Threepenny Oppenheimer Pt. 9 [Silencio]

 

The Tempest (Derek Jarman, 1979)

In the 1960s, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze produced in succession short and minor works of tremendous impact on Nietzsche (1962), Kant (1963), Proust (1964), and Bergson (1966). As regards Proust, it is Deleuze’s contention that a relationship to semiotic chains ought to replace a focus on memory in consideration of the basic operational mode of Proust’s multi-volume Recherche. Much of Deleuze’s trajectory through the 60s is traced in his letters. Writing to Jean Piel, who had taken over editorial stewardship of Critique after the death of Geroges Bataille in 1962, Deleuze apologizes for not being able to produce a piece on Céline anytime in the near future. Later, in 1968, writing to Piel again, Deleuze correlates, in passing, Lewis Carroll’s work to an emerging logic of sense and some kind of major project that threatens to expand indefinitely. Lewis Carroll and Antonin Artaud are already united in the work at hand along with a direct consideration of the schizophrenic, as stated explicitly in the letter, even though Deleuze will not meet institutional psychiatrist and future collaborator Félix Guattari until the two men are introduced in the Limousin region during the spring of 1969 (where Deleuze is, naturally, a man chronically unwell, convalescing). Many letters from Deleuze to Guattari are collected in the opening section of Semiotext(e)’s Letters and Other Texts. In one instance Deleuze provides his young depressive colleague with a pep talk: “The idea that conditions are not yet right to do it, either because things are not going well in the current inferno, or that you yourself are not doing well, seems false to me; because it is the same as saying that one can only truly write when things are going well, instead of seeing writing as a modest but active and effective factor in getting out of the inferno for a moment and in feeling better oneself.” Practical advise and indisputably wise. Already by April of 1971 Deleuze is writing derisively in a letter to the great Pierre Klossowski as concerns “Marxist-psychoanalytical immobilism.” Sent a questionnaire by Arnaud Villani in 1980, Deleuze responds to the question “Are you a non-metaphysician philosopher?” by insisting outright: “No, I see myself as a pure metaphysician.” As he has already told us emphatically: “Bergson says that modern science did not find its metaphysics, the metaphysics it needed. I am interested in this metaphysics.” Deleuze and Guattari stood on the side of youth and the “right to nonsense.” It is the jovial industriousness of these great thinkers and their almost jovial vision that makes me think of Ernst Lubitsch’s tender-comic immediate postwar Hollywood masterpiece Cluny Brown, in which young lady plumber Jennifer Jones bangs her wrench haplessly against the clanging pipes until the connection happens for her, the blockage is removed, all that goop slides loose and lazy, and she achieves her schizoanalytic line of flight. What is the line of flight? It’s the thing that finally works…and busts your ass out of the binary apparatus permanente. Prospero, a bunch of other people, a shipwrecking storm at sea, salubrious occasion for myth to emanate like a steam from a compact alien landmass, a little rock, just like all the little rocks from Ithaca to Alcatraz to The Invention of Morel. Bill Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1611. The Bard & Co.’s most metaphysical play. Kathleen M. Lea makes all the salient parallels between The Tempest and pan-European commedia dell-arte: “the favourite setting is either the coast of Arcadia or a lost island; the dramatis personae consists of a magician who has a somewhat malicious interest in the love affairs of a group of nymphs and shepherds among whom one may be his daughter and the other the lost son of the Magnifico or the Doctor who are shipwrecked onto the coast with the Zanni. The magician’s attendants are satyrs, demons, or rustics of the cruder sort… At the denouement the magician discovers the relationship between himself, the lovers, and the strangers, ends the play by renouncing his magic and sometimes agrees to leave the island and return to civic life.” Blaise Pascal said hedge your bets lest ye be ruled out by unknown celestial elites. You need serious computing power to do anything like that these days. “These are not catastrophes I went out of my way to look for—these were my friends,” bemoans F. Scott Fitzgerald respective of a life lived and dragged roughly along tarmac during the Jazz Age, “moreover, these things happened not during the depression but during the boom.” It’s a very delicate business, these intensities, caution Deleuze and Guattari. Intensive excitation may become “harmful if it overtaxes your strength at a given moment […] you have to be able to take it, you have to be in shape […]”

PORTIS

My favourite thing about the Arkansas writer Charles Portis is that when he quit his prestigious overseas journalism gig and they asked him what he was going to do next, he said he was going to go write novels in a fishing shack in Arkansas. Though the noble and sterling True Grit was the novel that made him rich and comfortably retired, it is Gringos, his final novel, that is his most filling/nourishing, most vivid, and just A#1 thoroughbred best. It tells the story of Jimmy Burns, a veteran of the Korean War originally from Louisiana who has spent a number of years eking out a half-assed living on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, occasionally tracking down runaways and wanted persons as a side gig. Gringos is to an extent dallying in genre fiction, combining elements of the western and the skip-trace-style detective yarn. Jimmy has something of the quality of a Southerner Philip Marlowe to him. He used to make his living illegally salvaging relics from remote Mayan tombs et cetera, but came to realize that the practice was somewhat risky and probably ethically indefensible. Now Jimmy tracks down the occasional missing person and transports things for people in his truck. One of the many mantras Jimmy shares with the reader warns: “if you have a truck your friends will drive you crazy.” On the subject of his one-time paramour Beth, a smart lady with a penchant for hooking up with poets, Jimmy notes: “Art and Mike said taking an intellectual woman into your home was like taking in a baby raccoon. They were both amusing for awhile but soon became randomly vicious and learned how to open the refrigerator.” Rudy is an itinerant Ufologist come to Mayaland in hopes of making either contact or substantive discoveries pertaining to ancient extraterrestrial interference in earthly affairs. There are others of Rudy’s ilk about. There are also many archeologists and archeological wannabes, foremost among them Dr. Richard Flandin, an elderly gentleman who has been working on his book on the Maya for many decades and who laments repeatedly and at length how he has been alternately robbed and ignored by the know-nothing institution bozos. There are endless ragged bands of roving hippies, more specifically “real hippies, false hippies, pyramid power people, various cranks and mystics, hollow earth people, flower children and the von Däniken people.” Among these can be counted the Jumping Jacks, who profess to be searching for the Inaccessible City of Dawn and who insist innocuously that they have “fled the madness and found the gladness.” They are led by a malevolent guy named Dan, sporting a tattoo which betrays his having spent at least some time in the Aryan Brotherhood, and in the company of the Jumping Jacks is a little red-headed girl who Jimmy will discover, having consulted the Blue Papers comprising the current roster of missing or wanted, to be a runaway named LaJoye Mishell Teeter. Rudy, the alien fanatic, will go missing. Jimmy will go off in pursuit of Rudy and LaJoye Mishell Teeter. He will be handed a .45 automatic pistola on a literal platter. There is an old man known to the locals as El Obisbo who walks around Mérida, the town where Jimmy has nominally set up shop, muttering over and over a passage from Mark about towers coming crashing down and who may or may not turn at night into a reddish fox-faced dog generally only seen about to disappear around a corner. Our house dick sets off with his buddy Refugio, a first-time-out-in-the-field archeologist named Gail, and the daffy Dr. Flandin. Somehow…they end up at the Inaccessible City of Dawn…where hippie hordes have gathered, “this flock of migrant cockatoos,” for what they believe to be the imminent end of the world, some apparently hoping to prevent the apocalypse by way of an unspecified sacrifice. Someone named El Mago would appear to figure in all of this business somewhere. “Monkeys were screaming back and forth at one another across the river. The lunatic monkeys knew something was up.” The world of Gringos is practically outside of world-historic time, though the profusion of hippies might seem to help date it. Jimmy Burns was at some point a teenager fighting as a Marine in Korea. He is forty-one years of age during the events that take place in the novel. Because of this, we can be fairly certain that Gringos, published in 1991 and otherwise not forthcoming on the subject, takes place sometime in the 70s. Portis was also a Marine in Korea. It would seem clear that he identifies with Jimmy Burns and no doubt hands to a certain extent part of his own sensibility over to this congenial loafer, lax as the man is for the most part, sometimes half misanthrope, but always more or less good-humoured and serious about his ethics, beholden to a code…which we all know to be a must for heroes of genre fiction. Sure, Jimmy Burns understands that the UFO nuts are indeed nuts. He’s nobody’s fool. “Still, the flying saucer books were fun to read and there weren’t nearly enough of them to suit me. I liked the belligerent ones best, that took no crap off the science establishment.”

HIGHSMITH

In 1969’s The Tremor of Forgery, a real slow-burner from the great Patricia Highsmith, we keep very close to protagonist Howard Ingham, an American writer who resides at least at the outset in New York, where, on account of the success of his third novel, he keeps a nice if smallish apartment on West Fourth Street, near Washington Square. Circumstances quietly congealing, Ingham finds himself dispatched to Tunisia where he has been sent to connect with a prospective collaborator named John Castlewood who hopes Ingham will craft a screenplay for a project titled Trio, which it is believed needs to be set in Tunisia because the behaviour of the amorous antagonists would not be terribly credible in an American milieu. Back in New York, Ingham has a love interest of his own, Ina Pallant, and he is not quite sure where things stand between the two of them. There is also the matter of Charlotte (or Lotte), a woman to whom Ingham was briefly married and for whom he retains unresolved feelings. The idea is that John Castlewood is supposed to join Ingham shortly, but this does not come to pass, and Ingham grows increasingly agitated in the foreign and totally unfamiliar environment, a great deal of time having passed without his receiving word from either Castlewood or Ina. Ina eventually shows up in Tunisia, the absence of Castlewood is explained, all of this produces further complications and psychospiritual mutations, these generally being complications of a sort that no reader is likely to predict—which is why the reader is reading suspense novels in the first place. Before Ina does show up, Ingham establishes relationships with three key people: Francis J. Adams of Connecticut, or OWL (Our Way of Life), a friendly and good-natured advocate of American values, anti-communist, claiming he has been recruited by dissident Soviets to covertly spread folksy radio propaganda behind the Iron Curtain; the attractive servant boy Mokta, about seventeen years of age or thereabouts, who Ingham would appear to intuit is far more cunning an operator than he lets on; and Anders Jensen, queer Dane with German police dog, whose somewhat bitter worldview seems to rub off on Ingham and with whom Ingham will eventually become something like roommates, moving from his comfy Reine de Hammamet bungalow and into an eminently Arabian squat, the toilet a hole in the floor, where he occupies the floor beneath Jensen and works to complete a novel commenced whilst killing time. Highsmith almost always writes in a third-person that is not properly omniscient in that it is careful to keep fixed on the cogitation of the characters and refrain from providing us with information to which they are not contextually privy. Ingham’s mental state increasingly becomes affected by his new environment. This is a man who moves slowly but is also impatient and restless, compulsively checking to see if mail has arrived, fussy and distracted, but lurking about his frazzled regime like a languid predator. “The days began to drag. They dragged for two days, then Ingham picked up mentally, or perhaps slowed down, so that he didn’t mind the dragging. He was making some progress in planning his novel, and had the first three chapters clearly in mind.” Eating less, its being so hot, Ingham is starting to lose weight. He writes to Ina: “Africa is strangely good for thinking. It’s like standing naked in glaring sunlight against a white wall. Somehow nothing is hidden in this bright light…” As he and Jensen become more bitter and vocal about it, coming to express disdain for Arabs and their attributed lack of a sense of sanctity, this eventually develops into Ingham's feeling at times “a detached disgust for the whole human race.” Though the situation is highly pressurized for sure and we might expect the Ingham-OWL cat-and-mouse business to get heated, as it probably would were this a different Highsmith novel, this great author’s genius lies in fact in her capacity to locate here in a pinpoint and pinwheel manner an interstice whereby two opposed men's competing domains and offset stratagems may well arrive at a powerful unexpected confluence, a radical and highly uncustomary synergy. What does that look like? Perhaps the destiny machine is producing hope rather than doom, and perhaps the unconscious is but its agent. The moral of the story is: I’m alone in this crumbling substandard dwelling structure and that’s how it was meant to be…oh, and the novel’s coming along great. Ommm.

Eddie Cochran, "Dark Lonely Street"

Jason Philip Wierzba Cordially Invites You to His Annual 'Eve of Cancellation' Celebrations

Tetsuo: The Iron Man (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1989) [Trailer]

Threepenny Oppenheimer Pt. 8

 

Inflation of the First Hydrogen Balloon

Don DeLillo’s all-too-timely 2020 novel The Silence, about the death of the grid and then the rest of it too, begins with a epigraph from Albert Einstein, scion of relativity and specialized relativity, for whom surely no extended introduction is required: “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” In the novel’s second chapter, some characters have convened in an apartment in New York City and await a couple who are flying in. Max Stenner, inveterate gambler, and his “something-or-other” partner Diane Lucas are joined for the moment in their residence by Diane’s former student, Martin Dekker, the threesome watching the televised pregame lead-up to Super Bowl LVI, the year being 2022. All of a sudden the television and the totality of the ad hoc threesome’s connected devices go haywire. Max, who evidently has considerable sums riding on the Super Bowl, beholds aghast as the television signal first falters and then ceases momentarily. “Something happened then. The images onscreen began to shake. It was not ordinary visual distortion, it had depth, it formed abstract patterns that dissolved into a rhythmic pulse, a series of elementary units that seemed to thrust forward and then recede. Rectangles, triangles, squares.” Local power failure? Chinese hack? Nobody present is in a position to know with any certainty, but what is very much clear is that the taken-for-granted web of virtuality holding everything in the 21st century nebulously together has been instantaneously rescinded, at least from the standpoint of a particular local experience, though what sort of gullible-ass reader is going to assume the crisis ends there? Everybody knows and is frightened by how connected we all are. Past the threshold of the known, into a futurity beyond the thinkable, the second section of The Silence replaces the past tense of the first with the present tense of a hyper-real intensive unbinding, as each of the principles, Jim and Tessa having now arrived at the apartment in the aftermath of the basically successful crash-landing or their commercial airliner, is provided the opportunity to soliloquize like a Shakespeare character against a green screen in a vacuum. Some vintage DeLillo parataxis: “E-mail-less. Try to imagine it. Say it. Hear how it sounds. E-mail-less.” Drones, satellites, cryptocurrency, China, powerful telescopes, cyber worms, either the planet or the god Mars. What does it all ultimately mean? To what do these fragments add up? O tempora! O mores! In times like these. In times like these what? I believe it more or less behooves me to draw the attention of readers to the bravura and comically decadent opening section of writer and editor Mark Doten’s 2019 novel Trump Sky Alpha. In the eponymous flying luxury machine, “Crystal Palace of the Sky,” president Donald Trump’s “ultraluxury zeppelin […] from the bridge of which Trump delivered streaming YouTube addresses every Wednesday, DC to New York, and every Sunday, New York to DC,” not perhaps advisedly, really, the reality of ongoing global nuclear war suggesting the necessity of different sorts of exigencies and more robust precautions. We have Trump, as well we might expect, calling the end of the world “fake news” whilst evidence of its sound factual basis rises above the earth in the form of innumerable mushroom clouds. There would in fact appear to be a pan-global flotilla of Trump zeppelins. It is the end of the world for damn certain. Turbulence, baby. You will recognize the beast when finally the beast arriveth: “the 2,000-gallon wheeled lobster habitats crashed against the Mount Rushmore-style sculptures that separated the gallery from the main cabin, and 2,000-gallon plate-glass tanks all around the world shattered against statues of Trump and Eric and Trump Jr. and Ivanka, sending huge crustaceans everywhere as passengers worldwide screamed in one voice […],” Trump with a “face like a Creamsicle dropped in the dirt,” bafflingly impervious, blasted out of the sky and his life functions persisting undaunted, like Slim Pickens at the end of Dr. Strangelove. I cannot help but suspect that the opening of Trump Sky Alpha explicitly tips its hat to that of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, a door-stopper novel that begins with a riotous and hardy section focusing on the Chums of Chance as they approach the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair in a hydrogen balloon.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

“Death? So full of life, of lives.” Who is speaking? Ariel? In the midst of a sudden wailing tempest that is already a dream of midsummer's night? Hélène Cixous, that is to say…the side of life, le côté de la vie. Along with speed, Cixous’ great longtime friend Jacques Derrida also detects in her force of life the centrality and/or primacy of what he at one point designates “the mighty impatience of the wish.” The “mighty impatience of the wish” makes possible time travel and immortality without need of recourse to scientific breakthrough or much of a budget, and it doesn’t even require that you not ever die…at least a little...I mean, don't you want to experience the full gamut? “This book owes its life to death,” writes Cixous in Death Shall Be Dethroned. “Death also lives.” In The Hanky of Pippin's Daughter, one of two very fine novels we have from poet Rosmarie Waldrop, the events of individual lives and the act of speaking or addressing are flung contingently into history and becoming in the context of weather and atmosphere, biological events (sexual reproduction, the development of the embryo), and renegade cosmological extrapolation—“a brighter galaxy of suns”—such that the condition of being flung into immanence and worldly substance leaves one both bound and unbound. “But in sex as in meteorology the number of particles in question is so enormous that an exact catalog of their positions and velocities is impossible.” Can we imagine any pure state of functional jouissance operative in any actually existing social field? I remember a friend once arguing to me that if you lived totally in the moment the way Eckhart Tolle advises you would no doubt routinely shit your pants. In the third section of Ingeborg Bachmann's magnificent-to-the-point-of-epochal novel Malina we are treated to the unforgettable story of the mailman Kranewitzer of Klagenfurt who could no longer honour the Privacy of Mails and could indeed no longer deliver the mail, barricading himself in his residence with ever-mounting piles of undelivered correspondences. It is normally the heroic and aberrant literary act that destabilizes in this manner, riding alongside its victims, in curious fidelity to an ulterior dimension seen only by a very few. Maybe too the pervasive plague is but a mirror to the author’s senescence, her psychosis little more than a quotidian matter of course, cause for cheer however raw the nerves. The whirlpool of dream and endless re-prisonings, we have a passage which imagines three stones bearing messages. Ingeborg Bachmann equated her own late style to deathstyle (which makes more sense as one word if you speak German). Death itself doesn’t bow to or even necessarily tolerate style or its dominion of embarrassing frippery. True, we die eventually and ought to rejoice of the matter, though deathstyle means more properly that in taking to life in our singular, inimitable way, we are each of us throughly specialized equipment, though hardly autonomous. What is a bundle of symptoms if not the weather around here? There are lots of different jobs in the ant colony, twenty-four hours a day. Ah, but the plague. “But Vienna doesn’t have much time left, it’s slipping away, the houses are falling asleep, people are turning their lights off earlier and earlier, no one is awake anymore, entire districts are gripped by apathy, people aren’t coming together or splitting apart, the city is slipping into decline although isolated thoughts and erratic monologues still occur at night. And from time to time the final dialogues between Malina and myself.” The aesthetic education advocated by comparative literature scholar and Derrida translator Gayatri Spivak—her long-running “false hope”—would seek to outsource the transcendental categories and doctrines to the legislative mercy of the imagination. Knowledge only takes an individual so far. We negotiate limits and try things…and just try and stop us. Our transcendental-legislative grounding operations are instrumental, they lack any detectable higher legitimation whatever. The Godhead ain't returning your calls. Mistakes will not only be acceptable but instrumentally necessary. Spivak, from her essay “Who Claims Alterity?”: “we must know what mistake to make with a specific text and must also know how to defend our mistake as the one that will allow us to live.”

The Blind Owl (Raúl Ruiz, 1987)

Naveed Noori, the translator of the 2011 Sadegh Hedayat Foundation-approved edition of The Blind Owl by tormented Persian modernist Sadegh Hedayat released by the Iran Open Publishing Group, has kept many of the original Persian terminologies utilized in Hedayat’s manuscript, for this and many other reasons wisely providing copious footnotes to help explicate such business. One such footnote fairly late in the text—a mere four pages from its conclusion—helps clarify a key point for Occidental readers: when coming across owls performing an apparently symbolic function or role we might be inclined to think of wisdom, byproduct no doubt of the Owl of Minerva and a mythological genealogy leading back from Germany’s Black Forest to Ancient Greece. In both Iran and India owls “are considered bad omens, with various superstitions and traditions ascribed to them.” A genuinely disturbing work of visionary literature akin to that of Poe, Lovecraft, or Baudelaire, The Blind Owl is broken into two distinct parts and terminates with a brief coda. It is a story of horror and hallucinations, but, that being said, if the fundamental recipe for modernist literature has something to do with industrial modernity and human alienation in all its many variegated forms, then The Blind Owl belongs in that discussion. Our unnamed narrator extemporizes thusly: “for in the course of my life experiences I came to this understanding that there existed a dreadful chasm between myself and others, and I understood that as much as possible one should remain inaudible, as much as possible I should keep my thoughts to myself, and if now I have decided to write, it is only to introduce myself to my shadow—a bent shadow on the wall, and it is as if the more I write, it devours it with an even greater appetite…” Conjoined with this disconnection from the outside world is a sense of the constitutional flimsiness of phenomenal reality. “Is not all that I feel, see and ponder completely illusory, far from reality?” Opium and wine are not only a refuge but literally painkilling. The departed beloved, not a beam of sunshine but rather a shooting star, “her two large wondrous and shining eyes, behind which my life slowly and painfully liquified and burned, she no longer belongs to this brutal and wretched world—no, I must not defile her name with earthly things.” Very rapidly the druggy, hypnagogic-type state of affairs becomes a whirlwind of obsession, driving the narrator to the limits of what he is capable of enduring, the damsel-angel replacing the former beloved as the fulcrum of all his desire and suffering polarized. The narrator paints again and again the eyes of the damsel-angel. So as to possess them, he claims, but who could he possibly be kidding, he clearly the one possessed? Deep in a delirium or fugue state, the narrator dismembers the angel's corpse and sets out to dispose of it, or believes this is what is happening. Parts of the body stuffed into suitcases, he ventures out to bury them, encountering in the process a number of eerily similar elderly men who offer to help him and who tell him they know where he lives. The narrator opens one of the bags he is about to bury and inside are “those large eyes amid the clotted blood.” The colour of meat and offal. Everywhere. Carousing night watchmen. The dire providential shadow, the statue or shadow with no head, indicating the imminent death of the one who hath fatefully tripped that invisible wire. The “oblivion and peace” of death, itself unattainable, no more than a stale sales pitch. Paradise would have to be a narcotic paradise. You would have to be able to feel nearly nothing there. Sexual obsession and bloodshed. The peddler, “the representative and manifestation of Creation.” Creation itself is the infernal. We have an idiom for things being forged in things.  What does Creation do? It burns insects alive for sport. There are different domains of horror at play in The Blind Owl, but its true implicit horror is the same as in Poe and Lovecraft: what if your already cemented destiny is a living hell on earth? Where you gonna run to, Sinnerman?

Ricky Nelson, "Lonesome Town" [Karaoke]

Threepenny Oppenheimer Pt. 7

John Huston
+
Albert DeSalvo

Not only does Claire Denis’ 2013 neo-noir masterpiece Les salauds calculatedly borrow from Sanctuary, William Faulkner’s most provocative and controversial novel, the instrument and venue for a horrific act of sexual violation that neither work depicts directly, but Denis could like Faulkner also in general be said to utilize crime fiction elements for elevated purposes whilst masterfully unfurling a sophisticated narrative characterized by ellipses and effervescent ripples of uncanny causation. All readers of detective novels know that criminal investigation gets all its cables crossed and tangled as matter of perfunctory routine. Anybody with a cursory knowledge of Hollywood and its lore will be aware of gregarious, larger-than-life director John Huston, son of the legendary actor Walter Huston. A born showman. John Huston also had a deeply sinister side. A problem drinker and womanizer, to be sure, but I’m afraid it would appear to extend beyond even that. He was friends with Los Angeles doctor and Venereal Disease Czar George Hodel, a man who would go on to marry Huston’s first wife Dorothy and later be credibly implicated by his own ex-homicide-detective son Steve Hodel in the extremely famous murder of Elizabeth Short—the Black Dahlia—as well as a flabbergasting array of other homicides. George Hodel’s daughter Tamar would not only accuse her father of engaging in an incestuous sexual relationship with her, accusations backed up by first-hand witnesses, but would also accuse John Huston of heinous improprieties. Consider in this light the fact that Roman Polanski, of all people, would cast Huston as an utterly prurient plutocrat who has an abusive incestuous relationship with his own daughter in 1974’s Chinatown. Additionally, Susan Tyrrell, who had a bad drinking problem herself and was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her performance in Huston’s 1972 masterpiece Fat City, would later accuse the director of assaulting her in a car during pre-production for that film. When something notably bad happens in a densely populated area worthless accusations come poring into the call centres. In her book The Boston Stranglers about the so-called Boston Strangler and the railroading of Albert DeSalvo, who was never formerly charged or tried, author Susan Kelly very quickly gets into the business of serving up a basically perfect true crime saga for the quantum age because it is impersonal and multi-perspectival, certainly, but also because Kelly has no choice but to remain largely agnostic with respect to the material over which she’s combing, every last detail stress-tested from six angles by one form of freshly emerging insanity or another. We have eleven or thirteen murders in the first half of the ‘60s in Boston, a very large city teeming with dynamic human enterprise, and we never figure out if it was one or two or three people who committed these strangling murders…or if it was closer to eleven or thirteen. Every time we look at an individual victim new sinister dimensions appear to reveal themselves. We know that Albert DeSalvo, seduced and flattered by his attorneys and the Strangler Task Force, confessed to all of those early-‘60s stranglings, though he couldn't have committed many, if any. What do you even do with guys like DeSalvo and Henry Lee Lucas who just won’t stop confessing? They’re almost like gambling addicts.

Histoire de Marie et Julien (Jacques Rivette, 2003)

In "The Last Wolf, ” one of many, many pieces by the beloved Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai the germinal seeds of which can be traced back to the influence of Austrian curmudgeon Thomas Bernhard, consists of not just a single paragraph but, indeed, a single seventy-six page sentence which superimposes time frames and ingeniously situates the entirety of the digression within the context of its retelling, like a lengthy digression from a 19th century English novel. In Krasznahorkai there is an implacable sense that man is a monster, and a grave danger to himself. Susan Sontag called him approvingly a master of the apocalypse. The hunter dutifully clocks his own extinction. There is a taped interview I love very much in which the filmmaker Jaques Rivette, having been asked by his interviewer about the “fantômes” in his film Histoire de Marie et Julien, grows extremely animated, insisting no, no, no, they are not fantômes, they are revenants. Different mythologies; different “space-times.” One of the key things that separates the revenant from the fantôme, insists Rivette, is the former's corporeality, indeed its carnality, explaining as this does the lovemaking in Histoire de Marie et Julien. Krasznahorkai’s 2016 novel Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming is about three revenants, the second of which is the eponymous Baron: “when still in his forties the doctors had told him that this would happen, that he would become an idiot …” The Baron desires nothing more, apparently, than to return to the Hungarian town of his youth so as to reconnect with his first love, Marika (or Marietta). An emblematic revenant, the Baron Wenckheim is spectral, unnerving, in some sense hardly there at all. He cannot stand to be touched, he presents as aphasic, maybe borderline demented. Finally arriving at her domicile, the Baron does not recognize Marika as herself though he does note a passing resemblance. She’s pretty cheesed about it: “was it possible something had really happened with the Baron’s mind?! because it just wasn’t possible for him to come here, to sit down in front of her, look at her, and not remember who she was, that simply wasn’t possible …” It proves to be a cataclysmic encounter, cosmic outer-atmosphere payload by the kiloton. Marika is shattered. More calamity is on its way, all of it pooling together, sure as the frost on the pumpkin. The Baron, escaping a diabolic meddler, walks into the forest and effectively out of the novel. The third revenant arrives subsequently, in the form of a poison pen letter, signed by the Baron but certainly not written by nor in any way sanctioned by him. Poison. Pen. The letter constitutes a blistering, categorical judgment, and it will lead to the immanentization of the eschaton and scorched earth every which way but loose. “The whole thing will go up in flames.” Krasznahorkai’s cosmology figures the universe and the human being within a constitutive condition of extreme agitation. We're standing upright on two legs like grubby teetering imbeciles…and we can get unpleasantly emotional. The Professor, internationally prominent specialist on moss, will have cause to ruminate, even entering intimate philosophical colloquy with a dog, though he has previously been known to kick dogs. He will bemoan that “the world is nothing more than an event-lunacy,” and, meditating on eternity, will himself briefly become analogical equivalent to the bird standing pensively in the Kamo river at the beginning of 2008’s Seiobo There Below: “the proper method of liquidating thought,” avers the prof, “is the standing position, that is our basic stance, in motionless observation, because only from here, only from this stance, do we have a chance, perhaps …”

The very short third paragraph of Gustav Flaubert’s 1881 novel Bouvard and Pécuchet—his best and his funniest—bearing all the curt gravity of fresh cataclysm announced: “Two men appeared.” Take note, Samuel Beckett. “One was coming from the Bastille, the other from the Jardin des Plantes. The taller one, wearing a linen suit, walked with his hat pushed back, vest unbuttoned and tie in his hand. The shorter one, whose body disappeared inside a brown frock coat, lowered his head beneath a cap with a pointed visor.” A special Parisian windfall having unexpectedly fallen, Bouvard and Pécuchet, granted to do wither they wilt, genuine in their zeal, committed in their puttering fashion, countr'fied, and forced into tenuous alliance with a farmer and his wife, set about fussing tirelessly at the immediate surroundings, setting their hungry eyes on mastering agronomy, which they will bungle imaginatively, repeatedly, and exhaustively, aghast and vexed at their inability to bring anything off in a manner that corresponds to expectations. “The wind enjoyed flattening the beanstalks.” It is not long before Bouvard is making scandalous use of cadavers for purposes of fertilization. Sheep are dying in considerable number after being forced to undergo his amateur phlebotomies. A focus on agronomy will tend to splinter off absentmindedly into peripheral disciplines, this a mode that will be repeated with numerous fantastically dynamic variations over ten more or less full chapters. “The worm that grows in the sheep’s brain and causes its death has an anatomy just as complex as the sheep itself,” argues Bouvard the Philosopher, sanguine at least for the moment. The distinctive physiognomies are the generative ground for the differentiation of these two imaginary men, closer than close. Thin, anxious, adult virgin Pécuchet becomes the physical and moral expression of suppressed trauma or a related complex, the implication being that the prude of the pair may have good reason to be gun shy. Controversy and acrimony can only inflame ardent bonhomie. “They tried to find solid bases for reasoning. The bases collapsed—and suddenly there was no more idea, the way a fly skitters off the moment you try to catch it.” Getting right with information means getting right with time, which is the embodied time—pulsed and non-pulsed—that you have on the earth. The spending of time becomes the spinal column of an individual style, the one-off aberration and wonky singularity that each of us constitutes itself constituting that little bit of vibrating difference, love, compulsion, and/or desire roping us into one another and into things. “Their words flowed tirelessly, remarks following upon anecdotes, philosophical musings upon personal observations. They denigrated the Public Works department, the Tobacco Authority, business, the theatre, our navy, and the entire human race, like men who had suffered grave disappointments. Each one, listening to the other, rediscovered forgotten parts of himself. And although they had passed the age of naïve emotions, they both felt a new pleasure, a kind of blossoming, the charm of affections newly born.”

Burning Star Core, Operator Dead...Post Abandoned [Full Album] 

F.E.A.R.

F.E.A.R.

- false evidence appearing real -

Spotlight on a Murder (Georges Franju, 1961)

La rupture (Claude Chabrol, 1970)

The human being that exists halfway through the year 2026, the vagaries of progress being whatever they may be, does not have developed faculties or specialized equipment adequate to cognate the incoming future with anything other than projections and fancy, whatever thin and dancing extrasensory vein does or does not herein obtain. Think about it. All your technical equipment is just you and you’re all you have. You take in the signals and you let them resound or flop to the floor like a flounder. The future you’re envisioning is tinted heavily by the extremes to which you’ve gone to avoid learning anything and by the dreams you’re having mostly unconsciously about the furthest and must gruelling extremities of pain in a blinding spatiotemporal window of horrific openness, outside even to the outside of itself. Hell is not other people. Hell is precise and rigorous torture without hope of surcease. Who came up with that shit? The Japanese? Beats me. Seems like it could basically have been any one of us. I mean, read history much?

Master of Suspense Alfred Hitchcock believed in addition to the fact that cruelty can kind of be funny, that its own culpability is what makes the audience squirm when seated attentive and taking in a lavish Technicolor murder spectacle made with professionalism and panache. It has been argued that even to pay an electrical bill is to be a flunky of the $tate. I remember once hearing about a series of assaults in my neighbourhood and being convinced somebody would blame me. Of course, they may well have. How would I know? How is my paranoia on a scale of one to ten? Who’s asking?

I used to romanticize the counterculture of the ‘60s and ‘70s. But we all know what happened to the Baby Boomers. (They shit the bed ridonkulous.) It’s impossibly fucking grim. The drop-out dreamers who brought us the Whole Earth Catalogue, jam band agrarian communes, and garage rock venture capitalism…and who breathed the breath of life into the fledgling internet…ultimately invented the key tool of gluttonous neoliberal expansion, our intrepid psychonauts of yesteryear getting high on the hogs of greed and wrath akin. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari—the populous pair—asserted that capitalism “makes the earth increasingly uninhabitable the more thoroughly it encompasses it.” Yup. Open pit mining and strip mining especially. 

You are looking deep into a well and things are starting to appear there because you are looking so hard. Do you hear someone down there? It isn’t novel or radical to insist that dreams are yelling at you in order to get your attention about something, hastily underscored directions for a supine soul horrifically off course. It’s because the self is an escape room and so is the cosmos. I brought Freud for his huffy accord.  Blech, he says. Which is good as gold or gravy. The hollow earth is a projection of the spinning heliocentric human who is imagining like an absolute Mad Hatter corncob that gravity is a business of apples dropping down. 

Fear goes after, peeps, breaks, enters, collects trophies. Fear is running a program across the urban delirium spectrum. When your lights start to go out they come to collect. Who’s that you say? The Angel of Death and his blue-smocked crew. How in the fuck do you happen to do?  I was reading that Uranus was hit at some point by some very large astral object that knocked it badly off its orbit such that now, whereas the rest of the planets spin like tops, Uranus rolls forward like a wheel. The precipitating incident happened billions of years ago. Nobody’s coming to accuse you of running off with the Moscow State Circus, Uranus in your arms.

The Reverend Patrick Brontë and his wife Maria had six children together, residing in relative isolation at West Riding, Yorkshire, in the north of England. Damp as hell, I would imagine. Among the six kids were three sisters who would come to be universally considered among the most important writers of the 19th century, the last of whom, Anne, was born in 1820. Maria Brontë died the following year, age thirty-eight, probably of uterine cancer, though she may also have had tuberculosis. The eldest Brontë daughters, Maria and Elizabeth, are said to have contracted tuberculosis on account of the harsh conditions at the school to which they were sent away and died in close temporal proximity to one another. Emily Brontë and Patrick, the sole brother, would both die of tuberculosis in 1848, as would Anne the following year. Charlotte Brontë would live the longest life of any of the siblings, dying in March of 1855 at thirty-eight, the same age at which her mother had passed. The Reverend Brontë lived to be a man eighty-four years of age, dying in 1861, pre-deceased by his wife and all six of his children. So much death, so regular the visitations, a distinguished clan laid progressively to waste. Sayonara, Gangsters. No wonder they used to call tuberculosis consumption. 

Fred Frith, Gravity [Full Album]

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]