SPELLING (L)IT OUT IN THE AGE OF TOTALITARIAN DECORUM: THE FICTION ISSUE
the GLORIES and the BURDEN of the WORD
315 Responses to The Endless Thread 6.0
A SPEECHLESS WALK THROUGH THE CITY
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This last one is funny: a German popster is asked by a German rag, “So, Mr. Westernhagen, what’s your opinion of our rag?” and the popster, known as a “rebel” (by, ahem, German standards) responds with: “Your rag is open to criticism!!? Or is this just advertising?” The system effortlessly absorbs and re-purposes your wan little strategies of resistance. Oh, and picture #6 is a grocery store
THEN AND NOW: TWO MYTHS WITH ONE STONE
After Bobby Kennedy
John Pilger
Published 29 May 2008
Bobby Kennedy’s campaign is the model for Barack Obama’s current bid to be the Democratic nominee for the White House. Both offer a false hope that they can bring peace and racial harmony to all Americans, writes John Pilger
In this season of 1968 nostalgia, one anniversary illuminates today. It is the rise and fall of Robert Kennedy, who would have been elected president of the United States had he not been assassinated in June 1968. Having travelled with Kennedy up to the moment of his shooting at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on 5 June, I heard The Speech many times. He would “return government to the people” and bestow “dignity and justice” on the oppressed. “As Bernard Shaw once said,” he would say, “‘Most men look at things as they are and wonder why. I dream of things that never were and ask: Why not?’” That was the signal to run back to the bus. It was fun until a hail of bullets passed over our shoulders.
Kennedy’s campaign is a model for Barack Obama. Like Obama, he was a senator with no achievements to his name. Like Obama, he raised the expectations of young people and minorities. Like Obama, he promised to end an unpopular war, not because he opposed the war’s conquest of other people’s land and resources, but because it was “unwinnable”.
Should Obama beat John McCain to the White House in November, it will be liberalism’s last fling. In the United States and Britain, liberalism as a war-making, divisive ideology is once again being used to destroy liberalism as a reality. A great many people understand this, as the hatred of Blair and new Labour attest, but many are disoriented and eager for “leadership” and basic social democracy. In the US, where unrelenting propaganda about American democratic uniqueness disguises a corporate system based on extremes of wealth and privilege, liberalism as expressed through the Democratic Party has played a crucial, compliant role.
In 1968, Robert Kennedy sought to rescue the party and his own ambitions from the threat of real change that came from an alliance of the civil rights campaign and the anti-war movement then commanding the streets of the main cities, and which Martin Luther King had drawn together until he was assassinated in April that year. Kennedy had supported the war in Vietnam and continued to support it in private, but this was skilfully suppressed as he competed against the maverick Eugene McCarthy, whose surprise win in the New Hampshire primary on an anti-war ticket had forced President Lyndon Johnson to abandon the idea of another term. Using the memory of his martyred brother, Kennedy assiduously exploited the electoral power of delusion among people hungry for politics that represented them, not the rich.
“These people love you,” I said to him as we left Calexico, California, where the immigrant population lived in abject poverty and people came like a great wave and swept him out of his car, his hands fastened to their lips.
“Yes, yes, sure they love me,” he replied. “I love them!” I asked him how exactly he would lift them out of poverty: just what was his political philosophy? “Philosophy? Well, it’s based on a faith in this country and I believe that many Americans have lost this faith and I want to give it back to them, because we are the last and the best hope of the world, as Thomas Jefferson said.”
“That’s what you say in your speech. Surely the question is: How?”
“How . . . by charting a new direction for America.”
The vacuities are familiar. Obama is his echo. Like Kennedy, Obama may well “chart a new direction for America” in specious, media-honed language, but in reality he will secure, like every president, the best damned democracy money can buy.
Embarrassing truth
As their contest for the White House draws closer, watch how, regardless of the inevitable personal smears, Obama and McCain draw nearer to each other. They already concur on America’s divine right to control all before it. “We lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good,” said Obama. “We must lead by building a 21st-century military . . . to advance the security of all people [emphasis added].” McCain agrees. Obama says in pursuing “terrorists” he would attack Pakistan. McCain wouldn’t quarrel.
Both candidates have paid ritual obeisance to the regime in Tel Aviv, unquestioning support for which defines all presidential ambition. In opposing a UN Security Council resolution implying criticism of Israel’s starvation of the people of Gaza, Obama was ahead of both McCain and Hillary Clinton. In January, pressured by the Israel lobby, he massaged a statement that “nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people” to now read: “Nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people from the failure of the Palestinian leadership to recognise Israel [emphasis added].” Such is his concern for the victims of the longest, illegal military occupation of modern times. Like all the candidates, Obama has furthered Israeli/Bush fictions about Iran, whose regime, he says absurdly, “is a threat to all of us”.
On the war in Iraq, Obama the dove and McCain the hawk are almost united. McCain now says he wants US troops to leave in five years (instead of “100 years”, his earlier option). Obama has now “reserved the right” to change his pledge to get troops out next year. “I will listen to our commanders on the ground,” he now says, echoing Bush. His adviser on Iraq, Colin Kahl, says the US should maintain up to 80,000 troops in Iraq until 2010. Like McCain, Obama has voted repeatedly in the Senate to support Bush’s demands for funding of the occupation of Iraq; and he has called for more troops to be sent to Afghanistan. His senior advisers embrace McCain’s proposal for an aggressive “league of democracies”, led by the United States, to circumvent the United Nations.
Amusingly, both have denounced their “preachers” for speaking out. Whereas McCain’s man of God praised Hitler, in the fashion of lunatic white holy-rollers, Obama’s man, Jeremiah Wright, spoke an embarrassing truth. He said that the attacks of 11 September 2001 had taken place as a consequence of the violence of US power across the world. The media demanded that Obama disown Wright and swear an oath of loyalty to the Bush lie that “terrorists attacked America because they hate our freedoms”. So he did. The conflict in the Middle East, said Obama, was rooted not “primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel”, but in “the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam”. Journalists applauded. Islamophobia is a liberal speciality.
The American media love both Obama and McCain. Reminiscent of mating calls by Guardian writers to Blair more than a decade ago, Jann Wenner, founder of the liberal Rolling Stone, wrote: “There is a sense of dignity, even majesty, about him, and underneath that ease lies a resolute discipline . . . Like Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama challenges America to rise up, to do what so many of us long to do: to summon ‘the better angels of our nature’.” At the liberal New Republic, Charles Lane confessed: “I know it shouldn’t be happening, but it is. I’m falling for John McCain.” His colleague Michael Lewis had gone further. His feelings for McCain, he wrote, were like “the war that must occur inside a 14-year-old boy who discovers he is more sexually attracted to boys than to girls”.
The objects of these uncontrollable passions are as one in their support for America’s true deity, its corporate oligarchs. Despite claiming that his campaign wealth comes from small individual donors, Obama is backed by the biggest Wall Street firms: Goldman Sachs, UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, J P Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, as well as the huge hedge fund Citadel Investment Group. “Seven of the Obama campaign’s top 14 donors,” wrote the investigator Pam Martens, “consisted of officers and employees of the same Wall Street firms charged time and again with looting the public and newly implicated in originating and/or bundling fraudulently made mortgages.” A report by United for a Fair Economy, a non-profit group, estimates the total loss to poor Americans of colour who took out sub-prime loans as being between $164bn and $213bn: the greatest loss of wealth ever recorded for people of colour in the United States. “Washington lobbyists haven’t funded my campaign,” said Obama in January, “they won’t run my White House and they will not drown out the voices of working Americans when I am president.” According to files held by the Centre for Responsive Politics, the top five contributors to the Obama campaign are registered corporate lobbyists.
What is Obama’s attraction to big business? Precisely the same as Robert Kennedy’s. By offering a “new”, young and apparently progressive face of the Democratic Party – with the bonus of being a member of the black elite – he can blunt and divert real opposition. That was Colin Powell’s role as Bush’s secretary of state. An Obama victory will bring intense pressure on the US anti-war and social justice movements to accept a Democratic administration for all its faults. If that happens, domestic resistance to rapacious America will fall silent.
Piracies and dangers
America’s war on Iran has already begun. In December, Bush secretly authorised support for two guerrilla armies inside Iran, one of which, the military arm of Mujahedin-e Khalq, is described by the state department as terrorist. The US is also engaged in attacks or subversion against Somalia, Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Bolivia and Venezuela. A new military command, Africom, is being set up to fight proxy wars for control of Africa’s oil and other riches. With US missiles soon to be stationed provocatively on Russia’s borders, the Cold War is back. None of these piracies and dangers has raised a whisper in the presidential campaign, not least from its great liberal hope.
Moreover, none of the candidates represents so-called mainstream America. In poll after poll, voters make clear that they want the normal decencies of jobs, proper housing and health care. They want their troops out of Iraq and the Israelis to live in peace with their Palestinian neighbours. This is a remarkable testimony, given the daily brainwashing of ordinary Americans in almost everything they watch and read.
On this side of the Atlantic, a deeply cynical electorate watches British liberalism’s equivalent last fling. Most of the “philosophy” of new Labour was borrowed wholesale from the US. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were interchangeable. Both were hostile to traditionalists in their parties who might question the corporate-speak of their class-based economic policies and their relish for colonial conquests. Now the British find themselves spectators to the rise of new Tory, distinguishable from Blair’s new Labour only in the personality of its leader, a former corporate public relations man who presents himself as Tonier than thou. We all deserve better.
This life is inconceivably beautiful. It is a life of the mind. It is always late summer, the blacks are inky-rich, the whites are milky singularities, the grayscale between is perfectly-judged. Satchmo, an immolated saint, has burned clear, finally, of all kitsch and his rehabilitation proves that we are capable of anything.
T. and I are standing as far apart as two Bohemians can, while still holding hands, looking at different paintings, grunting or sighing our assessments, our cool contentments or stern critiques, protected by the gallerist’s approving leer. The gallerist is a friend; she lowers the volume of the background music to afford us whispers. The city lowers its volume to afford us whispers. The ability to whisper is a function of IQ., or so I have read. T.’s whispers are suggestive and wet as little berries hung ripe on the air. She is taller than I. For her, the world will always be new.
-This is going to be great, tonight, at Bleecker Street, I say, pulling her close. She smells of everything fresh and healthy and young. Bertolucci’s first major statement in years, when it came out. A scandal. We have to get there early.
-What’s it about again?
-Existentialism. Brando. X-rated.
-X-rated? How will I get in? If they card me I’m dead.
-Think of it like Nick and Nora, I say, it’ll be an adventure and squeeze a muscular handful of her incredible ass through denim as soft as old money. She can’t understand why I prefer her to dress this way and she never will, because she’ll always be seventeen, just as I’ll always be forty two, older but not old, wise to life but not a fossil of cynicism and vigorously sex-possessed but not scary. I light a cigarette and touch it to my lips and sip it like ghostly grey wine through a straw, knowing it will never hurt me. Her bluejeans and sneakers and white dress shirt, tail out. And that striped t-shirt she sometimes wears, Seberg to my American Belmondo. I confess we own berets. I will teach her to smoke my cigars.
We gaze on a minor Warhol with affectionate contempt.
What is that melody?
It seems like days since last we’ve made love, but it’s only been minutes. An hour. She rode me in a corner of my loft beneath an Arbus. We heard a distant gunshot through an open window so like the sound effect from a radio drama of the ‘forties that we laughed and took a break and switched positions. A joke about Bridge. But the second position was more intense. No laughing. Just gunshots.
What is that melody?
Even crime transcends its dictionary definition to function as a compositional element, a narrative texture, in the masterpiece of this island. Rape and murder are the black that contrasts the white of witty banter; they are not foregrounded, they are anecdotal; no one we know has been touched or threatened by this kind of pain or grief or life-altering inconvenience. They merely tell stories about it. Something you watch out for, distracted by main events, like hornets in autumn on the Cape. It’s the colorful nonsense of the uneducated poor, as distant as whatever music they listen to (neither Gershwin nor Schubert).
We both suddenly remember and hum the rest of the tune together, accompanying the scratchy, fifty-year-old recording the gallerist has turned up again as we nod our smiled goodbyes and back through the glass into the vibrant sheen of the Sunday-dappled sidewalk. Looks like rain, later. An aesthetically-perfect thunderstorm.
Body and Soul.
***
Over dinner at our favorite bistro, Y. and I wallow in the almost obscene luxury of complaining about our copious lives. It’s an old script. A litany. A call-and-response in which we take our tacit comfort. Y.’s job is too good (he wishes he were a starving artist) and I worry out loud about having a seventeen-year-old lover who looks like a model, is obsequious to the point of being a fuckable housepet and boasts a lineage that intimidates every doorman in this impossible-to-intimidate town. My brow is knitted as I enumerate, again, every relevant superlative over the down-to-earth pizza we can share without needing to eye its last slice awkwardly with angst or regret. We usually simply leave the last slice untouched; a sacrifice to our casual Gods. The background chatter is reassuringly lively. Yet not too.
-She’s seventeen, I say, with a gesture more French than Rabbinical, though there is something vaguely and indefinably Jewish about the depth and pessimism of even my most light-hearted banter and there is something cozy in that; the ethnic weft; the white-but-not-too-ness. Also: it’s a devastatingly sexy contrast to the über-Wasp (Malevitch?) whiteness of my to-die-for lover, who’s so tomboyish, when I think about it, that she verges on being my catamite. I often fantasize about sodomy; the other kind. I touch the cool crook of Y.’s short-sleeved arm conversationally and say, with a Groucho Marks cadence, have I mentioned already she was a virgin when I first had Biblical knowledge of her? At the age of sixteen? In a hansom cab on Thanksgiving?
Y. counters with a story. I’m reminded of Borges but don’t say so and don’t know why. Story as follows.
A well-known director, otherwise associated with audience-pleasing romantic comedies, and known to write his own scripts, has an idea for a science fiction film, something dystopian, very dark, Owellian in the sense that a perpetual foreign war is described and slogans are everywhere and uniformed agents with unspecified powers keep the people in check. Dissent is not tolerated. Intellectuals sell-out, civilians disappear, the technology has reached a black-box level of godly near-magic that renders the regime invincible. A literal thousand-year-Reich is implied but never stated. The technology is both a giant’s oppressive fist and a drug-like distraction capable of soul-raping wonders. This is the scenario described. As I say: very dark. Bleak. Almost too dark to contemplate, but the well-known director, tired of being known for light fare, believes that this film will establish him as an artist of the first rank, up there with Welles. He throws himself into the project, despite his other commitments (the post-production of one romantic comedy and the pre-production of its follow-up), giving every extra moment; every gap of breathing-space in the continuum of his success-hijacked existence; to the conceptualization of this dark, depressing script.
But these prior commitments are endless; money has to be made. Time passes. Months become years, then decades, as the dystopian project (working title: 2002) fades in the intensity of its claim on his actual working time, but never frees his mind. Not a day goes by that he doesn’t think about it, until the day he suddenly realizes that thirty years have gone by and the scenario of the film he was never able to realize has come horribly true. That is, the hellish dystopia is Now and no one can escape it by simply walking out of a movie theater.
***
The cab ride home from the movie is wordless. That’s the difference between great art and mere entertainment: great art shuts you up. It’s a short ride but a long silence. I can read T.’s thoughts. Easy as perusing a book in a rack near the cashier in a shop at the Airport.
I had forgotten, of course, that the movie is more than existentialist sex in lower-strata Paris. E.g., I’d remembered the butter scene but not the scene with the open casket; I’d remembered the shaving sequence but not the eponymous tango. T. and I were kissing passionately, already, through the opening credits, and then we weren’t and then we weren’t even holding hands. Agnès Varda’s Camus cribs.
I’m thinking all this, and about Y.’s dinner story, while T. thinks only of the Jean-Pierre Léaud character, the single (hapless) innocent in the film. The hack is a regular Joe who can’t take his eyes off of T. in the rearview and I can read his little thoughts, too. In his mind, there’s nothing wrong with this morose little girl that his blue collar expertise in bed couldn’t cure by bringing her down a peg. By opening her to the smell of her own prejudices. The musk of her own prejudices. Barbieri’s sepiatone soundtrack invades the grayscale of my beautiful Gershwin thoughts; Barbieri’s soundtrack and Schneider’s bosomy tits. Should we have seen the Fellini instead?
Was Brando cheated, ironically, out of that phallic Oscar that so looks like a self he once was?
A pothole jolts me back to the actual. This borough after hours is a reflection of pearls in a flute of black water from the Lethe. Or the Styx? Anyway, every morning, all is forgiven as the slate is wiped clean; memories are chalk dust. I lean close to T. and whisper, Do you trust me?
-Of course.
-Play along.
I say to the driver, She’s something, isn’t she?
-Pardon? You talking to me?
-My date. I can see that you like her.
He laughs and says nothing. I press further.
-Don’t think I have a problem with that, because I don’t.
-Oh yeah?
-Yes. Are you married?
-Who isn’t?
-How long?
-The usual.
-Any kids?
-Not any more. What about you two? He winks in the mirror at T.
-You love your wife?
-Why not?
-How would you like to spend the night with my date here?
The quality of his attention is instantly altered. His eyes are off T. and dead on me, half-hidden and wary in the mirror’s black shine.
-Funny, you don’t look like a pimp.
-We’re not talking about a sum of money.
-What are we talking about?
-An experiment. A game.
-Yeah?
-You get my date and I get your wife. Six hours. Hotel of your choice. Tonight.
-And what does she think of all this?
-She thinks what I tell her to think.
-You look like a college professor but you talk like a what. I don’t know.
-Are you interested or not?
-I’m interested in everything. Oil crisis. The Knicks. That silly prick Carter, what he’s doing to this country, people say bring back Nixon. Nixon was a crook you could trust. Rich Arabs and uppity blacks. That Patty Hearst twat. I read the papers, I watch the evening news when I’m home. You think I’m uninformed?
I squeeze T.’s hand and lean in close again and say, You see? It’s all just talk. It was just a movie. This is what real guys are like, afraid of their sexual shadows. Safe as milk. Never ever forget that Jean-Pierre Lèaud and Marlon Brando are just actors, but this is real life and it’s without consequences. Cinema is the art of the worst-case scenario and I can feel her relax into the revelation; the literal muscles involved. I congratulate myself on saving the evening. I tip the cabbie so big, in the end, it probably insults him. I want him to be insulted: to admit that is liberating.
There is no sex tonight. We only murmur and spoon.
Just to be safe.
***
Y. and I stroll to the squash courts on a brilliant-yet-sunless Monday morning. A warm silver sky; the inhumanly reflective retina of a deity too close to distinguish. We both know what we will say before we say it, Y. and I. And so we say it, as we have and ever shall, without pleasure, but with the blank serenity that taunts free will with the brilliance of a nova-hot projector bulb, melting through time like a sign.
The laugh about intellectuals is, after a lifetime of gazing inwardly in print, reaching out and attempting to synthesize our patterns of experience and observation, into a rational whole; we often end up believing more in the reality of our psychological inventions and rhetorical proofs, than Reality as it is.
I was led from the academy-centric poetryetc website last night, to an article linking to the Noam ‘n Hitchens hoo ha and fall out they had in the pages of the Nation magazine after 9/11. It was all the proof one needs to demonstrate how, as intellectuals, our power as political vehicles are limited by a lack and absence of visionary force that spurs to practical action in the real world geo-political spheres and realms that it is very easy to pontificate about, a la this chap Pilger here.
There are few things funnier, instructive and occasionally annoying, than reading intellectuals opining what is wrong with the world at the macro nation-state, continental and global level, and exhorting us, in the strongest possible terms, to buy into their unproveable fantasies.
I thank Hermes and the gods of Letters, Thoth and Ogma, that I read what I did last night.
Though I have read little of Hitchens, by osmosis we glean that his trajectory was brilliant, all his ideas sane and reasonable, until he went off the boil after hitting his forties, still smoking, boozing and basically, turned into who he is now. A self-righteous know-all who might know all these amazing bits of information about the world, but so what?
For a person whose only weapon is a pen, to consciously choose to concentrate their mind on the largest geo-political questions of the gravest consequence such as: Shall we go to war?- the first question I think is, why?
If you are that concerned, why not get practically involved in politics, or join the army, but puhleez, don’t sit on your overpaid fanny ranting at the mouth, trying to justify the deaths of thousands on the strength of what you have managed to fantasize and convince yourself as being the utmost morally right thing to do, in the confines of your imagination alone. Rehearsing fantasies on a page, performing an act for the Reader, our world you tell us, ‘this is right, this war and death.’
~
Pilger here just doesn’t make sense. He does at a casual person chatting in the pub level, but not as a serious intellectual being whose theories are exactly that. The gravity a Reader apprehends in any ‘opinion’ writers’ world, on the page, is only the weight of belief the writer possesses as they write. Fantasy, in effect. That’s all it is.
That Pilger sincerely believes his own ideas, strung together over fifty years of watching and not doing, all the decades of him there in the wars, only as a witness, never as a person who went to assist, just observe – is clear to read. But it doesn’t make them right, his opinions on what would have happened, if the way he predicted life had the chance to happen and become our shared History not on the page of Pilger’s psychological inventions, but in reality itself.
If there was a technology that could magically test out his theories, go forward and back in time and change reality, play it out as Pilger, Hitchens and me or you do in our heads, posit and prove them/us wrong or correct, then I would take him and Hitchens seriously.
Especially the older they become, as they slip into the cyncial certainty of rich opinion writers, first class travellers hetting round the globe on the important business of writing what they think should be happening, jaded with what they choose to occupy their lives with, the watching and opining of what goes on in war zones they chose to spend their lives in, for money I assume, as it can’t be love, surely?
And it becomes clear to them, personally, I expect, and is the reason for this hardening of their hearts, that all they have is opinions and nothing more substantial to leave, as the legacy of their time on earth. Opinions formed by a life of doing little but report, not for us the Reader, but themselves, because we only write for ourselves first and last, surely?
Until they can prove their blather in the real world, all we have is the gravity of their personal belief decanted, via the technology of the intellect, onto a stage of Letters; and as we know, the greatest persuaders’ worlds exist wholly fictional. People like Hitchens and Pilger, are merely cardboard Shakespeares, pale imitations of the real Creator, sticking to told-you-so, wise after the fact opinion and not being a creator of original fictions themselves.
Here we have Bobby K and Pilger, a hangabout in the press pack, just one of many who had not chosen to change the world by deed, but thought alone, asking Kennedy, as Maria Hyde might ask Nick Clegg:
‘…how exactly he would lift them out of poverty: just what was his political philosophy?
‘Philosophy? Well, it’s based on a faith in this country and I believe that many Americans have lost this faith and I want to give it back to them, because “we are the last and the best hope of the world”, as Thomas Jefferson said.’
“That’s what you say in your speech. Surely the question is: How?”
“How . . . by charting a new direction for America.”
The vacuities are familiar. Obama is his echo. Like Kennedy, Obama may well “chart a new direction for America” in specious, media-honed language, but in reality he will secure, like every president, the best damned democracy money can buy.
~
You see, Kennedy is the Real human being here, the one actually doing the real doing, being the music of what happens, and the millions are there for him, not because they want to appear in an article Pilger will write, but for Robert Francis Fitzgerald Kennedy: the 100% Irish politican, all eight of his grandparents pukka paddies, in the sense that every bag of bones that made his, for the last many centuries at least, routed directly back to living and dying in Ireland.
An aside, but it’s interesting to note, because Kennedy loved poetry, and one of his favourites was Aeschylus, who he recited during an impromptu, extemporized address to a crowd in Indianapolis, the day Martin Luther King was murdered, and which was one of the few cities that did not erupt in flames that epoch defining night:
The majority of people in this vast country who live together,want to improve the quality of life and see justice for all human beings that abide by peace in our land.
‘Let’s dedicate ourselves to what a Greek poet wrote, many years ago:
tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.
Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say
a prayer for our country and for our people.
Thank you very much.
we can move as a country, into greater
polarization..filled with hatred toward
one another. Or we can make an effort,
As Martin Luther King did, to understand,
and to comprehend, and replace that violence,
that stain of bloodshed that has spread across
our land,
with an effort to understand,
Compassion, and love.
~
For those..tempted to fill with – be filled
with – hatred and mistrust of the injustice
of such an act, against.. people, I would only
say that I feel in my own heart the same kind
of feeling. I had a member of my family killed,
..by a white man. But we have to make an effort
In the United States. We have to make an effort
to understand, to get beyond, or go beyond
These rather difficult times. My favorite poem,
my — my favorite poet ..he once wrote:
Even in..pain which cannot forget ..drop by drop
upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against
our will, comes wisdom
Through the..grace of” good…
“What we need in the United States is not division;
what we need in the United States is not hatred;
What we need ..is not violence and lawlessness,
but..Love, and wisdom..Compassion ..
A feeling of justice toward those who still suffer
within our country, whether they be white or..black.”
~
You see, Pilger, when he cuts in his piece of writing, from Kennedy saying he wanted to ‘chart a new direction for America’; the Australian, Pilger, immediately cuts into saying this was ‘vacuous’, as though he, John Pilger and not Robert Francis Fitzgerald Kennedy, second last of the pure bred Irish American leaders, poet loving 100% ‘us’ person, was the one there changing the world around him through action and deed.
This exposes his own vanity, that he appropriates the dead into his theory on Obama, who he wants to trash because forty years later Pilger is cynical and unhappy with his life, surely, or why would he be so down on it?
This is a poem from one Desmond poet – Deasmuman, South Muinster, where the Fitzgeralds once where Earls of, to a dead hero in our clan, Robert Francis, Bobby Kennedy, I’d sooner take my chance with him than with a million Pilger-Hitchens.
(The end of it is 7C, Lorica of Saint Patrick)
And my own humble prayer:
Strong is the power of our light.
The spiritual armour of goodness
Resisting rulers’ wicked wiles
And the cult of men in darkness.
Within us beastial faith lies,
Learning truth in a fearless
Charm composed to invoke divine
Defence against all manner of evil
And inscribed upon Saint Patricks
Breastplate. A loricae. The snippet
Below, in druidic protection meter.
‘I arise today
Through the strength of heaven
Light of sun
Radiance of moon
Splendour of fire
Speed of lightening
Swiftness of wind
Depth of the sea
Stability of earth
Firmness of rock.
I arise today
Through God’s strength to pilot me.’
WELCOME TO THE HYPNO SHOW
“The laugh about intellectuals is, after a lifetime of gazing inwardly in print, reaching out and attempting to synthesize our patterns of experience and observation, into a rational whole; we often end up believing more in the reality of our psychological inventions and rhetorical proofs, than Reality as it is.”
Des, nothing terrifies and/or nauseates our Pharaohs more than the idea of millions of the poor who might also be intellectuals. They saw to that after the massive post-War mistake they made with the GI Bill, over-educating and radicalizing all those Korean War Vets: the anti-War movement of the late-’50s and early-’60s was gathering dangerous momentum and it was led by lower class intellectuals. The Pharaohs fixed that by sending in the clowns: The Hippies. The Hippies and their bullshit Narcissism, faux-Mysticism and aversion to Rigorous Fucking Thought. The Pharaohs made sure that the Dumbing Up hit hard and fast and it paid off in record time: less than three generations later the American electorate is the dumbest force on earth and they spread their anti-intellectual proclivities to all nations via Hollywood, which they subsidize with their food stamps. Heaping scorn on the notion of an intellectual (like George Wallace did with his “pointy-headed intellectual” riff) is what they want you to do, because having masses of the underclass react only to potent symbols and “moving” rhetoric and who determine their affiliations by means of the football-team-model means that things will stay as they are. Poetry is great but the anti-intellectual uses of it can be nefarious in a Real World seething with opportunistic killers. Fuck rhetoric; fuck epic beauty; fuck the Mystic nonsense that keeps us wandering in ineffectual clouds of unfocused feeling. Address the fucking DATA first.
“Pilger here just doesn’t make sense. He does at a casual person chatting in the pub level, but not as a serious intellectual being whose theories are exactly that. The gravity a Reader apprehends in any ‘opinion’ writers’ world, on the page, is only the weight of belief the writer possesses as they write. Fantasy, in effect. That’s all it is.”
Which is purest bullshit, Des. Pilger cites facts which you do not address. Pit your facts against Pilger’s facts; pitting your impassioned beliefs against Pilger’s depressing facts might win the game for an audience trained to interpret Truth as whatever makes them feel good, but on the level of intellectual debate (in which the goal is to arrive at the most Truthful of the possible conclusions), it’s useless.
“You see, Pilger, when he cuts in his piece of writing, from Kennedy saying he wanted to ‘chart a new direction for America’; the Australian, Pilger, immediately cuts into saying this was ‘vacuous’, as though he, John Pilger and not Robert Francis Fitzgerald Kennedy, second last of the pure bred Irish American leaders, poet loving 100% ‘us’ person, was the one there changing the world around him through action and deed.”
Vacuous is the best word to describe that “new directions” riff, yes. Politicians favor soundbites that feel good without committing them to specific deeds or positions. Stock, vacuous “uplifting” phrases like “yes I can” and “a thousand points of light” are risk-free, easy to utter, pay off well. And look to your uses of the words “Australian”, “Irish” and “American”, Des: it’s nationalist tosh. You’ve been pre-programmed to curl a lip at Truth-tellers like Pilger; and just how was RFK “changing the world”?
Bobby Kennedy was a rich, power-mad cunt who came from a family of rich, power-mad cunts. I don’t really give a damn if he was “Irish”… so was Ronnie Reagan. And I don’t give a damn if Pilger is an “Aussie”… these labels might as well be the names of football teams; every football team will have its brains and its rapists; its saints and its gluttons; its clowns and cold killers. The question is: is the bulk of Pilger’s argument close to being factual? Are you responding to AURA or DATA?
Here’s some more info on RFK; even his own family would refute the interpretation of the following evidence while not being able to deny the facts:
ROBERT FRANCIS Kennedy was the third son of Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., a ruthless and politically ambitious businessman from Massachusetts. Kennedy Sr. made a fortune from a variety of enterprises, including real estate, moviemaking, the stock market and bootlegging alcohol during Prohibition.
Joe Kennedy had extensive ties to organized crime and corrupt politicians, who helped make him very rich and to pursue his political ambitions. His own ambition to be the first Irish Catholic president of the United States, however, was thwarted by Franklin Roosevelt, and he transferred his dream to his sons. Three out of four would either become president or run for the presidency.
It is one of the great ironies of U.S. political mythology that the Kennedy family, viewed today as the very symbol of liberalism, was, in fact, deeply conservative.
Joe Kennedy was openly supportive of the pro-fascist forces in Spain during that country’s civil war in the 1930s. He was appointed U.S. ambassador to Great Britain by Roosevelt in 1938, and was known as an “appeaser”–one of those who supported making concessions to Hitler on the eve of the Second World War. Herbert von Dirksen, the German ambassador to Britain, told his superiors that Ambassador Kennedy was “Germany’s best friend” in London. Kennedy was fired as U.S. ambassador in 1940.
From this point onward, Joe Kennedy concentrated on promoting his sons’ political careers and conservative causes in more covert ways. He was very close to the infamous anticommunist Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, after McCarthy became famous for persecuting liberals and radicals. During McCarthy’s 1952 reelection campaign, Joe made a sizeable contribution and then asked that his son Bobby be placed on the McCarthy subcommittee investigating “subversives.”
Bobby only stayed on McCarthy’s committee for six months, using it as a springboard for an assignment to another congressional committee that gained him greater notoriety–the Senate Rackets Committee led by the reactionary Democratic Sen. John McClellan of Arkansas, whom the conservative labor leader George Meany described as “an anti-labor nut.”
As an assistant counsel to McClellan, Bobby carried on his particularly vicious persecution of Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa, gaining a reputation for ruthlessness in pursuit of his political enemies and rivals. Joe Kennedy complimented his son on this character trait. “He’s a great kid,” Joe said. “He hates the same way I do.”
Throughout the 1950s, Bobby remained focused on building his older brother’s political career. He was campaign manager for John F. Kennedy’s first U.S. Senate campaign in 1952 and his presidential campaign in 1960. Bobby was his brother’s closest advisor (after Joe Kennedy Sr.). When JFK won the presidency, he made Bobby his attorney general.
* * *
THE KENNEDY presidency took place during a crucial time for three issues that would later come to dominate the rest of the decade: the civil rights movement, the Cuban Revolution and the war in Vietnam.
The Kennedys relied heavily on the Black vote to win the presidency in 1960, making certain symbolic overtures to Martin Luther King during the campaign. But as Bobby recalled in 1964, “I did not lie awake at night worrying about the problems of Negroes.”
That would soon change as Freedom Riders challenged segregation on interstate bus lines during the first year of the Kennedy presidency. The year before, a wave of sit-ins took place across the country to desegregate everything from lunch counters to public swimming pools. A mass movement against Jim Crow segregation was emerging–and the Kennedys did everything they could to contain it.
The Democratic Party was still a Jim Crow party–white Southern Democrats were known as “Dixiecrats”–with Blacks almost entirely disenfranchised in the South and the border states. For most of the 20th century, the Democrats needed the “solid South” (the states of the former Confederacy voting for the Democratic ticket as a bloc) to win national elections, and Kennedy was no exception. During his short time in office, John Kennedy appointed five supporters of segregation to the federal judiciary.
The Freedom Riders and sit-ins threatened to push the Dixiecrats into the Republican Party. The Kennedys hoped to pressure civil rights activists in a direction that wouldn’t jeopardize their southern support.
John Kennedy told Louisiana Gov. James H. Davis that his administration was trying “to put this stuff in the courts and get it off the street.” As attorney general, Bobby Kennedy famously told representatives of student civil rights groups, “If you cut out this Freedom Rider and sitting-in stuff and concentrate on voter registration, I’ll get you a tax exemption.”
He told Harris Wofford, special assistant to the president on civil rights, “This is too much,” after King refused to call off the protests. RFK added, “I wonder if they have the best interests of the country at heart. Do you know that one of them is against the atom bomb? Yes, he even picketed against it in jail! The president is going abroad, and all this is embarrassing him.”
Robert Kennedy also authorized FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover to begin wiretapping Martin Luther King’s telephone conversations on the grounds that Stanley Levison, King’s closest adviser, was allegedly a closet member of the Communist Party. Of King, RFK remarked, “We never wanted to get very close to him just because of these contacts and connections that he had, which we felt were damaging to the civil rights movement.”
The Kennedys put enormous pressure on the organizers of the historic March on Washington in August 1963 to cancel the event; then, when that failed, to control it. Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee leader and future member of Congress John Lewis wanted to say in his speech: “I want to know: Which side is the federal government on?” The administration compelled him to take this out because, according to Bobby Kennedy, it “attacked the president.”
Lewis’s frustration with the Kennedy administration would have resonated with many civil rights supporters. One major source of frustration with the Kennedys was their refusal to provide federal protection to civil rights activists. Bobby later admitted, “We abandoned the solution, really, of trying to give people protection.”
A generation of civil rights activists became radicalized in the face of the waffling compromises and inaction of the Kennedy administration.
“How . . . by charting a new direction for America.” That’s what they always say, man.
I was raised to be a cynic by a man who was near the heart of the quasi-revolutionary foment in Chicago politics, c. ’68. I met Black Panthers, Jessie Jackson (a CIA tool) and Muhammad Ali in my father’s office when I was still in grade school. I was taken to see “living theater” where free fruit was distributed and some play that was way over my head was put on for an audience full of people in dashikis… midway through the play someone burst into the theater screaming “They’ve shot him!” and I had no idea that it was part of the play or that the victim the “hysterical” woman was referring to was Malcolm X. I only understood the deliciousness of the fruit they had handed out.
What I absorbed was an ability to go un-seduced by politicians and speeches and grand gestures and symbols and all such props in the political Hypno Show. I absorbed, also, a sense of the reality of Death. Anyone who claims that an ideal or movement transcends the actual LIFE of any actual person is not to be trusted. This includes any politician or “spiritual leader” sending hordes, from the worthless underclass, off to kill and die.
Scraps of poetry in high-reaching speeches from out of the crafty mouth-holes of handsome faces (black or white or other)… these are all props.
If we lived in Iraq or Afghanistan we wouldn’t need to be told this. The Truth would be the bombs we’d be dodging. The current Pres is a poetry-lover and a bomb-dropper (which makes him better than his predecessor by a pointless margin).
Wake up, mon.
You can’t blame Joe Kennedy’s sons for the sins of their father.
Kennedy was a notorious capitalist nazi supporter, but his sons weren’t.
When Kennedy came to power, the first thing he did was face down Russia trying to secretly ship missiles to Cuba, and unlike the Russian Communist leader, Kennedy taped, discussions, meetings and phone calls that chart the 13 day crisis, which only he his secretary and possibly his Brother, knew about.
The tapes are there to listen to and have been transcribed intoa book The Kennedy Tapes, which I have read.
Why would he do this?
It indicates the behaviour of someone with nothing to hide, surely, that he would leave his account to posterity, in this store, of History being made?
I would argue it is because he was led by a humanist impulse of truth and justice, more so than power and privilige, as he saw it, because he was born into power and privilige and need not pursue it, unlike his father who wouldn’t have done this, I suspect. Kennedy, I like to think, wanted to change the world and steer it in a positive direction.
He didn’t get up to the dirty tricks of his father and his life was different, very priviliged, but, unlike Bush junior whose imagination led him only to acquiring more money; the Kennedys, and particularly Bobby at the end of his life, were slogging away for real change for the good of everyone and not just people like them who were rich and powerful. Bobby Kennedy in his final years had a totally different realtionship with Martin Luther King, his previous resistance had given way to a close working relationship, both going in the same direction, fused in the radical time of a country that was in the first days of shaking off Jim Crow.
After his brother’s murder, Robert Kennedy changed and his previous world-view dissolved. He did not fall into bitterness and ire, but toward making America a land of peace and love, I would argue, as the invention my imagination creates after taking into account what I know.
The only one who can really prove this thesis is Kennedy himself, and as he was murdered by a lunatic whilst campaigning for president, both our different positions can not be prioved either way. So, all we are doing is having a conversation, two people sat on our arses with unique experiences. I make no claim of being ‘right’, you seem very passionate about it, but the obvious thing to say is – run for president yourself if it’s that important to you.
Kennedy came into a world as it was, like Obama, and becoming president isn’t like stepping into an empty office on the first day, because there are all sorts of people in the structure of State, visible and in the shadows, as Truman alluded to in his 1960 address warning againt the rise of the American military industrial complex:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
Some posit that it was around this time a shadow-government began crystalizing in America, as a web of influence exerted by bank-owning controllers of this military-industrial complex.
They point to the fact that Congress entrusted the printing of its money to a private banking cartel, The Federal Reserve, the bill passed to create it in 1913, done so in a more or less empty senate on 22/23 December, only a handful of people present.
The argument goes, that by the time JFK and his brother came along fifty years later, they were very small potatoes, because the real power was being exercised behind the scenes, and that Kennedy took on these unseen forces, wanted to seize it back for the people, and was murdered for his trouble by them.
These people, the srgument goes, are not stupid, they knew you can’t just waltz into the office on the first day of ruling the ‘free’ world, snap your fingers and the world changes to your tune, because for the tune to change they would have to release their grip on the money supply fuelling the military industrial complex, and the military industriall complex itself.
What the Kennedys had inherited from their father, was a clear view of reality and how best to act within it to effect what they wanted to happen. They were experts in the business of real politics, and we can argue all day long about what they did, but at some point we have to dilineate the wider frame of History that these brothers were contained within.
It’s all very well for one person intellectuals like you me Hitch and Pilger, to cognize reality in a simple black/white right/wrong binary, and rehearse in Letters why A is bad and B good: fall into the easy, untaxing options of belief that state changing things in the real world, in Reality, is exactly the same as creating (fictional) reality in our masterplans on paper.
But that’s fiction, no obstacles in the form of other people actively blocking our way; because, on paper, we are God in our own mind, and it is very easy to create anything in the docking of a petide to a neural receptor, very easy to change a world in our heads and write out our mumbo jumbo manifestos for freedom and love, or slavery and hate, and all mixes, ratios and shades between these two extremities in the spectrum of human potential.
The journeying flash of a neuron getting from A to Z, explaining why on a million points along the way, X was a cunt, Y was a cunt, A was a cunt, B is a cunt and I or you are Ms fucking Fabbo – takes not the effort of facing up to the shadowforce in the oval office and not getting murdered in the process.
“Some posit that it was around this time a shadow-government began crystalizing in America, as a web of influence exerted by bank-owning controllers of this military-industrial complex.
“They point to the fact that Congress entrusted the printing of its money to a private banking cartel, The Federal Reserve, the bill passed to create it in 1913, done so in a more or less empty senate on 22/23 December, only a handful of people present.”
Agree with all that, Des… 1913 indeed. There is not only a “shadow government”… there are surely more than one, in competition for control, involved in unknown coups, fakes and intrigues (see Machiavelli-era Italy for a glamorous analog). We’ll never untangle that knot or track all the plots and real meanings. But the point to focus on is the propaganda that would have you believe that America was anything other than an Imperialist power before 1913. What I don’t agree with is your unlikely theory that anyone can get as far within the system as any of the three Kennedy brothers and not also be of it. The system isn’t that naive. The system is not “God-given”: it was put into place by wealthy white landowners and it was not designed to divest wealthy white landowners of power; it has refined itself over the centuries into a powerful fucking machine that controls minds as easily as it controls bodies; it is not naive and its participants are not naive and they rise through a stringent protocol of filters. Only we, the audience, are so terribly fucking naive to think otherwise. We’re the hero-worshippers; the fans; the ones who buy the worthless fucking bumper-stickers.
Also: don’t confuse being martyred with being a saint: Mafiosi are famous for ordering hits on each other. This is interesting:
Ever since the United States Army massacred 300 Lakotas in 1890, American forces have intervened elsewhere around the globe 100 times. Indeed the United States has sent troops abroad or militarily struck other countries’ territory 216 times since independence from Britain. Since 1945 the United States has intervened in more than 20 countries throughout the world.
Since World War II, the United States actually dropped bombs on 23 countries. These include: China 1945-46, Korea 1950-53, China 1950-53, Guatemala 1954, Indonesia 1958, Cuba 1959-60, Guatemala 1960, Congo 1964, Peru 1965, Laos 1964-73, Vietnam 1961-73, Cambodia 1969-70, Guatemala 1967-69, Grenada 1983, Lebanon 1984, Libya 1986, El Salvador 1980s, Nicaragua 1980s, Panama 1989, Iraq 1991-1999, Sudan 1998, Afghanistan 1998, and Yugoslavia 1999.
Post World War II, the United States has also assisted in over 20 different coups throughout the world, and the CIA was responsible for half a dozen assassinations of political heads of state.
The following is a comprehensive summary of the imperialist strategy of the United States over the span of the past century:
Argentina – 1890 – Troops sent to Buenos Aires to protect business interests.
Chile – 1891 – Marines sent to Chile and clashed with nationalist rebels.
Haiti – 1891 – American troops suppress a revolt by Black workers on United States-claimed Navassa Island.
Hawaii – 1893 – Navy sent to Hawaii to overthrow the independent kingdom – Hawaii annexed by the United States.
Nicaragua – 1894 – Troops occupied Bluefield’s, a city on the Caribbean Sea, for a month.
China – 1894-95 – Navy, Army, and Marines landed during the Sino-Japanese War.
Korea – 1894-96 – Troops kept in Seoul during the war.
Panama – 1895 – Army, Navy, and Marines landed in the port city of Corinto.
China – 1894-1900 – Troops occupied China during the Boxer Rebellion.
Philippines – 1898-1910 – Navy and Army troops landed after the Philippines fell during the Spanish-American War; 600,000 Filipinos were killed.
Cuba – 1898-1902 – Troops seized Cuba in the Spanish-American War; the United States still maintains troops at Guantanamo Bay today.
Puerto Rico – 1898 – present – Troops seized Puerto Rico in the Spanish-American War and still occupy Puerto Rico today.
Nicaragua – 1898 – Marines landed at the port of San Juan del Sur.
Samoa – 1899 – Troops landed as a result over the battle for succession to the throne.
Panama – 1901-14 – Navy supported the revolution when Panama claimed independence from Colombia. American troops have occupied the Canal Zone since 1901 when construction for the canal began.
Honduras – 1903 – Marines landed to intervene during a revolution.
Dominican Rep 1903-04 – Troops landed to protect American interests during a revolution.
Korea – 1904-05 – Marines landed during the Russo-Japanese War.
Cuba – 1906-09 – Troops landed during an election.
Nicaragua – 1907 – Troops landed and a protectorate was set up.
Honduras – 1907 – Marines landed during Honduras’ war with Nicaragua.
Panama – 1908 – Marines sent in during Panama’s election.
Nicaragua – 1910 – Marines landed for a second time in Bluefields and Corinto.
Honduras – 1911 – Troops sent in to protect American interests during Honduras’ civil war.
China – 1911-41 – Navy and troops sent to China during continuous flare-ups.
Cuba – 1912 – Troops sent in to protect American interests in Havana.
Panama – 1912 – Marines landed during Panama’s election.
Honduras – 1912 – Troops sent in to protect American interests.
Nicaragua – 1912-33 – Troops occupied Nicaragua and fought guerrillas during its 20-year civil war.
Mexico – 1913 – Navy evacuated Americans during revolution.
Dominican Rep 1914 – Navy fought with rebels over Santo Domingo.
Mexico – 1914-18 – Navy and troops sent in to intervene against nationalists.
Haiti – 1914-34 – Troops occupied Haiti after a revolution and occupied Haiti for 19 years.
Dominican Rep 1916-24 – Marines occupied the Dominican Republic for eight years.
Cuba – 1917-33 – Troops landed and occupied Cuba for 16 years; Cuba became an economic protectorate.
World War I – 1917-18 – Navy and Army sent to Europe to fight the Axis powers.
Russia – 1918-22 – Navy and troops sent to eastern Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution; Army made five landings.
Honduras – 1919 – Marines sent during Honduras’ national elections.
Guatemala – 1920 – Troops occupied Guatemala for two weeks during a union strike.
Turkey – 1922 – Troops fought nationalists in Smyrna.
China – 1922-27 – Navy and Army troops deployed during a nationalist revolt.
Honduras – 1924-25 – Troops landed twice during a national election.
Panama – 1925 – Troops sent in to put down a general strike.
China – 1927-34 – Marines sent in and stationed for seven years throughout China.
El Salvador – 1932 – Naval warships deployed during the FMLN revolt under Marti.
World War II – 1941-45 – Military fought the Axis powers: Japan, Germany, and Italy.
Yugoslavia – 1946 – Navy deployed off the coast of Yugoslavia in response to the downing of an American plane.
Uruguay – 1947 – Bombers deployed as a show of military force.
Greece – 1947-49 – United States operations insured a victory for the far right in national “elections.”
Germany – 1948 – Military deployed in response to the Berlin blockade; the Berlin airlift lasts 444 days.
Philippines – 1948-54 – The CIA directed a civil war against the Filipino Huk revolt.
Puerto Rico – 1950 – Military helped crush an independence rebellion in Ponce.
Korean War – 1951-53 – Military sent in during the war.
Iran – 1953 – The CIA orchestrated the overthrow of democratically elected Mossadegh and restored the Shah to power.
Vietnam – 1954 – The United States offered weapons to the French in the battle against Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh.
Guatemala – 1954 – The CIA overthrew the democratically elected Arbenz and placed Colonel Armas in power.
Egypt – 1956 – Marines deployed to evacuate foreigners after Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal.
Lebanon – 1958 – Navy supported an Army occupation of Lebanon during its civil war.
Panama – 1958 – Troops landed after Panamanians demonstrations threatened the Canal Zone.
Vietnam – 1950s-75 – Vietnam War.
Cuba – 1961 – The CIA-directed Bay of Pigs invasions failed to overthrow the Castro government.
Cuba – 1962 – The Navy quarantines Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Laos – 1962 – Military occupied Laos during its civil war against the Pathet Lao guerrillas.
Panama – 1964 – Troops sent in and Panamanians shot while protesting the United States presence in the Canal Zone.
Indonesia – 1965 – The CIA orchestrated a military coup.
Dominican Rep- 1965-66 – Troops deployed during a national election.
Guatemala – 1966-67 – Green Berets sent in.
Cambodia – 1969-75 – Military sent in after the Vietnam War expanded into Cambodia.
Oman – 1970 – Marines landed to direct a possible invasion into Iran.
Laos – 1971-75 – Americans carpet-bomb the countryside during Laos’ civil war.
Chile – 1973 – The CIA orchestrated a coup, killing President Allende who had been popularly elected. The CIA helped to establish a military regime under General Pinochet.
Cambodia – 1975 – Twenty-eight Americans killed in an effort to retrieve the crew of the ayaquez, which had been seized.
Angola – 1976-92 – The CIA backed South African rebels fighting against Marxist Angola.
Iran – 1980 – Americans aborted a rescue attempt to liberate 52 hostages seized in the Teheran embassy.
Libya – 1981 – American fighters shoot down two Libyan fighters.
El Salvador – 1981-92 – The CIA, troops, and advisers aid in El Salvador’s war against the FMLN.
Nicaragua – 1981-90 – The CIA and NSC directed the Contra War against the Sandinistas.
Lebanon – 1982-84 – Marines occupied Beirut during Lebanon’s civil war; 241 were killed in the American barracks and Reagan “redeployed” the troops to the Mediterranean.
Honduras – 1983-89 – Troops sent in to build bases near the Honduran border.
Grenada – 1983-84 – American invasion overthrew the Maurice Bishop government.
Iran – 1984 – American fighters shot down two Iranian planes over the Persian Gulf.
Libya – 1986 – American fighters hit targets in and around the capital city of Tripoli.
Bolivia – 1986 – The Army assisted government troops on raids of cocaine areas.
Iran – 1987-88 – The United States intervened on the side of Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War.
Libya – 1989 – Navy shot down two more Libyan jets.
Virgin Islands – 1989 – Troops landed during unrest among Virgin Island peoples.
Philippines – 1989 – Air Force provided air cover for government during coup.
Panama – 1989-90 – 27,000 Americans landed in overthrow of President Noriega; over 2,000 Panama civilians were killed.
Liberia – 1990 – Troops entered Liberia to evacuate foreigners during civil war.
Saudi Arabia – 1990-91 – American troops sent to Saudi Arabia, which was a staging area in the war against Iraq.
Kuwait – 1991 – Troops sent into Kuwait to turn back Saddam Hussein.
Somalia – 1992-94 – Troops occupied Somalia during civil war.
Bosnia – 1993-95 – Air Force jets bombed “no-fly zone” during civil war in Yugoslavia.
Haiti – 1994-96 – American troops and Navy provided a blockade against Haiti’s military government. The CIA restored Aristide to power.
Zaire – 1996-97 – Marines sent into Rwanda Hutus’ refugee camps in the area where the Congo revolution began.
Albania – 1997 – Troops deployed during evacuation of foreigners.
Sudan – 1998 – American missiles destroyed a pharmaceutical complex where alleged nerve gas components were manufactured.
Afghanistan – 1998 – Missiles launched towards alleged Afghan terrorist training camps.
Yugoslavia – 1999 – Bombings and missile attacks carried out by the United States in conjunction with NATO in the 11 week war against Milosevic.
Iraq – 1998-2001 – Missiles launched into Baghdad and other large Iraq cities for four days. American jets enforced “no-fly zone” and continued to hit Iraqi targets since December 1998.
But: meanwhile: you haven’t responded to the factual evidence of RFK being a cunt.
“What the Kennedys had inherited from their father, was a clear view of reality and how best to act within it to effect what they wanted to happen. They were experts in the business of real politics, and we can argue all day long about what they did, but at some point we have to delineate the wider frame of History that these brothers were contained within.”
Why the apologia? Why the euphemisms? The “wider frame of history” that these brothers were “contained in” was Anglo-American Supremacy, thanks. Do you have to be a non-white to be bothered by this?
“The journeying flash of a neuron getting from A to Z, explaining why on a million points along the way, X was a cunt, Y was a cunt, A was a cunt, B is a cunt and I or you are Ms fucking Fabbo – takes not the effort of facing up to the shadowforce in the oval office and not getting murdered in the process.”
This is related to that age-old argument, “It’s easy to criticize!” Well, fuck me, it is indeed. But the ease of it has nothing to do with whether the criticisms are true or not. It’s an elegant way of smothering dissent, raising the bar so high… ie, “unless you yourself have a plan for stopping the repression and mass-slaughter, it’s very easy for you to criticize repression and mass-slaughter!”
Nonsense, Comrade. Facts are facts. Aura vs Data. I don’t care how white the Kennedy teeth are: they are different from the Bushes by degrees, not category.
I think my biggest question for you, again, is: why, despite the evidence, must you cling to that Kennedy image? Where did the image come from?
[ed.'s note: due to the responsibilities of playing with my daughter on a Saturday, I'm doing these responses piecemeal as opportunity arises... check back on them to catch new additions]
Yeah, I’ve seen the wiki page of American wars outside its borders.
I don’t know Steve, you say you have to be of the system to get along within it, but unless we are in the political system on a practical level like your town councillors, right through to Obama, what we say carries only so much authority.
For example. There’s a person. Lets call that person ‘I’, who doesn’t like ice-cream vans, for some long complex reasons that are too long and boring to go into here, but relate to having a pathological hatred of anything to do with ice-cream sellers.
I could sepnd my entire life warning people of the dangers and consequences of stepping into that colourful van and becoming intimate with the life and experience of a mobile ice cream vendor. After a few years hard study, I could start triumphantly making connections between Evil and ice-cream, find a few criminal dregs who murdered young kids, were corrupt politicans, where all sorts of things – and tie it all into the fact they all at some point, had spent time in the white coats flogging posicles, and after a lifetimes work, delvier some big Theory of everything that states all the lunacy in the world is a direct result of Mister Mickey selling 99′s.
However, unless I were to sell ice-cream myself, actually experience it as much as I denounce, I can only ever be talking out my fanny, I would argue, invent, write; and not because I am overly concerned and interested in geo-political reality, or icecream – but because I want you to read it.
It is interesting to note that John Kennedy, was in the process of taking back the powers of the federal reserve private banking cartel, with his order:
With the stroke of a pen, Mr. Kennedy was on his way to putting the Federal Reserve Bank of New York out of business. If enough of these silver certificats were to come into circulation they would have eliminated the demand for Federal Reserve notes..
Oh, sorry Steve, I didn’t see until now the writing after the wiki war check-list.
You ask why must I cling to the Kennedy image?
Because I am a Fitzgerald myself, I suppose.
“However, unless I were to sell ice-cream myself, actually experience it as much as I denounce, I can only ever be talking out my fanny…”
Disagree. The life-long experience of buying and eating the ice cream is a DATA-base, too. If you’re paying attention to the realities of it, eh? But, listen: it’s as though you’ve forgotten that the entire supposed point of “journalism” is to report honestly on the activities of the Ice Cream Mafia… informing citizens who therefore don’t need to sell Ice Cream in order to have some purchase on the Truth about selling it. Of course, most “professional journalism” is a sham… a control of the Truth that doesn’t involve delivering it. Which is why John Pilger… and the late Gary Webb… are/were so important.
I don’t want to claim it’s Hopeless, Des. But I’m not in the business of fooling myself. The fuckers have the planet in a serious headlock. The Way Out will not appear within our lifetimes. It’s a Generational Process. First step is being honest with ourselves. Second step is patience (Third step: throw away that Television). The Fuckers have been doing this for hundreds of years. Think about it: it’s an unbroken lineage… what would have caused the Discontinuity? America was founded by an Aristocracy, not its Serfs.
“Democratic ideas are most likely to take root among discontented and oppressed classes, rising middle classes, or perhaps some sections of an old, alienated, and partially disinherited aristocracy, but they do not appeal to a privileged class that is still amplifying its privileges. With a half dozen exceptions at the most, the men of the Philadelphia Convention were sons of men who had considerable position and wealth, and as a group they had advanced well beyond their fathers. Only one of them, William Few of Georgia, could be said in any sense to represent the yeoman farmer class which constituted the overwhelming majority of the free population. In the late eighteenth century “the better kind of people” found themselves set off from the mass by a hundred visible, tangible, and audible distinctions of dress, speech, manners, and education. There was a continuous lineage of upper-class contempt, from pre-Revolutionary Tories like Peggy Hutchinson, the Governor’s daughter, who wrote one day: “The dirty mob was all about me as I drove into town,” to a Federalist like Hamilton, who candidly disdained the people. Mass unrest was often received in the spirit of young Gouverneur Morris: “The mob begin to think and reason. Poor reptiles! . . . They bask in the sun, and ere noon they will bite, depend upon it. The gentry begin to fear this.” Nowhere in America or Europe—not even among the great liberated thinkers of the Enlightenment—did democratic ideas appear respectable to the cultivated classes. Whether the Fathers looked to the cynically illuminated intellectuals of contemporary Europe or to their own Christian heritage of the idea of original sin, they found quick confirmation of the notion that man is an unregenerate rebel who has to be controlled.”
South Carolina Senator Robert Hayne put it plainly in 1824, “Our policy with regard to Hayti is plain. We never can acknowledge her independence. The peace and safety of a large part of our Union forbids us even to discuss it.” Haiti was a challenge to U.S. slavery; its freedom could not be allowed. George Washington’s government sent $400,000 to support the white planters.
PS the American Wars stuff wasn’t a “wiki”: it was from the writings of a fellow whose name I’d rather not print here. Wrong type of name, innit? Don’t want to end up on a list, mon.
Steven your last TET with its industrial ammounts of YouTubery discombobulated my work computer so I had to retire early with overloaded pixels and wonder when you’d jump ship to a new thread. That plus several weeks preparation for summer touring and a new project which has subsequently stalled for the moment until we can find someone to top up a budget for 10 performers and 10 life-sized puppet figures.
I was interested in your comments on Pilger and television. My memory of Pilger was that he was very much a TV man so I find it difficult to see him as an outsider.Also very much a Daily Mirror journalist too and a populist in spreading the word for his causes/beliefs. I’m not au fait with all that he wrote but I remember those early reports on Pol Pot.
I’d always found him like a harder-edged version of Michael Moore i.e great starting points but a tendency to cloud the issues by trying to drag too much into the documentary/article. Fatally so in Moore’s case but not always clear in Pilger’s case as I remember.
Comrade ET! Good to have you back in the Bunker!
1. Any photos from the production-in-progress you’d like to post here? We’d be fascinated, man.
2. Re: Pilger’s cred: if he weren’t any sort of “insider”, he’d be in no position to report on this stuff, is how I see it. I’m not superstitious about TV as a medium, I’m wary about content.
3. Re: Pilger’s populism: I don’t see that as inconsistent with his message or an affront to Secular Humanism as a worldview or the Truth as a category of Data (my old DATA vs AURA war cry). In any case, “journalistic neutrality” is a myth that the myth-makers assert is being upheld only when it’s their views being promulgated
4. Re: “dragging too much” into the doc… there can never be too many facts, IMO. Propaganda tends to be slick/streamlined/bite-sized… the Truth is a fucking mess. To return to the original point: no one wants to think of RFK with bad breath or a selfish erection or as a power-mad fuck who did what he had to do to squirm up the greasy pole of Empire (from a pretty high starting point, we should add) in a grab for that morbidly beautiful brass ring (the one his brother died clutching). These Kennedy/Reagan/Clinton/Bush/Churchill/ Truman/ Washington people are not heroes and even the stuff on public record shows us this conclusively but our need for heroes/myths/dichotomies is strong; Pilger’s talks and articles are on a continuum with Pinter’s Nobel speech and Chomsky’s work and Gary Webb’s fatal adventure in exposé and Dorothy’s dog at the end of the Wizard of Oz, tugging away the curtain. Only, in this case, it’s reversed, innit? The image of the Wizard is benign… it’s the man behind the curtain we should be afraid of.
I mean… really afraid of.
Dozens of drawings only Steven which when I have time I’ll send via your email address and you can do with them what you will. Likely to be next week sometime as I’m escaping the UK election results here with a gig on the Polish border over the weekend.
I didn’t mean populism as a criticism btw. I’m a populist of sorts myself, only I dislike for the main part the forms that populism usually takes.
Pilger was like Dennis Potter – loved and hated by turns and given the chance to develop their views over time. I don’t think that happens anymore on TV – it’s more of a hit single attitude now.
Yeah, slip a sheaf of Art our way and we’ll (that’s the royale “we” with cheese) post them up glorious. And, Christ, I could go for some “Singing Detective” (Gambon’s version; wasn’t there an American re-make?) now that you mention it.
Listen: mid-period TV was far from monolithically evil. I saw “Between Time and Timbuktu” on TV, as a kid (as I’ve mentioned here before, I think) and it was a (positively) formative experience. Not to mention Ignatz Mouse and Krazy Kat.
YES, SIR! (is this the pre-campaign for the Palin Presidency?)
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Clearly, anti-intellectuals have all the fun!
RANDOM NOTES
1. Paradox in a theory is a sure sign of error or incompleteness
2. To sense the world is to enter it; to read the world is to be entered
3. The page is the first screen; the wall is the first page; the window is the first cinema
4. Reading is closer to eating than thinking: thinking is closer to digging a shred of chicken from between your molars with your tongue
5. A philosopher is a novelist who doesn’t know how to make the words more interesting
6. Writing is divination; reading is the prediction come true
7. Academic writing has the same quality, whether it’s translated or in the original: a halting imprecision as a direct result of the inability to control the temptation to avoid the trap of leaving oneself open to being proven wrong
Besides being interested in living and investing in your country, i am Miss Blender Bakari Freepong, the daugther of Mr.William J. Freepong of kenama distrit in serria-leone. My father was killed by his business partiners on a business trip. Following the political crisis in my country, i was forced to live my country to Abidjan Ivory Coast where my late father deposited the sum of $(4.500.000.00) (Four million Five Hundred united state dollars)in a security company here in Abidjan.
The money he made during his time as coco marchants in my country.To be honest with you, this is the only inheritance left for me by my late father which i am with the necessary documents concerning this deposite. Now i have succeeded in locating the security company here in Abidjan cote d’ ivoire and I am soliciting for your assistance to help me to transfer this money into your country for investments so that we can invest it in any lucrative business in your country because this is my only hope of life.
I have promise to gratify you with 10% of the total sum if you assist me. Awaiting anxiously to hear from you so that we can discuss the modalities of this transaction. Please kindly contact me with the above email address immediately for more discussion.
Thanks for your kind attention.
Most emphatically,
Miss Blender Bakari Freepong,
Last night I was invited by Comrade DJ Sensei Desmond to visit the Poetry site he co-hosts… Scarriet; the articles/discussions on the site are quite interesting and not bloggy (ie, shallow and schmooze-heavy) and often learnéd but I found thereon an old discussion about a Billy Collins pome (Billy being a former Poet Laureate of Murrka)… the pome itself made of very poor language; too wordy and unremarkable and estranged, in every line, from any sense of le mot juste… and I got an idea for an “extreme makeover” feature called…
THE POME REMADE
(the original pome)
Lines Composed Over Three Thousand Miles From Tintern Abbey
I was here before, a long time ago,
and now I am here again
is an observation that occurs in poetry
as frequently as rain occurs in life.
The fellow may be gazing
over an English landscape,
hillsides dotted with sheep,
a row of tall trees topping the downs,
or he could be moping through the shadows
of a dark Bavarian forest,
a wedge of cheese and a volume of fairy tales
tucked into his rucksack.
But the feeling is always the same.
It was better the first time.
This time it is not nearly as good.
I’m not feeling as chipper as I did back then.
Something is always missing—
swans, a glint on the surface of a lake,
some minor but essential touch.
Or the quality of things has diminished.
The sky was a deeper, more dimensional blue,
clouds were more cathedral-like,
and water rushed over rock
with greater effervescence.
From our chairs we have watched
the poor author in his waistcoat
as he recalls the dizzying icebergs of childhood
and mills around in a field of weeds.
We have heard the poets long dead
declaim their dying
from a promontory, a riverbank,
next to a haycock, within a copse.
We have listened to their dismay,
the kind that issues from poems
the way water issues forth from hoses,
the way the match always gives its little speech on fire.
And when we put down the book at last,
lean back, close our eyes,
stinging with print,
and slip in the bookmark of sleep,
we will be schooled enough to know
that when we wake up
a little before dinner
things will not be nearly as good as they once were.
Something will be missing
from this long, coffin-shaped room,
the walls and windows now
only two different shades of gray,
the glossy gardenia drooping
in its chipped terra-cotta pot.
And on the floor, shoes, socks,
the browning core of an apple.
Nothing will be as it was
a few hours ago, back in the glorious past
before our naps, back in that Golden Age
that drew to a close sometime shortly after lunch.
–Billy Collins (1998, Hollander)
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(suggested adjustments)
Lines Composed Over Three Thousand Miles From Tintern Abbey
I was here before, a long time ago (how about lose “before”, “a” and “time”?),
and now I am here again
is an observation that occurs in poetry (and cut that “is”)
as frequently as rain occurs in (“to”) life (as though it can occur elsewhere; try “Portland”).
The fellow may be gazing (stronger minus “may be”)
over an English landscape,
hillsides (“hills”) dotted (“tufted” would have been nice) with sheep,
a row (“rows”) of tall trees topping the downs (don’t think “tall” is necessary; specific type of trees more vivid),
or he could be moping through the shadows (try: “or he’s moping toward shadows”)
of a dark Bavarian forest (do we need those “shadows” in the “dark”?) ,
a wedge of cheese (“a sweating cheese”) and a volume of fairy tales
tucked (“pressed”) into his rucksack.
But the feeling is always the same.
It was better the first time.
This time it is not nearly as good (how many times can we say “time”?).
I’m not feeling as chipper (ugh) as I did back (lose “back”) then.
Something is always missing (those chiming “ings”)—
swans, a glint on the surface of a lake (as opposed to on its bottom),
some minor but (why “minor but”?) essential touch.
Or (lose “or”) the quality of things has diminished (without that “has” it might have sung).
The sky was a deeper (“fleshy” would be cooler), more dimensional blue,
clouds were (lose “were”) more cathedral-like (lose “like”),
and water rushed over (“smoothed”) rock
with greater effervescence (Schweppes?).
From our chairs we have watched
the poor author in his waistcoat (“the author in his rags”)
as he recalls the dizzying (“blinding”) icebergs of childhood
and mills around (“wheels” instead of “mills around”) in a field of (“through waist-high” instead of “in a field of”) weeds.
We have heard the poets long dead (try “long-elapsed”)
declaim their dying
from a (the) promontory, a (the) riverbank,
next to a (by the) haycock, within a (lose “within a”; “the” )copse. (grandiloquent-yet-flat: a paradox?)
We have listened to their dismay,
the kind that issues from poems
the way water issues forth (or just plain “issues” or how about “pours”) from hoses,
the way the match always gives its little (extraneously folksy adjective) speech on fire.
And when we put down (“drop” instead of “put down”) the book at last,
lean back, close our eyes (“eyes shut”),
stinging with print (ourselves or our eyes?),
and slip in (“and finger”) the bookmark of sleep,
we will be schooled enough (lose “enough”) to know
that when we wake up (lose “up”)
a little before dinner
things will not be nearly (lose “nearly”) as good as they once (“once” is extraneous) were.
Something will be missing (“something will be missed”)
from this long (lose “long”), coffin-shaped room,
the walls and windows now
only two different shades of gray,
the glossy gardenia drooping
in (“over”) its chipped terra-cotta pot.
And on the floor, shoes, socks,
the browning core (“spine”) of an apple.
Nothing will be as it (lose “it”) was
a few (lose “a few”; use “just”) hours ago, back in the (lose “back in”) glorious past
before our naps, back in (lose “back in” again) that Golden Age
that drew to a close sometime shortly (lose “sometime shortly”) after lunch.
–Billy Collins (1998, Hollander)
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(new pome)
Lines Composed Over Three Thousand Miles From Tintern Abbey, Improved
I was here, long ago
and now I am here again
an observation that occurs in poetry
as frequently as rain occurs to Portland
The fellow gazing
over an English landscape,
hills tufted with sheep,
rows of Ash topping the downs,
or he’s moping toward shadows
of a Bavarian forest ,
sweating cheese and a volume of fairy tales
pressed in his rucksack.
But the feeling is always the same.
It was better the first.
This is not nearly as good.
I’m not feeling as here as I did then.
Something is always missed:
swans, glints of lake,
some essential touch.
The quality of things diminished.
The sky was a fleshy, more dimensional blue,
clouds more cathedral,
and water smoothed rock
with greater tumult.
From our chairs we have watched
the author in his rags
as he recalls the blinder icebergs of childhood and
wheels through waist-high weeds.
We have heard the poets long-elapsed
declaim their dying
from the promontory, the riverbank,
by the haycock, the copse.
We have listened to their dismay,
the kind that issues from poems
the way water pours from hoses,
the way the match always wastes its speech on fire.
And when we drop the book at last,
lean back, eyes shut tight against
the sting of print,
and finger the bookmark of sleep,
we will be schooled to know
on waking
a little before dinner that
things will not be good as they were.
Something will be missed
from this coffin-shaped room,
the walls and windows now
only two shades of gray,
the glossy gardenia drooping
over its chipped terra-cotta pot.
And on the floor, shoes, socks,
the browning spine of an apple.
Nothing will be as was
just hours ago, the glorious past
before our naps, that Golden Age
that drew to its close after lunch.
–Billy Collins/ Augustine (1998, 2010)
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Sure, that “blinder icebergs” is gratuitous but it’s more interesting than “dizzying icebergs” and the rest of the pome is much spiffier now; it’s almost fuckable. Glad I could help, Billy!
Tom (Brady) over at Scarriet responds to my sneeze across Billy Collins’ Hallmark bow with:
#
thomasbrady said,
April 25, 2010 at 12:36 pm
Steven,
You ruin the poem in the first stanza. Why would you mention Portland? Portland?? Now you’ve got the reader thinking about…Portland…and that’s not what Billy wants the reader to do at all….
Why would you want to add Portland to this poem?
Tell me what you were thinking!
Portland???
Gadzooks!
Tom
to which I replied:
Steven Augustine said,
April 25, 2010 at 2:04 pm
Nah, if Billy thinks “English landscape” is more “poetic” than “Portland”, he has a middlebrow ear of purest imitation vinyl (but I knew that already). Why shouldn’t the reader think of “Portland” for a moment, there… it’s a more surprising choice than the sophomoric pairing of “Bavarian forest” and “fairytale”.
Collins’ orig. poem isn’t much of a poem (it lacks *talented* poetry’s necessary concision and any evidence of ability in the realm of word-choice), it’s just a clunky little boilerplate snippet of pseudo-philosophy: ie: really Billy? We never step in the same river twice? Is that why not-entirely-well-read politicians like your Greeting Cards… because they kinda make you “think”? I made that crap sing, baby. But I don’t expect to be thanked for that! Laugh
As you can see, I didn’t come here to agree! (laugh again). But I enjoyed the Poe article…
I then added (and Tom then replied):
“Collins explodes the nostalgic notion of the good old days, or good old golden age…”
With a shrug, Collins says, “Hey, you can’t step in the same river twice; nothing to get ‘mopey’ over!”
Irony in poetry (like emails) needs a key, internal to the poem, to work; a dissonant signal (like, erm, “Portland”?) that divides the text at least in two: the “send-up” vs “intended meaning”. Otherwise, Billy is counting on us to know a little something about Billy’s outlook in order to measure the intended degree and target of the irony. The word “moping” does not, in and of itself, indicate that the moper is falling for one of the more insidious traps of Classicism.
It’s my opinion that choosing between a crappy poem, and a better one, to make the same point: why not opt for the better one? With vital, rather than banal, language. Why take aim at a middlebrow misapprehension with a middlebrow poem? Is it the convention of talking down to the anti-intellectual American reader that enforces an unspoken rule that formal richness/variety/invention can’t deliver the “message” without causing sales to drop?
“…one could fault Collins for the awful line, “as frequently as rain occurs in life” but this would be to miss the point. Such ‘badness’ contributes to the necessary looseness, which in turn contributes to the trust between author and reader; such badness is like air in food which gives it lightness.”
Tom, I think one could rescue any shiddy pome with this maneuver; what’s the point? This is just tortuous Crappist Apologia.
“As long as Collins works in stanzas, he doesn’t really need the line, or he can get away with lines of no interest whatsoever, such as “the walls and windows now.” His lines can have no interest, the lines of a Billy Collins poem can be invisible, more or less, as long as he uses stanzas; few critics really understand how Collins’ poetry can even work.”
Billy’s poems “work” by being harmless/unchallenging and mediocrity-affirming to an intellectually-insecure (in fact: hostile) public with zero tolerance for being educated in anything other than career-advancing topics. Billy’s pomes are very long greeting cards; some more clever than others. What’s the mystery? And the ugly part is the “if so many people like it, it must be good” swagger that means Big Time Professional Wrestling is better than a 60-minute interview with Eric Satie. Well, fine. What can I do about that? No biggie. I’ll just bitch about it when the subject comes up. Like now!
Reply
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thomasbrady said,
April 25, 2010 at 5:42 pm
Now, here’s the thing, Steven: Because you can quickly sum up the essence of the Collins poem, you believe this somehow invalidates it…but this is the error the New Critics made…and here’s my reply to the New Critics: Ease of paraphrase in no way determines the worth, GOOD OR BAD, of the poem.
Here’s the point: Poems are not made for YOU; they are made for people. If Billy’s poem is ‘easy’ for you to grasp, it is perfectly valid for YOU to dismisss the poem, if that’s how you see it, but it is NOT, in a SCIENTIFIC OR CRITICAL SENSE, a fault of the poem, if it IS accessible to others, and if we read Billy’s poem with this IDEAL AUDIENCE in mind, we find the poem is excellent, as far as we can say it is. There’s no pleasing the individul mind, for neither science, nor excellent art, is FOR THE INDIVIDUAL MIND; it is for the IDEAL MASS OF HUMANITY–this is what poetry is for, not YOU, who are in a position to dismiss the Collins poem, because it is too ‘easy’ —-for who? for… YOU.
LIkewise, we find that YOU (surprise) are terribly fond of difficult poems of which the MASS OF HUMANITY puts no stock in. This, and here’s the crucial point, does not make YOU right and the MASS OF HUMANITY wrong; it doesn’t make you wrong and them right, necessarily EITHER…but…
In his ‘Essay of Criticism’ Pope warns against the critic who finds fault in a fastidious way with a work which is excellent in its general sweep…I think with Collins you are missing the forest for the trees… what Collins does may LOOK easy, but it’s not…
Over at Quick Study, the unwaveringly-intelligent Scott McClemee wrote something about a couple of references to something he wrote about (is this meta-enough, yet?) Andy Warhol. Which reminded me of my recent thoughts that the question “But is it Art” should nowadays be re-phrased as, “But is it an Art audience?” and I commented:
By Steven Augustine on March 27, 2010 6:11 PM
“It is the point in art history at which the problem of what constitutes the artwork, or the artworld, is posed in a radical way that exhausts the question while exploding the range of objects or practices so designated.”
Scott, this topic is the sand on so many crackers over here. I have one friend who’s (by sheer luck) a massive Art star; two who are struggling mid-listers; and then at least a half a dozen who’ll be killing themselves soon. This stuff gets discussed often in this city (Berlin).
Art remains as “deep” or “important” as it ever was if our contemplation of it does; to stare at a Warhol litho/piss painting with the same openness (and gratitude, even?) in the face of one’s mystification as with [name your canon master] is what’s needed: an open mind and some spare time. What Art requires is something from the Audience, too.
This old “But is it Art?” debate never switches perspective and investigate/prosecutes an audience that’s just as blasé in the face of [name your canon master] as a Warhol or a Chris Ofili. Where is the good-faith symbiosis of Artist and Audience? We always blame the Artist (and in very capitalist terms: if your product doesn’t sell, change-or-repackage the product). But imagine slapping down one artifact/gesture/concept after another for a crowd with a bored “impress me!” look on its face.
I know so many Artists who work hard, work well, talk and work long into the night. They won’t get anywhere without either kissing a magic ass or getting a serious PR budget. They show in neighborhood galleries: people wander in from the twilight and wander back out again without breaking stride or adjusting the distracted smile. “Funny” or “shocking” Art slows them down a little. Subtle Art… stuff you have to *contemplate*… forget it.
The “end of Art” is out happily watching The Hurt Locker tonight; it will come home and watch porn or do facebook. What constitutes the audience?
The Gears of Serendipity are at work: I won’t even bother to post my part of this fairly-involved discussion about Art I just had with Tom Brady (though I’ll flesh out the Billy Collins chat we had, in a few minutes, above):
thomasbrady said,
April 25, 2010 at 4:43 pm
I’ll give you an example: Kepler’s science canceled Aristotle’s art…for what can we call outdated ‘science’ but art?
Art is simply outdated science—and we have more faith in art which we don’t know is obsolete yet. The art which never becomes obsolete will one day be known for what it really is: science.
There’s no such thing as “Artistic insight;” once art becomes truly insightful it turns into science.
I find this to be a head-twisting comment. Not so much its content as that anyone would say or, even, believe it.
Egon Schiele: outdated scientist or scientist-of-the-future?
The Basement Plays
1. the statement
-And then she said, “What do you mean by that?”
-And I said, “What do you mean, what do I mean by that?”
-And she just stared at me.
-I repeated, “What do you mean, what do I mean by that?” and I added:
-“I don’t mean things, I say them. I said it. You make it sound as though I’d merely attempted to say something, when what I did was to accomplish that much and move on. I am a do-er, not a mean-er. Women mean, but men do.”
-It was then that she hit me.
-It was not a forceful blow like a man’s. It was a cruel blow, like a woman’s. I was upset.
-When I came to, later, I thought about what had happened, and realized that every thought and action in my life until that moment had led me directly to it. And, by extension, the thoughts and actions of every single one of my ancestors, from the beginning of time. Five billion years back, chains of carbon molecules linked up, or whatever they do, resulting, as surely as though it had been the sole point of the exercise, in this silly woman on her back in the missionary position, striking the eye of her only remaining friend.
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2. monolog
-So much of the world that is made by humans came into existence only because the eye demanded to see it. This “eye pressure” is the greatest primal force in the human and to that extent the eye is the only “evil” sense organ. The nose demands only that we avoid offending it; the skin is happy with a simple variety of touches; the tongue is only slightly more demanding than the skin and therefore fire was invented not to satisfy the tongue with cooked flesh but to satisfy the eye’s demand to see flames. The ear demands very little and it often gets too much in return for its demands and many new forms (à la Serialism) are invented only to be quickly discarded. But the eye discards nothing and still it wants more. It demanded to see sodomy and photography was created and nothing was discarded. It demanded to see flesh melt and the candid, un-posed shadows of the vaporized and so Hiroshima was created and nothing was discarded. It demanded to see decapitations and The Internet was created and nothing was discarded. The fact that burning humans alive is no longer a popular spectacle in many parts of the world is probably because cinema and television fulfilled, much better, that particular demand of the eye: to see the inter-mingle of pain, transfiguration and death with light. The eye pressure was temporarily relieved, in that case. But the demand will return re-doubled
Just posted this on a mod site and am testing if it will appear. Take it down if you want Steve.
cheers
[ed.'s note: Des: erm... what? laugh]
The ART vs SCIENCE debate I had with Tom Brady (which is linked to the one I had with Bill Benson) put me in mind of the HG Wells-based film THINGS TO COME. In the Wells-scripted film, Science is humankind’s ultimate muse and savior… the Arts are represented by a character named “Theotocopulos” who gives a climactic, progress-bashing speech before a rocket is launched into space. Wells makes Theotocopulos not only an Artist but a Religious one at that… making it clear that the Author doesn’t want to give this character’s views much rational authority. The original text (from 1933; the film came out in 1936) is rich material, too. This schism is a defining schism; Wells was the defining fantasist of a pseudo-objective-worldview-cum-religious-orthodoxy (what is the concept of Progress but humankind’s motion towards the realized moment of a “City of God”, which is just a euphemism for the Anglo-American Techno-Dominion of the Earth) which TET is a fortified bunker pagoda against.
Here’s what I mean (these definitions may sharpen in future debates) by ART and SCIENCE, roughly:
Science as a body of knowledge describing (attempting to describe) the universe as quantifiable objects, forces and processes according to laws which transcend (whether or not they are apprehended by) human consciousness.
Art as a body of human-consciousness-contingent objects, actions and practices focused (often, but not exclusively or necessarily) on Aesthetic goals.
THE MIDNIGHT SHOW
“In 1936 (when the film was made) the peaceful Everytown (read: London) is bracing for conflict, which comes in 1940 in the form of massed air raids. A decades-long world war ensues, bringing an end to civilization. Thirty years later, Everytown has barely survived a terrible plague called The Walking Sickness, and is still a rubble heap. Its feudal ruler Rudolph, The Boss (Ralph Richardson) wages un-mechanized war on neighboring fiefdoms in hopes of gaining the raw materials to revive more sophisticated weaponry. Into this Dark Age lands a futuristic aeroplane. Its pilot John Cabal (Raymond Massey) wears a giant bubbleheaded helmet. Cabal was once a citizen of Everytown who preached pacifism. Now he’s a leader in a Basra-based technical guild called Wings over the World that is using superior technology to defeat the warlords and make a new start for mankind. The Boss holds Cabal hostage, but engineer Richard Gordon (Derrick De Marney), his wife Mary (Ann Todd) and Doctor Harding (Maurice Braddell) conspire to steal one of Everytown’s antiquated biplanes to summon reinforcements from Basra. When giant bombing planes drop the ‘Gas of Peace’ Everytown is conquered without bloodshed, and joins the New Order.
“Decades of scientific advancements follow, re-engineering Earth into a peaceful technocracy of industry and underground living. A century later in 2036 society has built a giant Space Gun to shoot humans around the moon, but a dissident group of artists led by master sculptor Theotocopulos (Cedric Hardwicke) incites a mob to destroy it. The revolt fails. As the Moon capsule blazes to the stars, John’s grandson Oswald Cabal pontificates on the destiny of Man.”
(go to the 7:00 for The Speech)
I’m hoping CDS Steven’s not still on the rag [ed.'s note: Steven is a card-carrying ArseHole; he doesn't care if he is "liked" by Virtual Chums and is only really interested, with TET, in clearing a space in Litblogglandia where readers can be assured that Ideas and the site-owner's notions of Truths aren't being blunted, polluted, trivialized or obscured by the conventions of intra-blog circle-jerkage; ie, just because you complimented me yesterday doesn't mean I daren't call you a Cunt tomorrow] or at least that he took a few of the chocolate-covered Motrin tablets I snuck in the M&M’s dish, and that the bloating, cramping and fits of rage have subsided [ed.'s note: not as long as kids are being bombed in their bedrooms by yer POTUSOC], and that it’s safe to reenter the Bunker Pagoda [ed.'s note: erm, not really for NormLibs, no: try Jim H's rumpus room or Duh-Ed's beer hall instead]. In any event, you really do have this nasty habit [ed.'s note: it's called Critical Fucking Thinking], CDS Steven, of fixing a legacy at the nadir and not at the apex of a person’s evolution [ed.'s note: you mean like Nixon?]. You did it with Gandhi, now RFK [ed.'s note: if you have any DATA to refute the DATA I present on either, please present it; otherwise, you're just being a Normative Dupe of AURA, in my opinion; a Dupe who guzzles the Kool Aid and evangelizes the propaganda on the package, too] . It would be like saying that Daniel Day Lewis should only be known for his wooden Nine performance and not this thrilling star turn at the 3:26 mark [ed.'s note: at least you got the Acting metaphor right]. And since we’re talking, can we please put an end to any vestige of the notion of the superiority of English (or even Welsh) actors over American ones [ed.'s note: good old Murkkan flag waving! The Dredge of Allegiance]. Look at these MFs! Ray Liotta’s got that Patrick Swayze [ed.'s note: vomit] thing going, but without the apparent BO [ed.'s note: I'm more interested in actual Ideas than Stated Preferences, now: got any? Not that I don't cherish this passive-aggressive barrage of Ideas-scattering water-balloons! Frances, if you can learn to respect the fact that I don't agree with your politics or your overall taste in music, then I'm glad to offer you the forum in which to let your obvious and considerable Intelligence shine; otherwise, I'm forced to provide this forum joylessly... I can't believe you'd prefer that].
Talk about your line-item veto!
Give me your brackets, your bold
Your huddled masses learning to breathe free
The wretched refuse of your teaming sure
Send these, the homeless tempest-tossed to me
I light my lamp beside the Pagodan door.
[ed.'s note: I don't delete comments, remember. That's a double-edged sword; make sure your quips are you at your wittiest and they won't embarrass you later...]
Apropos of nothing as one of Cap’n Woody’s characters says repeatedly in T-BAG, we’ve never really discussed Beatles covers in any depth here in the Pagoda. Here’s one I came across that has merit, by which I mean style and heart.
The topic was/is going to be the novel that Clemens and Kipling mention in the interview I posted…
(I’m watching Yellow Submarine with Offsprung on half the screen while talking to CDS Barry with the phone between my shoulder and my jaw while leaving comments on other blogs and I must say, if you’re intent on forcing me to tell you to fuck off, could you come back and do so a little later? PS Meanwhile, you could go and start your own blog about Bobby Kennedy, featuring Madonna vids, if you like…)
Just because you’re on a DRY DRUNK doesn’t mean I’m going to abandon ship or you. Blow your chunks, boyfriend. I’m not going anywhere.
[ed.'s note: fair enough! Let's ignore the twee conventions of Totalitarian Decorum and confront, rather than avoid, your egocentric, self-pitying animus, Frances. I say you're becoming an obnoxious, foot-stomping cunt because your demographic sense of entitlement has led you to believe that anyone who doesn't share your beliefs and values and actually says so deserves the twee punishment of your goofy quips. You think that just because you compliment others effusively, you have a right to effusive compliments in return and on your terms and if the arse-kiss traffic isn't endlessly two-way, the fuckers must be sexist pigs. Now, to avoid such traps myself, I don't bound around other bloggers' sites asserting the inevitable right of my own Fiction to be praised there; I post my creative output on my own site and if people like it, great, if they don't, great... there's no Moral Imperative for Litblogglandia, or the World Itself, to dig what I'm doing... and I certainly wouldn't go around calling people "racist" just because they didn't seem to like or notice my creative output. If you want to discuss your creative output in detail, do as I have done and start a blog for that purpose. But that swaggery-obnoxious politically-retarded/parochial middle-class-NYer sense of grievance of yours is a non-starter. You're not even refuting my points, you're just quipping. And the quips aren't even witty. So: fine. You want to turn this edition into a detailed investigation of Unexamined Sense of Entitlement as Victim-Wrath vs Artistic Necessity? I'm there. And PS: I've never had a swallow of alcohol in my life. I doubt you can say this.]
“You want to turn this edition into a detailed investigation of Unexamined Sense of Entitlement as Victim-Wrath vs Artistic Necessity? I’m there. ”
Cool!
Excellent! Air your beef(s). I will address them.
My beefs are of the vegetable and mineral variety.
The first one is about rules and rulers, pick your sphere, any sphere. Rulers should not be allowed to change the rules to extend their rule.
So, you’re not going to do anything silly like articulating accusations anyone can actually refute, then.
That’s just what I’ve done, but in an open-ended way. Call me a Chomskyian copy-cat if you will, but I think it’s the most creative way of fostering meaningful critique. Personally, I had fascist mayor Bloomberg in mind, but like the Cap’n, he’s a symptom. I had hoped you wanted to root around in richer soil, Mister Piggie. And I mean that in a Beckettian way, which, as you know, is an enormous compliment in my lexicon.
I quit. You win. I’m starting a new blog in the same location with the same name and content and you can take over the old one; the only stipulation being that yours has to have a mustache to distinguish between the two.
Katryn releases, that night, for the first time in their relationship, a detectable fart. In bed, while pretending to sleep, or maybe she is sleeping, a noiseless fart. Like a prelapsarian self-defense philtre, purchased at a Renaissance Fair and stored in a greenglass atomizer, which perhaps she’d been carrying around in her purse a few years, waiting for the chance to use it. O’Sirus imagines a Clara Bow-style silent picture title card with a fleur-de-lis in each corner and inscribed with ornately cursive script: a fart. A fart is the ultimate passive-aggressive gesture, conjugally speaking, and a symbol of contempt, i.e., who cares what you think of me? I am what I am. Only thing more significant is shitting with the bathroom door open, unless your inamorata has done time in prison. O’Sirus smells trouble.
Or maybe she’s reading too much into it and this intimately airborne toxic event is not a result of the latest revelation of how much of a breadwinner O’Sirus isn’t by comparison, it’s just the superfatty, digestion-dementing diet they’ve been on (not even a week, yet) since flying over. Old potato salad, meet burning rubber. O’Sirus tries breathing through her mouth a few seconds but realizes that that only means she’s eating it, but to smell something is to eat it, anyway, no?
Her trouble with money began in her own initial eggstate when mother Peg (lots more Irish then) allowed the phalloprogenitor to inseminate her beyond the framing device of a state-approved marriage contract in a cheap boarding house in New Jersey, one of those homey rundown places that ordinary people stay in for a weekend for access to the shore, bathed in the eggy exudia of a heavy, unwashed Atlantic. An inauspicious beginning that came this close (Peg’s refusal of anal sex) to not happening.
There she is in her high school career-guidance counselor’s propaganda-postered cubicle delivering the speech about not being the product of six billion years of planetary, then thirty million years of biological, evolution, just so she could get a so-called good job. To which Miss Brandischauer, fifty-ish and long-nosed and gray, though not bad looking in a lavender pantsuit, wearing those feline glasses bound with a chain to her neck, gave her a look like Here we are in the disco era and I’m still dealing with beatniks and said,
“Okay. So what was six billion years of planetary, plus thirty million years of biological, evolution, for?”
To which Kim had to admit to herself (if not to Miss Brandischauer) that she hadn’t the slightest fucking idea. But neither did Leonardo Da Vinci, Miss Brandischauer, she thought to say, nine hours later, in bed, eyes shining in the dark, ears keyed to the sound of Unca Mundee either fucking or midwifing or casually torturing a white woman next door. Kim tried to imagine a black woman, the direct descendant of slaves, coming out with a Thankyou! at the moment of orgasm.
So here’s O’Sirus, who pulled in, last year, tops, seventy-two thousand pounds, after taxes, from various downloads and royalties and appearance fees (and felt rich because of it) in bed in a room on a floor in a villa on an estate, not hers, worth something like forty times that amount, paid for by products and services derived, in the end, from the fruits of her own imagination.
Her disappointed trophy wife Katryn (O’Sirus often caught herself wondering if the dogs she’d seen partnered to various beggars in London were aware enough to curse the luck) doesn’t know the half of it, for not only is O’Sirus an unspectacular breadwinner, she’s ten years older than Katryn thinks she is, ten years closer to decrepitude, with its lowered iron ceiling on possible future earnings; ten years closer to needing a fulltime attendant to wipe the elasticity-depleted guardian of her small intestines and shave her chin whiskers and rub her legsores down with painful tonics. There’s a phase in every lower-class teenager’s life, resenting the parents for not being rich. O’Sirus is going through hers now, at 52, rigid with futile thoughts beside her loosely slumbering Katryn, who releases another skinless green blimp of biochemical sarcasm to dock with the larger one already floating nose-high above the ducal bed. O’Sirus is unaware of the fact that the bed, which costs more than the car she would have if she had one, comes with a wireless console featuring a button for a discreet ventilation technology that sucks bad farts through the mattress, replacing them with rose wind or lambentjasmine or subtle musk or the mysteriously-named neutral.
What was the meaning of her problem with money? What was the use and what was the severity of it? Could she be cured of it? Would she be rewarded for it? Was it a flaw in her DNA or a certain fine superiority in the fabric of her spirit? Was it time now to be proud of the extraordinary single-mindedness of her longterm avoidance of wealth or sick with shame and regret that she’d never owned a new car or paid for a vacation for two in the Bahamas?
Her first job.
Peg found it via a friend of a friend (Doctor Shamton) to get Kim’s mind off of Lyndsay’s suicide. Kim went to the address that mother Peg handed her on a piece of paper with hearts drawn all over it, went with eyes still wettish and vadge-red and found a storefront on Wayne Avenue, a bunch of strange hippies in green smocks, clean hippies who were the vanguard of what would soon be called the New Age, the confluence of hippie mysticism and the Yankee religion of Money, counter-intuitively associating goodness with wealth, a belief system/lifestyle festooned with crystals and perfumed with incense and soundtracked with the blandest piano or zither noodlings. Hookless piano aswim in reverb. Fascinating how reverb as an audio effect can connote the ineffable, due, no doubt, to primordial race-memories of all those spooky caves we used to cower in. Anyway: what these hippies with surprisingly professional demeanors and lyrical names (like the boss, a very attractive, vaguely Asiatic woman named Sylvan) were up to was subcontracting temp workers as nursing aides for Old Folks Homes.
Sylvan told Kim she had a beautiful energy that the senior spirits (as she referred to the aged) would respond to. There was no office furniture in the room they (the applicants and company officers) were gathered in: just wall-to-wall carpeting and large pillows everywhere and a shrine to Buddha and a filing cabinet. Sylvan took a stethoscope out of the filing cabinet. The company was called Selfless Servants. Sylvan explained to Kim and other trainees that Seva is the spiritual practice of selfless service. Seva is a Sanskrit word and the concept flows from two forms of the yoga (she called it the yoga), Karma Yoga which is the yoga of action and Bhakti Yoga, the yoga of worship inspired by what we call divine love… Seva is one of the simplest and yet most profoundest and life changingest ways that we can put our deepest spiritual knowledge into action useful to the community… and after a crashcourse in first aid and such basics as pulse-or-temperature-taking Kim got a nametag (Selfless Kim), a green hospital smock, crepe-soled slip-ons and instructions to report to a nursing home in Bryn Mawr, graveyard shift.
She put her army surplus coat over the smock and took a trolley and two buses in the cold November night to her first day ever of work. She wanted to cry but not, just then, because of Lyndsay, cold and weird-smelling in an ugly box with no air holes in it. Kim contained two competingly disparate urges to cry and the one guiding her as she approached her first job was selfish and more childishly abject. Why did she feel betrayed by Peg? She felt as though she’d been kicked out of the sweet cloud of the last lingering amnesties of childhood; shoved from the very edge of the nest. Final proof that she was no better than anyone else (though breathtakingly inferior to rich kids who didn’t need jobs even if they took them as character-building experiences or gestures of noblesse oblige to placate the masses from time to time). Kim had always assumed that she’d live, jobless but well-fed, encouraged in her unproductive passions, under her mother-Peg’s protection until one of them died. Kim had always assumed that their little family owned no car in order that Peg could afford to do this.
She walked three blocks after getting off at the end of the line of the last bus and came to a saucer-shaped building at the end of a long path on a very large lawn, like a UFO that had come to rest, for reasons of its own, on a golf course. She entered the building (after some difficulty finding the front door) a few minutes after nine. The receptionist told her she was three minutes late but that they dock you for the quarter hour, so it make more sense to be a quarter hour late, if you going to be late, and handed Kim her timecard. These were old people who had a little money, she’d been told; this nursing home was better than most and yet she arrived to find high-WASP bedlam in progress, as in drooling crones with Mayflower surnames shuffling in and out of the frame, blue arses exposed in backless pyjamas, and a freckle-pated duke in his boxers, bathrobe tied around his neck by its sleeves like superman’s cape, hurrying from po-faced aide to po-faced aide with an urgent message of nothing but spit and consonants. He seized upon Kim and cornered her near a utility closet and she tried sincerely with zero success to comprehend. A beefy, squat-headed aide, black (but they were all black, and their charges were all white, don’t-touch-me white), whisked her away. Keith, with his clipboard. Keith guided her by the elbow.That’s Ol’ Zack. He been sayin’ exactly the same thing since I got here, which is three years this November, don’t pay him no mind. We gotta get this lady in her pyjamas fast. We laggin’ the schedule.
They were in a private room with a fat little woman circled by aides. Very much like a half-hearted gang-rape in which no one wanted to be first. The old woman (a card on the door called her Lilly Shaw) was clutching a bathrobe to her chest but otherwise naked, a baggy profusion of time-bleached meat. Keith told Kim to get her in those backless pyjamas and he took the other aides with him to whatever pointless emergency was next on the list. Lilly Shaw’s eyes were frantic but not really, as though she kept forgetting what “frantic” meant. Next was a thin white spider missing most of his legs and afraid to budge from the corner behind the safety toilet and the aluminum handholds and everything else smeared with his shiny tar shits. Next was a force-feeding on the theme of pureèd corn. Second childhood is not an empty figure of speech, mused Kim. But children are learning things.
And every time she stepped into the curving, overlit hallway to approach the next task on the time-coded (in increments down to the second) checklist in her pocket, Ole Zack grabbed her into a loopy waltz, pleading into her eyes his transmission of chaos from the great beyond until Keith came jogging to separate them. Kim was assigned the task of bullying a lucid woman (in fact she looked strikingly like Kim’s career guidance counselor, Miss Brandischauer) into brushing her teeth before lights-out. Brushing-her-teeth as a euphemism for dealing with the dentures. The alternative-universe Miss Brandischauer was sitting in bed, reading Agatha Christie, peering down a long nose through her feline glasses when Keith ushered Kim into the book-filled room without knocking. Keith told Kim, in front of Miss Brandischauer 2, that the 75-year-old woman was a naughty girl who didn’t like to brush her teeth and that Kim shouldn’t take no for an answer, whatever excuses the old girl managed to cook up and don’t forget, now, you’re new, girl, so she’ll try to fool you.
Kim sat on a chair beside Miss Brandischauer’s bed and watched the old woman read for awhile, making note of the curious fact that her eyes didn’t so much march methodically from left to right across the page and back again as seem to leap in giant intervals up and down and right to left and diagonally, assembling a jigsaw puzzle of words. Kim was wondering how she’d make it through her shift, despite the fact that her hourly wage was a whopping (for the era) eight dollars per, when Miss Brandischauer placed her bookmark and lay the whodunnit aside and said, with a surprising, twangfully melon-rich Southern accent,
“We have maybe fifteen minutes before the S.S. come looking for you. What would you like to talk about, sugar?”
“Talk about?”
“Don’t be shy, now.”
“I’m not shy.”
“No offence intended.”
“I know. Ma’am, how long have you been here, if it’s okay to ask?”
“A week. Five years. My whole life? Listen, I wish I had something to offer. Refreshments. You’re so pretty and young. Skin like yours is a great gift. So why so down in the mouth?”
“Me?”
“Appearances are rarely deceiving, sugar. Tell.”
“My best friend… ”
“Stole your boyfriend.”
“Killed herself.”
“Oh. Oh. Cut her wrists? Or jumped?”
“Pills. And strawberry ice cream.”
“Smart girl. Look what she avoided.”
Keith stuck his head in the room with such suddenness that they both jumped but Keith said not a word about Miss Brandischauer’s dentures, grinning horribly and beckoning Kim to follow him instead. She had to hurry to catch up as he jogged along the circular hall to the ever-so-slightly-ajar door to one of the two communal bathrooms. Kim entered behind him and without looking he told her to close the door and make sure it click shut and her first thought was panic that he was going to do something to her in the bathroom but then she watched him walk calmly around the far side of the water-filled tub in the center of the room. She approached the tub and saw with some surprise that there was a hairless blue potbellied man asleep underwater.
“I left him alone for a minute and I guess he slid under. On the count of three…”
Kim had his ankles and Keith hooked him under each arm and they lifted and lowered the body with a loud splash from the agitated tubwater on the tiles and rolled it over. What struck Kim was how Keith had appeared to be in no particular rush to get the man’s head out of water. His casual air had fooled her into believing for several moments that he must well know, from years of experience, that it’s better to leave them in a few minutes before yanking them out in case of shock or something. Keith straddled the body and seemed to be knuckledeep in the fat rolls of a frat house drunkslut shoulder massage when he told Kim to tell the receptionist to tell an ambulance to come. With an amused tone he added, detaining her for careless life-or-death eternities at the bathroom’s threshold, You shoulda seen the look on your face, Kim. You looked seriously freaked out, man, but you’ll get used to it.You and me’s a team.
So Kim went and told the receptionist to call the ambulance and when the receptionist had completed the call, Kim quit. She asked the receptionist to tell Selfless Servants not to contact her, she didn’t even (or especially didn’t) want her check for the night, she wanted nothing to do with them or this nursing home or the three hourse she’d spent in purgatory there. The receptionist, who resembled Diana Ross, said it’s not my job to deliver instructions to your boss, that’s one thing, okay, but are you serious about not wanting that check? Even if you only worked three hours that’s twenty five dollars before taxes. If it was me I’d sure enough take it. That’s a nice pair of shoes, but I ain’t your mama.
Kim put on her army surplus coat and left the building and crossed the black lawn panting and walked the wrong way and walked back and sat at the stop in the cold semi-rural November dark for forty minutes (during which she watched an ambulance with firework lights race towards the UFO and then the same ambulance with toplights extinguished roll with the silence of a deathbarge on still waters past her) but was lucky enough to get the last bus home out of Bryn Mawr. Six billion years of planetary, then thirty million years of biological, evolution, just so she could take this very long busride home.
That little blue man in the bathtub stayed with her for years.
O’Sirus rolls backwards down the incline of sleep. Katryn’s protest is done for the night.
12.
The next morning they are awakened by Javanese Gamelan music. O’Sirus thinks to herself that surely this isn’t Javanese Gamelan music, but it is, piped in through the mattress. During the five minutes that Katryn sleeps while O’Sirus watches, Katryn dreams of a leafy, warmish, aromatic paradise populated with unusually beautiful rabbits with (proportionally) very large, human-shaped breasts that one sucked on for nourishment; an ultimate kind of veganism (no chewing of a life-structure) that the rabbits didn’t mind… in fact, they enjoyed it, and were easily coaxed, like frolicsome coconuts, to give sweet milk. It was only a matter of wiping the nipples first, as they were usually a bit muddy. Katryn was smiling very broadly in her sleep. O’Sirus will never forget how that smile faded as Katryn’s eyes opened on the real world.
“What’s that?”
“Javanese Gamelan music.”
“Why’d you put it on?”
“I didn’t.”
“What time is it?”
“Early, I think.”
“Where are we?”
“Duluth.”
A whiff of syrup-hot pancakes comes up through the mattress and before either of them can comment, Shem’s cheerful voice follows. “Who’s ready for breakfast?!”
“I suppose there’s no opting out of it?” says O’Sirus, into the mattress.
“Breakfast is mandatory,” jokes slightly-muffled Shem. Half-jokes. “Would you prefer it in bed?”
Katryn’s smile comes back and she says, “Oooh, marvellous!”
“Any special requests?”
Katryn is playful. “Rabbit’s milk?”
“You got it,” booms Shem through the mattress. “Breakfast will be served in a jiffy!”
There’s a longish interval before O’Sirus whispers, “Is this thing off, now?”
Katryn makes a shrug face and climbs out of bed with a finger over her lips meaning silence. She gestures for O’Sirus to follow her into the bathroom. In the bathroom, Katryn turns on the shower full blast. She turns to O’Sirus and whispers,
“What shall we talk about?”
“I decided something after thinking long and hard last night.”
“Yes?”
“From now on, I concentrate on making money.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Relieved hugs. Grateful kisses. Katryn’s head in the crook of an olive elbow as O’Sirus reaches under Katryn’s frilly nightie and prods the drooled lips of a hot little animal’s smile. The moist click of separation and Katryn says ah. The cosmic YES of extremely wet. There’s a polite-but-energetic knucklerapping on the bedroom door and they hurry giddy back to bed and under the covers before sing-songing drunk, as one, “Come in!”
Much to Kim’s mitigated delight and surprise it’s Gwynneth, fleshy sweet, smoothly ripe and gobbleworthy Gwynneth, with her good-vibes-scented brown eyes and matching cinnamon freckles and big pink permasmile lips dressed in that eternal overalls-and-bandana uniform, backing through the self-opening door with a laden breakfast tray. This time, a bit of Gwynneth’s hair is visible from under the red bandana, but this glimpse of the hair doesn’t solve the racial puzzle, as the hair is a very curly, coloring-book yellow. Gwynneth gives O’Sirus a hello-again look that makes Katryn give O’Sirus a look (O’Sirus being triangulated perfectly to see and interpret both looks) of do you know this dyke from somewhere? Gwynneth gives Katryn a look meaning yes, she does know me from somewhere, but don’t feel threatened, I’m immensely attracted to both of you. Gwynneth sets down the two-tier tray and converts it into two separates, setting one before each of them as they look on (and back and forth between each other) and finally breaks the complexly-orchestrated silence while leaning over the bed, exposing the nested warmth of her cleavage, working on arranging the utensils .
“Is there anything else you want or need?” Looking at neither of them.
“The two of us can’t possibly eat all of this marvellous-looking food alone,” says Katryn. “Why not have some with us? What’s your name?”
“Gwynneth,” offers O’Sirus, elongating the “th” like she’s evaluating a flavour, wondering if anyone else can smell Katryn’s fresh cunt on her fingers.
“Gwynneth,” repeats Katryn with playful mimetic exaggeration.
“I am kinda starving,” says Gwynneth. Her nostrils flare. She smells it.
“What are you?” asks Katryn, with a child’s rude innocence.
Gwynneth, used to the question, says, “Black.”
“You’re a lot less ‘black’ than O’Sirus, and she calls herself ‘racially ambiguous’,” laughs Katryn, ladling hot syrup over her stack of dinkle-buckwheat/raspberry-pecan pancakes and deliberately avoiding O’Sirus’ consequent glare.
“’Black’ is the term Yanks use,” counters O’Sirus, looking at no one, laying on the accent, “When no other group will claim you.”
“‘Black’ is a pretty big church,” says Gwynneth, winningly, chewingly, with hot cake tumbling on her tongue. “How I see it, if everyone said they were black…”
“Like Spartacus,” says O’Sirus.
“Who?” say Gwynneth and Katryn, as Katryn feeds Gwynneth another forkfull. O’Sirus’ pancakes are dinkle-mocha, garnished with starfruit, and she feeds Gwynneth her next forkfull, with a feeling that she’s dabbling in a new kind of orgasmically-tasty-food-based sexuality. As if reading her mind, Gwynneth says, with a moistness of mouth that kills everyone else in the room,
“We’re having a mange-a-trois.”
Picture Gwynneth, her golden fat pussy sopping with syrup. But what paralyzes O’Sirus is uncertainty as to whether a groupfuck at this point will further, or hinder, the cause behind her brand new sacred oath to get ugly rich. She even forgets to ask Gwynneth for her sunglasses. Gwynneth doesn’t have them anyway. O’Sirus sees that butterfly smile on Gwynneth’s wrist and strokes it spontaneously with her flaking cunty finger and one thing leads to its other but O’Sirus still, for whatever reason, can’t come.
To the victress go the spoils.
Ohhhhh. I love it.
[ed.'s note: for anyone coming late to the thread: bored sarcasm]
Kitsch or Avant Garde? Reactionary or Visionary? Gallery or Sideshow? The Snout or the Tail? (this is not CGI, btw: it’s a real fluid reacting to magnetic fields)
the technology is pretty impressive, but that maudlin music can not make the aesthetic experience any less industrial. Trying to call this art is a stretch, I can imagine these things being sold like lavalamps… However, right now, as a science exhibit I think it is thrilling.
Next step is figurative ferro-fluid animation… and massive in-vitro sculptures you can change with a mouse click. Either that will mean that there’s a possibility that this gimmick can refine itself out from under the Kitsch umbrella or we’ll have to admit to ourselves that Rodin and Michelangelo (et al) were Kitsch all along. Unless it’s the sheer (at this point in Art History unimaginably) hard labor that went into The Thinker or David that rescues and elevates the artifact but, then, wouldn’t that be a pretty Kitschy qualifier? Kundera defines “kitsch” as the denial of shit, so, the antiseptic quality of bronze, marble and ferro-fluids make them all suspect. Has anyone done a polished brass Brancusi turd yet?
THE VINTAGE EMAIL
Wednesday, March 13, 2002 1:40 PM
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L___ I____ @aol.com
I___ :
if you’re having any kind of constipation littishly mebbe it’s because you’re hoping that the book stands a chance of being published. Sneaky mistake! You have to write it with the FUCK ‘EM glee which famed literary sons of the Upper Middle Class drew their genius and their courage from. Nothing’s more deflating than the Stern Faced Auntie of the Bottom Line when you’re trying to get your Prose Dick hard. Unless you happen to be lucky enough to be a meagerly-gifted guy who is nevertheless utilizing the top ten percent of his ability… they are the ones who reap the greatest financials. Listen: try as you might, you can’t write down successfully…you just have to be BORN there…and that’s where the bucks are. (Again, ignoring the Freak Jackpot of, say, ‘The English Patient,’ a book that features…have I mentioned this before?…a central act of Corpse Fucking… and yet was embraced by the Oprah Lattes. Okay book. Not great…the cloy-ful movie actually improves some bits of it.)
I hear, by the way, that Ian McEwan is back with a good one (after two disappointments…’Amsterdam’ I very nearly HATED… ‘Enduring Love’ couldn’t live up to the fun of its opening chapter. Tell me if you’ve heard something. “The Innocent” was diverting. The jumpers are worrisome, though.
As a guy doing Script(s) for hire at the moment (they’ll never be produced but it’s the film funding and option money the fuckers who are whoring me are mining), can I say that I’m leery of Structural and/or Mythic Conceits as anything better than the sketchiest of templates? The story, at some point, will start demanding to put itself together in ways that fit and fuck the template. Maybe you’re forcing your tiny people… maybe you’re bullying them a bit to adhere to the plastic Kismet of your fancy conceit. The book changed as you wrote it…were you sensitive to the change? And no no no don’t write the friends you’d like to have or the women you’d like to possess etc. Do you have to ask why? I keep writing my virgnity back but it never sticks. Sad, man.
Can’t say much without reading your MS. You’re in a funny (or terribly appropriate) part of the world for writing a novel that rages against Magical Thinking… which I believe starts with PC Euphemisms and ends up with Flat Earth rhetoric. I mean: cripples are fucking cripples. Right? The moment you refer to a paraplegic as ‘Otherly Abled’ you open the door to all KINDS of Unreality. Is it possible that living and working in the very Omphalos of the PC Belly, you’re a bit fed up? Longing for a good old fashioned barney down the pub, are you? A punch-up with a deaf black Dyke might be just what the Doctor ordered. Pick a small-ish one you fucking idiot.
Send me a bundle of pages for a look, okay? Sounds like a treat. (One final thing I will say, even without seeing it: if you’re having problem with the ‘ending;’ end it exactly one paragraph earlier as this works w/out fail. I think I stole this advice)
On the personal front: I THOUGHT we were divorced…but it turns out that some papers that I assumed would be filed on the day (May 30, 2001) I flew for Stockholm didn’t make it to city hall. Hope it’s down to sloth not plot. Sadly it is probably both.
S
Random Musings
Wouldn’t it be “funny” if it turned out that Sarah Palin was on a Bloomberg LLP subsidiary/affiliate payroll? So he could step in as the reasonable rational “better” choice in 2012. Shades of Margarita Lopez, my Loisaida friends?
Comrade DJ Barry and I are exporting a video file from the docu about his gallery show at this very moment… material forthcoming, Comrades Lurking and Explicit…
bla bla bla
2. we must make films politically
all films are political
cant wait for that imperfect shambling docu we imperfectly shambled together on our state of the art workstation today August Meisterstine.
in the meantime something to get you going; first as tragedy then as farce
But I wonder at the depth of the connections Spooky is making as he links these disparate ideas/situations, CDS Barry… isn’t he playing the Hodge-Podge as Complexity game that has become a cultural value since the i-pod shuffle play list? His use of the word “frequency” as a link, for example… what does it really signify? When he goes from Duchamp to the Matrix in under a minute, touching on “compression technology” and “intuitive mathematics” along the way, how is he connecting these conversational samples and what is the point he’s actually making? “Knowledge” as an assemblage of powerful fetishes? Maybe this is evidence of the post-verbal world we may be heading for: ideas as things we are no longer capable of putting into words. Ideas as hodge-podge pictograms. But I think it’s more that we’re reaching the point where commodities outnumber ideas by such a ratio that just putting two or three commodities next to each other will now have to stand for an idea. Like arranging, not deck chairs, on the Titanic, but all the personal possessions of the tourists on board. The def. of “commodities” to include names and experiences.
“It’s about a certain linkage between mythology and technology…”
And then all Spooky does, in the talk, is show an array of megawatt speakers at the base of the Acropolis? What is the special (or non-obvious) linkage between mythology and technology? And how do the break-dancing Beefeaters fit in?
Interesting speech tic of Spooky’s: “The funny thing is….”
Re: the Godard poster: yeah, true, I wasn’t sampling that as text but as an image
Is it such a very large file that it’s taking so long to upload, CDS Steven? Because it’s after the time of your post here, which means more than six hours have passed since your heads up. Not that I’m counting the milliseconds or anything. But I do now possess a visceral understanding of the idiom “waiting with BAITED breath.”
I didn’t mean by that that I’d be posting the very video here soon, Frances… I meant by that that my absence is due to meatspace responsibilities.
DREAR DIARY
Yesterday I was standing on a crowded train, crossing town. A woman nearby was reading a thick-ish paperback and she shifted the angle at which she was holding the book while turning a page and I saw it was a book by Samuel Beckett. She was in her mid-to-late 20′s and dressed in the standard outfit of a secretary (clearly not a student) and she was about half-way through the book, reading it with a smile, and I thought: Jesus fucking Christ, I know Central Europeans are more literate than Americans but this is ridiculous. I tried to imagine an American of about 27, no longer in school, with an okay-but-not-impressive job, reading a book by Samuel Beckett for pleasure on the commute home from work and I could not. Then I became intensely curious as to which book by Beckett it was.
My being taller than the literate secretary (but not so much taller: the Germans are tall; my Beloved is about 5’10 and my ex-wife is 6 feet tall) made the angles hard and I shifted and twisted a bit while trying my best not to look like someone who was working up the courage to come up with some embarrassing pickup line. I wasn’t interested in her at all (I’m in the lucky position of being sexually obsessed with my wife and over-the-moon-happy with family life and frankly the idea of a stranger’s genitals disgusts me; there may be some pheromone that my wife emits that I’m particularly vulnerable to) but I wanted to know which Samuel Beckett book a 27-ish secretary in a Burberry raincoat on the way home from a long day of work could be reading with a smile. I thought: have I ever read Samuel Beckett with a smile? Maybe I have; how would I know? I don’t always feel a smile on my face while I’m engaging in one.
I remember once sitting in a room watching a Television (which dates this memory as being at least a decade old) and the show that was on was some typically crappy show (whether it was supposed to be fiction or supposed to be real) and I don’t remember what the content was but I remember the horror of glancing up… this room had a large, gilt-framed, decorative mirror in it… and catching my reflection before there was time for the awareness of what I was seeing in the reflection to change my facial expression into the self-conscious mask I protect myself in the mirror with… and I saw that I was wearing a shockingly complicit smile. It wasn’t a “faint” smile, either. It was the smile of full-on assent. I was horrified. Who was that idiot in the mirror? That remote-controlled puppet? For all I know, I had read Molloy with just such an unconsciously pie-licking grin on my face. But I doubt it.
Then I thought: Germans are different. People who say, blithely, “People are people”… obviously haven’t traveled far or much or if they have they haven’t paid close attention to what they have seen. I see clots of American tourists careening around Berlin in their clear rubber bubbles of BigMac-fart-inflated Murrkana. Germans are different and maybe they smile while reading something like:
“And what I saw was more like a crumbling, a frenzied collapsing of all that had always protected me from all I was always condemned to be. Or it was like a kind of clawing towards a light and countenance I could not name, that I had once known and long denied. But what words can describe this sensation at first all darkness and bulk, with a noise like the grinding of stones, then suddenly as soft as water flowing. And then I saw a little globe swaying up slowly from the depths, through the quiet water, smooth at first, and scarcely paler than its escorting ripples, then little by little a face, with holes for the eyes and mouth and other wounds, and nothing to show if it was a man’s face or a woman’s face, a young face or an old face, or if its calm too was not an effect of the water trembling be-tween it and the light.”
I wanted to see which Beckett book the secretary was reading and two stops before I had to get off the train it jolted on a sharp turn and the secretary shifted to maintain her equilibrium and I saw that the German title of the book was “Die Chemie des Todes” and I thought: what? The Chemistry of Death? Not only is this 27-ish secretary in a Burberry raincoat reading a book by Samuel Beckett on the way home from work on the train with a smile… it’s a Beckett book I’ve never even heard of! And the train jolted again and the angle at which I was able to view the book changed so radically that I could see its entire cover, all at once, and I saw that the author of the thing was not Samuel but Simon Beckett. Reality restored.
When I got home I Googled Simon Beckett:
“Simon Beckett (born 1960 in Sheffield) is a British journalist and author.
“After earning a Master of Arts degree in English, Beckett taught in Spain and played in several bands before becoming a freelance journalist. He has written for The Times, The Independent on Sunday, The Daily Telegraph, The Observer, amongst others. He has previously written several well-received novels and published his first novel in the David Hunter series, The Chemistry of Death in 2006; a forensic crime novel. Centred on a forensic anthropologist, Dr David Hunter, as the protagonist, The Chemistry of Death was shortlisted for the 2006 Gold Dagger award. A sequel novel featuring David Hunter, Written in Bone was released in August 2007 and a further novel, Whispers of the Dead in January 2009. He has previous written several other novels (including Fine Lines in 1994), but these all go conspicuously unmentioned in interviews and on his website.
“The books and protagonist were inspired by a visit and series of articles made by Beckett to “The Body Farm” in Tennessee (Otherwise known as the Forensic Anthropology Centre, U. Tennessee, founded by the pioneer of modern forensic anthropology, Dr Bill Bass). Having watched – and participated – in “live” exercises involving manufactured crime scenes containing real decaying corpses, and having witnessed the fascinating and arcane sciences employed to ascertain how, when and where death occurred, Beckett was inspired to create a central character who is vulnerable, charming and engaging, while authoritative and knowledgeable regarding ‘The Chemistry of Death’.”
Exactly the kind of thing a German might smile at, in fact.
Drear Diary Annex: Tiny Thoughts and Quotes
1. I went for a walk with Comrade DJ Sensei JR the day before yesterday and we met before I’d eaten a single thing and it was not particularly early. I had been too busy to eat before running out the door to jump on the train to meet him. We walked for only a block before coming to a “Bio Markt” (ashen, withered carrots for twice the price and milk in glass bottles) and I slipped in to buy a bar of white chocolate. I haven’t eaten this kind of sweet stuff in a couple of months now after swearing it off but I gobbled this bar down and CDS JR said, “I thought you weren’t eating that crap,” and I said, spontaneously, “A triumph over the will!”
2. A new class of people is making itself known around town. A tribe or pseudo-race. Especially in the areas around certain hotels and convention halls. They are people of all ages (though mostly thirty-something) and all levels of wealth… some shabbily-dressed and others in expensive suits. The important thing (the connection) being that they are all wearing laminated Special Event ID Passes around their necks on the kind of ribbons you’d see on the backstage pass at a U2 concert. No matter how shabbily-dressed or otherwise-square you would look, these laminated IDs make you look elite/hip/jet-setting. CDS Barry and I call this new race The Illaminati.
3. “Do you realize that people don’t know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories — and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.”- Milan Kundera
4. Came up with “Loser-friendly” in a chat with CDS Barry and, of course, I Googled it and found that it was already common. Google is our chief instructor in the philosophy of the fact that we can’t be original. Still in pain over the loss of “Disasturbation” as a personal neologism.
5. The year of my birth (as I already knew) was a turning point:
Several years ago, it occurred to me that many of my favorite groundbreaking record albums, books, and movies—Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz To Come, The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce, Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself, Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows—were all released in 1959.
Was this just coincidence, or was it part of a pattern? Was there something more broadly significant about that time? The more I looked into it, the more it struck me that 1959 really was a pivotal year—not only in culture but also in politics, society, science, sex: everything.
Consider: It was the year when the microchip was introduced, the Food and Drug Administration held hearings on the birth-control pill, IBM marketed the first business computer, a passenger jetliner took the first nonstop trans-Atlantic flight, and America joined the Russians in the “space race.” It saw the rise of free jazz, “sick comics,” the New Journalism, and indie films; the birth of Motown, Happenings, and the Generation Gap; the Lady Chatterley trial that overthrew the nation’s obscenity laws; the U.S. Civil Rights Commission’s first report, which sparked the overhaul of segregation laws—all this bursting against fears of a “missile gap,” the fallout-shelter craze, and the first U.S. casualties in the war in Vietnam. Fred Kaplan, author of 1959: The Year Everything Changed
6. Soft Core Porno Questionnaire:
1. In showing sexual material, is it okay to show certain genders but not others?
2. Is semi-nudity better than total nudity?
3. Is showing solo bodies better than pairs (or trios)?
4. Is showing some positions good and showing other positions bad?
5. Is showing some body types good and showing other body types bad?
6. Is showing body types/ positions/configurations that you like good while showing body types/positions/configurations others like bad?
7. Or is it that it’s okay to discuss it but not to show it?
8. Or is discussing it okay only if the discussion is vague?
9. Or is it better not to discuss it at all?
10. Is sex bad?
11. Is sex sexist?
7. MEN and CHILDREN
We have two bathrooms; the one I share with Offsprung and one for Beloved. Beloved’s bathroom is a paradisaical sensorium of muted light and good smells and chrome surfaces and the one I share with Offsprung is a truckstop pissoir on a Turnpike in 1965. No matter how often I clean it.
THE DIFFICULT TEXT
ANOTHER COUNTRY SMELL (Director’s Cut)
1.
Every day of a school week, a yellow girl ran up the street toward the Chalfonts. She ran with a paper sack tucked under one arm, her black hair laid flat on the long March wind. It was a fine spring day, not long after Easter. Smells were blowing back up into Chicago from the South. Some good, some bad. The yellow girl lifted one corner of her white dress to run in it. The soles of her feet were as black as burnt pancakes as they slapped the sidewalk and black boys of the neighborhood, on the street or watching from porches and windows, with no work and nothing better to do, whistled and called out to her as she flew by.
2.
A yellow girl ran up the street toward the Chalfonts. She ran with her black hair laid flat on the long March wind. It was a fine spring day and the boys of the neighborhood called out to her as she ran. One of them whistled from the branches of an oak tree which dangled a banner made out of a bed sheet. It said I.H.T.J.W. He whistled and Terry looked up and waved but she did not deviate from her course. She ran up the street to the ramshackle house of the Chalfonts.
It was as crowded as a brothel during Lent. Fat Ethel Chalfont had been in the hospital and now she was home again, needing help with her seven children, or so she claimed, the youngest of whom was still awaiting a proper name, or so she claimed, because the truth was like ice in Fat Ethel’s mouth, ice she could shape to a fleeting perfection. She would present the false trinket on her tongue. A week before Terry started ‘helping’ at the Chalfonts, Fat Ethel had stopped Terry’s mother on the street, both of them on their way to a bake sale. It was on a weekday morning that this happened, Ruth with two cream cakes and Ethel with her burlap sack of salt biscuits and Fat Ethel imposed on poor Ruth right there on the street. Ethel asked to borrow Terry to help out a little being as Ethel was ill and Ruth said yes.
Her common-law husband Buck did no work. Ethel brought money into the house by doing what she called matchmaking which meant setting up men who could pay for the service with local girls. Terry had started with the Chalfonts on a Sunday. Friday afternoon came and she couldn’t stop herself from gloating over her new wristwatch, a gift that she’d claimed to have gotten from Ethel herself. Terry didn’t even mention the bracelet, the music box, or the five-pound sack of Fifth Avenue bars, all of which she hid in her closet. She thought back on the Sunday evening the man had given her these things.
The man’s voice was such a low thing. She hadn’t notice that he’d spoken until after each time, when she suddenly recalled it, hearing it as a voice in her head. He’d killed the headlights before stopping the car, a habit he’d picked up in Kentucky and the car rolled on another hundred yards until he brought it to rest on the wrong side of the road on the sloping shoulder along a carious length of picket fence with a sign that said Cider Apples. There was a v-shaped formation of trees far off to the left, two old oaks and a long, low building on the other side of the road, brown as tobacco, with truck tires leaning against it. She could hear the man’s fateful breathing. Fireflies drifted toward them from across the field, luminous drops of absinthe and he lifted the car door handle and the door swung open over the asphalt and the damp odor of night rose from it. He’d stuck a leg out, braced against the slight tilt of the car on the high shoulder and unbuttoned his fly.
Terry sat on the bed she’d known since before she knew what beds were, that Friday, staring at herself in a mirror as the room flushed with last-chance sunlight and she waited for Ruth to make dinner. A strangely detached breeze touched Terry’s cheek and she looked out the window it had come from and she could see the distant figures of children straggling in across the vacant lot on Throop Street. Terry pulled the window shade down: was tonight really the night?
-Slow down there! shouted a chorus of black boys as she ran. Terry ran under the banner in that oak tree, waving at the boy perched in it.
The Chalfont place was five blocks away, but it might as well have been in Kentucky. As Terry loped the long blocks, the houses got patchier, the yards got scrubbier and chickens appeared. The houses on the block with the Chalfont house were shacks but the Chalfont house was a splintery unpainted three-story palace, far back from the sidewalk, on a weedy, balding lot.
The house gave off the smell of burnt basil and other herbs that could be sickening depending on the time of day you might smell them. The screen door that opened into the front room was ajar and Terry picked her way across a floor with tussling curly-haired boys all over it and Terry ascended a flight of rickety stair steps and found Madame Chalfont reading Pearl Buck in bed.
Madame Chalfont asked the girl to switch on the lamp on the night table. Her hair flowed out for what seemed like yards around her, yards of wavy black hair like Terry’s, flowing out over her lacy pillows and her satin sheets. As fat as the woman was she was beautiful to Terry. The book she was reading was minuscule on her bosom.
Terry said I.H.T.J.W. to Madame Chalfont.
-Dear heart, said Madame Chalfont, You most surely do not hope the Japs win!
3.
A week before Terry started ‘helping’ at the Chalfonts, Fat Ethel had stopped Terry’s mother on the street, both of them en route to a bake sale. It was on a weekday morning that this happened, Ruth with two cream cakes and Ethel with her burlap sack of salt biscuits. Fat Ethel, who had once been as thin as anything, imposed on Ruth right there on the street, sly in knowing that Ruth would say ‘yes’ if only to get away from her. Ruth said yes.
Her common-law husband Buck rarely worked, so Ethel brought money into the house by doing what she called “matchmaking”. Being a good Christian and cut off from gossip, Ruth Dixon knew nothing about all of that. Terry had started with the Chalfonts on a Sunday.
She was sitting on her bed, staring at herself in the vanity mirror as the room blushed orange with last-chance sunlight, and she was chewing a Fifth Avenue bar, waiting for Ruth to make dinner. She was looking back at herself, from a time in the future, in the mirror’s past. A sweet breeze touched her cheek, causing her to look out the window and she could see the distant figures of children straggling in across the vacant lot on Throop Street, coming in from Ada park, summoned by mothers calling out about suppertime like muezzin bellowing from their towers and Terry pulled the window shade down. Was tonight really the night?
“It’s just like biting your tongue, but in your kootchie,” she’d heard. “And don’t wear nothin’ white.”
“If you don’t enjoy it, it ain’t even a sin.”
There had been a circle of girls at school, at lunch time, standing at the Throop street fire exit. Smoking cigarettes. A blustery day, wind gusting south. The Principal’s office was safely upwind and even Terry took a drag or two, which made her lips numb, but she loved it when Doreen Parker passed her a lit one, blowing a blue flower of smoke at Terry’s mouth and adding, “I.H.T.J.W.” And Terry answered in kind as she accepted the cigarette and sucked it, winking, trying for a smoke ring but destroying it with laughter instead.
Doreen, the fastest girl at Morgan Park High School, had drawn a diagram on the sooty bricks beside the fire exit door with a flinty stone from the garden. She accompanied the diagram with a lecture to the tune of “Do it standin’ up and you can’t get pregnant,” and scratched in an arrow pointing down from between the stick-girl’s legs. Marva Fortneaux had taken the stone from Doreen and given the stick-girl some big balloon breasts. She said “If you don’t cry right after, I promise he’ll think you’re a slut.” But Marva Fortneaux was so poor that Terry had seen her eating out of a little box of Argo corn starch, instead of popcorn, at the movies, so what did she know?
“How do they live in that Chalfont house, Terry?” asked Ruth at dinner, passing Terry a dish of caramelized sweet potatoes. Because she kept herself apart, Ruth relied on her daughters for the sweet juice of gossip. “I mean, honestly, can you imagine?” She took the dish back. “It’s 1943, and people are living like that! Like Hottentots!”
Terry told them all about it, between forkfuls. One cheek and then the other bulged while she talked. She told them about the filth and sloth and bad language and the way Buck Chalfont just sat on the porch all morning noon and night, eyes shut, rocking in that chair, a dusty-necked bottle in hand, singing off-key hymns with fearless sarcasm. Either that, or he was always busy typing out strange prophesies and tacking them up around the house for Terry and Ethel to read. Then Terry slid back from the table. She ran to her room and reappeared in the kitchen with a grease-spotted grocery bag and ran out of the house heading west as if to catch the Sun as it fell the last few feet from the sky.
“Slow down there!” shouted a chorus of black boys as she ran.
The Chalfont place was five blocks away, but it might as well have been in Mississippi. As Terry loped the long blocks approaching it, the houses got patchier, the yards got scrubbier and chickens appeared with the increasing frequency of omens. She stepped on the front porch without knocking. She stepped on the front porch without knocking. Buck Chalfont was sitting right in the middle of the porch, on an old stool, frowning over a brand new Remington Portable #9 on a side-turned apple crate and he was hunting and pecking, ignoring her as she padded by him. The house gave off the smell of burnt basil and other incantatory herbs that could be sickening depending on the time of day you might smell them. The screen door that opened into the front room was ajar and she walked across a floor with tussling curly-haired boys and inverted pot-lids as spinning tops. She ascended a flight of rickety stair steps that soon enough would never again bear the weight of Madame Chalfont’s descent.
Madame Chalfont was reading Pearl Buck in bed. Her hair flowed out for what seemed like yards around her, yards of wavy black hair like Terry’s, flowing out over her lacy pillows. Terry put a liberty dollar on the table by the base of the lamp and slipped into the adjoining room, where taffy-haired Jacques Chalfont, the ten-year-old, was wincing over his homework. Terry was as golden and smooth as a new bar of soap and Jacques put down his pencil and watched with lip-biting reverence as she stripped down to her threadbare bloomers and she shook a fist at Jacques with mock violence and he closed his eyes and then even the bloomers came off and she crossed the room like Eve. She wiggled into a white satin dress that had hung on a hook on Jacques’ wall all week.
The dress had belonged to Madame Chalfont twenty years ago, when she was as softly edible as Terry herself was now. Terry was renting it from her, along with Chalfont complicity, for one silver dollar per escapade. The dress, by degrees each night of that week, had lost its smell of mothballs and had taken on the smell of the humanized leather of a car’s interior, plus the tang of Bay Rum and the balls-and-sweat odor of a potent Negro male who paid considerably more than a silver dollar each time to Mrs. Chalfont for the service.
Terry pulled her hair straight out into a shiny rope and twisted it, stooping forward and folded it back into a licorice-black chignon and pinned and patted it into place, pulling bobby pins from her pursed lips to slip them into her hair with folk precision. She fished her dancing shoes out of the grease-stained grocery bag and held them up to the light then set them on the floor. Out the screen door she finally marched and down the dirt walkway, just as his car rounded the corner at Aberdeen and 110th, a coupe with running-boards she was proud to be seen in.
You didn’t have to drive far south on Aberdeen, then west on 105th Street, before the neighborhood seemed to regress, thin out, into a pre-city condition. It wasn’t quite country but the plots of land got broader and more desolate, the buildings more shed-like or ramshackle. Little corn fields and even a sway-backed horse or two appeared on the roadside, wire fences whisked by the Buick’s headlights. The lonely traffic lights they came to after long intervals seemed to be anticipating the far distant future, or another place entirely, for all the purpose they fulfilled. Sitting at a long red light, with no traffic or even signs of life for miles in any direction, built a comical tension in the car that once or twice caused the two of them to bust out laughing.
He hadn’t spoken a dozen words to her since she climbed in the car, but she didn’t mind: his silences were a blessing. She loved night-driving, with a breeze grazing her arm and even liked the dark green odor of mulch and ditch puddle which overran her perfume. All she wanted to do was be driven further.
“You ever talk to them stars up there, gal?”
His voice was such a low, gravelly thing. She shook her head.
“Never told them stars nothin’ sweet?”
He killed the headlights before stopping the car, a habit he’d picked up in Mississippi. It was always good to be one place when people thought you were another. The car rolled on another hundred yards until he brought it to rest on the wrong side of the road, on the shoulder sloping down, along a carious length of picket fence with a sign that said Cider Apples. There was a v-shaped formation of trees to the left, two old oaks, far enough away to run to for a whole minute, and a long, low building on the other side of the road, brown as tobacco, with truck tires leaning against it. If there were crickets singing when they arrived, they now stopped and the field was so quiet that she could hear his labored breathing.
Her death was a grateful easing after the briefest bad struggle, a struggle that seemed to him to pack the condensed vitality of her whole beautiful life into the inadequate space of his car and no hatred or anything personal she just wanted to live. Her dress was bright as the moon as he pulled it hissing heavy across the field to its secret home in the copse.
4.
He killed the headlights before stopping the car, a habit he’d picked up in Mississippi. The car rolled on another hundred yards until he brought it to rest on the wrong side of the road along a carious length of picket fence with a sign that said Cider Apples. There was a v-shaped formation of trees to the left, two old oaks, far enough away to run to for a whole minute, and a long, low building on the other side of the road, brown as tobacco, with truck tires leaning against it. If there were crickets singing when they arrived, they now stopped and the field was so quiet that she could hear him breathing. Fireflies drifted over the field like moonstruck drops of absinthe.
“Got big hands,” said the man, “from playing guitar.” He held them up for her to see.
He lifted the car door handle and the door swung open over the asphalt and the damp odor of night rose from it. He stuck a leg out, braced against the slight tilt of the car on the high shoulder and unbuttoned his fly. He dug a fleur-de-lis handkerchief from his breast pocket and spread it over the lap of his pants and he shifted his hips telling Terry to undo her hair. She laid her bobby pins in a row on the dashboard.
She couldn’t see it as he brought it out for her, because it was so black and the dashboard cast a moon-shadow over his lower half, but she could smell it. It was pungent and real. And then she detected, as she spread her own legs and the night pressed its cool lips on her there with evangelical grandeur, something equal from herself, a force, almost, but she wasn’t ashamed. It was a strong but not unpleasant odor. It was another country smell.
Did it smell like freshly baked baguette with dijon mustard–a Paris po-boy?
NEW DELHI – A scrap dealer who dismantled a machine once used by the chemistry class of a major Indian university died of radioactive poisoning, police said Thursday, raising concerns about the country’s ability to safely dispose of hazardous waste.
The dealer died Monday in New Delhi after being among workers who sawed open a gamma cell that Delhi University had auctioned off in February, a police statement said. Seven other workers are being treated for radiation exposure.
Police traced the cell to the school’s chemistry laboratory, where it had been lying around unused for more than 25 years. Students had used it in the 1970s to study the radiation effects of various chemicals, said police officer Sharad Aggarwal.
this was sequestered on an obscure page, Comrades Lurking and Explicit; let’s move it here to where the action is
3′ x 5′ acrylic on canvas-1985
“During the civil war, Trotsky wrote a book on art.”
-Harun Farocki, Dog From the Freeway
I was shaping snakes and mice in clay with my three-year-old in the year 2009 when the penny finally dropped and I realized I was handling a feces analog. The Art we were making was shit. My daughter probably knew that all along (and quite happily), but for me there had been a long gestational period, the decades during which I’d deluded myself into believing that the basic materials I was handling, in my life as an Artiste, were stardust and fairy diamonds.
My father was an Artiste; his life-sized canvases of hexagonal moons and primeval women (left breasts exposed) are almost as big a part of my childhood memories as the stink of his turpentine. He was an epic womanizer and his shoe of choice was the sandal. When I was ten we had a falling out. He had me taking Arabic classes on the weekends, but I balked as any headstrong ten-year-old would. I do not regret balking. The Arabic classes were meant to prepare me for the move he was planning to North Africa (the goal eventually shifted to another part of the continent). To that end, also, when I spent the night at his bachelor pad on weekends he’d have the heat turned up to unbearable levels to build a degree of tolerance. In my pre-pubertal mind, Sandals and Girls and Unbearable Heat were fusing into one awful urge called Art.
My father finally made the move to a faraway land (not quite North Africa) in 1980, with a whole new family, which is the only way he could have done it, and it was in the primitive villa they moved to (guarded by his Korean-War-era rifle, a rifle the government of Liberia eventually confiscated because it was bigger than anything in the nation’s armory) that he found his muse. He painted portraits of the locals and since it was the habit of the locals to return to him indignantly, weeks later, demanding the portraits “back”, he built a secret room under the villa to store what ended up being eight hundred canvases, a respectable oeuvre. There was a curfew in town, imposed by a gang of naked cannibals who called themselves something like The Butt-Naked Cannibal Boys: if they caught you outside at sundown, you were supper. Inspiration was plentiful. The paintings my father produced in exile were stripped of hexagonal moons and lyrical tits because he was no longer guessing at the contents of his imagination: he was finally living in it. He later died in Vegas.
It was in 1980 that I began receiving instruction from Tim, the mendicant monk of Art. He impressed me by drawing a perfect copy of the so-called Mona Lisa on the title page of a book in the public library and then tearing it out with fearless aplomb. This was long before Philistines became important people by learning to influence the conversational choices of even the angriest young men and women. It had been, by the time I met Tim, a couple of years since I’d dropped out of the expensive private college (known for its rich foreign students: Kofi Annan is an alum) that I had been packed off to by rich relatives who didn’t give a damn that I’d shown artistic promise. Swaths of both sides of my family had money but not the shred of the part I was born to. A Dickensian set-up.
Among the beautiful nightmare characters on campus we had an actual son/grandson of text-booked Bauhaus potentates: Conrad Feininger. He was tall, dressed like an adult with money in the bank, spoke with an envy-seedingly sinister accent and (I remember it thusly but it can’t be true) wore a monocle. He wanted to do something to a girl I wanted to do something to and I felt that as a congenital Artiste from a storied dynasty of suave European fuckers he had every right. I lacked ambition.
It was expected that I would use the time at this college correcting the frivolous mistakes my father made to make us poor. But my luscious spirit balked. The clearest memory I have of quitting school is walking out of the dormitory on a leafy warm day, carrying, with a friend’s help, a large table from the dormitory’s second floor lounge. I had convinced this friend that if we looked blasé enough while doing it, we could carry the thing off-campus with no one to stop us. It was about a ten block walk to the basement flat I shared with other students who had been inspired by me to also drop out. The table was heavy but worth the effort. We lived right up the street from the favorite circuit of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s skipping-and-running and sometimes sulking boyish ghost.
We were three or four young men and three or four young women unified by a heroically naive delusion of infinite possibilities and our smelly beatnik clothing. Sometimes we’d all strip and lull on the futons listening to Joan Armatrading. Periods and spermcounts synchronized and there was a daycare’s worth of abortions. I remember with a shudder of deferred lust a toy-faced girl from North Dakota handling my genitals with experimental ginger one evening in the communal bed whilst I feigned sleep because I wasn’t quite into her. The imaginary girl I dreamed of seeding in those days resembled the female figure on the cover of the Layla album and this girl from North Dakota looked nothing like that, with her big eyes and button nose and perkily doomed aura of Karen Carpenter.
The only chocolate-free drug I’ve ever taken was LSD (never grass, never coke, never booze or beer or heroin or ecstasy or meth or poppers or peyote or cigarettes and very little coffee) and that was the year I dabbled in it. Thirty or forty excursions on the brand of acid that came on little tabs of paper we imported via connections in the drama department. The drama teacher was a jumpsuited man with a Pan-beard whose signature theory of Method acting held that to be stabbed is to have an orgasm. There were lots of plays with stabbings. I took LSD and tried eating five hot dogs and this didn’t work. My then-girlfriend, looking exactly like a big aqua-and-white butterfly, straddled me after I spit the mulched quasimeat into a fern and drew my fluorescing seed into her anus.
I wanted to paint something grand.
I cut off most contact with my family, experimented with a sequence of horrid jobs in a department store (from loading dock to in-house repair to sales) and found I preferred to be self-employed as a house-painter/hedge-trimmer/ floor-refinisher and so forth. The only truly bad memory I have from this period was my having fucked some decent burgher’s hardwood floor so badly that I fled the scene in media res (or in flagrante), only to skulk back the next day to undo the damage while burgher oversaw until I finished and left, sans word or cheque.
The funniest work memory I have is from the loading dock days: a svelte, chic, nipply buyer striding towards a pallet stacked with imported shoes under the pumped-in workdisco of The Stones’ Miss You whilst my fellow apes went super-horny nova with Puerto Rican curses of hate and approval. Styrofoam packing material flying everywhere suddenly like New Year’s. It wasn’t until my youth was definitively spent (or invested) that I started earning good money selling anything finer (I am a composer) than my back-broken labor. Even now, in the 21st century, a decade after hauling my last infernal ton of bricks, or smearing my final vaulted ceiling with eye-spattering paint on the end of a wobbly pole, I look more like a construction worker than an intellectual.
My beautiful young wife (an actress and classically-trained musician) recently asked me to paint the kitchen and all she got was a look.
2
author's father in Korea
“Wow, obscure terms. English major, are we? But, I couldn’t agree with you more.Thanks”
-RedWolfSV, from a comment thread about a Kara Walker video
Tim the monk wasn’t a monk in the strictest sense because he wasn’t affiliated with Buddha or Christ, but as a penuriously unfuckable artist who lived in a garret he was Christ. He taught me that the world will always be hostile towards any Art that deserves the title and that the world’s suspicion and hostility coil neatly in the sweetest crannies of the richest implications of the word. When it was Art’s clear function to propitiate the Gods, the Artist was resented-but-tolerated. Minus the Gods the tolerations fade rapidly.
Tim would say Modigliani and the word was always gifted with the same Italianate flourish of his bony hand. From his correct pronunciation of the Great One’s name (soft “g”) I learned, in fact, to correctly pronounce the name of the trendiest restaurant in the trendiest neighborhood of the city, knowledge that required five years of gradually becoming a shallow, trendy, cunt-drunk prick before I could use it.
I taught myself to paint in a windowless room in a larger flat I shared with an anarchist and his ballbusting, helmet-haired, shovel-jawed girlfriend. Her allure whistled high above my head. I painted under a red bulb at midnight and feasted on jacket potatoes spirited home in an origami tinfoil swan and found myself with four or five girlfriends. The Psychedelic Furs became very important to me.
I walked into a 24-Hour grocery one night, reeking of turpentine (flirting with oils and Oedipus), hoping to buy a frozen cheesecake with a pile of quarters and dimes and the bleary-eyed hipster at the cash register had the radio tuned to a college station that sounded like it was broadcasting from the Urals, playing an unknown group called The Clash, which I hated because it sounded too earthy. Snow fell and I ran through it with frozen cheesecake. I began dating a fellow Artiste and discovered on the fourth date that I’d hit the jackpot: she was both virgin and orphan. She fed me an Xmas turkey that red oil paint had somehow worked itself in with the stuffing of.
Tim was missing teeth when I first met him and still more were long-lost by the time we last spoke, on a street corner, me just visiting the country for a few weeks from a new home in Europe, dressed in smart Berliner black and Tim just a wraith’s dingey sneeze, a total coincidence, a little awkward, fifteen years after the day he first made me his wide-eyed pupil by penciling a perfect Mona Lisa on a page torn boldly out of a library book. Perfect and from memory. The hands of Tim’s Mona were the hands of the woman herself, a pictorial stresspoint where every element of the composition locks together.
Why do so many blush at /despise/recoil from anything questingly original in Art? I can answer that question, but I won’t. I recently received this email from an otherwise worldy man, a man in the bigtime music business, friends with superstars and a guiding hand in the formation of two recording artists so huge that anyone born after 1960 would laugh if I name-dropped them here. He wrote:
“After a lot of years of looking-and-listening, I’ve come to the conclusion that ‘everything’ is a marketing exercise! I think anyone who produces art in any dimension, and says they did it for themselves is a liar. If they did it for themselves, why are they showing it to us???”
Tim was already thirty-something when we first met, incisors gone and sporting the Van de Graaff coif of the malnourished/mad. I learned soon enough to avoid riding buses with him because his favorite sex substitute was to sit in the back and extemporize weird melodies about the various failings of the lemmings, quislings, capos and dupes he believed we were sharing the bus with. I learned soon enough not to go with Tim to the cinema or grocery store or art gallery because the songs he made up for the bourgeois assassins of promise were much worse. He’d come down to my room at midnight a few times a week with a gallon of orange juice and talk for hours.
He taught me to be militant about Art. But I compartmentalized his influence because I did not want to end up like him. I liked sex with pretty girls and I wasn’t willing to forsake that pleasure for a howling gawk at the deafening core of the heartless furnace of aesthetic Truth.
3
3" x 5" acrylic on masonite-1990
“We are each a slimy apparatus of interacting liquids.”
-John Updike, Toward the End of Time
We were all so terrified of herpes. Articles about herpes appeared in the Vogue yet girls were falling ripe from the rafters like pomegranates. They were rolling soft from behind the arras. Uppermiddleclass ingenues with Planned Parenthood diaphragms in Pee-wee Herman purses reading Anäis Nin at the laundromat. It’s not politically correct to describe the atavistic sensation of wellbeing a young man sometimes feels when feeling rich in females so I’ll leave it at that. Not that this feeling is a strictly testicular dispensation, for I’ve known young women who collected men; who amassed portfolios of men; who collected and traded men like baseball cards. I can think of a specific example.
Half-Cuban… a dancer with fuckedup legs. Evangeline was olive-skinned, cinematically striking with a sheen of fine blonde hairs glittering on the muscular cake of her ass. Her father is a Gay Cuban professor of semiotics at Miami State University. If you’ve ever seen Masculin Feminin, Ev was a swarthy, bowlegged version of Chantal Goya. She preferred neither walking nor standing because she felt less bowlegged athwart a bed and on this bed she plied me with wry tales of her middleaged losers. As she put it she couldn’t get off on one of these fellows until she’d made him cry*. Evangeline’s nirvana (her masterpiece) came in Rishikesh where she made a fucking Yogi cry.
But we digress.
Tim lived on the third floor of a mansion-converted-into-a-hippie-flop-house and it was after I moved out of the drop-out commune and into this very mansion that I made Tim’s acquaintance, months before my conversion in the main branch of the public library with him and his Mona Lisa. His cheap room was under the roof so his ceiling was slanted. He shared a toilet with several other tenants down the hall, one of them retarded and the other a daughter of millionaires.
Among the beautiful nightmare characters inhabiting this mansion was a Miltonian poet with a massive upper body and one polio-withered (though shapely as a young girl’s) leg who introduced me to Suzanne Verdal (about whom the famous Leonard Cohen song was written), who once tried to seduce me as thanks for a thirty-dollar loan she never repaid. She’d visit the mansion on blessed days and dance on the lawn while her fairytale children sat on a low wall eating not oranges from China but apples that came all the way from Washington state as Tim glowered down from his belfry window.
There was this one, small, abstract painting on an easel near Tim’s belfry window and I can see it now as though it were on the screen before me. It was the only actual painting of Tim’s I ever saw. A dull green impasto circle, a thick blue diagonal and a dull red vertical stripe. He worked on and discussed and re-jiggered this painting for as long as I knew him.
How could Tim speak so movingly and with such detailed knowledge of Modigliani, Soutine, Kandinsky and the others and produce one worthless painting? I’m fairly sure it was a worthless painting. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it will make Tim famous in the 23rd century.
Fifteen years ago, I wrote a short story about Tim (who is always “Tim” whenever I write about him, because no other name comes close) called “The Half-Block Coat”. An excerpt I have cleaned up a little because my earlier, stiffer style irritates me:
So Tim bowed at the threshold and shuffled on the blackened mat and crept in, yanking off his cap and rubbing his palms, looking around the little room to see what had changed in the six months or so since he’d been there last. Henry noted that Tim was losing his hair and wisps of it reached longingly after the cap as he pulled it off. Poor Tim. Forty going on sixty. Henry was twenty two.
Tim kept his coats on and Henry knew it was because Tim didn’t want to appear to presume that he had been invited to stay. It was amazing, Henry thought. The less a person has, the more stylized the rituals. Tim had the florid manners of an Archduke. He only relaxed when invited to and when invited to relax he ranted.
In this story, the young protagonist meets a rich, powerful, sexually unsatisfied middle-aged woman from the bigtime genuine Aht World called Aria Tanner and deliberately keeps it a secret from his antisocial attitudinal mentor Tim, for fear that Tim will fuck things up.
At the story’s climax, Tim vomits.
*[One thing I could never do was picture Tim crying; Evangeline would have met her match in toothless sack-of-bones Art Angel Tim.]
4
3′ x 5′, acrylic on canvas
“Also because she actually went around calling herself a post-modernist. No matter where you are, you Don’t Do This.”
-David Foster Wallace, Westward The Course of Empire Takes Its Way
I met Aria Tanner a couple of years after moving out of the hippie mansion, introduced by an ex-girlfriend who was Aria’s stylist at a salon so snobby I always avoided picking her up from work when we were going together. I’d meet her at the corner. Ms. Tanner was in charge of millions of dollars of corporate Art-acquisition budgets. She was friends with Andy Warhol and lived near a lake with her dog and a lawyer boyfriend in a big house full of trendy Art .The ex suggested I show Aria a portfolio of slides of my mediocre paintings and though my stuff was neither neo-expressionist nor faux-naif enough to leave an impression, the nervy cover letter I included with the portfolio exhilarated the rich lady with its jejune panache. Either that or Pola (not her real name) had told Aria how good I had gotten in bed.
I had started off with very poor skills in this department until an art student (an ex; the virgin orphan, pictured above) I was cheating on Pola with at the time cheated on me in a menage-a-trois with fellow students, two hicks from Northern California, best friends since Sunday school (they kept exchanging the same sandy mustache since forever; I’d go to a party and one would have it and the other wouldn’t; a week later I’d see them walking with glum looks out of a matinee of Liquid Sky with the mustache situation reversed) who were separately and together, I was made to know, savants of the oral mysteries.
Aria gave me a high-paying job writing the artspeak mumbo jumbo for glossy corporate collection catalogues full of A.R. Penck’s stupid stickmen and Sandro Chia’s sickly telephone doodles and Julian Schnabel’s pointless crockery and Chuck Close’s titanic forays into the limitless realm of zero imagination and I quit housepainting for a whole summer and started buying new books and new clothing and feeling animally ambitious in a not very artistic way. I had moved out of the hippie mansion but I still bumped into Tim quite often (at the Artist’s Quarter Jazz cafe, for example, or Whole Foods co-op) and I had to hide any evidence of this wicked new job from Tim whenever we met.
-Where’d you get those new shoes, man?
-I stole them.
-Bullshit. Seriously?
5
5' x 7' acrylic on canvas (detail)-1984
“I made enemies on the East Coast, the West Coast, and in the Middle West.”
-Leonard Michaels
Gods know I knew Tim was hurting for cash. I think he was mowing lawns and leaf-raking and eating on Foodstamps.
I was dating a fresh-from-Paris lesbian fashion model who was the face for a line of cosmetics for rich old women in France (she was 20; they painted her hair white for the photos). She had a psychotic break on Bastille Day.
When the summer job writing copy for the acquisitions catalog dried up I took a bold trip downtown to Aria’s office in its greenglass skyscraper that looked like a shelf system for kitsch-addicted demigods. I saw this quest as a test of my testicular puissance but the distance from the elevator to the white plush spot in front of the desk of Aria’s secretary came very close to being asymptotically infinite. I’d walk half the distance, then half the remaining distance, then half of that, and so on.
When I finally made it into Aria’s black leather and chrome office, I can’t remember what I said; from where exactly I summoned the sauce to frame the proposal that she should think of some way to continue, despite the summer job’s end, funneling that good, good money towards me. There she sat behind her bunker of a desk in her pinstriped shoulder-padded business suit. She had the pretty, cow-eyed face and the spray-stiff coin-blonde hair and a witty-mean mouth any starving Artist with a molecule of common sense would have poked stuff into. One could tell, even in their armor, that her bosoms looked nothing like my father’s lyrical left tits or even Layla’s. They were triumphalist corporate ultra-mams.
I don’t remember how soon after that it was that Aria wrote me the first big for-nothing-in-particular cheque but I remember exactly what I did with it (along with the cash she’d given me for a taxi, which I pocketed by walking eight miles home): I bought my ravishing then-girlfriend a coat. The money flowed for quite a while. Imagine what her lawyer boyfriend (a dedicated jogger) thought of it all. I realize now that he deserved to claw at his hair near the lake alone and suffer a little over how wunderbar he imagined my youthful genitals might be.
Aria wanted to fly me to New York. She wanted to introduce me to her friend Andy Warhol. She wanted to fly me to Europe. She asked me for a backrub in a taxi once. She said with this new thing called H.I.V. flying around she’d never in a million years submit to anal sex… as if I had asked her to.
I see myself in Aria’s CEOish living room in that big house near the lake. I’m leafing through a coffeetablebook heavy as a Swiss toddler and fat with Modigliani nudes (and necrotic photographs of the whorish models he fucked before, during and after painting them) whilst Aria takes a shower (under what pretext?) upstairs. I turn to the page featuring my favorite (Reclining Nude… but they’re all called that, aren’t they?) and suddenly I hear the second floor master bathroom door swoosh open (in a sort of now-or-never way, but perhaps I’m reading into the sound of it, retrointuitively) and the hot rush and thunder of her highpressure yuppie shower and Aria calling out that she wants me to come upstairs because she needs to ask me something.
Tim never taught me an actual painting technique. He taught me that Art is a voice in the Artist’s head. The voice may change over the years but what doesn’t change is that no one else can hear it. And that your transformation as an Artist is complete when you can’t hear anything but that voice. That’s the point that Tim had reached: I knew that. Did I want to reach that point? I wasn’t sure.
All I knew for sure was that I didn’t want to deal with Aria Tanner nude and wet or just nude or just wet so that was the end of my career in painting, though not in Art.
Somewhere on the planet a Philistine is reading this piece with gratitude and wonder.
Tom Brady is a strange and interesting case: a guy who oscillates between the insightful and the near-retarded at a very rapid rate. Maybe he’s best explained by American Millenarianism; I have no idea what his background is but some of his richer rants make me wonder. He can be engaging-yet-naive as a questing student of Poetry, then perversely-fascinating as a nascent cult-leader-type and, suddenly, kind of ridiculous as a wannabe founder of some quasi-scientific system of Lit. I was drawn to Tom’s site (one he shares with Comrade Des) by his apparent commitment to the rescue of Poe’s myth (I haven’t put any thought into the story of Edgar’s death since High School; I’m not a fan of Edgar Allan’s Poetry, but I’m always interested in new angles on old objects) although I soon found myself sticking my rhetorical finger down my throat over Tom’s loonier and sloppier claims.
But Tom’s just posted THIS (it seems to have started life as a comment on the Harriet blog) and it isn’t the poorly-thought-through bloviation* of a self-promoting nut (though I hope it isn’t meant to be verse):
One of the obstacles to suspending one’s studies
In order to finally appreciate good poetry as a mature person
Is the general feeling that poetry is a useless item.
No matter how many times we read a critic extolling
The “virtues” and “uses” of poetry, no matter how eloquently
And how often such a defense is put (whether self-interested or not)
Let the argument be psychological, scientific, spiritual, political,
Even economic, the feeling (a universal one) remains:
Poetry is not a useful art, it is not a practice
Which furthers the world in a material sense, nor does the practice
Of it alone deserve any direct material award.
This humbling fact prevents the student from ceasing to be a student.
The inner voice which keeps insisting that poetry is trivial
Prevents the reader from securing his unspoken right–
And it is a right, ironically enough, in the highest political sense–
To enjoy poems, instead of learning from them.
For learning (aside from learning the mechanics of the art itself,
Which should be poetry’s chief study, if we are honest)
Is continued, with the unconscious hope that all this education
Will some day make it matter more, since poetry itself,
Says the student to himself, is of so little use in itself.
This is not to imply that poetry is without content, without history,
Without a potentially endless learnable context;
The point is, that these do not define poetry, per se.
The poem qua poem does not find them necessary.
Another obstacle is the belief (now a cliche) that we’re always learning.
It is one of those sentiments expressed, as a matter of procedure,
Everywhere we look: just one example is the talented person
Who humbly protests during an interview or an award ceremony:
“I still have so much to learn. I’ll be learning until the day I die.”
This is true, but at some point the show must go on.
The rehearsals end and the performance begins. The performance
Is an entity to be judged or enjoyed; it has a necessarily
Finished or completed existence. The painter cannot add
More paint, the director cannot shout out to his actors
In the middle of the performance, the poet cannot
Amend a line while the published version is scanned by a reader.
But as the distinction becomes more and more blurred
Between the study of poetry and the enjoyment of poetry,
The result is precisely what we would expect in poetry now:
Poems with an unfinished quality, as if the poet did not want
The process to end, was reluctant to let his poem go,
As if the poet could, in fact, have continued writing the poem
Forever, so that the length of the poem (the ultimate form of any
Poem being its length) is determined by “rehearsal time,” not by
The “poem’s time.” Anything can happen in rehearsal.
That’s the point of rehearsal. Learning is always artificially timed.
A professor must always determine how much time there is to
Cover the subject. ”Sorry,” the professor says,
“We don’t have time to talk about that.”
And the “answer” to the chief concern of the comment is, again, I think, something having to do with America. The America of Specialization, where people each tend to be known for one thing, if they’re known for anything at all, and the ten-year-old who’s fanatical about garbage trucks grows up to retire at thirty, selling his/her Sanitation Company for millions. Or the pop singer who also paints but keeps the painting as a low-key hobby because the audience is confused by the well-rounded talent and prefers the Idiot Savant. The kid who eats-sleeps-shits basketball is what America raises and understands. Students of Science who have also been spending significant and pleasurably-invested time with the Arts all along don’t end up chairing concerned symposia on the need for “Consilience” any more than Italian kids who grew up with Black kids and Hispanic kids make awkward overtures of symbolic friendship toward Black or Hispanic colleagues later. The narrowing life-range of Specialization leads to many imbalances, some simply disappointing and others bizarre. To be as rounded as the Athenian athlete-balladeer was an ideal at the JFK-era grammar school I attended… now it’s Sparta’s lethal single-mindedness which Americans admire most. Goethe would have had a problem with his High School guidance counselor. “Focus, Johann Wolfgang! Focus!”
Poetry can’t bear up under the pressure of being anyone’s everything; one needs a Life to give the reading/writing of Poetry a context and, more importantly, a fund of memories and inspiration in its creation and decoding. One really ought to be fucking regularly or pursuing the luxury; earning money and seeing friends or pursuing these luxuries; walking the city and eating at its various crossroads-bistros or burger joints in the company of strangers… or pursuing these luxuries. Reading all day is no better for the writer than drinking all day. How long or soon was it after Philip Roth was up to nothing but standing at his writerly lectern in a rural cabin all day that his books began to suffer?
Poetry that comes only from Poetry or Poetry read only in the light of other Poetry may not be a “useless item” but it will be a terribly etiolated one. Poetry accompanies a Life; it can’t supplant one. True also of Lit and Art in general. I wish more Americans knew this.
*[ed.'s note: speaking of "bloviation", why not call Blogs "Blovs" instead?]
Allegra Goodman has placed a synchronistically unconscious parody of my Chick-Lit parody (TALLULAH, JUDE… which I will continue soon, btw, now that I’m done filming Comrade DJ Sensei Barry’s Art Show) in the New Yorker, I see
(excerpt)
The day her fiancé left, Amanda went walking in the Colonial cemetery off Garden Street. The gravestones were so worn that she could hardly read them. They were melting away into the weedy grass. You are a very dark person, her fiancé had said.
She walked home and sat in her half-empty closet. Her vintage nineteen-fifties wedding dress hung in clear asphyxiating plastic printed “NOT A TOY.”
She took the dress to work. She hooked the hanger onto a grab bar on the T and the dress rustled and swayed. When she got out at Harvard Square, the guy who played guitar near the turnstiles called, “Congratulations.”
Work was at the Garden School, where Amanda taught art, including theatre, puppets, storytelling, drumming, dance, and now fabric painting. She spread the white satin gown on the art-room floor. Two girls glued pink feathers all along the hem. Others brushed the skirt with green and purple. A boy named Nathaniel dipped his hand in red paint and left his little handprint on the bodice as though the dress were an Indian pony. At lunchtime, the principal asked Amanda to step into her office.
You are like living with a dark cloud, Amanda’s fiancé had told her when he left. You’re always sad.
I’m sad now, Amanda had said.
The principal told Amanda that, for an educator, boundaries were an issue. “Your personal life,” said the principal, “is not an appropriate art project for first grade. Your classroom,” said the principal, “is not an appropriate forum for your relationships. Let’s pack up the wedding dress.”
“It’s still wet,” Amanda said.
Her mother could not believe it. She had just sent out all the invitations. Her father swore he’d kill the son of a bitch. They both asked how this could have happened, but they remembered that they had had doubts all along. Her sister Lissa said she could not imagine what Amanda was going through. She must feel so terrible. Was Amanda going to have to write to everyone on the guest list? Like a card or something? She’d have to tell everybody, wouldn’t she?
I waited all this time because I didn’t want to hurt you, Amanda’s fiancé had said.
After school, she went for a drink with the old blond gym teacher, Patsy. They went to a bar called Cambridge Common and ordered gin-and-tonics. Patsy said, “Eventually, you’re going to realize that this is a blessing in disguise.”
“We had too many differences,” said Amanda.
Patsy lifted her glass. “There you go.”
“For example, I loved him and he didn’t love me.”
“Don’t be surprised,” said Patsy, “if he immediately marries someone else. Guys like that immediately marry someone else.”
“Why?” Amanda asked.
Patsy sighed. “If I knew that, I’d be teaching at Harvard, not teaching the professors’ kids.”
Amanda tried writing a card or something. She wrote that she and her fiancé had decided not to marry. Then she wrote that her fiancé had decided not to marry her. She said that she was sorry for any inconvenience. She added that she would appreciate gifts anyway.
“As has long been his habit, Amis has seeded his novel’s publication with extensive interviews citing his latest book’s real-life models. “The sexual revolution killed my sister Sally” is a characteristic headline from a typical interview. Sally (who died at the hands of a serial killer) appears in this novel as the protagonist’s sister Violet…”
Actually, that was a fact-checking (or lack thereof) joke, Frances
[eds.'s note: The article-writer was confusing Sally Amis with Lucy Partington]
Kinda like “Hitch” attributing to Nathan Hale (and not Patrick Henry) “Give me liberty or give me death!” at the PEN festival wrap-up last evening. And not being corrected by Salman Rushdie, who should know better. Strange to say the least. Even weirder how they both repeatedly called Lally Weymouth, Katherine. Christopher looked like he might be drinking a Dean Martin beverage (a paler shade of Coke) but Salman seemed perfectly sober.
Other names were dropped more successfully I’m happy to report. And when you’re older, I’ll tell you the terribly unfunny (dumb blond with a shiksa twist) jokes Christopher cracked about Marilyn Monroe (at the Arthur Miller lecture, no less) unfortunately to much laughter. Had me looking around the Great Hall for the ghost of Joe DiMaggio walking softly and carrying … etc..
Well, now I want to hear the joke
When served matzoh ball soup by the august Mater Miller, Marilyn allegedly inquired: “Is this the only part of the matzoh you eat?”
What’s not to laugh?
Oh yeah, I forgot. He’s the arbiter of women, dead or alive, and funny and unfunny. Never mind as Gilda would lovingly say. Hoist him with his own petard!
But it’s not a “woman” (or, specifically, a “dumb broad” or “vagina”) joke that depends, for its effect, on the denigration of a whole gender/class/race/religion/nationality… it’s a Fish Out of Water joke that’s not at the expense of anyone but the character at the crux of the humorous misunderstanding, and, even then, the price the character pays is merely either appearing unworldly or awkward… very mild (and fairly Bellovian). We shouldn’t be too touchy and shut down the airport over the “bombscare” of an unattended banana peel… that’s my opinion.
I’m all for making jokes on Hitch or fat-white-academic-sell-out-drunks-as-stand-ins in turn… the crueler and funnier the better. But we won’t “win” by being thin-skinned and fuck Marilyn Monroe, btw. She was just a poor lost trollop who fell afoul of the Kennedy Bros.
That wasn’t Simone Signoret’s take on her. Not at all. (And remember MM had mounted Yves Montand.) Arthur Miller avoided serious jail time because Marilyn batted those lashes and shook her booty for HUAC.
How does mounting Montands or batting lashes at (or going down on) tail-gunner Joes get her into my Hall Of People To More-Than-Merely Shrug At?
[ed.'s note: I always loved how the photog staged the famous photo up there: MM is at the end of the book instead of the beginning, notice... right.]
Because she supported his humanity when it was at risk. And that makes her human in the best sense. Her great personal sorrow was to never have borne children. But she bore him; that was her crucible. One of many with which she was confronted. Make her a car hood ornament if you want to. But let the care be a Triumph.
Oh Christ, Frances. Enough with the hagiography. You know nothing supposedly “human” about the woman that hasn’t been filtered through a very long machine and if her works are to speak for her, we have a B-actress’ histrionic-or-goofily-diverting oeuvre to sift through. The clash of values here is primordial, I think. If it makes you feel any better, I have the same problem with CDS JR’s veneration of Che.
Except for that photograph of her after the miscarriage. There’s no filter. That’s her beaver shot.
Beatified via a beaver shot? May I submit, for the Vatican’s consideration, several billion beavers… but, seriously. If suffering is what sets MM apart, what are those women in Palestine/Mozambique/Bangladesh/Haiti/Romania doing… fucking around?
[ed.'s note: sorry about the cheap shot, but this is a pic of MM in the ambulance after the miscarriage]
[the funny thing is, Artie and his chum do indeed appear to be peering at MM's vadge in this shot]
This fine lady was married even more frequently than Mister Rushdie.
Now this is grooven.
I know! Even the cigarette smoke looks way cool.
IRREVERENCE AND THE REVEREND
I came up with the theory, on a walk with CDS Barry recently, that MLK got his signature rising-cadence-with-vibrato effect, in the “I Have a Dream” speech, from Bela Lugosi’s (1933, proto-civil rights) “Not men, not beasts… things!” speech from the first film version of HG Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau (where DEVO got the “Are we not men?” riff from)… but it’s still just a theory-in-progress. Or a joke that hinges on an insight/insight hinging on a joke. Not men, not beasts, things… indeed.
“[ed.'s note: sorry about the cheap shot, but this is a pic of MM in the ambulance after the miscarriage]”
It may indeed be a picture of Marilyn in the ambulance after the miscarriage making the best of it, bucking up. But the other one, and you know the one I mean, is Norma. I know you know the difference.
(As for Haiti, I’m sending a letter to our Special Envoy to Haiti today with some thoughts I hope his office will find helpful.)
Frances, the difference I know is between the hoopla-glamorized meatbag-with-hair (ie, the celebrity) and the run-of-the-mill meatbag-with-hair (ie, the rest of us, unless we’re Alopecians).
And, re, Haiti: interesting reading for the Comrades:
Haiti was an exception from the very beginning, from its revolutionary fight against slavery, which ended in independence in January 1804. “Only in Haiti,” Hallward notes, “was the declaration of human freedom universally consistent. Only in Haiti was this declaration sustained at all costs, in direct opposition to the social order and economic logic of the day.” For this reason, “there is no single event in the whole of modern history whose implications were more threatening to the dominant global order of things”. The Haitian Revolution truly deserves the title of repetition of the French Revolution: led by Toussaint ‘Ouverture, it was clearly “ahead of his time”, “premature” and doomed to fail, yet, precisely as such, it was perhaps even more of an event than the French Revolution itself. It was the first time that an enslaved population rebelled not as a way of returning to their pre-colonial “roots”, but on behalf of universal principles of freedom and equality. And a sign of the Jacobins’ authenticity is that they quickly recognised the slaves’ uprising – the black delegation from Haiti was enthusiastically received in the National Assembly in Paris. (As you might expect, things changed after Thermidor; in 1801 Napoleon sent a huge expeditionary force to try to regain control of the colony).
Denounced by Talleyrand as “a horrible spectacle for all white nations”, the “mere existence of an independent Haiti” was itself an intolerable threat to the slave-owning status quo. Haiti thus had to be made an exemplary case of economic failure, to dissuade other countries from taking the same path. The price – the literal price – for the “premature” independence was truly extortionate: after two decades of embargo, France, the old colonial master, established trade and diplomatic relations only in 1825, after forcing the Haitian government to pay 150 million francs as “compensation” for the loss of its slaves. This sum, roughly equal to the French annual budget at the time, was later reduced to 90 million, but it continued to be a heavy drain on Haitian resources: at the end of the 19th century, Haiti’s payments to France consumed roughly 80 per cent of the national budget, and the last instalment was only paid in 1947. When, in 2003, in anticipation of the bicentenary of national independence, the Lavalas president Jean-Baptiste Aristide demanded that France return this extorted money, his claim was flatly rejected by a French commission (led, ironically, by Régis Debray). At a time when some US liberals ponder the possibility of reimbursing black Americans for slavery, Haiti’s demand to be reimbursed for the tremendous sum the former slaves had to pay to have their freedom recognised has been largely ignored by liberal opinion, even if the extortion here was double: the slaves were first exploited, and then had to pay for the recognition of their hard-won freedom.
Little known fact:! Abraham Lincoln was in a bluegrass band called The Fox Mange when he lived in Springfield. He alternated playing the alto washboard and the ten-gallon moonshine jug. Big hit at their local azalea festival.
[ed.'s note: that's Richard Pryor, working off one thousand hours of community service, in the photo with Lincoln]
Richard Pryor’s cute, but Red Foxx was the one who took Lincoln’s legacy of light far more seriously.
“Legacy of Light”…? Gak.
When you capitalize it and put it inside quotation marks like that, I concede it’s a bit on the turgid side. But so much is in the political arena.
The “political arena” is the system of covert deals and overt lies The Cynical Controllers use to herd the Dupes towards optimal Cliffs. Neither Politics nor Advertising could exist without the Profound Dupability of The Fans/Shoppers/Masses. Nothing I can do to change it but fuck if I let myself roll over, on my own blog, with a polite simper, at reverential evocations of the gold-plated Super Turd of So-Called History in the gnarly surface of which Abe’s face is as much a feature as Normal Jean’s, Lady Di’s and Chuck Manson’s.
“I’m all for making jokes on Hitch or fat-white-academic-sell-out-drunks-as-stand-ins in turn… the crueler and funnier the better.”
For the record, and I was surprised by this because from pics of his talking head he looks like he would be, Hitch isn’t fat. Mr. Rushdie, however, should consider sitting on his hands when the basmati bowl is passed his way.
Hitch not fat? On what scale?
[ed.'s note: a Comrade Lurking has written in to inquire as to where I found the cool photo of Richard Pryor swabbing the smut from Abe's gigantic white bisexual ear; sorry, it's not really Richard, Comrade. I was joking]
But I wonder at the depth of the connections Spooky is making as he links these disparate ideas/situations, CDS Barry… isn’t he playing the Hodge-Podge as Complexity game that has become a cultural value since the i-pod shuffle play list? His use of the word “frequency” as a link, for example…
yes the down-to-earth street-smart intellectuo selling you his ice cold commonsensicle, Spooky is the prized emissary into the pantheon of high theory from the ‘dark-side’ of quip-hop smarts and New World Hucksterism, obscolescing the university as he thrives from it’s antiquated (hard currency) note of prestige.
Methodology anyone? is that a dirty word now? I agree Steven, frequency might have been an interesting term to explore it he had spent a bit more than 15 seconds on it. Obviously the star-sold class room is only too happy to make allowances, as long as he makes them feel good. And Spooky falls into a trap of his own making: ok maybe I have nothing to say, how about a little soft-shoe?
[ed.'s note: fixed, but not sure why CDS Barry's comments always get lodged in the spam folder; if anyone else has the same problem on TET, please email me about it]
So! Now I have time to engage!
CDS Barry, as you well know, you and I often touch on the issue of Academic Emperor’s-New-Clothesism during our Berlin zig-zagging walks. You can crystallize my position on the matter (regarding a very specific kind of Intellectual or Fancy Explainer, as I will specify below), after almost a decade and probably 20,000 kms of Berlinavigation, as:
1. The Academy is a Temple: just as it behooved the High Priest of the Temple of Thoth (or Merlin, or whoever) to pretend to know shit he really didn’t know in order to achieve and maintain his power as an intermediary between both the King and the peasants, and the King and the Imaginary God the King derived his power from, it behooves the Academic to preside over an inexhaustible well of academic pseudo-mysteries his/her presence will be forever required to interpret. A: All the more pressing now that Science has separated itself from Religion and Philosophy by producing so many concrete results B. All the more pressing since no stable method has yet been achieved to give the Academic’s Literary/Psycho/Philosophic pronouncement the methodological gravitas of Scientific Principles (eg, to cite Hegel is to argue from authority whereas to cite Fermi or Planck is to have, at hand, eg, Fermi’s Law or Planck’s Constant)
2. The Right-Inflected Academy (eg, as represented by Friedman, Greenspan or Fukuyama) has Agency… as cover for the Inevitable Policies of the Government (which is always, in the Anglo-American Sphere, Rightist)… whereas the Left-Inflected Academy (eg, Zizek or Chomsky) has Youth Appeal (as middle-class Youth invariably passes through its Utopianist Phase). This means: A. Left-Inflected Academic Discourse is never even expected to make sense, because: i. to commit oneself to a disprovable position in clear language is to all-but-beg for immediate obsolescence ii. clarity feels Conservative B. No politician in the Anglo-American sphere will even pretend to do something because Zizek said so
3. The Left-Inflected Academy conceives of itself, falsely, as a Cure For or Defense Against the Right A. in the name of the Masses i. though the language of Academic Discourse is deliberately pitched over The Masses’ Heads ii. though The Masses tend to be the overwhelmingly Conservative Force from which the Right draws Real World Strength and/or Authority B. in the name of an Objective or Absolute Moral Imperative i. despite the fact that this is in direct contradiction of most anti-Deist Left-Inflected Discourse ii. despite the fact that Right-Inflected Academic Discourse has drawn enormous Real World Strength and/or Authority by eschewing this position in Real Terms by pretending to argue beneath it
I think that covers the position I’ve been refining in the thirty years since college; thirty years of debating friends-(and lovers) as-academics while keeping up with Popular Philosophy and taking on doctoral candidates in heated Comment Threads online. One thing I have noticed with delighted horror is a weakness in rhetorical skills that the average Anglo-American Academic (or Hackademic) papers over with citation carpet-bombings in debate. These thoughts/opinions of mine don’t cover, say, the field of Linguistics, which is scientificized enough to ward off sheer intelligence or clarity of thought with Empirical Data such as Grimm’s Law… and soon, as Psychology mutates into Geno-Pharmacology, that pseudo-science (Freud was spot-on about assimilated, fin-de-siecle, middle-class Viennese Jews but that’s about it) will have a genuine fortress to abscond to in a heated debate, as well. But Philosophy, which is a popular way of Appearing to Know in a modernate world shaped almost entirely by Hard Tech, is a sitting duck. BHL qua BHL doesn’t “know” a thing that Plato didn’t. Why do we live, why do we die and what should we do in-between? Still don’t know. The trick is to somehow earn a living addressing that simple 30,000-year-old question.
It’s my feeling that you, CDS Barry, can embody a DISCONTINUITY in the unbroken tradition of the Academy As Pseudo-Masonic Temple and the Left-Inflected Academy as Esoteric Placebo on the order of Intellectual Homeopathy. You’re young, clued-in, angry enough and slightly strange. What I like is your tendency to mix a Chomskyite willingness to cite actual figures, banal as they are relevant, with the more abstruse arguments. You aren’t afraid of muddying high-flying rhetoric with bodily fluids in the actual Congo. Bodily fluids in the Actual Congo is where it’s at (there and in the Comment Threads of Celebrity Gossip Sites: if I were looking for Dissertation Fodder, I’d pick the latter).
So: I see DJ Spooky as failing only to cover his tracks well enough in that little spiel; he hasn’t learned to pick his citations well or lay them on artistically. He’s also dressed a little too well. Remember, always dress like clothes aren’t your main concern and cite the guys who are A) the most obscure and B) writing in a foreign language! No one can prove you wrong. It’s even better if you C) cite someone who hasn’t been done to death (eg Baudrillard, Hegel, Adorno, Lacan, Benjamin, Blanchot have been done to death… it seems to me that, pretty soon, Wittgenstein and Nietzsche and Bertrand Fucking Russell, whose citations I no longer run into so often, may well come back into vogue. If Mcluhan can do it…).
This piece by Richard Dawkins is not, in my opinion, too bad:
(excerpt):
Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content. The chances are that you would produce something like the following:
We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously.
This is a quotation from the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, one of many fashionable French ‘intellectuals’ outed by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont in their splendid book Intellectual Impostures, previously published in French and now released in a completely rewritten and revised English edition. Guattari goes on indefinitely in this vein and offers, in the opinion of Sokal and Bricmont, “the most brilliant mélange of scientific, pseudo-scientific and philosophical jargon that we have ever encountered”. Guattari’s close collaborator, the late Gilles Deleuze, had a similar talent for writing:
In the first place, singularities-events correspond to heterogeneous series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor unstable, but rather ‘metastable’, endowed with a potential energy wherein the differences between series are distributed… In the second place, singularities possess a process of auto-unification, always mobile and displaced to the extent that a paradoxical element traverses the series and makes them resonate, enveloping the corresponding singular points in a single aleatory point and all the emissions, all dice throws, in a single cast.
This calls to mind Peter Medawar’s earlier characterization of a certain type of French intellectual style (note, in passing, the contrast offered by Medawar’s own elegant and clear prose):
Style has become an object of first importance, and what a style it is! For me it has a prancing, high-stepping quality, full of self-importance; elevated indeed, but in the balletic manner, and stopping from time to time in studied attitudes, as if awaiting an outburst of applause. It has had a deplorable influence on the quality of modern thought…
Returning to attack the same targets from another angle, Medawar says:
I could quote evidence of the beginnings of a whispering campaign against the virtues of clarity. A writer on structuralism in the Times Literary Supplement has suggested that thoughts which are confused and tortuous by reason of their profundity are most appropriately expressed in prose that is deliberately unclear. What a preposterously silly idea! I am reminded of an air-raid warden in wartime Oxford who, when bright moonlight seemed to be defeating the spirit of the blackout, exhorted us to wear dark glasses. He, however, was being funny on purpose.
This is from Medawar’s 1968 lecture on “Science and Literature”, reprinted in Pluto’s Republic (Oxford University Press, 1982). Since Medawar’s time, the whispering campaign has raised its voice.
[ed.'s note: the POSTMODERN GENERATOR which Dawkins refers to at the end of this article can still be foundHERE]
I’m trying to picture the urban landscape that gave rise to 2,A,ii “clarity feels Conservative” as modified by the Dawkins statement “for clarity would expose your lack of content. ” All I’m coming up with is an abandoned fenced-in construction site, with a frame shop and dry cleaner on one side and whatever constitutes the German equivalent of a sprawling Salvation Army thrift shop on the other.
Yer gonna have to elucidate, Frances… meaning is… unclear
And therefore revolutionary?
You mean clarity would be revolutionary? Well, clarity of expression doesn’t preclude the telling of lies and the maintaining of a status quo, remember… in fact, that’s what the Hegemonic Right uses its clarity-of-expression for, no? (They get Obscurantist when it comes to Economics, of course… but you can see the utility of Obscurantism there)
Bastards sitting in their offices
And bastards trying to boss you around
Bastards up there in Canberra
You expect those bastards to be bastards
But what gets me
Is having bastards all around you
Bastards on your own side who turn out to be
Bastards.
I guarantee if they started a society
To rid the world of bastards
In six months the bastards
Would take it over.
–Len Fox (1905-2004), from his self-published collection Gumleaves and People (1967)
Rather fascinated by the “medical” illustration to this. Have you seen those full body-sized waxworks where disembodied hands peel open women’s bodies to show us the baby in the womb or what’s going on inside the chest.?
All the while the women’s faces remain as placid as if they were sunbathing on the verandah.
A demonstration that education, surrealism and prurience can peacefully co-exist.
Any indication where this came from? Taschen have probably put it out in an astoundingly expensive and oversized tome for “collectors”.
btw, wtf and fwiw drawings have been emailed to you and have not bounced back so there they are.
[ed's note tried to fix it, Comrade ET, but the comment seems to want to stay in this counter-intuitive location; for the record, Comrade ET was referring to the rectal probe above the Vasserly, Comment #48]
Haven’t seen those peeled-woman illustrations but I am, after all, in the land of Gunther Von Hagens (the Carnival of Corpses traveling show)… if I need to I know where to find it… (be cool if Gunther teamed up with Kevorkian somehow)
AS THE FAUCET WHOOSHED WATER INTO Jude’s smallish tub, Tallulah had a Father Pete flashback. Father Pete who called his semi-erect penis the aspergillum and had gotten Tallulah’s attention on her very first day of a summer job by ordering a BLT and a glass of holy water from her bath. Without even lowering his voice. Those were the days. Like all fornicating priests, Tallulah now realized, Father Pete had wanted to get caught. At the time, however, she’d been naively impressed by his recklessness, turning the color of an almost-unnecessary tampon and forgetting to charge for the holy water as she rang up the BLT with a trembling hand while the other hand steadied Tallulah against the counter. “Priest” was only beneath “judo instructor” on her adolescent fantasy-list of professions to seduce (or be seduced by) but she had literally shrugged and gone for it. Or let herself be gone for.
A summer job: a job they gave you just for being young: how she missed the concept. Tallulah asked, the first time she’d climbed into Father Pete’s hell-hot van on a drive half-way to the shore, “If nuns are married to Christ who are Priests married to, Father?” Without a pause, and without taking his eyes off the road and with seductive grimness, he’d answered: “Ourselves.”
Mistaking arrogance for desperation is one of my favorite fuck-ups, Tallulah thought, swirling what looked to her like a child’s hand in Jude’s deepening tubwater. Can I really be almost thirty? She broke things off with Father Pete after he’d confessed, upon making it as far as almost three-quarters of the way to the shore one afternoon, that Tallulah was the only thing keeping him from ending up like Father Robert. Father Robert who’d been sent to Mexico over allegations involving eighteen boys of Puerto Rican descent. There but for the grace of Tallulah, thought Tallulah. She wondered if Father Pete still had all his hair and a Prince cassette on his dashboard and she cast about Jude’s head for a bottle of bubble bath. Something aromatic they might smell all the way in the living room.
In a way, aren’t all men priests? Married to themselves? Isn’t Jesus just an excuse? And what are women in this way of looking at things? What am I, Tallulah? Satan? The World? A handjob on the way to a seashore you promise your whole life to reach but never quite make it to?
Tallulah was certain she could detect, over the proximate roar of the tubwater and the larger context of Sammy Davis Jr. singing Candy Man from Jude’s docked i-pod, a conspiratorial conversation against the other side of the bathroom door, half of which came in the muted tones of a man-child’s baffled concern. Or awe, probably. The female’s intermittent giggles Tallulah put down to the nerves of a bested rival. For Tallulah was sure Jude must be feeling awe about now.
Who but Tallulah, the girl who once jerked off a straight priest and a Chinese math tutor on the very same afternoon and then used the unwashed hand to help mold beef patties for a bar-b-cue at her grandmother’s, would have the nerve to take a bubble bath, uninvited, in the host’s tub during a dinner party? Jude was bound to be as impressed at Tallulah’s recklessness as Tallulah had been at Father Pete’s. It was important for Tallulah to believe that no man worth having really wanted a woman who was too predictable.
The doorknob turned a few futile half-turns clockwise and back but there was no knocking… as if Jude and his new apparent best friend were afraid of what they might find in there. Chickenshits, thought Tallulah. She decided to up the ante.
Next Monday: Chapter Six of TALLULAH, JUDE… ChickLit in Bite-Sized Pieces!!!
usually I wouldn’t want to watch anything from a U of Chicago Prof. but this is a worthy exception (though I must admit, I put it on in the background while I was preparing dinner) succinct, yet detailed analysis of an ever pressing (but perhaps not for long) problem, and a privileged peek into the inner thinkings of realpolitik today.
I would like to reply to myself encouraging all those, like myself with no time to tarry with mediocre media to allow the aforelinked vid a few moments more than you might normally deign to dispense with. My advice, put it on like radio and do some cleaning or something you’ve been meaning to do for a while, you’ll have an interesting time of it, and agree or not, you will have done something you’ve been meaning to do which does not involve sitting at a screen.
there, I said it. click the link. what did you think?
Interesting speech from a skilled speaker… I’ve made it to the 60-minute mark with only the qualm that given a realness-level-choice ranging from “Politics” to “Realpolitik” to “Real Realpolitik” (with the first being standard Disney and the last being the Nitty Gritty), Mearsheimer can only, of course, go as far as the middle path*. For example, he refers to Biden’s warning/complaint about the continuing expansion of settlements in Palestinian territory as a “threat to the security of American troops” when, of course, putting those troops (and the civilians they are ready to kill) in harm’s way for political gain (and no other reason) is what these fuckers do for lunch.
And the larger question… which being: how the conflict over this tiny strip of real estate became a Flash Point hotter than Check Point Charlie or anywhere along the border between North and South Korea at the height of the Cold War… can only be addressed in the language of Real-Realpolitik. What’s the real real story? It’s all too fucking Meta.
The tabloidish removal of the veils from the John Edwards story is a rich resource and pertinent to the question. We first saw Edwards at the level of Politics: handsome guy and devoted family man running for office. A veil was removed when the scandal rumors came out around the same time we were told that Edwards’ wife had cancer… rumors of an affair he dismissed as ridiculous; an aide stepped in to take the heat… that was the Realpolitik level of reality. Time passed and it turned out that Edwards had fathered a child with his mistress while his wife was battling cancer and had roughed her up a little, in a heated moment, too: the mask fell off and the Real-Realpolitik narrative asserted itself and the arc was extraordinary. Which only happens when a player, for whatever reason, falls so far out of favor that they’re thrown to the wolves and “journalists” are allowed to go for the kill. Think Nixon.
It’d be nice to be able to read a History Text about “The Middle East” a hundred years from now: I guarantee you that the overarching narrative won’t be what we’d generally expect it to be.
*Mearshiemer’s wiki: “Mearsheimer is an outspoken opponent of the Iraq War. In 2002, he was one of thirty-three professors to sign a letter in the New York Times arguing against President Bush’s intention to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein from power. He felt that invading Iraq would distract from the war against al Qaeda, which he described as a greater threat to national security.”
Which is the consummate Realpolitik-as-opposed-to Real Realpolitik stance.
THE SARCASTIC TEXT
The Rain Foundation
1. Rainy
Rainy Witherspoon was trying to get up her nerve. She had to muster the cold courage, or manufacture a little self-righteous indignation, but in any case she had to break things off with T___ today, she couldn’t let herself weaken. But she was weak! She had to give T___ his walking papers. Their relationship was taking her nowhere. What other justification did she require? A thirty-two-year-old woman was not a twenty-two-year-old girl!
Rainy phoned T___.
2. Willy’s Thing
Herr Lang stood at the corner of the intersection of Uhland Strasse and the KuDamm, waiting obediently for the light. How could he know that the light was broken? It was a Friday afternoon and he was becoming increasingly agitated. Excited. He couldn’t wait to cross the street. He felt that the street was a Great Divide and that the corner he was standing on was Before and the one he could see opposite, on the other side of the median, was After. From where he stood he could see, to the left of the corner he aspired to, McDonald’s, bustling with the overwhelming color of American tourism. Standing at the big windows with their shakes, staring out into Germany, recuperating from the shock of running up against McDonald’s employees who couldn’t even speak English. Through the montaged glass he saw jeweling lines of peaches and pinks and aquas; the bold yellow plaids and the thrilling green neons and the adamant capitalist fuchsias. As a painter Herr Lang was fascinated with Americana.
If he’d had the great luck of being born in Chicago (love the soft savagery of the sound of the name of that city) instead of Brunsbuttel (his father, still alive there, has a four-digit telephone number!), he’d be Willy Lang (rhyming with “tang”, sharp “a” exaggerated) instead of Veely Lahng and he’d be doing commercials for credit cards by now, saying “Hi, I’m Willy Lang…”
His work appeared so often on German television that he had begun, since the 1970s, to adapt his style to the medium. As in: curves and swirls come off better on screen than jagged lines and angles. Thick lines better than fine ones. VanGogh better than El Greco, El Greco better than Klee. Also: horizontal (obviously) better than vertical and odalisques better than crucifixions. Chiaroscuro grabbed and monotone bored; reds and yellows (but never yellows alone) over blues and violets; vaguer, broader brush strokes came off as energy while painstaking, detailed brushwork got lost in the pixels. His most successful installation (Fern Sehen; National Gallery, Fall of ’85) had been three big rooms full of very large video monitors showing live transmissions (from Israel) of new works that had never been exposed to the naked eyes of any audience (and never were as the video tape went into the permanent collection of the National Gallery and the actual canvasses were destroyed). New advances in the medium made him nervous. Would flat screens and high-definition send him back to the style lab? What if TV screens became upright rectangles in the future? But anyway he had little to worry about. In Germany he was famous. So famous that his hometown Berliners ignored him in person. In England he was flying well under the radar; in France he was just another bosch but in Israel intellectuals bothered to argue over him. He was known in The States, but it was unlikely that the woman he was watching from across the street in McDonald’s at the moment, the big-chinned white-haired one in a daffodil-colored ski jacket and matching drawstring pants, had a Willy-print hanging in the breakfast nook back home. No, never his Curvy Reclining Crucifixion. A more populist work, like Vaguely Yellow, maybe. Probably not.
Willy stood there and waited for the light to change. At first glance you’d think he was a jeweler or an eccentric banker trying to look young and not some successful artist who looked like a business man trying to look like an artist in an expensive leather jacket (soft as skin) trying to look young, in creased khakis, moderate jowls (rough as leather), Nietzchiean mustache and riding boots. The look of a prosperous Yugoslavian pimp, say. Dressed that way… he always dressed that way… he was doing what Anke eye-rollingly called flattering himself. She’d look at him over a milchkaffee at a patio table at Figaro’s (where she and her other boring writer-friends hung out) and laugh. Willy, that’s not how you look. Anke with her square-framed serious-looking writer glasses and those cock-forbidding tweed blazers and her preposterous backpack (a forty-five-year-old woman with a backpack) judging his style.
A skin-temperature breeze ruffled his hair with avuncular affection and he reached up and patted it down. It was his 46th annual spring on the planet Earth, the first spring that he’d ever really bothered to notice. He had never before noticed that certain flowers would bloom and fluoresce and reek and then wither before June. Or that bumble bees only appeared on the scene after snow was gone and disappeared again before Christmas and that Berlin smelled better in April than it did in July. He hadn’t noticed spring, he hadn’t noticed anything. His life had been a helicopter ride, numb and aloft, above experience, while decades elapsed under him and the Earth seemed a vague place tuned to a low frequency meant for others. But now, suddenly, his feet were smack on the ground and he took note of the copious miracle of sticky detail that Life shoved in your face. He took note, for the first time, with sensual accuracy, of the Creator’s finicky and generous craftsmanship.
There were stones placed in some of the buildings and sidewalks of this very neighborhood that Romans (both kinds, of course, but more wonderfully, ancient ones) had walked on! The sparrows which hopped the curb for crumbs were direct descendants of the dinosaurs, formerly as massive as U-Bahn wagons! At that very moment, in the coil-packed factories of his ginger-haired balls, nations of invisible proto-Willys were flailing toward existence… Willies within Willy. Willy as a Chinese box of biology, a hologram of wet awareness in which the tiniest part reproduced the whole and speaking of his reproductive organs, he had come to that morning, bedroom bathed in spring’s pure breath (in truth, the studio bedroom… the mattress in the studio office… because Anke preferred the house to herself) and discovered a questingly hard little prick under his covers! A hard prick! His own, even. How he had loved his hard prick as a boy, parading around the house with it, rubbing on magazines and his mother’s unterwaschen and even the docile dog and then its pups. He used to call it his ticket-puncher. Willy had forgotten about that. He had forgotten so much. But now, on the first day of spring, Nature had sent him a love letter, a registered letter stamped Urgent. The contents of the letter: Every Man is your brother; Every Woman your love-object. Enjoy your stupid life!
The first thing he’d done was call Anke to leave a rather cool message on the machine.
Then he’d washed and shaved in the studio, heaving a bucket of hot water onto the desk so he could watch the bustling KuDamm while he did it, shaving without a mirror (by touch), cool air from the open windows blowing goose pimples across his arms, his uncircumcised penis tormenting his briefs. Look at all the pretty young girls running up and down the KuDamm in and out of the shops high-laced boots bounce cottontits stocking-tight bellbottombum foal-skinny legs and long hair everywhere, long and natural, the luscious blond manes, lustrous black manes, the voluptuous young Turkish girls and their reliably brood-ready breasts rebelling against pious, scarf-wearing mothers and the whole long street blurry with ozone and pheromones. Willy couldn’t wash and shave quickly enough.
He was going to get out there and behave like one of God’s creatures. Today he was going to fornicate. Reproduce, even. He wanted a son (even a daughter would do). If Anke refused to give him a child (what did her doctors with their stupid warnings know?) he’d get one somewhere else. He wanted to do something; make something; feel something. Sick and tired of lying propped on an elbow in their queen-sized bed on Saturday night watching Anke with her fluttering eyelids insult him rooting around in her gravelly uterus with his arch-enemy that ten-year-old vibrator and by candlelight, yet. Fifteen years was enough. He finished shaving and toweled himself and dressed. Hurried short-legged down four flights to the foyer of the grand old building, taking a deep breath before pulling the baroque front door (crafted in the age of giants) and into the blustery, rose-scented, sun-dappled KuDamm with all of its sexual wonders.
Willy patted his hair down. He was still standing at the corner, waiting to cross the street, the upright red palm of the don’t walk signal still flashing. He looked longingly at the opposite corner and saw two skinny blacks standing there and then crossing towards him. One of them was wearing a black cowboy hat. They ignored the light and jogged over, splitting and re-combining like a zipper around him, continuing up Uhland Strasse behind him, while Willy stood still like an obedient schoolboy. Apes, he thought, amiably.
The fruity gold-green late-morning sunlight was busy scraping winter’s fuscous residue. Contagions of green broke out along the skinny arms of the trees which lined the promenade and Willy reflected on the perfect balance of the natural world. Those two blacks (jaywalkers) for instance: deficient intellectually, apparently cheated by Nature in that regard. (What European was foolish enough to proclaim, yet dense enough to disbelieve, the notion that the black species was intellectually simpler than most others?). And yet (hear him out!) those self-same jaywalking blacks (unable to design and fabricate a space shuttle, or even a cantilevered bridge) were clearly Willy’s sexual superiors. Sensually speaking, they are geniuses and I am a Mongolian Idiot, he mused. Willy had no problem admitting this.
Nature had compensated the sons of the tribe of Ham for their smaller brains with bigger, suppler, vastly more splendid penises. Plus the instinctive ability to wield them superlatively. Balance (phylogenic justice) was therefore maintained. Natural Law, which is compassionate (but firm), sees to it all at the level of the chromosome, for Man, with his blunt gavel, is an amateur. So every Race might lament its deficits, while in the same breath extol its own virtues. Every Race brag its blessings while bemoaning its curses. Every Race a dawn and a midnight too.
Experiencing a warm, wise chill, Willy suddenly thought of that peculiar political movement of the Thirties and Forties. The one his father would sometimes discuss with twinkly discretion, all those years ago, in the garage, while the Mercedes was running and Mother was busy checking all the locks on the house (sometimes double-and-triple checking), in that minute or two each week his father felt free to talk (he’d clam up again when Mother climbed into the passenger seat beside him) and sometimes the topic of these quick talks would be lovemaking (even when Willy was just a child) and other times the topic would be The War. Obliquely, his father referred to those times as our short leap over a wide chasm. The real evil of that system was how they had played too-cleverly with the truth. Savage lies can be mere entertainment, whereas the calculated near-precision of a semi-truth can be the deadliest toxin. Those so-called N___s actually destroyed reality by splitting the atoms of Meaning itself (the Allies opted to split matter instead and won but the fallout from N___ experiments in Word Fission still linger) because it’s a recognizable truth, after all, that the Jews can be money-lenders, usurers, shylocks. Yes, that is a semi-truth, Willy thought. But had the Jews not also been Deutschland’s greatest professional comedians? Now that they were gone, had Germany had a belly laugh once since the War? Also, admittedly, as writers (led by their Freud), Jews tended to be more neurotically over-intellectual (from the cultural habit of pouring over minutiae in arcane Rabbinical texts, probably) than healthier, straightforward Europeans. But they, the Jews, nevertheless had risen to occasional peaks of literary greatness: of this, Willy was certain that it was safe to assume. Jew and Gentile, German and Slav, white man and black. Intellectual and Athlete, Sensualist and Aesthete. Every teacher in turn a pupil! Every group its part to play in the World’s puzzle! Everyone was necessary, in the end, everyone belonged. I, Willy Lang, am no more worthy a being, when all is said and done, than those two illegally street-crossing blacks that I have seen!
Believing this, suddenly, with all of his heart, with the warm palm of the spring sun pressing on his shoulders, an unconscious smile stretched his thin, cracked lips. The benevolent smile of an upright member of a mighty congregation, standing straight-spined in the foremost pew, receiving the greatest and simplest and most uplifting of sermons. Every Man is your brother; Every Woman your love-object. Enjoy your stupid life!
That’s when he saw her.
Crossing the street toward him. Lips of fat raw steak and skin expensive chocolate and Willy’s heart shot a kilo of steel blood down the chamber in his pants and his thing stiff at her blind but resolute in its lair. Black Venus! Dark Dietrich! Chocolate Valkyrie! Eva Brown!
She crossed the street and whooshed by Willy in her short skirt on Moulin Rouge long legs, clacking the sidewalk with stiletto-heeled thigh-high black vinyl don’t-even-think-about-it boots. Clack clack clack clack clack. Willy’s hair fluttered in the sucking force of the wake that trailed behind her. Willy patted his hair back in place and hurried after, up Uhland Strasse, but try as he might, he couldn’t catch up! Her legs were eating vast lengths of sidewalk. Clack clack clack clack clack. Running would have been undignified, but fast-walking only got him within an arm’s length of her and the gap grew clack clack clack clack clack and he reached and touched her shoulder blurting in his best English black baby I am in love with you!
She stopped dead in her tracks.
Before Willy knew it he had introduced himself (her name was Rainy Witherspoon and she was American and she was starring in a production of Hair at the Theatre Des Westerns) and charmed her into going up to his studio to look at his paintings for just a little while, please and anyway the studio was right on the Ku’Damm so she felt safe and went up the stairs and his hand was light as a feather on her basketballed ass prodding onwards and upwards her heels like gunshots in the stairwell.
Rainy glanced at a few of the works with detached curiosity going uh-huh and that one’s nice and hmmmm, trying to think of a graceful way out until Willy mentioned that the going price for one of his larger works was thirty thousand marks.
Thirty thousand marks? Rainy listened respectfully. Walking around the studio more slowly now, giving the paintings a second look. It was more like being in a real art museum, suddenly. It was nice. The sun dragging luminous rhomboids across the parquet floor. The reassuring sounds wafting up from the crowds thronging the Ku’Damm. Willy stood behind her with his hands clasped didactically behind his back as she stood before a large work, a newer one, called F(r)ame. Richly-grained and varnished wood, huge, three by five meters and shaped like a picture frame but of weird proportions, with each side of the frame (banally fitted, end to end, by 45-degree joints) two meters wide. Swollen. It must have weighed a ton. At the center of all that shining dark wood was a little rectangle of blank canvas of about four square inches.
Willy said Yes, that is one of my favorite pieces too. He said If you like it, you must like me. He said Perhaps we two can be of help to each other in a soothing voice and stepped up closer behind her. To be honest, I have never felt before how I feel today. I’m so curious about the world, Rainy. Your world. I want to know more about you (he reached around under the denim jacket and dug out the tucked-in tee shirt and slipped his cool white hands up her hot black sides and tugged those nipples in a wonderfully futile milking). He said I want to know more about you; I’d like to meet your friends also. Taste your soul food and so forth. It’s not so crazy, my idea. He kissed her neck, tickling and burning it with his mustache and added I can help you and you can help me. I am not a nobody.
When Willy woke he realized he was snoring and stopped. What time was it? He was on the mattress in the studio office, fully clothed (but not dressed: his pants were around his ankles), bathed in the cool half-dark of twilight. He’d slept the day away. Sharp white lights refracted from the traffic outside were drifting across the dark ceiling like theoretical boats in a two-dimensional harbor. Willy was groggy and he heard voices coming from the other part of the studio. No, it was one voice. Rainy.
He quivered there in his leather jacket and his pants down around his booted ankles watching the delicate pattern of light-boats shifting across the ceiling, stroking his limp penis. Memorializing it already. Its work done, it was now dead. He had fathered the beginning of his own private master race: a creature with white intelligence and black beauty. Wie schöne, how marvelous. He listened with abstract pleasure to the sound of the half-whispered voice in the other room. Her dusky elegant Negroid laughter as she paced, a nipply silhouette, between the tall windows in his gallery.
Rainy twisted the curly white cord around her bare black arm like a lanyard, waiting for the operator to put her call through to yet another far flung friend she hadn’t gabbed with in ages when she suddenly felt it, a drastic change in the pH of the lining of the hinter-most valve in her womb, a cold little mercury ping down there between the heart and the cap of the bladder.
3. Legalize Stealing!
T___ was on a strict regime: no more this, no more that. This included masturbation because with masturbation come fantasies and fantasies engender longings and longings produce a time-wasting weakness called love. No more love.
With the accrued sublimated sexual energy of a hundred pent-up nights he wrote a great book called Legalize Stealing! about life among the freaks of the international underworld such as drug dealers, gun-runners, sadomasochists, pornographers, phony metaphysicians, art forgers, assassins, restaurateurs and pimps. He used a handsome illiterate friend as the model for the book’s sexual idiot savant Buddah and the book was published by a small independent press. A hit in Eastern Europe. T___ didn’t make huge amounts of money with it but he met an enchanting woman while signing copies of his book at the cafe Klik Klak in Prague. She smelled like cooking vanilla and T___ could smell her at the back of the book-signing line and T___’s own grandmother, because they had been poor, had dabbed cooking vanilla (eighty proof) behind her ears instead of perfume when he was a child so he signed books impatiently until he found the source of that smell. She handed him a copy of Legalize Stealing! inscribed already with her own inscription, to T___, the author, from Sofia, presumptuously, with love, in honor of many good future years together.
4. Best Wishes
601 East 32nd Street. Apt. 511. In the Lake Meadows apartment building, where the renters were mostly black professionals. There was a gynecologist next door, Dr. Cruszat and also, for example, a senior officer of Chicago’s first black-run bank in the two-story apartment down the hall. There was a framed poster of the 1993 Theatre Des Westerns production of “Hair” showing the entire cast on stage, holding hands, hands aloft, mouths open, photographed singing the climactic “Age of Aquarius” bathed in gold light and there, center right, was Rainy in a blond wig showing her perfect white teeth and her made-for-the-stage dimples. There were autographs and valedictory inscriptions inked like squashed spiders all over the poster. Best Wishes, Viel Glück and all that. The poster was in the nursery, over the crib. The crib was opposite the window which over-looked Lake Michigan. Low clouds advanced over the choppy water like black-bottomed magnets and the lake bristled obliquely. Soft pebbles of water dotted the nursery window.
Rainy was in the living room in her pajamas on the white leather couch drinking an herbal “reducing” tea and watching television. The television muttered at a barely audible volume forcing her to lean forward from time to time to make out what it was saying. So low that the clock ticking on the kitchen counter seemed loud.
A woman, daubing at tear-smashed eyes, described how her drug-dealing bisexual boyfriend had seduced her mentally-ill father, subsequently robbing the feeble old man of his life savings and giving him a sexually transmitted disease in the bargain: anal herpes: and the studio audience was rapt: fingers on cheeks, mouths gaping. Every few minutes, for the benefit of viewers just tuning in, an italicized subtitle appeared: Louise: Shot Cheating Boyfriend Who Raped Father.
Now I’ve heard everything, thought Rainy. Thank God that woman is white. Trailer-trash. With her thin, frizzy-permed, mousy-brown hair. If it was a nigger up there telling the same story, all the white folks in the audience would be thinking See, that’s how they are! But when it’s white trash perverts they’re dealing with, they don’t draw any generalized conclusions. Ever notice that? Let one crazy little jigaboo mess up and the entire black race gets the blame.
She flicked the remote at the television and the screen went black and she pushed herself up from the sofa. She slipped her feet into her comfortable slippers (pink rabbits, with ears and everything). Willy had sent them. At first she had taken one look at them and said, out loud, alone in the hallway, if he thinks I’m gonna put my feet in these foolish things he must be on crack! But here she was, wearing them. They were comfortable and it didn’t matter how they looked. The same remark could she also apply to herself, as Willy would have put it. Pride in youth, comfort in maturity.
She shuffled on the kitchen linoleum. Shi-shi-shi. Opened a cabinet and grabbed a bottle of vitamins. Then over to the ‘fridge for a pitcher of orange juice to sluice the pills down. Shi-shi-shi. That’s the thing she loved most about this apartment: the floors didn’t creak. It was spacious and ultra-modern and climate controlled but it was the creak-less floors she appreciated the most. Her whole life she had lived in places where the fucking floor creaked. Growing up with puritanical faux-bourgeois colored postal-worker parents in a house with creaky floors she couldn’t get away with anything. Friends of hers had already tried grass by the time they were in the fifth-grade and were worldly enough to complain, in the school cafeteria, about boys who cum too quick or fuck up your rear with lard but Rainy had been trapped in her childish downscale-Disney bedroom at night and she couldn’t even go to the toilet without waking up the whole fucking household. From as young as thirteen on she knew there were beautiful smooth-armed brothers out there on the not-too-filthy streets, breath like Passover wine, shirtless in humid moonlight, waiting for her. Ready and able to hump all firm-but-gentle on the hot hood of an idling Cadillac, shoe-horn those big black dicks in her. She would squirm and flop in her bed and fantasize ’til the cows came home and jerk off until her fingertips wrinkled and she had masturbated the ‘Seventies away because of those god-damned creaking floors.
Shi-shi-shi-shi-shi-shi-shi. From linoleum to parquet in the floppy-eared slippers. She went from the kitchen to the end of the hall, in the cul-de-sac where she had most of her pictures nailed to the walls, to pick up some tiny clothes lying around. When she stooped she felt the cheesy weight in her breasts and when she stood up again the sheer synthetic fabric of her night gown grated on her sore nipples. She winced and at the moment of wincing espied her reflection in the glass of a dark photograph she stood facing. Saw her wincing thirty-three-year-old face superimposed over her smiling twenty-two-year-old face, a portrait taken by a famous Austrian fashion photographer and the dark picture was a mirror, accurate enough but not brutal, so she took the time to really look at herself, something she hadn’t had the courage to attempt in the clinically-vicious bathroom mirror (the one real mirror she kept, out of necessity, in the house) and she tugged the fat on her neck.
Oh Lord oh fuck, she thought. For ten years, she had run as hard and as far and as fast as she could from America, from fat nigger mammies, from the ghetto, only to wind up here, in Chicago, surrounded by ghettos, herself a fat nigger mammy! Because of a German! The irony of it. I fell for the oldest trick in the book, she thought. Some guy comes along with a little money and knocks you up and offers to take care of you and you fall like a ton of bricks.
She opened the door to the nursery.
5. Rainy Junior
T___ and Sofia, living together in Prague, had a baby, a little girl who T___ insisted they name Rainy.
6. Acting Young Aged Him
Anke checked the address she’d scribbled on the KLM folder that had held her Concorde ticket. She repeated the address. The dashboard screen of the Global Positioning Map of Chicago flickered in response. Ten Forty Four West one hundred and fifteenth street… the address, according to the GPMOC, didn’t exist. It wasn’t in the data base. An apt enough metaphor. She’d have to find the place the way the pioneers had… by asking directions. Are you kidding? (If she had to, of course, she could use the car’s public address system).
The dashboard traffic light was red. She was at the intersection of 115th and Halsted and all her steelclear™ windows were rolled up and all the doors were vacuum-sealed plus the rental agency had furnished all vehicles with Riot-Ease gas vents but still she felt unsafe, unsicher and was prepared at any minute to hit the red light override and step on the gas and run the light and take her chances with traffic.
At 60, Anke Lang was still a great runner. She was wearing a silver foil track suit and Nike wraparound running goggle and she saw herself, as if in a premonition, dashing through the ghetto in this get up. She tried to make herself as small and transparent as possible behind the wheel of the chrome-colored Chevy Stiletto. Unlike in Deutschland, opaque car windows were illegal in the States. She felt exposed. So the cluster of black boys (the politically correct term for blacks was now urban nationals; she had to remember that) at the corner bus stop, until a few seconds ago busy smacking each other like chimps, noticed her.
She pretended not to notice that they had noticed her. A dwarfish dangerous-looking one pointed at her and blew her a kiss and then started out into the street, gesticulating wildly and the other little slum-monkeys went mad with delight, slapping each other five and then the little schwärze monster unzipped his white corduroy pants and un-taped the birth control diaper and got his bent little Schwanz out, black as licorice, two gold earrings through the glans and he wagged it at her, coming toward the car all comical bow-legged and googly-eyed. Waggling his penis at her. And these were school children, nine-year-olds with i-boox bags and corrective screenreading glasses! Probably straight-A students! Anke glowered.
The little cannibal got up on the hood like he was going to make love to it and thudded the windshield with a print-leaving fist. His teeth, per fashion, had all been pulled, except two in front at the top. He looked like a nightmarish crazy black rabbit. He was mouthing obscenities that the Stiletto’s insulation blotted and his gang was in hysterics and Anke, silly, squirted him with wiper fluid and he grabbed at his eye and the light turned green and she floored the pedal, zero to ninety and she saw him, in the rear view monitor, rolling across the asphalt, his homeboys bent-double with dumb-demon glee.
Of course, she had imagined the whole episode, gripping her steering wheel at the realism of the vision. She was a writer, and writers have imaginations. When the dashboard traffic light finally turned green, she drove carefully through the intersection and the urban nationals on the corner paid her no attention.
She drove slowly, funereally, in hope of spotting an address to orient herself. Was this really America? Block after block, mile after mile, of filth and devastation. Vacant lots of mountainous brick rubble; scorched abandoned buildings; drug-addicted bare-breasted minimum rights mothers with snot-slick, illegitimate children slung marsupial from their hips. Bellicose raggedy-assed nappy-haired men with bottles, staggering from trash can to trash can, pollinating the fires with their hundred-proof piss. Well, thought Anke. What’s wrong with these people?
More importantly, why had Willy loved this city so much? He’d been flying there twice a year for as long as she could remember. And then those bank records she’d uncovered and all those mysterious monthly payments to a mysterious charity (footnoted in his records as The Rain Foundation, 1044 West 115th Street, Chicago, Illinois, PoZone 7-uNat).
Anke regretted Willy’s recent death at that moment acutely, if only because now it would be impossible to put that and other questions to him directly. She’d have to infer an answer from accumulated evidence. She’d have to infer plenty of answers, writing, as she was, Willy’s biography. Ironic that his death gave her a moral right, an imperative, to do what Willy often bitterly referred to as snooping whenever she put a direct question to him when he was alive. I’ve had a noseful of this goddamned snooping of yours, Anke. I feel as though I’ve been tied to a chair by the fucking Stasi. And he’d be biting the corners of his walrusy mustache, a sure sign of his rage.
They had quarreled constantly at the end. His death hadn’t shocked her: he looked so old, already, like he could have been her father, that she was always surprised, again, when she got a call from him every morning. Bald and skinny and bent like an old nail, as if the mass of the mustache was too much to support. In a way, towards the end, the mustache symbolized everything. The more famous Willy got, the fuller and more baroque that mustache of his grew. Too much fame: too many drugs and girls and parties. If she could have shaved that thing off of him, at the end, perhaps he’d be alive today. He thought it made him look virile, younger! Acting young had aged him.
Writing Willy’s biography was a psychologically complex endeavor for Anke: part tribute, part snooping, part catharsis, part gold mine, part revenge. Anyway, now that Willy was a famous artist (even or especially in America), there were sure to be dozens of unauthorized biographies. Willy was the first major artist of a young Millennium. The show that MOMANU held of Willy’s famous Black Madonna Serial broke the attendance record previously held by the Lost Picasso event. Willy Lang had become an industry in America (now that High Culture had been rediscovered by the rediscovered middle classes). It was important that Anke’s biography become definitive by being first.
She finally found the place she was looking for, further out from the Dante-esque hub of the city. 1044 West 115th Street. A ramshackle wooden house, surrounded by vacant-lot jungles. Out of the tall grasses of the vacant lots rose old refrigerators and stacks of truck tires. A dented blue old fashioned mini van was parked in front of the house. Anke parked across the street from the mini van, in front of an abandoned commercial building, probably once a micro-chip or cigarette packing plant that had exploited South East Asians. Climbing out of the car was like disembarking from a space ship. The planet she was now on, America, was hostile but capable of sustaining humanoid life. The wind actually howled. It was late fall and the street and sidewalks, rarely traveled, were heel-deep in crunchy or cornflake-in-milk-mealy brown leaves. The sky a chilled gray womb full of holes. In her silver track suit and wraparound goggles, Anke really did look like a space visitor. At least this part of town was more wide-open, almost rural. Nature was in the process of repossessing it, splitting the unconscious asphalt with roots, covering the old factory (as one covers a corpse) with vines.
The moment she stepped on the first creaking stair step towards the front door (it was a comedy how those stairs creaked, like in an old time horror movie), a pack of dogs in the second level of the house (she could see them snarling in a bedroom window) went wild. She couldn’t find a doorbell, but there didn’t seem to be a point in having one. It wasn’t long before a gigantic bushy-haired black (urban national, rather) woman, in a yellow bathrobe (in the middle of the day!), came to the door.
Anke guessed the woman to be in her late fifties. Standing behind the woman (cowering, like an animal) was a yellow-skinned boy, in pajamas, anywhere from ten to fifteen years old, with Negroid features and wild, unkempt hair. Light-colored heavily-slanted drooping eyes. Three wet fingers stuck in his mouth. Mustache.
FriDay Pome: *sick in berlin*
steven augustine, 22:47h
Sunday, 10. February 2008
getting sick in berlin
its own black romance
like love in paris
a fling
strangers too close on the metro
fluids exchanged
the essence of nameless kissing
that rheumy-eyed grandfather with
his pre-Euro Aldi bag
his snotrag hard as a
fossil may as well have had his
tongue in your mouth
with a persistent cough
he is part of you
even poetry is humbled by the couple
you have become in fever’s
capacity for
regret
FriDay Pome: *you are a berlin*
steven augustine, 23:58h
(in honor of the end of an era)
you are a berlin at the center of which is
a Bezirk in the heart of which
is a cafe in the
smoke of which rave the dogs and babies old
beyond the saturated stains of all their days, the
tepid milch kaffees and kretek-punctuated
ennui-activated litany of
welfare-subsidized
complaints
you are a berlin of dogs and babies both, the
merde-smirched Pony Hof, imaginary
Schlosses atop ten
landfill-bulges looming o’er this
ganja-clouded yankee-haunted
WG-rich
terrain.
i love your streets, their
birdshit dog-do juicyfruits, their
smog-consuming, fog-excreting
piss-fed trees; the orgy of the prospect of
the easty beastie boulevards these trees line up in
nude platoons like flashers bent
and twisted in arthritic throes of
esoteric agony. i love
your frank municipality; its endless
wave of pidgin English
ironies; the sonnet-pretty übermenschy
whores of June the
17th, too late for Bloom,
too blonde and
cool, too cheap
to prove a mystery:
they are berlin and we
ride black
with Ecstasy
[i wrote the last one in response to a bar/cafe smoking ban; "June the 17th" is a famous street and to "ride black" is to use public transport without a ticket]
INSIDE JOKE, EH, GEORGE?
“Was there a book that inspired you?”
George H.W. Bush: “There was a marvelous book by Salinger called Catcher in the Rye.”
More Morris dancing, this time at the New York Public Library. The NYPL is honoring the Yankees. Here’s how the invite reads.
“Corporate Dinner Will Honor Champions On- and Off- the Field
June 7, 2010
6:30 p.m.
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
Join Reggie Jackson, Lee Mazzilli, Hal Steinbrenner, and Jennifer Steinbrenner Swindal for a spectacular night when The New York Public Library honors the World Champion New York Yankees at its annual corporate benefit. The Yankees have partnered with the Library to help kids all over this great city, renovating the children’s room at the Bronx Library Center, sponsoring the Library’s Summer Reading program, and underwriting the purchase of thousands of books for Bronx libraries. Have your picture taken with the Yankees’ 2000 and 2009 World Series trophies and join us in thanking the Yankees.”
Now, it was very cool that the Yankees stopped by Walter Reed Hospital on their way to the White House to shake President Obama’s hand, but what about honoring the commitments their coprporate managment has made (using their faces and images on the poster) to the people who breathe their same air?
This structural corruption, in which “non-profit” board members who control public institutions and shepherd billions of dollars of tax-payer resources, and who abuse the public trust by providing cover for unethical business practices in an almost complete vacuum of governmental oversight, really needs to be addressed.
Having said that, if Don DeLillo and other prominent Bronx authors would write a letter to the NYPL board, ccing the media, asking that the Yankee syndicate take the occasion of the gala to announce how it has addressed and redressed the community’s legitimate grievances, perhaps under PEN’s leadership, it could be a whole new…etc.
Just to show that it goes in all directions: I Googled upon reading of Lena Horne’s death and found this picture of Dorothy Dandridge, identified as Horne, on an African Fashion blogspot… because all us mischlings look alike…
Driven by a hunch I Googled “Billie Holiday” and found this, as a result, on several White-ish (though not all are Anglophone) blogs:
[ed.'s note: Beloved has a speaking part on a popular TV show, which films out of town; she was on her way to the train station at 4am... so I'm busy keeping Offsprung fed and busy all day and well into the evening, operating on zero sleep in 36 hour... posting will be intermittent...]
BELOVED’S ADVENTURES IN TUBEWORLD
That’s her messing with hardware between takes. It’s certainly bigger than mine.
They’re shuttering ten branch libraries in NYC. While the people scramble to save what should never be at risk what else will they be stealing right off the table?
Dunno, Frances. That sort of thing has to wait in line behind blowing kids up with drones on my list of Worries and Outrages. I’m sure there were vociferous campaigners for Animal Rights or against Local Corruption or Littering in the Berlin of 1939, too… it’s not just a matter of scale but of perspective. Look at it this way: at least they didn’t level these libraries with missiles while they were full of school kids and winos.
That’s the point, Steven. It’s all of a piece. It’s just another way into the same realization. The choice has now become fast death or slow death. When I was in Park Hills, MO a couple of weeks ago, I attended a lecture at the Mineral Rock Community College. It was held in the library there. A packed audience of multi-cultural kids and their teachers and librarians. They listened more or less respectfully, more or less attentively to Helen, age 86, told her story of survival. But also of a couple who were talked out of a quiet suicide at home only to be deported, tortured and ultimately gassed. It was the talker-outerer’s biggest regret in life.
“It’s just another way into the same realization. The choice has now become fast death or slow death.”
Drone death in Afghanistan being the fast version… ten branches of the public library being shut down in NYC being the very slow version.
If closing the libraries would save the Afghani lives, I’d be first in line with the Master locks. It’s all of a piece, Steven, and it’s all about privatizing the real estate, here and there. I know this because when I was 17 living through a war, an actual one, I routinely visited Israeli soldiers in Hadassah Hospital who had been wounded in the Sinai, and from their beds, behind their bandages, they told me so.
“Whereas the author’s early works, like ‘Dead Babies’ and ‘The Rachel Papers,’ were animated by a satiric gift for social observation and a deliciously black wit, this novel tackles the same themes — sex and identity and coming of age — with weary determination, and lacquers them all with pompous, inanely rococo meditations about the nature of art and truth. (‘Recently when he was out in the street, he used to think: Beauty is gone. He soon moved forward from this position, and thought, Beauty never was — there never was any.’)”
Wince. Not that I managed to talk myself into reading more than c. 50 pages into The Pregnant Widow; I used to think there was an obligation to finish any book I’d bought (linked obliquely, probably, to being doused, early and often, with my mother’s moral blackmail re: kids in Bangladesh and my french fries) and it’s true that the compulsion to do so taught me lots of negative lessons, as a young man trying to learn to put words together in such a way that some reader might feel compelled, at the least, to read them. As the hours become minutes and the years become months and then weeks I can’t fuck with books that don’t bother to inform me, early in the process, why I should bother (the subtlest wink will do it). Which is not a just critique in this case, because Pregnant Widow’s prologue really grabbed me. As I noted at The Valve,
The intro, in which Amis is doing what late-stage-Amis does best (the steely rue/ grim glee in the bodily disintegration of a late-stage-Amis type), got at least three big, hopeful chuckles out of me. Before chapter one ended, however… the grinding lovelessness of the task at hand became all too… etc.
Hard enough to spin fine fiction from autobiog’s stone; on top of that, in The Pregnant Widow, we’re reading a salvage job of at least half-a-decade’s work. He did it to himself, eh? Mart’s becoming the kid who everyone started calling a fuckup: gets harder and harder not to fuckup.
Kakutani writes:
“Can the changing sexual mores brought about by the pill and the women’s movement really be summed up as ‘girls acting like boys’ “?
And that’s the heart of the problem of the novel’s more-than-stylistic failure as a fancy explanation: the premise is dead wrong. If The Sexual Revolution has to be summed up in some kind of headline, let it be: The Year The Lower Classes Got Sex Lives Resembling The Sex Lives of Their Masters. You’d have to do it case-by-case if you wanted to calculate the total amount of pleasure each participant managed to save from the burning wreck of The Revolution before the Mullahs sprayed the fire with Fundamentalist foam (and AIDS), but it’s not an unreasonable guess that Men got more out of it than Women. Just look at all those vintage pictures of skinny white Zarathustra’s and their topless harems at play in the moddish mud. Scratch an “open relationship” of 1970 and you’d find a smooth-talking Peter Fonda wannabe and his long-suffering Beauvoir… biding her time until he got it out of his system (which he would, eventually: with a younger woman destined to dump him). The clamp-down (eg, throwing teens in jail for fucking teens) has a lot to do with the fact that the Aristocracy wants to keep the Right to Fuck: How, Who, When to itself. Adultery, abortion, statutory rape, bestiality, buggery and homo-love are meant for the Rich. The Congressman who’s soPro-Family that he has two of them (one with his mistress in a rented luxury flat, far far away) isn’t being a hypocrite, he’s being an Aristocrat.
Even as late as the late-1970s and early 1980s I remember thinking that something must be wrong because I was having more fun than all the several rich old men of my vague acquaintance (fathers of kids I was in school with, mostly). Yeah, suddenly the whole Sex thing was a meritocracy. Playing the guitar, being not bad on the eye and a dab hand at lyric verse seemed to erase the fact that I was shit poor and boasted zero career prospects. I was a boy with two pairs of shoes, three shirts, a sack of trousers, a few dozen books, a guitar, no car, no career… and five or six girlfriends. Real Role-Playing Equality would have meant seeing more girls with male harems around town (rather than the old configuration of the occasional belle deftly juggling suitors) but at least… for a shining moment… money wasn’t part of it. Not to mention the joys of being a hetero male Sex Object… which is as close as the Sexual Revolution got to being Gender-Blind.
The modern psycho-social horrors Amis wants to frame as The Sexual Revolution’s inevitable aftermath are, in fact, results of the crack-down. Too bad the Revolution wasn’t allowed to flower to the extent that Women began to have as much fun as the Men were. Equality of Fun is of the essence.
“The modern psycho-social horrors Amis wants to frame as The Sexual Revolution’s inevitable aftermath are, in fact, results of the crack-down.”
It’s just a matter of time before they start submitting their books to you prior to publication. Poor guy. It’s too late now, but with that one important adjustment he might’ve written a brilliant book, the book he meant to write, but didn’t know it..
Glad you seem to appear to seem to appreciate the commentary, Frances; it’s the sort of thing I enjoy writing here.
[ed.'s note: to anyone coming late to the party, the timestamps show Frances here responding to the actual post eight hours after she left the non-sequitur, below, which triggered the most recent skirmish]
By the way, I just sent my letter to President and U.S. Special Envoy to Haiti Clinton. I was waiting, hoping that a friend of mine might help me find just the right lines of poetry to include. But I didn’t want to wait any longer. So I sent it without poetry. It wasn’t about the poetry anyway. It was about the joining together. Anyway, I hope the Director of Correspondence will deem it worthy of President Clinton’s attention.
Seeing as the long-running U.S. policy toward Haiti is largely responsible for its structural and systemic vulnerability in the face of earthquakes, hurricanes and plagues of rats, Frances, isn’t your letter to the sinister Clintons a fairly Kafkan gesture? Did you respectfully request that they re-discover their humanity and beat their breasts and gnash their teeth and swear off the Vicious Game of Empire… and to thereby, rather than send Haiti the poison bait of so-called “aid”, just simply stop actively fucking Haiti up?
When I was last in Haiti, I watched very young girls stooped in front of whirring, hissing binding machines at the Superior baseball plant in Port-au-Prince. Many had swollen eyes and lacerated arms. I produced a camera and was thrown out. Haiti is where America makes the equipment for its hallowed national game, for next to nothing. Haiti is where Walt Disney contractors make Mickey Mouse pyjamas, for next to nothing. The US controls Haiti’s sugar, bauxite and sisal. Rice-growing was replaced by imported American rice, driving people into the town and jerry-built housing. Year after year, Haiti was invaded by US marines, infamous for atrocities that have been their speciality from the Philippines to Afghanistan. Bill Clinton is another comedian, having got himself appointed the UN’s man in Haiti. Once fawned upon by the BBC as “Mr Nice Guy . . . bringing democracy back to a sad and troubled land”, Clinton is Haiti’s most notorious privateer, demanding deregulation that benefits the sweatshop barons. Lately, he has been promoting a $55m deal to turn the north of Haiti into an American-annexed “tourist playground”.
Not for tourists is the US building its fifth-biggest embassy. Oil was found in Haiti’s waters decades ago and the US has kept it in reserve until the Middle East begins to run dry. More urgently, an occupied Haiti has a strategic importance in Washington’s “rollback” plans for Latin America. The goal is the overthrow of the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, control of Venezuela’s abundant petroleum reserves, and sabotage of the growing regional co-operation long denied by US-sponsored regimes.
Maybe you’re tired of reading this anti-Murkkan Empire stuff from me, but I have to neutralize the presence of that Normative Beer you seem to want to keep sprinkling TET with.
Nicholson Baker proved to us way back in 2004, when it was very dangerous to do so in the way that he did it, that it was possible to be angry-unto-nausea-and-clarity about the misery and killing that follows the shadow of the shadow of the Murrkan Flag around the planet. Turning TET into a platform for recycling a bunch of reassuring NormLib memes extracted from the Murkkan Press (Release) about politicians-n-celebrities (RFK, MM, The Clintons) would feel like a step or three backward. And I started the damn thing so I could post responses like this without fearing of being deleted.
You aren’t being deleted or ignored but fuck if you can expect me to play along with that stuff. Do you really believe it? And if so, why?
I’m genuinely curious.
“Did you respectfully request that they re-discover their humanity and beat their breasts and gnash their teeth and swear off the Vicious Game of Empire… and to thereby, rather than send Haiti the poison bait of so-called “aid”, just simply stop actively fucking Haiti up?”
I know the history, and yes, the Shawshank Redemption pipeline should be filled with shit-smeared crawlers. If I thought your words would move them in that direction, I’d happily send them along. But I don’t think they would. (I mean, what happened to all the comrades that were here? I’m used to pricks so you don’t bother me in the slightest, but obviously other people don’t cotton to being browbeat.) I tried to appeal to whatever decency might still be intact, the guy who listened to Coltrane and saved his mother and baby brother from being whaled on by Roger, Sr. He’s in there too.
As long as he’s already sending them flashlights I hoped (and hope) he might be open to sending them something to illuminate, like the materials and expertise to build homes such as the ones Michael Reynolds delivered to the tsunami survivors. Maybe he doesn’t know, isn’t aware, would if he did. We’ll find out.
Anyway, I ask or remind people in charge to do the right thing. I do that in many arenas and ways, Steven, any way I can creatively devise. For me, ranting and raving, (though important in educating and communicating and cultivating personal stamina), is the start point, not the end.
Scoff away at me (it actually makes me stronger), but I made 250 little orange ribbon ties and stood outside Cooper Union and distributed them to the attendees at President Obama’s speech about the financial markets, to remind him to keep his promises to the Guantanamo detainees. There were many takers, many more than I had imagined. So that was heartening, Steven. Obama is a brilliant and perceptive man. Maybe when he looked out from the podium he saw them; maybe he asked what they were for, or one of his aides did. Then a conversation begins and anything is possible from there. If those guys get out even one day sooner…
When I was in Missouri I asked many people that I met, and I met a lot of wonderful people, to work and vote for Robin Carnahan, who’s running for Senate and could be a decisive vote to help push whatever humanist agenda is on the table. A lot of people were already savvy and it lead to some really interesting discussions. If she wins it could make a big difference. Obama needs the votes.
Though I will read Checkpoint, it sounds really excellent, I didn’t see Nicholson Baker or any other representative from the literary establishment at Cooper Union. I didn’t see any of them at the AFL CIO rally on Wall Street last week. I didn’t see them at the showing of the film on the World March for Peace a few days ago. In fact, I never see them anywhere that isn’t about promoting their own products.
You often scareeeem about the benefit of writers living actual lives to write about. Part of that can be political participation, Steven, though I too have nothing against fucking someone attractive. Perhaps because I worked in the U.S. Congress for a bunch of years, and have volunteered in campaigns all my life, I don’t see the electeds as a monolith, or incapable of good actions. As long as I’m paying their salaries, they’re going to hear from me.
If you would like to send President Clinton the “just simply actively stop fucking Haiti up” message, his address is:
Correspondence Director
Office of William Jefferson Clinton
55 West 125th Street
New York, NY 10027
If I thought your words would move them in that direction, I’d happily send them along. But I don’t think they would.
Words don’t move them either way, Frances. Big fat fucking checks do. Write a few and they will listen; write a few large enough and anything is possible.
(I mean, what happened to all the comrades that were here? I’m used to pricks so you don’t bother me in the slightest, but obviously other people don’t cotton to being browbeat.)
The Comrade Thing was kitsch fun, Frances, but I didn’t start TET in order to make virtual friends and exchange mutually-appreciative belly-rubs and otherwise hold my tongue if someone wrote something I took strong exception to (or thought was flat-out fucking asinine) just because they’d complimented me before that point. That’s my mission statement, in fact: I will be blunt about what I think is true. This is not an ally-winning formula… but it serves my Literary Purposes and my Literary Purposes are tied in with my Political Views and my sense of the Insincere and the Clichèd in Art is related to my sense of Cant and Blather in politics. I see Normative Liberal (ie, NeoCon Lite) bullshit all over the inter-linked circle of Lit Blogs we have both read and commented on over the years. I started TET as a clearing in all that. Further, I’m not going to be a hypocrite like the otherwise-gifted Dan (Green) who attacks the mediocre and the idiotic with great verve and precision wherever he finds it… unless it happens to occur, of course, on a chum’s blog or in a chum’s book… in which case he tones it down (and lowers the standard) by magnitudes. Fair enough… but he loses quite a bit of credibility by doing that. I didn’t start TET to perpetuate that kind of message-diffusing hypocrisy.
The numbers on TET are nothing like a Cat Blog’s numbers but they are constant. In other words, people don’t tune in here to see me kiss ass on virtual chums. I think they may in fact be interested in a break from the tepid experience of watching Lit-Bloggers suck each other while copy-and-pasting the familiar half-dozen opinions on the same old issues and books… there’s something perhaps a little interesting, to a few intelligent oddballs out there, about reading an honest and original opinion well-put. And, surprise: most of the readers aren’t Murkkan. Fancy that!
Meanwhile, you have to face the fact that Life trumps a Lit Blog; we are all busy (some with brand new kids and others with difficult studies) but it’s my blog, after all, so I’m still here (when I can be)… writing. That’s my interest in the whole thing: writing. Do you still write?
And if you think my opinions on these things are any different than they were when I first opened these Comment Threads, you have not been paying attention.
I tried to appeal to whatever decency might still be intact, the guy who listened to Coltrane and saved his mother and baby brother from being whaled on by Roger, Sr. He’s in there too.
Anyway, I ask or remind people in charge to do the right thing. I do that in many arenas and ways, Steven, any way I can creatively devise. For me, ranting and raving, (though important in educating and communicating and cultivating personal stamina), is the start point, not the end.
If you think it’s ranting and raving when I point out what I consider to be bullshit, Frances, I’ll gladly refund the price of the ticket you purchase to enter the tent. The absolute absurdity of this current “conversation” revolves around the fact that you’re somehow oblivious to most of the material I post here and use the space as a random bulletin board for the kind of material I tend to avoid elsewhere on the INTERNnet. What a fucking delightful irony.
Scoff away at me (it actually makes me stronger), but I made 250 little orange ribbon ties and stood outside Cooper Union and distributed them to the attendees at President Obama’s speech about the financial markets, to remind him to keep his promises to the Guantanamo detainees. There were many takers, many more than I had imagined. So that was heartening, Steven. Obama is a brilliant and perceptive man. Maybe when he looked out from the podium he saw them; maybe he asked what they were for, or one of his aides did. Then a conversation begins and anything is possible from there. If those guys get out even one day sooner…
A) “Stronger” in what sense? B) Frances: that’s great if you believe any of it. I’m just asking you to respect the fact that I think it’s utterly ridiculous. Making Red Ribbons and Yellow Ribbons and Orange Ribbons is right up there with stacking teddy bears on blood-stained sidewalks in the Murkkan Book of Tribal Magic. Deals are made and plans are executed and it has nothing to do with you and it frankly astonishes me that any intelligent adult still falls for that Shell Game after all these years. Obama is extending the basic policies that were already in process under Bush-Clinton-Bush, you fucking nitwit. Christ, do they have to slaughter half the brown ferners on the planet before you catch on? What better cover for Brownie Slaughter than a Brown Prez, eh? They’re smart, those fuckers. They are. Oh, yeah: make some more orange ribbons, Frances. Thatta girl.
When I was in Missouri I asked many people that I met, and I met a lot of wonderful people, to work and vote for Robin Carnahan, who’s running for Senate and could be a decisive vote to help push whatever humanist agenda is on the table. A lot of people were already savvy and it lead to some really interesting discussions. If she wins it could make a big difference. Obama needs the votes.
Though I will read Checkpoint, it sounds really excellent, I didn’t see Nicholson Baker or any other representative from the literary establishment at Cooper Union. I didn’t see any of them at the AFL CIO rally on Wall Street last week. I didn’t see them at the showing of the film on the World March for Peace a few days ago. In fact, I never see them anywhere that isn’t about promoting their own products.
You promote your placebo activism and let Baker promote his books. The books are well-written. I find that good. It’s mediocrity that bores me and evil that pisses me off.
You often scareeeem about the benefit of writers living actual lives to write about.
That’s right, I do. And while I’m busy trying to develop ideas on the matter (like the Twain/Kipling thing I wanted to get to but was diverted by your childish tantrum over the fact that a couple of us don’t like Liza Minelli ) you’re busy bombing TET with innocuous LOOK AT ME non-sequiturs I have the choice to ignore or address. Well, I think ignoring you is too weird. So I address, doing my best to articulate a few ideas in the process.
I’ve posted an awful lot of creative material on TET, Frances… half of it brand new and half of it rescued from the attic. The purpose here is to talk about WRITING and the politics impinge to the extent that it’s my belief that writers who live in a Propaganda Bubble end up writing more Propaganda, no matter what the intent. Perhaps you haven’t picked up on that because you’re busy with your own concerns.
Part of that can be political participation, Steven, though I too have nothing against fucking someone attractive. Perhaps because I worked in the U.S. Congress for a bunch of years, and have volunteered in campaigns all my life, I don’t see the electeds as a monolith, or incapable of good actions. As long as I’m paying their salaries, they’re going to hear from me.
And they will continue to ignore the noise, Frances. But some wonderful old Capra movie told you to believe and so you fucking believe. Wonderful. Happy for you. Frances, look, have you considered starting your own blog in order to air these notions and fantasies you hold so dear? Listen, I got tired of trying to take stupid cunts like Ed “the revenge against talent” Champion (and his LOLing fans) seriously and started TET (the joke is that you’re Ed’s fucking spiritual twin… though, lots more intelligent than Ed, to be sure)… why don’t you start one of your very own and stop doing this weird passive-aggressive, unctuously-malevolent-presence routine?
Or would that be too easy?
I’m sure I can work your NormLib/NeoCon Lite sniper routine into the fabric of TET because your pronouncements are, almost perfectly, the anti-TET: you’re embodying most of the unreflected, deeply-hypnotized nonsense I’ve been going at since I started in the 1990′s. It’ll take time but I can probably come up with a framework to make the antipathy interesting.
Still… will you at least consider starting your own fucking blog?
No. I’m needed here. Who else has the courage, smarts and sense of humor to help you air these brave currents? I really admire you, Steven. And what’s more I’m certain it’s mutual. Nitwit is just so fucking sweet.
I think of you as a brilliant woman who is as Duped as almost everyone else living in that powerful propaganda field you’ve diverted your intelligence away from the painful task of analyzing, Frances. It’s a defense mechanism; a survival strategy, even. I understand it. Just don’t expect me to humor or abet.
I have no problem with that verbiage. We may not be in Kansas but neither are we in Kosovo, not today. The ships will either sail to Port-au-Prince or not. Let’s at least agree that neither of us can see into Bill Clinton’s night mind in May 2010.
Now, please, I want to read your story below in peace.
[ed.'s note: "We may not be in Kansas but neither are we in Kosovo, not today" must mean that at least the people we're bombing now aren't too white. Otherwise, it just doesn't make a fuck's bit of sense]
What do these people have in common?
Chinua Achebe
Madeleine Albright
Buzz Aldrin
David Amram
Alan Arkin
Burt Bacharach
Dave Brubeck
Dick Bruna
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Chuck Close
Billy Connolly
Terence Conran
Judi Dench
Clint Eastwood
Garret Fitzgerald
Frank Gehry
Jane Goodall
Nadine Gordimer
Vaclav Havel
Denis Healey
John Hume
Helmet Jahn
Edward M Kennedy
Billie Jean King
Henry Kissinger
Kris Kristofferson
Esther Mahlangu
Nelson Mandela
Kurt Masur
Jeanne Moreau
Graham Nash
Willie Nelson
Nick Nolte
Yoko Ono
Michael Parkinson
Jaques pepin
Rosamunde Pilcher
Mary Quant
Bernice Johnson Reagan
Robert Redford
Vanessa Redgrave
Richard Rogers
Ravi Shankar
Wole Soyinka
Helen Suzman
Desmond Tutu
Lella Vignellli
Massimo Vignelli
Bill Withers
My question is, don’t Yoko and Vanessa and Kris and Nelson, etc. understand that by participating in such an exhibit they’re providing cover for Henry Kissinger (who betcha any amount of gratitudicals probably paid for it)?
[ed.'s note: wait, were you being sarcastic here or not?]
The joke is you probably think I think highly of these celebrities. I like Achebe’s book. You haven’t understood a single point I’ve made on TET, Frances. You really haven’t. And, in the argument department, you’re rather heavy on AURA and light on DATA, kid. Which is standard.
And how gross is it that the dead have no say in being used in such a despicable fashion?
Yup.
The Excellent Taste of our Benefactors
Moody’s path crossed Beverly Lund’s before they formally met. The first encounter took place on the first day of summer in a drought. The trees and grass around all the lakes baked to a papery brown and the sidewalks kilned to dull sheen.
Half in hunger and half to escape the heat Moody had gone into Pickerlings and sheltered in refrigerated aisles and sample toothpicked lunchmeats and cheeses and cake fragments and ice creams from tiny paper cups. He was standing at a sample display festooned in flag-colored bunting when this woman eased her shopping cart beside him. She smiled but Moody looked away into her cart which was loaded with food. Very tall in flat shoes (bedroom slippers) she must have weighed two hundred pounds and breasts like babies asleep.
Moody enjoyed walking around Heart Lake in the afternoon when everyone else was at work. Because of the drought his walks depressed and exhilarated him. Depressed him because the air had a blunt stink and the lake evaporated into a jaundiced everglade but exhilarated because the lake grass became savanna and a dead wind lay over it and felt like a long dominion was had passed. A few people in a square mile sprawled on blankets in the itch grass with radios.
Coming at him barefoot on the sandy shoulder of the scorching asphalt lake path was a princess girl in a sleeveless black top and form-fitting slacks. Half her face under a reflective visor topped with the chopped glow of platinum high-salon-style hair. She blessed Moody with an enigmatic smile in passing. Maybe she was blind. His mind was on her that evening as he sat with Gwen at the movies. He wondered if he were good enough.
Gwen squeezed his hand when the people on the screen embraced. He glanced at Gwen as she smiled at the screen. He liked the durable black boyishness of her body. That night he fucked her half-dressed with non-specific tenderness in the living room. Gwen made a point of twisting to look back upon Moody as he climaxed and it broke his concentration and botched his orgasm. When he dressed to walk home he was pissed at her and guilty for being pissed, but why should he feel guilty?
A few days later, Moody lost his job at Heart Lake Rentals. The loss was a double blow because he lived in a little room over the shop and earned rent with the job. It was just noon and he had nothing to do so he went over to where Gwen worked. Gwen worked at the Heart Lake Salon.
He always felt self-conscious entering the salon. Gwen did nails from a little booth at the back of the salon and Moody had to walk the carpeted distance reflected by parallel mirrors while the futuristically-uniformed stylists and their older rich clients flicked eyes across the disinfecting sting of Vivaldi. Gwen wasn’t busy and her face lit up when she saw him. She said I’ll just be a minute and she hurried downstairs to change for lunch. Moody could hear her chatting with someone, probably her best friend Bee, while she dressed. As Moody and Gwen were leaving Gwen told the blonde at the reception desk that she’d be back in an hour in time for her appointment with Beverly Lund.
They walked hand in hand down a quiet street. Down Poplar Grove Lane was the tip of Snake Lake. Moody bought Gwen an expensive ice cream cone at the Snake Lake Snack Cabin. She said, Aren’t you having one too? and he told her that he wasn’t hungry but he resented it when she casually threw her half-eaten cone away a minute later. The vegetation around the Lake was still green despite the drought because a vista of sprinklers lobbed webbing shimmer over the grass and bushes and all the landmark trees with plaques at their bases and here and there the sun polished the shimmer to rainbows under which arrogant geese flapped. Gwen and Moody strolled beside the lake like a couple. He looked up from his feet and saw with a shock that tears were sliding down Gwen’s cheeks.
-It’s just that I’m so happy, she said. She said that she wanted the two of them to live together and Moody said Okay.
Over dinner that night Gwen was full of chit-chat. Moody poked and scraped and partitioned his pasta-in-white-sauce. His mind wandered. He chewed and he swallowed and took a deep breath and expelled it like he’d been it holding all day. It was a long loud exasperated breath. The candles jumped and Gwen shut up mid-sentence and looked at him. She stood up from the table and came and sat on Moody’s lap.
-Baby I don’t want to shock you but I’m twenty eight years old and you’re the first brother I ever been with.
-No shit?
-My last boyfriend before you was a Jew a blue-eyed blond Jewish lawyer. One before Scott was a Norwegian beach bum he had a little pink dick like a straight pig’s tail and the one before that he was an architect Dennis something. Not one black. My pretty blond lawyer he was okay he didn’t beat me and that but it dawned on me the relationship wasn’t going I mean nowhere because Dennis he couldn’t marry me. And it wasn’t the first time that that had happened. Only ring I ever got was in the bathtub.
She tapped Moody’s nose and unzipped his pants and reached in.
-I can’t tell you how many Thanksgiving dinners I’ve been to where I was the only black face at the table I was the smudge in all those family albums like who’s that little black ant behind Uncle Joe one time I overheard a boyfriend’s mother in the kitchen that old bitch she was telling somebody on the phone I was nicer than she’d thought I’d be I was pretty you know for a colored girl but she’d cut Tucker’s balls off before she let him shame the family with a nigger grandson I was standing right on the other side of the kitchen door when she said it I just swung the door open real slow like a movie looked her dead in the eye I have to give her credit she smiled at me I could see every single one of her gold teeth and she kept right on talking on the phone like I wasn’t even there.
Moody moaned like a stabbed man and came.
Gwen was happy that summer living with Moody. They fucked all the time. She considered that her secret weapon. She’d straddle and draw the sex out in a soft sliver or take him in her mouth in the morning before brushing. If Moody went to piss while Gwen was showering she’d reach and pull him in.
Her favorite occasional trick was to hide in the bedroom closet when she heard him on the stairs. Then they’d fuck in the closet. She didn’t do it so often that Moody would learn to expect it.
There were four topics of conversation that summer her best friend Bee (she looks like a movie star) the drought (it’s the ozone layer) the size of Gwen’s breasts (more than a mouthful is wasted) and the future (anything is possible if we put our minds to it).
By the beginning of August Moody was still out of a job and didn’t seem particularly interested in getting a new one. He watched television the whole day in his underwear. Gwen said,
-Baby, do you remember that rich lady I told you about? The one that owns a gallery downtown?
When the alarm clock rang the next morning at nine o’clock Moody felt he was being punished. He wanted to cry or smash something. When Gwen left for work at nine thirty he didn’t even tell her to be careful and felt with wicked satisfaction that the omission had cursed her and dozed off twice during the bus ride downtown despite the white heat that blasted in on him from an open window. He got off at Second Avenue and walked in the block-long shadow of the First Bank Building then turned up Lasalle. He found the glass facade of the Mojo Gallery book-ended by adult cinemas. The cinema on the left had a big sign that said air conditioned and the cinema on the right had an even bigger sign that said naked girls with fans.
Moody was five minutes early for his eleven o’clock job interview and the desk in front of the spacious, moodily-lit, minimally-decorated gallery was abandoned. The canvasses that hung here and there on the walls looked to Moody like the handiwork of children. A particularly vast work on a far wall was a garishly-colored triptych of a church with cartoonish Negroes lined up in front of it. Their eyes were white circles in which pupils rattled like beans and their fat balloon lips were pink and their teeth were jagged zigzags in lamprey mouths. Their hands were clenched in fists at their sides. They were all a smooth dung-brown and the male figures wore long black coats and top hats and the big-breasted female figures wore red or yellow miniskirts and their pigtails curled up towards the sky and the sun in the water-blue sky was a yellow ball with arrows radiating from it. A male figure in the far right panel had his fly open and a glistening burnt umber banana poked out from it. A silver plaque beside the masterpiece read To Each God Grants Peculiar Gifts. The Hon. Rev. Levi Milton Mosley. 105″ x 200″. Oil and Crayon on Canvas. 1985. And under that, on a discreet white card, it said, simply, $35,000.00 and Moody whistled and said Goddamn and looked at the painting again more closely.
-I sold that to a Jew this morning.
Moody turned and a gigantic woman in aggressively unaffordable glasses crossed the room towards him, her flat shoes scuffing and slapping the concrete floor and extended her left hand a Styrofoam cup of coffee in her right and said Hi Moody I’m Beverly Lund.
Moody said I’m Moody. He knew her.
She leaned forward and said Moody, how would you like a job working for me here at the Mojo Gallery? I think you’ll like working here. We support the Afro-American artistic community.
She said Would you be interested in working for me, Moody?
She said: the job description is as follows: odds and ends. Odds, mostly. Not many ends. Errands, phone work, heavy lifting. Nothing horrible. Flexible hours. Are you flexible?
She said again, mocking herself with a parody of a sexual voice, Are you flexible? And added, rapidly, covering her mouth, laughing, My God, that sounded terrible.
When he got home Gwen wasn’t there even though she’d made a point of telling Moody that it was going to be a short day at work. He called her name again, louder, in case she was taking a shower and couldn’t hear him the first time then closed the door and went into the bathroom and took a long luxurious piss. Pissing is really good. That’s when you know you know you’re young he thought. I’m young. I’m so cute I could fuck myself. He emerged from the bathroom pants undone dust on his knees after schlepping and hanging canvases all day. He got up again from the couch and went in the bedroom pants falling around his ankles and opened the closet door to get a hangar to drape these pants over. Gwen jumped out at him naked. She was laughing so hard.
By September Moody had started an affair with Beverly Lund and Gwen decided she was ready to move into a condominium with Moody. Moody didn’t want to move with her but he wasn’t ready to shatter the peace by telling her so. He didn’t even like her that much any more but they had formed habits that required mutual participation and Moody couldn’t quite bear to jar himself out of the homey comfort of her body which was a nice contrast that Gwen provided to Beverly’s fancy raunch. Gwen signed the papers on a condo.
We’ll move this Sunday said Gwen. She passed Moody a glass of orange juice.
Moody said, Sunday? Shit, baby, you should have told me in advance. I told Miss Lund that I’d help her prepare for an opening on Sunday.
That’s okay, baby, said Gwen. She explained that Bee had promised that she’d help, anyway, and Bee was always reliable. (Unlike you, Moody, he thought she thought).
She sat in Moody’s lap and took the serrated blade of the steak knife and tenderly sawed through one of his braids. She held it up to him and called it a keepsake. Outside, dust blew and heat-faded paint peeled like chameleon skin from the apartment houses and the bus stop benches and parchment leaves scratchy and clattered. But the air felt just barely different and the change registered in the high-tech insects of the topsoil in the delicate nerves of the cicadas a spring-wound drone shivering over the neighborhood.
-Have you heard, Moody?
-Have I heard what? Moody quietly closed the door of the gallery behind him.
-There’s going to be rain this weekend.
She had taken to wearing her hair down. It brushed her shoulders in the sleeveless top she was wearing. Her shoulders were round and fat and soft as bread. There was a script that had been worked out between the two of them and in the dozens of times that they’d been together the script had evolved.
-Does Gwen have big tits like these?
-No, Moody would say.
-What about her hair, Moody? Does she have pretty hair like mine?
-Gwen just got them nappy kinks.
***
- What did you say? said Moody.
Beverly gestured for him to come closer and said I said they say that it’s going to rain this weekend. Moody sat on the edge of her desk. He said Me and Gwen we’re moving this Sunday.
-Sunday was supposed to be our day this week.
-Fixed it. She’s got a friend to help her.
-Bee.
-Yeah, that’s right.
-She’ll be busy with Bee all morning, probably.
-Think so.
Sunday afternoon the sky boiled and birds darted streaks and flies clung to the walls of the fired buildings and Moody felt one warm droplet strike across his cheek as he approached the door of the gallery and he looked up and dark spots like a supernatural manifestation on the dusty sidewalk and suddenly a deluge so people were running up the street with light-hearted hysteria and Moody laughed his arms out-stretched and let the sky soak him through.
Beverly looked up from behind her desk as Moody shuffled in a slosh across the concrete floor and she chuckled and said You’re wet and he was unbuckling and she said, Don’t take them off here and he asked her why not and she said Because I think it would be more fun to do it at your place while Gwen is busy moving and Moody had to agree. It would be good. But he was nervous about it. He was nervous on the slow drive over through obscuring rain while Beverly went blah blah blah over the metronome of the wipers and nervous as they parked in the lot beside the building and nervous as they climbed the old wooden stairs in the downpour towards the little apartment that he and Gwen had shared that summer.
He called Gwen’s name twice in the hollowed-out apartment. Beverly ran a finger over an emptied shelf in the kitchen then stepped behind Moody and ran the dust on her fingertip in a line down his wet brown neck and said Mud. Beverly followed Moody into the bedroom where the shades were drawn and the rain on the A-frame roof and he was reading a note that Gwen had scribbled and left on their bed. Beverly snatched the note and she was kissing him, unbuttoning her blouse.
-Does Gwen have tits like these?
She said, Moody, tell it to me. Does she do it good like this? Does she fuck you like I do, baby? Does she fuck you good like I do?
-Does that nigger fuck like this?
-Does that nigger fuck like this?
-Skinny black nappy black piece of shit nigger?
Mao’s long march was a piece of cake compared to this. If the Chinese revolution had had to rely on email they’d still be back in feudal times.
[ed.'s note: I won't even bother to wonder at the fact that this comment appears here rather than at the end of the thread, where it should; you wouldn't by chance be a Satanic or otherwise uncanny creature of some sort, would you, Comrade ET? W6T6F6?]
No idea why it’s there as I didn’t press any Reply option. Yelworc rietsila evil gnol
It’s happened again !!!
I’ll get my coat and go and screw up a cat blog
[ed.'s note: no one got the joke that these two pictured are A. Crowley's various incarnations I suppose]
Calamus
1. Existalism
“There are three kinds of people,” said Uncle Ham, “and I use the term loosely.” I was on the dock, hands under my head, the sun soaking orange in my eyelids. I was pretending to be asleep.
“Stupid,” he said, “Smart,” he cleared his throat, “And Clever. The Clevers are Smart people who sell things to the Stupids.”
Uncle Ham was always making lists and saying sayings and some of the sayings are still with me today. “Never save money on toilet paper, rubbers, or chocolate,” was one of them. Or “Rome burned down in a day.” He was always telling parables and spouting pronouncements. Once, while we were eating cantaloupes in his lake-view kitchen, he told me, “Don’t assume that because a woman is of Asian extraction, she’ll be extraordinary in bed. That’s racist and can lead to disappointment.” I was seven or eight at the time that he said this and now, even decades later, I can’t eat a cantaloupe without thinking of Asian women.
He invented a Religion too, my Uncle Ham did. A Religion, or at least a Philosophy, called “Existalism” and everyone who ever loved him… his various girlfriends and me, basically… were involuntary followers. He applied Existalist principles everywhere. The breakfast nook, for example.
“Don’t just woof that omelet down, boy… smell it first! Touch it. Lick it. Make a sensual study of the object. That’s the first and last one you’ll ever eat.”
Or, at the Lakeville Sommerfest, pointing at a blonde in Swiss Miss braids and dirndl as she crossed the dusty Fairground, counting her tips, he’d say, gravely, “The first and last of her kind.”
He’d rap on the bathroom door and shout in at me, “Remember what you’re doing, Eggs, because you will never do it, exactly that way, again!” Or we’d be grunting and sweating at one of his summer projects in the garden such as digging a six-foot pit near the grape arbor and he’d suddenly stick his shovel in the mud like a bookmark and come over to me, displaying a pebble in his palm like a diamond: “Voila!”
“Either everything matters,” is how he summed up his philosophy, “Or nothing does.” And that’s how he lived his life, that’s how his moods toggled, bouncing between those two cases… those nerve-wracking extremes. One morning he’d take the trouble to count your eyelashes for you (312 left; 390 right) and the next afternoon he might give you the kind of unengaged look that made you feel like you were little more than an apple in the path of his lawn mower.
Existalism. Was that what he was thinking about when he looked upon the body of Tiny Payne?
Uncle Ham was my favorite uncle; he was my only uncle, my mother’s brother. He was tall and strong and he smelled like a goat. Not that I knew (or know) what a goat smells like: I appropriated the description from my grandma West, his mother. She always smelled like Clorox herself.
I had only been there in Lakeville for two days. I was staying with Uncle Ham for the duration of that summer vacation, in 1969, while my mother experimented with living with her boyfriend. I was out on that dock, sun in my face, picturing the two together… my mother and Shep Olgilvie… while Uncle Ham quizzed me in his Existalist system. I pretended to be asleep. Imagining my mother saying something humiliating like,
-Benedict needs a father figure in his life, Shep. All he has now is his crazy Uncle Ham. He needs a positive role model. He needs a Shep Olgilvie in his life, darling.
Like Hell! I rebutted, in thought. Like Hell I need a Shep Olgilvie in my Life!
“Stupid, Smart, or Clever. Which are you going to be? How do you think you’ll turn out? Don’t answer me now, off the top of your head… think about it. Study the question.” He was always saying that, too: study the question.
“Study the question and get back to me.”
I just lay there on the splintery dock, lips parted, my corneas dialing around under the rubber of their lids in a crafty simulation of r.e.m., avoiding the conversation. Lake Veronica (Ham’s name for it) lapped with fat tongue at the algae-socked pylons supporting us. My breathing was deep, measured. I was very good at faking sleep and had eavesdropped on some of the most spectacular adult conversations in history with this technique, curled up on a living room couch or on the back seat of a Cadillac while the creakingly-old with liquor on their breath stage-whispered furiously about Hugh Hefner, or Life After Death, or the Vietnam War. Once, at the age of thirteen, I was lucky enough to hear somebody’s date at a family picnic say, on a back porch where I was pretending to be zonked on a hammock, “You can’t get fat from swallowing it, doll. Trust me. It’s the fondue.” But with Ham, this day, by feigning sleep I was only trying to excuse myself from a serious lecture I knew I was too young, at the age of ten, to be forced to.
I had seen the serious lecture coming from ten miles down the track, after he’d had that altercation with those hippie girls in the Woolworth’s. We’d been driving through town when Uncle Ham suddenly slammed on his brakes and put her in reverse, deciding that he wanted to go to Woolworth’s. He decided that he wanted to buy us a couple of water pistols. We happened upon two hippie girls shoplifting a jar of Dippity-Do and Uncle Ham said to them, standing there with an arm around my shoulder in that narrow aisle,
“How do you two flower children expect to make a beautiful new world happen if you’re both still hooked on the ugly habits of the old one?”
They just stared at him at first, their ponchos laden with dime-store booty. I remember trying to make myself taller so that the pretty one would notice me. Outside the store, Ham said, trooping ahead in stalwart befrazzlement,
“And the worst thing is, that one… the pretty one… the one with the lips? The one that told me to fuck off and feel better? I know her. That’s one of mine. Her mother’s… a folk singer.” He sounded like he was lifting a bathtub of water as he said the word folksinger.
We climbed in his Nash (me in the back with the Coleman; “We’ll play Chauffeur and Bigwig today, Eggs,”) and he kept eying me in the rear-view as he drove the dirt road that snaked down to the landing. It was as though confronting those two had triggered in him a re-think of young people and I was one of them. As though I had to feel self-conscious, or even guilty, about those squalid lives, despite the fact that they were five or six years older than me. But that was the year the entire human population of the planet Earth was divided into three distinct camps. Never trust anyone over thirty. The whole world was either over thirty, or under thirty or like Ham, who was thirty.
And now he had me there out on the dock with him, asking me whose side I was on, really. His or everyone else’. The Stupids’, The Smarts’, The Clevers’…or Uncle Ham’s?
“The answer to this question accounts for fifty percent of your final grade,” he joked. But I remained silent. Sea-gulls complained weak weak weak overhead.
“Have you studied the question? Do you need more time? Do you want a refreshment?” But I did not budge. The lake was happy licking the dock.
“I just need to know if I can count on you.”
Silence.
“Eggs.” He nudged me with a moccasin. “Are you telling me you’re asleep?”
He was sitting on the deluxe red and white Coleman Cooler janglingly gravid with bottles of Green River and Mountain Dew and grape NeHi we’d lugged along for the day. “Eggs?” He sucked his teeth. “Well at least I’ll have some privacy when I pee,” he said, theatrically, just as the wind was swelling and I heard him, with a relieved creak of the Coleman, stand up and unzip. He said “Ahhh,” and I felt the first faint twinklings of his atomized pee-spray on my bare legs yet I didn’t flinch. I steeled myself against flinching. But then the droplets gained weight and splattered my shoulder and plopped on my lips… warm…
Ham was in hysterics, clutching our jerry-rigged water pistols when I jumped up, hair wild, spitting.
“You had that coming, Eggs!” he howled.
He danced around the dock. I was mad enough to hit him with a hammer, but yea, was I not laughing, too, chasing around the dock and socking his ass which must have felt like being thrashed with gladiolas. “You had that coming, Eggs!” We ended up sitting, tongues hanging, on the edge of the dock. Ham handed me my empty pistol after re-inserting its fine-bore tip. He socked me with a very soft no-harm-done sock on my jaw (always socking me that way) and added, pointing with a leather-red finger, “Never wait longer than five minutes for justice.”
And I thought back on that remark… having carried it with soul-shaping clarity… never wait longer than five minutes for justice …at the end of the summer. When I found what I found near the grapes.
2. Evil is a Form of Stupidity
Lakeville was a beautiful town for a town has to be preternaturally beautiful for a ten-year-old boy to notice. And I noticed. It inspired in the manner of a model on a plywood plank upon which a scale railroad was built with a widower’s loupe and tweezers. There was a town center, a broad square of shops, a movie theater, plaqued boulders, quasi-colonial buildings bristling with flag poles and a j-shaped main street plus powder-soft, old-as-the-Indian, roads. The roads dispersed from main street like flat shoots grown miles from a flat black rhizome and out in the surrounding woods were houses, all apart, with Uncle Ham’s on the edge of Lake Cromwell (Lake Veronica, Ham insisted, Lake Veronica) and the only other house with a view of the lake was on the opposite bank, about the size and color of a tin of Log Cabin maple syrup. Chimney and all. Where Tiny Payne had lived.
“That be Gordie Payne yonder,” said Ham, later that day, with the hick-taunting voice he had already used to make me laugh at the breakfast table. He pointed across the lake and handed me binoculars. We had come back from our afternoon at the dock, unloaded the Coleman and vacuumed the back seat of the car. We were standing there in his front yard, preparing to toss some guts on the grill, when Uncle Ham went to get them. Just standing in Uncle Ham’s front yard, it was hard not to spy on the house across the lake. It was only a ten minute walk away if you could cut straight across the water.
“Have a look.”
I steadied the binoculars with my tooth-pick arms and zeroed in on two figures; a white-haired bear and his red-headed cub. Only, the cub towered over the bear. And the bear was dressed in a union suit.
“That’s Gordie Payne and that’s Mr. Payne’s son, Tiny,” said Ham, dryly. “He’s a cat-skinner, Tiny is. He likes to skin cats. He binds their legs with old stockings and he skins them alive! How do I know this? Why, I’ve come across Tiny’s handiwork.”
“I came across one that wasn’t quite dead yet not a week before you arrived, Eggs. Flipping around on that pretty path we take into town sometimes. Where you lost your wallet last summer? The shortcut? Minding my own business as is my wont. At first, see, I didn’t know what I was hearing. I didn’t know what I was seeing. Looked like the garbage left after a big old chicken dinner, bundled with kite string and just flipping around in the gravel, and the, uh, gravel was sticking to this bloodiness like… all dipped in flies…”
He had to take deep breaths. He looked away and pinched the bridge of his nose. I remember thinking, Why is he pretending to be so upset?
“I wrapped it in my undershirt with a heavy rock and buried the poor thing in Lake Veronica.”
I kept the binoculars steady on Gordie Payne and his son stacking firewood against their homely lakeside digs in a yard with two flag poles stuck in it, frightening with furious expressions at heaving wood. Mr. Payne was beardless Santa in filthy long underwear. His son as tall as Uncle Ham and handsome in a little-eyed way and shirtless with flashing red shoulder-length hair and big muscles. He looked… cool.
“But how do you know it’s Tiny, Uncle Ham? Can you prove it? Did you ever,” I lowered the binoculars and shined a skeptical squint his way, “actually see Tiny skinning one of these cats?”
Ham took the binoculars from me gently. Chuckling. He thought, probably, “I guess we forgot about the essential bisexuality of all ten year old boys” but only allowed himself to say “Oh brother” instead. He handed the binoculars back. “Look there, just behind the woodpile. See the front of a fire-engine-red roadster. Rag top, yes? The Devil’s sport scar. Look.”
I screwed the adjuster on the binoculars and focused on what I could see of the roadster, lacquered and long as a goddess’ fingernail in dynamic repose behind the stack of firewood while Gordie and Tiny shuffle-grunted the foreground with logs.
“The radio antenna,” directed Uncle Ham. “Evil is a form of Stupidity.”
“Holy moly,” I said.
Half a dozen cat tails tied to it.
3. Civilization-Hating Men
We went into town for groceries about once every two weeks. The third time we drove in, Ham had me behind the steering wheel on a bundle of newspapers and him in the back, playing The Chauffeur and The Bigwig and I couldn’t believe how fast the time was escaping us. I’d already been in Lakeville for six weeks. Six weeks to go and then I’d be back with my mother and chinless Shep Olgilvie. Aiming the Nash straight and then holding the wheel in place was easy enough but then trying to turn it to follow the occasional curve was a challenge. We would have had death all over our faces had another car come around one of those curves.
“That’s it,” Uncle Ham kept saying from the back seat, reclined with hands behind his head in a brilliant pantomime of confidence in me, “thatsa boy.”
He finally made me stop and change places before the last mile into town. “Or they’ll toss you in jail, Eggs,” he laughed. “Can’t have that, partner.”
That very evening he had me drive us into town again for a movie at the Lakeville Odeon. It was Hitchcock night; three Hitchcock films for one dollar. Vertigo; The Birds; Psycho. Uncle Ham was only interested in seeing The Birds. I sat through the first and third films alone. Uncle Ham had originally suggested that I drive back from the last movie by myself in the Nash in the dark but I chickened out and he did not press me. To this day I feel that I let him down on that.
“The most brilliantly misogynistic rant of a film ever made, Eggs. Saint Paul himself couldn’t have done better.”
I nodded.
“Do you know what ‘misogynistic’ means?” Crossing the gravel behind the Odeon for the Nash. “Woman-hating. Don’t forget that Alfred Hitchcock was English and that ‘bird’ is a slang term for women over yonder.”
He silenced the gravel by stopping us suddenly and spoke with both hands on my shoulders and the moon his rusted halo. “There’s something I want you to read, Eggs. I just got it back from the person who… borrowed it.” He turned and continued toward the Nash in the dark and later handed me the book before bedtime.
I’m looking at the book right now, it’s in my lap, a nice edition of Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”. Published in the ‘60s, leather-bound, gold-leafed. I kept it all those years but couldn’t bear to read it and now that I can and do, it makes sense. It makes sense of things that have confused and hurt me for thirty years. Someone died for this book. Someone died and another one faded in his large stone fortress of civilization-hating men.
The title page is inscribed “To Hamilton, in the spirit of Calamus, E.” and under that it says “Everything Matters”. There’s a long lock of hair bookmarking a poem titled “Are You The New Person Drawn Toward Me?” and it is red.
THE EDWARD TAYLOR GALLERY ON TET
ET writes:
These are for a project involving 10 performers and 10 life-sized puppets that at the moment we can’t afford to do. The drawings are the very beginnings of the process looking at relationships between performer + puppet. – embarrassment, dependence, cruelty, aggression, tenderness and hopefully those emotions that hover in between. Imagine each image X 10.
For most of our work I do about 150 to 200 of these to kick ideas about and come up with images that have a performance dimension to them
The fantastic (highly Struwwelpeteresque) images (general sequence suggested by ET himself):
fig. 1
fig. 2
fig. 3
fig. 4
fig. 5
fig. 6
fig. 7
fig. 8
fig. 9
fig. 10
fig. 11
fig. 12
fig. 13
fig. 14
fig. 1
Rich metaphorical fodder for discussions ranging from the binaries boss/worker to king/serf to parent/child to lover/lover to god/creature or writer/character.
Not to mention a discussion about ART-qua-ART like this (answering first of all to the needs/whims/kinks of the creator’s imagination) vs BIG TIME ART as a commodity processed and packaged and sold on an industrial-conceptual level as design-artifacts for the Rich. There’s more for me to think about in looking at these images (separately and as a sequence) than I could ever find contemplating Damien Hirst’s experiments in formaldehyde or Jeff Koons’ factory kitsch or even in Banksy’s supposedly-edgy (but extremely slick and adman-like) street stencils…. I don’t get any more out of contemplating such objects* than I get out of contemplating fancy/shocking contemporary architecture: either it looks nice or it doesn’t.
Meatspace beckons but I’ll be back to this later in the day…
Many fucking thanks for this Art, Comrade DJ Sensei Edward!
*question of scale, innit? On the human scale (ie, roughly drawing-sized… anything that would fit through a normal doorway) we anticipate a message. On an industrial scale we switch to a level of contemplation below the philosophical one we affix to the natural and titanic… clouds, mountains, rivers, stars… but above the human scale of message. And what level of contemplation is that, then, between the two scales, where Big Ticket Art and Architecture hover? I think we can call it Intimidation.
Just before Xmas we went to see an exhibition by an art hero Jean Tinguely curated by rising Brit art “star” Michael Landy – the guy who destroyed his possessions in the name of art.
The Tinguely section was everything you’d hope for. Machines with a will of their own, a creator at home in scrap yards with an anarchic spirit.
Landy’s section were big framed graphite drawings he’d done about an event Tinguely made for MOMA in New York where a machine destroyed itself randomly, noisily and uncontrollably in front of the art elite.
There was something predatory, calculated and ultimately disgusting about making a set of sellable drawings about an event that although Tinguely evidently didn’t do it for free was the polar opposite of a suite of elegant art objects designed for the homes of rich art collectors.
“There was something predatory, calculated and ultimately disgusting about making a set of sellable drawings…”
Not that I “believe” in Che Guevara but it proves, ET, just as all that Che merchandise (featuring a Hollywood movie, thankyouverymuch) proves, that the system/worldview ultimately absorbs 99.99% of all dissent/subversion without even breaking a sweat. What’s the best strategy, then? Unpopularity seems like a start but that strategy snags itself on the apparent paradox that the only way to evade cooptation ( and thereby promote Resistance/Dissent ) is to keep the Art to yourself. But that can’t be right. Maybe the point is that the Artist can Resist while resigning her/his self to the awful Truth that the Art itself is helpless? (eg, Reagan using Springsteen’s hit for a campaign song, and Guernica coffee mugs)
Anyway: the first point I want to make about what I like about this little suite of drawings is that in every pairing, the only apparent difference between the figures is body language… but the performer/puppet thing is obvious immediately. This is deft stuff.
My father was a painter and I have some technical skills as a painter (I stopped after learning how to trompe-l’oeil “glass”) and I know that Line is the first accomplishment. Your Line is doing a very good job of putting on a little Kafka-cum-Pinter play with those figures. It’s not easy work.
Further point: the figures are “ordinary” to the extent that they are easily recognizable… it seems like good old conventional representation; but would drawings of lobster-headed figures carrying out the same actions be more, or less, “surreal”? I say it’s the latter.
So there are parallels with the kind of Soft Surrealism in fiction I favor. I think it’s easy to red-flag your strange goals by sprinkling the text with obvious absurdities… but the effectively Uncanny arises from the scene/scenario we first mistake as ordinary.
PS Is that a picture of you on the first WRAS Member’s page (click “The Company”), looking like Michael Stipe in a Biggles cap…?
Very exciting to be let in on this. Can you say anything about the eyes? Green, blue, open, shut? Even in the context of deadpan there seems to me to be a lot of potential nuance, especially given your stated subject matter. But maybe this has all been thoroughly explored?
Michael Stipe in a Biggle’s cap? I’m the one with glasses and naturally I can’t see the comparison. Someone once told me I looked like John Malkovich which isn’t much better.
re: obvious surrealism. Our latest show Brain Wave has a large head in a garden shed so obviously we like an arresting image. But we try ( whether we succeed is up to others ) to make a logic for these things happening so that the absurdities don’t feel gratuitous. We like a slow burn effect so that the strangeness creeps up on you.
I think your points about the fate of the artist are acute. Art is meant to be seen by others but putting it out there is problematic. I rather like the expression hard-core escapism. Seems to get the balance. We’re not fierce like you in terms of content but try to give an audience something vivid. We did a show a few weeks back and someone said ” I really liked that but I don’t know why”.
[ed.'s note: I meant a young Michael Stipe]
” I really liked that but I don’t know why”
The honesty of that statement is immense and pure. Also the perfect compliment: how deflating is it when someone says “I like it, it’s funny!” or “I like the colors!”?
My next point is a question: Botero has his signature character-facial-expression (saucy inanition) and late-Lucian Freud has his (the inner-directed thousand-yard stare) and I seem to recognize the helpless vigilance on the faces of the characters of your suite of drawings from somewhere but I can’t put my finger on it… where’s it from?
“I seem to recognize the helpless vigilance on the faces of the characters of your suite of drawings from somewhere but I can’t put my finger on it… where’s it from?”
Our performances are nothing like Buster Keaton films but they are a series of actions rather than the development of a character,
I often think of him in that lovely wind sequence in Steamboat Bill Jr. Someone whose character is created by what happens to him physically rather than any acute characterisation
Aha! Buster Keaton! That’s it!
I read Checkpoint. Head trip. Exactly the kind of book that gives political novels a bad rap. At least it was short. Beckett would’ve lashed Jay to the chair from the get-go. Would have been far more interesting. A little duct tape wouldn’t have hurt either. Great title though.
Thanks for that phenomenally clever literary critique: well-argued, citation-rich, pithy and nuanced. Um, Frances, don’t you have some Zionist pamphlets to circulate? Or some ribbons to “make”?
I think I do as a matter of fact. “Over and out. [Click.]”
[ed.'s note: but my sigh of relief was premature, Gentle Reader...]
See what I mean? Mesmerizing. (I just checked the U.S. reviews of Checkpoint. No one mentions Krapp’s Last Tape. I wouldn’t have thought it possible to have a literary work about men in a room with a tape recorder and not, especially in a novel written sort of like a play.)
[ed.'s note: thanks for the YouTube video in lieu of a cogent argument; who can argue with Samuel Beckett, right?]
I was going to mosey on down the garden path whistling Ha’shannah ha ba’ah, but this is too much. There’s a tradition, there’s a body of work. One rides roughshod over it at one’s peril. Knopf rushed it to publication to capture the pre-election moment and it bloody well shows. He wrote the fuel instead of letting it propel him to art. I think he should have started it where he ended it, in the binding chair. Isn’t that the image Ben’s last speech is meant to evoke? That we cripple ourselves out of some perverted vanity?
An assassin’s fantasies James Francken reviews Checkpoint by Nicholson Baker
James Francken
Published: 12:01AM BST 05 Sep 2004
Nicholson Baker made his name with The Mezzanine, a novel about a man who decides to buy a pair of shoelaces. It’s a wonderfully uneventful book, plotless and digressive, that takes relish in the insignificant details of modern life: ice-cube trays, drinking straws, the perforations on a reply coupon.
Baker’s new novel, Checkpoint, is about a man who decides to murder George W Bush. The dangerous subject matter has created a hubbub and the plan to nail the President has left readers at a loss. Why has Baker gone against the familiar grain and made this departure from his miniaturist fiction?
In interviews, Baker has a one-word answer: Iraq. “I was plodding along, writing my little books,” he explained, “and then suddenly this thing speared into my life and it just took me over.” He “lost a month of 2003″ as he followed the war in Iraq on the internet, checking Google’s news site and scrolling through weblogs. Events in Iraq overtake Baker’s would-be assassin in a similar way. For a time, the novel’s angry, semi-hysterical central character, Jay, “read blogs all day… I’d been reading Daily Kos and The Agonist, Talking Points Memo, checking Google news 20 times a day”. But he stops going online “because where does that get you?” Jay, a sad, crazy, panic-stricken man, wants his life “to count for something”. Checkpoint is the transcript of a conversation he has in a Washington hotel room with Ben, an old, liberal friend.
Ben plays the straight man as Baker teases jokes from a set-up with no obvious comic pay-off. Is Jay’s conviction bone-deep, or is it swagger and bravado? Ben wants to disentangle the truth. The transcript will be a record for posterity of Jay’s plot to assassinate the President – that “Texas punk”, as he calls him, a “felon” and “outlaw” with a “little flag pin”, a “hellacious… waste basket of a man”.
This is incendiary stuff. Jay’s arguments are saturated with disgust, not just for Bush but, as he sees it, for the cast of undesirables that constellates around the President. He describes Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, two other causes of spleen, as “rusted hulks”, “zombies” who were part of the Nixon White House and have “fought their way back up out of the peat bogs where they’ve been lying”. And then there’s Colin Powell. Powell was less enthusiastic about the war, so Jay concedes that he might only need to “put him in a coma”.
Jay’s frustration and rage are clear, but his intentions are muddled. How will he kill Bush? His fruitcake strategy is scrapped and recast as the conversation with Ben develops. Some of the particulars are kept under wraps, but the titbits he divulges – the magical homing bullets, the special Brazilian hammer, the deadly, radio-controlled flying saws that look like little compact discs – are terrible and laughable at the same time.
Checkpoint is a bold, hectic, daring book, a far angrier work than any of Baker’s previous novels. But it does not look out of place alongside his earlier fiction. The microscopic focus on humdrum information that makes Baker’s novels so engaging is turned, in this book, on Jay’s fixation with the money the Bush administration is spending on the war, in his estimate, $4 billion a month. Jay is a wildly unreliable conspiracy freak and his interests are obsessional.
But Baker’s fiction has always been driven by obsession, from U and I, the story of Baker’s fascination with John Updike, to his phone-sex novel, Vox, with its inner compulsions and fantasies.
Checkpoint, like Vox, is composed entirely of dialogue, and like that earlier novel, its outrageous premise can make it seem too eager to score points for taking risks. But if Baker is guilty of sensationalism, he has also pulled off a remarkable stunt.
It’s not a masterpiece; it’s not a life-changing or challengingly formalist experiment: it’s brief, it’s witty, it reminds us how inhuman we’ve become in order to absorb the constant news of all that death so “reasonably”. Baker has balls.
Obviously he has balls. Probably has a big dick, too.
For which you no doubt resent him.
Au contraire, mon ami. Is he Irish by any chance?
Frances, you write (in a surprisingly accurate imitation of Ed Championosity), “He wrote the fuel instead of letting it propel him to art.”
So, let’s try something interesting. Put up a passage of yours… something that you’ve written… and show us the Art of it. Lay the metrics on us by which “Checkpoint” is chumpstuff. By comparing texts (one you can answer for vs one you condemn), show us how Baker’s goals are wrong-headed or how his failure to achieve the goals he should have set is symptomatic of the book’s bad faith or failed language.
Put up something from your novel for us here. A page or two, say.
Why don’t I send you one and you pick? You find the worst/weakest two pages in my novel and put them up against the best/strongest two in Mr. Baker’s book. Accept the challenge?
It’s better if you pick, surely, Frances; not quite scientific if my taste taints the procedure in any way, eh? You pick your passage and you pick the “Checkpoint” passage to compare it with and you then make your case. That’s the challenge I’m interested in seeing you meet. Is there a big difference, for you, between these two scenarios? In any case, I’ll respect whatever conclusion you come to, that way (whether I agree or not), as the result of a genuine effort.
Of course there’s a difference. CONTEXT. It’s my way or the highway. (Hee-hee)
Frances, I’m offering you a forum to prove that you aren’t full of shit. Take it or leave it, chum.
In what world do you live in where I have to offer such “proofs?” I believe I’ll be leaving it. It was fun, though.
[ed.'s note: buh-bye!]
A SPEECHLESS WALK THROUGH THE CITY
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I note some of this graffiti art is done on paper then pasted onto the walls. Is this because increased CCTV makes the artist’s role more difficult? Or are today’s graffiti-ists into taking a longer time in achieving their designs and prefer to do so back home? or is it a separate branch of graffiti with its own rules and terminology?
Christ any more obviously out of touch comments like these and I’ll need a pipe and slippers.
I think it’s mostly that they want to be like Banksy, Comrade ET; it’s a career move. In fact, I lamented the very thing to Comrade Barry during a walk not a week ago: remember when people “defaced” walls for every kind of reason other than professional ambition? Money is the root of all weasel!
In fact, here’s an explicit Banksy imitator (all of these images are phone-taken, which explains the “quality”):
I’d recommend a visit to Lisbon. All the buidings are covered in those white tiles with Delft blue intricate patterns on top of which every barrio crew imaginable has painted their name tag. It’s unbelievably noisy to look at.
They discovered a Banksy in Manchester yesterday in fact. They will have built an art centre dedicated to urban interventions round it next week. I was thinking Banksy was more like a contemporary Leroy Neiman with his ability to push the right demographic buttons of his clientele. I don’t know whether when you painted ( in the mid 70′s?) you aimlesslessly flicked through the pages of Art Forum? Leroy with his horrendously slick confections was always a “highlight” or an eye-sore. Possibly both
Oh fuck yeah. Leroy’s Sport Paintings? I remember ‘em well. The optical equivalent of two dogs howling.
“I don’t know whether when you painted ( in the mid 70′s?)…”
my actual painting years were 1980-1987; though I was drawing an awful lot in the 70s
here’s a tiny painting from 1987; a re-purposed photo of my then-girlfriend and her idiotic model ex-boyfriend
and a drawing I did, on a paperbag in 1991, of a Chilean film maker (whose boyfriend was an original member of CLOCK DVA, the band Jeff Dahmer was listening to when the police kicked the door down)… unruly early days in Berlin
The red flag on Banksy, imo, is his “invisibility” (wasn’t JT Leroy also notoriously hard to photograph?)… the mysterioso angle seems just too-well engineered. And too many of Banksy’s stunts, even earlier on, required a team and money support to pull off. Is Damien Hirst involved? Hmmmm…
I know someone who was employed by Damien Hirst to do his dot paintings. An ex-art student who needed money. Very generous and amiable man apparently but the work was unbelievably dull – as she put it ” it was everything art isn’t”. She got made unemployed and part of the deal was a dot painting which I suppose will see her well in her dotage.
Painting huge pictures on those dividing walls in Palestine is a high profile activity – I saw a documentary about those guys who photograph pictures of Jews making stupid faces and Arabs doing the same and post them up on both sides of the wall and the minute they tried to put them up in Israel the security forces were on to them like a flash. So I can’t help feeling that either Banksy has diplomatic immunity or some serious pre-production negotiations have taken place.
Fucking exactly.
Just to prove that Lucre-Corrupted Art is not new nor confined to the vulgarian upstarts, Avida Dollars has a look in:
It turned out that Dali and Alice were mutual fans of each other. Alice had always been into surrealism in his own art and Dali appreciated the chaos and confusion of Alice’s work. There was talk of using Dali`s painting – Geopoliticus Child -as an album sleeve (for `Pretties For You`), but it didn’t suit the records of the time and so was not used.
In March 1973 Dali produced the first three dimensional hologram which was of Alice, wearing a million dollars [something like $2 million - Renfield April '96] worth of jewellery including a tiara and necklace. Alice sat cross legged on a rotating base, wearing the jewels, holding a statuette of the Venus De Milo as if it was a microphone. A Dali sculpture of Alice`s brain with a Chocolate Eclair covered in ants (a Dali trademark) was placed behind him and the Hologram was taken from this set up.
A college friend of mine who shared a studio with me and several others painted semi-abstract pushme-pullyou landscapes.
A visiting lecturer from the Royal Academy who painted micro-realist still lives in tempera gave him a crit ” This is much too wishy-washy, neither one thing nor the other. You need to observe, you need to identify with that which you are painting. Look for instance at the cup over there. When I paint that cup, I become that cup. Look at that table. When I paint that table it’s on I am that table.”
The response to this was ” Have you ever painted a cunt before?”
The room exploded in laughter , the lecturer stormed out and we were left in peace.
[ed.'s note: give me time to illustrate this beautiful memory with some justice, Comrade ET]
Joey Kincer is the kind of guy who likes to keep records. Kincer is a 32-year-old Web developer who lives in San Juan Capistrano, southeast of Los Angeles, and among the things he tracks on his personal home page at kinless.com are his collection of action figures based on the Mega Man video games (“Not for sale,” the site warns sternly), the piano awards he received as a child (“My mom kept track of them all,” he says) and a photo gallery of female celebrity crushes that he refers to as his Dream Team.
His highest achievement in record gathering, however, is contained in a Quicken file, where he has tracked his personal finances for 16 years, ever since he was in 11th grade. On a recent Wednesday evening, Kincer punched a few buttons on a keyboard and projected his entire financial history onto a giant screen hanging from the ceiling of his bedroom for me to see. There was the $3.38 he spent on chips and dip on March 16, 1996. A birthday card for a friend a few weeks later cost $3.18. Deposits arrived in small amounts every couple of weeks thanks to a job playing piano at church.
This trove of data came in handy a few years ago when Kincer happened upon a Web site called NetworthIQ, which allows people to record their net worths and display the ups and downs for anyone to view. Most people who share their data do so anonymously, but Kincer posts a link to his personal Web site, where he uses his real name. Kincer especially liked that the site allowed him to compare himself with others. It appealed to the Mega Man player in him. “NetworthIQ is kind of a game,” he said. “Can I get ahead of everyone? Can I be up there with the big shots?”
Net worth is the number you get when you subtract what you owe from what you own. You start with things like cash on hand, retirement savings and home value and subtract your mortgage, as well as credit-card, student-loan and other debts. Net worth paints a bigger picture than income; it rewards the saver and reveals the drain that big borrowers put on their finances. And it vividly reminds people who think only in terms of monthly payments that their debts may be with them for a good long while.
Figuring net worth isn’t hard, and programs like Quicken make it especially easy. Mint.com, a popular personal-financial-management service, introduced a net-worth feature in 2008 that links to credit-card, brokerage and mortgage accounts. The real-time, intraday updates allow people to obsessively check in on the microscopic daily ups and downs of their personal wealth.
The net-worth number, as Kincer found, is more appealing when you have someone else’s to compare it with. We tend to have an intense curiosity about our neighbors and friends, especially those who seem to earn about what we do but spend a lot more. Do they skimp on retirement savings or their children’s college funds? Are they not burdened by student loans? Do they have a trust fund? Have they simply maxed out every credit card they can get their hands on? There’s no way to answer these questions without seeing a breakdown of net worth.
So it should come as no great surprise that the curious are turning up at NetworthIQ to see what other people’s money really looks like. “This was our way of making money a little more social,” said Todd Kalhar, one of the founding executive partners at NetworthIQ, which is now part of Strands, an online-media company whose moneyStrands site competes with Mint. “People had been talking about stocks forever. We wanted to add a bit more context. The guy talking about stocks might have been bankrupt 10 times.”
Joey Kincer’s net worth is about $201,000, much higher than the $120,000 median figure for U.S. families from 2007, the last year for which the Federal Reserve Board released household net-worth numbers. Among NetworthIQ users who, like him, earned no more than an associate’s degree, that makes him a big shot. But when he compares himself with all the people his age and all California residents, he’s just a bit above average.
meme noir
to an iranian dentist
1
good lady perhaps
you don’t remember but i
despite my reputation as the forgetter of all
such things recall the dinner
i prepared that night on
Kant str., chicken &
peanuts & peas &
rice; suzanne by
leonard cohen; chet baker &
that short black (polka-dotted?)
meet-your-maker dress you sat in
cross-legged with the hot
plate on your lap; peculiar you
(you won’t remember but it’s true) did
the strangest thing the
moments after treating me to
virginity’s sweet
red pearl & curry
scent & singing t&em
breathlessness: you
played dead my dear (or unborn) in that
window-level bed, eyes
jammed shut & lips compressed
in a sarcophagal smile so rich but
sick with innocent shame & iranian
ironies & silly
adolescence & even
blame.
i must admit
i was mad when you did it
choosing that milestone to play a silly
prank (arms crossed)
(over your bulging breasts)
(& stiff as)
(planked). but now i’m grown so
older me (wizened-if-wrinkle)
(free) thinks back
on the morbid act &
almost dreams of
crying! not
for sorrow but
intimidated
admiration, or
even baffled pride that you picked my patience in a
world of men for
trying. neither you nor i
could see the aptness of your
teenage death vignette at
the time; the
rightness of the
pantomime. i
should have played it out with you, two
of us sprawled there
corpse-like, suppressing giggles,
drenched in
love’s great awful effort, glimmering
with sweat, too
busy with this cryptic act to
fool around re
gretting
2
Berlin is a gray-green map, a
topographic model of one corner of
the consciousness, the
territory of moody disillusion we
navigate with the joy &
energy of an interrupted winter
nap. the map’s
a million times the size of the
stamp-sized zone of mind it
cartographs. to study it on foot
i crossed each neighborhood with
huffing diligence & sought
to underst& the structure of my own vast
emptiness. came across
weird objects in this
path. counted off the distances with
other restless immigrants & animals co-
navigating ashed kilometers of
Hope & Selfishness & every night
restored myself to
the kitchen in Kant Str. to
eat a fish &
rest, or
lift your million’d, vinyl’d, incensed
hair & leave some
star-blue mark of
ego on
your neck
3
good thing wife worked
the graveyard shift. i’d lift you towards a
shaking climax around the time each night wife
petitioned her superiors for a
cigarette break with
pungent diffidence, although
she didn’t smoke but
took her minutes to
pace the limits of the
square of light outside the
ER entrance for the night’s own
un-medicated air and take her chary
look into that
long black street in Moabit plus
occasional attempts
at a payphone call
to home as you and i busy
laying, cursed the ring came
precisely in love’s
moment
THE TEXT RESCUED
2 para-pomes made by line-breaking passages from letters written to me by a very intelligent Bohemian substitute teacher in Manhattan; excerpts are verbatim
Justin T
Sardines are
superior to mackerel in that they are
smaller creatures
and thus lower on the
food chain and
blah blah blah about
toxins in flesh. I brought some
P. Breughel prints
and drawing repros to a
12 year old very
angry kid named
Justin T. at the middle school.
He liked one
(of big fish eating little fish, except
other odd things are going
on in it). I like to think
that our having looked at those
things together prevented him
from getting miserable and angry [about a thing
going on that afternoon] and
threatening to stab someone
[on that day, at least], as he
does
(threaten, not do).
2.
He trusts no one, or claims to, is a fantastically good
liar and, because he is smart, I
believe him because
I want smart people
to also be
honest. Maybe
he is or has been sexually abused. I found a drawing of his
of a phallus made of scoops
of ice cream. It had legs, and a
maraschino. I didn’t keep it, it was
creepy and compelling and
carefully done, top center
third of a
loose leaf page. Maybe
it was just a sort of tantric archetype
expressed in an american idiom (high
fat food). I do find things
on the floor of the
7th grade
classroom.
Rachel K-12/28/2002
Little Bulls
I crouched behind live trees or the silvery
rake of a dead
cactus, my heart nearly
punching my jaw, I was weak
from fasting or
sometimes
not. Gangs
from LA ended up moving
out there, tagging the
huge baking boulders out
in mountain deserts, for
hawks to see as
they looked for any
bloody
scuttling
thing. There were little
bulls there, too. Babies,
they roamed the
national forest. Beautiful,
counter height, red or
black or white
and brown. Little bulls should, and
probably do, have
some other
descriptor.
Teaching at Stanford, I have seen how intercollegiate athletics promotes the development of focused, confident, young women. It isn’t easy to balance academics and athletics, and I’ve had both male and female athletes do it well. But nationally, women’s athletics has had fewer problems with academic standards than big-time men’s programs. Some say this is because women are not subject to the siren call of professional athletics. For too many male athletes, college is just a pit stop on the road to the NFL or the NBA.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Decline of the Aura
1. Art is Honkies Fucking
The pedigree of the kiss in Western culture is less a matter of sex than of Christianity. Spirit is breath, it utters the sacred word. The early believers were enjoined to bestow on each other the kiss of peace. Blasphemy is the sacred’s inversion: the Judas kiss.
The kiss started to become secularized around the time of the troubadours. The fair skin of the beloved was a foreglimpse of the pleroma; through her lips poured the divine afflatus. Soon most of the afflatus had leaked out, but there was still enough left to puff the white sails of religion’s successor, romantic love.
By the time of the really iconographic kisses – Rodin, Klimt, Munch – many had begun to suspect that romantic love was a con. Schopenhauer and Darwin had given the hint: It was all about replenishing the racial stock. Hence the three most famous kisses of the time were also the most equivocal – too strenuous, or too brittle, or vampiric.
Along came Hollywood and pop music to re-inflate the tires. It wasn’t just a question of warm bodies after all, a whole society had to be reproduced. Rhett! Scarlett! Rhett! Scarlett! Some crooning, some swooning – then the Lent of mortgage payments, a new refrigerator, and picking a wallpaper pattern for the nursery.
The flowery script on the warranty said Forever but it wasn’t until Pop Art that we were able to appreciate the irony. Warhol’s Kiss (1963) would seem to spell the quietus est for twenty centuries of honkies fucking in frescoes and framed museum pieces. But instead we have a culture in the grip of cynical reason: I can’t stand to walk away . . . I can’t stand to stay . . . a generic pop tune in endless playback.
Fin. Repeat.
2. Art is Fucking Honkies
Traditionally the kiss symbolizes union. In the mingling of breaths, two souls meet and become one. Art, too, is supposed to resolve contradictions. It creates a unity that is “above” its determinations.
“Andy & Patty” refuses this harmonization, staging instead the disarticulation, the incommensurability of the very materials it brings together. They are not melded, only superimposed. Each new frame reframes the others.
The appearance of writing in a film destroys the unity of the image. So far so Godard, but the filmsong’s writing goes further, deploying the rhetorical figure of chiasmus:
Art is Honkies Fucking
Art is Fucking Honkies
Fucking is Art, Honkies
Chiasmus is the privileged trope of difference, of the production of difference-in-identity. It is the double-cross that undoes the self, in the same movement founding and confounding it. In this case, the universalist pretensions of Art are revealed to be a European narcissism, honkies pressing faces to the mirror.
The filmsong is chiastic in its very structure, almost an elaborate pun on the inverted parallelism of chiasmus itself. It opens with the straight couple from Warhol’s film but works its way to the mash-mouth of Warhol’s gay couple and a scene of two-fisted interracial monster-cock deep throating. Sexual difference and racial difference – ideological coordinates of the Great White Kiss.
In the era of cynical reason, however, nothing any longer has the power to shock, it’s all grist for the mill of social reproduction. Since Patty Hearst’s turn as “Tanya” even terrorism has become part of the spectacle. The only image to resist the tidal pull of banality is what would seem to be the most ordinary and everyday of them all, almost beneath notice: the scaffolding against the side of the building.
In the Greek alphabet the letter “chi” – the first letter in the name of Christ – is shaped like an X, a cross. For this reason chiasmus was once the favored trope of Christian writers. The scaffolding’s props and crossbeams also suggest a kind of Calvary. The two workmen arrive for their daily crucifixion.
The filmsong offers a chiastic pun on images of labor – labor as work, and childbirth as labor. These were, after all, the curses stamped on Adam and Eve’s eviction notice: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread . . . In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.” I almost said Andy and Patty’s eviction notice.
The image of childbirth avoids the banal affirmation of “new beginnings” to the extent that it is by caesarian section. Instead it is a parody of the Virgin Birth. We see a gaping wound; there will be a scar.
Every document of civilization has as its verso a transcript of toil, written in scars. The same with love: there was always someone before you. It’s as if our kissing couple should separate for a moment and one – it doesn’t matter which – should say to the other, “Whose cock is that on your breath?”
3. Fucking is Art, Honkies
Astrolabe, centrifuge, one-armed bandit – the Andy & Patty chiasmus-machine keeps turning. Old binaries undone, their tokens may yet yield up an unforeseen combination or novel precipitate. The one moment when a pair of eyes looks back at the viewer is in the clip of the blond porn-actress at work. Like much women’s work, it must be performed on her knees. With her hands raised to the sides of her head on the mahogany crossbeams of enormous cocks, it is another image of crucifixion. Yet covered in sweat and spit and goo, her hair plastered and mascara smeared, she glistens as wetly as a newborn. And look at the technique, the brio, the sprezzatura – she is good at what she does, and she knows it. Colors mix on the palette. A new millennium of poetry and fucking is in store for those who can divine this threefold mystery. All others pay cash.
Edmond Caldwell
February 2009
SEX IN A THEOCRACY
Before I was lucky enough to meet, fall in love with and knock-up Beloved, I was seeing a woman from Brighton for a few months. We met in Berlin and continued to correspond after she returned to the UK and the correspondence heated up. I was approaching my mid-forties and she was a year or two younger and the subtext was something along the lines of neither of us wanting to die alone. She was an avid reader, tall and fit, on the pretty side of ordinary in the face department and had nice thick red hair which she kept in a mod-ish cut that put me in mind of the early 1970s. I wasn’t mad about her (the way I am about Beloved; I am lucky enough to be nuts about my wife) but I wasn’t getting any younger and couldn’t imagine that my looks would be holding out much longer than another ten years. The clock was ticking and she was willing.
I took an Easy Jet over to her place by the sea and we spent a long weekend together. When the time came to fuck I was hesitant; not because she wasn’t my absolute dreamwoman (she wasn’t but my belief in the possibility of such a type was fading) but because I knew that there’s a big difference between the pre-penetration dynamic and the post-penetration dynamic. After a man has come in/on a woman, the man is in debt. Such a thought certainly never occurred to me while I was using my shiny new cock to fuck a sidelong swathe across the late-1970s and the 1980s, but that’s because I didn’t realize that I was living in a Theocracy. I didn’t notice that fact, probably, because small territories of the Theocracy were in remission when I was coming into my own as a Sexualite; the small territory I inhabited as a High School student and then a college student and then an independent, young adult was a mobile Bohemian enclave of young people who could make sexually explicit Jesus jokes without fear of being struck by thunderbolts (or developing cancer, later, or giving birth to retarded kids). All that Jesus shit seemed like crap of the past.
When I was a young man, a woman would pursue me or let herself be pursued and we’d end up reading Shakespeare to each other aloud in bed by candle (actually did this once) between bouts of ecstatically strenuous genitality. At the end of every orgasm (my technique wasn’t so hot when I started out, so I always encouraged my partners to masturbate, too, as a hedge against lopsided o-tallies) the ledger was always balanced… the participants had gotten what each had wanted from the encounter… nobody owed anybody anything.
By the time my 30′s were wrapping up, it occurred to me that this was no longer true. Perhaps it had never been true. Not only is it the world’s general presumption that men are obsessed with fucking and women tolerate this because they’re obsessed with men, but there’s an overlay of Cosmologic Superstition that turns the act of intercourse, and the genitals themselves, into spiritually significant things. And not just spiritual in a neutral sense, no: tending toward evil. A man who puts his penis in, or visibly near, a woman, has committed a spiritual crime against the woman and the greater community, unless the two are married, whether the woman was all for it or not. The crime can often by mediated, after the fact, by ritual gestures involving flowers and offers of marriage. If the woman is under a specific (though fluctuating, according to region) age, imagined by the State, the ritual mediation involves the police, lawyers, prison etc.
I hesitated before fucking the woman from Brighton despite the fact that she was 40-ish and “legal” because I knew that after I fucked her I would owe her something that I could never pay back, for the rest of her life. That’s the point: for a man to owe a woman a fuck is for a man to owe her forever (under a Theocracy), because to repay her in kind would only mean to owe her more. And no other payment settles the debt either.
The woman can collect on the debt at any time… and repeatedly. I only fucked the woman from Brighton once, that weekend; she saw me to the airport having already secured a plan to stay with me over the upcoming Christmas holiday. Having been just cool enough before that one fuck (emails every few days and phone calls rarely), after it she became not cool at all and phoned me every day, often twice a day, in the month-and-a-half before she was due to arrive in Berlin. After roughly seventy-five hours of long-distance phone talk, I knew all that I’d ever need to know about her and began to view her upcoming visit with dread. If hadn’t fucked her once already, it would have been easy to cancel the visit. Absurd, no? I owed her for a fuck I didn’t particularly enjoy and we both knew it. I once owed a fellow music-biz professional ten thousand dollars and it was a much better feeling.
When I came to Berlin I was thirty and within a month or two was seeing a 19-year-old model (the pinnacle of her career was a Marie Claire cover). At 19 she was only two years along from being illegal to fuck, had we been in America. The affair lasted about six months (the friendship lasted for about fifteen years, or until the day Beloved gave birth to Offsprung) and the first month or so of the relationship, I wouldn’t fuck her.
This baffled her. But I was already beginning to understand that Sex in a Theocracy is fraught (as non-Theocratic as Berlin then felt). This gave rise to a comical situation: a tall, young Schiffer-look-alike begging me to fuck her. “Is tonight the night?” she’d joke. When I finally gave in and followed her all the way home and upstairs into her flat (we’d been spending time in the room I was renting from a little Gay, bald voice coach right out of Cabaret), I thought: at least she’s so beautiful that owing her something will be fun. I was astonished at the size and elegance of the flat and thought that she couldn’t be earning enough, even as a model, to afford it. Her roommates must be stewardesses.
I went down on her and she made the loudest noises I’d ever heard a 19-year-old girl (who wasn’t a cheerleader) make. It was about 3am when we’d come back to her place from a club and I was afraid as she howled and keened that we’d wake up the downstairs, upstairs and both next-door neighbors. In fact, it was difficult to maintain an erection due to the ruckus she was making, which I put down to over-eager inexperience (her ruckus, I mean… not my softening dick). It was early the next morning, when I wandered out to the kitchen in search of orange juice, that I found her parents (and her little brother) around the kitchen table.
They were quite pleasant and invited me to have a seat at the table. Fucking A, I thought. Her parents were both psychiatrists and they had no problem with her love life, which had started, with their blessing, at the age of thirteen. At thirteen she looked like a 17-year-old (she showed me pictures) and her first boyfriend (who, again, her parents approved of) was 21. Fucking A, I thought.
The model became a psychiatrist, eventually (still modeling on the side) and is in her late 30′s, still very beautiful and with a very cute baby. I bumped into her on a long walk, last year, very pleasantly surprised and I kissed her baby’s forehead. This woman and I had been friends for almost 20 years but she had broken it off, as I said, after I met Beloved and fell in love and we produced magnificent Offsprung. The model couldn’t have been jealous; we hadn’t been romantic since the early 1990s. Why did it piss her off that I had finally fallen in love? Why did we stop going to lunch once a month; why did she stop sending me emails? It’s something to do with the fact that I fucked her once.
Why any man would want to fuck a thirteen-year-old girl is beyond my ken. I don’t understand men who do it and I don’t understand men who only don’t do it because it’s illegal. Why would you want to? Kids are a lot of things (goofy, touching, irritating, inspiring, creative, messy, impulsive, primeval, visionary)… but how can they be sex objects? The 19-year-old model was just barely sexy by then; she had just enough self-control and worldly self-awareness to project a crafted image. The physical beauty doesn’t hold together in Real Time (photographs are another thing entirely) if it isn’t lyricized; goofy is a turn-off. She was able to sit on the other side of a cafe table with some mysteriousness and think before speaking and half-smile at inside jokes I’d never get: it was all that, on top of the gleaming hair and symmetrical face and the magazine physique, that made me decide that going in debt to her by crossing the Fuck Line would be worth it. And that’s the irony: wanting to fuck her when she was a goofy, coltish, pop-addicted kid would have probably been more natural (a caveman would’ve done it; animals do it)… it’s my civilized unnaturalness, and my love of the unnatural (Art, in a word) which makes me nobler, in this case. Certainly nobler than a Theocrat who only avoids sex with minors for fear of Hell or prison.
It’s not the basic fact of the meat of the body that interests me. Men who fuck meat are opaque to me. The man who had wanted to be the model’s lover when she was only thirteen is even opaquer to me. But if she wanted it and her parents consented and the fellow was a decent lover and gave the girl no diseases and the girl grew up to be a fully-functional adult with a career, friends, a groovy flat and a child of her own… no harm done. I wouldn’t have consented, as a parent, but that’s just me.
Which brings me to the Roman Polanski case, which reminds us, Roman’s perverse opacity notwithstanding, that we are living in a global Theocracy.
I grew up near Frome in Somerset which in the early 70′s had the highest underage pregnancy rates in the UK. I left school when I was 16 and got jobs in shops and a factory. All the 18-20 year old lads I worked with were going out with 14/15 year old girls ( I was a late developer in this area but would definitely have been the same had the opportunity arisen ).
As they were the sort who picked their girl-friends up from their home in a car one can only assume the parents were aware that their daughters were going out with older boys. They must have known too what was going on in the back seats of those cars.
Difficult to tell but I think no harm was ever done. However statuatory rape is statuatory rape and could have been called down at any time on 75% of the young male population. And no doubt some of the older males too.
Like you I really don’t get paedophilia but there is a strange area where an age-limit is set which doesn’t acknowledge at what age the desire for consensual pleasure begins. My other half was sexually active a long while before legality – I’d imagine most people ( except me obviously ) were similarly at it when it was illegal.
.
There’s an important conversation about Sex we should all, in general, in various venues, be having… in pairs and clusters and as whole nations, I think, Comrade ET… but we aren’t having it, just as we aren’t having so many conversations that are all about Here & Now and which are far more important than bleeding Madonna’s bleeding Twitters. But trying to talk about Sex these days is like trying to remember and hum a beautiful melody at a parade with a fucking Marching Band in your face. The Marching Band in this case being Bigtime Porno.
More later after various chores…
Porno? More like a marching band in a tank [ed.'s note: panacheful metaphor]. I was reading a blog/discussion a while back about how young women are discovering that young lads are learning all their moves from porn films rather than the usual outlets. With the result that they have some rather extreme demands – so the choice appears to be either traditional nervous fumblings or gang-bangs with anal sex as the main course followed off with mass ejaculations on the face. [ed.'s note: not quite the same as getting it from DH Lawrence, then]
It was a good blog btw commendably lacking any exaggeration or finger-wagging prudery but not without criticism too. [ed.'s note: link?]
It was a link from a link from a link ( probably more links than that ) as I recall. Unfortunately if you Google ” Unexpected ejaculation on face from boyfriend” it gets you a lot of possibilities but none that shed light on where the blog might reside.
THE EMAILED ALIBI
as I wrote to ET, Comrades Lurking and Explicit:
Christ on a stick today was an experience… being a Lennonesque house-husband is great until you actually have to work, too… between peeling cucumbers, mopping the bathroom floor, washing a diner’s worth of meat-and-sauce-and-stuff-crusted dishes AND having a look at the material I got in the mail today for another miserable German ad campaign involving wretched music my contribution is sadly crucial to, I thought I’d have a fucking bervous nreakdown. Had a chance to glance through your Art once with some intensity and I think it’ll suit the purpose fine!
Meatspace will lighten soon and allow me to turn my friendly evil upon TET again…
HAS YOUR CHILD TAKEN THE SIMULOCRACY’S FUNCTIONAL SOCIOPATH TEST YET?
Little liars grow up to be great leaders
Researchers have found that the ability to tell fibs at the age of two is a sign of a fast-developing brain and means children are more likely to have successful lives.
A team of Canadian academics have found that the more plausible the lie, the more quick-witted they will be in later years and the better their abiliy to think on their feet.
“Parents should not be alarmed if their child tells a fib,” said Dr Kang Lee, director of the Institute of Child Study at Toronto University who carried out the research. “Almost all children lie. Those who have better cognitive development lie better because they can cover up their tracks. They may make bankers in later life.”
Lying involves multiple brain processes, such as integrating sources of information and manipulating the data to their advantage. It is linked to the development of brain regions that allow executive functioning and use higher order thinking and reasoning.
Dr Lee and his team tested 1,200 children aged two to 16 years old. They found at the age of two, 20 per cent of children will lie. This rises to 50 per cent by three and almost 90 per cent at four. The most deceitful age, they discovered, was 12, when almost every child tells lies.
Researchers say there is no link between telling fibs in childhood and any tendency to cheat in exams or to become a fraudster later in life.
NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT; GO READ A MADONNA TWITTER OR SOMETHING
Theresa May promises more powers for police
Theresa May, the Home Secretary, has promised police more powers and discretion to get on with their jobs as part of a ”radical” new deal.
The Tory Cabinet member said the new Government will ”do things differently” by scrapping Whitehall interference, ditching paperwork and removing targets.
She said she is ”not interested in running the police” and wants to give officers across England and Wales professional responsibility and freedom.
Ian McEwan is the gothic poet of British class anxiety. Over an arc of novels including The Innocent, Black Dogs, Enduring Love, and Atonement, McEwan has polished a talent for giving his readers nasty and sometimes bloody surprises when the classes interact on too intimate a level. His most recent, On Chesil Beach, however, is both a perfect specimen of McEwan’s hardening suavity as a prose stylist and the latest example of an ongoing renunciation of his greater gift. As Saturday did before it, this novella-length book promises much, initially, but ends up being deeply unsatisfying before its conclusion. A necessary catharsis has been frustrated for the sake of a decorous treatise on the grim predestinies of class.
The book’s unhurried narrative anchors to the first few hours of a marriage between Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting, shuttling between the “now” of their honeymoon supper (and its aftermath) and earlier points in their lives and their relationship. The presiding metaphor is on view from the French windows of their honeymoon suite: the “infinite shingle” of ChesilBeach, on which “thousands of years of pounding storms ha(ve) sifted and graded the size of pebbles…with the bigger stones at the eastern end.” Edward, a lower-class rustic educated above his station and faintly embarrassed about his background, is, in practically every way, Florence’s inferior. He’s even a chronic masturbator.
Florence’s upper-middle class parents are a neurasthenically haughty Oxford don and a prosperous businessman so competitive that he’s nearly an anachronism (or an American). Florence is a chaste, disciplined and accomplished violinist in possession of an IQ 17 points higher than Edward’s, as he discovers by having a “peep” into her school report folder; even this peep indicates a moral inferiority on Edward’s part. As if his congenital disadvantages weren’t enough, an accident during his childhood has left his mother brain-damaged and the Mayhew household dark and filthy as a consequence, in schematic contrast to the Ponting’s Victorian villa, sterile with the hard light of eminence. While Florence’s mother is friends with Iris Murdoch, Edward’s mother is friendless. Clearly, Edward and Florence are like the pebbles on Chesil Beach, widely separated by the work of thousands of years of merciless grading.
McEwan’s schematic stacks the deck with the force of stereotypes so entrenched they feel like empirical laws of a natural science. Making the upper class female love-object in this novel superior in almost every way may feel like an expression of the author’s (unconscious? Self-hating?) class prejudice, but it’s also the de rigeur chivalry of the post-feminist celebrity, as it would be difficult to imagine a writer with McEwan’s following getting away with making any of the males in his couples more intelligent than their invariably attractive wives or lovers. Hewing obediently to this unspoken stricture is a minor failure of nerve that doesn’t, on its own, threaten the integrity of the work. But as McEwan ages and his stature grows and he devolves towards the artistic cul-de-sac of Elder Statesmanship, other strictures…other obediences to the sensibilities of his auditors…undermine his mastery. A certain squeamishness sets in.
In the disappointing Saturday, the bloodletting centers on a broken nose for a prig and a tumble down stone stairsteps for a bad man of the lower class variety. Even in Enduring Love, the beginning of McEwan’s spiral descent from the previous heights of his Grand Guignol, the virtuoso set-piece is dispensed with in the first chapter of the book, as if to step clear of childish things before getting to the mature business of the rest of the story, which being a report on the dangerously unhinged behaviour of a lower-class person and the effect of said behaviour on his betters.
On Chesil Beach consists chiefly of interlocking character studies of fair nuance; as ever, with McEwan, we are privy not only to dossiers of the telling vignette for the folksier players on the page but rifle through papers written, curricula mastered, books planned and theories mused upon in the service of fleshing out the rich interiors of the brainier players as well. Edward’s and Florence’s story (and the story of their story) is about ideas when it isn’t about sex, and most of the sex is a phantom dreaded or a vision longed-for but not a physical fact. Tension accumulates as the mounting effect of preparatory exposition indicates the McEwanesque relief of a shocking twist, foreshadowed in carefully-seeded references to Edwards’s potential for violence.
The narrative tension created by putting this poorly-matched couple in the wedding night’s bed is further amplified by the tamped-down sexual hysteria of the era; it’s 1962, after all, and Kenneth Tynan hasn’t said “fuck” on television yet. The explosive pressure of the era’s sexual tension is recapitulated in Edward’s having “saved himself” for the big night by an unprecedented fortnight of autoerotic chastity. He’s fit to burst and, as it turns out, his brand new bride is frigid as a fjord. His legal right to Florence’s body can’t even guarantee him a sensual kiss, so something has to give.
In classic McEwan, the build-up always resolves to a horror, a corpse, some blood-letting…the uncanny moment around which the rest of the book swirls as towards a sucking drain. The horror revealed will be a set-piece of cinematic power; a short, sharp shock to cure the abiding malaise that has crept with the pace of a wasting disease into the mind of the reader for the duration of the book: the proletariat German corpse rolled up in a baklava of glue and carpet, then sliced, in The Innocent; the (perhaps apocryphal) rape of a French beauty by Nazi-trained Alsatiens in Black Dogs; the “head on a thickened stick” of the good samaritan who fell to his death in Enduring Love; the rotting extremities of parents exposed in their cracking tombs by the slack workmanship of their children in The Cement Garden.
With On Chesil Beach, however, we climax with an anti-climax…with nothing more shocking than a flesh-crawling joke as McEwan exerts his superb technique to alienate the reader from something only slightly more dramatic, and slightly less common, than a sneeze.
In the perfectly functioning McEwan novel, the suffocating horror of class is just the beginning; we are made to suffer it to the limits of our readerly tolerance (knowing how far to stretch this limit, which veers dangerously near to boredom, is the mark of mastery), at which point McEwan saves the day by producing and then describing with rejuvenating relish a human corpse, for Death trumps class every time. There are no upper or lower class corpses. In On Chesil Beach, however, McEwan provides the reader with no such twist or violent redemption. McEwan’s novella reveals itself as a monograph on socio-economic kismet in the United Kingdom.
The final movement of this book is a queerly compressed postmortem that violates the pace of all that came before it; roughly ten pages for the next forty years of the life Edward has tossed away merely by blowing his chance to remain married to a disciplined, ambitious, upper class girl. Edward, it seems, was doomed from the beginning, but not in the way a loyal reader of McEwan’s might have hoped.
DREAR DIARY
With consummate skill, Comrade DJ Sensei Barry left for South Korea this morning… just as North Korea is threatening to declare war. Comrade Alex, who is subletting Comrade Barry’s place while Barry is gone, wants to know if he can keep Barry’s mp3 collection if anything happens.
We of Rancho Augustine were all up late last night as Beloved came in from a gig in Hamburg at about 1am (Offsprung can’t sleep unless all of us are on the premises; this wasn’t true when she was only 2… before she knew the word “premises”). Late to bed, late-ish to rise. I met Comrade JR for Dunch (falafel at the usual place) and we walked across Kreuzberg and summer actually came to Berlin during the walk. Sharing the warm-winded street were people in t-shirts and people in overcoats; the t-shirters were overwhelmingly comprised of the under-30s and I did not trust them. I’m fairly sure the Gaga generation is dense with psychopaths.
Comrade JR and I revisited the story about how JR hitchhiked from Manhattan to Sacramento in ’74 or so. We got on the topic after Comrade JR mentioned the fact that Squeaky Fromme had been released from prison. Not only was Squeaky a would-be assassin (Gerald Ford) but she was a follower of Charles Manson (back when that meant something) and it was Squeaky who picked up a 17-year-old Comrade JR on the last leg of his trip across the USA and gave him somewhere to sleep in California. Comrade JR remembers a hippie-style dinner with both Squeaky and Sandra Good. Those were the days!
Speaking of South Korea, a long-time Comrade… the rich daughter of a Korean arms merchant (I don’t know if that’s supposed to be a secret or not) recently announced that she was giving up film making (with two films to her credit as a director and a few scripts in a drawer that had better remain there) in order to become a Faith Healer. Well, not exactly a Faith Healer but that’s pretty close translation of the German term for a New Age Hippie who charges cancer-sufferers lots of money for crystals-and-incense-based placebos. She wasn’t a very talented Artist (spoiled rich kid fucking around on dad’s blood-soaked pile, innit?) but at least she wasn’t doing much harm with her films. My personal beef being that I want those ten years, during which I was forced to pretend to take her seriously as an Artist, back. The hour I spent that one time talking her out of using Beatles songs (performed by The Beatles) in the documentary about her wacky dysfunctional family? I want it back. (I just now remember that it was at a dinner party at the Faith Healer’s trendy, paid-for-by-missiles flat that Beloved and I enjoyed our second date together. So there’s always that.)
It was a beautiful walk across graffiti-ridden Kreuzberg on the first really warm day of the year. It culminated at Comrade JR’s new studio, which is on the third floor of a largely-abandoned complex that long-ago housed a piano factory. A stately old turn-of-the-century building the size of a munitions factory… once solely dedicated to the fabrication of pianos. If one can imagine. Comrade JR saw the great Cecil Taylor perform in the parking lot (pictured below) on a magical afternoon during the 1970s.
With us on the walk today was a paperback of Milan Kundera’s The Farewell Waltz. Published in 1977 and written (as Kundera puts it) “in Bohemia in 1971 or 1972″, it’s interesting for packing lots of the same philosophical lunch that Kundera made a lighter, tastier, more satisfying snack of in his hit The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The tone is somewhere between “naturalistic” and “winking, digressive fable with a Doctorate”. Kundera hadn’t yet found his magically unassailable argument and too often relies (albeit toyingly), in TFW, on some good old narrative gizmos. For example: a poison pill is introduced early in the book and the reader thinks: “Chekhov’s pistol” (there must be a blog out there called Chekhov’s Pistol; there must be) and the reader is correct. Tips his hand rather often, as well: when the head of a fertility spa is seen tending to a woman with an unusual syringe described with a little too much care (the equivalent of the close up in filmic vocab) the reader guesses immediately that the fertility specialist is impregnating clients with his own semen. Which is the danger of narrative-dependent narratives: being too familiar with the conventions (and the conventional mechanics of moving characters around their stations of the cross as they hit their preordained plot-points) can deflate the book for the canny reader.
Kundera got to the point he was able to transcend all that and finally produced TULB a decade later. But you can see so many future bits of TULB seeded here and there in The Farewell Waltz… the most striking examples being: a moment of extreme cruelty to animals perpetrated by Czech children (a cat with nails in its eyes in TFW and crow half-buried and stoned in TULB); a charismatic dog (“Bob” in FW and “Karenin” in TULB) and a rustic girl either ruining, or threatening to ruin, an urbane sophisticate with sex and/or love plus Kundera’s apparent disgust with older women and the biological facts of fucking: in TULB the congenially academic narrator refers to sex as “absurd” (compared to what?) and in TFW there’s stuff about sagging boobs and cervical mucus and also a character’s unappetizing meditation on the saliva in an unloved woman’s mouth while kissing it. Even more interesting (for me): reading TFW makes me want to re-read TULB for traces of worryingly lyrical Judo-Christian Theological subtexts I never would have guessed, before, that Kundera was capable of. Soon.
That photo could be in the North West of England near where I live. Odd to think the Germans and the British spent so much time bombing each other’s identical factories.
Before the downturn various regeneration schemes turned a lot of these into “luxury” flats.
I met a builder who said that the building materials used were so cheap that all you needed to do was put on a crash helmet, keep your head down and you could run through the walls of every flat on a floor. Any criminal with sense wouldn’t bother trying to pick door-locks. You could punch your way into a flat.
In our old workshop in Manchester we were the only artists in a big mill when we moved in 20 years ago except for the band A Certain Ratio who had a studio . We left last year and the place was seething with the buggers.
There’s a theory that the process is – artists move into space lured in by cheap rent, original occupants move out gradually, artists take over, rent goes up, landlord throws artists out and hope the cachet brought by the artists means the property is hip and that they can convert building into flats, this happens, economy goes belly-up, no-one moves in except drug dealers and prostitutes, place becomes trendy for a different reason.
“I met a builder who said that the building materials used were so cheap that all you needed to do was put on a crash helmet, keep your head down and you could run through the walls of every flat on a floor.”
You’ve just provided a career-making idea to an impressionable young performance artist reading this, Comrade ET!
And your Realpolitik of Real Estate Theory sounds like Kreuzberg about three or four times over since The Wall fell.
YE MORBID POMES
‘culture’ is a rented room
‘culture’ is a rented room in
lung-dark house of
evil oldness. the homeowner roams
sidereal fields at whims that feel like
peace until the
home-bound god tracks back
his wastrel coldness, fetches
war back in
to shake us, paint warm life in
thuds and yowling slashes, baked-in
stains on running walls He
cleans with
ashes
and dread that insufficient frightener
works with hope to rape that killer
dream but
discourse in the room of culture
clarifies the keening. ‘culture’ is
that rented room we much prefer
to sleep in
9/2007
i envy the stupid
i envy the stupid their
long naps, their
short attention spans, the dark
grandeur of their
superstitions, the
nit-boggled obelisk of stupid
Conviction and certainly
i envy the stupid their
seeming vacation on the mind’s
smooth beach. i envy them all
what shortfalls to
stupids are benefits and the justice
that flushes the idiot’s path, that i and my questions
not clutter it. i
envy the stupid their lack
of envying me, their
gregarious insolence towards
death and poetry
7/27/93
dead languages
each infant automatically invents
or resurrects a
language long-thought
dead, the
burble and the susurrus, the
nugatory un-sense-ness of
joyful brand-new-brain-itude which
pops right out their
heads; the
proto-logos idios of
every human veritas, it
grows in time to
sound like more but
means much
less instead. by puberty the
tongue’s more dead than
anything the
Romans said.
6/96
the nigger bard
at best avoided, at worst
ignored, his
black inconsequence affords
the nigger bard few
followers; and
even then, the ones who do
confuse his grief
with negritude
8/95
stealing the language
I know that damn look, familiar as a phone number
I’m prone to it walking down aisles of trinkets:
the shop-keeper blinks, other customers think it.
I know that expression, its air of forbearance, that
hair-trigger shift from half-wary to sirens, the
look on your face as I read you this passage,
Impertinent nigger thief stealing
the language
8/95
A CLUSTER OF NANO-ESSAYS/NOTES FOR THE FEATURE-LENGTH VIDEO-FILM I’M MAKING (a film in 6 parts; Comrade ET is collaborating on one segment, Comrade Nick is doing the instrumental soundtrack, Comrades Craig and Beloved are doing the voice-overs and Comrades Khue and Peter the principal facework)
ENEMY OF THE STATED
“It is necessary to remember that the Coalition Government, important as it is, was created by accident.
A few more Election gains for the Conservatives and they would have been able to form an administration on their own; a few more seats held by Labour, and they could have formed a Government with support from the Liberal Democrats or in coalition with them.”
So says the Daily Mail, politely failing to mention that Nick Clegg was both an Obamoid confection (change as a progressive value, in and of itself) and the Ralph Nader (vote-splitter) of a loudly subliminal campaign the Tories have been waging for several years now with a saturation of knife-crime stories in the propulist press. You’d think that people were strolling up and down Oxford Street with handles sticking out of their backs, semi-resigned to the awful spectacle of black crime but thoroughly ready for a change. The Tories need Black Crime in much the same way that Labour needed Muslim Treason. Two sets of Boogie Men with two very different uses and effects and inherent limitations.
The problem with Muslim Treason as a Boogie Man is that it is Ideologically-driven, which means that it will always find veiled, Grudging Admiration from the Intellectual Right and Outright Sympathy from the Intellectual (and Oedipal) Left. Just look at the Red Scare of McCarthy America and its Leftist Dissenters or the Vietcong and Jane Fonda or even the Black Panthers and Leonard Bernstein: it’s impossible to curry across-the-board aversion to an ideologically-driven Boogie Man. Intellectuals like Ideologies; they admire fanatics.
The Black Crime Boogie Man is different: no ideology there to admire, eh? It’s a very effective domestic Boogie Man but useless Geo-politically, of course. That’s why the Anglo-American Sphere needs both; attempts to conflate them, briefly (it was around the time of the second Bush election that Muslim Treason was temporarily given an experimental Black Face… the case of the Miami Patsies who wore terrorist-jumpsuit-uniforms and did karate drills in a parking lot and supposedly wanted to blow up the Sears Tower is a flagship example) were ill-advised… to give an ideological basis to any Black Boogie Man would be to dilute its effectiveness; remember, there are white intellectuals, to this day, who think of the Black Panthers as cool.
The perfecting of the Black Boogie Man involves stripping him of all Ideology (ie, Intellect) and all Humanity (ie, Moral Limits) and all Sexiness (ie, make him pathetic and unclean and worthy only of distanced pity: see the Hollywood film “Precious“). We need more images of animalistic Black Rapists/Child-Killers/ Crack-Mothers juxtaposed with White Angels/ Potential Pillars of the Community Cut Down in The Bloom of Youth. (There are four essential News Archetypes now: 1) Black Felon 2) Black Celebrity Who Has Let Us Down 3) White Hero 4) White Victim… many presented figures are combinations thereof)
The UK and USA are polishing and coordinating these two presentations of the Boogie Man to compliment one another more efficiently; ie, whoever in the Voting Audience isn’t alienated by one will be alienated by the other and will associate the two. Whoever isn’t alienated by both or either will soon be of no demographic consequence.
It’s interesting to note that a new kind of Boogie Man… Failed White Entrepreneur Who Snapped and Murder-Suicided His Whole Family (ie, an indictment of the economy under Labour) … was dabbled in and dropped because, presumably, it diluted the Black Boogie Man message.
*
NOTHING IS WASTED
The world of Ideas is a closed system: it’s confined to the planet Earth. This, too, can be said of the Economy… which is why the “global economy” can be said to be neither “up” nor “down”: it’s a closed system (unless we’re trading with Mars and haven’t been notified). Zero Sum. Where do Ideas, on Earth, come from? They come from other Ideas and Earthly Events. Memes are like Dreams of the Culture… distorted versions of the day’s events (and the night’s sensations).
It’s my belief that the modern (vs post-modern and pre-modern) UFO Meme derives almost entirely from the trauma of the dropping of the A and H bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima (before civilians of the West shifted into Total Amorality Mode). Little Green Men are the ghosts of vaporized Japanese come back to haunt us. Please note the eyes and stature; I suppose the “green” is yellow skin gone radioactive. Please note the topological correspondence of the flying saucer, as it hovers on its propulsive column of light, to the mushroom cloud… a dynamic disc or doughnut surmounting a purifying pillar of fire.
(Note: Godzilla is the inverse: Japanese dreams of the H Bomb)
The post-modern iteration of the UFO Myth (ie, after the 1947-1970 period) shifts the reading/meaning from Japanese Ghosts (about whom the culture is no longer guilty or even mindful) to Shadow Government, with its stealth technology and intrusive aggression (the UFO folk myths of anal probes and abductions vs the Realpolitik of extra-legal kidnappings and torture ).
Add to that the Rapture Longing of Millennial Judo-Christianity (abduction rephrased as teleportation) and we end up with a weird version of the pre-modern UFO Myth… the Wellsian version… which was the shock of the Judo-Christian (Angels, Heaven) faced with the Industrial (Wells’ Martians tripods looking suspiciously like factory equipment). The Wellsian UFO Aliens were merely the irrevocable onset of Industrial Man, possibly… but this synthesis of the first two parts of the argument is complex and sketchy and needs work.
Hell as an allegory of gestation; the fetus is “underground” in the womb’s dark cavern… the bladder as the River Styx; the heat is the heat of the body and so forth and the “red” of the Devil as the bloody internal set-design. The Devil itself is the Penis, largely absent from Hades and busy above-ground but making His occasional guest-appearances in the form of pregnant fucking. Or is the dick first the Devil and then Orpheus, entering the tunnel to Hades (the Vagina) to retrieve an impossible-to-retrieve Eurydice, who went from the perfect passive beauty of Idealized Unconceived Lyric to the infernal, meaty reality of doomed Fetus? Perhaps Orpheus loses the dream of Eurydice again post-orgasm. If only O hadn’t cum on his journey back up out of Hell!
Isn’t every projected possible Ideal Personality an immortal/infinite abstraction until conception starts the clock running (towards death)? The infinity before conception is Non-Specific Immortality; the infinity after death is Eternal Nonexistence or Neverness (ie, you will never again exist as the being who existed as you existed in the connected version of space/time). Is the Male Imagination Heaven vs the Hell of the Womb?
The womb as Hades is the place where Death begins. Is this where women are taking the hatred/blame for all this Judo-Christian shit?
Further: compare THX 1138 and The Matrix to the Judo-Christian Eden Trope: in the first two cases, pills as the ANTI-APPLE (not conferring knowledge but protecting us from it)*.
White Males = MALES Black Males = FEMALES Attractive White Females = DOUBLE FEMALES (Angels/ Virgin Sacrifices) Unattractive White Females = BLACK MALES Black Females = WHITE FEMALES BURLESQUING BLACK MALES Asian Females = FETAL WHITE FEMALES Asian Males = DEMONIC WHITE FEMALES (humorous and/or threatening)
*THX 1138 twists the Eve Meme: LUH 3417, a Dystopian Eve, seduces her Adam (THX 1138) not by offering him the Apple but by preventing him from eating the Anti-Apple, a pill… a sedative that makes Dystopia okay (if not a paradise). In The Matrix, there are two pills: an Apple pill (revelation) and the Anti-Apple (sedative). In both films, the Eve is a sacrifice (though the penetration/crucifixion death of Eve in The Matrix comes later in that series). Check the first 8 scenes of the THX 1138 Script
run away, world!
If only I’d taken up archery as a child; if only the Walker weren’t so very, very far; if only the Art world weren’t dominated by well-connected cunts with talcum-dry arseholes and no ear for the unintentionally hilarious and the murderously boring
interesting too in the UK that the new government are spinning the idea that wasteful public spending is what has got us into this financial mess.
Not a mention of the banks who I thought were the culprits and who carried on rewarding themselves with bonuses even after public money had bailed them out.
Public services could always be better run but I fear we are about to head into a wave of privatisation ( where profit rules ) that we haven’t seen before.
Michael Moore is not one of this world’s greatest thinkers but his TV programme did a nice piece when Newt Gingrich was perfecting his “Get big government off our backs” routine ( not to help us of course but to make sure those in power could claim no responsibily when things go wrong ) . Moore went to Gingrich’s home town and noted down everything that “big government” had given to the population. It turned out that pretty much everything from public parks to private enterprise had received some form of government aid. Unfortunately, as per usual he ruined it with a dumb stunt but it was a point well made.
Delightful reply will come sometime tomorrow, Comrade ET… I’ve just emerged from a murky, brackish, three-day editing bubble and the most pressing need, at this point, is to get into bed before 2am…! (less than 36 minutes left to accomplish this)…
[ed.'s note: I did not accomplish it]
[delightful response still pending; first, I have to address Offsprung's daily breakfast offensive]
“Moore went to Gingrich’s home town and noted down everything that ‘big government’ had given to the population.”
Just try to imagine what a wonderful world this would be, Comrade ET, if The People all understood (most of us, anyway) that politicians say and do things (publicly) for effect?
Every politician who invokes the “big gummint” scare-trope really, of course, just wants to be the biggest government official in the biggest, baddest government ever known… that’s the dream. As I always point out: it’s called “Government” not “Servicement” and you’ve got to marvel at the rare freak who gets in the game with no motivation beyond the drive to be of service. I’m trying to think of a freakishly noble example. Well, there’s always Aung San Suu Kyi , but I was thinking of the Anglo-American sphere. I’m sure it’ll come to me…
“Not a mention of the banks who I thought were the culprits and who carried on rewarding themselves with bonuses even after public money had bailed them out.”
My favorite variation on this: all the people I’ve heard/overheard to blame the “financial crisis” on poor people who defaulted on their pathetic little home-buying loans… which is a little like examining a bullet-riddled corpse and suspecting tetanus: that’s not just stupid, it’s nasty.
[ed's note: it was right on the tip of my tongue, Comrade]
NOW and THEN
“It’s a voice novel, and they’re the hardest to film – you’ve got to use some voiceover to get the voice. But I think the BBC adaptation was really pretty close to my voice – ”
“The following wedge of prose has two things wrong with it: one big thing and one little thing – one infelicity and one howler. Read it with attention. If you can spot both, then you have what is called a literary ear.
… Craig Martin took an interest in the traces left by prior owners of his land. In the prime of his life, when he worked every weekday and socialised all weekend, he had pretty much ignored his land.
The minor flaw is the proximity of prior and prime. [...] And the major flaw? The first sentence ends with the words “his land”; and so, with a resonant clunk, does the second. Mere quibbles, some may say. [...]”
eerie bonus irony: “With all of this bad press, there is only one thing that has kept Martin Amis out of the public doghouse: his work.” June 2000
[UPDATE: a Lurking Comrade has almost immediately pointed out, emailically, the unfairness of this affectionate wind in Mart's direction as the clunking excerpt isn't from a novel; fair enough... it is fairly unfair]
Saw a bit of the Money adaptation. Hobbled by the need to conform to TV’s need for decency. So it was coy where the book is explicit.
Went to see Bad Lieutenant last night. Surprisingly good but not really a Herzog film – Lynch would have done the material better. But a couple of truly unexpected off-the-wall moments ( in a good way ) involving reptiles.
[ed.'s note: I'd put up the name of the illustrator responsible for the sampled collage but I don't want him to track TET down in a paroxysm of self-Googling and demand that I cease and desist; his name is James RhymeswithAwe]
Couldn’t have been as good, overall, as the original (well, minus the weirdly mawkish ending), though. For example, the stick-thin heroin-whore (played by a stick-thin heroin princess who co-authored the script) who’s Keitel’s shooting partner in the original becomes Eva Mendes in the remake (if I’m not mistaken)… a typical Hollywood denaturization. And is there a scene in the new one with a naked Cage (not that I’d like to see it) in a church on a bad high going “mee meee mee mee meee meee meee” and having visions of Christ and calling the loin-clothed feller a “fuck”? (Loosely adapted from memory). There again something hobbled by the need to conform to acceptable versions of the profane (possibly); the trailers for BL2 had that “fuck yeah” tone to them that sets my teeth on edge. “Doesn’t everyone have a lucky crack pipe?” Fuck off, Werner.
For me his last great feature film was Woyzzeck or Noseferatu. I loathed Fitzcarraldo – the film couldn’t make me give a toss about the title-character’s obsession – but Aguirre, Dwarfs and Kaspar Hauser are as good as they get.
But BL has a couple of authentic Herzog shots where the narrative stops still and we are asked to make something of a static shot. The music is the weak part for me – Mark Isham by and large, I didn’t spot the Stroszek piece, and uncharacteristically weak.
Kaspar Hauser, Stroszek, Aguirre, Nosferatu, Dwarfs: top notch, indeed (never got around to Woyzzeck)! Grizzly Man was (counter-intuitively, Grimm-type) funny. I’m sure there’s good stuff in BL2… there must be a molecule of Artist still knocking around in that asinine German whore’s mind somewhere, making inadvertent connections… it’s just those damn trailers (and Nick Cage playing a heat-packing Willy Loman in a Zoot-suit) I can’t abide. Well it’s the overall evil of the Remake I abhor, too: by the time the vulgarians raped and feathered Bedazzled I was forever closed to the concept. I mean: fuck: either make a new film or re-release the original if it’s really good enough to deserve destroying with a remake. Having said that, can I interest any producers in my concept for a remake of The Bicycle Thief (starring either LL Cool J or Lady Gaga as a Bushwick bike messenger)…?
Also: I think Herzog, to an unusual degree, depended on his casting: I can imagine a Kubrick without Peter Sellers, but can you imagine a Herzog without a Kinski or a Bruno S. (who is old friends with Comrade JR, btw: I was there… as I’ve perhaps mentioned… the time Bruno emerged from JR’s WC announcing that he’d just “fucked” it, whatever that meant)?
I think Herzog’s documentaries are his fiction at the moment. He seems to unearth these characters whose lives he can shape into his mould. I especially liked his vision of post first Gulf War Kuwait. A landscape of burning oil wells with the camera mounted on a helicopter flying over like some angel revisiting the fucked up earth.
I don’t begrudge him BL but hope he heads back to sub-Saharan Africa soon to discover someone who was an architect in Rotterdam but now lives in a termite hill.
Agreed there, ET: sub-Saharan Africa or the Amazon. A Lord Lucan doc might be just the thing…
…speaking of which, is the music near the end of this Hollywood “fuck yeah” scene familiar? Fuck yeah, it’s from Stroszek
IT’S ZOE LUND MONTH AT TET
All this talk of Bad Lieut. has gotten me on a Zoe Lund kick again; I ignore her Judo-Christian bent because the film talk here is so rich:
Why did you have the search for redemption flow through a “corrupt” policeman, as opposed to a mill worker or letter carrier?
In some way his corruption is entirely irrelevant, and in other ways its really important. To the irrelevancy, in no way did I want it implied that were he not corrupt that he would have been okay. That whole attitude of the film — him being corrupt — I think allows him to be closer to humility. And in his own strange way, perhaps what a policeman ought to be. For example, there are communities, especially here in New York, that have been totally corrupted by police bureaucracy. On the other hand, even after their death, officers who were corrupt are remembered in their community — even though they did drugs and hung out with whores. They know their surroundings, and if someone was getting mugged…goddamnit, that cop would be there! That type of corruption seems to be preferred, whereas here in the Lower East Side, dozens and dozens of cops stand about waiting to bust busses of junkies who just want to get their fix and go home. At the same time, a murder could happen two blocks away. Out of their own cowardice and misplaced sense of duty, they will stay on the corner and stalk the junkies.
So, everything is not what it seems.
Yes, sometimes when people are corrupt they are in touch with their own humanity and will know their community better, be closer to their community, and will know the priorities of the community better. If someone has a more humane sense of justice and the priorities of justice, I think that person could be judged corrupt. Corruption does not make the Lieutenant a sinner. I always like to point out that Christ himself hung out with whores and tax collectors. He turned water to wine…indeed, if he were here right now he might turn water to drugs, or something equivalent.
Some reviewers and viewers of the film did not like it because they seemed scared by the themes you present.
The only thing a person has to remember is that film is a wide-reaching medium…not every film will make it fun for the viewer. A conscious attempt was made to make it as difficult as possible for the viewer to escape. The use of real time is an example.
Being an independent film, was there a conscious attempt to stray away from the easy-selling realm of exploitation?
The only thing I can say is that the film was what it was to be, and that’s all. I had a great deal of control and, unlike my billing, wrote every word.
What about your character, Zoë, who in the film is the Lieutenant’s mistress?
There was alot of rewriting done on the set. Two other characters were cut, and my character modulated and took on more and more. A lot of things had to be changed and improvised. The vampire speech — which is crucial to the Lieutenant — was written two minutes before it was shot. I memorized it and did it in one take. The speech is important because she is acute in knowing the journey the Lieutenant makes. She shoots him up, sends him off, knowing of his passion, she lets him go.
The film is truly an emotional ride. Are you concerned about it possibly pushing audiences away?
I think the idea of carnal love versus hieratic love are issues we all deal with and are very strong throughout the film. In the beginning, the Lieutenant is pursuing carnal love, and at the end finally experiences the greater of the two, the hieratic. In terms of the viewers, if you leave halfway through, fine, you shouldn’t be there anyway. At the Rotterdam Film Festival I had to tell the audiences not to leave until the end, because its like reading the gospel up to Gethsemane [ED. NOTE: the garden where Jesus is betrayed by Judas Iscariot and handed over to the Romans] and then you shut the book. If you buy a ticket for the ride, you might as well see it through to the end.
Without giving away too much of the end, there is a sign in camera view that states “IT ALL HAPPENS HERE.” I though it only proper to end the film with that sign in view.
That wonderful sign also echoes the gospel, “IT ALL HAPPENS HERE,” and it truly does. The city gave us the sign for the shoot which, by the way, was shot with a hidden camera. The reaction of that scene is that of everyday New Yorker.
The narrative pace of LT’s wanderings during the first day and night is tight and engaging. He is an observer. The next day, after hearing of the sadistic rape and torture of a Nun (Frankie Thorn) in Spanish Harlem, LT is indifferent to the collective outrage of his fellow cops. The point LT makes (and it has been echoed by Ferrara in interviews) is that the Church makes the Nun’s rape an outrage, while the women on the street who are rape victims suffer alone and in silence – as Ms. 45 shows so well. After his disquieting face-to-face encounter with the nun, the tenor of LT’s daily activities changes. On the streets driving and drinking vodka (an interesting choice of alcohol: clear spirits), LT precipitates the queerly celibate (i.e. masturbatory) encounter with two young women that he stops and harasses. The ‘real time’ nature of this scene emphasises LT’s frightening masochistic nature of self-punishment and his confused sexual angst, magnified after having being affected by the Nun’s rape. Although LT is a father of two children, it seems that family life is a past he can leave behind him (when the mob man nicknamed Judas comments that the Mafia bookies will blow up his house with his wife, kids and family inside, LT doesn’t care – as a Catholic, he’s blessed and imperishable).
what I miss about that particular Phylum of All-Around-Artist-as-the-Masterpiece-Herself is any ability to balance the Narcissism with Insight and Revelation… too many of Zoe’s descendants are mere Facebook-Self-Photographing-Experts and irritating as insomnial mosquitoes
Women who fear becoming truly woman, a thing which would be equal to man, try to sink all females to their level of abnegation. The present furor over rape is the work of woman’s enemy, woman. They strive to turn all women into victims. Not fighters. Not creators. Not sources. These women want their sisters relegated to the ranks of the done-to. They fear the challenge of doing.
A woman recently raped is told she has been penetrated to the core. Her very being, violated. Her soul defiled. This makes her a victim — and truly a sex object. For it says that her soul, her very essence, is in her cunt. A penis entered the organ called vagina — it did not penetrate and scourge her soul. When I make love, I do endow my vagina with soul. But if I do not define my vagina as a sex organ, a love organ, a soul organ, then it is no such thing. It is merely an aperture, not unlike my ear. My soul is not in my cunt unless I put it there. While I was being raped, my soul was elsewhere. That man got nowhere near me. He was stuck in a hole. I was far away*.
Cowardly womanhood wishes to disempower women, to bring them down, to make them the craven creatures they too often are already. That is a crime. That is also why Thana, in Ms.45, is finally knifed in the back, until dead — by a woman.
I wrote the script for the film, Bad Lieutenant. Many people were surprised that such a “violent” film was written by a woman. Females were foremost among the ranks of the astonished. I didn’t try to be violent, or male, or, indeed, “macho”. I simply wrote the truth, and relished the penetrating sharpness, the harsh beauty of reality. And people were fascinated by the inherent challenge posed by my sex.
Men try, sometimes, to play along with the reactionary “feminism” that poses amorphism, formlessness, a total lack of telos as an ideal. I recall once, long ago, when I had sex with such a man. He lay there, inside me, and didn’t move at all. For an extended time. I was positively shuddering with frustration. At last, he said with a sigh, “Oh, this is so beautiful. We’re communicating…” While he got dressed, pulling on his faded, bell-bottom jeans, he said, “I know that women are sick of all that bang, bang, piston kind of thing. There’s far too little gentleness in the world. We all need to be more like women. Non-violent.” You, Mr. Feminist, are truly a male chauvinist pig.
When Dr Mark Gasson of Reading University injected himself with a chip containing a computer virus in a bid to capture some media attention, little did he know the fury he would have caused to more serious security experts worldwide.
Sophos’ senior technology consultant (and incidentally regular blogger), Graham Cluley, criticised the academic’s move saying that claims he made that he had been “infected” by a computer virus were sheer nonsense. [Ed.'s note: Will it still be "nonsense" in 20 years?]
MEDIEVAL SCIENCE CLASS
Krone’s husband is listed as “My Love” in her cell phone. Krone, who told “GMA” that she was “extremely, extremely surprised” to hear how calm her son was on the phone, spent 26 hours in the emergency room and was hospitalized for three days. She was sweating profusely, having seizures and her central nervous system shut down. Today, she still is prone to hot flashes and dizzy spells as the residual electricity makes its way outside her body. She told “GMA,” her left side is still weaker than her right.
WELL I HOPE THESE GIRLS WERE GIVEN LIGHT SENTENCES AS JUVENILES
“There have been various sexual assaults at that school,” said the teacher, who asked not to be identified. “A month ago, a sixth-grader was caught at one of the exits with two girls performing oral sex on him.”
and, finally:
THE SYSTEM WILL ABSORB YOUR DISSIDENT GESTURES EFFORTLESSLY AND WITH EVIL CUTENESS
“Tipper Gore later became friends with the late Zappa’s wife, Gail, and played drums and sang backup on daughter Diva Zappa’s album in 1999.”
Oh, and: slow this down by a factor of about 25x and watch the whole film (and remember, you’re more liable to appreciate any work of Art if you don’t presume to know what form it will take before you’ve even seen it):
WHERE NORMLIBS and NEOCONS EXCHANGE ATTITUDINAL FLUIDS
I don’t agree with Reed’s take on Kara Walker’s Art and I’m baffled by the notion that anyone should side with the POTUSOC just because he’s being niggered (any more than I would side with Paul Wolfowitz or Alan Dershowitz just because they’re kiked in some quarters), but there’s material of interest here (caveat: set your typo-phasers on stun) and I hope that our younger Lurkers, especially, read this. [ed.'s note: and you already know what I think of the fleetingly implied defense of the hideous Michael Jackson]
Reed refers to someone who refers to being “outpropagandized” and it’s just too true. Postmodern death means your avatar dies first and they bill your conscious corpse for the virtual bullet.
Would you explain the sub-title of your book, “The Return of the Nigger Breakers”?
Edward Covey was a member of a profession whose job was to tame unruly slaves. Frederick Douglass was one of those men who was sent to him, a Nigger Breaker, to be disciplined. Douglass turned the tables on him and thrashed him. I argue that this is the aim of the media, and other institutions that are opposed to Obama. In fact, Senator DeMint, from South Carolina, a state that has an active secessionist faction, used the verb, “break,” when describing the intentions of the Republican Party toward Obama. Moreover, with the firing, and buyouts of the hundreds of minority journalists, black institutions, blacks in general, black celebrities and even the president are being judged by a mostly white media jury and a handful of acceptable right wing blacks, a few of whom are farther to the right than the white right. You wrote the handbook on this trend with your book, “Involuntary Slavery.” The Hispanics and the Asian American tokens are also mostly right like Alex Castellanos of CNN, who was exposed as someone who profits from his connections to the insurance industry while making on air comments critical of Obama’s health reform goals. Despite this, he’s still on the air. Another Hispanic tough lover is Ruben Navarrette. He believes in that blacks are the people who are addicted to government handouts. A hoax. A report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities entitled “White Poverty in America” concludes that “ Contrary to the stereotype, whites use government safety-net programs more than blacks or Hispanics, and are twice as likely as minorities to be lifted out of poverty by the taxpayer money they get. ” Brookings just issued a report called “The Suburbanization of Poverty, ” yet neither Kristof nor cable, which makes money from blaming U. S. social problems on black lifestyles, have attributed this poverty to “personal behavior. ” Nicholas Kristof one of several white supremacists who writes for the Times, tea baggers who can spell, also believes that poverty is black exclusively and located in Harlem and is caused by “self destructive” behavior. ”These are samples of 24/7 propaganda assaults against black Americans.
Why were you unable to get this book published in the United States?
This is attributable to the state of black letters. Serious fiction and non fiction by blacks are becoming extinct, except for that which upholds the current line coming from the media owners and the corporations that all of the problems of Africans and African Americans are due to their behavior. This is true not only for literature but for black theater, film, art galleries and opinion columns as well. I saw a show of Kara Walker’s work at the Brooklyn Museum. I feel that this young brilliant artist’s growth is being stunted by museum curators, and big money capitalists. Even some white intellectuals support her most mediocre work and pit her against the great Betye Saar who uses a variety of materials and subject matter and whose work contains more depth. Her supporters limit her work just as David Selznick limited the range of Hattie McDaniel. I’d love to see her do color. The Brooklyn museum used the neo confederate line when describing her work. That her work presented a south in which “there were no heroes of villains. ” This is the way the slave trade is being described. Your readers should review “Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers”, subtitled. “the untold story of the Nazi racial laws and men of Jewish descent in the German military, ” by Bryan Mark Rigg, University Press of Kansas, yet if you wrote about the cooperation of some Jews and Nazis leading to the Holocaust, you couldn’t get it in the Times and the Neo Liberal Hawks, which includes black pathology profiteer Mickey Kaus, at Slate wouldn’t allow Henry Louis Gates to write about it at TheRoot. Kaus, outed in the May 17, SF Chonicle about his senate race against Barbara Boxer, gave some insight into the Neo Liberal thinking at Slate, which influences the “Black” zine, TheRoot. Using some code words, he is making an appeal to older white voters with some soft core white power and anti Union rhetoric: “It’s clear that the unions own the Democratic party – and it’s going to be a disaster unless that changes, ” says Kaus, 58, a longtime blogger for online magazine Slate. com and author of “The End of Equality, ” which urges a rethinking of liberalism. Instead of “chasing after the Latino vote” and pushing for public “card check” elections intended to make it easier for workers to join labor unions, he said his party and Boxer – whom he calls an “old-style pol, through and through” – should deal with issues that affect the everyday lives of working Californians. ”
Despite this cooperation by some Jews, Holocaust survivors still receive reparations, though Norman Finkelstein, author of “The Holocaust Industry, ” says that middle persons get most of the cash. Gates doesn’t know about this European history because although he criticizes the Afrocentrics, he sells high priced Afrocentric merchandise. As an example of his reach, his power, Tina Brown, his friend, got a writer to respond to my Counterpunch piece about Gates at The Daily Beast. He called the piece a “diatribe. ” What he didn’t reveal was that he’d received $50, 000 from one of the foundations controlled by Gates. The foundation is bankrolled by Arthur Fletcher whose brother, Geoffrey Fletcher wrote the script for “Precious. ”This is what the late Barbara Christian must have been referring to when she talked about “The Skip Machine. ”Gates is Afro Centric focused and doesn’t take the time to study the cultures of other ethnic groups, or he’d know that there’s less substance abuse among blacks than among whites. His fund raising Op ed in the Times was refuted by Eric Foner and others after he said that African participation in the slave trade is some sort of forbidden topic when as Foner pointed out, this information is published widely. He and Cosby can carry on about “35 year old grandmothers living in the projects, ” but the Times won’t publish a piece by him or Bob Herbert that would scold unmarried white women whose birth to children has risen by 69% over the last two decades according to a report called “ The New Demography of American Motherhood, ” published by PEW on May 6. I’m opposed to the government paying reparations, but the banks and the insurance companies that profited from the slave trade should pay up. They could guarantee the college education of students whose parents are traditional African Americans. It’s been shown that when black high school students are assured that their college bills will be picked up, they graduate. The Gates line is picked up by white critics like Nicholas Kristof urging white rule to return to Africa. I wrote Kristof a letter about his constant hammering of black male behavior toward women without challenging the wide spread abuse of women by white men. The Times got Solomon Moore a black Times writer to respond. He defended Kristof. (When I challenged NPR’s nasty and depraved “Ghetto I01,” they got a token Hispanic to respond). He wrote “… I think you are accusing the wrong dude of racially slanted coverage. If you read Kristof’s writings, I think you will find him to be pretty balanced and empathetic toward the wide variety of victims he writes about, and find him equally pissed off toward oppressors of all stripes. ” Yet when confronted by statistics that showed the abandonment of white children by their meth addicted white parents, he dismissed it as a “fad. ” The old penny press of the 1830s made money by depicting blacks as cannibals. Kristof updates this with his accusation that blacks in the Kongo engage in “auto-cannibalism ”yet on Sunday May, 2, he defended the catholic church which has had to pay billions for the pedophilic behavior of its priests and bishops. He doesn’t seem to be “pissed off” at the catholic church.
Kristof and Navarrete are not the only ones who draw readers and viewers to their opinion products by dissing blacks, a big business. Michelle Bernard, an MSNBC regular and a black right-winger says that “personal responsibility” is “especially !”a problem for black Americans. She’s irresponsible. There is a higher rate per thousand births to Hispanic unmarried mothers than to black teenagers. They have a higher drop out rate. We thought that when women gained power in the media, they’d be responsible. The producer of MSNBC’s “Hard Ball” where Bernard is a regular is Jennifer Berman. She books Bernard, whose allowed to run amuck over blacks with spiteful generalizations. If I were on “Hard Ball” and made a generalization about women like if I were to say that women can’t do math, Berman wouldn’t invite me to return. At one time, blacks could respond through writing. James Baldwin used a diamond encrusted megaphone to plead black aspirations, and his generation of writers could debate their critics one on one. But with the disappearance of serious black fiction and non fiction this is no longer the case. When was the last time you saw a black author appear on CNN and MSNBC where white authors appear around the clock. Terry McMillan, interviewed In the latest issue of Konch (IshmaelReedpub. com), says that black fiction that is selling is urban fiction that shows blacks at their worst, which is not to say that black criminals don’t exist. But that’s all we get from the mainstream media, television and movies. Anyway, when I was left for literary road kill after the publication of my novel, “Reckless Eyeballing, ” in which, ironically, the women characters fare better than the men, I decided that never again would the success or failure of my work be determined by the trends in African American culture that are defined by outsiders. I studied Japanese and wrote “Japanese By Spring. ” It was panned by American critics but received a very favorable press in Japan where I toured, and signed autographs in Katakana. I studied Yoruba and read poems I wrote in Yoruba before an audience in Nigeria. Now this book, which my agent said no American publisher would publish, was published in Quebec. Between April 14, and 20. I did national media in Canada with front page stories in the major dailies and weeklies and a front page story on The Montreal Review of Books and was greeted by crowds in Montreal and Toronto. In Montreal they had to turn people away. This must have been what it was like when the fugitive slaves traveled abroad and lectured. There is a black reading public in Canada and Quebec, mostly African and Caribbean readers, and some American ex pats. There’s a union movement. My reception in Toronto was hosted by the Steelworkers Union. By contrast, when I appeared at the Hue Man bookstore in Harlem last summer in connection with my book, “Ishmael Reed, The Plays, ” only three people showed up. The most recent play, “Body Parts” about the exploitation of blacks and Africans being used as guinea pigs by the pharmaceutical industry was dismissed as “angry “by the Times while blame the victim plays and plays about black men as sexual predators, here and in Africa, even MLK, are drooled over by white male and white feminist critics. My advice to young writers is that they seek audiences elsewhere. It’s a big world.
Much of your recent work has focused on media criticism. Why?
The segregated American media with its alliance with the right wing and racist forces like the Tea Party movement which was created, organized, and amplified by the segregated Jim Crow media, are the most powerful opponents to black and Hispanic progress. It’s not surprising that they have, using the late Carl Rowan’s expression, “outpropagandized” blacks, but white democrats and progressives as well. That’s because they have billions at their disposal. The insurance companies put 350 million dollars out to defeat health care reform and bank rolled this faux grass roots movement called the Tea Party. This movement is made up of over 55 year old white men, among the most privileged groups in world history, yet there they are bitching and groaning. Billionaire Willam Mellon Scaife, who backs a far right agenda is so powerful that publishing companies are scared to an unauthorized biography of him. The media have overblown the strength of this movement because racism is big business for them. Typical was the coverage of a gun rally that was held near Washington on April 19. CNN didn’t do aerial shots because that would have revealed the small turnout. John King the correspondent was very sympathetic to these men although he did point out that it was because of a measure approved of by the president that they were able to carry guns in the park. He said that they remembered Obama’s remark about people in small towns cling to guns and religion . What he didn’t point out was Zogby and Newsweek polls, which were available during the campaign, showed that most people agreed with Obama at the time. What I can’t understand is why a crazy ghetto Negro reading and writing rat like me knows this and someone with all of the resources available to CNN doesn’t. While I was in Montreal, two American “experts” were interviewed about the Tea Party. This was carried on the CBC. One of those interviewed was a white woman professor, who didn’t mention that racism was a factor that galvanized this movement. The Canadian interviewer had to bring it up. Another was Christopher Hedges who tried to use this movement to make some hackneyed Marxist points. He said that it was all about the working class striking back at capitalist exploiters. Well blacks Hispanics and Asian Americans are part of the working class. The reason that they are not present in the Tea Party is because they correctly view it as a racist movement. White commentators like these two can’t spot evidence right before their eyes. That’s why a segregated media right or “progressive” are incapable of reflecting American reality. Academia is just as bad.
The media are the mob leaders. And they cater to a niche of people who are addicted to black pathology, people who can’t seem to get a life. When you read that The New York Post ( run by a couple of coarse Aussies who, according to an internal memo, intend to break Obama) ran more front pages about Tiger Woods than 9/11 then you realize the sickness that we’re dealing with. Susan Block, a psychologist, at counterpunch. com, traced the fascination with Tiger Woods to the fantasies of her white male patients. The usual explanations don’t come close. Incidentally, a New York Post ex writer, Sandra Guzman, is suing the Post. She said that she was fired because she objected to the cartoon showing Obama as a dead chimp ( The Post also called Tiger “Cheetah” after Tarzan’s chimp companion). She also said that the Post’s men, who are making money from Tiger’s philandering, make sexist remarks to the women at the Post and even go beyond that. Rupert Murdoch, who has a thing about Obama because the New York Establishment considers him new money and won’t invite him to their A list parties, where you have all of these unemployed and broke Dukes and Counts who are trying to land a rich American woman. He married a young woman and abandoned his wife and kids of thirty five years, yet his operatives are always preaching family values to blacks. He thought he’d impress New York society, useless people who spend hours at lunch and dinner parties and playing bridge and shopping, by buying Laurence Rockefeller’s apartment. It didn’t work. Obama has access to this circle, a man whom Murdoch likens to a chimp. Murdoch must be burning up over this so he sics his pit-bull underlings after Obama at Fox whose boss is Roger Ailes, creator of the infamous Willie Horton ad and Glenn Beck, who called the survivors of Katrina “scumbags,” which got him hired at CNN.
Ishmael, your information about the media seems encyclopedic. What is your average daily media diet? (What do you read, watch, listen to, what sites on the internet?)
I read three newspapers each day, where the typical portrait of a black man has him in an orange jumpsuit. I watch cable and monitor the opinion pages whose post race line is usually challenged by reports and studies printed in the same newspapers. Like the recent report that white and black New York residents are treated differently when it comes to enforcement of drug laws. These reports and studies indicate that blacks and whites are treated differently by the health care industry, mortgage lending, including a criminal bank like Wells Fargo, which recently sponsored one of Bill Cosby’s tough love shows. Wells Fargo recently had to pay a fine of 152 million for laundering money from Mexican drug criminals(March, 18, Times). No wonder they recently announced an over 2 billion dollar profit. Cosby and Michelle Bernard, who gets money from the right were on. If Mrs. Bernard scolded Wells Fargo about its lack of personal responsibility her face would disappear from the tube forever. Another right wing manufactured personality is John McWhorter, who gets more media space than any other black person, because of his connections to the Manhattan Institute, which is linked to the neo Nazi race science movement. One of the Institute’s sponsors is Chase Manhattan Bank. Their favorite politicians are Giuliani and the reinvented Jerry Brown, the bad twin of the Jerry Brown who used to be Governor. MacWhorter says that when blacks point out things like racism in banking and the criminal justice system, it’s because they are “insecure. ” He said this on C-Span. When I debated him on Mike Dyson’s show he didn’t even know the history of the Institute that uses him. He didn’t know for example that it was founded by William Casey, Reagan’s CIA chief, who probably would have been indicted for Iran Contra had he not died. He assured me that the Institute had cut ties to Charles Murray, author of “The Bell Curve, ” who redirects stereotypes leveled at his group, The Scots Irish, to blacks for profit. When Veep Cheney made a joke about having Cheneys on each side of the family and not even being from West Virginia, he was invoking the “incest’ libel aimed at the Scots Irish. Six months or so after MacWhorter assured me that The Manhattan Institute, full of second and third generation ethnics, nouveau whites, had severed ties with Murray, the Institute sponsored Murray to talk about the intellectual inferiority of blacks. Al Young says that MacWhorter has an excellent knowledge of Linguistics. He should stick to that instead of hanging around people who are ashamed of their immigrant forbearers.
Any advice on how to become more critical in news consumption?
Blogs like yours are very useful. I have an online magazine. I get useful information each day from those who write on Facebook. Counterpunch, Media Matters, FAIR and Richard Prince’s “Journalisms” are essential. I don’t know how Richard Prince does it.
Do you think technology, particularly the Internet – is loosening the grip of corporate media?
I agree. That’s why they’re trying control it.
Given the existence of the “Jim Crow Media” and “The Nigger Breakers,” how do people of color, progressives and others critique Barack Obama without colluding with corporate America’s agenda?
I have some problems with some of Obama’s policies, but as long as these people are threatening to kill him and his family, calling them monkeys and his children whores and his mother, a distinguished Irish American anthropologist, “white trash” and even worse and assassination threats increase, I’m on his side. All of the stored up bile of white supremacy has exploded like airborne E-Coli as a result of Obama’s election. A Long Island newspaper with a circulation of 30, 000 just put up a photo depicting Obama and Michelle as characters in “Sanford and Son. ” Their new dirty trick is to put this stuff up and then apologize to anybody who might have been offended. He’s not only the nation’s president but chief exorcist. Like a St. Patrick stoking the nation’s lizard brain. The progressives are uncomfortable with Obama because they’ve been opposed to black leadership, historically. That’s why Askia Toure purged them from SNCC. The white males who dominate the progressive media are used to black guys playing basketball. Their opinions dominate NPR, Pacifica, The Nation even though it has a feminist editor. They’re crazy about Michael Jordan. The progressive media is just as segregated as the corporate media which they are always criticizing from their glass houses. Richard Prince printed a photo of a Huffington Post Xmas party. One black staffer!! The opposition to Obama from people of color comes from the fringes. He has a 90% approval rating from blacks, over 60% from Hispanics and he carried the Asian American vote, yet these arrogant white progressives say they are his base and that he is obligated to them.
You wrote very critically about the movie “Precious” and took a good deal of heat for it. Did you feel compelled to speak out?
Most of the responses I received from whites and blacks men and women were 85% positive. Among the young people at Twitters, support for my point of view was nearly unanimous. This propaganda movie that supported Neo Con policy points about Eugenics and Welfare had to be challenged because powerful critics were saying that this family was the typical black family living in poverty. Some of the young black women scholars at Duke challenged me and defended the movie, a movie that advocates sterilization of poor black women and Draconian welfare policies. Their leader, a black male professor, was brought on WBAI to debate me. He didn’t reveal that he also works for Womens’ Studies at Duke. When I confronted him about this, one of his friends, another professor, said that I was “bullying” him. His defending this movie without revealing this fact was like someone who is against global warming without revealing that he is on the payroll of the oil companies. I asked him to identify the head of Women’s’ studies at Duke because I wanted to examine her writings to detect the ideological bent of the department. He refused. I never denied that child abuse occurs in American communities. What the supporters of this movie were suggesting is that incest is “prevalent” in African American communities! And the media line was that only a few black angry men were opposed to the movie, the line pushed by “progressives” at WBAI. I pointed out that a number of black women and even white women intellectuals spoke out against the film. In fact the latest issue of my zine Konch (IshmaelReedpub. com) publishes a brilliant article by Hariette Surovell who describes herself as a “Jewish Atheist. ” She is vociferous in her opposition to the movie. Also included is an excellent piece by Sandra Goodridge, who confronted Ramona Lofton, when she was trying to push some false science about why the DNA found at Central Park crime scene, where some black and Hispanic kids were supposed to have raped a stock broker, pointed to their guilt. They were innocent and Ms. Lofton’s poem “Wild Thing” helped to create the hysteria that got them convicted. The poem made her famous. Even Vice President Dan Quayle read it. Now that she’s made some money, she might help those young men whose lives were ruined . They said the same thing about “The Color Purple, ” the business model for “Precious. ”That it was opposed by “angry black men. ”Nicholas Power the only black writer for a progressive site called Indypendent, said that it was opposed by only by Minster Louis Farrakhan and me, when the most devastating criticism of the “The Color Purple” came from Toni Morrison and Trudier Harris. The problem with my critics is that they don’t read anything. Alice Walker once called for a boycott of my novel, “Flight To Canada, ” which has been in print since 1976. They didn’t read that.
No American institution is immune to tabloid thinking. Not even academia. They said that the character in my novel “Reckless Eyeballing” was based on Walker because that’s one of three black women authors that they read. We thought that when white feminist progressives gained power in academia they’d end the one at a time admission of black writers to the Canon. The late June Jordan quit Womens’ Studies at Berkeley because, according to her, the faculty members spent all of their time worshiping the French theory of men. When I announced at a panel that most black women authors remain unknown to the general public, I was challenged by two famous feminists, one Asian American and the other Jewish American who pointed to two successful ones. Tokenism. Instead of these young black women weighing in on “Precious” and using the curriculum to get even with their fathers and dates, why don’t they do some serious work on black women authors, not just one of two. Over the last six months we lost Ai, Carlene Hatcher Polite, the pioneer black feminist author, Lucille Clifton, and most recently Carolyn Rodgers. Kristin Hunter Lattany went to her grave without the kind of honors that would be accorded a white writer of her stature. Her novel, “Breaking Away” shows what black women have to go through on college campuses. She was driven from academic life because she defended some black co-eds who’d been smeared and accosted with hate crimes. No, these young women and the black male Womens’ studies professor at Duke are too busy deconstructing Hip Hop. Charles Murray of “Bell Curve” fame is consultant to the Wisconsin welfare program, which is endorsed in “Precious” yet they back this movie.
The most vicious comments about my Times Op ed came from awardsdaily. com, a front for the Oscars’ establishment They were receiving ad money from Sarah Siegel’s “Precious. ” This is when I knew that I was drawing blood and jeopardizing the Oscar’s sweep for “Precious. ” Lionsgate was the studio that produced “Precious” for Sarah Siegel. These comments were from Hollywood bottom feeders and losers who can’t get through the day without a black path. fix, and who have a fetish for XXXL black women. The late great author, Nelson Algren, wrote, in his novel “ A Walk On The Wild Side, ”1956, about a special kind of white john who was called “a mammy freak. ” In my response to them, I reminded them of the widespread dope addiction in the industry, their segregated institutions like the Screen Writers Guild, and the influence of organized crime on Hollywood. The cocaine epidemic might have begun in Hollywood. Moreover for M’onique to compare herself to Hattie McDaniel is an insult to the memory of Hattie McDaniel. Haitte McDaniel was an innovator. She broke the barrier for women by organizing all black women minstrel shows that addressed the issues of the day when she had the money to stage her own productions and she herself lampooned the Mammy figure, which today’s segregated museums are requiring from black artists. She rejected the script based upon Margaret Mitchell’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Gone With the Wind which was written by a pro confederate writer. ( NAACP’s Walter White tried to get Selznick to read DuBois’s “Black Reconstruction. ”)McDaniel couldn’t be directed and sassed everybody in sight. She demanded that Selznick nominate her for an Oscar. She had no breathing room in Hollywood. Selznick even tried to copyright her style, yet she continued to talk back to her movie employees and co-stars. The role that they wrote for M’onique was more akin to the kind that Stepin Fetchit played. A slothful, ignorant couch potato and welfare cheat, the kind of stereotype that helped to get Ronald Reagan elected at a time when the majority of women on welfare shared Reagan and Moynihan’s ethnic heritage.
Sapphire has said you are “mentally ill.” Any comment on that?
Well, Selznick used blacks to front “Gone With The Wind.” Though hers and Daniels, Perry and Ophrah’s names are upfront, others are behind the scenes. Lionsgate’s Sarah Greenberg said that there was a “gold mine of opportunity” for their studio by producing this film for white audiences. If anybody would follow the marketing plan for this movie available for anyone to track at the NYtimes website where I have tracked the evolution of this project over the last year two years or so, they will see that the marketing plan wrote off a black audience, yet my critics dispute my claim and places like New York Magazine said that I was calling people who liked the film “racists. ”That’s what the marketers said! That it was for white audiences. They said that they couldn’t sell “The Great Debators” or “Miracle at Saint Anna” to white audiences! After the nominations, Daniels said that he wanted more “middle class whites” to see it. He said that so homophobic was the black community that he had to flee to the white world. Considering the number of Gay people connected to the “Precious” project, it might be considered a revenge movie. Black gay people getting back at straights whom they feel have abused them. I heard two black Gays on KPFA say that the black community is the most homophobic of all ethnic communities. If they believed that, they haven’t examined the attitudes of other ethnic communities. I’m all for Gays getting married, but I disagree with the white gays who objected my counterpunch and Times’ articles about “Precious, ” when they suggest that the history of white Gays and blacks are similar. Nonsense. During the period of slavery on which side did were you likely to find white Gays. Slave masters or slaves. Oscar Wilde, a Gay icon, was pro confederate. The whips? Dismissing the critics of “Precious” as “contrarian” and “crazy” black men was part of the marketing. Selznick on the other hand wooed his black critics and in a couple of cases he got them to tone down their criticism of” Gone With The Wind, ” by giving the critics a tour of 20th Century Fox and lunch at Fox’s restaurant that had a phony French name. Though Perry and Winfrey’s names appear as producers, the Oscar people- 43 whites 37 men and 6 women ( including Kathleen Kennedy vice president of their Board of Govs, and the co producer of “The Color Purple”) wouldn’t give them credit because they came on when the film was completed. The real producer is Sarah Siegel whose name hardly came up during the controversy. She says that she was on the set everyday. She successfully warded off critics by sending The Help to debate her critics. Now Sapphire has made me the villain in her traveling sideshow. Her putting me down at the Los Angeles library and in other cities drew “enthusiastic applause” from women from other ethnic groups who are scared to address the attitudes toward women held by men of their ethnic groups- like the Egyptian American father who killed his daughters for dating out-and use black men to represent universal male evil. The White women who were photographed as part of her audience are scared to talk about their oppression at the hands of white men according to a study and a book that I read, “Tales from the Boom Boom Room: Women vs. Wall Street” by Susan Antilla.
They also use black men as surrogates for their rage against white men. This could be a plot for your next book. Set up an enterprise where women of other ethnic groups can go to a place where they can vent. They can flog the brothers. It would become a big industry. Terry McMillan, who caught Sapphire’s show in London says that she “scares the daylights out of white people. ”Sapphire is upset because my counterpunch and Times’ articles prevented “Precious” from receiving an Oscars sweep including Best Caterer. Shows what one crazy ghetto Negro who is a writing rat armed with a $350. 00 laptop can do. Sends a message to all of the other off campus intellectuals, high school dropouts and college dropouts, victims of a Eurocentric curriculum. People living in the projects and other ghettos. Only 8% of poor people can afford to go to college; this shouldn’t be a barrier to a rich intellectual life. As for her calling me mentally ill, I don’t want to get into a black man black woman quarrel that’s been an entertainment dating back to minstrel days. They tried to do that with Alice Walker and me. They failed to notice that she finally agreed with me about how Spielberg interpreted her book. My critics didn’t read that in her “Stepping Into The Same River Twice.” They don’t read. Spielberg, David Mamet, and Ms. Siegel view themselves as a mediators between black men and black women when Jewish gender relations are in such a mess that the Jewish American community is close to extinction. (I just saw David Mamet’s “Race” on Broadway which was full of old wives tales about Affrimative Action, white guilt and a lot of cliché philosophical thought which was delivered as though it was profound. If a black person had written this thing, It would have been dismissed as a tirade a diatribe or polemic. In his film, “Edmund, ” black men are sexual predators, and in “Race” black women are promiscuous, the typical portraits of Jewish men and women in the media of Nazi Germany. Maybe Skip Gates can write a Times Op ed about why Jewish writers like David Simon, Richard Price, Sarah and others are pushing Nazi stereotypes on blacks).
Relations among Jewish men and women are so bad that Katha Politt of the Nation accused Jewish men of having anti Semitic attitudes toward Jewish women a charge that’s been made for over one hundred years, and Jewish feminists accuse the community of covering up the treatment of Jewish women both here and abroad. Reviewing a study called Matrilineal Ascent/ Patrilineal Descent: Gender Imbalance in American Jewish Life by Sylvia Fishman and Daniel Parmer, Politt wrote, July 21, 2008, Nation: “ The study is full of unusually frank references to Jewish men’s dislike of Jewish women–too aggressive, demanding, ethnic–but instead of challenging this as sexist and anti-Semitic, it accepts it as a fact of life that women must accommodate for the sake of the community. ” A recent issue of a Jewish magazine The Tablet accused Jewish directors and producers of denying Jewish women roles in the movies, historically. Hariette Surovell, who describes herself as an “atheist Jew” does a brilliant historical view of how some Jewish producers have done demeaning portraits of blacks over the years and continue to do so. Her focus is on “Precious. ” Her article is published in the latest issue of Konch. I doubt whether Spielberg will do a movie or Mamet a play or “Nightline” do a special about this conflict between Jewish men and women for over one hundred years. In fact the Pakistani American who moderates “Nightline, ” a reward for Martin Bashir’s slandering of Michael Jackson, might do a special on the conflict between South Asian American men and women, a conflict exposed brilliantly by Bharati Mukherjee in her story, ”A Wife’s Story” that was published by Carla Blank and me in our short story anthology Pow WoW, Charting the Fault Lines in the American Experience- Short Fiction from Then to Now. He had to apologize for sexist remarks he made about Asian American women journalists. According to the Telegraph. co. uk. Bashir made the comments during an annual banquet in Chicago for the Asian American Journalists Association. The London-born presenter, who moved to the US four years ago, said: ‘I’m happy to be in the midst of so many Asian babes. In fact, I’m happy that the podium covers me from the waist down. ”
I witnessed a rehearsal for Wajahat Ali’s “The Domestic Crusader” erupt into a shouting match between women actors who were Indian American and Pakistani American male actors over gender roles in the South Asian community. I sat there in silence. Stunned. As women demand freedom from their traditional roles, there will be conflicts in ethnic communities. By the way, where is the academic feminist outrage over Roth’s latest book, The Humbling, which proposes that all Lesbians need is a good fuck and they’ll not only change to heterosexuals but go out and recruit other lesbians that you can fuck. These conflicts between other ethnic men and women are not as entertaining as the old minstrel format of black men and women going after each other. Seems to me that Mamet and Spielberg and the producer of “Precious” have plenty of work to do in their own communities. Make films and television series about that gender conflict. But they will probably ignore the treatment of Jewish women here and in Israel. No box office in it. David Simon is another ghetto entrepreneur who sees his role as that of refereeing conflicts between black men and women. Spike Lee was passed over by HBO for a New Orleans series. They gave it to David Simon whose “The Wire” is the urban version of “Song of the South. ” I’m not surprised that some blacks wrote me letters objecting to my complaints about “The Wire, ” and “Precious. ” This is nothing new. Victims of propaganda supporting it. Julius Streicher, The Nazi editor of Der Sturmer, an evil Anti Semitic rag, which showed ugly cartoons of Jewish men raping Aryan women, said that his newspaper could not have survived without Jewish support. When black pathology entrepreneurs, George Pelecanos, Simon and Spielberg do war movies, the heroic efforts of the one million black men and women who fought in the war are left out. Like this series “The Pacific, ” which idealizes the role of American soldiers during the Allies and Japan’s struggle over the resources of Asia. The kind of movie that was made to sell Victory Bonds in the 1940s. American soldiers are shown expressing remorse over the death of each Japanese soldier and insisting that each be given their rights according to the Geneva convention. Right. Left out is the warfare between black and white soldiers at Guam. The black soldiers had become fed up by their treatment. It took novelists John O’Killens, subject of a great new biography by Keith Gilyard, and John A. Williams to tell this racist side of The Greatest Generation. For contributing to the NAACP, Spielberg will continue to get Image Awards like they gave some to “Precious” after Tyler Perry gave them one million dollars. Like they gave one to his version of “The Color Purple. ” The NAACP was the organization that during the 1940s tried to reform Hollywood. Lena Horne (whose newspaper obituaries have been half-assed) and Walter White put up a heroic fight. They failed.
It’s even getting worse. Soledad O. Brien does the old Hollywood stereotypes for CNN. She says that blacks make excuses for their plight, even though there are many studies and reports to support the opinion that we’ve not reached a post race paradise. She believes that crack smoking is confined to black parents in Harlem, and chided a black man for not attending his daughter’s birthday party, yet the National Association of Black Journalists gave her an award. She did two Black Path. entertainments called “Black in America, ” where they made money and increased their ratings by employing one of the sources of entertainment which is to have blacks on to engage in a verbal shootout with one another, each competing with the other for applause lines, what I call charismatic carnivals. CNN makes money and all the panelists get out of it is a limo ride and croissants in the green room. I attended the NABJ conference in Atlanta where I urged Jesse Jackson to begin a Montgomery Bus Boycott styled protest against the media. If blacks boycotted newspapers for six months, they’d change. I compared Ted Turner to Goebbels only to find out that Turner was one of the conferences financial contributers. Ted Turner does films praising war criminals like Robert E. Lee and Jeff Davis and greets visitors to one of his homes with the theme from “Gone With The Wind. ” Think that he would know better having been raised by a black man. Maybe that’s why Soledad got her award. CNN‘s financing of the conference. Incidentally, Soledad only read from a script that others wrote. The person who wrote the script about black males in America was a blonde woman. I do not come to criticism of the media empty handed. And I have support. After reading an Op ed written by me, the late Reginald Lewis sent me enough funds for me to convert my garage into a warehouse for the storage of books of quality by black, Native American and other authors. I bought a whole bunch of Alice Walker’s “The Temple of my Familiar, ” in my opinion, her best work. We still publish. Five black women authors over the last six years or so including an anthology of 16 women short story writers from Nigeria. In production is a book of poetry by Yuri Kageyama a writer who works for Associated Press in Tokyo. I published her first book, Peeling. We published the second novel by Alison Mills entitled “Maggie 3” about a woman who rises from heroin addiction to become a born again Christian minister. Steve Cannon Joe Johnson and I published her first novel, “Francisco” which was hailed by Toni Morrison and William Demby( whom we also published ). She took thirty years off to raise five kids, all of whom are achievers in sports and medicine. For equal time, we published “Under The Burning White Sky, ” by the foremost poet of Vodun, Boadiba, a Haitian.
In 1980 and 81, Steve Cannon and I produced a movie called “Personal Problems, ” starring Verta Mae Grosvenor and Walter Cotton. It was directed by Bill Gunn whom Hollywood found “difficult” just as they found Hazel Scott, Honi Coles and Fredi Washington difficult. Steve and I raised the money and gave the director, Bill Gunn full freedom. The actors created their characters based upon a treatment that I wrote. ( Author, Terry McMillan was one of the stars of the radio version of “Personal Problems,” which is housed at my archives at the University of Delaware). “Personal Problems” cast included Jim Wright who played Johnny Dollar in the old Oscar Michaux movies. Now thirty years later, Bill Gunn is considered a genius, a man so admired by his peers that James Dean did his portrait. We spent $40, 000 on this nearly three hour movie. Black independent movie companies that were formed to challenge Hollywood lost out because of the rise in production costs. With advances in technology more players will enter the movie business as costs come down. Forget about Hollywood. The black actors there are under the same restrictions as they were during the days of Clarence Muse, Hattie McDaniel and Louise Beavers. Once in awhile somebody like Lou Gossett can take over a script and run with it as he did in “An Officer and Gentleman. ” But that’s rare. Thirty years after its production, “Personal Problems” is considered a classic, recently viewed in April by another generation at Brooklyn’s BamCinemaetex. We tuned down commercial offers. We also produced a short film about a traditional Chinese American mother and her radical daughter based upon a script my Ginny Lim called “The Only Language She Knows. ”All of my plays are on video including “Mother Hubbard” starring Mary Wilson of the Supremes, a performer with integrity. She wouldn’t accept payment and learned her part over a weekend. Thirty years from now “Precious” will seem like an odd throwback to the days when blacks were showing running away from the farmer’s shotgun with chickens in both hands. Check out “Judge Priest” 1934. This pro confederate movie’s opening scene has Stepin Fetchit in court. He’s charged with stealing chickens. Only they are not processed like the ones stolen by “Precious. ” The judge is Will Rogers. When Hattie McDaniel and Walter White were going at it about Racism in Hollywood, McDaniel challenged blacks to begin independent movie companies. She was right.
Where do you think American media will be in 5 or 10 years?
Newspapers will be dead and buried and maybe some enterprising scholar will write a book about how they fomented racial and civil strife and helped the Gov. justify useless wars since the 1830s. They continue to do so. Right now the California media, which, in the 19th century, created such a hysteria against the Chinese that there were massacres and exclusion acts aimed at this community, is raising fear of a Black Peril, because of four assaults on Chinese Americans. I was shocked while traveling in the east to learn that an elderly Chinese American was killed in downtown Oakland. William Wong, a friend and a journalist, tried to blame black kids, collectively, for the murder committed allegedly by two black kids. When he brought up black criminality to me on another occasion, I reminded him of a New York Times report that had Chinese gangs in New York distributing heroin in black neighborhoods, which has led to ruined lives and deaths (“Chinese Now Dominate New York Heroin Trade, ” NYTIMES, 8/9/’87. ”) Asian American gangs were ignored by David Brooks, another literate tea bagger, when he tried to use “Asian American” model minorities against blacks, and Hispanics recently. These gangs distribute drugs to black neighborhoods in Oakland. Some of them came to San Francisco and Oakland after the Chinese took over Hong Kong. If Wong wrote about Chinese American gangs operating out of San Francisco and Oakland they’d retaliate. When Ben Fong-Torres wrote about Chinese gangs, he was beaten because “ I had violated some code of silence that had insinuated itself in the Chinatown underground. ”Even NBC and the Asian Gang Task force say that these gangs are a threat to national security. Wong can’t comment on the thousands of women brought by Chinese gangs to become sex slaves. These clownish black pimps are at the low end of earnings for this kind of crime too. Never were good at crime. Been here since the 1600s and not on single Bernard Madoff. No Goldman Sachs, a real criminal enterprise. One third of the nation’s heroin is trafficked through these China towns. But I don’t lump all Chinese Americans together as he did black teenagers. Even living in this ghetto, I’ve seen black kids go to college. I know Chinese poets musicians artists businessmen professionals, etc. I don’t blame them for the elderly inconspicuous Chinese American couple who were bringing drugs to a house abandoned by an absentee landlord. From a two parent home. We monitor these activities closely. We’ve tried to get this house demolished for years. The gang leader on our block was Nguyen Ngo a Vietnamese kid until he was murdered a few blocks from here near a liquor store owned by Arabs, who like many ethnic groups make money illegally in black neighborhoods and put me and my neighbors’ lives in jeopardy. The activities of this kid, Ngo, endangered our lives for over four years. The couple who belong to our crime fighting group, had one car totaled and another shot up as a result of these characters. Let CNN do a special on that. Let the Talented Tenth at Harvard and Yale weigh in. Mao had a habit of sending intellectuals among the peasants from time to time so that they might understand what’s what. That’s what should happen with the tough lovers and post race entrepreneurs at Yale Harvard and the Think Tanks. Send them to live in Detroit, Oakland or Washington D. C. inner cities for a couple of years. See what happens. Maybe Bob Herbert who blames all of the “underclass’s” problems on crack mothers and absentee fathers, the editorial line of the Times, would discover the complexity of urban crime were he to live in one of these neighborhoods instead of parachuting in from time to time and coming away with a sensational Neo-liberal eye bite.
SELLING DOWN
News comes that a person I have deleted from my Facebook is running for office (for a position higher than the mayoral level). It was almost always obvious that the time would come: she fit the profile. Ie, she’s attractive, craves attention, can give a speech, is crypto-anti-intellectual and a faux-hip Normative Liberal in the ancestral homeland of the NormLib Race ( which being Upper Walter Mondalia; I’m old friends with the guy married to Walter’s famously foxy Norm Lib daughter, btw; NormLib or not, she featured heavily in my auto-erotic dreamlife in the early ’90s… but I, uh, digress). I saw a picture of this un-friended woman slapping hands and licking babies beside her standard-issue Starchy Old White Guy running mate and I rolled my eyes. Candidate. Candy date… ? [ed.'s note: and the race is on, of course, to see who can grab the brass-plated ring of First Female Black President; one can just imagine her chanted mirror-affirmations every morning...]
Sometime during the first blush of the media’s necrophiliac infatuation with the Haiti quake was when I un-friended this woman from the vestigial Facebook account I keep. I abuse the groupthink-and-surveillance spirit of Facebook by A) keeping the number of friends down to dinner-party levels (except in Comrade Barry’s case, I only use Facebook to communicate with people I otherwise never see or phone with), B) never participating in the psy-op “quizzes” or “polls” or “questionnaires” (and asinine time-wasting games) and C) making it a point (the rare times I post) to post dissident or lengthy or offensively humorous and otherwise meaty material. No cat pix or toddlers drumming. I have never written a “LOL” on Facebook.
The person I un-friended was the local anchor of an American news channel. We’d exchanged a few emails, of a few paragraphs each, before I red-buttoned her… but it wasn’t the depressing Normative Liberality of her letters that made me reach for the button. It was the Haiti quake… first, my nausea at her self-dramatizing FB posts on the event (her friends were commenting that her broadcasts on the quake were so wonderfully “emotional” and she posted several things calling attention to her “exhaustion” that weekend which implied a sort of nobly understated heroism). The camel-snapping, shit-tipped straw came when I made the mistake of posting a link to substantive commentary (by Scott Mclemee) on the quake (re: Pat Robertson’s pact-with-the-devil gaffe); I posted the link on this stupid kunt’s Facebook “wall” thinking (foolishly, I now see) that she’d appreciate the article. Which brought me face to face with the smiley-faced stupidity of the Norm. Can these people fucking read?
1. Steven Augustine: If anyone’s interested in what CLR James might’ve said about the Haiti cataclysm, the always-astute Scott Mclemee has written an interesting essay here (the comment thread is substantive, too):
2. THE CANDIDATE: there is a time and place for everything. regardless of the kernel of truth in robertson’s heavily distorted history, the insensitivity and callousness was reflected in the timing. there are thousands of dead people on the street through an act of nature, no fault of their own… piling up like cord wood on the streets. no doctors. babies dying of thirst. families destroyed. no order. and this is what robertson weighed in with — offering no prayer for the victims. and he dare call himself a man of God. what robertson did would be tantamount to the pope going on the radio in world war two and explaining how the jews brought the holocaust on themselves because of some weird little warped fact. i can’t accept any supposed rationale to what robertson said. i’m sorry. January 16 at 4:19pm
3. Steven Augustine: Oh, don’t misinterpret Scott’s sarcasm (“kernel of truth”) here. He’s without question wholly against Robertson’s remark; he’s just using it as a frame to dig into the history behind the suffering, and the irony of the use of the word “devil” in Robertson’s comment. CLR James is still having the final word on all that, long-dead as he is! January 16 at 5:25pm ·
4. Asha L___: Very very interesting read, but R___ , I’m inclined to agree with you….as a person born and raised in the Caribbean, I understand all the talk about the voodoo talk, but I do not by any means agree or appreciate it. Haiti is not the only island where such practices occur but it may just be the most prevalent … but what does that matter? As you said, there are thousands and thousands of people dead on the street and many many more who will suffer beyond comprehension. Pat Robertson should not be talking in the capacity that he is doing, there is nothing humane about his thinking….how can he represent himself as a man of God? And why does he equate the desire for the haitian people to be free as something evil? A pact with the devil? I hope no natural disaster hits my small island, Lord knows what would be said…not only were we colonized and deeply desired to be free, but horror of horror, we are largely made up of non Christian faiths….well, maybe catastrophe will only affect the hindus and muslims on the island. January 16 at 10:25pm ·
5. Steven Seven Augustine: Have you guys read much CLR James? Mclemee’s article isn’t about metaphysics, it’s about socio-economics (slavery) and particulars of Haiti’s revolutionary history and it ties in with the larger argument that the “West” has been punishing Haiti for Toussaint L’Ouverture ever since… a clear-eyed analysis of the apparent “curse” on Haiti which most sympathetic observers take as a given. How can the current catastrophe be understood without at least a glancing mention of the Realpolitik of history? Compassion in lieu of understanding can be worse than antipathy in that antipathy can inspire change. People need to know that Haiti isn’t a congenital basket case; they need to exceed their assumptions.
I’m grateful to Scott Mclemee for invoking CLR James at a time so pertinent (and when so few seem to know who he was). Here’s a great essay by James that the good people who show Haiti so much compassion, at this hour, should read… in order to help alloy that compassion with respect. Quoting James’ essay:
” ‘But what men these blacks are! How they fight and how they die!’ wrote a French officer looking back at the last campaign after forty years. From his dying bed, Leclerc, Bonaparte’s brother-in-law and commander-in-chief of the French expedition, wrote home, ‘We have . . . a false idea of the Negro.’ And again, “We have in Europe a false idea of the country in which we fight and the men whom we fight against….’ We need to know and reflect on these things to-day.”
No reply to that last point, of course: they’d both read their quota of 600 contiguous words that week and were off to LOL some cat pix and toddlers-drumming vids. Or maybe the future candidate was busy posing for photos to promote the line of jewelry she designs.
Blimey. My dad, a traditional Olde Englishe Tory loves CLR James mainly for his cricket writing but also because of his writings about what my dad would call the underdogs.
A military man through and through he also admired Arafat greatly. Knowing his right wing proclivities I’m always wondering why he liked these two but compared to these so called liberal thinkers you engage with above he at least seems complex and ( at times ) willing to think beyond his prejudices.
Am away for a few weeks in Holland – may find some lurking time but otherwise it’s all quiet on the western front.
Fuck moi I love this comment, Comrade ET! I was just relaxing while Offsprung and Beloved are out shopping for Wallmarring Tools (crayons), reading some old Beatles trivia (someone claims Lennon slipped “fucking hell” into Hey Jude; must investigate), popped over to glance down TET and catch this comment. Aces, mon. And the point is sharp. Startling, innit? And bless yer dad. I’d take his sincere boot over a NormLib’s phony glove any day of the week! Watch out in Hamsterdam…
PS: btw, seeking a link to a story I did which mentioned CLR James, I came across the fact that I predicted Our Newscaster’s Political Ambitions in January already: “This woman is just fucking stupid enough to run for office. I would not be surprised.”
A Classic to Roll Around With While I Earn Money and Perform Other Meatspace Chores
He’s been accused of misogyny thanks to a scene in which a prostitute (Jessica Alba) is murdered by Casey Affleck’s Ford. It’s a shockingly ugly event: precisely as in the book, Ford punches her face until it collapses in on itself. Once read, never forgotten: I felt ill when I read it and ill when I saw it; to me that suggests a successful adaptation.
The overall point being…?
There’s something wrong with Winterbottom and his apparent ideal audience for this film, the writer of this article, both. The supposed point or lesson intended by such exploitative ultra-violence is what, exactly? That we shouldn’t bash womens’ faces in? Thanks, but I knew that already… as did anyone who’s disturbed by seeing it. Therefore, who is Winterbottom really “reaching” but the same creatures who lovingly posted the “real time” CGI rape from Irreversible, as a stand-alone gem, all over file-sharing sites the year Irreversible came out? I guess we’ll be catching this juicy new face-collapsing clip on the Pirate Bay soon enough.
Christ, how we rationalize our pleasures! The sicker the pleasure the more ridiculously torturous (and unconvincing) the rationale. You like seeing a woman’s face bashed in with anatomical verisimilitude : fine. Nothing I can do about that. Just don’t try to justify it by invoking Art…or are you claiming that whoever now makes an “anti-pedophilia” film showing the graphic rape of a baby is on the side of Creativity’s Angels?
This isn’t stimulating intellectual debate on the topic of violence or planting seeds of doubt or enlightenment in anyone’s mind… it’s part of the inexorable process of normalizing (and sexualizing) bloody horrors that were nearly impossible to come by, once… when the ratio of creeps-to-humans was a bearable number. Can a woman even have dinner with a man these days without wondering if he’s going to beat her to death for a nightcap?
The terrible irony here is that these ultra-violent films (Hostel, Inglorious, Irreversible, 29 Palms, Kill Bill, et al) have lots more impact on the culture at large than real Art does; real Art is a subtle, quiet, fragile presence demanding too much time and intelligence. There will be lots more talk about this murder porn than about Godard’s latest, which is far too playful and just not dick-hardeningly bloody enough.
Winterbottom is being dishonest with either himself or the rest of the world (both, probably) because this sort of thing is ever only done for one purpose: to raise the director’s profile. He’s adding his calorie to Hell’s climate for the sake of a fatter paycheck and I am fucking disappointed in him. 24 Hour Party People was a treat; I expect crap like this out of the soul-dead Tarrantino, who clearly gets a stiffy whenever a woman has her head lopped off on-screen. Or do you really think directors make a habit of staging and shooting and re-shooting and re-shooting material they just don’t enjoy?
Fuck the creeps; I hope Winterbottom loses half his potential revenue to illegal file-sharing.
“There’s a feeling of waste, a possibility of love that is being lost.”
The perversity of this article (apologia for a snuff film) is summed up by the use of the word “love” here. You make it sound as though the character had to choose between beating his lover to death or settling down with her and raising a happy family. Winterbottom has done his bit to spread the creep culture that made it possible for you to write that absurd sentence.
Also, to another commenter: conflating explicit sex and explicit murder is just not on. Sex is (or was) about Love; murder is the total fulfillment of Hate. Our only hope is to clarify the distinction; the artistic tragedy here is that Winterbottom would like us to believe that he has.
Sylvie’s father was a writer whose time had come and gone, but he was fine with that. He’d invested the windfall with prescience. He had a house in a decent neighborhood in a city that scored with consistent impressiveness on all the quality-of-life surveys worth checking, along with some property a two hours’ drive up north. The property up north featured a rustic cabin he was going to write his comeback in, a cabin near a well he wasn’t allowed to drink out of, overlooked by the aerie of an endangered species of hawk he could do up to ten years in prison for harassing or killing. The working title of the book was More Than Words. The rest of the book would come to him in the cabin. Usually he’d creep around the immaculately decorated house long after Sylvie had gone to bed, stewarding wineglasses and adjusting picture frames, soothed by the hum of the climate control, which made the house feel like an airship in flight over the continent. Sometimes he’d rescue a volume, or two, belonging to one of the sets of collected encyclopediae, open on its face on a settee in the media room, and shepherd it, humming, back up the three polished steps into the tracklit library, pushing against a satisfying resistance the thing into its proper slot. Tonight he just stood by Sylvie’s bedroom door, listening.
Chapter Two: A Perfectly-Judged Death-while-Sailing
Sylvie’s mother had come from a large, self-consciously colorful family that only tolerated exogamy, apparently, because exogamy’s extremest opposite was frowned on by The State. There were the four charismatic brothers who had always looked like men; an eldest sister of chilling beauty, with her infallible eye for long scarves (with their tragic associations) and a father who would have to die before Sylvie’s future mother finally moved out of the house she was born in, a recently painted Georgian mansion with pillars on its porches and Amish hex signs carved in its gable shutters, mocked on all sides by encroaching slum. Sylvie’s mother was the baby of the family and had effectively fended off Sylvie’s claim on the title. Driving by that house, recently, Sylvie’s father felt oddly vindicated by the graffiti all over its pillars and even slowed down in an ill-advised attempt to read some of it, stepping on the accelerator when the first stones ponked at the trunk. Girls who hate their fathers are not, as Sylvie’s father had discovered, the worst, if you aren’t the father. All three sisters, Sylvie’s future mother and the other two (the polyglot and the choreographer) had gotten pregnant within six months of the old man’s perfectly-judged death-while-sailing, and he wondered if there hadn’t been a subconscious race to produce a vessel for the old man’s anticipated return. Sylvie’s future father had first noticed Sylvie’s future mother not for her spectacular pre-Raphaelite hair, but for her terminal t’s, which she tended to over-articulate. Didn’t you want that with some fruit bits?- was the last sentence she’d spoken to him before he finally confessed, waving away the dry mangoes that always put him in mind of floor scraps from a bris, that he wanted her to move out. He hadn’t put it exactly that way. He’d offered to move out and she’d demurred as predicted. She’d joked about Arabs being able to divorce their wives by repeating a certain word three times but couldn’t remember the word and he’d said but we’re not really married and she’d stood suddenly and swept breakfast off the table, very much the prodigy losing a game against someone avowedly casual towards chess. She remembered the word was talaq. He said talaq, talaq, talaq, waving a finger like a wand, both of them laughing. To be honest, she was relieved. She’d said, We’ll let Sylvie decide who she wants to live with; that’s the only civilized thing to do, and Sylvie had chosen him, as predicted. Sylvie’s father and Sylvie’s mother continued sleeping together for quite some time until the night Sylvie’s mother never came home, which soon became the week she never came home.
Chapter Three: Cancer Gets the Girl
He imagined her seeing the country on a wasp-sleek Japanese motorcycle. He reminisced on how they’d met. They’d met in a self-defense class. She was there, looking barefoot and good, in what she called her Chinese pyjamas, because of encroaching slum, while he was there to meet a girl. Or girls. The solidarity of self-declared prey, as his best friend, whose idea it had been to go, had put it. This friend had dozens of good ideas on how to meet girls and yet never met any. From as far back as Sylvie’s future father could remember knowing this friend, this friend had talked like a well-informed cancer patient, with an ease in jargon and the cadences down and really good at reeling off technical specifications, probabilities, outlooks on graded contingencies with this clipped, confident, guardedly optimistic voice. And then he got cancer, causing no break or modulation in the flow of the way he communicated. He found the personality tic of his preferred mode of expression astonishingly well-suited to the circumstance. It’s as though he hit the ground running as far as cancer was concerned, was how Sylvie’s future father had put it to Sylvie’s future mother over a milkshake (this was before the days of fashionable young people drinking recreational coffee) after class. Should he feel guilty? Was the irony a bear, or a bluebird? He’d used his friend’s cancer to get a girl.
Chapter Four: Dreadlock Combover
Before Sylvie’s future father and her future mother got serious about each another, Sylvie’s future father wavered in his intentions towards another, slightly older, woman. Older, but in no way inferior, except, perhaps, in age. The woman was cultured and fine and dressed well in a manner that showed off her jaw, an angular marvel reminiscent of the jaw on the actress Jodie Foster, who was then still young. Whether she wore a ruffled collar, a turtleneck or a collarless t-shirt borrowed from her son, the jaw stood out with its sharp origami folds. He was enamored of this woman and had slept with her several times with memorable results and poetry and expensive baseball-sized sourdough blueberry muffins from her bottomless pantry as rewards. The day before Thanksgiving they attended an avant garde opera in a ceremonial gesture towards the deepening cultural seriousness of both that region of the country and their relationship, standing by coincidence behind her ex-boyfriend in the white-wine-line during intermission. The ex was a balding soi-disant (pre-internet) tech-whiz with blond dreadlocks leftswept over his pink pate like fraying ropes on a castaway ham. Fairly or not, she became repulsive to Sylvie’s future father in her ex-boyfriend’s reflected aura, but there was still an hour of grindingly self-serious and overlit opera to sit through. The weightless warm hand that sought its habitual place on his thigh when the opera commenced found only tensed muscle to rest on. The hand knew before the rest of her body. Sylvie’s future father reflected self-pityingly on an inner recitation of the oral history of his failed romances while two local characters (descendants both of auto workers) in Bauhaus-ish costumes of vaguely animal abstraction cavorted on a minimalist stage, realizing in a panic that the time he lost to the experience would never come refunded, and the woman he decided he loved was elsewhere.
Chapter Five: Ich mag sie nicht in einem Haus / Ich mag sie nicht mit einer Maus
Sylvie’s future father hurried over to Sylvie’s future mother’s house right after the opera, unmindful of the fact that he walked unarmed through encroaching slum. He found himself not only thinking of, but looking at, really looking at, more than one black-or-Afro-American-Negro-of-color at a time, for the first time in his life. He’d never admit this to anyone; not even to a friend with cancer; but the first thing that struck him was the variety. Not only in tint but in weight, gait, hair texture, posture, girth, aura, odor, manner of dress, scale of possible threat (from benign to sinister), range of facial features and sexual attractiveness. Some of the toughest boys were pretty as girls in their white t-shirts and tight jeans. Some of the prettiest women exerted the narcotic allure of the scent of the motherland, smouldering after a bushfire, and he locked eyes with more than one, with their coal-smooth breasts, before being ejected, further in his way down the road, each time, by a playfully dismissive smile. Sylvie’s future mother was on the front porch of the white island of the mansion, drying her gaze-stuffing pre-Raphaelite hair with a shreiking dryer at the end of a chain of three extension cords. Sylvie’s future father tried breathlessly to speak, sucking every other word back in, over the anti-siren song of the dryer. He told Sylvie’s future mother half the truth, which was twice the lie: that he’d suddenly realized that he loved her in the middle of an opera. She asked which opera. She laughed, or, being from a family of high-culture insiders, tittered, and explained. To his initial bafflement, which matured to a rage which hardened into a manifesto, he learned that the libretto of the work he’d squirmed through po-faced for two hours (the second half of which was twice as long as the first) was taken from Doctor Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham. In German. That’s the problem with postmodern so-called Art, he sorrowed. The joke is always on us.
Chapter Six: He decided to write a Book that Everyone could Understand
He decided to write a book that everyone could understand.
DIVERS EDITORIALE
A day like a snoozy afternoon on a sailboat. Beloved traipsing around the flat looking pants-distressingly beautiful, pony-tailed and milky-lithe in sort of an Italian Aristocrat-raised-as-a-peasant outfit of jogging pants with sleeveless, bosomy top and slingbacks. If Offsprung weren’t traipsing around behind her (with a sand bucket full of pennies) this would be a very short day indeed, blurring into groggy twilight… the kind of snoozy afternoon we used to use to rehearse making Offsprung with. Offsprung enforces my temperance (until Offsprung goes beddy-bye). I can either use this temperate hour to work or write this. I’m putting off the work.
The Paris Review has a new bloggy sort of thing running and the second or third post is part one of a series called “The Culture Diaries”, written by a woman who knows how to take a damn good photo of herself (if it’s sexist to say that, it must be reciprocally sexist to post a damn-good photo of yourself), Sarah Crichton. Crichton must be some publishing insider (or the late mega-seller’s wife) about whom I should be embarrassed to know fuck-all. I’m just not into baseball stats (or the game, even: just the ball), is how I put it, so I didn’t know who Sarah Crichton is when I started reading.
The Snarkster within wants to add that I know even less about who Sarah is after reading these “diary” entries…. beyond the fact that she has a Groovy Life. Having a groovy life and writing about it is an important genre of literature; every bit as important as the genre it parallels and is mated to, which is: writing a fucked-up life. I think perhaps there’s a gender-inflected division between the fans of one genre and the fans of its polar twin; is it my imagination that penis-having types prefer reading “fucked up life lit” (acronymically: FULL) to the Groovy Life stuff? I’ve always been Culturally Faggotty: I don’t mind reading reportage about Le Life Groovie at all. In fact…
…I started this essay with my latest modest entry in the annals of Groovy Life Lit (GRLL) and most of my diaristic things are of the GRLL kind. I try to add some substance to the bragging by weaving strong, blackly sincere opinionating in with my flushedly-pleasured reportage and to make the imposition defensible with a little style. The patron saint of GRLL is Anaïs Nin (Henry Miller paralleled Anaïs with a version of FULL that was cleverly diluted with lots of GRLL, ie pennilessness ameliorated by windfalls of French food and threesomes). The patron saint of FULL is probably Bukowski.
The specific kind of GRLL that Sarah Crichton is up to in this Paris Review piece is sort of Life As A Press Release or a Facebook Page but for a life that’s a lot more resplendent with Kultcha than the average Facebooker’s is… the tone is very much like Woody Allen’sManhattan. Or maybe it’s just that I felt the way, reading it, that I felt (and feel) when I watch(ed) Manhattan. Soothed by the sense that chaos, murder and illiteracy are far, far away. Strong opinions could only cloud/complicate that sense, so Sarah Crichton’s reference-rich, opinion-free description of her Groovy Life really works. Even Anaïs Nin clouds her diary with complaint and opinion.
What bothers me is how enjoyable I found reading Sarah Crichton’s diary. There I was in my early twenties again, watching Manhattan for the first time, dreaming of art galleries and bistro chats and upper class gamine paramours… my older, crusty, what-is-she-trying-to-sell detector was temporarily disabled.
It kicked in again when I saw my wife and daughter traipse in their splendors across the kitchen towards the garden door. Beauty is as big a part of the discussion as anything else; beauty is a literary argument. Half of Samuel Beckett’s authority, for example, after all, issues from his physical beauty and the gorgeously negative capability of his Groovy Life (framing the fiction). Plus all that other stuff: the cloudy, complicating essence. If I were bisexual (and unmarried), would I rather fuck (say) Samuel or Sarah…?
Very tough call.
2.
Facebook was horrendous this weekend. It was the Memorial Day holiday, a fact I had to have pointed out to me by befuddledly-blinking Germans standing in front of a very-closed American Embassy (tedious fucking passport issues) who must have assumed I wasn’t American in my goofy un-knowingness. They’d been informed by the German cop at the top of the stairs that this was an American holiday and passed the news on to me as I approached them with a spring in my step, congratulating myself on having gotten there before a line could form. It was drizzling (it always drizzles on Memorial Day and so I should have known). All the way back home, on the subway, I wracked my brain as to what holiday it could possibly be. Armistice Day…?
I logged into Facebook and there were entries from various friends (who I once thought were fairly progressive) eulogizing “our troops”. Sorry, but I presume our professional (non-draft-driven) army to be stocked with people who have voluntarily signed up to invade other countries and possibly kill people there? It’s not very nice to put it that way but is it or is it not true? How many soldiers in today’s army signed up after being gulled into believing they were joining Greenpeace? Show of hands…?
At the same time I read an article about a daring, dissident, Left-leaning Artiste who was projecting headshots of America’s War Dead on buildings in the downtown of some metropolis to “raise consciousness”. That’s what they call “radical” these days. The genuinely Radical is now, of course, more properly called The Unthinkable: projecting images of dead Iraqis and Afghanis, for example.
Don’t be so easily brainwashed, my old friends. Resist it a little bit, at least. Just a little. By thinking.
Please?
3.
I LOVE WHEN AN IMAGE EMBODIES A REALITY AND EXPLAINS IT, TOO or: BEFORE AND AFTER
October 14, 2007: “This sketch of a seemingly cherubic assailant was released by Oregon police looking for a man who shot 21-year-old James Kenney in a dispute over marijuana. The suspect, described as being in his teens or early 20s and having red curly hair, arrived at Kenney’s house and shot him after he answered the door, inflicting serious injuries. Nearly two years later, Juanito Ray Garcia, right, was arrested in California and charged in Oregon with Kenney’s shooting. The lack of resemblance between the initial sketch and 28-year-old Garcia remains unexplained.”
FROM THE DEPT. OF INTERESTING NARRATIVES (via Comrade Barry); wild stuff, dudes… [I'll come back and try to unpack this box of Meta-Political Crackerjacks later, if there's time][UPDATE: As it happens, Time is too short, but it would appear that Russia has a mainstream media horse or two in the Conspiracy-Narrative Meta-Politics Race... but why is this guy so scrupulously avoiding the word 'Communist'?]
FROM THE DEPT OF: YOU COULDN’T GET AWAY WITH THIS IN A SCREENPLAY:
“The American chief executive of the world’s biggest offshore oil drilling company was fulfilling a pledge to demonstrate his dance moves if the company’s Indian division achieved top safety award targets.
“Mr Newman and Transocean have very different safety concerns now. The firm owned operated the doomed Deepwater Horizon rig that was blown apart in April while drilling a well for BP, killing 11 workers and unleashing the disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil spill.”
RECONSTRUCTIVE JOURNALISM
Benjamin Markovits writes, creatively, at the Guardian: “American novelists have often turned to sportswriting when they want to get serious. Maybe the best sports novel ever written is Moby-Dick …”
A LOW-STAKES REVIEW: THE ANTHOLOGIST
The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker, Simon and Schuster, 243pp
I’ve been spending a pleasant two weeks with a lovably-losing friend-I-could-have-had, Paul Chowder. Paul is the narrator of Nicholson Baker’s novel The Anthologist, a book I’ve been using as my subway book, the filter/shield (shilter) against forced perception.
For example, on the way home from today’s Sunday shopping (most stores aren’t open on the fucking Sabbath in Berlin), a 30-something, ginger-haired fellow with an enormous pot belly and obvious mental incapacities sat across from me. The book/shilter was nearly enough to help me ignore the descending whole-tone triplets the retarded guy was grunting the whole ten minutes we shared the ride. Nearly, but not enough: I wanted to shit myself thickly, laughing. Matching the tune was his methodical ripping of a sky-blue pamphlet into squares. I thought I might plop.
Of course you couldn’t laugh out loud at a retarded man in public: it would be cruel (though I wonder if the retarded man himself would have noticed or taken offense). What I find ridiculous is how careful I’d have to be in picking someone to confess to, later, that I’d found this funny. I could even get in trouble writing it… people might think I’m an arsehole.
Which is the bearable failure of The Anthologist. Baker has set his Phasers on Nice. After the shock of the shit he’d taken for The Fermata and Vox (to a lesser degree) and Checkpoint (to a much greater degree; even the presumably natural audience for that book, Liberal Bush Loathers, tut-tut-tutted) and Human Smoke (one demographic you’d really rather not enrage is concentration camp survivors)… I forgive Baker for sitting down to write something that no one on Earth could possibly hate him for writing.
My schlumpy friend Paul! Nicholson hides a nice poetry lecture in Paul’s inner-monologue of soothing regret. Nicholson knows that American readers who don’t want to read about jobs or serial-killers want to feel that they’re learning something (improving themselves) by reading mere fiction and that they prefer the lesson to come from a passionate pedant.
There’s something winning about a character/author of a certain age who has sacrificed a whole life to master some finicky detail about philosophy, history, Art or Lit so that you, the reader, didn’t have to. While you were busy in the Real World earning money, the passionate pedant was busy with Herodotus (The English Patient) or Parmenides and Nietzsche (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) or Bonnard (Banville’s The Sea) and so on.
Baker’s Chowder’s learnéd hobbyhorse is modern poetry’s Stalinist commandment against rhyme. Baker is either very good at writing characters who don’t share his opinions, or he thinks that modern poets think that rhyming is corny, limiting, puerile and he resents the fact. I write the stuff myself (on leap years and during Syzygy) and what I find corny, limiting and puerile in poetry is end rhyme. Internal rhyme/ broken rhyme are much subtler practices… it’s the inevitability of that second-of-two fraternal quintuplets, shrugging and hopping, when summoned, into the obvious slot, that bores me. You’ll also never find identically-framed mom-and-dad photos in mirroring 45-degree-angle alignment flanking a central image of my daughter on a mantelpiece in my parlor. I think asymmetricality in Art (plastic and verbal too) is rather more interesting. Nicholson-Chowder’s crusade is for end rhyme and I say ‘no’ to that with zero twinging. He cites the primacy of nursery rhyme! QED.
Poor Paul’s rhyme-crusade bounced right off my modern head. He’s got a bone to pick about scansion, though, that’s right up my alley (I wished he’d been on the comment thread at The Valve, a few months ago, when Bill Benson was arguing that line-breaks aren’t rests and that the difference between an unpunctuated block of words and a vertical strip of the same words is purely perceptual, or conditioned).
There’s a neat irony in the fact that anti-Modern Chowder’s tale of love lost (and feasibly regainable) ends on an open-ended, Modernist (think High Fidelity) note. Surely an avid Poe fan should tell us whether the hero gets the girl back, in the end, or if she dies of consumption? If Baker did that on purpose (affirming the separability of Author and Mouthpiece): chapeau, as they say.
Paul’s got some nice Nicholsonian trivia for us (New England was the clothespin-manufacturing capital of the world in 1883/ real butter is flavored with butter flavor) and unusually sparse Nicholsonian stylistics (it took me several minutes, just now, to find “a frizzle of wind”) and a few nice Nicholsonian gags (eg, pg 138 about “booping” a horn by mistake). Some winningly-subordinate “man crush” activity (I prefer to call it gestural cock-sucking) towards James Fenton is a thread through the book.
“But Paul,” I sub-vocalized, while guarding my peripheral vision on the subway by holding the book just inches from my nose, “You’re a lonely, middle-aged man! You’ve just been dumped by your long-time partner! Where’s the stuff about the girl bursting from the prow of her t-shirt at Starbucks; the maddening smell of the scalp of the handsome mother whose hair swooshed your arm as she dove for the dates in the bin you’d just retracted your Wholefoods scoop from? Or the rage at being dumped; the rage at being pushed out on the late-Capitalist ice floe to die, just because you’re not a winner! The fear and/or hatred of the young, the apt, the canny! Revulsion at Vulgaria! What, not one machete-swipe at Billy fucking Collins?”
Nicholson-Chowder mentioned Billy a few times and every time he did, my nostrils flared. But I knew better; if Nicholson-Chowder (great kid’s-book name, btw) won’t even eviscerate the talentlessly long-dead (aka Longfellow), there’s no way he’s going after the fumble-witted (and extremely popular and perfectly named) and very living Billy. Baker doesn’t want a bunch of Billy Collins fans on his ass any more than he wants more holocaust survivors on it.
Nicholson-Chowder gets frisky, finally, on pages 232 and 233 (in a 243-page book), taking swipes at a “witchy-looking” John Ashbery, the New York Art Babylon Ashbery presided over in the sixties and seventies and some (gay) minimalist painting the character associates, eye-rollingly, with Ashbery’s work. But he softens it all by the end of the passage and we can sense Chowder chiding himself for being such a bitchy Quaker. He buys a copy of Ashbery’s most famous book in penance.
Reading The Anthologist is a lot more like knowing a lovable schlump than being in the mind of one. Fair enough! I’ll take either experience, if it’s written well enough, and The Anthology is written well enough. It’s a soothing read; it’s mildly instructive; it will almost protect you from funny retards on the subway.
What I worry is that Nicholson Baker is learning to keep the Truth out of his books because too many readers react adversely to it.
PS Chowder is invited to Switzerland to give a talk on poetry and after the talk sits in the open and describes a mountain. Comrade Barry met Baker a couple of years ago when Baker was lecturing at EGS, in Switzerland, so it’s reasonable to assume, unless he keeps a chalet there, that Baker saw the Alp shortly before, or shortly after, meeting Comrade Barry. Which ties us into the book, somewhat.
RESCUED TEXTS OF THE ATTIC
AZURA’S GIFT
Like many young prostitutes in Berlin, Azura had a dayjob. Due to reasons too numerous to go into here, the fee a prostitute could typically expect in exchange for the usual requests had withered, over the decades, to a paltry fraction. A young prostitute of today could expect the kind of money a middle-aged whore would have been disappointed to earn in the 1970s.
Middle-aged whores were now limping up and down the Kurfürstenstrasse, the scarred habitat of tattooed junkies and African exchange students, offering the total inventory of their butchershops for a pittance. Like the feather-sprung, peg-legged pigeons these damp women shared the curb with, time appeared to be dismantling them with extraordinary impatience. There was even a rumor that one of the oldest had been selling off toes and now fingers to pay for bigger implants.
Four days a week, Azura worked as an intern for a fledgling film production company called Auslandish Films, on Rosenthaler Strasse in the Mitte neighborhood. Her wage as an intern was minuscule… barely “drink money”… but she believed she was getting her foot in the door of the film business. She resembled a film star herself, in a 20th century way, with a defiant posture her customers at the brothel interpreted as a challenge.
Azura’s boss at Auslandish Films was a soft-spoken Afro-American expat named Mr. Jeffries, fluent in German, with an arrogant wife and three cookie-colored children, the oldest, a boy, not much younger than Azura. The boy was trouble, but he rarely showed up at the office. When he did, he made such an exaggerated show of ignoring Azura that it was the same as staring. His hair was in soft slow shoulder-length loops the color of dirty butter, floating in the invisible currents he seemed to move through. His own lazy ocean of Balthazar Jeffries.
Saturdays were the only days on which Azura worked both jobs, stopping in at Auslandish in the morning (opening up with her own key and code to the alarm) to deal with the overnight mail and important answering machine messages and then riding her scooter far across town to the neighborhood of Charlottenburg, on Blissestrasse, where Lady Luck, her brothel, took up the second and third floors of a grand old building that had dodged aerial bombs during the war.
On the Saturday morning in question Azura inadvertently intercepted a private message from Balthazar Jeffries to Mr. Jeffries on the answering machine. It was the last message on the tape and was so long that the tape ran out in the middle of a sentence. She played it more than once, hugging herself in the cozy gloom of the office with its steel shutters still down over the windows and sun slashing through like razors. She recognized immediately Balthazar’s deep deep voice.
He went on in a far-ranging monologue to say horrible things about his dark-skinned father Mr. Jeffries. There were almost no gaps between the words in his Gregorian chant of a diatribe and Azura knew from experience which drug was involved. Balthazar hinted more than once that the message was a suicide note. Tell Mom and Becky and Gladys and so forth. Azura realized that she had to come to a decision as to whether or not to delete the message before re-activating the security system and locking up shop and driving across town to the brothel. If the message was all merely the inhuman animus of a drug in oration, Balthazar would be profoundly relieved to discover later that his poor father had never received it.
Azura dwelt on her decision, and the implications of her decision, the rest of the rainy afternoon in the brothel.
The truth is that the most lucrative services weren’t about sex at all. Azura’s colleague Lilly, for example, had consented to an incision (local anesthetic) about four inches long, in her abdomen, not far from the left kidney, which the medical student who considered doing this a refined pleasure then carefully sutured, returning a week later to undo the threads (local anesthetic again) and probe gingerly, with a sterilized implement, the smiling wound. For this Lilly received two payments, the first much larger. And Azura herself had once complied with a request to make dirt discreetly into a chasteningly-expensive triple-gusseted flapover briefcase. Real alligator. A perfect little shit of a milkdud. This month’s gas, water, phone and electricity bills all neatly dispatched with a grunt.
All this happened in the neutrally-decorated chambers of Lady Luck, a converted gerontological clinic, where Azura paid rent for a smaller room overlooking the courtyard. In the courtyard twisted a chestnut tree whose flowered arms reached up towards her window, nagging her about the past, wagging its finger when she bent over the little bed or mounted it on all fours with her face to the window.
Every weekend during her happy childhood, Azura had slept at her grandmother’s. Some nights she’d sit up in her little bed crying. Her Nana was a woman from a small country of ritual and habit who only took her hair down when it was bedtime, before her prayers and after her milk and a magazine, and she climbed the stairs to the room where the ceiling slanted down towards the window by Azura’s small bed and asked her Azura, with the militant compassion of a saint, why she was crying.
-Weil der Neandertaler nicht in den Himmel kommen kann, the child answered, with a gulp after every word. Because the cavemen can’t get into heaven.
-Say again?
-The cavemen, she repeated, miserable. You said they were born before Christ Nana so how can they can ever be angels and go to Heaven?
-No, no, cooed Nana, softened by the truth, stroking Azura’s forehead with a trembling hand and confronting her blunder in this fine-cut grief. Bible stories were always distressing for younger children, who hadn’t yet learned to bend logic. In her diaphanous nightgown and shocking dark tumult of hair Nana resembled an excluded angel herself, cooing how the Christian God would never be so unfair like that, Azura. The good cavemen, they will go to Heaven. Don’t worry. Go to sleep.
-Even if they didn’t know it was a sin to kill Nana?
-Even so, said Azura’s grandmother, with somewhat less certainty in her voice but the persistent desire that the child should go peacefully to her dreams. She who was given to fevers and days on end of pretty speechlessness. Mother a stone and father an old suit in the closet.
The next night Nana was drinking her milk and re-reading a magazine (the hypnotic offense of raw youth in proud clothing; the communists would never have allowed it) when again she heard the prayer-like murmur of abject misery in the attic. Up the stairs she climbed, lifting the hem of her nightgown with one hand and clutching the candle holder with the other.
-The cavemen, Azura gulped.
-They’re in Heaven. Don’t you remember? The cavemen are in Heaven near God.
-Yes, answered Azura, but how can cavemen be happy in Heaven? They can’t talk with the others. They aren’t wearing good clothing! The others will treat them like animals Nana! How will the cavemen be happy?
Nana had to admit that it was difficult to imagine cavemen with angel wings flying around a standard Heaven, brandishing their clubs.
-The Christian God is wise, she responded, after thinking a while with her eyebrows so high they were straining. About such a problem he’s already thought, before creation, even. He has given the cavemen their own Heaven and there they are happy.
-There’s a caveman Heaven?
-Yes.
-And no one else can go there?
-No one else can go there, confirmed Nana. To point and laugh, she added, smoothing Azura’s astonishing hair. No one.
Rainy days brought out the worst kind of customer, for it was usually the type of person who would otherwise have been occupied, enjoying the weather in a convertible with a beautiful amateur had the sun been willing. She preferred the business of the damp white cast-offs who skulked in out of a glorious day, mocked by the splendors of existence. They were very quick and predictable and rarely had the money to propose something frightening. But of course such visits only covered a few hours of overhead.
On rainy days, as Azura’s colleague Lilly put it, the snakes use the staircase. Worst of all were middle-aged men with perfect bodies who mentioned the price they were willing to pay before describing the service they intended to pay for. The good news/bad news technique of the novice oncologist or seasoned sadist.
Azura was curled on the bed, gazing through the rain-melted window at a sky like cold dishwater and dishwater’s buried shapes, recovering from her last visit, toying with the idea of opening the window to let the bad feelings out. It was suppertime and she was daydreaming about Balthazar Jeffries. She daydreamed a knock on the door; she daydreamed putting on a bathrobe and telling whoever it was to wait.
She’d cross the room in three strides and sit at the vanity, the light from the illuminated mirror the only light in the rain-darkened room, and reconstruct the impenetrable mask of her makeup. Once, a customer had pressed her prone to the bed with his knee between her shoulder blades with such force while he pulled himself to completion that a perfect portrait of her face like a shroud of Turin remained on the pillowcase when he freed her to breathe again. Or, yes, more like that Munch painting.
She’d answer the door and like a horrible miracle and a gift there would stand Balthazar Jeffries, angered by rain and shivering off mud from the riverbed.
about a psychic ho
RESCUED TEXTS OF THE ATTIC 2
INTRODUCING INA BOYD
1.
-Ina says a dreamboat’s any man refrains demanding anal on like the third date.
-Dreamboat’s mother’s word.
-Mother’d pronounce it in-uh.
-Daddy said Eee-nah.
-Couldn’t even agree on that.
-Ina burns her fingers on the water glass.
-They served me coffee in a water glass.
-My first sensation in Berlin.
-A burn.
-A Flashback:
-Mother pretending drunk on balcony overlooking Mississippi.
-A balcony as architectural trophy of amicable divorce.
-Mother pretending drunk to make the saying…
-Ina needing no such excuse.
-…of certain things…
-Hard as some things are to say.
-…easy…
-Excuses are for those who can be bothered, says Ina.
-The darling child.
-Talks to herself openly in public.
-Sings oldies.
-Mother’s hiccup.
-Ma, it is only cranberry juice.
-Oh so you’re a drink inspector now too. My daughter the mind-reading drink-inspector who quits colleges to chase ratsafarians.
-The sunset a rich dessert.
-The mighty Mississippi.
-Dandan’s mercurial grave.
-Ina thinking it is a Negro river.
-Thinking but never saying this word Negro…
-Okay she remembers calling Joanie Joplin my Negro once.
-Mother saying now Ina…
-Mother saying now do not look at me when I say this but.
-Sunset spectacular flambeéd entrails.
-Staring she said remember dear, gentlemen…
-Ina remembers and laughs out loud at table alone in café where they burned her fingers.
-I must look crazy.
-Suitcase beside me.
-Crazy but hot.
-Nazi folksinger looks up when she laughs.
-Again.
-He sure looks like a folksinging nazi.
-Looking pure but not benign.
-Probably Jewish just to teach me to….
-Half-Jew.
-Half-Jews…
-Mother through ruby depths of faux Chablis peering says remember dear, gentlemen.
-Cheeks both red as cranberry.
-Is this how she turns herself on now?
-Talking dirty to college-age daughter?
-Remember dear, gentlemen do not expect a lady…
-Ina hoots.
-To swallow.
-Ina hoots.
-Ina thinks how preciously naïve.
-Is that the scariest…?
-Ina thinks if only.
-I’d swallow a quart if that’s where it stopped.
-I’d be like, is that all you’ve got?
-Mother pronounced it ratsafarian.
-Please never tell me you’re pregnant with ratsafarian…
-And do not give me that look like it never happens.
-She’d say for all intensive purposes.
-Nucular.
-Flashback finished.
-Inscribing Department of Human Race Horses in her immaculate handlike preserve a secret for the ages in notebook and smile.
-Catch that nazi folksinger look again.
-I am wet as an eight-second egg.
-I am wet as a Mississippi.
-Looks again I’m saying something.
-Looks again it’s on.
-Let’s do this.
-I don’t give a chunky fuck.
-LED eyes Thou hast.
-Kiss these blistered…
-Sorry means never having to say I love you.
-Ina stands and goes hey um would you watch my stuff for a minute I need to go to the bathroom.
-Uncomprehending look in return.
-Look of the daze-ruptured put-upon.
-It is 15:40.
-Do you speak English?
-Do you?
-She laughs and squeezes between the tables wishing she hadn’t said need. Sounds so well I don’t know so irrefutably graphic to say like I need to go to the bathroom. Want would have been better.
-And what’s up with the word bathroom.
-It’s like I need to take a humongous dump.
-For medical reasons.
-Perforated duodenum and such.
-Can you hold my colostomy bag for a sec thanks.
-Batting her eyelashes. Do you find me alluring?
-Feels two eyes on her ass as she passes.
-The tables are just a thigh apart yet she squeezes through without even touching edges.
-Passed the buttock test with flying colors.
-Buttock the farm word.
-Fantasize he is infallible cool cyborg assassin scan rapid digit display scroll phosphor-green screen while geometric simulation of ass rotate 180 degrees on pulsating graph when target-circle zeroes-in on her anus.
-Assassin.
-Get it?
-Loo door swings.
-Thankgod no Americans in this bathroom.
-Clears throat.
-Would it offend anyone if I called this shitroom Mecca?
-I could stay here all day.
-Having grown to abhor the sound of Trustifarian English.
-This haven.
-If I’m in here longer than five minutes nazi folksinger will picture the taking of a humongous dump.
-Can’t have that.
-Though: would it not be funny to birthgroan loud as a whale?
-We are not comedian.
-We are hot like Joan of Arc.
-’Tis only tinkle.
-Mother crying Jesus wept on the toilet.
-Door’s all wide open and I’m like Mother.
-Rotten jello smell: the pain of stench.
-Hemorrhoids mother hindparts acquired evacuating hero of our story.
-The mighty Mississippi.
-My little brother’s widow.
-This foreign toilet paper sucks.
-In-uh.
-Get it?
-Flashback finished.
-Srsly.
2.
-So he claims his name is Spinoza.
-He claims his name is Spinoza. Yes he does. I do. He do.
-That is a fuckedness.
-But seriously.
-Seriously?
-You are a name bigot?
-Your parents are hippies?
-So now she is hippie-intolerant?
-On top of everything else.
-What else?
-I am an honor student.
-What if I was black?
-Were.
-Was.
-Were.
-Whatever. What if I were black?
-You’d have an excuse. But your name would not be Spinoza.
-No, my name would be LaFoyer Grady.
-That is a pretty convincing job of black name random generating on short notice.
-You try.
-DeMario Smalls.
-I see we have our racism in common.
-Something to fall back on during lulls.
-Lulls aren’t the things we fall back on?
-So his name is seriously Spinoza.
-Yes.
-Just Spinoza?
-Simply Spinoza. Yes. I am a gifted young DJ. What is yours?
-LeKwanza Pinckney.
-My first black girlfriend.
-Whoa.
-Whoa?
-Things are moving quickly.
3.
-Ina thinking I recall now reading that a sweetish semen means it is diabetes.
-Which feels like far too intimate to know or to tell him.
-To wake and tell him.
-Rather text it.
-In a week I’ll text it.
-Spinoza in his fetal postcoital coma in the gloaming.
-Semen from her lips to his to close a circle.
-And also the Lego smell and Daniel.
-Daniel melted Legos on their bedroom lightbulb twice.
-Later died on a dare with the Mississippi.
-The varsity swimmer slash little brother in that mighty Negro river.
-Spinoza does not snore he fartles.
-Gnashing his teeth he fartles.
-Spinoza farts the smells of melting Legos to channel brother Daniel.
-Supine Ina sneers at posters of now-old or long-dead frog and wop actresses who wouldn’t even’ve as iffed him.
-Spiderwebs darkly drug-addled thoughts above his mattress.
-Said spiders watch his Jewy dreams.
-Said Ina too.
-Her mouth still sized to the proximate dick.
-The look called pursed.
-The boy she thought a nazi folksinger.
-The boy she thought pure not benign.
-He is fartling he is gnashing his teeth.
-Lo, a tugboat crosseth pudding lake.
-The anal flap and sputter.
-You just can’t imagine loving him less.
-In the spirit of which she note-writes about goodbyes and goodlucks and hinted-at manageable medical conditions.
-The dazzling legend of Nordic healthcare.
-Signed LeKwanza.
-Signed the first blowjob is free the next in dreams bereft ie fool me once.
-Signed I hate being an American on this Americans-choked sidewalk oh so looking the part of congenital Mallness.
-Like folks I just fell off the intercontinental turnip truck.
-But I will learn.
-She had a forty dollar haircut and birthcontrol bazooms and she was ready to use them.
-This rolling suitcase louder than the liberation of Paris.
-The airport handle.
-I am creditcard-dressed and distressed.
-Sweet-semen fed and obvious.
-Turning sees Spinoza in his briefs in window like mother on balcony overlooking mighty Negro brother-stealing river with a waving shyness mouthing call me.
-Call you what?
-Almost Daniel?
stream-of-texting consciousness
RESCUED TEXTS OF THE ATTIC 3
THE REAL JIMMY DAVIS
We’ve all heard of the Angel of Death, but what about the Angel of Poverty, the Angel of Rape, the Angel of Racism? They aren’t the subjects of florid poems or valuable French oil paintings. We rarely discuss them. Yet there they are.
Note for screenplay: cars as suits of armor. Animated? He leans on the horn. If the horn were a death button he’d press it even harder and far more often. He is Danny Vespers (this with a Rod Serling voice) driving home, from a pilgrimage to the hallowed gadget shop in the most masculine corner of his segregated mall, with a top-of-the-line camcorder. Danny is slightly embarrassed to bring this camcorder home to a less-than-immaculate household. High-end products give us a standard to live up to. Both in the viewfinder and in comparison, the sleek sexy camcorder made Miriam’s vagina look like an heirloom.
Can we work that into the voice-over?
***
An old idealist is impossible. At the very least, the body’s ongoing corruption as life runs out makes mock of ideals or ideas, noble or otherwise, because, check it out, the old man or woman’s bad odors and pathetic mechanical frailties are the ultimate betrayal of idealism; ultimate because irrefutably, not just rhetorically, true. Ideals are a nice decoration for physically perfect bodies: yes. And yet, the idealism of the young is idiotic. Imagine a lion cub arguing the ethical merits of vegetarianism to its parents.
***
He contemplated the fractured, contingent totality of their bored perception of him standing hip-handed in front of the class. His knees hurt. The old fuck the young as though they’re owed something. They are, aren’t they?
Vespers’s eye was on that one in the second row, that perfect little cinnamon titcake. God. Hindu? Imagine six arms in bed, a hand for each of his dicks. He had polished a suavely radical disquisition and it never failed to drop at least three students per school year in the sofabed under the curtained window in his office. Soft pink fruits with names like Tuesday or Ashley. You will be surprised to learn that instructors are still fucking students in certain private academies of higher knowledge for in the amoral old money timelessness of épater le bourgeois the parents secretly like it and provide a clear signal (like lights around a heli-pad) by naming a daughter Tallulah.
Anyone caught referring to it as “film class” would get a failing grade. Would Vespers be teaching if he hadn’t been failed by cinema?
***
Vespers was in a bit of trouble. Not for fucking Tallulah. This is how it happened. That good looking boy who actually was fucking Tallulah; Brody, Brody Camp; at some point in a discussion about Cassavetes, of all people… he says: We are here to help each other through this thing called Life…
Vespers, gunning for Brody anyway (infuriating name, pedigree, girlfriend, jawline, stature, pecs, youth and Italian shoes) goes, with a smile, tossing the chalk and snatching it down, “Thank you Mister Camp for invoking that quintessentially sappy all-American tautology we are here to help each other which is a little like claiming we exercise to build the strength to lift weights and is only trumped for sheer vacuous, well-meaning stupidity by the witlessly evil doctrine of Karma, an infinite, and therefore pointless, regress of balance and counter-balance that proposes we accept Adolph Hitler… think about it… as nothing more heinous than an agent of divine justice. Those Jews had it coming. More thinking and less reflex parroting of unexamined masscult bullshit in this class, thanks, Mr. Camp. We are here to think.”
Two days later Vespers is notified with ominous decorum of the early stages of a hate speech lawsuit being filed by the parents of none other than the Hindu titcake.
***
Miriam peered between slats in the blinds in the kitchen window towards the gazebo. Paolo was making uncanny sounds like the loyal hound in a slasher flick.
Vespers, preoccupied with this lawsuit bullshit, had left the side door of the garage ajar.
Leave a door open and something always comes in.
***
He liked the smell of his own farts. Looked forward to them. His pedagogical method encouraged what he called a living scepticism. Top positions in any field will be colonized by those with the desire but not the talent. It’s the lack of talent that breeds the desire. He said you won’t get a good grade in this class by agreeing with me. Approximately once a semester some student fell into the carefully-baited trap of asking if you know so much about movies how come you never made one?
He gave his speech about modern movies. The thesis of the cinema of tears and shit; blood being the stand-in for shit. Hollywood is not quite ready to show shit. We are not quite ready for the Hollywood shitbath.
He said: Democracy, an experiment in making freedom intolerable.
He scanned the room for reactions. His eyes sort of hopped over the Hindu girl. It occurred to him that this might turn out to be the first semester in his history as a teacher that he’d have to do without fucking a student. Or worse. Someone knuckle-rapped the bulletproof glass in the classroom door and Vespers jumped a lightyear in his skin.
Oh: just Good old Paul.
Paulie.
Over a bagel sandwich in the hot little student place about a block off campus good old Paul said thanks for taking the time.
-Come on. We’re friends.
-Longer than we’ve been married. Paul fingered the spot on his jacket’s lapel that corresponded to the spot on Vespers’s jacket lapel where he wore the black button that said The Doctor Is In and chuckled I can’t believe you’ve gotten away with wearing that all these years.
-Remember the time we brazenly rolled that wheelbarrow into the Riverpark nursery and stacked it with twenty-pound sacks of mulch and walked right out without paying and nobody said a word?
Paul set his bagel back down on its plate to laugh and nod loosely in his hands.
-It’s like that.
-Well, I always said you’d make a great cult leader.
-It’s only a matter of scale.
-Any prospects in the current crop?
-Too early to say.
-Times are hard.
-Among other things.
Paul said, God, remember how they used to say there are over a hundred words for snow in the Eskimo language?
They laughed.
-Listen, Danny…
-Uh oh.
-Yeah, it’s kind of obvious from my tone, isn’t it? I need to ask kind of a momentous favour of you.
-Shoot.
-I need you to talk to Bevvie.
-You want a divorce?
-I want to come out of the closet and I don’t know how to frame it for her, verbally, in a way that won’t sound like an apology or I don’t know. Like bragging or something. Or defiance. Or an admission of sin. Just, you know. I want it to be about relating a fact, or a set of facts, or circumstances, without the emotional or psycho-political distortion of all the baggage you build up in a long marriage which will inevitably have her searching my face for clues or deeper meanings when what I really need her to do is simply listen to and grasp and accept the facts. I don’t want this info dramatized I want it reported. I mean, if I deliver the message, I’m a kind of unreliable narrator figure, for purely circumstantial reasons, ie, her husband, regarding whom, as you know, the proper approach is, you know, forensic, mediated by a sense of the conventions surrounding the unreliable narrator’s performance, and by contrasting what the narrator presents with what we know of the greater circumstance we plug into the author’s intention. Right? But, see, there is no intention. It just is. Like a rock is or, I don’t know, this bagel. It’s just a fact which acceptance or non-acceptance is not the issue. Like oxygen.
-Paulie. Wait. What. You?
Vespers went for a drive through Inver Hills.
The mansions were pre-War, dignified, what you’d call imposing. Poor folks from down the hill when he was young would take spiraling walks up here to physically daydream convenient reincarnations into very old money. They daydreamed on foot along a curve overlooking the valley of low expectations they came up from, until a city ordinance in the early 1980s made it illegal to walk or park or dream on Inver Hills streets. There weren’t any sidewalks. It was Vespers’s guess that the rich used to enjoy the spectacle of having the poor up there before the definition of poor refined itself too sharply. Poor was no longer what you were but what you did. The armed response signs were being posted further and further down the driveways. Vespers remembered driving Miri up in the green Camaro, slowly, dreamily, in the creamy continuum of courtship, one arm around her waist. He wanted tears to well-up recalling the Kodachrome sweetness of the Kingston Trio. He wanted tears to well and over-brim imagining his old eight-track in its loyal woodgrain shell at the bottom of several generations of trash somewhere, poignantly built to survive its usefulness by a thousand years.
***
Vespers still fucked Miri to the sincere satisfaction of both parties at least once a week, occasionally pretending to be a running character named Jimmy Davis, a black burglar with an unplaceable accent. Acquiring a licorice-colored supercock in the process. A licorice nightstick as he put it to himself while putting it to Miri, who’d pretend to be chafed by it.
“Jimmy Davis” would rifle through Miriam Vespers’s underwear drawers in search of “jewelry”, uncovering a trail of carefully-placed sex widgets, already switched on, plus video tapes ready to pop in the VCR and blank tapes for the camcorder. “Rape” the gagged housewife to a bebop soundtrack. Rape as kitsch and marital aid. Vespers couldn’t imagine trying to get away with using Jimmy Davis on one of his coeds, although the fact that he could derive pleasure from pretending to be a black burglar raping a white housewife without having the slightest desire to be black or rape housewives was the most personal argument he could come up with in support of his false catharsises of cinema theory. The magic of cinema being that the audience is acting, too, though not out of identification. In self-defense. Powerful cinema is no less an intruder than is Jimmy Davis. The passive gaze is the ultimate mask.
But this is what Vespers had forgotten: he’d forgotten fucking a hardship student named Ruby Davis in 1977.
***
Miriam didn’t like the way her voice sounded as she heard herself calling who’s out there?
***
Paulie pointed suddenly and precisely saying Here. Turn right here, and they pulled into a tree-lined driveway.
Vespers said Where’s the front door?
-Real mansions don’t have front doors. That’s the point, isn’t it?
Vespers tried to pre-picture the polo-shirted catamite Paulie was so eager to introduce him to as what. Justification for obliterating the little spark of joie de vivre still lingering in the body of Vespers’s (and Vespers’s wife’s) dearest friend, the poor wife Bevvie, like futile volts in a leather lightbulb? They parked in a gravel lot, in front of a kerosene shed of heavy landscaping equipment, in a row of surprisingly downscale automobiles. Vespers voiced this observation with ungaurded smugness as he unbuckled his safety belt and Paulie said gardeners. Uncloseted Paulie was suddenly scoring snob points left and right and Vespers made a mental note to crucify his friend on some intellectual matter later. All the better if it related to fiction since Paulie was teaching the subject.
Danny Vespers was plotting this fey revenge on his undeservedly loyal friend at the very moment the brother of an alumna was tying his wife to a chair in the kitchen with an extension cord he’d gotten from the garage.
a nice little joke about karma
JOE PESCI MEETS JIMINIY CRICKET
TIMELESS
Goot Gawd, I’d forgotten that writing (especially with an Offsprung on the premises) is a winter activity! There are mud puddles in the garden which need tending and that’s not even at the top of the list.
Received a message today from an esteemed comrade on another land mass and attached to this message was the rough draft of a play: fantastic! There’ll be more to say about that after today’s trimming of the mud puddle.
THE TIMES THEY ARE A-WHATEVERIN’
Writing in the “Culture Diary” at the Paris Review Blog, Maud Newton says:
DAY FOUR
8:07 A.M. I don’t work on Wednesdays, but I’m up early anyway, mildly hungover and with tea in hand, to write. The dinner scene looks clunkier now; commence line-edits.
Why all the chipped shoulders re: Keillor’s poignant little farewell to a certain sense of a published self? It may not be true for you but it’s true for him and that used to be much of the published word’s allure: a window on the inner-worlds of others. All the online rage against Keillor feels like a militantly affirmation-hungry response.
I think I understand that his use of the word “children” isn’t snooty; I see tweens who are, indeed, growing into a world on the other side of a cusp I’ve spent most of my adulthood in. I’m not mad at Keillor or the cusp… it’s just something to think about.
Also think too many sensitive people get pissed at writers while free-passing, say, soldiers or TV execs.
Children, I am an author who used to type a book manuscript on a manual typewriter. Yes, I did. And mailed it to a New York publisher in a big manila envelope with actual postage stamps on it. And kept a carbon copy for myself. I waited for a month or so and then got an acceptance letter in the mail. It was typed on paper. They offered to pay me a large sum of money. I read it over and over and ran up and down the rows of corn whooping. It was beautiful, the Old Era. I’m sorry you missed it.
What’s to get mad at? There’s something of the sophomore-storming-out-of-the-house-as-a-way-of-preempting-Dad’s-advice-on-drugs-or-STD’s to all this. People who are genuinely busy writing (vs people champing at the bit to be taken as the new gatekeepers of Writing) won’t be much bothered.
UPDATE: It’s strange, but you get the feeling that most of the people spitting in Keillor’s general direction here didn’t read the piece closely (or at all) and certainly didn’t read the title, which is The End of an Era in Publishing.
Who’s silly enough to believe that this isn’t the end (or the end of a clear memory) of several eras: the end of nice advances for mid-listers, the end of serious bookchat in newspapers, the end of novelists marrying models and getting into fist-fights on mainstream talk shows…
“Keillor’s jeremiad is wrong on so many levels, and proceeds from a place of such monumental self-regard and fundamental misinformation, that a proper rebuttal would require an entire afternoon and a minimum of ten double-spaced pages. That, or one satirical essay by Mark Twain or Colson Whitehead…”
— Maud Newton, writer, editor, and book critic
You mean Keillor never wrote on a typewriter, mailed a manuscript to a publisher in NY or got an advance that made him run whooping through the corn? Who’s the dusty old fucker trying to fool, then? Christ, I’m glad you kids are patrolling the area! Hey, let’s do something about that sarcastic reference to postage stamps, too… is Keillor saying it’s the end of Snail Mail… ?
“If your approach to book publishing is in the past, then it’s good that it is dying. But I think this kind of pessimism is really detrimental to the books you love — because why do you want to stop what you love from evolving?”
— Dana Trombley, Senior Publicist, Grand Central
How about if your approach to describing how things went in the past is based on how things went in the past… ? Also horrid?
“In the New Era, writers will be self-anointed,’ he writes in his op-ed, which is nonsense. In this new world, many more writers will self-publish, it’s true. But every one of them will have to build an audience just like he did. These new writers will use Twitter, Facebook, podcasts, blogs, book clubs, and all the 21st Century community-building tools at an author’s disposal, just like he used the radio.”
—Jason Boog, Publishing Editor, Mediabistro.com
It may be “nonsense” but it’s largely true. I’m a self-anointed writer (just as you’re a self-anointed cultural critic); all writers start as self-anointed and most remain that way to the exclusion of other descriptions and the “New Era” just means that both categories represent lots more people now. Nothing wrong with being a self-anointed anything if the ability is there and nothing in your comment contradicts Keillor’s observation. But, when a pile-on beckons (and to buck the trend risks ostracism)…
“Garrison Keillor is just the latest in a line of prominent Chicken Littles rushing to declare the sky is falling; at least this version has the added twist of ‘And the sky was so much better in my day, let me tell you, sonny.’” -Ron Hogan, former director of e-marketing strategy at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and current curator of literary website Beatrice.com
I hate the types (let’s call them Oprah-Baiters) who fish for indignant applause. Reminiscent of Frat Boys who bash “sexism” hoping to score Lesbian blowjobs.
“It is his snobbery that got publishing into this mess. He talks about the coveted New York Times, but the Times doesn’t review the books that keep publishing alive. He is afraid of genre fiction. Publishing isn’t dying, it is evolving, and evolution hurts… Werewolf and vampire porn saved publishing.”
— Colleen Lindsay, Literary Agent, FinePrint
Werewolf and vampire porn is certainly an evolutionary step above Didion, Brodkey and DeLillo. But where’s the snobbery in the Keillor piece, lady?
Here’s my favorite no-nonsensically nonsensical pronouncement of the bunch:
“Publishing takes a lot of work, but at the end of the day, I’m in an industry of story.” — Roseanne Wells, Marianne Strong Literary Agency
Not to mention a World of Dumb.
OLDE FRIENDS AND RIOTS
Something with a down-home-on-Jupiter (Afro-Futurist) feel from a mate of 20 years’ standing, Mister Dreadlox Holmes (there he is being the naughty man of the handmade vid, looking, deal-with-the-devilishly, not a day over 34 or 35).
I first met Dreadlox (aka Steve) when he was busking at Covent Garden/Leicester Square, doing a Hendrix thing in leather pants, snakeskin boots and a top hat. It was a year of the cyclical Hendrix revival (1990) in what was otherwise the era of Adamski (introducing a fetal Seal), Guru Josh, Happy Mondays, Stone Roses etc. and Steve would earn about fifty pound-coins an afternoon for playing strange riffs very beautifully and with great speed (we call it shredding). I’d sit on the periphery until my view of Steve’s show would become blocked entirely by wide-bottomed short pants. It was a drought year (and the year of the Poll Tax riots… I saw a Porsche like a turtle on its back and a phalanx of mounted police swinging clubs at hippie heads) and very hot, a summer under weirdly Mediterranean skies, a summer of the dead breeze and brown parks and coveted shadow. I’d find a well-shaded spot and watch Steve play while the pigeons picked at discarded baked-potato snacks bursting chived guts all over the square. Afterward, once, Steve took us to dinner at a nice restaurant and paid with the contents of his hat.
SOSHUL INJUNEERING: OR WHY YOUR OWNERS PREFER YOU ILLITERATE
The book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes is discussed here- I must have a copy (if only because the cover of the edition referenced features Ringo, in a scene from AHDN, with a “boook”). The linked-to blog offers these nuggets from the boook:
- The flourishing of autodidactic culture among Scottish weavers in the 18th century resulted in one of the highest literacy levels in the world. Weavers as a group were “legendary readers,” noted for their habit of “reading at the loom.”
- Intellectual proclivities among tradesmen were intolerable to 18th century gentlemen. In 1812, radical tailor Francis Place lamented that “to accumulate books, and to be supposed to know something of their contents…was an abominable offense in a tailor, if not a crime; had it been known to all my customers that I accumulated a considerable library in which I spent all the leisure time I could spare…half of them at the least would have left me.”
- Autodidactic workers who taught themselves to read were markedly less deferential to power. Ferment was linked directly to print. After the First World War, historian Robert Roberts pointed out that “many more books, periodicals and newspapers were to be seen in ordinary homes. My mother recalled the plaint of our burial club collector. ‘Some of ‘em are reading mad!’ he grumbled. ‘They buy paper after paper, but won’t pay the weekly penny these days to bury their dead!”
- In the mid- 19th Century, Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe had a greater working-class readership than any book save the Bible.
- Rose describes the flowering of the “Mutual Improvement Societies” in early 20th century working class Britain- self-organized groups of a dozen to upwards of 100 people who met regularly in their own homes or churches. A member would typically deliver a paper on politics, religion, ethics, literature, or other “useful knowledge”, followed by discussion. “The aim was to develop verbal and intellectual skills among people who had never been encouraged to speak or think.”
- “In the first years of the 19th Century, shepherds in the Cheviot Hills maintained a kind of circulating library, leaving books they had read in designated nooks and crannies in boundary walls. The next shepherd who came that way could borrow it and leave another in its place, so that each volume was gradually carried through a circuit of 30 to 40 miles, on which the shepherds only occasionally met.”
- In 1854, Samuel Taylor, a passionate literacy advocate and a clay worker, began to read aloud from Crimean War dispatches published in The Times in a market square in Hanley. These readings attracted 8-10,000 people. The authorities welcomed them as “a way of keeping the lower orders out of pubs and music halls” and offered use of the town hall. Initially free, he began charging a penny, and by 1858 the movement had swept Staffordshire towns, attracting 60-70,000 people for selected readings from the works of popular writers. (In a district containing 100,000 people!)
FOR HE HAS NOT LONG TO LIVE
COMMENTS ABROAD
June 14th, 2010 / 3:28 am Steven Augustine—
DFW could be a bit on the anal-explosive side; I’m with him re: “prior to” vs “before” and “individual” vs “person” (and “vehicle” vs “car”, by extension… it’s all cop talk, isn’t it?) but not because three syllables take a millisecond longer to digest than two… that’s a wee-bit silly. If you don’t have an extra millisecond to spare, you shouldn’t be reading for pleasure (and I write that sentence deliberately avoiding the “if one doesn’t, one shouldn’t” register, which would have felt stilted). Language is a fluid, Grammar is a knife.
Also agree with the psychological aspects of Über Grammarianism: DFW had the sanctimony gene often found in Crusaders. Great writer and Extreme Human.
I just think that most of us don’t realize how successfully brainwashed we are. Just as Black Americans were involved in the evil, antebellum-style stereotype-bomb “Precious” (yes: always remember to pity Blacks and to be revolted by them in equal measure), they’ve got you linking Arabs and bombs in the first sentence of your article.
The Mass Media only ever mentions Arabs in association with violent death, religious fanaticism and/or cruelly retrograde cultural practices. You can’t allow yourself to support this standard; it’s part of the overall psychological campaign to justify (or at least normalize) the killing of people in the “Arab world”. Can you imagine Them flying weaponized drones to Sweden in order to kill blue-eyed blonds without a deafening global outcry as a result? Of course you can’t… because your Imagination hasn’t been trained to.
Speaking as yer bona fide Ayrab, I’m here to tell you, we do have a thing for ‘…violent death, religious fanaticism and/or cruelly retrograde cultural practices’…but no more so than yer average ‘Christian’, ‘Hindu’ or ‘Jew’. It’s the sanctimony that fucking annoys: The US can drop hydrogen bombs on civilians, carpet bomb peasant farmers in their rice-paddies, torture whoever they like, maintain a racist and misogynist social structure (by force when required) but that’s OK because they’re ‘a democracy’…or something. Fucking pinheads.
Well, yeah, of course I was playing the devil’s advocate there, M, all the while bearing in mind your long list of personal atrocities (and your fanatical belief that the universe is floating on an Ur-Turtle’s back).
Along those lines (the perfect segue into a non-sequitur, I’ve found), this is interesting:
Do you think Assange is in danger?
-I happen to have been the target of a White House hit squad myself. On May 3, 1972, a dozen CIA assets from the Bay of Pigs, Cuban émigrés were brought up from Miami with orders to “incapacitate me totally.” I said to the prosecutor, “What does that mean? Kill me.” He said, “It means to incapacitate you totally. But you have to understand these guys never use the word ‘kill.’”
Is the Obama White House anymore enlightened than Nixon’s?
-We’ve now been told by Dennis Blair, the late head of intelligence here, that President Obama has authorized the killing of American citizens overseas, who are suspected of involvement in terrorism. Assange is not American, so he doesn’t even have that constraint. I would think that he is in some danger. Granted, I would think that his notoriety now would provide him some degree of protection. You would think that would protect him, but you could have said the same thing about me. I was the number one defendant. I was on trail but they brought up people to beat me up.
You believe he is in danger of bodily harm, then?
-Absolutely. On the same basis, I was….Obama is now proclaiming rights of life and death, being judge, jury, and executioner of Americans without due process. No president has ever claimed that and possibly no one since John the First.
Now that is change we can believe in! (Christ, I’m not one to gloat… ahem… but I wonder how the NormLib dupes over at 3QD are taking the ongoing striptease of revelations that the really cool dude they voted into office was not, by mere dint of being brown, some sort of PC Messiah? Or even a “Progressive” by any sane definition of the term? But a Clintonian Bush-front instead? )
What I’ve been saying since before Obama was elected. He’s just Bush with better presentational skills. What I found especially sad at the time of his victory were the vast crowds of black Americans literally weeping with joy at thought that they’d finally got a president who was ‘one of their own’, the poor deluded saps.
What in God’s name the Tea Party/Right’s problem with Obama is I don’t know. It sure as hell can’t be ideological so I guess that just leaves the obvious: they hate him because he’s beige…
(photo: The Well-Oiled Pol)
My favorite teary-eyed inaugural bystander in blackface was decommissioned CIA asset Jesse Jackson (have I mentioned that my father interfaced with that feller back in the good old Heyday of Blaxploitation?). Remember the pic of JJ blubbing like a babe as BO ascended to the throne? It was spun along the lines that Jackson was overwhelmed by the poignant historicity of the event: wink. Jesse clearly felt betrayed. I’m sure those snickering fuckers promised it to him.
Meanwhile, you’ve got to wonder about the intelligence or sanity of anyone over the age of 35 who still falls for that stuff; if the candidate weren’t a cunt, It couldn’t have been a candidate, now could It? Ie, what’s your vote worth in real terms if you can’t even choose the candidates? Oh, it’s so simple! So brilliant! The Post-Industrial Masses are such wonderful retards! It seems to take the typical human roughly 90 years to figure things out these days… with an extended average lifespan of 75 years to work with.
There’s certainly very little fun in predicting the worst and invariably being right; the fact is, I resent it.
No: Darwinian models of competition, applied to animals which compete with cunning instead of muscle-mass, tooth and claw, will invariably reward the Sociopath. Rewarded, the Sociopaths advance and multiply while actively persecuting, eradicating and/or converting non-Sociopaths with the power of institutional Sociopathy. The World we know is a vision of Sociopaths, run by Sociopaths and designed to produce more Sociopaths.
The only hope is to A) take a clear-eyed measure of the situation and B) work for Fundamental Change by out-breeding Sociopaths. The biggest Lie going is that meaningful change… essential change… can happen in the span of one life. The fuckers would have you believe it can happen with one American Presidential election! How cynical is that?
We’re talking fucking centuries, Comrades. Three or four hundred years minimum.
(as previously noted, most non-Berlin photos on TET now come from elsewhere viaTHIS PLACE)
E(US)TACE AND HIS IRON BUTTERFLY
Read this excerpt from an article in the NYer and, if you have seen the videoclip which is being described, ask yourself what you think of the NYer and its attempt to spin the video clip in a “two sides to every story” way (are there two sides to every story in child molesting, too?):
Assange hit the pause button, and said, “In this video, you will see a number of people killed.” The footage, he explained, had three broad phases. “In the first phase, you will see an attack that is based upon a mistake, but certainly a very careless mistake. In the second part, the attack is clearly murder, according to the definition of the average man. And in the third part you will see the killing of innocent civilians in the course of soldiers going after a legitimate target.”
The first phase was chilling, in part because the banter of the soldiers was so far beyond the boundaries of civilian discourse. “Just fuckin’, once you get on ’em, just open ’em up,” one of them said. The crew members of the Apache came upon about a dozen men ambling down a street, a block or so from American troops, and reported that five or six of the men were armed with AK-47s; as the Apache maneuvered into position to fire at them, the crew saw one of the Reuters journalists, who were mixed in among the other men, and mistook a long-lensed camera for an RPG. The Apaches fired on the men for twenty-five seconds, killing nearly all of them instantly.
Phase two began shortly afterward. As the helicopter hovered over the carnage, the crew noticed a wounded survivor struggling on the ground. The man appeared to be unarmed. “All you gotta do is pick up a weapon,” a soldier in the Apache said. Suddenly, a van drove into view, and three unarmed men rushed to help the wounded person. “We have individuals going to the scene, looks like possibly, uh, picking up bodies and weapons,” the Apache reported, even though the men were helping a survivor, and were not collecting weapons. The Apache fired, killing the men and the person they were trying to save, and wounding two young children in the van’s front seat.
In phase three, the helicopter crew radioed a commander to say that at least six armed men had entered a partially constructed building in a dense urban area. Some of the armed men may have walked over from a skirmish with American troops; it is unclear. The crew asked for permission to attack the structure, which they said appeared abandoned. “We can put a missile in it,” a soldier in the Apache suggested, and the go-ahead was quickly given. Moments later, two unarmed people entered the building. Though the soldiers acknowledged them, the attack proceeded: three Hellfire missiles destroyed the building. Passersby were engulfed by clouds of debris.
Assange saw these events in sharply delineated moral terms, yet the footage did not offer easy legal judgments. In the month before the video was shot, members of the battalion on the ground, from the Sixteenth Infantry Regiment, had suffered more than a hundred and fifty attacks and roadside bombings, nineteen injuries, and four deaths; early that morning, the unit had been attacked by small-arms fire. The soldiers in the Apache were matter-of-fact about killing and spoke callously about their victims, but the first attack could be judged as a tragic misunderstanding. The attack on the van was questionable—the use of force seemed neither thoughtful nor measured—but soldiers are permitted to shoot combatants, even when they are assisting the wounded, and one could argue that the Apache’s crew, in the heat of the moment, reasonably judged the men in the van to be assisting the enemy. Phase three may have been unlawful, perhaps negligent homicide or worse. Firing missiles into a building, in daytime, to kill six people who do not appear to be of strategic importance is an excessive use of force. This attack was conducted with scant deliberation, and it is unclear why the Army did not investigate it.”
This is total bullcrap. I have been engaged in South Africa’s struggle from the time I was a student and the USA and Israel were supporting the racist Apartheid regime covertly and overtly. When Nelson Mandela was arrested by the South African Secret Service BOSSI after being fingered by CIA operatives in South Africa, he was in the car of the uncle of one of my friends. I was in South Africa when the barriers came down. This article states that South Africa is a “fragile democracy.” What rubbish!! Many things are lacking in South Africa, but its democracy is sturdy and in no danger.Your American artist in Fashionable New York can undertake a stupid feel good initiative that accomplishes nothing and get a writeup in the NYTimes. There is surely a word for this but it eludes me. . For her to think children in South Africa are disconnected from art is beyond laughable. If she understood the absurdity of this statement she would be ashamed. Fat chance
C. ALEXANDER BROWN
Rockcliffe Park, Ontario, Canada..
POP SOME CORN AND LACE YOUR SPRITE WITH LSD
PSY FI DOUBLE-FEATURE
BECAUSE IT’S PSY FI MONTH AT TET
HOMO ZERO
PROLOGUE: I am Born, Elvis Reports to Nixon, Primates and Bladder Infections, Fatidic Frank, a Schwinn is Taken, How Dietary Habits affect the Flavor and Bouquet of Mexican emissions, A Glimpse of the Primordial One in Pedal-Pushers, Hippie-Do’s Aflame
This isn’t one of those unreliable narrator jokes where the character talking thinks he’s god but really he’s some tragic sack in a coma. Really I am god and I am not in a coma. Really. I was kid in a coma once, true. Well that was the age of the Jethro Tull being the greatest flute combo in Creation is all. Nubile groupies sucked beardy-cock and Elvis answered only to Nixon in the war on drugs. Sigh. I am God or a god. I am omniscient yet not omnipotent and await some important clarification on that. In the meanwhile watch out or I’ll wink that sneer off your face, fucker. I’ll turn the pontoon titties into wufflers on the wind. Water to piss and Big Macs to turds and raise a stiffy from the middle-aged dead in a trice. Based on a True Story.
Please note: I all-knowingly forbid myself from seeing into the future or reading minds. I hate spoilers.
Use tons of profanity, though. People averse on principle to the word “fuck” are ignorant, blue-nosed cunts, in my opinion. I can’t remember at any point in eternal existence actually opening my mouth and booming let there be fuck and shit and cocksucker but it’s obvious that the existence of these words is my (or someone’s) careful doing. Because everything’s is. There is no such thing as a bad word. There are only bad species. (You know who I’m thinking of when I say that. And you can’t even read minds).
You can’t read minds, see into the future, kill with a wink or fuck a fashion model in the guise of a goose or a shower of gold. You aren’t even as funny (or strong, or fair-minded) as chimpanzees. You’ve really only got one thing going for you but that’s just my opinion (it goes without saying that everything you perceive in this inter-dimensional communique is mitigated by the tacit qualification that it’s all just my private opinion; private opinion sprinkled liberally with omniscient fact. Ask me who really killed Julius Caesar and why and I will blow your little mind).
You know on Star Trek how some alien being with vastly superior power and intelligence is always opining (near the end of the episode), with loftily bemused wistfulness, that the human race has something going for it; some scrappy, indomitable spirit or je ne sais quoi which the various superior entities of the galaxy admire or envy and this is why they never just wipe the Universe with a dirty rag to get rid of you?
Ha.
What I like about humans (the only thing I really like about humans) is that you can’t read minds or see into the future. Makes for excellent fucking. Hey and you’re mentally retarded and spectacularly deranged, too. Every single one of you. That’s a big major plus in the sack.
Picture this for a sec: three bantamy white guys on LSD in space suits on a mountain in Southern California.
I have fucked chimpanzees in times of need, although I don’t recommend the pleasure. They are very strong and they stink and they like it just a little too fast. They don’t require sonnets. They don’t require reassurances afterward and, even worse, it’s impossible to hurt a chimp’s feelings. There’s something about having the power to wound and yet keeping that power in check that makes a lover feel sort of godly. It’s a turn-on. But chimps are impregnable as hairy pentagons, as far as that goes. Which is why you’ve never seen a really fat one.
I have fucked chimps and been fucked by chimps in turn and really couldn’t say which is better. What’s best is ejaculating in, on or at the strictly human. Needy, fucked-up, clueless little cock sockets in constant rage and tumult and froth that they are. Caveat: always fuck but never marry: I know that, now, since coming into my omniscience: do not even think of getting married. Especially not in the name of sex or companionship.
Before I came into my omniscience. An early scene from the pseudo-mortal life:
Fatidic Frank. It’s 1969 and I’m sitting behind the white bucket seat of Frank’s brown Buick LeSabre and we are hurtling so fender-smooth and heavy in the twilight down the Dan Ryan Expressway that it feels like a free-fall when I close my eyes. There’s the Magikist sign. The friendly brontosaurus of a Sinclair station up there on the surface streets. A billboard for Jet magazine.
My Auntie Antonia is in the cock-sucking seat beside Frank and the moon, supposedly, has two people on it. I assume it was whiskey-voiced Walter on fatidic Frank’s radio handling the narrative. I used to trust Walter. The speaker is right behind my head. The speaker is like a perforated manhole cover under the nodding dog doll that Frank keeps in the sloping Hispanic heat of the rear window. Frank is married and real fucking late getting home and even at ten-years-old and pre-omniscient I can read his mind and tell that Frank, for all his jokey-bravado, would weep like a grateful baby if we allowed him to pull over and let us out on the highway shoulder and save him that precious forty-five minutes getting back to the marital driveway. And it actually would have changed everything. There’s the John Hancock.
I don’t remember now where I picked up the adult intelligence that Frank was married and less than honorable in his intentions towards my Aunt but maybe it was my omniscience already kicking in a little. How did I know that nobody was actually walking on the moon? Frank was a Mexican with a Zapata ‘stache and a balding brown head. I assume he’s dead now (uncork the omniscience for a sec: oops, Frank’s still with us) and I think of his head (and of the moon and of the moon as a bumpy skull under his sweaty scalp) whenever I listen to Jose Feliciano’s cover of The Doors’ Light My Fire. Which is less than super often. He wore a cowboy hat when he wasn’t driving. He was a very tall Mexican. Good tune.
We had driven way the hell out to some traveling carnival or fun fair. We got to the fair, which was located in a blue cloud of gnats and diesel and Frank gave me a whopping five dollars to hit all the rides and buy sacks of caramel corn and generally comport myself like a medieval prince. Five dollars in 1969 for a ten-year-old was equivalent to fifty thousand dollars today. Auntie Antonia flanked Frank with astonished pride when he handed me that green engraving of Lincoln. No plan or instructions just git. Frank’s married arm around the unmarried waist of erection-red Auntie Antonia. The Aunt with the bottle-bottom eyeglasses.
Mommy would have connipted. Mommy would have gone nova. She referred to psychics as gypsies. That’s pretty racist. Bussed out to them religiously and some gypsy in a taupe beret told her with a Bela Lugosi voice when I was about I guess five: I see a bicycle and a milk truck and tire tracks of blooood and, voila, simple as that, I never had a bicycle. Not when I was a kid. No swimming or bb guns or summer camp, either. First bicycle I ever had was an immaculate secondhand fire-engine-red three-speed Schwinn when I was twenty-five and it was spirited away by Moorlocks with excellent taste while I in my innocence diddled an ex-friend’s ex-wife with bomb-defusing care under her kitchen table. Chain was still swinging when I ran half-naked out the kitchen door. This, too, predates my omniscience. Maybe my mother knew, on some level beneath even her useless subconscious, that she had provided the flesh for the incarnation of God (or god) and maybe she took the responsibility too seriously. I could read at five.
Officially, mother believes in the existence of a bearded, vaguely-Levantine, anus-free sky giant. She has Alzheimer’s.
I wandered alone through a rural-type fun fair Illinois crowd. People were clustered at tall, round, umbrella-shaded fun fair tables preying on corn dogs and caramel corn, ears glued to transistor radios carrying the ongoing narrative of the phony trip to the moon. Hot grease and cotton candy and cracker-sweat illuminated the olfactory vision of the long-lost Illinois air. Beehived moms in lime-green culottes being sent to metaphorical watery graves by husbands at the dunking tank. Carny barkers with cancer nose. The other-wordly (extraterrestrials hold the patent on this device but they won’t tell you that) genius of the cotton-candy mill. The milk bottle pyramid, the dancing chickens and lusterless ponies. The beautiful, foreign-looking, dark-haired young woman I kept seeing wherever I went, smiling like a sweet warm death, untouched by the vulgar dust and not flustered by the stinks or noise and standing at a fixed distance of about five meters away whenever I glimpsed Her. I was learning the metric system that month. But I’m not ready to talk about Her.
Fun fact: I think she was scratching at the kitchen door this morning.
Aunt Antonia re-materialized in line behind me at the dunking tank after a few hours of panic-tainted fun and led me back like a frazzled runaway to Frank’s car. Antonia was sheepishly defiant and pleased in a frustrated way, her pony tail crimped by Frank’s fist. The carnival lights had torched up and they glittered and stuttered and blinked hot golds in the ashtrays over Antonia’s eyes. Without the glasses she looked fuckably helpless and I can sympathize with Frank’s delight in de-glassing her. We drove towards the highway-centered moon and listened to Sly, the Doobies, Santana, Jose Feliciano, Grand Funk Railroad, America, Walter Cronkite, the roar of motor-maddened wheels and city wind. Antonia kept wiping her big lips. Where had her lipstick gone? God knows how much Mexican cum she’d guzzled. Well, I do, in fact. We were breaking the speed limit.
Thirty three cc.
We crashed into a van full of hippies doing 45. I was in a coma for awhile. Sued and won and learned, again, to walk.
************
That pigeon is pissing me off.
It explodes like an M-80. The other birds skip and hop into a vortex that rises and wheels in a tilted craze above the trees and folks on all the other benches around the fountain of nymphs flinch and look up. An old black guy lap-catches his red sherbet still clutching the swung cone. I’m good at pretending to be as shocked as anyone else. Like, what the fuck was that?
Bad stink of incinerated sneaker /black diffusing cloud of vile pidge while/ proximate ears go ringing. Only one witness actually saw that it was a pigeon-bomb and that the explosion followed a lunging wink from the hero of this tale. This will change the witness’ life forever. The pigeons come back to finish their crumb lunch. “Forever” seems kind of redundant there but it’s standard. One gray feather falls back from heaven.
Here he comes to talk to me. The bigger my grin the slower he approaches.
You probably already know that the phenomenally-successful creepo band of the late-70s, 10cc, was named for the average fluid amount of adult ejaculate. A teaspoon. It always feels like so much more, doesn’t it? Always assumed it was a pint. By my calculations, unmarried Antonia gave fatidic Frank three point three three three blow jobs on the afternoon of the day of the supposed moon landing. She swallowed, for sure, because that’s the thing about doing it in a new car in public in the middle of the day: you have to swallow. I once saw a whore shove open a car door in a dangerous neighborhood and cough the stuff out on sad grass but Antonia wasn’t a whore. She was doing it in the fun fair parking lot for free. For love.
She’s still paralyzed and now coolly blind as a refrigerated grape. She looks like a pile of old tits on a wheelchair. She claims to be psychic.
“Excuse me…”
“Yes?”
“How did you do that?”
“Excuse me?”
“The pigeon.”
“The pigeon?”
“The one you blew up.”
“Ah… Okay. That pigeon.”
This fellow sports preposterous facial hair. A van dyke! Early-to-mid thirties. Handsome in a little-eyed way. Wearing a t-shirt of a colorized photo of Carol Merrill under which is written, in italics, GO FOR THE CURTAIN. T-shirt under a corduroy blazer. Something of the hetero-queer about him: sure sign of a trust fund. They don’t want cock but they don’t need pussy either. Pussy embarrasses them. The umbilical was never cut. I gesture he should have a seat.
“If you promise not to blow me up.”
“At this range, blowing you up would ruin my new white pants.”
“That’s some serious leisure-wear you’re into there. Are those Aldens?”
I extend a tasseled loafer. He whistles and sits. His distance from me on the bench is perfectly-judged. He is civilized. I am seriously thinking about turning him into a woman.
“While everybody else my age was wrestling with the question,” he said, gesturing with a cup of coffee, “of whether there’s a God or not, I was wrestling with the much-trickier issue of how, exactly, the guy would prove it to us if he were. I mean, seriously. Think about it. Conquistadors were able to convince the Aztecs they were Gods and they were just greasy fuckers in tin helmets on dwarf horses with syphilis. They didn’t even have guns! Wait, did they? Okay, that’s not important. Wait, was it the Aztecs or the Incas? Fuck, it’s all a blur, but that’s not important. My point is, what’s my point. Some local super-being could land on Earth and do some miracle-type-thing like make the sky black at noon or levitate a skyscraper and if he or she claimed to be God, how would we know she was lying? Even if dude managed to pull of some truly astounding shit like Uranus disappears or he reverses local time for five minutes, how would we know where he or she stood on the infinite power ladder of the Universe? Maybe they’re just in the middle of a ladder we’re on the bottom of.” He sipped the coffee. “Even if we felt convinced, so deep in our souls, that we were finally being granted an audience with Yahweh, the one true God, the beginning and the end of Creation, how would we know that we weren’t just merely under the power of like a minor warlord of this corner of the Galaxy with some mildly-impressive mind-control powers and a second-hand teleportation device? It’s not even that hard for the CIA to totally fool people. In fact, if God came along, or came back, as the Christians would have it, you know, think about it, what irrefutable evidence would we have that it wasn’t a psy-op?”
“You wouldn’t know until a bigger God came along to kick the smaller God’s ass..”
“Interesting.”
“But the difference between ‘god’ with a lower case ‘g’ and upper-case ‘God’ would have to be the indifference. Infinite power must mean infinite indifference. A true God wouldn’t bother to manifest. It just wouldn’t care enough.”
Aha. In talking to this stranger, I have answered my own First Question. I am not “God” but “a god”. But am I God becoming?
“You look like kind of a successful guy in a creative profession who looks like he could be in the market for an assistant, even if he doesn’t know it yet. My name’s Mark.”
Marcy, I think. Marcy.
I’m going to put it in him now. The change will be gradual. His tits should push out and his dick should fall off at about the time I’m actually ready to fuck him. I can wait for the hair to grow a little. He’ll have to lose that van dyke. The bone structure is already good which is half the battle. Ugly guys can’t become women they become ugly guys with tits.
I reach to shake his limp white hand and I hide the trigger in what resembles a wink of harmless gregariousness. Mark already looks .005% less male when he disengages from the handshake. He’ll be one of those tomboyish women with big tits and a boyish ass. But I won’t fuck him in it: too disgusting to think it was a man’s, once. Or maybe I’ll get over that. You’re shaking your heads but hey it is so much easier to make an easy-to-get-along-with woman than to try to find one. I failed at that lottery. I’ve already mentioned I was married once. Went through thirteen years of… I almost said a Hellish marriage. More redundancy.
I’ll need a transitional gender-free pronoun for Marcy. For a year.
Herm. Shuh-hee.
Shuh-hee smiles when I wink at herm.
“That’s what you did when the pigeon blew. Are you a weaponized performance artist? Trippy. Or, oh wow, wait: CIA! How did you do that? Is that even legal?”
Shuh-hee accompanies me on the day’s errands, jabbering away.
************
Twenty years on we are ready to begin.
(In a nutshell, to catch you all up as you emerge from the figurative coma of convenient narrative elision: by 2030, five members of the Bush dynasty have been hung in New Jerusalem Town over war crime issues, Prime Minister Palin has cancer of the nose, Radio has come back in a big way [there being a glass ceiling on the possibilities of things-that-can-be-shown] and the masses are somewhat surprised to discover that they are still obliged to pay traffic tickets, library fines and Federal Incomes taxes after First Contact. In fact, Federal Income taxes went up an average of 15%, post-First Contact [owing to that unpopular First Contact Tax], causing Texas [an anagram of “taxes”] to elope with New Mexico from the Union during the bloody year of the so-called First Contact Tax Riots. Which sparked, in turn, two Civil Wars, the second of which saw the use of so-called mini-nukes. The upshot of which is that warmly fluorescent lake where Gary and Chicago used to be.)
Marcy has kept her faith for all these twenty years (twenty years this July, knock on wood) based only on the inspiration/evidence of that one exploding pigeon. I can barely remember doing it. She has devoted her life to the worship of me with only that carny trick to tie her faith to, answering my calls, transcribing my epistles and aphorisms and correcting my pronunciation of trendy side-dishes, etc., while I have been scrupulous in hiding the garish miracle-minting for the duration. I refused to gimmick-bully her into worship. I’m sort of proud that that pigeon and my cock sufficed. St. Marcy never knew I was manifesting vintage Oscars, Hickok Belts, Kennedy Halfs, Barbies in their original packaging and Mark Spitz Medals in the basement to pay the rent nor noticed she that the huge refrigerator I gave her for the 40th birthday was stocked miraculous with eternally-supplied half-empty pickle, mustard, beet, Nutella and mayonnaise jars. I kept the magic away from her because I wanted her faith to remain pure. A rational faith (ie, based on evidence) is useless.
She has long-since lost any physical trace of male humanity and I often quite-thankfully forget, while doing her, that she was once a van-dyked page called Mark. Mark moved in when I gave his widowed father a heart-attack (this was no miracle) and his trust fund evaporated after the bulk of the puddle drained into bad tech stocks and first editions. I prefer a dense neat bush to the bristling horrors of waxed pussy and slender 50-ish Marcy’s is cherry-cola-red. At 70 my dick is unreliable and bendy as a month-old refrigerated celery stalk at its hardest so the sexuality has shifted almost entirely to the tongue and its savory kingdom of Marcy’s treasure of convex and concave and squishy and firm. This woman is a pleasure-cruise I pilot with my face. A ship in its own orgasmic waters. Her tits are half-size hairless models of my belly, with outies where my innie is. And remember because she was once a man she’s fairly rational.
The diminishing sense of smell of encroaching senescence is a blessing. Noshing away between her legs I often have the sense of a toy metropolis of biological commerce, a red Venice of kinked and webby canals, dark-luminous under humid skies of skin. My tongue a purple leviathan coming up through her grandiose sewers. Who says you can’t write about sex?
“Lord, my lord, my lord…” Marcy pleads and twists. “My God or god, my awesome god…”
On a spiritual level there is more pleasure given in giving her pleasure than I used to take in taking mine. Perhaps, I think, because the taking entails so much debt. I am finally, in this relationship, debt-free.
“…wonders to perf…”
Marcy is so oblivious in the shut-eyed madness of orgasm. I joke that I could burn the house down while she’s at it and she’d barely notice. Back away on my haunches and wipe my chin with a toilet-grunt and in celestial gush of petal-radiance become a 25-year-old, shaved-headed, gracefully-built black male with delicate features and a compassionate expression with a torso rigged to an erection like a pepper mill. Marcy’s eyes and mouth pop open one at a time and her legs cock far back and birth-wide as I plant ebon elbows in pillow-edges on either side of her cameo face and rock like I’m drilling for crude.
On the walk afterward (arm in my arm, her cut-glass features framed with silver auras of Farrah-do, eyes downcast, ecstatic devotion), I announce that we’re going on a trip. Picture us: me in khaki chinos, black espadrilles, white sport shirt… she in a crushed-velvet dress of purple, big silver ankh on a silver chain around her neck, barefoot. The Fortified Mall’s meretricious English-only food court. The long cold stares of rubes clock Marcy’s mature beauty and my youthful black strength beside her. A fat man with a fat family and a worthless degree in Economics mutters niggalova with onions and ojay on his breath and I give him cancer of the nose. I stop our progress across the two-acre court and hold up a Delphic finger.
“We are driving to Illinois.”
Marcy blinks through the sudden sunwashed windshield. We are. Driving there. A brown Buick LeSabre with Marcy in the role/seat of my Aunt Antonia and me in a cowboy hat, sleeveless black elbow out the window, driving. Plastic-wrapped Bart Simpson doll on the back seat standing in for the pre-pubertal/pre-omniscient me and no doubt as aware of its surroundings as I was back then.
It’s all happening so fast. The first twenty years: one miracle. The next twenty minutes: ten, twenty, one thousand miracles. Per minute.
CHAPTER ONE: Oh Fuck
I was having what my friend Fritz calls a Samurai (ie two-handed) wank when my wife caught me. She snatched the keyboard away before I came. She will use this as ammunition in the eternal battle centered around her complaint about needing her own keyboard.
“If you did your job I wouldn’t be doing it for you!” I shouted.
“If you had a job I would!” she shouted back.
I’d like to go back to the novel now, please.
CHAPTER TWO:
*
*
*
PSY FI MONTH
AT TET’S BUNKER PAGODA: THE RESCUED TEXT
file underFORTEAN HERMENEUTICS
This is a delicious old text from the brighter days of the Cold War. A rich and swoon-inducing vintage. Narratives have flavors and smells (as well as tints, temperatures and rhythms) and this particular narrative is a classic of cedar wood and leather. There’s the inherited whiff of HG Wells-era “ripping yarn” to it, too… snifters of brandy and wingback chairs as filtered through the sober Jesuitical data-speak proper to an officer in the mid-century Air force. This is from a “Flying Disc” narrative and is made all-the-more wonderful for being presented as fact roughly 60 years ago…
CHAPTER II
IT HAS BEEN over two years since the puzzling death of Captain Thomas Mantell.
Mantell died mysteriously in the skies south of Fort Knox. But before his radio went silent, he sent a strange message to Godman Air Force Base. The men who heard it will never forget it.
It was January 7, 1948.
Crowded into the Godman Field Tower, a group of Air Force officers stared up at the afternoon sky. For just an instant, something gleamed through the broken clouds south of the base.
High above the field, three P-51 fighters climbed with swift urgency. Heading south, they quickly vanished.
The clock in the tower read 2:45.
Colonel Guy Hix, the C.O., slowly put down his binoculars. If the thing was still there, the clouds now hid it. All they could do was wait.
The first alarm had come from Fort Knox, when Army M.P.’s had relayed a state police warning. A huge gleaming object had been seen in the sky, moving toward Godman Field. Hundreds of startled people had seen it at Madisonville, ninety miles away.
Thirty minutes later, it had zoomed up over the base.
Colonel Hix glanced around at the rest of the men in the tower. They all had a dazed look. Every man there had seen the thing, as it barreled south of the field. Even through the thin clouds, its intermittent red glow had hinted at some mysterious source of power. Something outside their understanding.
It was Woods, the exec, who had estimated its size. Hix shook his head. That was unbelievable. But something had hung over Godman Field for almost an hour. The C.O. turned quickly as the loud-speaker, tuned to the P-51′s, suddenly came to life.
“Captain Mantell to Godman . . . Tower Mantell to Godman Tower . . .”
p. 16
The flight leader’s voice had a strained tone.
“I’ve sighted the thing!” he said. “It looks metallic–and it’s tremendous in size!”
The C.O. and Woods stared at each other. No one spoke.
“The thing’s starting to climb,” Mantell said swiftly. “It’s at twelve o’clock high, making half my speed. I’ll try to close in.”
In five minutes, Mantell reported again. The strange metallic object had speeded up, was now making 360 or more.
At 3:08, Mantell’s wingman called in. Both he and the other pilot had seen the weird object. But Mantell had outclimbed them and was lost in the clouds.
Seven minutes dragged by. The men in the tower sweated out the silence. Then, at 3:15, Mantell made a hasty contact.
“It’s still above me, making my speed or better. I’m going up to twenty thousand feet. If I’m no closer, I’ll abandon chase.”
It was his last report.
Minutes later, his fighter disintegrated with terrific force. The falling wreckage was scattered for thousands of feet.
When Mantell failed to answer the tower, one of his pilots began a search. Climbing to 33,000 feet, he flew a hundred miles to the south.
But the thing that lured Mantell to his death had vanished from the sky.
Ten days after Mantell was killed, I learned of a curious sequel to the Godman affair.
An A.P. account in the New York Times had caught my attention. The story, released at Fort Knox, admitted Mantell had died while chasing a flying saucer. Colonel Hix was quoted as having watched the object, which was still unidentified. But there was no mention of Mantell’s radio messages–no hint of the thing’s tremendous size.
Though I knew the lid was probably on, I went to the Pentagon. When the scare had first broken, in the summer of ’47, I had talked with Captain Tom Brown, who was handling saucer inquiries. But by now Brown had been
p. 17
shifted, and no one in the Press Branch would admit knowing the details of the Mantell saucer chase.
“We just don’t know the answer,” a security officer told me.
“There’s a rumor,” I said, “it’s a secret Air Force missile that sometimes goes out of control.”
“Good God, man!” he exploded. “If it was, do you think we’d be ordering pilots to chase the damned things?”
“No–and I didn’t say I believed it.” I waited until he cooled down. “This order you mentioned–is it for all Air Force pilots, or special fighter units?”
“I didn’t say it was a special order,” he answered quickly. “All pilots have routine instructions to report unusual items.”
“They had fighters alerted on the Coast, when the scare first broke,” I reminded him. “Are those orders still in force?”
He shook his head. “No, not that I know of.” After a moment he added, “All I can tell you is that the Air Force is still investigating. We honestly don’t know the answer.”
As I went out the Mall entrance, I ran into Jack Daly, one of Washington’s veteran newsmen. Before the war, Jack and I had done magazine pieces together, usually on Axis espionage and communist activity. I told him I was trying to find the answer to Mantell’s death.
“You heard anything?” I asked him.
“Only what was in the A.P. story,” said Jack. “But an I.N.S. man told me they had a saucer story from Columbus, Ohio–and it might have been the same one they saw at Fort Knox.”
“I missed that. What was it?”
“They sighted the thing at the Air Force field outside of Columbus. It was around sundown, about two hours after that pilot was killed in Kentucky.”
“Anybody chase it?” I asked.
“No. They didn’t have time to take off, I guess. This I.N.S. guy said it was going like hell. Fast as a jet, anyway.”
“Did he say what it looked like?”
p. 18
“The Air Force boys said it was as big as a C-47,” said Jack. “Maybe bigger. It had a reddish-orange exhaust streaming out behind. They could see it for miles.”
“If you hear any more, let me know,” I said. Jack promised he would.
“What do you think they are?” he asked me.
“It’s got me stumped. Russia wouldn’t be testing missiles over here. Anyway, I can’t believe they’ve got anything like that. And I can’t see the Air Force letting pilots get killed to hide something we’ve got.”
One week later, I heard that a top-secret unit had been set up at Wright Field to investigate all saucer reports. When I called the Pentagon, they admitted this much, and that was all.
In the next few months, other flying-disk stories hit the front pages. Two Eastern Airline pilots reported a double-decked mystery ship sighted near Montgomery, Alabama. I learned of two other sightings, one over the Pacific Ocean and one in California. The second one, seen through field glasses, was described as rocket-shaped, as large as a B-29. There were also rumors of disks being tracked by radar, but it was almost a year before I confirmed these reports.
When Purdy wired me, early in May of ’49, I had half forgotten the disks. It had been months since any important sightings had been reported. But his message quickly revived my curiosity. If he thought the subject was hot, I knew he must have reasons. When I walked into his office at 67 West 44th, Purdy stubbed out his cigarette and shook hands. He looked at me through his glasses for a moment. Then he said abruptly:
“You know anything about the disks?”
“If you mean what they are–no.”
He motioned for me to sit down. Then he swiveled his chair around, his shoulders hunched forward, and frowned out the window.
“Have you seen the Post this week?”
I told him no.
“There’s something damned queer going on. For fifteen months, Project ‘Saucer’ is buttoned up tight. Top secret. Then suddenly, Forrestal gets the Saturday Evening Post
p. 19
to run two articles, brushing the whole thing off. The first piece hits the stands–and then what happens?”
Purdy swung around, jabbed his finger at a document on. his desk.
“That same day, the Air Force rushes out this Project ‘Saucer’ report. It admits they haven’t identified the disks in any important cases. They say it’s still serious enough–wait a minute–”he thumbed through the stapled papers–” ‘to require constant vigilance by Project “Saucer” personnel and the civilian population.’”
“You’d think the Post would make a public kick,” I said.
“I don’t mean it’s an out-and-out denial,” said Purdy. “It doesn’t mention the Post–just contradicts it. In fact, the report contradicts itself. It looks as if they’re trying to warn people and yet they’re scared to say too much.”
I looked at the title on the report: “A Digest of Preliminary Studies by the Air Materiel Command, Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio, on ‘Flying Saucers.’”
“Have the papers caught it yet?” I asked Purdy.
“You mean its contradicting the Post?” He shook his head. “No, the Pentagon press release didn’t get much space. How many editors would wade through a six-thousand-word government report? Even if they did, they’d have to compare it, item for item, with the Post piece.”
“Who wrote the Post story?”
Purdy lit a cigarette and frowned out again at the skyscrapers.
“Sidney Shallett–and he’s careful. He had Forrestal’s backing. The Air Force flew him around, arranged interviews, supposedly gave him inside stuff. He spent two months on it. They O.K.’d his script, which practically says the saucers are bunk. Then they reneged on it.”
“Maybe some top brass suddenly decided it was the wrong policy to brush it off,” I suggested.
“Why the quick change?” demanded Purdy. “Let’s say they sold the Post on covering up the truth, in the interests of security. It’s possible, though I don’t believe it. Or they could simply have fed them a fake story. Either
p. 20
Way, why did they rush this contradiction the minute the Post hit the stands?”
“Something serious happened,” I said, “after the Post went to press.”
“Yes, but what?” Purdy said impatiently. “That’s what we’ve got to find out.”
“Does Shallett’s first piece mention Mantell’s death?”
“Explains it perfectly. You know what Mantell was chasing? The planet Venus!”
“That’s the Post’s answer?” I said, incredulously.
“It’s what the Air Force contract astronomer told Shallett. I’ve checked with two astronomers here. They say that even when Venus is at full magnitude you can barely see it in the daytime even when you’re looking for it. It was only half magnitude that day, so it was practically invisible.”
“How’d the Air Force expect anybody to believe that answer?” I said.
Purdy shrugged. “They deny it was Venus in this report. But that’s what they told Shallett–that all those Air Force officers, the pilots, the Kentucky state police, and several hundred people at Madisonville mistook Venus for a metallic disk several hundred feet in diameter.”
“It’s a wonder Shallett believed it.”
“I don’t think he did. He says if it wasn’t Venus, it must have been a balloon.”
“What’s the Air Force answer?” I asked Purdy.
“Look in the report. They say whatever Mantell chased–they call it a ‘mysterious object’–is still unidentified.”
I glanced through the case report, on page five. It quoted Mantell’s radio report that the thing was metallic and tremendous in size. Linked with the death of Mantell was the Lockbourne, Ohio, report, which tied in with what Jack Daly had told me, over a year before. I read the report:
“On the same day, about two hours later, a sky phenomenon was observed by several watchers over Lockbourne Air Force Base, Columbus, Ohio. It was described as ’round or oval, larger than a C-47, and traveling in level
p. 21
flight faster than 500 miles per hour.’ The object was followed from the Lockbourne observation tower for more than 20 minutes. Observers said it glowed from white to amber, leaving an amber exhaust trail five times its own length. It made motions like an elevator and at one time appeared to touch the ground. No sound was heard. Finally, the object faded and lowered toward the horizon.”
Purdy buzzed for his secretary, and she brought me a copy of the first Post article.
“You can get a copy of this Air Force report in Washington,” Purdy told me. “This is the only one I have. But you’ll find the same answer for most of the important cases–the sightings at Muroc Air Base, the airline pilots’ reports, the disks Kenneth Arnold saw–they’re all unidentified.”
“I remember the Arnold case. That was the first sighting.”
“You’ve got contacts in Washington,” Purdy went on. “Start at the Pentagon first. They know we’re working on it. Sam Boal, the first man on this job, was down there for a day or two.”
“What did he find out?”
“Symington told him the saucers were bunk. Secretary Johnson admitted they had some pictures–we’d heard about a secret photograph taken at Harmon Field, Newfoundland. The tip said this saucer scared hell out of some pilots and Air Force men up there.
“A major took Boal to some Air Force colonel and Boal asked to see the pictures. The colonel said they didn’t have any. He turned red when the major said Symington had told Boal about the pictures.”
“Did Boal get to see them?” I said.
“No,” grunted Purdy, “and I’ll bet twenty bucks you won’t, either. But try, anyway. And check on a rumor that they’ve tracked some disks with radar. One case was supposed to be at an Air Force base in Japan.”
As I was leaving, Purdy gave me a summary of sighting reports.
“Some of these were published, some we dug up ourselves,” he said. “We got some confidential stuff from
p. 22
airline pilots. It’s pretty obvious the Air Force has tried to keep them quiet.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll get started. Maybe things aren’t sewed up so tightly, now this report is out.”
“We’ve found out some things about Project ‘Saucer,’ said Purdy. “Whether it’s a cover-up or a real investigation, there’s a lot of hush-hush business to it. They’ve got astronomers and astrophysicists working for them, also rocket expects, technical analysts, and Air Force Special Intelligence. We’ve been told they can call on any government agency for help–and I know they’re using the F.B.I.”
It was building up bigger than I had thought.
“If national security is involved,” I told Purdy, “they can shut us up in a hurry.”
“If they tell me so, O.K.,” said Purdy. He added grimly, “But I think they’re making a bad mistake. They probably think they’re doing what’s right. But the truth might come out the wrong way.”
“It is possible,” I thought, “that the saucers belong to Russia.”
“If it turns out to be a Soviet missile, count me out,” I said. “We’d have the Pentagon and the F.B.I. on our necks.”
“All right, if that’s the answer.” He chuckled. “But you may be in for a jolt.”
p. 23
UNCLE CRONENBERG’S DO’S and DON’T of MODERNIST DATING
brought to you by Psy Fi month at TET
South African Dr. Sonnet Ehlers was on call one night four decades ago when a devastated rape victim walked in. Her eyes were lifeless; she was like a breathing corpse.
“She looked at me and said, ‘If only I had teeth down there,’” recalled Ehlers, who was a 20-year-old medical researcher at the time. “I promised her I’d do something to help people like her one day.”
Forty years later, Rape-aXe was born.
Ehlers is distributing the female condoms in the various South African cities where the World Cup soccer games are taking place.
The woman inserts the latex condom like a tampon. Jagged rows of teeth-like hooks line its inside and attach on a man’s penis during penetration, Ehlers said.
Once it lodges, only a doctor can remove it — a procedure Ehlers hopes will be done with authorities on standby to make an arrest.
Looks like something an Aryan might stuff into livestock but don’t let that stop you, Doc
DREAR DIARY
Beloved is off on a glamorous gig in a far-flung Megalopolis (Frankfurt… great etymology, btw), meaning Offsprung and I are going it alone for 24 hours here at Augustine Ranch. Comrade Barry will be swinging by with promised treasures from Korea in the afternoonish to heal our pain. Beloved is looking incandescently beautiful these days and all of us can only hope that Offsprung isn’t about to be siblinged owing to my aversion to married condoms (which are not, in any case, anything like the condoms cited in comment #154 in anywise other than brute capacity). The family-as-trinity is by far our ideal config and we’re baffled by friend-couples who go for seconds after the first kid is 2… for, surely, that second kid-quake, just when the romance is nearly-recuperated from the paradigm-shifts entailed by the first, means the sex life is doomed to go in the back of a drawer behind nubby candles, old receipts, chapstick, pennies and long-dead AA batteries…?
Touching detail: last night, after Offsprung took Winnie and Tigger to bed, I was reading up on Nikola Tesla (a boyhood crush) into the wee hours then took a break and walked into the other room with a PC in it and found Beloved reading up on Edgar Cayce (or somesuch odd material). Delightful!
one of my recent fave phots of Beloved
UPDATE (4pm-ish):
Just idly Googled Edgar Cayce and fell upon a page of saucy-smug debunking, including this delicious bit of unwitting support (I’m sure it’s just a coincidence) for Cayce’s Mythos:
“He predicted that in 1958 the U.S. would discover some sort of death ray used on Atlantis…Cayce is one of the main people responsible for some of the sillier notions about Atlantis, including the idea that the Atlanteans had some sort of Great Crystal. Cayce called the Great Crystal the Tuaoi Stone and said it was a huge cylindrical prism that was used to gather and focus ‘energy,’ allowing the Atlanteans to do all kinds of fantastic things.”
The science students reading this will, by now, be chuckling knowingly. Why?
In 1957, Charles Hard Townes and Arthur Leonard Schawlow, then at Bell Labs, began a serious study… As ideas developed, they abandoned infrared radiation to instead concentrate upon visible light. The concept originally was called an optical “maser”. In 1958, Bell Labs filed a patent application for their proposed optical maser…
Otherwise known as a Laser. Which uses (or used, in 1958), at its core, a “cylindrical prism… used to gather and focus… energy”.
Spooky-good.
UPDATE (10:28 pm):
MART ‘N WILLI: A 2-LINE KOAN-PLAY
Willi: Tell me ‘gin why we got these stockings over our heads, Mart.
we’ll just have to ignore the unfortunate fact that the producers involved had something to do with the toe-curlingly racist District 9 for, Lo, when a THX 1138-like Psy Fi flick directed by a Kenyan woman features a black South African actress as the lead, we shall gladly take what we can fooking get
aye, and: consider the bitingly-fresh beauty of the lithe black, sexy-as-all-fuck lead in this film and ask yourself why we allow the fact that most of the black female image-models the Nu Nazi Media present are either fat, asexual, wig-wearing or mulatto?
GNOMENCLATURE
A long-time stealth-Comrade from the South Eastern United States (the only Comrade in that neck of the planetary woods, in fact) writes:
“Why the word lurker? It makes me feel so creepy. How about Appreciative Passive Observer?”
The new term shall therefore be LORKER.
THE RE-RUN
because I love this text but it’s buried way back on TET 4.0… fits into the DIFFICULT TEXT category as well. Conspiracy Lit. In which the Paranoid evolves into the Hypernoiac, yo. A young man asks “why not?” and we tell him.
the heart-breaking nautilus
a poem
1. Swan
But why not, said Swan. His nickname was Beef. Why not what, said Carne Rand, the fucking rich boy, taking a seat. Swan said, Why does it always have to be sinister, the shadowy cabal? Why can’t it be good? Why can’t there be good cabals that are shadowy and doing good. Working on some kind of generational plan for changing the total consciousness paradigm of a civilization the way that bad people have? They’ve got their secret societies and masons and handshakes or whatever so why can’t we have ours? The unbroken line of intent thing. Right? Eight hundred years of intent is a powerful thing. Knowledge is power. Supposedly. But knowledge is only power if you withhold it, right? But what if the withholders were doing it for nice reasons for a change? Noble reasons. We could start now.
Swan continued: remember when you were joking about why can’t we bring back the Afro?
Carne smiled. That particular remark had been inspired by a particular porno.
Swan said, well, imagine. Years from now we’re out of college, successful in the careers we have chosen. Say we’re worth a few million each. No, more. Like, say, thirty to fifty million each. That’s not impossible. It’s not unreasonable to assume.
Carne tipped back in his chair with the bristly back of his shaved head in the cradle of his meaty interlocked hands and his smile size increased. Swan wanted to tell him I’m responsible for that chair if you crack the legs. It came with the dorm.
Swan said say we chose a very young black girl who shows some talent. Get her at a young age. She’s still tender and slender. We sponsor a whole lifestyle of proper diet and really fine education. Part of the deal is that she doesn’t straighten her hair. Ever. She never straightens her hair. She grows tall and fine with this stupendous Afro and a gift at singing and she’s been groomed with more, you know, I don’t know, like, a 16th century courtesan-at-Versaille-or-something… versed in many languages and playing the harpsichord or, okay, the saxophone and the fine art of conversation and what not; we’ve invested a few million into making her this renaissance kind of black chick with an IQ you could choke a horse on and, but, yes, she can sing the paint off a Cadillac. And don’t forget she’s got this stupendous fucking Afro and we buy the best songwriters and producers money can buy. Let’s call her Super Sister. We buy Super Sister a number one in the charts kind of career, essentially. And she would be this massive influence. Black girls would stop straightening their hair and eating at the kitchen of the McDonald’s plantation and they’d be taking harpsichord lessons to emulate her. Whatever. All for just a few million dollars and the invisible machinations of a shadowy cabal for good. I mean. Fuck. Why not?
Carne’s eyes were closed by now and he looked almost asleep in his chair. The smile froze nicely.
Why not indeed, he said.
2. Victor
Swan’s trip to the WC has levels to it. There are fixations about not sitting square on the seat. For one thing the horror of the flush-wave dolphin-nosing his sweet little hair-purged balls. He tries to time evacuations to coincide with home-time but from time to time there is no getting around it and it comes in public, the call, sometimes, with importunate timing. The call is a widescreen mountaintop scene of monks blowing hard on spiraling five-meter horns filled with concrete. Swan thinks I’m reading the wrong tips about diet again.
Swan excuses himself with this kind of head-bow mis-gesture to the black or mulatto executive with something somehow Japanese about her (the suit? the seal-sleek hair? the sexual haze of death she marches through?) and moves with what he thinks of as fuckworthy grace through the point de capitoned leather of the doubledoors and down the out-of-body corridor toward the light. The door to the water closet you normally need the emperor’s touchbutton code for is propped yea-open with the black or mulatto janitor’s serf-bucket so Swan edges sort of sideways through the gap stepping over the bucket to justify entering by not actually opening or otherwise touching the actual matter of the door or the doorframe. Like an asymptote or something. He fantasizes swearing on a Bible that he did not open or touch this door. He fantasizes a baffled plainclothesmen finding no prints. He fantasizes Peter Falk giving him a sidelong glance of flummoxed admiration. The mere-mortals’ water closet is a whole flight down. And then he achieves his disappointing revelation which is that the forbidden water closet is identical to the water closet he should have traveled a whole flight down to and then comes the secondary impact of the epiphany that the difference would normally be him just not fucking being here. He is why the door is usually locked.
The body is not a machine it’s a community of machines. The gears of Swan’s shit machine are engaged and it is, of course, the end, not the beginning, of a process, an intestinal effort activated perhaps in the middle of that lecture-pretending-to-be-chit-chat from the black or mulatto with something somehow Japanese about her. The end-segment of the process becomes a process. The end of the process becomes a process in its own right with an arc and accoutrements. You can break down the stations of the cross into interlocking “stations of the cross”. The skull-white throne of Golgotha. He tries to remember those care-free college days. He visualizes a heart-breaking nautilus. Fibonacci.
…And then he will have to wipe and he will have to look at the result each time he wipes because if you don’t look you won’t know how much you’ll have to keep looking and wiping. You expunge or wrap and re-wrap the memory of the streaks and the smells and later walk into a restaurant pretending not to know or have a clue exactly how those fritters will end up. The notion that the planet is a closed-system nauseates him when he dwells on it. There are planets out there with zero shit. Swan thinks I’m getting ahead of myself here I haven’t even shit and I’m thinking about wiping.
The knees are bathed in milklight. The knees appear deceased. His knees are actually bearing weight as though he’s waiting for a starter’s pistol. He wants to groan and pant and finally give birth.
Very little of his weight is on the seat when the man they call VHR or The Master of Disaster or Death and Taxes comes in coughing. This is an entity that nobody has ever said hush to. This is a despot on the throne since before he could walk. He farts down a suit leg at the urinal shaking the leg. Swan should not be in here and withholds final delivery for fear of the telltale plop. A lush (even woodland) splash and gurgle on worn urinal candy of impossible duration is Swan’s warning to hold his plop in. The stream goes on and on for superhuman units without reaching the trickle part when VHR’s phone rings suddenly Beethoven’s Fifth so loud and stereo that Swan kind of lifts up off the seat and bangs the right elbow on the sharp-cornered high-security roll-dispenser. Blood he won’t be aware of until later as he goes over in his mind the terrifying conversation he is over-hearing that will seem to want to kill his mind as he is hearing it.
3. Elizabeth Houghton-Rand
I couldn’t fucking believe I was having a serious quote philosophical debate about whether or not to violate, abuse, torture and otherwise mortally fuck with a seventeen-year-old heiress for the sake of a political movement my comrades had as yet not quite managed to convince me even existed outside the endless late night bull-sessions we had in some white boy’s dorm-room before we’d even met her. White boy pays for the keg and and he’s suddenly what, Malcolm X? I kept kind of muttering under my breath to myself that this is really happening, guy. This is not a dream. That this shit was only an illusion to the extent that life itself is and waking up from this weirdass scenario will be impossible to achieve by any means less meaningful than death itself which is not a thought I even wanted to sneak up on. Let alone exemplify. On channel 7 news. She was passed-out on an air mattress in the fucking bathroom of Kwame and Dookie’s shabby-grandiose off-campus housing and it was not, as yet, any kind of a crime, no matter what Walter Cronkite tells you.
And then Josephus… Josephus… I remember wondering who had met that quote psycho first. Okay. He wasn’t Kwame’s friend. I asked Dookie later and Dookie said fuck no. I never knew the bumpkin existed before x-moment in time which I’m saying was scripted. With that big-assed bloody dick? Like he was seriously pulling a sword out the belly of an infidel and so forth. Like what am I seeing? Plus taking forever.
4. Josephus
Nobody stopped you from taking your dinner trays to your dormitory because you were black. You were taking your dinner trays, to your dormitory, because you were black. Nobody stopped you, from taking your dinner trays to your dormitory, because you were black. You were at Moorbury College because you were black. Your scholarship to Moorbury depended on your being black but you would not have been at Moorbury without a scholarship if you had not been black and needing a special way into a college that wouldn’t have been interested in you if you hadn’t been black. You put the tray on the bare mattress of the narrow bed in your single room and sat beside it and winced through the nasty work of escaping your snow-clogged boots while your dinner cooled. You had to remember to buy a thick rough doormat. You had wanted a thick rough doormat since the first time you saw one at the age of seventeen. As a result of that program.
You needed matches and canned ravioli for emergencies and a can opener. You would also need to buy a pillow case and sheets. Your first Student Aid check would come on Thursday which was a four-day wait. You’d been sleeping on a naked pillow on a raw mattress under a beach towel for three days in your long underwear with the heat cranked up. A sock hit the cement floor with living weight. You saw that you hadn’t clipped your toenails since the week before taking the two-day bus to Moorbury and added a toenail-clipper to the mental list. Thursday was also shrimp or steak dinner day. Tonight was cheeseburger and tater tots or home fries and fruit salad with chocolate mousse for dessert. You had three envelopes of powdered strawberry milkshake drink left in your suitcase.
You had never tasted chocolate mousse but you had heard about it. You had always assumed they set those on fire but that was another dessert. You noticed that the dark room was not very dark and even in the dark your foot looked very black and shiny because it was wet because the boots weren’t made for snow. The movie poster on the wall you faced as you peeled your other wet sock off was just out of reach. You had gotten it for free during your unusually late orientation and had not seen the film it was advertising nor heard of the actors appearing on it. They did not look famous to you.
You needed six “C” batteries for the cassette recorder you kept in the box it had come in and some more 60-minute tapes and added this to the to-buy list and reached for the dinner tray with your legs folded under. In a soft shell of doubled long-underwear you hadn’t removed in five days. You had come to your orientation two months late. Snow blown straight through the floodlight cutting across your view of the campus from the dorm room window provided the illusion the whole empty building was in motion like a majestic ship. The cafeteria was crowded and brightly loud and you had walked right out with your dinner tray, no questions asked.
You left the light off and sat on the bed eating the food you were embarrassed to admit was the best food of your life and you watched the snow. You wondered what it meant that no one had stopped you. You wondered if you had a blank check for anti-social behavior out of fear or compassion or same old disregard. Through the veil of the snow and at the other end of the very long walk dividing the icing-caked lawns lit by haloed lights at broad intervals like gas lamps from a Dickens engraving was the sharp black geometry of the new Moorbury chapel which had gone up in the 1960s. Stained glass at the core of the jarring shape caught needles of light from cars turning the corner in the distance occasionally heading for town or St. John’s to the south. The older chapel was not visible from your dormitory window and was on the older side of the campus where all the buildings were actually ivy-drenched scale-model cathedrals and you felt the unspoken sense of off-limits. You had walked over just once during your unusual two-month-late orientation to have some papers signed in an office by a woman who seemed surprised the whole time you were standing in her office in the grand old building. Surprised or ashamed. Or maybe she wanted to hug you. The tater tots were delicious. When you had bought a thick rough doormat on Thursday you would feel you had accomplished something. The first doormat you ever saw was in front of Victor Rand’s mansion.
NIBBLING ON THE CANDY-GLASS DIVIDER
THE PARIS REVIEW has a newish blogthing and it’s my favorite comment-thread playground at the moment. The commenters there are all some degree of literate [one day an enterprising young doctoral candidate is going to do a dissertation on the wildly-varying socio-intellectual registers of comment threads... compare the PR thread with a thread at YAHOO NEWS and the resultant vertigo is trippy; and, ps: a comment thread at the latter site, recently, clocked 175,000 comments! This isn't worthy of investigation as a meme-sack or paradigm?] and the articles are, largely, worthy. I could do without the World Cup articles and the accounts of PR vs VF softball games but I realize that young men who devote too much (or any) of their day to Things Literary are forced to assert their masculinity. But we digress…
So: PR is doing Terry Southern month and it’s lots of fun. Good old Terry! Terry was a red-warm shadow over my 70s-era coming-of-age. I was an avid reader of Terry-inflected/infected National Lampoon (I’ve managed to save one vintage copy of that glorious rag, from ’75, as I’ve mentioned before) and into Michael O’D's work on vintageSaturday Night Live (Terry and Mikey were chums and they overlapped, attitudinally) and Kubrick’s Terry-scripted Dr. Strangelove was/is, of course, a seminal text.
This is from a recent Terry Southern Month post at PR… the article-writer’s reminiscence about a lunch with Terry; I don’t so much take exception to it as think that such things require analytical (vs hagiographic) illumination:
We met, for the first time, in the basement of the now extinct O’Neal’s on 57th Street and Sixth Avenue, and while we were waiting to be seated in this rather crepuscular restaurant, we somehow got onto the subject of race and my teenaged envy of black guys for their superior basketball skills, their superior dancing moves, and, I had to believe, their superior sexual abilities. Which last launched Terry—by that stage in his life a fairly disheveled being—into the following monologue, delivered in a broad Texas drawl: “That reminds of a story about old Jim Brown. You know who Jim Brown was, don’t you?” I assured Terry that I did. “Well, back in the early sixties I was dating this model poon, and when we got back to her apartment, her roommate, who was also a model poon, was on the phone telling someone all about her date the night before with the football player Jim Brown. And I wasn’t listening very hard until I heard this model poon say, quite clearly, ‘And it was so big I couldn’t get my mouth around it!’” Deeply dirty and appreciative chuckle. “Jim Brown.”
and then:
But two hours and five bourbons apiece later we stumbled up the stairs into the bright summer sunlight. And as we strolled in a thick and pleasant alcoholic fog along 57th and then up Madison in the direction of the Penguin offices I looked across the street and noticed a handsome and very athletic looking black man walking in conversation with a smaller white man. The black man was built like some sort of superbly fashioned logging tool, wide at the shoulders and narrow at the waist, a leather jacket hanging off his muscular frame. He was wearing tight blue jeans as well, so tight that they left little doubt that this man’s love muscle was as developed as all the rest. And there was something familiar about this guy. Very familiar . . .
And so I turned to Terry and declared to him delightedly, “Look over there, Terry. See that black guy? My God, do you know who that is? That is . . . JIM BROWN!”
To which I respond at the blog:
2 Comments
1.
Steven Augustine says:
June 22, 2010 at 12:24 pm
“…we somehow got onto the subject of race…”
I like that “somehow”.
Okay, bookish, clubby white guys… enough with the affectionate depersonalization (as socio-economic prosthetics) of “black guys” already… though, I must admit, I’ve never heard one of us referred to as a “logging tool” before. The “Us” vs “Them” of it is just too palpable… and it ain’t satire. Even with all the chuckles. Thankgawd Ray Carver wasn’t at the same lunch, I suppose. Or Gore Vidal… !
2.
Steven Augustine says:
June 22, 2010 at 12:25 pm
PS (I bet it wasn’t even Jim Brown…)
This is just the patient work of nibbling away at those candy-glass walls (between people of various races/genders/classes) that really shouldn’t be there. LITERARY FICTION and its contiguous territories and conversations should not be a clubby preserve of one particular demographic, with a corner of the Genre-ghetto reserved for the non-male and non-straight and non-white. More women should do this nibbling and chipping; more of the Poor; more Queers; more so-called Persons of Colour.The key is to do the work in a spirit of gregarious lucidity instead of opaque, self-defeating rage.
UPDATE: still waiting for an Intellectual Sister to take on the “model poon” riff
“Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem on Wednesday threatened to forcibly evict four Palestinian families they claim are living on property belonging to Jews in the neighborhood of Silwan.
Beit Yonatan
“The settlers said they would hire private security firms to implement the evictions if the four families, which include 40 individuals, do not leave by July 4.
The Palestinian families are living in a structure that was once a Yemenite synagogue in Silwan, located near the neighborhood’s controversial Beit Yonatan structure.”
A PLEA for QUALITY CONTROL
Tom Brady, over at Scarriet, is still very busy being a champion of retrograde literary practices… such as quasi-philosophical doggerel, as in the following:
Doctor and mourner die, too,
After mourning over you.
So everything’s equal in the end:
In the world, nothing to defend
But another moment of giving
By those fortunate to be living.
What we strain—with our souls—to say
Cannot be articulated anyway,
Except in vague gestures understood
By ceremony and the common good.
So do not panic about your fate–
The poetry prize arrives too late.
The happy do not heed fame.
After burying you,
Doctor and mourner will be buried, too,
With furious indifference the same.
The first couplet, as a stand-alone, is okay… it’s actually nearly good, and says everything Brady needs to say on the subject:
Doctor and mourner die, too,
After mourning over you.
Why not just leave it at that? The rest of the poem is an exercise in padding which argues, against itself, and Brady’s mission, that quasi-philosophical doggerel (on an overly-colonized topic) is the kind of kitsch that framed needlepoint cries out to serve. Tom has been inadvertently hammering this point home over the course of the past dozen poems of his that have popped in my In Box (I guess by commenting there, a while back, I became a subscriber).
This is either a cautionary tale about the American tendency towards Messianic Salesmanship (or Visionary Hucksterism: Tom is Branding his knee-jerk Antiquarianism, I suppose) or a cautionary tale about the too-casual approach that too many Blahgs take towards Quality Control.
The Angela Davis Experience in Berlin, June 20, 2010
I guess in the USA they would peg her as an “icon of the radical left”, a lead figure of the black panthers and vice-presidential candidate for the Communist Party USA. But stamping her with the rabble-rouser seal of pop-aganda approval makes it easy to avoid the complexity and real struggle of her life, which will prove to have more influence on world history than the resumé of her Birmingham boot-licking paisana, Condoleezza Rice.
Angela Davis: a student of Adorno and Marcuse, fired from her Professorship at UCLA by Ronald Reagan personally … a leader in both the Black Panther and Communist Parties, and put on the FBI’s ten most-wanted list… after being arrested, her bail was paid by a farmer from Caruthers, California and part of her legal defense expenses were paid for by the Presbyterian Church . Yes, the world has changed since then.
Which is why the bizarre mix of the audience here in Berlin was pretty fascinating: as young pupils in East German grade school, many had written postcards to Angela in prison as part of the state-sponsored free-Angela campaign. But also the former old-guard of stodgy East German Party-soldiers were present… as well as a new generation of German people of colour, born and bred in a “reunited” Germany that obviously still hasn’t come to terms with the fact that Germany is not as homogeneous as it once had been… or that maybe the wrong side won the Cold War? The questions revealed much about the questioners: Did she still consider herself a communist? Wasn’t she naïve “back then” to believe that revolution was possible? But Angela Davis consistently hurled the audience back into the present: maybe she was naïve “back then” but thankfully so, because otherwise nobody would ever have mustered the strength for organization and struggle that did change things… and proceeded to explain her own experience in community-building and militant action.
A good woman.
Excellent reportage, Comrade DJ Sensei Ninetto! I’m sorry I missed Ms. Davis… I was busy cooking Offsprung her breakfast.
You didn’t mention that her response to the question “[does] she still consider herself a communist?” got your solitary applause until the others (the Germans always need permission) took your cue…
Let’s see if I can find the video clip of that moment…
RE: The Cold War: I’m of the still-hardening opinion that there was more (or less) to that conflict than met the eye and that much of it was a pantomime being put on for us Serfs… by both “sides”. When you look back and watch Nikki Kruschev behaving obligingly like the bellicose bumpkin to the delight of a very easy-going Tricky Dick, it strikes you that the supposed dichotomy there was as theatrical as the one between William Jefferson Clinton and George HW Bush Sr during the ’92 election: these men weren’t fierce fucking rivals. Bush was Clinton’s mentor. And we fell for that shit like a ton of bricks.
Supposedly “fighting communism” gave them as much of an excuse to fuck with sovereign nations (ie, kill their democratically-elected leaders and replace them with Friedmanite puppets) as “fighting radical Islam” gives them to fuck with Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, et al, now (and just as the Taliban were armed, and are still funded, by the CIA, or whatever wing of the Sociopathocracy, Kruschev was on the payroll, too). I’m not saying there aren’t/weren’t True Believers of either the Communist or Islamist faith. I just think the True Believers were/are out of the loop and the real game is being crafted by the super-cynical sociopaths (of various national persuasions) at the Top. The really tricky part being that the game always changes. Note, for example, that now that Russia is an openly capitalist state, the guy in charge ain’t acting obligingly goofy*.
PS My own little Hypernoiac addendum: covert cooperation between Moscow and Washington would certainly explain the fact that the supposed-enemy never blew the whistle on the Apollo hoax!
*Actually, let’s go into this issue at length, later: the Cold War-era USSR was a Communist society with a Capitalist government. The “Revolution” was “betrayed” at a very early stage… as such “revolutions” usually are. The question is not, “Which system works best, Communism or Capitalism?”… the question is, “Was genuine Communism in Russia ever possible?”
Check out this hokum; this staged event:
HOW WE LIVED 2
Porn was a lot more interesting twenty-to-forty years ago when the so-called smutty magazines were windfalls one might discover (in bundled heaps) while taking a shortcut down some alley. Porn was only for sale in the sleaziest of despair-soaked shops but there was an otherwise-respectable place where I bought expensive photo magazines (like ZOOM) and new-wavey imports (like FACE) and in the very back was an entrance with a beaded curtain that was reputed to lead to the porno. One had to stand near the French, Italian and Russian imports (mostly fashion magazines) to get a look through the beaded curtain but I would have died of shame to actually pass through the Sad Man Portal. One never saw handsome, confident young men or women go there. One only ever felt anxiety-free, standing near that threshold, if in the company of one’s pretty girlfriend.
I saw the movie CAFE FLESH (script: Jerry Stahl) in 1983 or 1984 on an ex-girlfriend’s VCR while apartment-sitting; I’d looked under her bed for goodies and there it was, a videocassette in a lurid box. It was the first porno movie (if you don’t count anything by Pasolini) I ever saw and the only one that ever got me all het up. It was absurdo-erotic lyricism and I haven’t seen anything like it since. In comparison, the 21st-century XXXX being fire-hosed into your face online is cruel, bland and horrifying.
I can’t see clips from CAFE FLESH without thinking of Olde New York and the original INTERVIEW magazine. CAFE FLESH can make you laugh during your orgasm and that’s a sensation to covet…
GNOMENCLATURE 2
“Thanks for writing back so quickly. And thank you for changing the “u” in Lurker to an “o”. It makes me feel approximately 30% less creepy. I must admit, Lorker still makes me feel like I’m some lunatic peeping through someone’s blinds at night, furiously jerking off, hunched over, jaw jutting out.”
I shall call the stealth-comrades LORCAS, then. Is very nice, no?
Nice. Listen with a decent set of speakers (or headphones), Comrades Lorcas and Explicit:
Down the spiraling drive they sail, smooth as a Haitian lawyer. All five in the land-galleon: Shem, Seth, Katryn, O’Sirus and Gwynneth, Gwynneth with her hands on her knees in the ergonometric circulating-gel-filled bucketseat between O’Sirus’s and Katryn’s, the sky so bright that only the van’s tinted, treated, polarized bubble windows can protect them. Shakuhachi music on the soundsystem. “Shakuhachi” means “one foot eight”, the standard length of a Shakuhachi. O’Sirus thinks wouldn’t it be embarrassing if our names were our measurements. The lavender sun is harsh on her arm despite the filtering window. Her arm is the color of an internal organ.
The landscaped estates at the top of the hill give way to large-but-crammed-together houses lower and then smaller, crammed-together houses intermingled with apartment buildings and transient-looking commercial spaces. The lower the van descends, the more pedestrians they see, like denizens of oceanic depths, colorful and cartoonish in their monstrousness, deceptively humorous-looking, weird in their movements, soundtracked by Shakuhachi.
O’Sirus is in a zone, watching but not seeing, hearing but not listening. Having to do with not coming, probably. She hasn’t come in weeks. Gwynneth is telling Katryn (quietly, in deference to the Japaneseness of the flute music) about her youth and how her life was changed immeasurably by personally meeting the most important unknown Civil Rights activist of the 21st century, Doctor Jonatha Shamton, who was in Duluth to give a series of lectures at the U. of D., where Gwynneth had a job in one of the campus bookstores, fifteen years old, ten years ago, stickering books when an exquisitely dark black woman of slight build, medium height, shiny shaved head, somewhere in the area of sixty years old, wearing those over-sized hoop earrings that black women with shaved heads favored, in the ‘60s and ‘70s, as an ornamental ersatz for hair and also wearing big round blackframed eyeglasses, making her look very much like a priestess of the circle or something, with her big round glinting lenses and swinging hoops and the perfectly curved back of her glistening skull… walked in.
-Good afternoon, Sister.
“I’d heard about black women calling each other sister, back in the day, but I’d never seen it happen before, especially not to me, because most people can’t even tell that I’m black, so that kind of threw me right there, but I was, I don’t know. I was flustered. I hadn’t even come out yet. All I knew was I didn’t like boys. It was like, greeting me that way, she was telling me things about myself I didn’t even know yet, and I was ready to listen.
“She said, Can you please direct me to your Jewish writers section. I told her we didn’t have one. She said, well, can you please direct me to your Polish writers section. I said we didn’t have one of those, either. She said, you mean Joseph Conrad and Philip Roth are just mixed in with all the other writers of literary fiction? With this, like, horrified look on her face. It was hysterical. I told her yes, that was the case. Then she took me by the hand… she actually grabbed my hand and it was the firmest, warmest, softest grip I ever felt… and she guided me to the African American Studies shelf in the back of the bookstore. She said, Then why are Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison and Langston Hughes and this Duke Ellington biography all crammed together in this little plantation over here?
“We walked back to the counter in front and she got her business card out and wrote down her room number at the hotel she was staying at and told me I should inform my manager at the bookstore that racial segregation was officially illegal in the United States of America, even in bookstores, and to call her and let her know how it went. So I called her after dinner. She said, hey, Gwynneth,thanks for calling,how did it go? I said, well, to make a long story short, I quit. She said, hmmm, I guess that means you’re working for me now.
“First, my job was showing her around Duluth while she was here, even though I didn’t have a driver’s license and couldn’t drive. We went by foot or public transportation. I showed her the lift bridge, our big tourist attraction, you know, the Statue of Liberty of Duluth, and she looked at me like I was a little dumb but kinda sweet and said, Why are you showing me this? I told her that it could be raised from 155 feet to 225 feet in under a minute and she laughed so hard I turned red. I didn’t know it, but my education had begun.
“How long did it take that old sharpie to get you?” asks Shem, physically unable to twist in her seat and therefore gloating at Gwynneth in the rearview. O’Sirus is not paying attention and did not happen to hear Doctor Shamton’s name. If she had she’d have considered the mention miraculous.
“Oh, I don’t know, a week or so,” answers Gwynneth, turning red. She flushes such delicate Japanese-like crushed-cherry-in-eggshell-colored-milk tints that Katryn wonders if Shem has triggered the appetizing blush on purpose. “But she was very respectful. No pressure or anything. You could kinda sense she was never what you’d call horny, so she kinda turned the whole thing into what I’d call an aesthetic experience.”
Everything’s a matter of scale. Chubby Gwynneth looks impossibly petite compared to the twin giants strapped in the front seats of the van. Katryn a trinket. Shem begins fiddling with a box full of bubble wrap and Seth begins what they all soon realize is some sort of presentation.
“Okay, because we’re on Sony’s early adopter VIP list, we got a cool toy in the mail the other day that I thought would be kinda kicky for us all to try out on this outing.”
Seth hands everyone in the back seats what appears to be retro-designed feline-style black horn-rimmed eyeglasses with smokey pink lenses. The galleon is steering itself, of course. Other than the fact that the stems of the glasses are a few millimeters thicker than the stems on normal glasses, and the lenses are smokey pink, and there are fine-mesh grilles on the stems near the ears, they look like normal glasses. Some new kind of phone? Everyone is tired of meeting new kinds of phones.
“They’re powered by movement and body heat; to keep them charged you just have to walk about thirty minutes a day. The average workout on a treadmill’ll do it.”
O’Sirus slips hers on. The lenses appear to have little or no magnifying power. “But what do they do?”
“The prototype name is Gyno-Encoded Reactive Telemetry. GERTY, for short. They might, like, change that after getting a little consumer feedback, but I hope not because I think it’s kinda cute.”
Katryn leans across Gwynneth’s lap towards O’Sirus and stage-whispers, “You look like a librarian named Edith in those.”
“Nothing’s happening.”
“They have to charge up for a while. Wait.”
They enter a tunnel fast and follow a spiral of recessed sodium lights upwards and upwards and round and round then heave into epiphany of virgin blue incandescence at such a drastic angle that O’Sirus suffers bellydrop vertigo. It’s like coming out of a long weird dream she immediately begins forgetting as they ring the roof of the lot looking for just the right place to park on, and as the galleon is finally parked and de-boarded and running through its checklist of function-altered adjustments, clicking and humming and off-gassing in microjets hissing through underside vents, the group gathers in a broad morning shadow at its side, all of them looking like librarians named Edith. They are standing on grid-painted asphalt overlooking Lake Superior; the top level of a parking complex filling, from the bottom up, since daybreak. The air is a spectacle of freshness; the gulls like feathers from a pillowfight; the moon a ghostly fingerprint on the invisible button that made the sun pop up. From the side of the roof they’re standing on it appears as though one could run fifty yards and hop off the opposite wall and land directly in the water. O’Sirus thinks that this is what this continent once had to offer, the vastness of unbroken vista, and now you only get it in slivers and flakes and soon enough not at all as everything goes interior, packed away in the space-saving storage of everyone’s sad little cell of private experience. What is an i-pod but a prison cell of music? What is a masturbation fantasy but a prison cell of sex? What is a snack but a prison cell of yummy?
…Where did that come from?
Seth is speaking. Now Shem adds something. They enter an express elevator that bears with unhuman grace the recordbreakingness of their party and drops with computered tolerance to earth. Modern elevators compared to their ancestors are like modern football players compared to those comically scrawny, middleaged guys in very little padding and leather helmets cavorting in newsreel footage of the ‘30s. Modern elevators are safe at roughly eight times the load. Never before have elevator engineers been tasked with imagining that eight people weighing a thousand pounds each are not unlikely to enter the same elevator all at once and expect a safe ride up or down. In fact, considering the upsurged flow of American tourists in various cities of Europe, the Society of German Elevator Engineers (Die Bundes-Genossenschaft der Fahrstuhltechniker) has convened a series of emergency symposia, all across the E.U., to address the problem. There’s even a convention, right there, in Duluth, in a building that happens to be along the route they will all be walking this morning, which is why I brought it up.
The elevator doors open and they file out. Shem and Katryn and Gwynneth up front, Seth trailing behind them, O’Sirus trailing behind everyone, the cool lotion of a shapely breeze mitigating the imposition of the sun’s male force. They are walking to the shop where Seth and Shem have ordered imported fabrics from a Muslim province of China. The fabric will go into the making of special garments to be worn by everyone in Shem and Seth’s wedding party. The fabric is so rare that it would be cheaper to tailor all 197 garments from twenty-dollar bills. O’Sirus is thinking about money.
WHY CAN’T JOHNNY or JENNIFER WRITE?
Roxane Gay, at a place called HTML GIANT, posted an essay, about the ins-and-outs of social networking vs editorial policy, called “I’ll Be There For You, Just Not in the Submission Queue”:
In a community as small as what can be loosely termed the independent publishing community, the lines are easily blurred. With blogs and social networking and sites such as this one, it’s easy for writers and editors to become familiar and sometimes friends. There are days when it feels like every writer is an editor and every editor is a writer, and we’re all submitting work to each other in a deeply incestuous whirlwind of writing. The Internet has also made the word friend interesting. I’ve written on this subject before. I correspond with lots of people. I have many acquaintances and writers/editors with whom I get on well, but the people I consider friends have my phone number and could call me at 7 am and that’s not many. With few exceptions, we’ve spent time together, in person. We know things about each other that we wouldn’t share in 140 characters or less.
A lot of editors write about finding rejection difficult. While I don’t cackle gleefully while sending rejections, I don’t have a problem with doing it. I don’t find it troubling. Sending rejections is inevitable and necessary. It is part of the process for putting together a magazine. Whether I know you or not, whether we are friends, acquaintances, or strangers, I am looking for great writing. If you don’t send me great writing, or if for whatever reason your writing isn’t a great fit, I will reject you and sleep soundly. If we’re friends or acquaintances, I will send you a really nice note. I don’t know if friends expect that friendship translates into an automatic acceptance but I hope not.
What struck me was a certain nicely-integrated smugness in the essay’s tone, which would be fine if the author of the piece were William Shawn or Dorothy Parker. One of the Zines cited in the piece is Smokelong Quarterly; clicking over to it, we find that the first story on the page is a sloppy piece of shit shaped with a sophomore’s plastic tools. It begins:
She steps forward, her bare feet cut by the light from the street lamp. Her big toe curls in toward the others. Cigarette butts and bottle caps litter the tar of the alley behind her apartment. Let’s hope there’s no broken glass.
She stands motionless in the half-light, and then slowly, almost imperceptibly, begins to sway. The blue hem of her skirt shifts in the light.
A hand slips about her waist. Holds her close. We strain to make out the rough shape of it, the thick fingers, the wide palm. She stiffens at first, then tilts her head back, as if resting on an invisible shoulder.
She raises her own hand in invitation. Please, take it, we think. And then he does. A strong hand. A sure hand. A hand with battered knuckles and rough hair along the back. He pulls her into the darkness.
The night surrounds us like an attic.
[it goes on for another 500 words or so]
Not that we’re surprised that this text is crap. The next story I access on the site (written by a James Tad Adcox who is, himself, an editor at another Zine), begins:
i.
My father calls me on the phone. It’s been years since I last talked with him. He asks me how I am, asks how’s the wife, how’s our kid. He says he was watching TV and he saw an ad for a local college and started to think of me. I wonder if he’s a little drunk. His mood changes, he’s quiet for a long time while I talk, and then he tells me that all my education ever did was make me think I was too good for people.
It goes on for another five or six numbered paragraphs and does not, at any point, improve. Clicking over from there to the Zine that writer edits, I clicked on a piece posted on that Zine which linked to another Zine, where I read this, by a writer named Lydia Ship:
At that time everyone lived in a cave underground and the burrow I found to call home hosted so many fleshy languid wayfarers that every move and thought became erotic, even walking to the fridge, now nestled against a few boulders but otherwise the same cheap white affair it had always been in dens of that ilk. Don’t ask me how it worked or how anyone got oxygen because what did I care? Everyone was so sincere and sincere is sex, so no, no one minded living underground, in our burrow or anywhere else, since violence went away forever and life was a boudoir mall cave: rock, and open-faced people, and things people bought before the underground time. Walk out of the burrow through another rock burrow into another rock burrow and pass women in faded silk bathrobes still carrying designer handbags, men in slippers and suit jackets, children in lollipop-sized rubies and bug-eyed Chanel sunglasses. Everything functional and back to a new norm, just step over rubble now, no architecture, no wallpaper, no plants, no sunlight, everyone mellow, all around cave. A hippie living in my burrow left me a love note in a bag of chocolate-covered graham cookies, but I never have any privacy so I walked to the river running through the cave to read. The note was four pages long and full of sincerity, I was sure, and I couldn’t wait; it would totally turn me on. What do you think but when I got there and pulled the note from my pocket, strangers still slung their arms around me and tried to look over my shoulder, everyone sharing everything now, so I waded into the water but you wouldn’t believe the current and with the water rushing and masses of people bobbing along for the ride, urgency lost its hold and the next thing I knew I was at least twenty miles downstream in who knew what burrow.
Which gets points for wandering out of the box, a little. But it’s not very good writing, despite the writer’s slightly-better Imagination. The entire story is a single paragraph about four times longer than this excerpt (the equivalent of about two pages) but Lydia couldn’t be bothered to make any of the sentences necessary; the tone is the conversational, idiomatically-standard tone we recognize from James Tad Adcox and other half-arsed writers here mentioned. Lydia lays it out a little differently (in run-ons, the clue that we are reading avant garde material) but it’s the same voice, which is not, in essence, different from the voices they chat, or order pizzas, with. It’s the voice of the descriptive passages in a screenplay which is, itself, the textual analog of someone describing the action on a television program, in real time, over the phone.
In Lydia’s author-bio we find mentions of all the Zines she’s published in, so I Google the first Zine mentioned (Night Train) and quote here the second story presented (short enough to review easily), on the front page of that Zine, by someone named Yvette Ward-Horner:
When I met him, he was thin and shifty and he did things to my body that no other man had contemplated. I called him the Mucky Man, blushing a little to think where his tongue had been. No crevice on the body too dark and fetid for him. I fell in love with his persistent fingers.
At first, it turned me on to know he was cheating. He was at it constantly—with women from bars, with his middle-aged neighbor, with a friend’s cousin, even with a couple of heroin addicts. His best friend, Roady, told me about it, leering over his beer.
“You’re going to catch something,” he said.
But I didn’t.
After a while, his cheating made me fat and vicious. When he wasn’t around, I sat in dim bars by myself, squeezing my cleavage between my arms and waiting for any old someone to buy me drinks. Sometimes Roady appeared, his big raw cheeks freshly pimpled with stinging razor-burn. He lurked by the jukebox, always pretending not to notice me. I went home with short men, dirty men, hairy men, men who scraped their callused hands over my thighs and whispered Oh baby in my hot, chubby ear. After a year of this, I left town and no one tried to stop me.
What we notice is the standard level of competency in English, which qualifies the writer to craft, say, a functional writer’s bio. The level of Invention is nil. There are no striking images or fresh metaphors or ironies/paradoxes/subtle jokes to turn the reading of the piece into anything resembling a pleasure. It is merely a fictional data dump.
What is this? An epidemic of people-who-weren’t-born-to-be-writers writing. Imagine the fashion industry being suddenly glutted with people whose talent in/fascination with fashion was limited to the fact that they wore shorts in the summer and parkas in the winter and knew enough not to match polka dots and plaids. The plague of excerpted texts above, remember, was stuff that made it through the merciless filters of high-minded editors like Roxane Gay.
To get our bearings, let’s read something by a born-writer who became a great writer through self-critical diligence:
“She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
Only a genuine writer could have come up with that (I won’t insult anyone’s knowledge or intelligence by naming the writer). It only takes one sentence to tell, doesn’t it? But who can tell anymore?
I left this comment on the blogpost at HTML GIANT:
This discussion would be more resonant if the majority of the *accepted and published* material out there weren’t so predictable/ constricted in style and subject / mediocre as a school lunch. The metastasizing killer in Lit Fict (hinted at in the blogpost) is the one which has already destroyed Poetry: the very dull feedback-hum of a community of producers which is the only natural audience for its product. This is in part because of a damaging shift in the focus and meaning of the early stages of the writer’s development, which used to hinge on inspiration and humble goals set in the face of overwhelming mastery… whereas it’s now just a matter of the simple expedience of learning to piece-together, from standard components, the model that “works”.
The free-product model of Online Lit has, alas, allowed me to read hundreds of stories in dozens of Zines in the past decade and the summing up is easy: three or four basic subjects in two or three standard voices at the same (workshopped) level of competency… meh. What’s at stake if the difference between what gets “published” and what doesn’t is the difference between “MEH” and “sub-MEH”? Edmund Wilson, Kathy Acker, Italo Calvino, Harold Brodkey, Paul Bowles, Flannery O’Connor, DFW and WSB, et al, are meh-ing in their graves.
Look: face it, you’re not going to earn any real money doing this any way… so take some risks. Walk away from the faux-confirmations of the consensus-driven “community”. Start from scratch. Forget how to “market yourself” and learn to write. You’ll feel great. A few of you may turn out to be geniuses and I will be deeply grateful to read the results. I’ll even be happy to pay for the privilege.
In the cruel 15 years since the premature victory-lap of Experience, Mart has gone from fluffing Saul Bellow and getting French kisses in return to… being fluffed by Will Self and letting Will lick his dentures.
“Martin Amis and Will Self were in Paris this weekend for the Shakespeare and Company literary festival. Self said Amis was the most important writer in English since the 1960s and Amis returned the compliment, saying Self seemed to be the result of a romantic union between Jorge Luis Borges and J.G.Ballad.”
Cursory analysis reveals the weak assertion inherent in that “seemed”, plus the diplomatic ambiguity of referring to any writer as the offspring of any other two writers: yes, but is the kid any good? I give it two years, tops, before Will turns on Mart with a tepid review of the next, or the next after next, disappointment.
you have too much time
and you waste it
[ed.'s note: we have to be amazed that we've managed to avoid this kind of idiot's fart comment for all this time, Comrades Lorcas and Explicit! Consider this one framed and hung over the Shytter]
The Quaker churchbell at nearby School House Lane says six with authority of the long, long dead. Kimbo eases the closet open, tugs a tumble of sheets and blankets and pillows out like textile guts. A bed takes shape on the floor near the rocking chair she hasn’t rocked in for years. Who has the patience in 1977 for working so hard to go nowhere? And other pre-mechanical technologies. A book of poems face-down beside the bed’s putative head. A water glass. In drama they call it dressing the set. Convincing precautions against mother having that dyke-inspired nervous breakdown or worse. Backing out the room screaming whores of Babylon, first thing in the morning.
As if it’s not bad enough I’m a Mulatto, she thinks, mussing a pillow and appraising her handiwork. Now I’m a Lesbian, too. The two dumbest words that she knows and she is now both. Kim is now officially a Mulatto Lesbian and Lyndsay is a Jew Dyke but there is a difference. Lyndsay is also a writer, which trumps everything. Wipes the slate clean. Lyndsay is a writer. The root of the word “Mulatto” is mule. Writer trumps everything.
Mother is insufferably cheerful at breakfast. Looks younger than either of the other two. The other two, the Jew and Mulatto, look tired. Kim’s denim hat. Lyndsay’s round head and weak chin. Looks like she’s melting into the pudding of her boobs. Mother is getting her Masters at Temple. She passes a laden plate. Her dimples, her mint-green eyes, her red satin hair. You’d never dream of fucking your mother but you’re forced to admit to seeing why others would want to. Those high hard tiny tits and perfect tan pancakes of hers. What is a pancake in the Linnean system of classification? Eggs and flour in the shape of a sand dollar: half animal, half plant. Plantimal. Having never lived, is it really dead? I can’t eat these undead things, thinks Kimbo, as Lyndsay chops and spears and shovels hers in. Disgusting. It doesn’t occur to Kim that Lyndsay would rather chew than talk just now. Or make eye contact.
Hunched over her plate, she forks the plantimal pancakes in. Mother is talking about a certain Doctor Shamton who leads the seminar called Psycho-Geographic Approaches to Folk Discourse and Literature 101 she’s so excited about auditing. It was three years ago to the day that Kim looked across the very breakfast table at her mother and was flattened by the realization that mother’s Caucasian. And I’m not.
“I just think it’s the most fascinating course. We were analyzing Jack and the Beanstalk? I’ll bet you never knew it’s an allegory about adultery as a tool of class oppression! You have to unravel the puzzle with what Doctor Shamton calls textual mirroring. More jam? Try this one, sweetie. You’ll love this on the pancakes. So. Jack’s beans: well, those are obviously semen, but not his. The beans are in exchange for money; reverse that and it means he’s achieving a social or economic advantage from turning a blind eye to his wife’s affair. Or forcing her to. The beanstalk is phallic but it doesn’t grow up, it grows down, into the earth, which is an obvious womb symbol, not only for the fertility thing but the notion of earth, of dirtiness. The giant is the opposite of a giant: a fetus. Jack smells the ‘blood of an Englishman’… the man from the ruling class who gets his wife pregnant. It’s really quite something. We ran through a reading of War of the Worlds, too, in which the aliens are crypto-white men. Drink your orange juice before the vitamins die, Kimbaud.”
“This Doctor Shamton wouldn’t happen to be black, would he?” asks Kim, finishing her orange juice with a hostile flourish.
“Kimbo, darling, what would that have to do with anything?”
That glow on mother’s face.
They are heading for the trolleystop on Wayne Avenue in a pico font drizzle of commas, periods, ellipsis and dashes when Lyndsay reaches for Kim’s hand. Like it’s natural. Fuck. And now their arms swing stiffly, falsely, hard against the rhythm of the stride. Lyndsay’s big-knuckled grip. Omnivorous bossy Jew tit rapist genius writer grip.
“You want to know the first time I noticed how beautiful you are?” asks Lyndsay. She speaks with the militantly naive tones of an adopted child. The Philly rain beads her face with dark soft glass and she is staring in shy triumph forward. Her neck stretches out over chugging breasts, comically intrepid. Human breasts are the largest, proportionally, of any mammal’s and Lyndsay’s are larger than most. Each is the size of an over-suckled infant; each breast is big enough to have its own tits. They clamor and kick under her oversized shirt and unbuttonable red raincoat and you could see how a caveman would think of himself as wealthy for owning them and how he’d be willing to put the energy into doing so. She would’ve been a hit on the primordial veld. In fact she looked not unlike the Venus of Willendorf, that stone age pinup, all dimple and bulge. With a longer neck.
Dressing for breakfast, matter-of-factly nude, Lyndsay had looked gravitybound and turtly and exactly like one of her trademark self-mocking mammophallus cartoons, sending a hot pang of pity through the skinny girl who was stealing a peek while pretending to do morning yoga. Kim hadn’t even sucked on one of them yet, unless she’d done it in her sleep. She doesn’t want to. She’d hefted one, though. Her own nipples are sore as cherries. Glancing from passersby to oncoming traffic and back again, expecting a hurled bottle or epithet or hail of bullets to come teach them a lesson. The raincoat is such a bright red vinyl that she might as well be wearing a helmet equipped with a turret light. The rain isn’t beading on Kim’s face (is it the Ph of mulatto skin?) but adhering like a clammy mask and she thinks how in yet another way am I different from the white women in my life.
“It was in the Quaker pool. We must have been seven or eight because your father was still around. I remember how he looked from the point of view of underwater. He was standing at the edge of the pool in his white suit like a celebrity in a funhouse mirror. We were both underwater, you and I, and, Kim, listen, I looked and saw you floating there near me with your hair like a cloud of ink and you just seemed like the most astonishing sloe-eye siren to me. I was so awe-struck to the degree that I almost drowned. That’s really truly when I noticed how beautiful you are, although I had already loved you for so many years.” Laughs. “Listen, I was never as innocent as I seemed.”
She squeezes Kim’s hand love-hard and then harder and Kim waits for the other shoe to fall. The red-hot penny to drop. For pedestrians to stop mid-stride and gawk and sneer or for some bluecollar super-ape with a pumping shoulder to crank down the driverside window on his beater in a clotted grey cloud (the exhaust traveling faster than the car itself) and shout what the whole street is already thinking. Kim expects it with such a force that when it comes it will be a relief, she figures. The tension is killing. Like being pregnant with a bomb set to detonate at the moment of birth.
“Oh, my love, I’m so glad you like the book, my love, because I think I would’ve died if you hadn’t, because, is it safe to confess now that I wrote it for you, about us? About my feelings for you and how beautiful you are. I’m Kith and you’re Kynna in the book, as you could probably guess. I’m the Kith character, the boy, sent away to Brotherland, writing letters to his beloved. And you’re Kynna, the beloved. Didn’t you recognize yourself in her description? Kith writes that his beloved is the color of moonlight on the pages of his precious old diary. The color of moonlight on inky paper. That’s you.”
Something about Philadelphia is so hideously apt when it’s wet.
Kim, eyes on the oily street, says, “The description of the Brotherland camp is pretty convincing. Does it all take place on an island or something? Kith’s part of it, I mean. Because that part wasn’t clear.”
“Listen, Kim, Kim, why are you ignoring the issue?”
“Fuck, man. What issue?”
A car is coming up behind them, two wheels on the curb, at the rough speed of an untalented hundred yard dasher, muffler sparking the stone.
***
When males in the world of Lyndsay’s novel, Kith and Kynna, reach thirteen, they are by law required to take a blood test. The test is called a Singh-Draper. The results are read in twenty columns, each column scored on a scale from one to twelve. Any value higher than six appearing in any of the twenty columns is considered a red flag; a “typical” male scores red flags across the board and is required by law to report to a Brotherland Transit Station within three months of receiving his test results. Therefrom to be transferred by secure federal transport to Brotherland, to remain for a period of no less than thirteen, and no more than twenty five, years. This is for the protection of Society, and it works. There is no rape, theft, bullying, battery, sexual harassment, murder or graffitti in the cities or the villages. All of that has been moved to Brotherland. The most harmful of the immemorial patrimonies have been moved, en bloc, to Brotherland. The Arts flourish. An open sense of community and public space, to be utilized at zero risk at any time of day or night or season of the year, flourishes. Does every male who enters Brotherland return from it? This is a controversial question.
Studies have determined that even such physical violence as had been perpetrated by females of pre-Brotherland eras had been, without fail, a result of the proximity and influence of males. Male violence, like female materialism, is an outmoded trait that had been essential to early humanity’s survival on the neolithic African playing field. Male violence, like female materialism (the fascinating parallel being that each gender-specific trait was known to excite mimetically negative behavior in susceptible members of the colleague gender), has no place in civilization. Female materialism, unlike male violence, has been shown to vanish when subjects are placed in an environment in which the trait proves irrelevant (ie, equal distribution of wealth). Conversely: destructive male violence is irremediable; intrinsic. That male violence wanes with age leads to the adjusted standardized scientific, legal and ethical guidelines defining the mature male, greatly more responsive to moderate chemo-therapeutic conditioning, as belonging to a fifth gender, official taxonomy pending. Colloquially, though: Softies, grampies, halfmen, euns, nomo’s, shufflers, danglers, bachelors, capotes, custards, doughcocks, sweeties, hardnots, deadballs, uncs, uncas, groanas…
Weissman imagines a suburban nationscape with its hi-tech hidden to the extent that it’s indistinguishable from magic. Blackbox super-tech. The houses are pseudo-woodframed but it’s a wood that can’t burn; the automobiles are lightweight and intelligent and can’t crash or pollute or exceed the modest speed limits; there are no guns; no cash to steal, no conspicuous wealth to envy: it’s a quasi-socialist, round-edged suburban culture devoted to peace and safety. Peace and Safety forming a sort of secular religion against a backdrop of unofficial, vaguely discouraged, nevertheless tolerated, vaguely animist spirituality for which the hieroglyph of a tree, bearing an unknown (almost human-shaped) fruit, is the accepted underground symbol.
There is no cash but there are two-piece notes and notational symbols called “Favor Credits”, a casual and personalized system of currency. There are Artisanal Malls where shops line both sides of a street and along which candles, books, honey, cutlery, textiles, decorative artworks, scented oils, recorded music, self-pleasure aids, and so forth, are bartered for Favor Credits. Acronymed as Facre. A good-faith system of barter which would be impossible in an aggressive, competitive (read: male-dominated) society.
The houses. They’re more rounded than what you’d know in patriarchies. Rounded so rain runs right off without the need for roof gutters and the faux-wood is flexible, like a very hard rubber if you were to kick it, but you never would. The material is cool in the summer and warm in the winter. You don’t paint them but they’re dyed. Indigo, Amarinth, Saffron, Bisque… the material is deep-dyed, subtle, lambent with color. The material is the color it is all the way through, which is what you’d discover if you cut it (though you wouldn’t). From an aerial vantage (commercial zeppelin travel: slow, sky-protecting, graceful) the neighborhoods look like stamp collections.
Adult sexuality is self-pleasuring. It’s okay to do it in public. Not while driving or teaching the young. The world that Kith was born into.
Kith and Kynna were lovers from a riverside neighborhood in the Midwest, before Kith took the Singh-Draper and the Singh-Draper said he was a man. Kynna, at sixteen, was three years the elder, a girl of great beauty, inside and out. Kith had fathered seven children (two male) in the three months before packing his things, in November, and setting out in Sara’s car for the transit station. Fathering these children was both his duty and his right, a coming-of-age thing. The losing-their-virginity rite. He was matched to the fertile women, two of which were the legal upper age limit of forty five, by lottery, and discharged his obligation in a comfortable, attractive facility run by the State.
The Brotherland Transit Station was an hour’s journey north and he was driven on a Monday morning by Sara, his housemother, as required by law. They left very early, to beat the rush hour traffic. He said his goodbyes to Kynna before getting in the car. There were tears, but no wailing. Wailing was not their style. Each inductee was allowed to bring as much as he could carry. Kith, being frail, nevertheless rose to the challenge of carrying Kynna’s gift: the sack of how many antique, creamy-paged journals in which to record the chronicle of his time away from her. That and packets of pencils and pens and tins of his favorite chocolate. The State will provide the rest.
The drive up to the BTS was beautiful. The drive was nice. The car was a wide, sleek, fully-enclosed, low-to-the-ground, steam-powered two-seater bicycle that sounded very much like a sewing machine as it ran. Sara had little to say, but sniffed a lot, sleeving her nose without taking her hands off the steering wheel. Fresh fall gusts and nice old songs on the radio. They switched back and forth between oldies and national volleyball: the loving group grunts and isolated joy-yelps and call and response of batsqueaking sneakers on gymnasium parquet with the sportscaster’s churchvoice a nice punctuation. Everything nice, all the time. Kith was weirdly, almost callously, calm. He pointed out the various kinds of trees in staggered rows like all the kings of history gathered to watch the procession resplendent in their mortal blood-and-gold robes by the sides of the thin white highway. The distant green hills like buried, voluptuous giants in sweet repose. Hilly green in all directions. The black galaxy of unseen life in its potent not-quite consciousness interlacing the hills like ramifyingly and sub-branchingly endless roots of Time.
***
Kim turns to see the car come upon them. It’s Unca Mundee and a woman who will introduce herself as Jonatha Shamton.
The Abbess Qw’ T-Ang of the Impenetrable Convent of the Odious Gorge on a Scarred Planet (nicknamed, by her aging warlord lover, “The Abyss”) is now accepting requests for personal advice from readers
DEAR ABYSS
DEAR ABYSS: “Todd” and I have been close friends since eighth grade. We’re now in our mid-20s, and over the years I have gotten to know his family. His mother, “Cindy,” is a kind and darling woman and I like her a lot.
The problem is, she has it in her head that I am perfect for Todd. On more than one occasion she has gone so far as to ask me why I don’t marry him. Todd and I have always been close, but I have never had any interest in him beyond friendship. In fact, I am involved in a serious relationship right now with a man I love dearly.
Is there a way to stop Cindy from making suggestive comments without hurting her feelings? — HOLDING MY TONGUE FOR NOW IN MINNESOTA
DEAR HOLDING YOUR TONGUE:When the cycle runs a glorious course the blood released shall be sufficient to sail thine grand black ships toward surest slaughter on.
DEAR ABYSS: I am a 48-year-old man about to be married for the second time. My bride, “Jennifer,” is significantly younger than I, but aside from that, we’re alike on most issues. We have lived together for five years and have two beautiful daughters, ages 3 and 7.
We are now involved in making wedding plans. I know it’s a woman’s special day, but when I ask the normal question of “How much does it cost?” Jennifer becomes unglued. She says she’s aware that we don’t have an unlimited budget, and she’s sick and tired of my always asking about the costs and saying things are too expensive.
Today she went off again when I said that the diamond-encrusted wedding band she wants me to wear was too expensive, and a simple gold band is fine for me. I told Jennifer to cut out the Bridezilla attitude. Money is a factor in a wedding, and since I’m part of it, my opinion should matter as much as hers.
Now she’s stomping around in a huff, and I’m at the end of my rope. If this is how she acts now, what about after the wedding? Am I being an idiot to worry about the money, or is Jennifer being unrealistic by ignoring it and stifling my concerns? — GROOM (?) IN MICHIGAN
DEAR GROOM (?) IN MICHIGAN:The screams of the infidel’s brood in its million’d fetid wombs elicit the counter-song of appreciative arrows.
KIKI ’68: A SHORT STORY as the SCREENPLAY of a 22-MINUTE FILM
in which we consider Mr. Chaucer, Mr. Reich, Mr. Belafonte and Miss Novak
Orgone Energy
“And we are?” asks Saul, on the rising tune of the inveterate pedant.
“Visiting specialists from the Mayo Clinic,” drones Wally. He can’t be bothered to lift his eyes from Life, specifically Kim Novak. Luscious as platinum cantaloupes on the dark background of the flapping page. The odor of terror-intensified pigshit pulses through the car like an evil silk as Wally pumps the window crank without taking his eyes for a moment off his girl.
“Visiting specialists by the name of…?”
“Drs. Gus Guildencranz and Harold Rosenstern,” finally looking up, “but that’s where I think you’re going too far, old bean. If you don’t mind a little constructive criticism.”
Window sealed he can hear his stomach growling so he rolls it down again for the cover of the roar of the road. Just an inch. He’s starving but to ask Saul to stop for a bite anywhere along the next forty miles of U.S. Route 19 is to risk death or humiliation.
“This is a pilgrimage of sorts,” says Saul, lifting that chin. “And by the way, Wally, what’s the state of your Chaucer?”
I can’t get the line Come, Mister tally man, tally me banana out of my head.
Without waiting for a response, Saul launches into a few lines from the gap-toothed Wife of Bath’s prologue, Yiddish lilt intact, and Wally wants to guffaw but restricts himself to a smirk because it’s still rather early in the drive and this isn’t exactly the most propitious spot on the trip to be hailing a cab. But he can just see Saul assaying the arduous task of memorizing a little Olde English in preparation for the very conversation he was sure to initiate in order to feature it, rehearsing it out loud on the toilet and over breakfast and while packing his overnight bag with that pungent Italian aftershave and the Japanese fishgut rubbers Berryman mailed him for his 49th birthday.
I keep wanting to sing it Talleyrand.
The truck of pig thunders by again, a massive green Waukesha semi from the 1930s, pitching like a slave ship, left flank studded with flexing pink snouts, the smell in the wash in its wake instructive. Wally knows pigs as intelligent, sensual creatures, all too aware of their fated purpose. From the pig’s point of view, the totality of human culture is dedicated to the control, torture and consumption of pigs. Wally waits until Bellow competitively overtakes the truck again and he rolls down the window again and his hand is a dark glider, pushing the interstate wind. He’s sweating in his laughable smock (Bellow’s idea) and the wind that funnels down the sleeve is a numb tongue licking his armpit.
Makes him think of some good old days. Driving back in the back of the feed truck from a squirrel hunt with Tooty, say. Shoot enough squirrels and it starts to feel like you’re shooting squirrels; that is, that squirrels are being shot like bullets from the barrel of your squirrel gun. Tooty said so and it was true. You aim the barrel and the squirrel bounces against the fence or the tree trunk in a savory puff of smoke.
“To translate,” Saul adds, with a wink, “surely cock and cunt weren’t designed by the good Lord for the mundane purpose of distinguishing the sexes, or mere pissing, or the making of more pissers. Listen, along those lines, something’s been haunting me, and I’d like your esteemed gloss on it. I would appreciate a little sober reflection before you pontificate on the matter. How do you suppose a medieval cunt smelled?”
He tosses an unwrapped stick of Beeman’s. Flicks it. It bounces off Wally’s head and lands on the detritus between the two car seats, the crumpled mimeographs and candy-wrappers. Lots of candy wrappers, because sweetmeats and poontang are the Bellow Scylla and Charybdis: he’s always either skinny and in rut or chaste and chubby. Wally must admit he prefers this slower, rounder Bellow. Even in the ridiculous lab coat. Wally must also admit that the idea of visiting Wilhelm Reich in Lewisburg State Penitentiary may be just what he needs to kickstart his muse.
Come, Mr. Talleyrand.
Wally had been half-way through the writing of a novel about which he’d told not even Saul, the type of thing called Science Fiction, set three thousand years in the future, an end-of-the-world sort of scenario, the races of man all extinct but for one middle aged Negro intellectual and one young Scandinavian tourist girl (speaking not a word of English) who is first spotted by the Negro on the observation deck of the Statue of Liberty, to which they’ve both climbed to get a view of post-apocalypse Manhattan. Anyway, he’d gotten that far, one hundred and forty pages, and then froze, but froze in the dynamic paralysis of a tightrope walker who’s made the mistake of looking down. Simply stopping won’t save you.
“He possessed the affable good looks of the man who accepts that he is not handsome, nor need he be, winning from surprisingly attractive women of his caste and color, once every blue moon, that fair genus of sympathy that is not altogether distinguishable from love.”
He’d been rewriting that sentence for a week, stymied as to how to go on, when Bellow rang. And now they’re on the way to pay a visit to cosmic sex-theorist Dr. Wilhelm Reich, an involuntary guest of the Feds these days for shipping an Orgone Box (a telephone-booth-sized chamber specially designed to accumulate cosmic radiation while an occupant masturbates in it) across state lines. The guy is the Werner Von Braun of mental sex hygiene and he’s locked up in the joint with bootleggers, killers, white slavers, pansies, mulattoes and tax shirks. Bellow downshifts and says something about the erect penis being a rigid, all-purpose umbilicus and Wally responds rather plaintively:
“But don’t you see… sex is the profoundest subject on Earth… until one speaks of it? Isn’t it rather like one of those bewitching monsters that dwell at the bottom of the sea? Miles and miles down? More beautiful than anything encountered on the surface? Shining like dreams in the cold, deep dark of an eternal night? But when one makes the fatal mistake of bringing one up into the warm light of day… a few ounces of dead gray sludge on the hand is all one is left with.”
“I like that metaphor, kiddo. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that I admire it. Would you mind, terribly, if I took the liberty of extending it for your edification?”
“Not at all, old bean.”
“Well, the wondrous creatures of which you speak are, in point of fact, sometimes brought to the earth’s surface for close examination by the great scientists. They’re brought to the surface in specially-pressurized containers in which they survive the journey quite wonderfully intact. I propose that the mysteries of sex can likewise handle the transition from the murky depths of man’s subconscious to the sunlight of rational analysis if the language dealing of it is a special container, so to speak. A special container, designed for the purpose. This is where the topnotch novelist, with a philosophical inclination and unequaled experience in the field, not dissimilar to our best scientists, mapping the unknown, enters the picture.”
“Namely toi.”
“Namely moi.”
“And you’re working on something…”
“It is going to be earthshaking.”
“And this pilgrimage to Herr Doktor Reich…”
“Research. This book will be like no other book I’ve written, Wally, or that anyone has written, for that matter, and it is therefore incumbent upon me to get this thing just right. There is precious little room for error in this undertaking. Quite frankly, there’ll be none. I’m not an impressionist like you, buddy boy, which is not to say that impressionism doesn’t have its place, of course it does, there are people out there who light their lamps with it, but I’m dealing in high explosives here. As I see it, I’ll either end up blowing the lid off of two millennia of Western man’s psychosexual oppression, from which every modern evil springs… famine, war, social injustice, racial hatred… and, thereafter, be feted as a hero on a par with a Paul Revere or a Martin Luther, or…”
“Or you’ll end up with your ass in a sling and a baked apple in your mouth.”
“Precisement.”
“Far from kosher.”
“You know what I always say.”
Lining the left and right of the modern highway run buffers of bristling greenery behind which a highway-bisected community of American citizens united in the near-unanimity of their conception of Wally as a sort of trick gorilla bustles. Or so Wally sees it. They are cloving hams and clipping coupons and sluicing driveways and pruning forsythia and tweezing chin-hairs and house-breaking puppies and listening to a county-wide Little League tournament on the radio. And if Wally by some deranged caprice were to persuade Saul to drive to the patchbald diagrammatic field where the Bluejays were besting the Hickories and were then to walk as in a dream towards the pitcher’s mound amidst all those uniformed, apple-cheeked, freckle-nosed Buds and Scottys, the radio announcer would’ve whooped and said There’s a nigger on the field, ladies and gentlemen, a mustached nigger on the field in a medical smock! Good Lord and Hallelujah I have truly seen it all!
Saul sees something similar.
*
*
PART 2 of the SAUL and WALLY series
in which we consider Mr. James, Mr. Chester, Miss Howard, Miss Webb and Mr. Wright
IF I DEALT IN CANDLES
Constance thanked Wally profusely for his helpful critique and slipped the manuscript into her purse while Fan, with her gloved hand on Wally’s throbbing mitt, beamed at him and they all ordered drinks and that was the last anyone ever heard of it.
Have the critics given you any constructive help in your writing?
It had been days already and he couldn’t get that line out of his head. Bald frigging sissy. Bald frigging wig-wearing pansy son of a bitch. Couldn’t sleep because of it. Heart racing. Well, that and Fan’s snoring. It’s not marriage that kills the marital romance but the fartsoaked, snorehaunted warmth of the marriage bed. Poor Fan: the mottled brown back she smuggles into sleep in her pyjamas. Guilt from thinking this triggered a wave of loving pity and genuine gratitude like an endorphin rush after a hammer blow to an extremity and he thought, with a nod and the tenderest smile: partners for life, Fanny.
She always slept so deep and hard he could pretty much do whatever he wanted on his side of the bed without waking her. There he lay with his bedcovers thrown back and his pyjama bottoms off and his big fat jimmy in his hand while birdsong, streetsong, the singing of the water in the pipes as the neighbors performed their ablutions heralded another pinkeyed Paris dawn. Wally swears you can hear the French dookie crashing against the s-curves in the pipes on the way down but Fan just laughs at him. Like meteorites. Like fiery meteorites. His vivid imagination.
-This vivid imagination paid for that dress, didn’t it?
-Now don’t you start!
-I’m just saying, Fan. I’m just saying.
He still relishes the fact that it’s no longer Fanny who brings in all the money.
Have the critics given you any constructive help in your writing?
He finally gets his very own Paris Reviewinterview and they send Tinkerbell and Butterfly McQueen to do the job. Ain’t that something.You know how lethal a white sissy and a faghag Negress can be together, each a canny burlesque of the other… inside jokes and furtive looks and an infallible knowledge of absolutely everything, especially, of course, manner of dress and style of speech. Condescended to by a couple of hincty short-story writers for godsake. Ain’t that rich. For this I win the National Book Award? Vilma and her conked hair and that keloid on her right biceps and she’s trying to get saditty on him.
He had his eelhead jimmy in his hand and Connie was crawling across the hotel’s Persian carpet towards him on her white satin belly just begging for it. There goes that vivid imagination of yours again, Waldo. The most important Negro-American writer on earth… shove this in that little pink mouth of yours, gal… winner of the National Book Award… he couldn’t believe that either Saul or himself had ever been so young or on intimate terms as to competitively compare erections. It was a close race but his was bigger and so of course Bellow runs and gets a tape measure. Hoping he’ll triumph in girth. Then he theorizes with a straight face that the Negro penis isn’t rooted as deeply in the groin as the Caucasian organ and this explains the average extra inch or two. In other words the Negro prick is cheating. The Negro prick; the Hebrew schnozz; the Irish capacity for drink: the exemplary dimensions of the ethnic. Saul’s buzzword: exemplary.
The look on Chester’s face as they picked their table at the Café de la Mairie and Chester ordered in high school French and Wally opened his mouth and ordered in a nosy rich Boursault of a tone and switched to his professorial English for the duration of the interview… Chester’s look had been one of those well what do we have here looks and Wally immediately thought of Saul’s frigging Sam Johnson joke, of which he frigging never tires, apparently, and if Saul tells it one more time at a party in Wally’s presence Wally will break that schnozz of Saul’s for him. At the very least put it out of joint. Besides which he always gets it wrong: it’s not a talking dog it’s a dog walking on its hind legs. Is that erudition?
Saul would sit there with a book of ‘great’ quotations open right next to the typewriter and salt-and-pepper his manuscript with kultcha. Season it with what he called ‘smarts’. Wally has seen him do it. Saul would wink and say, Whaddya think, buddyboy, a Matthew Arnold or something from Suetonious? Or maybe let’s throw ‘em a real curve ball and opt for a schmeck of Lao- Tze. Way back when when Saul was still in on the joke. They would argue well into the night, Wally and Saul, about teleological niceties such as the fate of consciousness after the fact of mortality and Saul could not abide Wally’s assertion that individual consciousness reverts to its place in the great Undifferentiated Essence upon the moment of death… he was adamant, vociferous, nearly hysterical in his condemnation of it and Wally finally twigged that Saul’s resistance to the concept was, at root, anti-integrationist.
Connie paging through the manuscript.
I’m fat, thinks Wally. Call me Wally, says Ralph. I sweat too much, I need to lose weight, I’m losing my hair. I hate this big round barrel-shaped Negro head of mine and I hate these black gums and ashen elbows. This mustache. I look like an usher at the Apollo. I look like a Gold Coast garbage man. Freddy Dupee with that lethal smirk of his going, it’s funny, but he only seems to bark at you and the garbage man. Nobody fears or respects me. I’m all curves and no angles. I look like the over-stuffed furniture in Connie’s grandmother’s parlor. No wonder she won’t screw me. Saul and his goddamned girlish waist. Fine, if you like runty.
Vilma winking at Alfred so subtly that Wally almost misses it and she asks him, smiling with parental tenderness, Have the critics given you any constructive help in your writing?
-Call me Wally.
In the intro to the interview, in the penultimate sentence before the interview commences, this: “While Mr. Ellison speaks, he rarely pauses, and although the strain of organizing his thought is sometimes evident (emphasis Wally’s), his phraseology and the quiet, steady flow and development of ideas are overwhelming.”
Saul’s paging through Wally’s top secret manuscript, the follow-up to Invisible Man, kind of wincing and shaking his head and muttering to himself: damaging, very damaging. He tells Wally, Okay, fine, it shows a new sort of fluency for you, but fluency at what cost? This is very damaging to one’s reputation; they’ll massacre you if you’re crazy enough to publish it. Better to aim low and hit a bulls eye than aim at the stars and kill an albatross instead. Listen, don’t be sore. You wanted my honest opinion and now you have it. My suggestion would be to take this new found fluency and apply it to something a little closer to home. Your own people, for example. Don’t over-reach, Wally. What, this rich, vibrant diasporan culture you keep telling me about… this fertile vein of ore, as you once put it, has suddenly run out of stories?You’ve outgrown it? It ain’t worth mining any more? Dismissive gesture at the manuscript. Is that what this means?
Constance, Saul and Ralph standing at the corner where the eyepatched veteran sells roasted chestnuts from a rusty cart across from the Tuileries in full flower and throng. A warm but overcast day. Saul’s holding a helium-filled balloon and unties it and sucks the gas and does a few bars of What’ll I do? in a cartoon grasshopper croon and Connie laughs, thoroughly charmed. Ralph is fuming but he can’t show it and says, I say, old chap, you sound like one of Hadrian’s prize eunuchs!
Dud.
All three traipse arm-in-arm across the Place Pigalle, gay talk and big smiles except Ralph’s smile, of course, which is faux as an undiscovered Lautrec, a wet forgery, not even a good one, twitching at the corners. He keeps having this vision of an open manhole appearing suddenly on Saul’s side of the sidewalk. Saul, wearing his hat at a rakish angle, is saying, out of the corner of his mouth and rather loudly, Be advised, young lady, that if you keep up with these enchanting ways of yours you run the severe risk of ending up in one of my novels. You’re not litigious, I hope. Constance blushing. Saul snaps his fingers. Say, that’s an exemplary title for something: The Litigious Sylph. Whaddya say, Waldo? We haven’t heard a peep outta you since the Tuileries…
Ralph and Saul in the alley behind the hotel.
-I saw her first!
-This isn’t the schoolyard, buddyboy. This is the jungle and in the jungle, as you oughta know by now, the king of beasts holds sway. Namely, moi.
-You only even came over in the first place because of those damned letters I was writing about her!
-Hindsight is 20/20, ain’t it?
Constance paging through the manuscript on the checkered tablecloth in an out-of-the-way bistro that Ralph discovered with Fanny last year and whereinto Saul is highly unlikely to stumble. Ralph’s palms are moist. Constance is radiant in a pink mohair sweater, matching beret, black satin slacks and patent leather mules. Wally inquired, both to quell his nerves and because he had a genuine interest in fashion, as to the shoe’s designer. Constance said she honestly couldn’t remember; Robbie had given them to her right before the divorce. Robbie would know, she said. He has a shoe fetish.
Ralph joked, “What do they know of mules who only mules know?”
Have the critics given you any constructive help in your writing?
Fanny croaks, “Baby?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Are you awake?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Was I snoring again?”
“No, baby. You weren’t snoring. You were talking in your sleep.”
“I was?”
“You sure were.”
She reaches for her glasses on the nightstand and rolls over to face him, blinking behind the lenses, face lined with the meaningless diagram of her recent dreams, monogrammed silk pyjama top buttoned to the neck. Smiling she says, “What did I say?”
“You sang Stardust.”
She slugs his shoulder affectionately. Wally’s hand is still throbbing… it’s killing him. His writing hand. It’s infected. It amazes him that Fan has yet to notice the four raw against-the-grain gouges in fat fester behind the knuckle rill.
The three of them emerge from the rear exit of Madame Tussuad’s, blinking into the midday sun, waiting under the awning, and Saul does one of his impromptu magic tricks, only instead of a quarter from behind Ralph’s ear he snatches a frigging cotton ball.
Connie must be, what, 34 or 35 and she looks it at certain angles and yet there remains a youthful glow to her, a creamy kind of pastry warmth and though she is not quite the sylph that Ralph first saw on C.L.R.’s arm in ’46 he remains terribly smitten. She looks up from the manuscript and studies his face as though mystified.
“And the title…”
“If I Dealt in Candles.”
“That’s right. It’s very pretty, Wally. Where is it from?”
“An old Yiddish proverb. If I dealt in candles, the sun wouldn’t set; if I dealt in shrouds, people would stop dying!”
She closes the manuscript and without taking her eyes off the title page she says, “It’s just so well-written, what I’ve read so far. It really is. But I…”
“I’m glad it pleases you. I thought…”
“Yes?” She seems to steel herself against the blunder she’s certain he’s about to make.
He takes a deep breath in a sort of now-or-never way and she beats him to it, interceding on behalf of their friendship. She says, pressing her palms flat on the paper, “It’s not my place to comment, Wally, and please don’t be sore, but, gee, isn’t it kind of, I don’t know, wrong for you to be writing about Shtetl Jews, no matter how beautiful the writing is, while your own people still strain against the bonds of slavery?”
“By adding this certain amount of beauty to the story of the Jews, aren’t you stealing the same amount from the story of your people, who can ill afford to have this beauty stolen from them?” She says, “Oh please, please don’t be sore about all this, what I’m saying, Wally, but I guess I’ve taken it upon myself to speak for your race in this matter because you’ve turned your back on them… with the blood of old Egypt in your veins you’d rather tell the story of Moses! With that gorgeous, wonderful, heart-breakingly loyal woman by your side all the years of a fruitful and intimate marriage you opt to pursue the fickle affections of a silly, inconsequential, self-absorbed white girl who couldn’t even manage to stay married to the father of her own poor mulatto child. Wally, Wally, what’s the matter with you? What are you doing to yourself? Are you sick in the heart? Tired of being the luckiest Negro on Earth?”
“Don’t get me wrong… as I said, gosh I’m impressed, Wally, I really am, it’s beautifully written… it proves that you’re more of an intellectual than even I or Richard or Saul ever took you for, though I’m sure Fanny wouldn’t be surprised at all… she’d read a few paragraphs and know it was you, although, ironically, and correct me if I’m wrong on this: she was never meant to see it. Was she? Was she, Wally? Is that what being intellectual is for, Wally… for fooling your own good wife? Is being intellectual, in the end… is it only good for writing clever books for fooling your people and your wife? Is there no higher end towards which to apply the magnificent mind in that little boy’s head of yours? That school boy head of yours with its silly school boy crush on a sad, tired female of your oppressor’s race?”
“I will always love you, Wally, honestly, although by the time I’ve said my piece I’m willing to bet your passion for me won’t exactly be blue ribbon material.” She laughs and digs her fingernails hard into the hand he reaches for her under the table with.
Wally had been so concerned about eluding Saul that he’d clean forgotten about eluding Fanny. In walked Fanny to find Wally and Constance in a cozy little corner of the out-of-the-way bistro that Wally and Fan had discovered together last year. They called it ‘Our Out of the Way Bistro.’ It was a common rendezvous point. Had Wally forgotten? Or was his subconscious the secret engineer of the entire scenario? He stood rubber-knee’d but steadied himself and fetched a chair for Fan from one of a dozen empty tables and said, with a smile that seemed to be little more than his mustache, Constance was just showing me a manuscript for a book she’s working on, Fan. He glanced down at Constance who glanced up at him and he addressed her,
“It really is marvelous, doll, but it needs work, as I say. I wouldn’t show it to anyone else until you’ve rectified, uh… a few of the particular points we discussed. I’d be happy to look it over again after you’ve… yes… worked on it a bit…”
Connie chained naked and writhing to a rusty bedspring in a vacant lot on the South Side of Chicago on an overcast day in Autumn as several dozen identical Bigger Thomases in tattered flesh-revealing piss-reek finery emerge in deprivation and hunger from various caves, warrens, gutters, cellars and trash heaps in the vicinity…
Wally holds his breath. He toetenses and… sees stars and… detects one of the semen arcs landing with a tap on the Herald Tribune far away atop the dresser. Where the other two squirts land he neither knows nor cares but in the tingle of post-ecstatic slump he envisions Alfred Chester in that ratty orange wig tilting back in his chair at the Café de la Mairie with his fingers intertwined on his chest and his lips moving in the deliverance of some grand theory or profound observation or other as though he’s the famous writer being interviewed for the Paris Review and Wally fantasizes standing up and hauling off and punching Chester so hard his head snaps back and the chair back cracks and a fusillade of flashbulbs going pop pop pop pop pop like Ernest Fucking Hemingway has just walked in the room.
[ed.'s note: the following was sent via email by a semi-Explicit Comrade who asked that I post this for him]
Timothy Garton Ash was invited as a keynote speaker at an event commemorating 20 years of the falling of the wall in Berlin. It was a cultural event, connected with an art exhibition, a kind of second rate commemoration which could neither attract nor afford a more esteemed eminence grise, someone maybe I had heard of.
The event was held at the slightly dilapidated ‘House of World Cultures, a place designed with a dramatic arcing roof, according to the architect Hugh Stubbins Jr., intended as a beacon of freedom of expression’ visible from East Berlin. In 1980, several people died when the roof collapsed.
The House of World Cultures is situated on CIA-man John Foster Dulles Allee and features a plaque from the 80s in which the congress of the US congratulates the ‘people of Berlin’ for ‘creating a thriving democracy amidst Communist tyranny”.
And thus, symbolically 20 years after the fall of the Wall, the so-called collapse of the failed system called communism, we were amassed here in this beacon of freedom to commemorate, with Ash, ironically, in the language of freedom, English, the closure of that dark time.
Though he speaks perfect German chose the English to tell the audience that, after 20 years of post cold war disappointments and difficulty, perhaps Chinese Authoritarian Capitalism might not be a bad model to try. Of course, since the audience was largely German, they might have thought they misheard or misconstrued, and so, not wishing to embarrass themselves in front of the professorial persona, kept they doubts to themselves.
But I heard him clearly, and I recognized him as an intellectual mercenary up for the highest bidder. And now that times are tough, he is proselytizing the benefits of the Chinese system, without ever having lived there. I know Chinese people, their wisdom and their chauvinism (or their wisdom in their chauvinism), how for them, the whole cold war was but a couple of moves in a millennial game of chess.
Anyone who has seen the rise of China in Africa will know that this is the first stage of their global domination. Unlike the Europeans who dominated that content for 2 centuries, the Chinese make no effort to acculturate or assimilate the natives. They are not insecure about the superiority of their culture or their beliefs as were the Europeans. With China you acknowledge a fully autonomous power, or cross it at your peril. It is simple, clean. World dominion without European guilt hypocrisy.
In the Chinese sense, Timothy Garton Ash should not be impugned, for individual opinion is over-esteemed pretense, unlikely to be much valued in he future, if it ever had been. This noble dupe herald of the ultra-conservative avant garde is only too happy to be rid of the flawed and enfeebled tradition of Enlightenment Humanism.
Comrade DJ Sensei Pastor Prime! Welcome! And congratulations on that moniker. I’d like to set you up with a friend (unless you consider yourself too, too married to Gawd)… her name is Ann Ominous… boy is she hot. And such a lush! We’ll talk later…
1. “intended as a beacon of freedom of expression’ visible from East Berlin. In 1980, several people died when the roof collapsed.”
Stasi Op.
2. I’d like to load Timmy Garton-Ash and Ian Buruma into the same cattle car to Ouchwitz! Two little trembly-lipped cunts I cannot abide.
3. “World dominion without European guilt hypocrisy.”
Spooky intimations of Maximum Hive. And, again: Dystopian Pulp Sci Fi Maestros of the mid-20th century saw it all coming before we were born.
4. How are Africans… the Senegalese, say… disposed towards the looming Beige Master Race? Do they welcome the incursion?
VINTAGE REALITY
Recorded in 1938 (a song Jelly Roll claimed he heard in 1908)
THE RE-WRITTEN
OEDIPUS Rx
Goss slithered out of the hotel bed, careful not to wake her. This was not easy because she was the lightest sleeper ever. He hadn’t been able to shift a millimeter without getting an interrogative grunt from her and his escape from the bed had taken what seemed like hours of excruciating control. When he finally slipped into the bathroom he realized it must be suppertime back home. Sat on the toilet, seat down, lights off, with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands but he was smiling. Not quite laughing. Actually maybe he felt slightly sick.
She was suddenly upright in bed. ‘Jimmy?’ she called. Not his name. And she pronounced it weird anyway. Yeemy?
Go in there, he ordered himself, and get your clothes. And don’t you say a fucking word.
‘Jimmy?’
Goss stared straight at the corner where his pants must be, ignoring the motionless silhouette which registered on his peripheral vision like a human shape in a sinister dreamscape as he groped and found briefs and slipped them on, then socks, his pants and going down on all fours patted the floor for his cap and found it. His scarf. His pullover was flung across the half of the bed they hadn’t used and he remembered kicking his shoes off right inside the door, bouncing them off the wall, so they must be here and here. He could not get the sensation of flap out of his mouth.
‘Jimmy,’ she sang, softly, sounding very sad.
He shod himself with one hop on each foot and got both hands on the doorknob squinting against the light he let like a rush of air into the room so musty with what they had done. He backed out careful not to look as the light closed on her old face and Goss blew out a long breath turning to the red AUSGANG sign and high-fiving his own ghost before it hit him that his jacket containing not only a copy of Levy’s keys but also all of Goss’s money and his passport and the sacred lock of hair was still hanging in the hotel room closet.
He rapped on the door and waited and rapped again. His nerve-endings sang with shame.
‘Mom?’
-2 Days Before That-
Goss on a couch beside Levy in a café on Königen Strasse called The Supreme Bean where they both liked the music and one of the waitresses was really pretty. Dogs romping around the café and hot coffee served in water glasses but Goss was comforted by normalizing details such as lonely males over Powerbooks like Nosferatus by the light of their desktops. As Tears go by, the ballad second only to the majestic Angie in the Richards/Jagger songbook was the song playing when it happened.
Goss had never written a song or fucked a girl worth writing a song about but he could remember a time in his life when both activities had seemed like eventual givens. He had almost fucked Tina Yee and had almost written a song about almost doing it, twenty years ago. It was Levy who had pointed out that every woman Goss ever fucked (not counting his first, a cousin) had been the ex-best friend of the girlfriend previous.
It is the evening of the day…
Goss was mouthing the lyrics while Levy talked. He anticipated with emotions he could barely control the last stanza, containing as it did one of the great couplets in English verse: doing things I used to do, they think are new. Levy, meanwhile, who knew so much about everything that he knew exactly how much of everything that he didn’t know, as he often quipped, was yammering away. White streamers in the cafe window were part of a greater horizon-wide movement of cold ash padding; a miraculous makeover of the dirty old city.
Something told Goss to look up. An oldish woman, furred and painted, very tall or on preposterous heels, pushing through the corpsey curtain of the snowfall. Her epic grimace and coin-colored bob. Levy with his back to her but Goss’s heart flinched as the beautiful old thing moved across the picture window of the Supreme Bean like a queen puppet traversing a stage and the knowledge, the recognition, was so basic in Goss that it was semi-conscious. His body knew before his mind could react. Levy hunched forward in his chair, prepared to deliver the Levy-affirming punchline to whatever anecdote when Goss suddenly tugged at and freed his army surplus jacket from under Levy’s ass and he held up a finger and said Excuse, please, one sec, and bolted. It wasn’t forty seconds before Goss thought about running back for his scarf and gloves too but didn’t want to risk losing her on the shopper-choked street. She was roughly a block ahead. She was walking so fast with a spine so straight and open coat flying that Goss wasn’t sure briefly if she didn’t look a bit crazy and busy in the bad manner of the insanely alone. She was, or had been, he had been told, a performer and if Goss was 36 she would be about 55 with her bob hard-luminous in the creamy gloom of the high street.
-20 Years Before That-
In back of the house at 25th & Colfax the dog-breathed summer Tie a Yellow Ribbon was a hit young Goss was on his knees digging a hole behind the oak with a bent spatula on a Saturday morning. A lawnmower morning so loud with the sci fi sound of a planet hive, the neighborhood doused in green perfume, while Dad added his own nasal motor sleeping a stiff one off. When was the last time anyone mowed this lawn, thought Goss. He actually spat with contempt. It never occurred to him to mow the lawn. Cursing and in tears he worried a rooty wound in the earth at the mouth of the tree. This was a household of three males sharing the surname Goss and yet Goss, the youngest, was the one they all called Goss. Behind the oak to bury a picture of Tina Yee.
You may lose that fading sense-print of The First Kiss but you will never forget the very first I Don’t Love You Anymore. Despite the traditional disclaimer, it is you, you’re the one, the failure, the disappointment, the faded value, the seed on the deepest level unworthy of egg. Goss could always tell when an outbreak of I Don’t Love You Anymore was coming. They never look better than they do on the day they dump you.
Tina Yee in cap and gown smiling by the hole. About a foot into the nugatory cakemix of middleclass earth his bent spatula scraped a cigar box. He coughed and accidentally dropped a gross track of phlegm-web on the rim of the hole when he levered the box up and out and knocked a jacket of dirt off. An old Panetellas box for a photograph of a disturbingly attractive woman. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Also in the box a long lock of ice-blond hair. Goss was suddenly not crying and blinked at the photograph with no recognition, no switches tripped but the lock of hair was eerily-if-inaccurately familiar, like flying had been the first time he’d ever been on an airplane.
The evening of that day while Goss was out with his big brother and his big brother’s so-called friends mourning Yee, dousing the burning witch of his heart with tepid beer at a place called Moose’s, the photograph he’d found in the cigar box that morning disappeared from his bedroom from the top right drawer behind the magic mushrooms, never to be seen again. Over breakfast the next morning Goss glowered with the irritating wisdom of not mentioning it. But he had the lock of hair in his pocket and he fought the urge to place it on the table.
Joe senior had been a band-leader, a sax player, he’d even toured Europe. His sister Aunt Pennie told the brothers all about it but there hadn’t been a horn in the house since shortly after the year Goss was born. The saxophone, with its fetal curves, was a dead sibling you never mentioned and had become Goss’s stillborn twin like the twin haunting the dim but intense imagination of Elvis. Elvis was how Goss and Levy had met a month before Elvis’s self-satirizing death on a toilet. Levy was short but ramrod-erect among a slouching jumble of sideburned lotus-eaters near the front of the ticket line, turning suddenly to confront Goss about his t-shirt.
‘You’re wearing an Elvis t-shirt to a Beatles film festival?’ Levy laughed. ‘Man, if we weren’t all hippies, we’d have to kick your lanky ass!’
What you do with your hands when you’re not doing anything with them says a lot about you, thought Goss: this loudmouth has his arms folded over his chest like a drill instructor. Goss’s thumbs were hooked in the front pockets of his dungarees. He hankered after girls who struck limp-wristed postures like Cher (or Robert Plant, to be honest), a pose so feminine that it seemed to have vanished entirely from the increasingly macho planet by the time Goss was thirty, a loss that inspired vague pangs. All these years later, Levy was still Goss’s friend and friendship-deformingly rich. He had a company called The Bombardier Beetle and split his time between Minneapolis, Vancouver and Berlin.
-Last Night-
Back in the spare room, listening to Levy’s German girlfriend do something dramatic with Levy on the other side of the large flat, Goss found it impossible to sleep. But when they were finally finished the noise of his own breathing kept him awake so he slipped into his briefs and out of his unfamiliar bed and down the hall into the flicker-blue living room where he found the post-coital girlfriend watching the final minutes of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ in German but with the sound off. Goss was prepared for what he found because Levy had carefully prepared him: Liesl likes to go naked around the flat. It had something to do with good health, or self-expression, or equal rights. She reflected the light of the widescreen television, naked as an Equatorial baby and unremarkably attractive. Nice big hands, though. Her breasts a goatee’d lunatic’s unblinking stare. A giant bust of Lenin transfixed by It’s a Wonderful Life.
‘Hallo, man,’ she said. ‘…this flick is so corny.’
Goss squeezed her shoulder. ‘Corny? Are you kidding? It’s like something out of the Brothers Grimm.’
She lowered her voice and said ‘Levy is completely asleep. He’s sleeping like a baby. It’s always like that.’
She smiled at the TV. ‘I put him to sleep. Like a baby.’
She stared sidelong at Goss and Goss cleared his throat but said nothing. He scratched his head. Jimmy Stewart was clutching Donna Reed with all of his might, sending a pang through Goss that made him want to jump out of his skin and smash all the lights in the universe. Liesl hugged her knees and said, a tad loudly, ‘You know what I hate?’
‘What?’ asked Goss, who assumed he was about to be treated to a diatribe against American kitsch as embodied by Jimmy Stewart.
It was so cool to be not interested.
-Earlier Today-
‘I’ve heard disturbing reports,’ said Levy the next morning pacing the new carpet in his furnitureless storefront, ‘…that some of you, in violation of my policy, are smoking while distributing promotional materials to the public.’ Levy’s muscular arms were folded over his ever-expanding chest because getting rich had inspired him to start working out. It wouldn’t be long before he became too top-heavy to swim. ‘Smoking on the job is not just verboten. It’s fucking dis-gusting.’
Levy glared at Nikola B, the fleshily-attractive brunette with blonde streaks he had hired on the spot without any references. Nikola gathered her purse and coat from a big pile in the corner and left without saying a word slamming the front door so hard they were all afraid the building might collapse.
Goss asked himself, hours later, making his way to the building he believed was harboring his long-lost mother, why he couldn’t be like Levy. Why couldn’t he? It was a Vital Force thing.
Goss had followed the woman this far yesterday and turned back. He’d seen his mother enter that building. But did he really believe this? Or was it a sort of meta-belief… a belief that this belief was possible to believe? What seemed shakiest about this latest in a long line of improvised quests was the lack of gravity in his emotional response to the situation. Where was the bloody roil of emotions he was supposed to be feeling? He only knew for a fact that his mother had been from Berlin. Had followed Joe Goss to The States and bore him there two children and very soon after left. She could be in Berlin. A mile, two blocks, a neighborhood away. Yes, she could very well be the woman he saw walk by the café window last night. He would know his own mother, wouldn’t he? Mammals have that going for them, at least. Don’t they?
Last night’s spectacular snow was already melting under the fierce efforts of a little white custodial sun. The shoppers Goss squeezed by were unreadable, avoiding eye contact. Goss was wondering about this eye contact thing when he slowed and then stopped. He stuck his hands in his pocket and cleared his throat.
‘Hey, Nicole,’ he said.
She was crying. Not really crying; her face was relatively blank although her cheeks were bright red and decorated with silver tear-streaks. Her eyes might as well have been glands.
‘Nikola,’ she corrected him.
He looked away up the street towards the shop. He wanted to say: I’ve been searching for all of my life for the mother who abandoned me as an infant and I’ve finally tracked her down to an apartment building right up the street. Will you come there with me now as I see her again for the first time in thirty-five years and share that moment with me? Instead he said:
‘I’m sorry about what happened.’
She snorted.
Goss gathered the collar of his jacket around his neck. ‘Because. I don’t know. I thought you were a good worker.’
She laughed.
‘What?’
‘I thought Levy is so seductive to the women only because he is an American,’ she said, digging in her purse for a taschentuch, a kleenex, ‘But I see now that it is because he is a Jew.’
She blew her nose. ‘Talking to a female is hard for you, I think.’ She shocked Goss by tossing the balled tissue on the sidewalk.
‘You will probably be remembering this conversation for the rest of your life.’ She gestured at a balding red-haired scowler pushing impatiently between them on his way up the street. ‘Whereas to him, sex with me would mean less than nothing.’ She produced a package of Marlboros and lit one and stared at Goss through a cloud she kept adding to. Like eggs in the air.
‘So?’ she said, finally.
It was a very long bus ride away and early in the route the bus took them right by the building that Goss believed it was possible to believe harbored his mother. As the bus rounded the building’s corner he suppressed the urge, again, to proclaim, ‘I have good reason to believe that my mother, who I haven’t seen since I was an infant, is dwelling in that building,’ but he didn’t. Nicole’s hair was in a loose knot and she untied the knot and shook out and re-tied it twice during the awkwardly wordless journey. When they got off the bus at its Endstation it was in a neighborhood of fenced brown snow-patched yards and their dead-vine-covered houses of stone. It felt as though they’d bussed to another city. They walked through a rustic maze of narrow lanes under the high commentary of suburban birdsong until Nikola lifted the latch on a splintery wooden gate and Goss followed her in. I could be a killer, he thought. She pulled off her shoes at the door so he did also and they moved across the gloomy living room. In the kitchen they found Nikola’s mother busy at the sink with her back to them. She either hadn’t heard them enter the house or chose not to react. Nikola opened the refrigerator and removed a large black ceramic bowl of green grapes and pantomimed that Goss should take the bowl and follow her out of the kitchen. The bowl was heavy and warm; the mother had just then put it in the refrigerator. Nikola’s room was up a staircase so brief it was ridiculous, down a hallway, last right before a circular hall window overlooking a stone-ringed pond through the branches of a tree in a posture of agony. Goss managed a peek into two rooms along the way to Nikola’s bedroom and was surprised to see that each room he peeked into contained a person. The first was a teenage boy the second a man and each wearing a churchgoing suit and tie.
In Nikola’s little room, Goss put the bowl of grapes down on a dresser and closed her door and removed his jacket and tried to drape it from her door knob, which wasn’t a knob but a handle. His jacket shrugged off into a puddle on the floor and Nikola removed her own coat and purse and piled them on top of it. She positioned an old wooden folding chair beside her bed and reclined on the bed, smoothing her dress, her feet touching. Then, as though to a blown whistle only she could hear, she sat straight up and pulled the dress off over her head. She unsnapped her bra. The breasts of a beached sea creature when she was on her back. Goss was touched at how helpless they looked on land. They were too smooth, too firm and her vagina was simple as a fold in a table cloth. She reached and patted the seat of the folding chair and Goss sat.
‘No,’ she said, ‘bring the grapes here first and feed them to me.’
Goss had the look of a man attempting to make something happen with his thoughts alone. Bend a spoon or something.
‘Get the grapes,’ she repeated.
Goss was frozen.
Nikola flipped on to her stomach and hugged her pillow and counted to ten before saying,
‘Leave.’
‘Get out,’ she reiterated.
Goss was half way down the hall when he remembered his jacket and had to go back. When he left the house, the sky was a far dilute blue. He was surprised at how calm he felt. Everything was so familiar.
It was possible that Joe Goss, sideburned and swaggery, had been in this very neighborhood, had walked these lanes and maybe Goss’s mother, a teenager not so much younger than Nikola when she’d met Goss’s father, was from this part of town, had grown up in this area and had used the bus that Goss rode out there. He was used to the kind of small-town coincidences that people from Chicago or Tokyo considered mindfucks of cosmic import. He was thinking that very thing when he looked up and saw Levy walking towards him.
‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ asked Levy, who stopped in his tracks.
After Goss said to Levy that he’d taken the wrong bus to the end of the line and was now good and lost, Levy led Goss back to his car. ‘I have a little business to take care of, won’t be long, drive you back home when I’m done.’
-Earlier This Evening-
Goss ended up climbing out of Levy’s car again before night fell. It had been a profitable time alone, he thought. He put his cap on and zipped up his jacket and knotted his scarf and picked a random direction to walk in.
Loping along above the low seare hedge of one chalk-white cottage after another, Goss turned right, abruptly, when he spotted what looked like a major thoroughfare at the end of a darkening lane, a major thoroughfare behind which the sun was crashing to torch the brittle lung of the forest as it ground to a halt in the earth. Where the lane emptied into the thoroughfare, Goss found a bus stop bench in a shelter across the wet black shadow of the road. Seated on the bench was an older but nice-enough looking woman who smiled as he settled on the bench beside her. She waited until he was completely still and said, with an older woman’s precision, ‘You are an American.’
‘Yep,’ said Goss. ‘How could you tell?’
‘You weren’t afraid to look at me.’
Goss laughed. ‘Who would be afraid to look at you?’ He reached for her hand and looked her right in the eye and said, defiantly, ‘Jimmy.’
She hesitated so long before announcing her name in return that he knew it was a lie and he knew what the lie meant and it encouraged him.
‘Margarethe.’
She was tall and slender and profited from what looked like a fairly expensive dye job. Her hair up in a thick bun blurred gold in the fading last lights of the day.
‘Where are you going, Jimmy?’ she asked him. ‘Would you like a ride?’
He pulled his cap off. ‘You have a car?’ She was the right age. It was possible that she’d lived in America.
‘Yes, I have a car.’
He closed one eye. ‘Why are you waiting for the bus if you have a car?’
THE RE-WRITTEN # 2
SALTER’S LUCK
Salter woke up to Lola shouting there was oil fucking paint on her Jil fucking Sander. He couldn’t at first tell if he was having a heart attack or caught in an earthquake or both but Lola was so up in his face she appeared to have one long ice-blue eye in the middle of her forehead, a monstrous organ of inhuman beauty, a lens through which he could not see the future but through which the future could plainly see him, despising the information it gathered.
On the street ten minutes later he caught his reflection in a shop window showing his t-shirt inside out. Never dress in terror. No wonder those foxy Jap girls had giggled. In that case he headed for the park and wouldn’t bother looking for a new girlfriend until he had a chance to get home and change. He sat alone under a two-hundred-year old tree for two hours, enjoying the indirect pleasures of the So Cal sunshine. The tepid milk breeze and the leaf-cut kaleidoscope spangling the yellow grass at his feet under the quadrophrenic wig of the tree. Fucking squirrels, too. Funny about squirrels: no one seemed to appreciate what a nightmare life would easily be if squirrels decided to go militant. Make mosquitoes look like a blessing. If rats had half the talent and energy of squirrels…
Later, when Lola was at her post at Chez Guevara, gilt and alabaster under her designated beam from the track lighting, he slunk home and started work on a new slab rather than bothering to change and bike over to Pacific Beach in hopes of finding that one true lasting Love capable of paying rent. The name of this new slab was Oil Fucking Paint on Her Jil Fucking Sander and he got bored with it after x-hours of pointless messy work, slopping the cadmium red around the canvas with a palette knife like it was lead-based organic van Gogh spaghetti sauce. Why not just eat it all and kill himself?
It was too late to make it to the beach, too early to sleep and too soon to call Lola at work to see if she was still in hate with him. Yet he grabbed the phone and punched the number with a relatively paintless thumb.
“Chez Guevara, can you please hold?”
“Yes ma’am.”
Brief pause of recognition and then the “hold” click. He’d half-hoped to get Jem, who could always be counted on to flirt with him a bit before handing it over to Lola, thus proving his worth to Lola. Jem: what kind of parents named a girl that? He could never have a girlfriend named Jemima. Names were important to him. A bad name was worse than bad breath. He’d backed out of something once with a model named Santana.
He caught himself nodding to the black black jazz they treated him to while he waited for Lola to release him from the tasteful limbo of On Hold. A CD burned from an authentic and scratchy old 78. He couldn’t help visualizing a synchronized chorus line of Al Jolsons in shoe polish, dwindling towards infinity, strumming banjos and grinning like skulls while being buggered by an equal infinity of Satchmos. Black black jazz for a white white restaurant. Friendly racism. Does any Ethnic Group valued chiefly for the quality of its suffering stand a chance?
When Lola got back on the line, Salter was relieved to find that she was half-whispering conspiratorially in the phone to him so he knew he probably wasn’t in danger of Fargo in bed that night. Fargo; Siberia: name your frigid wasteland. He so badly needed the existence-confirming sensation of something fuckish tonight.
“Get this,” she hissed, “rich fucker just dropped $42,000.00 on a dinner for five.” She pronounced “fucker” fokkar. Otherwise her speech was thoroughly Americanized, which is to say ornamented with luridly nasal banalities. “I don’t know why but the servers thought he’s going to stiff them so each one goes and spits in the butternut squash soup.” Punch line: “Eight thousand dollar tip.”
She got home at one, eight-feet-tall in her heels and the cool fuselage of her dress and hair of burnished blades. He was watching television like a good boy when she clomped into the bedroom waving hello but not speaking as though speaking’s a kind of touch and she wasn’t in the mood but he got a bobbing erection the instant he saw her in all her pomp and nametag.
L. Beedo.
Lola unsheathed her nude glory. Breasts and hair lifted and falling as the dress went up and she clomped into the bathroom in heels and zilch else to brush and floss and mop the angel-face off then proceeded to snore and smell of soap on her side of the bed within thirty minutes of walking through the door. A record. He wouldn’t even have minded the usual missionary position and get it over with. No touching the tits, don’t mess up my hair and keep that finger away from my rectum. Poor Salter sat knees-up beside her, treated to a view of a meter of tawny back and he clutched the remote. O wretched man who craveth a fuck.
Tears.
Robbie The Robot warped and blurred, swimming in them. Salter was ostensibly watching “Forbidden Planet” (Walter Pigeon, Patrick O’Neal, Anne Francis) with the sound off and he strained to make sense of the flick through the seawater filter of his grief. The Griffin-like monster, visible only as raw energy, howled and clawed the protective field around the ship. It would have blown Salter’s mind to learn that Griffins are a symbol of monogamy. A heroic crew member with his pastels-emitting blaster was seized and ripped apart. Anne Francis with her buttery coif and the spanking sarcasm of her dotted pout startled a recognition in him for she was his genuine Sexual Ideal and he correctly pegged the futility of his sex life to her unavailability.
Snuffed the tube and the reading lamp on his side of the futon and stood up. Suddenly saw himself running across the bedroom from an impossibly distant corner, axe over his head, bringing the blade down with a scream of regret to cut his frustrating girlfriend in two but the very cartoon of it horrified him and made him sorry and love her all that much more, exacerbating his desire, which frustrated him further, which re-ignited his anger, which again made him see himself running across the bedroom from an impossibly distant corner with an axe hefted over his head, bringing the blade down with a scream of regret to cut himself in two instead.
He crept miserably into the living room with an unrequited hard-on of devilish force and he knelt milking it across the gleaming black pumps with arched backs like onyx cats stacked in a diptych of sadism and sexual snobbery under the coat hooks by the door. He lay three lengths of solder-colored semen in her $300 heels, steadying himself with a hand on the sleeve of an old coat which stood like a priest with its back to Salter’s indiscretion. Not the first time he’d fucked those shoes either. He crouched there, postmodern shoe-rapist, still burning with richly-satisfying orgasms and he pondered this awful exchange:
Lola: Honey, I hate to break it to you, but as a painter you have no talent whatsoever. Not that’s visible in the paintings, I mean. A retard with a paint-soaked ass and no arms could do better.
Salter (with a shrug): So?
That had been six months ago. She’d dropped that A-bomb six months ago so what next? Everything escalates. Hunger, porno, Vietnam. She’d be punching and kicking him soon. Stabbing him on the toilet. Scissoring his face off and wearing it like a bib at breakfast.
In fifteen minutes he was dressed and out on Fifth Avenue in the dark. He walked by the Tea Leaf and Rockit Records and the boarded-up and tramp-infested deco-era Bijou. The Starbucks on the corner and the Rite Aid parking lot across the street. Left towards Sixth Avenue up Robinson. Then a right to the park. What really hit him as he sailed along was the unbelievable number of people in the sultry night who seemed to be happy. There they were, the dozens, the hundreds, holding hands and swinging arms in that triumphalist goose-step of love. Salter had to wonder how abnormal he was. Had it been him all of these years? Him and not them; her; It? His problem and not The World’s?
Standing at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Upas, he near-swooned as his mind came that close to accepting the notion that the Misery he once considered typical of Sentient Life was in fact just his own and his own fucking fault, not even necessary, just the result of faulty thinking and bad choices that could be blamed on nobody else. A pink convertible was honking at the traffic light.
Me? Salter pantomimed and the car honked yes.
The pink convertible was some kind of vintage wonder. Salter didn’t know from vintage cars but with white tires and a lot of chrome and the salvaged motor from a B-52 it looked and sounded like a horny birthday cake in the form of a yacht piloted by a white-haired gent in a Commodore’s cap (Salter didn’t know from Commodore’s Caps but that’s how he would have described it to the police). Beside the gent was a white-gloved woman in matching white shoulder-length hair, presumably the gent’s better half or lady-friend or however the old quaintly put it.
“I said,” said the duffer when Salter had scurried out into the street to lean over the convertible to hear him, “Would you like a ride young man?”
The duffer gunned the motor for emphasis. Or to pressure him. Salter was 30, and the old gent was 66, so, arithmetically speaking, the offer of a ride in the gent’s car was no different than if their respective ages had been 5 and 41. Defying his mother, Salter jumped in the back seat of the car, banging his elbow, as the light changed. He jumped on the naïve belief that a man with a woman is never as dangerous as a man alone. The old guy twisted to face Salter as he drove, saying,
“This is the only city in the world that it makes sense to own a convertible in. Others are too damned dangerous or rainy. Are you from the area?”
Talking like a man in a gale. White-haired ringer for Don Ameche. Salter was, in fact, tempted to ask the old guy if he was related (or even Ameche himself) but instead merely limited himself to responding directly to Don’s query.
They drove as far as Robinson and did a swaggering u-turn so wide they nearly took the door handle off a parked car on the other side of the four lane road and headed back the way Salter had been walking when they picked him up. With his eyes on the road again Don smiled in the rearview.
“We’re practically neighbors then. We do this every Friday night…” he inserted a pause to indicate his companion, whose teeth were the simplest smile… “We see something new every time.” He added, “For example, I’ll bet you didn’t know that there’s a banana tree in the yard of that bungalow on the corner of Robinson and Third Avenue.”
“No,” said Salter, surprised, “I didn’t.”
“Delicious. Stolen fruit tastes better in an open convertible at night, you know. And you probably weren’t aware of the fact that there’s a full-sized statue of the comedian Jonathan Winters in the backyard of a place up there on Point Loma. On a six foot plinth. A prop from the movie ‘The Loved One.’ We saw that when it first came out, at the old Bijou.” He thought a moment. “Evelyn Waugh.”
“Really?” Salter had never heard of the movie or the comedian or Evelyn Waugh. He wasn’t sure about the word ‘plinth.’
“Awful lot of movie people down here,” concluded Salter’s genial host. They were idling at a red light at the corner of Laurel and Sixth. To the left was Balboa Park and its orderly arrangement of skyscraping palms attended by a vassalage of shorter pines in low darkness. The old woman was touching up her lipstick and the drawstringed mouth was grinning at Salter in the rearview and he was thinking what have we here? A crucial detail was all wrong, of course: the combined age of the two was more than half the age of America. Otherwise things seemed to be shaping up into one of Salter’s hoariest fantasies.
Rich couple picks up a young stud. They drive to a deserted stretch of the beach. A towel on the sand. The millionaire with his arm around the young stud’s shoulder: I love my wife but I’m impotent… please… I don’t know how to ask this, but could you… would you… ?
“Vincent Price had a house over there, back a-ways, in Mission hills, overlooking the Airport. Lindbergh Field. I always had a problem calling it ‘Lindbergh Field,’ you know. I guess I’m showing my age, but I can never hear the name ‘Lindbergh’ without remembering one of those awful ‘Lindbergh Baby’ jokes.”
He assumed a perfect deadpan and turned with his right arm along the top of the seat and looked at Salter and cleared his throat and said, “Say, what do you call a… a, uh… oh, wait a minute. That’s not how it goes. Dammit. I’m useless. I just thought of one the other day…”
A classic specimen of one of those old-time couples, thought Salter. The man doing all the talking; the woman just smiling… beaming, really… mostly at the man himself, oblivious to outsiders. Salter tried to remember. There was another example. It rang a bell…
The Reagans.
Salter tried his hand at small talk.
“So, you two are married, then?”
Don was still idling at the intersection of Sixth and Laurel, despite the long-ago fact of the light going green. Was he still trying to remember a Lindbergh Baby joke? The traffic light became a clock. The old guy was staring at something to the left, away from his wife, in the park maybe, so intently just then that Salter guessed that he hadn’t even heard the question but as Salter cleared his throat and undertook to repeat himself verbatim, the old guy replied, overlapping him, “For a very long time.”
For a very long time.
Which sounded so nice. It sounded so nice that it made Salter regret every single fact of his life as it was and made him hunger for a change and it made him long for a second chance and the first thing he resolved to throw out before relocating into the shiny new home of the Duplex of his re-organized Soul was ‘Art,’ that dusty thing, that furry brown shit-caked 19th century attic heirloom called ‘Art.’ Fuck it! Toss it! Filthy old bristly bearded hoary repulsive thing! Musty fusty dirtbag thing! What had ART done but ruin his chances at Life?
Where was Salter’s convertible? Where was Salter’s love-dumb, worshipful wife? Where was all his stuff, his security, his peace-of-fucking-mind? Somewhere back there, at some juncture so remote that he couldn’t even remember what sickly-sweet pop song was a hit on the radio the day that he did it, he had veered Left when so many others had trudged ahead. So many others kept on going down that long straight road. The long straight road of happiness. So easily achieved! You just remain on that long straight road. How hard could it be?
The light went green again and the car moved forward as effortlessly as a breath or a liquid downhill advertising wealth and a jet bellied loud overhead on its way to Lindbergh Field and Salter hollered, “It must be great to grow old with someone you love!” and he was nearly choked with emotion as he hollered it, touched as he was by the serene beauty of human completion radiated by the white-haired couple, the living opposites of Salter’s world and Salter’s monotonously unspectacular luck but Salter vowed to change all that inspired by this couple.
“It must be great…”
“Rubbish,” laughed the old coot. “We can barely stand the sight of each other.”
Salter laughed right back at him. Weren’t old guys always funny in the same way? Never quite slap-your-knee funny but just as reliably never unfunny, either. Wry. Are young people ever ‘wry’?
“I suppose you think I’m joking,” he said and then grunted, like a man on the phone on the toilet, doing something complicated with the gear shift and clutch or whatever as the car took on the hill that rose up before them, “But I’m not, I promise. ‘Hate’ is too strong a word, of course. But…”
“But, no. Love? No. I can see how you’d get that impression. Nice old couple, cruising around in a convertible on a Friday night, right? Not a care in the world! All smiles…” He winked in the mirror.
“But that’s just nerve damage. See? Look: that’s a permanent grin on her face, like a Jack-O-Lantern. Pure luck it didn’t freeze into a scowl. I’ll give The Good Lord credit for that much.”
“She’s ten years older than I am, but you’d never know it. Got a collection of face lifts older than our grown children. I even started naming them! The last one I called Griselda. That’s the nerve damage right there, if you ask me. You can only lift a human face so many times. Something’s gotta give.”
He released a sigh so long that Salter could smell his breath. Bananas.
“I could have had two convertibles for the money I’ve spent on making a seventy-five year old woman look seventy!”
They were headed for the Highway. Salter could see it clearly with his Tales From The Crypt imagination: a Luger in the glove compartment. A Luger stuffed in beside a bloody road-map folded around a sandy, black-edged ear. Or: thirty two wallets. Or: Mexican scalps on a belt. A cock in a jar? Don Ameche was shaking his head. He exploded with a guffaw that sounded like an Apache War Whoop which made Salter jump.
“You must think I’m awful! But don’t worry, I forgot to mention, the poor thing can’t hear a word. Deaf as an old boot!”
He leaned on the horn and raised his voice over it and shouted, “AREN’T YOU, NAT? AREN’T YOU? Can’t read lips, either. Couldn’t be bothered! I keep this happy look on my face,” he nodded, grinning, “And Old Yeller just thinks I’m saying nice things about her. Haven’t done the Hokey-Pokey in a Coon’s age. Mostly I abhor the smell of talcum powder. Turns me off.”
After a long pause he added, with extra significance, “I’m dying for a little company,” and he waited a calculated interval before slipping a shy glance into the rearview. But Salter was already gone. Had he ever really been there?
2FLASHPOMES
ADVICE
Success is an STD.
2019
My daughter asked if farts have germs in them. I honestly don’t know. I was hunched over my hands on my knees trying to catch my breath after kicking the ball a bit. I couldn’t really talk. I waved her off and she went over to LaLa and LaLa’s dad on his knees with his back to us being sick. LaLa’s dad and I go back a few years. The posterior of his head looks like a monkey’s thumbnail. It’s shocking enough that Astra fucked me but in Daniel’s case it’s almost inspiring.
“China!” I summon her back. “Let Daniel catch his breath, darling.” I hand her my dodo. “You and LaLa watch television.” It’s nice that the half-sisters get along. It’s nicer still that mine is the beautiful one. Chubby LaLa with Daniel’s swiped chin. She’s smarter of course but a fucking lot of good that’ll do her. Daniel oh-so casually instigated a conversation about implants recently and from the look on his face when I voiced my opinion I could tell that he and Astra are seriously considering it.
One of those big hummy things casts a bat-shadow across the entire playing field and what a cool relief it is. Fucking sports in the sun is unnatural. Of course there are always a few idiots giving an ironic Chinese salute or flipping them off when they pass over but I’m a realist with pretty low blood pressure. I could nap in this shadow for days. LaLa and China with their fingers in their ears and their eyes closed. But the sun is back in less than a minute and the hum fades like a pressure drop and we watch the shadow recede across the park and over the white buildings on the far side of the park and across downtown like flat black snakes chasing flat white snakes chasing flat black snakes towards the water.
China is bored with the television and came to peek over my shoulder while I was writing. I didn’t want her to see the stuff about LaLa so I told her I was watching horseporn. She thinks that’s disgusting. She’s a weird kid. A loner like I was.
What would you like me to write about? Switching subscribers is always a little strange, at first. I liken it to wearing new shoes. But you’re the foot in this metaphor, aren’t you?
THE RE-WRITTEN #3
THE BIRTHMARK
The little bald citizen from an Otto Dix painting asks Veer ah yoo go-ink and Frederick shrugs so slowly the gesture becomes strange to him before he completes it. The last thing he came to Berlin to do is sit beside a panting homosexualist as the lights go down in a movie house. He doesn’t know what he came to Berlin for but he knows it wasn’t that. He knows so little so well. He can feel Herr Ludwig watching from the kitchen as he saunters up the street with his hands in his pockets under fizzy warm twilight with a hetero set to his shoulders.
It is an omen that The Sheltering Sky premieres the very day he lands in Berlin though Debra Winger playing Kit Moresby (playing Jane Bowles) elicits a sneer as he waits in line to buy a ticket thinking of apter actresses. Dressed in a light gray three-piece summer suit and Italian shoes that Bowles himself would approve of he eases into his dirty velor seat and nods off dreaming Herr Ludwig is Paul Bowles in disguise. A ruse to test Frederick’s sincerity.
“But how could I have known?” pleads Frederick.
“To be is to know,” chides Mr. Bowles, stripping out of his bathrobe. He has beautiful breasts.
Shoved by an usher and reluctant to go home Frederick wanders a bus route through Turkish neighborhoods. He hears fruit vendors wailing and sees burka’d matrons like piles of coats that have walked off from their respective parties. He thrills to bold glances from sloe-eyed houris the color of smoked meat revealed in the slutty garb of the West. The Germans he sees remind him of UN inspectors. On Marburger Strasse he finds a nightclub called Limbo. The doorman nods at Frederick’s suit.
Frederick is staring at a black-haired girl at a table under the window of the DJ’s booth.
Winter comes to Berlin as a sick sweet dream of bunker life ie drinking and smoking and fucking in darkness. Back in his room on Hauptstrasse where Herr Ludwig gives voice lessons at his baby grand to the great-grandniece of Gustave Mahler Frederick masturbates under a borrowed duvet pretending to torture the caterwauling Mahler. His orgasm fails to silence her.
Frederick takes the black-haired girl to a Hitchcock festival in a cinema so small the ceiling is someone’s bedroom floor. Watching The Birds in German.
Out the Ausgang and on the street into the night they walk for a block of ruminative silence until Sariah, who emigrated from Iran with her dissident mother as the Khomeini came to power in ’79, says I believe that is the most religious film I have ever seen.
“Religious?” guffaws Frederick. “Au contraire. The most misogynist rant in film history! Fellini’s City of Women is nothing compared to The Birds, as far as that goes, my dear. ‘Bird’ is working class British slang for ‘girl,’ as you know. Don’t forget Hitchcock was British.”
“I mean, what, you have this hen-pecked bachelor, no pun intended, played by Rod Taylor. Rod. Right? And all the other important characters of the film -his girlfriend, his ex-girlfriend, his little sister, and his mother- they’re all women.”
He ticks the points off on his fingers. “The girlfriend’s a frigid tease, the ex is a slut -that’s why her hair is dark- and his mother is a clinging, emasculating shrew, and his little sister is a brat, also dark-haired, implying that she’s going to grow up to be a slut too. Meanwhile, the mother and the girlfriend are almost mirror images of each other. Their hairdos are identical, which means a lot in Hitchcock, who was the most hairdo-obsessed director in film history. Our hero, Mitch -rhymes with bitch, if you please -wants to, ahem nest- with a girl who looks like a young version of his own mother, invoking the Oedipus complex. Which ends up putting out the eyes not of Mitch himself but of his ex-girlfriend, in a perfect example of substitution, since the resemblance between Rod Taylor and Suzanne Pleshette, who plays the ex, is uncanny. The birds, like Freudian harpies, pluck out her eyes.”
“The female romantic lead, his girl friend, Tippy Hedron, she goes from being a perfectly-coiffed snob and a tease in the beginning of the film to a disheveled, catatonic loony by the end.”
“Remember that the first blood drawn in the film, in fact, is from Tippy, who’s trying to strike a silly, an absurdly elegant, pose in the prow of a beat up old motor boat. She’s wearing a jade-green Dior dress or what have you. As a matter of fact, as I now recall, she’s even got the nerve to be freshening up her makeup with a compact as she’s sitting there in this filthy boat, proving how vain, how shameless, how typical, or Tippy-cal she really is. Her nose is in the air, her bosom is high and hard, her spun-gold hair is immaculately coiffed.”
“Between the tease, the shrew, the slut and the brat, this guy, Rod Taylor -Rod, for Chrissakes- he doesn’t have a chance! The illogical savagery, the unpredictable pattern of violence, of the birds, is just a metaphor for the daily reality of life for a guy among these women. All women.”
He looks to see that eleven of tears. He feels long and red and sort of amorally malarial later climbing over her with the tiled stone headache of the heated stove at their feet. Her Bible hair and her cunt the black lamb with its fiercely trusting grip. She resists very subtly at first or wants to control how it plays out but he pushes through that. He jigs her legs around his waist to cross the room and slam the door with her back while Fraulein Mahler wails against Herr Ludwig’s piano. Sariah’s homework is spread on the parquet and Frederick slips on world history coming.
She is always all over again so sweetly tentative, so eager and afraid because her virginity heals between fuckings. Frederick thinks she fucks like dogs swim and records this thought in a notebook. They always seem so surprised they can do it.
She has her seventeenth birthday. Frederick extends his visa. Herr Ludwig discusses opera in German with Sariah at the table while Frederick washes the dishes in his silk pyjamas. She looks so worldly with that cigarette in her mouth.
Summer is the relief that everyone promised. The city gushes foreign greens and the Tiergarten is heavy with stone-white tits and root-red cocks and Sariah studies the earth at her feet as she follows Frederick traversing a field. Her mother isn’t even aware of Frederick’s existence for that first half year. Sariah calls Frederick from pay phones or leaves notes about when and where to meet. The day before she tells him she’s pregnant Frederick dreams it following a long trail of tiny prints in warm snow to a tree which stinks of pillows.
So it is at Chez Jacques Sariah tells him and Frederick finishes his spaghetti in the tender light of the dingy Moorish pale gold walls of Chez Jacques and he looks at Sariah and sees a mistake the size of a grapeseed and asks for the bill.
MORE and MORE TIMELESS
Again little time to post at the moment, Comrades Lorcas and Explicit; Beloved gigging heavily this summer [ed.'s note: yesterday she was gone all day on a gig performing for Germany's new President, riding from and to and from and to Rancho Augustine in a state limousine with tinted windows and hobnobbing with celebrities not a single one of you, with the exception of Comrade Barry, will have heard of] and so with Offsprung designing more sky-castles, Kermit-chambers and pudding-yachts for which my help as a consultant is required I am busy. And I had just finished working on that rent-paying commercial music crap of my own, too and was looking forward to killing time nobly with Lit. Instead of killing time nobly, of course, I’m being useful at home and that’s much better.
Comrade Barry (now down with a flu or the fantods or something) and I are cooking up things for TET 7.0. Until then just please (and pleasedly, please) peruse the fresh and/or re-tooled Fiction. Read about Goss, Salter and Frederick (directly above), for example… they’re each a special kind of arsehole! Read my flash version of the future (2019)! And above those the delicious postmodern Milkyway Bars of the Saul and Wally tales! Scroll higher, Icarus, and read more… and more… and… and…!
“The Giant’s Fence (by Michael Jacobson) is a unique book. Instead of being filled with words, it gives you 80 pages of trans-symbolic script. Each page has several lines of linked, dancing symbols. They live, move, mutate, and die. The whole book could be interpreted both as the song of how we humans invented symbolic communication, and the telling of its slow disintegration. There are at least 2 ways to “read” The Giant’s Fence. You can begin at page 1, scan the first line, scan the second line, and so on, as you would read a regular book. You can also flip to a random page, and jump to a line which catches your eye. Some pages distort the rows of horizontal lines of symbols into curves, so you can’t exercise your usual reading habits. The Giant’s Fence stimulates new ways of reading and new ways of thinking. As the introduction says, “any meaning” the reader constructs “is a correct translation.” The book’s title is a translation of Finnish “Jatulintarha”, a name given to many of the stone labyrinths found in Finland. The only precursors to The Giant’s Fence are the hypergraphic novels of the Lettristes (such as Alain Satie’s Ecrit en Prose) and some of the more complex works of asemic poetry. If you want to step outside of language, and bathe in unmuddied waters, this book is for you.”
Fucking retarded Art-n-Lit-killing cunts. Far more dangerous to Art-n-Lit than rampant Philistinism (as dangerous as that is) are the venal incursions of the Clever-But-Untalented… dangerous in the way that the Agent Provocateur… the Infiltrator… is dangerous to any progressive movement. Maybe violence is a solution. Kicking one of these Art-killers in the pants might do us (and Art) such wonders.
DER FUTURE IS HERE
(via Comrade DJ Sensei JR)
UNPOPULIST OPINION and the RACIAL DIVIDE or THE DEAD BLACK GODS
“It won’t be news to aficionados, but this spring the gospel historian and producer Anthony Heilbut released a new compilation, How Sweet It Was: The Sights and Sounds of Gospel’s Golden Age. A copy arrived last week at White Street. The CD contains some knockout live performances: Brother Joe May, Mahalia Jackson at her best, Dorothy Love Coates “groaning and even barking” onstage with the Swan Silvertones…”
Steven Augustine July 3, 2010 at 10:39 am
Christ I find Gospel depressing; its ironies too corrosive and its “uplift” truly redeemable only by its upper-class fans. Can you imagine the Ashkenazim singing paeans to Odin?
UPDATE: later the discussion expanded to:
# Lorin Stein says:
July 3, 2010 at 2:02 pm
Hmmm, I think you lost me with those idolatrous Ashkenazim.
# Steven Augustine says:
July 3, 2010 at 2:33 pm
Descendants of slaves singing passionately to the deity introduced to/ foisted upon them by their owners (as a control mechanism) vs descendants of victims of the Holocaust singing praises to the deity of a creation myth connected to Nazis…? There’s an equation to be found there.
Having worked in a funeral home (as a teen) which served a Black Community, I can’t tell you how many calendars, featuring the Aryan Surfer Jesus, I found nailed (this time casually) over the deathbeds of the loved-ones. And I could swear the Dude was sneering…
# pudel says:
July 3, 2010 at 2:43 pm
Um, well actually the much-loved Passover song, “Chad Gadya”
(Then came the Holy One
Blessed be G-d
And destroyed the Angel of Death
That killed the butcher
That slew the ox
That drank the water
That quenched the fire..)
is widely believed to have been borrowed from the medieval German folk song “Der Herr der schickt den Jokel aus”
(Da geht der Herr nun selbst hinaus
Und macht gar bald ein Ende draus.
Der Teufel holt den Henker nun,
der Henker hängt den Schlächter nun..)
so it’s not *too* hard to imagine, on either the Odin or the Nazis.
# Steven Augustine says:
July 3, 2010 at 2:51 pm
Ehrlicht gesagt: not a perfect analogy. Jews singing to a God who descended directly from their tradition doesn’t generate a cog dis; neither do Jews borrowing German cultural bits (in that there were quite a few Germany-based Jews, even during the Middle Ages; in fact, you know, of course, that Jews predate Germans in Cologne!)
# Steven Augustine says:
July 3, 2010 at 2:52 pm
(erratum: ehrlich; my wife will chuckle)
# Steven Augustine says:
July 3, 2010 at 3:08 pm
Or, if you will: imagine a Navajo choir singing Gospel. No cringes to be had there?
I think we’re so deeply-branded with the comforting meme of the rapturously Christian Negro that it’s difficult to deconstruct. But just a little unwrapping reveals some serious food for thought. Whites, having created God in their own image, have the luxury of not thinking too much about the effects on the psyche of internalizing the notion that your oppressor is related to the Owner and Creator of the Universe! Laugh. (However, if you think this is *only* funny, try floating the concept of an Afro-imaged Jesus or Holy Father on a Yahoo News Comment Thread).
I ask only that we ponder the contradictions, my friends.
# ursula birdwood says:
July 3, 2010 at 3:17 pm
Having seen How Sweet It Was, I agree with Lorin entirely. But I’d add: watch the choir and the backup singers. Their faces, their expressions (not to mention their harmony), are extraordinary…
# Steven Augustine says:
July 3, 2010 at 3:20 pm
Extraordinarily duped/brainwashed.
Can (presumably) Liberal Whites ever take instruction on the matters of Race? Gut Gawd I can just see the look on Miss Ursula Birdwood’s face when she brings us this news: the niggers just looked soooo happy!
UPDATE2:
# Lorin Stein says:
July 3, 2010 at 3:49 pm
The history of Christianity and slavery is super-complicated. To those who are interested I recommend Albert J. Raboteau’s 1978 classic Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution. As Raboteau shows, slave religion cut many ways. It was just as often a force for dissent as it was for white control. This is reflected in slave spirituals. Many of the oldest draw their tropes entirely from Old Testament promises of justice and vengeance. (One school of thought regrets the “Christianization” of the black church, which it treats as a relatively recent development.)
Leaving aside the origins of African-American religious music, I think it would be hard to argue that the black church in the years 1945-65 was an instrument of white mind control. These “dupes” were, many of them, leaders in the Civil Rights movement, and if you listen to the music, I think you find it hard to disentangle the politics from the faith.
# Steven Augustine says:
July 3, 2010 at 4:19 pm
“I think it would be hard to argue that the black church in the years 1945-65 was an instrument of white mind control.”
You perhaps aren’t aware of the internalized self-hatred that many Blacks (yes, even participants in the Civil Rights Movement) suffer from as a result of the Cosmic Brainwashing we’re discussing. Being unaware of it is one thing; are you also uninterested as a matter of *policy*? You can’t be; I won’t let myself believe that.
“These ‘dupes’ were, many of them, leaders in the Civil Rights movement, and if you listen to the music, I think you find it hard to disentangle the politics from the faith.”
And it all turned out so well, in the end, too. Snark aside: what’s your reading on the current state of Blacks in North America? I think things are in a state of emergency. Things are not changing for the better on *any* front. I wouldn’t place the weight of the blame on Chronic Liberal Resistance to being questioned/challenged on these things, but…
*Your* investment in the argument is grounded in a pleasure that isn’t even a big part of your daily life; my side of the argument is driven by a lifetime of thought and experience. Not curious enough about these thoughts and experiences to even *consider* unpacking the cited contradictions?
As for this: “One school of thought regrets the “Christianization” of the black church, which it treats as a relatively recent development,”… I find it striking what “Christianization” is being used as a euphemism for.
Where are the Public Black Intellectuals on this matter? The professionals are worried about tenure and parrot the comfiest normative tropes.
Anyway: I express this with zero piss-offedness!
Cheers,
SA
Does no one find it worthwhile to do a little critical thinking when it comes to Blacks in North America? Are we really embedded so deeply (near sensitive areas adjacent to the Id and the Libido) in the waking dreamlife of Liberal Whites that unpacking this shit is out of the question? In thirty years of discussing this general topic I’ve never had one Liberal White concede a single point in debates about Ebonics/ Blaxploitation/ Aunt Jemima/ The Black Church / The Wire / Gangsta Rap / Concepts of Ethnic Purity and Authenticity/ Low-Intellectual-Expectations-for-Black-Culture/ Hair-Straightening/ The Basketball Meme/ What The Election of the First Black President Really Means (erm, nothing?)/ … pfew! In German they call it being a “Besserwisser”. In English I believe the term is “know-it-all”. What an amazing patrimony! And to be so pampered!
[ed.'s note: I did once, miraculously, find a bunch of commenters, all women, to agree with me that it was outrageous for so many Liberal White Male Bloggers to chide HL Gates as "stupid" for resisting arrest, in his own kitchen, for being in his kitchen; that was nice]
Consider, Comrades Lorcas and Explicit: if I identified myself as a Palestinian and started a debate about Gaza, would the same Liberal Whites remain as immune to being challenged or corrected on any and every point…?
UPDATE3:
pudel says:
July 3, 2010 at 4:40 pm
An interesting/opposite take from James C. Scott’s *Domination and the Arts of Resistance: hidden transcripts*:
“Slaves in Georgetown, South Carolina, apparently crossed that linguistic boundary [of permissible euphemism]when they were arrested for singing the following hymn at the beginning of the Civil War:
[I'm excerpting..]
…We’ll soon be free
When Jesus sets me free
We’ll fight for liberty
When the Lord will call us home.
Slave owners took the references to ‘the Lord’ and ‘Jesus’ and ‘home’ to be too thinly veiled references to the Yankees and the North. Had their gospel hymn not been found seditious the slave worshippers would have had the satisfaction of having gotten away with an oblique cry of freedom in the public transcript.”
# Steven Augustine says:
July 3, 2010 at 4:54 pm
Rather a minor mitigation, though, wouldn’t you say?
I’m hoping someone will address the core of my argument:
“Whites, having created God in their own image, have the luxury of not thinking too much about the effects on the psyche of internalizing the notion that your oppressor is related to the Owner and Creator of the Universe! Laugh. (However, if you think this is *only* funny, try floating the concept of an Afro-imaged Jesus or Holy Father on a Yahoo News Comment Thread).”
I know why *Whites* aren’t much bothered by the tacit culture-wide acceptance of a Euranthropomorphic God (wink), but, erm, nothing there worthy of scrutiny…?
# pudel says:
July 3, 2010 at 4:56 pm
And aren’t we basically rehashing the old internalizing vs. appropriating debate? All instinct leads me to agree with you, SA, but all experience leads me to the constructivist line, that things are real insofar as they’re real in their consequences, that regardless of *how* you come to believe it, *what* you believe will set you free probably will. Which seems evident watching the rapturous expressions on gospel singers’ faces.
# Steven Augustine says:
July 3, 2010 at 5:03 pm
Pudel! First: thanks very much for engaging!
Second:
“Which seems evident watching the rapturous expressions on gospel singers’ faces.”
Goodness, what’s a rapturous facial expression (during a *performance*… rock singers do it all the time; are we arguing that Blacks are too simple/pure to behave like *performers*… to use Artifice?) compared to a lifetime of being wretched by most (if not all) Real Metrics?
At least Pudel was good enough to engage! Always appreciated. But when he/she writes “regardless of *how* you come to believe it, *what* you believe will set you free probably will,” we have to admit that’s kind of breath-taking. It’s All in Our Heads, apparently, Brothers and Sisters! We are just one lateral move from the dear old concept of Pie in the Sky (pron: “Pah in de Skah”)!
PS:
Just for fun: go here, look at the second portrait from the left… what do you think of the fact that this portrait is the only ugly, thuggish and moronic-looking portrait in the gallery? Especially when both of the original photos the artist worked from (especially the girl’s; she is beautiful) are of good-looking people? The black boy’s eyes aren’t half-lidded and the girl’s are exquisite. Does the artist assassinate the images of any of the other couples this way? Is it just too delicious that the artist acquired his technical skill working as a perp-sketcher for the police… ?
UPDATE (in summation):
Ah, the Crypto-Contempt. It’s obvious here that even Whites who are sympathetic towards Blacks (or who “love” “them”) have not yet learned to respect Blacks. Not in the full sense of the word. It’s easy to respect a Black in the way one respects a big dog or a piece of industrial machinery for Whites enjoy physically fearing Blacks, a social terror that combines the gruesome fun of a slasher flick with the constant affirmation of being superior to the savages (a White’s chances of actually being raped, robbed or murdered by a Black Terror are still as slim as a patron’s in the audience of said slasher flick). Whites can only respect Blacks in the human dimension of the word if they are allowed the experience of fearing them intellectually… a fear they’ve worked hard at making impossible for three centuries. It’s not likely to happen, then. Such Public Black Intellectuals as are allowed through the gate are toothless/harmless/ second-rate and, as stated, too worried about tenure to say anything radical: Institutions are, after all, primarily, filters. This is the root of the problem. A “black” is a product precisely engineered by “white men” to serve and give pleasure. A “black” is a product designed to be disrespected. The only possible Revolution will involve destroying the product.
For a bit more context about why war cheerleaders are so eager to demonize efforts to generalize lessons from Nuremberg, see this passage from Nuremberg Diary by G.M. Gilbert, the American prison psychologist at Nuremberg who wrote the following as part of his account of an interview he did (one of many) with Hermann Goering on April 18, 1946, in Goering’s cell (pp. 278-79):
We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary to his attitude, I did not think that the common people are very thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction.
“Why, of course, the people don’t want war,” Goering shrugged. “Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.”
“There is one difference,” I pointed out. “In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare war.”
“Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
Anyone demanding that comparisons not be made between our own political culture and that is doing nothing less than attempting to conceal the truth of how things work.
SIZE IS EVERYTHINK
Reading a piece about Gangs in London (Black gangs, overwhelmingly, of course) I thought on how symbolic-deconstructive analysis (a la Zizek) of the largest socio-political structures never happens in terms of GANG THEORY.
It’s obvious that the U.S. military, for example, is, by any definition (barring magnitudes or quantities) that applies to all other gangs, a GANG. Dividing Gang Activities into basic categories such as A) the protection or annexation of territory or B) revenge or C) financial-profit-motivated, the definition holds. The Bloods and Crips are micro-gangs to the Ur-Gang of the U.S. (or any nation-state’s) military. Include even corollary or collateral activities like Rape, Pillage and Recreational/Random Terror and: yes: the definition still holds. The Gang patois and hieroglyphics we see in use by, eg, The Bloods we can compare to military jargon, acronyms, slang etc. This is not a metaphor. The historical activity of the family of Gangs called “Vikings” is often, for some reason, celebrated.
The commenters on any thread about regional (or municipal) Gangs such as The Bloods and The Crips (or the GMGs of London) will break down into 1) white commenters expressing contempt/ horror/ revulsion and 2) black commenters expressing themselves in the argot of the regional (or municipal) gang. The negative white commenters can’t seem to see the sacking/rape/incineration of entire countries as revolting as black members of regional gangs stabbing each other to death and/or menacing whites.
What’s contempt-worthy about the regional (or municipal) gang is what a small operation it is, clearly. They don’t even have helicopters!
People running businesses selling the creations/labors of others are almost invariably some form of cnut. Record labels, publishers, art galleries, booking agents, management teams, plantations, brothels, adoption agencies, et al. Even in the rare instances in which these people start out not being cnuts, they most certainly become them… regardless of the size (or the hipness, greenness, fair-tradeness or quasi-collectivistness) of the operation. They may or may not be necessary cnuts but cnuts they are. Strange.
reply
July 3rd, 2010 / 5:39 pm ce.—
Misspelling for the sake of euphemism makes that word so much more appropriate. Thanks for that.
reply
July 3rd, 2010 / 6:11 pm Steven Augustine—
I was referring to a Danish King, you ignorant cunt… what are *you* talking about?
THE VINTAGE CHAMPIONSHIP: A JOURNALISTIC REACTION
(first published in the summer of 2008)
HELENS of TROY
Berlin’s normally rainy early summer has produced a drought, blowing a gritty breeze that dries the sweat before it beads and vexes the eye with particles sluiced in camel-colored veils trailing from building sites where the progress is slow on a nihilistically Mediterranean scale. I sat down to a plate of very good falafel and watched a sirocco rise up like a Jinn from a dumpster under a scaffold up the street and it swept over me before I could make it indoors. Minus the eye-irritants the breeze is quite pleasant in the evening.
It’s a very light late-suppertime and the EM, or europäischer Meisterschaft, has crammed the tables of the outdoor cafes with men and their girlfriends watching sidewalked widescreen televisions. The televisions make a spectacle of the spectacle of uniformed stags at play on green fields against the vast curtain of the local twilight, which is the color of a vintage picture tube in a dark room a millisecond after the shut-off. The fields on the widescreens are greener than anything in the neighborhood. Or the city. Except other screens.
The widescreens have given public space the unusual feeling of a public space; strangers on benches at long tables are groaning and cheering together while flirting in open harmlessness with each others’ Helens of Troy, leering in jest. The females are dressed to compete with the athletes and seemed to have forgotten the fact that they’re the traditional spoils of symbolic Byzantine war. The better looking girlfriends belong to the more brutal of the fans and will be obliged to fuck when they go home after the game, whatever the game’s results. A friend once claimed you can tell the civilized nations from the barbaric ones by their respective responses to winning or losing an important soccer match: the civilized fans loot and riot after a loss and the barbaric ones do so after winning. A similar dichotomy will determine the tone of post-match fucking. Which of the trophy girlfriends dread a win, and which a loss?
Tinny echoes of fascist rallies pour out into the night as though channeled by spiritualist mediums wherever I walk. I’ve never before made a conscious association between spiritualist mediums and modern media, bridging the gap between the 1930s and the 21st century. We can use our televisions to visit the dead; the dead in their aquarium. I’m looking for an outdoor café that doesn’t feature a widescreen television. I’m not hungry enough to forgo the pleasures of this prejudice.
The EM explains the German flags everywhere, little ones sticking from cars and big ones sticking from windows, although Germany isn’t in the game this evening. I see Turkish flags, too, because Turkey is in the game. The flags are national erections. Orientals, Aryans and Africans all compete. America’s team ineptitude is an insulting testament to the game’s unimportance; i.e., cavort in your short pants while we determine the fate of the planet. No one voices this observation.
A few years ago, a German businessman stabbed his wife for pulling the plug on his widescreen the moment before a tournament-winning goal and received a light sentence. There was the wag who cast soccer balls in concrete and skillfully painted the products and placed them around town during the tournament fever of that same year, breaking many feet. The sexual itch of a soccer ball just begging to be kicked.
I think of Samuel Beckett, at the end of his life, watching televised soccer as a kind of bitter confession of the hopelessness of higher intelligence: to know so many things, with no power to change them; to have so many memories, with no power to return to the past.
Practitioners of soccer, like those of sex, can achieve an impressive mastery which is nowhere else applicable.
***
It’s not difficult to draw comparisons between a soccer match and the traditional literary narrative, or to find echoes of my disdain for the one in my boredom with the other. Victory in a soccer match has its equivalent in the moral outcome of a traditional literary narrative, for example. The soccer ball is either roughly analogous to the reader’s consciousness or the mutable gestalt of the protagonist’s dreams and sensibilities, buffeted by the plot, or the ball is even, perhaps, the author’s soul.
Why only one ball? Why only two teams? Why the boring rigidity of the diagrammed field, the player costumes, the segregated spectators and simplistic goal positions? Why aren’t players allowed to defect from one team to another mid-play, or import useful non-standard paraphernalia onto the field, or defecate/urinate/ejaculate on the pitch in an expression of extreme displeasure or animal exuberance or for purely tactical reasons? Why no trench-digging, pyre-building, or half-time stonings or dissident funerals?
Spare a thought for fiction that invokes the hexagonal soccer pitch, a goal placed at every of the six sides, with three teams and three balls and six referees on horseback, three of the horses being mares in deep heat and the others stallions and the game frequently interrupted by violently elemental couplings which rip up the pitch.
***
The penis is a symbol and a tool. The penis is a symbol of tools. It is the effigy of man, and in the fullness of its dance, from latency to tumescence to discharge to quiescence, it recapitulates the poignancy of man’s determined arc. The spent penis alone in the vagina’s chamber is but man in his grave. The penis at daybreak is but crowless cock. Penis jester troll god. Where others see the empire state building, or pencils, rockets, eels, swords, Buicks, spindles, wieners, thermos jugs, snakes, worms, derricks, trees, mushrooms, church spires, trombones, syringes, fingers, tongues, decanters, snails, submarines, cucumbers, neckties, female torsos, bell towers, pistols, barracudas, paramecia, daggers, telescopes, salamanders, walking sticks, chainsaws, carrots, thermometers, dolphins and blimps… the athlete sees penis.
-The athlete at five years old: big soft mommy and funny-smell-lady are laughing (the athlete learns that he isn’t just a human with thoughts and feelings but an object with attributes).
-The athlete at seventeen years old: his asthmatic easy-lay is laughing (the athlete learns that his attributes aren’t constant).
-The athlete at eighty: Samuel Beckett.
***
I find an outdoor café with a decent menu and no widescreen television. There’s only one other customer, four tables distant, facing the dark end of this tree-lined sidestreet on Savignyplatz. A woman.
***
“I may look German but I’m not,” she smiles, in California tones, as the waiter hands her her second drink. She’s smiling at me while reaching for the wine. I don’t think she looks German at all; she’s clearly, in my book of prejudices, the second wife of an American professional who’s been exiled to Germany. The egalitarian t-shirt; the woundingly-expensive Jackie O sunglasses mounted in the burnished crop of her dye-job like a tiara. “Not a football fan?”
“Hardly. Football’s sworn nemesis,” I joke, and we lift our respective glasses in a toast to a coincidentally-timed, ambient roar of jubilation that pours down the street and out of the windows of the genteel flats above us. I get up and move to the table next to hers to hear better. A whiff of vulva to her perfume.
“Are you Gay?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Well, there’s Gay and then there’s Gay.”
“DNA Gay versus the Gay of convenience.”
“That’s right. I basically found all this amazing porno on my ex-husband’s Mac one day and it hit me all the amazing stuff he’d been missing. I actually felt guilty for cheating him out of all that for so many years. You know? They do things I normally assumed was physically impossible and they consider it whitebread. Talk about out of the loop! We’re really good friends now,” she laughs, “but it kinda bugs me that his boyfriend is younger than mine. Younger and cuter. If you were Gay we’d end up being the best of friends. You’d call me up all giddy and breathless every time you thought you’d met Mister Right and six months later I’d be the shoulder you blubbered on when it all goes terribly wrong. I tried to get a personalized license plate called Fag Hag 27 but they wouldn’t let me. They say it’s a free country but what do I know. It’s free if you’re willing to pay for it, right? Except I was willing to pay for it and I still couldn’t have it.”
“Story of your life.” I toast her again; again comes the coincidental jubilation.
“If this were a movie I’d come on to you rather drunkenly about now, wouldn’t I?” She toasts me back and bisects her grin with the sharp lip of her wineglass. “But it isn’t so I won’t. Not that you care. What brings you to the Fatherland, anyway?”
An hour later I’m guiding her to her flat like a spotter beside a low tightrope. Twice she falls, floppily busty and loud. The second time she scratches her hand and an orange knuckle bleeds but she doesn’t care to notice. I surprise myself by being afraid of the blood.
Patiently fingernailing the double-knot-collapsed-into-a-recalcitrant-single-knot lace of her second trainer, I realize I’ll never be able to get hard enough to fuck her, so I decide to talk instead, leaving the trainer where it is, dangling from the edge of her depressing double bed. I extract, from the breast pocket of my blazer, a folded print-out of a story I’d been working on months ago and had forgotten about. Before I can pretend to solicit feedback and read her the excerpt, she’s snoring, an fish-mouthed snore like a boy’s impression of half a stadium’s distant ecstasy at the tie-breaking goal. I stand with one knee on the mattress and ejaculate in three thick beams on her widescreen sunglasses, miffed that she won’t hear the excerpt.
via Comrade DJ Sensei JR
UNPOPULIST OPINION and the RACIAL DIVIDE or THE DEAD BLACK GODS-PART 2
Sorry to have let the thread drop. I didn’t mean to seem uninterested–on the contrary! It’s just that I generally spend the weekends off-line.
This weekend in particular, Steven, I’ve been thinking about your Aryan Surfer Jesus. I realize that you’re quite right–when I listen to the sermons of C.L. Franklin, for example, or to Sam Cooke singing his tweaked version of “Were You There,” or to Ruth Davis singing “When He Spoke” (etc., etc.) I’ve taken it for granted that the Christ under discussion was not, in any sense, a “white” man. (Ditto the Moses and Job of the spirituals.) You’ve made me very curious to read a history of pictorial representations of Jesus in the black church.
Thanks to all for these comments.
# Steven Augustine says:
July 4, 2010 at 5:11 pm
Lorin: I appreciate your comment and the genuine curiosity motivating it!
My only interest in pursuing these kinds of arguments to some Nth-point, beyond the standard, is to shake things up a little. Not, certainly, for shaking-up’s own sake. And I’m not here to rehash a familiar case from the annals of American Victimology… my points/theories/arguments rile as many Blacks as non-Blacks… but it’s clear to me that the standard approaches to “racial healing” (PC euphemisms/ Oprah-catharsis/ summer jobs at the inner-city McDonalds) haven’t even come *close* to working. You may not remember that hallucinogenic interval, before Obama’s inauguration, when Liberals were arguing that his election meant the end of racism, but I do! Laugh. On no other topic do I find people (of all colors, as the cliche goes) *so* impregnably resistant to critical-analysis of their presets.
It’s my theory that, for structural reasons, a “Black” is more of a cultural artifact (or product) than an ethnic or cultural category of human. Ie: the concept hasn’t moved that far on from the antebellum, which presented Black (Wo)Man to her/himself as a commodity or tool. The product is a little more abstract now (in the Information Age we’re holograms; cf: THX 1138) but Black is still a product… and humans don’t do very well as products. Humans who aren’t treated as humans go nuts; ditto humans who don’t treat other humans as humans. (Apply this to “Woman”, as a product, as well, of course)
To address your question: there have been definite local movements (esp. during the 60s and 70s, but some probably pre-dated Marcus Garvey) to standardize an Afro-imaged Christ for Black contemplation/consumption, but these were almost always not organic but self-consciously “militant” projects and ended up being cosmetic overlays (like the Black Santa movement; if the culture-at-large doesn’t buy it, it’s very hard to make it stick).
One point I’ll leave you with: I’m sure we all know quite a few Atheists (I’m an Agnostic, myself: zero proof that the Universe *isn’t* mounted on an Ur-turtle’s back). But even Atheism is not pure; it’s ethnocentric, as I’ve discovered, because as Atheists reject the concept of the Christian God, they consider the Pantheon of Greek Gods (for example) to be so quaint that it isn’t even worth a serious debate. The Hindu Pantheon even worse (though pleasantly colorful); Voodoo the most “primitive”. I’ve never heard an intellectual Atheist bother to seriously refute (as they do with the pseudo-monotheistic Holy Trinity) the probability of the existence of Baron Samedi. But shouldn’t all three superstitions be assigned an absolutely equal value of un-dis-provability? This discrepancy is brainwashing at its subtlest.
I was always taught that Monotheism represented an evolutionary advance in Religious Belief. Just a few moments of critical analysis reveals that hegemonic propaganda nugget for the bullshit it is.
I think we’re *full* of these hegemonic propaganda nuggets. My interest is in cracking these nuggets open! Any nugget that it *hurts* to crack open should be a target. Isn’t that what intellectuals should do with their leisure time?
Again: I salute the spirit behind your respectful attention.
SA
Note: to extend the argument a bit (I felt constrained by comment-length etiquette at PR): a Black who isn’t a champion at basketball or a rapping savant or exemplary as one of only a few product-types is not only a product but a defective one.
Also Note: Sam Cooke may have lived and died as a Conceptual Product, but when he moved on to singing about Pussy from singing about Jeezis he acquired some dignity, imo.
PHILOSOPHY in the OPRAH-GAGA YUGA
Ziz? Ziz used to be good for some tasty inversions. Now he’s reduced to recycling tropes we precocious students diddled in High School. And why is Ziz lecturing about what “Nature” is or isn’t? Is that his specialty? What are his sources on that? Aren’t his pronouncements merely anecdotal or conceits of rhetoric and attitude? And who is this collective “We” (with imaginary Agency) he addresses /interrogates? Does he think “we” are in charge? Go to 10 minutes into it: Ziz manages to A) invoke a Hallmark card and B) shill for Heavy Industry in one limp swoop!
Who is this nose-hair-tugging guy with the funny accent telling us about EVERYTHING? Why do we ask him to tell us about EVERYTHING? Also: Fancy Explainer: Look to Thy vanity! He’s wearing that vest to hide his gut.
“He opens a copy of Living in the End Times, and finds the contents page. ‘I will tell you the truth now,’ he says, pointing to the first chapter, then the second. ‘Bullshit. Some more bullshit. Blah, blah, blah.’ He flicks furiously through the pages. ‘Chapter 3, where I try to read Marx anew, is maybe OK. I like this part where I analyse Kafka’s last story and here where I use the community of outcasts in the TV series Heroes as a model for the communist collective. But, this section, the Architectural Parallax, this is pure bluff. Also the part where I analyse Avatar, the movie, that is also pure bluff. When I wrote it, I had not even seen the film, but I am a good Hegelian. If you have a good theory, forget about the reality.’”
Ah, so winningly Brando-esque in his candid disavowals.
LIFE and DEATH in the OPRAH-GAGA YUGA
Major League Eating is the undisputed authority on competitive eating worldwide. All official eating contests are sanctioned by MLE and MLE maintains all official eating records. Following are recent records:
24″ Pizza
7 1/2 Extra Large Bacci Pizza Slices
15 Minutes/ July 9, 2005
Richard LeFevre
16″ Pizza
47 Slices Big Apple Pizza/Battle at the Big Apple World Pizza Eating Championship
10 Minutes/November 8, 2008
Patrick Bertoletti
7-Eleven Sports Slurpee
22 oz Sports Slurpee/7-Eleven Sports Slurping Time Trials
9 seconds/April 15, 2010
Patrick Bertoletti
Armour Vienna Sausage
8.31 pounds Armour Vienna Sausage /Lowe’s Motor Speedway Charlotte
10 Minutes/ May 28, 2005
Sonya Thomas
Ultimate Eating Tournament (Various Foods)
7 Chicken Wings, 1 lb of Nachos, 3 Hot Dogs, 2 Personal Pizzas, 3 Italian Ices/Broaday at the Beach
7 minutes, 13 seconds/April 19, 2008
Juliet Lee
Waffles
29 Waffles (8 oz.)/ Waffle House
10 Minutes/ Oct. 7, 2007
Patrick Bertoletti
Watermelon
13.22 pounds Watermelon/ Brookville Community Picnic
15 minutes/ July 30, 2005
Jim Reeves
Whole Turkey, Short Form
6.91 lbs roast turkey meat/Spike TV
8 Minutes/Nov. 22, 2007
Patrick Bertoletti
THE NEW WORD ORDER
I’ve decided to post a pdf of 23 shorts because I’ve received poignant emails about the fact that accessing the links to my fiction on TET is a tryingly-tedious process. This is owing to the effup that the images on every thread take a while to load (which is owing to the effup that I couldn’t be bothered to add the extra steps of shrinking the bytes of each image to quick-loading dimensions).
The shorts (and one novella) in this collection represent about a fourth of the tale-telling material (by page-count) I have published online. These 23 (Illuminati-groupies, take note) are a fair sample of the range … lopping off extremes at both the mainstreamy and obscurantist nipple-ends of my savory rainbow.
I believe this may be the most painless €00.00 you’ll ever pay for this much relatively-typo-free literature.
UPDATE: some typos corrected, pg numbers added to TOC
A SPEECHLESS WALK THROUGH THE CITY
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This last one is funny: a German popster is asked by a German rag, “So, Mr. Westernhagen, what’s your opinion of our rag?” and the popster, known as a “rebel” (by, ahem, German standards) responds with: “Your rag is open to criticism!!? Or is this just advertising?” The system effortlessly absorbs and re-purposes your wan little strategies of resistance. Oh, and picture #6 is a grocery store
THEN AND NOW: TWO MYTHS WITH ONE STONE
THE DIFFICULT TEXT
GRAY SCALE
This life is inconceivably beautiful. It is a life of the mind. It is always late summer, the blacks are inky-rich, the whites are milky singularities, the grayscale between is perfectly-judged. Satchmo, an immolated saint, has burned clear, finally, of all kitsch and his rehabilitation proves that we are capable of anything.
T. and I are standing as far apart as two Bohemians can, while still holding hands, looking at different paintings, grunting or sighing our assessments, our cool contentments or stern critiques, protected by the gallerist’s approving leer. The gallerist is a friend; she lowers the volume of the background music to afford us whispers. The city lowers its volume to afford us whispers. The ability to whisper is a function of IQ., or so I have read. T.’s whispers are suggestive and wet as little berries hung ripe on the air. She is taller than I. For her, the world will always be new.
-This is going to be great, tonight, at Bleecker Street, I say, pulling her close. She smells of everything fresh and healthy and young. Bertolucci’s first major statement in years, when it came out. A scandal. We have to get there early.
-What’s it about again?
-Existentialism. Brando. X-rated.
-X-rated? How will I get in? If they card me I’m dead.
-Think of it like Nick and Nora, I say, it’ll be an adventure and squeeze a muscular handful of her incredible ass through denim as soft as old money. She can’t understand why I prefer her to dress this way and she never will, because she’ll always be seventeen, just as I’ll always be forty two, older but not old, wise to life but not a fossil of cynicism and vigorously sex-possessed but not scary. I light a cigarette and touch it to my lips and sip it like ghostly grey wine through a straw, knowing it will never hurt me. Her bluejeans and sneakers and white dress shirt, tail out. And that striped t-shirt she sometimes wears, Seberg to my American Belmondo. I confess we own berets. I will teach her to smoke my cigars.
We gaze on a minor Warhol with affectionate contempt.
What is that melody?
It seems like days since last we’ve made love, but it’s only been minutes. An hour. She rode me in a corner of my loft beneath an Arbus. We heard a distant gunshot through an open window so like the sound effect from a radio drama of the ‘forties that we laughed and took a break and switched positions. A joke about Bridge. But the second position was more intense. No laughing. Just gunshots.
What is that melody?
Even crime transcends its dictionary definition to function as a compositional element, a narrative texture, in the masterpiece of this island. Rape and murder are the black that contrasts the white of witty banter; they are not foregrounded, they are anecdotal; no one we know has been touched or threatened by this kind of pain or grief or life-altering inconvenience. They merely tell stories about it. Something you watch out for, distracted by main events, like hornets in autumn on the Cape. It’s the colorful nonsense of the uneducated poor, as distant as whatever music they listen to (neither Gershwin nor Schubert).
We both suddenly remember and hum the rest of the tune together, accompanying the scratchy, fifty-year-old recording the gallerist has turned up again as we nod our smiled goodbyes and back through the glass into the vibrant sheen of the Sunday-dappled sidewalk. Looks like rain, later. An aesthetically-perfect thunderstorm.
Body and Soul.
***
Over dinner at our favorite bistro, Y. and I wallow in the almost obscene luxury of complaining about our copious lives. It’s an old script. A litany. A call-and-response in which we take our tacit comfort. Y.’s job is too good (he wishes he were a starving artist) and I worry out loud about having a seventeen-year-old lover who looks like a model, is obsequious to the point of being a fuckable housepet and boasts a lineage that intimidates every doorman in this impossible-to-intimidate town. My brow is knitted as I enumerate, again, every relevant superlative over the down-to-earth pizza we can share without needing to eye its last slice awkwardly with angst or regret. We usually simply leave the last slice untouched; a sacrifice to our casual Gods. The background chatter is reassuringly lively. Yet not too.
-She’s seventeen, I say, with a gesture more French than Rabbinical, though there is something vaguely and indefinably Jewish about the depth and pessimism of even my most light-hearted banter and there is something cozy in that; the ethnic weft; the white-but-not-too-ness. Also: it’s a devastatingly sexy contrast to the über-Wasp (Malevitch?) whiteness of my to-die-for lover, who’s so tomboyish, when I think about it, that she verges on being my catamite. I often fantasize about sodomy; the other kind. I touch the cool crook of Y.’s short-sleeved arm conversationally and say, with a Groucho Marks cadence, have I mentioned already she was a virgin when I first had Biblical knowledge of her? At the age of sixteen? In a hansom cab on Thanksgiving?
Y. counters with a story. I’m reminded of Borges but don’t say so and don’t know why. Story as follows.
A well-known director, otherwise associated with audience-pleasing romantic comedies, and known to write his own scripts, has an idea for a science fiction film, something dystopian, very dark, Owellian in the sense that a perpetual foreign war is described and slogans are everywhere and uniformed agents with unspecified powers keep the people in check. Dissent is not tolerated. Intellectuals sell-out, civilians disappear, the technology has reached a black-box level of godly near-magic that renders the regime invincible. A literal thousand-year-Reich is implied but never stated. The technology is both a giant’s oppressive fist and a drug-like distraction capable of soul-raping wonders. This is the scenario described. As I say: very dark. Bleak. Almost too dark to contemplate, but the well-known director, tired of being known for light fare, believes that this film will establish him as an artist of the first rank, up there with Welles. He throws himself into the project, despite his other commitments (the post-production of one romantic comedy and the pre-production of its follow-up), giving every extra moment; every gap of breathing-space in the continuum of his success-hijacked existence; to the conceptualization of this dark, depressing script.
But these prior commitments are endless; money has to be made. Time passes. Months become years, then decades, as the dystopian project (working title: 2002) fades in the intensity of its claim on his actual working time, but never frees his mind. Not a day goes by that he doesn’t think about it, until the day he suddenly realizes that thirty years have gone by and the scenario of the film he was never able to realize has come horribly true. That is, the hellish dystopia is Now and no one can escape it by simply walking out of a movie theater.
***
The cab ride home from the movie is wordless. That’s the difference between great art and mere entertainment: great art shuts you up. It’s a short ride but a long silence. I can read T.’s thoughts. Easy as perusing a book in a rack near the cashier in a shop at the Airport.
I had forgotten, of course, that the movie is more than existentialist sex in lower-strata Paris. E.g., I’d remembered the butter scene but not the scene with the open casket; I’d remembered the shaving sequence but not the eponymous tango. T. and I were kissing passionately, already, through the opening credits, and then we weren’t and then we weren’t even holding hands. Agnès Varda’s Camus cribs.
I’m thinking all this, and about Y.’s dinner story, while T. thinks only of the Jean-Pierre Léaud character, the single (hapless) innocent in the film. The hack is a regular Joe who can’t take his eyes off of T. in the rearview and I can read his little thoughts, too. In his mind, there’s nothing wrong with this morose little girl that his blue collar expertise in bed couldn’t cure by bringing her down a peg. By opening her to the smell of her own prejudices. The musk of her own prejudices. Barbieri’s sepiatone soundtrack invades the grayscale of my beautiful Gershwin thoughts; Barbieri’s soundtrack and Schneider’s bosomy tits. Should we have seen the Fellini instead?
Was Brando cheated, ironically, out of that phallic Oscar that so looks like a self he once was?
A pothole jolts me back to the actual. This borough after hours is a reflection of pearls in a flute of black water from the Lethe. Or the Styx? Anyway, every morning, all is forgiven as the slate is wiped clean; memories are chalk dust. I lean close to T. and whisper, Do you trust me?
-Of course.
-Play along.
I say to the driver, She’s something, isn’t she?
-Pardon? You talking to me?
-My date. I can see that you like her.
He laughs and says nothing. I press further.
-Don’t think I have a problem with that, because I don’t.
-Oh yeah?
-Yes. Are you married?
-Who isn’t?
-How long?
-The usual.
-Any kids?
-Not any more. What about you two? He winks in the mirror at T.
-You love your wife?
-Why not?
-How would you like to spend the night with my date here?
The quality of his attention is instantly altered. His eyes are off T. and dead on me, half-hidden and wary in the mirror’s black shine.
-Funny, you don’t look like a pimp.
-We’re not talking about a sum of money.
-What are we talking about?
-An experiment. A game.
-Yeah?
-You get my date and I get your wife. Six hours. Hotel of your choice. Tonight.
-And what does she think of all this?
-She thinks what I tell her to think.
-You look like a college professor but you talk like a what. I don’t know.
-Are you interested or not?
-I’m interested in everything. Oil crisis. The Knicks. That silly prick Carter, what he’s doing to this country, people say bring back Nixon. Nixon was a crook you could trust. Rich Arabs and uppity blacks. That Patty Hearst twat. I read the papers, I watch the evening news when I’m home. You think I’m uninformed?
I squeeze T.’s hand and lean in close again and say, You see? It’s all just talk. It was just a movie. This is what real guys are like, afraid of their sexual shadows. Safe as milk. Never ever forget that Jean-Pierre Lèaud and Marlon Brando are just actors, but this is real life and it’s without consequences. Cinema is the art of the worst-case scenario and I can feel her relax into the revelation; the literal muscles involved. I congratulate myself on saving the evening. I tip the cabbie so big, in the end, it probably insults him. I want him to be insulted: to admit that is liberating.
There is no sex tonight. We only murmur and spoon.
Just to be safe.
***
Y. and I stroll to the squash courts on a brilliant-yet-sunless Monday morning. A warm silver sky; the inhumanly reflective retina of a deity too close to distinguish. We both know what we will say before we say it, Y. and I. And so we say it, as we have and ever shall, without pleasure, but with the blank serenity that taunts free will with the brilliance of a nova-hot projector bulb, melting through time like a sign.
-Jew eat?
-No, Jew?
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other difficult texts
The laugh about intellectuals is, after a lifetime of gazing inwardly in print, reaching out and attempting to synthesize our patterns of experience and observation, into a rational whole; we often end up believing more in the reality of our psychological inventions and rhetorical proofs, than Reality as it is.
I was led from the academy-centric poetryetc website last night, to an article linking to the Noam ‘n Hitchens hoo ha and fall out they had in the pages of the Nation magazine after 9/11. It was all the proof one needs to demonstrate how, as intellectuals, our power as political vehicles are limited by a lack and absence of visionary force that spurs to practical action in the real world geo-political spheres and realms that it is very easy to pontificate about, a la this chap Pilger here.
There are few things funnier, instructive and occasionally annoying, than reading intellectuals opining what is wrong with the world at the macro nation-state, continental and global level, and exhorting us, in the strongest possible terms, to buy into their unproveable fantasies.
I thank Hermes and the gods of Letters, Thoth and Ogma, that I read what I did last night.
Though I have read little of Hitchens, by osmosis we glean that his trajectory was brilliant, all his ideas sane and reasonable, until he went off the boil after hitting his forties, still smoking, boozing and basically, turned into who he is now. A self-righteous know-all who might know all these amazing bits of information about the world, but so what?
For a person whose only weapon is a pen, to consciously choose to concentrate their mind on the largest geo-political questions of the gravest consequence such as: Shall we go to war?- the first question I think is, why?
If you are that concerned, why not get practically involved in politics, or join the army, but puhleez, don’t sit on your overpaid fanny ranting at the mouth, trying to justify the deaths of thousands on the strength of what you have managed to fantasize and convince yourself as being the utmost morally right thing to do, in the confines of your imagination alone. Rehearsing fantasies on a page, performing an act for the Reader, our world you tell us, ‘this is right, this war and death.’
~
Pilger here just doesn’t make sense. He does at a casual person chatting in the pub level, but not as a serious intellectual being whose theories are exactly that. The gravity a Reader apprehends in any ‘opinion’ writers’ world, on the page, is only the weight of belief the writer possesses as they write. Fantasy, in effect. That’s all it is.
That Pilger sincerely believes his own ideas, strung together over fifty years of watching and not doing, all the decades of him there in the wars, only as a witness, never as a person who went to assist, just observe – is clear to read. But it doesn’t make them right, his opinions on what would have happened, if the way he predicted life had the chance to happen and become our shared History not on the page of Pilger’s psychological inventions, but in reality itself.
If there was a technology that could magically test out his theories, go forward and back in time and change reality, play it out as Pilger, Hitchens and me or you do in our heads, posit and prove them/us wrong or correct, then I would take him and Hitchens seriously.
Especially the older they become, as they slip into the cyncial certainty of rich opinion writers, first class travellers hetting round the globe on the important business of writing what they think should be happening, jaded with what they choose to occupy their lives with, the watching and opining of what goes on in war zones they chose to spend their lives in, for money I assume, as it can’t be love, surely?
And it becomes clear to them, personally, I expect, and is the reason for this hardening of their hearts, that all they have is opinions and nothing more substantial to leave, as the legacy of their time on earth. Opinions formed by a life of doing little but report, not for us the Reader, but themselves, because we only write for ourselves first and last, surely?
Until they can prove their blather in the real world, all we have is the gravity of their personal belief decanted, via the technology of the intellect, onto a stage of Letters; and as we know, the greatest persuaders’ worlds exist wholly fictional. People like Hitchens and Pilger, are merely cardboard Shakespeares, pale imitations of the real Creator, sticking to told-you-so, wise after the fact opinion and not being a creator of original fictions themselves.
Here we have Bobby K and Pilger, a hangabout in the press pack, just one of many who had not chosen to change the world by deed, but thought alone, asking Kennedy, as Maria Hyde might ask Nick Clegg:
‘…how exactly he would lift them out of poverty: just what was his political philosophy?
‘Philosophy? Well, it’s based on a faith in this country and I believe that many Americans have lost this faith and I want to give it back to them, because “we are the last and the best hope of the world”, as Thomas Jefferson said.’
“That’s what you say in your speech. Surely the question is: How?”
“How . . . by charting a new direction for America.”
The vacuities are familiar. Obama is his echo. Like Kennedy, Obama may well “chart a new direction for America” in specious, media-honed language, but in reality he will secure, like every president, the best damned democracy money can buy.
~
You see, Kennedy is the Real human being here, the one actually doing the real doing, being the music of what happens, and the millions are there for him, not because they want to appear in an article Pilger will write, but for Robert Francis Fitzgerald Kennedy: the 100% Irish politican, all eight of his grandparents pukka paddies, in the sense that every bag of bones that made his, for the last many centuries at least, routed directly back to living and dying in Ireland.
An aside, but it’s interesting to note, because Kennedy loved poetry, and one of his favourites was Aeschylus, who he recited during an impromptu, extemporized address to a crowd in Indianapolis, the day Martin Luther King was murdered, and which was one of the few cities that did not erupt in flames that epoch defining night:
The majority of people in this vast country who live together,want to improve the quality of life and see justice for all human beings that abide by peace in our land.
‘Let’s dedicate ourselves to what a Greek poet wrote, many years ago:
tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.
Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say
a prayer for our country and for our people.
Thank you very much.
we can move as a country, into greater
polarization..filled with hatred toward
one another. Or we can make an effort,
As Martin Luther King did, to understand,
and to comprehend, and replace that violence,
that stain of bloodshed that has spread across
our land,
with an effort to understand,
Compassion, and love.
~
For those..tempted to fill with – be filled
with – hatred and mistrust of the injustice
of such an act, against.. people, I would only
say that I feel in my own heart the same kind
of feeling. I had a member of my family killed,
..by a white man. But we have to make an effort
In the United States. We have to make an effort
to understand, to get beyond, or go beyond
These rather difficult times. My favorite poem,
my — my favorite poet ..he once wrote:
Even in..pain which cannot forget ..drop by drop
upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against
our will, comes wisdom
Through the..grace of” good…
“What we need in the United States is not division;
what we need in the United States is not hatred;
What we need ..is not violence and lawlessness,
but..Love, and wisdom..Compassion ..
A feeling of justice toward those who still suffer
within our country, whether they be white or..black.”
~
You see, Pilger, when he cuts in his piece of writing, from Kennedy saying he wanted to ‘chart a new direction for America’; the Australian, Pilger, immediately cuts into saying this was ‘vacuous’, as though he, John Pilger and not Robert Francis Fitzgerald Kennedy, second last of the pure bred Irish American leaders, poet loving 100% ‘us’ person, was the one there changing the world around him through action and deed.
This exposes his own vanity, that he appropriates the dead into his theory on Obama, who he wants to trash because forty years later Pilger is cynical and unhappy with his life, surely, or why would he be so down on it?
This is a poem from one Desmond poet – Deasmuman, South Muinster, where the Fitzgeralds once where Earls of, to a dead hero in our clan, Robert Francis, Bobby Kennedy, I’d sooner take my chance with him than with a million Pilger-Hitchens.
(The end of it is 7C, Lorica of Saint Patrick)
And my own humble prayer:
Strong is the power of our light.
The spiritual armour of goodness
Resisting rulers’ wicked wiles
And the cult of men in darkness.
Within us beastial faith lies,
Learning truth in a fearless
Charm composed to invoke divine
Defence against all manner of evil
And inscribed upon Saint Patricks
Breastplate. A loricae. The snippet
Below, in druidic protection meter.
‘I arise today
Through the strength of heaven
Light of sun
Radiance of moon
Splendour of fire
Speed of lightening
Swiftness of wind
Depth of the sea
Stability of earth
Firmness of rock.
I arise today
Through God’s strength to pilot me.’
WELCOME TO THE HYPNO SHOW
Des, nothing terrifies and/or nauseates our Pharaohs more than the idea of millions of the poor who might also be intellectuals. They saw to that after the massive post-War mistake they made with the GI Bill, over-educating and radicalizing all those Korean War Vets: the anti-War movement of the late-’50s and early-’60s was gathering dangerous momentum and it was led by lower class intellectuals. The Pharaohs fixed that by sending in the clowns: The Hippies. The Hippies and their bullshit Narcissism, faux-Mysticism and aversion to Rigorous Fucking Thought. The Pharaohs made sure that the Dumbing Up hit hard and fast and it paid off in record time: less than three generations later the American electorate is the dumbest force on earth and they spread their anti-intellectual proclivities to all nations via Hollywood, which they subsidize with their food stamps. Heaping scorn on the notion of an intellectual (like George Wallace did with his “pointy-headed intellectual” riff) is what they want you to do, because having masses of the underclass react only to potent symbols and “moving” rhetoric and who determine their affiliations by means of the football-team-model means that things will stay as they are. Poetry is great but the anti-intellectual uses of it can be nefarious in a Real World seething with opportunistic killers. Fuck rhetoric; fuck epic beauty; fuck the Mystic nonsense that keeps us wandering in ineffectual clouds of unfocused feeling. Address the fucking DATA first.
Which is purest bullshit, Des. Pilger cites facts which you do not address. Pit your facts against Pilger’s facts; pitting your impassioned beliefs against Pilger’s depressing facts might win the game for an audience trained to interpret Truth as whatever makes them feel good, but on the level of intellectual debate (in which the goal is to arrive at the most Truthful of the possible conclusions), it’s useless.
Vacuous is the best word to describe that “new directions” riff, yes. Politicians favor soundbites that feel good without committing them to specific deeds or positions. Stock, vacuous “uplifting” phrases like “yes I can” and “a thousand points of light” are risk-free, easy to utter, pay off well. And look to your uses of the words “Australian”, “Irish” and “American”, Des: it’s nationalist tosh. You’ve been pre-programmed to curl a lip at Truth-tellers like Pilger; and just how was RFK “changing the world”?
Bobby Kennedy was a rich, power-mad cunt who came from a family of rich, power-mad cunts. I don’t really give a damn if he was “Irish”… so was Ronnie Reagan. And I don’t give a damn if Pilger is an “Aussie”… these labels might as well be the names of football teams; every football team will have its brains and its rapists; its saints and its gluttons; its clowns and cold killers. The question is: is the bulk of Pilger’s argument close to being factual? Are you responding to AURA or DATA?
Here’s some more info on RFK; even his own family would refute the interpretation of the following evidence while not being able to deny the facts:
Let’s not be suckers.
“How . . . by charting a new direction for America.” That’s what they always say, man.
I was raised to be a cynic by a man who was near the heart of the quasi-revolutionary foment in Chicago politics, c. ’68. I met Black Panthers, Jessie Jackson (a CIA tool) and Muhammad Ali in my father’s office when I was still in grade school. I was taken to see “living theater” where free fruit was distributed and some play that was way over my head was put on for an audience full of people in dashikis… midway through the play someone burst into the theater screaming “They’ve shot him!” and I had no idea that it was part of the play or that the victim the “hysterical” woman was referring to was Malcolm X. I only understood the deliciousness of the fruit they had handed out.
What I absorbed was an ability to go un-seduced by politicians and speeches and grand gestures and symbols and all such props in the political Hypno Show. I absorbed, also, a sense of the reality of Death. Anyone who claims that an ideal or movement transcends the actual LIFE of any actual person is not to be trusted. This includes any politician or “spiritual leader” sending hordes, from the worthless underclass, off to kill and die.
Scraps of poetry in high-reaching speeches from out of the crafty mouth-holes of handsome faces (black or white or other)… these are all props.
If we lived in Iraq or Afghanistan we wouldn’t need to be told this. The Truth would be the bombs we’d be dodging. The current Pres is a poetry-lover and a bomb-dropper (which makes him better than his predecessor by a pointless margin).
Wake up, mon.
You can’t blame Joe Kennedy’s sons for the sins of their father.
Kennedy was a notorious capitalist nazi supporter, but his sons weren’t.
When Kennedy came to power, the first thing he did was face down Russia trying to secretly ship missiles to Cuba, and unlike the Russian Communist leader, Kennedy taped, discussions, meetings and phone calls that chart the 13 day crisis, which only he his secretary and possibly his Brother, knew about.
The tapes are there to listen to and have been transcribed intoa book The Kennedy Tapes, which I have read.
Why would he do this?
It indicates the behaviour of someone with nothing to hide, surely, that he would leave his account to posterity, in this store, of History being made?
I would argue it is because he was led by a humanist impulse of truth and justice, more so than power and privilige, as he saw it, because he was born into power and privilige and need not pursue it, unlike his father who wouldn’t have done this, I suspect. Kennedy, I like to think, wanted to change the world and steer it in a positive direction.
He didn’t get up to the dirty tricks of his father and his life was different, very priviliged, but, unlike Bush junior whose imagination led him only to acquiring more money; the Kennedys, and particularly Bobby at the end of his life, were slogging away for real change for the good of everyone and not just people like them who were rich and powerful. Bobby Kennedy in his final years had a totally different realtionship with Martin Luther King, his previous resistance had given way to a close working relationship, both going in the same direction, fused in the radical time of a country that was in the first days of shaking off Jim Crow.
After his brother’s murder, Robert Kennedy changed and his previous world-view dissolved. He did not fall into bitterness and ire, but toward making America a land of peace and love, I would argue, as the invention my imagination creates after taking into account what I know.
The only one who can really prove this thesis is Kennedy himself, and as he was murdered by a lunatic whilst campaigning for president, both our different positions can not be prioved either way. So, all we are doing is having a conversation, two people sat on our arses with unique experiences. I make no claim of being ‘right’, you seem very passionate about it, but the obvious thing to say is – run for president yourself if it’s that important to you.
Kennedy came into a world as it was, like Obama, and becoming president isn’t like stepping into an empty office on the first day, because there are all sorts of people in the structure of State, visible and in the shadows, as Truman alluded to in his 1960 address warning againt the rise of the American military industrial complex:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
Some posit that it was around this time a shadow-government began crystalizing in America, as a web of influence exerted by bank-owning controllers of this military-industrial complex.
They point to the fact that Congress entrusted the printing of its money to a private banking cartel, The Federal Reserve, the bill passed to create it in 1913, done so in a more or less empty senate on 22/23 December, only a handful of people present.
The argument goes, that by the time JFK and his brother came along fifty years later, they were very small potatoes, because the real power was being exercised behind the scenes, and that Kennedy took on these unseen forces, wanted to seize it back for the people, and was murdered for his trouble by them.
These people, the srgument goes, are not stupid, they knew you can’t just waltz into the office on the first day of ruling the ‘free’ world, snap your fingers and the world changes to your tune, because for the tune to change they would have to release their grip on the money supply fuelling the military industrial complex, and the military industriall complex itself.
What the Kennedys had inherited from their father, was a clear view of reality and how best to act within it to effect what they wanted to happen. They were experts in the business of real politics, and we can argue all day long about what they did, but at some point we have to dilineate the wider frame of History that these brothers were contained within.
It’s all very well for one person intellectuals like you me Hitch and Pilger, to cognize reality in a simple black/white right/wrong binary, and rehearse in Letters why A is bad and B good: fall into the easy, untaxing options of belief that state changing things in the real world, in Reality, is exactly the same as creating (fictional) reality in our masterplans on paper.
But that’s fiction, no obstacles in the form of other people actively blocking our way; because, on paper, we are God in our own mind, and it is very easy to create anything in the docking of a petide to a neural receptor, very easy to change a world in our heads and write out our mumbo jumbo manifestos for freedom and love, or slavery and hate, and all mixes, ratios and shades between these two extremities in the spectrum of human potential.
The journeying flash of a neuron getting from A to Z, explaining why on a million points along the way, X was a cunt, Y was a cunt, A was a cunt, B is a cunt and I or you are Ms fucking Fabbo – takes not the effort of facing up to the shadowforce in the oval office and not getting murdered in the process.
Agree with all that, Des… 1913 indeed. There is not only a “shadow government”… there are surely more than one, in competition for control, involved in unknown coups, fakes and intrigues (see Machiavelli-era Italy for a glamorous analog). We’ll never untangle that knot or track all the plots and real meanings. But the point to focus on is the propaganda that would have you believe that America was anything other than an Imperialist power before 1913. What I don’t agree with is your unlikely theory that anyone can get as far within the system as any of the three Kennedy brothers and not also be of it. The system isn’t that naive. The system is not “God-given”: it was put into place by wealthy white landowners and it was not designed to divest wealthy white landowners of power; it has refined itself over the centuries into a powerful fucking machine that controls minds as easily as it controls bodies; it is not naive and its participants are not naive and they rise through a stringent protocol of filters. Only we, the audience, are so terribly fucking naive to think otherwise. We’re the hero-worshippers; the fans; the ones who buy the worthless fucking bumper-stickers.
Also: don’t confuse being martyred with being a saint: Mafiosi are famous for ordering hits on each other. This is interesting:
But: meanwhile: you haven’t responded to the factual evidence of RFK being a cunt.
Why the apologia? Why the euphemisms? The “wider frame of history” that these brothers were “contained in” was Anglo-American Supremacy, thanks. Do you have to be a non-white to be bothered by this?
This is related to that age-old argument, “It’s easy to criticize!” Well, fuck me, it is indeed. But the ease of it has nothing to do with whether the criticisms are true or not. It’s an elegant way of smothering dissent, raising the bar so high… ie, “unless you yourself have a plan for stopping the repression and mass-slaughter, it’s very easy for you to criticize repression and mass-slaughter!”
Nonsense, Comrade. Facts are facts. Aura vs Data. I don’t care how white the Kennedy teeth are: they are different from the Bushes by degrees, not category.
I think my biggest question for you, again, is: why, despite the evidence, must you cling to that Kennedy image? Where did the image come from?
[ed.'s note: due to the responsibilities of playing with my daughter on a Saturday, I'm doing these responses piecemeal as opportunity arises... check back on them to catch new additions]
Yeah, I’ve seen the wiki page of American wars outside its borders.
I don’t know Steve, you say you have to be of the system to get along within it, but unless we are in the political system on a practical level like your town councillors, right through to Obama, what we say carries only so much authority.
For example. There’s a person. Lets call that person ‘I’, who doesn’t like ice-cream vans, for some long complex reasons that are too long and boring to go into here, but relate to having a pathological hatred of anything to do with ice-cream sellers.
I could sepnd my entire life warning people of the dangers and consequences of stepping into that colourful van and becoming intimate with the life and experience of a mobile ice cream vendor. After a few years hard study, I could start triumphantly making connections between Evil and ice-cream, find a few criminal dregs who murdered young kids, were corrupt politicans, where all sorts of things – and tie it all into the fact they all at some point, had spent time in the white coats flogging posicles, and after a lifetimes work, delvier some big Theory of everything that states all the lunacy in the world is a direct result of Mister Mickey selling 99′s.
However, unless I were to sell ice-cream myself, actually experience it as much as I denounce, I can only ever be talking out my fanny, I would argue, invent, write; and not because I am overly concerned and interested in geo-political reality, or icecream – but because I want you to read it.
It is interesting to note that John Kennedy, was in the process of taking back the powers of the federal reserve private banking cartel, with his order:
‘On June 4, 1963, a little known attempt was made to strip the Federal Reserve Bank of its power to loan money to the government at interest. On that day President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order No. 11110 that returned to the U.S. government the power to issue currency, without going through the Federal Reserve. Mr. Kennedy’s order gave the Treasury the power “to issue silver certificates against any silver bullion, silver, or standard silver dollars in the Treasury.” This meant that for every ounce of silver in the U.S. Treasury’s vault, the government could introduce new money into circulation. In all, Kennedy brought nearly $4.3 billion in U.S. notes into circulation. The ramifications of this bill are enormous.
With the stroke of a pen, Mr. Kennedy was on his way to putting the Federal Reserve Bank of New York out of business. If enough of these silver certificats were to come into circulation they would have eliminated the demand for Federal Reserve notes..
Oh, sorry Steve, I didn’t see until now the writing after the wiki war check-list.
You ask why must I cling to the Kennedy image?
Because I am a Fitzgerald myself, I suppose.
Disagree. The life-long experience of buying and eating the ice cream is a DATA-base, too. If you’re paying attention to the realities of it, eh? But, listen: it’s as though you’ve forgotten that the entire supposed point of “journalism” is to report honestly on the activities of the Ice Cream Mafia… informing citizens who therefore don’t need to sell Ice Cream in order to have some purchase on the Truth about selling it. Of course, most “professional journalism” is a sham… a control of the Truth that doesn’t involve delivering it. Which is why John Pilger… and the late Gary Webb… are/were so important.
I don’t want to claim it’s Hopeless, Des. But I’m not in the business of fooling myself. The fuckers have the planet in a serious headlock. The Way Out will not appear within our lifetimes. It’s a Generational Process. First step is being honest with ourselves. Second step is patience (Third step: throw away that Television). The Fuckers have been doing this for hundreds of years. Think about it: it’s an unbroken lineage… what would have caused the Discontinuity? America was founded by an Aristocracy, not its Serfs.
PS the American Wars stuff wasn’t a “wiki”: it was from the writings of a fellow whose name I’d rather not print here. Wrong type of name, innit? Don’t want to end up on a list, mon.
Steven your last TET with its industrial ammounts of YouTubery discombobulated my work computer so I had to retire early with overloaded pixels and wonder when you’d jump ship to a new thread. That plus several weeks preparation for summer touring and a new project which has subsequently stalled for the moment until we can find someone to top up a budget for 10 performers and 10 life-sized puppet figures.
I was interested in your comments on Pilger and television. My memory of Pilger was that he was very much a TV man so I find it difficult to see him as an outsider.Also very much a Daily Mirror journalist too and a populist in spreading the word for his causes/beliefs. I’m not au fait with all that he wrote but I remember those early reports on Pol Pot.
I’d always found him like a harder-edged version of Michael Moore i.e great starting points but a tendency to cloud the issues by trying to drag too much into the documentary/article. Fatally so in Moore’s case but not always clear in Pilger’s case as I remember.
Comrade ET! Good to have you back in the Bunker!
1. Any photos from the production-in-progress you’d like to post here? We’d be fascinated, man.
2. Re: Pilger’s cred: if he weren’t any sort of “insider”, he’d be in no position to report on this stuff, is how I see it. I’m not superstitious about TV as a medium, I’m wary about content.
3. Re: Pilger’s populism: I don’t see that as inconsistent with his message or an affront to Secular Humanism as a worldview or the Truth as a category of Data (my old DATA vs AURA war cry). In any case, “journalistic neutrality” is a myth that the myth-makers assert is being upheld only when it’s their views being promulgated
4. Re: “dragging too much” into the doc… there can never be too many facts, IMO. Propaganda tends to be slick/streamlined/bite-sized… the Truth is a fucking mess. To return to the original point: no one wants to think of RFK with bad breath or a selfish erection or as a power-mad fuck who did what he had to do to squirm up the greasy pole of Empire (from a pretty high starting point, we should add) in a grab for that morbidly beautiful brass ring (the one his brother died clutching). These Kennedy/Reagan/Clinton/Bush/Churchill/ Truman/ Washington people are not heroes and even the stuff on public record shows us this conclusively but our need for heroes/myths/dichotomies is strong; Pilger’s talks and articles are on a continuum with Pinter’s Nobel speech and Chomsky’s work and Gary Webb’s fatal adventure in exposé and Dorothy’s dog at the end of the Wizard of Oz, tugging away the curtain. Only, in this case, it’s reversed, innit? The image of the Wizard is benign… it’s the man behind the curtain we should be afraid of.
I mean… really afraid of.
Dozens of drawings only Steven which when I have time I’ll send via your email address and you can do with them what you will. Likely to be next week sometime as I’m escaping the UK election results here with a gig on the Polish border over the weekend.
I didn’t mean populism as a criticism btw. I’m a populist of sorts myself, only I dislike for the main part the forms that populism usually takes.
Pilger was like Dennis Potter – loved and hated by turns and given the chance to develop their views over time. I don’t think that happens anymore on TV – it’s more of a hit single attitude now.
Yeah, slip a sheaf of Art our way and we’ll (that’s the royale “we” with cheese) post them up glorious. And, Christ, I could go for some “Singing Detective” (Gambon’s version; wasn’t there an American re-make?) now that you mention it.
Listen: mid-period TV was far from monolithically evil. I saw “Between Time and Timbuktu” on TV, as a kid (as I’ve mentioned here before, I think) and it was a (positively) formative experience. Not to mention Ignatz Mouse and Krazy Kat.
YES, SIR! (is this the pre-campaign for the Palin Presidency?)
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Clearly, anti-intellectuals have all the fun!
RANDOM NOTES
more random notes
GREATEST UNSUNG DECONSTRUCTION OF A CELEBRITY DEATH IN 2009
THE ART OF THE EPISTOLARY NOVEL
Last night I was invited by Comrade DJ Sensei Desmond to visit the Poetry site he co-hosts… Scarriet; the articles/discussions on the site are quite interesting and not bloggy (ie, shallow and schmooze-heavy) and often learnéd but I found thereon an old discussion about a Billy Collins pome (Billy being a former Poet Laureate of Murrka)… the pome itself made of very poor language; too wordy and unremarkable and estranged, in every line, from any sense of le mot juste… and I got an idea for an “extreme makeover” feature called…
THE POME REMADE
(the original pome)
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(suggested adjustments)
Lines Composed Over Three Thousand Miles From Tintern Abbey
I was here before, a long time ago (how about lose “before”, “a” and “time”?),
and now I am here again
is an observation that occurs in poetry (and cut that “is”)
as frequently as rain occurs in (“to”) life (as though it can occur elsewhere; try “Portland”).
The fellow may be gazing (stronger minus “may be”)
over an English landscape,
hillsides (“hills”) dotted (“tufted” would have been nice) with sheep,
a row (“rows”) of tall trees topping the downs (don’t think “tall” is necessary; specific type of trees more vivid),
or he could be moping through the shadows (try: “or he’s moping toward shadows”)
of a dark Bavarian forest (do we need those “shadows” in the “dark”?) ,
a wedge of cheese (“a sweating cheese”) and a volume of fairy tales
tucked (“pressed”) into his rucksack.
But the feeling is always the same.
It was better the first time.
This time it is not nearly as good (how many times can we say “time”?).
I’m not feeling as chipper (ugh) as I did back (lose “back”) then.
Something is always missing (those chiming “ings”)—
swans, a glint on the surface of a lake (as opposed to on its bottom),
some minor but (why “minor but”?) essential touch.
Or (lose “or”) the quality of things has diminished (without that “has” it might have sung).
The sky was a deeper (“fleshy” would be cooler), more dimensional blue,
clouds were (lose “were”) more cathedral-like (lose “like”),
and water rushed over (“smoothed”) rock
with greater effervescence (Schweppes?).
From our chairs we have watched
the poor author in his waistcoat (“the author in his rags”)
as he recalls the dizzying (“blinding”) icebergs of childhood
and mills around (“wheels” instead of “mills around”) in a field of (“through waist-high” instead of “in a field of”) weeds.
We have heard the poets long dead (try “long-elapsed”)
declaim their dying
from a (the) promontory, a (the) riverbank,
next to a (by the) haycock, within a (lose “within a”; “the” )copse. (grandiloquent-yet-flat: a paradox?)
We have listened to their dismay,
the kind that issues from poems
the way water issues forth (or just plain “issues” or how about “pours”) from hoses,
the way the match always gives its little (extraneously folksy adjective) speech on fire.
And when we put down (“drop” instead of “put down”) the book at last,
lean back, close our eyes (“eyes shut”),
stinging with print (ourselves or our eyes?),
and slip in (“and finger”) the bookmark of sleep,
we will be schooled enough (lose “enough”) to know
that when we wake up (lose “up”)
a little before dinner
things will not be nearly (lose “nearly”) as good as they once (“once” is extraneous) were.
Something will be missing (“something will be missed”)
from this long (lose “long”), coffin-shaped room,
the walls and windows now
only two different shades of gray,
the glossy gardenia drooping
in (“over”) its chipped terra-cotta pot.
And on the floor, shoes, socks,
the browning core (“spine”) of an apple.
Nothing will be as it (lose “it”) was
a few (lose “a few”; use “just”) hours ago, back in the (lose “back in”) glorious past
before our naps, back in (lose “back in” again) that Golden Age
that drew to a close sometime shortly (lose “sometime shortly”) after lunch.
–Billy Collins (1998, Hollander)
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(new pome)
Lines Composed Over Three Thousand Miles From Tintern Abbey, Improved
I was here, long ago
and now I am here again
an observation that occurs in poetry
as frequently as rain occurs to Portland
The fellow gazing
over an English landscape,
hills tufted with sheep,
rows of Ash topping the downs,
or he’s moping toward shadows
of a Bavarian forest ,
sweating cheese and a volume of fairy tales
pressed in his rucksack.
But the feeling is always the same.
It was better the first.
This is not nearly as good.
I’m not feeling as here as I did then.
Something is always missed:
swans, glints of lake,
some essential touch.
The quality of things diminished.
The sky was a fleshy, more dimensional blue,
clouds more cathedral,
and water smoothed rock
with greater tumult.
From our chairs we have watched
the author in his rags
as he recalls the blinder icebergs of childhood and
wheels through waist-high weeds.
We have heard the poets long-elapsed
declaim their dying
from the promontory, the riverbank,
by the haycock, the copse.
We have listened to their dismay,
the kind that issues from poems
the way water pours from hoses,
the way the match always wastes its speech on fire.
And when we drop the book at last,
lean back, eyes shut tight against
the sting of print,
and finger the bookmark of sleep,
we will be schooled to know
on waking
a little before dinner that
things will not be good as they were.
Something will be missed
from this coffin-shaped room,
the walls and windows now
only two shades of gray,
the glossy gardenia drooping
over its chipped terra-cotta pot.
And on the floor, shoes, socks,
the browning spine of an apple.
Nothing will be as was
just hours ago, the glorious past
before our naps, that Golden Age
that drew to its close after lunch.
–Billy Collins/ Augustine (1998, 2010)
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Sure, that “blinder icebergs” is gratuitous but it’s more interesting than “dizzying icebergs” and the rest of the pome is much spiffier now; it’s almost fuckable. Glad I could help, Billy!
Tom (Brady) over at Scarriet responds to my sneeze across Billy Collins’ Hallmark bow with:
#
to which I replied:
I then added (and Tom then replied):
Over at Quick Study, the unwaveringly-intelligent Scott McClemee wrote something about a couple of references to something he wrote about (is this meta-enough, yet?) Andy Warhol. Which reminded me of my recent thoughts that the question “But is it Art” should nowadays be re-phrased as, “But is it an Art audience?” and I commented:
The Gears of Serendipity are at work: I won’t even bother to post my part of this fairly-involved discussion about Art I just had with Tom Brady (though I’ll flesh out the Billy Collins chat we had, in a few minutes, above):
I find this to be a head-twisting comment. Not so much its content as that anyone would say or, even, believe it.
Egon Schiele: outdated scientist or scientist-of-the-future?
The Basement Plays
1. the statement
-And then she said, “What do you mean by that?”
-And I said, “What do you mean, what do I mean by that?”
-And she just stared at me.
-I repeated, “What do you mean, what do I mean by that?” and I added:
-“I don’t mean things, I say them. I said it. You make it sound as though I’d merely attempted to say something, when what I did was to accomplish that much and move on. I am a do-er, not a mean-er. Women mean, but men do.”
-It was then that she hit me.
-It was not a forceful blow like a man’s. It was a cruel blow, like a woman’s. I was upset.
-When I came to, later, I thought about what had happened, and realized that every thought and action in my life until that moment had led me directly to it. And, by extension, the thoughts and actions of every single one of my ancestors, from the beginning of time. Five billion years back, chains of carbon molecules linked up, or whatever they do, resulting, as surely as though it had been the sole point of the exercise, in this silly woman on her back in the missionary position, striking the eye of her only remaining friend.
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2. monolog
-So much of the world that is made by humans came into existence only because the eye demanded to see it. This “eye pressure” is the greatest primal force in the human and to that extent the eye is the only “evil” sense organ. The nose demands only that we avoid offending it; the skin is happy with a simple variety of touches; the tongue is only slightly more demanding than the skin and therefore fire was invented not to satisfy the tongue with cooked flesh but to satisfy the eye’s demand to see flames. The ear demands very little and it often gets too much in return for its demands and many new forms (à la Serialism) are invented only to be quickly discarded. But the eye discards nothing and still it wants more. It demanded to see sodomy and photography was created and nothing was discarded. It demanded to see flesh melt and the candid, un-posed shadows of the vaporized and so Hiroshima was created and nothing was discarded. It demanded to see decapitations and The Internet was created and nothing was discarded. The fact that burning humans alive is no longer a popular spectacle in many parts of the world is probably because cinema and television fulfilled, much better, that particular demand of the eye: to see the inter-mingle of pain, transfiguration and death with light. The eye pressure was temporarily relieved, in that case. But the demand will return re-doubled
Just posted this on a mod site and am testing if it will appear. Take it down if you want Steve.
cheers
[ed.'s note: Des: erm... what? laugh]
The ART vs SCIENCE debate I had with Tom Brady (which is linked to the one I had with Bill Benson) put me in mind of the HG Wells-based film THINGS TO COME. In the Wells-scripted film, Science is humankind’s ultimate muse and savior… the Arts are represented by a character named “Theotocopulos” who gives a climactic, progress-bashing speech before a rocket is launched into space. Wells makes Theotocopulos not only an Artist but a Religious one at that… making it clear that the Author doesn’t want to give this character’s views much rational authority. The original text (from 1933; the film came out in 1936) is rich material, too. This schism is a defining schism; Wells was the defining fantasist of a pseudo-objective-worldview-cum-religious-orthodoxy (what is the concept of Progress but humankind’s motion towards the realized moment of a “City of God”, which is just a euphemism for the Anglo-American Techno-Dominion of the Earth) which TET is a fortified bunker pagoda against.
Here’s what I mean (these definitions may sharpen in future debates) by ART and SCIENCE, roughly:
THE MIDNIGHT SHOW
(go to the 7:00 for The Speech)
I’m hoping CDS Steven’s not still on the rag [ed.'s note: Steven is a card-carrying ArseHole; he doesn't care if he is "liked" by Virtual Chums and is only really interested, with TET, in clearing a space in Litblogglandia where readers can be assured that Ideas and the site-owner's notions of Truths aren't being blunted, polluted, trivialized or obscured by the conventions of intra-blog circle-jerkage; ie, just because you complimented me yesterday doesn't mean I daren't call you a Cunt tomorrow] or at least that he took a few of the chocolate-covered Motrin tablets I snuck in the M&M’s dish, and that the bloating, cramping and fits of rage have subsided [ed.'s note: not as long as kids are being bombed in their bedrooms by yer POTUSOC], and that it’s safe to reenter the Bunker Pagoda [ed.'s note: erm, not really for NormLibs, no: try Jim H's rumpus room or Duh-Ed's beer hall instead]. In any event, you really do have this nasty habit [ed.'s note: it's called Critical Fucking Thinking], CDS Steven, of fixing a legacy at the nadir and not at the apex of a person’s evolution [ed.'s note: you mean like Nixon?]. You did it with Gandhi, now RFK [ed.'s note: if you have any DATA to refute the DATA I present on either, please present it; otherwise, you're just being a Normative Dupe of AURA, in my opinion; a Dupe who guzzles the Kool Aid and evangelizes the propaganda on the package, too] . It would be like saying that Daniel Day Lewis should only be known for his wooden Nine performance and not this thrilling star turn at the 3:26 mark [ed.'s note: at least you got the Acting metaphor right]. And since we’re talking, can we please put an end to any vestige of the notion of the superiority of English (or even Welsh) actors over American ones [ed.'s note: good old Murkkan flag waving! The Dredge of Allegiance]. Look at these MFs! Ray Liotta’s got that Patrick Swayze [ed.'s note: vomit] thing going, but without the apparent BO [ed.'s note: I'm more interested in actual Ideas than Stated Preferences, now: got any? Not that I don't cherish this passive-aggressive barrage of Ideas-scattering water-balloons! Frances, if you can learn to respect the fact that I don't agree with your politics or your overall taste in music, then I'm glad to offer you the forum in which to let your obvious and considerable Intelligence shine; otherwise, I'm forced to provide this forum joylessly... I can't believe you'd prefer that].
Talk about your line-item veto!
Give me your brackets, your bold
Your huddled masses learning to breathe free
The wretched refuse of your teaming sure
Send these, the homeless tempest-tossed to me
I light my lamp beside the Pagodan door.
[ed.'s note: I don't delete comments, remember. That's a double-edged sword; make sure your quips are you at your wittiest and they won't embarrass you later...]
Apropos of nothing as one of Cap’n Woody’s characters says repeatedly in T-BAG, we’ve never really discussed Beatles covers in any depth here in the Pagoda. Here’s one I came across that has merit, by which I mean style and heart.
We’ll be getting back to this interrupted topic later, after I get to today’s pressing meatspace chores
The topic being: the science of male menses?
The topic was/is going to be the novel that Clemens and Kipling mention in the interview I posted…
(I’m watching Yellow Submarine with Offsprung on half the screen while talking to CDS Barry with the phone between my shoulder and my jaw while leaving comments on other blogs and I must say, if you’re intent on forcing me to tell you to fuck off, could you come back and do so a little later? PS Meanwhile, you could go and start your own blog about Bobby Kennedy, featuring Madonna vids, if you like…)
Just because you’re on a DRY DRUNK doesn’t mean I’m going to abandon ship or you. Blow your chunks, boyfriend. I’m not going anywhere.
[ed.'s note: fair enough! Let's ignore the twee conventions of Totalitarian Decorum and confront, rather than avoid, your egocentric, self-pitying animus, Frances. I say you're becoming an obnoxious, foot-stomping cunt because your demographic sense of entitlement has led you to believe that anyone who doesn't share your beliefs and values and actually says so deserves the twee punishment of your goofy quips. You think that just because you compliment others effusively, you have a right to effusive compliments in return and on your terms and if the arse-kiss traffic isn't endlessly two-way, the fuckers must be sexist pigs. Now, to avoid such traps myself, I don't bound around other bloggers' sites asserting the inevitable right of my own Fiction to be praised there; I post my creative output on my own site and if people like it, great, if they don't, great... there's no Moral Imperative for Litblogglandia, or the World Itself, to dig what I'm doing... and I certainly wouldn't go around calling people "racist" just because they didn't seem to like or notice my creative output. If you want to discuss your creative output in detail, do as I have done and start a blog for that purpose. But that swaggery-obnoxious politically-retarded/parochial middle-class-NYer sense of grievance of yours is a non-starter. You're not even refuting my points, you're just quipping. And the quips aren't even witty. So: fine. You want to turn this edition into a detailed investigation of Unexamined Sense of Entitlement as Victim-Wrath vs Artistic Necessity? I'm there. And PS: I've never had a swallow of alcohol in my life. I doubt you can say this.]
“You want to turn this edition into a detailed investigation of Unexamined Sense of Entitlement as Victim-Wrath vs Artistic Necessity? I’m there. ”
Cool!
Excellent! Air your beef(s). I will address them.
My beefs are of the vegetable and mineral variety.
The first one is about rules and rulers, pick your sphere, any sphere. Rulers should not be allowed to change the rules to extend their rule.
So, you’re not going to do anything silly like articulating accusations anyone can actually refute, then.
That’s just what I’ve done, but in an open-ended way. Call me a Chomskyian copy-cat if you will, but I think it’s the most creative way of fostering meaningful critique. Personally, I had fascist mayor Bloomberg in mind, but like the Cap’n, he’s a symptom. I had hoped you wanted to root around in richer soil, Mister Piggie. And I mean that in a Beckettian way, which, as you know, is an enormous compliment in my lexicon.
I quit. You win. I’m starting a new blog in the same location with the same name and content and you can take over the old one; the only stipulation being that yours has to have a mustache to distinguish between the two.
THE DIFFICULT TEXT
(an excerpt from the novel THE BROTHERLAND MIRACLES)
11.
Katryn releases, that night, for the first time in their relationship, a detectable fart. In bed, while pretending to sleep, or maybe she is sleeping, a noiseless fart. Like a prelapsarian self-defense philtre, purchased at a Renaissance Fair and stored in a greenglass atomizer, which perhaps she’d been carrying around in her purse a few years, waiting for the chance to use it. O’Sirus imagines a Clara Bow-style silent picture title card with a fleur-de-lis in each corner and inscribed with ornately cursive script: a fart. A fart is the ultimate passive-aggressive gesture, conjugally speaking, and a symbol of contempt, i.e., who cares what you think of me? I am what I am. Only thing more significant is shitting with the bathroom door open, unless your inamorata has done time in prison. O’Sirus smells trouble.
Or maybe she’s reading too much into it and this intimately airborne toxic event is not a result of the latest revelation of how much of a breadwinner O’Sirus isn’t by comparison, it’s just the superfatty, digestion-dementing diet they’ve been on (not even a week, yet) since flying over. Old potato salad, meet burning rubber. O’Sirus tries breathing through her mouth a few seconds but realizes that that only means she’s eating it, but to smell something is to eat it, anyway, no?
Her trouble with money began in her own initial eggstate when mother Peg (lots more Irish then) allowed the phalloprogenitor to inseminate her beyond the framing device of a state-approved marriage contract in a cheap boarding house in New Jersey, one of those homey rundown places that ordinary people stay in for a weekend for access to the shore, bathed in the eggy exudia of a heavy, unwashed Atlantic. An inauspicious beginning that came this close (Peg’s refusal of anal sex) to not happening.
There she is in her high school career-guidance counselor’s propaganda-postered cubicle delivering the speech about not being the product of six billion years of planetary, then thirty million years of biological, evolution, just so she could get a so-called good job. To which Miss Brandischauer, fifty-ish and long-nosed and gray, though not bad looking in a lavender pantsuit, wearing those feline glasses bound with a chain to her neck, gave her a look like Here we are in the disco era and I’m still dealing with beatniks and said,
“Okay. So what was six billion years of planetary, plus thirty million years of biological, evolution, for?”
To which Kim had to admit to herself (if not to Miss Brandischauer) that she hadn’t the slightest fucking idea. But neither did Leonardo Da Vinci, Miss Brandischauer, she thought to say, nine hours later, in bed, eyes shining in the dark, ears keyed to the sound of Unca Mundee either fucking or midwifing or casually torturing a white woman next door. Kim tried to imagine a black woman, the direct descendant of slaves, coming out with a Thankyou! at the moment of orgasm.
So here’s O’Sirus, who pulled in, last year, tops, seventy-two thousand pounds, after taxes, from various downloads and royalties and appearance fees (and felt rich because of it) in bed in a room on a floor in a villa on an estate, not hers, worth something like forty times that amount, paid for by products and services derived, in the end, from the fruits of her own imagination.
Her disappointed trophy wife Katryn (O’Sirus often caught herself wondering if the dogs she’d seen partnered to various beggars in London were aware enough to curse the luck) doesn’t know the half of it, for not only is O’Sirus an unspectacular breadwinner, she’s ten years older than Katryn thinks she is, ten years closer to decrepitude, with its lowered iron ceiling on possible future earnings; ten years closer to needing a fulltime attendant to wipe the elasticity-depleted guardian of her small intestines and shave her chin whiskers and rub her legsores down with painful tonics. There’s a phase in every lower-class teenager’s life, resenting the parents for not being rich. O’Sirus is going through hers now, at 52, rigid with futile thoughts beside her loosely slumbering Katryn, who releases another skinless green blimp of biochemical sarcasm to dock with the larger one already floating nose-high above the ducal bed. O’Sirus is unaware of the fact that the bed, which costs more than the car she would have if she had one, comes with a wireless console featuring a button for a discreet ventilation technology that sucks bad farts through the mattress, replacing them with rose wind or lambent jasmine or subtle musk or the mysteriously-named neutral.
What was the meaning of her problem with money? What was the use and what was the severity of it? Could she be cured of it? Would she be rewarded for it? Was it a flaw in her DNA or a certain fine superiority in the fabric of her spirit? Was it time now to be proud of the extraordinary single-mindedness of her longterm avoidance of wealth or sick with shame and regret that she’d never owned a new car or paid for a vacation for two in the Bahamas?
Her first job.
Peg found it via a friend of a friend (Doctor Shamton) to get Kim’s mind off of Lyndsay’s suicide. Kim went to the address that mother Peg handed her on a piece of paper with hearts drawn all over it, went with eyes still wettish and vadge-red and found a storefront on Wayne Avenue, a bunch of strange hippies in green smocks, clean hippies who were the vanguard of what would soon be called the New Age, the confluence of hippie mysticism and the Yankee religion of Money, counter-intuitively associating goodness with wealth, a belief system/lifestyle festooned with crystals and perfumed with incense and soundtracked with the blandest piano or zither noodlings. Hookless piano aswim in reverb. Fascinating how reverb as an audio effect can connote the ineffable, due, no doubt, to primordial race-memories of all those spooky caves we used to cower in. Anyway: what these hippies with surprisingly professional demeanors and lyrical names (like the boss, a very attractive, vaguely Asiatic woman named Sylvan) were up to was subcontracting temp workers as nursing aides for Old Folks Homes.
Sylvan told Kim she had a beautiful energy that the senior spirits (as she referred to the aged) would respond to. There was no office furniture in the room they (the applicants and company officers) were gathered in: just wall-to-wall carpeting and large pillows everywhere and a shrine to Buddha and a filing cabinet. Sylvan took a stethoscope out of the filing cabinet. The company was called Selfless Servants. Sylvan explained to Kim and other trainees that Seva is the spiritual practice of selfless service. Seva is a Sanskrit word and the concept flows from two forms of the yoga (she called it the yoga), Karma Yoga which is the yoga of action and Bhakti Yoga, the yoga of worship inspired by what we call divine love… Seva is one of the simplest and yet most profoundest and life changingest ways that we can put our deepest spiritual knowledge into action useful to the community… and after a crashcourse in first aid and such basics as pulse-or-temperature-taking Kim got a nametag (Selfless Kim), a green hospital smock, crepe-soled slip-ons and instructions to report to a nursing home in Bryn Mawr, graveyard shift.
She put her army surplus coat over the smock and took a trolley and two buses in the cold November night to her first day ever of work. She wanted to cry but not, just then, because of Lyndsay, cold and weird-smelling in an ugly box with no air holes in it. Kim contained two competingly disparate urges to cry and the one guiding her as she approached her first job was selfish and more childishly abject. Why did she feel betrayed by Peg? She felt as though she’d been kicked out of the sweet cloud of the last lingering amnesties of childhood; shoved from the very edge of the nest. Final proof that she was no better than anyone else (though breathtakingly inferior to rich kids who didn’t need jobs even if they took them as character-building experiences or gestures of noblesse oblige to placate the masses from time to time). Kim had always assumed that she’d live, jobless but well-fed, encouraged in her unproductive passions, under her mother-Peg’s protection until one of them died. Kim had always assumed that their little family owned no car in order that Peg could afford to do this.
She walked three blocks after getting off at the end of the line of the last bus and came to a saucer-shaped building at the end of a long path on a very large lawn, like a UFO that had come to rest, for reasons of its own, on a golf course. She entered the building (after some difficulty finding the front door) a few minutes after nine. The receptionist told her she was three minutes late but that they dock you for the quarter hour, so it make more sense to be a quarter hour late, if you going to be late, and handed Kim her timecard. These were old people who had a little money, she’d been told; this nursing home was better than most and yet she arrived to find high-WASP bedlam in progress, as in drooling crones with Mayflower surnames shuffling in and out of the frame, blue arses exposed in backless pyjamas, and a freckle-pated duke in his boxers, bathrobe tied around his neck by its sleeves like superman’s cape, hurrying from po-faced aide to po-faced aide with an urgent message of nothing but spit and consonants. He seized upon Kim and cornered her near a utility closet and she tried sincerely with zero success to comprehend. A beefy, squat-headed aide, black (but they were all black, and their charges were all white, don’t-touch-me white), whisked her away. Keith, with his clipboard. Keith guided her by the elbow.That’s Ol’ Zack. He been sayin’ exactly the same thing since I got here, which is three years this November, don’t pay him no mind. We gotta get this lady in her pyjamas fast. We laggin’ the schedule.
They were in a private room with a fat little woman circled by aides. Very much like a half-hearted gang-rape in which no one wanted to be first. The old woman (a card on the door called her Lilly Shaw) was clutching a bathrobe to her chest but otherwise naked, a baggy profusion of time-bleached meat. Keith told Kim to get her in those backless pyjamas and he took the other aides with him to whatever pointless emergency was next on the list. Lilly Shaw’s eyes were frantic but not really, as though she kept forgetting what “frantic” meant. Next was a thin white spider missing most of his legs and afraid to budge from the corner behind the safety toilet and the aluminum handholds and everything else smeared with his shiny tar shits. Next was a force-feeding on the theme of pureèd corn. Second childhood is not an empty figure of speech, mused Kim. But children are learning things.
And every time she stepped into the curving, overlit hallway to approach the next task on the time-coded (in increments down to the second) checklist in her pocket, Ole Zack grabbed her into a loopy waltz, pleading into her eyes his transmission of chaos from the great beyond until Keith came jogging to separate them. Kim was assigned the task of bullying a lucid woman (in fact she looked strikingly like Kim’s career guidance counselor, Miss Brandischauer) into brushing her teeth before lights-out. Brushing-her-teeth as a euphemism for dealing with the dentures. The alternative-universe Miss Brandischauer was sitting in bed, reading Agatha Christie, peering down a long nose through her feline glasses when Keith ushered Kim into the book-filled room without knocking. Keith told Kim, in front of Miss Brandischauer 2, that the 75-year-old woman was a naughty girl who didn’t like to brush her teeth and that Kim shouldn’t take no for an answer, whatever excuses the old girl managed to cook up and don’t forget, now, you’re new, girl, so she’ll try to fool you.
Kim sat on a chair beside Miss Brandischauer’s bed and watched the old woman read for awhile, making note of the curious fact that her eyes didn’t so much march methodically from left to right across the page and back again as seem to leap in giant intervals up and down and right to left and diagonally, assembling a jigsaw puzzle of words. Kim was wondering how she’d make it through her shift, despite the fact that her hourly wage was a whopping (for the era) eight dollars per, when Miss Brandischauer placed her bookmark and lay the whodunnit aside and said, with a surprising, twangfully melon-rich Southern accent,
“We have maybe fifteen minutes before the S.S. come looking for you. What would you like to talk about, sugar?”
“Talk about?”
“Don’t be shy, now.”
“I’m not shy.”
“No offence intended.”
“I know. Ma’am, how long have you been here, if it’s okay to ask?”
“A week. Five years. My whole life? Listen, I wish I had something to offer. Refreshments. You’re so pretty and young. Skin like yours is a great gift. So why so down in the mouth?”
“Me?”
“Appearances are rarely deceiving, sugar. Tell.”
“My best friend… ”
“Stole your boyfriend.”
“Killed herself.”
“Oh. Oh. Cut her wrists? Or jumped?”
“Pills. And strawberry ice cream.”
“Smart girl. Look what she avoided.”
Keith stuck his head in the room with such suddenness that they both jumped but Keith said not a word about Miss Brandischauer’s dentures, grinning horribly and beckoning Kim to follow him instead. She had to hurry to catch up as he jogged along the circular hall to the ever-so-slightly-ajar door to one of the two communal bathrooms. Kim entered behind him and without looking he told her to close the door and make sure it click shut and her first thought was panic that he was going to do something to her in the bathroom but then she watched him walk calmly around the far side of the water-filled tub in the center of the room. She approached the tub and saw with some surprise that there was a hairless blue potbellied man asleep underwater.
“I left him alone for a minute and I guess he slid under. On the count of three…”
Kim had his ankles and Keith hooked him under each arm and they lifted and lowered the body with a loud splash from the agitated tubwater on the tiles and rolled it over. What struck Kim was how Keith had appeared to be in no particular rush to get the man’s head out of water. His casual air had fooled her into believing for several moments that he must well know, from years of experience, that it’s better to leave them in a few minutes before yanking them out in case of shock or something. Keith straddled the body and seemed to be knuckledeep in the fat rolls of a frat house drunkslut shoulder massage when he told Kim to tell the receptionist to tell an ambulance to come. With an amused tone he added, detaining her for careless life-or-death eternities at the bathroom’s threshold, You shoulda seen the look on your face, Kim. You looked seriously freaked out, man, but you’ll get used to it.You and me’s a team.
So Kim went and told the receptionist to call the ambulance and when the receptionist had completed the call, Kim quit. She asked the receptionist to tell Selfless Servants not to contact her, she didn’t even (or especially didn’t) want her check for the night, she wanted nothing to do with them or this nursing home or the three hourse she’d spent in purgatory there. The receptionist, who resembled Diana Ross, said it’s not my job to deliver instructions to your boss, that’s one thing, okay, but are you serious about not wanting that check? Even if you only worked three hours that’s twenty five dollars before taxes. If it was me I’d sure enough take it. That’s a nice pair of shoes, but I ain’t your mama.
Kim put on her army surplus coat and left the building and crossed the black lawn panting and walked the wrong way and walked back and sat at the stop in the cold semi-rural November dark for forty minutes (during which she watched an ambulance with firework lights race towards the UFO and then the same ambulance with toplights extinguished roll with the silence of a deathbarge on still waters past her) but was lucky enough to get the last bus home out of Bryn Mawr. Six billion years of planetary, then thirty million years of biological, evolution, just so she could take this very long busride home.
That little blue man in the bathtub stayed with her for years.
O’Sirus rolls backwards down the incline of sleep. Katryn’s protest is done for the night.
12.
The next morning they are awakened by Javanese Gamelan music. O’Sirus thinks to herself that surely this isn’t Javanese Gamelan music, but it is, piped in through the mattress. During the five minutes that Katryn sleeps while O’Sirus watches, Katryn dreams of a leafy, warmish, aromatic paradise populated with unusually beautiful rabbits with (proportionally) very large, human-shaped breasts that one sucked on for nourishment; an ultimate kind of veganism (no chewing of a life-structure) that the rabbits didn’t mind… in fact, they enjoyed it, and were easily coaxed, like frolicsome coconuts, to give sweet milk. It was only a matter of wiping the nipples first, as they were usually a bit muddy. Katryn was smiling very broadly in her sleep. O’Sirus will never forget how that smile faded as Katryn’s eyes opened on the real world.
“What’s that?”
“Javanese Gamelan music.”
“Why’d you put it on?”
“I didn’t.”
“What time is it?”
“Early, I think.”
“Where are we?”
“Duluth.”
A whiff of syrup-hot pancakes comes up through the mattress and before either of them can comment, Shem’s cheerful voice follows. “Who’s ready for breakfast?!”
“I suppose there’s no opting out of it?” says O’Sirus, into the mattress.
“Breakfast is mandatory,” jokes slightly-muffled Shem. Half-jokes. “Would you prefer it in bed?”
Katryn’s smile comes back and she says, “Oooh, marvellous!”
“Any special requests?”
Katryn is playful. “Rabbit’s milk?”
“You got it,” booms Shem through the mattress. “Breakfast will be served in a jiffy!”
There’s a longish interval before O’Sirus whispers, “Is this thing off, now?”
Katryn makes a shrug face and climbs out of bed with a finger over her lips meaning silence. She gestures for O’Sirus to follow her into the bathroom. In the bathroom, Katryn turns on the shower full blast. She turns to O’Sirus and whispers,
“What shall we talk about?”
“I decided something after thinking long and hard last night.”
“Yes?”
“From now on, I concentrate on making money.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Relieved hugs. Grateful kisses. Katryn’s head in the crook of an olive elbow as O’Sirus reaches under Katryn’s frilly nightie and prods the drooled lips of a hot little animal’s smile. The moist click of separation and Katryn says ah. The cosmic YES of extremely wet. There’s a polite-but-energetic knucklerapping on the bedroom door and they hurry giddy back to bed and under the covers before sing-songing drunk, as one, “Come in!”
Much to Kim’s mitigated delight and surprise it’s Gwynneth, fleshy sweet, smoothly ripe and gobbleworthy Gwynneth, with her good-vibes-scented brown eyes and matching cinnamon freckles and big pink permasmile lips dressed in that eternal overalls-and-bandana uniform, backing through the self-opening door with a laden breakfast tray. This time, a bit of Gwynneth’s hair is visible from under the red bandana, but this glimpse of the hair doesn’t solve the racial puzzle, as the hair is a very curly, coloring-book yellow. Gwynneth gives O’Sirus a hello-again look that makes Katryn give O’Sirus a look (O’Sirus being triangulated perfectly to see and interpret both looks) of do you know this dyke from somewhere? Gwynneth gives Katryn a look meaning yes, she does know me from somewhere, but don’t feel threatened, I’m immensely attracted to both of you. Gwynneth sets down the two-tier tray and converts it into two separates, setting one before each of them as they look on (and back and forth between each other) and finally breaks the complexly-orchestrated silence while leaning over the bed, exposing the nested warmth of her cleavage, working on arranging the utensils .
“Is there anything else you want or need?” Looking at neither of them.
“The two of us can’t possibly eat all of this marvellous-looking food alone,” says Katryn. “Why not have some with us? What’s your name?”
“Gwynneth,” offers O’Sirus, elongating the “th” like she’s evaluating a flavour, wondering if anyone else can smell Katryn’s fresh cunt on her fingers.
“Gwynneth,” repeats Katryn with playful mimetic exaggeration.
“I am kinda starving,” says Gwynneth. Her nostrils flare. She smells it.
“What are you?” asks Katryn, with a child’s rude innocence.
Gwynneth, used to the question, says, “Black.”
“You’re a lot less ‘black’ than O’Sirus, and she calls herself ‘racially ambiguous’,” laughs Katryn, ladling hot syrup over her stack of dinkle-buckwheat/raspberry-pecan pancakes and deliberately avoiding O’Sirus’ consequent glare.
“’Black’ is the term Yanks use,” counters O’Sirus, looking at no one, laying on the accent, “When no other group will claim you.”
“‘Black’ is a pretty big church,” says Gwynneth, winningly, chewingly, with hot cake tumbling on her tongue. “How I see it, if everyone said they were black…”
“Like Spartacus,” says O’Sirus.
“Who?” say Gwynneth and Katryn, as Katryn feeds Gwynneth another forkfull. O’Sirus’ pancakes are dinkle-mocha, garnished with starfruit, and she feeds Gwynneth her next forkfull, with a feeling that she’s dabbling in a new kind of orgasmically-tasty-food-based sexuality. As if reading her mind, Gwynneth says, with a moistness of mouth that kills everyone else in the room,
“We’re having a mange-a-trois.”
Picture Gwynneth, her golden fat pussy sopping with syrup. But what paralyzes O’Sirus is uncertainty as to whether a groupfuck at this point will further, or hinder, the cause behind her brand new sacred oath to get ugly rich. She even forgets to ask Gwynneth for her sunglasses. Gwynneth doesn’t have them anyway. O’Sirus sees that butterfly smile on Gwynneth’s wrist and strokes it spontaneously with her flaking cunty finger and one thing leads to its other but O’Sirus still, for whatever reason, can’t come.
To the victress go the spoils.
Ohhhhh. I love it.
[ed.'s note: for anyone coming late to the thread: bored sarcasm]
Kitsch or Avant Garde? Reactionary or Visionary? Gallery or Sideshow? The Snout or the Tail? (this is not CGI, btw: it’s a real fluid reacting to magnetic fields)
mercury pubis proboscis magimix
the technology is pretty impressive, but that maudlin music can not make the aesthetic experience any less industrial. Trying to call this art is a stretch, I can imagine these things being sold like lavalamps… However, right now, as a science exhibit I think it is thrilling.
Next step is figurative ferro-fluid animation… and massive in-vitro sculptures you can change with a mouse click. Either that will mean that there’s a possibility that this gimmick can refine itself out from under the Kitsch umbrella or we’ll have to admit to ourselves that Rodin and Michelangelo (et al) were Kitsch all along. Unless it’s the sheer (at this point in Art History unimaginably) hard labor that went into The Thinker or David that rescues and elevates the artifact but, then, wouldn’t that be a pretty Kitschy qualifier? Kundera defines “kitsch” as the denial of shit, so, the antiseptic quality of bronze, marble and ferro-fluids make them all suspect. Has anyone done a polished brass Brancusi turd yet?
THE VINTAGE EMAIL
Random Musings
Wouldn’t it be “funny” if it turned out that Sarah Palin was on a Bloomberg LLP subsidiary/affiliate payroll? So he could step in as the reasonable rational “better” choice in 2012. Shades of Margarita Lopez, my Loisaida friends?
Comrade DJ Barry and I are exporting a video file from the docu about his gallery show at this very moment… material forthcoming, Comrades Lurking and Explicit…
bla bla bla
all films are political
cant wait for that imperfect shambling docu we imperfectly shambled together on our state of the art workstation today August Meisterstine.
in the meantime something to get you going; first as tragedy then as farce
But I wonder at the depth of the connections Spooky is making as he links these disparate ideas/situations, CDS Barry… isn’t he playing the Hodge-Podge as Complexity game that has become a cultural value since the i-pod shuffle play list? His use of the word “frequency” as a link, for example… what does it really signify? When he goes from Duchamp to the Matrix in under a minute, touching on “compression technology” and “intuitive mathematics” along the way, how is he connecting these conversational samples and what is the point he’s actually making? “Knowledge” as an assemblage of powerful fetishes? Maybe this is evidence of the post-verbal world we may be heading for: ideas as things we are no longer capable of putting into words. Ideas as hodge-podge pictograms. But I think it’s more that we’re reaching the point where commodities outnumber ideas by such a ratio that just putting two or three commodities next to each other will now have to stand for an idea. Like arranging, not deck chairs, on the Titanic, but all the personal possessions of the tourists on board. The def. of “commodities” to include names and experiences.
“It’s about a certain linkage between mythology and technology…”
And then all Spooky does, in the talk, is show an array of megawatt speakers at the base of the Acropolis? What is the special (or non-obvious) linkage between mythology and technology? And how do the break-dancing Beefeaters fit in?
Interesting speech tic of Spooky’s: “The funny thing is….”
Re: the Godard poster: yeah, true, I wasn’t sampling that as text but as an image
Is it such a very large file that it’s taking so long to upload, CDS Steven? Because it’s after the time of your post here, which means more than six hours have passed since your heads up. Not that I’m counting the milliseconds or anything. But I do now possess a visceral understanding of the idiom “waiting with BAITED breath.”
I didn’t mean by that that I’d be posting the very video here soon, Frances… I meant by that that my absence is due to meatspace responsibilities.
DREAR DIARY
Yesterday I was standing on a crowded train, crossing town. A woman nearby was reading a thick-ish paperback and she shifted the angle at which she was holding the book while turning a page and I saw it was a book by Samuel Beckett. She was in her mid-to-late 20′s and dressed in the standard outfit of a secretary (clearly not a student) and she was about half-way through the book, reading it with a smile, and I thought: Jesus fucking Christ, I know Central Europeans are more literate than Americans but this is ridiculous. I tried to imagine an American of about 27, no longer in school, with an okay-but-not-impressive job, reading a book by Samuel Beckett for pleasure on the commute home from work and I could not. Then I became intensely curious as to which book by Beckett it was.
My being taller than the literate secretary (but not so much taller: the Germans are tall; my Beloved is about 5’10 and my ex-wife is 6 feet tall) made the angles hard and I shifted and twisted a bit while trying my best not to look like someone who was working up the courage to come up with some embarrassing pickup line. I wasn’t interested in her at all (I’m in the lucky position of being sexually obsessed with my wife and over-the-moon-happy with family life and frankly the idea of a stranger’s genitals disgusts me; there may be some pheromone that my wife emits that I’m particularly vulnerable to) but I wanted to know which Samuel Beckett book a 27-ish secretary in a Burberry raincoat on the way home from a long day of work could be reading with a smile. I thought: have I ever read Samuel Beckett with a smile? Maybe I have; how would I know? I don’t always feel a smile on my face while I’m engaging in one.
I remember once sitting in a room watching a Television (which dates this memory as being at least a decade old) and the show that was on was some typically crappy show (whether it was supposed to be fiction or supposed to be real) and I don’t remember what the content was but I remember the horror of glancing up… this room had a large, gilt-framed, decorative mirror in it… and catching my reflection before there was time for the awareness of what I was seeing in the reflection to change my facial expression into the self-conscious mask I protect myself in the mirror with… and I saw that I was wearing a shockingly complicit smile. It wasn’t a “faint” smile, either. It was the smile of full-on assent. I was horrified. Who was that idiot in the mirror? That remote-controlled puppet? For all I know, I had read Molloy with just such an unconsciously pie-licking grin on my face. But I doubt it.
Then I thought: Germans are different. People who say, blithely, “People are people”… obviously haven’t traveled far or much or if they have they haven’t paid close attention to what they have seen. I see clots of American tourists careening around Berlin in their clear rubber bubbles of BigMac-fart-inflated Murrkana. Germans are different and maybe they smile while reading something like:
I wanted to see which Beckett book the secretary was reading and two stops before I had to get off the train it jolted on a sharp turn and the secretary shifted to maintain her equilibrium and I saw that the German title of the book was “Die Chemie des Todes” and I thought: what? The Chemistry of Death? Not only is this 27-ish secretary in a Burberry raincoat reading a book by Samuel Beckett on the way home from work on the train with a smile… it’s a Beckett book I’ve never even heard of! And the train jolted again and the angle at which I was able to view the book changed so radically that I could see its entire cover, all at once, and I saw that the author of the thing was not Samuel but Simon Beckett. Reality restored.
When I got home I Googled Simon Beckett:
Exactly the kind of thing a German might smile at, in fact.
Drear Diary Annex: Tiny Thoughts and Quotes
1. I went for a walk with Comrade DJ Sensei JR the day before yesterday and we met before I’d eaten a single thing and it was not particularly early. I had been too busy to eat before running out the door to jump on the train to meet him. We walked for only a block before coming to a “Bio Markt” (ashen, withered carrots for twice the price and milk in glass bottles) and I slipped in to buy a bar of white chocolate. I haven’t eaten this kind of sweet stuff in a couple of months now after swearing it off but I gobbled this bar down and CDS JR said, “I thought you weren’t eating that crap,” and I said, spontaneously, “A triumph over the will!”
2. A new class of people is making itself known around town. A tribe or pseudo-race. Especially in the areas around certain hotels and convention halls. They are people of all ages (though mostly thirty-something) and all levels of wealth… some shabbily-dressed and others in expensive suits. The important thing (the connection) being that they are all wearing laminated Special Event ID Passes around their necks on the kind of ribbons you’d see on the backstage pass at a U2 concert. No matter how shabbily-dressed or otherwise-square you would look, these laminated IDs make you look elite/hip/jet-setting. CDS Barry and I call this new race The Illaminati.
3. “Do you realize that people don’t know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories — and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.”- Milan Kundera
4. Came up with “Loser-friendly” in a chat with CDS Barry and, of course, I Googled it and found that it was already common. Google is our chief instructor in the philosophy of the fact that we can’t be original. Still in pain over the loss of “Disasturbation” as a personal neologism.
5. The year of my birth (as I already knew) was a turning point:
6. Soft Core Porno Questionnaire:
7. MEN and CHILDREN
We have two bathrooms; the one I share with Offsprung and one for Beloved. Beloved’s bathroom is a paradisaical sensorium of muted light and good smells and chrome surfaces and the one I share with Offsprung is a truckstop pissoir on a Turnpike in 1965. No matter how often I clean it.
THE DIFFICULT TEXT
ANOTHER COUNTRY SMELL (Director’s Cut)
1.
Every day of a school week, a yellow girl ran up the street toward the Chalfonts. She ran with a paper sack tucked under one arm, her black hair laid flat on the long March wind. It was a fine spring day, not long after Easter. Smells were blowing back up into Chicago from the South. Some good, some bad. The yellow girl lifted one corner of her white dress to run in it. The soles of her feet were as black as burnt pancakes as they slapped the sidewalk and black boys of the neighborhood, on the street or watching from porches and windows, with no work and nothing better to do, whistled and called out to her as she flew by.
2.
A yellow girl ran up the street toward the Chalfonts. She ran with her black hair laid flat on the long March wind. It was a fine spring day and the boys of the neighborhood called out to her as she ran. One of them whistled from the branches of an oak tree which dangled a banner made out of a bed sheet. It said I.H.T.J.W. He whistled and Terry looked up and waved but she did not deviate from her course. She ran up the street to the ramshackle house of the Chalfonts.
It was as crowded as a brothel during Lent. Fat Ethel Chalfont had been in the hospital and now she was home again, needing help with her seven children, or so she claimed, the youngest of whom was still awaiting a proper name, or so she claimed, because the truth was like ice in Fat Ethel’s mouth, ice she could shape to a fleeting perfection. She would present the false trinket on her tongue. A week before Terry started ‘helping’ at the Chalfonts, Fat Ethel had stopped Terry’s mother on the street, both of them on their way to a bake sale. It was on a weekday morning that this happened, Ruth with two cream cakes and Ethel with her burlap sack of salt biscuits and Fat Ethel imposed on poor Ruth right there on the street. Ethel asked to borrow Terry to help out a little being as Ethel was ill and Ruth said yes.
Her common-law husband Buck did no work. Ethel brought money into the house by doing what she called matchmaking which meant setting up men who could pay for the service with local girls. Terry had started with the Chalfonts on a Sunday. Friday afternoon came and she couldn’t stop herself from gloating over her new wristwatch, a gift that she’d claimed to have gotten from Ethel herself. Terry didn’t even mention the bracelet, the music box, or the five-pound sack of Fifth Avenue bars, all of which she hid in her closet. She thought back on the Sunday evening the man had given her these things.
The man’s voice was such a low thing. She hadn’t notice that he’d spoken until after each time, when she suddenly recalled it, hearing it as a voice in her head. He’d killed the headlights before stopping the car, a habit he’d picked up in Kentucky and the car rolled on another hundred yards until he brought it to rest on the wrong side of the road on the sloping shoulder along a carious length of picket fence with a sign that said Cider Apples. There was a v-shaped formation of trees far off to the left, two old oaks and a long, low building on the other side of the road, brown as tobacco, with truck tires leaning against it. She could hear the man’s fateful breathing. Fireflies drifted toward them from across the field, luminous drops of absinthe and he lifted the car door handle and the door swung open over the asphalt and the damp odor of night rose from it. He’d stuck a leg out, braced against the slight tilt of the car on the high shoulder and unbuttoned his fly.
Terry sat on the bed she’d known since before she knew what beds were, that Friday, staring at herself in a mirror as the room flushed with last-chance sunlight and she waited for Ruth to make dinner. A strangely detached breeze touched Terry’s cheek and she looked out the window it had come from and she could see the distant figures of children straggling in across the vacant lot on Throop Street. Terry pulled the window shade down: was tonight really the night?
-Slow down there! shouted a chorus of black boys as she ran. Terry ran under the banner in that oak tree, waving at the boy perched in it.
The Chalfont place was five blocks away, but it might as well have been in Kentucky. As Terry loped the long blocks, the houses got patchier, the yards got scrubbier and chickens appeared. The houses on the block with the Chalfont house were shacks but the Chalfont house was a splintery unpainted three-story palace, far back from the sidewalk, on a weedy, balding lot.
The house gave off the smell of burnt basil and other herbs that could be sickening depending on the time of day you might smell them. The screen door that opened into the front room was ajar and Terry picked her way across a floor with tussling curly-haired boys all over it and Terry ascended a flight of rickety stair steps and found Madame Chalfont reading Pearl Buck in bed.
Madame Chalfont asked the girl to switch on the lamp on the night table. Her hair flowed out for what seemed like yards around her, yards of wavy black hair like Terry’s, flowing out over her lacy pillows and her satin sheets. As fat as the woman was she was beautiful to Terry. The book she was reading was minuscule on her bosom.
Terry said I.H.T.J.W. to Madame Chalfont.
-Dear heart, said Madame Chalfont, You most surely do not hope the Japs win!
3.
A week before Terry started ‘helping’ at the Chalfonts, Fat Ethel had stopped Terry’s mother on the street, both of them en route to a bake sale. It was on a weekday morning that this happened, Ruth with two cream cakes and Ethel with her burlap sack of salt biscuits. Fat Ethel, who had once been as thin as anything, imposed on Ruth right there on the street, sly in knowing that Ruth would say ‘yes’ if only to get away from her. Ruth said yes.
Her common-law husband Buck rarely worked, so Ethel brought money into the house by doing what she called “matchmaking”. Being a good Christian and cut off from gossip, Ruth Dixon knew nothing about all of that. Terry had started with the Chalfonts on a Sunday.
She was sitting on her bed, staring at herself in the vanity mirror as the room blushed orange with last-chance sunlight, and she was chewing a Fifth Avenue bar, waiting for Ruth to make dinner. She was looking back at herself, from a time in the future, in the mirror’s past. A sweet breeze touched her cheek, causing her to look out the window and she could see the distant figures of children straggling in across the vacant lot on Throop Street, coming in from Ada park, summoned by mothers calling out about suppertime like muezzin bellowing from their towers and Terry pulled the window shade down. Was tonight really the night?
“It’s just like biting your tongue, but in your kootchie,” she’d heard. “And don’t wear nothin’ white.”
“If you don’t enjoy it, it ain’t even a sin.”
There had been a circle of girls at school, at lunch time, standing at the Throop street fire exit. Smoking cigarettes. A blustery day, wind gusting south. The Principal’s office was safely upwind and even Terry took a drag or two, which made her lips numb, but she loved it when Doreen Parker passed her a lit one, blowing a blue flower of smoke at Terry’s mouth and adding, “I.H.T.J.W.” And Terry answered in kind as she accepted the cigarette and sucked it, winking, trying for a smoke ring but destroying it with laughter instead.
Doreen, the fastest girl at Morgan Park High School, had drawn a diagram on the sooty bricks beside the fire exit door with a flinty stone from the garden. She accompanied the diagram with a lecture to the tune of “Do it standin’ up and you can’t get pregnant,” and scratched in an arrow pointing down from between the stick-girl’s legs. Marva Fortneaux had taken the stone from Doreen and given the stick-girl some big balloon breasts. She said “If you don’t cry right after, I promise he’ll think you’re a slut.” But Marva Fortneaux was so poor that Terry had seen her eating out of a little box of Argo corn starch, instead of popcorn, at the movies, so what did she know?
“How do they live in that Chalfont house, Terry?” asked Ruth at dinner, passing Terry a dish of caramelized sweet potatoes. Because she kept herself apart, Ruth relied on her daughters for the sweet juice of gossip. “I mean, honestly, can you imagine?” She took the dish back. “It’s 1943, and people are living like that! Like Hottentots!”
Terry told them all about it, between forkfuls. One cheek and then the other bulged while she talked. She told them about the filth and sloth and bad language and the way Buck Chalfont just sat on the porch all morning noon and night, eyes shut, rocking in that chair, a dusty-necked bottle in hand, singing off-key hymns with fearless sarcasm. Either that, or he was always busy typing out strange prophesies and tacking them up around the house for Terry and Ethel to read. Then Terry slid back from the table. She ran to her room and reappeared in the kitchen with a grease-spotted grocery bag and ran out of the house heading west as if to catch the Sun as it fell the last few feet from the sky.
“Slow down there!” shouted a chorus of black boys as she ran.
The Chalfont place was five blocks away, but it might as well have been in Mississippi. As Terry loped the long blocks approaching it, the houses got patchier, the yards got scrubbier and chickens appeared with the increasing frequency of omens. She stepped on the front porch without knocking. She stepped on the front porch without knocking. Buck Chalfont was sitting right in the middle of the porch, on an old stool, frowning over a brand new Remington Portable #9 on a side-turned apple crate and he was hunting and pecking, ignoring her as she padded by him. The house gave off the smell of burnt basil and other incantatory herbs that could be sickening depending on the time of day you might smell them. The screen door that opened into the front room was ajar and she walked across a floor with tussling curly-haired boys and inverted pot-lids as spinning tops. She ascended a flight of rickety stair steps that soon enough would never again bear the weight of Madame Chalfont’s descent.
Madame Chalfont was reading Pearl Buck in bed. Her hair flowed out for what seemed like yards around her, yards of wavy black hair like Terry’s, flowing out over her lacy pillows. Terry put a liberty dollar on the table by the base of the lamp and slipped into the adjoining room, where taffy-haired Jacques Chalfont, the ten-year-old, was wincing over his homework. Terry was as golden and smooth as a new bar of soap and Jacques put down his pencil and watched with lip-biting reverence as she stripped down to her threadbare bloomers and she shook a fist at Jacques with mock violence and he closed his eyes and then even the bloomers came off and she crossed the room like Eve. She wiggled into a white satin dress that had hung on a hook on Jacques’ wall all week.
The dress had belonged to Madame Chalfont twenty years ago, when she was as softly edible as Terry herself was now. Terry was renting it from her, along with Chalfont complicity, for one silver dollar per escapade. The dress, by degrees each night of that week, had lost its smell of mothballs and had taken on the smell of the humanized leather of a car’s interior, plus the tang of Bay Rum and the balls-and-sweat odor of a potent Negro male who paid considerably more than a silver dollar each time to Mrs. Chalfont for the service.
Terry pulled her hair straight out into a shiny rope and twisted it, stooping forward and folded it back into a licorice-black chignon and pinned and patted it into place, pulling bobby pins from her pursed lips to slip them into her hair with folk precision. She fished her dancing shoes out of the grease-stained grocery bag and held them up to the light then set them on the floor. Out the screen door she finally marched and down the dirt walkway, just as his car rounded the corner at Aberdeen and 110th, a coupe with running-boards she was proud to be seen in.
You didn’t have to drive far south on Aberdeen, then west on 105th Street, before the neighborhood seemed to regress, thin out, into a pre-city condition. It wasn’t quite country but the plots of land got broader and more desolate, the buildings more shed-like or ramshackle. Little corn fields and even a sway-backed horse or two appeared on the roadside, wire fences whisked by the Buick’s headlights. The lonely traffic lights they came to after long intervals seemed to be anticipating the far distant future, or another place entirely, for all the purpose they fulfilled. Sitting at a long red light, with no traffic or even signs of life for miles in any direction, built a comical tension in the car that once or twice caused the two of them to bust out laughing.
He hadn’t spoken a dozen words to her since she climbed in the car, but she didn’t mind: his silences were a blessing. She loved night-driving, with a breeze grazing her arm and even liked the dark green odor of mulch and ditch puddle which overran her perfume. All she wanted to do was be driven further.
“You ever talk to them stars up there, gal?”
His voice was such a low, gravelly thing. She shook her head.
“Never told them stars nothin’ sweet?”
He killed the headlights before stopping the car, a habit he’d picked up in Mississippi. It was always good to be one place when people thought you were another. The car rolled on another hundred yards until he brought it to rest on the wrong side of the road, on the shoulder sloping down, along a carious length of picket fence with a sign that said Cider Apples. There was a v-shaped formation of trees to the left, two old oaks, far enough away to run to for a whole minute, and a long, low building on the other side of the road, brown as tobacco, with truck tires leaning against it. If there were crickets singing when they arrived, they now stopped and the field was so quiet that she could hear his labored breathing.
Her death was a grateful easing after the briefest bad struggle, a struggle that seemed to him to pack the condensed vitality of her whole beautiful life into the inadequate space of his car and no hatred or anything personal she just wanted to live. Her dress was bright as the moon as he pulled it hissing heavy across the field to its secret home in the copse.
4.
He killed the headlights before stopping the car, a habit he’d picked up in Mississippi. The car rolled on another hundred yards until he brought it to rest on the wrong side of the road along a carious length of picket fence with a sign that said Cider Apples. There was a v-shaped formation of trees to the left, two old oaks, far enough away to run to for a whole minute, and a long, low building on the other side of the road, brown as tobacco, with truck tires leaning against it. If there were crickets singing when they arrived, they now stopped and the field was so quiet that she could hear him breathing. Fireflies drifted over the field like moonstruck drops of absinthe.
“Got big hands,” said the man, “from playing guitar.” He held them up for her to see.
He lifted the car door handle and the door swung open over the asphalt and the damp odor of night rose from it. He stuck a leg out, braced against the slight tilt of the car on the high shoulder and unbuttoned his fly. He dug a fleur-de-lis handkerchief from his breast pocket and spread it over the lap of his pants and he shifted his hips telling Terry to undo her hair. She laid her bobby pins in a row on the dashboard.
She couldn’t see it as he brought it out for her, because it was so black and the dashboard cast a moon-shadow over his lower half, but she could smell it. It was pungent and real. And then she detected, as she spread her own legs and the night pressed its cool lips on her there with evangelical grandeur, something equal from herself, a force, almost, but she wasn’t ashamed. It was a strong but not unpleasant odor. It was another country smell.
Did it smell like freshly baked baguette with dijon mustard–a Paris po-boy?
DEATH BY SCIENCE FICTION
Uh… Yeah
THE RESCUED TEXT
this was sequestered on an obscure page, Comrades Lurking and Explicit; let’s move it here to where the action is
3′ x 5′ acrylic on canvas-1985
“During the civil war, Trotsky wrote a book on art.”
-Harun Farocki, Dog From the Freeway
I was shaping snakes and mice in clay with my three-year-old in the year 2009 when the penny finally dropped and I realized I was handling a feces analog. The Art we were making was shit. My daughter probably knew that all along (and quite happily), but for me there had been a long gestational period, the decades during which I’d deluded myself into believing that the basic materials I was handling, in my life as an Artiste, were stardust and fairy diamonds.
My father was an Artiste; his life-sized canvases of hexagonal moons and primeval women (left breasts exposed) are almost as big a part of my childhood memories as the stink of his turpentine. He was an epic womanizer and his shoe of choice was the sandal. When I was ten we had a falling out. He had me taking Arabic classes on the weekends, but I balked as any headstrong ten-year-old would. I do not regret balking. The Arabic classes were meant to prepare me for the move he was planning to North Africa (the goal eventually shifted to another part of the continent). To that end, also, when I spent the night at his bachelor pad on weekends he’d have the heat turned up to unbearable levels to build a degree of tolerance. In my pre-pubertal mind, Sandals and Girls and Unbearable Heat were fusing into one awful urge called Art.
My father finally made the move to a faraway land (not quite North Africa) in 1980, with a whole new family, which is the only way he could have done it, and it was in the primitive villa they moved to (guarded by his Korean-War-era rifle, a rifle the government of Liberia eventually confiscated because it was bigger than anything in the nation’s armory) that he found his muse. He painted portraits of the locals and since it was the habit of the locals to return to him indignantly, weeks later, demanding the portraits “back”, he built a secret room under the villa to store what ended up being eight hundred canvases, a respectable oeuvre. There was a curfew in town, imposed by a gang of naked cannibals who called themselves something like The Butt-Naked Cannibal Boys: if they caught you outside at sundown, you were supper. Inspiration was plentiful. The paintings my father produced in exile were stripped of hexagonal moons and lyrical tits because he was no longer guessing at the contents of his imagination: he was finally living in it. He later died in Vegas.
It was in 1980 that I began receiving instruction from Tim, the mendicant monk of Art. He impressed me by drawing a perfect copy of the so-called Mona Lisa on the title page of a book in the public library and then tearing it out with fearless aplomb. This was long before Philistines became important people by learning to influence the conversational choices of even the angriest young men and women. It had been, by the time I met Tim, a couple of years since I’d dropped out of the expensive private college (known for its rich foreign students: Kofi Annan is an alum) that I had been packed off to by rich relatives who didn’t give a damn that I’d shown artistic promise. Swaths of both sides of my family had money but not the shred of the part I was born to. A Dickensian set-up.
Among the beautiful nightmare characters on campus we had an actual son/grandson of text-booked Bauhaus potentates: Conrad Feininger. He was tall, dressed like an adult with money in the bank, spoke with an envy-seedingly sinister accent and (I remember it thusly but it can’t be true) wore a monocle. He wanted to do something to a girl I wanted to do something to and I felt that as a congenital Artiste from a storied dynasty of suave European fuckers he had every right. I lacked ambition.
It was expected that I would use the time at this college correcting the frivolous mistakes my father made to make us poor. But my luscious spirit balked. The clearest memory I have of quitting school is walking out of the dormitory on a leafy warm day, carrying, with a friend’s help, a large table from the dormitory’s second floor lounge. I had convinced this friend that if we looked blasé enough while doing it, we could carry the thing off-campus with no one to stop us. It was about a ten block walk to the basement flat I shared with other students who had been inspired by me to also drop out. The table was heavy but worth the effort. We lived right up the street from the favorite circuit of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s skipping-and-running and sometimes sulking boyish ghost.
We were three or four young men and three or four young women unified by a heroically naive delusion of infinite possibilities and our smelly beatnik clothing. Sometimes we’d all strip and lull on the futons listening to Joan Armatrading. Periods and spermcounts synchronized and there was a daycare’s worth of abortions. I remember with a shudder of deferred lust a toy-faced girl from North Dakota handling my genitals with experimental ginger one evening in the communal bed whilst I feigned sleep because I wasn’t quite into her. The imaginary girl I dreamed of seeding in those days resembled the female figure on the cover of the Layla album and this girl from North Dakota looked nothing like that, with her big eyes and button nose and perkily doomed aura of Karen Carpenter.
The only chocolate-free drug I’ve ever taken was LSD (never grass, never coke, never booze or beer or heroin or ecstasy or meth or poppers or peyote or cigarettes and very little coffee) and that was the year I dabbled in it. Thirty or forty excursions on the brand of acid that came on little tabs of paper we imported via connections in the drama department. The drama teacher was a jumpsuited man with a Pan-beard whose signature theory of Method acting held that to be stabbed is to have an orgasm. There were lots of plays with stabbings. I took LSD and tried eating five hot dogs and this didn’t work. My then-girlfriend, looking exactly like a big aqua-and-white butterfly, straddled me after I spit the mulched quasimeat into a fern and drew my fluorescing seed into her anus.
I wanted to paint something grand.
I cut off most contact with my family, experimented with a sequence of horrid jobs in a department store (from loading dock to in-house repair to sales) and found I preferred to be self-employed as a house-painter/hedge-trimmer/ floor-refinisher and so forth. The only truly bad memory I have from this period was my having fucked some decent burgher’s hardwood floor so badly that I fled the scene in media res (or in flagrante), only to skulk back the next day to undo the damage while burgher oversaw until I finished and left, sans word or cheque.
The funniest work memory I have is from the loading dock days: a svelte, chic, nipply buyer striding towards a pallet stacked with imported shoes under the pumped-in workdisco of The Stones’ Miss You whilst my fellow apes went super-horny nova with Puerto Rican curses of hate and approval. Styrofoam packing material flying everywhere suddenly like New Year’s. It wasn’t until my youth was definitively spent (or invested) that I started earning good money selling anything finer (I am a composer) than my back-broken labor. Even now, in the 21st century, a decade after hauling my last infernal ton of bricks, or smearing my final vaulted ceiling with eye-spattering paint on the end of a wobbly pole, I look more like a construction worker than an intellectual.
My beautiful young wife (an actress and classically-trained musician) recently asked me to paint the kitchen and all she got was a look.
2
author's father in Korea
“Wow, obscure terms. English major, are we? But, I couldn’t agree with you more.Thanks”
-RedWolfSV, from a comment thread about a Kara Walker video
Tim the monk wasn’t a monk in the strictest sense because he wasn’t affiliated with Buddha or Christ, but as a penuriously unfuckable artist who lived in a garret he was Christ. He taught me that the world will always be hostile towards any Art that deserves the title and that the world’s suspicion and hostility coil neatly in the sweetest crannies of the richest implications of the word. When it was Art’s clear function to propitiate the Gods, the Artist was resented-but-tolerated. Minus the Gods the tolerations fade rapidly.
Tim would say Modigliani and the word was always gifted with the same Italianate flourish of his bony hand. From his correct pronunciation of the Great One’s name (soft “g”) I learned, in fact, to correctly pronounce the name of the trendiest restaurant in the trendiest neighborhood of the city, knowledge that required five years of gradually becoming a shallow, trendy, cunt-drunk prick before I could use it.
I taught myself to paint in a windowless room in a larger flat I shared with an anarchist and his ballbusting, helmet-haired, shovel-jawed girlfriend. Her allure whistled high above my head. I painted under a red bulb at midnight and feasted on jacket potatoes spirited home in an origami tinfoil swan and found myself with four or five girlfriends. The Psychedelic Furs became very important to me.
I walked into a 24-Hour grocery one night, reeking of turpentine (flirting with oils and Oedipus), hoping to buy a frozen cheesecake with a pile of quarters and dimes and the bleary-eyed hipster at the cash register had the radio tuned to a college station that sounded like it was broadcasting from the Urals, playing an unknown group called The Clash, which I hated because it sounded too earthy. Snow fell and I ran through it with frozen cheesecake. I began dating a fellow Artiste and discovered on the fourth date that I’d hit the jackpot: she was both virgin and orphan. She fed me an Xmas turkey that red oil paint had somehow worked itself in with the stuffing of.
Tim was missing teeth when I first met him and still more were long-lost by the time we last spoke, on a street corner, me just visiting the country for a few weeks from a new home in Europe, dressed in smart Berliner black and Tim just a wraith’s dingey sneeze, a total coincidence, a little awkward, fifteen years after the day he first made me his wide-eyed pupil by penciling a perfect Mona Lisa on a page torn boldly out of a library book. Perfect and from memory. The hands of Tim’s Mona were the hands of the woman herself, a pictorial stresspoint where every element of the composition locks together.
Why do so many blush at /despise/recoil from anything questingly original in Art? I can answer that question, but I won’t. I recently received this email from an otherwise worldy man, a man in the bigtime music business, friends with superstars and a guiding hand in the formation of two recording artists so huge that anyone born after 1960 would laugh if I name-dropped them here. He wrote:
“After a lot of years of looking-and-listening, I’ve come to the conclusion that ‘everything’ is a marketing exercise! I think anyone who produces art in any dimension, and says they did it for themselves is a liar. If they did it for themselves, why are they showing it to us???”
Tim was already thirty-something when we first met, incisors gone and sporting the Van de Graaff coif of the malnourished/mad. I learned soon enough to avoid riding buses with him because his favorite sex substitute was to sit in the back and extemporize weird melodies about the various failings of the lemmings, quislings, capos and dupes he believed we were sharing the bus with. I learned soon enough not to go with Tim to the cinema or grocery store or art gallery because the songs he made up for the bourgeois assassins of promise were much worse. He’d come down to my room at midnight a few times a week with a gallon of orange juice and talk for hours.
He taught me to be militant about Art. But I compartmentalized his influence because I did not want to end up like him. I liked sex with pretty girls and I wasn’t willing to forsake that pleasure for a howling gawk at the deafening core of the heartless furnace of aesthetic Truth.
3
3" x 5" acrylic on masonite-1990
“We are each a slimy apparatus of interacting liquids.”
-John Updike, Toward the End of Time
We were all so terrified of herpes. Articles about herpes appeared in the Vogue yet girls were falling ripe from the rafters like pomegranates. They were rolling soft from behind the arras. Uppermiddleclass ingenues with Planned Parenthood diaphragms in Pee-wee Herman purses reading Anäis Nin at the laundromat. It’s not politically correct to describe the atavistic sensation of wellbeing a young man sometimes feels when feeling rich in females so I’ll leave it at that. Not that this feeling is a strictly testicular dispensation, for I’ve known young women who collected men; who amassed portfolios of men; who collected and traded men like baseball cards. I can think of a specific example.
Half-Cuban… a dancer with fuckedup legs. Evangeline was olive-skinned, cinematically striking with a sheen of fine blonde hairs glittering on the muscular cake of her ass. Her father is a Gay Cuban professor of semiotics at Miami State University. If you’ve ever seen Masculin Feminin, Ev was a swarthy, bowlegged version of Chantal Goya. She preferred neither walking nor standing because she felt less bowlegged athwart a bed and on this bed she plied me with wry tales of her middleaged losers. As she put it she couldn’t get off on one of these fellows until she’d made him cry*. Evangeline’s nirvana (her masterpiece) came in Rishikesh where she made a fucking Yogi cry.
But we digress.
Tim lived on the third floor of a mansion-converted-into-a-hippie-flop-house and it was after I moved out of the drop-out commune and into this very mansion that I made Tim’s acquaintance, months before my conversion in the main branch of the public library with him and his Mona Lisa. His cheap room was under the roof so his ceiling was slanted. He shared a toilet with several other tenants down the hall, one of them retarded and the other a daughter of millionaires.
Among the beautiful nightmare characters inhabiting this mansion was a Miltonian poet with a massive upper body and one polio-withered (though shapely as a young girl’s) leg who introduced me to Suzanne Verdal (about whom the famous Leonard Cohen song was written), who once tried to seduce me as thanks for a thirty-dollar loan she never repaid. She’d visit the mansion on blessed days and dance on the lawn while her fairytale children sat on a low wall eating not oranges from China but apples that came all the way from Washington state as Tim glowered down from his belfry window.
There was this one, small, abstract painting on an easel near Tim’s belfry window and I can see it now as though it were on the screen before me. It was the only actual painting of Tim’s I ever saw. A dull green impasto circle, a thick blue diagonal and a dull red vertical stripe. He worked on and discussed and re-jiggered this painting for as long as I knew him.
How could Tim speak so movingly and with such detailed knowledge of Modigliani, Soutine, Kandinsky and the others and produce one worthless painting? I’m fairly sure it was a worthless painting. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it will make Tim famous in the 23rd century.
Fifteen years ago, I wrote a short story about Tim (who is always “Tim” whenever I write about him, because no other name comes close) called “The Half-Block Coat”. An excerpt I have cleaned up a little because my earlier, stiffer style irritates me:
So Tim bowed at the threshold and shuffled on the blackened mat and crept in, yanking off his cap and rubbing his palms, looking around the little room to see what had changed in the six months or so since he’d been there last. Henry noted that Tim was losing his hair and wisps of it reached longingly after the cap as he pulled it off. Poor Tim. Forty going on sixty. Henry was twenty two.
Tim kept his coats on and Henry knew it was because Tim didn’t want to appear to presume that he had been invited to stay. It was amazing, Henry thought. The less a person has, the more stylized the rituals. Tim had the florid manners of an Archduke. He only relaxed when invited to and when invited to relax he ranted.
In this story, the young protagonist meets a rich, powerful, sexually unsatisfied middle-aged woman from the bigtime genuine Aht World called Aria Tanner and deliberately keeps it a secret from his antisocial attitudinal mentor Tim, for fear that Tim will fuck things up.
At the story’s climax, Tim vomits.
*[One thing I could never do was picture Tim crying; Evangeline would have met her match in toothless sack-of-bones Art Angel Tim.]
4
3′ x 5′, acrylic on canvas
“Also because she actually went around calling herself a post-modernist. No matter where you are, you Don’t Do This.”
-David Foster Wallace, Westward The Course of Empire Takes Its Way
I met Aria Tanner a couple of years after moving out of the hippie mansion, introduced by an ex-girlfriend who was Aria’s stylist at a salon so snobby I always avoided picking her up from work when we were going together. I’d meet her at the corner. Ms. Tanner was in charge of millions of dollars of corporate Art-acquisition budgets. She was friends with Andy Warhol and lived near a lake with her dog and a lawyer boyfriend in a big house full of trendy Art .The ex suggested I show Aria a portfolio of slides of my mediocre paintings and though my stuff was neither neo-expressionist nor faux-naif enough to leave an impression, the nervy cover letter I included with the portfolio exhilarated the rich lady with its jejune panache. Either that or Pola (not her real name) had told Aria how good I had gotten in bed.
Aria gave me a high-paying job writing the artspeak mumbo jumbo for glossy corporate collection catalogues full of A.R. Penck’s stupid stickmen and Sandro Chia’s sickly telephone doodles and Julian Schnabel’s pointless crockery and Chuck Close’s titanic forays into the limitless realm of zero imagination and I quit housepainting for a whole summer and started buying new books and new clothing and feeling animally ambitious in a not very artistic way. I had moved out of the hippie mansion but I still bumped into Tim quite often (at the Artist’s Quarter Jazz cafe, for example, or Whole Foods co-op) and I had to hide any evidence of this wicked new job from Tim whenever we met.
-Where’d you get those new shoes, man?
-I stole them.
-Bullshit. Seriously?
5
5' x 7' acrylic on canvas (detail)-1984
“I made enemies on the East Coast, the West Coast, and in the Middle West.”
-Leonard Michaels
Gods know I knew Tim was hurting for cash. I think he was mowing lawns and leaf-raking and eating on Foodstamps.
I was dating a fresh-from-Paris lesbian fashion model who was the face for a line of cosmetics for rich old women in France (she was 20; they painted her hair white for the photos). She had a psychotic break on Bastille Day.
When the summer job writing copy for the acquisitions catalog dried up I took a bold trip downtown to Aria’s office in its greenglass skyscraper that looked like a shelf system for kitsch-addicted demigods. I saw this quest as a test of my testicular puissance but the distance from the elevator to the white plush spot in front of the desk of Aria’s secretary came very close to being asymptotically infinite. I’d walk half the distance, then half the remaining distance, then half of that, and so on.
When I finally made it into Aria’s black leather and chrome office, I can’t remember what I said; from where exactly I summoned the sauce to frame the proposal that she should think of some way to continue, despite the summer job’s end, funneling that good, good money towards me. There she sat behind her bunker of a desk in her pinstriped shoulder-padded business suit. She had the pretty, cow-eyed face and the spray-stiff coin-blonde hair and a witty-mean mouth any starving Artist with a molecule of common sense would have poked stuff into. One could tell, even in their armor, that her bosoms looked nothing like my father’s lyrical left tits or even Layla’s. They were triumphalist corporate ultra-mams.
I don’t remember how soon after that it was that Aria wrote me the first big for-nothing-in-particular cheque but I remember exactly what I did with it (along with the cash she’d given me for a taxi, which I pocketed by walking eight miles home): I bought my ravishing then-girlfriend a coat. The money flowed for quite a while. Imagine what her lawyer boyfriend (a dedicated jogger) thought of it all. I realize now that he deserved to claw at his hair near the lake alone and suffer a little over how wunderbar he imagined my youthful genitals might be.
Aria wanted to fly me to New York. She wanted to introduce me to her friend Andy Warhol. She wanted to fly me to Europe. She asked me for a backrub in a taxi once. She said with this new thing called H.I.V. flying around she’d never in a million years submit to anal sex… as if I had asked her to.
I see myself in Aria’s CEOish living room in that big house near the lake. I’m leafing through a coffeetablebook heavy as a Swiss toddler and fat with Modigliani nudes (and necrotic photographs of the whorish models he fucked before, during and after painting them) whilst Aria takes a shower (under what pretext?) upstairs. I turn to the page featuring my favorite (Reclining Nude… but they’re all called that, aren’t they?) and suddenly I hear the second floor master bathroom door swoosh open (in a sort of now-or-never way, but perhaps I’m reading into the sound of it, retrointuitively) and the hot rush and thunder of her highpressure yuppie shower and Aria calling out that she wants me to come upstairs because she needs to ask me something.
Tim never taught me an actual painting technique. He taught me that Art is a voice in the Artist’s head. The voice may change over the years but what doesn’t change is that no one else can hear it. And that your transformation as an Artist is complete when you can’t hear anything but that voice. That’s the point that Tim had reached: I knew that. Did I want to reach that point? I wasn’t sure.
All I knew for sure was that I didn’t want to deal with Aria Tanner nude and wet or just nude or just wet so that was the end of my career in painting, though not in Art.
Somewhere on the planet a Philistine is reading this piece with gratitude and wonder.
Saint Tim shortly after drawing the Mona Lisa
what’s it called again when online marketeers create fake people to sell you things? here they are selling tits
Tom Brady is a strange and interesting case: a guy who oscillates between the insightful and the near-retarded at a very rapid rate. Maybe he’s best explained by American Millenarianism; I have no idea what his background is but some of his richer rants make me wonder. He can be engaging-yet-naive as a questing student of Poetry, then perversely-fascinating as a nascent cult-leader-type and, suddenly, kind of ridiculous as a wannabe founder of some quasi-scientific system of Lit. I was drawn to Tom’s site (one he shares with Comrade Des) by his apparent commitment to the rescue of Poe’s myth (I haven’t put any thought into the story of Edgar’s death since High School; I’m not a fan of Edgar Allan’s Poetry, but I’m always interested in new angles on old objects) although I soon found myself sticking my rhetorical finger down my throat over Tom’s loonier and sloppier claims.
But Tom’s just posted THIS (it seems to have started life as a comment on the Harriet blog) and it isn’t the poorly-thought-through bloviation* of a self-promoting nut (though I hope it isn’t meant to be verse):
And the “answer” to the chief concern of the comment is, again, I think, something having to do with America. The America of Specialization, where people each tend to be known for one thing, if they’re known for anything at all, and the ten-year-old who’s fanatical about garbage trucks grows up to retire at thirty, selling his/her Sanitation Company for millions. Or the pop singer who also paints but keeps the painting as a low-key hobby because the audience is confused by the well-rounded talent and prefers the Idiot Savant. The kid who eats-sleeps-shits basketball is what America raises and understands. Students of Science who have also been spending significant and pleasurably-invested time with the Arts all along don’t end up chairing concerned symposia on the need for “Consilience” any more than Italian kids who grew up with Black kids and Hispanic kids make awkward overtures of symbolic friendship toward Black or Hispanic colleagues later. The narrowing life-range of Specialization leads to many imbalances, some simply disappointing and others bizarre. To be as rounded as the Athenian athlete-balladeer was an ideal at the JFK-era grammar school I attended… now it’s Sparta’s lethal single-mindedness which Americans admire most. Goethe would have had a problem with his High School guidance counselor. “Focus, Johann Wolfgang! Focus!”
Poetry can’t bear up under the pressure of being anyone’s everything; one needs a Life to give the reading/writing of Poetry a context and, more importantly, a fund of memories and inspiration in its creation and decoding. One really ought to be fucking regularly or pursuing the luxury; earning money and seeing friends or pursuing these luxuries; walking the city and eating at its various crossroads-bistros or burger joints in the company of strangers… or pursuing these luxuries. Reading all day is no better for the writer than drinking all day. How long or soon was it after Philip Roth was up to nothing but standing at his writerly lectern in a rural cabin all day that his books began to suffer?
Poetry that comes only from Poetry or Poetry read only in the light of other Poetry may not be a “useless item” but it will be a terribly etiolated one. Poetry accompanies a Life; it can’t supplant one. True also of Lit and Art in general. I wish more Americans knew this.
*[ed.'s note: speaking of "bloviation", why not call Blogs "Blovs" instead?]
Allegra Goodman has placed a synchronistically unconscious parody of my Chick-Lit parody (TALLULAH, JUDE… which I will continue soon, btw, now that I’m done filming Comrade DJ Sensei Barry’s Art Show) in the New Yorker, I see
(excerpt)
The day her fiancé left, Amanda went walking in the Colonial cemetery off Garden Street. The gravestones were so worn that she could hardly read them. They were melting away into the weedy grass. You are a very dark person, her fiancé had said.
She walked home and sat in her half-empty closet. Her vintage nineteen-fifties wedding dress hung in clear asphyxiating plastic printed “NOT A TOY.”
She took the dress to work. She hooked the hanger onto a grab bar on the T and the dress rustled and swayed. When she got out at Harvard Square, the guy who played guitar near the turnstiles called, “Congratulations.”
Work was at the Garden School, where Amanda taught art, including theatre, puppets, storytelling, drumming, dance, and now fabric painting. She spread the white satin gown on the art-room floor. Two girls glued pink feathers all along the hem. Others brushed the skirt with green and purple. A boy named Nathaniel dipped his hand in red paint and left his little handprint on the bodice as though the dress were an Indian pony. At lunchtime, the principal asked Amanda to step into her office.
You are like living with a dark cloud, Amanda’s fiancé had told her when he left. You’re always sad.
I’m sad now, Amanda had said.
The principal told Amanda that, for an educator, boundaries were an issue. “Your personal life,” said the principal, “is not an appropriate art project for first grade. Your classroom,” said the principal, “is not an appropriate forum for your relationships. Let’s pack up the wedding dress.”
“It’s still wet,” Amanda said.
Her mother could not believe it. She had just sent out all the invitations. Her father swore he’d kill the son of a bitch. They both asked how this could have happened, but they remembered that they had had doubts all along. Her sister Lissa said she could not imagine what Amanda was going through. She must feel so terrible. Was Amanda going to have to write to everyone on the guest list? Like a card or something? She’d have to tell everybody, wouldn’t she?
I waited all this time because I didn’t want to hurt you, Amanda’s fiancé had said.
After school, she went for a drink with the old blond gym teacher, Patsy. They went to a bar called Cambridge Common and ordered gin-and-tonics. Patsy said, “Eventually, you’re going to realize that this is a blessing in disguise.”
“We had too many differences,” said Amanda.
Patsy lifted her glass. “There you go.”
“For example, I loved him and he didn’t love me.”
“Don’t be surprised,” said Patsy, “if he immediately marries someone else. Guys like that immediately marry someone else.”
“Why?” Amanda asked.
Patsy sighed. “If I knew that, I’d be teaching at Harvard, not teaching the professors’ kids.”
Amanda tried writing a card or something. She wrote that she and her fiancé had decided not to marry. Then she wrote that her fiancé had decided not to marry her. She said that she was sorry for any inconvenience. She added that she would appreciate gifts anyway.
In its entirety HERE
HAS SOMEONE TOLD MART, YET?
http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_14986590
We’re living it!
Actually, that was a fact-checking (or lack thereof) joke, Frances
[eds.'s note: The article-writer was confusing Sally Amis with Lucy Partington]
Kinda like “Hitch” attributing to Nathan Hale (and not Patrick Henry) “Give me liberty or give me death!” at the PEN festival wrap-up last evening. And not being corrected by Salman Rushdie, who should know better. Strange to say the least. Even weirder how they both repeatedly called Lally Weymouth, Katherine. Christopher looked like he might be drinking a Dean Martin beverage (a paler shade of Coke) but Salman seemed perfectly sober.
Other names were dropped more successfully I’m happy to report. And when you’re older, I’ll tell you the terribly unfunny (dumb blond with a shiksa twist) jokes Christopher cracked about Marilyn Monroe (at the Arthur Miller lecture, no less) unfortunately to much laughter. Had me looking around the Great Hall for the ghost of Joe DiMaggio walking softly and carrying … etc..
Well, now I want to hear the joke
When served matzoh ball soup by the august Mater Miller, Marilyn allegedly inquired: “Is this the only part of the matzoh you eat?”
What’s not to laugh?
Oh yeah, I forgot. He’s the arbiter of women, dead or alive, and funny and unfunny. Never mind as Gilda would lovingly say. Hoist him with his own petard!
But it’s not a “woman” (or, specifically, a “dumb broad” or “vagina”) joke that depends, for its effect, on the denigration of a whole gender/class/race/religion/nationality… it’s a Fish Out of Water joke that’s not at the expense of anyone but the character at the crux of the humorous misunderstanding, and, even then, the price the character pays is merely either appearing unworldly or awkward… very mild (and fairly Bellovian). We shouldn’t be too touchy and shut down the airport over the “bombscare” of an unattended banana peel… that’s my opinion.
I’m all for making jokes on Hitch or fat-white-academic-sell-out-drunks-as-stand-ins in turn… the crueler and funnier the better. But we won’t “win” by being thin-skinned and fuck Marilyn Monroe, btw. She was just a poor lost trollop who fell afoul of the Kennedy Bros.
That wasn’t Simone Signoret’s take on her. Not at all. (And remember MM had mounted Yves Montand.) Arthur Miller avoided serious jail time because Marilyn batted those lashes and shook her booty for HUAC.
How does mounting Montands or batting lashes at (or going down on) tail-gunner Joes get her into my Hall Of People To More-Than-Merely Shrug At?
[ed.'s note: I always loved how the photog staged the famous photo up there: MM is at the end of the book instead of the beginning, notice... right.]
Because she supported his humanity when it was at risk. And that makes her human in the best sense. Her great personal sorrow was to never have borne children. But she bore him; that was her crucible. One of many with which she was confronted. Make her a car hood ornament if you want to. But let the care be a Triumph.
Oh Christ, Frances. Enough with the hagiography. You know nothing supposedly “human” about the woman that hasn’t been filtered through a very long machine and if her works are to speak for her, we have a B-actress’ histrionic-or-goofily-diverting oeuvre to sift through. The clash of values here is primordial, I think. If it makes you feel any better, I have the same problem with CDS JR’s veneration of Che.
Except for that photograph of her after the miscarriage. There’s no filter. That’s her beaver shot.
Beatified via a beaver shot? May I submit, for the Vatican’s consideration, several billion beavers… but, seriously. If suffering is what sets MM apart, what are those women in Palestine/Mozambique/Bangladesh/Haiti/Romania doing… fucking around?
[ed.'s note: sorry about the cheap shot, but this is a pic of MM in the ambulance after the miscarriage]
[the funny thing is, Artie and his chum do indeed appear to be peering at MM's vadge in this shot]
This fine lady was married even more frequently than Mister Rushdie.
Now this is grooven.
I know! Even the cigarette smoke looks way cool.
IRREVERENCE AND THE REVEREND
I came up with the theory, on a walk with CDS Barry recently, that MLK got his signature rising-cadence-with-vibrato effect, in the “I Have a Dream” speech, from Bela Lugosi’s (1933, proto-civil rights) “Not men, not beasts… things!” speech from the first film version of HG Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau (where DEVO got the “Are we not men?” riff from)… but it’s still just a theory-in-progress. Or a joke that hinges on an insight/insight hinging on a joke. Not men, not beasts, things… indeed.
“[ed.'s note: sorry about the cheap shot, but this is a pic of MM in the ambulance after the miscarriage]”
It may indeed be a picture of Marilyn in the ambulance after the miscarriage making the best of it, bucking up. But the other one, and you know the one I mean, is Norma. I know you know the difference.
(As for Haiti, I’m sending a letter to our Special Envoy to Haiti today with some thoughts I hope his office will find helpful.)
Frances, the difference I know is between the hoopla-glamorized meatbag-with-hair (ie, the celebrity) and the run-of-the-mill meatbag-with-hair (ie, the rest of us, unless we’re Alopecians).
And, re, Haiti: interesting reading for the Comrades:
http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2008/08/haiti-aristide-lavalas
Little known fact:! Abraham Lincoln was in a bluegrass band called The Fox Mange when he lived in Springfield. He alternated playing the alto washboard and the ten-gallon moonshine jug. Big hit at their local azalea festival.
[ed.'s note: that's Richard Pryor, working off one thousand hours of community service, in the photo with Lincoln]
Richard Pryor’s cute, but Red Foxx was the one who took Lincoln’s legacy of light far more seriously.
“Legacy of Light”…? Gak.
When you capitalize it and put it inside quotation marks like that, I concede it’s a bit on the turgid side. But so much is in the political arena.
The “political arena” is the system of covert deals and overt lies The Cynical Controllers use to herd the Dupes towards optimal Cliffs. Neither Politics nor Advertising could exist without the Profound Dupability of The Fans/Shoppers/Masses. Nothing I can do to change it but fuck if I let myself roll over, on my own blog, with a polite simper, at reverential evocations of the gold-plated Super Turd of So-Called History in the gnarly surface of which Abe’s face is as much a feature as Normal Jean’s, Lady Di’s and Chuck Manson’s.
“I’m all for making jokes on Hitch or fat-white-academic-sell-out-drunks-as-stand-ins in turn… the crueler and funnier the better.”
For the record, and I was surprised by this because from pics of his talking head he looks like he would be, Hitch isn’t fat. Mr. Rushdie, however, should consider sitting on his hands when the basmati bowl is passed his way.
Hitch not fat? On what scale?
[ed.'s note: a Comrade Lurking has written in to inquire as to where I found the cool photo of Richard Pryor swabbing the smut from Abe's gigantic white bisexual ear; sorry, it's not really Richard, Comrade. I was joking]
http://staugustine2.wordpress.com/2010/04/23/the-endless-thread-6-0/#comment-3235
Pity the autist!
yes the down-to-earth street-smart intellectuo selling you his ice cold commonsensicle, Spooky is the prized emissary into the pantheon of high theory from the ‘dark-side’ of quip-hop smarts and New World Hucksterism, obscolescing the university as he thrives from it’s antiquated (hard currency) note of prestige.
Methodology anyone? is that a dirty word now? I agree Steven, frequency might have been an interesting term to explore it he had spent a bit more than 15 seconds on it. Obviously the star-sold class room is only too happy to make allowances, as long as he makes them feel good. And Spooky falls into a trap of his own making: ok maybe I have nothing to say, how about a little soft-shoe?
[ed.'s note: fixed, but not sure why CDS Barry's comments always get lodged in the spam folder; if anyone else has the same problem on TET, please email me about it]
So! Now I have time to engage!
CDS Barry, as you well know, you and I often touch on the issue of Academic Emperor’s-New-Clothesism during our Berlin zig-zagging walks. You can crystallize my position on the matter (regarding a very specific kind of Intellectual or Fancy Explainer, as I will specify below), after almost a decade and probably 20,000 kms of Berlinavigation, as:
I think that covers the position I’ve been refining in the thirty years since college; thirty years of debating friends-(and lovers) as-academics while keeping up with Popular Philosophy and taking on doctoral candidates in heated Comment Threads online. One thing I have noticed with delighted horror is a weakness in rhetorical skills that the average Anglo-American Academic (or Hackademic) papers over with citation carpet-bombings in debate. These thoughts/opinions of mine don’t cover, say, the field of Linguistics, which is scientificized enough to ward off sheer intelligence or clarity of thought with Empirical Data such as Grimm’s Law… and soon, as Psychology mutates into Geno-Pharmacology, that pseudo-science (Freud was spot-on about assimilated, fin-de-siecle, middle-class Viennese Jews but that’s about it) will have a genuine fortress to abscond to in a heated debate, as well. But Philosophy, which is a popular way of Appearing to Know in a modernate world shaped almost entirely by Hard Tech, is a sitting duck. BHL qua BHL doesn’t “know” a thing that Plato didn’t. Why do we live, why do we die and what should we do in-between? Still don’t know. The trick is to somehow earn a living addressing that simple 30,000-year-old question.
It’s my feeling that you, CDS Barry, can embody a DISCONTINUITY in the unbroken tradition of the Academy As Pseudo-Masonic Temple and the Left-Inflected Academy as Esoteric Placebo on the order of Intellectual Homeopathy. You’re young, clued-in, angry enough and slightly strange. What I like is your tendency to mix a Chomskyite willingness to cite actual figures, banal as they are relevant, with the more abstruse arguments. You aren’t afraid of muddying high-flying rhetoric with bodily fluids in the actual Congo. Bodily fluids in the Actual Congo is where it’s at (there and in the Comment Threads of Celebrity Gossip Sites: if I were looking for Dissertation Fodder, I’d pick the latter).
So: I see DJ Spooky as failing only to cover his tracks well enough in that little spiel; he hasn’t learned to pick his citations well or lay them on artistically. He’s also dressed a little too well. Remember, always dress like clothes aren’t your main concern and cite the guys who are A) the most obscure and B) writing in a foreign language! No one can prove you wrong. It’s even better if you C) cite someone who hasn’t been done to death (eg Baudrillard, Hegel, Adorno, Lacan, Benjamin, Blanchot have been done to death… it seems to me that, pretty soon, Wittgenstein and Nietzsche and Bertrand Fucking Russell, whose citations I no longer run into so often, may well come back into vogue. If Mcluhan can do it…).
This piece by Richard Dawkins is not, in my opinion, too bad:
(excerpt):
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/dawkins.html
[ed.'s note: the POSTMODERN GENERATOR which Dawkins refers to at the end of this article can still be found HERE]
I’m trying to picture the urban landscape that gave rise to 2,A,ii “clarity feels Conservative” as modified by the Dawkins statement “for clarity would expose your lack of content. ” All I’m coming up with is an abandoned fenced-in construction site, with a frame shop and dry cleaner on one side and whatever constitutes the German equivalent of a sprawling Salvation Army thrift shop on the other.
Yer gonna have to elucidate, Frances… meaning is… unclear
And therefore revolutionary?
You mean clarity would be revolutionary? Well, clarity of expression doesn’t preclude the telling of lies and the maintaining of a status quo, remember… in fact, that’s what the Hegemonic Right uses its clarity-of-expression for, no? (They get Obscurantist when it comes to Economics, of course… but you can see the utility of Obscurantism there)
From HERE we get:
Rather fascinated by the “medical” illustration to this. Have you seen those full body-sized waxworks where disembodied hands peel open women’s bodies to show us the baby in the womb or what’s going on inside the chest.?
All the while the women’s faces remain as placid as if they were sunbathing on the verandah.
A demonstration that education, surrealism and prurience can peacefully co-exist.
Any indication where this came from? Taschen have probably put it out in an astoundingly expensive and oversized tome for “collectors”.
btw, wtf and fwiw drawings have been emailed to you and have not bounced back so there they are.
[ed's note tried to fix it, Comrade ET, but the comment seems to want to stay in this counter-intuitive location; for the record, Comrade ET was referring to the rectal probe above the Vasserly, Comment #48]
Haven’t seen those peeled-woman illustrations but I am, after all, in the land of Gunther Von Hagens (the Carnival of Corpses traveling show)… if I need to I know where to find it… (be cool if Gunther teamed up with Kevorkian somehow)
TALLULAH, JUDE: A NOVEL IDEA
(CHAPTER ONE HERE)
(CHAPTER TWO HERE)
(CHAPTER THREE HERE)
(CHAPTER FOUR HERE)
CHAPTER FIVE
AS THE FAUCET WHOOSHED WATER INTO Jude’s smallish tub, Tallulah had a Father Pete flashback. Father Pete who called his semi-erect penis the aspergillum and had gotten Tallulah’s attention on her very first day of a summer job by ordering a BLT and a glass of holy water from her bath. Without even lowering his voice. Those were the days. Like all fornicating priests, Tallulah now realized, Father Pete had wanted to get caught. At the time, however, she’d been naively impressed by his recklessness, turning the color of an almost-unnecessary tampon and forgetting to charge for the holy water as she rang up the BLT with a trembling hand while the other hand steadied Tallulah against the counter. “Priest” was only beneath “judo instructor” on her adolescent fantasy-list of professions to seduce (or be seduced by) but she had literally shrugged and gone for it. Or let herself be gone for.
A summer job: a job they gave you just for being young: how she missed the concept. Tallulah asked, the first time she’d climbed into Father Pete’s hell-hot van on a drive half-way to the shore, “If nuns are married to Christ who are Priests married to, Father?” Without a pause, and without taking his eyes off the road and with seductive grimness, he’d answered: “Ourselves.”
Mistaking arrogance for desperation is one of my favorite fuck-ups, Tallulah thought, swirling what looked to her like a child’s hand in Jude’s deepening tubwater. Can I really be almost thirty? She broke things off with Father Pete after he’d confessed, upon making it as far as almost three-quarters of the way to the shore one afternoon, that Tallulah was the only thing keeping him from ending up like Father Robert. Father Robert who’d been sent to Mexico over allegations involving eighteen boys of Puerto Rican descent. There but for the grace of Tallulah, thought Tallulah. She wondered if Father Pete still had all his hair and a Prince cassette on his dashboard and she cast about Jude’s head for a bottle of bubble bath. Something aromatic they might smell all the way in the living room.
In a way, aren’t all men priests? Married to themselves? Isn’t Jesus just an excuse? And what are women in this way of looking at things? What am I, Tallulah? Satan? The World? A handjob on the way to a seashore you promise your whole life to reach but never quite make it to?
Tallulah was certain she could detect, over the proximate roar of the tubwater and the larger context of Sammy Davis Jr. singing Candy Man from Jude’s docked i-pod, a conspiratorial conversation against the other side of the bathroom door, half of which came in the muted tones of a man-child’s baffled concern. Or awe, probably. The female’s intermittent giggles Tallulah put down to the nerves of a bested rival. For Tallulah was sure Jude must be feeling awe about now.
Who but Tallulah, the girl who once jerked off a straight priest and a Chinese math tutor on the very same afternoon and then used the unwashed hand to help mold beef patties for a bar-b-cue at her grandmother’s, would have the nerve to take a bubble bath, uninvited, in the host’s tub during a dinner party? Jude was bound to be as impressed at Tallulah’s recklessness as Tallulah had been at Father Pete’s. It was important for Tallulah to believe that no man worth having really wanted a woman who was too predictable.
The doorknob turned a few futile half-turns clockwise and back but there was no knocking… as if Jude and his new apparent best friend were afraid of what they might find in there. Chickenshits, thought Tallulah. She decided to up the ante.
Next Monday: Chapter Six of TALLULAH, JUDE … ChickLit in Bite-Sized Pieces!!!
Dear Esteemed Parole Board and/or Comrades Lurking, Explicit, Disappeared and Forgotten,
usually I wouldn’t want to watch anything from a U of Chicago Prof. but this is a worthy exception (though I must admit, I put it on in the background while I was preparing dinner) succinct, yet detailed analysis of an ever pressing (but perhaps not for long) problem, and a privileged peek into the inner thinkings of realpolitik today.
I would like to reply to myself encouraging all those, like myself with no time to tarry with mediocre media to allow the aforelinked vid a few moments more than you might normally deign to dispense with. My advice, put it on like radio and do some cleaning or something you’ve been meaning to do for a while, you’ll have an interesting time of it, and agree or not, you will have done something you’ve been meaning to do which does not involve sitting at a screen.
there, I said it. click the link. what did you think?
Interesting speech from a skilled speaker… I’ve made it to the 60-minute mark with only the qualm that given a realness-level-choice ranging from “Politics” to “Realpolitik” to “Real Realpolitik” (with the first being standard Disney and the last being the Nitty Gritty), Mearsheimer can only, of course, go as far as the middle path*. For example, he refers to Biden’s warning/complaint about the continuing expansion of settlements in Palestinian territory as a “threat to the security of American troops” when, of course, putting those troops (and the civilians they are ready to kill) in harm’s way for political gain (and no other reason) is what these fuckers do for lunch.
And the larger question… which being: how the conflict over this tiny strip of real estate became a Flash Point hotter than Check Point Charlie or anywhere along the border between North and South Korea at the height of the Cold War… can only be addressed in the language of Real-Realpolitik. What’s the real real story? It’s all too fucking Meta.
The tabloidish removal of the veils from the John Edwards story is a rich resource and pertinent to the question. We first saw Edwards at the level of Politics: handsome guy and devoted family man running for office. A veil was removed when the scandal rumors came out around the same time we were told that Edwards’ wife had cancer… rumors of an affair he dismissed as ridiculous; an aide stepped in to take the heat… that was the Realpolitik level of reality. Time passed and it turned out that Edwards had fathered a child with his mistress while his wife was battling cancer and had roughed her up a little, in a heated moment, too: the mask fell off and the Real-Realpolitik narrative asserted itself and the arc was extraordinary. Which only happens when a player, for whatever reason, falls so far out of favor that they’re thrown to the wolves and “journalists” are allowed to go for the kill. Think Nixon.
It’d be nice to be able to read a History Text about “The Middle East” a hundred years from now: I guarantee you that the overarching narrative won’t be what we’d generally expect it to be.
Which is the consummate Realpolitik-as-opposed-to Real Realpolitik stance.
THE SARCASTIC TEXT
The Rain Foundation
1. Rainy
Rainy Witherspoon was trying to get up her nerve. She had to muster the cold courage, or manufacture a little self-righteous indignation, but in any case she had to break things off with T___ today, she couldn’t let herself weaken. But she was weak! She had to give T___ his walking papers. Their relationship was taking her nowhere. What other justification did she require? A thirty-two-year-old woman was not a twenty-two-year-old girl!
Rainy phoned T___.
2. Willy’s Thing
Herr Lang stood at the corner of the intersection of Uhland Strasse and the KuDamm, waiting obediently for the light. How could he know that the light was broken? It was a Friday afternoon and he was becoming increasingly agitated. Excited. He couldn’t wait to cross the street. He felt that the street was a Great Divide and that the corner he was standing on was Before and the one he could see opposite, on the other side of the median, was After. From where he stood he could see, to the left of the corner he aspired to, McDonald’s, bustling with the overwhelming color of American tourism. Standing at the big windows with their shakes, staring out into Germany, recuperating from the shock of running up against McDonald’s employees who couldn’t even speak English. Through the montaged glass he saw jeweling lines of peaches and pinks and aquas; the bold yellow plaids and the thrilling green neons and the adamant capitalist fuchsias. As a painter Herr Lang was fascinated with Americana.
If he’d had the great luck of being born in Chicago (love the soft savagery of the sound of the name of that city) instead of Brunsbuttel (his father, still alive there, has a four-digit telephone number!), he’d be Willy Lang (rhyming with “tang”, sharp “a” exaggerated) instead of Veely Lahng and he’d be doing commercials for credit cards by now, saying “Hi, I’m Willy Lang…”
His work appeared so often on German television that he had begun, since the 1970s, to adapt his style to the medium. As in: curves and swirls come off better on screen than jagged lines and angles. Thick lines better than fine ones. VanGogh better than El Greco, El Greco better than Klee. Also: horizontal (obviously) better than vertical and odalisques better than crucifixions. Chiaroscuro grabbed and monotone bored; reds and yellows (but never yellows alone) over blues and violets; vaguer, broader brush strokes came off as energy while painstaking, detailed brushwork got lost in the pixels. His most successful installation (Fern Sehen; National Gallery, Fall of ’85) had been three big rooms full of very large video monitors showing live transmissions (from Israel) of new works that had never been exposed to the naked eyes of any audience (and never were as the video tape went into the permanent collection of the National Gallery and the actual canvasses were destroyed). New advances in the medium made him nervous. Would flat screens and high-definition send him back to the style lab? What if TV screens became upright rectangles in the future? But anyway he had little to worry about. In Germany he was famous. So famous that his hometown Berliners ignored him in person. In England he was flying well under the radar; in France he was just another bosch but in Israel intellectuals bothered to argue over him. He was known in The States, but it was unlikely that the woman he was watching from across the street in McDonald’s at the moment, the big-chinned white-haired one in a daffodil-colored ski jacket and matching drawstring pants, had a Willy-print hanging in the breakfast nook back home. No, never his Curvy Reclining Crucifixion. A more populist work, like Vaguely Yellow, maybe. Probably not.
Willy stood there and waited for the light to change. At first glance you’d think he was a jeweler or an eccentric banker trying to look young and not some successful artist who looked like a business man trying to look like an artist in an expensive leather jacket (soft as skin) trying to look young, in creased khakis, moderate jowls (rough as leather), Nietzchiean mustache and riding boots. The look of a prosperous Yugoslavian pimp, say. Dressed that way… he always dressed that way… he was doing what Anke eye-rollingly called flattering himself. She’d look at him over a milchkaffee at a patio table at Figaro’s (where she and her other boring writer-friends hung out) and laugh. Willy, that’s not how you look. Anke with her square-framed serious-looking writer glasses and those cock-forbidding tweed blazers and her preposterous backpack (a forty-five-year-old woman with a backpack) judging his style.
A skin-temperature breeze ruffled his hair with avuncular affection and he reached up and patted it down. It was his 46th annual spring on the planet Earth, the first spring that he’d ever really bothered to notice. He had never before noticed that certain flowers would bloom and fluoresce and reek and then wither before June. Or that bumble bees only appeared on the scene after snow was gone and disappeared again before Christmas and that Berlin smelled better in April than it did in July. He hadn’t noticed spring, he hadn’t noticed anything. His life had been a helicopter ride, numb and aloft, above experience, while decades elapsed under him and the Earth seemed a vague place tuned to a low frequency meant for others. But now, suddenly, his feet were smack on the ground and he took note of the copious miracle of sticky detail that Life shoved in your face. He took note, for the first time, with sensual accuracy, of the Creator’s finicky and generous craftsmanship.
There were stones placed in some of the buildings and sidewalks of this very neighborhood that Romans (both kinds, of course, but more wonderfully, ancient ones) had walked on! The sparrows which hopped the curb for crumbs were direct descendants of the dinosaurs, formerly as massive as U-Bahn wagons! At that very moment, in the coil-packed factories of his ginger-haired balls, nations of invisible proto-Willys were flailing toward existence… Willies within Willy. Willy as a Chinese box of biology, a hologram of wet awareness in which the tiniest part reproduced the whole and speaking of his reproductive organs, he had come to that morning, bedroom bathed in spring’s pure breath (in truth, the studio bedroom… the mattress in the studio office… because Anke preferred the house to herself) and discovered a questingly hard little prick under his covers! A hard prick! His own, even. How he had loved his hard prick as a boy, parading around the house with it, rubbing on magazines and his mother’s unterwaschen and even the docile dog and then its pups. He used to call it his ticket-puncher. Willy had forgotten about that. He had forgotten so much. But now, on the first day of spring, Nature had sent him a love letter, a registered letter stamped Urgent. The contents of the letter: Every Man is your brother; Every Woman your love-object. Enjoy your stupid life!
The first thing he’d done was call Anke to leave a rather cool message on the machine.
Then he’d washed and shaved in the studio, heaving a bucket of hot water onto the desk so he could watch the bustling KuDamm while he did it, shaving without a mirror (by touch), cool air from the open windows blowing goose pimples across his arms, his uncircumcised penis tormenting his briefs. Look at all the pretty young girls running up and down the KuDamm in and out of the shops high-laced boots bounce cottontits stocking-tight bellbottombum foal-skinny legs and long hair everywhere, long and natural, the luscious blond manes, lustrous black manes, the voluptuous young Turkish girls and their reliably brood-ready breasts rebelling against pious, scarf-wearing mothers and the whole long street blurry with ozone and pheromones. Willy couldn’t wash and shave quickly enough.
He was going to get out there and behave like one of God’s creatures. Today he was going to fornicate. Reproduce, even. He wanted a son (even a daughter would do). If Anke refused to give him a child (what did her doctors with their stupid warnings know?) he’d get one somewhere else. He wanted to do something; make something; feel something. Sick and tired of lying propped on an elbow in their queen-sized bed on Saturday night watching Anke with her fluttering eyelids insult him rooting around in her gravelly uterus with his arch-enemy that ten-year-old vibrator and by candlelight, yet. Fifteen years was enough. He finished shaving and toweled himself and dressed. Hurried short-legged down four flights to the foyer of the grand old building, taking a deep breath before pulling the baroque front door (crafted in the age of giants) and into the blustery, rose-scented, sun-dappled KuDamm with all of its sexual wonders.
Willy patted his hair down. He was still standing at the corner, waiting to cross the street, the upright red palm of the don’t walk signal still flashing. He looked longingly at the opposite corner and saw two skinny blacks standing there and then crossing towards him. One of them was wearing a black cowboy hat. They ignored the light and jogged over, splitting and re-combining like a zipper around him, continuing up Uhland Strasse behind him, while Willy stood still like an obedient schoolboy. Apes, he thought, amiably.
The fruity gold-green late-morning sunlight was busy scraping winter’s fuscous residue. Contagions of green broke out along the skinny arms of the trees which lined the promenade and Willy reflected on the perfect balance of the natural world. Those two blacks (jaywalkers) for instance: deficient intellectually, apparently cheated by Nature in that regard. (What European was foolish enough to proclaim, yet dense enough to disbelieve, the notion that the black species was intellectually simpler than most others?). And yet (hear him out!) those self-same jaywalking blacks (unable to design and fabricate a space shuttle, or even a cantilevered bridge) were clearly Willy’s sexual superiors. Sensually speaking, they are geniuses and I am a Mongolian Idiot, he mused. Willy had no problem admitting this.
Nature had compensated the sons of the tribe of Ham for their smaller brains with bigger, suppler, vastly more splendid penises. Plus the instinctive ability to wield them superlatively. Balance (phylogenic justice) was therefore maintained. Natural Law, which is compassionate (but firm), sees to it all at the level of the chromosome, for Man, with his blunt gavel, is an amateur. So every Race might lament its deficits, while in the same breath extol its own virtues. Every Race brag its blessings while bemoaning its curses. Every Race a dawn and a midnight too.
Experiencing a warm, wise chill, Willy suddenly thought of that peculiar political movement of the Thirties and Forties. The one his father would sometimes discuss with twinkly discretion, all those years ago, in the garage, while the Mercedes was running and Mother was busy checking all the locks on the house (sometimes double-and-triple checking), in that minute or two each week his father felt free to talk (he’d clam up again when Mother climbed into the passenger seat beside him) and sometimes the topic of these quick talks would be lovemaking (even when Willy was just a child) and other times the topic would be The War. Obliquely, his father referred to those times as our short leap over a wide chasm. The real evil of that system was how they had played too-cleverly with the truth. Savage lies can be mere entertainment, whereas the calculated near-precision of a semi-truth can be the deadliest toxin. Those so-called N___s actually destroyed reality by splitting the atoms of Meaning itself (the Allies opted to split matter instead and won but the fallout from N___ experiments in Word Fission still linger) because it’s a recognizable truth, after all, that the Jews can be money-lenders, usurers, shylocks. Yes, that is a semi-truth, Willy thought. But had the Jews not also been Deutschland’s greatest professional comedians? Now that they were gone, had Germany had a belly laugh once since the War? Also, admittedly, as writers (led by their Freud), Jews tended to be more neurotically over-intellectual (from the cultural habit of pouring over minutiae in arcane Rabbinical texts, probably) than healthier, straightforward Europeans. But they, the Jews, nevertheless had risen to occasional peaks of literary greatness: of this, Willy was certain that it was safe to assume. Jew and Gentile, German and Slav, white man and black. Intellectual and Athlete, Sensualist and Aesthete. Every teacher in turn a pupil! Every group its part to play in the World’s puzzle! Everyone was necessary, in the end, everyone belonged. I, Willy Lang, am no more worthy a being, when all is said and done, than those two illegally street-crossing blacks that I have seen!
Believing this, suddenly, with all of his heart, with the warm palm of the spring sun pressing on his shoulders, an unconscious smile stretched his thin, cracked lips. The benevolent smile of an upright member of a mighty congregation, standing straight-spined in the foremost pew, receiving the greatest and simplest and most uplifting of sermons. Every Man is your brother; Every Woman your love-object. Enjoy your stupid life!
That’s when he saw her.
Crossing the street toward him. Lips of fat raw steak and skin expensive chocolate and Willy’s heart shot a kilo of steel blood down the chamber in his pants and his thing stiff at her blind but resolute in its lair. Black Venus! Dark Dietrich! Chocolate Valkyrie! Eva Brown!
She crossed the street and whooshed by Willy in her short skirt on Moulin Rouge long legs, clacking the sidewalk with stiletto-heeled thigh-high black vinyl don’t-even-think-about-it boots. Clack clack clack clack clack. Willy’s hair fluttered in the sucking force of the wake that trailed behind her. Willy patted his hair back in place and hurried after, up Uhland Strasse, but try as he might, he couldn’t catch up! Her legs were eating vast lengths of sidewalk. Clack clack clack clack clack. Running would have been undignified, but fast-walking only got him within an arm’s length of her and the gap grew clack clack clack clack clack and he reached and touched her shoulder blurting in his best English black baby I am in love with you!
She stopped dead in her tracks.
Before Willy knew it he had introduced himself (her name was Rainy Witherspoon and she was American and she was starring in a production of Hair at the Theatre Des Westerns) and charmed her into going up to his studio to look at his paintings for just a little while, please and anyway the studio was right on the Ku’Damm so she felt safe and went up the stairs and his hand was light as a feather on her basketballed ass prodding onwards and upwards her heels like gunshots in the stairwell.
Rainy glanced at a few of the works with detached curiosity going uh-huh and that one’s nice and hmmmm, trying to think of a graceful way out until Willy mentioned that the going price for one of his larger works was thirty thousand marks.
Thirty thousand marks? Rainy listened respectfully. Walking around the studio more slowly now, giving the paintings a second look. It was more like being in a real art museum, suddenly. It was nice. The sun dragging luminous rhomboids across the parquet floor. The reassuring sounds wafting up from the crowds thronging the Ku’Damm. Willy stood behind her with his hands clasped didactically behind his back as she stood before a large work, a newer one, called F(r)ame. Richly-grained and varnished wood, huge, three by five meters and shaped like a picture frame but of weird proportions, with each side of the frame (banally fitted, end to end, by 45-degree joints) two meters wide. Swollen. It must have weighed a ton. At the center of all that shining dark wood was a little rectangle of blank canvas of about four square inches.
Willy said Yes, that is one of my favorite pieces too. He said If you like it, you must like me. He said Perhaps we two can be of help to each other in a soothing voice and stepped up closer behind her. To be honest, I have never felt before how I feel today. I’m so curious about the world, Rainy. Your world. I want to know more about you (he reached around under the denim jacket and dug out the tucked-in tee shirt and slipped his cool white hands up her hot black sides and tugged those nipples in a wonderfully futile milking). He said I want to know more about you; I’d like to meet your friends also. Taste your soul food and so forth. It’s not so crazy, my idea. He kissed her neck, tickling and burning it with his mustache and added I can help you and you can help me. I am not a nobody.
When Willy woke he realized he was snoring and stopped. What time was it? He was on the mattress in the studio office, fully clothed (but not dressed: his pants were around his ankles), bathed in the cool half-dark of twilight. He’d slept the day away. Sharp white lights refracted from the traffic outside were drifting across the dark ceiling like theoretical boats in a two-dimensional harbor. Willy was groggy and he heard voices coming from the other part of the studio. No, it was one voice. Rainy.
He quivered there in his leather jacket and his pants down around his booted ankles watching the delicate pattern of light-boats shifting across the ceiling, stroking his limp penis. Memorializing it already. Its work done, it was now dead. He had fathered the beginning of his own private master race: a creature with white intelligence and black beauty. Wie schöne, how marvelous. He listened with abstract pleasure to the sound of the half-whispered voice in the other room. Her dusky elegant Negroid laughter as she paced, a nipply silhouette, between the tall windows in his gallery.
Rainy twisted the curly white cord around her bare black arm like a lanyard, waiting for the operator to put her call through to yet another far flung friend she hadn’t gabbed with in ages when she suddenly felt it, a drastic change in the pH of the lining of the hinter-most valve in her womb, a cold little mercury ping down there between the heart and the cap of the bladder.
3. Legalize Stealing!
T___ was on a strict regime: no more this, no more that. This included masturbation because with masturbation come fantasies and fantasies engender longings and longings produce a time-wasting weakness called love. No more love.
With the accrued sublimated sexual energy of a hundred pent-up nights he wrote a great book called Legalize Stealing! about life among the freaks of the international underworld such as drug dealers, gun-runners, sadomasochists, pornographers, phony metaphysicians, art forgers, assassins, restaurateurs and pimps. He used a handsome illiterate friend as the model for the book’s sexual idiot savant Buddah and the book was published by a small independent press. A hit in Eastern Europe. T___ didn’t make huge amounts of money with it but he met an enchanting woman while signing copies of his book at the cafe Klik Klak in Prague. She smelled like cooking vanilla and T___ could smell her at the back of the book-signing line and T___’s own grandmother, because they had been poor, had dabbed cooking vanilla (eighty proof) behind her ears instead of perfume when he was a child so he signed books impatiently until he found the source of that smell. She handed him a copy of Legalize Stealing! inscribed already with her own inscription, to T___, the author, from Sofia, presumptuously, with love, in honor of many good future years together.
4. Best Wishes
601 East 32nd Street. Apt. 511. In the Lake Meadows apartment building, where the renters were mostly black professionals. There was a gynecologist next door, Dr. Cruszat and also, for example, a senior officer of Chicago’s first black-run bank in the two-story apartment down the hall. There was a framed poster of the 1993 Theatre Des Westerns production of “Hair” showing the entire cast on stage, holding hands, hands aloft, mouths open, photographed singing the climactic “Age of Aquarius” bathed in gold light and there, center right, was Rainy in a blond wig showing her perfect white teeth and her made-for-the-stage dimples. There were autographs and valedictory inscriptions inked like squashed spiders all over the poster. Best Wishes, Viel Glück and all that. The poster was in the nursery, over the crib. The crib was opposite the window which over-looked Lake Michigan. Low clouds advanced over the choppy water like black-bottomed magnets and the lake bristled obliquely. Soft pebbles of water dotted the nursery window.
Rainy was in the living room in her pajamas on the white leather couch drinking an herbal “reducing” tea and watching television. The television muttered at a barely audible volume forcing her to lean forward from time to time to make out what it was saying. So low that the clock ticking on the kitchen counter seemed loud.
A woman, daubing at tear-smashed eyes, described how her drug-dealing bisexual boyfriend had seduced her mentally-ill father, subsequently robbing the feeble old man of his life savings and giving him a sexually transmitted disease in the bargain: anal herpes: and the studio audience was rapt: fingers on cheeks, mouths gaping. Every few minutes, for the benefit of viewers just tuning in, an italicized subtitle appeared: Louise: Shot Cheating Boyfriend Who Raped Father.
Now I’ve heard everything, thought Rainy. Thank God that woman is white. Trailer-trash. With her thin, frizzy-permed, mousy-brown hair. If it was a nigger up there telling the same story, all the white folks in the audience would be thinking See, that’s how they are! But when it’s white trash perverts they’re dealing with, they don’t draw any generalized conclusions. Ever notice that? Let one crazy little jigaboo mess up and the entire black race gets the blame.
She flicked the remote at the television and the screen went black and she pushed herself up from the sofa. She slipped her feet into her comfortable slippers (pink rabbits, with ears and everything). Willy had sent them. At first she had taken one look at them and said, out loud, alone in the hallway, if he thinks I’m gonna put my feet in these foolish things he must be on crack! But here she was, wearing them. They were comfortable and it didn’t matter how they looked. The same remark could she also apply to herself, as Willy would have put it. Pride in youth, comfort in maturity.
She shuffled on the kitchen linoleum. Shi-shi-shi. Opened a cabinet and grabbed a bottle of vitamins. Then over to the ‘fridge for a pitcher of orange juice to sluice the pills down. Shi-shi-shi. That’s the thing she loved most about this apartment: the floors didn’t creak. It was spacious and ultra-modern and climate controlled but it was the creak-less floors she appreciated the most. Her whole life she had lived in places where the fucking floor creaked. Growing up with puritanical faux-bourgeois colored postal-worker parents in a house with creaky floors she couldn’t get away with anything. Friends of hers had already tried grass by the time they were in the fifth-grade and were worldly enough to complain, in the school cafeteria, about boys who cum too quick or fuck up your rear with lard but Rainy had been trapped in her childish downscale-Disney bedroom at night and she couldn’t even go to the toilet without waking up the whole fucking household. From as young as thirteen on she knew there were beautiful smooth-armed brothers out there on the not-too-filthy streets, breath like Passover wine, shirtless in humid moonlight, waiting for her. Ready and able to hump all firm-but-gentle on the hot hood of an idling Cadillac, shoe-horn those big black dicks in her. She would squirm and flop in her bed and fantasize ’til the cows came home and jerk off until her fingertips wrinkled and she had masturbated the ‘Seventies away because of those god-damned creaking floors.
Shi-shi-shi-shi-shi-shi-shi. From linoleum to parquet in the floppy-eared slippers. She went from the kitchen to the end of the hall, in the cul-de-sac where she had most of her pictures nailed to the walls, to pick up some tiny clothes lying around. When she stooped she felt the cheesy weight in her breasts and when she stood up again the sheer synthetic fabric of her night gown grated on her sore nipples. She winced and at the moment of wincing espied her reflection in the glass of a dark photograph she stood facing. Saw her wincing thirty-three-year-old face superimposed over her smiling twenty-two-year-old face, a portrait taken by a famous Austrian fashion photographer and the dark picture was a mirror, accurate enough but not brutal, so she took the time to really look at herself, something she hadn’t had the courage to attempt in the clinically-vicious bathroom mirror (the one real mirror she kept, out of necessity, in the house) and she tugged the fat on her neck.
Oh Lord oh fuck, she thought. For ten years, she had run as hard and as far and as fast as she could from America, from fat nigger mammies, from the ghetto, only to wind up here, in Chicago, surrounded by ghettos, herself a fat nigger mammy! Because of a German! The irony of it. I fell for the oldest trick in the book, she thought. Some guy comes along with a little money and knocks you up and offers to take care of you and you fall like a ton of bricks.
She opened the door to the nursery.
5. Rainy Junior
T___ and Sofia, living together in Prague, had a baby, a little girl who T___ insisted they name Rainy.
6. Acting Young Aged Him
Anke checked the address she’d scribbled on the KLM folder that had held her Concorde ticket. She repeated the address. The dashboard screen of the Global Positioning Map of Chicago flickered in response. Ten Forty Four West one hundred and fifteenth street… the address, according to the GPMOC, didn’t exist. It wasn’t in the data base. An apt enough metaphor. She’d have to find the place the way the pioneers had… by asking directions. Are you kidding? (If she had to, of course, she could use the car’s public address system).
The dashboard traffic light was red. She was at the intersection of 115th and Halsted and all her steelclear™ windows were rolled up and all the doors were vacuum-sealed plus the rental agency had furnished all vehicles with Riot-Ease gas vents but still she felt unsafe, unsicher and was prepared at any minute to hit the red light override and step on the gas and run the light and take her chances with traffic.
At 60, Anke Lang was still a great runner. She was wearing a silver foil track suit and Nike wraparound running goggle and she saw herself, as if in a premonition, dashing through the ghetto in this get up. She tried to make herself as small and transparent as possible behind the wheel of the chrome-colored Chevy Stiletto. Unlike in Deutschland, opaque car windows were illegal in the States. She felt exposed. So the cluster of black boys (the politically correct term for blacks was now urban nationals; she had to remember that) at the corner bus stop, until a few seconds ago busy smacking each other like chimps, noticed her.
She pretended not to notice that they had noticed her. A dwarfish dangerous-looking one pointed at her and blew her a kiss and then started out into the street, gesticulating wildly and the other little slum-monkeys went mad with delight, slapping each other five and then the little schwärze monster unzipped his white corduroy pants and un-taped the birth control diaper and got his bent little Schwanz out, black as licorice, two gold earrings through the glans and he wagged it at her, coming toward the car all comical bow-legged and googly-eyed. Waggling his penis at her. And these were school children, nine-year-olds with i-boox bags and corrective screenreading glasses! Probably straight-A students! Anke glowered.
The little cannibal got up on the hood like he was going to make love to it and thudded the windshield with a print-leaving fist. His teeth, per fashion, had all been pulled, except two in front at the top. He looked like a nightmarish crazy black rabbit. He was mouthing obscenities that the Stiletto’s insulation blotted and his gang was in hysterics and Anke, silly, squirted him with wiper fluid and he grabbed at his eye and the light turned green and she floored the pedal, zero to ninety and she saw him, in the rear view monitor, rolling across the asphalt, his homeboys bent-double with dumb-demon glee.
Of course, she had imagined the whole episode, gripping her steering wheel at the realism of the vision. She was a writer, and writers have imaginations. When the dashboard traffic light finally turned green, she drove carefully through the intersection and the urban nationals on the corner paid her no attention.
She drove slowly, funereally, in hope of spotting an address to orient herself. Was this really America? Block after block, mile after mile, of filth and devastation. Vacant lots of mountainous brick rubble; scorched abandoned buildings; drug-addicted bare-breasted minimum rights mothers with snot-slick, illegitimate children slung marsupial from their hips. Bellicose raggedy-assed nappy-haired men with bottles, staggering from trash can to trash can, pollinating the fires with their hundred-proof piss. Well, thought Anke. What’s wrong with these people?
More importantly, why had Willy loved this city so much? He’d been flying there twice a year for as long as she could remember. And then those bank records she’d uncovered and all those mysterious monthly payments to a mysterious charity (footnoted in his records as The Rain Foundation, 1044 West 115th Street, Chicago, Illinois, PoZone 7-uNat).
Anke regretted Willy’s recent death at that moment acutely, if only because now it would be impossible to put that and other questions to him directly. She’d have to infer an answer from accumulated evidence. She’d have to infer plenty of answers, writing, as she was, Willy’s biography. Ironic that his death gave her a moral right, an imperative, to do what Willy often bitterly referred to as snooping whenever she put a direct question to him when he was alive. I’ve had a noseful of this goddamned snooping of yours, Anke. I feel as though I’ve been tied to a chair by the fucking Stasi. And he’d be biting the corners of his walrusy mustache, a sure sign of his rage.
They had quarreled constantly at the end. His death hadn’t shocked her: he looked so old, already, like he could have been her father, that she was always surprised, again, when she got a call from him every morning. Bald and skinny and bent like an old nail, as if the mass of the mustache was too much to support. In a way, towards the end, the mustache symbolized everything. The more famous Willy got, the fuller and more baroque that mustache of his grew. Too much fame: too many drugs and girls and parties. If she could have shaved that thing off of him, at the end, perhaps he’d be alive today. He thought it made him look virile, younger! Acting young had aged him.
Writing Willy’s biography was a psychologically complex endeavor for Anke: part tribute, part snooping, part catharsis, part gold mine, part revenge. Anyway, now that Willy was a famous artist (even or especially in America), there were sure to be dozens of unauthorized biographies. Willy was the first major artist of a young Millennium. The show that MOMANU held of Willy’s famous Black Madonna Serial broke the attendance record previously held by the Lost Picasso event. Willy Lang had become an industry in America (now that High Culture had been rediscovered by the rediscovered middle classes). It was important that Anke’s biography become definitive by being first.
She finally found the place she was looking for, further out from the Dante-esque hub of the city. 1044 West 115th Street. A ramshackle wooden house, surrounded by vacant-lot jungles. Out of the tall grasses of the vacant lots rose old refrigerators and stacks of truck tires. A dented blue old fashioned mini van was parked in front of the house. Anke parked across the street from the mini van, in front of an abandoned commercial building, probably once a micro-chip or cigarette packing plant that had exploited South East Asians. Climbing out of the car was like disembarking from a space ship. The planet she was now on, America, was hostile but capable of sustaining humanoid life. The wind actually howled. It was late fall and the street and sidewalks, rarely traveled, were heel-deep in crunchy or cornflake-in-milk-mealy brown leaves. The sky a chilled gray womb full of holes. In her silver track suit and wraparound goggles, Anke really did look like a space visitor. At least this part of town was more wide-open, almost rural. Nature was in the process of repossessing it, splitting the unconscious asphalt with roots, covering the old factory (as one covers a corpse) with vines.
The moment she stepped on the first creaking stair step towards the front door (it was a comedy how those stairs creaked, like in an old time horror movie), a pack of dogs in the second level of the house (she could see them snarling in a bedroom window) went wild. She couldn’t find a doorbell, but there didn’t seem to be a point in having one. It wasn’t long before a gigantic bushy-haired black (urban national, rather) woman, in a yellow bathrobe (in the middle of the day!), came to the door.
Anke guessed the woman to be in her late fifties. Standing behind the woman (cowering, like an animal) was a yellow-skinned boy, in pajamas, anywhere from ten to fifteen years old, with Negroid features and wild, unkempt hair. Light-colored heavily-slanted drooping eyes. Three wet fingers stuck in his mouth. Mustache.
A NEW EVENT FOR THE 2012 OLYMPICS
[and, again: the overwhelming majority of non-Berlin photos on TET come from HERE but the above-sampled does not]
THE ARGUMENT FOR DISCONTINUITY (images from a prior century)
THE FREE RANGE POET
http://madscience.antville.org/stories/1759191/
http://madscience.antville.org/stories/1747108/
[i wrote the last one in response to a bar/cafe smoking ban; "June the 17th" is a famous street and to "ride black" is to use public transport without a ticket]
INSIDE JOKE, EH, GEORGE?
that was great. the eyeball bass drum is genius.
dang…
http://blog.92y.org/index.php/item/kurt_vonnegut_breakfast_of_champions_podcast/
and this:
More Morris dancing, this time at the New York Public Library. The NYPL is honoring the Yankees. Here’s how the invite reads.
“Corporate Dinner Will Honor Champions On- and Off- the Field
June 7, 2010
6:30 p.m.
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
Join Reggie Jackson, Lee Mazzilli, Hal Steinbrenner, and Jennifer Steinbrenner Swindal for a spectacular night when The New York Public Library honors the World Champion New York Yankees at its annual corporate benefit. The Yankees have partnered with the Library to help kids all over this great city, renovating the children’s room at the Bronx Library Center, sponsoring the Library’s Summer Reading program, and underwriting the purchase of thousands of books for Bronx libraries. Have your picture taken with the Yankees’ 2000 and 2009 World Series trophies and join us in thanking the Yankees.”
I’m assuming that means that the promises the Yankees have made to the community in which they operate in exchange for building the new stadium, as detailed below, have been fulfilled (but somehow I doubt it). From http://nyclatinopolitics.com/2009/04/03/community-protest-yankee-opener/
YANKEE PROMISES THE REALITY
- 25% Community Jobs – Not True
- 25% Community Contracts – Not True
- 25% Local Business Contracts – Not True
- Less Traffic in the Community – To Be Determined
- Temporary Parks – Where Are They?
- New Park by 2010 – Maybe by 2013?
- 15,000 Free Tickets For The Community – Who’s Getting Them?
Here is a link to the NYPL Board of Directors (What? Only two from the glossy New Yorker?) . http://cityfile.com/lists/nypl-board
Now, it was very cool that the Yankees stopped by Walter Reed Hospital on their way to the White House to shake President Obama’s hand, but what about honoring the commitments their coprporate managment has made (using their faces and images on the poster) to the people who breathe their same air?
This structural corruption, in which “non-profit” board members who control public institutions and shepherd billions of dollars of tax-payer resources, and who abuse the public trust by providing cover for unethical business practices in an almost complete vacuum of governmental oversight, really needs to be addressed.
Having said that, if Don DeLillo and other prominent Bronx authors would write a letter to the NYPL board, ccing the media, asking that the Yankee syndicate take the occasion of the gala to announce how it has addressed and redressed the community’s legitimate grievances, perhaps under PEN’s leadership, it could be a whole new…etc.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3739500579629840148#
CINEMATET
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-586446106246014754#
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6273634405638821891#
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6273634405638821891#docid=9198809969200913970
Just to show that it goes in all directions: I Googled upon reading of Lena Horne’s death and found this picture of Dorothy Dandridge, identified as Horne, on an African Fashion blogspot… because all us mischlings look alike…
Driven by a hunch I Googled “Billie Holiday” and found this, as a result, on several White-ish (though not all are Anglophone) blogs:
[ed.'s note: Beloved has a speaking part on a popular TV show, which films out of town; she was on her way to the train station at 4am... so I'm busy keeping Offsprung fed and busy all day and well into the evening, operating on zero sleep in 36 hour... posting will be intermittent...]
BELOVED’S ADVENTURES IN TUBEWORLD
That’s her messing with hardware between takes. It’s certainly bigger than mine.
They’re shuttering ten branch libraries in NYC. While the people scramble to save what should never be at risk what else will they be stealing right off the table?
Dunno, Frances. That sort of thing has to wait in line behind blowing kids up with drones on my list of Worries and Outrages. I’m sure there were vociferous campaigners for Animal Rights or against Local Corruption or Littering in the Berlin of 1939, too… it’s not just a matter of scale but of perspective. Look at it this way: at least they didn’t level these libraries with missiles while they were full of school kids and winos.
That’s the point, Steven. It’s all of a piece. It’s just another way into the same realization. The choice has now become fast death or slow death. When I was in Park Hills, MO a couple of weeks ago, I attended a lecture at the Mineral Rock Community College. It was held in the library there. A packed audience of multi-cultural kids and their teachers and librarians. They listened more or less respectfully, more or less attentively to Helen, age 86, told her story of survival. But also of a couple who were talked out of a quiet suicide at home only to be deported, tortured and ultimately gassed. It was the talker-outerer’s biggest regret in life.
“It’s just another way into the same realization. The choice has now become fast death or slow death.”
Drone death in Afghanistan being the fast version… ten branches of the public library being shut down in NYC being the very slow version.
If closing the libraries would save the Afghani lives, I’d be first in line with the Master locks. It’s all of a piece, Steven, and it’s all about privatizing the real estate, here and there. I know this because when I was 17 living through a war, an actual one, I routinely visited Israeli soldiers in Hadassah Hospital who had been wounded in the Sinai, and from their beds, behind their bandages, they told me so.
Oh dear. A Zionist too, Frances?
SEX REV
It’s a very bad sign when you’ve written a book which Michiko Kakutani fails to misunderstand.
Wince. Not that I managed to talk myself into reading more than c. 50 pages into The Pregnant Widow; I used to think there was an obligation to finish any book I’d bought (linked obliquely, probably, to being doused, early and often, with my mother’s moral blackmail re: kids in Bangladesh and my french fries) and it’s true that the compulsion to do so taught me lots of negative lessons, as a young man trying to learn to put words together in such a way that some reader might feel compelled, at the least, to read them. As the hours become minutes and the years become months and then weeks I can’t fuck with books that don’t bother to inform me, early in the process, why I should bother (the subtlest wink will do it). Which is not a just critique in this case, because Pregnant Widow’s prologue really grabbed me. As I noted at The Valve,
Kakutani writes:
And that’s the heart of the problem of the novel’s more-than-stylistic failure as a fancy explanation: the premise is dead wrong. If The Sexual Revolution has to be summed up in some kind of headline, let it be: The Year The Lower Classes Got Sex Lives Resembling The Sex Lives of Their Masters. You’d have to do it case-by-case if you wanted to calculate the total amount of pleasure each participant managed to save from the burning wreck of The Revolution before the Mullahs sprayed the fire with Fundamentalist foam (and AIDS), but it’s not an unreasonable guess that Men got more out of it than Women. Just look at all those vintage pictures of skinny white Zarathustra’s and their topless harems at play in the moddish mud. Scratch an “open relationship” of 1970 and you’d find a smooth-talking Peter Fonda wannabe and his long-suffering Beauvoir… biding her time until he got it out of his system (which he would, eventually: with a younger woman destined to dump him). The clamp-down (eg, throwing teens in jail for fucking teens) has a lot to do with the fact that the Aristocracy wants to keep the Right to Fuck: How, Who, When to itself. Adultery, abortion, statutory rape, bestiality, buggery and homo-love are meant for the Rich. The Congressman who’s so Pro-Family that he has two of them (one with his mistress in a rented luxury flat, far far away) isn’t being a hypocrite, he’s being an Aristocrat.
Even as late as the late-1970s and early 1980s I remember thinking that something must be wrong because I was having more fun than all the several rich old men of my vague acquaintance (fathers of kids I was in school with, mostly). Yeah, suddenly the whole Sex thing was a meritocracy. Playing the guitar, being not bad on the eye and a dab hand at lyric verse seemed to erase the fact that I was shit poor and boasted zero career prospects. I was a boy with two pairs of shoes, three shirts, a sack of trousers, a few dozen books, a guitar, no car, no career… and five or six girlfriends. Real Role-Playing Equality would have meant seeing more girls with male harems around town (rather than the old configuration of the occasional belle deftly juggling suitors) but at least… for a shining moment… money wasn’t part of it. Not to mention the joys of being a hetero male Sex Object… which is as close as the Sexual Revolution got to being Gender-Blind.
The modern psycho-social horrors Amis wants to frame as The Sexual Revolution’s inevitable aftermath are, in fact, results of the crack-down. Too bad the Revolution wasn’t allowed to flower to the extent that Women began to have as much fun as the Men were. Equality of Fun is of the essence.
“The modern psycho-social horrors Amis wants to frame as The Sexual Revolution’s inevitable aftermath are, in fact, results of the crack-down.”
It’s just a matter of time before they start submitting their books to you prior to publication. Poor guy. It’s too late now, but with that one important adjustment he might’ve written a brilliant book, the book he meant to write, but didn’t know it..
Glad you seem to appear to seem to appreciate the commentary, Frances; it’s the sort of thing I enjoy writing here.
[ed.'s note: to anyone coming late to the party, the timestamps show Frances here responding to the actual post eight hours after she left the non-sequitur, below, which triggered the most recent skirmish]
By the way, I just sent my letter to President and U.S. Special Envoy to Haiti Clinton. I was waiting, hoping that a friend of mine might help me find just the right lines of poetry to include. But I didn’t want to wait any longer. So I sent it without poetry. It wasn’t about the poetry anyway. It was about the joining together. Anyway, I hope the Director of Correspondence will deem it worthy of President Clinton’s attention.
Seeing as the long-running U.S. policy toward Haiti is largely responsible for its structural and systemic vulnerability in the face of earthquakes, hurricanes and plagues of rats, Frances, isn’t your letter to the sinister Clintons a fairly Kafkan gesture? Did you respectfully request that they re-discover their humanity and beat their breasts and gnash their teeth and swear off the Vicious Game of Empire… and to thereby, rather than send Haiti the poison bait of so-called “aid”, just simply stop actively fucking Haiti up?
As Mr. Pilger puts it:
Maybe you’re tired of reading this anti-Murkkan Empire stuff from me, but I have to neutralize the presence of that Normative Beer you seem to want to keep sprinkling TET with.
Nicholson Baker proved to us way back in 2004, when it was very dangerous to do so in the way that he did it, that it was possible to be angry-unto-nausea-and-clarity about the misery and killing that follows the shadow of the shadow of the Murrkan Flag around the planet. Turning TET into a platform for recycling a bunch of reassuring NormLib memes extracted from the Murkkan Press (Release) about politicians-n-celebrities (RFK, MM, The Clintons) would feel like a step or three backward. And I started the damn thing so I could post responses like this without fearing of being deleted.
You aren’t being deleted or ignored but fuck if you can expect me to play along with that stuff. Do you really believe it? And if so, why?
I’m genuinely curious.
“Did you respectfully request that they re-discover their humanity and beat their breasts and gnash their teeth and swear off the Vicious Game of Empire… and to thereby, rather than send Haiti the poison bait of so-called “aid”, just simply stop actively fucking Haiti up?”
I know the history, and yes, the Shawshank Redemption pipeline should be filled with shit-smeared crawlers. If I thought your words would move them in that direction, I’d happily send them along. But I don’t think they would. (I mean, what happened to all the comrades that were here? I’m used to pricks so you don’t bother me in the slightest, but obviously other people don’t cotton to being browbeat.) I tried to appeal to whatever decency might still be intact, the guy who listened to Coltrane and saved his mother and baby brother from being whaled on by Roger, Sr. He’s in there too.
As long as he’s already sending them flashlights I hoped (and hope) he might be open to sending them something to illuminate, like the materials and expertise to build homes such as the ones Michael Reynolds delivered to the tsunami survivors. Maybe he doesn’t know, isn’t aware, would if he did. We’ll find out.
Anyway, I ask or remind people in charge to do the right thing. I do that in many arenas and ways, Steven, any way I can creatively devise. For me, ranting and raving, (though important in educating and communicating and cultivating personal stamina), is the start point, not the end.
Scoff away at me (it actually makes me stronger), but I made 250 little orange ribbon ties and stood outside Cooper Union and distributed them to the attendees at President Obama’s speech about the financial markets, to remind him to keep his promises to the Guantanamo detainees. There were many takers, many more than I had imagined. So that was heartening, Steven. Obama is a brilliant and perceptive man. Maybe when he looked out from the podium he saw them; maybe he asked what they were for, or one of his aides did. Then a conversation begins and anything is possible from there. If those guys get out even one day sooner…
When I was in Missouri I asked many people that I met, and I met a lot of wonderful people, to work and vote for Robin Carnahan, who’s running for Senate and could be a decisive vote to help push whatever humanist agenda is on the table. A lot of people were already savvy and it lead to some really interesting discussions. If she wins it could make a big difference. Obama needs the votes.
Though I will read Checkpoint, it sounds really excellent, I didn’t see Nicholson Baker or any other representative from the literary establishment at Cooper Union. I didn’t see any of them at the AFL CIO rally on Wall Street last week. I didn’t see them at the showing of the film on the World March for Peace a few days ago. In fact, I never see them anywhere that isn’t about promoting their own products.
You often scareeeem about the benefit of writers living actual lives to write about. Part of that can be political participation, Steven, though I too have nothing against fucking someone attractive. Perhaps because I worked in the U.S. Congress for a bunch of years, and have volunteered in campaigns all my life, I don’t see the electeds as a monolith, or incapable of good actions. As long as I’m paying their salaries, they’re going to hear from me.
If you would like to send President Clinton the “just simply actively stop fucking Haiti up” message, his address is:
Correspondence Director
Office of William Jefferson Clinton
55 West 125th Street
New York, NY 10027
Words don’t move them either way, Frances. Big fat fucking checks do. Write a few and they will listen; write a few large enough and anything is possible.
The Comrade Thing was kitsch fun, Frances, but I didn’t start TET in order to make virtual friends and exchange mutually-appreciative belly-rubs and otherwise hold my tongue if someone wrote something I took strong exception to (or thought was flat-out fucking asinine) just because they’d complimented me before that point. That’s my mission statement, in fact: I will be blunt about what I think is true. This is not an ally-winning formula… but it serves my Literary Purposes and my Literary Purposes are tied in with my Political Views and my sense of the Insincere and the Clichèd in Art is related to my sense of Cant and Blather in politics. I see Normative Liberal (ie, NeoCon Lite) bullshit all over the inter-linked circle of Lit Blogs we have both read and commented on over the years. I started TET as a clearing in all that. Further, I’m not going to be a hypocrite like the otherwise-gifted Dan (Green) who attacks the mediocre and the idiotic with great verve and precision wherever he finds it… unless it happens to occur, of course, on a chum’s blog or in a chum’s book… in which case he tones it down (and lowers the standard) by magnitudes. Fair enough… but he loses quite a bit of credibility by doing that. I didn’t start TET to perpetuate that kind of message-diffusing hypocrisy.
The numbers on TET are nothing like a Cat Blog’s numbers but they are constant. In other words, people don’t tune in here to see me kiss ass on virtual chums. I think they may in fact be interested in a break from the tepid experience of watching Lit-Bloggers suck each other while copy-and-pasting the familiar half-dozen opinions on the same old issues and books… there’s something perhaps a little interesting, to a few intelligent oddballs out there, about reading an honest and original opinion well-put. And, surprise: most of the readers aren’t Murkkan. Fancy that!
Meanwhile, you have to face the fact that Life trumps a Lit Blog; we are all busy (some with brand new kids and others with difficult studies) but it’s my blog, after all, so I’m still here (when I can be)… writing. That’s my interest in the whole thing: writing. Do you still write?
And if you think my opinions on these things are any different than they were when I first opened these Comment Threads, you have not been paying attention.
Frances… Christ. Where to begin? you are fucking uninformed in a terribly standard way.
If you think it’s ranting and raving when I point out what I consider to be bullshit, Frances, I’ll gladly refund the price of the ticket you purchase to enter the tent. The absolute absurdity of this current “conversation” revolves around the fact that you’re somehow oblivious to most of the material I post here and use the space as a random bulletin board for the kind of material I tend to avoid elsewhere on the INTERNnet. What a fucking delightful irony.
A) “Stronger” in what sense? B) Frances: that’s great if you believe any of it. I’m just asking you to respect the fact that I think it’s utterly ridiculous. Making Red Ribbons and Yellow Ribbons and Orange Ribbons is right up there with stacking teddy bears on blood-stained sidewalks in the Murkkan Book of Tribal Magic. Deals are made and plans are executed and it has nothing to do with you and it frankly astonishes me that any intelligent adult still falls for that Shell Game after all these years. Obama is extending the basic policies that were already in process under Bush-Clinton-Bush, you fucking nitwit. Christ, do they have to slaughter half the brown ferners on the planet before you catch on? What better cover for Brownie Slaughter than a Brown Prez, eh? They’re smart, those fuckers. They are. Oh, yeah: make some more orange ribbons, Frances. Thatta girl.
You promote your placebo activism and let Baker promote his books. The books are well-written. I find that good. It’s mediocrity that bores me and evil that pisses me off.
That’s right, I do. And while I’m busy trying to develop ideas on the matter (like the Twain/Kipling thing I wanted to get to but was diverted by your childish tantrum over the fact that a couple of us don’t like Liza Minelli ) you’re busy bombing TET with innocuous LOOK AT ME non-sequiturs I have the choice to ignore or address. Well, I think ignoring you is too weird. So I address, doing my best to articulate a few ideas in the process.
I’ve posted an awful lot of creative material on TET, Frances… half of it brand new and half of it rescued from the attic. The purpose here is to talk about WRITING and the politics impinge to the extent that it’s my belief that writers who live in a Propaganda Bubble end up writing more Propaganda, no matter what the intent. Perhaps you haven’t picked up on that because you’re busy with your own concerns.
And they will continue to ignore the noise, Frances. But some wonderful old Capra movie told you to believe and so you fucking believe. Wonderful. Happy for you. Frances, look, have you considered starting your own blog in order to air these notions and fantasies you hold so dear? Listen, I got tired of trying to take stupid cunts like Ed “the revenge against talent” Champion (and his LOLing fans) seriously and started TET (the joke is that you’re Ed’s fucking spiritual twin… though, lots more intelligent than Ed, to be sure)… why don’t you start one of your very own and stop doing this weird passive-aggressive, unctuously-malevolent-presence routine?
Or would that be too easy?
I’m sure I can work your NormLib/NeoCon Lite sniper routine into the fabric of TET because your pronouncements are, almost perfectly, the anti-TET: you’re embodying most of the unreflected, deeply-hypnotized nonsense I’ve been going at since I started in the 1990′s. It’ll take time but I can probably come up with a framework to make the antipathy interesting.
Still… will you at least consider starting your own fucking blog?
No. I’m needed here. Who else has the courage, smarts and sense of humor to help you air these brave currents? I really admire you, Steven. And what’s more I’m certain it’s mutual. Nitwit is just so fucking sweet.
I think of you as a brilliant woman who is as Duped as almost everyone else living in that powerful propaganda field you’ve diverted your intelligence away from the painful task of analyzing, Frances. It’s a defense mechanism; a survival strategy, even. I understand it. Just don’t expect me to humor or abet.
I have no problem with that verbiage. We may not be in Kansas but neither are we in Kosovo, not today. The ships will either sail to Port-au-Prince or not. Let’s at least agree that neither of us can see into Bill Clinton’s night mind in May 2010.
Now, please, I want to read your story below in peace.
[ed.'s note: "We may not be in Kansas but neither are we in Kosovo, not today" must mean that at least the people we're bombing now aren't too white. Otherwise, it just doesn't make a fuck's bit of sense]
What do these people have in common?
Chinua Achebe
Madeleine Albright
Buzz Aldrin
David Amram
Alan Arkin
Burt Bacharach
Dave Brubeck
Dick Bruna
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Chuck Close
Billy Connolly
Terence Conran
Judi Dench
Clint Eastwood
Garret Fitzgerald
Frank Gehry
Jane Goodall
Nadine Gordimer
Vaclav Havel
Denis Healey
John Hume
Helmet Jahn
Edward M Kennedy
Billie Jean King
Henry Kissinger
Kris Kristofferson
Esther Mahlangu
Nelson Mandela
Kurt Masur
Jeanne Moreau
Graham Nash
Willie Nelson
Nick Nolte
Yoko Ono
Michael Parkinson
Jaques pepin
Rosamunde Pilcher
Mary Quant
Bernice Johnson Reagan
Robert Redford
Vanessa Redgrave
Richard Rogers
Ravi Shankar
Wole Soyinka
Helen Suzman
Desmond Tutu
Lella Vignellli
Massimo Vignelli
Bill Withers
They’re all in this internationally touring exhibit on of all things, Wisdom: http://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Arts_World_Financial_Center_Hosts_Wisdom_Portraits_by_Andrew_Zuckerman_429523_20100422
My question is, don’t Yoko and Vanessa and Kris and Nelson, etc. understand that by participating in such an exhibit they’re providing cover for Henry Kissinger (who betcha any amount of gratitudicals probably paid for it)?
[ed.'s note: wait, were you being sarcastic here or not?]
The joke is you probably think I think highly of these celebrities. I like Achebe’s book. You haven’t understood a single point I’ve made on TET, Frances. You really haven’t. And, in the argument department, you’re rather heavy on AURA and light on DATA, kid. Which is standard.
And how gross is it that the dead have no say in being used in such a despicable fashion?
Yup.
The Excellent Taste of our Benefactors
Moody’s path crossed Beverly Lund’s before they formally met. The first encounter took place on the first day of summer in a drought. The trees and grass around all the lakes baked to a papery brown and the sidewalks kilned to dull sheen.
Half in hunger and half to escape the heat Moody had gone into Pickerlings and sheltered in refrigerated aisles and sample toothpicked lunchmeats and cheeses and cake fragments and ice creams from tiny paper cups. He was standing at a sample display festooned in flag-colored bunting when this woman eased her shopping cart beside him. She smiled but Moody looked away into her cart which was loaded with food. Very tall in flat shoes (bedroom slippers) she must have weighed two hundred pounds and breasts like babies asleep.
Moody enjoyed walking around Heart Lake in the afternoon when everyone else was at work. Because of the drought his walks depressed and exhilarated him. Depressed him because the air had a blunt stink and the lake evaporated into a jaundiced everglade but exhilarated because the lake grass became savanna and a dead wind lay over it and felt like a long dominion was had passed. A few people in a square mile sprawled on blankets in the itch grass with radios.
Coming at him barefoot on the sandy shoulder of the scorching asphalt lake path was a princess girl in a sleeveless black top and form-fitting slacks. Half her face under a reflective visor topped with the chopped glow of platinum high-salon-style hair. She blessed Moody with an enigmatic smile in passing. Maybe she was blind. His mind was on her that evening as he sat with Gwen at the movies. He wondered if he were good enough.
Gwen squeezed his hand when the people on the screen embraced. He glanced at Gwen as she smiled at the screen. He liked the durable black boyishness of her body. That night he fucked her half-dressed with non-specific tenderness in the living room. Gwen made a point of twisting to look back upon Moody as he climaxed and it broke his concentration and botched his orgasm. When he dressed to walk home he was pissed at her and guilty for being pissed, but why should he feel guilty?
A few days later, Moody lost his job at Heart Lake Rentals. The loss was a double blow because he lived in a little room over the shop and earned rent with the job. It was just noon and he had nothing to do so he went over to where Gwen worked. Gwen worked at the Heart Lake Salon.
He always felt self-conscious entering the salon. Gwen did nails from a little booth at the back of the salon and Moody had to walk the carpeted distance reflected by parallel mirrors while the futuristically-uniformed stylists and their older rich clients flicked eyes across the disinfecting sting of Vivaldi. Gwen wasn’t busy and her face lit up when she saw him. She said I’ll just be a minute and she hurried downstairs to change for lunch. Moody could hear her chatting with someone, probably her best friend Bee, while she dressed. As Moody and Gwen were leaving Gwen told the blonde at the reception desk that she’d be back in an hour in time for her appointment with Beverly Lund.
They walked hand in hand down a quiet street. Down Poplar Grove Lane was the tip of Snake Lake. Moody bought Gwen an expensive ice cream cone at the Snake Lake Snack Cabin. She said, Aren’t you having one too? and he told her that he wasn’t hungry but he resented it when she casually threw her half-eaten cone away a minute later. The vegetation around the Lake was still green despite the drought because a vista of sprinklers lobbed webbing shimmer over the grass and bushes and all the landmark trees with plaques at their bases and here and there the sun polished the shimmer to rainbows under which arrogant geese flapped. Gwen and Moody strolled beside the lake like a couple. He looked up from his feet and saw with a shock that tears were sliding down Gwen’s cheeks.
-It’s just that I’m so happy, she said. She said that she wanted the two of them to live together and Moody said Okay.
Over dinner that night Gwen was full of chit-chat. Moody poked and scraped and partitioned his pasta-in-white-sauce. His mind wandered. He chewed and he swallowed and took a deep breath and expelled it like he’d been it holding all day. It was a long loud exasperated breath. The candles jumped and Gwen shut up mid-sentence and looked at him. She stood up from the table and came and sat on Moody’s lap.
-Baby I don’t want to shock you but I’m twenty eight years old and you’re the first brother I ever been with.
-No shit?
-My last boyfriend before you was a Jew a blue-eyed blond Jewish lawyer. One before Scott was a Norwegian beach bum he had a little pink dick like a straight pig’s tail and the one before that he was an architect Dennis something. Not one black. My pretty blond lawyer he was okay he didn’t beat me and that but it dawned on me the relationship wasn’t going I mean nowhere because Dennis he couldn’t marry me. And it wasn’t the first time that that had happened. Only ring I ever got was in the bathtub.
She tapped Moody’s nose and unzipped his pants and reached in.
-I can’t tell you how many Thanksgiving dinners I’ve been to where I was the only black face at the table I was the smudge in all those family albums like who’s that little black ant behind Uncle Joe one time I overheard a boyfriend’s mother in the kitchen that old bitch she was telling somebody on the phone I was nicer than she’d thought I’d be I was pretty you know for a colored girl but she’d cut Tucker’s balls off before she let him shame the family with a nigger grandson I was standing right on the other side of the kitchen door when she said it I just swung the door open real slow like a movie looked her dead in the eye I have to give her credit she smiled at me I could see every single one of her gold teeth and she kept right on talking on the phone like I wasn’t even there.
Moody moaned like a stabbed man and came.
Gwen was happy that summer living with Moody. They fucked all the time. She considered that her secret weapon. She’d straddle and draw the sex out in a soft sliver or take him in her mouth in the morning before brushing. If Moody went to piss while Gwen was showering she’d reach and pull him in.
Her favorite occasional trick was to hide in the bedroom closet when she heard him on the stairs. Then they’d fuck in the closet. She didn’t do it so often that Moody would learn to expect it.
There were four topics of conversation that summer her best friend Bee (she looks like a movie star) the drought (it’s the ozone layer) the size of Gwen’s breasts (more than a mouthful is wasted) and the future (anything is possible if we put our minds to it).
By the beginning of August Moody was still out of a job and didn’t seem particularly interested in getting a new one. He watched television the whole day in his underwear. Gwen said,
-Baby, do you remember that rich lady I told you about? The one that owns a gallery downtown?
When the alarm clock rang the next morning at nine o’clock Moody felt he was being punished. He wanted to cry or smash something. When Gwen left for work at nine thirty he didn’t even tell her to be careful and felt with wicked satisfaction that the omission had cursed her and dozed off twice during the bus ride downtown despite the white heat that blasted in on him from an open window. He got off at Second Avenue and walked in the block-long shadow of the First Bank Building then turned up Lasalle. He found the glass facade of the Mojo Gallery book-ended by adult cinemas. The cinema on the left had a big sign that said air conditioned and the cinema on the right had an even bigger sign that said naked girls with fans.
Moody was five minutes early for his eleven o’clock job interview and the desk in front of the spacious, moodily-lit, minimally-decorated gallery was abandoned. The canvasses that hung here and there on the walls looked to Moody like the handiwork of children. A particularly vast work on a far wall was a garishly-colored triptych of a church with cartoonish Negroes lined up in front of it. Their eyes were white circles in which pupils rattled like beans and their fat balloon lips were pink and their teeth were jagged zigzags in lamprey mouths. Their hands were clenched in fists at their sides. They were all a smooth dung-brown and the male figures wore long black coats and top hats and the big-breasted female figures wore red or yellow miniskirts and their pigtails curled up towards the sky and the sun in the water-blue sky was a yellow ball with arrows radiating from it. A male figure in the far right panel had his fly open and a glistening burnt umber banana poked out from it. A silver plaque beside the masterpiece read To Each God Grants Peculiar Gifts. The Hon. Rev. Levi Milton Mosley. 105″ x 200″. Oil and Crayon on Canvas. 1985. And under that, on a discreet white card, it said, simply, $35,000.00 and Moody whistled and said Goddamn and looked at the painting again more closely.
-I sold that to a Jew this morning.
Moody turned and a gigantic woman in aggressively unaffordable glasses crossed the room towards him, her flat shoes scuffing and slapping the concrete floor and extended her left hand a Styrofoam cup of coffee in her right and said Hi Moody I’m Beverly Lund.
Moody said I’m Moody. He knew her.
She leaned forward and said Moody, how would you like a job working for me here at the Mojo Gallery? I think you’ll like working here. We support the Afro-American artistic community.
She said Would you be interested in working for me, Moody?
She said: the job description is as follows: odds and ends. Odds, mostly. Not many ends. Errands, phone work, heavy lifting. Nothing horrible. Flexible hours. Are you flexible?
She said again, mocking herself with a parody of a sexual voice, Are you flexible? And added, rapidly, covering her mouth, laughing, My God, that sounded terrible.
When he got home Gwen wasn’t there even though she’d made a point of telling Moody that it was going to be a short day at work. He called her name again, louder, in case she was taking a shower and couldn’t hear him the first time then closed the door and went into the bathroom and took a long luxurious piss. Pissing is really good. That’s when you know you know you’re young he thought. I’m young. I’m so cute I could fuck myself. He emerged from the bathroom pants undone dust on his knees after schlepping and hanging canvases all day. He got up again from the couch and went in the bedroom pants falling around his ankles and opened the closet door to get a hangar to drape these pants over. Gwen jumped out at him naked. She was laughing so hard.
By September Moody had started an affair with Beverly Lund and Gwen decided she was ready to move into a condominium with Moody. Moody didn’t want to move with her but he wasn’t ready to shatter the peace by telling her so. He didn’t even like her that much any more but they had formed habits that required mutual participation and Moody couldn’t quite bear to jar himself out of the homey comfort of her body which was a nice contrast that Gwen provided to Beverly’s fancy raunch. Gwen signed the papers on a condo.
We’ll move this Sunday said Gwen. She passed Moody a glass of orange juice.
Moody said, Sunday? Shit, baby, you should have told me in advance. I told Miss Lund that I’d help her prepare for an opening on Sunday.
That’s okay, baby, said Gwen. She explained that Bee had promised that she’d help, anyway, and Bee was always reliable. (Unlike you, Moody, he thought she thought).
She sat in Moody’s lap and took the serrated blade of the steak knife and tenderly sawed through one of his braids. She held it up to him and called it a keepsake. Outside, dust blew and heat-faded paint peeled like chameleon skin from the apartment houses and the bus stop benches and parchment leaves scratchy and clattered. But the air felt just barely different and the change registered in the high-tech insects of the topsoil in the delicate nerves of the cicadas a spring-wound drone shivering over the neighborhood.
-Have you heard, Moody?
-Have I heard what? Moody quietly closed the door of the gallery behind him.
-There’s going to be rain this weekend.
She had taken to wearing her hair down. It brushed her shoulders in the sleeveless top she was wearing. Her shoulders were round and fat and soft as bread. There was a script that had been worked out between the two of them and in the dozens of times that they’d been together the script had evolved.
-Does Gwen have big tits like these?
-No, Moody would say.
-What about her hair, Moody? Does she have pretty hair like mine?
-Gwen just got them nappy kinks.
***
- What did you say? said Moody.
Beverly gestured for him to come closer and said I said they say that it’s going to rain this weekend. Moody sat on the edge of her desk. He said Me and Gwen we’re moving this Sunday.
-Sunday was supposed to be our day this week.
-Fixed it. She’s got a friend to help her.
-Bee.
-Yeah, that’s right.
-She’ll be busy with Bee all morning, probably.
-Think so.
Sunday afternoon the sky boiled and birds darted streaks and flies clung to the walls of the fired buildings and Moody felt one warm droplet strike across his cheek as he approached the door of the gallery and he looked up and dark spots like a supernatural manifestation on the dusty sidewalk and suddenly a deluge so people were running up the street with light-hearted hysteria and Moody laughed his arms out-stretched and let the sky soak him through.
Beverly looked up from behind her desk as Moody shuffled in a slosh across the concrete floor and she chuckled and said You’re wet and he was unbuckling and she said, Don’t take them off here and he asked her why not and she said Because I think it would be more fun to do it at your place while Gwen is busy moving and Moody had to agree. It would be good. But he was nervous about it. He was nervous on the slow drive over through obscuring rain while Beverly went blah blah blah over the metronome of the wipers and nervous as they parked in the lot beside the building and nervous as they climbed the old wooden stairs in the downpour towards the little apartment that he and Gwen had shared that summer.
He called Gwen’s name twice in the hollowed-out apartment. Beverly ran a finger over an emptied shelf in the kitchen then stepped behind Moody and ran the dust on her fingertip in a line down his wet brown neck and said Mud. Beverly followed Moody into the bedroom where the shades were drawn and the rain on the A-frame roof and he was reading a note that Gwen had scribbled and left on their bed. Beverly snatched the note and she was kissing him, unbuttoning her blouse.
-Does Gwen have tits like these?
She said, Moody, tell it to me. Does she do it good like this? Does she fuck you like I do, baby? Does she fuck you good like I do?
-Does that nigger fuck like this?
-Does that nigger fuck like this?
-Skinny black nappy black piece of shit nigger?
Mao’s long march was a piece of cake compared to this. If the Chinese revolution had had to rely on email they’d still be back in feudal times.
[ ET says his pictures are coming]
[however: nothing in the email yet, ET...!]
[ed.'s note: I won't even bother to wonder at the fact that this comment appears here rather than at the end of the thread, where it should; you wouldn't by chance be a Satanic or otherwise uncanny creature of some sort, would you, Comrade ET? W6T6F6?]
No idea why it’s there as I didn’t press any Reply option. Yelworc rietsila evil gnol
It’s happened again !!!
I’ll get my coat and go and screw up a cat blog
[ed.'s note: no one got the joke that these two pictured are A. Crowley's various incarnations I suppose]
Calamus
1. Existalism
“There are three kinds of people,” said Uncle Ham, “and I use the term loosely.” I was on the dock, hands under my head, the sun soaking orange in my eyelids. I was pretending to be asleep.
“Stupid,” he said, “Smart,” he cleared his throat, “And Clever. The Clevers are Smart people who sell things to the Stupids.”
Uncle Ham was always making lists and saying sayings and some of the sayings are still with me today. “Never save money on toilet paper, rubbers, or chocolate,” was one of them. Or “Rome burned down in a day.” He was always telling parables and spouting pronouncements. Once, while we were eating cantaloupes in his lake-view kitchen, he told me, “Don’t assume that because a woman is of Asian extraction, she’ll be extraordinary in bed. That’s racist and can lead to disappointment.” I was seven or eight at the time that he said this and now, even decades later, I can’t eat a cantaloupe without thinking of Asian women.
He invented a Religion too, my Uncle Ham did. A Religion, or at least a Philosophy, called “Existalism” and everyone who ever loved him… his various girlfriends and me, basically… were involuntary followers. He applied Existalist principles everywhere. The breakfast nook, for example.
“Don’t just woof that omelet down, boy… smell it first! Touch it. Lick it. Make a sensual study of the object. That’s the first and last one you’ll ever eat.”
Or, at the Lakeville Sommerfest, pointing at a blonde in Swiss Miss braids and dirndl as she crossed the dusty Fairground, counting her tips, he’d say, gravely, “The first and last of her kind.”
He’d rap on the bathroom door and shout in at me, “Remember what you’re doing, Eggs, because you will never do it, exactly that way, again!” Or we’d be grunting and sweating at one of his summer projects in the garden such as digging a six-foot pit near the grape arbor and he’d suddenly stick his shovel in the mud like a bookmark and come over to me, displaying a pebble in his palm like a diamond: “Voila!”
“Either everything matters,” is how he summed up his philosophy, “Or nothing does.” And that’s how he lived his life, that’s how his moods toggled, bouncing between those two cases… those nerve-wracking extremes. One morning he’d take the trouble to count your eyelashes for you (312 left; 390 right) and the next afternoon he might give you the kind of unengaged look that made you feel like you were little more than an apple in the path of his lawn mower.
Existalism. Was that what he was thinking about when he looked upon the body of Tiny Payne?
Uncle Ham was my favorite uncle; he was my only uncle, my mother’s brother. He was tall and strong and he smelled like a goat. Not that I knew (or know) what a goat smells like: I appropriated the description from my grandma West, his mother. She always smelled like Clorox herself.
I had only been there in Lakeville for two days. I was staying with Uncle Ham for the duration of that summer vacation, in 1969, while my mother experimented with living with her boyfriend. I was out on that dock, sun in my face, picturing the two together… my mother and Shep Olgilvie… while Uncle Ham quizzed me in his Existalist system. I pretended to be asleep. Imagining my mother saying something humiliating like,
-Benedict needs a father figure in his life, Shep. All he has now is his crazy Uncle Ham. He needs a positive role model. He needs a Shep Olgilvie in his life, darling.
Like Hell! I rebutted, in thought. Like Hell I need a Shep Olgilvie in my Life!
“Stupid, Smart, or Clever. Which are you going to be? How do you think you’ll turn out? Don’t answer me now, off the top of your head… think about it. Study the question.” He was always saying that, too: study the question.
“Study the question and get back to me.”
I just lay there on the splintery dock, lips parted, my corneas dialing around under the rubber of their lids in a crafty simulation of r.e.m., avoiding the conversation. Lake Veronica (Ham’s name for it) lapped with fat tongue at the algae-socked pylons supporting us. My breathing was deep, measured. I was very good at faking sleep and had eavesdropped on some of the most spectacular adult conversations in history with this technique, curled up on a living room couch or on the back seat of a Cadillac while the creakingly-old with liquor on their breath stage-whispered furiously about Hugh Hefner, or Life After Death, or the Vietnam War. Once, at the age of thirteen, I was lucky enough to hear somebody’s date at a family picnic say, on a back porch where I was pretending to be zonked on a hammock, “You can’t get fat from swallowing it, doll. Trust me. It’s the fondue.” But with Ham, this day, by feigning sleep I was only trying to excuse myself from a serious lecture I knew I was too young, at the age of ten, to be forced to.
I had seen the serious lecture coming from ten miles down the track, after he’d had that altercation with those hippie girls in the Woolworth’s. We’d been driving through town when Uncle Ham suddenly slammed on his brakes and put her in reverse, deciding that he wanted to go to Woolworth’s. He decided that he wanted to buy us a couple of water pistols. We happened upon two hippie girls shoplifting a jar of Dippity-Do and Uncle Ham said to them, standing there with an arm around my shoulder in that narrow aisle,
“How do you two flower children expect to make a beautiful new world happen if you’re both still hooked on the ugly habits of the old one?”
They just stared at him at first, their ponchos laden with dime-store booty. I remember trying to make myself taller so that the pretty one would notice me. Outside the store, Ham said, trooping ahead in stalwart befrazzlement,
“And the worst thing is, that one… the pretty one… the one with the lips? The one that told me to fuck off and feel better? I know her. That’s one of mine. Her mother’s… a folk singer.” He sounded like he was lifting a bathtub of water as he said the word folksinger.
We climbed in his Nash (me in the back with the Coleman; “We’ll play Chauffeur and Bigwig today, Eggs,”) and he kept eying me in the rear-view as he drove the dirt road that snaked down to the landing. It was as though confronting those two had triggered in him a re-think of young people and I was one of them. As though I had to feel self-conscious, or even guilty, about those squalid lives, despite the fact that they were five or six years older than me. But that was the year the entire human population of the planet Earth was divided into three distinct camps. Never trust anyone over thirty. The whole world was either over thirty, or under thirty or like Ham, who was thirty.
And now he had me there out on the dock with him, asking me whose side I was on, really. His or everyone else’. The Stupids’, The Smarts’, The Clevers’…or Uncle Ham’s?
“The answer to this question accounts for fifty percent of your final grade,” he joked. But I remained silent. Sea-gulls complained weak weak weak overhead.
“Have you studied the question? Do you need more time? Do you want a refreshment?” But I did not budge. The lake was happy licking the dock.
“I just need to know if I can count on you.”
Silence.
“Eggs.” He nudged me with a moccasin. “Are you telling me you’re asleep?”
He was sitting on the deluxe red and white Coleman Cooler janglingly gravid with bottles of Green River and Mountain Dew and grape NeHi we’d lugged along for the day. “Eggs?” He sucked his teeth. “Well at least I’ll have some privacy when I pee,” he said, theatrically, just as the wind was swelling and I heard him, with a relieved creak of the Coleman, stand up and unzip. He said “Ahhh,” and I felt the first faint twinklings of his atomized pee-spray on my bare legs yet I didn’t flinch. I steeled myself against flinching. But then the droplets gained weight and splattered my shoulder and plopped on my lips… warm…
Ham was in hysterics, clutching our jerry-rigged water pistols when I jumped up, hair wild, spitting.
“You had that coming, Eggs!” he howled.
He danced around the dock. I was mad enough to hit him with a hammer, but yea, was I not laughing, too, chasing around the dock and socking his ass which must have felt like being thrashed with gladiolas. “You had that coming, Eggs!” We ended up sitting, tongues hanging, on the edge of the dock. Ham handed me my empty pistol after re-inserting its fine-bore tip. He socked me with a very soft no-harm-done sock on my jaw (always socking me that way) and added, pointing with a leather-red finger, “Never wait longer than five minutes for justice.”
And I thought back on that remark… having carried it with soul-shaping clarity… never wait longer than five minutes for justice …at the end of the summer. When I found what I found near the grapes.
2. Evil is a Form of Stupidity
Lakeville was a beautiful town for a town has to be preternaturally beautiful for a ten-year-old boy to notice. And I noticed. It inspired in the manner of a model on a plywood plank upon which a scale railroad was built with a widower’s loupe and tweezers. There was a town center, a broad square of shops, a movie theater, plaqued boulders, quasi-colonial buildings bristling with flag poles and a j-shaped main street plus powder-soft, old-as-the-Indian, roads. The roads dispersed from main street like flat shoots grown miles from a flat black rhizome and out in the surrounding woods were houses, all apart, with Uncle Ham’s on the edge of Lake Cromwell (Lake Veronica, Ham insisted, Lake Veronica) and the only other house with a view of the lake was on the opposite bank, about the size and color of a tin of Log Cabin maple syrup. Chimney and all. Where Tiny Payne had lived.
“That be Gordie Payne yonder,” said Ham, later that day, with the hick-taunting voice he had already used to make me laugh at the breakfast table. He pointed across the lake and handed me binoculars. We had come back from our afternoon at the dock, unloaded the Coleman and vacuumed the back seat of the car. We were standing there in his front yard, preparing to toss some guts on the grill, when Uncle Ham went to get them. Just standing in Uncle Ham’s front yard, it was hard not to spy on the house across the lake. It was only a ten minute walk away if you could cut straight across the water.
“Have a look.”
I steadied the binoculars with my tooth-pick arms and zeroed in on two figures; a white-haired bear and his red-headed cub. Only, the cub towered over the bear. And the bear was dressed in a union suit.
“That’s Gordie Payne and that’s Mr. Payne’s son, Tiny,” said Ham, dryly. “He’s a cat-skinner, Tiny is. He likes to skin cats. He binds their legs with old stockings and he skins them alive! How do I know this? Why, I’ve come across Tiny’s handiwork.”
“I came across one that wasn’t quite dead yet not a week before you arrived, Eggs. Flipping around on that pretty path we take into town sometimes. Where you lost your wallet last summer? The shortcut? Minding my own business as is my wont. At first, see, I didn’t know what I was hearing. I didn’t know what I was seeing. Looked like the garbage left after a big old chicken dinner, bundled with kite string and just flipping around in the gravel, and the, uh, gravel was sticking to this bloodiness like… all dipped in flies…”
He had to take deep breaths. He looked away and pinched the bridge of his nose. I remember thinking, Why is he pretending to be so upset?
“I wrapped it in my undershirt with a heavy rock and buried the poor thing in Lake Veronica.”
I kept the binoculars steady on Gordie Payne and his son stacking firewood against their homely lakeside digs in a yard with two flag poles stuck in it, frightening with furious expressions at heaving wood. Mr. Payne was beardless Santa in filthy long underwear. His son as tall as Uncle Ham and handsome in a little-eyed way and shirtless with flashing red shoulder-length hair and big muscles. He looked… cool.
“But how do you know it’s Tiny, Uncle Ham? Can you prove it? Did you ever,” I lowered the binoculars and shined a skeptical squint his way, “actually see Tiny skinning one of these cats?”
Ham took the binoculars from me gently. Chuckling. He thought, probably, “I guess we forgot about the essential bisexuality of all ten year old boys” but only allowed himself to say “Oh brother” instead. He handed the binoculars back. “Look there, just behind the woodpile. See the front of a fire-engine-red roadster. Rag top, yes? The Devil’s sport scar. Look.”
I screwed the adjuster on the binoculars and focused on what I could see of the roadster, lacquered and long as a goddess’ fingernail in dynamic repose behind the stack of firewood while Gordie and Tiny shuffle-grunted the foreground with logs.
“The radio antenna,” directed Uncle Ham. “Evil is a form of Stupidity.”
“Holy moly,” I said.
Half a dozen cat tails tied to it.
3. Civilization-Hating Men
We went into town for groceries about once every two weeks. The third time we drove in, Ham had me behind the steering wheel on a bundle of newspapers and him in the back, playing The Chauffeur and The Bigwig and I couldn’t believe how fast the time was escaping us. I’d already been in Lakeville for six weeks. Six weeks to go and then I’d be back with my mother and chinless Shep Olgilvie. Aiming the Nash straight and then holding the wheel in place was easy enough but then trying to turn it to follow the occasional curve was a challenge. We would have had death all over our faces had another car come around one of those curves.
“That’s it,” Uncle Ham kept saying from the back seat, reclined with hands behind his head in a brilliant pantomime of confidence in me, “thatsa boy.”
He finally made me stop and change places before the last mile into town. “Or they’ll toss you in jail, Eggs,” he laughed. “Can’t have that, partner.”
That very evening he had me drive us into town again for a movie at the Lakeville Odeon. It was Hitchcock night; three Hitchcock films for one dollar. Vertigo; The Birds; Psycho. Uncle Ham was only interested in seeing The Birds. I sat through the first and third films alone. Uncle Ham had originally suggested that I drive back from the last movie by myself in the Nash in the dark but I chickened out and he did not press me. To this day I feel that I let him down on that.
“The most brilliantly misogynistic rant of a film ever made, Eggs. Saint Paul himself couldn’t have done better.”
I nodded.
“Do you know what ‘misogynistic’ means?” Crossing the gravel behind the Odeon for the Nash. “Woman-hating. Don’t forget that Alfred Hitchcock was English and that ‘bird’ is a slang term for women over yonder.”
He silenced the gravel by stopping us suddenly and spoke with both hands on my shoulders and the moon his rusted halo. “There’s something I want you to read, Eggs. I just got it back from the person who… borrowed it.” He turned and continued toward the Nash in the dark and later handed me the book before bedtime.
I’m looking at the book right now, it’s in my lap, a nice edition of Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”. Published in the ‘60s, leather-bound, gold-leafed. I kept it all those years but couldn’t bear to read it and now that I can and do, it makes sense. It makes sense of things that have confused and hurt me for thirty years. Someone died for this book. Someone died and another one faded in his large stone fortress of civilization-hating men.
The title page is inscribed “To Hamilton, in the spirit of Calamus, E.” and under that it says “Everything Matters”. There’s a long lock of hair bookmarking a poem titled “Are You The New Person Drawn Toward Me?” and it is red.
THE EDWARD TAYLOR GALLERY ON TET
ET writes:
The fantastic (highly Struwwelpeteresque) images (general sequence suggested by ET himself):
Rich metaphorical fodder for discussions ranging from the binaries boss/worker to king/serf to parent/child to lover/lover to god/creature or writer/character.
Not to mention a discussion about ART-qua-ART like this (answering first of all to the needs/whims/kinks of the creator’s imagination) vs BIG TIME ART as a commodity processed and packaged and sold on an industrial-conceptual level as design-artifacts for the Rich. There’s more for me to think about in looking at these images (separately and as a sequence) than I could ever find contemplating Damien Hirst’s experiments in formaldehyde or Jeff Koons’ factory kitsch or even in Banksy’s supposedly-edgy (but extremely slick and adman-like) street stencils…. I don’t get any more out of contemplating such objects* than I get out of contemplating fancy/shocking contemporary architecture: either it looks nice or it doesn’t.
Meatspace beckons but I’ll be back to this later in the day…
Many fucking thanks for this Art, Comrade DJ Sensei Edward!
*question of scale, innit? On the human scale (ie, roughly drawing-sized… anything that would fit through a normal doorway) we anticipate a message. On an industrial scale we switch to a level of contemplation below the philosophical one we affix to the natural and titanic… clouds, mountains, rivers, stars… but above the human scale of message. And what level of contemplation is that, then, between the two scales, where Big Ticket Art and Architecture hover? I think we can call it Intimidation.
Just before Xmas we went to see an exhibition by an art hero Jean Tinguely curated by rising Brit art “star” Michael Landy – the guy who destroyed his possessions in the name of art.
The Tinguely section was everything you’d hope for. Machines with a will of their own, a creator at home in scrap yards with an anarchic spirit.
Landy’s section were big framed graphite drawings he’d done about an event Tinguely made for MOMA in New York where a machine destroyed itself randomly, noisily and uncontrollably in front of the art elite.
There was something predatory, calculated and ultimately disgusting about making a set of sellable drawings about an event that although Tinguely evidently didn’t do it for free was the polar opposite of a suite of elegant art objects designed for the homes of rich art collectors.
“There was something predatory, calculated and ultimately disgusting about making a set of sellable drawings…”
Not that I “believe” in Che Guevara but it proves, ET, just as all that Che merchandise (featuring a Hollywood movie, thankyouverymuch) proves, that the system/worldview ultimately absorbs 99.99% of all dissent/subversion without even breaking a sweat. What’s the best strategy, then? Unpopularity seems like a start but that strategy snags itself on the apparent paradox that the only way to evade cooptation ( and thereby promote Resistance/Dissent ) is to keep the Art to yourself. But that can’t be right. Maybe the point is that the Artist can Resist while resigning her/his self to the awful Truth that the Art itself is helpless? (eg, Reagan using Springsteen’s hit for a campaign song, and Guernica coffee mugs)
Anyway: the first point I want to make about what I like about this little suite of drawings is that in every pairing, the only apparent difference between the figures is body language… but the performer/puppet thing is obvious immediately. This is deft stuff.
My father was a painter and I have some technical skills as a painter (I stopped after learning how to trompe-l’oeil “glass”) and I know that Line is the first accomplishment. Your Line is doing a very good job of putting on a little Kafka-cum-Pinter play with those figures. It’s not easy work.
Further point: the figures are “ordinary” to the extent that they are easily recognizable… it seems like good old conventional representation; but would drawings of lobster-headed figures carrying out the same actions be more, or less, “surreal”? I say it’s the latter.
So there are parallels with the kind of Soft Surrealism in fiction I favor. I think it’s easy to red-flag your strange goals by sprinkling the text with obvious absurdities… but the effectively Uncanny arises from the scene/scenario we first mistake as ordinary.
PS Is that a picture of you on the first WRAS Member’s page (click “The Company”), looking like Michael Stipe in a Biggles cap…?
Very exciting to be let in on this. Can you say anything about the eyes? Green, blue, open, shut? Even in the context of deadpan there seems to me to be a lot of potential nuance, especially given your stated subject matter. But maybe this has all been thoroughly explored?
Michael Stipe in a Biggle’s cap? I’m the one with glasses and naturally I can’t see the comparison. Someone once told me I looked like John Malkovich which isn’t much better.
re: obvious surrealism. Our latest show Brain Wave has a large head in a garden shed so obviously we like an arresting image. But we try ( whether we succeed is up to others ) to make a logic for these things happening so that the absurdities don’t feel gratuitous. We like a slow burn effect so that the strangeness creeps up on you.
I think your points about the fate of the artist are acute. Art is meant to be seen by others but putting it out there is problematic. I rather like the expression hard-core escapism. Seems to get the balance. We’re not fierce like you in terms of content but try to give an audience something vivid. We did a show a few weeks back and someone said ” I really liked that but I don’t know why”.
[ed.'s note: I meant a young Michael Stipe]
” I really liked that but I don’t know why”
The honesty of that statement is immense and pure. Also the perfect compliment: how deflating is it when someone says “I like it, it’s funny!” or “I like the colors!”?
My next point is a question: Botero has his signature character-facial-expression (saucy inanition) and late-Lucian Freud has his (the inner-directed thousand-yard stare) and I seem to recognize the helpless vigilance on the faces of the characters of your suite of drawings from somewhere but I can’t put my finger on it… where’s it from?
Speaking of Botero: I’m willing to wager few of us have seen this departure from his pleasant norm
Our performances are nothing like Buster Keaton films but they are a series of actions rather than the development of a character,
I often think of him in that lovely wind sequence in Steamboat Bill Jr. Someone whose character is created by what happens to him physically rather than any acute characterisation
Aha! Buster Keaton! That’s it!
I read Checkpoint. Head trip. Exactly the kind of book that gives political novels a bad rap. At least it was short. Beckett would’ve lashed Jay to the chair from the get-go. Would have been far more interesting. A little duct tape wouldn’t have hurt either. Great title though.
Thanks for that phenomenally clever literary critique: well-argued, citation-rich, pithy and nuanced. Um, Frances, don’t you have some Zionist pamphlets to circulate? Or some ribbons to “make”?
I think I do as a matter of fact. “Over and out. [Click.]”
[ed.'s note: but my sigh of relief was premature, Gentle Reader...]
See what I mean? Mesmerizing. (I just checked the U.S. reviews of Checkpoint. No one mentions Krapp’s Last Tape. I wouldn’t have thought it possible to have a literary work about men in a room with a tape recorder and not, especially in a novel written sort of like a play.)
[ed.'s note: thanks for the YouTube video in lieu of a cogent argument; who can argue with Samuel Beckett, right?]
I was going to mosey on down the garden path whistling Ha’shannah ha ba’ah, but this is too much. There’s a tradition, there’s a body of work. One rides roughshod over it at one’s peril. Knopf rushed it to publication to capture the pre-election moment and it bloody well shows. He wrote the fuel instead of letting it propel him to art. I think he should have started it where he ended it, in the binding chair. Isn’t that the image Ben’s last speech is meant to evoke? That we cripple ourselves out of some perverted vanity?
It’s not a masterpiece; it’s not a life-changing or challengingly formalist experiment: it’s brief, it’s witty, it reminds us how inhuman we’ve become in order to absorb the constant news of all that death so “reasonably”. Baker has balls.
Obviously he has balls. Probably has a big dick, too.
For which you no doubt resent him.
Au contraire, mon ami. Is he Irish by any chance?
Frances, you write (in a surprisingly accurate imitation of Ed Championosity), “He wrote the fuel instead of letting it propel him to art.”
So, let’s try something interesting. Put up a passage of yours… something that you’ve written… and show us the Art of it. Lay the metrics on us by which “Checkpoint” is chumpstuff. By comparing texts (one you can answer for vs one you condemn), show us how Baker’s goals are wrong-headed or how his failure to achieve the goals he should have set is symptomatic of the book’s bad faith or failed language.
Put up something from your novel for us here. A page or two, say.
Why don’t I send you one and you pick? You find the worst/weakest two pages in my novel and put them up against the best/strongest two in Mr. Baker’s book. Accept the challenge?
It’s better if you pick, surely, Frances; not quite scientific if my taste taints the procedure in any way, eh? You pick your passage and you pick the “Checkpoint” passage to compare it with and you then make your case. That’s the challenge I’m interested in seeing you meet. Is there a big difference, for you, between these two scenarios? In any case, I’ll respect whatever conclusion you come to, that way (whether I agree or not), as the result of a genuine effort.
Of course there’s a difference. CONTEXT. It’s my way or the highway. (Hee-hee)
Frances, I’m offering you a forum to prove that you aren’t full of shit. Take it or leave it, chum.
In what world do you live in where I have to offer such “proofs?” I believe I’ll be leaving it. It was fun, though.
[ed.'s note: buh-bye!]
A SPEECHLESS WALK THROUGH THE CITY
I note some of this graffiti art is done on paper then pasted onto the walls. Is this because increased CCTV makes the artist’s role more difficult? Or are today’s graffiti-ists into taking a longer time in achieving their designs and prefer to do so back home? or is it a separate branch of graffiti with its own rules and terminology?
Christ any more obviously out of touch comments like these and I’ll need a pipe and slippers.
I think it’s mostly that they want to be like Banksy, Comrade ET; it’s a career move. In fact, I lamented the very thing to Comrade Barry during a walk not a week ago: remember when people “defaced” walls for every kind of reason other than professional ambition? Money is the root of all weasel!
In fact, here’s an explicit Banksy imitator (all of these images are phone-taken, which explains the “quality”):
Not that I believe there’s a “Banksy“; I think some very clever Bigtime Artworld Insiders put their heads together a while ago and decided to try a long-term project with the goal of raking in large sums about now. And fuck if it didn’t work out as planned! Banksy is the JT Leroy of the Aht World (there’s also more than a whiff of Andy Kauffman to this “Thierry Guetta” character Banksy supposedly decided to feature in “Exit Through the Gift Shop”)
I’d recommend a visit to Lisbon. All the buidings are covered in those white tiles with Delft blue intricate patterns on top of which every barrio crew imaginable has painted their name tag. It’s unbelievably noisy to look at.
They discovered a Banksy in Manchester yesterday in fact. They will have built an art centre dedicated to urban interventions round it next week. I was thinking Banksy was more like a contemporary Leroy Neiman with his ability to push the right demographic buttons of his clientele. I don’t know whether when you painted ( in the mid 70′s?) you aimlesslessly flicked through the pages of Art Forum? Leroy with his horrendously slick confections was always a “highlight” or an eye-sore. Possibly both
Oh fuck yeah. Leroy’s Sport Paintings? I remember ‘em well. The optical equivalent of two dogs howling.
The red flag on Banksy, imo, is his “invisibility” (wasn’t JT Leroy also notoriously hard to photograph?)… the mysterioso angle seems just too-well engineered. And too many of Banksy’s stunts, even earlier on, required a team and money support to pull off. Is Damien Hirst involved? Hmmmm…
I know someone who was employed by Damien Hirst to do his dot paintings. An ex-art student who needed money. Very generous and amiable man apparently but the work was unbelievably dull – as she put it ” it was everything art isn’t”. She got made unemployed and part of the deal was a dot painting which I suppose will see her well in her dotage.
Painting huge pictures on those dividing walls in Palestine is a high profile activity – I saw a documentary about those guys who photograph pictures of Jews making stupid faces and Arabs doing the same and post them up on both sides of the wall and the minute they tried to put them up in Israel the security forces were on to them like a flash. So I can’t help feeling that either Banksy has diplomatic immunity or some serious pre-production negotiations have taken place.
Fucking exactly.
Just to prove that Lucre-Corrupted Art is not new nor confined to the vulgarian upstarts, Avida Dollars has a look in:
Meanwhile, here’s some real Art*
*ie, my daughter made it
Art school joke.
A college friend of mine who shared a studio with me and several others painted semi-abstract pushme-pullyou landscapes.
A visiting lecturer from the Royal Academy who painted micro-realist still lives in tempera gave him a crit ” This is much too wishy-washy, neither one thing nor the other. You need to observe, you need to identify with that which you are painting. Look for instance at the cup over there. When I paint that cup, I become that cup. Look at that table. When I paint that table it’s on I am that table.”
The response to this was ” Have you ever painted a cunt before?”
The room exploded in laughter , the lecturer stormed out and we were left in peace.
[ed.'s note: give me time to illustrate this beautiful memory with some justice, Comrade ET]
SO FAR BEYOND FUCKED-UP IT’S EITHER EVIL OR FUNNY
or
FOURTH REICH FUNNIES
via Yahoo “news”
meme noir
to an iranian dentist
1
good lady perhaps
you don’t remember but i
despite my reputation as the forgetter of all
such things recall the dinner
i prepared that night on
Kant str., chicken &
peanuts & peas &
rice; suzanne by
leonard cohen; chet baker &
that short black (polka-dotted?)
meet-your-maker dress you sat in
cross-legged with the hot
plate on your lap; peculiar you
(you won’t remember but it’s true) did
the strangest thing the
moments after treating me to
virginity’s sweet
red pearl & curry
scent & singing t&em
breathlessness: you
played dead my dear (or unborn) in that
window-level bed, eyes
jammed shut & lips compressed
in a sarcophagal smile so rich but
sick with innocent shame & iranian
ironies & silly
adolescence & even
blame.
i must admit
i was mad when you did it
choosing that milestone to play a silly
prank (arms crossed)
(over your bulging breasts)
(& stiff as)
(planked). but now i’m grown so
older me (wizened-if-wrinkle)
(free) thinks back
on the morbid act &
almost dreams of
crying! not
for sorrow but
intimidated
admiration, or
even baffled pride that you picked my patience in a
world of men for
trying. neither you nor i
could see the aptness of your
teenage death vignette at
the time; the
rightness of the
pantomime. i
should have played it out with you, two
of us sprawled there
corpse-like, suppressing giggles,
drenched in
love’s great awful effort, glimmering
with sweat, too
busy with this cryptic act to
fool around re
gretting
2
Berlin is a gray-green map, a
topographic model of one corner of
the consciousness, the
territory of moody disillusion we
navigate with the joy &
energy of an interrupted winter
nap. the map’s
a million times the size of the
stamp-sized zone of mind it
cartographs. to study it on foot
i crossed each neighborhood with
huffing diligence & sought
to underst& the structure of my own vast
emptiness. came across
weird objects in this
path. counted off the distances with
other restless immigrants & animals co-
navigating ashed kilometers of
Hope & Selfishness & every night
restored myself to
the kitchen in Kant Str. to
eat a fish &
rest, or
lift your million’d, vinyl’d, incensed
hair & leave some
star-blue mark of
ego on
your neck
3
good thing wife worked
the graveyard shift. i’d lift you towards a
shaking climax around the time each night wife
petitioned her superiors for a
cigarette break with
pungent diffidence, although
she didn’t smoke but
took her minutes to
pace the limits of the
square of light outside the
ER entrance for the night’s own
un-medicated air and take her chary
look into that
long black street in Moabit plus
occasional attempts
at a payphone call
to home as you and i busy
laying, cursed the ring came
precisely in love’s
moment
THE TEXT RESCUED
2 para-pomes made by line-breaking passages from letters written to me by a very intelligent Bohemian substitute teacher in Manhattan; excerpts are verbatim
via Comrade JR
WE LIKES EM CLEVER
from: http://magicmolly.tumblr.com/post/590321185/ways-to-simulate-contact
IS IT A FAUX PAS TO BRING A SEVERED IRAQI-CHILD’S HEAD TO THE VOLLEYBALL GAME AT THIS NORMATIVE CORNFEST?
THE DIVINE REPRINT
meditations by EC on a filmsong by SA
SEX IN A THEOCRACY
Before I was lucky enough to meet, fall in love with and knock-up Beloved, I was seeing a woman from Brighton for a few months. We met in Berlin and continued to correspond after she returned to the UK and the correspondence heated up. I was approaching my mid-forties and she was a year or two younger and the subtext was something along the lines of neither of us wanting to die alone. She was an avid reader, tall and fit, on the pretty side of ordinary in the face department and had nice thick red hair which she kept in a mod-ish cut that put me in mind of the early 1970s. I wasn’t mad about her (the way I am about Beloved; I am lucky enough to be nuts about my wife) but I wasn’t getting any younger and couldn’t imagine that my looks would be holding out much longer than another ten years. The clock was ticking and she was willing.
I took an Easy Jet over to her place by the sea and we spent a long weekend together. When the time came to fuck I was hesitant; not because she wasn’t my absolute dreamwoman (she wasn’t but my belief in the possibility of such a type was fading) but because I knew that there’s a big difference between the pre-penetration dynamic and the post-penetration dynamic. After a man has come in/on a woman, the man is in debt. Such a thought certainly never occurred to me while I was using my shiny new cock to fuck a sidelong swathe across the late-1970s and the 1980s, but that’s because I didn’t realize that I was living in a Theocracy. I didn’t notice that fact, probably, because small territories of the Theocracy were in remission when I was coming into my own as a Sexualite; the small territory I inhabited as a High School student and then a college student and then an independent, young adult was a mobile Bohemian enclave of young people who could make sexually explicit Jesus jokes without fear of being struck by thunderbolts (or developing cancer, later, or giving birth to retarded kids). All that Jesus shit seemed like crap of the past.
When I was a young man, a woman would pursue me or let herself be pursued and we’d end up reading Shakespeare to each other aloud in bed by candle (actually did this once) between bouts of ecstatically strenuous genitality. At the end of every orgasm (my technique wasn’t so hot when I started out, so I always encouraged my partners to masturbate, too, as a hedge against lopsided o-tallies) the ledger was always balanced… the participants had gotten what each had wanted from the encounter… nobody owed anybody anything.
By the time my 30′s were wrapping up, it occurred to me that this was no longer true. Perhaps it had never been true. Not only is it the world’s general presumption that men are obsessed with fucking and women tolerate this because they’re obsessed with men, but there’s an overlay of Cosmologic Superstition that turns the act of intercourse, and the genitals themselves, into spiritually significant things. And not just spiritual in a neutral sense, no: tending toward evil. A man who puts his penis in, or visibly near, a woman, has committed a spiritual crime against the woman and the greater community, unless the two are married, whether the woman was all for it or not. The crime can often by mediated, after the fact, by ritual gestures involving flowers and offers of marriage. If the woman is under a specific (though fluctuating, according to region) age, imagined by the State, the ritual mediation involves the police, lawyers, prison etc.
I hesitated before fucking the woman from Brighton despite the fact that she was 40-ish and “legal” because I knew that after I fucked her I would owe her something that I could never pay back, for the rest of her life. That’s the point: for a man to owe a woman a fuck is for a man to owe her forever (under a Theocracy), because to repay her in kind would only mean to owe her more. And no other payment settles the debt either.
The woman can collect on the debt at any time… and repeatedly. I only fucked the woman from Brighton once, that weekend; she saw me to the airport having already secured a plan to stay with me over the upcoming Christmas holiday. Having been just cool enough before that one fuck (emails every few days and phone calls rarely), after it she became not cool at all and phoned me every day, often twice a day, in the month-and-a-half before she was due to arrive in Berlin. After roughly seventy-five hours of long-distance phone talk, I knew all that I’d ever need to know about her and began to view her upcoming visit with dread. If hadn’t fucked her once already, it would have been easy to cancel the visit. Absurd, no? I owed her for a fuck I didn’t particularly enjoy and we both knew it. I once owed a fellow music-biz professional ten thousand dollars and it was a much better feeling.
When I came to Berlin I was thirty and within a month or two was seeing a 19-year-old model (the pinnacle of her career was a Marie Claire cover). At 19 she was only two years along from being illegal to fuck, had we been in America. The affair lasted about six months (the friendship lasted for about fifteen years, or until the day Beloved gave birth to Offsprung) and the first month or so of the relationship, I wouldn’t fuck her.
This baffled her. But I was already beginning to understand that Sex in a Theocracy is fraught (as non-Theocratic as Berlin then felt). This gave rise to a comical situation: a tall, young Schiffer-look-alike begging me to fuck her. “Is tonight the night?” she’d joke. When I finally gave in and followed her all the way home and upstairs into her flat (we’d been spending time in the room I was renting from a little Gay, bald voice coach right out of Cabaret), I thought: at least she’s so beautiful that owing her something will be fun. I was astonished at the size and elegance of the flat and thought that she couldn’t be earning enough, even as a model, to afford it. Her roommates must be stewardesses.
I went down on her and she made the loudest noises I’d ever heard a 19-year-old girl (who wasn’t a cheerleader) make. It was about 3am when we’d come back to her place from a club and I was afraid as she howled and keened that we’d wake up the downstairs, upstairs and both next-door neighbors. In fact, it was difficult to maintain an erection due to the ruckus she was making, which I put down to over-eager inexperience (her ruckus, I mean… not my softening dick). It was early the next morning, when I wandered out to the kitchen in search of orange juice, that I found her parents (and her little brother) around the kitchen table.
They were quite pleasant and invited me to have a seat at the table. Fucking A, I thought. Her parents were both psychiatrists and they had no problem with her love life, which had started, with their blessing, at the age of thirteen. At thirteen she looked like a 17-year-old (she showed me pictures) and her first boyfriend (who, again, her parents approved of) was 21. Fucking A, I thought.
The model became a psychiatrist, eventually (still modeling on the side) and is in her late 30′s, still very beautiful and with a very cute baby. I bumped into her on a long walk, last year, very pleasantly surprised and I kissed her baby’s forehead. This woman and I had been friends for almost 20 years but she had broken it off, as I said, after I met Beloved and fell in love and we produced magnificent Offsprung. The model couldn’t have been jealous; we hadn’t been romantic since the early 1990s. Why did it piss her off that I had finally fallen in love? Why did we stop going to lunch once a month; why did she stop sending me emails? It’s something to do with the fact that I fucked her once.
Why any man would want to fuck a thirteen-year-old girl is beyond my ken. I don’t understand men who do it and I don’t understand men who only don’t do it because it’s illegal. Why would you want to? Kids are a lot of things (goofy, touching, irritating, inspiring, creative, messy, impulsive, primeval, visionary)… but how can they be sex objects? The 19-year-old model was just barely sexy by then; she had just enough self-control and worldly self-awareness to project a crafted image. The physical beauty doesn’t hold together in Real Time (photographs are another thing entirely) if it isn’t lyricized; goofy is a turn-off. She was able to sit on the other side of a cafe table with some mysteriousness and think before speaking and half-smile at inside jokes I’d never get: it was all that, on top of the gleaming hair and symmetrical face and the magazine physique, that made me decide that going in debt to her by crossing the Fuck Line would be worth it. And that’s the irony: wanting to fuck her when she was a goofy, coltish, pop-addicted kid would have probably been more natural (a caveman would’ve done it; animals do it)… it’s my civilized unnaturalness, and my love of the unnatural (Art, in a word) which makes me nobler, in this case. Certainly nobler than a Theocrat who only avoids sex with minors for fear of Hell or prison.
It’s not the basic fact of the meat of the body that interests me. Men who fuck meat are opaque to me. The man who had wanted to be the model’s lover when she was only thirteen is even opaquer to me. But if she wanted it and her parents consented and the fellow was a decent lover and gave the girl no diseases and the girl grew up to be a fully-functional adult with a career, friends, a groovy flat and a child of her own… no harm done. I wouldn’t have consented, as a parent, but that’s just me.
Which brings me to the Roman Polanski case, which reminds us, Roman’s perverse opacity notwithstanding, that we are living in a global Theocracy.
I grew up near Frome in Somerset which in the early 70′s had the highest underage pregnancy rates in the UK. I left school when I was 16 and got jobs in shops and a factory. All the 18-20 year old lads I worked with were going out with 14/15 year old girls ( I was a late developer in this area but would definitely have been the same had the opportunity arisen ).
As they were the sort who picked their girl-friends up from their home in a car one can only assume the parents were aware that their daughters were going out with older boys. They must have known too what was going on in the back seats of those cars.
Difficult to tell but I think no harm was ever done. However statuatory rape is statuatory rape and could have been called down at any time on 75% of the young male population. And no doubt some of the older males too.
Like you I really don’t get paedophilia but there is a strange area where an age-limit is set which doesn’t acknowledge at what age the desire for consensual pleasure begins. My other half was sexually active a long while before legality – I’d imagine most people ( except me obviously ) were similarly at it when it was illegal.
.
There’s an important conversation about Sex we should all, in general, in various venues, be having… in pairs and clusters and as whole nations, I think, Comrade ET… but we aren’t having it, just as we aren’t having so many conversations that are all about Here & Now and which are far more important than bleeding Madonna’s bleeding Twitters. But trying to talk about Sex these days is like trying to remember and hum a beautiful melody at a parade with a fucking Marching Band in your face. The Marching Band in this case being Bigtime Porno.
More later after various chores…
Porno? More like a marching band in a tank [ed.'s note: panacheful metaphor]. I was reading a blog/discussion a while back about how young women are discovering that young lads are learning all their moves from porn films rather than the usual outlets. With the result that they have some rather extreme demands – so the choice appears to be either traditional nervous fumblings or gang-bangs with anal sex as the main course followed off with mass ejaculations on the face. [ed.'s note: not quite the same as getting it from DH Lawrence, then]
It was a good blog btw commendably lacking any exaggeration or finger-wagging prudery but not without criticism too. [ed.'s note: link?]
It was a link from a link from a link ( probably more links than that ) as I recall. Unfortunately if you Google ” Unexpected ejaculation on face from boyfriend” it gets you a lot of possibilities but none that shed light on where the blog might reside.
THE EMAILED ALIBI
as I wrote to ET, Comrades Lurking and Explicit:
Meatspace will lighten soon and allow me to turn my friendly evil upon TET again…
HAS YOUR CHILD TAKEN THE SIMULOCRACY’S FUNCTIONAL SOCIOPATH TEST YET?
QED
QED2
QED3
NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT; GO READ A MADONNA TWITTER OR SOMETHING
THE VINTAGE LITCRIT
Doomed from the Beginning: a review of On Chesil Beach January 18, 2007
for our new Lurkers
DREAR DIARY
With consummate skill, Comrade DJ Sensei Barry left for South Korea this morning… just as North Korea is threatening to declare war. Comrade Alex, who is subletting Comrade Barry’s place while Barry is gone, wants to know if he can keep Barry’s mp3 collection if anything happens.
We of Rancho Augustine were all up late last night as Beloved came in from a gig in Hamburg at about 1am (Offsprung can’t sleep unless all of us are on the premises; this wasn’t true when she was only 2… before she knew the word “premises”). Late to bed, late-ish to rise. I met Comrade JR for Dunch (falafel at the usual place) and we walked across Kreuzberg and summer actually came to Berlin during the walk. Sharing the warm-winded street were people in t-shirts and people in overcoats; the t-shirters were overwhelmingly comprised of the under-30s and I did not trust them. I’m fairly sure the Gaga generation is dense with psychopaths.
Comrade JR and I revisited the story about how JR hitchhiked from Manhattan to Sacramento in ’74 or so. We got on the topic after Comrade JR mentioned the fact that Squeaky Fromme had been released from prison. Not only was Squeaky a would-be assassin (Gerald Ford) but she was a follower of Charles Manson (back when that meant something) and it was Squeaky who picked up a 17-year-old Comrade JR on the last leg of his trip across the USA and gave him somewhere to sleep in California. Comrade JR remembers a hippie-style dinner with both Squeaky and Sandra Good. Those were the days!
Speaking of South Korea, a long-time Comrade… the rich daughter of a Korean arms merchant (I don’t know if that’s supposed to be a secret or not) recently announced that she was giving up film making (with two films to her credit as a director and a few scripts in a drawer that had better remain there) in order to become a Faith Healer. Well, not exactly a Faith Healer but that’s pretty close translation of the German term for a New Age Hippie who charges cancer-sufferers lots of money for crystals-and-incense-based placebos. She wasn’t a very talented Artist (spoiled rich kid fucking around on dad’s blood-soaked pile, innit?) but at least she wasn’t doing much harm with her films. My personal beef being that I want those ten years, during which I was forced to pretend to take her seriously as an Artist, back. The hour I spent that one time talking her out of using Beatles songs (performed by The Beatles) in the documentary about her wacky dysfunctional family? I want it back. (I just now remember that it was at a dinner party at the Faith Healer’s trendy, paid-for-by-missiles flat that Beloved and I enjoyed our second date together. So there’s always that.)
It was a beautiful walk across graffiti-ridden Kreuzberg on the first really warm day of the year. It culminated at Comrade JR’s new studio, which is on the third floor of a largely-abandoned complex that long-ago housed a piano factory. A stately old turn-of-the-century building the size of a munitions factory… once solely dedicated to the fabrication of pianos. If one can imagine. Comrade JR saw the great Cecil Taylor perform in the parking lot (pictured below) on a magical afternoon during the 1970s.
With us on the walk today was a paperback of Milan Kundera’s The Farewell Waltz. Published in 1977 and written (as Kundera puts it) “in Bohemia in 1971 or 1972″, it’s interesting for packing lots of the same philosophical lunch that Kundera made a lighter, tastier, more satisfying snack of in his hit The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The tone is somewhere between “naturalistic” and “winking, digressive fable with a Doctorate”. Kundera hadn’t yet found his magically unassailable argument and too often relies (albeit toyingly), in TFW, on some good old narrative gizmos. For example: a poison pill is introduced early in the book and the reader thinks: “Chekhov’s pistol” (there must be a blog out there called Chekhov’s Pistol; there must be) and the reader is correct. Tips his hand rather often, as well: when the head of a fertility spa is seen tending to a woman with an unusual syringe described with a little too much care (the equivalent of the close up in filmic vocab) the reader guesses immediately that the fertility specialist is impregnating clients with his own semen. Which is the danger of narrative-dependent narratives: being too familiar with the conventions (and the conventional mechanics of moving characters around their stations of the cross as they hit their preordained plot-points) can deflate the book for the canny reader.
Kundera got to the point he was able to transcend all that and finally produced TULB a decade later. But you can see so many future bits of TULB seeded here and there in The Farewell Waltz… the most striking examples being: a moment of extreme cruelty to animals perpetrated by Czech children (a cat with nails in its eyes in TFW and crow half-buried and stoned in TULB); a charismatic dog (“Bob” in FW and “Karenin” in TULB) and a rustic girl either ruining, or threatening to ruin, an urbane sophisticate with sex and/or love plus Kundera’s apparent disgust with older women and the biological facts of fucking: in TULB the congenially academic narrator refers to sex as “absurd” (compared to what?) and in TFW there’s stuff about sagging boobs and cervical mucus and also a character’s unappetizing meditation on the saliva in an unloved woman’s mouth while kissing it. Even more interesting (for me): reading TFW makes me want to re-read TULB for traces of worryingly lyrical Judo-Christian Theological subtexts I never would have guessed, before, that Kundera was capable of. Soon.
That photo could be in the North West of England near where I live. Odd to think the Germans and the British spent so much time bombing each other’s identical factories.
Before the downturn various regeneration schemes turned a lot of these into “luxury” flats.
I met a builder who said that the building materials used were so cheap that all you needed to do was put on a crash helmet, keep your head down and you could run through the walls of every flat on a floor. Any criminal with sense wouldn’t bother trying to pick door-locks. You could punch your way into a flat.
In our old workshop in Manchester we were the only artists in a big mill when we moved in 20 years ago except for the band A Certain Ratio who had a studio . We left last year and the place was seething with the buggers.
There’s a theory that the process is – artists move into space lured in by cheap rent, original occupants move out gradually, artists take over, rent goes up, landlord throws artists out and hope the cachet brought by the artists means the property is hip and that they can convert building into flats, this happens, economy goes belly-up, no-one moves in except drug dealers and prostitutes, place becomes trendy for a different reason.
You’ve just provided a career-making idea to an impressionable young performance artist reading this, Comrade ET!
And your Realpolitik of Real Estate Theory sounds like Kreuzberg about three or four times over since The Wall fell.
YE MORBID POMES
A CLUSTER OF NANO-ESSAYS/NOTES FOR THE FEATURE-LENGTH VIDEO-FILM I’M MAKING (a film in 6 parts; Comrade ET is collaborating on one segment, Comrade Nick is doing the instrumental soundtrack, Comrades Craig and Beloved are doing the voice-overs and Comrades Khue and Peter the principal facework)
*
[However, see HERE]
*
*
*THX 1138 twists the Eve Meme: LUH 3417, a Dystopian Eve, seduces her Adam (THX 1138) not by offering him the Apple but by preventing him from eating the Anti-Apple, a pill… a sedative that makes Dystopia okay (if not a paradise). In The Matrix, there are two pills: an Apple pill (revelation) and the Anti-Apple (sedative). In both films, the Eve is a sacrifice (though the penetration/crucifixion death of Eve in The Matrix comes later in that series). Check the first 8 scenes of the THX 1138 Script
run away, world!
If only I’d taken up archery as a child; if only the Walker weren’t so very, very far; if only the Art world weren’t dominated by well-connected cunts with talcum-dry arseholes and no ear for the unintentionally hilarious and the murderously boring
interesting too in the UK that the new government are spinning the idea that wasteful public spending is what has got us into this financial mess.
Not a mention of the banks who I thought were the culprits and who carried on rewarding themselves with bonuses even after public money had bailed them out.
Public services could always be better run but I fear we are about to head into a wave of privatisation ( where profit rules ) that we haven’t seen before.
Michael Moore is not one of this world’s greatest thinkers but his TV programme did a nice piece when Newt Gingrich was perfecting his “Get big government off our backs” routine ( not to help us of course but to make sure those in power could claim no responsibily when things go wrong ) . Moore went to Gingrich’s home town and noted down everything that “big government” had given to the population. It turned out that pretty much everything from public parks to private enterprise had received some form of government aid. Unfortunately, as per usual he ruined it with a dumb stunt but it was a point well made.
Delightful reply will come sometime tomorrow, Comrade ET… I’ve just emerged from a murky, brackish, three-day editing bubble and the most pressing need, at this point, is to get into bed before 2am…! (less than 36 minutes left to accomplish this)…
[ed.'s note: I did not accomplish it]
[delightful response still pending; first, I have to address Offsprung's daily breakfast offensive]
“Moore went to Gingrich’s home town and noted down everything that ‘big government’ had given to the population.”
Just try to imagine what a wonderful world this would be, Comrade ET, if The People all understood (most of us, anyway) that politicians say and do things (publicly) for effect?
Every politician who invokes the “big gummint” scare-trope really, of course, just wants to be the biggest government official in the biggest, baddest government ever known… that’s the dream. As I always point out: it’s called “Government” not “Servicement” and you’ve got to marvel at the rare freak who gets in the game with no motivation beyond the drive to be of service. I’m trying to think of a freakishly noble example. Well, there’s always Aung San Suu Kyi , but I was thinking of the Anglo-American sphere. I’m sure it’ll come to me…
“Not a mention of the banks who I thought were the culprits and who carried on rewarding themselves with bonuses even after public money had bailed them out.”
My favorite variation on this: all the people I’ve heard/overheard to blame the “financial crisis” on poor people who defaulted on their pathetic little home-buying loans… which is a little like examining a bullet-riddled corpse and suspecting tetanus: that’s not just stupid, it’s nasty.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2008/oct/10/us-economy-credit-crunch-poverty
http://www.newsweek.com/id/162789
http://washingtonindependent.com/80022/more-than-half-of-republicans-dont-believe-banks-are-to-blame-for-the-financial-crisis
http://redjenny.blogspot.com/2008/10/blame-poor-and-minorities-and-social.html
Stalin? he said innocently
[ed's note: it was right on the tip of my tongue, Comrade]
NOW and THEN
vs
eerie bonus irony: “With all of this bad press, there is only one thing that has kept Martin Amis out of the public doghouse: his work.” June 2000
[UPDATE: a Lurking Comrade has almost immediately pointed out, emailically, the unfairness of this affectionate wind in Mart's direction as the clunking excerpt isn't from a novel; fair enough... it is fairly unfair]
Saw a bit of the Money adaptation. Hobbled by the need to conform to TV’s need for decency. So it was coy where the book is explicit.
Went to see Bad Lieutenant last night. Surprisingly good but not really a Herzog film – Lynch would have done the material better. But a couple of truly unexpected off-the-wall moments ( in a good way ) involving reptiles.
[ed.'s note: I'd put up the name of the illustrator responsible for the sampled collage but I don't want him to track TET down in a paroxysm of self-Googling and demand that I cease and desist; his name is James RhymeswithAwe]
Couldn’t have been as good, overall, as the original (well, minus the weirdly mawkish ending), though. For example, the stick-thin heroin-whore (played by a stick-thin heroin princess who co-authored the script) who’s Keitel’s shooting partner in the original becomes Eva Mendes in the remake (if I’m not mistaken)… a typical Hollywood denaturization. And is there a scene in the new one with a naked Cage (not that I’d like to see it) in a church on a bad high going “mee meee mee mee meee meee meee” and having visions of Christ and calling the loin-clothed feller a “fuck”? (Loosely adapted from memory). There again something hobbled by the need to conform to acceptable versions of the profane (possibly); the trailers for BL2 had that “fuck yeah” tone to them that sets my teeth on edge. “Doesn’t everyone have a lucky crack pipe?” Fuck off, Werner.
I have a bone to pick with Herzog, anyway. It took him thirty years to go from Stroszek to Rescue Dawn. Not a world’s record for selling out or anything but still.
I like his “documentaries” still.
For me his last great feature film was Woyzzeck or Noseferatu. I loathed Fitzcarraldo – the film couldn’t make me give a toss about the title-character’s obsession – but Aguirre, Dwarfs and Kaspar Hauser are as good as they get.
But BL has a couple of authentic Herzog shots where the narrative stops still and we are asked to make something of a static shot. The music is the weak part for me – Mark Isham by and large, I didn’t spot the Stroszek piece, and uncharacteristically weak.
Kaspar Hauser, Stroszek, Aguirre, Nosferatu, Dwarfs: top notch, indeed (never got around to Woyzzeck)! Grizzly Man was (counter-intuitively, Grimm-type) funny. I’m sure there’s good stuff in BL2… there must be a molecule of Artist still knocking around in that asinine German whore’s mind somewhere, making inadvertent connections… it’s just those damn trailers (and Nick Cage playing a heat-packing Willy Loman in a Zoot-suit) I can’t abide. Well it’s the overall evil of the Remake I abhor, too: by the time the vulgarians raped and feathered Bedazzled I was forever closed to the concept. I mean: fuck: either make a new film or re-release the original if it’s really good enough to deserve destroying with a remake. Having said that, can I interest any producers in my concept for a remake of The Bicycle Thief (starring either LL Cool J or Lady Gaga as a Bushwick bike messenger)…?
Also: I think Herzog, to an unusual degree, depended on his casting: I can imagine a Kubrick without Peter Sellers, but can you imagine a Herzog without a Kinski or a Bruno S. (who is old friends with Comrade JR, btw: I was there… as I’ve perhaps mentioned… the time Bruno emerged from JR’s WC announcing that he’d just “fucked” it, whatever that meant)?
I think Herzog’s documentaries are his fiction at the moment. He seems to unearth these characters whose lives he can shape into his mould. I especially liked his vision of post first Gulf War Kuwait. A landscape of burning oil wells with the camera mounted on a helicopter flying over like some angel revisiting the fucked up earth.
I don’t begrudge him BL but hope he heads back to sub-Saharan Africa soon to discover someone who was an architect in Rotterdam but now lives in a termite hill.
Agreed there, ET: sub-Saharan Africa or the Amazon. A Lord Lucan doc might be just the thing…
…speaking of which, is the music near the end of this Hollywood “fuck yeah” scene familiar? Fuck yeah, it’s from Stroszek
IT’S ZOE LUND MONTH AT TET
All this talk of Bad Lieut. has gotten me on a Zoe Lund kick again; I ignore her Judo-Christian bent because the film talk here is so rich:
also, this:
what I miss about that particular Phylum of All-Around-Artist-as-the-Masterpiece-Herself is any ability to balance the Narcissism with Insight and Revelation… too many of Zoe’s descendants are mere Facebook-Self-Photographing-Experts and irritating as insomnial mosquitoes
and
St. Zoe writes:
*TET concurs
DIET HORSE
I’ve referenced this one before but, surely: the greatest act of product placement in Cinema history… (on the table near Harvey’s arm)…
Proper soundtrack
Have some Goddamn Aht, Comrades Lurking and Explicit; ideal with a nice German sausage…
MURKKAN NOOZ CHANNEL
THEY’RE JUST PISSED BECAUSE THE FUCKER MADE YOU THINK
MEDIEVAL SCIENCE CLASS
WELL I HOPE THESE GIRLS WERE GIVEN LIGHT SENTENCES AS JUVENILES
and, finally:
THE SYSTEM WILL ABSORB YOUR DISSIDENT GESTURES EFFORTLESSLY AND WITH EVIL CUTENESS
Oh, and: slow this down by a factor of about 25x and watch the whole film (and remember, you’re more liable to appreciate any work of Art if you don’t presume to know what form it will take before you’ve even seen it):
WHERE NORMLIBS and NEOCONS EXCHANGE ATTITUDINAL FLUIDS
http://www.counterpunch.org/reed05182010.html
I don’t agree with Reed’s take on Kara Walker’s Art and I’m baffled by the notion that anyone should side with the POTUSOC just because he’s being niggered (any more than I would side with Paul Wolfowitz or Alan Dershowitz just because they’re kiked in some quarters), but there’s material of interest here (caveat: set your typo-phasers on stun) and I hope that our younger Lurkers, especially, read this. [ed.'s note: and you already know what I think of the fleetingly implied defense of the hideous Michael Jackson]
Reed refers to someone who refers to being “outpropagandized” and it’s just too true. Postmodern death means your avatar dies first and they bill your conscious corpse for the virtual bullet.
SELLING DOWN
News comes that a person I have deleted from my Facebook is running for office (for a position higher than the mayoral level). It was almost always obvious that the time would come: she fit the profile. Ie, she’s attractive, craves attention, can give a speech, is crypto-anti-intellectual and a faux-hip Normative Liberal in the ancestral homeland of the NormLib Race ( which being Upper Walter Mondalia; I’m old friends with the guy married to Walter’s famously foxy Norm Lib daughter, btw; NormLib or not, she featured heavily in my auto-erotic dreamlife in the early ’90s… but I, uh, digress). I saw a picture of this un-friended woman slapping hands and licking babies beside her standard-issue Starchy Old White Guy running mate and I rolled my eyes. Candidate. Candy date… ? [ed.'s note: and the race is on, of course, to see who can grab the brass-plated ring of First Female Black President; one can just imagine her chanted mirror-affirmations every morning...]
Sometime during the first blush of the media’s necrophiliac infatuation with the Haiti quake was when I un-friended this woman from the vestigial Facebook account I keep. I abuse the groupthink-and-surveillance spirit of Facebook by A) keeping the number of friends down to dinner-party levels (except in Comrade Barry’s case, I only use Facebook to communicate with people I otherwise never see or phone with), B) never participating in the psy-op “quizzes” or “polls” or “questionnaires” (and asinine time-wasting games) and C) making it a point (the rare times I post) to post dissident or lengthy or offensively humorous and otherwise meaty material. No cat pix or toddlers drumming. I have never written a “LOL” on Facebook.
The person I un-friended was the local anchor of an American news channel. We’d exchanged a few emails, of a few paragraphs each, before I red-buttoned her… but it wasn’t the depressing Normative Liberality of her letters that made me reach for the button. It was the Haiti quake… first, my nausea at her self-dramatizing FB posts on the event (her friends were commenting that her broadcasts on the quake were so wonderfully “emotional” and she posted several things calling attention to her “exhaustion” that weekend which implied a sort of nobly understated heroism). The camel-snapping, shit-tipped straw came when I made the mistake of posting a link to substantive commentary (by Scott Mclemee) on the quake (re: Pat Robertson’s pact-with-the-devil gaffe); I posted the link on this stupid kunt’s Facebook “wall” thinking (foolishly, I now see) that she’d appreciate the article. Which brought me face to face with the smiley-faced stupidity of the Norm. Can these people fucking read?
No reply to that last point, of course: they’d both read their quota of 600 contiguous words that week and were off to LOL some cat pix and toddlers-drumming vids. Or maybe the future candidate was busy posing for photos to promote the line of jewelry she designs.
Oh and the phot above is the woman herself
Blimey. My dad, a traditional Olde Englishe Tory loves CLR James mainly for his cricket writing but also because of his writings about what my dad would call the underdogs.
A military man through and through he also admired Arafat greatly. Knowing his right wing proclivities I’m always wondering why he liked these two but compared to these so called liberal thinkers you engage with above he at least seems complex and ( at times ) willing to think beyond his prejudices.
Am away for a few weeks in Holland – may find some lurking time but otherwise it’s all quiet on the western front.
Fuck moi I love this comment, Comrade ET! I was just relaxing while Offsprung and Beloved are out shopping for Wallmarring Tools (crayons), reading some old Beatles trivia (someone claims Lennon slipped “fucking hell” into Hey Jude; must investigate), popped over to glance down TET and catch this comment. Aces, mon. And the point is sharp. Startling, innit? And bless yer dad. I’d take his sincere boot over a NormLib’s phony glove any day of the week! Watch out in Hamsterdam…
PS: btw, seeking a link to a story I did which mentioned CLR James, I came across the fact that I predicted Our Newscaster’s Political Ambitions in January already: “This woman is just fucking stupid enough to run for office. I would not be surprised.”
A Classic to Roll Around With While I Earn Money and Perform Other Meatspace Chores
Muster of Triviums-On Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine
(downloadable pdf)
YOU KNOW YOU’RE YESTERDAY’S MAN WHEN…
Meow meow…?
NOT ‘AVIN’ IT
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/may/29/michel-winterbottom-jim-thompson?showallcomments=true#end-of-comments
UPDATE an as-yet-not-published comment at: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article7137181.ece
LISTEN TO THESE (IN THE DARK & MUNCHING COOKIES)
by Augustine’s first virtual friend, GJ
GINNY GOOD
Sylvie: *A Nanonovel in 6 Chaptagraphs*
originally written as a tongue-in-cheek response to the literary invention of the “sentagraph”
DIVERS EDITORIALE
A day like a snoozy afternoon on a sailboat. Beloved traipsing around the flat looking pants-distressingly beautiful, pony-tailed and milky-lithe in sort of an Italian Aristocrat-raised-as-a-peasant outfit of jogging pants with sleeveless, bosomy top and slingbacks. If Offsprung weren’t traipsing around behind her (with a sand bucket full of pennies) this would be a very short day indeed, blurring into groggy twilight… the kind of snoozy afternoon we used to use to rehearse making Offsprung with. Offsprung enforces my temperance (until Offsprung goes beddy-bye). I can either use this temperate hour to work or write this. I’m putting off the work.
The Paris Review has a new bloggy sort of thing running and the second or third post is part one of a series called “The Culture Diaries”, written by a woman who knows how to take a damn good photo of herself (if it’s sexist to say that, it must be reciprocally sexist to post a damn-good photo of yourself), Sarah Crichton. Crichton must be some publishing insider (or the late mega-seller’s wife) about whom I should be embarrassed to know fuck-all. I’m just not into baseball stats (or the game, even: just the ball), is how I put it, so I didn’t know who Sarah Crichton is when I started reading.
The Snarkster within wants to add that I know even less about who Sarah is after reading these “diary” entries…. beyond the fact that she has a Groovy Life. Having a groovy life and writing about it is an important genre of literature; every bit as important as the genre it parallels and is mated to, which is: writing a fucked-up life. I think perhaps there’s a gender-inflected division between the fans of one genre and the fans of its polar twin; is it my imagination that penis-having types prefer reading “fucked up life lit” (acronymically: FULL) to the Groovy Life stuff? I’ve always been Culturally Faggotty: I don’t mind reading reportage about Le Life Groovie at all. In fact…
…I started this essay with my latest modest entry in the annals of Groovy Life Lit (GRLL) and most of my diaristic things are of the GRLL kind. I try to add some substance to the bragging by weaving strong, blackly sincere opinionating in with my flushedly-pleasured reportage and to make the imposition defensible with a little style. The patron saint of GRLL is Anaïs Nin (Henry Miller paralleled Anaïs with a version of FULL that was cleverly diluted with lots of GRLL, ie pennilessness ameliorated by windfalls of French food and threesomes). The patron saint of FULL is probably Bukowski.
The specific kind of GRLL that Sarah Crichton is up to in this Paris Review piece is sort of Life As A Press Release or a Facebook Page but for a life that’s a lot more resplendent with Kultcha than the average Facebooker’s is… the tone is very much like Woody Allen’s Manhattan. Or maybe it’s just that I felt the way, reading it, that I felt (and feel) when I watch(ed) Manhattan. Soothed by the sense that chaos, murder and illiteracy are far, far away. Strong opinions could only cloud/complicate that sense, so Sarah Crichton’s reference-rich, opinion-free description of her Groovy Life really works. Even Anaïs Nin clouds her diary with complaint and opinion.
What bothers me is how enjoyable I found reading Sarah Crichton’s diary. There I was in my early twenties again, watching Manhattan for the first time, dreaming of art galleries and bistro chats and upper class gamine paramours… my older, crusty, what-is-she-trying-to-sell detector was temporarily disabled.
It kicked in again when I saw my wife and daughter traipse in their splendors across the kitchen towards the garden door. Beauty is as big a part of the discussion as anything else; beauty is a literary argument. Half of Samuel Beckett’s authority, for example, after all, issues from his physical beauty and the gorgeously negative capability of his Groovy Life (framing the fiction). Plus all that other stuff: the cloudy, complicating essence. If I were bisexual (and unmarried), would I rather fuck (say) Samuel or Sarah…?
Very tough call.
2.
Facebook was horrendous this weekend. It was the Memorial Day holiday, a fact I had to have pointed out to me by befuddledly-blinking Germans standing in front of a very-closed American Embassy (tedious fucking passport issues) who must have assumed I wasn’t American in my goofy un-knowingness. They’d been informed by the German cop at the top of the stairs that this was an American holiday and passed the news on to me as I approached them with a spring in my step, congratulating myself on having gotten there before a line could form. It was drizzling (it always drizzles on Memorial Day and so I should have known). All the way back home, on the subway, I wracked my brain as to what holiday it could possibly be. Armistice Day…?
I logged into Facebook and there were entries from various friends (who I once thought were fairly progressive) eulogizing “our troops”. Sorry, but I presume our professional (non-draft-driven) army to be stocked with people who have voluntarily signed up to invade other countries and possibly kill people there? It’s not very nice to put it that way but is it or is it not true? How many soldiers in today’s army signed up after being gulled into believing they were joining Greenpeace? Show of hands…?
At the same time I read an article about a daring, dissident, Left-leaning Artiste who was projecting headshots of America’s War Dead on buildings in the downtown of some metropolis to “raise consciousness”. That’s what they call “radical” these days. The genuinely Radical is now, of course, more properly called The Unthinkable: projecting images of dead Iraqis and Afghanis, for example.
Don’t be so easily brainwashed, my old friends. Resist it a little bit, at least. Just a little. By thinking.
Please?
3.
I LOVE WHEN AN IMAGE EMBODIES A REALITY AND EXPLAINS IT, TOO
or: BEFORE AND AFTER
FROM THE DEPT. OF INTERESTING NARRATIVES (via Comrade Barry); wild stuff, dudes… [I'll come back and try to unpack this box of Meta-Political Crackerjacks later, if there's time] [UPDATE: As it happens, Time is too short, but it would appear that Russia has a mainstream media horse or two in the Conspiracy-Narrative Meta-Politics Race... but why is this guy so scrupulously avoiding the word 'Communist'?]
FROM THE DEPT OF: YOU COULDN’T GET AWAY WITH THIS IN A SCREENPLAY:
RECONSTRUCTIVE JOURNALISM
A LOW-STAKES REVIEW: THE ANTHOLOGIST
The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker, Simon and Schuster, 243pp
I’ve been spending a pleasant two weeks with a lovably-losing friend-I-could-have-had, Paul Chowder. Paul is the narrator of Nicholson Baker’s novel The Anthologist, a book I’ve been using as my subway book, the filter/shield (shilter) against forced perception.
For example, on the way home from today’s Sunday shopping (most stores aren’t open on the fucking Sabbath in Berlin), a 30-something, ginger-haired fellow with an enormous pot belly and obvious mental incapacities sat across from me. The book/shilter was nearly enough to help me ignore the descending whole-tone triplets the retarded guy was grunting the whole ten minutes we shared the ride. Nearly, but not enough: I wanted to shit myself thickly, laughing. Matching the tune was his methodical ripping of a sky-blue pamphlet into squares. I thought I might plop.
Of course you couldn’t laugh out loud at a retarded man in public: it would be cruel (though I wonder if the retarded man himself would have noticed or taken offense). What I find ridiculous is how careful I’d have to be in picking someone to confess to, later, that I’d found this funny. I could even get in trouble writing it… people might think I’m an arsehole.
Which is the bearable failure of The Anthologist. Baker has set his Phasers on Nice. After the shock of the shit he’d taken for The Fermata and Vox (to a lesser degree) and Checkpoint (to a much greater degree; even the presumably natural audience for that book, Liberal Bush Loathers, tut-tut-tutted) and Human Smoke (one demographic you’d really rather not enrage is concentration camp survivors)… I forgive Baker for sitting down to write something that no one on Earth could possibly hate him for writing.
My schlumpy friend Paul! Nicholson hides a nice poetry lecture in Paul’s inner-monologue of soothing regret. Nicholson knows that American readers who don’t want to read about jobs or serial-killers want to feel that they’re learning something (improving themselves) by reading mere fiction and that they prefer the lesson to come from a passionate pedant.
There’s something winning about a character/author of a certain age who has sacrificed a whole life to master some finicky detail about philosophy, history, Art or Lit so that you, the reader, didn’t have to. While you were busy in the Real World earning money, the passionate pedant was busy with Herodotus (The English Patient) or Parmenides and Nietzsche (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) or Bonnard (Banville’s The Sea) and so on.
Baker’s Chowder’s learnéd hobbyhorse is modern poetry’s Stalinist commandment against rhyme. Baker is either very good at writing characters who don’t share his opinions, or he thinks that modern poets think that rhyming is corny, limiting, puerile and he resents the fact. I write the stuff myself (on leap years and during Syzygy) and what I find corny, limiting and puerile in poetry is end rhyme. Internal rhyme/ broken rhyme are much subtler practices… it’s the inevitability of that second-of-two fraternal quintuplets, shrugging and hopping, when summoned, into the obvious slot, that bores me. You’ll also never find identically-framed mom-and-dad photos in mirroring 45-degree-angle alignment flanking a central image of my daughter on a mantelpiece in my parlor. I think asymmetricality in Art (plastic and verbal too) is rather more interesting. Nicholson-Chowder’s crusade is for end rhyme and I say ‘no’ to that with zero twinging. He cites the primacy of nursery rhyme! QED.
Poor Paul’s rhyme-crusade bounced right off my modern head. He’s got a bone to pick about scansion, though, that’s right up my alley (I wished he’d been on the comment thread at The Valve, a few months ago, when Bill Benson was arguing that line-breaks aren’t rests and that the difference between an unpunctuated block of words and a vertical strip of the same words is purely perceptual, or conditioned).
There’s a neat irony in the fact that anti-Modern Chowder’s tale of love lost (and feasibly regainable) ends on an open-ended, Modernist (think High Fidelity) note. Surely an avid Poe fan should tell us whether the hero gets the girl back, in the end, or if she dies of consumption? If Baker did that on purpose (affirming the separability of Author and Mouthpiece): chapeau, as they say.
Paul’s got some nice Nicholsonian trivia for us (New England was the clothespin-manufacturing capital of the world in 1883/ real butter is flavored with butter flavor) and unusually sparse Nicholsonian stylistics (it took me several minutes, just now, to find “a frizzle of wind”) and a few nice Nicholsonian gags (eg, pg 138 about “booping” a horn by mistake). Some winningly-subordinate “man crush” activity (I prefer to call it gestural cock-sucking) towards James Fenton is a thread through the book.
“But Paul,” I sub-vocalized, while guarding my peripheral vision on the subway by holding the book just inches from my nose, “You’re a lonely, middle-aged man! You’ve just been dumped by your long-time partner! Where’s the stuff about the girl bursting from the prow of her t-shirt at Starbucks; the maddening smell of the scalp of the handsome mother whose hair swooshed your arm as she dove for the dates in the bin you’d just retracted your Wholefoods scoop from? Or the rage at being dumped; the rage at being pushed out on the late-Capitalist ice floe to die, just because you’re not a winner! The fear and/or hatred of the young, the apt, the canny! Revulsion at Vulgaria! What, not one machete-swipe at Billy fucking Collins?”
Nicholson-Chowder mentioned Billy a few times and every time he did, my nostrils flared. But I knew better; if Nicholson-Chowder (great kid’s-book name, btw) won’t even eviscerate the talentlessly long-dead (aka Longfellow), there’s no way he’s going after the fumble-witted (and extremely popular and perfectly named) and very living Billy. Baker doesn’t want a bunch of Billy Collins fans on his ass any more than he wants more holocaust survivors on it.
Nicholson-Chowder gets frisky, finally, on pages 232 and 233 (in a 243-page book), taking swipes at a “witchy-looking” John Ashbery, the New York Art Babylon Ashbery presided over in the sixties and seventies and some (gay) minimalist painting the character associates, eye-rollingly, with Ashbery’s work. But he softens it all by the end of the passage and we can sense Chowder chiding himself for being such a bitchy Quaker. He buys a copy of Ashbery’s most famous book in penance.
Reading The Anthologist is a lot more like knowing a lovable schlump than being in the mind of one. Fair enough! I’ll take either experience, if it’s written well enough, and The Anthology is written well enough. It’s a soothing read; it’s mildly instructive; it will almost protect you from funny retards on the subway.
What I worry is that Nicholson Baker is learning to keep the Truth out of his books because too many readers react adversely to it.
PS Chowder is invited to Switzerland to give a talk on poetry and after the talk sits in the open and describes a mountain. Comrade Barry met Baker a couple of years ago when Baker was lecturing at EGS, in Switzerland, so it’s reasonable to assume, unless he keeps a chalet there, that Baker saw the Alp shortly before, or shortly after, meeting Comrade Barry. Which ties us into the book, somewhat.
RESCUED TEXTS OF THE ATTIC
AZURA’S GIFT
about a psychic ho
RESCUED TEXTS OF THE ATTIC 2
stream-of-texting consciousness
RESCUED TEXTS OF THE ATTIC 3
a nice little joke about karma
JOE PESCI MEETS JIMINIY CRICKET
TIMELESS
Goot Gawd, I’d forgotten that writing (especially with an Offsprung on the premises) is a winter activity! There are mud puddles in the garden which need tending and that’s not even at the top of the list.
Received a message today from an esteemed comrade on another land mass and attached to this message was the rough draft of a play: fantastic! There’ll be more to say about that after today’s trimming of the mud puddle.
THE TIMES THEY ARE A-WHATEVERIN’
Writing in the “Culture Diary” at the Paris Review Blog, Maud Newton says:
I commented:
At the end of the hated (and, oops, well-written) piece, Keillor writes:
What’s to get mad at? There’s something of the sophomore-storming-out-of-the-house-as-a-way-of-preempting-Dad’s-advice-on-drugs-or-STD’s to all this. People who are genuinely busy writing (vs people champing at the bit to be taken as the new gatekeepers of Writing) won’t be much bothered.
UPDATE: It’s strange, but you get the feeling that most of the people spitting in Keillor’s general direction here didn’t read the piece closely (or at all) and certainly didn’t read the title, which is The End of an Era in Publishing.
Who’s silly enough to believe that this isn’t the end (or the end of a clear memory) of several eras: the end of nice advances for mid-listers, the end of serious bookchat in newspapers, the end of novelists marrying models and getting into fist-fights on mainstream talk shows…
http://flavorwire.com/94044/publishings-not-dead-the-industry-responds-to-garrison-keillor
You mean Keillor never wrote on a typewriter, mailed a manuscript to a publisher in NY or got an advance that made him run whooping through the corn? Who’s the dusty old fucker trying to fool, then? Christ, I’m glad you kids are patrolling the area! Hey, let’s do something about that sarcastic reference to postage stamps, too… is Keillor saying it’s the end of Snail Mail… ?
How about if your approach to describing how things went in the past is based on how things went in the past… ? Also horrid?
It may be “nonsense” but it’s largely true. I’m a self-anointed writer (just as you’re a self-anointed cultural critic); all writers start as self-anointed and most remain that way to the exclusion of other descriptions and the “New Era” just means that both categories represent lots more people now. Nothing wrong with being a self-anointed anything if the ability is there and nothing in your comment contradicts Keillor’s observation. But, when a pile-on beckons (and to buck the trend risks ostracism)…
I hate the types (let’s call them Oprah-Baiters) who fish for indignant applause. Reminiscent of Frat Boys who bash “sexism” hoping to score Lesbian blowjobs.
Werewolf and vampire porn is certainly an evolutionary step above Didion, Brodkey and DeLillo. But where’s the snobbery in the Keillor piece, lady?
Here’s my favorite no-nonsensically nonsensical pronouncement of the bunch:
Not to mention a World of Dumb.
OLDE FRIENDS AND RIOTS
Something with a down-home-on-Jupiter (Afro-Futurist) feel from a mate of 20 years’ standing, Mister Dreadlox Holmes (there he is being the naughty man of the handmade vid, looking, deal-with-the-devilishly, not a day over 34 or 35).
I first met Dreadlox (aka Steve) when he was busking at Covent Garden/Leicester Square, doing a Hendrix thing in leather pants, snakeskin boots and a top hat. It was a year of the cyclical Hendrix revival (1990) in what was otherwise the era of Adamski (introducing a fetal Seal), Guru Josh, Happy Mondays, Stone Roses etc. and Steve would earn about fifty pound-coins an afternoon for playing strange riffs very beautifully and with great speed (we call it shredding). I’d sit on the periphery until my view of Steve’s show would become blocked entirely by wide-bottomed short pants. It was a drought year (and the year of the Poll Tax riots… I saw a Porsche like a turtle on its back and a phalanx of mounted police swinging clubs at hippie heads) and very hot, a summer under weirdly Mediterranean skies, a summer of the dead breeze and brown parks and coveted shadow. I’d find a well-shaded spot and watch Steve play while the pigeons picked at discarded baked-potato snacks bursting chived guts all over the square. Afterward, once, Steve took us to dinner at a nice restaurant and paid with the contents of his hat.
SOSHUL INJUNEERING: OR WHY YOUR OWNERS PREFER YOU ILLITERATE
The book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes is discussed here- I must have a copy (if only because the cover of the edition referenced features Ringo, in a scene from AHDN, with a “boook”). The linked-to blog offers these nuggets from the boook:
FOR HE HAS NOT LONG TO LIVE
COMMENTS ABROAD
Speaking as yer bona fide Ayrab, I’m here to tell you, we do have a thing for ‘…violent death, religious fanaticism and/or cruelly retrograde cultural practices’…but no more so than yer average ‘Christian’, ‘Hindu’ or ‘Jew’. It’s the sanctimony that fucking annoys: The US can drop hydrogen bombs on civilians, carpet bomb peasant farmers in their rice-paddies, torture whoever they like, maintain a racist and misogynist social structure (by force when required) but that’s OK because they’re ‘a democracy’…or something. Fucking pinheads.
Well, yeah, of course I was playing the devil’s advocate there, M, all the while bearing in mind your long list of personal atrocities (and your fanatical belief that the universe is floating on an Ur-Turtle’s back).
Along those lines (the perfect segue into a non-sequitur, I’ve found), this is interesting:
Now that is change we can believe in! (Christ, I’m not one to gloat… ahem… but I wonder how the NormLib dupes over at 3QD are taking the ongoing striptease of revelations that the really cool dude they voted into office was not, by mere dint of being brown, some sort of PC Messiah? Or even a “Progressive” by any sane definition of the term? But a Clintonian Bush-front instead? )
UPDATE: speaking of Fatwas…
What I’ve been saying since before Obama was elected. He’s just Bush with better presentational skills. What I found especially sad at the time of his victory were the vast crowds of black Americans literally weeping with joy at thought that they’d finally got a president who was ‘one of their own’, the poor deluded saps.
What in God’s name the Tea Party/Right’s problem with Obama is I don’t know. It sure as hell can’t be ideological so I guess that just leaves the obvious: they hate him because he’s beige…
(photo: The Well-Oiled Pol)
My favorite teary-eyed inaugural bystander in blackface was decommissioned CIA asset Jesse Jackson (have I mentioned that my father interfaced with that feller back in the good old Heyday of Blaxploitation?). Remember the pic of JJ blubbing like a babe as BO ascended to the throne? It was spun along the lines that Jackson was overwhelmed by the poignant historicity of the event: wink. Jesse clearly felt betrayed. I’m sure those snickering fuckers promised it to him.
Meanwhile, you’ve got to wonder about the intelligence or sanity of anyone over the age of 35 who still falls for that stuff; if the candidate weren’t a cunt, It couldn’t have been a candidate, now could It? Ie, what’s your vote worth in real terms if you can’t even choose the candidates? Oh, it’s so simple! So brilliant! The Post-Industrial Masses are such wonderful retards! It seems to take the typical human roughly 90 years to figure things out these days… with an extended average lifespan of 75 years to work with.
There’s certainly very little fun in predicting the worst and invariably being right; the fact is, I resent it.
No: Darwinian models of competition, applied to animals which compete with cunning instead of muscle-mass, tooth and claw, will invariably reward the Sociopath. Rewarded, the Sociopaths advance and multiply while actively persecuting, eradicating and/or converting non-Sociopaths with the power of institutional Sociopathy. The World we know is a vision of Sociopaths, run by Sociopaths and designed to produce more Sociopaths.
The only hope is to A) take a clear-eyed measure of the situation and B) work for Fundamental Change by out-breeding Sociopaths. The biggest Lie going is that meaningful change… essential change… can happen in the span of one life. The fuckers would have you believe it can happen with one American Presidential election! How cynical is that?
We’re talking fucking centuries, Comrades. Three or four hundred years minimum.
(as previously noted, most non-Berlin photos on TET now come from elsewhere via THIS PLACE)
E(US)TACE AND HIS IRON BUTTERFLY
Read this excerpt from an article in the NYer and, if you have seen the videoclip which is being described, ask yourself what you think of the NYer and its attempt to spin the video clip in a “two sides to every story” way (are there two sides to every story in child molesting, too?):
Surely that last line is a joke.
REMEMBER WHEN OIL SPILLS WERE GOOD?
COMRADE DJ SENSEI NEIL BEING OOT-AND-ABOOT
(Bloomsday salute)
A FROZEN MOMENT OF GOOEY GOODNESS
I like the blog post, the responding comment and the accompanying picture, too
QUOTE OF THE DAY; HE SHITS ON THE INNOCUOUS GNOMIC
POP SOME CORN AND LACE YOUR SPRITE WITH LSD
PSY FI DOUBLE-FEATURE
BECAUSE IT’S PSY FI MONTH AT TET
HOMO ZERO
PROLOGUE: I am Born, Elvis Reports to Nixon, Primates and Bladder Infections, Fatidic Frank, a Schwinn is Taken, How Dietary Habits affect the Flavor and Bouquet of Mexican emissions, A Glimpse of the Primordial One in Pedal-Pushers, Hippie-Do’s Aflame
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CHAPTER ONE: Oh Fuck
CHAPTER TWO:
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PSY FI MONTH
AT TET’S BUNKER PAGODA: THE RESCUED TEXT
file under FORTEAN HERMENEUTICS
This is a delicious old text from the brighter days of the Cold War. A rich and swoon-inducing vintage. Narratives have flavors and smells (as well as tints, temperatures and rhythms) and this particular narrative is a classic of cedar wood and leather. There’s the inherited whiff of HG Wells-era “ripping yarn” to it, too… snifters of brandy and wingback chairs as filtered through the sober Jesuitical data-speak proper to an officer in the mid-century Air force. This is from a “Flying Disc” narrative and is made all-the-more wonderful for being presented as fact roughly 60 years ago…
UNCLE CRONENBERG’S DO’S and DON’T of MODERNIST DATING
brought to you by Psy Fi month at TET
Looks like something an Aryan might stuff into livestock but don’t let that stop you, Doc
DREAR DIARY
Beloved is off on a glamorous gig in a far-flung Megalopolis (Frankfurt… great etymology, btw), meaning Offsprung and I are going it alone for 24 hours here at Augustine Ranch. Comrade Barry will be swinging by with promised treasures from Korea in the afternoonish to heal our pain. Beloved is looking incandescently beautiful these days and all of us can only hope that Offsprung isn’t about to be siblinged owing to my aversion to married condoms (which are not, in any case, anything like the condoms cited in comment #154 in anywise other than brute capacity). The family-as-trinity is by far our ideal config and we’re baffled by friend-couples who go for seconds after the first kid is 2… for, surely, that second kid-quake, just when the romance is nearly-recuperated from the paradigm-shifts entailed by the first, means the sex life is doomed to go in the back of a drawer behind nubby candles, old receipts, chapstick, pennies and long-dead AA batteries…?
Touching detail: last night, after Offsprung took Winnie and Tigger to bed, I was reading up on Nikola Tesla (a boyhood crush) into the wee hours then took a break and walked into the other room with a PC in it and found Beloved reading up on Edgar Cayce (or somesuch odd material). Delightful!
one of my recent fave phots of Beloved
UPDATE (4pm-ish):
Just idly Googled Edgar Cayce and fell upon a page of saucy-smug debunking, including this delicious bit of unwitting support (I’m sure it’s just a coincidence) for Cayce’s Mythos:
The science students reading this will, by now, be chuckling knowingly. Why?
Otherwise known as a Laser. Which uses (or used, in 1958), at its core, a “cylindrical prism… used to gather and focus… energy”.
Spooky-good.
UPDATE (10:28 pm):
MART ‘N WILLI: A 2-LINE KOAN-PLAY
NAME ONE THING COOLER THAN KENYAN PSY FI
we’ll just have to ignore the unfortunate fact that the producers involved had something to do with the toe-curlingly racist District 9 for, Lo, when a THX 1138-like Psy Fi flick directed by a Kenyan woman features a black South African actress as the lead, we shall gladly take what we can fooking get
aye, and: consider the bitingly-fresh beauty of the lithe black, sexy-as-all-fuck lead in this film and ask yourself why we allow the fact that most of the black female image-models the Nu Nazi Media present are either fat, asexual, wig-wearing or mulatto?
GNOMENCLATURE
A long-time stealth-Comrade from the South Eastern United States (the only Comrade in that neck of the planetary woods, in fact) writes:
The new term shall therefore be LORKER.
THE RE-RUN
the heart-breaking nautilus
a poem
1. Swan
But why not, said Swan. His nickname was Beef. Why not what, said Carne Rand, the fucking rich boy, taking a seat. Swan said, Why does it always have to be sinister, the shadowy cabal? Why can’t it be good? Why can’t there be good cabals that are shadowy and doing good. Working on some kind of generational plan for changing the total consciousness paradigm of a civilization the way that bad people have? They’ve got their secret societies and masons and handshakes or whatever so why can’t we have ours? The unbroken line of intent thing. Right? Eight hundred years of intent is a powerful thing. Knowledge is power. Supposedly. But knowledge is only power if you withhold it, right? But what if the withholders were doing it for nice reasons for a change? Noble reasons. We could start now.
Swan continued: remember when you were joking about why can’t we bring back the Afro?
Carne smiled. That particular remark had been inspired by a particular porno.
Swan said, well, imagine. Years from now we’re out of college, successful in the careers we have chosen. Say we’re worth a few million each. No, more. Like, say, thirty to fifty million each. That’s not impossible. It’s not unreasonable to assume.
Carne tipped back in his chair with the bristly back of his shaved head in the cradle of his meaty interlocked hands and his smile size increased. Swan wanted to tell him I’m responsible for that chair if you crack the legs. It came with the dorm.
Swan said say we chose a very young black girl who shows some talent. Get her at a young age. She’s still tender and slender. We sponsor a whole lifestyle of proper diet and really fine education. Part of the deal is that she doesn’t straighten her hair. Ever. She never straightens her hair. She grows tall and fine with this stupendous Afro and a gift at singing and she’s been groomed with more, you know, I don’t know, like, a 16th century courtesan-at-Versaille-or-something… versed in many languages and playing the harpsichord or, okay, the saxophone and the fine art of conversation and what not; we’ve invested a few million into making her this renaissance kind of black chick with an IQ you could choke a horse on and, but, yes, she can sing the paint off a Cadillac. And don’t forget she’s got this stupendous fucking Afro and we buy the best songwriters and producers money can buy. Let’s call her Super Sister. We buy Super Sister a number one in the charts kind of career, essentially. And she would be this massive influence. Black girls would stop straightening their hair and eating at the kitchen of the McDonald’s plantation and they’d be taking harpsichord lessons to emulate her. Whatever. All for just a few million dollars and the invisible machinations of a shadowy cabal for good. I mean. Fuck. Why not?
Carne’s eyes were closed by now and he looked almost asleep in his chair. The smile froze nicely.
Why not indeed, he said.
2. Victor
Swan’s trip to the WC has levels to it. There are fixations about not sitting square on the seat. For one thing the horror of the flush-wave dolphin-nosing his sweet little hair-purged balls. He tries to time evacuations to coincide with home-time but from time to time there is no getting around it and it comes in public, the call, sometimes, with importunate timing. The call is a widescreen mountaintop scene of monks blowing hard on spiraling five-meter horns filled with concrete. Swan thinks I’m reading the wrong tips about diet again.
Swan excuses himself with this kind of head-bow mis-gesture to the black or mulatto executive with something somehow Japanese about her (the suit? the seal-sleek hair? the sexual haze of death she marches through?) and moves with what he thinks of as fuckworthy grace through the point de capitoned leather of the doubledoors and down the out-of-body corridor toward the light. The door to the water closet you normally need the emperor’s touchbutton code for is propped yea-open with the black or mulatto janitor’s serf-bucket so Swan edges sort of sideways through the gap stepping over the bucket to justify entering by not actually opening or otherwise touching the actual matter of the door or the doorframe. Like an asymptote or something. He fantasizes swearing on a Bible that he did not open or touch this door. He fantasizes a baffled plainclothesmen finding no prints. He fantasizes Peter Falk giving him a sidelong glance of flummoxed admiration. The mere-mortals’ water closet is a whole flight down. And then he achieves his disappointing revelation which is that the forbidden water closet is identical to the water closet he should have traveled a whole flight down to and then comes the secondary impact of the epiphany that the difference would normally be him just not fucking being here. He is why the door is usually locked.
The body is not a machine it’s a community of machines. The gears of Swan’s shit machine are engaged and it is, of course, the end, not the beginning, of a process, an intestinal effort activated perhaps in the middle of that lecture-pretending-to-be-chit-chat from the black or mulatto with something somehow Japanese about her. The end-segment of the process becomes a process. The end of the process becomes a process in its own right with an arc and accoutrements. You can break down the stations of the cross into interlocking “stations of the cross”. The skull-white throne of Golgotha. He tries to remember those care-free college days. He visualizes a heart-breaking nautilus. Fibonacci.
…And then he will have to wipe and he will have to look at the result each time he wipes because if you don’t look you won’t know how much you’ll have to keep looking and wiping. You expunge or wrap and re-wrap the memory of the streaks and the smells and later walk into a restaurant pretending not to know or have a clue exactly how those fritters will end up. The notion that the planet is a closed-system nauseates him when he dwells on it. There are planets out there with zero shit. Swan thinks I’m getting ahead of myself here I haven’t even shit and I’m thinking about wiping.
The knees are bathed in milklight. The knees appear deceased. His knees are actually bearing weight as though he’s waiting for a starter’s pistol. He wants to groan and pant and finally give birth.
Very little of his weight is on the seat when the man they call VHR or The Master of Disaster or Death and Taxes comes in coughing. This is an entity that nobody has ever said hush to. This is a despot on the throne since before he could walk. He farts down a suit leg at the urinal shaking the leg. Swan should not be in here and withholds final delivery for fear of the telltale plop. A lush (even woodland) splash and gurgle on worn urinal candy of impossible duration is Swan’s warning to hold his plop in. The stream goes on and on for superhuman units without reaching the trickle part when VHR’s phone rings suddenly Beethoven’s Fifth so loud and stereo that Swan kind of lifts up off the seat and bangs the right elbow on the sharp-cornered high-security roll-dispenser. Blood he won’t be aware of until later as he goes over in his mind the terrifying conversation he is over-hearing that will seem to want to kill his mind as he is hearing it.
3. Elizabeth Houghton-Rand
I couldn’t fucking believe I was having a serious quote philosophical debate about whether or not to violate, abuse, torture and otherwise mortally fuck with a seventeen-year-old heiress for the sake of a political movement my comrades had as yet not quite managed to convince me even existed outside the endless late night bull-sessions we had in some white boy’s dorm-room before we’d even met her. White boy pays for the keg and and he’s suddenly what, Malcolm X? I kept kind of muttering under my breath to myself that this is really happening, guy. This is not a dream. That this shit was only an illusion to the extent that life itself is and waking up from this weirdass scenario will be impossible to achieve by any means less meaningful than death itself which is not a thought I even wanted to sneak up on. Let alone exemplify. On channel 7 news. She was passed-out on an air mattress in the fucking bathroom of Kwame and Dookie’s shabby-grandiose off-campus housing and it was not, as yet, any kind of a crime, no matter what Walter Cronkite tells you.
And then Josephus… Josephus… I remember wondering who had met that quote psycho first. Okay. He wasn’t Kwame’s friend. I asked Dookie later and Dookie said fuck no. I never knew the bumpkin existed before x-moment in time which I’m saying was scripted. With that big-assed bloody dick? Like he was seriously pulling a sword out the belly of an infidel and so forth. Like what am I seeing? Plus taking forever.
4. Josephus
Nobody stopped you from taking your dinner trays to your dormitory because you were black. You were taking your dinner trays, to your dormitory, because you were black. Nobody stopped you, from taking your dinner trays to your dormitory, because you were black. You were at Moorbury College because you were black. Your scholarship to Moorbury depended on your being black but you would not have been at Moorbury without a scholarship if you had not been black and needing a special way into a college that wouldn’t have been interested in you if you hadn’t been black. You put the tray on the bare mattress of the narrow bed in your single room and sat beside it and winced through the nasty work of escaping your snow-clogged boots while your dinner cooled. You had to remember to buy a thick rough doormat. You had wanted a thick rough doormat since the first time you saw one at the age of seventeen. As a result of that program.
You needed matches and canned ravioli for emergencies and a can opener. You would also need to buy a pillow case and sheets. Your first Student Aid check would come on Thursday which was a four-day wait. You’d been sleeping on a naked pillow on a raw mattress under a beach towel for three days in your long underwear with the heat cranked up. A sock hit the cement floor with living weight. You saw that you hadn’t clipped your toenails since the week before taking the two-day bus to Moorbury and added a toenail-clipper to the mental list. Thursday was also shrimp or steak dinner day. Tonight was cheeseburger and tater tots or home fries and fruit salad with chocolate mousse for dessert. You had three envelopes of powdered strawberry milkshake drink left in your suitcase.
You had never tasted chocolate mousse but you had heard about it. You had always assumed they set those on fire but that was another dessert. You noticed that the dark room was not very dark and even in the dark your foot looked very black and shiny because it was wet because the boots weren’t made for snow. The movie poster on the wall you faced as you peeled your other wet sock off was just out of reach. You had gotten it for free during your unusually late orientation and had not seen the film it was advertising nor heard of the actors appearing on it. They did not look famous to you.
You needed six “C” batteries for the cassette recorder you kept in the box it had come in and some more 60-minute tapes and added this to the to-buy list and reached for the dinner tray with your legs folded under. In a soft shell of doubled long-underwear you hadn’t removed in five days. You had come to your orientation two months late. Snow blown straight through the floodlight cutting across your view of the campus from the dorm room window provided the illusion the whole empty building was in motion like a majestic ship. The cafeteria was crowded and brightly loud and you had walked right out with your dinner tray, no questions asked.
You left the light off and sat on the bed eating the food you were embarrassed to admit was the best food of your life and you watched the snow. You wondered what it meant that no one had stopped you. You wondered if you had a blank check for anti-social behavior out of fear or compassion or same old disregard. Through the veil of the snow and at the other end of the very long walk dividing the icing-caked lawns lit by haloed lights at broad intervals like gas lamps from a Dickens engraving was the sharp black geometry of the new Moorbury chapel which had gone up in the 1960s. Stained glass at the core of the jarring shape caught needles of light from cars turning the corner in the distance occasionally heading for town or St. John’s to the south. The older chapel was not visible from your dormitory window and was on the older side of the campus where all the buildings were actually ivy-drenched scale-model cathedrals and you felt the unspoken sense of off-limits. You had walked over just once during your unusual two-month-late orientation to have some papers signed in an office by a woman who seemed surprised the whole time you were standing in her office in the grand old building. Surprised or ashamed. Or maybe she wanted to hug you. The tater tots were delicious. When you had bought a thick rough doormat on Thursday you would feel you had accomplished something. The first doormat you ever saw was in front of Victor Rand’s mansion.
NIBBLING ON THE CANDY-GLASS DIVIDER
THE PARIS REVIEW has a newish blogthing and it’s my favorite comment-thread playground at the moment. The commenters there are all some degree of literate [one day an enterprising young doctoral candidate is going to do a dissertation on the wildly-varying socio-intellectual registers of comment threads... compare the PR thread with a thread at YAHOO NEWS and the resultant vertigo is trippy; and, ps: a comment thread at the latter site, recently, clocked 175,000 comments! This isn't worthy of investigation as a meme-sack or paradigm?] and the articles are, largely, worthy. I could do without the World Cup articles and the accounts of PR vs VF softball games but I realize that young men who devote too much (or any) of their day to Things Literary are forced to assert their masculinity. But we digress…
So: PR is doing Terry Southern month and it’s lots of fun. Good old Terry! Terry was a red-warm shadow over my 70s-era coming-of-age. I was an avid reader of Terry-inflected/infected National Lampoon (I’ve managed to save one vintage copy of that glorious rag, from ’75, as I’ve mentioned before) and into Michael O’D's work on vintage Saturday Night Live (Terry and Mikey were chums and they overlapped, attitudinally) and Kubrick’s Terry-scripted Dr. Strangelove was/is, of course, a seminal text.
This is from a recent Terry Southern Month post at PR… the article-writer’s reminiscence about a lunch with Terry; I don’t so much take exception to it as think that such things require analytical (vs hagiographic) illumination:
and then:
To which I respond at the blog:
This is just the patient work of nibbling away at those candy-glass walls (between people of various races/genders/classes) that really shouldn’t be there. LITERARY FICTION and its contiguous territories and conversations should not be a clubby preserve of one particular demographic, with a corner of the Genre-ghetto reserved for the non-male and non-straight and non-white. More women should do this nibbling and chipping; more of the Poor; more Queers; more so-called Persons of Colour.The key is to do the work in a spirit of gregarious lucidity instead of opaque, self-defeating rage.
UPDATE: still waiting for an Intellectual Sister to take on the “model poon” riff
UPDATE: corollary cool
How about the word “JAZIS”…?
A PLEA for QUALITY CONTROL
Tom Brady, over at Scarriet, is still very busy being a champion of retrograde literary practices… such as quasi-philosophical doggerel, as in the following:
The first couplet, as a stand-alone, is okay… it’s actually nearly good, and says everything Brady needs to say on the subject:
Why not just leave it at that? The rest of the poem is an exercise in padding which argues, against itself, and Brady’s mission, that quasi-philosophical doggerel (on an overly-colonized topic) is the kind of kitsch that framed needlepoint cries out to serve. Tom has been inadvertently hammering this point home over the course of the past dozen poems of his that have popped in my In Box (I guess by commenting there, a while back, I became a subscriber).
This is either a cautionary tale about the American tendency towards Messianic Salesmanship (or Visionary Hucksterism: Tom is Branding his knee-jerk Antiquarianism, I suppose) or a cautionary tale about the too-casual approach that too many Blahgs take towards Quality Control.
I’ve stated before that I think Tom is an intermittently-interesting Thinker (this, for example, is a pretty good gag) . But his Pomes need lots of work.
HOW WE LIVED
THE ROVING BUNKER: A COMRADE DJ REPORTS
The Angela Davis Experience in Berlin, June 20, 2010
I guess in the USA they would peg her as an “icon of the radical left”, a lead figure of the black panthers and vice-presidential candidate for the Communist Party USA. But stamping her with the rabble-rouser seal of pop-aganda approval makes it easy to avoid the complexity and real struggle of her life, which will prove to have more influence on world history than the resumé of her Birmingham boot-licking paisana, Condoleezza Rice.
Angela Davis: a student of Adorno and Marcuse, fired from her Professorship at UCLA by Ronald Reagan personally … a leader in both the Black Panther and Communist Parties, and put on the FBI’s ten most-wanted list… after being arrested, her bail was paid by a farmer from Caruthers, California and part of her legal defense expenses were paid for by the Presbyterian Church . Yes, the world has changed since then.
Which is why the bizarre mix of the audience here in Berlin was pretty fascinating: as young pupils in East German grade school, many had written postcards to Angela in prison as part of the state-sponsored free-Angela campaign. But also the former old-guard of stodgy East German Party-soldiers were present… as well as a new generation of German people of colour, born and bred in a “reunited” Germany that obviously still hasn’t come to terms with the fact that Germany is not as homogeneous as it once had been… or that maybe the wrong side won the Cold War? The questions revealed much about the questioners: Did she still consider herself a communist? Wasn’t she naïve “back then” to believe that revolution was possible? But Angela Davis consistently hurled the audience back into the present: maybe she was naïve “back then” but thankfully so, because otherwise nobody would ever have mustered the strength for organization and struggle that did change things… and proceeded to explain her own experience in community-building and militant action.
A good woman.
Excellent reportage, Comrade DJ Sensei Ninetto! I’m sorry I missed Ms. Davis… I was busy cooking Offsprung her breakfast.
You didn’t mention that her response to the question “[does] she still consider herself a communist?” got your solitary applause until the others (the Germans always need permission) took your cue…
Let’s see if I can find the video clip of that moment…
RE: The Cold War: I’m of the still-hardening opinion that there was more (or less) to that conflict than met the eye and that much of it was a pantomime being put on for us Serfs… by both “sides”. When you look back and watch Nikki Kruschev behaving obligingly like the bellicose bumpkin to the delight of a very easy-going Tricky Dick, it strikes you that the supposed dichotomy there was as theatrical as the one between William Jefferson Clinton and George HW Bush Sr during the ’92 election: these men weren’t fierce fucking rivals. Bush was Clinton’s mentor. And we fell for that shit like a ton of bricks.
Supposedly “fighting communism” gave them as much of an excuse to fuck with sovereign nations (ie, kill their democratically-elected leaders and replace them with Friedmanite puppets) as “fighting radical Islam” gives them to fuck with Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, et al, now (and just as the Taliban were armed, and are still funded, by the CIA, or whatever wing of the Sociopathocracy, Kruschev was on the payroll, too). I’m not saying there aren’t/weren’t True Believers of either the Communist or Islamist faith. I just think the True Believers were/are out of the loop and the real game is being crafted by the super-cynical sociopaths (of various national persuasions) at the Top. The really tricky part being that the game always changes. Note, for example, that now that Russia is an openly capitalist state, the guy in charge ain’t acting obligingly goofy*.
PS My own little Hypernoiac addendum: covert cooperation between Moscow and Washington would certainly explain the fact that the supposed-enemy never blew the whistle on the Apollo hoax!
*Actually, let’s go into this issue at length, later: the Cold War-era USSR was a Communist society with a Capitalist government. The “Revolution” was “betrayed” at a very early stage… as such “revolutions” usually are. The question is not, “Which system works best, Communism or Capitalism?”… the question is, “Was genuine Communism in Russia ever possible?”
Check out this hokum; this staged event:
HOW WE LIVED 2
Porn was a lot more interesting twenty-to-forty years ago when the so-called smutty magazines were windfalls one might discover (in bundled heaps) while taking a shortcut down some alley. Porn was only for sale in the sleaziest of despair-soaked shops but there was an otherwise-respectable place where I bought expensive photo magazines (like ZOOM) and new-wavey imports (like FACE) and in the very back was an entrance with a beaded curtain that was reputed to lead to the porno. One had to stand near the French, Italian and Russian imports (mostly fashion magazines) to get a look through the beaded curtain but I would have died of shame to actually pass through the Sad Man Portal. One never saw handsome, confident young men or women go there. One only ever felt anxiety-free, standing near that threshold, if in the company of one’s pretty girlfriend.
I saw the movie CAFE FLESH (script: Jerry Stahl) in 1983 or 1984 on an ex-girlfriend’s VCR while apartment-sitting; I’d looked under her bed for goodies and there it was, a videocassette in a lurid box. It was the first porno movie (if you don’t count anything by Pasolini) I ever saw and the only one that ever got me all het up. It was absurdo-erotic lyricism and I haven’t seen anything like it since. In comparison, the 21st-century XXXX being fire-hosed into your face online is cruel, bland and horrifying.
I can’t see clips from CAFE FLESH without thinking of Olde New York and the original INTERVIEW magazine. CAFE FLESH can make you laugh during your orgasm and that’s a sensation to covet…
GNOMENCLATURE 2
I shall call the stealth-comrades LORCAS, then. Is very nice, no?
Nice. Listen with a decent set of speakers (or headphones), Comrades Lorcas and Explicit:
IN HONOR of PSY FI MONTH at TET:
THE NOVEL NOVEL
from
THE BROTHERLAND MIRACLES
my Psy Fi serial
13.
Down the spiraling drive they sail, smooth as a Haitian lawyer. All five in the land-galleon: Shem, Seth, Katryn, O’Sirus and Gwynneth, Gwynneth with her hands on her knees in the ergonometric circulating-gel-filled bucketseat between O’Sirus’s and Katryn’s, the sky so bright that only the van’s tinted, treated, polarized bubble windows can protect them. Shakuhachi music on the soundsystem. “Shakuhachi” means “one foot eight”, the standard length of a Shakuhachi. O’Sirus thinks wouldn’t it be embarrassing if our names were our measurements. The lavender sun is harsh on her arm despite the filtering window. Her arm is the color of an internal organ.
The landscaped estates at the top of the hill give way to large-but-crammed-together houses lower and then smaller, crammed-together houses intermingled with apartment buildings and transient-looking commercial spaces. The lower the van descends, the more pedestrians they see, like denizens of oceanic depths, colorful and cartoonish in their monstrousness, deceptively humorous-looking, weird in their movements, soundtracked by Shakuhachi.
O’Sirus is in a zone, watching but not seeing, hearing but not listening. Having to do with not coming, probably. She hasn’t come in weeks. Gwynneth is telling Katryn (quietly, in deference to the Japaneseness of the flute music) about her youth and how her life was changed immeasurably by personally meeting the most important unknown Civil Rights activist of the 21st century, Doctor Jonatha Shamton, who was in Duluth to give a series of lectures at the U. of D., where Gwynneth had a job in one of the campus bookstores, fifteen years old, ten years ago, stickering books when an exquisitely dark black woman of slight build, medium height, shiny shaved head, somewhere in the area of sixty years old, wearing those over-sized hoop earrings that black women with shaved heads favored, in the ‘60s and ‘70s, as an ornamental ersatz for hair and also wearing big round blackframed eyeglasses, making her look very much like a priestess of the circle or something, with her big round glinting lenses and swinging hoops and the perfectly curved back of her glistening skull… walked in.
-Good afternoon, Sister.
“I’d heard about black women calling each other sister, back in the day, but I’d never seen it happen before, especially not to me, because most people can’t even tell that I’m black, so that kind of threw me right there, but I was, I don’t know. I was flustered. I hadn’t even come out yet. All I knew was I didn’t like boys. It was like, greeting me that way, she was telling me things about myself I didn’t even know yet, and I was ready to listen.
“She said, Can you please direct me to your Jewish writers section. I told her we didn’t have one. She said, well, can you please direct me to your Polish writers section. I said we didn’t have one of those, either. She said, you mean Joseph Conrad and Philip Roth are just mixed in with all the other writers of literary fiction? With this, like, horrified look on her face. It was hysterical. I told her yes, that was the case. Then she took me by the hand… she actually grabbed my hand and it was the firmest, warmest, softest grip I ever felt… and she guided me to the African American Studies shelf in the back of the bookstore. She said, Then why are Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison and Langston Hughes and this Duke Ellington biography all crammed together in this little plantation over here?
“We walked back to the counter in front and she got her business card out and wrote down her room number at the hotel she was staying at and told me I should inform my manager at the bookstore that racial segregation was officially illegal in the United States of America, even in bookstores, and to call her and let her know how it went. So I called her after dinner. She said, hey, Gwynneth, thanks for calling, how did it go? I said, well, to make a long story short, I quit. She said, hmmm, I guess that means you’re working for me now.
“First, my job was showing her around Duluth while she was here, even though I didn’t have a driver’s license and couldn’t drive. We went by foot or public transportation. I showed her the lift bridge, our big tourist attraction, you know, the Statue of Liberty of Duluth, and she looked at me like I was a little dumb but kinda sweet and said, Why are you showing me this? I told her that it could be raised from 155 feet to 225 feet in under a minute and she laughed so hard I turned red. I didn’t know it, but my education had begun.
“How long did it take that old sharpie to get you?” asks Shem, physically unable to twist in her seat and therefore gloating at Gwynneth in the rearview. O’Sirus is not paying attention and did not happen to hear Doctor Shamton’s name. If she had she’d have considered the mention miraculous.
“Oh, I don’t know, a week or so,” answers Gwynneth, turning red. She flushes such delicate Japanese-like crushed-cherry-in-eggshell-colored-milk tints that Katryn wonders if Shem has triggered the appetizing blush on purpose. “But she was very respectful. No pressure or anything. You could kinda sense she was never what you’d call horny, so she kinda turned the whole thing into what I’d call an aesthetic experience.”
Everything’s a matter of scale. Chubby Gwynneth looks impossibly petite compared to the twin giants strapped in the front seats of the van. Katryn a trinket. Shem begins fiddling with a box full of bubble wrap and Seth begins what they all soon realize is some sort of presentation.
“Okay, because we’re on Sony’s early adopter VIP list, we got a cool toy in the mail the other day that I thought would be kinda kicky for us all to try out on this outing.”
Seth hands everyone in the back seats what appears to be retro-designed feline-style black horn-rimmed eyeglasses with smokey pink lenses. The galleon is steering itself, of course. Other than the fact that the stems of the glasses are a few millimeters thicker than the stems on normal glasses, and the lenses are smokey pink, and there are fine-mesh grilles on the stems near the ears, they look like normal glasses. Some new kind of phone? Everyone is tired of meeting new kinds of phones.
“They’re powered by movement and body heat; to keep them charged you just have to walk about thirty minutes a day. The average workout on a treadmill’ll do it.”
O’Sirus slips hers on. The lenses appear to have little or no magnifying power. “But what do they do?”
“The prototype name is Gyno-Encoded Reactive Telemetry. GERTY, for short. They might, like, change that after getting a little consumer feedback, but I hope not because I think it’s kinda cute.”
Katryn leans across Gwynneth’s lap towards O’Sirus and stage-whispers, “You look like a librarian named Edith in those.”
“Nothing’s happening.”
“They have to charge up for a while. Wait.”
They enter a tunnel fast and follow a spiral of recessed sodium lights upwards and upwards and round and round then heave into epiphany of virgin blue incandescence at such a drastic angle that O’Sirus suffers bellydrop vertigo. It’s like coming out of a long weird dream she immediately begins forgetting as they ring the roof of the lot looking for just the right place to park on, and as the galleon is finally parked and de-boarded and running through its checklist of function-altered adjustments, clicking and humming and off-gassing in microjets hissing through underside vents, the group gathers in a broad morning shadow at its side, all of them looking like librarians named Edith. They are standing on grid-painted asphalt overlooking Lake Superior; the top level of a parking complex filling, from the bottom up, since daybreak. The air is a spectacle of freshness; the gulls like feathers from a pillowfight; the moon a ghostly fingerprint on the invisible button that made the sun pop up. From the side of the roof they’re standing on it appears as though one could run fifty yards and hop off the opposite wall and land directly in the water. O’Sirus thinks that this is what this continent once had to offer, the vastness of unbroken vista, and now you only get it in slivers and flakes and soon enough not at all as everything goes interior, packed away in the space-saving storage of everyone’s sad little cell of private experience. What is an i-pod but a prison cell of music? What is a masturbation fantasy but a prison cell of sex? What is a snack but a prison cell of yummy?
…Where did that come from?
Seth is speaking. Now Shem adds something. They enter an express elevator that bears with unhuman grace the recordbreakingness of their party and drops with computered tolerance to earth. Modern elevators compared to their ancestors are like modern football players compared to those comically scrawny, middleaged guys in very little padding and leather helmets cavorting in newsreel footage of the ‘30s. Modern elevators are safe at roughly eight times the load. Never before have elevator engineers been tasked with imagining that eight people weighing a thousand pounds each are not unlikely to enter the same elevator all at once and expect a safe ride up or down. In fact, considering the upsurged flow of American tourists in various cities of Europe, the Society of German Elevator Engineers (Die Bundes-Genossenschaft der Fahrstuhltechniker) has convened a series of emergency symposia, all across the E.U., to address the problem. There’s even a convention, right there, in Duluth, in a building that happens to be along the route they will all be walking this morning, which is why I brought it up.
The elevator doors open and they file out. Shem and Katryn and Gwynneth up front, Seth trailing behind them, O’Sirus trailing behind everyone, the cool lotion of a shapely breeze mitigating the imposition of the sun’s male force. They are walking to the shop where Seth and Shem have ordered imported fabrics from a Muslim province of China. The fabric will go into the making of special garments to be worn by everyone in Shem and Seth’s wedding party. The fabric is so rare that it would be cheaper to tailor all 197 garments from twenty-dollar bills. O’Sirus is thinking about money.
WHY CAN’T JOHNNY or JENNIFER WRITE?
Roxane Gay, at a place called HTML GIANT, posted an essay, about the ins-and-outs of social networking vs editorial policy, called “I’ll Be There For You, Just Not in the Submission Queue”:
What struck me was a certain nicely-integrated smugness in the essay’s tone, which would be fine if the author of the piece were William Shawn or Dorothy Parker. One of the Zines cited in the piece is Smokelong Quarterly; clicking over to it, we find that the first story on the page is a sloppy piece of shit shaped with a sophomore’s plastic tools. It begins:
Not that we’re surprised that this text is crap. The next story I access on the site (written by a James Tad Adcox who is, himself, an editor at another Zine), begins:
It goes on for another five or six numbered paragraphs and does not, at any point, improve. Clicking over from there to the Zine that writer edits, I clicked on a piece posted on that Zine which linked to another Zine, where I read this, by a writer named Lydia Ship:
Which gets points for wandering out of the box, a little. But it’s not very good writing, despite the writer’s slightly-better Imagination. The entire story is a single paragraph about four times longer than this excerpt (the equivalent of about two pages) but Lydia couldn’t be bothered to make any of the sentences necessary; the tone is the conversational, idiomatically-standard tone we recognize from James Tad Adcox and other half-arsed writers here mentioned. Lydia lays it out a little differently (in run-ons, the clue that we are reading avant garde material) but it’s the same voice, which is not, in essence, different from the voices they chat, or order pizzas, with. It’s the voice of the descriptive passages in a screenplay which is, itself, the textual analog of someone describing the action on a television program, in real time, over the phone.
In Lydia’s author-bio we find mentions of all the Zines she’s published in, so I Google the first Zine mentioned (Night Train) and quote here the second story presented (short enough to review easily), on the front page of that Zine, by someone named Yvette Ward-Horner:
What we notice is the standard level of competency in English, which qualifies the writer to craft, say, a functional writer’s bio. The level of Invention is nil. There are no striking images or fresh metaphors or ironies/paradoxes/subtle jokes to turn the reading of the piece into anything resembling a pleasure. It is merely a fictional data dump.
What is this? An epidemic of people-who-weren’t-born-to-be-writers writing. Imagine the fashion industry being suddenly glutted with people whose talent in/fascination with fashion was limited to the fact that they wore shorts in the summer and parkas in the winter and knew enough not to match polka dots and plaids. The plague of excerpted texts above, remember, was stuff that made it through the merciless filters of high-minded editors like Roxane Gay.
To get our bearings, let’s read something by a born-writer who became a great writer through self-critical diligence:
Only a genuine writer could have come up with that (I won’t insult anyone’s knowledge or intelligence by naming the writer). It only takes one sentence to tell, doesn’t it? But who can tell anymore?
I left this comment on the blogpost at HTML GIANT:
Let the hate (or indifference) begin.
UPDATE:
DEPT. OF CUTBACKS
In the cruel 15 years since the premature victory-lap of Experience, Mart has gone from fluffing Saul Bellow and getting French kisses in return to… being fluffed by Will Self and letting Will lick his dentures.
Cursory analysis reveals the weak assertion inherent in that “seemed”, plus the diplomatic ambiguity of referring to any writer as the offspring of any other two writers: yes, but is the kid any good? I give it two years, tops, before Will turns on Mart with a tepid review of the next, or the next after next, disappointment.
you have too much time
and you waste it
[ed.'s note: we have to be amazed that we've managed to avoid this kind of idiot's fart comment for all this time, Comrades Lorcas and Explicit! Consider this one framed and hung over the Shytter]
IN HONOR of PSY FI MONTH at TET:
more of THE NOVEL NOVEL
from
THE BROTHERLAND MIRACLES
my Psy Fi serial
14. (excerpt)
The Quaker churchbell at nearby School House Lane says six with authority of the long, long dead. Kimbo eases the closet open, tugs a tumble of sheets and blankets and pillows out like textile guts. A bed takes shape on the floor near the rocking chair she hasn’t rocked in for years. Who has the patience in 1977 for working so hard to go nowhere? And other pre-mechanical technologies. A book of poems face-down beside the bed’s putative head. A water glass. In drama they call it dressing the set. Convincing precautions against mother having that dyke-inspired nervous breakdown or worse. Backing out the room screaming whores of Babylon, first thing in the morning.
As if it’s not bad enough I’m a Mulatto, she thinks, mussing a pillow and appraising her handiwork. Now I’m a Lesbian, too. The two dumbest words that she knows and she is now both. Kim is now officially a Mulatto Lesbian and Lyndsay is a Jew Dyke but there is a difference. Lyndsay is also a writer, which trumps everything. Wipes the slate clean. Lyndsay is a writer. The root of the word “Mulatto” is mule. Writer trumps everything.
Mother is insufferably cheerful at breakfast. Looks younger than either of the other two. The other two, the Jew and Mulatto, look tired. Kim’s denim hat. Lyndsay’s round head and weak chin. Looks like she’s melting into the pudding of her boobs. Mother is getting her Masters at Temple. She passes a laden plate. Her dimples, her mint-green eyes, her red satin hair. You’d never dream of fucking your mother but you’re forced to admit to seeing why others would want to. Those high hard tiny tits and perfect tan pancakes of hers. What is a pancake in the Linnean system of classification? Eggs and flour in the shape of a sand dollar: half animal, half plant. Plantimal. Having never lived, is it really dead? I can’t eat these undead things, thinks Kimbo, as Lyndsay chops and spears and shovels hers in. Disgusting. It doesn’t occur to Kim that Lyndsay would rather chew than talk just now. Or make eye contact.
Hunched over her plate, she forks the plantimal pancakes in. Mother is talking about a certain Doctor Shamton who leads the seminar called Psycho-Geographic Approaches to Folk Discourse and Literature 101 she’s so excited about auditing. It was three years ago to the day that Kim looked across the very breakfast table at her mother and was flattened by the realization that mother’s Caucasian. And I’m not.
“I just think it’s the most fascinating course. We were analyzing Jack and the Beanstalk? I’ll bet you never knew it’s an allegory about adultery as a tool of class oppression! You have to unravel the puzzle with what Doctor Shamton calls textual mirroring. More jam? Try this one, sweetie. You’ll love this on the pancakes. So. Jack’s beans: well, those are obviously semen, but not his. The beans are in exchange for money; reverse that and it means he’s achieving a social or economic advantage from turning a blind eye to his wife’s affair. Or forcing her to. The beanstalk is phallic but it doesn’t grow up, it grows down, into the earth, which is an obvious womb symbol, not only for the fertility thing but the notion of earth, of dirtiness. The giant is the opposite of a giant: a fetus. Jack smells the ‘blood of an Englishman’… the man from the ruling class who gets his wife pregnant. It’s really quite something. We ran through a reading of War of the Worlds, too, in which the aliens are crypto-white men. Drink your orange juice before the vitamins die, Kimbaud.”
“This Doctor Shamton wouldn’t happen to be black, would he?” asks Kim, finishing her orange juice with a hostile flourish.
“Kimbo, darling, what would that have to do with anything?”
That glow on mother’s face.
They are heading for the trolleystop on Wayne Avenue in a pico font drizzle of commas, periods, ellipsis and dashes when Lyndsay reaches for Kim’s hand. Like it’s natural. Fuck. And now their arms swing stiffly, falsely, hard against the rhythm of the stride. Lyndsay’s big-knuckled grip. Omnivorous bossy Jew tit rapist genius writer grip.
“You want to know the first time I noticed how beautiful you are?” asks Lyndsay. She speaks with the militantly naive tones of an adopted child. The Philly rain beads her face with dark soft glass and she is staring in shy triumph forward. Her neck stretches out over chugging breasts, comically intrepid. Human breasts are the largest, proportionally, of any mammal’s and Lyndsay’s are larger than most. Each is the size of an over-suckled infant; each breast is big enough to have its own tits. They clamor and kick under her oversized shirt and unbuttonable red raincoat and you could see how a caveman would think of himself as wealthy for owning them and how he’d be willing to put the energy into doing so. She would’ve been a hit on the primordial veld. In fact she looked not unlike the Venus of Willendorf, that stone age pinup, all dimple and bulge. With a longer neck.
Dressing for breakfast, matter-of-factly nude, Lyndsay had looked gravitybound and turtly and exactly like one of her trademark self-mocking mammophallus cartoons, sending a hot pang of pity through the skinny girl who was stealing a peek while pretending to do morning yoga. Kim hadn’t even sucked on one of them yet, unless she’d done it in her sleep. She doesn’t want to. She’d hefted one, though. Her own nipples are sore as cherries. Glancing from passersby to oncoming traffic and back again, expecting a hurled bottle or epithet or hail of bullets to come teach them a lesson. The raincoat is such a bright red vinyl that she might as well be wearing a helmet equipped with a turret light. The rain isn’t beading on Kim’s face (is it the Ph of mulatto skin?) but adhering like a clammy mask and she thinks how in yet another way am I different from the white women in my life.
“It was in the Quaker pool. We must have been seven or eight because your father was still around. I remember how he looked from the point of view of underwater. He was standing at the edge of the pool in his white suit like a celebrity in a funhouse mirror. We were both underwater, you and I, and, Kim, listen, I looked and saw you floating there near me with your hair like a cloud of ink and you just seemed like the most astonishing sloe-eye siren to me. I was so awe-struck to the degree that I almost drowned. That’s really truly when I noticed how beautiful you are, although I had already loved you for so many years.” Laughs. “Listen, I was never as innocent as I seemed.”
She squeezes Kim’s hand love-hard and then harder and Kim waits for the other shoe to fall. The red-hot penny to drop. For pedestrians to stop mid-stride and gawk and sneer or for some bluecollar super-ape with a pumping shoulder to crank down the driverside window on his beater in a clotted grey cloud (the exhaust traveling faster than the car itself) and shout what the whole street is already thinking. Kim expects it with such a force that when it comes it will be a relief, she figures. The tension is killing. Like being pregnant with a bomb set to detonate at the moment of birth.
“Oh, my love, I’m so glad you like the book, my love, because I think I would’ve died if you hadn’t, because, is it safe to confess now that I wrote it for you, about us? About my feelings for you and how beautiful you are. I’m Kith and you’re Kynna in the book, as you could probably guess. I’m the Kith character, the boy, sent away to Brotherland, writing letters to his beloved. And you’re Kynna, the beloved. Didn’t you recognize yourself in her description? Kith writes that his beloved is the color of moonlight on the pages of his precious old diary. The color of moonlight on inky paper. That’s you.”
Something about Philadelphia is so hideously apt when it’s wet.
Kim, eyes on the oily street, says, “The description of the Brotherland camp is pretty convincing. Does it all take place on an island or something? Kith’s part of it, I mean. Because that part wasn’t clear.”
“Listen, Kim, Kim, why are you ignoring the issue?”
“Fuck, man. What issue?”
A car is coming up behind them, two wheels on the curb, at the rough speed of an untalented hundred yard dasher, muffler sparking the stone.
***
When males in the world of Lyndsay’s novel, Kith and Kynna, reach thirteen, they are by law required to take a blood test. The test is called a Singh-Draper. The results are read in twenty columns, each column scored on a scale from one to twelve. Any value higher than six appearing in any of the twenty columns is considered a red flag; a “typical” male scores red flags across the board and is required by law to report to a Brotherland Transit Station within three months of receiving his test results. Therefrom to be transferred by secure federal transport to Brotherland, to remain for a period of no less than thirteen, and no more than twenty five, years. This is for the protection of Society, and it works. There is no rape, theft, bullying, battery, sexual harassment, murder or graffitti in the cities or the villages. All of that has been moved to Brotherland. The most harmful of the immemorial patrimonies have been moved, en bloc, to Brotherland. The Arts flourish. An open sense of community and public space, to be utilized at zero risk at any time of day or night or season of the year, flourishes. Does every male who enters Brotherland return from it? This is a controversial question.
Studies have determined that even such physical violence as had been perpetrated by females of pre-Brotherland eras had been, without fail, a result of the proximity and influence of males. Male violence, like female materialism, is an outmoded trait that had been essential to early humanity’s survival on the neolithic African playing field. Male violence, like female materialism (the fascinating parallel being that each gender-specific trait was known to excite mimetically negative behavior in susceptible members of the colleague gender), has no place in civilization. Female materialism, unlike male violence, has been shown to vanish when subjects are placed in an environment in which the trait proves irrelevant (ie, equal distribution of wealth). Conversely: destructive male violence is irremediable; intrinsic. That male violence wanes with age leads to the adjusted standardized scientific, legal and ethical guidelines defining the mature male, greatly more responsive to moderate chemo-therapeutic conditioning, as belonging to a fifth gender, official taxonomy pending. Colloquially, though: Softies, grampies, halfmen, euns, nomo’s, shufflers, danglers, bachelors, capotes, custards, doughcocks, sweeties, hardnots, deadballs, uncs, uncas, groanas…
Weissman imagines a suburban nationscape with its hi-tech hidden to the extent that it’s indistinguishable from magic. Blackbox super-tech. The houses are pseudo-woodframed but it’s a wood that can’t burn; the automobiles are lightweight and intelligent and can’t crash or pollute or exceed the modest speed limits; there are no guns; no cash to steal, no conspicuous wealth to envy: it’s a quasi-socialist, round-edged suburban culture devoted to peace and safety. Peace and Safety forming a sort of secular religion against a backdrop of unofficial, vaguely discouraged, nevertheless tolerated, vaguely animist spirituality for which the hieroglyph of a tree, bearing an unknown (almost human-shaped) fruit, is the accepted underground symbol.
There is no cash but there are two-piece notes and notational symbols called “Favor Credits”, a casual and personalized system of currency. There are Artisanal Malls where shops line both sides of a street and along which candles, books, honey, cutlery, textiles, decorative artworks, scented oils, recorded music, self-pleasure aids, and so forth, are bartered for Favor Credits. Acronymed as Facre. A good-faith system of barter which would be impossible in an aggressive, competitive (read: male-dominated) society.
The houses. They’re more rounded than what you’d know in patriarchies. Rounded so rain runs right off without the need for roof gutters and the faux-wood is flexible, like a very hard rubber if you were to kick it, but you never would. The material is cool in the summer and warm in the winter. You don’t paint them but they’re dyed. Indigo, Amarinth, Saffron, Bisque… the material is deep-dyed, subtle, lambent with color. The material is the color it is all the way through, which is what you’d discover if you cut it (though you wouldn’t). From an aerial vantage (commercial zeppelin travel: slow, sky-protecting, graceful) the neighborhoods look like stamp collections.
Adult sexuality is self-pleasuring. It’s okay to do it in public. Not while driving or teaching the young. The world that Kith was born into.
Kith and Kynna were lovers from a riverside neighborhood in the Midwest, before Kith took the Singh-Draper and the Singh-Draper said he was a man. Kynna, at sixteen, was three years the elder, a girl of great beauty, inside and out. Kith had fathered seven children (two male) in the three months before packing his things, in November, and setting out in Sara’s car for the transit station. Fathering these children was both his duty and his right, a coming-of-age thing. The losing-their-virginity rite. He was matched to the fertile women, two of which were the legal upper age limit of forty five, by lottery, and discharged his obligation in a comfortable, attractive facility run by the State.
The Brotherland Transit Station was an hour’s journey north and he was driven on a Monday morning by Sara, his housemother, as required by law. They left very early, to beat the rush hour traffic. He said his goodbyes to Kynna before getting in the car. There were tears, but no wailing. Wailing was not their style. Each inductee was allowed to bring as much as he could carry. Kith, being frail, nevertheless rose to the challenge of carrying Kynna’s gift: the sack of how many antique, creamy-paged journals in which to record the chronicle of his time away from her. That and packets of pencils and pens and tins of his favorite chocolate. The State will provide the rest.
The drive up to the BTS was beautiful. The drive was nice. The car was a wide, sleek, fully-enclosed, low-to-the-ground, steam-powered two-seater bicycle that sounded very much like a sewing machine as it ran. Sara had little to say, but sniffed a lot, sleeving her nose without taking her hands off the steering wheel. Fresh fall gusts and nice old songs on the radio. They switched back and forth between oldies and national volleyball: the loving group grunts and isolated joy-yelps and call and response of batsqueaking sneakers on gymnasium parquet with the sportscaster’s churchvoice a nice punctuation. Everything nice, all the time. Kith was weirdly, almost callously, calm. He pointed out the various kinds of trees in staggered rows like all the kings of history gathered to watch the procession resplendent in their mortal blood-and-gold robes by the sides of the thin white highway. The distant green hills like buried, voluptuous giants in sweet repose. Hilly green in all directions. The black galaxy of unseen life in its potent not-quite consciousness interlacing the hills like ramifyingly and sub-branchingly endless roots of Time.
***
Kim turns to see the car come upon them. It’s Unca Mundee and a woman who will introduce herself as Jonatha Shamton.
DEAR ABYSS
DEAR HOLDING YOUR TONGUE: When the cycle runs a glorious course the blood released shall be sufficient to sail thine grand black ships toward surest slaughter on.
DEAR GROOM (?) IN MICHIGAN: The screams of the infidel’s brood in its million’d fetid wombs elicit the counter-song of appreciative arrows.
KIKI ’68: A SHORT STORY as the SCREENPLAY of a 22-MINUTE FILM
KiKi ’68
http://staugustine2.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/kiki-687.pdf
THE RESCUED TEXTS
2 Stories from my Saul and Wally series
in which we consider Mr. Chaucer, Mr. Reich, Mr. Belafonte and Miss Novak
Orgone Energy
“And we are?” asks Saul, on the rising tune of the inveterate pedant.
“Visiting specialists from the Mayo Clinic,” drones Wally. He can’t be bothered to lift his eyes from Life, specifically Kim Novak. Luscious as platinum cantaloupes on the dark background of the flapping page. The odor of terror-intensified pigshit pulses through the car like an evil silk as Wally pumps the window crank without taking his eyes for a moment off his girl.
“Visiting specialists by the name of…?”
“Drs. Gus Guildencranz and Harold Rosenstern,” finally looking up, “but that’s where I think you’re going too far, old bean. If you don’t mind a little constructive criticism.”
Window sealed he can hear his stomach growling so he rolls it down again for the cover of the roar of the road. Just an inch. He’s starving but to ask Saul to stop for a bite anywhere along the next forty miles of U.S. Route 19 is to risk death or humiliation.
“This is a pilgrimage of sorts,” says Saul, lifting that chin. “And by the way, Wally, what’s the state of your Chaucer?”
I can’t get the line Come, Mister tally man, tally me banana out of my head.
Without waiting for a response, Saul launches into a few lines from the gap-toothed Wife of Bath’s prologue, Yiddish lilt intact, and Wally wants to guffaw but restricts himself to a smirk because it’s still rather early in the drive and this isn’t exactly the most propitious spot on the trip to be hailing a cab. But he can just see Saul assaying the arduous task of memorizing a little Olde English in preparation for the very conversation he was sure to initiate in order to feature it, rehearsing it out loud on the toilet and over breakfast and while packing his overnight bag with that pungent Italian aftershave and the Japanese fishgut rubbers Berryman mailed him for his 49th birthday.
I keep wanting to sing it Talleyrand.
The truck of pig thunders by again, a massive green Waukesha semi from the 1930s, pitching like a slave ship, left flank studded with flexing pink snouts, the smell in the wash in its wake instructive. Wally knows pigs as intelligent, sensual creatures, all too aware of their fated purpose. From the pig’s point of view, the totality of human culture is dedicated to the control, torture and consumption of pigs. Wally waits until Bellow competitively overtakes the truck again and he rolls down the window again and his hand is a dark glider, pushing the interstate wind. He’s sweating in his laughable smock (Bellow’s idea) and the wind that funnels down the sleeve is a numb tongue licking his armpit.
Makes him think of some good old days. Driving back in the back of the feed truck from a squirrel hunt with Tooty, say. Shoot enough squirrels and it starts to feel like you’re shooting squirrels; that is, that squirrels are being shot like bullets from the barrel of your squirrel gun. Tooty said so and it was true. You aim the barrel and the squirrel bounces against the fence or the tree trunk in a savory puff of smoke.
“To translate,” Saul adds, with a wink, “surely cock and cunt weren’t designed by the good Lord for the mundane purpose of distinguishing the sexes, or mere pissing, or the making of more pissers. Listen, along those lines, something’s been haunting me, and I’d like your esteemed gloss on it. I would appreciate a little sober reflection before you pontificate on the matter. How do you suppose a medieval cunt smelled?”
He tosses an unwrapped stick of Beeman’s. Flicks it. It bounces off Wally’s head and lands on the detritus between the two car seats, the crumpled mimeographs and candy-wrappers. Lots of candy wrappers, because sweetmeats and poontang are the Bellow Scylla and Charybdis: he’s always either skinny and in rut or chaste and chubby. Wally must admit he prefers this slower, rounder Bellow. Even in the ridiculous lab coat. Wally must also admit that the idea of visiting Wilhelm Reich in Lewisburg State Penitentiary may be just what he needs to kickstart his muse.
Come, Mr. Talleyrand.
Wally had been half-way through the writing of a novel about which he’d told not even Saul, the type of thing called Science Fiction, set three thousand years in the future, an end-of-the-world sort of scenario, the races of man all extinct but for one middle aged Negro intellectual and one young Scandinavian tourist girl (speaking not a word of English) who is first spotted by the Negro on the observation deck of the Statue of Liberty, to which they’ve both climbed to get a view of post-apocalypse Manhattan. Anyway, he’d gotten that far, one hundred and forty pages, and then froze, but froze in the dynamic paralysis of a tightrope walker who’s made the mistake of looking down. Simply stopping won’t save you.
“He possessed the affable good looks of the man who accepts that he is not handsome, nor need he be, winning from surprisingly attractive women of his caste and color, once every blue moon, that fair genus of sympathy that is not altogether distinguishable from love.”
He’d been rewriting that sentence for a week, stymied as to how to go on, when Bellow rang. And now they’re on the way to pay a visit to cosmic sex-theorist Dr. Wilhelm Reich, an involuntary guest of the Feds these days for shipping an Orgone Box (a telephone-booth-sized chamber specially designed to accumulate cosmic radiation while an occupant masturbates in it) across state lines. The guy is the Werner Von Braun of mental sex hygiene and he’s locked up in the joint with bootleggers, killers, white slavers, pansies, mulattoes and tax shirks. Bellow downshifts and says something about the erect penis being a rigid, all-purpose umbilicus and Wally responds rather plaintively:
“But don’t you see… sex is the profoundest subject on Earth… until one speaks of it? Isn’t it rather like one of those bewitching monsters that dwell at the bottom of the sea? Miles and miles down? More beautiful than anything encountered on the surface? Shining like dreams in the cold, deep dark of an eternal night? But when one makes the fatal mistake of bringing one up into the warm light of day… a few ounces of dead gray sludge on the hand is all one is left with.”
“I like that metaphor, kiddo. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that I admire it. Would you mind, terribly, if I took the liberty of extending it for your edification?”
“Not at all, old bean.”
“Well, the wondrous creatures of which you speak are, in point of fact, sometimes brought to the earth’s surface for close examination by the great scientists. They’re brought to the surface in specially-pressurized containers in which they survive the journey quite wonderfully intact. I propose that the mysteries of sex can likewise handle the transition from the murky depths of man’s subconscious to the sunlight of rational analysis if the language dealing of it is a special container, so to speak. A special container, designed for the purpose. This is where the topnotch novelist, with a philosophical inclination and unequaled experience in the field, not dissimilar to our best scientists, mapping the unknown, enters the picture.”
“Namely toi.”
“Namely moi.”
“And you’re working on something…”
“It is going to be earthshaking.”
“And this pilgrimage to Herr Doktor Reich…”
“Research. This book will be like no other book I’ve written, Wally, or that anyone has written, for that matter, and it is therefore incumbent upon me to get this thing just right. There is precious little room for error in this undertaking. Quite frankly, there’ll be none. I’m not an impressionist like you, buddy boy, which is not to say that impressionism doesn’t have its place, of course it does, there are people out there who light their lamps with it, but I’m dealing in high explosives here. As I see it, I’ll either end up blowing the lid off of two millennia of Western man’s psychosexual oppression, from which every modern evil springs… famine, war, social injustice, racial hatred… and, thereafter, be feted as a hero on a par with a Paul Revere or a Martin Luther, or…”
“Or you’ll end up with your ass in a sling and a baked apple in your mouth.”
“Precisement.”
“Far from kosher.”
“You know what I always say.”
Lining the left and right of the modern highway run buffers of bristling greenery behind which a highway-bisected community of American citizens united in the near-unanimity of their conception of Wally as a sort of trick gorilla bustles. Or so Wally sees it. They are cloving hams and clipping coupons and sluicing driveways and pruning forsythia and tweezing chin-hairs and house-breaking puppies and listening to a county-wide Little League tournament on the radio. And if Wally by some deranged caprice were to persuade Saul to drive to the patchbald diagrammatic field where the Bluejays were besting the Hickories and were then to walk as in a dream towards the pitcher’s mound amidst all those uniformed, apple-cheeked, freckle-nosed Buds and Scottys, the radio announcer would’ve whooped and said There’s a nigger on the field, ladies and gentlemen, a mustached nigger on the field in a medical smock! Good Lord and Hallelujah I have truly seen it all!
Saul sees something similar.
*
*
PART 2 of the SAUL and WALLY series
in which we consider Mr. James, Mr. Chester, Miss Howard, Miss Webb and Mr. Wright
IF I DEALT IN CANDLES
Constance thanked Wally profusely for his helpful critique and slipped the manuscript into her purse while Fan, with her gloved hand on Wally’s throbbing mitt, beamed at him and they all ordered drinks and that was the last anyone ever heard of it.
Have the critics given you any constructive help in your writing?
It had been days already and he couldn’t get that line out of his head. Bald frigging sissy. Bald frigging wig-wearing pansy son of a bitch. Couldn’t sleep because of it. Heart racing. Well, that and Fan’s snoring. It’s not marriage that kills the marital romance but the fartsoaked, snorehaunted warmth of the marriage bed. Poor Fan: the mottled brown back she smuggles into sleep in her pyjamas. Guilt from thinking this triggered a wave of loving pity and genuine gratitude like an endorphin rush after a hammer blow to an extremity and he thought, with a nod and the tenderest smile: partners for life, Fanny.
She always slept so deep and hard he could pretty much do whatever he wanted on his side of the bed without waking her. There he lay with his bedcovers thrown back and his pyjama bottoms off and his big fat jimmy in his hand while birdsong, streetsong, the singing of the water in the pipes as the neighbors performed their ablutions heralded another pinkeyed Paris dawn. Wally swears you can hear the French dookie crashing against the s-curves in the pipes on the way down but Fan just laughs at him. Like meteorites. Like fiery meteorites. His vivid imagination.
-This vivid imagination paid for that dress, didn’t it?
-Now don’t you start!
-I’m just saying, Fan. I’m just saying.
He still relishes the fact that it’s no longer Fanny who brings in all the money.
Have the critics given you any constructive help in your writing?
He finally gets his very own Paris Review interview and they send Tinkerbell and Butterfly McQueen to do the job. Ain’t that something.You know how lethal a white sissy and a faghag Negress can be together, each a canny burlesque of the other… inside jokes and furtive looks and an infallible knowledge of absolutely everything, especially, of course, manner of dress and style of speech. Condescended to by a couple of hincty short-story writers for godsake. Ain’t that rich. For this I win the National Book Award? Vilma and her conked hair and that keloid on her right biceps and she’s trying to get saditty on him.
He had his eelhead jimmy in his hand and Connie was crawling across the hotel’s Persian carpet towards him on her white satin belly just begging for it. There goes that vivid imagination of yours again, Waldo. The most important Negro-American writer on earth… shove this in that little pink mouth of yours, gal… winner of the National Book Award… he couldn’t believe that either Saul or himself had ever been so young or on intimate terms as to competitively compare erections. It was a close race but his was bigger and so of course Bellow runs and gets a tape measure. Hoping he’ll triumph in girth. Then he theorizes with a straight face that the Negro penis isn’t rooted as deeply in the groin as the Caucasian organ and this explains the average extra inch or two. In other words the Negro prick is cheating. The Negro prick; the Hebrew schnozz; the Irish capacity for drink: the exemplary dimensions of the ethnic. Saul’s buzzword: exemplary.
The look on Chester’s face as they picked their table at the Café de la Mairie and Chester ordered in high school French and Wally opened his mouth and ordered in a nosy rich Boursault of a tone and switched to his professorial English for the duration of the interview… Chester’s look had been one of those well what do we have here looks and Wally immediately thought of Saul’s frigging Sam Johnson joke, of which he frigging never tires, apparently, and if Saul tells it one more time at a party in Wally’s presence Wally will break that schnozz of Saul’s for him. At the very least put it out of joint. Besides which he always gets it wrong: it’s not a talking dog it’s a dog walking on its hind legs. Is that erudition?
Saul would sit there with a book of ‘great’ quotations open right next to the typewriter and salt-and-pepper his manuscript with kultcha. Season it with what he called ‘smarts’. Wally has seen him do it. Saul would wink and say, Whaddya think, buddyboy, a Matthew Arnold or something from Suetonious? Or maybe let’s throw ‘em a real curve ball and opt for a schmeck of Lao- Tze. Way back when when Saul was still in on the joke. They would argue well into the night, Wally and Saul, about teleological niceties such as the fate of consciousness after the fact of mortality and Saul could not abide Wally’s assertion that individual consciousness reverts to its place in the great Undifferentiated Essence upon the moment of death… he was adamant, vociferous, nearly hysterical in his condemnation of it and Wally finally twigged that Saul’s resistance to the concept was, at root, anti-integrationist.
Connie paging through the manuscript.
I’m fat, thinks Wally. Call me Wally, says Ralph. I sweat too much, I need to lose weight, I’m losing my hair. I hate this big round barrel-shaped Negro head of mine and I hate these black gums and ashen elbows. This mustache. I look like an usher at the Apollo. I look like a Gold Coast garbage man. Freddy Dupee with that lethal smirk of his going, it’s funny, but he only seems to bark at you and the garbage man. Nobody fears or respects me. I’m all curves and no angles. I look like the over-stuffed furniture in Connie’s grandmother’s parlor. No wonder she won’t screw me. Saul and his goddamned girlish waist. Fine, if you like runty.
Vilma winking at Alfred so subtly that Wally almost misses it and she asks him, smiling with parental tenderness, Have the critics given you any constructive help in your writing?
-Call me Wally.
In the intro to the interview, in the penultimate sentence before the interview commences, this: “While Mr. Ellison speaks, he rarely pauses, and although the strain of organizing his thought is sometimes evident (emphasis Wally’s), his phraseology and the quiet, steady flow and development of ideas are overwhelming.”
Saul’s paging through Wally’s top secret manuscript, the follow-up to Invisible Man, kind of wincing and shaking his head and muttering to himself: damaging, very damaging. He tells Wally, Okay, fine, it shows a new sort of fluency for you, but fluency at what cost? This is very damaging to one’s reputation; they’ll massacre you if you’re crazy enough to publish it. Better to aim low and hit a bulls eye than aim at the stars and kill an albatross instead. Listen, don’t be sore. You wanted my honest opinion and now you have it. My suggestion would be to take this new found fluency and apply it to something a little closer to home. Your own people, for example. Don’t over-reach, Wally. What, this rich, vibrant diasporan culture you keep telling me about… this fertile vein of ore, as you once put it, has suddenly run out of stories?You’ve outgrown it? It ain’t worth mining any more? Dismissive gesture at the manuscript. Is that what this means?
Constance, Saul and Ralph standing at the corner where the eyepatched veteran sells roasted chestnuts from a rusty cart across from the Tuileries in full flower and throng. A warm but overcast day. Saul’s holding a helium-filled balloon and unties it and sucks the gas and does a few bars of What’ll I do? in a cartoon grasshopper croon and Connie laughs, thoroughly charmed. Ralph is fuming but he can’t show it and says, I say, old chap, you sound like one of Hadrian’s prize eunuchs!
Dud.
All three traipse arm-in-arm across the Place Pigalle, gay talk and big smiles except Ralph’s smile, of course, which is faux as an undiscovered Lautrec, a wet forgery, not even a good one, twitching at the corners. He keeps having this vision of an open manhole appearing suddenly on Saul’s side of the sidewalk. Saul, wearing his hat at a rakish angle, is saying, out of the corner of his mouth and rather loudly, Be advised, young lady, that if you keep up with these enchanting ways of yours you run the severe risk of ending up in one of my novels. You’re not litigious, I hope. Constance blushing. Saul snaps his fingers. Say, that’s an exemplary title for something: The Litigious Sylph. Whaddya say, Waldo? We haven’t heard a peep outta you since the Tuileries…
Ralph and Saul in the alley behind the hotel.
-I saw her first!
-This isn’t the schoolyard, buddyboy. This is the jungle and in the jungle, as you oughta know by now, the king of beasts holds sway. Namely, moi.
-You only even came over in the first place because of those damned letters I was writing about her!
-Hindsight is 20/20, ain’t it?
Constance paging through the manuscript on the checkered tablecloth in an out-of-the-way bistro that Ralph discovered with Fanny last year and whereinto Saul is highly unlikely to stumble. Ralph’s palms are moist. Constance is radiant in a pink mohair sweater, matching beret, black satin slacks and patent leather mules. Wally inquired, both to quell his nerves and because he had a genuine interest in fashion, as to the shoe’s designer. Constance said she honestly couldn’t remember; Robbie had given them to her right before the divorce. Robbie would know, she said. He has a shoe fetish.
Ralph joked, “What do they know of mules who only mules know?”
Have the critics given you any constructive help in your writing?
Fanny croaks, “Baby?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Are you awake?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Was I snoring again?”
“No, baby. You weren’t snoring. You were talking in your sleep.”
“I was?”
“You sure were.”
She reaches for her glasses on the nightstand and rolls over to face him, blinking behind the lenses, face lined with the meaningless diagram of her recent dreams, monogrammed silk pyjama top buttoned to the neck. Smiling she says, “What did I say?”
“You sang Stardust.”
She slugs his shoulder affectionately. Wally’s hand is still throbbing… it’s killing him. His writing hand. It’s infected. It amazes him that Fan has yet to notice the four raw against-the-grain gouges in fat fester behind the knuckle rill.
The three of them emerge from the rear exit of Madame Tussuad’s, blinking into the midday sun, waiting under the awning, and Saul does one of his impromptu magic tricks, only instead of a quarter from behind Ralph’s ear he snatches a frigging cotton ball.
Connie must be, what, 34 or 35 and she looks it at certain angles and yet there remains a youthful glow to her, a creamy kind of pastry warmth and though she is not quite the sylph that Ralph first saw on C.L.R.’s arm in ’46 he remains terribly smitten. She looks up from the manuscript and studies his face as though mystified.
“And the title…”
“If I Dealt in Candles.”
“That’s right. It’s very pretty, Wally. Where is it from?”
“An old Yiddish proverb. If I dealt in candles, the sun wouldn’t set; if I dealt in shrouds, people would stop dying!”
She closes the manuscript and without taking her eyes off the title page she says, “It’s just so well-written, what I’ve read so far. It really is. But I…”
“I’m glad it pleases you. I thought…”
“Yes?” She seems to steel herself against the blunder she’s certain he’s about to make.
He takes a deep breath in a sort of now-or-never way and she beats him to it, interceding on behalf of their friendship. She says, pressing her palms flat on the paper, “It’s not my place to comment, Wally, and please don’t be sore, but, gee, isn’t it kind of, I don’t know, wrong for you to be writing about Shtetl Jews, no matter how beautiful the writing is, while your own people still strain against the bonds of slavery?”
“By adding this certain amount of beauty to the story of the Jews, aren’t you stealing the same amount from the story of your people, who can ill afford to have this beauty stolen from them?” She says, “Oh please, please don’t be sore about all this, what I’m saying, Wally, but I guess I’ve taken it upon myself to speak for your race in this matter because you’ve turned your back on them… with the blood of old Egypt in your veins you’d rather tell the story of Moses! With that gorgeous, wonderful, heart-breakingly loyal woman by your side all the years of a fruitful and intimate marriage you opt to pursue the fickle affections of a silly, inconsequential, self-absorbed white girl who couldn’t even manage to stay married to the father of her own poor mulatto child. Wally, Wally, what’s the matter with you? What are you doing to yourself? Are you sick in the heart? Tired of being the luckiest Negro on Earth?”
“Don’t get me wrong… as I said, gosh I’m impressed, Wally, I really am, it’s beautifully written… it proves that you’re more of an intellectual than even I or Richard or Saul ever took you for, though I’m sure Fanny wouldn’t be surprised at all… she’d read a few paragraphs and know it was you, although, ironically, and correct me if I’m wrong on this: she was never meant to see it. Was she? Was she, Wally? Is that what being intellectual is for, Wally… for fooling your own good wife? Is being intellectual, in the end… is it only good for writing clever books for fooling your people and your wife? Is there no higher end towards which to apply the magnificent mind in that little boy’s head of yours? That school boy head of yours with its silly school boy crush on a sad, tired female of your oppressor’s race?”
“I will always love you, Wally, honestly, although by the time I’ve said my piece I’m willing to bet your passion for me won’t exactly be blue ribbon material.” She laughs and digs her fingernails hard into the hand he reaches for her under the table with.
Wally had been so concerned about eluding Saul that he’d clean forgotten about eluding Fanny. In walked Fanny to find Wally and Constance in a cozy little corner of the out-of-the-way bistro that Wally and Fan had discovered together last year. They called it ‘Our Out of the Way Bistro.’ It was a common rendezvous point. Had Wally forgotten? Or was his subconscious the secret engineer of the entire scenario? He stood rubber-knee’d but steadied himself and fetched a chair for Fan from one of a dozen empty tables and said, with a smile that seemed to be little more than his mustache, Constance was just showing me a manuscript for a book she’s working on, Fan. He glanced down at Constance who glanced up at him and he addressed her,
“It really is marvelous, doll, but it needs work, as I say. I wouldn’t show it to anyone else until you’ve rectified, uh… a few of the particular points we discussed. I’d be happy to look it over again after you’ve… yes… worked on it a bit…”
Connie chained naked and writhing to a rusty bedspring in a vacant lot on the South Side of Chicago on an overcast day in Autumn as several dozen identical Bigger Thomases in tattered flesh-revealing piss-reek finery emerge in deprivation and hunger from various caves, warrens, gutters, cellars and trash heaps in the vicinity…
Wally holds his breath. He toetenses and… sees stars and… detects one of the semen arcs landing with a tap on the Herald Tribune far away atop the dresser. Where the other two squirts land he neither knows nor cares but in the tingle of post-ecstatic slump he envisions Alfred Chester in that ratty orange wig tilting back in his chair at the Café de la Mairie with his fingers intertwined on his chest and his lips moving in the deliverance of some grand theory or profound observation or other as though he’s the famous writer being interviewed for the Paris Review and Wally fantasizes standing up and hauling off and punching Chester so hard his head snaps back and the chair back cracks and a fusillade of flashbulbs going pop pop pop pop pop like Ernest Fucking Hemingway has just walked in the room.
*
*
LITWEB 3.0
[ed.'s note: the following was sent via email by a semi-Explicit Comrade who asked that I post this for him]
Timothy Garton Ash was invited as a keynote speaker at an event commemorating 20 years of the falling of the wall in Berlin. It was a cultural event, connected with an art exhibition, a kind of second rate commemoration which could neither attract nor afford a more esteemed eminence grise, someone maybe I had heard of.
The event was held at the slightly dilapidated ‘House of World Cultures, a place designed with a dramatic arcing roof, according to the architect Hugh Stubbins Jr., intended as a beacon of freedom of expression’ visible from East Berlin. In 1980, several people died when the roof collapsed.
http://www.hkw.de/en/hkw/gebauede/erinnern/galerie_1/stubbins.php
The House of World Cultures is situated on CIA-man John Foster Dulles Allee and features a plaque from the 80s in which the congress of the US congratulates the ‘people of Berlin’ for ‘creating a thriving democracy amidst Communist tyranny”.
And thus, symbolically 20 years after the fall of the Wall, the so-called collapse of the failed system called communism, we were amassed here in this beacon of freedom to commemorate, with Ash, ironically, in the language of freedom, English, the closure of that dark time.
Though he speaks perfect German chose the English to tell the audience that, after 20 years of post cold war disappointments and difficulty, perhaps Chinese Authoritarian Capitalism might not be a bad model to try. Of course, since the audience was largely German, they might have thought they misheard or misconstrued, and so, not wishing to embarrass themselves in front of the professorial persona, kept they doubts to themselves.
But I heard him clearly, and I recognized him as an intellectual mercenary up for the highest bidder. And now that times are tough, he is proselytizing the benefits of the Chinese system, without ever having lived there. I know Chinese people, their wisdom and their chauvinism (or their wisdom in their chauvinism), how for them, the whole cold war was but a couple of moves in a millennial game of chess.
Anyone who has seen the rise of China in Africa will know that this is the first stage of their global domination. Unlike the Europeans who dominated that content for 2 centuries, the Chinese make no effort to acculturate or assimilate the natives. They are not insecure about the superiority of their culture or their beliefs as were the Europeans. With China you acknowledge a fully autonomous power, or cross it at your peril. It is simple, clean. World dominion without European guilt hypocrisy.
In the Chinese sense, Timothy Garton Ash should not be impugned, for individual opinion is over-esteemed pretense, unlikely to be much valued in he future, if it ever had been. This noble dupe herald of the ultra-conservative avant garde is only too happy to be rid of the flawed and enfeebled tradition of Enlightenment Humanism.
Comrade DJ Sensei Pastor Prime! Welcome! And congratulations on that moniker. I’d like to set you up with a friend (unless you consider yourself too, too married to Gawd)… her name is Ann Ominous… boy is she hot. And such a lush! We’ll talk later…
1. “intended as a beacon of freedom of expression’ visible from East Berlin. In 1980, several people died when the roof collapsed.”
Stasi Op.
2. I’d like to load Timmy Garton-Ash and Ian Buruma into the same cattle car to Ouchwitz! Two little trembly-lipped cunts I cannot abide.
3. “World dominion without European guilt hypocrisy.”
Spooky intimations of Maximum Hive. And, again: Dystopian Pulp Sci Fi Maestros of the mid-20th century saw it all coming before we were born.
4. How are Africans… the Senegalese, say… disposed towards the looming Beige Master Race? Do they welcome the incursion?
VINTAGE REALITY
Recorded in 1938 (a song Jelly Roll claimed he heard in 1908)
THE RE-WRITTEN
OEDIPUS Rx
Goss slithered out of the hotel bed, careful not to wake her. This was not easy because she was the lightest sleeper ever. He hadn’t been able to shift a millimeter without getting an interrogative grunt from her and his escape from the bed had taken what seemed like hours of excruciating control. When he finally slipped into the bathroom he realized it must be suppertime back home. Sat on the toilet, seat down, lights off, with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands but he was smiling. Not quite laughing. Actually maybe he felt slightly sick.
She was suddenly upright in bed. ‘Jimmy?’ she called. Not his name. And she pronounced it weird anyway. Yeemy?
Go in there, he ordered himself, and get your clothes. And don’t you say a fucking word.
‘Jimmy?’
Goss stared straight at the corner where his pants must be, ignoring the motionless silhouette which registered on his peripheral vision like a human shape in a sinister dreamscape as he groped and found briefs and slipped them on, then socks, his pants and going down on all fours patted the floor for his cap and found it. His scarf. His pullover was flung across the half of the bed they hadn’t used and he remembered kicking his shoes off right inside the door, bouncing them off the wall, so they must be here and here. He could not get the sensation of flap out of his mouth.
‘Jimmy,’ she sang, softly, sounding very sad.
He shod himself with one hop on each foot and got both hands on the doorknob squinting against the light he let like a rush of air into the room so musty with what they had done. He backed out careful not to look as the light closed on her old face and Goss blew out a long breath turning to the red AUSGANG sign and high-fiving his own ghost before it hit him that his jacket containing not only a copy of Levy’s keys but also all of Goss’s money and his passport and the sacred lock of hair was still hanging in the hotel room closet.
He rapped on the door and waited and rapped again. His nerve-endings sang with shame.
‘Mom?’
-2 Days Before That-
Goss on a couch beside Levy in a café on Königen Strasse called The Supreme Bean where they both liked the music and one of the waitresses was really pretty. Dogs romping around the café and hot coffee served in water glasses but Goss was comforted by normalizing details such as lonely males over Powerbooks like Nosferatus by the light of their desktops. As Tears go by, the ballad second only to the majestic Angie in the Richards/Jagger songbook was the song playing when it happened.
Goss had never written a song or fucked a girl worth writing a song about but he could remember a time in his life when both activities had seemed like eventual givens. He had almost fucked Tina Yee and had almost written a song about almost doing it, twenty years ago. It was Levy who had pointed out that every woman Goss ever fucked (not counting his first, a cousin) had been the ex-best friend of the girlfriend previous.
It is the evening of the day…
Goss was mouthing the lyrics while Levy talked. He anticipated with emotions he could barely control the last stanza, containing as it did one of the great couplets in English verse: doing things I used to do, they think are new. Levy, meanwhile, who knew so much about everything that he knew exactly how much of everything that he didn’t know, as he often quipped, was yammering away. White streamers in the cafe window were part of a greater horizon-wide movement of cold ash padding; a miraculous makeover of the dirty old city.
Something told Goss to look up. An oldish woman, furred and painted, very tall or on preposterous heels, pushing through the corpsey curtain of the snowfall. Her epic grimace and coin-colored bob. Levy with his back to her but Goss’s heart flinched as the beautiful old thing moved across the picture window of the Supreme Bean like a queen puppet traversing a stage and the knowledge, the recognition, was so basic in Goss that it was semi-conscious. His body knew before his mind could react. Levy hunched forward in his chair, prepared to deliver the Levy-affirming punchline to whatever anecdote when Goss suddenly tugged at and freed his army surplus jacket from under Levy’s ass and he held up a finger and said Excuse, please, one sec, and bolted. It wasn’t forty seconds before Goss thought about running back for his scarf and gloves too but didn’t want to risk losing her on the shopper-choked street. She was roughly a block ahead. She was walking so fast with a spine so straight and open coat flying that Goss wasn’t sure briefly if she didn’t look a bit crazy and busy in the bad manner of the insanely alone. She was, or had been, he had been told, a performer and if Goss was 36 she would be about 55 with her bob hard-luminous in the creamy gloom of the high street.
-20 Years Before That-
In back of the house at 25th & Colfax the dog-breathed summer Tie a Yellow Ribbon was a hit young Goss was on his knees digging a hole behind the oak with a bent spatula on a Saturday morning. A lawnmower morning so loud with the sci fi sound of a planet hive, the neighborhood doused in green perfume, while Dad added his own nasal motor sleeping a stiff one off. When was the last time anyone mowed this lawn, thought Goss. He actually spat with contempt. It never occurred to him to mow the lawn. Cursing and in tears he worried a rooty wound in the earth at the mouth of the tree. This was a household of three males sharing the surname Goss and yet Goss, the youngest, was the one they all called Goss. Behind the oak to bury a picture of Tina Yee.
You may lose that fading sense-print of The First Kiss but you will never forget the very first I Don’t Love You Anymore. Despite the traditional disclaimer, it is you, you’re the one, the failure, the disappointment, the faded value, the seed on the deepest level unworthy of egg. Goss could always tell when an outbreak of I Don’t Love You Anymore was coming. They never look better than they do on the day they dump you.
Tina Yee in cap and gown smiling by the hole. About a foot into the nugatory cakemix of middleclass earth his bent spatula scraped a cigar box. He coughed and accidentally dropped a gross track of phlegm-web on the rim of the hole when he levered the box up and out and knocked a jacket of dirt off. An old Panetellas box for a photograph of a disturbingly attractive woman. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Also in the box a long lock of ice-blond hair. Goss was suddenly not crying and blinked at the photograph with no recognition, no switches tripped but the lock of hair was eerily-if-inaccurately familiar, like flying had been the first time he’d ever been on an airplane.
The evening of that day while Goss was out with his big brother and his big brother’s so-called friends mourning Yee, dousing the burning witch of his heart with tepid beer at a place called Moose’s, the photograph he’d found in the cigar box that morning disappeared from his bedroom from the top right drawer behind the magic mushrooms, never to be seen again. Over breakfast the next morning Goss glowered with the irritating wisdom of not mentioning it. But he had the lock of hair in his pocket and he fought the urge to place it on the table.
Joe senior had been a band-leader, a sax player, he’d even toured Europe. His sister Aunt Pennie told the brothers all about it but there hadn’t been a horn in the house since shortly after the year Goss was born. The saxophone, with its fetal curves, was a dead sibling you never mentioned and had become Goss’s stillborn twin like the twin haunting the dim but intense imagination of Elvis. Elvis was how Goss and Levy had met a month before Elvis’s self-satirizing death on a toilet. Levy was short but ramrod-erect among a slouching jumble of sideburned lotus-eaters near the front of the ticket line, turning suddenly to confront Goss about his t-shirt.
‘You’re wearing an Elvis t-shirt to a Beatles film festival?’ Levy laughed. ‘Man, if we weren’t all hippies, we’d have to kick your lanky ass!’
What you do with your hands when you’re not doing anything with them says a lot about you, thought Goss: this loudmouth has his arms folded over his chest like a drill instructor. Goss’s thumbs were hooked in the front pockets of his dungarees. He hankered after girls who struck limp-wristed postures like Cher (or Robert Plant, to be honest), a pose so feminine that it seemed to have vanished entirely from the increasingly macho planet by the time Goss was thirty, a loss that inspired vague pangs. All these years later, Levy was still Goss’s friend and friendship-deformingly rich. He had a company called The Bombardier Beetle and split his time between Minneapolis, Vancouver and Berlin.
-Last Night-
Back in the spare room, listening to Levy’s German girlfriend do something dramatic with Levy on the other side of the large flat, Goss found it impossible to sleep. But when they were finally finished the noise of his own breathing kept him awake so he slipped into his briefs and out of his unfamiliar bed and down the hall into the flicker-blue living room where he found the post-coital girlfriend watching the final minutes of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ in German but with the sound off. Goss was prepared for what he found because Levy had carefully prepared him: Liesl likes to go naked around the flat. It had something to do with good health, or self-expression, or equal rights. She reflected the light of the widescreen television, naked as an Equatorial baby and unremarkably attractive. Nice big hands, though. Her breasts a goatee’d lunatic’s unblinking stare. A giant bust of Lenin transfixed by It’s a Wonderful Life.
‘Hallo, man,’ she said. ‘…this flick is so corny.’
Goss squeezed her shoulder. ‘Corny? Are you kidding? It’s like something out of the Brothers Grimm.’
She lowered her voice and said ‘Levy is completely asleep. He’s sleeping like a baby. It’s always like that.’
She smiled at the TV. ‘I put him to sleep. Like a baby.’
She stared sidelong at Goss and Goss cleared his throat but said nothing. He scratched his head. Jimmy Stewart was clutching Donna Reed with all of his might, sending a pang through Goss that made him want to jump out of his skin and smash all the lights in the universe. Liesl hugged her knees and said, a tad loudly, ‘You know what I hate?’
‘What?’ asked Goss, who assumed he was about to be treated to a diatribe against American kitsch as embodied by Jimmy Stewart.
It was so cool to be not interested.
-Earlier Today-
‘I’ve heard disturbing reports,’ said Levy the next morning pacing the new carpet in his furnitureless storefront, ‘…that some of you, in violation of my policy, are smoking while distributing promotional materials to the public.’ Levy’s muscular arms were folded over his ever-expanding chest because getting rich had inspired him to start working out. It wouldn’t be long before he became too top-heavy to swim. ‘Smoking on the job is not just verboten. It’s fucking dis-gusting.’
Levy glared at Nikola B, the fleshily-attractive brunette with blonde streaks he had hired on the spot without any references. Nikola gathered her purse and coat from a big pile in the corner and left without saying a word slamming the front door so hard they were all afraid the building might collapse.
Goss asked himself, hours later, making his way to the building he believed was harboring his long-lost mother, why he couldn’t be like Levy. Why couldn’t he? It was a Vital Force thing.
Goss had followed the woman this far yesterday and turned back. He’d seen his mother enter that building. But did he really believe this? Or was it a sort of meta-belief… a belief that this belief was possible to believe? What seemed shakiest about this latest in a long line of improvised quests was the lack of gravity in his emotional response to the situation. Where was the bloody roil of emotions he was supposed to be feeling? He only knew for a fact that his mother had been from Berlin. Had followed Joe Goss to The States and bore him there two children and very soon after left. She could be in Berlin. A mile, two blocks, a neighborhood away. Yes, she could very well be the woman he saw walk by the café window last night. He would know his own mother, wouldn’t he? Mammals have that going for them, at least. Don’t they?
Last night’s spectacular snow was already melting under the fierce efforts of a little white custodial sun. The shoppers Goss squeezed by were unreadable, avoiding eye contact. Goss was wondering about this eye contact thing when he slowed and then stopped. He stuck his hands in his pocket and cleared his throat.
‘Hey, Nicole,’ he said.
She was crying. Not really crying; her face was relatively blank although her cheeks were bright red and decorated with silver tear-streaks. Her eyes might as well have been glands.
‘Nikola,’ she corrected him.
He looked away up the street towards the shop. He wanted to say: I’ve been searching for all of my life for the mother who abandoned me as an infant and I’ve finally tracked her down to an apartment building right up the street. Will you come there with me now as I see her again for the first time in thirty-five years and share that moment with me? Instead he said:
‘I’m sorry about what happened.’
She snorted.
Goss gathered the collar of his jacket around his neck. ‘Because. I don’t know. I thought you were a good worker.’
She laughed.
‘What?’
‘I thought Levy is so seductive to the women only because he is an American,’ she said, digging in her purse for a taschentuch, a kleenex, ‘But I see now that it is because he is a Jew.’
She blew her nose. ‘Talking to a female is hard for you, I think.’ She shocked Goss by tossing the balled tissue on the sidewalk.
‘You will probably be remembering this conversation for the rest of your life.’ She gestured at a balding red-haired scowler pushing impatiently between them on his way up the street. ‘Whereas to him, sex with me would mean less than nothing.’ She produced a package of Marlboros and lit one and stared at Goss through a cloud she kept adding to. Like eggs in the air.
‘So?’ she said, finally.
It was a very long bus ride away and early in the route the bus took them right by the building that Goss believed it was possible to believe harbored his mother. As the bus rounded the building’s corner he suppressed the urge, again, to proclaim, ‘I have good reason to believe that my mother, who I haven’t seen since I was an infant, is dwelling in that building,’ but he didn’t. Nicole’s hair was in a loose knot and she untied the knot and shook out and re-tied it twice during the awkwardly wordless journey. When they got off the bus at its Endstation it was in a neighborhood of fenced brown snow-patched yards and their dead-vine-covered houses of stone. It felt as though they’d bussed to another city. They walked through a rustic maze of narrow lanes under the high commentary of suburban birdsong until Nikola lifted the latch on a splintery wooden gate and Goss followed her in. I could be a killer, he thought. She pulled off her shoes at the door so he did also and they moved across the gloomy living room. In the kitchen they found Nikola’s mother busy at the sink with her back to them. She either hadn’t heard them enter the house or chose not to react. Nikola opened the refrigerator and removed a large black ceramic bowl of green grapes and pantomimed that Goss should take the bowl and follow her out of the kitchen. The bowl was heavy and warm; the mother had just then put it in the refrigerator. Nikola’s room was up a staircase so brief it was ridiculous, down a hallway, last right before a circular hall window overlooking a stone-ringed pond through the branches of a tree in a posture of agony. Goss managed a peek into two rooms along the way to Nikola’s bedroom and was surprised to see that each room he peeked into contained a person. The first was a teenage boy the second a man and each wearing a churchgoing suit and tie.
In Nikola’s little room, Goss put the bowl of grapes down on a dresser and closed her door and removed his jacket and tried to drape it from her door knob, which wasn’t a knob but a handle. His jacket shrugged off into a puddle on the floor and Nikola removed her own coat and purse and piled them on top of it. She positioned an old wooden folding chair beside her bed and reclined on the bed, smoothing her dress, her feet touching. Then, as though to a blown whistle only she could hear, she sat straight up and pulled the dress off over her head. She unsnapped her bra. The breasts of a beached sea creature when she was on her back. Goss was touched at how helpless they looked on land. They were too smooth, too firm and her vagina was simple as a fold in a table cloth. She reached and patted the seat of the folding chair and Goss sat.
‘No,’ she said, ‘bring the grapes here first and feed them to me.’
Goss had the look of a man attempting to make something happen with his thoughts alone. Bend a spoon or something.
‘Get the grapes,’ she repeated.
Goss was frozen.
Nikola flipped on to her stomach and hugged her pillow and counted to ten before saying,
‘Leave.’
‘Get out,’ she reiterated.
Goss was half way down the hall when he remembered his jacket and had to go back. When he left the house, the sky was a far dilute blue. He was surprised at how calm he felt. Everything was so familiar.
It was possible that Joe Goss, sideburned and swaggery, had been in this very neighborhood, had walked these lanes and maybe Goss’s mother, a teenager not so much younger than Nikola when she’d met Goss’s father, was from this part of town, had grown up in this area and had used the bus that Goss rode out there. He was used to the kind of small-town coincidences that people from Chicago or Tokyo considered mindfucks of cosmic import. He was thinking that very thing when he looked up and saw Levy walking towards him.
‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ asked Levy, who stopped in his tracks.
After Goss said to Levy that he’d taken the wrong bus to the end of the line and was now good and lost, Levy led Goss back to his car. ‘I have a little business to take care of, won’t be long, drive you back home when I’m done.’
-Earlier This Evening-
Goss ended up climbing out of Levy’s car again before night fell. It had been a profitable time alone, he thought. He put his cap on and zipped up his jacket and knotted his scarf and picked a random direction to walk in.
Loping along above the low seare hedge of one chalk-white cottage after another, Goss turned right, abruptly, when he spotted what looked like a major thoroughfare at the end of a darkening lane, a major thoroughfare behind which the sun was crashing to torch the brittle lung of the forest as it ground to a halt in the earth. Where the lane emptied into the thoroughfare, Goss found a bus stop bench in a shelter across the wet black shadow of the road. Seated on the bench was an older but nice-enough looking woman who smiled as he settled on the bench beside her. She waited until he was completely still and said, with an older woman’s precision, ‘You are an American.’
‘Yep,’ said Goss. ‘How could you tell?’
‘You weren’t afraid to look at me.’
Goss laughed. ‘Who would be afraid to look at you?’ He reached for her hand and looked her right in the eye and said, defiantly, ‘Jimmy.’
She hesitated so long before announcing her name in return that he knew it was a lie and he knew what the lie meant and it encouraged him.
‘Margarethe.’
She was tall and slender and profited from what looked like a fairly expensive dye job. Her hair up in a thick bun blurred gold in the fading last lights of the day.
‘Where are you going, Jimmy?’ she asked him. ‘Would you like a ride?’
He pulled his cap off. ‘You have a car?’ She was the right age. It was possible that she’d lived in America.
‘Yes, I have a car.’
He closed one eye. ‘Why are you waiting for the bus if you have a car?’
THE RE-WRITTEN # 2
SALTER’S LUCK
Salter woke up to Lola shouting there was oil fucking paint on her Jil fucking Sander. He couldn’t at first tell if he was having a heart attack or caught in an earthquake or both but Lola was so up in his face she appeared to have one long ice-blue eye in the middle of her forehead, a monstrous organ of inhuman beauty, a lens through which he could not see the future but through which the future could plainly see him, despising the information it gathered.
On the street ten minutes later he caught his reflection in a shop window showing his t-shirt inside out. Never dress in terror. No wonder those foxy Jap girls had giggled. In that case he headed for the park and wouldn’t bother looking for a new girlfriend until he had a chance to get home and change. He sat alone under a two-hundred-year old tree for two hours, enjoying the indirect pleasures of the So Cal sunshine. The tepid milk breeze and the leaf-cut kaleidoscope spangling the yellow grass at his feet under the quadrophrenic wig of the tree. Fucking squirrels, too. Funny about squirrels: no one seemed to appreciate what a nightmare life would easily be if squirrels decided to go militant. Make mosquitoes look like a blessing. If rats had half the talent and energy of squirrels…
Later, when Lola was at her post at Chez Guevara, gilt and alabaster under her designated beam from the track lighting, he slunk home and started work on a new slab rather than bothering to change and bike over to Pacific Beach in hopes of finding that one true lasting Love capable of paying rent. The name of this new slab was Oil Fucking Paint on Her Jil Fucking Sander and he got bored with it after x-hours of pointless messy work, slopping the cadmium red around the canvas with a palette knife like it was lead-based organic van Gogh spaghetti sauce. Why not just eat it all and kill himself?
It was too late to make it to the beach, too early to sleep and too soon to call Lola at work to see if she was still in hate with him. Yet he grabbed the phone and punched the number with a relatively paintless thumb.
“Chez Guevara, can you please hold?”
“Yes ma’am.”
Brief pause of recognition and then the “hold” click. He’d half-hoped to get Jem, who could always be counted on to flirt with him a bit before handing it over to Lola, thus proving his worth to Lola. Jem: what kind of parents named a girl that? He could never have a girlfriend named Jemima. Names were important to him. A bad name was worse than bad breath. He’d backed out of something once with a model named Santana.
He caught himself nodding to the black black jazz they treated him to while he waited for Lola to release him from the tasteful limbo of On Hold. A CD burned from an authentic and scratchy old 78. He couldn’t help visualizing a synchronized chorus line of Al Jolsons in shoe polish, dwindling towards infinity, strumming banjos and grinning like skulls while being buggered by an equal infinity of Satchmos. Black black jazz for a white white restaurant. Friendly racism. Does any Ethnic Group valued chiefly for the quality of its suffering stand a chance?
When Lola got back on the line, Salter was relieved to find that she was half-whispering conspiratorially in the phone to him so he knew he probably wasn’t in danger of Fargo in bed that night. Fargo; Siberia: name your frigid wasteland. He so badly needed the existence-confirming sensation of something fuckish tonight.
“Get this,” she hissed, “rich fucker just dropped $42,000.00 on a dinner for five.” She pronounced “fucker” fokkar. Otherwise her speech was thoroughly Americanized, which is to say ornamented with luridly nasal banalities. “I don’t know why but the servers thought he’s going to stiff them so each one goes and spits in the butternut squash soup.” Punch line: “Eight thousand dollar tip.”
She got home at one, eight-feet-tall in her heels and the cool fuselage of her dress and hair of burnished blades. He was watching television like a good boy when she clomped into the bedroom waving hello but not speaking as though speaking’s a kind of touch and she wasn’t in the mood but he got a bobbing erection the instant he saw her in all her pomp and nametag.
L. Beedo.
Lola unsheathed her nude glory. Breasts and hair lifted and falling as the dress went up and she clomped into the bathroom in heels and zilch else to brush and floss and mop the angel-face off then proceeded to snore and smell of soap on her side of the bed within thirty minutes of walking through the door. A record. He wouldn’t even have minded the usual missionary position and get it over with. No touching the tits, don’t mess up my hair and keep that finger away from my rectum. Poor Salter sat knees-up beside her, treated to a view of a meter of tawny back and he clutched the remote. O wretched man who craveth a fuck.
Tears.
Robbie The Robot warped and blurred, swimming in them. Salter was ostensibly watching “Forbidden Planet” (Walter Pigeon, Patrick O’Neal, Anne Francis) with the sound off and he strained to make sense of the flick through the seawater filter of his grief. The Griffin-like monster, visible only as raw energy, howled and clawed the protective field around the ship. It would have blown Salter’s mind to learn that Griffins are a symbol of monogamy. A heroic crew member with his pastels-emitting blaster was seized and ripped apart. Anne Francis with her buttery coif and the spanking sarcasm of her dotted pout startled a recognition in him for she was his genuine Sexual Ideal and he correctly pegged the futility of his sex life to her unavailability.
Snuffed the tube and the reading lamp on his side of the futon and stood up. Suddenly saw himself running across the bedroom from an impossibly distant corner, axe over his head, bringing the blade down with a scream of regret to cut his frustrating girlfriend in two but the very cartoon of it horrified him and made him sorry and love her all that much more, exacerbating his desire, which frustrated him further, which re-ignited his anger, which again made him see himself running across the bedroom from an impossibly distant corner with an axe hefted over his head, bringing the blade down with a scream of regret to cut himself in two instead.
He crept miserably into the living room with an unrequited hard-on of devilish force and he knelt milking it across the gleaming black pumps with arched backs like onyx cats stacked in a diptych of sadism and sexual snobbery under the coat hooks by the door. He lay three lengths of solder-colored semen in her $300 heels, steadying himself with a hand on the sleeve of an old coat which stood like a priest with its back to Salter’s indiscretion. Not the first time he’d fucked those shoes either. He crouched there, postmodern shoe-rapist, still burning with richly-satisfying orgasms and he pondered this awful exchange:
That had been six months ago. She’d dropped that A-bomb six months ago so what next? Everything escalates. Hunger, porno, Vietnam. She’d be punching and kicking him soon. Stabbing him on the toilet. Scissoring his face off and wearing it like a bib at breakfast.
In fifteen minutes he was dressed and out on Fifth Avenue in the dark. He walked by the Tea Leaf and Rockit Records and the boarded-up and tramp-infested deco-era Bijou. The Starbucks on the corner and the Rite Aid parking lot across the street. Left towards Sixth Avenue up Robinson. Then a right to the park. What really hit him as he sailed along was the unbelievable number of people in the sultry night who seemed to be happy. There they were, the dozens, the hundreds, holding hands and swinging arms in that triumphalist goose-step of love. Salter had to wonder how abnormal he was. Had it been him all of these years? Him and not them; her; It? His problem and not The World’s?
Standing at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Upas, he near-swooned as his mind came that close to accepting the notion that the Misery he once considered typical of Sentient Life was in fact just his own and his own fucking fault, not even necessary, just the result of faulty thinking and bad choices that could be blamed on nobody else. A pink convertible was honking at the traffic light.
Me? Salter pantomimed and the car honked yes.
The pink convertible was some kind of vintage wonder. Salter didn’t know from vintage cars but with white tires and a lot of chrome and the salvaged motor from a B-52 it looked and sounded like a horny birthday cake in the form of a yacht piloted by a white-haired gent in a Commodore’s cap (Salter didn’t know from Commodore’s Caps but that’s how he would have described it to the police). Beside the gent was a white-gloved woman in matching white shoulder-length hair, presumably the gent’s better half or lady-friend or however the old quaintly put it.
“I said,” said the duffer when Salter had scurried out into the street to lean over the convertible to hear him, “Would you like a ride young man?”
The duffer gunned the motor for emphasis. Or to pressure him. Salter was 30, and the old gent was 66, so, arithmetically speaking, the offer of a ride in the gent’s car was no different than if their respective ages had been 5 and 41. Defying his mother, Salter jumped in the back seat of the car, banging his elbow, as the light changed. He jumped on the naïve belief that a man with a woman is never as dangerous as a man alone. The old guy twisted to face Salter as he drove, saying,
“This is the only city in the world that it makes sense to own a convertible in. Others are too damned dangerous or rainy. Are you from the area?”
Talking like a man in a gale. White-haired ringer for Don Ameche. Salter was, in fact, tempted to ask the old guy if he was related (or even Ameche himself) but instead merely limited himself to responding directly to Don’s query.
They drove as far as Robinson and did a swaggering u-turn so wide they nearly took the door handle off a parked car on the other side of the four lane road and headed back the way Salter had been walking when they picked him up. With his eyes on the road again Don smiled in the rearview.
“We’re practically neighbors then. We do this every Friday night…” he inserted a pause to indicate his companion, whose teeth were the simplest smile… “We see something new every time.” He added, “For example, I’ll bet you didn’t know that there’s a banana tree in the yard of that bungalow on the corner of Robinson and Third Avenue.”
“No,” said Salter, surprised, “I didn’t.”
“Delicious. Stolen fruit tastes better in an open convertible at night, you know. And you probably weren’t aware of the fact that there’s a full-sized statue of the comedian Jonathan Winters in the backyard of a place up there on Point Loma. On a six foot plinth. A prop from the movie ‘The Loved One.’ We saw that when it first came out, at the old Bijou.” He thought a moment. “Evelyn Waugh.”
“Really?” Salter had never heard of the movie or the comedian or Evelyn Waugh. He wasn’t sure about the word ‘plinth.’
“Awful lot of movie people down here,” concluded Salter’s genial host. They were idling at a red light at the corner of Laurel and Sixth. To the left was Balboa Park and its orderly arrangement of skyscraping palms attended by a vassalage of shorter pines in low darkness. The old woman was touching up her lipstick and the drawstringed mouth was grinning at Salter in the rearview and he was thinking what have we here? A crucial detail was all wrong, of course: the combined age of the two was more than half the age of America. Otherwise things seemed to be shaping up into one of Salter’s hoariest fantasies.
Rich couple picks up a young stud. They drive to a deserted stretch of the beach. A towel on the sand. The millionaire with his arm around the young stud’s shoulder: I love my wife but I’m impotent… please… I don’t know how to ask this, but could you… would you… ?
“Vincent Price had a house over there, back a-ways, in Mission hills, overlooking the Airport. Lindbergh Field. I always had a problem calling it ‘Lindbergh Field,’ you know. I guess I’m showing my age, but I can never hear the name ‘Lindbergh’ without remembering one of those awful ‘Lindbergh Baby’ jokes.”
He assumed a perfect deadpan and turned with his right arm along the top of the seat and looked at Salter and cleared his throat and said, “Say, what do you call a… a, uh… oh, wait a minute. That’s not how it goes. Dammit. I’m useless. I just thought of one the other day…”
A classic specimen of one of those old-time couples, thought Salter. The man doing all the talking; the woman just smiling… beaming, really… mostly at the man himself, oblivious to outsiders. Salter tried to remember. There was another example. It rang a bell…
The Reagans.
Salter tried his hand at small talk.
“So, you two are married, then?”
Don was still idling at the intersection of Sixth and Laurel, despite the long-ago fact of the light going green. Was he still trying to remember a Lindbergh Baby joke? The traffic light became a clock. The old guy was staring at something to the left, away from his wife, in the park maybe, so intently just then that Salter guessed that he hadn’t even heard the question but as Salter cleared his throat and undertook to repeat himself verbatim, the old guy replied, overlapping him, “For a very long time.”
For a very long time.
Which sounded so nice. It sounded so nice that it made Salter regret every single fact of his life as it was and made him hunger for a change and it made him long for a second chance and the first thing he resolved to throw out before relocating into the shiny new home of the Duplex of his re-organized Soul was ‘Art,’ that dusty thing, that furry brown shit-caked 19th century attic heirloom called ‘Art.’ Fuck it! Toss it! Filthy old bristly bearded hoary repulsive thing! Musty fusty dirtbag thing! What had ART done but ruin his chances at Life?
Where was Salter’s convertible? Where was Salter’s love-dumb, worshipful wife? Where was all his stuff, his security, his peace-of-fucking-mind? Somewhere back there, at some juncture so remote that he couldn’t even remember what sickly-sweet pop song was a hit on the radio the day that he did it, he had veered Left when so many others had trudged ahead. So many others kept on going down that long straight road. The long straight road of happiness. So easily achieved! You just remain on that long straight road. How hard could it be?
The light went green again and the car moved forward as effortlessly as a breath or a liquid downhill advertising wealth and a jet bellied loud overhead on its way to Lindbergh Field and Salter hollered, “It must be great to grow old with someone you love!” and he was nearly choked with emotion as he hollered it, touched as he was by the serene beauty of human completion radiated by the white-haired couple, the living opposites of Salter’s world and Salter’s monotonously unspectacular luck but Salter vowed to change all that inspired by this couple.
“It must be great…”
“Rubbish,” laughed the old coot. “We can barely stand the sight of each other.”
Salter laughed right back at him. Weren’t old guys always funny in the same way? Never quite slap-your-knee funny but just as reliably never unfunny, either. Wry. Are young people ever ‘wry’?
“I suppose you think I’m joking,” he said and then grunted, like a man on the phone on the toilet, doing something complicated with the gear shift and clutch or whatever as the car took on the hill that rose up before them, “But I’m not, I promise. ‘Hate’ is too strong a word, of course. But…”
“But, no. Love? No. I can see how you’d get that impression. Nice old couple, cruising around in a convertible on a Friday night, right? Not a care in the world! All smiles…” He winked in the mirror.
“But that’s just nerve damage. See? Look: that’s a permanent grin on her face, like a Jack-O-Lantern. Pure luck it didn’t freeze into a scowl. I’ll give The Good Lord credit for that much.”
“She’s ten years older than I am, but you’d never know it. Got a collection of face lifts older than our grown children. I even started naming them! The last one I called Griselda. That’s the nerve damage right there, if you ask me. You can only lift a human face so many times. Something’s gotta give.”
He released a sigh so long that Salter could smell his breath. Bananas.
“I could have had two convertibles for the money I’ve spent on making a seventy-five year old woman look seventy!”
They were headed for the Highway. Salter could see it clearly with his Tales From The Crypt imagination: a Luger in the glove compartment. A Luger stuffed in beside a bloody road-map folded around a sandy, black-edged ear. Or: thirty two wallets. Or: Mexican scalps on a belt. A cock in a jar? Don Ameche was shaking his head. He exploded with a guffaw that sounded like an Apache War Whoop which made Salter jump.
“You must think I’m awful! But don’t worry, I forgot to mention, the poor thing can’t hear a word. Deaf as an old boot!”
He leaned on the horn and raised his voice over it and shouted, “AREN’T YOU, NAT? AREN’T YOU? Can’t read lips, either. Couldn’t be bothered! I keep this happy look on my face,” he nodded, grinning, “And Old Yeller just thinks I’m saying nice things about her. Haven’t done the Hokey-Pokey in a Coon’s age. Mostly I abhor the smell of talcum powder. Turns me off.”
After a long pause he added, with extra significance, “I’m dying for a little company,” and he waited a calculated interval before slipping a shy glance into the rearview. But Salter was already gone. Had he ever really been there?
2FLASHPOMES
ADVICE
2019
THE RE-WRITTEN #3
THE BIRTHMARK
The little bald citizen from an Otto Dix painting asks Veer ah yoo go-ink and Frederick shrugs so slowly the gesture becomes strange to him before he completes it. The last thing he came to Berlin to do is sit beside a panting homosexualist as the lights go down in a movie house. He doesn’t know what he came to Berlin for but he knows it wasn’t that. He knows so little so well. He can feel Herr Ludwig watching from the kitchen as he saunters up the street with his hands in his pockets under fizzy warm twilight with a hetero set to his shoulders.
It is an omen that The Sheltering Sky premieres the very day he lands in Berlin though Debra Winger playing Kit Moresby (playing Jane Bowles) elicits a sneer as he waits in line to buy a ticket thinking of apter actresses. Dressed in a light gray three-piece summer suit and Italian shoes that Bowles himself would approve of he eases into his dirty velor seat and nods off dreaming Herr Ludwig is Paul Bowles in disguise. A ruse to test Frederick’s sincerity.
“But how could I have known?” pleads Frederick.
“To be is to know,” chides Mr. Bowles, stripping out of his bathrobe. He has beautiful breasts.
Shoved by an usher and reluctant to go home Frederick wanders a bus route through Turkish neighborhoods. He hears fruit vendors wailing and sees burka’d matrons like piles of coats that have walked off from their respective parties. He thrills to bold glances from sloe-eyed houris the color of smoked meat revealed in the slutty garb of the West. The Germans he sees remind him of UN inspectors. On Marburger Strasse he finds a nightclub called Limbo. The doorman nods at Frederick’s suit.
Frederick is staring at a black-haired girl at a table under the window of the DJ’s booth.
Winter comes to Berlin as a sick sweet dream of bunker life ie drinking and smoking and fucking in darkness. Back in his room on Hauptstrasse where Herr Ludwig gives voice lessons at his baby grand to the great-grandniece of Gustave Mahler Frederick masturbates under a borrowed duvet pretending to torture the caterwauling Mahler. His orgasm fails to silence her.
Frederick takes the black-haired girl to a Hitchcock festival in a cinema so small the ceiling is someone’s bedroom floor. Watching The Birds in German.
Out the Ausgang and on the street into the night they walk for a block of ruminative silence until Sariah, who emigrated from Iran with her dissident mother as the Khomeini came to power in ’79, says I believe that is the most religious film I have ever seen.
“Religious?” guffaws Frederick. “Au contraire. The most misogynist rant in film history! Fellini’s City of Women is nothing compared to The Birds, as far as that goes, my dear. ‘Bird’ is working class British slang for ‘girl,’ as you know. Don’t forget Hitchcock was British.”
“I mean, what, you have this hen-pecked bachelor, no pun intended, played by Rod Taylor. Rod. Right? And all the other important characters of the film -his girlfriend, his ex-girlfriend, his little sister, and his mother- they’re all women.”
He ticks the points off on his fingers. “The girlfriend’s a frigid tease, the ex is a slut -that’s why her hair is dark- and his mother is a clinging, emasculating shrew, and his little sister is a brat, also dark-haired, implying that she’s going to grow up to be a slut too. Meanwhile, the mother and the girlfriend are almost mirror images of each other. Their hairdos are identical, which means a lot in Hitchcock, who was the most hairdo-obsessed director in film history. Our hero, Mitch -rhymes with bitch, if you please -wants to, ahem nest- with a girl who looks like a young version of his own mother, invoking the Oedipus complex. Which ends up putting out the eyes not of Mitch himself but of his ex-girlfriend, in a perfect example of substitution, since the resemblance between Rod Taylor and Suzanne Pleshette, who plays the ex, is uncanny. The birds, like Freudian harpies, pluck out her eyes.”
“The female romantic lead, his girl friend, Tippy Hedron, she goes from being a perfectly-coiffed snob and a tease in the beginning of the film to a disheveled, catatonic loony by the end.”
“Remember that the first blood drawn in the film, in fact, is from Tippy, who’s trying to strike a silly, an absurdly elegant, pose in the prow of a beat up old motor boat. She’s wearing a jade-green Dior dress or what have you. As a matter of fact, as I now recall, she’s even got the nerve to be freshening up her makeup with a compact as she’s sitting there in this filthy boat, proving how vain, how shameless, how typical, or Tippy-cal she really is. Her nose is in the air, her bosom is high and hard, her spun-gold hair is immaculately coiffed.”
“Between the tease, the shrew, the slut and the brat, this guy, Rod Taylor -Rod, for Chrissakes- he doesn’t have a chance! The illogical savagery, the unpredictable pattern of violence, of the birds, is just a metaphor for the daily reality of life for a guy among these women. All women.”
He looks to see that eleven of tears. He feels long and red and sort of amorally malarial later climbing over her with the tiled stone headache of the heated stove at their feet. Her Bible hair and her cunt the black lamb with its fiercely trusting grip. She resists very subtly at first or wants to control how it plays out but he pushes through that. He jigs her legs around his waist to cross the room and slam the door with her back while Fraulein Mahler wails against Herr Ludwig’s piano. Sariah’s homework is spread on the parquet and Frederick slips on world history coming.
She is always all over again so sweetly tentative, so eager and afraid because her virginity heals between fuckings. Frederick thinks she fucks like dogs swim and records this thought in a notebook. They always seem so surprised they can do it.
She has her seventeenth birthday. Frederick extends his visa. Herr Ludwig discusses opera in German with Sariah at the table while Frederick washes the dishes in his silk pyjamas. She looks so worldly with that cigarette in her mouth.
Summer is the relief that everyone promised. The city gushes foreign greens and the Tiergarten is heavy with stone-white tits and root-red cocks and Sariah studies the earth at her feet as she follows Frederick traversing a field. Her mother isn’t even aware of Frederick’s existence for that first half year. Sariah calls Frederick from pay phones or leaves notes about when and where to meet. The day before she tells him she’s pregnant Frederick dreams it following a long trail of tiny prints in warm snow to a tree which stinks of pillows.
So it is at Chez Jacques Sariah tells him and Frederick finishes his spaghetti in the tender light of the dingy Moorish pale gold walls of Chez Jacques and he looks at Sariah and sees a mistake the size of a grapeseed and asks for the bill.
MORE and MORE TIMELESS
Again little time to post at the moment, Comrades Lorcas and Explicit; Beloved gigging heavily this summer [ed.'s note: yesterday she was gone all day on a gig performing for Germany's new President, riding from and to and from and to Rancho Augustine in a state limousine with tinted windows and hobnobbing with celebrities not a single one of you, with the exception of Comrade Barry, will have heard of] and so with Offsprung designing more sky-castles, Kermit-chambers and pudding-yachts for which my help as a consultant is required I am busy. And I had just finished working on that rent-paying commercial music crap of my own, too and was looking forward to killing time nobly with Lit. Instead of killing time nobly, of course, I’m being useful at home and that’s much better.
Comrade Barry (now down with a flu or the fantods or something) and I are cooking up things for TET 7.0. Until then just please (and pleasedly, please) peruse the fresh and/or re-tooled Fiction. Read about Goss, Salter and Frederick (directly above), for example… they’re each a special kind of arsehole! Read my flash version of the future (2019)! And above those the delicious postmodern Milkyway Bars of the Saul and Wally tales! Scroll higher, Icarus, and read more… and more… and… and…!
… not to mention:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
…and, wait… did I forget this one…?
…and, aha, yes: this and these… and this novel
…oh dear… forgot this and THIS
ART: YOU BROKE IT YOU BOUGHT IT
#1
Fucking retarded Art-n-Lit-killing cunts. Far more dangerous to Art-n-Lit than rampant Philistinism (as dangerous as that is) are the venal incursions of the Clever-But-Untalented… dangerous in the way that the Agent Provocateur… the Infiltrator… is dangerous to any progressive movement. Maybe violence is a solution. Kicking one of these Art-killers in the pants might do us (and Art) such wonders.
DER FUTURE IS HERE
(via Comrade DJ Sensei JR)
UNPOPULIST OPINION and the RACIAL DIVIDE or THE DEAD BLACK GODS
(over at the Paris Review):
UPDATE: later the discussion expanded to:
Can (presumably) Liberal Whites ever take instruction on the matters of Race? Gut Gawd I can just see the look on Miss Ursula Birdwood’s face when she brings us this news: the niggers just looked soooo happy!
UPDATE2:
Does no one find it worthwhile to do a little critical thinking when it comes to Blacks in North America? Are we really embedded so deeply (near sensitive areas adjacent to the Id and the Libido) in the waking dreamlife of Liberal Whites that unpacking this shit is out of the question? In thirty years of discussing this general topic I’ve never had one Liberal White concede a single point in debates about Ebonics/ Blaxploitation/ Aunt Jemima/ The Black Church / The Wire / Gangsta Rap / Concepts of Ethnic Purity and Authenticity/ Low-Intellectual-Expectations-for-Black-Culture/ Hair-Straightening/ The Basketball Meme/ What The Election of the First Black President Really Means (erm, nothing?)/ … pfew! In German they call it being a “Besserwisser”. In English I believe the term is “know-it-all”. What an amazing patrimony! And to be so pampered!
[ed.'s note: I did once, miraculously, find a bunch of commenters, all women, to agree with me that it was outrageous for so many Liberal White Male Bloggers to chide HL Gates as "stupid" for resisting arrest, in his own kitchen, for being in his kitchen; that was nice]
Consider, Comrades Lorcas and Explicit: if I identified myself as a Palestinian and started a debate about Gaza, would the same Liberal Whites remain as immune to being challenged or corrected on any and every point…?
UPDATE3:
At least Pudel was good enough to engage! Always appreciated. But when he/she writes “regardless of *how* you come to believe it, *what* you believe will set you free probably will,” we have to admit that’s kind of breath-taking. It’s All in Our Heads, apparently, Brothers and Sisters! We are just one lateral move from the dear old concept of Pie in the Sky (pron: “Pah in de Skah”)!
PS:
UPDATE (in summation):
Ah, the Crypto-Contempt. It’s obvious here that even Whites who are sympathetic towards Blacks (or who “love” “them”) have not yet learned to respect Blacks. Not in the full sense of the word. It’s easy to respect a Black in the way one respects a big dog or a piece of industrial machinery for Whites enjoy physically fearing Blacks, a social terror that combines the gruesome fun of a slasher flick with the constant affirmation of being superior to the savages (a White’s chances of actually being raped, robbed or murdered by a Black Terror are still as slim as a patron’s in the audience of said slasher flick). Whites can only respect Blacks in the human dimension of the word if they are allowed the experience of fearing them intellectually… a fear they’ve worked hard at making impossible for three centuries. It’s not likely to happen, then. Such Public Black Intellectuals as are allowed through the gate are toothless/harmless/ second-rate and, as stated, too worried about tenure to say anything radical: Institutions are, after all, primarily, filters. This is the root of the problem. A “black” is a product precisely engineered by “white men” to serve and give pleasure. A “black” is a product designed to be disrespected. The only possible Revolution will involve destroying the product.
http://www.southpark.de/alleEpisoden/408?lang=en
CONTRA CONTRA HITLER-CALLING
Finally, a mainstreamish organ takes on the chilling effects of Godwin’s Law. Concluding with a nugget:
SIZE IS EVERYTHINK
Reading a piece about Gangs in London (Black gangs, overwhelmingly, of course) I thought on how symbolic-deconstructive analysis (a la Zizek) of the largest socio-political structures never happens in terms of GANG THEORY.
It’s obvious that the U.S. military, for example, is, by any definition (barring magnitudes or quantities) that applies to all other gangs, a GANG. Dividing Gang Activities into basic categories such as A) the protection or annexation of territory or B) revenge or C) financial-profit-motivated, the definition holds. The Bloods and Crips are micro-gangs to the Ur-Gang of the U.S. (or any nation-state’s) military. Include even corollary or collateral activities like Rape, Pillage and Recreational/Random Terror and: yes: the definition still holds. The Gang patois and hieroglyphics we see in use by, eg, The Bloods we can compare to military jargon, acronyms, slang etc. This is not a metaphor. The historical activity of the family of Gangs called “Vikings” is often, for some reason, celebrated.
The commenters on any thread about regional (or municipal) Gangs such as The Bloods and The Crips (or the GMGs of London) will break down into 1) white commenters expressing contempt/ horror/ revulsion and 2) black commenters expressing themselves in the argot of the regional (or municipal) gang. The negative white commenters can’t seem to see the sacking/rape/incineration of entire countries as revolting as black members of regional gangs stabbing each other to death and/or menacing whites.
What’s contempt-worthy about the regional (or municipal) gang is what a small operation it is, clearly. They don’t even have helicopters!
IT’S TAKEN SEVERAL YEARS BUT IT’S FINALLY HAPPENED!
THE VINTAGE CHAMPIONSHIP: A JOURNALISTIC REACTION
(first published in the summer of 2008)
HELENS of TROY
Berlin’s normally rainy early summer has produced a drought, blowing a gritty breeze that dries the sweat before it beads and vexes the eye with particles sluiced in camel-colored veils trailing from building sites where the progress is slow on a nihilistically Mediterranean scale. I sat down to a plate of very good falafel and watched a sirocco rise up like a Jinn from a dumpster under a scaffold up the street and it swept over me before I could make it indoors. Minus the eye-irritants the breeze is quite pleasant in the evening.
It’s a very light late-suppertime and the EM, or europäischer Meisterschaft, has crammed the tables of the outdoor cafes with men and their girlfriends watching sidewalked widescreen televisions. The televisions make a spectacle of the spectacle of uniformed stags at play on green fields against the vast curtain of the local twilight, which is the color of a vintage picture tube in a dark room a millisecond after the shut-off. The fields on the widescreens are greener than anything in the neighborhood. Or the city. Except other screens.
The widescreens have given public space the unusual feeling of a public space; strangers on benches at long tables are groaning and cheering together while flirting in open harmlessness with each others’ Helens of Troy, leering in jest. The females are dressed to compete with the athletes and seemed to have forgotten the fact that they’re the traditional spoils of symbolic Byzantine war. The better looking girlfriends belong to the more brutal of the fans and will be obliged to fuck when they go home after the game, whatever the game’s results. A friend once claimed you can tell the civilized nations from the barbaric ones by their respective responses to winning or losing an important soccer match: the civilized fans loot and riot after a loss and the barbaric ones do so after winning. A similar dichotomy will determine the tone of post-match fucking. Which of the trophy girlfriends dread a win, and which a loss?
Tinny echoes of fascist rallies pour out into the night as though channeled by spiritualist mediums wherever I walk. I’ve never before made a conscious association between spiritualist mediums and modern media, bridging the gap between the 1930s and the 21st century. We can use our televisions to visit the dead; the dead in their aquarium. I’m looking for an outdoor café that doesn’t feature a widescreen television. I’m not hungry enough to forgo the pleasures of this prejudice.
The EM explains the German flags everywhere, little ones sticking from cars and big ones sticking from windows, although Germany isn’t in the game this evening. I see Turkish flags, too, because Turkey is in the game. The flags are national erections. Orientals, Aryans and Africans all compete. America’s team ineptitude is an insulting testament to the game’s unimportance; i.e., cavort in your short pants while we determine the fate of the planet. No one voices this observation.
A few years ago, a German businessman stabbed his wife for pulling the plug on his widescreen the moment before a tournament-winning goal and received a light sentence. There was the wag who cast soccer balls in concrete and skillfully painted the products and placed them around town during the tournament fever of that same year, breaking many feet. The sexual itch of a soccer ball just begging to be kicked.
I think of Samuel Beckett, at the end of his life, watching televised soccer as a kind of bitter confession of the hopelessness of higher intelligence: to know so many things, with no power to change them; to have so many memories, with no power to return to the past.
Practitioners of soccer, like those of sex, can achieve an impressive mastery which is nowhere else applicable.
***
It’s not difficult to draw comparisons between a soccer match and the traditional literary narrative, or to find echoes of my disdain for the one in my boredom with the other. Victory in a soccer match has its equivalent in the moral outcome of a traditional literary narrative, for example. The soccer ball is either roughly analogous to the reader’s consciousness or the mutable gestalt of the protagonist’s dreams and sensibilities, buffeted by the plot, or the ball is even, perhaps, the author’s soul.
Why only one ball? Why only two teams? Why the boring rigidity of the diagrammed field, the player costumes, the segregated spectators and simplistic goal positions? Why aren’t players allowed to defect from one team to another mid-play, or import useful non-standard paraphernalia onto the field, or defecate/urinate/ejaculate on the pitch in an expression of extreme displeasure or animal exuberance or for purely tactical reasons? Why no trench-digging, pyre-building, or half-time stonings or dissident funerals?
Spare a thought for fiction that invokes the hexagonal soccer pitch, a goal placed at every of the six sides, with three teams and three balls and six referees on horseback, three of the horses being mares in deep heat and the others stallions and the game frequently interrupted by violently elemental couplings which rip up the pitch.
***
The penis is a symbol and a tool. The penis is a symbol of tools. It is the effigy of man, and in the fullness of its dance, from latency to tumescence to discharge to quiescence, it recapitulates the poignancy of man’s determined arc. The spent penis alone in the vagina’s chamber is but man in his grave. The penis at daybreak is but crowless cock. Penis jester troll god. Where others see the empire state building, or pencils, rockets, eels, swords, Buicks, spindles, wieners, thermos jugs, snakes, worms, derricks, trees, mushrooms, church spires, trombones, syringes, fingers, tongues, decanters, snails, submarines, cucumbers, neckties, female torsos, bell towers, pistols, barracudas, paramecia, daggers, telescopes, salamanders, walking sticks, chainsaws, carrots, thermometers, dolphins and blimps… the athlete sees penis.
-The athlete at five years old: big soft mommy and funny-smell-lady are laughing (the athlete learns that he isn’t just a human with thoughts and feelings but an object with attributes).
-The athlete at seventeen years old: his asthmatic easy-lay is laughing (the athlete learns that his attributes aren’t constant).
-The athlete at eighty: Samuel Beckett.
***
I find an outdoor café with a decent menu and no widescreen television. There’s only one other customer, four tables distant, facing the dark end of this tree-lined sidestreet on Savignyplatz. A woman.
***
“I may look German but I’m not,” she smiles, in California tones, as the waiter hands her her second drink. She’s smiling at me while reaching for the wine. I don’t think she looks German at all; she’s clearly, in my book of prejudices, the second wife of an American professional who’s been exiled to Germany. The egalitarian t-shirt; the woundingly-expensive Jackie O sunglasses mounted in the burnished crop of her dye-job like a tiara. “Not a football fan?”
“Hardly. Football’s sworn nemesis,” I joke, and we lift our respective glasses in a toast to a coincidentally-timed, ambient roar of jubilation that pours down the street and out of the windows of the genteel flats above us. I get up and move to the table next to hers to hear better. A whiff of vulva to her perfume.
“Are you Gay?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Well, there’s Gay and then there’s Gay.”
“DNA Gay versus the Gay of convenience.”
“That’s right. I basically found all this amazing porno on my ex-husband’s Mac one day and it hit me all the amazing stuff he’d been missing. I actually felt guilty for cheating him out of all that for so many years. You know? They do things I normally assumed was physically impossible and they consider it whitebread. Talk about out of the loop! We’re really good friends now,” she laughs, “but it kinda bugs me that his boyfriend is younger than mine. Younger and cuter. If you were Gay we’d end up being the best of friends. You’d call me up all giddy and breathless every time you thought you’d met Mister Right and six months later I’d be the shoulder you blubbered on when it all goes terribly wrong. I tried to get a personalized license plate called Fag Hag 27 but they wouldn’t let me. They say it’s a free country but what do I know. It’s free if you’re willing to pay for it, right? Except I was willing to pay for it and I still couldn’t have it.”
“Story of your life.” I toast her again; again comes the coincidental jubilation.
“If this were a movie I’d come on to you rather drunkenly about now, wouldn’t I?” She toasts me back and bisects her grin with the sharp lip of her wineglass. “But it isn’t so I won’t. Not that you care. What brings you to the Fatherland, anyway?”
An hour later I’m guiding her to her flat like a spotter beside a low tightrope. Twice she falls, floppily busty and loud. The second time she scratches her hand and an orange knuckle bleeds but she doesn’t care to notice. I surprise myself by being afraid of the blood.
Patiently fingernailing the double-knot-collapsed-into-a-recalcitrant-single-knot lace of her second trainer, I realize I’ll never be able to get hard enough to fuck her, so I decide to talk instead, leaving the trainer where it is, dangling from the edge of her depressing double bed. I extract, from the breast pocket of my blazer, a folded print-out of a story I’d been working on months ago and had forgotten about. Before I can pretend to solicit feedback and read her the excerpt, she’s snoring, an fish-mouthed snore like a boy’s impression of half a stadium’s distant ecstasy at the tie-breaking goal. I stand with one knee on the mattress and ejaculate in three thick beams on her widescreen sunglasses, miffed that she won’t hear the excerpt.
via Comrade DJ Sensei JR
UNPOPULIST OPINION and the RACIAL DIVIDE or THE DEAD BLACK GODS-PART 2
(read at: Paris Review):
Note: to extend the argument a bit (I felt constrained by comment-length etiquette at PR): a Black who isn’t a champion at basketball or a rapping savant or exemplary as one of only a few product-types is not only a product but a defective one.
Also Note: Sam Cooke may have lived and died as a Conceptual Product, but when he moved on to singing about Pussy from singing about Jeezis he acquired some dignity, imo.
PHILOSOPHY in the OPRAH-GAGA YUGA
Ziz? Ziz used to be good for some tasty inversions. Now he’s reduced to recycling tropes we precocious students diddled in High School. And why is Ziz lecturing about what “Nature” is or isn’t? Is that his specialty? What are his sources on that? Aren’t his pronouncements merely anecdotal or conceits of rhetoric and attitude? And who is this collective “We” (with imaginary Agency) he addresses /interrogates? Does he think “we” are in charge? Go to 10 minutes into it: Ziz manages to A) invoke a Hallmark card and B) shill for Heavy Industry in one limp swoop!
Who is this nose-hair-tugging guy with the funny accent telling us about EVERYTHING? Why do we ask him to tell us about EVERYTHING? Also: Fancy Explainer: Look to Thy vanity! He’s wearing that vest to hide his gut.
Ah, so winningly Brando-esque in his candid disavowals.
LIFE and DEATH in the OPRAH-GAGA YUGA
THE NEW WORD ORDER
I’ve decided to post a pdf of 23 shorts because I’ve received poignant emails about the fact that accessing the links to my fiction on TET is a tryingly-tedious process. This is owing to the effup that the images on every thread take a while to load (which is owing to the effup that I couldn’t be bothered to add the extra steps of shrinking the bytes of each image to quick-loading dimensions).
The shorts (and one novella) in this collection represent about a fourth of the tale-telling material (by page-count) I have published online. These 23 (Illuminati-groupies, take note) are a fair sample of the range … lopping off extremes at both the mainstreamy and obscurantist nipple-ends of my savory rainbow.
I believe this may be the most painless €00.00 you’ll ever pay for this much relatively-typo-free literature.
UPDATE: some typos corrected, pg numbers added to TOC
DIFFICULT TEXTS: THE COLLECTION
http://staugustine2.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/difficult-texts-by-steven-augustine.pdf