Ziggurat: New Yorker Story

What is the maze in Stephen O'Connor's New Yorker story, Ziggurat?

What is the Minotaur?

I resist asking for the same reasons I resist asking 'what is M Moreau in A Sentimental Education? (substitute for 'M Moreau,' any character or object in any work of Realist Fiction.) Not that the question is inappropriate. Few questions one might ask of a literary work could be more important. But everything depends on the quality--and direction--of the resistance.

In O'Connor's story there is a Minotaur. He sleeps on a pool table in what seems to be a sort of rec-room in the maze. He eats people. And dogs. Tears them into pieces and gnaws the meat from their bones. He is a very messy eater. The only other character (the only other character who doesn't become food before they have a chance to earn the distinction) is the New Girl. We don't know her name. For that matter, we don't know the Minotaur's name. Only the games the New Girl plays on the rec-room console have names: Ziggarat being the Main One.

To the Minotaur, humanity consisted of loud noises and a series of cowardly and craven acts. Running, etc. Curses, self-soiling. It was not uncommon for one human being to push another into his path, or even to slay that human being and stretch the cadaver out on the ground as an offering... None of this made any difference, of course. Wham! Crunch. Splurt. Hmm. Hmm. Tasty.

The New Girl knows this. She is aware that the Minotaur sees her as lunch. But she is too absorbed in her game. "Her shoulders shook. Her fingers twitched on the computer keys, making noises like munching rodents." Her eyes "were separated by two wrinkles that said to the Minotaur, Go away! I'm too busy for you!"

Oh, no!" the new girl said. "Oh, shit." Her smell filled his sinuses and engendered slobber. At one point, he brought his lips so close to her shoulder that he could feel his breath bounce back off her skin. Why not? he thought. Why not right now? There's not a reason in the world. But he didn't.

And there is the story. Why didn't he?

He likes the way she smells. Is confused and intrigued by her indifference. Almost like love. He follows her through the maze. She follows him through the maze. He loses track of her. Years pass. Centuries. She returns. She sleeps beside him, sleeps in his arms. He loses her again. Builds a Ziggarat (like in the game), breaks through the ceiling of the maze and finds himself in the rec-room with the pool table where it all began. He somehow finds his way to the sea, grows smaller ever smaller climbing and descending the dunes. The End.

Unlike characters in mainstream realist fiction, one can't stop here: describing the plot, the mind and motives of the characters. The story creates blanks one is impelled to fill in. What is this Minotaur? What is the Maze? Realist fiction does too, but it's easier to ignore them. Because a Minotaur is a member of the Null Set--does not exist in the real world, we think his signifigance lies elsewhere--in what he represents, something outside the Null Set. In the case of Realist Fiction, sign and signifier are pasted one over the other, as though they were the same thing. Resistance has to come from the opposite direction. It creates a maze of illusion where we wander, indifferent to the Minotaur stalking us. Interesting, I thought when I finished this story. Opposites illuminate by their difference. But where is the light here, what is it's nature and what does it illuminate?

I thought about Chekhov. Gusev's body sinking into the sea and the sky with colors without names. And how could anyone think of Gusev without remembering Billy Bud? Or the White Whale? Or Judge Holden? Or... a vast range of literary production... you don't have to turn to Kafka... for the blank that needs filling, that will not let us rest without engaging our resistance to answer the question... what is the Minotaur?

And there it is, I thought... what's wrong--not with realist fiction--but with its apologists, who want to use literature and art to point back to what they already believe--when everything that matters in art pushes us beyond, out of the maze... the endless game... vanishing into the unknown.

Tohu v'vohu

Until the first word is writen everything is possible. Speech opens outward to the unconditioned, to consequences unintended, to freedom. Not so the written word. In speech, we are like a ship with the bone in its teeth the words trailing out behind us in a widening wake soon to vansih on the surface of a restless sea, We may, of course, erase as we write, circling back to a new starting point--speaking to ourselves, as it were, but that all comes to an end the moment the page is read, and in truth, even the freedom of erasure and revision is an illusioin. Every word added to the next forecloses an infinite array of possibilities, locks you in on a course to the end.

If you set out to tell a story you quickly find that you cannot go just anywhere. The more you write the more the words take charge, reducing the writer to a mere instrument playing out theme and variation over sets of ever more determinate patterns, and yet, it is seldem clear what those patterns are; they seem to generate ghosts, shades, douplegangers eager to mislead, eager to lure the story into featureless deserts, barren wastes where it will wander hopelessly lost.

Resist the temptation to give in, to surrender to passivity. Above all, resist the safe way out, the straight and narrow path to the finish. There is no safety. No easy way to end it. The very demons that seem so threatening may hold the answer. Run from them and everything is lost. Like the fire around Busirane's castle, it is there to pass through. How else will you be able to give Amoret back her heart? ..

I tie a blindfold around my head. It's surprisingly effective. I wave my hand in front of my face and perceive a shadow image of its passing. No light leaks through from the bottom. Nothing. Perfect darkness. And yet there is this vague image of my hand; my brain, not my eyes, tracking its motion. Reminds me of a drawing class I took years ago. Wichita State University. An exercise we did. We sat facing a reflective screen. In front of us, a large pad of newsprint, in our hands, a stick of charcoal. The room had been specially prepared; blackout curtains on the windows; doors were draped so no light could seep under or around them; a single pinpoint of red light over the screen, lest we become disoriented in the five minutes or so of complete darkness while we waited for our eyes to adapt and the signal for the exercise to begin. The drawing master--Simone, I think his name was Simone--had a slide projector fitted with a mechanism that coordinated a graduated adjustment, rheostat with the lens, increasing light proportionately as the image came into focus. The projection would begin as a blur at the threshold of visibility. Over an interval of ten minutes, the light would grow brighter, the focus sharper. Unable at first to recognize anything--like peering into a thick fog on a moonless night; we were to try to represent what we saw as it developed: an exercise in pure, unmediated vision shades of light and dark creating forms with no identifiable figuration--to record the picture as it emerged. Only in the final seconds was it possible to recognize what we had been drawing. When the light was sufficient to see what our efforts had rendered on the paper a reproduction of a drawing or print would come into focus: a landscape, a still life, a photograph of a nude model. The lights would go on, and the exercise would be over.

My mind drifts back in time. I am fishing on Lake Michigan with my father in his boat. This is shortly before he will die. My parents had bought a retirement cottage not far from Grand Rapids and my mother had sent me bus fare hoping for a reconciliation. The light on the water, that silvered turquoise water, the peaks of the waves glisten in the sun--even the Voice is lulled to somnambulant slumber. I think of my mother--of that last summer, the summer before her final illness, while she is still herself--sitting on the porch--martini hour--watching the sunset over the lake, the jet skiers droning and whining like gigantic mechanized insects, a moment I wanted to go on forever. A tableaux that recedes into the distance, perceived as the light of stars that no longer exist.

That moment of perfect clarity... what happened? Where did it go? Another waking from dreamless sleep. The silence we enter but cannot bring with us, from which we emerge bearing not a trace, as though it had not happened. I listen. The room is quiet--not even the sound of passing traffic on the street. Quiet, but never silent. The mind is always moving, the endless stream of words. To fall asleep, I turn them into images, and then I dream. Of dreamless sleep we have no memory. The Voice calls from the crevice of darkness, from the gates of death and I resist. I pretend to listen, to follow where it leads but where it turns left I turn right. I close the door of the room in my house of the dead. Living with others we shore up the walls of our existence, the walls that contain us, hold us together, the waters of our being. Alone we bleed into the world, the outlines run and blur, we cannot tell where we begin and where we end. Was this what Blake feared? The absence of strong lines define the figure. What he could not abide in Rembrandt.

Why do I keep thinking about silence--a word we can know nothing about, or know only as we know death, as metaphor, surmise, the nothingness that frames the span of our life, the before and after beyond experience, experience that is always filled with signs, signs that may not speak but are never silent. I think of the silence of the woman pouring milk. It is hers, in that room before that window, in the light that caresses her, in the shadows that surround her, but it is not ours. Vermeer doesn't give us silence. He reminds us of the presence of something we cannot know. The silence is in the painting, not in us; we know it only as an absence that draws us out of ourselves, like the silence that frames the lines of a poem. We read the words, read to the end of the line, to the end of the poem and encounter there that same absence. We call it silence, but the silence is on the page, in the white spaces between the words, it is not in us. It is never ours. Never. We say that we have come from silence, as we will return to silence. But our saying this is an admission that between birth and death there is no silence. Not for single second. Look into the eyes of an animal and you will see it--the impenetrable silence we are not permitted to enter, and if we were, if we could (perhaps again, as in dreamless sleep) we would emerge (again) with no trace, no memory of where we had been, no knowledge that we had been there. Is it possible, then, that we do enter into this silence, which we neither experience, nor know nor remember; is silence the dark matter of our being--dark energy that does not interact, or only weakly with our voluble lives? We are left always with this intimation that there is something more, but we can never know or name what lies beyond it. How many times have I fallen through without knowing, into the silence, losing everything? Erased from the lives of others? Not even alone?

Weaving and Unweaving the Tale

1000 banana trees

Imagine a mountain range "read" as a soundwave.
Time as a physical wave, the physical wave as sound, as music.
The wave on the ear, the brushstroke on stone.
Where water and brush touch stone, a spot without form. Where the brush moves, trailing water, a formless spot becomes the history of the evolving present, shapes the meaning of the brush, dictates new direction, evaporates, dissappears.
Brush as dancer, calligraphy as dance.

Gil Johnson

So You Want Your LitBlog on Kindle?

Good reasons for second thoughts. From Follow the Reader

... for instance

Amazon’s murky Digital Publishing Distribution Agreement including open-ended phrasing such as: “You grant to us, throughout the term of this Agreement, a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide right and license to distribute Publications as described in this Agreement.” Sure, the “nonexclusive” part sounds good, but “irrevocable and worldwide” are rather broad terms. Oh, and this part is also a little daunting: “We reserve the right to change the terms of this Agreement at any time.”
Keeping one’s blog free. (One blogger said, ” I don’t want some users to have to pay for it. I’d much rather optimise it for mobile use so people can read it on their phones.”)

And, as expressed by Eoin Purcell: “the locking in of revenue splits.” In his post, Bloggers: Amazon will eat your lunch, Eoin states, “One of my major concern is that if bloggers agree to this completely uneven deal from Amazon now, it will persist. This will give Amazon an enviable position and allowing even their competitors to take hefty slices of the distribution chain value even while offering better terms than Amazon itself.” (Emphasis mine)  

This sounds especially ominous if you publish (or link to--how does that fit into the agreement?) orignal fiction and poetry on your blog. If you have as much money and as many lawyers as Amazon, this might turn out to be a fair offer. Otherwise, it's a rigged game, and if you think Amazon has your interests in mind... you probably think that health insurance you pay for will take care of you when you get sick. 

Jonathan Littell's letter to the Jury of the Athens Prize for Literature

The Literary Saloon has posted Jonathan Littell's letter to the Jury of the Athens Prize for Literature.

It has always been my view that literature is a very private matter now, and that what takes place between a writer and his work belongs to a sphere utterly separate from the interaction of that work with those who read it, comment it, praise it or damn it. Privacy, for me, is a fundamental condition of creation, of work. It was so before my book was published, and must remain so now. It is in this spirit that I express my hope that my inability to join you today will be taken for what it is, an expression of our common love for literature. I thank you very much.

Read the rest HERE.

Some Thoughts on the Public Reaction to the Death of Michael Jackson

Who killed Cock Robin ?

The sense of loss when a public icon dies is real. We identify these figures with important moments of our lives. I in no way mean to mock that, but the very potency of the psychological attachment raises some disturbing questions. First, the way the mourning and recapitulation of life and career takes over the news cycle implies a judgment on the part of those selecting the news; projecting the death of a pop star front center on the stage of unfolding history suggests something not entirely right with our collective mental health.

Equally significant: what happens to the object of this public idolatry when the charismatic force is rooted in impossible fantasies, fantasies the stars feel compelled to vicariously live out, a kind of sacrifice, so the fans can have the juice and still go about their normal lives? It would take a remarkably grounded individual to resist the temptation to make those fantasies real: the one about never-ending childish innocence, for instance. MJ must have been especially vulnerable, never having had the opportunity to experience the normal stages of disappointment/loss/impotence of will/and then adjustment that turns us into mature adults.

The self-destructive character of so many ‘stars’ is not simply an individual failure: it’s a cooperative relationship, for the fans, a dance of fantasized life, a dance of death for their celebrated star.

If only he had felt called upon in the “love” he so much needed from his fans, to write a song about growing up… about growing old… How much of that feeling of loss is guilt at knowing we were watching and encouraging a man on a journey that no one could survive?  

Little bird on the back of the Great Beast

It's impossible to overstate the importance of unscripted events like we're seeing in Iran. We fall into the illusion of the power brokers, those who benefit from the status quo, that history is made by policy makers, politicians, backroom deals by looters and corporate death dealers. This is what they want us to believe. This is what they depend on our believing: that history is made by them, by the leaders.

 Their 'control' is a con-game. They are like little birds riding the back of a sometimes lumbering, sometimes charging rhino... whispering into its ear, picking at the lice... believing THEY are in command.

It is not so.

It never is.

There is no more important lesson to be learned. 

Postmodernism/Modernism

Dan Green channeling Jonathan Mayhew:

A part of a continuing conversation reclaiming the centrality, or rather, the continuity of writing effectively marginalized by these misleading labels (experimental, postmodern, post avant...) with modernist literature of the late 19th and early 20th Century. 

One might add to Dan Green and Jonathan Mayhew's observations the importance of market driven forces in that interrupting "resurgence of realism and naturalism from the 1930s to the 1960s:"  what I would call the 'late, or decadent capitalist nostalgia, represented by James Wood. 

Jonathan Mayhew questions whether there is such a perceptible difference between the "modern" and the "postmodern," both in fiction and poetry, as we are sometimes led to believe. As Jonathan observes, "the term [postmodernism] took on a different meaning after Lyotard and Jameson. Basically, the word was hijacked as a term for 'poststructuralism' or for 'late capitalism,' respectively."
[...]
Jonathan suggests that poets from this period were really "continuers of a tradition" extending back to Williams and Pound, that these "new" poets' work still essentially belonged to the "modernist period." I think the same is true of what was postmodern fiction "Post-" modern meant not just after modernism but more specifically a return to the spirit of modernism understood as the attempt to expand the possibilities of form and style in fiction, an endeavor that to some extent had been interrupted by a resurgence of realism and naturalism from the 1930s to the 1960s

Fantasy and Dream: The Supreme Tyrant and the Dreamers on the Street.

Fadi Abou-Rihan  has been posting a running commentary on Winnicott's ideas on 'Found Things," on the trasitional quality of play,  dreaming and fantasy.  Go to his post, Structure and Process, to follow his ideas.

While I can't pretend to offer useful interpretation--I was struck by Winnicott's distinctions between fantasy and dreaming, on the comparitive fixity of fantasy--which is tyrannically (I don't think that that overstates it) re-guided back to whatever has been identified as the desired object, as opposed to the poetic quality of the dream, whose "agility is the mark of a mucking about and a taking liberty with whatever it may encounter."

 How often I've experienced in my writing--parfticularly when the going gets rough, the words hard to come by--that I've become 'fixed' in just this way, to a goal, preconceived--even if one I'm as yet unable to articulate, that I'm trying to keep everything within bounds...coloring within the lines, not at all unlike fantasy daydreams in states of infatuation: securing the hand of the lover, of winning the prize, getting the book published. This is not, I think, a matter of releasing a bundle of unacknowledged desires pent up in some prison cell of the unconscious. It is not a turning inward, however much it involves unconscious and perhaps repressed forces; rather, it is a losening outward--a movement toward the world, a relaxation of the border police. Play brings new aspects of reality into view... into play, involves us in the world in ways we had missed, or avoided, or feared. 

It is certainly possible to push ahead in that goal oriented mode, "purpose driven" writing; one can even learn to be quite good at it, which may be the worst thing that can happen--that one can get good at it; good at making it happen... which is really a way of not letting it happen. The mental Besiji may indeed succeed in striking fear in the hearts of the dreamers, chasing  them 'safely' indoors, shooting the Voice through the heart, letting it bleed to death on the street. We need to learn to say to the Voice, like the primal cry that it is... don't be afraid! Don't be afraid!

Here are exerts from the post.

By the early 1970’s, Winnicott elaborated further on the quality of this interaction when, with the help of one of his patients, he introduced a distinction between “fantasying” and “dreaming.” Fantasying is an isolated and isolating activity as with, for instance, the daydreaming of the perfect partner, perfect job, perfect home, or perfect finances, the daydreaming of, in sum, the perfect and perfectly satisfying life (the aeternitas) in the face of an intolerably disorganised, unmanageable, and fleeting reality (the tempus). Fantasying instigates no action; it at best runs parallel to and at worst substitutes for life and action; it is a fixity that distracts from and drains objects and relations; it inhibits and at times altogether paralyses them . Dreaming, on the other hand, corresponds to the agility typical of an excursion into an “imaginative planning of the future” (”Dreaming, Fantasying, and Living”, 35), an excursion that precipitates and looks forward to action as much as it is shaped by it (DFL, 26-33). Doctor and patient had come to see that fantasying about an action and dreaming about it belong to two separate orders; indeed, “fantasying was about a certain subject and it was a dead end. It had no poetic value. The corresponding dream, however, had poetry in it, that is to say, layer upon layer of meaning relating to past, present, and future, and to inner and outer, and always fundamentally about [the dreamer]” (DFL, 35; emphasis in the original).

[...]

Yet, and however distinct they may be, fantasying and dreaming remain inextricably implicated in one another. The fixity that is the trademark of fantasying speaks a strong attachment and a wish to revise and preserve as is, in other words, a fidelity to a particular object or situation, while dreaming’s agility is the mark of a mucking about and a taking liberty with whatever it may encounter

James Meredith March Against Fear.

 1966 . Freedom Summer one year later.

This was Mississippi

Lest we forget. from Wikipedia:

In Canton, Mississippi the march was attacked and tear-gassed by the Mississippi State Police joined by other police agencies. Several marchers were wounded, one severely. Human Rights Medical Committee members conducted a house-to-house search that night looking for wounded marchers. The nuns of the Catholic school extended their help and hospitality to the marchers, especially to the wounded.

I stood before Mississippi State cops... I thought they would shoot us. They didn't. Tear gas and rifle buts. The most liberating moment of my life.  

Perhaps some part of my obsession with events in Iran.

What is a 'tweet'... but a cyber pen held up to a sword?

Foucault in Iran: What is at Stake?

From One Way Street: Aesthetics and Politics

Foucault in Iran

With no abatement in the anti-government fury now gripping Iran, it’s worth recalling Michel Foucault’s remarks on the 1978-79 Iranian revolution, which toppled the Shah. In a career full of provocative statements, Foucault’s most notorious stance was his enthusiastic endorsement what he called the “rapture” (ivresse) of the rebellion that killed thousands of Iranian civilians and left the country in the grip of a repressive theocratic order. 

I haven’t heard anyone describe the current uprising as rapturous, but there’s certainly been some degree of romanticization of the role of the Internet in fomenting rebellion in the IRI. It’s easy to imagine that the thunderous voice of Iranian rebellion is a Tweet, but that’s mostly because Twitter is virtually the only source of news from the streets of Tehran. Iranians themselves are much more likely to communicate through cellphone text messages.
[...]

Daily life was the primary political battleground for Foucault, and it was here that the 1979 Iranian revolution failed, as he recognized. In this sense the stakes are the same today. In the US we have some valid interests in seeing political change in Iran. After all, Iran is a state spinning its way to a nuclear bomb. But there’s also a sense of American triumphalism in the commentary here: Iranians chose the ayatollahs while we chose the Internet, and now we’re winning. It’s worth keeping in mind what Foucault would say is really at stake in Tehran right now: not the freedom to use Twitter, but the very possibility of risking everything to become more of what one is.

Is it real? The Social Media News Breakthrough?

From Brian Mattix's notes... link at end of quotes

This is pretty lengthy, but I didn't expect to experience what I did today when I woke up this morning. I just wanted to share this crazy experience I definitely didn't plan on happening on a Saturday, and get what I saw and felt off my chest:

Last night, I went to sleep a little earlier than usual, and thanks to the show Real Time with Bill Maher, I found out hundreds of thousands of protesters were planning a protest at 4pm their time, about 6:30am here, so I wanted to be up by at least 8am to see how the situation was going. My normal means for getting a big story like this are the cable nets, especially CNN. I was interested because of the potential story, and I also needed to know so I could post a story for kptm.com. For about 30-45 minutes, it didn't seem like anything was really going on, until I started poking around YouTube and Twitter.

I usually don't go for Twitter, because it really seems trivial, but today it seemed like a good idea to check it out. Within a half-hour it was clear a BIG story was happening, something you wouldn't know if you were watching TV. The first clips I found were the basic clips you see everywhere on TV, large crowds chanting, throwing rocks, etc. But when I found the Twitter topic #IranElection, I was immediately sucked in.

First of all, the updates hitting this page were literally in the hundreds per minute. It was like the AP wire was on September 11 (if you worked in media that day, you'll remember how hectic those bulletins got that morning), but instead of news bulletins, they were a combination of unconfirmed on-the-scene reports, support from people around the world, misinformation and disinformation from the Iranian government. I had never seen anything like it, ever. Not only that, but most posts included links, which allowed video clips and photos to be spread.

It was immediately clear that the CNN story I had copied and pasted from their website was not going to do the story justice.

Please read the rest HERE

And WHY are news media stories 10-12 hours behind what we can find on our own--and if half way intelligent, sort out wheat from chaff--draw conclusions way ahead of the bought and paid for so-called "journalists?"

Neda

HERE is the death that has become an icon. 

As the messages scroll past, one can see in the repetitions--every Iranian Tweet ( heard claimed... and believe) is repeated more than 50 times. But not all are repeated... ReTweeted. There is a communal selection process... mythmaking before our eyes.

And nothing so far compares with the death of this young woman--the look of astonishment on her face... though I'm sure she was past consciousness, and that sudden flow of blood, the cries of her father... it is finished. Before our eyes. Before the eyes of the world. 

We cannot see them all, all of the fallen. They vanish as though they never were--but for the few who mourne them, the fathers, sons, daughters, mothers, friends... and out the swelling need to see, we take up this single image, this single death, this single irreplaceble life and make of it a sign for all the others, all those otherwise lost, fallen in darkness...and in this vision we find... strangely... even for we who are not believers... light. A light that illuminates all ... all of the fallen.

Neda... has become her name, the voice of a revolution, the call to freedom.

Fragments and Synthesis: The origins of Narrative

As Tweets become increasingly repetitious and I search for more synthetic reporting, I think about how much we have to learn from what has been happening in Iran: how it's been reported, how stories and myths comes to be.  I can't understand how anyone interested in fiction, with the origins of narrative, would not be facinated almost to obsession with the unfolding of events in their various guises.

Huffington Post has been most creative, as I see it, in bridging the transition from the stream of granular, fragmented and democratic factoids to a synthetic assimulation that adds space for empirical verification and intellectual reflection--while remaining close to the immediacy of the unfolding events. 

The old and the new: She has found ways to use the new media to do what Edward R. Murrow did reporting on the London blitz.

Poetry and Politics: Iran

From the Huffington Post: 6/18/09

1:47 PM ET -- Life imitates art. Today's mourning rally passed through Ferdowsi Square in Tehran. Ferdowsi is, as an Iranian-American friend put it, "like the Persian Homer," having written the epic Book of Kings.

Here's a shot from the Square today sent in by an Iranian, of Ferdowski being inducted into the Uprising: 


As it turns out, English professor Rich Newman is in the process of translating the Book of Kings, and wrote a moving post about how it ties into the current unrest:
The connection between literature and politics is always a difficult one. Treating politics as if it were literature, politicizing literary texts, are strategies that people use to advance agendas that are fundamentally political, and often not progressive/egalitarian, in nature. Especially in connection with what is going on in Iran right now, when people are really dying and when the Iranian government is doing everything it can to isolate the entire nation of Iran so that it (the government) can restore what it believes should be the (clearly repressive) order of things, to talk about life imitating art, to read what is going on in Iran through the lens of Iran's own literature, has felt to me like a self-indulgent and gratuitous intellectual exercise. 


Yet literature, and in this case specifically poetry, also helps people give meaning to their lives; it can inspire, and it can connect us to something larger than ourselves in ways that political feelings, not matter how strongly felt and/or acted upon, often cannot. And so, precisely because people are really dying in Iran--because I really do believe, along with William Carlos Williams, that people die every day for lack of what is found in poetry--and precisely because there is so much at stake over there, and because Iran is a culture that loves and reveres its poets, I have decided to write. 

Perhaps connecting the unrest in Iran not only to the specific history of the Islamic Republic and the revolution out of which that republic was born--which most analysts, reasonably, are focusing on--but also to the Iranian culture that is larger and older than both the Republic and Islam, will make a difference. What that difference might be, and to whom, I have no way of knowing, but I just don't think it is mere coincidence that the current unrest finds echoes in a story Iran has been telling itself about itself for centuries: the tale of Kaveh and Zahhak from the poem commonly referred to as Iran's national epic, Shahnameh (Book, or Epic, of the Kings), part of which I am in the process of translating.

Clay Shirky on Twitter and Iran

A useful analysis of the new media HERE.

NYU professor Clay Shirky gave a fantastic talk on new media during our TED@State event earlier this month. He revealed how cellphones, the web, Facebook and Twitter had changed the rules of the game, allowing ordinary citizens extraordinary new powers to impact real-world events. As protests in Iran exploded over the weekend, we decided to rush out his talk, because it could hardly be more relevant. I caught up with Clay this afternoon to get his take on the significance of what is happening. HIs excitement was palpable.

What do you make of what's going on in Iran right now.
I'm always a little reticent to draw lessons from things still unfolding, but it seems pretty clear that ... this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. I've been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted "the whole world is watching." Really, that wasn't true then. But this time it's true ... and people throughout the world are not only listening but responding. They're engaging with individual participants, they're passing on their messages to their friends, and they're even providing detailed instructions to enable web proxies allowing Internet access that the authorities can't immediately censor. That kind of participation is reallly extraordinary.

Which services have caused the greatest impact? Blogs? Facebook? Twitter?
It's Twitter. One thing that Evan (Williams) and Biz (Stone) did absolutely right is that they made Twitter so simple and so open that it's easier to integrate and harder to control than any other tool. At the time, I'm sure it wasn't conceived as anything other than a smart engineering choice. But it's had global consequences.

Iran Elections: Why We Must Watch!

Tweeter is virtually the only source consistently reporting from the post election crisis. #iranelection, being the most important channel. Many of the linked images and videos are extremely disturbing... the one posted on Huffington Post of the man dying after being stabbed in the throat.... but we must not turn away. We must not avert our eyes.

The world watching doesn't guarantee there won't be a massive blood letting, but with an internal struggle for power and such a broad based support for the opposition, it will at least make it a more difficult decision--to open fire and unleash a massacre. So far, violence has been sporadic and relatively uncorrdinated, inititated by para-military, not neccesarily under orders from the highest authories.

It's terribly important that we keep watching, and reporting what we see, spreading the word. Some of the scenes are disturbing... watching a man die on the street after being stabbed in the throat... a video later linked on Huffington Post... but we cannot alow ourselves to be one of those faces in the window who pull the shades and turn away while the rapist on the street below has his way. 

Reporters have been locked into hotels. Foreign reports have had visas cancelled. Tweeter is virtually the only source of information coming from Iran--our information lifeline. #iranelection is the most active Tweeter channel, with new images and videos. Follow this... spread the word.  It matters. 

Imagine a newspaper written by poets? Why not?

Haaretz tried it for a day.

From Tweets to Narrative.

Images from Iran Many new photos by Farad Rajabali, who is doing an extraordinary job.

I've been following news from Iran, obsessively. I say "news;" what I mean, are Tweets. Primarily from #iranelection, and #persiankiwi. An endless scroll of fragments, often repeated, passed on from one source to another, information picked up from readers in other parts of Iran, other parts of the world, filtered through commercial media, recycled through Tweeter.

The compulsion to keep watching is driven by two needs, the desire to "know what happens next," and to tie the fragments together, to discern their connection, not at all unlike reading a book. The affective and cognitive components are inseparable: each serves to give form to the other. Raw emotion is profoundly disturbing, unsettling, creates a desire to know, to understand what those feelings are about, how they are connected to what is happening, what they mean.

The reality... that is, the fragments of information, the strings of words, the anguish and wonder they evoke, resist, powerfully resist, assimilation into narrative. The story made to package what is happening--out there, and in us as we observe and react, enhances the sense of coherence, prepares the experience for retelling, for remembering, while losing in something like proportionate measure what gives the fragments their immediacy, their feel of reality. An impossible trade-off, because the reality is unendurable: a fragmentation that penetrates and tears apart our sense of a coherent Self, and yet--as long as we remain immersed in the unfolding of events--the narrative--any narrative--has the feel of illusion, of a lie.

I read the streaming Tweets, the fragmented, unassimilable Reality, and feel myself in the basic workshop of the creative imagination, a chaos of raw materials, bits and pieces--awkwardly working them over with an array of tools I know I will never master, uncertain who or what is being worked over, or who or what is agent.

Jacob Russell's Dog House

Slow going... building a web site for my writing. 

From The Magic Slate: Processional, First Two Movements

Short Fiction:

Theology of Anorexia

Godzilla's Eye

Reality and its Conterfeits: Images from Iran

More news from Twitter than ABC, CNN combined. Many new images on MSNBC. BBC and NYT ground reports have been good

IMAGES

Underlying the clashes on the streets and the storming of the universities, the emergence of conflicting narratives. Truth searching for its story.

Politics and Metaphysics?

Not metaphysics exactly... but thought that penetrates the obvioius, that calls to account the easy... and the difficult... reductions, that translate irruducible reality to manageable abstractions.

Right up there with my favorite "reality checking" blogs: Cosmic Variance and Real Climage... Levi Briant's Larval Subjects

Let me quote at length here... only in the hope that you will take in the whole of this post, and circle back and take in the general conversation on Larval Subjects. Bryant is concerned with "reality" in a way that no one hoping to understand politics... or the role of imaginative literature in addressing that reality,can afford to ignore.

The "Becket" refered to here is not Samuel, but a blog pseudonymn...

Apparently if one finds fault with Badiou or Zizek’s accounts of the political, they immediately fall into the category of “neo-liberalism”. It seems to me that the motivation of such critiques, however, is instead something quite different. On the one hand– and independent of questions of politics –there are genuine reasons for finding fault with the metaphysical and ontological claims of Badiou and Zizek. Both, in my view, fall into the anti-realist camp. It seems to me that there is a strong tendency within French inflected Continental philosophy to subordinate all questions of philosophy to political imperatives. As a result, one is supposed to choose their ontology, metaphysics, or epistemology on political grounds rather than grounds that directly pertain to these questions. I suspect that this suturing of the philosophical to the political has more to do with academic insecurities pertaining to the place of philosophy and cultural studies in the contemporary world (having lost a lot of ground in the last three centuries) than anything to do with these questions themselves.

On the other hand, within the domain of politics, I find it difficult not to wrinkle my nose in amusement at Beckett’s charge of an unwillingness to confront ideology. Beckett seems to be of the view that politics unfolds through critiquing ideology. However, having witnessed twenty years of critiques of ideology I’m led to wonder what critiques of ideology have ever done to really change anything. The conception of politics as ideology critique seems to largely result among bookish academics that believe it is books and discourses are the primary real and who are therefore persuaded that change takes place through books and discourses. Like the obsessional– who might this obsessional be? –who talks endlessly precisely to avoid saying what really should be said, this conception of the political endlessly dissects various narratives and cultural formations to create the illusion of acting without ever hitting the real. Indeed, there’s a very real sense in which those literary studies types so delighted by Zizek seem to be more motivated to find a justification for writing about their favorite movies and television shows rather than changing social organization in any significant way.

The critique of Badiou and Zizek on political grounds has little to do with the attempt to defend neo-liberalism, and everything to do, I think, with the manner in which both exclude the domain of political economy from the field of the political. In the case of Zizek we get the assertion of a parallax between economy and politics without ever getting any substantial analysis of economic issues. In other words, one half of the parallax always gets short shrift. In the case of Badiou we are directly told that the domain of economy falls entirely outside of politics. In both cases we get the comfortable analysis of signifying formations, meaning, etc., but never much in the way of concrete engagement with the world. In my view, time would be better spend reading Harvey but that requires paying attention to drearily boring things like actual numbers, trends, economic phenomena, etc., and lacks the narcissistic self-gratification of thinking oneself as a subject of truth procedures or engaging in a “radical act”. What we thus get is a profound contradiction between the form and content of these discourses, the subject of enunciation and the subject of the statement. At the level of content and statement there is the declaration of a certain radicality that purports to be seeking to undermine “capitalism” (whatever that might mean… as if capitalism were an “entity”). Yet at the level of form and enunciation, we instead get a form of theorization and a mode of comportment towards the social world that functions to insure that everything remains in place just as it was before. Was it a critique of ideology that led to certain recent changes in American politics? Weren’t these critiques all over the place for the last eight years? Why did things begin to give in 2006? Better to understand the workings of an assemblage or a network to target the key points or nodes in that network than to tarry with the foam that floats up from those networks at the level of discourses.

Like all forms of obsessional thought, these sorts of political theory believe in the omnipotence of thought, ignoring the manner in which forms of social organization require their telephone wires, highways, electricity, sites of exchange, etc. As a result, they perpetual miss the real infrastructures that organize bodies and render social relations impossible, instead believing that the important things are the electrical pulses that travel along those telephone lines, i.e., the messages. It is remarkable to observe, however, how quickly the content of those messages change when, for example, a shift in these infrastructural phenomena takes place, e.g., the collapse of the economy. Perhaps there is a confusion of causes and effects here.

Last performance of InterAct's ReadingAloud

Received this announcement.

InterAct has offered an open venue for writers of short fiction where you could hear your stories read by professional actors. A story--a chapter from my novel-in-progres, was read this past November. Saddend to hear of their passing.

If you're in Philly, show your support for the arts, and all their variety.

Dear Writing Aloud Writers Past and Present.

As some of you may have heard, the upcoming performance of Writing Aloud
on Monday June 15 marks the final installment of the series and the
closing of the program.

With much regret, we at InterAct have made the decision not to continue
Writing Aloud after this season. But I am writing to you now to invite
you to come celebrate the ten great years the program had!

Please join us for the closing performance on Monday, June 15, at 7:00 at
InterAct, 2030 Sansom Street.

The program will feature stories by Gloria Klaiman, Brenda Witmer, and Tom
Teti, read by Nancy Boykin, Miriam White, and Tim Moyer, and it will be
followed by a reception so that we can all drink a toast to Writing Aloud
together.

Tickets are already selling quickly to friends and admirers of the
program, so I urge you to call and reserve now. You can book tickets:
over the phone by calling 215-568-8079.

Thank you for your participation in Writing Aloud.
I hope to see all of you on the 15th!

Sincerely,

Rebecca Wright
Literary Director & Dramaturg
InterAct Theatre Company
2030 Sansom Street
Philadelphia, PA 19103
215-568-8077
www.interacttheatre.org

 

Behind the Silence

All my attention has been absorbed in trying to finish my novel. For months I've found it difficult even to find words for my journal--though thoughts are beginning to bubbling to the surface again, a few words here, a few there.

I go through these periods. They are not easy. Often a sign of coming depression,  increasing isolation. Even in conversations, it's difficult to find anything to say. Not made easier by worry about how I'm going to earn my living. I was coming out of one these phases when I began this blog--in fact, the Barking Dog was in part an effort to break through, to find words to penetrate the silence--a subject that informed a number of those early posts, some of them recycled below
------

Silence ?

Going over a long passage of interior monolog, I realized I had been visualizing this scene as though it were staged and the actor playing the role had been speaking his thoughts to the audience. When I stopped writing, I saw him sit down, silent for some time before the change of scenes.

What kind of silence? I thought.

The words would not stop. The audience would no longer hear the character's inner voice, but would know that it continued beyond their hearing--and to the members of the audience, the silence would be outside them, beyond them, for they would play back the words they had heard, transform them into their own interior monolog, as I was doing even as I imagined my character sitting in a silent room... silent, I thought-but no one hears the silence, for the voice is never still.

When I open a book and begin to read, the words on the page do not emerge out of silence, but enter the verbal currents already flowing in my own mind--but they do not replace them, rather they flow over them as a second layer, interacting, sometimes disappearing beneath the surface so that for a moment I am aware only of my own thoughts, my own words--until the written words regain my attention and rise again to the surface. Currents from many rivers merging, and yet each following its course.

-----------

Poetics of Renunciation

What I admire and seek to emulate are those works that bring me most forcefully into the presence of a uniquely individual voice and consciousness. This is the opposite of the exposition of Self--even when imaginatively fecund, artfully presented and emotionally powerful. More like the erasure of Self, a stripping away of ego, of the I.

Writing that approaches selflessness (the self as sacrificial offering)  requires a self to sacrifice.

This is neither paradox nor contradiction.

It isn't what the work is about, but what happens to the contagion of self that clings to the subject. Forge words into knives to strip the flesh from the bone; may the greater voice emerge from the death of the lesser.

-------


Why Bother?

Art snuck in the back door. Not all at once. Giotto appropriated religious icons and deflected attention from content to form.

A beginning.

Soon enough, a blink of an eye in cosmic time, an apple and a Madonna are one.

The same paradigm for the literary arts.

William Hazlitt's essay on fame. What we now call "fame" was for Hazlitt, notoriety. Fame, for Hazlitt, might never come to the poet while he lived, but what matter? The true poet wrote not for recognition in his own time, but for posterity... for eternity.

We have no such thing now. Not that we can believe in. A compensation there for the Romantics... even for the modernist--say, pre-Becket, but not for us. What then does it mean? If there is no other compensation, why not sell out to the highest bidder?

          What's a whore, but a realist? A Good Capitalist? 

The metaphysics of the is, is all about the bottom line. What works, is. What else is there?

I don't believe this. But am helpless to explain why.

I will do what I do. Confirmation comes my way... or doesn't, but the question remains.

This is not a frivolous question. I know talented people--who, having no other model, no more powerfully persuasive mythology--have given up, sold out to the Great Beast... for the dream of the Beamer, the trophy paramour, financial independence... the illusion of a Place in the World... because they had no alternative, no believable narrative to draw on--to believe in against all evidence.

I have no future so I have nothing to sacrifice--it's easier for me, if only because I no longer have a choice.  But what of the young? What can I tell them when they ask... when they tell me, why bother?

------
Dust and Silence

I look about this room: cheap desk, computer, second hand book shelves, box fan on the floor, two K-Mart lamps, the blankets I roll out at night to sleep on; nothing here that will outlive its present use. Nothing that has more than momentary utility to recommend it--except, perhaps, the books. But even these: paperbacks in tatters, worn volumes, covers held together with tape--if I searched I might find a few first editions--may even have one or two autographed volumes, though I couldn't tell you which or where.

Everything here, disposable--like my life; objects which, were I an ancient tribal chief, a seer, elder, bard--only because they would be meaningless apart from my life, might be buried with me.

All but the books.

Let them be read until the pages come loose and fly away in the wind. Let them be read till they too are dust, to be rejoined again in dust and silence.

------------
Silence is Nameless

Why do I keep thinking about silence--Silence, an absence, a thing we can know nothing about, or know only as we know death, as metaphor, surmise, the nothingness that frames the span of our life, the before and after beyond experience, experience that is always filled with signs, signs that may not speak but are never silent. I think of the silence of the woman pouring milk. It is hers, in that room before that window, in the light that caresses her, in the shadows that surround her, but it is not ours. Vermeer doesn't give us silence. She reminds us of the presence of something we cannot know. The silence is in the painting, not in us; we know it only as an absence that draws us out of ourselves, like the silence that frames the lines of a poem. We read the words, read to the end of the line, to the end of the poem and encounter there that same absence. We call it silence, but the silence is on the page, in the white spaces between the words, it is not in us. It is not ours. We say that we have come from silence, as we will return to silence. But our saying this is an admission that between birth and death there is no silence. Look into the eyes of an animal and you will see it--the impenetrable silence we are not permitted to enter, and if we were, if we could (as perhaps we do in dreamless sleep) we would emerge with no trace, no memory of where we had been, no knowledge that we had been there. Is it possible, then, that we do enter into this silence, which we neither experience, or know or remember, that silence is the dark matter of our being--that does not interact with our voluble lives? Even if it were so, even if it were possible to know, it would be useless knowledge. We are left always with this intimation that there is something more, but we can never know or name what lies beyond it, and if we are honest, we will refuse to do so.

---------

Journal Entry: October 8, 1977

Logic is language talking about itself
Logic is language talking to itself

Poetry is language talking to itself, unable to resist the desire to be overheard.
Poetry is language talking to itself, indulging in the desire to be overheard.

Poetry is the desire to be overheard, talking to itself.

Atlantic Diner: Sunday Breakfast

I carry index cards.. for 7 and 8 line poems

Hot Coffee Cold Day
Street sign green the number 12
Order sausage & eggs
Hot coffee cold day
and the dog walking in the park
beside a man in a brown coat
sniffing a dead bird
FRESHLY BAKED! the sign says - Enjoy!

No place in the world...the right place for a writer

I knew (sensed) that this was coming. The end of a phase. Given the students and where they came from, I was always grateful for the one or two each term who thanked me for opening their minds, who told me I was a good teacher.

God knows I tried. 

This was the closest I've come to having a legitimate place in the world, an occupation there was no need to explain or apologize for. Twelve years. I've never held a job this long.

It was "real"... maybe not high-end respectable to the human flesh eating class, but it was there, listed on the registry. I existed... 

Far more important to me--I loved teaching.  I had way more freedom than I suppose I had any right to expect or enjoy... but in the end, with top down evaluations, statistical analysis of student evaluations... etc ... I was exposed for the outsider I truly was, and am. At least, I'm sure that went into the decision. 

I did my best to honor the program... while remaining forever outside its perameters. 

I will be always be gratefull, for the years left of my life, to my collegues--who were always respectful and personnally open, and most of all, to the committment at Saint Joseph's to the personal needs of the students. More than a "mission statement" commitment. The one most important factor in my year to year effort to fit in and do my part to honor my responsibility... it was always more than a way to pay the rent, though it gave me little more than that in compensation. 

Like I said.... I had a sense, an inner sense, that this was a phase that was drawing to a close. Anxious about what comes next? Sure... but excited... and in a way, back to my own way... as an outsider, a pariah... with a taste in my mouth of what it feels like to imagine one "belongs" somewhere. 

Interesting prospects... looking for work at age 68, with no "real world" experience in anything.

I am amazed... at how fortunate I've been. And acutely aware of how my own background has prepared me--taught me the proper masks to wear in order to get by, when I have  been no more worthy than many of those I pass on the street... holding out their hats for coins.

If I end up beside them...it will be no injustice... not to me. Only the injustice I've managed to escape most of my life by the skin of my teeth.  

And if I can keep writing... I'll be all right.

Severance package...

Class reductions, tenured faculty replacing part-timers. I've really enjoyed teaching. It's been a great priviledge.

I can joke about the severance package (my head), but the truth is, no billion dollar handout could replace the experience of these past 12 years.

All things come to an end.

Social Security will cover a little more than half of my basic expenses. Have to find a way to earn another $600 a month. My needs are modest. 

May have to find a dry spot under a bridge with wireless to keep on barking.

Like a Fox

Every evening about this time a man passes by. Pushing a grocery cart. A kind of prop--usually empty. Up the middle of our one-way street. Against the traffic.

I don’t have to look for him. I hear him. Even in cold weather when the windows and door are shut.

He shouts, curses. As though he is angry, challenging any and everyone not to “fuck with him.” But I don’t think he is. Angry. No one around here pays him any attention—certainly don’t feel threatened.

It seems a kind of learned program. A defense strategy. On occasions when he sees me sitting on the stoop, he waves a fist--not in threat, but as a gesture of recognition.

I gesture in kind. Fellow conspirators against the greater insanity of the world.

And he smiles—even while keeping up his cursive rap. Who can imagine what kind of abuse this man has suffered? I won’t venture to classify the disorder, but it’s likely longstanding and relentless.

At this point, he has a system. Crazy like a fox. Really crazy—but with a method. The streets here—especially on the other side of Broad where he’s headed, can be dangerous at night. 

Don’t nobody mess wit ME! He shouts. I’m fucking NUTS. You can’t scare ME, bro! I’m WAY too fucking crazy to notice!

… I hear him, I listen... till he’s out of earshot.

My own craziness has never achieved such coherence. 

Maybe one evening I’ll follow him. Has he, perhaps, been inviting me to do just that?

I could learn from him. There is much I could learn from him.

Author Interview

Here's an interview/questionaire I did for Serenity Promotions.

Imagination knows no borders: Largest, most complex machine ever built

Some really cool images of the LHC.

...followed by revealing comments on the state of general education... these people did attend school. They can write. They read the words, though the sense escapes them.

When we think of the "third world" we are reminded of the great economic and technological divide that seperate us, of Somalia and Chad and Haiti, but in those comments we witness a chasim even greater in the developed world.

This is what happens when 'education' is perceived primarily as job training: create corporate, relatively well paid (though less and less so) corporate slaves to keep the wealth flowing to the top: everything beyond that (art, literature, philosophy--even basic science has to fight an endless defensive rear-guard action) is at best, superflous, at worst, subversive.

 

 

Finding the Beginning

The difficulty of finishing a work is not about finding the right ending; it's about discovering where it really began.

This book you've been working on for more than eight years, my son offered, presciently; maybe the problem is--you aren’t the same person, the same writer you were when you began; maybe you need to write it as though it were written by the writer you are now.

This was about when I wrote the post on PLAY. I’ve rewritten revised and edited almost 150 pages since. I’ve also been doing a lot of cutting and pasting, moving chapters and sections—like a collage. When I look over the new configurations (actually, I read them, record them as MP3’s and listen to them), I ask, where did this come from? What is the common source? … a question of generation.

Disparate pieces fitted together, added, rearranged, create a new reading for each part in the context of their altered relationship. Their relative proximity and distance does more than alter the reading; it reveals a new and unanticipated source—creates and points back to a common origin which defines the aesthetic whole, the illusion of unity. When seeking for the thematic center--for 'what the book is about,' I find the answer changes, not because I change my mind but because different answers are created through these different arrangements... as they are through the whole process of writing. There is no beginning--no source, until the book is finished, and then--it is bound to change, to be changed, with every reading.

This morning I worked over another four chapters. Coming up on material more resistant, less sure how or if it belongs. Following through on ideas from my previous post HERE, the right question: what has generated it? Again, striking analogies with the interpretation of dreams, and in a broader sense, with psychoanalysis. One reads and responds to what one writes in search for the source, not of one's own experience (except indirectly... the indirection being all important), but for the source of the work. An act of expulsion severing its Being from that of the Self--until it become self-creating, self-generating.

Spinning off Levi Bryant's Deleuza...

I've been reading. slowly (along with catching up on a stack of New Yorker short stories, finishing The Interpretation of Dreams and continuing my journey through Silliman's The Alphabet) Difference and Giveness: Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence, by Levi Bryant of Larval Subjects.

This is dense reading. I don't have the background to follow the arguments, though I do my best. At the same time--in part, precisely because I can't always do justice to the text, I find my mind gleefully tripping off on excursions, following suggestions that are certainly misreadings and would no doubt not earn me a passing grade on the subject at hand. No matter; I give full and unapologetic latitude to these reflections. For me, this is one of the joys of reading 'outside the field' and beyond my competence.

Take the following Deleuze quote from the chapter: Empiricism and the Search for the Conditions of Real Experience:

The elementary concepts of representation are the categories defined as the conditions of possible experience. These, however, are too general or too large for the real. The net is so loose that the largest fish pass through. No wonder, then, that aesthetics should be divided into two irreducible domains: that of the theory of the sensible which captures only the real's conformity with possible experience, and that of theory of the beautiful, which deals with the reality of the real in so far as it is thought. Everything changes once we determine the conditions of the real experience which are not larger than the conditioned and which differ in kind from the categories. The two senses of the aesthetic become one, to the point where the being of the sensible reveals itself in the work of art, while at the same time the work of art appears as experimentation. (Difference and Repetition 68)
(emphasis, mine)

Realism, Reality and the fallacy of Representation

As reality is not composed of--let me stop... as the reality an artist responds to and renders forth in his response (the work is the response) is not composed of fixed "things" or sets, alone or in patterns, representation can't be formulated in terms of correspondences (here is the representation: there is the reality to which it is thought to correspond)). Rather, both internally and formally within the work and in its generation, the reality is a continuum, unceasingly productive of itself, evolving through a continuum of response--or a continuum of co-responses, as the reality of work is shared by all those who encounter it--shared as genetic codes are shared, a continuity between individuals that generate a continuing evolution of difference... as these codes are never reproduced as perfect repetitions, in the organism; there are always perturbations in the code: in art, as variations on the pattern.

There is no possibility of founding aesthetic judgement on references between a work and the reality it is presumed to represent. Nor can critical thought be applied, comparing a work with principles, however pliant and adaptable, which remain external to the work and/or the reality it both represents, and IS.

Doesn't this suggest that we look at critical response as itself a part of the continuum, its authority drawing from its being generated as part of (another branch, if you will) of the continuum of response which is perpetually generating the work, and at work in all those who become part of its flow?

Death's Duty: Robin Blasir 1925-2009

A moving tribute to Robin Blasir by Stan Persky.

Freud, on How to Read...

Without comment: from Freud's Interpretation of Dreams: origninal (in translation) wording substituted with words in [brackets].

It is easy to show that dream-distortion [literary artifice] too profits from displacement of expression: If one ambiguous word is used instead of two unambiguous ones the result is misleading: and if our everyday; sober method of expression is replaced by a pictorial [figurative] one, our understanding is brought to a halt, particularly since a dream [literary work] never tells us whether its elements are to be interpreted literally or in a figurative sense or whether they are to be connected with the material of the dream-thoughts [literary text] directly or through the intermediary of some interpolated phraseology. In interpreting any dream-element [lit text] it is in general doubtful
(a) whether it is to be interpreted historically (as a recollection)
(b) whether it is to be interpreted symbolically, or
(d) whether its interpretation is to depend on its wording. Yet, in spite of all this ambiguity; it must be remembered, it is fair to say that the productions of the dream-work [literarty text], which; it must be remembered, are not made with the intention of being understood, present no greater difficulties to their translators than do the ancient hieroglyphic scripts to those who seek to read them.

One could do worse than use this as foundamental guidlines for literary critical reading.

Everything hangs on the phrase... "not made with the intention of being understood," itself, if applied to literary work, as abiguous and disputable as any statement one could possibly make... and as incontravertibly, if not indisputably, true.

Found Things

In the beginning, congealed out of Nothingness, Becoming gathered itself together and grew into a Cosmic Egg., half silver and gold, half shit and dust. The later was Heaven, the former, the late great planet Earth (though some held it to be the other way around). For countless ages, the Egg of the World sat on the mantle over the decorative electric fireplace (complete with simulated chimney flue), of the Hendricks family of Wheaton, Illinois. One day, when Queeny Hendricks was weeding the garden, she discovered a cat... or, as she liked to tell her neighbors, the cat discovered her. Falling under its spell, she let it follow her into the house. That very night, the cat leapt onto the mantelpiece, and, brushing against the Egg, knocked it to the floor where it shattered on the artificial marble hearthstone below, scattering shards like stars, particles of Heaven and Earth rising into everlasting confusion.

Never fall under spell of Found Things.

Winter Dancer

  Winter Dancer

The sun has drawn its arc four times
across the circle of the year,
transcribed its tangent on the bow,
and now the bow is laid aside, the music stops.

I wake, and see ahead a season without change,
a winter free of spring's apologies--the old
embarrassment of summer lies--an Amundson
of mind who shakes his shaggy coat
and makes a blizzard out of June.  

His eyes glitter under frozen brows; 
He smiles, and ice clouds wrap his shoulders
like a mountain in a Himalayan storm.

I know this man, have seen his face,
and not in dreams. His hands are small
and strong like mine; the wind blows brittle
at their finger tips, and yet
a supple music lends his movement 

Grace, an ease as when the mind
remembers what the body's lost,
as when an old dancer on a winter day
stops, stiff and cold beneath a snow bent tree, 
and hears the dance well up within, and motionless,

Rises like a child's song
into a season of its own creating.

I am the child singing,
out of fear for his old bones,
I sing. He takes my hand
as though it were his own and wraps
me in his great coat. I sing,
and still unmoving as the winter tree above,
he teaches me his dance--our foolish bodies
clinging one to one.
 

Redesigning the Dog

Finals over, I hope to spend time this week moving (and linking) my writing to a web page, getting rid of the clutter in the labels list and posting some new material.

Meanwhile, taking up the Hubble chalenge/experiment from Larval Subjects

A nice infrared shot of our solar system's second largest gas giant and for good measure,  a galactic collisioin.

Black Tie Affair

It was a black tie diner: band (much too loud), cocktails, long speeches honoring the eleemosynary exploits of one A.Gold; women dressed like ice cream cones: wrapped and tied in enormous bows--glittering, pointy heeled, hovering among the men like jungle parrots in a rookery of penguins.

Craig Lebain Reviews Lucky 13

Craig Lebain's review of Lucky 13 in the Philadelphia Inquier--Ben is my son.

Mississippi: Canton, 1966 ?

Was I was there... ? (Link)

I wonder if the LIFE photographer is the one who grabbed my wife and I (who were, blinded by pepper gas, running in the wrong direction) and turned us around and likely saved us from being clubbed with rifle buts by Mississippi State Troupers?

Philly Poetry Scene

From the Philadelphia Inquirer, Arts and Entertainment, Sunday April 19

 

Philly Poetry Scene  offers variety of venues for verse

By John Timpane 

Inquirer Staff Writer
San Francisco is famous as a great poetry town. As it should be.

But move over, San Fran: Philadelphia should be as famous for poetry as it is for cheesesteak and Rocky. Philly is a bursting cauldron, a dizzying maelstrom, a chorusing kennel, yea, a mad laser light show of verse.      Continued

"A Tiny Feast" Chris Adrian. New Yorker Story

Chris Adrian. "A Tiny Feast". New Yorker, April 20, 2009

There are places in the world--too many places--for too many of this planet's temporary inhabitants, where death does not come as a surprise or interruption, but camps like an unwelcome guest, squatting on the doorstep, sharing the family compound, sleeping beside them in the box or the sheet of aluminum that shelters them from sun or rain (when rain remembers to come); a guest who has been there as long as even the oldest can remember, stealing, as soon as one's back is turned, or in plain sight, from the cupboard of life, the very breath they thought had been hidden away, for whose sake they had gone through the motions of masking from his vision with charms and prayers--long after there remains not the least reason to believe in the power of charms or prayers to save--but for those of us privileged to live what we like to think of as normal lives, even those who understand and accept the terms of our limited contract on this earth, when death comes to claim those we love, it comes as something uncanny, a mystery, incomprehensible, for which, not even our previous losses can prepare us.

Chris Adrian's "A Tiny Feast" is an almost miraculous realization of the mystery of death, of the power of its visitation, of how it astonishes us into recognition of love--how is it possible for anything to be at once, "so awesome and so utterly powerless?"

Oh, and how do we account for the strange ways of medicine and therapeutic care, the magic of which is not love... but indifference?

This story is a Faery tale. The parents of the dying child are none other than Oberon and Tatiana. The caretakers don't recognize them for what or who they are--for the absolutely unique and unanticipated loss they are experiencing. Cut off, as we all are in their place, at least for a time, from the human community: what the Jewish tradition of mourning recognizes in the etiquette of sitting shiva. Guests enter the house of the mourners, but in silence. They may speak, but only if the mourners initiate the conversation. It's understood that death and mourning cuts us off from the community and we re-enter only in stages over time. Seven days of Shiva. Thirty days without the artificial pleasures of music and wine. Eleven months and the end of the obligation to recite Kaddish. Yahrzeit commemorating the day of loss after a year. A light ignited year by year for life.

For life... 

They are faeries. They are immortal... as are we all in our imagination. What do you do with Death, when you are immortal?

... but offer to the dying ... a little feast?

Chris Adrian's story... is just that: a little feast. To all of us... mortals, who live under the hill ... and always have, and always will.

Harry Kalas: 1936-2009

...and... he's OUTa here...

good to have heard ya...

The Brain's Need for Myth

While I've been busy with end-of-term grading, trying to squeeze in work on my novel, the Barking Dog has been feeling neglected. I often hear him as I rush from place to place, from one obligation to another--especially at the end of the day sipping a glass of wine at Stogie Joe's when I'm too tired to do more than write a few words in my journal. Hope for a snatch of conversation before trundling home to bed.

Be patient; we're waiting for inspiration, I tell him. Inspiration. A word that can't be trotted out-of-doors naked these days without a fig leaf of irony, else one risks arrest for indecent exposure.

The Dog understands none of this. What he wants is satisfaction, not rationalizations.

I was thinking about this as I read the Demon Haunted World post on Think Buddha. I found myself making connections... as close as I get to 'inspiration,' imaginary connections between unrelated elements--like seeing figures of the immortals in the stars.

We don't--that is--those of us who think of ourselves as enlightened rational beings, believe the world is haunted by demons and supernatural forces, and yet--our brains are so configured that we are apt to see at the end of the block at twilight--in that shape we cannot yet discern--such things as we know full well have no place in nature, and though quickly dismissed--even before, on closing the distance between us--these strange forms resolve themselves itself into: mailbox, stump of a tree, overturned recycling bin, we realize that we have not evolved beyond that state that led our kind to make of airy nothingness a local habitation and a place, to conceive of a universe haunted by gods and demons.

The common opposition of reason and emotion is far too simple--we understand this. No need to explain. One of the elements we should add to fill out this perceived polarity, I thought, as I read that post on Think Buddha--is a need to believe in the projections of our minds, a powerful drive that we can't repress, which reason cannot entirely satisfy; nor can we give up the claims of reason, of empirical understanding. Later... over the second or third glass of wine, I thought of Buffy. And this new series--what is it called--the Mormon chaste teenage vampire series? And Jane Austin's resurrection as a zombie... these are not, like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, explorations of the limits of reason and science--they are not meant to be believed, not meant to be taken at face value--not even in the popular misrepresentation of Coleridge's "suspension of disbelief." No, they come wrapped in a body-stocking sized fig leaf of irony. Then what are they about?

If not myth. Our need for myth. And that in our age--as Georges Bataille told us--our only encompassing myth, is the absence of myth.

The other day I read the previously untranslated story, "The Daughter's of the Moon, from Italo Calvino's Cosmicomic series (New Yorker. Feb. 23, 2009), and there it was again. The conventional opening to these stories, the "scientific" preface... which reads here more like the introduction to a myth than anything else, and Calvino's 'Qfwfq,' his narrator for every story in this series... who a few paragraphs later morphs into a collective "we," responding to the same need as Buffy ?

With more, or less success?

Where this left me was wondering about how literature, art--serves these irrational, or meta-rational needs, without subverting reason and our objective mastery of the physical world. I don't think I can spell this out at this point, but I see something relevant to the recent literary disputes about establishment realism and ... whatever you want to call its several challengers. One of the more interesting... and for me, disturbing thoughts... had to do with the assumed reasons for the success of ELF--the primacy of the market and all that.

Maybe, I wondered... does Buffy give us here a hint of another factor? Does ELF reaffirm the "Demon haunted world"... by pretending rationality while subverting it, by satisfying a reader's irrational need for a coherent mythos of "reality," which is itself a denial of any notion of mindful, self-critical rational grasp of the Real?

I always thought Shakespeare would have liked Buffy... really--how different in kind (suspending other aesthetic criteria for the moment).. is The Tempest? A work that fully engages our brain's need for a richly configured mythos... yet never lets us believe that any of it is other than the creation of our own minds? Here is a rope I would hang Pynchon from... but not Delillo... who avoids a rationality that so eviscerates the capacity to engage and respond in a way that satisfies our brain's hunger for the lost "demon haunted world" that it would (as I think happens when I read Pynchon) elevates rational critical response to such a necessity (if you are to understand it at all ) that it become a repressive force, and by neccesity, aesthetically limiting.

Return of The Psychoanalytic Field

I'm a reactive writer. I'm not inclined to spin out the kind of long contemplative meditations that Spurious (or Clavdia of Letters from a Librarian) do so well. I need to feel engagement, to feel something click, to realize that I've been preoccupied with the very ideas I'm reading about, but hadn't known it till that moment. Best of all, to find myself wakened to something else--thoughts that would seem to have only a peripheral relation to what has triggered them, that make me eager to trace out the connection, to find the parallel structure that has been waiting to for me... waiting to be Found. 

Fadi Abou-Rihan's posts were good at that. A section of his multi-part review of Anti-Oedipus, or his series on "Found Things," would be good for a new chapter in my novel, or several poems. It wasn't necessarily the ideas, but the sense of engagement, of presence, that they evoked. I might change the subject entirely (most often, that would be the case), but what I was writing was part of a conversation again--the primal energy that drives me to write, so I was quite pleased to see, after a long silence, a new post on The Psychoanalytic Field. Abou-Rihan will be taking up where he left off--recapping some of his previous posts on Found Things, and then moving on to new material. I'm looking forward to reading his new posts, and to continuing what for me has been an energizing and creative conversation.

... speaking of Spurious

Kafka For Himself

You have to know you're not Kafka, says W., that's the first thing. But you have to know that the person you're speaking to might be Kafka, that's the second. This is why conversation, for W., is always a matter for hope. The very ability to speak, to listen and respond is already something, he says.

 

Animal Silence

 

    If you look at this cat, Ari Figue's cat, it will occur to you that what you see and experience of its silence is not her silence at all; does not belong to them--to the animals, does not begin or end with them, but rather, to all that lies hidden on the other side of speech, to everything the words deny. They meet us emerging from this silence, moving toward us, rising out of white space, but never fully there, a surface impenetrable: animate markings on a blank page, unreadable convergence of being and silence, neither theirs nor ours.

Our collective, genetic biological material efflorescence opens and closes, opens and closes: unique moments of entropic dissolution.

 These are the words he saw on the page. He wrote them. He does not know what they mean. A convergence whose Emperor is the illusion of the first person singular. You see (he tells himself) all along what he heard as the Voice, was only silence, a deeper silence, a more than bodily silence, a river of silence upon which the I moves as a leaf carried on the surface of the stream.

Taking Leave of the Animals

We cannot begin without taking leave
He said when he turned us away
Fire leapt from his tongue

Instead, we gathered the names, leaving the animals
Speechless in the forest brakes, the river's course.
Only now do we understand the nature of our loss

We cannot begin without taking leave
They were more than we could bear, these words.
They grew fruitful and multiplied

We hung them on every bough.
There were not enough trees to hold them.
They fell to the earth like leaves

We cannot begin without taking leave
Our lips are dry with trying
Our fingers sign what we cannot say

How can we leave
What was never ours to begin with?
How can we ever return what we found
in their burning, silent eyes?

The Narrator is Death

I've been obsessed with the problem of narrative voice for more than twenty years. There has always seemed to be something missing--from critical accounts, in what I was searching for in my own writing. I found myself thinking about this again after reading a recent post by Dan Green. He was reflecting on the shifting point of view in Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides. I realized that in both of my novels I have not so much been searching for the right narrative voice, the right POV, as trying to escape it--a sense that the written voice was secondary, itself a reflection of or response to what remains--what must remain--outside the work, the real narrator is that presence that is called into being between the reader and the word--something heard and but imperfectly embodied in what finds its way onto the page, a threatening presence which can only be felt as a kind of absence--as the silence the words are there, not to reveal, but to obscure, to hide, to protect us from... a thing to drive off; leaving the writing, in essence, as a kind of incantation, the words, meaningless in themselves, their real purpose, to draw a circle around the living, to chant into being a border which the real Voice, the countless shifting voices of the dead are powerless to cross.


Here from the first line of Ari Figue's Cat, and the opening of chapter 2.

Late Winter
1995
He had been lying in bed for hours, half asleep, half awake when he heard, as distinct and real as the rattling of the windows in the wind, as the knocking of the heating pipes in the walls, a woman's voice calling out the name, Jacob, as though it were his own.

Cicadas


When he was a child it would come to him, the voice--sometimes out of common white noise, the sound of passing cars, a ceiling fan, a radio playing in another room﷓﷓sometimes in his own head, like the one he would hear when he was reading. Do not forget this moment, it seemed to say, as though he were being held accountable for what he had seen and heard--for everything experienced in that moment. Not seldom, it would take on the voice of a real person: Mrs. Erickson in the third grade, who, catching him daydreaming, would grab him by the ear: Pay attention! she would hiss, pointing to figures on a blackboard, demanding an answer to a question he could no longer remember. Somewhere in adolescence, the voice faded, but the feeling that had accompanied it, this sense of accountability, did not. If anything, it grew stronger. It would come over him like a seizure: a squirrel running up a tree, a bubblegum wrapper floating in a puddle on the sidewalk, a snatch of conversation overheard--the most trivial things would suddenly be transformed into  enigmas--as though something momentous hung in the balance--a problem he was compelled to solve. Portents of the empty set.

Tweeting Jane Austen: The Geograpy of Self

I've been thinking about time and space in narrative, how the arrow of time in fiction is not set in a single direction; that though we may speak of linear narratives, there are no such things; unlike life, we can always return to the first page and begin again. Nor, within the narrative itself, no matter how easy or difficult the story makes it for the reader to straighten out the path of time, is there any necessity for time to always move, as in the physical world, in a single direction: present, future, past may follow in any order. Direction, where all movement is one way, does not really apply to time. Take the word 'direction;' this is a spacial word, a metaphor at best when applied to time. I see in this a structural remnant of myth and the reenactment of its cycles in recurrent ritual, where time is merely another dimension--or better, 'direction' --on the cosmic map. Fiction--story telling of any kind, retains this mythical power to spacialize time and so impose on its representation of reality a fundamental and inescapable distortion. In primitive myths this distortion appears, at least to us--far removed from the worlds they created--as primarily metaphysical, but it is also psychological, social, relational, and it is this that remains when we have shed ourselves of the narratized metaphysics of primitive myth.

We've been reading Sense and Sensibility in my freshman class this past week. I've lost count of how many times I've read this book, but it never fails to engage me, to draw me in, to surprise me. How delicious those conversations of discovery--Elinor and Lucy Steele, the last chapter of Volume I, where Elinor learns of Lucy's engagement to Edward Ferrar, and first chapter of the next volume where, in conversation with herself, by an application of reality-testing and reason, she works her way through to a reconciliation with this painful discovery, from denial to self pity to anger to a saving compassionate understanding. Knowing the book, and knowing it well, only makes these passages the more moving. The experience is not unlike listening to an aria from an opera: the more familiar you are with every note and word, the more powerfully it wrenches the heart. Familiarity also creates room around the affect, a stillness apart from the emotion that makes peace between mind and emotion, where it's possible to think intensely and feel strongly in the same breath. Several trains of thought occurred to me as I was reflecting on what I'd read. While these threads seemed as disconnected at first as elements in a dream, like a dream, I felt a strong sense of unity, and was convinced this had to do with my reading of Austen.

One of those threads, in fact, had to do with dreams: how there is always a special component; how moving from room to room, or along a road, takes the place of--re-places--time. In reconstructing a dream I will sometimes see how, say--what happened on that beach beside the lake had to do with something long ago, where I spent my summers on the shore of Lake Michigan, and when I was in the apartment building searching for my room, this came from something more recent, and the water running through the hall was the past flooding into and eroding my present life. There is a geography of the mind, I thought, and in the architecture of dreams time is but another material element, occupying and defining space. In a dream, I thought, we move through time as from room to room and back again.

I played this against a feeling I had while reading the chapters I mentioned--an intense feeling of difference in the reality represented by Austen and my own, a difference of a kind that changes in social and political and economic conditions could not account for. I'm not sure I understand yet what I was sensing, but it has to do with the geography of self: That Austen's characters live in a different space, that while our biology may not have altered, something of the internal map by which we negotiate the narratives of our lives has. The myth has been radically revised. In particular, what is near and what is far has lost much of the meaning it seemed to hold and those distinctions, so important to Austen, between inner and outer reality is far more permeable and does not govern us as they do the people in her fiction. Or I should say--does not govern me. Her reality is not mine. There have been great changes in our physical world--and it is of this world we make for ourselves the map of Self. I suppose the conclusion I can draw from this is: the distortion created by the spacialization of time peculiar to Austen's day is not ours, and that writers can not pretend to borrow, without betraying their own place in reality, the formative distortion of another place and time.

Reading over what I've written, it all seems so obvious, hardly worth the trouble to describe. Even trivial. I also feel there is more to this thread if I keep following it. It does feel good to be writing here again after almost two weeks absence. That review--if you can call it that--of the Alice Munro story quite wore me out.

May the dog live to bark another day!

Trapped in the Myth of Self

From Will Buckingham's post on The Body Artist, HERE

...as with a lot of the Western philosophical tradition – for DeLillo this idea of the subsiding of the self and the stories of the self, this loss of the great narrative of the self, seems to be approached with a kind of fearful foreboding. But is it such a terrible thing? After all, when we slip the bonds of the grand narrative, we may find that everything else still goes on before, that the body and mind persist, continuing to do their job, and that all we have lost is our attachment to a myth. Might it not be liberating? Here I cannot help thinking of Dōgen: ‘Unless the cold pierces through our bones once, how can we have the apricot blossoms perfuming the whole world?’

To be trapped by one’s own myth, when all is said and done, may be a pretty grim fate.

Poker Puritans and Toking

I do what we all do on our down times... link to stuff worth reading.  Here's Sean Carroll, my all time fave physisist restaurant critic and general wise guy on railroading American Pilgrims...

HERE

And do NOT miss his link to the letter Michael Phelps should have written, HERE