Lucian Freud, "Man in a Chair" [1985]
Sober Alcoholic and Literary Giant Barry Hannah
[1942-2010]
At some point in my thirties I had read some stuff and maybe seen some stuff and for sure had a pretty vivid and for me quite novel second-sight kind of dream. As such, I had developed a picture in my head that sort of grew and got very weird respective of the Cuban Missile Crisis and how close humanity did or didn’t come to nuclear war and rapid planetary despeciation. I had in my mind a scene on a submarine, all very cinematic…all very Das Boot. The moment comes and the commanding Soviet officer knows he must launch the first nuclear warhead at mainland United States and he even wants to do it, absolutely believing it the only noble option, but all of a sudden his body fails him and will not comply with the demands of his faltering will; we can see the panic in his eyes, and yet he is apparently all but totally paralyzed, unable to carry the act to its termination. The other day as I was smoking Camel cigarettes and trying to figure out what to eat, I happened to have a neat little YouTube infotainment video going in the background where the narrator was talking about Soviet submarines during the Cuban Missile Crisis and all the wild shit we know about for certain (the Russians never liked making anything public if they could help it). The actual official story that is on the record: out of radio contact, suffering from a broken cooling system, and exhausted by harassment from U.S. ships and planes, the crew of Soviet submarine B-59, who definitely would have been hot and stressed-out beyond anything any of us could imagine, gradually came to believe World War III had begun and that they needed to hit hard and hit fast. Three officers had to okay it, and the two militarist twats voted yes, let’s do it, but Flotilla Commander Vasili Arkhipov strongly dissented, and they needed his accord, because he had—in addition to the education and culture they lacked—a higher military rank also. Basically, he told them he wasn’t going to let them end the world…and they didn’t…although you can bet that’s a plenty truncated version. Tee hee. In completely unrelated news, the culminating sequence of Paul West’s Bela Lugosi’s White Christmas—final novel of the Alley Jaggers trilogy and not to be confused with Donald Barthelme’s Come Back, Dr. Caligari—has got to be one of the greatest literary crescendos of all time: recently incarcerated escapee Alley Jaggers goes back to his home town, tears up the graveyard with a bulldozer, bulldozes the church, harangues a barroom full of locals in Schutzstaffel German, lights his old workplace on fire, Sweeney Todds a cow, and finally gets himself arrested, floating in a boat, dam-adjacent, still in full regalia, giving the performance of a lifetime and, holy hell, probably good and spent. You know, sometimes I pause and consider all the great many rough and tumble motorcyclists who have but a moment to see the traffic accident organizing itself immediately in front of them. Oh, fuck, that’s the end of me and teeth. “Dream of Pines was the best high school band in at least the world,” writes wry Mississippi ironist Barry Hannah in his astonishing 1972 debut Geronimo Rex. “They made you want to pick up a rifle and just get killed somewhere.”
Ministry of Fear (Fritz Lang, 1944)
So obscure as to have been very nearly lost to history altogether—saved by Dalkey Archive! we should all have it so good!—Felipe Alfau liked to tell other members of the Spanish diaspora in New York City that he was not one to declare special interest in literary matters or fidelity to contemporary literature as a going concern, if it was indeed that. He even said that his own novels were definitely incomprehensible because not even he could comprehend them. Alas, he was also a bit of a Franco sympathizer and goose-stepper. Learned in the extreme, there can be no denying, and prodigiously gifted as a literary stylist and fabulist, he seems to have cultivated his blindspots in the manner of a true and proper 20th century eccentric. Alfau was born in Barcelona shortly after the dawn of the 20th century and his family emigrated to the United States when Felipe was fourteen. He worked primarily as a translator, but not of literary texts or anything especially prestigious. He only wrote two novels—in English—as well as a collection of poems in Spanish and a book of children’s stories at the end of the 1920s. In the preface to his debut, Alfau describes Locos, originally published two years before Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, as a novel composed of stories that can be read in any order the reader chooses. He says that the meaningless gesture is its Arche. It takes place primarily in Madrid—with stopovers in China, the Philippines, and the Americas—but starts, if we we read it as presented to us, any linearity strictly illusory, with a story set in the city of Toledo where all the primary recurring characters convene in the Café de los Locos. “Bad writers were in the habit of coming to that café in quest of characters, and I came now and then among them. At that particular place one could find some very good secondhand bargains and also some very good, cheap, new material. As fashion has a great deal to do with market value, one could find at that place some characters who in their time had been glorious and served under famous geniuses, but who for some time had been out of a job, due to the change of literary trend toward other ideals.” Alfau calls Toledo a “petrified forest of centuries” that “died in the Renaissance.” The legacy of the Spanish Baroque looms. Is there anything adjacent to the realism-naturalism they teach at creative writing workshops that has happened in literature since Miguel de Cervantes, especially should it prove comic and/or irreverent, that does not owe the Spaniard and his milieu a considerable debt? Voltaire, Laurence Sterne, the ‘pataphysicians (in league with drunken, five-foot-tall Alfred Jarry), the Surrealists, Oulipo, Magical Realism, the postmodernists, and so on and so forth: they all hold their individual debts to Cervantes. And to the boisterous and grim topsy-turvy metaphysics of his finest windmill-tilting-at work. Felipe Alfau is a descendant as well, only he is a sort of necromancer who has succeeded in wiping from his consciousness the very material fact of four hundred years of history. The characters are in a centrifuge and they move by way of strobing expanses of glitch. It is surmised in Locos that people are reluctant to have their fingerprints taken because they seem to vaguely intuit that it might ultimately cause them to be unable to suppress the commission of future crimes (almost like something out of a Patricia Highsmith yarn or a Fritz Lang picture). There is also the possibility that your fingerprints are off committing heinous acts unbeknownst to you. If it were your fingerprints that committed the offence, then that’s your crime to own, son. A new identity can adopt you rather than the other way around. Take Juan Chinelato or whoever he really is; the “awaking” in him of “an unknown self of wild and heroic deeds, which he had often imagined in his sleepless nights.” Doña Micaela Valverde, whose love affair with death involves periodic hibernations there, will lie for all intents and purposes dead…for two or three months…and then get up and go back about her workaday affairs. How does she avoid decomposition? Dr. de los Rios believes that Doña Micaela “only wants the decorative and ephemeral part of death,” but definitely seems like the whole thing confuses him. An antidote to the darkness comes at the end of Locos in the form of spring, the season. Spring arrives as the eternal return of Will Itself. It spins you like a top. Which way will you come out this time? Which character will you be? Will your district supervisor now be your virgin bride or vice versa? Will you be on the right or wrong side of spring? Spring comes and rips away every bit of stitching, the melting snow revealing the tireless orgy of death, and each of us will gladly take any damn role offered us, no mater how paltry or contemptible. There is an earlier vignette in Locos involving a butterfly charmer, the butterfly wrangler. This is your new cosmology, comrades in cosplay: Even the butterfly wrangler is nothing more than a butterfly, wrangled.
Slavoj Žižek and Joseph Stalin
JLG/JLG-autoportrait de décembre (Jean-Luc Godard, 1994)
So what does young and innocent 2017 pre-pandemic Slavoj Žižek have for us all this tranquil June evening? Snot, snot; slobber, slobber. Right from when it wasn’t even 9/11 yet, our commendable and dependable Mr. Žižek has skated like a critic instead of hunkering down like a philosophical golem in the catacombs, and that’s how he has thought the system and the territory…by walking them on his legs and generating new insights, whether or not they’re comfortable or rolling properly along a track. At a time when the level of popular discourse has degenerated to such a dire extreme, and knowing that much worse ahead is all but certain, it is refreshing always to encounter someone doing adequate justice to current geopolitics and the concurrent mystifications of ideology, not that anybody grows up asking to do this kind of tap-dancing as an adult. In The Courage of Hopelessness, Žižek looks at banking and exploitation; Greek resistance to Brussels and austerity (his pet project for a number of years); Chinese authoritarian capitalism and other diverse political structures that adapt themselves to global capitalism; Islam, fundamentalist and not; PC culture and populist rage as two sides of the same coin (identitariansim). Žižek sees the PC policing of language as little more than an attempt to neutralize intractable immanent antagonisms that aren’t going away just because some subsection of the society would like them to. Hannah Arendt said that what made #1 (living) Nazi nemesis Adolf Eichmann’s evil so banal was that he could only think of life in terms of tasks and could not imagine the perspective of another person, because his imagination had totally atrophied. The contemporary arena becomes one of "ethico-politcal fiasco." This is the fundamental Hegelian core of Žižek: reverse-engineering back to basic antagonisms, extrapolating in all directions, beating the thing like a goddamn parade drum. Progressive western values are often seen as an extension of neocolonial power. The world is populated by disparate and innately antagonistic social models. The threat with the status quo is that we’re going to all walk off a cliff and you’re going to demand I hold your fucking hand. Since I started reading Žižek in the late 1990s, he has punctuated his books continually with statements to the effect that we must take pause and theorize where we are at until we see the emancipatory moment and can seize it. I fear that somebody someday will walk right up to him and punch him in the mouth. It’s doubtful that even he believes that shit anymore. Allow me to paraphrase the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, as I am often wont to do, when he says, in his beautiful and tender film JLG/JLG-autoportrait de décembre something like culture is the rule, art the exception. Art is always going to have a troubled time thriving in the glare of the limelight, not that I am so extreme a Calvinist as to insist that it requires the dim garret. “I thought of schoolteachers, noodles, movies, prices, theatre productions, the names of writers, titles of books, buildings, gardens, a cat, an unhappy love affair, a chair, a flower whose name I couldn’t remember, a perfume, a brand of toothpaste, and so on,” enumerates Argentine master Silvina Ocampo in her note perfect posthumous novel The Promise. “Memory: how you made me suffer!” I try not to get mad at my thoughts or my feelings or the immediate lifeworld. I am reassured that consciousness cannot originate from where we are currently situated and yet…here we are. When Aristotle talked about the role of the prime mover in ultimate causation, he was talking about all living things as agents of the living thing, although, yes, it’s definitely conceivable that he did not know that’s what he meant, or at least not precisely. The collective and largely unconscious rendering of life and art and culture. In the multimedia age. Guess what? All things are co-created by all. For a time I toyed with this as a potential dissertation…
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