Eponymy strikes again. Spellcheck disapproves. Silly checker.
I suppose this one's on me. Cheers.
Saturday, June 7, 2008
Thursday, August 30, 2007
faking out your reflection
8-29-07
Tricks with mirrors. Conjoinment, communion, reflection. My favorite writers (including myself) have one essential story they reiterate in different ways.
Borges told of the Double, or the Platonic ideal, the recycling of time, the one thing becoming the other.
Nabokov wrote about mimesis, metamorphosis, the one thing echoed in the other, the reality behind the mundane veneer.
William Gibson wrote about the present as the future. Time having caught with him, he now writes about the future as the present. (Looking up ‘mimesis’ to verify my doddering memory, I rediscovered a favorite word: metathesis. Can I get away with applying it to the double-reverse Gibson does with futurity and presentism?)
Paul Auster writes about the story within the story. He studies how reality changes as we examine it, and how we change as life ponders us.
I write about the metathetic double, as in the transmigration of souls (Channel Z), or being stalked by one’s doppleganger or vice versa (Burton in the Sind), or being schizophrenically one with god, or a detective search following a string or network of coincidences to reach the vanishing point of the asymptote between coincidence and miracle (Augustus Googol, Demimage, Feral).
Another boring critic has spoken. However, for really bizarre critiques (and one that I think would have Old Vlad howling with laughter, read here:
http://www.lolitariddle.com/mirrors.htm
I especially like this:
"Provided that we follow Nabokov's instructions and exchange the pawn for a knight, the author then insisted that the best move open to Black was to avoid placing the White King under check from the Black Rook. Instead he advised that the Black Pawn on c3 should be advanced to square c2. This move, I strongly suspect, is the equivalent of the "modest dilatory move" (Speak Memory, 230). Via this ingenious code Nabokov managed to divulge how Uncle Ruka escalated his abuse from fondling to anal digital penetration. (Ruka richly deserved his reputation as a 'bottom-feeler.') The Black Pawn is now only one move away from his fraught rendezvous with the Black Knight on square c1 and no chess piece can intercede to prevent its perilous advance.
http://archive.salon.com/books/feature/2000/05/17/nabokov/index.html
Tricks with mirrors. Conjoinment, communion, reflection. My favorite writers (including myself) have one essential story they reiterate in different ways.
Borges told of the Double, or the Platonic ideal, the recycling of time, the one thing becoming the other.
Nabokov wrote about mimesis, metamorphosis, the one thing echoed in the other, the reality behind the mundane veneer.
William Gibson wrote about the present as the future. Time having caught with him, he now writes about the future as the present. (Looking up ‘mimesis’ to verify my doddering memory, I rediscovered a favorite word: metathesis. Can I get away with applying it to the double-reverse Gibson does with futurity and presentism?)
Paul Auster writes about the story within the story. He studies how reality changes as we examine it, and how we change as life ponders us.
I write about the metathetic double, as in the transmigration of souls (Channel Z), or being stalked by one’s doppleganger or vice versa (Burton in the Sind), or being schizophrenically one with god, or a detective search following a string or network of coincidences to reach the vanishing point of the asymptote between coincidence and miracle (Augustus Googol, Demimage, Feral).
Another boring critic has spoken. However, for really bizarre critiques (and one that I think would have Old Vlad howling with laughter, read here:
http://www.lolitariddle.com/mirrors.htm
I especially like this:
"Provided that we follow Nabokov's instructions and exchange the pawn for a knight, the author then insisted that the best move open to Black was to avoid placing the White King under check from the Black Rook. Instead he advised that the Black Pawn on c3 should be advanced to square c2. This move, I strongly suspect, is the equivalent of the "modest dilatory move" (Speak Memory, 230). Via this ingenious code Nabokov managed to divulge how Uncle Ruka escalated his abuse from fondling to anal digital penetration. (Ruka richly deserved his reputation as a 'bottom-feeler.') The Black Pawn is now only one move away from his fraught rendezvous with the Black Knight on square c1 and no chess piece can intercede to prevent its perilous advance.
"Non-traumatic anal penetration can be very pleasurable for children (as well as adults). It is clear that this indelicate maneuver, performed by Ruka upon Vladimir, placed his nephew in grave and immediate danger. It set Vladimir off on a disastrous course whereby he agreed to meet his uncle in private. So began a long and painful period of sexual enslavement and tuition. Nabokov's acute sensitivity to how adults 'seduce' children in order to gain their co-operation and compliance (escalating from fondling, gift-giving, and lavishing the child with special attention to tickling games, and more sexual forms of stroking and genital contact) is well illustrated in Nabokov's novella The Enchanter where Arthur knows he must perform certain unspecified actions on Marie in order to awaken her sexual curiosity. This disastrous, seductive sequence of events, which invariably results in the 'queening' of a pawn, is precisely what the true solution to Nabokov's chess problem must prevent."
For a less speculative, less absurd treatment of the subject, something that doesn't read like a Victorianera ghost medium charlatan using chess to contact the homoerotic dead, read this:http://archive.salon.com/books/feature/2000/05/17/nabokov/index.html
Friday, August 24, 2007
resume radio contact
8-24-07
Having resumed writing after several months’ hiatus, I’ve discovered an enthusiastic abundance of words, pages, ideas that come forth with not little but no pain and great excitement. It’s not supposed to be like this. It normally isn’t. Normally, it is as my distant Canadian friend and artist, Aaron Paquette, says of the paintings that earn his livelihood: “Sitting down to work every day is like ripping a piece out of my soul and seeing what I can make of it.”
It was like that getting back to writing. Two weeks or so of rereading what I’d put down so far, occasionally writing an entire sentence, then one day deciding where to pick up, and whoosh? No, not whoosh. Dry-cleaners have these monorail clothes-hanger tracks that click along when activated, steadily carrying clothes around a ceiling-hung toy-train railway from the back where the dirty work gets done to the front where the product is delivered in shiny plastic covering.
It feels as if I can just turn on the switch, and words, sentences, pages, ideas ticker by, and I just look for matching tickets to decide which to pull down and take home.
Like this:
"I square-danced once. Little kid. Really little. Maybe 4, no more than five. Church dance; I was raised a Mormon. It wasn't a square-dance square dance; I mean, it wasn't just a square dance. They danced other stuff, I don't know, maybe foxtrots, swing dance... No one was wearing western stuff, see. No big calico skirts or whatever they are, no cowboy boots or bolo ties. Hmm. I must've been 4. 1960. Before the Twist. 'cuz you KNOW I'd have remembered doing the Twist.
"Anyway, I remember we were square-dancing at one point. I know it was square-dancing because we were allemanding left and all that. Swing yer partner. Cool stuff to a 4-year old kid. I remember having the time of my life, being real excited, all spazzed out, you know, like kids get. Man, I was excited. I remember being SO happy."
He stared off a bit. Harpo suddenly chuckled.
"What?" asked August.
"Huh. I just realized I was stomping my foot to a square dance tune in my head, playing a bit of air banjo. Hee."
G-Dad came back from ancient memory to the present.
"You know," he said, "I was just remembering. Being that happy, happy, really happy kid. Back then."
There were at that perfect level of inebriation where talk is rich and slow, and pauses aren't interrupted except by something really good. This was good, since G-Dad was full of himself right now, and paused a lot. Like he was burping off excess soul.
"And part of that being really happy was that I was dancing with a whole bunch of pretty women. Yeah..."
"Yeah," said Harpo, "and at four years old, you could see up their skirts when they did the dipsie-doodle. Isn't that what you call it? You know, when the girl spins under the guy's hand?"
"Beats me. But yeah, I probably could see their undies, that small. Wish I could remember. But I remember... It's funny about long ago memories; sometimes they'll hit you with a full sensorium. Like the feelies in Brave New World. Smell, sound, skin sensations, kinesthetics, sight, emotional states, the whole kabang... and I just now remembered that giddiness -- just like that -- not like really being there but like, briefly, for a moment, there was here."
He leaned forward and looked Harpo dead on.
"Dude, I could SMELL 'em. The women. I could smell their perfume, and their sweat -- I mean, we were all going at it, must've been over 50 of us in an upstairs dance hall sort of thing the church had, no AC, just a giant stand-up fan in the corner and the windows open, and the door on the fire escape, that scary, fun, exciting fire escape, and we're romping around doing the dosi-do.. and I could smell 'em, those women."
He thought a moment.
"What I mean is, a big part of those giddies, of my being so ecstatic, I think the biggest part, was some part of me that responded to getting all worked up and sweaty with women."
He whistled low.
"I get breathless now just remembering it. I don't remember being hard-on or anything, or even wanting to look up their skirts, but I distinctly remember that the men in the crowd, while they were fun and all, probably threw me up in the air and all that, the men weren't nothing to it. I was just... entranced… to be running around with those women. And I could smell 'em. And I know now, when I remember it, that I was smelling women, 'cuz I'm old, right?”
He winked.
"Oh, shut up old man, you're not old. You're just not young any more."
"Don't I know it. But I know now that part of what I was smelling was their pussies. Ha!"
And he slapped the table, just like an old coot, and August realized that his Dad really was an old man, pretty much.
Harpo was sniffing the air.
***
Extra pleasure comes from being able to switch from one work in progress to another. The above is from a back-burner novel that suddenly jumped burners and began boiling so fast it was all I could do to keep it from bubbling over.
The Thing Formerly on the Front-Burner, which I believe has reclaimed its frontal status, if my thought patterns in last night’s insomnia are any clue, includes this:
Her father, Brock, seriously contemplated suicide himself. Contemplating suicide had been an old hobby of his for decades, a notion that to date had proved no more dangerous than growing old. But, for the first week after Deirdre’s near demise, the thought of absconding their souls elsewhere seemed especially attractive to both of them. Fortunately neither of them, Deirdre nor Brock, could bring themselves to heave their passing on to the other. It dawned on them that they were all each other had. Or at least they saw this truth as a valuable thing for the first in a long time. So they suffered living for each other. Hell on the installment plan, one day at a time. Suffer now, die later. The interest was incalculable, but no matter, it wasn’t likely either of them would live too many more years. There was only hell to pay, after all.
It could be worse. I have plenty of that on my hard drive. And better, too, but I’m keeping that to myself and some future publication date.
Having resumed writing after several months’ hiatus, I’ve discovered an enthusiastic abundance of words, pages, ideas that come forth with not little but no pain and great excitement. It’s not supposed to be like this. It normally isn’t. Normally, it is as my distant Canadian friend and artist, Aaron Paquette, says of the paintings that earn his livelihood: “Sitting down to work every day is like ripping a piece out of my soul and seeing what I can make of it.”
It was like that getting back to writing. Two weeks or so of rereading what I’d put down so far, occasionally writing an entire sentence, then one day deciding where to pick up, and whoosh? No, not whoosh. Dry-cleaners have these monorail clothes-hanger tracks that click along when activated, steadily carrying clothes around a ceiling-hung toy-train railway from the back where the dirty work gets done to the front where the product is delivered in shiny plastic covering.
It feels as if I can just turn on the switch, and words, sentences, pages, ideas ticker by, and I just look for matching tickets to decide which to pull down and take home.
Like this:
"I square-danced once. Little kid. Really little. Maybe 4, no more than five. Church dance; I was raised a Mormon. It wasn't a square-dance square dance; I mean, it wasn't just a square dance. They danced other stuff, I don't know, maybe foxtrots, swing dance... No one was wearing western stuff, see. No big calico skirts or whatever they are, no cowboy boots or bolo ties. Hmm. I must've been 4. 1960. Before the Twist. 'cuz you KNOW I'd have remembered doing the Twist.
"Anyway, I remember we were square-dancing at one point. I know it was square-dancing because we were allemanding left and all that. Swing yer partner. Cool stuff to a 4-year old kid. I remember having the time of my life, being real excited, all spazzed out, you know, like kids get. Man, I was excited. I remember being SO happy."
He stared off a bit. Harpo suddenly chuckled.
"What?" asked August.
"Huh. I just realized I was stomping my foot to a square dance tune in my head, playing a bit of air banjo. Hee."
G-Dad came back from ancient memory to the present.
"You know," he said, "I was just remembering. Being that happy, happy, really happy kid. Back then."
There were at that perfect level of inebriation where talk is rich and slow, and pauses aren't interrupted except by something really good. This was good, since G-Dad was full of himself right now, and paused a lot. Like he was burping off excess soul.
"And part of that being really happy was that I was dancing with a whole bunch of pretty women. Yeah..."
"Yeah," said Harpo, "and at four years old, you could see up their skirts when they did the dipsie-doodle. Isn't that what you call it? You know, when the girl spins under the guy's hand?"
"Beats me. But yeah, I probably could see their undies, that small. Wish I could remember. But I remember... It's funny about long ago memories; sometimes they'll hit you with a full sensorium. Like the feelies in Brave New World. Smell, sound, skin sensations, kinesthetics, sight, emotional states, the whole kabang... and I just now remembered that giddiness -- just like that -- not like really being there but like, briefly, for a moment, there was here."
He leaned forward and looked Harpo dead on.
"Dude, I could SMELL 'em. The women. I could smell their perfume, and their sweat -- I mean, we were all going at it, must've been over 50 of us in an upstairs dance hall sort of thing the church had, no AC, just a giant stand-up fan in the corner and the windows open, and the door on the fire escape, that scary, fun, exciting fire escape, and we're romping around doing the dosi-do.. and I could smell 'em, those women."
He thought a moment.
"What I mean is, a big part of those giddies, of my being so ecstatic, I think the biggest part, was some part of me that responded to getting all worked up and sweaty with women."
He whistled low.
"I get breathless now just remembering it. I don't remember being hard-on or anything, or even wanting to look up their skirts, but I distinctly remember that the men in the crowd, while they were fun and all, probably threw me up in the air and all that, the men weren't nothing to it. I was just... entranced… to be running around with those women. And I could smell 'em. And I know now, when I remember it, that I was smelling women, 'cuz I'm old, right?”
He winked.
"Oh, shut up old man, you're not old. You're just not young any more."
"Don't I know it. But I know now that part of what I was smelling was their pussies. Ha!"
And he slapped the table, just like an old coot, and August realized that his Dad really was an old man, pretty much.
Harpo was sniffing the air.
***
Extra pleasure comes from being able to switch from one work in progress to another. The above is from a back-burner novel that suddenly jumped burners and began boiling so fast it was all I could do to keep it from bubbling over.
The Thing Formerly on the Front-Burner, which I believe has reclaimed its frontal status, if my thought patterns in last night’s insomnia are any clue, includes this:
Her father, Brock, seriously contemplated suicide himself. Contemplating suicide had been an old hobby of his for decades, a notion that to date had proved no more dangerous than growing old. But, for the first week after Deirdre’s near demise, the thought of absconding their souls elsewhere seemed especially attractive to both of them. Fortunately neither of them, Deirdre nor Brock, could bring themselves to heave their passing on to the other. It dawned on them that they were all each other had. Or at least they saw this truth as a valuable thing for the first in a long time. So they suffered living for each other. Hell on the installment plan, one day at a time. Suffer now, die later. The interest was incalculable, but no matter, it wasn’t likely either of them would live too many more years. There was only hell to pay, after all.
It could be worse. I have plenty of that on my hard drive. And better, too, but I’m keeping that to myself and some future publication date.
withdrawing the gibson
8-23-07
It’s a precious logic, like a baby’s cry when the nipple goes away. I don’t have Internet access this AM. I can’t visit my 2-3 favorite forums and blogs, or check yahoo headlines. So I dredge up my lowly word soft and write about it.
MA-MA!!!
This stimulates me to take aspects of my life, the LAN of my daily life, and write them into position for upload rather than my usual habit of downloading stuff, ruminating on it, and then uploading the cud this makes, which is typically how we happy cattle of the mediated world discourse.
I acquired, by devious accident, a copy of Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland” that formerly was a guest book at last week’s family rental cabin on Lake Getaway.
I had never read Pynchon before except for detestable opening pages from alleged masterpieces like Gravity’s Rainbow. But William Gibson, whom I admire, revere, and adore (he is by all accounts a very gracious fellow), worships Pynchon.
So… to my surprise I find Vineland enjoyable. I am not reading it front to back. I see no reason to do so with books cited by critics as prime and pinnacle examples of ‘hysterical realism’, described as brilliantly unreadable. Instead, I dip in here and there, and enjoy how Pynchon gets away, at least in “Vineland”, which I believe is considered one of his most accessible, perhaps even readable books, with indulging himself as he will but, owing to talent, practice, and discipline, does so in easily understood prose that meanders where it will yet rarely trips over itself. As if Salman Rushdie, another ‘hysterical realist’, actually paid attention to what we wrote. (No, I don’t care for Rushdie. Yes, he is a brave man, and ‘twould seem, a genius, but genius has difficulty avoiding the vulgarity of its own excess, and I do not think I will ever read more than a few paragraphs or pages of his, here and there during library rambles.)
I can see why Gibson loves Pynchon. He is funny, very stylish, and sensitive to technology and its futurist implications. Indeed, it is as I thought (nay, knew) all along: Pynchon is for Gibson what Nabokov is to me: they are writers who uniquely inspired us, and whose influence on our writing we must struggle to remove from the word, sentence, paragraph, work at hand. For if we must be married to our work, we must visit our Nabokovs and Pynchons after hours, in a rented room or spare apartment uptown, and consistently tell our work-wives that that old thing is over, definitely over, long ago.
It’s a precious logic, like a baby’s cry when the nipple goes away. I don’t have Internet access this AM. I can’t visit my 2-3 favorite forums and blogs, or check yahoo headlines. So I dredge up my lowly word soft and write about it.
MA-MA!!!
This stimulates me to take aspects of my life, the LAN of my daily life, and write them into position for upload rather than my usual habit of downloading stuff, ruminating on it, and then uploading the cud this makes, which is typically how we happy cattle of the mediated world discourse.
I acquired, by devious accident, a copy of Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland” that formerly was a guest book at last week’s family rental cabin on Lake Getaway.
I had never read Pynchon before except for detestable opening pages from alleged masterpieces like Gravity’s Rainbow. But William Gibson, whom I admire, revere, and adore (he is by all accounts a very gracious fellow), worships Pynchon.
So… to my surprise I find Vineland enjoyable. I am not reading it front to back. I see no reason to do so with books cited by critics as prime and pinnacle examples of ‘hysterical realism’, described as brilliantly unreadable. Instead, I dip in here and there, and enjoy how Pynchon gets away, at least in “Vineland”, which I believe is considered one of his most accessible, perhaps even readable books, with indulging himself as he will but, owing to talent, practice, and discipline, does so in easily understood prose that meanders where it will yet rarely trips over itself. As if Salman Rushdie, another ‘hysterical realist’, actually paid attention to what we wrote. (No, I don’t care for Rushdie. Yes, he is a brave man, and ‘twould seem, a genius, but genius has difficulty avoiding the vulgarity of its own excess, and I do not think I will ever read more than a few paragraphs or pages of his, here and there during library rambles.)
I can see why Gibson loves Pynchon. He is funny, very stylish, and sensitive to technology and its futurist implications. Indeed, it is as I thought (nay, knew) all along: Pynchon is for Gibson what Nabokov is to me: they are writers who uniquely inspired us, and whose influence on our writing we must struggle to remove from the word, sentence, paragraph, work at hand. For if we must be married to our work, we must visit our Nabokovs and Pynchons after hours, in a rented room or spare apartment uptown, and consistently tell our work-wives that that old thing is over, definitely over, long ago.
Friday, May 25, 2007
commercial dreamery
I dreamed I saw a commercial. It was for K-Y Jelly, a new improved version, containing sparkles of some allegedly pleasantly tingling substance. My daughter said, "That's what you need, Daddy," referring not to coital lubrication (which would be a perhaps unwholesome reference for my daughter to invoke) but to my nose, which suffers a rare genetic disorder whereby it bleeds chronically and requires various astringents to pinch blood vessels shut and moisturizing goo to keep the tissues moist despite astringent dessication.
That is, I think I dreamed it. I'm not sure. Perhaps I really did see such a commercial. It's certainly the kind of thing my wise-ass daughter would say. The commercial had a sea-side setting, young blond Caucasians, and images of glittering sand being washed by lapping waves.
It occurs to me now that I could google K-Y Jelly and perhaps resolve this riddle. But there's no rush, is there?
That is, I think I dreamed it. I'm not sure. Perhaps I really did see such a commercial. It's certainly the kind of thing my wise-ass daughter would say. The commercial had a sea-side setting, young blond Caucasians, and images of glittering sand being washed by lapping waves.
It occurs to me now that I could google K-Y Jelly and perhaps resolve this riddle. But there's no rush, is there?
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
why gibson retired from sci-fi
My job, said William Gibson (in so many words), became so much harder when Lisa Marie Presley married Michael Jackson. Gibson's job, in this context, was the prediction of weird future developments in pop culture that reflected ironically on today.
He was wise to quit while he was ahead (click title link to see why).
He was wise to quit while he was ahead (click title link to see why).
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
dead men smell no smells
In comments published Tuesday, the 63-year-old Rolling Stones guitarist said he had snorted his father’s ashes mixed with cocaine.“The strangest thing I’ve tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father,” Richards was quoted as saying by British music magazine NME.
“He was cremated, and I couldn’t resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn’t have cared,” he said, adding that “it went down pretty well, and I’m still alive.”
“He was cremated, and I couldn’t resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn’t have cared,” he said, adding that “it went down pretty well, and I’m still alive.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
