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."
Bruno Schulz, "Undula Visits the Artists" [1920-22]
“The future belongs to crowds,” writes Don DeLillo semi-famously as capstone to the bold opening of his 1991 novel Mao II, a book you might say is about art and trouble. One might argue additionally that what the novel fails to foresee is the way in which the internet would existentially isolate folks while leaving them hyper-connected…and hypervigilant. The Indian writer Arundhati Roy once said that the American version of freedom is the freedom to sit at home with your washing machine. DeLillo: “The war is so fucking simple. It is the lunar part of us that dreams of wasted terrain. She hears their voices calling across the levelled city. Our only language is Beirut.” This concern with the individual in unsettled relation to the mass has always been at the heart of DeLillo, but what concerns his later works just as much is an obsession with history—the development of historical spirit should we deign to frame it Hegelian-like—and human evolution (in the way that human evolution is more or less the principle zone of interest for both J.G. Ballard and David Cronenberg also). I love the delicate twinnings—the doublings—in Mao II: the novelist and the terrorist; [Warhol’s] Mao II and Coke II; Yankee Stadium and the Theatre of War. Who did the future end up belonging to? “But it is funny how a picture. It is funny how a picture what?” Totally, Don, totally. I feel seen. In his introduction to the New Directions edition of The Besieged City by Clarice Lispector, the greatest novelist of the 20th century, Benjamin Moser argues with verve and convincing conviction that this characteristically astonishing 1949 Lispector virtuoso ostentationem, written in Portuguese in Switzerland, is mostly about horses and things and how each become central to how the novel’s nominal protagonist, Lucrécia Neves, frames herself in her world; how she navigates. There is the idea of the horse and the idea of unhorsing, obyezloshadenie, a concept borrowed from Isaac Babel, who wrote of the disappearance of horses, their replacement by motors, during the process of industrial modernization. Lucrécia Neves lives in the township of São Geraldo, and the novel depicts a process of modernization in which the town is first filled with horses, brought in to do work related to building and transportation, followed later by a subsequent emptying of the transmorphological city of said horses. Horse and woman are presented as the basic agents of building. They are the main things you need if you want a city in the first place. Lucrécia lives on Market Street, and she drifts through the free market of men and things on offer, bound to nothing but what passes through her senses, what she thereby constructs or helps to construct, if only in passing…if only sketched in passing as ephemeral diagram. If São Geraldo is not a dream world it has something of a dream geography and is never fixed in place, not only because of the predations of progress but because of how unstable our constructions cannot help but be to begin with, the species handcuffed by the conditions of its speciation. Early in my reading of TheBesieged City, and definitely with Moser’s inadvertent prompt, I thought a little of Orson Welles’s 1942 film adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons, that preeminent Hollywood movie about the effects of unhorsing on the world-frame and the subsequent rise of the motor, but the further I waded into Lispector’s hallucinatory urban vision the more it reminded me of Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, perhaps the great literary work covering communities and their ubiquitous metaphysical slippages. A literature of trap doors, cinnamon men, and animatronic playthings you haven’t even imagined yet.
Dr. Polidori and Lord Byron
Paul West and his wife Diane Ackerman in 2012
One of his many ultra-refined and goes-down-smooth sublime historical fictions, Lord Byron’s Doctor by supreme master Paul West tends, if for sure inherently tragicomic, toward the mirthless, the aghast guffaw, or a wisecrack or chortle caught in the throat. The word “humour” once carried associations with anatomical implications, the elemental fluids upon which our general health was then believed to rest being blood, the biles, and phlegm. When the body’s humours become fowled or corrupted, it may sap one's ability to laugh and carry on and do the good living our tough-love God wants done. Fun and freewheeling days of yore? What good were they ever for? Doctor John Polidori, real and noted historical personage, became at the ripe age of twenty travelling companion and personal physician to legendary Romantic brute Lord Byron, a man of title, fame, and endless stores of mad caprice. Percy Shelley, the great Romantic poet, serially reckless on water and a sworn hash smoker, only three years Polidori’s senior, drowned the year before the doctor committed suicide, age twenty-nine. George Gordon Byron, libertine Baron, died in Greece in 1824, age thirty-six, which he probably went there unconsciously to do. Allegra, the illegitimate daughter Byron sired with Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley’s stepsister, died at the age of five in 1822. Mary Shelley’s mother, legendary feminist campaigner Mary Wollstonecraft, died shortly after giving birth to her daughter, and Mary Shelley would herself lose three children before giving birth to Percy Florence Shelley. Percy Shelley’s first wife committed suicide and so did Fanny Imlay, Mary Wollstonecraft’s illegitimate daughter, who had an extremely close personal connection to both Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont throughout the childhoods of all three. Mary Shelley lived to see fifty-three, Claire Clairmont, ever the odd woman out, an impressive eighty. It turns out that Lord Byron had sex with lots of people by any standard but that he was clubfooted, bilious, and nobody’s idea of a good screw. The tragedy of Dr. Polidori is that he aspires to be honest with himself and with the world presented before him, but simply finds himself inadequate to the task, as if his bad faith is happening to him, effect of some other affect, rather than being produced in real time by his nervous system and his choices. Claire Claremont avers, her read a sound one assuredly, that Byron prefers ever to be on the giving end of hurt and anguish, never the receiving, and that’s the cad’s modus operandi. “I don’t give a damn for death,” says Byron in confirmation, “but I do dread its sting. I am not among those who dote deliciously on pain—not my own, at least.” Polidori seeks to achieve a big picture plateau he can actually use or at least settle under provisionally like a tarp: “Heaven, I thought, was like Ampleforth, my old school, where you died a little every day, and we were taught by all those devout old Catholic dominies that the end of life is death. Such is life’s aim, its fruition. I half believed it, sensing even in my early years of school that, once you accepted death, the rest of life was one sustained lying-back, head against the antimacassar for ever. No need to try.” This is the angle of perspective of what comparative literature scholar Gayatri Spivak calls “planetarity,” a position that looks at human existence from the perspective of the biggest of big pictures, reducing it to a matter of minimal cosmic import. Of course, one almost never remains at this level of scale long in the course of one’s meditations, if only because one generally wishes to accomplish things with the limited time one has on this earth—for as long as one is able to continue deluding oneself. If as an early boy Romantic with cute locks of hair, Polidori had placed flowers into the chest cavities of cadavers, he is toward the end of his life collecting organs in preservative in annoyance. The young doctor’s tragedy is the deinosis he would prefer to disavow, such that it must come out sideways, like a flatulence that can kill enclosed mice. It can be traced back through telling vacillations throughout the old doctor’s life. For example, there’s the prostitute Gaby, whom he had revered absurdly, until his participation in a sordid ménage à trois disabused him of any lingering sense of her baseline purity. And the fates and the furies being what they are, it’s only too late that poor Polidori becomes aware that he loves Claire Clairmont, their first sexual congress having been preceded by his peeling leeches from her prone body.
In his typically compact novel The Divorce, Argentinian writer César Aira sets his central metaphysical set piece off to the periphery of the Rhode Island temporarily-ex-national divorcee we think is the hero, putting Enrique instead for that decisive moment in the driver’s seat, fulcrum of a pratfall involving a dousing with water distractedly released from the canvas awning of a Buenos Aires sidewalk café. We are to quickly discover that his childhood "plunged" Enrique “into the bafflement produced by doublings and parallel universes.” The divorcee is sitting at the same sidewalk cafe with charming video artist Leticia, she the first to be hit by the evental waveform of uncanny recognition reverse-spiralling out of Enrique’s sudden dousing. The waveform then hits the male divorcee, who realizes he too knows Enrique, and then a third party, Enrique’s mother, who Enrique had himself believed long dead and who has been seated unbeknownst this past while behind the divorcee and Leticia, out of their eye-lines and for a considerable time unremarked upon by even the author. During his childhood, an event removed Enrique’s mother from his space-time and relegated her to another—until such time as something like another evental portal might open. “It’s not true that you came into this world,” Alan Watts tells us. “You came out of it, like a flower comes out of a plant.” In The Divorce and its metaphysics of the event, natural selection is the linchpin, as in Darwin, the question being: how is it events and semiosis make their selections? “It must have been a kind of short-hand, one event standing in for all the rest. But it could not have been randomly chosen: the recollection must have been special in some way, like all the others, of course…. If that was where the meaning of life lay, it was very mysterious, because no two episodes can have precisely the same significance.” In An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, from ten years before The Divorce and one of Aira’s most perfect books, the hero, kidnapped from the pages of history, is Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802-1858), a German belonging to and descending from a family dynasty consisting of clockmakers and painters who were originally Flemish but ended up in Germany where Protestants were not subject to persecution and where a lineage of mastery could perhaps attain new footing. “On the threshold of his twentieth year, the world that opened before him was roughly mapped out yet still unexplored, much as it was, around the same time, for the young Charles Darwin.” If Rugendas’s journey through Argentina in the late 1830s is a journey into the heart of darkness, this never becomes a matter of any kind of infernal absorption into the primal or the savage in the commonplace sense, rather taking the form of a somewhat ungainly personal revolution, an enabling and even emancipatory one, even if this picaresque tale is darkly comic and even a little slapstick. A student of the Humboldtian naturalist school of painting and geometric order as well as a bold and ambitious young man, Rugendas heads at the end of 1837 into the Cordillera mountain region of Argentina in the company of guides and Robert Krause, his less talented but otherwise extremely competent colleague, discovering that along the treacherous paths the landscape itself begins to resist even cursory intelligibility. “Jagged lines, impossible angles, trees growing downwards from ceilings of rock, sheer slopes plunging into mantles of snow under a scorching sun.” The horses are thrown off, the mules irritable. After a protracted midsummer idyll in the town of Mendoza, where regular earthquakes and Indian raids are incorporated into the local economy and social life, the team sets out across a flat landscape that is not yet technically the famous Argentinean pampas. “On the plains, space became small and intimate, almost mental.” The resident gaucho begins to have discomfiting premonitions; something doesn’t feel right. Many days into the journey across the plain the group comes upon a surreal, apocalyptic sight: an entire region apparently swallowed up be a plague of locusts moments before their happening upon it, “a lunar ocean.” The landscape painter himself, young master already famous as the foremost cataloguer of the physiognomy of nature, has front row seats he never asked for to physiognomic nature’s comprehensive systems crash. And he is born anew, a battered-to-hell phoenix from the ashes. “Owls began to moan deep in the woods and the terrified Indians were captured in swirls of blood and optical effects. In the dancing firelight, their features drifted free.” So who, then, unseen, is in the landscape? The irreconcilable plural.
The Dick Gibson Show and The Franchiser strike me, who is always approximately me, as the most noble and surpassingly emblematic novels of the great Jewish-American literary lion Stanley Elkin, who struggled with and worked through lifelong chronic illness, as they are the most boastfully crass and single-minded yet open-armed and warm in their pursuit of shuck-and-jive American hucksterism lingo and bravura, almost recognizable from the pages of Sinclair Lewis except that Elkin’s peerless pursuit of finessed language and form first pays homage to and then surpasses Saul Bellow. Arriving directly after The Franchiser, The Living End is a long novella or short novel in three discreet parts, presented as a “triptych,” each piece originally published in a separate journal, concerning death, passage to the afterlife, and what happens after you get there, either on the winning or losing side, may God help you. The Living End begins with Ellerbee, liquor store proprietor, his enterprise repeatedly victim to “burly, hopped-up and armed deprivators, ski-masked, head-stockinged,” his finances top tier boondoggle, his luck sure as shot on all the working gauges. He’s supporting the families of his fallen-in-battle clerks: there is George’s widow, and then there is the comely, red-headed Dorothy Register, now de facto single mother in her early twenties, her husband Harold a quadriplegic vegetable. And after all is said and done there is Ellerbee’s charming but mean-spirited wife May. Ellerbee has decided he is going to sell the liquor store to the strong-arm syndicate that's been making depreciating offers, a syndicate he suspects is robbing him and shooting his employees. Kind, unselfish Ellerbee gets approved for a loan and buys a new liquor store, High Spirits, the real estate upmarket, a better neighbourhood…like where he and his wife used to lived, before their house burnt down. The grey market syndicate robs the store and shoots Ellerbee dead. When Ellerbee asks the angel of death if there is an afterlife, the angel of death says “Oh boy.” Heaven, it turns out, seems pretty inclusive, colourfully nondenominational. There are mosques, cathedrals, and synagogues. Heavenly choir, pearly gates, ambrosia, manna, harp-plucking angels, halos. It’s all there for the soul to behold. Ellerbee meets Saint Peter and Saint Peter with gleeful sadism banishes Ellerbee to hell for no reason. Elkin, on the beam, Jackson: “Hell was the ultimate inner city. Its stinking sulphurous streets were unsafe. Everywhere Ellerbee looked he saw atrocities. Pointless, profitless muggings were commonplace; joyless rape that punished its victims and offered no relief to the perpetrator. Everything was contagious, cancer as common as cold, plague the quotidian. There was stomachache, headache, toothache, earache. There was angina and indigestion and painful third-degree burning itch. Nerves like hideous body hair grew long enough to trip over and lay raw and exposed as live wires or shoelaces that had come undone.” There is nobody sinless enough to get to heaven and no this is not a dream. Does not God’s own bitterness and indulgence read sinful to you, dear reader? What of his apocalyptic wrath?! And what of ill-used Jesus, hands crippled by nails such that they cannot any longer form fists? Life doesn’t stop dying, maestro, and it doesn’t stop living either. Paradiso, Purgatorio, Inferno. Death is wasted on us. We don’t seem to learn anything.
Along with the painter Albrecht Dürer, argues Fernand Hallyn in his book The Poetic Structure of the World: Copernicus and Kepler, Kepler believed that the organic unity of man and the celestial realm “is based on number.” Hallyn has the harmonic correspondences of whole and part, genus and species, operative at any number of levels, existing in a homogenous Euclidean space and corresponding to the introduction of synecdoche into truth and method, which supplants simpler metaphors of mimesis. Ultimately, Copernicus had believed his system was superior to Ptolemy’s not because of his own superiority with mathematical calculations—with number—but rather because Ptolemy’s system was not “sufficiently pleasing to the mind,” a statement that cannot help but suggest aesthetic rather than mathematical criteria. Copernicus additionally finds his astronomy more satisfactory because he believes it represents a more enlightened way of relating to God. In writing about the sun, Copernicus demonstrates “lyricism and proliferation of devices such as the rhetorical question, enumeration, asyndeton, metaphor, and comparison.” His bottom-up concentric/vertical cosmology evokes Dante’s Divine Comedy. Placement of an altar in a church, a matter of the situation of symbols or signifiers within a composite symbolic order, is a major issue of Copernicus’s day, running parallel to the questions Copernicus is asking himself regarding how to situate celestial bodies in terms of one another, with the sun, of course, now central. He keeps God primary, but he deviates from Copernicus, presenting new ways of conceptualizing man’s relation to God and the heavens, Hallyn arguing that these developments indicate the heliocentric revolution’s Mannerist turn. Kepler emerges in the context of 17th century arguments concerning whether or not symmetry is a necessary precondition for beauty. Tycho Brahe doesn’t believe the heliocentric universe constitutes legitimate symmetry, whether it is “pleasing” or not. Johannes Kepler’s cosmology is one of perverse ellipses and all manner of confounding motion, appropriate to his own historical epistemic and its space-time. Visual aesthetics are always transmissible across demarcated lines and elements imported from rhetoric and literature find themselves intertextually interpolated into Kepler also. Kepler says of music that it is “a construction […] so rational and natural that God the Creator has impressed it upon the relations of the celestial movements.” His equations establishing the harmonic relations of planets were subsequently transcribed into musical notation. For Robert Fludd, another Mannerist esoteric, the monochord is the central organizing symbol of cosmology, equivalent to the sphere in Kepler. A dazzling autobiographical passage of writing from Kepler, cited by Fernand Hallyn: “This man was born with the destiny of devoting much time to difficult things that are repulsive to others. In his childhood, he undertook versifying before the proper age. He attempted to write comedies, chose the longest psalms to learn by heart…. In poetry, he tried first to write acrostics and anagrams…. He then undertook the most difficult of diverse lyrical genres; he wrote Pindaric verses, dithyrambs. He embraced unusual subjects [such as] the sun’s repose, the source of rivers, a view of Atlantis through the clouds. He delighted in enigmas, searched out the most subtle figures of speech; he amused himself with allegories, wove the tiniest details into them and even teased them by the hair…” In 1608, Kepler writes a dizzying bit of speculative theory—framing it as a dream, this being an ever-reliable literary device for throwing the hounds off your scent—in which he imagines astrology as it might be practiced by a person situated on the surface of the moon.
The Trigger Effect (David Koepp, 1996)
The Strange Case of Angelica (Manoel de Oliveira, 2010)
It used to be much more common that you would hear wise and distinguished writers, like those dragged out and tarted-up in Donald Hall's Old Poets: Reminiscences and Opinions, advise young aspiring writers wondering how it's all done that anybody who can tell a joke properly can write a story. Right, but whose properly are we talking about here, hmmm? Your properly told story might just look an awful lot to me like damage to my personal property. You could sue them for libel, Jennifer Juniper, on account of clear and quantifiable damage to earning power, but you've been walking the streets for years wearing a big ridiculous placard that says you don't want no bullshit Rotarian earning power or something like that, mmm. First you make your bed and then you leap on it, Jennifer Juniper. Is it true that you only feel like you have power when you've tapped all the power from the city and its huddled, shivering citizenry? Do you remember The Trigger Effect starring Elisabeth Shue? It's about a serious blackout and how short a time it takes for nothing whatsoever to work anymore after you've noticed some of them maybe aren't working quite right. I honestly used to think I could survive a nuclear war if I just sat it out drinking bourbon and watching movies, but this was never what I was ultimately aspiring to. Everybody in grad school who knew me at all well knew that my plan for after was to pump gas and write poems and make love, living hard until I couldn't take it anymore, hopefully having some kind of modest success with the writing at some point and ultimately retiring to a quiet place in the country, hopefully with a wife, where I could execute my patented razzmatazz with heightened lucidity and sensible time-management. There used to be a lot of middle aged men on the prairie who took that long to find their ass and set up shop. I should run for sheriff. A woman I did not love but with whom I was for a good while regularly intimate once told me that I was a hard person to love, and I told her that she was only saying that because I was being an absolute piece of shit in that present moment. Are you excusing yourself? she asked. I wouldn't know how to restrain me! I like fairly vanilla sex because I am reticent to turn myself into a circus act...again. "I did not deceive myself for a moment as to the way," writes Nietzsche in Ecce Homo, "sea, danger—andsuccess!" Well, a Wagnerian naval fleet would very much not be my scene and I am not at present time in anything like my prime, no sir. "I could maybe hold my Claire for a little while," writes Ben Marcus in his fantastic 2012 novel The Flame Alphabet, "hold her so tight that perhaps it would not hurt so much when together we landed in the world below."
“Sense,” writes the great Gilles Deleuze in his jaw-dropping 1969 whopper The Logic of Sense, a book we might call an innovation in a field named Transcendental Structuralism that it also inaugurates, “is exactly the boundary between propositions and things.” Naturally, Deleuze is compelled to follow logic to the boundary places and see what its skin wears on the outside—perhaps millions of little rhinoceros horns—the part of language worn on the outside of language but not strictly extrinsic to language, a place where it abandons propositions and things and has only free-floating sensors and morphic sense, a nonsense, perhaps, which is the only sense. Antonin Artaud, the schizo-gnostic machinist, Félix Guattari and transversal “infra-sense.” Before the schizo, however, the pervert is king and the logic of sense his lair. The pervert escapes the neurosis and interpersonal paralysis of the everyday on one side of the plank and the depths of psychosis and dissolution on the other, like Chaplin in Modern Times or Tati in Playtime. What is The Logic of Sense, Deleuze's self-admitted attempt to give structural semiotics its transcendental [i.e. Kantian] philosophy, but a perversion of structuralism and a bit of a pugilist’s broadside or bromide? Politics is like trying to screw a cat in the ass, said one famous creep in a faraway land called Los Angeles County, long, long ago, but Deleuze is the one major 20th century thinker we can imagine giving the proposition some serious thought. Perhaps we might even take a page out of the book of Deleuze-commentator David Lapoujade and declare the bold and ennobling pervert a connoisseur of aberrant movements within structure. The pervert prevails proud only so long as data fails to upload to the cloud. From Structuralism to Silicon, from “what does it mean?” to “how does it work?” and then back again, roundelay and turnstiles, the relationship with depth gradually changes, as in Herman Melville, the nonsense of the depths that are deployed at the surface according to the intensive variations of the body without organs. Somebody in Paris asked me if there is an easy way to explain the body without organs and I told her that when she dreams the body she has and uses in her dreams doesn’t have any organs. The photogenic and always available face of the earth itself has been remodelled in the image of smooth moon-like scarcity and oblivion, “a kind of postmortem ground,” and, by the end of the 60s, with those Paris cops dressed up as actual Martians swinging their bang-bang clubs, the One-Many as Infinite Multiplicity becomes run through with “inclusive disjunctions” and pockets of ungodly bad harmony…the fantasia of black holes. The acute schizophrenic is always a perfectly functional transmitter/receiver, although to mislabel the schizo a pervert would be to add far too aristocratic a gloss, I should imagine, to the ransacked worldly toil of the former.
Modern Times (Charles Chaplin, 1936)
Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)
One time I was talking with a musician I know in town who is also a bookworm and an athletics nut and he asked me about Robert Coover’s 1968 novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., its being about baseball, sort of, and authored by a writer my very high regard for whom was already known to my interlocutor from previous chats and neighbourly seed-chewin’. When I actually thought for a moment about how to tackle the query, it suddenly dawned on me that The Universal Baseball Association, only his second of twenty-one novels, is also the only one in the Coover corpus entire that strongly resembles something Harry Mathews might write. It’s what I thought in the moment and it’s what I said, by God. My musician associate was justifiably surprised to hear me make this curious claim for the perfectly sound reason that Harry Mathews is connected by discursive habit to Paris, France’s Oulipo laboratory and Bob Coover, only two years his junior, to American Postmodernism Inc. So here is the thing: in order to write The Universal Baseball Association, Coover needed to invent a fantasy baseball league that made sense and that you could theoretically operate in real life, put all that stuff in the main character’s head, and then also plot a coherent whirlpool-type narrative around it. Something analogous happens in Mathews’ significantly later masterpiece The Journalist, from 1994: a psychotherapist encourages the narrator to start journaling for the therapeutic value it may provide in the aftermath of a mental health event, only for the journaling to become so obsessive and specified that complex systems of collation gradually enter the picture, leading in kind to cross-referencing, column manipulation, variable fonts, and special paginating. In novels like these the characters seem to be doing all of the novelist’s work for them, but they definitely are not. A big, weird job like this, with a zillion little moving pieces like a model train passing through a tiny elaborate war zone, you take on only because you want a big, weird job to set your teeth into and have at. What is it in the end that I love so much about Bob Coover of Iowa, U.S.A.? I keep waiting for him to pull up in his blue Studebaker truck and take me to go get a root beer float and play Fat Boys on the Wurlitzer. And though the scouts may presuppose them in opposing camps, dumb in all the currently relevant faculties as it is their plight to be right this very night, falling asleep in their hosiery, I know I see the influences of Coover and Mathews both bubbling up with some regularity in the cauldron of my own creative spell-castings. Hey, boys, I greet the two of them, running a cloth quickly over my face. You’ll be happy to hear the robins are still guarding the tree!
L'Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962)
Vagabond (Agnès Varda, 1985)
Coming out of high school, I applied to four or five universities and got into two of them. I applied to the film program at Ryerson but that was not one of the two, alas, as getting accepted there would have pushed me more in a film production than a film theory direction. That’s fate, dawg, so now you have to listen to me talk about Lacan while I pick my misshapen nose in my stained Tallulah Bankhead hoodie. As part of my application to Ryerson, I sent in a treatment for a possible student film, which ended up being about an anonymous backpacker who enters a mountain village only to find it completely abandoned. Naturally, I stipulated that this all-but-silent film was to be shot in high contrast black and white.
The Millarville Racing and Agricultural Society Times-Gazette sent your intrepid reporter and gallant lad-about-the-place to the trial of cowboy actor John Wayne, who smokes constantly and mutters like an overgrown toddler in need of a throttling and a talking to. Perhaps I was forged in a more traditional and less compromised furnace. Who, sir or madame, is to say?
Here are some of the things I saw in the hour leading up to the trial of disgraced cowboy actor and known war apologist John "If That is Your Real Name" Wayne: soldiers drinking tea next to artillery; a journalist working studiously on that day's crossword; clipboard busybodies busily busy at their business; the big stentorian judge and his mighty quivering jowl, the whole package fresh from the gardens of Luxembourg. Enter legal council, choir, children of war torn and also famine-ravaged Cosumel, the district attorney's suicide blonde mistress who also works for him, and then finally armed Zapatista women to cover the perimeter.
Moustaches now cease to writhe, ye heathen horde, in their ubiquitous suspicion and disdain. The man behind me says: "Give these motherfuckers a trampoline and some turpentine and they go and try to put over a three-ring circus like this was Duck Soup or the Skull and Bones society."
"Shut it with the chatter, harpies," says the seven-foot bailiff with the hairlip and his hands on his hips. "Go outside and clutch your prayer beads down in the gravel with God pummelled to incognizant dust if you can't stop openly bleating."
A slow and perhaps drugged fly buzzes out the in door.
We should be above trials and such. Can you dig it? This is a time-consuming activity!
The cowboy actor John Wayne enters in his workaday chains, a little sheepish, hat in his hands...except for his having no hat. Behold, good people, the toddler chastened!
A long time passes.
Shelling has started up again nearby and artillery near the courthouse is being fired at a solid tempo. Buildings shed brick like dandruff. God the Insensible, long may he thunder and roar in the divine downpour!
When all the audience has left John Wayne looks bereft, like he knew he'd caused that himself with his bitterness, cigarettes, and grotty lowborn heft. Mr. Wayne turned to the judge and said: "Please, whatever you do, just don't characterize me as a militant, 'cause that would make me plain sick." He added: "There can't be no matter of there being any jury of my peers; don't nobody know the trouble I've seen."
Some ranchers and young folk come in because they think it's a bar...apologize...leave...
Suddenly my dear Reba runs in and she's proper liquored and no I damn well cannot believe it, but she is screaming presently the following to my awe and astonishment: "John Wayne, you cheap, cheatin' two-bit half-assed cowboy-actin' bastard, you owe me and little Jim alimonies. If you keep having second thoughts it's over, lard ass, and look at me, a prize horse's ass, 'cause you didn't even have the dadblasted brainpower sufficient to so much as try and seduce me."
The district attorney's mistress goes by and I get a curious chill up my spine. She's built like a jackhammer. A grim thought flashes through my head: the next lunch break is permanent.
The judge: "Very illuminating, but I hardly manage to see how..."
Part of a helicopter crashes through the ceiling of the courthouse. "Who brought the reefer?" quips some wag two rows behind me.
Asked for any final words, the disgraced and now convicted cowboy actor John Wayne complains in grief that it was never any more a case of his having thrown away his badge in order to confront the authorities and the powers that be than it was a contrary gesture meant to antagonize the outlaws who to a man overestimated the extent to which "the Duke" was handcuffed to the badge.
In an interview from prison, incarcerated former cowboy star John Wayne, who works in the commissary, said the following to me personally: "I loved Reba very much, I think, and I wasn't yanking her chain or anything. I fucked it up very badly but also she became irritating to me, slowly and progressively until my last goddamn nerve had had it. She became much less desirable every time she spoke. You didn't find that? I get jealous and suspicious and paranoid. On occasion. She'd then poke at me like I were the proverbial bear. I'm not going to lie, I hit her a few times. In the mouth, the stomach. One of my things is I can't stand to let somebody leave a room so...uh...I could never let her, you know, leave a room. I wouldn't even let her go to the bathroom alone. I was sure one of us was going to kill the other at some point, like a basic and crude law of nature, but that never did happen. Haw haw. Wheel of life! Sheesh."
Oh my God, I cannot believe this, don't look now, but that same guy is still working on that fucking crossword puzzle...
