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).
Showing posts with label Joyce. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Joyce. Show all posts
11.25.2009
10.04.2009
Mass Link Updates
It's been a while since I've posted a number of links to interesting articles that have caught my eye in my daily journeys through the internets. I often just don't have the time to say something insightful about everything that catches my eye, so the world will just have to speak for itself.
Muthos:
-Interactive Fiction Competition 09
-Submissions wanted for an anthology on The Immanence of Myth
-Fair Use copyright:1 the Estate of James Joyce:0
-Best Fiction of the Millennium so far (and critics vs. readers)
-Most challenged books of 2008 for banned book week
-Exquisite Corpse Adventure
-School of Witchcraft opens in Taiwan
-Nabokov Edits Kafka's Metamorphosis
-Horacio Castellanos Moya's Disgust with the Bolaño Myth
-Dan Brown gets D.C. all Wrong
-More youths write today than ever before
-Post-medium publishing
-Tolkien trained as British Spy
Logos:
-The Psychology of anxiety
-Religious experience linked to the social regions of the brain
-The connection between Schizophrenia and smoking
-Quantum Entanglement now visible to the naked eye
-The Decline of Polymathy and General Knowledge
-Indians find Water on the Moon
-Brain Scans closer to Revealing what we have seen
-the Sun gets its Spots back
-Cities Organized like Human Brains, and as battlesuits for surviving the future
-Earth's oldest living organism cloned
Muthos:
-Interactive Fiction Competition 09
-Submissions wanted for an anthology on The Immanence of Myth
-Fair Use copyright:1 the Estate of James Joyce:0
-Best Fiction of the Millennium so far (and critics vs. readers)
-Most challenged books of 2008 for banned book week
-Exquisite Corpse Adventure
-School of Witchcraft opens in Taiwan
-Nabokov Edits Kafka's Metamorphosis
-Horacio Castellanos Moya's Disgust with the Bolaño Myth
-Dan Brown gets D.C. all Wrong
-More youths write today than ever before
-Post-medium publishing
-Tolkien trained as British Spy
Logos:
-The Psychology of anxiety
-Religious experience linked to the social regions of the brain
-The connection between Schizophrenia and smoking
-Quantum Entanglement now visible to the naked eye
-The Decline of Polymathy and General Knowledge
-Indians find Water on the Moon
-Brain Scans closer to Revealing what we have seen
-the Sun gets its Spots back
-Cities Organized like Human Brains, and as battlesuits for surviving the future
-Earth's oldest living organism cloned
9.16.2009
Faith and the Pattern
Over the past year I have been going through an extreme crisis of faith. Due to a number of physical, emotional, and psychic challenges I found myself last winter in a state of disillusionment, that everything I had previously held to be good, desirable, possible, and expected in the world may not have been the case at all, a state close to feeling jaded, except that the crisis is precisely in trying to find some reason to carry on, to still believe: in love, the power of the human spirit, self-growth, god, some point to life as we know it, or at least a deeper understanding. But the closer I looked at any of these things the further they seemed to recede, from view, from understanding, so I was left wondering if they really existed. In centuries of the human quest for the truth and goodness we are still no closer to truth it seems, and people can be as ignorant, violent, and uncaring as they always have been, if not more so, which is rather disheartening to someone who feels they have spent their life searching for and hoping to bring these positive qualities into being. More recently I have summed up my quandary in asking, what is the point of self-growth, of struggling to improve how one is in the world, when the work is hard and there seems to be no real “reward” no incentive from society to do so (though that I take this as a valid question shows at least some will towards growing). How can I spend roughly the same amount of time writing on my novel as watching a TV show, and find the same amount of satisfaction in both? And sometimes more in the casual, indulgent activities, because they are easier? This is baffling to me. I believe that everything is real, even those things we can only imagine, but nevertheless there seems to be a primacy to the everyday, to those things, which when we pick ourselves off the floor or put down our books we still have to deal with, of which we can sigh and say, well maybe this is it. But is it? Ultimately everything is real, but some things are more real than others. Worrying about money or physical pain unfortunately feel to be some of the most real there is.
The problem, I know, is one of perspective. To say, this is it, is to presuppose that we know everything there is to know about life, enough to cast some judgment on it, when really we can know nothing with any such certainty. I am aware that the mystery of the Universe is far deeper than we can fathom. Not even the scientific method can say what is really true, either point at a position or velocity of a particle but not both, or how and why they are entangled and add up to all this. Any other human effort to value one mode of the world over another is based on subjective claims, of perception, of intuition, of faith. On some level even an atheist claims, I believe God doesn’t exist, because it is a statement that can’t be proven one way or another. For centuries scientists laughed at the notion of atoms, of forces and fields, because they couldn’t be seen, only to find that maybe they really are there, and though still unseen may be more real than this, but just as inexplicable and mystic as when the ancient Greeks first made up the story. How can I know this is just it, when my intuitions, the evidence my senses have gathered over a lifetime of searching, have suggested otherwise, if but to say, maybe it’s too hard to keep looking, no one else is really looking, not everywhere at once, and the whole edifice of Western knowledge is constructed on the basis of looking only at the visible and provable, and when confronted with a reality greater than that which can be known, it crumbles, is shown to be a charade based on the misapplication of ancient dialectical devices and assumptions: that dialectics can really tell us anything about anything, for when you point at or name something it always creates the thing it is not, and the thing neither of those are, ad nauseum, the way a proton pulled from an atomic nucleus mysteriously creates another proton in its place. This is beautiful and mysterious, but then you still have to go to work, or patch up an argument with your beloved. And there is no place to escape from that reality to, no one to turn to in our need outside this predicament. No matter what your perspective is on the world/Universe, or what you believe is our place and purpose in it, we are still within that system, like an existential Goedel’s Theorem, constrained by our physical senses and abilities and ways of knowing, and still have to find some reason to get out of bed in the morning, some small joy, and maybe the courage to choose to act as decent human beings, for ourselves and others, if we have any strength and calmness left over.
But how, and why? Because most days I feel full of rage, time slipping through the eye of it and feeling there is something more I could be doing that is the thing I really am meant to be doing, except I only have a vague, limited notion of what that is and no one has stepped down from on high to let me in on the secret plan for the Universe and my role in it. I feel a lot like the character John Locke from the show Lost, who, unlike the more reason-based characters trying to escape from the Island,, has an intuitive faith that he can and is meant to solve the labyrinthine puzzle and mystery that surrounds the place, following his gut, connecting scraps of information, seeking ever deeper in the mystery, and yet still plagued by doubts, hoping someone will tell him where to look next, constrained like the original philosopher Locke to the empiricism of believing what he can see, yet unable to explain that he has seen things beyond what most people would ever believe could be real. I relate to this and wonder how many others can. I think of my neighbor, watching sports on his big-screened TV, driving his motorcycle noisily up and down our street. He seems totally fulfilled in this, as far as I can see. There is not a question or even a need for a question of is this it.
The Presocratics (who I am studying in a class on the historical roots of science in mythology), were the first to systematically ask the questions, what is really real, can and do things change, can and what do we know? These ontological and epistemological questions are the foundation of any philosophy or metaphysics, and without before realizing that, they have also been my pivotal questions (along with that bugaboo, are we free/active agents). In answer to what is really real, they posit everything from water, to air, to numbers as the foundational substance of reality, or there is Anaximander, who believed it was the Apeiron, the unlimited storehouse of potential qualities of all things as the one underlying substance. My teacher, a younger grad student, laughed, this all seems absurd or primitive in light of our current scientific conceptions of reality, and the class all nodded. Except for me it doesn’t. For me the idea of some fount, of imagination or possibility, seems more intuitively true than the random motion of subatomic particles. In fact, it is an idea recorded in a number of different spiritual traditions: the Theosophic Akashic Records, the Sufi Scriptorum, the Hebraic Book of Life, even the Platonic Forms as an underlying reality. Is this really so absurd then, or are they all wrong? And more confounding, it is something that I have experienced, with my own senses (admittedly under a mystical trance state), but without knowing of it beforehand or expecting anything of the sort. But how could I explain this in class, in the face of the entire academic apparatus that is not about my experiences but recorded “facts?” These are two entirely different views of reality, like the conflict between Evolution and Creationism, both of which are mistaken for Truth, when they can never be anything more than descriptions, stories, metaphors for processes we can never really know anything about. Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” (reading in my class on Narrative and Technlogy), does a good job of framing this problem, n the context of a metaphysical detective story: we can either romantically-intuitively appreciate the surface aesthetic of things, or logically seek out the structures beneath them. But not both, though that is exactly what it seems we must do. That ability and desire however were lost centuries ago, when Aristotle argued down the Sophists in the forum, paving the way for Dialectical Materialism. And the world has been a cold calculating place since, lit by moments of decadence and revelry, but with no real new understanding or wisdom, meaning or faith to guide us out of this spiritual morass.
To what can we turn then, if not to our own experiences and the way we choose to pick them up in our daily lives (this division between events and our intentions or them being my definitions of fate and destiny). Are we just trapped on this island in space or do we choose to explore what being here could mean? When the stars that guided the ancients (both in sea travel and in mythic timekeeping) now begin to fade, there are still the stars in our hearts, which is the meaning of that word desire. As Crowley said, each and every one of us is a star. For most of my life I have been a proponent of a magical worldview, most clearly as spelled out in Bill Whitcomb’s Axioms, the first three of which are that reality is created from our worldviews that can be changed, that we reaffirm or change our worldviews through attention, and that seemingly disconnected events can strike us as being intricately connected, what Jung called synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence, but I call constellations of meaning, because meaning does not exist in events but in our interpretation of the relationships between them in relation to the patterns of our worldviews. Though I have actively sought out such constellations of meaning, in the last several years they have grown few and far between, a feeling I keep expressing as that always before the pattern of meanings suggested where to look next, except recently they haven’t, and everywhere has felt like a dead end, not at all that personal Eureka moment I recall first feeling reading James Joyce’s description of that Eureka moment in “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and I’ve chased after ever since. Perhaps I have stopped looking in as active or connected a manner. Or perhaps, as I fear, that though I’ve looked and connected, the net of my looking wasn’t wide enough, and the pattern or destiny I found meaningful for myself in following certain dreams and ideas is too small, is not interrelated to Reality as a whole, as was the case with the Apeiron in class. Am I crazy for having experienced something no one else has, or are they for not even considering that such things could be? So that I lost faith with any of it being meaningful. And lastly, I have been afraid, for to connect our own meanings to any larger collective meaning takes work, and forces us to confront ourselves in wholly new ways, and precisely where our old maps no longer fit the territory of actual existence.
I have come to recognize recently that my novel, and indeed my task as a creative being, is an attempt to create such interconnected maps of our experience of Reality, a daunting and seemingly impossible task (though less impossible due to our current information technologies), yet one I am driven to through whatever genetic or spiritual reasons. To this end I have to start experiencing again the world, the larger world, as synchronistically connected, however those mechanisms work, but from scratch. Because if my patterns before are what I expected to find, but clearly didn’t, then I have to forgo faith in my expectations and recreate a new pattern from nothing, from everything, but not with the certainty in thinking that Descates had in his doubting of all. And in this letting go was confronted yesterday with a number of synchronicities if not answering than at least pointing to ways out of my current crisis. I wrote a letter to my beloved discussing love in terms of encouraging another’s and our own self-growth, an idea from Peck’s “The Road Less Traveled,” and immediately after in my Wisdom class in which we are reading that book, I had to write a letter as if to a distant friend on that very subject, allowing me to better clarify my questions. Then, finishing “Zen and the Art of…” came upon a summation passage equating Pirsig’s concept of Quality (as that missing from the Western dialectical tradition) to the Presocratic Ariste, excellence or heroic virtue, virtue already being a term personally loaded with positive meaning of acting right in the world, here defined not as virtue for others but of the self, improvement and growth into what one can most be, a joy in the process that I had forgotten, also connected to the Buddhist Dharma (further constellated in relation to the mystery in Lost as well as the self-mythologizing of Kerouac). All of which left me with a big Yes! And further constellated into this essay, which before I started writing I found a blog on synchronicities, cementing the point.
But the question remains, as much as I live this and find it necessary to my life, it seems mainly like a metaphysical thought experiment, and still does not connect back to the mundane, having to work sleep, relate to other people, go the bathroom, let alone all the wars and environmental degradation and illness at large in the world. Years ago I had a chance to sit in on a Zen retreat and told the Monk that it felt like I was in a dream from which I couldn’t wake up. He said, all our ideas, knowledge, stories, expectations, these are the dream, when Reality is just this. But now I realize that what I really meant was that that just this is what feels dreamlike, or actually worse, nightmarish, when the stories and ideas would be much more wonderful if they were that primarily real. I may find joy in contemplating quantum entanglement or synchronicity, but I see my friends struggling daily to find jobs or housing, getting robbed, sick, or mentally ill, and I wonder, why is that more real? Why am I not satisfied with it, except for perhaps being raised with some religious notion of an afterlife that has crushed me on idealism and hope for more? I understand that I am in a way very privileged to be able to even ask these questions. I have a steady job, a home, friends and family and fairly good health, I was raised with an education of intelligence, creativity, and faith, and questioning. Many do not have this, or if they did they got bogged down in the tribulations of the everyday, or just don’t care. I doubt for instance that my neighbor, if he were to take time away from his TV and motortoys, would he feel inclined to ask any of this? The meaning of his everyday life and material possessions seems to be enough for him (if they really are). Does he not want to spiritually grow, or is that process different for each person? Who can answer any of this? I on the other hand do not feel like I have a choice; even at my poorest and most downtrodden I have always felt the urge and made the time to ask these questions. I suspect that, being raised to have a capacity and willingness towards belief, but always questioning the presumed things one might believe in, it is like this large, too large hole that no material thing and few non-material things have ever come close to filling, or even fitting into, that leaves me with this internal tension, a spiritual angst like a spring about to burst, that might only find ease with ordering the whole reality in myself, and then what of everything out of reality? And then what of still having to live, and share this with others? It is as if, what are these questions for if they cannot be interconnected and applied in our daily lives, for everyone’s lives? What god is a map or pattern if other people can’t follow it somewhere they want to go? That I do not know, and only raises further questions. As Rilke put it, the pattern grows more intricate and subtle & being swept along is no longer enough.
The problem, I know, is one of perspective. To say, this is it, is to presuppose that we know everything there is to know about life, enough to cast some judgment on it, when really we can know nothing with any such certainty. I am aware that the mystery of the Universe is far deeper than we can fathom. Not even the scientific method can say what is really true, either point at a position or velocity of a particle but not both, or how and why they are entangled and add up to all this. Any other human effort to value one mode of the world over another is based on subjective claims, of perception, of intuition, of faith. On some level even an atheist claims, I believe God doesn’t exist, because it is a statement that can’t be proven one way or another. For centuries scientists laughed at the notion of atoms, of forces and fields, because they couldn’t be seen, only to find that maybe they really are there, and though still unseen may be more real than this, but just as inexplicable and mystic as when the ancient Greeks first made up the story. How can I know this is just it, when my intuitions, the evidence my senses have gathered over a lifetime of searching, have suggested otherwise, if but to say, maybe it’s too hard to keep looking, no one else is really looking, not everywhere at once, and the whole edifice of Western knowledge is constructed on the basis of looking only at the visible and provable, and when confronted with a reality greater than that which can be known, it crumbles, is shown to be a charade based on the misapplication of ancient dialectical devices and assumptions: that dialectics can really tell us anything about anything, for when you point at or name something it always creates the thing it is not, and the thing neither of those are, ad nauseum, the way a proton pulled from an atomic nucleus mysteriously creates another proton in its place. This is beautiful and mysterious, but then you still have to go to work, or patch up an argument with your beloved. And there is no place to escape from that reality to, no one to turn to in our need outside this predicament. No matter what your perspective is on the world/Universe, or what you believe is our place and purpose in it, we are still within that system, like an existential Goedel’s Theorem, constrained by our physical senses and abilities and ways of knowing, and still have to find some reason to get out of bed in the morning, some small joy, and maybe the courage to choose to act as decent human beings, for ourselves and others, if we have any strength and calmness left over.
But how, and why? Because most days I feel full of rage, time slipping through the eye of it and feeling there is something more I could be doing that is the thing I really am meant to be doing, except I only have a vague, limited notion of what that is and no one has stepped down from on high to let me in on the secret plan for the Universe and my role in it. I feel a lot like the character John Locke from the show Lost, who, unlike the more reason-based characters trying to escape from the Island,, has an intuitive faith that he can and is meant to solve the labyrinthine puzzle and mystery that surrounds the place, following his gut, connecting scraps of information, seeking ever deeper in the mystery, and yet still plagued by doubts, hoping someone will tell him where to look next, constrained like the original philosopher Locke to the empiricism of believing what he can see, yet unable to explain that he has seen things beyond what most people would ever believe could be real. I relate to this and wonder how many others can. I think of my neighbor, watching sports on his big-screened TV, driving his motorcycle noisily up and down our street. He seems totally fulfilled in this, as far as I can see. There is not a question or even a need for a question of is this it.
The Presocratics (who I am studying in a class on the historical roots of science in mythology), were the first to systematically ask the questions, what is really real, can and do things change, can and what do we know? These ontological and epistemological questions are the foundation of any philosophy or metaphysics, and without before realizing that, they have also been my pivotal questions (along with that bugaboo, are we free/active agents). In answer to what is really real, they posit everything from water, to air, to numbers as the foundational substance of reality, or there is Anaximander, who believed it was the Apeiron, the unlimited storehouse of potential qualities of all things as the one underlying substance. My teacher, a younger grad student, laughed, this all seems absurd or primitive in light of our current scientific conceptions of reality, and the class all nodded. Except for me it doesn’t. For me the idea of some fount, of imagination or possibility, seems more intuitively true than the random motion of subatomic particles. In fact, it is an idea recorded in a number of different spiritual traditions: the Theosophic Akashic Records, the Sufi Scriptorum, the Hebraic Book of Life, even the Platonic Forms as an underlying reality. Is this really so absurd then, or are they all wrong? And more confounding, it is something that I have experienced, with my own senses (admittedly under a mystical trance state), but without knowing of it beforehand or expecting anything of the sort. But how could I explain this in class, in the face of the entire academic apparatus that is not about my experiences but recorded “facts?” These are two entirely different views of reality, like the conflict between Evolution and Creationism, both of which are mistaken for Truth, when they can never be anything more than descriptions, stories, metaphors for processes we can never really know anything about. Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” (reading in my class on Narrative and Technlogy), does a good job of framing this problem, n the context of a metaphysical detective story: we can either romantically-intuitively appreciate the surface aesthetic of things, or logically seek out the structures beneath them. But not both, though that is exactly what it seems we must do. That ability and desire however were lost centuries ago, when Aristotle argued down the Sophists in the forum, paving the way for Dialectical Materialism. And the world has been a cold calculating place since, lit by moments of decadence and revelry, but with no real new understanding or wisdom, meaning or faith to guide us out of this spiritual morass.
To what can we turn then, if not to our own experiences and the way we choose to pick them up in our daily lives (this division between events and our intentions or them being my definitions of fate and destiny). Are we just trapped on this island in space or do we choose to explore what being here could mean? When the stars that guided the ancients (both in sea travel and in mythic timekeeping) now begin to fade, there are still the stars in our hearts, which is the meaning of that word desire. As Crowley said, each and every one of us is a star. For most of my life I have been a proponent of a magical worldview, most clearly as spelled out in Bill Whitcomb’s Axioms, the first three of which are that reality is created from our worldviews that can be changed, that we reaffirm or change our worldviews through attention, and that seemingly disconnected events can strike us as being intricately connected, what Jung called synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence, but I call constellations of meaning, because meaning does not exist in events but in our interpretation of the relationships between them in relation to the patterns of our worldviews. Though I have actively sought out such constellations of meaning, in the last several years they have grown few and far between, a feeling I keep expressing as that always before the pattern of meanings suggested where to look next, except recently they haven’t, and everywhere has felt like a dead end, not at all that personal Eureka moment I recall first feeling reading James Joyce’s description of that Eureka moment in “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and I’ve chased after ever since. Perhaps I have stopped looking in as active or connected a manner. Or perhaps, as I fear, that though I’ve looked and connected, the net of my looking wasn’t wide enough, and the pattern or destiny I found meaningful for myself in following certain dreams and ideas is too small, is not interrelated to Reality as a whole, as was the case with the Apeiron in class. Am I crazy for having experienced something no one else has, or are they for not even considering that such things could be? So that I lost faith with any of it being meaningful. And lastly, I have been afraid, for to connect our own meanings to any larger collective meaning takes work, and forces us to confront ourselves in wholly new ways, and precisely where our old maps no longer fit the territory of actual existence.
I have come to recognize recently that my novel, and indeed my task as a creative being, is an attempt to create such interconnected maps of our experience of Reality, a daunting and seemingly impossible task (though less impossible due to our current information technologies), yet one I am driven to through whatever genetic or spiritual reasons. To this end I have to start experiencing again the world, the larger world, as synchronistically connected, however those mechanisms work, but from scratch. Because if my patterns before are what I expected to find, but clearly didn’t, then I have to forgo faith in my expectations and recreate a new pattern from nothing, from everything, but not with the certainty in thinking that Descates had in his doubting of all. And in this letting go was confronted yesterday with a number of synchronicities if not answering than at least pointing to ways out of my current crisis. I wrote a letter to my beloved discussing love in terms of encouraging another’s and our own self-growth, an idea from Peck’s “The Road Less Traveled,” and immediately after in my Wisdom class in which we are reading that book, I had to write a letter as if to a distant friend on that very subject, allowing me to better clarify my questions. Then, finishing “Zen and the Art of…” came upon a summation passage equating Pirsig’s concept of Quality (as that missing from the Western dialectical tradition) to the Presocratic Ariste, excellence or heroic virtue, virtue already being a term personally loaded with positive meaning of acting right in the world, here defined not as virtue for others but of the self, improvement and growth into what one can most be, a joy in the process that I had forgotten, also connected to the Buddhist Dharma (further constellated in relation to the mystery in Lost as well as the self-mythologizing of Kerouac). All of which left me with a big Yes! And further constellated into this essay, which before I started writing I found a blog on synchronicities, cementing the point.
But the question remains, as much as I live this and find it necessary to my life, it seems mainly like a metaphysical thought experiment, and still does not connect back to the mundane, having to work sleep, relate to other people, go the bathroom, let alone all the wars and environmental degradation and illness at large in the world. Years ago I had a chance to sit in on a Zen retreat and told the Monk that it felt like I was in a dream from which I couldn’t wake up. He said, all our ideas, knowledge, stories, expectations, these are the dream, when Reality is just this. But now I realize that what I really meant was that that just this is what feels dreamlike, or actually worse, nightmarish, when the stories and ideas would be much more wonderful if they were that primarily real. I may find joy in contemplating quantum entanglement or synchronicity, but I see my friends struggling daily to find jobs or housing, getting robbed, sick, or mentally ill, and I wonder, why is that more real? Why am I not satisfied with it, except for perhaps being raised with some religious notion of an afterlife that has crushed me on idealism and hope for more? I understand that I am in a way very privileged to be able to even ask these questions. I have a steady job, a home, friends and family and fairly good health, I was raised with an education of intelligence, creativity, and faith, and questioning. Many do not have this, or if they did they got bogged down in the tribulations of the everyday, or just don’t care. I doubt for instance that my neighbor, if he were to take time away from his TV and motortoys, would he feel inclined to ask any of this? The meaning of his everyday life and material possessions seems to be enough for him (if they really are). Does he not want to spiritually grow, or is that process different for each person? Who can answer any of this? I on the other hand do not feel like I have a choice; even at my poorest and most downtrodden I have always felt the urge and made the time to ask these questions. I suspect that, being raised to have a capacity and willingness towards belief, but always questioning the presumed things one might believe in, it is like this large, too large hole that no material thing and few non-material things have ever come close to filling, or even fitting into, that leaves me with this internal tension, a spiritual angst like a spring about to burst, that might only find ease with ordering the whole reality in myself, and then what of everything out of reality? And then what of still having to live, and share this with others? It is as if, what are these questions for if they cannot be interconnected and applied in our daily lives, for everyone’s lives? What god is a map or pattern if other people can’t follow it somewhere they want to go? That I do not know, and only raises further questions. As Rilke put it, the pattern grows more intricate and subtle & being swept along is no longer enough.
6.02.2009
Sex in the Library and the Eye of Eros
I am currently reading Lolita, as I haven't touched Nabokov before and would like to get through at least his most (in)famous works before the publication of his posthumous novel The Original of Laura. While Lolita is scandalous for its content, an aged European's ecstatic affair with a twelve-year old girl, the novel's style is perhaps the opposite of pornography: there is no mention of actual sexual acts (so far), or when they are they are couched in delicate, literary terms that apparently bore most readers, but to my mind heighten the impact of Humbert Humbert's desire.
Contrast this to recently-reviewed love letters from James Joyce to his wife Nora Barnacle, suppressed by their grandson because they contain some of the raunchiest, explicit sex acts (anal, S&M, masturbation, etc) as only a master linguist could describe them, including a fetish for farting: "It was the dirtiest fucking I ever gave you, darling. My prick was stuck up in you for hours, fucking in and out under your upturned rump. I felt your fat sweaty buttocks under my belly and say your flushed face and mad eyes. At every fuck I gave you your shameless tongue came bursting out through your lips and if I gave you a bigger stronger fuck than usual fat dirty farts came spluttering out of your backside. You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole.”
Over the winter I was working on a survey of sexual representation for an article called The Eye of Eros for my friend's sex anthology, the Living Room Handjob, an article I unfortunately never finished, that swings from the erotic symbolisms of Georges Bataille's "Story of the Eye" to philosophies of sexual perversions to paleolithic sexual cave art to the fascination of sexualized horror in the Ciudad Juárez femecides dramatized in Roberto Bolaño's "2666," showing the broad range of ways that people have expressed both their fascination and discomfort with sexual desire over history and literature:
The Eye of Eros
In 1928, Georges Bataille published “The Story of the Eye,” since considered a masterpiece of pornographic literature. In the novella, two teenage lovers embark on a series of disturbing sexual escapades, opening with the narrator watching his lover sit naked in a dish of milk and progressing through orgies and rape to the insertion of not only a bull testicle but also a human eyeball (of a priest) into the vagina of the heroine. There are conflicting critical opinions of whether or not this work classifies as pornography; Susan Sontag suggests the book is, through its juxtaposition of sex and death and recourse to the transgressive sexual narratives of the Marquis De Sade. Roland Barthes on the other hand points out the centrality and interchangeability of the sexual objects in the story: liquids of milk, blood, semen, urine, vomit, and ovoids of eggs, testicles, the sun, and the eye, suggesting instead that the coherence of the underlying metaphors moves the story away from a pornographic reading. While sex scenes and perversions abound in “The Story of the Eye,” what is most fascinating, most arousing about the text, is that the sexual images are pushed far past the point where they can be considered primarily sexual, sex is pushed beyond standing for just sex, and the reader is left with the feeling that any symbol meditated on in a sexual way can elicit similar feelings of arousal and fascination, the pleasure principle of Eros.
Biologically, human sexuality is little different from animal sexuality, in that its primary purpose is the reproduction of the species. Sex however is also pleasurable, evoking sensations of ludic play over ergic work, through foreplay, masturbation, intercourse, orgasm, and sexual fetishes or perversions. People tend to experiment with a range of sexual activities during their lives, generally settling on a few that they find most pleasurable. The philosopher Michel Foucault suggests that what activities and sensations that are considered “sexual” are culturally and historically determined, that is, what is acceptable sexually is determined by social rules of behavior and the status quo. Societies however define some sexual activities as inappropriate (wrong person, wrong activity, wrong place, etc.). These social rules are referred to as sexual morality (what can and can not be done by society's rules) and sexual norms (what is and is not expected). In the United States for example, attitudes towards premarital sex and the use of contraceptives correlate to religious beliefs and political affiliation. As Foucault points out, society defines what is considered sexually “normal,” and in order to escape this culture-bound sexuality one ought to focus on “bodies and pleasures.” But in an age of hyper, almost obsessive media depiction is it possible to only focus on pleasures and bodies outside of their attendant images and modes of representation?
Sexual perversions, or paraphilia, refer to any “powerful and persistent sexual interest other than sexual interest in copulatory or precopulatory behavior with phenotypically normal, consenting adult human partners” (that is, any sex beyond reproduction), and are described by the DSM as conditions which "are characterized by recurrent, intense sexual urges, fantasies, or behaviors that involve unusual objects, activities, or situations and cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning." Hundreds of paraphilias are listed in the DSM: exhibitionism, the recurrent urge or behavior to expose one's genitals to an unsuspecting person; fetishism, the use of inanimate objects to gain sexual excitement; pedophilia, a psychological disorder in which an adult experiences a sexual preference for prepubescent children; sexual masochism, the recurrent urge or behavior of wanting to be humiliated, beaten, bound, or otherwise made to suffer for sexual pleasure; sexual sadism, the recurrent urge or behavior involving acts in which the pain or humiliation of a person is sexually exciting; transvestic fetishism, arousal from clothing associated with members of the opposite sex; voyeurism, the recurrent urge or behavior to observe an unsuspecting person who is naked, disrobing or engaging in sexual activities. The DSM also mentions telephone scatalogia (obscene phone calls), necrophilia (corpses), partialism (exclusive focus on one part of the body), zoophilia (animals), coprophilia (feces), klismaphilia (enemas), urophilia (urine), emetophilia (vomit).
Reading a sex column like Dan Savage’s “Savage Love,” or browsing for any particular paraphilia on the internet, one almost gets the feeling that the majority of these perversions are now socially acceptable, that it is in fact straightforward, unkinky, heterosexual intercourse that is bizarre or perverse. But unless one is partial to one of these sexual fantasies, what is most likely to result in the mind on hearing of them are the images or objects associated with each perversion: the exhibitionist’s overcoat; dildos, butt plugs, and other insertable, fetishistic objects (including elongated vegetables and statuary); bondage belts, hoods, whips, chains, or soft rope and scarves; young boys talking to older teachers or priests; garter belts, underwear, and high heel shoes; and behind them all, the voyeur’s peeping eye behind a curtain. These images are such a vast part of popular culture and consciousness that it is enough to mention just one to evoke whole scenes and fantasies in an active imagination regardless of ones’ own sexual proclivities. The pleasure or fascination that results is derived from being able to see the experience, and the images of paraphilias add to the uniqueness (and thus visibility) of a sexual experience over other normal or perhaps boring sexual experiences. As such, the insertion of an eyeball into the vagina in “The Story of the Eye” becomes the ultimate fetish, the act of seeing itself sexualized, the witness of sex from the inside of the body.
But what of the body, which is perhaps the most common thing to human experience? Once unadorned, our differences are discernable by height, weight, shape, hair color, eye color, skin color, and physical age; generally the options one might find on a typical porn website, along with the previous lists of perversions. As opposed to erotica, which only uses or alludes to sexually arousing imagery, pornography is the explicit depiction of sexual subject matter with the sole intention of sexually exciting the viewer. It is important to note that it is not the sexual act itself that is pornographic but the depiction of the act. With more tolerant social attitudes towards sexual representation, an immense pornography industry has grown, using a variety of media – printed literature, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, film, video, or video game – depicting not only real human sex but also situations involving fictional, cartoon, and video game characters. Studies in 2001 put the porn industry gross at between $2.6 billion and $3.9 billion a year, and the industry is considered influential in deciding format wars in media. The weight of the porn industry, the sheer amount of naked and sexualized bodies available for perusal, has to have some effect on the way we perceive the human body. And this is not even to consider the gratuitous use of sex to sell products in advertisements. Humans are multiplied, catalogued, anonymously masturbated to, in short, objectified beyond all personal experience, pleasure, or identity.
Feminist critics generally consider pornography demeaning to women. It eroticizes the domination, humiliation, and coercion of women, reinforces sexual and cultural attitudes that are complicit in rape and sexual harassment, and contributes to the male-centered objectification of women. Other recent feminists claim that appearing in or using pornography can be explained as each individual woman's choice, and is not guided by socialization in a capitalist patriarchy. Some researchers interestingly have concluded that there is an inverse relationship between availability of porn and per capita crime rates; that an increase in pornography equates to a decrease in sex crimes. Japan for example, which is noted for its large output of rape fantasy pornography, has the lowest reported sex crime rate in the industrialized world, though some attribute this to the emphasis on a woman's "honor" in Japanese culture, which makes victims of sex crime less likely to report it. The most shocking case of sex crimes are perhaps the over 400 women who have been victims of sexual homicide over the past ten years in the town of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, which still remain unsolved. In his recently published novel, “2666,” Roberto Bolaño dramatizes these sex crimes in several hundred pages of false police reports, giving the incidental details of each victim’s discovery along with the recurring line, “the victim had been vaginally and anally raped.” Despite the horror of attempting to represent such brutal acts, the act of murder is itself never depicted, and what results is essentially a reduction of sexualized human bodies to a meaningless catalogue of names and images, albeit with the threat that someone still might find this arousing. Someone has to in order to keep committing the crimes, regardless of the amount of pornographic imagery or social sexual norms in Mexico. Perhaps what they find arousing is that they are the only one(s) who get to see the actual act and not just its aftermath. Pornographers and rapists control the lens of the modern sexual spectacle.
If bodies and pleasures have been reduced to dehumanized catalogues, how was sex seen in earlier ages? The depiction of sexual acts is as old as civilization, but the concept of pornography as understood today did not exist until the Victorian era. Previous to that time law did not stipulate looking at sexual objects or images. In some cases, specific books, engravings or image collections were censored or outlawed, but the trend to compose laws that restricted viewing of sexually explicit things in general was a Victorian construct. When large-scale excavations of Pompeii were undertaken in the 1860s, much of the erotic art of the Romans came to light, shocking the Victorians who saw themselves as the intellectual heirs of the Roman Empire. They did not know what to do with the frank depictions of sexuality, and endeavored to hide them away from everyone but upper class scholars. The Victorians’ morality and sexual conservatism is legendary, so much so that the earliest psychological analysis carried out by Sigmund Freud focused primarily on sexual repressions, conjecturing the concepts of erogenous zones, psychosexual development, and the Oedipus complex. Freud believed that all culture was essentially a response to cover up childhood sexual traumas, though later it was decided that his theories were based primarily out of his own experiences (while perhaps with a desire to shock his stiff-laced contemporaries).
What would Freud have made of the Paleolithic cave paintings and carvings that are the oldest surviving examples of erotica, much less the entire history of human civilization? The ancient Greeks painted sexual scenes onto their ceramics; many are famous for being some of the earliest depictions of same-sex relations and pederasty. The Moche of Peru in South America also sculpted explicit scenes of sex into their pottery. There has been a long tradition of erotic painting among the Eastern cultures as well. In Japan, shunga appeared in the 13th century and continued to grow in popularity until the late 19th century when photography was invented, and the erotic art of China reached its popular peak during the latter part of the Ming Dynasty. In India the Kama Sutra was written between the 1st and 6th centuries. It was intended as both an exploration of human desire, including seduction and infidelity, and a technical guide to pleasing a sexual partner within a marriage sex manual, and is still popularly read throughout the world. In Europe, starting with the Renaissance, there was a tradition of producing erotica for the amusement of the aristocracy. In the early 16th century, the text “I Modi” was a woodcut album created by the designer Giulio Romano, the engraver Marcantonio Raimondi and the poet Pietro Aretino. In 1601, Caravaggio painted the "Amor Vincit Omnia" for the collection of the Marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani. The tradition is continued by other, more modern painters, such as Fragonard, Courbet, Millet, Balthus, Picasso, Edgar Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Egon Schiele, who served time in jail and had several works destroyed by the authorities for offending turn-of-the-century Austrian mores with his depiction of nude young girls. With the 20th Century, photography became the most interesting medium for erotic art, as it made the reproduction of images democratic, rapid, and widely distributable, a trend that has only continued through film to our present media overload. It would now be much more difficult to censor or legislate sexually explicit material, despite frequent governmental attempts to do so. The history of culture is too intertwined with the history of sexual representation to pull their sweating bodies apart. And yet how did we move from the erotic appreciation of sex as beauty to the pornographic selling of sex as spectacle, and what does this human fascination with sexual imagery mean?
Contrast this to recently-reviewed love letters from James Joyce to his wife Nora Barnacle, suppressed by their grandson because they contain some of the raunchiest, explicit sex acts (anal, S&M, masturbation, etc) as only a master linguist could describe them, including a fetish for farting: "It was the dirtiest fucking I ever gave you, darling. My prick was stuck up in you for hours, fucking in and out under your upturned rump. I felt your fat sweaty buttocks under my belly and say your flushed face and mad eyes. At every fuck I gave you your shameless tongue came bursting out through your lips and if I gave you a bigger stronger fuck than usual fat dirty farts came spluttering out of your backside. You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole.”
Over the winter I was working on a survey of sexual representation for an article called The Eye of Eros for my friend's sex anthology, the Living Room Handjob, an article I unfortunately never finished, that swings from the erotic symbolisms of Georges Bataille's "Story of the Eye" to philosophies of sexual perversions to paleolithic sexual cave art to the fascination of sexualized horror in the Ciudad Juárez femecides dramatized in Roberto Bolaño's "2666," showing the broad range of ways that people have expressed both their fascination and discomfort with sexual desire over history and literature:
The Eye of Eros
In 1928, Georges Bataille published “The Story of the Eye,” since considered a masterpiece of pornographic literature. In the novella, two teenage lovers embark on a series of disturbing sexual escapades, opening with the narrator watching his lover sit naked in a dish of milk and progressing through orgies and rape to the insertion of not only a bull testicle but also a human eyeball (of a priest) into the vagina of the heroine. There are conflicting critical opinions of whether or not this work classifies as pornography; Susan Sontag suggests the book is, through its juxtaposition of sex and death and recourse to the transgressive sexual narratives of the Marquis De Sade. Roland Barthes on the other hand points out the centrality and interchangeability of the sexual objects in the story: liquids of milk, blood, semen, urine, vomit, and ovoids of eggs, testicles, the sun, and the eye, suggesting instead that the coherence of the underlying metaphors moves the story away from a pornographic reading. While sex scenes and perversions abound in “The Story of the Eye,” what is most fascinating, most arousing about the text, is that the sexual images are pushed far past the point where they can be considered primarily sexual, sex is pushed beyond standing for just sex, and the reader is left with the feeling that any symbol meditated on in a sexual way can elicit similar feelings of arousal and fascination, the pleasure principle of Eros.
Biologically, human sexuality is little different from animal sexuality, in that its primary purpose is the reproduction of the species. Sex however is also pleasurable, evoking sensations of ludic play over ergic work, through foreplay, masturbation, intercourse, orgasm, and sexual fetishes or perversions. People tend to experiment with a range of sexual activities during their lives, generally settling on a few that they find most pleasurable. The philosopher Michel Foucault suggests that what activities and sensations that are considered “sexual” are culturally and historically determined, that is, what is acceptable sexually is determined by social rules of behavior and the status quo. Societies however define some sexual activities as inappropriate (wrong person, wrong activity, wrong place, etc.). These social rules are referred to as sexual morality (what can and can not be done by society's rules) and sexual norms (what is and is not expected). In the United States for example, attitudes towards premarital sex and the use of contraceptives correlate to religious beliefs and political affiliation. As Foucault points out, society defines what is considered sexually “normal,” and in order to escape this culture-bound sexuality one ought to focus on “bodies and pleasures.” But in an age of hyper, almost obsessive media depiction is it possible to only focus on pleasures and bodies outside of their attendant images and modes of representation?
Sexual perversions, or paraphilia, refer to any “powerful and persistent sexual interest other than sexual interest in copulatory or precopulatory behavior with phenotypically normal, consenting adult human partners” (that is, any sex beyond reproduction), and are described by the DSM as conditions which "are characterized by recurrent, intense sexual urges, fantasies, or behaviors that involve unusual objects, activities, or situations and cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning." Hundreds of paraphilias are listed in the DSM: exhibitionism, the recurrent urge or behavior to expose one's genitals to an unsuspecting person; fetishism, the use of inanimate objects to gain sexual excitement; pedophilia, a psychological disorder in which an adult experiences a sexual preference for prepubescent children; sexual masochism, the recurrent urge or behavior of wanting to be humiliated, beaten, bound, or otherwise made to suffer for sexual pleasure; sexual sadism, the recurrent urge or behavior involving acts in which the pain or humiliation of a person is sexually exciting; transvestic fetishism, arousal from clothing associated with members of the opposite sex; voyeurism, the recurrent urge or behavior to observe an unsuspecting person who is naked, disrobing or engaging in sexual activities. The DSM also mentions telephone scatalogia (obscene phone calls), necrophilia (corpses), partialism (exclusive focus on one part of the body), zoophilia (animals), coprophilia (feces), klismaphilia (enemas), urophilia (urine), emetophilia (vomit).
Reading a sex column like Dan Savage’s “Savage Love,” or browsing for any particular paraphilia on the internet, one almost gets the feeling that the majority of these perversions are now socially acceptable, that it is in fact straightforward, unkinky, heterosexual intercourse that is bizarre or perverse. But unless one is partial to one of these sexual fantasies, what is most likely to result in the mind on hearing of them are the images or objects associated with each perversion: the exhibitionist’s overcoat; dildos, butt plugs, and other insertable, fetishistic objects (including elongated vegetables and statuary); bondage belts, hoods, whips, chains, or soft rope and scarves; young boys talking to older teachers or priests; garter belts, underwear, and high heel shoes; and behind them all, the voyeur’s peeping eye behind a curtain. These images are such a vast part of popular culture and consciousness that it is enough to mention just one to evoke whole scenes and fantasies in an active imagination regardless of ones’ own sexual proclivities. The pleasure or fascination that results is derived from being able to see the experience, and the images of paraphilias add to the uniqueness (and thus visibility) of a sexual experience over other normal or perhaps boring sexual experiences. As such, the insertion of an eyeball into the vagina in “The Story of the Eye” becomes the ultimate fetish, the act of seeing itself sexualized, the witness of sex from the inside of the body.
But what of the body, which is perhaps the most common thing to human experience? Once unadorned, our differences are discernable by height, weight, shape, hair color, eye color, skin color, and physical age; generally the options one might find on a typical porn website, along with the previous lists of perversions. As opposed to erotica, which only uses or alludes to sexually arousing imagery, pornography is the explicit depiction of sexual subject matter with the sole intention of sexually exciting the viewer. It is important to note that it is not the sexual act itself that is pornographic but the depiction of the act. With more tolerant social attitudes towards sexual representation, an immense pornography industry has grown, using a variety of media – printed literature, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, film, video, or video game – depicting not only real human sex but also situations involving fictional, cartoon, and video game characters. Studies in 2001 put the porn industry gross at between $2.6 billion and $3.9 billion a year, and the industry is considered influential in deciding format wars in media. The weight of the porn industry, the sheer amount of naked and sexualized bodies available for perusal, has to have some effect on the way we perceive the human body. And this is not even to consider the gratuitous use of sex to sell products in advertisements. Humans are multiplied, catalogued, anonymously masturbated to, in short, objectified beyond all personal experience, pleasure, or identity.
Feminist critics generally consider pornography demeaning to women. It eroticizes the domination, humiliation, and coercion of women, reinforces sexual and cultural attitudes that are complicit in rape and sexual harassment, and contributes to the male-centered objectification of women. Other recent feminists claim that appearing in or using pornography can be explained as each individual woman's choice, and is not guided by socialization in a capitalist patriarchy. Some researchers interestingly have concluded that there is an inverse relationship between availability of porn and per capita crime rates; that an increase in pornography equates to a decrease in sex crimes. Japan for example, which is noted for its large output of rape fantasy pornography, has the lowest reported sex crime rate in the industrialized world, though some attribute this to the emphasis on a woman's "honor" in Japanese culture, which makes victims of sex crime less likely to report it. The most shocking case of sex crimes are perhaps the over 400 women who have been victims of sexual homicide over the past ten years in the town of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, which still remain unsolved. In his recently published novel, “2666,” Roberto Bolaño dramatizes these sex crimes in several hundred pages of false police reports, giving the incidental details of each victim’s discovery along with the recurring line, “the victim had been vaginally and anally raped.” Despite the horror of attempting to represent such brutal acts, the act of murder is itself never depicted, and what results is essentially a reduction of sexualized human bodies to a meaningless catalogue of names and images, albeit with the threat that someone still might find this arousing. Someone has to in order to keep committing the crimes, regardless of the amount of pornographic imagery or social sexual norms in Mexico. Perhaps what they find arousing is that they are the only one(s) who get to see the actual act and not just its aftermath. Pornographers and rapists control the lens of the modern sexual spectacle.
If bodies and pleasures have been reduced to dehumanized catalogues, how was sex seen in earlier ages? The depiction of sexual acts is as old as civilization, but the concept of pornography as understood today did not exist until the Victorian era. Previous to that time law did not stipulate looking at sexual objects or images. In some cases, specific books, engravings or image collections were censored or outlawed, but the trend to compose laws that restricted viewing of sexually explicit things in general was a Victorian construct. When large-scale excavations of Pompeii were undertaken in the 1860s, much of the erotic art of the Romans came to light, shocking the Victorians who saw themselves as the intellectual heirs of the Roman Empire. They did not know what to do with the frank depictions of sexuality, and endeavored to hide them away from everyone but upper class scholars. The Victorians’ morality and sexual conservatism is legendary, so much so that the earliest psychological analysis carried out by Sigmund Freud focused primarily on sexual repressions, conjecturing the concepts of erogenous zones, psychosexual development, and the Oedipus complex. Freud believed that all culture was essentially a response to cover up childhood sexual traumas, though later it was decided that his theories were based primarily out of his own experiences (while perhaps with a desire to shock his stiff-laced contemporaries).
What would Freud have made of the Paleolithic cave paintings and carvings that are the oldest surviving examples of erotica, much less the entire history of human civilization? The ancient Greeks painted sexual scenes onto their ceramics; many are famous for being some of the earliest depictions of same-sex relations and pederasty. The Moche of Peru in South America also sculpted explicit scenes of sex into their pottery. There has been a long tradition of erotic painting among the Eastern cultures as well. In Japan, shunga appeared in the 13th century and continued to grow in popularity until the late 19th century when photography was invented, and the erotic art of China reached its popular peak during the latter part of the Ming Dynasty. In India the Kama Sutra was written between the 1st and 6th centuries. It was intended as both an exploration of human desire, including seduction and infidelity, and a technical guide to pleasing a sexual partner within a marriage sex manual, and is still popularly read throughout the world. In Europe, starting with the Renaissance, there was a tradition of producing erotica for the amusement of the aristocracy. In the early 16th century, the text “I Modi” was a woodcut album created by the designer Giulio Romano, the engraver Marcantonio Raimondi and the poet Pietro Aretino. In 1601, Caravaggio painted the "Amor Vincit Omnia" for the collection of the Marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani. The tradition is continued by other, more modern painters, such as Fragonard, Courbet, Millet, Balthus, Picasso, Edgar Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Egon Schiele, who served time in jail and had several works destroyed by the authorities for offending turn-of-the-century Austrian mores with his depiction of nude young girls. With the 20th Century, photography became the most interesting medium for erotic art, as it made the reproduction of images democratic, rapid, and widely distributable, a trend that has only continued through film to our present media overload. It would now be much more difficult to censor or legislate sexually explicit material, despite frequent governmental attempts to do so. The history of culture is too intertwined with the history of sexual representation to pull their sweating bodies apart. And yet how did we move from the erotic appreciation of sex as beauty to the pornographic selling of sex as spectacle, and what does this human fascination with sexual imagery mean?
11.18.2008
Place Names as Reality Effect in Joyce's “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”
Place Names as Reality Effect in Joyce's “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”
While it is tempting to read James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" purely in terms of the spiritual and artistic growth of its main character, it is also profitable to look at the way in which Joyce uses details to construct the reality of the world of his novel. In his essay, “The Reality Effect,” Roland Barthes argues that authors include incidental details – details that don’t add to plot, character development, or atmosphere – which indicate the reality of the story in which they are deployed. While Barthes’ argument is primarily applied to Realist authors, the inclusion of seemingly insignificant details in a modern text, such as the use of specific place names in “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” can also produce this ‘reality effect,’ while raising questions as to whether these kinds of detail in Joyce’s novel are actually incidental.
One of the most obvious uses of specific detail in Joyce’s novel is the inclusion of place names in the text. Throughout the book the protagonist Stephen Dedalus goes on numerous walks through Dublin and its environs, where the story is set: “Along the Goatstown road and thence into Dundrum,” or, “from the door of Byron’s publichouse to the gate of Clontarf Chapel” (Joyce, 64 and 128). It is arguable that if the novel focused solely on the apotheosis of Stephen’s character, these specific place names would be incidental to both plot and character. Their inclusion primarily sets the story in a reality – that of the recognizable and historically accurate Ireland – and as such produces Barthes’ ‘reality effect.’
To say that this use of place names is incidental however seems to evade the fact that the novel is essentially a working out of the protagonist’s perspective in relation to the reality in which he exists. That the place names set the novel in a ‘real’ Ireland is not insignificant to the plot, as Stephen is trying to grapple with the nets of Irish “nationality, language, religion” (Joyce, 220). The place names make the references to Parnellian politics, the revival of the Gaelic tongue, and the intricacies of Irish Catholicism more specific and valid for the character. For example, “the name of [Maple’s Hotel]… stung him like a glance of polite disdain. He stared angrily back at the softly lit drawingroom of the hotel in which he imagined the sleek lives of the patricians of Ireland housed in calm” (Joyce, 258). Without these specific locations, it might be easier to read this story as taking place anywhere, but in doing so we would miss the way in which Stephen’s character is driven by his specific culture.
We furthermore see that Stephen has a fascination with language throughout the novel: “We are in Cork, in Ireland. Cork is a city. Our room is in the Victoria Hotel. Victoria and Stephen and Simon. Simon and Stephen and Victoria. Names” (Joyce, 98). It is essential to the protagonist’s development into a writer that he pays attention to names in this way. As he later suggests in his aesthetic theory, “that is beautiful the apprehension of which pleases” (Joyce, 225), and as such, the apprehension of specific place names adds to this artistic aspect of Stephen’s character. He is the kind of character who finds names and language beautiful, or at least worth attending to.
There is another, brief passage that illuminates a third way in which the use of place names in “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” is intimately related to the character and structure of the story. In an aside, Stephen remarks that his friend Cranly has a “way of remembering thoughts in connection with places” (Joyce, 267). Place names do not just serve as cultural or aesthetic signs, but are also markers for memory and association. As the novel is directly concerned with Stephen’s associations, it is possible to take the inclusion of specific places in the story as a structure on which the events of Stephen’s life are hung.
This connection between location and personal association furthermore suggests an identification between the character and specific places, as when Stephen remarks in his journal: “Crossing Stephen’s, that is, my green” (Joyce, 271), identifying himself with the actual Stephen’s Green. From a young boy living in Ireland but feeling culturally separate from it, Stephen is able to identify with his country through specific place names to the extent that he feels “the thoughts and desires of the race to which he belonged flitting like bats, across the dark country lanes” (Joyce, 259). This identification with Ireland, as a real place full of memories and associations, ultimately allows Stephen to both leave the country and begin creating the conscience of his race, a conscience that that is born nowhere but in the specific setting of Ireland. So though Joyce’s use of place names does at some basic level create Barthes’ ‘reality effect,’ this specific kind of detail is crucial to the development of plot and character through the story, and as such is hardly what Barthes might call incidental.
While it is tempting to read James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" purely in terms of the spiritual and artistic growth of its main character, it is also profitable to look at the way in which Joyce uses details to construct the reality of the world of his novel. In his essay, “The Reality Effect,” Roland Barthes argues that authors include incidental details – details that don’t add to plot, character development, or atmosphere – which indicate the reality of the story in which they are deployed. While Barthes’ argument is primarily applied to Realist authors, the inclusion of seemingly insignificant details in a modern text, such as the use of specific place names in “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” can also produce this ‘reality effect,’ while raising questions as to whether these kinds of detail in Joyce’s novel are actually incidental.
One of the most obvious uses of specific detail in Joyce’s novel is the inclusion of place names in the text. Throughout the book the protagonist Stephen Dedalus goes on numerous walks through Dublin and its environs, where the story is set: “Along the Goatstown road and thence into Dundrum,” or, “from the door of Byron’s publichouse to the gate of Clontarf Chapel” (Joyce, 64 and 128). It is arguable that if the novel focused solely on the apotheosis of Stephen’s character, these specific place names would be incidental to both plot and character. Their inclusion primarily sets the story in a reality – that of the recognizable and historically accurate Ireland – and as such produces Barthes’ ‘reality effect.’
To say that this use of place names is incidental however seems to evade the fact that the novel is essentially a working out of the protagonist’s perspective in relation to the reality in which he exists. That the place names set the novel in a ‘real’ Ireland is not insignificant to the plot, as Stephen is trying to grapple with the nets of Irish “nationality, language, religion” (Joyce, 220). The place names make the references to Parnellian politics, the revival of the Gaelic tongue, and the intricacies of Irish Catholicism more specific and valid for the character. For example, “the name of [Maple’s Hotel]… stung him like a glance of polite disdain. He stared angrily back at the softly lit drawingroom of the hotel in which he imagined the sleek lives of the patricians of Ireland housed in calm” (Joyce, 258). Without these specific locations, it might be easier to read this story as taking place anywhere, but in doing so we would miss the way in which Stephen’s character is driven by his specific culture.
We furthermore see that Stephen has a fascination with language throughout the novel: “We are in Cork, in Ireland. Cork is a city. Our room is in the Victoria Hotel. Victoria and Stephen and Simon. Simon and Stephen and Victoria. Names” (Joyce, 98). It is essential to the protagonist’s development into a writer that he pays attention to names in this way. As he later suggests in his aesthetic theory, “that is beautiful the apprehension of which pleases” (Joyce, 225), and as such, the apprehension of specific place names adds to this artistic aspect of Stephen’s character. He is the kind of character who finds names and language beautiful, or at least worth attending to.
There is another, brief passage that illuminates a third way in which the use of place names in “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” is intimately related to the character and structure of the story. In an aside, Stephen remarks that his friend Cranly has a “way of remembering thoughts in connection with places” (Joyce, 267). Place names do not just serve as cultural or aesthetic signs, but are also markers for memory and association. As the novel is directly concerned with Stephen’s associations, it is possible to take the inclusion of specific places in the story as a structure on which the events of Stephen’s life are hung.
This connection between location and personal association furthermore suggests an identification between the character and specific places, as when Stephen remarks in his journal: “Crossing Stephen’s, that is, my green” (Joyce, 271), identifying himself with the actual Stephen’s Green. From a young boy living in Ireland but feeling culturally separate from it, Stephen is able to identify with his country through specific place names to the extent that he feels “the thoughts and desires of the race to which he belonged flitting like bats, across the dark country lanes” (Joyce, 259). This identification with Ireland, as a real place full of memories and associations, ultimately allows Stephen to both leave the country and begin creating the conscience of his race, a conscience that that is born nowhere but in the specific setting of Ireland. So though Joyce’s use of place names does at some basic level create Barthes’ ‘reality effect,’ this specific kind of detail is crucial to the development of plot and character through the story, and as such is hardly what Barthes might call incidental.
11.17.2008
The Unsayable
As a writer, or more generally an artist, something that has become increasingly more important to me is the ability, desire, or perhaps necessity to express the inexpressible, to represent in some form those situations, characters, feelings, or ideas that either defy representation, or are shades of experience that others have not found ways of representing before. Heidegger, I believe, discussed experience or perception as being similar to driving over the surface of the world, that is, one can only or most readily articulate the outermost (or perhaps innermost) layer of reality. I take it for certain that many deep and true things have been said in the past, that language has been used in innumerable ways, that any subject has been discussed, any combination has been to some degree tried out (one only has to turn to Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake” for illustration of that). But I also resent how much schlock and ironic, surface content is thrown around these days, how easy it is to not have the courage to face the unfathomable in one’s self and in the world. A fellow student in my fiction class told me that he once wrote a story putting in a lot of himself and his real feelings and decided that it was so intense that he’d rather not do it again. I fear it’s indicative of our age.
And yet, as far as one can or chooses to push words, music, and visions, it seems that there will always be something more that is left unexpressed; that any art is ultimately a medium, a mediation of a reality that is still immediate and sensorially complete, and more, carrying in every moment associations to memory and imagination, references to culture and history, and gods know what else besides. Emotions, thoughts, sensations, intentions. And even then, if one where able to accurately convey all these modes of perspective, there still remains some ineffable and overwhelming quality, the spirit or life-ness of reality that has not yet come across through any artifice. Though one can come closer, through pushing ones’ perspectives and means of expression. Freud and other psychologists have called this inexpressibleness the ‘uncanny,’ or, by the religious theorist Rudolf Otto, the ‘numinous’. It reveals itself in what is weird, non-rational, fascinating, and terrifying, in the unexpected, unprecedented, and juxtaposed. It is processed in dreams, prayed to in religious rituals, and approached tentatively through an artist’s imagination and vision. Some have called it God but I think that’s just a symbol and it’s something else entirely, something wholly other than the surfaces we say it is.
For a visceral example take the body. For many the body as material is the surface, what it looks like, what’s on it, or the mass, the weight. For those trained to see it otherwise, like doctors, the body is series of elaborate processes, organs, meat, hidden beneath the outward skin. But how often do we have a total lived sense of this (excepting of course moments of illness and malfunction), on an aesthetic or even spiritual level? Or apply it outwards to the rest of the world? One of the most intense and inexpressible moments for me of this sort was not religious or drug-induced, but was the result of seeing the Bodyworlds exhibit several years back: the plasticization of human bodies and organ systems and parts of bodies, all splayed open in exact form, some refracted or expanded to bizarre, inhuman proportions. And yet all still recognizably human, still recognizably my form. One was split down the middle and folded open so that he was standing in two place at once, and I felt my own body trying to physically know what that felt like. I left acutely aware of my every organ, of every living layer within me, and when I walked out into the city and looked around I was just as aware of the insides of every other thing: the trees, machines, animals, building, the air itself even. It was awe-inspiring in such a way that I still don’t know if I’ve gotten it across.
Or on the other hand there are the psychological approaches toward memory and emotion, therapy or artistic transmutation. You could spend a lifetime tracing out the symbols and associations of your individual psyche, and still there might be some part of what makes you tick that you can’t quite lay your finger on. Or perhaps you begin to recognize feelings that you’ve never felt before and can’t yet explain. I am currently working on a story which the character goes through a transformation of a wide spectrum of emotions, and in doing so I am forced to similarly process my own emotions towards an emotional perspective that I know I’ve never felt before and certainly don’t yet know how to express. Several of my friends and classmates have asked why I am writing this piece if it is such an intense and inexplicable process, to which my response has invariably been that this is why I am writing: to experience something that hasn’t been experienced or expressed before in order to offer it up to others and the world.
And yet, as far as one can or chooses to push words, music, and visions, it seems that there will always be something more that is left unexpressed; that any art is ultimately a medium, a mediation of a reality that is still immediate and sensorially complete, and more, carrying in every moment associations to memory and imagination, references to culture and history, and gods know what else besides. Emotions, thoughts, sensations, intentions. And even then, if one where able to accurately convey all these modes of perspective, there still remains some ineffable and overwhelming quality, the spirit or life-ness of reality that has not yet come across through any artifice. Though one can come closer, through pushing ones’ perspectives and means of expression. Freud and other psychologists have called this inexpressibleness the ‘uncanny,’ or, by the religious theorist Rudolf Otto, the ‘numinous’. It reveals itself in what is weird, non-rational, fascinating, and terrifying, in the unexpected, unprecedented, and juxtaposed. It is processed in dreams, prayed to in religious rituals, and approached tentatively through an artist’s imagination and vision. Some have called it God but I think that’s just a symbol and it’s something else entirely, something wholly other than the surfaces we say it is.
For a visceral example take the body. For many the body as material is the surface, what it looks like, what’s on it, or the mass, the weight. For those trained to see it otherwise, like doctors, the body is series of elaborate processes, organs, meat, hidden beneath the outward skin. But how often do we have a total lived sense of this (excepting of course moments of illness and malfunction), on an aesthetic or even spiritual level? Or apply it outwards to the rest of the world? One of the most intense and inexpressible moments for me of this sort was not religious or drug-induced, but was the result of seeing the Bodyworlds exhibit several years back: the plasticization of human bodies and organ systems and parts of bodies, all splayed open in exact form, some refracted or expanded to bizarre, inhuman proportions. And yet all still recognizably human, still recognizably my form. One was split down the middle and folded open so that he was standing in two place at once, and I felt my own body trying to physically know what that felt like. I left acutely aware of my every organ, of every living layer within me, and when I walked out into the city and looked around I was just as aware of the insides of every other thing: the trees, machines, animals, building, the air itself even. It was awe-inspiring in such a way that I still don’t know if I’ve gotten it across.
Or on the other hand there are the psychological approaches toward memory and emotion, therapy or artistic transmutation. You could spend a lifetime tracing out the symbols and associations of your individual psyche, and still there might be some part of what makes you tick that you can’t quite lay your finger on. Or perhaps you begin to recognize feelings that you’ve never felt before and can’t yet explain. I am currently working on a story which the character goes through a transformation of a wide spectrum of emotions, and in doing so I am forced to similarly process my own emotions towards an emotional perspective that I know I’ve never felt before and certainly don’t yet know how to express. Several of my friends and classmates have asked why I am writing this piece if it is such an intense and inexplicable process, to which my response has invariably been that this is why I am writing: to experience something that hasn’t been experienced or expressed before in order to offer it up to others and the world.
11.16.2008
Snowy Day Update
I realize I haven't been posting here in a while, not once all October! School's been rather consuming this semester, as has my writing (not just the storytelling but notes on aesthetic and spiritual systems and the use of fiction as a tool for processing the emotions, but more on that later perhaps), and as always my personal life seems to take more precedence. It also doesn't help that I no longer have home internet access, though I find I'm now getting more done with myself, which is a blessing. Except for when I pick up a stray wireless signal.
Anyway here are some links for your perusal:
The life and work of James Joyce explained
The life and work of Joseph Campbell
Big Dreams and Archetypal Visions
The Future of Science Fiction
Obama on Faith
"I believe that there are many paths to the same place, and that is a belief that there is a higher power, a belief that we are connected as a people. That there are values that transcend race or culture, that move us forward, and there's an obligation for all of us individually as well as collectively to take responsibility to make those values lived." - Barack Obama
9.25.2008
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.
9.07.2008
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.
7.21.2008
Rabbi unveils the reversible name and gender of God
"Rabbi Mark Sameth contends in a soon-to-be-published article that the four-letter Hebrew name for God - held by Jewish tradition to be unpronounceable since the year 70 - should actually be read in reverse. When the four letters are flipped, he says, the new name makes the sounds of the Hebrew words for "he" and "she." God thus becomes a dual-gendered deity, bringing together all the male and female energy in the universe, the yin and the yang that have divided the sexes from Adam and Eve to Homer and Marge.
"The Hebrew name of God that is known as the Tetragrammaton - the four letters Yud-Hay-Vov-Hay - appears 6,823 times in the Hebrew Bible. Since early Hebrew script included no vowels, the pronunciation of the name was known by those who heard it. According to Sameth's footnotes, the name was said only by priests after the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE. After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, the name was no longer said and the pronunciation lost.
"Sameth doesn't believe that he has stumbled on a previously unknown understanding of God's name, but that he has been able to connect the dots in a fresh way. Those who find meaning in his work, he said, may encounter a different understanding of God that is comforting to feminists and those on many spiritual journeys. They may also read the Torah differently. "If this interpretation is correct, it says that the Torah is a mystical or esoteric text," he said. "The mystics have been saying all these years that the text conceals more than it reveals. It is structured with different levels of meaning and reveals itself over time. We're talking about one tradition that goes all the way back."
"Sameth has shared his image of a dual-gendered God with the seventh- and eighth-graders he teaches at his synagogue. He said they've been very receptive, which isn't surprising because they are growing up in a post-modern age. "As post-moderns, we've been conditioned to a different relationship with language," he said. "That's why there is all this interest now in Jewish mysticism." He wonders how, 2,000 years from now, people will understand the final chapter of "Ulysses," which includes no punctuation. Will they try to add punctuation, believing that it's been lost? Or will they grasp that James Joyce knew what he was doing? "Joyce was playing with language, using language to play with the medium," Sameth said. "And the Torah isn't just about Noah taking the animals, twosies by twosies. If that's what the Torah was all about, how could it have captivated Western civilization for 3,000 years? There had to be more."
"The Hebrew name of God that is known as the Tetragrammaton - the four letters Yud-Hay-Vov-Hay - appears 6,823 times in the Hebrew Bible. Since early Hebrew script included no vowels, the pronunciation of the name was known by those who heard it. According to Sameth's footnotes, the name was said only by priests after the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE. After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, the name was no longer said and the pronunciation lost."Sameth doesn't believe that he has stumbled on a previously unknown understanding of God's name, but that he has been able to connect the dots in a fresh way. Those who find meaning in his work, he said, may encounter a different understanding of God that is comforting to feminists and those on many spiritual journeys. They may also read the Torah differently. "If this interpretation is correct, it says that the Torah is a mystical or esoteric text," he said. "The mystics have been saying all these years that the text conceals more than it reveals. It is structured with different levels of meaning and reveals itself over time. We're talking about one tradition that goes all the way back."
"Sameth has shared his image of a dual-gendered God with the seventh- and eighth-graders he teaches at his synagogue. He said they've been very receptive, which isn't surprising because they are growing up in a post-modern age. "As post-moderns, we've been conditioned to a different relationship with language," he said. "That's why there is all this interest now in Jewish mysticism." He wonders how, 2,000 years from now, people will understand the final chapter of "Ulysses," which includes no punctuation. Will they try to add punctuation, believing that it's been lost? Or will they grasp that James Joyce knew what he was doing? "Joyce was playing with language, using language to play with the medium," Sameth said. "And the Torah isn't just about Noah taking the animals, twosies by twosies. If that's what the Torah was all about, how could it have captivated Western civilization for 3,000 years? There had to be more."
6.22.2008
"to wound the autumnal city"
Early thursday morning I took the train down to Virginia for various family occasions (littlest brother graduating high school, parents' 40th anniversary, father's 60th birthday, helping them pack to move to a new home). I spent most of the trip looking out the windows, listening to the new Sigur Ros and Bill Frisell albums (along with several symphonies), and reading what is now one of my favorite books, "Dhalgren" by Samuel R. Delaney. Written in the 60s it reads like a sci-fi Pynchon or Joyce, about a mid-western city where some mysterious catastrophe took place and into which people arrive, looking for freedom. Many reviews tout the book's labyrinthine incomprehensibility along with its almost shocking questioning of issues of race, gender, and sexuality, which are certainly more than enough reason for anyone to pick up this tome. What really impressed me however were the masterful use of psychogeography and the fantastic, which rarely get enough play in modern literature. The entire city in the book shifts to correspond with the characters' moods and emotions, especially with the nameless protagonist, who thinks he is going mad. This plays into the element of the fantastic, in the sense used by the critic Todorov- that a potentially un- or hyper-real situation is presented and then doubts are established in the character and readers' minds (madness, dreams, drugs, etc) as to whether the event was real or just a fault of perception. I haven't finished it yet, so I'm not sure whether he will reveal just what happened to the city (I hope he doesn't!), but combined with its stellar discussions on artistic meaning and viscerally rendered sex scenes, "Dhalgren" is one of the most enjoyable, epic, and important books I've ever read. (Ironically enough it was hated within the sci-fi community, especially by Philip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison...which I suppose says something about its attempt to rise out of the genre).
While sorting through boxes to make more room to pack, I came across several fun books, a bestiary by T.H. White, a novel by Lord Dunsany and another by H.G. Wells, and a collection of literary ghost stories by many of the famous sci-fi and fantasy writers that should be a scream to flip through. I also just found (via Neil Gaiman's blog), that for its 85th anniversary issue Weird Tales magazine has released a list of the 85 weirdest storytellers of the past 85 years, including not just the expected authors but a wide selection of musicians, directors, and artists as well (Delaney is on the list for "Dhalgren"). It's a goldmine for anyone interested in the outré and peculiar, especially since they set up a permanent page for readers to share their own selection of weird storytellers, which I imagine will quickly become a rather interesting resource.
While sorting through boxes to make more room to pack, I came across several fun books, a bestiary by T.H. White, a novel by Lord Dunsany and another by H.G. Wells, and a collection of literary ghost stories by many of the famous sci-fi and fantasy writers that should be a scream to flip through. I also just found (via Neil Gaiman's blog), that for its 85th anniversary issue Weird Tales magazine has released a list of the 85 weirdest storytellers of the past 85 years, including not just the expected authors but a wide selection of musicians, directors, and artists as well (Delaney is on the list for "Dhalgren"). It's a goldmine for anyone interested in the outré and peculiar, especially since they set up a permanent page for readers to share their own selection of weird storytellers, which I imagine will quickly become a rather interesting resource.
5.20.2008
When the Cosmic Clock Strikes
Having friends who have been fascinated by the modern resurgence of Mayan cosmology for the past decade, it has been rather interesting watching the hype growing around the year 2012 as a potential doomsday,, a cosmic awakening, or just another catastrophic letdown. While people are quick to jump to apocalypses whenever any ending is in sight, such as the end of centuries (and we all know how the world ended with Y2K), it seems important to keep in mind that what is essentially at stake is the end of a calendar cycle, much like midnight or new years, but on the scale of planetary revolutions. 
While it seems that the Mayans may not have predicted anything specific happening on December 21st of that swiftly approaching year, it is important to remember that people have a tendency to fulfill their own prophecies in any way possible. Though the ending of the solar year does not currently signal the end of the world, for centuries it did- cultures such as that of ancient Mesopotamia reenacted the destruction and recreation of reality on the new years, in elaborate, orgiastic festivals in which law was held at bay and chaos ruled, at least until tomorrow. Likewise it is possible that though no apocalyptic or revelatory event was predicted by the ancient Mayans, there is nothing to stop modern man from acting like it was, and putting on the kind of elaborate, psychotic dramas we're known for. Of course, the event of 2012 I'm most looking forward to is James Joyce's work going into the public domain.
While it seems that the Mayans may not have predicted anything specific happening on December 21st of that swiftly approaching year, it is important to remember that people have a tendency to fulfill their own prophecies in any way possible. Though the ending of the solar year does not currently signal the end of the world, for centuries it did- cultures such as that of ancient Mesopotamia reenacted the destruction and recreation of reality on the new years, in elaborate, orgiastic festivals in which law was held at bay and chaos ruled, at least until tomorrow. Likewise it is possible that though no apocalyptic or revelatory event was predicted by the ancient Mayans, there is nothing to stop modern man from acting like it was, and putting on the kind of elaborate, psychotic dramas we're known for. Of course, the event of 2012 I'm most looking forward to is James Joyce's work going into the public domain.
4.30.2008
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.
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.
4.17.2008
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.
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.
3.17.2008
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.
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.
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