[from Harper's]
As you know, the glut of illiquid, insolvent, and troubled poems is clogging the literary arteries of the West. These debt-ridden poems threaten to infect other areas of the literary sector and ultimately to topple our culture industry.
Cultural leaders have come together to announce a massive poetry buyout: leveraged and unsecured poems, poetry derivatives, delinquent poems, and subprime poems will be removed from circulation in the biggest poetry bailout since the Victorian era. We believe the plan is a comprehensive approach to relieving the stresses on our literary institutions and markets.
Let there be no mistake: the fundamentals of our poetry are sound. The problem is not poetry but poems. The crisis has been precipitated by the escalation of poetry debt—poems that circulate in the market at an economic loss due to their difficulty, incompetence, or irrelevance.
Illiquid poetry assets are choking off the flow of imagination that is so vital to our literature. When the literary system works as it should, poetry and poetry assets flow to and from readers and writers to create a productive part of the cultural field. As toxic poetry assets block the system, the poisoning of literary markets has the potential to damage our cultural institutions irreparably.
As we know, lax composition practices since the advent of modernism led to irresponsible poets and irresponsible readers. Simply put, too many poets composed works they could not justify. We are seeing the impact on poetry, with a massive loss of confidence on the part of readers. What began as a subprime poetry problem on essentially unregulated poetry websites has spread to other, more stable, literary magazines and presses and contributed to excess poetry inventories that have pushed down the value of responsible poems.
9.25.2008
The Eyeless Prison
I just uploaded a revised version of The Last 20 Moments to my Goodreads account. It is now called The Eyeless Prison (sign in required) and it is a historical romance about international art thieves at the outbreak of World War II.
This was another assignment for my fiction class, and the exercise for the revision process we had to do was rather interesting. We were required to take our 300 word stories and revise them as seven drafts in seven days, each day focusing on a different mechanic of storytelling: character, conflict, setting, point of view, plot, language, symbol. It was actually shockingly useful, editing has never been one of my strong points, mainly because I have a hard time missing the trees for the whole damn forest, but if this is the kind of stuff I can get out of honing in on specifics then I'm all for it.
* * *
Sobs resounded in the cramped black cell. The man took his ear from against the immobile concrete and whispered through the hole in the wall. “Randolph? Is that you?”
There was a groan. “Thank God you’re still there Murphy, I don’t know if I could have born this any longer, not without you to talk to. The things they did…”
“It’s okay, friend, I’m still here, as much as I wish otherwise. I don’t think they’ll ever let us out.”
“Murphy? This time it was my eyes…”
Murphy sank to the straw and piss covered floor in despair. It was inhuman. When would it be his turn? He could barely remember how long it had been; years lost rotting in this shit-smelling hole. He used to try and count the days, the constant light dancing just out of reach in the thin, barred window by the ceiling. But then it grew dark, for what seemed like months at a time, they must have been covering it, trying to break his will, make him confess to the impossible, the same way they gave him cigarettes without a math, lavish dinners wafting on the other side of the locked iron door. Until Randolph had appeared in the adjoining cell Murphy thought he’d go mad, days pacing back and forth between the tight walls, avoiding the growing pile of offal in the corner. He wondered at what point things had gone wrong.
The last he knew for certain was a confusion of small rooms, train cars tumbling through the ancient, gloomy forests of Europe towards this place, bound and occasionally beaten within an inch of his life. The brown-uniformed officers snarled at him like wolves. They’d stripped him of his good suit and brass pocket watch, waved the notepad in front of his face asking where he’d hidden the secrets. American spy, they barked, and paraded in front of him a panoply of identities that offered some hope of freedom if he’d but given in. Yet he swore these names were not his own, if only he could convince them who he was, why didn’t they see it in his face, the fear contrasted by the electric torches in their rough hands?
“Randolph,” he asked when the man had stopped moaning though the hole, only large enough to transmit their words and cries, “did they get you to talk?” Murphy scratched at his beard, how he wanted to shave it. He wished there was a mirror to se how haggard he looked, but there wouldn’t have been enough light in the cell for a reflection.
“Only so much, doubt they believed any of it, though I swore it was the truth. Ha, as far as I can see it. I told them about us, everything, except what they wanted to know. I’m sorry, but it’s been on my mind.” Randolph’s big mouth had made him the first target of interrogations, but Murphy feared he too would be reduced to this same fate before he saw the light of day again. He tried to remember Eleanor’s face, as she’d stood on their porch in the brilliant Massachusetts spring, a quickly fading talisman in the dim of the prison.
Through the desperate numb of the days that felt like one endless night, Murpy’s only safety, his sanity now was with this friend on the far side of the wall, who once was a braggart and now a shriveled husk of a man. Randolph would tell stories through the ragged hole to keep their spirits up, starting with what he’d do when they escaped and moving on to a progressively incoherent fantasy that Murphy feared was rubbing off on him. He hated the man, but they’d been through so much together, he was all he had. Eventually the two recounted their delirious history, trying to sort out how they’d ended up here, afraid that the answer still wouldn’t set them free.
(read the rest through the link above!)
This was another assignment for my fiction class, and the exercise for the revision process we had to do was rather interesting. We were required to take our 300 word stories and revise them as seven drafts in seven days, each day focusing on a different mechanic of storytelling: character, conflict, setting, point of view, plot, language, symbol. It was actually shockingly useful, editing has never been one of my strong points, mainly because I have a hard time missing the trees for the whole damn forest, but if this is the kind of stuff I can get out of honing in on specifics then I'm all for it.
* * *
Sobs resounded in the cramped black cell. The man took his ear from against the immobile concrete and whispered through the hole in the wall. “Randolph? Is that you?”
There was a groan. “Thank God you’re still there Murphy, I don’t know if I could have born this any longer, not without you to talk to. The things they did…”
“It’s okay, friend, I’m still here, as much as I wish otherwise. I don’t think they’ll ever let us out.”
“Murphy? This time it was my eyes…”
Murphy sank to the straw and piss covered floor in despair. It was inhuman. When would it be his turn? He could barely remember how long it had been; years lost rotting in this shit-smelling hole. He used to try and count the days, the constant light dancing just out of reach in the thin, barred window by the ceiling. But then it grew dark, for what seemed like months at a time, they must have been covering it, trying to break his will, make him confess to the impossible, the same way they gave him cigarettes without a math, lavish dinners wafting on the other side of the locked iron door. Until Randolph had appeared in the adjoining cell Murphy thought he’d go mad, days pacing back and forth between the tight walls, avoiding the growing pile of offal in the corner. He wondered at what point things had gone wrong.
The last he knew for certain was a confusion of small rooms, train cars tumbling through the ancient, gloomy forests of Europe towards this place, bound and occasionally beaten within an inch of his life. The brown-uniformed officers snarled at him like wolves. They’d stripped him of his good suit and brass pocket watch, waved the notepad in front of his face asking where he’d hidden the secrets. American spy, they barked, and paraded in front of him a panoply of identities that offered some hope of freedom if he’d but given in. Yet he swore these names were not his own, if only he could convince them who he was, why didn’t they see it in his face, the fear contrasted by the electric torches in their rough hands?
“Randolph,” he asked when the man had stopped moaning though the hole, only large enough to transmit their words and cries, “did they get you to talk?” Murphy scratched at his beard, how he wanted to shave it. He wished there was a mirror to se how haggard he looked, but there wouldn’t have been enough light in the cell for a reflection.
“Only so much, doubt they believed any of it, though I swore it was the truth. Ha, as far as I can see it. I told them about us, everything, except what they wanted to know. I’m sorry, but it’s been on my mind.” Randolph’s big mouth had made him the first target of interrogations, but Murphy feared he too would be reduced to this same fate before he saw the light of day again. He tried to remember Eleanor’s face, as she’d stood on their porch in the brilliant Massachusetts spring, a quickly fading talisman in the dim of the prison.
Through the desperate numb of the days that felt like one endless night, Murpy’s only safety, his sanity now was with this friend on the far side of the wall, who once was a braggart and now a shriveled husk of a man. Randolph would tell stories through the ragged hole to keep their spirits up, starting with what he’d do when they escaped and moving on to a progressively incoherent fantasy that Murphy feared was rubbing off on him. He hated the man, but they’d been through so much together, he was all he had. Eventually the two recounted their delirious history, trying to sort out how they’d ended up here, afraid that the answer still wouldn’t set them free.
(read the rest through the link above!)
Punk Rock and Irish Literature
The Sick Bag Of Cuchulainn
[from The Blog of Revelations]
The folks from the Edge08 festival invited a few of us up to Ballina recently to talk about how punk rock influenced Irish literature. That’s a big question. The short answer is ‘not enough’, but of course it’s a little more complicated than that. The corollary is that Irish literature influenced punk rock – or at least the Irish strain of the virus – a lot more than punk subsequently re-influenced modern Irish writing.
Irish punk bands and their new wave cousins swallowed Joyce, Beckett, Wilde and Flann O’Brien, chewed them up in a blender and spewed them back out in a great technicolour yawn. By contrast, modern Irish fiction writers, even the ones who treasured their copies of Never Mind The Bollocks and London Calling, seemed to be looking the other way when the punk stinkbomb let off. The influence is there, but in the most staggered and splintered way, a series of sporadically tossed pipe bombs rather than one big atomic bang.
Punk rock was a musical – some say cultural – revolution that happened in New York circa 1975, instigated by the Bowery bands who played Max’s Kansas City and CBGBs: The Ramones, Television, the Patti Smith Group, the Heartbreakers. Latter-day New York Dolls manager Malcolm McClaren caught the bug from Johnny Thunders and Richard Hell and passed it onto his charges the Sex Pistols a year later. But if the New York strain was an art movement conspired by misfits who’d never been to university, its English counterpart was more seditious. The Sex Pistols were the ultimate Oedipal act: ‘Anarchy In the UK’ attempted to kill the King; ‘God Save The Queen’ stuck it to her Majesty.
These were leery, sneering rebel songs played at high volume, sung by a London-Irish misfit with a wicked mouth and eyes like headlights. The Pistols were a horror show, and like the best horror shows they were conceived on a shoestring, with the production values of a snuff movie, and so their music felt scarily real. Never Mind The Bollocks ripped a fissure in reality through which could be glimpsed a whole new wave of horrors: The Clash, The Damned, The Buzzcocks, Siouxsie & the Banshees, the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag.
But despite the Year Zero propaganda, punk wasn’t conceived in a void. It was a mutant Eraserhead baby with many fathers: the 60s garage acts collected by Patti Smith Group guitarist Lenny Kaye on the Nuggets box set, Detroit’s Stooges and the MC5, the Velvet Underground and the New York Dolls, Alice Cooper, David Bowie and Roxy Music.
Punk lifted bits of its aesthetic from the Decadents, the Symbolists, the Modernists, the Lettrists, the Dada-ists and Surrealists and Situationists, from the Paris Communes and the 1968 riots. It was Un Chien Andalou and Howl and A Clockwork Orange and Catcher In the Rye. Its icons included Rimbaud, Genet, Beckett and Burroughs. It produced poets and writers like Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Jim Carroll and John Cooper Clark, artists like Raymond Pettibon and Ray Lowry, filmmakers like Don Letts, Julien Temple, Alex Cox and Mary Harron, was documented by journalists like Lester Bangs, Nick Kent, Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill, and inspired a hundred fanzines and indie labels.
But if punk began as an homogenous skinny whiteboy noise, it evolved with the speed of mutagen into something that transgressed genre. It refused to know its place, wouldn’t stay within the prescribed lines. It had the gall to speak in bad taste, to venerate energy and innovation over technique, to thieve from previously prohibited sources. By comparison with the old boys’ club of stadium rock acts, punk was multicultural, homo-friendly and equal opportunities.
It acknowledged Captain Beefheart and Neu and Can, ska and dub and street poets like Lynton Kwesi Johnson, and through The Clash’s appropriation of ghetto blaster chic, Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five. When John Lydon teamed up with Afrika Bambaataa for the one-off single ‘World Destruction’ in 1984, it sounded like a replay of ‘Anarchy in The UK’ set in a New York dance club, and prophesised Public Enemy’s armagedddon effects, the smash and grab sample larceny of hip-hop.
Punk was, on the face of it, aggressively Modernist bordering on dystopian Futurist, even if many of its avatars were of the old guard. Pete Shelley was a Beckett fan. Joy Division channelled JG Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition. The Clash co-opted Allen Ginsberg for Combat Rock. Martin Scorsese considered casting the Clash as a street gang in his earliest imaginings of Gangs of New York. Eraserhead’s Jack Nance looked like a member of Pere Ubu.
Burroughs was celebrated by the punk set at the Nova Convention in New York in 1978. Debbie Harry collaborated with HR Giger, appeared in Cronenberg’s Videodrome, and but for her management’s intervention might have secured Darryl Hannah’s part in Blade Runner. She and Chris Stein forged a friendship with William Gibson, chief visionary of the literary movement that would become termed ‘cyberpunk’, a new wave of streetwise noirish sci fi that proliferated in the early 80s, and whose Neuromancer mantra – “the street finds its own use for things” – could have been a neo-Situationist slogan.
“1977 seemed kind of like a roots moment,” Gibson said. “My take on it wasn’t that it was brand new nihilism, it was like a return to something that had been the real beginning of the ’60s but had been collectively forgotten. I had forgotten it to some extent myself.
“And it actually wasn’t so much the punk from England that did that for me, it was the stuff from New York that slightly predated what happened in London: Television and the first Patti Smith album. They were very consciously subversively retro in a really irony-free way, they seemed very, very sincere about it, and what I was seeing and hearing out of London was much more self-conscious material.
“Now, decades later, I know that Malcolm McClaren had been reading the Situationists, and the stuff from New York was somehow way less considered and in fact didn’t really go anywhere. Most of those people vanished or took too much heroin or wound up pumping gas, which is actually a more traditional fate for young artists at that time.”
Here in Ireland, punk did something unprecedented: it occurred in real time. Pre 1977, the future was on a five year sattelite delay. Ireland received its inklings of a brave new world via Radio Luxembourg. The country didn’t have a pop music station until 1979. But London and New York punk generated a direct current that jumpstarted The Radiators, The Boomtown Rats, U2, The Virgin Prunes, The Atrix, Stiff Little Fingers, the Outcasts, DC Nien, The Blades, The Undertones.
Except Irish punk acts were different. They resisted the Oedipal pose, acknowledged rather than erased history. On The Radiators’ second album Ghostown, Philip Chevron wrote about ‘Kitty Ricketts’, one of the prosititutes from the Nightown section of Ulysses. U2’s debut album Boy namechecked Dorian Gray and stole from William Goldman’s Lord Of The Flies, a sacred text shared by The Virgin Prunes. Gavin Friday took Wilde as his oracle on Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves. The Pogues’ brilliant, bawdy carnivalesque songs referenced Brendan Behan and James Clarence Mangan and James Stephens.
Nor did Irish punk bands necessarily disassociate from their musical predecessors. They were more likely to consult members of Horslips or Thin Lizzy for advice than badmouth them in the press, and if they didn’t exactly pay homage to Rory Gallagher and Van Morrison, they didn’t deny them either.
Van, always a contrary figure, started out with Them, a snotnosed Belfast R&B band who wrote the all time great garage staple ‘Gloria’, but he made his reputation with Astral Weeks, an emigrant’s recurring dream of an East Belfast demimonde populated by hustlers, heroin casualties and persecuted drag queens.
The songs had strong literary associations – the dirty old man obsessed with a thirteen year old schoolgirl in ‘Cypress Avenue’ could’ve been Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert; the tragic drag queen Madame George was straight out of Last Exit To Brooklyn by way of Tennessee Williams.
Like its weirder twin, the Velvet Underground & Nico, Astral Weeks was a seminal album dealing with adult themes of vice, mortality and deviance. And like the Velvets, its influence vastly overshadowed its sales. In time it came to occupy the same place in pop music as Joyce’s Ulysses does in literature.
But if Irish musicians were galvanised and inspired by the country’s literary history, its post-war writers were always in danger of being paralysed by the towering figures of Oscar Wilde, Brendan Behan, Sean O’ Casey, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Eugene O’ Neill – the litany invoked by by Kevin Rowland in Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ ‘Dance Stance’. To any young scribbler, such figures could seem as ancient and ominous as the Tuatha De Danaan, mythic beings, ten feet tall, casting shadows of influence in which few new forms could grow.
The revolutionary example of punk rock – and the free for all polyglot of styles and sounds that it permitted – did not find expression in an identifiable Irish literary movement akin to the Beats of ’50s New York, or Scotland’s Children of Albion Rovers in the 90s. Throughout the 1970s it seemed more furtive, more covert. There were secret meetings and small presses, cellar rendezvous and writers’ groups that numbered among their suspects Dermot Bolger, Neil Jordan, John Banville, Colm Toibin.
Punk’s impact on writers like Clash fan Roddy Doyle was manifest in form rather than content. His first novel The Commitments chose proletarian soul rather than white noise as its motif, although the book’s self-published DIY ethic, plus its use of sawn off rapid fire dialogue and Northside Dublin vernacular, was pure punk. Elsewhere, the cover of Boomtown Rats disciple Joe O’ Connor’s Cowboys and Indians featured a London postcard mohawk. Novelist and playwright Billy Roche started out as singer with The Roach Band, who combined Springsteen-ish smalltown visions with a the taut energy of Elvis Costello and Graham Parker; his first play A Handful of Stars climaxed with a James Cagney stand-off soundtracked by PiL’s ‘Rise’.
Despite these strobe flashes, Irish fiction seemed still preoccupied with trying to make sense of the grim and grey preceding decades – a landscape of domineering fathers, martyred mothers, ogre-like Christian Brothers, despotic priests, skeletons in family closets, valleys of squinting windows, incessant rainfall. Throughout the 1980s it operated under the influence of the late John McGahern, the big daddy of rainy realism, a writer many modern Irish novelists still feel compelled to define themselves in alliance with or opposition to.
Maybe the satellite delay was still in effect, because 1977 finally arrived in 1993, in the unholy form of Pat McCabe’s The Butcher Boy. Notwithstanding the fact that it was written in the late early 90s and set 30 years before, this was the first true Irish punk novel, the Never Mind The Bollocks of letters, and its impact on modern Irish fiction was analogous to that of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting on Scottish writing: an adrenaline jab to the heart. Pitched halfway between slapstick and horror, the tale of Francie Brady was a shocking but moving hybrid of Huckleberry Finn, A Clockwork Orange and Lord Of The Flies, and Pat McCabe became the dragon young upstarts had to slay – or at least sneak past – before they gained entry to the crypt.
“I remember reading The Butcher Boy and recognising something about small town Ireland, and the dialogue struck me as amazingly vivid,” says Mayo writer Mike McCormick. “I was really sickened, because I was about halfway through the writing of the Getting It In The Head when I read it. McCabe’s work was important, as was Roddy Doyle’s, in that it also allowed people to use popular culture, songs and comic books.”
McCormack is, as the old saw goes, a man out standing in his own field: in this case a wind-blasted pasture in a mythologised Co. Mayo where the natives veer between decent skinnery and intemperent religiosity, where speaking statues of the Sacred Virgin drive local women to apocalyptic ministry, where earthbound angels coast across bay waves the colour of hammered lead, where you can’t move but for masonry saints and shrines and visitations and plastic Jesuses luminescing day-glo green.
Both McCormack’s full-length novels Crowe’s Requiem (1998) and Notes From A Coma (2006) meld the fantastical and future-shocked with the local and parochial. If Pat McCabe’s feverish inner monologues trace the southern gothic bloodlines of Faulkner and O’Connor back to their Irish origins, McCormack’s yarns are rendered with a rigorous, almost Anglo-Irish formalism on a par with Patrick McGrath.
“I was asked to describe Notes From A Coma towards the ending of my writing of it,” McCormack recalls, “and I say this respectfully now the man is dead, and I respected his work hugely, but the book was like if you imagined John McGahern and Philip K Dick were contracted to write an episode of the X Files, this would be the result.”
This, I believe, is under-explored territory in Irish fiction. We’ve had books like Eoin McNamee’s Belfast noir classic Resurrection Man, Joe Ambrose’s squat culture dispatch Serious Time, Conor McPherson’s rewiring of ghost stories and strange tales for the modern depopulated rural Ireland, Julian Gough’s metafictional Jude trology, John Connolly’s Nocturnes, Claire Keegan’s tales from the county hell. But the literary chattering classes are still more likely to cite John Banville over Blade Runner.
Maybe writers like Roddy Doyle and Joe O’Connor and Colm Toibin confuse the argument when they produce their richest writing in the guise of stately historical novels like A Star Called Henry, Star Of the Sea and The Master. But imagine a climate where Irish writers, and, crucially, non-Irish writers resident here, co-opted punk’s refusal to observe protocol, where there’s no confining delineation between so called serious and popular literature, where language, theme, storytelling craft and imagination all co-exist.
The equivalent, maybe, of the generation of writers who’ve thrived in the realm of the slipstream, an umbrella term wide enough to encompass Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Kelly Link, Joe Hill, AM Homes, David Foster Wallace, Steven Hall, Jeffrey Eugenides, Dave Eggars, George Saunders, Katherine Dunne and Tom Spanbauer.
The compost theory of culture holds that what was once held as ‘low’ entertainment – gothic, southern gothic, pulp fiction, westerns, post-war noir, horror, magic realism, new journalism, the new wave of 60s sci-fi, EC and Marvel comics, tales from the crypt, performance poetry, graffitti art, graphic novels – gets turned to precious metal by the pressure of successive decades heaped on top of each other, until, at this end of the process, what was once derided as common has become retroactively transmuted into art.
Anybody feeling queasy here should note that Cormac McCarthy, maybe the most respected living American writer, has worked exclusively in genre for decades, be it the post-apocalyptic (The Road), modern noir, (No Country For Old Men), western (The Border Trilogy) horror masquerading as western (Blood Meridian) or southern gothic (Child of God, Outer Dark).
The Serious Fiction Factory, the Man Booker mill, seems a long way from the surreal, funny, hyperbolic, fantastical tales that reside in the national body of mythology, legend, folk tale, gothic yarns, murder ballads and outrageously tall tales. Celtic storytelling has always been by turns bawdy, mystical, absurdist, and prone to gross exagerration. The Midnight Court contained lusty couplets that’d make a sailor blush. The Song of Amergin was a visionary shape-shifter hymn. And there’s an account of Cuchulainn’s bersker fit in Thomas Kinsella’s translation of The Táin that reads like a live review of Iggy & the Stooges:
“The first warp-spasm seized Cuchulainn, and made him into a monstrous thing, hideous and shapeless, unheard of… His face and features became a red bowl: he sucked one eye so deep into his head that a wild crane couldn’t poke it onto his cheek out of the depths of his skull; the other eye fell out along his cheek.
“His mouth weirdly distorted: his cheek peeled back from his jaws until the gullet appeared, his lungs and liver flapped in his mouth and throat, his lower jaw struck the upper a lion-killing blow, and fiery flakes large as a ram’s fleece reached his mouth from his throat.
“His heart boomed loud in his breast like the baying of a watch-dog at its feed or the sound of a lion among bears. Malignant mists and spurts of fire – the torches of the Badb – flickered red in the vaporous clouds that rose boiling above his head, so fierce was his fury.”
Now that’s what I call punk rock.
[from The Blog of Revelations]
The folks from the Edge08 festival invited a few of us up to Ballina recently to talk about how punk rock influenced Irish literature. That’s a big question. The short answer is ‘not enough’, but of course it’s a little more complicated than that. The corollary is that Irish literature influenced punk rock – or at least the Irish strain of the virus – a lot more than punk subsequently re-influenced modern Irish writing.
Irish punk bands and their new wave cousins swallowed Joyce, Beckett, Wilde and Flann O’Brien, chewed them up in a blender and spewed them back out in a great technicolour yawn. By contrast, modern Irish fiction writers, even the ones who treasured their copies of Never Mind The Bollocks and London Calling, seemed to be looking the other way when the punk stinkbomb let off. The influence is there, but in the most staggered and splintered way, a series of sporadically tossed pipe bombs rather than one big atomic bang.
Punk rock was a musical – some say cultural – revolution that happened in New York circa 1975, instigated by the Bowery bands who played Max’s Kansas City and CBGBs: The Ramones, Television, the Patti Smith Group, the Heartbreakers. Latter-day New York Dolls manager Malcolm McClaren caught the bug from Johnny Thunders and Richard Hell and passed it onto his charges the Sex Pistols a year later. But if the New York strain was an art movement conspired by misfits who’d never been to university, its English counterpart was more seditious. The Sex Pistols were the ultimate Oedipal act: ‘Anarchy In the UK’ attempted to kill the King; ‘God Save The Queen’ stuck it to her Majesty.
These were leery, sneering rebel songs played at high volume, sung by a London-Irish misfit with a wicked mouth and eyes like headlights. The Pistols were a horror show, and like the best horror shows they were conceived on a shoestring, with the production values of a snuff movie, and so their music felt scarily real. Never Mind The Bollocks ripped a fissure in reality through which could be glimpsed a whole new wave of horrors: The Clash, The Damned, The Buzzcocks, Siouxsie & the Banshees, the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag.
But despite the Year Zero propaganda, punk wasn’t conceived in a void. It was a mutant Eraserhead baby with many fathers: the 60s garage acts collected by Patti Smith Group guitarist Lenny Kaye on the Nuggets box set, Detroit’s Stooges and the MC5, the Velvet Underground and the New York Dolls, Alice Cooper, David Bowie and Roxy Music.
Punk lifted bits of its aesthetic from the Decadents, the Symbolists, the Modernists, the Lettrists, the Dada-ists and Surrealists and Situationists, from the Paris Communes and the 1968 riots. It was Un Chien Andalou and Howl and A Clockwork Orange and Catcher In the Rye. Its icons included Rimbaud, Genet, Beckett and Burroughs. It produced poets and writers like Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Jim Carroll and John Cooper Clark, artists like Raymond Pettibon and Ray Lowry, filmmakers like Don Letts, Julien Temple, Alex Cox and Mary Harron, was documented by journalists like Lester Bangs, Nick Kent, Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill, and inspired a hundred fanzines and indie labels.
But if punk began as an homogenous skinny whiteboy noise, it evolved with the speed of mutagen into something that transgressed genre. It refused to know its place, wouldn’t stay within the prescribed lines. It had the gall to speak in bad taste, to venerate energy and innovation over technique, to thieve from previously prohibited sources. By comparison with the old boys’ club of stadium rock acts, punk was multicultural, homo-friendly and equal opportunities.
It acknowledged Captain Beefheart and Neu and Can, ska and dub and street poets like Lynton Kwesi Johnson, and through The Clash’s appropriation of ghetto blaster chic, Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five. When John Lydon teamed up with Afrika Bambaataa for the one-off single ‘World Destruction’ in 1984, it sounded like a replay of ‘Anarchy in The UK’ set in a New York dance club, and prophesised Public Enemy’s armagedddon effects, the smash and grab sample larceny of hip-hop.
Punk was, on the face of it, aggressively Modernist bordering on dystopian Futurist, even if many of its avatars were of the old guard. Pete Shelley was a Beckett fan. Joy Division channelled JG Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition. The Clash co-opted Allen Ginsberg for Combat Rock. Martin Scorsese considered casting the Clash as a street gang in his earliest imaginings of Gangs of New York. Eraserhead’s Jack Nance looked like a member of Pere Ubu.
Burroughs was celebrated by the punk set at the Nova Convention in New York in 1978. Debbie Harry collaborated with HR Giger, appeared in Cronenberg’s Videodrome, and but for her management’s intervention might have secured Darryl Hannah’s part in Blade Runner. She and Chris Stein forged a friendship with William Gibson, chief visionary of the literary movement that would become termed ‘cyberpunk’, a new wave of streetwise noirish sci fi that proliferated in the early 80s, and whose Neuromancer mantra – “the street finds its own use for things” – could have been a neo-Situationist slogan.
“1977 seemed kind of like a roots moment,” Gibson said. “My take on it wasn’t that it was brand new nihilism, it was like a return to something that had been the real beginning of the ’60s but had been collectively forgotten. I had forgotten it to some extent myself.
“And it actually wasn’t so much the punk from England that did that for me, it was the stuff from New York that slightly predated what happened in London: Television and the first Patti Smith album. They were very consciously subversively retro in a really irony-free way, they seemed very, very sincere about it, and what I was seeing and hearing out of London was much more self-conscious material.
“Now, decades later, I know that Malcolm McClaren had been reading the Situationists, and the stuff from New York was somehow way less considered and in fact didn’t really go anywhere. Most of those people vanished or took too much heroin or wound up pumping gas, which is actually a more traditional fate for young artists at that time.”
Here in Ireland, punk did something unprecedented: it occurred in real time. Pre 1977, the future was on a five year sattelite delay. Ireland received its inklings of a brave new world via Radio Luxembourg. The country didn’t have a pop music station until 1979. But London and New York punk generated a direct current that jumpstarted The Radiators, The Boomtown Rats, U2, The Virgin Prunes, The Atrix, Stiff Little Fingers, the Outcasts, DC Nien, The Blades, The Undertones.
Except Irish punk acts were different. They resisted the Oedipal pose, acknowledged rather than erased history. On The Radiators’ second album Ghostown, Philip Chevron wrote about ‘Kitty Ricketts’, one of the prosititutes from the Nightown section of Ulysses. U2’s debut album Boy namechecked Dorian Gray and stole from William Goldman’s Lord Of The Flies, a sacred text shared by The Virgin Prunes. Gavin Friday took Wilde as his oracle on Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves. The Pogues’ brilliant, bawdy carnivalesque songs referenced Brendan Behan and James Clarence Mangan and James Stephens.
Nor did Irish punk bands necessarily disassociate from their musical predecessors. They were more likely to consult members of Horslips or Thin Lizzy for advice than badmouth them in the press, and if they didn’t exactly pay homage to Rory Gallagher and Van Morrison, they didn’t deny them either.
Van, always a contrary figure, started out with Them, a snotnosed Belfast R&B band who wrote the all time great garage staple ‘Gloria’, but he made his reputation with Astral Weeks, an emigrant’s recurring dream of an East Belfast demimonde populated by hustlers, heroin casualties and persecuted drag queens.
The songs had strong literary associations – the dirty old man obsessed with a thirteen year old schoolgirl in ‘Cypress Avenue’ could’ve been Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert; the tragic drag queen Madame George was straight out of Last Exit To Brooklyn by way of Tennessee Williams.
Like its weirder twin, the Velvet Underground & Nico, Astral Weeks was a seminal album dealing with adult themes of vice, mortality and deviance. And like the Velvets, its influence vastly overshadowed its sales. In time it came to occupy the same place in pop music as Joyce’s Ulysses does in literature.
But if Irish musicians were galvanised and inspired by the country’s literary history, its post-war writers were always in danger of being paralysed by the towering figures of Oscar Wilde, Brendan Behan, Sean O’ Casey, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Eugene O’ Neill – the litany invoked by by Kevin Rowland in Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ ‘Dance Stance’. To any young scribbler, such figures could seem as ancient and ominous as the Tuatha De Danaan, mythic beings, ten feet tall, casting shadows of influence in which few new forms could grow.
The revolutionary example of punk rock – and the free for all polyglot of styles and sounds that it permitted – did not find expression in an identifiable Irish literary movement akin to the Beats of ’50s New York, or Scotland’s Children of Albion Rovers in the 90s. Throughout the 1970s it seemed more furtive, more covert. There were secret meetings and small presses, cellar rendezvous and writers’ groups that numbered among their suspects Dermot Bolger, Neil Jordan, John Banville, Colm Toibin.
Punk’s impact on writers like Clash fan Roddy Doyle was manifest in form rather than content. His first novel The Commitments chose proletarian soul rather than white noise as its motif, although the book’s self-published DIY ethic, plus its use of sawn off rapid fire dialogue and Northside Dublin vernacular, was pure punk. Elsewhere, the cover of Boomtown Rats disciple Joe O’ Connor’s Cowboys and Indians featured a London postcard mohawk. Novelist and playwright Billy Roche started out as singer with The Roach Band, who combined Springsteen-ish smalltown visions with a the taut energy of Elvis Costello and Graham Parker; his first play A Handful of Stars climaxed with a James Cagney stand-off soundtracked by PiL’s ‘Rise’.
Despite these strobe flashes, Irish fiction seemed still preoccupied with trying to make sense of the grim and grey preceding decades – a landscape of domineering fathers, martyred mothers, ogre-like Christian Brothers, despotic priests, skeletons in family closets, valleys of squinting windows, incessant rainfall. Throughout the 1980s it operated under the influence of the late John McGahern, the big daddy of rainy realism, a writer many modern Irish novelists still feel compelled to define themselves in alliance with or opposition to.
Maybe the satellite delay was still in effect, because 1977 finally arrived in 1993, in the unholy form of Pat McCabe’s The Butcher Boy. Notwithstanding the fact that it was written in the late early 90s and set 30 years before, this was the first true Irish punk novel, the Never Mind The Bollocks of letters, and its impact on modern Irish fiction was analogous to that of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting on Scottish writing: an adrenaline jab to the heart. Pitched halfway between slapstick and horror, the tale of Francie Brady was a shocking but moving hybrid of Huckleberry Finn, A Clockwork Orange and Lord Of The Flies, and Pat McCabe became the dragon young upstarts had to slay – or at least sneak past – before they gained entry to the crypt.
“I remember reading The Butcher Boy and recognising something about small town Ireland, and the dialogue struck me as amazingly vivid,” says Mayo writer Mike McCormick. “I was really sickened, because I was about halfway through the writing of the Getting It In The Head when I read it. McCabe’s work was important, as was Roddy Doyle’s, in that it also allowed people to use popular culture, songs and comic books.”
McCormack is, as the old saw goes, a man out standing in his own field: in this case a wind-blasted pasture in a mythologised Co. Mayo where the natives veer between decent skinnery and intemperent religiosity, where speaking statues of the Sacred Virgin drive local women to apocalyptic ministry, where earthbound angels coast across bay waves the colour of hammered lead, where you can’t move but for masonry saints and shrines and visitations and plastic Jesuses luminescing day-glo green.
Both McCormack’s full-length novels Crowe’s Requiem (1998) and Notes From A Coma (2006) meld the fantastical and future-shocked with the local and parochial. If Pat McCabe’s feverish inner monologues trace the southern gothic bloodlines of Faulkner and O’Connor back to their Irish origins, McCormack’s yarns are rendered with a rigorous, almost Anglo-Irish formalism on a par with Patrick McGrath.
“I was asked to describe Notes From A Coma towards the ending of my writing of it,” McCormack recalls, “and I say this respectfully now the man is dead, and I respected his work hugely, but the book was like if you imagined John McGahern and Philip K Dick were contracted to write an episode of the X Files, this would be the result.”
This, I believe, is under-explored territory in Irish fiction. We’ve had books like Eoin McNamee’s Belfast noir classic Resurrection Man, Joe Ambrose’s squat culture dispatch Serious Time, Conor McPherson’s rewiring of ghost stories and strange tales for the modern depopulated rural Ireland, Julian Gough’s metafictional Jude trology, John Connolly’s Nocturnes, Claire Keegan’s tales from the county hell. But the literary chattering classes are still more likely to cite John Banville over Blade Runner.
Maybe writers like Roddy Doyle and Joe O’Connor and Colm Toibin confuse the argument when they produce their richest writing in the guise of stately historical novels like A Star Called Henry, Star Of the Sea and The Master. But imagine a climate where Irish writers, and, crucially, non-Irish writers resident here, co-opted punk’s refusal to observe protocol, where there’s no confining delineation between so called serious and popular literature, where language, theme, storytelling craft and imagination all co-exist.
The equivalent, maybe, of the generation of writers who’ve thrived in the realm of the slipstream, an umbrella term wide enough to encompass Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Kelly Link, Joe Hill, AM Homes, David Foster Wallace, Steven Hall, Jeffrey Eugenides, Dave Eggars, George Saunders, Katherine Dunne and Tom Spanbauer.
The compost theory of culture holds that what was once held as ‘low’ entertainment – gothic, southern gothic, pulp fiction, westerns, post-war noir, horror, magic realism, new journalism, the new wave of 60s sci-fi, EC and Marvel comics, tales from the crypt, performance poetry, graffitti art, graphic novels – gets turned to precious metal by the pressure of successive decades heaped on top of each other, until, at this end of the process, what was once derided as common has become retroactively transmuted into art.
Anybody feeling queasy here should note that Cormac McCarthy, maybe the most respected living American writer, has worked exclusively in genre for decades, be it the post-apocalyptic (The Road), modern noir, (No Country For Old Men), western (The Border Trilogy) horror masquerading as western (Blood Meridian) or southern gothic (Child of God, Outer Dark).
The Serious Fiction Factory, the Man Booker mill, seems a long way from the surreal, funny, hyperbolic, fantastical tales that reside in the national body of mythology, legend, folk tale, gothic yarns, murder ballads and outrageously tall tales. Celtic storytelling has always been by turns bawdy, mystical, absurdist, and prone to gross exagerration. The Midnight Court contained lusty couplets that’d make a sailor blush. The Song of Amergin was a visionary shape-shifter hymn. And there’s an account of Cuchulainn’s bersker fit in Thomas Kinsella’s translation of The Táin that reads like a live review of Iggy & the Stooges:
“The first warp-spasm seized Cuchulainn, and made him into a monstrous thing, hideous and shapeless, unheard of… His face and features became a red bowl: he sucked one eye so deep into his head that a wild crane couldn’t poke it onto his cheek out of the depths of his skull; the other eye fell out along his cheek.
“His mouth weirdly distorted: his cheek peeled back from his jaws until the gullet appeared, his lungs and liver flapped in his mouth and throat, his lower jaw struck the upper a lion-killing blow, and fiery flakes large as a ram’s fleece reached his mouth from his throat.
“His heart boomed loud in his breast like the baying of a watch-dog at its feed or the sound of a lion among bears. Malignant mists and spurts of fire – the torches of the Badb – flickered red in the vaporous clouds that rose boiling above his head, so fierce was his fury.”
Now that’s what I call punk rock.
9.11.2008
The Legend of the Forbidden Treasure in Conrad’s “Nostromo”
The Legend of the Forbidden Treasure in Conrad’s “Nostromo”
This passage, which stands at the beginning of Conrad’s Nostromo, tells of two sailors who go in search of a buried treasure, in the process becoming ghosts. This story is told stylistically as a folk legend or local fairytale of the people of Sulaco, that is, an event that may not have actually happened, or occurred only in some mythical, non-historic time. The use of fairytale sets up a tone that this story may not be important to the following events, as it is something that did not happen, perhaps only suggesting some background about the people or place of the book. Linguistically however, Conrad uses the same kinds of descriptive language that abound through the rest of the novel. The depictions of the folk of the neighborhood or the gringos’ provisions clearly place this legend within a setting and cultural context similar to that in which Nostromo as a whole takes place. It is important to notice that despite this clarity of detail, the two gringos are not given names; in fact it is not even certain that they are actually Americans. They only thing definite is that they are sailors, and as gringos they may most likely be foreigners to Sulaco.
Several images appear in the legend of the forbidden treasure that hold thematic importance for Nostromo, and can be tied up in the opening sentence’s equating of evil and wealth. Beyond the almost insignificant details mentioned above, the story focuses on a treasure hidden in a ravine on the peninsula of Azuera, off the coast of Sulaco, suggesting the lure and inaccessibility of money. Secondly, there is the pair of foreigners who go searching for the treasure with the help of a mozo, a native youth. This image points to the way that foreign interests have exploited the local populaces of Latin America in order to grow wealthy. Then there is the fate of the gringos, who become hungry ghosts, unable to either use or abandon the treasure once they find it. This idea of money as a curse or “fatal spell” most clearly illustrates the evil inherent in wealth, and leads the way into the actual story of Nostromo.
Legends and fairytales hold an important place for the people of Sulaco, even though the rest of the novel unfolds in actions clearly bound to a historical chain of events (though often a labyrinthine one). There is for instance a popular legend that the former dictator Guzman Bento became a specter whose body is carried off by the devil after his death, a fitting apotheosis for a man who had many put to death under his regime. This local folktale can be contrasted with the names of classical Roman mythology, the old deities of the Spanish upper class, which are household words in Sulaco only because the O.S.N. Company ships are named after them. Costaguana had “never been ruled by the gods of Olympus” (Conrad, 43). Another more basic local story concerns a treasure supposedly buried under the house of Giorgio Viola, echoing the legend of the gringos’ treasure and foreshadowing both the treasure that is his daughters as well as the lost silver that ends up under his lighthouse. As the engineer-in-chief puts it, the events of the novel are “like a comic fairy tale… true to the very spirit of the country” (Conrad, 273).
Many of the characters in Nostromo not only tell, but live their lives based on such fantasies, which they identify with or make up about themselves. One case of this is the mine owner Charles Gould, who Decoud claims idealizes everything and does not believe his own motives if they are not part of a fairytale. When first introduced to Charles Gould’s fascination with the San Tomé mine, we are even told that he personifies mines as living beings. The journalist Decoud claims that his own life is not “a moral romance derived from… a pretty fairy tale” (Conrad, 202), yet while trying to save the silver he later admits to living an imaginative existence: the desire to form an independent state out of his love of Antonia. It is not just the book’s “heroes” who contain this flaw of self-mythologizing. General Montero’s brother Pedrito helps bring about the Monterist Revolution because he wants to live out the political splendor depicted in stories of the Duc de Morny. Colonel Sotillo is similarly possessed by the delusion that the silver has been sunk in the harbor, and eventually gets killed by his own man for refusing to give in to reality. As Mrs. Gould says of her husband, though it could apply to almost any character in the book, “A man haunted by a fixed idea is insane. He is dangerous even if that idea is an idea of justice; for may he not bring the heaven down pitilessly upon a loved head” (Conrad, 322)?
There is no clearer place where we see this tragic self-mythologizing than in the character of Nostromo, especially since he directly identifies himself with the gringos of Azuera in the legend of the forbidden treasure. While trying to save the silver, Nostromo says that the treasure of the mine is greater than the one guarded by ghosts on Azuera, and that their task is more dangerous than trying to get the forbidden treasure. Nostromo also tells Dr. Monygham that if he fails he won’t linger like the dead sailors, while at the same time suggesting that having the silver is like a curse. After the treasure is hidden it does indeed become a curse on the sailor, and we really begin to see the association of evil and wealth. Where Nostromo had been an integral, though proud, man, after becoming a slave to the silver “the genuineness of all his qualities was destroyed” (Conrad, 432). He compares himself to the gringos again, as unable to forget the treasure until he is dead, and “belonging body and soul to the unlawfulness of his audacity” (Conrad, 438) in stealing the silver.
“There are spirits of good and evil that hover near every concealed treasure” (Conrad, 416), spirits that seem to make Decoud fascinated with the power of the silver until he kills himself, spirits that turn Mrs. Gould’s heart into a wall of silver-bricks. It is perhaps these same evil spirits, trapped in the ghosts of Azuera, that keep Nostromo coming back for more treasure until he is accidentally killed for it (by his old friend Viola, who thought he was another man trying to run off with the treasure of his daughter). On his deathbed Nostromo says that the silver has killed him, when his killer was perhaps his own fascination with its mythology. Yet even still he offers to pass that curse on. Thankfully Mrs. Gould decides to let the legend of the forbidden treasure die with him.
“The poor, associating by an obscure instinct of consolation the ideas of evil and wealth, will tell you that [the peninsula of Azuera] is deadly because of its forbidden treasures. The common folk of the neighbourhood, peons of the estancias, vaqueros of the seaboard plains, tame Indians coming miles to market with a bundle of sugar-cane or a basket of maize worth about threepence, are well aware that heaps of shining gold lie in the gloom of the deep precipices cleaving the stony levels of Azuera. Tradition has it that many adventurers of olden time had perished in the search. The story goes also that within men's memory two wandering sailors -- Americanos, perhaps, but gringos of some sort for certain -- talked over a gambling, good-for-nothing mozo, and the three stole a donkey to carry for them a bundle of dry sticks, a water-skin, and provisions enough to last a few days. Thus accompanied, and with revolvers at their belts, they had started to chop their way with machetes through the thorny scrub on the neck of the peninsula.
“On the second evening an upright spiral of smoke (it could only have been from their camp-fire) was seen for the first time within memory of man standing up faintly upon the sky above a razor-backed ridge on the stony head… The impious adventurers gave no other sign. The sailors, the Indian, and the stolen burro were never seen again… the two gringos, spectral and alive, are believed to be dwelling to this day amongst the rocks, under the fatal spell of their success. Their souls cannot tear themselves away from their bodies mounting guard over the discovered treasure. They are now rich and hungry and thirsty.”
Conrad, Joseph. “Nostromo.” Penguin Classics edition. 1990. Pgs. 39-40
This passage, which stands at the beginning of Conrad’s Nostromo, tells of two sailors who go in search of a buried treasure, in the process becoming ghosts. This story is told stylistically as a folk legend or local fairytale of the people of Sulaco, that is, an event that may not have actually happened, or occurred only in some mythical, non-historic time. The use of fairytale sets up a tone that this story may not be important to the following events, as it is something that did not happen, perhaps only suggesting some background about the people or place of the book. Linguistically however, Conrad uses the same kinds of descriptive language that abound through the rest of the novel. The depictions of the folk of the neighborhood or the gringos’ provisions clearly place this legend within a setting and cultural context similar to that in which Nostromo as a whole takes place. It is important to notice that despite this clarity of detail, the two gringos are not given names; in fact it is not even certain that they are actually Americans. They only thing definite is that they are sailors, and as gringos they may most likely be foreigners to Sulaco.
Several images appear in the legend of the forbidden treasure that hold thematic importance for Nostromo, and can be tied up in the opening sentence’s equating of evil and wealth. Beyond the almost insignificant details mentioned above, the story focuses on a treasure hidden in a ravine on the peninsula of Azuera, off the coast of Sulaco, suggesting the lure and inaccessibility of money. Secondly, there is the pair of foreigners who go searching for the treasure with the help of a mozo, a native youth. This image points to the way that foreign interests have exploited the local populaces of Latin America in order to grow wealthy. Then there is the fate of the gringos, who become hungry ghosts, unable to either use or abandon the treasure once they find it. This idea of money as a curse or “fatal spell” most clearly illustrates the evil inherent in wealth, and leads the way into the actual story of Nostromo.
Legends and fairytales hold an important place for the people of Sulaco, even though the rest of the novel unfolds in actions clearly bound to a historical chain of events (though often a labyrinthine one). There is for instance a popular legend that the former dictator Guzman Bento became a specter whose body is carried off by the devil after his death, a fitting apotheosis for a man who had many put to death under his regime. This local folktale can be contrasted with the names of classical Roman mythology, the old deities of the Spanish upper class, which are household words in Sulaco only because the O.S.N. Company ships are named after them. Costaguana had “never been ruled by the gods of Olympus” (Conrad, 43). Another more basic local story concerns a treasure supposedly buried under the house of Giorgio Viola, echoing the legend of the gringos’ treasure and foreshadowing both the treasure that is his daughters as well as the lost silver that ends up under his lighthouse. As the engineer-in-chief puts it, the events of the novel are “like a comic fairy tale… true to the very spirit of the country” (Conrad, 273).
Many of the characters in Nostromo not only tell, but live their lives based on such fantasies, which they identify with or make up about themselves. One case of this is the mine owner Charles Gould, who Decoud claims idealizes everything and does not believe his own motives if they are not part of a fairytale. When first introduced to Charles Gould’s fascination with the San Tomé mine, we are even told that he personifies mines as living beings. The journalist Decoud claims that his own life is not “a moral romance derived from… a pretty fairy tale” (Conrad, 202), yet while trying to save the silver he later admits to living an imaginative existence: the desire to form an independent state out of his love of Antonia. It is not just the book’s “heroes” who contain this flaw of self-mythologizing. General Montero’s brother Pedrito helps bring about the Monterist Revolution because he wants to live out the political splendor depicted in stories of the Duc de Morny. Colonel Sotillo is similarly possessed by the delusion that the silver has been sunk in the harbor, and eventually gets killed by his own man for refusing to give in to reality. As Mrs. Gould says of her husband, though it could apply to almost any character in the book, “A man haunted by a fixed idea is insane. He is dangerous even if that idea is an idea of justice; for may he not bring the heaven down pitilessly upon a loved head” (Conrad, 322)?
There is no clearer place where we see this tragic self-mythologizing than in the character of Nostromo, especially since he directly identifies himself with the gringos of Azuera in the legend of the forbidden treasure. While trying to save the silver, Nostromo says that the treasure of the mine is greater than the one guarded by ghosts on Azuera, and that their task is more dangerous than trying to get the forbidden treasure. Nostromo also tells Dr. Monygham that if he fails he won’t linger like the dead sailors, while at the same time suggesting that having the silver is like a curse. After the treasure is hidden it does indeed become a curse on the sailor, and we really begin to see the association of evil and wealth. Where Nostromo had been an integral, though proud, man, after becoming a slave to the silver “the genuineness of all his qualities was destroyed” (Conrad, 432). He compares himself to the gringos again, as unable to forget the treasure until he is dead, and “belonging body and soul to the unlawfulness of his audacity” (Conrad, 438) in stealing the silver.
“There are spirits of good and evil that hover near every concealed treasure” (Conrad, 416), spirits that seem to make Decoud fascinated with the power of the silver until he kills himself, spirits that turn Mrs. Gould’s heart into a wall of silver-bricks. It is perhaps these same evil spirits, trapped in the ghosts of Azuera, that keep Nostromo coming back for more treasure until he is accidentally killed for it (by his old friend Viola, who thought he was another man trying to run off with the treasure of his daughter). On his deathbed Nostromo says that the silver has killed him, when his killer was perhaps his own fascination with its mythology. Yet even still he offers to pass that curse on. Thankfully Mrs. Gould decides to let the legend of the forbidden treasure die with him.
9.10.2008
End Times, by Lydia Lunch
End Times
By Lydia Lunch. [via, posted in full]
“In times of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
– George Orwell
It took balls for Elton John to suggest banning all organized religion because it turned people into hateful lemmings devoid of compassion. And I may be putting my cock on the line here, but I think we need to go directly to the source and simply get rid of God. After all God was the first cop. The original tyrant. An egotistical dictator whose sadism was so immense that he insisted on the murder of his only begotten son just to prove what he was capable of after he condemned us all to rot in eternal damnation like flesh puppets in his own private dungeon. An amusement arcade full of fire and brimstone.
Religion used to be the opium of the masses. Now it’s the crack cocaine of assassins. Millions of addicts tripping on a celestial high. Throwing psychotic temper tantrums like little brats who forgot to take their Ritalin. Backyard bullies screaming MY GOD IS BIGGER THAN YOUR GOD. God junkies — dangerous and delirious. Drunk on blood and bombs and the smell of burning flesh. Painting the desert red in an attempt to appease BIG POPPA, that vengeful War Lord whose favorite blood sport has always been one of violence, torture and retribution.
And excuse me if I feel that John McCain is suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. If after five years of being held in captivity and forced to endure relentless tortures, he is simply too twisted to realize what the real price of war is, then we’re all doomed. After all if he could survive such mind numbing cruelty and still want to play war whore, what the hell are the rest of us all whining about?
War is as old as God himself. And the War is never over. The War is never ending. The War is just an orgy of blood and guts masterminded by testosterone-fueled dirty old men that get off on fucking the entire fucking planet. This is the REAL PORNOGRAPHY. An outrageous cockfight fought by gung-ho cowboys who have drawn a line in the sand and will challenge anyone to a duel foolish enough to threaten resistance against the advent of the rodeo mind.
And hold on to your hats because now entering the bullring is a petite pit-bull in lipstick with a hotline to God’s pipeline whose idiotic credo of “Intelligent Design” insults not only science and evolution but the individual’s ability to reason when presented with hundreds of thousands of pages of evidence to the contrary.
Man was not created in the image of God. God was created in the image of man so that man had someone to blame his infantile rage on. The need to believe in God is a pathological viral infection that has spread like an incurable disease infecting man’s ability to reason clearly. Belief acts as a psychic buffer against anxiety over the unavoidable reality of impending mortality. Scared shitless and still greedy for more than merely earthly delights, man, that all consuming piranha has wreaked havoc by gobbling up and devouring every other creature forcing predictions that unless a miracle happens even the fish will be wiped out before the midterm of this century. And with rifle-toting zealots like Sarah Palin and her Assembly of God clan smiling smugly and smirking about killing caribou, hunting moose, exterminating wolves and hounding polar bears into near extinction the death count will surely mount.
Only end times apocalypticians are demented enough to dream of a magnificent bounty to be served up in heaven by angels and virgins alike assuming it’s the just deserve of a hard fought battle for the glory of God and Cuntry. In the meantime, the rest of us better prepare to go hungry because soon enough we won’t even be able to afford food anyway.
Am I imagining it or were we a lot safer when the so-called leader of the free world was getting blowjobs in the White House? Isn’t it better to blow off a little steam in the face of a willing victim than to take out your sexual frustrations and pent-up aggression on endangered species or countries half way around the world, blatantly lying about democracy and freedom in a thinly-veiled disguise to suck the juice out of a hole in the ground, while the rest of us are stuck at the Exxon stations holding gas pumps in our fists like big limp dicks that we pay out the ass to get perpetually screwed by?
No one wins in War except the Military Industrial Complex. A Corporate Cabal run from inside the Pentagon’s walls set up to both build weapons of mass destructions and then repair the damage done by them. The astronomical expense of war, at last count $100,000 dollars a minute in maintenance fees seems paltry when you consider the estimated 37,000 corporations who have their hands in the till and are growing fat on the blood and bones of widows, orphans and soldiers piling up in mass graves strewn throughout the desert. An oasis of death and destruction.
A war which has utterly demolished the separation of church and state, is operating secret prisons across the globe, grants immunity to mercenaries and has turned America into a Police State whose own citizens are now under siege. A war in continuum, orchestrated by an arrogant pig-headed son of a military father whose status as head cop at the CIA lead him to believe that America has a divine duty to police the planet as his Soldiers of Christ commit whole sale slaughter in effort to push forth judgment day. Oh closer my God to thee! Holy War! Holy War!
I pity the fool who prays for life everlasting. I want my taste of Heaven and I want it now. I realize that at any moment I could become the next victim of this war without end. And Heaven to me would mean dying with a smile on my face, screwing a half a dozen returning amputee Iraqi war veterans. Hell, somebody’s gotta take care of the vets. Their own government sure as shit won’t. America has over 200,000 homeless veterans of war. Men tossed to the streets and forced to fend for themselves when they were no longer useful as mercenary cogs on the wheel of the world’s greatest killing machine; suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, tricked into a war and conned by doublespeak into believing that fighting will bring peace, domination will bring freedom, and that your Uncle Sam will take care of you after you’ve risked life and limb to safe guard his superiority complex.
We inhabit this vast potential Utopia, which is being destroyed by its abusers. Man has created a hell on earth, turning the world into a ghetto, a slaughterhouse, a refugee camp, an orphanage, a sweatshop, a bomb factory, a land mine, a shooting gallery, an insane asylum, a toxic dump. And the way I see it Mother Nature is getting pretty pissed off. Earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, mudslides, hurricanes, droughts, monsoons, famine. She is becoming more violent against the men who cause her violence.
And maybe after all, violence is only natural. All Creation bears the molecular memory of a terrible explosion of electricity, energy, matter and motion. A violent eruption of white light and white heat. Violence was the first act of creation. THE BIG BANG. Chaos is the law of Nature; it is the score upon which reality is written. Or to quote Mussolini “Blood alone moves the wheels of history.” Same as it ever was.
War is an incurable virus, forever mutating, that travels the globe feeding on man’s fears, spreading panic and terror, violence and death, which until we find a vaccine that finally inoculates the entire population against stupidity, arrogance, aggression and blind faith, we will be forced to forever repeat like stunted victims of Orwell’s Memory Hole.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lydia Lunch is an art terrorist who has been confronting apathy and kicking its fucking teeth in for the past three decades.
By Lydia Lunch. [via, posted in full]
“In times of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
– George Orwell
It took balls for Elton John to suggest banning all organized religion because it turned people into hateful lemmings devoid of compassion. And I may be putting my cock on the line here, but I think we need to go directly to the source and simply get rid of God. After all God was the first cop. The original tyrant. An egotistical dictator whose sadism was so immense that he insisted on the murder of his only begotten son just to prove what he was capable of after he condemned us all to rot in eternal damnation like flesh puppets in his own private dungeon. An amusement arcade full of fire and brimstone.
Religion used to be the opium of the masses. Now it’s the crack cocaine of assassins. Millions of addicts tripping on a celestial high. Throwing psychotic temper tantrums like little brats who forgot to take their Ritalin. Backyard bullies screaming MY GOD IS BIGGER THAN YOUR GOD. God junkies — dangerous and delirious. Drunk on blood and bombs and the smell of burning flesh. Painting the desert red in an attempt to appease BIG POPPA, that vengeful War Lord whose favorite blood sport has always been one of violence, torture and retribution.
And excuse me if I feel that John McCain is suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. If after five years of being held in captivity and forced to endure relentless tortures, he is simply too twisted to realize what the real price of war is, then we’re all doomed. After all if he could survive such mind numbing cruelty and still want to play war whore, what the hell are the rest of us all whining about?
War is as old as God himself. And the War is never over. The War is never ending. The War is just an orgy of blood and guts masterminded by testosterone-fueled dirty old men that get off on fucking the entire fucking planet. This is the REAL PORNOGRAPHY. An outrageous cockfight fought by gung-ho cowboys who have drawn a line in the sand and will challenge anyone to a duel foolish enough to threaten resistance against the advent of the rodeo mind.
And hold on to your hats because now entering the bullring is a petite pit-bull in lipstick with a hotline to God’s pipeline whose idiotic credo of “Intelligent Design” insults not only science and evolution but the individual’s ability to reason when presented with hundreds of thousands of pages of evidence to the contrary.
Man was not created in the image of God. God was created in the image of man so that man had someone to blame his infantile rage on. The need to believe in God is a pathological viral infection that has spread like an incurable disease infecting man’s ability to reason clearly. Belief acts as a psychic buffer against anxiety over the unavoidable reality of impending mortality. Scared shitless and still greedy for more than merely earthly delights, man, that all consuming piranha has wreaked havoc by gobbling up and devouring every other creature forcing predictions that unless a miracle happens even the fish will be wiped out before the midterm of this century. And with rifle-toting zealots like Sarah Palin and her Assembly of God clan smiling smugly and smirking about killing caribou, hunting moose, exterminating wolves and hounding polar bears into near extinction the death count will surely mount.
Only end times apocalypticians are demented enough to dream of a magnificent bounty to be served up in heaven by angels and virgins alike assuming it’s the just deserve of a hard fought battle for the glory of God and Cuntry. In the meantime, the rest of us better prepare to go hungry because soon enough we won’t even be able to afford food anyway.
Am I imagining it or were we a lot safer when the so-called leader of the free world was getting blowjobs in the White House? Isn’t it better to blow off a little steam in the face of a willing victim than to take out your sexual frustrations and pent-up aggression on endangered species or countries half way around the world, blatantly lying about democracy and freedom in a thinly-veiled disguise to suck the juice out of a hole in the ground, while the rest of us are stuck at the Exxon stations holding gas pumps in our fists like big limp dicks that we pay out the ass to get perpetually screwed by?
No one wins in War except the Military Industrial Complex. A Corporate Cabal run from inside the Pentagon’s walls set up to both build weapons of mass destructions and then repair the damage done by them. The astronomical expense of war, at last count $100,000 dollars a minute in maintenance fees seems paltry when you consider the estimated 37,000 corporations who have their hands in the till and are growing fat on the blood and bones of widows, orphans and soldiers piling up in mass graves strewn throughout the desert. An oasis of death and destruction.
A war which has utterly demolished the separation of church and state, is operating secret prisons across the globe, grants immunity to mercenaries and has turned America into a Police State whose own citizens are now under siege. A war in continuum, orchestrated by an arrogant pig-headed son of a military father whose status as head cop at the CIA lead him to believe that America has a divine duty to police the planet as his Soldiers of Christ commit whole sale slaughter in effort to push forth judgment day. Oh closer my God to thee! Holy War! Holy War!
I pity the fool who prays for life everlasting. I want my taste of Heaven and I want it now. I realize that at any moment I could become the next victim of this war without end. And Heaven to me would mean dying with a smile on my face, screwing a half a dozen returning amputee Iraqi war veterans. Hell, somebody’s gotta take care of the vets. Their own government sure as shit won’t. America has over 200,000 homeless veterans of war. Men tossed to the streets and forced to fend for themselves when they were no longer useful as mercenary cogs on the wheel of the world’s greatest killing machine; suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, tricked into a war and conned by doublespeak into believing that fighting will bring peace, domination will bring freedom, and that your Uncle Sam will take care of you after you’ve risked life and limb to safe guard his superiority complex.
We inhabit this vast potential Utopia, which is being destroyed by its abusers. Man has created a hell on earth, turning the world into a ghetto, a slaughterhouse, a refugee camp, an orphanage, a sweatshop, a bomb factory, a land mine, a shooting gallery, an insane asylum, a toxic dump. And the way I see it Mother Nature is getting pretty pissed off. Earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, mudslides, hurricanes, droughts, monsoons, famine. She is becoming more violent against the men who cause her violence.
And maybe after all, violence is only natural. All Creation bears the molecular memory of a terrible explosion of electricity, energy, matter and motion. A violent eruption of white light and white heat. Violence was the first act of creation. THE BIG BANG. Chaos is the law of Nature; it is the score upon which reality is written. Or to quote Mussolini “Blood alone moves the wheels of history.” Same as it ever was.
War is an incurable virus, forever mutating, that travels the globe feeding on man’s fears, spreading panic and terror, violence and death, which until we find a vaccine that finally inoculates the entire population against stupidity, arrogance, aggression and blind faith, we will be forced to forever repeat like stunted victims of Orwell’s Memory Hole.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lydia Lunch is an art terrorist who has been confronting apathy and kicking its fucking teeth in for the past three decades.
9.08.2008
Banned Books and the Election
Maybe the only thing I'll say about politics... [via technoccult]
There’s a bogus list of books that Palin wanted banned making the rounds on the internet these past few days. In reality the books listed were taken from a site listing books that were once banned in the United States. And while the list is clearly disinformation at its finest, it at least brings attention to the fact that Palin attempted to fire a librarian after inquiring into banning some books from the library. According to Anne Kilkenny who has known Palin since ’92:
“While Sarah was Mayor of Wasilla she tried to fire our highly respected City Librarian because the Librarian refused to consider removing from the library some books that Sarah wanted removed. City residents rallied to the defense of the City Librarian and against Palin’s attempt at out-and-out censorship, so Palin backed down and withdrew her termination letter. People who fought her attempt to oust the Librarian are on her enemies list to this day.”
This poses a threat to the liberty of writers, book lovers, publishers, and libraries everywhere in the country. This means that it’s extremely important to put additional emphasis on this year’s “Banned Books Week-Celebrating the Freedom to Read” (Sept. 27-Oct. 4). Spread the word…
There’s a bogus list of books that Palin wanted banned making the rounds on the internet these past few days. In reality the books listed were taken from a site listing books that were once banned in the United States. And while the list is clearly disinformation at its finest, it at least brings attention to the fact that Palin attempted to fire a librarian after inquiring into banning some books from the library. According to Anne Kilkenny who has known Palin since ’92:
“While Sarah was Mayor of Wasilla she tried to fire our highly respected City Librarian because the Librarian refused to consider removing from the library some books that Sarah wanted removed. City residents rallied to the defense of the City Librarian and against Palin’s attempt at out-and-out censorship, so Palin backed down and withdrew her termination letter. People who fought her attempt to oust the Librarian are on her enemies list to this day.”
This poses a threat to the liberty of writers, book lovers, publishers, and libraries everywhere in the country. This means that it’s extremely important to put additional emphasis on this year’s “Banned Books Week-Celebrating the Freedom to Read” (Sept. 27-Oct. 4). Spread the word…
Water Bears in Space
While I don't usually post stuff like this here, I've been somewhat fascinated by tardigrades, more commonly known as water bears, for years now. What's not to love about a cute little microscopic critter that can repair its DNA and survive radiation and exposure to extreme elements by essentially dehydrating itself? In fact, water bears are so hardy that they can survive direct exposure to outer space.
9.07.2008
Review: "Nostromo" by Joseph Conrad
The most important of Joseph Conrad's novels, Nostromo (full online text) is probably one of the densest stories I've ever read (Joyce's writing aside). Detailing the history, landscape, political struggles, and desperate citizens of an entire imaginary South American country takes a lot of attention on the part of the reader, but is was well worth it for intricate plot and brilliantly written characters (although it offers a rather bleak picture of human nature in which every major protagonist fails due to their internal flaws). Written in 1904, Nostromo was ahead of its time, addressing issues of colonialism and psychological depth, but also made more complex by several almost post modern literary techniques. The story is told in a bizarre folding of time that circle around one main event, a failed revolution on the town of Saluco and the fate of its infamous silver mine that hangs like a weight around the characters' necks. Similarly the whole novel begins with a folk tale about buried treasure and the foreigners who were cursed trying to find it, a legend that not only finds symbolic repercussion in the significance and danger of material wealth, but also gets reenacted by characters within the plot. Conrad also claimed his major source for the country was a book called "Fifty Years of Misrule," fictitiously written by one of the characters in the novel. These projections of myth, alternative and lavish timelines, and the breaking of the facade of reality are techniques that predate, but are later much used by the Latin American magical realist writers such as Marquez or Borges, lending one to wonder if there is something in that land itself that breeds such labyrinthine histories.
9.02.2008
Last 20 Moments
Time does strange things when you’re locked in a room, when even that window near the ceiling ceases to illuminate. It has been dark for years, or it’s just the same interminable night. They used to bring a pack of Marlboro’s daily, and seafood on the weekends, but that tapered off some point ago. Thankfully there’s this crust of bread I can nibble till kingdom come.
I like to think I did something wrong, trespassing maybe, or murder, that would be a reason. I like to think that Eleanor is waiting; when I get out we’ll go to the Dollar Theatre, camp at Treasure Lake, even take the kids like we used to. But maybe I’m just making that up, a story to keep my mind off this darkness. I don’t remember if I have kids, what Eleanor’s face looks like.
As long as I’m writing I know I’m at least alive, though I wish my neighbor were still here. He was a man like myself, that is, trapped, who up till Time stopped used to chat through the hole in the wall, my ear against the immobile stone, whispering his inconsistent fables. I’m afraid he’s rubbed off on me.
Now he’s back. He tried to break out. I asked why he returned. Well, there’s nothing left out there. What do you mean, has there been a war? No, unless a rather big one, I mean, there’s nothing left, no ground, no sun, just an immense whiteness, I was so scared to turn around that this room would be gone, at least these walls are safe. I found a pack of smokes though. Are you sure, I lit one of our last twenty moments, this is it then? That’s my story, he said, and this time I’m sticking to it.
(Some flash for an assignment for my advanced fiction class.)
I like to think I did something wrong, trespassing maybe, or murder, that would be a reason. I like to think that Eleanor is waiting; when I get out we’ll go to the Dollar Theatre, camp at Treasure Lake, even take the kids like we used to. But maybe I’m just making that up, a story to keep my mind off this darkness. I don’t remember if I have kids, what Eleanor’s face looks like.
As long as I’m writing I know I’m at least alive, though I wish my neighbor were still here. He was a man like myself, that is, trapped, who up till Time stopped used to chat through the hole in the wall, my ear against the immobile stone, whispering his inconsistent fables. I’m afraid he’s rubbed off on me.
Now he’s back. He tried to break out. I asked why he returned. Well, there’s nothing left out there. What do you mean, has there been a war? No, unless a rather big one, I mean, there’s nothing left, no ground, no sun, just an immense whiteness, I was so scared to turn around that this room would be gone, at least these walls are safe. I found a pack of smokes though. Are you sure, I lit one of our last twenty moments, this is it then? That’s my story, he said, and this time I’m sticking to it.
(Some flash for an assignment for my advanced fiction class.)
9.01.2008
Sufi Wisdom
"Fate continues. But on no account abandon your own intentions. For if your plans accord with the Supreme Will you will attain a plenitude of fulfillment for your heart."
-Anwar-iSuhaili, from Idries Shah's The Dermis Probe
-Anwar-iSuhaili, from Idries Shah's The Dermis Probe
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
