A Magnet for Possibilities (news)

APA Philosophy Referee Hand Sginals (above)
Rumors that first Dark Matter Particle has been discovered
US finally to settle Native American Trust Lawsuit
What Philosophers Believe
How the iPhone could Reboot Education (which I've already seen with my own eyes at Pitt)
Tom Waits may be up for a role in the Hobbit
David Bowie and the Occult
The Fortsas Bibliohoax
The Milky Way at different Wavelengths
Don't Believe in God? Can't Hold Office in NC
MIT's Mind Machine Project takes AI research to 2.0
Dave Eggers publishes a newspaper
Casual Sex found to not be psychologically dangerous for young people
Henry Miller's Watercolors
Should Earth Scientists take a Hippocratic Oath? (I say yes)
The Mystery of the Magically Braided Horse Manes
Music for Water Bears
100 Best last lines of novels, the first of which and my favorite is from Beckett's The Unnameable:

".... ...you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on."

Academicia

As part of the current process of integrating my various creative works onto the Internet, I've decided to post some of the more interesting academic papers I've written over the last several years for school (backdated to when they were written, including a couple pieces of fiction, not including any work from the current semester):

Manifesting Power: Indra’s Slaying of Vṛtra as Kratophany of the Vedic Kings, 10.6.07

Vivid Wanderings: The Gunwinggu Rainbow Serpent as Symbol for Indigenous Australian Life, 11.3.07

Speaking the World: Pico della Mirandola’s Cabalism and the Languages of Science, 11.20.07

Dreams of Identity in Everett's Erasure, 11.28.07

Haunting Tradition: Ritual Failure in the Lakota Ghost Dance, 12.10.07

The Incoherence of the Sentence in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”, 1.30.08

Analyzing the Mystery of Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue, 2.15.08

Distorted Reflections of Reality in Borges' “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, 4.16.08

The Mythic Narrative of Beckett's “The Calmative”, 4.24.08

The Legend of the Forbidden Treasure in Conrad’s “Nostromo”, 9.11.08

Simultaneity of Tradition in Eliot’s “The Wasteland", 10.2.08

Dystopian Symbols and Counter-Symbols in V for Vendetta and Alphaville, 11.2.08

Place Names as Reality Effect in Joyce's “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, 11.18.08

Saving Middle-Earth: The Power of Recording Reality in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, 2.20.09

The Anthropological Perspective in LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness, 2.22.09

Apocryphal Narratives in Pynchon's Slow Learner, 4.13.09

Believing in the Fantastic of Gaiman's Neverwhere, 4.8.09

Cyberpunk and the Magical Power of Language, 4.21.09

Please feel free to cite these papers and ideas if of interest and use. I would prefer not to be plagiarized. Thanks!


A Personal Myth (fiction), 10.1.07

The Death of the Author as a Young Man (autobiographical fiction), 2.27.09


I've also gone back and updated tags for all entries on this blog and transferred the posts from my old blog True Names to here (but haven't gotten to their tags yet).

New Writings

I've added several more short stories to my Goodreads page for your reading pleasure: In The Roof, an older piece of psychic-fiction; Beast In The Eye Of, a recent story about a golem, religion, and control; and Echoplex, an unexpected horror story about love and underground shopping malls.

I also present to you this interesting and somewhat Beckettian blog, the fall and demise of the artist as a young man.

Library of Unique Experiences

As a writer and avid reader it often worries me that in this hyper-modern world literature is becoming a rather insular art form: those who read read, and the rest, the majority, don't. This is one reason why I am fascinated by book lists such as these lists of the 50 best cult books or banned and challenged books. Hell, I even geek out over lists on Amazon, because sometimes these kinds of arbitrary collections can point me to books I ought to read, and even more importantly, suggest the extreme influence literature has had, and still has, on individuals.

For me however it is often not enough to read, or list, books that are inspiring, deviant, and fantastic for their own sake. Who hasn't tripped through the imaginations of Kafka, Burroughs, Vonnegut, or Poe? The more I read the more I become aware that one thing literature can do is describe, and allow us to experience, ever finer shades of being- much the way good classical music can create subtle emotional tensions through the contrast of chords, a masterful narrative can create as equally refined tensions through the tools of plot, language, identification. Of course, this has also meant for me a quest to discover ever more complex psychological narratives and descriptions of irreality, somewhat along the lines of Italo Calvino's idea of a library created out of books that only belong on the periphery of the established canon, the shamans and madmen of the book world, that by their tentative inclusion change our perceptions on the rest of our literally conjured experiences. On that note I want to present my own list of authors and texts that by haunting and redefining the canonical texts have been rather indispensable in my understanding of what is possible to experience.

Samuel Beckett- "Stories and Texts for Nothing," "Molloy," "Malone Dies," "The Unnamable," etc. While most people are familiar with "Waiting for Godot," the play that made him famous, few have braved Beckett's prose writing. Dense and dreamlike only scratch the surface, having been influenced heavily by Joyce and Proust, Beckett sets out to destroy every convention and form of thought available to language, so that we are left with plotless, settingless, and even characterless stories that nonetheless explore the despair and consciousness of what it means to be alive. Not for the casual reader, or even most experienced ones.

Nick Blinko- "Primal Screamer." The singer and artist of seminal anarcho-punk band Rudimentary Peni, Blinko followed in the footsteps of many great artists by going insane. From the asylum he produced an album dedicated entirely to H.P. Lovecraft, and this novel. "Primal Screamer" charts his descent into madness and childhood regression from the perspective of his psychiatrist, who may also be going mad.

Jorge Luis Borges- "Labyrinths," etc. I won't say much because he's more well known these days. Storytelling as the philosophy of infinite regression. A must read.

Julio Cortázar- "Hopscotch," "All Fires the Fire," etc. Though Borges, Márquez, Fuentes, and Vargas Llosa are perhaps the more widely known Latin American authors, Cortázar was also highly responsible for the Boom of Latin American Fiction in the 60s-70s. More urbane than Márquez's colonial-themed magical realism, Cortázar's work often deals with the loose boundaries of history and desire. Furthermore, his work "Hopscotch" has been hailed as the first hypertext novel or literary choose-your-own-adventure, featuring several chapters that can be inserted into the main text while remaining an immanently lyrical read.

Mark Z. Danielewski- "House of Leaves," "Only Revolutions." Also becoming more popular as his latest novel was nominated for several awards, Danielewski's "House of Leaves" was for years a cult classic circling around the internets. Personally I was not too impressed by his powers of storytelling, but was fascinated by the innovative, non-linear, and self-referential form of his texts, which are like reading trembling, labyrinthian, academic papers. And the idea of a house that continues to get larger inside itself gave me exquisite nightmares for about a week.

Mircea Eliade- "The Forbidden Forest," "Two Occult Tales," etc. Most famous as a scholar and founder of comparative religions, the Romanian Eliade always considered himself more of a storyteller. While the vast erudition of his academic work has a way of looping in on itself, his fiction does nothing but benefit from an intricate understanding of world mythological themes, put at the service of describing the psychological effects of time and the World Wars. He also writes some rather fantastic short stories based on his wide occult knowledge. A personal favorite.

Richard Hell- "Godlike," "Go Now." Another punk turned poet and author, Hell was most famous for his song "Blank Generation" with the Voidoids. His work offers a curious modern updating of several literary traditions that inspired his life. "Go Now" corrupts the Beat spirit of Kerouac and Clellon Holmes, while "Godlike" re-imagines the life of Rimbaud and Verlaine as gay New York poets on acid, all the while retaining a grasp on the frailness or pointlessness of humanity.

John Clellon Holmes- "Go." The novel that made the Beats a household word, and yet now falls outside the Beat canon. In the same vein as many other good author-wandering-around-aimlessly stories (cf. Henry Miller), "Go" gives an accurate portrait of the drunken striving and frightened insignificance of the best minds of his generation.

J.K. Huysmans- "Au Rebours (Against the Grain)," "Lá-Bas (Down There)." In the widely read "Portrait of Dorian Grey," Oscar Wilde has his character read a peculiar text that changes his life. That book happens to be "Au Rebours," which depicts the kind of decadent French lifestyle that Wilde only dreamed of living. Starting from this decadence, Huysmans manages to span the gamut of extreme experience in his works, from attending satanic masses to eventually joining a monastery.

Comte de Lautréamont- "Les Chants de Maldoror." Entirely unknown in its time, this work was eventually rediscovered by the surrealists who hailed it as one of the two masterpieces that informed their movement, especially the line: "The chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella." "The Songs of Maldoror" is a long imagistic prose poem about a relentless and possibly demonic anti-hero who has renounced God, mankind, and ultimately himself. Camus was also fascinated about this work and there are shadows of Maldoror in "The Stranger."

Stéphane Mallarmé- "Divigations," var. prose poems. While more often poetic then a prose writer, the Symbolist Mallarmé, along with Baudelaire in "Paris Spleen" and Rimbaud in "Seasons of Hell," attempted to destroy the boundary between poetry and prose, creating narratives outside of traditional syntactic forms that could be read for both the story and images at once. These works also capture the picture of the distraught French writer so eloquently distilled later in Sartre's "Nausea." On the other hand, Mallarmé's most famous poem, "A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance," is a sprawling meta-poem about writing where words strewn everywhere on the page can be read in whatever order the reader chooses.

Gérard de Nerval- "Aurélia," etc. The other major influence on the Surrealists, as well as on Proust and Joseph Cornell, Nerval manages to record the fantastic dreams and hallucinations that accompany his descent into madness. Before and after his madness he paints vivid scenes of childhood love, Parisian neighborhoods, and occult rituals.

Kenneth Patchen- "The Journal of Albion Moonlight." A major influence on the Beats and collaborator with jazz musicians, Patchen somehow taps into the collective horror of World War II, penning a disjointed and surreal journal of a group of people fleeing and raging against a ubiquitous army of wolves. Phenomenal and chilling, this is the 40s, an emotional intensity never reached in the work of Pynchon, including the ballsy move of making both Jesus and Hitler misunderstood minor characters to his plot. A must read.

Milorad Pavić- "Dictionary of the Khazars," etc. More experiments with non-linear narratives. This text weaves a mythic story over several centuries through tentatively connected encyclopedia articles that can be read in any order and sound like masterful fairy-tales. Pavić's other works take the form of crossword puzzles and tarot readings.

Victor Pelevin- "The Yellow Arrow." I haven't read any of Pelevin's other work, but the Yellow Arrow is a personal favorite. A dark allegory about life and the Russian State, in which a man who is riding on a train that never stops, houses countries of people, and the dead are thrown out the windows, begins to wonder what would happen if he were able to get off. Beautiful and simple.

Fernando Pessoa- "The Book of Disquiet." Pessoa distinguished himself by creating several distinct literary heteronyms, who are the authors of their own works. In "The Book of Disquiet," one of these invented authors muses about the uncertainty and tedium of his life, and desire to imagine something different. For some reason I couldn't get through the book (mostly due to my own disquiet), though lines and images from it come back to me from time to time.

Rainer Maria Rilke- "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge." Many are familiar with his "Duino Elegies," and some colleges even require his "Letters to a Young Poet" in freshmen classes, but Rilke's only novel remains somewhat of a mystery. Much like other existential, man-about-town texts, in which not much happens but a character's obsession becomes fully lived (cf. Sartre and nausea, Lautréamont and evil, Miller and sex), Rilke's Malte is troubled by the question of death and transcendence, and that place where the veil of reality is torn to reveal poetic meaning. Though as a whole the "Notebooks" wanders off without a proper finish, many of the scenes display a linguistic and imagistic virtuosity that I don't think is rivaled in any other piece of literature. A personal favorite, try to find Stephen Mitchell's masterful translation.

Bruno Schulz- "The Street of Crocodiles." An obscure Polish art teacher, Schulz wrote down his childhood memories as letters to a fellow teacher and later published them as short stories. While drawing on the clarity and warmth of early Proust, as well as the ability to let incidental objects trigger emotional memories, Schulz sets himself apart by being able to see the extreme magic and dark possibilities that are peculiar to childhood. A personal favorite. The title piece also later served as inspiration for a short film by the Brothers Quay.

Of course, like all lists, this one is far from comprehensive. Other authors I am just discovering now deserve to be on here, such as Felisberto Hernandez, José Donoso, and E.T.A. Hoffmann, each of whom refines this library of unique experiences further. Hopefully others may read this and discover an author worth checking into, and if there are any texts that you have found inspirational or experientially exquisite, please post a comment.

The Mythic Narrative of Beckett's “The Calmative”

The Mythic Narrative of Beckett's “The Calmative”

After recalling that he does not know when he died, the narrator in Samuel Beckett’s “The Calmative” says that he needs to tell himself a story in order to calm down. While he could tell a modern story, the narrator insists that he has to tell his story “in the past… as though it were a myth, or an old fable” (Beckett, 28). Though the narrator’s mental state does not seem to resolve to one of calmness by the end of the story, his choice to utilize a mythic form of storytelling suggests that he may find this kind of narrative potentially more calming than depictions of modern life.

In order to discuss the use of myth in “The Calmative” we must first make a distinction between the popular use of the term myth, which designates something as being untrue, and the more traditional use of myth as a narrative form. Though there are many, and often conflicting, characteristics of what makes a story mythic, the myth-theorist Mircea Eliade gives a generally accepted definition of the term: myths are narratives that a particular culture believes to be true, which often use the adventures of supernatural beings to explain the foundation of and make sense of that culture’s reality (Eliade, 5-6).
While Beckett’s narrator is not necessarily telling a cultural story dealing with supernatural beings, it is important to note that nor is he telling a deliberate falsehood. The narrator’s myth draws on certain forms and themes that can be found in cultural mythologies, which he points to within the text of “The Calmative.” The story must take place in the past, the narrator needs “another age, that age to become another age in which I became what I was” (Beckett, 28). This somewhat circular passage seems to suggest Eliade’s definition of a foundational story; the narrator’s story takes him back to the time in which his reality was made. If we take this reality to be the narrator’s present state of death, then we might expect his myth to recount the events or adventures leading to his demise.

Beyond this somewhat “autobiographical” function of myth, or of stories set in the past tense, Beckett’s narrator also points to certain narrative forms that are common to mythology, which he attempts to use within his calming story. The narrator remarks that his story has to be like the one his father used to read him, the adventures of a boy named Joe Breem, or Breen, who swam for miles through the night “out of sheer heroism” (Beckett, 30). It is suggested that the narrator must go on a similar heroic adventure, one including the plot elements of “the setting forth, the struggle and perhaps the return” (Beckett, 30). This structure of the heroic journey is common to mythic narratives, and has perhaps been made most recognizable by Joseph Campbell, who discusses it in similar terms of the departure, the initiation, and the return (Campbell, ix). The narrator even recognizes the literary tradition of using this mythic motif when he recalls the woods at the mouth of hell, an allusion to, and perhaps a suggestion that he is inhabiting, the journey of Dante’s “Inferno.”

The other mythic form that Beckett’s narrator attempts to calm himself with is that of a fall and redemption, a theme commonly found in Christian mythology. Early in the story the narrator mentions that he fell, called for help, and it came, perhaps within the series of events leading to his death. This is echoed near the end of the story when the narrator actually does fall. For a moment he is “sated with dark and calm” (Beckett, 45), and with the redemptive courtesy of not being touched by the throng that he thinks surrounds him, before this is swept away and he continues on his journey. While the structure of this mythic form is less clearly articulated within the text than that of the hero’s journey, a number of references to the mythology of Christ are sprinkled through the story. From the “Shepherd’s Gate” and “bats like flying crucifixions” to the “colours of the Virgin” in the butcher’s window (Beckett, 31, 44), it seems that the narrator is striving to find a similar mythic calmative as that found by Christ: a redemptive death.

Having established the devices by which the narrator of “The Calmative” hopes to tell his story, we can now turn to the question of how this mythic form of storytelling may be capable of calming him. Beckett returns to the story of Joe Breem, or Breen in the first text from his later collection, “Texts for Nothing,” where it is further elaborated that this story “began unhappily and it ended happily, every evening, a comedy” (Beckett, 79). Drawing on the elements of comedic drama, in which the narrative resolves positively for its protagonists, this suggests that the story told by the narrator of “The Calmative” might have a calming effect because it too can resolve. Looking at the mythic narrative forms discussed above we see that these each have that possibility of reaching a positive ending; a fall can be redeemed, a journey can be returned from, a story told as if in the past can ideally reach the present. The narrator hopes that by telling a mythic story he can reach the calm of a definitive ending.

Another calming element of this mythic form of storytelling is suggested in “The Calmative” by looking at what specifically in his father’s story calms the narrator. It is not enough that his father tell him the story, but it has to be read “evening after evening” (Beckett, 30), without missing a single word or picture. What is calming in this story is its repetition, its familiarity. In “Texts for Nothing” the narrator says that he is “all ears for the old stories” (Beckett, 78); what makes his father’s story familiar, and consequently his own, is that they can draw on the repetition of familiar elements throughout the history of literature and myth. It is calming for the narrator to cast himself in the role of Dante or Christ because he knows these stories, and in them he can hope to find a similar ending for his own. The pictures in the story of Joe Breem, or Breen were already pictures of the narrator. By identifying with these “supernatural,” or at least heroic, literary beings from his cultural tradition, it appears that Beckett’s narrator may indeed be telling a myth in the full scope of Eliade’s definition. Telling his story as if it was a myth allows the narrator the calming effect of existing within an established cultural narrative.

But, having chosen to tell his story in this particular form, what makes a mythic narrative more calming for the narrator than a story set in modern times? What makes him long “for the tender nonesuch” (Beckett, 41), and for the shade of his wood far from the terrible light of the city? Though the narrator attempts to tell his story as if it were in another age, he admits that what he tells “this evening is passing this evening, at this passing hour” (Beckett, 28). He lives in the modern present, where “houses and factories darken the air, trams go by, and under your feet wet from the grass there are suddenly cobbles” (Beckett, 28). If a story set in the past is calming because it can hope to reach towards and explain the present, the present must be anxiety provoking because it can only continue moving forward without allowing the narrator to rest in a specific point in time. With the “scarcity of passers-by” and the “extraordinary light shed by the streetlamps” (Beckett, 38), the narrator is left to ask everyone he encounters what time it is, as if being able to fix himself in a specific moment will calm him. But when he finally is told a time it leaves him just as anxious as before. Even his father’s greatcoat, which would fix his story in the 1900s, has become a sleeveless cloak, perhaps indistinguishable from those worn throughout the ages.

The anxiety causing and alienating effects of modernity echo throughout “The Calmative.” The trams and busses run “as if underwater” (Beckett, 31), the houses and factories, even the people lurking behind their windows are described as if in a dream. Like in his fruitless quest to determine what time it is, the narrator describes these elements of modern life as being unrecognizable, unfamiliar and thus unsettling. Mythic narratives can be calming by presenting a repetition of familiar scenes and characters, but a modern story can only present the nameless goatherd and salesman, people sunk into themselves and all moving in the same direction. Even more unsettling is the narrator’s inability to locate the Shepherd’s Gate and constellation of the Bears. Without these recognizable, mythic elements, the narrator is unable to find his way out of the modern city into the calm of a familiar story. Though the narrator attempts to place himself in the woods of the chronicler d’Aubigné, or the posture of the poet Walther, no element of a modern story can replicate the familiarity of a literary tradition. It is only with the passage of time that stories become culturally accepted, and so the narrator is left to wander through a story that even he is not yet sure how it will end.

The strongest blow to the possibility of a calming modern story is its inability to achieve the structure of myth (though perhaps this also signals the narrator’s inability to tell his story as if it were a myth). The story does not have a recognizable beginning, instead of setting forth the narrator suddenly finds himself in a wood in which “no trace remained” (Beckett, 28) of his previous passage. Nor is there a struggle or initiation. The narrator says, “this evening something has to happen… as in myth and metamorphosis” (Beckett, 29-30), but despite his attempted interactions with the other characters no real heroic action takes place that might calm him. Even when the salesman grabs him the narrator claims that nothing has changed, and he wanders on looking for his moment of redemption.

As for a narrative return, the story “ends” with the narrator still wandering lost through the city. This lack of resolve can be taken as symptomatic of modern stories, because the present still continues to move forward without foreseeable end. In contrast to the contained form of the myth, Beckett presents us with what might be considered a definition of a modern story: the salesman’s story of a life that is “brief and dense, facts, without comment” (Beckett, 40). Though the narrator finds this story almost fairy-like in places the salesman corrects his mistake by explaining that he left his lover Pauline, who will only grow old and die. We do not find here the happy ending of a comedy, such as that ascribed to the story of Joe Breem, or Breen. There is no typical comedic ending of a wedding; there is no rebirth, no happily-ever-after. In this modern story of a life there is only divorce and then death.

Of course, for the narrator of “The Calmative,” a happy ending might be one that ends in his being able to die. But this kind of ending may only be possible in a story told through the traditionally familiar, positively resolving, and foundational elements of mythic narratives. The calming effect that the narrator seeks is otherwise unattainable in the anxiety-ridden and never-ending stories of modern life.


Works Cited

Beckett, Samuel. “The Calmative” and “Texts for Nothing.” Stories and Texts for Nothing. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967
Campbell, Joseph. “The Hero with a Thousand Faces.” 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968
Eliade, Mircea. “Myth and Reality.” New York: Harper & Row, 1963

Rewriting Reality

Yesterday I finished my classes for the semester, and despite the gorgeous weather drifting into the stuffy wooden room through the blue stain-glass windows, the students in my short story class were somehow excited to continue discussing the functions of literature. Debating Salman Rushdie's use of both magical realist elements and the English language in his collection "East, West" as a move towards a broader global perspective, one of my classmates asked why is any of this important to talk about, he's just a writer trying to make some money. Just a writer? Both my teacher and I had to bite our tongues, certainly one does not write in order to make money (just ask any aspiring author and many acclaimed ones). Something that we've been discussing all semester, through the writings of Poe, Kafka, Joyce, Beckett, Borges, and Rushdie, is the way in which literature can present the expectations and conventions both of literature and of life itself back to the reader, reaching for ever larger perspectives on what it means to write, to inhabit a culture, to create reality. While not explicitly addressed in class I have been debating with my classmates over what I see as being one of the most important functions of fiction: that it can create reality, if even at the very least by suggesting new and other ways of being and perceiving the world and ourselves. If there's anything I've gotten out of this semester it is the recognition that writing has the power and responsibility to shape reality.

Of course, this has also meant that I have been entirely exasperated by the current trend in American literature, which for the past fifty years has been dominated by a "quotidian realism," that is, by snarky loosers sarcastically bemoaning the inconsequentiality of their everyday lives while trying to find moments of pale truth in the arms of their ex-wives, addictions, and academic pretensions. The biggest difficulty I see in this approach to literature is that it only confirms what is base and common about real life, while utterly refusing to allow any grander emotions or events room to occur. Personally I think that while art can be a mirror held up to reality, I also agree with Bertolt Brecht that art can be a hammer with which to shape it. My biggest philosophical influences here would be Robert Anton Wilson's quote that "reality is what you can get away with," and the Hashashin mystic Hassan ibn Sabbā's apocryphal assertion that "nothing is true; everything is permitted." While realism may claim to reflect everyday life, we forget that all it does is reflect literary trends and arch/stereotypes. No story is "true" outside of being a story, and consequently, one does not have to be bound by any proscriptions against that which is not typically real or true. Take Borges' work for example, in which fictional worlds ultimately overpower conventional reality, showing that it itself is nothing but a fiction of language.

According to the structuralist critic Tzvetan Todorov in his brilliant discussion of the fantastic as a literary genre, the supernatural, or even just the hyper-real and magically real, can function in narratives to express those things that might otherwise be inexpressible, whether cultural taboos or a Daoist ineffability of reality itself. Certainly psychoanalysis has taken the modern place of saying the unsayable, so that one could today write about rather taboo subjects in a realist style, but it still does not address the more imaginative aspects of what might be possible in the world. Not that one has to include magically real elements to do this, but this function of imagination is the place at which myth and folktales function. Italo Calvino suggests the way the earliest storytellers took the elements of life around them, caves, hunting, tigers, reproduction, etc. and recombined them in all possible ways, creating both a boundary on what had been seen and done before, and the possibility of other things that hadn't and either could be desired or feared. In myth, dreams are born, and the ability for culture to advance. This process is still continuing today. The human imagination in stories has more recently created both the internet (Vernor Vinge's "True Names") and the modern totalitarian state (Orwell's "1984"). If these aren't everyday enough examples for you, consider the now ubiquitous and almost bromidic myth of the American Dream. Thousands of people believe that they can raise themselves from rags to riches, and many actually do, precisely because in the late 1800s Horatio Alger Jr. happened to write a particular kind of dime novel in which that was possible. Maybe it was possible before that, but due to his stories it seems to many to be much more possible now. I know that my own life was intimately shaped by reading certain kinds of heroic fiction as a child (what always impressed me about Anne McCaffrey's "Dragonriders of Pern" series was not a desire to actually ride dragons, but the utter integrity of her characters in the face of societal pressure and change). I can only think of the current generation of children, who in reading the "Harry Potter" series may grow up with an increased sense of the possibility of true magic. Who, on the other hand, wants to grow up to be one of the bitter anti-heroes of a tepid realism, who himself is only a a second-order shadow of the much more interesting and articulate underdog, Henry Miller?

This post is of course not meant to be an exhaustive essay on the topic of rewriting reality, it is more along the lines of a tentative aesthetic statement or a whispered call to action. I'll only briefly point people to Grant Morrison's idea of art as a hypersigil, or to Paulo Coelho's idea of the Personal Legend. Why was his book "The Alchemist" on bestseller lists for the past year? Because he is telling people quite simply that they can create and live out their own stories. And if even just one reader believes him, then he has done his job as a writer. Never doubt that you too can be living in the greatest story ever told.

Clockwork Texts

I have to admit that I often feel like some what of an impostor writing literary critiques. Not that I couldn't tell you what is going on in a given story, but as a writer I am often more interested in unveiling an author's techniques, so that I can learn to use them (or not) in my own work. I am currently working on a critique of the use of mythic narrative forms in Beckett's "The Calmative," which while interesting in what it has to say about the literary use of mythical themes, is less fascinating then what seems to have been Beckett's implicit literary goal: to point out all of the conventional expectations about how narrative works, and then roundly demolish any chance that his stories will follow these conventions. Throughout the height of his prose career in the '50s, spanning from this story across his "trilogy," Beckett routinely looks at the typical narrative devices, plot, setting, characters, action, narrative voice, and then strips them away, so that by the "Texts for Nothing" there is literally no recognizable place where these elements can exist in the text. Certainly I could try and write a paper on this authorial move, but I find myself almost fascinated by the way these works have laid literary devices bare, so that I can hardly read any piece of writing without saying, oh here's where the author is using x expected device... It is like suddenly stumbling into the backstage of writing, the pulleys and costume changes of storytelling, and I almost want to hoard these techniques like they are some occult secret. The other day I was talking with my fiction teacher about the early authorial move of apprenticing yourself to a few authors, writing your own versions of their work in order to collect a "bag of tricks" that can be later dipped into in your own writing. While I haven't ever exactly written someone else's story I am always on the look out for these mechanical underpinnings of fiction.



More recently I was reading Borges for class and in the introduction found an interesting passage which described Borges' perspective on the elements of fantastic literature, something near and dear to me in my detestation (or at least boredom) with stories of the realistically everyday. While the fantastic in art is often categorized as an emotional reaction to the super- or un-natural, where unlike magical realism where the fantastic is accepted as bieng a part of everyday life, fantastic literature maintains a sate of anxiety or wonder in the face of the more than real. An, oh god is this really happening feeling that seems to be all but avoided in modern literature. Borges on the other hand takes an entirely different look at what makes literature fantastic, suggesting four specific mechanisms: the work within the work, the contamination of reality by the dream, the voyage in time, and the double. Personally these elements are much more familiar to me from doing most of my writing from my dreams. The almost meta level symbolism in which every event, setting, object, character etc. stands for the consciousness of the protagonist, the chaotic moment when what seems like an everyday world falls apart (whether into thwartedness, false resolves, or unexplained yet emotionally vexing illogical incidents), and the reflection of scenes and symbols as if they were harmonics of themselves. Of Borges' mechanics the one most ambiguous seems to be the voyage in time, which can not just reflect the ordinary meaning of a temporal plot, but seems to suggest a larger adventure, or, a stepping outside of one's day and age within the story. Of course, one again, I could use these elements as a sort of map or template to deconstruct the writing of others, but instead they will go into my trick bag, so that someone someday may be shocked to find them in my own work.

On Being Green: St. Paddy's Day and the Degradation of Irish Culture

One year ago I found myself in one of the city's most active bar districts on Saint Patrick's Day, and was quite disgusted to see so many drunk college kids wandering around in large green lucky charms hats and shamrock beaded necklaces like it was Mardi Gras in the Emerald City. It is somewhat disheartening to think of how commercialized modern holidays have become, what I call the trinketization of celebration; there isn't one major American holiday where you can't find enormous amounts of junk decorations for sale, as if that was the only way to show one's enthusiasm for whatever given time of year, and Saint Patrick's Day certainly falls under that kitschy subset. Of course, and especially in an alcoholic town like Pittsburgh, that might be rephrased as drinketization, for Saint Patrick's Day is perhaps even more infamous for its green food-colored toll on people's livers. Certainly there is the notion that drinking is a national pastime for the Irish, but this may be due to the extreme cultural deprivations that Ireland has suffered throughout its history.



As this Cracked.com article points out, the fabled luck of the Irish may indeed be only a fable. The Irish have been routinely trounced by the vikings, British, and famine, and they have a running tally of all the political saviors who have unfortuitously died before liberating the country. Perhaps the greatest irony is Saint Patrick's Day itself. A British Roman Catholic missionary, Saint Patrick was kidnapped by Irish pirates at a young age and later returned to convert the Irish to Catholicism, perhaps as an effort at revenge. Those snakes he drove out of Ireland in legend? Those were the celtic druids and the traditional Irish culture and religion. There seems to be something highly dubious in celebrating Irish culture by those who are not Irish themselves worshipping the first person to prominently suppress it, through an excess of hangovers. If one wants to actually pay homage to Irish culture, they should probably read James Joyce's "Dubliners," which paints a fairly depressing portrait of the cultural decline suffered in Ireland at the turn of the last century. Or better yet, go visit Ireland itself and actively support their culture. When I was over there several years ago many people were bitterly complaining about how the switch to the new EU monetary system had all but wrecked their economy. I'm sure that buying a shamrock necklace that was probably made in China helps.

As someone who is actually proud of my Irish heritage, I want nothing to do with this holiday, and the closest I've come to celebrating Irish culture is in immersing myself in Beckett's fiction. Like Joyce, Beckett was an Irish native by birth who expatriated in order to help the older writer edit "Finnegan's Wake." Forsaking what Joyce has mainly described as the provincial perspective of their homeland, Beckett lived in Paris, writing his stories first in French and then translating them into English in order to avoid any Irish or English colloquialisms. Of course, unlike Joyce who still wanted to describe his native land, Beckett seems much more content to avoid describing any reality altogether, which itself is not an un-Irish pastime, as much of the Irish mythology collected by Lady Gregory and Yeats describe heroes who almost always want to get off of the island or out of their everyday lives.

Psychogeography and You

As I had mentioned in my brief raving about Beckett the other day, I am fascinated by psychogeography, that peculiar relationship between people and the spaces they inhabit. Currently I am interested in the way that fictive narratives can use setting as a reflection of a character's consciousness, but admittedly this concept only grabbed me from seeing it play out night after night in my dreams. I'm not sure what particular dream theory this falls under, but I've noticed that the locations that appear in dreams often are more expressive of my moods and psychic phenomena than they are of real places. Even real places in my dreams take on a greater significance, and it may even be possible that this same phenomena happens when we are awake.

I found a great link [via the Dream Studies Portal] to a woman charting the urban dreamscape of her life in San Francisco. While San Fran is already a dream-laden city, due to the somewhat surreal events of the '60s that still linger in the collective unconscious, it is interesting to see someone taking the psychogeographical approach and actually mapping out specific dreams onto locations in the city. There is a great article on the front page about the practice of psychogeography, what it means, how it works, and its historical roots in the Dérive of the Situationists (long aimless walks being another fascination of mine). Great food for thought for anyone who is curious about how we invest our environments with meaning.

Perhaps one of the most in depth looks at our emotional involvement in locality is Gaston Bachelard's "The Poetics of Space," which draws on Bachelard's phenomenological ideas of reverie and the imagination to suggest the intimate way our thoughts, memories, and emotions, are wrapped up in our lived experience of intimate spaces such as closets, stairwells, and seashells, though of course the same could apply to cities, landscapes, and other environments at large.

Of Books

This is a couple days old, but it seemed an interesting footnote to the whole question of Krystian Bala's murder-in-a-novel. It turns out he's not the first to fictionalize a real killing.

Published for the first time, 60 years after it was written, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs' "And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks," turns out to be an account of a murder committed by a friend of the writers who confessed to them and asked for their help to escape the law. Both Kerouac and Burroughs were arrested for it.

In other (somewhat unrelated) words, I think I may have discovered a new favorite author: Samuel Beckett. Though his play "Waiting for Godot" is now a classic, I am surprised no one has shoved one of his books into my hands before now. I had to read his short story "The Calmative" for class, and was shocked at what seems to me the most convincing narrative portrayal of dreaming. Though the character himself seems to question, and disregard, that possibility, the entire story shifts from one hazy locale to another, with a slew of significant and ghostly characters and symbols wandering through the night. Something that immediately struck me, and was confirmed through an evening of academic research, is that Beckett might employ what I consider an example of pyschogeography: the use of locations that are reflective of the narrator's consciousness more than being real places, much the way that the odd corridors and towers of dreams seem to be landscape of the internal workings of the mind.