The God of Small Things Broken on the Wheel

Titian's Madonna of the Rabbit might be sweet and simple and pastoral: the young woman holding the baby, the child reaching for one of two domestic white rabbits, the mother's hand caressing the back of the child's head. You can almost hear them murmuring, gentle, now. The mother's hand cupping the rabbit's haunches rather than holding the scruff of its neck, an indication of trust on the rabbit's part that must have been observed from life. A shepherd in the backgrond that might be a guardian of the gentle triangle, petting a black sheep, his gaze not anxious, but dreamy and thoughtful in a place where "sheep may safely graze". Is the baby reaching, or blessing? Is the mother's hand intentionally making the Buddha's "earth touching" gesture?



That's a big part of Christmas for me, a midnight when animals can talk, a truce when soldiers from the tranches exchange cigarettes and play soccer, when the world is supposed to stop savaging children and animals. On any other day of the year, the Baby Jesus, the ox and the donkey would be "collateral damage", swollen at the side of the road somewhere-- just look at the statistics on civilians from Our Monkey Emperor's invasion of Iraq, or if, as Stalin believed, "statistics" don't count, Brian K. Vaughan's Pride of Baghdad. For one night, the Roman Saturnalia is turned into a celebration of the most vulnerable fragments of suffering humanity.

Titian's meditation goes deeper; the young girl attending the baby is Saint Catherine of Alexandria, who lived almost 300 years later. Artists called these kinds of paintings "sacred conversations", sacra conversazione, figures from different periods brought together to carry some symbolic message.

A ghost of horror stalks the loving scene, because Catherine symbolized the torture and cruelty imposed on the small things of the world. When she was eighteen, she was condemned to be broken on the wheel: on the "Catherine wheel", the victim is bound to the spokes and the wheel is turned with a rod shoved in between the spoke and the all too human limb. Arms and legs can be broken many times this way, with the victim still conscious; sometimes broken so many times that the torturers could wrap your arms and legs around the spokes like a piece of string. According to the saint's legend, Catherine touched the wheel, and the wheel itself broke into pieces. Robbed of their fun, they beheaded her instead. Of the rabbits, and the flowers (artists were very specific about the symbolism of plants in Titian's day), the shepherd and the black sheep, I'm fairly ignorant, except as indications of gentleness and trust. That the world contains such cruelty in juxtaposition with beauty and tenderness is one of those mysteries of the "philosophia perennis" that I keep trying to understand with Christian and ecumenical metaphors, but there's real blood mixed in with the wine.

So Merry Christmas. Sorry, cosmos, that we've been such vicious, murderous primates all year, but we promise to do better next year. That was Christmas Eve, of course, and we made those promises and toast while we were drunk on sentiment, sentiment being defined here as emotions that you don't really mean, as sincere as Jove's perjuries. Christmas Day, people were back to taunting a captive Siberian tiger, dangling a leg over its prison and then affecting surprise when the tiger climbed up that leg, killed one of them and mauled two more, doing what tigers do. What would William Blake make of this? Word comes as I finish this post of the death of Benazir Bhutto. Let us continue this talent for killing our best and brightest on the altar of a murderous God, and then see what we've accomplished. Our friend Michael in Colorado sends his usual cynical Christmas card: Merry Fucking Christmas. Not nearly cynical enough.

Everything I Needed to Know About Religious Fanaticism, I Learned from DC and Marvel's Problems with Continuity


Peter Brook once said that directing an opera was like getting spring water to run through old, calcified pipes-- there was nothing wrong with the living music, but the institution had built up so much lime and scale in the pipes the water had to travel through that in some places they choked off the flow. I expect a similar phenomenon occurs in major religious institutions and big comic book companies.

I was rereading Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers of Victory , which plays with obscure characters DC didn't care about and not only revives, but makes them profound. On Comic Book day (Wednesday) after savoring the high minded stuff I push on the literary goyim about (Ex Machina, Fables, the stuff deemed acceptable by The New York Times and the Royal Society-- will someone please beat some life into Chris Ware with rolled up copies of Fantastc Four # 48-60?), I induged myself with episodes of DC's The Search for Ray Palmer. Nowhere near as layered or meaningful as Seven Soldiers, but it struck me how full of comic goodness they both were, the stuff Alan Moore defined as "the Snap! Crackle! Pop! of comics" when describing Love and Rockets. This is the living water forcing its way through the calcified pipes of the genre, and although some very dark things happen in Morrison's epic, as dark when taken out of context as anything in Ellis, Miller or Moore, it avoids the abasement of humanity that seems to be the editorial norm at Marvel and DC.

I'm not very good at analyzing great art, too emotionally involved by the whole to ever figure out "how'd they do that?" It's easier to see what went right, or wrong, in journeyman work like The Search for Ray Palmer. The plotline is simple alternative-universe stuff: the Atom, shrinking down to the size where Newton no longer applies, scoots from parallel universe to parallel universe while four heroes follow after, so they can ask him where the remote is, or how to save the universe, or some damn thing. There's a universe where genders are reversed, another where "The Bat-Man" in army surplus cape stalks a gaslight-era Gotham, and one very scary world in which the infant Superman's rocket landed in Stalinist Russia, with Batchik a bitter dissident haunting the subways. They even did the "everybody's a vampire!" hooey-- so why does this entertain, while Marvel's alternate universes (What If? and Marvel Zombies) are as emotionally vile and morally repugnant as a Bush administration law brief?

It has something to do with the demon of "continuity", an invention of Marvel's in the 1960s that gave its superhero books greater depth and literary credence than DC, which lagged behind as "kid's stuff" for decades. "Continuity" already existed in slice-of-life strips like Gasoline Alley, but applied to the serial adventures of a superhero, it meant that characters would age, graduate from school, fall in and out of love, marry, have children, and interact with each other and the "real" world. Thus Captain America would have his heart broken by Richard Nixon and expose Ronald Reagan as a reptilian alien conqueror; Peter Parker, hero of a soap opera for boys, would sooner or later have to choose between Felicia Hardy or Mary Jane, and marriage meant a family and hostages to fortune.

But continuty meant calcified pipes choking off the water, like the ones in Peter Brook's old opera house, conventions that become sacred cows and then taboos. If a series character becomes successful-- steady contracts and health insurance for all-- continuity becomes a trap. Some series have so much back story, they can scarcely move. The more brilliant creators, like musicians improvising on a theme, can play with an archetype without breaking it, but for journeymen artists and writers it must be like writing the hundredth episode of MacGuyver-- what's the gimmick this week, and how will our hero escape it while coming out the other end without fundamental change? Star Trek writers had a direct approach to this conundrum: kill off the love interest in the next-to-last scene. The much reviled editor-in-chief at Marvel, Joe Quesada, can think of no better solution to his characters' problems than to burn everything down and start over. DC avoided the continuity trap longer than Marvel did, primarily aiming their books at young children and tweens. They could play with continuity in the most absurd ways, and who the heck cared? Marvel marketed itself towards adolescents and college students, and they paid attention to whether the Hulk was grey or green. When DC started getting "gritty" like Marvel, they found themselves trying to make sense of infinite crises as byzantine as a history of religious wars.

Which leads us to the crisis in monotheistic religions, and people willing to murder in an argument over whether the eyes of God are grey or green. The insistence on historical veracity found in Judaism, Christianity and Islam seems to me another version of this pernicious trait, with real casualties. It perverts the intention of the archetype. Hinduism, though it makes room for ten thousand gods, seems no better at suppressing the will to murder or die over something that cannot be known. Even Buddhism was perverted by the samurai to affect indifference to life and death and the suffering of others. Mental flexibity, the ability to play with ideas and explore alternatives, allowed us to take over the planet, and a lack of flexibility now finds us strangling each other's children in a dispute about which end of a hard-boiled egg an invisible being orders us to open first. Why an entity with ten thousand names would be so insecure is beyond me. Worst Excuse for Murder Ever.

How the Boss Made a Monkey Out of Me

The recent headlines about chimps who outperform college students at mental math are somewhat misleading. It's not that these were super chimps, or moronic freshmen. Boxer and Feinstein, two female chimps named for California's senators, played a memory game that asked them to compare numbers and choose the larger number of two sets of objects. Their human opponents-- here's what made the difference-- "were not allowed to count or verbalize as they worked, and they were told to answer as quickly as possible. Both chimps and humans typically answered within 1 second. And both groups fared about the same."

Comparing sets of numbers resembles a task primates might have to perform in nature: grabbing as much as you can before the hyenas chase you away, or the po-pos arrive, whichever comes first. Taking language away from the humans put us on a level playing field with the other primates. "I think of this more as using non-human primates as a tool for discovering where the sophisticated human mind comes from," explains Jessica Cantlon of Duke. "I don't think language is the only thing that differentiates humans from non-human primates, but in terms of math tasks, it is probably the big one," she said.

The snatch-and-grab-it instinct tells us a lot about why so many right wing cranks reject taxation, and vote against their own self interest to support the Republican party while the infrastructure turns to shit around them. Kim Stanley Robinson does the math in his novel Forty Signs of Rain:
“The average surplus value created by American workers is thirty-three dollars an hour.... Sixty four thousand three hundred and fifty dollars a year, generated by the average worker in surplus value.”

".... What's the average income?" Edgardo asked. "Thirty thousand?.... Call it thirty, and what's the average taxes paid?.... Call it ten. So let's see. You work every day of the year, except for three lousy weeks. You make around a hundred thousand dollars. Your boss takes two thirds, and gives you one third, and you give a third of that to the government. Your government uses what it takes to build all the roads and schools and police and pensions, and your boss takes his share and buys a mansion on an island somewhere. So naturally you complain about your bloated inefficient Big Brother of a government, and you always vote for the pro-owner party."

“.... It's a matter of what you can see," [Frank] suggested. "You see your boss, you see your paycheck, it's given to you. You have it. Then you're forced to give some of it to the government. You never know about the surplus value you've created, because it was disappeared in the first place. Cooked in the books.... The only things people understand are sensory. We’re hard-wired to understand life on the savannah. Someone gives you meat, they’re your friend. Someone takes your meat, they’re your enemy. Abstract concepts or statistics just aren’t as real as what you see and touch. People are only good at what they can think out in terms of their senses. That’s just the way we evolved.”

Heartbreaker, Nervewrecker, Meansucker—Which of You Stole Wesley Willis’ Money?

My kid-sister-in-law Colleen used to greet Wesley Willis on her way to and from class in Chicago. Wesley was a homeless, 300-pound schizophrenic who then made a few bucks selling ballpoint pen drawings and a CD he’d cut of homemade songs sung (badly— tone-deaf Wesley was a living refutation of the myth that black people are naturally musical) in front of a Casio keyboard that always played the same tune. Colleen usually shared her change, bought a CDs and received her blessing: knocking foreheads together and Wesley’s assurance that “you are my friend in Jesus’ name”. Starting in the 1970s, and then with a vengence in the 1980's, there was a devil's bargain between liberal pity for the institutionalized and conservative disdain for the poor : schizophrenics and severe manic depressives were turned out of the State Hospitals by the thousands and given pittances for rent and medications-- of course, they didn't take their medicine without supervision and wound up living on the street or being exploited in the new, private sector "group homes". Wesley was just one more broken loser, a failed capitalist in self congratulatory America. Great job, Brownie.

Then the beautiful people discovered Wesley. Chicago punks started using him as an opening act, then nationally known “alternative” artists, who shall remain nameless because I don’t feel like getting into a pissing match with Jello Biafra fans, started hailing Wesley Willis as a primitive genius, a celebrity of outsider art, started getting him gigs, recording contracts, having him over until they got tired of him. And I have no problem with that, if it got him out of the cold once in a while, if he had friends who checked on him once in a while.

But as entertainment, I never quite thought the joke was funny. I thought Will Robinson Sheff hit the nail on the head when he said "periodic appearances for crowds of jeering white "fratboys" evoke an uncomfortable combination of minstrel act and traveling freakshow. “It’s funny” my less fastidious friends tell me, “it’s not exploitive, it’s funny the way he screams ‘Suck a Swiss hound’s diiiiick...’ “. It’s still a freak show, I answer, and I have mixed feelings about the morality of freak shows. But then it’s all about the freak show these days, isn’t it? And nothing is immoral in America if it can be marketed somehow.

But Wesley died of leukemia at the age of 40, and no one seems to know where Wesley’s money went from the sold-out shows and the novelty act CD sales and his appearance fees for being laughed at on the Howard Stern show. If stealing a dead crazy man's money is a prerequisite for hipness, then turn my heart to stone. In a more honest age, we called them “geeks” and they bit the heads off live chickens and we paid them in drugs or bottles of hootch, and paraded them for the marks as “The Wild Man of Borneo” or some such-- but we knew it was grotesque and we didn’t kid ourselves that we were being chic. Yeah, rock on, Chicago.

I'm with Stupid


The Bush White House will be hosting this year's Nobel Laureates, including Al Gore, on Thursday the 26th. This is one of those strange scenes we need a Shakespeare to record, or maybe Hunter Thompson. David Halberstam was good at this sort of fated meeting in our own War of the Roses-- see The Powers That Be for Bill Moyers asking William Paley one last time to do something of greater service to mankind than The Beverly Hillbillies, or the scene when a dying Norman Chandler sends a last message to Richard Nixon. I'm not someone who believes there would have been a golden age of Al Gore if not for Florida, but certainly we might have have been spared George Bush, our American Alcibiades.

Possum Progressives in Kalamazoo: The Michigan Organizing Project



Small steps, Master Kung tells us, incremental progress; anything more, and you'll break your heart.

Michigan is seeing some small progressive successes in places like Kalamazoo, Grand Rapids and Muskegon. A group of liberal-to-moderate church congregations, homeless shelters and community NPOs called the Michigan Organizing Project are networking "to assist in the development of strong, congregation-based, grassroots community organizations committed to democratic principles and values of justice and fairness". They've been careful to define themselves as "non-partisan" while leaning towards social justice projects beloved of the left.

One key element seems to be choosing three (3) specific legislative changes every six months or so, a deliberate decision to avoid the scattershot laundry list of issues I see at other demonstrations. MOP stays tightly focused on small issues: changing local dental care rules for the poor, changing new development projects to include 1/3 low income housing. The member associations then pester hell out of our local politicos, and every three months or so, the congregations get the warm bodies in the seats for a public declaration of intent ("will you vote Yes or No on projects one, two and three?") from our representatives.

This end run is making progressive changes in local politics, while completing ignoring the Democratic party, still trying to get its thumb out of its ass. Michigan Republicans are too busy honking "no taxes! taxes no!" (in a state with an infrastructure already on life support) to pay any attention to MOP; Republicans have a tendency not to show up at MOP rallies, sensing an unsympathetic audience, perhaps. While it's true there's no one there with a purse worth kissing up to, I want to think there's one or two of them willing to go where the people are in pain. The Presbyterians are there; the Catholics are there. The Mayor, the city council, and our state representatives are there. The Kalamazoo Homeless Action Network is there, which allows me to nudge my hipper friends and whisper, "KHAN...!" in an effort to make them snort or giggle during the prayer.

History and a mercurial nature compel me to spend my activism on grandiose, more quixotic projects, chipping away at the obtuse mountain we laughingly call public education-- but that's a fight the gods contend against in vain, gnawing away at the Old Enemy though you know you're going to lose. There is much to be learned from these almost imperceptible notes of grace won by the Michigan Organizing Project. If the next national election is stolen, if it makes no difference who's in charge at the top (though I think ordinary people have it a tiny bit better under the Democrats), this kind of grassroots attention to detail might prove a successful adaptation by the Progressive species to an unfriendly environment.

If I Were a Carpenter, and You Were a Bag Lady


The most disgusting act of treachery against labor today must be the Brotherhood of Carpenters' practice of hiring homeless people to man picket lines instead of union members. Apparently their members can't be bothered; it's cheaper and more "convenient" to hire a desperate man at $8.00 an hour than ask a $20.00 an hour carpenter to walk his own damn line. And "the creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."

The Mid-Atlantic Regional Council of Carpenters is supposedly the only national union to crawl so low, but you can bet this will used as a canard against unions by every anti-labor lickspittle from here to Canarsie.

Taking advantage of the poor is a job for management, not labor. A dirty little sliver of rationalization tells me that the street people working the picket line could really use the $8.00, and who's to begrudge them any pittance--? But that's the line of sophistry that lets the apologists of capitalism excuse the Mexican border factories, and the hypocritical exploitation of illegal immigrants on this side of the border, and the insult of a $5.85 minimum wage.

They best not come to my neighborhood; our homeless people are organized. It seems to be the American consensus that anyone dumb enough to fall under the wheels of the system probably deserves what happens to them, and geeking for the Carpenters is a better gig for the homeless than scrounging for bottle deposits. Thus shit is transmuted to sugar. But before I concede, and smile and wink at such a crime against the soul, let my bones turn to dust with Joe Hill's, and mix with the sawdust, and choke the sanctimonious throats of the too-proud to picket members of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Council of Carpenters.

Carmen Dog by Carol Emshwiller: What I'm Reading


Carol Emshwiller was one of the Guests of Honor at the World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs last week, and the convention goody bag included a new edition of her comic novel Carmen Dog from Peapod Classics. Peapod is an imprint from the folks who produce Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, a small press specializing in books that blur genre distinctions, the true "literature of the fantastic". I went back to my hotel room for a nap before the evening festivities, pulled Carmen Dog out of the duffel, and instead of napping read the entire book front to back, giggling and smiling most of the way.

Carmen Dog has been called Emshwiller's Candide. It is sweet, short, funny, hard-eyed and true, but its heroine, although a true innocent, is more intelligent, decisive and resourceful than Voltaire's Candide. The villiains are confounded but have a softer landing than those in Voltaire, and although the world is turned upside down, no one has their buttocks eaten by pirates, and there is a happy, uptopian ending.

Pooch (the people she encounters think she's saying "Pucci") is a golden-haired dog who is evolving into a human girl. This phenomenon is happening all over the world, like one of those unexplained sea-changes in J.G. Ballard. Human women are devolving into animals-- Pooch's mistress has turned into a drunken snapping turtle, wallowing in the bathtub-- and female animals are evolving up into humans. On both extremes, their personalities reflect their animal nature: a human socialite with borderline personality disorder becomes a self-destructive, angry wolverine, attacking the Plaza Hotel, while Pickle the amiable guinea-pig has grown into a cozy midwife, puzzled by other's cruelty when there are more important things to be done.

The males, of course, are baffled and blaming the women for the changes-- this has finally proved to some of them that women are, indeed, a separate race-- and although the villains are quite monstrous, Carmen Dog is too forgiving of human foibles to be called an anti-male tract. If you're interested, Peapod Classics has posted a sample chapter here:
.... What the doctor doesn't mention is how many similar cases he's seen and just how far some of them have progressed. He doesn't realize that the husband wouldn't be a bit surprised, that the husband realizes from personal experience that some of the women are already talking in grunts (if at all), while others, who used to speak only in guttural mutterings, are now mouthing long, erudite words such as teleological, hymenopterology, omphalos, and quagmire.

Christine, for instance, red-headed, plump Christine, who had several times been taken for an orangutan, can now argue her way out of any zoo no matter what the educational level of the keepers. Mona, on the other hand, can almost fly (though it is unlikely that she ever really will). Her husband complains that she makes funny noises, but her children like her all the better for it. John is divorcing Lucille in order to marry Betty (quite bearish still, but evidently what John wants). Mabel has only recently been given a name at all.

This is not the case with Pooch, who has had a name from the start and who now finds herself taking over more and more of the housework and baby-sitting, yet continues to be faithful. Her mistress is deteriorating rapidly -- mouth grown wide, eyes suspicious. Her master (the man who visited the doctor, as mentioned a moment ago) has tried all the experts he can afford and they are now, both of them, in psychotherapy, as the doctor recommended, but it looks as though the marriage can't last.

In other homes, similar dramas are playing themselves out in various ways. A guinea pig named Cucumber (because of her shape, and sometimes affectionately referred to as "Pickle"), although not very smart, is taking over several of the easier tasks in the house next door. Cucumber has spoken to Pooch on several occasions, but Pooch finds it hard to be with her because she feels that she, Pooch, needs to hold herself back. Sometimes she feels she'd like to grab hold of Cucumber by the back of the neck and give her a good shake. And for no reason. Phillip, the king snake down the block, has turned out to be female after all, as has Humphrey the iguana. Neither of them, it is clear, has much maternal instinct, though, and they were last seen heading south on Route 95 with not so much as a good-bye kiss to the little ones who had watched over them tenderly, albeit not very consistently.

On the other hand, Pooch is doing the best she can for her foster family. (The mistress has taken to drink and sleeps a good bit of the day, but bites out viciously if provoked. Not that she hasn't done something of the sort to some degree all her life, but before it had usually been a quick slap.) Pooch now does the shopping as well as the laundry, diapering, and much of the cooking, though she is hardly as old as the oldest child she's looking after. Pooch, who had always been smiling and playful, now has become serious and sad, watching over everything with her big, golden-brown, color-blind eyes.

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What I'm Reading: Clive James Cultural Amnesia


Came back Sunday night from the World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs, much too over-stimulated and inspired by many meetings to give a coherant account of the experience: I saw this one, heard that one, developed a little crush on another, bumped into this one or saw such-and-so a mighty one from a distance drinking overpriced scotch in the hotel bar. I expect the anecdotes and insights will come dribbling out bit by bit as I have time to process them.

Here is one such: the comic book artist Matthew Dow Smith and I had an informal gripe session about why some "superstar" artists who shall remain nameless turn into shitheels. I compared notes from my own experience watching medieval graduate students evolve into professors and my own brief encounters with the famous (in my experience, famous persons most deserving of reknown have been the least pretentious, and showed the most curiosity about the world around them.) It costs so little-- seconds really-- to show noblesse oblige to someone farther down the ladder than yourself, and pays off down the road by spreading good will. He was interested in my ideas about the "poison mentor", the false friend and father figure who uses the apprentice instead of teaching them, a type who causes at least as much damage in society as the overly-analyzed "devouring mother".

All this is prologue to saying that Cultural Amnesia is a very generous book, by which I mean Mr. James has crammed so much good thought and bonhomie into this collection, you can browse just one or two of the essays and come away with passages that will keep your wheels turning for a week. Cultural Amnesia is a collection of original essays concerning the violence of the past century, a handful of people who did their best to stave off the darkness, and favorite writers off Mr. James' shelves. I plan on giving it to my more thoughtful former students as a friendly introduction to the larger world of humanistic thought and why it matters, as generous a gift as the Durants' Story of Civilization. A long time ago, a casual recommendation by a professor when I was a teen led me to Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory and the works of Joseph Campbell, and when I came across them years later, took me miles from where I started. Cultural Amnesia is that kind of resource. This is how we are nutured by those who have gone before, rather than exploited.



Slate magazine has a selection of some of the essays here, enough perhaps to make you buy a copy and keep it on your shelf for reading with your morning coffee. I got mine as a birthday present and read it through the summer, starting with characters I was already familiar with, and then more slowly from A-Z. Someone in the old Whole Earth News recommended this approach when reading new reference books: start by reading the entries on a subject you already know something about, and if it's good, start working your way in deeper.

It's like a really good buffet from a generous host. This morning I dipped into "Hegel" and "Keats" and found enough in there to have me muttering to myself the rest of the day. Here are a few bites from James' essay on Adolf Hitler:

"Some of the last aphorisms written by the great Robert Musil were devoted to summarizing the pathogenic nature of Hitler. Beautifully crafted statements, they had no effect on Hitler whatsoever.... a sufficient concentration of violence could neutralize any amount of culture, no matter how widely diffused."

"It may seem unfair to condemn intellectuals who conspire to undermine vulgar democracy in favor of a refined dream for failing to foresee the subsequent nightmare. And Moeller was only one among many. But there were too many: That was the point. Too many well- read men combined to prepare the way for a pitiless hoodlum who despised them, and they even came to value him for being a hoodlum: for lacking their scruples, for being a drum of nature."

If that doesn't take the piss out of the neo-conservative "intellectuals", the Podhoretzs, Kristols and Abrams who have enabled Bush the past several years, who are now foisting Rudolph Guliani on us, nothing will-- their self-love is adamantine.

DOPES



There once was a time, when the British and Americans were at least pretending to be grown-ups in Afghanistan, when Tony Blair-- that too-clever Greek who thought he could school the bumptious Romans-- advised President Bush to simply buy up the opium crop in Afghanistan. It could be used by legitimate drug companies for needed medicines, and the influx of cash would win some hearts and minds among the farmers. "Are you kidding?" he was told, "We're fighting a war on drugs." The Bush administration had already given millions of dollars to the Taliban for their eradication program. Steve Clemons and his readers, far better educated than I am, have some hard numbers on the subject of opium at the Washington Note.

The Taliban, of course, is making hay while the sun shines and the dope's hitting the streets. Didn't someone-- Shrub's favorite political philosopher-- say something about people who swallow camels but choke on gnats? Not a moment of sleep lost over the thousands of deaths they've caused, and they can tuck themselves in at night with the warm thought that they didn't spend a few pennies to save millions of dollars in grief.

I'm Shocked, Shocked...


And the Captain Renault Award for Disingenuous Surprise goes this week to anyone over the age of 18 who professes bewilderment at Musharraf's behavior in Pakistan. The omniscent strategists of the Bush dynasty are ineligible, as they now compete amongst themselves in a special category, the exemplary "Again-- It Is the Legend" Prize.

If this level of sophistication can be achieved by a schoolteacher in the hinterlands, whose knowledge of Pakistan consists of:
1) an Oriana Fallaci interview with Ali Bhutto in 1976,
2) a second interview with his daughter Benazir after the Musharraf coup, and
3) that guy with the cigarette holder in the film biography Gandhi,
imagine what the Bush State Department must-- oh, right. Better bring Karen Hughes out of retirement to help Condi with this one. The Taliban can practically taste those nuclear convoys the Pakistanis drive around.

The Captain Renault Award comes with a framed portrait of the good gray Mr. Claude Rains in his most famous role. The "Legend" Prize is given only to professed experts who repeat more blunders than the combined cast of "Cops" in a given year. The "Again-- It Is the Legend" Prize comes with a sculpture showing Arrakis fremen looking on with amazement at a monkey trying to fuck a football.

Hamlet with Extra Cheese in California





A poor thing, but mine own: Colina Middle School in Thousand Oaks, California put on a production of my student play Hamlet with Extra Cheese , available until the Tromp of Doom from Brooklyn Publishers. Here we see Birnham Wood come to Dunsinane, Julius Caesar and the fickle plebes at the Senate, Lady and Mr. Macbeth, et alia.

THE AMERICAN DEMIURGE: In Which Toto Pulls Back the Curtain on Consensual Reality

A great number of Americans no longer live in the real world; they subscribe instead to a false reality, composed by a false creator I would describe as the "American demiurge". The American demiurge is a deliberate distortion of consensual reality, a false idol erected by marketers, lobbyists, editors, advertisers, public relations executives and “spin doctors”.



The ancient Gnostics were troubled by a dissonance between the reality we wish for and the world as it is. If God is good, why make a universe that includes childhood cancer and suffering innocents? They imagined a creature called the demiurge, a “false god”, who created this imperfect, indifferent reality. The true Creator, they believed, exists on a plane beyond the one we can perceive. Humanity worships a cruel deceiver, while the God of the Real languishes unseen, and weeps for our self-inflicted wounds.

Human dictators have always tried to construct a flattering version of reality as a means of social control. The oppressed may comply with the slogans and the rituals, but more than a few know they’re being lied to. Americans, of course, are free to flatter and lie to themselves, to embrace our self-made chains and customize them with charms and ring-tones, too. Edward Bernays, the father of modern propaganda and advertising, called this “engineered consent”, “crystallizing public opinion”. The techniques were used by Goebells to sell Hitler, and by Bernays to sell cigarettes. The heirs of Bernays and Goebbels, professional illusionists, now dominate our culture.

Imagine our perception of reality as a bead on a wire, with absolute truth represented by a mark at the center of the wire. We adjust the bead this way or that, but because our senses can never hold all the permutations of an event, the best we can hope for is to get the bead a little closer or a little further from the truth. Wander too far from the truth, and the bead slides off the end of the wire and falls to the ground.

Still, mundus vult decipi-- “the World wants to be deceived.” Americans have again and again elected administrations that shape reality by manipulating our perception of what is true. The opposition sputters like a straight man trying to out talk the Marx Brothers; serious men are made to look like fools, and fools elevated to the presidency. We have had eight years of a White House that mocked “the reality based community” and denied the existence of any truth that could not be altered with the proper mental framework. This is an ethic as old as making a lame horse look healthy, or gilding a leaden crown.

When reality catches up with us, when brute fact slaps down our mental constructs, the showmen shout down the dissidents until the rubes doubt the evidence of their own eyes. We have wandered far from objective reality and embraced what will sell. The mainstream rushes to the theatres, swallows the panaceas, votes for the best marketing campaign. The counterculture is likewise compromised; the rebel’s cri de coeur will be used tomorrow as an anthem to market clothing, cars, and retirement plans.

Self-delusion has attached itself to our commercial culture like a virus mimicking the genetic code of a cell. The Fourth Estate currently wallows in celebrity coverage and revels in shame like an alcoholic in the gutter. News executives can no more resist the latest frenzy than a fish can rebel against the sea it swims in.

Marketers and public relations executives, high priests of the demiurge, are as amoral as a weapons engineer who sees each murderous device as an interesting technical problem. They smile, they flatter, they insinuate, they distort, and take great
personal offense if someone calls them a liar. The logic of the marketplace convinces them of the virtue of almost any cause, whether selling toothpaste or a politician or a war.

If our culture has a dysfunctional relationship with reality, the first step would be to recognize that we have a problem. Our task is to insist that simple honesty is recognized as the essential policy in the marketplace of ideas, and warn our citizens that the American demiurge is a god of illusion.

An Irish bishop, George Berkeley, once “proved” that matter did not exist. Dr. Johnson refuted Bishop‘s notion by kicking a stone and saying, “I refute it thus”. The rock that Dr. Johnson kicked has been picked up by the fellaheen around the world, and they aim to put it through our front window and hit someone in the head.

© 2007 by Michael Fountain

My President Staged a Coup, and All I Got Was This Lousy Orange T-Shirt

The gentle journey jars to halt,
The drifting dream is done;
The Deadly, that we thought were dead,
Stand waiting, every one.

(Walt Kelly, For Lewis Carroll and the Children)

The political news, to be frank, has been so unrelentingly ghastly as to render me speechless for some weeks. Instead, I've retreated happiily to spending my creative time in the 12th century with Eleanor of Aquitaine, researching, drawing and writing an eight page web comic for submission to DC's Zuda comics project. Now I emerge from my marmot hole to find Bush still posturing (if a bit stiffly), and Cheney still grabbing more and more power for the Executive, his delayed revenge for the Church committee's reining in the CIA. Al Qaeda thrives in the environment created for them by a clumsy America. Gonzales is gone, but Michael Mukasey can't quite bring himself to say that a president can't break the law. These things anger us, but we cannot claim surprise; these are all cases of a scorpion acting like a scorpion, true to its nature.

Worse than these, perhaps, is the Congress' inability to put the brakes on an monarchist president. They don't have the votes, even for something as clear cut as Bush's veto of health insurance for poor children while spending billions in Iraq. How, then, will they find enough members to understand what's at stake in Bush's suspension of habeas corpus, rendition and torture without hindrance, domestic spying without judicial oversight? This mealy-mouthed generation of Democrats cannot rebel without asking permission first, or apologizing afterwards.


"Trust me", says the scorpion when he asks the frog for a ride across the river, and then when he stings the frog, the frog is naive enough to profess surprise. Again and again, President Bush has told the Congress, "Trust me to know what I'm doing," ignored their edicts, and used "signing statements" (more than all other presidents combined) to make bold his intention to do exactly what he wanted to do in the first place. Is this not "contempt of Congress"?

Wake me when they're ready to recognize that Bush's coup has reached the level of "treason, high crimes and misdemeanor". We cannot impeach the creature for simple incompetence-- that's the American people's fault, in voting for him-- but how can it be that this popinjay has skated over the law again and again, without breaking the ice?

What I'm Reading: Clive James' Cultural Amnesia


Came back Sunday night from the World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs, much too over-stimulated and inspired by many meetings to give a coherant account of the experience: I saw this one, heard that one, developed a little crush on another, bumped into this one or saw such-and-so a mighty one from a distance drinking overpriiced scotch in the hotel bar. I expect the anecdotes and insights will come dribbling out bit by bit as I have time to process them.

Here is one such: the comic book artist Matthew Dow Smith and I had an informal gripe session about why some "superstar" artists who shall remain nameless turn into shitheels. I compared notes from my own experience watching medieval graduate students evolve into professors and my own brief encounters with the famous (in my experience, famous persons most deserving of reknown have been the least pretentious, and showed the most curiosity about the world around them.) It costs so little-- seconds really-- to show noblesse oblige to someone farther down the ladder than yourself, and pays off down the road by spreading good will. He was interested in my ideas about the "poison mentor", the false friend and father figure who uses the apprentice instead of teaching them, a type who causes at least as much damage in society as the overly-analyzed "devouring mother".

All this is prologue to saying that Cultural Amnesia is a very generous book, by which I mean Mr. James has crammed so much good thought and bonhomie into this collection, you can browse just one or two of the essays and come away with passages that will keep your wheels turning for a week. Cultural Amnesia is a collection of original essays concerning the violence of the past century, a handful of people who did their best to stave off the darkness, and favorite writers off Mr. James' shelves. I plan on giving it to my more thoughtful former students as a friendly introduction to the larger world of humanistic thought and why it matters, as generous a gift as the Durants' Story of Civilization. A long time ago, a casual recommendation by a professor when I was a teen led me to Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory and the works of Joseph Campbell, and when I came across them years later, took me miles from where I started. Cultural Amnesia is that kind of resource. This is how we are nutured by those who have gone before, rather than exploited.



Slate magazine has a selection of some of the essays here, enough perhaps to make you buy a copy and keep it on your shelf for reading with your morning coffee. I got mine as a birthday present and read it through the summer, starting with characters I was already familiar with, and then more slowly from A-Z. Someone in the old Whole Earth News recommended this approach when reading new reference books: start by reading the entries on a subject you already know something about, and if it's good, start working your way in deeper.

It's like a really good buffet from a generous host. This morning I dipped into "Hegel" and "Keats" and found enough in there to have me muttering to myself the rest of the day. Here are a few bites from the essay on Adolf Hitler:

"Some of the last aphorisms written by the great Robert Musil were devoted to summarizing the pathogenic nature of Hitler. Beautifully crafted statements, they had no effect on Hitler whatsoever."

"... a sufficient concentration of violence could neutralize any amount of culture, no matter how widely diffused."

"It may seem unfair to condemn intellectuals who conspire to undermine vulgar democracy in favor of a refined dream for failing to foresee the subsequent nightmare. And Moeller was only one among many. But there were too many: That was the point. Too many well- read men combined to prepare the way for a pitiless hoodlum who despised them, and they even came to value him for being a hoodlum: for lacking their scruples, for being a drum of nature."

If that doesn't take the piss out of the neo-conservative "intellectuals", the Podhoretzs, Kristols and Abrams who have enabled Bush the past several years, now foisting Rudolph Guliani on us, nothing will-- their self-love is adamantine.

Ghosts in Chicago


The Red Lion Pub on Lincoln in Chicago will be closing its doors for complete renovation, opening again sometime in 2008. The Twilight Tales Writers' Group, of which I are one, will hold its Monday Night readings at Mix: The Lakeview Lounge at 2843 N. Halsted, starting October 8 at 7:30 PM. The Red Lion has always emulated the great pubs of England, like the Cheddar Cheese around the corner from Hodge and Dr. Johnson's house, but the timbers of boomtown Chicago are not the oaks of England and nostalgia ain't what it used to be. The floor tilts crazily, and whoever imported British style plumbing was no friend of the working man.

The Red Lion is one of the oldest buildings in the neighborhood, having gone up when Lincoln Park was just a field on the outskirts of town. The upstairs lounge, where the writers meet, was a hook shop in the 19th century, kitty-corner from the Biograph alley where Dillinger met his end. There are ghosts, at least three, who presumably will learn the new floor plan after renovation. I have an unsold story about one of them, the ghost who sometimes jams the upstairs ladies' bathroom door. Sadly, the market for toilet ghosts is rather more limited than I'd anticipated.

One of the Twilight Tales writers, Mary, has posted some photos of the creaky old place as was, here, including pictures of Eric Cherry, Martel Sardina, the Other Michael, and others. A last big blowout is planned Monday Night for insomniac, night driving authors and others.

Why Wayne's E-Mails Get Opened First

At 09:05 13-8-2007, jonalgiers@ wrote:
My name is Wayne Allen Sallee and I see several books reprinted in Dutch that I am in (YEARS BEST HORROR). I would like to purchase copies of anything you might have with my work, as I was never informed of the foreign sales.
Thank you in advance.
Wayne Allen Sallee

In a message dated 8/27/2007 3:00:40 P.M. Central Daylight Time, Kees Buis writes:
Dear Wayne,
According to my information I have two anthologies with a story of you in it.
"De beste horror verhalen van het jaar" published by Loeb in 1988 with your story "De ballentent"
"De beste horror verhalen van het jaar" published by Loeb in 1989 with your story "Bloed tussen de regels"
Freely translated the first story would be something like "The Tent of Balls"; the second would be "Blood Between the Lines".
With kind regards,
Kees Buis

In the name of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, can anyone tell me what story I could POSSIBLY have written that freely translates as Tent of Balls? What, when, how.....? These crazy foreign editions, especially the ones I don't know exist and never got paid for.....

Wayne

A Brief History of Collateral Damage

A lot of civilians are being killed in this crazy little thing that Bush calls a war. The U.S. military is measuring out other people's lives with coffee spoons. If an American soldier risks killing civilians, up to thirty deaths are acceptable, so long as the strike was against military targets. In the Iraqui war, which even its most ardent lovers admit cannot be "won" by military means, thirty civiian deaths would be counterproductive, if those thirty corpses leave one or two very angry survivors; certainly if my own loved ones were killed by a well-groomed aviator listening to headphones, I'd be dead or in Guantanamo before i'd stop hunting. Why do we expect better behavior from the fellaheen than we do from outrselves?

Time was, with a sword in one hand and a pistol in the other, you could see the face of the poor bastard you shot, and be sure of your mark. War sure has gone downhill since Napoleon's brother added state terror to his conquest of Spain, and the outgunned Spanish responded with tactics that were given the name guerilla, "little war". The French hussars thought a little shock and awe would cow the Spanish into submission, and of course it did-- only for so long as they kept the eye on weeping fathers and screaming women. The moment the big guy's back was turned, survivors started thinking up homespun ways to make a technologically superior force die very slowly, and very old.

This is a fundamental problem in the use of air force and massive strikes that has never been publically debated in a society that claims to have civilian control of its military. its origins lie in the biplane-era theories of an Italian aviator, Giulio Douhet, who thought you could bomb an enemy into submission by destroying his infrastructure and taking civilian lives. They thought he was a crank during the First World War, even court-martialed and threw him in jail, but starting in the 1920s, when The Command of the Air was published, he found an audience, with Guernica the first experiment.

The first part of Douhet's theory-- that you could destroy an enemy's war-making infrastructure from the air, and force him to surrender-- proved to be true as far as Germany was concerned. In Japan, the atomic bomb forced Japanese civilians to force the emperor to force the military to surrender-- but a close examination, as in the Pacific War Research Society's Japan's Longest Day, proves, beyond the wishful thinking of my gentle pacifist brethren, that the Japanese military was still not going to surrender even after Nagasaki. It was our good luck and a civilian revolt against the samurai generals in charge that forced the emperor to concede. The second half of Douhet's premise has never been openly debated, except in our war colleges. It may be that American civilians, seeing their military adventures as fundamentally altruistic, cannot imagine there would be any organized revenge for an accidental killing.

The 14 Japanese researchers that make up the Pacific War Research Society must be lonely men, since so much of their work puts the lie to dearly held cliches on both sides of the Pacific. You might even find out that the Japanese were working on their ownatomic bomb project at Hungnam, Korea, under Yoshio Nishina at the Imperial Japanese Army's Riken Institute.

In the case of Vietnam, the infrastructure was bombed "back to the Stone Age" many times over, with neutral Cambodia and Laos bombed for good measure, but it did not yield the results described by the Douhet: the Vietnamese simply hunkered down and toughened their resolve. The Luftwaffe could have told them that; Hitler's bombing of Britain did nothing to "weaken the resolve" of the civilian population, but only pissed everyone off and made Arthurian legends out of the teenagers who went up in Spitfires during the Battle of Britain, the firemen memorialized near St. James Cathedral, and Winston Churchill's sad guilty poking through the ashes of Canterbury.

And what is the emotional effect of modern American air power, for those unlucky enough to be standing under it? Are their first thoughts, "Gosh, we'd better surrender", or "Come close enough, you bastard, and I'll put a Stone-Age cap in your high-tech ass"? American audiences, who gasp at the atrocities inflicted on downed Americans in Somalia, apparently lack the imagination to see a Blackhawk helicopter from the Somali's point of view. Americans want always to be loved, and always perceive themselves as acting out of good will, like the Abominable Snowman hugging Bugs Bunny, and are always astonished, hurt, and then angry when they face rejection by the other.

If we are willing to as the Romans did, "make a desert and call it peace", then bombing and collateral damage will suffice; but there are no guarantees about what happens later, when the few survivors grow to manhood.

Poor Tom's A-Cold: King Lear and Empathy


Isak Dinesen told Truman Capote that she judged people by what they thought of King Lear, which is pretty damned intimidating, if you ask me. If actors think of the play as a mountain to be climbed, how much more of a wilderness for us Sunday climbers, who might never make it over the top but become lost in the brambles and ankle-turning boulders around the base of the mountain? Maybe she just said it to scare visitors, or start a conversation.

This is occasioned by the arrival in New York of Ian McKellen and Trevor Nunn's production of King Lear, which is mostly getting good reviews. I'd follow these guys most anywhere: Trevor Nunn's film of Twelfth Night is my favorite Shakespearean movie, being less melancholy and easier to bear repeated viewings than Zefferelli's beautiful Romeo and Juliet, and in interviews McKellen "gets" things that most actors miss.

For most of us peasants, the whole last century was a bloody meditation on just the implications of the "flies to wanton boys" speech. Millions were having our wings pulled off and more than enough signed up to do the pulling, whether for Stalin, Mao, Hitler, and Pinochet, or on a smaller scale, for Reagan and Kissinger in Latin America. Dinesen hid her Jewish neighbors (Denmark was the only European country to not lose a single Jewish citizen) in plain sight, posing as household servants when the Nazis came to call, "hiding them like winter apples in the cellar", but then in the face of syphylis, failed crops, inconstant lovers and plane crashes, she seems to always have had more style than the rest of us (when the apocalypse comes, I'm standing next to her).

By a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summoned am to tourney
Ten leagues beyond the wide world's end-
Methinks it is no journey.

Myself, I've always been a Tom O'Bedlam/Edgar, not old and never powerful enough for Lear, although of late I've begun to understand all too well Yeats' "Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?" I've worked for all too many Gloucesters, the difference being I'll be damned if I rescue them. I dated Goneril, or was it Regan? And Edmund is in charge of Republican strategy and most athletic programs in this country. McKellen says that Lear's a talker, always showing off verbally or muttering in argument with the gods, so maybe I'd better watch my ass.



If you pinned me down to say One Big Thing, with the stipulation that no one's ever done re-reading these plays, I'd have to say this: that the sympathetic characters, whether ragged or royal, Cordelia and Edgar and the Fool, all posess the trait of empathy, an ability to make emotional connection with others. Some of them even come around to forgive the people who drove them off. The villains all have one frightening trait in common: there is not a trace of fellow-feeling or empathy in them. They are as casual about digging out someone's eyes or disposessing an old man or hanging their own sister in prison, as those gods and wanton boys are with the rest of us. And this problem of empathy-- why some have it, and others don't, why some Join the Party in order to escape the demands of empathy for others, why others embrace the world and accept the broken heart that goes with it-- is essential to humanity.

Phillip K. Dick wrestled with this a little in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, with the metaphor of androids identical to humans in every way, except for their demonstrable lack of human empathic reactions. This makes them a danger to others, a lesson learned in the aftermath of a nuclear war and the almost complete extinction of animal species (one of the ways androids and humans are tested for empathy is to note their reaction to animal cruelty.) The Hollywood ending of Blade Runner, with the Rutger Hauer android suddenly growing a conscience, runs contrary to the rest of the story and the evidence of the past century, where Nazis can shovel children into a pit and that same evening weep at their daughter's violin recital. How else explain Jeanne Kirkpatrick, as a diplomat under Reagan, dismissing the rape and murder of Maryknoll nuns because they were "sympathizers" somehow with The Enemy? How else explain the willingness of people to use indiscriminate bombs in warfare, whether strapped to their body or from the air-conditioned comfort of a fighter plane?

Maybe I could have bumper stickers printed up: If You Think Empathy's Not Important, the Next Time There's a Holocaust, Call a Psychopath.

Loving a Girl with a Broken Nose


Nelson Algren was Chicago's great broken-hearted lover, and even he gave up and moved to New Jersey in the end. My buddy Wayne and I have Algren watching over our shoulders the way Turgenev looked over Tolstoy (well he didn't, but the alliteration sounded good), so in his honor here's some quotations collected by The Local Tourist:

"Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring." Nelson Algren, Newsweek, August 13, 1984

"Loving Chicago is like loving a woman with a broken nose." Nelson Algren

"Chicago is not the most corrupt American city. It's the most theatrically corrupt." Studs Terkel, 1978

"Satan (impatiently) to Newcomer: The trouble with you Chicago people is, that you think you are the best people down here; whereas you are merely the most numerous." Mark Twain "Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar," 1897

"Chicago is a sort of journalistic Yellowstone Park, offering haven to a last herd of fantastic bravos." Ben Hecht

"In most places in the country, voting is looked upon as a right and a duty, but in Chicago it's a sport." Dick Gregory, 1972

"He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way." David Mamet

"Chicago is the product of modern capitalism, and, like other great commercial centers, is unfit for human habitation." Eugene Debs, 1908

"It's a 106 miles to Chicago, we've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes; it's dark and we're wearing sun glasses. Hit it!" The Blues Brothers

"The Chicago Tribune has come out against syphilis. Bet you 8 to 5 syphilis will win." Anonymous, 1940

Happy Birthday, Daniel Schorr


Just as I've finished my whinging about the good dying young, comes news of Daniel Schorr's 91st birthday. The last of Murrow's Boys still working: the guys who could write well, speak well and had the moxie to "tell the truth and run". (Marvin Kalb was actually the last hired by Murrow, four years after Schorr, but he took the king's shilling years ago to teach at Harvard and become a Gray Eminence, a Lippman instead of a George Seldes or I.F. Stone.)

Murrow hired Schorr two years before I was born, for God's sake, when Schorr was 37-- and very much the "kid" around CBS, compared with colleagues like William Shirer, who'd stuck around Nazi Germany and didn't get out until 1940, or Cronkite, a wire-and-print man at UPI until 1950, who'd landed with troops behind enemy lines in a glider on D-Day. Shirer himself gave Murrow a civics lesson by quitting when CBS was late coming to the table against McCarthy and failed to stand up for Shirer when he was being red-baited as prematurely anti-fascist. (We like to remember Murrow at his best, but at the time, Murrow's eloquent speech against McCarthyism was akin to Stalin declaring war on Japan after the US bombed Hiroshima.)

Kid Schorr got his chance to show what it takes to be a "Murrow Boy" when he got in a pissing match with the Pentagon, the Nixon White House and CBS itself, which fired him over his reporting on CIA villainy and the Pike Committee hearings. It's part of guy lore that a man is defined not just by his friends but by who his enemies are, and there are few more deserving of a great soul in opposition than the secret murderers at CIA, or moments more delicious than Schorr reading Nixon's "enemies list" on-air without realizing that his own name was on the list.

If I seem in a valedictory mood, it's inspired by watching in quick succession Richard Pryor's first concert film (the one with the dead pet monkies and a sympathetic German Shepherd) and a Paul McCartney broadcast, Chaos and Creation at Abbey Road, with McCartney fiddling around with Elvis' bass or explaining how the chords of "Blackbird" were born of a mistake he and George Harrison used to make while trying to play Bach as kids. This inclines me to appreciate our treasures while we have them.

Some of my my favorite moments in the week are Schorr's conversations with Scott Simon on Saturday mornings. Apparently it's a favorite joke at NPR to send the most naive interns around to ask Schorr questions about covering the Spanish American war, but he seems to be enjoying himself. Long may he continue to be a Ring-Tailed Wonder, pissing off the right people and much loved by the best.

Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake and Descents into Darkness


I found Theresa Duncan's blog of cultural criticism, The Wit of the Staircase while doing a search for the spelling of the phrase esprit d'escalier, "the wisdom of the staircase", meaning the things you wish you'd said after an argument, after slamming the door, on your way down the stairs or a couple of blocks down the street. Being cursed with fierce memory means that I have to make a conscious decision to pack away and dismiss other's (minor) faults and my own (major) sins, or else carry them around with me all day and night. This makes a phrase that describes regret more sympathetically than "coulda shoulda woulda" a useful thing to have.

Now I find out from New York magazine that Theresa Duncan killed herself, that her lover Jeremy Blake followed a week after. At first I was just going to move her link next to Molly Ivins', in memorium, still worth reading, with regrets for another intelligent stranger that shouldn't be dead, but is. People that make the world a better place in small or large ways keep dropping like flies, while shitheels go on crawling like roaches, leaking juices and polluting the world for days, even after being squashed. It must be a part of that plan for the world that says at any given time there are only thirty six tzadikkum, just and righteous people, who hold the world together with masking tape and mud and never know the value of their labor. Poisonous assholes, great and small, never get tired, while nature apparently puts a load limit on virtue.

According to the article, Duncan had been frustrated in her efforts to become an independent filmaker, which if you'd asked me, I coulda told you, Henry Slesar's description of "success in Hollywood" being enough for me. Add to that what Jim Harrison said: that a successful career in the arts faces about the same odds as an unlucky combat platoon, or a retirement community in Florida, with a few survivors breaking through and then attributing their success to inherent virtue and hard work instead of the vagaries of fate. Garrison Keillor wisely sneered at religious pundits who talk about Faith without ever really having to dig for it: "there's no one knows more about faith than an undiscovered artist." There's no one waiting for your next outburst, you have to feel energized enough to do the work, but not so energized you don't want to stay in your seat, you have to and believe that a project's worth finishing even if no one ever sees it, its value to the world roughly less than that fallen sumac tree that no one heard.

As connected as Theresa Duncan was in New York, even after her big break when her animated film The History of Glamour got national attention, it just wasn't enough to get a film made. I knew a guy who had the "option" picked up for a comedy script he wrote, thousands of dollars-- but six years later he was still waiting tables. Filmmaking, if you'da ast me (which you didn't), is art-by-committee: you need a lot of hands and a lot of money, and all kinds of trouble I don't need-- whereas when the power was out in Kalamazoo for more than three days, we managed somehow with a pencil and a flashlight. Theresa Duncan had at least one editor telling her to give up on film for now, and move into prose full time... but it tasked her. Zero Mostel, after he was blacklisted, just said Screw It and went on painting until the wheel turned around again. Worried about that day the Right finally transforms the United States into Chile, and we're all locked up with three hots and a cot in Guantanamo...? I'm the guy muttering, "Finally, I can get some work done."

Apparently for Duncan and Blake, their frustrations started turning into conspiracy theories about Scientologists who didn't want them to succeed. The natural process of finding out Who Your True Friends Are degenerated into making lists of Who Was Loyal and Who Was Part of the Conspiracy. No one can follow from the outside all the dark and lonely convolutions that lead a person to suicide, and according to New York, no one knows exactly when this beautiful couple drove off the main road until they were lost from sight.

Yeah, yeah, I was young and beautiful and doomed once, too. And yet, and yet, as I read on, I was surprised to find out that Theresa Duncan was a sister under the skin, another smart and literate kid from a small town (Lapeer, in her case) in Michigan, another talented writer unable to break into the world dominated by million dollar contracts for celebrity authors, which, in case you haven't figured out, means more than a thousand talented writers who will never be published at all because the corporation blew the budget on Sonnee Tufts' tell-all. She didn't want to be a fly-over, when silly people with much less to say are lionized in the cultural centers of New York and Los Angeles. We are mute, emasculated, unheard, drowned out by the shouting from Madison Avenue until we find some way to break a crack in the rock so the living water can flow through to bring water to the owls and the dragons. Add in chemical, genetic and situational depression, suicidal impulses, the frustration of having one eye in a kingdom of the blind (for example, I see from the papers that Norman Finkelstein was denied tenure by Depaul for getting into a pissing match with the Israeli lobby, his apparent sin being speaking truth to someone who buys ink by the barrellful). Add in the chronic anguish that can drive someone to a hasty decision simply to escape, baby, my credentials are on file. These are the things that Hamlet puts on his list of daily insults to the brain, next to the law's delay and the proud man's contumely.

There's a conversation in Long Day's Journey into Night between the compromised father and the ambitious son:
James: Yes, there's the makings of a poet in you all right
Edmund: The makings of a poet. I'm like a bum who asks for a cigarette: he doesn’t have the makings, he's only got the habit. I could never touch what I tried to tell you just now. I just stammered.

I've been luckier than poor Theresa Duncan (would she have chased those pills with whiskey if she'd known Jeremy Blake would follow her in? Was it an poorly thought-out impulse?) I was lucky enough to have a friend nearby who could warn me when I started to sound like a danger to myself. Non-depressives sometimes forget the nature of the disease: when you're down in a hole (hence, "depression") the only reality you can see is the side of the hole, with the patch of sunlight up above being something reserved for "winners" instead of "losers" like yourself. Reality is filtered through a delusion that even the most despicable human beings-- telemarketers, torturers, dog fight promoters-- are winners in the eyes of the world, while the most noble depressive is unworthy of life. The depressive appears lucid, even cheerful-- how many of us are full of jokes!-- but when those chemicals are acting up, there's a distortion of subjective reality that would make a schizophrenic call us crazy.

So include a little prayer for Thersa Duncan and Jeremy Blake and sad people everywhere, even, reportedly, the actor Owen Wilson, and for all the wayfarers looking for the soul of the world, the hobos Kerouac described as wearing two watches, the sun on one wrist and the moon on the other. Some of the very best people are exiles from the culture at large; you'll eat canned beans with the likes of Diogenes and Chu Yuan. But it's like all those times when you were maybe too drunk to drive but you made it home anyway, or went home with the wrong person but you managed not to drive your life into a ditch. If making a success as an artist requires the happiest of chances, so does being rescued from suicide, encountering this person instead of that, turning left instead of right on some dark corner on one dark night. I can remember a night when a photograph of Isak Dinesen's ancient face saved my life: I said, "she looks like I feel", and with nothing left but curiosity, I went home and read the only story by Dinesen I had in the house, and by chance it was a tale that had a particular blessing for me, and so I was saved. I've been rescued too many times by the luck of floating branches in the rushing current to ever sneer at someone else's nemesis.

Commonplace Book: Quotations, August 2007



Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque revenit: “You may drive nature out with a pitchfork, she will nevertheless come back.”
Horace,The Epistles. Book I: Epistle X

***
Saddam may have been despised almost everywhere, but it was only in the United States that a majority of the population were terrified of what he might do to them, tomorrow. Not surprisingly, support for the war correlated very closely with such fears.
(Noam Chomsky)

***
(from The Onion, July 25)
CHAPEL HILL, NC—A field study released Monday by the University of North Carolina School of Public Health suggests that Iraqi citizens experience sadness and a sense of loss when relatives, spouses, and even friends perish, emotions that have until recently been identified almost exclusively with Westerners.
"We were struck by how an Iraqi reacts to the sight of the bloody or decapitated corpse of a family member in a not unlike an American, or at the very least a Canadian, would," said Dr. Jonathan Pryztal, chief author of the study. "In addition to the rage, bloodlust, and hatred we already know to dominate the Iraqi emotional spectrum, it appears that they may have some capacity, however limited, for sadness."
.... "We are, in truth, still a long way from determining if Iraqis are exhibiting actual, U.S.-grade sadness," Mayo Clinic neuropsychologist Norman Blum said. "At present, we see no reason for the popular press to report on Iraqi emotions as if they are real."

***
“The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical; art was an instrument of ritual. (Cf. the paintings in the caves at Lascaux, Altamira, Niaux, La Pasiega, etc.) The earliest theory of art, that of the Greek philosophers, proposed that art was mimesis, imitation of reality.

It is at this point that the peculiar question of the value of art arose. For the mimetic theory, by its very terms, challenges art to justify itself.... the contemporary zeal for the project of interpretation is often prompted not by piety toward the troublesome text (which may conceal an aggression), but by an open aggressiveness, an overt contempt for appearances. The old style of interpretation was insistent, but respectful; it erected another meaning on top of the literal one. The modem style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys.
-- Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation”

***
“You never want to be writing the thing you're writing, unless you're actually in it, unless it's just flowing, and you're typing, and you're laughing, and you're crying, and everything's giddy, and you're in the moment. That's the beauty of it. All the rest of the time, all you want to think about is whatever it is you're not supposed to be thinking about. Having said that, most of my best ideas have come while I was procrastinating about something else I was supposed to be writing. So I respect that. If my brain is saying, "You know what? You're supposed to be working on Runaways, but you're in an X mood," I go there, because if that's where the muse is hovering, I'm gonna go visit her. Sometimes you've got to bite the bullet, and be a man, and say, "Just write the script. Come on, find the inspiration. Bring that muse over here." But if I have a little leeway, and it's clearly going one way and not the other, that's what I'm going to follow.”
(Joss Whedon)

***
"We are back where we started. Sending raw materials out, bringing cheap manufactured goods in. This isn’t progress. It is colonialism."
WILFRED COLLINS WONANI, (head of the Chamber of Commerce in Kabwe, Zambia, where a Chinese company once manufactured finished cloth but now exports only raw cotton, quoted in the NYT)

***
“When we live in the science fiction condition, what's left but writing contemporary fiction with the eye for detail and extrapolation that comes from an sf writer?“
(Warren Ellis)

PARKOUR



My friend Patricia Relf's nephew Jack practices Parkour. Jackie Chan used to go over a high gate not by walking through, but by bouncing off the thresholds like a chamois goat or a cat crossed with a monkey. French kids in the outskirts of Paris have turned it into an art form, here reaching as far as Washington State.

It's beautiful.

Their own definition is better than Wikipedia's: "Practioners of Parkour (traceurs) strive to move through their environments with speed and agility by flowing over, under, or around obstacles in ways not intended by society."

Joss Whedon Interview, Lessons from Bad Writing, & Cultural Notes on Wonder Woman


Joss Whedon being one of the contemporary writers that I admire, an interview with Tasha Robinson at the AV Club is useful and informative not just for Whedon fans, but for all students of the culture. The standard take on writers in Hollywood is Henry Slesar's "success in Hollywood is like climbing a mountain of shit to pluck one perfect rose, and then discovering that you've lost your taste of smell". To my unschooled eye, Whedon has managed to pluck more roses from the pile than most, even compared with the admirable William Goldman and Hal Ashby. If this keeps up, Whedon could have a resume that makes him the Billy Wilder of adventure movies.

As much as I am wrapped up in Whedon's successes, I learn more, as a creative person, from his failures. As much as I admired (and early on, imitated) for example, John D. MacDonald and Robert Heinlein, all I could do was gape and wonder, how'd they do that?, whereas it was easier to decode what didn't work in bad novels, B-movies and crap comics, and so learn what not to do. It wasn't until I matured enough to see MacDonald and Heinlein's flaws that I was able to decipher how they got their affects.

The failures described at length in this interview-- the collapse of Whedon's script for Wonder Woman, for instance, has some interesting things to say about our culture's relationship with feminine archetypes. Try and name a female character in an action film that isn't somebody's girlfriend (the anonymous scream machine) or a soulless-but-hot killing machines (Aeon Flux, Underworld, Linda Hamilton in the Terminator sequels, ad infinitum. (Whedon himself, at a low point in his career, was reduced to tears when he saw what had been made of his script forAlien: Ressurection.) To this day, Greg Rucka's series of Wonder Woman reprints are the only ones I'd recommend with a clean conscience.

Whedon's Wonder Woman sounds like an opportunity to stir fish-out-water social satire together with comic book ass-kicking. His Diana of Themiscrya was a kind of Candide with super-powers, who just doesn't understand why humans are so small and nasty and cruel, clawing one another for top position on a mudball, when they could build a paradise on earth if they just... ? He wrote a scene that worked the magic bracelets into this vision. Whedon even managed to redeem the (I thought) unredeemable Steve Trevor (a character so disliked, I found it difficult to type his name)-- making him the wry voice of struggling humanity, trying to explain to a perfect creature made from clay why children are starving, or this group hates that group, or...

I can imagine all kinds of PG-13 Michael Valentine Smith moments, with an Amazon princess being gobsmacked by human taboos-- remember when Heinlein's character took his first dip on a public beach? Or economic inequities-- I can imagine Diana saving us from Max Lord (DC's young-and-handsome take on Rupert Murdoch) and then baffled as to why this man goes unpunished, why he should have more wealth than the people who do the work that creates his wealth. More difficult to pull off, but interesting, might be the feminist villains-- why does the Cheetah's sexual power turn to bitterness and villainy instead of joy, or Circe's revelling in manipulation and deceit instead of using her power to heal? (This is starting to sound too good to me; I'd better get back to my own work before the long day wanes.)