human mind is stocked with identical experiences, and wired for identical reactions, and every word and sentence is magically weighted to be equally evocative to every sensibility, Wood’s book is stylish nonsense.
Which, I fully admit, is better than *un-stylish* nonsense, any old day. But only slightly.
The mere fact that James Wood is *the* critic who comes up, again and again, in these discussions, indicates the faddishness of the phenomenon; we’re not arguing literature, we’re arguing The Beatles and The Stones. Without any Stones.
So Wood is a rock star. Cool. But I’m too confident in my own ability to *read* to be unduly impressed. 10:15 PM
from the walk yesterday with Comrade DJ Sensei Barry
from the walk today with Beloved and Offsprung (note Offsprung’s cap)
15 seconds in… the wonderful clarity of it
“[ed.'s note: good portents all around: this won't be a week to fear]”
I don’t mean to apply undue pressure, but I am rahlly looking forward to (our real Nick) CDS Nick’s March fil-um. And, of course, ChickLit Monday. Man that ‘s coming around fast.
But CDS Frances, you didn’t like the last installment of ChickLitMonday at all! larf
I hope all the comrades, new and old, explicit and lurking, love cello music. I’ve been saving this for a special occasion; it feels like one today.
Frances much obliged.
One of my mum’s boyfriends had a bootleg first-take recording of Pablo Casals playing a cello concerto ( think it was Elgar but memory defeats me here ).The sound engineer had put the mike too near to Casal’s mouth so picked up the song he was singing whilst playing. A completely different “tune” borne of concentration and effort. At times it was like a non-stop heckle of his own playing and in its way beautiful.
But I suppose Deutsche Grammaphon or whoever decided duo-tune cello concertos wouldn’t sell and they did a second take or third or….
Ahh, the possibilities, if we would just let ourselves be free, really and truly free. What you described is an effect I’d like to try executing in writing as an experiment. I don’t know if I can achieve it but I’m excited to undertake it.
IN THE TIME IT TOOK THE DOORBELL to ring twice, Tallulah remembered her childhood. Pre-school with the children of the rich (how old was she before she realized that those handsome black men in smart-looking uniforms who picked up her classmates with limos at the curb, while she waited for her mother’s Volvo at the corner, weren’t the fathers?). Grade school with Catholics (the cheapest good education available) and then what felt like fifty years of High School with twelve-hundred kids who hadn’t made it into the real Academy of the Performing Arts. All these pushy, wide-hipped attention-whores with home-cut hair who couldn’t quite sing the national anthem and couldn’t quite do the splits. Neither rich nor talented, Tallulah and her classmates weren’t cool enough to be really poor, either. The genuinely poor would beat them up outside the slice-of-pizza place they’d linger at after school and the moderately rich would group-sneer them at the Galleria on the weekend. The only kids she could get away with looking down on were the ones who read Bibles in the cafeteria at lunch and even those kids were smugly convinced that the Son of the Creator of the Universe was going to come pick them up real soon and take them to Paradise after killing everybody else in the school. You could not convince them otherwise.
Tallulah’s mother, who seemed to think Tallulah hadn’t noticed that Tallulah’s parents had ruined her life (first, by dropping from-upper-to-lower-middle class in the time it took to grow breasts that weren’t even big enough to help) would sometimes belt out “Lame!, I’m gonna suuuuuck forevuh!” in the Volvo, on the way home, after whatever class play or recital or musical, as their little running gag, like they were snarky buds. Who wants a mother for a snarky bud? Tallulah always felt sadly obliged to laugh and join in the “Lame!” song whenever it came up. But not before thinking how unfair it felt to be so good at fake laughter before being able to vote.
And then came the divorce. Her little sister (born clever) chose to move in with Tallulah’s father. The resemblance between Tallulah’s little sister and Tallulah’s father’s subsequent beautiful new girlfriend, everyone agreed, was uncanny. Why, you two look like sisters, said Tallulah’s mother, once, unbelievably, after the replacement-mom and the-wannabe-only-child came back from a ski trip together, laughing like snarky-buds. Tallulah knew real laughter when she heard it.
Fake laughter, she whispered to herself, is the training bra of fake orgasms.
Jude was buzzing whoever it was through the security door without even asking. Tallulah was frantically conceptualizing a position: there, with her legs curled under her, chubby ass toward the unlit fire…? Fine, until she had to move: you can’t undo one of those ’60s poses gracefully without help. How about: on the couch in front of the blue Dorito…? Negative: she would appear to be hogging the quiches. She had about four minutes to craft a breezily desirable tableaux before whoever it was got into the elevator, squeaked up to the fourth floor and sauntered coolly to Jude’s end of the dirty deco hallway.
Next Monday: Chapter Four of TALLULAH, JUDE… ChickLit in Bite-Sized Pieces!!!
CDS Neil,
Check in with us please and let us know where in the world you are.
Who Am I To Chime For Rusty Addison
How we grieve.
It is tenfold an anchor
and
bombs with families
by hacking off their bowers
and junking good cells.
Chosen for a mammoth pressing
of reactive prowess,
[ed.'s note: Des, since you name Neil in this, I'm not super comfortable with posting his private email to you]
Yes, c’mon Neil you poetic regular in Berlin, doing it for what Faer make the derbhfine within you Neil Addison, i know who you are, come on and show yourself.
Remember that first mail, I have it here to hand:
‘Hullo Desmond.
I hope this email reaches you OK – I found this address via google and don’t know if it still holds good.
[this bit of the message redacted]
~
Yes Neil, strange how the weft of time, chance and choice serendipitously lure into a weave which appears – persuading supernatural force of Brigante and Setantii – Ormskirk poetically writ. We could be Heaney and Mahon trumping and self-trumping one another, Addison you Lancastrian Aughton Ormy boy: not one thing or t’other, poised on some border a mile from scouser scally hordes, their city-witted jive talk in yeah yeah yeah – our woolyback oop north Coronation Street vowels, elided and either/or as/is de facto scouser manques: Do you remember, the fights on Coronation Park?
[this bit of the message redacted]
Well Neil, that’s poetry – the sudden appearance – ‘through special uses of language quite beyond prose, that persuades, tricks, cajoles, entertains and wrenches us into perceptions that we have never had before.’ – as Woodman, the seventy year old Harvard-Oxford Comrade in SE Asia, ripped off by Joan Houlihan, has it, over on the Scarriet blog mentioned in post 23 above.
“Those perceptions may be just flashes, hunches, tiny little glimpses of things we never imagined before, or they may be profound changes in our whole way of being. But they’re real — indeed, we may even say “I never guessed that before,” “I had no idea,” “My God!”
Christopher Woodman.
FLAME WAR AS PERPETUAL EXORCISM
The thing still smolders. A week later, the creature called Pinkroom is still refusing to let the Comment Thread to the GUblogicle about Ted Hughes end on a positive note. The blogicle lauds Hughes, commenters weighed in with their Yays and Nays. But what’s the point, for any one commenter, after registering the first dozen or so Nays, to go on? Lots of these things are unnaturally extended by personal combat… it’s not just a matter of registering one’s opinion on the original blogicle: it becomes a matter of fending off/ pressing personal attacks from/on other commenters. Fair enough. But in the absence of personal attacks, now, this Pinkroom Dybbuk just keeps coming back to the thread to stick her rabbit shit on any hint that Ted Hughes was anything better than crap as a poet or anything less than ridiculous or despicable as a person.
Most of it is the bogstandard UK cocktail of tall-tree-gnawing/ regional chauvinism and weaponized class anxiety (to write too well is to be a virtual “Toff”). But there’s something else. What is it?
* Parisa
28 Mar 2010, 10:56PM
I was glad to read this on a Grauniad blog – Ted Hughes is more popular than I thought. Good.
“After totting up 1,600 recommendations, the independent reading charity has found that The Letters of Ted Hughes was the title most frequently chosen as book of the year by newspaper critics.”
*
pinkroom
28 Mar 2010, 11:19PM
Popularity, or infamy?
What price some lunatic assault upon his plaque in poet’s corner within a year?
* Parisa
28 Mar 2010, 11:40PM
Here is a beautiful tribute to Ted Hughes & also one to Sylvia & Ted. He was pretty dishy & softly spoken to boot – what a hunk! (By coincidence, my cousin owns an apartment in the house Sylvia Plath died in – in Primrose Hill.)
“““““`
Here is a two – part tribute to Ted Hughes & Sylvia Plath with poets who personally knew them – ie Heaney & Alvarez:
I don’t think the newspaper critics are choosing it ‘cos they think he’s a bastard, Pinkroom.
*
* pinkroom
29 Mar 2010, 7:11AM
I didn’t say the b. word P. I was thinking about the whole soap opera bit.
“He was pretty dishy & softly spoken to boot – what a hunk!”
You’ll be comparing him to Heathcliff next!
*
* Parisa
29 Mar 2010, 7:54AM
pinkroom:
29 Mar 2010, 7:11AM
“You’ll be comparing him to Heathcliff next!”
Not a bad comparison, PInkr!
And this comes in, three days after my last appearance in the thread and five days after the comment the insurgent is referring to:
Isferin
29 Mar 2010, 9:25AM
How to make a piece on poetry into an ego trip for peculiars.
There are some serious psychological difficulties represented here, I’d say, especially in the Hughes v Plath twaddle.
The Daily Mirror gibe was easy to make but reveals a lot about a very unpleasant person. Shut the fuck up, Goebbels.
Larf.
Note the projection: the commenter rages about “serious psychological difficulties” and refers to me as “goebbels”. This first-in-the-thread-comment from this avatar isn’t fending off any attack I’ve made on this particular commenter and doesn’t even take the trouble to comment on Hughes’ poetry: the hatred is palpable, as is the level of psychic disturbance. Amazing shit. We’re nearly in the twilit preserve of the Spiritually Creepy here. This is the microcosm: what’s the macro…?
Much is made of Hughes deep interest in shamanism. You bet! It has many practices but a common factor is the manipulation of the mind of the victim to cause damage or death ( by their own hand ). Ring any bells ?
Due to my alcoholic tendency, the thoughts and feelings I find myself expressing online generally – in the cut and thrust atmosphere of avataristic debate with anonymous posters – swing from smiling bevevolence and easy tolerance, to rabid foaming hatred, depending on where in the cycle the bi-polar swing is.
I rarely go more than a week or two without getting drunk and feeling shit for days after, and the down side to this are the downers. It takes a week to fully recover my form and humor, and if I slip into drinking more than once a week, it could be three and four weeks of paranoia, staring listless at the computer screen, everything I read by the anonymous and known regs on my cyberounds, really bugging me – and projecting into belief some editorial conspiracy on the part of every editor in the world hating me because they know I know their game.
How dare they, by psychic means on a social-network literature site, use supernatural methods to affect one’s game, hungover, denying me the right to use my name. How fucking dare they Steve!!!!
I am often in this state of mind, feeling rough and driven by a strong come-down-combative urge which displaces all of one’s intellectual and human flaws, into feeling somehow personally hard-done to by – a) the anonymous bloggers on the Guardian poetry threads I view as lexicographical objects to romper and deconstruct in the linguisitc gimp-room and – b) every online poet I am ‘competing’ with for the title of One Most Knowing The Truth of Bardic lore.
It’s all linked to the booze because it’s only in the days after a bender I convince myself we are all middle-aged, sat on the arse know-all equivalents of (verbal) violence loving louts who just want to beat random anonymous people up online in print, to develop and sharpen our oral stiletto – for the sole purpose of THEATRE.
Perform in print, give the reader a show: this sometimes slips out of view, but because I haven’t been on the ale for two weeks, I have had long enough to get a stable run in and should be fairly pleasant and genuinely without animosity, until the next session, after which I will be hating everyone online.
It’s difficult to lure a reader in when writing about online spats. Most just aren’t that interesting to read, and the biggest reason why, I think, is because arguing in print about literature, is boring for all but the few participants doing so.
I know from personal experience, reading back stuff about online spats that I can now recognize how and why it was boring for the reader. That what I was doing, how I felt, was really an act and the printed performance of an actuary bore and ham I was pretending to be, in the theatrical set-piece flytes with others I had convinced myself with projection were cunts, but in truth where exactly the same as me, just another human being who loves poetry and performing – back then, still finding my ‘voice’ and ‘name’ within.
I read back earlier flytings and spot the hollowness in my pose, knowing now writing is only a performance, sure I needed to deep-act and con myself I believed all the rubbish I wrote, that such a poet by sating such a thing, means s/he was a disgrace to the human race and a calculated affront to me personally as some middle aged grey headed fat tosser on the scratch avoiding any real kinda work for a living, yoking further and further into the fiction I am a productive member of the bourgeoisie boring bastards class.
It was only recently I felt I got past all that and came to grasp, it’s not about them anonymous and/or famous tossers, but your blog-reader, who doesn’t wanna hear the moans of some bloke on the dole talking shit about how poetical it all is, but wants some proper Theatre and kerfuffle, rants and spats, scraps, competitive insults. Two poster-poets going at it hammer and tongue, both telling one another to fuck right off as inventively as possible in the flyting.
It took me a long time to work through the anon-not anon bollocks and honestly mate, it’s all just theatre, smoke and mirrors, abracadabra and abracadabru, and at the end of the day, as far as poetry’s concerned Lancashababru cannot be beaten online, as far as I can read, coz I aint seen no other honest boring bardic git obsessed by ‘emselves to the extent I and Lancashafuckingbabaru is you cunts!!!
What I’d prefer from the thrashers and sneerers would be higher-quality verbal-dagger-play; post-Cyrano stuff. Talent improves even Hate.
The image of that child in a KKK getup is chilling. One of my own earliest memories is of attending a fair housing demonstration with my parents to fight against redlining, a memory I can be proud of. One must never condescend to children or display them gratuitously. No way that little girl understood the hateful fantasy in which she was an extra. Here’s an antidote.
“No way that little girl understood the hateful fantasy in which she was an extra.”
If only, CDS Frances! If anything, the hatred of her grownups is childish in its purity; I remember all too well the terrifying force that hatred could marshal in children that girl’s rough age. Children see more clearly, hear more sharply and are infinitely better gauges of body-language and para-verbal inflection than we are… to grow old is to forget how to perceive the world by substituting our senses (and unmediated sense of Reality) with inculcated models. That little girl has absorbed every lesson of her environment. Maybe she grew up to marry a Lesbian Jewess of Color but at that time of her life (unless that photo is staged) she is all there and in it and happy to learn from her parents.
PS Have I mentioned that I have a (non-Klan) son of thirty…?
That’s what you meant by “kids.” You really are a mean old daddy, but I do like you. Don’t even try and scare me with Carrie. I turn somersaults in pig’s blood at this point. It’s like amniotic fluid for me. I just gurgle and splash and frolic awash in the glorious elixir. And I give as good as I get. The Mayan kings have nothing on me.
I am ecstatically happy to hear you have a grown son. You’re the kind of capaciously-hearted man who should have many children, CDS Steven. Please tell us something about him when you can. I’m already proud of him.
Well, he’s a musician (in two popular bands; he’ll be touring in France soon), a husband… and (hold on to your hat)… the father of a daughter who’s only two and a half years younger than my second child, his half-sister (ie, his daughter’s aunt). Get back to me when you regain consciousness! Larf [ed.'s note: he was the result, if you're curious, of a college pregnancy; mother was a rich girl who grew up next door to Earl Butz, if that rings a bell]
UPDATE: forgot to mention that I first met Comrade DJ Sensei JR after she and he became lovers! Ach! Hippies…
I know I’m a mean old man, CDS Frances, but, even on my best behavior, I wouldn’t be able to sit through more than fifteen minutes of this sort of film… with that adorable little girl with perma-clean hair and the speechless days of penny-whistle chores of unsurpassed beauty. Having said that, just imagine how much better off Blacks in North America would be now if they’d gotten this soft-focus mythologizing for twenty years instead of smear-jobs like Precious…
And another. A steady little rocker in the making.
Now that’s more like it!
Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change from radically impacting on our lives over the coming decades. This is the stark conclusion of James Lovelock, the globally respected environmental thinker and independent scientist who developed the Gaia theory. -The Grauniad, today
Shit…I could have told him that and I’m an Arts graduate…
Hard to imagine going wrong with the formula “Humans Are Too Stupid”: it applied the moment our regrettable ancestors became self-conscious and decided to fuck up stuff simply because they could. It’s just unfair we’ll be taking goats, cows, chickens, dogs and parrots with us when we finally torch it (my money is on micro-black holes or oxygen fission). It’s okay that we’ll be collaterally killing cats off, though; they’re as amoral as we are. In fact, maybe cats have been egging us on the whole time. Just probably bored with it all, innit? Fish-flavored shit for dinner, fuck once a lifetime (if at all) and torture a mouse to death for distraction: wears thin quick. Yeah, humans: push the button. G’wan you hairless bipedal cunts…
The sheer volume of people going to the Arctic circle to tell us the dangers of global warming can’t help matters either.
Gone are the days when standing in front of a photo and wagging your finger was enough. Now keeping it real is the name of the game.
Was reading about the decimation of the passenger pigeon which carpetted the US skies before the Mayflower arrived. Even though they knew the last flock was the last flock they still killed them all.
The Cadaver Synod occurred sometime in January 897 in the Church of St. John Lateran, the pope’s official church in his capacity as Bishop of Rome. The defendant on trial was Formosus, an elderly pope who after a reign of five years had died April 4, 896 and been buried in St. Peter’s Basilica. (According to P. G. Maxwell-Stuart’s Chronicle of the Popes (1997), the name Formosus means “good-looking” in Latin.) The trial of Formosus was ordered by the reigning pontiff, Stephen VII, who had been prodded into issuing the order by a powerful Roman family dynasty and other anti-Formosus political factions, and who apparently also was personally motivated by what The Oxford Dictionary of Popes (1986) calls a “near-hysterical hatred [of Formosus].” Although Formosus had been, according to McBrien, “a man of exceptional intelligence, ability, and even sanctity, he [had] made some bitter political enemies … including one of his successors, Stephen VII.”
No trial transcript of the Cadaver Synod exists. Nonetheless, it is reasonably clear what happened. Sitting on a throne, Stephen VII personally presided over the proceeding. Also present as co-judges were a number of Roman clergy who were there under compulsion and out of fear. The trial began when the disinterred corpse of Formosus was carried into the courtroom. On Stephen VII’s orders the putrescent corpse, which had been lying in its tomb for seven months, had been dressed in full pontifical vestments. The dead body was then propped up in a chair behind which stood a teenage deacon, quaking with fear, whose unenviable responsibility was to defend Formosus by speaking in his behalf. The presiding judge, Stephen VII, then read the three charges. Formosus was accused of (1) perjury, (2) coveting the papacy, and (3) violating church canons when he was elected pope.
The trial was completely dominated by Stephen VII, who overawed the assemblage with his frenzied tirades. While the frightened clergy silently watched in horror, Stephen VII screamed and raved, hurling insults at and mocking the rotting corpse. Occasionally, when the furious torrent of execrations and maledictions would die down momentarily, the deacon would stammer out a few words weakly denying the charges. When the grotesque farce concluded, Formosus was convicted on all counts by the court. The sentence imposed by Stephen VII was that all Formosus’s acts and ordinations as pope be invalidated, that the three fingers of Formosus’s right hand used to give papal blessings be hacked off, and that the body be stripped of its papal vestments, clad in the cheap garments of a lay person, and buried in a common grave. The sentence was rigorously executed. (The body was shortly exhumed and thrown into the Tiber, but a monk pulled it out of the river.)
Stephen VII’s fanatical hatred of Formosus, his eerie decision to convene the Cadaver Synod in the first place, his even eerier decision to have Formosus’ corpse brought into court, his maniacal conduct during the grisly proceeding, and his barbaric sentence that the corpse be abused and humiliated make it difficult to disagree with the historians who say that Stephen VII was stark, raving mad.
The Cadaver Synod was the cause of Stephen VII’s prompt and precipitous downfall. The appalling trial and the savage mistreatment of Formosus’s corpse provoked so much anger and outrage in Rome that within a few months there was a palace revolution and Stephen VII was deposed, stripped of his gorgeous pope’s clothing and required to dress as a monk, imprisoned, and, some time in August 897, strangled.
Three months later another pope, Theodore II, whose pontificate lasted only 20 days, all in the month of November 897, held a synod which annulled the Cadaver Synod and fully rehabilitated Formosus. Theodore II also ordered that the body of Formosus be reverentially reburied. Therefore, according to Joseph S. Brusher’s Popes Through the Ages (1980), the corpse was “brought back to [St. Peter's Basilica] in solemn procession. Once more clothed in the pontifical vestments, the body was placed before the Confession [the part of the high altar in which sacred relics were placed] of St. Peter’s. There, in the presence of Pope Theodore II, a Mass was said for the soul of Formosus, and his poor battered body was restored to its own tomb.”
Yes, indeed. When those dudes had a flame-war, they didn’t pull any fucking punches. Happy days…mind you, at least the poor bastard was dead. An older generation of Romans knew how to conduct a feud, too. Throw your enemies off the Tarpeian Rock (a steep cliff at the southern summit of the Capitoline Hill, overlooking the Forum).
It was used during the Republic as an execution site. Murderers, traitors, perjurors, and larcenous slaves, if convicted by the quaestores parricidii, were flung from the cliff to their deaths. Those who had a mental or significant physical disability also suffered the same fate as they were thought to have been cursed by the gods (bye-bye Ian Drury; farewell Ray Charles; so long Michael Jackson; hasta la vista Wendy Carlos).
Wasn’t Ollie Cromwell disinterred, put on trial, convicted and hung and quartered (after the restoration of Slippery Charlie Stuart)? I could be wrong…
And to think the imaginative fuckers only missed having 10,000,000-hits viral YouTube sensations by centuries! Ever read the book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Foucault? I read it in the ’90s and it prepared me for the noughties. Eye-opener. (Ooops, we’ve missed a chance at an Edward ll jape…)
Yeah. Cromwell ‘the Cunt’ was posthumously executed in 1661 – dug up and hung in chains at Tyburn three years after death, his decapitated head put on a pole outside Westminster Hall until 1685
‘Afterwards the head changed hands several times, including the sale in 1814 to a man named Josiah Henry Wilkinson, before eventually being buried in the grounds of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in 1960′ – wikipedia informs the reader.
There’s a poet from Galway who makes a living selling the Big Issue in Dublin, in his sixties, known for putting Yeats into Irish and occassionally on TG4 the Irish language channel, reciting his translations. Paddy Finnegan, a legend to the small band of Dublin dabblers and if you ctach him before he’s drunk too much, a pure treat.
He has a Curse on Cromwell poem I have heard that puts the hairs up on the back of your neck. This is him at the Patrick Kavanagh Celebration 2007, above in the Palace Bar, literary watering hole of Smiley the Irish Times editor, who doled out favours to the forties and fifties Dublin literati.
Grooven! Des, can you do us the godly favor (when you’ve got the time) of transcribing the lyric? I can make out most of it but the audio quality is iffy (even with headphones) and missing two words in a row is too much.
And haven’t you got access to a camera of some sort? Film yourself in the WC declaiming, man, and post it here!
It’s called
Post From Parnassus (after Patrick Kavanagh) by myself, Paddy Finnegan.
Here by my seat, the old ghosts meet
Here to face, where the old menagerie
Relentlessly soldiers on, remembering
The old green dragon me, on the feast
Of the apostle of Ireland
Yea greedy graying catacuman will cease
To stage this avarice only on the command
Of sadness death. Then plague not the…
I can’t make it out myself, and only posted it because I know that a remote viewer who’s not been on the island before, will probably take away something essentially poetic about this reality. Here’s a man at the other end of the spectrum from Heaney in wealth and fame, but who’s appeared on the same bill as the Mossbawn magus, just as ‘respected’ as a human being by the poets of this small green dump of wet and wind, topography of the sidhe, they who make sixteen great-greats and four grandparents, eight forebears in our derbhfine – mother, father binary half and half system Amergin in the untitled advice to poets – leads us know and which theoretical physics declares real, it-magic not on show but beneath your surface, unseen abracadabra and Lancashababru, a world and realm within – withouts you in the reflection of our Cosmic Co-ordinating Creator – space-time string Michio Kaku dreamt, far more epistemologically real, his philosophy and explanation of nature’s original branch, method and limits of human knowledge, perhaps..we just dunno.
This is Raven, who pitched up here from San Francisco a year after myself, and me and Sweeney. Noel, who has the live magic more than most – looked at each other and thought, oh well, pack in now coz Raven’s smohken, but what happened after a few weeks is we saw through the ‘show’ and into the technical act, finding succor in that because he then became just like us instead of out there on his own in some best-bubble with his own star-wars defence shield deflecting any criticism with his live act, trumping and self-trumping, the poet Group who weekly went through the motions and learned from one another, in Dublin, home of dreamy poetical types and a great gas, while it lasted, the three year weekly learning how to be a live ****
Tanks mon! Aces. Will hit the pillow now and plow through the riches in the morning…
“…but what happened after a few weeks is we saw through the ’show’ and into the technical act, finding succor in that because he then became just like us instead of out there on his own in some best-bubble with his own star-wars defence shield deflecting any criticism with his live act…”
Good point. It’s a smooth act (only one mistake while doing it all from memory, in the below-linked clip) resting very heavily on the cliché of that cadence/intonation… my bookish friends and I (into poetry readings in 1977 in Philly; there was a shockingly literate subculture in a neighborhood called Germantown, back then) would do precisely that Beatnik-y thing, satirically, while declaiming the stock-phrase joke-line “concrete fingers scrape the sky”… pretending to be accompanied by bongos. I’ve done that bit as recently as last year, btw: whenever we see a chick in a black beret and a leotard or a hipster with a monkish beard and set of bongos…
And that’s a serious failing, I feel: “authenticity” depends on a narrow interpretation of “tradition” that really means “cliché” lurching towards self-parody. Raven’s performance is professional but where are the surprises? The lack of surprise there is the very thing that makes the performance professional (call it the Big Mac effect?).
Still, the cat is cool. His package is shiny.
It’s funny how an audience can tell when an act is going through the motions and a genuine connection with them is not there, be it a show that is a distant fourth wall affair or an act that relies on direct communication with its public.
I remember going to see Spalding Gray who at the time I thought had that kind of self-awareness about the importance of the here and now down as good as anyone. But you could tell on the night he wasn’t really there. It can be tiredness due to over-performing and over-touring or that the performer has become bored with his/her own act.
When something works live it’s very hard to break away from that as the adrenaline gained is a delightful feeling. But it’s no good for you artistically.
The late great tragic Spalding. I kept three or four treasured VCR cassettes of his performance films for years, plus two of his books, but they’ve all finally vanished now that he’s gone.
“When something works live it’s very hard to break away from that as the adrenaline gained is a delightful feeling. But it’s no good for you artistically.” Yeah, funny how pleasing/pleasuring (pandering to) the contemporaneous audience can degrade your Art. One of the facts of life.
That’s true but on the other hand before the advent of YouTube where what you do is almost online before you’ve finished doing it many acts used to tour the same show for decades. I suppose it’s down to how you approach it. We keep acts on the road but also have an almost neurotic obsession to make new work as well.
2 of my friends were back-up musicians for ( what transpired to be ) Viv Stanshall’s last tour. He played “Jollity Farm” amongst many other Bonzo favourites and next to me were similarly aged men who you could see were moved by that experience where memory-attachment mixes with he’s in the same room as me singing that song.
So I’m extremely Stalinist about the necessity to create new work all the time but make allowances for those I like.
I guess I’m bound for those camps aren’t I?
Your monogrammed jumpsuit is ready.
Any colour choice other than orange?
Erm no.
Over the years, I’ve had a lot of friends who were involved in the entertainment/performance lark in one way or another. The majority of them barely scraped a living at it nor did they ever really expect to.
Thing is, although I like to pretend that I’m a pragmatic bastard and I teased them mercilessly, secretly I had nothing but admiration for them.
They loved performing and they loved and respected the work they performed. Things done for love are always, always purer, nobler, just flat-out better than things done for any other reason.
At the risk of sounding like some patchouli-addled hippie, love is the best reason of all.
Don’t tell anyone I said so, though…
[ed.'s note: as long as you don't refer to it as "empowering"...]
I’m going to post this because CDS Frances reminded me of this story (upthread); I’d forgotten how much I like it. Comrades Lurking and Explicit who know this text too well, already… scroll on… scroll on…
SARAH IS FIVE-ISH
You expect a clockwork metropolis resembling dirty stacks of old wedding cakes. It’s a surprise riding into Vienna from the airport on the shuttle and seeing miles of heavy industry instead. Silver pipes and vast white tanks and smokestacks protruding from asphalt plants and refineries. There was a premonition of this already at the airport because the horizon is ringed with the rust-tinged edge of an inverted bowl of old industrial weather. The last thing you’d expect of the former heart of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire is to be reminded of pre-EPA Pittsburgh in its sky-killing heyday, but life is just one long surprise for the living, isn’t it?
Further in, at the center, in the area around the Stephansdom (the cathedral), things look more as they are supposed to. Vienna is a closer match for “Vienna” here: the plaster-pallid coachmen are top-hatted and their Fiackers are brightly enameled in greens or reds and heavily trimmed in black. Some of the Fiackers, drawn by two-horse teams, are so black they look like funeral carriages, never more so than when the horses drawing one of the grandiose things through crowds across Graben, the old square, are pure white.
Sarah and I are having a rest on the long lawn in front of the Votivkirche. Sarah is five-ish. We watch as a bespectacled file clerk in short-sleeves and stiff-legged pants goes from girl to girl, snapping photos with the barest minimum of subterfuge. Every three snaps or so, he pretends to take a picture of the church, or a tree, as long as the church or tree happens to fall within the sight line of an interposed girl showing skin. He makes his way around the park, barely able to control his excitement at capturing all these soft white girls and their long limbs laid out browning in the sun.
In the sun it feels like late spring but in the shade it feels much colder, as though patches of snow should still be visible in the trees and on the grass. The man snaps his fill of girlflesh and eventually disappears into the Votivkirche, following two tiny things in tulip dresses with their unsuspecting parents who are entering the whispery dark no doubt with the unironic intention of prayer. Sarah and I stand up, brush off our bums and leave the park as the bells begin their robust work at noon. I am feeling a bit hungry.
Sitting in The Café Braeunerhof, I’m struck by the paradox that the service is both far ruder and infinitely more polite than what I have come to expect in Berlin. The waiters in Berlin espouse the rights of man and bodily refute the very notion of service; what are your pennies compared to their self respect? They slouch and mumble while serving and your manners devolve to the level of the service. Viennese staff hold the clientele to a much higher standard, for service is a form of mastery in Vienna. Sarah’s plate of scrambled eggs comes with an implicit command not to play with her food and I’ve never seen her use a fork so adultly. For myself I’ve ordered a sausage filled with cheese and served with a tin of beer, known in jolly Viennese slang as An aatrige mit a blech… some pus with a tin.
Sarah says, “Aunt Iris has two big horses, a black one and a white one, like the ones we saw with the carriage, Henry,” but I tell her that isn’t true. Then she says, “But I saw them,” and I assert that this, too, is untrue. Sarah has never seen her Aunt Iris before, unless it was in photos so old that Iris herself was a child in them. And Iris definitely doesn’t have horses. She lives with a cat in a shitty little apartment on Hahngasse.
Leaning through the cook’s portal in his immaculate toque and framed by steam is a dead ringer for Paul Gaugin, bent nose, grease-paint mustache and everything. Earlier in the day we saw Richard Wagner in a light gray suit, shirt open at the collar, inspecting the tourists and shop fronts of Graben with an air of lordly tolerance, hands clasped behind his back, gray hair skirting the suit collar.
Half of the clientele of The Braeunerhof are phantoms themselves. There’s the grinning geezer with a lap-long beard he is not much wider than to the front and there’s the off-season Brunhilde in a booth like a ship in her bosom-prowed dress slurping soup and there’s a dapper fellow with his Herald Tribune in the window under a fading magazine clipping about Thomas Bernhard, the Austrian writer who liked brooding over his coffee and a newspaper in that very spot. Bernhard is dead as a Mesopotamian now, ribs like a sprung umbrella. Can no longer talk, feel, write or taste coffee. I wonder what he thinks about in that little room. I wonder if death was worth it?
When I ask Sarah if she wants a dessert she says no thankyou, Henry. Declining the pleasure is her way of proving to me that she’s a good person I guess and this touches me terribly and I take her hand and lead her out of The Braeunerhof and onto the iron shadow of the cathedral. I almost make the mistake of offering a look inside the eternity-obsessed hangar with its gray recumbent saints and its vertebral columns but catch myself before the blunder. I’m relieved that she’s simply happy to walk in the new shoes I bought her. Relieved they don’t hurt.
The goodwill that being an English-speaking tourist elicits never ceases to astonish me. Sheepishly begging directions from one Viennese after another, we become not only progressively more lost, but treated with greater and greater patience and sympathy, until I’m ready for the last direction-giver, a Muslim lady pushing her somber tram, to give us a kiss, cab fare to Hahngasse and a little mother’s milk for the trip. I come to the interesting conclusion that the landmark each person has given us to navigate by is calibrated to his or her respective social class or personality. Bank, kulturhaus, discount shoe store. The dark-robed Muslim lady tells us to turn right at the cemetery.
We are standing on a steep hill on a wide street in windy shadows when we notice a gray pasha in brown polyester, shiny-domed and grandiosely mustached, beckoning madly from a café table in front of the bistro on the other side. He is either the bistro’s owner, or some sort of local landmark, a colorful character busily writing himself into the oral history of the neighborhood.
“Where do you want to go?” he asks, dismissing my map with a gesture of gregarious scorn. He thumps his chest. “I know everywhere.”
I tell him the name of the street and he frowns. Soon, both of us are huddled over the map, gripping its corners like the wings of a bird we’ve snatched, for the purposes of divination, from the breast of the wind. A handsome matron in a cheerful scarf and a Burberry coat is just then stepping from the bistro and pasha intercepts her with one discreetly lateral move, blocking her exit and inquires, sotto voce, how to get to Hahngasse. The matron peers at Sarah, then me, registering, no doubt, the fact that the little girl and I cannot possibly be related.
“Do you speak English?” she asks, with a heavy German accent.
With five or six sets of conflicting directions to choose from, Sarah and I finally find Hahngasse. I think I remember the street number, but how to get into the building to search for the flat? Her name isn’t on any of the buzzers. I buzz a random name and politely explain that I wish to leave a note for Frau Lott. Once in the building, we climb the staircase, ascending into a bowely-warm odor of cooking that harmonizes with the dark trim and carpet. On each landing I look for Iris Lott’s name, three different doors per landing, many of the doors astonishingly beautiful, ornate in the Belle Epoque style. On the fourth landing, two to go, Sarah says she’s tired so we take a break, sitting on the stairs, and I wish I’d been prescient enough to buy fruit for her. Something. She says,
“Henry, when we find Aunt Iris, will you stay with Aunt Iris too?”
I say no.
“Just me and Aunt Iris?”
And her cat. Yes.
“Will I see you again Henry?”
No.
She lowers her head to a resolute angle and says, logically, “Then I hope we don’t find Aunt Iris.”
We descend again to the front hall and find the mailboxes and there stands, on one of the boxes, on a strip of paper taped beside the name on the official nameplate on the box, in faintest pencil, M. Lott. It must be Iris, but I don’t know what the “M” stands for. Does she have a name I’ve never heard her sister Sandy mention? Discoveries like this tend to take all the air out of me; doors opening onto doors opening onto doors towards a room of useless secrets; so I concentrate on the task at hand. But there’s no slot on the box that I might slip a note through (if I had a pencil and paper to write one with) . The mailman carries a master key, I assume, with which to open the whole bank of boxes in one go.
I’m trying to shimmy my business card through a hairline crack in the mailbox, an activity that looks suspiciously like a foreigner tampering with the Austrian postal system, a crime probably punishable with flogging, when we hear a key in the front door and I jump an inch in my skin. An elderly gentleman in a derby hat and a three-piece suit lets himself in, pauses to take in the scene and greets us with a loose nod and a “Grüss Gott” that sounds like a dying man’s terminal greeting.
Sarah says, “That man scared me, Henry!” and I have to admit that he scared me too. But everything does.
I like this story. It’s empowering, in a very real sense.
BTW, I’m not sure if this is true or not and I can’t googlefirm it, but a poster on the Aussie censorship thread (at the Graun) stated that Australia has banned images of small-breasted women because it’s a ‘gateway drug’ to paedophilia. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry…
[ed.'s note: much more effective to ban daycare centers]
[ed.'s other note: the building appearing in the last bit of that Vienna story was the building Beloved and I were actually in looking for her old friend, a great-grandson of Robert Louis Stevenson]
While activists in Britain battle on in an attempt to regulate lapdance clubs – the number of which has been growing at an alarming rate during the last decade – Iceland has passed a law that will result in every strip club in the country being shut down. And forget hiring a topless waitress in an attempt to get around the bar: the law, which was passed with no votes against and only two abstentions, will make it illegal for any business to profit from the nudity of its employees.
Men need to be helped/forced to familiarize themselves with the anatomies of women they actually know (and who are already familiar with their men’s anatomies in turn). Fuck locally, surf globally.
My head is full of pornographic images of my wife. The advantages of this are many but the most obvious being that it’s free, you silly fuckers. Why are you paying cash to humiliate yourselves with ringers who despise you? I always thought the biggest kick of sexplay was the fact that it was one’s own dick (and other bits) that had been picked (from a field of worthy contenders). Professionalizing that process short-circuits the atavistic ecstasy of being Chosen. We just aren’t taught enough of these important things, brothers. I don’t need to mention how poor your Pussy-slurping skills are, do I (just once try doing it after your own apotheosis)? Time to bone up.
Off to Iceland, Comrades Penis-Bearing Single and non-Homomanic!
[ed.'s note: Comrades Ed, Edmond, Mish, Des, Sean and, erm, a few others are obviously exempt as targets of these exhortations as a result of being either erotogenically married or existing on a higher plane than sex]
If you read Genet it would appear that almost anything ( a pick-axe and cigarette smoke in his case ) is the gateway drug to impure thoughts.
Leave it to an ugly bald cock-sucking ex-con Frog to delight us so. It’s got nothing on my Burroughs but my 1963 edition of “Our Lady of the Flowers” is carefully wrapped in plastic.
“Your Burroughs”? Is that a euphemism?
[ed.'s note: more of a nickname]
TET Escort Service–We Take You All The Way There
[ed's note- they deleted a rearview nude of Simone de Beauvoir?]
[ed.'s note: how about, "TET Escorts-We take you home and back!"]
Out the door… back in a few hours, CDS Frances! Offsprung wants to visit a Satanic Global coffee chain…
She’s a busy little bee. Buzz on!
(Hope they take their hoverboards–much faster to-ing and fro-ing.)
As she put it recently:
“I dreamed about the whole world that we sailed in a boat.”
Sunday, March 28, 3:34pm
There’s something I want to say to you about that when I meet you. I think you’ll enjoy hearing it spoken in my voice rather than reading it on a monitor.
As an inveterate re-reader I prefer my smalltalk sonic and the things worth saying in print. Can’t you tell?
Sure. What you have done for Sprout, covering her into the projected future, is Godlike, in my humble opinion.
By being her Boswell, you mean?
“Jonathan Mayhew affirms the notion that poetry aspires to the condition of music…”
If the poetry features a “refrain” and the music is “pop” (structurally repetitive): okay: almost. Otherwise: pure nonsense. Music and non-representational painting are closer: poetry consists of words and words (as shifty as they can be) “mean” something. A G-minor chord doesn’t “mean” anything.
I just saw this refinement. I endorse it wholeheartedly.
“I’m trying to read your portrait, but
I’m helpless like a rich man’s child.”
I don’t get this in Temporary Achilles. Dylan definitely sings “poetry” but the lyrics say “portrait.” Why?
For the same reason that Mp3s of “Crimson and Clover” are usually labeled “Velvet Underground”…?
Duh. Why didn’t I think of that?
Because you are trustworthy you think others are worthy of trust
[ed.'s note: a familiar refrain Chez Augustine, btw]
I just don’t like “nice”… (chiefly because it’s so A) disingenuous B) uninformative)
parallax March 30, 2010 at 12:48 pm
I know I’m not allowed to post mish – but can I ask if MM is ok?
[Until you fucking apologise for calling us 'racists, white supremacists, BNP members...' etc ad nauseum, you're not welcome. Either grow a pair and acknowledge your stupidity and fundamental wrongness or fuck right off. Did you really think I'd let that slide? -Ed.]
THOSE WHO CAN, DO; THOSE WHO CAN’T, TEACH. THOSE WHO CAN’T TEACH GET TENURE
“Finally, I offer you Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, in modernized spelling, but without punctuation, initial caps, or line breaks:
the expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action and till action lust is perjured murderous blood full of blame savage extreme rude cruel not to trust enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight past reason hunted and no sooner had past reason hated as a swallow’d bait on purpose laid to make the taker mad mad in pursuit and in possession so had having and in quest to have extreme a bliss in proof and proved a very woe before a joy proposed behind a dream all this the world well knows yet none knows well to shun the heaven that leads men to this hell
What’s lost? It’s one thing to restore the ends of sentences and the phrasing within them. But what about the sonnet form? If you didn’t know that this was a sonnet, how would you figure out the line divisions or even know to look for them? How would you detect the rhymes? Could you even detect the meter?
How can so much be lost by changing so little?”
my response
“How can so much be lost by changing so little?”
The answer being that you’ve changed a *lot*: the line-breaks in a sonnet usually isolate/identify the clauses (distributing the subjects and objects/ nouns and verbs/ etc) in a way that preserves the approximate intended sense.
By StevenAugustine on 03/30/10 at 12:02 PM | Permanent link to this comment
response to my response
“This exercise would only fly with a biochemist” [quoted from Augustine]
Or a literary critic. They don’t pay much attention to words either. Just meaning.
By Bill Benzon on 03/30/10 at 12:42 PM | Permanent link to this comment
Now, I ask you…
There was a blog a few weeks back about writing naturalistic dialogue in which Woody Allen was cited. An odd choice I thought.
I suggested that on the page Allen’s dialogue doesn’t seem any more realistic than anything else – it was the overlaps of speech, pauses in speech, stutters and tics ( natch ) when the actors are directed that gave his dialogue its naturalistic quality. The way it’s spoken rather than what it is.. Although the fact that some of his lines are so funny ( I’m talking mid-period Allen here ) that in “real life” the characters would surely acknowledge the fact by laughing at them, to me means that we probably have to look elsewhere for real realism.
Your advantage/disadvantage being that you’ve actually taken the trouble to think about this stuff long before commenting… Ed… I mean… Al….
I’ve chuckled over that “Realism” (aka the Naturalistic) in movies riff more times than I can calculate…
UPDATE: in fact, here I am in May of 2007:
Dramatic Art privileges the exceptional, even when it pretends to revel in the ordinary (or do you know so many people who speak not in repetitive loops of chit-chatty popspeak but rather in neat dialogue packets providing expositional detail, while subtly recapitulating or anticipating the trajectory of their character arcs?). DeLillo’s art privileges the exceptional within the already exceptional realm of Art: expect a heightened effect. Ditto with Mr. Mamet, Mr. Hemingway, Ms. O’Connor and Billy Wilder. And, yes, even the characters on The Sopranos *don’t* talk like “real people”; you just want to think they do.
THE MASKS BEHIND THE FACE
One relevant observation and one epiphany… one rather long ago and another sunk cold in the bog of primordial time:
In the ’60s, I only ever saw grownups with the mask off when they were extremely angry, or mildly drunk. That is, I only ever got to hear what grownups really thought about things during Thanksgiving. Every other time of the year I heard them speaking to each other (whether or not they knew I was within earshot), or to me, I detected what I now would characterize as the Disney Voice. Specifically: the Late Disney Voice, since Early Disney was rather cruel.
The Late Disney Voice was innocuous and often cheerful and what’s striking about this is that we’re talking about the “height” (or our perception of it as thus) of the Vietnam war… a war in which an uncle was “serving” (that word is just so apt) and fairly fucking likely to die. It was only once a year, over turkey and the mysteriously aromatic red stuff in the rarely-seen glasses on the grownup’s table, that I got to hear (if I waited up) grownups freaking out, externally, about the stuff they were freaking out about, internally, all year long. Is that why people get really fucking mad: so they can finally say what they really think? Is that why they get shit-faced drunk?
That was my observation. My epiphany:
In the late 1980s, I read an interview with the then up-and-coming, semi-outsider band called WAS NOT WAS. They were a WEEN-like duo that went mainstream and had one stupid, original-mission-statement-contradicting, very big novelty hit. The interview I read was before the hit. In it, they described what I considered then (and still consider) a brilliant working method: in order to discuss important compositional/production/business decisions, they put on masks first (I seem to remember that they were Nixon masks but I suspect that’s an embellishment).This made it possible for one partner to say to the other, “I think that idea is stupid, and here’s why…”.
And so the epiphany came to me with a Rolling Stone in my hands: that most of what we say to each other, while we’re being polite, and wearing our daily masks, is junk. Emollient junk, to be sure. But junk. Because the paradox is that when using your actual face, feet or inches from another actual face, it’s much safer to use fake words. And vice versa. Which is my point. Real face/fake words vs Real words/fake face. (Well, not so much with Germans… but that’s another analysis…)
Ignore the lamentations about the “loss of civility” that the Internet appears to be breeding, Comrades Lurking and Explicit. Just as booze won’t make a genuinely gentle person into an angry drunk, the Internet isn’t turning a bunch of natural-born French diplomats into a horde of angry fuckers. The fuckers were already angry (and all I ask of the angry fuckers is that the angry fuckers learn to express themselves better with words; when they reach that point, imagine how fruitful it will be when someone asks all those angry fuckers why they’re so fucking angry).
Get out there and express some blunt fucking Truth of your own, Comrades. Seriously. If not now, when?
This comes to us via airmail from CDS Barry, Comrades. Most powerful:
(excerpt)
AMY GOODMAN: President Obama made a very brief unannounced visit to Afghanistan Sunday night. It was his first trip as president to the war zone he’s expanded and remade over the past year. In his six-hour visit, he met with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his aides in Kabul and addressed a crowd of US soldiers at Bagram Air Base before flying out of the country before daybreak.
President Obama told US troops, quote, “We did not choose this war.” He added, quote, “If I thought for a minute that America’s vital interests were not served, were not at stake here in Afghanistan, I would order all of you home right away.”
Well, as the President renews his commitment to expand the US military presence in Afghanistan, we turn to a man he’s sometimes compared to: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A new special on PBS from TV host and author Tavis Smiley delves into this comparison and looks at a speech that has a particular resonance today with the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Dr. King’s famous antiwar speech of April 4th, 1967 was called “Beyond Vietnam.”
Well, here’s an excerpt of the upcoming PBS primetime special episode of Tavis Smiley Reports. It’s called MLK: A Call to Conscience. It premiers on Wednesday night.
REV. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.: I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight, because my conscience leaves me no other choice. A time comes when silence is betrayal. That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.
CLAYBORNE CARSON: Martin Luther King knew, when he gave that speech, that it would set off a firestorm.
SUSANNAH HESCHEL: It’s the speech that challenges us, and in that sense it’s his most important. That we are uncomfortable with that speech tells us something.
REV. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.: Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don’t mix, they say. Well, such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, that question suggests that they do not know the world in which they live.
VINCENT HARDING: It was precisely one year to the day after this speech that that bullet, which had been chasing him for a long time, finally caught up with him. And I am convinced that that bullet had something to do with that speech.
AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt of Tavis Smiley’s PBS film “Beyond Vietnam” [MLK: A Call to Conscience] that will air on Wednesday night.
Tavis Smiley, joining us now from Burbank, California, welcome to Democracy Now! This is extremely powerful and relevant, as President Obama just made this surprise trip to Afghanistan. You go back to a time when another African American leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, broke ranks not only with the president that he had worked with on civil rights and voting rights, but with many in his own circles, to speak out against the war in Vietnam.
TAVIS SMILEY: Yeah, Amy, first of all, always an honor to be on your program.
The timing of this special, airing on Wednesday night, to your point, could not be more propitious, given that the President has just made this surprise visit to Afghanistan. Of course, we never know these things when we schedule these kinds of specials, what the news will bring us, but the timing, again, couldn’t be any better.
But this speech, “Beyond Vietnam: Breaking the Silence,” is given by Dr. King on April 4, 1967, literally one year to the day later he’s assassinated in Memphis, April 4, 1968. But to your point, it is the speech that caused him the greatest deal of controversy and consternation, quite frankly. Most Americans, I think, know the “I Have a Dream” speech. Some Americans, Amy, know the “Mountaintop” speech given the night before he was assassinated in Memphis. But most Americans do not know this “Beyond Vietnam” speech, which got King, again, in a world of trouble. He comes out very clearly and talks about three things that are causing him consternation: militarism, racism and poverty. And he links all three of those things in this “Beyond Vietnam” speech.
And the speech is so—it so rankles and angers the country that 168 major newspapers the next day—168 the following day—all did editorials denouncing him. The New York Times, the liberal New York Times, called the speech “wasteful” and “self-defeating.” The Washington Post goes on to aver that he has done himself, his country and the world, quite frankly, a disservice, and he would never be respected again—paraphrasing it, but that’s what the Washington Post says the next day. But in most major newspapers he was denounced the next day, because the night before, in the speech, he had referred to the US, Amy, as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
And for saying that, he gets demonized by most major newspapers; he gets disinvited, as you said earlier, by LBJ to the White House; indeed, black leaders—Roy Wilkins, the head of the NAACP, Whitney Young, the head of the Urban League—black leaders turned against him. And finally, over the next year of his life before he’s killed in Memphis, the last poll taken about his popularity, a Harris poll, Amy, found that almost three-quarters of the American people had turned against King. Fifty-five percent of his own people, black folk, had turned against King. The last years of his life were very, very lonely, in part because he was so adamant about the war in Vietnam.
AMY GOODMAN: Tavis, I want to go to that very place in Dr. Martin Luther King’s speech that he gave at Riverside Church, April 4th, 1967.
REV. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.: As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask, and rightly so, “What about Vietnam?” And I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.
AMY GOODMAN: Yes, that was Dr. King, April 4th, 1967. A year later to the day, he would be assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Time Magazine called the speech “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” But he wouldn’t stop, Tavis Smiley.
TAVIS SMILEY: Yeah, he would not stop. And what’s fascinating, Amy—and I think this will come through Wednesday night, when the special airs on PBS—what will come through is that if you replace the words “Iraq” for “Vietnam,” “Afghanistan” for “Vietnam,” “Pakistan” for “Vietnam,” this speech is so relevant today.
[ed.'s note: not to be spooky, Comrades Lurking and Explicit, but anyone notice the Vietnam War thread running through the last four posts? Pure TET Coincidence.]
How spooky Zen is it that I have had two impassioned friendships with Italian-American actors who have both appeared on the Sopranos and whom I consider teachers? The first is a former co-worker named John who could reduce me to tears of laughter simply by asking “Are you having fun yet?” at just the opportune time. (That was the teaching.) The second was with Carl Capotorto of Twisted Head fame. His name tells you why I adore him. He’s cute in the vid below but you have to see his poopy diaper scene in the Trey Billings Show (a star-turn to rival Carol Channing in Hello Dolly), to know what my threshold for pre-Pagodan funny was. I have thought of both of these vigorous men often and with great fellow-feeling.
seems affable enough
In light of the KKK child here’s another WTF is going on here exactly moment.
Is there an acronym slightly more emphatic than WTF?
Mudder fudder as the Scarface kids would have it runs it close.
Chilling on at least 14 levels.
You know the story about Disney animators calling the studio Mauschwitz and then, after being told from above that this wasn’t acceptable, they re-christened it Duckau.
If you don’t that’s it.
alarming
Egg
[ed's note- not quite a haiku, Ed, but evocative]
Edlarming Alyor
caterpillar
[ed's note-getting there]
Edward Taylor
Imago
This word-press is certainly easy to use when when you’re locked in a battle between anonymity and real identity it does yer bleedin’ head in.
[ed's note-now you've overshot "haiku" entirely-try for a sonnet]
The way things are going Norse saga with foot-notes might be the appropriate form to cover this.
[ed's note-the trick will be illustrating it with an image that tiny pic or photobucket won't delete]
The Tijuana Bible drawing is still up ( on this computer at least )
For a while it was replaced by a deleted sign but it seems to have won in the High Court and Wimpy’s decidedly non-wimpy “Burroughs” is there for all to see.
Perhaps drawings don’t count????
[ed's note-don't jinx it! have you seen Comment #69?]
Erm… this has something to do with the JFK assassination… apparently…
ANOTHER SPEECHLESS WALK THROUGH BERLIN
******
******
******
******
******
******
fuck a saint’s nostril with a puritan’s cold blue dick: not five minutes after I posted a photo of a poster on display on a busy street in Berlin, it was deleted because the poster features femnips (have since re-posted on photo bucket)! Is it 1957? And how are so many sites getting away with showing snaps of cruelly gnarled cocks in livid pink anuses and so forth? Is “anal” okay? Tits toxic? What?
DIFFICULT TEXTS
low fat episode
I AM PHILLY DAWG
Before marrying Luddy, way back in what Luddy refers to disparagingly as Bobbi’s “interesting past,” Bobbi had been married, for not quite a year, to a boyish man named Charlton Diggins. This was back in Philly. Bobbi suspected from the beginning that Charlton was a guy of Jewish descent trying to pass himself off as a guy of Italian descent and she’d liked that about him.
She’d suspected it was Charlton’s mother who was the X-factor, because Charlton was strangely evasive about both his mother and his mother’s side of the family. He said she was dead and Bobbi asked when, were you a child or already grown, because it might explain some things, but he’d seemed to need a few seconds to decide what was what before answering her. Or maybe it’s how your mind freezes when you’re talking to a Customs Official, but Bobbi wasn’t a Customs Official, she was Charlton Diggins’s newlywed bride, Roberta Gertrude Fortneaux Diggins, and he was obviously, touchingly, making it up, the line about his mother died in child birth. Charlton tried to pass off his three-second pause of invention as grief but Bobbi assumed it was shame and that Charlton’s mother was a Jewess maybe living right there in Philadelphia. He had that look about him, and Philadelphia was the kind of city in which you might lie about something like that in 1977.
The black roofs of the gray row-homes in Germantown are slick as rain hats in the fog at daybreak. Mornings in Philly can seem like classical mornings in a seaport and you do glimpse errant gulls sometimes, spiraling over rotted weather vanes and the witchy black fingers of Prussian spires. Bobbi loved the 19th century row-homes of Germantown with their bracketed cornices and flat roofs, built of Wissahickon schist. She tried sketching a block of these immaculately painted row-homes on a mostly black street from a corner bus stop one morning but found it was more pleasurable to look than draw. Three mornings in a row she tried and failed. The final morning of that little project she had an episode with some frisky black kids toting book bags shouting, “Draw me!” “Draw me!” “Hey lady, draw me!”
Three minutes felt like hours. They left Bobbi with a frozen grin and a racing heart when the SEPTA bus finally wheezed to a halt at the stop and took the little devils away. The blouse under her nylon windbreaker was soaking with sweat. Why did these kids scare her so? They were just kids.
Bobbi was 26 when she met her future first husband, 26 and feeling old and anxious to get married. No lines yet on her face, hair still dense and shiny, figure Huck-Finnish if tall. She wasn’t living at home with her parents, she was set up in a leafy little back-of-the-building apartment on Penn Street about a ten minute walk to the three-storey house of her birth, on Queen Lane, where she was expected to stop by a few times a week, vulnerable to the pressure to do so by dint of being single and without a career.
Bobbi just didn’t have it in her to pretend to be too busy to visit her depressing parents. All of her school friends had 5-year-old sons and careers and Bobbi had a part time job and an easel. She rarely watched television. She was trying to be a painter, devouring winsome biographies of Picasso and Chagall and Modigliani over canned ravioli for dinner and then painting in stinkless, unserious acrylic well into the strangely suburban Philadelphia night by candle light, listening to the thick shiver of the breezed leaves of the Elms and the hourly clatter of the number 26 trolley up Wayne avenue and the lonely attenuated bark of a dog in another neighborhood. The dog became her mascot and her familiar. You bark and I paint. We are faithful to our given tasks while the lockstep world is sleeping.
Working in an art supply store, Bobbi was plugged into an endless source of children and old women with projects and hobbies but never had the serious art conversations with up-and-coming painters she’d dreamed of when applying for the job. Where were the up-and-coming painters of Philly buying their supplies? Were they all grinding their own pigments? She could well imagine that buying commercial tubes of paint was some kind of uncool capitulation in the eyes of artistic geniuses and that’s how she began to think of herself: the timid kind of amateur who not only used tubes of store-bought paint but had a part-time job in the store she bought them in.
The only thing Bobbi had going for herself artistically speaking was monomania. She knew that much about art, that monomanias are good. Versatility is show-offy and evolution is craftsmanlike but monomania bespeaks the psychological disturbances that average citizens and patrons of the art expect worthwhile artists to suffer. Over and over again she painted her hieroglyphic of the barking dog, mouth open and tail straight back. The dog was either barking or howling.
Eventually she worked with Krylon spray paint and a cardboard stencil for iconic mass-produced accuracy, but the fumes indoor were too much so she sprayed outside, in the back yard, with the canvases propped against the hurricane fence, which began looking geometrically diseased with partial rectangles of various colors. Bobbi got the bold inspiration one humid, meteorologically backed-up evening to just keep on going through the fence gate and down the alley with the spray can and the stencil and do it on a nearby office building. Just an unobtrusive and enigmatic silhouette in black metallic spray paint on the building’s cornerstone, right next to the A.D. MCMXXXVII, the execution of which produced in Bobbi’s skull the soft pop of an artistic breakthrough orgasm. A middle aged (in her mind) white (to all appearances) middle class (irrefutably) graffitist. One of those things where it suddenly hits you you’ve been heading this direction all along. Your whole life.
Spraying on public structures at 3am was an intensely sexual thrill for her, like a skin change operation she could undo every daybreak and re-do every night, like having Velcro’d genitals; a black set and a white set for night and day respectively. The black set of course male.The risk was distinct considering Frank Rizzo’s notorious graffiti-hating cops and here she was, suddenly engaging them on their territory, or at least trafficking in their milieu, while her old Main Line school friends with proper careers and lyrically named 5-year-olds and nannies were only reading about the brutality and strife in the morning papers and tut-tut-tutting over their sectioned grapefruits. This city is becoming a multicultural trash basket. In a way her long lost school chums were all now hearing from Bobbi, picking up her vibrations in the ether as she added her note to the million-note chord of the streets that frightened them above and below the range of conscious human hearing.
Something about becoming some kind of measurable graffiti presence in Germantown, Philadelphia, triggered in Bobbi thoughts more serious and curious about black kids. They scared the hell out of her, no matter how much safely-distant concern or affection she managed to scrape up for them from her wholly other sphere. Why? Black kids scared the hell out of her and scared the hell out of others like her as well as others unlike her and even other black kids, too. Part of it was just the fearsomeness of kids, period; everyone in America is afraid of American kids because kids have a worldview and a budget and spending power which dictates much of the look of the modern world, certainly commercial spaces, arguably private space also, and that’s power enough to be afraid of. And beneath that the deranged impulsiveness, the famous cruelty, the avid gift in the art of wounding truths…
Which would seem to sum it up but if you come across two or three white youngsters in an urban setting it’s not an intrinsically frightening experience. It’s frightening if you call them juveniles but not if you call them youngsters. But if you refer to black kids as youngsters you’re not being wholly sincere: what you mean is juveniles. And that is a scary word.
Black kids were by no means the majority of the population in that integrated neighborhood called Germantown but they were the main unspoken topic of discussion. Condensed vectors of guilt and anarchy. Once you’ve made a serious mark or painted illicitly on public space you never again look at public space the same; you find yourself seeing lots of unmarked, unused, image-ready surfaces where before you saw banal or forbidding municipal order. Crossing that line is liberating but also feels like mess-making and the constant struggle to rein it in. The sense of “public” versus “private” vanishes completely after the first few times you cross that line and Bobbi realized that poor black kids with cans of shoplifted Krylon had become the psychological landlords of massive tracts of real estate simply by labeling it. Without bothering to write doctoral thesises on the topic they explored the limits of appropriation, grasping with a collective intuition that property law is the white man’s graffiti and by writing over the writing they have amended it. The white man’s graffiti is fine-print. Imagine graffiti all over the White House. It wouldn’t be the White House any more.
Bobbi’s own self-esteem skyrocketed after she became a clandestine trademark on the blank spots of her neighborhood and as a side-effect acquired another valuable secret to add to her repertoire, becoming even less knowable to her mother and her friends and so much more knowable to herself. Not that she was as one with those juveniles with their gang code juvenilia, advertising in the glyph of the gonad. She was doing it in her own well-educated pretty white woman way with a neat little stencil and a smirk.
Her apotheosis as a graffitist in her neighborhood of Germantown, Philadelphia arrived the Tuesday afternoon she’d hired two kids, two twelve or thirteen-year-old black kids who lived in her building and should have been in school but weren’t. Kids just sitting on the back steps right outside her bedroom window making, what, trucks or motorcycles or super-heroes-battling noises. She hired them for five dollars apiece to come in and haul her old sofa bed out to the curb. Just to shut them up. Even though what would she sleep on before she bought the next one?
They filed in through her screen door with sheepish grins and asymmetrical Afros, weirdly embarrassed, she guessed, to be alone in an intimate space with an attractive young white woman; they were over-polite yet precociously sexual; and she offered them each a glass of powdered lemonade mix before delegating who would tackle which end of the sofa bed. Yes ma’am, thank you ma’am, they said, and Bobbi entered the kitchen, a move that took no more than a sidestep, and she heard the taller, thinner boy say to the stockier darker one, in a stage whisper, Check it out, she rippin’ off Philly Dawg!
Ripping off Philly Dawg. Bobbi peeped back into the living room, while the tap water ran, to see the boys stooped over the stack of her original barking dog canvases leaning against the radiator. She couldn’t believe it; her first acknowledgment; she did a little dance in the kitchen. Philly Dawg?
When Charlton Diggins came into Germantown Graphic Supply the next day, Bobbi was still so jazzed in the unrevealed guise of Philly Dawg that she parlayed the man’s shy query about piñata-making (he was a substitute teacher) into coffee and cheesecake at the Maplewood mall, her treat. There was something about this gangling Charlton, she thought. Trying to pass himself off as Italianate when in fact he was almost certainly a Jew. She liked how vulnerable and literary that made him seem. She liked how open-minded it made her feel. She imagined saying with a breezy Norman Lear sitcom inflection, “Honey, I don’t give a damn if you’re a Zarathustran as long as you don’t pick your nose or wear my panties,” in response to his tearful confession. All in good time, she counseled herself. All in good time.
Bobbi would stand in the autobiographies aisle of Paige Turner’s, the Chestnut Hill bookshop, one among a half-dozen Madras-shirt-wearing graduate-school-age white women on the premises, thinking: I am Philly Dawg.
The day before inviting master Diggins over to her apartment for the first time ever, she’d hidden all the art paraphernalia, hidden or destroyed all the old paintings, because she had an absolute horror of seeing herself as some kind of pathetic would-be artist through her man-boy’s eyes. Better to present herself as unapologetically shop girlish. Defiantly boho shabby genteel. An espresso-drinking, highly literate, flat-broke style snob. The barking dog stencil and the three or four cans of Krylon she secreted in a big canvas purse with a curved bamboo handle and vivid threadbare bowls of fruit stitched on each side her mother had given her after a Golden Wedding Anniversary trip she took alone to Nassau, in the Bahamas. The stuffed canvas purse Bobbi kept in the basement.
After the wedding, Bobbi forgot all about her life as an irony-cloaked municipal art guerilla for all of six months, or until the honeymoon was irremediably over. It was definitively played out, the honeymoon, when the sex lost all of its unprecedentedness and entered the workaday schedule inked in for Monday evenings following CBS’s The Jeffersons. Once-a-week sex on a rigid schedule. At which point Philly Dawg soon found herself at it again, sneaking out at all hours of the night during her husband’s deeply effort-wracked postcoital sleep. Kicking and twitching. What inner-conflict was the poor wretch rehashing unresolved every night? At whose eidolon was he twitching and whimpering? Surely not Bobbi’s.
Sneaking out with an adulterer’s thrill, she claimed new buildings, new streets and kelly-green awnings became attractive to her. Kelly-green, brick-red and royal blue. Hotels, pricier restaurants and funeral homes. She noticed that nobody had thought of doing the awnings yet and she did them so neatly that her work looked like discreet corporate logos on the projection flaps. In the beginning, she’d found faking orgasms with her newlywed husband to be an erotic experience but spraying projection flaps soon replaced that.
She got to the point that the end credits reprise of the sitcom’s theme song made her shoulders tense and her vagina very dry. Knowing that her husband would soon be reaching across to switch off that little lamp on the night table on her side of the double-bed. Conjugal duty: the phrase started life as a chauvinism-lampooning joke between them and morphed into something more hideous every time it went unspoken. Six months: it flew by like a week that took an eternity and turned out to be the actual extent of their marriage. Trial period. Bobbi began rehearsing that phrase. Philly Dawg began targeting the 26 trolley. Taking therapeutic risks.
Therapeutic risks in the dead of night and Charlton’s interminable tales of Charlton Diggins, blue-eyed crusading substitute school teacher over dinner and The Jeffersons on Monday: that was her married life. This is what I got married for? She’d sit there nodding while he gestured emphatically. Relating in great anecdotal detail how dumb the kids could be while regularly gushing the liberal alibi of how smart they were. These kids are so smart, Bobbi. Running his hands through his curly ash-colored hair and then cupping his face in them. And that other liberal bromide that Bobbi takes exception to and wanted to correct Charlton over every time he uttered it: children are the future. No, children are not the future they are the past. The elderly are the future.
She found herself slipping more and more Yiddish into their dinner-time conversations. She found herself placing a box of Matzoh on top of the refrigerator. A secondhand copy of the Bernard Malamud Reader on top of the toilet tank. She wanted that confession. She needed it soon.
Even the shock of the size of Charlton’s penis had devolved from delight to dread via a transitory phase of familial boredom and her childhood gag reflex came back in spades. She reminisced fondly about tongue depressors. She’d get cold tears in her eyes and see stars. Performing it felt like a sorority hazing.
The only value at all Bobbi could find in Charlton’s favorite show The Jeffersons was in the marriage of Helen and Tom Willis, secondary characters, television’s first interracial couple. They were metaphysically privy, in a Jungian sense, to Bobbi’s racial secret and she nurtured the imaginary rapport, turning their straight lines into insights. Charlton would belly-laugh at George Jefferson’s zebra taunts and Bobbi would narrow her eyes.
Christmas Eve the year they married the sky was a low ceiling and the air was a loom of fluff, the flakes falling so densely they didn’t appear to be falling at all but rather stacked or even rising in air, muffling sound and holying the street and haloing the streetlights, and it was the scintillating spaces between the flakes themselves that seemed to be falling cold and invisible to earth. Bobbi put Charlton to bed early with goose and a handjob and bundled up and was out in it on the perfectly deserted streets in her Dostoevskian greatcoat, relishing the spectacle.
Just her alone on the blinded streets, the padded cell of the night, everything cold and swollen and soft… the only intense little burning pattern of color coming from the traffic lights changing from green to yellow to red with post-apocalyptic poignancy. The only sound was Bobbi’s frosted breath and Bobbi’s crunching boots. Even that distant neighborhood dog, the prototype of her graphic mission, her lone inspiration and spirit familiar, was silenced out there in the fused horizon, painted out under blankness. She thought of the word Leningrad as she set herself like an italic exclamation mark against the crumbling wind as it picked up, tickling and numbing her face. Up Penn to Wakefield, south on Wakefield for thirty minutes straight to Garfield, north on Garfield to Wister Woods Park. It’s a Christmas Eve blizzard and the only marks in the deep snow besides Bobbi’s gashing footprints are clover-shaped rabbit tracks printing the path leading into the park’s southern entrance like a whimsical invitation from the spirit of the park itself.
Entering the park from its north entrance is a tall, well-built 17-year-old black boy in a brand new camouflage parka from the Army Surplus store on Chestnut Street, hood down, dark face vivid in the snowlight. The black boy outweighs Bobbi by a good thirty or forty pounds, as slender as he is (and as tall as she is), and if she were to find herself walking towards him on a dark street her dread of his approach would be incalculable and only properly described in physiological terms. But as it is she spies him from a comfortable vantage in a thicket on a hill, on her belly, laying up a snow dune in her greatcoat, bundled under the coat in itchy sweaters, peering over the top of the little hill. Watches him pick a fluff-upholstered bench under the white canopy of ancient oak and elm branches which half-shelter them both from the wind-shot snow. If she were a member of the Wehrmacht’s snow patrol and he were a Leningrad partisan she could lob a grenade over the thicket right into his lap.
The secret proximity to such a figure of terror is perversely delicious, even better than watching a panther in a zoo because here there are no bars and the panther doesn’t know he’s being watched. What’s he doing here? Sitting on a bench in a blizzard in Wister Woods Park. This big kid glowing black in the shadowed snowlight and the frozen trees making that occasional gun crack sound from the matrix of branches. He’s sitting there like Buddha in a snow globe.
He is thinking. Thinking back over the events of the evening. Just sitting and thinking all alone in the park while snow falls and kids all over Philly are dreaming in the aftermath of A Charlie Brown Christmas or The Grinch or Rudolph (Frosty the Snowman doesn’t rate a mention; Frosty is bullshit) or whichever cartoon perennial was on tonight. Innocent little kids who play stick ball in the summer and toboggan on flattened cardboard boxes down hills like the hills in the park here in winter and know not a thing about the pleasures and terrors of the real world. You think tobogganing down a steep hill on a flattened cardboard box is terrifying? You think it’s fun? Kid, you have no idea. Trust me. Sleeping furiously after the cartoons through the unbearable suspense of what did I get on Christmas morning. Only the cartoons as the years go by will definitely mean more to you than the toys you got the next morning; more than the train set, the GI Joe, everything.
His favorite will always be the Burl Ives-narrated stop-animation Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, due mainly to the character Clarice, the sweet little big-eyed reindeer with the white girl voice who remains faithful to the outcast Rudolph despite his freakishness. Despite the deformation of his glowing nose. Even Rudolph’s parents are ashamed of him and treat him like shit.
High point of the show is when Clarice sings to Rudolph there’s always tomorrow for dreams to come true. He’s seen Clarice sing this song to Rudolph what… ten times? Once a year since he was seven or something. He missed it the year before last because he felt it appropriate at fifteen to have outgrown such frippery but sure enough the very next year his ass was on that corduroy sofa in front of the color television and he misted up a little, careful to hide the childish reaction, when it came time for Clarice to sing. Well this year he guesses he really was too old for Clarice’s song of hope because he missed the show not for psychological reasons but because he was too busy fucking his 54-year-old aunt and if that’s not too grownup for cartoons, what is? Knocking on the door to his room in her transparent nightie holding a candle and with no underwear on going Merry Christmas.
The young man has a lot to think about. Even the categories of the thoughts he must think are many, from humorous (the way she’d kept whispering, gasping, with fake mounting panic, what are you doing? What are you doing? And he’d felt the urge to shout I’m cleaning the rain gutters, what does it look like I’m doing?), to the philosophical (did he fuck her or did she fuck him?), to the scientific (what possible purpose could evolution find in making a 17 year old boy want to copulate with a woman beyond childbearing age?), to the moral (should I be ashamed? Should she? Should both of us?), to the legal (what if somebody finds out and reports it?). He imagines himself writing a love poem to his 54-year-old Aunt and it makes him sick to his stomach. Well that’s the worst aspect of this whole situation. Nobody to write a love poem for. Nobody from whom to receive one.
Bobbi thinks: what’s that sound? Is the big black boy sitting on that bench there in a blizzard in Wister Park with his shoulders heaving… is he sobbing?
When her father revealed their secret to her while sitting among soft shreds of his own semen in the bathtub, 17-year-old Bobbi absorbed the news with only the slightest lurch of disorientation. This is a girl who could light a cigarette in a hurricane, she was thinking. She didn’t become suddenly and extraordinarily invested in Black History; she didn’t even become a self-hating Negrophobe in a wounded psychotic sense. She calmly folded the information about her particle of blackness into a corner of her deepest self for future delectation. It gave her strength to know that she and her father both knew what her mother didn’t know…both knew that her mother didn’t know.
For giving her that, if for nothing else, Bobbi was grateful to him, pathetic as his need for sedative bathtub handjobs was. All daughters crave a secret with Daddy they can call their very own and some think it’s incest until it happens but in Bobbi’s case the incest wasn’t a secret, it was part of the culture of their nuclear family. The real secret was so much bigger than that.
The kid is definitely crying.
Being a veteran (she refused the word victim) of incest explained nothing about her. But being an octoroon explained the strange prettiness she couldn’t have inherited from any known member of either side of her family: her aptitude for perfect tans and her incongruously full lower lip and the rich thick wave of her buttery hair… it all made perfect sense now, solving a riddle she hadn’t even realized was driving her nuts. The mirror finally made sense to her. Her mirror finally fit. Bobbi, 27, would stand in line at the Whole Truth Co-Op with other Birkenstock-wearing white women buying lentils in three pound sacks, thinking, I am Philly Dawg.
Belly-down in her great coat on the snow dune that night in Wister Park like one of Rommel’s soldiers in North Africa, only with chattering teeth and no binoculars, up on that little hill spying down on the big sobbing black boy, Bobbi was thinking I am Philly Dawg. How many years since she has thought that?
Her first husband Charlton came stumbling up from the basement in a Eureka state one day while she was napping off lunch on the new sofa bed; he burst into the living room swinging the dusty old canvas purse from Nassau crying “You? It’s you? You’re Philly Dawg?”
He’d been in the basement looking for stuff for a Valentine’s Day project, and Bobbi was horrified at how cutesy-fied she suddenly felt; how patronized; how utterly destroyed the meaninglessly cool thing she’d been devoting herself to for months became in her incompatible husband’s fuckface knowledge of it. How small. He knelt by the sofa bed and cupped his face in his hands and said, I have a confession to make, too.
She divorced him soon after the revelation. Not, of course, because he’d confessed to being a Negro. But that was definitely her excuse.
I’m so excited about this one I can barely think straight. The invention of the paint tube is to en plein air (and ergo the subversion of the Academie, rise of Impressionism, Naturalism, Post-Impressionism…) as the invention of the spray can is to graffiti art. So, now I just have to calm down enough to unpack all of the interesting observations and suggestions about danger and erotica vs, conformism, routine and sexual apathy cum dysfunction, in relation to pig’s bladders (the technology for carrying paint around prior to actual paint tubes, which were unsatisfactory because they dried out.) And think of all of this in light of race and economics, miscegenation, and, no doubt, Chiaroscuro.
This is thrilling tabaccy to chaw while I’m cooking up some victuals. Thank you, CDS Steven.
CDS Frances… the Ideal Reader is almost always a Writer, eh? Just finished a long night of editing footage (helping to document CDS Barry’s gallery show)… must fall backwards, unflinching, to bed anon. More tomorrow. And I’m not finished seething over the arrogant hackademia on display in the matter of Comment #72… the leather-eared assault on Literary Art is relentless, Comrades. Fookin relentless…
Thanks for that, the comrades have taught me well. And now I am thrice-graced to be here in the Bunker Pagoda, this very Spring, in the historically enviable position of chatting about your work with you, CDS Steven.
Sweet, CDS Frances… but let’s keep our heads here. There is no history involved. We’re just a couple of Artists chit-chatting in a virtual elevator in which the Muzak is shut off. The talk is most pleasant.
THE VINTAGE EMAIL
Sunday, July 14, 2002 8:33 AM
From:
“S. Augustine”
To:
G___ R____ @ R____.org
Dear G____:
The project that V____ initially mentioned to you (regarding me) is a short film that I’m designing with a creative partner who’s a record producer here in Germany. He’s successful enough here that his word carries a bit of weight with more than one record company (Sony among them), so this short film I’m writing is meant to attract funding, from one or more of these companies, for future (larger) projects. Interestingly enough, however, it’s not this short film, but a very different project, that you might turn out to be very good for.
Before going any further, and to counter-act the hype that V____ is using to energize people (V___ could sell string bikinis to Arctic explorers!), I have to say that I’m not a ‘heavy’ from California. I am from California, but I don’t represent a rolodex full of important phone numbers! I am no species of bigshot. I am a super-unknown. The only reason that any actor/actress/director or producer should spend any time with me is this: I’m a pretty good writer. I hope you’ll forgive the bad manners of such a statement and appreciate the bluntness necessary in getting directly to the point.
I have a feature-length project (treatment completed; script still rough). called ‘The Second Guest,’ that I’ve been nursing since spring. ‘The Second Guest’ is a German intellectual ghost story… a ghost story without special effects, driven by theatrical forces like character, dialogue… the text itself (no ‘Industrial Light& Magic’). The piece will provide enough twists and jolts to be entertaining on a basic level but is layered enough to give serious viewers something to mull over a long time after the lights have gone up in the cinema. There’s also the matter of controversy. I foresee ‘The Second Guest’ stirring up some healthy debate.
Plot: five friends meet, once a year, at the ‘cottage’ of the wealthiest friend. The friends are all well-educated, successful and lean to the left, politically. They know each other from University, late ´80s, and have made a ritual of this yearly weekend, during which they eat great food and discuss politics, philosophy, culture, etc. They even call themselves ‘The Schiller Club,’ and border on being pretentious… but that’s not the crux of the film. The crux of the film is that on this particular weekend, one of the five principals, Frieda, brings along with her, from her last trip to America, a ‘Ouija board,’ for entertainment. A ‘Ouija board’ has been a popular American party trick for a century. A chessboard-sized square is inscribed with the letters of the alphabet, numbers from zero to nine, and the words ‘yes’ and ‘no’. By means of a ‘planchette’ (a pointer-shaped wooden piece) upon which each of those playing are meant to place a finger, the supposed spirits of the dead spell out messages.
Of course, none of these five rational intellectuals take the game seriously, but they go ahead and play it anyway, with Frieda as the focus of the activity. There are amusing results: Frieda seems to be channeling a randy female spirit (‘Iris,’ my homage to Fellini’s ‘Juliet of the Spirits’); she makes everyone laugh with her bawdy comments. So far so good; the Ouija board is a big success; all present (the five, plus three lovers) have had a good laugh. But, as in all such stories, they can’t leave it at that… they don’t leave well enough alone… and soon enough are trying to conjure ‘Iris’ again for another giggle. Instead, they manage to make contact with something a bit more ominous: a dead fascist. An extremely racist… and very charmingly persuasive… dead fascist.
The metaphor behind the film revolves around the question: how far can you push these ‘good Germans’… these thirty-something intellectual middle-European Lefties… before something ‘deeper’ pops out? The controversy is inevitable because the dead fascist (speaking through Frieda) gets most of the best lines.
‘Frieda’ is the hub of the film; from your ‘look’ you struck me as a strong candidate for the part. You ‘read’ as very pretty but very smart; layers are visible; you aren’t a Barbie Doll, but you aren’t a character actress either. You’re a lead-type with character and I think that’s a terribly under-used resource (esp. in female roles; even with the above-mentioned short film, for the record company, my partner wants to cast a Barbie Doll and that disappoints me!). The challenge of the role is being able to do ‘Frieda’ doing ‘Iris,’ and then ‘Seth’ (the fascist, male), without invoking some unintended humor.
What I’m looking for with this script, at this stage, are allies. I started the writing with a particular male lead in mind (a German actor of my acquaintance) and if I can cast the two leads well, my funding proposal will be that much stronger. International co-producers are not ruled out, so the script is being written in English and may or may not end up being translated into German.
So! If you’re interested at all, please contact me, either by phone (0176-XXX-XXXX) or this eMail account. If your curiosity is piqued, I can forward a bit of text, to give you an idea for the feel of the piece.
Thankyou for your time and hope to hear from you,
Steven
Who is the wanker behind Lady Bird winking at LBJ?
“This is the “wink” photograph, a shot of LBJ receiving a wink from Congressman Albert Thomas after the swearing-in, the day John F Kennedy was murdered in Dallas. Both Johnson and Thomas were members of Suite 8F Group, the origins of a company today known as Kellogg, Brown & Root. With Kennedy out of the way, the war would remain on schedule, and Johnson would be President. Mrs. Kennedy reluctantly washed her face of her husband’s blood for this swearing in.
Description: L-R: Congressman Albert Thomas, Lady Bird Johnson, President Lyndon B. Johnson, Jacqueline Kennedy, Lem Johns (back), Congressman Jack Brooks, Bill Moyers (back wearing eyeglasses)”
Could it be more fucking obvious? Hiding in plain sight, Comrades… the Easter Eggs are all around us.
But what has Bill Moyers made of this? Certainly he’s aware of this photo.
Dunno. At this point it’s probably incumbent on us to seek sources of “news” other than the ones we were raised with. I take everything with a grain of salt. The grains vary in size.
VINTAGE EMAIL
Sunday, December 16, 2001 11:15 AM
From:
“P___ C____”
To:
“S. Augustine”
S!
Thanx for the pix of the babe and the text of monologue.
It sounds and looks good……
seems like you’re keeping busy in freezing Berlin (is
it freezing?)
Look at how I’ve gotten since living here in the Irony
and Culture-free Zone. “Ya can’t BEAT the weatha…”
OI! I always thought it was so stupid, and annoying,
and mystifying-this obsession with THE WEATHER in San
Diego. It’s always the first thing on everyone’s lips
when asked about SD, or when I complain about the lack
of culture and political evolution, they always say,
“Yeah, but you can’t beat the weather!!!!!!”
I even thought you were a little insane, my S, when I
asked you one day why the hell you had moved to San Diego, and you
said…….
“The Weather.”
I thought, “Oh no, here is a seemingly pretty cool guy
and HE MOVED TO THIS FUCKING WEIRDO NOWHEREVILLE
BECAUSE OF THE WEATHER OF ALL THINGS!! Straight from
Berlin! Why not Hawaii or Venice or Tangier or
anywhere else? Random!”
But now look at me! I mention Berlin and I don’t say “fabulous,” I say
“freezing.” NOW I LIKE THE WEATHER HERE TOO. Except when my eyes itch every other
day from the dust and pollutants that get kicked up from the war games and secret testing
that they do in the desert.
The few good things that actually are here are not
appreciated. Sewer poo-poo still gets pumped onto the
beaches, and the cool 50′s and 60′s architecture that
gives SD that almost interesting time-warp feeling
gets ripped down “to make way for the 80′s,” as
J____ says. For example, the cool building
that housed the philly cheese steak place on 5th, the
Aztec Bowl, and I hear that maybe in a few months my
art studio is also getting torn down. Not
architecturally important, BUT IMPORTANT TO ME DAMMIT!
I used to say that San Diego was pre-Stonewall, but
now I think mabye not quite….I’ve just been spoiled.
But I do think it is pre-theory. Foucault and Dyke
theory have not found their way here, yet. Will they
ever? Irony-free zone.
There was a horrible display in the Hillcrest Ace
hardware window-actually it’s still there-they did’nt
get our hint. They have a silver, long, pointy phallic
xmas tree decorated with little american flags, a 2
1/2 foot tall shell of a bazooka or whatever bomb,
also phallically upright, military-issue packets of
dehydrated PORK CHOPS (a Muslim favorite) and a
message displayed in a queeny frame that reads: “Look
what’s coming down your chimney this Christmas, Mr.
bin Laden.”
Even though it’s fucking stupid San Diego, we were
still shocked and disappointed at the thing. So J and
I, late one night, plastered the window with rainbow
peace-sign and “hatred is not a family value”
stickers, and in big, day-glo pink spraypainted
letters, “RACISM SUCKS”
We went for the over-obvious, simple message, hoping
that someone in the fucking gay neighborhood would
make the connection between their pet peeve of
homophobia and the frightening fascist shit that Ace
hardware had the nerve to promote……
but like we figured, the next morning (the day after
thanksgiving and the biggest shopping day of them
all,) our messages were gone, and their display is
still there. (Well actually, I’d hoped they’d change
the window display….)
Futile? Who knows? I still feel better at having done
something.
Whoa dang, I just noticed the time-
this was a marathon rant. Why do I do this to you?
I’m sorry. It’s my emotionally crippled way of
saying hello. So tell me what’s new with you?
xoxo,
P
MANTRAS
The Impossible becomes Inevitable
The Inevitable becomes a Right
Rights become Obligations
Obligations become Liesure-Time Activities
Liesure-Time Activities become Mandatory
What’s Mandatory becomes Torture
Torture becomes Life
Life becomes Impossible
Wendy Wild did not wed Rudy Protrudi. Rather, Dino Sorbello was the lucky groom, though the union was short-lived. This was confirmed by WW friend and fellow wedding reception attendee, Paul Drake International.
I have long advised my teen-aged children that they are entering a new era, an era where focus on green, sustainable energy technologies will be the path to job security and financial well-being in the future—as well as making this world a better place. My sense is that, as with personal computers in the late ’70s, we are at the starting line for an entrepreneurial boom in this area that will not so readily go bust.
The Anthropocene epoch arrives perhaps too soon. The paradox of human nature is as yet unresolved. I worry we have not yet shaken off the existential insecurities that accompanied the rise of our civilization over the last 10,000 years. And with those insecurities come the sorts of fears and animosities that drove us into the global wars and genocides and environmental disasters that reached near apotheosis in the last century.
We have to ask whether humanity is essentially Life-affirming, or whether its dark undercurrents will once again surface in this new epoch. I hope and, at base, believe that, though it is not inevitable given human nature, we as a race will ultimately stumble into a solution that works to preserve our environment, ourselves, and, thus, Life itself.
No comment?
Nothing further from me on this but I think CDS Sean has some thoughts on the matter, and matter it does.
“The simplest but most radical of these alterations is in lifespan. We have already seen average human lifespan increase into the 70s and 80s; might we realistically expect to see that number grow into the hundreds? Or even further? ”
Damien, there’s an awful surprise waiting for anyone who expects that these marvels are meant for any but the Ruling Class. Ever.
The Dystopian bits are ours to embrace… or reject, to the extent that we wise up, finally.
response:
@AugustineSteven - I’ve never bought the Marxist ideology that blames the suppression of the the masses on the Ruling Classes. But I’m interested to know who you think the Ruling Classes are, and you you think they will be in the future. If anything is certain, its that our future will grow ever more complex. The idea of any single group maintaining overarching control of that complexity seems unlikely to me. Exactly who is going to be keeping the masses under the thumb in the future, thats my question?
The worst aspect is that we can see the ineptitude and two-faced-ness with clear eyes yet there’s nothing much we can do to stop the general drift.
In terms of the election soon to happen here in the UK I don’t think I’ve ever experienced such a lack of faith in what’s on offer. But that lack of faith will do nothing to stop one of the parties getting in – no doubt on about 40% of the potential vote and it will be business as usual with the emphasis on business.
“The worst aspect is that we can see the ineptitude and two-faced-ness with clear eyes yet there’s nothing much we can do to stop the general drift.”
Because there’s no critical mass of The Aware. With most people drifting around in a pop-lubricated, celebrity-centric haze of self-loathing consumerism, the wolves in charge of the legless-chicken factory never had such an easy ride. An eye-opener: going on Leftish sites (like the wonderful Fafblog) to watch how the Dupes bitch and rage at anyone who points out, in a clear-eyed fashion, that the POC (prez of color) just happens to be a warmongering tool of Wallstreet. The facts don’t mean a fucking thing… what counts is staying “positive”. Or falling for self-serving Fadspeak like “Green Technology”… a scam it only takes a couple of hours of serious reading to reveal in its cynical splendor.
The Fuckers are winning, Comrade Ed… they always do.
“Here is news of the Third World War. The United States has invaded Africa. US troops have entered Somalia, extending their war front from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and now the Horn of Africa. In preparation for an attack on Iran, “bunker-buster” bombs are said to be arriving at the US base on the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
“In Gaza, the sick and abandoned population, mostly children, is being entombed behind underground American-supplied walls to reinforce a criminal siege. In Latin America, the Obama administration has secured seven bases in Colombia from which to wage a war of attrition against the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay. Meanwhile, the secretary of “defence”, Robert Gates, complains that “the general [European] public and the political class” are so opposed to war, they are an “impediment” to peace. Remember, this is the month of the March Hare.
“According to an American general, the invasion of Afghanistan is not so much a real war as a “war of perception”. Thus, the recent “liberation of the city of Marjah” from the Taliban’s “command-and-control structure” was pure Hollywood. Marjah is not a city; there was no Taliban command and control. The heroic liberators killed the usual civilians, the poorest of the poor. Otherwise, it was fake. A war of perception is meant to provide fake news for the folks back home, to make a failed colonial adventure seem worthwhile and patriotic, as if The Hurt Locker were real and the parades of flag-wrapped coffins through Wootton Bassett were not a cynical propaganda exercise.
Silent witness
“War is fun”, the helmets in Vietnam used to say with bleakest irony, meaning that if a war is shown to have no purpose other than to justify voracious power in the cause of lucrative fanaticisms such as the weapons industry, the danger of truth beckons. This danger can be illustrated by comparing the liberal perception of Tony Blair in 1997 as one “who wants to create a world [where] ideology has surrendered entirely to ‘values’” (Hugo Young, the Guardian) to the public reckoning today of a liar and war criminal.
“Western war-states such as the US and Britain are threatened not by the Taliban or any other introverted tribesmen in faraway places, but by the anti-war instincts of their own citizens. Consider the draconian sentences handed down in London to scores of young people who protested against Israel’s assault on Gaza in January last year. Following demonstrations in which paramilitary police “kettled” thousands, first offenders have received two and a half years in prison for minor offences that would not normally carry a custodial sentence. On both sides of the Atlantic, serious dissent exposing illegal war has become a serious crime.
“Silence in other high places allows this moral travesty. Across the arts, literature, journalism and the law, liberal elites, having hurried away from the debris of Blair and now Obama, continue to fudge their indifference to the barbarism and aims of western state crimes by promoting retrospectively the evils of their convenient demons, such as Saddam Hussein. With Harold Pinter gone, try compiling a list of well-known writers, artists and advocates whose principles are not consumed by the “market” or neutered by their celebrity. Who among them has spoken out about the holocaust in Iraq during almost 20 years of lethal blockade and assault? And all of it has been deliberate. On 22 January 1991, the US Defence Intelligence Agency predicted in impressive detail how a blockade would systematically destroy Iraq’s clean water system and lead to “increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease”. So the US set about eliminating clean water for the Iraqi population: one of the causes, Unicef noted, of the deaths of half a million Iraqi infants under the age of five. But this extremism apparently has no name.
Partners in crime
“Norman Mailer once said he believed the US, in its endless pursuit of war and domination, had entered a “pre-fascist era”. Mailer seemed tentative, as if trying to warn about something even he could not quite define. “Fascism” is not right, for it invokes lazy historical precedents, conjuring yet again the iconography of German and Italian repression. On the other hand, American authoritarianism, as the American cultural critic Henry Giroux pointed out recently, is “more nuance, less theatrical, more cunning, less concerned with repressive modes of control than with manipulative modes of consent”.
“This is Americanism, the only predatory ideology to deny that it is an ideology. The rise of tentacular corporations that are dictatorships in their own right and of a military that is now a state within the state, set behind the façade of the best democracy 35,000 Washington lobbyists can buy, and a popular culture programmed to divert and stultify, is without precedent. More nuanced, perhaps, but the results are unambiguous. Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, the senior UN officials in Iraq during the US- and British-led blockade, are in no doubt they witnessed genocide. They saw no gas chambers. Insidious, undeclared, even presented wittily as enlightenment on the march, the Third World War and its genocide proceeded, human being by human being.
In the coming election campaign in Britain, the candidates will refer to this war only to laud “our boys”. The candidates are almost identical political mummies, shrouded in the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes. As Blair demonstrated a mite too eagerly, the British elite love America because America allows them to barrack and bomb the natives and call themselves “partners”. We should interrupt their fun.”
“The genius of the American method is to define the Truth as whatever makes you happiest.”
-T. Raleigh Dennis
In my experience, pursuing social justice is in itself “fun” and the source of “happiness.” It’s not a matter of interrupting anyone’s fun but extending it out concentrically as if someone had thrown even a pea-sized pebble on that placid surface. How much more fun for that gliding swan to ride the ripples, play with the currents, and piece together a fractured image of its own devising. The possibilities are in the fissures. The cracked mirror reflects most accurately.
CDS Frances, I miss Harold Pinter. I’m glad Pilger is still around (but for how much longer?) but Pilger is a journalist and we need an Artist with an unwavering vision of the bloody fucking Truth to set an example that Artists can have Plutonium Balls / Pussies of Steel, too. The Artist/Intellectual Race is now wan and effete… an impotent Eloi to Cheney-Co.’s Moorlocks. It wasn’t always thus. Even soft-spoken Vonnegut didn’t flinch from his responsibility not to delude himself.
Frankly speaking, it was that very silence that forced me to overcome my personal inhibitions and insert Cooperative Village into the world. Also to spend the last three years since its publication fighting to gain a readership for it and for the literary and political culture in which it could thrive and serve. If you would only read it, CDS Steven, you might see in it a robust response to Harold Pinter’s insistent cry. Call and response. Both are essential. Thank you for reminding me that my own work has value.
Well, let’s try to see this speech in a context that goes beyond our own work. Whether or not people read me, or you, is an issue separable from whether or not we have the courage to take the measure of the world as it is and our place in it.
Pinter’s speech is more important to me, on one level, than all my work, and there is more Truth in half of it than all the bullshit, copy-and-paste discussions of Plato or Aristotle on the Literary Bloggosphere. If Pinter’s speech is so easily absorbed (or half-dismissed) by even so-called “Liberals”, what impact is our work having?
There can be no impact if we keep trying to discuss things in terms provided by the very Fuckers Pinter was coldly raging against. They own the language now, clearly. Where did these idiotic catch-phrases, like “Green Technology” and “Conspiracy Theory” come from? Why, the same clever source as “Where’s the Beef?” and “Get over it”, of course.
Where did the sentence,
“We have to ask whether humanity is essentially Life-affirming, or whether its dark undercurrents will once again surface in this new epoch…”
…come from? Because it can’t really mean what it seems to be saying… not in the year 2010. Surely, it’s a sentence from 1870. It’s just too precious for words. Gee: should Jim go visit any number of the dozens of hot or warm or cooling-before-reheating war zones on the planet to see if those “dark undercurrents” are surfacing yet? Should he check on the mines where the precious metals for his “Green Technology” are being clawed from African earth by slaves at gunpoint?
My work can’t do a thing about any of that. But fuck me if I avoid discussing the issue FRANKLY on my own fucking blog for the sake of decorum. I still believe in the pre-mindfuck concept of an Intellectual as someone capable of doing more than being able to choose between “Avatar” and “The Hurt Locker” as coded vehicles for affirming the impossibility of dissent.
My work is worthless if the words are owned by killers. We have ceded ownership of the words in the time it took us to finally learn to use them. The rest is vanity.
For the Freaktionary.
Pintercle. The summit gained by fearlessly standing upright on the shoulders of the most courageous.
Who needs shoulder-perching when Truth-facing is such a down-to-earth thrill?
Then fix-her-upper please, CDS Steven.
[ed.'s note: fixed?]
Not enough people got a chance to read this when it came out, and not enough of the ones who did read it managed to read it all the way through, or with any care. Let’s post it here before it flies down the memory hole. And then cross-reference it with THIS
Art, truth and politics
* Harold Pinter
In 1958 I wrote the following:
‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.’
I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?
Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.
I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did.
Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or an image. The given word is often shortly followed by the image. I shall give two examples of two lines which came right out of the blue into my head, followed by an image, followed by me.
The plays are The Homecoming and Old Times. The first line of The Homecoming is ‘What have you done with the scissors?’ The first line of Old Times is ‘Dark.’
In each case I had no further information.
In the first case someone was obviously looking for a pair of scissors and was demanding their whereabouts of someone else he suspected had probably stolen them. But I somehow knew that the person addressed didn’t give a damn about the scissors or about the questioner either, for that matter.
‘Dark’ I took to be a description of someone’s hair, the hair of a woman, and was the answer to a question. In each case I found myself compelled to pursue the matter. This happened visually, a very slow fade, through shadow into light.
I always start a play by calling the characters A, B and C.
In the play that became The Homecoming I saw a man enter a stark room and ask his question of a younger man sitting on an ugly sofa reading a racing paper. I somehow suspected that A was a father and that B was his son, but I had no proof. This was however confirmed a short time later when B (later to become Lenny) says to A (later to become Max), ‘Dad, do you mind if I change the subject? I want to ask you something. The dinner we had before, what was the name of it? What do you call it? Why don’t you buy a dog? You’re a dog cook. Honest. You think you’re cooking for a lot of dogs.’ So since B calls A ‘Dad’ it seemed to me reasonable to assume that they were father and son. A was also clearly the cook and his cooking did not seem to be held in high regard. Did this mean that there was no mother? I didn’t know. But, as I told myself at the time, our beginnings never know our ends.
‘Dark.’ A large window. Evening sky. A man, A (later to become Deeley), and a woman, B (later to become Kate), sitting with drinks. ‘Fat or thin?’ the man asks. Who are they talking about? But I then see, standing at the window, a woman, C (later to become Anna), in another condition of light, her back to them, her hair dark.
It’s a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author’s position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to define. You certainly can’t dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man’s buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your hands, people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort.
So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time.
But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot.
Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice. He must be prepared to approach them from a variety of angles, from a full and uninhibited range of perspectives, take them by surprise, perhaps, occasionally, but nevertheless give them the freedom to go which way they will. This does not always work. And political satire, of course, adheres to none of these precepts, in fact does precisely the opposite, which is its proper function.
In my play The Birthday Party I think I allow a whole range of options to operate in a dense forest of possibility before finally focussing on an act of subjugation.
Mountain Language pretends to no such range of operation. It remains brutal, short and ugly. But the soldiers in the play do get some fun out of it. One sometimes forgets that torturers become easily bored. They need a bit of a laugh to keep their spirits up. This has been confirmed of course by the events at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad. Mountain Language lasts only 20 minutes, but it could go on for hour after hour, on and on and on, the same pattern repeated over and over again, on and on, hour after hour.
Ashes to Ashes, on the other hand, seems to me to be taking place under water. A drowning woman, her hand reaching up through the waves, dropping down out of sight, reaching for others, but finding nobody there, either above or under the water, finding only shadows, reflections, floating; the woman a lost figure in a drowning landscape, a woman unable to escape the doom that seemed to belong only to others.
But as they died, she must die too.
Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.
As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true.
The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.
But before I come back to the present I would like to look at the recent past, by which I mean United States foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. I believe it is obligatory upon us to subject this period to at least some kind of even limited scrutiny, which is all that time will allow here.
Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.
But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now. Although constrained, to a certain extent, by the existence of the Soviet Union, the United States’ actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked.
Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America’s favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as ‘low intensity conflict’. Low intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued – or beaten to death – the same thing – and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in US foreign policy in the years to which I refer.
The tragedy of Nicaragua was a highly significant case. I choose to offer it here as a potent example of America’s view of its role in the world, both then and now.
I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.
The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: ‘Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.’
Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.’ There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.
Innocent people, indeed, always suffer.
Finally somebody said: ‘But in this case “innocent people” were the victims of a gruesome atrocity subsidised by your government, one among many. If Congress allows the Contras more money further atrocities of this kind will take place. Is this not the case? Is your government not therefore guilty of supporting acts of murder and destruction upon the citizens of a sovereign state?’
Seitz was imperturbable. ‘I don’t agree that the facts as presented support your assertions,’ he said.
As we were leaving the Embassy a US aide told me that he enjoyed my plays. I did not reply.
I should remind you that at the time President Reagan made the following statement: ‘The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.’
The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution.
The Sandinistas weren’t perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilised. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated.
The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of health care and education and achieve social unity and national self respect, neighbouring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things. There was of course at the time fierce resistance to the status quo in El Salvador.
I spoke earlier about ‘a tapestry of lies’ which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a ‘totalitarian dungeon’. This was taken generally by the media, and certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic or official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the government, two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala. The United States had brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of successive military dictatorships.
Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of the Alcatl regiment trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA. That extremely brave man Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people died. Why were they killed? They were killed because they believed a better life was possible and should be achieved. That belief immediately qualified them as communists. They died because they dared to question the status quo, the endless plateau of poverty, disease, degradation and oppression, which had been their birthright.
The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. ‘Democracy’ had prevailed.
But this ‘policy’ was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened.
The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.
Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it.
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It’s a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, ‘the American people’, as in the sentence, ‘I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.’
It’s a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words ‘the American people’ provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don’t need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it’s very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.
The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn’t give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.
What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days – conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead? Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what’s called the ‘international community’. This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be ‘the leader of the free world’. Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally – a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man’s land from which indeed they may never return. At present many are on hunger strike, being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anaesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture. What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States has said: to criticise our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You’re either with us or against us. So Blair shuts up.
The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading – as a last resort – all other justifications having failed to justify themselves – as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.
We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it ‘bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East’.
How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice. Therefore if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in the dock Bush has warned that he will send in the marines. But Tony Blair has ratified the Court and is therefore available for prosecution. We can let the Court have his address if they’re interested. It is Number 10, Downing Street, London.
Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don’t exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. ‘We don’t do body counts,’ said the American general Tommy Franks.
Early in the invasion there was a photograph published on the front page of British newspapers of Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a little Iraqi boy. ‘A grateful child,’ said the caption. A few days later there was a story and photograph, on an inside page, of another four-year-old boy with no arms. His family had been blown up by a missile. He was the only survivor. ‘When do I get my arms back?’ he asked. The story was dropped. Well, Tony Blair wasn’t holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other mutilated child, nor the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It dirties your shirt and tie when you’re making a sincere speech on television.
The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of harm’s way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot, in different kinds of graves.
Here is an extract from a poem by Pablo Neruda, ‘I’m Explaining a Few Things’:
And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children’s blood.
Jackals that the jackals would despise
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate.
Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives.
Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain:
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull’s eye of your hearts.
And you will ask: why doesn’t his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land.
Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets! *
Let me make it quite clear that in quoting from Neruda’s poem I am in no way comparing Republican Spain to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. I quote Neruda because nowhere in contemporary poetry have I read such a powerful visceral description of the bombing of civilians.
I have said earlier that the United States is now totally frank about putting its cards on the table. That is the case. Its official declared policy is now defined as ‘full spectrum dominance’. That is not my term, it is theirs. ‘Full spectrum dominance’ means control of land, sea, air and space and all attendant resources.
The United States now occupies 702 military installations throughout the world in 132 countries, with the honourable exception of Sweden, of course. We don’t quite know how they got there but they are there all right.
The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning. It is developing new systems of nuclear force, known as bunker busters. The British, ever cooperative, are intending to replace their own nuclear missile, Trident. Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama bin Laden? You? Me? Joe Dokes? China? Paris? Who knows? What we do know is that this infantile insanity – the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons – is at the heart of present American political philosophy. We must remind ourselves that the United States is on a permanent military footing and shows no sign of relaxing it.
Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government’s actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force – yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish.
I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose the following short address which he can make on television to the nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously attractive, a man’s man.
‘God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden’s God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam’s God was bad, except he didn’t have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don’t chop people’s heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don’t you forget it.’
A writer’s life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don’t have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection – unless you lie – in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.
I have referred to death quite a few times this evening. I shall now quote a poem of my own called ‘Death’.
Where was the dead body found?
Who found the dead body?
Was the dead body dead when found?
How was the dead body found?
Who was the dead body?
Who was the father or daughter or brother
Or uncle or sister or mother or son
Of the dead and abandoned body?
Was the body dead when abandoned?
Was the body abandoned?
By whom had it been abandoned?
Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey?
What made you declare the dead body dead?
Did you declare the dead body dead?
How well did you know the dead body?
How did you know the dead body was dead?
Did you wash the dead body
Did you close both its eyes
Did you bury the body
Did you leave it abandoned
Did you kiss the dead body
When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror – for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.
I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.
If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us – the dignity of man.
* Extract from “I’m Explaining a Few Things” translated by Nathaniel Tarn, from Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems, published by Jonathan Cape, London 1970. Used by permission of The Random House Group Limited.
Dear Frances and Steven and others lurking near and far,
Just back from the O2 center where I watched the heavy favorite Ice-bears lose to the Augsburger Panther (yes the team is only one panther) more DEL (German Ice Hockey League) reports on request.
Before the game I had the pleasure to spend a few hours with Steven in the flesh (he may post a snap from that meeting), whereupon we broached the issue of Green Energy. Thus this comment is in some way related to #92 and #96 above, I am posting here at the thread head as instructed.
Let’s just get one thing clear. The human race will do everything it has to to survive. This is not a matter of being nice or being good it is a matter of survival. And by human race, I don’t mean the entire human race, but, most likely, a severely culled selection of the species with traits deemed valuable will be promoted and promulgated and the rest culled or otherwise banished. The future of humanity is the future of a master race, and that is the hidden message in the sweet pretense glowing from the word anthropocene (which literally means ‘new human’).
The destiny of this new human will be the destiny of the earth. This new human will cordon off certain sections for resource exploitation and others for ‘environmental regeneration’ Every such designation will be justified through the most advanced automated realtime economic reckoning. This is so-called anthropocene Green Technology. not to mention that the sites mentioned in the article linked above are just the most visible of a long line of polluting procedures, which, as as we move from newer processing techniques to assembly lines and eventually down to the mine we are witnessing work conditions akin to, or even of outright slavery, which Steven touched on above, just Google ‘conflict minerals’.
Everything that depends on electronics, that is, everything Jim H from Atlanta says he constantly advises his children (why constantly? does he have the sneaking suspicion they don’t quite believe him? ) on his three little quarks-nominated-blog to be optimistic about is based on hegemonic systems of resource (human and ‘natural’) exploitation which, in many cases have evolved little since Dickens.
If you want to give your children hope, dear Jim H, tell them that if they study real hard and encourage each other to be authentically, un-dupe-ably critical, they may have a chance at a form of optimism that does not need to be pumped up out of marketing statements for the next techno-industrial juggernaut. Then again, maybe not, it is unclear how welcome such people will be among the anthropocene.
I, who sleep at your vigils and fast for your feasts (w/apologies to Joyce)
“…tell them that if they study real hard and encourage each other to be authentically, un-dupe-ably critical, they may have a chance at a form of optimism that does not need to be pumped up out of marketing statements for the next techno-industrial juggernaut.”
Well that’s the problem, isn’t it, CDS Barry: the most effective form of education is marketing. And the most effective form of marketing is disguised as wisdom. I write “disguised”, there, as though “wisdom” is an absolute, and absolutely positive, value. But what is it? It’s not a stable body of knowledge, it’s a subjective, essentially conservative category of opinion. “Wisdom” was Ronald Reagan’s shtick; the presumption being that, at his age (and position) he just knew certain things… don’t worry, I’ll take care of it: you’re still too young to know. Reagan was beloved by Americans on both “sides” of the Left/Right pseudo-dichotomy.
The concept of “wisdom” isn’t amenable to critical analysis, but, clearly, the “wisdom” of a 19th-century plantation owner of Georgia would have diverged somewhat from the “wisdom” of one of his elder slaves. Not always, of course: in a perfectly-run plantation, there would have been a unity of “wisdom” visions between master and slave. And there often is, to this day.
Critical analysis means ignoring the debate-foreclosing, inviolable aura of “wisdom” (conventional and otherwise) and breaking the arguments down to basic, foundational elements we can then use Fact and Logic to test. We aren’t trained to do this. If we were (if all of us were), it would be Marketing’s end and the end of Politics. Which is why critical analysis is taboo (example: one of the classical arguments against critical/forensic analysis at the scene of a possible False Flag operation in which many are killed is the “wisdom” of letting the “healing process” begin instead of, you know, digging up all that hurtful evidence-muck).
Which leads me to my second point: in the false dichotomy of “Left” and “Right” in American Political Theater, the most conservative force is not “Wing Nut” but “Normative Liberal”. Wing Nuts (eg, bellicose chubby radio personalities) actually promote a kind of debate by being (for the “Left”) so clearly racist/hawkish/wrong and thereby providing sanctioned targets for passionate criticism. A Normative Liberal, on the other hand, supports an arbitrary (comfort zone) boundary on discourse… a line beyond which a line of thinking or complaint can’t go. The punishment for crossing the line is ostracism. The Normative Liberal is a quasi-bourgeois mindset (I say “quasi” because the “middle class” no longer exists in real terms; only on Credit): it wants to keep things largely as they are while also, somehow, at the same time (impossibly), “improving conditions” for the Lesser Orders… the goal of which, of course, in the end, is more about improving conditions for the Normative Liberal by absolving him/her of Guilt. Guilt is ruining the Normative Liberal’s ability to enjoy the Goods and Services that are his/her credit-based birthright. Think “Hillary Supporter” c. 2003.
A Golden Avatar of Normative Liberalism (and 3QD readers) is Jon Stewart, of the Daily Show. As I pointed out to CDS Barry during yesterday’s walk, using Satire on Monsters only works to bring the Monsters back into the tent of the Human and the acceptable (ie, it normalizes monstrousness). To laugh at Karl Rove or Dick Cheney is to turn these monsters into your merely wrong-headed or eccentric or irascible grandfathers. Satire is only appropriate (and effective) against a politician who is no worse than inept. To rehabilitate a Mass Murderer (this is fact, not impressionism: check the figures on Iraq, for one example) from a deserved spot in Beyond the Pale to a much-more-huggable place in the breakfast nook of the Crotchety… is not exactly a service to fucking humanity. Cheney, Rove, the Bushes, et al, should be repulsive to us as We are to them.
Far from challenging the system, Stewart does his part to keep the whole thing from blowing up. Not that he’s intentionally-complicit… he’s a structural collaborator: Stewart just wants to earn a good living at something he does well and what he does well is, necessarily (to sell it to the target-demo of Normative Liberals), packaged misleadingly as a form of Dissent. Stewart wants to earn a good living while also doing “good”… for structural reasons, it’s not that simple. Doing “good” in [name your favorite example of a rogue state] is a bad career move. Those who do “good” often suffer catastrophic reversals in career trajectory (a possible euphemism for plane crash).
Structural Collaboration has to be widespread for the system to work. It is.
[ed.'s note: most of the images I'm using these days... unless they're of Berlin... are from this picture-blog]
Green technology seems to me to be about trying to preserve a particular life-style not the human race. Yes we can carry on as before as long as we carbon-trade with some impoverished third world country who will have to be even more impoverished so we can carry on with a 2 car, cheap goods economy.
I don’t even know where you start. I live off-street, out of town in a sort of witness-protection housing 70′s bungalow on a farm. The council re-cycling scheme won’t come near us as the quality of the “road” outside our front door is apparently bad for their vehicle suspension. Our touring vehicle hasn’t suffered in the 5 years we’ve lived there. The local tip costs money to dump at and the nearest recycling skips involve driving- thus cancelling out the carbon footprint we’ve “avoided” through recycling.
Walking into work last week there was enough tipped rubbish on the side of the road to fill several skips. Saving plastic bottles from my household consumption and putting them in the correct place seems a speck in the face of all this. It’s a downward spiral. No wonder the draw-bridges will be raised at some point – most likely by those who’ve helped aggravate the problem in the first place.
“Green technology seems to me to be about trying to preserve a particular life-style not the human race.”
Preserving a life-style and a self-image both, Comrade Ed.
Thank you, comrades, for kicking it (and my understanding) up quite a few notches. So grateful you’ve thought about these things with such depth and clarity. The lifestyle and self-image they wish to preserve is so blanched and vapid, so second-hand and carbon-copied, so verbally stunted and mentally impoverished, one wonders why they bother. What are they so greedy for when even with all the diamonds, coiffure and accoutrement life as they live it seems so artificial, lackluster and chicken soup for the soul-sickening.
Substitute that “They” for a “We” and we’re headed in a better direction, CDS Frances! We are Structural Collaborationists.
UPDATE:
I wrote, “To laugh at Karl Rove or Dick Cheney is to turn these monsters into your merely wrong-headed or eccentric or irascible grandfathers.” The greater implications of this are far-reaching. To picture Cheney-and-Ilk as our cranky-and/or-fumbling grandfathers is to render it impossible to imagine them perpetrating the kind of crimes-against-humanity we have no problem picturing foreign heads of state (the more “foreign” and melanin-afflicted the better) being eventually hung for. This control of the realm of the plausibly imaginable is key. The Normative Liberals control this realm (as it relates to “discourse”) in the Litbloggosphere. The price of violating their decorous Weltanschauung is to be called a “troll” or a you-know-what-theorist.
Thought experiment: the WTC buildings weren’t situated in NY, they were situated in Baghdad. Imagine the famous, hypno-newsclip tragedy unfolding exactly as it appeared to unfold in the fall of 2001, with only its location changed… its location and, therefore, the presiding regime. A presiding regime we all know was capable of anything. The smarter (or more cynical) Comrades will see where I’m going with this… ie, when Saddam was accused of gassing the Kurds, how many NormLibs flounced about sneering dismissively and called that a “conspiracy theory”…? [see TET 4.0- The Simulocracy Edition... for more on this]
I bridle at that label even as I drink the Vichy water.
[ed.'s note: as I always say, Veni, Vidi Vichy: I came, I saw, I collaborated]
(it’s Sunday, Comrades Lurking and Explicit; have you got thirty surplus minutes on this day of rest…?)
“There are two political figures in America who are masters of self-invention.
One is Arnold Schwarzenegger. The other is Barack Obama.
Arnold invented himself as a body builder, movie star, and Governor. Barack Obama invented himself as a black man, Christian, and President.”
Note Evert Cilliers’ classical Normative Liberal feeling-tone in the blogicle: he’s no naif; he acknowledges Realpolitik: politicians aren’t choirboys, after all. Dirty back-room deals will sometimes be made; there will be cigar-smoking and certain minority groups may have to wait a little longer in line than they’d hoped… or been promised. But only he, The Normative Liberal Blogicle Author, will determine how Human/Fallen we admit his Hero-of-choice is (speaking of which, there’s a beautiful Gandhi debacle to be had in the future but there’s no time for that now). Evert NormLib becomes dismissive and angry when some rogue (ie, troll) takes the process of recriminations too far. And look at Elatia Harris, the grand dame of the Literary-Politico Normative Liberal Niche-Bloggosphere, as she does her little job on a troll, or two, herself! Classical Normative Liberal discourse-pinching. Cruelly, I post this example from Xmas 2008 to make the winkingly tacit point that the NormLibs on the linked-to Comment Thread are palpably less cocksure of their NormLib Mascot (the POC) today.
Suddenly we 3QDers who are willing to suck up Obama’s bad compromises for the good things he’ll do are the gentle ones? And the venting snarling whining baby purists are macho babes facing the brutal facts? We’re the ones in pain!?
Steven Augustine, have you checked your mirror lately?
Posted by: Evert Cilliers | Dec 26, 2008 12:35:55 PM
I wonder what Evert would say about sucking up today?
[ed.'s note: humorous disclosure: for the sake of being permitted to even debate these points with the NormLibs at 3QD, I pretended to vote for Obama. Well, I didn't really, now, did I?]
UPDATE: you choose, Comrades Lurking and Explicit: “POC” or “POTUSOC” or “CPOTUS”?
How they must miss you and your dating advice from Confucius. How many of them thought to at least go to Wikipedia to learn about “virtue ethics” and connect it to the discussion at hand about virtual ethics.
I didn’t even get a chance to lay Lao Tze’s line about giving it up on the first date on them! I had to withdraw from that particular exercise in Canute-like (imprecations ‘n oceans) or Sisyphus-like (rocks ‘n inclines) advocacy. The absurdity of the NormLib Effect was overwhelming and I wasn’t even arguing at full-strength; hiding my real opinions just so the cunts would talk to me. My favorite description of the Pagan Ritual of Presidential Politics (as indulged in by The People) in America is this:
btr3 said… There are two Americas and they have two presidential races. One contest involves raising cash from the hyper-rich and the last one ended in the spring of 2008. The second contest lets the rest of us participate in choosing between the two candidates who won the first contest. See how fair that is? The second-class America gets to pick the President, while the hyper-rich America only gets to pick the candidates.
Put that way, it’s all so fucking obvious, isn’t it? That’s why NormLibs and NeoCons alike don’t like it when anyone puts it that way
Not a lone wolf, huh? Just a big bad one!
Well, I do love straw houses full of straw men
And now let’s change the, erm, subject, before we all accidentally go down in a private plane, Comrades… shall we?
seems as good a time as any to re-introduce WTF or even mudder-fudders into the thread. For the above and also for the below.
Incidentally the Scarface school play is by a music video director. It can only have been thus but its WTF-ness is still there – post-modern, sub-Wooster Group stylings or not.
It was made ” to stimulate debate” apparently. The debate being, presumably about why young kids are used in something to stimulate a debate about why young kids are …. you get the picture and the value of the debate.
Maybe the writer/director of that video was hoping to save kids in the way the director/writers of The Wire hoped to save North American blacks, Comrade Ed…?
Confession. The Scarface play stimulated me to go to the Metropolitan Museum that very day to view the Young Archer (with its curious lion’s paw quiver). Both the attribution (maybe Michelangelo) and the subject (maybe Apollo, maybe Cupid) are uncertain. Mystery aside, It’s astonishingly beautiful from every possible angle.
I’m out of the loop on this one. I can see that the makers of the Wire are trying to expose how a system works and of course whether they achieve that is open to debate.
But here, unless there’s been an upsurge in US primary schools of ultra-violent school plays or indeed ultra violence itself I’m unaware of what the problem is that needs to be debated using kids so young. Adults with “creative” ideas seems to be the only answer.
I’m not outraged by it – the table of popcorn and the drawn surveillance cameras are nice touches but the “only there to stimulate a debate” excuse seems to be folding in the face of public scrutiny.
“I’m out of the loop on this one. I can see that the makers of the Wire are trying to expose how a system works and of course whether they achieve that is open to debate.”
A) With millions of dollars and many careers at stake, in a cruelly-competitive medium, nothing on populist Television is done for any reason other than projected profit, bullshit bien pensant showbiz palaver to the contrary B) such luridly violent tales/stagings of the ghetto for genteel consumption are a venerable North American tradition. Thinking that anyone will save Niggas by showing/watching a lurid soap opera of Niggas blowing other Niggas’ heads off is wishful thinking at best, Comrade Ed. I had to laugh, by the way, when CDS Sean defended the Wire against charges of Racism… after he was so militantly anti- Monty Python (because of UK patterns of Cultural Discrimination) on another TET thread. If you can show how Geordies are locked in an eternal-cycle of ignorance, violence, self-hatred and premature death by Python’s vicarious glorification of an underclass’ homicidal agency etc.
(Funny: in the 1970s we called it Blaxploitation, but maybe that was because it was actually aimed at a Black audience then; when it’s for Whites the packaging is more dignified and guilt-absolving)
Militantly anti Monty Python? Must be an age thing. For me it no longer matters whether they were good or bad – they were just there when needed.
While sensitive to CDS Sean’s socio-politico aversion to Python, I have to re-post this, which is so good it doesn’t even rely on acting to make it as funny as it is; but if he gets to watch The Wire, I get to watch Python (from the Life of Brian):
Scene 9: The commandos
FRANCIS: We’re gettin’ in through the underground heating system here, up through into the main audience chamber here, and Pilate’s wife’s bedroom is here. Having grabbed his wife, we inform Pilate that she is in our custody and forthwith issue our demands. Any questions?
COMMANDO XERXES: What exactly are the demands?
REG: We’re giving Pilate two days to dismantle the entire apparatus of the Roman Imperialist State, and if he doesn’t agree immediately, we execute her.
MATTHIAS: Cut her head off?
FRANCIS: Cut all her bits off. Send ‘em back on the hour every hour. Show them we’re not to be trifled with.
REG: And of course, we point out that they bear full responsibility when we chop her up, and that we shall not submit to blackmail!
COMMANDOS: No blackmail!
REG: They’ve bled us white, the bastards. They’ve taken everything we had, and not just from us, from our fathers, and from our fathers’ fathers.
LORETTA: And from our fathers’ fathers’ fathers.
REG: Yeah.
LORETTA: And from our fathers’ fathers’ fathers’ fathers.
REG: Yeah. All right, Stan. Don’t labour the point. And what have they ever given us in return?!
XERXES: The aqueduct?
REG: What?
XERXES: The aqueduct.
REG: Oh. Yeah, yeah. They did give us that. Uh, that’s true. Yeah.
COMMANDO #3: And the sanitation.
LORETTA: Oh, yeah, the sanitation, Reg. Remember what the city used to be like?
REG: Yeah. All right. I’ll grant you the aqueduct and the sanitation are two things that the Romans have done.
MATTHIAS: And the roads.
REG: Well, yeah. Obviously the roads. I mean, the roads go without saying, don’t they? But apart from the sanitation, the aqueduct, and the roads–
COMMANDO: Irrigation.
XERXES: Medicine.
COMMANDOS: Huh? Heh? Huh…
COMMANDO #2: Education.
COMMANDOS: Ohh…
REG: Yeah, yeah. All right. Fair enough.
COMMANDO #1: And the wine.
COMMANDOS: Oh, yes. Yeah…
FRANCIS: Yeah. Yeah, that’s something we’d really miss, Reg, if the Romans left. Huh.
COMMANDO: Public baths.
LORETTA: And it’s safe to walk in the streets at night now, Reg.
FRANCIS: Yeah, they certainly know how to keep order. Let’s face it. They’re the only ones who could in a place like this.
REG: All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
XERXES: Brought peace.
REG: Oh. Peace? Shut up!
I had an exchange with a troublemaker on the GU blogs a while back about MP. I countered his blog-typical aversion to the show with a “What about Life of Brian?” gambit. “Ah but that wasn’t really Monty Python” was the reply – which I took to mean that the debate had swung my way.
I’ll take MP and The Wire to be honest.
You can wear t-shirts for both shows (simultaneously) , Comrade Ed, without a twitch from me, if you don’t also claim that doing so helps either Geordies or Black North Americans…
I’ll pass on wearing 2 T-Shirts simultaneously you cruel swine but please enlighten me on the Geordie reference. I don’t remember a Python sketch about them*.
The usual crit about them over here is that they were yet another example in the endless Oxford/Cambridge brigade on the BBC – plus they never had good roles for women.
All of which is true but at their best they were extremely funny.
*[ed.'s note: I think that was the point]
But the women they did have roles for had most excellent boo… oh. Blacks, Women, Black Women, Geordies, Black Geordies and Black Geordie Women all deserve an apology from Monty Python, The Wire and… me.
You might also want to apologise to those 2 rutting lions while you’re at it.
is that by Christian Schad? The haircut looks curiously 50′s American if it is.
Only the most famous woman in the Westernmost world (c. 1974) as envisioned by John Currin. I like the National Geographicality of it (one question: how do you determine “West” on a sphere? I mean, where’s it really start or…)
CDS Frances, I saw Rev. Brown in 1987, I think. He opened the show with an irony-free version of “That’s Entertainment”… segued into “Living in America” (the recent hit: that should date it)… I had to wait about an hour before I felt reasonably funkified. I think it may have been the same year/venue I saw PIL… the night naughty people were tossing crap onstage and Mr. Lydon stopped the music and lectured the audience with bugging-out eyes… and an ice cube arced with perfect grace through the spot light and bounced off his famous red barnet at the very end of his rant. What a night!
comin’ at you one more ‘gain… jus’ refrencin’ post #102 the dark force, the Schwarnz! And pointin’ y’all (you know how we do this) case you ain’t been down this road yet, to some unmissable watching/listening (you don’t really need to watch it, but you must listen to at least the first 90 mins or so of this, put it on while you do something else). For anyone interested in politics, an, especially in American politics : Tavis Smiley’s recent Black Agenda Forum on CSPAN, LOTS to discuss here for those who are up to thee pahhhhh-tayyyy! if you enjoyed notchin’ it up on that Western Culture Anthropocenocratic Crusade butt…
CDS Barry, I’m struggling mightily to get past the prayer that prefaces the conversation; I’m trying to remember the last time I saw a round table of white pundits kick off the chit chat with a prayer to the Prince of Peas. Sure, it’s supposed to remind us how deeply religious “black folk” are but doesn’t it really make them seem like second-rate thinkers? Or, like, qualified to speak on their own experiences, and in emotional terms, at best? If Zizek presaged one of his exegesises with an appeal to Loki (for, surely, it would be Loki) would you be able to take his defense of Lacan seriously…?
And… Jesse Jackson, that CIA dress-sock-puppet…?
Okay…okay… I’ll watch it now…
(the picture is credited as “54th National Reunion Convention of Ex-Slaves and Former Owners, 1916″)
Yeah, I know, and since when does God love justice? Is justice another word for humanity? and if so that’s a pretty wanton and merciless ‘love’ god metes out sometimes. Why not leave that old paleoanthropomorph out of it and just say Love loves justice?
I understand, to some extent, the need to shield oneself, being very persecuted and afraid, behind the mantle of officially sanctioned authority in the guise of the Church. I understand it but I don’t trust it. And I also somehow don’t trust how the folksy inflection is being employed. I notice Obama tries it on for size at times, as if to over-compensate for the fact that he is,as Dorothee Tillman pointed out to some shaking heads, not exactly representative of American Black People, not having decended from slaves (at least not American slaves…)
Anyway, try dear Steven at least to get to the ‘anti-Christ’ around 85 mins, he is one who doesn’t employ the inflection, he has his own, though. I plead with you one last ‘gain~
When they finally get the green-light on The New Adventures of Amos ‘n Andy, Cornel West is a shoo-in for a principal role (as evidenced at exactly 59 minutes into it: that’s the Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton University going “whooo! whooo!” in the background when the tenuously-grammatical lady in the church-hat gets her Oprah applause-moment). I had to drop out of the audience at that point but I’ll try to press on to the 85-minute mark, CDS Barry, if it please you.
Note: is it just me or is Louis Farrakhan (née Louis Eugene Walcott) doing a note-perfect late-period Jerry Lewis at this event? Wait: fruity top note of Jerry but a smoky aftertaste of… William Shatner…
Note: look how much lighter the hands (of the more mulatto-y participants) are than their faces: the meta-politics of stage makeup, eh? On Television talks and Variety Shows of the 1960s and 1970s the problem was reversed: dark hands, paler faces.
Note: West wrote, once, “I arrived at Harvard unashamed of my African, Christian, and militant de-colonized outlooks. More pointedly, I acknowledged and accented the empowerment of my black styles, mannerisms…” but many of the black intellectuals and academics who preceded him did not indulge in these “styles”, which are not an across-the-board Black inheritance but expressions of the street and of pop and of youth. Somehow, middle-aged white academics don’t feel as pressured to skateboard to work flashing Deathmetal devil-greetings as a militantly unashamed celebration of White style. West is a ridiculous, self-conscious Cunt for the tragically trivial reason that his skin is so pale. If the poor man had only been born darker (obviating the need to overcompensate), imagine the grand books he might have written…
The treacherous waters of Black Demagogic Practice are shallow but swift and studded with rocks. There’s the awful balancing act of needing to seem Black enough for the audience yet educated enough to impress the other members of the panel… and then the skin-tone and hair type have to be factored in if the Demagogue is mulatto-y (in other words, they have to try harder: Julian Bond and Adam Clayton Powell, in their heydays, would’ve had a tough time out there). But what struck me after an hour of watching was that if the POTUSOC had only made sure that more money/jobs had gone to the “black community”, there’d be nothing but praise for him, Imperialist Warmongering or not. There is (or should be) a clear distinction between GRIPE and DISSENT. Given the fact that none of the people at the actual table are hurting financially, what to make of the discussion?
Time to cleanse my Psycho-Political Palate:
the old story that Marx would never have (co-)written the Communist Manifesto if he had been given the chair in philosophy he had applied for at the University of Bremen.
… and/or if his hair had been straighter?
[London,] 30 July [1862]
Dear Engels,
From the enclosed scrawls you will partly see how bothered I am. So far, the landlord has allowed himself to be placated; he has yet to receive £25. The piano chap, who is being paid in instalments for the piano, should already have had £6 at the end of June, and is a most ill-mannered brute. I have rate demands in the house amounting to £6. The wretched school fees — some £10 — I have fortunately been able to pay, for I do my utmost to spare the children direct humiliation. I have paid the butcher $6 on account (the sum total of my quarterly takings from the Presse!), but I’m again being dunned by that fellow, not to mention the baker, the teagrocer, the greengrocer, and such other sons of Belial as there may be.
The Jewish nigger Lassalle who, I’m glad to say, is leaving at the end of this week, has happily lost another 5,000 talers in an ill-judged speculation. The chap would sooner throw money down the drain than lend it to a ‘friend’, even though his interest and capital were guaranteed. In this he bases himself on the view that he ought to live the life of a Jewish baron, or Jew created a baron (no doubt by the countess). Just imagine! This fellow, knowing about the American affair, etc., and hence about the state of crisis I’m in, had the insolence to ask me whether I would be willing to hand over one of my daughters to la Hatzfeldt as a ‘companion’, and whether he himself should secure Gerstenberg’s (!) patronage for me! The fellow has wasted my time and, what is more, the dolt opined that, since I was not engaged upon any ‘business’ just now, but merely upon a ‘theoretical work’, I might just as well kill time with him! In order to keep up certain dehors vis-à-vis the fellow, my wife had to put in pawn everything that wasn’t actually nailed or bolted down!
Had I not been in this appalling position and vexed by the way this parvenu flaunted his money bags, he’d have amused me tremendously. Since I last saw him a year ago, he’s gone quite mad. His head has been completely turned by his stay in Zurich (with Rüstow, Herwegh, etc.) and the subsequent trip to Italy and, after that, by his Herr Julian Schmidt, etc. He is now indisputably, not only the greatest scholar, the profoundest thinker, the most brilliant man of science, and so forth, but also and in addition, Don Juan cum revolutionary Cardinal Richelieu. Add to this, the incessant chatter in a high, falsetto voice, the unaesthetic, histrionic gestures, the dogmatic tone!
As a profound secret, he told me and my wife that he had advised Garibaldi not to make Rome the target of his attack but instead proceed to Naples, there set himself up as dictator (without affronting Victor Emmanuel), and call out the people’s army for a campaign against Austria. Lassalle had him conjure 300,000 men out of thin air — with whom, of course, the Piedmontese army joined forces. And then, in accordance with a plan approved, so he says, by Mr Rüstow, a detached corps was to make, or rather set sail, for the Adriatic coast (Dalmatia) and incite Hungary to revolt, while, heedless of the Quadrilateral, the main body of the army under Garibaldi marched from Padua to Vienna, where the population instantly rebelled. All over in 6 weeks. The fulcrum of the action — Lassalle’s political influence, or his pen, in Berlin. And Rüstow at the head of a corps of German volunteers attached to Garibaldi. Bonaparte, on the other hand, was paralysed by this Lassallean coup d’éclat.
He has just been to see Mazzini, and ‘the latter, too,’ approved and ‘admired’ his plan.
He introduced himself to these people as the ‘representative of the German revolutionary working class’ and assumed they knew (to use his own words) that his (Izzy’s) ‘pamphlet on the Italian war’ had prevented Prussia’s intervention and, in fact, that he had controlled ‘the history of the past three years’. Lassalle was absolutely furious with me and my wife for poking fun at his plans, quizzing him as ‘an enlightened Bonapartist’, etc. He shouted, blustered, flung himself about and finally got it fixed in his mind that I was too ‘abstract’ to understand politics.
As to America, it’s of no interest whatever, he says. The Yankees have no ‘ideas’. ‘The freedom of the individual’ is merely a ‘negative idea’, etc., and other antiquated, mouldering, speculative rubbish of the same ilk.
As I have said, if circumstances had been different (and he hadn’t disrupted my work), the chap would have amused me tremendously.
And on top of it all, the sheer gluttony and wanton lechery of this ‘idealist’!
It is now quite plain to me — as the shape of his head and the way his hair grows also testify — that he is descended from the negroes who accompanied Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or paternal grandmother interbred with a nigger). Now, this blend of Jewishness and Germanness, on the one hand, and basic negroid stock, on the other, must inevitably give rise to a peculiar product. The fellow’s importunity is also nigger-like.
If, by the by, Mr Rüstow was responsible for thinking up the march from Padua to Vienna, I should say that he also has a screw loose.
Salut.
Your
K. M.
One of our nigger’s great discoveries — which, however, he only confides to his ‘closest friends’ — is that the Pelasgians were of Semitic descent. The main evidence: in the Book of Maccabbees, the Jews send emissaries to solicit the help of Greece on grounds of kinship. Furthermore, an Etruscan inscription has been found in Perugia, and this was simultaneously deciphered by Hofrat Stucker in Berlin and an Italian, and both independently converted the Etruscan into the Hebrew alphabet.
So that we can no longer discomfit him with ‘Blue Books’, he has bought 20 pounds’ worth of Blue Books (under Bucher’s guidance).
He has converted Bucher to socialism, or so he maintains. Now Bucher’s quite a fine little man, if a cranky one, and, in any case, I can’t believe that he has accepted Lassalle’s ‘foreign policy’. Bucher is the ‘compositress’ in Julian Schmidt.
If you’d been here just for a day or two, you’d have been able to lay in enough material to keep you laughing for a whole year. That’s why I was so anxious to have you here. One doesn’t get an opportunity like that every day.
Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 388;
First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913, and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.
lest we forget
“The peculiarly African character is difficult to comprehend, for the very reason that in reference to it, we must quite give up the principle which naturally accompanies all our ideas-the category of Universality. In Negro life the characteristic point is the fact that consciousness has not yet attained to the realization of any substantial objective existence-as for example, God, or Law-in which the interest of man’s volition is involved and in which he realizes his own being. This distinction between himself as an individual and the universality of his essential being, the African in the uniform, undeveloped oneness of his existence has not yet attained; so that the Knowledge of an absolute Being, an Other and a Higher than his individual self, is entirely wanting. The Negro, as already observed, exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state. We must lay aside all thought of reverence and morality-all that we call feeling-if we would rightly comprehend him; there is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in this type of character. The copious and circumstantial accounts of Missionaries completely confirm this, and Mahommedanism appears to be the only thing which in any way brings the Negroes within the range of culture.” [Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover, 1956), 93.]*
But, Marx’s use of the word ‘nigger’ to describe Lassalle was quite common at the time as a way to distinguish between cultured and shtetl jews. Lassalle, being by all accounts, as white and as jewish as Marx but simply having been born with the taint of his origins east of Germany in today’s Poland (formerly Galicia).
Berlin was the scene of legendary rivalry between the settled Christianised German Jews of the West side of the city and the johnny-come -lately(as they perceived them, ‘bumpkin’) Jews from today’s Poland and Ukraine. All educated Jews had to acknowledge that their origins were somewhere around Egypt and, very likely of a skin tone darker than pearl. However, as can be seen, in the Hegel citation, original did not yet have the post-modern commodity-liberal nostalgic value of ‘authenticity’ about it. What was original was simply primitive….and it is in that sense that Marx’s racism approaches that of today’s black ‘Streber’ (a Yiddish word for someone from humble origins who immodestly strives for a higher position in society) attempts to distinguish status between shades of skin colour.
In closing let’s also factor that primordial problem of the relative attractiveness, the exotic charm, of the rogue provincial intellectual “You have made my wife into a special admirer of your play.” writes Marx to Lassalle, ambivalent and a little plaintively.
*[ed.'s note: the lauded Euro-bumpkin Hegel made these breezily disparaging remarks roughly 150 years before THISinterview with the novelist CHINUA ACHEBE; it's amazing how African humanoid consciousness grew from an undifferentiated lump of unreflected sensation to later field questions in the Paris Review; sadly, to this day, Wildebeests and Springboks remain unpublished]
Yes, but the funny bit is how often it has been remarked that Marx himself resembled…
The hatred of the nearest-Other; maybe there’s an Evolutionary dynamic there
INTERVIEWER: You have said that you wrote Things Fall Apart as a response to Joyce Cary’s Mr. Johnson.
ACHEBE: I wish I hadn’t said that.
INTERVIEWER: You made Mr. Johnson famous! But your most trenchant essay on the colonial novel is your subsequent essay on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. I wonder what you think is the image of Africa today in the Western mind.
ACHEBE: I think it’s changed a bit. But not very much in its essentials. When I think of the standing, the importance and the erudition of all these people who see nothing about racism in Heart of Darkness, I’m convinced that we must really be living in different worlds. Anyway, if you don’t like someone’s story, you write your own. If you don’t like what somebody says, you say what it is you don’t like. Some people imagine that what I mean is, Don’t read Conrad. Good heavens, no! I teach Conrad. I teach Heart of Darkness. I have a course on Heart of Darkness in which what I’m saying is, Look at the way this man handles Africans. Do you recognize humanity there? People will tell you he was opposed to imperialism. But it’s not enough to say, I’m opposed to imperialism. Or, I’m opposed to these people—these poor people—being treated like this. Especially since he goes on straight away to call them “dogs standing on their hind legs.” That kind of thing. Animal imagery throughout. He didn’t see anything wrong with it. So we must live in different worlds. Until these two worlds come together we will have a lot of trouble.
And
THIS: Achebe bumps his head against the hard rubber wall of Euranthropic self-regard (in this case, Coloured)… some very good lines in this interview. Having to do with Conrad’s 19th-century version of (ahem) The Wire
A little puzzle for the Comrades until I come home from today’s errands and adventures…
UPDATE: a little later than that, actually
Dialing Margaret Fuller…
INTERMEZZO
CDS Frances! Not knowing who Margaret Fuller was, I Googled her dial, read her Wiki, then looked her up on Project Gutenberg; I ended up reading a goodly chunk from her letters, bits and pieces of her essays and criticism and three detailed, contemporary accounts of her dramatic death by shipwreck (only a two-minute walk, had she been able to walk on water, from shore). From there I scrolled/trawled down, open to Serendipity’s reading list and I found this (or THIS) good olde Sci Fi from the Innocent Age of Penny Lit:
THE TALKATIVE TREE
By H. B. Fyfe
from Worlds of If January 1962
Dang vines! Beats all how some plants have no manners—but what do you expect, when they used to be men!
All things considered—the obscure star, the undetermined damage to the stellar drive and the way the small planet’s murky atmosphere defied precision scanners—the pilot made a reasonably good landing. Despite sour feelings for the space service of Haurtoz, steward Peter Kolin had to admit that casualties might have been far worse.
Chief Steward Slichow led his little command, less two third-class ration keepers thought to have been trapped in the lower hold, to a point two hundred meters from the steaming hull of the Peace State. He lined them up as if on parade. Kolin made himself inconspicuous.
“Since the crew will be on emergency watches repairing the damage,” announced the Chief in clipped, aggressive tones, “I have volunteered my section for preliminary scouting, as is suitable. It may be useful to discover temporary sources in this area of natural foods.”
Volunteered HIS section! thought Kolin rebelliously.
Like the Supreme Director of Haurtoz! Being conscripted into this idiotic space fleet that never fights is bad enough without a tin god on jets like Slichow!
Prudently, he did not express this resentment overtly.
His well-schooled features revealed no trace of the idea—or of any other idea. The Planetary State of Haurtoz had been organized some fifteen light-years from old Earth, but many of the home world’s less kindly techniques had been employed. Lack of complete loyalty to the state was likely to result in a siege of treatment that left the subject suitably “re-personalized.” Kolin had heard of instances wherein mere unenthusiastic posture had betrayed intentions to harbor treasonable thoughts.
“You will scout in five details of three persons each,” Chief Slichow said. “Every hour, each detail will send one person in to report, and he will be replaced by one of the five I shall keep here to issue rations.”
Kolin permitted himself to wonder when anyone might get some rest, but assumed a mildly willing look. (Too eager an attitude could arouse suspicion of disguising an improper viewpoint.) The maintenance of a proper viewpoint was a necessity if the Planetary State were to survive the hostile plots of Earth and the latter’s decadent colonies. That, at least, was the official line.
Kolin found himself in a group with Jak Ammet, a third cook, and Eva Yrtok, powdered foods storekeeper. Since the crew would be eating packaged rations during repairs, Yrtok could be spared to command a scout detail.
Each scout was issued a rocket pistol and a plastic water tube. Chief Slichow emphasized that the keepers of rations could hardly, in an emergency, give even the appearance of favoring themselves in regard to food. They would go without. Kolin maintained a standard expression as the Chief’s sharp stare measured them.
Yrtok, a dark, lean-faced girl, led the way with a quiet monosyllable. She carried the small radio they would be permitted to use for messages of utmost urgency. Ammet followed, and Kolin brought up the rear.
****
To reach their assigned sector, they had to climb a forbidding ridge of rock within half a kilometer. Only a sparse creeper grew along their way, its elongated leaves shimmering with bronze-green reflections against a stony surface; but when they topped the ridge a thick forest was in sight.
Yrtok and Ammet paused momentarily before descending.
Kolin shared their sense of isolation. They would be out of sight of authority and responsible for their own actions. It was a strange sensation.
They marched down into the valley at a brisk pace, becoming more aware of the clouds and atmospheric haze. Distant objects seemed blurred by the mist, taking on a somber, brooding grayness. For all Kolin could tell, he and the others were isolated in a world bounded by the rocky ridge behind them and a semi-circle of damp trees and bushes several hundred meters away. He suspected that the hills rising mistily ahead were part of a continuous slope, but could not be sure.
Yrtok led the way along the most nearly level ground. Low creepers became more plentiful, interspersed with scrubby thickets of tangled, spike-armored bushes. Occasionally, small flying things flickered among the foliage. Once, a shrub puffed out an enormous cloud of tiny spores.
“Be a job to find anything edible here,” grunted Ammet, and Kolin agreed.
Finally, after a longer hike than he had anticipated, they approached the edge of the deceptively distant forest. Yrtok paused to examine some purple berries glistening dangerously on a low shrub. Kolin regarded the trees with misgiving.
“Looks as tough to get through as a tropical jungle,” he remarked.
“I think the stuff puts out shoots that grow back into the ground to root as they spread,” said the woman. “Maybe we can find a way through.”
In two or three minutes, they reached the abrupt border of the odd-looking trees.
Except for one thick trunked giant, all of them were about the same height. They craned their necks to estimate the altitude of the monster, but the top was hidden by the wide spread of branches. The depths behind it looked dark and impenetrable.
“We’d better explore along the edge,” decided Yrtok. “Ammet, now is the time to go back and tell the Chief which way we’re—Ammet!”
Kolin looked over his shoulder. Fifty meters away, Ammet sat beside the bush with the purple berries, utterly relaxed.
“He must have tasted some!” exclaimed Kolin. “I’ll see how he is.”
He ran back to the cook and shook him by the shoulder. Ammet’s head lolled loosely to one side. His rather heavy features were vacant, lending him a doped appearance. Kolin straightened up and beckoned to Yrtok.
For some reason, he had trouble attracting her attention. Then he noticed that she was kneeling.
“Hope she didn’t eat some stupid thing too!” he grumbled, trotting back.
As he reached her, whatever Yrtok was examining came to life and scooted into the underbrush with a flash of greenish fur. All Kolin saw was that it had several legs too many.
He pulled Yrtok to her feet. She pawed at him weakly, eyes as vacant as Ammet’s. When he let go in sudden horror, she folded gently to the ground. She lay comfortably on her side, twitching one hand as if to brush something away.
When she began to smile dreamily, Kolin backed away.
****
The corners of his mouth felt oddly stiff; they had involuntarily drawn back to expose his clenched teeth. He glanced warily about, but nothing appeared to threaten him.
“It’s time to end this scout,” he told himself. “It’s dangerous. One good look and I’m jetting off! What I need is an easy tree to climb.”
He considered the massive giant. Soaring thirty or forty meters into the thin fog and dwarfing other growth, it seemed the most promising choice.
At first, Kolin saw no way, but then the network of vines clinging to the rugged trunk suggested a route. He tried his weight gingerly, then began to climb.
“I should have brought Yrtok’s radio,” he muttered. “Oh, well, I can take it when I come down, if she hasn’t snapped out of her spell by then. Funny … I wonder if that green thing bit her.”
Footholds were plentiful among the interlaced lianas. Kolin progressed rapidly. When he reached the first thick limbs, twice head height, he felt safer.
Later, at what he hoped was the halfway mark, he hooked one knee over a branch and paused to wipe sweat from his eyes. Peering down, he discovered the ground to be obscured by foliage.
“I should have checked from down there to see how open the top is,” he mused. “I wonder how the view will be from up there?”
“Depends on what you’re looking for, Sonny!” something remarked in a soughing wheeze.
Kolin, slipping, grabbed desperately for the branch. His fingers clutched a handful of twigs and leaves, which just barely supported him until he regained a grip with the other hand.
The branch quivered resentfully under him.
“Careful, there!” whooshed the eerie voice. “It took me all summer to grow those!”
Kolin could feel the skin crawling along his backbone.
“Who are you?” he gasped.
The answering sigh of laughter gave him a distinct chill despite its suggestion of amiability.
“Name’s Johnny Ashlew. Kinda thought you’d start with what I am. Didn’t figure you’d ever seen a man grown into a tree before.”
Kolin looked about, seeing little but leaves and fog.
“I have to climb down,” he told himself in a reasonable tone. “It’s bad enough that the other two passed out without me going space happy too.”
“What’s your hurry?” demanded the voice. “I can talk to you just as easy all the way down, you know. Airholes in my bark—I’m not like an Earth tree.”
Kolin examined the bark of the crotch in which he sat. It did seem to have assorted holes and hollows in its rough surface.
“I never saw an Earth tree,” he admitted. “We came from Haurtoz.”
“Where’s that? Oh, never mind—some little planet. I don’t bother with them all, since I came here and found out I could be anything I wanted.”
“What do you mean, anything you wanted?” asked Kolin, testing the firmness of a vertical vine.
****
“Just what I said,” continued the voice, sounding closer in his ear as his cheek brushed the ridged bark of the tree trunk. “And, if I do have to remind you, it would be nicer if you said ‘Mr. Ashlew,’ considering my age.”
“Your age? How old—?”
“Can’t really count it in Earth years any more. Lost track. I always figured bein’ a tree was a nice, peaceful life; and when I remembered how long some of them live, that settled it. Sonny, this world ain’t all it looks like.”
“It isn’t, Mr. Ashlew?” asked Kolin, twisting about in an effort to see what the higher branches might hide.
“Nope. Most everything here is run by the Life—that is, by the thing that first grew big enough to do some thinking, and set its roots down all over until it had control. That’s the outskirts of it down below.”
“The other trees? That jungle?”
“It’s more’n a jungle, Sonny. When I landed here, along with the others from the Arcturan Spark, the planet looked pretty empty to me, just like it must have to—Watch it, there, Boy! If I didn’t twist that branch over in time, you’d be bouncing off my roots right now!”
“Th-thanks!” grunted Kolin, hanging on grimly.
“Doggone vine!” commented the windy whisper. “He ain’t one of my crowd. Landed years later in a ship from some star towards the center of the galaxy. You should have seen his looks before the Life got in touch with his mind and set up a mental field to help him change form. He looks twice as good as a vine!”
“He’s very handy,” agreed Kolin politely. He groped for a foothold.
“Well … matter of fact, I can’t get through to him much, even with the Life’s mental field helping. Guess he started living with a different way of thinking. It burns me. I thought of being a tree, and then he came along to take advantage of it!”
Kolin braced himself securely to stretch tiring muscles.
“Maybe I’d better stay a while,” he muttered. “I don’t know where I am.”
“You’re about fifty feet up,” the sighing voice informed him. “You ought to let me tell you how the Life helps you change form. You don’t have to be a tree.”
“No?”
“Uh-uh! Some of the boys that landed with me wanted to get around and see things. Lots changed to animals or birds. One even stayed a man—on the outside anyway. Most of them have to change as the bodies wear out, which I don’t, and some made bad mistakes tryin’ to be things they saw on other planets.”
“I wouldn’t want to do that, Mr. Ashlew.”
“There’s just one thing. The Life don’t like taking chances on word about this place gettin’ around. It sorta believes in peace and quiet. You might not get back to your ship in any form that could tell tales.”
“Listen!” Kolin blurted out. “I wasn’t so much enjoying being what I was that getting back matters to me!”
“Don’t like your home planet, whatever the name was?”
“Haurtoz. It’s a rotten place. A Planetary State! You have to think and even look the way that’s standard thirty hours a day, asleep or awake. You get scared to sleep for fear you might dream treason and they’d find out somehow.”
“Whooeee! Heard about them places. Must be tough just to live.”
Suddenly, Kolin found himself telling the tree about life on Haurtoz, and of the officially announced threats to the Planetary State’s planned expansion. He dwelt upon the desperation of having no place to hide in case of trouble with the authorities. A multiple system of such worlds was agonizing to imagine.
****
Somehow, the oddity of talking to a tree wore off. Kolin heard opinions spouting out which he had prudently kept bottled up for years.
The more he talked and stormed and complained, the more relaxed he felt.
“If there was ever a fellow ready for this planet,” decided the tree named Ashlew, “you’re it, Sonny! Hang on there while I signal the Life by root!”
Kolin sensed a lack of direct attention. The rustle about him was natural, caused by an ordinary breeze. He noticed his hands shaking.
“Don’t know what got into me, talking that way to a tree,” he muttered. “If Yrtok snapped out of it and heard, I’m as good as re-personalized right now.”
As he brooded upon the sorry choice of arousing a search by hiding where he was or going back to bluff things out, the tree spoke.
“Maybe you’re all set, Sonny. The Life has been thinkin’ of learning about other worlds. If you can think of a safe form to jet off in, you might make yourself a deal. How’d you like to stay here?”
“I don’t know,” said Kolin. “The penalty for desertion—”
“Whoosh! Who’d find you? You could be a bird, a tree, even a cloud.”
Silenced but doubting, Kolin permitted himself to try the dream on for size.
He considered what form might most easily escape the notice of search parties and still be tough enough to live a long time without renewal. Another factor slipped into his musings: mere hope of escape was unsatisfying after the outburst that had defined his fuming hatred for Haurtoz.
I’d better watch myself! he thought. Don’t drop diamonds to grab at stars!
“What I wish I could do is not just get away but get even for the way they make us live … the whole damn set-up. They could just as easy make peace with the Earth colonies. You know why they don’t?”
“Why?” wheezed Ashlew.
“They’re scared that without talk of war, and scouting for Earth fleets that never come, people would have time to think about the way they have to live and who’s running things in the Planetary State. Then the gravy train would get blown up—and I mean blown up!”
The tree was silent for a moment. Kolin felt the branches stir meditatively. Then Ashlew offered a suggestion.
“I could tell the Life your side of it,” he hissed. “Once in with us, you can always make thinking connections, no matter how far away. Maybe you could make a deal to kill two birds with one stone, as they used to say on Earth….”
****
Chief Steward Slichow paced up and down beside the ration crate turned up to serve him as a field desk. He scowled in turn, impartially, at his watch and at the weary stewards of his headquarters detail. The latter stumbled about, stacking and distributing small packets of emergency rations.
The line of crewmen released temporarily from repair work was transient as to individuals but immutable as to length. Slichow muttered something profane about disregard of orders as he glared at the rocky ridges surrounding the landing place.
He was so intent upon planning greetings with which to favor the tardy scouting parties that he failed to notice the loose cloud drifting over the ridge.
It was tenuous, almost a haze. Close examination would have revealed it to be made up of myriads of tiny spores. They resembled those cast forth by one of the bushes Kolin’s party had passed. Along the edges, the haze faded raggedly into thin air, but the units evidently formed a cohesive body. They drifted together, approaching the men as if taking intelligent advantage of the breeze.
One of Chief Slichow’s staggering flunkies, stealing a few seconds of relaxation on the pretext of dumping an armful of light plastic packing, wandered into the haze.
He froze.
After a few heartbeats, he dropped the trash and stared at ship and men as if he had never seen either. A hail from his master moved him.
“Coming, Chief!” he called but, returning at a moderate pace, he murmured, “My name is Frazer. I’m a second assistant steward. I’ll think as Unit One.”
Throughout the cloud of spores, the mind formerly known as Peter Kolin congratulated itself upon its choice of form.
Nearer to the original shape of the Life than Ashlew got, he thought.
He paused to consider the state of the tree named Ashlew, half immortal but rooted to one spot, unable to float on a breeze or through space itself on the pressure of light. Especially, it was unable to insinuate any part of itself into the control center of another form of life, as a second spore was taking charge of the body of Chief Slichow at that very instant.
There are not enough men, thought Kolin. Some of me must drift through the airlock. In space, I can spread through the air system to the command group.
Repairs to the Peace State and the return to Haurtoz passed like weeks to some of the crew but like brief moments in infinity to other units. At last, the ship parted the air above Headquarters City and landed.
The unit known as Captain Theodor Kessel hesitated before descending the ramp. He surveyed the field, the city and the waiting team of inspecting officers.
“Could hardly be better, could it?” he chuckled to the companion unit called Security Officer Tarth.
“Hardly, sir. All ready for the liberation of Haurtoz.”
“Reformation of the Planetary State,” mused the captain, smiling dreamily as he grasped the handrail. “And then—formation of the Planetary Mind!”
JUDE’S HEAD WAS EXACTLY as Tallulah had always imagined it: a little too clean, a little too little, a little too well-stocked with reading material. Three packed shelves directly over the chute (as Tallulah’s father always called it) but only one volume on the macrame-vested toilet tank and it spoke to Tallulah of to-die-for regularity: a pert little collection of nano-fiction called TWITTEREADS.
Not like the grinder-Lit in Tallulah’s mother’s “toity” at all… those dusty self-help books, diet books, celebrity memoirs with the glossy picture-pages falling out. The “Ages of Woman” (Tallulah had once read, in a tell-all book by an actress who devoted a whole chapter to the time George Peppard nearly slept with her, in her mother’s toity, when she was twelve) were bathroom (2-18), bedroom (19-42) and kitchen (43-80). Tallulah was supposed to be deep in the bedroom phase by now but all she used her “bliss chamber” for was TV-dozing and snacking, lately. Even the clam-waxing she preferred to do in the shower because it felt more like a thigh-toning Pilates work-out that way and nothing to wipe off afterward but a soapy left palm-print from the shower door. Staring at her own face in Jude’s floss-debris-free mirror, Tallulah saw her eyes recall with pupil-shrinking horror the time she’d found a long black vibrator (thereafter referred to as the “bad banana”) in the towel drawer under her mother’s bathroom sink; even worse was remembering how she hadn’t been able to resist the impulse to sniff it. Windex.
Ducking into Jude’s head with seconds to spare had been a stroke of genius: now she could make a grand entrance and freshen up a little first. The only problem was that she’d been in there so long already, how could she finally emerge without giving the impression that she’d taken a protracted and agonizing poo?
She put her ear to the keyhole and heard lounge music and conspiratorial footsteps so muffled that she could only detect the fact that Jude’s second party guest wasn’t wearing stiletto heels. For which she was grateful. Tallulah imagined a God who resembled a bearded George Peppard winking at her and it occurred to her that at some point before she’d started seeing God as George Peppard, she’d thought he was black , because of something she’d been told by one of her baby-sitters. She seemed to remember being informed by that same baby-sitter that Abraham Lincoln and Albert Einstein were black, too. Tallulah found herself still doing it, all these years later: looking at celebrities with her former baby-sitter’s unfoolable eye. Mariah Carey had been her greatest (and single verified) triumph.
Tallulah’s only option was to stay locked in Jude’s head for so long that it would imply a medical emergency instead of an unlady-like mega-dump. Jude would break the door down and give her mouth-to-mouth after finding the emptied jar of prescription painkillers (flushed, of course) on the sink. Or would that look like she was trying too hard?
She opened Jude’s medicine cabinet. The Acyclovir, Vaseline, q-tips, preparation H, Viagra and echinacea chapstick were standard stuff. But the Mexican tapeworm diet pills horrified and intrigued her. She was trying to read through the “possible side-effects” (efectos secundarios posibles) with her high school Spanish when a woman’s voice called out to Jude, over the lounge music, from right on the other side of the bathroom door, “I’ll only be a minute, hon!”
Thank God the door is locked, thought Tallulah. George Peppard winked. She hunched toward the keyhole again, then stopped herself. Hon…?
Her second stroke-of-genius hit her like a ton of bricks…
Next Monday: Chapter Five of TALLULAH, JUDE… ChickLit in Bite-Sized Pieces!!!
FAMOUS DUMB POEMS AND THEIR CRITICAL APOLOGIA#3
in which the “real” meaning redeems the doggerel yet again
“And yet, Charles Bernstein, prominent poet and critic, and co-founder of the Language (or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E) poetry movement, in an essay included in “Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture” (published in November 2009 by the University of Alabama Press), still states: “I am no more Jewish than when I refuse imposed definitions of what Jewishness means. I am no more Jewish than when I attend to how such Jewishness lives itself out, plays tunes not played.” Truly, the idea of Jewish self-denial as the ultimate expression of Judaism is far from being new. But it’s not ancient or even very old, either: It’s somewhere in between — perhaps it is middle-aged, not unlike the poet himself. And, as it were, knee-deep in crisis. What is the nature of Bernstein’s crisis, and what are these “tunes not played”? Bernstein’s poem (musical enough to be a tune) “Rivulets of the Dead Jew,” from his recently published retrospective collection, “All the Whiskey in Heaven,” sings out:
Fill my plate with boudin noir
Boudin noir, boudin noir
Fill my plate with a hi-heh-ho
& rumble I will go
Don’t dance with me
’til I cut my tie
Cut my tie, cut my tie
Don’t fancy me ’til
The rivers run dry
& a heh & a hi & a ho
I’ve got a date with a
Bumble bee, bumble bee
I’ve got a date with a
wee bonnie wee
& ahurtling we will go
“With all the repetitions and simplistic rhymes, the poem prances around, rumbling and hurtling itself, as it embodies emotional and semantic fluidity, avoidance of stasis at all costs. The bee’s flight is the key metaphor here: Unlike an airplane headed to a specific destination, the bee moves in uneven circles, compulsive, changing its mind, landing on pretty flowers it sees — as does this poem, which lands on a balladlike tone, a dancing rhythm, the image of a (very treyf) French blood sausage, and an Irish folk song motive “wee bonnie” (little pretty). The bee collects random sweet bits of reference, assimilating them into a single hybrid collage. We taste the honey and may be seduced into thinking that it is the poem’s essence. Yet it is the bee itself — its work, its elusive flight — that constitutes the poet’s vision of his Jewish identity.
“Although, perhaps this isn’t what the poem is about at all. Susan Bee is Bernstein’s wife who the narrator thinks is “bonnie.” Bee and Bernstein are about to go on a date — it’s a strictly personal noir love serenade. Could it be both? And the image of the cut “tie,” is it referring to a slapstick slashing of the cravat, or circumcision, or castration anxiety? Or is this keriyah, tearing of the clothing, Jewish mourning ritual? The severing of “ties” looms large in the image, as well. And what a word choice for the last line: “ahurtling.” There’s room for echoes of “hurting” and “hurdle” in there, as well.”
Without critics to tell us such things are good, how would we know? The next text we’ll look at is even richer with geopolitical allusions, themselves with roots spread deep in the rich loam of the postmodern psyche
See the USA in your Chevrolet
America is asking you to call
Drive your Chevrolet through the USA
America’s the greatest land of all
On a highway, or a road, along the levy
Performance is sweeter, nothing can beat her
Life is completer in a Chevy
So make a date today to see the USA
And see it in your Chevrolet
The k’riyah! Absolutely fascinating. The gash on the cover of The Kindly Ones (or TKO as we like to call it on TET),
With this in mind the Jamaican reggae star Yellowman’s exhortation to the crowd ” If you’re happy and you know it shout Murder!” takes on new politico-psycho-sociological meaning.
Given the excellence of your picture accompaniments I will strive to make my examples ever more obscure.
DIFFICULT TEXTS
POEM OF THE WEAK
my love song to paranoia
The drive up was tense not only because of the tritely appropriate drama of the rain but also because if he got lost on the way there was no one to call to for help. No safety net. He was forbidden from square one to store the information on a device or to print the directions on paper.
*
The directions appeared one morning in an audio loop that disabled itself after ten or fifteen minutes, a loop accompained by a black screen, a loop in the form of a sonnet. He’d been chanting it to himself for forty eight hours with an eerie pride in knowing that medieval illiterates had done it in much the same way. Further back than that, too, because songs in the fog of unmetered time had been less often used as entertainment than mnemonic devices of desperate importance. Didn’t antediluvian Asians in birchbark canoes navigate the Aleutians to landfall on North America using chanted sea maps? Or something.
*
He was roughly a third of the way through the sonnet and maybe two thirds of the distance to the compound and all of the clues had worked out very smoothly. But what if they hadn’t? He’d been on the road for seven hours. His team was up for an Emmy. He had inside information that the world would end before they won it.
*
Of course he could have cheated and written the directions down but he hadn’t wanted to. He longed for that new beginning. He hungered to start afresh. No more lies or cheating. Lose weight, no television, early nights and mornings. Stop masturbating. He had less than twelve hours, driving from several states away, making rest stops to eat and/or relieve himself, to get there before the others took steps to block the old dirt access road. To make the place impenetrable. If you can’t stop cold turkey, cut back to reasonable levels, at least. He thought of a cool title: Get fit at the Apocalypse Spa.
The new kind of man he was to become was not the kind who’d find himself bashing his Amherst-enhanced brain for four days against three lines of sitcom dialogue, of this he was certain. Like a chain of hyper-haikus from the sinisterly dumb future, various versions were branded on the soft white flesh of his consciousness.
Lola Beedo: I just love that dress you’re wearing, darling!
Elke Hall: (warily) Why, thank you, doll.
Lola Beedo: (beat) Tell me, does it come in human sizes, too?
*
He thought of a picture someone had posted on the message board in the production team’s lounge. The multi-Emmy-award-winning production team’s lounge. A photograph from 1905. The young Ludwig Wittgenstein in a class picture from his days in the Realschule in the city of Linz and there, a distance of one or two students to the upper right (a knight’s move, as Nabokov would have put it), looking resigned to his fate, is Ludwig’s classmate Adolf Hitler. The fact being that nothing Wittgenstein had subsequently done as a philosopher, no great strides in ethics or logic or the lyric aprehension of mathematics, amounted to a hill of beans compared to the contribution he could have made had he taken the opportunity to act decisively during the long walk home from school one day and crushed young Adolf’s skull with a paving stone. In other words, not only thought but direct action is required of us at certain pivotal moments. And not only action but a little prescience helps too.
*
Hamilton Gold, the head writer, always said name me what’s funnier than decapitation. But, he’d say, let’s see if the audience is there yet. He’d looked over the bit quickly on Monday, flipping the pages in that idiot-savant scan of his and immediately picked out the three lines they’d been having trouble with and shook his head, I like the bit but fat jokes are dangerous. Fat is our demographic, don’t forget. How about substitute fat with slut? Slut is funny.
*
Gold propounds a theory that sitcoms govern Congress. What people laugh at is exactly how they will vote. Americans can’t bomb a country until they’ve laughed at it a little bit first. Maybe he took the sentiment more seriously than Gold had intended but pretty soon he was feeling like J. Robert Oppenheimer in that porkpie hat hearing the phrase comedy has known sin and he’s on the internet at 3:14 in the morning, looking for absolution.
*
No one knew that he’d based the popular character of Elke Hall on his mother. He had inside information that it was the end of the world and he hadn’t even notified her.
*
Beyond the rain and the ticking of the clock, drama or any sense of a grand doomsday epic on the road itself was sorely lacking. No roadblocks or frenzied hordes or menacingly black or fluorescent sunset: just zonked-out commuters in start-and-stop traffic on the long way home from the daily deathsentence of work. Most of these people were only vaguely aware of things, if at all, and the precious few who considered the situation anything to lose sleep over had lost sleep over so many looming catastrophes of the past that this recent matter would strike them as little more than more of the same. Tonight they would go to bed after a starchy meal, vacuous television and perfunctory sex per usual. A couple of pills and out like a light. How typical to be wrong the one time it counted. The one time it counted in a thousand years, you dumbshits. You call your wife to come out on the porch to have a look and less than a second later you’re all dead.
*
What gave him a kind of vertigo when he contemplated it was how close he had come to being just like them. Before that life-changing night on the internet which fanned into a dozen online conversations, each conversation in turn fanning out into a hundred others, and all of those but the crucial one petering out… the crucial one connecting to his special contact to the man whose vision he had now irrevocably made himself a part of. Yes, thinking back on it, it was amazing… how cloaked in the ordinary it had all once seemed. How something appeared in the inbox of a personals account at a no-hoper’s dating site he’d signed up to pseudonymously because it was free and therefore relatively untraceable: a message exactly two sentence fragments long. Two months later, after visiting god-knows-how-many encrypted sites and exchanging deepcover spam mails and vital details in chatrooms he found himself paypal-ing a mindboggling sum into an account set up in a Biblical name.
Eighty acres of land and five years of provisions for twenty three people (they’d done their best to balance male with female but visionary survivalism is not, strictly speaking, a female interest, so nine females and fourteen males. But their unflinching honesty about this state of affairs reassured him). No couples or families or friends. Only loners with college degrees… professionals older than 27 and younger than 55, disgusted with mainstream politics, wary of organized religion, environmentally friendly but not averse to the occasional bar-b-que. All strangers to one another. All white.
*
Sid Caesar.
*
Radio was out of the question, in case some catchy tune came on and drove the sonnet out of his head. What he had was seven hours of motordrone and rubberhum and occasional rainfry sizzle on the roads. That and talking to himself. He supplied his own commercials. He thought of the Man from Glad, that futuristic Aryan hovering in a jetpack to shill ersatz Saranwrap to sexually frustrated newlyweds. He thought of The Beatles’ rooftop concert and George switching his amp back on in open defiance of the bobby. He thought: of course the whole thing could be a clever scam.
But the verisimilitude of the finework of paranoiac details like emailing strategies such as using spam prosodies for deepcover (mploy *black anal virgin* n subj. line & spyprgs wnt rd ur eml) had convinced him. Or how the ambiguously allusive chats he’d had with the man himself, the chats on the gratis personals site, had been regularly scheduled for 3:14 in the morning, based, he realized, on the value for pi and he wasn’t exactly sure why but that last detail had soothed him. Assuaged his fears.
*
I’m cuckoo for cocoa puffs.
*
When traffic slowed to a crawl he took the opportunity to peek into other cars. All those faces in profile, innocent with impatience or boredom. For the first time in his adult life he found himself loving humanity.
The automobile beside his to the right was a bruise-blue vintage Ford with a cream-white top, a big old iron box of a thing, perfectly preserved, its contour suggesting a jut-jawed crewcut profile and containing, as it happened, two male passengers with just that style of haircut. The driver could plausibly have been the father of the boy in the passenger seat. They both had brown hair…the guessed-brown on a vintage b&w picture tube… and they were so animated in that hatefully cheerful and perfectly postured way you’d expect in the kind of midcentury film the car and their haircuts seemed keyed to. You can’t see two males like that without automatically picturing the female that belongs with them. The bandana and the oven cleaner. The bubble bath and the shapely leg and the drawer of “female items” you aren’t even allowed to open in your mind, forbidden as the Arc of the Covenant in the cabinet under the sink.
He wondered, for a bemused moment, if he weren’t hallucinating, or if such types in just such a car weren’t obviously time-travelers. Terrorists from the future, because that’s what they will look like, although, wait, he keeps forgetting that the future has already arrived. Would he be crossing state lines with a trunk full of firearms otherwise?
*
Lola Beedo: I just love that dress you’re wearing, darling!
Elke Hall: (warily) Why, thank you, doll.
Lola Beedo: (beat) Tell me, did Bill Clinton design it?
He’d never known a girl named Amanda. He’d never been slapped in the face. Why was he sad about these two facts?
In the script margin Gold had scribbled, Bill who?
*
They had a regular skit called “Poem of the Week” that was supposedly topical. In the memos Gold had taken to referring to it as Poem of the Weak and the written phrase had acquired a poignancy and profundity all its own. He swears he saw Gold’s assistant-to-the-assistant wiping her eyes and sniffing furtively after reading that phrase. Honey-baked boobs out to here.
*
The dream he held both dear and sheepishly for its foolishness was the dream of the girl who is waiting for him, waiting at the compound, one of the nine, the most beautiful of the nine, the barefoot heroine in rustic clothing without whom he had been rudderless, unmated, bereft for all these years. She’ll step intuitively out onto the porch of the rambling woodframe house in order to watch him drive up, her tomboy heart quickening to the recognition. She’ll smile tentatively as he greets her with an ironic salute, lugging his trunk of munitions stiff-legged towards the front steps, winded but amused by the exertion, shrugging off her offer to help him carry the massive thing. Golden-haired, curly-haired, of solid pioneer stock. She’d say, the others are inside.
-I’m the last?
-We thought you weren’t coming. We were preparing…
-To mine the road.
-Yes.
She’d hold the door open for him. She’d search his face as he squeezed his way past the woodland aura of her health into a sort of vestibule that opened into a large, high-ceilinged room, a room with a rough, honest look to it: a gathering place for the strong, the wise, the bravely sad. Oil paintings of country life on the walls, maybe. Old bay mares. Or, no, something ironic like Victorian portraits or blue period Picasso. A dynastic sort of fire snapping twigs in the hearth. Quiet conversations here and there tapering off as he sets his clanking trunk at his feet and senses her feminine presence gather force at his side as he takes everyone in while catching his breath, the late arrival at a party in honor of the end of the fucking world. Peripherally he’d feel her delicately hawk-eye him for the subtlest reaction to everything as though her self-esteem depended on his acceptance of the new reality. As though she’s putting herself in the picture with him and hoping there’s a fit.
*
Then it hit him who She was. She was Donna Douglas aka Ellie Mae Clampett and only then did the improbability of the fantasy mock him and he leaned on the horn and spoke in the precise duration of the car’s grievance as a motorcycle cut in front of him. He realized in a fleeting panic that he couldn’t remember the name of former president Jimmy Carter’s brother; if that went, could a key line from the sonnet be far behind? He then wondered in a morphed extention of this panic if he’d left the shower on. Which extended and morphed yet again into the awful realization that he’d left all his speed in a fannypack in the gym bag on top of his bedroom dresser. How was he supposed to get through the Apocalypse without his vitamin S?
*
He considered turning back for it.
*
The howdydoody Ford lurched forward and fell behind in the maddening traffic. Lurched forward and fell behind. It caught up again in a fanfare of horns he added his note to and he saw with self-perplexing irritation that the father and son were indifferent to the agonies of the traffic jam. Just chatting away. Even their windshield wiper seemed relaxed in the offhandedness of its gesture and the two reached up all smiles and lowered their sun-shades as an errant beam levered under the lowered lid of the late-afternoon rainmass with gospel brilliance. The beam illuminated them grinsquinting at eyelevel, goop-haired and adam-appled, a hit show, monster ratings from 1957 broadcast straight into the traffic beside him.
He pictured the mom, coifed and trim in her gown in a pensive pose smoking in the living room window, the young trees in a line in the front yard doing the Watusi and all the televisions off, the radios off, the wall clocks off, the power dead and the Frigidaire silent in the tabernacle of the kitchen. She’s awed by the roiled heavens and so moved by the glory of God’s vast hand as it shapes the wind and the waters and green leaves plucked living from the trees that she forgets to worry about her own boys on the road at the mercy of it, the mystery of life and her place in it. And the man out there, the survivalist, the comedy writer, the agnostic visionary out there in her Christian storm, a half-Jewish Noah saving the world one shaky ego at a time.
*
Lola Beedo: I just love that dress you’re wearing, darling!
Elke Hall: (warily) Why, thank you, doll.
Lola Beedo: (beat) The perfect outfit for a decapitation!
What a clever novelist I am to have read this story over a year ago. Lucky for me it was tucked away in my long-term memory where I could easily access it with just the right prompting from Sherriff Ralph and The Sherman Gang. Bravi. Bravissimi! Grazie lei.
CDS Frances, you are the angel-headed sumo of polymath erudition… can you elucidate your gnomic gold for us here…?
The late arrival, the end of the road. It all came together. Detonation of the mines. Controlled explosion. The first one anyway. That’s all I can say right now. You know what it’s like when you’re working on a new piece. Don’t want to diffuse the energy. However, I can share this. The image that tripped the wire in my imagination. Stay tuned.
Oh there’s blood on the splinters
Of my mind, coz i’ve broken down
This wall just like its one last time
And you never cease to amaze
me, after all my mistakes you could
Learn so quickly – oh i’m not so
god-damn naive, and i’m not a well
Meaning acolyte for a troubled
Day at sea no more, oh no,
That’s why i’ll be walking, walkin
Out the door.
Well i’m not as wise as i was
As a child, and i’m not just the back-
End of a colour from the light
oh but i’m sure that i could ever
Succeed, if i keep working so well
For those faces the summer leaves,
And without this truth, there’d
Be no fallacy, and without this
dream of mine, there can be no
there will be no reality:
Well, if we’re kicking back that far today…
Old friends, old friends, sat on a park bench like bookends
a newspaper blows through the cracks, falls on the round
toe, of the high shoe, of the old friends, winter companions
the old men, lost in their overcoats waiting for the sun,
sounds of the city sifting through trees, settles like dust
on the shoulders of the old friends. Can you imagine us
years from today, sharing a park bench quietly, how terribly
strange to be seventy, old friends, memories brushing
the same year, silently sharing the same fears, time it was
and what a time it was, it was a time of innocence
a time of confidences, long ago it must be, I have a photo-
graph, preserve your memories they’re all that’s left you
old friends, loving the memories from yesterdays internet
branch, when we had just begun, anonymous and new
friends, tweeting from Twitter and FB accounts, loving aye
tea-banjo was ever so lovely; old pals, turned out fabulous
again hasn’t it? What am I to do, loving you both is breaking
all the rules, torn between two lovers pondering qualities
sizing up the odds, old friends – always lovely to see you
again you cunt. Fuckoff yer whole and stand straight, take
that look from off yer face, coz you aint ever gonna blare
this heart out yeah. So, Sandy can bait, she nose it’s
two late as we’re talking on aye, so sad to state, do snark
back in anger, do smack back in anger, one heard UK
at least USA.
Welcome to Balcony TV.
I’m Mike Igoe.
I’m going to be reading a poem tonight called, Rosanna You Slag. An unwarranted personal attack on (singer Chris De Burgh’s first ever Miss World Ireland 2003 issue):
Rosanna Davison
Rosanna Davison!
I’m with you in your cocaine hell!
I know your pain of sainted martyrs and cancer sufferers,
I know your agony of wooden rice bowls and children with distended bellies,
I was with you in solidarity when you walked barefoot on landmines and razor wire,
From Land’s End to John O’ Gods collecting direct debit mandates for the victims
Of burst Russian fission reactors.
I shared your stoic horrors under a 7,600% pay cut, due to inflation,
To feel your connection with public sector school teachers in Zimbabwe.
I was grinding my teeth in the background when you donated those
Twenty-five gallon drums of cooking oil to Haiti
And accepted the key to the city, graciously,
When they buried the machete in your honour.
I was off my fucking tits, with wonder, when you handed the key
To your Land Rover to a Venezuelan teenage hooker.
I suffered my share of disgust at your tits, your growler
and tabloid ass, your nipples of nomenclature,
Spread tactlessly on the breakfast table,
Beside the rashers and Beslan massacres…
After all those nippers you saved from drowning…
It’s shocking!
- Rosanna, it’s a cruel world, baby, these are bad people we’re dealing with -
We were all wailing wall-side in Jerusalem eating shit when they were
Crowning your body with thorns of doggy style porno pageantry,
Our poor miss world,
Miss humanity,
Miss agony,
Miss humility,
Miss publicity,
Little miss notice me,
Miss in-for-a-penny-in-for-a-pound,
Miss money-makes-the-world-go-round…
Rosanna… Katy French died alone… Truly alone… Rosanna her heart was pounding in the darkness at the end full of amphetamines and flowers and you have no idea… Rosanna just because we’ve noticed her doesn’t mean you should copy her… Rosanna just because we talk about her doesn‘t mean we liked her… Rosanna…
Just go sit in the corner.
~
A very ambitious piece
Toe-tapping! It has the jokey cadence of There’s a Hole, There’s a Hole, There’s a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea. Do you know that one?
I’ll be re-joining the fray/chat/conspiracy tomorrow morning, Comrades Lurking and Explicit and Even Imaginary… I was up until four last “night” (editing a short doc on Comrade DJ Sensei Barry) and I feel the bed’s gravity is at Jupiter-strength, dragging me, gasping like a young bride, across the bourgie-boho parquet…
This is a favorite chant of mine from American Indian Poetry, Edited by George W. Cronyn (Liveright, NY) 1934. Note how the poem, or chant, powerfully conjures the absence of the maid’s mother or sisters by emphasizing the presence of the father, husband and brother. To my mind an almost cosmic negation of the female.
Sednor and the Fulmar
(recitative)
An Eskimo Ballad
Where is she
who would never marry?
In a kayak to the mainland
going away.
Dost thou see, my eyes,
dost thou see them?
Ia, ha, ha, ha, ha!
To a tent of ragged skins,
he has brought her, crying;
(the Fulmar, her husband)
Her father with her elder brother
in a boat coming;
(he, seeking his daughter)
In a boat his daughter embarked.
Her husband, the Fulmar, cried:
(thus the Magician!)
The Fulmar says: “My means for transforming
let me see them as they are;
let me see them once more.”
Now they are taking the woman back;
to the tent going home;
the Fulmar followed,
(thus the Magician!)
Wind very strong to come near them;
(he made, the Magician!)
they were shipwrecked, nearly.
(Her father fears death!)
His daughter he pushes
into the sea.
To the boat on both sides–
to the boat she clings.
(still followed, the Fulmar!)
With a knife he struck her;
whales emerged.
(thus the Magician!)
Her whole body she leaned.
(Sednor, fearing death!)
With a knife into the eyes
he stabbed her;
he killed her.
(thus the Fulmar, the Magician!)
On the shore
her father lifted her.
A quilt he took;
on the beach laid her down.
With a dog skin she was covered,
(Sednor, the Beautiful!)
The flood-tide took her.
Comrade DJ Sensei Frances and Comrade DJ Sensei Des have built us a recondite dialogue that’s more explicit the less we try to figure it out. Still, I can’t help trying to figure it out. We’ve moved from Flame War to the segment of this edition of TET that’s all about smoke and mists, maybe. Incense, even. When Spooky smells good, inhale.
the lover of the harpist
too near
her tough hands pull and lock each
shimmer-feathered tone to build en bloc
with crisis-speed the
dark-winged cormorant of
Satie’s first
gnossienne on the
audient side of the frightening
gate of this harp; half-a-titan’s ribcage-
shaped, cochleate, Lethe-gate strung against her
blur-caressing tension and its
breast, the curve less
feminine than fossiline in blood-sheen mineral
hauteur, each string
resounding for the stern
beak of fingers paired to fight
in flapping droves which pluck and slap this
thing to life. and it comes
long-eyed, s-necked, pulsing
the room. too huge for human
use in the octaves of its blooded span it
beats the air to fan
the lover-of-the-harpist’s helpless wealth
of face-engulfing
ear
You sent me flying to the dictionary for these two: cochleate and fossilene. They sound like Martha Stewart (post-incarceration ) accent colors for some creative family’s holiday table project, e.g. a decoupaged cornucopia centerpiece. One of those endearing one-of-a-kind home-crafted heirlooms to treasure and bequeath. Can’t you just hear the commanding matriarch presiding over the sparkling delicacy-laden table: “Muffy, please pass the salt, but carefully dear. Mind the china!”
CDS Frances, “fossiline” is mine (fossil plus “ine” as in “of or relating to”) but “fossilene” is Swedish, apparently! I left out of the poem the fact that afterward I ate a chocolate muffin she’d baked (this was before Offsprung was seeded and she was only a dream): not dramatic enough. It was the first time she played something for me and I was struck by how violent the playing could be! And yes, I can hear Martha saying “Muffy” without parting her jaws
Though it’s wonderful to know (the specifics of dream food always fascinate me), I agree. That detail’s a bit saccharin to include in this poem. Would have defiled its pristine and somewhat severe gloss.
Aren’t there child labor laws anymore?!
The title of the new line is fitting: Material Girl. Because, really, what else could Madonna’s daughter possibly be? Granted, she’s not sporting a bright pink gown and pearl accessories around town like her mother did in the video for the song of the same name. But, let’s be real. For a young girl barely out of childhood, the girl’s got taste. Thanks to the ever-present paparazzi, Lourdes has been spotted wearing outfits that could be featured in a photo spread. Leather fitted bomber jackets, pinstripe vests, high-top converse with skinny denim, teal blue fedoras, leg warmers, and bubble skirts are only a few examples in her mom-inspired fashion repertoire. So I would say she is an indefinite “Material girl.”
If your mother is someone like Madonna who has an envy-worth closet, it is sure to be raided. According to Madonna, Lourdes is already keen on swiping the most expensive and stylish pieces from her wardrobe. Part of me believes that Lourdes’ ability to dress so well stems from the fact that she has access to one of the world’s biggest celebrity’s closet. I can only imagine the contents inside. I envision a time capsule of Madonna’s famous on-stage costumes, red-carpets dresses, and music video get-ups, with the decades’ most coveted styles represented on every rack. Lourdes indefinitely has the inspiration from her famous mother on her side, lending a hand to her fabulous street attire.
[ed.'s note: It's sad that sucking celebrity phantom-cock is probably futile for most journalists... still safer than swallowing actual gene-fizz soda in exchange for rent munny, I guess]
I can still remember when that brand name was so new that the rumor in clubland was that Ciccone was a mulatto. The only thing she ever did I didn’t consider dull was that Bjork imitation
Talk about dull! I only post this because it seems to be some kind of boot camp for budding consumerist monsters. What kind of parents would allow their children to participate in something so humiliating and mindless?
Another atrocity from the U.K.! Who ever heard of real honest-to-goodness irish men in the kitchen? In the theater, in poetry clubs, in the pub, most definitely in bed–all yes! (Especially that last I hear tell. It’s a “yet” for me but most highly ranked on my deserted island fantasy mate wish list, way above the Professor from G.I. Frankly, given the choice from that crew I’d probably “do” the Captain). No good can possibly come of this.
Russell Johnson? Strangely enough, CDS Barry and I were discussing G.I. yesterday… I was able to rattle off the actual (professional, that is: “Ginger” is without a doubt the top layer of a parfait of aliases) names of the cast, along with the name of the band doing the theme song plus the stage name of their greatest occasional guest-star (Vito Scotti). Better than Star Trek, imo. Second only to the original TV Batman and Lost in Space.
Oh my. Did I actually write on the world wide web that I’d “do” the Captain? Sorry! What was I thinking? I meant the Skipper.
Worry not. I never for one moment…
The film of the TV Batman knocks Tim Burton’s efforts into outer space. I’ve never understood the importance of trying to “get inside” the head of someone who wants to be a bat. It’s not as if we can learn anything from analysing a comic book compulsion. So far better to keep it light as a souffle and well within budget.
“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. “
BTW, what do you think of these mysterious sentences (from an article about “celebrity suicides”):
Sylvia Plath was “one of those rare authors who remain as popular in life as she does in death”
Or:
George Reeves’ fans believe that it wasn’t a suicide but that he was “murdered by the husband of a romantic rival”
and
Sid Vicious “apparently overdosed on heroin and apparently died when his own fluids filled his lungs”
Oh and: a Comrade just mailed this to me. More proof that Grownups… even talented, acronymed Grownups like JLG… are just creeps, in the end:
Sid Vicious “apparently died” Oh Lawd don’t tell me he’s working in a garage in Slough with Elvis.
I live not too far from where Plath is “buried”. Apparently. I’ll watch out for any sightings of a poet floating popularly in between life and death next time I’m over that way.
You work on those two, I’ll work on the George “Superman” Reeves case re: what exactly the husband of a romantic rival did to him, Comrade Ed. Meet us at the cemetery at midnight, of course. And don’t tell Sid or Sylvia.
Given than no-one might actually be dead, those garages along the M4 must be filled with the “deceased”, the graveyard is probably the safest and emptiest place to meet.
PS I just got my royalties statement for April and I am reasonably certain that no one else in your wide circle, Comrade Ed, has received a royalty payment from Chechnya (the fact that the payment from there totals €4.40 shouldn’t diminish the We Are The World quality of seeing that far-flung territory mentioned, on paper, with my name near it)
Royalty cheques from rogue ex-USSR states. What a time we live in.
After reading your terrorising of the earnest batfans and in light of my own responses all I can say is “Holy synchronicity of opinions Batman !”
I suppose the Burton films at least have a sense of the absurdity of their situation but the later ones with Heath Ledger as the Joker are just idiotic. The fact that there were Burger King merchandise tie-ins summed it up for me.
– Returns to reading the collected Krazy Kat in a slightly more self-righteous and similarly self-deluded tone than normal -
Krazy Kat: about time for a re-make, I’d say. Kevlar breast-plate, codpiece… wicked.
“Eat brick fur-ball!”
Nice one. I think they’ll probably use that.
DIFFICULT TEXTS
A decisive battle in the War on Talent was won with the successful movement to place all Cultural Activity under the jurisdiction of Market Concepts. The shift from auditor to consumer is the shift from curious bystander to client or (even more vertigo-inducing) from supplicant to boss and the blow against Culture is staggering. And yet it’s rarely discussed in these terms. I always say that the difference between Art and Entertainment is that Entertainment is the friend who tells you want you want to hear and Art is the friend who doesn’t. Art is the unpredictable mistress (or catamite) while Entertainment is the oh-so-reliable whore. An audience of consumers knows only what it likes (mistaking this reflex-knowledge for critical acumen) and an Artist who loses her/his Authority (the independence to say, without anger, “Fuck You”) is doomed to become an Entertainer, always worried about the vapid tantrums of a Client with a short attention-span who doesn’t want to be “talked-down to” or “baffled” or “challenged” or in any way “fucked with”. The Client wants jugglers/fire-eaters/wisdom merchants/ pornographers and clowns. Not so long ago, the Artist emerged from his/her velveteen bondage to the Church and the self-aggrandizing, de Medici-style castle-stocking Patron to emerge into a brief, wondrous, post-Industrial, between-Wars butterfly-role as the Middle Class Imagination’s respected guide. The Artist never meant diddly to The Masses, of course (except to the extent that The Masses fantasized about fucking Modigliani’s models and trading sketches for Cadillacs, a la Pablo) but the Artist was never before at the low point he or she is now, reduced, for the most part, to selling out, no matter what, and largely (here’s the irony) in obscurity, anyway.
My writerly foundations are in Science Fiction. Science Fiction, I think, suffers from its own relative popularity: a talented writer has more of a chance of squeezing some money out of the rock of the Client’s collective head doing technology-oriented escapism (with lashings of sex bunny and light sabers to sweeten the deal) than with “literary fiction”: a good hook (has anyone done time-traveling hermaphrodite hookers, yet?) can spawn a graphic novel, a video game, a feature film or, even, a Television series. That’s rent right there. And who’s going to spend all that time writing shit they know won’t sell when some shit sells pretty well? It’s back to the Artist vs Entertainer thing. The audience has come to take for granted the Nero-like prerogative (see: the Consumer’s Magna Carta Mantra: “The Customer’s Always Right” ) to sneer at any uppity fuck who refuses to get on her/his knees and suck until his arsehole whistles.
I had most of this in mind when I sat down, one day, to write some Sci Fi.
This particular Difficult Text is set a not-exactly-clear number of decades in the future. Maybe centuries. The slo-mo genocide of blacks (the Shoah may have been brief but unspeakably intense; The Holocaust engulfing the Black African Diaspora took five or six centuries in its thoroughness and worked, in this tale) is very near completion. Germany is a province of an Anglophone Empire and the Fatherland’s former Turks are now known as “Gypsies”: the only German-speaking people on Earth. The protag is pure black and therefore a prized oddity at dinner parties. Science is geriatric and giving way to magic in a big way and the protagonist finds himself bewitched. Sees ghosts and so forth.
In keeping with the Flame War motif (and also the post-Flame War motif of smoke and mists for this tale is dark/mysterious) :this was one of the most savagely-attacked stories I’ve ever written (lots of accusations from various Guardian readers that it’s proof that I should nevuh bother writing again) when it popped out of me, three years ago. That’s why I’m sponging it off and trimming its mustache and propping it in a wing-backed chair in the window of the DIFFICULT TEXT brothel. Fuck it gratis.
_
_
_
GYPSIES
Veering into the sun before his sunbrella went up was like having a frying pan in full sizzle put flat on his cheek. The bulgey curve of the station wall had a sharp collar of shade around it in which sat the gypsy with her accordion, playing the dolorous tango they all played within a laughable range of capability, from not-at-all to utter mastery. She gave him a look as he veered out into the sun because she blocked the very narrow path the shadow protected, sitting cross-legged on a collapsible chair with a shoe tip burning in light. The look she gave him contained a library of philosophical treatises, a look at once aware and detached, worldweary-yet-playful, dismissively flirtatious, seductively bored and suppler than thought itself. It took him somewhat aback. She was in the same cruel league of beauty as his obsession Margarethe, though she was just a gypsygirl and he was late for dinner.
Margarethe in a printed dress as tight as a chocolate bar’s wrapper handed him warm wine and introduced people who were milling around the room hungry and browsing her paintings, examining the work with what struck Van in some cases as almost hostile diffidence, as though the paintings were untouchable meals reserved for richer guests due to arrive much later. As he’d often said his ex-wife Margarethe was the best bad painter in the world and he thought of her near-perfect copy of van Gogh’s self-portrait in front of the easel, 1888, showing the darkling feral head and retardedly-intense blue eyes but in her version he’s smiling and hoisting a condensation-bejeweled bottle of Coke. She said,
“Van, this is Taylor and Scotty and you know…”
“Konrad.”
“Exactly,” she grinned.
A large-ish American with short shiny hair stood up from the couch and introduced himself as Bartholomew, pointedly ignoring nearby Taylor and Scotty, who were Queers from London. Fucking Heteromanic American.
The air in the flat was dense with meat. Her new husband Konrad was clearly no vegetarian but a well-built, distracted-looking German in formal attire with red hands and a peeling nose which propped up big square black-rimmed glasses. From time to time he’d nod or grunt with disgust or amusement despite the fact that no one was talking to him. He pronounced “ski” in the old German manner: she. He peeled some skin off his nose and said aprés she as he went ahead to his place at the dinner table, Margarethe rolling her eyes at his back.
She confessed with rue that one has to climb so high to find natural snow these days that one wears a Lycra space suit on the slopes. The men get tremendous hardons. The glasses Konrad was wearing may or may not have been connected, though Van had noted that Konrad sported them in the manner of the blind, face beatifically elevated in an unfinished smile.
Something sharp-toothed and furtive squealed flaming to cinders in a trap in one of the rooms under renovation and Van could see it for a moment and then he couldn’t. He blinked.
When Margarethe announced dinner with a clap of her hands they formed a pilgrim’s procession of low chatter and crossed the apartment through a long, over-lit wing of plastic sheets and scaffolding. Up some plaster-dusted stairsteps they went leaving shoe prints and Van straggled behind studying the pretentious sepia-tone images on the wall in a hallway, pictures he’d taken with the antique Hasselblad Maggie had given him their first Christmas. Gypsies of unvarying facial expression hefted arched accordions over their knees like gulls with broken backs.
Margarethe laid a hand on an arm each of Scott’s and Taylor’s as she lead the procession, walking between them, and said, “I had the most ghastly nightmare again, darlings.”
Konrad was chewing and laughing at something on the ceiling as they filed into the dining room.
Bartholomew with his wide, flat, not-fat-at-all body, waved a finger at various points around the dinner table at which Van found himself seated among the others having their chunky pork soup ladled into exquisite porcelain bowls. Van only heard what sounded like the sea in a very big conch shell as the American droned on, a prime exemplar of the effect of the loss of empire on a disoriented consciousness. The dining room felt airless lit only with candles feeding mostly on Bartholomew’s breath and Van wanted desperately to open a window but he was no longer the flat’s master. Bartholomew had no plate set before him; no knife or fork or water glass. No food.
Konrad exhibited open-eyed signs of REM.
Someone was saying, “I suppose in the latter category you’ve got the theory of Relativity and smoking will kill you and an embryo is conceived when an egg cell meets a sperm cell in the womb and so forth.”
Bartholomew was rocking in his seat.
Second course was blood pudding.
Konrad noted suspicious gas leaks in Istanbul and Crete, hundreds dead or unaccounted for.
Van recognized the spider, limbs fanning long and tenuous as internet links, in a high corner. The spider or its descendant. He’d been separated from Margarethe for over two years and divorced for a year yet every single thing about the apartment was the same as he’d left it, minus the meaty veil of odors. He recognized the faint pattern of stains on the tablecloth, the brown-tinged continents on a medieval map of the known world.
He glanced at Margarethe with her high forehead and incongruously Croatian nose and the pewter ringlets of her hair. Memory provided the glistening plum of her kissable buttocks which had in turn been provided by her superblack boy-diddling bishop of a sweet-breathed father late of an almost blackless Capetown. Due to whom she pronounced black as bleck.
Van heard, “The fear of looking stupid is what keeps the intellectual in line.”
Playfully, he imagined Bartholomew as a big blond gypsy with a ring in his ear wrestling an accordion in the shadow of the station begging for coins instead of dispensing unsolicited pontifications at the dinner table. Van edited the gypsy girl into Bartholomew’s place, seated beside him at the table, slyly embarrassed by her decadent plateful of fatty meats. He found himself hoping she’d still be on that stool at the station wall when it came time to leave but it was New Year’s so of course she’d be at the Brandenburg Dome with the others, picking pockets or playing that same hideous tango with champagne-oiled ease.
Konrad had Bartholomew’s bright hair in a knuckle-grip and jerked hard, hacking through pulpy fat neck with a serrated blade, though no one else seemed to notice.
Fingerbowls were distributed.
Margarethe was blowing kisses at someone, mouthing Kiss ma bleck aws, whileTaylor indulged in the so-called New Nostalgia with the repeated use of the phrase, “The Tolerable ‘20s.”
Maragarethe was saying, behind her hand while she chewed on gristle, “It was that nightmare about Bartholomew again, I’m afraid, I hope he calls,” but Van never heard this. She was hoping to get a rise out of her insufficiently jealous husband.
She was playing the drollest of hostesses and staring into her wineglass, the bowl of the wineglass magnifying her eye into a batty black goldfish, telling Van that Taylor was a Money Artist. That is, she clarified, Taylor works in the medium of money. The national gallery has a room of his elegant displays, each display featuring a fluctuating digit synched to an enormous amount somewhere. You see he started his career with artifactual lucre… didn’t you, Taylor… crisp bundles of Euros and dollars, arranged on plinths… though his breakthrough came when he finally grasped money in its most spiritual form.
Critics call his new work cleaner.
Konrad quoted an article to the effect that the art market is the biggest money laundering operation on the planet. He told a joke in a halting cadence that ended with the punchline the sweet smell of sock sex.
After a haunting gypo film in the screening room about transvestites (Manche Mogen’s Heiss), Margarethe, rubbing her eyes like a waking child, excused herself with a cautionary remark about dessert and Van, glancing at Konrad, offered to help in the kitchen, so down a dark hall and with the vented door still swinging he lay a finger athwart her woodgrain arm and moaned how he missed being the only black couple at the opera.
He said he missed the way she kicked in her sleep and commented too mordantly and far too loud in the theater and buttered both sides of her toast or snatched at her bushy cloud of pillowed hair like a honeybear in a cloud of bees when he used to go down on her.
He pulled her towards him and she laughed offering a modicum of resistance saying don’t. She said,
-Van, your words are lovely as ever, and you’re a good Christian, truly you are, but as a woman grows older she responds less to words than to deeds, and deeds aren’t done without power, and, as you know, Konrad has an inherited seat on the Ministry of the Interior…there’s more power in one of his ash-colored eyelashes than in the whole of that big carbon dick of yours.
-Ha! That old white devil be damned.
-You’re talking about my husband, darling.
-I’m your husband.
-No you’re not. Not any more you’re not.
-In the eyes of God.
The first punch stunned her and the second one brought her to her knees.
When she swept in from the kitchen with sugar-free parfaits on a tray of hammered tin from Morocco which Van, trailing behind her with half a dozen neon aperitifs, had forgotten giving her for their second anniversary, the shifty mass of her sheathed bosom as she lowered each parfait to every spot around the table was so milk-maidishly servile that it made them appear to be overdressed black help. This pleased Van perversely and he handed out the aperitifs with a shamingly servile flourish.
Scott turned to Taylor and said, not quietly enough, “I’m having that headache we talked about.”
Margarethe stamped her foot with winning petulance and said but it’s almost midnight! Her plan was to gather on the balcony after dessert and watch fireworks and greet the majestic change of centuries with upturned faces of child-like wonder.
A meth-massacre in Phuket. Konrad joked from the corner of his mouth that it takes a child to raze a village.
They sweated the proximity of the sultry night and watched animated neo-classical constellations like Diana the archer and Pegasus flapping his wings and the stars-and-cross of the Anglo-Germanian union scintillate then shatter into hundreds of jiggle-boobed goose-stepping showgirls in turn becoming great pinwheels lilting like funereal Lilies to Earth. After which, rainbow-colored cubes representing the six colors of the union rolled across the sky unfolding into crucifixes larger than any skyscraper. Crucifixes ringing the ecliptic, pulsing to Die Walküre and foreshortened towards the galactic hub.
Van was distracted by the scene he watched instead. Down there on the sidewalk, two stories below the balcony, near enough he heard their pleas for mercy. Handsome theatergoers surrounded and doused by a broken circle of gypsies and put peremptorily to the torch, dancing away from each other in flames towards opposite ends of the street trailing rich black streamers of skinsmoke. Reflections of the flames shrank curving across bubble windshields and Van was clutching his throat, suppressing the nausea, unsure of what he was seeing.
Konrad shouted U-Nasa with conclusive evidence: Asgaard settlement extinct. The others on the balcony merely oooh’d and ahhh’d with patriotic boredom at the immensity of the crucifixes stainglassing the sky.
Van knew it now. He was bewitched.
2.
He rode the near-empty train to its endstation. He gasped at the foretaste of heat that rolled under the platform’s baked awning as he stepped from the train. It pulled away as he shuffled in his bright white flapsuit and widebrimmed hat, a Pierrot in blackface shuffling to platform’s end then down the hundred stairs in his two-legged tent, the handrail untouchably hot, bracing himself to emerge from the station into the noon’s blast furnace, slower than wading through oil.
Entering Gypsytown at high noon was the only way to sneak into the city.
He pictured them snoring in dark rooms while he stalked the blinding streets at noon, a striking lone figure, something from a dream, and he realized that he was thinking about himself again, as he often did, and the tight cap of his mossy black hair itched. He was thinking of himself as a museumpiece, a rare collection of features gathered in the vitrine of his flat-nosed face, so broad across the cheekbones and heavy in the jaw, a public monument trusted to his own irresponsible stewardship. What if a gypsy punched him in the nose, ruining something of priceless rarity?
The rare blacks allowed back on the continent had been welcomed grudgingly under the stainless-steel wing of the Church. He was thinking of Margarethe’s father, Bishop Siss, or his own great-grandfather, the influential Christian theoretician famous for Multiple-Christ Doctrine, the original Vanross Olubodon, a remote and frightening figure. Not for one moment since birth had Van…or anyone from the small colony of blackies and darkfacers in Berlin…felt welcome.
Most of them, as in the case of Margarethe’s family, had commenced immediately to exobreed out of the color with almost any whites who were mad enough to fuck them. Margarethe had nieces and nephews who were already as light as the palms on her hands, or no darker than the inner folds of her navel, but, still, there were tests you were required to take at a certain age. Forms you had to fill out. You’d get Homo sapiens africanus stamped on your license for all to see, though perhaps one might keep it a secret on all but the genobureaucratic level.
Van’s family was an oddity. Both for having been in Europa for so many generations and for breeding almost exclusively black for the duration. Many of his people were priests; Van wasn’t a priest but he was a prominent theologian. The family members who weren’t in the priesthood, who were out there in the game of life, competing for love and money, were running out of black non-relatives to mate with. And with Van’s recent loss of mostly-black Margarethe, what would he do? Write his amateurish sonnets and masturbate on whores in blackface until the end of all time?
The station was a ziggurat of limestone steps on a dusty peninsula of asphalt. Across a weedy road were the vacant lots of the western edge of Gypsytown and beyond the vacant lots, a fifteen minute walk over rubble and weeds, queued the first of the white buildings, the coated buildings like walls in a low maze, each building decorated with its check of foil, foil over all the windows, the abandoned vista of an ancient millennial film project.
Set on the very edge of the asphalt before the broken road there stood a longish tent full of stacked bundles of newspapers and a sinewy bearded troll. The tall troll was seated crosslegged, dressed in the altogether save a suet-colored loincloth and sandals and sipping from a vintage bottle in the open shade of the tent. The man had the shaggy blonde sea-burned look of the Viking about him. But he was very thin.
As Van approached the tent in order to cross the broken road behind it the Viking put down his bottle with great care and slipped into a hooded cape which hung from head to knees. The cape had weight to it and concealed a dagger no doubt. He stepped into the sunpressure towards Van wielding a newspaper and Van recognized the paper as the Cassandran Standard and formed preemptive noises in his throat, shaking his head, but there was no way the tout would be put off, for Van was probably the first non-gypsy to cross his path all day… all week, possibly. Despite being momentarily flummoxed by the impossible blackness of Van’s face, he smiled and followed across the broken road with his spiel:
“Get your Cassandran, get your Cassandran right here, your sweet Cassandran Standard, all the news you were never supposed to know, reported at great risk to all involved, no gratitude necessary… top stories: the facts are in… average life-expectancy down by thirty percent in less than a century… top stories… the Asgaard Settlement alive and well and preparing for war against Earth… top stories… fish return to the Persian Gulf… you’ll read it here first… the news you were never supposed to know… all this plus the usual tasty all-color supplement: they’re fresh, they’re female, they’re Pagan… five dollars and the truth is yours to filter as you see fit….”
But when Van gave him a stainless steel dollar in hopes he’d scurry off the tout secreted the coin in the voluminous cuntfolds of his cape and said, wonderingly, after licking his lower lip, “You’re black.”
Van stopped walking and sighed. “That’s right.”
“I’m honored. They call me Gregorius. Is it true that blacks think not in words but in pictures, Sir?”
“I can only speak for myself when I say no to that question.”
“Ah.”
Van nodded. Gregorius pointed at Gypsytown. “You are not going in there alone, are you, Sir?”
“Why shouldn’t I?” He glared from the grotto under the wide brim of his hat.
“For one thing, there are no street signs… they took every single one of them down, Sir. The gypos are dead clever. You’d find yourself hopelessly lost in minutes. In heat like this, for more than an hour, no shelter… that can mean heart failure, Sir.”
“You’re advertising your services as a guide.”
“Not just a guide. There are horrors greater than being lost…”
“Horrors.”
“Not many know that the gypsies are provided by The State to operate under their own rule of law and governance, Sir.”
“I’m well aware of that fact.”
“But do you know the tone or timbre of these Laws of theirs, Sir? The codes and statutes? Run afoul of them and it could mean your happiness, to say the least. And then there are ravenous crowpacks to deal with and bandits…”
“Alright.”
“Five steel dollars an hour. Payment on the hour.”
They shook on it and continued across the weedy terrain of the vacant lots, Gregorius just slightly ahead. What does he have in that cape, wondered Van. A telescope? A rifle?
Without turning to face Van he called out, “What are you looking for, if I may ask, Sir?”
“Who.”
“What?”
“Who, not what. I’m looking for a gypsy girl. A gypsy girl I saw this New Year’s Eve just past.”
“A gypsy you saw at the Dome, was it, Sir?”
“No. Earlier that day. At the Charlottenburg Station.”
“Charlottenburg Station? Performing there or just traveling, Sir?”
“She was performing.”
“Fair or dark?”
“Dark.”
“Young?”
Van shrugged. “Not old.”
Walking backwards at Van’s pace, Gregorius stared a good long time before finally turning to point far off, lifting the edge of his cape. “That’ll mean she lives over there, on what was formerly known as Bergmann Strasse, then. The other end of Gypsytown.”
Van laughed.
“Sir?”
“The way you pronounce ‘Strasse’. ”
“Strasse.”
Van laughed again. “Strah-suh. You even talk like a gypsy. You speak it?”
“Fließend.”
“What?”
“Fluently, Sir. Fließend means ‘fluently’.”
Van was pleased. He felt he was getting his money’s worth.
Flickered shadows now and then swept them over and up they’d look to see clouds of suntorched crows tumble headlong as though hurled from an invisible mountain and Gregorius would crouch low and dip one shoulder as if ready to swing hard at whatever came at them but the shadows flew onward, falling sidelong away at great speed. The nearest tree was kilometers distant.
Van and his taciturn page (what was he brooding on?) exchanged nary a word until they were well into the city-within-a-city, with its uniform myriad six-storey flatblocks and narrow treeless immaculate streets and sidewalks. No trash or thick brushstrokes of dogshit or mosaics of smashed glass forever. Nor rusting hulks of cars or trucks or gutted refrigerators. So unlike Berlin proper. He could have licked the griddle ground and left it hissing with spit with no fear of dirt-eating.
“It’s all so clean,” marveled Van, breaking the silence at such a low volume, just slightly above the striding rustle of his garment, that breaking it was barely worth it. His unwieldy white flapsuit. He was exhausted. He longed for his sunbrella. “It’s cleaner than any street I’ve walked on!”
“Of course it is, Sir. The Gypsies waste nothing.”
“Not even merdes…”
“They make fuel with it, Sir.”
“You’re very well-spoken for a man who lives in a tent, Gregorius.”
“There was a time, long ago, I participated in the world, like you. I gave it all up to do the noble work of selling the Cassandran. It’s a hard life but I sleep well every night and my gypo wife supports me. And I don’t live in that tent, you see. We live in a flat like any other.”
“I suppose it’s a myth that they steal, as well, then, Gregorius?”
“An ugly and ignorant myth, Sir. No offense.”
Van chuckled. He said, “So if one had a peek through a gypo flat…”
“One would most of all see books, Sir. Every gypsy lives with more books than he has stories to tell…a gypsy aphorism.”
Van curled his lip. Even he couldn’t afford more than a few books, and those he kept in a vault. “Books?”
Gregorius continued, “In point of fact they make nearly all their money as infobrokers.”
“Infobrokers?”
“Spies, Sir.”
“Spies?”
“Is there anyone less visible than a gypo? All dressed alike, all playing the same…”
Van scratched at his nose and grunted. He did not believe this, nor the other thing about books. He said, “Possibly.”
“May I ask why you speak so softly, Sir?”
Van lifted his chin at the building they were just then shuffling past and said, “They sleep in the heat of the day, as you know. It’s prudent…one speaks in certain tones…”
“Another falsehood, Sir,” Gregorius said, wearily. “Ironic, too, considering that they’re all awake and been doing business for hours when the rest of Berlin is still yawning over its first bitter coffee! It is true, these buildings have no power to offset the heat, but the cellars of the buildings are dark and cool and…”
“This is astonishing news…”
“…the gypsies have connected all the cellars in a kind of underground city.” Gregorius stopped in the street and touched his bare red chest with a flourish of his cape. “And I know the safest point of entry to the system.”
“But I must,” pleaded Van, revealing his desperation suddenly, “I must find this gypsy girl! She has bewitched me!”
Gregorius pointed at the cracked black skin of the three-hundred-year-old road.
“You’ll find her there.”
Looking at the road where he had been directed to, Van watched as Gregorius’ shadow appeared to raise a long dark sword to the sky, gripping the hilt with both hands as though he might fly away on it.
There was a roaring silence as Van stared blinkless into the white skull of the sun without being conscious of ceasing to.
3.
A temperate breeze poured in over the tall grasses of the Auroran Savannah and clattered through the blinds and windchimes on the front porch and the naked prospects of the sunrooms above it and pushed open, with one polite hand, the curtains of the attic window.
The servant stooped polishing wood in the attic bedroom happened to look out the window at that moment to glimpse through the curtains the procession of secondhand government Zils coming in on the long approach paralleling the canal, like a funeral, though she knew for a fact it was only a lunch.
The master was still drowsing in his hammock on the porch. Drowsing as indolent in the summer’s long day as he was frenetic during the winter’s long night of restorative darkness, and though she felt the giddy impulse to hurry downstairs to wake him, one of the others would probably see to it, so she kept at her polishing, waltzing the soft fat cloth over the loops and whorls of the wood’s exquisitely ancient fingerprint. The chest of drawers she brought to its hard gleam predated her language; her people; the city of Aurora itself. Centuries of breath had trapped spirit-words in the microscopic chambers of the wood and she felt the furniture breathe as her palm swirled over it.
She expected at some point after lunch that the master would gather the barefoot staff in the kitchen in order to introduce them to the overfed guests, as ever, and charmingly perform his favorite trick of naming their various tribes: Aleuti, Russo Lapp, Samoyed, Swedish Tungu, Dane and Red Yankee! All living together under one roof, he would exclaim. A boast of his taste, his benevolence.
And all sharing one bed, she was always tempted to add. The two boys among them were even prettier than the black-eyed girls.
Lieutenant Governor Mey and the trade delegation from the North Atlantic States looked mortified in their youth, clustered together in the center of Stark’s library, waiting obediently for lunch. Stark was still drowsy and rumpled in his patrician, couldn’t-be-bothered way, scratching his belly through a fine garment. He knew history well enough to relish this sensation of intimidating elected officials with anything more subtle than an army. Their sincere diffidence was innocence and a luxury that wouldn’t last more than a few generations before sophistication, with the renascent persistence of evil, returned again to the world. But for now a breathing space. An Eden.
Stark drew their attention to two black heads on a recessed shelf in the wall beside the book case. The floor-to-ceiling, wall-wide case was emblematic in itself of staggering wealth, but they couldn’t begin to calculate the value of those heads.
“Very beautiful,” nodded Lieutenant Governor Mey, hands clasped behind his back because otherwise they’d be shaking. “May I ask how you got them that color?”
Stark laughed. “Jahweh gave it to them.”
“Jahweh?”
“The super-being they both believed in, while they lived. The man in the sky who created the Earth and the Heavens. In the beginning he is said to have said to let there be light, and there was light.”
The trade delegation chuckled politely.
Stark touched the male head with a collector’s awed affection. “Preserved eternally with a process that renders the flesh incorruptible without changing its natural composition. If you care to touch here… very carefully… you’ll find that it is indeed flesh, flesh like yours or mine… at room temperature. Not even particularly cold. Though they’ve been dead for centuries.”
“Anyway, it’s a lost technology. We couldn’t do anything close to it.”
With a cupped hand Stark rounded the cheek and delicate jawline of the female head, her ear bending and springing from under his touch. The gesture was so like a lover’s postcoital caress that two of the delegates flinched. The head was so beautiful, so life-like in its preservation, yet so strange in its blackness and shining shaved skull that they expected the eyes and mouth to pop open with a scream when Stark had finished fondling it.
“I call the two of them the world’s greatest love story. I also call them the gypsies, because they’ve been all over the habitable world, seeking one another in death. The facts are really quite extraordinary.”
“Before I explain how I acquired them, I’ll let you in on the amazing fact that I know quite a lot of detail about their social status, their manner of dress and eating habits and even the specific circumstances of her death. His death I know less about.”
“I inherited him, you see. I grew up in a house that counted him coyly among its treasures, though he was kept in a locked case in the attic. I didn’t get a look at him until my father died and I inherited the estate. We were doing an inventory of the art treasures and he sort of popped up. As it turns out, he was worth more than all of the other paintings and sculptures combined.”
“He’s the only known example of a fully intact head from the species Homo sapiens africanus… what they called back then, rather obviously, a black. Interestingly, the black species thought only in pictures but not in words as we do. Otherwise, they were both shockingly different and uncomfortably similar to us.”
“I only regret that in preserving the head they’ve shaved the hair off, you see, because his hair was just as unique as the rest of him… very tight little kinks, very short, rather mossy… imagine, possibly, a cross between moss and wool.”
“The female’s hair was a bit different… imagine a cross between his hair as I’ve described it and yours or mine… because she’s not purebred, you see; her mother was Homo sapiens. Look at the nose.”
“Anyway, for years I’ve had him here in my library, the guardian of my books. Then one day, on a trip through Romana, to pay my respects to the ancestors, as one does… and also because I love French sweets, and France is right across that border, as it happens…”
Stark could see he was beginning to bore them. Time to spice up the story.
“I was offered the chance to bid on her by a private collector of ill repute. Of course I couldn’t refuse… money was no object. I felt I owed it to my black Adam to provide an Eve.” The Biblical reference went over their heads but he forged on. “The broker I purchased her from informed me that she’d been quite the celebrity of her era…married to a rich, powerful official… back when those three words together weren’t oxymoronic, gentlemen… back in that barbaric era…”
“He was rich and powerful and rather psychotically jealous. It seems he beheaded her lover and fed the lover’s corpse to her guests at a dinner party! Only a few weeks later he killed her, too. Beat her to death… most luckily sparing the face. The interesting thing about all that is how little punishment he received for his crimes; I’d dare say any of you would face more bother over a parking violation than he did for double murder. He lived to be a ripe old age and dined out, no pun intended, on the legend of his atrocity.”
“It was only after bringing Eve home to Adam, and setting them beside one another on that very shelf, that I began to wonder if they might have known one another in life. I wondered if there was some connection… perhaps by a few degrees of separation at the least. I knew they were from the same part of the world… I knew they were from the same era, vaguely…”
“Peeling off the tiniest amount of flesh from the back of our Adam’s neck, a technician had his genetic numbers checked against the oldest known database.”
“You won’t believe this, gentleman…but I assure you that what I’m about to say is true. It turns out… I’m getting goosebumps as I think about it… it turns out our black Adam and Eve were once married.”
“Let that sink in for a moment.”
“They were married, divorced, met their separate deaths… were separated as artifacts by thousands of kilometers for centuries… different countries and continents… now reunited on that shelf.”
Even Lieutenant Governor Mey was obviously moved. There was a catch in his throat when he asked, pointing to a small oil painting set in the center of the book case…asking, perhaps, merely to diffuse the intensity of the moment… “Can you tell us who this is?”
Stark drew himself straight with awful pride, but spoke with self-satirizing pomp.
“This? This is Iseult Tsurak, mother of the modern nation of Romana, hero of the Gypsytown rebellion, intellectual architect of the Pax Romana and the founder of the immense fortune that nourishes the Stark family to this day, even as far north as we’ve drifted. Stark is an Arctic modernization of the name Tsurak, you see.”
“She’s my great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother.”
Mmmmmm….very nice…(lights cigarette and watches smoke drift upwards as a feeling of agreeable melancholy takes hold)…and I’ll still respect you in the morning.
We’ve got to stop meeting like this, M…
“Most of them, as in the case of Margarethe’s family, had commenced immediately to exobreed out of the color with almost any whites who were mad enough to fuck them. ”
It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.
It’s after hours in Berlin. Besides, if CDS Sean could get away with that smiley face…wink-wink-wink.
COUNTER-INTUITIVE SENTENCES
The former Sex Pistols manager died after uttering the words: “Free Leonard Peltier.”
and
“It was the loneliness of the 12-year-old that first drew me to Helga Goebbels.”
I’m guessing the 2nd quote is from the current Pope.
The tributes to McClaren have been extraordinarily tight-lipped. You can almost see pantomime dame Johnny Lydon’s lips pursing as he tried to squeeze out his positive remark.
CDS Edward,
Who do we revile more? Those who perpetrate or those who stand silently by and let the rapists hollow another human being out? The wife of one of my dearest friends in life was sexually abused by her step-father. The worser pain for her was that she was powerless to prevent him also hurting her younger sisters. The story has a happy ending though. He blew his own brains out with a shotgun in the family barn. Dirty work, but someone had to do it. His act was not exactly redemptive but it was a step in the right direction. Someone needs to give the Pope the heads up on that concept. I bet any number of us in the Bunker Pagoda, especially CDS Steven, would happily clean and load the rifle, find the right words of encouragement to help him see it through, and bless the act when it was done.
Frances
This from the Guardian
“The experience the church has gained in battling abuse in its ranks “could be useful to other institutions and society as a whole,” he [Father Federico Lombardi] added. “It seems that the media has not considered this aspect sufficiently.”
So the abuse is useful in giving the Church experience in how to deal with the fall-out of abuse. Admire is the wrong word completely but one has to admire the ability to twist in the wind. As with some of the pronouncements about Haiti the church’s main concern seems to be self-survival and self-justification. I suppose it joins a lengthy queue of similar institutions.
Which are comprised of people, some with great power, who make the choices that ultimately redound to the institutions. And we know the difference.
Not to hi-jack this thread and be too personal, I was the near victim of rape. But my friend and neighbor, Chris Post, heard me screaming from my bed where I was pinned down, the would-be rapist’s knee on my low back. That scream was my last chance as the bad guy was trying to stuff a linen dinner napkin in my mouth to silence me. But Chris heard it and literally ran naked through the courtyard of our crappy apartment dwelling (this was in college) and saved me. SAVED ME. That’s really how I think of it. I sing his praises, I say his name, I think of him whenever I hear the words hero and miracle.
Thing about rape is: I wish we could learn to treat it as a physical assault. There’s collateral damage in the quasi-Koranic sense that a rape victim has been “defiled” or even devalued. I mean, in the age of AIDS (and weaponized sexual sadism), rape can be worse than a bar beating, of course, but… yeah. There are societal attitudes there that deserve scrutinizing…
“I bet any number of us in the Bunker Pagoda, especially CDS Steven, would happily clean and load the rifle…”
Erm,… I don’t do guns, really, CDS Frances. Also, as much as I dislike the notion of the Pope…
“…rape can be worse than a bar beating, of course, but… yeah. There are societal attitudes there that deserve scrutinizing…”
I agree. Do the cells and nerve endings in my body really care if its my kneecap or my cervix that gets pounded? No. Pain is pain.
And there’s the subtext of woman-as-virginal-chattel to think about, too
That’s the crux of it.
I don’t believe I’ve ever told anybody this before, comrades. And it’s personal knowledge that redefined my perception of my father as a man, and a passionate one at that. My father’s wife told me that his very last words on this earth were: “Kiss me!”
Very good last words, CDS Frances… hope your father doesn’t mind if I plagiarize them!
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 believe Ms. Stritch is in the Pagoda! Stand back.
The fulcrum on my heart.
I’m shooting my whole April wad here!
Oh, fuck me, I’m into May.
Yipes, CDS Frances! This is where I reveal my feral lack of good taste and admit to hating that kind of music! Larf. Okay, I know, I know: I posted a Shirley Bassey video once or twice, but “Goldfinger” is a micron edgier than this fare (for me). Remember when I wrote, up-thread, that I don’t really do guns (re: your suggestion that I treat the Pope like a clay pigeon)? I just envisioned a grassy knoll secreted in each of the theaters in which each of these performances was videotaped… a grassy knoll behind a duck blind. I see myself using night-vision goggles and a laser-sight sniper-scope. Though I wouldn’t aim to kill Liza, just disable her (I liked Cabaret… the movie). The one with Lesley-Ann Warren as Cinderella was the worst of the bunch, for me… the sheer post-Disney, restricted Country Club, Earl Butz whiteness of it set off my vestigial Mason Dixon gland (the one that would give me trouble, as a kid, whenever I found myself in a car being driven too far South or too deep into the Suburbs or stopping at a turnpike Sambo’s). It’s my failing, I know! I take full responsibility for being a barbarian who could never sit in an audience with the people at those various events without bouts of usher-summoning Tourette’s. Well, I’m a twee barbarian because I could never sit through a boxing match either. There are so many strata and cliques of The People I just could never really hang with… you can see why I wouldn’t make a good Commie. Or a New Yorker (I lived in Park Slope for six months in 1988-ish and was in Manhattan in 1980, the day after Lennon was silenced, to see Elephant Man, which I probably wouldn’t have gone to, despite Bowie’s being in it, had it been a musical ).
Thank you CDS Steven and CDS Edward both for your indulgence. I respect your right to loathe what I love even as I struggle to understand that anitpathy. I mean, it’s not as if I posted Jim Nabors belting To Dream the Impossible Dream or Robert Goulet warbling If Ever I Would Leave You. But if you can’t tell the diff between a Lawrence Welk polka or a HeeHaw medley and these exquisitely sensitive star-turns I see we have still have much work ahead of us on the road to gender equity.
CDS Frances, if we’d posted either closeted square atrocity you cite, you’d have a fair point! laugh. You know what they say: one (wo)man’s fromage…
Of course the Panthers were full of people on a CIA allowance (agent provocateur Mr. Cleaver being not the least of these; if Cleaver was such a threat to society, why was his wife… pictured here… given a full scholarship from Yale in 1981? How did Eldridge end up designing and marketing codpieces in the Reagan Era?) but note the style.
Frances lucky I don’t have much hair on the top of my haid otherwise those Broadway belles would have seen to it. Liza Minnelli reminds me of one of those offshore windfarms ( sorry! )
But I must confess to having enjoyed a TV programme about Lorenz and Hart a few nights ago. Mainly because no matter how much I dislike the music ( and in these cases like opera it’s much much more the trimmings rather than the actual meal itself ) I do like to hear musicians talk about the process of writing music.
Steven! do you ever play music in front of an audience? I know a few composers who hate the idea and others who enjoy it. I’m not a Liza with a Zee needy, permanently switched on type of acTOR/ performer but I do like the presence and concentration of an audience. Somehow I can’t imagine you do but my personality profiling is not high on the list of achievements.
Comrade Ed, long, long ago I made a decision to privilege my Lit Muse by turning her Musical Twin into a whore. I wouldn’t be caught dead (with a stick up my arse and a hinged jaw) performing the sonic-atrocities I now co-compose (important to diffuse the guilt) for munny. Shudder. But back when I was trying to be an envelope-pusher in Lit and Music… sure. I performed often enough. Never really enjoyed it, I have to admit… stage-time was always a fraught blur. Pulling off the required rokk moves (“Hullo Toykyo!”) always seemed too much like begging for love and … you know. I never trusted my fellow band-members not to make mind-bending errors (have I got stories: Saint Patrick’s Day in Saint Paul in 1981, I think it was…. hostile audience of 400 very shitfaced fuckers making polite requests for “BILLY SQUIRE!!!” while I was launching into Stand By Me, ignorant of the fact that the drummer was launching into a Bo Diddley classic… sang the entire song to that rhythm. Pelted with drinks, of course).
“much hair on the top of my hair”??? Sorry I seem to have slipped into Flann O’Brien’s Third Policeman world.
[ed.'s note: sorted]
I understand. Oddly enough people often say to me how brave we must be to perform outside. Well it does have its problems but if people don’t like what you do they can walk away and usually do whereas when you’re inside they are a little less inclined to do so and when you factor alcohol into the equation there will be blood.
Not only blood. Fucking up so hugely, in a spotlight, in front of a crowd of half-a-thousand people, is a face-numbing, autonomic-nervous-system-endangering sensation like no other I’ve ever experienced. Put that down to my Ego, of course. The rest of the band beshat themselves laughing.
UPDATE: Just recovered a blood-solidifying memory of playing in front of a packed house… in a church. What I hadn’t counted on was the fact that the audience of Liberal Lutheran Yuppies would be stone-silent and poker-faced for the duration… applause (not to mention whistling or hard-rock-style devil-greetings) in a church would have been an unthinkable breach of decorum, you see. It was just me, my acoustic and two stunning back-up singers (rummages around for photos). Got to the end of the first song… I was contracted to do two tunes per performance, two performances… and the deafening silence erased my mind. Couldn’t think of the second song. I was paid seventy-five bucks for the gig, which was somehow related to Nicaragua. Second performance was a little better. I think it was 1985. One of the songs, I remember, was called Senseless (the second, I now recall, was Twilight).
Ah the sound of silence – I prefer the sound of a teenager calling the three of us ” a complete set of wankers” ( collect all 3 and swap them with your friends! ) to the sound of indifference.
Free in Every Box!
But, back to Rape (lower parts of Comment #140): we should list the world’s most famous Hollywood Rapes. There’s the bit in Gone With the Wind, obviously. And what about Bond overpowering Pussy Galore (in that barn) in Goldfinger? I can’t think of any others off the top of my head but I know they are plentiful…
Goin South has a comedy rape where Jack Nicholson ties up Mary Steenburgen and gives her what she so obviously wants. The presence of John Belushi also explains why Jack develops a cold in the nose at intermittent points throughout the film – depending I suppose on which take they used.
I see a best-selling full-color mammoth coffee table book in all this. THE BIG BOOK OF HOLLYWOOD RAPES. Who do we approach about such a potentially [ed.'s note to self: check etymology of "potential"] munny-spinning project…?
“Who do we approach about such a potentially… munny-spinning project…?”
Start at the top Steven.
I’d also nominate The Big Easy, not that it includes rape but for its sexual harassment by an entire community scene where Dennis Quaid tricks Ellen Barkin into going to a Cajun party. It’s number one in a field of one I think. Or is it??????
[ed.'s note: we'll have to work on that; there's something on the edge of my memory tickling me...]
Aha: Blade Runner.
There’s certainly an entire French pull-out section about nymphettes and elderly men.
Rather coincidentally I re-read Lolita last month – first time since about 1980. Apart from its brilliance and realising how many of its phrases have stuck with me I found myself wondering what all the fuss was about. I can’t think of a better dissection of the delusional, monotonous and pedantic behaviour that constitutes an obsession. I suppose the fuss was over the fact that he gets you to savour his writing thus making it an enjoyable experience.
“I was led upstairs and to the left – into “my” room. I inspected it through the mist of my utter rejection of it.” Perfection in rhythmn, economy of expression and freshness of idea that even a non-writer like me can roll around in my mind.
The first time Sadie Olubodun saw Siegfried Von Stummfeldt, he was sitting at the snaking long wrought-iron bar of some trendy nihilist cave-like club in a run-down neighborhood deep in East Berlin, reading Baudelaire and looking so above it all. The music was deafening and the disco lights were seizure-inducing and this guy is sitting there with a green glass of Absinthe reading Les Fleurs du Mal with a smirk of genial boredom. Of course she had to talk to him.
He was wearing leather pants, sandals, and a tuxedo jacket over a hooded sweatshirt. Sadie was wearing a terribly expensive tiny kidskin backpack over a second-hand wedding dress over thigh-high black vinyl boots and her hair piled in a tilted tower atop her perfect little black head. She stood behind him and spied on what he was reading, so close that she was literally breathing down his neck, but he played it cool and did not react and she spotted a fortuitous couple of lines near the bottom of the page, something that would go very well with the Absinthe, and she raised her voice, quoting it to him over the idiot throb of the music: Et dans ces bains de sang qui des Romains nous viennent, Et dont sur leurs vieux jours les puissants se souviennent…
He closed the book without looking up and finished the passage for her, declaiming: … Il n’a su réchauffer ce cadavre hébété, Où coule au lieu de sang l’eau verte du Léthé! He gestured to the bartender to bring another glass, filled it about two thirds full from his bottle, and placed his own monogrammed spoon (the slot in it was like a snake, writhing in harmony with the wrought iron bar itself) over the glass, then a sugar cube in the slotted spoon and so forth. His preparation of her drink of wormwood was practised and precise and embellished with magician-like flourishes of his long-fingered hands. The satiny hands of a man who’s never done a day of manual labor in his life.
One thing Sadie truly abhorred was the hard-earned “character” of a workman’s paws. The pathetic scars and bulging knuckles and ugly calluses. She could never bear to be handled by mitts like that. Mr. Fleurs du Mal’s face was merely so-so and his body was not the sexiest she’d seen, but she was instantly smitten with those aristocratic hands.
He handed her the glass and shouted, “Do you know the Café Slavia? It over-looks the Moldau. There is a painting in it of a good-dressed Bohemian fellow enjoying his delicious Absinthe and seeing this most lovely vision…” he touched the air above them with the glass, “…a naked, absinthe-green girl floating. But now I see…” he handed her the glass, “…that this floating dream girl, she was really very black and has come to life in front of me.”
Linking arms they sipped the Absinthe.
Things happened very quickly. They left the bar, ears ringing, and hailed a taxi and promised the driver a huge tip to defy the speed limit rushing to Siegfried’s loft where Siegfried practically kicked the huge door down and Sadie hiked up her wedding dress and commanded Siegfried to bugger her without much preamble right there in front of the kitchen sink. In her kidskin backpack there was a water-soluble clove-scented chapstick from The Body Shoppe that she favored and bending over and bracing her hands on her knees she’d directed Siegfried to fetch the chapstick out and smear it on liberally as a numbing lubricant. This chapstick she never used on her own lips of course but she’d been known to share it on location once or twice with various models and booking agents she didn’t much care for. When he’d slipped in with much gasping and groaning she asked him, firmly “Will you do as I say?” and in a very humble tone he said yes.
She said, “Good. Now, hold very still. I will do all the moving. You see?”
And he held very still with his hands bracing his back and his mouth hanging half-open with bomb-defusing suspense as she moved on him in the high-ceilinged gloom of his lit-only-by-a-tiny-fluorescent-light-under-the-buff-aluminum-kitchen-cabinets loft with an almost imperceptible corkscrewing of her serpentine hips. There curled a livid seam somewhere deep in her rectal lining just itching for the jab of a pointed dick. That irritable little seam was her ersatz clitoris. By slowly rolling and shifting and clinching and un-clinching she inched the tip of his organ towards that very spot, holding her breath, eyes closed, straining, knees weak, creeping up on a howl of satisfaction…
Without so much as discussing the matter with him, Sadie moved into Siegfried’s loft the very next week, bringing over a dozen suitcases in a taxi around dinner time, unannounced. He hadn’t eaten dinner yet and they went for a walk in the twilight along the Spree where the sun was warm butter on the cool green water as it set. Siegfried, with a massive old Leica hanging from his neck and dressed in the dashing vest and dented ball cap and worn khakis of a modern war correspondent, took the opportunity to lay out his Manifesto, seeing as they were now living together, and also to tell Sadie about his best friend Hansi Kraus…
…the I.P. photographer whom Somalians had beaten to death in the city of Mogadishu in 1993. Poor sweet little Hansi who loved black American culture like you wouldn’t believe and was executed by an African mob for his white skin. Siegfried described the weekend-long soul parties Hansi would throw in his cool pad on Wiener Strasse… described Hansi’s proudest possession: the old time American juke box stocked with mint-condition 45′s… What Does it Take (to win Your Love) by Junior Walker and the All Stars and Give it Up (or Turn it Loose) by James Brown and Love On A 2-Way Street by The Moments, etc., but even better: three different versions of Mbube, that unrivaled Meisterwerk of African pop, by the late great Solomon Linda… the first version (1940 or so) of moan-inspiring rareness and scratchy as a recording of Edison’s voice and it had to be transferred from the original massive clay 78rpm disc to the “modern” 45 on vintage equipment in Stuttgart to even play in Hansi’s jukebox… that’s how much passionate love and tender respect Hansi Kraus could show towards African culture.
Second version, recorded live in concert in 1957 by a white group called The Weavers and also not the easiest artifact to come by was re-titled “Wimoweh” after a homophonic approximation of the refrain and Hansi had that one, too. The third version of the song in Hansi’s jukebox was the one almost everyone knows: The Lion Sleeps Tonight, a Christmas hit for The Tokens in 1961, and this was the version that the drunks at Hansi’s soul parties would end up singing along with at three in the morning, cracking the glass in all the windows of the apartment block by singing the high parts en masse, though it was the original version, the version performed by its creator, the profoundly-cheated Solomon Linda (who received less than one percent of what he deserved in royalties), which Hansi would insist on.
It just so happens that Siegfried was watching CNN the night they reported Hansi’s lynching and Siegfried was eating spaghetti with ketchup for sauce when he saw the footage… glimpsed a near-naked barefoot limp white corpse being kicked and dragged and spat upon, and it may have been Hansi or it may have been one of the others in his doomed entourage but the sheer magnitude of the injustice was surely greater than whatever happened to Solomon Linda. Siegfried spent the next two weeks shouting accusations at whatever confused little African students were unlucky enough to cross paths with him, no matter from where on that continent they’d come to Berlin.
Siegfried said to Sadie I must be completely honest with you… since then I have had two feelings… A) that I need to do whatever I can do to insure that such a misunderstanding never again occurs in this world and B) a certain ambivalence towards blacks.
Siegfried talked and Sadie listened. He talked not only about poor Hansi but also about Baudelaire and Lou Reed and Thomas Bernhard and all about the Artist’s responsibility to his own Aboveness… above Work, above Morality… which is why in ninety-nine out of one-hundred cases women can’t really be Artists because they are too firmly grounded in the quotidian… the domestic banalities of clothing and food and children… too grounded to know Aboveness… even if they let themselves float a bit they get an earthy reminder once a month that no amount of detachment will enable them to ignore… and yet any woman truly capable of Aboveness is such a freak that her presence would be repulsive and sexually intolerable and the Muslims would be right to stone her. This last bit was a joke. Wasn’t it.
He said, as they passed closely by plain or unattractive couples strolling in cautious or giddy hand-holding silence, these people aren’t even living. He said do you know what the great mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss said when he was told, while he was in the middle of performing a great calculation, that his wife was dying? Siegfried beamed at her and shook his fist with admiration:
He said: please tell her to wait a moment until I’m finished!
Intermittently, during that rambling inaugural lecture on the topic of his Weltanschauung… his worldview… Siegfried would halt… at a corner or facing a weird old Gothic Church or the streaky hand-lettered storefront of a Turkish Social Club (through which you’d see the men at various little round tables in their cheap boxy suits, smoking and playing cards) and snap pictures. Siegfried said: Sometimes I go out without film in the camera and snap pictures anyway, to remind myself that it’s the taking, not the having, that counts… after which he leered at her significantly. Sadie had just started thinking: yes, I could be happy doing this for a year or two when she noticed that Siegfried’s speech was starting to jumble and slur.
And his stride was getting. It was becoming slightly limpy then staggery and… was he being funny? But his breath. It smelled… it began to reek… of chemicals. Acetone. Had he popped some evil powerful pill unbeknownst to her during the course of their conversation? One minute they were walking side by side like any slightly awkward man and woman on a date, crossing Berlin in the twilight, and the next thing Sadie knew this tall strange Siegfried was stumbling and ranting like a shit-faced belligerent drunk trying to walk across a trampoline.
He crumpled to his knees and then collapsed on the curb like a string-shorn marionette. This is not happening, she thought. Oh, okay: it’s a dream, yes? No. Her new boyfriend was thrashing about and screaming and foaming at the mouth and what was she supposed to do about it?! She barely spoke German!
He was having some kind of seizure right in front of the gates of a playground and kids from all over the little park ran to the gate to watch him flop and sputter on the sidewalk under the garishly cruel street light half-shaded by a tree and all Sadie wanted to do was back away… back away a few paces and turn and run because it wasn’t fair because he hadn’t even told her he was an epileptic! Or possessed by the devil or whatever the fuck his problem was. His lips were shiny black with blood and his eyes were vivid whites rolled up in his head and he was growling and banging his skull on the pavement as though refuting the untenable principle the pavement was intent on adhering to.
A cherubic redhead with a mouthful of corrective braces that made her look too young… in overalls with a two-year-old slung over her hip… calmly unlatched the playground gate and handed numb Sadie her squirming child. She knelt beside Siegfried and batted his flailing hands away and stuffed a Snickers bar in his mouth and even pressed his jaws together to start him chewing it. She glanced over a shoulder at Sadie and said, with a reassuringly competent British accent, “I’m assuming your friend never bothered to mention that he’s a diabetic.”
Sadie stared.
“I always carry a bit of candy in my pocket or a can of Coke or something in my purse just in case.”
Sadie blinked.
“A pretty good indicator is when they start behaving in an inebriated fashion.” Looking puzzled and shifting back on her haunches and standing up she added, “But then it got to the point with my Marco that I could always tell something was amiss when… he’d suddenly become this playful, affectionate… puppy, almost. Not like him at all, seeing as he’s a 14-stone Squaddie. Funny, isn’t it? When he was being lovely to me it always meant something was wrong.” She stared at Sadie and said, “You poor dear.”
She handed down to Siegfried a Kleenex to dab his mouth with and fetched her child back from Sadie and looked on with tired benevolence as Siegfried sat upright on the sidewalk, moaning and looking very much like he’d fallen out of a tree. The lens on his Leica was good and cracked. There was the slow blue flashing light of an ambulance pulling up on the pavement. The redhead squeezed Sadie’s arm and walked back through the playground gate towards where another daughter was calling from the floodlit swings.
How many embarrassing and/or terrifying diabetic fits has Siegfried jigged through since that first one, her initiation, wonders Sadie. Twenty? Twenty five? The prize-winner had to be the time his big fat mouth got him in trouble with a Prole in front of a Curry Wurst stand and he puddled into a seizure as Sadie pleaded with the Prole who had him by the lapels, preparing the head-butt. And yet he’s the one afraid of commitment! And if his racist Austrian mother has finally in some small way accepted the black African Sadie Olubodun in her precious son’s bed it’s only because Siegfried Stummfeldt needs a fucking nursemaid and nobody else, certainly no German bitch, is stupid enough to do this thankless job.
Don’t these guys have it easy compared to lit-critters?
As thrilling and rapid growth-inducing as my participation in our literary culture is, and it is, sometimes I wonder what might have been if I’d had sufficient confidence and self-esteem to pursue acting in a more serious way. I never really believed in myself in that arena, not like I do as a fiction writer. And it’s too bad, because looking over some memorabilia while in the midst of packing I came across these 1970 pics from my high school play–Flowers for Algernon. (In a crazy coincidence Claire Bloom starred in the movie Charly–different name, same sad story). Reading the pictures from the distance of time and space it appears to me that I might’ve had some innate talent worth cultivating. But I only took it so far. No real complaints. I’ve loved every minute of my life, so far. My co-star (heartthrob of the school) was David Neuman or Newman, not sure which. Ach, memory.
VINTAGE EMAIL
Sunday, May 2, 1999 4:08 PM
From:
“S. Augustine”
Add sender to Contacts
To:
“S___ B___”
S:
Back from helping drummer Ray move his boxed and unboxed
Junk Mass. (Of course, he had to move into a second-storey apartment, next door to the very apartment I helped him move OUT of eight months ago).
I was under a crumbling concrete cloud all day yesterday after my weekendly phone-talk with not-quite-Alma Mater. Ninety minutes of her ranting with peculiar vehemence about “World Issues” of little or no relevance to our actual relationship (Kosovo is the Topic of the Month) because she sits there watching the “News” all day and recycles the opinions of various “experts” in her tortured naps. I’m glad she has an opinion, but why is she ranting about THAT when we could be discussing ACTUAL PERSONAL ISSUES of historic value? I’ve been doing this phone thing with her every weekend since I re-entered The States (the second time) in spring of ’97 and this could have been the opportunity to dredge up all those best-left-unsaid things we’ve left unsaid. I try to steer the “conversation” (mostly her monologue) towards something relevant like that but it always goes back to this Poli-gossip KRAP she takes so mystifyingly PERSONALLY. Like, what the Hell does she care about Clinton’s foul red spit-slick cock? You’d think that he’d souped all over HER dress-
The utter futility of having a real talk with her depresses me. She’s an animatronic (sp?) feature in the Wax Museum of my Past. Can’t get through to her. It was the same with A___, near the end. It suddenly dawned on me that she needed a male figure to liberate herself from (she hates her omar-shariff-like Dad) and I, because I was the closest, was it. When I stayed with her last time on a visit to Berlin, after leaving the country for So Cal, I did ALL the cleaning and 90% of the cooking, but she would go into these RANTS about not wanting to be any man’s Servant or House Keeper! And I was like standing there wearing an f’ing APRON, holding a feather duster, going EH?
The similarity, I mean, is that in both cases it didn’t really matter whether I was THERE or not… they (Mother, A____ ) were, ARE, using me as an Inert Wall to bounce something off of. Nothing depersonalizes (or irritates) a feller quicker.
I healed my shit-spirit last night by watching “Husbands and Wives”. I experience a LITERAL physical effect… a quasi-euphoria or thrilled serenity. That must be why I went the direction I did, escaping the chaotic irritations of childhood for the rational deliriums of outsider adulthood’s Art. Lucky also my genes craved bohemian pussy instead of Drugs.
S
You were crying all over your Dreamsicle, eh? So glad you’re in a better place. We’re built for loving, that’s for sure. I’m rereading Flowers for Algernon (the cover says over 5 million copies in print). Can’t remember what happened to the lab mouse. Maybe he ran off with Stuart Little to live happily ever after in a West Village alcove studio? Or was he carried out of the laboratory four paws up?
“You were crying all over your Dreamsicle, eh? So glad you’re in a better place. ”
Nah, that wasn’t it, or the point of it, CDS Frances. It’s about how poor we all are at applying discriminating intellect and critical distance to the texts of our own lives. This was a concern of mine even as a teen, though I wouldn’t have put it in so many words.
What do we think we know and why do we think we know it? It hit me at around the age of 16 that a lot of the things I assumed to be true-without-question were loonshit; this minor epiphany came about when I was going to take a bath in the third floor of a house I had to myself in Philly (next door, across a driveway over which a domestic version of Minneapolis’ famous “Skyway” connected the complex, were the other two row-houses, the middle one housing a Funeral Home, owned by relatives). I had just eaten dinner and I was in the middle of waiting an hour before taking a bath when I realized I had been raised with this precautionary superstition because my mother had adapted/perverted the safety tip that to go swimming on a full stomach is dangerous. It hit me like a duffel bag of a drowned sailor’s last laundry that I had been involved in a ritualized minor absurdity for most of my life (despite being a “gifted” student of physics), waiting a full hour (after even the slightest snack!) before taking every night’s bath. And I thought: holyfuckingshit: this is just the tip of an iceburg (sic). And the vectors of the nonsense virus are so good at it because they so rarely submit themselves to critical analysis of any depth, relevance or originality. Bullshit is said and done copiously and passed-on.
And the relationship with A____ was literarily romantic and sexually exquisite but hopeless because it was a drama written long before I stepped into the role of the male lead and the director (her subconscious? “Culture”?) refused to allow much improvisation and there was damn sure no way the ending (tragically-romantic alienation; futility; not to mention a lyrical abortion) was ever going to change.
I took baby-steps back then in my liberation from Received Truth and Debate-Foreclosing-Pieties. Still, it amazes me how long it took me to shatter and lever-off the thick carapace of Waxy Intellection to the extent that any actual fresh-air reached the core of my perception of What I Think I Know and Why I Think I Know It. Which puts one so far out of Perlite Society, on so many levels, that my mother’s valiant refusals, later in life, to engage in anything resembling Thinking in Real Time strike me now as completely forgivable. While remaining, of course, Not an Option.
Beloved is patient with the program and Offsprung is a giggling beneficiary. 98% of the bullshit gets filtered around here before the kid even whiffs it. Eg: she announced, just the other day, after a visit from two boys (one 3, the other 7; she’s 4) that she doesn’t like “sharing” and it hit me that neither do Grownups and all the propaganda about teaching kids to “share” is revealed as utter bullshit the minute we imagine “sharing” our cars/i-pods/favorite meals with acquaintances (or total strangers, even), though it seems to make Grownups feel big about themselves to force their kids to hand over prized shit to be pawed by others. It took me a millisecond to work this out and I said, without missing a beat, “No, I don’t like to share my favorite things, either,” and her visible relief was my reward. Now she feels zero conflict (or pressure) when handing out old shit she no longer loves to kids who nevertheless appreciate the largess: Win/win… through critical analysis.
So that’s part of what I meant by posting that email.
“However, while Dewey might accept ‘sensibility’ as the name for the human receptivity to art, he would not characterize our response to art and literature as primarily an opportunity “to enage the mind,” especially if this means a retreat into an ‘inwardness’ that is itself the ultimately desired state, cut off from the projected space occupied by the work instigating the experience in the first place.”
Dan says this a lot; he’s forced to, because he can’t even enunciate the tenet at the core of that comment (and its cascade of primary corollaries) without having to fend off a wave of reflex naysaying. What any “movement” needs is enough people who agree, vocally (or “vocally”) with its precepts that it can grow, in time, to a point that isn’t obvious from reading the precepts.
In a less hostile environment, TRE would be minting conjectural marvels, all these years later, or burning down Normative Rome… instead of tying Dan up with the weekly chore of beating out brush-fires. The comment thread at TRE is neither hostile in a sharp enough way or supportive in a canny enough way and if he’d been subsidized to write a book, instead… maybe it would’ve been better? It’s a little frustrating for me. I don’t want confirmation: I want to be surprised. Dan is capable of doing it but he isn’t allowed.
Why does Dan need, over and over again, to affirm that water is mostly wet? Because there are a lot of stupid fuckers out there who think that yelling “ice!” at him, every single time, is new and clever.
You hit the nail on the head, comrade. I scream it wherever I am–the Opportunity Cost for tolerating their bullshit a second longer is too high a price to continue paying. It’s not just what he has to give us, it’s what we need to experience to grow. We are all totally and wastefully and needlessly, senselessly, stupidly, self-sacrificingly-for-no-good-reasoningly, starving ourselves of basic, wholesome and delicious nutrition. It’s as simple as that. For what? Brownie points with Ensure frosting. No fucking thank you.
I don’t think I need anyone’s LitCrit that badly, CDS Frances, but I can dig the spot from which you’re zooming.
[ed.'s note: crap, this edition of DIFFICULT TEXTS was too long to insert here, apparently; and a two-parter would be disconcerting]
Can’t you please link to it?
It’s nowhere online in a full version, CDS Frances! I’m sending in a sub instead…
THE DIFFICULT TEXT
This one is based on a death. Here’s the last email she sent me (4 days later she was destroyed)
hi there busy man
well iam not surprised iam not the only one who has
crazy stories like you told me in the last mail.iam
very sorry i have not responded that long.but i tell
you every time i come back to bali i get kind of
dipressed a little i know you think iam crazy iam here
sunshine,ocean etc.but as i live here its like coming
home so all rolls over me like a big wave…my best
friend also wasnt here when i arrived so it made more
difficult.i had one week of jetlag and one week party
with boyz…just going out.felt bad on top of all for
s___ [her daughter] since i didnt want to and couldnt spend enough
time with her.now one of my good friends thank god
arrived from berlin for a month which is great she is
very into sport so after a whole time of going crazy
here and beeing kinda lost i got back into
sport.waking up early etc.but s___ still some time
drives me crazy those terrible two’s…
your story reminds me just of one of my own.with the
girl you told me about.i have this friend in berlin
who kinda told me this time that he loves me i dont
know in which way but i came so unexpected i think he
got scared of what he said to me and we saw each other
after that less and less.until i left and did not even
tell him.i know this man for over 10years and i always
thought he was the love of my life but our pathways
always crossed in very strange situations.he has 3kids
from 3different women…what can i say.not the perfect
kinda guy i know.now once he knew from my girlfriend
that i already left he wants to write and would try to
come to bali.but i dont know.life is crazy after all
so just wanted to let you know that i understand your
situation.keep me posted.i will be back around 20.th
of november.lets try next time to hook up for coffee.i
will come without s____ .
so long take good care and all the best luck for your
business things.
talk soon
n
NOTES FOR A STORY ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED
I’m going to tell you a lie and you’re going to believe it. You will have no choice. I will tell you the truth, too, but that you’ll doubt. Also inevitable. The lie will be seductive because it is something you already know.
I didn’t love her.
I got the call on the train, at lunchtime, and believe it or not I was actually watching the news (the Nth iteration of it) on a ceiling-mounted monitor as I answered the phone, swaying with the train. A Hollywood coincidence. The Malaysian with his infuriating grin. I was thinking give me ten minutes with that cunt in his padded cell. I was thinking ten minutes and a hammer. I could do it in five. Hello?
-Is this Steven?
She was five foot seven, about one hundred and twenty pounds. I don’t know if they weighed her after; what the procedure is; what she even looked like. Put her on a scale in a plastic bag. I do know that she’d just signed up for a fitness course and that is what always angers me when I think about it, the time and effort she wasted. Getting back in the game. But then some stupid cunt with his grand ideas. His belief system. Some vast sea of stupid cunts with their million raised fists called a belief system.
Note: the fistfight we got into in Limbo.
Note: also, the argument in class with Herr Wieland about the word “Jew” in the story and how I then lost my job over it. He hadn’t written the story: I had. It was a published story. Wieland claimed the term was pejorative.
Note: tie it together. Something about violence. But what?
-Is this okay? Does it hurt?
-No, it’s good. It’s okay, it’s good.
-Can she hear us?
-She’s asleep.
-We shouldn’t wake her.
-Are you saying I’m noisy?
-I’m just saying.
-You’re sweet.
But I’m not. I am what I am, and I was doing what I wanted to her, without asking first, on the gold batik bedspread on the fold-out sofa in her borrowed living room, capitalizing on her position of relative weakness as a single mother of 28 without any real career prospects. New age music down low. Or a recording of the ocean with gulls dubbed in. The inevitable candles. The inevitably post-coital, anticipated-with-genuine-dread looks of searching depth. The kinds of looks that make one’s face feel as though it’s crawling with tiny people. I buried my nose in her hair. Went to the bathroom. Anything to escape those searching looks. Jogging with Ginger the next day, I was too out of breath to go into detail. I said,
“What can I say? The earth didn’t move.”
“For you or for her?”
He gestured at a rain-glazed croissant of merde on the sidewalk and we veered. We usually veer together; this time we veered apart. Significant? Ginger, whose man-of-the-world self-image has a tendency to grate at precisely the moment I most need his worldly advice, said, “Any woman who lets you fuck her in the ass is the kind of woman you should never under any circumstance fuck in the ass.”
“So the only acceptable option is forcible sodomy, in your opinion.” I was so out of breath that it ruined my timing and killed the joke.
“Were you wearing a condom?”
“Were you?”
“When?”
“Whenever.”
Last night she came back to me again: most of her hair burned off and half of her face crunchy black. I was thinking I hope I don’t see any bone. Don’t let me see the bones. Any skull or ribs or lidless eyeball. She was trying to kiss me and I was forced to be honest.
It was August of that year that I bumped into Indra while walking along Golt Strasse. I hadn’t seen her since the early part of the last decade, but walking along Golt Strasse on a Friday afternoon is a reliable method for bumping into long-lost Berliners of a certain generation. The veterans of this fossilizing in-crowd still haunt the area on weekends, shocking (and reassuring) each other with toddlers and wrinkles and receding hairlines, waltzing towards the same precipice with touching synchrony, clearing the way for the next great wave.
I knew her from the golden age on the cusp between my boredom and my stupid youth, an appetizing girl whose last name I never caught, one of the faces I’ll always associate with my first few ecstatic months in Berlin, before my increasing familiarity with the language, and its native speakers, ruined everything. Beware the expat who masters his German. We had always flirted and nothing more. We never risked touching (each assumed the other had fucked or been fucked too much), but had sometimes exchanged a certain kind of laden look on the packed dance floors of an era during which it now seems to me we all had been rather hysterically afraid to go home.
And here she was sitting in sunlight. That same black-haired girl, now a woman, or old enough to claim the title, sitting on a bench in front of a restaurant a few doors down from the café I had always seen her showing off in, looking almost exactly as she had a decade before. Half-Indian, father German, she was a mischling, as the Germans put it. Coin-colored, round-faced, voluptuous under spectacular black blades of hair. I jogged to her, grinning, and was rewarded with a crushing hug that felt more genuine than what I’d expect. Bent by the hug, I smiled meaninglessly at a toddler seated near her on the bench, hoping the child wasn’t hers, but she was.
“This is Jinny,” said Indra, introducing me to Jinny, but not Jinny to me (most probably because she couldn’t recall or had never known my name) as I took a place between them. I toasted Jinny with a Coke I ordered.
“To once being young,” I said, but Jinny just stared and Indra corrected me. She tapped her temple. “To staying young,” she smiled. “Both of us.”
Which made me feel extremely old. Several times during the conversation, Indra touched my arm and stared unwaveringly in my eyes and invited me to visit her in Bali. She painted a dreamy picture of a murmuring sea and laid-back days and Caligulan disco nights and I was touched to realize that she was looking for a man.
“Anyway” she said, as I eventually stood to leave, “Let’s hook up soon. We should really do something. It’s so good to see you again! Ciao!”
Jinny waved back (note: as though prompted) as I saluted a jaunty goodbye from the corner. It was the end of my lunch break.
I’d lucked into this incredible corporate gig, teaching creative writing to the executives of a company called Eurologika. The CEO wanted his underlings not only to speak and write English fluently but to be able to do so creatively. He wanted them to do that supposedly American thing called thinking outside the box. A dreadful cliché, yes, but I had a year’s contract.
The first day (the class was on a Friday afternoon, in a conference room with a view of the canal, when most people with good jobs were already wherever they’d be spending the long weekend) saw me facing down the bemused tolerance/ mild contempt, for non-famous artists, of the typical German of a certain class. If you’re so good, why haven’t we heard of you? What is it that you do, exactly, that a hundred other people off the streets, with a little time on their hands, can’t do as well or better?
I turned the tables on them: what is it that you do?
“We design and manage systems protocols for capital storage and retrieval patterns on the Hannover model,” sighed Herr Wieland, the youngest in the room, whose headset never, in the three months I knew him, left the bluish egg of his balding head.
“Can you repeat that in plain English?”
He couldn’t. Pressing my momentary advantage, I said: “Your race, your class, your sexual preferences, national identity, earliest childhood memories, religion, education and professional standing are all stories that you have been told, and that you re-tell to others, without having a clue what the techniques and mechanics of storytelling are all about. I’m surprised you’d rather be so sloppy and haphazard about something you will do for every waking moment of your life. And in your dreams, too, and long after you die, possibly. You will be storytelling, but you don’t even really know how to. Is that a satisfactory state of affairs?”
-Is this Steven?
-Yes.
-Steven, you don’t know me. This is Indra’s sister Padme.
I was on the train during the lunch break on the ninth Friday of the class. Classes were held from 14:00 until 15:00, then a forty five minute lunch break, after which another hour or so until I dismissed them to fly off to Ibiza or Gstaad. On this ninth Friday we were critiquing the first bona fide assignment I’d given them: write a 600-word story about another member of the class.
Note: every single story they handed in was about me.
Note: exactly 600 words each.
I was staring at that little fucker’s monkey-grin face on the monitor. I’d assumed it was Ginger, calling with a new number. I looked at the phone and said,
-Excuse me?
-It’s about Indra.
A light dawned as I frowned at the monitor. Note: It’s astonishing how much thinking we’re capable of in a millisecond. Goosebumps. The coroners had shipped the recovered cellphones to the next of kin.
-Wow.
-I second that emotion.
-Your English is pretty good, you know that?
-I had good teachers.
-Is that what this is about? Free lessons?
-(laughs) I’m so glad I called you. Are you glad I called you?
-Of course I am.
-You’re not just saying?
-Would I tell you if I were?
-What do you want to do now?
Note: again the dream. She’s burning and moaning and I’m wondering if it’s pleasure. Does it hurt to burn? In the dream I’m not sure. I turned all the lights on afterwards and watched a little television before falling asleep again. Coda?
(Work this in as dialogue-possibly ironic: I firmly believe that you fake your own reality. What is a lie but the truth with a little talent? What is life but death pretending? When a katydid pretends to be a leaf, do we call that lying? The hawk moth caterpiller resembles a snake, and I resemble a hawk moth caterpiller. I lie, I get laid, I move on.)
Herr Schlegel, who looks like a JFK who’s made it to his 70th birthday with thick white hair intact and now only dresses in black, is confused. He is Herr Wieland’s picador, just as Herr Brueckner, with his off-puns and aphorisms, is the rodeo clown who breaks things up when I challenge Wieland’s arrogance; Wieland’s default pretense that any information he doesn’t already own is trivial. Everyone else is the audience. The coliseum. Schlegel says, “This story of yours, Herr Instructor, is it true?”
Note: classes were cancelled after the 12th week, but I was paid for the year.
“Define true.” At which, of course, Herr Wieland snorts.
“Did it happen as you have written it?”
“Does that matter?”
“If it is fiction, it is mere pornography. If it is true, I think, in all honesty, one must say the writer has no shame.”
“By revealing his truth, the writer reveals the reader to himself, Herr Schlegel. It’s a sacrifice we’ve been obligated to make since before Mr. Joyce.”
“Nonsense. There is nothing of me in this story!”
Wieland picks up his copy of the stapled pages and flips them until he comes to an excerpt, which he reads with such excitement, such theatrical disgust and sarcasm, that he can barely pronounce the words, let alone contain himself.
It’s the posture of submission that turns you on: the oiled flesh, brown as furniture, rich in the flamelight. The ass up and the head down with all that hair gushing forth, gushing out, a fountain of crude oil spilling over the edge and pooling on the Persian carpet at the foot of the futon, the face inclined politely away, gasping at the wall in a prayerful rhythm, the grunts of assent or helpless recognitions. So many groans are just prayer, and so much of prayer is just begging, and almost all begging is the music of pain. Her guttural prayers and my flickering shadow on her wall and those glistening streaks of her mud on me: what’s more exciting than that?
“Goatfuckers.”
Ginger, with his Jesuit upbringing, says “Don’t start.”
“Don’t start what?”
“Don’t start that intolerance shit.”
We are back in Limbo, our old club, after two months of swearing off the smoke and the sweat and the alarming influx of rich kids in from Zehlendorf, simply because there is nowhere else to go. Twice we’d tried places where the sensation that hit us like a wall of digital locusts as we entered couldn’t even be identified as music. We’d tried places that looked and smelled like the decadent version of daycare. Sheepishly, we returned to the passé nightspot we’d sworn off, and three Turkish types in payment-plan suits and pastel loafers, sunglasses mired in their highly flammable jet-black hair, have pushed across our view of the dancefloor, tugging their blondes by the rings in their noses. Two are blondes, actually, and one is not.
I finish my drink. “What intolerance shit?”
Ginger says, “Oh, come on. Remember the day Indra flew back to Bali? You were so fucking relieved you bought me dinner. And now you’re playing the grieving fiancé. Boo fucking hoo.”
I pretend not to hear and move onto the dance floor, parting a metaphorical curtain, doing my American dance. Loose in the shoulders. Impossible for Germans and alien to Asians and instantly identifiable. That and my very good shoes. I dance from the periphery in, eyes on myself, easing towards the center. The three Turks and their escorts are trying out their modern dance lessons in the middle of the crowd and I am locked on the best-looking girl in their menagerie, the taller, thinner, slightly embarrassed and attractively reticent one in dark slacks, gold pumps and ruffled white collar and sleeves. She can’t be older than nineteen. Tossing her hair. They must have kidnapped her. First you look, and then you look away, and then they look, and then they look away. There’s a rhythm to it until your eyes meet and you can all but predict the future.
THE DIFFICULT TEXT
This one is fun; a wily exercise in POV (“This is still a third-person narrative. This is still Gwenda and this is my story”)…
CHILDREN ARE NOT THE FUTURE: THE OLD ARE, OBVIOUSLY; ARE YOU STUPID?
The hour was late, so late that he could expect either to witness unquiet ghosts walking the halls of the hundred-year-old house or fetching harlots fellating donkeys on internet porn. Okay, “fetching harlots” is grandiose. But he had an education. He wasn’t some whatever in overalls with plaster on his knees. He was unhappy with his girlfriend and what else was there to do? Other than be a voyeur to a donkey at this late late hour. Or watch the ghosts walk. Or let the ghosts watch porn.
He ejaculated to the volume-down sound of braying. He realized that he’d reached a sort of low point and the aftermath felt exactly like eating a stick of butter. Or two. You just want to back away from your own saturation. To masturbate to a brief film about a pretty girl putting a donkey’s penis in her mouth and gagging explosively on half a pint of probably caustic semen means what about how one feels about either pretty girls or donkeys? But what a great word.
Harlot.
-But donkey should be an adjective.
His girlfriend, Gwenda, asleep downstairs, was a lawyer. Sleeping a lawyer’s off-the-clock sleep, her spare-time sleep. A fitness fanatic with a nice enough body but a not-entirely beautiful face. In fact she was plain. In some lights she was not even that. Let’s be frank. While her worked-on biceps and trim waist were no illusions, her substantial bust had turned out to be somewhat of a mirage when he’d unwrapped it, greedy hands trembling, unravelling the bulges into lots of cotton wadding and air.
-What was the name of that song about vaginal moisture? A big hit. Early ’60s.
There’s cheap porn for those who like women and expensive porn for those who don’t and plenty for those who aren’t sure. Very few are sure. Like almost everything, it’s funny when you think about it because, think about it, the point is, okay, you sit through a film, not always short, waiting patiently for the payoff which is basically some male (human or dog or donkey) ejaculating. The chowdery or birdshittish or gasoliney semen, emitted by the spoonful or the cup. You’re saying you find this interesting.
Which is fine.
He was no male model but he was a lot better looking considering his gender than she was considering hers. In fact he was the best looking man she’d ever touched. Which may not be saying much etc. His relatively good looks were not an issue, initially, or, that is to say, they were an issue but in such a way that Gwenda benefitted from it. Call it Affirmative Action of the heart.
When he first saw her wearing that camelhair coat which rhymed almost religiously with her waved and buttery hair in the muted light of the subway tunnel under Christmas carols and timed festive electronics and everything. That stuff in the air called childhood. He knew straight off she wasn’t what you’d call attractive but she was something, in the aspirational competence of her effects, the hairshape and lipthickness and bustle-swell of the coat in its bosom, promising so much, though what, exactly?
-Da Do Ron Ron.
He used his sly system of saying hello to open things up. His system was I mock myself internally like Burt Reynolds while doing it but also he was quite serious in using that mustache voice he used that usually worked though the smallest part of him (the part he thinks of as his original infant humanity) felt silly. Hammy. But it worked.
-People are afraid of great actors.
It took him weeks to admit everything about her actual face to himself. By the night of full disclosure, when the makeup had grazed or sweated off and the roots had grown in and the wave had frazzled to lustreless wires, he was already, however, dangerously intrigued. He wouldn’t say smitten. Smitten was the word he was saving. “Smitten” he was guarding in a box.
-He had trained himself to speak in a lower register.
-He tweezed his eyebrows regularly.
When he made the decision to give off certain signals indicating he wouldn’t be averse to becoming the thing labeled boyfriend in her phonebook, it was with this in mind: that looks aren’t everything. And they aren’t. Weren’t. Are they? Were they? After the seven different kinds of hell his many moviestar-model-grade girlfriends had put him through, from his eighteenth year clear until the year before the night he pleasured himself watching a harlot giving pleasure to a donkey, he had come to the conclusion that a sweet-natured, forgiving and generous personality would be a welcome change in a bedmate.
No more dragon ladies, ice princesses, black widows or femme fatales. From now on: plain Janes and peppermint Patties. The Girl Next Door in an ugly suburb. He felt a sudden hunger for a lot more gratitude and much less condescension and coming to the conclusion that a ‘homely’ girl was the answer to his prayers felt like growing up. A Bar Mitzvah of sorts.
“Finally,” he thought to himself, as he kissed Gwenda’s wounded little underbite face that very first time after that sappy movie, a snowflake intact on her eyelid as he drew himself near, “you’ve learned your lesson.”
The smell of pine needles. His smile stuck shark-bulged in a blue ornament.
Things were great with Gwenda for the first few months. She laughed at many of his jokes and treated him to a detailed recap, every evening, of the day’s rich legal adventures. He discovered that during sexual congress on her living room carpet at a certain distance and angle from the floor lamp in muted light in the missionary position she resembled Meg Ryan, a famous actress of the era, but only in his suffused pre-orgasm deliria. This was a pleasant discovery.
He met her sister (slightly better looking but still rather homely though he did toy with the idea of etc), did most of the cooking, accepted expensive gifts and wondered if getting Gwenda pregnant was out of the question. He was toying with the voluptuous thrill of throwing his life away. The only thing that gave him serious pause was the thought of an ugly baby. Half-ugly at best. Accusing him with Gwenda’s small eyes and high forehead.
He shuddered.
One night, after the snow melted and all the childhood had vanished from the warming air, they fought rather passionately over something disproportionately trivial and she revealed herself, like a rainbow-colored cocoon splitting to reveal a fearsome black butterfly, as a strikingly effective bitch. Ugly faces are better at bitchery than beautiful ones, regardless of what the beautiful prefer to believe. He gazed upon the mask of her sarcasm-twisted features and thought: “She’s a bitch and she’s ugly,” and that’s when it dawned on him.
He said, “Do I look fat in this?” and her silence spoke volumes.
2.
Dearest Nate:
Perhaps I’m hallucinating on a grand scale, but when I go out in public and observe human beings at work and at play, I don’t see very much of this post-gendered world of yours that you defend against my arguments, as hard as I try (even squinting). For the most part, I see women/girls dressing up and/or pushing prams and I see men/boys horsing around, ogling cleavage, and scratching themselves. When I attend ‘fancy’ functions for people with better jobs and higher educations, I see women dressing up…and men ogling cleavage (and very discreetly, from time to time, scratching themselves). My married friends are either sexually bored-with-each-other and stable, or cheating like minks and totally comfortable indulging in passionlessly vicious verbal punch-ups in front of company.
I’m not saying I’ve never observed this state of PC Dyad Grace you seem to be eulogizing with your pep talks…I’m saying that PC Dyad Grace as I’ve observed it is generally larval, and, approximately six months into a relationship, moults its golden skin to become the twin brown moths of the lovable slob and the tolerable nag (before time gradually prefixes each adjective with an ‘un’ and an ‘in’, resp.)
The day I stumble into a happy, egalitarian, romantically sex-healthy relationship, I’ll lose about 70% of my friends, who will rightly consider my new found bliss to be a freakish and unforgivable betrayal. As post-humanly above reproach as my mate and I will be to each other, I’m hoping he’ll still get an atavistic thrill out of the fact that I can twist open jar lids, without much effort, that he couldn’t dream of budging. And me? I’ll get an atavistic thrill out of the way he looks dripping naked and pink after a shower. Anyway, you may call me a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.
Hope this letter finds you safe, warm and very dry,
Ain’t college life wonderful?
(The sarcasm of a spoiled brat, I know)
3.
Thursday evening I am on my way home from the studio. It is about 9pm. Half a block from the front door of our apartment (the large one, the old one with high ceilings; the one Ingrid inherited from her father), I pass a figure, a noirish cartoon of mercury arc light and shadow wedged in a doorway, a little guy with a cell phone, Italianate, pleading in heavily accented German, “I love you, I love you, please…please…tell me what I must do.” It’s a scene from a movie with subtitles I’ll never decipher and sub-plots I’ll never know. And yet it’s the oldest movie on Earth. It’s pre-Colombian, pre-Christian, pre-English.
I love you, I love you… please…
I’ve been there, I’ve cried for love, I’ve never pleaded, I’ve never begged for it, never offered to die or kill for it, but I have cried real tears, tears that felt like they were cut right out of the jelly of each eye with a dull blade but always I was shrewd enough to know that begging never helps. Some of my ex-girlfriends, the ones who no longer speak, who don’t answer my calls and letters, who duck me on the street or actively propagandize against me five, ten, fifteen years after the fact might call me a womanizer. Simply because I didn’t stop at any of them in the long search for my happiness.
What am I, a ball on a roulette wheel?
I’m sure they ascribed it to a short attention span, or adolescent sexual whatever it is, the fact that I often showed signs of restlessness a month or two into it, but nothing could be further from the truth. Both parties (I sound like old Gwenda here: the plaintiff and the defense) are well aware when the fit isn’t right, but only one party ever seems to have the will or the courage to admit it and utter the magic phrase that will dissolve the contract.
-I love you, I love you…please…
The desperation in that guy-in-the-doorway’s voice: I’m haunted by it. It could power an Edward Albee play. A gypsy camp. The energy of an ego collapsing. He reminds me of what it’s like to be young, although he isn’t so young, he looks a bit like Peter Lorre, but being young is being desperate. In my middle-aged wisdom I know too well that if things don’t work with a woman, she isn’t The One and if she isn’t The One, why bother wanting her so much? The answer to that mostly rhetorical question, speaking from experience, is prestige. Prestige plus sexual intoxication, although sexual intoxication is so closely circuited with prestige that it’s technically inaccurate to list them as separate values. Who knows what Peter Lorre’s girlfriend…or ex-girlfriend…looks like. We can’t say with any certainty what his scale of reference is but it’s clear from the force of the pain in his pleading that this woman is a commodity he desperately wants to keep. A beautiful woman is a poor man’s Porsche.
You’re wrapped around each other in bed, auras blended, indulging in sticky warm penetrative intercourse. That high clear chime of addiction you detect above the mechanical comfort of humping is the thrill of possession. You’re thinking, as you pin her gently by the wrists, decorating her perfect face with a garland of worshipful kisses, “She’s mine, all mine, only mine.”
-Maybe she’s a 19 year old girl from the suburbs of Minnesota who looks like Grace Kelly and pees with the bathroom door open, charming you with her bravery. Because what if?
-Maybe she attends a tony hairdressing academy where half the instructors are snobby vain homosexuals who walk as though they’re wearing capes and the other half are aging heterosexual operators, sinewy-single and baked-looking, Roy Scheider in “All That Jazz”.
-Maybe they all hate you, you, a poor boy, a college boy who drives a fifteen year-old rust-scabbed hatchback and owns just three pairs of scuffed shoes who gets to fuck this flickeringly cinematic blonde and all they can do is glare when you drop her off in front of the academy on a brilliant August morning with a lingering kiss plus nuanced references in posture and smirk to sexual taboos that were breached the previous night.
-Or maybe that morning.
-They glare through the green glass walls of the provincially fancy, faux-Manhattan wellness and hair salon and if they could know that you and she had spent the summer in a menage-a-trois with your most recent ex, a tall brunette with cut-glass features and a mild gas problem, a heretic with something to prove in her second-hand suits from travelling salesmen who ranged from Iowa to the Dakotas to Missouri and Illinois, all three dancing together to Bauhaus in neoned clubs and sneaking mathematical fucks in the toilet, they’d hate you even more.
-You want to call me “sexist” because it will feel good.
-We all want to feel good.
Like many young Bohemian romantics, I believed in an anthropomorphic Universe when I was too young to know better. I believed in a Universe that was both aware of my existence and concerned with the delicate work of guiding me with signs and nudges through the maze of its horrors and rewards. Like many middle-aged men who have subsequently suffered the scarred disillusionments of common experience, I went from the comfort of my lyrical animism to the bleakness of abject disbelief almost over night: the ‘Universe’ became a vast black mechanical box of perfect coldness and harsh light and I was nothing but a molecule bouncing around in it.
-She’d do a mild kind of hotdogish fart and dare you to say something.
-He wrote none of the above. The above is an impersonation in a deep-yet-fey voice. This is still a third-person narrative. This is still Gwenda and this is my story.
4.
From the age of nine, she’d adopted her Aunt Aggie’s husband Nate as the adult to listen to and emulate in general and follow around like his somber little potbellied squire. When she was free to do with her time as she pleased, she chose to spend it in Uncle Nate’s company. The comedy that she and Nate presented to anyone who might catch them entering a room together or walking up the street in tandem to buy the morning Tribune, two chins lowered and four hands in four pockets, was far from apparent to her at the time. This strange rapport with Uncle Nate, to whom she wasn’t even related by blood, was baffling to the adults in the family but clear enough to her, if not to Nate. Nate was the first person on the planet Earth who’d asked her opinion on an important issue and she’d appreciated that.
They’d been sitting on packing crates after lunch. Nate had come over to help another one of his wife’s sisters to move and his future shadow and his future shadow’s mother had been conscripted, too. It was a depressing little apartment they were gathering into boxes and the one to which all the boxes and furniture were going wasn’t even far enough away to play a good game of running bases between former and future front stoops. It was right next door in a long block of red brick buildings with green paint on the trim. The dented rain gutters and the fake shutters, screwed to the wall.
She was seated in what she thought of as a grownup slouch on a packing crate in a warm spring breeze from the open door when Nate, who was seated on the adjacent packing crate, reading a magazine while everyone waited for the caretaker with his pickle-reek to come and confirm on a checklist that no fixtures had been stolen nor walls violated by nails larger than a certain size and that working lightbulbs had been left in the bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and living room sockets. Nate looked over his shoulder at her, obviously disturbed by something he’d just read.
“Let me ask you something, kiddo. Honestly. What does God want from us humans?”
Obviously, in retrospect, it was a rhetorical question. It tickles her now to think that her relationship with Nate (dead ten years next Friday) had been based, initially, on a misunderstanding: a nine year old’s misapprehension of the proper protocol for dealing with a rhetorical question. She’d taken the apparent request for input seriously, flattered beyond any previous value that she’d managed to experience, and worked on the problem with Jesuitical diligence all day, carrying boxes of silverware and small appliances and bags of linen out one door and right back into the next one like a robot, silent, frowning, lips very vaguely mobile with a secret symposium convened to address Nate’s question. At the end of the day, when every item in flat A had been transferred to identical flat B and the grownups were vetting the notion of ordering two or three large pizzas as an unprecedented treat, she approached Nate when they had a moment alone and said,
“He wants us to stop.”
“Who wants us to…?”
“You asked what God…”
Uncle Nate was genuinely impressed and so perfectly deserving of his new shadow that he suppressed his first impulse to get his wife’s or sisters-in-law’s attention in order to announce, “This kid’s a damn genius! Did you hear what she just said?” He played it cool instead.
“Could be,” is all Nate said, with raised eyebrows and from that day they were almost a father and daughter arrangement. Maybe closer than that. Like salt and pepper; snow and hot cocoa: Nate and his special little Gwenda.
-He taught her the surefire method for charcoal fires.
-He taught her that arm wrestling is all in the wrist.
-He taught her to think before saying thankyou.
-He taught her that Bruce Lee was genuine and that David Carradine was bullshit and that a faculty for detecting the difference could be applied to almost anything in Life.
-Why does Time consume perfectly happy children for the sake of producing all these wretched adults?
5.
I once quipped to someone that suicide is a lot like smoking or drinking: if you don’t try either before the age of nineteen, you probably never will. But I didn’t know what I was talking about when I made that witty remark and there’s some evidence to suggest that the wittier the aphorism, the less it will actually apply to real life. It would have terrified me to know back then that so many years after the remark, I would have nothing and no one and no apparent reason to live. Despite my money; my professional success; my knowledge.
Burdened and blessed with the kind of intelligence that made me the little star of my grammar school and had me bagging college-level reading scores in fifth and sixth grade, I am living proof that while it may be the case that the moderately above average in intelligence have the world on a string, the freakishly gifted are in for tons of trouble.
I remember fresh workbooks were handed out in the first week of second grade, intended to last for half the school year; however, knowing no better, I completed every exercise in my workbook by the end of the day, oblivious to whatever it was the teacher was droning on about at the blackboard while I breezed through the (to me) elementary exercises. All the answers I had filled the blanks with were correct, but rather than being amazed, Mrs. Johnson was angry. And rather than feeling special as a result of my feat, I felt guilty and ashamed.
Any hope of ‘fitting in’ was lost long before that point, and so what it occurred to me to do was apply my intelligence towards money-making and a solid position in society.
Now what?
6.
-A photo of Gwenda at 15.
She had a mild crush (her only foray into what could have been a life-affirming lesbianism if only she were wired that way) on the girl who took the picture and wrote tons of poetry that summer.
i.
a plum is waiting
at the center of the world
for just the right tongue
ii.
is a plum a plum
before you have eaten it?
or just a theorem?
iii.
this plum got warm in
the sun and smelled better than
every one of us
iv.
refrigerated
cinematographically
blue plums at midnight
v.
these plums are famous
for never being those but
what if you mixed them?
vi.
this artist painted
nothing but plums until he
finally got one right
vii.
don’t pay me dollars
pay me in plums but just one
very lovely plum
viii.
la petite mort is
the state of brief amnesia
of the plum just loved
7.
I cried shamelessly in the presence of the doctor and her very young trainee nurse, the first time in my life that I had let myself cry in front of strangers. Part of my blubbing was lack of sleep (the contractions came at 5 a.m.) and part of it was the pain I knew that my lover had gone through to bring our child into the late morning light of the sun. But most of it was mingled grief and gratitude about the distance I had come to the first day of the life I’d always dreamed of. With the circumstantial poetry of so many significant coincidences in this life, the birth happened on the first sunny morning in a months-long block of cold gray gloom. The tears in my eyes as I looked at her refracted brilliant sunlight. I had packed CDs for the birthing room that we never had a chance to use but, still, some delirious hybrid of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy and Bo Diddley’s Little Girl blasted in my head as I wept and my daughter came forth and the Past made its exit with a blast from my beloved’s operatic screams and yes, yes, yes, our baby girl is beautiful.
“But the chimps’ awareness of the mistreatment of others as well as themselves also lays the groundwork for complex social interactions more like those of human groups, they note.”
Post hoc ergo propter hoc…no sarcasm intended, this time. Either the Judo-Christian creation myth was accurate, and humans just kind of appeared on the scene out of the Jahweh-enchanted blue, or human communities gradually evolved from out of near-human communities… in which case the moral framework of the near-humans was passed on to the moderns. And where does this moral framework come from, if not from The Bearded, Vaguely Levantine, Anus-Free Sky Giant? The Life-or-Death requirement of Community Stability. A community of under-pressure hominids will not cohere very well against cheetahs, famine and other hominids if they are busy fucking about with each others’ property (Thou Shalt Not Steal) and raping each others’ daughters, mothers and sisters (Thou Shalt Not…. oh, wait, the Judo-Christers don’t bother with that one) and bumping each other off (Thou Shalt Not Bump Each Other Off). On the other hand, War probably came in handy… ergo the overwhelming popularity of the greatly-revered practice to this very day. Anyway, no need to draft in the Bearded, Vaguely Levantine, Anus-Free Sky Giant to explain any of that…. or to get precious about the power and glory of human so-called morality.
[ed.'s note: again the disclaimer: if the image isn't of Berlin, I probably got it HERE]
“The brains of elite soldiers can respond faster to signs of anger than normal, which could help them detect threats and make the difference between life and death when under fire.”
Because it makes a big difference whether that guy with a rocket-launcher is miffed or not, kids
“The scientists found the insula, a region deep within the brain, activated more strongly in Navy SEALs when they saw angry faces than when compared to ordinary men.”
Did a Navy Seal write this sentence?
doesn’t really explain why they kill so many of their own side in what must be one of the most chilling expressions – “Friendly Fire”.
Perhaps tank and jeep drivers are now being trained not to frown or display any negative expressions in case they activate the SEALS errrm brains.
Reminds me that The Manchurian [ed's note: "Mancunian"] Candidate ( original version ) has just been re-released in the UK.
Richard Condon’s original book now looks like kitchen sink realism.
When I’m drawing I often think that no matter what elaborate design or pattern you make there will be something in nature that has already beaten you to it.
Similarly I can imagine that any outlandish story-line you can think of writing has already been done or considered by agencies like the CIA or their ex-Soviet equivalents.
Steven Yes The Mancunian Candidate sublimnally programmed to take a candidate for the General Election out everytime he hears the phrase “It’s time for a change”. The 3 main party leaders wouldn’t have survived the first minute of the first hour of the first morning of the first day of the campaign — their supporting cast of M.P’s would maybe have lasted 2 or 3 days but it would have been a catch-phrase led mass-slaughter by Thursday..
After the first debate where the 3 stood on stage behind glass lecterns and bored people to death there was quite a good response from some Twitterstream “Worst Kraftwerk gig ever”.
When I’m drawing I often think that no matter what elaborate design or pattern you make there will be something in nature that has already beaten you to it.
Similarly I can imagine that any outlandish story-line you can think of writing has already been done or considered by agencies like the CIA or their ex-Soviet equivalents.
Odd how Lombardi’s drawings look like those outsider art maps where obsessives connect incidents which have significance for them together to form patterns.
I don’t mean this as a flip way of dismissing his work but there’s obviously a hair-line of difference between lucidity and having, as it were, driven your coach over the cliff..
I’d say that any Artist worth her/his salt is an obsessive, Comrade Ed and, further, that any sensitive soul with a reason-and-justice-loving mind has his/her coach driven over the (ever-lifting) cliff several times a week. I think Lombardi’s case is interesting; Artists have such a terrible struggle getting attention that it’s hard to imagine one hanging himself just as the attention really started to come; afterward, sure… I could see a jaded, bloated Jeff or Damien topping themselves…
Most certainly. When preparing to make a new show I do drawing after drawing after drawing.
Not to storyboard or design an object ( although that can happen ) but to be able to think my way into the mood of what we want to create. Within those drawings there will be ones that eat themselves, ones that are done just to sit still and ones that I know will be a crap idea even before I draw them, biut if I don’t get it down on paper I fear the idea will linger and fester in my head. So put me down as a superstitious obsessive.
re: suicide. I wonder if the exposure and the resultant pressure of anticipation of what he will do next exacerbated some form of depression. I used to be annoyed that no critical attention came our way but nowadays I’m so glad we fly under the critical radar. Especially if the critics are self important knob-heads like Ian Beale below.
Of course a critical kick can be a good thing but the critics on offer to give you that kick don’t inspire confidence.
“Ian” Beale sounds a crumb less comical, I think; the character “Nigel” could only possibly be trumped by a “Clive” or “Rufus” in the All-Philistine Online Panto Lit Crit Follies
PS As an example of Nigel’s Nigelness, here’s an arse-schlurpping comment he deposited at the end of something Wood wrote at The New Republic before swaggering slightly uphill from that to the NormLib New Yorker; I’ve seen Nigel schlurrp a lot of arse on his way to the lower middle of Litblogglandia but he has yet to top this one (retrieved from an email that was doing the rounds in early 2008):
| Posted by Nigel Beale
3 of 3 | warn tnr | respond
Thanks for another beautifully written review James. I particularly liked your “accidental air,” and art healthier than its own sickness. Reference to Aristotle’s convincing impossibilities also useful. I haven’t yet read Atonement. I plan to, despite, or perhaps because of, a disappointing introduction to McEwan. Amsterdam suffers from what you allude to:ironically, by imposing symmetrical structure on the novel McEwan undermines efforts to sketch ‘the perfect arc,’ truncating what could have been a much better, more significant read. Anyhow, best of luck at the New Yorker. You should have fun with Paul Muldoon.
I was reading Nigel Beale’s website, just going through and being more and more stunned by the idiocy that permeated damn near everything he published online. At that point I googled “NIGEL BEALE IS A FUCKING TWAT.” This is the first thing that came up.
Thank you so much for this.
Comment by Kate June 21, 2009 @ 7:39 am
“As an example of Nigel’s Nigelness, here’s an arse-schlurpping comment he deposited…”
I’ll double your urp and add a bleeeurgh. Plus a wet-wipe to clean the unctuousness off my lap-top.
A subtext so bleedin’ obvious that if contained in a novel presumably Nigel would be the first to slam it for its lack of subtlety.
[ed.'s note: helpful hint to careerist arse-waxers: you can write awful little notes like that, of course, but not for public display; too many witnesses, innit?]
WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU KNOW AND WHY DO YOU THINK YOU KNOW IT?
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.
(excerpt)
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
[ed.'s note: again the disclaimer: if the image isn't of Berlin, I probably got it HERE]
THE DIFFICULT TEXT
(until I can get back to the bunker pagoda at some point before next week, Comrades Lurking and Explicit; pop some corn and…)
Qua
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Puppet in a Tunnel
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Tourerism
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Every Death an Opportunity
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Fake Real Fake
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Speaking of Flame Wars (this is, remember, the Flame War edition of TET): a “referrer” link led me back to the following old comment thread at TRE. It’s a pretty good one; a fair little microcosm of Litblogglandia, with Nigel “Beagle” Beale being James Wood’s biggest local suck (how does Cap’n Woody feel about the fact that his boosters tend to be about 25 IQ points, on average, dimmer than his detractors?) and Jim H. doing his Normlib-Neocon fence-walk (Christ, how did I miss the implication of Jim’s “Genesis” ref the first time around?) and “Luther Blisset” being reliably intelligent (and not citation-happy for an academic; nicely rare) and me with my flaming sword. The original post of Dan’s was this:
May 29, 2008 The Bizarre Extremes of Human Existence
Citing a recent news item relating bizarre human behavior, Peter Kerry Porter at his blog Read, Write, Now writes:
. . .one looks at this stuff published daily and has to say helplessly that Dickens and O’Connor and Faulkner have nothing on this. Stephen King could do no better in calling up the bizarre extremes of human existence. No wonder contemporary readers have little taste for fiction, and novelists feel compelled to present their fictions as spurious memoir. With a world as it already is beyond all imagining, what role for the writer who wants to imagine what is not.
This is reminiscent of Philip Roth’s essay from the early 1960s in which he too lamented the fact that truth is often stranger than fiction:
. . .the American writer. . .has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.
There is certainly much truth in these observations, and if we conceive of the fiction writer’s task as one by which the writer depicts a set of characters and events that transcend ordinary reality in their extremity, evokes a landscape that strikes us as intensely strange yet still faithful to “actuality,” then perhaps fiction cannot compete with reality. But is this the writer’s task? Should fiction be in competition with reality in a search for the “bizarre extremes of human existence”?
In its way, the notion that fiction should be engaged in such a search only reinforces the underlying idea that realism is the novel’s natural mode, that the novel exists to “record” reality, even if it is reality in its most outrageous manifestations. If William Dean Howells believed that the novel provided an opportunity to record the ordinary course of human reality, the 21st century realist may choose to portray that reality through its outliers, its most outlandish displays of human behavior, but the goal, to re-present “reality” as it is lived (by someone), remains the same. Peter qualifies his own conclusions about the difficulty of the writer’s job by adding that “Imagination isn’t just an effort to invoke the extreme, but to shape it, to tame it to a tale,” but while this begins to consider the art involved in fiction’s confrontation with reality (“to shape it”), it finally equates that art with pruning and trimming, with taking the edge off reality (or maybe sharpening it) rather than creating something new–an addition to reality rather than a meticulously groomed version of it.
All fiction begins in reality–where else could it begin?–but why must it end merely in offering a plausible version of “real life”? Is the goal of writing fiction to lure back those readers so obsessed with the superficial appearance of reality that they’ve turned to memoir? Writers of fiction ought to take the opportunity to transfigure and re-imagine the real rather than just describe it. More than that, they should be seeking out fresh ways of using language to invoke the real, fresh ways of making language itself up to the task of engaging with all levels of “human existence.” The writer’s job is to “imagine what is not” first of all in imagining what words can do that they haven’t yet been made to do.
May 29, 2008 in Realism in Fiction | Permalink
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Again, one of my (and apparently your) favorite perennial topics. Let’s make another run at it, shall we? It seems to me (wearing my fiction-writer hat now) the artist’s task is to create a reality with a set of values, principles, rules, settings, inhabitants, etc., that works in certain narrative dramatic ways. Full Stop. This is how that thing we call “fiction” can comprise, say, Dickens and Calvino, King and Connelly, Dick and Delillo (I could go on…).
The critical venture—and here I think I’m reading James Wood aright—is to compare that fictional reality with his/her own preconceptions or sense of reality and pronounce on the plausibility (or credibility or lifelikeness or lifeness) of that reality; accept, reject, approve, dislike, etc.
There is that further critical venture (let’s call it hermeneutical) which is to articulate the world/the reality presented in the text in all its complexity; this Mr. Wood does not necessarily feel it is his business to do—even though this is really to get at the nub of ‘how fiction works.’ The hard work of exegesis and interpretation does not, as a rule, appear in the periodical review format.
Best,
Jim H.
Posted by: Jim H. | May 29, 2008 at 02:43 PM
Many things to be said on this subject, but just as an aside: given the way such essays have regularly popped up over the decades, I wonder when that time was when American reality (or human existence) was so normal, or so stimulating, healthful, and glad-making, that fiction easily outstripped even the most strenuous endeavors of Reality. Must have been some time to have lived.
Posted by: Chris | May 29, 2008 at 02:51 PM
JH:
“The critical venture—and here I think I’m reading James Wood aright—is to compare that fictional reality with his/her own preconceptions or sense of reality and pronounce on the plausibility (or credibility or lifelikeness or lifeness) of that reality; accept, reject, approve, dislike, etc.”
Aha, so *that’s* why no one reads Kafka. The defining quality of a written fiction that pleases us is never an *engaging vitality of imagination*, rather, it’s about “plausibility/credibility/lifeness”!
Confoundingly, “lifeness” is impressionistically vague (and therefore rhetorically capacious) enough a term for any book the reviewer fancies to qualify as having some… so… I still find myself yearning for an absurdly reductive gimmick with which to super-simplify my authority-starved taste in Art. Sigh.
But, enough fun. Should the writerly task/readerly voyage/ critical venture really diverge so dramatically? Is it possible to match up the tastes and temperaments from each of the three categories so as to leave everyone more or less happy? That is, can readers who like this “lifeness” stuff read writers who indulge in it, as recommended by critics who value it? Likewise, for the reader who finds the mechanical conventions of narrative trompe l’oeil, particular to “lifeness”, tedious as hell: are such readers allowed to tell “lifeness” to take a hike?
If only we knew!
Posted by: Steven Augustine | May 29, 2008 at 04:23 PM
This was exactly Alejo Carpentier’s position in his essay where he coins the term “the fabulous real,” or what has come to be called “magical realism.” He argued that reality in the former Caribbean, Latin American, and South American colonies was so extreme, so unbelievable, that the artist had to embrace an aesthetic that allowed for the representation of such experience. His *The Lost Steps* is an excellent novel along these lines.
Posted by: Luther Blissett | May 29, 2008 at 07:39 PM
Stephen: I read Kafka. Hell, I had tea once with Borges and, guess what, he was flesh and blood just like the rest of us in the room! I assume Kafka was as well since he succumbed to the Consumption. The three paths converge in/on/around the text and its pleasures.
Luther: Yes, sometimes it takes the magical to express the real. Vide: Genesis.
“To the preliterate man of integral vision a fable is what we would call a major scientific truth…” Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, “War and Peace in the Global Village.” So, to project: our fables of today … ? N’est pas?
Best,
Jim H.
Posted by: Jim H. | May 29, 2008 at 08:46 PM
“More than that, they should be seeking out fresh ways of using language to invoke the real, fresh ways of making language itself up to the task of engaging with all levels of “human existence.” The writer’s job is to “imagine what is not” first of all in imagining what words can do that they haven’t yet been made to do.”
This sounds a great deal like this:
“The true writer, that free servant of life, is one who must always be acting as if life were a category beyond anything the novel had yet grasped; as if life itself were always on the verge of becoming conventional.”
Which of course is how Wood ends How Fiction Works.
I think many of those who putatively disagree with him, wouldn’t, if they really read his text closely.
Jim H: As for hermeneutics, while Wood may not formally provide us with a ‘theory’ of interpretation, he does I think provide some of the most thoughtful direct exegesis and interpretation that you can find around today.
His ideas on character and ‘lifeness’, agree with them or not, give us a pretty clear indication of how he attributes merit…
What specifically are you suggesting when you say that he doesn’t get to the nub of how fiction works?
Posted by: Nigel Beale | May 31, 2008 at 05:32 PM
“as if life were a category beyond anything the novel had yet grasped”
In my opinion, here is the difference between us: Wood wants writers to grasp beyond existing categories in the name of “life” I want them to do so in the name of writing, of literature.
Posted by: Dan Green | May 31, 2008 at 07:35 PM
“I think many of those who putatively disagree with him, wouldn’t, if they really read his text closely.”
I love this sophomorically condescending argument more, every time I read it. I love the sheer doggedness of its repetition, presented, as it always is, without a *modicum* of reasoned support. The deployment of superlatives does not an argument make.
Given the apparent case you make for Wood’s infallibility (ie, to disagree with him is to misread him), Wood’s task (and yours, by extension) is to show his naysayers as *never right*; Wood’s naysayers’ task is to show, merely, that Wood is sometimes wrong. Show how the latter has never happened (or how the first case always does).
Stamping your feet and calling him “superb” just won’t cut it.
Wood makes broad proscriptions about what *can’t*, or *shouldn’t*, be attempted or allowed in the crafting of a “useful” sort of fiction, and rests the weight of his argument on something as amorphous as the notion of “reality”, and the *thinking* reader reacts instinctively with the reasonable response that there is more than one way to skin a cat; to each his own; come down off your imperious hobby horse, feller, and stick to the humble illumination of treasured texts.
The *thinking* reader is quite able to unpack a wedding cake of a sentence, such as the following, in order to identify its philosophical heart as frothy, sugared lard:
“The true writer, that free servant of life, is one who must always be acting as if life were a category beyond anything the novel had yet grasped; as if life itself were always on the verge of becoming conventional.”
What, pray tell, does that actually *mean*?
Life as a “category” of *what*? Things to do before ceasing to exist? Ie, Experience? As opposed to… ? If we can’t find another “category” of *something* against which “Life” is juxtaposed, we’ll have to conclude that the word “category” is filler in this sentence; strike it out (making the sentence *sound* less technical, sadly).
“Free servant of Life”: whose Life? One’s own? When? “Life” as the abstract congregate of everything that has, and will have, ever “lived”? Gay Weimar Bordello “Life”? The American greeting-card, t-shirt sense of “Life” (a bowl of cherries; a dame; a roller coaster…)? The dorm-room quasi-philosophical pot-fueled sense of The Great Oh Wow?
Or just another “poshly”, Nabokov-irking generality? And how does one “serve” this vague, clumsily personalized concept? (Oh, if only Nabokov were around to go after Mr. Wood’s big, bold, vacuous terminology today). Does one “serve” “Life” by planting flowers? By writing, erm, Novels that *everyone on Earth will treasure forever, regardless of culture, era, temperament or literacy*?
And what about this junk word “acting”… surely Wood could have come up with a better verb than this? How about “writing” or “thinking”, for starters? Is Wood referring to every minute of the writer’s life, or the time that writer is actually typing away, or does working through a plotline on the tram count, too, and, if so, how would “acting” a certain way, on the tram or the can or over the keyboard, influence the resultant text?
Next: the word “conventional”. “Conventional” in what sense? Surely, in the larger sense, until such point that gravity reverses polarity or the melting point of marble becomes water’s former boiling point, Life is *eternally*, irremediably, “conventional”.
On the socio-economic level, the word is relative, obviously; “conventional” for a 55 year old French banker, c. 1935, is possibly “exotic” for a 20 year old Jamaican guitarist on the poppy trail, c. 1968. Are any two lives so similar, in every detail, that “conventional” can ever be used in a *factual*, as opposed to statistically-flattened, or conversational, sense?
Show me absolutely *anything* that Mr. Wood would confidently describe as “conventional” and I can show you quite a few of the many ways in which it is decidely *not*. The word is either absolutely applicable, or not at all: same difference: it’s meaningless in its sentence.
So, the Jamaican guitarist, “acting” as though the ungraspable category “Life” were on the verge of becoming “conventional”, takes Mr. Wood’s vague advice and writes a novel that manages to surprise him (the guitarist), and all of his friends … while boring the poor banker to death. Success? Failure?
Or are we back to Square One, with *some* readers preferring one sort of thing, and others preferring something quite different, and Mr. Wood (with his endearingly aphid-like dependents) a self-appointed hall monitor, blowing his whistle and tattling on the writers who break his little rules by running too fast or otherwise horsing around?
Or, put it this way: there are some who cannot *abide* the works of Henry James; prove them *wrong*. I’m willing to wager you probably think you *can*, but that just proves how ill-equipped you are to argue *any* of this.
How about this for a valediction, instead of Mr. Wood’s:
“The true writer will write. And write. And write. And not everyone will get it.”
Some will like the results, others won’t, some books will sell millions, others none, and neither case will be a default reflection of intrinsic artistic value. Intrinsic artistic value, in fact, will not only be impossible to establish, it will be as impossible to *define* for any more than a few minds subscribing to a given worldview at a given moment.
But the disciples aren’t having it, of course. They suffer a mysterious loss of imaginary status if their much-projected-upon avatar, with his spurious methodology and weddingcake sentences, is considered to be anything less than The Great Wan Hope of Murrican Letters. Christ, who wants to look up to a guy who merely argues his preferences in careful critiques of texts he actually “gets”, right? I can see how Wood is under lots of pressure to be Torquemada-the-Baptist. Am I obligated to buy into the pantomime? No.
But, yes, Wood *is* such a convenient crutch for LitCritter-wouldbeez who wouldn’t have a *clue* where to start if they had to illuminate a text, or perform comparative evaluations, without Wood as an attitudinal crib (for evidence please check out Nigel Beale’s bumbling comparison of Yeats’ most-commonly-known-poem… of course… to Harold Pinter’s scrappy, anti-euphoniously outraged verse… in the world’s most reactionary, hamfistedly amusing attempt to show up Pinter as Yeats’ poetic inferior: well, Duh! And Rembrandt paints trompe l’oeil rings around Otto Dix; next… ?).
I’ll grant Wood (n.p.i.) this: it must *suck* to have all his woodbeez (of varying degrees of intelligence) arguing his case, as stand-ins, for him; must also suck to go on record with flimsy arguments that will float around the Internet forever
I thought his review of “Exit Ghost” was fair enough, though. Grant him that.
Hugs and back rubs,
SA
Posted by: Steven Augustine | May 31, 2008 at 07:55 PM
Steven:
Persistent and/or willful misreading and use of insulting language aside:
It appears you have shown up to class once again without having read the assigned text. Please now pay attention:
1) No case was made for Wood’s infallibility
2) Wood is opinionated
3) Any attention starved “sophomore” can easily dismantle sentences taken out of context. It takes a bit more cortex and simple reading to understand, in this case, for example, the ‘sense’ of the word convention, a sense which is developed throughout the course of the whole of Wood’s book in relation to William Gass, and others.
5) All you have really said is that Wood’s lifeness doesn’t do it for you in fiction. Why not expend some your boundless energy on explaining what exactly does?
6) Please reader, do go to http://nigelbeale.com/?p=831 and read not my ‘bumbling’ comparison of Yeats and Pinter, but in fact, highly regarded literary critic David Solway’s. For it was he who chose these poets in response to my request to discuss what constitutes a worthy poem, and what doesn’t. I think it represents a valuable exercise, and that Solway offers some impressive insight. You can listen too here http://nigelbeale.com/?p=797 if you are interesting in more of what Solway has to say.
6a) Visit also to witness how Steven, after his usual spate of insulting, fluorescent picaresqueness, scurries to the sidelines when ever serious discussion looms. http://nigelbeale.com/?p=876
7. In short Steven: by all means disagree, but try something new: do it with civility; while your flourid, effusive commentary may entertain some, and animate the odd discussion, for the most part it represents what is worst about the literary blogosphere: rude, bullying, name calling; misrepresentation, and bombast.
No Hugs. Back rubs maybe.
Posted by: Nigel Beale | June 01, 2008 at 12:52 AM
1. Welcome to the Local Chapter of the Culture Wars.
2.If I can save the wild imagination of just one budding novelist from the gummy poison of Wood’s normative proscriptions, I’m happy with the effort; arguing for the writer’s right to access and display the full range of her/his imaginitive gift is what I do for pleasure.
3. You haven’t refuted a *single* point, Nigel. And I won’t go into the “history” behind my snarky insults towards you, here, but there *is* one, as you know; I’m civil until provoked, baby. You and your Linkin’ Buddies will have to get used to that one. If anyone else should think me cruel, evil, heartless, ill-mannered or uncouth, I’ll just have to live with that.
As to the “worst of the literary bloggosphere”: it’s *my* opinion that the problem is the same as the one in “print” (times ten): far too much “product” and not enough of interest and *very* little treasure. Oh, and lots and lots of silly posing in the self-congratulation cult.
Posted by: Steven Augustine | June 01, 2008 at 02:18 AM
BTW, Nige: before I said a *single* “insulting” thing about Nigel Beale, did you or did you not put up a series of posts (not comments: *posts*) on your blog, featuring an edited collection of a few of my old Wood critiques (culled from various sites), referring to *me* as a “horsefly” (exact word) buzzing about with these annoying, supposedly empty-headed anti-Wood comments of mine?
But that’s not an “insult” because, of course, *you* wrote it (whilst wearing that styrofoam halo).
Right?
And what about the very humorous post in which you *initially* claimed the words of other writers, on the topic of Nietzsche and Plato (in another attempted whack at me), as your *own*…. before you were caught out and forced to use quotation marks?
Do you deny this?
Posted by: Steven Augustine | June 01, 2008 at 03:47 AM
Posted by: Steven Augustine | June 01, 2008 at 03:55 AM
Pointing to one ill considered post adapted from widely available material substantially re-written to suit my immediate purposes, confirms to me that you are in good company with Toast, and unworthy of future engagement.
Posted by: Nigel Beale | June 01, 2008 at 06:56 AM
Ha ha! That’s certainly one way of putting it, Nige.
Posted by: Steven Augustine | June 01, 2008 at 07:34 AM
Zzz.
Posted by: Z | June 01, 2008 at 08:37 AM
who is nigel beale and why do steve and toast h8 him so much =/
Posted by: Schopenhauer’s bloody knuckles | June 01, 2008 at 11:28 AM
Wrong verb, Schopi
Posted by: Steven Augustine | June 01, 2008 at 11:46 AM
BEFORE THE CREATION of CASUAL WHITENESS
“The cartoon… contrasts Florence Nightingale, the British pioneer of modern nursing, and a noted statistician, with ‘Bridget McBruiser’.”
-
the similarity between the Irishman and the Negro established
IF POP WERE NO MORE EVIL THAN THIS
WHERE’S JOHNNY SWIFT WHEN YOU NEED HIM?
“Costing hundreds of dollars a pound, these beans are found in the droppings of the civet, a nocturnal, furry, long-tailed catlike animal that prowls Southeast Asia’s coffee-growing lands for the tastiest, ripest coffee cherries. The civet eventually excretes the hard, indigestible innards of the fruit — essentially, incipient coffee beans — though only after they have been fermented in the animal’s stomach acids and enzymes to produce a brew described as smooth, chocolaty and devoid of any bitter aftertaste.”
We see GERHARD waiting as passengers (largely Japanese) who have disembarked a JAL flight from Tokyo file past him after making it through CUSTOMS
Gerhard is tall, blonde and in his late twenties; dressed semi-formally; holding a photo; he looks rather stiff
He is waiting for someone and occasionally looks at the photo he’s holding: a low-res picture on print-out paper, implying it was made from an Internet download
CLOSEUP: PHOTO IN GERHARD’S HAND: headshot of a grinning, freckled Japanese schoolgirl, SHOKO, in pigtails
CLOSEUP: GERHARD’S FACE as he studies the photo
TRACKING IN: on SHOKO as she emerges from CUSTOMS
SHOKO is 20, tall, beautiful, unsmiling, apparently busty, outfitted in expensive retro-futuristic fashions: a white vinyl rain coat, green vinyl top and skirt, and thigh-high white vinyl boots
Her thick black hair is done up in an elaborate traditional Geisha-like style (with long pins)
she is carrying no luggage (not even a purse)
She is wearing trendy big yellow sunglasses and her skin is as white with makeup as a Kabuki actor’s; she looks nothing like the photo in GERHARD’S hand
GERHARD looks at SHOKO, then at the photo in his hand, then at SHOKO: he isn’t sure
GERHARD
hesitantly
Entschuldigung. Shoko?
SHOKO walks right by him, shaking her head with a polite smile
1-INT. DAY: WC IN TEGEL
We see SHOKO enter a stall and close it behind herself; sitting on the toilet she unzips her top and slips a hand into one cup of the bra, then the other
She pulls carefully-packed wads of FIFTY DOLLAR BILLS out of her bra (the secret of her large cup size) and counts out a good amount, stuffing what’s left back into the two very nice hiding places
Before leaving the WC SHOKO catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror over the bathroom sinks and notices that the LEFT CUP is now much bigger than the RIGHT CUP and so she has to quickly re-pack them
2-INT. DAY: MONEY-CHANGING KIOSK AT TEGEL
We see SHOKO standing at the clerk’s window as he counts out five or six thousand EURO for her, which she stuffs in her pockets
3-EXT. DAY: TAXI STAND IN FRONT OF TEGEL
SHOKO climbs in a taxi
She hands the turbaned driver, SAHIDS, a 100 Euro bill
SHOKO
in uncertain English
Please take me to best place.
SAHIDS
grinning at SHOKO in the rearview mirror
I’ve been driving in this city for 15 years, and this is the first time someone has trusted me enough to just give me some money and say, ‘take me somewhere!’ If there were more people like you in this world, being a taxi driver would be the exciting profession that it should be!
He puts on his eye glasses
I won’t let you down!
SAHIDS salutes SHOKO in the mirror and puts the taxi in gear and they drive off (with a screeching of the tires)
POV: SHOKO’S as we see Berlin through her window
SFX: a cassette of modern Pakistani pop music: synthesizers and sitars.
They drive by the crumbling shells of buildings that haven’t been repaired since the war; they drive by brand new perfect glass palaces…
They drive and drive
CUT TO:
4-EXT. DAY: IN FRONT OF ‘THE SHOE FITS’
Finally, SHOKO’S taxi pulls up in front of a trendy shoe store in Mitte; ‘The Shoe Fits.’
SHOKO climbs out of the taxi, waves ‘goodbye’ to SAHIDS and enters the store
The store is full of Japanese tourist girls dressed exactly like SHOKO, in sunglasses of red, yellow, blue and green, listening to the trendiest TECHNO music while trying on thigh-high vinyl boots of either black or white
For SHOKO it is a depersonalizing nightmare of clones
SHOKO backs out of the store in a barely-controlled panic; she runs up the street
She flags down a taxi and climbs into it. She hands the German driver, BERNDT, a 100 Euro bill
SHOKO
out of breath
Please take me to best place.
BERNDT hands the bill back to her
BERNDT
in heavily-accented English
The ‘best place?’ The best place for what?
Shoko
For where I belong.
BERNDT
Pardon me, miss, but wondering where you belong, it is not my job.
SHOKO
Well, you can name a few place?
BERNDT
No.
Shoko
You have map?
Grunting in exasperation, BERNDT pops the glove compartment, gets out a map of BERLIN, and hands it to SHOKO
SHOKO closes her eyes randomly fingers a spot on the map
CUT TO:
5-EXT. DAY: FLOH MARKT at STRASSE DES 17th JUNI
We see the taxi pull up and let SHOKO out at the FLOH MARKT
CUT TO:
SHOKO wandering through the crowded market, looking like a beautiful visitor from THE FUTURE (or another planet) and getting stares
We see her squeeze by various stalls: a stall of hand-painted silk scarves; a stall of glass beads and cheap jewelry; a stall of animal-shaped candles, etc.
SHOKO passes a stall of FILM POSTERS (with a poster from GODARD’S ‘BREATHLESS’ displayed prominently, as well as FELLINI’S ‘LA DOLCE VITA,’,’ TRUFFAUT’S ‘JULES ET JIM,’ and WERTMULLER’S ‘SWEPT AWAY,’)
We see that a guy browsing through posters (looking at the poster of BERTOLUCCI’S ‘LAST TANGO IN PARIS) at that particular stall, JEAN PAUL, a Senegalese teen-ager, happens to look up and notice as SHOKO passes
JEAN PAUL is tall, skinny, coal-black, and wearing a second-hand suit that’s two sizes too big for him; the suit is baggy-but-chic-looking on his slender frame; JEAN PAUL looks very cool but rather hungry
He has an unlit MARLOBORO sticking out of his mouth
SHOKO glances at him as she walks by: their eyes meet briefly and time seems to slow down for a moment
CLOSEUP: JEAN PAUL watching SHOKO; his face is so shiny and black that we can almost see her reflection in it as she passes
CUT TO:
SHOKO is in a USED CDs stall, flipping through rows and rows of discount CDs with the speed and precision of an android. She pulls out one and lays it atop the other CDS: we see that it’s something by JIMI HENDRIX
She continues searching through the CDs in a different row, placing another CD atop the others and moving on
We see that JEAN PAUL is by now standing in the same used CD stall, coolly working his way around to where SHOKO is standing
JEAN PAUL sees the HENDRIX CD that SHOKO has put aside for herself on top of the other CDs and he slips it into his pocket
SHOKO notices this
SHOKO
That’s mine.
JEAN PAUL
With a charming smile
But it was sleeping there alone, sister.
SHOKO
I was coming back soon.
Jean Paul
But it spoke to me!
SHOKO
You love Jimi Hendrix? He is very beautiful.
Jean Paul
Jimi is the grandfather of rappers.
SHOKO
No, Jimi Hendrix godfather of Punk.
JEAN PAUL
diplomatically
He is the ancestor of all music.
SHOKO
Okay, you can steal it.
sniffing
You smell very good.
JEAN PAUL
pointing at the cigarette in his mouth
Thank you, sister. Do you got a fire?
SHOKO
Never. Smoking kills.
JEAN PAUL
Do you think I’m afraid of little killers like smoke?
SHOKO
Your English is not so best.
JEAN PAUL
Yours not too.
SHOKO
We should speak our only languages.
JEAN PAUL
Agreed.
They shake hands in agreement
SHOKO
In Japanese; subtitled English/German
This is much better. Now I’m free to say what I want and you can’t understand a word. It’s like watching you on television.
Jean Paul
in Wolof
I agree. But what you don’t know is that my father ran a soccer camp for two years in Tokamachi. I love Japanese girls, and I can understand every single thing you say.
SHOKO
in Japanese
That’s funny… it sounded like you said ‘Tokamachi.’ My cousin lives there.
CUT TO:
6-EXT. DAY: NEAR IMBISS WAGON AT FLOH MARKT
SHOKO and JEAN PAUL are walking together past the FLOH MARKT’S IMBISS WAGON when JEAN PAUL notices that someone has left a paper plate of pomme frittes on one of the tables, almost entirely uneaten
JEAN PAUL promptly grabs a handful of fries and eats them hungrily, then offers the plate to SHOKO
SHOKO frowns like a mother and takes the plate of half-eaten potatoes and throws it away in a nearby trash can, shaking her head
she tugs JEAN PAUL by the sleeve and heads for the cue at the IMBISS WAGON
CUT TO:
We see a GERMAN BAUARBEITER with a fistful of napkins return to the table where JEAN PAUL ‘found’ the pommes …the BAUARBEITER is puzzled…where did his plate of French fries go?
CUT TO:
SHOKO and JEAN PAUL preparing to order
SHOKO
To Jean Paul, In Japanese
You order and I’ll pay.
Switching to English
You hungry?
She hands JEAN PAUL a ‘20’; he accepts it reluctantly
JEAN PAUL
In Wolof
An old saying in Senegal goes: A man who lets his woman pay for everything in the morning, will end up paying another woman for everything else at night. But it’s very hard to be wise when you’re hungry.
In English
What you want?
SHOKO
in English
Diet Coke. And your best food for you.
Seeing Jean Paul’s reluctance to accept her money; whispering in his ear
Don’t worry, I am rich.
SFX: SHOKO’S whisper
CUT TO:
7-EXT. DAY: STRASSE DES 17th JUNI
We see SHOKO and JEAN PAUL walking along with the inspiring monument of ‘Gold Elsie’ rising behind them
JEAN PAUL carrying a large clear plastic bag full of SNICKERS BARS and CHIPS and various non-perishable snacks that he’s bought at the IMBISS WAGON with SHOKO’s money; SHOKO sipping her DIET COKE
We see quite a few young people on foot heading in the opposite direction, towards the FLOH MARKT, or some spot in the TIERGARTEN
A VERY PRETTY GERMAN GIRL walks by and winks boldly at JEAN PAUL (who now seems even more attractive to the opposite sex than ever, with this beautiful Japanese girl beside him)
JEAN PAUL peeks over to SHOKO to see if she has noticed: SHOKO looks jealous
JEAN PAUL grins and shrugs as if to say: Can I help being so good-looking?
THEN: a group of HANDSOME SCHOOL BOYS of every description stare and flirt and whistle at SHOKO as they stream by in a crowd
SHOKO, triumphant, peeks over at JEAN PAUL to see if he’s noticed
JEAN PAUL is pouting; SHOKO is looking satisfied
CUT TO:
8-EXT. DAY: A STREET IN CHARLOTTENBURG
JEAN PAUL and SHOKO are walking along still, some time later, and we see that JEAN PAUL is still pouting (with a new, unlit cigarette sticking out of his mouth)
a man walks by and turns his head to stare at SHOKO and we see why JEAN PAUL’S mood is bad: there’s too much competition…it’s obvious that SHOKO could have almost any man she wants, especially in her attention-getting outfit
Another man walks by but this one smiles flirtatiously at JEAN PAUL; JEAN PAUL looks at SHOKO pointedly in reaction, as though to say: a point for me!
But then a car full of young men drives by, honking at SHOKO: she wins again
SHOKO
In Japanese
Men are all just wild monkeys.
JEAN PAUL
Angrily, in Wolof
If you don’t like the attention, why do you dress that way?
SHOKO
in Japanese
A man is like a run-away bus that his penis is driving!
JEAN PAUL
Responding with irritation, in Wolof
And a woman is like a bus station, with buses coming and going every hour.
SHOKO
Giggling, in Japanese
Men should wear special clothing in which their faces are completely covered, but their penises are allowed to hang out. That would be the only way to know if a man really likes you. The face doesn’t mean anything!
JEAN PAUL
Becoming increasingly vexed, in Wolof
Now we know what they really think of us!
SHOKO
In Japanese
The next movie that stars Bruce Willis and Hugh Grant and Mel Gibson, the billboard advertising the movie should only show their penises, and then we would know whether we should bother seeing the movie or not!
JEAN PAUL makes a look of disgust and rolls his eyes, but sees something that suddenly excites him:
They have come to a fenced-in little park on KNESEBECK STR, squeezed in between the shops, where a bunch of Turkish boys are playing soccer
JEAN PAUL makes a ‘whooop!’ of joy and runs to join the game, dropping his bag of snacks
SHOKO is at first a bit irritated: she thinks it’s silly: JEAN PAUL is behaving like a little boy
The Turkish kids are very good, displaying their expert skill with the ball with big grins…but it turns out that JEAN PAUL is even better
He displays such an admirable talent with the ball that even SHOKO is impressed: her mood gradually changes from exasperation, to skepticism, to reluctant admiration, to pride, to awe
JEAN PAUL is very cool: he’s playing with the unlit cigarette still in his mouth
SHOKO begins cheering JEAN PAUL on
SHOKO
Shouting, in Japanese
Go! Go! I’m really impressed!
CLOSEUP: JEAN PAUL’S fancy footwork
POV: through the wires of the fence: SHOKO cheering
SHOKO (cont’d)
In Japanese
I couldn’t tell you had so much talent! I’m very proud to know you!
Thinking that nobody can understand her, SHOKO is unrestrained in her language
She is cheering JEAN PAUL with great enthusiasm, hopping up and down
ANGLE TIGHT ON SHOKO (bouncing in and out of frame):
SHOKO (cont’d)
Shouting with joy, in Japanese
YOU MOVE LIKE A DREAM! I HAVE NEVER BEEN SO EXCITED BY ANYONE IN MY LIFE! I HAVE DECIDED TO GIVE YOU MY ALMOST-VIRGINITY! YOU LOOK SO SEXY I COULD EAT YOU LIKE A BIG BLACK CHOCOLATE BAR AND LICK MY FINGERS AFTERWARDS! YOU ARE THE STRONG BLACK HERO OF MY MOST PRIVATE SEXUAL FANTASIES!
We PULL BACK: and see a white-haired JAPANESE TOURIST COUPLE (wearing shorts and socks-with-sandals; heavy with cameras) standing directly behind SHOKO
They look shocked; SHOKO turns and sees them and flinches with the surprise, then bows and apologizes profusely to them
We CUT in the middle of her apologies to:
9-EXT. DAY: ANOTHER STREET IN CHARLOTTENBURG: LATER
SHOKO and JEAN PAUL are walking along, both looking quite happy
SHOKO has removed her raincoat
SHOKO is carrying the bag of snacks
JEAN PAUL is happy because he heard and understood all of SHOKO’S secret praise during the game…as well as the offer of her ‘Almost Virginity’; he is sweetly exhausted from the soccer game; he probably played for hours
It is twilight
SHOKO
In Japanese
So this is what fun is like! I never had it before! I like it. And it costs almost no money! But I can’t tell if it’s the fun that I really like, or you. This is a puzzle that could take weeks to solve.
beat
It makes me sad to think that I’m only here in Berlin until tomorrow morning.
JEAN PAUL is surprised by the news…she’s leaving tomorrow morning…but can’t show it
He spreads his arms and makes a dramatic announcement to the moon that we can see mounting the sky
JEAN PAUL
in Wolof
O Father Moon, help your son Jean Paul use his magic love powers to make this girl stay here forever, so she can have so many of my babies that she’ll become as fat as Aretha Franklin, and the television news will come to our house to interview her!
SHOKO, not understanding a word of it, giggles
They are approaching a BUS STOP and a DOUBLE DECKER BUS roars ahead of them to the stop
SHOKO impulsively reaches out and grabs JEAN PAUL’S hand: they break into childishly happy laughter and start running to catch the bus together
CUT TO:
10-INT. DAY: THE BUS: TWILIGHT
SHOKO and JEAN PAUL are seated in the upper deck of the bus, SHOKO in the window seat in the very front, JEAN PAUL two seats directly behind her
SHOKO is singing, very softly, with a beautifully childish voice, a version of HEY JOE (JIMI HENDRIX) with new lyrics (and a complete arrangement behind her vocals)
SHOKO
singing, in English
Hey Joe, where you going with that Love in your hand? Hey Joe, where you going with that Love in your hand? He said, I’m going down to bless my old lady, because she made me into a better man…
CUT TO:
11-INT. NIGHT: THE BUS
Shoko has fallen asleep on the bus
she wakes up disoriented… the bus has stopped moving, all she can see through the window is the moon and the edge of a forest; JEAN PAUL is nowhere to be seen
SFX: crickets
Believing she is alone, she slowly gathers up the bag of snacks, and her rain coat, and starts crying: where is she? What should she do? How could he leave her?
she walks awkwardly down the steep steps from the top of the bus and then out of the bus
and finds JEAN PAUL standing outside, waiting for her
He is taking an unlit cigarette break, puffing on a cigarette with no smoke
SHOKO is so relieved to see him that she throws her arms around him
SHOKO
In English
I thought you gone!
We can see the BUS DRIVER in the BG, across the street, illuminated by the light in a phone booth, glancing at his watch and talking
JEAN PAUL
In English
End of a line.
12-EXT: NIGHT: THE FOREST
They walk, hand in hand, into the forest
SHOKO puts her raincoat back on and zips it all the way up; JEAN PAUL turns up the collar of his coat
SHOKO
In English
I cold.
JEAN PAUL
Me also.
SFX: forest noises: owls, crickets, frogs
SHOKO
In English
Where we are?
JEAN PAUL
In English
The oldest neighborhood of Berlin.
Beat
This is where the bears live.
They walk deeper into the forest; SHOKO is holding JEAN PAUL’S arm and talking to him, making her confessions in what she thinks is a safe way
SFX: the lonely hoot of an owl; the rustling of an animal in the bushes
SHOKO pulls closer to JEAN PAUL in fear
SHOKO
in Japanese
I needed a job. I mean, I needed money. I went to a club in the middle of the afternoon to audition as a dancer. It was a Yakuza club. Everyone is scared of the Yakuza, but they don’t scare me. The Yakuza want everyone to like them, especially little boys and old ladies! How scary can they be?
beat
I went to my audition with an extra large bag from McHegemony’s because I was hungry. I’m in love with the fish sandwich. My extra large bag had three fish sandwiches in it and a Diet Coke. I sat at the bar and waited for my appointment to arrive: Mr. Kamimura. Then I noticed that behind the bar is a very big stack of American money. I took the three fish sandwiches out of the extra large McHegemony’s bag and put some of the money in instead. Then I left the bar, because I realized that topless dancing was not for me.
JEAN PAUL
In Wolof
That’s a good story.
beat
Both of us are runaways, and our bright futures are what we have in common. By refusing the automatic destiny of our god-given talents… for me it is soccer, for you it is dancing… we prove ourselves to be people of character who deserve success.
SHOKO
In Japanese
If only you were brave enough, we could be kissing already.
JEAN PAUL restrains himself from doing just that; they continue to walk in silence through the forest for quite a distance before JEAN PAUL can’t take it anymore and suddenly tries to kiss SHOKO, taking the cigarette out of his mouth and leaning towards her
SHOKO pulls her face away, avoiding the kiss, but when JEAN PAUL’S reaction is to then pull away from her, she grabs him and pulls him closer again
But no kiss happens
They come to the edge of the forest, part some leafy branches, and see a busy street on a Saturday night in Berlin in a trendy neighborhood; flashy cars crusing; well-dressed people sitting at outdoor cafes, music throbbing from clubs
13-EXT: NIGHT: BUSY NIGHTLIFE STREET
They walk along the colorful street together, still holding hands, staring at everything: the CLUB KIDS in their quasi-military fashions; the RICH OLD MEN with their MODELS; the beggars and buskers
They notice the PROSTITUTES (in their spandex jumpsuit uniforms) marching up and down the street
Tugging a reluctant JEAN PAUL along with her by the hand, SHOKO approaches a tall, beautiful, long-legged blond PROSTITUTE in a futuristic outfit that is in many ways reminiscent of SHOKO’S
SHOKO
In English
Excuse me please. You have hotel?
PROSTITUTE
In stiffly formal English
Yes I can assure you that I do. I can also assure you that I have passed my regular tests for A.I.D.S., Hepatitis A, B and C, and Mononucleosis. I am a professional supported by the health care services of the City Government. The taxes I pay benefit the local infrastructure. 70% of my clients are Japanese.
SHOKO
In English
You have television in room?
PROSTITUTE
There is a choice of fifteen channels of hardcore pornography.
beat
How will you be paying for my services this evening? Cash, credit, or Euro-Tourist Travel Vouchers?
SHOKO digs a wad of 100 EURO BILLS out of her pocket
REACTION SHOT: PROSTITUTE: her eyes get big
CUT TO:
14-INT.NIGHT: HOTEL STAIRWAY
The Prostitute, followed by SHOKO and JEAN PAUL, climbs the red-carpeted stairs
CUT TO:
15-INT. NIGHT: HOTEL ROOM
SHOKO, JEAN PAUL, and THE PROSTITUTE standing awkwardly in the hotel room, which is plush and ornately tacky
The bed is a huge old four-poster; a wide screen television faces it
SHOKO is the first to move: she goes and gets a chair and sits it between the bed and the television, facing the television
She takes the PROSTITUTE by the hand and seats her in this chair
SHOKO then takes the TV remote control, switches the television on, and hands the remote control to THE PROSTITUTE
SHOKO
In English, pointing at television
You watch.
ANGLE TIGHT: on THE PROSTITUTE as she watches the television; switching channels
SFX: SHOKO unzipping; the small change jingling in JEAN PAUL’S pants as he removes them; the two giggling
CLOSE-UP: THE PROSTITUTE: turning to peek at them
SHOKO and JEAN PAUL (OS)
Shouting in unison, in English
Turn that head around, silly girl!
THE PROSTITUTE complies
SFX: SHOKO and JEAN PAUL kissing/the TV show (an intellectual Talk Show)/television applause
SHOKO (OS)
Whispering, to Jean Paul, in English
Close your eyes and something big will happen.
16-INT. NIGHT:HOTEL ROOM, MUCH LATER
We see THE PROSTITUTE, asleep in her chair in front of the television, which is showing a cartoon
We slowly PAN: to SHOKO and JEAN PAUL, ‘spooning’ together in the bed behind THE PROSTITUTE
They are half-covered with bed covers, enjoying the floating sensation of ‘after’
SHOKO is facing us, JEAN PAUL pressed behind her, his black arm around her
TRACK IN: slowly on the serene-looking SHOKO; her hairdo is un-done and her beautiful black hair spilling out across the pillow
Her makeup partially removed: we see the freckles that were hiding under all that pancake
SHOKO
Softly, in Japanese
I think I’m in love.
PANNING UP: slowly from SHOKO to JEAN PAUL
CLOSEUP: JEAN PAUL
JEAN PAUL
In Wolof, with panic
I am thirteen years old.
Cut to: BLACK
CREDITS
FIN
NEEDS TO GET HIS PRIORITIES STRAIGHT
CARACAS, Venezuela – Former lightweight champion Edwin Valero was detained Sunday on suspicion of killing his wife, the gravest in a string of problems that have threatened to derail his career.
Comrade DJ Sensei Barry and I pulled a word out of the ether during a walk last winter; we thought we’d coined it but it’s already there on the Net: Disasturbation. We were chugging through the interlinking system of courtyards you can walk from Rosenthaler Strasse all the way through to Gipps Strasse, cold and cynical in a throng of shoppers, when Comrade Barry misheard a portmanteau I’d uttered and generated an even better one which we didn’t realize was already taken
CNN was the first truly modern (in the sense that if something is to be truly modern, it must be pervasive) Disasturbator and its first great fetish-event was probably the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion of 1986: an endless loop of an airborne crematorium straining against the surly bonds of Ronald Reagan. Disasturbation as an Art Form really came into its own with the Rwanda event: an endless stream of naked black corpses bouncing down a river like logs… in an endless loop. We didn’t learn much about the post-colonial tensions between the Hutu and the Tutsi but we acquired a new, viscerally aesthetic response to naked black corpses in a stream: pisgust. Or dispity.
If you read about a disaster, even cursorily, the intellect is tethered to the task. The thing about Disasturbation is how it engages directly with older, pre-verbal gears of the mind. It becomes a creepy and addictive sort of pleasure. DeLillo makes a crack (I think it’s in Cosmpolis) about how disappointed we secretly are if the body count from some disaster ends up being too small. The only place for Disasturbation to go, now, after Haiti (which is, in Disasturbatory terms, merely a continuation of Katrina) would be in showing an endless stream (or endless piles) of naked white corpses… in an endless loop. The transition will be a paradigm-shift on the order of how we went from bare brown breasts in National Geographic to bare white breasts in Vogue (and from often-sagging brownies to siliconed whiteys at that); it may take a while.
The September Reichstag Towers, like the Challenger deaths, was an aerospace-themed fetish-event that presented James-Bondian fireballs in lieu of white corpses evoking pisgust. It was a “cleaner”-looking atrocity, which reminds me of a comment I was treated to at a cocktail party in Berlin during the week of the Rwanda Event: a svelte young blonde opined that “at least the Nazis were scientific… not just this primitive hacking with machetes!”
The difference between News and Disasturbation is the difference between the novel and cinema. And is there a phenomenological difference between Blockbuster Movies and Disasturbation? The only essential difference between the two forms is stated intent. What difference does stated intent make if we can’t trust the staters? All we had as proof that an endless loop of an endless stream of naked black corpses was “News” (as opposed to a fetish event or ephemeral fetish object) was Ted Turner’s word that CNN was there to give us News rather than a new kind of Snuff film.
Imagine the difference between reading about the morass of intrigues and affiliations that led to WW1, the day after its declaration… or watching an endless loop of Gavrilo Princip blow chunks out of Ferdinand’s neck.
Was the early 1960s the first time in North American history that a sizable portion of the populace was more than one generation removed from the direct, bloody, shit-ridden experience of Life and Death as lived in farm and/or hunting life? Imagine a generation of consumers who had never seen an animal slaughtered (or one born, for that matter) watching an endless stream of naked black corpses in an endless loop; talk about shock treatment: these poor fuckers are now A) ready to be shown anything and B) secretly becoming Disasturbation addicts (and just wait until hostage decapitations go mainstream).
But what is it the Disasturbation Addict ends up craving to see? A) The Unjust Destruction of White Property and B) Black Bodies in pisgust-inspiringextremity.
What do you think you know and why do you think yo know it?
A Thought Experiment: how different would your Racial Worldview be if you’d been exposed to endless variations of the following pair of images as opposed to the endless variations on the conceptual-inverse of this pair to which we are constantly exposed?
We all know Advertising works. But do we understand the product that’s really being sold with it?
Why is it that despite the obvious appetite for events with disasturbation value, CNN, Sky, BBC et al balk at the idea of showing white bodies in a mutilated state (think the blanket ban on-screen body counts after the attacks in New York) yet have no qualms showing Tutsi and Hutu bodies floating in Rwandan rivers or freshly de-limbed black bodies or even a Haitian girl with half of her skull missing and her brain exposed? “Some viewers may find these images disturbing” is the standard warning phrase. Why “some viewers”? Would it be “all viewers” if the victims were white, hence the ban on showing them? Is this all part of the dehumanising of the “other” which is openly practised in the pure entertainment industry (as opposed to masquerading as factual documentary in the news entertainment industry)? On a similar note…
Up until a few days ago I had never watched an episode of the “The Wire”. There are a number of reasons for this: the lack of a television; a chronic aversion to TV soap operas – particularly ones that are described in the popular press as “edgy” and “gritty” and, which notwithstanding the fact that they may be less than a couple of years old, are already being awarded the additional monikers of “classic” and “cult”; and , most importantly, the fact that when it comes to shows peddling cheap clichés about ethnic minorities my already limited TV attention span is reduced to that of a three year old who’s just dined on Big Macs washed down with a fluorescent coloured high fructose corn-syrup laden beverage laced with E102 (don’t bother Googling it, E102 is tartrazine – you may want to Google tartrazine though if you don’t know what that is). And, the truth be told, I still haven’t watched a whole episode of “The Wire” (I couldn’t get past the first 20 minutes before ADHD like-symptoms started to kick in), so what I write below is based, admittedly, on limited exposure to the “best bits” of the above edgy, gritty classic and cult TV show.
Anyway, a couple of nights ago I happened upon a YouTube video entitled “The Wire Greatest Death Scenes”. Expecting to see the terrifying, but yet strangely disasturbatory, voyeuristic and alluring spectacle of various hapless tight-rope walkers losing their balance and hurtling headlong into shallow lakes or thudding their heads onto concrete pavements beneath ropes they had the previous night surreptitiously spanned between the terrifying expanses between skyscrapers (an image that was denied us by the news teams reporting 9/11), I was instead greeted by the scene of a black man pointing a small calibre fire arm at the head of another black man whilst uttering what I presume is the gangster equivalent of the last rites. While this black fellow waxed menacingly about some issue or other (he was obviously not at all happy with his interlocutor) other gang members milled around, some of them wearing Captain Pugwash headscarves, which they had no-doubt earlier stolen at gun point from a fancy-dress shop; I think the headscarves were meant to symbolise their allegiance to a particular crime syndicate or fraternity. A shot then rang out but it was the firearm wielding “nigger” who was lying face down on the pavement in a small pool of blood (why is it always a pool – why not puddle, plashet or pond?). The crumpled figure lay in what I recognised from my misspent youth watching Hill Street Blues as the standard American sidewalk crime scene death-pose. Whilst the other “niggers” all continued milling around aimlessly (or, if there was an aim, it was not readily apparent from the short clip I had the misfortune to be watching) as if seeing someone have their brains blown out was the least dramatic thing that had happened to them that day, a vertically challenged “nigger” made some flippant remarks regarding the now dead gun totting nigger’s executioner “costing them money”. The YouTube comments in the accompanying threads were universally tickled by the light-hearted way in which the dwarf “nigger” vented his personal displeasure at this casual murder. The other scenes in the “The Wire Greatest Death Scenes” montage unfolded in similar vein – one “nigger” being shot, mutilated or tortured (or all three) by another “nigger” for stealing some “nigger’s” money, snitching on a fellow “nigger” or encroaching on some “nigger’s” drugs patch or for some other equally egregious behaviour that breached some dark underworld code of conduct. All of this killing was accompanied by similarly ludicrous Tarantino-esque dialogue of the type spouted by the dwarf “nigger” in the first scene, which since the advent of Pulp Fiction apparently elevates to the level of high art all on-screen depictions of mindless violence, the use of offensive and derogatory language and the reinforcement of old and the creation of new racial stereotypes.
Intrigued by the level of pure unadulterated violence in these scenes and the casual and constant use of what until a couple of years ago was euphemistically referred to as the “N-word”, I Googled “The Wire” in order to find out how such a show could be put on mainstream television without there being a public outcry from the rightwing press and public that usually decries gangster rap and its attendant symbolism. I also wanted to find out the demographic of the audience for the show. The lack of universal condemnation made me soon realise how out of touch I had become. My initial thought was that “The Wire” would be a niche show watched by a few “yoofs”, TV critics and a handful of middle class trustafarians (the same demographic that that listen to gangster rap on the way to Royal Ascot). However during my scientific and entirely Google-based research, I came across a few debates regarding the authenticity or otherwise of the show and realised pretty soon that its main champions seemed to be mainly fairly well-educated (in the traditional sense) left-leaning white liberal males. Why was it, I asked myself, do white people actually like this stuff?
In a kind of online version of speaking out loud I unloaded my subconscious into the Google search bar and found I had typed the question “Why do white people like the Wire?” and lo and behold one of the results was a website called Stuff White People Like (Is there any topic for which there is not a website or at least a blog or twitter entry?). Judging by its position at No.85 in its list and by the comment threads on SWPL.Com, one of the things that white people like is, apparently, “The Wire”.
After ruminating on this for a while, the penny finally dropped: could it be that the reason why white people like this stuff is because, like males of many ethnic origins, they actually like vacuous television and violent death scenes (i.e. they are disasturbators) and also, in the case of many viewers including so-called liberals, deep down do not see anything wrong in calling dark folk “nigger” – “why is the world so PC” they cry in mock exasperation. (And, yes, I know it’s unfair that some black people think that they can use the N-word but feel that whites can’t; not even white TV producers portraying blacks. The reason for this is the same reason why feminists may find nothing wrong in making misogynistic or sexist jokes amongst themselves but, in the face of the inequality that still exists between men and women, become understandably suspicious and aggrieved when men start making such jokes). One way to satisfy this desire for violence and racist banter without attracting the wrath of right thinking human beings and anti-racism activists is for TV execs. to commission a “real-life” drama based on the perceived reality of black gangster life and feed it to white consumers as drama-cum-documentary. Offence at the language is countered with “hey, “Nigger” is the word they use, so why shouldn’t we use it”; offence at the violence is greeted with “this is what happens to them in their ghettos, I read it in the paper”. And lo and behold you have an “edgy” and “gritty” realistic TV show which, rather than merely pandering to the baser side of the white liberal male and reinforcing, and in some respects creating, racial stereotypes, is actually depicting the reality of so-called black life and culture. And it also satisfies the disasturbator’s needs pending the next natural or man-made disaster involving dark folk.
Comrade DJ Sensei Spratt, what I’d like is to see the Black Body given the same kind of saturated and haloed and subliminal enhancements that the White Body has been given since the advent of the technology (which may or may not have been Stained Glass); this image-enhancing tech that trumped oil painting by exciting bits of the brain we never knew we had and stimulated reverential cravings. Stained Glass, TV screens, Cinema screens… simulating the radiance of religious visions! And doing it for the sake of beatifying Jennifer Anniston.
“Western” Culture has been selling us Whiteness Triumphant (with a much-narrower definition of “White”) for how many centuries? And the lesson of capitalism is that you can’t properly hype a product without derogating its competition (its Other) and in this case the derogated product is the Black Body (the term “body” here includes head/face/soul). The crypto-porny Hollywood Blonde is the flagship avatar of the Human Flippin’ Race.
The red flag appeared long ago, obviously: how many of the Earth’s religions actually have the audacity to assert that Gawd resembles (down to the follicle) the humans in charge of building the cathedrals in praise of Him? I can only think of one and it is the center-piece in a Holy Trinity of inter-penetrating Agencies: Crapitalism-Judo/Christianity-Demockracy. That blue-eyed blonde super-dude (with neat beard and immaculate tan and Malibu blow-dried coif) doesn’t just run Murrka… He created All of Space and Time! Where does that leave the Nigga in the hierarchy of the Image Bank of the Collective Unconscious of Das Volk? Turn on your TV to find out.
You have no idea how long it took my Google search to come up with that svelte Black goddess pictured above; the Black Image seeding the Internet (and, by extension, the consciousness of the current crop of “Western” adolescents) is pathetic: flabby crack-hos wearing wigs, mostly. Who the fuck would daydream of fucking (more the less worshiping) one of those?
The deck is so terribly fucking stacked. “The Wire” is just a small part of the overall process the reversal of which could be achieved in less than a generation if any organ/office/movement had control of some of Mass Media’s bandwidth and produced well-crafted images to show an equal divinity in/of the Black Body. Instead we’re hit with Psycho-Genocidal Anti-PR like “Precious” and “The Wire”.
They made any number of bonafide extraterrestrials look sexy/dreamy/heroic on Star Trek, The Next Generation… surely they could manage to do the same, in the 21st century, for Black Earthlings?
What stuck in my craw a few year’s ago in the UK was a news item about a National Health Service hospital being strapped for space and having to store bodies in a spare room whilst waiting for the morgue back-up to clear.They’d gone to the effort of cooling the room.
But the reporter kicked up a lot of hot air about the lack of dignity this gave the dead and local M.P’s were dragged in to be angry and they obliged. The right wing press added to the blah the following day ….of course.
Meanwhile 6th or 7th item in was film of vultures picking at a corpse in a piece about a natural disaster in India. Where was the dignity afforded that body or the 30 more that the camera casually displayed? Why was this item 6th or 7th on the bill and why was it below the item about the hospital which seemed cooked up mainly to score cheap political points? One rule for locals and an entirely different attitude to the faceless “third” world.
Chronic, innit, Comrade Ed? Chronic.
THE DIFFICULT TEXT: A SCI-FI TRIPLE-FEATURE
Ambiguous narratives weren’t considered “difficult” forty years ago. I consumed them like potato chips.
[ed.'s note: the following image, of an older woman in her bra, was deemed 'obscene' by Tiny Pics and deleted]
DOLORES
I remember everything about Dolly the first time I saw her and almost nothing about my self. Was I happy? Sad? Confused? Lonely? Driven? In great shape still or a wreck like I am today? Hairy or hairless? The prince or the toad? I can’t seem to remember being anything other than the bitter old me I’ve become. Useless old animal hands. Blessed is the forgetting. But I remember Dolly, what Dolly looked like, the tensile strength of her warm grip and that everyone in those days was walking around with a telephone. Talking not to the phones but to each other! The phones were merely a medium. You won’t know what I mean by that. You’ll shake your heads; you’ll wink at each other.
Too much has happened. Maybe it will come back. I will come back. As I talk about it. Get it off my chest. They told me to record my thoughts, all of my thoughts, don’t be selective. They said that they’ll be the ones to worry about what to throw away and what to keep and despite the fact that I’m more than sure (delusions of grandeur, right?) that I can out-talk anything’s capacity to record me, talking about it might bring, in the archaic parlance of a long-gone culture, ‘closure.’ It might even be what people who once read better books than the people who once said ‘closure’ called ‘cathartic’. Submit ‘cathartic’ and the know-it-all thingy will inform you that it comes from the Greek, meaning ‘to cleanse.’ I could use some of that now. I look around me at all these gleaming white surfaces and let me tell you I feel like the rag that was used to clean them.
Twenty five years ago. There was a lot more sex then. It took two, three, maybe four people sometimes to do it, actually. You’re snickering at that. On the day in question, the day I’ll call Dolly Day (or D-Day) from now until the end of time, I had just turned thirty and had been feigning horror for weeks, for thirty is the last milestone one can truly afford to mock. So true. Thirty is like the girl you’ll never forget or the song you’d forgotten you’d loved more than any other song you ever knew. Thirty is as fragile as an egg; a skull.
The sun was coming out after a terrific little tantrum of weather, on D-Day. It was the middle of May and the cloudburst was winter’s parting shot. Like an antique soldier charging, bayonet extended, after all the bullets are gone. The Daguerreotype buffoon in his mustache and his long underwear. The sun that emerged was so vital and fierce that it murdered the clouds and got busy drying the sidewalks and I was so warm, suddenly. It was so suddenly summer. The sidewalks steaming. I carried my jacket over an arm and walked up the hill past the park, looking for a café for breakfast and the café that I chose was the café that Dolly was sitting in front of, soaking up the rays with her eyes shut, smiling at the sky. I’m thinking, in retrospect: I’ll bet the sky knew. You know? I’ll bet it winked at her.
People of the past strike us as being so stupid. We know everything they knew plus everything we know and they knew only what they could have known at the time. The people of the past are like country bumpkins. Excuse me but it’s like watching a retarded or blind person walking right for an open manhole. All you can do is gaze with open-mouthed incredulity. You almost have to laugh.
I remember trying to remember the word for omelet. I ordered an omelet which came with two diagonally halved slices of toast, a pat of butter, a decorative wedge of orange and a suspicious sprig of parsley. Suspicious because I had a friend who claimed that the parsley was often recycled; he never ate it but also never left it on his plate. He’d slip it in his pocket with compressed lips and a curt nod like he was doing his civic duty. His jacket pockets were full of brittle sprigs of parsley. He later turned out to have a screw loose.
Inside the café was dark with cigarette smoke and greasy light bulbs and a half a dozen tables of couples and trios in dark clothing at work on their cappuccinos and puffing on Marlboro’s and complaining about either or both of the new governments. I told the waitress I’d be sitting outside and she handed me a rag to wipe my seat with.
Dolores and I were the only ones in the sun. The sun’s news hadn’t yet reached the cryptish-cool depths of the café. And I stared while wiping the seat of a chair at a table that was neither too close nor too far. I stared because I thought her eyes were safely shut but on closer inspection I would have seen her eyelids fluttering, sneaky little thing. The rag I was using on the rain-beaded seat was too wet already and didn’t much help to dry the seat. It was wet and greasy and Dolores, who was peeking, laughed as though she was watching a Chaplin film. Then she handed me her orange scarf. Orange. As they say: there are no accidents in this clever world.
“Use this.”
“Oh no, I couldn’t.”
“I used it to dry my seat. Why shouldn’t you?”
“But.”
“Use it, take it home, wash it and dry it and return it to me tomorrow. As long as there are tomorrows, yes?” The trinket of her laughter. “I trust you to return it.”
I remember being nervous talking to her; not just because she was so beautiful but because of the age difference, which was obviously significant, without me having to ask. Anything seeing us talking… flirting… would be sure to think: what does this pervert want? With her? What a face she had. Her face the first time I saw it was half- dream, half-cat, voluminously-wrinkled like satin. Tooth translucence.
She was carrying already, of course. What I thought of as a stringent, crushing, unearthly beauty at the time (30! The last-call!) was, in fact, the oracular fingerprint. A fingerprint from the angel of that particular attitude towards extinction. The angel pressed his faint red fingerprint hard on the paper of her old white face and I mistook the blood-pattern for beauty. I gallantly offered to buy her a chamomile tea, if I recall correctly. Not that you’d know what that is. Hot water?
I keep telling them it was already in her the day we met but they don’t believe me. If I could speak with someone face to face I’m pretty sure I could convince them. Communication isn’t only about words but none of you seem to trust me; you feel safer on the other side of that glass, don’t you? But you aren’t.
*
*
*
>THE APPLICANT
“You speak of them as though they had souls,” said the applicant. She wasn’t really an applicant. She had to calibrate her tone just so. Being perceived as even remotely critical could have her on the other side of the moat in less time than it would take for her valise to hit the drawbridge. She gave the Dowaja a philosophical-instruction-requesting look of confused wonder. Amazing tits for a creature that age, really, but it’s always the eyes, she thought, isn’t it? Nothing they can do about those rheumy red time-poisoned eyes.
“Don’t they?” asked the Dowaja, stroking one, which strained blindly towards her black silk glove.
“Forgive me. Don’t they…?”
“Have souls. They feel pleasure and pain… require feeding… think, to the extent that they can be trained… perhaps they even dream. Who knows? I wouldn’t be so quick to claim the distinction for ourselves.” The one she had stroked (unusually bottom-heavy and hairless as a balloon in its mood-elevating brilliance) was hefted in both gloves toward her mouth where she gave it an asexual kiss and set it down again in a languid state of half-tumescence. It flopped and rolled on a satin pillow.
The Dowaja said “So!” with the impatience of an immortal. “What have you brought me?”
The applicant set the valise upon the blunted point of the Dowaja’s heart-shaped bed and poked its gusseted sides with trembling fingers. The locks gave way like snapping bones. This Dowaja was famous for her Escargot collection; the richest in the valley: she owned hundreds and they were of Louvre-quality and every one artisanally unique; bespoke. The applicant extracted the Chinapanese nautilus flight case and laid it at the valise’ corner and butterflied it open on its hinge. Yes.
The most magnificent black cunt-stuffer the Dowaja had ever seen was curled in a warm dream of the oiled channel of the right-most valve of its case. The detailing deserved ovations. Old-world standards of handicraft in the dorsal rill and scrotal convolutions and the heavy black sheen of young flesh. The applicant regained every calorie of confidence in her mission when she lifted the oily thing by its head (collector’s method: never grab the sac) and ran a thumbnail along the sac seam and the Dowaja actually gasped. Nubs of foliage pushed out across the sac in a wave. They grew toward curling.
“I must have this,” said the Dowaja, snatching it. With expert handling the thing was a hard black amputee’s arm in a flash and the smooth white naked old witch wielded it like something she had suddenly decided to straddle. Stopping herself in mid-squat.
“But where are my manners?” sang the Dowaja, slyly. “You first.”
The applicant parted the billows in her courtly apparel and leaned back on the bed with a smile of inoculated assent.
*
*
*
FROM NEAR TO ETERNITY
On the centennial of the passage of the American Civil Rights Act of 1964, an act of Congress made the word ‘race’ obsolete and the concept that the obsolete word represented illegal. “The very concept of ‘race’ itself,” stated the document, known as the Personhood Bill, “is racist.” The replacement word was Somatype and it was determined that humankind breaks down into 22 major Somatypes, each Somatype divisible further into a dozen-plus-one S-Inflections, each of these S-Inflections either an “A” or a “B” of its kind, and each “A” or “B” a possible positive or a negative, according to specific markers in the genome. It was hoped that the unwieldy terminology would inhibit casual distinction-drawing in a kind of inverse of the way in which the intuitive simplicity of the original system had been a runaway success in framing and disseminating the uneducated hatred of diversity. Not a year later, in time for the semi-centennial of the inauguration of the First Earth Parliament of 202 countries (minus China), the Somatype standard was adopted as global law.
Another century plus forty years after that, Siegfried Olubodun was told by his nearest rival at the University of Hamburg’s department of Tempanthropy that the only reason he’d got the research grant was because he was black.
About Siegfried’s blackness there was no debating; you rarely saw a face that black in Europe. Siegfried’s blackness was only marginally less rare than the famed whiteness of a family (blue-eyed, blond) who lived in a northern suburb of the city and whose estate had become a zoo, practically; people came from all over Europe to see the throw-backs in their natural habitat (they were auto mechanics, dynastically; half of the 80 hectares of the family compound was given over to garages and test-tracks). Siegfried tried to remember their name. The Ziegeldorfs. Siegfried was ancestrally Nigerian to an unusually single-minded degree. Whereas the Ziegeldorfs were viewed in Europe with great curiosity and a bemusement bordering on distaste, the Oluboduns were sometimes suspected of reproductive fascism. The Ziegeldorfs had been, perhaps, as driven by self-preservation as by greed in the opening of their compound to the public. But the Oluboduns were not so many in number and were spread among a handful of baronial flats overlooking the Alster.
By the time of Siegfried’s thirteenth birthday, human Somatypes had dropped from 22 to 15 and, as a result of cheap travel and zero borders (but one) and the lure of exogamy, the number was still falling. Practically everyone on earth these days looked like a somewhat lighter or darker Brazilian. With the notable exception of the Chinese, who had long-ago absorbed Japan, the two Koreas, and much of Malaysia and who were exactly half of the global population. Africa (with its population density of one human per six hundred square kilometers) was still pretty dark but only in the range of bland toffees. There was something his father always said but he could not remember.
“Selbstverstaendlich,” said Siegfried. Naturally. Speaking German was considered an elitist affectation. But sometimes Siegfried couldn’t help himself.
“Ich wollte damit keinen Ärger machen,” I meant no harm in saying it, countered Marta, shrugging, but Siegfried suspected that Marta’s aggression (not the first time) was her clumsy way of flirting. No wonder the population figures in Europe were falling again. Perhaps it was on that topic, the thing his father had said that Siegfried could not seem to remember. Though it ticked on the rim of his memory.
“They can’t very well expect someone with beige skin and European facial features to infiltrate the living quarters of Igbo-identified field slaves of early 18th century North America, can they?”
“But there was mixing even then.”
“Not so much in evidence among the field slaves. House servants were another class entirely and my research is on the topic of field slaves, Fraulein Sauerwald.”
“It’s a major grant. You’re lucky.”
Siegfried lifted his chin. “I don’t, as you know, believe in luck.”
“But perhaps,” said Marta, with an unreadable pout, “you will need it.”
“Excuse me?” He touched his codpiece.
“Something could happen.”
“I’m sure you’ll agree that ‘something could happen’ in the faculty dining hall, as well.” Siegfried curled his lip with bravado and placed the call confirming his receipt of the notice of his having won the grant. He pressed the patch on his throat and spoke clearly. In a flash he remembered and the enormousness of it filled his mind to bursting not only with the implanted knowledge of his era but the weight and roar of future history.
Like Prometheus…
Even as Marta, with her lustrous blue-black hair, arms folded (the aureole of the left nipple lurid against the bisque mound of its breast; an allergy; it was itching like mad) looked on with an impossible mixture of longing and resentment, Siegfried, along with all of his belongings there at Uni… family photos, clothing, equipment, nametags and gene-keyed snacks in the faculty locker… vanished. With no sense of motion, Marta, too, vanished and her haircut changed. She re-materialized on the other side of the campus and formed in the midst of a conversation with a PsySoc Prof who, by appearance, might’ve been her cousin. She was not surprised by Siegfried’s disappearance; she’d never heard of him. Nor had anyone.
That’s how time travel works, since no object can occupy two timestreams in one universe. The only options are A) sending a duplicate, or B) removing the original from one timestream completely before inserting it in another. A virtual googlebit calculator in quantum n-space is responsible for keeping track of (and eventually reversing) the transaction. The process is funded by shaving a billionth of a second from the very end of all Time. As a military option it made the oxygen fission bomb seem like a toy in comparison.
The first thing that met him was the smell. The smells. He hit 19th-century North America vomiting… he staggered and fell to his knees in a sunlit bush, vomiting his guts out and scratching his arms and chest on the brambles. The sweat, bad breaths and long reek of the open latrine hit him like a seething kiss. Or perhaps it was a side-effect of the massive dose of thought-modifiers he had taken in order to mask his true intent.
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FOUND NARRATIVES: IT WAS THE “wearing the same clothes as in the video” LINE WHICH MADE THE TEXT WORK FOR ME
SEATTLE — A convicted cocaine smuggler has been arrested for running what authorities say appears to be a bestiality farm in Washington state in which visitors could engage in all sorts of twisted sex acts with animals.
Douglas Spink was arrested at his ramshackle, heavily wooded compound near the Canadian border along with a 51-year-old tourist from Great Britain who is accused of having sex with three dogs.
Dozens of dogs, horses and pet mice were seized, along with what investigators described as thousands of images of bestiality and apparent child pornography. The mice were euthanized, said Whatcom County Sheriff Bill Elfo, whose office assisted federal agents in the case.
“This stuff is just truly bizarre,” he said. “These were mice that had their tails cut off, they were smothered in Vaseline and they had string tied around them.”
It wasn’t immediately clear whether other zoophilic tourists had been to Spink’s farm, but Assistant U.S. Attorney Susan Roe said Friday, “I expect there may have been other people visiting the property.”
Spink has not been charged with any bestiality or child porn charges at this point, only with violating the terms of his supervised release. Stephen Clarke of Peterborough, England, was arrested on state charges for allegedly abusing the dogs.
Spink’s lawyer, Howard Phillips, insisted there’s no evidence his client violated the terms of his release. “There’s no hard evidence he’s been engaging in bestiality at all,” Phillips said.
Spink, who has a history of training and breeding dogs and horses, appeared in U.S. District Court in Seattle on Friday and was ordered detained pending another hearing, set for April 30. He calls his operation Exitpoint Stallions Limitee and expounds at length on its Web site about his philosophy.
“Are we unconventional in our approach to stallion care? Absolutely,” he writes.
He later adds: “We don’t wall off sexual energy in our stallions as something dangerous or inappropriate, but rather channel that energy towards positive, safe, appropriate paths. There’s a proper time and place for it, and we work towards those sorts of skills rather than fighting un-winnable fights against deeply-rooted instincts.”
Spink, 39, made a fortune in Oregon buying and selling small companies in the 1990s and was known as an adrenaline junkie, listing rockclimbing and base-jumping off cliffs, radio towers and bridges among his hobbies.
But by 2002 his wealth had evaporated. He filed for bankruptcy as creditors sought millions from him, and he began running cocaine and marijuana across the border for a local drug kingpin.
Spink was arrested in 2005 after investigators pulled him over with a load of nearly 375 pounds (170 kilograms) of cocaine, valued at $34 million. He was given a lenient, three-year sentence because of his extensive cooperation with investigators.
Since then, he has been on a five-year term of supervised release, during which time he must abide by all state, local and federal laws.
Under Washington law, it’s illegal to assist others in engaging in bestiality — and breaking any state law would be a violation of Spink’s release, punishable by up to five years in prison.
Authorities searched his farm Wednesday after prosecutors received a tip from a public defender’s office in Tennessee. The office reported that Spink had been calling them incessantly about a jailed defendant in a bestiality case in Tennessee.
That man, James Michael Tait, had previously admitted filming a man having sex with a horse in Washington state in 2005. The man Tait filmed died of internal injuries suffered during the incident. He received a minor sentence in the case because Washington had relatively weak bestiality laws at the time.
It’s not immediately clear why Spink was calling Tennessee about the Tait case.
When agents searched Spink’s home, they found a video of a man sexually abusing dogs — and that man, Clarke, was still on the property, wearing the same clothes as in the video, Elfo said. He was charged with animal cruelty and made an initial appearance in Whatcom County Superior Court on Thursday.
Clarke was given a court-appointed defense lawyer for that appearance only and otherwise does not yet have an attorney.
Roe said Friday that Clarke had admitted his involvement to investigators.
Perhaps the most debilitating limitation of the book review, at least as practiced in American newspapers and most magazines, is that too often critical judgment is pronounced in the absence of articulated standards. Underlying assumptions about what makes for a “good novel,” and thus assumptions about what makes fiction worthwhile in the first place, are left unstated, even when those assumptions are clearly implicated in the judgment rendered. This is first of all the consequence of the enforced conventions of the form itself, which appear to proscribe explicit discussion of assumed standards, presumably to give reviews a facade of objectivity (as if criteria of judgment are so well known it’s only a bother to mention them) and ward off the possibility they might become too “academic.” But reviewers also frequently seem all too ready to embrace these conventions and advance conclusions whose premises are allowed to go unexamined.
Two recent reviews illustrate the problem, although one relies on an unstated assumption in order to praise while the other does so to find fault. Ed Champion’s Philadelphia Inquirer review of Donald Westlake’s Memory wants to commend the novel as “pulp” but as pulp with something else, something identifiably literary. Critics of mystery fiction, Ed mantains, deny that it can deliver “thematic truths and behavioral insight.” Westlake’s book shows that this objection does not always hold up, since Memory displays “serious thematic concerns.”
Of course, the assumption here is that “literary” fiction can properly be defined as that containing “thematic truths and behavioral insight.” Granted, Ed is countering what he thinks is a critical dismissal itself bound to this assumption, but the phrasing really seems to be Ed’s gloss on the criticisms made of a form of fiction otherwise focused on “plot-oriented puzzles.” If it’s too heavy on “plot” and “puzzles,” it must be too light on “substance,” which must mean “theme” or “insight.” It’s a common enough opposition, but rather than trying to break it down, by, say, making a case that “plot-oriented puzzles” have their own kind of substance, especially in pulp fiction, Ed unfortunately adopts it to his own purposes and in extolling the work of Donald Westlake reinforces the notion that “literature” is equivalent to “theme.”
(etc.; ending with:)
Reviews such as these help sustain the illusion that the boundaries of the “literary” are well-known and that the principles of criticism are so well-settled they merely need to be applied consistently. These illusions need to be dispelled, not encouraged, but the protocols of “literary journalism” as it now exists probably aren’t going to contribute much to that effort.
And now the comments:
April 19, 2010 in Book Reviewing | Permalink
This is a somewhat fair criticism, Dan. I think it might help if I were to produce the original opening, which had to be cut for space:
“Only a clueless snob would lob his histrionic fists at twenty million tuning in for American Idol, eight million enjoying Lady Gaga’s latest YouTube video, and more than a million readers feverishly purchasing Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight from bookstores. Yet the larger question of whether mass cultural development is worthy of deeper investigation, perhaps containing the seeds for unexpected inspiration, is often ignored. Elitist spittle remains a distressingly stubborn force, designed more to douse crisp blue collars rather than enlighten the seemingly unwashed masses. This distressing epidemic has proven to be more troublesome within the comparatively smaller world of books, with the mystery genre regularly turning over a dry cleaning ticket after another bloodsoaked reception.”
Granted, I think the editor was wise to cut all that. But the specific angle here — one that isn’t terribly new — is that there is literary worth to be found within mass culture, that mystery novels aren’t just “plot-oriented puzzles,” and that those who deride these books or classify books into neat little genres without accepting an individual book on its own terms (such as Wilson and Barthes) overlook the melange of fun, style, and substance to be found within ostensible trash. I don’t see this as an opposition, but rather an argument for fusion, one that asks the reader to reconsider a derided genre or to dispense with genre classification entirely.
Posted by: Edward Champion | April 19, 2010 at 08:04 AM
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Ah, the smaller question of lobbed histrionic fists. Ah, the epidemic of spittle, those receptions of blood.
Posted by: Andy | April 19, 2010 at 10:20 AM
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“I think it might help if I were to produce the original opening, which had to be cut for space…”
Cut for space? Ed, if that mercifully-excised passage isn’t proof of your small-but-vigorous participation in the death of American Letters, what is… the fact that the rest of that high-school-ish essay was actually printed? You do “genre” a serious disservice by affecting to rescue it as a “critic” without first learning to write. This is exasperating, man.
“Elitist spittle remains a distressingly stubborn force, designed more to douse crisp blue collars rather than enlighten the seemingly unwashed masses.”
How is it that co-bloggers who have a problem with actual critics and/or writers (like dull old Franzen, say, or knobby old Wood, as dire as they often are) keep cutting you slack? I really don’t see what’s keeping you from growing, other than the complicity of your chums and the blindfold of your ego. Drop the blindfold and learn to write or at least get an honest friend to proof-read.
And, re: Lady Gaga and Twilight: what if, rather than “lob my fists” (ouch) at stuff that’s aimed at not-particularly-sophisticated tweens and kidults, I shrug and leave the kids to their fun, while considering any adult who takes that stuff *seriously* a little dumb (or desperate to seem with-it)?
Shut off that TV and work on those sentences.
Posted by: Steven Augustine | April 19, 2010 at 06:56 PM
I think these criticisms are a mite over the top. I took issue with Ed’s underlying assumption, but I’d otherwise rather judge the review based on what was actually printed rather than what wasn’t. What was printed might participate in the distortion of critical standards, but it hardly signals the death of literature.
Posted by: Dan Green | April 19, 2010 at 08:55 PM
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Apparently Ed would prefer not to limit himself to what was printed, Dan. He’s an insane, full-on, writing monster, providing timely judgments (“there is literary worth to be found within mass culture”) and solecisms galore, and no mere newspaper editor’s sense of, er, literacy will stop him. I lob a mighty fist of triumph in the air and salute him, dousing myself with the People’s spittle!
Posted by: Andy | April 19, 2010 at 09:19 PM
If there’s going to be a mud fight, I’d prefer it be done elsewhere.
Posted by: Dan Green | April 19, 2010 at 09:57 PM
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Dan, it’s not a “mud fight”; these are valid criticisms, and, as I pointed out, even the version that was actually printed was very poor (I can get as detailed as you like) and this is no aberration in Ed’s case. Anyone who’s paying attention is going to notice that there’s a double-standard at work here and I think this double-standard undermines the seriousness and/or integrity of the project. The friendship is trumping the mission-statement and this is a litblogworld-wide problem: those links can be like chains. It’s a maturity problem… the medium itself is still too young (I’m hoping) to have sorted all that out.
Even Hitchens and Amis are (in this one respect) mature enough to have been blunt about the stuff they each felt the other had done a poor job of writing. And the material we’re taking to task *here* is leagues below anything I can remember rolling my eyes at in paid-for print. If online criticism is to ever bank some serious overall credibility, this matter will *have* to be seen to. Otherwise: farce.
Posted by: Steven Augustine | April 20, 2010 at 02:32 AM
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I don’t really see how a double standard could be at work, since the post was, after all, a criticism Ed’s review. What I object to is the needlessly personal way in which these further criticisms are expressed–”I really don’t see what’s keeping you from growing.” Ed’s personal growth is his own business. I’m not interested in it.
Posted by: Dan Green | April 20, 2010 at 06:56 AM
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Why not? What could be more important?
Posted by: Frances Madeson | April 20, 2010 at 08:56 AM
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Ed’s judgments and the way he expresses them are inextricably linked. I think it’s absolutely pertinent to make fun of Ed’s “critical writing” because he has no more business writing criticism than he does performing heart surgery. He has very little to say, he says it badly, he misreads his sources (I’m not familiar with the Wilson quote, but the cherry-picked Barthes severely distorts it), and, in this case, when he does have a valid — albeit eighty-year-old (“there is literary worth to be found within mass culture”) — point, he focuses on an inappropriate object of contemplation in order to make it: it doesn’t even sound like an especially good book.
The awesome misunderstanding of Barthes, enabling Ed for the purposes of his review both to quote a genu-ine intelleckchal and to distill the incredible complexity of his thought into a simplistic meme concerning his “feelings about genre” is really sufficient to make me want to kick Ed around the block.
In fact, the more I think about it, the angrier I get. Ed’s rooting his point in some murky essentialist concept of “literary value” is only par for the course. One doesn’t expect Ed to be able to express what it is he finds valuable in or essential to literature because nearly everything Ed writes radiates his ignorance of literature, beginning with his manically affected prose, which he clearly equates with being “literary.” But even if he wrote calmly and understandably, one would be struck by the ad hominem nature of Ed’s “work,” his criticism of authors on the basis of their photos, their hair, how much money they’ve earned, how famous they are. Even in as controlled a context as a newspaper’s book section, Ed must conjure up some figure of opposition, in this case the shadowy figures who consider mystery to be an inferior genre. Is there a reason to frame a review that way? Let me think. Hmmm. Is it too much of a stretch to suggest that Ed needs to point out this mythical opposition to the mystery’s legitimacy and to defend that legitimacy because he feels that otherwise a reader might feel that he’s just a guy who likes mysteries, as opposed to a sagacious literary critic who has deeply considered mysteries, weighing them in the pans of his evaluative scale against The Classics? I think it’s probably Ed who secretly suspects that the mystery is inferior.
Posted by: Andy | April 20, 2010 at 09:00 AM
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Andy,
Ever thought about the possibility that Ed’s just turning up the volume on the superficiality of newspaper literary “criticism” so people can see it more clearly? To my mind, there’s very little difference between his cherry-picking and Morris Dickenstein’s.
Posted by: Frances Madeson | April 20, 2010 at 09:18 AM
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“I don’t really see how a double standard could be at work, since the post was, after all, a criticism Ed’s review.”
You critiqued the plot of Ed’s review, essentially, and turned a blind eye to its style… inverting your usual priorities. The double-standard is the fact that you’re judging a virtual acquaintance with a much lower level of critical expectations.
“Ed’s personal growth is his own business.”
“Growing” as in growing into someone who can write a decent essay, Dan. I’m not concerned with Ed’s spiritual journey or even the subjective matter of Ed’s argument, here. I’m concerned with the fact that he expresses the argument with only borderline literacy.
Do you think there was a time, a few years back, when an “editor” would have caught the fact that Ed doesn’t know what (eg) “busman’s holiday” means? Ed’s little part in the overall decline is that he’s just, again, helped to ease the bar a millimeter lower: you don’t think it adds up? Ed should learn to use the Dictionary (“lob” doesn’t mean what he thinks it does, either) and approach that Thesaurus with caution.
Andy writes:
“In fact, the more I think about it, the angrier I get.”
If Literature is anything more than an excuse for people to hang out online, I understand how he feels. It’s the FARCE problem.
Posted by: Steven Augustine | April 20, 2010 at 10:13 AM
From there, Dan reveals the fact that all this “Literary Critic” nonsense is really about a circle of chums who each like to be King on their little blogs; the “literature” part is just an excuse (don’t expect all of the following comments to remain intact on Dan’s site… Dan has a bit of a hissy fit):
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You mean deliberately, Frances? No. Otherwise the Ed Champion House Organ wouldn’t be so chock-full of lobbed fists and spittle-doused collars.
Oh, I think there’s a difference. Dickstein pretty clearly has actually read S/Z.
Posted by: Andy | April 20, 2010 at 10:22 AM
“I think it’s absolutely pertinent to make fun of Ed’s “critical writing”"
You can do that all you want, but I don’t have to indulge it here. Perhaps it would be more courageous of you to take it up directly with Ed at his site, or on your own blog, rather than doing it indirectly in this thread.
“You critiqued the plot of Ed’s review, essentially, and turned a blind eye to its style”
Ed’s review per se was not my subject. I critiqued the “plot” because only it was relevant to my larger point. Ed’s writing style is not my concern here. You and Andy are the ones who have introduced these other extraneous issues.
By the way: We’re not going pursue them any farther in this thread.
Posted by: Dan Green | April 20, 2010 at 10:33 AM
It might be more courageous of me, Dan, but unfortunately Ed is in the habit of banning the IP addresses of those who dare to disagree with him…
Posted by: Andy | April 20, 2010 at 10:38 AM
“Perhaps it would be more courageous of you to take it up directly with Ed at his site…”
Bearing in mind that if Ed can’t respond with any fluency or accuracy, the resulting thread will be shut down. Those pixels cost money, after all, and we can’t have debates going on in the comment thread that we can neither profit from nor control! Can we?
Anyway, Dan, why not address the gist of my complaint: I say Ed can barely write, and I find it curious that you can’t detect this failing, given your track-record as an otherwise-perceptive critic. Is it your honest feeling that Ed writes as well, or better, than any of the critics and writers you’ve righteously (to my cheers and whistles) bashed on TRE?
If the quality *isn’t* an issue, there’s a whole nation of High School newspapers, out there, to trawl for critique-fodder, too.
Posted by: Steven Augustine | April 20, 2010 at 10:49 AM
“These reductionist takes presumptuously assumed that mysteries served only as plot-oriented puzzles, and that thematic truths and behavioral insight were taking a busman’s holiday within an allegedly inferior form.”
And can anyone decode this passage?
“When Cole gets a job at a tannery, hoping to save up enough cash for a one-way ticket back home, Westlake inserts a map with specific instructions. Cole increasingly becomes a working-class organization man, finding a generic yet somewhat idyllic life renting a room from a family, whose paterfamilias informs Cole that ‘he’d still be pretty much where I am and who I am,’ no matter whom he ended up marrying.”
Now, I ask you…
Apologies for butting in unannounced and unwashed, but the final sentence says it all:
“Memory isn’t just a tour de force that shows a master at the top of his game. It is an invitation to reconsider an “inferior” genre, beckoning us to find unexpected truths within the seemingly conventional.”
What serious critic has ever claimed that “truths”, (“unexpected” or otherwise), and the “seemingly conventional” were mutually exclusive? Also I’m assuming that the “conventional” refers to the genre and not the plot of the book under review – but I cannot be sure.
Far from “beckoning” us “to reconsider an “inferior” genre”, I’d be very surprised if the poor quality of this review did not have the exact opposite effect of reinforcing prejudices against the genre. On that note, anybody who buys me a copy of Memory (or any other book by Donald Westlake for that matter) will be removed from my Christmas card list forthwith.
I’m not even concerned with the validity/invalidity… or relative originality (none)… of the “critical” argument presented… it’s the illiteracy I object to. I used to consider Ed a guy who strung “big words” together without having a clue what they actually meant and with the results not even sounding good. But “lob” is not a big word and “busman’s holiday” is not an esoteric turn of phrase. More Dictionary, less Thesaurus… which may not fix the leather ear (seriously: read Ed’s tongue-twisters out loud) but it’s a start…
Here’s Ed “not quite Wilson” Champion doing an amateurish job of skewering a J. Franzen story, which appeared in the NYer, June of last year… and the resulting comments (the names precede their associated comments, in this case): please note how I tell Ed “to his face” that the “lampoon” is not so hot. Also read Franzen’s story; is this not clearly a case of an actual writer (whether the material is to your taste or not) vs any-old-guy-with-a-keyboard-a-chip-on-his-shoulder-and-delusions-of-grandeur?
Bad Neighbors Written by Edward Champion
Posted on June 8, 2009
Filed Under Franzen, Jonathan, New Yorker
Walter and Patty Melted were the young products of Franzen Hill — the first dreadful characters to spit out of the misanthropic novelist’s mind since the old heart of The Twenty-Seventh City had fallen on hard times two decades earlier. The Melteds hadn’t done anything to that bitter elitist hillock in Manhattan, except have the misfortune to run into it and kill themselves for ten years while the ultramontane deities renovated them. Early on, some very determined blogger torched the shit monster and did everything except beat this sad lifeless soil to a pulp so that he could drink Pabst Blue Ribbon with Howard Junker and cook up a few hot dogs with some of the boys at the raucous rooftop party that Jonathan, that sour whiny motherfucker with earplugs permanently stuck inside his hirsute ears, would never attend. “Hey, you guys, you know what?” Jonathan asked on behalf of the Melteds, “you are low-class people who will never understand my literary genius.” He saw Oprah — or was it Oona? [ed.'s exasperated note: idiotic reference to "Una" in TKO?] — on a bigass tv set and wanted to destroy this pox upon pop culture that his dainty toes would never touch. The Melteds hung down their heads, wondering why they had to be attached to this utterly incurious novelist and outright wanker. Behind the Melteds you could see the glazed Galassi making book-encumbered demands of book-encumbered novelists who forgot just what lively writing was all about; ahead of him, an afternoon of George Michael on radio, Freedom, an important title for an important man who had sideswiped Gaddis, taking his title and then dissing his last two books while the great Bill G was safely packed away into his maggot feeding plot, and then “Goodnight Fuck,” then Zinfandel, not that low-class populist Pabst Blue Ribbon. The Melteds knew that Gawker reporters would be there. Jonathan knew that he was a gasbag that just couldn’t stop expanding over the itchy and queasy expanse of Franzen Hill.
In the earliest years, when you could still remember getting your fingers greasy without feeling self-conscious or ashamed of the remainder of those middling Missouri roots, the collective task at Franzen Hill was to relearn certain joys about life that everybody else seemed to experience, but that eluded the sourpuss gestalt, like how to find some moment to smile at over the course of a 72-hour period, and how to actually enjoy some sight without standing on the edge of Central Park with a stick up your ass, and how to understand that there was actually a universe that extended beyond the island of Manhattan, and how to not write needlessly long sentences with laundry list clauses and pretend that you had something significant to say. Did they print this silly shit because it shot from the soulless steam stacks atop Franzen Hill? Did they even check the manifest anymore? Who needed to? The piece — whether story or excerpt from forthcoming novel — would give phony comfort to New Yorker readers. Franzen Hill was a brand name. One as dependable as Nike, Pepsi-Cola, and Microsoft.
For all existential queries and verisimilitudinous volts, Patty Melted was a resource, a dried up construct whom Jonathan the novelist could desperately look to for the answers. A carrier of sociocultural pollen, if only the author had anything sociocultural to really draw from. She would have to remain a spent capsule, a sarcophagal bee that never talked back and stung the author, and only the author, when provoked.
Make no mistake: this was a disease, a cancer that would cause the unthinking literary acolytes to praise Franzen Hill’s physical dimensions without considering the pustules and sputum enervating the whole. Those flabby Bolanoites holed up in garrets still actually believed that they could bust shit up from the inside when they were part of the unthinking market forces. The rush of Franzen Hill would spread with the thwacks of magazines hitting doorsteps and newsstands, and continue with the reverberating dings from email clients. Endless forwarding, some printing off of the story for the subway, the sense that Franzen Hill was only the finest. Never mind what shit the story was. It appeared in The New Yorker!
The Melteds still knew that Everest towered over Franzen Hill.
“It’s a wonder,” Walter Melted remarked to Patty afterward, “that this sad and contemptuous man is even still writing.”
Patty shook her head. “I don’t think he’s figured out how to love anything.”
33 Responses to “Bad Neighbors”
1. Miracle Jones on June 8th, 2009 8:57 pm
! 2.Jane Hammons on June 8th, 2009 9:16 pm
Thank you. It’s not just me! I thought it was a really mean-spirited story. But I kept hearing people go on and on about how wonderful and insightful and blah blah blah. I thought maybe I should reread it. But knew I couldn’t.
3. judith on June 9th, 2009 12:48 am
I’m with you. Also it felt like it was too self-consciously trying to be Richard Yates-esque.
4. Mike Czobit on June 9th, 2009 2:49 pm
Was this even a short story?
I read it as an excerpt from his next novel. If it was actually meant to be a story on its own, it’s disappointing. Or I’m completely missing the point of its conventionalism.
5. Patrick Stephenson on June 9th, 2009 4:22 pm
The story is about my city. Fictional people in my county. I do not like it, Mr. Franzen. I do not like it one bit.
6. Andy on June 9th, 2009 5:51 pm
In its malicious spirit, I find it to be the precise opposite of the work of, say, Flannery O’Connor, who could populate a story entirely with unappealing and reprehensible characters who are unappealing and reprehensible in completely different ways, yet resonate against one another to make the story work perfectly. Who or what in “Good Neighbors” is essential, isn’t gilding the lily? Which of the characters is necessary? It’s an almost entirely unliterary work, consisting of facile prose, complete (if misplaced) confidence in the values of his audience (to whom he panders), and a cataloging of things — occupations, institutions, products, pursuits, hobbies, clothes, etc. — that are intended to do all the heavy lifting that comes with creating character and voice, neither of which, if you give the story even a cursory read, are present — i.e., do we know who Walter is? No, we think we know what sort of guy would work for the Nature Conservancy. Do we know who Carol is? Well, we’ve seen someone who’s kind of like that hanging around on Court Street, so sure, we know the “type.” I mean, I have no trouble with grotesques or with caricature, but in instance in which those things are deployed exclusively as a matter of fictional technique, I require an overarching form, a suggestion that something’s at stake, there’s something to be lost. What does Franzen give us?
7. Jade Park on June 9th, 2009 6:55 pm
howling with laughter! :)
8. Steven Augustine on June 9th, 2009 7:56 pm
It’s not exactly the sort of thing I enjoy reading (or, to put it this way: would pay to read), but I really can’t see what all the whining is about.
Yes, the characters are a grating bunch, but they are well-observed, I’m afraid… I have spent time (whilst visiting The States: once every 5 years, roughly) with just such people on their decks or in their gazebos, eating seafood salad (it’s always delicious; much better than the stuff that keeps me svelte in Berlin) and listening to their harmless, nostalgia-and- kitsch-undermined record collections and the overheard chatter of their weirdly self-assured (not yet fat or tattooed) children and drifting in and out of conversations with various toothy moms about their placebo activism etc.
These people are all very nice, hug-prone, earnestly helpful, truly lost and impossible to bear for more than a few hours every five years… and there are *tons* of them. Isn’t NPR their CNN? Lileks their Proust? Didn’t they buy most of the tickets for the Police reunion? Why *not* write about them? Edith Wharton did.
Also: reality check: the writing is *slightly* more accomplished (while being, again, not really my thing at all) than any of you seem willing to admit; it’s only a few IQ-degrees removed from late-phase DFW, in fact. Ed: be honest: do you think your parody is *stronger*, stylistically, than the target?
Trashing Franzen is obvious and corny and easy, IMO; who has the balls to trash some of the time-stealing, silly-assed, imagination-depleting (corporate-coffers-swelling) TV shows that have the hipsters slickly hypnotized? It would be (wo)manlier than these Fish-in-a-Barrel Olympics to do so, dudes and dudesses. It would.
9. Andy on June 9th, 2009 10:57 pm
Steven, isn’t it possible they’re well-observed only on the most superficial of levels? What you see every five years at someone’s garden party is all well and good, but that sort of reportage invades the pages of New York Magazine every week — is it really “literature,” or at least literature as defined by the terms Franzen himself has set forth in his divers manifestoes on the subject? Wharton may have written about them, but she didn’t write about them like *this.* And I know we’ve been hearing and hearing about Cheever lately, but certainly Cheever’s lacerations of the smooth surface of the nice were more incisive — these are machete hacks. Who or what is being satirized here? Everything? The men, the women, the workers, the stay-at-homes, the politically correct, the politically incorrect, the information class, the working class, the architecturally precious, the architecturally vulgar, the virtuous and the venal? To what in the world is this “everything” analogously linked? To everything that we, including you, flatter ourselves that we are not.
10. Steven Augustine on June 10th, 2009 3:39 am
“Steven, isn’t it possible they’re well-observed only on the most superficial of levels?”
-Contradiction?
“What you see every five years at someone’s garden party is all well and good, but that sort of reportage invades the pages of New York Magazine every week — is it really “literature,”…”
-”Literature” is a nicely inclusive and forgiving term, Andy; it even manages to encompass stuff you (and I) don’t like. (And: I may hit the garden parties every 5 years, but I’ve known the party-givers/goers since college.)
“Wharton may have written about them, but she didn’t write about them like *this.*”
-Two different writers; we’d expect them to differ.
“And I know we’ve been hearing and hearing about Cheever lately, but certainly Cheever’s lacerations of the smooth surface of the nice were more incisive — these are machete hacks. Who or what is being satirized here?”
-Don’t set a personal goal for a piece of writing that you yourself didn’t write, then complain that this goal wasn’t met. That’s the easiest, and most common, attack platform on the Liternet (and in print hatchet-hackery).
“Everything? The men, the women, the workers, the stay-at-homes, the politically correct, the politically incorrect, the information class, the working class, the architecturally precious, the architecturally vulgar, the virtuous and the venal? To what in the world is this “everything” analogously linked?”
-You bring in this “everything”, then mock it in scare quotes (see preceding point). See the problem?
“To everything that we, including you, flatter ourselves that we are not.”
-Sounds good as a wrap-up riff but unless you actually *know* everything that “we” are, it’s not only irrelevant as a fragment of LitCrit but just as presumptuous (as sociology) as you seem to think Franzen is being in daring to write this story. You’re only qualified to speak of yourself (and the people you know) in this way… speaking of which: isn’t it possible that Franzen struck a nerve?
“It’s a wonder,” Walter Melted remarked to Patty afterward, “that this sad and contemptuous man is even still writing.”
Srsly. Why the fury?
11. Andy on June 10th, 2009 10:22 am
-Contradiction?
No, not really. You don’t have to get into characters in Jamesian depth to observe them well. But surface is all, here, a surface tricked out with elaborately empty details that might give John O’Hara pause.
-”Literature” is a nicely inclusive and forgiving term, Andy; it even manages to encompass stuff you (and I) don’t like. (And: I may hit the garden parties every 5 years, but I’ve known the party-givers/goers since college.)
Franzen has been quite specific, even dogmatic, in his remarks on the subject of “literature,” in which he has expressed ambitions that clearly go beyond what might be expected of pop sociology and New York Magazine. Here’s just one of them: “…most works of serious literature share certain things: a belief in the individual; a ‘pessimistic’ conviction that world (or history, or fate, or God) will be forever smarter than the people in it; a commitment to mediating between the author’s subjectivity and the world in which she finds herself by subjecting that subjectivity to the rigors of conventional form and permanent language; and the whole battery of stuff like honesty and responsibility and love and significance that constitutes ‘humane values’…If you believe in these humane values it’s possible to continue believing in literary fiction as, if nothing else, a vessel for preserving them…”
To me, it’s evident that the only relevant thing “smarter than the people in” the world of “Good Neighbors” is Jonathan Franzen and the readers who he flatters by presenting them with a caricature of bourgeois values in which no one could possibly recognize themselves. But more crucially, perhaps, is that rote line about “stuff” like honesty, responsibility, love — humane values. What of that is present here? These aren’t necessarily my standards, it’s not a question of whether this is “literature” I like, it’s a question of whether it’s “literature” as rather piously defined by Jonathan Franzen.
-Two different writers; we’d expect them to differ.
Of course we would, but that’s clearly not what I meant.
-Don’t set a personal goal for a piece of writing that you yourself didn’t write, then complain that this goal wasn’t met. That’s the easiest, and most common, attack platform on the Liternet (and in print hatchet-hackery).
There’s nothing personal about mentioning a writer who handled the same sort of milieu and its pretensions, fears, anxieties, failings, failures, triumphs, and grace more deftly, more imaginatively, and more comprehensively than Franzen does. Setting a goal and invoking a standard are two entirely different things. I’m certain that Franzen attained his goal, my implication is that the goal is an unworthy one.
-You bring in this “everything”, then mock it in scare quotes (see preceding point). See the problem?
No, it’s Franzen’s “everything.” There’s absolutely nothing in the story that Franzen seems to think has the slightest worth. There isn’t any ambiguity. I wouldn’t like the story in any event, but I like it even less when the author takes to the pulpit, sometimes in the same pages, to shake his finger in my face and tell me that fiction is “a vessel for preserving humane values.”
-Sounds good as a wrap-up riff but unless you actually *know* everything that “we” are, it’s not only irrelevant as a fragment of LitCrit but just as presumptuous (as sociology) as you seem to think Franzen is being in daring to write this story. You’re only qualified to speak of yourself (and the people you know) in this way… speaking of which: isn’t it possible that Franzen struck a nerve?
Well, it sounds good as a wrap-up riff, because it is good as a wrap-up riff. My presumptuousness may derive, a little, from your condescending dismissal of your old college buds, their “harmless” music, their “placebo” activism, their gazebos and seafood salad, the “toothy” moms and their “weirdly self-assured” children. I take it that you’re somehow in but not of this group, but also that, despite seeing them twice each decade, you’re absolutely dead-on in your evaluation of them. Jeez, Steven. With friends like you sitting on the gazebo eating seafood salad, one doesn’t need enemies sitting on the gazebo eating seafood salad. But you’re missing the point, again, I think. I asked to what in our world the everything in Franzen’s world is linked; my answer was that it was linked only to the spotless conscience we can admire when we compare ourselves to these odious caricatures Franzen has set in motion, who have no counterparts on Planet Earth. What “nerve” might it have struck? I found it to be an unpleasant story, but there’s nothing here to make anyone uncomfortable. That’s the whole point of the story.
“It’s a wonder,” Walter Melted remarked to Patty afterward, “that this sad and contemptuous man is even still writing.”
Srsly. Why the fury?
Well, you’ll have to ask Ed why he’s furious. I’m not furious. I just think it’s a contemptible piece of work.
12. Steven Augustine on June 10th, 2009 11:07 am
Andy:
I won’t keep cranking the rebuttal wheel on the points raised above; I’ll just get to this one and then post a proposal:
“I take it that you’re somehow in but not of this group, but also that, despite seeing them twice each decade, you’re absolutely dead-on in your evaluation of them.”
I went to college with these people but share almost nothing of their background(s) or life-paths; I am still friends with some of them (and some of them are exes)… a spy in the house that Martha Stewart built? Laugh.
My circle of friends and acquaintances probably represents the most jarring melange/overlap of disparate subcultures imaginable (as a professional composer I often hang out with teenage musicians, as a writer/Artist I hang out with middle-aged and “foreign” academics, as a racial mutt I’m close to “blacks”, “whites”, “Asians”, whatever…).
The proposal:
If online literary discourse is ever to transcend the zero-sum of a bizillion passionate consumers planting their flags (eg, the ground-breaking “The Beatles Suck” chat room declaration), we’re going to have to get to the level where we can *appreciate* literary artifacts (or their creators) that we don’t necessarily like. Big step.
I’ve had people react to that suggestion with a “Wtf?” as though the concept is an oxymoron. It isn’t! It’s a form of critical maturity that expands the practice to allow for the otherwise baffling paradox that a dozen equally-intelligent readers can all be “right” while enjoying mutually antithetical tastes.
Easy example: I just *can’t* get into Tom Wolfe’s novels. They’re as much my cup of tea as movies directed by Wolfgang Peterson are. But for me to claim that Wolfe “can’t write” would be ridiculous. The man knows how to write… I’ve read individual passages of his that were worthy of genuine admiration (and there are plenty of intelligent readers who cherish the novels). Ditto Franzen. Why is something like that so hard to admit? It shouldn’t be.
13. Steven Augustine on June 10th, 2009 11:15 am
PS “Jeez, Steven. With friends like you sitting on the gazebo eating seafood salad, one doesn’t need enemies sitting on the gazebo eating seafood salad.”
Since when is the Truth 100% nice? “Nice” is for kindergarten.
14. Andy on June 10th, 2009 11:46 am
“…we’re going to have to get to the level where we can *appreciate* literary artifacts (or their creators) that we don’t necessarily like. Big step.”
It’s a “big step” that I took long ago. Having taken it doesn’t require me to appreciate literary artifacts that fall short in my opinion. This one does. I think it’s a bad story. As for Franzen, I have absolutely no opinion about him personally.
“It’s a form of critical maturity that expands the practice to allow for the otherwise baffling paradox that a dozen equally-intelligent readers can all be ‘right’ while enjoying mutually antithetical tastes.”
Dude, I didn’t say you were “wrong.” I raised issues I had with the story, questioned its relationship to positions Franzen has taken publicly on literature, compared him to another author, and suggested that satire really needs to draw blood from an object in the world being satirized, not from humanoid figurines whose function is to enable us to feel smug about ourselves. None of these are critically immature strategies.
“Since when is the Truth 100% nice? ‘Nice’ is for kindergarten.”
I’d be more prepared to celebrate your intrepid honesty if you turned up at the gazebo one night and enumerated aloud all the ways in which the enthusiasms, tastes, values, and “life paths” of your hosts and fellow guests are patently inferior to your own. Of course, since it’s the truth — I mean, the Truth — they probably already know that, and want you around so they can bask in your aura.
15. Steven Augustine on June 10th, 2009 11:59 am
Let’s not be literal-minded, Andy (do you really think it was “seafood salad”? Or a “gazebo”?). Also: don’t take it personally, okay? I don’t.
Anyway: how broadly are you defining “satire” here? Is this short story meant to have more “satire” to it than something by Carver, say? Or, again, a short story by DFW? What if it’s a cluster of insights/observations which lead to a payoff the point of which is not to make us gasp, or laugh, or sigh, but merely to tie the observations into a neat little point?
16. DrMabuse on June 10th, 2009 12:01 pm
Andy and Steven: Guys, let’s try and keep this conversation civil, kindergarten or not. It’s clear that both of you are fighting over subjective viewpoints.
To answer Steven’s question, keep in mind that this piece IS a construct. And I couldn’t possibly care about whether you think it’s better or worse than Franzen. Tear it up. Condemn it. Praise it. Be my guest. I don’t care. My intentions are my own and you’ll never know. Inquiries along these line exist to badger me and no matter WHICH way I answer (and no I won’t tell you), I’ll be forced into a narcissistic terrain that isn’t in my character and that isn’t germane to this discussion at all. It’s all a bit silly and embarrassing.
There is, however, a clue contained within about what I’m doing. But most folks will have to wait until later in the year to understand, assuming they get the clue and the obscure connection and that they simultaneously understand what the basis of THAT connection is. Does that clear things up for you? :)
17. Steven Augustine on June 10th, 2009 12:03 pm
“I just think it’s a contemptible piece of work.”
I don’t see how you (or Ed) have made a compelling case for the story (as opposed to J Franzen, for some personal reason) being “contemptible”. That’s a fairly extraordinary damnation. I haven’t seen the proportionately extraordinary argument yet.
18. Steven Augustine on June 10th, 2009 12:05 pm
“Does that clear things up for you? :) ”
Not really, but I love a good riddle, Ed!
19. Steven Augustine on June 10th, 2009 12:07 pm
Erm, is “Bolanoites” a clue?
20. Andy on June 10th, 2009 1:29 pm
“Let’s not be literal-minded, Andy (do you really think it was “seafood salad”? Or a “gazebo”?). Also: don’t take it personally, okay? I don’t.”
Your riposte that my taking you at your (written) word marks a defect of intellection is too subtle for me, I guess. And I don’t take it personally. I just think it’s too bad that you don’t like your friends.
“Anyway: how broadly are you defining “satire” here? Is this short story meant to have more “satire” to it than something by Carver, say? Or, again, a short story by DFW? What if it’s a cluster of insights/observations which lead to a payoff the point of which is not to make us gasp, or laugh, or sigh, but merely to tie the observations into a neat little point?”
Well, now, this is just getting silly. If it’s a satire, I think it fails within the terms I outlined above. If it’s not a satire, then I think it fails on several levels: style, character, voice, plot, theme (unless “contempt for mankind” is a theme, which I’ll grant it is for, say, Celine or Bernhard, who make up for it with — you guessed it — style, character, voice, etc.), etc. I thought I’d made my feelings clear. And what if it is just that? Well, great. It’s a highly professional sketch containing reportage on the level of that which invades the pages of New York Magazine. The neat little point of which gratifies you, I gather, but leaves me cold.
“’I just think it’s a contemptible piece of work.’
…That’s a fairly extraordinary damnation. I haven’t seen the proportionately extraordinary argument yet.”
Do I need an argument more extraordinary than that of Franzen’s own evident contemptuousness?
21. Steven Augustine on June 10th, 2009 2:34 pm
I think what you need, Andy, is a little more distance… and a smaller chip on that shoulder. I think you also need to question that default American need for writers/stories to be personable/uplifting/nice. A sense of humor/irony would help.
22. Andy on June 10th, 2009 3:58 pm
Good of you to draw inferences, unsupported by any of my comments, about what I require of fiction. Yes, that nice, personable Flannery O’Connor. That nice, uplifting John Cheever.
I’m not sure what I need to keep my distance from, Steven. You? Fiction? The way I read? I mean, you tipped your hypothesis earlier — I hate the story, ergo I recognize myself among the story’s targets — but that, too, is unsupported by my comments. I can assure you that I’ve felt the chill of self-recognition in the pages of fiction before, and my response isn’t revulsion directed at the fiction. There’s a difference between having one’s pieties and airs picked off by a merciless sniper and being caught in the lunchroom when a teen mass killer starts firing a scatter gun. Franzen’s just another undiscriminating “disgruntled loner,” except equipped with a mandarin vocabulary.
But I don’t think that’s Franzen’s “offense.” I think, as I’ve tried to make clear, that what is bothersome about this story is that Franzen has fabricated it so that it points its finger everywhere except at us. It points at, you know, *them,* which to me indicates one of two alternatives: first, and most likely, that Franzen is well aware of his audience and tailors his work expertly to accommodate its sensibilities, which may be a testament to his craft but condemns the work as art; or, second, that Franzen actually sees *everybody* as no more than the sum of their Volvo-driving, Nature Conservancy-supporting, inner-city-gentrifying — i.e., liberal consumer — ways, which is no more and no less than a failure of the imagination. To parrot back at “us” what “we” “know” about our own class — about the idiocy of its assumptions, the dumb seductiveness of its ad copy, the impurity of its goodness, it marginal superiority over the patently dumb (“Blake”) — by presenting us with caricatured exponents of that class isn’t the stuff of art, it’s the stuff of redundant and self-important propaganda.
23. Steven Augustine on June 10th, 2009 4:40 pm
(Sorry about the absence; we were putting our daughter to bed)…
Andy, my points are: A) how do you get “contemptible” out of the argument you present, when all your evidence does is point to a (by your system) failed story? I wonder if there’s an extra-literary cinder in your critical eye on this… which leads to B), my feeling that your basic reading of the author’s intent is by no means open-and-shut. I read it less as a “satire” than as a sort of low-temp tragedy. I see the jokes in the thing, but I detect compassion, too. Not that compassion in a story is necessary (depends on the story), but if you’re indicting Franzen for a lack thereof, I think you’re missing something.
I’m not here to defend Franzen, or this particular story… I’m just curious about the violence of the pile-on here.
“I think, as I’ve tried to make clear, that what is bothersome about this story is that Franzen has fabricated it so that it points its finger everywhere except at us.”
In a way, I think the same of this anti-Franzen hysteria.
24. Steven Augustine on June 10th, 2009 5:14 pm
In fact, having been compelled by this argument to look “Good Neighbors” over more than once, I’m beginning to admire it a bit more… precisely as a kind of Hardy-esque tragedy. Hamartia? Check. Inevitability (and symmetry) of the tragic characters’ downfall? Check.
And bringing Flannery into this argument while seeing fit to pillory Franzen for using one of O’Connor’s signal methods for heightening the garish beauty of some fool’s downfall seriously undermines the logic of your outrage. You think any of Flannery O’Connor’s doomed-to-a-comeuppance characters (the fancypants college shits or the harpy-hausfrauen or the hapless freaks) are not painted with blinking targets from the beginning? You want to lambast Franzen for animating some post-Yuppie foibles for us… while turning a blind eye to St. Flannery’s picaresque racism? (Not that I give a damn about the latter)
Inconsistent, Andy. And highly suspicious.
(At least you’ve forgotten about the seafood salad…)
25. Andy on June 10th, 2009 6:00 pm
–(Sorry about the absence; we were putting our daughter to bed)…
Ach, and one of mine’s just waking up…
–Andy, my points are: A) how do you get “contemptible” out of the argument you present when all your evidence does is point to a (by your system) failed story? I wonder if there’s an extra-literary cinder in your critical eye on this…
Well, it’s not a system, for one thing, it’s a set of pretty flexible and wide-ranging criteria. I think shooting fish in a barrel is contemptible, particularly when you’ve taken pains to exclude any fish who might escape your aim. I just do. It may not be a persuasive argument, but I suppose it’s not ordinarily one I feel constrained to make, because I find the work of Jonathan Franzen generally to be beside the point, and Franzen does a really good job of impugning himself whenever the opportunity presents. If it isn’t satire (and I hold that it is) then, OK, it’s not contemptible, it’s merely bad.
–which leads to B), my feeling that your basic reading of the author’s intent is by no means open-and-shut. I read it less as a “satire” than as a sort of low-temp tragedy. I see the jokes in the thing, but I detect compassion, too. Not that compassion in a story is necessary (depends on the story), but if you’re indicting Franzen for a lack thereof, I think you’re missing something.
I may be missing the compassion, but one thorough go-through and another cursory one were enough for me, really. But I don’t think a lack of compassion is the principal flaw of the story. I think it’s a certain relentless doo-hickeyism: Grab-bag characters, big, slow-moving targets, a flabby premise that unfolds sloppily, like an inflatable raft. I don’t know if this sort of contrivance really rates as tragedy at any temperature.
–I’m not here to defend Franzen, or this particular story… I’m just curious about the violence of the pile-on here.
Can’t speak for the others in the pile. Me, I don’t like the story, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and I think I’ve justified my dislike to an acceptable extent, even if you do disagree. I don’t *think* there’s anything extraliterary influencing me. I’m not even a Franzen-hater — really! I think that a lot of what he does here he does to much better effect — because of a larger and balancing context — in The Corrections.
–“I think, as I’ve tried to make clear, that what is bothersome about this story is that Franzen has fabricated it so that it points its finger everywhere except at us.” In a way, I think the same of this anti-Franzen hysteria.
I don’t think I’ve been hysterical, or anti-Franzen. And I’m not really sure what you mean. I haven’t authored a series of blog comments about a boogeyman so that we can all feel reassured that we have nothing in common with that boogeyman, I’m scrutinizing a published short story by a writer who is, rightly or wrongly, regarded as one of the pre-eminent authors of his generation. It’s become a canard that, on the web, some writers (name the dozen of your choice) get unfairly beat up on, and while I’d agree that it would be better if the scope of the beating-up were enlarged I do think it’s a good thing that Great Writers A, B, and C are publicly taken to task in a manner that I doubt would ever see the light of day in print. I’m not a big fan of take-down culture, don’t value that sweeping “Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation” crap, and certainly I’m not a theorist of the Creeping Conspiracy, like King Wenclas. But I also believe that it’s neither unreasonable nor “extraliterary” to question whether someone other than a Jonathan Franzen could so prominently publish a short story of this caliber — a question, to be sure, that I could ask regarding a lot of the stories published in the New Yorker. The object isn’t an envy-driven piling on, the object is (in part) to query the unexamined status, methods, ends, and appeal of Jonathan Franzen as a brand name.
26. Andy on June 10th, 2009 6:05 pm
“Inconsistent, Andy. And highly suspicious.”
No, not really. Re-read “Good Country People” and then “Good Neighbors” and if you see more similarity than difference in *any* respect than I really can’t help you.
27. Steven Augustine on June 10th, 2009 6:15 pm
Well, we’ve juiced as much as we can out of this one, probably. Thanks for the debate and I sincerely hope there are no hard feelings.
28. Steven Augustine on June 10th, 2009 6:17 pm
“…a question, to be sure, that I could ask regarding a lot of the stories published in the New Yorker.”
There we agree!
29. Andy on June 10th, 2009 6:18 pm
Why would there be any hard feelings?
30. CTR on June 12th, 2009 12:59 am
Steven Augustine is quickly becoming one of the best known trolls on the Internet. Congrats, Steve, that is actually quite an accomplishment. I can’t wait for your droll response. I’m sure it will be one of your best.
31. Steven Augustine on June 12th, 2009 11:22 am
CTR:
Gee, how can I respond now that you’ve preempted any response so effectively with this childish chatroom tactic? (In lieu of anything as difficult to generate as an articulate literary opinion, of course). But wait: you mean there are LOLers out there who don’t LOVE me… ?
Finally read the Franzen story, thought it was weak, enjoyed Ed’s take, arguing about the story gives it more attention than it deserves.
33. Kristin on July 21st, 2009 4:53 pm
I stumbled upon this web site while searching for reviews and analysis of “Good Neighbors.” Though the original blog post didn’t do much for me, I found debate in the comments really fascinating.
I think Steven Augustine made some really brilliant points and was the clear winner of the argument. It saddens me that some people seemed to want to shut down the discussion, while others called Steven a “troll.” I guess you must face that kind of wrath when you dare to take on the echo chamber mentality.
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Of course, Ed was the guy who wrote the thing referring to the brilliant “The Kindly Ones” (Jonathan Littell) as “The worst book I have read in the past three years”:
In today’s edition of the Chicago Sun-Times, you will find my review of Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones. Let it be known that I did not arrive at my assessment lightly. I am an ardent lover of ambitious literature, and I realize when taking on any review assignment that an author has probably sweated for years on a project. As such, I do everything in my power to attempt to understand a book on its own terms.
But this novel was so atrocious that I was forced to record a video presenting just how this atrocious book left me vitiated. If you haven’t yet seen the video and you’re on the fence about Littell, I strongly urge you to see what it might do to you. For if you have any decent literary standards, you may very well find yourself incapacitated in a similar manner when you reach the end. (I still don’t know how Orthofer got to the end, but his review is also worthy of your attention.)
One other side effect of reading Littell: I was forced to spend half a day staring into space in order to recover from the book’s sheer awfulness. You can find out the specific reasons why in the review. But I must stress that, even if I didn’t possess some modest spirit of decency, I could not possibly recommend this book to my worst enemy. The Kindly Ones still rests in the stacks of spent tomes, sullying the fine offerings of other skilled voices. I have strongly considered burning it.
Fucking ID.I.OT.
All to say: the only actual “Literary Critique” and “Discussion” I’m seeing on these blogs is happening in the heated exchanges on the comment threads. Much to the dismay of the various LitBlog owners. Yes, there’s a LOT to read on TET. No, I’m not working to make this place more “accessible”. This is where you come if you want to read something deeper and longer and harder-to-grasp than quips and blurbs.
This, for example, is some pretty good shit (comment 24 from the above-cited thread):
And bringing Flannery into this argument while seeing fit to pillory Franzen for using one of O’Connor’s signal methods for heightening the garish beauty of some fool’s downfall seriously undermines the logic of your outrage. You think any of Flannery O’Connor’s doomed-to-a-comeuppance characters (the fancypants college shits or the harpy-hausfrauen or the hapless freaks) are not painted with blinking targets from the beginning? You want to lambast Franzen for animating some post-Yuppie foibles for us… while turning a blind eye to St. Flannery’s picaresque racism? (Not that I give a damn about the latter)
DEPT. OF THE MIRACULISH
Christ-on-a-pike, Steve Mitchelmore (must suppress urge to write “Bitchelmore”) has just gone from being a semi-arch-nemesis to someone I’d give an oven-mitted handjob to in a public place:
“Forgive me, but how can someone not like Ed Champion?”
Answer: Very easily.
I used to think he was harmless fun but things changed last year. Both Dan and Steven have read and, I think, admired Littell’s The Kindly Ones. One only has to see and read Champions’ video response and review to recognise a buffoon at work. And a buffoon with a megaphone can do harm. (Someone should tell him megaphones weren’t meant for that end.)
Dan’s wish for reviewers to examine premises is one I share. It’s why print reviewing doesn’t hold the allure it once did. It’s absence in the majority of print locations perhaps explains Champions’ contempt for Littell’s novel and for Mendelsohn’s magnificent review of it in the NYRB. The novel subjects itself to literature and to its own writing. That is, unlike the genre pap Champion reviews. We needn’t take any more notice.
Posted by: steve mitchelmore | April 20, 2010 at 03:46 PM
Well, SM and I will not suddenly start (b)logrolling, of course (unless he swears off that slacker pimp-litter Tao Lin), but it’s very nice to see Literary values trump virtual enmities
[editor's note: The Kindly Ones reference appearing in the 420th comment... according to the total at the top of the page as of 11:37... on Hitler's birthday? Spooky]
Gut Gawd, CDS Frances. You won’t mind if I’m blunt about this comment you’ve left on Dan’s thread, will you? I’ll respond here, rather than on Dan’s site, making it less easy for Dan to delete my response; first, your comment:
Steve [Mitchelmore],
I hadn’t seen Ed’s TKO vid until you publicized it on This Space, a blog I have long ago bookmarked, read regularly, and very much respect and enjoy. In fact, the rotating art thumbnails have gotten me through some really tough moments; I often find them revelatory and inspiring (though I do wish they were identified with titles and creators). I thought Ed’s bit of fluff was silly and fun to watch (like when Harvey Korman and Tim Conway would crack themselves up on The Carol Burnett Show) and I’d bet you a fish n’ chips that it would crack Littell up too if he were to see it. At least I hope so. I know if Ed had done it about my book, I would have nearly died laughing. In fact, the whole effort exemplifies one of Ed’s finer qualities–the willingness to risk condemnation. All too rare if you ask me.
When Daniel Mendelsohn makes me laugh as hard as Ed Champion has done (on several occasions) I’ll pay more attention to his perspective (humor being the highest form of intelligence, remember). At present, I generally find reading that Daniel on the laborious and head-trippy side. And although I found the first 400 or so pages of TKO very interesting (and the remainder something rather less than “riveting”), on the whole my impression of Littell is that he needs to get over himself–big time. And if nothing else, from flat on his back, Ed sent that message to Barthelona, loud and clear.
Posted by: Frances Madeson | April 20, 2010 at 10:47 PM
“…my impression of Littell is that he needs to get over himself–big time.”
Frances, that’s the favorite phrase of the chip-on-the-shoulder brigade. “Getting over himself” has nothing to do with the quality of the Art and everything to do with the fact that Littell has written something, in TKO, that both you and Ed Champion are incapable of having written. I’m not capable of having written it, either; I’m grateful that Littell is: this isn’t abject self-deprecation or false modesty, it’s a symptom of my saving grace. I’m not threatened by the specter of superior talent or intelligence, I’m inspired by it. There’s a sense of Entitlement… not to goods, but to achievement and its victory laps… that can turn corrosive if it isn’t moderated by a sense of proportion. Saying that Littell would “crack up” at an ignorant, envy-rotten attack on his work is not the most insightful remark you’ve ever made. Shrinking the practice and perception of Literary Art to the dimension of one’s wounded sense of affront-in-the-face-of-greater-talent is useful to no one.
“In fact, the whole effort exemplifies one of Ed’s finer qualities–the willingness to risk condemnation.”
This is a perfectly baffling reverse of the True; it’s utter, oozing bullshit, in fact; TKO was condemned by such a tidal wave of Yankee Bluenose Philistinism that the safest thing Ed could do was what he did: blow his childish raspberry and flash his ugly moon. Ed’s default alignment with the majority à la “twenty million tuning in for American Idol, eight million enjoying Lady Gaga’s latest YouTube video, and more than a million readers feverishly purchasing Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight” is hardly the brave work of a lone dissident, it’s the default maneuver of the standard-issue demagogue for whom the numbers are always the prize. Ed will always go where the numbers go because he wants to be “popular”. He wants that modicum of “power”. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s the consumerist majority setting all the standards these days, not some meritocratic elite.
“When Daniel Mendelsohn makes me laugh as hard as Ed Champion has done (on several occasions) I’ll pay more attention to his perspective (humor being the highest form of intelligence, remember).”
Depends on the kind of laughter, doesn’t it? The belly-laughs at the Colosseum are not inspired by wit. I’ll bet there are bars full of skinheads rocking with laughter at this very moment and I’m sure they aren’t laughing at aphorisms from Dorothy Parker. Buffoonery isn’t the “highest form” of anything. I think you know that.
Re-visting that old comment thread re: Jonathan Franzen’s NYer story vs Ed Champion’s idiotic “parody” of it, I was stumped, again, by the fury against Franzen from Ed and his followers. I like a good mystery. And now I understand, suddenly, that all that rage is Narcissistic Pain. Now I understand Ed’s general motivation and I understand the function of his projects; the service he provides. All those sense-of-Entitlement-poisoned thirty-somethings, barely capable of writing interesting/coherent comments yet somehow convinced of the innate superiority of their sheer Bulk Normality. Who can they sue/prosecute/recriminate for their emotional distress in being effortlessly superior with nothing to show for it? Ed sets up his dunking pool.
I used to enjoy listening to Ed’s Bat Segundo show by filtering out the bulk of Ed’s asinine, OCD-informed quasi-insights (“How does your frequent use of the words ‘the’ and ‘and’ inform the themes of the book? I’ve written in my notes that you use the word ‘the’ 5,089 times… surely that means something“) and steering round the writers’ baffled, stammering responses. I thought Ed would “develop” over time; I thought the problems with these interviews would eventually work themselves out. I didn’t realize, then, that these problems with the interviews were the very key to Ed’s approach: hostility. The various writers, some great, others not, put up with this hostility in the name of, possibly, broadening the fan base. Ie: for money. A Faustian pact with a very minor devil. The problem being that there are no shortage of these minor devils running around.
Ed is The Ongoing Revenge of the Talentless.
But, as I wrote in an email, yesterday:
I think literacy should matter to the practice (and practitioners) of literature, CDS Frances… it’s a pretty deep rabbit hole to fall down in order to discover that Dan’s righteous defense of Lit as a serious and/or higher pursuit doesn’t even extend to his comment thread. I don’t suppose that it would have counted much if, while we were lambasting Cap’n Woody, a commenter chimed in with “But James Wood is my friend and I like him!” At least Wood isn’t illiterate.
Ed writes the crappiest shit I’ve ever seen anyone dignify with critical attention. The PR flacks take him seriously because they think he can deliver readers; his buddies give him a free pass because, as we know, once someone has complimented you online, you will agree with/praise/defend them forever.
This is the anti-intellectual escalator to the Picture Book future.
I refuse.
I set up the TET Bunker Pagoda as a safe-zone where anyone can write any comment (unless it’s gibberish pure) without fear of having it deleted. That’s the first requirement of intellectual discourse: genuine freedom of speech. The second requirement of intellectual discourse is the belief in the possibility of the intellectual. Support for the blatantly anti-intellectual is not one of my responsibilities here.
Littell PO’d me (possibly permanently) when in an interview he said that there was NO literary figure he would be interested in meeting. Really? Not a single one? Not Sean McNulty or Neil Addison or Edmond Caldwell or any of the other comrades? I found that outrageous. There’s outsized talent and there’s outsized ego and if Ed deflates the second while farcically blabbering about the first, I not only think there’s a place for it, I’ll titter along.
Frances, Jonathan Littell hasn’t heard of Sean, Edmond, Neil, you or me. He hasn’t. I promise. He hasn’t even heard of Ed Champion.
CDS Steven,
I close my eyes and try to imagine your response to the same question and I can see a list, a long one, of writers–living and dead– that you would invoke (and honor them by so doing). That he had the limelight and chose not to share it, not to seize the opportunity to extend it outward and beyond his own accomplishment is not only telling but Littelling.
Nonsense. Littell isn’t responsible to your notion of what any writer’s responsibility is. Even if he were, it would have nothing to do with the brilliance or stupidity of his work. Separating the two as categories of judgment is important.
My response to the same question is that I’m happy to read the work. Not so interested in the personalities behind it.
V. S. Pritchett comes knocking at the Pagoda door. In or out?
If he wants to leave a posthumous comment, he’s more than welcome to.
Frances, maybe I should make it clear that what most people see as an elitist divide between the writer-as-god/celebrity and her/his readers, I see as a very convenient (even protective) distance. I don’t want to smell Roth’s talc or put up with Amis’ boozed-up mood-swings. Why would I? What’s the advantage? My religion gene is vestigial to the point of non-existence.
[ed.'s note: each reply chain is only ten links long; if you get cut off at some point, start the comment in a fresh box with a quoted sentence to establish the connection]
“Littell isn’t responsible to your notion of what any writer’s responsibility is.”
And First Lady Obama is not obliged to spend Mother’s Day in the Guantanamo gulag. But if she had done it last year, those men, the bounty-hunted, might at this writing be free.
Again: nonsense. First of all, don’t invoke the hologrammic wife of the hologrammic figurehead of the Fourth Reich so credulously. Second: what-the-fuck is the connection between a literary artist and a cynical political pantomime?
Light. Light and consciousness.
[ed.'s note: erm: no]
[UPDATE: and when did the vacuities of therapy-speak become so inextricably bound with literary discourse?]
HARRISON BERGERON
by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
Some things about living still weren’t quite right, though. April for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.
It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn’t think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.
George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel’s cheeks, but she’d forgotten for the moment what they were about.
On the television screen were ballerinas.
A buzzer sounded in George’s head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits from a burglar alarm.
“That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did,” said Hazel.
“Huh” said George.
“That dance-it was nice,” said Hazel.
“Yup,” said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren’t really very good-no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn’t be handicapped. But he didn’t get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.
George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.
Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself, she had to ask George what the latest sound had been.
“Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer,” said George.
“I’d think it would be real interesting, hearing all the different sounds,” said Hazel a little envious. “All the things they think up.”
“Um,” said George.
“Only, if I was Handicapper General, you know what I would do?” said Hazel. Hazel, as a matter of fact, bore a strong resemblance to the Handicapper General, a woman named Diana Moon Glampers. “If I was Diana Moon Glampers,” said Hazel, “I’d have chimes on Sunday-just chimes. Kind of in honor of religion.”
“I could think, if it was just chimes,” said George.
“Well-maybe make ‘em real loud,” said Hazel. “I think I’d make a good Handicapper General.”
“Good as anybody else,” said George.
“Who knows better then I do what normal is?” said Hazel.
“Right,” said George. He began to think glimmeringly about his abnormal son who was now in jail, about Harrison, but a twenty-one-gun salute in his head stopped that.
“Boy!” said Hazel, “that was a doozy, wasn’t it?”
It was such a doozy that George was white and trembling, and tears stood on the rims of his red eyes. Two of of the eight ballerinas had collapsed to the studio floor, were holding their temples.
“All of a sudden you look so tired,” said Hazel. “Why don’t you stretch out on the sofa, so’s you can rest your handicap bag on the pillows, honeybunch.” She was referring to the forty-seven pounds of birdshot in a canvas bag, which was padlocked around George’s neck. “Go on and rest the bag for a little while,” she said. “I don’t care if you’re not equal to me for a while.”
George weighed the bag with his hands. “I don’t mind it,” he said. “I don’t notice it any more. It’s just a part of me.”
“You been so tired lately-kind of wore out,” said Hazel. “If there was just some way we could make a little hole in the bottom of the bag, and just take out a few of them lead balls. Just a few.”
“Two years in prison and two thousand dollars fine for every ball I took out,” said George. “I don’t call that a bargain.”
“If you could just take a few out when you came home from work,” said Hazel. “I mean-you don’t compete with anybody around here. You just set around.”
“If I tried to get away with it,” said George, “then other people’d get away with it-and pretty soon we’d be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else. You wouldn’t like that, would you?”
“I’d hate it,” said Hazel.
“There you are,” said George. The minute people start cheating on laws, what do you think happens to society?”
If Hazel hadn’t been able to come up with an answer to this question, George couldn’t have supplied one. A siren was going off in his head.
“Reckon it’d fall all apart,” said Hazel.
“What would?” said George blankly.
“Society,” said Hazel uncertainly. “Wasn’t that what you just said?
“Who knows?” said George.
The television program was suddenly interrupted for a news bulletin. It wasn’t clear at first as to what the bulletin was about, since the announcer, like all announcers, had a serious speech impediment. For about half a minute, and in a state of high excitement, the announcer tried to say, “Ladies and Gentlemen.”
He finally gave up, handed the bulletin to a ballerina to read.
“That’s all right-” Hazel said of the announcer, “he tried. That’s the big thing. He tried to do the best he could with what God gave him. He should get a nice raise for trying so hard.”
“Ladies and Gentlemen,” said the ballerina, reading the bulletin. She must have been extraordinarily beautiful, because the mask she wore was hideous. And it was easy to see that she was the strongest and most graceful of all the dancers, for her handicap bags were as big as those worn by two-hundred pound men.
And she had to apologize at once for her voice, which was a very unfair voice for a woman to use. Her voice was a warm, luminous, timeless melody. “Excuse me-” she said, and she began again, making her voice absolutely uncompetitive.
“Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen,” she said in a grackle squawk, “has just escaped from jail, where he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. He is a genius and an athlete, is under-handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous.”
A police photograph of Harrison Bergeron was flashed on the screen-upside down, then sideways, upside down again, then right side up. The picture showed the full length of Harrison against a background calibrated in feet and inches. He was exactly seven feet tall.
The rest of Harrison’s appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had ever born heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H-G men could think them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.
Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a military neatness to the handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. In the race of life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds.
And to offset his good looks, the H-G men required that he wear at all times a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle-tooth random.
“If you see this boy,” said the ballerina, “do not – I repeat, do not – try to reason with him.”
There was the shriek of a door being torn from its hinges.
Screams and barking cries of consternation came from the television set. The photograph of Harrison Bergeron on the screen jumped again and again, as though dancing to the tune of an earthquake.
George Bergeron correctly identified the earthquake, and well he might have – for many was the time his own home had danced to the same crashing tune. “My God-” said George, “that must be Harrison!”
The realization was blasted from his mind instantly by the sound of an automobile collision in his head.
When George could open his eyes again, the photograph of Harrison was gone. A living, breathing Harrison filled the screen.
Clanking, clownish, and huge, Harrison stood – in the center of the studio. The knob of the uprooted studio door was still in his hand. Ballerinas, technicians, musicians, and announcers cowered on their knees before him, expecting to die.
“I am the Emperor!” cried Harrison. “Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody must do what I say at once!” He stamped his foot and the studio shook.
“Even as I stand here” he bellowed, “crippled, hobbled, sickened – I am a greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can become!”
Harrison tore the straps of his handicap harness like wet tissue paper, tore straps guaranteed to support five thousand pounds.
Harrison’s scrap-iron handicaps crashed to the floor.
Harrison thrust his thumbs under the bar of the padlock that secured his head harness. The bar snapped like celery. Harrison smashed his headphones and spectacles against the wall.
He flung away his rubber-ball nose, revealed a man that would have awed Thor, the god of thunder.
“I shall now select my Empress!” he said, looking down on the cowering people. “Let the first woman who dares rise to her feet claim her mate and her throne!”
A moment passed, and then a ballerina arose, swaying like a willow.
Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear, snapped off her physical handicaps with marvelous delicacy. Last of all he removed her mask.
She was blindingly beautiful.
“Now-” said Harrison, taking her hand, “shall we show the people the meaning of the word dance? Music!” he commanded.
The musicians scrambled back into their chairs, and Harrison stripped them of their handicaps, too. “Play your best,” he told them, “and I’ll make you barons and dukes and earls.”
The music began. It was normal at first-cheap, silly, false. But Harrison snatched two musicians from their chairs, waved them like batons as he sang the music as he wanted it played. He slammed them back into their chairs.
The music began again and was much improved.
Harrison and his Empress merely listened to the music for a while-listened gravely, as though synchronizing their heartbeats with it.
They shifted their weights to their toes.
Harrison placed his big hands on the girls tiny waist, letting her sense the weightlessness that would soon be hers.
And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang!
Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the laws of motion as well.
They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun.
They leaped like deer on the moon.
The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers nearer to it.
It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling. They kissed it.
And then, neutraling gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended in air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a long, long time.
It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.
Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians and told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps back on.
It was then that the Bergerons’ television tube burned out.
Hazel turned to comment about the blackout to George. But George had gone out into the kitchen for a can of beer.
George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook him up. And then he sat down again. “You been crying” he said to Hazel.
“Yup,” she said.
“What about?” he said.
“I forget,” she said. “Something real sad on television.”
“What was it?” he said.
“It’s all kind of mixed up in my mind,” said Hazel.
“Forget sad things,” said George.
“I always do,” said Hazel.
“That’s my girl,” said George. He winced. There was the sound of a rivetting gun in his head.
“Gee – I could tell that one was a doozy,” said Hazel.
“You can say that again,” said George.
“Gee-” said Hazel, “I could tell that one was a doozy.”
“Harrison Bergeron” is copyrighted by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., 1961.
LIBERATION TECHNOLOGY
Comrades, I’ve been having a problem with both TINY PICS and PHOTOBUCKET deleting images they appear to deem obscene (though some of these verboten images were merely pictures of posters from the very public streets of Berlin; is Tiny Pics based in Tehran? Possibly).
The solution is less convenient than using either of these image-hosting sites but it renders us immune to the tiny-brained discretion of some bluenosed cunt:
4. note “width” and “height”: these are the values for the dimensions in pixels
5. et voila, fuckers
THE DIFFICULT TEXT
THREE STRUCTURAL DEFINITIONS OF RACE
A. George Walton was born in 1809, child of a black father and white mother and died in prison about twenty eight years later, having lived as a man who was good-looking in a manner that predated all hope of appreciation, as if a painting by Yves Tanguy had found its way back to the dawn of the 19th century only to inspire baffled glares and lots of kicks in the pants, as though a kick in the pants was the only persuasive critique his critics could improvise to respond to the singularity of his appearance: the loopy curls of broth-colored hair, the tawny skin, the full lips and a high-bridged nose sporting freckles… this, remember, during an era when leaded-white faces and lips like incisions were considered the essence of beauty.
B. Von Ziegeldorff drove into town every Friday night to patronize a low club called The Chicken Shack which was famous for appealing to blacks. The drive in from his villa in a wooded, nearly-rustic suburb of Potsdam through the throb of weekend traffic often took ninety minutes, during which he either had time to nurture his grievances against society in general and women specifically or listen to an instructional cassette of Advanced English for Germans. Somewhere in the lonely vastness of his car there was also a misplaced cassette of Callas he was suddenly in the mood to hear again after a year-long estrangement from that exquisitely bullying voice, the voice of high culture, because he’d been listening to far too much soul music recently.
C. Ramses sneeks a peek at the graying blonde as she steers gravely home. Or so he assumes. She reaches over and switches on the sound system. The fantasy, obviously, is that they will do the dirty without exchanging so much as a single word and she’s afraid that Ramses will ruin it now by saying a word. She doesn’t know that Ramses Gordon knows the rules of this game so well that he might have invented it; that he can play it blindfolded and has on more than one occasion and that he is thinking, also, against the background of the anti-erotic aria from Lucia Lammermoor, how differently blacks and whites absorb the behavioral proscriptions of Christianity. How this difference has a measurable impact on the respective copulatory styles of the races. How they fuck and how we live. Their guilt and our shrugs and the sacrificial sacrament of chicken.
A. Across the broad map of his short life, having been abandoned at an early age by parents driven chiefly by sexual logic through a low-walled maze of poverty, George Walton served almost a third of his earthly existence in prison. Born James, alias George, alias Jonas, alias James, alias Burley, alias Chick or Chicken John.
B. There was one black in particular. Von Ziegeldorff had made the mistake, early on, of running after all of them at once, like a kitten in a fishpond, therefore catching none, but being observant and far from stupid he soon took note of the fact that the old hands were patiently bedding one after another of the finest specimens the club had to offer, merely by choosing one and bringing to bear a convincing ersatz of passion until the goal was achieved (or quota met) and thereafter moving on. Every black girl in the club, of course, thinks of herself as The One who will prove to be so irresistible that the game will stop with her, therefore perpetuating the game.
C. Look at this respectable middle-aged German lady, for example. The grimly determined look on her face (this is supposed to be fun, lady); the way she clutches that steering wheel as though it’s hot with current: she feels Christ’s eyes on her, his disappointment in her, his weary sneer of disgust. Her husband has no problem with her little Liebesaffären…he encourages her because it absolves him of guilt for his substantial porno expenses. Christ is not so easygoing about it. Christ is not quite so cool. He plagues her with subliminal remonstrations (in which his lips never move, spookily, but his sad eyes pierce her). She wasn’t even raised in an overtly Christian family because Germans are traditionally pagan and she believes that she believes in fucking as a kind of physical therapy. A higher form of jogging. Far more therapeutic if she fucks an Asian, a Native American, or a Black. That’s what she thinks she thinks a liberal West German should believe they feel about it. But a stern (and vaguely oriental) Christ has the last word on all that and she has to hide the physical act itself behind all kinds of masks and filters to smuggle the pleasure out of Hell like a red hot trinket between her legs without fainting.
A. As a boy the tragic mulatto was the object of lazy sport among the poor whites of his acquaintance, though when he was kicked in the seat of his dusty breeches it was as a kind of running gag or after-thought, rarely with enough force to mean tears. As a manchild George fed himself by doing odd jobs for neighbors and once spent a summer doing back-breakingly honest labor for a farmer who paid him with two counterfeit five-dollar bills. “Well nigh half of what was owing me,” as handsome James alias George alias Chicken John put it. A philosophical turning point.
B. Earletta Goins was a would-be disco singer with her own little cassette out called The Story of My Life, released by a local label, an independent based in East Berlin and on this particular Friday night Von Ziegeldorff tipped the DJ a substantial amount to play both sides of Earletta’s cassette, as well as subsidizing free beers for all the patrons in the club (about two hundred people) for the duration of the cassette’s play, making for a good mood and plenty of people on the dance floor to dance beside VZ and Earletta while they danced with attention-getting self-consciousness to her disco music, which was neither truly bad nor truly good but fell within the range of most things.
C. The bedroom smells like…what? A kitchen. It smells vaguely of chicken not fried but stewed. Disgusting. On the walls flanking the massive bed, one on each, are two large wood-framed photos meant to resemble very old oil paintings. There is one of the lady in question and the other of her husband, or what looks like her husband or could be an Ex, and they are dressed up to look like an Iroquois chief and his squaw…the weak-chinned fellow sports an enormous feathered head dress. His lady, in real life the gray-haired blonde on her back on the bed with her eyes closed and her legs up like an as-yet-unstuffed Christmas goose, is black-haired and light-eyed in her sepiatone photo and neither reveal the subtlest shade of mirth, self-mockery, defensive irony or even decent embarrassment in the portraits.
A. After another period of backbreaking in the Charlestown shipyards and then aboard a fishing smack with the olfactory bloom of an African cathouse’s toilet, Walton fell in with a hook-nosed ex-convict named Symmes who mentored him in the trade of bank robbing, the craft of which George failed fully to master, being neither self-righteous nor brutal enough with his pistol, landing in prison in 1824 for a six month sentence after which he dabbled unchastened in the lighter art of the highwayman… with just as little talent. When Walton wasn’t busy being apprehended (being a mulatto in early 19th century America was a liability in the incognito game), it was easy if unremunerative work, as most of his victims chose to toss him their wallets and flee rather than tussle or risk injury at the hands of a thieving diabolical coon with freckles.
B.“I must confess,” shouted VZ, “I have never before seen a lady of your race with these green eyes of such beauty,” and he mimed his own astonishment, hands on his heart as though it might burst, for also her skin was the color of the pancakes he’d been mad for on his legendary trip across America, during which being a slave to this crude delicacy had given him an insight into the American psyche he was sure he could apply to the swift achievement of his goal.
C. Ramses imagines, quite vividly, the chin-free husband answering the telephone on one of those interminable Sundays of petty household chores choreographed to the pandering drone of television, the day on which long-married Germans speak less than a sentence to each other and he envisions the man of the household putting a hand over the receiver and lifting an eyebrow and invoking, yet again, the worn-out magic of his wife’s name as though it were a mild rebuke, tonally, or the long-suffering request to please stop something.
A. It was only when Walton came upon intended victim John Fenno, returning one evening from a dance across the old Chelsea bridge, that he met resistance and his fate. Fenno was a beefy man and sprang from his cart to wrestle Walton rather than part with his coins or jewelry, invigorated as he was by sexual frustration; had the dance been successful things may well have turned out differently; as it was, the robbery was thwarted though Walton escaped, but not before trying and failing to punish Fenno with a bullet. A suspender buckle saved Fenno’s life and doomed George as he was soon captured.
B. Driving on the fast black road towards his villa before dawn with gems of sparse precipitation fixed like glass moths to his glittering windshield, VZ found himself bedevilled by a sickening internal debate as to whether he dare risk slipping into the stereo his rediscovered cassette dub of a valuable reel-to-reel bootleg of the one-time-only performance of Callas doing Lammermoor with the notorious unscored E-flats included… punishingly high notes Callas tries for with laudable brio but misses, grazing the first E-flat with such a grasping shade of the pitch that it’s almost a blue note and chipping the second with a Levantine fraction redolent of the bazaar. In every subsequent performance she eschewed the dreaded E-flats entirely. Wisely. As far as VZ knew, he was the only one on Earth in possession of this wounded version of Donizetti’s lugubrious masterpiece, a discarded run-through of Callas’s premier performance of the piece in Mexico City, 1953, and he felt a craving just then to hear it. Despite the fact that there in the white leather seat beside him was his prize, Earletta Goins, slouched with drowsy pliancy, a half smile playing on her chewable lips, lips he fully envisioned in contact with the freckled red glans of his penis and VZ had to think long and hard before changing the sexual weather in his Porsche just then. He could only imagine the anti-aphrodisiacal effect an opera would have on this colored American sex machine. He could only imagine his future grief at never knowing the warm weight of those lips and the breathlessness of those strong brown unshaved legs crushing the breath out of him.
C. Wifey’s on her stomach, moaning and kicking, both hands locked under her thrashing pelvis making an extravagant display of humping alone. Some guy must have told her, thirty years ago, as an excuse for not touching her, that it turns him on. She’s waistless, veiny and pale as old frogs. Ramses very quietly puts his cold dangle of dick away and hitches his pants back up and sneaks out of the bedroom as the gnadige frau whips her egg into its bad-lathered glory. Down the hall and to the left the second floor bathroom door is open and sizzling with the sound of a midday shower and Ramses’s interest is piqued. Is it hubby, home early from work? A nubile daughter, out of school for the day with a chest cold? An impertinent maid, a poltergeist or a poor relation? Ramses eases up towards the invitingly open bathroom door on the plush white carpet, carrying his shoes, boldly curious, holding his breath, with little or no backup plan in place if anyone should catch him.
A. Faced with the gravity of his final punishment, Walton directed that a copy of his memoirs be bound in his own tawny skin and presented to the very Mr. Fenno whom George was sent to the gallows for trying to shoot. White historians take George Walton’s avowal that the gesture was one of esteem for Fenno’s bravery at face value, unfamiliar with the bitter nuances of colored irony. His skin, stripped in a supple parallelogram from his still-warm back after the hanging, was treated to look like a gray deer skin by the tanner, who delivered the stuff without comment to Peter Low the book binder, the latter of perhaps a less pragmatic disposition and therefore much disturbed by the job and suffering increasingly vivid nightmares the rest of his life.
B.I’ve spent so much time and money on this one dream of making sweet love with an Afro-American and on the very threshold of all that and more I decide to risk ruining the sexy mood that all of my efforts have managed by some miracle to put her into with a blast of my so-called high culture? Am I crazy?
C. What Ramses witnesses through the fogged, beaded, soap-scummed shower door is a jug-eared middle-aged black man with love handles and a sagging ass, the cheeks of which are matte and blacker than the rest of him, his large head crowned with a cap of webby, water-matted hair. Who is this man? Where does he fit in the cosmology? Was the guy in the Iroquois photo the Ex or is this the Ex and are things much kinkier around the homestead than Ramses first imagined? This avuncular apparition of a black man with the posture of an utterly defeated specimen. His left armpit foams as he scrubs at it with an eerie lack of energy more suitable to a nursing home sitz bath than a home owner’s shower; it’s like he’s preparing for his own execution. It is a joyless, prosaic, song-free ablution so full of truth that Ramses backs away from the threshold in waves of nausea and a paradoxical joy in his own life, the details of which he can claim as otherwise impossible, his uniqueness in time, the song of his soul in this skin.
THE DIFFICULT TEXT: IN 3 PARTS
This is my free-jazz-loving, wife-beater-wearing, i-ching-consulting, multi-personality Nobodaddy of Difficult Texts. It is long and black. A clue (it is a more difficult text than it first appears to be): the intro movement is a sort of sitcom…
JESUS IN VEGAS
1. Jesus in Vegas
Benny LaFontaine remained hunched on one side of the greeting card carousel in Burgertown Drugs. His neck was beginning to hurt, yet he dared not stand up. But if he couldn’t even stand up, literally and figuratively, to a couple of gossipy old-maid hairdressers with high school diplomas and only the dimmest awareness of the world around them, how could he ever hope to effect a fundamental change in society itself? In the world, even? Would Malcolm X or Marcus Garvey have remained in a stoop behind the Hallmark Cards like this, afraid of the mockery of Jolene Barnes?
Benny was snooping on a conversation that involved him personally. The conversation was taking place on the other side of the carousel and it was between Jolene and another woman who may or may not have been Bernadette McPhatter. Benny’s connection to the topic was unflattering. He’d noticed the surprising mention of his name, and, having spent the better part of a decade in a city out west where no one knew him or had any idea who his family had been back when they had been something, overhearing his name in a public space was a strange sensation.
“Trust me, I am not exaggerating.”
“What’s this world coming to?”
“If only I knew, child…”
[laughter]
He’d been stooping to pluck a particular card. A greeting card featuring a blonde-haired, pink-cheeked Gerber baby framed by tulips under the silver inscription On Her Confirmation. A card like that in this all-postAfrican neighborhood of Philadelphia!
When he’d first noticed it down there he’d smiled that smile one smiles when a remark or event confirms one’s fondest prejudices. In this case it was The White Man who was again being true to form. Or was it the docile, self-hating, Caucasian-embracing postAfrican middle-class? Benny stooped to reach the racist greeting card, thinking he ought to buy it and show it to Precious as further proof, when a voice he’d quickly identified as belonging to Jolene’s dropped his name into the conversation like a defective firework. He froze in mid-stoop to listen to it sputter across the floor.
“Child, you had to be there.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I could not believe my eyes.”
“Ain’t that something?”
“What can I say? It was long ago and far away. But look at him now… it’s a damn shame, girl.”
“I hear you.”
“Coon looks like a black Robinson Crusoe! Looks like something that washed up on shore! Skinny as death and with that scraggly-assed beard and a bushy red Afro like some flea-bitten old Jew…”
“Lord.”
“And with his skinny arm around that little black nappy-haired monkey-lip spasm he diddlin’ like he’s proud!”
[laughter]
Not an hour ago, he and Precious had bumped into Jolene over at Roosevelt Park. On the sidewalk behind the batter’s cage on the softball diamond in Roosevelt Park. He’d taken Precious there to see his childhood.
-Out there, way out, in left field, near the pump… can you see the rusty pump? We called that Lourdes in this game we used to play called Leppy Leper… if you were tagged you were a leper and you had to make it to that pump and stick your hand in the water to cure yourself before the other kids could pull your shoes off or else you were incurable the rest of the day…
He laughed and shifted his pointing finger about ten radial degrees to the right, drawing her attention to a rotten wooden bench in the shade of a tree a short jog beyond second base on the softball diamond.
-That bench, okay, 1947, the annual barbecue of the Greater Masonic Negro Tradesmen Association of West Philly…my father was the president for most of my childhood…kept a ceremonial sword in the closet and everything… caught me playing pirate with that sword one day and tore my behind up… but it was 1947 that I met… I never told you this…my father… I never told you…
Suddenly there stood before Benny his female counterpart of the unenlightened past, the prom Queen from another life: light-skinned, green-eyed, chestnut-haired Jolene Barnes. With her hand on her bosom in a gesture of primly flustered delight. You’d think she’d been dreaming of this moment every day since the last time they’d seen each other, at the end of the Truman administration. It was eerily cinematic that Jolene Barnes should have appeared to Benny just then, stepping out of the bright green prism of his peripheral vision of Roosevelt Park. Roosevelt Park, the scene of so many of Benny’s earliest triumphs and not a few of his humiliations and many feverish experiments with the delights and dangers of the opposite sex.
He would have recognized her voice under any circumstances, even after not seeing or hearing from her once in twenty five years, because she’d had that voice…husky, sultry, tinged with smoke and chocolate… all the way back in seventh grade, the record-breaking year her tits popped out. Still, he’d always preferred darker girls. And as if to confirm this fact for both himself and Precious, and perhaps even for Jolene’s edification as well, he squeezed Precious extra tight as Jolene smiled at them. Jolene who looked, after a fourth-of-a-century, not a day older than sixteen. Which wasn’t possible.
-Why, Benjamin Franklin LaFontaine the 2nd, do my light eyes deceive me or is that really truly you, after all these years?
She’d made such a fuss over seeing Benny again that he’d felt grateful to her for making him look so good in front of Precious, who had to be impressed. Not that he really needed to impress Precious at this point but the age gap was something that still worried him, often in the middle of the night, his heart racing for no particular reason as she slept. Jolene had been friendly with Precious, too, telling her that they really all had to get together and there was so much to talk about and how do you get your natural to hold its shape at that size, maybe I should stop straightening my hair, do you think I’d look good in an Afro and so forth.
From all that to this… the character assassination… with whomever it was on the other side of the greeting cards? It made no sense. That had to be Bernadette McPhatter she was dishing to and hearing the two of them together took Benny right back to high school, a trip he didn’t relish taking. He had to squeeze his nostrils shut to stifle a sneeze and came heart-stoppingly close to pinching out a reciprocal fart instead. Just imagine.
[laughter]
Jolene and Bernadette had been best friends all through high school and there was no reason to believe they would have stopped at the onset of adulthood with its comings and goings of various unreliable men. Bernadette had always been Jolene’s chubby, light-brown and squeaky-voiced foil. Jolene had put on weight in twenty-five years and her trademark ponytail was now a face-framing pageboy but she was still recognizably herself, a pampered daughter of the postAfrican middle-class whose approval was hard-won and whose disdain could be lethal.
The conversation moved on to other topics but Benny, at six foot four, was trapped in a stoop on the other side of the carousel. He couldn’t bear the idea of revealing himself just then to the gossips, looking approximately as Jolene had described him (a black Robinson Crusoe), and he prayed for the women to pick a card, pay for it, and go.
(…a flea-bitten old Jew…)
The carousel rotated a semi-turn left and a quarter-turn right and a whole turn back again. He listened as Jo-Jo and Bernie…it was all coming back to him now…discussed the respective pros and cons of two similar seventy five cent cards and then sauntered across the aisle in a jingle of coin purses towards the register, flirting with the brown-skinned proprietor, Humpy Clark.
Benny was furious with himself for hiding. Why should he care what those two silly bourgeois Negresses thought of him? He rose to his full height when the coast was clear and peered over the carousel at bald headed Nathaniel ‘Humpy’ Clark at the cash register, who was also peering at Benny with undisguised concern, and Benny took a step towards an adjacent wire rack of newspapers and magazines. Ebony, Essence, Jet… they were all just Look, Photoplay and Life in blackface, weren’t they? When would his people learn? He had been in such an incredible mood just thirty minutes ago, too. He paged quickly through the Ebony with that forbearing smile, full of pain, again.
He started for the cash register clutching the guilty pleasure of a Baby Ruth bar but put that back, remembering his new health food regime, then remembered that he’d come, in the first place, for a birthday card. He grabbed one that said Have a Soulful Birthday in funky earthtone lettering and remembered to look for that lily-white uber-Caucasian confirmation card to present to Precious as a comment on the sad state the black community was in but he couldn’t find it. He rotated the carousel through several complete revolutions with no luck. He looked again, frowning, and wondered if he wasn’t losing his mind. Had he imagined the damned thing?
Then it came to him: Jolene herself had purchased it! Paid seventy five cents for that lily-white Gerber baby for the right to take it home! He could just picture it on her mantelpiece. Benny had to laugh out loud at that one. Much to Humpy’s alarm. Ah: but then he found a duplicate behind a Fat Albert card. He paid for the two with a stack of dimes.
Outside again, his mood began to improve.
It improved in the braided waft of barbecue fumes and fresh-cut lawn and the sociable hum of the Philly sunshine. It improved as he edged by little sisters in last year’s Sunday best, their stiff fat braids antennae waving as they skipped rope in complicated gospel-enlightened rhythms, skinny and shiny-dull as licorice twists and look at the little brothers wobbling on fluorescent stingray bikes in an officious procession. Plus those enigmatic old folks, tobacco-dark and dry-mute as dead plants on the porches though also still fussy with frustrated life-force, rocking and fanning, rocking and fanning and waving hullo…
Just about everyone stared long and hard as Benny passed. A couple of slick-head young bucks in a beat-up sedan listening to The Ojays yelled Yo, black Bozo as they roared by mufflerless but still Benny’s mood was good. He was 42-years-old and feeling younger than ever. He had a dream, a vision and most of all he had Precious Stone.
Just gloating to himself about Precious inspired a quickening in his crotch as he mounted the steep hill at the Penn Avenue side of the park, parallel to the trolley. It amazed him. Together nearly four years and they were still going at it like teenagers on a first date, morning noon and night. He was proud of his born again virility after that soft spell of the year before. Nothing worse than when women came up with the excuses for you, he thought: they say just hold me or wink and say it was probably pressure at work or performance anxiety or maybe you’re queer and don’t know it. Well, never again. He nodded. Then he scowled.
He scowled with compassion at the thought of most of his contemporaries, who were already no doubt resorting to wistful, middle-aged self-abuse. The poignant pornography of the High School Yearbook or short messy sessions in front of a TV rancid with venal white starlets on segregated cop shows and sitcoms in which a postAfrican just might make an occasional appearance as a sassy maid, a flamboyant pimp or a precocious, dwarf-like child. How sad.
But Benny couldn’t help hearing, again, as he strolled back towards his aunt’s mansion in the low late orange of the suppertime sun, Jolene’s outrageous dig at Precious as a little black nappy-haired monkey-lip spasm. Part of him wanted to catch up with Jolene (and her honky greeting card) and enlighten her as to the sickness of the self-hatred evident in her attitude towards a sister of Precious’ manifest black beauty and part of him…
“Benny LaFontaine? Is that you under all that fuzz, boy?”
[laughter]
An old man, gnarled and dusty-black bent as dead branches on a hanging tree, appeared in Benny’s path with the suddenness of a chess piece. Just set down right in front of Benny. A certain unreality to the whole thing, as though this was Benny’s version of It’s a Wonderful Life, or A Christmas Carol. The old man peered up with one good eye from under a derby’s worn brim, his spade-shaped face sheathed in a crisp white goatee and the sleeveless t-shirt he sported was gray with years of lukewarm washings. His pinstriped baggy suit pants were shiny at the knees and they dragged on the ground over sandals showing toes like coy Brazil nuts. Benny’s face remembered before his mind could catch up and he smiled broadly for a beat or two before speaking.
“Mr. Jimmy!”
“Used to march up and down Penn Avenue in a French sailor suit and curly light brown hair lookin’ prettier than any of the little flirts in the neighborhood! Nothin’ you loved more than a Baby Ruth bar. I used to buy ‘em by the sack and you’d come over on my stoop and sit on my lap after Sunday school and say,’ and here Mr. Jimmy lapsed into a quavery, breathless, slightly disturbing imitation of a child’s voice, “ ‘Can you please give me another Baby Booth bar, Mr. Jimmy?’”
He wheezed a laugh and coughed into his derby hat revealing a wrinkled gray head that appeared as though one might easily press a thumb through it. He slipped the derby back on and continued, ‘People used to tell me, why you wanna associate with them saditty old high yalla LaFontaines, Jimmy? Don’t you know that to them you ain’t nothin’ but a lowly black-assed Alabama Niggra? Ain’t you got no pride? Can’t you see through them hincty phonies? But I just ignored that, see, despite the element of truth in their remarks, because you tickled me so. Lord, we had some fun on that old stoop, didn’t we? Can you please give me another Baby Booth bar, Mr. Jimmy?” and here he wheezed a laugh and coughed into the derby again with the corners of his mouth turned down.
Mr. Jimmy hailed from a simpler era which honored a comic tradition of the neighborhood pedophile. Mr. Jimmy and his fat yellow wife Aunt Bessy (long dead), no kids of their own, rarely seen together outside the cramped kitchen of their row home, had been a fixture of Burgertown mythology since before Benny’s birth. It wasn’t until the 1960s attached a sexual overtone to every aspect of daily life that old men who liked to lure children to their laps with ancient bags of candy began receiving unwelcome visits from plainclothes detectives and state-appointed psychiatrists and irate fathers with softball bats. In the golden age of pedophilia that had been Benny’s childhood, men like Mr. Jimmy were unofficial watchdogs of the neighborhood, making sure the smaller kids didn’t play in the street or tease stray dogs or fight each other or play hooky or ruin their best duds hopping in puddles on the way to Sunday school. Impossible to match the vigilant omnipresence of the neighborhood pedophile. Benny remembered vividly Mr. Jimmy explaining to him once that that hard thing in his lap that sometimes made it so uncomfortable for Benny to sit there was a magic black frog named Buddy.
“And you were such a handsome, brave little man at your Daddy’s service, as I recall, all dressed up in your tailored black suit and a white silk tie and spats! Better dressed than most of the grownups, I’d say! I know your mama and your Aunt Gracie were so proud of you they coulda burst and so was I, way back in the last pew of that church with my opera glasses, a church so packed with mourners from every what-you-call strata of society that they were turnin’ ‘em away by the dozen. You were the crown prince of old man LaFontaine’s empire and you looked it. Yes you did. People would say to me, you know that Benny LaFontaine better than his own folks, Mr. Jimmy, what’s your honest assessment of his character? And you know what I’d tell ‘em?”
It was a while before Benny realized he was expected to participate in Jimmy’s reverie, as his mind was wandering off on a tangent of its own, thinking back on the days after his father’s passing, when he suddenly found himself in a household governed by the fractious couple of his mother and his father’s sister, both of them decades younger than his father’s terminal age of seventy. In his mother’s case five. Decades.
Mr. Jimmy repeated his question with emphasis, showing his matte yellow dentures and black gums. “And do you know what I would tell them?”
“What, Mr. Jimmy?”
“I’d say… oh no, he won’t let us down! Not him, not Benjamin Franklin LaFontaine. He will do us all proud one day and uplift his Negro race and teach the white man that a people of color can produce forth a prince of its own making to lead this country to greatness no less so than the sons of the white man and all of his fair-haired heroes! They asked me and I told ‘em! You see what I’m saying? We depended on you. You were our pride and joy!”
Benny now felt his good mood come back completely, and then some. And he was deeply moved, not to mention encouraged… confirmed… in all the thankless, payless, sleepless hard work of recent years… his battle with The System, his attempt to bring dignity and leadership to His People out West… wasn’t it all somehow crystallized in this old man’s heartfelt speech? Did Benny feel a tear or two welling? Mr. Jimmy removed his derby and struck Benny across the face with it.
“And just look at you! You let us down! Let down your family and let down this neighborhood and your whole damn colored race! Look at you you dirty, filthy, shameful vagabond! If I was a young man I’d knock your ass out! If I was a young man you’d think twice before walking these streets looking like that. Let me guess… you ride into Philly on a freight train in that get-up? Or you jump ship on a garbage scow down in Jersey? Answer me this, did you come here hoping for work as a scarecrow in my back garden, fool? Yes, you’d scare the crows and the squirrels and the damn seedlings, too! Damn! I wouldn’t touch your funky ramshackle ass with Frank Rizzo’s dick!”
[laughter]
Benny found himself walking. Mr. Jimmy was ranting behind him, raising his voice a notch for every few yards of distance Benny put between them. The sun was setting with fragile grace behind the high dark leaves of the century-old elms and maples girding Roosevelt Park, the crickets announced their invisible quorum, and curious neighbors leaned out of second-storey windows or stood on their stoops with hands on their hips wearing oven mitts to see what all the fuss was about.
A blisteringly righteous moral upbraiding from a pedophile: you don’t soon get over something like that. Jimmy’s rant was going strong but fading fast as Benny crossed Queen Lane against the red light and slipped behind a trolley as it lurched on its tracks, a handful of Sunday passengers lowering their newspapers and craning their necks to stare at him as he resisted the urge to break into a run for the mansion. Until he could resist no longer. And then he was far away.
[applause]
***
When he let himself in through the double-locked outer and inner doors of the front porch of 26 Green Lane and entered the parlor, short of breath, he found his Precious and Aunt Gracie in a state of suspended détente, sitting on opposite sides of the room, as far apart as physically possible, watching television. The shades were drawn to reduce the glare on the large screen of the Magnavox, rendering the room appropriately sepulchral. It had been, after all, for many years the main viewing room of a funeral parlor.
The bier on which the Magnavox now sat having been in former times the platform for the coffin which would sink into the basement on a pulleyed lift, rigged so that whilst the coffin sank, a good-sized angel (purchased from a Wannamaker’s Christmas display in ’33 or so) would rise dramatically on another chain through a trap door cut in the chapel ceiling, a special effect Benny’s father believed gave him a competitive edge over other undertakers in the area. The angel, with one wing snapped off, was still in a box in the building’s enormous L-shaped cellar. It was the first thing Benny had wanted to see after unpacking. Shining a flashlight on it in its open, excelsior-stuffed box made the hairs on Benny’s neck stand on end, and it had suddenly hit him that for most of his childhood he had associated this wooden white angel with his mother, who lingered in his memory with less force or detail than a recurrent dream.
‘Hello everybody, I’m back,’ said Benny, softly, needlessly, and out of breath.
The parlor was decorated in the ornate style fashionable to the era in which the mansion had been built. It showed signs, here and there around the room, that the world had since moved on, if not down. The marble mantelpiece over a hearth that hadn’t borne more heat than a smoldering cigarette butt’s since Benny’s childhood was nothing but a shelf now for a row of white-capped cans of aerosol air fresheners and the three hundred pound brass-and-crystal chandelier that hung from an ornate plaster dome in the center of the fifteen foot ceiling… four hundred long crystals it had once upon a time taken three servants on step-ladders, twice a year, an entire afternoon to polish… was hung with three orange chemical pest strips for trapping flies and mosquitoes. At the base of each mahogany column in every corner of the room pulsed a no-vacancy roach motel.
It took a puzzled minute or two for Benny to realize that Precious and Gracie, who had as yet failed to acknowledge his presence, weren’t watching television so much as they were “watching television”… that is, demonstrating, for Benny’s benefit, the degree to which they were refusing to interact. Any random show on the tube was preferable to each other. He understood that for the sake of the purity of the exercise, they’d started a good while before Benny was even there in the house to observe them.
The clicker was on a hassock at a midpoint between the two superpowers. For either Gracie or Precious to have used it or even moved from their respective spots would have shattered the symbolic spell of indifference. Which would explain why his spectacularly Afro’d Precious and his Bible-quoting Aunt were watching Mike McGarvey’s Fly Fishing in America show on public television. Red-faced, big-chinned, blond-mustached Mike was showing the proper way to tie an improved clinch knot to connect your fly to your tippet. Benny cleared his throat.
Gracie jerked to look at him, rose a few inches in her seat and plopped down again, slapping a hand across the massive bisque bosom packed away in the white of her frilly blouse. “Goodness gracious, Benjamin, if you don’t shave that hideous beard off I promise you’ll be responsible for my premature extinction by heart failure! I didn’t recognize you!”
“Jesus had a beard,” shrugged Benny.
“He also had a job,” retorted Gracie.
Benny opened his mouth to rebut that but thought better of it. A joke about nepotism. But he was, after all, preparing to ask her to loan or possibly even give to him and to Precious a very large amount of money.
He glanced at his beloved who simply scratched her scalp through Afro and rose from her spot and left the room with the most overtly sexual, yet boredly aloof, walk imaginable, the kind of walk that demands musical accompaniment, or that is music itself, not the growl and whoof of burlesque sax and trombone but something from Debussy, appropriate to Rousseau, the unholy jungle of Debussy’s tritone growing towards the staircase with sinuous vines and creepers. Precious brushed by him where he stood in the arched entrance to the parlor, giving him an instant erection and she slinked into the hallway and up the stairs, stripping as she ascended, dropping bracelets and bits of clothing in her wake, none of which Auntie Gracie could see or hear from where she sat on the far side of the parlor near the mantelpiece. With Jack Benny timing Gracie then stood and grabbed a can of air freshener and pointedly sprayed in the direction of the area in which Precious had been sitting.
Auntie Gracie, his father’s sister, hadn’t gotten along with Benny’s mother, either, but for the opposite reason that she didn’t get along with Precious: Benny’s mother had been too white. With light eyes, pale skin, a boyish figure and thin brown hair to her waist. The neighbors nicknamed her ‘Frenchie’ soon after Benny’s father hauled her up from Baton Rouge, a decade after the Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918 made him the third richest colored man in Philadelphia. In fact he’d had the pleasure of burying the fourth-richest. Out of 12,000 Philadelphians dead roughly a fourth had been colored and roughly a fourth of those were handled by Benny’s father. Benjamin Franklin LaFontaine the 2nd, a baronial old fellow in top hat and tails, married Cassy Beauchamp in the spring of 1930. Frenchie was then 18.
She’d claimed to be octoroon… a Creole… and Benny wanted to believe that, he really did, but he suspects, always suspected, she’d been nothing but white, descended from French-inflected redneck Cajuns and the octoroon story was a security precaution to avoid some very bad trouble with various Klan-like organizations of the north, the chief of which being the Klan itself, which had made its presence felt in Philly on more than one occasion.
Every photograph that Benny had seen of his mother showed a ghostly girl with big hands, in a flowing white gown, wearing a time-softened expression of regret. He has no clear memories of her. Aunt Gracie did most of Benny’s actual day-to-day raising anyway and when, one day, the girl everyone persisted in calling his mother disappeared, he felt the vague relief of a child in a room where a framed picture has finally been straightened on the wall. Probably crawled back to the cold white bosom of her people, as Gracie put it, therein to bleach even whiter in peace. There were some who hinted she hadn’t really ‘gone’ anywhere. Who relished delicious gossip of foul play.
Benny turned to follow Precious up the stairs when he remembered the birthday card. He crossed the room with a “voila” gesture and handed it to Gracie, still in its little white bag from Burgertown Drugs and she opened the bag and pulled something out of it with a frown. Benny said, “Happy Birthday, Auntie Gracie.”
She seemed to him to be doing a perfect imitation of an unflappable senior nurse in a psych ward. She handed the card right back to him without comment. The worst thing about being so pale, for Benny (despite his fanatical efforts at tanning; he’d already had a patch of skin on his right shoulder removed by a dermatologist as a precaution), was the blushing. He felt the heat rise in his cheeks and then double in depth as the shame from the blushing itself kicked in. He glanced at the card as his Aunt handed it back to him… the card with its picture of a cherubic white baby on it… and he gestured with it that Gracie should look again in the Burgertown Drugs bag.
“It’s the other card, Auntie Gracie. The birthday card.”
Auntie Gracie aimed the remote at the TV and upped the volume and said, “Lord knows why you are under the peculiar impression that today is my birthday, Benjamin, but I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation. Now why don’t you just get up those stairs so you can rut with the whore of Babylon while I watch my television program in peace.”
Mike McGarvey said “Saltwater fly rods are normally fitted with heavy-duty, corrosion-resistant fittings and reel seats equipped with fighting butts.”
The bedroom that Precious and Benny were staying in was on the third floor and had its own adjoining bathroom. The bathroom had a skylight. Benny bathed while watching the stars through the skylight which was opened wide enough to gaze through by a pull-chain on a pulley over the toilet. Precious sat cross-legged and naked on the bed, singing softly, post-coitally, while sewing the holes in several pairs of Benny’s socks. He reclined in the tub, lights off, with starlight and the bright clank of the trolley lowered in through the open square in the ceiling. The stars were always there for Benny… the stars never let him down. Up there, he mused. Way up there. Beyond the indignities of money and skin color. Beyond the ancient dilemma of flesh.
2. The Early Days of Television, Part One
The first time Benny saw her was in the produce aisle of the Decatur Blvd Von’s in Vegas and the first thing he said to her was “You look like you come from the stars, sister.” A meteorite-black Nefertiti in white.
Who, me? she pantomimed.
Wearing a flowing white caftan and a miter-like head-wrap, also white, and affecting a bewildered foreign air, she smiled her dimpled, dazzling smile and considered both the intent and merit of Benny’s effort. Bemused, and finished with her own “shopping”, she followed him up and down several aisles as he tossed various processed, animal fat, refined white sugar and bleached flour products into his cart and pushed it towards the check-out line, trying his blarney on her.
Benny was clean-shaven at the time and dressed in the hip square look of a man trying to break into the upper reaches of the hip square world of writing for Television: the Timex, the turtle neck, the khakis, the loafers. She mistook him for a swarthy honky talking black but let him rap on for the reasons that he was tall and handsome and would provide an excellent cover as she exited the Von’s with thirty pounds of shoplifted produce concealed upon her person, pressed tight upon her naked flesh. The cashier, a bleach-blonde leather-tanned cracker, fingernails chipped and bitten to the pork-pink quick, gave Benny a look of uncomplicated racial disgust as he paid for his purchases with that Negress in tow, signing a cheque that required three pieces of picture ID before she, the lipless cashier, would accept it. The striking black lady took Benny by the arm as they promenaded with some pomp through the double-electric-door airlock of the supermarket.
Beyond the protection of the arctic bubble of the supermarket’s air conditioning and prior to the bubble of Benny’s ’68 Mercury Cougar, the asphalt on which the car was parked pushed back at the sky with its black, impacted heat. It felt like walking behind a pre-takeoff F-15 as Benny slipped his Foster Grants on, a climatic extreme his East Coast blood never got used to. He popped the lid on his trunk and offered her a ride. She bent over to climb in and he noticed her belly, her hips and thighs were bulging and jutting and lumping out at various stresspoints along the seams of the caftan, and perhaps white wasn’t the most fortuitous color for her to have wrapped such a voluminous body in.
He stole boyishly furtive glances as he steered the Cougar, talking his head off. He was talking his head off in hopes that the right sequence of words might click and open the lock (if lock there was) on the young lady’s alpha and omega, which he intuited would be as restorative to his sexual powers as a dip in a rain barrel at Lourdes. Six months on MetraCal or some other modern dietary supplement and she’d be just about perfect.
Just as the brothers were dreaming of “dating” those incandescent peppermint blondes one saw on billboards all over the country hawking Virginia Slims and Miss Clairol: Only Her Hairdresser Knows For Sure, the preppy masterminds responsible for those very billboards were in turn lusting horribly after the brothers’ sisters, and Benny, perhaps, would have been shocked to be informed that in lusting after this black beauty his sexual proclivities were closer to a white man’s than to a brother’s that year.
“The thing to remember about the industry,” he heard himself saying, “it’s a medium in its infancy. It’s still what you call protean… everything’s up for grabs, you see what I’m saying? What you want is to be in on the ground level at the next paradigm shift and how do you achieve that? You just need that one solid hit… a bonafide hit that seems to contradict everything that came before it. See, I plan on having that hit, sister. I bank on it.”
If there was one thing in 1972 that she was sick of, it was white men calling her ‘sister’. Especially a white man trying to talk black. Still, he was cute.
“Take something like The Name of the Game. It’s the kind of television that successful people between the ages of 27 and 33 stay home to watch… they’ll turn down a cocktail party or a night out at the movies to watch this show and yet it defies all conventional wisdom. Each episode is 90 minutes long… 90 minutes! It’s really three shows, with three leads, wrapped into one. The leads rotate. Each episode is like a feature-length film, if you can ignore the commercials… a feature-length film for free. That’s what television means…that’s the meaning of television. The destiny of television. Never having to leave your own home for entertainment! One day, sister, there won’t be any commercials, either. What you’ll have then is an uninterrupted experience of your favorite shows, and, believe me, by then, everything on the tube will be your favorite. You’ll never want to leave that spot in front of the picture tube. You’ll never need to.”
“They’re working on that already. As things are now, what you’re seeing, listen, an advertiser pays a very large fee for the right to interrupt the show to talk a little about his product. A little song and dance about ketchup.They call it a break like it’s some kind of relief but the fact is it’s an interruption. But what if they could work the product into the show? You could charge the advertiser more for that because the product could end up with longer screen time but, see, there’d be no interruption. Okay, between shows you’d need a pause so people could… you know. So they could go to the, uh… to the bathroom…” Benny blushed.
“Anyway, I’m just talking now. I know I talk too much. What about you? Where are you from? Some exotic location. Let me guess. Port Au Prince? Cairo? Madagascar?”
Precious lifted her chin and shut him up with her Nefertiti profile. How should she play this? Would he be disappointed to learn that she wasn’t a foreigner? That she was born in North Carolina?
“I hope you don’t think there’s anything wrong,” she said, with exactly the kind of voice a Siamese cat would if one knew a human worth speaking to, “with a girl just being a common-ass Negro.”
“Common-ass you are not, sister,” said Benny.
“Maybe you don’t know enough Negroes.”
“Maybe you don’t know enough light-skinned brothers passing for white.”
“Well I’ll be damned,” she said. “Why didn’t you say so?” She reached down the front of her dress and extracted a mango. “You hungry?”
Benny said he was starving.
***
His immediate higher-up at The Studio went by the name of Gray, or Grayson, Parker, an affected anti-affectation meant to call attention to the fact that he was calling attention away from the fact that his actual name was much longer and stamped with pedigrees as old as the thirteen original Colonies. Parker was standing half-crouched on his desk, back to Benny, facing the enormous sixth floor picture window that guests in the chair in front of his desk usually faced (stunned by the view of The Strip which filled it precisely for that purpose, dormant and raw as the bottom of the Dead Sea, during working hours, and spectacular as a Con Edison-powered vision of a Kansan’s idea of a first class purgatory, at night).
It was late-lunch time on a Thursday afternoon and The Studio was meticulously emptied of higher-ups, most of them over at Sarno’s Circus Circus sucking radium-colored Margaritas through glass straws at the white-leather bar where Sean Connery had only months-prior filmed a scene for Diamonds Are Forever.Circus Circus wasn’t visible from Parker’s office but the north face, upper level, corner suite of the Satellite Motor Lodge was. Parker reached back without looking, and said, with a surgeon’s urgency, “Bushnells.” As Parker handed Benny the old Steiner spy glass in exchange, he took the Bushnells, adjusted them, and emitted an admiring groan that could easily have been taken for a song of pain.
“Son of a bitch,” he grinned.
An hour later they were waiting for seafood platters over bottomless glasses of so-so wine at the street-level bar of the relatively-rundown Stardust. As everyone who actually knew Vegas knew, each of the major casino/hotels was calibrated to appeal to visitors from a specific region of the greater Midwest, with The Sands aimed at Kansas, The Tropicana keyed to Oklahoma, and The Frontier designed specifically to rope in tourists from North and South Dakota, and so on. Or something like that. Benny could never remember the exact formula. Elements of the Stardust felt like an homage towards the blue-collar, redlight ambiance of near-Northside Chicago; the shocking abundance of colored waitresses (two) couldn’t have been a coincidence. The fact that Parker preferred the Stardust over the garishly swanky Circus Circus couldn’t have been a coincidence, either. As the waitress, a Benin bronze in a polyester wig, marched towards the kitchen, her red satin hotpants sucked so hard on Parker’s eyes that his optic nerves twanged like a banjo.
Parker had a habit, especially when he was feeling rose-lit by the grape-light, of calling Benny Pierre, due to Benny’s French-sounding surname, probably, and the only thing that kept Benny from taking umbrage at this was his knowing that Parker didn’t know he was a Negro. It was okay, in other words, because he was being denigrated as a man but not as a human. Most Negroes would never know how good that could feel, or even that an inexplicable appetite for such abuse (first to receive it, later to dole it out) was the key to success in business.
“Looks are everything, Pierre,” said Parker, checking the time, “…why do you suppose my watch is worth more than your monthly salary and yet yours costs less than this lunch? Does one keep better time than the other? I think not. Look,” he mimed drawing a diagram on the bar with his finger, “there’s an atomic clock with an IBM brain buried a mile under a mountain in Colorado in a top-secret room that cost the tax payers eighty five milliondollars to build and a million a year to maintain… ” He raked his fingers through a haircut the color and texture of doll hair. He had a phenomenally small face. He looked bewildered, briefly, and started again.
“Pierre, I know you appreciate frankness. So I’m going to be frank. Why do you think the old guy hired you, despite your somewhat, shall we say, skimpy qualifications? Two years of art school on the G.I. Bill? Six months in the mail room of an AM radio station in Philly? Good grades in High School? I think not. We took you on because you look the part. The sideburns, the cheekbones, the suede jacket and turtleneck sweater. You beat out a guy who graduated near the top of his class from Harvard.”
It hit Benny that he was either about to be promoted to junior executive or fired with less ceremony than Parker had ordered their drinks with and his posture changed accordingly. With almost imperceptible stealth, he shifted back up off his elbows. He tasted a deep swallow of the bar’s stale layer-cake of old smoke and gambler’s fearsweat and became lucid as hell, clear as a tall glass of lunar vacuum, ready for whatever Parker was about to throw at him. His mouth was as dry as all that encroaching desert out there, only a three minute walk in any direction from any point on The Strip, tumbleweeds blowing down Sahara Avenue. He was ready for death.
Hamilton Gold entered the bar with an exaggerated tip-toe pantomime made all the more would-be comical by his briefcase, sneaking up on Parker with a wink at Benny, who was far from in the mood to play along. Gold loomed behind Parker for what felt like a solid minute, obviously stuck on what to do next, unable to think of anything hysterically funny. He took a seat at the bar and nodded defeated hellos. He caught the waitress’s eye and asked Parker,
“Have you, uh…?”
“Not yet. I was just getting to it.”
Gold turned to Benny and, making that face he made when he meant to make it clear that the face he was making meant he wasn’t beating around the bush, said, “We were interested in knowing whether you know any Negroes.”
“He means qualified.”
“Obviously.”
Parker leaned forward for emphasis. “We thought you might know, or might know someone who knows someone who is or knows…”
“See, you’re a bit younger than we are, LaFontaine, despite our official ages… ” Gold winked and turned to the waitress to order whatever the other two were having, then joked, as she sashayed towards a table of leisured-suited Missourians who were waving hundred dollar bills to get her attention, with a jerk of his big chin at her back,“Hey, I know, maybe we should ask… ?”
Parker made his in-point-of-fact-we’re-being-quite-serious-despite-Gold’s-tiresome-japes faceand said, “Pierre, ever hear of a colored guy with the unforgettable name of Thaddeus Mumford?” When Benny shook his head, reaching for the steaming plate a Malaysian busboy was lifting shakily over Parker’s shoulder, Gold said,
“Talented kid… sings, acts, writes… I even hear he can direct. Clean-cut, well-spoken, sweet as a hundred eighty pound Hershey Bar…”
“Million-watt smile… sexy as hell… ”
“Not mad at anyone…”
“We want a Negro like that, Pierre, and we figure you can help us find one. Can’t you go to one of those parties we hear you go to… ?”
“There must be a couple of colored college types… ”
“Or Jewish girls who… no offense, Gold… they usually…”
Gold watched Parker pop a fried scallop in his mouth with a well-fed dog’s bored envy and said, in a neutral tone, “None taken, Gray. Maybe we should tell LaFontaine… ”
“Why we’re in desperate need of a Negro?” Parker frowned at Benny, chewing. “Think he can be trusted?”
“I think so. He’s one of us now, Gray,” said Gold, though his eyes darted to Parker to check for any notable reaction to the word us. “I think LaFontaine,” he toyed with the sound of the word,“needs to be aware of the gravity of the situation.”
Parker fixed Benny with a blinkless this-goes-no-further-than-this-conversation stare and said, “Remember that guy I was telling you about, before, the way-better-qualified guy you cheated out of a job…? The Harvard grad? Well,” Parker smiled pleasurelessly and Gold smiled back, “word has it his lawyers are about to hit us with a multi-million dollar lawsuit… discrimination… ”
“And it looks like they’ve got a pretty tight case.”
“We need your help.”
Benny drove directly home after the meeting, steering as straight as he could, though it felt like the Cougar, or the road, or the earth itself, was zig-zagging. Not just right and left but up and down and back and forth, too. And he tried his best to ignore the roadrunner, which resembled so much the famous cartoon…the long-necked bird pacing the car for a mile in a cloud of dust before loping off on a side-road towards North Las Vegas… he tried to ignore the tumbleweeds blowing into traffic in the middle of the city or the redneck sheriff’s deputy that zoomed past doing ninety wearing aviator sunglasses on the Tonopah Highway… or the billboard out there advertising The Chicken Ranch which featured a blonde, a brunette, a redhead like an Attack of the 50 Foot Whores and everything else conspiring at that moment to make him scream what the fuck am I doing here?
He spoke to himself, he spoke aloud, he declared in a firm, clear voice that he should go grocery shopping to secure provisions for the long weekend he predicted would see him reverting to the bunker mentality he’d perfected at his all-white Art School alma mater, where he flirted with and then fucked his first white women, experiences he only found exciting because they could get him killed, theoretically, though only if he confessed he wasn’t white. But still. He decided he needed a shower to clear his head before going grocery shopping. On top of everything else, he was very tired.
When he parked the Cougar he sat in it for a while and almost nodded off listening to the very weak signal of an AM radio station from L.A. playing rhythm and blues records from his adolescence… what they called jump blues back then…ladies and gentlemen Mr. Wynonie Harris… those old shellac 78s so heavy you could break windows with them… he would’ve preferred jazz for his mood but only one station featured one weekly show with jazz of any value and that was late in the evening on Saturdays… until he noticed there was mail waiting in the bank of aluminum boxes under the stairs curving up to his second-level apartment. A Stargazer’s Monthly magazine and other items visible through the slot. He got out of the car and fetched the mail, his mind still zonked on various Alexander-Dumas-grade ironies as he gripped the hot handrail and laid a tasseled loafer on each consecutive concrete step as the almost patronizingly helpful geometry of the spiral led him to his unlocked door.
He kicked off his loafers and treated his delicate feet to the carpet. He gazed upon the totem of his alphabetized collection of jazz LPs, seven thousand records in row upon row on shelf upon shelf along the wall leading out of the living room emitting the delicious perfume of time and cardboard. On the top shelf, beside the book-ended collection of miscellaneous 45s, was the painted wood and wire scale-model of the solar system that used to sit on his father’s desk, the only thing he got (by stealing it) when the old man migrated to the afterlife.
In the bundle of mail was a letter from a person with a name he suddenly remembered he’d forgotten years ago, a buddy from art school, Ricky Lang, a white boy with a Quaker background who’d been more or less indifferent towards Benny until discovering Benny was a Negro, which had seemed to make all the difference. This was before Benny had learned to dissemble on the topic. Parting the curtain of glass beads and standing in the arched passage between his modern white kitchen and the earthtone living room, Benny opened the letter first, before the bills, or even the latest issue of Stargazer, featuring a ten-page cover story on black holes, with its lurid artist’s renderings of stars being eaten alive, stars and their screams of light, destruction on a scale that made the continent-clearing whims of the Old Testament’s Jehovah seem childishly cute and extremely local. Clearly, Jehovah Himself answered to an even supremer being, and whatever It was, It was not to be fucked with.
Friend Benny,
I hope this finds you in good health and cheerful as ever.
Tomorrow, I start that weird occasional job again that I couldn’t expect you to know about, since we haven’t kept in contact much since our time together at the FranklinAcademy, where we both planned to be world-famous artists. I was going to be Matisse and you were going to be Picasso, if I recall it right (wink).
Well, for a year now my job is standing naked before the art students. I swear, there are probably 300 drawings of me in student’s portfolios, trying to get them into the best colleges. Skinny guy, small dick, pot belly, gawky neck, womanly breasts, pointy nose. You can imagine. It’s at least SOME money (6 dollars per hour unless they’ve upped it again) and I just can’t say no, since I know that no one else in this whole fucking town of 3500 people wants to (or in some cases, would be allowed to) stand naked before our children. Did I tell you already that I moved upstate after my divorce? Anyway, I’m up in the sticks now.
It’s a funny fantasy. Do you ever have dreams that you show up in highschool and you’re partly or completely naked? Many people do have that dream. I do sometimes — and I’m the guy who’s actually doing it for real. I stand there in some pose and I think, hey, I really AM NAKED in front of the eyes of these people. I see these teenagers on the street and say Hi, and I think, wow, that person usually sees me naked.
But I think my more frequent dream is that I’m walking on the street at night, naked. I dreamed that the other night, and it was so real, I was thinking to myself in the dream, yes, I do this often actually, and no, it’s not a dream. After I woke up, I actually scanned my memory to clarify for myself whether I actually do go walking naked at night or not … and I don’t … but I have this nagging almost-memory, like yes, it does seem familiar.
I guess I should go do something productive now. Or just curl up.
Keep in touch,
Your old friend,
Henri Matisse
Benny lifted the wall-mounted white trimline receiver from the kitchen wall and dialed Sheila Silver’s number, auditioning a variety of salutations (so wide in range that he realized he hadn’t a clue as to the proper general tone to adopt with her, and this after nearly screwing, and then eating, her twice) before she answered. When she finally fumbled the phone and drawled a very weak Yes?, sounding something like someone wearing a blindfold in bed in a dark room in the middle of the afternoon you’ve only managed to rouse at all because she just took the sleeping pill; sounding, in fact, exactly like that; Benny hung up. Sheila was a depressive jazz-head with big tits who often slept in the middle of the afternoon. There was just no way Benny was seriously going to ask Sheila Silver if she knew of any parties this weekend at which there might be college-educated Negroes present, though he knew that there was no logical reason for him not to. Which is why he rang Sheila Silver’s number again, immediately after hanging up, rolling his eyes at his own squeamishness, his own lack of business acumen, before hanging up again the moment she answered again (this time a lot less drowsy, annoyed, even) while Benny mused on how telephones were less useful for talking than for not talking. What middle-late 20th century man accomplished by slamming a phone in its cradle could only have been achieved as thoroughly, in the time of Louis XVl, with a guillotine. And that was progress.
PART TWO FOLLOWS
JESUS IN VEGAS: cont’d
3. The Early Days of Television, Part Two
When he pulled up into the lot in front of the Von’s on Decatur Blvd he expected to come walking out of the store again, in under fifteen minutes, with nothing more earthshaking than cinnamon buns. Certainly not a Nubian Queen. He patrolled the numbingly long and relatively empty-of-shoppers aisles, aisles gently Muzaked (Yesterday, Cherish, Ramblin’ Rose, Moon River) yet astringent in their chill. Something about the modern supermarket epitomized, for Benny, when Benny was in a certain mood, neither quite despondent nor truly mellow, the European mind. The orderly-yet-somehow-borderline-psychotic nature of these cold white right-angled corridors. The soul’s abattoir. How many more thousands of years, if left on their own, would Africans have needed before they came up with a Vons Supermarket? And to what end, if then? The thought was more a twinge of disquiet than the rudiments of a manifesto at that point in Benny’s life. It passed, he pushed, and the visible spectrum of Smucker’s preserves rolled by.
There was still water in his ears, his left ear, from the shower. In his right ear was Moon River but in his left ear he could hear his breathing, his heartbeat, regular intervals of swallowing, the weight of his bones as he walked. His inner auteur imagined a voice-over on top of the left channel of his bodily sound effects saying blank-eyed he gazed upon the bounty of civilization. He searched but he did not find. He cruised the produce department and the meat department and glimpsed a marbled flank of beef swinging on its cold steel hook. He glimpsed the bloody mass through a round window in the stainless steel door behind the man in the white smock arranging neat little packages of ground cow on the astroturfed bottom of the frosted display case and he thought of Ricky Lang, naked in front of those art students. He saw Ricky on a serving platter carved into fatty pink flaps and slathered with his own blood’s gravy because he was old and would never be famous and he needed the pocket money. He saw Ricky’s bodiless head dictating a letter making light of the situation. Dear Friends, the letter would start, I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving…
-I must find a qualified Negro, whispered Benny, as he rounded the corner of the carbonated beverages aisle.
A qualified Negro. Wouldn’t that be a home run? He’d be promoted. He’d be invited for golf and cocktails with the Hamilton Golds in Palm Desert and flirt with Gold’s pretty Argentine Jew of a wife named Isolde and chuckle with Gold to country club bossa nova about Parker behind Parker’s back, an activity Parker himself subtly encouraged, since to be mocked enviously is to be powerful. Later, a purely mechanical affair with Gold’s wife as an unspoken favor to Gold so Gold could take his stupendous-looking quadrilingual Japanese secretary on ski trips without feeling guilty. One of the boys. Gold had said He’s one of us, now, Gray, but what he’d meant by that was that Benny could be if he passed this test.
Even if having a qualified Negro on the team couldn’t save The Studio from losing the lawsuit, everyone would know that Benny had delivered, under fire, on D-Day. They’d know he’d tried. The only gesture more effective than being seen to try would be going to jail on the company’s behalf on charges of discrimination himself. A possibility he wouldn’t rule out.
When he circled back around through Produce he saw her. And what was his first thought. Before even that romantic jolt her beauty chased through him like nausea. His very first thought, about which he was immediately ashamed, while Moon River swooned through the air on strings, as she turned to him as he rolled his cart past and she gave him that dimpled smile and time seemed to speed up and slow down simultaneously (even as it was happening, he seemed to be looking back on it, going over it as a series of stills and scribbled memos approximating the initial sensations):
I’ll bet she knows a qualified Negro.
It’s clear that all straight men want to fuck all women all the time (though not necessarily twice); that’s a given; but what happens in the mind of a man the first time he sees the woman he was more or less made to love? In Benny’s case, shame and self-pity both preceded a wave of the above-mentioned quasi-nausea, reddening his face, clearing the field for awe. He didn’t notice her slightly puffy eyelid. The still (slightly) discolored cheek.
“You look like you come from the stars, sister.”
Hers was the face of the First Woman, though Benny didn’t flatter himself that he was Adam. He wasn’t even Cain. But he knew he was fated to be her man. He knew he was her qualified Negro.
His penis knew it, too. He was astonished to feel it stirring in its cotton shroud, inflating from the tip down, already harder than any number of Sheila Silvers had managed to get it after hours (or so it always felt) of digital, then oral, than oral-digital, then verbal, then verbal-digital-oral-digital attention. He’d once had a worldly Sally Kellerman lookalike shove two fingers up his anus as what in some cases was probably The Secret Weapon but which only achieved, for Benny, the added complaint that he couldn’t masturbate (or defecate normally) for a week afterward. No: a peace sign up his ass was not the solution.
The solution was seated in the passenger seat of his Cougar, offering him a mango.
The Compound was out, way out, on the Tonopah Highway, beyond a cluster of mirage-like apartment complexes so new there were no flags on the flag poles yet, and many of the factory-fresh aluminum-frame windows were still wrapped in billowing plastic. The Compound was beyond, even, the skeletal shopping center (a concrete house of cards) that was going up in response to the sudden apartment complexes. Past all that, east on Mercury Road, which stretched straight back to the Sunrise Mountains, a black seam of fresh tarmac in the brushed suede of the desert, a zipper straight back to the huge rock bosom the sun rose over at the end of every working day.
Eating the proffered mango, Benny realized how hungry he’d been, back-handing his sticky chin and grinning at her. Benny’s groceries, including a pint of Neapolitan ice cream he’d forgotten about, were in a slumped sack on the back seat, but she extracted hers from the opening in the front of her caftan. She handed him a peach salted with the healthy odor of her perspiration and he did not hesitate to eat it. In fact he relished the sensation. How could Benny not be intrigued when he’d asked his new lady friend exactly where to drop her off and she’d answered, in the most matter-of-fact tone, or even perhaps with a tincture of affected modesty, as in -it’s really not a big deal, but-
“The Compound.”
“Excuse me, sister. The what?”
“The Compound.”
“The Compound?”
“You haven’t heard of The Compound? Don’t you watch the Evening News?”
But Benny hadn’t come to Vegas yet when all that happened. The fifteen-hour standoff with the Clark County Sheriff’s department and so on. Two long low stucco structures appeared on either side of a fifteen foot sun-blasted camper on a gravel lot protected by a hurricane fence, the gravel decorated in three of the four corners of the fence by dead brown Yucca trees. Benny expected snarling dogs to crawl out of camouflaged pits in the gravel but none were forthcoming. Where were the cable-armed brothers with their muscle t-shirts, lopsided Afros and Kalashnikovs?
“Is that it? What is it? It looks like a motel with a hurricane fence around it.”
“It was a motel. Once upon a time. Now it’s a deconsecrated Satellite Motor Lodge.”
He was taken aback at the unexpected glimpse of an unexpected vocabulary.
“Park across the street and leave the motor running,” she said. “I’ll be back soon.” She pulled on the door lock and added, “But if I don’t come out in fifteen minutes, just go. Do not step inside that fence and try to get me, okay? You understand? Just go.”
Benny understood, though it pained him to agree to it. He executed a tight u-turn and gunned the engine and put the car in park. She said, “Say yes, My African Queen, I understand.”
“Yes, My African Queen, I understand.”
She pecked his cheek and hopped out of the car and hurried across the road and let herself in through a silently swinging gate. She disappeared around back of one of the long low stucco structures. After waiting a few minutes he shut off the engine. He paged through the new issue of Stargazer, humming along with some oldies, reading about black holes, the trendiest topic in space.
One esteemed astrophysicist (dressed like a tennis instructor in the little photo beside his contribution) propounded the theory that nothing exists yet, and that Time as we experience it is a futuristic effect obtaining in the million billion trillionth of a second elapsing as the Super Black Hole of Reality (smaller than a neutron; comprised of the total mass of the Universe) collapses further before exploding to create Everything. And when Time finally does begin, it won’t be anything like what we think we’re experiencing in this infinitesimal moment.
Another even more esteemed astrophysicist (goatee’d Viennese) claimed that everything that has ever happened will happen again, exactly as it has always happened, oscillating like a perpetual motion machine between the perfectly balanced space/time forces of every perfectly-placed black hole in space.
The only female astrophysicist pictured (suspiciously young; an amateur watercolorist with some talent) likened black holes to tumors…the cancers of space/time…and predicted an epoch in mankind’s distant future when we’ll be able to treat these monster malignancies like surgeons with precisely detonated, super-compact nuclear weapons, many times more powerful than our sun.
Benny kept thinking: but how do they know all this?
And The Voice said: Believing is Knowing.
And Benny said: But what are we to believe, O Lord?
And The Voice said nothing. Or “nothing”. Or nothing. Benny couldn’t be sure.
When he awoke, the sky was being eaten by stars.
The dome of the overhead swarmed and seethed and he saw, half-dreaming, vast shapes with perforated edges fluttering upon the desert, papering it over in black. The domesticated nightsky as seen from his patio was one thing but the cosmos as revealed from where he lay at that moment was of another order of magnitude entirely and he realized that for the first time ever he was gazing upon the irrefutable Truth, groggy as he was, head still wedged between the headrest and the door. His neck was stiff and from his wiped-dry mouth he knew he’d been snoring in the face of All That.
Only the weakest light was visible from somewhere towards the back of The Compound, a gray blur like a stresspoint in black acetate, that and the green glimmer from the radio dial in his dashboard. And through the speaker-holes in the fiberboard shelf behind the back seat, what at first sounded like weak flies fucking under waxpaper revealed itself as a virtually inaudible version of Duke of Earl, Gene Chandler, 1957, and he knew without trying that his battery was too dead to turn the ignition and that he was stranded, twelve miles from home, like the fool he was, straining to hear the corpse of his battery channeling a heartbreaking Duke of Earl. Stranded across the street from The Compound late at night, hungry and cold. He’d rolled the window down and reclined in the bucket seat at dusk and that was all he remembered. He remembered being tired. He turned the radio off.
He remembered dreaming.
He’d dreamt he was married to that amazing black girl now curled up asleep in The Compound and that he’d traveled back East with her, incredibly, to introduce her to the family, but not his family, a dream family, with members he seemed to recognize within the dream with the accumulated confirmation of all of his childhood memories, and, yet, very strangely, the fading recollections of whom were alien to him less than two minutes after waking. What master-forger lived in his head, capable of counterfeiting recognitions he would have bet his life (in the dream) were forty years in the making?
Out of the Cougar, careful to ease the door shut, he went around to the back of the car, the wooden heels of his hundred dollar Joe Namath Dingo boots going clop clop clop, the irony of the ad copy for the boots coming to him like the stinging memory of a serious gambling loss: he knows when to wear them. And if the night had seemed unreal until that point it was real enough now as he was out in it, chilled by it, moving horizontally through a vertical vastness, a kind of elevator shaft, the walls of which receded as you approached them, the mockery it made of the infinitesimal scale of private thought and effort. He looked and found her reclining, over his shoulder, the constellation about ten feet above the horizon, the one he’d known and prayed to since childhood. Cassiopeia, with her incongruously-named constituent stars… Shedir, Caph, Ruchbah, Segin, Achird, Marfak. It had always bothered him that they were in her, part of her, these Arabs with their ugly names.
He popped the trunk of the car and found an Aztec-patterned beach blanket from Tijuana, a beach-blanket he’d never used because the beach wasn’t part of his cultural inheritance, whatever he pretended, however fair-skinned or straight-haired he was, the blanket was still folded in eighths and packaged in its scuffed plastic. Around he went again through the driver’s-side window and leaned over to the sack of groceries in the back, the sack with its dark spots of melted and spoiling foods, and he extracted a box of frosted strawberry ToasTarts. He rolled up the window and locked all the doors and, thus equipped, and with the unpackaged Aztec-patterned beach blanket wrapped around his shoulders like a serape, he began the twelve mile walk up the road.
He’d only been walking five minutes when nothing… his car, The Compound… was any longer visible behind him. He experienced the convincing illusion that he was walking towards it all rather than away from it. Or on a treadmill or in a hamster wheel. He realized that this was the point in the story during which the protagonist, of a certain age, at a certain point in his life, being by nature a seeker… has his Desert Epiphany.
It’s always in the desert. Bushes don’t burn in the suburbs, or, if and when they do, the burning doesn’t mean anything more philosophical than having to replace insured topiary. The desert is where it all happens, as far as revelations go, and the Native Americans and the antediluvian Semites and the Aboriginal Australians all had plenty of desert to wander around in and there to unearth their shallowly-buried epiphanies, epiphanies like golden statues lodged in the sand and becoming the roots of their cultural wisdoms, cultural wisdoms they’ve since shared with a grateful, spiritually hungry world, the keys to the cosmos handed down to us in popular movies and songs and best-selling novels. He thought of Kahlil Gibran. And now it was his turn to have his spirituality improved by nothingness. Or nothingness.
He followed the sound of his boot heels, swaddled in the Aztec-patterned beach blanket, with its very faint odor of petrol, and when not paying close attention he walked off the tarmac accidentally, twice, stumbling on scrabbly hard scallops of sand and the occasional low prickle of tumbleweed, hurrying back to the reassuring surface of the road, a symbol of progress since before the Romans, probably. A symbol for everything, actually, when he thought of it.
Further he walked, counting his boot clicks, tearing open the box of ToasTarts and into each of the three foil wrappers (each, in turn, containing two frosted strawberry ToasTarts) every quarter hour or so, suffused with an intensely private pleasure in the threatening face of the cold infinite as the plasticky dough of the mass-produced pastry accumulated between the rills of his gums and the inner pockets of his cheeks in a slow-dissolving infusion of sugar-heavy cud.
In the woolly blanket of the below-sea-level darkness he thought he glimpsed lumbering forms in his peripheral vision, the desert remembering its dinosaur dead. Brilliant as the sky was (like a vertiginous view of The Strip from a space ship) the light failed to trickle to anything lower than a hundred feet above the sand, half-illuminating the occasional bat or swallow or buzzard tumbling headlong overhead like ripples in spacetime and crying out.
Benny pretended he was entering an African village on foot. Where the village is exactly doesn’t matter. A sentry at the village gate; a fearsome sentry brandishing a scimitar and a necklace of yellow molars, a sentry big as Roosevelt Grier; poses a riddle the correct answer to which will allow Benny entry to the village. A wrong answer, on the other hand, will see Benny’s head rolling around in the sand. The sentry speaks English with the camp elocution of a mad Shakespearean actor.
“Interloper!” says the sentry. “I pose to Thee a riddle.”
“I say I say I say,” says Benny, in this fantasy, imitating Alan Alda imitating Groucho Marx, chomping on a mimed cigar in a manic stoop, “Pose away, Mr. Bones!”
“What creature is it,” booms the sentry, molar necklace chattering as he gestures violently to paint a picture of fable immemorial in the middle distance, “that travels on all fours in the morning, on two legs in the afternoon, and on three in the evening?”
“That’s an easy one, chief,” says Benny. “The secret word,” he pronounces “word” as woid, “is lush. A lush crawls around on all fours with a hangover in the morning, staggers on two legs in search of his next drink after a business lunch in the afternoon, and totters on a three-legged barstool in the evening!”
With a grunt of respect the sentry grants passage into the village, with its neat little roads and thatched huts, and, to make a long fantasy short, the king of the village, looking suspiciously like Benny’s father, wearing Benny’s father’s tuxedo jacket and Benny’s father top hat along with a grass skirt instead of his pants, presents Benny with a harem to service as part two of the trials he must endure before becoming the chief of the village (freeing the old man to enjoy his sunset years collecting stamps, and freshwater fishing).
The harem with which Benny is presented, he recognizes: every single girlfriend he ever had in grade school, starting with Beverly Huff, moon-faced, chubby and shiny brown. Beverly is five, smells like a pickle, and can punch harder than Benny, who is considered to be prettier than any of the girls in kindergarten. Beside Beverly is the girl Benny replaced her with, the same year, an older woman from second grade named Tamara, with root beer-colored eyes.
Looking cosmi-comically displaced amongst the little schoolgirls is the woman to whom he’d actually lost his virginity in a very nearly meaningless act (though orchestrating it probably took some doing on her part) at the age of thirteen: Gracie Barnes. The proprietress of the corner store at which Benny did all his after-school shopping. Bosomy black Gracie with her feline eyeglasses and her helmet of conked gray hair and her impotent, cigar-chomping husband named… Jimmy. Benny went in that shop one day and Gracie put the OUT TO LUNCH sign up and locked the door and that’s all he remembers about it except the ecstasy of walking out again ten minutes later clutching a fat roll of free comic books. Plastic man was his favorite.
Gracie, Beverly, Tamara, Verlene… Benny isn’t particularly enthralled until he gets to Karenna Beauchamp, sixteen years old in the tenth grade, held back a year due to being distracted from her school work by problems at home. Karenna’s mother was a paranoid schizophrenic, a very unusual complaint for a black woman to have in those days; so unusual, that the family tended to brag about it: she got her a white lady’s disease! My mama she got her a white lady disease, is how Karenna had broken the ice at a dance, in fact, as Benny remembers it. Maybe he’s making that up. Karenna is tall, slender, wide-hipped but nearly titless, with the kind of face that would have been used to sell face cream if she hadn’t been so incredibly, deliciously, blasphemously black. He singles out Karenna Beauchamp and she steps out of her vaguely native-ish, sarong-or-sari-like, drapey kind of clothing and reclines on a soft soft pile of ostrich feathers, pipe-cleaner legs spread, her hairless wrinkled blue-black cunt (like an elephant’s eye, squinting at him, crying its tear of vaginal moisture) cocked at the perfect angle of reception. A lion roars. Monkeys gibber in the trees and the ceremonial drums commence throbbing as Benny kicks out of his safari trunks and the king stares with kingly dispassion.
The problem Benny often has with his fantasies, especially the sexual ones, is their uncontrollability. At the very moment they become most persuasive, they tend to get away from him (stuck in a meeting, late for lunch, stomach growling for mercy while Gold or Parkerson drone on, for example, he’ll visualize a perfect plate of spaghetti, only to see a turd plop on it). Karenna Beauchamp is on that pile of ostrich feathers with her blank expression and her legs spread and her pussy ready to receive and all the other little black girls from Benny’s romantic history plus Gracie Barnes in a circle around the altar, chattering with school-girlish excitement like at the Saturday Matinee and Benny ready to mount when who should push through the crowd in a fury but his most painful memory, his half-sister Jolene, the illegitimate product of his father’s most famous affair?
Exactly (to the day) Benny’s age, Jolene was his eerie black twin, his dark mirror, the sister he didn’t even know existed until his father unwisely orchestrated a meeting on the occasion ofthe annual barbecue of the Greater Masonic Negro Tradesmen Association of West Philly, 1947, taking Benny aside with, “Son, you’re seventeen now, which is a man by any means of reckoning, and it’s time for you to know the things a man knows about the things a man will do, the things of the world beyond arithmetic or spelling or the pretty Bible tales your mother fills your head with.”
The whole terrible business. A very very painful thing. Benny hadn’t thought about it or Jolene for years and now she was filling him with her hot prickles of shame, grief, regret. The look on Benny’s father’s face when he found out, clutching that letter and shrieking at Benny from the other side of the kitchen although his face seemed just an inch away, filling Benny’s vision, the spit on his lips and the hate in his eyes and the look on everyone else’s face at the breakfast table, the detail of every expression Benny managed to absorb without taking his own eyes off of his father’s Old Testament Jehovah mask as he cast Benny out of the bosom of the family. Benny’s wailing, red-faced, innocently terrified mother and sisters… the toast burning… the Korean war… art school on the GI bill…
He stood cactus-still with the last ToasTart in one hand and the serape clutched in the other. And his socks were soggy with blood because his boots had never walked more than thirty unpunctuated steps since he’d bought them and it is amazing how far you can walk on bloody feet… the body must secrete some kind of natural anesthetic. Until you stop. And try to start again. How could he do this? But he had to: he couldn’t sleep in the desert. But his right foot was unbearably swollen. However long it had taken Benny to walk away from his car, it took him three times longer to walk back again, gasping and cursing and hobbling in this unexpected Jesus pain.
He cried out.
The sleek dead car in its cold dark sleep. He’d bought it with his first big check from television. The Compound. The silently swinging gate gave way. The gravel crunched. Ominously, the door to the lobby was not locked.
There was only just the floor lamp on, severely dimmed. He found himself standing in what had obviously been the ‘50s-style, modernist lobby of the front desk of the deconsecrated motel, listening to his own heavy breathing. Geometric patterns in aquatints and white all darkened by the dimness of that one sad floor lamp.
Frankly he’d rather be in a meeting with Parker.
There was no longer a front desk, but two dozen or so folding chairs, not in rows, but strewn in clusters across the carpet. The walls were darkly paneled and a patched screen for an 8mm movie projector…no wider than Benny’s outstretched arms… hung on the wall behind what had once been the spot upon which the front desk had rested. He could see that the pool-colored carpet with its geometric swirls was cleaner in that spot, a clean-spot of bright blue shaped like a giant’s thumbnail and grooved by pressure points. There was the pebbled glass of the outer wall behind him and the dim floor lamp before him and the outline of a man on the swinging door of the men’s room to the right of the phantom desk, half-illuminated by the light, and, further, a dark corner around which there’d be a hall or a storage room, probably.
A very large man with bushy gray hair and a hooked nose slipped into the lobby from around that corner. The man’s skin was the color and texture of a football Benny had owned as a child. Benny was tall but the man was taller and two of Benny wide. He struck Benny as being merely the visible aspect of a much larger creature or force. He was definitely not the qualified Negro, though he was obviously capable of giving either Gog or Magog a run for the money in the Destroyer of Worlds category. The whites of the man’s eyes were dark and he was dressed in his bathrobe and his bedroom slippers and when he spoke there was an amplified, over-articulated quality to his voice; a pressure you’d need to blow out the glass walls of the lobby to release. He spoke with the majestic belligerence of a voice-over in a PSA about street crime. It was too dark outside for the way he spoke, which was fully awake.
“What do you want here, white man?”
Benny didn’t know what to say.
“I repeat: what do you want here at three o’clock in the morning, whitey?”
“I’m not white.”
“Really.”
“I’m Negro. I admit I don’t look it but I’m a Negro. Like you.”
“Like me. Is that so?” The man laughed, but not too loudly. “What’s a Negro if a Negro’s not a thing that answers to the Negro description?”
Benny touched his chest and said “In here,” although the look on the man’s face was powerful enough to give Benny doubts.
“Really? Gosh, that’s good news, because in that case I’m T.S. Eliot,” said the man, who also touched his chest, “in here. You care for a spot of tea and some crumpets, whitey?”
“My battery’s dead.” He looked at his boots, near to fainting. “My feet…”
The man, hands on his hips, his chest exposed, eyebrows high, seemed ready to laugh again. His chest hairs were scant and curly white. “Your feet.”
“I’m parked across the street.”
“In front of my property.”
“Yes.”
“Oh, just, you know, star gazing. Yeah?”
Benny shook his head.
“Butterfly hunting?”
Benny lowered his head and shook it.
“Okay. I see.” The big man nodded. “Keeping us under surveillance.” He smiled with unexpected warmth. “I’m still that important?”
“No….”
The smile faded. Or pretended to. A comedic possibility. Would have to be one dedicated undercover cop.
“I mean,” added Benny, quickly, pointing towards the road again. “I gave your lady friend…”
“Careful now.”
“…I gave her a ride…”
The man pulled a folding chair to his side and sat in it, arms folded over his chest, head cocked. He looked at Benny a good long time and it was clear to Benny that the man was deciding upon how much energy to expend on dealing with him. How much trouble to go to or get into. He leaned back in the chair, which whimpered under his weight, and he shifted his huge clasped hands to the belly of his bathrobe and yawned, turning it into language.
“You agree I have a dilemma on my hands here?”
“Only if you think I’ve come to… ”
“Haven’t you?”
Benny’s right foot was so swollen in his Dingoes that he imagined having to cut the boot off, peeling the leather away from the delicate white bones of his foot along with a sopping roll of flesh.
“You’re from back East.”
“Yes.”
“You talk like it.”
Benny winced. He needed to get off of that foot.
“A high yellow sort of fellow from… ”
“Philly,” said Benny, after a groan.
“Good old Philly,” said the man. “I killed a guy in Philly, once,” he added, “a yellow Nigger who looked too white for my tastes, I hope I haven’t upset you,” but he winked to show he was joking. He said he knew quite a few high yellow Negro girls from back East in Chicago because he used to have money and he used to be somewhat famous in what you would call a notorious way. He asked Benny if Benny had any sisters and Benny said yes, three, and the man stood and said maybe you’ll introduce me someday and gestured for Benny to follow him and Benny, in agony on his swollen foot, did so.
***
Benny awoke, fully clothed and wearing his boots, under the crisp clean sheet of a motel bed, the hard dry sun of the deep desert parting the drawn curtains like a sword. Benny’s first thought was that there must be a woman in the bathroom, freshening up, but he heard no water running, no flushing or spritzing or fussing with a purse or car keys or spray-on deodorant. But why would he have been sleeping in a motel room alone? Why was there a framed portrait of JFK on the wall to his right, above the television? What year was it and why wasn’t he sure? Behind every “why” was another “why”, and any particular procession of whys he could think of telescoped backwards by only a dozen or so degrees before butting up against the creation of the universe.
The throb in his right foot clarified and asserted itself as a terrible pain as he remembered where he was and how, to some extent, he’d come to be there. Still, his dreams lingered; the dream tastes and smells and emotions. Closing his eyes he saw, or felt, the fading trace of the people he’d known and loved in the other life he’d lived through the troubled hours of his recent unconsciousness, and losing them to daylight was like losing them to death. Or to life, maybe.
When Benny opened his eyes again, the man was standing at the foot of the bed. He was wearing the overalls of an auto mechanic, with a wide-brimmed sun hat and a solemnly curious expression, smelling powerfully of hard physical labor. The door was open brightly behind his massive silhouette and the fading wash of an airforce jet’s passing gave a great depth to the afternoon.
“What time is it, please?” asked Benny.
“It’s quarter after five, white man. Would you care for some breakfast?”
“A half a grapefruit would be nice.”
The man laughed. “Watching your weight, white man?”
Benny smiled. “Why do you keep calling me white man?”
“Well, for one thing, because your driver’s license says ‘Caucasian’ on it.”
Benny could feel his wallet still bulging in his back right pocket, clearly one of the two main causes of his troubled sleep. Still, he panicked. “How do you know that?”
The man laughed again. A surprisingly robust and good-natured laughter, for all its brevity. “Call it an educated guess. Why don’t you wash up while I prepare your grapefruit? You remember how? All the soap and water you’ll ever need is right in that little room. Some disposable razors and a can of shaving cream, too, if you’re feeling ambitious.”
Benny waited a few extra minutes after the man’s exit into the cauterizing sunlight, then lifted the sheet and pulled off his serape and rolled out of bed, discovering that things were as bad as he had feared when he tried to put some weight on his right foot. With a jolting pain like shattering glass with a nervous system he hopped the distance to the toilet and landed against the sink, leaning heavily on it, afraid to look in the mirror. Afraid of the thing in it.
He eased himself down on the toilet seat by clutching the shower curtain and spent a good long time contemplating his boots. They would have to come off, if only in order for him to undress fully so as to bathe, though of course the real issue was the confronting of the condition of his right foot, which no longer even felt like one, but was transmitting sensations that caused him to visualize a bloody fork of bone pronged out of his leg, jabbing into a raw chunk of meat with toes at the end of it.
Seated on the toilet he was able to remove a drawer in the cabinet the sink was built into and laid it upon his lap, fingering through several little bottles of aspirin, loose papers, ballpoint pens, rolls of gauze, a tampon or two and a sewing kit. Out of the sewing kit he removed a small pair of scissors and with these scissors he cut the smooth-heeled soles off each boot, beginning with the left, a not entirely difficult job, being as each boot was tattered and stitch-blown and road-blasted with holes. The soles hit the clean tiles of the bathroom with an earthy density, along with the remaining bits of each boot, including curled tongues and bitty laces, and he thought of Napoleon’s army, or the German infantry stranded in Stalingrad, boiling their footwear for dinner. The debris plopped into a black pile and while his left foot was merely stained indigo from the old coloration of the lived-in boot, the right foot was a vivid thing of purple and yellow and orange and red, glowing in the half-dark of the bathroom. He wanted to faint but he didn’t.
The over-shirts he unbuttoned and removed, one at a time, still seated, and then the t-shirts came off, ripping as he tugged them, exposing his chest and belly to the tingle and itch of air. After this phase he rested, steadying himself, avoiding the tableaux (though not the odor; impossible) of his neon foot, which dangled in a bulbous throb from the leg he’d crossed over the knee of the other.
Reaching over he managed to stopper the tub and turn on the water. Watching water so pure it was nearly blue gush into the Platonic form of a clean white bathtub was so fascinating that the tub was nearly full before he snapped out of the reverie and twisted the tap off. Hoisting himself on the shower curtain he managed to get to an upright position again, all of his weight on his left foot. He dug his wallet out of the back pocket and placed it on the edge of the sink, and, after a strength-gathering pause, he ripped his unzipped pants from the crotch down, tearing the rotted cloth from his legs in four strokes, and he ripped off the shreds of his underwear, which were a complicated color, and he sat himself groaning on the edge of the bathtub before falling sideways into it, splashing the floor tiles. He screamed when the parched wound of his macerated foot hit the hot water.
“You alright in there?” came the man’s deep voice.
When he got no answer he stepped into the bathroom, switching on the lights, and found the white man breathing, but semi-conscious, or pretending to be, in the bathtub, the blind fish of his little white dick floating in the bushy red kelp of his public hair, the bathwater pink. The bathroom floor tiles were covered in a quarter inch of water and he was careful to avoid the puddled filth of the white man’s clothing, which would have to be disposed of if ever he could find a fire hot enough. There was a wallet on the edge of the sink and he looked through it, finding a typewritten letter folded into eighths, a ticket stub for dry cleaning, and a long-expired driver’s license that claimed that the white man was a 42-year-old citizen of the state of New Jersey by the name of Ricky Lang.
***
When the white man came to consciousness again, he’d been summoned by the not entirely unpleasant pain of having his right foot cleaned and bandaged. He lay naked on the motel room bed he’d spent the previous night and morning in, his long hair and beard still damp but drying rapidly in the zero-moisture Vegas heat. The large black man who was tending to his foot said, “Someone tried to get into my car last night. There were scratch marks on the door. Was that you?”
“I’ve been sick for a while.”
The black man nodded, seeming to accept this for an answer. But then he added,
“I was about to throw away what was left of your pants when I found these.” He jingled a full set of house keys. “Why have you been living outside for so long? Where’s your home?”
The white man looked genuinely puzzled, and not a little pained, by the question. The black man stood with a graceful weariness and gestured at the bandaged foot and said, “I can’t guarantee you won’t get gangrene and die, but maybe this’ll help. Here’s a bathrobe you can wear. You can follow me if you’re hungry.”
They hobbled outside, the one helping the other to walk. There was a café-style table under a sunshade umbrella on the gravel between the two long, low stucco buildings of the old motel. Some distance behind them was a Jetstream motor home of dented and polished aluminum, parked beside a flagless flag pole and looking like a gargantuan kitchen appliance of the 1950s, its side door open and the unarticulated murmur of news radio at a low volume leaking out. The sun was still hours from setting but depleted and forgiving and the wind finished drying the white man’s shoulder-length hair and chest-length beard before he took his place at the table, lowered into the seat, wearing, with comical inadequacy, the very bathrobe he’d first seen the black man in.
“Help yourself,” said the black man. He nodded at a serving plate of cold scrambled eggs, a cold plate of sausages and potatoes, a stack of cold pancakes and a pitcher of warm orange juice.
The white man took a surprisingly petite forkful of the eggs and said, “I’m wondering what you might have found in my wallet.”
“Wasn’t much to find.”
“That’s what I’m thinking.”
“Want it?” The black man held it up.
“May I?”
The white man reached and took the wallet and placed it on the table beside the plate he was eating from. Something was in the air. It was different between the two of them now. The confrontational energy of the evening prior had evaporated. The black man scratched his chin and said, “And it wasn’t you I’ve been getting all those letters from?”
The white man, he shrugged and he chewed.
The black man said, “I’m slowly coming to the conclusion that you are what you appear to be.”
The white man asked, without looking up from his plate, “Which is?”
“Somebody with an interesting story to tell.”
There was a good long silence. The black man sneezed and the white man said god bless you.
The white man looked up, finally, and said, “Why don’t you tell yours first?”
***
I was born in 1932 near Chicago. My father was a sanitation worker employed by the city of Chicago and we came, in my thirteenth year, to live in a little gray, clean, clapboard house in a colored neighborhood of Chicago called Golders Park. By Negro terms of reckoning we were suddenly middle class, because my father had a job with the city. His position wasn’t as prestigious as that of a Federal postal worker’s, but he wasn’t a dishwasher, or a hustler, either. I was the second of eight children, and all of my siblings (six sisters and a baby brother), as far as I know, are living. Thelma, Marva, Bernadette, Antonia, Edwina, Gloria and Benny Jr.
I was an avid and talented student, twice promoted ahead of my classmates, so that I graduated from High School at the age of sixteen. Being younger than my classmates was never a social problem because I was always large, and, though I had no talent or interest in sports, I was built like a linebacker, so no one trifled with me. Being bigger than the bullies, I had that rare thing, a taunt-free experience of High School. I was never what you would call a handsome boy, but there were always girls around, whether or not you could call them attractive, and whether or not I ever did much with them. I made it through school with my virginity technically intact.
The year I graduated from Golders Park High School was 1948, and back then there were no real scholarships established to help the poor to attend college. If there were, they were a well-kept secret. There were little funds and sponsorships from local church and business but I wasn’t offered any, probably because I didn’t look the part of a student with the potential of bringing glory to the colored race. With no other options, I entered the job market, taking on a string of odd jobs while nursing my ultimate dream of working at a library. The year I turned 19, my dream came true, incredibly, and I assumed a custodial position at a little library on Chicago’s near North Side, a working class neighborhood of immigrant Poles and scattered Irish, ignorant, superstitious newcomers to the American dream. From our house in Golder’s Park to my job every morning at the Joseph Pulaski Memorial Library was an hour’s bus ride, involving three connections, through many different ethnic enclaves of the city, and it was into that most hostile of all the enclaves that I stepped off of that last bus, early every morning, five days a week. I learned soon enough that the best way to deflect hostile, wary looks as I walked the three blocks from the bus stop to the library was to carry my mop bucket to work with me.
The librarian was a woman named Bernadine Weaver. Caucasian, obviously. When I first met her, the day I applied for the position of janitor, she was 33 years old, single, a remarkably tall, but unremarkably handsome, bronze-blonde who always wore her very long hair in a burnished librarian’s bun. There’s something of the nun in a librarian: the chaste silence, the spinsterish dedication to an intellectual ideal of abstinence. The cloister-like smell of the stacks adds to the impression. She could as well have been wearing a wimple that day I first walked in, embarrassing us both with my height, which implied a pairing, for very tall women and very tall men can’t, in the end, avoid one another. I was dressed in my Sunday shoes, pressed dungarees and brand new flannel shirt. In that look she gave me, the first time ever she looked, she seemed to recognize the introductory few moments of her oldest recurrent nightmare. She knew she was fated to lay that big blonde head on this strapping 19 year old Negro’s chest and I, of course, would be the one who paid the highest price for her doing it. But, before I go any further on the subject of Bernadine Weaver, another word or two about my own family.
My father was a garbage man. But he was a good man. Raised in Oklahoma before it became the dust bowl of the Great Depression, he knew horses and cattle, and he longed to return to that life. He literally dreamed of the oatsy-sweet odor of cowshit, but it was the acid reek of the human variety he was forced to live with. People actually shit in their garbage in those days; he wouldn’t have recognized modern trash, with its cosmetic packagings and perfectly edible food, at all. When people threw something away back then, it really meant garbage, because any material that could be used for anything was hoarded like a treasure. If you’ve ever seen people come to blows over a heap of rotten vegetables (the first party claiming they were thrown away by accident, the second party claiming finder’s keepers, losers weepers), you’ll know what I mean. To be a garbage man for most of the years that my father plied his craft really meant something awful, collecting in places right there in the middle of Chicago where asphalt often gave way to dirt roads. It was an odious life for him, but he never once took it out on his family. He was a mild man, with a limited vocabulary, and a shiny black nose like a hound’s, who never resorted to talking with his hands.
Once a month he’d take me, just me, the eldest, to ride horses for a whole day in fresh air along the trails on a horse ranch in rural Illinois, run by people he was friendly with. I’m assuming we rode those horses free of charge, because what could he have paid them with? What service could he have bartered for the privilege? A little garbage-collecting around the ranch? I couldn’t possibly recall the name of the place, or the names or technical classifications of the horses we rode, but I will never forget the stinging rich odor of the polished leather of the saddles. Yes, and the warm sexual charge I remember, bumping along on a pony behind my father on that caramel-colored mare with her haughty blonde tail swishing and her sweaty rump in a rhythm like any female’s under the burden of my father’s body.
My father taught me all about horses; I’m sure he taught me plenty; but I lost that knowledge in prison. The theory of incarceration that’s most popular with modern jurists centers on re-education, more than punishment, but prison was always a school, and school is considered by many to be a punishment, while the terms of an institution’s educating are by no means under the control of the institution’s officials. Longterm incarceration replaces any knowledge you may have had, going in, with incarcerated knowledge, which is only ever useful within the walls of the institution of incarceration, or for going back to them, in a process you can almost feel while it’s happening. A student writing his dissertation for an advanced degree is as unfit, in his way, for society, as a man near the end of a fourteen year sentence for rape.
I was a tenant of Joliet for one hundred and seventy months, commencing my stay on April 1, 1953 and walking back out again on June 6, 1967, with a neatly wrapped package of my earthly possessions under one arm and all of my father’s lovingly imparted horse knowledge erased. The first act I committed as a free man was to catch a bus to the so-called scene of the crime, but I could have taken a limo. I wasn’t aware that I’d become a rich man while serving my fourteen years, and wasn’t to discover this fact until six months after walking out into the frightening daylight of the parking lot in front of the prison.
I took a Greyhound bus back to Chicago, and, from State Street bustling with shoppers, took a bus which connected to a bus that let me out just three blocks away from my old place of employment, the Joseph Pulaski Memorial Library, where I’d worked as a janitor for three happy years of my life. I stood on the sidewalk near the flagpole in the summer sun and looked upon the building that had become more symbolic, in my mind, of my fourteen years in prison than the building I had actually spent all those years inside of. It was a windy day, and the chain on the aluminum flagpole was whipping the pole with the repetitive frenzy of an SOS, and the American flag I’d personally repaired rips in was snapping high overhead like a sail on a sleek yacht, my trouser legs rippling and my hat in danger of being blown clear off. I noticed there were flag-colored candy wrappers stuck here and there in the bushes that ran in a broken rectangle around the library as I walked up the stairs and entered the place with a hand on my gray hat and my heart pounding.
In the bright gloom of library light I saw things pretty much as I had left them, despite the changes the country had gone through from 1953 to 1967. The high walls that were ringed low in a dark crowd by the stacks were still hung with dingy portraits of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Pulaski, and framed maps of America, the world and the solar system according to early 20th century science, with its eight planets. In the center of this main room was the abandoned island of the horseshoe-shaped librarian’s station, and I took my place at a long table between the geography stacks from which I could watch things while remaining unobtrusive myself, hidden by a cart of jumbled atlases, my sweat-stained hat on the table in front of me.
This was the room, with its fluorescent hum and odor of old sentences and a musty carpet sweeper, in which everything had happened. I’d befriended my first white person in this room, learned to read intellectually in this room (and, by extension, to write) and in this room, not far from where I was seated, had I also lost my virginity to the woman for whom I was now patiently waiting, fresh out of prison after serving a fourteen year sentence for her alleged rape. When I noticed her standing behind the counter at the librarian’s station, counting three stacks of books, having rolled a cart back in from the lecture room while my mind was somewhere else, I suppose, it appeared as though she’d taken all of the changes that the library might have suffered, in my long absence, upon her self.
She was gray-haired and sharp-shouldered and dressed like a widow. I had turned 36 that January, in my prison-built body, and sat upright on that bench between the stacks, at the peak of my physical condition, feeling like something polished and cast-iron forged, greatly superior to my pathetic John Doe clothing, a black god who only had to go naked in order to become revealed, calculating that Bernadine must be exactly 50, or weeks from it. I couldn’t remember her birthday.
It was after observing her for a while that I realized that she must be aware of my presence. There’s a theatrical quality to even the most banal movements of someone who’s aware she’s being watched. There’s also, of course, a vast difference between the self-consciousness induced by having a stranger for an audience and the formal requirements of putting on a show for someone who has sucked on your breasts. She kept her head down and was careful not to glance in the direction of the geography stacks.
You can fantasize a moment with all of the kitchen-sink, realist skill of an Arthur Miller, but you will fail in your predictions, for the simple reason that the mind is a fantasist, and is even poorer at simulating reality than it is at observing it. Curled up on a mattressless bunk in a half-lit concrete room with a wet floor that smelled like a fillingstation toilet, I had rehearsed this scenario as many times as there were nights in Joliet, but I had never pictured just sitting there, watching, from between the stacks, for hours, while Bernadine Weaver did her shitwork. This diverged somewhat from the scenario of her begging for forgiveness, or begging to start a new life with me out West, or choking bug-eyed and purple-lipped in the grip of these hard Othello thumbs, or submitting, silently, justly, to the Socratic sexual torture I had mastered in prison.
Have you ever crossed the floor at a ball in order to ask a girl for the pleasure of her dance? If she says no, sometimes, you linger beside her anyway, for the longest time, paralyzed at the prospect of the humiliating walk back to where you started. The longer you remain beside her, with your hands in your pockets or your arms crossed over your chest, with nothing to do and no reason to be there, the more foolish you feel, the more paralyzed you become, the longer you remain. This is how it was in the Joseph Pulaski Memorial library that day, until, finally, after four hours which recapitulated the history of the world, Bernadine finally rolled the cart back into the lecture room, with her back to me, to fetch more books. I very quietly gathered my hat and box of possessions and walked back out into the sunshine, which had soaked into gold-edged shadows under the oaks and maples in the long hot hours after lunch.
I’d never before dared to walk anywhere on the near-Northside beyond the L-shaped, tree-lined path from the bus stop to the library, but here I was seeking out, boldly, a place to sit and eat before deciding the rest of my life. Having suffered the ultimate insult (short of execution) that a black skin can expect in America, I had deconstructed, and demystified, any innate sense of where a black skin is and isn’t welcome. Which I’m sure, in many cases, explains the high rates of Negro recidivism. If a particular bistro or lunch counter didn’t want my specific kind of business, let them tell me to my face. I was no longer going to discriminate against myself, on their behalf, to save them the trouble. Of such stuff is a budding “bad ass” made.
Well, any cop stopping the large, obviously freshly-minted vision of an ex-con I presented walking the sidewalks of Poletown, as that neighborhood was often called, would have been baffled to search my box of possessions and find in it nothing more incriminating than a cheap overcoat, a paperback Thesaurus, a change of underwear, four pairs of argyle socks I’d won in a prison raffle, and one letter of literary praise, each, from the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, the British theater critic Kenneth Tynan, and the American classical music conductor Leonard Bernstein. I’d gotten other letters, too, from celebrities such as the boxer Cassius Clay and the actor Godfrey Cambridge, but these had been lifted from my cell by the guards whose job it was to search our personal effects, regularly, for handmade weapons, or drug paraphernalia, or digging tools, while we were walking the exercise yard, punching keyrings or license plates, or sitting for chow.
I’d probably collected a hundred letters. Most were written by ordinary people, in that pleasantly illiterate, Chaucerian style of the masses, spelling and grammar prescribed by common sense. Quite a lot of it was out-and-out hate-mail: genuine vintage coon-hating screeds from the 1920s and ‘30s. Fifteen-page death threats and so forth. My book, of course, is a lightning rod for coon-haters, and will never go out of print as long as coons and coon-haters walk the earth.
I received this “fan mail” from the time my book was published, four years into my stint at Joliet, until the day, a year later, when the publisher, suddenly realizing he had the biggest hit of his career on his hands, and, in hopes of defrauding me out of substantial royalties, stopped forwarding it. He destroyed any concrete evidence of both our relationship and my existence, emboldened by the fact that I was in prison, and that he’d published the book under a title I knew nothing about. Also, the book was published under the author’s pseudonym, standard for pulp pornography back then, of “Anonymous”. I never once received a copy. Later, by the nth print, the author’s pseudonym became the dashing “Napoleon Fanon”, a fact I discovered, quite by accident, years later. Meanwhile, between the day that my fan mail had stopped arriving and the morning I walked out of prison, I’d assumed that the book had sunken without a trace, and that I was owed no more than a few hundred dollars in royalties, a nice little sum I had little chance of recovering. C’est la vie.
I had tried writing poems, short stories and little essays under Bernadine’s tutelage at the library, but I hadn’t the time to develop any technique, or had access to an audience, until I went to prison. After the chores are done, what’s there to do in an eighty-one square foot cell, but read, do push-ups, or write? While there were acquaintances of mine who were breaking records, and winning prison tournaments, by doing five, six, or even ten thousand push-ups a day, I used my leisure time to become a force in the black market prison economy, writing out and then copying, or reading aloud, pornographic vignettes in exchange for contraband, or services, or small amounts of cash. I discovered that even the most illiterate, anti-social, and physically dangerous, prisoners responded to the golden rules of narrative. They were a better gauge, in fact, than any audience of politely encouraging well-wishers you could imagine. When a story didn’t work, or disappointed them in its ending, or had too much, or too little, or unconvincing, sex, I heard about it before the offending story or passage had barely cooled in their minds.
To get specific: I learned, for example, never to write a sex scene in which the female participant appeared to be enjoying it too much. That’s not how it work, I was informed, over and over again. That ain’t how it happen. And that a man only truly enjoys doing it to a woman who resists, if only inside. Nobody really want a woman who really want it. I took in this technical advice while honing my stories to the tastes of a paying audience, and realized, after much internal resistance (what Romantic wants to concede any of this as true?), that I was learning about something much larger than storytelling. I was learning about the thing about which all stories are told. As if I needed to be told. Here I was, doing a twenty five year sentence for aggravated rape (reduced to twenty for good behavior; reduced, again, eventually, to fourteen) as an innocent man, still playing, absurdly, the role of the lyre-strumming, lady-worshiping troubadour, in my eighty-one square-foot cell, with its wet floor and its stench of the sewer, a stench which taunted me with its echo of our daily routine of buggery in the showers.
To write at all well is to relinquish one’s casual understanding of the world. One’s self-protecting misconceptions of the world. To write at all well is to yank the veil off it. The process changes the writer, and only a changed writer can change the world for the reader reading him. Writing for a complicated, captive, paying audience of con men, arsonists, robbers, rapists, drug addicts, tax evaders, purse-snatchers, brawlers, burglars, bootleggers and sundry uncouth disturbers of the peace, I developed a complicated knowledge of what I was and wasn’t; what I could and couldn’t; what I longed for and abhorred, and my written words slowly became real writing, even if it was just material for womenless men to masturbate, or rape other men, to. But isn’t that the goal of any writer, metaphorically speaking? To make his reader come?
The manuscript I sent out to be published started life as one of these pornographic stories. My audience demanded something more than tight young pussies and big bad thrusting dicks. They were a higher grade of illiterate, many of them, being older; they were illiterates who couldn’t read Frederick Douglas or Homer as opposed to illiterates who couldn’t read Irving Stone. I wrote for them a political allegory: a nameless Negro everyman rapes his way across the Midwest, in the 1940s and 1950s, as a form of existential protest, targeting the most beautiful, upper class, socially valuable white women, getting them pregnant wherever possible. Ruining them. This was long before the blockbusting black-power rape memoirs of the 1960s which my work paved the way for. First it was a short story, which became a serial of weekly installments, until I bashed it into the rough form of a novel of 100,000 words. It was originally called “Jesus in Kansas” and I wrote it out in an impeccable longhand on seven composition notebooks I’d bartered for the cigarettes I’d received in payment for earlier, cruder efforts about, for instance, a church-going towhead and a runaway con hiding invisibly black in the basement.
During my stint in Joliet, my mother died, of grief, stress, over-work, lack of sleep, poor nutrition and a host of environmental poisons, as most Negroes will. She did not live the Natural Life; as a woman, she could not, and if she’d have been a man, she wouldn’t have. My father went bitter: perhaps, even (if he allowed himself to speak or think about me) he blamed his oldest son. The human I called on my first day of freedom regained, from a phone booth in downtown Chicago, in the cold shadow of the John Hancock building, the ultimate symbol of white power, was an old friend, from the old neighborhood. He gave me a place to stay, though he knew better than to offer to let me stay where he lived with his family. My friend was a married man who kept a low-rent apartment on the far Southside. The telephoneless apartment was furnished very basically with a bed, a liquor cabinet and a dirty bath towel. I could imagine what he used the place for. In fact, he warned me that he might drop by, from time to time, unannounced, for which occasions I wouldn’t have to leave the premises, as long as I remained in the kitchen.
The apartment was in a housing project called Harriet Tubman Gardens, a ghetto, in an industrial nomansland near Gary, Indiana. Tubman Gardens had rats and roaches and stray dogs that ran in packs like would-be wolves every night, but because it was situated on the outskirts of the city proper, bordered on one side by a marsh and the other by a wood, I sometimes, during long walks on sleepless nights, saw foxes and deer. The foxes were in town to raid the ramshackle pens of the folks who, in coming up directly from the Deep South, had invited all of their future fried chicken to come with them.
Most evenings I could hear the pounding of steel at the InterLake Steel Mills at a bend in the canal a few miles south, and I thought how the men working there must be deaf, and numb, and insane with this noise, which was the loudest I’d ever heard. It sounded to me like a god’s, if not the God’s, rage or hatred. Meanwhile, I breathed, from the opposite direction, the livid processes of a paint factory a mile upwind, smelling like rotten eggs and gasoline. To the west, across the blacktop of playground at the nearby Harriet Tubman elementary school, and from there across a few lanes of highway, extended the marsh, in the middle of which rose a missile silo, a bristling Cold War dick. All day and all night, every day and every night, an eternal flame, like a serpent-shaped sword, burned white from a pipe in the silo, burning off that volatile fuel, a primary target in the likely event of a nuclear war and a dim glow on the thin fabric of my bedroom curtain on even the foggiest night. The only way in which I was better off than I had been in prison was my freedom.
I took to sleeping through the day, troubled by the sounds of children running to and from school (and the rare event of garbage collection) and spending my nights on walks into the city, on an unpaved route that took me around the bend of the black canal being showered by sparks from the steel mill, my hands in my ears for miles, or the opposite direction, into the woods towards Lake Calumet and Gary, Indiana. Soon, I was feeding myself by hunting rabbits in those woods, with a sling I made from black stockings I found at the bottom of the closet. Skinning a rabbit was something I’d seen my mother do a thousand times, and it was a practical kind of non-verbal knowledge that fourteen years in prison hadn’t managed to erase. The satisfaction of quickly making the right cuts with a sharp knife, then separating, in one pull, the soft covering from the smooth wet muscle of the still-warm flesh, can be a kind of relief, and I began to see how the urban Negro, with his car, his woman, his TV dinner and his TV, is doomed to a short life of insanity and illness.
PART THREE FOLLOWS
JESUS IN VEGAS: cont’d
4. The Early Days of Television, Part Three
A side-story:
It sometimes happened that I would be coming home from one of my long walks, very early on a Sunday morning, ready for bed. At the same time, it sometimes happened that my neighbor in the flatblock was just then leaving for church. This neighbor, a stout Negress with an ashen complexion, a crow’s nest of gray hair and the gait of a waddling hunchback, had surprisingly light eyes. She carried an edition of the Bible that was written in Pidgin English, which I often heard her reciting from through the thin wall our apartments shared, in the hypnotic cadences of a desperation greater than anything I’d heard in fourteen years inside the Joliet state correctional facility. She was raising a child I assumed was her grand daughter, a child I gathered was retarded, and just as I heard this woman reading her Bible, she no doubt heard some of the sounds from my side of the wall, too.
One Sunday morning, as I was letting myself into the cell of my sanctuary, and she was letting herself out of hers, she said something. To me, I guess. Whatever she’d said was unclear, and I didn’t give a damn either way, so I entered my apartment and closed the door behind me. Only seconds after I’d closed the door she was knocking on it, but I ignored this. I stripped out of my clothes and walked upstairs to the little bathroom to produce a bowel movement and take a shower in preparation for bed. When the sound of the flushing toilet had died down I could hear her down there, knocking again, or still knocking. It was not a loud or an angry style of knocking; it was evenly repetitive, mechanical, in a very strange way; it was the kind of sound I imagined a ghost might make, rapping from the inside of a closet door. One two, one two. One two, one two…
I showered, went to bed in the little bedroom next door to the little bathroom upstairs. My sleep, in the iron strength of my youth, was as heavy as I was large, and although I could still hear the knocking, I slipped easily away. I had a dream, then, so vivid that I wrote it down as soon as I woke from it, barely able to open my eyes. I dreamt that I had a wooden heart, and that I could always hear it beating, and that I lived in terror that I would hear it stop. I dreamt that no matter how I rested, or exerted myself, my wooden heart always beat at the same speed, with the same strange rhythm, neither weak nor strong nor particularly invested in self-perpetuation; a rhythm that implied that it could, at any time, simply stop. Someone tried to speak but I hurried away, intent as I was on listening to the sound of my wooden heart beating. I came to understand that it was the hearing of my wooden heart that kept it beating. This person who’d tried to speak was chasing me, and I ran everywhere to hide, afraid that their talking would drown out the sound of my wooden heart. I climbed a fence and hid behind a stack of tires, but this person followed me, climbing over the fence, shouting some important message or warning. I put my hands over my ears to keep out the shouting; I squeezed my hands over my ears as hard as I could and I could hear nothing but the sound of my labored breath and my wooden heart stopped beating. I woke up in a terror, heart racing, half-blind with sleep. I wrote the dream down on a child’s notebook I’d found on the street, with a pencil I’d stolen from Paddy’s. The old Negress’s knocking had finally stopped, but I don’t doubt, to this day, that she was a practitioner of the Old Religion, and the nightmare she gave me was either a warning or a test, and taught me to respect the supreme strength of her ignorant beliefs.
Where was I?
During one of my long walks, I became aware of a place in a blue-collar, industrial neighborhood, what they call a transitional neighborhood, where only the poorest whites still clung as it flooded with Negroes and Mexicans and the freaks you get when the two groups mix, the shell of an Irish tavern called Paddy’s, with a changing clientele that did not reflect the neighborhood. I found Paddy’s by following a man who I knew, by instinct, had also done more than a few months in prison. Part of the fund of prison knowledge that pushes out a man’s prior wit and experience is the tool of knowing how to walk in such a way as to communicate specific messages, and also how to receive such messages, which go lost on the uninitiated. A man can walk in such a way that means he is open to reason. Or that the thing towards which he is walking is his alone. A man can walk in such a way as to indicate that he intends to kill, or to die, or to let fate decide. The way this man walked, which I spotted from a distance as he stepped into the one working headlight of some Mexican’s old tank of a car while crossing the street, was meant to communicate to receptive eyes that he was not a queer, although he was amenable to having his sexual tensions relieved by one.
I’m not afraid of your judgment, because, to be frank, who, on the ladder, from what I can see, and what I guess you have done, is lower than you? So I tell you this. My time in Joliet opened my eyes to society’s best kept secret, by which I mean that men who have sexual relations with women do so because society frowns on the alternative, an alternative society frowns on precisely because it would be far more popular than the acceptable option otherwise. Look at the army, the navy, the seminary, the high school locker room, the camping trips for boyscouts and their so-called masters. Men are inclined towards fucking other men. I say this as a man, however brutally you choose to define the term, without a trace of femininity in his makeup.
Seeing other men either naked or clothed inspires no feelings of tenderness, or yearnings for tenderness, or poetical metaphors or spiritual insights, in me. I’m no follower of Wilde or Whitman, though I’ve been known to read both writers with equal parts pleasure and skepticism. When I see another man, I see an obstacle to be overcome, an ally to be won over, or an animal to exploit. Sometimes, when I see a man, I see a servant I will humble by placing my erect penis in his mouth as he kneels, or by forcing the same hard thing into his rectum, as he assumes an even more subservient position, with no concern for his physical comfort or personal preferences. I went into Joliet as a man who’d only ever known the soft white body of one woman, the woman who sent him there, and I left the institution, fourteen years later, as a master of the mammalian sex game at its fundamental level. All of us in this Enlightened Society know, by now, the truism that rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power. That statement doesn’t go quite far enough. Sex, in general, is not about sex, either.
When I walked into Paddy’s that foggy October night, with my collar turned up and my hands in the pockets of my longshoreman’s jacket, I couldn’t even identify the man I’d followed into it, because half the men in there were him; were me. The other half were white and some of those were rather frail looking. The frail ones, the ones who looked most like girls, attracted me. I’d sexually dominated enough scarred, ugly, sour-breathed bantamweight Mick and Pollack bluffers and brawlers already to last me two lifetimes. The tavern was dimly lit as you’d expect it to be, and, as I stood there, waiting for my eyes to adjust to a picture even darker than the streets I’d been walking, I realized I had no money in my pockets for a drink. I’d been living an approximation of the Natural Life for a few months already, eating nothing but rabbit and stolen fruit and garden vegetables and even some fish from Lake Calumet, and so I had clean forgotten about the thing called money. The irony being that there was money due me, riches I knew nothing about.
A fine-boned young man with pale skin and jet-black, longish hair approached me and offered to buy me a drink. He pointed at a little table and I took a seat at it while he pushed up to the bar. When he returned with the beer I’d ordered and one for himself, he wasted no time telling me what was on his mind. He said I looked big, very big, and asked me if it was so. I said it was so. He asked me if it was black. I said it was very black. He said he dreamed of hard black shiny long cock all day while he was sitting through Philosophy classes at the University, so that by the time he was home again and it was late enough for Paddy’s to open and start filling up, he could barely control the urge to run all the way from Hyde Park, a good twenty minute drive by car. He said he was usually disappointed. The real big specimens usually went to a harder place in The Loop you had to know the password to get into. The indoor pool in the old athletic club all the Irish cops prefer.
He asked me how much time I’d done in Joliet, and I was too impressed to ask him how he could tell. I told him how much time and he whistled. He asked what for and I said rape and he said good. He said maybe murder would’ve been the wrong answer. He said I like it rough but I don’t want to die for it. He said in my opinion, it’s as harmless a sin as smoking, it’s not fatal for either party, maybe a little messy at worst and anyway it’s nobody’s business, and everyone should treat it like that, but that’ll never happen in my lifetime. In two centuries, maybe. He said we can use the john but it’s filthy with scat and there’s a waiting line. He asked me if I had a place nearby and I said it was about an hour’s walk. He said he had a car.
He had a beautiful car, a foreign car, a big black thing with running boards that would have suited an old-time diplomat, which led me to deduce that his parents were somewhat wealthy and much older than they should have been, perhaps in their sixties, curled up in bed in some Gold Coast, or Lincoln Park, mansion, while the young master was getting his kicks on the wrong side of the wrong side of the tracks. Did they expect him to finish his studies soon and marry a debutante? Did they have any idea that, for some young upper-class men, it floats their boats to thrust their tongues up the unwashed rectums of hulking black members of the underclass? Would the news kill them? Would the son be willing to pay good money to spare them the shock? I’m ashamed to say that these thoughts passed through my mind, though I never considered myself a hustler; no more so than a man who finds a wallet stuffed with cash, and briefly-if-seriously entertains the notion of keeping it, is a pickpocket.
I warned him that we wouldn’t be doing it on the bed, where I had to sleep, and he said a folded towel on the floor for his knees would be fine, but that there should please be no choking or punching, or burning, with cigarettes, or my lighter, although rough was fine, rough was good, he guessed it depended how big I really was, but I didn’t have to rupture his insides or anything, and of course he wouldn’t need or expect any hugging or kissing afterward. And, also, please, no name-calling. Which I considered an extraordinary speech.
A few days later, I walked to Paddy’s, and had two beers purchased for me by a sheepish-looking crew-cut blonde with very bad teeth whom I couldn’t bring myself to screw. We were in an alley a few blocks from Paddy’s and his moonlit breath was so foul I couldn’t face the prospect of putting anything of mine in that snaggle-toothed hole, more the less in his rectum. When I changed my mind about the transaction, he apologized profusely for wasting my time, and I struck him, not hard, but hard enough that he backed away down the alley, holding that side of his face as though he’d always treasure the pain.
It was only a week or two later that I met Fabian Saldo at Paddy’s again. I was standing at the bar with an older man, for a change, a flinty, thick-haired, knife-faced man who put me in mind of the pictures I’d seen, on the backs of books, of the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett. He was well-spoken and cautious and I had a strong suspicion he was a priest with his collar hidden safe in his pocket. Fabian Saldo joined us at the bar and we all ended up driving back to my place in Fabian’s car, the priest and I seated in the back, the priest singing under his breath. I have vivid memories of clutching that man’s desiccated waist, which expanded and contracted like a blacksmith’s bellows as he cried out, on all fours, in his throaty, tobacco-dark Latin.
Word got around that I was of an unusual size and spectacular (virtually mineral) coloring, could be had for a beer or two, was not violent, sarcastic or likely to steal. And so I became a known factor and very popular. The queers who shared in relieving my tensions improvised between themselves a fair system about who could have me whenever I made an appearance at the tavern (no more than three times a week), and they never fought or grumbled, while to me, in any case, it made no difference, for, obviously, to have preferences any finer than the ones that rejected that one queer for his evil breath, would have indicated some small element of the queer in my own makeup. Though I have no problem admitting that I seemed to enjoy, most of all, the time I spent with Fabian Saldo. I didn’t even want to call Fabian Saldo a “queer”; I affected, once or twice, to call him a Laestrygonian, but it failed to stick, so, “queer” it was.
It was with Fabian that I fully developed my philosophy of the Natural Life: food and drink without additives; verbal communication only when necessary or meaningful; sex without the nonsense of emotional games and attachments; exercise in general (and long walks, specifically), as a form of prayer. Three of these four elements are impossible, I believed, with a woman. Believed: past tense.
Gradually, the system of knowledge called “prison”, which had replaced the system of knowledge called “family,” was replaced by the system of knowledge called “the Natural Life”. While the prison system had trained me to conform to a way of knowing shared by the semi-conscious, instinct-driven thousands, the system of the Natural Life eased me towards a unique knowledge, the knowledge of the self. While the fool hopes for immortality by lengthening his life, the wise man learns to deepen it, rather. Clearly, the goal is to slow time down, though mankind, everywhere, as far as I can tell, is doing his best to accelerate. The white man, that is. Only the white man could have dreamed up the concept of time seeming to fly while you’re having fun; everyone sane knows that real pleasure slows time down, and that boredom makes it fly: ask the office worker who sits down at his desk on the first day of work at the age of twenty three, only to wake up, suddenly, at the age of sixty five, as he is being ushered from the premises with the contents of his desk and a gold-plated watch! How cruel, to give this old man a watch. This dangerously neurotic white man who daydreamed immortality while speeding towards his death. Driven, pushed, goaded, of course, by his morally bankrupt white woman, who couldn’t wait to be rid of him.
Stare at a clock, or a gold watch, if you will, while listening closely to yourself breathe, and you will get a glimmer of what I mean. What takes a minute, according to the clock, will feel like two, three, or five, when you learn how. And a single day of such deepened one-minute intervals, that each felt like five, adds up to five days, not one. And a year of such days equals five years. Ten years of that equals fifty years. Fifty years of that… and so on.
New Lucrative T-Shirt Slogan
(Ain’t gonna lie. I’m really proud of this one.)
“Doing It Yourself Does Not Mean Doing It Alone”
Other Cat: “But I still don’t get it, where does all the money go? With all that cheap labour and the vast new open markets, shouldn’t we in the West all be really, really, really rich and have like, our own flying machines, really smart housing in acres of land, a great education system that everybody can access and study of all manner of humanities based subjects and free healthcare for all as well as iPods and iPads and iPhones and iTunes and other Apple branded products and, and, and…endless supplies of free full fat milk?”
Pinky: “Well I can understand you thinking that, given the vast sums of money being legitimately taken out of the Third World through the fair and transparent system of globalisation that I have been describing. All those things you spoke about, well, some people do have them. But you’ve got to understand that although the Third World countries are, hmmm…benefitting from globalisation and don’t really have to pay for it, it doesn’t mean it comes for free. Some of the smartest minds in the world thought up the system, so it’s only fair that they should be able to get a little bit more stuff than everybody else”
Other Cat: “Oh, I get it. Although the Third World countries are smelly and undeserving, the inventors of globalisation felt a moral obligation to take up the burden of educating and liberating these ignoramuses, and in return the inventors of globalisation only ask for a modest, er,…fee?”
Pinky: “That’s right. It’s only fair. Most people don’t work as hard as the inventors of globalisation and those in charge of it. They’ve got MBAs and have to go to meetings and things, whereas everybody else just works on the tills of the big shops selling stuff, which is a really, really easy job. Oh, and some people work in offices and write e-mails all day. And anyway, the inventors of globalisation need a minimum of 2 Mercedes Benz’s each (or equivalent brands) and a private jet, otherwise they would have to use the same transportation as everybody else. And that would defeat the point of them inventing globalisation in the first place.”
Other Cat: “But what if it all goes, er, pear shaped? I heard that the really big money shops all went a bit funny last year. Something about credit default swaps, derivatives, repackaged sub-prime mortgages and other poisonous things that leaked out of the big money shops and were threatening to possibly destabilise the entire international banking system and maybe even reverse globalisation.
Pinky: “Wow, Other Cat, you’re suddenly well read in the workings of the more esoteric financial instruments and securities that have acted as the lubricant for the wheels of globalisation…”
Other Cat: “I’ve been watching Bloomberg and following the Basle II debates between catnaps…”
Pinky: “Anyway, when it all goes pear shaped, it’s only fair that the governments of the West step in and use taxpayer’s money to help out the financial institutions who, incidentally, are also some of the inventors of globalisation”.
Other Cat: “But I still don’t get it. Shouldn’t the inventors of globalisation have to pay for if it goes wrong?” I mean, it was their idea and they’re the ones with the private jets, I’ve only got a cat box and some catty litter.”
Pinky: “Ah, but remember Other Cat, we all benefit from globalisation…if the system collapsed we would all be much worse off; you would be sleeping out on the roofs again and we wouldn’t be able to even dream about changing our catty litter every day like we do at the moment. Think about the stink that would cause. And think about those poor Third World countries, what would happen to them once the inventors of globalisation close their mines, stop using cheap and child labour and take their troops home?”
Well done, Comrade Jack! We should probably clarify that your adaptation of Pinky’s dialogue is probably sarcasm…
What amazes me is the fact that the unnecessarily (or necessarily, depending on which side of the riot-geared police you’re on) abstruse narrative of economics both effects what and how and where and when I write and is affected by what others have written… there’s this planetary web of text and a fly tugging its strands in Zimbabwe will make the dew on the web that covers the territory of my existence jiggle and drop in Berlin. Well, not really, but almost. What the Hippies affected to grasp with pot-blown awe.. the Oneness of It All… strikes me as a problem.
The problem is explicit with “famous” writers: we really have to buy a copy of DeLillo’s Point Omega to ponder DeLillo’s recondite maneuver in featuring Douglas Gordon’s 24-Hour Psycho as a foundational metaphor. Art is an esoteric corner of the Real Estate market which vulgarians are effectively blocked from (or restrained in) entering; Gordon’s 24-Hour Psycho was his entré into that restricted (high wasp?) market; DeLillo is effectively reporting on the metaphysical fluctuations in an esoteric corner of the Real Estate market. Or the sentences in Kafka’s The Trial: don’t they keep changing, imperceptibly, with every election of a new Murrkan President? Compare reading The Trial under FDR to reading it under JFK and then reading it under GWB. It’s just too fucking contingent. Isn’t there a Firewall to protect against this sort of thing?
I wrote this phrase out last night: “CONTINUITY IS CONTROL”
DISCONTINUITY (being able to draw a line on the sidewalk and through the calender that turns into a moat or even a neat old circular canyon) would be nice. Only after that… establishing a circular clean-break and an island of meaning… could we start thinking up the next step. Which being, of course, the Parasitic Utopia…there’d be power cables coming in from the mainland, you see. Power cables but no information; no economics; no academics; no traditions, manners or sense of decorum.
It’s the only hope, innit?
But let’s have a look at Pinky again to make sure we know the thing we need to leave behind…
“I never read novels myself,” said he, “except when the popular persecution forces me to— when people plague me to know what I think of the last book that every one is reading.”
“And how did the latest persecution affect you?”
“Robert?” said he, interrogatively.
I nodded.
“I read it, of course, for the workmanship. That made me think I had neglected novels too long— that there might be a good many books as graceful in style somewhere on the shelves; so I began a course of novel reading. I have dropped it now; it did not amuse me. But as regards Robert, the effect on me was exactly as though a singer of street ballads were to hear excellent music from a church organ. I didn’t stop to ask whether the music was legitimate or necessary. I listened, and I liked what I heard. I am speaking of the grace and beauty of the style.
“You see,” he went on, “every man has his private opinion about a book. But that is my private opinion. If I had lived in the beginning of things, I should have looked around the township to see what popular opinion thought of the murder of Abel before I openly condemned Cain. I should have had my private opinion, of course, but I shouldn’t have expressed it until I had felt the way. You have my private opinion about that book. I don’t know what my public ones are exactly. They won’t upset the earth.”
He recurled himself into the chair and talked of other things.
(Note: The “Robert” to which Mark Twain refers during his conversation with Kipling is Robert Elsmere, an 1888 novel by Mrs. Humphrey Ward.)
It was a brilliant afternoon toward the end of May. The spring had been unusually cold and late, and it was evident from the general aspect of the lonely Westmoreland valley of Long Whindale that warmth and sunshine had only just penetrated to its bare, green recesses, where the few scattered trees were fast rushing into their full summer dress, while at their feet, and along the bank of the stream, the flowers of March and April still lingered, as though they found it impossible to believe that their rough brother, the east wind, had at last deserted them. The narrow road, which was the only link between the farm-houses sheltered by the crags at the head of the valley, and those far away regions of town and civilization suggested by the smoke wreaths of Whinborough on the southern horizon, was lined with masses of the white heckberry or bird-cherry, and ran, an arrowy line of white through the greenness of the sloping pastures. The sides of some of the little books running down into the main river and, many of the plantations round the farms were gay with the same tree, so that the farm-houses, gray-roofed and gray-walled, standing in the hollows of the fells, seemed here and there to have been robbed of all their natural austerity of aspect, and to be masquerading in a dainty garb of white and green imposed upon them by the caprice of the spring.
During the greater part of its course the valley of Long Whindale is tame and featureless. The hills at the lower part are low and rounded, and the sheep and cattle pasture over slopes unbroken either by wood or rock. The fields are bare and close shaven by the flocks which feed on them; the walls run either perpendicularly in many places up the fells or horizontally along them, so that, save for the wooded course of the tumbling river and the bush-grown hedges of the road, the whole valley looks like a green map divided by regular lines of grayish black. But as the walker penetrates further, beyond a certain bend which the stream makes half-way from the head of the dale, the hills grow steeper, the breadth between them contracts, the enclosure lines are broken and deflected by rocks and patches of plantation, and the few farms stand more boldly and conspicuously forward, each on its spur of land, looking up to or away from the great masses of frowning crag which close in the head of the valley, and which from the moment they come into sight give it dignity and a wild beauty.
On one of these solitary houses, the afternoon sun, about to descend before very long behind the hills dividing Long Whindale from Shanmoor, was still lingering on this May afternoon we are describing, bringing out the whitewashed porch and the broad bands of white edging the windows, into relief against the gray stone of the main fabric, the gray roof overhanging it, and the group of sycamores and Scotch firs which protected it from the cold east and north. The Western light struck full on a copper beech, which made a welcome patch of warm color in front of a long gray line of outhouses standing level with the house, and touched the heckberry blossom which marked the upward course of the little lane connecting the old farm with the road; above it rose the green fell, broken here and there by jutting crags, and below it the ground sank rapidly through a piece of young hazel plantation, at this present moment a sheet of bluebells, toward the level of the river. There was a dainty and yet sober brightness about the whole picture. Summer in the North is for Nature a time of expansion and of joy as it is elsewhere, but there is none of that opulence, that sudden splendor and superabundance, which mark it in the South. In these bare green valleys there is a sort of delicate austerity even in the summer; the memory of winter seems to be still lingering about these wind-swept fells, about the farm-houses, with their rough serviceable walls, of the same stone as the crags behind them, and the ravines in which the shrunken brooks trickle musically down through the débris of innumerable Decembers. The country is blithe, but soberly blithe. Nature shows herself delightful to man, but there is nothing absorbing or intoxicating about her. Man is still well able to defend himself against her, to live his own independent life of labor and of will, and to develop that tenacity of hidden feeling, that slowly growing intensity of purpose which is so often wiled out of him by the spells of the South.
The distant aspect of Burwood Farm differed in nothing from that of the few other farmhouses which dotted the fells or clustered beside the river between it and the rocky end of the valley. But as one came nearer certain signs of difference became visible. The garden, instead of being the old-fashioned medley of phloxes, lavender bushes, monthly roses, gooseberry trees, herbs, and pampas grass, with which the farmers’ wives of Long Whindale loved to fill their little front enclosures, was trimly laid down in turf dotted with neat flowerbeds, full at the moment we are writing of with orderly patches of scarlet and purple anemones, wallflowers, and pansies. At the side of the house a new bow window, modest enough in dimensions and make, had been thrown out on to another close-shaven piece of lawn, and by its suggestion of a distant sophisticated order of things disturbed the homely impression left by the untouched ivy-grown walls, the unpretending porch, and wide slate-window sills of the front. And evidently the line of sheds standing level with the dwelling-house no longer sheltered the animals, the carts, or the tools which make the small capital of a Westmoreland farmer. The windows in them were new, the doors fresh painted and closely shut; curtains of some soft outlandish make showed themselves in what had once been a stable, and the turf stretched smoothly up to a narrow gravelled path in front of them, unbroken by a single footmark. No, evidently the old farm, for such it undoubtedly was, had been but lately, or comparatively lately, transformed to new and softer uses; that rough patriarchal life of which it had once been a symbol and centre no longer bustled and clattered through it. It had become the shelter of new ideals, the home of another and a milder race than once possessed it.
[ed.'s note: more on all this tomorrow, Comrades, but anyone who doesn't consider this presentation of bonded data a good example of a type of the Internet's miraculous bounties: Thou Art retarded]
In the piece we link to above, a 23-year-old Rudyard Kipling reports on his meeting with a 54-year-old (as I calculate) “Mark Twain”. Rudyard (on the verge of being as famous, as Tom Sawyer’s god, himself) came to visit as an awe-inspired fan. You have to envy them the unknown pleasures of the chat: this was before the military-industrial-style practice of celebrity that would have made it impossible for a “nobody” to get through the fence at the bottom of the 500-foot driveway and it was before Literary Practice shattered like a white light, through a prism, into the rainbow of identities and canons we know today. Rudyard and his idol were two white males concerned with the ironies (tragi-comic, in Twain’s case and usually more bloody with Rudyard) of the White Man’s Burden.
At least once a year I join the fray in comment thread discussions (sometimes Flame Wars, sometimes not) about “the canon”. Just this last month I was involved in a couple of such discussions at The Valve which never reached a level of passion sufficient to burst into flames but which saw Bill Benson make a case for “intersubjective agreement” as a hedge against the evaluative chaos that must ensue when everyone likes something different. “Intersubjective agreement” just means that clumps, here and there, of readers who like the same kind of books can talk about these books without getting too exasperated; but the only “scientific” value would be if any theories a given clump might come up with could be transplanted, unmolested, into the middle of the discussion of a radically-different clump. Eg: if teenage fans of Tao Lin could come up with some kind of taxonomy or list of aesthetic proscriptions that some middle-aged followers of Philip Roth would be happy to use (or vice versa)… for the next fifty years. But we know that’s not going to happen (I’m not even considering the problem of trying the exercise cross-nationally; cross-language) short of the old (temporarily out of favor) academic method of imposing a taste-range by fiat and enforcing it with grades. Bill, apparently, looks to the Cognitive Sciences for a cross-cultural, cross-demographic, era-transcending framework for normalizing literary aesthetics so we can have fruitful conversations about books. As I observed in a comment:
“What I don’t get is why the concept of *utter subjectivity* would disturb anyone. Again: we live with it with Religion; why shouldn’t we be able to accept it with Aesthetics? My sneaking suspicion is that the Competition Gene is involved: we want *our* tastes to be measurably “better”.”
Bill then took the discussion down a long and winding path without ever addressing (or, for the express purpose of avoiding engagement with) this point. (A chunk of the comment thread from one of these two discussions appears at the end of this).
But isn’t it about Ego, in the end? Reading Ruddy’s report about Ruddy’s and Sammy’s hang, the pleasure of being at the top of things is fairly palpable. This is not a prosecutorial point; I don’t want Sammy and Ruddy’s corpses exhumed to face a PC tribunal. This is an exercise in Imaginative Empathy. Life was so simple (if physically messy) then: a white man from “fourteen thousand miles away” could appear in another white man’s parlor and presume to know what the other white man was reading… and be correct!
White Men miss those days and I don’t blame them. Neither do I wish those days back.
There’s a Part Two to this comment, which I’ll get to after today’s Glorious Meatspace Chores; first, a sample of one of the mentioned discussions at The Valve (please note Bill’s strangely literal-minded misreading of my “red” argument: all in service of swerving around my point that the need for “standards” is the need for a hierarchy and the need for hierarchy is based in the possible existence of a competition gene):
“It is often possible to reach substantial intersubjective agreement on matters that are subjective. Society would be impossible without such agreement.”
You’re using “agreement” very broadly here, Bill. Eg: people agree to *disagree* on their favorite sports teams, which is the dynamic without which team sports would be impossible. Or, an entire office building of male workers in Guam can “agree” on the notion that, say, erm, “Marilyn Monroe” is “sexy” without agreeing about what “sexy” means. To “agree” with a notion or a value is not, necessarily, at the same time, to agree with others about the terms on which “agreement” hinges: to say “yes” is not, necessary, to agree about what saying “yes” entails, and so forth. The more “scientific” we attempt to get with non-quantifiable pseudo-objects (ie: words and their meanings), the more we reveal the fact that true consensus isn’t even *possible* (whether or not it’s desirable) and Literary and/or Arts Criticism is, chiefly, a form of entertainment that provides the corollary service of sharpening our personal opinions on matters that no two human minds will ever view (or contain) identically (unless there’s a mind-reading Twin Study to refute this; but even a consensus of two won’t put much of a dent in my contention).
I defy anyone to assert a verifiable consensus on the flavor, feel, charm, vitality, uses, mis-uses and associations of a *single word*… more-the-less a poem or novel.
We can measure subatomic particles; we can *agree* on those measurements (I guess); but words are too fine for that.
What I don’t get is why the concept of *utter subjectivity* would disturb anyone. Again: we live with it with Religion; why shouldn’t we be able to accept it with Aesthetics? My sneaking suspicion is that the Competition Gene is involved: we want *our* tastes to be measurably “better”.
By StevenAugustine on 04/14/10 at 08:02 PM | Permanent link to this comment
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“Note that I believe genuine critical activity, aesthetic or ethical evaluation of texts, is subjective and so criticism in this sense is about securing intersubjective agreement.”
I think it’s rather more about charismatic/influential critics garnering followers (eg JW): which brings me back to the Religion analogy and the overlap (priests as interpreters of texts) is obvious.
By StevenAugustine on 04/15/10 at 04:30 AM | Permanent link to this comment
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. . . I think it’s rather more about charismatic/influential critics garnering followers. . .
Which is to say that such critics are central to a social mechanism for bringing about intersubjective agreement.
I defy anyone to assert a verifiable consensus on the flavor, feel, charm, vitality, uses, mis-uses and associations of a *single word*… more-the-less a poem or novel.
Nonetheless we manage to use words for communication, not perfectly, but effectively. As for poems and novels, our academic and critical institutions stress interpretive novelty and so are designed to foment disagreement. I not saying that “deep down” we all agree. I don’t think that for a moment. Nor do I take verbalized disagreements as anything like a full measure of the “weight” and “influence” those texts have.
. . . why the concept of *utter subjectivity* would disturb anyone . . .
I’m not sure what “utter” subjectivity is supposed to mean As far as I can tell, something is either subjective or not. The color red is subjective and so is one’s experience of, say, Avatar. It doesn’t make much sense to assert that one is more subjective than the other. But one seems to be more variable between individuals, but it’s not the inter-individual variability that makes the thing subjective.
By Bill Benzon on 04/15/10 at 05:01 PM | Permanent link to this comment
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“Which is to say that such critics are central to a social mechanism for bringing about intersubjective agreement.”
My point being that the social mechanism of “agreement” is suspect when it comes to a discussion with aspirations towards something *conclusive*; it’s not even necessarily about a meeting of minds, then, this agreement of which you sing: so what’s the value in it? “The Cubs are better than the Orioles; or they aren’t”… how is it not, in the end, on that level?
“Nonetheless we manage to use words for communication, not perfectly, but effectively.”
The “argument” here being not about whether we can communicate but whether there’s any possible value in your “intersubjective agreement” so stable that discussions about Aesthetics, anchored in these agreements, can come close to generating anything conclusive.
“I’m not sure what “utter” subjectivity is supposed to me. As far as I can tell, something is either subjective or not. The color red is subjective and so is one’s experience of, say, Avatar. It doesn’t make much sense to assert that one is more subjective than the other.”
Well, I disagree: however I experience “red”, there are quantifiable definitions of it (involving wavelengths, say) that scientists/manufacturers rely on at such times that “red” is an important description of a result or a product, etc. Whereas my experience of Avatar is necessarily trickier/shiftier (even after repeated hypothetical viewings) than that. Not to mention the fact that the color red’s objective reality (as a range of wavelengths) transcends my experience of it (appearing at various uninhabited points of the universe at this very moment), whereas Avatar’s objective reality (as a crafted pattern of light and sound) has *no other purpose* than to generate an audience’s subjective experience of it. For me, the difference deserves discrimination and earns that “utter” (or someone else’ “rather” or “fairly”). I don’t see “subjective” as a qualifier-snubbing absolute (like “infinite” or “unique”). But that’s probably just subj…
By StevenAugustine on 04/15/10 at 07:12 PM | Permanent link to this comment
* . . . the color red’s objective reality (as a range of wavelengths). . .
I’m afraid that’s not how color perception works. Perceptual psychology is quite clear on that point, but it’s more than I can explain in a comment. Here’s an old post that indicates some of what’s going on:
By Bill Benzon on 04/15/10 at 08:05 PM | Permanent link to this comment
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Uh oh! Somebody better tell those astronomers:
“Spectroscopy is the study of objects based on the spectrum of color they emit or absorb. Spectroscopy is an important investigative tool in astronomy where scientists use it to analyze the properties of distant objects.”
But, again. I have to confess I’m not sure what we’re arguing about, now. I agree that groups of people can line up their senses of the Aesthetic in order to agree on this or that novel or poem; I just don’t think they can generate a discussion that comes to any conclusions that are then transferable to *those with different tastes*. The issue for me is the impossibility of “conclusivity” here.
Bill, as I wrote long ago, ten Euros to anyone who can *prove* (rather than assert persuasively) that DeLillo’s Underworld is better than Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (substitute any book you think is shitty hackwork) …or vice versa. That’s the crux of it, isn’t it? There’s no possibility of proof… and I don’t mean that in a maddeningly metaphysical pot-smoking sense, because I believe in the legal and scientific and logical possibilities of “proof”.
Anyway, I won’t dilute my points by reiterating them further… I’m happy to agree to almost-agree on this…
By StevenAugustine on 04/16/10 at 04:20 AM | Permanent link to this comment
Oh, I suspect those astronomers will come up with the difference between wavelength and color if pressed. And, while I hate to harp on this, color really is subjective. The color you see is not a direct function of the wavelengths that enter your eye from (through and/or reflected by) an object. If it were, the color of objects would vary more widely than it does. Perceptual psychologists call that color constancy. Perceived color is relatively constant because the eye/brain makes context sensitive adjustments. There isn’t anything such thing as non-perceived color; there’s wavelength, but that’s not color.
And if it seems like I’m being picky on this, well I am. I want to separate the notion of subjectivity from the notion of (wild) idiosyncratic variation between individuals. I don’t deny that the latter exists in the subjective realm, but I do deny that that is a defining characteristic of the subjective realm. Talk about color is a good way to do that. But you have to pay attention to the psychophysics.
Bill, as I wrote long ago, ten Euros to anyone who can *prove* (rather than assert persuasively) that DeLillo’s Underworld is better than Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (substitute any book you think is shitty hackwork) …or vice versa. That’s the crux of it, isn’t it?
Well, if we’re in a bar arguing good books, OK. Of if we’re arguing The Canon in some journal, OK. But we really don’t need such specific agreement in order to make culture work. And that’s what I’m concerned about, making culture work, in the large and over the long term.
By Bill Benzon on 04/16/10 at 07:03 AM | Permanent link to this comment
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Bill, I think we’re kinda arguing past each other here (eg, read the distinction between my perception of “red”, and its objective definition as a range of wave-lengths, that I’ve already taken pains to make, as the support for my use of “utter”! laugh). I mostly agree with you! And culture definitely works.
By StevenAugustine on 04/16/10 at 07:33 AM | Permanent link to this comment
*
Ah, but “range of wavelengths” is ambiguous. And I’m not saying that the boundary between red and, say, orange is somewhat arbitrary. Set the boundary however you wish, I don’t care; that’s not what the argument is about. It’s about what the eye/brain does over the whole ensemble of wavelengths entering at a time.
There are these demonstrations where a patch that reflects some wavelength will appear as color X in one context and color Y in a different context. Same wavelength, different colors.
By Bill Benzon on 04/16/10 at 07:46 AM | Permanent link to this comment
CogDiss this!
First, the Jeopardy answer:
The dark-haired Italian Cuomo—son of former New York governor Mario and once one of Playgirl’s most eligible bachelors—and the perky blond homemaking expert aren’t theater buffs or cultural connoisseurs, according to friends and colleagues. They’re not regulars at any of the city’s top restaurants. Instead, Lee often cooks Italian food for Cuomo, whose favorite meal is her simple lasagna, which she prepares with canned tomato soup, cottage cheese and ground chuck. Via http://www.nypost.com/pagesixmag/issues/20091203/Sandra+Lee+and+Andrew+Cuomo+Love+Story
The question is:
Is there anyone out there who actually believes that any self-respecting Italian-American man would eat such a lasagna?
Steven,
You’ve finally got the lay of the land. Bravo!
Alright then: now it’s your turn to show how someone who doesn’t share your taste in Show Tunes is being, by default, the enemy of “gender equity”, when A) 99.9% of the musical acts I’ve lauded on TET are “female” (being careful not to foreclose any alternate gender-identity readings here) and B) one of the cultural artifacts you were lauding (Cinderella) is an Ur-text of Gender Bias/Stereotype and C) whenever I’ve posted any videos or comments about my private tastes in music, I’ve been up front about inviting possible scorn for a purely subjective, ultimately personal and finally wonderfully-indefensible preference (eg: mock away about my Shirley Bassey vids: no arguments there, folks!).
Is there a Ring of Fire around your taste in Show Tunes because you possess a Cunt instead of a Cock?
Very possibly. Let’s not pursue this argument. I mean I don’t mind and CDS Orianna Fallaci is standing by with some heavy artillery. But that would be throwing you in the briar patch and truth be told I just don’t possess the upper body strength for that heavy a lift.
Frances, that’s the kind of cheap rhetorical gambit I tend to abhor in Comment Thread tussles the world over. I’ve just done a cursory check and I’ve found that I have singled out the following female musical artists for praise on TET:
That’s just a partial list. In fact, I’m worried that I’ve only found one male in the TET pantheon (Rob Zimmerman).
So: please: by all means, make your case or concede that you’re full of shit on this one.
Any concessions I make will not include fecal matter, thank you very much. I’ll return to this, on my honor, after a few errands and naps and shots of espresso. I’m working on an application to the NYC Landmarks Commission for permission to have a decorative and informative placque affixed to 236 Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights to honor James Purdy. A simple 20″ by 25″ placque, but there’s a whole rigmarole and yards and yards of bureaucratic red tape. (The building itself is landmarked, which complicates matters.) So please allow me to push the pause button on our flame-war. And you might wish to take advantage of said pause by donning your plated armor. Just a friendly suggestion. I’m in no mood!
Yesterday while checking out the Auden and Thomas Wolfe homes I found these pearls. Wolfie first:
“Great God, the only bridge, the bridge of power, life and joy. The bridge that was a span, a cry, an ecstasy–that was America.”
And from the poet:
“And love illuminates again the city and the lion’s den. The world’s great rage, the travel of young men.”
“I’m in no mood!”
Frances, whatever mood you’re in is not the point. The point is that your egocentric fit over the fact that I had the temerity to be honest about my response to those videos is bad enough, but to drape your fit in the banner of “feminism” is just cheezy. Now, you and I know that no amount of fancy rhetorical footwork is capable of showing that preferring Joni Mitchell or Nina Simone to Liza Minelli is a “gender equity” issue.
The issue here is your inability to be a sport about the fact that everyone doesn’t share your particular notion of the musical sublime.
The irony being that my co-conspirator in Liza-dissing, Comrade ET, and I, were involved in a little conversation in the vicinity of all that Liza-dissing… a conversation about the absurdity of the Hollywood Sex Vision. Stuff about rape, pedophilia… and you didn’t even see fit to chime in. Too busy being pissed that we don’t all rate Lesley-Ann Warren as Cinderella. Cinderella!
And that’s certainly more than the average woman’s suggested daily intake of Irony.
[ed.'s note: in any case, this thread has reached the magic number of 451 comments and you'll have to post in TET 6.0]
Let’s Kick off TET 5.0 with a Speechless Walk through The City
Too Funny
THE TRIALS OF TERRY
“Žižek calls this the ‘double-cynical wager’, that if someone acts like what they are, then people will expect them not to be that.” -Dave Semple
(to keep this post from becoming meaningless when the photos are all deleted: the image was/is naked Terry, seen from behind, straddling a model’s face while snapping a pic… presumably with his cock quite close to her mouth)
(this post is somewhat of an experimental tolerance-comparison between photobucket and tiny pic; tiny pic seems to have an in-house delete-monkey with an itchy trigger-finger and it deletes certain images as soon as I post them; curiously, images are more likely to get axed if they’ve been adjusted for size. The bottom-most image is hosted on photobucket. Let’s see which, if either, lasts. Censor-Monkeys, if you’re reading this: a note as to whether the material is being axed due to copyright issues, or issues of sexual content, would be fucking helpful…)
UPDATE: and photobucket wins (for now)
Mary Gaitskill, Mary Gaitskill.
Oh, and btw, my other monologue was Rosalie from John Guare’s “Landscape of the Body.”
Ach, you got in (down there) before I could think of a Merle Jeter joke, CDS Frances!
It’s a vibe. Ride it.
(Speaking of. I might be close to cracking The Humbling. I’m out on a rather far flung limb but I might be able to crawl back in shortly. I just have to (gag me) finish reading James Wood’s Book Against God.)
Better than wearing a hair shirt, one supposes!
Or doing a Zorba dance while wearing one.
What a coptic remark…
Grazie lei!
There is a Do Not Miss Part 2 to this one.
I wonder if CDS Barry likes the choreography on this one…?
The Hippest Squares of the Era! I like Laura’s version best (I’ve got it here somewhere in the archives…). What’s the connec with CDS Barry, btw? I’m going to ‘surry down and cover his Art Exhibition this week, I think… camera-phone in hand…
CDS Steven,
I don’t think I’ve mentioned this, but Laura Nyro’s father was our piano tuner when I lived on E. 81st near Central Park and The Met. He’d come to tune my sister’s baby grand and then he’d always take in an exhibit at the museum afterward. I always watched him while he worked; he was devoted to the care of pianos. You can hear that when she plays. If you have her version I’d love to have a listen!
Great little vignette. I will find Laura’s version and send it, CDS Frances! Give us a moment…
[ed.'s note: zinyer inbox]
“What’s the connec with CDS Barry, btw? I’m going to ’surry down and cover his Art Exhibition this week, I think… camera-phone in hand…”
Way back in TET 1.0 when we posted our top ten lists, CDS Barry commented on the Wendy Wild Pyramid Club vid that he enjoyed the choreography, which made me instantly fond of CDS Barry. You see, Wendy has since died of breast cancer and I have nothing but beautiful memories of her. In fact, I was a guest at her wedding to Rudy Protrudi at The Dive, a Halloween-themed costumed affair that I really must write about one of these days. Possibly the most fabulous party I have ever attended (and I have been to some amazingly fabulous parties in my life). Wendy wore a white mini dress and sang the wedding song with the band, which was Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit.
One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small…
Aha! Wheels within wheels! Gorgeous (and tragic) anecdote.
“In fact, I was a guest at her wedding to Rudy Protrudi at The Dive, a Halloween-themed costumed affair that I really must write about one of these days.”
Now it’s official: you have to.
Gezundheit!
http://xyzzy.com.au/lucifer/dragons/dragon-farside-small.jpg
DIFFICULT TEXTS
This one isn’t really difficult but it’s on an obscure corner of my fiction site. Yes, and CDS Frances’ dragon cartoon link (along with just hearing Laura Nyro’s version of Eli’s Coming) put me in mind of it, suddenly. So out of the cellar (rubbing its unchained wrists) it comes…
THE GRADUATE
Miriam with the curly blonde hair that when you looked closer was full of white and gray. Her point being that everyone knew she had two college-age offspring from a previous marriage. Who would she be fooling with a dye job? Robert didn’t want to seem timid or dull in Miriam Wallace’s eyes.
Robert had first met Miriam during the Christmas season after his twenty-second birthday, the Christmas he flew back to Philly from Minneapolis to tell his parents he wouldn’t be going to graduate school. Turbulence on the flight had strengthened his resolve. Turbulence and his rotten stomach. His bachelors degree would have to be enough. He’d told his father that he needed time to consider his options and his mother, from the next room, the kitchen, had shouted, ‘Your options to fail?’
They drove, not slowly, the twelve blocks from Wayne Avenue to the Wallace house in Mount Airy on streets so icy and some so steep that Robert had a hopeful premonition that they would all die silent and angry in a grisly wreck. His mother angry at his father for his father’s laissez-faire attitude to discipline as Robert was growing up; his father angry at his mother for attaching so much weight to the opinions and judgments of outsiders; Robert angry at both of them for his existence and, more pressingly, the churning guts courtesy of the evening’s outcome. Robert’s mother’s technique of what his father called ‘analytical sarcasm’ was devastating and had left Robert longing for the corrective violence of a bowel-puncturing crash. The fatal relief of it. They drove by five illuminated black Santas in a row without comment.
Robert’s vision of an impact had been so vivid that it felt like a dream of the afterlife when they all found themselves on the Wallace’s dark front porch fifteen minutes later, kicking clots of snow off their heels as if they meant to demolish the building. Miriam Wallace answered the door in a ball gown with that bemused look of hers. She didn’t know Dot or Alan terribly well and Robert seemed new to her, though it’s possible that she’d petted him once at a bar-b-cue when he was child.
‘Vampirella,’ said Robert’s mother under her breath as they followed Miriam into the living room. Miriam Wallace was tall, leathery, svelte. She had boyishly short curly blonde hair and definition in her biceps and an ass in the shiny dark material of her low-cut backless gown like a wet plum.
Forty minutes prior to their arrival at the Christmas party, right before Robert’s confession that he was ditching the notion of grad school altogether, Robert’s father had confessed, with Chablis breath, that he and Robert’s mother had been ‘fairly dedicated swingers’ in the ‘70s. And that Victor Wallace had been among the discreet circle of friends who had taken their Updike too seriously. Nineteen seventy four. His father said further that Victor, an architect, had fellated him and that the man sported a goatee in those days that looked like an Irish au pair’s fussy pussy. The women seemed to have been more interested in seeing Alan’s cock in Victor’s mouth than in each other and weeks later Robert’s mother was still making his father wash his penis with Phisohex before relations. Robert’s father said Victor had coughed the semen out into his cupped hands with his back to everyone, and then he handed Robert a glass of Chablis and said, winking, ‘This isn’t freaking you out, son, is it?’ Beaming.
‘No dad. It’s just that I have something I need to tell you.’
The swinging had lasted no longer than the whole country’s appetite for Scrabble and fondue. When Victor’s first wife Marnie, who was such a ‘cutie’ that Robert’s father had endured Victor’s ‘finicky’ blow job just to ‘get at her,’ died of breast cancer, the two families of former swingers used the funeral as a watershed; an excuse to wipe the slate clean. The surviving adults behaved as though the swinging had never happened. As though Victor had never tasted Alan’s semen or that Marnie and Dot had never awkwardly petted and kissed or had intercourse on numerous occasions with each other’s husband while the others watched and sometimes photographed it. They only socialized still at all because pointedly not to socialize would have been a tacit reminder of the unspoken. There stood Robert’s family on the Wallace porch on Christmas Eve, alive and brooding.
Miriam Wallace had paid no particular attention to Robert at her Christmas party for the first hour or so after he’d arrived. As Robert put it, in her arms in a rented bed a year later, it seemed as though it was an idea that ‘kinda sorta creeped up’ on her. Miriam said no, it wasn’t that. She’d had a lot on her mind that night. Her husband Victor, also responding to whatever nostalgia trigger a combination of mulled wine, Christmas, and the anticipatory angst of seeing old friends after a gap of years can create, had bragged to her about the swinging, too. With the notable twist that in his version of the confession, Victor hadn’t been the one coughing the semen out. Though Miriam stopped short of adding this detail when the topic came up. Let the boy keep his illusions. There is no kinder sentiment.
They were three assignations into the intermittent affair and spring had arrived in the form of green lawns appearing through block-long scabs of slush. More dangerous driving conditions; a self-conscious, rhythmless slow dance behind the drawn curtains of the motel window. Afterward, Miriam, up on one elbow in bed, tracing random arabesques on Robert’s hairless chest with the finger of a much younger woman, told him, ‘You can’t imagine how jealous I was. It was bad enough that pictures of Marnie were still up all over the house, fifteen years after she’d died. Some of her clothes were still in the guest room closet, for god’s sake.’ She said, ‘Then I have to find out that Victor fucked Dot and Alan and this experience he shared with his dead wife the titless saint? Give me a break.’
As Miriam described it, Victor, clutching a wineglass with one hand and tugging the waist of his wife’s gown with the other, had pulled her into his study while friends and a token neighbor or two were singing along teary-eyed to a scratchy Joni Mitchell album in the living room. The scratches and skips on the record are the sound of our wrinkles, Miriam remembered thinking. That’s when Victor made the confession, producing a manila envelope of faded Polaroids from the back of a locked desk drawer for proof.
‘He was so proud of himself I wanted to slap him.’
The sun was setting in the curtains. Miriam and Robert had known each other for over a year. It struck Robert as his eyes darted from Miriam’s heaped clothing on the chair nearest the bed… to her fur-trimmed coat on the door… to that Panzer-like purse on top of the television and the lipsticked water glass beside it… that she had made the room her own. That is, although Robert had chosen the motel himself and made the reservation and would soon pay for the room with tip money it felt like they were trysting in Miriam’s boudoir. He felt bound by the rules of decorum imposed by being her guest. He couldn’t just get up and switch on a light, for example, or take a piss without asking. The mere thought of voiding his bowels in the motel toilet… her motel toilet… was beyond the pale. He wondered if this was something she was good at, taking over a space, and was it just her or tall, attractive, adulterous wives in general. And yet, he reflected: ironically, she is the guest of her husband’s dead first wife in her own home.
Miriam squeezed the hollows in Robert’s cheeks together in a way uncannily like his mother had done when he was a boy and she was a happier, more playful person and said, ‘You better not be thinking this is anything like a scene from The Graduate, buster.’
‘What?’
‘The Graduate. You better not…’
‘The graduate? Which graduate? Who?’
‘The film. Dustin Hoffman! You…’
‘Who?’
‘Simon and Garfunkle!’
‘Simon and what?’
‘Jesus fucking Christ.’
Miriam said nothing for a long time during which Robert could actually hear his Swatch watch ticking on the counter beside the sink in the bathroom. He thought: there are people who could pass gas in front of an attractive woman and laugh it off with a joke and people who’d rather hold it in for hours of discomfort and I am of the latter group. Although I admire the former. Life must be so much easier for them. He stole a glance at Miriam whose hands were covering her face. He came to understand that she was crying. He tried to imagine what the rest of his life would feel like if he let one fly beside Miriam under these circumstances. Hot and hissing and green like absinthe… the poltergeist of a rotten egg. His actual insides, exposed to the open room and her judgment.
‘Miriam.’
‘No.’
‘Miriam. No what?’
He pulled her hands away from her face and he flinched: she wasn’t crying, she was laughing with mirthless glee like a deaf child torturing a cat. She rolled off the bed and fetched her purse and got her cigarettes and lit a Kretek and sat with her back to him. She puffed like it was a thinking tool or a method of divination. She turned to squint and said ‘Okay, the problem is this.’ More puffing.
‘An older married woman having relations with the young son of her husband’s friends, there’s plenty to hide. But in our case, ja? My husband encourages this. He asks for details afterward. We’re just doing it in this motel room to give us the illusion that we’re indulging in an illicit thrill.’ Puff.
‘We could be doing this at home and Victor would be reading the New York Times downstairs in the fricking breakfast nook. Or washing the dishes. And he’d call up the back stairs and ask if anyone wants an herbal tea. He’d serve us on a breakfast tray complete with linen napkins. How erotic is that?’
‘What we do isn’t erotic?’
‘You think it is.’
‘I always assumed that anything anyone did with my erect penis was erotic.’
She turned her back to him again and blew out an empty blue thought-balloon of smoke. Robert passed wind and waited.
There’s Kool Aid in the Drinking Water
CDS Jacob just posted this at his site:
I responded:
*[ed.'s note: "plaintiff"]
Keeping the Tongue Sharp on Dull Stone
at the GU, of course
My hero!
Nothing like the glorious flame wars of old, of course, but a poignant little reenactment…
Sorry. I was just washing the Aquaphor and critical dark matter off my weighty green strap-on. You’re so right about past times! Cue up the Bruce Springsteen. (Larf!)
Actually, there are genuine shocks to be found in this GUblog debate.
A commenter (of our acquaintance at TET, who happens to be an able UK-based poet) writes:
I still can’t wrap my noggin around that one. I responded:
“A tractor is and does none of these things…” goes right on the TET t-shirt! Christ, there’s almost a whiff of Woody to it…
I’m getting so I can smell him through Vicks-coated nostrils, that symp-tom.
I think it’s our clue that Cap’n Woody is just another manifestation of the Fundamentalist Zeitgeist; it’s a mistake to picture him as the source of it in Lit. You’d think this sort of thing would be the reaction to a prior period of decadence, but we’re still knee-deep in the decadence. I must admit that it very nearly saddens me that the near-Comrade who authored that anti-poetic “A tractor is and does none of these things…” argument can’t, apparently, appreciate something like 2nd gl(ance) @ a Jag (title obscured to avoid prosecution by the copyright hawks watching the net):
Yes, indeed, it’s not some fey, minimalist ramble a sad old fuck of a reader can project his/her diary of regret upon… for that’s surely what most poetry is expected to do for us as we age and so that is the poet’s crime here (there’s also the fact that talent is always prosecuted). It’s a work that ignores us. It stands aloof in its well-made beauty. I would, too.
That’s peppy.
I was just re-reading the Guardian obit about Nicholas Hughes (little more than a year since his suicide). And this may explain the aloofness.
“A 2004 paper explored why larger fish swim upstream in the turbulence of midstream rather than in the quieter waters near the banks: ‘Large fish swim further from the bank to avoid wave drag, the resistance associated with the generation of surface waves when swimming close to the surface,’ he wrote.”
However, Margaret Drabble should have her mouth washed out with soap for this grotesque misandric flourish:
“Her son tried to survive her, escaping to Alaska, pursuing the wild fish through the icy rivers, but in the end he swam back up stream to the terrible birth and death place. Plath was heroic, in her struggles to create light and art from darkness, and so, I must and need to feel, was he.”
That’s been gnawing at me this whole year. I am purged.
“…that symp-tom.”
Oh Lord! Remember that Yahwevian break I plaintively entreated Daddy for? There it is–love and syllables! Philip Roth gave it to me, after all. As surely as he stood over me while I typed. If you think about it–in this last round of books Sorrentino, Roth, Coetzee and DeLillo–have given us everything we need to be victorious. Our fathers did not disinherit us; they do care for us as we care for them. What’s more, they are with us, and for us. What more do we need to go Into the breech with every confidence?!
This is beyond my conceptual abilities to fathom, CDS Frances! My limits lie chiefly in the fact that I think of great writers as hairy meatbags like the rest of us, possessing powers no greater than the ability to choose and sequence words with an unerring eye towards making them seem like more than they are. It’s a spooky power but not supernatural! Roth and DeLillo shit and snore and pick at their scabs according to the natural law we all commune in; and Coetzee isn’t even a genius. The spirit you call on when you slam into that breech is your own, CDS Frances! The spirit is mighty and non-transferable: books nourish it but it is already there to be nourished. But what do I know?
CDS Steven,
You should know me by now. I always have to put “it” (whatever it is) where I can see it on someone else before I can go to the coat check and give them the claim ticket for my own wrap. I don’t think that’s uncommon, which is why I’m willing to risk exposing the process, faulty as it seems. It’s like when you take Beloved’s avatar with you when you enter the fray. She’s with you, so guaranteed you’re going to be your best self. If I need to take them with me right now, I take them. If it’s a trick of the mind, who cares? What isn’t? I don’t go anywhere alone anymore. Not by choice anyway.
Aha! Well-explained and now filed in my memory banks: like George Foreman taking a St. Francis medal into the ring…
Yeah, thanks for saying that. And it’s WHY I fight too.
The fighting is good. In this the Era of Vegging, esp.
I see your tantalizing carrot down below. I’m thinking about it. Deeply.
undertakings
1. 70-80
the undertaker’s a
potent figure in the cosmology of the
negro neighborhood, standing
somewhere between baron samedi and
charon and paul in the
hodgepodge of religious myth infusing
negro blood since after the flood and before
the fall (that’s)
(a.d.1492)
(and 1864, resp.,)
(y’all). every
sweatbox baptist
storefront hall with
crosses soaped on
steamed-up street level
windows and a
drumkit near the
pulpit and all, has one
square-jawed well-dressed man to which
the heart-stopped sisters will
report, slack jaw’d and black-tit
naked as a last
resort: maybelle splayed on the
stainless steel
table; nelly with his
trochar in her
belly; to be
sewn and bewigged and
bought back by
kin folk like
dolls
in ’75 it came to
philly to live, to seek asylum from its
run-down origins. its
grandmother’s sister and its
grandmother’s sister’s husband and a family friend ran
a funeral home on penn street and
took it in. the first nude girl he saw his age was
dead; he found himself at
10pm in homes smelling richly
frugal chicken dinners, pulling
ageless men by ankles from broke
beds. which had the effect
of making sylvia plath seem
so much less than serious; just
hysterical instead: to think some
grape-dark skin came
off in your hands and the
sheets were stiff with
black shit shat in perishing by some
poverty-ravished nigger and the orangey blood he
shudderingly bled, gluing the sheets to
his fingers, back of his head, then who-the-fuck must care
what sylvia’s god-damned daddy
did or
said?
was the year of paperback friendships and
other people’s next of
kin; philly the gothic backdrop; the prussian ghosts and
hoagie shops and sinisterly ubiquitous willie penn and his
sternly integrated
quaker friends and the sound back then:
doo wop’s residue and
gamble and huff and negro chapel requiems with
the white album thrown in as his
imagination’s only
alternative, bedroom lit
like an aquarium by the
atlantic light of the fm dial, (all four sides played)
(entire one night) (he nodded off and dreamed)
(four bodies in the)
(chapel were)
(brit and white); and the smells. the
odor of life in
’75, old spice and
formaldehyde, herbal lotion on hand milking
new penis dreams in strawberry incense from
headshop and
vaseline on anus of
the sister of his
friend, the tooth-white boy-thin girl who
quoted sylvia post-
coitally, wiping herself matter-
of-factly while
grinning. he shyly showed her
poems tapped on
onionskin and she provided
mocking encouragement, her
poems being better but
beginning good she’d never
be great: beginning poor he
had to compensate; she gave him
poems to over-take; she
cut the sex off when
he did
2. 80-90
ws’ was a creepy curse; emily’s reads
“called back” (or)
(reimbursed) and he at 30 to
kill a three-day weekend plots his
own stone verse in
draft after draft of
epitaph while
drinking/ smirking (plus the stinking)
(vcr’s not)
(working)
the avenue’s a patent leather belt, the
rain-bearded air and welted
windows and the wetted shingle
smells, he tilts on
shaker back-legs (oblique revenge against)
(his woman’s wealth), tingling
and sneezing in the screen door and shaking
in memorial day breezes like
a mortal sparkling of the
“self”, naked in its skin:
(not bad but flashy and)
(oblique: an epitaph should)
(make immediate sense)
(discreetly)
the apartment’s dark, outside is filled
with the crash and patter and soak
of weather and million sparks of
high-beam lights that
wick and shatter; guide incessant
cars together, a
sluice-along procession at
the dignified velocity of
the blind or
the wise or
the tarrying ride
to a burial rite, about the star of which
the wry might bitch
he did and didn’t
make it. naked
as an upper-case A in the
doorway (the busted shaker)
(foal-legs cracked) (sits in shock)
as he stands, bottle-grips the
hard-necked muse and crafts his
auto-epitaphs
peering, he can see their bed along a vacant line of sight
through three small rooms to the front of the flat in bleary light.
beside the bed, a nightstand on which a bottle of great beauty (he)
(drank the stuff inside but) (she was too snooty)
is sodomized by a candle she claimed to like. above the bed
those middlebrow diplomas: vincent’s squiggles of his final field; a
steel-framed print of arbus dunces,
their quaintly stunted poses
(and by the way)
(middle-brow means)
(not knowing but knowing about the work of)
(immanuel kant or)
(reading one umberto eco once)
(or finding anything written or spoken)
(by some british bloke so very)
(serious or terribly)
(funny) (or better yet saying)
(vagina in place of that)
(lower-or-higher-brow chestnut)
(cunt)
he stepped out on the landing over akimbo shaker, exiting the flat like
a simple objet d’art crafted from glue and a
stack of shadows by some gifted
nigger-maker (don’t forget he’s still)
(naked as blood in a)
(beaker) so
down the back stairs towards
garbage can and garden, the
shimmering steps in sizzling
darkness, he’s never felt
so typical in
life: a truly nigger thing to
do alright, to
lurk with no intention but
hiding
(he remembers reading)
(an issue of psychology today about some wasps’)
(stigmatic bleeding)
(and on pg. 23 a treatise on the syndrome plaguing weedy)
(men, who, reaching 33)
(fretfully compare themselves to christ)
(troubled by what little they’d each achieved by the time)
(said son of man had floor-planned the futures of)
(belfast and rome and)
(inspired modern anti-semitix and militarized the womb while)
(finding time to)
(gerrymander palestine)
(in eponymous millennia to come)
(but, dig: they once asked coltrane’s cousin)
(didjall think the brother would amount to sumpin?)
(and she said no)
(nobody thought anybody was going to be anything)
(and that’s exactly right)
(any nigger’s epitaph)
(could only be)
i tried
Possibly peppier still.
It’s no masterpiece like Comrade DJ Sensei Ted’s but it gets some kind of job done, CDS Frances.
Meanwhile, I like this comment in that otherwise largely dreary, belligerent, finger-sniffing thread about Ted:
The comment will be deleted soon because the poster is a boogieman over at the GUblogs for his flamboyant irascibility. Better the flamboyant irascibility than the bog-standard cocktail of tall-tree-gnawing, chauvinistic regionalism and obsessional class-anxiety-hostility that characterizes most of the “discussions about literature” thereabouts.
Well,comrades, I think we just went truly global.
VINTAGE EMAIL
VINTAGE EMAIL
I think you gave your friend really wonderful advice. In the alternative, you could have suggested she get a Smith-Corona portable typewriter and take it to a cafe to “click and clack away!” as CDS Jacob put it recently. I bet you my next paycheck of gratitudicals that some wet and wild Winslet wannabe offers to pass him the Wite-Out before his first java refill, especially if she glances over his shoulder and sees the word “grackles” typed there. He’s got me thinking of investing in some castanets. Lighter to carry.
And then coconuts to simulate the steed-based exit
FINGER IN YOUR I
I suppose this part of TET 5.0 is the POETRY section. There are themes I feel compelled to illuminate in the ruddy clouds of this skirmish. Why is the vast majority of the pyramid of poetry of the past 30 years a hot dump of utter shit ?
Ego. I’m up against it, quite often, professionally (in the music world): hacks who shrink the world to the fit of their Egos rather than stretching to accommodate a world full of elements beyond their current ken. Prosecute the talented; reward the fair-to-middlin’, cultivate the terms under which you may reasonably crown Thyself.
This is what I mean: the modern definition of “Poetry” as whatever a given Ego is, itself, capable of. If YOU couldn’t have written it, it isn’t POETRY. Lauding the mediocre means endorsing ones modest accomplishments; ones meager talents; to damn the talented is to protect the needy Self. When did people stop praising the extraordinary? When did they stop praising wonders they, themselves, were incapable of? When they shrank into bitter smugness. Maybe capitalism (that unrelentingly cruel and unfair beauty contest) battered them that far. Maybe I understand. I wonder if I can forgive? Not within hearing of some sweaty, low-IQ, fumble-word “poetry slam”.
Some time ago, the near-Comrade I’m debating (at the GUblog on Hughes) posted a link (among others) to a “poet” responsible for the following:
This, he links to. Ted Hughes he pooh-poohs. This coy little bowl of alphabet soup. This, you call poetry? The sort of narcisso-scribble the awful huckster Silliman will praise. It takes more talent to pick a horse’s nose with pliers than to type this gunk! Why laud it?
Because it threatens not. One may easily out-write it. It’s an adolescent’s maneuver… teenage girls did it when I was a teenage boy and easily baffled: slyly praise the looks of a homely girl! I didn’t get it then. I get it now.
It’s fine when teenage girls do it.
I’m sick to my stomach. There isn’t enough friendship between myself and the near-Comrade I have a problem with, in all this, to protect him from my apprehension that he is contributing to the grindingly inexorable fucking-up of Poetry for his own Selfish needs.
Addendum: the dabbler who wrote the above-cited “poem” endorses the following on his page, writing “Here’s one from Uncertain Time which has been particularly with me this past year”:
Only ten or twenty million people (schooled in the proper attitude) are capable of producing that, eh? Well, as I wrote, on March 9, 2009, before happening upon that gem:
And: another great post from Desmond Swords on the topic (in response to my posting of the Hughes Jag pome):
*
METAPHORPHYSICS, METAMORPHYSICALLY
Reading and writing are the only Arts I know of which are also, at the basic level, quotidian. People don’t sketch, sculpt or compose music as a matter of course as they tick-off the must-do boxes of the day’s unavoidable chores. There’s lots of confusion, then, between the entry-level activities and their manifestations as Art. It doesn’t help that the levels of accomplishment between crudest practitioner and the furthest, finest opposite on the scale are not infinite but divided by the rough number of the total literate population of earth, past, present, future.
I often press the point, when the old controversy comes up, that Sylvia Plath died before she could mature as a poet. She gassed herself when she was thirty. Her poems were fine, of course… she’s Sylvia Plath and I note the accomplishment. We’ve probably lost the sense of the thrill of newness her kind of confessional poem presented when it hit the scene. But the technology froze at the level of a certain kind of precociousness whereas Hughes’ technology developed (they will always be compared; it’s inevitable; what I don’t like is that Plath usually wins the comparison because Hughes, you know, was a cad). He reached another order of competency that few readers appear to be sensitive to. The special ability is evident in the poem I cite in a comment above. This line; look:
There’s nothing in Plath like this. Hughes has crushed the physical world to a weird plane where a void becomes an object and he has mastered Nature into being a creature that takes this transformed void into its mouth as if by instinct. The words have taken on a near-frightening power to remake physics, Nature and the normal hierarchy of object and perception, in the reader’s mind. Our sense of the basic is subtly breached and Hughes is in control of far more than his emotions or his recall. It’s there, again, in the poem, when he has the cat running under its own spine: an impossibly lyrical disjointing of a thing’s place and moment from itself. It’s a dangerous stereotype, given Hughes’ absurdly toxic biography, to cast him as any kind of brute but the force of his craft is brutal. Hughes the brute wizard of metaphorphysics. The visual equivalent is Cubism, of course, but the paradox is that Cubism is less dynamic, with no dimensional element of Time, and, compared to Hughes’ deformations, it is quaint. Picture a Hughes poem as a Cinematic Cubism, then, but one with a tactile component. Hughes took Cubism further with a much more brutal violation of the “real” or the “natural” than Picasso could muster (it’s hard not to point to the fact that Hughes’ mythos out-brutes Picasso’s as well). The next contender in the reality-smashing sweepstakes will have to be CERN.
Plath didn’t live to grow beyond a polite relationship with her words and the objects she matched them to. She’s famous for passages like this (I’m avoiding titles here to hide this talk from the copyright hawks):
It’s beautiful enough but Plath hasn’t forced us into a new relationship with the world (and its natural laws) here; she has certainly not forced us into a new relationship with our relationship with the world. Godivas are white, hands can be dead, seas do glitter and it’s not much of a stretch to picture anything melting into a wall. Children cry, eyes can be red. We already know this world; it’s just a matter of now knowing Plath’s emotional state regarding it. We may sympathize or be shocked or depressed but we will not finish this poem with a new sense of the hierarchy of perception, word, object. Plath never reached the point of daring to breach the walls between these dimensions; dying and folding her actual death into the subsequent sense of her oeuvre was as close as she got to reaching it.
Here’s Hughes manipulating the animal to exaggerate an effect that will embody the animal, and animality itself, for us, in a way that polite observation couldn’t:
Hughes hasn’t smashed timespace flat to the dimension of the page in this particular example but he is utterly this animal’s god. You can’t be an entry-level reader and catch this point.
Your point about longevity and mastery is well-taken. Why not compare big cat to big katze, then? (Some echoes of Narcissus here too.)
OR
But can she type?
Cubism quaint? Hmmmmmmm. The decorative stuff where elements of the real world appear in the form of pattern and collage are certainly quaint but the first phase with very little colour or recognisable forms is well hard. Brutal as you’d put it.
I’ve not read enough Hughes to compare – your defence of him elsewhere and my partner’s response to the Birthday Letters suggest he’s not someone who can be wafted away easily but his word-world is a very recognisable world by dint of its words.Whereas those early Braques and Picassos are like looking at something with your glasses smeared in mud. Charlie Parker would be a musical equivalent of Cubism – melodies taken apart and replayed in an determinedly “ugly” fashion.
“…his word-world is a very recognisable world by dint of its words…”
To which I’d say: just as much as the paint-world of Picasso’s Cubism is a world “recognizable” by dint of being made of brown paint and canvas! I always thought of Charlie Parker as a sepia-tone Kandinsky, btw. Back to Picasso: he was the visual obsession of my teen years (I read the Roland Penrose and was it Francoise Gilot’s autobiog? over and over) before I moved on to Modigliani and from “Dedo” (“Je suis Juif!”) to Schiele. And as I got older I saw Pablo as the original Modern Pop Star (proto-Madonna), changing his styles with uncanny timing to keep the market fresh. The only phase I still don’t care for is the stuff most likely to go on Get Well cards: the Rose, the Blue, the Saltimbanques. I like his Marie Therese onanie calendar-pages but I’m probably the only one you know who likes his Late stuff most of all. I don’t think he was trying to sell anything with those. Desmoiselles (and The Musicians and, perhaps, Screaming Head with Lightbulb) were the last great edge-pushing grunts before Don Pablo went into money-minting as a fulltime operation. Remember how Hockney tried to bring Cubism back? I was hoping he would and then I realized… after seeing Hockney’s (and David Byrne’s) Polaroid Cubism that the idea was already maximally squeezed when Pablo was still in those cool overalls and Braque was his “wife”. And then Ted came along…
If I post again (!!! ) I’ll use my real name as above. Too cubist otherwise
Comrade Ed, Old Chum! Glad to see you here. My journey began hours ago, when I promised my daughter a walk into the first warm day of the year (always heralded by the concentrated waft of thawed dogstuff; in this case a very long Winter’s worth) to go buy a “little toy” (I was thinking of a water pistol) and ended up, not more than fifteen minutes ago, lugging home a fully-functional farm, about a quarter of the size of a Fussball table… I will get back to you after dinner (in a few hours)…
I’m not proud of it but I am now reading The Book Against God, and one of the little tricks I’ve devised to keep pushing through the mire is to antidotally read other pieces–a chapter of T-BAG, a something else enlivening and spiritually rejuvenating. So how funny is it that on this Rilke Friday I quite randomly selected Sarah at Five-ish, which is set in Vienna. http://staugustinian.wordpress.com/category/why-not-try-sarah-is-five-ish/
Gruss Gott!
Gott… don’t remind me, CDS Frances… the most terrifying waiters in the world!
Christ: I just got that one… T-BAG?
As our adventure in Tedland (from Terry World to Tedland: from midlife crisis to afterlife’s flame wars) draws to a close, this parting shot: surely the most idiotic and anti-poetry statement to make it into a comment thread about poetry in a long, long time; is this creature writing from a bar stool with very loud Dexy’s Midnight Runners in the background?
Did she really write “let the animals be”…?
It was Melton Mowbray and not pinkroom who posted first the bizzare claim that the – ‘grafting of human emotions on to animals is objectionable and diminishes the animal itself, which ought to be allowed an existence beyond the human.’
Not that I have any problem with him and her believing this: No, what makes me smirk is the fact of them being anonymous and – for whatever reason – after two years, we know the two people writing this, as only mm and PR. If they dropped dead tomorrow we would never know, or like Cynical Steve, find out only after their life ends, what their real names are. At least old Cynicals dared give his first name to us. These two do not, and yet demand equal treatment.
Something that has long challenged me is this notion that the default ‘anonymous’ position online is somehow a right and we should all just treat each other as we would if we knew one another’s real identity. It’s OK for a while but after a short time the insidious falsity bugs me. It took a couple of years to work it out, flyting with the numerous made-up names online, eventually getting past it and coming to see – that when a person you do not know the name of, who answers questions that in real life would elicit a simple answer like John Janice, Madelaine or Jock – refuse – for whatever reason – to reveal who they really are, I twitch and think – why?
They can present all the reasoned argument they want, and I have had this debate before several years back, with anonymous people who claim it to be a human right almost, to remain anonymous doggerelists writing stuff of the same poetic quality they trash in other, non-anonymous poets. When they start raving:
Two and more years I’ve known these two and they have often tried to patronize me, but is not the truth, they are anonymous for a reason – because they are victims of the very cultural force they try to articulate as the one shaping, making, being that Britishness at the heart of the poetry they talk of as though… I dunno, but pink and melton will always remain anonymous bitters reading people like me, and until they wake up and stop falling for the bullshit that they can’t reveal who they are because the people in charge of their country, ‘my’ fucking England – instruct ‘em to.
Tossers.
Greetings, Comrade DJ Sensei Des!
Well, I do, in fact, understand Anonymity on the Net… I’ve been physically threatened many times since the late-’90s and if I weren’t built like a bouncer (Comrades who know me in meatspace know I’m not a fragile reed and resemble my literary voice not at all) I’d be circumspect about offending lunatics online. I don’t need to know who’s writing a comment; I’d just prefer that the comment be interesting and not eye-woundingly stupid. And then there’s Pig Ignorance on a barstool with its tongue up Shirty Boor’s arse…
As I wrote in a relevant email today:
“I rarely post at the GUblogs because of the overwhelming Yobbism (and petite Yobbism).”
It was worth it , in the end, because a few posters (you included) actually had interesting comments to make. That’s the beauty of comment threads: the Yobboes can’t shout you down as they would in a pub.
Please comment again and as long-windedly and often as you’d like (we’re not threatened by ideas over here and we do NOT delete comments), chum. We’re not precious about the pixel use.
Fuck The Kunts,
S
UPDATE: I see from the GUblog Hughes thread that Melton is trying to massage this into a turf war between myself and POLITELY HOMICIDAL, just because I referred to his doggerel, and to Pinkroom’s doggerel, as doggerel. Good old shit-stirring 101. I have no problem with others at that blog (besides that unknown fucker HenryLoydMoon, who took a swipe at me before I even knew his avatar existed: who the fuck is he?): a few of them over there actually have talent (and I have said so). I like Al, I like Mishari (much to Des’ and Suze’s understandable chagrin: he was beastly to them, but I can be beastly, too)… I won’t go down the list. This is my clarification, shit-stirrers. On the matter of Billy: that gets complicated. That “tractor” remark of his will take some time getting over… it does (as anyone who knows me knows) epitomize the kind of randomly proscriptive bullshit I happen to think is…etc.
[ed.'s note: this is rich stuff, Des and I want to edit the wee typos and illustrate it and serve it proper; I'll take a good long intelligent rant about lived life and ideas tested over smug ignorant posing any day; I think you'll find Comrade DJ Sensei Frances supporting your work as well. Just don't be too precious if I fix the typos and do scream if I illustrate your text with images you can't warm to]
Hey, I like Al, and know he likes me, it’s just a shame what happened with him and sue, but now, enough time has passed and we have a laugh about it, unless sue gets into a particularly delusional bout of victimhood and is looking for any old shite excuse to rail against the force of fate.
There are seven billion in the world and at least a billion will think we are cunts, but the truth is, our poetry does the talking and I know Al has a thing about me because he always links to the video of me in Mayo, 11.59 on the clock of drunkeness, twenty minutes later it was lights out, pissed as arseholes and awoke the following day in a field on the fringe of Kiltimagh, a spiritual occasion, it was the first time I had seen myself recite, after seven years in and I thought, hey, I look alright and it’s strange, all the blokes hate it but the women don’t.
I wonder what that means?
ha ha ha ha ha
“Crown and the poster poets anthology…”
Opting out of that was instantaneous and the easiest decision I’ve ever had to make (next to removing a tack from my foot).
oops, should be Godfrey. Fionn O Daly, one of the top three in the 1200 year tradition who died in 1387.
CDS Frances, please come mingle with the guests!
I shall, thank you! I was just freshening up after my reading experience before I joined the guests.
Aha. Decontam….
Ah! Bob! Nice.
Ohhhh, how I needed that. Thank you, CDS Desmond.
Norman Rush unveiled. Sucker punch. I swear to God, I did not see that one coming. And it hurts! It hurts bad.
NORMAN RUSH’S STAR RISING
Well, here’s some straightforward propagenda from Normative Rush (Christ, we of Uncle Sam Co. need our constant affirmations, don’t we?)
The armored mummy was Ronald Reagan, of course, but who’s counting? And the “right metaphor”, Norm, was Punch ‘n Judy
Cap’n Woody writes, over at The Millions:
a blogger writes:
From The Millions (surely it’s time to change that to The Billions, by now?):
Yeah, check out that “love of language”. It, erm, coruscates off the flippin’ page. And, oohh, daring, he mentions a Woody
Form the horse’s Norm himself:
We’re going to prevail on CDS Barry to come in here and talk about Africa to counter Rush’s self-serving, disingenuous bilge. Beware the Yankee B’wana (redundant, I know) who makes Africa his subject, Comrades…
UPDATE:
But, wait, Christ, how could I miss this? Cap’n Woody’s appearance at The Billions was a covert operation in the Cold War between Woody ‘n Zadie. The Billions shopkeeper wrote the following and so Woody rushed in with that above-cited, vote-buying pat on the head:
Woody sneaking around in darkest 21st Century Litblogglandia is not terribly unlike Uncle Sam in Africa c. 1965, seducing/bullying banana republic converts against the Russkies. Not that Zadie is a superpower, but this won’t be the first time that Cap’n Woody’s vanity led him to a category error, or an error of proportions
Thanks very much FM and Augustine.
Your alert-to presence and flow, seeking self-control in Letters – who knows – what energies real love and what’s y’all luvvie – readers – muse – and trick pantomimed, folly left ‘n right, scratch ‘n sniff the yes – no question an existential outsider-us posits of Stevie baby.
The utmost sensitivity and awareness of bullshit-to-beauty-ratio. odds of any one directorial two to three whole going on to one wish turned towardness, during a second quarter of the 2010 UK po-biz surprise – AmPo all Carey sharey faery from a land of air and sinner, tripping craic into what awaits when we’re no longer ‘ere but.. none here to present and address, redress our apologia – philosophy of seeking wisdom through freindship – Love poised facing inward-anonymously and producing quality the FB verse, discernment be not thee, they base of fawns one can expect, as/is England’s own boring tossers, who agree and suck for one in the prescribed manner befitting: Me baby Lancashabru, not yr Foney UK scene: No Am Po travisty Harriet, Sina Torregian – Sotère Queyras and a host of Silliman simulacra shares being all same-as.. arghh, don’t let one get ******* started on those ****s.
~
It is late. It is great. I feel like a whole new solar system for lunch, don’t touch that wad, it’s a Lancashababru you worked so jolly hard to hear – reach that combination of Letters, you must be a poetry failure and freak of natural justice, placebo of rain and snooker-snuggle muggins smuggling things into our possession, refrain from talk and lie through yer teeth too much, get caught you’ll pretend, you know that ‘don’t you fwend’ wah, wah and art of noise, in 1988 with Echo and the Bunnymen – semi-invisible in Canada and hard-core fans, clustered in middle age unionizing, reunioning and splitting up, awakening, flourishing and perishing, always McCullough the Liverpool Lip, Angelina Jolie manque once she come along with Liam and Noel, when the pose dissolved and Ian is found being too cool for school, in middle years, relying on props and potions of the ever baggying yore – useless in the face of prettier less aged competitors, Ian’s trajectory through the cultural rank at UK central-heights in nova superb avenue, tumbled down with one short shout – more roar by the Gallaghers into a face of their fan-base magic from Lancashababru spirit that rips it up and starts again, teardrop explodes, aztec camera, two fucking weeks on that **** Frame… who wrote the songs a whole world love, Roddy F’s the name – Scottish troubador, orator and king of the pop-chart he was resident in, a resident who went to just what made him, a one man of song singing still at the Komedia in Brighton and very very legendary – just like you and me (well not me, but the real musicians reading among you will know what I mean), at least – dearest billion favourite readers, toybands and a trillion terra faers, ghostly clan of cloak and brick, we’re gonna run, we’re gonna hide, we’re gonna tear down these rules that hold us to be, only to be with me, only to be with you, have we tried every toyband and through the scene only to be back again here with you Steven and Frances.
Any time you wanna ****, just post the vidz, backchanel@foxnewbs and I can add in the inter-dimensional graphic via the thought-portal Stephen King operates as the worlds worst Ron Silliman tribute to toyband routine – cheering y’all oop in the Lancashababratastic pop-swindle Frances and Augustine, facebook legend is it…not Augustine the great and Stevie the Brave, we who fought in many an unread campaign know, cured what itch at the weigh-in gates of God’s, was his own Boston persuader, Clint, Clint Kong – do not approach the states, in black and white
out of the frame
Normal Norman unveiling soccer skill – when you were Ian Rush, did Madeson the Brave and younger ‘Rushie’ – play for L – I – V – E – R – P – Double Oh El – Liverpool FC…during their heyday nineteen seventies and eighties decades, Liverpool dominating relentlessly – a cultural flux and existential duende effecting the societal ‘imbas’ – psychic-jazz – jubilationary force for positive good – and bad – in NW Britoons, sailor, every normal liverpudlian citizen and ‘scouser’ – (liverpool inhabitants’ ubiquitous islands’ wide-nickname) was a de facto soccer fan and tosser
obsessed with a **** city’s team:
Everton FC fans – on the other hand, could not perform – as their rival team across the Stanley Park that divides these two teams, one red the ‘other’ blue – with imbas sufficient to float higher full time as a joke..
Only joking Travis Nichols you pleasant **** [ed.'s note: Des: wish you'd you write "cunt" instead, I find **** upsetting] (we’re really thick on facebook) I know you are very different and individual, poet who knows it isn’t difficult to be a **** on Harriet today – very effin easy, very bleeding squeezie, flippin up jolly again miss, gosh, only Ron to tell it straight this week, on his **** blog no one reads, not like mine, not like me and my two FUCKIN thousand fans on facebook – well – facebook, myspace personal e-mail address list of the hundred or two one has – as perfomers and people in poetry today – been intimate with in print: Who have received a personal e-mail from aye in one’s capacity as a scouse-manque tosser telling it like it aint – luv.
Unlike Sonaldo the silly mon ronning you deaf to five on for a see-through humanity, and caring senior sharey presence who carved his own ‘tone’ out of being heard loud and very clear, in every single region of the English speaking poetry world-community not here, not now and very very fractured, all over the place, anemically astray, lacking power, vigor, vitality, or colorfulness; listless; weak: and out of shape – that’s me – UK po-biz, here to serve: Me first Lancashababru, i’m afraid.
‘If the tea-party Mad Hatters think that the socious today looks bizarrely non-white, non-male & non-straight, wait till they look at it circa 2020 or 2050. But between now & then, we can anticipate that this same cluster of conservative – or at least reactionary – values will only get more upset, more hyperbolic, more dislodged from reality, more extreme, and definitely more dangerous.’
This be by Your Ronstar, was the stand up piece from a true in form AmPo Laureate of the online era – you know who I mean, don’t you? The name is effortlessly irrelevant because the **** is known by sight and sound in all of cyberville – along a brooding and incredibly intelligent carey sharey network here at work where we love full-on full time 26/7 American all-rounder vibe: Superlatives for Ron’s one person and mind, could stretch to fourteen books of ultra-critically engaged, sazzy, snazzy, fresh air of hope about Silliman the Cool bespectabled bumbler tumbling his own merry way, very much Ron – always he’ll have a one true boast to flyte: Number One baby.
Maybe fall in love and use the magick aye to unlock her past, remove Dolly’s husband from the frame of our potential everlasting bliss, me and she who I do as Michael J Fox in Back To The Future, but with less oomph, more just me and Dolly singing Country, teaching the abc of a two-room shack in Louisville Kentucky, where the Champ was born: who came home to no parade and yet will tell the most poetic tale of all, refused an order at his local life-long diner, and a scene developing out of that, into which several colorful characters introduce themselves into a nineteen yr old Champ – and tell him to go fuck off, or die – presenting to a stranger and our boxing god natural human law suggests, should have been fixing Ali’s auto with their motorbicycle abilities, but didn’t because….
Ron is on and on again- relentlesly like Liverpool and Everton – scouser manque: Me, I was that Manque – we found the role paid off our capacity as ****S banned not by Tuatha Dé Danann rules, but by the peoples of the goddess Lancashabru – the tuatha de dannan – at least – if ay want – behaving intimately with me and Self in print dearest luvvies Frances and Steven – c’mon and sing an old sad song by one of Sevierville’s finest poets, Parton – Dolly Tennessee – who got me falling in love with her, when she sings at the height of her bloom, alas for me not a dabbler in Lancashababra but Lanacashababru, one was not in possession of a key to experiencing the past as present, in a Matrix game where I get to go back in time and meet Dolly.
I’ll need some time to tuck into this transmission!
Steven Charlie Parker is mid-period Kandinsky For you and High Cubist phase Picasso for me. Aren’t we in danger of turning into a George Steiner school here? A sentence I never thought I’d see myself write.
Well I am probably the only lover of late Picasso that YOU know. Particularly a late series of about 500 drawings where an impotent old Pablo P looks on as Raphael and his partner get it on.
But in that early period of Cubism I can’t see how or why he made the pictorial choices he did – I’m perfectly capable of imagining my way into a variety of artist’s decision making processes but that period remains genuinely mysterious. I’ve read the books, the critiques but they still remain elusive.
Which is the point I was trying to make with Hughes whose language is comprehensible and makes strong connections with its subject in a way that is recognisable albeit surprising too.
As long as we don’t take on Steiner’s corny sexual perversions, we’re fine, Comrade Ed!
I always thought Cubism was A) logical extension of Cezanne B) rejection of the “mainstream” academy painting holding sway. The rejection game (ie, Revolution) is a key motif of how many generations, now? As a youngish man (it was mostly men; not being sexist, being an acute social critic) your only chance at the jackpot of outsider fame is a Johnny Rotten thing. There’s almost always a manifesto involved, too. Cubism was probably as far as they could march from Watteau. Oh: I forgot to sprinkle the whole formula with African ju ju fetishes…
I don’t separate pop from politics and you have to marvel at the line of zig-zagging (permitted) revolutionary descent connecting Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky, Breton, Burroughs, Berry, Coltrane, Godard, Rotten, Cobain…
(and the muted parallel history of quashed female revolutionaries a lá Brooks, Barnes, Holiday, Derbyshire, Mitchell, Bley, Tharp…)
(PS I was always baffled by the condescension heaped on Late Period Pablo)
(PPS the Revolutionaries cited are all the obvious suspects because Obscure Revolutionary is oxymoronic in pop)
Delia Derbyshire. If memory serves me correctly ( and it usually doesn’t ) she might have done the sound for mid-period 70′sDr. Who.
whilst idling flicking channels about 10 years ago I happened on an episode. It was like a rubber monster costume party in a church hall ( perhaps George Steiner was dressed up in the background) l was with an improvised music festival happening next door. Normally the music fits the action in SOME way but not here. I suspect it was Delia at the controls. The guy who does our sound ( Matt Wand ) is a big aficionado of her work.
Check this out, CDS Edward… you’d swear it’s Portishead… but she beats them by 25 years…
I’m sure we’ve done Delia on TET already but let’s do her again
Bear with me, Comrades Lurking and Explicit. There’s a steady trickle of traffic to an old essay of mine called THE BARREN GOVERNESS and the format-limitations on the site I keep this essay on frustrate me. I’m going to re-post the damned thing here (with long-text-clarifying “block quote” technology) and those of you familiar with it… scroll by… scroll by…
There’s another reason to post this here: this Issue of TET, with its generic title of 5.0, is the FLAME WAR Issue (just as TET 4.0 was the Simulocracy Issue). If the second-half of the 20th Century was about Cold War, the opening phase of the 21st Century is given to Flame War: the propaganda (popagenda/propergander) battles that were restricted to OP Eds and Talk Shows in the 1960s and 1970s and became Talk Radio call-in debacles in the 1990s has erupted into all-out, cross-platform guerrilla warfare in the “noughties” as FLAME WAR. Kinda Rich vs Kinda Poor, Largely Black vs Largely White, Smart vs Dumb, ‘Lil Wayne Devotee vs Fiddy Fanatic, Nice Fascist vs Mean Fascist… and every possible permutation therefrom. It’s not so much Hearts and Minds as Possessions and Imaginations to be won.
The Barren Governess: The James Wood Snafu
Published May 24, 2008 Litcritters , disinterested score-settling , vanities and veritas
Tags: Add new tag, James Wood, reality
James Wood, noted literary and film critic, has, apparently, written an email critical of comments I’ve made about his critical approach (Mr. Wood’s email is appended to following document):
“I also see no reason to doubt that the email is genuine.”
With all due respect (and being somewhat involved) I see at least two:
1) Are we to believe that Wood is naive enough to have been duped by a relatively unknown Litblogger into scoring points against another relatively unknown Litblogger in a petty *flame war*? Does Wood, with no small fund of credibility at stake, go dashing into flamewars, or wherever bloggers have the temerity to disagree with him (in otherwise courtly language, I might add) , fighting battles for Litbloggers running blogs boasting content on a level he’d otherwise sneer at? Strains credulity.
Occam’s Razor would indicate a hoax, though I’m far from claiming that James Wood is not human enough to have done something pointless.
2) The tone and quality of the letter itself: is this document really the work of (arguably) America’s foremost literary critic? Michiko K., sure: I could see her writing something like this (before an added pass or two through the vernacularizer). But *James Wood*?
Before I go into that email, here are the two comments (unedited) I posted on Nigel Beale’s blog, when I still believed it was a casual blog and not a creepy space rigged for unintentionally amusing revenge:
**********
**********
Well, those were the comments. I’d like to draw the jury’s attention to A) the casual tone (ie, I was not writing an essay for a lit journal, I was leaving a profanity-free comment on a litblog) and, B) the importance of the “cinema metaphor” to the overall point of the comments (ie, not very) and, C) the importance of Wood’s use of the word “reality” in the quote my comments took exception to… and (as a treat), D) the amount of “ignorance” on display in my comments (we’ll come back to that one).
So.
If that Augustine-excoriating email really was from James Wood (and not concocted by one of Nigel Beale’s more literate friends), it shows an amazing grasp of flamewar technology (while falling somewhat short on metrics of good-faith and reason): the first thing “Wood” does, in his “rebuttal”, is avoid the *heart* of my criticism and go right for what he must have considered my comment’s softspot: that jokey metaphor about his taste in film.
Clearly, the metaphor was *really* about his taste in literature, which I consider to veer a wee towards the conservative. I don’t give a damn whether James Wood has seen “120 Days of Sodom” 1,000 times and knows all the dialogue by heart and dresses for the occasion; what I was, rather obviously, expressing was my sense that novels that flout naturalistic effects (unnaturally), doing away with old-fashioned sops like “moral” along the way, seem to zoom right over his head (or between his legs). Again (and again and again): I cite his (imo) wrong-headed dismissal of DeLillo’s preternaturally witty, sobbingly-beautiful “Underworld” as an example of one gap in his literary sensors large enough to fly an 827-page masterpiece through.
I treasure “Underworld”, Wood doesn’t. Is one of us wrong? Sadly, no. Is one of us a(n) (apparent) “square”…? Well…
When I pegged Wood for a “Talented Mr. Ripley” fan, I didn’t mean it literally (how the hell would I know, and why would I want to?): I was rendering visual my estimation of his literary taste-range (which I even have the plutonium balls to suggest was very possibly confirmed in his recent review of “Netherland” for the New Yorker).
“Wood” goes to extraordinary lengths (was he charging Nigel by the letter?) to attack my “ignorance” of his bona fides as a lover of cinema… pointlessly. But, again: that was the most convenient portal of entry (flamewar 101: flamewar is a war of attrition: never attack an argument’s strong points).
Whereas the crux of my argument was/is Wood’s use of the word “reality” (both in the quote I originally nutmegged on Nigel’s blog, and in general, in what I’ve read of his), Mr. “Wood” deals with *that* with a flamer’s aplomb:
“I don’t want to argue with Steven Augustine about reality, because that is a wilderness of mirrors…”
Ah. Well. Hmmm. Now that James Wood has gotten *that* out of the way, he can get to the shocking matter of my blog-type “ignorance” about his taste in films!
Inconvenient for me, of course, because that was the core of my point, no? His profligate use of the word “reality”.
“James Wood” doesn’t want to “argue” with Steven Augustine about Wood’s inaccurate estimation of Tom Wolfe’s ability to craft characters, either, obviously, but that’s small beer.
Again, here’s Wood on “reality”:
“Everything flows from the real including the beautiful deformations of the real; it is realism that allows surrealism, magic realism, fantasy dream and so on,” but no, fiction is real only “when its readers validate its reality.”
It’s Samurai-bold of Mr. “Wood” to try getting away with sweeping my quibble with his use of the word “reality” under the rug. And to invoke Vladimir “When I hear the word Reality I reach for my fountainpen” Nabokov in the same “reality”-asseverative email, piling irony upon irony, is giddy-making stuff.
When he (or someone) circles back to the matter of “reality”, later in the email, it’s not to address my criticism of the above (twice-cited) quote.
When “Wood” writes (in this email), “Decomposition like this happens to any long -lived and successful style, surely; so the writer’s — or critic’s, or reader’s — task is then to search for the irreducible, the superfluous, the margin of gratuity, the element in a style which cannot be easily reproduced and reduced,”…
…This is nicely put, but it hinges on the same sort of phantom crux (unless the “irreducible, the superfluous, the margin of gratuity” are standardized, from mind to mind, or measurable as pi) that his (for me) offending riff about “reality” does. The rather obvious flaw such a gilded argument dazzles us out of noticing is its presumption that everyone being exposed to this “long-lived” style, has the same degree of wear-and-tear on his/her readerly cherry; the same long log of literary experiences; the same mandarin burden of education to overcome in the gleaning of readerly pleasure.
Wood (or “Wood”) is a master of building rhetorical Alhambras like these on philosophical soap bubbles such as the word “reality”.
I’ve never stared, gaga, at a lavalamp in my life, but whenever Wood mints proscriptions about how far a novelist is allowed to wander from “reality” before the silvery cord of the reader’s attention/credulity/infatuation snaps, I’m forced to put on my worst Cam-side, Russian accent and demand, “Whose reality?” (or, “Who’s reality?”)
Is it “ignorant” of me to express this opinion? I haven’t read *all* of Wood (that’d be a peculiar thing to do, being that I’m neither a fan, nor immortal) but I have read, closely, whatever of his that I have bothered to comment on.
If I know little about Wood, Wood knows *nothing* of me (beyond the damning clue that I don’t hold *his* judgment of the books I treasure over mine) so his wounded plea, “It’s the ignorance I so dislike, sanctioned by that online free-for-all in which quick judgments, based on the thinnest acquaintanceship with the subject’s work, can be prodigally posted,” has rather a hollow ring to it, and a boomeranging echo: what *does* he know of me, or what I’ve read of what he’s written? Is Mr. Wood claiming clairvoyance as a second talent?
His signal flare of a salvo against “Hysterical Realism” (that word again) was my (contemporaneous) introduction to his work; I found it just in some bits and absurd in others and largely irritating.
I’ve read, dunno, two dozen essays, reviews, interviews and profiles? (If Wood is offering to hire me to write a carefully-researched, corrective overview, we can discuss the terms; otherwise, I think my various comments, over the years, are not the worst a Wood fan-or-critic could’ve stumbled upon. Actually, there’s one comment, in particular, I thought was rather good… taking him to task for his apparent lack of a viable sense of humor…perhaps I can provide the link later?)
Anyway: that’s rather a precious pose for a critic to strike, I’d say, if “Wood” (or Wood) is claiming that I’m “ignorant” (in more than the literal sense) because I haven’t read *all* of his work, and have no right to express strong opinions on what I *have* read until I purchase the lot (which may be a brilliant marketing technique…)
If he did, in fact, write all that.
Stranger things, as we know too well, have happened. The email was a disturbing graft of the imperious on the vulnerable, if he *did* author it. I’m still not sure if I’d be delighted if it were authentic.
Mr. Wood’s apparent email:
****selected further comments on James Wood, from my archives****
and
How come you never mentioned this blog before, Mr. I’m-so-enigmatic Augustine? Hiding your light under a bushel is an iffy strategy at best. I’ll put up a link to this, if you don’t mind.
Grooven, Sah! Link on! (For any Comrade Lurking or Explicit who tries to parse the postmodern politics of these feuds and affiliations: good luck, sucka… life is complicated)
It is annoying. Over the last year or so, I’ve often thought ‘Gee, I wish Steven were more prolific. I really enjoy his writing’. And here you were the whole time, writing away, beyond my ken. Did your vow to ‘love, honour and keep posted’ mean nothing, then, you cruel deceiver? For shame…
Well, there is the small matter of 600+ pages of fiction on my primary site, fella… and 200-or-so pages of very old (some like 20 years old) fiction in the attic… and a frigging serialized novel I haven’t had time to look to recently…
(Actually, that “attic” is pretty hard to negotiate, Comrades… the old fiction, which is more mainstreamy than what I do now, is largely buried there; I just managed to unearth this deposit)
I must say there was a time (long since past) when this line from the “deposit” gave me pause:
“Sometimes I frankly dread my own black gifts of persuasion.”
ha ha! ich auch
(PS I’ve just re-read the second story on that link for the first time, all the way through, in a decade; I don’t know where it came from. Not to my taste but mysteriously interesting. What was I on back then?)
In The It Takes One To Know One Department
It reminded me of what you wrote in Muster of Triviums about Wells’ Time Machine:
e
f
[ed's note: we're trying out the new Ouija App here at TET but there are still a few bugs...]
I have totally run amok. Here’s what I meant to say.
NOTE THE ENGORGED PENIS:
the zeppelin?
Actually, you can see it better here:
Calling Agnolo di Cosimo, per favore.
I’m not sure if I appreciate Mike Myers’ penis being rammed down my throat at this time in the evening.
re: Mr. Woods. I’ve never understood why some critics narrow their definitions as to what CAN be good to such a degree that nothing other than their favourite 3 authors ( or possibly themselves ) can actually be any good. Those who don’t conform to these arbitrary rules are criticised for what they don’t do and probably never set out to do in the first place.
Welcome to The Puritans 2.0, Comrade Ed: The Olde World Odor
FOUND NARRATIVE (subgenre: delicious)
tinlaurelledandhardy
26 Mar 2010, 11:05AM
I think some men are just vain and bragging about their adultery; my husband had a lot of affairs but always, always denied it to the last skirt, so it was his word against evidence. Not being the jealous kind, I put my faith in him. I will always have a soft spot in my heart for him because of this his attitude. He was raised by his auntie and the Jesuits.
What comes to mind is a story told by a Thai girl, a neighbor of mine. She once was a nanny with a family from one of the Gulf States. Her job was to nanny one of the sons, always attend to him and keep him safe in spite of his own clownish foolishness. At any time of day he told her to come and spread her legs so he could smell her **** . She said that every time she saw his little head down there, the image of her knee striking upwards flew through her brain and the fear to actually do it, made her sweat all over. I have no idea what became of him.
Some men are womanizers because they can and women love them, some are just bored, is my guess. Adultery, on the other hand, is not necessarily womanizing.
Don’t look at me, chief. I never had a Thai nanny…
Not as subtle as I thought I was, eh?
I have been summoned from the dark reaches to comment on the literary dispensations of a certain Norman Rush.
I cannot claim to know his oeuvre, and even less to understand his purported importance in the literary affairs of the Nation.
The TV has been on in the background all night on the SPIEGEL channel with its habitual Saturday parade of films about Hitler and the Nazis. First there was one about Eva Braun and Hitler’s retreat at Obersalzburg, with lots of film and photographs shot by Eva Braun of the ordinary life up there. Mostly sunbathing and skinny dipping (the ladies of the Reich were left alone a lot), by the end of the war every body is smoking and drinking despite Adi’s disapproval of such.
Next was/is a long documentary about Nuremberg. Robert Jackson is on now admitting that the trial is not really about condemning criminals, but “administering preventive justice with a view toward forestalling repetition of these crimes against peace…”
here (around 5 minutes) :
which brings me back to Norman Rush. When I read the interview here,
he sounded just like your average well-meaning dupe, even with a couple of endearing left-aromatic pretenses, does not diverge from the imperial view, that only White Christianity holds aloft the torch of world peace (which of course is a messianic world empire). He wasn’t particularly articulate or insightful. Yet oblivious of the high esteem some hold of him, I imagined him nothing much more than your average fusty waylaid old Peace Corps pro. But once I became aware of his repute, I looked again:
“Obviously, all scrutiny of the contributions of colonialism, and indigenous kleptocracy, to the lack of economic development of post-independence Africa takes place with an awareness that they have been imposed on societies existing in environments that have been, it is being argued persuasively, inhospitable to human prosperity.”
Pot calling kettle black here, I mean, where is there no indigenous kleptocracy? Aren’t we seeing that globalization was just that? I always liked this article
although it can go libertarian as much as it sustains the earnest true believer in universal principles of human justice.
in this sense, the second part of this Rush quote really raised a brow.
“…they have been imposed on societies existing in environments that have been, it is being argued persuasively, inhospitable to human prosperity.”
Yes globalized development schemes (neo-colonialism) have been imposed on these societies riven and shattered by generations of European divide-and-conquer old-school colonialism. Rush writes (in Mortals) with righteous annoyance about how the Native Africans cheat around all the rules and systems well meaning dominant races attempt to impose on them. No-one would dare write with such a tone about how American slaves defied their masters to congregate and elaborate ways they maintained their own humanity.
The defiance of arbitrary and unfair rules is fundamentally emancipatory. What must irritate Rush about the Africans is that they do not use their intelligence to prop up his sorry patronizing agenda. “inhospitable to human prosperity” indeed! Code words for inhospitable to globalization, which is a code word for I takee you givee. Give the Africans a chance Mr Rush, stop trying to help them so much.
He admits, in America he would be nothing, only in Africa he could be a crabby plantation massa, sipping sarsaparilla and self-righteously overwrought (overwriting) about his petty little bourgeois life’s petty little travails.
“here (around 5 minutes)”
EXCERPT from Norman “Abnormally Normative” Rush’s MORTALS (I think SPOOKS would have been a much better title)
This is The Hurt Locker of domestic dramas, then. The narrator isn’t Norman Rush, of course: it’s just fiction. But we are thinking the narrator’s thoughts. Whatever the book presents is judged against the solid metrics of the narrator’s worldview/personality… which seems, on the basis of this excerpt, to be pitched in the direction of the lovably irascible, no-nonsense B’wana. We can tell this by the meta-joke about the narrator’s taste in fiction: “Iris seemed to want her fiction to be excruciating. But that was the way she was and he was sorry he’d asked, when she’d given up right away on something light he’d recommended, probably Tom Sharpe, Isn’t it excruciating enough for you?” We see, immediately, that his wife is intelligent… too intelligent, probably… but lacking in common sense. The narrator’s no-nonsense view of fiction as a “light” pastime means that we can trust his opinion on things. His type builds dams and bridges. His type solves problems created by A) Nature B) the Other Types.
“He was fanatical about the screens. There was malaria nearby. He was the force behind both of them continuing to take chloroquine.” The no-nonsense narrator is the only thing between death and a livable-but-tightly-controlled Life. We will side with his opinion on everything, even when he is wrong. And he will have to be wrong about something and later admit to it: this will reinforce our trust in the narrator and in Norman Rush, too. Coetzee, in his more Leftish way, uses the same technique. A flawed narrator who isn’t too vain to admit his flaws earns our trust and identification: he is, paradoxically, perfect.
“He had an image of something like a metal claw sunk into half the planet suddenly disarticulating…” Aha: the metal claw sunk into most of the planet isn’t nominally American? No, it was Russian, and now it’s gone (and who even bothers to thank him for it?): a no-nonsense reading of The End of History which the narrator, our trusted guide, confirms for us. The planet is rife with war, however, even after the red claw’s disarticulation: History is Over but we’re still dreaming it. It seems so real.
“Nothing is more useless than dwelling on grievances, he reminded himself, feeling himself about to twitch in that direction. He’d earned the right to some satisfaction.” Or, as Donald Rumsfeld says: get over it! The stiff-upper-lip of British Empire in a sleeker, folksier, Yankee-er format. We see Bruce Willis’ self-mocking, lopsided smirk. The white-man’s-burden smirk. What’s not to admire in these guys? What a seductive avatar to lead us through a normative narrative with.
“Of course nobody knew who he was, except for Iris who had to know generally. She had no details. But when somebody wrote The Decline and Fall of the Russian Empire and Everything Connected with It he would be there between the lines.” Aha: Secret Agent. Cool.
“On weekends it could happen that there wasn’t much for lunch and he would think about the procession of chops and drumsticks that had gone out the kitchen door to Fikile that week, but he’d never complained about it.” He is a good man, the narrator. But the Africans are thieves. He understands that poverty drives them to it.
“Ray suspected that behind her agitation over Fikile was a short story she’d broken her heart reading in which one of the wretched of the earth is tricked into thinking he can learn to read by staring at a mystical diagram and repeating a nonsense mantra he has paid some charlatan his last nickel for.” He understands that Africans are poor because they are simple.
“He overlapped the yardman’s tour by half an hour or so, but the yardman could be anywhere, doing anything, including napping someplace.” Simple and lazy.
“This moment [his self-satisfaction after saving the planet from the Russian claw] was what Iris was suddenly taking away.” Women!
“The corrugated iron roof, painted red to suggest terracotta tile, was a mistake, but only in the hottest part of the year, like now, when it converted the unshaded parts of the house into ovens, to which the answer was the airconditioners they had in their bedroom and living room, at least, at opposite ends of the house, except that unfortunately Iris saw herself as acquiring virtue by abstaining from using them exactly when the justification for using them was greatest. She always denied her attitude had anything to do with solidarity with Dimakatso and the other servants in the neighborhood out in their hot cubicles or with the un-airconditioned population in general, but he thought otherwise. She claimed it was because the airconditioners made too much noise for her. She was very sensitive to noise.” There is something wrong with the way women think, too. White women and black Africans: there’s some connection. The white man is on his own.
Not only the Hurt Locker – the excerpt you quote is like Mills&Boon from a male perspective.
Does his chest swell in the way that M&B heroine’s cleavages do in other passages in the book? If not the author should consider such a device for his next piece it’ll fill up a few paragraphs if nothing else.
To all of you who have read this so I don’t have to – the excerpts were enough even without the filter of your views. Thank you!
Comrade Ed, the Foremost Neocon Literary Critic of the Milky Way Galaxy rates this normative bilge highly, you know. Get with the program. Are you Old Europe or what? Third Reich or Fourth? Look in the mirror and ask yourself.
I’m either post-Herriman or as thick as a post.
See you in The Camps, sucka!
Have only seen the trailer clips for the Hurt Locker too. I rather enjoyed the agitation of dirt by bomb shock-wave clips. If the rest of the film were like that and created a sort of Jean Genet fixation/fetishisation on banal objects as a way of measuring day to day life then one could argue its merits against its political stance. But I suspect it’s the usual US jingo-ism with faceless Ay-rabs and the agitated dirt is, as it were, a smoke-screen to cover business as usual.
Spots-on (sic), CDS Ed. What I like is how this odiously simple-minded propaganda flick is lauded as “suspenseful”. It’s about a bomb-disposal crew, you stupid cunts… one would have to be the second-least able son-of-cousin-fuckers on Earth to fumble that one, eh? (the first least-able being Bush2′s director in the 9/11: First Blood… This Time It’s Simulated kindergarten scene)
Agreed–a stonehenge of mocumentary.
Zizek chimes in with a movie review :
nutshell resume: “This is ideology at its purest: the focus on the perpetrator’s traumatic experience enables us to obliterate the entire ethico-political background of the conflict.”
its getting like the Bushes and Clintons at the Academy, now we are supposed to get excited about the competition between Camoron and his ex-wife.
Or, as I posted at The Valve in February:
Not that anyone responded: their asses were glued to the sticky seats. (Comrade DJ Sensei Ben sack-punches THL, too; I just don’t get why he recommends The Valve on the topic. CDS Ben, if you should read this anytime soon…?
The fun thing about that Žižek review is the moment when Žižek’s evil clone, “Zunenshine”, jumps in and takes over in the Comment Thread; Žižek’s left-hand sock puppet starts talking to the right and in no uncertain terms:
Comrades, by all that is holy, if James Wood ever publishes another “novel” and I for whatever perverse reasons feel compelled to read it, I want you to take appropriate action. Let this be your guide.
I thought you were going to give us the “jumping in the shit-trough” scene… (didn’t Stalin’s son do just that, btw?)
Believe me, I looked. But then, there’s something about a clean shot to the front lobe that has its undeniable appeal. So funny that I came at him with “wily” and “edifying.” I wouldn’t blame him for having assumed that I had previously read him. How to explain that that vocabulary reached me before the stain of the T-BAG on my soul? I am, as we all are, (even if you have personally steered clear) diminished for its existence.
You know who I would give my eye teeth to have dissect an excerpt, any excerpt, as you’ve done for that bum Rush? This fine lady. http://www.bu.edu/psych/faculty/charris/ If there were a Cabal for the Good as you once mused, I’d like to have her on the Steering Committee.
Running out the door on a family outing, Frances… this comment deserves energetic attention and it will get some in a couple of hours!
Perfect timing, because I am due at the Bialystoker Nursing Home to pick up a free annual package of Passover groceries for my neighbor Sylvia who is now sadly too frail to collect it herself.
Life is marvelous. I sang Hatikvah and scored a bottle of Borscht for my neighborliness!
[ed.'s note: good portents all around: this won't be a week to fear]
Those Caldwells are the Nick and Nora of TET, CDS Frances. Adding the imminent Offspringers, they are a Cabal unto themselves (we can only hope it’s for good; Catherine looks very good but Edmond looks… hmmm… suavely naughty and just ever-so-slightly … dissipated…). Clearly, Comrade Catherine is one of us already:
Invert that and you’ve modeled Simulocracy Value Judgments to a “t”
“So funny that I came at him with “wily” and “edifying.” I wouldn’t blame him for having assumed that I had previously read him. ”
Explain this please, CDS Frances. Did you catch him at an in-store appearance at Walmart…?
Many years ago, (I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now) when Dan-Dan edified Cappy on How Fiction Works over at Open Letters Monthly, I left a comment, I think it was my first lit-blog comment ever, saying that Wood was a wily thinker and a clever man (which, needless to say, I did not mean as compliments).
And then, when under Fyodor’s tuition we gang-raped him at TRE, I wrote that I thought the thrashing he received would be edifying. (And I sincerely think it was, but alas and alack for him, too little, far too late.) These two words–wily and edifying (there are others but these two especially) are so central to the relationship between Bunting Père et Fil in T-BAG. (Please don’t make me touch the book again to search for page numbers.)
It’s all so very ept, ane and fantile, in all the best possible senses, all at once!
Aha! I remember both milestones well.
I read the first two chapters of T-BAG and because no one was blackmailing me to read further, I couldn’t. I remember thinking: this fellow has no idea how to compel A Reader to go from one sentence to the next. None. It was like dancing with some rhythmless, humorless and deeply needy fucker who’d had free cha-cha lessons that very morning…
As I posted, long ago, on that semi-cunt Bitchelmore’s site (remember, this is the FLAME WAR edition of TET):
from the walk yesterday with Comrade DJ Sensei Barry
from the walk today with Beloved and Offsprung (note Offsprung’s cap)
15 seconds in… the wonderful clarity of it
“[ed.'s note: good portents all around: this won't be a week to fear]”
I don’t mean to apply undue pressure, but I am rahlly looking forward to (our real Nick) CDS Nick’s March fil-um. And, of course, ChickLit Monday. Man that ‘s coming around fast.
But CDS Frances, you didn’t like the last installment of ChickLitMonday at all! larf
I hope all the comrades, new and old, explicit and lurking, love cello music. I’ve been saving this for a special occasion; it feels like one today.
Frances much obliged.
One of my mum’s boyfriends had a bootleg first-take recording of Pablo Casals playing a cello concerto ( think it was Elgar but memory defeats me here ).The sound engineer had put the mike too near to Casal’s mouth so picked up the song he was singing whilst playing. A completely different “tune” borne of concentration and effort. At times it was like a non-stop heckle of his own playing and in its way beautiful.
But I suppose Deutsche Grammaphon or whoever decided duo-tune cello concertos wouldn’t sell and they did a second take or third or….
Ahh, the possibilities, if we would just let ourselves be free, really and truly free. What you described is an effect I’d like to try executing in writing as an experiment. I don’t know if I can achieve it but I’m excited to undertake it.
TALLULAH, JUDE: A NOVEL IDEA
(CHAPTER ONE HERE)
(CHAPTER TWO HERE)
(CHAPTER FOUR HERE)
Next Monday: Chapter Four of TALLULAH, JUDE … ChickLit in Bite-Sized Pieces!!!
CDS Neil,
Check in with us please and let us know where in the world you are.
http://flyingpigfoldingchair.blogspot.com/
Posted by Neil Addison at 15:13
Labels: death, escape, event
FBG (fucking beyond good)
[ed.'s note: Des, since you name Neil in this, I'm not super comfortable with posting his private email to you]
Yes, c’mon Neil you poetic regular in Berlin, doing it for what Faer make the derbhfine within you Neil Addison, i know who you are, come on and show yourself.
Remember that first mail, I have it here to hand:
~
Yes Neil, strange how the weft of time, chance and choice serendipitously lure into a weave which appears – persuading supernatural force of Brigante and Setantii – Ormskirk poetically writ. We could be Heaney and Mahon trumping and self-trumping one another, Addison you Lancastrian Aughton Ormy boy: not one thing or t’other, poised on some border a mile from scouser scally hordes, their city-witted jive talk in yeah yeah yeah – our woolyback oop north Coronation Street vowels, elided and either/or as/is de facto scouser manques: Do you remember, the fights on Coronation Park?
Well Neil, that’s poetry – the sudden appearance – ‘through special uses of language quite beyond prose, that persuades, tricks, cajoles, entertains and wrenches us into perceptions that we have never had before.’ – as Woodman, the seventy year old Harvard-Oxford Comrade in SE Asia, ripped off by Joan Houlihan, has it, over on the Scarriet blog mentioned in post 23 above.
“Those perceptions may be just flashes, hunches, tiny little glimpses of things we never imagined before, or they may be profound changes in our whole way of being. But they’re real — indeed, we may even say “I never guessed that before,” “I had no idea,” “My God!”
Christopher Woodman.
FLAME WAR AS PERPETUAL EXORCISM
The thing still smolders. A week later, the creature called Pinkroom is still refusing to let the Comment Thread to the GUblogicle about Ted Hughes end on a positive note. The blogicle lauds Hughes, commenters weighed in with their Yays and Nays. But what’s the point, for any one commenter, after registering the first dozen or so Nays, to go on? Lots of these things are unnaturally extended by personal combat… it’s not just a matter of registering one’s opinion on the original blogicle: it becomes a matter of fending off/ pressing personal attacks from/on other commenters. Fair enough. But in the absence of personal attacks, now, this Pinkroom Dybbuk just keeps coming back to the thread to stick her rabbit shit on any hint that Ted Hughes was anything better than crap as a poet or anything less than ridiculous or despicable as a person.
Most of it is the bogstandard UK cocktail of tall-tree-gnawing/ regional chauvinism and weaponized class anxiety (to write too well is to be a virtual “Toff”). But there’s something else. What is it?
And this comes in, three days after my last appearance in the thread and five days after the comment the insurgent is referring to:
Note the projection: the commenter rages about “serious psychological difficulties” and refers to me as “goebbels”. This first-in-the-thread-comment from this avatar isn’t fending off any attack I’ve made on this particular commenter and doesn’t even take the trouble to comment on Hughes’ poetry: the hatred is palpable, as is the level of psychic disturbance. Amazing shit. We’re nearly in the twilit preserve of the Spiritually Creepy here. This is the microcosm: what’s the macro…?
UPDATE: at least this one’s erudite and entertaining: yesterday, a commenter named “CRANBROOK” accused Ted Hughes of offing Sylvia Plath with psyops:
Due to my alcoholic tendency, the thoughts and feelings I find myself expressing online generally – in the cut and thrust atmosphere of avataristic debate with anonymous posters – swing from smiling bevevolence and easy tolerance, to rabid foaming hatred, depending on where in the cycle the bi-polar swing is.
I rarely go more than a week or two without getting drunk and feeling shit for days after, and the down side to this are the downers. It takes a week to fully recover my form and humor, and if I slip into drinking more than once a week, it could be three and four weeks of paranoia, staring listless at the computer screen, everything I read by the anonymous and known regs on my cyberounds, really bugging me – and projecting into belief some editorial conspiracy on the part of every editor in the world hating me because they know I know their game.
How dare they, by psychic means on a social-network literature site, use supernatural methods to affect one’s game, hungover, denying me the right to use my name. How fucking dare they Steve!!!!
I am often in this state of mind, feeling rough and driven by a strong come-down-combative urge which displaces all of one’s intellectual and human flaws, into feeling somehow personally hard-done to by – a) the anonymous bloggers on the Guardian poetry threads I view as lexicographical objects to romper and deconstruct in the linguisitc gimp-room and – b) every online poet I am ‘competing’ with for the title of One Most Knowing The Truth of Bardic lore.
It’s all linked to the booze because it’s only in the days after a bender I convince myself we are all middle-aged, sat on the arse know-all equivalents of (verbal) violence loving louts who just want to beat random anonymous people up online in print, to develop and sharpen our oral stiletto – for the sole purpose of THEATRE.
Perform in print, give the reader a show: this sometimes slips out of view, but because I haven’t been on the ale for two weeks, I have had long enough to get a stable run in and should be fairly pleasant and genuinely without animosity, until the next session, after which I will be hating everyone online.
It’s difficult to lure a reader in when writing about online spats. Most just aren’t that interesting to read, and the biggest reason why, I think, is because arguing in print about literature, is boring for all but the few participants doing so.
I know from personal experience, reading back stuff about online spats that I can now recognize how and why it was boring for the reader. That what I was doing, how I felt, was really an act and the printed performance of an actuary bore and ham I was pretending to be, in the theatrical set-piece flytes with others I had convinced myself with projection were cunts, but in truth where exactly the same as me, just another human being who loves poetry and performing – back then, still finding my ‘voice’ and ‘name’ within.
I read back earlier flytings and spot the hollowness in my pose, knowing now writing is only a performance, sure I needed to deep-act and con myself I believed all the rubbish I wrote, that such a poet by sating such a thing, means s/he was a disgrace to the human race and a calculated affront to me personally as some middle aged grey headed fat tosser on the scratch avoiding any real kinda work for a living, yoking further and further into the fiction I am a productive member of the bourgeoisie boring bastards class.
It was only recently I felt I got past all that and came to grasp, it’s not about them anonymous and/or famous tossers, but your blog-reader, who doesn’t wanna hear the moans of some bloke on the dole talking shit about how poetical it all is, but wants some proper Theatre and kerfuffle, rants and spats, scraps, competitive insults. Two poster-poets going at it hammer and tongue, both telling one another to fuck right off as inventively as possible in the flyting.
It took me a long time to work through the anon-not anon bollocks and honestly mate, it’s all just theatre, smoke and mirrors, abracadabra and abracadabru, and at the end of the day, as far as poetry’s concerned Lancashababru cannot be beaten online, as far as I can read, coz I aint seen no other honest boring bardic git obsessed by ‘emselves to the extent I and Lancashafuckingbabaru is you cunts!!!
What I’d prefer from the thrashers and sneerers would be higher-quality verbal-dagger-play; post-Cyrano stuff. Talent improves even Hate.
The image of that child in a KKK getup is chilling. One of my own earliest memories is of attending a fair housing demonstration with my parents to fight against redlining, a memory I can be proud of. One must never condescend to children or display them gratuitously. No way that little girl understood the hateful fantasy in which she was an extra. Here’s an antidote.
“No way that little girl understood the hateful fantasy in which she was an extra.”
If only, CDS Frances! If anything, the hatred of her grownups is childish in its purity; I remember all too well the terrifying force that hatred could marshal in children that girl’s rough age. Children see more clearly, hear more sharply and are infinitely better gauges of body-language and para-verbal inflection than we are… to grow old is to forget how to perceive the world by substituting our senses (and unmediated sense of Reality) with inculcated models. That little girl has absorbed every lesson of her environment. Maybe she grew up to marry a Lesbian Jewess of Color but at that time of her life (unless that photo is staged) she is all there and in it and happy to learn from her parents.
PS Have I mentioned that I have a (non-Klan) son of thirty…?
That’s what you meant by “kids.” You really are a mean old daddy, but I do like you. Don’t even try and scare me with Carrie. I turn somersaults in pig’s blood at this point. It’s like amniotic fluid for me. I just gurgle and splash and frolic awash in the glorious elixir. And I give as good as I get. The Mayan kings have nothing on me.
I am ecstatically happy to hear you have a grown son. You’re the kind of capaciously-hearted man who should have many children, CDS Steven. Please tell us something about him when you can. I’m already proud of him.
Well, he’s a musician (in two popular bands; he’ll be touring in France soon), a husband… and (hold on to your hat)… the father of a daughter who’s only two and a half years younger than my second child, his half-sister (ie, his daughter’s aunt). Get back to me when you regain consciousness! Larf [ed.'s note: he was the result, if you're curious, of a college pregnancy; mother was a rich girl who grew up next door to Earl Butz, if that rings a bell]
UPDATE: forgot to mention that I first met Comrade DJ Sensei JR after she and he became lovers! Ach! Hippies…
I know I’m a mean old man, CDS Frances, but, even on my best behavior, I wouldn’t be able to sit through more than fifteen minutes of this sort of film… with that adorable little girl with perma-clean hair and the speechless days of penny-whistle chores of unsurpassed beauty. Having said that, just imagine how much better off Blacks in North America would be now if they’d gotten this soft-focus mythologizing for twenty years instead of smear-jobs like Precious…
And another. A steady little rocker in the making.
Now that’s more like it!
Shit…I could have told him that and I’m an Arts graduate…
Hard to imagine going wrong with the formula “Humans Are Too Stupid”: it applied the moment our regrettable ancestors became self-conscious and decided to fuck up stuff simply because they could. It’s just unfair we’ll be taking goats, cows, chickens, dogs and parrots with us when we finally torch it (my money is on micro-black holes or oxygen fission). It’s okay that we’ll be collaterally killing cats off, though; they’re as amoral as we are. In fact, maybe cats have been egging us on the whole time. Just probably bored with it all, innit? Fish-flavored shit for dinner, fuck once a lifetime (if at all) and torture a mouse to death for distraction: wears thin quick. Yeah, humans: push the button. G’wan you hairless bipedal cunts…
The sheer volume of people going to the Arctic circle to tell us the dangers of global warming can’t help matters either.
Gone are the days when standing in front of a photo and wagging your finger was enough. Now keeping it real is the name of the game.
Was reading about the decimation of the passenger pigeon which carpetted the US skies before the Mayflower arrived. Even though they knew the last flock was the last flock they still killed them all.
GLORIOUS MEATSPACE FLAME WARS OF YORE
THE CADAVER SYNOD:
STRANGEST TRIAL IN HISTORY
Yes, indeed. When those dudes had a flame-war, they didn’t pull any fucking punches. Happy days…mind you, at least the poor bastard was dead. An older generation of Romans knew how to conduct a feud, too. Throw your enemies off the Tarpeian Rock (a steep cliff at the southern summit of the Capitoline Hill, overlooking the Forum).
It was used during the Republic as an execution site. Murderers, traitors, perjurors, and larcenous slaves, if convicted by the quaestores parricidii, were flung from the cliff to their deaths. Those who had a mental or significant physical disability also suffered the same fate as they were thought to have been cursed by the gods (bye-bye Ian Drury; farewell Ray Charles; so long Michael Jackson; hasta la vista Wendy Carlos).
Wasn’t Ollie Cromwell disinterred, put on trial, convicted and hung and quartered (after the restoration of Slippery Charlie Stuart)? I could be wrong…
And to think the imaginative fuckers only missed having 10,000,000-hits viral YouTube sensations by centuries! Ever read the book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Foucault? I read it in the ’90s and it prepared me for the noughties. Eye-opener. (Ooops, we’ve missed a chance at an Edward ll jape…)
Yeah. Cromwell ‘the Cunt’ was posthumously executed in 1661 – dug up and hung in chains at Tyburn three years after death, his decapitated head put on a pole outside Westminster Hall until 1685
‘Afterwards the head changed hands several times, including the sale in 1814 to a man named Josiah Henry Wilkinson, before eventually being buried in the grounds of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in 1960′ – wikipedia informs the reader.
There’s a poet from Galway who makes a living selling the Big Issue in Dublin, in his sixties, known for putting Yeats into Irish and occassionally on TG4 the Irish language channel, reciting his translations. Paddy Finnegan, a legend to the small band of Dublin dabblers and if you ctach him before he’s drunk too much, a pure treat.
He has a Curse on Cromwell poem I have heard that puts the hairs up on the back of your neck. This is him at the Patrick Kavanagh Celebration 2007, above in the Palace Bar, literary watering hole of Smiley the Irish Times editor, who doled out favours to the forties and fifties Dublin literati.
Grooven! Des, can you do us the godly favor (when you’ve got the time) of transcribing the lyric? I can make out most of it but the audio quality is iffy (even with headphones) and missing two words in a row is too much.
And haven’t you got access to a camera of some sort? Film yourself in the WC declaiming, man, and post it here!
It’s called
Post From Parnassus (after Patrick Kavanagh) by myself, Paddy Finnegan.
I can’t make it out myself, and only posted it because I know that a remote viewer who’s not been on the island before, will probably take away something essentially poetic about this reality. Here’s a man at the other end of the spectrum from Heaney in wealth and fame, but who’s appeared on the same bill as the Mossbawn magus, just as ‘respected’ as a human being by the poets of this small green dump of wet and wind, topography of the sidhe, they who make sixteen great-greats and four grandparents, eight forebears in our derbhfine – mother, father binary half and half system Amergin in the untitled advice to poets – leads us know and which theoretical physics declares real, it-magic not on show but beneath your surface, unseen abracadabra and Lancashababru, a world and realm within – withouts you in the reflection of our Cosmic Co-ordinating Creator – space-time string Michio Kaku dreamt, far more epistemologically real, his philosophy and explanation of nature’s original branch, method and limits of human knowledge, perhaps..we just dunno.
This is Raven, who pitched up here from San Francisco a year after myself, and me and Sweeney. Noel, who has the live magic more than most – looked at each other and thought, oh well, pack in now coz Raven’s smohken, but what happened after a few weeks is we saw through the ‘show’ and into the technical act, finding succor in that because he then became just like us instead of out there on his own in some best-bubble with his own star-wars defence shield deflecting any criticism with his live act, trumping and self-trumping, the poet Group who weekly went through the motions and learned from one another, in Dublin, home of dreamy poetical types and a great gas, while it lasted, the three year weekly learning how to be a live ****
Tanks mon! Aces. Will hit the pillow now and plow through the riches in the morning…
“…but what happened after a few weeks is we saw through the ’show’ and into the technical act, finding succor in that because he then became just like us instead of out there on his own in some best-bubble with his own star-wars defence shield deflecting any criticism with his live act…”
Good point. It’s a smooth act (only one mistake while doing it all from memory, in the below-linked clip) resting very heavily on the cliché of that cadence/intonation… my bookish friends and I (into poetry readings in 1977 in Philly; there was a shockingly literate subculture in a neighborhood called Germantown, back then) would do precisely that Beatnik-y thing, satirically, while declaiming the stock-phrase joke-line “concrete fingers scrape the sky”… pretending to be accompanied by bongos. I’ve done that bit as recently as last year, btw: whenever we see a chick in a black beret and a leotard or a hipster with a monkish beard and set of bongos…
And that’s a serious failing, I feel: “authenticity” depends on a narrow interpretation of “tradition” that really means “cliché” lurching towards self-parody. Raven’s performance is professional but where are the surprises? The lack of surprise there is the very thing that makes the performance professional (call it the Big Mac effect?).
Still, the cat is cool. His package is shiny.
It’s funny how an audience can tell when an act is going through the motions and a genuine connection with them is not there, be it a show that is a distant fourth wall affair or an act that relies on direct communication with its public.
I remember going to see Spalding Gray who at the time I thought had that kind of self-awareness about the importance of the here and now down as good as anyone. But you could tell on the night he wasn’t really there. It can be tiredness due to over-performing and over-touring or that the performer has become bored with his/her own act.
When something works live it’s very hard to break away from that as the adrenaline gained is a delightful feeling. But it’s no good for you artistically.
The late great tragic Spalding. I kept three or four treasured VCR cassettes of his performance films for years, plus two of his books, but they’ve all finally vanished now that he’s gone.
“When something works live it’s very hard to break away from that as the adrenaline gained is a delightful feeling. But it’s no good for you artistically.” Yeah, funny how pleasing/pleasuring (pandering to) the contemporaneous audience can degrade your Art. One of the facts of life.
That’s true but on the other hand before the advent of YouTube where what you do is almost online before you’ve finished doing it many acts used to tour the same show for decades. I suppose it’s down to how you approach it. We keep acts on the road but also have an almost neurotic obsession to make new work as well.
2 of my friends were back-up musicians for ( what transpired to be ) Viv Stanshall’s last tour. He played “Jollity Farm” amongst many other Bonzo favourites and next to me were similarly aged men who you could see were moved by that experience where memory-attachment mixes with he’s in the same room as me singing that song.
So I’m extremely Stalinist about the necessity to create new work all the time but make allowances for those I like.
I guess I’m bound for those camps aren’t I?
Your monogrammed jumpsuit is ready.
Any colour choice other than orange?
Erm no.
Over the years, I’ve had a lot of friends who were involved in the entertainment/performance lark in one way or another. The majority of them barely scraped a living at it nor did they ever really expect to.
Thing is, although I like to pretend that I’m a pragmatic bastard and I teased them mercilessly, secretly I had nothing but admiration for them.
They loved performing and they loved and respected the work they performed. Things done for love are always, always purer, nobler, just flat-out better than things done for any other reason.
At the risk of sounding like some patchouli-addled hippie, love is the best reason of all.
Don’t tell anyone I said so, though…
[ed.'s note: as long as you don't refer to it as "empowering"...]
I’m going to post this because CDS Frances reminded me of this story (upthread); I’d forgotten how much I like it. Comrades Lurking and Explicit who know this text too well, already… scroll on… scroll on…
SARAH IS FIVE-ISH
You expect a clockwork metropolis resembling dirty stacks of old wedding cakes. It’s a surprise riding into Vienna from the airport on the shuttle and seeing miles of heavy industry instead. Silver pipes and vast white tanks and smokestacks protruding from asphalt plants and refineries. There was a premonition of this already at the airport because the horizon is ringed with the rust-tinged edge of an inverted bowl of old industrial weather. The last thing you’d expect of the former heart of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire is to be reminded of pre-EPA Pittsburgh in its sky-killing heyday, but life is just one long surprise for the living, isn’t it?
Further in, at the center, in the area around the Stephansdom (the cathedral), things look more as they are supposed to. Vienna is a closer match for “Vienna” here: the plaster-pallid coachmen are top-hatted and their Fiackers are brightly enameled in greens or reds and heavily trimmed in black. Some of the Fiackers, drawn by two-horse teams, are so black they look like funeral carriages, never more so than when the horses drawing one of the grandiose things through crowds across Graben, the old square, are pure white.
Sarah and I are having a rest on the long lawn in front of the Votivkirche. Sarah is five-ish. We watch as a bespectacled file clerk in short-sleeves and stiff-legged pants goes from girl to girl, snapping photos with the barest minimum of subterfuge. Every three snaps or so, he pretends to take a picture of the church, or a tree, as long as the church or tree happens to fall within the sight line of an interposed girl showing skin. He makes his way around the park, barely able to control his excitement at capturing all these soft white girls and their long limbs laid out browning in the sun.
In the sun it feels like late spring but in the shade it feels much colder, as though patches of snow should still be visible in the trees and on the grass. The man snaps his fill of girlflesh and eventually disappears into the Votivkirche, following two tiny things in tulip dresses with their unsuspecting parents who are entering the whispery dark no doubt with the unironic intention of prayer. Sarah and I stand up, brush off our bums and leave the park as the bells begin their robust work at noon. I am feeling a bit hungry.
Sitting in The Café Braeunerhof, I’m struck by the paradox that the service is both far ruder and infinitely more polite than what I have come to expect in Berlin. The waiters in Berlin espouse the rights of man and bodily refute the very notion of service; what are your pennies compared to their self respect? They slouch and mumble while serving and your manners devolve to the level of the service. Viennese staff hold the clientele to a much higher standard, for service is a form of mastery in Vienna. Sarah’s plate of scrambled eggs comes with an implicit command not to play with her food and I’ve never seen her use a fork so adultly. For myself I’ve ordered a sausage filled with cheese and served with a tin of beer, known in jolly Viennese slang as An aatrige mit a blech… some pus with a tin.
Sarah says, “Aunt Iris has two big horses, a black one and a white one, like the ones we saw with the carriage, Henry,” but I tell her that isn’t true. Then she says, “But I saw them,” and I assert that this, too, is untrue. Sarah has never seen her Aunt Iris before, unless it was in photos so old that Iris herself was a child in them. And Iris definitely doesn’t have horses. She lives with a cat in a shitty little apartment on Hahngasse.
Leaning through the cook’s portal in his immaculate toque and framed by steam is a dead ringer for Paul Gaugin, bent nose, grease-paint mustache and everything. Earlier in the day we saw Richard Wagner in a light gray suit, shirt open at the collar, inspecting the tourists and shop fronts of Graben with an air of lordly tolerance, hands clasped behind his back, gray hair skirting the suit collar.
Half of the clientele of The Braeunerhof are phantoms themselves. There’s the grinning geezer with a lap-long beard he is not much wider than to the front and there’s the off-season Brunhilde in a booth like a ship in her bosom-prowed dress slurping soup and there’s a dapper fellow with his Herald Tribune in the window under a fading magazine clipping about Thomas Bernhard, the Austrian writer who liked brooding over his coffee and a newspaper in that very spot. Bernhard is dead as a Mesopotamian now, ribs like a sprung umbrella. Can no longer talk, feel, write or taste coffee. I wonder what he thinks about in that little room. I wonder if death was worth it?
When I ask Sarah if she wants a dessert she says no thankyou, Henry. Declining the pleasure is her way of proving to me that she’s a good person I guess and this touches me terribly and I take her hand and lead her out of The Braeunerhof and onto the iron shadow of the cathedral. I almost make the mistake of offering a look inside the eternity-obsessed hangar with its gray recumbent saints and its vertebral columns but catch myself before the blunder. I’m relieved that she’s simply happy to walk in the new shoes I bought her. Relieved they don’t hurt.
The goodwill that being an English-speaking tourist elicits never ceases to astonish me. Sheepishly begging directions from one Viennese after another, we become not only progressively more lost, but treated with greater and greater patience and sympathy, until I’m ready for the last direction-giver, a Muslim lady pushing her somber tram, to give us a kiss, cab fare to Hahngasse and a little mother’s milk for the trip. I come to the interesting conclusion that the landmark each person has given us to navigate by is calibrated to his or her respective social class or personality. Bank, kulturhaus, discount shoe store. The dark-robed Muslim lady tells us to turn right at the cemetery.
We are standing on a steep hill on a wide street in windy shadows when we notice a gray pasha in brown polyester, shiny-domed and grandiosely mustached, beckoning madly from a café table in front of the bistro on the other side. He is either the bistro’s owner, or some sort of local landmark, a colorful character busily writing himself into the oral history of the neighborhood.
“Where do you want to go?” he asks, dismissing my map with a gesture of gregarious scorn. He thumps his chest. “I know everywhere.”
I tell him the name of the street and he frowns. Soon, both of us are huddled over the map, gripping its corners like the wings of a bird we’ve snatched, for the purposes of divination, from the breast of the wind. A handsome matron in a cheerful scarf and a Burberry coat is just then stepping from the bistro and pasha intercepts her with one discreetly lateral move, blocking her exit and inquires, sotto voce, how to get to Hahngasse. The matron peers at Sarah, then me, registering, no doubt, the fact that the little girl and I cannot possibly be related.
“Do you speak English?” she asks, with a heavy German accent.
With five or six sets of conflicting directions to choose from, Sarah and I finally find Hahngasse. I think I remember the street number, but how to get into the building to search for the flat? Her name isn’t on any of the buzzers. I buzz a random name and politely explain that I wish to leave a note for Frau Lott. Once in the building, we climb the staircase, ascending into a bowely-warm odor of cooking that harmonizes with the dark trim and carpet. On each landing I look for Iris Lott’s name, three different doors per landing, many of the doors astonishingly beautiful, ornate in the Belle Epoque style. On the fourth landing, two to go, Sarah says she’s tired so we take a break, sitting on the stairs, and I wish I’d been prescient enough to buy fruit for her. Something. She says,
“Henry, when we find Aunt Iris, will you stay with Aunt Iris too?”
I say no.
“Just me and Aunt Iris?”
And her cat. Yes.
“Will I see you again Henry?”
No.
She lowers her head to a resolute angle and says, logically, “Then I hope we don’t find Aunt Iris.”
We descend again to the front hall and find the mailboxes and there stands, on one of the boxes, on a strip of paper taped beside the name on the official nameplate on the box, in faintest pencil, M. Lott. It must be Iris, but I don’t know what the “M” stands for. Does she have a name I’ve never heard her sister Sandy mention? Discoveries like this tend to take all the air out of me; doors opening onto doors opening onto doors towards a room of useless secrets; so I concentrate on the task at hand. But there’s no slot on the box that I might slip a note through (if I had a pencil and paper to write one with) . The mailman carries a master key, I assume, with which to open the whole bank of boxes in one go.
I’m trying to shimmy my business card through a hairline crack in the mailbox, an activity that looks suspiciously like a foreigner tampering with the Austrian postal system, a crime probably punishable with flogging, when we hear a key in the front door and I jump an inch in my skin. An elderly gentleman in a derby hat and a three-piece suit lets himself in, pauses to take in the scene and greets us with a loose nod and a “Grüss Gott” that sounds like a dying man’s terminal greeting.
Sarah says, “That man scared me, Henry!” and I have to admit that he scared me too. But everything does.
I like this story. It’s empowering, in a very real sense.
BTW, I’m not sure if this is true or not and I can’t googlefirm it, but a poster on the Aussie censorship thread (at the Graun) stated that Australia has banned images of small-breasted women because it’s a ‘gateway drug’ to paedophilia. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry…
[ed.'s note: much more effective to ban daycare centers]
[ed.'s other note: the building appearing in the last bit of that Vienna story was the building Beloved and I were actually in looking for her old friend, a great-grandson of Robert Louis Stevenson]
Amazing synchronicity there, M…
A sort of TACKINESS BAN; I like it:
Men need to be helped/forced to familiarize themselves with the anatomies of women they actually know (and who are already familiar with their men’s anatomies in turn). Fuck locally, surf globally.
My head is full of pornographic images of my wife. The advantages of this are many but the most obvious being that it’s free, you silly fuckers. Why are you paying cash to humiliate yourselves with ringers who despise you? I always thought the biggest kick of sexplay was the fact that it was one’s own dick (and other bits) that had been picked (from a field of worthy contenders). Professionalizing that process short-circuits the atavistic ecstasy of being Chosen. We just aren’t taught enough of these important things, brothers. I don’t need to mention how poor your Pussy-slurping skills are, do I (just once try doing it after your own apotheosis)? Time to bone up.
Off to Iceland, Comrades Penis-Bearing Single and non-Homomanic!
[ed.'s note: Comrades Ed, Edmond, Mish, Des, Sean and, erm, a few others are obviously exempt as targets of these exhortations as a result of being either erotogenically married or existing on a higher plane than sex]
If you read Genet it would appear that almost anything ( a pick-axe and cigarette smoke in his case ) is the gateway drug to impure thoughts.
Leave it to an ugly bald cock-sucking ex-con Frog to delight us so. It’s got nothing on my Burroughs but my 1963 edition of “Our Lady of the Flowers” is carefully wrapped in plastic.
“Your Burroughs”? Is that a euphemism?
[ed.'s note: more of a nickname]
TET Escort Service–We Take You All The Way There
[ed's note- they deleted a rearview nude of Simone de Beauvoir?]
http://noggs.typepad.com/the_reading_experience/2010/03/jonathan-mayhew-affirms-the-notion-that-poetry-aspires-to-the-condition-of-music-arguing-specifically-that-poetry-is-closer.html (I’d like to think it was we who egged him on, but either way, we’re home.)
[ed.'s note: how about, "TET Escorts-We take you home and back!"]
Out the door… back in a few hours, CDS Frances! Offsprung wants to visit a Satanic Global coffee chain…
She’s a busy little bee. Buzz on!
(Hope they take their hoverboards–much faster to-ing and fro-ing.)
As she put it recently:
“I dreamed about the whole world that we sailed in a boat.”
Sunday, March 28, 3:34pm
There’s something I want to say to you about that when I meet you. I think you’ll enjoy hearing it spoken in my voice rather than reading it on a monitor.
As an inveterate re-reader I prefer my smalltalk sonic and the things worth saying in print. Can’t you tell?
Sure. What you have done for Sprout, covering her into the projected future, is Godlike, in my humble opinion.
By being her Boswell, you mean?
“Jonathan Mayhew affirms the notion that poetry aspires to the condition of music…”
If the poetry features a “refrain” and the music is “pop” (structurally repetitive): okay: almost. Otherwise: pure nonsense. Music and non-representational painting are closer: poetry consists of words and words (as shifty as they can be) “mean” something. A G-minor chord doesn’t “mean” anything.
I just saw this refinement. I endorse it wholeheartedly.
“I’m trying to read your portrait, but
I’m helpless like a rich man’s child.”
I don’t get this in Temporary Achilles. Dylan definitely sings “poetry” but the lyrics say “portrait.” Why?
For the same reason that Mp3s of “Crimson and Clover” are usually labeled “Velvet Underground”…?
Duh. Why didn’t I think of that?
Because you are trustworthy you think others are worthy of trust
[ed.'s note: a familiar refrain Chez Augustine, btw]
FLAMELET OF THE DAY
I just don’t like “nice”… (chiefly because it’s so A) disingenuous B) uninformative)
THOSE WHO CAN, DO; THOSE WHO CAN’T, TEACH. THOSE WHO CAN’T TEACH GET TENURE
There was a blog a few weeks back about writing naturalistic dialogue in which Woody Allen was cited. An odd choice I thought.
I suggested that on the page Allen’s dialogue doesn’t seem any more realistic than anything else – it was the overlaps of speech, pauses in speech, stutters and tics ( natch ) when the actors are directed that gave his dialogue its naturalistic quality. The way it’s spoken rather than what it is.. Although the fact that some of his lines are so funny ( I’m talking mid-period Allen here ) that in “real life” the characters would surely acknowledge the fact by laughing at them, to me means that we probably have to look elsewhere for real realism.
Your advantage/disadvantage being that you’ve actually taken the trouble to think about this stuff long before commenting… Ed… I mean… Al….
I’ve chuckled over that “Realism” (aka the Naturalistic) in movies riff more times than I can calculate…
UPDATE: in fact, here I am in May of 2007:
THE MASKS BEHIND THE FACE
One relevant observation and one epiphany… one rather long ago and another sunk cold in the bog of primordial time:
In the ’60s, I only ever saw grownups with the mask off when they were extremely angry, or mildly drunk. That is, I only ever got to hear what grownups really thought about things during Thanksgiving. Every other time of the year I heard them speaking to each other (whether or not they knew I was within earshot), or to me, I detected what I now would characterize as the Disney Voice. Specifically: the Late Disney Voice, since Early Disney was rather cruel.
The Late Disney Voice was innocuous and often cheerful and what’s striking about this is that we’re talking about the “height” (or our perception of it as thus) of the Vietnam war… a war in which an uncle was “serving” (that word is just so apt) and fairly fucking likely to die. It was only once a year, over turkey and the mysteriously aromatic red stuff in the rarely-seen glasses on the grownup’s table, that I got to hear (if I waited up) grownups freaking out, externally, about the stuff they were freaking out about, internally, all year long. Is that why people get really fucking mad: so they can finally say what they really think? Is that why they get shit-faced drunk?
That was my observation. My epiphany:
In the late 1980s, I read an interview with the then up-and-coming, semi-outsider band called WAS NOT WAS. They were a WEEN-like duo that went mainstream and had one stupid, original-mission-statement-contradicting, very big novelty hit. The interview I read was before the hit. In it, they described what I considered then (and still consider) a brilliant working method: in order to discuss important compositional/production/business decisions, they put on masks first (I seem to remember that they were Nixon masks but I suspect that’s an embellishment).This made it possible for one partner to say to the other, “I think that idea is stupid, and here’s why…”.
And so the epiphany came to me with a Rolling Stone in my hands: that most of what we say to each other, while we’re being polite, and wearing our daily masks, is junk. Emollient junk, to be sure. But junk. Because the paradox is that when using your actual face, feet or inches from another actual face, it’s much safer to use fake words. And vice versa. Which is my point. Real face/fake words vs Real words/fake face. (Well, not so much with Germans… but that’s another analysis…)
Ignore the lamentations about the “loss of civility” that the Internet appears to be breeding, Comrades Lurking and Explicit. Just as booze won’t make a genuinely gentle person into an angry drunk, the Internet isn’t turning a bunch of natural-born French diplomats into a horde of angry fuckers. The fuckers were already angry (and all I ask of the angry fuckers is that the angry fuckers learn to express themselves better with words; when they reach that point, imagine how fruitful it will be when someone asks all those angry fuckers why they’re so fucking angry).
Get out there and express some blunt fucking Truth of your own, Comrades. Seriously. If not now, when?
This comes to us via airmail from CDS Barry, Comrades. Most powerful:
(excerpt)
[ed.'s note: not to be spooky, Comrades Lurking and Explicit, but anyone notice the Vietnam War thread running through the last four posts? Pure TET Coincidence.]
How spooky Zen is it that I have had two impassioned friendships with Italian-American actors who have both appeared on the Sopranos and whom I consider teachers? The first is a former co-worker named John who could reduce me to tears of laughter simply by asking “Are you having fun yet?” at just the opportune time. (That was the teaching.) The second was with Carl Capotorto of Twisted Head fame. His name tells you why I adore him. He’s cute in the vid below but you have to see his poopy diaper scene in the Trey Billings Show (a star-turn to rival Carol Channing in Hello Dolly), to know what my threshold for pre-Pagodan funny was. I have thought of both of these vigorous men often and with great fellow-feeling.
seems affable enough
In light of the KKK child here’s another WTF is going on here exactly moment.
Is there an acronym slightly more emphatic than WTF?
Mudder fudder as the Scarface kids would have it runs it close.
Chilling on at least 14 levels.
You know the story about Disney animators calling the studio Mauschwitz and then, after being told from above that this wasn’t acceptable, they re-christened it Duckau.
If you don’t that’s it.
alarming
Egg
[ed's note- not quite a haiku, Ed, but evocative]
Edlarming Alyor
caterpillar
[ed's note-getting there]
Edward Taylor
Imago
This word-press is certainly easy to use when when you’re locked in a battle between anonymity and real identity it does yer bleedin’ head in.
[ed's note-now you've overshot "haiku" entirely-try for a sonnet]
The way things are going Norse saga with foot-notes might be the appropriate form to cover this.
[ed's note-the trick will be illustrating it with an image that tiny pic or photobucket won't delete]
The Tijuana Bible drawing is still up ( on this computer at least )
For a while it was replaced by a deleted sign but it seems to have won in the High Court and Wimpy’s decidedly non-wimpy “Burroughs” is there for all to see.
Perhaps drawings don’t count????
[ed's note-don't jinx it! have you seen Comment #69?]
Erm… this has something to do with the JFK assassination… apparently…
ANOTHER SPEECHLESS WALK THROUGH BERLIN
fuck a saint’s nostril with a puritan’s cold blue dick: not five minutes after I posted a photo of a poster on display on a busy street in Berlin, it was deleted because the poster features femnips (have since re-posted on photo bucket)! Is it 1957? And how are so many sites getting away with showing snaps of cruelly gnarled cocks in livid pink anuses and so forth? Is “anal” okay? Tits toxic? What?
DIFFICULT TEXTS
low fat episode
I AM PHILLY DAWG
Before marrying Luddy, way back in what Luddy refers to disparagingly as Bobbi’s “interesting past,” Bobbi had been married, for not quite a year, to a boyish man named Charlton Diggins. This was back in Philly. Bobbi suspected from the beginning that Charlton was a guy of Jewish descent trying to pass himself off as a guy of Italian descent and she’d liked that about him.
She’d suspected it was Charlton’s mother who was the X-factor, because Charlton was strangely evasive about both his mother and his mother’s side of the family. He said she was dead and Bobbi asked when, were you a child or already grown, because it might explain some things, but he’d seemed to need a few seconds to decide what was what before answering her. Or maybe it’s how your mind freezes when you’re talking to a Customs Official, but Bobbi wasn’t a Customs Official, she was Charlton Diggins’s newlywed bride, Roberta Gertrude Fortneaux Diggins, and he was obviously, touchingly, making it up, the line about his mother died in child birth. Charlton tried to pass off his three-second pause of invention as grief but Bobbi assumed it was shame and that Charlton’s mother was a Jewess maybe living right there in Philadelphia. He had that look about him, and Philadelphia was the kind of city in which you might lie about something like that in 1977.
The black roofs of the gray row-homes in Germantown are slick as rain hats in the fog at daybreak. Mornings in Philly can seem like classical mornings in a seaport and you do glimpse errant gulls sometimes, spiraling over rotted weather vanes and the witchy black fingers of Prussian spires. Bobbi loved the 19th century row-homes of Germantown with their bracketed cornices and flat roofs, built of Wissahickon schist. She tried sketching a block of these immaculately painted row-homes on a mostly black street from a corner bus stop one morning but found it was more pleasurable to look than draw. Three mornings in a row she tried and failed. The final morning of that little project she had an episode with some frisky black kids toting book bags shouting, “Draw me!” “Draw me!” “Hey lady, draw me!”
Three minutes felt like hours. They left Bobbi with a frozen grin and a racing heart when the SEPTA bus finally wheezed to a halt at the stop and took the little devils away. The blouse under her nylon windbreaker was soaking with sweat. Why did these kids scare her so? They were just kids.
Bobbi was 26 when she met her future first husband, 26 and feeling old and anxious to get married. No lines yet on her face, hair still dense and shiny, figure Huck-Finnish if tall. She wasn’t living at home with her parents, she was set up in a leafy little back-of-the-building apartment on Penn Street about a ten minute walk to the three-storey house of her birth, on Queen Lane, where she was expected to stop by a few times a week, vulnerable to the pressure to do so by dint of being single and without a career.
Bobbi just didn’t have it in her to pretend to be too busy to visit her depressing parents. All of her school friends had 5-year-old sons and careers and Bobbi had a part time job and an easel. She rarely watched television. She was trying to be a painter, devouring winsome biographies of Picasso and Chagall and Modigliani over canned ravioli for dinner and then painting in stinkless, unserious acrylic well into the strangely suburban Philadelphia night by candle light, listening to the thick shiver of the breezed leaves of the Elms and the hourly clatter of the number 26 trolley up Wayne avenue and the lonely attenuated bark of a dog in another neighborhood. The dog became her mascot and her familiar. You bark and I paint. We are faithful to our given tasks while the lockstep world is sleeping.
Working in an art supply store, Bobbi was plugged into an endless source of children and old women with projects and hobbies but never had the serious art conversations with up-and-coming painters she’d dreamed of when applying for the job. Where were the up-and-coming painters of Philly buying their supplies? Were they all grinding their own pigments? She could well imagine that buying commercial tubes of paint was some kind of uncool capitulation in the eyes of artistic geniuses and that’s how she began to think of herself: the timid kind of amateur who not only used tubes of store-bought paint but had a part-time job in the store she bought them in.
The only thing Bobbi had going for herself artistically speaking was monomania. She knew that much about art, that monomanias are good. Versatility is show-offy and evolution is craftsmanlike but monomania bespeaks the psychological disturbances that average citizens and patrons of the art expect worthwhile artists to suffer. Over and over again she painted her hieroglyphic of the barking dog, mouth open and tail straight back. The dog was either barking or howling.
Eventually she worked with Krylon spray paint and a cardboard stencil for iconic mass-produced accuracy, but the fumes indoor were too much so she sprayed outside, in the back yard, with the canvases propped against the hurricane fence, which began looking geometrically diseased with partial rectangles of various colors. Bobbi got the bold inspiration one humid, meteorologically backed-up evening to just keep on going through the fence gate and down the alley with the spray can and the stencil and do it on a nearby office building. Just an unobtrusive and enigmatic silhouette in black metallic spray paint on the building’s cornerstone, right next to the A.D. MCMXXXVII, the execution of which produced in Bobbi’s skull the soft pop of an artistic breakthrough orgasm. A middle aged (in her mind) white (to all appearances) middle class (irrefutably) graffitist. One of those things where it suddenly hits you you’ve been heading this direction all along. Your whole life.
Spraying on public structures at 3am was an intensely sexual thrill for her, like a skin change operation she could undo every daybreak and re-do every night, like having Velcro’d genitals; a black set and a white set for night and day respectively. The black set of course male.The risk was distinct considering Frank Rizzo’s notorious graffiti-hating cops and here she was, suddenly engaging them on their territory, or at least trafficking in their milieu, while her old Main Line school friends with proper careers and lyrically named 5-year-olds and nannies were only reading about the brutality and strife in the morning papers and tut-tut-tutting over their sectioned grapefruits. This city is becoming a multicultural trash basket. In a way her long lost school chums were all now hearing from Bobbi, picking up her vibrations in the ether as she added her note to the million-note chord of the streets that frightened them above and below the range of conscious human hearing.
Something about becoming some kind of measurable graffiti presence in Germantown, Philadelphia, triggered in Bobbi thoughts more serious and curious about black kids. They scared the hell out of her, no matter how much safely-distant concern or affection she managed to scrape up for them from her wholly other sphere. Why? Black kids scared the hell out of her and scared the hell out of others like her as well as others unlike her and even other black kids, too. Part of it was just the fearsomeness of kids, period; everyone in America is afraid of American kids because kids have a worldview and a budget and spending power which dictates much of the look of the modern world, certainly commercial spaces, arguably private space also, and that’s power enough to be afraid of. And beneath that the deranged impulsiveness, the famous cruelty, the avid gift in the art of wounding truths…
Which would seem to sum it up but if you come across two or three white youngsters in an urban setting it’s not an intrinsically frightening experience. It’s frightening if you call them juveniles but not if you call them youngsters. But if you refer to black kids as youngsters you’re not being wholly sincere: what you mean is juveniles. And that is a scary word.
Black kids were by no means the majority of the population in that integrated neighborhood called Germantown but they were the main unspoken topic of discussion. Condensed vectors of guilt and anarchy. Once you’ve made a serious mark or painted illicitly on public space you never again look at public space the same; you find yourself seeing lots of unmarked, unused, image-ready surfaces where before you saw banal or forbidding municipal order. Crossing that line is liberating but also feels like mess-making and the constant struggle to rein it in. The sense of “public” versus “private” vanishes completely after the first few times you cross that line and Bobbi realized that poor black kids with cans of shoplifted Krylon had become the psychological landlords of massive tracts of real estate simply by labeling it. Without bothering to write doctoral thesises on the topic they explored the limits of appropriation, grasping with a collective intuition that property law is the white man’s graffiti and by writing over the writing they have amended it. The white man’s graffiti is fine-print. Imagine graffiti all over the White House. It wouldn’t be the White House any more.
Bobbi’s own self-esteem skyrocketed after she became a clandestine trademark on the blank spots of her neighborhood and as a side-effect acquired another valuable secret to add to her repertoire, becoming even less knowable to her mother and her friends and so much more knowable to herself. Not that she was as one with those juveniles with their gang code juvenilia, advertising in the glyph of the gonad. She was doing it in her own well-educated pretty white woman way with a neat little stencil and a smirk.
Her apotheosis as a graffitist in her neighborhood of Germantown, Philadelphia arrived the Tuesday afternoon she’d hired two kids, two twelve or thirteen-year-old black kids who lived in her building and should have been in school but weren’t. Kids just sitting on the back steps right outside her bedroom window making, what, trucks or motorcycles or super-heroes-battling noises. She hired them for five dollars apiece to come in and haul her old sofa bed out to the curb. Just to shut them up. Even though what would she sleep on before she bought the next one?
They filed in through her screen door with sheepish grins and asymmetrical Afros, weirdly embarrassed, she guessed, to be alone in an intimate space with an attractive young white woman; they were over-polite yet precociously sexual; and she offered them each a glass of powdered lemonade mix before delegating who would tackle which end of the sofa bed. Yes ma’am, thank you ma’am, they said, and Bobbi entered the kitchen, a move that took no more than a sidestep, and she heard the taller, thinner boy say to the stockier darker one, in a stage whisper, Check it out, she rippin’ off Philly Dawg!
Ripping off Philly Dawg. Bobbi peeped back into the living room, while the tap water ran, to see the boys stooped over the stack of her original barking dog canvases leaning against the radiator. She couldn’t believe it; her first acknowledgment; she did a little dance in the kitchen. Philly Dawg?
When Charlton Diggins came into Germantown Graphic Supply the next day, Bobbi was still so jazzed in the unrevealed guise of Philly Dawg that she parlayed the man’s shy query about piñata-making (he was a substitute teacher) into coffee and cheesecake at the Maplewood mall, her treat. There was something about this gangling Charlton, she thought. Trying to pass himself off as Italianate when in fact he was almost certainly a Jew. She liked how vulnerable and literary that made him seem. She liked how open-minded it made her feel. She imagined saying with a breezy Norman Lear sitcom inflection, “Honey, I don’t give a damn if you’re a Zarathustran as long as you don’t pick your nose or wear my panties,” in response to his tearful confession. All in good time, she counseled herself. All in good time.
Bobbi would stand in the autobiographies aisle of Paige Turner’s, the Chestnut Hill bookshop, one among a half-dozen Madras-shirt-wearing graduate-school-age white women on the premises, thinking: I am Philly Dawg.
The day before inviting master Diggins over to her apartment for the first time ever, she’d hidden all the art paraphernalia, hidden or destroyed all the old paintings, because she had an absolute horror of seeing herself as some kind of pathetic would-be artist through her man-boy’s eyes. Better to present herself as unapologetically shop girlish. Defiantly boho shabby genteel. An espresso-drinking, highly literate, flat-broke style snob. The barking dog stencil and the three or four cans of Krylon she secreted in a big canvas purse with a curved bamboo handle and vivid threadbare bowls of fruit stitched on each side her mother had given her after a Golden Wedding Anniversary trip she took alone to Nassau, in the Bahamas. The stuffed canvas purse Bobbi kept in the basement.
After the wedding, Bobbi forgot all about her life as an irony-cloaked municipal art guerilla for all of six months, or until the honeymoon was irremediably over. It was definitively played out, the honeymoon, when the sex lost all of its unprecedentedness and entered the workaday schedule inked in for Monday evenings following CBS’s The Jeffersons. Once-a-week sex on a rigid schedule. At which point Philly Dawg soon found herself at it again, sneaking out at all hours of the night during her husband’s deeply effort-wracked postcoital sleep. Kicking and twitching. What inner-conflict was the poor wretch rehashing unresolved every night? At whose eidolon was he twitching and whimpering? Surely not Bobbi’s.
Sneaking out with an adulterer’s thrill, she claimed new buildings, new streets and kelly-green awnings became attractive to her. Kelly-green, brick-red and royal blue. Hotels, pricier restaurants and funeral homes. She noticed that nobody had thought of doing the awnings yet and she did them so neatly that her work looked like discreet corporate logos on the projection flaps. In the beginning, she’d found faking orgasms with her newlywed husband to be an erotic experience but spraying projection flaps soon replaced that.
She got to the point that the end credits reprise of the sitcom’s theme song made her shoulders tense and her vagina very dry. Knowing that her husband would soon be reaching across to switch off that little lamp on the night table on her side of the double-bed. Conjugal duty: the phrase started life as a chauvinism-lampooning joke between them and morphed into something more hideous every time it went unspoken. Six months: it flew by like a week that took an eternity and turned out to be the actual extent of their marriage. Trial period. Bobbi began rehearsing that phrase. Philly Dawg began targeting the 26 trolley. Taking therapeutic risks.
Therapeutic risks in the dead of night and Charlton’s interminable tales of Charlton Diggins, blue-eyed crusading substitute school teacher over dinner and The Jeffersons on Monday: that was her married life. This is what I got married for? She’d sit there nodding while he gestured emphatically. Relating in great anecdotal detail how dumb the kids could be while regularly gushing the liberal alibi of how smart they were. These kids are so smart, Bobbi. Running his hands through his curly ash-colored hair and then cupping his face in them. And that other liberal bromide that Bobbi takes exception to and wanted to correct Charlton over every time he uttered it: children are the future. No, children are not the future they are the past. The elderly are the future.
She found herself slipping more and more Yiddish into their dinner-time conversations. She found herself placing a box of Matzoh on top of the refrigerator. A secondhand copy of the Bernard Malamud Reader on top of the toilet tank. She wanted that confession. She needed it soon.
Even the shock of the size of Charlton’s penis had devolved from delight to dread via a transitory phase of familial boredom and her childhood gag reflex came back in spades. She reminisced fondly about tongue depressors. She’d get cold tears in her eyes and see stars. Performing it felt like a sorority hazing.
The only value at all Bobbi could find in Charlton’s favorite show The Jeffersons was in the marriage of Helen and Tom Willis, secondary characters, television’s first interracial couple. They were metaphysically privy, in a Jungian sense, to Bobbi’s racial secret and she nurtured the imaginary rapport, turning their straight lines into insights. Charlton would belly-laugh at George Jefferson’s zebra taunts and Bobbi would narrow her eyes.
Christmas Eve the year they married the sky was a low ceiling and the air was a loom of fluff, the flakes falling so densely they didn’t appear to be falling at all but rather stacked or even rising in air, muffling sound and holying the street and haloing the streetlights, and it was the scintillating spaces between the flakes themselves that seemed to be falling cold and invisible to earth. Bobbi put Charlton to bed early with goose and a handjob and bundled up and was out in it on the perfectly deserted streets in her Dostoevskian greatcoat, relishing the spectacle.
Just her alone on the blinded streets, the padded cell of the night, everything cold and swollen and soft… the only intense little burning pattern of color coming from the traffic lights changing from green to yellow to red with post-apocalyptic poignancy. The only sound was Bobbi’s frosted breath and Bobbi’s crunching boots. Even that distant neighborhood dog, the prototype of her graphic mission, her lone inspiration and spirit familiar, was silenced out there in the fused horizon, painted out under blankness. She thought of the word Leningrad as she set herself like an italic exclamation mark against the crumbling wind as it picked up, tickling and numbing her face. Up Penn to Wakefield, south on Wakefield for thirty minutes straight to Garfield, north on Garfield to Wister Woods Park. It’s a Christmas Eve blizzard and the only marks in the deep snow besides Bobbi’s gashing footprints are clover-shaped rabbit tracks printing the path leading into the park’s southern entrance like a whimsical invitation from the spirit of the park itself.
Entering the park from its north entrance is a tall, well-built 17-year-old black boy in a brand new camouflage parka from the Army Surplus store on Chestnut Street, hood down, dark face vivid in the snowlight. The black boy outweighs Bobbi by a good thirty or forty pounds, as slender as he is (and as tall as she is), and if she were to find herself walking towards him on a dark street her dread of his approach would be incalculable and only properly described in physiological terms. But as it is she spies him from a comfortable vantage in a thicket on a hill, on her belly, laying up a snow dune in her greatcoat, bundled under the coat in itchy sweaters, peering over the top of the little hill. Watches him pick a fluff-upholstered bench under the white canopy of ancient oak and elm branches which half-shelter them both from the wind-shot snow. If she were a member of the Wehrmacht’s snow patrol and he were a Leningrad partisan she could lob a grenade over the thicket right into his lap.
The secret proximity to such a figure of terror is perversely delicious, even better than watching a panther in a zoo because here there are no bars and the panther doesn’t know he’s being watched. What’s he doing here? Sitting on a bench in a blizzard in Wister Woods Park. This big kid glowing black in the shadowed snowlight and the frozen trees making that occasional gun crack sound from the matrix of branches. He’s sitting there like Buddha in a snow globe.
He is thinking. Thinking back over the events of the evening. Just sitting and thinking all alone in the park while snow falls and kids all over Philly are dreaming in the aftermath of A Charlie Brown Christmas or The Grinch or Rudolph (Frosty the Snowman doesn’t rate a mention; Frosty is bullshit) or whichever cartoon perennial was on tonight. Innocent little kids who play stick ball in the summer and toboggan on flattened cardboard boxes down hills like the hills in the park here in winter and know not a thing about the pleasures and terrors of the real world. You think tobogganing down a steep hill on a flattened cardboard box is terrifying? You think it’s fun? Kid, you have no idea. Trust me. Sleeping furiously after the cartoons through the unbearable suspense of what did I get on Christmas morning. Only the cartoons as the years go by will definitely mean more to you than the toys you got the next morning; more than the train set, the GI Joe, everything.
His favorite will always be the Burl Ives-narrated stop-animation Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, due mainly to the character Clarice, the sweet little big-eyed reindeer with the white girl voice who remains faithful to the outcast Rudolph despite his freakishness. Despite the deformation of his glowing nose. Even Rudolph’s parents are ashamed of him and treat him like shit.
High point of the show is when Clarice sings to Rudolph there’s always tomorrow for dreams to come true. He’s seen Clarice sing this song to Rudolph what… ten times? Once a year since he was seven or something. He missed it the year before last because he felt it appropriate at fifteen to have outgrown such frippery but sure enough the very next year his ass was on that corduroy sofa in front of the color television and he misted up a little, careful to hide the childish reaction, when it came time for Clarice to sing. Well this year he guesses he really was too old for Clarice’s song of hope because he missed the show not for psychological reasons but because he was too busy fucking his 54-year-old aunt and if that’s not too grownup for cartoons, what is? Knocking on the door to his room in her transparent nightie holding a candle and with no underwear on going Merry Christmas.
The young man has a lot to think about. Even the categories of the thoughts he must think are many, from humorous (the way she’d kept whispering, gasping, with fake mounting panic, what are you doing? What are you doing? And he’d felt the urge to shout I’m cleaning the rain gutters, what does it look like I’m doing?), to the philosophical (did he fuck her or did she fuck him?), to the scientific (what possible purpose could evolution find in making a 17 year old boy want to copulate with a woman beyond childbearing age?), to the moral (should I be ashamed? Should she? Should both of us?), to the legal (what if somebody finds out and reports it?). He imagines himself writing a love poem to his 54-year-old Aunt and it makes him sick to his stomach. Well that’s the worst aspect of this whole situation. Nobody to write a love poem for. Nobody from whom to receive one.
Bobbi thinks: what’s that sound? Is the big black boy sitting on that bench there in a blizzard in Wister Park with his shoulders heaving… is he sobbing?
When her father revealed their secret to her while sitting among soft shreds of his own semen in the bathtub, 17-year-old Bobbi absorbed the news with only the slightest lurch of disorientation. This is a girl who could light a cigarette in a hurricane, she was thinking. She didn’t become suddenly and extraordinarily invested in Black History; she didn’t even become a self-hating Negrophobe in a wounded psychotic sense. She calmly folded the information about her particle of blackness into a corner of her deepest self for future delectation. It gave her strength to know that she and her father both knew what her mother didn’t know…both knew that her mother didn’t know.
For giving her that, if for nothing else, Bobbi was grateful to him, pathetic as his need for sedative bathtub handjobs was. All daughters crave a secret with Daddy they can call their very own and some think it’s incest until it happens but in Bobbi’s case the incest wasn’t a secret, it was part of the culture of their nuclear family. The real secret was so much bigger than that.
The kid is definitely crying.
Being a veteran (she refused the word victim) of incest explained nothing about her. But being an octoroon explained the strange prettiness she couldn’t have inherited from any known member of either side of her family: her aptitude for perfect tans and her incongruously full lower lip and the rich thick wave of her buttery hair… it all made perfect sense now, solving a riddle she hadn’t even realized was driving her nuts. The mirror finally made sense to her. Her mirror finally fit. Bobbi, 27, would stand in line at the Whole Truth Co-Op with other Birkenstock-wearing white women buying lentils in three pound sacks, thinking, I am Philly Dawg.
Belly-down in her great coat on the snow dune that night in Wister Park like one of Rommel’s soldiers in North Africa, only with chattering teeth and no binoculars, up on that little hill spying down on the big sobbing black boy, Bobbi was thinking I am Philly Dawg. How many years since she has thought that?
Her first husband Charlton came stumbling up from the basement in a Eureka state one day while she was napping off lunch on the new sofa bed; he burst into the living room swinging the dusty old canvas purse from Nassau crying “You? It’s you? You’re Philly Dawg?”
He’d been in the basement looking for stuff for a Valentine’s Day project, and Bobbi was horrified at how cutesy-fied she suddenly felt; how patronized; how utterly destroyed the meaninglessly cool thing she’d been devoting herself to for months became in her incompatible husband’s fuckface knowledge of it. How small. He knelt by the sofa bed and cupped his face in his hands and said, I have a confession to make, too.
She divorced him soon after the revelation. Not, of course, because he’d confessed to being a Negro. But that was definitely her excuse.
I’m so excited about this one I can barely think straight. The invention of the paint tube is to en plein air (and ergo the subversion of the Academie, rise of Impressionism, Naturalism, Post-Impressionism…) as the invention of the spray can is to graffiti art. So, now I just have to calm down enough to unpack all of the interesting observations and suggestions about danger and erotica vs, conformism, routine and sexual apathy cum dysfunction, in relation to pig’s bladders (the technology for carrying paint around prior to actual paint tubes, which were unsatisfactory because they dried out.) And think of all of this in light of race and economics, miscegenation, and, no doubt, Chiaroscuro.
This is thrilling tabaccy to chaw while I’m cooking up some victuals. Thank you, CDS Steven.
CDS Frances… the Ideal Reader is almost always a Writer, eh? Just finished a long night of editing footage (helping to document CDS Barry’s gallery show)… must fall backwards, unflinching, to bed anon. More tomorrow. And I’m not finished seething over the arrogant hackademia on display in the matter of Comment #72… the leather-eared assault on Literary Art is relentless, Comrades. Fookin relentless…
Thanks for that, the comrades have taught me well. And now I am thrice-graced to be here in the Bunker Pagoda, this very Spring, in the historically enviable position of chatting about your work with you, CDS Steven.
Sweet, CDS Frances… but let’s keep our heads here. There is no history involved. We’re just a couple of Artists chit-chatting in a virtual elevator in which the Muzak is shut off. The talk is most pleasant.
THE VINTAGE EMAIL
Who is the wanker behind Lady Bird winking at LBJ?
Could it be more fucking obvious? Hiding in plain sight, Comrades… the Easter Eggs are all around us.
But what has Bill Moyers made of this? Certainly he’s aware of this photo.
Dunno. At this point it’s probably incumbent on us to seek sources of “news” other than the ones we were raised with. I take everything with a grain of salt. The grains vary in size.
VINTAGE EMAIL
MANTRAS
CORRECTION
Wendy Wild did not wed Rudy Protrudi. Rather, Dino Sorbello was the lucky groom, though the union was short-lived. This was confirmed by WW friend and fellow wedding reception attendee, Paul Drake International.
More Words To Live By from http://wisdomofthewest.blogspot.com/2010/04/articles-of-faith-parameters-of-last.html
I have long advised my teen-aged children that they are entering a new era, an era where focus on green, sustainable energy technologies will be the path to job security and financial well-being in the future—as well as making this world a better place. My sense is that, as with personal computers in the late ’70s, we are at the starting line for an entrepreneurial boom in this area that will not so readily go bust.
The Anthropocene epoch arrives perhaps too soon. The paradox of human nature is as yet unresolved. I worry we have not yet shaken off the existential insecurities that accompanied the rise of our civilization over the last 10,000 years. And with those insecurities come the sorts of fears and animosities that drove us into the global wars and genocides and environmental disasters that reached near apotheosis in the last century.
We have to ask whether humanity is essentially Life-affirming, or whether its dark undercurrents will once again surface in this new epoch. I hope and, at base, believe that, though it is not inevitable given human nature, we as a race will ultimately stumble into a solution that works to preserve our environment, ourselves, and, thus, Life itself.
No comment?
Nothing further from me on this but I think CDS Sean has some thoughts on the matter, and matter it does.
http://theadorata.com/
I’LL JUST SIT THIS ONE OUT, THANKS
response:
My Hypothetical Response:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/apr/01/science-fiction#start-of-comments
The worst aspect is that we can see the ineptitude and two-faced-ness with clear eyes yet there’s nothing much we can do to stop the general drift.
In terms of the election soon to happen here in the UK I don’t think I’ve ever experienced such a lack of faith in what’s on offer. But that lack of faith will do nothing to stop one of the parties getting in – no doubt on about 40% of the potential vote and it will be business as usual with the emphasis on business.
“The worst aspect is that we can see the ineptitude and two-faced-ness with clear eyes yet there’s nothing much we can do to stop the general drift.”
Because there’s no critical mass of The Aware. With most people drifting around in a pop-lubricated, celebrity-centric haze of self-loathing consumerism, the wolves in charge of the legless-chicken factory never had such an easy ride. An eye-opener: going on Leftish sites (like the wonderful Fafblog) to watch how the Dupes bitch and rage at anyone who points out, in a clear-eyed fashion, that the POC (prez of color) just happens to be a warmongering tool of Wallstreet. The facts don’t mean a fucking thing… what counts is staying “positive”. Or falling for self-serving Fadspeak like “Green Technology”… a scam it only takes a couple of hours of serious reading to reveal in its cynical splendor.
The Fuckers are winning, Comrade Ed… they always do.
13:15
TELL ME THE ONE ABOUT GREEN TECHNOLOGY AGAIN, UNCLE SANTA
“The genius of the American method is to define the Truth as whatever makes you happiest.”
-T. Raleigh Dennis
In my experience, pursuing social justice is in itself “fun” and the source of “happiness.” It’s not a matter of interrupting anyone’s fun but extending it out concentrically as if someone had thrown even a pea-sized pebble on that placid surface. How much more fun for that gliding swan to ride the ripples, play with the currents, and piece together a fractured image of its own devising. The possibilities are in the fissures. The cracked mirror reflects most accurately.
CDS Frances, I miss Harold Pinter. I’m glad Pilger is still around (but for how much longer?) but Pilger is a journalist and we need an Artist with an unwavering vision of the bloody fucking Truth to set an example that Artists can have Plutonium Balls / Pussies of Steel, too. The Artist/Intellectual Race is now wan and effete… an impotent Eloi to Cheney-Co.’s Moorlocks. It wasn’t always thus. Even soft-spoken Vonnegut didn’t flinch from his responsibility not to delude himself.
Frankly speaking, it was that very silence that forced me to overcome my personal inhibitions and insert Cooperative Village into the world. Also to spend the last three years since its publication fighting to gain a readership for it and for the literary and political culture in which it could thrive and serve. If you would only read it, CDS Steven, you might see in it a robust response to Harold Pinter’s insistent cry. Call and response. Both are essential. Thank you for reminding me that my own work has value.
Well, let’s try to see this speech in a context that goes beyond our own work. Whether or not people read me, or you, is an issue separable from whether or not we have the courage to take the measure of the world as it is and our place in it.
Pinter’s speech is more important to me, on one level, than all my work, and there is more Truth in half of it than all the bullshit, copy-and-paste discussions of Plato or Aristotle on the Literary Bloggosphere. If Pinter’s speech is so easily absorbed (or half-dismissed) by even so-called “Liberals”, what impact is our work having?
There can be no impact if we keep trying to discuss things in terms provided by the very Fuckers Pinter was coldly raging against. They own the language now, clearly. Where did these idiotic catch-phrases, like “Green Technology” and “Conspiracy Theory” come from? Why, the same clever source as “Where’s the Beef?” and “Get over it”, of course.
Where did the sentence,
…come from? Because it can’t really mean what it seems to be saying… not in the year 2010. Surely, it’s a sentence from 1870. It’s just too precious for words. Gee: should Jim go visit any number of the dozens of hot or warm or cooling-before-reheating war zones on the planet to see if those “dark undercurrents” are surfacing yet? Should he check on the mines where the precious metals for his “Green Technology” are being clawed from African earth by slaves at gunpoint?
My work can’t do a thing about any of that. But fuck me if I avoid discussing the issue FRANKLY on my own fucking blog for the sake of decorum. I still believe in the pre-mindfuck concept of an Intellectual as someone capable of doing more than being able to choose between “Avatar” and “The Hurt Locker” as coded vehicles for affirming the impossibility of dissent.
My work is worthless if the words are owned by killers. We have ceded ownership of the words in the time it took us to finally learn to use them. The rest is vanity.
For the Freaktionary.
Pintercle. The summit gained by fearlessly standing upright on the shoulders of the most courageous.
Who needs shoulder-perching when Truth-facing is such a down-to-earth thrill?
Then fix-her-upper please, CDS Steven.
[ed.'s note: fixed?]
Not enough people got a chance to read this when it came out, and not enough of the ones who did read it managed to read it all the way through, or with any care. Let’s post it here before it flies down the memory hole. And then cross-reference it with THIS
Dear Frances and Steven and others lurking near and far,
Just back from the O2 center where I watched the heavy favorite Ice-bears lose to the Augsburger Panther (yes the team is only one panther) more DEL (German Ice Hockey League) reports on request.
Before the game I had the pleasure to spend a few hours with Steven in the flesh (he may post a snap from that meeting), whereupon we broached the issue of Green Energy. Thus this comment is in some way related to #92 and #96 above, I am posting here at the thread head as instructed.
Let’s just get one thing clear. The human race will do everything it has to to survive. This is not a matter of being nice or being good it is a matter of survival. And by human race, I don’t mean the entire human race, but, most likely, a severely culled selection of the species with traits deemed valuable will be promoted and promulgated and the rest culled or otherwise banished. The future of humanity is the future of a master race, and that is the hidden message in the sweet pretense glowing from the word anthropocene (which literally means ‘new human’).
The destiny of this new human will be the destiny of the earth. This new human will cordon off certain sections for resource exploitation and others for ‘environmental regeneration’ Every such designation will be justified through the most advanced automated realtime economic reckoning. This is so-called anthropocene Green Technology. not to mention that the sites mentioned in the article linked above are just the most visible of a long line of polluting procedures, which, as as we move from newer processing techniques to assembly lines and eventually down to the mine we are witnessing work conditions akin to, or even of outright slavery, which Steven touched on above, just Google ‘conflict minerals’.
Everything that depends on electronics, that is, everything Jim H from Atlanta says he constantly advises his children (why constantly? does he have the sneaking suspicion they don’t quite believe him? ) on his three little quarks-nominated-blog to be optimistic about is based on hegemonic systems of resource (human and ‘natural’) exploitation which, in many cases have evolved little since Dickens.
If you want to give your children hope, dear Jim H, tell them that if they study real hard and encourage each other to be authentically, un-dupe-ably critical, they may have a chance at a form of optimism that does not need to be pumped up out of marketing statements for the next techno-industrial juggernaut. Then again, maybe not, it is unclear how welcome such people will be among the anthropocene.
I, who sleep at your vigils and fast for your feasts (w/apologies to Joyce)
Well that’s the problem, isn’t it, CDS Barry: the most effective form of education is marketing. And the most effective form of marketing is disguised as wisdom. I write “disguised”, there, as though “wisdom” is an absolute, and absolutely positive, value. But what is it? It’s not a stable body of knowledge, it’s a subjective, essentially conservative category of opinion. “Wisdom” was Ronald Reagan’s shtick; the presumption being that, at his age (and position) he just knew certain things… don’t worry, I’ll take care of it: you’re still too young to know. Reagan was beloved by Americans on both “sides” of the Left/Right pseudo-dichotomy.
The concept of “wisdom” isn’t amenable to critical analysis, but, clearly, the “wisdom” of a 19th-century plantation owner of Georgia would have diverged somewhat from the “wisdom” of one of his elder slaves. Not always, of course: in a perfectly-run plantation, there would have been a unity of “wisdom” visions between master and slave. And there often is, to this day.
Critical analysis means ignoring the debate-foreclosing, inviolable aura of “wisdom” (conventional and otherwise) and breaking the arguments down to basic, foundational elements we can then use Fact and Logic to test. We aren’t trained to do this. If we were (if all of us were), it would be Marketing’s end and the end of Politics. Which is why critical analysis is taboo (example: one of the classical arguments against critical/forensic analysis at the scene of a possible False Flag operation in which many are killed is the “wisdom” of letting the “healing process” begin instead of, you know, digging up all that hurtful evidence-muck).
Which leads me to my second point: in the false dichotomy of “Left” and “Right” in American Political Theater, the most conservative force is not “Wing Nut” but “Normative Liberal”. Wing Nuts (eg, bellicose chubby radio personalities) actually promote a kind of debate by being (for the “Left”) so clearly racist/hawkish/wrong and thereby providing sanctioned targets for passionate criticism. A Normative Liberal, on the other hand, supports an arbitrary (comfort zone) boundary on discourse… a line beyond which a line of thinking or complaint can’t go. The punishment for crossing the line is ostracism. The Normative Liberal is a quasi-bourgeois mindset (I say “quasi” because the “middle class” no longer exists in real terms; only on Credit): it wants to keep things largely as they are while also, somehow, at the same time (impossibly), “improving conditions” for the Lesser Orders… the goal of which, of course, in the end, is more about improving conditions for the Normative Liberal by absolving him/her of Guilt. Guilt is ruining the Normative Liberal’s ability to enjoy the Goods and Services that are his/her credit-based birthright. Think “Hillary Supporter” c. 2003.
A Golden Avatar of Normative Liberalism (and 3QD readers) is Jon Stewart, of the Daily Show. As I pointed out to CDS Barry during yesterday’s walk, using Satire on Monsters only works to bring the Monsters back into the tent of the Human and the acceptable (ie, it normalizes monstrousness). To laugh at Karl Rove or Dick Cheney is to turn these monsters into your merely wrong-headed or eccentric or irascible grandfathers. Satire is only appropriate (and effective) against a politician who is no worse than inept. To rehabilitate a Mass Murderer (this is fact, not impressionism: check the figures on Iraq, for one example) from a deserved spot in Beyond the Pale to a much-more-huggable place in the breakfast nook of the Crotchety… is not exactly a service to fucking humanity. Cheney, Rove, the Bushes, et al, should be repulsive to us as We are to them.
Far from challenging the system, Stewart does his part to keep the whole thing from blowing up. Not that he’s intentionally-complicit… he’s a structural collaborator: Stewart just wants to earn a good living at something he does well and what he does well is, necessarily (to sell it to the target-demo of Normative Liberals), packaged misleadingly as a form of Dissent. Stewart wants to earn a good living while also doing “good”… for structural reasons, it’s not that simple. Doing “good” in [name your favorite example of a rogue state] is a bad career move. Those who do “good” often suffer catastrophic reversals in career trajectory (a possible euphemism for plane crash).
Structural Collaboration has to be widespread for the system to work. It is.
[ed.'s note: most of the images I'm using these days... unless they're of Berlin... are from this picture-blog]
Green technology seems to me to be about trying to preserve a particular life-style not the human race. Yes we can carry on as before as long as we carbon-trade with some impoverished third world country who will have to be even more impoverished so we can carry on with a 2 car, cheap goods economy.
I don’t even know where you start. I live off-street, out of town in a sort of witness-protection housing 70′s bungalow on a farm. The council re-cycling scheme won’t come near us as the quality of the “road” outside our front door is apparently bad for their vehicle suspension. Our touring vehicle hasn’t suffered in the 5 years we’ve lived there. The local tip costs money to dump at and the nearest recycling skips involve driving- thus cancelling out the carbon footprint we’ve “avoided” through recycling.
Walking into work last week there was enough tipped rubbish on the side of the road to fill several skips. Saving plastic bottles from my household consumption and putting them in the correct place seems a speck in the face of all this. It’s a downward spiral. No wonder the draw-bridges will be raised at some point – most likely by those who’ve helped aggravate the problem in the first place.
“Green technology seems to me to be about trying to preserve a particular life-style not the human race.”
Preserving a life-style and a self-image both, Comrade Ed.
Thank you, comrades, for kicking it (and my understanding) up quite a few notches. So grateful you’ve thought about these things with such depth and clarity. The lifestyle and self-image they wish to preserve is so blanched and vapid, so second-hand and carbon-copied, so verbally stunted and mentally impoverished, one wonders why they bother. What are they so greedy for when even with all the diamonds, coiffure and accoutrement life as they live it seems so artificial, lackluster and chicken soup for the soul-sickening.
Substitute that “They” for a “We” and we’re headed in a better direction, CDS Frances! We are Structural Collaborationists.
UPDATE:
I bridle at that label even as I drink the Vichy water.
[ed.'s note: as I always say, Veni, Vidi Vichy: I came, I saw, I collaborated]
CHRISTMAS WITH THE NORMLIBS (there’s a second page of comments HERE)
(it’s Sunday, Comrades Lurking and Explicit; have you got thirty surplus minutes on this day of rest…?)
Note Evert Cilliers’ classical Normative Liberal feeling-tone in the blogicle: he’s no naif; he acknowledges Realpolitik: politicians aren’t choirboys, after all. Dirty back-room deals will sometimes be made; there will be cigar-smoking and certain minority groups may have to wait a little longer in line than they’d hoped… or been promised. But only he, The Normative Liberal Blogicle Author, will determine how Human/Fallen we admit his Hero-of-choice is (speaking of which, there’s a beautiful Gandhi debacle to be had in the future but there’s no time for that now). Evert NormLib becomes dismissive and angry when some rogue (ie, troll) takes the process of recriminations too far. And look at Elatia Harris, the grand dame of the Literary-Politico Normative Liberal Niche-Bloggosphere, as she does her little job on a troll, or two, herself! Classical Normative Liberal discourse-pinching. Cruelly, I post this example from Xmas 2008 to make the winkingly tacit point that the NormLibs on the linked-to Comment Thread are palpably less cocksure of their NormLib Mascot (the POC) today.
I wonder what Evert would say about sucking up today?
[ed.'s note: humorous disclosure: for the sake of being permitted to even debate these points with the NormLibs at 3QD, I pretended to vote for Obama. Well, I didn't really, now, did I?]
UPDATE: you choose, Comrades Lurking and Explicit: “POC” or “POTUSOC” or “CPOTUS”?
How they must miss you and your dating advice from Confucius. How many of them thought to at least go to Wikipedia to learn about “virtue ethics” and connect it to the discussion at hand about virtual ethics.
I didn’t even get a chance to lay Lao Tze’s line about giving it up on the first date on them! I had to withdraw from that particular exercise in Canute-like (imprecations ‘n oceans) or Sisyphus-like (rocks ‘n inclines) advocacy. The absurdity of the NormLib Effect was overwhelming and I wasn’t even arguing at full-strength; hiding my real opinions just so the cunts would talk to me. My favorite description of the Pagan Ritual of Presidential Politics (as indulged in by The People) in America is this:
Put that way, it’s all so fucking obvious, isn’t it? That’s why NormLibs and NeoCons alike don’t like it when anyone puts it that way
Not a lone wolf, huh? Just a big bad one!
Well, I do love straw houses full of straw men
And now let’s change the, erm, subject, before we all accidentally go down in a private plane, Comrades… shall we?
seems as good a time as any to re-introduce WTF or even mudder-fudders into the thread. For the above and also for the below.
Incidentally the Scarface school play is by a music video director. It can only have been thus but its WTF-ness is still there – post-modern, sub-Wooster Group stylings or not.
It was made ” to stimulate debate” apparently. The debate being, presumably about why young kids are used in something to stimulate a debate about why young kids are …. you get the picture and the value of the debate.
Maybe the writer/director of that video was hoping to save kids in the way the director/writers of The Wire hoped to save North American blacks, Comrade Ed…?
Confession. The Scarface play stimulated me to go to the Metropolitan Museum that very day to view the Young Archer (with its curious lion’s paw quiver). Both the attribution (maybe Michelangelo) and the subject (maybe Apollo, maybe Cupid) are uncertain. Mystery aside, It’s astonishingly beautiful from every possible angle.
And the curator’s remarks are available here: http://www.metmuseum.org/audio/exhibitions/mmaExhibPodcast.11022009.052.mp3?refpage=mma_xml_link_052
I’m out of the loop on this one. I can see that the makers of the Wire are trying to expose how a system works and of course whether they achieve that is open to debate.
But here, unless there’s been an upsurge in US primary schools of ultra-violent school plays or indeed ultra violence itself I’m unaware of what the problem is that needs to be debated using kids so young. Adults with “creative” ideas seems to be the only answer.
I’m not outraged by it – the table of popcorn and the drawn surveillance cameras are nice touches but the “only there to stimulate a debate” excuse seems to be folding in the face of public scrutiny.
“I’m out of the loop on this one. I can see that the makers of the Wire are trying to expose how a system works and of course whether they achieve that is open to debate.”
A) With millions of dollars and many careers at stake, in a cruelly-competitive medium, nothing on populist Television is done for any reason other than projected profit, bullshit bien pensant showbiz palaver to the contrary B) such luridly violent tales/stagings of the ghetto for genteel consumption are a venerable North American tradition. Thinking that anyone will save Niggas by showing/watching a lurid soap opera of Niggas blowing other Niggas’ heads off is wishful thinking at best, Comrade Ed. I had to laugh, by the way, when CDS Sean defended the Wire against charges of Racism… after he was so militantly anti- Monty Python (because of UK patterns of Cultural Discrimination) on another TET thread. If you can show how Geordies are locked in an eternal-cycle of ignorance, violence, self-hatred and premature death by Python’s vicarious glorification of an underclass’ homicidal agency etc.
(Funny: in the 1970s we called it Blaxploitation, but maybe that was because it was actually aimed at a Black audience then; when it’s for Whites the packaging is more dignified and guilt-absolving)
Militantly anti Monty Python? Must be an age thing. For me it no longer matters whether they were good or bad – they were just there when needed.
While sensitive to CDS Sean’s socio-politico aversion to Python, I have to re-post this, which is so good it doesn’t even rely on acting to make it as funny as it is; but if he gets to watch The Wire, I get to watch Python (from the Life of Brian):
I had an exchange with a troublemaker on the GU blogs a while back about MP. I countered his blog-typical aversion to the show with a “What about Life of Brian?” gambit. “Ah but that wasn’t really Monty Python” was the reply – which I took to mean that the debate had swung my way.
I’ll take MP and The Wire to be honest.
You can wear t-shirts for both shows (simultaneously) , Comrade Ed, without a twitch from me, if you don’t also claim that doing so helps either Geordies or Black North Americans…
I’ll pass on wearing 2 T-Shirts simultaneously you cruel swine but please enlighten me on the Geordie reference. I don’t remember a Python sketch about them*.
The usual crit about them over here is that they were yet another example in the endless Oxford/Cambridge brigade on the BBC – plus they never had good roles for women.
All of which is true but at their best they were extremely funny.
*[ed.'s note: I think that was the point]
But the women they did have roles for had most excellent boo… oh. Blacks, Women, Black Women, Geordies, Black Geordies and Black Geordie Women all deserve an apology from Monty Python, The Wire and… me.
You might also want to apologise to those 2 rutting lions while you’re at it.
is that by Christian Schad? The haircut looks curiously 50′s American if it is.
Only the most famous woman in the Westernmost world (c. 1974) as envisioned by John Currin. I like the National Geographicality of it (one question: how do you determine “West” on a sphere? I mean, where’s it really start or…)
Well then, what about THIS or
CDS Frances, I saw Rev. Brown in 1987, I think. He opened the show with an irony-free version of “That’s Entertainment”… segued into “Living in America” (the recent hit: that should date it)… I had to wait about an hour before I felt reasonably funkified. I think it may have been the same year/venue I saw PIL… the night naughty people were tossing crap onstage and Mr. Lydon stopped the music and lectured the audience with bugging-out eyes… and an ice cube arced with perfect grace through the spot light and bounced off his famous red barnet at the very end of his rant. What a night!
comin’ at you one more ‘gain… jus’ refrencin’ post #102 the dark force, the Schwarnz! And pointin’ y’all (you know how we do this) case you ain’t been down this road yet, to some unmissable watching/listening (you don’t really need to watch it, but you must listen to at least the first 90 mins or so of this, put it on while you do something else). For anyone interested in politics, an, especially in American politics :
Tavis Smiley’s recent Black Agenda Forum on CSPAN, LOTS to discuss here for those who are up to thee pahhhhh-tayyyy! if you enjoyed notchin’ it up on that Western Culture Anthropocenocratic Crusade butt…
CDS Barry, I’m struggling mightily to get past the prayer that prefaces the conversation; I’m trying to remember the last time I saw a round table of white pundits kick off the chit chat with a prayer to the Prince of Peas. Sure, it’s supposed to remind us how deeply religious “black folk” are but doesn’t it really make them seem like second-rate thinkers? Or, like, qualified to speak on their own experiences, and in emotional terms, at best? If Zizek presaged one of his exegesises with an appeal to Loki (for, surely, it would be Loki) would you be able to take his defense of Lacan seriously…?
And… Jesse Jackson, that CIA dress-sock-puppet…?
Okay…okay… I’ll watch it now…
(the picture is credited as “54th National Reunion Convention of Ex-Slaves and Former Owners, 1916″)
Yeah, I know, and since when does God love justice? Is justice another word for humanity? and if so that’s a pretty wanton and merciless ‘love’ god metes out sometimes. Why not leave that old paleoanthropomorph out of it and just say Love loves justice?
I understand, to some extent, the need to shield oneself, being very persecuted and afraid, behind the mantle of officially sanctioned authority in the guise of the Church. I understand it but I don’t trust it. And I also somehow don’t trust how the folksy inflection is being employed. I notice Obama tries it on for size at times, as if to over-compensate for the fact that he is,as Dorothee Tillman pointed out to some shaking heads, not exactly representative of American Black People, not having decended from slaves (at least not American slaves…)
Anyway, try dear Steven at least to get to the ‘anti-Christ’ around 85 mins, he is one who doesn’t employ the inflection, he has his own, though. I plead with you one last ‘gain~
the video link again
When they finally get the green-light on The New Adventures of Amos ‘n Andy, Cornel West is a shoo-in for a principal role (as evidenced at exactly 59 minutes into it: that’s the Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton University going “whooo! whooo!” in the background when the tenuously-grammatical lady in the church-hat gets her Oprah applause-moment). I had to drop out of the audience at that point but I’ll try to press on to the 85-minute mark, CDS Barry, if it please you.
Note: is it just me or is Louis Farrakhan (née Louis Eugene Walcott) doing a note-perfect late-period Jerry Lewis at this event? Wait: fruity top note of Jerry but a smoky aftertaste of… William Shatner…
Note: look how much lighter the hands (of the more mulatto-y participants) are than their faces: the meta-politics of stage makeup, eh? On Television talks and Variety Shows of the 1960s and 1970s the problem was reversed: dark hands, paler faces.
Note: West wrote, once, “I arrived at Harvard unashamed of my African, Christian, and militant de-colonized outlooks. More pointedly, I acknowledged and accented the empowerment of my black styles, mannerisms…” but many of the black intellectuals and academics who preceded him did not indulge in these “styles”, which are not an across-the-board Black inheritance but expressions of the street and of pop and of youth. Somehow, middle-aged white academics don’t feel as pressured to skateboard to work flashing Deathmetal devil-greetings as a militantly unashamed celebration of White style. West is a ridiculous, self-conscious Cunt for the tragically trivial reason that his skin is so pale. If the poor man had only been born darker (obviating the need to overcompensate), imagine the grand books he might have written…
The treacherous waters of Black Demagogic Practice are shallow but swift and studded with rocks. There’s the awful balancing act of needing to seem Black enough for the audience yet educated enough to impress the other members of the panel… and then the skin-tone and hair type have to be factored in if the Demagogue is mulatto-y (in other words, they have to try harder: Julian Bond and Adam Clayton Powell, in their heydays, would’ve had a tough time out there). But what struck me after an hour of watching was that if the POTUSOC had only made sure that more money/jobs had gone to the “black community”, there’d be nothing but praise for him, Imperialist Warmongering or not. There is (or should be) a clear distinction between GRIPE and DISSENT. Given the fact that none of the people at the actual table are hurting financially, what to make of the discussion?
Time to cleanse my Psycho-Political Palate:
the old story that Marx would never have (co-)written the Communist Manifesto if he had been given the chair in philosophy he had applied for at the University of Bremen.
… and/or if his hair had been straighter?
Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 388;
First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913, and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.
lest we forget
“The peculiarly African character is difficult to comprehend, for the very reason that in reference to it, we must quite give up the principle which naturally accompanies all our ideas-the category of Universality. In Negro life the characteristic point is the fact that consciousness has not yet attained to the realization of any substantial objective existence-as for example, God, or Law-in which the interest of man’s volition is involved and in which he realizes his own being. This distinction between himself as an individual and the universality of his essential being, the African in the uniform, undeveloped oneness of his existence has not yet attained; so that the Knowledge of an absolute Being, an Other and a Higher than his individual self, is entirely wanting. The Negro, as already observed, exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state. We must lay aside all thought of reverence and morality-all that we call feeling-if we would rightly comprehend him; there is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in this type of character. The copious and circumstantial accounts of Missionaries completely confirm this, and Mahommedanism appears to be the only thing which in any way brings the Negroes within the range of culture.” [Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover, 1956), 93.]*
But, Marx’s use of the word ‘nigger’ to describe Lassalle was quite common at the time as a way to distinguish between cultured and shtetl jews. Lassalle, being by all accounts, as white and as jewish as Marx but simply having been born with the taint of his origins east of Germany in today’s Poland (formerly Galicia).
Berlin was the scene of legendary rivalry between the settled Christianised German Jews of the West side of the city and the johnny-come -lately(as they perceived them, ‘bumpkin’) Jews from today’s Poland and Ukraine. All educated Jews had to acknowledge that their origins were somewhere around Egypt and, very likely of a skin tone darker than pearl. However, as can be seen, in the Hegel citation, original did not yet have the post-modern commodity-liberal nostalgic value of ‘authenticity’ about it. What was original was simply primitive….and it is in that sense that Marx’s racism approaches that of today’s black ‘Streber’ (a Yiddish word for someone from humble origins who immodestly strives for a higher position in society) attempts to distinguish status between shades of skin colour.
In closing let’s also factor that primordial problem of the relative attractiveness, the exotic charm, of the rogue provincial intellectual “You have made my wife into a special admirer of your play.” writes Marx to Lassalle, ambivalent and a little plaintively.
*[ed.'s note: the lauded Euro-bumpkin Hegel made these breezily disparaging remarks roughly 150 years before THIS interview with the novelist CHINUA ACHEBE; it's amazing how African humanoid consciousness grew from an undifferentiated lump of unreflected sensation to later field questions in the Paris Review; sadly, to this day, Wildebeests and Springboks remain unpublished]
Yes, but the funny bit is how often it has been remarked that Marx himself resembled…
The hatred of the nearest-Other; maybe there’s an Evolutionary dynamic there
And
NOW BACK, TO THE SECOND MOVEMENT, OF THE THREAD THAT DESCENDED FROM A CHAT ABOUT LOGO-IMPERIALISM
this…? (tragic)
or this? (funny)
But, first, her:
and her
A little puzzle for the Comrades until I come home from today’s errands and adventures…
UPDATE: a little later than that, actually
Dialing Margaret Fuller…
INTERMEZZO
CDS Frances! Not knowing who Margaret Fuller was, I Googled her dial, read her Wiki, then looked her up on Project Gutenberg; I ended up reading a goodly chunk from her letters, bits and pieces of her essays and criticism and three detailed, contemporary accounts of her dramatic death by shipwreck (only a two-minute walk, had she been able to walk on water, from shore). From there I scrolled/trawled down, open to Serendipity’s reading list and I found this (or THIS) good olde Sci Fi from the Innocent Age of Penny Lit:
TALLULAH, JUDE: A NOVEL IDEA
(CHAPTER ONE HERE)
(CHAPTER TWO HERE)
(CHAPTER THREE HERE)
Next Monday: Chapter Five of TALLULAH, JUDE … ChickLit in Bite-Sized Pieces!!!
FAMOUS DUMB POEMS AND THEIR CRITICAL APOLOGIA#3
in which the “real” meaning redeems the doggerel yet again
Without critics to tell us such things are good, how would we know? The next text we’ll look at is even richer with geopolitical allusions, themselves with roots spread deep in the rich loam of the postmodern psyche
The k’riyah! Absolutely fascinating. The gash on the cover of The Kindly Ones (or TKO as we like to call it on TET),
With this in mind the Jamaican reggae star Yellowman’s exhortation to the crowd ” If you’re happy and you know it shout Murder!” takes on new politico-psycho-sociological meaning.
Given the excellence of your picture accompaniments I will strive to make my examples ever more obscure.
DIFFICULT TEXTS
POEM OF THE WEAK
my love song to paranoia
The drive up was tense not only because of the tritely appropriate drama of the rain but also because if he got lost on the way there was no one to call to for help. No safety net. He was forbidden from square one to store the information on a device or to print the directions on paper.
*
The directions appeared one morning in an audio loop that disabled itself after ten or fifteen minutes, a loop accompained by a black screen, a loop in the form of a sonnet. He’d been chanting it to himself for forty eight hours with an eerie pride in knowing that medieval illiterates had done it in much the same way. Further back than that, too, because songs in the fog of unmetered time had been less often used as entertainment than mnemonic devices of desperate importance. Didn’t antediluvian Asians in birchbark canoes navigate the Aleutians to landfall on North America using chanted sea maps? Or something.
*
He was roughly a third of the way through the sonnet and maybe two thirds of the distance to the compound and all of the clues had worked out very smoothly. But what if they hadn’t? He’d been on the road for seven hours. His team was up for an Emmy. He had inside information that the world would end before they won it.
*
Of course he could have cheated and written the directions down but he hadn’t wanted to. He longed for that new beginning. He hungered to start afresh. No more lies or cheating. Lose weight, no television, early nights and mornings. Stop masturbating. He had less than twelve hours, driving from several states away, making rest stops to eat and/or relieve himself, to get there before the others took steps to block the old dirt access road. To make the place impenetrable. If you can’t stop cold turkey, cut back to reasonable levels, at least. He thought of a cool title: Get fit at the Apocalypse Spa.
The new kind of man he was to become was not the kind who’d find himself bashing his Amherst-enhanced brain for four days against three lines of sitcom dialogue, of this he was certain. Like a chain of hyper-haikus from the sinisterly dumb future, various versions were branded on the soft white flesh of his consciousness.
Lola Beedo: I just love that dress you’re wearing, darling!
Elke Hall: (warily) Why, thank you, doll.
Lola Beedo: (beat) Tell me, does it come in human sizes, too?
*
He thought of a picture someone had posted on the message board in the production team’s lounge. The multi-Emmy-award-winning production team’s lounge. A photograph from 1905. The young Ludwig Wittgenstein in a class picture from his days in the Realschule in the city of Linz and there, a distance of one or two students to the upper right (a knight’s move, as Nabokov would have put it), looking resigned to his fate, is Ludwig’s classmate Adolf Hitler. The fact being that nothing Wittgenstein had subsequently done as a philosopher, no great strides in ethics or logic or the lyric aprehension of mathematics, amounted to a hill of beans compared to the contribution he could have made had he taken the opportunity to act decisively during the long walk home from school one day and crushed young Adolf’s skull with a paving stone. In other words, not only thought but direct action is required of us at certain pivotal moments. And not only action but a little prescience helps too.
*
Hamilton Gold, the head writer, always said name me what’s funnier than decapitation. But, he’d say, let’s see if the audience is there yet. He’d looked over the bit quickly on Monday, flipping the pages in that idiot-savant scan of his and immediately picked out the three lines they’d been having trouble with and shook his head, I like the bit but fat jokes are dangerous. Fat is our demographic, don’t forget. How about substitute fat with slut? Slut is funny.
*
Gold propounds a theory that sitcoms govern Congress. What people laugh at is exactly how they will vote. Americans can’t bomb a country until they’ve laughed at it a little bit first. Maybe he took the sentiment more seriously than Gold had intended but pretty soon he was feeling like J. Robert Oppenheimer in that porkpie hat hearing the phrase comedy has known sin and he’s on the internet at 3:14 in the morning, looking for absolution.
*
No one knew that he’d based the popular character of Elke Hall on his mother. He had inside information that it was the end of the world and he hadn’t even notified her.
*
Beyond the rain and the ticking of the clock, drama or any sense of a grand doomsday epic on the road itself was sorely lacking. No roadblocks or frenzied hordes or menacingly black or fluorescent sunset: just zonked-out commuters in start-and-stop traffic on the long way home from the daily deathsentence of work. Most of these people were only vaguely aware of things, if at all, and the precious few who considered the situation anything to lose sleep over had lost sleep over so many looming catastrophes of the past that this recent matter would strike them as little more than more of the same. Tonight they would go to bed after a starchy meal, vacuous television and perfunctory sex per usual. A couple of pills and out like a light. How typical to be wrong the one time it counted. The one time it counted in a thousand years, you dumbshits. You call your wife to come out on the porch to have a look and less than a second later you’re all dead.
*
What gave him a kind of vertigo when he contemplated it was how close he had come to being just like them. Before that life-changing night on the internet which fanned into a dozen online conversations, each conversation in turn fanning out into a hundred others, and all of those but the crucial one petering out… the crucial one connecting to his special contact to the man whose vision he had now irrevocably made himself a part of. Yes, thinking back on it, it was amazing… how cloaked in the ordinary it had all once seemed. How something appeared in the inbox of a personals account at a no-hoper’s dating site he’d signed up to pseudonymously because it was free and therefore relatively untraceable: a message exactly two sentence fragments long. Two months later, after visiting god-knows-how-many encrypted sites and exchanging deepcover spam mails and vital details in chatrooms he found himself paypal-ing a mindboggling sum into an account set up in a Biblical name.
Eighty acres of land and five years of provisions for twenty three people (they’d done their best to balance male with female but visionary survivalism is not, strictly speaking, a female interest, so nine females and fourteen males. But their unflinching honesty about this state of affairs reassured him). No couples or families or friends. Only loners with college degrees… professionals older than 27 and younger than 55, disgusted with mainstream politics, wary of organized religion, environmentally friendly but not averse to the occasional bar-b-que. All strangers to one another. All white.
*
Sid Caesar.
*
Radio was out of the question, in case some catchy tune came on and drove the sonnet out of his head. What he had was seven hours of motordrone and rubberhum and occasional rainfry sizzle on the roads. That and talking to himself. He supplied his own commercials. He thought of the Man from Glad, that futuristic Aryan hovering in a jetpack to shill ersatz Saranwrap to sexually frustrated newlyweds. He thought of The Beatles’ rooftop concert and George switching his amp back on in open defiance of the bobby. He thought: of course the whole thing could be a clever scam.
But the verisimilitude of the finework of paranoiac details like emailing strategies such as using spam prosodies for deepcover (mploy *black anal virgin* n subj. line & spyprgs wnt rd ur eml) had convinced him. Or how the ambiguously allusive chats he’d had with the man himself, the chats on the gratis personals site, had been regularly scheduled for 3:14 in the morning, based, he realized, on the value for pi and he wasn’t exactly sure why but that last detail had soothed him. Assuaged his fears.
*
I’m cuckoo for cocoa puffs.
*
When traffic slowed to a crawl he took the opportunity to peek into other cars. All those faces in profile, innocent with impatience or boredom. For the first time in his adult life he found himself loving humanity.
The automobile beside his to the right was a bruise-blue vintage Ford with a cream-white top, a big old iron box of a thing, perfectly preserved, its contour suggesting a jut-jawed crewcut profile and containing, as it happened, two male passengers with just that style of haircut. The driver could plausibly have been the father of the boy in the passenger seat. They both had brown hair…the guessed-brown on a vintage b&w picture tube… and they were so animated in that hatefully cheerful and perfectly postured way you’d expect in the kind of midcentury film the car and their haircuts seemed keyed to. You can’t see two males like that without automatically picturing the female that belongs with them. The bandana and the oven cleaner. The bubble bath and the shapely leg and the drawer of “female items” you aren’t even allowed to open in your mind, forbidden as the Arc of the Covenant in the cabinet under the sink.
He wondered, for a bemused moment, if he weren’t hallucinating, or if such types in just such a car weren’t obviously time-travelers. Terrorists from the future, because that’s what they will look like, although, wait, he keeps forgetting that the future has already arrived. Would he be crossing state lines with a trunk full of firearms otherwise?
*
Lola Beedo: I just love that dress you’re wearing, darling!
Elke Hall: (warily) Why, thank you, doll.
Lola Beedo: (beat) Tell me, did Bill Clinton design it?
He’d never known a girl named Amanda. He’d never been slapped in the face. Why was he sad about these two facts?
In the script margin Gold had scribbled, Bill who?
*
They had a regular skit called “Poem of the Week” that was supposedly topical. In the memos Gold had taken to referring to it as Poem of the Weak and the written phrase had acquired a poignancy and profundity all its own. He swears he saw Gold’s assistant-to-the-assistant wiping her eyes and sniffing furtively after reading that phrase. Honey-baked boobs out to here.
*
The dream he held both dear and sheepishly for its foolishness was the dream of the girl who is waiting for him, waiting at the compound, one of the nine, the most beautiful of the nine, the barefoot heroine in rustic clothing without whom he had been rudderless, unmated, bereft for all these years. She’ll step intuitively out onto the porch of the rambling woodframe house in order to watch him drive up, her tomboy heart quickening to the recognition. She’ll smile tentatively as he greets her with an ironic salute, lugging his trunk of munitions stiff-legged towards the front steps, winded but amused by the exertion, shrugging off her offer to help him carry the massive thing. Golden-haired, curly-haired, of solid pioneer stock. She’d say, the others are inside.
-I’m the last?
-We thought you weren’t coming. We were preparing…
-To mine the road.
-Yes.
She’d hold the door open for him. She’d search his face as he squeezed his way past the woodland aura of her health into a sort of vestibule that opened into a large, high-ceilinged room, a room with a rough, honest look to it: a gathering place for the strong, the wise, the bravely sad. Oil paintings of country life on the walls, maybe. Old bay mares. Or, no, something ironic like Victorian portraits or blue period Picasso. A dynastic sort of fire snapping twigs in the hearth. Quiet conversations here and there tapering off as he sets his clanking trunk at his feet and senses her feminine presence gather force at his side as he takes everyone in while catching his breath, the late arrival at a party in honor of the end of the fucking world. Peripherally he’d feel her delicately hawk-eye him for the subtlest reaction to everything as though her self-esteem depended on his acceptance of the new reality. As though she’s putting herself in the picture with him and hoping there’s a fit.
*
Then it hit him who She was. She was Donna Douglas aka Ellie Mae Clampett and only then did the improbability of the fantasy mock him and he leaned on the horn and spoke in the precise duration of the car’s grievance as a motorcycle cut in front of him. He realized in a fleeting panic that he couldn’t remember the name of former president Jimmy Carter’s brother; if that went, could a key line from the sonnet be far behind? He then wondered in a morphed extention of this panic if he’d left the shower on. Which extended and morphed yet again into the awful realization that he’d left all his speed in a fannypack in the gym bag on top of his bedroom dresser. How was he supposed to get through the Apocalypse without his vitamin S?
*
He considered turning back for it.
*
The howdydoody Ford lurched forward and fell behind in the maddening traffic. Lurched forward and fell behind. It caught up again in a fanfare of horns he added his note to and he saw with self-perplexing irritation that the father and son were indifferent to the agonies of the traffic jam. Just chatting away. Even their windshield wiper seemed relaxed in the offhandedness of its gesture and the two reached up all smiles and lowered their sun-shades as an errant beam levered under the lowered lid of the late-afternoon rainmass with gospel brilliance. The beam illuminated them grinsquinting at eyelevel, goop-haired and adam-appled, a hit show, monster ratings from 1957 broadcast straight into the traffic beside him.
He pictured the mom, coifed and trim in her gown in a pensive pose smoking in the living room window, the young trees in a line in the front yard doing the Watusi and all the televisions off, the radios off, the wall clocks off, the power dead and the Frigidaire silent in the tabernacle of the kitchen. She’s awed by the roiled heavens and so moved by the glory of God’s vast hand as it shapes the wind and the waters and green leaves plucked living from the trees that she forgets to worry about her own boys on the road at the mercy of it, the mystery of life and her place in it. And the man out there, the survivalist, the comedy writer, the agnostic visionary out there in her Christian storm, a half-Jewish Noah saving the world one shaky ego at a time.
*
Lola Beedo: I just love that dress you’re wearing, darling!
Elke Hall: (warily) Why, thank you, doll.
Lola Beedo: (beat) The perfect outfit for a decapitation!
-
-
-
-
What a clever novelist I am to have read this story over a year ago. Lucky for me it was tucked away in my long-term memory where I could easily access it with just the right prompting from Sherriff Ralph and The Sherman Gang. Bravi. Bravissimi! Grazie lei.
CDS Frances, you are the angel-headed sumo of polymath erudition… can you elucidate your gnomic gold for us here…?
The late arrival, the end of the road. It all came together. Detonation of the mines. Controlled explosion. The first one anyway. That’s all I can say right now. You know what it’s like when you’re working on a new piece. Don’t want to diffuse the energy. However, I can share this. The image that tripped the wire in my imagination. Stay tuned.
Oh there’s blood on the splinters
Of my mind, coz i’ve broken down
This wall just like its one last time
And you never cease to amaze
me, after all my mistakes you could
Learn so quickly – oh i’m not so
god-damn naive, and i’m not a well
Meaning acolyte for a troubled
Day at sea no more, oh no,
That’s why i’ll be walking, walkin
Out the door.
Well i’m not as wise as i was
As a child, and i’m not just the back-
End of a colour from the light
oh but i’m sure that i could ever
Succeed, if i keep working so well
For those faces the summer leaves,
And without this truth, there’d
Be no fallacy, and without this
dream of mine, there can be no
there will be no reality:
Well, if we’re kicking back that far today…
old friends, loving the memories from yesterdays internet
branch, when we had just begun, anonymous and new
friends, tweeting from Twitter and FB accounts, loving aye
tea-banjo was ever so lovely; old pals, turned out fabulous
again hasn’t it? What am I to do, loving you both is breaking
all the rules, torn between two lovers pondering qualities
sizing up the odds, old friends – always lovely to see you
again you cunt. Fuckoff yer whole and stand straight, take
that look from off yer face, coz you aint ever gonna blare
this heart out yeah. So, Sandy can bait, she nose it’s
two late as we’re talking on aye, so sad to state, do snark
back in anger, do smack back in anger, one heard UK
at least USA.
Welcome to Balcony TV.
I’m Mike Igoe.
I’m going to be reading a poem tonight called, Rosanna You Slag. An unwarranted personal attack on (singer Chris De Burgh’s first ever Miss World Ireland 2003 issue):
Rosanna Davison
Rosanna Davison!
I’m with you in your cocaine hell!
I know your pain of sainted martyrs and cancer sufferers,
I know your agony of wooden rice bowls and children with distended bellies,
I was with you in solidarity when you walked barefoot on landmines and razor wire,
From Land’s End to John O’ Gods collecting direct debit mandates for the victims
Of burst Russian fission reactors.
I shared your stoic horrors under a 7,600% pay cut, due to inflation,
To feel your connection with public sector school teachers in Zimbabwe.
I was grinding my teeth in the background when you donated those
Twenty-five gallon drums of cooking oil to Haiti
And accepted the key to the city, graciously,
When they buried the machete in your honour.
I was off my fucking tits, with wonder, when you handed the key
To your Land Rover to a Venezuelan teenage hooker.
I suffered my share of disgust at your tits, your growler
and tabloid ass, your nipples of nomenclature,
Spread tactlessly on the breakfast table,
Beside the rashers and Beslan massacres…
After all those nippers you saved from drowning…
It’s shocking!
- Rosanna, it’s a cruel world, baby, these are bad people we’re dealing with -
We were all wailing wall-side in Jerusalem eating shit when they were
Crowning your body with thorns of doggy style porno pageantry,
Our poor miss world,
Miss humanity,
Miss agony,
Miss humility,
Miss publicity,
Little miss notice me,
Miss in-for-a-penny-in-for-a-pound,
Miss money-makes-the-world-go-round…
Rosanna… Katy French died alone… Truly alone… Rosanna her heart was pounding in the darkness at the end full of amphetamines and flowers and you have no idea… Rosanna just because we’ve noticed her doesn’t mean you should copy her… Rosanna just because we talk about her doesn‘t mean we liked her… Rosanna…
Just go sit in the corner.
~
A very ambitious piece
Toe-tapping! It has the jokey cadence of There’s a Hole, There’s a Hole, There’s a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea. Do you know that one?
I’ll be re-joining the fray/chat/conspiracy tomorrow morning, Comrades Lurking and Explicit and Even Imaginary… I was up until four last “night” (editing a short doc on Comrade DJ Sensei Barry) and I feel the bed’s gravity is at Jupiter-strength, dragging me, gasping like a young bride, across the bourgie-boho parquet…
This is a favorite chant of mine from American Indian Poetry, Edited by George W. Cronyn (Liveright, NY) 1934. Note how the poem, or chant, powerfully conjures the absence of the maid’s mother or sisters by emphasizing the presence of the father, husband and brother. To my mind an almost cosmic negation of the female.
Sednor and the Fulmar
(recitative)
An Eskimo Ballad
Where is she
who would never marry?
In a kayak to the mainland
going away.
Dost thou see, my eyes,
dost thou see them?
Ia, ha, ha, ha, ha!
To a tent of ragged skins,
he has brought her, crying;
(the Fulmar, her husband)
Her father with her elder brother
in a boat coming;
(he, seeking his daughter)
In a boat his daughter embarked.
Her husband, the Fulmar, cried:
(thus the Magician!)
The Fulmar says: “My means for transforming
let me see them as they are;
let me see them once more.”
Now they are taking the woman back;
to the tent going home;
the Fulmar followed,
(thus the Magician!)
Wind very strong to come near them;
(he made, the Magician!)
they were shipwrecked, nearly.
(Her father fears death!)
His daughter he pushes
into the sea.
To the boat on both sides–
to the boat she clings.
(still followed, the Fulmar!)
With a knife he struck her;
whales emerged.
(thus the Magician!)
Her whole body she leaned.
(Sednor, fearing death!)
With a knife into the eyes
he stabbed her;
he killed her.
(thus the Fulmar, the Magician!)
On the shore
her father lifted her.
A quilt he took;
on the beach laid her down.
With a dog skin she was covered,
(Sednor, the Beautiful!)
The flood-tide took her.
Comrade DJ Sensei Frances and Comrade DJ Sensei Des have built us a recondite dialogue that’s more explicit the less we try to figure it out. Still, I can’t help trying to figure it out. We’ve moved from Flame War to the segment of this edition of TET that’s all about smoke and mists, maybe. Incense, even. When Spooky smells good, inhale.
You sent me flying to the dictionary for these two: cochleate and fossilene. They sound like Martha Stewart (post-incarceration ) accent colors for some creative family’s holiday table project, e.g. a decoupaged cornucopia centerpiece. One of those endearing one-of-a-kind home-crafted heirlooms to treasure and bequeath. Can’t you just hear the commanding matriarch presiding over the sparkling delicacy-laden table: “Muffy, please pass the salt, but carefully dear. Mind the china!”
CDS Frances, “fossiline” is mine (fossil plus “ine” as in “of or relating to”) but “fossilene” is Swedish, apparently! I left out of the poem the fact that afterward I ate a chocolate muffin she’d baked (this was before Offsprung was seeded and she was only a dream): not dramatic enough. It was the first time she played something for me and I was struck by how violent the playing could be! And yes, I can hear Martha saying “Muffy” without parting her jaws
Though it’s wonderful to know (the specifics of dream food always fascinate me), I agree. That detail’s a bit saccharin to include in this poem. Would have defiled its pristine and somewhat severe gloss.
Aren’t there child labor laws anymore?!
http://www.quchronicle.com/2010/04/like-madonna-like-daughter/
[ed.'s note: It's sad that sucking celebrity phantom-cock is probably futile for most journalists... still safer than swallowing actual gene-fizz soda in exchange for rent munny, I guess]
I can still remember when that brand name was so new that the rumor in clubland was that Ciccone was a mulatto. The only thing she ever did I didn’t consider dull was that Bjork imitation
Talk about dull! I only post this because it seems to be some kind of boot camp for budding consumerist monsters. What kind of parents would allow their children to participate in something so humiliating and mindless?
21st Century Candid Camera: Fifty Years On, They Finally Get to the Point
Another atrocity from the U.K.! Who ever heard of real honest-to-goodness irish men in the kitchen? In the theater, in poetry clubs, in the pub, most definitely in bed–all yes! (Especially that last I hear tell. It’s a “yet” for me but most highly ranked on my deserted island fantasy mate wish list, way above the Professor from G.I. Frankly, given the choice from that crew I’d probably “do” the Captain). No good can possibly come of this.
Russell Johnson? Strangely enough, CDS Barry and I were discussing G.I. yesterday… I was able to rattle off the actual (professional, that is: “Ginger” is without a doubt the top layer of a parfait of aliases) names of the cast, along with the name of the band doing the theme song plus the stage name of their greatest occasional guest-star (Vito Scotti). Better than Star Trek, imo. Second only to the original TV Batman and Lost in Space.
Oh my. Did I actually write on the world wide web that I’d “do” the Captain? Sorry! What was I thinking? I meant the Skipper.
Worry not. I never for one moment…
The film of the TV Batman knocks Tim Burton’s efforts into outer space. I’ve never understood the importance of trying to “get inside” the head of someone who wants to be a bat. It’s not as if we can learn anything from analysing a comic book compulsion. So far better to keep it light as a souffle and well within budget.
Comrade Ed! Indeed. Or, as I wrote once,
BTW, what do you think of these mysterious sentences (from an article about “celebrity suicides”):
Oh and: a Comrade just mailed this to me. More proof that Grownups… even talented, acronymed Grownups like JLG… are just creeps, in the end:
Sid Vicious “apparently died” Oh Lawd don’t tell me he’s working in a garage in Slough with Elvis.
I live not too far from where Plath is “buried”. Apparently. I’ll watch out for any sightings of a poet floating popularly in between life and death next time I’m over that way.
You work on those two, I’ll work on the George “Superman” Reeves case re: what exactly the husband of a romantic rival did to him, Comrade Ed. Meet us at the cemetery at midnight, of course. And don’t tell Sid or Sylvia.
Given than no-one might actually be dead, those garages along the M4 must be filled with the “deceased”, the graveyard is probably the safest and emptiest place to meet.
PS I just got my royalties statement for April and I am reasonably certain that no one else in your wide circle, Comrade Ed, has received a royalty payment from Chechnya (the fact that the payment from there totals €4.40 shouldn’t diminish the We Are The World quality of seeing that far-flung territory mentioned, on paper, with my name near it)
Royalty cheques from rogue ex-USSR states. What a time we live in.
After reading your terrorising of the earnest batfans and in light of my own responses all I can say is “Holy synchronicity of opinions Batman !”
I suppose the Burton films at least have a sense of the absurdity of their situation but the later ones with Heath Ledger as the Joker are just idiotic. The fact that there were Burger King merchandise tie-ins summed it up for me.
– Returns to reading the collected Krazy Kat in a slightly more self-righteous and similarly self-deluded tone than normal -
Krazy Kat: about time for a re-make, I’d say. Kevlar breast-plate, codpiece… wicked.
“Eat brick fur-ball!”
Nice one. I think they’ll probably use that.
DIFFICULT TEXTS
A decisive battle in the War on Talent was won with the successful movement to place all Cultural Activity under the jurisdiction of Market Concepts. The shift from auditor to consumer is the shift from curious bystander to client or (even more vertigo-inducing) from supplicant to boss and the blow against Culture is staggering. And yet it’s rarely discussed in these terms. I always say that the difference between Art and Entertainment is that Entertainment is the friend who tells you want you want to hear and Art is the friend who doesn’t. Art is the unpredictable mistress (or catamite) while Entertainment is the oh-so-reliable whore. An audience of consumers knows only what it likes (mistaking this reflex-knowledge for critical acumen) and an Artist who loses her/his Authority (the independence to say, without anger, “Fuck You”) is doomed to become an Entertainer, always worried about the vapid tantrums of a Client with a short attention-span who doesn’t want to be “talked-down to” or “baffled” or “challenged” or in any way “fucked with”. The Client wants jugglers/fire-eaters/wisdom merchants/ pornographers and clowns. Not so long ago, the Artist emerged from his/her velveteen bondage to the Church and the self-aggrandizing, de Medici-style castle-stocking Patron to emerge into a brief, wondrous, post-Industrial, between-Wars butterfly-role as the Middle Class Imagination’s respected guide. The Artist never meant diddly to The Masses, of course (except to the extent that The Masses fantasized about fucking Modigliani’s models and trading sketches for Cadillacs, a la Pablo) but the Artist was never before at the low point he or she is now, reduced, for the most part, to selling out, no matter what, and largely (here’s the irony) in obscurity, anyway.
My writerly foundations are in Science Fiction. Science Fiction, I think, suffers from its own relative popularity: a talented writer has more of a chance of squeezing some money out of the rock of the Client’s collective head doing technology-oriented escapism (with lashings of sex bunny and light sabers to sweeten the deal) than with “literary fiction”: a good hook (has anyone done time-traveling hermaphrodite hookers, yet?) can spawn a graphic novel, a video game, a feature film or, even, a Television series. That’s rent right there. And who’s going to spend all that time writing shit they know won’t sell when some shit sells pretty well? It’s back to the Artist vs Entertainer thing. The audience has come to take for granted the Nero-like prerogative (see: the Consumer’s Magna Carta Mantra: “The Customer’s Always Right” ) to sneer at any uppity fuck who refuses to get on her/his knees and suck until his arsehole whistles.
I had most of this in mind when I sat down, one day, to write some Sci Fi.
This particular Difficult Text is set a not-exactly-clear number of decades in the future. Maybe centuries. The slo-mo genocide of blacks (the Shoah may have been brief but unspeakably intense; The Holocaust engulfing the Black African Diaspora took five or six centuries in its thoroughness and worked, in this tale) is very near completion. Germany is a province of an Anglophone Empire and the Fatherland’s former Turks are now known as “Gypsies”: the only German-speaking people on Earth. The protag is pure black and therefore a prized oddity at dinner parties. Science is geriatric and giving way to magic in a big way and the protagonist finds himself bewitched. Sees ghosts and so forth.
In keeping with the Flame War motif (and also the post-Flame War motif of smoke and mists for this tale is dark/mysterious) :this was one of the most savagely-attacked stories I’ve ever written (lots of accusations from various Guardian readers that it’s proof that I should nevuh bother writing again) when it popped out of me, three years ago. That’s why I’m sponging it off and trimming its mustache and propping it in a wing-backed chair in the window of the DIFFICULT TEXT brothel. Fuck it gratis.
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GYPSIES
Veering into the sun before his sunbrella went up was like having a frying pan in full sizzle put flat on his cheek. The bulgey curve of the station wall had a sharp collar of shade around it in which sat the gypsy with her accordion, playing the dolorous tango they all played within a laughable range of capability, from not-at-all to utter mastery. She gave him a look as he veered out into the sun because she blocked the very narrow path the shadow protected, sitting cross-legged on a collapsible chair with a shoe tip burning in light. The look she gave him contained a library of philosophical treatises, a look at once aware and detached, worldweary-yet-playful, dismissively flirtatious, seductively bored and suppler than thought itself. It took him somewhat aback. She was in the same cruel league of beauty as his obsession Margarethe, though she was just a gypsygirl and he was late for dinner.
Margarethe in a printed dress as tight as a chocolate bar’s wrapper handed him warm wine and introduced people who were milling around the room hungry and browsing her paintings, examining the work with what struck Van in some cases as almost hostile diffidence, as though the paintings were untouchable meals reserved for richer guests due to arrive much later. As he’d often said his ex-wife Margarethe was the best bad painter in the world and he thought of her near-perfect copy of van Gogh’s self-portrait in front of the easel, 1888, showing the darkling feral head and retardedly-intense blue eyes but in her version he’s smiling and hoisting a condensation-bejeweled bottle of Coke. She said,
“Van, this is Taylor and Scotty and you know…”
“Konrad.”
“Exactly,” she grinned.
A large-ish American with short shiny hair stood up from the couch and introduced himself as Bartholomew, pointedly ignoring nearby Taylor and Scotty, who were Queers from London. Fucking Heteromanic American.
The air in the flat was dense with meat. Her new husband Konrad was clearly no vegetarian but a well-built, distracted-looking German in formal attire with red hands and a peeling nose which propped up big square black-rimmed glasses. From time to time he’d nod or grunt with disgust or amusement despite the fact that no one was talking to him. He pronounced “ski” in the old German manner: she. He peeled some skin off his nose and said aprés she as he went ahead to his place at the dinner table, Margarethe rolling her eyes at his back.
She confessed with rue that one has to climb so high to find natural snow these days that one wears a Lycra space suit on the slopes. The men get tremendous hardons. The glasses Konrad was wearing may or may not have been connected, though Van had noted that Konrad sported them in the manner of the blind, face beatifically elevated in an unfinished smile.
Something sharp-toothed and furtive squealed flaming to cinders in a trap in one of the rooms under renovation and Van could see it for a moment and then he couldn’t. He blinked.
When Margarethe announced dinner with a clap of her hands they formed a pilgrim’s procession of low chatter and crossed the apartment through a long, over-lit wing of plastic sheets and scaffolding. Up some plaster-dusted stairsteps they went leaving shoe prints and Van straggled behind studying the pretentious sepia-tone images on the wall in a hallway, pictures he’d taken with the antique Hasselblad Maggie had given him their first Christmas. Gypsies of unvarying facial expression hefted arched accordions over their knees like gulls with broken backs.
Margarethe laid a hand on an arm each of Scott’s and Taylor’s as she lead the procession, walking between them, and said, “I had the most ghastly nightmare again, darlings.”
Konrad was chewing and laughing at something on the ceiling as they filed into the dining room.
Bartholomew with his wide, flat, not-fat-at-all body, waved a finger at various points around the dinner table at which Van found himself seated among the others having their chunky pork soup ladled into exquisite porcelain bowls. Van only heard what sounded like the sea in a very big conch shell as the American droned on, a prime exemplar of the effect of the loss of empire on a disoriented consciousness. The dining room felt airless lit only with candles feeding mostly on Bartholomew’s breath and Van wanted desperately to open a window but he was no longer the flat’s master. Bartholomew had no plate set before him; no knife or fork or water glass. No food.
Konrad exhibited open-eyed signs of REM.
Someone was saying, “I suppose in the latter category you’ve got the theory of Relativity and smoking will kill you and an embryo is conceived when an egg cell meets a sperm cell in the womb and so forth.”
Bartholomew was rocking in his seat.
Second course was blood pudding.
Konrad noted suspicious gas leaks in Istanbul and Crete, hundreds dead or unaccounted for.
Van recognized the spider, limbs fanning long and tenuous as internet links, in a high corner. The spider or its descendant. He’d been separated from Margarethe for over two years and divorced for a year yet every single thing about the apartment was the same as he’d left it, minus the meaty veil of odors. He recognized the faint pattern of stains on the tablecloth, the brown-tinged continents on a medieval map of the known world.
He glanced at Margarethe with her high forehead and incongruously Croatian nose and the pewter ringlets of her hair. Memory provided the glistening plum of her kissable buttocks which had in turn been provided by her superblack boy-diddling bishop of a sweet-breathed father late of an almost blackless Capetown. Due to whom she pronounced black as bleck.
Van heard, “The fear of looking stupid is what keeps the intellectual in line.”
Playfully, he imagined Bartholomew as a big blond gypsy with a ring in his ear wrestling an accordion in the shadow of the station begging for coins instead of dispensing unsolicited pontifications at the dinner table. Van edited the gypsy girl into Bartholomew’s place, seated beside him at the table, slyly embarrassed by her decadent plateful of fatty meats. He found himself hoping she’d still be on that stool at the station wall when it came time to leave but it was New Year’s so of course she’d be at the Brandenburg Dome with the others, picking pockets or playing that same hideous tango with champagne-oiled ease.
Konrad had Bartholomew’s bright hair in a knuckle-grip and jerked hard, hacking through pulpy fat neck with a serrated blade, though no one else seemed to notice.
Fingerbowls were distributed.
Margarethe was blowing kisses at someone, mouthing Kiss ma bleck aws, while Taylor indulged in the so-called New Nostalgia with the repeated use of the phrase, “The Tolerable ‘20s.”
Maragarethe was saying, behind her hand while she chewed on gristle, “It was that nightmare about Bartholomew again, I’m afraid, I hope he calls,” but Van never heard this. She was hoping to get a rise out of her insufficiently jealous husband.
She was playing the drollest of hostesses and staring into her wineglass, the bowl of the wineglass magnifying her eye into a batty black goldfish, telling Van that Taylor was a Money Artist. That is, she clarified, Taylor works in the medium of money. The national gallery has a room of his elegant displays, each display featuring a fluctuating digit synched to an enormous amount somewhere. You see he started his career with artifactual lucre… didn’t you, Taylor… crisp bundles of Euros and dollars, arranged on plinths… though his breakthrough came when he finally grasped money in its most spiritual form.
Critics call his new work cleaner.
Konrad quoted an article to the effect that the art market is the biggest money laundering operation on the planet. He told a joke in a halting cadence that ended with the punchline the sweet smell of sock sex.
After a haunting gypo film in the screening room about transvestites (Manche Mogen’s Heiss), Margarethe, rubbing her eyes like a waking child, excused herself with a cautionary remark about dessert and Van, glancing at Konrad, offered to help in the kitchen, so down a dark hall and with the vented door still swinging he lay a finger athwart her woodgrain arm and moaned how he missed being the only black couple at the opera.
He said he missed the way she kicked in her sleep and commented too mordantly and far too loud in the theater and buttered both sides of her toast or snatched at her bushy cloud of pillowed hair like a honeybear in a cloud of bees when he used to go down on her.
He pulled her towards him and she laughed offering a modicum of resistance saying don’t. She said,
-Van, your words are lovely as ever, and you’re a good Christian, truly you are, but as a woman grows older she responds less to words than to deeds, and deeds aren’t done without power, and, as you know, Konrad has an inherited seat on the Ministry of the Interior…there’s more power in one of his ash-colored eyelashes than in the whole of that big carbon dick of yours.
-Ha! That old white devil be damned.
-You’re talking about my husband, darling.
-I’m your husband.
-No you’re not. Not any more you’re not.
-In the eyes of God.
The first punch stunned her and the second one brought her to her knees.
When she swept in from the kitchen with sugar-free parfaits on a tray of hammered tin from Morocco which Van, trailing behind her with half a dozen neon aperitifs, had forgotten giving her for their second anniversary, the shifty mass of her sheathed bosom as she lowered each parfait to every spot around the table was so milk-maidishly servile that it made them appear to be overdressed black help. This pleased Van perversely and he handed out the aperitifs with a shamingly servile flourish.
Scott turned to Taylor and said, not quietly enough, “I’m having that headache we talked about.”
Margarethe stamped her foot with winning petulance and said but it’s almost midnight! Her plan was to gather on the balcony after dessert and watch fireworks and greet the majestic change of centuries with upturned faces of child-like wonder.
A meth-massacre in Phuket. Konrad joked from the corner of his mouth that it takes a child to raze a village.
They sweated the proximity of the sultry night and watched animated neo-classical constellations like Diana the archer and Pegasus flapping his wings and the stars-and-cross of the Anglo-Germanian union scintillate then shatter into hundreds of jiggle-boobed goose-stepping showgirls in turn becoming great pinwheels lilting like funereal Lilies to Earth. After which, rainbow-colored cubes representing the six colors of the union rolled across the sky unfolding into crucifixes larger than any skyscraper. Crucifixes ringing the ecliptic, pulsing to Die Walküre and foreshortened towards the galactic hub.
Van was distracted by the scene he watched instead. Down there on the sidewalk, two stories below the balcony, near enough he heard their pleas for mercy. Handsome theatergoers surrounded and doused by a broken circle of gypsies and put peremptorily to the torch, dancing away from each other in flames towards opposite ends of the street trailing rich black streamers of skinsmoke. Reflections of the flames shrank curving across bubble windshields and Van was clutching his throat, suppressing the nausea, unsure of what he was seeing.
Konrad shouted U-Nasa with conclusive evidence: Asgaard settlement extinct. The others on the balcony merely oooh’d and ahhh’d with patriotic boredom at the immensity of the crucifixes stainglassing the sky.
Van knew it now. He was bewitched.
2.
He rode the near-empty train to its endstation. He gasped at the foretaste of heat that rolled under the platform’s baked awning as he stepped from the train. It pulled away as he shuffled in his bright white flapsuit and widebrimmed hat, a Pierrot in blackface shuffling to platform’s end then down the hundred stairs in his two-legged tent, the handrail untouchably hot, bracing himself to emerge from the station into the noon’s blast furnace, slower than wading through oil.
Entering Gypsytown at high noon was the only way to sneak into the city.
He pictured them snoring in dark rooms while he stalked the blinding streets at noon, a striking lone figure, something from a dream, and he realized that he was thinking about himself again, as he often did, and the tight cap of his mossy black hair itched. He was thinking of himself as a museumpiece, a rare collection of features gathered in the vitrine of his flat-nosed face, so broad across the cheekbones and heavy in the jaw, a public monument trusted to his own irresponsible stewardship. What if a gypsy punched him in the nose, ruining something of priceless rarity?
The rare blacks allowed back on the continent had been welcomed grudgingly under the stainless-steel wing of the Church. He was thinking of Margarethe’s father, Bishop Siss, or his own great-grandfather, the influential Christian theoretician famous for Multiple-Christ Doctrine, the original Vanross Olubodon, a remote and frightening figure. Not for one moment since birth had Van…or anyone from the small colony of blackies and darkfacers in Berlin…felt welcome.
Most of them, as in the case of Margarethe’s family, had commenced immediately to exobreed out of the color with almost any whites who were mad enough to fuck them. Margarethe had nieces and nephews who were already as light as the palms on her hands, or no darker than the inner folds of her navel, but, still, there were tests you were required to take at a certain age. Forms you had to fill out. You’d get Homo sapiens africanus stamped on your license for all to see, though perhaps one might keep it a secret on all but the genobureaucratic level.
Van’s family was an oddity. Both for having been in Europa for so many generations and for breeding almost exclusively black for the duration. Many of his people were priests; Van wasn’t a priest but he was a prominent theologian. The family members who weren’t in the priesthood, who were out there in the game of life, competing for love and money, were running out of black non-relatives to mate with. And with Van’s recent loss of mostly-black Margarethe, what would he do? Write his amateurish sonnets and masturbate on whores in blackface until the end of all time?
The station was a ziggurat of limestone steps on a dusty peninsula of asphalt. Across a weedy road were the vacant lots of the western edge of Gypsytown and beyond the vacant lots, a fifteen minute walk over rubble and weeds, queued the first of the white buildings, the coated buildings like walls in a low maze, each building decorated with its check of foil, foil over all the windows, the abandoned vista of an ancient millennial film project.
Set on the very edge of the asphalt before the broken road there stood a longish tent full of stacked bundles of newspapers and a sinewy bearded troll. The tall troll was seated crosslegged, dressed in the altogether save a suet-colored loincloth and sandals and sipping from a vintage bottle in the open shade of the tent. The man had the shaggy blonde sea-burned look of the Viking about him. But he was very thin.
As Van approached the tent in order to cross the broken road behind it the Viking put down his bottle with great care and slipped into a hooded cape which hung from head to knees. The cape had weight to it and concealed a dagger no doubt. He stepped into the sunpressure towards Van wielding a newspaper and Van recognized the paper as the Cassandran Standard and formed preemptive noises in his throat, shaking his head, but there was no way the tout would be put off, for Van was probably the first non-gypsy to cross his path all day… all week, possibly. Despite being momentarily flummoxed by the impossible blackness of Van’s face, he smiled and followed across the broken road with his spiel:
“Get your Cassandran, get your Cassandran right here, your sweet Cassandran Standard, all the news you were never supposed to know, reported at great risk to all involved, no gratitude necessary… top stories: the facts are in… average life-expectancy down by thirty percent in less than a century… top stories… the Asgaard Settlement alive and well and preparing for war against Earth… top stories… fish return to the Persian Gulf… you’ll read it here first… the news you were never supposed to know… all this plus the usual tasty all-color supplement: they’re fresh, they’re female, they’re Pagan… five dollars and the truth is yours to filter as you see fit….”
But when Van gave him a stainless steel dollar in hopes he’d scurry off the tout secreted the coin in the voluminous cuntfolds of his cape and said, wonderingly, after licking his lower lip, “You’re black.”
Van stopped walking and sighed. “That’s right.”
“I’m honored. They call me Gregorius. Is it true that blacks think not in words but in pictures, Sir?”
“I can only speak for myself when I say no to that question.”
“Ah.”
Van nodded. Gregorius pointed at Gypsytown. “You are not going in there alone, are you, Sir?”
“Why shouldn’t I?” He glared from the grotto under the wide brim of his hat.
“For one thing, there are no street signs… they took every single one of them down, Sir. The gypos are dead clever. You’d find yourself hopelessly lost in minutes. In heat like this, for more than an hour, no shelter… that can mean heart failure, Sir.”
“You’re advertising your services as a guide.”
“Not just a guide. There are horrors greater than being lost…”
“Horrors.”
“Not many know that the gypsies are provided by The State to operate under their own rule of law and governance, Sir.”
“I’m well aware of that fact.”
“But do you know the tone or timbre of these Laws of theirs, Sir? The codes and statutes? Run afoul of them and it could mean your happiness, to say the least. And then there are ravenous crowpacks to deal with and bandits…”
“Alright.”
“Five steel dollars an hour. Payment on the hour.”
They shook on it and continued across the weedy terrain of the vacant lots, Gregorius just slightly ahead. What does he have in that cape, wondered Van. A telescope? A rifle?
Without turning to face Van he called out, “What are you looking for, if I may ask, Sir?”
“Who.”
“What?”
“Who, not what. I’m looking for a gypsy girl. A gypsy girl I saw this New Year’s Eve just past.”
“A gypsy you saw at the Dome, was it, Sir?”
“No. Earlier that day. At the Charlottenburg Station.”
“Charlottenburg Station? Performing there or just traveling, Sir?”
“She was performing.”
“Fair or dark?”
“Dark.”
“Young?”
Van shrugged. “Not old.”
Walking backwards at Van’s pace, Gregorius stared a good long time before finally turning to point far off, lifting the edge of his cape. “That’ll mean she lives over there, on what was formerly known as Bergmann Strasse, then. The other end of Gypsytown.”
Van laughed.
“Sir?”
“The way you pronounce ‘Strasse’. ”
“Strasse.”
Van laughed again. “Strah-suh. You even talk like a gypsy. You speak it?”
“Fließend.”
“What?”
“Fluently, Sir. Fließend means ‘fluently’.”
Van was pleased. He felt he was getting his money’s worth.
Flickered shadows now and then swept them over and up they’d look to see clouds of suntorched crows tumble headlong as though hurled from an invisible mountain and Gregorius would crouch low and dip one shoulder as if ready to swing hard at whatever came at them but the shadows flew onward, falling sidelong away at great speed. The nearest tree was kilometers distant.
Van and his taciturn page (what was he brooding on?) exchanged nary a word until they were well into the city-within-a-city, with its uniform myriad six-storey flatblocks and narrow treeless immaculate streets and sidewalks. No trash or thick brushstrokes of dogshit or mosaics of smashed glass forever. Nor rusting hulks of cars or trucks or gutted refrigerators. So unlike Berlin proper. He could have licked the griddle ground and left it hissing with spit with no fear of dirt-eating.
“It’s all so clean,” marveled Van, breaking the silence at such a low volume, just slightly above the striding rustle of his garment, that breaking it was barely worth it. His unwieldy white flapsuit. He was exhausted. He longed for his sunbrella. “It’s cleaner than any street I’ve walked on!”
“Of course it is, Sir. The Gypsies waste nothing.”
“Not even merdes…”
“They make fuel with it, Sir.”
“You’re very well-spoken for a man who lives in a tent, Gregorius.”
“There was a time, long ago, I participated in the world, like you. I gave it all up to do the noble work of selling the Cassandran. It’s a hard life but I sleep well every night and my gypo wife supports me. And I don’t live in that tent, you see. We live in a flat like any other.”
“I suppose it’s a myth that they steal, as well, then, Gregorius?”
“An ugly and ignorant myth, Sir. No offense.”
Van chuckled. He said, “So if one had a peek through a gypo flat…”
“One would most of all see books, Sir. Every gypsy lives with more books than he has stories to tell…a gypsy aphorism.”
Van curled his lip. Even he couldn’t afford more than a few books, and those he kept in a vault. “Books?”
Gregorius continued, “In point of fact they make nearly all their money as infobrokers.”
“Infobrokers?”
“Spies, Sir.”
“Spies?”
“Is there anyone less visible than a gypo? All dressed alike, all playing the same…”
Van scratched at his nose and grunted. He did not believe this, nor the other thing about books. He said, “Possibly.”
“May I ask why you speak so softly, Sir?”
Van lifted his chin at the building they were just then shuffling past and said, “They sleep in the heat of the day, as you know. It’s prudent…one speaks in certain tones…”
“Another falsehood, Sir,” Gregorius said, wearily. “Ironic, too, considering that they’re all awake and been doing business for hours when the rest of Berlin is still yawning over its first bitter coffee! It is true, these buildings have no power to offset the heat, but the cellars of the buildings are dark and cool and…”
“This is astonishing news…”
“…the gypsies have connected all the cellars in a kind of underground city.” Gregorius stopped in the street and touched his bare red chest with a flourish of his cape. “And I know the safest point of entry to the system.”
“But I must,” pleaded Van, revealing his desperation suddenly, “I must find this gypsy girl! She has bewitched me!”
Gregorius pointed at the cracked black skin of the three-hundred-year-old road.
“You’ll find her there.”
Looking at the road where he had been directed to, Van watched as Gregorius’ shadow appeared to raise a long dark sword to the sky, gripping the hilt with both hands as though he might fly away on it.
There was a roaring silence as Van stared blinkless into the white skull of the sun without being conscious of ceasing to.
3.
A temperate breeze poured in over the tall grasses of the Auroran Savannah and clattered through the blinds and windchimes on the front porch and the naked prospects of the sunrooms above it and pushed open, with one polite hand, the curtains of the attic window.
The servant stooped polishing wood in the attic bedroom happened to look out the window at that moment to glimpse through the curtains the procession of secondhand government Zils coming in on the long approach paralleling the canal, like a funeral, though she knew for a fact it was only a lunch.
The master was still drowsing in his hammock on the porch. Drowsing as indolent in the summer’s long day as he was frenetic during the winter’s long night of restorative darkness, and though she felt the giddy impulse to hurry downstairs to wake him, one of the others would probably see to it, so she kept at her polishing, waltzing the soft fat cloth over the loops and whorls of the wood’s exquisitely ancient fingerprint. The chest of drawers she brought to its hard gleam predated her language; her people; the city of Aurora itself. Centuries of breath had trapped spirit-words in the microscopic chambers of the wood and she felt the furniture breathe as her palm swirled over it.
She expected at some point after lunch that the master would gather the barefoot staff in the kitchen in order to introduce them to the overfed guests, as ever, and charmingly perform his favorite trick of naming their various tribes: Aleuti, Russo Lapp, Samoyed, Swedish Tungu, Dane and Red Yankee! All living together under one roof, he would exclaim. A boast of his taste, his benevolence.
And all sharing one bed, she was always tempted to add. The two boys among them were even prettier than the black-eyed girls.
Lieutenant Governor Mey and the trade delegation from the North Atlantic States looked mortified in their youth, clustered together in the center of Stark’s library, waiting obediently for lunch. Stark was still drowsy and rumpled in his patrician, couldn’t-be-bothered way, scratching his belly through a fine garment. He knew history well enough to relish this sensation of intimidating elected officials with anything more subtle than an army. Their sincere diffidence was innocence and a luxury that wouldn’t last more than a few generations before sophistication, with the renascent persistence of evil, returned again to the world. But for now a breathing space. An Eden.
Stark drew their attention to two black heads on a recessed shelf in the wall beside the book case. The floor-to-ceiling, wall-wide case was emblematic in itself of staggering wealth, but they couldn’t begin to calculate the value of those heads.
“Very beautiful,” nodded Lieutenant Governor Mey, hands clasped behind his back because otherwise they’d be shaking. “May I ask how you got them that color?”
Stark laughed. “Jahweh gave it to them.”
“Jahweh?”
“The super-being they both believed in, while they lived. The man in the sky who created the Earth and the Heavens. In the beginning he is said to have said to let there be light, and there was light.”
The trade delegation chuckled politely.
Stark touched the male head with a collector’s awed affection. “Preserved eternally with a process that renders the flesh incorruptible without changing its natural composition. If you care to touch here… very carefully… you’ll find that it is indeed flesh, flesh like yours or mine… at room temperature. Not even particularly cold. Though they’ve been dead for centuries.”
“Anyway, it’s a lost technology. We couldn’t do anything close to it.”
With a cupped hand Stark rounded the cheek and delicate jawline of the female head, her ear bending and springing from under his touch. The gesture was so like a lover’s postcoital caress that two of the delegates flinched. The head was so beautiful, so life-like in its preservation, yet so strange in its blackness and shining shaved skull that they expected the eyes and mouth to pop open with a scream when Stark had finished fondling it.
“I call the two of them the world’s greatest love story. I also call them the gypsies, because they’ve been all over the habitable world, seeking one another in death. The facts are really quite extraordinary.”
“Before I explain how I acquired them, I’ll let you in on the amazing fact that I know quite a lot of detail about their social status, their manner of dress and eating habits and even the specific circumstances of her death. His death I know less about.”
“I inherited him, you see. I grew up in a house that counted him coyly among its treasures, though he was kept in a locked case in the attic. I didn’t get a look at him until my father died and I inherited the estate. We were doing an inventory of the art treasures and he sort of popped up. As it turns out, he was worth more than all of the other paintings and sculptures combined.”
“He’s the only known example of a fully intact head from the species Homo sapiens africanus… what they called back then, rather obviously, a black. Interestingly, the black species thought only in pictures but not in words as we do. Otherwise, they were both shockingly different and uncomfortably similar to us.”
“I only regret that in preserving the head they’ve shaved the hair off, you see, because his hair was just as unique as the rest of him… very tight little kinks, very short, rather mossy… imagine, possibly, a cross between moss and wool.”
“The female’s hair was a bit different… imagine a cross between his hair as I’ve described it and yours or mine… because she’s not purebred, you see; her mother was Homo sapiens. Look at the nose.”
“Anyway, for years I’ve had him here in my library, the guardian of my books. Then one day, on a trip through Romana, to pay my respects to the ancestors, as one does… and also because I love French sweets, and France is right across that border, as it happens…”
Stark could see he was beginning to bore them. Time to spice up the story.
“I was offered the chance to bid on her by a private collector of ill repute. Of course I couldn’t refuse… money was no object. I felt I owed it to my black Adam to provide an Eve.” The Biblical reference went over their heads but he forged on. “The broker I purchased her from informed me that she’d been quite the celebrity of her era…married to a rich, powerful official… back when those three words together weren’t oxymoronic, gentlemen… back in that barbaric era…”
“He was rich and powerful and rather psychotically jealous. It seems he beheaded her lover and fed the lover’s corpse to her guests at a dinner party! Only a few weeks later he killed her, too. Beat her to death… most luckily sparing the face. The interesting thing about all that is how little punishment he received for his crimes; I’d dare say any of you would face more bother over a parking violation than he did for double murder. He lived to be a ripe old age and dined out, no pun intended, on the legend of his atrocity.”
“It was only after bringing Eve home to Adam, and setting them beside one another on that very shelf, that I began to wonder if they might have known one another in life. I wondered if there was some connection… perhaps by a few degrees of separation at the least. I knew they were from the same part of the world… I knew they were from the same era, vaguely…”
“Peeling off the tiniest amount of flesh from the back of our Adam’s neck, a technician had his genetic numbers checked against the oldest known database.”
“You won’t believe this, gentleman…but I assure you that what I’m about to say is true. It turns out… I’m getting goosebumps as I think about it… it turns out our black Adam and Eve were once married.”
“Let that sink in for a moment.”
“They were married, divorced, met their separate deaths… were separated as artifacts by thousands of kilometers for centuries… different countries and continents… now reunited on that shelf.”
Even Lieutenant Governor Mey was obviously moved. There was a catch in his throat when he asked, pointing to a small oil painting set in the center of the book case…asking, perhaps, merely to diffuse the intensity of the moment… “Can you tell us who this is?”
Stark drew himself straight with awful pride, but spoke with self-satirizing pomp.
“This? This is Iseult Tsurak, mother of the modern nation of Romana, hero of the Gypsytown rebellion, intellectual architect of the Pax Romana and the founder of the immense fortune that nourishes the Stark family to this day, even as far north as we’ve drifted. Stark is an Arctic modernization of the name Tsurak, you see.”
“She’s my great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother.”
“What a look in those eyes, eh?”
“What a look.”
-
-
Mmmmmm….very nice…(lights cigarette and watches smoke drift upwards as a feeling of agreeable melancholy takes hold)…and I’ll still respect you in the morning.
We’ve got to stop meeting like this, M…
“Most of them, as in the case of Margarethe’s family, had commenced immediately to exobreed out of the color with almost any whites who were mad enough to fuck them. ”
It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.
It’s after hours in Berlin. Besides, if CDS Sean could get away with that smiley face…wink-wink-wink.
COUNTER-INTUITIVE SENTENCES
and
I’m guessing the 2nd quote is from the current Pope.
The tributes to McClaren have been extraordinarily tight-lipped. You can almost see pantomime dame Johnny Lydon’s lips pursing as he tried to squeeze out his positive remark.
CDS Edward,
Who do we revile more? Those who perpetrate or those who stand silently by and let the rapists hollow another human being out? The wife of one of my dearest friends in life was sexually abused by her step-father. The worser pain for her was that she was powerless to prevent him also hurting her younger sisters. The story has a happy ending though. He blew his own brains out with a shotgun in the family barn. Dirty work, but someone had to do it. His act was not exactly redemptive but it was a step in the right direction. Someone needs to give the Pope the heads up on that concept. I bet any number of us in the Bunker Pagoda, especially CDS Steven, would happily clean and load the rifle, find the right words of encouragement to help him see it through, and bless the act when it was done.
Frances
This from the Guardian
“The experience the church has gained in battling abuse in its ranks “could be useful to other institutions and society as a whole,” he [Father Federico Lombardi] added. “It seems that the media has not considered this aspect sufficiently.”
So the abuse is useful in giving the Church experience in how to deal with the fall-out of abuse. Admire is the wrong word completely but one has to admire the ability to twist in the wind. As with some of the pronouncements about Haiti the church’s main concern seems to be self-survival and self-justification. I suppose it joins a lengthy queue of similar institutions.
Which are comprised of people, some with great power, who make the choices that ultimately redound to the institutions. And we know the difference.
Not to hi-jack this thread and be too personal, I was the near victim of rape. But my friend and neighbor, Chris Post, heard me screaming from my bed where I was pinned down, the would-be rapist’s knee on my low back. That scream was my last chance as the bad guy was trying to stuff a linen dinner napkin in my mouth to silence me. But Chris heard it and literally ran naked through the courtyard of our crappy apartment dwelling (this was in college) and saved me. SAVED ME. That’s really how I think of it. I sing his praises, I say his name, I think of him whenever I hear the words hero and miracle.
Thing about rape is: I wish we could learn to treat it as a physical assault. There’s collateral damage in the quasi-Koranic sense that a rape victim has been “defiled” or even devalued. I mean, in the age of AIDS (and weaponized sexual sadism), rape can be worse than a bar beating, of course, but… yeah. There are societal attitudes there that deserve scrutinizing…
Erm,… I don’t do guns, really, CDS Frances. Also, as much as I dislike the notion of the Pope…
Pat Mann considers treating rape as Tort in Micro-Politics: Agency in a Postfeminist Era http://www.amazon.com/Micro-Politics-Postfeminist-Patricia-S-Mann/dp/0816620490 I really do wish it (the whole book) was required reading at the high school level. She breaks it down.
“…rape can be worse than a bar beating, of course, but… yeah. There are societal attitudes there that deserve scrutinizing…”
I agree. Do the cells and nerve endings in my body really care if its my kneecap or my cervix that gets pounded? No. Pain is pain.
And there’s the subtext of woman-as-virginal-chattel to think about, too
That’s the crux of it.
I don’t believe I’ve ever told anybody this before, comrades. And it’s personal knowledge that redefined my perception of my father as a man, and a passionate one at that. My father’s wife told me that his very last words on this earth were: “Kiss me!”
Very good last words, CDS Frances… hope your father doesn’t mind if I plagiarize them!
I wrote, in Comment #69, TET 4.0:
This writer concurs
Just try not to fall under her spell…
I believe Ms. Stritch is in the Pagoda! Stand back.
The fulcrum on my heart.
I’m shooting my whole April wad here!
Oh, fuck me, I’m into May.
Yipes, CDS Frances! This is where I reveal my feral lack of good taste and admit to hating that kind of music! Larf. Okay, I know, I know: I posted a Shirley Bassey video once or twice, but “Goldfinger” is a micron edgier than this fare (for me). Remember when I wrote, up-thread, that I don’t really do guns (re: your suggestion that I treat the Pope like a clay pigeon)? I just envisioned a grassy knoll secreted in each of the theaters in which each of these performances was videotaped… a grassy knoll behind a duck blind. I see myself using night-vision goggles and a laser-sight sniper-scope. Though I wouldn’t aim to kill Liza, just disable her (I liked Cabaret… the movie). The one with Lesley-Ann Warren as Cinderella was the worst of the bunch, for me… the sheer post-Disney, restricted Country Club, Earl Butz whiteness of it set off my vestigial Mason Dixon gland (the one that would give me trouble, as a kid, whenever I found myself in a car being driven too far South or too deep into the Suburbs or stopping at a turnpike Sambo’s). It’s my failing, I know! I take full responsibility for being a barbarian who could never sit in an audience with the people at those various events without bouts of usher-summoning Tourette’s. Well, I’m a twee barbarian because I could never sit through a boxing match either. There are so many strata and cliques of The People I just could never really hang with… you can see why I wouldn’t make a good Commie. Or a New Yorker (I lived in Park Slope for six months in 1988-ish and was in Manhattan in 1980, the day after Lennon was silenced, to see Elephant Man, which I probably wouldn’t have gone to, despite Bowie’s being in it, had it been a musical ).
Thank you CDS Steven and CDS Edward both for your indulgence. I respect your right to loathe what I love even as I struggle to understand that anitpathy. I mean, it’s not as if I posted Jim Nabors belting To Dream the Impossible Dream or Robert Goulet warbling If Ever I Would Leave You. But if you can’t tell the diff between a Lawrence Welk polka or a HeeHaw medley and these exquisitely sensitive star-turns I see we have still have much work ahead of us on the road to gender equity.
CDS Frances, if we’d posted either closeted square atrocity you cite, you’d have a fair point! laugh. You know what they say: one (wo)man’s fromage…
Of course the Panthers were full of people on a CIA allowance (agent provocateur Mr. Cleaver being not the least of these; if Cleaver was such a threat to society, why was his wife… pictured here… given a full scholarship from Yale in 1981? How did Eldridge end up designing and marketing codpieces in the Reagan Era?) but note the style.
Frances lucky I don’t have much hair on the top of my haid otherwise those Broadway belles would have seen to it. Liza Minnelli reminds me of one of those offshore windfarms ( sorry! )
But I must confess to having enjoyed a TV programme about Lorenz and Hart a few nights ago. Mainly because no matter how much I dislike the music ( and in these cases like opera it’s much much more the trimmings rather than the actual meal itself ) I do like to hear musicians talk about the process of writing music.
Steven! do you ever play music in front of an audience? I know a few composers who hate the idea and others who enjoy it. I’m not a Liza with a Zee needy, permanently switched on type of acTOR/ performer but I do like the presence and concentration of an audience. Somehow I can’t imagine you do but my personality profiling is not high on the list of achievements.
Comrade Ed, long, long ago I made a decision to privilege my Lit Muse by turning her Musical Twin into a whore. I wouldn’t be caught dead (with a stick up my arse and a hinged jaw) performing the sonic-atrocities I now co-compose (important to diffuse the guilt) for munny. Shudder. But back when I was trying to be an envelope-pusher in Lit and Music… sure. I performed often enough. Never really enjoyed it, I have to admit… stage-time was always a fraught blur. Pulling off the required rokk moves (“Hullo Toykyo!”) always seemed too much like begging for love and … you know. I never trusted my fellow band-members not to make mind-bending errors (have I got stories: Saint Patrick’s Day in Saint Paul in 1981, I think it was…. hostile audience of 400 very shitfaced fuckers making polite requests for “BILLY SQUIRE!!!” while I was launching into Stand By Me, ignorant of the fact that the drummer was launching into a Bo Diddley classic… sang the entire song to that rhythm. Pelted with drinks, of course).
“much hair on the top of my hair”??? Sorry I seem to have slipped into Flann O’Brien’s Third Policeman world.
[ed.'s note: sorted]
I understand. Oddly enough people often say to me how brave we must be to perform outside. Well it does have its problems but if people don’t like what you do they can walk away and usually do whereas when you’re inside they are a little less inclined to do so and when you factor alcohol into the equation there will be blood.
Not only blood. Fucking up so hugely, in a spotlight, in front of a crowd of half-a-thousand people, is a face-numbing, autonomic-nervous-system-endangering sensation like no other I’ve ever experienced. Put that down to my Ego, of course. The rest of the band beshat themselves laughing.
UPDATE: Just recovered a blood-solidifying memory of playing in front of a packed house… in a church. What I hadn’t counted on was the fact that the audience of Liberal Lutheran Yuppies would be stone-silent and poker-faced for the duration… applause (not to mention whistling or hard-rock-style devil-greetings) in a church would have been an unthinkable breach of decorum, you see. It was just me, my acoustic and two stunning back-up singers (rummages around for photos). Got to the end of the first song… I was contracted to do two tunes per performance, two performances… and the deafening silence erased my mind. Couldn’t think of the second song. I was paid seventy-five bucks for the gig, which was somehow related to Nicaragua. Second performance was a little better. I think it was 1985. One of the songs, I remember, was called Senseless (the second, I now recall, was Twilight).
Ah the sound of silence – I prefer the sound of a teenager calling the three of us ” a complete set of wankers” ( collect all 3 and swap them with your friends! ) to the sound of indifference.
Free in Every Box!
But, back to Rape (lower parts of Comment #140): we should list the world’s most famous Hollywood Rapes. There’s the bit in Gone With the Wind, obviously. And what about Bond overpowering Pussy Galore (in that barn) in Goldfinger? I can’t think of any others off the top of my head but I know they are plentiful…
Goin South has a comedy rape where Jack Nicholson ties up Mary Steenburgen and gives her what she so obviously wants. The presence of John Belushi also explains why Jack develops a cold in the nose at intermittent points throughout the film – depending I suppose on which take they used.
[ed.'s note: I'm not entirely sure Belushi was the over-achieving coke-fiend he was made out to be]
I see a best-selling full-color mammoth coffee table book in all this. THE BIG BOOK OF HOLLYWOOD RAPES. Who do we approach about such a potentially [ed.'s note to self: check etymology of "potential"] munny-spinning project…?
(do we include statutory Rapes?)
(glamorized professional-victimhood Rape?)
(pedo-romanticism?)
and then there’s the special category of the supposedly anti-rape/anti-violence film that produces state-of-the-art wanking material for future possible sados
“Who do we approach about such a potentially… munny-spinning project…?”
Start at the top Steven.
I’d also nominate The Big Easy, not that it includes rape but for its sexual harassment by an entire community scene where Dennis Quaid tricks Ellen Barkin into going to a Cajun party. It’s number one in a field of one I think. Or is it??????
[ed.'s note: we'll have to work on that; there's something on the edge of my memory tickling me...]
Aha: Blade Runner.
There’s certainly an entire French pull-out section about nymphettes and elderly men.
Rather coincidentally I re-read Lolita last month – first time since about 1980. Apart from its brilliance and realising how many of its phrases have stuck with me I found myself wondering what all the fuss was about. I can’t think of a better dissection of the delusional, monotonous and pedantic behaviour that constitutes an obsession. I suppose the fuss was over the fact that he gets you to savour his writing thus making it an enjoyable experience.
“I was led upstairs and to the left – into “my” room. I inspected it through the mist of my utter rejection of it.” Perfection in rhythmn, economy of expression and freshness of idea that even a non-writer like me can roll around in my mind.
THE ILLUSTRATED TEXT
Don’t these guys have it easy compared to lit-critters?
As thrilling and rapid growth-inducing as my participation in our literary culture is, and it is, sometimes I wonder what might have been if I’d had sufficient confidence and self-esteem to pursue acting in a more serious way. I never really believed in myself in that arena, not like I do as a fiction writer. And it’s too bad, because looking over some memorabilia while in the midst of packing I came across these 1970 pics from my high school play–Flowers for Algernon. (In a crazy coincidence Claire Bloom starred in the movie Charly–different name, same sad story). Reading the pictures from the distance of time and space it appears to me that I might’ve had some innate talent worth cultivating. But I only took it so far. No real complaints. I’ve loved every minute of my life, so far. My co-star (heartthrob of the school) was David Neuman or Newman, not sure which. Ach, memory.
VINTAGE EMAIL
You were crying all over your Dreamsicle, eh? So glad you’re in a better place. We’re built for loving, that’s for sure. I’m rereading Flowers for Algernon (the cover says over 5 million copies in print). Can’t remember what happened to the lab mouse. Maybe he ran off with Stuart Little to live happily ever after in a West Village alcove studio? Or was he carried out of the laboratory four paws up?
“You were crying all over your Dreamsicle, eh? So glad you’re in a better place. ”
Nah, that wasn’t it, or the point of it, CDS Frances. It’s about how poor we all are at applying discriminating intellect and critical distance to the texts of our own lives. This was a concern of mine even as a teen, though I wouldn’t have put it in so many words.
What do we think we know and why do we think we know it? It hit me at around the age of 16 that a lot of the things I assumed to be true-without-question were loonshit; this minor epiphany came about when I was going to take a bath in the third floor of a house I had to myself in Philly (next door, across a driveway over which a domestic version of Minneapolis’ famous “Skyway” connected the complex, were the other two row-houses, the middle one housing a Funeral Home, owned by relatives). I had just eaten dinner and I was in the middle of waiting an hour before taking a bath when I realized I had been raised with this precautionary superstition because my mother had adapted/perverted the safety tip that to go swimming on a full stomach is dangerous. It hit me like a duffel bag of a drowned sailor’s last laundry that I had been involved in a ritualized minor absurdity for most of my life (despite being a “gifted” student of physics), waiting a full hour (after even the slightest snack!) before taking every night’s bath. And I thought: holyfuckingshit: this is just the tip of an iceburg (sic). And the vectors of the nonsense virus are so good at it because they so rarely submit themselves to critical analysis of any depth, relevance or originality. Bullshit is said and done copiously and passed-on.
And the relationship with A____ was literarily romantic and sexually exquisite but hopeless because it was a drama written long before I stepped into the role of the male lead and the director (her subconscious? “Culture”?) refused to allow much improvisation and there was damn sure no way the ending (tragically-romantic alienation; futility; not to mention a lyrical abortion) was ever going to change.
I took baby-steps back then in my liberation from Received Truth and Debate-Foreclosing-Pieties. Still, it amazes me how long it took me to shatter and lever-off the thick carapace of Waxy Intellection to the extent that any actual fresh-air reached the core of my perception of What I Think I Know and Why I Think I Know It. Which puts one so far out of Perlite Society, on so many levels, that my mother’s valiant refusals, later in life, to engage in anything resembling Thinking in Real Time strike me now as completely forgivable. While remaining, of course, Not an Option.
Beloved is patient with the program and Offsprung is a giggling beneficiary. 98% of the bullshit gets filtered around here before the kid even whiffs it. Eg: she announced, just the other day, after a visit from two boys (one 3, the other 7; she’s 4) that she doesn’t like “sharing” and it hit me that neither do Grownups and all the propaganda about teaching kids to “share” is revealed as utter bullshit the minute we imagine “sharing” our cars/i-pods/favorite meals with acquaintances (or total strangers, even), though it seems to make Grownups feel big about themselves to force their kids to hand over prized shit to be pawed by others. It took me a millisecond to work this out and I said, without missing a beat, “No, I don’t like to share my favorite things, either,” and her visible relief was my reward. Now she feels zero conflict (or pressure) when handing out old shit she no longer loves to kids who nevertheless appreciate the largess: Win/win… through critical analysis.
So that’s part of what I meant by posting that email.
“However, while Dewey might accept ‘sensibility’ as the name for the human receptivity to art, he would not characterize our response to art and literature as primarily an opportunity “to enage the mind,” especially if this means a retreat into an ‘inwardness’ that is itself the ultimately desired state, cut off from the projected space occupied by the work instigating the experience in the first place.”
From http://noggs.typepad.com/the_reading_experience/2010/04/sven-birkerts-has-been-developing-a-critique-of-electronic-media-for-quite-a-long-time-publishing-the-gutenberg-elegies-in-1.html
See how his words adorn the earth.
Dan says this a lot; he’s forced to, because he can’t even enunciate the tenet at the core of that comment (and its cascade of primary corollaries) without having to fend off a wave of reflex naysaying. What any “movement” needs is enough people who agree, vocally (or “vocally”) with its precepts that it can grow, in time, to a point that isn’t obvious from reading the precepts.
In a less hostile environment, TRE would be minting conjectural marvels, all these years later, or burning down Normative Rome… instead of tying Dan up with the weekly chore of beating out brush-fires. The comment thread at TRE is neither hostile in a sharp enough way or supportive in a canny enough way and if he’d been subsidized to write a book, instead… maybe it would’ve been better? It’s a little frustrating for me. I don’t want confirmation: I want to be surprised. Dan is capable of doing it but he isn’t allowed.
Why does Dan need, over and over again, to affirm that water is mostly wet? Because there are a lot of stupid fuckers out there who think that yelling “ice!” at him, every single time, is new and clever.
You hit the nail on the head, comrade. I scream it wherever I am–the Opportunity Cost for tolerating their bullshit a second longer is too high a price to continue paying. It’s not just what he has to give us, it’s what we need to experience to grow. We are all totally and wastefully and needlessly, senselessly, stupidly, self-sacrificingly-for-no-good-reasoningly, starving ourselves of basic, wholesome and delicious nutrition. It’s as simple as that. For what? Brownie points with Ensure frosting. No fucking thank you.
I don’t think I need anyone’s LitCrit that badly, CDS Frances, but I can dig the spot from which you’re zooming.
[ed.'s note: crap, this edition of DIFFICULT TEXTS was too long to insert here, apparently; and a two-parter would be disconcerting]
Can’t you please link to it?
It’s nowhere online in a full version, CDS Frances! I’m sending in a sub instead…
THE DIFFICULT TEXT
This one is based on a death. Here’s the last email she sent me (4 days later she was destroyed)
NOTES FOR A STORY ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED
I’m going to tell you a lie and you’re going to believe it. You will have no choice. I will tell you the truth, too, but that you’ll doubt. Also inevitable. The lie will be seductive because it is something you already know.
I didn’t love her.
I got the call on the train, at lunchtime, and believe it or not I was actually watching the news (the Nth iteration of it) on a ceiling-mounted monitor as I answered the phone, swaying with the train. A Hollywood coincidence. The Malaysian with his infuriating grin. I was thinking give me ten minutes with that cunt in his padded cell. I was thinking ten minutes and a hammer. I could do it in five. Hello?
-Is this Steven?
She was five foot seven, about one hundred and twenty pounds. I don’t know if they weighed her after; what the procedure is; what she even looked like. Put her on a scale in a plastic bag. I do know that she’d just signed up for a fitness course and that is what always angers me when I think about it, the time and effort she wasted. Getting back in the game. But then some stupid cunt with his grand ideas. His belief system. Some vast sea of stupid cunts with their million raised fists called a belief system.
Note: the fistfight we got into in Limbo.
Note: also, the argument in class with Herr Wieland about the word “Jew” in the story and how I then lost my job over it. He hadn’t written the story: I had. It was a published story. Wieland claimed the term was pejorative.
Note: tie it together. Something about violence. But what?
-Is this okay? Does it hurt?
-No, it’s good. It’s okay, it’s good.
-Can she hear us?
-She’s asleep.
-We shouldn’t wake her.
-Are you saying I’m noisy?
-I’m just saying.
-You’re sweet.
But I’m not. I am what I am, and I was doing what I wanted to her, without asking first, on the gold batik bedspread on the fold-out sofa in her borrowed living room, capitalizing on her position of relative weakness as a single mother of 28 without any real career prospects. New age music down low. Or a recording of the ocean with gulls dubbed in. The inevitable candles. The inevitably post-coital, anticipated-with-genuine-dread looks of searching depth. The kinds of looks that make one’s face feel as though it’s crawling with tiny people. I buried my nose in her hair. Went to the bathroom. Anything to escape those searching looks. Jogging with Ginger the next day, I was too out of breath to go into detail. I said,
“What can I say? The earth didn’t move.”
“For you or for her?”
He gestured at a rain-glazed croissant of merde on the sidewalk and we veered. We usually veer together; this time we veered apart. Significant? Ginger, whose man-of-the-world self-image has a tendency to grate at precisely the moment I most need his worldly advice, said, “Any woman who lets you fuck her in the ass is the kind of woman you should never under any circumstance fuck in the ass.”
“So the only acceptable option is forcible sodomy, in your opinion.” I was so out of breath that it ruined my timing and killed the joke.
“Were you wearing a condom?”
“Were you?”
“When?”
“Whenever.”
Last night she came back to me again: most of her hair burned off and half of her face crunchy black. I was thinking I hope I don’t see any bone. Don’t let me see the bones. Any skull or ribs or lidless eyeball. She was trying to kiss me and I was forced to be honest.
It was August of that year that I bumped into Indra while walking along Golt Strasse. I hadn’t seen her since the early part of the last decade, but walking along Golt Strasse on a Friday afternoon is a reliable method for bumping into long-lost Berliners of a certain generation. The veterans of this fossilizing in-crowd still haunt the area on weekends, shocking (and reassuring) each other with toddlers and wrinkles and receding hairlines, waltzing towards the same precipice with touching synchrony, clearing the way for the next great wave.
I knew her from the golden age on the cusp between my boredom and my stupid youth, an appetizing girl whose last name I never caught, one of the faces I’ll always associate with my first few ecstatic months in Berlin, before my increasing familiarity with the language, and its native speakers, ruined everything. Beware the expat who masters his German. We had always flirted and nothing more. We never risked touching (each assumed the other had fucked or been fucked too much), but had sometimes exchanged a certain kind of laden look on the packed dance floors of an era during which it now seems to me we all had been rather hysterically afraid to go home.
And here she was sitting in sunlight. That same black-haired girl, now a woman, or old enough to claim the title, sitting on a bench in front of a restaurant a few doors down from the café I had always seen her showing off in, looking almost exactly as she had a decade before. Half-Indian, father German, she was a mischling, as the Germans put it. Coin-colored, round-faced, voluptuous under spectacular black blades of hair. I jogged to her, grinning, and was rewarded with a crushing hug that felt more genuine than what I’d expect. Bent by the hug, I smiled meaninglessly at a toddler seated near her on the bench, hoping the child wasn’t hers, but she was.
“This is Jinny,” said Indra, introducing me to Jinny, but not Jinny to me (most probably because she couldn’t recall or had never known my name) as I took a place between them. I toasted Jinny with a Coke I ordered.
“To once being young,” I said, but Jinny just stared and Indra corrected me. She tapped her temple. “To staying young,” she smiled. “Both of us.”
Which made me feel extremely old. Several times during the conversation, Indra touched my arm and stared unwaveringly in my eyes and invited me to visit her in Bali. She painted a dreamy picture of a murmuring sea and laid-back days and Caligulan disco nights and I was touched to realize that she was looking for a man.
“Anyway” she said, as I eventually stood to leave, “Let’s hook up soon. We should really do something. It’s so good to see you again! Ciao!”
Jinny waved back (note: as though prompted) as I saluted a jaunty goodbye from the corner. It was the end of my lunch break.
I’d lucked into this incredible corporate gig, teaching creative writing to the executives of a company called Eurologika. The CEO wanted his underlings not only to speak and write English fluently but to be able to do so creatively. He wanted them to do that supposedly American thing called thinking outside the box. A dreadful cliché, yes, but I had a year’s contract.
Herr Weiss, Herr Brückner, Herr Rechtner, Herr Gumpenhölzl, Herr Wieland, Herr Woyczechowski, Herr Sonnabend, Herr Schlegel.
The first day (the class was on a Friday afternoon, in a conference room with a view of the canal, when most people with good jobs were already wherever they’d be spending the long weekend) saw me facing down the bemused tolerance/ mild contempt, for non-famous artists, of the typical German of a certain class. If you’re so good, why haven’t we heard of you? What is it that you do, exactly, that a hundred other people off the streets, with a little time on their hands, can’t do as well or better?
I turned the tables on them: what is it that you do?
“We design and manage systems protocols for capital storage and retrieval patterns on the Hannover model,” sighed Herr Wieland, the youngest in the room, whose headset never, in the three months I knew him, left the bluish egg of his balding head.
“Can you repeat that in plain English?”
He couldn’t. Pressing my momentary advantage, I said: “Your race, your class, your sexual preferences, national identity, earliest childhood memories, religion, education and professional standing are all stories that you have been told, and that you re-tell to others, without having a clue what the techniques and mechanics of storytelling are all about. I’m surprised you’d rather be so sloppy and haphazard about something you will do for every waking moment of your life. And in your dreams, too, and long after you die, possibly. You will be storytelling, but you don’t even really know how to. Is that a satisfactory state of affairs?”
-Is this Steven?
-Yes.
-Steven, you don’t know me. This is Indra’s sister Padme.
I was on the train during the lunch break on the ninth Friday of the class. Classes were held from 14:00 until 15:00, then a forty five minute lunch break, after which another hour or so until I dismissed them to fly off to Ibiza or Gstaad. On this ninth Friday we were critiquing the first bona fide assignment I’d given them: write a 600-word story about another member of the class.
Note: every single story they handed in was about me.
Note: exactly 600 words each.
I was staring at that little fucker’s monkey-grin face on the monitor. I’d assumed it was Ginger, calling with a new number. I looked at the phone and said,
-Excuse me?
-It’s about Indra.
A light dawned as I frowned at the monitor. Note: It’s astonishing how much thinking we’re capable of in a millisecond. Goosebumps. The coroners had shipped the recovered cellphones to the next of kin.
-Wow.
-I second that emotion.
-Your English is pretty good, you know that?
-I had good teachers.
-Is that what this is about? Free lessons?
-(laughs) I’m so glad I called you. Are you glad I called you?
-Of course I am.
-You’re not just saying?
-Would I tell you if I were?
-What do you want to do now?
Note: again the dream. She’s burning and moaning and I’m wondering if it’s pleasure. Does it hurt to burn? In the dream I’m not sure. I turned all the lights on afterwards and watched a little television before falling asleep again. Coda?
(Work this in as dialogue-possibly ironic: I firmly believe that you fake your own reality. What is a lie but the truth with a little talent? What is life but death pretending? When a katydid pretends to be a leaf, do we call that lying? The hawk moth caterpiller resembles a snake, and I resemble a hawk moth caterpiller. I lie, I get laid, I move on.)
Herr Schlegel, who looks like a JFK who’s made it to his 70th birthday with thick white hair intact and now only dresses in black, is confused. He is Herr Wieland’s picador, just as Herr Brueckner, with his off-puns and aphorisms, is the rodeo clown who breaks things up when I challenge Wieland’s arrogance; Wieland’s default pretense that any information he doesn’t already own is trivial. Everyone else is the audience. The coliseum. Schlegel says, “This story of yours, Herr Instructor, is it true?”
Note: classes were cancelled after the 12th week, but I was paid for the year.
“Define true.” At which, of course, Herr Wieland snorts.
“Did it happen as you have written it?”
“Does that matter?”
“If it is fiction, it is mere pornography. If it is true, I think, in all honesty, one must say the writer has no shame.”
“By revealing his truth, the writer reveals the reader to himself, Herr Schlegel. It’s a sacrifice we’ve been obligated to make since before Mr. Joyce.”
“Nonsense. There is nothing of me in this story!”
Wieland picks up his copy of the stapled pages and flips them until he comes to an excerpt, which he reads with such excitement, such theatrical disgust and sarcasm, that he can barely pronounce the words, let alone contain himself.
It’s the posture of submission that turns you on: the oiled flesh, brown as furniture, rich in the flamelight. The ass up and the head down with all that hair gushing forth, gushing out, a fountain of crude oil spilling over the edge and pooling on the Persian carpet at the foot of the futon, the face inclined politely away, gasping at the wall in a prayerful rhythm, the grunts of assent or helpless recognitions. So many groans are just prayer, and so much of prayer is just begging, and almost all begging is the music of pain. Her guttural prayers and my flickering shadow on her wall and those glistening streaks of her mud on me: what’s more exciting than that?
“Goatfuckers.”
Ginger, with his Jesuit upbringing, says “Don’t start.”
“Don’t start what?”
“Don’t start that intolerance shit.”
We are back in Limbo, our old club, after two months of swearing off the smoke and the sweat and the alarming influx of rich kids in from Zehlendorf, simply because there is nowhere else to go. Twice we’d tried places where the sensation that hit us like a wall of digital locusts as we entered couldn’t even be identified as music. We’d tried places that looked and smelled like the decadent version of daycare. Sheepishly, we returned to the passé nightspot we’d sworn off, and three Turkish types in payment-plan suits and pastel loafers, sunglasses mired in their highly flammable jet-black hair, have pushed across our view of the dancefloor, tugging their blondes by the rings in their noses. Two are blondes, actually, and one is not.
I finish my drink. “What intolerance shit?”
Ginger says, “Oh, come on. Remember the day Indra flew back to Bali? You were so fucking relieved you bought me dinner. And now you’re playing the grieving fiancé. Boo fucking hoo.”
I pretend not to hear and move onto the dance floor, parting a metaphorical curtain, doing my American dance. Loose in the shoulders. Impossible for Germans and alien to Asians and instantly identifiable. That and my very good shoes. I dance from the periphery in, eyes on myself, easing towards the center. The three Turks and their escorts are trying out their modern dance lessons in the middle of the crowd and I am locked on the best-looking girl in their menagerie, the taller, thinner, slightly embarrassed and attractively reticent one in dark slacks, gold pumps and ruffled white collar and sleeves. She can’t be older than nineteen. Tossing her hair. They must have kidnapped her. First you look, and then you look away, and then they look, and then they look away. There’s a rhythm to it until your eyes meet and you can all but predict the future.
THE DIFFICULT TEXT
This one is fun; a wily exercise in POV (“This is still a third-person narrative. This is still Gwenda and this is my story”)…
CHILDREN ARE NOT THE FUTURE: THE OLD ARE, OBVIOUSLY; ARE YOU STUPID?
The hour was late, so late that he could expect either to witness unquiet ghosts walking the halls of the hundred-year-old house or fetching harlots fellating donkeys on internet porn. Okay, “fetching harlots” is grandiose. But he had an education. He wasn’t some whatever in overalls with plaster on his knees. He was unhappy with his girlfriend and what else was there to do? Other than be a voyeur to a donkey at this late late hour. Or watch the ghosts walk. Or let the ghosts watch porn.
He ejaculated to the volume-down sound of braying. He realized that he’d reached a sort of low point and the aftermath felt exactly like eating a stick of butter. Or two. You just want to back away from your own saturation. To masturbate to a brief film about a pretty girl putting a donkey’s penis in her mouth and gagging explosively on half a pint of probably caustic semen means what about how one feels about either pretty girls or donkeys? But what a great word.
Harlot.
-But donkey should be an adjective.
His girlfriend, Gwenda, asleep downstairs, was a lawyer. Sleeping a lawyer’s off-the-clock sleep, her spare-time sleep. A fitness fanatic with a nice enough body but a not-entirely beautiful face. In fact she was plain. In some lights she was not even that. Let’s be frank. While her worked-on biceps and trim waist were no illusions, her substantial bust had turned out to be somewhat of a mirage when he’d unwrapped it, greedy hands trembling, unravelling the bulges into lots of cotton wadding and air.
-What was the name of that song about vaginal moisture? A big hit. Early ’60s.
There’s cheap porn for those who like women and expensive porn for those who don’t and plenty for those who aren’t sure. Very few are sure. Like almost everything, it’s funny when you think about it because, think about it, the point is, okay, you sit through a film, not always short, waiting patiently for the payoff which is basically some male (human or dog or donkey) ejaculating. The chowdery or birdshittish or gasoliney semen, emitted by the spoonful or the cup. You’re saying you find this interesting.
Which is fine.
He was no male model but he was a lot better looking considering his gender than she was considering hers. In fact he was the best looking man she’d ever touched. Which may not be saying much etc. His relatively good looks were not an issue, initially, or, that is to say, they were an issue but in such a way that Gwenda benefitted from it. Call it Affirmative Action of the heart.
When he first saw her wearing that camelhair coat which rhymed almost religiously with her waved and buttery hair in the muted light of the subway tunnel under Christmas carols and timed festive electronics and everything. That stuff in the air called childhood. He knew straight off she wasn’t what you’d call attractive but she was something, in the aspirational competence of her effects, the hairshape and lipthickness and bustle-swell of the coat in its bosom, promising so much, though what, exactly?
-Da Do Ron Ron.
He used his sly system of saying hello to open things up. His system was I mock myself internally like Burt Reynolds while doing it but also he was quite serious in using that mustache voice he used that usually worked though the smallest part of him (the part he thinks of as his original infant humanity) felt silly. Hammy. But it worked.
-People are afraid of great actors.
It took him weeks to admit everything about her actual face to himself. By the night of full disclosure, when the makeup had grazed or sweated off and the roots had grown in and the wave had frazzled to lustreless wires, he was already, however, dangerously intrigued. He wouldn’t say smitten. Smitten was the word he was saving. “Smitten” he was guarding in a box.
-He had trained himself to speak in a lower register.
-He tweezed his eyebrows regularly.
When he made the decision to give off certain signals indicating he wouldn’t be averse to becoming the thing labeled boyfriend in her phonebook, it was with this in mind: that looks aren’t everything. And they aren’t. Weren’t. Are they? Were they? After the seven different kinds of hell his many moviestar-model-grade girlfriends had put him through, from his eighteenth year clear until the year before the night he pleasured himself watching a harlot giving pleasure to a donkey, he had come to the conclusion that a sweet-natured, forgiving and generous personality would be a welcome change in a bedmate.
No more dragon ladies, ice princesses, black widows or femme fatales. From now on: plain Janes and peppermint Patties. The Girl Next Door in an ugly suburb. He felt a sudden hunger for a lot more gratitude and much less condescension and coming to the conclusion that a ‘homely’ girl was the answer to his prayers felt like growing up. A Bar Mitzvah of sorts.
“Finally,” he thought to himself, as he kissed Gwenda’s wounded little underbite face that very first time after that sappy movie, a snowflake intact on her eyelid as he drew himself near, “you’ve learned your lesson.”
The smell of pine needles. His smile stuck shark-bulged in a blue ornament.
Things were great with Gwenda for the first few months. She laughed at many of his jokes and treated him to a detailed recap, every evening, of the day’s rich legal adventures. He discovered that during sexual congress on her living room carpet at a certain distance and angle from the floor lamp in muted light in the missionary position she resembled Meg Ryan, a famous actress of the era, but only in his suffused pre-orgasm deliria. This was a pleasant discovery.
He met her sister (slightly better looking but still rather homely though he did toy with the idea of etc), did most of the cooking, accepted expensive gifts and wondered if getting Gwenda pregnant was out of the question. He was toying with the voluptuous thrill of throwing his life away. The only thing that gave him serious pause was the thought of an ugly baby. Half-ugly at best. Accusing him with Gwenda’s small eyes and high forehead.
He shuddered.
One night, after the snow melted and all the childhood had vanished from the warming air, they fought rather passionately over something disproportionately trivial and she revealed herself, like a rainbow-colored cocoon splitting to reveal a fearsome black butterfly, as a strikingly effective bitch. Ugly faces are better at bitchery than beautiful ones, regardless of what the beautiful prefer to believe. He gazed upon the mask of her sarcasm-twisted features and thought: “She’s a bitch and she’s ugly,” and that’s when it dawned on him.
He said, “Do I look fat in this?” and her silence spoke volumes.
2.
Dearest Nate:
Perhaps I’m hallucinating on a grand scale, but when I go out in public and observe human beings at work and at play, I don’t see very much of this post-gendered world of yours that you defend against my arguments, as hard as I try (even squinting). For the most part, I see women/girls dressing up and/or pushing prams and I see men/boys horsing around, ogling cleavage, and scratching themselves. When I attend ‘fancy’ functions for people with better jobs and higher educations, I see women dressing up…and men ogling cleavage (and very discreetly, from time to time, scratching themselves). My married friends are either sexually bored-with-each-other and stable, or cheating like minks and totally comfortable indulging in passionlessly vicious verbal punch-ups in front of company.
I’m not saying I’ve never observed this state of PC Dyad Grace you seem to be eulogizing with your pep talks…I’m saying that PC Dyad Grace as I’ve observed it is generally larval, and, approximately six months into a relationship, moults its golden skin to become the twin brown moths of the lovable slob and the tolerable nag (before time gradually prefixes each adjective with an ‘un’ and an ‘in’, resp.)
The day I stumble into a happy, egalitarian, romantically sex-healthy relationship, I’ll lose about 70% of my friends, who will rightly consider my new found bliss to be a freakish and unforgivable betrayal. As post-humanly above reproach as my mate and I will be to each other, I’m hoping he’ll still get an atavistic thrill out of the fact that I can twist open jar lids, without much effort, that he couldn’t dream of budging. And me? I’ll get an atavistic thrill out of the way he looks dripping naked and pink after a shower. Anyway, you may call me a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.
Hope this letter finds you safe, warm and very dry,
Ain’t college life wonderful?
(The sarcasm of a spoiled brat, I know)
3.
Thursday evening I am on my way home from the studio. It is about 9pm. Half a block from the front door of our apartment (the large one, the old one with high ceilings; the one Ingrid inherited from her father), I pass a figure, a noirish cartoon of mercury arc light and shadow wedged in a doorway, a little guy with a cell phone, Italianate, pleading in heavily accented German, “I love you, I love you, please…please…tell me what I must do.” It’s a scene from a movie with subtitles I’ll never decipher and sub-plots I’ll never know. And yet it’s the oldest movie on Earth. It’s pre-Colombian, pre-Christian, pre-English.
I love you, I love you… please…
I’ve been there, I’ve cried for love, I’ve never pleaded, I’ve never begged for it, never offered to die or kill for it, but I have cried real tears, tears that felt like they were cut right out of the jelly of each eye with a dull blade but always I was shrewd enough to know that begging never helps. Some of my ex-girlfriends, the ones who no longer speak, who don’t answer my calls and letters, who duck me on the street or actively propagandize against me five, ten, fifteen years after the fact might call me a womanizer. Simply because I didn’t stop at any of them in the long search for my happiness.
What am I, a ball on a roulette wheel?
I’m sure they ascribed it to a short attention span, or adolescent sexual whatever it is, the fact that I often showed signs of restlessness a month or two into it, but nothing could be further from the truth. Both parties (I sound like old Gwenda here: the plaintiff and the defense) are well aware when the fit isn’t right, but only one party ever seems to have the will or the courage to admit it and utter the magic phrase that will dissolve the contract.
-I love you, I love you…please…
The desperation in that guy-in-the-doorway’s voice: I’m haunted by it. It could power an Edward Albee play. A gypsy camp. The energy of an ego collapsing. He reminds me of what it’s like to be young, although he isn’t so young, he looks a bit like Peter Lorre, but being young is being desperate. In my middle-aged wisdom I know too well that if things don’t work with a woman, she isn’t The One and if she isn’t The One, why bother wanting her so much? The answer to that mostly rhetorical question, speaking from experience, is prestige. Prestige plus sexual intoxication, although sexual intoxication is so closely circuited with prestige that it’s technically inaccurate to list them as separate values. Who knows what Peter Lorre’s girlfriend…or ex-girlfriend…looks like. We can’t say with any certainty what his scale of reference is but it’s clear from the force of the pain in his pleading that this woman is a commodity he desperately wants to keep. A beautiful woman is a poor man’s Porsche.
You’re wrapped around each other in bed, auras blended, indulging in sticky warm penetrative intercourse. That high clear chime of addiction you detect above the mechanical comfort of humping is the thrill of possession. You’re thinking, as you pin her gently by the wrists, decorating her perfect face with a garland of worshipful kisses, “She’s mine, all mine, only mine.”
-Maybe she’s a 19 year old girl from the suburbs of Minnesota who looks like Grace Kelly and pees with the bathroom door open, charming you with her bravery. Because what if?
-Maybe she attends a tony hairdressing academy where half the instructors are snobby vain homosexuals who walk as though they’re wearing capes and the other half are aging heterosexual operators, sinewy-single and baked-looking, Roy Scheider in “All That Jazz”.
-Maybe they all hate you, you, a poor boy, a college boy who drives a fifteen year-old rust-scabbed hatchback and owns just three pairs of scuffed shoes who gets to fuck this flickeringly cinematic blonde and all they can do is glare when you drop her off in front of the academy on a brilliant August morning with a lingering kiss plus nuanced references in posture and smirk to sexual taboos that were breached the previous night.
-Or maybe that morning.
-They glare through the green glass walls of the provincially fancy, faux-Manhattan wellness and hair salon and if they could know that you and she had spent the summer in a menage-a-trois with your most recent ex, a tall brunette with cut-glass features and a mild gas problem, a heretic with something to prove in her second-hand suits from travelling salesmen who ranged from Iowa to the Dakotas to Missouri and Illinois, all three dancing together to Bauhaus in neoned clubs and sneaking mathematical fucks in the toilet, they’d hate you even more.
-You want to call me “sexist” because it will feel good.
-We all want to feel good.
Like many young Bohemian romantics, I believed in an anthropomorphic Universe when I was too young to know better. I believed in a Universe that was both aware of my existence and concerned with the delicate work of guiding me with signs and nudges through the maze of its horrors and rewards. Like many middle-aged men who have subsequently suffered the scarred disillusionments of common experience, I went from the comfort of my lyrical animism to the bleakness of abject disbelief almost over night: the ‘Universe’ became a vast black mechanical box of perfect coldness and harsh light and I was nothing but a molecule bouncing around in it.
-She’d do a mild kind of hotdogish fart and dare you to say something.
-He wrote none of the above. The above is an impersonation in a deep-yet-fey voice. This is still a third-person narrative. This is still Gwenda and this is my story.
4.
From the age of nine, she’d adopted her Aunt Aggie’s husband Nate as the adult to listen to and emulate in general and follow around like his somber little potbellied squire. When she was free to do with her time as she pleased, she chose to spend it in Uncle Nate’s company. The comedy that she and Nate presented to anyone who might catch them entering a room together or walking up the street in tandem to buy the morning Tribune, two chins lowered and four hands in four pockets, was far from apparent to her at the time. This strange rapport with Uncle Nate, to whom she wasn’t even related by blood, was baffling to the adults in the family but clear enough to her, if not to Nate. Nate was the first person on the planet Earth who’d asked her opinion on an important issue and she’d appreciated that.
They’d been sitting on packing crates after lunch. Nate had come over to help another one of his wife’s sisters to move and his future shadow and his future shadow’s mother had been conscripted, too. It was a depressing little apartment they were gathering into boxes and the one to which all the boxes and furniture were going wasn’t even far enough away to play a good game of running bases between former and future front stoops. It was right next door in a long block of red brick buildings with green paint on the trim. The dented rain gutters and the fake shutters, screwed to the wall.
She was seated in what she thought of as a grownup slouch on a packing crate in a warm spring breeze from the open door when Nate, who was seated on the adjacent packing crate, reading a magazine while everyone waited for the caretaker with his pickle-reek to come and confirm on a checklist that no fixtures had been stolen nor walls violated by nails larger than a certain size and that working lightbulbs had been left in the bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and living room sockets. Nate looked over his shoulder at her, obviously disturbed by something he’d just read.
“Let me ask you something, kiddo. Honestly. What does God want from us humans?”
Obviously, in retrospect, it was a rhetorical question. It tickles her now to think that her relationship with Nate (dead ten years next Friday) had been based, initially, on a misunderstanding: a nine year old’s misapprehension of the proper protocol for dealing with a rhetorical question. She’d taken the apparent request for input seriously, flattered beyond any previous value that she’d managed to experience, and worked on the problem with Jesuitical diligence all day, carrying boxes of silverware and small appliances and bags of linen out one door and right back into the next one like a robot, silent, frowning, lips very vaguely mobile with a secret symposium convened to address Nate’s question. At the end of the day, when every item in flat A had been transferred to identical flat B and the grownups were vetting the notion of ordering two or three large pizzas as an unprecedented treat, she approached Nate when they had a moment alone and said,
“He wants us to stop.”
“Who wants us to…?”
“You asked what God…”
Uncle Nate was genuinely impressed and so perfectly deserving of his new shadow that he suppressed his first impulse to get his wife’s or sisters-in-law’s attention in order to announce, “This kid’s a damn genius! Did you hear what she just said?” He played it cool instead.
“Could be,” is all Nate said, with raised eyebrows and from that day they were almost a father and daughter arrangement. Maybe closer than that. Like salt and pepper; snow and hot cocoa: Nate and his special little Gwenda.
-He taught her the surefire method for charcoal fires.
-He taught her that arm wrestling is all in the wrist.
-He taught her to think before saying thankyou.
-He taught her that Bruce Lee was genuine and that David Carradine was bullshit and that a faculty for detecting the difference could be applied to almost anything in Life.
-Why does Time consume perfectly happy children for the sake of producing all these wretched adults?
5.
I once quipped to someone that suicide is a lot like smoking or drinking: if you don’t try either before the age of nineteen, you probably never will. But I didn’t know what I was talking about when I made that witty remark and there’s some evidence to suggest that the wittier the aphorism, the less it will actually apply to real life. It would have terrified me to know back then that so many years after the remark, I would have nothing and no one and no apparent reason to live. Despite my money; my professional success; my knowledge.
Burdened and blessed with the kind of intelligence that made me the little star of my grammar school and had me bagging college-level reading scores in fifth and sixth grade, I am living proof that while it may be the case that the moderately above average in intelligence have the world on a string, the freakishly gifted are in for tons of trouble.
I remember fresh workbooks were handed out in the first week of second grade, intended to last for half the school year; however, knowing no better, I completed every exercise in my workbook by the end of the day, oblivious to whatever it was the teacher was droning on about at the blackboard while I breezed through the (to me) elementary exercises. All the answers I had filled the blanks with were correct, but rather than being amazed, Mrs. Johnson was angry. And rather than feeling special as a result of my feat, I felt guilty and ashamed.
Any hope of ‘fitting in’ was lost long before that point, and so what it occurred to me to do was apply my intelligence towards money-making and a solid position in society.
Now what?
6.
-A photo of Gwenda at 15.
She had a mild crush (her only foray into what could have been a life-affirming lesbianism if only she were wired that way) on the girl who took the picture and wrote tons of poetry that summer.
i.
a plum is waiting
at the center of the world
for just the right tongue
ii.
is a plum a plum
before you have eaten it?
or just a theorem?
iii.
this plum got warm in
the sun and smelled better than
every one of us
iv.
refrigerated
cinematographically
blue plums at midnight
v.
these plums are famous
for never being those but
what if you mixed them?
vi.
this artist painted
nothing but plums until he
finally got one right
vii.
don’t pay me dollars
pay me in plums but just one
very lovely plum
viii.
la petite mort is
the state of brief amnesia
of the plum just loved
7.
I cried shamelessly in the presence of the doctor and her very young trainee nurse, the first time in my life that I had let myself cry in front of strangers. Part of my blubbing was lack of sleep (the contractions came at 5 a.m.) and part of it was the pain I knew that my lover had gone through to bring our child into the late morning light of the sun. But most of it was mingled grief and gratitude about the distance I had come to the first day of the life I’d always dreamed of. With the circumstantial poetry of so many significant coincidences in this life, the birth happened on the first sunny morning in a months-long block of cold gray gloom. The tears in my eyes as I looked at her refracted brilliant sunlight. I had packed CDs for the birthing room that we never had a chance to use but, still, some delirious hybrid of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy and Bo Diddley’s Little Girl blasted in my head as I wept and my daughter came forth and the Past made its exit with a blast from my beloved’s operatic screams and yes, yes, yes, our baby girl is beautiful.
-I am smitten.
SELF-FULFILLING PROFITS
Shocking like the end of Casablanca.
You were shocked when Louis and Rick declared themselves at the airfield, CDS Frances? It’s simple: Louis knew how to whistle.
fear is of the essence
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627554.800-chimps-reject-unfairness-to-their-fellows.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100412124952.htm
“But the chimps’ awareness of the mistreatment of others as well as themselves also lays the groundwork for complex social interactions more like those of human groups, they note.”
Post hoc ergo propter hoc…no sarcasm intended, this time. Either the Judo-Christian creation myth was accurate, and humans just kind of appeared on the scene out of the Jahweh-enchanted blue, or human communities gradually evolved from out of near-human communities… in which case the moral framework of the near-humans was passed on to the moderns. And where does this moral framework come from, if not from The Bearded, Vaguely Levantine, Anus-Free Sky Giant? The Life-or-Death requirement of Community Stability. A community of under-pressure hominids will not cohere very well against cheetahs, famine and other hominids if they are busy fucking about with each others’ property (Thou Shalt Not Steal) and raping each others’ daughters, mothers and sisters (Thou Shalt Not…. oh, wait, the Judo-Christers don’t bother with that one) and bumping each other off (Thou Shalt Not Bump Each Other Off). On the other hand, War probably came in handy… ergo the overwhelming popularity of the greatly-revered practice to this very day. Anyway, no need to draft in the Bearded, Vaguely Levantine, Anus-Free Sky Giant to explain any of that…. or to get precious about the power and glory of human so-called morality.
[ed.'s note: again the disclaimer: if the image isn't of Berlin, I probably got it HERE]
NORMATIVE MARTIAL SCIENCE NUGGETS
Because it makes a big difference whether that guy with a rocket-launcher is miffed or not, kids
Did a Navy Seal write this sentence?
doesn’t really explain why they kill so many of their own side in what must be one of the most chilling expressions – “Friendly Fire”.
Perhaps tank and jeep drivers are now being trained not to frown or display any negative expressions in case they activate the SEALS errrm brains.
Reminds me that The Manchurian [ed's note: "Mancunian"] Candidate ( original version ) has just been re-released in the UK.
[e.'s note: speaking of which, Comrade Ed...]
Richard Condon’s original book now looks like kitchen sink realism.
When I’m drawing I often think that no matter what elaborate design or pattern you make there will be something in nature that has already beaten you to it.
Similarly I can imagine that any outlandish story-line you can think of writing has already been done or considered by agencies like the CIA or their ex-Soviet equivalents.
Steven Yes The Mancunian Candidate sublimnally programmed to take a candidate for the General Election out everytime he hears the phrase “It’s time for a change”. The 3 main party leaders wouldn’t have survived the first minute of the first hour of the first morning of the first day of the campaign — their supporting cast of M.P’s would maybe have lasted 2 or 3 days but it would have been a catch-phrase led mass-slaughter by Thursday..
After the first debate where the 3 stood on stage behind glass lecterns and bored people to death there was quite a good response from some Twitterstream “Worst Kraftwerk gig ever”.
Ever hear of this (ahem) dead artist?
and then there’s this:
Odd how Lombardi’s drawings look like those outsider art maps where obsessives connect incidents which have significance for them together to form patterns.
I don’t mean this as a flip way of dismissing his work but there’s obviously a hair-line of difference between lucidity and having, as it were, driven your coach over the cliff..
I’d say that any Artist worth her/his salt is an obsessive, Comrade Ed and, further, that any sensitive soul with a reason-and-justice-loving mind has his/her coach driven over the (ever-lifting) cliff several times a week. I think Lombardi’s case is interesting; Artists have such a terrible struggle getting attention that it’s hard to imagine one hanging himself just as the attention really started to come; afterward, sure… I could see a jaded, bloated Jeff or Damien topping themselves…
http://www.nyfa.org/nyfa_quarterly.asp?type=2&qid=4&id=108&fid=6&sid=16
Most certainly. When preparing to make a new show I do drawing after drawing after drawing.
Not to storyboard or design an object ( although that can happen ) but to be able to think my way into the mood of what we want to create. Within those drawings there will be ones that eat themselves, ones that are done just to sit still and ones that I know will be a crap idea even before I draw them, biut if I don’t get it down on paper I fear the idea will linger and fester in my head. So put me down as a superstitious obsessive.
re: suicide. I wonder if the exposure and the resultant pressure of anticipation of what he will do next exacerbated some form of depression. I used to be annoyed that no critical attention came our way but nowadays I’m so glad we fly under the critical radar. Especially if the critics are self important knob-heads like Ian Beale below.
Of course a critical kick can be a good thing but the critics on offer to give you that kick don’t inspire confidence.
[ed.'s note: http://www.globalcomplexity.org/Death%20by%20Association.htm ]
Ian Beale? Nigel Beale of course.
“Ian” Beale sounds a crumb less comical, I think; the character “Nigel” could only possibly be trumped by a “Clive” or “Rufus” in the All-Philistine Online Panto Lit Crit Follies
PS As an example of Nigel’s Nigelness, here’s an arse-schlurpping comment he deposited at the end of something Wood wrote at The New Republic before swaggering slightly uphill from that to the NormLib New Yorker; I’ve seen Nigel schlurrp a lot of arse on his way to the lower middle of Litblogglandia but he has yet to top this one (retrieved from an email that was doing the rounds in early 2008):
Urp
I like this:
“As an example of Nigel’s Nigelness, here’s an arse-schlurpping comment he deposited…”
I’ll double your urp and add a bleeeurgh. Plus a wet-wipe to clean the unctuousness off my lap-top.
A subtext so bleedin’ obvious that if contained in a novel presumably Nigel would be the first to slam it for its lack of subtlety.
[ed.'s note: helpful hint to careerist arse-waxers: you can write awful little notes like that, of course, but not for public display; too many witnesses, innit?]
WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU KNOW AND WHY DO YOU THINK YOU KNOW IT?
from: http://web.archive.org/web/20010111010000/www.davesweb.cnchost.com/eugenics.htm
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.
(excerpt)
[ed.'s note: again the disclaimer: if the image isn't of Berlin, I probably got it HERE]
THE DIFFICULT TEXT
(until I can get back to the bunker pagoda at some point before next week, Comrades Lurking and Explicit; pop some corn and…)
Speaking of Flame Wars (this is, remember, the Flame War edition of TET): a “referrer” link led me back to the following old comment thread at TRE. It’s a pretty good one; a fair little microcosm of Litblogglandia, with Nigel “Beagle” Beale being James Wood’s biggest local suck (how does Cap’n Woody feel about the fact that his boosters tend to be about 25 IQ points, on average, dimmer than his detractors?) and Jim H. doing his Normlib-Neocon fence-walk (Christ, how did I miss the implication of Jim’s “Genesis” ref the first time around?) and “Luther Blisset” being reliably intelligent (and not citation-happy for an academic; nicely rare) and me with my flaming sword. The original post of Dan’s was this:
-
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Again, one of my (and apparently your) favorite perennial topics. Let’s make another run at it, shall we? It seems to me (wearing my fiction-writer hat now) the artist’s task is to create a reality with a set of values, principles, rules, settings, inhabitants, etc., that works in certain narrative dramatic ways. Full Stop. This is how that thing we call “fiction” can comprise, say, Dickens and Calvino, King and Connelly, Dick and Delillo (I could go on…).
The critical venture—and here I think I’m reading James Wood aright—is to compare that fictional reality with his/her own preconceptions or sense of reality and pronounce on the plausibility (or credibility or lifelikeness or lifeness) of that reality; accept, reject, approve, dislike, etc.
There is that further critical venture (let’s call it hermeneutical) which is to articulate the world/the reality presented in the text in all its complexity; this Mr. Wood does not necessarily feel it is his business to do—even though this is really to get at the nub of ‘how fiction works.’ The hard work of exegesis and interpretation does not, as a rule, appear in the periodical review format.
Best,
Jim H.
Posted by: Jim H. | May 29, 2008 at 02:43 PM
Many things to be said on this subject, but just as an aside: given the way such essays have regularly popped up over the decades, I wonder when that time was when American reality (or human existence) was so normal, or so stimulating, healthful, and glad-making, that fiction easily outstripped even the most strenuous endeavors of Reality. Must have been some time to have lived.
Posted by: Chris | May 29, 2008 at 02:51 PM
JH:
“The critical venture—and here I think I’m reading James Wood aright—is to compare that fictional reality with his/her own preconceptions or sense of reality and pronounce on the plausibility (or credibility or lifelikeness or lifeness) of that reality; accept, reject, approve, dislike, etc.”
Aha, so *that’s* why no one reads Kafka. The defining quality of a written fiction that pleases us is never an *engaging vitality of imagination*, rather, it’s about “plausibility/credibility/lifeness”!
Confoundingly, “lifeness” is impressionistically vague (and therefore rhetorically capacious) enough a term for any book the reviewer fancies to qualify as having some… so… I still find myself yearning for an absurdly reductive gimmick with which to super-simplify my authority-starved taste in Art. Sigh.
But, enough fun. Should the writerly task/readerly voyage/ critical venture really diverge so dramatically? Is it possible to match up the tastes and temperaments from each of the three categories so as to leave everyone more or less happy? That is, can readers who like this “lifeness” stuff read writers who indulge in it, as recommended by critics who value it? Likewise, for the reader who finds the mechanical conventions of narrative trompe l’oeil, particular to “lifeness”, tedious as hell: are such readers allowed to tell “lifeness” to take a hike?
If only we knew!
Posted by: Steven Augustine | May 29, 2008 at 04:23 PM
This was exactly Alejo Carpentier’s position in his essay where he coins the term “the fabulous real,” or what has come to be called “magical realism.” He argued that reality in the former Caribbean, Latin American, and South American colonies was so extreme, so unbelievable, that the artist had to embrace an aesthetic that allowed for the representation of such experience. His *The Lost Steps* is an excellent novel along these lines.
Posted by: Luther Blissett | May 29, 2008 at 07:39 PM
Stephen: I read Kafka. Hell, I had tea once with Borges and, guess what, he was flesh and blood just like the rest of us in the room! I assume Kafka was as well since he succumbed to the Consumption. The three paths converge in/on/around the text and its pleasures.
Luther: Yes, sometimes it takes the magical to express the real. Vide: Genesis.
“To the preliterate man of integral vision a fable is what we would call a major scientific truth…” Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, “War and Peace in the Global Village.” So, to project: our fables of today … ? N’est pas?
Best,
Jim H.
Posted by: Jim H. | May 29, 2008 at 08:46 PM
“More than that, they should be seeking out fresh ways of using language to invoke the real, fresh ways of making language itself up to the task of engaging with all levels of “human existence.” The writer’s job is to “imagine what is not” first of all in imagining what words can do that they haven’t yet been made to do.”
This sounds a great deal like this:
“The true writer, that free servant of life, is one who must always be acting as if life were a category beyond anything the novel had yet grasped; as if life itself were always on the verge of becoming conventional.”
Which of course is how Wood ends How Fiction Works.
I think many of those who putatively disagree with him, wouldn’t, if they really read his text closely.
Jim H: As for hermeneutics, while Wood may not formally provide us with a ‘theory’ of interpretation, he does I think provide some of the most thoughtful direct exegesis and interpretation that you can find around today.
His ideas on character and ‘lifeness’, agree with them or not, give us a pretty clear indication of how he attributes merit…
What specifically are you suggesting when you say that he doesn’t get to the nub of how fiction works?
Posted by: Nigel Beale | May 31, 2008 at 05:32 PM
“as if life were a category beyond anything the novel had yet grasped”
In my opinion, here is the difference between us: Wood wants writers to grasp beyond existing categories in the name of “life” I want them to do so in the name of writing, of literature.
Posted by: Dan Green | May 31, 2008 at 07:35 PM
“I think many of those who putatively disagree with him, wouldn’t, if they really read his text closely.”
I love this sophomorically condescending argument more, every time I read it. I love the sheer doggedness of its repetition, presented, as it always is, without a *modicum* of reasoned support. The deployment of superlatives does not an argument make.
Given the apparent case you make for Wood’s infallibility (ie, to disagree with him is to misread him), Wood’s task (and yours, by extension) is to show his naysayers as *never right*; Wood’s naysayers’ task is to show, merely, that Wood is sometimes wrong. Show how the latter has never happened (or how the first case always does).
Stamping your feet and calling him “superb” just won’t cut it.
Wood makes broad proscriptions about what *can’t*, or *shouldn’t*, be attempted or allowed in the crafting of a “useful” sort of fiction, and rests the weight of his argument on something as amorphous as the notion of “reality”, and the *thinking* reader reacts instinctively with the reasonable response that there is more than one way to skin a cat; to each his own; come down off your imperious hobby horse, feller, and stick to the humble illumination of treasured texts.
The *thinking* reader is quite able to unpack a wedding cake of a sentence, such as the following, in order to identify its philosophical heart as frothy, sugared lard:
“The true writer, that free servant of life, is one who must always be acting as if life were a category beyond anything the novel had yet grasped; as if life itself were always on the verge of becoming conventional.”
What, pray tell, does that actually *mean*?
Life as a “category” of *what*? Things to do before ceasing to exist? Ie, Experience? As opposed to… ? If we can’t find another “category” of *something* against which “Life” is juxtaposed, we’ll have to conclude that the word “category” is filler in this sentence; strike it out (making the sentence *sound* less technical, sadly).
“Free servant of Life”: whose Life? One’s own? When? “Life” as the abstract congregate of everything that has, and will have, ever “lived”? Gay Weimar Bordello “Life”? The American greeting-card, t-shirt sense of “Life” (a bowl of cherries; a dame; a roller coaster…)? The dorm-room quasi-philosophical pot-fueled sense of The Great Oh Wow?
Or just another “poshly”, Nabokov-irking generality? And how does one “serve” this vague, clumsily personalized concept? (Oh, if only Nabokov were around to go after Mr. Wood’s big, bold, vacuous terminology today). Does one “serve” “Life” by planting flowers? By writing, erm, Novels that *everyone on Earth will treasure forever, regardless of culture, era, temperament or literacy*?
And what about this junk word “acting”… surely Wood could have come up with a better verb than this? How about “writing” or “thinking”, for starters? Is Wood referring to every minute of the writer’s life, or the time that writer is actually typing away, or does working through a plotline on the tram count, too, and, if so, how would “acting” a certain way, on the tram or the can or over the keyboard, influence the resultant text?
Next: the word “conventional”. “Conventional” in what sense? Surely, in the larger sense, until such point that gravity reverses polarity or the melting point of marble becomes water’s former boiling point, Life is *eternally*, irremediably, “conventional”.
On the socio-economic level, the word is relative, obviously; “conventional” for a 55 year old French banker, c. 1935, is possibly “exotic” for a 20 year old Jamaican guitarist on the poppy trail, c. 1968. Are any two lives so similar, in every detail, that “conventional” can ever be used in a *factual*, as opposed to statistically-flattened, or conversational, sense?
Show me absolutely *anything* that Mr. Wood would confidently describe as “conventional” and I can show you quite a few of the many ways in which it is decidely *not*. The word is either absolutely applicable, or not at all: same difference: it’s meaningless in its sentence.
So, the Jamaican guitarist, “acting” as though the ungraspable category “Life” were on the verge of becoming “conventional”, takes Mr. Wood’s vague advice and writes a novel that manages to surprise him (the guitarist), and all of his friends … while boring the poor banker to death. Success? Failure?
Or are we back to Square One, with *some* readers preferring one sort of thing, and others preferring something quite different, and Mr. Wood (with his endearingly aphid-like dependents) a self-appointed hall monitor, blowing his whistle and tattling on the writers who break his little rules by running too fast or otherwise horsing around?
Or, put it this way: there are some who cannot *abide* the works of Henry James; prove them *wrong*. I’m willing to wager you probably think you *can*, but that just proves how ill-equipped you are to argue *any* of this.
How about this for a valediction, instead of Mr. Wood’s:
“The true writer will write. And write. And write. And not everyone will get it.”
Some will like the results, others won’t, some books will sell millions, others none, and neither case will be a default reflection of intrinsic artistic value. Intrinsic artistic value, in fact, will not only be impossible to establish, it will be as impossible to *define* for any more than a few minds subscribing to a given worldview at a given moment.
But the disciples aren’t having it, of course. They suffer a mysterious loss of imaginary status if their much-projected-upon avatar, with his spurious methodology and weddingcake sentences, is considered to be anything less than The Great Wan Hope of Murrican Letters. Christ, who wants to look up to a guy who merely argues his preferences in careful critiques of texts he actually “gets”, right? I can see how Wood is under lots of pressure to be Torquemada-the-Baptist. Am I obligated to buy into the pantomime? No.
But, yes, Wood *is* such a convenient crutch for LitCritter-wouldbeez who wouldn’t have a *clue* where to start if they had to illuminate a text, or perform comparative evaluations, without Wood as an attitudinal crib (for evidence please check out Nigel Beale’s bumbling comparison of Yeats’ most-commonly-known-poem… of course… to Harold Pinter’s scrappy, anti-euphoniously outraged verse… in the world’s most reactionary, hamfistedly amusing attempt to show up Pinter as Yeats’ poetic inferior: well, Duh! And Rembrandt paints trompe l’oeil rings around Otto Dix; next… ?).
I’ll grant Wood (n.p.i.) this: it must *suck* to have all his woodbeez (of varying degrees of intelligence) arguing his case, as stand-ins, for him; must also suck to go on record with flimsy arguments that will float around the Internet forever
I thought his review of “Exit Ghost” was fair enough, though. Grant him that.
Hugs and back rubs,
SA
Posted by: Steven Augustine | May 31, 2008 at 07:55 PM
Steven:
Persistent and/or willful misreading and use of insulting language aside:
It appears you have shown up to class once again without having read the assigned text. Please now pay attention:
1) No case was made for Wood’s infallibility
2) Wood is opinionated
3) Any attention starved “sophomore” can easily dismantle sentences taken out of context. It takes a bit more cortex and simple reading to understand, in this case, for example, the ‘sense’ of the word convention, a sense which is developed throughout the course of the whole of Wood’s book in relation to William Gass, and others.
5) All you have really said is that Wood’s lifeness doesn’t do it for you in fiction. Why not expend some your boundless energy on explaining what exactly does?
6) Please reader, do go to http://nigelbeale.com/?p=831 and read not my ‘bumbling’ comparison of Yeats and Pinter, but in fact, highly regarded literary critic David Solway’s. For it was he who chose these poets in response to my request to discuss what constitutes a worthy poem, and what doesn’t. I think it represents a valuable exercise, and that Solway offers some impressive insight. You can listen too here http://nigelbeale.com/?p=797 if you are interesting in more of what Solway has to say.
6a) Visit also to witness how Steven, after his usual spate of insulting, fluorescent picaresqueness, scurries to the sidelines when ever serious discussion looms. http://nigelbeale.com/?p=876
7. In short Steven: by all means disagree, but try something new: do it with civility; while your flourid, effusive commentary may entertain some, and animate the odd discussion, for the most part it represents what is worst about the literary blogosphere: rude, bullying, name calling; misrepresentation, and bombast.
No Hugs. Back rubs maybe.
Posted by: Nigel Beale | June 01, 2008 at 12:52 AM
1. Welcome to the Local Chapter of the Culture Wars.
2.If I can save the wild imagination of just one budding novelist from the gummy poison of Wood’s normative proscriptions, I’m happy with the effort; arguing for the writer’s right to access and display the full range of her/his imaginitive gift is what I do for pleasure.
3. You haven’t refuted a *single* point, Nigel. And I won’t go into the “history” behind my snarky insults towards you, here, but there *is* one, as you know; I’m civil until provoked, baby. You and your Linkin’ Buddies will have to get used to that one. If anyone else should think me cruel, evil, heartless, ill-mannered or uncouth, I’ll just have to live with that.
As to the “worst of the literary bloggosphere”: it’s *my* opinion that the problem is the same as the one in “print” (times ten): far too much “product” and not enough of interest and *very* little treasure. Oh, and lots and lots of silly posing in the self-congratulation cult.
Posted by: Steven Augustine | June 01, 2008 at 02:18 AM
BTW, Nige: before I said a *single* “insulting” thing about Nigel Beale, did you or did you not put up a series of posts (not comments: *posts*) on your blog, featuring an edited collection of a few of my old Wood critiques (culled from various sites), referring to *me* as a “horsefly” (exact word) buzzing about with these annoying, supposedly empty-headed anti-Wood comments of mine?
But that’s not an “insult” because, of course, *you* wrote it (whilst wearing that styrofoam halo).
Right?
And what about the very humorous post in which you *initially* claimed the words of other writers, on the topic of Nietzsche and Plato (in another attempted whack at me), as your *own*…. before you were caught out and forced to use quotation marks?
Do you deny this?
Posted by: Steven Augustine | June 01, 2008 at 03:47 AM
As in:
http://toastpoints-toast.blogspot.com/2008/05/naughty-nigel.html
Posted by: Steven Augustine | June 01, 2008 at 03:55 AM
Pointing to one ill considered post adapted from widely available material substantially re-written to suit my immediate purposes, confirms to me that you are in good company with Toast, and unworthy of future engagement.
Posted by: Nigel Beale | June 01, 2008 at 06:56 AM
Ha ha! That’s certainly one way of putting it, Nige.
Posted by: Steven Augustine | June 01, 2008 at 07:34 AM
Zzz.
Posted by: Z | June 01, 2008 at 08:37 AM
who is nigel beale and why do steve and toast h8 him so much =/
Posted by: Schopenhauer’s bloody knuckles | June 01, 2008 at 11:28 AM
Wrong verb, Schopi
Posted by: Steven Augustine | June 01, 2008 at 11:46 AM
BEFORE THE CREATION of CASUAL WHITENESS
-
IF POP WERE NO MORE EVIL THAN THIS
WHERE’S JOHNNY SWIFT WHEN YOU NEED HIM?
http://www.vietnamese-coffee.com/coffee_kopi_luwak_shop.php
THE COMMERCIAL CINEMA
NEEDS TO GET HIS PRIORITIES STRAIGHT
The Bearded, Vaguely Levantine, Anus-Free Sky Giant is Not Amused
BLACK BODIES
Comrade DJ Sensei Barry and I pulled a word out of the ether during a walk last winter; we thought we’d coined it but it’s already there on the Net: Disasturbation. We were chugging through the interlinking system of courtyards you can walk from Rosenthaler Strasse all the way through to Gipps Strasse, cold and cynical in a throng of shoppers, when Comrade Barry misheard a portmanteau I’d uttered and generated an even better one which we didn’t realize was already taken
CNN was the first truly modern (in the sense that if something is to be truly modern, it must be pervasive) Disasturbator and its first great fetish-event was probably the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion of 1986: an endless loop of an airborne crematorium straining against the surly bonds of Ronald Reagan. Disasturbation as an Art Form really came into its own with the Rwanda event: an endless stream of naked black corpses bouncing down a river like logs… in an endless loop. We didn’t learn much about the post-colonial tensions between the Hutu and the Tutsi but we acquired a new, viscerally aesthetic response to naked black corpses in a stream: pisgust. Or dispity.
If you read about a disaster, even cursorily, the intellect is tethered to the task. The thing about Disasturbation is how it engages directly with older, pre-verbal gears of the mind. It becomes a creepy and addictive sort of pleasure. DeLillo makes a crack (I think it’s in Cosmpolis) about how disappointed we secretly are if the body count from some disaster ends up being too small. The only place for Disasturbation to go, now, after Haiti (which is, in Disasturbatory terms, merely a continuation of Katrina) would be in showing an endless stream (or endless piles) of naked white corpses… in an endless loop. The transition will be a paradigm-shift on the order of how we went from bare brown breasts in National Geographic to bare white breasts in Vogue (and from often-sagging brownies to siliconed whiteys at that); it may take a while.
The September Reichstag Towers, like the Challenger deaths, was an aerospace-themed fetish-event that presented James-Bondian fireballs in lieu of white corpses evoking pisgust. It was a “cleaner”-looking atrocity, which reminds me of a comment I was treated to at a cocktail party in Berlin during the week of the Rwanda Event: a svelte young blonde opined that “at least the Nazis were scientific… not just this primitive hacking with machetes!”
The difference between News and Disasturbation is the difference between the novel and cinema. And is there a phenomenological difference between Blockbuster Movies and Disasturbation? The only essential difference between the two forms is stated intent. What difference does stated intent make if we can’t trust the staters? All we had as proof that an endless loop of an endless stream of naked black corpses was “News” (as opposed to a fetish event or ephemeral fetish object) was Ted Turner’s word that CNN was there to give us News rather than a new kind of Snuff film.
Imagine the difference between reading about the morass of intrigues and affiliations that led to WW1, the day after its declaration… or watching an endless loop of Gavrilo Princip blow chunks out of Ferdinand’s neck.
Was the early 1960s the first time in North American history that a sizable portion of the populace was more than one generation removed from the direct, bloody, shit-ridden experience of Life and Death as lived in farm and/or hunting life? Imagine a generation of consumers who had never seen an animal slaughtered (or one born, for that matter) watching an endless stream of naked black corpses in an endless loop; talk about shock treatment: these poor fuckers are now A) ready to be shown anything and B) secretly becoming Disasturbation addicts (and just wait until hostage decapitations go mainstream).
But what is it the Disasturbation Addict ends up craving to see? A) The Unjust Destruction of White Property and B) Black Bodies in pisgust-inspiring extremity.
What do you think you know and why do you think yo know it?
A Thought Experiment: how different would your Racial Worldview be if you’d been exposed to endless variations of the following pair of images as opposed to the endless variations on the conceptual-inverse of this pair to which we are constantly exposed?
We all know Advertising works. But do we understand the product that’s really being sold with it?
Why is it that despite the obvious appetite for events with disasturbation value, CNN, Sky, BBC et al balk at the idea of showing white bodies in a mutilated state (think the blanket ban on-screen body counts after the attacks in New York) yet have no qualms showing Tutsi and Hutu bodies floating in Rwandan rivers or freshly de-limbed black bodies or even a Haitian girl with half of her skull missing and her brain exposed? “Some viewers may find these images disturbing” is the standard warning phrase. Why “some viewers”? Would it be “all viewers” if the victims were white, hence the ban on showing them? Is this all part of the dehumanising of the “other” which is openly practised in the pure entertainment industry (as opposed to masquerading as factual documentary in the news entertainment industry)? On a similar note…
Up until a few days ago I had never watched an episode of the “The Wire”. There are a number of reasons for this: the lack of a television; a chronic aversion to TV soap operas – particularly ones that are described in the popular press as “edgy” and “gritty” and, which notwithstanding the fact that they may be less than a couple of years old, are already being awarded the additional monikers of “classic” and “cult”; and , most importantly, the fact that when it comes to shows peddling cheap clichés about ethnic minorities my already limited TV attention span is reduced to that of a three year old who’s just dined on Big Macs washed down with a fluorescent coloured high fructose corn-syrup laden beverage laced with E102 (don’t bother Googling it, E102 is tartrazine – you may want to Google tartrazine though if you don’t know what that is). And, the truth be told, I still haven’t watched a whole episode of “The Wire” (I couldn’t get past the first 20 minutes before ADHD like-symptoms started to kick in), so what I write below is based, admittedly, on limited exposure to the “best bits” of the above edgy, gritty classic and cult TV show.
Anyway, a couple of nights ago I happened upon a YouTube video entitled “The Wire Greatest Death Scenes”. Expecting to see the terrifying, but yet strangely disasturbatory, voyeuristic and alluring spectacle of various hapless tight-rope walkers losing their balance and hurtling headlong into shallow lakes or thudding their heads onto concrete pavements beneath ropes they had the previous night surreptitiously spanned between the terrifying expanses between skyscrapers (an image that was denied us by the news teams reporting 9/11), I was instead greeted by the scene of a black man pointing a small calibre fire arm at the head of another black man whilst uttering what I presume is the gangster equivalent of the last rites. While this black fellow waxed menacingly about some issue or other (he was obviously not at all happy with his interlocutor) other gang members milled around, some of them wearing Captain Pugwash headscarves, which they had no-doubt earlier stolen at gun point from a fancy-dress shop; I think the headscarves were meant to symbolise their allegiance to a particular crime syndicate or fraternity. A shot then rang out but it was the firearm wielding “nigger” who was lying face down on the pavement in a small pool of blood (why is it always a pool – why not puddle, plashet or pond?). The crumpled figure lay in what I recognised from my misspent youth watching Hill Street Blues as the standard American sidewalk crime scene death-pose. Whilst the other “niggers” all continued milling around aimlessly (or, if there was an aim, it was not readily apparent from the short clip I had the misfortune to be watching) as if seeing someone have their brains blown out was the least dramatic thing that had happened to them that day, a vertically challenged “nigger” made some flippant remarks regarding the now dead gun totting nigger’s executioner “costing them money”. The YouTube comments in the accompanying threads were universally tickled by the light-hearted way in which the dwarf “nigger” vented his personal displeasure at this casual murder. The other scenes in the “The Wire Greatest Death Scenes” montage unfolded in similar vein – one “nigger” being shot, mutilated or tortured (or all three) by another “nigger” for stealing some “nigger’s” money, snitching on a fellow “nigger” or encroaching on some “nigger’s” drugs patch or for some other equally egregious behaviour that breached some dark underworld code of conduct. All of this killing was accompanied by similarly ludicrous Tarantino-esque dialogue of the type spouted by the dwarf “nigger” in the first scene, which since the advent of Pulp Fiction apparently elevates to the level of high art all on-screen depictions of mindless violence, the use of offensive and derogatory language and the reinforcement of old and the creation of new racial stereotypes.
Intrigued by the level of pure unadulterated violence in these scenes and the casual and constant use of what until a couple of years ago was euphemistically referred to as the “N-word”, I Googled “The Wire” in order to find out how such a show could be put on mainstream television without there being a public outcry from the rightwing press and public that usually decries gangster rap and its attendant symbolism. I also wanted to find out the demographic of the audience for the show. The lack of universal condemnation made me soon realise how out of touch I had become. My initial thought was that “The Wire” would be a niche show watched by a few “yoofs”, TV critics and a handful of middle class trustafarians (the same demographic that that listen to gangster rap on the way to Royal Ascot). However during my scientific and entirely Google-based research, I came across a few debates regarding the authenticity or otherwise of the show and realised pretty soon that its main champions seemed to be mainly fairly well-educated (in the traditional sense) left-leaning white liberal males. Why was it, I asked myself, do white people actually like this stuff?
In a kind of online version of speaking out loud I unloaded my subconscious into the Google search bar and found I had typed the question “Why do white people like the Wire?” and lo and behold one of the results was a website called Stuff White People Like (Is there any topic for which there is not a website or at least a blog or twitter entry?). Judging by its position at No.85 in its list and by the comment threads on SWPL.Com, one of the things that white people like is, apparently, “The Wire”.
After ruminating on this for a while, the penny finally dropped: could it be that the reason why white people like this stuff is because, like males of many ethnic origins, they actually like vacuous television and violent death scenes (i.e. they are disasturbators) and also, in the case of many viewers including so-called liberals, deep down do not see anything wrong in calling dark folk “nigger” – “why is the world so PC” they cry in mock exasperation. (And, yes, I know it’s unfair that some black people think that they can use the N-word but feel that whites can’t; not even white TV producers portraying blacks. The reason for this is the same reason why feminists may find nothing wrong in making misogynistic or sexist jokes amongst themselves but, in the face of the inequality that still exists between men and women, become understandably suspicious and aggrieved when men start making such jokes). One way to satisfy this desire for violence and racist banter without attracting the wrath of right thinking human beings and anti-racism activists is for TV execs. to commission a “real-life” drama based on the perceived reality of black gangster life and feed it to white consumers as drama-cum-documentary. Offence at the language is countered with “hey, “Nigger” is the word they use, so why shouldn’t we use it”; offence at the violence is greeted with “this is what happens to them in their ghettos, I read it in the paper”. And lo and behold you have an “edgy” and “gritty” realistic TV show which, rather than merely pandering to the baser side of the white liberal male and reinforcing, and in some respects creating, racial stereotypes, is actually depicting the reality of so-called black life and culture. And it also satisfies the disasturbator’s needs pending the next natural or man-made disaster involving dark folk.
Comrade DJ Sensei Spratt, what I’d like is to see the Black Body given the same kind of saturated and haloed and subliminal enhancements that the White Body has been given since the advent of the technology (which may or may not have been Stained Glass); this image-enhancing tech that trumped oil painting by exciting bits of the brain we never knew we had and stimulated reverential cravings. Stained Glass, TV screens, Cinema screens… simulating the radiance of religious visions! And doing it for the sake of beatifying Jennifer Anniston.
“Western” Culture has been selling us Whiteness Triumphant (with a much-narrower definition of “White”) for how many centuries? And the lesson of capitalism is that you can’t properly hype a product without derogating its competition (its Other) and in this case the derogated product is the Black Body (the term “body” here includes head/face/soul). The crypto-porny Hollywood Blonde is the flagship avatar of the Human Flippin’ Race.
The red flag appeared long ago, obviously: how many of the Earth’s religions actually have the audacity to assert that Gawd resembles (down to the follicle) the humans in charge of building the cathedrals in praise of Him? I can only think of one and it is the center-piece in a Holy Trinity of inter-penetrating Agencies: Crapitalism-Judo/Christianity-Demockracy. That blue-eyed blonde super-dude (with neat beard and immaculate tan and Malibu blow-dried coif) doesn’t just run Murrka… He created All of Space and Time! Where does that leave the Nigga in the hierarchy of the Image Bank of the Collective Unconscious of Das Volk? Turn on your TV to find out.
You have no idea how long it took my Google search to come up with that svelte Black goddess pictured above; the Black Image seeding the Internet (and, by extension, the consciousness of the current crop of “Western” adolescents) is pathetic: flabby crack-hos wearing wigs, mostly. Who the fuck would daydream of fucking (more the less worshiping) one of those?
The deck is so terribly fucking stacked. “The Wire” is just a small part of the overall process the reversal of which could be achieved in less than a generation if any organ/office/movement had control of some of Mass Media’s bandwidth and produced well-crafted images to show an equal divinity in/of the Black Body. Instead we’re hit with Psycho-Genocidal Anti-PR like “Precious” and “The Wire”.
They made any number of bonafide extraterrestrials look sexy/dreamy/heroic on Star Trek, The Next Generation… surely they could manage to do the same, in the 21st century, for Black Earthlings?
What stuck in my craw a few year’s ago in the UK was a news item about a National Health Service hospital being strapped for space and having to store bodies in a spare room whilst waiting for the morgue back-up to clear.They’d gone to the effort of cooling the room.
But the reporter kicked up a lot of hot air about the lack of dignity this gave the dead and local M.P’s were dragged in to be angry and they obliged. The right wing press added to the blah the following day ….of course.
Meanwhile 6th or 7th item in was film of vultures picking at a corpse in a piece about a natural disaster in India. Where was the dignity afforded that body or the 30 more that the camera casually displayed? Why was this item 6th or 7th on the bill and why was it below the item about the hospital which seemed cooked up mainly to score cheap political points? One rule for locals and an entirely different attitude to the faceless “third” world.
Chronic, innit, Comrade Ed? Chronic.
THE DIFFICULT TEXT: A SCI-FI TRIPLE-FEATURE
Ambiguous narratives weren’t considered “difficult” forty years ago. I consumed them like potato chips.
[ed.'s note: the following image, of an older woman in her bra, was deemed 'obscene' by Tiny Pics and deleted]
DOLORES
I remember everything about Dolly the first time I saw her and almost nothing about my self. Was I happy? Sad? Confused? Lonely? Driven? In great shape still or a wreck like I am today? Hairy or hairless? The prince or the toad? I can’t seem to remember being anything other than the bitter old me I’ve become. Useless old animal hands. Blessed is the forgetting. But I remember Dolly, what Dolly looked like, the tensile strength of her warm grip and that everyone in those days was walking around with a telephone. Talking not to the phones but to each other! The phones were merely a medium. You won’t know what I mean by that. You’ll shake your heads; you’ll wink at each other.
Too much has happened. Maybe it will come back. I will come back. As I talk about it. Get it off my chest. They told me to record my thoughts, all of my thoughts, don’t be selective. They said that they’ll be the ones to worry about what to throw away and what to keep and despite the fact that I’m more than sure (delusions of grandeur, right?) that I can out-talk anything’s capacity to record me, talking about it might bring, in the archaic parlance of a long-gone culture, ‘closure.’ It might even be what people who once read better books than the people who once said ‘closure’ called ‘cathartic’. Submit ‘cathartic’ and the know-it-all thingy will inform you that it comes from the Greek, meaning ‘to cleanse.’ I could use some of that now. I look around me at all these gleaming white surfaces and let me tell you I feel like the rag that was used to clean them.
Twenty five years ago. There was a lot more sex then. It took two, three, maybe four people sometimes to do it, actually. You’re snickering at that. On the day in question, the day I’ll call Dolly Day (or D-Day) from now until the end of time, I had just turned thirty and had been feigning horror for weeks, for thirty is the last milestone one can truly afford to mock. So true. Thirty is like the girl you’ll never forget or the song you’d forgotten you’d loved more than any other song you ever knew. Thirty is as fragile as an egg; a skull.
The sun was coming out after a terrific little tantrum of weather, on D-Day. It was the middle of May and the cloudburst was winter’s parting shot. Like an antique soldier charging, bayonet extended, after all the bullets are gone. The Daguerreotype buffoon in his mustache and his long underwear. The sun that emerged was so vital and fierce that it murdered the clouds and got busy drying the sidewalks and I was so warm, suddenly. It was so suddenly summer. The sidewalks steaming. I carried my jacket over an arm and walked up the hill past the park, looking for a café for breakfast and the café that I chose was the café that Dolly was sitting in front of, soaking up the rays with her eyes shut, smiling at the sky. I’m thinking, in retrospect: I’ll bet the sky knew. You know? I’ll bet it winked at her.
People of the past strike us as being so stupid. We know everything they knew plus everything we know and they knew only what they could have known at the time. The people of the past are like country bumpkins. Excuse me but it’s like watching a retarded or blind person walking right for an open manhole. All you can do is gaze with open-mouthed incredulity. You almost have to laugh.
I remember trying to remember the word for omelet. I ordered an omelet which came with two diagonally halved slices of toast, a pat of butter, a decorative wedge of orange and a suspicious sprig of parsley. Suspicious because I had a friend who claimed that the parsley was often recycled; he never ate it but also never left it on his plate. He’d slip it in his pocket with compressed lips and a curt nod like he was doing his civic duty. His jacket pockets were full of brittle sprigs of parsley. He later turned out to have a screw loose.
Inside the café was dark with cigarette smoke and greasy light bulbs and a half a dozen tables of couples and trios in dark clothing at work on their cappuccinos and puffing on Marlboro’s and complaining about either or both of the new governments. I told the waitress I’d be sitting outside and she handed me a rag to wipe my seat with.
Dolores and I were the only ones in the sun. The sun’s news hadn’t yet reached the cryptish-cool depths of the café. And I stared while wiping the seat of a chair at a table that was neither too close nor too far. I stared because I thought her eyes were safely shut but on closer inspection I would have seen her eyelids fluttering, sneaky little thing. The rag I was using on the rain-beaded seat was too wet already and didn’t much help to dry the seat. It was wet and greasy and Dolores, who was peeking, laughed as though she was watching a Chaplin film. Then she handed me her orange scarf. Orange. As they say: there are no accidents in this clever world.
“Use this.”
“Oh no, I couldn’t.”
“I used it to dry my seat. Why shouldn’t you?”
“But.”
“Use it, take it home, wash it and dry it and return it to me tomorrow. As long as there are tomorrows, yes?” The trinket of her laughter. “I trust you to return it.”
I remember being nervous talking to her; not just because she was so beautiful but because of the age difference, which was obviously significant, without me having to ask. Anything seeing us talking… flirting… would be sure to think: what does this pervert want? With her? What a face she had. Her face the first time I saw it was half- dream, half-cat, voluminously-wrinkled like satin. Tooth translucence.
She was carrying already, of course. What I thought of as a stringent, crushing, unearthly beauty at the time (30! The last-call!) was, in fact, the oracular fingerprint. A fingerprint from the angel of that particular attitude towards extinction. The angel pressed his faint red fingerprint hard on the paper of her old white face and I mistook the blood-pattern for beauty. I gallantly offered to buy her a chamomile tea, if I recall correctly. Not that you’d know what that is. Hot water?
I keep telling them it was already in her the day we met but they don’t believe me. If I could speak with someone face to face I’m pretty sure I could convince them. Communication isn’t only about words but none of you seem to trust me; you feel safer on the other side of that glass, don’t you? But you aren’t.
*
*
*
>THE APPLICANT
“You speak of them as though they had souls,” said the applicant. She wasn’t really an applicant. She had to calibrate her tone just so. Being perceived as even remotely critical could have her on the other side of the moat in less time than it would take for her valise to hit the drawbridge. She gave the Dowaja a philosophical-instruction-requesting look of confused wonder. Amazing tits for a creature that age, really, but it’s always the eyes, she thought, isn’t it? Nothing they can do about those rheumy red time-poisoned eyes.
“Don’t they?” asked the Dowaja, stroking one, which strained blindly towards her black silk glove.
“Forgive me. Don’t they…?”
“Have souls. They feel pleasure and pain… require feeding… think, to the extent that they can be trained… perhaps they even dream. Who knows? I wouldn’t be so quick to claim the distinction for ourselves.” The one she had stroked (unusually bottom-heavy and hairless as a balloon in its mood-elevating brilliance) was hefted in both gloves toward her mouth where she gave it an asexual kiss and set it down again in a languid state of half-tumescence. It flopped and rolled on a satin pillow.
The Dowaja said “So!” with the impatience of an immortal. “What have you brought me?”
The applicant set the valise upon the blunted point of the Dowaja’s heart-shaped bed and poked its gusseted sides with trembling fingers. The locks gave way like snapping bones. This Dowaja was famous for her Escargot collection; the richest in the valley: she owned hundreds and they were of Louvre-quality and every one artisanally unique; bespoke. The applicant extracted the Chinapanese nautilus flight case and laid it at the valise’ corner and butterflied it open on its hinge. Yes.
The most magnificent black cunt-stuffer the Dowaja had ever seen was curled in a warm dream of the oiled channel of the right-most valve of its case. The detailing deserved ovations. Old-world standards of handicraft in the dorsal rill and scrotal convolutions and the heavy black sheen of young flesh. The applicant regained every calorie of confidence in her mission when she lifted the oily thing by its head (collector’s method: never grab the sac) and ran a thumbnail along the sac seam and the Dowaja actually gasped. Nubs of foliage pushed out across the sac in a wave. They grew toward curling.
“I must have this,” said the Dowaja, snatching it. With expert handling the thing was a hard black amputee’s arm in a flash and the smooth white naked old witch wielded it like something she had suddenly decided to straddle. Stopping herself in mid-squat.
“But where are my manners?” sang the Dowaja, slyly. “You first.”
The applicant parted the billows in her courtly apparel and leaned back on the bed with a smile of inoculated assent.
*
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FROM NEAR TO ETERNITY
On the centennial of the passage of the American Civil Rights Act of 1964, an act of Congress made the word ‘race’ obsolete and the concept that the obsolete word represented illegal. “The very concept of ‘race’ itself,” stated the document, known as the Personhood Bill, “is racist.” The replacement word was Somatype and it was determined that humankind breaks down into 22 major Somatypes, each Somatype divisible further into a dozen-plus-one S-Inflections, each of these S-Inflections either an “A” or a “B” of its kind, and each “A” or “B” a possible positive or a negative, according to specific markers in the genome. It was hoped that the unwieldy terminology would inhibit casual distinction-drawing in a kind of inverse of the way in which the intuitive simplicity of the original system had been a runaway success in framing and disseminating the uneducated hatred of diversity. Not a year later, in time for the semi-centennial of the inauguration of the First Earth Parliament of 202 countries (minus China), the Somatype standard was adopted as global law.
Another century plus forty years after that, Siegfried Olubodun was told by his nearest rival at the University of Hamburg’s department of Tempanthropy that the only reason he’d got the research grant was because he was black.
About Siegfried’s blackness there was no debating; you rarely saw a face that black in Europe. Siegfried’s blackness was only marginally less rare than the famed whiteness of a family (blue-eyed, blond) who lived in a northern suburb of the city and whose estate had become a zoo, practically; people came from all over Europe to see the throw-backs in their natural habitat (they were auto mechanics, dynastically; half of the 80 hectares of the family compound was given over to garages and test-tracks). Siegfried tried to remember their name. The Ziegeldorfs. Siegfried was ancestrally Nigerian to an unusually single-minded degree. Whereas the Ziegeldorfs were viewed in Europe with great curiosity and a bemusement bordering on distaste, the Oluboduns were sometimes suspected of reproductive fascism. The Ziegeldorfs had been, perhaps, as driven by self-preservation as by greed in the opening of their compound to the public. But the Oluboduns were not so many in number and were spread among a handful of baronial flats overlooking the Alster.
By the time of Siegfried’s thirteenth birthday, human Somatypes had dropped from 22 to 15 and, as a result of cheap travel and zero borders (but one) and the lure of exogamy, the number was still falling. Practically everyone on earth these days looked like a somewhat lighter or darker Brazilian. With the notable exception of the Chinese, who had long-ago absorbed Japan, the two Koreas, and much of Malaysia and who were exactly half of the global population. Africa (with its population density of one human per six hundred square kilometers) was still pretty dark but only in the range of bland toffees. There was something his father always said but he could not remember.
“Selbstverstaendlich,” said Siegfried. Naturally. Speaking German was considered an elitist affectation. But sometimes Siegfried couldn’t help himself.
“Ich wollte damit keinen Ärger machen,” I meant no harm in saying it, countered Marta, shrugging, but Siegfried suspected that Marta’s aggression (not the first time) was her clumsy way of flirting. No wonder the population figures in Europe were falling again. Perhaps it was on that topic, the thing his father had said that Siegfried could not seem to remember. Though it ticked on the rim of his memory.
“They can’t very well expect someone with beige skin and European facial features to infiltrate the living quarters of Igbo-identified field slaves of early 18th century North America, can they?”
“But there was mixing even then.”
“Not so much in evidence among the field slaves. House servants were another class entirely and my research is on the topic of field slaves, Fraulein Sauerwald.”
“It’s a major grant. You’re lucky.”
Siegfried lifted his chin. “I don’t, as you know, believe in luck.”
“But perhaps,” said Marta, with an unreadable pout, “you will need it.”
“Excuse me?” He touched his codpiece.
“Something could happen.”
“I’m sure you’ll agree that ‘something could happen’ in the faculty dining hall, as well.” Siegfried curled his lip with bravado and placed the call confirming his receipt of the notice of his having won the grant. He pressed the patch on his throat and spoke clearly. In a flash he remembered and the enormousness of it filled his mind to bursting not only with the implanted knowledge of his era but the weight and roar of future history.
Like Prometheus…
Even as Marta, with her lustrous blue-black hair, arms folded (the aureole of the left nipple lurid against the bisque mound of its breast; an allergy; it was itching like mad) looked on with an impossible mixture of longing and resentment, Siegfried, along with all of his belongings there at Uni… family photos, clothing, equipment, nametags and gene-keyed snacks in the faculty locker… vanished. With no sense of motion, Marta, too, vanished and her haircut changed. She re-materialized on the other side of the campus and formed in the midst of a conversation with a PsySoc Prof who, by appearance, might’ve been her cousin. She was not surprised by Siegfried’s disappearance; she’d never heard of him. Nor had anyone.
That’s how time travel works, since no object can occupy two timestreams in one universe. The only options are A) sending a duplicate, or B) removing the original from one timestream completely before inserting it in another. A virtual googlebit calculator in quantum n-space is responsible for keeping track of (and eventually reversing) the transaction. The process is funded by shaving a billionth of a second from the very end of all Time. As a military option it made the oxygen fission bomb seem like a toy in comparison.
The first thing that met him was the smell. The smells. He hit 19th-century North America vomiting… he staggered and fell to his knees in a sunlit bush, vomiting his guts out and scratching his arms and chest on the brambles. The sweat, bad breaths and long reek of the open latrine hit him like a seething kiss. Or perhaps it was a side-effect of the massive dose of thought-modifiers he had taken in order to mask his true intent.
*
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FOUND NARRATIVES: IT WAS THE “wearing the same clothes as in the video” LINE WHICH MADE THE TEXT WORK FOR ME
MEANWHILE
THE ELEPHANT IN THE CLOSET
I’ll let the texts speak for themselves…
Dan (Green) wrote (excerpt):
(etc.; ending with:)
And now the comments:
From there, Dan reveals the fact that all this “Literary Critic” nonsense is really about a circle of chums who each like to be King on their little blogs; the “literature” part is just an excuse (don’t expect all of the following comments to remain intact on Dan’s site… Dan has a bit of a hissy fit):
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-EDBONICS-
The second sentence, in the version of the review that made it past the “editor”:
And can anyone decode this passage?
Now, I ask you…
Apologies for butting in unannounced and unwashed, but the final sentence says it all:
“Memory isn’t just a tour de force that shows a master at the top of his game. It is an invitation to reconsider an “inferior” genre, beckoning us to find unexpected truths within the seemingly conventional.”
What serious critic has ever claimed that “truths”, (“unexpected” or otherwise), and the “seemingly conventional” were mutually exclusive? Also I’m assuming that the “conventional” refers to the genre and not the plot of the book under review – but I cannot be sure.
Far from “beckoning” us “to reconsider an “inferior” genre”, I’d be very surprised if the poor quality of this review did not have the exact opposite effect of reinforcing prejudices against the genre. On that note, anybody who buys me a copy of Memory (or any other book by Donald Westlake for that matter) will be removed from my Christmas card list forthwith.
I’m not even concerned with the validity/invalidity… or relative originality (none)… of the “critical” argument presented… it’s the illiteracy I object to. I used to consider Ed a guy who strung “big words” together without having a clue what they actually meant and with the results not even sounding good. But “lob” is not a big word and “busman’s holiday” is not an esoteric turn of phrase. More Dictionary, less Thesaurus… which may not fix the leather ear (seriously: read Ed’s tongue-twisters out loud) but it’s a start…
Here’s Ed “not quite Wilson” Champion doing an amateurish job of skewering a J. Franzen story, which appeared in the NYer, June of last year… and the resulting comments (the names precede their associated comments, in this case): please note how I tell Ed “to his face” that the “lampoon” is not so hot. Also read Franzen’s story; is this not clearly a case of an actual writer (whether the material is to your taste or not) vs any-old-guy-with-a-keyboard-a-chip-on-his-shoulder-and-delusions-of-grandeur?
33 Responses to “Bad Neighbors”
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Of course, Ed was the guy who wrote the thing referring to the brilliant “The Kindly Ones” (Jonathan Littell) as “The worst book I have read in the past three years”:
Fucking ID.I.OT.
All to say: the only actual “Literary Critique” and “Discussion” I’m seeing on these blogs is happening in the heated exchanges on the comment threads. Much to the dismay of the various LitBlog owners. Yes, there’s a LOT to read on TET. No, I’m not working to make this place more “accessible”. This is where you come if you want to read something deeper and longer and harder-to-grasp than quips and blurbs.
This, for example, is some pretty good shit (comment 24 from the above-cited thread):
DEPT. OF THE MIRACULISH
Christ-on-a-pike, Steve Mitchelmore (must suppress urge to write “Bitchelmore”) has just gone from being a semi-arch-nemesis to someone I’d give an oven-mitted handjob to in a public place:
Well, SM and I will not suddenly start (b)logrolling, of course (unless he swears off that slacker pimp-litter Tao Lin), but it’s very nice to see Literary values trump virtual enmities
[editor's note: The Kindly Ones reference appearing in the 420th comment... according to the total at the top of the page as of 11:37... on Hitler's birthday? Spooky]
Gut Gawd, CDS Frances. You won’t mind if I’m blunt about this comment you’ve left on Dan’s thread, will you? I’ll respond here, rather than on Dan’s site, making it less easy for Dan to delete my response; first, your comment:
“…my impression of Littell is that he needs to get over himself–big time.”
Frances, that’s the favorite phrase of the chip-on-the-shoulder brigade. “Getting over himself” has nothing to do with the quality of the Art and everything to do with the fact that Littell has written something, in TKO, that both you and Ed Champion are incapable of having written. I’m not capable of having written it, either; I’m grateful that Littell is: this isn’t abject self-deprecation or false modesty, it’s a symptom of my saving grace. I’m not threatened by the specter of superior talent or intelligence, I’m inspired by it. There’s a sense of Entitlement… not to goods, but to achievement and its victory laps… that can turn corrosive if it isn’t moderated by a sense of proportion. Saying that Littell would “crack up” at an ignorant, envy-rotten attack on his work is not the most insightful remark you’ve ever made. Shrinking the practice and perception of Literary Art to the dimension of one’s wounded sense of affront-in-the-face-of-greater-talent is useful to no one.
“In fact, the whole effort exemplifies one of Ed’s finer qualities–the willingness to risk condemnation.”
This is a perfectly baffling reverse of the True; it’s utter, oozing bullshit, in fact; TKO was condemned by such a tidal wave of Yankee Bluenose Philistinism that the safest thing Ed could do was what he did: blow his childish raspberry and flash his ugly moon. Ed’s default alignment with the majority à la “twenty million tuning in for American Idol, eight million enjoying Lady Gaga’s latest YouTube video, and more than a million readers feverishly purchasing Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight” is hardly the brave work of a lone dissident, it’s the default maneuver of the standard-issue demagogue for whom the numbers are always the prize. Ed will always go where the numbers go because he wants to be “popular”. He wants that modicum of “power”. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s the consumerist majority setting all the standards these days, not some meritocratic elite.
“When Daniel Mendelsohn makes me laugh as hard as Ed Champion has done (on several occasions) I’ll pay more attention to his perspective (humor being the highest form of intelligence, remember).”
Depends on the kind of laughter, doesn’t it? The belly-laughs at the Colosseum are not inspired by wit. I’ll bet there are bars full of skinheads rocking with laughter at this very moment and I’m sure they aren’t laughing at aphorisms from Dorothy Parker. Buffoonery isn’t the “highest form” of anything. I think you know that.
Re-visting that old comment thread re: Jonathan Franzen’s NYer story vs Ed Champion’s idiotic “parody” of it, I was stumped, again, by the fury against Franzen from Ed and his followers. I like a good mystery. And now I understand, suddenly, that all that rage is Narcissistic Pain. Now I understand Ed’s general motivation and I understand the function of his projects; the service he provides. All those sense-of-Entitlement-poisoned thirty-somethings, barely capable of writing interesting/coherent comments yet somehow convinced of the innate superiority of their sheer Bulk Normality. Who can they sue/prosecute/recriminate for their emotional distress in being effortlessly superior with nothing to show for it? Ed sets up his dunking pool.
I used to enjoy listening to Ed’s Bat Segundo show by filtering out the bulk of Ed’s asinine, OCD-informed quasi-insights (“How does your frequent use of the words ‘the’ and ‘and’ inform the themes of the book? I’ve written in my notes that you use the word ‘the’ 5,089 times… surely that means something“) and steering round the writers’ baffled, stammering responses. I thought Ed would “develop” over time; I thought the problems with these interviews would eventually work themselves out. I didn’t realize, then, that these problems with the interviews were the very key to Ed’s approach: hostility. The various writers, some great, others not, put up with this hostility in the name of, possibly, broadening the fan base. Ie: for money. A Faustian pact with a very minor devil. The problem being that there are no shortage of these minor devils running around.
Ed is The Ongoing Revenge of the Talentless.
But, as I wrote in an email, yesterday:
I set up the TET Bunker Pagoda as a safe-zone where anyone can write any comment (unless it’s gibberish pure) without fear of having it deleted. That’s the first requirement of intellectual discourse: genuine freedom of speech. The second requirement of intellectual discourse is the belief in the possibility of the intellectual. Support for the blatantly anti-intellectual is not one of my responsibilities here.
Littell PO’d me (possibly permanently) when in an interview he said that there was NO literary figure he would be interested in meeting. Really? Not a single one? Not Sean McNulty or Neil Addison or Edmond Caldwell or any of the other comrades? I found that outrageous. There’s outsized talent and there’s outsized ego and if Ed deflates the second while farcically blabbering about the first, I not only think there’s a place for it, I’ll titter along.
Frances, Jonathan Littell hasn’t heard of Sean, Edmond, Neil, you or me. He hasn’t. I promise. He hasn’t even heard of Ed Champion.
CDS Steven,
I close my eyes and try to imagine your response to the same question and I can see a list, a long one, of writers–living and dead– that you would invoke (and honor them by so doing). That he had the limelight and chose not to share it, not to seize the opportunity to extend it outward and beyond his own accomplishment is not only telling but Littelling.
Nonsense. Littell isn’t responsible to your notion of what any writer’s responsibility is. Even if he were, it would have nothing to do with the brilliance or stupidity of his work. Separating the two as categories of judgment is important.
My response to the same question is that I’m happy to read the work. Not so interested in the personalities behind it.
V. S. Pritchett comes knocking at the Pagoda door. In or out?
If he wants to leave a posthumous comment, he’s more than welcome to.
Frances, maybe I should make it clear that what most people see as an elitist divide between the writer-as-god/celebrity and her/his readers, I see as a very convenient (even protective) distance. I don’t want to smell Roth’s talc or put up with Amis’ boozed-up mood-swings. Why would I? What’s the advantage? My religion gene is vestigial to the point of non-existence.
[ed.'s note: each reply chain is only ten links long; if you get cut off at some point, start the comment in a fresh box with a quoted sentence to establish the connection]
“Littell isn’t responsible to your notion of what any writer’s responsibility is.”
And First Lady Obama is not obliged to spend Mother’s Day in the Guantanamo gulag. But if she had done it last year, those men, the bounty-hunted, might at this writing be free.
Again: nonsense. First of all, don’t invoke the hologrammic wife of the hologrammic figurehead of the Fourth Reich so credulously. Second: what-the-fuck is the connection between a literary artist and a cynical political pantomime?
Light. Light and consciousness.
[ed.'s note: erm: no]
[UPDATE: and when did the vacuities of therapy-speak become so inextricably bound with literary discourse?]
LIBERATION TECHNOLOGY
Comrades, I’ve been having a problem with both TINY PICS and PHOTOBUCKET deleting images they appear to deem obscene (though some of these verboten images were merely pictures of posters from the very public streets of Berlin; is Tiny Pics based in Tehran? Possibly).
The solution is less convenient than using either of these image-hosting sites but it renders us immune to the tiny-brained discretion of some bluenosed cunt:
1. upload image to your Word.Press Media Library
2. retrieve the url of said image; say:
http://staugustine2.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/post-orgy2.jpg
3. Plug this url into the following formula:
4. note “width” and “height”: these are the values for the dimensions in pixels
5. et voila, fuckers
THE DIFFICULT TEXT
THREE STRUCTURAL DEFINITIONS OF RACE
A. George Walton was born in 1809, child of a black father and white mother and died in prison about twenty eight years later, having lived as a man who was good-looking in a manner that predated all hope of appreciation, as if a painting by Yves Tanguy had found its way back to the dawn of the 19th century only to inspire baffled glares and lots of kicks in the pants, as though a kick in the pants was the only persuasive critique his critics could improvise to respond to the singularity of his appearance: the loopy curls of broth-colored hair, the tawny skin, the full lips and a high-bridged nose sporting freckles… this, remember, during an era when leaded-white faces and lips like incisions were considered the essence of beauty.
B. Von Ziegeldorff drove into town every Friday night to patronize a low club called The Chicken Shack which was famous for appealing to blacks. The drive in from his villa in a wooded, nearly-rustic suburb of Potsdam through the throb of weekend traffic often took ninety minutes, during which he either had time to nurture his grievances against society in general and women specifically or listen to an instructional cassette of Advanced English for Germans. Somewhere in the lonely vastness of his car there was also a misplaced cassette of Callas he was suddenly in the mood to hear again after a year-long estrangement from that exquisitely bullying voice, the voice of high culture, because he’d been listening to far too much soul music recently.
C. Ramses sneeks a peek at the graying blonde as she steers gravely home. Or so he assumes. She reaches over and switches on the sound system. The fantasy, obviously, is that they will do the dirty without exchanging so much as a single word and she’s afraid that Ramses will ruin it now by saying a word. She doesn’t know that Ramses Gordon knows the rules of this game so well that he might have invented it; that he can play it blindfolded and has on more than one occasion and that he is thinking, also, against the background of the anti-erotic aria from Lucia Lammermoor, how differently blacks and whites absorb the behavioral proscriptions of Christianity. How this difference has a measurable impact on the respective copulatory styles of the races. How they fuck and how we live. Their guilt and our shrugs and the sacrificial sacrament of chicken.
A. Across the broad map of his short life, having been abandoned at an early age by parents driven chiefly by sexual logic through a low-walled maze of poverty, George Walton served almost a third of his earthly existence in prison. Born James, alias George, alias Jonas, alias James, alias Burley, alias Chick or Chicken John.
B. There was one black in particular. Von Ziegeldorff had made the mistake, early on, of running after all of them at once, like a kitten in a fishpond, therefore catching none, but being observant and far from stupid he soon took note of the fact that the old hands were patiently bedding one after another of the finest specimens the club had to offer, merely by choosing one and bringing to bear a convincing ersatz of passion until the goal was achieved (or quota met) and thereafter moving on. Every black girl in the club, of course, thinks of herself as The One who will prove to be so irresistible that the game will stop with her, therefore perpetuating the game.
C. Look at this respectable middle-aged German lady, for example. The grimly determined look on her face (this is supposed to be fun, lady); the way she clutches that steering wheel as though it’s hot with current: she feels Christ’s eyes on her, his disappointment in her, his weary sneer of disgust. Her husband has no problem with her little Liebesaffären…he encourages her because it absolves him of guilt for his substantial porno expenses. Christ is not so easygoing about it. Christ is not quite so cool. He plagues her with subliminal remonstrations (in which his lips never move, spookily, but his sad eyes pierce her). She wasn’t even raised in an overtly Christian family because Germans are traditionally pagan and she believes that she believes in fucking as a kind of physical therapy. A higher form of jogging. Far more therapeutic if she fucks an Asian, a Native American, or a Black. That’s what she thinks she thinks a liberal West German should believe they feel about it. But a stern (and vaguely oriental) Christ has the last word on all that and she has to hide the physical act itself behind all kinds of masks and filters to smuggle the pleasure out of Hell like a red hot trinket between her legs without fainting.
A. As a boy the tragic mulatto was the object of lazy sport among the poor whites of his acquaintance, though when he was kicked in the seat of his dusty breeches it was as a kind of running gag or after-thought, rarely with enough force to mean tears. As a manchild George fed himself by doing odd jobs for neighbors and once spent a summer doing back-breakingly honest labor for a farmer who paid him with two counterfeit five-dollar bills. “Well nigh half of what was owing me,” as handsome James alias George alias Chicken John put it. A philosophical turning point.
B. Earletta Goins was a would-be disco singer with her own little cassette out called The Story of My Life, released by a local label, an independent based in East Berlin and on this particular Friday night Von Ziegeldorff tipped the DJ a substantial amount to play both sides of Earletta’s cassette, as well as subsidizing free beers for all the patrons in the club (about two hundred people) for the duration of the cassette’s play, making for a good mood and plenty of people on the dance floor to dance beside VZ and Earletta while they danced with attention-getting self-consciousness to her disco music, which was neither truly bad nor truly good but fell within the range of most things.
C. The bedroom smells like…what? A kitchen. It smells vaguely of chicken not fried but stewed. Disgusting. On the walls flanking the massive bed, one on each, are two large wood-framed photos meant to resemble very old oil paintings. There is one of the lady in question and the other of her husband, or what looks like her husband or could be an Ex, and they are dressed up to look like an Iroquois chief and his squaw…the weak-chinned fellow sports an enormous feathered head dress. His lady, in real life the gray-haired blonde on her back on the bed with her eyes closed and her legs up like an as-yet-unstuffed Christmas goose, is black-haired and light-eyed in her sepiatone photo and neither reveal the subtlest shade of mirth, self-mockery, defensive irony or even decent embarrassment in the portraits.
A. After another period of backbreaking in the Charlestown shipyards and then aboard a fishing smack with the olfactory bloom of an African cathouse’s toilet, Walton fell in with a hook-nosed ex-convict named Symmes who mentored him in the trade of bank robbing, the craft of which George failed fully to master, being neither self-righteous nor brutal enough with his pistol, landing in prison in 1824 for a six month sentence after which he dabbled unchastened in the lighter art of the highwayman… with just as little talent. When Walton wasn’t busy being apprehended (being a mulatto in early 19th century America was a liability in the incognito game), it was easy if unremunerative work, as most of his victims chose to toss him their wallets and flee rather than tussle or risk injury at the hands of a thieving diabolical coon with freckles.
B. “I must confess,” shouted VZ, “I have never before seen a lady of your race with these green eyes of such beauty,” and he mimed his own astonishment, hands on his heart as though it might burst, for also her skin was the color of the pancakes he’d been mad for on his legendary trip across America, during which being a slave to this crude delicacy had given him an insight into the American psyche he was sure he could apply to the swift achievement of his goal.
C. Ramses imagines, quite vividly, the chin-free husband answering the telephone on one of those interminable Sundays of petty household chores choreographed to the pandering drone of television, the day on which long-married Germans speak less than a sentence to each other and he envisions the man of the household putting a hand over the receiver and lifting an eyebrow and invoking, yet again, the worn-out magic of his wife’s name as though it were a mild rebuke, tonally, or the long-suffering request to please stop something.
A. It was only when Walton came upon intended victim John Fenno, returning one evening from a dance across the old Chelsea bridge, that he met resistance and his fate. Fenno was a beefy man and sprang from his cart to wrestle Walton rather than part with his coins or jewelry, invigorated as he was by sexual frustration; had the dance been successful things may well have turned out differently; as it was, the robbery was thwarted though Walton escaped, but not before trying and failing to punish Fenno with a bullet. A suspender buckle saved Fenno’s life and doomed George as he was soon captured.
B. Driving on the fast black road towards his villa before dawn with gems of sparse precipitation fixed like glass moths to his glittering windshield, VZ found himself bedevilled by a sickening internal debate as to whether he dare risk slipping into the stereo his rediscovered cassette dub of a valuable reel-to-reel bootleg of the one-time-only performance of Callas doing Lammermoor with the notorious unscored E-flats included… punishingly high notes Callas tries for with laudable brio but misses, grazing the first E-flat with such a grasping shade of the pitch that it’s almost a blue note and chipping the second with a Levantine fraction redolent of the bazaar. In every subsequent performance she eschewed the dreaded E-flats entirely. Wisely. As far as VZ knew, he was the only one on Earth in possession of this wounded version of Donizetti’s lugubrious masterpiece, a discarded run-through of Callas’s premier performance of the piece in Mexico City, 1953, and he felt a craving just then to hear it. Despite the fact that there in the white leather seat beside him was his prize, Earletta Goins, slouched with drowsy pliancy, a half smile playing on her chewable lips, lips he fully envisioned in contact with the freckled red glans of his penis and VZ had to think long and hard before changing the sexual weather in his Porsche just then. He could only imagine the anti-aphrodisiacal effect an opera would have on this colored American sex machine. He could only imagine his future grief at never knowing the warm weight of those lips and the breathlessness of those strong brown unshaved legs crushing the breath out of him.
C. Wifey’s on her stomach, moaning and kicking, both hands locked under her thrashing pelvis making an extravagant display of humping alone. Some guy must have told her, thirty years ago, as an excuse for not touching her, that it turns him on. She’s waistless, veiny and pale as old frogs. Ramses very quietly puts his cold dangle of dick away and hitches his pants back up and sneaks out of the bedroom as the gnadige frau whips her egg into its bad-lathered glory. Down the hall and to the left the second floor bathroom door is open and sizzling with the sound of a midday shower and Ramses’s interest is piqued. Is it hubby, home early from work? A nubile daughter, out of school for the day with a chest cold? An impertinent maid, a poltergeist or a poor relation? Ramses eases up towards the invitingly open bathroom door on the plush white carpet, carrying his shoes, boldly curious, holding his breath, with little or no backup plan in place if anyone should catch him.
A. Faced with the gravity of his final punishment, Walton directed that a copy of his memoirs be bound in his own tawny skin and presented to the very Mr. Fenno whom George was sent to the gallows for trying to shoot. White historians take George Walton’s avowal that the gesture was one of esteem for Fenno’s bravery at face value, unfamiliar with the bitter nuances of colored irony. His skin, stripped in a supple parallelogram from his still-warm back after the hanging, was treated to look like a gray deer skin by the tanner, who delivered the stuff without comment to Peter Low the book binder, the latter of perhaps a less pragmatic disposition and therefore much disturbed by the job and suffering increasingly vivid nightmares the rest of his life.
B. I’ve spent so much time and money on this one dream of making sweet love with an Afro-American and on the very threshold of all that and more I decide to risk ruining the sexy mood that all of my efforts have managed by some miracle to put her into with a blast of my so-called high culture? Am I crazy?
C. What Ramses witnesses through the fogged, beaded, soap-scummed shower door is a jug-eared middle-aged black man with love handles and a sagging ass, the cheeks of which are matte and blacker than the rest of him, his large head crowned with a cap of webby, water-matted hair. Who is this man? Where does he fit in the cosmology? Was the guy in the Iroquois photo the Ex or is this the Ex and are things much kinkier around the homestead than Ramses first imagined? This avuncular apparition of a black man with the posture of an utterly defeated specimen. His left armpit foams as he scrubs at it with an eerie lack of energy more suitable to a nursing home sitz bath than a home owner’s shower; it’s like he’s preparing for his own execution. It is a joyless, prosaic, song-free ablution so full of truth that Ramses backs away from the threshold in waves of nausea and a paradoxical joy in his own life, the details of which he can claim as otherwise impossible, his uniqueness in time, the song of his soul in this skin.
THE DIFFICULT TEXT: IN 3 PARTS
This is my free-jazz-loving, wife-beater-wearing, i-ching-consulting, multi-personality Nobodaddy of Difficult Texts. It is long and black. A clue (it is a more difficult text than it first appears to be): the intro movement is a sort of sitcom…
JESUS IN VEGAS
1. Jesus in Vegas
Benny LaFontaine remained hunched on one side of the greeting card carousel in Burgertown Drugs. His neck was beginning to hurt, yet he dared not stand up. But if he couldn’t even stand up, literally and figuratively, to a couple of gossipy old-maid hairdressers with high school diplomas and only the dimmest awareness of the world around them, how could he ever hope to effect a fundamental change in society itself? In the world, even? Would Malcolm X or Marcus Garvey have remained in a stoop behind the Hallmark Cards like this, afraid of the mockery of Jolene Barnes?
Benny was snooping on a conversation that involved him personally. The conversation was taking place on the other side of the carousel and it was between Jolene and another woman who may or may not have been Bernadette McPhatter. Benny’s connection to the topic was unflattering. He’d noticed the surprising mention of his name, and, having spent the better part of a decade in a city out west where no one knew him or had any idea who his family had been back when they had been something, overhearing his name in a public space was a strange sensation.
“Trust me, I am not exaggerating.”
“What’s this world coming to?”
“If only I knew, child…”
[laughter]
He’d been stooping to pluck a particular card. A greeting card featuring a blonde-haired, pink-cheeked Gerber baby framed by tulips under the silver inscription On Her Confirmation. A card like that in this all-postAfrican neighborhood of Philadelphia!
When he’d first noticed it down there he’d smiled that smile one smiles when a remark or event confirms one’s fondest prejudices. In this case it was The White Man who was again being true to form. Or was it the docile, self-hating, Caucasian-embracing postAfrican middle-class? Benny stooped to reach the racist greeting card, thinking he ought to buy it and show it to Precious as further proof, when a voice he’d quickly identified as belonging to Jolene’s dropped his name into the conversation like a defective firework. He froze in mid-stoop to listen to it sputter across the floor.
“Child, you had to be there.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I could not believe my eyes.”
“Ain’t that something?”
“What can I say? It was long ago and far away. But look at him now… it’s a damn shame, girl.”
“I hear you.”
“Coon looks like a black Robinson Crusoe! Looks like something that washed up on shore! Skinny as death and with that scraggly-assed beard and a bushy red Afro like some flea-bitten old Jew…”
“Lord.”
“And with his skinny arm around that little black nappy-haired monkey-lip spasm he diddlin’ like he’s proud!”
[laughter]
Not an hour ago, he and Precious had bumped into Jolene over at Roosevelt Park. On the sidewalk behind the batter’s cage on the softball diamond in Roosevelt Park. He’d taken Precious there to see his childhood.
-Out there, way out, in left field, near the pump… can you see the rusty pump? We called that Lourdes in this game we used to play called Leppy Leper… if you were tagged you were a leper and you had to make it to that pump and stick your hand in the water to cure yourself before the other kids could pull your shoes off or else you were incurable the rest of the day…
He laughed and shifted his pointing finger about ten radial degrees to the right, drawing her attention to a rotten wooden bench in the shade of a tree a short jog beyond second base on the softball diamond.
-That bench, okay, 1947, the annual barbecue of the Greater Masonic Negro Tradesmen Association of West Philly…my father was the president for most of my childhood…kept a ceremonial sword in the closet and everything… caught me playing pirate with that sword one day and tore my behind up… but it was 1947 that I met… I never told you this…my father… I never told you…
Suddenly there stood before Benny his female counterpart of the unenlightened past, the prom Queen from another life: light-skinned, green-eyed, chestnut-haired Jolene Barnes. With her hand on her bosom in a gesture of primly flustered delight. You’d think she’d been dreaming of this moment every day since the last time they’d seen each other, at the end of the Truman administration. It was eerily cinematic that Jolene Barnes should have appeared to Benny just then, stepping out of the bright green prism of his peripheral vision of Roosevelt Park. Roosevelt Park, the scene of so many of Benny’s earliest triumphs and not a few of his humiliations and many feverish experiments with the delights and dangers of the opposite sex.
He would have recognized her voice under any circumstances, even after not seeing or hearing from her once in twenty five years, because she’d had that voice…husky, sultry, tinged with smoke and chocolate… all the way back in seventh grade, the record-breaking year her tits popped out. Still, he’d always preferred darker girls. And as if to confirm this fact for both himself and Precious, and perhaps even for Jolene’s edification as well, he squeezed Precious extra tight as Jolene smiled at them. Jolene who looked, after a fourth-of-a-century, not a day older than sixteen. Which wasn’t possible.
-Why, Benjamin Franklin LaFontaine the 2nd, do my light eyes deceive me or is that really truly you, after all these years?
She’d made such a fuss over seeing Benny again that he’d felt grateful to her for making him look so good in front of Precious, who had to be impressed. Not that he really needed to impress Precious at this point but the age gap was something that still worried him, often in the middle of the night, his heart racing for no particular reason as she slept. Jolene had been friendly with Precious, too, telling her that they really all had to get together and there was so much to talk about and how do you get your natural to hold its shape at that size, maybe I should stop straightening my hair, do you think I’d look good in an Afro and so forth.
From all that to this… the character assassination… with whomever it was on the other side of the greeting cards? It made no sense. That had to be Bernadette McPhatter she was dishing to and hearing the two of them together took Benny right back to high school, a trip he didn’t relish taking. He had to squeeze his nostrils shut to stifle a sneeze and came heart-stoppingly close to pinching out a reciprocal fart instead. Just imagine.
[laughter]
Jolene and Bernadette had been best friends all through high school and there was no reason to believe they would have stopped at the onset of adulthood with its comings and goings of various unreliable men. Bernadette had always been Jolene’s chubby, light-brown and squeaky-voiced foil. Jolene had put on weight in twenty-five years and her trademark ponytail was now a face-framing pageboy but she was still recognizably herself, a pampered daughter of the postAfrican middle-class whose approval was hard-won and whose disdain could be lethal.
The conversation moved on to other topics but Benny, at six foot four, was trapped in a stoop on the other side of the carousel. He couldn’t bear the idea of revealing himself just then to the gossips, looking approximately as Jolene had described him (a black Robinson Crusoe), and he prayed for the women to pick a card, pay for it, and go.
(…a flea-bitten old Jew…)
The carousel rotated a semi-turn left and a quarter-turn right and a whole turn back again. He listened as Jo-Jo and Bernie…it was all coming back to him now…discussed the respective pros and cons of two similar seventy five cent cards and then sauntered across the aisle in a jingle of coin purses towards the register, flirting with the brown-skinned proprietor, Humpy Clark.
Benny was furious with himself for hiding. Why should he care what those two silly bourgeois Negresses thought of him? He rose to his full height when the coast was clear and peered over the carousel at bald headed Nathaniel ‘Humpy’ Clark at the cash register, who was also peering at Benny with undisguised concern, and Benny took a step towards an adjacent wire rack of newspapers and magazines. Ebony, Essence, Jet… they were all just Look, Photoplay and Life in blackface, weren’t they? When would his people learn? He had been in such an incredible mood just thirty minutes ago, too. He paged quickly through the Ebony with that forbearing smile, full of pain, again.
He started for the cash register clutching the guilty pleasure of a Baby Ruth bar but put that back, remembering his new health food regime, then remembered that he’d come, in the first place, for a birthday card. He grabbed one that said Have a Soulful Birthday in funky earthtone lettering and remembered to look for that lily-white uber-Caucasian confirmation card to present to Precious as a comment on the sad state the black community was in but he couldn’t find it. He rotated the carousel through several complete revolutions with no luck. He looked again, frowning, and wondered if he wasn’t losing his mind. Had he imagined the damned thing?
Then it came to him: Jolene herself had purchased it! Paid seventy five cents for that lily-white Gerber baby for the right to take it home! He could just picture it on her mantelpiece. Benny had to laugh out loud at that one. Much to Humpy’s alarm. Ah: but then he found a duplicate behind a Fat Albert card. He paid for the two with a stack of dimes.
Outside again, his mood began to improve.
It improved in the braided waft of barbecue fumes and fresh-cut lawn and the sociable hum of the Philly sunshine. It improved as he edged by little sisters in last year’s Sunday best, their stiff fat braids antennae waving as they skipped rope in complicated gospel-enlightened rhythms, skinny and shiny-dull as licorice twists and look at the little brothers wobbling on fluorescent stingray bikes in an officious procession. Plus those enigmatic old folks, tobacco-dark and dry-mute as dead plants on the porches though also still fussy with frustrated life-force, rocking and fanning, rocking and fanning and waving hullo…
Just about everyone stared long and hard as Benny passed. A couple of slick-head young bucks in a beat-up sedan listening to The Ojays yelled Yo, black Bozo as they roared by mufflerless but still Benny’s mood was good. He was 42-years-old and feeling younger than ever. He had a dream, a vision and most of all he had Precious Stone.
Just gloating to himself about Precious inspired a quickening in his crotch as he mounted the steep hill at the Penn Avenue side of the park, parallel to the trolley. It amazed him. Together nearly four years and they were still going at it like teenagers on a first date, morning noon and night. He was proud of his born again virility after that soft spell of the year before. Nothing worse than when women came up with the excuses for you, he thought: they say just hold me or wink and say it was probably pressure at work or performance anxiety or maybe you’re queer and don’t know it. Well, never again. He nodded. Then he scowled.
He scowled with compassion at the thought of most of his contemporaries, who were already no doubt resorting to wistful, middle-aged self-abuse. The poignant pornography of the High School Yearbook or short messy sessions in front of a TV rancid with venal white starlets on segregated cop shows and sitcoms in which a postAfrican just might make an occasional appearance as a sassy maid, a flamboyant pimp or a precocious, dwarf-like child. How sad.
But Benny couldn’t help hearing, again, as he strolled back towards his aunt’s mansion in the low late orange of the suppertime sun, Jolene’s outrageous dig at Precious as a little black nappy-haired monkey-lip spasm. Part of him wanted to catch up with Jolene (and her honky greeting card) and enlighten her as to the sickness of the self-hatred evident in her attitude towards a sister of Precious’ manifest black beauty and part of him…
“Benny LaFontaine? Is that you under all that fuzz, boy?”
[laughter]
An old man, gnarled and dusty-black bent as dead branches on a hanging tree, appeared in Benny’s path with the suddenness of a chess piece. Just set down right in front of Benny. A certain unreality to the whole thing, as though this was Benny’s version of It’s a Wonderful Life, or A Christmas Carol. The old man peered up with one good eye from under a derby’s worn brim, his spade-shaped face sheathed in a crisp white goatee and the sleeveless t-shirt he sported was gray with years of lukewarm washings. His pinstriped baggy suit pants were shiny at the knees and they dragged on the ground over sandals showing toes like coy Brazil nuts. Benny’s face remembered before his mind could catch up and he smiled broadly for a beat or two before speaking.
“Mr. Jimmy!”
“Used to march up and down Penn Avenue in a French sailor suit and curly light brown hair lookin’ prettier than any of the little flirts in the neighborhood! Nothin’ you loved more than a Baby Ruth bar. I used to buy ‘em by the sack and you’d come over on my stoop and sit on my lap after Sunday school and say,’ and here Mr. Jimmy lapsed into a quavery, breathless, slightly disturbing imitation of a child’s voice, “ ‘Can you please give me another Baby Booth bar, Mr. Jimmy?’”
He wheezed a laugh and coughed into his derby hat revealing a wrinkled gray head that appeared as though one might easily press a thumb through it. He slipped the derby back on and continued, ‘People used to tell me, why you wanna associate with them saditty old high yalla LaFontaines, Jimmy? Don’t you know that to them you ain’t nothin’ but a lowly black-assed Alabama Niggra? Ain’t you got no pride? Can’t you see through them hincty phonies? But I just ignored that, see, despite the element of truth in their remarks, because you tickled me so. Lord, we had some fun on that old stoop, didn’t we? Can you please give me another Baby Booth bar, Mr. Jimmy?” and here he wheezed a laugh and coughed into the derby again with the corners of his mouth turned down.
Mr. Jimmy hailed from a simpler era which honored a comic tradition of the neighborhood pedophile. Mr. Jimmy and his fat yellow wife Aunt Bessy (long dead), no kids of their own, rarely seen together outside the cramped kitchen of their row home, had been a fixture of Burgertown mythology since before Benny’s birth. It wasn’t until the 1960s attached a sexual overtone to every aspect of daily life that old men who liked to lure children to their laps with ancient bags of candy began receiving unwelcome visits from plainclothes detectives and state-appointed psychiatrists and irate fathers with softball bats. In the golden age of pedophilia that had been Benny’s childhood, men like Mr. Jimmy were unofficial watchdogs of the neighborhood, making sure the smaller kids didn’t play in the street or tease stray dogs or fight each other or play hooky or ruin their best duds hopping in puddles on the way to Sunday school. Impossible to match the vigilant omnipresence of the neighborhood pedophile. Benny remembered vividly Mr. Jimmy explaining to him once that that hard thing in his lap that sometimes made it so uncomfortable for Benny to sit there was a magic black frog named Buddy.
“And you were such a handsome, brave little man at your Daddy’s service, as I recall, all dressed up in your tailored black suit and a white silk tie and spats! Better dressed than most of the grownups, I’d say! I know your mama and your Aunt Gracie were so proud of you they coulda burst and so was I, way back in the last pew of that church with my opera glasses, a church so packed with mourners from every what-you-call strata of society that they were turnin’ ‘em away by the dozen. You were the crown prince of old man LaFontaine’s empire and you looked it. Yes you did. People would say to me, you know that Benny LaFontaine better than his own folks, Mr. Jimmy, what’s your honest assessment of his character? And you know what I’d tell ‘em?”
It was a while before Benny realized he was expected to participate in Jimmy’s reverie, as his mind was wandering off on a tangent of its own, thinking back on the days after his father’s passing, when he suddenly found himself in a household governed by the fractious couple of his mother and his father’s sister, both of them decades younger than his father’s terminal age of seventy. In his mother’s case five. Decades.
Mr. Jimmy repeated his question with emphasis, showing his matte yellow dentures and black gums. “And do you know what I would tell them?”
“What, Mr. Jimmy?”
“I’d say… oh no, he won’t let us down! Not him, not Benjamin Franklin LaFontaine. He will do us all proud one day and uplift his Negro race and teach the white man that a people of color can produce forth a prince of its own making to lead this country to greatness no less so than the sons of the white man and all of his fair-haired heroes! They asked me and I told ‘em! You see what I’m saying? We depended on you. You were our pride and joy!”
Benny now felt his good mood come back completely, and then some. And he was deeply moved, not to mention encouraged… confirmed… in all the thankless, payless, sleepless hard work of recent years… his battle with The System, his attempt to bring dignity and leadership to His People out West… wasn’t it all somehow crystallized in this old man’s heartfelt speech? Did Benny feel a tear or two welling? Mr. Jimmy removed his derby and struck Benny across the face with it.
“And just look at you! You let us down! Let down your family and let down this neighborhood and your whole damn colored race! Look at you you dirty, filthy, shameful vagabond! If I was a young man I’d knock your ass out! If I was a young man you’d think twice before walking these streets looking like that. Let me guess… you ride into Philly on a freight train in that get-up? Or you jump ship on a garbage scow down in Jersey? Answer me this, did you come here hoping for work as a scarecrow in my back garden, fool? Yes, you’d scare the crows and the squirrels and the damn seedlings, too! Damn! I wouldn’t touch your funky ramshackle ass with Frank Rizzo’s dick!”
[laughter]
Benny found himself walking. Mr. Jimmy was ranting behind him, raising his voice a notch for every few yards of distance Benny put between them. The sun was setting with fragile grace behind the high dark leaves of the century-old elms and maples girding Roosevelt Park, the crickets announced their invisible quorum, and curious neighbors leaned out of second-storey windows or stood on their stoops with hands on their hips wearing oven mitts to see what all the fuss was about.
A blisteringly righteous moral upbraiding from a pedophile: you don’t soon get over something like that. Jimmy’s rant was going strong but fading fast as Benny crossed Queen Lane against the red light and slipped behind a trolley as it lurched on its tracks, a handful of Sunday passengers lowering their newspapers and craning their necks to stare at him as he resisted the urge to break into a run for the mansion. Until he could resist no longer. And then he was far away.
[applause]
***
When he let himself in through the double-locked outer and inner doors of the front porch of 26 Green Lane and entered the parlor, short of breath, he found his Precious and Aunt Gracie in a state of suspended détente, sitting on opposite sides of the room, as far apart as physically possible, watching television. The shades were drawn to reduce the glare on the large screen of the Magnavox, rendering the room appropriately sepulchral. It had been, after all, for many years the main viewing room of a funeral parlor.
The bier on which the Magnavox now sat having been in former times the platform for the coffin which would sink into the basement on a pulleyed lift, rigged so that whilst the coffin sank, a good-sized angel (purchased from a Wannamaker’s Christmas display in ’33 or so) would rise dramatically on another chain through a trap door cut in the chapel ceiling, a special effect Benny’s father believed gave him a competitive edge over other undertakers in the area. The angel, with one wing snapped off, was still in a box in the building’s enormous L-shaped cellar. It was the first thing Benny had wanted to see after unpacking. Shining a flashlight on it in its open, excelsior-stuffed box made the hairs on Benny’s neck stand on end, and it had suddenly hit him that for most of his childhood he had associated this wooden white angel with his mother, who lingered in his memory with less force or detail than a recurrent dream.
‘Hello everybody, I’m back,’ said Benny, softly, needlessly, and out of breath.
The parlor was decorated in the ornate style fashionable to the era in which the mansion had been built. It showed signs, here and there around the room, that the world had since moved on, if not down. The marble mantelpiece over a hearth that hadn’t borne more heat than a smoldering cigarette butt’s since Benny’s childhood was nothing but a shelf now for a row of white-capped cans of aerosol air fresheners and the three hundred pound brass-and-crystal chandelier that hung from an ornate plaster dome in the center of the fifteen foot ceiling… four hundred long crystals it had once upon a time taken three servants on step-ladders, twice a year, an entire afternoon to polish… was hung with three orange chemical pest strips for trapping flies and mosquitoes. At the base of each mahogany column in every corner of the room pulsed a no-vacancy roach motel.
It took a puzzled minute or two for Benny to realize that Precious and Gracie, who had as yet failed to acknowledge his presence, weren’t watching television so much as they were “watching television”… that is, demonstrating, for Benny’s benefit, the degree to which they were refusing to interact. Any random show on the tube was preferable to each other. He understood that for the sake of the purity of the exercise, they’d started a good while before Benny was even there in the house to observe them.
The clicker was on a hassock at a midpoint between the two superpowers. For either Gracie or Precious to have used it or even moved from their respective spots would have shattered the symbolic spell of indifference. Which would explain why his spectacularly Afro’d Precious and his Bible-quoting Aunt were watching Mike McGarvey’s Fly Fishing in America show on public television. Red-faced, big-chinned, blond-mustached Mike was showing the proper way to tie an improved clinch knot to connect your fly to your tippet. Benny cleared his throat.
Gracie jerked to look at him, rose a few inches in her seat and plopped down again, slapping a hand across the massive bisque bosom packed away in the white of her frilly blouse. “Goodness gracious, Benjamin, if you don’t shave that hideous beard off I promise you’ll be responsible for my premature extinction by heart failure! I didn’t recognize you!”
“Jesus had a beard,” shrugged Benny.
“He also had a job,” retorted Gracie.
Benny opened his mouth to rebut that but thought better of it. A joke about nepotism. But he was, after all, preparing to ask her to loan or possibly even give to him and to Precious a very large amount of money.
He glanced at his beloved who simply scratched her scalp through Afro and rose from her spot and left the room with the most overtly sexual, yet boredly aloof, walk imaginable, the kind of walk that demands musical accompaniment, or that is music itself, not the growl and whoof of burlesque sax and trombone but something from Debussy, appropriate to Rousseau, the unholy jungle of Debussy’s tritone growing towards the staircase with sinuous vines and creepers. Precious brushed by him where he stood in the arched entrance to the parlor, giving him an instant erection and she slinked into the hallway and up the stairs, stripping as she ascended, dropping bracelets and bits of clothing in her wake, none of which Auntie Gracie could see or hear from where she sat on the far side of the parlor near the mantelpiece. With Jack Benny timing Gracie then stood and grabbed a can of air freshener and pointedly sprayed in the direction of the area in which Precious had been sitting.
Auntie Gracie, his father’s sister, hadn’t gotten along with Benny’s mother, either, but for the opposite reason that she didn’t get along with Precious: Benny’s mother had been too white. With light eyes, pale skin, a boyish figure and thin brown hair to her waist. The neighbors nicknamed her ‘Frenchie’ soon after Benny’s father hauled her up from Baton Rouge, a decade after the Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918 made him the third richest colored man in Philadelphia. In fact he’d had the pleasure of burying the fourth-richest. Out of 12,000 Philadelphians dead roughly a fourth had been colored and roughly a fourth of those were handled by Benny’s father. Benjamin Franklin LaFontaine the 2nd, a baronial old fellow in top hat and tails, married Cassy Beauchamp in the spring of 1930. Frenchie was then 18.
She’d claimed to be octoroon… a Creole… and Benny wanted to believe that, he really did, but he suspects, always suspected, she’d been nothing but white, descended from French-inflected redneck Cajuns and the octoroon story was a security precaution to avoid some very bad trouble with various Klan-like organizations of the north, the chief of which being the Klan itself, which had made its presence felt in Philly on more than one occasion.
Every photograph that Benny had seen of his mother showed a ghostly girl with big hands, in a flowing white gown, wearing a time-softened expression of regret. He has no clear memories of her. Aunt Gracie did most of Benny’s actual day-to-day raising anyway and when, one day, the girl everyone persisted in calling his mother disappeared, he felt the vague relief of a child in a room where a framed picture has finally been straightened on the wall. Probably crawled back to the cold white bosom of her people, as Gracie put it, therein to bleach even whiter in peace. There were some who hinted she hadn’t really ‘gone’ anywhere. Who relished delicious gossip of foul play.
Benny turned to follow Precious up the stairs when he remembered the birthday card. He crossed the room with a “voila” gesture and handed it to Gracie, still in its little white bag from Burgertown Drugs and she opened the bag and pulled something out of it with a frown. Benny said, “Happy Birthday, Auntie Gracie.”
She seemed to him to be doing a perfect imitation of an unflappable senior nurse in a psych ward. She handed the card right back to him without comment. The worst thing about being so pale, for Benny (despite his fanatical efforts at tanning; he’d already had a patch of skin on his right shoulder removed by a dermatologist as a precaution), was the blushing. He felt the heat rise in his cheeks and then double in depth as the shame from the blushing itself kicked in. He glanced at the card as his Aunt handed it back to him… the card with its picture of a cherubic white baby on it… and he gestured with it that Gracie should look again in the Burgertown Drugs bag.
“It’s the other card, Auntie Gracie. The birthday card.”
Auntie Gracie aimed the remote at the TV and upped the volume and said, “Lord knows why you are under the peculiar impression that today is my birthday, Benjamin, but I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation. Now why don’t you just get up those stairs so you can rut with the whore of Babylon while I watch my television program in peace.”
Mike McGarvey said “Saltwater fly rods are normally fitted with heavy-duty, corrosion-resistant fittings and reel seats equipped with fighting butts.”
The bedroom that Precious and Benny were staying in was on the third floor and had its own adjoining bathroom. The bathroom had a skylight. Benny bathed while watching the stars through the skylight which was opened wide enough to gaze through by a pull-chain on a pulley over the toilet. Precious sat cross-legged and naked on the bed, singing softly, post-coitally, while sewing the holes in several pairs of Benny’s socks. He reclined in the tub, lights off, with starlight and the bright clank of the trolley lowered in through the open square in the ceiling. The stars were always there for Benny… the stars never let him down. Up there, he mused. Way up there. Beyond the indignities of money and skin color. Beyond the ancient dilemma of flesh.
2. The Early Days of Television, Part One
The first time Benny saw her was in the produce aisle of the Decatur Blvd Von’s in Vegas and the first thing he said to her was “You look like you come from the stars, sister.” A meteorite-black Nefertiti in white.
Who, me? she pantomimed.
Wearing a flowing white caftan and a miter-like head-wrap, also white, and affecting a bewildered foreign air, she smiled her dimpled, dazzling smile and considered both the intent and merit of Benny’s effort. Bemused, and finished with her own “shopping”, she followed him up and down several aisles as he tossed various processed, animal fat, refined white sugar and bleached flour products into his cart and pushed it towards the check-out line, trying his blarney on her.
Benny was clean-shaven at the time and dressed in the hip square look of a man trying to break into the upper reaches of the hip square world of writing for Television: the Timex, the turtle neck, the khakis, the loafers. She mistook him for a swarthy honky talking black but let him rap on for the reasons that he was tall and handsome and would provide an excellent cover as she exited the Von’s with thirty pounds of shoplifted produce concealed upon her person, pressed tight upon her naked flesh. The cashier, a bleach-blonde leather-tanned cracker, fingernails chipped and bitten to the pork-pink quick, gave Benny a look of uncomplicated racial disgust as he paid for his purchases with that Negress in tow, signing a cheque that required three pieces of picture ID before she, the lipless cashier, would accept it. The striking black lady took Benny by the arm as they promenaded with some pomp through the double-electric-door airlock of the supermarket.
Beyond the protection of the arctic bubble of the supermarket’s air conditioning and prior to the bubble of Benny’s ’68 Mercury Cougar, the asphalt on which the car was parked pushed back at the sky with its black, impacted heat. It felt like walking behind a pre-takeoff F-15 as Benny slipped his Foster Grants on, a climatic extreme his East Coast blood never got used to. He popped the lid on his trunk and offered her a ride. She bent over to climb in and he noticed her belly, her hips and thighs were bulging and jutting and lumping out at various stresspoints along the seams of the caftan, and perhaps white wasn’t the most fortuitous color for her to have wrapped such a voluminous body in.
He stole boyishly furtive glances as he steered the Cougar, talking his head off. He was talking his head off in hopes that the right sequence of words might click and open the lock (if lock there was) on the young lady’s alpha and omega, which he intuited would be as restorative to his sexual powers as a dip in a rain barrel at Lourdes. Six months on MetraCal or some other modern dietary supplement and she’d be just about perfect.
Just as the brothers were dreaming of “dating” those incandescent peppermint blondes one saw on billboards all over the country hawking Virginia Slims and Miss Clairol: Only Her Hairdresser Knows For Sure, the preppy masterminds responsible for those very billboards were in turn lusting horribly after the brothers’ sisters, and Benny, perhaps, would have been shocked to be informed that in lusting after this black beauty his sexual proclivities were closer to a white man’s than to a brother’s that year.
“The thing to remember about the industry,” he heard himself saying, “it’s a medium in its infancy. It’s still what you call protean… everything’s up for grabs, you see what I’m saying? What you want is to be in on the ground level at the next paradigm shift and how do you achieve that? You just need that one solid hit… a bonafide hit that seems to contradict everything that came before it. See, I plan on having that hit, sister. I bank on it.”
If there was one thing in 1972 that she was sick of, it was white men calling her ‘sister’. Especially a white man trying to talk black. Still, he was cute.
“Take something like The Name of the Game. It’s the kind of television that successful people between the ages of 27 and 33 stay home to watch… they’ll turn down a cocktail party or a night out at the movies to watch this show and yet it defies all conventional wisdom. Each episode is 90 minutes long… 90 minutes! It’s really three shows, with three leads, wrapped into one. The leads rotate. Each episode is like a feature-length film, if you can ignore the commercials… a feature-length film for free. That’s what television means…that’s the meaning of television. The destiny of television. Never having to leave your own home for entertainment! One day, sister, there won’t be any commercials, either. What you’ll have then is an uninterrupted experience of your favorite shows, and, believe me, by then, everything on the tube will be your favorite. You’ll never want to leave that spot in front of the picture tube. You’ll never need to.”
“They’re working on that already. As things are now, what you’re seeing, listen, an advertiser pays a very large fee for the right to interrupt the show to talk a little about his product. A little song and dance about ketchup.They call it a break like it’s some kind of relief but the fact is it’s an interruption. But what if they could work the product into the show? You could charge the advertiser more for that because the product could end up with longer screen time but, see, there’d be no interruption. Okay, between shows you’d need a pause so people could… you know. So they could go to the, uh… to the bathroom…” Benny blushed.
“Anyway, I’m just talking now. I know I talk too much. What about you? Where are you from? Some exotic location. Let me guess. Port Au Prince? Cairo? Madagascar?”
Precious lifted her chin and shut him up with her Nefertiti profile. How should she play this? Would he be disappointed to learn that she wasn’t a foreigner? That she was born in North Carolina?
“I hope you don’t think there’s anything wrong,” she said, with exactly the kind of voice a Siamese cat would if one knew a human worth speaking to, “with a girl just being a common-ass Negro.”
“Common-ass you are not, sister,” said Benny.
“Maybe you don’t know enough Negroes.”
“Maybe you don’t know enough light-skinned brothers passing for white.”
“Well I’ll be damned,” she said. “Why didn’t you say so?” She reached down the front of her dress and extracted a mango. “You hungry?”
Benny said he was starving.
***
His immediate higher-up at The Studio went by the name of Gray, or Grayson, Parker, an affected anti-affectation meant to call attention to the fact that he was calling attention away from the fact that his actual name was much longer and stamped with pedigrees as old as the thirteen original Colonies. Parker was standing half-crouched on his desk, back to Benny, facing the enormous sixth floor picture window that guests in the chair in front of his desk usually faced (stunned by the view of The Strip which filled it precisely for that purpose, dormant and raw as the bottom of the Dead Sea, during working hours, and spectacular as a Con Edison-powered vision of a Kansan’s idea of a first class purgatory, at night).
It was late-lunch time on a Thursday afternoon and The Studio was meticulously emptied of higher-ups, most of them over at Sarno’s Circus Circus sucking radium-colored Margaritas through glass straws at the white-leather bar where Sean Connery had only months-prior filmed a scene for Diamonds Are Forever. Circus Circus wasn’t visible from Parker’s office but the north face, upper level, corner suite of the Satellite Motor Lodge was. Parker reached back without looking, and said, with a surgeon’s urgency, “Bushnells.” As Parker handed Benny the old Steiner spy glass in exchange, he took the Bushnells, adjusted them, and emitted an admiring groan that could easily have been taken for a song of pain.
“Son of a bitch,” he grinned.
An hour later they were waiting for seafood platters over bottomless glasses of so-so wine at the street-level bar of the relatively-rundown Stardust. As everyone who actually knew Vegas knew, each of the major casino/hotels was calibrated to appeal to visitors from a specific region of the greater Midwest, with The Sands aimed at Kansas, The Tropicana keyed to Oklahoma, and The Frontier designed specifically to rope in tourists from North and South Dakota, and so on. Or something like that. Benny could never remember the exact formula. Elements of the Stardust felt like an homage towards the blue-collar, redlight ambiance of near-Northside Chicago; the shocking abundance of colored waitresses (two) couldn’t have been a coincidence. The fact that Parker preferred the Stardust over the garishly swanky Circus Circus couldn’t have been a coincidence, either. As the waitress, a Benin bronze in a polyester wig, marched towards the kitchen, her red satin hotpants sucked so hard on Parker’s eyes that his optic nerves twanged like a banjo.
Parker had a habit, especially when he was feeling rose-lit by the grape-light, of calling Benny Pierre, due to Benny’s French-sounding surname, probably, and the only thing that kept Benny from taking umbrage at this was his knowing that Parker didn’t know he was a Negro. It was okay, in other words, because he was being denigrated as a man but not as a human. Most Negroes would never know how good that could feel, or even that an inexplicable appetite for such abuse (first to receive it, later to dole it out) was the key to success in business.
“Looks are everything, Pierre,” said Parker, checking the time, “…why do you suppose my watch is worth more than your monthly salary and yet yours costs less than this lunch? Does one keep better time than the other? I think not. Look,” he mimed drawing a diagram on the bar with his finger, “there’s an atomic clock with an IBM brain buried a mile under a mountain in Colorado in a top-secret room that cost the tax payers eighty five million dollars to build and a million a year to maintain… ” He raked his fingers through a haircut the color and texture of doll hair. He had a phenomenally small face. He looked bewildered, briefly, and started again.
“Pierre, I know you appreciate frankness. So I’m going to be frank. Why do you think the old guy hired you, despite your somewhat, shall we say, skimpy qualifications? Two years of art school on the G.I. Bill? Six months in the mail room of an AM radio station in Philly? Good grades in High School? I think not. We took you on because you look the part. The sideburns, the cheekbones, the suede jacket and turtleneck sweater. You beat out a guy who graduated near the top of his class from Harvard.”
It hit Benny that he was either about to be promoted to junior executive or fired with less ceremony than Parker had ordered their drinks with and his posture changed accordingly. With almost imperceptible stealth, he shifted back up off his elbows. He tasted a deep swallow of the bar’s stale layer-cake of old smoke and gambler’s fearsweat and became lucid as hell, clear as a tall glass of lunar vacuum, ready for whatever Parker was about to throw at him. His mouth was as dry as all that encroaching desert out there, only a three minute walk in any direction from any point on The Strip, tumbleweeds blowing down Sahara Avenue. He was ready for death.
Hamilton Gold entered the bar with an exaggerated tip-toe pantomime made all the more would-be comical by his briefcase, sneaking up on Parker with a wink at Benny, who was far from in the mood to play along. Gold loomed behind Parker for what felt like a solid minute, obviously stuck on what to do next, unable to think of anything hysterically funny. He took a seat at the bar and nodded defeated hellos. He caught the waitress’s eye and asked Parker,
“Have you, uh…?”
“Not yet. I was just getting to it.”
Gold turned to Benny and, making that face he made when he meant to make it clear that the face he was making meant he wasn’t beating around the bush, said, “We were interested in knowing whether you know any Negroes.”
“He means qualified.”
“Obviously.”
Parker leaned forward for emphasis. “We thought you might know, or might know someone who knows someone who is or knows…”
“See, you’re a bit younger than we are, LaFontaine, despite our official ages… ” Gold winked and turned to the waitress to order whatever the other two were having, then joked, as she sashayed towards a table of leisured-suited Missourians who were waving hundred dollar bills to get her attention, with a jerk of his big chin at her back,“Hey, I know, maybe we should ask… ?”
Parker made his in-point-of-fact-we’re-being-quite-serious-despite-Gold’s-tiresome-japes face and said, “Pierre, ever hear of a colored guy with the unforgettable name of Thaddeus Mumford?” When Benny shook his head, reaching for the steaming plate a Malaysian busboy was lifting shakily over Parker’s shoulder, Gold said,
“Talented kid… sings, acts, writes… I even hear he can direct. Clean-cut, well-spoken, sweet as a hundred eighty pound Hershey Bar…”
“Million-watt smile… sexy as hell… ”
“Not mad at anyone…”
“We want a Negro like that, Pierre, and we figure you can help us find one. Can’t you go to one of those parties we hear you go to… ?”
“There must be a couple of colored college types… ”
“Or Jewish girls who… no offense, Gold… they usually…”
Gold watched Parker pop a fried scallop in his mouth with a well-fed dog’s bored envy and said, in a neutral tone, “None taken, Gray. Maybe we should tell LaFontaine… ”
“Why we’re in desperate need of a Negro?” Parker frowned at Benny, chewing. “Think he can be trusted?”
“I think so. He’s one of us now, Gray,” said Gold, though his eyes darted to Parker to check for any notable reaction to the word us. “I think LaFontaine,” he toyed with the sound of the word, “needs to be aware of the gravity of the situation.”
Parker fixed Benny with a blinkless this-goes-no-further-than-this-conversation stare and said, “Remember that guy I was telling you about, before, the way-better-qualified guy you cheated out of a job…? The Harvard grad? Well,” Parker smiled pleasurelessly and Gold smiled back, “word has it his lawyers are about to hit us with a multi-million dollar lawsuit… discrimination… ”
“And it looks like they’ve got a pretty tight case.”
“We need your help.”
Benny drove directly home after the meeting, steering as straight as he could, though it felt like the Cougar, or the road, or the earth itself, was zig-zagging. Not just right and left but up and down and back and forth, too. And he tried his best to ignore the roadrunner, which resembled so much the famous cartoon…the long-necked bird pacing the car for a mile in a cloud of dust before loping off on a side-road towards North Las Vegas… he tried to ignore the tumbleweeds blowing into traffic in the middle of the city or the redneck sheriff’s deputy that zoomed past doing ninety wearing aviator sunglasses on the Tonopah Highway… or the billboard out there advertising The Chicken Ranch which featured a blonde, a brunette, a redhead like an Attack of the 50 Foot Whores and everything else conspiring at that moment to make him scream what the fuck am I doing here?
He spoke to himself, he spoke aloud, he declared in a firm, clear voice that he should go grocery shopping to secure provisions for the long weekend he predicted would see him reverting to the bunker mentality he’d perfected at his all-white Art School alma mater, where he flirted with and then fucked his first white women, experiences he only found exciting because they could get him killed, theoretically, though only if he confessed he wasn’t white. But still. He decided he needed a shower to clear his head before going grocery shopping. On top of everything else, he was very tired.
When he parked the Cougar he sat in it for a while and almost nodded off listening to the very weak signal of an AM radio station from L.A. playing rhythm and blues records from his adolescence… what they called jump blues back then…ladies and gentlemen Mr. Wynonie Harris… those old shellac 78s so heavy you could break windows with them… he would’ve preferred jazz for his mood but only one station featured one weekly show with jazz of any value and that was late in the evening on Saturdays… until he noticed there was mail waiting in the bank of aluminum boxes under the stairs curving up to his second-level apartment. A Stargazer’s Monthly magazine and other items visible through the slot. He got out of the car and fetched the mail, his mind still zonked on various Alexander-Dumas-grade ironies as he gripped the hot handrail and laid a tasseled loafer on each consecutive concrete step as the almost patronizingly helpful geometry of the spiral led him to his unlocked door.
He kicked off his loafers and treated his delicate feet to the carpet. He gazed upon the totem of his alphabetized collection of jazz LPs, seven thousand records in row upon row on shelf upon shelf along the wall leading out of the living room emitting the delicious perfume of time and cardboard. On the top shelf, beside the book-ended collection of miscellaneous 45s, was the painted wood and wire scale-model of the solar system that used to sit on his father’s desk, the only thing he got (by stealing it) when the old man migrated to the afterlife.
In the bundle of mail was a letter from a person with a name he suddenly remembered he’d forgotten years ago, a buddy from art school, Ricky Lang, a white boy with a Quaker background who’d been more or less indifferent towards Benny until discovering Benny was a Negro, which had seemed to make all the difference. This was before Benny had learned to dissemble on the topic. Parting the curtain of glass beads and standing in the arched passage between his modern white kitchen and the earthtone living room, Benny opened the letter first, before the bills, or even the latest issue of Stargazer, featuring a ten-page cover story on black holes, with its lurid artist’s renderings of stars being eaten alive, stars and their screams of light, destruction on a scale that made the continent-clearing whims of the Old Testament’s Jehovah seem childishly cute and extremely local. Clearly, Jehovah Himself answered to an even supremer being, and whatever It was, It was not to be fucked with.
Friend Benny,
I hope this finds you in good health and cheerful as ever.
Tomorrow, I start that weird occasional job again that I couldn’t expect you to know about, since we haven’t kept in contact much since our time together at the Franklin Academy, where we both planned to be world-famous artists. I was going to be Matisse and you were going to be Picasso, if I recall it right (wink).
Well, for a year now my job is standing naked before the art students. I swear, there are probably 300 drawings of me in student’s portfolios, trying to get them into the best colleges. Skinny guy, small dick, pot belly, gawky neck, womanly breasts, pointy nose. You can imagine. It’s at least SOME money (6 dollars per hour unless they’ve upped it again) and I just can’t say no, since I know that no one else in this whole fucking town of 3500 people wants to (or in some cases, would be allowed to) stand naked before our children. Did I tell you already that I moved upstate after my divorce? Anyway, I’m up in the sticks now.
It’s a funny fantasy. Do you ever have dreams that you show up in highschool and you’re partly or completely naked? Many people do have that dream. I do sometimes — and I’m the guy who’s actually doing it for real. I stand there in some pose and I think, hey, I really AM NAKED in front of the eyes of these people. I see these teenagers on the street and say Hi, and I think, wow, that person usually sees me naked.
But I think my more frequent dream is that I’m walking on the street at night, naked. I dreamed that the other night, and it was so real, I was thinking to myself in the dream, yes, I do this often actually, and no, it’s not a dream. After I woke up, I actually scanned my memory to clarify for myself whether I actually do go walking naked at night or not … and I don’t … but I have this nagging almost-memory, like yes, it does seem familiar.
I guess I should go do something productive now. Or just curl up.
Keep in touch,
Your old friend,
Henri Matisse
Benny lifted the wall-mounted white trimline receiver from the kitchen wall and dialed Sheila Silver’s number, auditioning a variety of salutations (so wide in range that he realized he hadn’t a clue as to the proper general tone to adopt with her, and this after nearly screwing, and then eating, her twice) before she answered. When she finally fumbled the phone and drawled a very weak Yes?, sounding something like someone wearing a blindfold in bed in a dark room in the middle of the afternoon you’ve only managed to rouse at all because she just took the sleeping pill; sounding, in fact, exactly like that; Benny hung up. Sheila was a depressive jazz-head with big tits who often slept in the middle of the afternoon. There was just no way Benny was seriously going to ask Sheila Silver if she knew of any parties this weekend at which there might be college-educated Negroes present, though he knew that there was no logical reason for him not to. Which is why he rang Sheila Silver’s number again, immediately after hanging up, rolling his eyes at his own squeamishness, his own lack of business acumen, before hanging up again the moment she answered again (this time a lot less drowsy, annoyed, even) while Benny mused on how telephones were less useful for talking than for not talking. What middle-late 20th century man accomplished by slamming a phone in its cradle could only have been achieved as thoroughly, in the time of Louis XVl, with a guillotine. And that was progress.
PART TWO FOLLOWS
JESUS IN VEGAS: cont’d
3. The Early Days of Television, Part Two
When he pulled up into the lot in front of the Von’s on Decatur Blvd he expected to come walking out of the store again, in under fifteen minutes, with nothing more earthshaking than cinnamon buns. Certainly not a Nubian Queen. He patrolled the numbingly long and relatively empty-of-shoppers aisles, aisles gently Muzaked (Yesterday, Cherish, Ramblin’ Rose, Moon River) yet astringent in their chill. Something about the modern supermarket epitomized, for Benny, when Benny was in a certain mood, neither quite despondent nor truly mellow, the European mind. The orderly-yet-somehow-borderline-psychotic nature of these cold white right-angled corridors. The soul’s abattoir. How many more thousands of years, if left on their own, would Africans have needed before they came up with a Vons Supermarket? And to what end, if then? The thought was more a twinge of disquiet than the rudiments of a manifesto at that point in Benny’s life. It passed, he pushed, and the visible spectrum of Smucker’s preserves rolled by.
There was still water in his ears, his left ear, from the shower. In his right ear was Moon River but in his left ear he could hear his breathing, his heartbeat, regular intervals of swallowing, the weight of his bones as he walked. His inner auteur imagined a voice-over on top of the left channel of his bodily sound effects saying blank-eyed he gazed upon the bounty of civilization. He searched but he did not find. He cruised the produce department and the meat department and glimpsed a marbled flank of beef swinging on its cold steel hook. He glimpsed the bloody mass through a round window in the stainless steel door behind the man in the white smock arranging neat little packages of ground cow on the astroturfed bottom of the frosted display case and he thought of Ricky Lang, naked in front of those art students. He saw Ricky on a serving platter carved into fatty pink flaps and slathered with his own blood’s gravy because he was old and would never be famous and he needed the pocket money. He saw Ricky’s bodiless head dictating a letter making light of the situation. Dear Friends, the letter would start, I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving…
-I must find a qualified Negro, whispered Benny, as he rounded the corner of the carbonated beverages aisle.
A qualified Negro. Wouldn’t that be a home run? He’d be promoted. He’d be invited for golf and cocktails with the Hamilton Golds in Palm Desert and flirt with Gold’s pretty Argentine Jew of a wife named Isolde and chuckle with Gold to country club bossa nova about Parker behind Parker’s back, an activity Parker himself subtly encouraged, since to be mocked enviously is to be powerful. Later, a purely mechanical affair with Gold’s wife as an unspoken favor to Gold so Gold could take his stupendous-looking quadrilingual Japanese secretary on ski trips without feeling guilty. One of the boys. Gold had said He’s one of us, now, Gray, but what he’d meant by that was that Benny could be if he passed this test.
Even if having a qualified Negro on the team couldn’t save The Studio from losing the lawsuit, everyone would know that Benny had delivered, under fire, on D-Day. They’d know he’d tried. The only gesture more effective than being seen to try would be going to jail on the company’s behalf on charges of discrimination himself. A possibility he wouldn’t rule out.
When he circled back around through Produce he saw her. And what was his first thought. Before even that romantic jolt her beauty chased through him like nausea. His very first thought, about which he was immediately ashamed, while Moon River swooned through the air on strings, as she turned to him as he rolled his cart past and she gave him that dimpled smile and time seemed to speed up and slow down simultaneously (even as it was happening, he seemed to be looking back on it, going over it as a series of stills and scribbled memos approximating the initial sensations):
I’ll bet she knows a qualified Negro.
It’s clear that all straight men want to fuck all women all the time (though not necessarily twice); that’s a given; but what happens in the mind of a man the first time he sees the woman he was more or less made to love? In Benny’s case, shame and self-pity both preceded a wave of the above-mentioned quasi-nausea, reddening his face, clearing the field for awe. He didn’t notice her slightly puffy eyelid. The still (slightly) discolored cheek.
“You look like you come from the stars, sister.”
Hers was the face of the First Woman, though Benny didn’t flatter himself that he was Adam. He wasn’t even Cain. But he knew he was fated to be her man. He knew he was her qualified Negro.
His penis knew it, too. He was astonished to feel it stirring in its cotton shroud, inflating from the tip down, already harder than any number of Sheila Silvers had managed to get it after hours (or so it always felt) of digital, then oral, than oral-digital, then verbal, then verbal-digital-oral-digital attention. He’d once had a worldly Sally Kellerman lookalike shove two fingers up his anus as what in some cases was probably The Secret Weapon but which only achieved, for Benny, the added complaint that he couldn’t masturbate (or defecate normally) for a week afterward. No: a peace sign up his ass was not the solution.
The solution was seated in the passenger seat of his Cougar, offering him a mango.
The Compound was out, way out, on the Tonopah Highway, beyond a cluster of mirage-like apartment complexes so new there were no flags on the flag poles yet, and many of the factory-fresh aluminum-frame windows were still wrapped in billowing plastic. The Compound was beyond, even, the skeletal shopping center (a concrete house of cards) that was going up in response to the sudden apartment complexes. Past all that, east on Mercury Road, which stretched straight back to the Sunrise Mountains, a black seam of fresh tarmac in the brushed suede of the desert, a zipper straight back to the huge rock bosom the sun rose over at the end of every working day.
Eating the proffered mango, Benny realized how hungry he’d been, back-handing his sticky chin and grinning at her. Benny’s groceries, including a pint of Neapolitan ice cream he’d forgotten about, were in a slumped sack on the back seat, but she extracted hers from the opening in the front of her caftan. She handed him a peach salted with the healthy odor of her perspiration and he did not hesitate to eat it. In fact he relished the sensation. How could Benny not be intrigued when he’d asked his new lady friend exactly where to drop her off and she’d answered, in the most matter-of-fact tone, or even perhaps with a tincture of affected modesty, as in -it’s really not a big deal, but-
“The Compound.”
“Excuse me, sister. The what?”
“The Compound.”
“The Compound?”
“You haven’t heard of The Compound? Don’t you watch the Evening News?”
But Benny hadn’t come to Vegas yet when all that happened. The fifteen-hour standoff with the Clark County Sheriff’s department and so on. Two long low stucco structures appeared on either side of a fifteen foot sun-blasted camper on a gravel lot protected by a hurricane fence, the gravel decorated in three of the four corners of the fence by dead brown Yucca trees. Benny expected snarling dogs to crawl out of camouflaged pits in the gravel but none were forthcoming. Where were the cable-armed brothers with their muscle t-shirts, lopsided Afros and Kalashnikovs?
“Is that it? What is it? It looks like a motel with a hurricane fence around it.”
“It was a motel. Once upon a time. Now it’s a deconsecrated Satellite Motor Lodge.”
He was taken aback at the unexpected glimpse of an unexpected vocabulary.
“Park across the street and leave the motor running,” she said. “I’ll be back soon.” She pulled on the door lock and added, “But if I don’t come out in fifteen minutes, just go. Do not step inside that fence and try to get me, okay? You understand? Just go.”
Benny understood, though it pained him to agree to it. He executed a tight u-turn and gunned the engine and put the car in park. She said, “Say yes, My African Queen, I understand.”
“Yes, My African Queen, I understand.”
She pecked his cheek and hopped out of the car and hurried across the road and let herself in through a silently swinging gate. She disappeared around back of one of the long low stucco structures. After waiting a few minutes he shut off the engine. He paged through the new issue of Stargazer, humming along with some oldies, reading about black holes, the trendiest topic in space.
One esteemed astrophysicist (dressed like a tennis instructor in the little photo beside his contribution) propounded the theory that nothing exists yet, and that Time as we experience it is a futuristic effect obtaining in the million billion trillionth of a second elapsing as the Super Black Hole of Reality (smaller than a neutron; comprised of the total mass of the Universe) collapses further before exploding to create Everything. And when Time finally does begin, it won’t be anything like what we think we’re experiencing in this infinitesimal moment.
Another even more esteemed astrophysicist (goatee’d Viennese) claimed that everything that has ever happened will happen again, exactly as it has always happened, oscillating like a perpetual motion machine between the perfectly balanced space/time forces of every perfectly-placed black hole in space.
The only female astrophysicist pictured (suspiciously young; an amateur watercolorist with some talent) likened black holes to tumors…the cancers of space/time…and predicted an epoch in mankind’s distant future when we’ll be able to treat these monster malignancies like surgeons with precisely detonated, super-compact nuclear weapons, many times more powerful than our sun.
Benny kept thinking: but how do they know all this?
And The Voice said: Believing is Knowing.
And Benny said: But what are we to believe, O Lord?
And The Voice said nothing. Or “nothing”. Or nothing. Benny couldn’t be sure.
When he awoke, the sky was being eaten by stars.
The dome of the overhead swarmed and seethed and he saw, half-dreaming, vast shapes with perforated edges fluttering upon the desert, papering it over in black. The domesticated nightsky as seen from his patio was one thing but the cosmos as revealed from where he lay at that moment was of another order of magnitude entirely and he realized that for the first time ever he was gazing upon the irrefutable Truth, groggy as he was, head still wedged between the headrest and the door. His neck was stiff and from his wiped-dry mouth he knew he’d been snoring in the face of All That.
Only the weakest light was visible from somewhere towards the back of The Compound, a gray blur like a stresspoint in black acetate, that and the green glimmer from the radio dial in his dashboard. And through the speaker-holes in the fiberboard shelf behind the back seat, what at first sounded like weak flies fucking under waxpaper revealed itself as a virtually inaudible version of Duke of Earl, Gene Chandler, 1957, and he knew without trying that his battery was too dead to turn the ignition and that he was stranded, twelve miles from home, like the fool he was, straining to hear the corpse of his battery channeling a heartbreaking Duke of Earl. Stranded across the street from The Compound late at night, hungry and cold. He’d rolled the window down and reclined in the bucket seat at dusk and that was all he remembered. He remembered being tired. He turned the radio off.
He remembered dreaming.
He’d dreamt he was married to that amazing black girl now curled up asleep in The Compound and that he’d traveled back East with her, incredibly, to introduce her to the family, but not his family, a dream family, with members he seemed to recognize within the dream with the accumulated confirmation of all of his childhood memories, and, yet, very strangely, the fading recollections of whom were alien to him less than two minutes after waking. What master-forger lived in his head, capable of counterfeiting recognitions he would have bet his life (in the dream) were forty years in the making?
Out of the Cougar, careful to ease the door shut, he went around to the back of the car, the wooden heels of his hundred dollar Joe Namath Dingo boots going clop clop clop, the irony of the ad copy for the boots coming to him like the stinging memory of a serious gambling loss: he knows when to wear them. And if the night had seemed unreal until that point it was real enough now as he was out in it, chilled by it, moving horizontally through a vertical vastness, a kind of elevator shaft, the walls of which receded as you approached them, the mockery it made of the infinitesimal scale of private thought and effort. He looked and found her reclining, over his shoulder, the constellation about ten feet above the horizon, the one he’d known and prayed to since childhood. Cassiopeia, with her incongruously-named constituent stars… Shedir, Caph, Ruchbah, Segin, Achird, Marfak. It had always bothered him that they were in her, part of her, these Arabs with their ugly names.
He popped the trunk of the car and found an Aztec-patterned beach blanket from Tijuana, a beach-blanket he’d never used because the beach wasn’t part of his cultural inheritance, whatever he pretended, however fair-skinned or straight-haired he was, the blanket was still folded in eighths and packaged in its scuffed plastic. Around he went again through the driver’s-side window and leaned over to the sack of groceries in the back, the sack with its dark spots of melted and spoiling foods, and he extracted a box of frosted strawberry ToasTarts. He rolled up the window and locked all the doors and, thus equipped, and with the unpackaged Aztec-patterned beach blanket wrapped around his shoulders like a serape, he began the twelve mile walk up the road.
He’d only been walking five minutes when nothing… his car, The Compound… was any longer visible behind him. He experienced the convincing illusion that he was walking towards it all rather than away from it. Or on a treadmill or in a hamster wheel. He realized that this was the point in the story during which the protagonist, of a certain age, at a certain point in his life, being by nature a seeker… has his Desert Epiphany.
It’s always in the desert. Bushes don’t burn in the suburbs, or, if and when they do, the burning doesn’t mean anything more philosophical than having to replace insured topiary. The desert is where it all happens, as far as revelations go, and the Native Americans and the antediluvian Semites and the Aboriginal Australians all had plenty of desert to wander around in and there to unearth their shallowly-buried epiphanies, epiphanies like golden statues lodged in the sand and becoming the roots of their cultural wisdoms, cultural wisdoms they’ve since shared with a grateful, spiritually hungry world, the keys to the cosmos handed down to us in popular movies and songs and best-selling novels. He thought of Kahlil Gibran. And now it was his turn to have his spirituality improved by nothingness. Or nothingness.
He followed the sound of his boot heels, swaddled in the Aztec-patterned beach blanket, with its very faint odor of petrol, and when not paying close attention he walked off the tarmac accidentally, twice, stumbling on scrabbly hard scallops of sand and the occasional low prickle of tumbleweed, hurrying back to the reassuring surface of the road, a symbol of progress since before the Romans, probably. A symbol for everything, actually, when he thought of it.
Further he walked, counting his boot clicks, tearing open the box of ToasTarts and into each of the three foil wrappers (each, in turn, containing two frosted strawberry ToasTarts) every quarter hour or so, suffused with an intensely private pleasure in the threatening face of the cold infinite as the plasticky dough of the mass-produced pastry accumulated between the rills of his gums and the inner pockets of his cheeks in a slow-dissolving infusion of sugar-heavy cud.
In the woolly blanket of the below-sea-level darkness he thought he glimpsed lumbering forms in his peripheral vision, the desert remembering its dinosaur dead. Brilliant as the sky was (like a vertiginous view of The Strip from a space ship) the light failed to trickle to anything lower than a hundred feet above the sand, half-illuminating the occasional bat or swallow or buzzard tumbling headlong overhead like ripples in spacetime and crying out.
Benny pretended he was entering an African village on foot. Where the village is exactly doesn’t matter. A sentry at the village gate; a fearsome sentry brandishing a scimitar and a necklace of yellow molars, a sentry big as Roosevelt Grier; poses a riddle the correct answer to which will allow Benny entry to the village. A wrong answer, on the other hand, will see Benny’s head rolling around in the sand. The sentry speaks English with the camp elocution of a mad Shakespearean actor.
“Interloper!” says the sentry. “I pose to Thee a riddle.”
“I say I say I say,” says Benny, in this fantasy, imitating Alan Alda imitating Groucho Marx, chomping on a mimed cigar in a manic stoop, “Pose away, Mr. Bones!”
“What creature is it,” booms the sentry, molar necklace chattering as he gestures violently to paint a picture of fable immemorial in the middle distance, “that travels on all fours in the morning, on two legs in the afternoon, and on three in the evening?”
“That’s an easy one, chief,” says Benny. “The secret word,” he pronounces “word” as woid, “is lush. A lush crawls around on all fours with a hangover in the morning, staggers on two legs in search of his next drink after a business lunch in the afternoon, and totters on a three-legged barstool in the evening!”
With a grunt of respect the sentry grants passage into the village, with its neat little roads and thatched huts, and, to make a long fantasy short, the king of the village, looking suspiciously like Benny’s father, wearing Benny’s father’s tuxedo jacket and Benny’s father top hat along with a grass skirt instead of his pants, presents Benny with a harem to service as part two of the trials he must endure before becoming the chief of the village (freeing the old man to enjoy his sunset years collecting stamps, and freshwater fishing).
The harem with which Benny is presented, he recognizes: every single girlfriend he ever had in grade school, starting with Beverly Huff, moon-faced, chubby and shiny brown. Beverly is five, smells like a pickle, and can punch harder than Benny, who is considered to be prettier than any of the girls in kindergarten. Beside Beverly is the girl Benny replaced her with, the same year, an older woman from second grade named Tamara, with root beer-colored eyes.
Looking cosmi-comically displaced amongst the little schoolgirls is the woman to whom he’d actually lost his virginity in a very nearly meaningless act (though orchestrating it probably took some doing on her part) at the age of thirteen: Gracie Barnes. The proprietress of the corner store at which Benny did all his after-school shopping. Bosomy black Gracie with her feline eyeglasses and her helmet of conked gray hair and her impotent, cigar-chomping husband named… Jimmy. Benny went in that shop one day and Gracie put the OUT TO LUNCH sign up and locked the door and that’s all he remembers about it except the ecstasy of walking out again ten minutes later clutching a fat roll of free comic books. Plastic man was his favorite.
Gracie, Beverly, Tamara, Verlene… Benny isn’t particularly enthralled until he gets to Karenna Beauchamp, sixteen years old in the tenth grade, held back a year due to being distracted from her school work by problems at home. Karenna’s mother was a paranoid schizophrenic, a very unusual complaint for a black woman to have in those days; so unusual, that the family tended to brag about it: she got her a white lady’s disease! My mama she got her a white lady disease, is how Karenna had broken the ice at a dance, in fact, as Benny remembers it. Maybe he’s making that up. Karenna is tall, slender, wide-hipped but nearly titless, with the kind of face that would have been used to sell face cream if she hadn’t been so incredibly, deliciously, blasphemously black. He singles out Karenna Beauchamp and she steps out of her vaguely native-ish, sarong-or-sari-like, drapey kind of clothing and reclines on a soft soft pile of ostrich feathers, pipe-cleaner legs spread, her hairless wrinkled blue-black cunt (like an elephant’s eye, squinting at him, crying its tear of vaginal moisture) cocked at the perfect angle of reception. A lion roars. Monkeys gibber in the trees and the ceremonial drums commence throbbing as Benny kicks out of his safari trunks and the king stares with kingly dispassion.
The problem Benny often has with his fantasies, especially the sexual ones, is their uncontrollability. At the very moment they become most persuasive, they tend to get away from him (stuck in a meeting, late for lunch, stomach growling for mercy while Gold or Parkerson drone on, for example, he’ll visualize a perfect plate of spaghetti, only to see a turd plop on it). Karenna Beauchamp is on that pile of ostrich feathers with her blank expression and her legs spread and her pussy ready to receive and all the other little black girls from Benny’s romantic history plus Gracie Barnes in a circle around the altar, chattering with school-girlish excitement like at the Saturday Matinee and Benny ready to mount when who should push through the crowd in a fury but his most painful memory, his half-sister Jolene, the illegitimate product of his father’s most famous affair?
Exactly (to the day) Benny’s age, Jolene was his eerie black twin, his dark mirror, the sister he didn’t even know existed until his father unwisely orchestrated a meeting on the occasion of the annual barbecue of the Greater Masonic Negro Tradesmen Association of West Philly, 1947, taking Benny aside with, “Son, you’re seventeen now, which is a man by any means of reckoning, and it’s time for you to know the things a man knows about the things a man will do, the things of the world beyond arithmetic or spelling or the pretty Bible tales your mother fills your head with.”
The whole terrible business. A very very painful thing. Benny hadn’t thought about it or Jolene for years and now she was filling him with her hot prickles of shame, grief, regret. The look on Benny’s father’s face when he found out, clutching that letter and shrieking at Benny from the other side of the kitchen although his face seemed just an inch away, filling Benny’s vision, the spit on his lips and the hate in his eyes and the look on everyone else’s face at the breakfast table, the detail of every expression Benny managed to absorb without taking his own eyes off of his father’s Old Testament Jehovah mask as he cast Benny out of the bosom of the family. Benny’s wailing, red-faced, innocently terrified mother and sisters… the toast burning… the Korean war… art school on the GI bill…
He stood cactus-still with the last ToasTart in one hand and the serape clutched in the other. And his socks were soggy with blood because his boots had never walked more than thirty unpunctuated steps since he’d bought them and it is amazing how far you can walk on bloody feet… the body must secrete some kind of natural anesthetic. Until you stop. And try to start again. How could he do this? But he had to: he couldn’t sleep in the desert. But his right foot was unbearably swollen. However long it had taken Benny to walk away from his car, it took him three times longer to walk back again, gasping and cursing and hobbling in this unexpected Jesus pain.
He cried out.
The sleek dead car in its cold dark sleep. He’d bought it with his first big check from television. The Compound. The silently swinging gate gave way. The gravel crunched. Ominously, the door to the lobby was not locked.
There was only just the floor lamp on, severely dimmed. He found himself standing in what had obviously been the ‘50s-style, modernist lobby of the front desk of the deconsecrated motel, listening to his own heavy breathing. Geometric patterns in aquatints and white all darkened by the dimness of that one sad floor lamp.
Frankly he’d rather be in a meeting with Parker.
There was no longer a front desk, but two dozen or so folding chairs, not in rows, but strewn in clusters across the carpet. The walls were darkly paneled and a patched screen for an 8mm movie projector…no wider than Benny’s outstretched arms… hung on the wall behind what had once been the spot upon which the front desk had rested. He could see that the pool-colored carpet with its geometric swirls was cleaner in that spot, a clean-spot of bright blue shaped like a giant’s thumbnail and grooved by pressure points. There was the pebbled glass of the outer wall behind him and the dim floor lamp before him and the outline of a man on the swinging door of the men’s room to the right of the phantom desk, half-illuminated by the light, and, further, a dark corner around which there’d be a hall or a storage room, probably.
A very large man with bushy gray hair and a hooked nose slipped into the lobby from around that corner. The man’s skin was the color and texture of a football Benny had owned as a child. Benny was tall but the man was taller and two of Benny wide. He struck Benny as being merely the visible aspect of a much larger creature or force. He was definitely not the qualified Negro, though he was obviously capable of giving either Gog or Magog a run for the money in the Destroyer of Worlds category. The whites of the man’s eyes were dark and he was dressed in his bathrobe and his bedroom slippers and when he spoke there was an amplified, over-articulated quality to his voice; a pressure you’d need to blow out the glass walls of the lobby to release. He spoke with the majestic belligerence of a voice-over in a PSA about street crime. It was too dark outside for the way he spoke, which was fully awake.
“What do you want here, white man?”
Benny didn’t know what to say.
“I repeat: what do you want here at three o’clock in the morning, whitey?”
“I’m not white.”
“Really.”
“I’m Negro. I admit I don’t look it but I’m a Negro. Like you.”
“Like me. Is that so?” The man laughed, but not too loudly. “What’s a Negro if a Negro’s not a thing that answers to the Negro description?”
Benny touched his chest and said “In here,” although the look on the man’s face was powerful enough to give Benny doubts.
“Really? Gosh, that’s good news, because in that case I’m T.S. Eliot,” said the man, who also touched his chest, “in here. You care for a spot of tea and some crumpets, whitey?”
“My battery’s dead.” He looked at his boots, near to fainting. “My feet…”
The man, hands on his hips, his chest exposed, eyebrows high, seemed ready to laugh again. His chest hairs were scant and curly white. “Your feet.”
“I’m parked across the street.”
“In front of my property.”
“Yes.”
“Oh, just, you know, star gazing. Yeah?”
Benny shook his head.
“Butterfly hunting?”
Benny lowered his head and shook it.
“Okay. I see.” The big man nodded. “Keeping us under surveillance.” He smiled with unexpected warmth. “I’m still that important?”
“No….”
The smile faded. Or pretended to. A comedic possibility. Would have to be one dedicated undercover cop.
“I mean,” added Benny, quickly, pointing towards the road again. “I gave your lady friend…”
“Careful now.”
“…I gave her a ride…”
The man pulled a folding chair to his side and sat in it, arms folded over his chest, head cocked. He looked at Benny a good long time and it was clear to Benny that the man was deciding upon how much energy to expend on dealing with him. How much trouble to go to or get into. He leaned back in the chair, which whimpered under his weight, and he shifted his huge clasped hands to the belly of his bathrobe and yawned, turning it into language.
“You agree I have a dilemma on my hands here?”
“Only if you think I’ve come to… ”
“Haven’t you?”
Benny’s right foot was so swollen in his Dingoes that he imagined having to cut the boot off, peeling the leather away from the delicate white bones of his foot along with a sopping roll of flesh.
“You’re from back East.”
“Yes.”
“You talk like it.”
Benny winced. He needed to get off of that foot.
“A high yellow sort of fellow from… ”
“Philly,” said Benny, after a groan.
“Good old Philly,” said the man. “I killed a guy in Philly, once,” he added, “a yellow Nigger who looked too white for my tastes, I hope I haven’t upset you,” but he winked to show he was joking. He said he knew quite a few high yellow Negro girls from back East in Chicago because he used to have money and he used to be somewhat famous in what you would call a notorious way. He asked Benny if Benny had any sisters and Benny said yes, three, and the man stood and said maybe you’ll introduce me someday and gestured for Benny to follow him and Benny, in agony on his swollen foot, did so.
***
Benny awoke, fully clothed and wearing his boots, under the crisp clean sheet of a motel bed, the hard dry sun of the deep desert parting the drawn curtains like a sword. Benny’s first thought was that there must be a woman in the bathroom, freshening up, but he heard no water running, no flushing or spritzing or fussing with a purse or car keys or spray-on deodorant. But why would he have been sleeping in a motel room alone? Why was there a framed portrait of JFK on the wall to his right, above the television? What year was it and why wasn’t he sure? Behind every “why” was another “why”, and any particular procession of whys he could think of telescoped backwards by only a dozen or so degrees before butting up against the creation of the universe.
The throb in his right foot clarified and asserted itself as a terrible pain as he remembered where he was and how, to some extent, he’d come to be there. Still, his dreams lingered; the dream tastes and smells and emotions. Closing his eyes he saw, or felt, the fading trace of the people he’d known and loved in the other life he’d lived through the troubled hours of his recent unconsciousness, and losing them to daylight was like losing them to death. Or to life, maybe.
When Benny opened his eyes again, the man was standing at the foot of the bed. He was wearing the overalls of an auto mechanic, with a wide-brimmed sun hat and a solemnly curious expression, smelling powerfully of hard physical labor. The door was open brightly behind his massive silhouette and the fading wash of an airforce jet’s passing gave a great depth to the afternoon.
“What time is it, please?” asked Benny.
“It’s quarter after five, white man. Would you care for some breakfast?”
“A half a grapefruit would be nice.”
The man laughed. “Watching your weight, white man?”
Benny smiled. “Why do you keep calling me white man?”
“Well, for one thing, because your driver’s license says ‘Caucasian’ on it.”
Benny could feel his wallet still bulging in his back right pocket, clearly one of the two main causes of his troubled sleep. Still, he panicked. “How do you know that?”
The man laughed again. A surprisingly robust and good-natured laughter, for all its brevity. “Call it an educated guess. Why don’t you wash up while I prepare your grapefruit? You remember how? All the soap and water you’ll ever need is right in that little room. Some disposable razors and a can of shaving cream, too, if you’re feeling ambitious.”
Benny waited a few extra minutes after the man’s exit into the cauterizing sunlight, then lifted the sheet and pulled off his serape and rolled out of bed, discovering that things were as bad as he had feared when he tried to put some weight on his right foot. With a jolting pain like shattering glass with a nervous system he hopped the distance to the toilet and landed against the sink, leaning heavily on it, afraid to look in the mirror. Afraid of the thing in it.
He eased himself down on the toilet seat by clutching the shower curtain and spent a good long time contemplating his boots. They would have to come off, if only in order for him to undress fully so as to bathe, though of course the real issue was the confronting of the condition of his right foot, which no longer even felt like one, but was transmitting sensations that caused him to visualize a bloody fork of bone pronged out of his leg, jabbing into a raw chunk of meat with toes at the end of it.
Seated on the toilet he was able to remove a drawer in the cabinet the sink was built into and laid it upon his lap, fingering through several little bottles of aspirin, loose papers, ballpoint pens, rolls of gauze, a tampon or two and a sewing kit. Out of the sewing kit he removed a small pair of scissors and with these scissors he cut the smooth-heeled soles off each boot, beginning with the left, a not entirely difficult job, being as each boot was tattered and stitch-blown and road-blasted with holes. The soles hit the clean tiles of the bathroom with an earthy density, along with the remaining bits of each boot, including curled tongues and bitty laces, and he thought of Napoleon’s army, or the German infantry stranded in Stalingrad, boiling their footwear for dinner. The debris plopped into a black pile and while his left foot was merely stained indigo from the old coloration of the lived-in boot, the right foot was a vivid thing of purple and yellow and orange and red, glowing in the half-dark of the bathroom. He wanted to faint but he didn’t.
The over-shirts he unbuttoned and removed, one at a time, still seated, and then the t-shirts came off, ripping as he tugged them, exposing his chest and belly to the tingle and itch of air. After this phase he rested, steadying himself, avoiding the tableaux (though not the odor; impossible) of his neon foot, which dangled in a bulbous throb from the leg he’d crossed over the knee of the other.
Reaching over he managed to stopper the tub and turn on the water. Watching water so pure it was nearly blue gush into the Platonic form of a clean white bathtub was so fascinating that the tub was nearly full before he snapped out of the reverie and twisted the tap off. Hoisting himself on the shower curtain he managed to get to an upright position again, all of his weight on his left foot. He dug his wallet out of the back pocket and placed it on the edge of the sink, and, after a strength-gathering pause, he ripped his unzipped pants from the crotch down, tearing the rotted cloth from his legs in four strokes, and he ripped off the shreds of his underwear, which were a complicated color, and he sat himself groaning on the edge of the bathtub before falling sideways into it, splashing the floor tiles. He screamed when the parched wound of his macerated foot hit the hot water.
“You alright in there?” came the man’s deep voice.
When he got no answer he stepped into the bathroom, switching on the lights, and found the white man breathing, but semi-conscious, or pretending to be, in the bathtub, the blind fish of his little white dick floating in the bushy red kelp of his public hair, the bathwater pink. The bathroom floor tiles were covered in a quarter inch of water and he was careful to avoid the puddled filth of the white man’s clothing, which would have to be disposed of if ever he could find a fire hot enough. There was a wallet on the edge of the sink and he looked through it, finding a typewritten letter folded into eighths, a ticket stub for dry cleaning, and a long-expired driver’s license that claimed that the white man was a 42-year-old citizen of the state of New Jersey by the name of Ricky Lang.
***
When the white man came to consciousness again, he’d been summoned by the not entirely unpleasant pain of having his right foot cleaned and bandaged. He lay naked on the motel room bed he’d spent the previous night and morning in, his long hair and beard still damp but drying rapidly in the zero-moisture Vegas heat. The large black man who was tending to his foot said, “Someone tried to get into my car last night. There were scratch marks on the door. Was that you?”
“I’ve been sick for a while.”
The black man nodded, seeming to accept this for an answer. But then he added,
“I was about to throw away what was left of your pants when I found these.” He jingled a full set of house keys. “Why have you been living outside for so long? Where’s your home?”
The white man looked genuinely puzzled, and not a little pained, by the question. The black man stood with a graceful weariness and gestured at the bandaged foot and said, “I can’t guarantee you won’t get gangrene and die, but maybe this’ll help. Here’s a bathrobe you can wear. You can follow me if you’re hungry.”
They hobbled outside, the one helping the other to walk. There was a café-style table under a sunshade umbrella on the gravel between the two long, low stucco buildings of the old motel. Some distance behind them was a Jetstream motor home of dented and polished aluminum, parked beside a flagless flag pole and looking like a gargantuan kitchen appliance of the 1950s, its side door open and the unarticulated murmur of news radio at a low volume leaking out. The sun was still hours from setting but depleted and forgiving and the wind finished drying the white man’s shoulder-length hair and chest-length beard before he took his place at the table, lowered into the seat, wearing, with comical inadequacy, the very bathrobe he’d first seen the black man in.
“Help yourself,” said the black man. He nodded at a serving plate of cold scrambled eggs, a cold plate of sausages and potatoes, a stack of cold pancakes and a pitcher of warm orange juice.
The white man took a surprisingly petite forkful of the eggs and said, “I’m wondering what you might have found in my wallet.”
“Wasn’t much to find.”
“That’s what I’m thinking.”
“Want it?” The black man held it up.
“May I?”
The white man reached and took the wallet and placed it on the table beside the plate he was eating from. Something was in the air. It was different between the two of them now. The confrontational energy of the evening prior had evaporated. The black man scratched his chin and said, “And it wasn’t you I’ve been getting all those letters from?”
The white man, he shrugged and he chewed.
The black man said, “I’m slowly coming to the conclusion that you are what you appear to be.”
The white man asked, without looking up from his plate, “Which is?”
“Somebody with an interesting story to tell.”
There was a good long silence. The black man sneezed and the white man said god bless you.
The white man looked up, finally, and said, “Why don’t you tell yours first?”
***
I was born in 1932 near Chicago. My father was a sanitation worker employed by the city of Chicago and we came, in my thirteenth year, to live in a little gray, clean, clapboard house in a colored neighborhood of Chicago called Golders Park. By Negro terms of reckoning we were suddenly middle class, because my father had a job with the city. His position wasn’t as prestigious as that of a Federal postal worker’s, but he wasn’t a dishwasher, or a hustler, either. I was the second of eight children, and all of my siblings (six sisters and a baby brother), as far as I know, are living. Thelma, Marva, Bernadette, Antonia, Edwina, Gloria and Benny Jr.
I was an avid and talented student, twice promoted ahead of my classmates, so that I graduated from High School at the age of sixteen. Being younger than my classmates was never a social problem because I was always large, and, though I had no talent or interest in sports, I was built like a linebacker, so no one trifled with me. Being bigger than the bullies, I had that rare thing, a taunt-free experience of High School. I was never what you would call a handsome boy, but there were always girls around, whether or not you could call them attractive, and whether or not I ever did much with them. I made it through school with my virginity technically intact.
The year I graduated from Golders Park High School was 1948, and back then there were no real scholarships established to help the poor to attend college. If there were, they were a well-kept secret. There were little funds and sponsorships from local church and business but I wasn’t offered any, probably because I didn’t look the part of a student with the potential of bringing glory to the colored race. With no other options, I entered the job market, taking on a string of odd jobs while nursing my ultimate dream of working at a library. The year I turned 19, my dream came true, incredibly, and I assumed a custodial position at a little library on Chicago’s near North Side, a working class neighborhood of immigrant Poles and scattered Irish, ignorant, superstitious newcomers to the American dream. From our house in Golder’s Park to my job every morning at the Joseph Pulaski Memorial Library was an hour’s bus ride, involving three connections, through many different ethnic enclaves of the city, and it was into that most hostile of all the enclaves that I stepped off of that last bus, early every morning, five days a week. I learned soon enough that the best way to deflect hostile, wary looks as I walked the three blocks from the bus stop to the library was to carry my mop bucket to work with me.
The librarian was a woman named Bernadine Weaver. Caucasian, obviously. When I first met her, the day I applied for the position of janitor, she was 33 years old, single, a remarkably tall, but unremarkably handsome, bronze-blonde who always wore her very long hair in a burnished librarian’s bun. There’s something of the nun in a librarian: the chaste silence, the spinsterish dedication to an intellectual ideal of abstinence. The cloister-like smell of the stacks adds to the impression. She could as well have been wearing a wimple that day I first walked in, embarrassing us both with my height, which implied a pairing, for very tall women and very tall men can’t, in the end, avoid one another. I was dressed in my Sunday shoes, pressed dungarees and brand new flannel shirt. In that look she gave me, the first time ever she looked, she seemed to recognize the introductory few moments of her oldest recurrent nightmare. She knew she was fated to lay that big blonde head on this strapping 19 year old Negro’s chest and I, of course, would be the one who paid the highest price for her doing it. But, before I go any further on the subject of Bernadine Weaver, another word or two about my own family.
My father was a garbage man. But he was a good man. Raised in Oklahoma before it became the dust bowl of the Great Depression, he knew horses and cattle, and he longed to return to that life. He literally dreamed of the oatsy-sweet odor of cowshit, but it was the acid reek of the human variety he was forced to live with. People actually shit in their garbage in those days; he wouldn’t have recognized modern trash, with its cosmetic packagings and perfectly edible food, at all. When people threw something away back then, it really meant garbage, because any material that could be used for anything was hoarded like a treasure. If you’ve ever seen people come to blows over a heap of rotten vegetables (the first party claiming they were thrown away by accident, the second party claiming finder’s keepers, losers weepers), you’ll know what I mean. To be a garbage man for most of the years that my father plied his craft really meant something awful, collecting in places right there in the middle of Chicago where asphalt often gave way to dirt roads. It was an odious life for him, but he never once took it out on his family. He was a mild man, with a limited vocabulary, and a shiny black nose like a hound’s, who never resorted to talking with his hands.
Once a month he’d take me, just me, the eldest, to ride horses for a whole day in fresh air along the trails on a horse ranch in rural Illinois, run by people he was friendly with. I’m assuming we rode those horses free of charge, because what could he have paid them with? What service could he have bartered for the privilege? A little garbage-collecting around the ranch? I couldn’t possibly recall the name of the place, or the names or technical classifications of the horses we rode, but I will never forget the stinging rich odor of the polished leather of the saddles. Yes, and the warm sexual charge I remember, bumping along on a pony behind my father on that caramel-colored mare with her haughty blonde tail swishing and her sweaty rump in a rhythm like any female’s under the burden of my father’s body.
My father taught me all about horses; I’m sure he taught me plenty; but I lost that knowledge in prison. The theory of incarceration that’s most popular with modern jurists centers on re-education, more than punishment, but prison was always a school, and school is considered by many to be a punishment, while the terms of an institution’s educating are by no means under the control of the institution’s officials. Longterm incarceration replaces any knowledge you may have had, going in, with incarcerated knowledge, which is only ever useful within the walls of the institution of incarceration, or for going back to them, in a process you can almost feel while it’s happening. A student writing his dissertation for an advanced degree is as unfit, in his way, for society, as a man near the end of a fourteen year sentence for rape.
I was a tenant of Joliet for one hundred and seventy months, commencing my stay on April 1, 1953 and walking back out again on June 6, 1967, with a neatly wrapped package of my earthly possessions under one arm and all of my father’s lovingly imparted horse knowledge erased. The first act I committed as a free man was to catch a bus to the so-called scene of the crime, but I could have taken a limo. I wasn’t aware that I’d become a rich man while serving my fourteen years, and wasn’t to discover this fact until six months after walking out into the frightening daylight of the parking lot in front of the prison.
I took a Greyhound bus back to Chicago, and, from State Street bustling with shoppers, took a bus which connected to a bus that let me out just three blocks away from my old place of employment, the Joseph Pulaski Memorial Library, where I’d worked as a janitor for three happy years of my life. I stood on the sidewalk near the flagpole in the summer sun and looked upon the building that had become more symbolic, in my mind, of my fourteen years in prison than the building I had actually spent all those years inside of. It was a windy day, and the chain on the aluminum flagpole was whipping the pole with the repetitive frenzy of an SOS, and the American flag I’d personally repaired rips in was snapping high overhead like a sail on a sleek yacht, my trouser legs rippling and my hat in danger of being blown clear off. I noticed there were flag-colored candy wrappers stuck here and there in the bushes that ran in a broken rectangle around the library as I walked up the stairs and entered the place with a hand on my gray hat and my heart pounding.
In the bright gloom of library light I saw things pretty much as I had left them, despite the changes the country had gone through from 1953 to 1967. The high walls that were ringed low in a dark crowd by the stacks were still hung with dingy portraits of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Pulaski, and framed maps of America, the world and the solar system according to early 20th century science, with its eight planets. In the center of this main room was the abandoned island of the horseshoe-shaped librarian’s station, and I took my place at a long table between the geography stacks from which I could watch things while remaining unobtrusive myself, hidden by a cart of jumbled atlases, my sweat-stained hat on the table in front of me.
This was the room, with its fluorescent hum and odor of old sentences and a musty carpet sweeper, in which everything had happened. I’d befriended my first white person in this room, learned to read intellectually in this room (and, by extension, to write) and in this room, not far from where I was seated, had I also lost my virginity to the woman for whom I was now patiently waiting, fresh out of prison after serving a fourteen year sentence for her alleged rape. When I noticed her standing behind the counter at the librarian’s station, counting three stacks of books, having rolled a cart back in from the lecture room while my mind was somewhere else, I suppose, it appeared as though she’d taken all of the changes that the library might have suffered, in my long absence, upon her self.
She was gray-haired and sharp-shouldered and dressed like a widow. I had turned 36 that January, in my prison-built body, and sat upright on that bench between the stacks, at the peak of my physical condition, feeling like something polished and cast-iron forged, greatly superior to my pathetic John Doe clothing, a black god who only had to go naked in order to become revealed, calculating that Bernadine must be exactly 50, or weeks from it. I couldn’t remember her birthday.
It was after observing her for a while that I realized that she must be aware of my presence. There’s a theatrical quality to even the most banal movements of someone who’s aware she’s being watched. There’s also, of course, a vast difference between the self-consciousness induced by having a stranger for an audience and the formal requirements of putting on a show for someone who has sucked on your breasts. She kept her head down and was careful not to glance in the direction of the geography stacks.
You can fantasize a moment with all of the kitchen-sink, realist skill of an Arthur Miller, but you will fail in your predictions, for the simple reason that the mind is a fantasist, and is even poorer at simulating reality than it is at observing it. Curled up on a mattressless bunk in a half-lit concrete room with a wet floor that smelled like a fillingstation toilet, I had rehearsed this scenario as many times as there were nights in Joliet, but I had never pictured just sitting there, watching, from between the stacks, for hours, while Bernadine Weaver did her shitwork. This diverged somewhat from the scenario of her begging for forgiveness, or begging to start a new life with me out West, or choking bug-eyed and purple-lipped in the grip of these hard Othello thumbs, or submitting, silently, justly, to the Socratic sexual torture I had mastered in prison.
Have you ever crossed the floor at a ball in order to ask a girl for the pleasure of her dance? If she says no, sometimes, you linger beside her anyway, for the longest time, paralyzed at the prospect of the humiliating walk back to where you started. The longer you remain beside her, with your hands in your pockets or your arms crossed over your chest, with nothing to do and no reason to be there, the more foolish you feel, the more paralyzed you become, the longer you remain. This is how it was in the Joseph Pulaski Memorial library that day, until, finally, after four hours which recapitulated the history of the world, Bernadine finally rolled the cart back into the lecture room, with her back to me, to fetch more books. I very quietly gathered my hat and box of possessions and walked back out into the sunshine, which had soaked into gold-edged shadows under the oaks and maples in the long hot hours after lunch.
I’d never before dared to walk anywhere on the near-Northside beyond the L-shaped, tree-lined path from the bus stop to the library, but here I was seeking out, boldly, a place to sit and eat before deciding the rest of my life. Having suffered the ultimate insult (short of execution) that a black skin can expect in America, I had deconstructed, and demystified, any innate sense of where a black skin is and isn’t welcome. Which I’m sure, in many cases, explains the high rates of Negro recidivism. If a particular bistro or lunch counter didn’t want my specific kind of business, let them tell me to my face. I was no longer going to discriminate against myself, on their behalf, to save them the trouble. Of such stuff is a budding “bad ass” made.
Well, any cop stopping the large, obviously freshly-minted vision of an ex-con I presented walking the sidewalks of Poletown, as that neighborhood was often called, would have been baffled to search my box of possessions and find in it nothing more incriminating than a cheap overcoat, a paperback Thesaurus, a change of underwear, four pairs of argyle socks I’d won in a prison raffle, and one letter of literary praise, each, from the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, the British theater critic Kenneth Tynan, and the American classical music conductor Leonard Bernstein. I’d gotten other letters, too, from celebrities such as the boxer Cassius Clay and the actor Godfrey Cambridge, but these had been lifted from my cell by the guards whose job it was to search our personal effects, regularly, for handmade weapons, or drug paraphernalia, or digging tools, while we were walking the exercise yard, punching keyrings or license plates, or sitting for chow.
I’d probably collected a hundred letters. Most were written by ordinary people, in that pleasantly illiterate, Chaucerian style of the masses, spelling and grammar prescribed by common sense. Quite a lot of it was out-and-out hate-mail: genuine vintage coon-hating screeds from the 1920s and ‘30s. Fifteen-page death threats and so forth. My book, of course, is a lightning rod for coon-haters, and will never go out of print as long as coons and coon-haters walk the earth.
I received this “fan mail” from the time my book was published, four years into my stint at Joliet, until the day, a year later, when the publisher, suddenly realizing he had the biggest hit of his career on his hands, and, in hopes of defrauding me out of substantial royalties, stopped forwarding it. He destroyed any concrete evidence of both our relationship and my existence, emboldened by the fact that I was in prison, and that he’d published the book under a title I knew nothing about. Also, the book was published under the author’s pseudonym, standard for pulp pornography back then, of “Anonymous”. I never once received a copy. Later, by the nth print, the author’s pseudonym became the dashing “Napoleon Fanon”, a fact I discovered, quite by accident, years later. Meanwhile, between the day that my fan mail had stopped arriving and the morning I walked out of prison, I’d assumed that the book had sunken without a trace, and that I was owed no more than a few hundred dollars in royalties, a nice little sum I had little chance of recovering. C’est la vie.
I had tried writing poems, short stories and little essays under Bernadine’s tutelage at the library, but I hadn’t the time to develop any technique, or had access to an audience, until I went to prison. After the chores are done, what’s there to do in an eighty-one square foot cell, but read, do push-ups, or write? While there were acquaintances of mine who were breaking records, and winning prison tournaments, by doing five, six, or even ten thousand push-ups a day, I used my leisure time to become a force in the black market prison economy, writing out and then copying, or reading aloud, pornographic vignettes in exchange for contraband, or services, or small amounts of cash. I discovered that even the most illiterate, anti-social, and physically dangerous, prisoners responded to the golden rules of narrative. They were a better gauge, in fact, than any audience of politely encouraging well-wishers you could imagine. When a story didn’t work, or disappointed them in its ending, or had too much, or too little, or unconvincing, sex, I heard about it before the offending story or passage had barely cooled in their minds.
To get specific: I learned, for example, never to write a sex scene in which the female participant appeared to be enjoying it too much. That’s not how it work, I was informed, over and over again. That ain’t how it happen. And that a man only truly enjoys doing it to a woman who resists, if only inside. Nobody really want a woman who really want it. I took in this technical advice while honing my stories to the tastes of a paying audience, and realized, after much internal resistance (what Romantic wants to concede any of this as true?), that I was learning about something much larger than storytelling. I was learning about the thing about which all stories are told. As if I needed to be told. Here I was, doing a twenty five year sentence for aggravated rape (reduced to twenty for good behavior; reduced, again, eventually, to fourteen) as an innocent man, still playing, absurdly, the role of the lyre-strumming, lady-worshiping troubadour, in my eighty-one square-foot cell, with its wet floor and its stench of the sewer, a stench which taunted me with its echo of our daily routine of buggery in the showers.
To write at all well is to relinquish one’s casual understanding of the world. One’s self-protecting misconceptions of the world. To write at all well is to yank the veil off it. The process changes the writer, and only a changed writer can change the world for the reader reading him. Writing for a complicated, captive, paying audience of con men, arsonists, robbers, rapists, drug addicts, tax evaders, purse-snatchers, brawlers, burglars, bootleggers and sundry uncouth disturbers of the peace, I developed a complicated knowledge of what I was and wasn’t; what I could and couldn’t; what I longed for and abhorred, and my written words slowly became real writing, even if it was just material for womenless men to masturbate, or rape other men, to. But isn’t that the goal of any writer, metaphorically speaking? To make his reader come?
The manuscript I sent out to be published started life as one of these pornographic stories. My audience demanded something more than tight young pussies and big bad thrusting dicks. They were a higher grade of illiterate, many of them, being older; they were illiterates who couldn’t read Frederick Douglas or Homer as opposed to illiterates who couldn’t read Irving Stone. I wrote for them a political allegory: a nameless Negro everyman rapes his way across the Midwest, in the 1940s and 1950s, as a form of existential protest, targeting the most beautiful, upper class, socially valuable white women, getting them pregnant wherever possible. Ruining them. This was long before the blockbusting black-power rape memoirs of the 1960s which my work paved the way for. First it was a short story, which became a serial of weekly installments, until I bashed it into the rough form of a novel of 100,000 words. It was originally called “Jesus in Kansas” and I wrote it out in an impeccable longhand on seven composition notebooks I’d bartered for the cigarettes I’d received in payment for earlier, cruder efforts about, for instance, a church-going towhead and a runaway con hiding invisibly black in the basement.
During my stint in Joliet, my mother died, of grief, stress, over-work, lack of sleep, poor nutrition and a host of environmental poisons, as most Negroes will. She did not live the Natural Life; as a woman, she could not, and if she’d have been a man, she wouldn’t have. My father went bitter: perhaps, even (if he allowed himself to speak or think about me) he blamed his oldest son. The human I called on my first day of freedom regained, from a phone booth in downtown Chicago, in the cold shadow of the John Hancock building, the ultimate symbol of white power, was an old friend, from the old neighborhood. He gave me a place to stay, though he knew better than to offer to let me stay where he lived with his family. My friend was a married man who kept a low-rent apartment on the far Southside. The telephoneless apartment was furnished very basically with a bed, a liquor cabinet and a dirty bath towel. I could imagine what he used the place for. In fact, he warned me that he might drop by, from time to time, unannounced, for which occasions I wouldn’t have to leave the premises, as long as I remained in the kitchen.
The apartment was in a housing project called Harriet Tubman Gardens, a ghetto, in an industrial nomansland near Gary, Indiana. Tubman Gardens had rats and roaches and stray dogs that ran in packs like would-be wolves every night, but because it was situated on the outskirts of the city proper, bordered on one side by a marsh and the other by a wood, I sometimes, during long walks on sleepless nights, saw foxes and deer. The foxes were in town to raid the ramshackle pens of the folks who, in coming up directly from the Deep South, had invited all of their future fried chicken to come with them.
Most evenings I could hear the pounding of steel at the InterLake Steel Mills at a bend in the canal a few miles south, and I thought how the men working there must be deaf, and numb, and insane with this noise, which was the loudest I’d ever heard. It sounded to me like a god’s, if not the God’s, rage or hatred. Meanwhile, I breathed, from the opposite direction, the livid processes of a paint factory a mile upwind, smelling like rotten eggs and gasoline. To the west, across the blacktop of playground at the nearby Harriet Tubman elementary school, and from there across a few lanes of highway, extended the marsh, in the middle of which rose a missile silo, a bristling Cold War dick. All day and all night, every day and every night, an eternal flame, like a serpent-shaped sword, burned white from a pipe in the silo, burning off that volatile fuel, a primary target in the likely event of a nuclear war and a dim glow on the thin fabric of my bedroom curtain on even the foggiest night. The only way in which I was better off than I had been in prison was my freedom.
I took to sleeping through the day, troubled by the sounds of children running to and from school (and the rare event of garbage collection) and spending my nights on walks into the city, on an unpaved route that took me around the bend of the black canal being showered by sparks from the steel mill, my hands in my ears for miles, or the opposite direction, into the woods towards Lake Calumet and Gary, Indiana. Soon, I was feeding myself by hunting rabbits in those woods, with a sling I made from black stockings I found at the bottom of the closet. Skinning a rabbit was something I’d seen my mother do a thousand times, and it was a practical kind of non-verbal knowledge that fourteen years in prison hadn’t managed to erase. The satisfaction of quickly making the right cuts with a sharp knife, then separating, in one pull, the soft covering from the smooth wet muscle of the still-warm flesh, can be a kind of relief, and I began to see how the urban Negro, with his car, his woman, his TV dinner and his TV, is doomed to a short life of insanity and illness.
PART THREE FOLLOWS
JESUS IN VEGAS: cont’d
4. The Early Days of Television, Part Three
A side-story:
It sometimes happened that I would be coming home from one of my long walks, very early on a Sunday morning, ready for bed. At the same time, it sometimes happened that my neighbor in the flatblock was just then leaving for church. This neighbor, a stout Negress with an ashen complexion, a crow’s nest of gray hair and the gait of a waddling hunchback, had surprisingly light eyes. She carried an edition of the Bible that was written in Pidgin English, which I often heard her reciting from through the thin wall our apartments shared, in the hypnotic cadences of a desperation greater than anything I’d heard in fourteen years inside the Joliet state correctional facility. She was raising a child I assumed was her grand daughter, a child I gathered was retarded, and just as I heard this woman reading her Bible, she no doubt heard some of the sounds from my side of the wall, too.
One Sunday morning, as I was letting myself into the cell of my sanctuary, and she was letting herself out of hers, she said something. To me, I guess. Whatever she’d said was unclear, and I didn’t give a damn either way, so I entered my apartment and closed the door behind me. Only seconds after I’d closed the door she was knocking on it, but I ignored this. I stripped out of my clothes and walked upstairs to the little bathroom to produce a bowel movement and take a shower in preparation for bed. When the sound of the flushing toilet had died down I could hear her down there, knocking again, or still knocking. It was not a loud or an angry style of knocking; it was evenly repetitive, mechanical, in a very strange way; it was the kind of sound I imagined a ghost might make, rapping from the inside of a closet door. One two, one two. One two, one two…
I showered, went to bed in the little bedroom next door to the little bathroom upstairs. My sleep, in the iron strength of my youth, was as heavy as I was large, and although I could still hear the knocking, I slipped easily away. I had a dream, then, so vivid that I wrote it down as soon as I woke from it, barely able to open my eyes. I dreamt that I had a wooden heart, and that I could always hear it beating, and that I lived in terror that I would hear it stop. I dreamt that no matter how I rested, or exerted myself, my wooden heart always beat at the same speed, with the same strange rhythm, neither weak nor strong nor particularly invested in self-perpetuation; a rhythm that implied that it could, at any time, simply stop. Someone tried to speak but I hurried away, intent as I was on listening to the sound of my wooden heart beating. I came to understand that it was the hearing of my wooden heart that kept it beating. This person who’d tried to speak was chasing me, and I ran everywhere to hide, afraid that their talking would drown out the sound of my wooden heart. I climbed a fence and hid behind a stack of tires, but this person followed me, climbing over the fence, shouting some important message or warning. I put my hands over my ears to keep out the shouting; I squeezed my hands over my ears as hard as I could and I could hear nothing but the sound of my labored breath and my wooden heart stopped beating. I woke up in a terror, heart racing, half-blind with sleep. I wrote the dream down on a child’s notebook I’d found on the street, with a pencil I’d stolen from Paddy’s. The old Negress’s knocking had finally stopped, but I don’t doubt, to this day, that she was a practitioner of the Old Religion, and the nightmare she gave me was either a warning or a test, and taught me to respect the supreme strength of her ignorant beliefs.
Where was I?
During one of my long walks, I became aware of a place in a blue-collar, industrial neighborhood, what they call a transitional neighborhood, where only the poorest whites still clung as it flooded with Negroes and Mexicans and the freaks you get when the two groups mix, the shell of an Irish tavern called Paddy’s, with a changing clientele that did not reflect the neighborhood. I found Paddy’s by following a man who I knew, by instinct, had also done more than a few months in prison. Part of the fund of prison knowledge that pushes out a man’s prior wit and experience is the tool of knowing how to walk in such a way as to communicate specific messages, and also how to receive such messages, which go lost on the uninitiated. A man can walk in such a way that means he is open to reason. Or that the thing towards which he is walking is his alone. A man can walk in such a way as to indicate that he intends to kill, or to die, or to let fate decide. The way this man walked, which I spotted from a distance as he stepped into the one working headlight of some Mexican’s old tank of a car while crossing the street, was meant to communicate to receptive eyes that he was not a queer, although he was amenable to having his sexual tensions relieved by one.
I’m not afraid of your judgment, because, to be frank, who, on the ladder, from what I can see, and what I guess you have done, is lower than you? So I tell you this. My time in Joliet opened my eyes to society’s best kept secret, by which I mean that men who have sexual relations with women do so because society frowns on the alternative, an alternative society frowns on precisely because it would be far more popular than the acceptable option otherwise. Look at the army, the navy, the seminary, the high school locker room, the camping trips for boyscouts and their so-called masters. Men are inclined towards fucking other men. I say this as a man, however brutally you choose to define the term, without a trace of femininity in his makeup.
Seeing other men either naked or clothed inspires no feelings of tenderness, or yearnings for tenderness, or poetical metaphors or spiritual insights, in me. I’m no follower of Wilde or Whitman, though I’ve been known to read both writers with equal parts pleasure and skepticism. When I see another man, I see an obstacle to be overcome, an ally to be won over, or an animal to exploit. Sometimes, when I see a man, I see a servant I will humble by placing my erect penis in his mouth as he kneels, or by forcing the same hard thing into his rectum, as he assumes an even more subservient position, with no concern for his physical comfort or personal preferences. I went into Joliet as a man who’d only ever known the soft white body of one woman, the woman who sent him there, and I left the institution, fourteen years later, as a master of the mammalian sex game at its fundamental level. All of us in this Enlightened Society know, by now, the truism that rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power. That statement doesn’t go quite far enough. Sex, in general, is not about sex, either.
When I walked into Paddy’s that foggy October night, with my collar turned up and my hands in the pockets of my longshoreman’s jacket, I couldn’t even identify the man I’d followed into it, because half the men in there were him; were me. The other half were white and some of those were rather frail looking. The frail ones, the ones who looked most like girls, attracted me. I’d sexually dominated enough scarred, ugly, sour-breathed bantamweight Mick and Pollack bluffers and brawlers already to last me two lifetimes. The tavern was dimly lit as you’d expect it to be, and, as I stood there, waiting for my eyes to adjust to a picture even darker than the streets I’d been walking, I realized I had no money in my pockets for a drink. I’d been living an approximation of the Natural Life for a few months already, eating nothing but rabbit and stolen fruit and garden vegetables and even some fish from Lake Calumet, and so I had clean forgotten about the thing called money. The irony being that there was money due me, riches I knew nothing about.
A fine-boned young man with pale skin and jet-black, longish hair approached me and offered to buy me a drink. He pointed at a little table and I took a seat at it while he pushed up to the bar. When he returned with the beer I’d ordered and one for himself, he wasted no time telling me what was on his mind. He said I looked big, very big, and asked me if it was so. I said it was so. He asked me if it was black. I said it was very black. He said he dreamed of hard black shiny long cock all day while he was sitting through Philosophy classes at the University, so that by the time he was home again and it was late enough for Paddy’s to open and start filling up, he could barely control the urge to run all the way from Hyde Park, a good twenty minute drive by car. He said he was usually disappointed. The real big specimens usually went to a harder place in The Loop you had to know the password to get into. The indoor pool in the old athletic club all the Irish cops prefer.
He asked me how much time I’d done in Joliet, and I was too impressed to ask him how he could tell. I told him how much time and he whistled. He asked what for and I said rape and he said good. He said maybe murder would’ve been the wrong answer. He said I like it rough but I don’t want to die for it. He said in my opinion, it’s as harmless a sin as smoking, it’s not fatal for either party, maybe a little messy at worst and anyway it’s nobody’s business, and everyone should treat it like that, but that’ll never happen in my lifetime. In two centuries, maybe. He said we can use the john but it’s filthy with scat and there’s a waiting line. He asked me if I had a place nearby and I said it was about an hour’s walk. He said he had a car.
He had a beautiful car, a foreign car, a big black thing with running boards that would have suited an old-time diplomat, which led me to deduce that his parents were somewhat wealthy and much older than they should have been, perhaps in their sixties, curled up in bed in some Gold Coast, or Lincoln Park, mansion, while the young master was getting his kicks on the wrong side of the wrong side of the tracks. Did they expect him to finish his studies soon and marry a debutante? Did they have any idea that, for some young upper-class men, it floats their boats to thrust their tongues up the unwashed rectums of hulking black members of the underclass? Would the news kill them? Would the son be willing to pay good money to spare them the shock? I’m ashamed to say that these thoughts passed through my mind, though I never considered myself a hustler; no more so than a man who finds a wallet stuffed with cash, and briefly-if-seriously entertains the notion of keeping it, is a pickpocket.
I warned him that we wouldn’t be doing it on the bed, where I had to sleep, and he said a folded towel on the floor for his knees would be fine, but that there should please be no choking or punching, or burning, with cigarettes, or my lighter, although rough was fine, rough was good, he guessed it depended how big I really was, but I didn’t have to rupture his insides or anything, and of course he wouldn’t need or expect any hugging or kissing afterward. And, also, please, no name-calling. Which I considered an extraordinary speech.
A few days later, I walked to Paddy’s, and had two beers purchased for me by a sheepish-looking crew-cut blonde with very bad teeth whom I couldn’t bring myself to screw. We were in an alley a few blocks from Paddy’s and his moonlit breath was so foul I couldn’t face the prospect of putting anything of mine in that snaggle-toothed hole, more the less in his rectum. When I changed my mind about the transaction, he apologized profusely for wasting my time, and I struck him, not hard, but hard enough that he backed away down the alley, holding that side of his face as though he’d always treasure the pain.
It was only a week or two later that I met Fabian Saldo at Paddy’s again. I was standing at the bar with an older man, for a change, a flinty, thick-haired, knife-faced man who put me in mind of the pictures I’d seen, on the backs of books, of the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett. He was well-spoken and cautious and I had a strong suspicion he was a priest with his collar hidden safe in his pocket. Fabian Saldo joined us at the bar and we all ended up driving back to my place in Fabian’s car, the priest and I seated in the back, the priest singing under his breath. I have vivid memories of clutching that man’s desiccated waist, which expanded and contracted like a blacksmith’s bellows as he cried out, on all fours, in his throaty, tobacco-dark Latin.
Word got around that I was of an unusual size and spectacular (virtually mineral) coloring, could be had for a beer or two, was not violent, sarcastic or likely to steal. And so I became a known factor and very popular. The queers who shared in relieving my tensions improvised between themselves a fair system about who could have me whenever I made an appearance at the tavern (no more than three times a week), and they never fought or grumbled, while to me, in any case, it made no difference, for, obviously, to have preferences any finer than the ones that rejected that one queer for his evil breath, would have indicated some small element of the queer in my own makeup. Though I have no problem admitting that I seemed to enjoy, most of all, the time I spent with Fabian Saldo. I didn’t even want to call Fabian Saldo a “queer”; I affected, once or twice, to call him a Laestrygonian, but it failed to stick, so, “queer” it was.
It was with Fabian that I fully developed my philosophy of the Natural Life: food and drink without additives; verbal communication only when necessary or meaningful; sex without the nonsense of emotional games and attachments; exercise in general (and long walks, specifically), as a form of prayer. Three of these four elements are impossible, I believed, with a woman. Believed: past tense.
Gradually, the system of knowledge called “prison”, which had replaced the system of knowledge called “family,” was replaced by the system of knowledge called “the Natural Life”. While the prison system had trained me to conform to a way of knowing shared by the semi-conscious, instinct-driven thousands, the system of the Natural Life eased me towards a unique knowledge, the knowledge of the self. While the fool hopes for immortality by lengthening his life, the wise man learns to deepen it, rather. Clearly, the goal is to slow time down, though mankind, everywhere, as far as I can tell, is doing his best to accelerate. The white man, that is. Only the white man could have dreamed up the concept of time seeming to fly while you’re having fun; everyone sane knows that real pleasure slows time down, and that boredom makes it fly: ask the office worker who sits down at his desk on the first day of work at the age of twenty three, only to wake up, suddenly, at the age of sixty five, as he is being ushered from the premises with the contents of his desk and a gold-plated watch! How cruel, to give this old man a watch. This dangerously neurotic white man who daydreamed immortality while speeding towards his death. Driven, pushed, goaded, of course, by his morally bankrupt white woman, who couldn’t wait to be rid of him.
Stare at a clock, or a gold watch, if you will, while listening closely to yourself breathe, and you will get a glimmer of what I mean. What takes a minute, according to the clock, will feel like two, three, or five, when you learn how. And a single day of such deepened one-minute intervals, that each felt like five, adds up to five days, not one. And a year of such days equals five years. Ten years of that equals fifty years. Fifty years of that… and so on.
New Lucrative T-Shirt Slogan
(Ain’t gonna lie. I’m really proud of this one.)
“Doing It Yourself Does Not Mean Doing It Alone”
Other Cat: “But I still don’t get it, where does all the money go? With all that cheap labour and the vast new open markets, shouldn’t we in the West all be really, really, really rich and have like, our own flying machines, really smart housing in acres of land, a great education system that everybody can access and study of all manner of humanities based subjects and free healthcare for all as well as iPods and iPads and iPhones and iTunes and other Apple branded products and, and, and…endless supplies of free full fat milk?”
Pinky: “Well I can understand you thinking that, given the vast sums of money being legitimately taken out of the Third World through the fair and transparent system of globalisation that I have been describing. All those things you spoke about, well, some people do have them. But you’ve got to understand that although the Third World countries are, hmmm…benefitting from globalisation and don’t really have to pay for it, it doesn’t mean it comes for free. Some of the smartest minds in the world thought up the system, so it’s only fair that they should be able to get a little bit more stuff than everybody else”
Other Cat: “Oh, I get it. Although the Third World countries are smelly and undeserving, the inventors of globalisation felt a moral obligation to take up the burden of educating and liberating these ignoramuses, and in return the inventors of globalisation only ask for a modest, er,…fee?”
Pinky: “That’s right. It’s only fair. Most people don’t work as hard as the inventors of globalisation and those in charge of it. They’ve got MBAs and have to go to meetings and things, whereas everybody else just works on the tills of the big shops selling stuff, which is a really, really easy job. Oh, and some people work in offices and write e-mails all day. And anyway, the inventors of globalisation need a minimum of 2 Mercedes Benz’s each (or equivalent brands) and a private jet, otherwise they would have to use the same transportation as everybody else. And that would defeat the point of them inventing globalisation in the first place.”
Other Cat: “But what if it all goes, er, pear shaped? I heard that the really big money shops all went a bit funny last year. Something about credit default swaps, derivatives, repackaged sub-prime mortgages and other poisonous things that leaked out of the big money shops and were threatening to possibly destabilise the entire international banking system and maybe even reverse globalisation.
Pinky: “Wow, Other Cat, you’re suddenly well read in the workings of the more esoteric financial instruments and securities that have acted as the lubricant for the wheels of globalisation…”
Other Cat: “I’ve been watching Bloomberg and following the Basle II debates between catnaps…”
Pinky: “Anyway, when it all goes pear shaped, it’s only fair that the governments of the West step in and use taxpayer’s money to help out the financial institutions who, incidentally, are also some of the inventors of globalisation”.
Other Cat: “But I still don’t get it. Shouldn’t the inventors of globalisation have to pay for if it goes wrong?” I mean, it was their idea and they’re the ones with the private jets, I’ve only got a cat box and some catty litter.”
Pinky: “Ah, but remember Other Cat, we all benefit from globalisation…if the system collapsed we would all be much worse off; you would be sleeping out on the roofs again and we wouldn’t be able to even dream about changing our catty litter every day like we do at the moment. Think about the stink that would cause. And think about those poor Third World countries, what would happen to them once the inventors of globalisation close their mines, stop using cheap and child labour and take their troops home?”
Well done, Comrade Jack! We should probably clarify that your adaptation of Pinky’s dialogue is probably sarcasm…
What amazes me is the fact that the unnecessarily (or necessarily, depending on which side of the riot-geared police you’re on) abstruse narrative of economics both effects what and how and where and when I write and is affected by what others have written… there’s this planetary web of text and a fly tugging its strands in Zimbabwe will make the dew on the web that covers the territory of my existence jiggle and drop in Berlin. Well, not really, but almost. What the Hippies affected to grasp with pot-blown awe.. the Oneness of It All… strikes me as a problem.
The problem is explicit with “famous” writers: we really have to buy a copy of DeLillo’s Point Omega to ponder DeLillo’s recondite maneuver in featuring Douglas Gordon’s 24-Hour Psycho as a foundational metaphor. Art is an esoteric corner of the Real Estate market which vulgarians are effectively blocked from (or restrained in) entering; Gordon’s 24-Hour Psycho was his entré into that restricted (high wasp?) market; DeLillo is effectively reporting on the metaphysical fluctuations in an esoteric corner of the Real Estate market. Or the sentences in Kafka’s The Trial: don’t they keep changing, imperceptibly, with every election of a new Murrkan President? Compare reading The Trial under FDR to reading it under JFK and then reading it under GWB. It’s just too fucking contingent. Isn’t there a Firewall to protect against this sort of thing?
I wrote this phrase out last night: “CONTINUITY IS CONTROL”
DISCONTINUITY (being able to draw a line on the sidewalk and through the calender that turns into a moat or even a neat old circular canyon) would be nice. Only after that… establishing a circular clean-break and an island of meaning… could we start thinking up the next step. Which being, of course, the Parasitic Utopia…there’d be power cables coming in from the mainland, you see. Power cables but no information; no economics; no academics; no traditions, manners or sense of decorum.
It’s the only hope, innit?
But let’s have a look at Pinky again to make sure we know the thing we need to leave behind…
SEMINAL CREATIVES OF ’74
SEMINAL CREATIVES of ’89
“I never read novels myself,” said he, “except when the popular persecution forces me to— when people plague me to know what I think of the last book that every one is reading.”
“And how did the latest persecution affect you?”
“Robert?” said he, interrogatively.
I nodded.
“I read it, of course, for the workmanship. That made me think I had neglected novels too long— that there might be a good many books as graceful in style somewhere on the shelves; so I began a course of novel reading. I have dropped it now; it did not amuse me. But as regards Robert, the effect on me was exactly as though a singer of street ballads were to hear excellent music from a church organ. I didn’t stop to ask whether the music was legitimate or necessary. I listened, and I liked what I heard. I am speaking of the grace and beauty of the style.
“You see,” he went on, “every man has his private opinion about a book. But that is my private opinion. If I had lived in the beginning of things, I should have looked around the township to see what popular opinion thought of the murder of Abel before I openly condemned Cain. I should have had my private opinion, of course, but I shouldn’t have expressed it until I had felt the way. You have my private opinion about that book. I don’t know what my public ones are exactly. They won’t upset the earth.”
He recurled himself into the chair and talked of other things.
http://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2010/04/interview-with-mark-twain.html
and here ’tis, a text both Sammy and Ruddy held in high’st esteem:
ROBERT ELSMERE
By Mrs. Humphrey Ward
(excerpt)
CHAPTER I.
It was a brilliant afternoon toward the end of May. The spring had been unusually cold and late, and it was evident from the general aspect of the lonely Westmoreland valley of Long Whindale that warmth and sunshine had only just penetrated to its bare, green recesses, where the few scattered trees were fast rushing into their full summer dress, while at their feet, and along the bank of the stream, the flowers of March and April still lingered, as though they found it impossible to believe that their rough brother, the east wind, had at last deserted them. The narrow road, which was the only link between the farm-houses sheltered by the crags at the head of the valley, and those far away regions of town and civilization suggested by the smoke wreaths of Whinborough on the southern horizon, was lined with masses of the white heckberry or bird-cherry, and ran, an arrowy line of white through the greenness of the sloping pastures. The sides of some of the little books running down into the main river and, many of the plantations round the farms were gay with the same tree, so that the farm-houses, gray-roofed and gray-walled, standing in the hollows of the fells, seemed here and there to have been robbed of all their natural austerity of aspect, and to be masquerading in a dainty garb of white and green imposed upon them by the caprice of the spring.
During the greater part of its course the valley of Long Whindale is tame and featureless. The hills at the lower part are low and rounded, and the sheep and cattle pasture over slopes unbroken either by wood or rock. The fields are bare and close shaven by the flocks which feed on them; the walls run either perpendicularly in many places up the fells or horizontally along them, so that, save for the wooded course of the tumbling river and the bush-grown hedges of the road, the whole valley looks like a green map divided by regular lines of grayish black. But as the walker penetrates further, beyond a certain bend which the stream makes half-way from the head of the dale, the hills grow steeper, the breadth between them contracts, the enclosure lines are broken and deflected by rocks and patches of plantation, and the few farms stand more boldly and conspicuously forward, each on its spur of land, looking up to or away from the great masses of frowning crag which close in the head of the valley, and which from the moment they come into sight give it dignity and a wild beauty.
On one of these solitary houses, the afternoon sun, about to descend before very long behind the hills dividing Long Whindale from Shanmoor, was still lingering on this May afternoon we are describing, bringing out the whitewashed porch and the broad bands of white edging the windows, into relief against the gray stone of the main fabric, the gray roof overhanging it, and the group of sycamores and Scotch firs which protected it from the cold east and north. The Western light struck full on a copper beech, which made a welcome patch of warm color in front of a long gray line of outhouses standing level with the house, and touched the heckberry blossom which marked the upward course of the little lane connecting the old farm with the road; above it rose the green fell, broken here and there by jutting crags, and below it the ground sank rapidly through a piece of young hazel plantation, at this present moment a sheet of bluebells, toward the level of the river. There was a dainty and yet sober brightness about the whole picture. Summer in the North is for Nature a time of expansion and of joy as it is elsewhere, but there is none of that opulence, that sudden splendor and superabundance, which mark it in the South. In these bare green valleys there is a sort of delicate austerity even in the summer; the memory of winter seems to be still lingering about these wind-swept fells, about the farm-houses, with their rough serviceable walls, of the same stone as the crags behind them, and the ravines in which the shrunken brooks trickle musically down through the débris of innumerable Decembers. The country is blithe, but soberly blithe. Nature shows herself delightful to man, but there is nothing absorbing or intoxicating about her. Man is still well able to defend himself against her, to live his own independent life of labor and of will, and to develop that tenacity of hidden feeling, that slowly growing intensity of purpose which is so often wiled out of him by the spells of the South.
The distant aspect of Burwood Farm differed in nothing from that of the few other farmhouses which dotted the fells or clustered beside the river between it and the rocky end of the valley. But as one came nearer certain signs of difference became visible. The garden, instead of being the old-fashioned medley of phloxes, lavender bushes, monthly roses, gooseberry trees, herbs, and pampas grass, with which the farmers’ wives of Long Whindale loved to fill their little front enclosures, was trimly laid down in turf dotted with neat flowerbeds, full at the moment we are writing of with orderly patches of scarlet and purple anemones, wallflowers, and pansies. At the side of the house a new bow window, modest enough in dimensions and make, had been thrown out on to another close-shaven piece of lawn, and by its suggestion of a distant sophisticated order of things disturbed the homely impression left by the untouched ivy-grown walls, the unpretending porch, and wide slate-window sills of the front. And evidently the line of sheds standing level with the dwelling-house no longer sheltered the animals, the carts, or the tools which make the small capital of a Westmoreland farmer. The windows in them were new, the doors fresh painted and closely shut; curtains of some soft outlandish make showed themselves in what had once been a stable, and the turf stretched smoothly up to a narrow gravelled path in front of them, unbroken by a single footmark. No, evidently the old farm, for such it undoubtedly was, had been but lately, or comparatively lately, transformed to new and softer uses; that rough patriarchal life of which it had once been a symbol and centre no longer bustled and clattered through it. It had become the shelter of new ideals, the home of another and a milder race than once possessed it.
[ed.'s note: more on all this tomorrow, Comrades, but anyone who doesn't consider this presentation of bonded data a good example of a type of the Internet's miraculous bounties: Thou Art retarded]
In the piece we link to above, a 23-year-old Rudyard Kipling reports on his meeting with a 54-year-old (as I calculate) “Mark Twain”. Rudyard (on the verge of being as famous, as Tom Sawyer’s god, himself) came to visit as an awe-inspired fan. You have to envy them the unknown pleasures of the chat: this was before the military-industrial-style practice of celebrity that would have made it impossible for a “nobody” to get through the fence at the bottom of the 500-foot driveway and it was before Literary Practice shattered like a white light, through a prism, into the rainbow of identities and canons we know today. Rudyard and his idol were two white males concerned with the ironies (tragi-comic, in Twain’s case and usually more bloody with Rudyard) of the White Man’s Burden.
At least once a year I join the fray in comment thread discussions (sometimes Flame Wars, sometimes not) about “the canon”. Just this last month I was involved in a couple of such discussions at The Valve which never reached a level of passion sufficient to burst into flames but which saw Bill Benson make a case for “intersubjective agreement” as a hedge against the evaluative chaos that must ensue when everyone likes something different. “Intersubjective agreement” just means that clumps, here and there, of readers who like the same kind of books can talk about these books without getting too exasperated; but the only “scientific” value would be if any theories a given clump might come up with could be transplanted, unmolested, into the middle of the discussion of a radically-different clump. Eg: if teenage fans of Tao Lin could come up with some kind of taxonomy or list of aesthetic proscriptions that some middle-aged followers of Philip Roth would be happy to use (or vice versa)… for the next fifty years. But we know that’s not going to happen (I’m not even considering the problem of trying the exercise cross-nationally; cross-language) short of the old (temporarily out of favor) academic method of imposing a taste-range by fiat and enforcing it with grades. Bill, apparently, looks to the Cognitive Sciences for a cross-cultural, cross-demographic, era-transcending framework for normalizing literary aesthetics so we can have fruitful conversations about books. As I observed in a comment:
Bill then took the discussion down a long and winding path without ever addressing (or, for the express purpose of avoiding engagement with) this point. (A chunk of the comment thread from one of these two discussions appears at the end of this).
But isn’t it about Ego, in the end? Reading Ruddy’s report about Ruddy’s and Sammy’s hang, the pleasure of being at the top of things is fairly palpable. This is not a prosecutorial point; I don’t want Sammy and Ruddy’s corpses exhumed to face a PC tribunal. This is an exercise in Imaginative Empathy. Life was so simple (if physically messy) then: a white man from “fourteen thousand miles away” could appear in another white man’s parlor and presume to know what the other white man was reading… and be correct!
White Men miss those days and I don’t blame them. Neither do I wish those days back.
There’s a Part Two to this comment, which I’ll get to after today’s Glorious Meatspace Chores; first, a sample of one of the mentioned discussions at The Valve (please note Bill’s strangely literal-minded misreading of my “red” argument: all in service of swerving around my point that the need for “standards” is the need for a hierarchy and the need for hierarchy is based in the possible existence of a competition gene):
CogDiss this!
First, the Jeopardy answer:
The dark-haired Italian Cuomo—son of former New York governor Mario and once one of Playgirl’s most eligible bachelors—and the perky blond homemaking expert aren’t theater buffs or cultural connoisseurs, according to friends and colleagues. They’re not regulars at any of the city’s top restaurants. Instead, Lee often cooks Italian food for Cuomo, whose favorite meal is her simple lasagna, which she prepares with canned tomato soup, cottage cheese and ground chuck. Via http://www.nypost.com/pagesixmag/issues/20091203/Sandra+Lee+and+Andrew+Cuomo+Love+Story
The question is:
Is there anyone out there who actually believes that any self-respecting Italian-American man would eat such a lasagna?
Frances, is this your revenge on me for dissing Liza Minelli?
Steven,
You’ve finally got the lay of the land. Bravo!
Alright then: now it’s your turn to show how someone who doesn’t share your taste in Show Tunes is being, by default, the enemy of “gender equity”, when A) 99.9% of the musical acts I’ve lauded on TET are “female” (being careful not to foreclose any alternate gender-identity readings here) and B) one of the cultural artifacts you were lauding (Cinderella) is an Ur-text of Gender Bias/Stereotype and C) whenever I’ve posted any videos or comments about my private tastes in music, I’ve been up front about inviting possible scorn for a purely subjective, ultimately personal and finally wonderfully-indefensible preference (eg: mock away about my Shirley Bassey vids: no arguments there, folks!).
Is there a Ring of Fire around your taste in Show Tunes because you possess a Cunt instead of a Cock?
Very possibly. Let’s not pursue this argument. I mean I don’t mind and CDS Orianna Fallaci is standing by with some heavy artillery. But that would be throwing you in the briar patch and truth be told I just don’t possess the upper body strength for that heavy a lift.
Frances, that’s the kind of cheap rhetorical gambit I tend to abhor in Comment Thread tussles the world over. I’ve just done a cursory check and I’ve found that I have singled out the following female musical artists for praise on TET:
That’s just a partial list. In fact, I’m worried that I’ve only found one male in the TET pantheon (Rob Zimmerman).
So: please: by all means, make your case or concede that you’re full of shit on this one.
Any concessions I make will not include fecal matter, thank you very much. I’ll return to this, on my honor, after a few errands and naps and shots of espresso. I’m working on an application to the NYC Landmarks Commission for permission to have a decorative and informative placque affixed to 236 Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights to honor James Purdy. A simple 20″ by 25″ placque, but there’s a whole rigmarole and yards and yards of bureaucratic red tape. (The building itself is landmarked, which complicates matters.) So please allow me to push the pause button on our flame-war. And you might wish to take advantage of said pause by donning your plated armor. Just a friendly suggestion. I’m in no mood!
Yesterday while checking out the Auden and Thomas Wolfe homes I found these pearls. Wolfie first:
“Great God, the only bridge, the bridge of power, life and joy. The bridge that was a span, a cry, an ecstasy–that was America.”
And from the poet:
“And love illuminates again the city and the lion’s den. The world’s great rage, the travel of young men.”
“I’m in no mood!”
Frances, whatever mood you’re in is not the point. The point is that your egocentric fit over the fact that I had the temerity to be honest about my response to those videos is bad enough, but to drape your fit in the banner of “feminism” is just cheezy. Now, you and I know that no amount of fancy rhetorical footwork is capable of showing that preferring Joni Mitchell or Nina Simone to Liza Minelli is a “gender equity” issue.
The issue here is your inability to be a sport about the fact that everyone doesn’t share your particular notion of the musical sublime.
The irony being that my co-conspirator in Liza-dissing, Comrade ET, and I, were involved in a little conversation in the vicinity of all that Liza-dissing… a conversation about the absurdity of the Hollywood Sex Vision. Stuff about rape, pedophilia… and you didn’t even see fit to chime in. Too busy being pissed that we don’t all rate Lesley-Ann Warren as Cinderella. Cinderella!
And that’s certainly more than the average woman’s suggested daily intake of Irony.
[ed.'s note: in any case, this thread has reached the magic number of 451 comments and you'll have to post in TET 6.0]