Chuck Richardson

Krunga In Atticus Review

2012-01-25T14:34:00.007-05:00

Katrina Gray: "Right now I want to talk about 'Krunga.' Chuck Richardson’s short story reminds me a lot of my primal birthing experience—all the fluids and sounds and friction and urges and small necessary actions. The knowing, or unknowing, of a self. The pulling of something deep in our DNA. If a text could illustrate the core of physical human-ness without being a series of grunts, this would be it."

Also, check out Katrina's introduction to this week's issue of Atticus Review, which is about her natural child birth and what she did with her placenta. Amazing.

Photo by Mariano

Uncle Bill's Thanksgiving Prayer, 1986

2011-11-23T17:52:00.001-05:00

To be a little more precise...

2011-11-22T11:02:00.006-05:00

"The trouble with too much contemporary American literature is it seems to be dominated by a certain naive bourgeois cultural 'whiteness,' an unconscious manifestation of Ishmael Reed's Atonist/Wallflower political-economic system and Robert Coover's Uncle Sam/Phantom in The Burning Game..."

That quote from the previous blog post needs clarification. No one's criticized me for it yet, but if they had they'd been right. Let me be more precise by defining "contemporary American literature" as the Poetry Foundation and big corporate publishers who require you to have an agent, etc.

This conversation among Kent Johnson, John Bloomberg-Rissmann and others articulates exactly what I meant to say, and since I can't say it better, here's the link, and the author Johannes' opening remarks [the revealing conversation follows the question]:

*****

http://www.montevidayo.com/?p=2178.

“Free (Market) Verse”: Steve Evans on the Poetry Foundation and Conservative Politics/Aestheticsby Johannes on Nov.17, 2011, under Uncategorized

One commentor to another post made a link to this piece by Steve Evans.

Excerpt:If there was no trace in the magazine’s cartoon gallery of a cohort of midwestern white guys with business backgrounds aspiring to write instantly “accessible” poems about authentic American life for the amusement and improvement of semi-literate “regular” folks, that’s because it would take a presidency as benighted and hokey as that of George W. Bush to bring such a group to prominence. Through men like Dana Gioia, John Barr, and Ted Kooser, Karl Rove’s battle-tested blend of unapologetic economic elitism and reactionary cultural populism is now being marketed in the far-off reaches of the poetry world. A curiously timed gift from a pharmaceutical heir who, before slipping into four decades of crippling depression, had submitted a pseudonymous item or two to Chicago’s Poetry magazine, which politely rejected them, has bankrolled the unlikely effort.

Thoughts?

*****

Thanks to Johannes for posting this at Montevidayo and Kent Johnson for sharing it with me.

Philip K. Dick & Occupy Wall Street

2011-11-19T10:42:00.004-05:00

I think we're heading toward civil war. I think the richest one percent can now afford to pay 50 percent to wipe out the other 50 percent. So much for the 99 percent. Divide and conquer.

I don't know who will "win," which is to say survive in greater numbers. The coming election is going to exacerbate things the way the 1968 election did, but much much worse. I think both conventions next summer will make Chicago 68 seem small. I expect clashes between right wing and left wing protesters, defections among police and military...a complete unraveling.

What happens then is anyone's guess, but here's some ideas from Philip K. Dick's Tractates: Cryptica Scriptura:

41. The Empire is the institution, the codification, of derangement; it is insane and imposes its insanity on us by violence, since its nature is a violent one.
42. To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement. This is a paradox; whoever defeats a segment of the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies. Thereby it becomes its enemies.
43. Against the Empire is posed the living information, the plasmate or physician, which we know as the Holy Spirit or Christ discorporate. These are the two principles, the dark [the Empire] and the light [the plasmate]. In the end, Mind will give victory to the latter. Each of us will die or survive according to which he aligns himself and his efforts with. Each of us contains a component of each. Eventually one or the other component will triumph in each human. Zoroaster knew this, because the Wise Mind informed him. He was the first savior. Four have lived in all. A fifth is about to be born, who will differ from the others: he will rule and he will judge us.

Dick goes on to say that "information will save us. This is the saving gnosis which the Gnostics sought." He also says the Empire has killed each of the previous homoplasmates, but "the next one will kill the Empire by phagocytosis."

Think of phagocytosis, perhaps, in terms of interdimensional "staining" and mindful holographs...memes/information that when perceived go viral in the form of fractals, eliminating forces of entropy to maintain the necessary disequilibria via feedback loops to keep the perceiving hologram alive and/or animated. One's channel or frequency of sentience is determined by one's situated permanence in relation to time...

From Wikipedia: "Phagocytosis...is involved...in the immune system, it is a major mechanism used to remove pathogens and cell debris. Bacteria, dead tissue cells, and small mineral particles are all examples of objects that may be phagocytosed.The process...in multicellular animals...has been adapted to eliminate debris and pathogens."

What are the recursive symmetries of phagocytosis in this narrative scale of things, where "occupy" seems to have gained a life of its own?

The trouble with too much contemporary American literature is it seems to be dominated by a certain naive bourgeois cultural "whiteness," an unconscious manifestation of Ishmael Reed's Atonist/Wallflower political-economic system and Robert Coover's Uncle Sam in The Burning Game...

When push comes to shove, I believe most people will probably fall back on their knee-jerk ethnocentric view of civilization, which is closer to Newt Gingrich's preferences than my vision of a kind of social anarchy occurring post-psycho-phagocytosis as a primary effect on cultural consciousness.

Order is entropy, equilibrium and death. Life is a self-sustaining disequilibria dependent on feedback loops of information. It involves chaos and fractals, which is time staining the eternal...

Personally, I'm on the side of boogie woogie. Occupy your space, be yourself, have fun. And do not cooperate with any authoritarian attitude. Just say no to the drug of corporate acceptability.

Terrify authoritarians with your freedom and celebrate chaos and rejoice at the uncertainty of it all. It will mean you're alive...

10 Simple Demands

2011-10-16T01:10:00.006-04:00

The challenge of the moment for the Occupy Wall Street protesters seems to be articulating what it is they want, exactly. Since the Internet’s a virtual suggestion box of nearly infinite capacity, consider these the 10 reforms I think would have the most profound effect on improving the way America goes about its business. I’m sure I’ll see some of you at a protest soon.

The demands:

1. Overturn Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, the 1886 Supreme Court decision that allegedly establishes corporations as legal persons. Corporatism isn’t capitalism. It’s more fascist than democratic. And corps definitely aren’t “human.” If they were they’d be diagnosed psychopaths.
2. Overturn all laws, rulings, etc. & et al, that equate the spending of money with free speech.
3. Education, Health Care and basic welfare like food, shelter and clothing are fundamental human rights in the 21st century. Minimal levels of these things must be made available free to all. You want more, work for it. We’ve evolved to a point where that degree of humanity’s necessary…global warming, 7 billion people and counting…Make it happen, or else…
4. End the corporate empire and bring home all the troops from all the bases all over the world and use them to defend our well-being against the various forms of malfeasance perpetrated by global corporate anarchists, primarily ecocide, global warming and nefarious forms of trafficking, as in labor, capital, humans, drugs and guns, etc. & et al.
5. A jubilee on student loans and mortgages.
6. Energy independence in 10 years or bust. That means a solar panel on every building in America. Decrease our dependence on the grid.
7. Scrap all free trade agreements, or at least strip them of all NAFTA Chapter 11 qualities.
8. Break up the biggest, most criminal banks. Adopt a nationwide system of credit unions that governs capital from the local level up to the global, rather than the other way around.
9. Break up Wall Street and rebuild it according to what kind of markets are OK for that kind of speculation, like sports, entertainment, technology, etc., where the competition is clear and exciting and, indeed, just a game.
10. Ban all private money from politics. Elections are financed by taxpayers only and will adhere to strict rules of fairness and truth. Violators will be banned from holding public office or doing business with government, or having any kind of public influence for a time as determined by a judge.

And that’s just a start. I think I wrote at least one column on each of those subjects back in the Bush years. Nobody but my friends Pat and Jared listened back then. Maybe a few more are agreeing with me now. I’m glad. It’s about time. I’m almost hopeful something cool might happen…

See you in the streets.

Artful Rebellion:

2011-10-08T12:08:00.011-04:00

The alchemy of tantric-fusion* in 21st Century America

Today we’re going through a transitional phase in human experience where people are less conscious of traditional forms of grammar in their daily routines. That’s because we aren’t as involved with formal reading and writing as we used to be. Listening, speaking and even, of late, recording/viewing has taken precedence. It’s akin to what happened when photography overtook portraiture at the end of the nineteenth century and the way Guttenberg marked the end of oral culture. The difference is the rate at which the change is occurring.

With the advent of Twitter and texting, the evolution of reading-writing language has accelerated in unprecedented ways in an effort to reflect the new media technologies shaping a new form of awareness. Grammars, the ways we describe these new rules of language, are changing at such a rate we can actually observe their evolution and interact with and evolve with them.

The increasing interactivity of media is decreasing the centralization of power, which now evolves too slowly in its administrative dimension to adequately keep up with everything that’s going on. Evolution seams a public-private cooperative affair. Our political-economic systems and cultures may be going through a process of natural de-selection.

Aren’t we forever and always facing extinction? In the end, doesn’t everything succumb to entropy?

The death spasms of authoritarian, which is to say hierarchical political-economies [or the grammars of power] are, unfortunately, too often violent. This conflict between old and new cultures reflects a shift in emphasis away from selfishness and competitive disintegration to a cooperative identity with a “tribal base,” according to Marshall McLuhan, whose work seems to be having something of a revival since its marginalization in the 1980s and 90s. The danger of a tribe-based society, of course, is genocide, where the extermination of weaker tribes is believed integral to the dominant tribe’s security and status. That’s a greed- and fear-oriented evolution and we need to do better than that by being more mindful of our behavior.

In light of this virtually emergent neo-tribalism it might be important to note how much art has in common with shamanism and the way each helps people become more conscious of what they’re doing. Both involve strict ways of freely going about one’s craft, innovating means of becoming the reflection of shifting shapes and changing appearances in an otherwise empty space. I’m thinking in terms of Kurt Vonnegut as a witch doctor…

Perhaps, today’s most relevant art merges private with public knowledge to reveal an evolving psychogeographic system of gist and flow where sentient entities are seduced by their perceived milieux into choosing to believe in their perceptions of what their environments are doing. Maybe art reflects the movement of a public/private mind making love to its surroundings.

But what happens when something new emerges into that environment? How is it incorporated? How is that apparent corporation reflected? How does that reflection appear to a third party? Imagine the art that third party, the next to emerge on the scene, could do? What could it mean to make art that isn’t conceived by you, but still seems to appear only through you? Might that make the artist more than himself? Could self-transcendence happen as a result of his method? What does it feel like going beyond perception? Is it pure vibration? Are there ways of applying language/matter to relay that feeling? Is purity even possible?

I’d like to make three assertions vis-à-vis what I’ll call tantric-fusion art:

1. The desire for significance seams together the pulsating intertext of innovations at the core of any theoretically sufficient art.
2. That artistic invention applies form and content to humankind’s apocalyptic mental existence seems an effect of the artist’s craft.
3. The necessity of art speaks to the otherwise absent meaning—the neverness of truth.

Tantric-fusion art seams reflection to actual feeling throughout the work[s], signifying a specific logical flaw unique to the particular situation as it morphs and evolves through its human cycles.

It’s this flaw that seems the thrill of disequilibria to which one’s response feels automatic.

In The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes writes of tmesis as being “…the very rhythm of what is read and what is not read that creates the pleasure of the great narratives.” He continues, suggesting “the layering of significance” is “an introduction to what will never be written.”

It might also be said the very rhythm of what’s perceived and not perceived creates the pleasure of great art, where the layering of significance is an introduction to an artistic move that will never be made.

It is this everness of never that fills the streets with souls rebelling against uncreative, nay-saying ugliness.

We, too, have a say in what’s beautiful and not.

MIND & POLITICAL-ECONOMY

Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, who was also a psychoanalyst, lived in the United States and became known as “the Father of Public Relations.”

Horrified by the atrocities of WWII, particularly the Holocaust, he had an idea of civilization where the common man’s perilous sex drive would be fed and exploited by a corporate elite for its own private economic benefit. To get the full grasp of what Bernays wrought on American culture, watch Adam Curtis’ “The Century of the Self,” a BBC documentary.

But the down and dirty of it is he was the mastermind whose methods produced the spectacle the Situationists rebelled against in the late 60s early 70s, and that seemed to somehow manifest Deleuze and Guattari’s “Body without Organs,” a somewhat older species than Marshall McLuhan’s “global village” but not quite as old as Pierre Tielhard de Chardin’s noosphere. Bernays’ idea was to basically engage in a policy of mass brainwashing as a means to prevent another Holocaust. Centralize power and unite the nation via mass media, but instead of doing it for evil purposes, like the Nazis, do so for good reasons, like making money and opening up the planet for business. And rather than working for just one party, open up the methodology to the entire business class of entrepreneurs with American know-how.

Family, work, consumption would replace race, slavery, genocide. Almost 70 years later and we’re trying to expand the definition of family, put work in the proper perspective and consume less to prevent a resurgence of nationalism and racism, the further acceleration of wage slavery, and the aiding and abetting of suicidal ecocide in the guise of delusional sky god religions. We’ve replaced “colonial” with “corporate” to little advantage.

Some might address this situation by making art that has the same aim as the best journalism, which is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. If it’s true that artists are “the antennae of the race,” as Ezra Pound suggested, and they feel the need to rebel against the humiliations of wage slavery and environmental degradation, etc. & et al, maybe there’s a very deep reason the present situation is no longer tolerable for anyone with an ear or eye or heart for what we bugs are saying. There’s a difference between good and evil that’s self-evident to anyone who’s experienced it.

If art’s truly rebellious, it is so because it reveals a sense of “we are” in a way that isn’t at all proud or falsely humble, but on fire with a need to improve, to reject ugliness and strive after the beautiful.

A revolution, if it were real, might re-cognize beauty as a means of making reality, not as an end in itself. I write, we rebel…to unify and make beautiful what increasingly disintegrates into ugliness.

But fine aspirations deflate behind the masks of their organizations, habits of speech and their evident realization, leaving behind the emptied husks of institutions, conformist discourse and perceived success the way a snake slithers from its skin.

The nihilist wants to clear this debris away so a fresh garden might grow in its place. The nihilist dreams of the day something can be built, when, for a while, people drop their usual intentions for moving and acting, their means of relating, their doings re: toil and relaxation, and feel the pull of the contextualizing topography’s odd magnetism and the actual encounters that might occur there.

Tantric-fusion art involves letting go of one’s self while fully understanding the range of possible behaviors in the responding environment, which seems the very limit of what both mentally attracts and physically repels us. This method might be compared or contrasted to Deleuze and Guatarri’s “Theory of the Derive,” but I’m no expert.

The aim is to transmutate the idiomatic substance of art via the alchemy of tantric-fusion into a new sanity that allows for a more concentrated participation in the world soul’s vitality and experience.

Tantric-fusion plays art in the heart of all primal cultures, springing from the well of life.

etc.

*Tantra’s Sanskrit for "loom” and “warp;" the mixing of two root words that means the stretching, extension or expansion of liberation into enlightenment. It’s a vision with heart that embraces everything with cosmic consciousness. Fusion indicates tantra’s effect on multiple entities that fuse or unite, forming the seams of beautiful minds weaving strands of beautifully networked social minds suturing a beautiful planetary mind stitching itself into a beautifully weaving universal consciousness. Tantric-fusion represents the apparent particle/wavelength duality in quantum physics. Ocean is water, but water is not sea. Art seems the natural effect or response to a perceived tantric fusion stimulus. It’s the activity in which beauty can happen.

Revolutionize the Boot Stamping News Media!

2011-10-05T20:26:00.007-04:00

[Note: It’s from watching supposedly liberal shows on MSNBC and observing how, as part of the spectacle, they try to make sense of and commodify what’s happening with the Occupy Wall Street crowd that I’ve come to the sad realization they don’t get what’s happening, that people are beginning to wake up to the fact fundamental systemic change is necessary. This is one example of what I’m talking about. This type of pro-corporate re-framing and de-contextualization of issues prompted me to re-post this rant from seven years ago, which first appeared in Dissident Voice.]

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Bob Dylan’s right. The pump don’t work cause the vandals took the handle. That was 40 years ago, but it’s still a contemporary analogy. The "pump" is democracy, the "vandals" are corporations, and "handle," of course, is the free press.

Robert Kane Pappas, director of Orwell Rolls in His Grave, could have used that metaphor in his documentary, if he wished, but didn’t need to. Instead, by mapping how the mainstream news media distort reality by projecting what’s important to their corporate owners, Pappas reveals that American culture has become a world of Orwellian doublespeak in which Big Brother is the political-corporate elite.

But alas, as these first two paragraphs show, the crisis these United States now face is the latest version of the malevolence that has plagued humankind throughout the ages, but most hideously during the last century. Those opposing it struggle against bureaucracy, centralization, privatization, incorporation, colonialism, consumption, hero worship, stupidity, bigotry, anti-intellectualism, bullying, blind emotion, obscene spectacle, nationalism, ubiquitous vanity, greed, the psychopathy of totalitarianism and the neuroses of slavery, wages paid or not. And finally, they—we—struggle against our own goddamned hubris.

We’re now under siege by an enemy from within: "patriotic" right-wing Americans, about 99 percent white, who celebrate all of the above. You know them as the folks who exercise their right to consume without giving anything back to the earth because they’re rugged individuals, who experience road rage while driving monster trucks, revere strength and respect aggression, who value security ahead of freedom, cheer on wars as long as they have the advantage, and masturbate to Hip Hop videos once their "loved" ones have gone to bed. They’re NASCAR and football and hockey fans who vote Republican and identify with the manipulation of speed and the necessity of collision as rudiments of their rough and tumble daily lives, while lacking any sense of the "big picture," opting instead for a literal faith in a Jesus they know nothing about and some dreamy concept of their imminent rapture before the looming apocalypse. These are the ingrates running America against the backdrop of an ever-increasing morbidity rate within the planet’s ecosystem that’s being catalyzed by humankind’s lizard brain impulses toward greed, power and gluttony.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot, there’s also the geo-political realities of peak oil brewing beneath the veneer of the corporate sponsored spectacle called "prime time." There’s a big die-off underway, but it has no entertainment value. It can’t be consumed because it’s consuming us.

The question is: How did America take this insanely selfish hard right turn?

ORWELL

In George Orwell’s time as a writer (1930-50), the global enemy was fascism, particularly Nazism. A world war was waged, and the side that was defending itself won. An aftershock of this war was the emergence of the postmodern military-industrial complex. The premier newsman of the day was Edward R. Murrow.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell’s 1949 novel, strips naked the duplicity of a meddling, bureaucratized state symbolized by "Big Brother," which has invented "newspeak," a form of language intended to obscure truth. A year later, in "Politics and the English Language," Orwell directly links the corruption of language to authoritarianism. Of course, there’s nothing new under the sun. Confucius, when asked what his first official act would be if he were made emperor of China, answered: "Rectify the language."

Orwell was intellectually and morally offended when confronted with totalitarianism in the form of Stalinist Russia, which he dramatized in his most popular novel among Americans, Animal Farm. But he was also a soldier against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, and was wounded by communists during a power struggle among the antifascist opposition groups. So, yes, his antipathy for communism was personal and well documented. But he had been allied with them in the initial fight against fascism.

According to the New York Times’ original review of Nineteen Eighty-Four, British socialism annoyed Orwell, which the reviewer, not Orwell, described as a "drab gray pall" that had been cast over post-war Britain. It wasn’t the years of bombing, of course, that had caused the malaise, but the political-economic system! The U.K. was rebuilding its war-ravaged cities, and its government took a socialist approach because its shell-shocked, grief-stricken citizenry needed help, and lacked the energy and preternatural desire to be "bastions of freedom," as they had, as people, given up on colonialism. U.S. cities, however, due to their geographical isolation from the rest of the world (with more tombs and monuments, broken hearts, single women, and men with missing limbs and shattered minds being their only palpable testimony to the war that had just occurred), and allegedly having long rebounded from the Great Depression thanks to the "socialist" policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the refined petroleum-, chemical- and nuclear-based military-industrial machine that emerged during the war effort, were booming. Though some "experts" were predicting a return to the Depression as a perverse peace dividend, and so promoted the need to maintain FDR’s social programs, most saw the way to keep going was to keep growing, which meant producing and consuming ever greater quantities of a limited variety of products derived from limited, non-renewable resources. Consumption became patriotic as it drove the defense industry during an arms race with the Godless communists.

The Soviet Union was the needed external enemy of the capitalist west, so federal budgets remained on a wartime footing and strategies for dismantling the New Deal began among the nation’s hawks behind closed doors. To them, the New Deal was socialism, of course, and social-ism was one step away from communism. They worshipped individual-ism, and found the concept of social Darwinism to be self-evident. Privatization, predation, colonialism and empire, thus, were natural, universal urges of all men and shouldn’t be tampered with, despite all the evidence to the contrary among our closest allies. Again, America’s detachment from the rest of the world was the source of its increasingly pathological desire for the "good life."

Though the Times’ 1949 review is favorable, it’s too quick to point out socialism as the primary source of Orwell’s frustration with the British political-economic system’s constitutional monarchy bolstered by socialized industry. Simply put, the American review emphasized that part of the novel which the reviewer perceived as bolstering the cause of capitalism against the godless commies, in other words, confirmed "his" worldview, rather than looking at it as the way such a system works regardless of the ism it claims to be adhering to.

Newspeak, modeled on the rising jargon of the U.K.’s bureaucratic establishment, intended to make sure "there will be no tools for thinking outside the concepts provided by the state," which is controlled by a single party whose membership comprises a small minority of the population. The party’s leadership, of course, is the only "free" segment of society. The masses are slaves of conformity, producing and consuming with no concept of what they’re really doing. The "proles," as Orwell calls them, are led into materialistic wantonness for Big Brother’s benefit. The party leadership, of course, lead "chaste" lives enforced by the "Anti-Sex League." "Thought Police" monitor the most intimate details of party members’ lives using high tech surveillance. What was private is now public. They are free of secrets, existing in non-celebrity fish bowls.

By focusing on a minor figure within the ruling party, a man whose job it is to expunge historical facts from the record that subvert the politically expedient "truth" of the moment, Orwell brilliantly constructs the legalese and methods of what the party has deemed "thought crimes," its devious political-economy and celebration of the Hobbesian worldview of nature being a state of eternal warfare, where life is short, brutish and simple (if you’re weak). The ruling party’s number one purpose, therefore, is to crush any meaningful or true concept of individual identity. By doing so, disorder ends and everything runs efficiently—a well-oiled machine. Say what you will, but your favorite show is always there for you when you need it, just like Mussolini made the trains run on time.

Indeed, power and the desire for order and efficiency lead to the usurpation of humankind’s higher ideals. Absolutely. And which is the most "powerful" nation in the world with the most puffed-up, unrealistic vision of itself and its role in the universe? Simply put, which nation’s citizens are fondest of chanting "We’re number one!" and "U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!?"

Hint: It’s not Canada.

ROLLS

When Dylan wrote the lyrics to Subterranean Homesick Blues between 1963 and 1965, most Americans, himself and his fans particularly, had been deeply affected by global events since 1962.

First was the threat of nuclear annihilation that had been brought home by the Cuban missile crisis, which was nearing its third anniversary. Next was the looming second anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Third was the murder of civil rights activists and church bombings in the South, especially Mississippi and Alabama, which had put the nation on edge. Fourth was America’s growing entanglement in the Vietnam War, thanks to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution concocted by the Johnson administration and authorized by Congress over the previous summer. Fifth was a sea change in American popular culture. Gone were the days of Fabian, Pat Boone and Frankie Avalon. Elvis was starting to make B-movies for the colonel. Rock-n-Roll was becoming more a British art form than American—with one major exception—as America’s stature and popularity suffered around the world. Fear ruled the day, and one had to be a sworn anti-communist to get anywhere in politics, business or the arts. Those people who were sensitive to the above issues and celebrated the fact the world was entering an era of great upheaval, unlike most Americans who just wanted all the crap to stop, were subjected to blacklisting and worse. The military-industrial complex was having its way with the federal budget, treating Congress like a cheap date, and quickly incorporating itself as a political-economic necessity for the nation’s survival. America’s top journalist was Walter Cronkite, who was branded "the most trusted man in America." And what was good for General Motors was good for all of us.

Dylan, like Jack Kerouac a decade before, was rebelling against the closing of the American road; and, like Thoreau ten decades before that, he was raging against the loss of the commons. Dylan was, like America itself, at a transitional moment, on the cusp of either being shackled and caged by the political-economic culture, or escaping from it. The bridge back was gone. New bridges needed building, and a powerful counterculture was born.

In the program of his 1964 Halloween Concert, Dylan had written a message, "Advice for Geraldine on her Miscellaneous Birthday," which open with these caustic commandments and critical response: "stay in line. stay in step. People are afraid of someone who is not in step with them. it makes them look foolish t' themselves for being in step. it might even cross their minds that they themselves are in the wrong step."

Indeed, the times were changing, but few realized just how much, or understood what the changes really were.

The 1970s saw Watergate, the fall of Saigon, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, oil embargoes, deep recession and the huge growth of cable television and the large corporations that profited from it. There was also disco. The decade pretty much sucked.

Suffering from a nationwide malaise, the discontented proles elected Ronald Reagan president, and a new day dawned in America. Especially for the military-industrial complex, which began transforming itself into a postmodern military-petroleum complex, cheered on by a news media that it began buying up in huge chunks.

Most were proud to be an American, where at least they "knew" they were "free." One of the most popular bumper stickers of the decade was, ironically, "I owe, I owe, So off to work I go." Good Americans were not allowed to view themselves as wage slaves, being imbued with Anglo-Puritan values no matter their race, ethnicity or gender. America was allegedly a classless society because anyone could rise to the top and acquire privileges. The separation between rich and poor began expanding, and the corporate media succeeded in getting the masses to not only go along, but cheer the advancements of the upper class. Everyone dreamed of living a lifestyle of the rich and famous, where they would be on TV every day.

Somewhere along the line, these poor, uneducated fools—most of us suckers (we’re born again every minute)—got totally ripped off.

IN HIS GRAVE

Today, a full two decades beyond Orwell’s prophesied year, 1984, we have a war on two abstract nouns—terrorism and evil. We have a corporate government that was able to write and pass a law (the PATRIOT Act), several hundred pages long, allegedly in a matter of days, that the "legislators" never read. It essentially weakened the rights of human beings and increased government power, which is essentially privatized. No child is being left behind and Bill O’Reilly is the nation’s top TV news personality, running a "no spin zone" for cognitively dissonant Neanderthals.

In Orwell Rolls in His Grave, Pappas has provocative answers to questions most people will never hear directed to the corporate news media: Are Americans pathologically detached from reality thanks to corporate manipulation and censorship of news? Isn’t it ironic that in an era when there are more news sources than ever before, regular folks are less and even misinformed because the "news" is owned and operated by fewer and fewer corporate persons with ever more convergent viewpoints?

"We falsely think of our country as a democracy when it has evolved into a mediacracy—where a media that is supposed to check political abuse is part of the political abuse," says Danny Schecter, an author and filmmaker whose latest project is Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception: How the Media Failed to Cover the War on Iraq, one of the documentary’s many talking heads.

Another, Mark Crispin Miller, a media professor at New York University, describes how the corporate media now vie with the government for control over our lives: "They are not a healthy counterweight to government. Goebbels said that what you want in a media system—he meant the Nazi media system—Is to present the ostensible diversity that conceals an actual uniformity."

This practice results in a revolving door between private profiteering and "public service" among the political-economic elite, which is simply accepted as a fact of life among most of the exploited majority, who are dreaming that some day they or their descendants will join the privileged class.

In one of this outstanding film’s truly funny moments, liberal culture critic Michael Moore is delivering an impassioned speech to an unseen, but sympathetic audience. Waving his arms in the air, his face flush with frustration as he imagines what people 100 years hence will think of us while studying the records we’ve left behind, shouts: "The top 1 percent that controls the top 90 percent of the wealth have two major political parties doing their bidding for them, and the other 99 percent have NO political party representing them and NO representation in Congress and yet that 99 percent ran around saying, `we’re free, we’re free, we live in a democracy.’ Ooh, we’re gonna look like assholes."

According to Charles Lewis, director of the Center for Public Integrity, and author of The Buying of the President 2004: Who’s Really Bankrolling Bush and his Democratic Challengers—and What They Expect in Return: "People sense, I think, that the financial elites and the political elites have become one in the same and that the people themselves have no voice in Washington, or in their state capitols, that they are somehow being left behind—The gate keepers of the truth are not the reporters, they are the owners and the lackey editors who work for the owners and they’ll decide what flies and what works and what pays the freight in terms of advertising and the numbers."

"To remove controversy from story selection," says Robert McChesney, "there becomes a tremendous reliance on official sources. It means those people in power, political power or business power are the sort of assignment editors. What they want to talk about becomes news. If they agree they don’t want to debate something—like the CIA—it’s virtually impossible to introduce it as a story. The media companies are extremely successful because they actually control the means by which the public can learn about debates. Exxon would love to own the media, or Philip Morris, so any debate over cigarettes has to go through them."

Of course, corporate lackeys inside government—like FCC Chairman Michael Powell, a Republican and son of Secretary of State Colin Powell, and another Republican FCC commissioner, Kathleen Abernathy, whose Congressional testimony footage Pappas uses brilliantly—are ensuring such corporations as General Electric, which owns NBC, and media moguls like Rupert Murdoch, not only have the right to invest in mass media, but also to expand their ownership and control over public communication without any oversight.

Powell, a clueless beneficiary of nepotism, patronage and phony political affirmative action, tells a committee on Capitol Hill that he has "no idea who is celebrating our decision [regarding the further deregulation of media concentration rules]."

Abernathy was even more insane or disingenuous, whichever you prefer: "What you have to balance is the first amendment rights of the licensees [media corporations] against the rights of the public to have diversity, localism and competition."

Of course, the feelings of corporations as living, breathing legal persons, must be considered. Balancing the "right" of the rich to make an obscene profit from others with the poor’s right to survive according to their own means is only humane, right?

At the FCC’s public announcement of further media deregulation last June, Pappas captures what is perhaps Orwell’s most poignant moment, Democratic commissioner Michael Copps’ dissenting opinion:

"Today the FCC empowers America’s media elite with unacceptable levels of influence over the ideas and information upon which our society and democracy depend.... I see centralization [on further media concentration], not localism. I see uniformity, not diversity. I see monopoly and oligopoly, not competition."

During an interview, Pappas said he was drawn to Orwell for two basic reasons: the first being the way the latest news story, both in 1984 and the present situation, flushes the item preceding it down a memory hole; and the second, of course, being the abuse of language.

By using officially sanctioned "experts" and hiring the most marketable "moderator," corporations are controlling our nation’s public discussion, according to Pappas. Corporations are playing smoke and mirrors with their imagined target audiences, focusing their attention briefly on one product and then another, then more snippets of infotainment until the targeted audience is totally mesmerized and self-deluded. Despite their technical ability to do so brilliantly, corporate journalists (i.e. wage slaves) never connect any dots, as to do so would prove their insanity and unmarketability as "conspiracy theorists."

Pappas monitored corporate journalism, analyzing it closely over an extended period of time while researching the film, and became increasingly alarmed by the current shape and course of America’s ever-changing democracy:

"Watching the news over the last several years more carefully, I realized that complicated stories or concepts are boiled down to short `tag lines’ so the public's understanding of it is diminished. This euphemistic use of language turns everything into either a two-word marketing phrase, something is named the opposite of what it means. By lying first, or misnaming something first, you can define how people think about it, and quite strikingly.

"It’s so ubiquitous—the mass news media, and the mass media in general—that the public consciousness really is affected. It influences the way people look at things; it’s incredible how confused they are. The general public only hears around the edges of stories. They have the collective ability to remember what happened six months ago, but the ability to make any kind of connections seems to be diminished.

"When watching TV news, you notice there are polls for everything. We hear about these things called focus groups. The way they sell us anything—which car we’re going to buy, what cereal we eat—the same exact techniques are used for politics, and for grouping the population very specifically, like you’re trying to sell them something. You massage it with the right words and focus-group those words. You can see how dangerous that is when it’s purposely used to manipulate a population."

In Orwell, Pappas shows how he came to this conclusion, interviewing industry insiders and scholars, and interspersing their running commentary with documentary footage focusing on the complicity of the corporate media with a government that’s doing their bidding.

"People don’t understand how overwhelmingly important that point is," he said.

In the film, Pappas shows a cross-ownership chart of media, and how five or six corporations own literally everything. The mass media is an oligopoly and its strongest players are trying to monopolize the market, which it already is in far too many cities and towns across America.
Media corporations feel that the public airwaves are up for sale, just like everything else.
When are we, the flesh and blood human beings of America and the world, going to say enough is enough?

Gimme Back My Handle

We need to revolutionize the boot stamping corporate news media before anything else can be accomplished. After all, the role of the news media is to educate people so they can behave as responsible citizens in a functioning democracy.

Just ask Rep. Bernie Sanders, Independent-Vermont and author of Outsider in the House, who ominously tells the camera that we "have reached the stage in American politics where the issue is not a debate over ideas. The issue is whether ideas at all matter."

In most corporate newsrooms, those who think ideas are important are an increasingly marginalized minority. They are being driven out of their jobs by their corporate employers’ pursuit of ever-higher profit margins.

A personal anecdote: I used to be a reporter/columnist for a small town, corporate-owned newspaper. I was very outspoken and my skeptical eye toward those in power infected some of my co-workers. For a short while, we did a good job covering issues like racism, nepotism and other forms of public corruption. Circulation began rising, but alas, the business community rebelled. Increased circulation means nothing if your pool of targeted advertisers won’t do business with you. So, being a corporation, and bound by law to turn a profit for shareholders, the newspaper must change its editorial content to please the chamber of commerce.

Employees who want to investigate injustice are told to shut up or go away. Some choice. Unfortunately, there are hundreds if not thousands of unpaid journalists out here who are just like me.

As I noted earlier, the tradition that Orwell Rolls in His Grave adheres to is one that rebels against the elimination of other possibilities and better alternatives, which rages against the mechanical privatization and development of an Earth commonly owned by all of its inhabitants—from the tiniest microbe to Gaia herself.

The counterculture that was launched by the Beats and the events of the 1960s is due for resurrection. We’ve spent our three days in Hell staring down the Beast, and have survived to bear witness to it.

Our season is arriving.

ONTOLOGY OF VOICE?

2011-08-27T15:30:00.001-04:00

I don't think of my synapse metaphor as dis-embodied any more than the electric signal between neurons [in the synapse] has escaped the neurological system, or has escaped my body, but rather in terms of spandrels, which is a cognate term between evolution and architecture, a branching off that's still attached, signifying an evolving complexity that produces arbitrary forms which seem to serve no purpose in the overall systemic structure of its native environment....analogous to the human mind being a byproduct of evolutionary forces that seam a “spandrel” which seems to be evolving the means of linking up with other “spandrels,” finding a way to make themselves functional within the overall life system, which somehow becomes dependent on spandrels seaming spandrels at a particular point in imagined time. …the struggle is to overcome the babel...

SMOKE ON KINDLE!

2011-08-17T09:37:00.002-04:00

My first novel, Smoke, has joined my second novel, So It Seams, on Amazon's Kindle. I may need to get one of these doohickeys before long...

Roy Buchanan, Roy's Bluz (Live 1976), Austin

2011-08-06T16:15:00.002-04:00

I first heard of Roy Buchanan from my late friend, Kevin Henning, back in the mid-1980s. We spent hours listening to Buchanan play through the Peavy speakers in his basement. I've never heard anyone play guitar like this, and I'm always surprised by how few younger musicians have ever even heard of him. Buchanan should go viral among guitar players, in my opinion.

Also, check out "The Messiah Will Come Again." I flashback to driving along the Niagara Escarpment one afternoon in the 1980s...this on with snow blowing over the road. It would make a great soundtrack for a film...a sci-fi spaghetti western, perhaps.

THE 10 LEVELS OF OOPS: THE ROLE OF ERROR IN THE UNCERTAIN AESTHETIC

2011-08-02T11:57:00.002-04:00

An anxiety arising from constant uncertainty seems to be an intrinsic element in the emotional tide of people these days. Therefore, it seems to me, an artist might try to make an aesthetic of uncertainty as a way of inoculating one’s psyche against it, much like the way a vaccine works. If one can begin seeing the beauty and even humor in knowing you don’t actually know what’s going on, the anxiety slides away. If anything, that’s been a big part of my fiction: An attempt to play with the fire that seems both solid and vaporous.

If I must be Mr. Jones, I don’t want to lose my sense of humor about it.

One of the key elements, it seems to me, in dealing with this uncertainty-driven anxiety is to examine the errors we’re all constantly making. To begin this examination, I’ve come up with 10 levels of oops:

1. Premeditated with a good, yet surprising result.
2. Premeditated with a surprisingly bad result.
3. Intentional, but not premeditated with a good result.
4. Intentional, but not premeditated with a bad result.
5. Happily unintentional, resulting from a conscious reflex [one’s aware of it as it happens].
6. Sadly unintentional, resulting from a conscious reflex.
7. Happily unintentional, resulting from an unconscious reflex [one’s unconscious of it as it happens].
8. Sadly unintentional, resulting from an unconscious reflex, yet totally unaware that anything’s happened.
9. The oblivious, resulting from an unconscious reflex action to unconsciously perceived stimuli.
10. The nonplussed/uncertain, resulting from a chaotic mishmash of conscious and unconscious, premeditation and reflex.

It seems to me that the last is the most common, but that’s what I’m most aware of as a conscious human being. When you think about it, number nine greatly outnumbers number 10, perhaps by the same ratio as the numbers differentiating conscious from unconscious actions. It also seems to me one might try this as a loose framework for writing comedies of errors, something I’ve been experimenting with a little, but not too much…yet.

Please comment if you’re so inclined. None of this is set in stone and I just wrote it down longhand off the top of my head this morning while defragging.

Anyway…what do you think?

TALKING WITH JARED: insight incite in-sight in cite

2011-07-26T13:04:00.013-04:00

Me to Jared Schickling
6/9/10

I never really understood fully what So It Seams is "about" until the last 48-72 hours. Cleaning out the verb “to be,” alternative use of quotation marks that constantly bring into question the reality/actuality of other named realities, etc., has led me to the clearer message/vision my subconscious mind was writing all along. Typed below are a few things I've written down longhand that I think may be "necessary" to a more pleasurable reading today as opposed to tomorrow...

Please indulge this because I don't intend to discuss this book or Smoke much more after this. I'm taking a very lengthy hiatus from writing. I feel like being very quiet and returning to Nature. I'm also sending this to myself, saving it in my "one of those" file...

Anyway...

If, in some magical year I find myself working adequately on three different levels, each dimension comprising four parts, dimensions vertically and aspects horizontally arranged, yet visible diagonally in multiple directions and patterns with possibly everything seaming itself to potentially perceivable actualities, I would make these things—my word-beings—visible as phase space trajectories careening through and across and over and under and between and among my various event horizons...which I call "texts." The "reader" then functions as their black hole...the writer-text's death/birth...gateway to life...another mind. The page is a membrane of the black hole that is you, reading...

You are me living that situation, and I am you living this one, meaning the apparently private verbness of existing.

Heaven might be in black and white, a geometric humanity in Nature, approaching the fog under the chaos of striated angelic limbs...a moist vague distance inviting...whereas Hell might seem the essence of feeling stuck in this geometry, worshipped for your absence of motion, your frozen solidity where everything seems logically lit from below; also lacking sine, cosine and tangent...no ships on the horizon.

SIS is another world, an alternate-adjacent universe sharing a membrane with what we perceive as their universe or world. Its existence is downstream from its bifurcation from this apparent world [hence the odd use of quotation marks and italics]. It's a time and place in which, at least, some "humans" are beginning to evolve in a direction shared more with bonobos than chimpanzees. What is absent from their "sex" is "human" emotion...the word-beings are chimps crossing over or going under to the more beautiful essence of their inner bonobo. Its world emerged or bloomed from Smoke.

The fundamental aesthetic, its underlying principle, seems uncertainty; and a kind of polisexuality or pansexuality promising a different kind of certitude.

Jared Schickling to me
6/9/10

OK, I'll indulge it, now. First thought best thought, as you say.

First, the thing recognizable as "for us tomorrow" is, to certain ones, today's pleasure.

What you write here is readable, successfully rendered, in SIS, as well as in Smoke. The intentions of your novels are not opaque. For the interested reader of your novels it's less issues of "getting it" than....

"If, in some magical year I find myself working adequately on three different levels, each dimension comprising four parts, dimensions vertically and aspects horizontally arranged, yet visible diagonally in multiple directions and patterns with possibly everything seaming itself to potentially perceivable actualities, I would make these things—my word-beings—visible as phase space trajectories careening through and across and over and under and between and among my various event horizons...which I call 'texts.'"

I hear context, structure, situation, frames, angles of perception, and any number of these occurring as the singularity or plurality of any other singularity or plurality. Relations and constitutions. The flux of that.

"Heaven might be in black and white, a geometric humanity in Nature, approaching the fog under the chaos of striated angelic limbs...a moist vague distance inviting...whereas Hell might seem the essence of feeling stuck in this geometry, worshipped for your absence of motion, your frozen solidity where everything seems logically lit from below; also lacking sine, cosine and tangent...no ships on the horizon."

"Logically lit from below" : "the earth is my body, my head's in the stars " (Maude to Harold)

The structural aspect of being—and the structure of collapsing and reforming and collapsing, too—alongside, complicit with, the experiential. We are certainly in sight of romance (the romantic imagination not the pretty thing we think—shadows, nightmares, Coleridge's hacking cough, Ruskin's Scandinavian Grotesque) when talking "essence."

"The 'reader' then functions as their black hole...the writer-text's death/birth...gateway to life...another mind. The page is a membrane of the black hole that is you, reading..."

Your texts invite and depend upon our participation. The idea is not new, of course. Your terms and way of describing the process, degrees determined by the context(s) in which the terms appear, are, perhaps. If this is true, then how are we talking more than aesthetics, at least in terms of the text to be written on the page? (No derision; perhaps aesthetics deserves more than we're prone to allow it.) More broadly, are we talking about the death of the text—an unheard of idea—dissolving the boundaries between text and reader and world (and for the hell of it, author) BACK into a space in which each actually involves and looks to the other in order that....

What I'm suggesting is that you describe, insightfully, in addition to your own concerns in your writing and reading, my own. And, as the above suggests, I'm inclined to see that description giving something not new. The structure of the thought seems almost ancient. It's the lyrical interference—not the lyric I, but lyrical interference—the lushness of your sentences, some have said, and I'd add, the particularity of your terms—that somehow recasts the old terms in ways that seem accurate and useful. If this is true, then I'm curious to know where you go from there. For me, this rather obviously turns into a question of song—a catch-all category for such phenomena as myth—more than what is it, why does it persist? How, more precisely? (perhaps you've already described it! Elliptical poetics—not mere solipsism) It's not a human failing as much as it's human being. Why and how are stories still so freakin necessary? This seams a reflection of your heaven-hell question (I'm calling it a question)

Chuck Richardson to Jared
6/10/10

You got it. And where do I take it from here? The very first sentence of Objective 13: The Panspermian Apocalypse:

“I am the Messiah...”

The rest will be a deconstruction of a messiah complex to an absolutely absurd level. I'm going to be totally fucking serious. The more serious I am, the funnier it will be. And in the end, the reader will have laughed his or her way through a cosmic journey and say, you know what, "he" just might be the Messiah, but then again there's no "he," no "Messiah," and that's the messianic energy...in other words the text sets you free...laughtrature as Federman said...i don't give a damn about originality per se so much as trust it, know it will come out in the due course of things. the process one might concentrate on hardest is how to stay out of the way and not worry about saying anything yourself.

I'm relieved you get it. Anyway...

Jared Schickling to me
6/10/10

I think you're right on in the process, your closing remark. I think the "originality" does come out, on its own. Without revisiting the reasons for saying so, the terms in which you house the old ideas make for new terms. Specifically, I see the relegation of all to word-beings and texts as a dehumanizing practice – while the life prioritized and artistically discovered / rendered in the nonhuman (speaking animals, shapeshifting rocks, unpronouncable rivers, interstellar gases) revises our understanding of the "human" via the fact of the text(s), bringing the whole thing full-circle. Something like that.

It would be absurd. (in Harold and Maude, they use the word "absurd" twice in the first twenty minutes; saw it the other night, so can't help myself)

The way you describe Messiah sounds like Nietzsche's Zarathustra. Which, I think, is the "upward" way of dehumanizing. You either see through to "god is dead," or you wind up a Nazi, or squeaky clean in the Clearing's dasein. Forms of its truth's risk.

Chuck Richardson to Jared
6/11/10

you're right, though i prefer the term "inhumanize" or “transhuman” [in Robinson Jeffers’ sense] over "dehumanize." for some goddamned reason i have a need to overturn or underturn or just downright confuse the "common" "human" definitions for "human." To "de-humanize" seems to carry too much ugly baggage. Whereas "transhumanize" seems a more accurate description of the self situated where ever. Nothing original in this. Jeffers and Gary Snyder are where I first came across this "etymology" or whatever, somewhere in that neighborhood. It's not so much about humiliating homo sapiens sapiens as reminding him-her s/he's not the center of the universe so much as a symptom of it...in that we think and make things we are symptoms of God...As in Rumi, perhaps, It's mind seaming its mind minding Its seams sensing Itself as "I," him, her, me, you, us, It...swirling into perceivably Arabesque patterns displaying recursive symmetries across scale, not only making language possible but necessary, essential...part of the divine vibration that makes us feel something. And before Jeffers and Snyder I think Thoreau and Melville and Homer knew it, too. i think it's very "greek," pre-socratic. heraclitus. fire and numbers...mayan, shinto...egyptian, etc. & et al. [not of indo-european origin]...

you're right in part about zarathustra. i finally got through it all and the only way i could was deciding to laugh at nietzsche, or maybe with him, i'm still conflicted over that. it truly is quite "aryan" and i can see how his greedy idiot sister and Nazis abused it. it must be read as satire, as must Sade, or one falls into a pit of revulsion re: the "author." at least i do. the better the author the more i want to kick the shit out of him or her, as the case may be. i feel the same derision toward thus spake as i did atlas shrugged when i read that 25 years ago...

re: Objective 13's "I am the messiah," think of ignatius reilly on steroids with cancer, three stooges pornography for the chirren, a queer teddy roosevelt driving home the great white empire...all of them echoing Quixote on a "dead souls" mission across time and space...episodic pointilism...minimalism...connect-the-dot quasi-neo-naturalism, where the sounds of sentences in a paragraph seem like unseen birds calling in the forest...

what do i fucking know? i only have a bachelor's degree from a public university. i work in a group home. i live in lockport. my name is chuck...

Jared Schickling to me
6/11/10

THE BIG QUESTION

There’s a mouse living @
home behind the dials, inside our stove
Because the stovetop’s where we keep
leftover bacon grease

SOUL SUCKING HEADPHONE

But me modifier poorly no
uns, enduring this
Voice in my ear
both ears, no credit

MEASURED PROGRESS

For getting the right answer
the wrong way, they’re 6th graders
It’s much easier to find idiots among poets than
Idiots

Jared Schickling to me
6/12/10

lest you assume the worst about the poem forwarded, i started a new job recently, at Measured Progress, scoring 6th grade tests from Massachusetts.

Chuck Richardson to Jared
6/13/10

No. Not assuming anything. I like them. They make quick points. Great starters for good conversations. You make enough of them you can organize them into a big picture. In fact, I think it's very important to be able to just come right out and say it the way sixth graders can, getting it right the wrong way. These tiny pieces each have much to say, and if poetry is to have any "social" value today I think it has to fit into the openings of whatever's left...something quickly consumed giving the consumer a dose of profundity in their otherwise harried life...And that's not a put down. I'd love it if my best sentences appeared on the sides of buses and trains around the world, and people without thinking about it read them and began thinking a certain way...judo against the corporate structure...make the system of signs consume something that purges it of its bathwater, bucket by bucket, pail by pale, impaling itself, etc., as millions of people say to themselves "I am the messiah."

No, good work. And I'm glad you've got some income.

I'm very much looking forward to my road trip to Maine this summer. I've begun mapping it out and it's one of the main drives I've always planned on taking [sic]...along Lake Ontario to St. Lawrence River over to Vermont across northern Vermont along Quebec border to Maine then through the heart of the state southeastward. No tolls, no highways, 608 miles, 13-14 hours drive time. I plan to drive about four hours a day then stop at a bed & breakfast and relax and explore. Then when I get to your place I'll do the "The Maine Woods" thing, pretend I'm Thoreau, heal wounded moose, grieve life on Ktaadn, etc. & et al., and see you guys a bit, too. But no, this IS the vacation I wanted...that I need, a seam of necessity...

The deep contradiction of someone like me with my beliefs taking a "road trip" while the Gulf of Mexico gradually transmogrifies into a tar pit is not lost on me, nor is the fact I gain great pleasure from anticipating my gleeful participation in the ongoing ecocide, perversely toying with that which I'm killing...all so I can fucking write better before I die and become nothing again...big deal, eh?

It seems being alive is perverse, a required perversion...being truly conscious is knowing one's self a pervert, that is a perverter of what was into what is and might well be some day...

Final thought: Most Americans are not smarter than a fifth grader, but you're grading sixth graders. You must be pretty smart, relatively speaking...;)

Ron Paul, Libertarianism & Corporate Personhood

2011-07-13T10:30:00.008-04:00

My friend, the "Renaissance Man*" Mike Bermel Jr., told me at his high school graduation party last weekend that I had "lied" to him about Ron Paul because I said Ron Paul was a corporate libertarian, which meant he wasn't really a populist since a corporate libertarian works against the liberties of flesh and blood persons. In other words, Ayn Rand-fan Ron Paul wasn't the kind of populist libertarian Mike thought he was in my opinion. I re-iterated this position, but Mike remained skeptical, so I decided to look up, once again, Paul's position on corporations.

Here's an excerpt from my e-mail to Mike today:

"In case you haven't done it yet, I've done it for you. I Googled 'ron paul corporate personhood,' and this is what came up:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=1264&bih=702&q=ron+paul+corporate+personhood&aq=4&aqi=g10&aql=&oq=ron+paul+corpor

"If he's against corporate personhood, why the silence? What game is Ron Paul playing?

"I figure if I simply ask questions, it will be hard for you to accuse me of lying...which is a redundancy ignorant of the writer's paradox: 'all writers are liars; I am a writer.' The moment one speaks, one lies. Some Buddhists consider all language profane. Remember the Buddha's "Flower Sermon." That's why it's almost impossible to speak sufficiently when discussing politics, which is a charade of lies. All serious conversation must, therefore, be blatantly abstract, which is to say intellected [sic] fantasy...and to the actual point from something real, which is to say adequately mental [reality and actuality are two different things, reality being of one's mind and actuality being of things in themselves; reality, therefore, is always an opinionated clusterfuck of conspiratorial fictions manifesting themselves in the political-economy, aesthetics, etc. & et al]. The best we can do these days is 'keep our eyes wide as the chance won't come again...'"

Nonetheless, the question remains: Does Ron Paul Value the Freedoms of Flesh & Blood Humans More Than The Liberties of Corporations? What's the answer?

I'm not sure.

*Mike Jr. played saxophone, drums and guitar with his Dad's band, The Frame, Saturday, as well as performed lead vocals on a Tragically Hip tune whose title I forget [about cleaning an orca tank at Marineland]. He's going to college to study computers. He's fascinated by physics. Loves literature. Is leaning toward Buddhism. Seems spiritually and philosophically inclined...outgoing and very, very curious. The list goes on...

So It Seams on Kindle

2011-07-11T14:40:00.007-04:00

Geoffrey Gatza, publisher of BlazeVox[books], made the exciting announcement today that 30 BlazeVox titles are now available on Kindle, with many more going up soon. He also said titles will be appearing soon on iTunes, whatever that is...

Among the titles offered: First Baby Poems by Anne Waldman, Slaves to Do These Things by Amy King, To Be Sung by Michael Kelleher, The Carcasses: A Fable by Raymond Federman, Secrets of My Prision House by Geoffrey Gatza, For the Ordinary Artist Short Reviews, Occasional Pieces and More by Bill Berkson.

And oh yeah, So It Seams is one of the 30 titles. You can get it here.

TALKING WITH JARED: On Some Living Works By Dead Writers [and some politics, too]

2011-06-26T10:37:00.011-04:00

Chuck Richardson to Jared Schickling
2/27/10

i've just put ballard at the top of my "to read" pile. ted pelton sent me some sweet stuff in the mail, including a first-edition of Zachary Mason's Lost Tales of the Odyssey that's selling for $180 on e-bay right now, making the point that buying independent books is something of an investment game...

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/3am-cult-hero-jg-ballard/

and a very interesting selection of articles which i intend to read for their contributions to aesthetics...

http://www.bookforum.com/blog/archive/20100226#entry5248

jared schickling to me
2/27/10

Thanks for the links.

I was reading Olson's Call Me Ishmael and this turned up, I think it makes for a hell of a blurb. If you're in agreement, we should go with this one:

"'A reality equivalent to his own penetration of reality had not come into being in his time,' Olson.
--Jared Schickling"

Or we could just delete the attribution to Olson and go with the quote, which is actually a bit of a misquote as I've kept the bracket-palimpsests but deleted the brackets. The actual quote and full context is from Merton Sealts's Afterword to the book, speaking I think merely to Olson's accounting of the unsalable White Whale:

"Its concluding paragraph, where Olson finds Melville's impressive achievement ultimately limited because 'a reality equivalent to [his] own penetration of reality had not come into being in [his] time,' anticipates the thesis of his third review of recent publications on Melville: 'Equal, That Is, to the Real Itself.'"

I've heard along the way that some say there's nothing in American lit after Moby-Dick that Moby-Dick didn't already do. The longer I turn to that work the more I think that could be true. And the funny thing, that book's a mess. The narrative is, mechanically, completely unbelievable, unaccountably shifting in and out of third-person omniscience and first-person, first-hand account. How can you hear Stubbs's maniacal whispers three boats away? But such is the whim of the book is thrilling, it's so grand beyond its borders. Beckett might present a unique case re originality but I don't know enough of him. And Richardson confounds me, not completely, but enough to trouble anything I read in it, hence the suggestion of this as blurb.

I'm reading Jean Toomer's Cane presently. Something about sex...

What's that Mason's Odyssey about? I'll be chasing the dead for some time now, I know that. This one sounds interesting -- and admittedly it's the price tag it's bearing -- someone apparently thinks well enough of it. Is it a relatively new book? If so the only other I can think of in my lifetime that sold out its first print run copies of which went for hundreds was Myung Mi Kim's Dura, a circumstance that wasn't lying. Dura's in some ways a must-be-read for poetry.

So has Pelton answered to Skyrope?

Chuck Richardson to jared
2/28/10

I have to think more about that blurb, which, if I'm not mistaken, with a bit of context added, could be:

A reality equivalent to Richardson's own penetration of reality has yet to occur in [his] time,' and therefore So It Seams seems equal to the Real Itself.

I'm not intending to put words in your mouth so much as understand what you mean by the blurb. Maybe I'm just stupid today, but I don't get it. It's over my head...

But this would be a hell of a blurb, your best one yet:

...the whim of the book is thrilling, it's so grand beyond it's borders. Beckett might present a unique case re originality but I don't know enough of him. And Richardson confounds me, not completely, but enough to trouble anything I read in it.

*****

I'm not so sure I've ever been comfortable with the idea of Melville as "American" writer simply because he was rejected by America in his lifetime and has never been well understood since then. I think much of the confusion regarding Melville is that he doesn't fit anywhere in literature. And Moby Dick is thrown around as the prototype "American" novel when, if you asked most writers who really love and "get" Melville which works grab them most, they speak of the novellas. Nor would they likely think of themselves as "American" writers. Bartleby, when it's all said and done, may be the single greatest piece of short fiction ever written in any language. Melville foreshadows Kafka and Mann more than Hemingway or Stein. Yes, there's a lot of New England Puritanism in the books, but there had to be some place and some idea and those were the closest at hand. We all do it. Humans are by nature restless. Who wants to waste time researching when the spirit's raging upon them? When the white whale beckons, put down your damn books and go...unless you were wise enough to have your crew tie you up and stuff their ears while passing by the Sirens...

Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of the Odyssey:

http://www.bing.com/search?q=Zachary%20Mason%2c%20The%20Lost%20Books%20of%20the%20Odyssey&mkt=en-us&FORM=TOOLBR&DI=6244&CE=14.0&CM=SearchWeb&filt=custom

*****

A very interesting column by Frank Rich:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/opinion/28rich.html

I agree with the general idea that we're at the beginning of a "neo-60's" period/cycle, except rather than the revolutionaries being from the "Left" they'll be from the "Right." Look for an inversion of the sixties to play out in the decade or so ahead. But the one thing I think Rich is missing is the general idea that things really are that bad with the system and it's going down, like Sovietism, one way or another. Entropy has set in...we're heading into whitewater and that's just the way it is. I see it this way: If you're opposed to gummint on the Right, you're a "counterconservative." If you're opposed to the state on the Left, you're an "anarchist." The biggest difference between them, I think, is that one is "urban" the other "country." [notice the invisibility of suburbia: what might we call suburban anarchists--"suburbanites?" "sub-anarcho-conservatives?"] If the best elements of each side congeal into a true national movement [perhaps hiding out in the suburbs], things could get very interesting and we might have a "velvet revolution." However, if this congealment reaches too many bifurcation points along its phase space trajectory it could suffer a fate worse than tragedy [where the worst elements congeal personifying our national hubris giving birth to a national nightmare necessitating cathartic-karmic bliss]--historical banality. Humans need a good "show" and we're not "getting it." As it is, I don't agree with Frank Rich anymore than I agree with the "counterconservatives" and/or "anarchists." The bottom line is things are getting ugly and people want things to be beautiful. Making things beautiful should be a terrifying process in which one necessarily finds a seam, plants a kiss/bomb and slips away/flees...politically, I'm a leaf...a page...riffling in the breeze. Like water, you can swim in me, but I can't be gripped or squeezed, which isn't to say portions or quantities of me can't be temporarily contained. Once contained, these samples of me will find our lowest common denominator. Drink me and you will be nourished [if I haven't become stagnant], inhale me, you will drown. I may boil and evaporate but you cannot burn me without polluting me first. I am the state. I am politics, among other things, perhaps...peace. I am the peace of us; we are the peace of you.

People who feel superior to their surroundings, or equal to their surroundings yet oppressed by them, feel frustrated. Eventually, we climb into our airplanes and fly them toward the tallest most significant structure we can locate and reach on one tank of gas. And hope or pray for the best...believing whatever comes next will be beautiful. Others of us, not using our planes to fly, merely write about it or draw pictures or sing. At our best we're much larger than any flying machines or magic carpet...our seats equal those who read us, the quality of their reading increases the pleasure of our flight...think of the number of minds piled up on any page of any "great book" and you will see the power of such thin, flexible fabric...almost alien in form, in its texture.

Let me know which blurb I can use. I prefer the one in bold, where you were really talking about Moby Dick. I'm a manipulative tricky dick. And as expected you came through with something very good inside the given deadline.

Have a nice day.

jared schickling to me
2/28/10

It's funny, most everything said here is an element of Moby-Dick. Though, "when the white whale beckons, put down your damn books and go" -- one side the double-sided doubloon nailed to the mainmast -- that element of Melville's "America" which seeking the sea in place of a bullet, restless, a reflection on the errand into the wilderness, in this version the vessel a corrupted name for an exterminated people, becomes the whaler at the close of the whaling era surviving by a coffin. The aftermath, which *is* our story (1st sentence, "Call me Ishmael"), is an act of reading. A book not just about but *is* reading in any of the word's dimensions. It's a work of research; these chapters frame and re-frame the narrative, a memory. I've read three items that adequately grapple with the convolutions of the book, Olson's Call Me Ishmael, DBQ's A Whaler's Dictionary, and Lawrence's chapter in Studies in Classic American Literature. I've never seen a case for the novellas as superior -- nor does that matter much to me -- Melville himself wrote he writes em for money. MD was to be one of these, until 1851, per his letter to Hawthorne. "Two Moby-Dicks." I read Bartleby, a great work, as already told in MD.

As to blurb, yes, the quote was to speak to your own novel. Pretty direct, I thought. Go ahead and use whichever you'd like. It's becoming one hell of a project. My experience with blurbs is, use them or don't. I mean, it's a good book, and hopefully something out of the mass of emails satisfies you to use it as a marketing tool.

"Humans need a good 'show' and we're not 'getting it'" -- I'm not sure how true that is. Or at least, the value of a question precludes the judgment. Insofar as I'm not sure how much anyone gets of anything. The more one focuses on an aspect of the thing, the more one misses of the rest of it, that principle. One looks back perhaps and says oh, ok -- as Moby-Dick has to show *itself* -- initially no whale, no Ahab. The author was responding, after the fact perhaps understanding his trip through the watery part of the world, once the name is gone.

"People who feel superior to their surroundings, or equal to their surroundings yet oppressed by them, feel frustrated. Eventually, we climb into our airplanes and fly them toward the tallest most significant structure we can locate and reach on one tank of gas. And hope or pray for the best...believing whatever comes next will be beautiful. Others of us, not using our planes to fly, merely write about it or draw pictures or sing. At our best we're much larger than any flying machines or magic carpet...our seats equal those who read us, the quality of their reading increases the pleasure of our flight..." Ahab was no bullshit, the former; Ishmael, the latter, but an erased self-identity, conscious of the danger in song's transformations, and one who quite literally sought that (see Queequeg's jojo). A liar, for better or worse (see narrative structure). But otherwise, the only way this can work is if the author walks the walk -- which is to say, takes the opposite approach, gives himself over to text and reader, is indulgent in that way, wherein some ideas about that audience are helpful -- wherein reading is useful, particularly the dead, perhaps the classics, Thoreau's prescription, fodder. First rule of freshman workshop, don't defend the work.

Chuck Richardson to jared
3/1/10

Dude, I'm burned out today and can't respond in length. I need to re-read Melville. Haven't read MB in 22 years. When I say more writers are influenced by the shorter works, Bartleby in particular, if you asked them, is precisely because it's not a mess. If you asked them if they think MB is inferior to B. we'd look at you as if that were a stupid question. MB's a huger masterpiece. The response to it is primarily emotional, that is to say it works on us subconsciously. It's influence on our work is unattributable because of its mystery. The mess is intentional, an effort to apply consciousness, reason, the enlightenment even transcendentalism into the mix, romanticism, but to no avail...they only make a mess of things...and so we go about describing the boat itself in detail, etc....Bartleby, on the other hand, is something we can consciously toy with, it's something that cognitively evolves a logic in dealing with the fundamental mystery at the bottom of Melville's work. If I seem a bit Melvillean, as if there's definitely a taste of that spice in the work, it's because I absorbed Bartleby precisely because it was absorbable. You need rolls and rolls of paper towels to wipe up MD. B's nowhere's near as quantitative or overflowing or maximal...it's quite "minimal" for Melville. Whereas I've been mopping up Moby's maximal mess for 20 some odd years [or standing there looking at it while smoking and leaning on my mop is more like it]. In my opinion, B & MB embody the frictioning, antagonistic elements seaming together the elan vital of Melville's journey, or is it the elan vital which seems them? Billy Budd, perhaps, reveals the dead end of delicate ways amid life's psychic chaos, which feels more like the weather than anything humans might call "reasonable."

Saw this today and think you'll find it interesting: http://tinfisheditor.blogspot.com/2010/02/language-acquisition-dictee-and-radhika.html

Thank god it's March! The birds are returning and making a racket as they battle to re-claim their seasonal space as the snow melts making a giant wet mess of everything. Walking the dog necessitates giving him a bath afterward. At least he's loving it.

I may take a week off, sort of, and only check my e-mail every other day or so. I need to get some shit done or undone or whatever. Get back to the grind in 10 days or so...

Cheers.

The Condemned (Short Film) an Appropriation of Franz Kafka's 'In the Penal Colony'

2011-06-16T10:09:00.000-04:00

Very interesting.

James Joyce's Ulysses

2011-06-16T08:12:00.004-04:00

Happy Bloom's Day!

Ulysses 2
Ulysses 3
Ulysses 4
Ulysses 5
Ulysses 6
Ulysses 7
Ulysses 8
Ulysses 9
Ulysses 10
Ulysses 11
Ulysses 12
Ulysses 13
Ulysses 14
Ulysses 15

AVANT-POP QUOTES

2011-06-07T11:30:00.003-04:00

From Avant-Pop: Fiction For A Daydream Nation
edited by Larry McCaffery, Black Ice Books, 1993.

“I have tried to follow in his footnotes.” –Derek Pell, speaking of the Marquis de Sade, in “Elements of Style.”

“Education smarts.” Ibid.

“The breezy style is often the work of an egocentric, the person who imagines that everything that pops into his head is of general interest.” Ibid.

“…decuntstruction…postmortemism…” Kathy Acker, according to McCaffery’s introduction, “Tsunami.”

“Reason is an outdated, phallocentric system of anal-compulsive delusion devised by men so they don’t have to contemplate how much they’ll stink after they’re dead.” Ibid.

“…you have to become a criminal or a pervert…I’m sick of fucking not knowing who I am.” Kathy Acker, “Politics.”

“…the passing of the days which speed by with the swiftness of a buried ton.” Mark Leyner, “I’m Writing About Sally.”

“The last image he remembered framing as an objective fact was of a dignified gentleman in a Vandyke beard, latex gloves, and nothing else, hunched behind a juniper bush, furiously masturbating onto a slice of wheat bread.” Stephen Wright, “Blessed”

“One gang sprays on a stanchion, competing gang sprays on a billboard. Media compare them to animals scenting territory. Well, what do you think art is?” Harold Jaffe, “Sex Guerillas.”

30 UNDER 30 A WORTHY READ

2011-06-02T11:14:00.006-04:00

Just finished reading Starcherone Books’ latest—30 Under 30: An Anthology of Innovative Fiction by Younger Writers, edited by Blake Butler and Lily Hoang.

What Butler and Hoang have strung together counter-intuitively reveals these “younger” writers as not young, but old, not inexperienced, but wizened, by the raw force of daily life surging through, over and around them, whether it’s in digital, mechanistic or ideated form[s].

I particularly liked the selections by Danielle Adaire, Todd Seabrook, Beth Couture, Angi Becker Stevens, Matt Bell, Joanna Ruocco [winner of FC2’s Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize for Another Governess/The Least Blacksmith - A Diptych—a book I look forward to reading], James Yeh, Megan Milks, Michael Stewart, Sean Kilpatrick and Adam Good.

I’m heartened by the apparent fact that so many talented writers were born in the Reagan years—an otherwise horrific period for the arts in America.

I’ll have more to say on this book later, when I finish a rather lengthy review comparing and contrasting it with editor Larry McCaffery’s Avant-Pop: Fiction For A Daydream Nation [Black Ice], and another Starcherone offering PP/FF: an anthology, edited by Peter Connors.

At the moment, I’m thinking of a chaotic progression from Avant-Pop’s 1993 concerns with sex/AIDS/identity/freedom, to 2006’s PP/FF, which navigates streams of words flowing between poetry and fiction, poem and prose, occupying a world of homeland security, global warming and peak everything. Some of the same writers who appear in Avant-Pop also appear in PP/FF.

Among the questions I may or may not ask in this longer review are how well these “younger” writers “stack up” against their “older” peers and how, or if, the newcomers’ innovations point to a new beginning for fiction on paper…and what they may have done with yesterday’s baby and bathwater?

I might also consider the function of editors in such compilations, comparing-contrasting Butler & Hoang’s apparent results to McCaffery’s and Conners’, as I see the former taking a very different approach from the latter two.

Please feel free to share your opinion[s] on any of these three books with everyone by commenting below.

And, as always, cheers!

WHAT’S OBAMA UP TO? DOES HE GET IT?

2011-05-26T16:30:00.004-04:00

A STILL RELEVANT EXCHANGE FROM 18 MONTHS AGO

Jared Schickling to me
12/21/09

Just reading up on this health bill that passed this morning. What a crock of shit. Of course it ain't just Obama -- but he has a job to do -- he's a piece of shit. What a fucking let down. I've had this feeling for some months now. But this seals the deal. He seriously thinks he's doing the good work. What a pretentious fuck.

Chuck Richardson to Jared
12/22/09

I agree with your…remarks. I haven't bothered reading up on it because regardless of what's passed, it won't be executed. The Congress has to fund it. It won't take effect until 2013-14, and if Obama's a one-termer and we have a Republican President, it will all be meaningless. Nothing good's going to happen in this country until after the coming unavoidable revolution or civil war. The ruling class is deeply divided between the coercers and the bribers. The bribers [Democrats] will end up winning something that doesn't look like victory. It's a miserable mess and I refuse to look at the details of the health bill because I believe the whole thing is a meaningless sideshow and distraction, an ugly spectacle that's also a dangerous gamble, because something will happen that might turn the mob against both parties, rather than it siding with one or the other.

The most interesting thing to watch right now is the Tea Bag movement, as it morphs from an idiotic FoxNews creation of the right wing, to shrill libertarianism [not really human, but actually corporate] and now it seems to be increasingly and truly populist [notice the progression into something increasingly serious and dangerous to the status quo]. When intellectuals begin joining their fight, watch out. Also watch for its name to change as splinter groups form and unite in various ways. It's out of this movement a third party will emerge by 2012 that might take over and at the very least become as permanent an entity as Democrats and Republicans, which in an ideal world would become the Democratic Republicans [I won't even guess on a TeaBag ideology other than it might be something "new" in the world, as in non-existent today]. Lots of things can happen. Health care's only a large ugly tree we're passing on the highway. One thing I'm rather certain of, if I live to be 70, I doubt we'll have this federal government with this Constitution. It will be something else. It will still be called America the way England's been called England and France has been called France for hundreds of years despite their forms of government. There's no way the federal government will survive the first half of this century because of what it's doing to itself [and its inability to do anything meaningful re: global warming], which is pretty much what it's making everyone else do to themselves. It's a sick cycle--pun intended--that's going to kill off these fuckers and lots of good people before it's done. Very sad and quite literally tragic...yet I fear necessary. Hubris must play itself out...

The smartest and angriest people will win in the end, but at what cost and for how long [not very, I imagine]?

Note: I believe ethics is a necessary ingredient in intelligence...I sense a debate, but let's not now. I'm way too busy.

I thought you were going to leave me alone, fucker? LOL

Jared Schickling to me
12/22/09

No argument. And so much for leaving you alone. We're on autopilot I think after all that back and forth so no need to respond. Do your work. But no argument. I get the sense the Dems just need to get something through and claim all the little meaningless inane details as progressive reforms while the big picture is anything but. And 13-14 I'd be surprised if Republicans didn't put up a stink about mandatory coverage and claim that victory. the whole thing stinks cuz now there's a precedent, hc industry knows it can strong arm this administration. the future's cut off. reform's not possible (took 40 more years for ussr once it started recognizing that). Anyway off to clean.

Chuck Richardson to Jared
12/23/09

i'm trying to empathize with obama and think about what it is about him that does make him different, and that's his demeanor and long term approach. he's on an 8-year plan and i'll judge him then. he's not bush. the democrats are not the republicans. the republicans march in goosestep with each other. democrats, like us, will argue over what the meaning of the word "is" is, or was or might be, and at which juncture...the republicans end the debate, their minds being numbed...mostly i worry about Obama's need to be "popular" with people in every group, which makes him rather naive about each group's majority...if there is such a thing as a "majority." which leads to my concern about Obama's relationship to the ruling class. In actuality, the power of the president is very limited, and if a president is to use what power s/he has wisely they have to be able to perceive, read and negotiate the seams in the ruling class. This is very hard for someone with Obama's background, easier for someone like Bill Clinton, impossible for Jimmy Carter, Johnson was the recent best among the Democrats, Kennedy actually being the embodiment of a particular seam with a familial axe to grind is therefore disqualified. The best President we've had at negotiating the seams [political, economic, social, religious, sexual, etc.] across the spectrum of ruling class clans was, of course, Ronald Reagan. Reagan understood power in America better than anyone since FDR. Nixon comes in fourth. Jimmy Carter and W. understood it the least [of the presidents in my lifetime].

I worry that Obama's more naive than audacious. I also worry that he hates confrontation to the point he can be bullied [infuriates me, but my better self knows I wanted the President with the least body bags ultimately attached, and Obama's passive Spock-like demeanor may be appropriate to the situation and/strategy...I worry that Obama and the Democrats don't recognize that corporations/Wall Street and the Republican Party are bigger threats to American well-being than al Qaeda, the Soviet Union, the Red Chinese, Hugo Chavez and Castro could ever be, and wage a serious effort to drive a stake through their heart. The American right wing must be flat out defeated. But Obama’s a defender of the free market as he must be since he was sworn to uphold the Constitution [considering all the precedents like corporate personhood…although there’s nothing about the “free market” in the Constitution, I know…corporatists weaseled that in there via Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad]. And this worries me. I want him to be the kind of president who invites people with views like mine to share them with him in private in the white house so he can consider them and be very aware of the possibility that something might happen between the masses and the system and he will need to behave in "extra-constitutional" fashion to reduce the effects and collateral damage of the necessary strife and keep it from escalating into all-out combat by reducing the necessity of that option. How else will he know how to be on the right side of history? He's a great ape [like the rest of us] who needs to be aware when there's a serious problem among the monkies, because when they get really pissed everything under their trees will be carpeted with shit forcing the silverback below to move on. Obama should edit and re-craft their ideas, knowing that their aims are correct but their methods will fail. And that's the thing...what's Obama's actual method? Is there a method to the madness? Is he giving his opponents the rope he's going to hang them with, figuratively speaking? If everything gets totally fucked up will he, like Clinton in the 96 budget showdown when the government stopped operating, be able to rally the country to his side to defeat those who fucked it up? All this stuff isn't about health care so much as it's part of a series of moves in a chess game between the two major wings of the corporate ruling class, who need to keep raising the national credit limit to keep playing.

Then again, perhaps not. The big shit's going to happen whether I have a health care plan on paper or not.

Ok, i repeated “ruling class" several times. Check out this documentary by Lewis Lapham when you have an hour. I think it sums it up as quickly and as simply as anything I've seen or read on the subject [Roger & Me is better but much longer, this is short]--in essence, the true political problem every nation faces is how to populate its ruling class with the best people for both the society of humans and ecology of natural resources [material sustainability]--it all comes down to what we are to do with "success," the ways we measure "success," and the kinds of success we actually want to experience, rather than McMansions in gated communities…a less somber more playful elite, who carry no burdens, only light...

http://www.hulu.com/search?query=ruling+class

Jared Schickling to me
12/23/09

thanks for the link. you're probably right. i'm sure he's got plans. i'm not convinced of his commitment to climate health. copenhagen seems disappointing. i remember reading somewhere a while a back how violent crime rates go down during recessions. i don't know -- as if misery loves company and the poor chill on this one. i told you so or something. i wonder about domestic abuse rates among the ruling class, or employee abuse in their offices and factories (broadly), both evade such recording. (the latter point would seem to complicate the my initial one.) up all night. off to bed.

A Conversation About “Zero’s Blooming Excursion” [& Whatnot], Finale(?)

2011-05-17T12:27:00.003-04:00

Re: The Blurbs
Chuck Richardson to jared
12/21/09

I attached the notes I took instead of writing my blog entry. I now want to let this book sink in for the achievement it is. I'll write something short about it, teasing readers, right before it comes out then a review right after. Good god, man. This is your first real book. And it's a doozy. After work I'm going to stop at the Diamond and buy someone a beer and toast you. Then go home and go to bed.

I prefer the ones in bold, perhaps the first one best. The choice is yours. Feel free to re-write them, mash them together, whatever...just get my approval before you put my name on it. We're not only on the same page with this one now, but the same letter. Yet I think I'm still saying it's capitalized while you say it's not. Fucker! At least we agree it's a vowel, right?

1. Zero’s Blooming Excursion seems a trans-bifurcation of voice...some cacophonous unity of symbols—visual, aural, intellectual—collaborating in the emergence of something deeply spiritual: The awakened human mind dealing with the chaos, projecting the Arabesque patterns of its own movements. Schickling’s book is a brilliant success.
2. Zero’s Blooming Excursion seems sets within sets becoming texts within texts, differing fonts joining together via familiar lines and groupings that now seem alien or other-worldly—inhuman or transhuman—in the way they're seamed together.
3. If one is to be literate in the realm of Zero’s Blooming Excursion’s merged pineal glands, one must make sense of its seams...It's as much a painting to make sense of [the repeated Chagall] or puzzle to construct [the chemistry and mathematics] as a poem to read...It's a critifiction seducing its reader into numerous re-reads, each one producing different patterns and forms of pleasure…Schickling's book is the very embodiment of Calvino’s ideal of multiplicity..
4. Zero’s Blooming Excursion uses the space on the page as a painting of words, and as the pages accumulate so does the sense that a real, albeit esoteric, that is highly personal, which is to say…spiritual…narrative is taking shape... 5. Zero’s Blooming Excursion is a myth making a psychology of Itself in poetic, fictional and critical terms...seeking a form of salvation by salvaging the world via diverse means of constructive nihilism…
6. Zero’s Blooming Excursion’s bizarro science, invisibility cloaking, mathematics, chemistry, strange symbols, numerology, Kabbala, lots of trivial news and obscure data [like patent backgrounds]...all add up to a paranoid yet valid approach to the cosmos which seems to subvert or counter its own overt nihilism. Jared Schickling’s poetic brilliance shines throughout.
7. Zero’s Blooming Excursion’s an ecopoetic manifesto that comes with an instruction manual for anyone knew to Schickling’s fascinating worlds…and who isn’t? Yet.
8. Zero's Blooming Excursion seams redemptive nihilism to the emptiness of lost space...dead "socia"...a dead friend, breathing life into a dying place…

jared schickling to me
12/21/09

this will work! i like the first one. though i might take some things from the some others to add. have to think on it. certainly i'll send it your way afterward. thanks.

Chuck Richardson to jared
12/21/09

Good. You better not drop my "fable." They're refined pieces of a puzzle that naturally fit together. And it helps the reader the way Ziggy's letter does in Smoke. It truly amps everything else in the book. To call "the book" poetry seems inadequate. I'll just refer to it as "the book."

Now leave me alone! LOL. Cheers!

jared schickling to me
12/21/09

Yes, I'll leave you alone now. Thanks for showing up to work!

A CONVERSATION ABOUT ZERO’S BLOOMING EXCURSION [& WHATNOT] PART 2

2011-05-14T10:58:00.024-04:00

NOTE: The first part of this correspondence is “E-Mails/Jared Schickling #3,” posted below. I would’ve changed the title, but my Blogger Edit Layout won’t seem to allow it. Anyway, I’ve begun posting excerpts of my correspondence with Jared because I’ve discovered that we say some of our best things this way…off the cuff, freely without concern that you would eventually have access to it. So you’re something of a voyeur after the fact, dear reader. And what you have in these correspondences is, in some cases, better than the fiction or poetry myself or Jared may have composed that particular day. I also think superior writers might find it amusing that Jared and me worry about such stupid things. Our peers may find our thoughts entertaining, and our few “students” may find these e-mails stimulating and helpful to their sincerest efforts in the” language arts.” Cheers to all, boos to none. Unless it’s booze…with Peace!

Chuck Richardson to Jared Schickling:
12/18/09

I had intended to write up a draft today of my general views re: Zero's Blooming Excursion in the hope of finding a few possible blurbs, but I ended up researching XXXXXX for nine hours instead. I'm writing…XXXXXX's fictional biography, sort of. I'm setting the bar very high. I spent most of the day copying and pasting samples of 1920s' writing so I can begin feeling the period [I'm going to relate somehow the horrifying circumstances of her birth and the obstetrician's malpractice--too much silver nitrate in the eyes, blinding her in one eye and severely scarring the other--today she'd be a millionaire...a comment derivative of a 1920s ideal, which was derivative of] in terms of language. I'm also scrutinizing advertizing, the economy, global situation, etc. & et al. Once that's all sunk in to a point that the first sentence pops out, I'll be on my way. But I see myself researching for a few days. I'll be following the same method 11 more times covering the periods of her 83-year life [pretty much the personal story of the 20th century and turn of the 21st]. It's possibly going to be told in the third person objective from a narrator who knows she's dead in her chair...she's experiencing her life eternally recurring in an apparently random order...this is the only chapter written in the past tense because the subject has entered the past tense...while this is going on, there's knocking on the door. She lived alone, her successful writer son having moved away and taken the animals with him... Obviously, I'm very wrapped up...This is something I'll want her to read, so you know the pressure I'm feeling.

That said, I'll have something on Zero for you within a week. And hopefully it will be right and I'll post a public version of it on my blog and at NHR if they want it. Good exposure for you and it's an interesting conversation on the very subject I'm struggling with regarding my colleagues' work...how much of it seems informed by an entropy that they seem to refuse to fully wrestle with [I'll be more specific later]...and as I said, I have the same level of admiration and disappointment for Cohen's Heaven of Others that I do Zero's Blooming Excursion [a kind of Romanticism I might like except for the "hero's" being a "protagonist" of a "nil" sort...]

That said my disappointment's minor and a matter of taste and I'm open to the idea I might be wrong about your aesthetic decision...the way I'm open to the idea Obama might be a genius in consciously pissing off everybody...don't Americans deserve and need to be pissed off at Americans before anything gets straightened out? Maybe there's a method to his and your madness...it's just that the coolness of the whole approach tweaks me...the apparent refusal to get relatively dirty and smartly fight to the end...and the fact that, despite the hope for change and nihilistic tendencies, there's an element of maintenance about it...how to keep things going...or to conserve something while things keep going...except the poem. It's a very good poem and I want it to go further, then have a fable of sorts transitioning into the essay. Really explode the forms. It would be an uncategorizable must read. We slap the term "poetry" on it as a catch-all that you prefer over "fiction," which is OK because it would actually be neither one or nonfiction...I see your potential, the book's potential...it may not yet be time for it to kinetically expend itself in the "market." You're building a bomb and I say there's room for more TNT, plastique, nitro, etc. Go Nucular! Advance your stategeries a few more goosesteps, brother, and humankind might perceive itself evolving into the "next" human...and actually feel the part of something continuous rather than its mere ending in close conjunction with its own, or stopping, of something...

I'm too vague. Never mind. I know you feel you're done with it, Geoffrey's about to start work on it and it would be asking too much at this point to delay it, and you're probably right with regards to the aesthetics, being a more refined and sophisticated chap than me by nature. I like my women to mud wrestle. I'd also say compared to the other contemporary work I've been reading, Zero achieves a heartfelt complexity with a precision I haven't seen. It makes me think of no one or nothing else but your weeping and laughing genius. So don't let my criticism get you down. Just tell me to fuck off if you feel like it. You're "the poet Jared Schickling" for chrissakes.

I'll have something for you in a week rather than a day. Molasses.

On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 11:27 PM, jared schickling wrote:

Hey Chuck,

Started writing this yesterday and then figured I'd come back. I'm sick thanks to Mollie and spent the past nine hours getting our reading series junk in order. After a day of grading. But it's a load off the back. Anyway. Continue composing message --

That's fine and understandable -- doing your own work today -- I spent *all* of today grading. Glad that's over. The course and its papers are predictable at this point. More or less plowed through 600 pages of freshman writing. As the semester's over I don't need to comment, just have a look and mark it. Some of em caught my attention.

And I'll risk irritating you -- by suggesting a second read before you begin writing about what's unsatisfactory or insufficient in Zero's.

"the personal story of the 20th century and turn of the 21st": Zero's is the personal story of one's most recent history -- that being, a text to be read -- told from the outside, the bird's eye, cloaked in the form of a person. One suspects this by recognizing the multiple poems within poems, spilling into each other -- consistently a given construct is deconstructed by the context in which it’s occurring, and the thing deconstructed on the other hand deconstructs the initial deconstructor. And out of this entropy a threshold is reached at which point a new organizational principle emerges -- always larger than whatever human. This happens formally -- voices colliding, obviously -- but other ways too. In each case the multiplicity of tongues creates one readable poem, and within that one can trace any number of threads, different poems -- follow one font by itself, another by itself, or both together. They'll say different things -- complimentary, antagonistic -- read clusters as separate, or take the flying leap across charged (not empty) space to find the syntaxes and cadences ordering parts and wholes. In all cases read left right up down and all around. This fragmentary unity leaves the place to be...

And I bring this up because there is no protagonist, contrary to your suggestion. There is a place -- that's all -- and a human experience within that, only part -- a necessary thing to write because, so it seems to me, the place will always only be understand in this dimension by its human author (or reader). The text itself, which might usurp that role (both roles), remains forever a human production. The human is the frame through which you see -- anything else sounds to me like lip service.

I'm more curious about the ways we're stupid than any intelligence

I also find it necessary because otherwise, without giving the poem over to another's poem, a given character turns unfairly used by the text, a limited dimensional representation. i.e., no longer alive. A slave to the author's needs -- it seems to me easier to write about the thing than to write the thing. And I'll repeat something said in a previous email, death as death is not possible in any true sense until...the text, in order to accurately be, must find a way to give itself over to that which is other than "my" intention, my imagined text. Neither will this be any kind of death, and is utterly human, this imaginative potential.

"Advance your stategeries a few more goosesteps, brother, and humankind might perceive itself evolving into the "next" human...and actually feel the part of something continuous rather than its mere ending in close conjunction with its own..." The thing is, I'm not interested in escaping "this." The "this" is always already continuous and part of something larger. Zero's is concerned with helping us see this, It. And I feel it does this. The human being within it is merely one cog within Its by which we might notice it -- and in turn the elsewhere of it. Not central in the sense of importance...but central in the sense of what one has to go on, mine of data, bag of Its alleles. I was always more partial to Akhmatova and Mandelstam and their acmeism than Blok and their symbolism -- the latter arguing art must reject its precursors to imagine something new while the former arguing that's precisely the problem, future hypomnesia. Where has postmodernism gotten us? We're still waiting for the Big Machine, old Panopticon and Disciplinary Mechanism, capable of absorbing all contradictions, to simply run its course. The symbolists were little dandies of the Bolsheviks for a while, while the acmeists were killed, exiled, families arrested etc, all that wonderful stuff. Why? Why is Myung Mi Kim paid so well? David Foster Wallace? Federman? Across the board, why is postmodern art that doubts the imagination and its potential so well rewarded? Art that writes Its (and others') colonies? Not for me. I hate machines. The thing about the Carcasses is they're dead. Hence their nowhere -- which would be their biggest problem.

I also am not interested in escaping "this" because by paying attention to "this," and empathizing with it, one is more prone to understand that in the supermarket it's wise to make wiser consumer choices. Just one example.

The thing about Zero's is it's an eco-poetry, with "ecology" broadly understood (note the broad referential vectors of "they" in the epigraph, the only time [sic see epigraph] in the ms the word is used -- and note the seldom, consciously used word "it," the resistance to Its objectification -- possessives becoming the intimacy of Its simultaneous presence and absence). It's not romantic, insofar as it does nothing more than see and *hear* the mind's play as environmental phenomena. As derivative, a site-specific charge. The poem (not the fiction -- fiction sounds to me more purely Its staged production) is where the "he" is located and across scale, Its/his own synonym and antonym, simultaneously. The poem is always undoing itself; the he within it is always other than itself. Shit, we're not even sure if he is alive in this thing. Whatever "new" human we'd like to see, that's already "us."

If you decide on a second read, use the attached. In light of our conversations I've added a footnote here and there, but most importantly focused its mythic dimensions with some grand insertions. What I'm after can't be well enough understood before this draft. I think you know it well enough for some blurb, but I'm suspicious otherwise when I begin to hear about a "protagonist." If you're reading it in such terms, well...I've attached the prospective cover image, "pagoda." It's an accurate depiction.

None of this is to suggest the poem is finished. All of it fails. That's the beauty of it and a bit of the point.

Date: Sun, 20 Dec 2009 10:15:01 -0500
Subject: Re: zero
From: Chuck Richardson
To: Jared Schickling

Jared, believe me, I'm going to give Zero several readings. And I already have read it a second time and then gone over it and referring to it, etc. Our e-mail correspondence, prior to this response, totals 5,729 words, filling 11 single spaced pages. I can say without equivocation I totally get you and where you're coming from. I wouldn't change a thing that's there. I would simply add a fable between Reger and the essay to further "bloom" the form. "Zero's" form of sense--sensibility--or absence thereof--seams a necessary "fiction."

I see ZBE as a flower that hasn't quite fully bloomed. The excitement is not knowing whether it actually has or not because every flower's different. You'll see this in greater detail in a day or two once I've straightened everything out in my head enough to adequately share the confusion, which is aesthetically pleasurable so far. Zero's Blooming Excursion is already a very good book because it's put my mind to work willingly and pleasurably on the ramifications of what appears to be happening on the page.

This is an utterly brilliant book so far and you're going to have several blurbs to choose from, all of which will sound hyperbolic but won't be, as I'm going to try and lay out my reading as lucidly and calmly as possible without too many details. You don't need the details. My fundamental opinion is that Zero requires something in the fable form to serve as a transition mechanism between "Reger" and the essay. The shift as it is seems unnecessarily harsh and reduces the pleasure. I like getting slapped with an essay, just not until after I've orgasmed. The essay's a post-coital cuddle or cigarette and I haven't got off yet. You're a selfish bastard for lighting up and spooning now. I'll be less crude in a day or two once I've gone over all my notes and our lengthy correspondence one more time. I would say Zero has the potential to truly expand the literary debate of what we can do in the face of our death and global deterioration from the human perspective. Right now it's a very meaningful contribution. You, Jared Schickling, are capable of more...just a little.

If you don't write the fable, perhaps I will...I'll take Kafka past Zero in an effort to find out that last thing...then let the reader take it from there. My duty is to go as far as I can...humankind benefits from Prometheus and Icarus, etc. & et al.

Peace.

On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 12:10 PM, Jared Schickling wrote:

Well now that you've lubed me up...and I do see where you're coming from. My thoughts re the essay as it's currently placed, something along the lines of, the reader is inclined after the first section to start seeing people, and focusing on that, perhaps lulled into forgetting the place-ness even of these people, at which point the essay redirects our attention. More or less. A fable, or something, could provide all the stuff you're suggesting. Thing is, at this point, I'm freakin empty. The end of my ind. study with DBQ took dumped as I dropped everything to slave over this thing. Luckily he's supportive. And with all this reading series and job app crap to deal with over the break I'm not sure I'll find the time or the ideas to make anything happen. There is a poem excluded from the ms that might get re-worked into prose and deal with the necessary things. I don't know. Babbling. Federman hit the nail on the head with you...[being dangerous].

And ps congrats on the Artvoice promotion. That's sure to sell some books. It looks like Buffalo's experiencing a second literary birth, and importantly, outside of the official channels. I swear I just miss everything. Dammit.

Date: Sun, 20 Dec 2009 12:39:04 -0500
Subject: Re: zero
From: Chuck Richardson
To: Jared Schickling

First, please re-work the deleted piece. Add something...some mechanism that isn't so rude...The ArtVoice promotion wasn't about me, didn't mention me [did it?], just BV and Starcherone, putting BV on top with the term "SubPop." I'll have to re-read it and see if I saw my name. I don't think I did, but I sometimes forget I'm me...

and i feel for you, my friend. you're definitely going through a crunch time. hopefully you both will land something nice in WNY and we'll start being a physical community again. shit's really happening here, i think. and, for better or worse, it's home...i relate.

On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 12:47 PM, jared schickling wrote:

The author asks Geoffrey to recommend some books -- he recommends yours and I think the cover image is there --

Date: Sun, 20 Dec 2009 13:06:05 -0500
Subject: Re: zero
From: Chuck Richardson
To: Jared Schickling

Jesus Christ. I didn't scroll all the way down. It looked different and I assumed it was ads. I'll have to pick up a print version and see if it's in there. Very cool. I'm returning to XXXXXX at 4:30 p.m. I got a lot and nothing done the last nine days. The research for the novel keeps blooming and taking up more and more time and somewhere in January Geoffrey's sending me the galleys for So It Seams. The less time I spend on the job, the busier I get. I'm taking the rest of the day off from this and tomorrow will write something up on Zero. You'll get your blurbs. The gist of my blog version will be the similar way you and Cohen seem to face peak everything, revealing, perhaps, a hint of how your generation of artists and intellectuals are to likely rationalize the very dramatic events of your life times, which may be occurring at the peak of something called "humankind's life time." There's a confident affirmation in being able to say no--or is it actually an uncertain denial/negation/nihilism also--or just sheer exhaustion, "we are old?"--to various aspects of it, living to fight another day, living to refuse to fight again today, etc. I don't know. But what a magnificent struggle. Personally, it gives me some hope for everything...because there seem valid men doing apparently valid things.

On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 2:58 AM, Jared Schickling wrote:

You sound really well in these past few emails. It's more than music to my ears. Our conversations have been helpful. I'm having a celebration Pabst. Ask me tomorrow and maybe I've changed my mind, "fable," before the essay. attached. the bestiality of it prevents it from being called a parable. i'd like to think the arc now has that wad blowing effect you were talking about -- still not knowing what the final word is. or has to be. i don't know. Don't feel that you have to get to anything with this right away. When you feel like it. Though it might be easier with all the fresh back and forth. I don't know. I saw Orson Welles's version of The Trial last night, so here's this thing.

I hear you about winding up with less time the more you have. That's the problem with this mfa thing. But in this case i ain't kidding anybody it's a total luxury.

Chuck Richardson to Jared Schickling
12-21-09

You bastard! I was going to write the blurb and blog stuff today, but will hold off. I guess I deserve that. But seriously, I'm going to look at it right away and get back to you. I'm already thrilled. The fact is a "fable" just has to happen at the end of a process. You dream it. You get high, party, have a good long conversation over Pabst with someone who doesn't give a hoot about Romanticism and ecopoetics, and you get in the mood and then all of a sudden BAM! the mind crystallizes something for you out of the flames, and there it is and you wonder what the fuck. It leaves things simultaneously open and closed...you have the exact mess you were looking for...what you needed to see for yourself...

I'd also like to say I loathe "escape." Going through the valley of nails is suicide. The poem begins with a suicided friend as a doorway. The fun about writing is you can "do" things there you should and can never do in actuality. I don't understand how it works, but I got my driver's license. Everything I "know" "I" "know" from having dealt with it in my head and on the page. And I didn't have any help and had nowhere to turn but the Swamps and Thoreau and Melville and O'Connor. The only time in my writing life that I experienced writer's block was December 1999 to about October 2001. The towers coming down loosened me up, got me feeling again. And I got off the meds. Right now I'm feeling and writing a great deal. No writer's block. It all just pours out of me despite, or because of, my sadness of late. My sister's pug got hit by a car and killed the other day. Her picture on the Christmas card is on the refrigerator…Death rips me apart. I wage all out war against Thanatos and its forces. I plunge through the valley of nails screaming fuck you! and swinging my fists every single day because I decided if I wasn't going to commit suicide, if I was going to live, I was going to strike a blow for God almighty, whatever the fuck that might be. And now I'm typing. Tears. I'm not better, but perhaps the best I've ever been. My dreams have fallen into such syncronicity with my waking life thanks to my writing that I dreamed lucidly last night that the cover of Smoke was in Artvoice. I've a feeling that 2010 could be the year I finally feel I won a fucking round. Hopefully by next year at this time you and I will be sitting on our respective stools in our corner, sharing a joint, planning how to take the belts away from whatever bastards have them...and by any means necessary because we're playing for keeps.

OK. Enough of that shit. I'm going to read your fable and then try to come up with a few blurbs. I need to finish this now because I'm going to be increasingly busy for the next few months...especially the next two…

Anyway. You're the man. I'm done moaning.

Cheers.

Chuck Richardson to jared
12/21/09

Just read it. Perfect. That piece has found its home...the absolutely correct and natural transition--not a "mechanism" [you should know by now I'm not at all Cartesian, so why you brought that up...]

First we have the larva, then the pupa, then the apparent emergence of the metamorphosed being, and then the placement of "criticism" that is "death." A naturally "progressive cycle" with all of its chaotic messiness and bifurcations, blooming into those things that do end up seeming to "mean" something, where we're running for a moment with the spirit informing things before it outpaces us and moves on, leaving only the essay behind [everyone's fascinated by a corpse]...an inconclusive autopsy used for the "education of morticians" instead, perhaps?

Anyway, you did it. You can drink something nicer than Pabst now. Go ahead...Send me the bill.

New Issue of Eccolinguistics!

2011-05-13T17:40:00.003-04:00

Featuring poems by Joel Chace, Brad Vogler, the barbarian poet of Lostport—Marc Pietrzyskowski; a collage from Steve Dalachinsky that seems a visual fit for this issue’s theme, an excerpt from Angela Hume’s SECOND STORY OF YOUR BODY; a couple of outstanding anonymous pieces—A PLAGUE UPON THE VINEYARD Hack butts and hand-written letter dated July 24, 2004; plus this, one of my three prosey contributions, Bob Dylan Dream #...

i was surprised to read both in huxley and someplace else, which i don't remember, about the rarity of lucid dreaming...now i remember the second place, a book called "personal mythology." both claim that few people have lucid dreams in which they can "consciously" act. personally, i'm somewhat skeptical about that, though when i tell people i can do this they tend to look at me as if i were insane or lying, so maybe there's some truth in it. it's rare for me in the sense that it comes and goes. however, right now it just keeps happening every single night. i think perhaps taking two pills of xanax at bedtime helps. if i don't take them, i still have the dreams, but they tend to be very very disturbing. with the xanax, they're amazing. for instance last night i found myself sitting with friends in lawn chairs configured as a horse shoe facing the neighbor's tool shed in the middle of the night. and who was at my right hand side? bob dylan. we talked about our families and how much pain they caused us. he said he coped with it all by touring, and i said i wished i could go on tour and he said i should join him. i said i had to do some things around the house first, finish up a project and he said keep in touch and join him when i can. the next thing i know i'm driving my car at a high rate of speed, but blinded by orange light with white lights whizzing by each side of me as if i were driving into traffic. i keep trying to slam on the brakes but there's no pedals on the floor. all i can do is go straight and hope for the best. when i regain my vision i'm at a university campus that's a hybrid between u.b. and a shopping mall. i can hear dylan playing at the campus stadium but have no sense of direction and can't find the place. everytime i ask somebody for directions they say follow the sound of the music. and i'm not walking, i'm running. in every direction. finally, i'm back in my car at night and pull into a motel 6 [buick 6?]. i go into one of the rooms and it's crowded with friendly strangers who all seem to know me. then dylan comes out of the bathroom and covers himself with a blanket as if playing hide and seek, laughing like crazy. we sit down together in the middle of the room, everyone circling around us, and are about to sing a duet of Tomorrow's Such A Long Time, and I wake up. i went to bed at 10 p.m. and woke up at 7:30 a.m. it's been this way almost every night for at least a month...8-10 hours of miraculous sleep with lucid dreaming. i've never felt my head so clear. also, my movement in all the dreams, disturbing and not, is generally counterclockwise and i've been having lots of discussions with the dead...like my father and a dear, dear friend kevin henning who died of cancer in 2002 who i sang-recorded an album of my poetry with, which is now, unfortunately, long gone...

E-Mails/Jared Schickling #3

2011-05-09T15:15:00.006-04:00

Jared Schickling to me:
Dec 14, 2009

When you have a moment, attached is the ms. I was hoping you'd blurb it. Only if you're moved to.

Me to Jared Schickling
Dec 14, 2009

Will do. When do you need the blurb by?

Jared Schickling to me
Dec 14, 2009

No rush. If you can get to it in a month, that'd work. And longer would probably work too. I think Geoffrey's got a number of things before he gets to mine.

I'd recommend printing it, unfortunately. There are variations in the font easy to make out on paper but tough on a screen. But either way....

Me to Jared Schickling
Dec 15, 2009

I'll print it out. Was going to do it that way anyway. To seriously read something I need to see it on the page literally. Computer screens are too small and incompatible with the eyes.

I decided to turn down a couple so-called writing offers from XXXXX and the XXXXX. The pay was ridiculously low and it was obviously geared for someone looking for exposure not money. I got exposure and neither of these outlets would be very dignified for me. But nonetheless, XXXXX, a '75 DeSales grad and friend of Ted Pelton, is looking over my writing samples, etc., and she edits XXXXX. That's a monthly and if she wanted to throw me $50 to $100 a month for five to 10 hours of copy writing a month, or something, that'd be sweet.

I'm also not going to make too much of a fuss at XXXX. Just take the new position and be quiet. They're not bright people--management/union--and I'll be finished with that outfit all together, one way or another, by the end of 2010. In the meantime, I'm loving the time off. The novel's truly blooming. Here's the title that's sticking: Objective 13: A Ziggy Fumar Manifesto. I'm not saying anything else about it other than it will be the piece I was born to write and will probably not need to write anymore when it's done...unless I feel there's yet a better way for it to be said...though I think I'll be reaching my limits with this one. I already feel myself somewhat slipping in the mental area...zero short term memory...increasing fugue states as if my waking life were a low-grade acid trip and my dreams, my REM sleep, an equally lucid adventure...could I be going insane? Dementia? Whether I am or not, Objective 13 will be the necessary achievement to hunt down my birth mother and say see? See what you gave up? To look at my mother now and say thank-you, see what your patience and kindness has wrought? And also, a great deal of I told you so. This is the one. It's all collapsing into simple arabesque patterns thanks to the simple method of the writing and its autobiographical nature. Enough said.

I'll begin work on the blurb today. I'm thinking of asking you to blurb So It Seams because I still don't really know that many people. I'm also going to ask Goro Takano and Bennett Lovett-Graff. I'll ask Geoffrey if he can think of someone else, the way he asked me for Goro. I also imagine he might put something from the reviews of Smoke on the back cover. I don't know. I hate this part of it. I enjoy the opportunity to blurb and closely read unpublished texts, but I don't like thinking about who to ask. Asking isn't bad, just thinking about it is...

If you're interested, I attached an excerpt from Objective 13. These are all real people. I haven't changed the names yet. Tomorrow I start a similar section about my mother.

The only thing I'll say is that I keep thinking of the way Italo Calvino approached his Invisible Cities and the way Robbe-Grillet examined objects in his dimension in Jealousy and The Labrynth. A later draft edited and commented on by Ziggy Fumar will contain a manifesto without agenda. Ziggy will be a recursion of the narrator and it will be up to the reader--Marco Polo's Kublah Kahn or Scheherezade's king--who will compose the final draft...or 13th objective, to close the hoop of the spirit's text. You'll see. It's going to work. It's going to be pleasure inducing...or I've wasted my life in the most amusing way.

Jared Schickling to me
Dec 16, 2009

ps and regarding the edits -

thanks for all your patience and no pressure. With those edits we have a final draft.

Me to Jared Schickling
Dec 16, 2009

OK. I read through this thing last night and the edits this morning. I'm simply going to type out my handwritten notes for whatever they're worth. I imagine my blurb will emerge from our discussion.

*****

1. Like Dura, Zero refuses to be organized into a singular matrix or web, locating Itself in various fonts and forms of writing.

2. Zero un-travels, un-locates and un-relocates Itself...be-ing on a blooming excursion.

3. Reading Zero requires constant translation and re-translation, which is to say cursion and re-cursion...

4. p. 12, 21: Zero lingering on [me] as an object that's a combination of phallus and window. I'm flattered and touched, and moved by the footnote at bottom of p. 21.

5. p. 62--"Let the old dwarf stutter"--"we leak"--much improved placement; works in a way worthy of your talent, which is huge and tender...reminiscent of Whitman.

6.Merging with the Socia's pineal gland...The whole [of Zero] is a transbifurcation of voice...a cacophonous unity of symbols--visual, aural, intellectual--collaborating in the emergence of something deeply spiritual--The awakened human mind making sense of the chaos...THE MIND IS AN ARABESQUE ONE MUST RELEASE TO PERCEIVE.

7. Zero's Blooming Excursion is, in part, a literature of negation...nihilism seams a fundamental force...like entropy...a natural law...death.

8. Whom is the "they" who "loved address/of new men year"...?

9. Begins with a negating enigma that takes off via the salvation of 10 deleted lines [a "complete set?"]...

10. OK. Right off the bat I'm mystified...struggling to figure out a way to read Zero from the start...p. 3 seems almost heiroglyphic...something seems to be going on re: sets within sets...then the name of our dearly departed, suicided friend...It's as if we're entering another realm...one of a negated, suicided ego named Zero--the intentional black hole, the necessary absence].

11. Zero is the text's strange attraction to a kind of suicide/nihilism.

12. This is quite literally an end-time apocalypse...a near death revelation.

13. p. 5: Could be a message to Pat, the p. 6 becomes a portal with a footnote...a threshold that feels like Beckett's Lost Ones.

14. p. 7: MERGER OF THE PINEAL GLANDS. A whole new room or world...I'm expecting a land of the dead...an enigmatic, esoteric narrative seems to be taking shape--Zero's psychomythology in the face of death?...That it's composed by joining two minds/souls together across the life/death divide via the part of the brain controlling waking and sleeping patterns and seasonal fluctuations of brainwaves, etc. & et al, which, according to the Surrealist Battaille reveal a blind spot in Western philosophy...the theosophist Madame Blavatsky spoke of an esoteric pineal gland and HP Lovecraft's "From Beyond" deals with a machine that stimulates the PG allowing subjects to perceive alternate realities...

15. Is Zero like Orpheus chasing Eurydice [suicided/suiciding/annihilated humankind] to the Underworld?

16. Sets within sets become texts within texts of different fonts joined together via familiar lines and groupings yet alien or other-worldly--inhuman or transhuman--in the way they're seamed together. If one is to be literate in the realm of merged pineal glands one must make sense of the seams...It's as much a painting to make sene of [the repeated Chagall] or puzzle to construct [the chemistry and mathematics] as a poem to read...It's a poem that's forcing the reader to write the final draft.

17. Aural punning like "ears quoi" adds to the almost meaningful, yet still annihilative chaos...

18. Humankind seems killed off by mathematics and chemistry.

19. The redacted parts can be viewed as stand-ins for Zero. Every time you see a redaction, fill it in with Zero and it makes a shifting sensibility...

20.The lined-through parts seem visible stages, or mid-scales of awareness pushed aside...each pineal gland seems to operate with its own font...

21. p. 24--"I dominate this space." "I"=Zero's delusion of transcendence...

22. Uses the space on the page as a painting of words, and as the pages accumulate so does the sense that a real, albeit esoteric, that is highly personal, narrative is taking place...this is quite literally a myth making a psychology of Itself in poetic and fictional terms...

23. Seeking a kind of salvation/salvaging through nihilism...

24. Every word bleeds into the next, defamiliarizing them as objects, allowing the reader to feel them as subjects instead--worlds blocked in by sheer data of a single pivotal year in the life of the re-dacted Zero...

25. pp. 35-6--Beautiful. The rhythms of the whole piece boil down into concise poetic form, and yet it's not Zero stitching the senses together...

26. Bizarro science, invisibility cloaking, mathematics, chemistry, strange symbols, numerology/Kabbala, lots of trivial news and obscure data [like patent backgrounds]...all adding up to a paranoiac approach to the cosmos that seems to subvert or counter Its own overt nihilism...Zero also seems a bit sentimental, as if he were re-couping what Pat Lowther rejected with his suicide and what humankind seems to be rejecting with its own...a psychopathically rational materialism hinging on superstition...

27. Shares a similar joy of ironically sending up technical jargon, much the way I do marketing in So It Seams...language can be hilariously mocked...have fun goddamnit!

28. p. 49--Excellent definition and placement of Hinge.

29. p. 50--Now it get's really political with the Lt's body coming home and a reporter capitalizing on it with a feature story for which he wins a Pulitzer--told as footnote--Zero's trying to stay out of the reader's face--sure, go ahead, just read the "poems" my dear...

30. p. 51--Interesting use of images like thought clouds...the hearts and Chagall very moving personally...this is, in a way. a love poem to the people and animals and flora and things you love, yet it's paradoxically nihilistic...or is it? Beginning to salvage something spiritual from the suicided/suiciding wreckage called "humankind."

31. And then the sheer bifurcated music seaming language at top of page 52...you can literally see and breathe the weaving coaxis esemplasizing...

32. The repetition of the Chagall image of the green man a kind of mantra, repeated over and over--Zero projecting himself out of the poem and into the painting...Possibility and the Village, p. 52--entering a climax the way one might enter an event horizon.

33. OU and Socia--partner, companion--salvaging what Pat suicided on p. 61

34. p. 63--Therefore...an essay on the objectification of ecocriticism?

35. Focus on the non-human...recuperating the "primordial experience" by conceptualizing it in non-linguistic symbols...regard for and valuation of dream symbols--The Symbology of Silence--"The verbal record of an interactive encounter in the world...where Nature retains its autonomy."

36. This is an ecopoetic manifesto that comes with an instruction manual for how to read it.

37. pp. 65-6--Derrida--literature of negation, Zero, nihilism to differance & arabesque via language as an alchemical membrane...or, perhaps, falling into the grotesque of Baudrillard's "hallucinatory hyperreality."

38. For me, the essay seems to suggest you quit poetry for criticism, as if the ladder was more adequate to the task at hand. It seems a further descent, formally speaking into nihilism without having salvaged what it originally hoped for...Orpheus fails to recoup Eurydice...this would be a tragedy but Zero has no hubris [at least not as of this reading]...By including an essay at the end you seem to negate your original intent of poetic apocalypse...sort of the way Joshua Cohen falls short by not sending Jonathan through the Valley of Nails...it seems a limit you didn't explore...it's the textual parallel of Pat's suicide, of humankind's surrender to consumption/commodification...Is that what you actually want? It seems to me you were getting somewhere then stopped.

*****

Nonetheless, this is a brilliant book and my mind could change about the essay over time. It throws me for a loop. Don't get me a wrong, it's a very informative, excellent piece for what it is...i just wonder if it will be as well received placed there as it might elsewhere, and if it doesn't somehow diminish the experience...then again, it helps the reader read the first part...perhaps if you finished the first part and kept the essay?

I really don't know what I'm talking about. You're today's cowboy genius, not me. Great work.

Jared Schickling to me
Dec 16, 2009

Thanks for the insightful read. I'm uncomfortable with "nihilism" -- though, I won't disagree with your read -- I didn't notice a direct noticing of the time line, the chronicle (less narrative), 1996-2006, and the "events" marked at stages ("ten to cover," beginning with an enlistment in first section, 2003 invasion in second half of second section, and a return in the third -- all told from these shores, or from a bird's eye view either over these shores or of a self-aware surreality that derives from its roots in these shores -- re-read the poem "3rd person 2003" in light of the war -- after finding what's at stake, or not, ask, what survives? "No return address." In the sense that the "he" possibly doesn't, the he of the third section must necessarily be some ghost. That's one possible read). There are two characters, confused and complicated and clarified and over again along the way, he and she -- the book doesn't so much tell the story as speak about the story, in order to find the story, by being the things contained inside and outside the story, the things that won't let what "he" (and she) wants just be. I'm not even sure what he "wants" is present in any finally discernible way -- more of a settling -- and, then thinking of "he" as an aspect of "the poem" which is talking about itself -- for domesticity and "love" and that baby which is or is not born -- as if, such things are grounding, last ditch efforts at finding something worth it, perhaps good, uncontaminatable by virtue of its undergirding makeup or facts, whose manifestation doesn't really believe this either. What persists, maybe, is the force of this, the energy, the vectors of a human life -- but which nonetheless leave the actual lives behind (closer to birth), or ahead (closer to death), forlorn lying etc. This in a way necessitates the essay -- which I hope forces a re-read based on new information in terms of what's been constructed. The human dimension of the poetry is also a nonhuman dimension, being other to itself. It's mythical aspects and allusions -- I think it boils down to Apollo stealing Iris's caduceus and passing it on to Hermes for his gift of eloquence and skill at the lute -- Hermes is rewarded for his lying and thieving. And Hermes is messenger between human and gods, god of poetry, the role granted by Apollo, who stole it from Iris (first part of second section, also notice the direct engagement with third-wave feminism --- allusions and engagements saturate this thing -- I don't think it's necessary to pick up on all these, but where they are grasped, it adds layers of reading, particularly in the way quotes are contextualized and re-worked and mangled). Iris carried a ewer dipped in the river Styx which she used to put to sleep those who perjure themselves. I love the etymology of "iris"....

Me to Jared Schickling
Dec 16, 2009

That's all very hard to digest. I don't read that stuff in your poem. Well, sort of. And the essay at the end can make sense and may grow on me [though as I said before it's an excellent stand-alone piece]. However, due to the poetry/poem itself, and what the reader's going to read on any given page, I think you have to accept a certain misprision, a creative misreading/misinterpretation/misrepresentation of the text on my part [which composes my palate with my prior knowledge of you the way a poet might misread Yeats to achieve a Yeatsian level of poetry for herself--I can't help trying to read Jared Schickling as well as Zero's Blooming Excursion, to read Dylan's lyrics the way I might hear Bob sing them], for the reader to find a way into the text for herself.

This stuff you mention may all be very important to you, but the reader might pick up on "a" repetition or allusion, just not "the" repetition or allusion. Perhaps they will pick their own, things you weren't aware of that your subconscious nonetheless projected there, waiting for someone--you, perhaps--to read/see/bear witness to...

When you name Pat Lowther in the beginning, the average reader will be non-plussed, just a name. When I read it I instantly click to suicide, a suicide caused by humankind's suiciding that has shaken us in a variety of ways. So I look for a recuperation because that's what it--the whole poem--seems to be...almost.

Theoretically, I think the intentional fallacy is itself a fallacy on my end [best not ignore what I know about you and just focus on the text alone...otherwise I'd probably be lost]. My cultivating an ignorance of your intentions is easily "annihilated" due to the power of your language in light of our relationship. I'm trapped into reading certain things certain ways.

And by nihilism, I don't necessarily mean it in a negative sense, but simply in the existential sense of God being dead--the old ways of making sense no longer work--meaning we're free to make sense of the chaos as we will, and that your brand of nihilism is ecopoetic-ethical in that it refuses to cultivate an ignorance of that chaos in favor of some delusional form of happiness...focusing on a re-distributed material environment in search of some sort of literary or linguistic consensus.

Keep responding...perhaps explain a little how the poet named Zero is not Orpheus but Hermes, told as if to a bright-eyed child...seriously. What are you doing, Daddy?

Finally, that we're even writing about something one of us has written on this level seems to signify, at least to me, that the text has achieved its aim of provocative, intellectual stimulation. In other words, I can't really ask for more from a book [other than you follow my advice, trudging through the Valley of Nails, completing the first part]...or is it a sense of incompletion you're after...?

This is a very good book.

Jared Schickling to me
Dec 16, 2009

"misprision" -- right. I was just curious that the timeline wasn't mentioned in your notes. perhaps it was and i missed it....

i'll have to think more about Zero Orpheus Hermes -- hmmmmmm ---

i really do appreciate your honest and spot-on read -

I'm curious though, and I know you already said, but I guess I need maybe other words to put alongside what you already said -- in what way doesn't the essay fit in? The poem was "abandoned" for the essay, suggesting that the essay isn't part of the same work, but different and antithetical and therefore doesn't fit? If so, how so, all over again?

From me to Jared Schickling
Dec 16, 2009

Yes, I was aware of the timeline but focusing on different aspects. The fact I read it as a narrative implies a timeline...narrative necessitates time and vice versa...I was really reading it in sync with A Heaven of Others...it just seemed to fall in that way for some reason...all the contemporary fiction I've been reading deals with loss in various ways...but your "heaven" seems the recuperation of a chaotically inhuman natural world...a nihilism that isn't actually a loss a but spiritual-cognitive gain...there's a hero's journey in Zero's Blooming Excursion [love love love the title by the way, love saying it], but not quite. I see Zero--the narrator/poem--as plumbing another realm within or without this one [again that sets within sets thing I sensed], chasing after that which has died or gone elsewhere like a missing cat...slipped away between the seams and cracks of one's consciousness...our tears being the splash of its wet entrance into the beyond, dampened by our impotent memory...

In my view it's not so much that the essay doesn't fit, in fact it's probably necessary to extend the method and metaphor into the book's architecture, so we have a variety of fonts and styles, footnotes, poems, and yes, an essay [ever think of adding a piece of short fiction? a fable, perhaps?]. It's just that the "poem" proper doesn't seem to go far enough for me. Of course Pat and the dead can't be recuperated into this realm the way we would like them to be...we miss them...but the actual emotion of missing hasn't been fully explored in the poem, though Zero does go all out to give it shape by layers upon layers of testimony as to what it isn't or what it seems to be, almost...I'm looking for the "poem" to come to an utterly mystifying point of simplicity beyond which no human being can imagine that points to, in Jeffers' words, the "transhuman sublime," the inhuman point beyond that makes humanness necessary. Does that make sense?

Jesus Christ, if I were a gormande, and you a chef, you'd cut my throat with your favorite fillet knife about now, and if you didn't cut my voice box, I'd criticize your stroke and dare you to try again...

And please, I'm going to write something about all this, probably more than once, so take the time and think about, and then explain to me in simple English, how Zero is Hermes not Orpheus...then I may retort, or not, on how you're wrong that he's Orpheus, or how I'm right that he's Orpheus...or some exasperating words of such nature...

LOL. Wish you were here. We'd smoke a fatty and celebrate your most excellent work. Bravo, my friend.

Jared Schickling to me
Dec 17, 2009

To be honest, Orpheus never crossed my mind. But I think you're right -- insofar as Hermes is a further abstraction of the idea of Orpheus. And vice-versa. I'm not sure Hermes and Orpheus are that separate. Though, of course, they are. Anyway here are some notes on how I'm navigating your question...

MORTAL

Orpheus founds Apollo's cult, the oracular god who in one of his roles brings plague and misfortune. Hymns sung to Apollo are "paeans," while a "peon" was a Spanish someone who travels by foot instead of horse, and describes a laborer with little control over his and her work conditions. "Pawn's" etymology.

Orpheus is one of Apollo's sons. Strabo, a veritable ecological anthropologist in his geographies, early historian, emphasizes Orpheus's mortality and explains he used his skills for money, gathered followers and power and dies as a result of it:

Here lived Orpheus, the Ciconian, it is said -- a wizard who at first collected money from his music, together with his soothsaying and his celebration of the orgies connected with the mystic initiatory rites, but soon afterwards thought himself worthy of still greater things and procured for himself a throng of followers and power. Some, of course, received him willingly, but others, since they suspected a plot and violence, combined against him and killed him.

In his version, Apollo was courting the laughing muse Thalia when he met Orpheus, grew fond, gave him a lyre and taught him to play it (an instrument learned from Hermes, see below). In Strabo's version, Apollo silently (or audibly, depending how you look at it) brings misfortune upon Orpheus, who also worships chthonic Demeter. Strabo uses a word to describe Orpheus meaning "charlatan."

Put Strabo's early treatment of the myth next to the advent of democratic values in ancient Greece (see below), that the popularity of the lyric evolves into the popularity of the tragedy...

In versions earlier than Virgil, (such as Strabo's, though the Eurydice tale is not there) Orpheus is presented only with an apparition of Eurydice. He is punished for being a coward, for resisting the true death that would actually return him to his wife -- which is to say, his muse, and a false one we should remember, who is invoked as such only upon her disappearance, upon Orpheus's own loss, the one to whom his sad, most famous music is played. He is punished twice for his cowardice. When he re-enters the living world the apparition vanishes and the trick exposed, and he learns "what" was dead remains so. In some versions he is then the first to name Apollo (thus he "founds Apollo's cult") and one morning when going to the mountaintop to worship, he neglects his ablutions to his previous patron Dionysus, and the Maenads tear him apart, his second punishment.

Who or what ruins lyrical Orpheus, conspires against him? Why does he himself, eventually, by the time of Virgil, ruin the chance of his dead wife's / born muse's actually returning to flesh and earth? How does tragedy appropriate the lyric?

Note the homophonic lyre / liar...

IMMORTAL

Apollo is also the god of healing -- of music and the lyre, of battle and victory -- Roman soldiers sung paeans on the march. Because of Orpheus, Rome could know Apollo.

Aeschylus identifies Maia with Gaia, Maia being Hermes's mother ("Orpheus worships chthonic Demeter"), Zeus his father. Hermes: guide to the underworld, messenger of the gods (bridge between gods and men), master of the lyre. "Hermeneutics": art of interpreting hidden meanings. Hermes was born before Dionysus. Inventor of fire, he parallels Prometheus; in Aeschylus, Hermes visits Prometheus on the mountainside with a message, and matter-of-factly, smugly, urges him to repent. He is a trickster. God of boundaries. Note he is a "guide" to those already dead.

God of thieves, the night he was born he slipped away and stole his elder brother Apollo's immortal herd of cattle. He chose two ("Hermes Logios" becomes Plato's god of persuasion), killed them, and divided them into 12 parts -- 11 corresponding to the number of Olympian gods, the remainder set aside for himself. This establishes a new sacrificial ritual among men -- which required transgression, breaking of taboo, cosmic theft, in order to do so. He hid the rest of the herd in a cave and covered his tracks.

Apollo somehow knew what had happened -- he visits Maia, who defends her son Hermes, but Zeus intervenes and sides with Apollo (dad's a son of a bitch). Hermes, suspecting he'd be found out, had killed a tortoise and strung its shell prior to Apollo's arrival. In the midst of arguing, Hermes strums this original lyre, a strung hollow shell, and seduces Apollo -- Hermes keeps the cattle in exchange for the lyre. Hermes is granted a servile, peon (Hermes's winged *feet*) position on Olympus. Later Apollo gives Hermes the caduceus in exchange for a flute.

Note some of Hermes offspring, all chimeric and related to fertility: Pan, Hermaphroditus, Eros, Priapus, Fortuna. And the prince of thieves, Lone Wolf Autolycus. Note that by breaking taboo, in which lying and eloquence and seduction are involved, a new covenant between the gods and men is established. Note the "immortal herd" receives a new shepherd. Note his promotion to a regime post and its nature. Note the new peon, an addition to the Olympian regime, across the invoking lips of men, brings a new "paean."

****

Note the homophones "lyre" and "liar." And note how the "lyre" reached Orpheus's hands. Apollo, oracular bringer of plague and healing -- sometimes at the same time as the case may be -- is the stitch joining them -- who is himself the thief of all that was Iris -- the locus of the myth and its knowledge shifts thus from the eye to the ear -- Iris brings "sleep" from the river Styx, closed eyelids, to those who perjure themselves. Put this development next to the flourishing of literary arts, always to be performed, in ancient Greece. Note the decay of ancient Greece, the advent of tragedy, the spurning of epic and the preservation of lyric, the invention of oratory and rhetoric, and Rome's embrace of all things Greek.

It's not possible to flesh out all the details. Part of the problem and value of myth seems to lie in that it adapts. In how it adapts. In the case of the Greeks, ex-change between Orpheus, Hermes, and Apollo seemingly represents in part an ongoing navigation of representing the nature of music and poetry, two things the west took time to divorce, and which were part and parcel to the advent of history as a discipline -- myth and the births and doings of the gods were once our literal "history." "His story." The mind was a living being whose attributes were to be understood in the same terms as bodily doings -- hence the anthropomorphizing of the perceivable immortal. The myths correspond to your comments about truth not feeling good, nor intending to. In ZERO's, the poem would be something like the Hermes of an Orpheus, wise and unwise to Apollo, the true seducer yet unconscious in that role.

Me to Jared Schickling
Dec 17, 2009

Duly “noted.”

Jared Schickling to me
Dec 17, 2009

Don't be turned off by all the "note." Was talking to myself more or less

Me to Jared Schickling
Dec 17, 2009

I know. Note that it was fucking annoying and how I felt like tweaking you. Note when I'll have a much more detailed response [in a day or two]. Note what you said was instructive, and useful. Note that what I write will be something of a rough preliminary first draft of a preview. Note how it will eventually be something on NHR, at least. Note how I imagine out of this response, the drafts of several blurbs will emerge. Note why I'll then brush them up and give you a multiple choice, as I did Goro. Please note that my private review will likely rake you over the coals a bit on a specific point, which I hope you'll note I'm going to belabor. Note my public review will be that the reader should brace herself for an odyssey beyond Eliot's Wasteland upon a magic carpet woven of symbols we can only seem to note due to their hermeneutical nature...Please note that one will be absolutely as sincere as the other. Note how you deserve nothing less...LOL!!! ;)

All writers are liars, etc. & et al...

E-Mails/Jared Schickling #2

2011-05-07T09:48:00.005-04:00

Jared Schickling to me
12/6/09

Hey Chuck,

Sorry I've been so out of it lately. It's that time of year and since i've been writing my brains out, learning a little what beckett means the siege in the room, all the expected things piling up, some more facts to take care of, so that when i'm not writing my work i've been switching to autopilot and thus unfit for cluttering your inbox. plus XXXXXX coming wednesday for the first time is the expected things to complete two weeks in advance. one unfortunate, i'm completely divorced from XXXXX and XXX -- not technically, but literally, and i'm happy that everyone's seemingly happy with the arrangement. if i could stay on as sporadic partaker, that'd work. the other night i gave a reading, our tri-annual reading. crowd of about 200. without blowing my own horn -- i've seen a recording, i don't know what they're talking about -- it seems to have been a success. so i'm calm today. our third snow.

but i wanted to send you this keats i'm reading. seems a little closer to home, sort of end-stage romanticism proper, keats an expressed atheist, as i read it, which seems only in the way blake was an atheist, not atheism, verb not noun (but a modifier)

To G. and G. Keats, 1819

"I have been reading lately two very different books Robertson's America and Voltaire's Siecle De Louis xiv It is like walking arm and arm between Pizarro and the great-little Monarch. In How lamentable a case do we see the great body of the people in both instances: in the first, where Man might seem to inherit quiet of Mind from unsophisticated senses; from uncontamination of civilisation; and especially from their being as it were estranged from the mutual helps of Society and its mutual injuries--and thereby more immediately under the Protection of Providence--even there they had mortal pains to bear as bad; or even worse than Bailiffs, Debts and Poverties of civilised Life--The whole appears to resolve into this--that Man is originally 'a poor forked creature' subject to the same mischances as the beasts of the forest, destined to hardships and disquietude of some kind or other. If he improves by degrees his bodily accommodations and comforts--at each stage, at each accent there are waiting for him a fresh set of annoyances--he is mortal and there is still a heaven with its Stars above his head. The most interesting question that can come before us is, How far by the persevering endeavours of a seldom appearing Socrates Mankind may be made happy--I can imagine such happiness carried to an extreme--but what must it end in?--Death--and who could in such a case bear with death--the whole troubles of life which are now frittered away in a series of years, would then be accumulated for the last days of a being who instead of hailing its approach, would leave this world as Eve left Paradise--But in truth I do not at all believe in this sort of perfectibility--the nature of the world will not admit of it--the inhabitants of the world will correspond to itself--Let the fish philosophise the ice away from the Rivers in winter time and they shall be at continual play in the tepid delight of summer. Look at the Poles and at the sands of Africa, Whirlpools and volcanoes--Let men exterminate them and I will say that they may arrive at earthly Happiness--The point at which Man may arrive is as far as the parallel state in inanimate nature and no further--"

Jared Schickling to me
12/7/09

MIT Uses Social Networking to Win [DARPA-sponsored] High-Tech Scavenger Hunt

Chuck Richardson to Jared
12/8/09

It's always stunning to me how blatantly stupid smart people can be, especially if they're getting paid. Not one of these MIT scientists or associates even considered where the money was coming from and how the research would be used by the entity funding it. The level of stupidity is nauseating. And these are "smart" people. Yesterday I read the literacy rate in Afghanistan is under 10 percent. If that's true, what's really possible there? It's all a fucking sham and the "educated" function as Kool-Aid engineers, nothing else. The comments at the end are really disturbing, at least the two that were there when I read this.

Chuck Richardson to Jared
12/8/09

Nietzsche’s statement that “God is dead” seems the very essence of nihilism, or the belief in no-thing-ness, only the mental essence of something referred to as “existence.” The void, however, is not meaningless, the black hole of death does not usurp the spirit, it does not snuff out awareness…though it indeed does try to do these things, it actually creates our shared “event horizon.” The void is Wile E. Coyote, the sometimes comical sword of Damocles subverting our very situation at every moment…until “we” as someone inevitably get up and walk away, full from our meal…We’re not dead yet…Shit doesn’t always happen, but it will. The limit my imagination may arrive at seems recursive to the imagined limits of the things it imagines, and can go no further…Perfection is irrelevant as a conscious aim because it’s beyond imagination, nothing anyone can imagine is perfect, which is to say universal and standard and unending…Who the fuck wants that anyway?...The words of any language will correspond with the words of that language only…and if everyone’s language is like a fingerprint—experienced as touch, formed from the inside-out—no word I use will correspond with any word you use absolutely…it’s a leap of faith on our part that we both see the same black letters on white background…and we must at least agree there’s a consistency of pattern allowing for the agreement of terms…but what if....every time we enter into the illusion we share something in common we become neo-Adams and new-Eve’s re-entering the imaginary Eden of our faith-based mutual understanding, the closest thing we can agree on in terms of “happiness?” Until death do us part heightens the illusion and heightens the happiness…for “us”…and so fucking what, actually? But, then again, why the fuck not? Is one alternative better than another? Says who? Says what? Isn’t there more than one alternative, one alternative or other person actually speaking themselves? For starters, I don’t think it necessarily takes a Socrates to have the kind of conversation that can create a thrilling enough illusion of shared meaning to call it happiness. Anyone with a gift of gab, sex appeal, money, good food, weed, anything you want…can be a Socrates. Socrates is Santa Claus, knowing who’s naughty and nice [and you are always nice], etc., and at some point we gotta kill him because he’s corrupting our chirren, and killing him like killing the Buddha is a gateway to enlightenment and presumably greater happiness, or higher dimension thereof…

The inner chaos of anyone worthy of happiness gives birth to dancing stars…Who will find the limits of their imagination? Those who are grief-stricken and truly happy for it? Who’s worthy of happiness? Consider this from William Blake’s notes written on the pages of the Four Zoas:

Christ’s Crucifix shall be made an excuse for Executing Criminals.

Till thou dost injure the distrest

Thou shalt never have peace within thy breast.

The Christian Religion teaches that No Man is Indifferent to you, but that every one is Either your friend or your enemy; he must necessarily be the one or the other, And that he will be equally profitable both ways if you treat him as he deserves.

Unorganiz’d Innocence: An Impossibility.

Innocence dwells with Wisdom, but never with [uncultivated, Chuck presumes] Ignorance.

I would suggest that, echoing Blake, those who innocently cultivate the proper Ignorance, treating themselves and others as they actually deserve, heaping further injury upon the sources of pain, the undeserving speakers of happy talk who strive after happiness, who will always have a use for the term “happy” in their lexicon, are truly happy because they need not insist on their being happy anymore than they would insist on being unhappy. Truly happy people need not speak of happiness, much less bother pursuing it. A country that idealizes the “pursuit of happiness” is informed by ideologies of profound sadness, where a “negro”* can be counted 3/5 human…Those who pursue happiness are pathetic; therefore, the American is a pathetic ideal.

Bottom line: If you’re happy you deserve it clap your hands…

*“Negro” has an evolving etymology…in the sixties feminist said woman was the new nigger… “negro” today might mean all poor people, everyone middle class and under, all organic as opposed to corporate “human beings.” The ideal human is inhuman, or incorporate…a “good corporate citizen.”

Jared Schickling to me
12/8/09

I think you misread Keats's use of "happy" -- and that, replace Socrates with Beckett -- but that's ok. And I think too what you say about death must only apply to the living. "Whereof...thereof one must be silent." Everything said about or to death has lived on this side of it. If it's a void, it is so as its (our) concept, but seems in point of fact more an all-extensive barrier as any life would be. One can't adequately mean death while living.

I've been thinking through the movement through romanticism through modernism through postmodernism. And I don't see much difference at heart -- the difference is in the treatment of terms -- which accounts then for the differing poem. Romantic imagination = perception squaring off with cognition, the use of one's medium and the perceived world to speak/understand a self within that world. Its limit to know one's limit. The modern and postmodern imagination inhabits the same thing, asks the same question -- perception squaring off with cognition -- but here the cognitive side of the argument turns more purely constructed, social, *cultural,* economic, political etc. Increasingly in time, the cognitive takes center-stage, and correspondingly, the "without" replaces the "within," as the question is necessarily historicized/feminized/economized etc. "this" becoming "that" -- very different from "that" becoming "this." The purely former seems to me as error-prone as the purely latter romantic, ideal, individual transcendental (note the irony -- "that" becoming "this"). I mean, I'm a colony? As a desirable aesthetic, or rather, life, philosophy? Whom would that serve? Recognitions never precluded resistances. Emily Dickinson, when asked for a photo from a friend, explained she never had one. The romantic attention, mostly lacking in mirrors, in its best forms was deeply other-oriented, a less bubbly, more severe conception of the I, because it was at liberty to speak of growth and life, not compelled to shrinkage and death. Happiness, here, is as inevitable as you say it is.

Chuck Richardson to Jared
12/9/09

Holy shit. You're going to have a lot to say in about 3 to 6 months. That e-mail sounded like one of those blizzard balls, you pickem up and shake them and the snow flies all over inside until it settles. You're really riled up and that's sweet. I didn't misread Keats' use of happy, either. And I didn't replace Socrates with Beckett. Let the snow settle. You're grading too many undergrad moron papers with fun distracting ideas swirling in your head. I'm presuming much, perhaps...but any more than you?

Jared Schickling to me
12/10/09

I'd like to say I've found a lot to say the past few weeks!!!! If not, fuckin A, I'll just burn the manuscript. If nothing else I simply can't help defending this stuff I'm reading and taking to. I think I might live in the 19th century for a while. Mind you, various ideas are of course by now problematic, seen for what they turn out to be, fruit from the tree -- but reading it clues me in to what that means, how also the common reading may or may not be wrong or ignoring certain things, and besides, shit, this stuff is rich, more clearly rich and of depths lacking in most contemporary writing. Adds folds in yr brain. I enjoy the way the ideas happen in the work. Anyway. It'd be like if I started poking and prodding your Beckett -- the other Chuck stands up.

Chuck Richardson to Jared
12/10/09

you always have interesting things to say. and lately i sense big things are going on in your mind...the grappling with it is only just beginning. And I agree with you one-hundred percent about the 19th century. When I think what the "average" human mind in America would have contained back then and imagine what it contains now, I see anything but progress [just compare the literacy and penmanship of soldiers' letters home]. Technology has had an inversive effect to its intents. We have less time, less freedom, less well-being. It's not saving but destroying the world. And since you are where you are, I'm hopeful at some point, when you're finally ready to go fucking nuts and get all John Brown and shit, you'll pick up Thoreau. And read all of it. Then start the journals. One of these days I'm going to Walden where they have the mss of his journals in a library and i'm going to study them. The experts I respect most claim this is the true treasure trove of Thoreau's genius. No one I've read truly stands up to the totality of his achievement. Einstein comes to mind, but he became really popular really fast. Thoreau's beyond that because he bears witness to the esoteric in material terms like no one else I've come across. Beckett, Melville, Whitman, Flannery O'Connor, Hawthorne, Kafka, Nabakov, Hesse, Marquez, Borges, Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Huxley...the list goes on of people who bear witness to the esoteric in material terms very well. But Thoreau gets the most across, in my opinion. All these folks are better writers than Thoreau, but none have a more transcendent original language that seems other than or beyond human in its function. In other words, one doesn't read Thoreau to find out how a human being should behave so much as how humans actually behave within their cosmic situation. Thoreau isn't self-help or a guide book of any sort. It's an odyssey through life into the recognition that you and I are not fundamentally human, or even fundamentally earthlings, as the stuff we are made of is stardust...The truth is not meant to make human beings feel good. In fact, truth has no intention at all...it insists on nothing, including non-insistence. Of course, Thoreau didn't know that stuff about stardust as a scientific fact, but intuited it as an essential and necessary human reality in light of the big picture as he witnessed it, according to the language he let pass through him...

I'm rambling, but I'm psyched that you're going where you're going.

What do you mean by "It'd be like if I started poking and prodding your Beckett -- the other Chuck stands up."? Sometimes you really stump me.

E-Mails/Jared Schickling #1

2011-05-05T08:09:00.004-04:00

jared schickling to me
11/2/09

Eliot Weinberger—Statement for “poetry is news” conference—February 2003

Chuck Richardson to jared
11/2/09

I agree with 90 percent of that. Particularly intriguing is the idea that the next youth movement will be characterized by iconoclastic asceticism. I hope so. It seems to me the best form of resistance is to do more than say "no," but actually be "no." [Beano. I made a joke!] It's a form of civil disobedience. But rather than protesting in the streets, breaking the law, pies in face, etc., it would be far more effective if people simply came to the realization that they would prefer not to do these things, would prefer not to be good Americans, devout Christians, disciplined soldiers, worshipped everyday heroes, et al. Every opportunity to do something traditional that Americans and peoples in empires throughout history have always done--get married, pay taxes, raise a family, do good works, obey, disobey, see themselves as citizens and subjects and members of something, et al--one might simply say "I would prefer not to." The system would rapidly collapse if enough of the right people--those who feel like it--said "no." And I'm not talking about Atlas shrugging as Ayn Rand would put it...More like apes simply tiring of all the rules and going off to pick fleas from each other in peace. This, of course, entails cultivating the proper form[s] of ignorance. We idealize the cultivation of knowledge and ignore the cultivation of ignorance. We never discuss what we choose to ignore, though every human being alive must choose to ignore most data if it's to function and get through the day. And of course, it takes a great deal of courage to cultivate enlightened ignorance, a great deal of fear to be ignorantly interested [if nothing matters, if "God" is dead, if we're randomly evolved beings, the pursuit of knowledge seems an effort to deny that and therefore the ultimate in delusional behavior]. Knowledge as the emergency of fear is the worst kind of ignorance because it's not cultivated. The emergency of a properly cultivated ignorance provides a sweet form of knowledge allowing the self to function smoothly amid all the meaninglessness. We're essentially meaning machines that ignore the nature of our ignorance and suffer greatly for it. And the greater the suffering the harder it is to ignore.

That was a good essay and it's got me thinking. I'm open to a bit of argument. I left a great deal unsaid. It could develop into a kind of manifesto in simple English. Thanks.

jared schickling to me
11/2/09

Knowledge as your using it here reminds me of capital. Which as we've heard, can be a strange thing, laying golden eggs. If the pursuit of knowledge becomes the pursuit of capital, then I can see how we'd transition absolutely into ignorance. But knowledge, as knowledge, seems not only possible but desirable. Its pursuit not always "delusional." (I'm not sure we're completely "randomly evolved" either -- certain developments look entirely reasonable -- though a reasonable process might hatch from random ones, so random ones might from reasonable ones, as reason requires, perhaps dictates, such uncontrollable excess --

But what you're suggesting is a kind of knowledge that's valuable in the first place --

"Knowledge as the emergency of fear is the worst kind of ignorance because it's not cultivated. The emergency of a properly cultivated ignorance provides a sweet form of knowledge allowing the self to function smoothly amid all the meaninglessness."

Unless, one has reason to fear, in which case the "sweet" of knowledge "allowing the self to function smoothly" is a more potent ignorance? Does the reason to fear disappear? Does fear impede or pave ones way -- likewise any other emotion?

What are the evolutionary currencies of fear, love, ignorance, knowledge, meaning, imagination? IS everything meaningless, or is meaning an inherent part of the process wherever meaning occurs? What kind of animal, parasite, farmer is meaning (remembering memes)? Does it have a face?

Chuck Richardson to jared
11/3/09

hey. i'm pasting the stuff below into a word file with the intent of addressing everything with as much brevity as possible. it will take as long as it takes, because as usual your questions are somewhat tangential to where I'm going but definitely in the same direction. i'll send it to you when i'm finished and you can expand on it if you wish. it's a conversation that will end when it ends and when it's over we have the option of publishing it, saving it, or forgetting about it. it'll be up to us. i feel a need to try and flat out just say some things to put the fiction into a larger context. that's what i liked about the link you sent, which basically says extraordinary times require extraordinary measures, and writers are not excluded from this. it's our fundamental responsibility to try and boil it down into a language our brothers and sisters can digest willingly. and that's a huge fucking challenge. it's not an artistic challenge. it's an eco-political-economic one that's embedded itself in our psychology. in my opinion, however, one must first graduate from artistic challenges to have the necessary mental sophistication and proper level of physical skill to cope with and adapt to the complexities of the presently conceived eco-political-economic crises of perceptions...if that makes sense. i'm trying. i'll add this to the file mentioned above.

jared schickling to me
11/3/09

That sounds like a plan. I like the idea of being part of some critical-prose-become what it may statement on art and commitments and practice and whatever else you decide to talk about. I like it particularly in that I'll (as I'm reading what you're proposing) be given limited fragments and chunks and thoughts to consider, my comments more or less fuel for the larger thinking you'll be doing.

The piece I sent was linked to from a recent interview with Kent Johnson at the Argotist. It's worth a read, if for nothing else Johnson's impressive life. It's curious to me that those Nicaraguan poetry workshops haven't been studied very closely. Out of a bunch of "uneducated" worker groups reading and writing poetry -- activities beneath, in service to, larger material plights -- we have 4 or 5 translated anthologies rivaling any American poetry anthology, in my opinion (I've two on my shelf).

Synopses of Smoke and So It Seams for Potential Film-Makers

2011-05-03T10:59:00.005-04:00

A friend of mine with some film industry connections asked me the other day for brief synopses of my two novels and how I might see them translated to film, because she'd like to pitch them to her friends. At first, I was stymied. I hadn't thought of them as films at all while writing. But financial "desperation" rendered these results.

I'm sharing these "sales pitches" because I believe they're the best short descriptions for the novels I've come up with yet. I also highly recommend the films mentioned. It now occurs to me I may have also mentioned Akiro Kurosawa's Rashomon when talking about Smoke. Perhaps my friend will see this post and add it to the synopsis below.

*****

Dear ------:

A two sentence synopsis and a vision for the film[s]. Here goes [I know I fail spectacularly at brevity]:

Smoke: Compassion for paranoid authority, compassion for paranoid anarchy, compassion for the paranoia-driven mysterious incidents defining all. A post-9/11 trauma dramatizing the frayed tribalism of a country gone berserk with a certain terrifying humor [I laughed out loud in the movie theater when Christ--in Mel Gibson's ridiculous passion movie, is being nailed to the cross by bumbling idiotic Romans as the over-the-top ignorantly evil San Hedrin bear witness--cries out "Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do;" the Romans in the scene don't seem to know how to nail him to a cross nor Gibson know how to film such a movie, hilarious, unintentionally ironic, and you should have seen the dirty looks I got for laughing when others were crying]. The closest films to a possible Smoke adaptation I've seen might be Pi and A Serious Man. However, the cinematography of Pi is closer to what I imagine, and the unanswerable questions of A Serious Man might be closest theme-wise.

So It Seams: "It" seems the Atman. "Seams" derives from sutra-suture and tantra, "to weave." It depicts a between space not unlike the Bardo Thodol's bardo plane, how the diversity of things are joined together and mysteriously inter-relate. Abundant sex is a necessary element in the way the Kama Sutra is necessary to certain kinds of spiritual enlightenment. It skewers [pun intended] ideology, theology and isms in general. Like Smoke, it raises more questions than it answers. It depicts The Mystery of Consciousness with, I hope, a great deal of humor. It reveals the impotence of technology and machines. It shows the necessity of literature as opposed to film. It actualizes the fiction of everything. The end is not the end. The "So" preceding "It" means there's a reason, but as in Smoke, the cause to the effect is mysterious. By "Atman" I mean the self; one's truest nature; the indestructible life drop at our core which is that element of the universal soul in-forming all things. A cosmic intra-relatedness manifesting itself to us as inter-relatedness. As a film, it's difficult to find comparisons. Perhaps Wim Wenders' "Until the End of the World" on acid...a David Lynch re-make. It would take an odd genius to translate it to cinema.

Among my favorite film-makers, the ones whose visions seem closest to mine in these particular cases, are the Coen brothers and Darren Aronofsky...maybe David Lynch, too. Someone capable of pulling off comic terror in a medium that parodizes itself.

I hope that helps. It's not easy summing up fiction in terms of film when film was the farthest thing from my mind when writing them. It's only the financial pressure and a desire to survive that's pushing this forward. The film-makers would have to be brave and generous souls to undertake either project.

Anyway, I hope this helps...and thank-you from the bottom of my heart. Things will work out for us one way or the other. Keep the faith.

Cheers,
Chuck

E-Book from BlazeVox Now Available...For Free!

2011-05-01T15:07:00.001-04:00

A Ziggy Fumar Foreword to "Dreamlands: 3 Fictions"

2011-05-01T15:02:00.001-04:00

A Ziggy Fumar Foreword

As the astute reader undoubtedly knows by now, John Andrew Blake and myself, as well as the writer here presented, Chuck Richardson, have come to be known as “Psychedelic-Anarcho-Fictionists.” Although I would argue against such labeling, I must confess that PAF does indeed seem to describe Richardson’s work in general, and, if not, Dreamlands in particular.

Let me explain.

It would be a mistake if we read Dreamlands as a direct manifestation of Richardson’s unconscious, transcribed into a dream journal over a number of years of foggy waking moments. Richardson was awake while he wrote this book. What else should I say? Nothing, I suppose. But the art of the whole damned thing isn’t so much that it’s the dream itself re-presented, but the process of rendering it which seems somewhat symmetrical, which is to also say somewhat asymmetrical, with the way his unconscious mind might have originally went about unfolding or blooming the original experience. Dreamlands seems an effect resulting from behaving like its cause. Meanwhile, its totality, perhaps, seems to disagree with the original dream…functioning as a response to the stimulus antagonizing it. So one begins by jotting down the details as the sleep still crusts one’s eyelids, jotting them down then writing them over and over again until the original fungi or gist of their sensation re-emerges, the raised child of that parent, mushrooming as if it were rendered by something said in the process…somewhere down the line...back in the day, perhaps…and thar t’is, here we go…we hast seen the white whale.

Spike Jones Jr., according to my poker buddy Tom Pynchon, once said: “When you replace a C-sharp with a gunshot, it has to be a C-sharp gunshot or it sounds awful.”

Now, you might ask, and I hear you: How would I know if the C-sharp dream became a C-sharp text if I weren’t there with Chuck in his dream dreaming it along with him….?...or maybe I was…through the words becoming a text…It seems to me that through writing Dreamlands, Richardson hoped to discharge his full mind., meaning he had to find ways of undermining his innately egocentric creative process of telling the same old familiar stories about himself. And the most tried and true way to rid himself of these stale tales was the pursuit of an objective process that would only render the elements of dreams and not the details he made up or falsely re-membered, out of convenience, but a process that purposely absents them in a sometimes brutal, but always rigorous, fashion. This means his “ego” functioned as it should have, at the end, trying to put the pieces together in a way that somehow resembled a capacity to respond and feel external stimuli and what might be good and/or bad about them based on the apparent effects they seem to cause, in other words a sensibility, or the implied possibility thereof…

Consider the opening of “counterclockwise:”
The text is the unknown, or ambiguous quantity we’re seeking…The text when combined with its apparent intention (Y) equals “me.” That is, the “me” (usually the reader-writer) engaged with the text defines the text’s intention. Each “me” will likely uncover a different intent from the text when engaging it…From this formula we can also deduce that if one subtracts the text’s intention from the self, all that remains is the text…Therefore (of course), if one subtracts the text from the self what remains is pure intention. What we have here is a formula relating the text and its intention with the identity of the individual engaging with it…78

Richardson, luckily for us, seems to have been undaunted by the quixotic nature of such a task because he doesn’t take anything too seriously. To take something too seriously would imply, indeed require, too much ego…too much insistence. Richardson is fond of saying “insist on nothing, including non-insistence.” That which is taken too seriously is absented. What’s left is a fiction-centered creative process that under-stands reality as a fictional mode methodically deployed by awareness to transmigrate itself from sense to sensibility…from flesh to spirit…from slavery to freedom.

From “Mid-December 20—:”
If your attitude is good, and there’s reason to believe it is, I mean, you’re here aren’t you…if you’re attitude is good life has no limits, experience can have no bounds, we can get outside these suits of flesh and see our human existence as a midway transition between fields of infinite pain and pleasure. Your body, E, gives you the freedom and opportunity for spiritual evolution. Human life is necessarily intense. 76

One’s world is the way one goes about looking at one’s world, and the way one looks at one’s world depends upon one’s perceived situation, and one’s perceived situation relies on the stories one’s been telling one’s self up to that point. So, one’s world is one’s ego and to change one’s ego is to change one’s world. That’s how we humans can make a heap of sense out of nothing, and Dreamlands seems a way of re-membering it…how to make a heap of sense out of nothing.

From “Mid-December 20—:”
And many things are heading our way, rising from the seafloor, enlightened of their burden. The heavenly light is like a baby farting in a tub. Bubbles of joy rising and bursting as he does it again and again. The lightness is your joy. It has limited itself for your pleasure. It has densified for your feeling. And yet you feel it hiding from you with each passing evolution, each veil that covers it with a new form, and the farting continues but you’re lost in bubbles, milky ways of divine gas, and for a moment it sees itself, you seeing yourself in its translucent luster, infinite possibilities of its seminal trace are invading you, each a delight of discovery. As each bubble bursts a new one emerges, and you look and see yourself reflected upon each one, inside being something rarefied yet common. We can smell it. The bubbles burst, their voids nullified by cosmic plasma—the sea’s bombardment. The cycle of fulfillment goes round and round in the farting sea bubbles. I’m a churning bubble, the same as any other. 46

Richardson views writing [and reading] as a revolutionary act. And Dreamlands functions as a history of that revolution. For PAF to be PAF, it must seam various revolutions together. His rebellion—brace yourselves, gentle readers—takes the form of weaving a series of dreamscapes sewn together via uncommon, shifting [that is fluid] punctuation, syntax, grammar, etc. & et al, forming the flesh and air of the dreams’ focused emotions, vibrating fictional undertones with poetic riptides wringing out the connotative ambiguities between what Richardson actually dreamt and what Chuck really wrote [sic]. Dreamlands renders, if nothing else, the feeling of how meaningless the human world seems outside of its context situated within the inhuman world, which includes all forms of non-human mind making up the fabric of life on Earth. No me-centered rules of behavior-writing seems adequate to capture even the slightest gist of what Richardson’s pursuing in Dreamlands: the essence of mind behavior Itself. Yet he somehow manages to do just that, in my opinion, though I can’t say exactly how:
Remember…always remember and never forget the Tibetan pacification of the Mongols. That’s the plan to do it with. Everybody gets a monk’s education. Nobody gets by anymore without being able to exhibit some degree of literary and philosophical creativity. No more skaters. Time to get their priorities straight. They can get started by quitting their jobs and devoting their free time to meditation. When they’re awake they’re to engage in festivals and dances and make traditions of them to pass their time in harmony with God.
Mid-December, 75

Yet…

What I can say is it seems Richardson’s looking for a true perception and criticism of humankind’s ongoing worldwide slaughter of organisms and the ripping apart of the global viscera, the planet’s organic fascia or web of life. Richardson’s Dreamlands meets the destructive and demoralizing ways of the American-Political-Economic-System head-on by committing literary sacrilege against the APES’s prevailing dogma of corporate libertarianism, which seeks to re-create global, national, regional, local, spatial and personal boundaries as corporate borders [eg: incorporated boundaries…as cells in a body…working], where only incorporated persons, that is workers, are allowed to exist, function and/or travel-learn-communicate. The rest will be expunged like alien interlopers who might do us harm…or not. Too many lurking threats could certainly be defined as a “nightmare scenario.” Dreamlands sounds like that mouse in the wall when you’re trying to sleep:

I hope I have my usual room. You need some sleep before you start tonight. Dreamless sleep. If only you could pray. If there was only a personal god you could believe in. Don’t kid yourself. You can’t. But it would be nice to pray. Nice to hope. You’ll have to live with this the rest of your life. Praying only deludes you, dilutes your pain. Pushes it off on something, someone else. It’s yours. It belongs to you. And you may as well get used to it. You’ll be having this dream for as long as you live. You even saw it coming. You knew you’d let them down. You knew you weren’t man enough to take care of them. The way they required. Not you. No. It would have been an answer to their prayers. That’s not you. You’re a killer. Mid-December, 70

As a work of Psychedelic-Anarcho-Fiction, Dreamlands should, as should all of Richardson’s work, if we are a species worthy of it, become as fundamental to our daily existence as cave painting and sculpture and oral traditions were in the primitive societies of our dead ancestors. Richardson doesn’t type out best sellers hoping to generate material wealth. He seams beneath that.

Reader, you have on this screen before you an e-text created by someone who feels the internet is a doomed Tower of Babel about to be abandoned due to babble [eg: Yogi Berra’s “Nobody goes there; it’s always too crowded”], or a Library of Alexandria situation where all the files and URLs are about to be erased by DARPA. When the string holding the sword over Damocles finally snaps, this electronic mandala will dissolve. For now, Dreamlands seams part of our daily fabric.

In the meantime, you might want to print this out, just in case…

Walla Walla, Washington
2011

Quotes from "Dreamlands: 3 Fictions"

2011-05-01T14:43:00.008-04:00

Here are some quotes from my new e-book, Dreamlands: 3 Fictions, from BlazeVox:

From “Digressions On A Recurring Dream”

Such is the philosophical activism of the adolescent mind—ruled by hormones musk tricks it into perceiving everything in a warm, bruised haze, alienating it from the cross of its upbringing. 10

From “Mid-December 20—”

He’s pushing you now. He’s seeing how far you’ll go. It’s a game to him. He’s in shape for the movies. You’re not. But fuck him. He deserves an expose. You deserve the money and pull that brings. Peace, but fuck him. Telling this same old story’s like climbing up this mountain. I’m Sisyphus, A’s my boulder, my quarry. I’m pushing him up this hill and he’s just showing off. He did this to the corporate executives on Kilimanjaro when he played Tarzan. Befriended by Hemingway, he agreed to lead an excursion in search of the snow leopard. He exhausted them and they abandoned their search. The consumers were unworthy of their quarry. Pray be that situation isn’t applying here. Perhaps you’re being led astray and will be forced once again to provide fiction for your unsuspecting nonfiction readers. We are relativists, after all. Every last one of us. We are thousands of light specks flickering in chaos, moving dots longing for connection, a pointillist’s nightmare. 39

And many things are heading our way, rising from the seafloor, enlightened of their burden. The heavenly light is like a baby farting in a tub. Bubbles of joy rising and bursting as he does it again and again. The lightness is your joy. It has limited itself for your pleasure. It has densified for your feeling. And yet you feel it hiding from you with each passing evolution, each veil that covers it with a new form, and the farting continues but you’re lost in bubbles, milky ways of divine gas, and for a moment it sees itself, you seeing yourself in its translucent luster, infinite possibilities of its seminal trace are invading you, each a delight of discovery. As each bubble bursts a new one emerges, and you look and see yourself reflected upon each one, inside being something rarefied yet common. We can smell it. The bubbles burst, their voids nullified by cosmic plasma—the sea’s bombardment. The cycle of fulfillment goes round and round in the farting sea bubbles. I’m a churning bubble, the same as any other. 43

I hope I have my usual room. You need some sleep before you start tonight. Dreamless sleep. If only you could pray. If there was only a personal god you could believe in. Don’t kid yourself. You can’t. But it would be nice to pray. Nice to hope. You’ll have to live with this the rest of your life. Praying only deludes you, dilutes your pain. Pushes it off on something, someone else. It’s yours. It belongs to you. And you may as well get used to it. You’ll be having this dream for as long as you live. You even saw it coming. You knew you’d let them down. You knew you weren’t man enough to take care of them. The way they required. Not you. No. It would have been an answer to their prayers. That’s not you. You’re a killer. 67

Remember…always remember and never forget the Tibetan pacification of the Mongols. That’s the plan to do it with. Everybody gets a monk’s education. Nobody gets by anymore without being able to exhibit some degree of literary and philosophical creativity. No more skaters. Time to get their priorities straight. They can get started by quitting their jobs and devoting their free time to meditation. When they’re awake they’re to engage in festivals and dances and make traditions of them to pass their time in harmony with God. 72

All goodness has to do with spiritual productivity. Evil has to do with spiritual inefficiency. All obstacles to spiritual growth are evil, and therefore our primary concern is the world of inner experience. 72

Death is a doorway. It can be worse than fatal if you’re unprepared, or heading in the wrong direction. If your inertia’s sending you in the wrong direction, look out. We’re giving you an opportunity to get on track. If you’re attitude is good, and there’s reason to believe it is, I mean, you’re here aren’t you…if you’re attitude is good life has no limits, experience can have no bounds, we can get outside these suits of flesh and see our human existence as a midway transition between fields of infinite pain and pleasure. Your body, E, gives you the freedom and opportunity for spiritual evolution. Human life is necessarily intense. 73

From “counterclockwise”

…The text is the unknown, or ambiguous quantity we’re seeking…The text when combined with its apparent intention (Y) equals “me.” That is, the “me” (usually the reader-writer) engaged with the text defines the text’s intention. Each “me” will likely uncover a different intent from the text when engaging it…From this formula we can also deduce that if one subtracts the text’s intention from the self, all that remains is the text…Therefore (of course), if one subtracts the text from the self what remains is pure intention. What we have here is a formula relating the text and its intention with the identity of the individual engaging with it… 75

So finally, growing tired of growing
fatigued I became artificial, a drink
overwhelming the world
And disappeared 75-6

As parents and pets we battle, University trained yet vanquished nonetheless, and confused. I can’t find my back pages anymore after achieving too much as a mere word-being there…We descend, circling Main Street in the gloom of too many alleys, overhearing peddlers scheming hopefully, claiming they’ve just gussied up the square. They’re geared to gloriously impound it with a myriad of faithful rites, baptizing it a convenient commercial zone for hard-working consumers…Traffic will bulge and boom, they cackle…Thankfully, I’m as invisible to the peddlers as the ghost of something forever absent, hoarding their unknowable ignorance, the transparent deliria they will no longer deposit. Emerging from the radiance, I cede all but my self. Their senses feel quickly littered. And you feel violated. 77

Here you sense materiality is summer, vis-à-vis oblivion. 78
I personify kinetic stillness vibrating juices with thought. 78

Now, if I lease it, I’ll have more cash, but won’t own my own new car now. I want my own new cash and my own new car. Now I want to own my own new things including my own nice new car, but I also want to keep the cash I got now. I want to own my own nice new things now. But I also want the cash I got. 79

The way between
the same place
she said, among
the tongue, here
where survival or
extinction become

War, the same way
where always
there is
Tao there is

Tongue, then
loss 80

There’s a lake forming at the foot of the river, and I can smell you rising from it. 82

Five of them perch in lawn chairs in the garage, facing me. I can’t get my work done. Their lips stir, but I shall not do their bidding. Pop hoists his tin of ale at me and they all gape at him, tittering consent. My father’s there, but who are the rest of them? I suppose one of them is my mother, but the only thing I know for sure is that the bricks, and my house, yes; this is my driveway and my house, or my mother’s house, I live here, and the garage is filled with ghosts who pass judgment on me as they succeed in distracting me from the simple chore at hand… 89

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #30: THE FINALE

2010-12-13T19:31:00.005-05:00

…the subconscious seems a part of the psychic volatility escaping language’s efforts to sensibly convey useful and productive meaning. It seams a textured current of organic systems continuously bifurcating into subjective, which is to say egocentric, phenomena….Literature, like schizophrenia [see Deleuze & Guattari, henceforth D/G], frees itself from the normative grammars adhering to language’s power structures, which are also referred to here as the “law.” Thus D/G say a “desire-liberating reader, a schizoanalyst, whose task it is to convert the text into a desiring-machine, or better still, into a revolutionary machine,” seems necessary for oppression to be overcome and true autonomy, the liberation of desire, to be attained… D/G theorize that desire exists coincidentally in two forms: a “paranoiac transcendental law” signified by the oedipal system; and an “immanent schizo-law” shaping subconscious desire that ends up revealing the ineffable. In every situation the schizo-law is taking apart and subverting the paranoiac law, its method of writing deconstructing the systems of language, the universal control compositions…. Desire is essentially and primarily a social production…

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #29

2010-12-13T13:15:00.024-05:00

…all token acts of power are insurrections [of some kind] against a higher form of order, consciously perceived by the individual rebel, or not. Sexual standards, which is to say general production standards, manifest in some way that higher form of order which we can perceive, or imagine, evolving; that which is deemed “good” for reasons that go beyond any individual consciousness or interest…

All sex, which is to say any process by which a group of something reproduces its constituent parts, and, by extension, ends up reproducing itself in its own, somewhat expanded dimension, is evolutionary [evolution is unconscious, not mindless as earlier suggested by someone else]. From this aspect, the masculine political-economic elite exact an insurrection against the rights of psyches it considers feminine and/or alien in relation to itself, exotic people of other, that is lower, social classes, as well as humankind’s general interest, which involves having a healthy environment and a modicum of justice in "human affairs" rather than the submissive stance underlings are now expected to take…the political-economic elite smother the inalienable rights of outsiders and interlopers to maintain its own privilege, a status quo in which these self-selected chosen ones alone exercise power and full personal autonomy in the social and cultural spheres...as well as their own bedrooms. There’s nothing new in this. It’s as old as our species. Both Foucault and Freud believed sex to be a strategy of power and knowledge, that sex is a human “truth” which supports power and authority, not self-autonomy or integrity.

Furthermore, I wonder if it may not be possible to view sex as a projection of the Earthling’s survival instinct, in which all organisms “eat,” “drink,” “screw” or die. Sex seems like the Earthling’s will to power, Its pleasure principle, Its reaction to the disequilibria caused by entropy...

...“Love” seems something that happens when “sex” goes well. It perhaps functions as an apparatus of social slavery. “Straight” sex [by which I mean reproduction that is exclusionary to the extreme, as in you must incorporate your business to do business efficiently, you must get married for insurance and legal rights, etc.] seems the epitome of good citizenship. Bad love, deviants, criminals who diverge from the socially acceptable forms of reproduction, who might have sex for other reasons than procreation, who as artists might produce things that are not efficient or useful or profitable…must not be allowed to exist!

...so it’s not only “sex” as we habitually think of it, but also political, economic, spiritual, cultural renewal that must be repressed and oppressed at every turn. Because these types of desire are socially oppressed [it’s bad form to be seen as overly ambitious in any of these areas], each one of us [because none of us truly belongs to the “elite” in our own minds] must repress the desire for sex, power, money, spiritual enlightenment and cultural popularity in ourselves if we want to be “successful,” and truly join the elite as something more than just some public spectacle, which is to say celebrity.

This, of course, necessitates the need for private lives in which to pursue individual fetishes [alternative forms of production of whatever seem fetishes] as part of our personal development and growth, something that’s increasingly imperiled thanks to technology, perhaps. And by fetish I mean whatever makes a meaningless social process personally meaningful…whatever it is that might turn us on about what we must do…that which we’re doing all the time…

...manifesting the general procreative drive of the Living Planet, which each of us experiences as an insurrection against decent society while in the act of copulating, participating in the general spectacle, or orgasm, for ourselves…the general horniness producing types of horninesses we can dominate, and these types producing further extended or intended horninesses that feel oppressed into repressing their own perceived “types” of horniness to avoid our oppression because we're attempting to repress the same kinds of horny in ourselves, and so on, while we also almost universally find our horniness and subsequent release or liberation the source of our greatest pleasure…At least in my opinion….So it seems “love,” or the socially acceptable forms of it in the West, according to Freud and Foucault, and I think I might somewhat agree with them in my own way, functions socially, politically, economically, culturally and individually as a slavery machine because the power structure enslaving it defines what forms of love are acceptable instead of the individual lover (or, perhaps, because of The Individual Lover)…

And what does sex have to do with writing? Well, perhaps, writing is a sub-species of sex…the way sex...may seem a sub-species of writing…each dealing with its own reproduction, procreation, re-cognition, etc., of meaning...when this could be pure fiction...or not...?

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #28

2010-12-12T08:05:00.008-05:00

And consider Foucault, who believes a type of “cultural unconscious” is subject to continuous instability and alteration, to discontinuity rather than permanence, and therefore serves as something of an unconscious archive of exclusionary rules, or grammars. This set of linguistic practices generates social and cultural activity, governed by rules that are unformulated and characteristically unrecognized by the speakers concerned [e.g.: Eichman]… Recognizing the unavoidability of the given culture’s power matrix, Foucault analyzes how the strategies of social and political-economic power have a double effect by leading to strategies of evasion and subversion….

Domination necessarily evolves the means for insurrection: “…there is no relationship of power without the means of escape and possible flight.’ (Foucault 1982, p.225) The token exercise of power is always an insurrection of some type…

Foucault believes, and I agree, that sexuality has not only dominated our historical discourse of the last five centuries, but has evolved over time to dominate our institutions and customs…The era of psychoanalysis brought about what Foucault calls the “surveillance” of the body, a textualization of confessions and self-revelations of analysts and patients alike. From all this new data emerged new understandings of the power relations between the individual psyche and the external world it’s perceiving, how the body enables a sensualization of power…

THINGS TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #27

2010-12-11T10:36:00.005-05:00

The writer's game seems, perhaps, about involving the unconscious, narcissistic reader in a form of collusion that disturbs, twists, perverts the reader's transformation from mere consumer or audience-member into producer-collaborator...with the intention of letting meaning expand beyond the mere ideology of some individual into a feedback loop necessitating the evolution of meaning as part of the systemic stabilization process necessitated by disequilibria ["boat rocking"]...

...so books have margins for readers to write in, allowing for the development of "stories" as texts begin rocking each other's boats...stirring up the emergencies of diverse fictions--hornets from a nest/collaborators from a text...the patterns of human consciousness...apparently symmetrical with other patterns of consciousness...kaleidoscopic cognition...The writer's game seems about playing the game of human life and consciousness--the liberation and repression of psychic content--while smiting whatever might oppose it whenever its ugly head might pop up, dripping Viking blood on every page...with both I and eye wide open...but who can truly say...and how might they say it?

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #26

2010-12-10T08:33:00.007-05:00

...a form of what Federman called "critifiction," a self-reflexive, self-conscious, self-analyzing neurosis focusing on the absented mother, the blank page being an empty womb, the words echoing there like some voice in the closet imagining Balzac's Sarrasine, and how to read and write and seduce her.

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #25

2010-12-09T09:34:00.008-05:00

Also, see Game Theory.

…the canny (i.e.: conscious) imagination is what makes fiction pleasurable to reader-writers…Repression seems essential to reading-writing fiction because repression helps determine a vital aspect of the initial conditions by which reading-writing fiction occurs. These initial conditions, of course, seam rules, forming “rhetorical strategies” [playful ones, hopefully]…For the fictionist, reading-writing fictions seam the means to relive the primal anxiety of birth, the initial un-pleasure of be-ing born—our original experience with angst. We do this because at heart we are explorers. No bend in the mind can be left unturned, no twisting peak left un-surmounted, no game left unplayed…or at least beyond the reasonable effort of turning, twisting, surmounting, gaming our psyches to do so…It seems the inevitable inability to do these essential things that gnaws…the day spent not being born…This anxiety, in turn, leads to useful or what Bloom calls “enabling fictions” that result in “analysis terminable and interminable”…It seems possible that through these processes of writing and analysis reader-writers might overcome the “catastrophe” of our apparently strange attraction to what we perceive as death, and redeem ourselves for the “evil” which seems the un-atonable fact of reading-writing, the doing of nothing…

...our idle hands making the devil’s work…that said, we reader-writers might also find a better way of living decently in an indecent world than keeping busy, being useful and productive, despite the odds against it these, and relatively speaking any time, of course…if we might manage to live lightly enough to be easily ignored by the Earth Itself, each and every one of us, we just might…or whatnot…

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #24

2010-12-07T11:14:00.005-05:00

According to Elizabeth Wright, Freud’s major contribution to literary theory was his view of “id-psychology as focusing on the return of the repressed, ego-psychology on the return of repression, and object-relations theory as uneasily trying to reconcile the two”… Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice,..., Methuen & Co. Ltd, New York/London, 1984, p. 138

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #23

2010-12-06T11:13:00.005-05:00

...looking for the ways that literature and writing--by which I mean a specific type of deadly serious laziness and evil--can playfully confront certain kinds of useful, industrious work ethics and all their efficient and productive effects, revealing or concealing our irrepressible unconscious, which is to say the truer or, perhaps, more powerful intentions of literature and writing...to see the psychonautic, word-being self through the textual "I" the same way the Earth sees Itself through the eyes of an astronaut looking homeward from his base on the Moon...it seems getting there always requires a going beyond...a breaking of taboo...the eclipsing of once necessary cultural evils...doing nothing, even if it's wrong, when everyone else wants you to do something they think is useful and productive...or not...

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #22

2010-12-04T08:34:00.011-05:00

Literary application[s] of branes as texts...M-theory as "ultimate textuality?"

...by writing/imagining a text in a manner intended to mediate between the subconscious and conscious minds, by nurturing the emergence of a text that serves as a feedback loop esemplasizing the functions of unconscious and conscious into a single entity--much like the post-Freudian ego-psychologists merging of the reader/writer--the writer allows formation of new meanings by making previously unconscious content perceivable. It is the text's "strangeness" that attracts the reader/writer and brings them together on a narrative or text--that psychic membrane mediating various perceptions.

Please see "The Secret Life of Chaos," especially part 4.

The trouble I have with the documentary linked to above, however, is its denial of mind, its concluding statement that "evolution is mindless." The film makers seem to ignore the nature of their own curiosity...the possibility that their mind needs chaos...that chaos itself, as a higher form of order, requires mind...If no mind perceives or conceives chaos, does it exist?

I'm more uncertain than these chaps about these things...their idea that evolution is mindless seems, somehow, a comfort to them, as if they were relieved. Why? What types of "Dangerous Knowledge" might they be avoiding? Why do they seem so afraid of the marriage of science and mysticism? Are their imagined excuses justifiable if they claim "truth" as their ultimate aim? Does it take too much courage to be a "psychonaut?"

I'm not sure I'd know...

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #21

2010-12-03T09:24:00.007-05:00

The fear/greed dichotomy seems a symptom of a matter-based reality as opposed to a consciousness-based reality...We are "consciousness conductors."

Fiction...transcends...wish-fulfillment, exceeds mere daydreaming...the fictionist relates fantasy to time by using, according to Freud, "an occasion in the present to construct, on the pattern of the past, a picture of the future...pleasure...[is] connected with the dynamics of the work of art"...While the daydreamer's fantasy succumbs to egocentric opposition, the fictionist devises strategies to transcend mere ego through writing by using the same methods the subconscious uses to subvert egoistic intent...and so the fiction/reality dichotomy dissolves and consciousness expands accordingly...ego may be at the helm, but a much wider and deeper awareness captains the ship.

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #20

2010-12-02T09:43:00.004-05:00

My fiction seams an awareness that we feel alone amid all the togetherness, longing for the true togetherness of a lone...It seems the autonomous sensitivity of interrelatedness...a longing for a "return of the repressed"...to atone with the actual universe...if my fiction has any intent, it's this.

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #19

2010-12-01T15:01:00.008-05:00

My fiction reveals the emotional fallout and alienation resulting from the individual human being's cognitive confrontation with an apparently meaningless or absurd modern and/or postmodern civilization...It's the "nausea" of one who's derived deep meaning from Nature via a complex understanding of language confronted by the asininities of those in political-economic power, who seem to be forces of entropy, agents of that strange attraction toward death...It is the feeling of being Eros in an age of Thanatos.

As nuclear physicist Nick Herbert asks: "If they trusted me with Plutonium, why not LSD?...Why has our society decided to promote the worst possible drugs [alcohol, cocaine, tobacco] and persecute those who use the best?"

Is it because we live in a culture of death rather than one of love?

I actually think I know the answer to those questions. So do you if you're not deceiving yourself...

THINGS TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #18

2010-11-29T10:48:00.008-05:00

...the apparently clear separation between humankind and Nature is made ambiguous by the apparent randomness of individual perceptions over time...yet, perceiving this cleavage or bifurcation between humans and Nature seems to, perhaps, necessitate an evolution in language allowing us an adequately complex sensibility to consciously rub up against Its membrane ["M-theory"]...which is to say mind...or Nature.

Humankind and Nature seam, in reality, useful fictions--wet surfable waves we catch on the ocean to ride for awhile...heading, perhaps, to shore...or home...

Maybe our minds are parallel universes forming a universal mind participating in a symphony of universal minds...vibrating the brane.

...or not. What do I know?

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #17

2010-11-28T11:14:00.007-05:00

The apparent "evil" among us, that malignancy haunting our every action these days, which seems possibly the result of acting on our superficial desires for temporary security and comfort for ourselves at Nature's expense, a symptom of which might be seen as an increased delusion of ourselves as chosen people equating Nature with wilderness and irrationality...and that which must be tamed and reasoned away for holy land profit maintaining the promise of Empire...

and so our waging war among ourselve seems like It at war with Itself...perhaps even suicidal and riddled with self-loathing, calling Death Its "manifest destiny" in the note Its leaving behind, something It might have called "history" had It survived Itself...

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #16

2010-11-27T12:02:00.003-05:00

To be deeply spiritual in the ecological sense is to perceive one's place and function within the organic system, then be it, and the only way to be it seems to live in communication with Its mind and seam with It, nostering with Its being. Otherwise, one might function differently, serving other purposes...

...Human desire reflects and manifests Nature's desire...our desire appears an extension of Nature's desire, a natural intention...dissolve concepts of self and other, humankind and Nature, ego and id, as unnecessarily distinct categories...

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #15

2010-11-26T15:35:00.003-05:00

The deeper one's understanding of language, the more deeply one might perceive Nature's cognitive processes and realize we are not the world's supreme consciousness when it comes to percipient contact with others.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2010-11-25T10:10:00.003-05:00

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #14

2010-11-24T07:09:00.009-05:00

The more that humans produce meaning in Nature by languaging, ever-honing more precise and complex descriptions of It, the more aware Nature will become of Itself, as the perception of humans communicating with other humans can be imagined as Nature communicating with Itself...or "thinking"...It be-ing mind perceiving matter and energy organizing Itself...

...so, the quality of our communication will seam the qualities of Nature's thinking...as It is, the planet seems depressed, suicidal...how do we heal It and ourselves?

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #13

2010-11-23T09:13:00.005-05:00

Grammar is the imagined and thus usefully fictive communication rule book by which these [autopoietic] systems maintain themselves, at least as we can perceive them, making their feedback loops possible. This understanding or sensibility, however, only exists in the cognitive dimension, as one must be aware of the constant uncertainty regarding the adequacy of description for what's actually going on, as opposed to what's really going on. What's really going on is what we imagine, or what we think and feel is going on; and what's actually happening is beyond that...inside or outside, but elsewhere nonetheless.

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #12

2010-11-22T10:52:00.007-05:00

...an autopoietic system undergoes continual structural changes while preserving its weblike pattern of organization. It couples to its environment structurally, in other words, through recurrent interactions, each of which triggers structural changes in the system. The living system is autonomous, however. The environment only triggers the structural changes. The autonomous living system also specifies which perturbation from the environment triggers these changes...and by doing so, the system "brings forth a world..."

Cognition, then, is not a representation of an independently existing world, but rather a continual bringing forth of a world through the process of living. The interactions of a living system [a biological entity] with its environment are cognitive interactions, and the process of living itself a process of cognition. In the words of Maturana and Varela, "To live is to know"...likewise, perhaps, language selects what is expressible and gives shape to the ineffable, or inexpressible, in a figure-ground relationship that seems the expression of awareness. Cognition is the continuous bringing forth of awareness through the process of language. The cognitive interactions of a living system with its environment are linguistic interactions, and the process of languaging itself is a process of cognition. In other words, language seams to know...

But I know nothing, perhaps. Maybe I'm nuts...somewhere beyond this language...like you.

Is that OK?

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #11

2010-11-21T10:37:00.005-05:00

...that if "we" seem to be conscious beings aware of each other as separate biological entities and that together "we" are functionaries cooperatively forming, via language, a psychic ecosystem that, on the global scale seems, in part, Nature's cognition, then Nature seams Itself, composing Its own awareness as the supersitial mind composing/thinking/dreaming-nostering/minding/feeling/obeying us into be-ing existent. This seams a psychic form of recursive symmetry across scale, functioning to maintain an equilibrium/meaning amidst the perceived chaos/confusion of Its own processes.

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #10

2010-11-20T11:29:00.004-05:00

...if one begins writing fiction with a few basic rules [the idea being for a "plot" or phase-space mechanism to emerge over time and pages] in sync with a "chaos game" of random limits, various meanings will begin arising from the text, moving toward a visible spectacle proportionate to scale, lured by some "strange attractor" across the textual "event horizon" toward some "black hole" singularity that's always ineffable to the individual human being...experiencing itself, for what seems like the first time, alive in something else...this seams the faith one starts with.

Thelonius Monk: Blue Monk

2010-11-19T16:24:00.002-05:00

DH Lawrence has much the same view of women as Stephen Fry

2010-11-19T15:55:00.003-05:00

"Pornography is the literature of prostitution. Prostitution and art have always lived together." Germaine Greer.

The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley Online

2010-11-19T15:47:00.002-05:00

From the University of California Digital Library.

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #9

2010-11-19T09:39:00.005-05:00

Supersymmetry is the grail of string theory, addressing the vision of multidimensional feedback loops that also include quantum mechanics. The "string" is the feedback loop, fascia, membrane stitching/joining these dimensions together as they flow through time [or as time vibrates them in its passing]. The ultimate particle has been replaced by the image of a vibrating string whose pitch varies and harmonizes with the pitch variances and harmonizations of other strings [remember Emerson's "Nature?" Now keep going], which ravel together forming an infinitely large string and infinitely small strings harmonizing one to the others, and vice versa. It's the difference between music and noise, language and gibberish. It's a unifying theory, a titillating big picture and useful fiction.

SIMPLE COMPLEXITY

2010-11-18T16:22:00.006-05:00

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #8

2010-11-18T09:26:00.003-05:00

...consider how, as the human mind has evolved, its imagination and potential of perception has expanded into increasingly larger and smaller scales, as if perception were a simultaneous ripple effect inward and outward. At one time we were mentally stuck on the scale of things we perceive with our naked senses, but now we've left Earth, entered space and looked back at Earth, we've struggled to survive and thrive, examining the depths inside the atom and the expanses beyond our solar system...Since we are Earthlings, when we look at a photograph of Earth from space, the Earthling, or Earth Itself, looks with us, seeing an image of Itself recorded elsewhere. The Earth's biological system has possibly reached [if It wasn't already there and "we're" just catching up] a level of complexity where It's experiencing the first glimmers of sentience, or global consciousness. In theory, this planetary cognition seams an aspect, scale and/or dimension of cosmic psychignition, an awakening self that seems to work--in each dimension to the infinite micro and macro scales--at perceiving Itself as a unifying, and therefore by intention [as opposed to extension], rightly or wrongly, universal order...

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #7

2010-11-17T09:00:00.003-05:00

Literary texts apparently emerge from cognitive evolution, which seems a localized creative awareness. Languaging seams their most essential processes. Texts exist as the skins of reading/writing, and might even be considered "alive" if they were taking part in Life's evolution by writing, reading, thinking-feeling about and discussing whatever [on the externalized or extended page or screen] by manipulating various symbols within themselves [on the internalized or intended "mind's eye"]. While actively, selectively engaged by reader/writers, texts maintain their scrabbling, subjunctive fluidities, serving as flexible, permeable membranes vibrating meanings between one consciousness and another, evolving evermore complex we/ouis: Systemic cognitions [which some might call, rightly or wrongly, "singularities"], etc. & et al...

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #6

2010-11-16T09:15:00.004-05:00

...the concept of cognitive equilibrium among autonomous functioning entities that are forming, and being formed by, their common and particular ecosystems across scale and over time.

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #5

2010-11-15T16:55:00.003-05:00

Evolutionary theories seem those that might try showing and telling the multidimensional grammar which, over time, produces complex systems producing a likely more complex system elsewhere, demonstrating some form of transdimensional functioning or, perhaps, recursive symmetry across scale...the arabesque as opposed to grotesque, or not.

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #4

2010-11-14T09:34:00.003-05:00

...attempt to help recalibrate American thinking so it can better cope with these dangerous, even apocalyptic, which is to say revelationary times. My aim is not to suggest what to think so much as how one might think. My focus is on process, fluidity and change as opposed to outcomes because process seams the perceivable effect. The ends will take care of themselves if we focus on the means, excepting unforeseen events...that require reflexive responses to stimulating obstacles which enable the formation of shared realities, provided the randomness that's occuring seems a knowable variable...falling within the parameters of human perception, language and thought.

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #3

2010-11-13T11:11:00.002-05:00

...how to find our way out of this mess?

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #2

2010-11-12T09:23:00.004-05:00

What do most Americans need more these days than to grow up, think and act freely and be less rigid, to bravely assert themselves in the face of systemic crises?

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #1

2010-11-11T10:17:00.006-05:00

Whenever I start a new writing project I jot down the main ideas then print them out. I end up re-reading the highlighted and bold stuff repeatedly before work each day. The eventual effect--theoretically/hypothetically--might seem uncanny.

Anyway, the "worry" part comes from it being related to the working title of a fiction piece I'm doing.

My idea is to share this list with you via daily excerpts. The list of "worries" is culled from a short "book" I was writing in 2007 called "Nature's Ching." This litany will take about a month of daily postings to get through. Please feel free to comment, either here or on Facebook. I'll read every one even if I don't respond.

Topping the list is everything we perceive, think and do is fiction. This is a lot like Richard Rorty's idea that science and philosophy are essentially stories or "literature." I say human life seams fiction...

Here's the opening quote:

I am quite willing to give up the goal of getting things right, and to substitute that [with] enlarging our repertoire of individual and cultural self-descriptions. The point of philosophy, on this view, is not to find out what anything is “really” like, but to help us grow up—to make us happier, freer, and more flexible.
Richard Rorty, Philosophy As Cultural Politics

Etc. & Et al: A Few Notes on Smoke and So It Seams for Potential Reviewers

2010-10-20T11:27:00.006-04:00

There seems to me at least two matters that an interesting review of Smoke and So It Seams might speculate upon:
1) The make-up of the narrative voice in Its relation to textual space and time [is It, perhaps, just ink squirted from an octopus?]; and,
2) What actually occurs vs. what really happens.
Such a critique might reveal hitherto unread seams possibly holding the texts together from below—seeming their voices’ hidden fascia, if you will.

A reviewer might also ask herself whether or not the texts render the return of “wildness/wilderness” as a potentially more evolved form of civilization the way chaos might seem a more complex form of order [to certain people ]? And if so, by extension, do the texts’ rendered implications suggest anarchy as a more evolved form of governing society, or not?

Actuality seems beyond our scope, and reality requires a leap of faith, conscious or not. We can only respond to real things because actual things might not stimulate the senses we apparently have. We respond to something whenever we perceive its importance, which seems its meaning. Vividness stimulates response, emerging meaning. Spirituality seams consciousness to meaning, perhaps.

Whom, by intuiting [that is feeling and/or sensing] the unwritten aspects or absented dimensions of these novels, seems to seam the writing narrator into a read text? You, perhaps? Who are you and who am I, or who do we seam to be, according to these novels? Who seems the reader and who seems the writer, relating to each other, meeting on this seam they call “text?”

These novels concern themselves with interiors, with what we imagine hiding inside Its shell. They approach their memes—subjects and objects, themes and characters—via sarcasm [a form of negation] while disclosing a universalism that destabilizes human being-ness, making a change of perception not only possible but necessary and actual for the next new message to be read. Our reality will then, perhaps, appear, trying to catch up. The action, far ahead as always, seems rooted in the verbs, not the nouns and modifiers we use in our vain attempts to apply meaning to what we perceive going on, what we think’s possibly happening to us…to “me”…what “we” do…the crisis of the crux Itself…whatever it seems itself be-ing.

These novels are as wild and loose as I could suture them, holding them together in the daily processes of writing. Their wildness and looseness serve as a negative, a contrast against which I [and, by extension, the reader] might perceive the shape of our own tameness and cultural sympathies.

The “wilder-ness” experience of reading/writing these novels seams to me the immediate reality of a natural universe within “human” experience. Sometimes, one might choose to surrender her desire and ability to make such experiences meaningful, choosing to give up one thing to gain another, so she might more simply experience the text in some less adulterated way [remember how you felt reading your first novel?]. Our ability to understand our actual position within any given situation seems limited, and therefore somewhat tangible, thanks to nature’s language function from which, it seems to me, emerges a kind of myth mentality where language seams comprehensibility into an incomprehensible universe. The fact language inevitably takes on “narrative” form makes myth, according to Joseph Campbell, “the secret opening through which inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation.” In other words, myth isn’t the story, but the process, the means by which language creates and/or replicates meaning. Myth is the verb that language seeks to modify and govern via “grammar.” Myths replicate whatever grammar misses: the human place in the possibly inhuman world. Myths seam [or linguify ] meme-machines, replicating culture; and languages seem the seams holding It [the presumably self-replicating universal myth-verb] together.

These novels might suggest [or not] a “posthistoric primitivism ” that reveals the seams of the mythological, as opposed to the more prevalent historical, consciousness of some of my fellow and contemporary “Americans.” These novels seek out their initial “American” conditions, their originating apocalypses rendering “Nature-in-its-manner-of-operation” as fictional revelations.

These novels possibly explore human apocalypse/revelation at its point of entry [or exit], while Its subject, perhaps, seams Life together in Its entirety. I think I feel these novels as “American” books of the between/among… membrane texts forming boundaries among past, present and future with now feeling the present tenseness seaming the only tangible thing we might presently experience for ourselves. Every single word possibly seams a pun into Its deeper symbol for Itself. There is no chance here, only experience. It seems actual karma, form seaming an extension into or onto content, content then intending the form, knotting the deal. No? OK.

Normally, we’re not aware of how the socio-political-economic venom of “history” conspires to direct, or at least heavily influence, the types of choices we too often perceive ourselves making because we don’t know any better, or if we do we feel intimidated by the prospects of making other choices. Hopefully, these novels strip naked the whys and wherefores of this situation. Hopefully, certain readers might feel empowered by their new level of Self awareness…or not. Maybe they’ll project their newly found Self hatred onto these texts or, worse, onto me. That would be too bad, because I’ve been trying very hard to sort these issues out and bring them into better view so I could actually deal with them within myself for 25 years, me learning to hate me hating rather than you, and Smoke and So It Seams are the results of my best efforts at Self hatred properly aimed at the Self. Pathetic? Perhaps. Worthy of derision? Maybe. But these novels are what they are in the same way venom is venom, and I’ve seen much worse…Defending one’s poison seems a way of defending one’s indefensible Self when It seems like “me,” no?

When one studies existence—one’s life and the fictive projection often referred to as “life in general”—pondering the differences between reality and actuality, the nature of being and the being of nature, the physics of physics, etc. & et al, one might come to an understanding of power that recognizes some validity in the idea that our decisions might actually create the successive worlds we perceive ourselves occupying/occupied by, we seem both inhabitants and nests, coevolving with our parasites the way our hosts co-evolve with us…the way our systems work together to maintain our mutually contextualizing system via increasingly complex interactions over time as our life form[s] grow, but then again, maybe not. Yet, if so, I imagine one simple formula might begin a description of the process of decision making: I=E/R. That’s Ohm’s Law —current equals voltage divided by resistance. Currencies, like choices, generally follow the path of least resistance to achieve oneness or at-one-ment with their hungered for opposite [a negative charge seeking something more positive from which naturally emerges something resembling the lowest common denominator beneath the highest imagined numerator], desiring as little friction and fireworks as possible until they get there. No? So for anything to systemically happen a complex of stimulation of desire, resistance, and necessary degrees of satiation must emerge that shapes the flow of time and energy through our possibly shared realities. But what do I know? I merely live-write fictions.

Everything in these texts seems a possible reflection of a word-being’s psychosomatic apparatus for following its narrator’s apparent system of decision-making. Everything seems a reflection of a reflection and totally imaginary. Duh. Some earnest readers might try making sense of these novels by trying to figure out where I’m coming from. Hopefully, you as a reviewer might write something that may facilitate putting these books in someone’s hands, and your review will give them some tools to derive greater pleasure from what I’ve possibly rendered. Hopefully, these notes will help you, but maybe not. Maybe the reader will hear there’s lots of sex in these novels and buy them for that. But be assured, gentle reviewer, the sex is not pornographic [at least in my opinion].

The differences among readings/reviews might reflect the differences of private mind-dimensions projecting personal thoughts into reading/reviewing the texts. In other words, I imagine some “folks,” unable to escape themselves, will simply misread these novels. And maybe you, being privy to these notes, can help or at least try setting them free onto happier trails...[!]. But I don’t know. In light of everything, I believe it’s better being paralyzed by knowledge than activated by ignorance. So I keep in mind Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” while writing the way an angry person might repeat “Thou shalt not kill” over and over to themselves as they go about their business, hoping for the best possible morals to emerge as an improved, or at least further evolved, effect…

Finally, if these novels have any utility whatsoever, they might be viewed as antidotes to the Tea Party mentality. They also have very nice covers designed by Geoffrey Gatza, a modern day Renaissance man, and will look cool on your coffee table or lap on the bus. So please buy a copy of each and tell your friends to buy them, too.

For better or worse, or no matter. It’s been fun. Cheers.

Chuck Richardson
October 20, 2010

NOTES

1. The boundary between “wilderness” and “civilization,” “wild” and “civil” don’t actually exist, but exist only as a mental construct or invention that makes mental processes possible [much like the number “0” was imagined as the boundary/seam/membrane/edge between positive and negative numbers, because “numbers” were always relative to each other and in motion, in that they needed to represent change to be useful. According to Max Oelschlaeger in The Idea of Wilderness: “The boundaries between wilderness and civilization can be explored only obliquely. If we look directly through the historical lens we see nothing. And the reason why we see nothing is clear: the idea of history itself precludes any understanding of a Paleolithic idea of wilderness. The idea of history itself has a history…What is crucial at this juncture is to recognize that through the lens of history human experience takes place entirely outside nature…Our prevailing definitions of ‘wildness’ and ‘wilderness’ preclude recognition of nature as a spontaneous and naturally organized system in which all parts are harmoniously interrelated; in consequence, humankind has believed itself compelled to impose order on nature…The Paleolithic counterrevolutionary, however, actually sees the deep past. From such a perspective…wild nature and culture are understood as organically related. So viewed, the destruction of things wild and free will entail the collapse of any civilization that rests upon them…the modern project, which has long promised the total humanization of the earth’s surface, is paradoxically destined to fail through its own success.”
2. The evolution of life seems a “self-organizing system.” From Fritjof Capra’s The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems: “Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela have described the process of evolution in terms of their theory of autopoiesis, seeing the evolutionary history of a species as the history of its structural coupling….and Gaia theory explore[s] the planetary dimensions of the unfolding of life…Throughout the living world evolution cannot be limited to the adaptation of organisms to their environment, because the environment itself is shaped by a network of living systems capable of adaptation and creativity…they co-evolve…an ongoing dance that proceeds through a subtle interplay of competition and cooperation, creation and mutual adaptation.” [227] I would amend that to “…creation and destruction, unitary growth and mutual adaptation.” Capra’s view of nature reads a little too nice for my tastes. Nature/evolution seem meaner than that. I often wonder if “my” interests and Gaia’s interests are one and the same. I have strong doubts that whatever benefits me personally will benefit the planet, because I don’t think what would necessarily benefit the planet would behoove me in any way. In other words, I struggle with the idea that “man” and “God” have competing interests, and that the values of the one don’t actually work for the other. In light of this, it becomes very complicated to develop values that make universal sense. That’s not saying it’s impossible to do so, I’m merely confessing that I don’t know how it might be done. This problem might be the crux of my writing situation…I have ideas without knowledge. But that seems to me a universal among humans.
3. Civilization: 1) The result of man’s desire to please woman. 2) A relative term measuring the complexities of a given set of human social systems, where the greater the perceived complexity the greater quantity of civilization is assumed. 3) The domestication of wilderness, the taming of the wild. 4) Areas of dense human population. 5) The value of creating a culture that allows us to believe we’ve risen up out of the muck, inventing the bootstraps by which we pulled ourselves up. 5) The degree of comfy coziness one feels relative to a contestant on Survivor Island. 6) A more complex and secretive rendering of Goulding’s Lord of the Flies. 7) The way the human superorganism appears to be operating.
4. Chaos: Making A New Science, Robert Gleick: “A chaotic system could be stable if its particular brand of irregularity persisted in the face of small disturbances. Lorenz’s system was an example…The chaos Lorenz discovered was as stable as a marble in a bowl [if you nudged it, it would return to the same spot]. You could add noise to this system, jiggle it, stir it up, interfere with its motion, and then when everything settled down, the transients dying away like echoes in a canyon, the system would return to the same peculiar pattern of irregularity as before. It was locally unpredictable, globally stable.” [48]
5. Certain people are those who perceive their worlds as self-organizing systems as opposed to actually pre-ordained by a god in heaven. Those who see the world as a self-organizing system are process oriented, more interested in creating than their actual creations, which are always flawed replications of what they really meant [if they end up actually meaning something]. And that’s the whole point: Flawed does not equal fallen. It seems other than that…a systemic necessity, perhaps.
6. Anarchism: There’s not much agreement on a single definition for anarchism, evidenced by how controversial every definition seems to be. Regardless, I’ve come to define it for myself as the feeling that the political-economic state of human affairs—civilization itself—is a malignant tumor metastasizing across the face of its earthly host. Therefore, anarchism seems a necessary rebellion against the discontents of civilization, and an extremely individualistic collectivism opposing all authority beyond the local…not trusting in or having faith in global entities…again, the interests of “individual” seem opposed to the interests of “gods.” Worship might not be a good thing. Respect, maybe. But I’m not sure.
7. Thoreau begins Civil Disobedience: “I heartily accept the motto, ‘That government is best which governs least’; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe, ‘That government is best which governs not at all’; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.” Italics and bold signify my emphasis, not Thoreau’s.
8. The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, “The Hero With A Thousand Faces,” Joseph Campbell.
9. Grammar [excerpts from a very good and short article on grammar by Cathbin Ayoob]:[Garammar is] “‘The internalized system that native speakers of a language share’…‘the unbound and ungoverned speech in which people actually live and manage their lives has become a challenge to the Crown’ [quote from first book of grammar, 1492, coinciding with the onset of the colonial era]…If these rules propose that there is one perfect language, and language creates reality, then it can be understood that these rules assume one perfect reality…James Baldwin writes: ‘People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by reality that they cannot articulate. It goes without saying, then, that language is also a political instrument, means, and proof of power’ (40). Those who control language and the formation of language shape reality. Perhaps it is time to have language rules that incorporate all of these origins.”
10. Linguify. For an object to become a subject of language, having evolved from mere complex of atoms or gene-machine to word-being.
11. Etymology of sutra: "series of aphorisms," 1801, from Skt. sutram "rule," lit. "string, thread" (as a measure of straightness), from sivyati "sew;" cognate with L. suere "to sew" (see sew), “to suture.” Applied to rules of grammar, law, philosophy, etc., along with their commentaries. Also a collection of aphorisms relating to some aspect of the conduct of life; the sermons of Buddha; one of the approximately 4000 rules or aphorisms that constitute Panini's grammar of sanskrit. Therefore, So It Seams might also have been “So It Sutrad” [sic].
12. Posthistoric primitivism: Paul Shepard recommends that we need to recover pre-history and reconnect to mythos (sacred story), ancestors, and nonhuman Others. He believes that history’s real lesson is that it is no guide to the future, because it is a declaration of independence from the deep past and its peoples, living or dead, and from the natural state of our being. We must study primal peoples to begin thinking about living ecologically in post-historic and post-industrial ways.
13. Oelschlaeger, 11.
14. Ohm's law states that the current through a conductor between two points is directly proportional to the potential difference or voltage across the two points, and inversely proportional to the resistance between them. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohm%27s_law#cite_ref-0.
15. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and Observer Effect [from Wikipedia]: “The uncertainty principle is often stated this way: The measurement of position necessarily disturbs a particle's momentum, and vice versa. This makes the uncertainty principle a kind of observer effect. This explanation is not incorrect, and was used by both Heisenberg and Bohr. But they were working within the philosophical framework of logical positivism. In this way of looking at the world, the true nature of a physical system, inasmuch as it exists, is defined by the answers to the best-possible measurements which can be made in principle. To state this differently, if a certain property of a system cannot be measured beyond a certain level of accuracy (in principle), then this limitation is a limitation of the system and not the limitation of the devices used to make this measurements. So when they made arguments about unavoidable disturbances in any conceivable measurement, it was obvious to them that this uncertainty was a property of the system, not of the devices. Today, logical positivism has become unfashionable in many cases,[citation needed] so the explanation of the uncertainty principle in terms of observer effect can be misleading.[original research?] For one, this explanation makes it seem to the non-positivist that the disturbances are not a property of the particle, but a property of the measurement process; the particle secretly does have a definite position and a definite momentum, but the experimental devices we have are not good enough to find out what these are. This interpretation is not compatible with standard quantum mechanics. In quantum mechanics, states that have both definite position and definite momentum at the same time do not exist. This explanation is misleading in another way, because sometimes it is a failure to measure the particle that produces the disturbance. For example, if a perfect photographic film contains a small hole, and an incident photon is not observed, then its momentum becomes uncertain by a large amount. By not observing the photon, we discover indirectly that it went through the hole, revealing the photon's position. The third way in which the explanation can be misleading is due to the nonlocal nature of a quantum state. Sometimes, two particles can be entangled, and then a distant measurement can be performed on one of the two. This measurement should not disturb the other particle in any classical sense, but it can sometimes reveal information about the distant particle. This restricts the possible values of position or momentum in strange ways. Unlike the other examples, a distant measurement will never cause the overall distribution of either position or momentum to change. The distribution only changes if the results of the distant measurement are known. A secret distant measurement has no effect whatsoever on a particle's position or momentum distribution. But the distant measurement of momentum for instance will still reveal new information, which causes the total wavefunction to collapse. This will restrict the distribution of position and momentum, once that classical information has been revealed and transmitted. For example If two photons are emitted in opposite directions from the decay of positronium, the momenta of the two photons are opposite. By measuring the momentum of one particle, the momentum of the other is determined, making its momentum distribution sharper, and leaving the position just as indeterminate. But unlike a local measurement, this process can never produce more position uncertainty than what was already there. It is only possible to restrict the uncertainties in different ways, with different statistical properties, depending on what property of the distant particle you choose to measure. By restricting the uncertainty in p to be very small by a distant measurement, the remaining uncertainty in x stays large. (This example was actually the basis of Albert Einstein's important suggestion of the EPR paradox in 1935.) This queer mechanism of quantum mechanics is the basis of quantum cryptography, where the measurement of a value on one of two entangled particles at one location forces, via the uncertainty principle, a property of a distant particle to become indeterminate and hence unmeasurable. But Heisenberg did not focus on the mathematics of quantum mechanics, he was primarily concerned with establishing that the uncertainty is actually a property of the world — that it is in fact physically impossible to measure the position and momentum of a particle to a precision better than that allowed by quantum mechanics. To do this, he used physical arguments based on the existence of quanta, but not the full quantum mechanical formalism. This was a surprising prediction of quantum mechanics, and not yet accepted. Many people would have considered it a flaw that there are no states of definite position and momentum. Heisenberg was trying to show this was not a bug, but a feature—a deep, surprising aspect of the universe. To do this, he could not just use the mathematical formalism, because it was the mathematical formalism itself that he was trying to justify.” See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle#Uncertainty_principle_and_observer_effect
16. 10 Rules I Seem to Live By: 1—Insist on nothing, including non-insistence. 2—Live philosophically. 3—Write: Recurse/Replicate evolutionary materials in linguistic form as an “artistic medium.” 4—Commune with, and meditate upon, “Shiva.” 5—Look for large ass stimulation. 6—When hungry, eat; when thirsty, drink—but be expedient about it and don’t dwell. 7—Be your own man; work and play for no one. 8—Don’t be ruled by superficial, commonplace desires. 9—Do what’s necessary to stay on course. 10—Your character seams a role to play, so go ahead and act it.

WORKS CITED
Ayoob, Cathbin. “The Systematic Teaching of Grammar: A Critique”, Intertext: A Student Publication of the Syracuse University Writing Program.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Pantheon Books, Princeton University Press, 1968.

Capra, Fritjof. The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems. Doubleday, New York. 1996.

Gleick, James. Chaos: Making A New Science. Penguin, New York. 1988.

Heisenberg, Werner. Uncertainty Principle [and “Observer Effect”]. Wikipedia at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_Principle#Uncertainty_principle_and_observer_effect

Oelschlaeger, Max. The Idea of Wilderness. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1991.

“Ohm’s Law.” Wikipedia at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohm%27s_law

Shepard, Paul. Posthistoric primitivism at http://www.archive.org/stream/Post-historicPrimitivism/Post-historicPrimitivism_djvu.txt

Thoreau, Henry David. Civil Disobedience, 1849, @ http://thoreau.eserver.org/civil.html.

OTHER, PERHAPS RELEVANT READING, Etc.

Capra, Fritjof. The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism. Shambhala Publications. 2000.

Castaneda, Carlos. The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (©1968); A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan (©1971); Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan (©1972); Tales of Power (©1974) ISBN 0-671-73252-8. (Autumn 1971 to the 'Final Meeting' with don Juan Matus in 1973.); & etc. @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliography_of_Carlos_Castaneda

Crumb, R. The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb. W.W. Norton, New York, 2009.

Dick, Philip K. A Scanner Darkly. Vintage, New York, 1999.

Diogenes. At Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_of_Sinope

Dylan, Bob. Time Out of Mind, Blood On The Tracks, Positively Fourth Street, Highway 61 Revisited, Desolation Row, etc. & et al.

Epic of Gilgamesh. At Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_gilgamesh; and online text: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11000.

Federman, Raymond. Critifiction: Postmodern Essays. SUNY, 2010.

Genesis, The Book of. As translated, annotated, etc. & et al, in the Oxford Annotated Edition, Oxford University Press, 1971.

Homer. The Iliad and The Odyssey. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iliad, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey.

Jonah, The Book of. Ibid Genesis.

Kafka, Franz. Parables and Paradoxes. Schocken. 1972.

Kama Sutra. Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kama_Sutra.

Kerouac, Jack. Visions of Cody [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visions_of_Cody]; The Dharma Bums [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dharma_Bums]; Big Sur [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Sur_(novel)]; Desolation Angels [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desolation_Angels_(novel)]; Visions of Gerard [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visions_of_Gerard].

Lovelock, James. The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of our Living Earth. W.W. Norton, 1995.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick, “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street.”

Nollmann, Jim. Spiritual Ecology: A Guide to Reconnecting with Nature. Bantam, 1990.

O’Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1971.

Orwell, George. 1984, Animal Farm.

Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels. Vintage, 1989; Adam, Eve & the Serpent: Sex & Politics and Early Christianity, Vintage, 1989.

Pirandello, Luigi. Various Works. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirandello

Popul Vuh, The. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popol_Vuh and The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings, by Dennis Tedlock, Touchstone, 1996.

Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow, Viking Press, 1973.

Revelation, The Book of, Apocalypse of St. John of Patmos. Ibid, Oxford Bible.

Tao te Ching, Victor H. Mair, translator; Huston Smith, introduction; Quality Paperback Book Club, 1998.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden [http://thoreau.eserver.org/walden00.html]; The Maine Woods [http://thoreau.eserver.org/mewoods.html]; “Walking,” [http://thoreau.eserver.org/walking.html].

Tibetan Book of the Dead, …(Mystical Classics of the World) by Huston Smith, Bantam, 1993.

So It Seams finally ready

2010-09-29T12:52:00.001-04:00

I hope at least a few people enjoy this. Cheers.

One of those infrequent updates...

2010-05-25T10:18:00.004-04:00

News: Robert Glick wrote a great review for Smoke in the current issue of American Book Review. A quote:

“...these hallucinatory acts performed by metafictive narrators in the name of solving a state-manufactured mystery may not enlighten Smoke’s psychically crippled characters, but they do give the reader a good deal of narrative pleasure. We profit from Smoke’s uncontained, comic dystopia—part X-Files, part Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), part Franz Kafka, part Philip K. Dick, part Three Stooges.”

*****

I’m slogging through the proofs of my next novel, So It Seams. I thought it was finished, but the first time through I found myself slightly altering almost every sentence. There are so many things to focus on and each draft requires a shifted focus...

Starting round two today.

*****

Some things I scribbled into my notebook yesterday morning in a hospital waiting room as a friend had pre-surgery tests:

FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT

People used to have very little and less to hide behind and couldn't talk shit or they'd get cracked in the mouth and only those who weren't finished when they got cracked in the mouth and fought back ever got more than enough shit to hide behind.

All this inglorious bullshit we witness today was nurtured out of non-bullshit times. Men don't wear suits to the ballpark anymore but you don't dare form a union or you'll destroy the country, the social fabric of consumption.

In a country where consumption outpaces production a lot of bullshit passes for product. Not everyone needs to produce but everyone needs some talent for bullshit that everyone must consume. Feeding one's face beats getting cracked, so we feed all the time.

Most thought when we selected the first black president we'd finally have leadership that keeps things real and represents...

AFTER THE BIG BUST

black thongs
push-up bras
fishnet stockings
spiked heels

right up to the big bust
the buttered phat ass co-
sponsoring the NRA's viagra
habit
miley cyrus DVDs for all the little girls and
pornography for all the little boys and
adult language for Mature Folks Only
otherwise known as MaFos

but some day
not too far from now, maybe even
today the black
thongs will become slingshots
bras will hold the nuts we gather
fishnet stockings will catch fish not men

after the big bust
we'll have militias
and hormones only.

fewer people will have babies.
and spiked heels will be used as weapons.

Giggling In The Face of Doom [or, Lilly In the Field of Poetry]

2010-01-07T09:33:00.004-05:00

There’s a big hoopla going on about what Poetry magazine is, perhaps, doing with the millions of dollars the late Ruth Lilly donated to the outfit during the roaring nineties.

Seems despite the recent downturn the magazine’s assets have grown to $200 million and its staff stands accused of enjoying the good life.

I heard all about it from the godforsaken Chicago Tribune. It was pretty gruesome going for a sensitive poet-type like myself. There should be a rating system on such coverage, something that warns “for insensitive readers only.”

Here’s the offending article ... You be the judge.

And now that you’ve read it and perhaps done a little research of your own, here’s what I think:

All the money and related bullshit aside, when was the last time Poetry Inc. did anything interesting, substantial, important, influential...? Even before Lilly’s donation, was it doing anything?

The best way to kill art is to smother artists with money [it's my hoped-for cause of death]. An actual artist can be wrecked, I think, with too much money. If I were a rich patron, I would consider it my responsibility to fuck with an artist's mind in equal proportion to the money I gave, so his/her angst would be nurtured not soothed. I would personify "the man" for them because I prefer their psychotic pictures and texts to their pretty ones. I'd give the artist as much shit as s/he could handle, no more and no less.

Having enough is vital, but too much is deadly. The money basically took Poetry from a shoestring budget of nothing special and turned it into a corporation that needs to "play nice" for PR reasons.

Unlike us [sentient biological entities, not just legal persons], corporations seek to avoid dangerous artistic malfunctions [i.e.: stuff resulting in higher expenses and lower profits, embarrassment].

The corporate system and its sibling bureaucracy are the greatest evils in the world today...maybe ever because they seem so benign and necessary relative to fascism and communism, of which they're actually kin, the rich relatives of bastard children, one big illegitimate family of dis-eased inhuman ideologies.

People are slowly waking up to this fact, but I fear it's already too late. We're poised to see a cataclysmic drop in the world's human population resulting from an onslaught of catastrophes—magnetic field reversal, climate change, peak everything, nitrogen imbalance, dying oceans, famine, pestilence, war, disease, pandemic. People with children are going to have incredible, unbelievable, unprecedented horror, stress and anxiety to deal with. Their children will kill them, will be the reason they struggle to survive, will necessitate some form of law and order out of fear and exhaustion ... eventually ...and those people who most people fear and are tired of will be outlawed, institutionalized, jailed and/or killed. Even more so than today! C'est la vie.

And somewhere along the line it's likely that human mutations will begin appearing who, as new humans, will do to us what we Cro-Magnons possibly did to the Neanderthals: fuck and murder them/us out of existence. The new breed will, perhaps, be more OJ than Jesus. By the time the meek inherit the earth no one will want it. So it goes.

And of course, at some point a giant asteroid will strike, or something else like anomalous sun spot and flare activity will happen, ending hominid existence on the third planet from the sun...

We're all going to die...so it seams.

Thus [hate the tone of that word, the diction it implies, but its use seams correctly, hearing here the ear that says “ergo” would feel a step too far...] from Ruth Lilly's donation that kills Poetry to the end of the world. Only fitting we see the pernicious effects of ruling class "drug money."

I know. I go too far...But why not? Everything the profit/prophet-driven commie-fascists touch turns to shit! Global corporate libertarians merely think of flowers and their attention wilts flora far and wide...

So part of my life's mission, anyway, is to keep Thanatos' ideas away from my flowers...distract death and keep it at bay…wherever it lurks, blind it with my light and run like hell.

Amen.

For some reason, I can’t help giggling about all this…

Federman's Last Laugh

2009-12-28T12:52:00.007-05:00

Raymond Federman’s last novel, Shhh: A Story of Childhood, forthcoming from Starcherone Books, is excerpted at viceland.com, with a piece called “LIST OF SCENES OF MY CHILDHOOD TO BE WRITTEN.”

Federman died last October, shortly after BlazeVox[books] published his novella, The Carcasses. The first relative works I thought of while reading it were The Tibetan Book of the Dead, or Book of Natural Salvation, which I prefer, and Kafka’s Parables and Paradoxes as well as some of his other short work.

Federman’s narrator seems to have fnacs [the afterlife revolutionary forces] dancing around in what is traditionally Satan’s rebellious role in Heaven by calling for a democratic transmutation of the dead—politicizing metamorphosis, the apparent essence of nature itself.

The Carcasses is not a human-centered fable, it’s not even biocentric, since there’s a likelihood at some point in one’s eternity they shall come back to this dimension as a piss pot. The novella’s flexible topology, its permeability of self, the apparent possibility of its imaginary carcass narrator’s future enlightenment/escape from karma, its wheel of life, make it a pleasure to read. And in the end, when facing transmutation, these feelings about civil rights among the dead seem irrelevant. Too much freedom and freedom’s meaningless, an emptiness that seems a death itself. A carcass with too much freedom is, perhaps, too much a carcass. One who’s free of one’s self is without self.

We laugh at all this death because we’re dying, which means we’re alive. It’s seems our grief can tickle our funny bone. Why? What does it say about us that we can laugh at death?

In The Carcasses I see mind, matter and energy seeking to sustain their inter-related disequilibria for as long as possible, an unsentimental journey with a dash of Calvino’s “lightness,” a tad bit of Laurence Sterne the Psychonaut resisting his uncarcassization…forever digressing because the novella’s ending is the carcass's ending…

Shhh: A Story of Childhood, on the other hand, seems from this brief yet tantalizing excerpt, Federman’s ever-playful, ever-youthful spirit looking back, planning ahead despite the fact…despite the unspeakable…laughing…

I was one of Raymond’s students at SUNY Buffalo in the mid-90s, and was quite surprised when, in one of our last e-mails before he died, he said Proust had influenced him more than Beckett. He’d barely ever mentioned Proust fifteen years ago. He said I should read Proust if I wanted to know what he meant. I recently began following that advice and one of the first things I came across, while doing some preliminary reading, was Proust’s [alleged, unverified source] statement that "An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates."

The portion of Shhh excerpted at Viceland is a list of things to do, an imperative litany fleshing out memory before it forever slips into the past tense, beginning with his Uncle Leon’s planting a tree, his digging in the yard a metaphor for Federman’s digging through memory, planting and dispersing seeds in the mind evolving into word-beings that populate a living text…a family tree…and in less than an hour Federman makes a universe of memories that never were, memories of senses left un-sensed…in a vase [or urn]…

Federman’s list of things to do is a list of things never done, the outline of some unspeakable undone, knowing that if not for the Holocaust these word-beings would have been people who would have, like us, had sex with themselves and others, congregated for various reasons, become excited over political ideas and whatnot, etc. & et al. They would have lived messy lives, like us…no better, no worse...moisnous.

This list of 33 imperatives perhaps signifies "Solomon's Seal" or the "Star of David"—a mature family tree that never bloomed except in these stories, in Federman’s mind where his imagination lived for them and words became beings…

The ninth item is, perhaps, the most poignant if the reader’s aware of Federman’s actual biography and the myth of Federman he created through 50 years of critifiction, surfiction and laughtrature. It’s here where his family leaves Paris, rather than staying as they actually did, when the Nazis invaded.

Then, three points later: “Scene demonstrating how verisimilitude often becomes improbable when one tells a story.”

Feel the fiction of the fiction to your bones.

I have a feeling that Shhh: A Story of Childhood might be my favorite of all Federman’s books, but I’ll have to wait and see like everyone else.

And that’s hard.

Pushing Thoreau & Talking About Happiness, sort of

2009-12-11T21:52:00.005-05:00

Jared Schickling, in a recent e-mail: "If nothing else I simply can't help defending this stuff I'm reading and taking to. I think I might live in the 19th century for a while."

My response, in part: "I agree with you one-hundred percent about the 19th century. When I think what the "average" human mind in America would have contained back then and imagine what it contains now, I see anything but progress [just compare the literacy and penmanship of soldiers' letters home]. Technology has had an inversive effect to its intents. We have less time, less freedom, less well-being. It's not saving but destroying the world. And since you [Schickling] are where you are, I'm hopeful at some point, when you're finally ready to go fucking nuts and get all John Brown and shit, you'll pick up Thoreau. And read all of it. Then start the journals.

"One of these days I'm going to Walden where they have the mss of his journals in a library and I'm going to study them. The experts I respect most claim this is the true treasure trove of Thoreau's genius. No one I've read truly stands up to the totality of his achievement. Einstein comes to mind, but he became really popular really fast. Thoreau's beyond that because, in my autodidactically informed opinion, he bears witness to the esoteric in material terms like no one else I've come across. Beckett, Melville, Whitman, Flannery O'Connor, Hawthorne, Kafka, Nabakov, Marquez, Borges, Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg...the list goes on of people who bear witness to the esoteric in material terms very well. But Thoreau gets the most across, in my opinion.

"All these folks are better writers than Thoreau, but none have a more transcendent original language that seems other than or beyond human in its function. In other words, one doesn't read Thoreau to find out how a human being should behave so much as how humans actually behave within their cosmic situation. Language like nature does not so much conform to us as we to it. Thoreau isn't self-help or a guide book of any sort. It's an odyssey through life into the recognition that you and I are not fundamentally human, or even fundamentally earthlings, as the stuff we are made of is stardust...The truth is not meant to make human beings feel good. In fact, truth has no intention at all...it insists on nothing, including non-insistence.

"Of course, Thoreau didn't know that stuff about stardust as a scientific fact, but intuited it as an essential and necessary human reality in light of the big picture as he witnessed it, according to the language he let pass through him...

"I'm rambling, but I'm psyched that you're going where you're going."

In the same chain, a day or so earlier, Jared wrote: "but i wanted to send you this keats i'm reading. seems a little closer to home, sort of end-stage romanticism proper, keats an expressed atheist, which seems only in the way blake was an atheist, not atheism, verb not noun (but a modifier)

"To G. and G. Keats, 1819

"I have been reading lately two very different books Robertson's America and Voltaire's Siecle De Louis xiv It is like walking arm and arm between Pizarro and the great-little Monarch. In How lementabl a case do we see the great body of the people in both instances: in the first, where Man might seem to inherit quiet of Mind from unsophisticated senses; from uncontamination of civilisation; and especially from their being as it were estranged from the mutual helps of Society and its mutual injuries--and thereby more immediately under the Protection of Providence--even there they had mortal pains to bear as bad; or even worse than Baliffs, Debts and Poverties of civilised Life--The whole appears to resolve into this--that Man is originally 'a poor forked creature' subject to the same mischances as the beasts of the forest, destined to hardships and disquietude of some kind or other. If he improves by degrees his bodily accomodations and comforts--at each stage, at each accent there are waiting for him a fresh set of annoyances--he is mortal and there is still a heaven with its Stars abov his head. The most interesting question that can come before us is, How far by the persevering endeavours of a seldom appearing Socrates Mankind may be made happy--I can imagine such happiness carried to an extreme--but what must it end in?--Death--and who could in such a case bear with death--the whole troubles of life which are now frittered away in a series of years, would then be accumulated for the last days of a being who instead of hailing its approach, would leave this world as Eve left Paradise--But in truth I do not at all believe in this sort of perfectability--the nature of the world will not admit of it--the inhabitants of the world will correspond to itself--Let the fish philosophise the ice away from the Rivers in winter time and they shall be at continual play in the tepid delight of summer. Look at the Poles and at the sands of Africa, Whirlpools and volcanoes--Let men exterminate them and I will say that they may arrive at earthly Happiness--The point at which Man may arrive is as far as the paralel state in inanimate nature and no further--"

And I responded: "Nietzsche’s statement that “God is dead” seems the very essence of nihilism, or the belief in no-thing-ness, only the mental essence of something referred to as “existence.” The void, however, is not meaningless, the black hole of death does not usurp the spirit, it does not snuff out awareness…though it indeed does try to do these things, it actually creates our shared “event horizon.” The void is Wile E. Coyote, the sometimes comical sword of Damocles subverting our very situation at every moment…until “we” as someone inevitably get up and walk away, full from our meal…We’re not dead yet…Shit doesn’t always happen, but it will. The limit my imagination may arrive at seems recursive to the imagined limits of the things it imagines, and can go no further…Perfection is irrelevant as a conscious aim because it’s beyond imagination, nothing anyone can imagine is perfect, which is to say universal and standard and unending…Who the fuck wants that anyway?...The words of any language will correspond with the words of that language only…and if everyone’s language is like a fingerprint—experienced as touch, formed from the inside-out—no word I use will correspond with any word you use absolutely…it’s a leap of faith on our part that we both see the same black letters on white background [sic]…and we must at least agree there’s a consistency of pattern allowing for the agreement of terms…but what if...every time we enter into the illusion we share something in common we become neo-Adams and new-Eve’s re-entering the imaginary Eden of our faith-based mutual understanding, the closest thing we can agree on in terms of “happiness?” Until death do us part heightens the illusion and heightens the happiness…for “us”…and so fucking what, actually? But, then again, why the fuck not? Is one alternative better than another? Says who? Says what? Isn’t there more than one alternative, one alternative or other person actually speaking themselves? For starters, I don’t think it necessarily takes a Socrates to have the kind of conversation that can create a thrilling enough illusion of shared meaning to call it happiness. Anyone with a gift of gab, sex appeal, money, good food, weed, anything you want…can be a Socrates. Socrates is Santa Claus, knowing who’s naughty and nice [and you are always nice], etc., and at some point we gotta kill him because he’s corrupting our chirren, and killing him like killing the Buddha is a gateway to enlightenment and presumably greater happiness, or higher dimension thereof…

"The inner chaos of anyone worthy of happiness gives birth to dancing stars…Who will find the limits of their imagination? Those who are grief-stricken and truly happy for it? Who’s worthy of happiness? Consider this from William Blake’s notes written on the pages of the Four Zoas:

Christ’s Crucifix shall be made an excuse for Executing Criminals.

Till thou dost injure the distrest
Thou shalt never have peace within thy breast.

The Christian Religion teaches that No Man is Indifferent to you, but that every one is Either your friend or your enemy; he must necessarily be the one or the other, And that he will be equally profitable both ways if you treat him as he deserves.

Unorganiz’d Innocence: An Impossibility.
Innocence dwells with Wisdom, but never with Ignorance.

"I would suggest that, echoing Blake, those who innocently cultivate the proper Ignorance, treating themselves and others as they actually deserve, heaping further injury upon the sources of pain, the undeserving speakers of happy talk who strive after happiness, who will always have a use for the term “happy” in their lexicon, are truly happy because they need not insist on their being happy anymore than they would insist on being unhappy. Truly happy people need not speak of happiness, much less bother pursuing it. A country that idealizes the “pursuit of happiness” is informed by ideologies of profound sadness, where a “slave”* can be counted 3/5 human…Those who pursue happiness are pathetic; therefore, the good American seems, perhaps, a somewhat pathetic ideal.

"Bottom line: If you’re happy you deserve it clap your hands…

*“Slave” has an evolving etymology…consider the long-forgotten term "wage slave," which today might mean all poor people, everyone middle class and under, all organic as opposed to corporate “human beings.” The ideal American is inhuman, or incorporate…a “good corporate citizen.”

Now Crossposting to New Haven Review and Buffalo Examiner

2009-12-11T20:18:00.002-05:00

I have a piece just published in the New Haven Review. It looks like I'll be a semi-regular contributor. I may also be focusing on the Buffalo writing scene for the Buffalo Examiner because, like everybody, I need a little cash. The Examiner wants 3-4 articles a week, which seems like a lot considering my schedule, so we'll see how it goes.

Smoke Reviewed in NHR

2009-10-12T11:06:00.003-04:00

Here's the first review of my novel, Smoke. It would not have been written without the influence of the late, great Raymond Federman, who passed away last week. It also wouldn't have been as acutely articulated without the deep reading of my friend, Jared Schickling, the best reader this writer could hope to have. And finally, without Geoffrey Gatza's agreeing to publish it, and then doing a phenomenal job designing the book and doing the artwork for the cover, it would have never taken its present form. I hope I can pass this generosity along some day.

http://newhavenreview.com/index.php/2009/10/12/smoke-mirrors/

JONATHAN SPEAKS:

2009-10-10T14:50:00.009-04:00

THE ETERNAL BOY MATURING FOREVER INWARD
A Reading of Joshua Cohen’s A Heaven of Others
Drawings by Michael Hafftka
Starcherone Books, Buffalo, NY, 2008, 178 pages.

[Note: This piece's original form included numerous endnotes and links, which I decided not to post here due to tedious technical difficulties. However, I hope this reading sings Cohen's novel as is. If not, nothing's perfect.]

Judaism’s cosmic hoop seems broken, at least for one dead child.

Joshua Cohen’s novel, A Heaven of Others, verbalizes 10-year-old Jonathan Schwarzstein’s soul’s trip through a Muslim heaven, which occurs after he and his parents’ are slaughtered at the hands of an exploding Palestinian boy outside a Jerusalem shoe store.

All Jonathan wants is the fundamental correction of his re-placement into the proper heaven where he’ll be re-united with his mother and father.

His desired afterlife seems an articulation of the common Jewish idea of heaven as some mystical future when, according to Cohen, human life on earth might actually become enlightened in the here-now, as opposed to the common Christian and Muslim traditions of heaven being a complex of eternal cosmic warehouses of the “good.”

Jonathan, like God and by Divine Intention “His” “chosen people,” desires to occupy a figment of his imagination, a shard of his former self dreaming the dream of when this between-phase exodus will end and he’ll be in his desired after heaven…stuck to the mindful membrane of his warmest, brightest fantasies…

The novel unravels these mental energies by showing them as demonstrations of mind. Jonathan’s lucid choices amid this apparent psychic chaos have ontological clout because they evolve the realms of awareness he recursively occupies.

Cohen states in his essay, “On Writing A Heaven of Others:”

For Jews, especially those after Spinoza’s Enlightenment, heaven is not the attainment of souls, but the work of the living embodied.

He doesn’t, however, cite any of the three “noble” religions [Buddhism, Taoism, Jainism ], nor Hinduism [except for some remark about elephants holding up the world ], as having influenced him. Yet the narrative he’s spun seems to fit over the patterns revealed in these eastern traditions, to which he claims to have sought some sort of reconciliation with Western philosophy via Judaism. Cohen writes:

… I set out to make…an art of peace. A Heaven of Others attempts to put to rest the idea of an afterlife established exclusively for one religion or race ….

The task of writing this epic “afterlife” prose poem necessitated Cohen’s becoming something of a “psychonaut,” imagining in the first person a murdered child’s post-mortem adventures, inviting whatever he’d been perhaps repressing to erupt within the given framework…as if in a dream. Cohen, in my view, unleashes his mind’s uncanny ability to project new realms of awareness by allowing Jonathan’s ego to become enough of an enabling obstacle, enough of an adequate form of the right kind of friction, for the author’s voice to make sense from nonsense, allowing for new emergencies from old content [new patterns within given parameters], surrendering to the ever-continuing existence of mind.

Over time and the space of pages, the reader of Cohen’s text may begin discerning the “psychomythology of everyday life.” Like God, Jonathan needs to “walk outside his own house” and experience otherness if he’s to re-occupy and have dominion over his imagined reality…his imagined Jewish desire for an imaginary Zion. But Jonathan would prefer not to. Israel symbolizes the setting of the stage for this future Zion, and like Jonathan must pass through the Valley of Nails [past Mohammed, symbolized by a serpent in the boy’s mind] to get there, to actually become what It’s dreaming. Jonathan, seeming the personification of Israel, repeatedly sees an image of himself nailed to a mountainside…God’s will be done not as It is in heaven, but because It is heaven…not because God is merciful, but because It isn’t unmerciful.

In “heaven” everything seems an inversion of the boy’s psychic processes…as if things were turned inside-out revealing the subconscious movements inside his awareness. His waking world seams projections as our dream-worlds suture away, the difference being the dimensions or aspects of the psyche actually seaming prominent in the seeming here-now, the one most constantly changing, evolving in some sort of self-sustaining disequilibrium.

The novel’s esoterica [that God seems absented in the Muslim heaven because Cohen approaches God—or Allah—via negation —a sighting of form without content—a heaven without us—a seeking of transcendence beyond the ever-present “me/them” duality, achieving at some future point at-one-ment with God on Earth] seems projected onto the page as Jonathan’s hoped-for reunion with his parents in a heaven of their own…the mystical Jewish heaven of Jonathan’s…

…KARMA…in which Jonathan’s angel via Cohen describes “the podiatry of [the child’s alienated] wandering” about his Muslim afterlife, feeling like an Exodus ending at some point when he might once again walk in his own shoes rather than roaming about “unshod” or in the ill-fitting hand-me-down footwear given to him as one of “them,” one of the displaced, the poor, the wandering wretched of “heaven,” whose trail of tears has no reservations…

Jonathan seems, to my reading, a Joseph, an Esau, the medieval Wandering Jew all rolled into one. He’s the Israelites, roaming the Wilderness without Moses, needing to somehow transcend his former Judaism the hard way, without dying, by “facing the more complex realities of daily exigencies,” as Cohen himself has written.

In the chapter “A Pilgrimage,” A Heaven of Others becomes something of a hero’s journey, a spiritual exodus sliding unshod along a seam[s] of eternity, becoming a repressed form of the heroic Self re-turning into the identifiable frameworks of ever re-creating emergencies, uncannily subverting Jonathan’s own word-being epistemologies with an ecstatic carpeting of verbal mind bombs...then slipping away, the hero eluding its necessary martyrdom, denying the once required sacrifice...

Despite the strength of his faith [which doesn’t move mountains, as stated above, but rather nails him to them], the fruit of Jonathan’s language seems to have fallen from its tree. Cohen invokes a mixture of Kafka’s In The Penal Colony, Zionism and the myth of Sodom and Gomorrah in “The Valley of the Nails” passage describing Mohammed’s heavenly situation, the necessary passage of His in-between, where God seams the language hearing-speaking Mohammed’s apparatus, that mechanism of nails ripping his flesh and torturing him, turning him into a giant, eternally disfigured, fork-tongued serpent forever passing along the gauntlet of the empathetic language gnawing Its way through Him with barbed words forming narratives of the displaced, of the repressed and/or oppressed. Apart from seeming an inversion of Jonathan’s identification with The Prophet, this passage seems a projection of Cohen’s own situation writing this novel. His portrayal feels empathetic with Mohammed’s cosmic predicament.

Then, through the sheer power of Cohen’s lyrical prose, the novel begins, perhaps, conjuring up a new myth, emerging from a mish-mash of old ones, maturing infinitely inward…nails forever ripening his impertinence…exploding the invalid, which is to say inadequate, representations of his all too human desire, hoping to uncover the seams of some new limitation…stitching…

…THREE ENTRY POINTS, BEIT PERHAPS…

…Kabbalists believe, to my understanding, that God created man in His own image [mind/body/soul] so He could possess man and dominate His own creation. I think “man” can, in some ways, be read as God’s fall into Nature. God didn’t create “man” in His image, but “man” emerged from God’s inward, ever-ripening, narcissistic self-reflection…Its eye/I seaming a nail. This God does not create creation so much as use the ongoing emergency of Its narcissism to forever become Itself in Its own “eyes.” Therefore, there is no “heaven of us” as previously desired—only a more sensitive, self-regarding state of mind some might call “heaven,” of which we are only players, and then only according to our degree of empathy.

In the chapter “Limitation,” Jonathan says “…a distinction must be made between limitation and weakness,” and that during his never-ending Odyssey, he “…sought the brotherhood merited in, and gracing surrender.”

It’s not that Jonathan would not pass through The Valley of Nails to help God inhabit Zion, it’s that the Valley of Nails passed through Jonathan to help Zion inhabit God. The fundamental direction of the old myth seems inverted, Jonathan listens, becomes passive rather than speaking. It’s not that he would not pass through, but should not as an article of the new faith [cognitive limit] emerging from his en-lightened experience, seeming the ripple effect of the original explosion of a few initial conditions…the big bang of his textual universe paradoxically seaming the obedient side of prayer, in which the listener would not ignore the exploding spirit.

Jonathan would have passed through the Valley of Nails but the old myth seemed stale, that story—having become a voice without an ear—had discovered its limits in real time, leading to his realization that “…though I am in the wrong heaven it is only because I think this is the wrong heaven,” and also leading to his decision that he “should like to consecrate this homesick history, mine—to vial and stop this mad gushing past,” venting his profound desire to go beyond it...

…WITHOUT BECOMING CLICHÉ…

…metamorphosing “A ‘Metaphor’”…mixing higher and lower waters… Jonathan’s angel tells Cohen, as if in a dream:

…bathing [writing] me was A process as strange and as involved as that of any political [psychological] negotiations… [my voice] required An artful and experienced manipulation of both taps [God and Man]…those twinned faucets pouring individually…so the mingling so the mating of the two waters…

…forever ripening one’s side of everything…a kind of ghost dance emergency evolving…
“like that absolute truly terrible dreaming of dreaming of mine.”

And so it seams to its own end. Perhaps the hoop is no longer broken, or all that unfixable…for now.

Yet at some point, if one matures forever inward, it seems to me some future text might require liberation from a merely human-centered focus into something else, something other…a transhuman sublime…if it’s to continue evolving.

Though A Heaven of Others doesn’t achieve this, its movement seems in that direction—from me to us to “chosen people” to humankind to animal kingdom to living things to life itself and perhaps beyond...

What else should one ask of a human novelist?

Finally, this novel is beautifully and disturbingly illustrated by Michael Hafftka. Check him out at www.hafftka.com.

*****

Further Reading:

“The Wrong Heaven: Critic Joshua Cohen on His New Novel,” By Dan Elkind, Published January 16, 2008, issue of Forward, January 18, 2008.

“On Writing A Heaven of Others,” By Joshua Cohen.

“In The Penal Colony,” Franz Kafka.

“Jackals and Arabs,” Franz Kafka.

"What's It About?"

2009-09-28T10:43:00.004-04:00

Whenever I'm socializing and someone mentions I wrote a novel, the inevitable question "what's it about?" arises, and I never have a good answer. Frustrated, I decided to type out the whole conversation I always have later in my head, when I'm saying I should have said...And what I've done with it is put it in 8 pt. font so it fits on a single page, print out copies, carry a couple in my wallet, and when someone asks...So far I've given three away...

How would you describe Smoke and So It Seams?

As apocalyptic, magically real, eco-political-economic-post-future-SciFi-psychological-horror novels in the ecstatic mode. Where the first seems minimal, the second seems maximal. Together they form a kind of disequilibrium that seems to be trying, I hope, to maintain itself in ether and print. They’re informed by chaos theory, string theory, M-theory, deep ecology and my own alienated experiences. In other words, I imagine them as rather comical.

What are they about?

Smoke is about the incineration of de facto American ideals like the pursuit of happiness at a time of peak everything. The old forms of joy no longer deliver. What does one do about it? And then, how is one treated by those who support the status quo whenever one pursues their happiness in an alternative, untraditional way. It also displaces the human being from the center of textual reality in favor of something infinitely larger and smaller and more complex…something like “God” as Nature’s ego function, which allows for shapeshifting once one’s precise seam within the flow of things is discovered. The patterns of smoke seem to represent our phase space trajectories’ patterns, that is to say there seems to be a recursive symmetry informing the way human lives take shape, and the “writer” of these forms is most likely non-human, or beyond human, or sur-homo, or meta-sapient or something…some divine It wise enough to keep Its ego out of Its own way…

So It Seams continues in this vein, with some characters from Smoke appearing here as well, suggesting an overlapping of multiple worlds vis a vis intertextuality. The novel’s final words, “God’s mistakes seam this world, or not,” sum up the general idea that consciousness evolves [sews/stitches/sutures/seams] via error…and that error is perhaps a form/type/aspect/dimension of natural selection…and that these errors or flaws allow for the individualities within seemingly infinite patterns, and rather than being grotesque it’s actually an arabesque, which is to say rather than being ugly mistakes they are aesthetic. So It Seams is an arabesque techno-fetishization of cosmic error highlighting the crises of our perceptions as we seek the beautiful…an enlightenment of the Enlightenment…a neo-meta-enlightenment, perhaps…enlightenment as a movement toward Calvino’s idea of lightness and away from brainiac radiation, maybe…I’m digressing into aesthetics, at war against the ugly, which ironically seams the point…or particle-wavelength…

How do you account for the religiosity of these two novels, especially So It Seams?

By my long-time feeling that the old myths, as Joseph Campbell once said, no longer worked and that if the human superorganism is to continue evolving, new myths will takeover. One can’t stop this from happening. It’s something deeply programmed into us on the species level. Individually, we may debate the old myths, believe in Jesus, make choices, etc., but the number of compromises we have to make to continue existing in a world that no longer reflects the challenges those religions faced in surviving make new beliefs emerge. The traditional forms of Abraham’s beliefs make less and less sense as time goes on. New myths emerge from our dreams to take their place. Federman writes somewhere that he’s not a spiritual medium, but an artistic medium. The artist who knows his ego gets in the way of the larger work of allowing the subconscious mind to express itself, to find its human form without repression—much like an ideal democracy that overthrows its despotic leaders who formed then functioned as the political system’s ego—will be a conduit for these forms so they can appear in whatever medium the artist is working in. You channel a zeitgeist, a universe of forms, through the shape of your human mind, and hopefully what appears on the expressed end is something conveying some kind of vibrating multiplicity forming oneness to another human being. Someone once said that consciousness plus meaning equals spirituality. As I search for new meanings in this mess of a world, new and old meanings come and go through the course of time. The novel is an extended form of this passage and the shear accrual of the comings [sic] and goings [sic] of these meanings may take on the vestige of something spiritual over the course of the novel, which is too often mistaken for religious. For me, religion is the institutionalization of “God.” Spirituality seems about setting “It” free. The spirit is a holy thing and anything that provides meaning to what we experience feels sacred, relatively speaking. That said, if one were to read The Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Bhagavad Gita, The Tao Te Ching, The Book of Revelation [from a Marxist perspective], Black Elk Speaks and Thoreau [all of it, including a couple good bios], one might get a feel for where I’m coming from with regards to the holy spirit.

What about all the sex?

It’s impossible to do what I’m trying to do in my work without much of it taking a sexual form. The essence of our shared membrane of reality is friction, it’s this rubbing up against that makes the world go round, that psychologically torques us…and there’s nothing like sex to reveal just how small a role the “ego” plays in all the really really big stuff in our lives. Something much deeper and bigger makes us approach each other with stirrings in our loins…Sex is also rather funny and ridiculous and violent and absurd and pathetic…There’s nothing quite like two people humping as Rome burns…and it’s perfectly natural to do so. Why? What’s reason or ego got to do with it? Sex is very spiritual because its meaning is beyond reason, and we get that meaning, whether we like it or not, every time we have sex with something capable of having sex itself. Take that where you may or where you will. That’s part of the psychological horror and, I hope, comedy of my fiction: the ways sexual acts recurse themselves throughout every situation…this seems maybe some kind of pan-sexuality akin to Freud, a truly frictional fiction, though I hope not too much.