Not a Slave

 

I would never go to work for another boss unless I had a firearm pointed directly at me

by

JPW

Little Blue Rogue Cop

 

1976 Motion Picture Dish

The foremost motion picture that is an exact genetic splice of exactly two previously distributed motion pictures on the public record is John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13, which is a clean and mean genetic splice of Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo and George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Don't knock it 'til you've rock-a-cock-cuck-cocked it. Bird is the wüürd, sailor.

Jason Philip Wierzba presenziz 

The Trashmen playin' "Surfin' Bird"

 

 

Jason, 2026

I deserve food, shelter, and clothing...

by

Confession: cigarettes may be a stimulant, but I smoke ten or fifteen of them things each and every day...

Dressed as Jupiter

I’m left with little more than my basic kindness and generosity when you take away the name that would live in infamy. The war was asymmetric but I was barely with it. You can’t storm a garrison with a soup spoon. My tendency to harass and harangue seldom pleases me much more than it does the target. The rolling thunder of compulsion leaves me feeling lost in blurry motion in mid-contortion. Folks have all kinds of opinions and believe their opinions and beliefs to be sacrosanct. They would oftentimes have you be different from how you presently are so that they’ll be able to fit you in their hip pocket and massage you like a pet rock while they put on lip gloss and walk-and-talk. Never really knowing the real you that never was. If you know the game is rigged and you continue to play you shouldn’t expect legislators to come save the day. If you want to get the stalactites of peanut butter from off the roof of your damn mouth, you do the hokey pokey and you turn yourself around. Naturally, I’m plenty able to wince at what enmity compelled me to do…upon such occasions that it has actually been me what gone done it. They say that resentment is drinking poison in the hopes that the other person will die. You can turn your guts to motor oil. It is a beautiful summer day with a breeze. I have not really gotten manic this summer. How can I be sure? I often need one or even two short naps during the daytime. I’m feeling a lot of pressure in the surrounding atmosphere and my head is frankly more thought-clogged than I would prefer. Sometimes my sinuses feel like they’re clogged with gravel. The cumulus clouds over the city are riding low and easy. Every few years I get to a place in my creative work where the spree comes to a short halt because every single first next step is a step into oblivion and the discontinuous stellar lines of the outer limits. I need to huddle inward and hum. If you let your thinking do your thinking for you, don’t be surprised when good fortune choses to ignore you. The voices you should be listening to are not going to sound a lot like friends to you at first, but either you take on the mass of that divided part or the open air may no longer be there to saturate your hiccupping heart.

Arnold Dreyblatt, "Resolve" 

Definitions of 'Plot' and 'Story'

When it comes to narratives and the art of making them bustle and boogey—whether we’re talking about a barroom joke told to a woodpecker, a short story, a novel, or a major motion picture from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer—the main thing a person ought to know about plot and story is that story is the entire planet and all of time stretching back to the Big Bang and the void of no yesterdays that precedes it, whereas plot is Google Maps. One of the fun things the marvellous and drunken detective fiction writer Dashiell Hammett likes to do with plot is to employ it in the opening chapter in such a way that the reader starts off with a bit of a mistaken idea of what the story is and where we’re physically supposed to be atop its surface. In Russian Formalism, “fabula” is the earth’s crust and crudeness and wanton babbling brooks—its timequakes and spaceways—and “syuzhet” is the plot, a grocer’s itemized inventory as scrolling banner advert. There is a special feature behind-the-scenes documentary on the Arrow Blu-ray for Terry Gilliam’s classic 12 Monkeys where we see the director arriving on set early in the morning looking like he got his ass kicked by a kangaroo and complaining, as he no doubt searches for the script supervisor, that he never remembers what he’s supposed to be doing on any given day of production anymore. That is a man who is swamped in story and has lost the plot. The secret truth behind how you build suspense that’s used by all the top professionals is that you have the story everywhere all around you at all times and then the plot moves like a slow, rickety sled through the, uh, permafrost. Things are materializing in front of you and you’re impatient because you can’t see them clearly yet. If there are trapdoors in the plot you can play snakes and ladders with the story. Actors who ask their directors for backstory should be ashamed of themselves. The whole fucking cosmos is backstory, thespian.    

Sun Ra, Spaceways [Full Album]

Dinner and a Movie

 

When Winifred got home from work I had already started dinner and it reeked of garlic throughout the apartment. I asked her how her day went and she said: ugh, I’m afraid it’s going to remain something of a hostage situation for so long as I remain alive. Winnifred spent some time with her meddlesome aunt Gladys yesterday evening and her tongue has been a little sharper than normal since. I guess the question of children and when we’re going to have some came up again…but the answer remained: we are absolutely not having any children ever. Winifred told Gladys that it’s immoral to bring children into this putrescent and mouldering world. Why?!, exclaimed Gladys. Well it was certainly immoral to bring you here, snarled Winifred. To her credit, she didn’t feel great about it by sundown.    

 

Neither Winifred nor I drink alcohol anymore. You could say we developed an allergy. For a time she experimented with mocktails, but it really was all very frou-frou and saturated in silly ritual, especially since I would probably prefer a glass of tap water anyway. We always keep coffee, tea, Coca-Cola, and Pellegrino. I like sugary breakfast cereals and Winifred doesn’t really approve. She was born in Medicine Hat and comes by that small town toughness real natural. A few years ago we went to see Guillermo del Toro’s remake of Nightmare Alley at Country Hills, and when Rooney Mara came on the screen for the first time in her period sideshow finery, I turned to Winifred and said that she and Rooney Mara betray a bit of a physical resemblance. I thought it flattering and gentlemanly. Her lip curled slightly. Yeah, she said with mild disdain, because we’re both so farmy. 

Winifred and I each consider ourselves specialized connoisseurs of Cold War-era Eastern European science fiction, and following the dinner I basically botched but which we finished off most of, we decided to throw on the new Blu-ray of Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel that Amazon delivered earlier. It’s adapted from a Strugatsky brothers novel that I read a long time ago but distinctly recall to this day being by far the zaniest and most odd thing I’d ever read from those august filial noble notables. The movie is like Twin Peaks, Tarkovsky’s Stalker, and Dario Argento’s version of Fawlty Towers all rolled into one tight little motherfucker of a blunt. It made me delirious and I couldn’t really follow it…but it was fun. Crazy purples and blues and reds. When the weather is nice, we usually like to sit out on the deck during all or part of sunset, Winifred dutifully making sure she’s got on the proper viscosity coat of sunscreen, which is not something I’d be inclined to fret over myself. I don’t take a lot of precautions and never did. I was the touring bassist with a popular rock ensemble for awhile and one time a significantly younger musician came up to me before the set and asked if I’d forgotten to put in ear plugs. I never use them, I told him. The music doesn’t sound as good. The little brat looked at me with absolute terror and nausea. He looked like he’d just sucked a lemon. 

Believe it or not, there was a time where I had made such a great big mess of things that there was almost no coming back. I was a pariah and I stood out like Big Bird. As I watched Winifred sleeping, almost tranquil and not yet snoring, I quickly realized how grateful I was to have had her to cushion my landing and recalibrate my settings. There was the sound of a branch lightly slapping against the bedroom window and the commencement of steady rain. I was reading in a science magazine that was lying around about synchronistic movement and mirroring between creatures. In interrelating, creatures develop an “automatic imitation bias.” It helps build trust, empathy, and collaborative spirit. Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel isn’t really a science fiction story. It has the kind of comedy and magic you find in classical antiquity, but it’s really a story about people snowbound at a very remote and very absurd hotel in the middle of nowhere that is also a madcap museum, and then Agatha Christie stuff starts to go down with the bodies piling up and the suspects shape-shifting. Well, I guess it is science fiction after all, isn’t it? It’s openly suspected that many of these chameleonic hotel guests and suspects manqué are actually extraterrestrials.

A Leisurely Coffee Break on a Cool Afternoon

Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.
- Aldous Huxley, Island

Robert Wyatt, "Dondestan"

Paris, 2026

 

I reply whenever someone says: I.

- Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

Le joli mai (Pierre Lhomme, Chris Marker, 1963)

Haut bas fragile (Jacques Rivette, 1995)

When Vittorio sat down at the table on the terrace at Le Hibou in Paris’s six arrondissement for our annual tête-à-tête, the first thing he wanted to get into as he worked on that first shimmering, golden cognac was actor, comedian, and needy populist Adam Sandler and how everybody knows he’s only given two really remarkable, superlative performances, first in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love from 2002 and then Uncut Gems by the Safdie brothers from 2019. Looking thinner, more wiry, and more unkempt than I remember him being this time last year, Vittorio commenced to arguing in his winding way that anybody of sense would rather be Sandler in Uncut Gems as opposed to Sandler in Punch-Drunk Love. I don’t want to wear that idiotic blue suit every single day, bow and scrape for tepid laughs, break the glass door with my fist in an impotent rage, or do semi-cannibalistic kink stuff with Emily Watson in Hawaii, says Vittorio. I told him he only likes Uncut Gems because he fences stollen jewelry. Touché, he said amiably, a young green-haired gal at the same moment setting down another cognac. I can see Vittorio slump down into a thoughtful meditative stupor.  The scene near the beginning of the final act of Uncut Gems where Adam Sandler and Julia Fox make that hand-off window-to-window, says Vittorio with gravity, is the most romantic thing I have seen in my entire life.        

My hotel is a block-and-a-half from Chanel and as I weaved through the human traffic, trying to keep a reasonable, steady pace, I contemplated the obscurity of language and the clarity of things. Whenever they send me in to do a cleanup job on some expensive, incoherent screenplay intended to go into production in a fortnight with an untested neophyte director and a cokehead production manager, I read the screenplay over and over for twelve days and twelve nights and then I slaughter a lamb in the bathtub with sage burning. Not in Paris. You can’t do that here. But they’re cool with it in the provinces, and they were cool with it back in Southern Ontario pig shit country. Solitude, malaise, creativity…the beast with two backs. I am not a self. I am not a name. I am to an extent what I survived. Roger that. Weary chronicler, where is your walking stick? I went looking in the vents and light fixtures for strange high-frequency sounds I was hearing and all I discovered was this fistful of sinewy wildebeest hairs. The hotel has an elderly lady with a wide grin in a proper French maid’s get-up who serves me coffee and breakfast while I watch Al Jazeera or the BBC. As soon as she comes around the corner my day brightens and I think of it as one of those “good indicators” the Scientologists in the yoga workshops talk about. Paris is my favourite city, but only for twelve days and twelve nights. I watched some porn on the hotel TV but wasn’t feeling it. All the formality and staging make me itchy. Some of these ladies are wearing far too much foundation. Pornography is just endless stimulation and release for today’s busy on-the-go consumer, but obscenity can be art.

After I got back from a quick, solitary lunch and extended gambol along the Seine, I received a text from my eldest daughter Mirilia: “Did you know that consciousness is extensive of physical brain structure?” I’ll have to sit with that one, I thought. Within the hour, Solange from the production department, the only steady and capable person around, or so it would appear, came up to the room and I pored us each some wine. The first time I met her, Solange told me that she’d had a film professor who when he lectured on the poetic realist strain in French cinema of the 1930s for three consecutive Fridays, kept a large map of Montmartre pinned over the blackboard and referred to it regularly in reference to scenes in important films that had been shot out on the streets. The film we’re supposed to be working on is an adaptation of James M. Cain’s lesser-known Galatea. It is set with distinct purpose in Southern Maryland. Holly Valenty is wife to farmer-restauranteur Val Valenty and the daughter of a prominent family, using “prowtocowl” for protocol and “hawndshake” for handshake. “You git, and git quick,” demands one character of another. The narrator is Duke Webster, a washed-up boxer and itinerant labourer who only really had any fight in him when he was seriously pissed off. We’re going to keep the voice-over or we’re fried. Holly’s husband would appear intent on feeding his wife to death, fattening her to an early grave. Foie gras metaphors are utilized. When Duke first lays eyes on Holly, what he sees instinctively horrifies and disgusts him. However, in short order Duke and Holly discover that they are able to be tender to one another as nobody has ever previously been to either party. The moral of the story is: tenderness and devotion will not save you. Love. Desire. Insanity. As Holly gets larger and larger and Duke more and more pissed off…somebody in Wisconsin is bound to die. Solange and I actually both like this story a lot. On paper. How are we supposed to put this up on the screen? How are we to credibly make the lead actress appear to grow fatter and fatter? Twice now producers have tried to explain this to me, but nothing I heard satisfied even remotely. Alas, I’m comfortable knowing I’ll receive my modest stipend before all the larceny and backstabbing starts to set in. As Solange left for her pilates class, I opened the Dalkey Archive edition of Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point on the bedside table and read her the following pair of sentences aloud: “If you’ve never had a religious experience, it’s folly to believe in God. You might as well believe in the excellence of oysters, when you can’t eat them without being sick.” Yum, said Solange.

Is consciousness the electrical expression of physical, organic brain structure? Probably. I spent part of the morning Googling and surfing. There was a video about consciousness and birds. Vittorio, Brother Blunderbuss himself, sent a text and suggested we go catch a screening of John Sturges’s brilliant ‘50s Technicolor pressure-cooker Bad Day at Black Rock at the little repertory cinema on Rue Christine on account of he’s leaving for Johannesburg early in the A.M. Having sat dutifully until the maroon curtains closed, we retired to a minuscule tiki bar with Polynesian music that Vittorio said he likes and where extremely attractive young women from the Sorbonne apprised us with open contempt. I always look at them hard and cold like I’m Shylock here to turn in my pound of flesh. My wife told me she’s expecting a baby, confessed Vittorio. And I asked her: at what time is this baby expected to land? I was drinking a strange teal cocktail with orange peels floating in it, thinking that today was finally the day Gilles de Rais and the Latinate Primitives all finally shit the bed in revolting anticlimax.

"Give me your hand," entreats Clarice Lispector, or at least her looming and fastidious narrator G. H., addressing a reader who is no doubt lazy and bored, hurt ‘cause ignored. This morning I got up quite early, walked in the direction of Montmartre, and found myself at Sacré-Cœur before there were any more than three or four tourists milling about up there. It was foggy and slightly chilly but I wore my windbreaker. Sacré-Cœur was built as a supposed beacon on a hill in what was essentially a working class red light district immediately following France’s profound demoralization in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War and the brutally suppressed Paris Commune. Somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 were executed in the streets beneath that church during the suppression of the 1871 Commune. Sacré-Cœur is a paternalistic building. It was not meant to mourn or honour the dead. It was intended as a vehicle with which to restore decorum and good order to working class streets. And yet we splay ourselves out in the gutter—arms akimbo—like Oscar Wilde whether you Siamese please or Siamese don’t please. All I’m after is Clarice Lispector’s “opaque piece of thing.” Pardon me if I’m hunched over outside Sacré-Cœur like a tall pigeon with harsh angles and techno-semiotic backdrop. There’s some Scandinavian jazz luminaries playing at the the jazz bar from Rivette’s Haut bas fragile tonight. I’m going to see if Solange wants to go check that out.

Montmartre, 1935

Alcoholics Are Like Snowflakes...

The old watchmaker knew he’d never see her again. (Can a liver “break” like a heart?)

- Mark Leyner, Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit

The Blackout (Abel Ferrara, 1997)

eXistenZ (David Cronenberg, 1999)

Alcoholics are like snowflakes: all very similar but no two are deformed and mangled in quite the same way. The character defects emerge way before the drinking actually commences, and my main one is toxic pride. Ask just about anybody. It can get ugly, but I’m usually a drunk who implodes instead of exploding. I’m the kind of drunk who camps out on the floor for eternity and a day. An unpleasant curse attached to my lived delusion-formation—we all have them—is that my dominating and most impregnable triggers to relapse, consistently, are the heartache and romantic disappointments I bring on myself. I’m a bad enough and old enough low bottom alcoholic to know at this point that when I pick up a bottle I am summoning all the infernal, flaying resources of hell to go to work for me and devour me comprehensively in so doing. I usually hit the pavement below at least as fast as a jumper would. Recovering alcoholic Charles Jackson’s 1944 novel The Lost Weekend is almost certainly the most brutal and accurate depiction of late stage alcoholism found anywhere in literature, though the popular Billy Wilder film adaptation is not generally taken very serious by actual alcoholics on account of its being so sanitized. If you don’t believe me, Nick Tosches says so too in his excellent but unsettling Me and the Devil. Charles Jackson goes in like an ace surgeon in front of a cohort of medical students, showing everybody around the affected body. Resentment, self-pity, inward loathing ballooning, the soul pocked with tailings ponds, another sack of meat leaning against another sack of meat in the meat packing district and no way back to dear old Omaha. Mania, torment, obsession, visions of the dead. Asked by the extremely skeezy doctor he’s chatting with on a large oceanic passenger vessel if he knows what the expression “running amok” means, the narrator of Stefan Zweig’s 1922 novella Amok thinks it perhaps has something to do with “a kind of intoxication affecting the Malays…” Doc: “It’s more than intoxication…it’s madness, a sort of human rabies, an attack of murderous, pointless monomania that bears no comparison with ordinary alcohol poisoning.” Buddy, you’re spilling all my secrets! The villagers in Malaysia get it. They’re able to ascertain that no accessible power can halt a man running amok, so they shout warnings ahead when they see him coming—‘Amok! Amok!’—and everyone beats it for the trees. Yes, the doctor and his story are tragic, but they are also manipulative and cruel, evidence of a compromised spirit intent on taking hostages. A legitimate spiritual guru once told me: stop telling your story. Sometimes the plague passes itself on through stories. Storytelling that unburdens? No, it is poison and it knows it and it does what it does anyway. There is no absolution. There can be no absolution for anybody who didn’t  have the time or the vantage point to have their heart break for every last living creature. You cannot undo the damage done by the alcoholic in active addiction, but you can work with the alcoholic as you find them today…even if it’s only working at making a ham sandwich or sorting through bills. Alcoholism is in large part a spiritual disorder and spirituality is about connections to both worlded and otherworldly things. Try not to leave the sick person in isolated disconnection. If you can help it. I understand perfectly well how frustrating it can be. I worked in a homeless shelter and a treatment centre. It’s no better with normal people, actually. As soon as you have approximately five people you’re basically herding cats. I have ingrained bodily memory of my own traumas along with all the ones I missed out on, too. The database of the whole history of our pain is in the part of your spine where there used to be a tail sticking out. Go ahead…rub it.  

Jim O'Rourke, Happy Days [Full Album]

Definition of 'Happy Accident'

 

Artists who know enough about what they’re doing to actually do it often talk about the central role of happy accidents in producing work that’s satisfying to all concerned. A happy accident is when something happens that you didn’t foresee and then it works good or even better than good. I think writers mostly have happy accidents at the neurochemical and submolecular levels. Or maybe, like, with housing, romance, and what have you. If you are an abstract expressionist painter like hellbent boozehound Jackson Pollock, then you can have your happy scandalous accidents all over the goddamn place until you lose consciousness or the cows come home, but if you’re in Buckingham Palace with an hour left to complete your portrait of King Charles…you probably can’t afford to have any. The Philharmonic cannot afford to have more than one or two very small happy accidents. (Happy accidents with the tympany are my personal favourite.) I’m a retired film scholar, and I can tell you with basis in measurable fact that moving pictures have all the best happy accidents going. So what if some spectral hobo comes drifitng into frame while the camera’s rolling? Consider it production values! Do you know the story of how hard-drinking one-man-demolition-derby Buster Keaton broke his neck? Buster discovered that he had broken his neck and fractured his skull about a decade after the incident initially occurred. Pondering briefly, he was able to trace the injury back to a stunt from Sherlock Jr.—included in the complete film!—where all the water in a water tower comes down on him hard. Ah, Buster. Harry Houdini sure did call it. And whether your stomach can take it or not: yup, that was actually a happy accident. The way I see it, if Jean-Luc Godard and Hong Sang-soo write their dialogue in the cab on the way to the set then you should be able to do any damn thing you choose when they call action. Alas, the greatest miracle of all is rolling out of your mother like a little soccer ball. When I grow up I want to be a bowling ball. In honour of Marcel Carné and his pivotal 1933 essay “When Will the Cinema Go Down onto the Street?,” shouldn’t it be ‘round 'bout that time we found ourselves collectively asking: when will a thousand cinemas finally go down into the street and trip all over each other to much public merriment and boisterous laughter? 

Yo La Tengo, "Two Trains"

Writers and Company

Javier Marías and Lydia Davis

The writers who've most influenced the mundane minutiae of my personal pocket literary style and prosecraft over the course of the past tumultuous-but-worthy decade are Paul West, Alexander Theroux, Stanley Elkin, Javier Marías, and Lydia Davis. It shouldn't appear surprising this late in the development of the central dramatic complications, all the rising action having all but risen, that the way Lydia Davis compresses things down into unfussy palatable miniatures—only to accentuate their confounding complexity!—continues to influence, direct, and excite me very much. Both Lydia Davis and Javier Marías work with narrators who analyze their situation (analysis paralysis), their past, and things that are going on around them. The centralized nervous system of the human being is fielded within the greater systems we still only faintly apprehend. The self as escape room is the mad and finicky machine that obsesses, arranges, returns, mulls over, eddies, walks the perimeter over and over, ultimately seeking to make an elusive world somehow intelligible. Though it probably isn't one of his very best novels—and the man really ought to have received the Nobel Prize for Literature—Javier Marías's excellent 1994 novel Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me has one of the great opening set-ups in the history of literary fiction. The narrator, a ghostwriter and television screenwriter named Víctor, has been invited to dinner at the Madrid apartment of a married woman named Marta, whose husband is felicitously out of town.  After they finally get Marta’s two-year-old to sleep, the two retreat to the bedroom, where, right as they begin to undress, Marta suddenly feels inexplicably ill, very rapidly and quite surprisingly dying right in the arms of the mortified Víctor. What happens next? The real question is: how are you going to think your way out of this one? And in praising Paul West as a “vital writer and man of irrepressible spirit” who is “able to analyze his every last dilemma,” Alexander Theroux could just as easily have been talking about himself...or it could have been Paul West talking about Alexander Theroux. God, I love those guys.

The Nomadic Warrior Prince does not require answers to the Great Questions. The Nomadic Warrior Prince requires a way.

Beat Happening, "Bad Seeds"

In Which I Lightly Chasten and Correct Two Noted Authors of Record

Wallace Stevens and Jim Harrison 

Prize Bitch Alexander Theroux

In his real compact essayistic Arthur Rimbaud-enamoured fabulation Splendide-Hôtel, Gilbert Sorrentino espies and retains a surprising archnemesis in the form of…poet and lawyer Wallace Stevens. Sorrentino’s blindsiding excoriations are mostly amusing. He laments Stevens' prodigious level of the wrong kind of cultural immersion along with his evidently lavish and well-appointed personage, all ersatz style and no Zeus thunder. Sorrentino laments what he calls the man's lack of personal style, suggesting Stevens to be a kind of mendaciously gifted copycat or fake. What he most laments, however, is that Stevens fails to hear "the bell of rose-colored fire tolling in the clouds." Lol. My verdict: Wallace Stevens was the best American poet of the first half of the 20th century, and that includes William Carlos Williams and all them others too. Alexander Theroux—one initial away from being the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms—is the writer I often think of the way Alfred Hitchcock thought of actor James Stewart, which is to say he's the literary craftsman I wouldn’t want to be but nonetheless am, I suppose, and he lays into everybody as a matter of course just like his cutthroat brother Paul. Alexander Theroux sees something that interests him and all of a sudden he’s helplessly dragging some entrenched cult of personality through miles of mud and then just as much mud or double on the way back to where they done begun. It’s true. And y'all heard it here first. Alexander Theroux drags his kill across the landscape. His first novel, Three Wogs, beat the shit out of the whole garbled and racist nation of England. In the 779 page Einstein’s Beets: An Examination of Food Phobias, Theroux comes at hundreds of real historical personages, some still living, like a punch-drunk pugilist on a mission from the Old Testament God, occasionally getting disgruntled because this or that centuries-old eminence enjoyed eating copious quantities of something Theroux himself finds outright disgusting. I love this asshole and read him avidly, but even I myself was not prepared for how derogatory and mean he gets respective of poet, man’s man, and Legends of the Fall author Jim Harrison. Looking at the index in the backend of Einstein’s Beets, I see they’ve left Harrison, Jim out of the postoperative equation altogether. Believe me when I say that the offending passage or passages is/are unrelentingly venomous. My verdict: Jim Harrison was, like Wallace Stevens, an excellent poet…and a fuck-ton better than Bukowski. 

Thank you,
This has been Chessboxin' with J 😺

Wu-Tang Clan, "Da Mystery of Chessboxin'" [Official Video]

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"