My Favourite New Record of the Year Thus Far

 

Threepenny Oppenheimer Pt. 6

 

Women working as computers for the U.S. Space Program

Tao Yuanming and Su Shi

It was James Bridle in his book New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future who first hipped me to the fact that computers were once people and that was the name of their job. Often these computers would sit at desks lined up in rows in large rooms crunching numbers in the hopes of accurately predicting the weather for this or that military during wartime. Almost all our major technological breakthroughs begin in research with military applications. Computers will not set you free. More numbers on the abacus means more smoke in your eye, not crystallinity and transcendence, bub. It’s Antonioni’s Blow-Up: the more you zoom in the more it’s just opacity and blur. The 21st century Russians especially are a case in point. Viewers of Adam Curtis’s documentary HyperNormalisation will be familiar: the Russians are less interested in cherry-picking Western leaders or pushing measures like Brexit through than they are in producing mass confusion and animus upon which they can capitalize, and it is in this light that Trump can be seen as a kind of rampaging asset. Our perplexity and incapacity will only grow. Our economics and technology are inherently divisive and they are running hella hot in maximum overdrive. At the end of his chapter on "Conspiracy," James Bridle speaks of living in the "gray zone,” a temporary autonomous zone that "allows us to sample from the myriad of explanations that our limited cognition stretches like a mask over the vibrating half-truths of the world. It is a better approximation of reality than any rigid binary encoding can ever hope to be—an acknowledgment that all our apprehensions are approximations, and all the more powerful for being so. The gray zone allows us to make peace with the otherwise-irreconcilable, conflicting worldviews that prevent us from taking meaningful action in the present." It is not a matter of finding our way out of darkness but rather of finding a way to live within it…until the solitary pinprick star in the distance fades out anticlimactic once and for bless’d all. Why be interested in class struggle without desire, madmen, and adventure? Do you simply wish to hand over the key to your locks and chains to some new patron? In The Chinese Pleasure Book, her encompassing study of early classical Chinese thought, Michael Nylan apprehends a vital and vibrant living territory that is stridently pragmatic, rejecting immutable moral law, making use of the “delicate constructions” in classical Chinese rhetoric, and committed to sustainable pleasures for as much of the community as possible, modifying “models and commitments as necessary.” What I would call the ontological dimension of pleasure relates to cosmic order, resonance theory, and ‘qi.’ All things have 'qi,' which is spirit or vital energy. Resonance relates to embodied immersion in the macrocosmic domain—manifold frequency connectedness. Translating ‘le’ as “pleasure,” Nylan tells us, will rub certain people the wrong way. She explains why she doesn’t think happiness or joy work. She looks at all kinds of different synonyms for different forms of delight. Rapture, enjoyment, et cetera. I could not help but consider the concept of ‘jouissance’ as elaborated by various thinkers steeped in psychoanalytic theory, especially Julia Kristeva. What distinguishes ‘le’ from ‘jouissance,’ to my mind, is the former’s sober pragmatics and dependence on the natural and the prosaic. A central principle is that the sage lives with an ever-present consciousness of living vitality. From the Zhuangzi: “Great understanding is broad and unhurried, in contrast to petty understanding, which is cramped and busy.” Then we have Yang Xiong, the Western Han philosophical master famous in his time for his ‘fu’ poetry. Yang would seem the apotheosis of early manuscript culture, writing in Exemplary Figures that books “are as alluring as women.” Yang Xiong’s rhetorical question: “Are you for the Way or for profit?” The seventh and final chapter of The Chinese Pleasure Book—probably my personal favourite—addresses the poets Tao Yuanming and Su Shi, separated by almost seven centuries. I was absolutely blown away by the fragments of Tao Yuanming’s poetry included in the Zone edition of the book; his work is at once profound and plainspoken, sometimes ironic, and almost modern as such. “Tao never expected unalloyed happiness at all times; by his lights, he, like all other mortals, took pleasure and felt sorrow by turns, even as he sought to realize the full magnitude of life’s simple gifts.” Su Shi dedicated much of his life—seven centuries later!—to cementing a kind of spiritual bond with Tao, writing matching equivalents of almost all his predecessor’s poems. Both poets dealt with exile, travail, and expendable downtime, attempting the whole while to maintain fidelity to the Way, with varying degrees of success. Tao Yuanming was explicitly an inheritor of Confucian wisdom, Su Shi in dialogue with emerging Buddhist ideas and practices. The final section terminates with a large number of Tao’s poems juxtaposed with Su’s corresponding variations. If Tao excites me considerably more than does Su, largely on account of his commitment to earnestly communicating his own struggles and doubts, the parcel entire is enlightening nevertheless, and I would not given editorial licence have excluded any part. As Warren Oates says in Two-Lane Blacktop: “Those satisfactions are permanent." 

Most people who know me now know about my friend Paul in the low desert of Southern, California, who was my closest friend as an adult even though he was born in 1940 and, when he took sixteen years sober, boasted: “sweet sixteen, never been kissed!” And then said: “sixteen years sober and not one day of personal growth!” He was hilarious. I actually had another friend named Paul back in my university days and he was a real character too. He was a year or two younger than me and his wide black spectacle frames and jet-black hair actually made him look more than a little like the best friend Paul on classic sitcom The Wonder Years, played by Josh Saviano (or like Van Dyke Parks on the cover of the album Song Cycle). I took note of Paul when I happened to catch him presenting a paper to other students and a professor in the film department at Carleton, University on his childhood obsession with Blue Velvet and the way it could not have helped but determine his personal development. His rhythm and language were good, the often self-deprecating humour was genuinely clever and endearing, and he was obviously trying much harder than even my serious academic friends to produce solid and defined pieces of quality writing. It was Paul who changed my life by showing me Andy Kaufman and Freddie Blassie in My Breakfast with Blassie. He loved outsider and degenerate comedy and was also a connoisseur of tape-cassette-era pornography. Together, Paul and I wrote an anarchist remake of the ‘80s teen comedy Revenge of the Nerds where we took every single scene from that film and tried to see how we could make it more subversive and confrontational and yet still fun and inclusive. All Fears of the Forest was the title we gave to our gnarly and unkempt remake of Revenge of the Nerds; we took it from the song “Changes” by Phil Ochs. I still have all or most of the screenplay sitting in a box. Paul and I also made a short film that people did see but which I definitely think would be best conclusively vaporized from the surface of the planet, in which Paul filmed me semi-covertly as I walked around three different Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets with a disturbing grin on my face, acting aphasic and out-of-it, saying nothing more to anyone other than the word “chicken” repeatedly and with increasing hopelessness. I know for a fact that we were largely inspired by Lars von Trier’s The Idiots but I think the influence of Tom Green, too. After all, Mr. Green came up with and perfected his schtick in Ottawa, on our stomping grounds. I even knew a guy who said Tom Green had sex with his girlfriend at a house party back in the Organized Rhyme days. I have a nude scene in this little video movie. Actually, we decided to make it the opening scene. I enter the foyer of a house in the suburbs dressed like a business man in a peacoat, then I hang my coat carefully on a hook, strip off the rest of my clothes, which I leave piled on the floor in the foyer, and finally enter the house off-frame, stark naked. It did not take me long to become embarrassed by this whole thing. Even worse was the Andy Kaufman-inspired open mic performance art we did—and filmed!—with me playing the nastiest barroom piano in history, him telling vaudeville era jokes, and the general volume and misrule rapidly growing unwholesome. When I saw that tape a few days later I asked Paul to please destroy it. One night some of my friends aggressively rustled me to alertness when I was passed out drunk and then recorded me on video as I thrashed about, whined, and pitifully threatened them, my friends lightly chuckling as though I were the entertainment following the courtly feast. I will confess that I did not at all like this footage either, but even then could see perfectly well that I’d brought it on my own no-account goldarn self.       

Anne Carson performs A Brief History of Sky Writing, 2010

Live performance of Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, 2019

During COVID lockdown, the Facebook page for the Louisiana Channel brought Canadian poet and classics scholar Anne Carson’s wonderful Lecture on the History of Sky Writing into my life—out, as it were, of the blue. You can find the performance I watched over at Vimeo where it remains to delight and engage uncommonly canny surfers of the web and happeners upon alike. Lecture on the History of Sky Writing was originally performed at the New York Live Ideas Festival in spring 2016 and shortly thereafter at the Whitney Museum. The piece finds Carson standing before podium and microphone delivering the lecture in question, a comprehensive history of everything and more composed by the sky itself, collaborator Robert Currie, got up in nifty western garb, participating in the role of Beckett’s arrival-averse Godot, fanciful banter serving as stimulating counterpoint. Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, released by New Directions in early 2020 in an ultra-slim volume, is a delightful patchwork of poems and fragments of prose which compounded altogether serve as a playlet, in a similar vein to the sky lecture, like which it was originally presented live, as the page following the obligatory copyright boilerplate informs us, at the Shed in New York City, premiering on April 9, 2019 (less than a year before the New Directions edition). Norma Jeane Baker who is also Marilyn Monroe is also Helen of Troy. That’s the high concept elevator pitch. Norma Jeane has rather materialized in Troy to occupy the Helenic seat, which leads rapidly to further obfuscation and shroud-shifting. Who actually went to Troy? Norma Jeane Baker? Not exactly. “A cloud in the shape of Norma Jeane Baker.” A cloud that flummoxed the armies. A cloud indicating not only epistemological opacity, obliquity, and obfuscation of the identity of all things and creatures, but also flux and blinding light. Norma Jeane Baker of Troy is married to a man named Arthur. We do not get Arthur’s surname, but we would have cause to imagine it to be Miller, and he’s “king of Sparta and New York.” He has gone and led an army to Troy in order to drag his wife home and hopefully earn back her affections. “As Marilyn used to say, ‘Keep the balloon and dare not to worry.’” Systems are being undermined, the order of things not only called into question but tripping on banana peels in a public thoroughfare. Helen of Troy and Marilyn Monroe traditionally occupy distinctive and very separate timelines, but you fold those timelines over one another en papillote and you get a whole bunch of the more things change the more they stay the same, much of this revolving around the subjection of women and the sacrifice of female idols taken by force. We are told the Greeks prize women below gold “but slightly ahead of oxen, sheep or goats —”; the men of Greece and Los Angeles and New York are driven to distraction by “that WMD in the forked form of woman.” Having once considered dying her pubes blonde to match her iconic simulated Marilyn locks, Norma decided that men prefer the bush the way it is. Is that how they want it? What do men want? “Most men like what slips away. A bit of strange. But I digress.” This is a cloud talking, and she’s expert at slipping away. Slipping away back to the hotel; slipping away from Fritz Lang and MGM; slipping away into any given set of arms. The ground of our groundlessness is entropy itself. What our experts in thermodynamics call entropy is mainly a tendency over time toward the loss of net organization within all systems. The 20th century was rich in entropy literature, especially once things got post-atomic. Much of this literature involved the loss of net organization of history or historicity, a posteriori, sequence and record collapsing into themselves like a tower pancaking. In certain respects, Norma Jeane Baker of Troy has quite a lot in common with a novel like Donald Barthelme’s posthumous The King, in which a manic-maniacal mash-up has the Dark Ages insinuating themselves back into the Second World War, Ezra Pound as nutbar radio personality intermediary. Anne Carson is much more an actual anarchist than the self-destructive and sedentary Barthelme, and though sometimes she may speak on behalf of the sky, sometimes she speaks on behalf of…dirt. “Dirt is something that has crossed a boundary it ought not to have crossed. Dirt confuses categories and mixes up form.” Dirt is “coming to get you.” Rape is one of the book’s themes and one of war’s. Carson returns a couple times to Persephone, a woman made famous in large part on account of her having been raped. May we not perhaps begin to grow convinced that Persephone will have her revenge? She might not even have to lift a finger. Maybe all Persephone needs is a certain number of her ducks in a row and advantageous atmospheric conditions.

Ikue Mori, Labyrinth [Full Album]

Top Five Classical Hollywood Romantic Comedies [in Chronological Order]

More happy love! more happy, happy love!

- John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn"  

Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939)

The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941)

The Strawberry Blonde (Raoul Walsh, 1941)

Cluny Brown (Ernst Lubitsch, 1946)

The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960) 

John Coltrane, A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle [Full Album]

💀

☣️☣️

Threepenny Oppenheimer Pt. 5

In my second year as an undergraduate student at Carleton University in Ottawa, as an elective I picked the big quasi-obligatory Canadian literature English class with dispassion and a certain amount of indifference. Great gifts arrive best that way. I’d already been surprised by how much I liked Hugh MacLennan’s dusty and handwringing Two Solitudes when they had us read it back in high school, but this course very quickly became a delight I looked forward to weekly and three of the books on that syllabus are never far from my mind to this present day: Susanna Moodie’s Roughing it in the Bush (hot off the presses in 1852); Ernest Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley (1952); and, from Alberta my home and broken hand, Robert Kroetsch’s The Studhorse Man (1969). At the behest of an editor, when immigrating to Upper Canada near modern-day Peterborough, Ontario during the 1830s, Susanna Moodie wrote a "guide" to settler life for British subjects considering coming to Canada, such that not only did she have to suffer setbacks, hardships, weather, and topography, she also had to get it all down and hand in her copy on time. What is toughest about this brazen and formidable woman is her composure. From right here on the Canadian prairie, Robert Kroetsch’s The Studhorse Man is more than any other novel I know like the penis of a horse. You heard me. When I read it back in ’98-’99, I remember how much it reminded me at some points of Thomas Pynchon and at others of Rudy Wurlitzer, both American writers of the burnout counterculture who I fussed over back then...in my ringlets. Hazard Lepage, the self-proclaimed last of the studhorse men, attempts to preserve the bloodline of his rare blue stallion, Poseidon, against the backdrop of Alberta in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Poseidon is ultimately conscripted into nonstop impregnation for the industrial production of estrogen for birth control pills. I think it’s meant to parallel the atrocities of Nazi Germany. One passage involves seventeen different slang terms for the male sex organ. A sex act may or may not bring one character back from the dead. A prairie home companion for all. It’s the book in the middle of the CanLit three, however—Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley—that was most relatable to me, touched me the most deeply, and even left me in a bit of a cold sweat a couple nights…almost as though it were destiny talking. Definitely inspired by Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and for certain written pretty tipsy, The Mountain and the Valley is an autobiographical Bildungsroman set in Nova Scotia’s beautiful and lonely Annapolis Valley. Growing up in the direction of his author, dissipation and ruin in the fallout of molten creativity and haywire yearning, from the epilogue on we know that protagonist David Canaan, his name practically a set of spiritual chains around his ankles, will die on the summit of the South Mountain at the age of thirty. The thing that touched me the most back in ’98-’99 was the way in which creativity is demonstrated to bloom. Young David cannot go serve in the Second World War, so he starts to write fictional stories about himself serving over in the theatre of operations on the Europe continent…and then naturally realizes that you can really travel all kinds of places using this simple and affordable technique. Our professor told us that he and some other devout supplicants at the teat of letters once went on a modest pilgrimage to see Ernest Buckler at his farm in Nova Scotia and that though the great man opened the door to them agreeably enough, he was so insensibly drunk that they did not ultimately stay long.

Gilbert Sorrentino

Budd Lake, New Jersey

It is never going to be easy to discuss no-bullshit Brooklynite Gilbert Sorrentino’s wonderful 1980 novel Aberration of Starlight without dutifully invoking Rashomon, both the 1950 Akira Kurosawa film and the 1922 Ryūnosuke Akutagawa short story upon which it is based, perhaps the most famous parallax narrative of them all. Folks probably have some cursory knowledge of Rashomon and its basic engineering at the very least. The story focuses on a single event, backing up multiple times to come at it from the disparate vantages of the various tangentially-connected characters who participate in it from the standpoints of their own individual position within its schematics, informed as these are by contrasting conditions and outlooks. The word “parallax” refers to differences in how an object will be perceived conditional to the location of the observer. In the Sorrentino the event around which all pivots involves an act of violence between adults that is witnessed by a boy. This concern with variations in perception and another additional concern with the fundamentally illusory character of things as they are perceived, is already foregrounded in the title Aberration of Starlight and the epigraph at the beginning of the novel explaining it: light traveling from a star appears to be “traveling along a path at an angle to the true direction of the star” because of “the component of the observer’s velocity in a direction perpendicular to the direction of the star.” Sorrentino is less concerned with perceptions and misperceptions of the central event as event, and more with how the event registers in each of the four central characters’ narrative construction of his or her own self-modifying on-the-ground reality. Aberration, like much of Sorrentino’s early work, expresses a distinct and potent species of soul-sickness. This is a novel that becomes increasingly grim. There is a spreading sense of psychospritual desolation and devouring moral rot. It is telling that its mounting nastiness coincides with the two final sections focusing on the inner lives of its two adult males, two spectacularly malign individuals, first Tom Thebus, a recently divorced womanizer, and second John McGrath, father of Marie, also recently separated from her spouse—a man targeted with a great many epithets reserved for those of Italian heritage—and the woman Tom is cravenly pursuing. If Marie and her ten-year-old son seem sad and brittle with nothing good coming their way, in Tom and Mr. McGrath the sadness mutates into two modes of pathetic, callow monstrosity, a woundedness that wounds back with malice, the tongue forked. Tom is heedless libido, a born user and despoiler. McGrath is another case altogether. He’s not a predator nor much of a lech, at least not at the level of his actions and observable behaviours, but he represents reactivity and ressentiment, those eminently unattractive characteristics Nietzsche saw rise in the shadow of classical Jewish theosophistry and the Church of Blame, and which Sorrentino regularly bestows unflatteringly and as a central defect on men in his darker, more brooding fictions. His emotionally brutal and a-challenge-to-take autobiographical 1966 debut The Sky Changes might well remain the foremost exemplar here, actually. McGrath’s ressentiment is in large part born of emasculation; an emasculation exacerbated by decades of marriage to his domineering and spiteful wife Bridget, who has recently died. John is one of many characters in the novel who spouts racist vitriol or generalized disdain for those of different ethnicity/race, a behaviour the novel routinely ties to impotence and self-hatred. McGrath is enamoured of a recently widowed German woman at the boardinghouse who herself expresses sympathy for Hitler, and we cannot help remain mindful of the fact that the Second World War lies on the immediate horizon in terms of the novel’s historical timeline. As to the “one outstanding flaw in the otherwise carefully composed whole” respective of Tom Thebus in his cocksman’s pomp and poncy protocols: the fact that the man’s “trousers hung from his waist to his thighs with no readily distinguishable evidence that he possessed buttocks.” What? Didn’t nobody tell you a man need a ass to push with, boy?

Ferat Vampire (Juraj Herz, 1982)

Diverting things a little, perhaps, with respect to threepenny standards and procedures, I thought I might extemporize on two car accidents from my past…and I’ve had a few of ‘em. In a way, one of my major achievements as a teenager was rolling my puke green Volvo GT into a farmer’s field without writing the car off. Truly. We continued to drive that redoubtable Swedish cocksucker. I lived in the country and my school was in the country, such that much of my commute in the last year-and-a-half of high school was along gravel roads. I had my sister with me and we were going down the fairly steep hill on one of said gravel roads when I got a puncture in one of the back tires. As soon as I hit the brake the car started to fishtail and swerve. I went off the road at the bottom of the hill, took out a stretch of fence, and rolled the Volvo once. We got out and stood well back until somebody came. We were both back at school in a few hours, good and shook but damn well gonna barge our way through the rest of the bullshit day. A friend who liked the Pynchon novel upon which it was based told me he got in a fender bender right outside the theatre after seeing Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice because the movie, which he basically liked, left him dazzled and thrown. Something similar happened to me in my final year of undergraduate studies. I had spent the afternoon at the townhouse in Kanata I was sharing with two other guys reading Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy for Bela Egyed’s Deleuze seminar course, which was really lighting up my nervous system like a pachinko parlour. Active and reactive forces; the eternal return of the same [under the sun of difference]; affirmation. I got in the car to go to Deleuze class and, heading from Kanata to Ottawa proper, hit the back-end of a series of small pileups on the 417. I know that my judgement was unnaturally impaired by Nietzsche and Philosophy because I saw what was happening in enough time to avoid hitting the car in front of me, but just couldn’t make it happen, the deer caught in its own headlights. However, the upshot is that I was the first car in that particular pileup not to get hit from behind. Somebody let me use a phone, and I called Egyed at Carleton and told him I’d probably miss the seminar on account of a pretty weird car accident I’d just been in. He said: Oh, my God, of course, I hope you are okay, be well and take care of yourself, how awful. Anyway, about twenty-five minutes later I walked into the class…

Royal Trux, "Chairman Blow"

* Chairman Blow is a tough dude who do what he choose

John Cassavetes Hoodie Selfie for Timely Distribution to All Remaining Media Outlets

Shanna, don't you think I look like Brad Pitt in Inglourious Basterds? Feeling cute...might just dump the bosses off my back and kick dirt in they faces...

Le Tigre, "What’s Yr Take on Cassavetes"

Threepenny Oppenheimer Pt. 4

Lucian Freud, "Man in a Chair" [1985]

Sober Alcoholic and Literary Giant Barry Hannah 
[1942-2010]

At some point in my thirties I had read some stuff and maybe seen some stuff and for sure had a pretty vivid and for me quite novel second-sight kind of dream. As such, I had developed a picture in my head that sort of grew and got very weird respective of the Cuban Missile Crisis and how close humanity did or didn’t come to nuclear war and rapid planetary despeciation. I had in my mind a scene on a submarine, all very cinematic…all very Das Boot. The moment comes and the commanding Soviet officer knows he must launch the first nuclear warhead at mainland United States and he even wants to do it, absolutely believing it the only noble option, but all of a sudden his body fails him and will not comply with the demands of his faltering will; we can see the panic in his eyes, and yet he is apparently all but totally paralyzed, unable to carry the act to its termination. The other day as I was smoking Camel cigarettes and trying to figure out what to eat, I happened to have a neat little YouTube infotainment video going in the background where the narrator was talking about Soviet submarines during the Cuban Missile Crisis and all the wild shit we know about for certain (the Russians never liked making anything public if they could help it). The actual official story that is on the record: out of radio contact, suffering from a broken cooling system, and exhausted by harassment from U.S. ships and planes, the crew of Soviet submarine B-59, who definitely would have been hot and stressed-out beyond anything any of us could imagine, gradually came to believe World War III had begun and that they needed to hit hard and hit fast. Three officers had to okay it, and the two militarist twats voted yes, let’s do it, but Flotilla Commander Vasili Arkhipov strongly dissented, and they needed his accord, because he had—in addition to the education and culture they lacked—a higher military rank also. Basically, he told them he wasn’t going to let them end the world…and they didn’t…although you can bet that’s a plenty truncated version. Tee hee. In completely unrelated news, the culminating sequence of Paul West’s Bela Lugosi’s White Christmas—final novel of the Alley Jaggers trilogy and not to be confused with Donald Barthelme’s Come Back, Dr. Caligari—has got to be one of the greatest literary crescendos of all time: recently incarcerated escapee Alley Jaggers goes back to his home town, tears up the graveyard with a bulldozer, bulldozes the church, harangues a barroom full of locals in Schutzstaffel German, lights his old workplace on fire, Sweeney Todds a cow, and finally gets himself arrested, floating in a boat, dam-adjacent, still in full regalia, giving the performance of a lifetime and, holy hell, probably good and spent. You know, sometimes I pause and consider all the great many rough and tumble motorcyclists who have but a moment to see the traffic accident organizing itself immediately in front of them. Oh, fuck, that’s the end of me and teeth. “Dream of Pines was the best high school band in at least the world,” writes wry Mississippi ironist Barry Hannah in his astonishing 1972 debut Geronimo Rex. “They made you want to pick up a rifle and just get killed somewhere.”

Ministry of Fear (Fritz Lang, 1944)

So obscure as to have been very nearly lost to history altogether—saved by Dalkey Archive! we should all have it so good!—Felipe Alfau liked to tell other members of the Spanish diaspora in New York City that he was not one to declare special interest in literary matters or fidelity to contemporary literature as a going concern, if it was indeed that. He even said that his own novels were definitely incomprehensible because not even he could comprehend them. Alas, he was also a bit of a Franco sympathizer and goose-stepper. Learned in the extreme, there can be no denying, and prodigiously gifted as a literary stylist and fabulist, he seems to have cultivated his blindspots in the manner of a true and proper 20th century eccentric. Alfau was born in Barcelona shortly after the dawn of the 20th century and his family emigrated to the United States when Felipe was fourteen. He worked primarily as a translator, but not of literary texts or anything especially prestigious. He only wrote two novels—in English—as well as a collection of poems in Spanish and a book of children’s stories at the end of the 1920s. In the preface to his debut, Alfau describes Locos, originally published two years before Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, as a novel composed of stories that can be read in any order the reader chooses. He says that the meaningless gesture is its Arche. It takes place primarily in Madrid—with stopovers in China, the Philippines, and the Americas—but starts, if we we read it as presented to us, any linearity strictly illusory, with a story set in the city of Toledo where all the primary recurring characters convene in the Café de los Locos. “Bad writers were in the habit of coming to that café in quest of characters, and I came now and then among them. At that particular place one could find some very good secondhand bargains and also some very good, cheap, new material. As fashion has a great deal to do with market value, one could find at that place some characters who in their time had been glorious and served under famous geniuses, but who for some time had been out of a job, due to the change of literary trend toward other ideals.” Alfau calls Toledo a “petrified forest of centuries” that “died in the Renaissance.” The legacy of the Spanish Baroque looms. Is there anything adjacent to the realism-naturalism they teach at creative writing workshops that has happened in literature since Miguel de Cervantes, especially should it prove comic and/or irreverent, that does not owe the Spaniard and his milieu a considerable debt? Voltaire, Laurence Sterne, the ‘pataphysicians (in league with drunken, five-foot-tall Alfred Jarry), the Surrealists, Oulipo, Magical Realism, the postmodernists, and so on and so forth: they all hold their individual debts to Cervantes. And to the boisterous and grim topsy-turvy metaphysics of his finest windmill-tilting-at work. Felipe Alfau is a descendant as well, only he is a sort of necromancer who has succeeded in wiping from his consciousness the very material fact of four hundred years of history. The characters are in a centrifuge and they move by way of strobing expanses of glitch. It is surmised in Locos that people are reluctant to have their fingerprints taken because they seem to vaguely intuit that it might ultimately cause them to be unable to suppress the commission of future crimes (almost like something out of a Patricia Highsmith yarn or a Fritz Lang picture). There is also the possibility that your fingerprints are off committing heinous acts unbeknownst to you. If it were your fingerprints that committed the offence, then that’s your crime to own, son. A new identity can adopt you rather than the other way around. Take Juan Chinelato or whoever he really is; the “awaking” in him of “an unknown self of wild and heroic deeds, which he had often imagined in his sleepless nights.” Doña Micaela Valverde, whose love affair with death involves periodic hibernations there, will lie for all intents and purposes dead…for two or three months…and then get up and go back about her workaday affairs. How does she avoid decomposition? Dr. de los Rios believes that Doña Micaela “only wants the decorative and ephemeral part of death,” but definitely seems like the whole thing confuses him. An antidote to the darkness comes at the end of Locos in the form of spring, the season. Spring arrives as the eternal return of Will Itself. It spins you like a top. Which way will you come out this time? Which character will you be? Will your district supervisor now be your virgin bride or vice versa? Will you be on the right or wrong side of spring? Spring comes and rips away every bit of stitching, the melting snow revealing the tireless orgy of death, and each of us will gladly take any damn role offered us, no mater how paltry or contemptible. There is an earlier vignette in Locos involving a butterfly charmer, the butterfly wrangler. This is your new cosmology, comrades in cosplay: Even the butterfly wrangler is nothing more than a butterfly, wrangled.

Slavoj Žižek and Joseph Stalin

JLG/JLG-autoportrait de décembre (Jean-Luc Godard, 1994)

So what does young and innocent 2017 pre-pandemic Slavoj Žižek have for us all this tranquil June evening? Snot, snot; slobber, slobber. Right from when it wasn’t even 9/11 yet, our commendable and dependable Mr. Žižek has skated like a critic instead of hunkering down like a philosophical golem in the catacombs, and that’s how he has thought the system and the territory…by walking them on his legs and generating new insights, whether or not they’re comfortable or rolling properly along a track. At a time when the level of popular discourse has degenerated to such a dire extreme, and knowing that much worse ahead is all but certain, it is refreshing always to encounter someone doing adequate justice to current geopolitics and the concurrent mystifications of ideology, not that anybody grows up asking to do this kind of tap-dancing as an adult. In The Courage of Hopelessness, Žižek looks at banking and exploitation; Greek resistance to Brussels and austerity (his pet project for a number of years); Chinese authoritarian capitalism and other diverse political structures that adapt themselves to global capitalism; Islam, fundamentalist and not; PC culture and populist rage as two sides of the same coin (identitariansim). Žižek sees the PC policing of language as little more than an attempt to neutralize intractable immanent antagonisms that aren’t going away just because some subsection of the society would like them to. Hannah Arendt said that what made #1 (living) Nazi nemesis Adolf Eichmann’s evil so banal was that he could only think of life in terms of tasks and could not imagine the perspective of another person, because his imagination had totally atrophied. The contemporary arena becomes one of "ethico-politcal fiasco." This is the fundamental Hegelian core of Žižek: reverse-engineering back to basic antagonisms, extrapolating in all directions, beating the thing like a goddamn parade drum. Progressive western values are often seen as an extension of neocolonial power. The world is populated by disparate and innately antagonistic social models. The threat with the status quo is that we’re going to all walk off a cliff and you’re going to demand I hold your fucking hand. Since I started reading Žižek in the late 1990s, he has punctuated his books continually with statements to the effect that we must take pause and theorize where we are at until we see the emancipatory moment and can seize it. I fear that somebody someday will walk right up to him and punch him in the mouth. It’s doubtful that even he believes that shit anymore. Allow me to paraphrase the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, as I am often wont to do, when he says, in his beautiful and tender film JLG/JLG-autoportrait de décembre something like culture is the rule, art the exception. Art is always going to have a troubled time thriving in the glare of the limelight, not that I am so extreme a Calvinist as to insist that it requires the dim garret. “I thought of schoolteachers, noodles, movies, prices, theatre productions, the names of writers, titles of books, buildings, gardens, a cat, an unhappy love affair, a chair, a flower whose name I couldn’t remember, a perfume, a brand of toothpaste, and so on,” enumerates Argentine master Silvina Ocampo in her note perfect posthumous novel The Promise. “Memory: how you made me suffer!” I try not to get mad at my thoughts or my feelings or the immediate lifeworld. I am reassured that consciousness cannot originate from where we are currently situated and yet…here we are. When Aristotle talked about the role of the prime mover in ultimate causation, he was talking about all living things as agents of the living thing, although, yes, it’s definitely conceivable that he did not know that’s what he meant, or at least not precisely. The collective and largely unconscious rendering of life and art and culture. In the multimedia age. Guess what? All things are co-created by all. For a time I toyed with this as a potential dissertation… 

Les Rallizes Dénudés, Mizutani [Full Album]

Scented JPW Customer Appreciation Leaflet

He thought of going to a movie tonight—strictly to get out of the house. He resented having to do it, resented it so much, he wasn’t going to do it.
- Patricia Highsmith, The Cry of the Owl

Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa, 1951)

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (Jim Jarmusch, 1999)

I no longer have any friends and I don’t want any of the old ones back. Am I perverse? cruel? stubborn as an old intransigent mule bucking in its stable? In fact, my biggest problems in nominal recovery are the hurt I alchemically transform into quasi-terroristic hatred very quickly (on account of the high-strung nature of my metabolism), and the unbelievable amount of crap I talk at a rapid clip, very often knowing it to be crap just about as soon as it comes out of my mouth. In the tradition of twelve-step upkeep and maintenance, I try to clean up these messes as best I can and as fast as I can, because I’m fast but also fundamentally conscientious. However, because my system runs so hot and so fast like a spazzing Toshiba tube TV, I’m often probably many kilometres away by the time you’ve stood to call me to account and demand I stand rigid in receipt of some witless, stammered judgement. One thing that good painters and the best music producers always come in time to understand is that like the Samurai who rapidly dispatches thirteen successive adversaries with one decisive brushstroke, from the beginning the painter must have a vague sense of what the painting will look like when it is done and even more importantly the painter must know when the comprehensive gesture is fully consummated, because if you put even a little too much paint on your canvas it's garbage and you have to throw it out. I’m pretty confident I recall and old episode of the sitcom Malcolm in the Middle where the paterfamilias played by Bryan Cranston finds himself with a bunch of time with which to do whatever he wants and so he decides he’s going to live out his lifelong dream of producing an abstract expressionist painting which has always existed hazily in his mind…and which will require an unseemly amount of paint. Ultimately, he puts just a little too much paint on a perfect painting and the canvas falls on him. I personally work with quantum chaos and every last thing people are reluctant to face or resist accepting. I am one skinny, jittery man. When I make my own little world I can only really put a very small amount of stuff in it, like a time capsule buried in a building’s foundation. In a recent short essay called “Dark Humour in the Reign of Daddy Cool,” Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst-in-theory Slavoj Žižek expresses his delight at having discovered that the widely-revered and majorly intimidating German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk had in a recent interview praised his Slovenian colleague for bringing “dark humour” into philosophy. Žižek: “we live in an age when only dark humour enables us to adequately grasp the madness of our social reality.” Of course, simply for ballast if nothing else, we must include—and I should think end on—the words of the great Hermann Broch who terminates a series of clauses in the following way in his large portmanteau novel The Sleepwalkers, probably the greatest novel ever written in German: "we feel the totality to be insane, but for each single life we can easily discover logical guiding motives." 

The Residents, "Hello Skinny"