http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Fri, 10 Sep 2004 19:38:20 EDT http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/ Phillip WinnSunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. 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Administration0@blogcritics.org Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/09/10/193820.php Sean ScottThis was written back in 1997, when the book was brand-new and Kurt hadn't broken his promise not to write any more books!Six years passed between the appearance of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and his megalithic magnum opus Ulysses. Thomas Pynchon took seven years to reach the pot of gold at the end of Gravity's Rainbow; he took another seven to chart the distance from Vineland to Mason & Dixon.Likewise, it has been six years since Kurt Vonnegut's last book, Fates Worse Than Death, and seven since his most recent novel, Hocus Pocus. His new book, Timequake, comes with a great deal of anticipation and nearly as much hype -- this is not only the first novel in years by one of America's most popular writers, but also, he claims, the last book he will write.In early 1996, Vonnegut found himself "the creator of a novel which did not work, which had not point, which had never wanted to be written in the first place." How many established authors would have the courage to say this? In this book, the titular timequake was "a sudden glitch in the space-time continuum," a "déjŕ vu that wouldn't quit for ten years," in which everyone in the world relived the 1990s on autopilot. At the end of the redoubled decade, chaos ensues because everyone have lost the habits of agency and free will.Faced with a novel "which stunk so," Vonnegut went through a timequake of his own, salvaging the best bits of the beached book, revisiting episodes from his life, and braiding fiction and fact into this coda to his career.Book in hand, the reviewer asks: Masterpiece or monster? Last gasp or second wind? From a critical standpoint, the book is problematic for the same reasons that Vonnegut is. Despite his lasting popularity, Vonnegut has never been an artist of the stature of, say, the aforementioned Joyce or even Pynchon. Any number of writers craft more graceful prose, compose more vivid worlds, and construct more intricate plots. Yet to those who have acquired the taste for Vonnegut's deadpan melange of moralism and metafiction, allegory and entertainment, black humor and compassion, his books have an appeal unlike any others. But the qulaity of his work has always been erratic, with high points like Slaughterhouse-Fiveand, two decades later, Bluebeard, surrounded by books ranging from haphazardly charming to downright forgettable.In his novels and lectures, Vonnegut has long promoted artificial extended families as a way to create bonds and assuage alienation between people. Vonnegut's fans -- and I, despite my critical reservations, consider myself one -- form such a family. To this clan, Vonnegut is like an amusing uncle who visits from Minneapolis every few years. Picking up a new Vonnegut or returning to an old one, is like spending time with funny, cranky old Uncle Kurt. Even at his most disappointing, he inspires a certain fondness and familial devotion. You'd hardly reject your uncle just because he rambles a bit or repeats himself, would you?In Timequake, Vonnegut's musings on life, with the recurring theme that "the most highly evoloved Earthling creatures fund being alive embarrassing or much worse," are shaded with more grimness than before, as if Vonnegut is bending under the weight of the thoughts that once buoyed up his work. The upside is that he has blended fable and memoir more intricately and playfully than ever before. In his essayistic interludes and insertion of himslef into his narratives, Vonnegut is a sort of poor-man's Milan Kundera; in Timequake, the levels of reality blend more smoothly and pointedly than in any of his novels since Slaughterhouse-Five.For diehard Vonnegut fans, Timequake is an essential, if none too artistically rigorous, footnote to his career. In one sense, it seems natural to let Vonnegut retire. Turning 75 on November 11, and with 19 volumes of "curious tales told with ink on bleached and flattened wood pulp" behind him, he's earned a rest, and has left more work that do most writers. But the desultory pleasures Timequake offers are tempered by the knowledge that this is to be his last book -- knowledge that usually comes only with a writer's death.Goodbye, Uncle Kurt. We will miss you. Books19699@blogcritics.org Fri, 10 Sep 2004 19:38:20 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/09/10/190121.php Sean ScottThis was a prediction about the "music of the future" that I wrote back in 1996. It holds up better than I might have thought.Future Listening may be a rather presumptuous title, but Towa Tei deserves it. The 1995 solo debut by the former Deee-Lite DJ is a virtual roadmap to the music of the near future. The album's cover art has an airline theme, which is especially fitting because Future Listening is a convenient point of departure for meditations on the music of the future. If you aren't familiar with Future Listening -- which is quite likely, as its well-deserved airplay was pre-empted by a few billion spins through "You Ought to Know" -- some summary is in order.Towa Tei mixes the sounds of cheesy 1960s mood music with contemporary club tunes. He is shamelessly pancultural, picking what he pleases from the U.S., Europe, South America, and Asia. With one foot in the recent past and one in the immediate future, Future Listening is intelligent dance music that one can actually listen to.Significantly, Tei is both everywhere and nowhere to be found on the album. He composed or co-composed all but one song, and wrote many of the lyrics. He programmed most of the computers, and played most of the keyboards. But he takes no blazing solos and sings hardly a word -- only background vocals, on just two songs. Yet his musical sensibility permeates the music. Like Gustave Flaubert, Tei expresses himself through careful self-effacement.The commercial rise of punk and grunge is a manifestation of egocentric, self-important Romanticism. Though lyrics cover a wide range -- from Nirvana's "I hate myself and I want to die" and Green Day's "I'm fucking lazy" to the pompous banality of Pearl Jam's "I'm still alive" -- the childlike message is the same: "Look at me! I'm special! Look at me!"In the coming years, grunge Romanticism will give way to a sort of detached neo-classicism, just as the pseudo-Dionysian energies of the 1960s burned out, making room for the cool Apollonian polish of 1970s music. Though the 70s are known as the "Me Decade" the music of the time was actually quite depersonalized.So shall it be in the near future -- for better and for worse. Prefab heart-throbs like Keith Partridge and the Bay City Rollers will find their 21st-century equivalents, but there will also be relatively faceless, private auteurs along the lines of Georgio Moroder or Brian Eno. (Actually, the Eno of the 21st century will be Eno himself, continuing to reform and deform pop paradigms.)This trend, in which the cult of pure form will often triumph over the cult of personality, is comparable to the so-called "death of the author" in postmodern fiction. It has already manifested itself in celebrity DJs and one-hit techno acts. As in the heyday of classical music, the musical artist of the future will not just be the hands that play the licks or the face that croons the tunes, but the mind that conceives of the sounds and structures.That doesn't mean that future musicians will spend all their time navel-gazing. Instead, the wisest will go on a perpetual shopping spree of diverse musics. Pluralism will be the keystone of 21st-century music. Half-pioneer and half-alchemist, the future musician will bring together disparate sounds in inspired, and inspiring, ways.In the 1930s, George Gershwin wedded the sounds of the street and concert hall to create Porgy and Bess, the first jazz opera. Three decades later, Miles Davis stirred elements of jazz and rock into a Bitches Brew that would influence the taste of experimental music throughout the 1970s. As the coming century unfolds, such multi-cultural genre-jumping will become the norm, not the exception. While stylistic cross-pollination can result in beautiful hybrids, it will also result in uninspired jumbles. Mediocre artists will feign creativity not by copying a given style, but by merely tossing clichés into a musical Cuisinart. Avant-bubblegum, tribal & western, baroque ska, adult industrial, zyde-core, new jack bluegrass, and doo-wop death-metal are just a few of the monsters that will come flying out of Pandora's Jukebox before a grassroots movement scrubs the slate clean. This new traditionalism will be more than just a rehash of early jazz, 50s folksong, or 70s punk -- though each of these is sure to get another 15 minutes of fame.With the increasing availability of multimedia technology, grassroots performers won't be restricted to strumming battered guitars. The Internet will replace the campfire and the coffeehouse as a musical forum. "Open-mike" sessions will bring together digital players from around the world, allowing engineering students in Dubuque and civil servants in Sarajevo to jam on the latest grooves.With impersonal performers, stylistic diversity, pseudo-classical restraint, and cutting-edge technology result in complete chaos? Is the future of music doomed to keep swirling and subdividing into fractal-like flurries of neo-post-world-alternative sub-sub-sub-genres? Will any values surface to make sense of the scene and tighten the loose canons of the post-postmodern soundscape?My prediction is both highly idealistic and unfashionably traditional. When the whirlwind slows and the dust settles, three old standards will remain: emotion, imagination, and talent.. Music19697@blogcritics.org Fri, 10 Sep 2004 19:01:21 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/09/10/151616.php Sean ScottA Russian novel can be a frightening thing: 600-plus pages filled with morbid melodrama, populated with 50 characters, each with five nicknames. The Yellow Arrow, however, is a sharp, aerodynamic projectile of a novel. Without wallowing in Dostoevskian soul-composting, Pelevin combines elements of Eastern European dread and South American fantasy into an absorbing allegory that recalls the stories of Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges. The eponymous arrow is a train on which the necessarily limited action takes place. Not only can no one get off the train, but most people are oblivious to their status as passengers. Andrei, the novel's protagonist, is one of a secret group that questions the status quo - even daring to consider the world beyond the train. Think of it as a travelogue of the absurd: Ionesco on wheels. Though slim - 92 pages - this slip of a novella contains more fictive invention and food for thought than many books several times its size. Like Kafka, Borges, and Italo Calvino, Pelevin has created a fable without a moral, an ambivalent allegory with uncertain referents, a dry comedy laced with angst, and a realistic fantasy in miniature. What does it all mean? Everything and nothing. Where does it all lead? Don't worry about the destination - just relax, settle in for the trip, and pay attention to the passing scenery. All aboard! Books19689@blogcritics.org Fri, 10 Sep 2004 15:16:16 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/09/08/172200.php Sean Scott “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is one of Jorge Luis Borges’ many meditations on the postulation of reality. As is common in Borges, this meditation simultaneously inhabits a variety of genres. It is an academic satire that takes philosophical idealism to its chilling reductio ad absurdum. It is a formal experiment, a piece of fiction written as a note to a nonexistent book. It is a call to attention against totalitarianism in the overall sense that the “horrible or banal reality”1 of Tlönism is the ultimate totalitarianism. Borges’ sternly comic fantasy is held up by a rigid system of artifices. These artifices both focus themselves inward to form a discrete reality and send tendrils outside the limits of the story. One of the techniques that Borges uses is the repetition of numerical motifs. The narrator discovers the eleventh volume of A First Encyclopedia of Tlön and refers to a “heresiarca del undésimo siglo.” (Emphasis mine.) This Onceno Tomo contains 1001 pages; this number reflects the Book of One Thousand Nights and a Night, a key Borges touchstone to which the narrator later refers. “Eleventh volume” and “eleventh century” also mirror the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, published in 1911. Borges frequently returned to the 1911 Britannica, which he purchased with his prize money when took second place in the 1929 Municipal Literary Convention.2 (The numbers 11 and 1001 are also palindromes; we could multiply interpretations and associations almost ad infinitum.) These symmetries are not “meaningful” in the normal sense. They are not “significant” in the manner of crude Freudian symbols or “shocking” in the manner of the ultraist metaphors of Borges’ youth. The 1001 pages of the Onceno Tomo neither “are” nor “represent” the 1001 nights in the same way that a sword “represents” a phallus or a man with a rifle “is” a streetcar. They are, however, significant. These repetitions and reflections form a sort of organic artifice, a music of chance, an aesthetic order. The two eyes, four limbs, and axially located genitals of a man do not “represent” the two eyes, four limbs, and axially located genitals of a dog, or vice versa. They are parallel yet differing results of the same natural or divine processes; one could call them variations on a theme. Perhaps the same is true of Borges’s use of patterning. In one way, these patterns give the fictional world “una aparencia de orden” — just as does Tlön. Borges uses the same fictional techniques that he attributes to the Tlönistas; perhaps it would be more realistic to say that he attributes his own techniques to his creations. Borges not only simulates an order — as do even the most realistic and naturalistic fiction writers — but also includes the simulation of an order in his simulation. This is also an order, but one of a different kind. Ironically, this higher form of fictional order is called the structure en abîme, which is at the same time a narrrative structure, a trope and a spatial model. The structure en abîme is another extraordinary example of what I have called a philosophical narrative situation: it poses a philosophical question (about infinity or infinite periodic repetitions) in terms of visual representation or in terms of a pattern for plots. It leads to what Bioy Casares, apropos of ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, describes as a metaphysical fiction. The structure en abîme also engages with a topic of Western classical philosophy, the principle of identity, and it troubles us in a waqy that no other conceptual pattern does, because it asserts, to a degree, the superiority of images over reality.3 The same techniques that Borges uses to create verisimilitude also unhinge and deform the sense of reality. The structure en abîme is a dizzying example of the way that words can imply the existence of the impossible. The sense of order created by repeated motifs is just a bit too orderly to qualify as “realistic” literature. In “La postulación de la realidad,” Borges hypothesized that “la imprecisión es tolerable o verosímil en la literatura, porque a ella propendemos siempre en la realidad.” Similarly, rigorously ordered fiction is often seen as “unrealistic.” Paul Auster has said that “there’s a widely held notion that novels shouldn’t stretch the imagination too far. Anything that appears ‘implausible’ is necessarily taken to be forced, artificial, ‘unrealistic.’ […Critics] are so immersed in the conventions of so-called realistic fiction that their sense of reality has been distorted.”4 By pushing the limits of what is acceptable in fiction, Borges reawakens the reader. Far from being escapist, Borges’s fiction helps restore the critical faculty necessary to properly judge “reality.” Borges uses references and allusions to real literary figures to ground his story and lend it verisimilitude. (The verb “lend” is especially apt. as Borges habitually builds houses of cards, only to demolish them, robbing them of their verisimilitude.) Mixing fact and fancy is a common technique for Borges. Just as the imaginary novel El acercamiento a al-Mutasim had a preface by Dorothy L. Sayers5, various writers from Borges’s own coterie offer their opinions on the “Eleventh Volume.” This trick had a certain ideal quality in the literary circles of Argentina in the 1940s; now that Borges’s work belongs to the ages and the world, the same technique has a different effect. By including the names of Borges’s friends and colleagues, the story should be more grounded than if he’d referred to more universal figures. Just as “doce mil monjes y treinta y dos mil Bodhisattvas son menos concretos que un monje y que un Bodhisattva,” 6 so Dante and Shakespeare, or even Twain and Kafka, are in a way less “real” than Adolfo Bioy Casares or Nestor Ibarra. Readers can expect liberties to be taken with the names of Homer, Cervantes, or Goethe; humbler figures can seem more real — why bother to make up a story about Nestor Ibarra? This effect is changed and lessened for today’s international reader. These names are not familiar to the general literary public the way they would have been for a member of Borges’s milieu. No longer facts of “real life” as they were for an Argentinean man of letters in the 1940s, they have become arcana to be unearthed, dug out of musty libraries like so many hrönir. This change in the reading of the text is similar to the shift Borges describes in “Parabola de Cervantes y de Quixote.” Cervantes tried to create an “oposición de dos mundos: el mundo irreal de los libros de caballerías, el mundo cotidiano y común del siglo XVII.” To posterity, says Borges, the prosaic world of La Mancha and Montiel would be “no menos poéticas que las estapas de Simbad o que las vastas geografías de Ariosto.” To Borges, names like Martinez Estrada or Mastronardi were a part of real life; to posterity, they are bits of erudite trivia, taking their place alongside Thomas Browne and Smerdis the impostor. Note that Borges may have intended this change of reading. While we might think that Borges naïvely aimed his stories at the readers around him, ignoring the way the reading would change for readers in different places and different times, I think it more reasonable, and interesting, to assume that he knew the way the stories would change with age. As a reader of literature from disparate centuries and countries, Borges was exquisitely aware of how the meaning of a work evolved as the readership changed and spread. In essays such as “Parabola de Cervantes y de Quixote,” and “Kafka y sus precusores,” Borges explored the way works are interpreted differently in different cultural contexts. Though Borges might have claimed that he didn’t assume his works would have the staying power of his beloved works of literature, I think it likely that he was aware that with time his stories would change and acquire a certain patina, just as a work of plastic art may grow more interesting as it decays with time, like the verdigris on a bronze statue. While he could not presume to know what changes time would make to his stories — for example, an author ignored in Borges’ time might be rediscovered by future critics — I believe that he intentionally decorated his writings with names that would mean different things to different people at different times. Whether these passing references are seen as reliable comtemporary facts, mythical fancies, or forgotten history (forgotten by everyone but Borges), they have the effect of multiplying the text. Borges emphasized and celebrated the independence of fiction, criticizing novels for accumulating too many ties to the outside world; at the same time, through the use of literary and historical allusions,, each story reaches its tendril outward in many directions. A Borges ficción is like a jewel, but it is also a rhizome7 ; the red sonora may be a tightly woven net, but the threads have loose ends that reach out beyond the edges of the page. A story like “Tlön” is indeed a garden of forking paths to the researcher or the scrupulous reader. Each extramural reference “extramural” in the sense that it connects to the world outside the walls of Borges’s otherwise insular fiction) is a point where the reader’s own will and knowledge come into play. Coming upon a name like Silas Haslam or Xul Solar, each reader will react differently. The reader may recognize the name from another text, look it up in some sort of reference work, or ignore it entirely. Since even a scrupulous philologist is unlikely to recognize or research every name, each reading is bound to be imperfect and incomplete in one way or another. (One could argue that this is true of any literary work, but Borges’s extensive use of allusions draws our attention to this.) The deceptive nature of many of Borges’s references is shown in the two examples above. He appears to clarify Silas Haslam, but this reference casts additional shadows if we know about his grandmother, Frances Haslam, who told young Jorge stories of life on the Argentine frontier, and whose very life seems like a catalog of Borgesian motifs.8 (For a writer who trumpeted the independence of fiction from “real life,” a quality common to the Latin American “nueva narrativa,” Borges frequently plays games with the reader by mixing details from his own biography into the “pura ficción” of his stories.) Unless we are familiar with the Argentine literary community of the mid-twentieth century, Xul Solar looks as much like the name of an Indian god as that of a writer whose “Juan Dahlmann”-esque real name was Alejandro Schultz. Full recognition of the facts, fables, and fallacies tangled in “Tlön” would require someone much like the reader Umberto Eco imagined for Finnegans Wake: “a model reader endowed with an infinite encyclopedic competence, superior to that of the empirical author James Joyce — a reader able to discover allusions and semantic connections even where they escaped the notice of the empirical author.”9 As no one is likely to get everything there is to be gotten from the story, every reading will be different.10 In “El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan,” Stephen Albert says: “En todas las ficciones, cada vez que un hombre se enfrenta con diversas alternativas, opta por una y elimina las otras.” “Un hombre” appears to refer to a character in the story in question, whose choices determine the direction of the plot — or perhaps to the author, whose choices truly determine what happens next. Tellingly, Borges does not specify who the “hombre” is. The fact that Borges titled this collection Ficciones also encourages the authorial interpretation. “Hombre” can also apply to the reader, who must constantly choose one alternative and eliminate others as he reads; the reader cannot simultaneously ignore, recognize, and look up a name, though he may do all of these on subsequent readings. Each reference is a potential fork in the fictional path. This fork may be a momentary distraction, or a stimulus toward more involved thought. To show how far one allusion can extend and bifurcate, we can take the example of Ezequiel Martinez Estrada, who correctly hypothesized that the First Encyclopedia of Tlön was not limited to one volume. Martinez Estrada, like Borges, wrote about Kafka, Nietzsche, Lugones, Martín Fierro, and W.H. Hudson; he might thus be read as a sort of mirror for Borges. Each point where Martinez Estrada’s oeuvre overlaps with that of Borges is a fork we can follow through the garden; let us start with Hudson. Appropriately enough, there were actually two William Henry Hudsons writing in the nineteenth century. We will choose the author of The Purple Land, which Borges treated in Otras inquisiciones. Hudson was an Englishman who lived in and wrote about Argentina; this distorts the image of Borges, the Argentinean anglophile. Another Hudson title seems particularly Borgesian: A Traveler in Little Things. Not only did Borges explore the minutiae of literature, but he drolly cajoles his readers to do so as well. It would be outrageous to think that Borges expected his readers to know all this trivia. Borges himself might not have known all of it; this brings us back to Eco’s idea of the reader so erudite as to grasp connections the author missed. It was not, however, unreasonable for Borges to assume that some of his readers would make some of these associations, and that each reader who knew something of Martinez Estrada, or Hudson, would recall something different. All these facts are implicit in the reference to Martinez Estrada, and any of them can influence, however slightly, the interpretation of the story. Borges’s reach exceeds the reader’s grasp. This does not mean that Borges inflicts upon the reader confusion for its own sake. His ultimate lesson may be that our comprehension of life, like our comprehension of literature, is always incomplete. On subsequent readings, the same reader may take different paths. For example, in the time since I last picked up Borges, I might read an article about Hudson, or a friend preparing for a trip to Buenos Aires may recommend The Purple Land. I may read the story once for pleasure, but the next time I might be inclined to consult a reference book each time I come across an unfamiliar name. At this point, it may not be out of line to invoke Heraclitus — is it possible to read the same Borges story twice? Reading the text changes it; it will never be possible to reread it with “innocent” eyes. It also changes the reader, fortifying and rearranging the imagination. Borges changes the way we read literature: first he teaches us how to read him, then he gives us the tools to read everything differently. After we see the openness of Borges’s supposedly “hermetic” fiction, we can realize the open, intertextual nature of all writing. As always, Borges has beaten us to this realization. In the prologue to El informe de Brodie, he denied that his later, more “direct” stories were simple: “no hay en la tierra una sola página, una sola palabra, que lo sea, ya que todas postulan el universo, cuyo más notorio atributo es la complejidad.” A story like “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is the perfect fable to illustrate this point.1 Daniel Balderston, Out of Context: Historical Reference and the Representation of Reality in Borges, Duke, 1993, p. 5.2 Emir Rodriguez Monegal, Jorge Luis Borges: a Literary Biography, E.P. Dutton, New York, 1978, p. 89.3 Beatriz Sarlo, Jorge Luis Borges: a Writer on the Edge, New York, Verso, 1993, p. 56.4 Paul Auster, The Art of Hunger. Penguin Books, 1993. p 278.5 This is a typically Borgesian choice that illustrates my later point about Borges’s use of literary allusions as forking paths. Borges imagines El acercamiento a al-Mutasim as a sort of mystery novel, so he could have plausibly attributed the fictive preface to any comtemporary mystery writer — say, Agatha Christie or Rex Stout. Sayers, who was both a writer of detective stories and a translator of Dante, is a much more pregnant choice.6 Borges, “Formes de Una Leyenda,” Otras inquisiciones, Alianza Editorial, 1976, p. 151.7 Umberto Eco: “And finally there is the net, or, rather, what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘rhizome.’ The rhizome is so constructed that every path can be connected with every other one. It has no center, no periphery [cf. Borges, “La esfera de Pascal”], no exit, because it is potentially infinite[…]it can be structured but is never structured definitively.” Eco, The Name of the Rose: including Postscript to the Name of the Rose, Harvest, 1984, pp. 525-6.8 Frances Haslam was born in England, then moved to Argentina to be with her sister, who married an Italian-Jewish engineer. She later married Colonel Francisco Borges, who defended the city of Párana against a gaucho militia. (Borges, “An Autobiographical Essay,” The Aleph and other Stories 1933-1969, Dutton, 1971, pp. 136-7.)9 Eco, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, Harvard University Press, 1994, pp. 109-110.10 While no one reader, not even Borges, will live up to Eco’s image of the ideal reader, or appreciate every allusion in Borges, the collective readership will asymptotically approach this hypothetical “infinite” reader. This notion of a collective readership that knows more than any member calls to mind Borges’s appreciation of the Encyclopedia Britannica: “I believe that no one in the world knows as much as any encyclopedia. The majority of the contributors do not know what the others have written; thus, as a whole, encyclopedias know more than anybody.” Monegal p. 89. Books19616@blogcritics.org Wed, 8 Sep 2004 17:22:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/09/08/162644.php Sean ScottIf you're expecting soup cans and canned supertars, you may be in for a shock. This is the squalid, squirming flip side of the swinging sixties, and Warhol is little more than an intermittent background hum. False advertising? not really, for Woronov-star of Chelsea Girls and other Warhol films-serves up a memoir tthat's both seedier, sleazier, and more sophisticated than the standard celebrity tell-all. Woronov is icily seductive, coaxing the reader into a tar pit of sex and death, of drugs and drag queens, of the twilight zone between real life and hallucination. All-night speed binges, Velvet Underground gigs, the woman without a vagina-this freakshow is closer to David Lynch or Hieronymous Bosch than any of Warhol's dry-cleaned imagery. The book reads like a flashback; one moment you'll feel there's nothing going on, and the next you'll be sent spinning by a cunning metaphor or appalling image. A sleeper of a book, but full of strange and affecting dreams. Books19613@blogcritics.org Wed, 8 Sep 2004 16:26:44 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/09/07/164629.php Sean ScottLou Reed has used his songwriting and sociopathic P.R. persona to tell the world more than anyone could have wanted to know about a middle-class Jewish kid from Long Island who just happened to revolutionize rock'n'roll. So why does the world need another soon-to-be remaindered rock-bio? Two reasons. One: Reed changed his personalities more often than his underwear, contradicting himself and opening as many mysteries as he solved. Two: Victor Bockris has done a damn fine job of playing Boswell to Reed's drugged-out bisexual Dr. Johnson. Collating endless reviews, interviews, and other views of Reed's life and work, Bockris has used his considerable literary skill to form a coherent, insightful narrative from Reed's often incoherent chaos of a life. Bockris has an authorial voice that's lively yet restrained; his writing takes a back seat to the biography, but his brisk style and intelligence are worthy of Reed, America's most literary rock star. Rock journalism needs a Victor Bockris almost as much as rock music needs a Lou Reed. Books19562@blogcritics.org Tue, 7 Sep 2004 16:46:29 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/07/31/174857.php Sean ScottKubla Khan is a musical and powerful poem, made more fantastic by the account of its creation. Ostensibly, Coleridge composed a long poem mentally in a opium dream and was only able to write down a fragment of the mental whole. But the poem and introductory note can be read together as a compound artifice. Perhaps the story of the poem's genesis makes it more powerful not because it is true, but because it too is a fantastic literary creation.It is all too easy to mistake the poem for a work of imagination and the introductory note for a piece of non-fiction reportage from the "real" Coleridge. But this is to forget that Coleridge is not just a man, but a man of letters, and that anything he creates may be a work of the imagination. One would not assume that Poe's "MS Found in a Bottle" was actually found in a bottle, or that some kindly, if nameless, editor took the trouble to collate and annotate Werther's letters. Coleridge's account of the creation of Kubla Khan seems more plausible, but it has the same fictive potential; we need not take it as literal truth. Indeed, a careful reading reveals the poem to be so complex and involuted as to preclude the probability of its spontaneous generation.Taken alone, Kubla Khan is a stirring, striking, piece of verse. When read as narrative and not explication, the introductory note becomes a frame story worthy of Jorge Luis Borges or Edgar Allen Poe. The poem and its introduction can be fruitfully read as the two parts of a crafty, deceptive fiction that casts doubt over the imaginative process of literature.Whether or not one accepts the premise put forth in the introductory note, Kubla Khan is undoubtedly a work of the imagination. Even without glosses, the poem paints a picture of exotic, fabulous, fairy-tale splendor. With a naive reading of the note, the poem seems a product of the "inspired" imagination. With the aid of a drug, the "Author" creates an opening into the realm beyond the rational mind, like what Vladimir Nabokov elsewhere calls "a rent in his world leading to another world of tenderness, brightness and beauty."But the introduction shows that inherently literary nature of the vision. Whether this vision is brought on by chemical or divine inspiration, or is the result of the so-called "reasoned imagination," it stems from the reading of a text.In the frame story, "the Author" (not "I" or "Coleridge") takes the now-famous "anodyne" and nods off while reading. From this anodyne, a dynamic poem sprang. With an unusual degree of lucidity, especially if the note was written much later, Coleridge even presents the "sentence, or words of the same substance" he was reading at the moment he "fell asleep." This is the "quote" from Purchas that Coleridge cites: "Here the Khan Kubla commanded a passage to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were enclosed within a wall."The adaptation of the line from "Purchas's Pilgrimage" into Kubla Khan demonstrates Coleridge's conception of "fancy" in its simplest form. Fancy is combinatory; Coleridge's conscious or unconscious mind "created" the beginning of the poem by recombining the elements of the lines he had been reading. "Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built" becomes "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree"; the adjective "stately" is transplanted from the "stately garden" onto the "palace," which has become a "pleasure-dome."From the near-plagiarism of the beginning, Coleridge's combinatory powers reach further. Through the "law of association," Coleridge's well-fed mind could jump from the pleasure-dome to other images, fixing itself on those which fit the poetic plan. The "passive" principle of the mind has gathered and stored a number of words and images. The "spontaneous" principle skips from thought to thought as one crosses a river by hopping from stone to stone. The "active" principle forms these thoughts into a poem. Thus, the poem can be read as a fanciful, spontaneous creation on the part of the author; with little or no mediation save the opium dream, he dashed off Kubla Khan -- what he was able to, that is. How convenient that the poor Porlockian came calling right when Coleridge had reached a perfect concluding line!The verse is stunning on its own. How much more stunning it becomes when the reader "learns" that it was a hasty, opium-induced improvisation! Coleridge had to be creative to write such a poem; how much more clever to place an already admirable poem in a context that could not but make it seem more impressive! Had Coleridge written the poem by lucid, measured means, he could play a trick on the reader with a clever frame. Coleridge may have been familiar with Cervantes' Don Quixote, Carlyle's Sartor Resartus or Voltaire's Candide, all of which pose as texts composed by other authors. He could have also had the ingenuity to come up with such a scheme on his own, either to create a tricky fiction or to apologize for the brevity of the poem.The words of Purchas planted a seed in Coleridge's mind; he then cultivated the words of a minor author into his own immortal poem. Words beget words. Words also beget worlds. Kubla Khan presents us with a vision formed solely of words; Coleridge the visionary poet gives us words, the words give us visions. The process is a sort of cycle; Purchas's words lead to Coleridge's visions lead to Coleridge's words lead to the reader's visions. This creative process is mirrored in the content of the poem.We shall enter this reading of the poem not from the verse itself, and not even from the introductory note. We shall start where Coleridge says he started, in Purchas. Here is the beginning of the passage in Purchas: "In Xanada did Cabla Can build a stately Pallace..." In his note, Coleridge intentionally or carelessly transforms this to: "words of the same substance...Here the Kubla Khan commanded a palace to be built." In the poem itself, this becomes "in Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree."Strangely, it seems that Coleridge followed the letter of Purchas's text closer than the introduction lets on. But something more crucial is happening here. The creation of the palace tessellates from a physical to a purely verbal act. First "Cublai Can" builds the palace. Then Khan Kubla commands that it be built. Then, in the final poem, Kubla Khan decrees the pleasure dome, rather than builds it. He makes a decree, and there is a palace -- just as Coleridge gives us the pleasure-dome with nothing more than words. Both within and without the poem, the castle is brought into being through language.Later on in the poem, we find a passage that again mirrors the creation of the poem. It would be most curious if his dreaming, irrational mind created a symbol of its own process. Conversely, it would be highly inventive and ingenious of Coleridge to create a poetic image and a deceptively prosaic frame story that so closely harmonized, fitting together like Russian dolls."And from this chasm," -- a chasm which has already been called "romantic" -- "amid whose swift half-intermitted burst / Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail." Just as the "Author" suffered a "slight indisposition" which required an "anodyne," the "romantic chasm" was "with ceaseless turmoil seething." Then, when Coleridge came to, he wrote out the vision in a "burst" of poetic inspiration. This burst, unfortunately, was "half-intermitted" by the ill-timed (or perhaps perfectly-timed) person from Porlock.It is crucial that in its burst, the fountain sends up "fragments" -- crucial because this is the first point at which the reality within the vision crosses with the textual, poetic reality that we find at the level of the introduction. The poem itself is a "fragment." In some of its published forms, "fragment" is included as part of the title. But from the beginning of the introductory note, it is referred to as a "fragment." One might call this a coincidence; to do so would be to ignore a direct parallel between the imagery within the poem and the poem itself.This interpretation is supported by the fact that the "fragments" measured within the poem remain abstract; they are not explicitly fragments of anything. A bursting fountain might throw up fragments of stone or dirt or any number of other things; it would not throw up mere "fragments." This abstraction helps to undermine whatever naturalistic presentation there is within the vision.Looking deeper into this interpretation, one can almost see a mise-en-abîme. Coleridge has a vision within the chasm of his drug-and-prose inspired reverie. This vision bursts forth like a fountain. Only a fragment remains. Within this fragment, we see a fountain vaulting "fragments." Perhaps if we could look close enough, each of these fragments would contain its own fountain, its own fragments.Just as a character in André Gide's The Counterfeiters writes a novel called The Counterfeiters and Velasquez' canvas Las Meninas shows Velasquez in the process of painting, so does Coleridge's fragment include a fountain of fragments.These fragments are compared not only to "rebounding hail," but to "chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail." The grain is being laboriously refined; perhaps Coleridge similarly refines his original grain of an idea.The inset stanza lines 37-44, provides another key to the reflexive structure of the poem. This passage appears to create a separate vision, especially because of the line "In a vision once I saw." The vision of the "Abyssinian maid" is either a distinct vision remembered from the same vantage point as at the end of the poem, or a vision remembered from within the vision of Xanadu. This is also the first appearance ofthe first person, as well as the first time we see the word "vision." In this section, Coleridge starts to bring together the various threads and levels of the poem. The poem's narrator hears the damsel's song -- itself a work-within-a-work. The narrator says:Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such deep delight 'twould win me That with music loud and long, I would build those domes in air, That sunny dome, those caves of ice!The narrator wishes to recall another's art tapping into the mnemonic basis of the creative process. The ecstasy inspired by this process would provoke him to "build that dome in air" "with music loud and long." From the maiden's song, the narrator has returned to Kubla Khan's visionary castle.Perhaps the maiden's song "of Mount Abora" was only circumstantially related to the vision of Xanadu; after all, as Coleridge wrote in Chapter V of Biographia Literaria: "The objects of any two ideas need not have co-existed in the same sensation to become mutually associable. The same result will follow when only one of the two ideas has been represented by the senses and the other by the memory." There need be no more solid bond between the maiden's song and the vision of Xanadu than the powerful effect they had on the narrator. The poem implies, however, that the song of Abora and vision of Xanadu are related. More than that, there is the strong possibility that the damsel was singing of Xanadu. How else would the narrator by reviving the maid's song, "build that dome in air"?If the poet-within-a-poem sang the song, he would not just recall the dome and caves of ice of the vision to himself. When he says "all who heard should see them there," he means that his words would recreate the vision in the listener's mind, just as Coleridge does with Kubla Khan, Xanadu exists in visionary language, and we share in this vision, as the music of Coleridge's poetry makes us see the shimmer of the stately pleasure dome.Coleridge and his narrator conclude the poem with the listeners' reactions to the poet's visions. The listeners fear the visionary poet; they "cry, 'Beware, beware!'" This can be seen as bringing the poem back to quotidian reality or plunging it further into the multi-layered, involuted fictive world. With the end of the poem, we are no longer in Xanadu or Abyssinia; we seem to be back in "reality," where rakish, ecstatic poets shock the bourgeoisie with their visionary verse. But this is not really reality, any more than was the image of the pleasure-dome. In a way, the pleasure dome was a more honest fantasy, since it didn't pose as fact. The final simulation, ending with the declaration that the poet has "drunk the milk of paradise," is not only pure poetic fantasy or objective reality; it is both and neither. Either way, it complicates the levels of "reality" represented in the poem. With this ending, Coleridge ties the threads that he's been spinning into one solid knot. The final words, "he on honey-dew hath fed / and drunk the milk of paradise" bring together the two poles of the poem's reality. These words form a judgement passed on the poet, and a distilled metaphor for the imagination itself.The vision that fills this work is indeed a miracle. It is not, however, an organic miracle of the subconscious or a divine miracle of intervention from on high. It is a miracle of poetic lucidity, a miracle of crystalline creation. It is, in Coleridge's own words, a miracle of rare device. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Footnotes 1. Disturbing not only in the commonsense, but also evoking the root turba, or "crowd." 2. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1963, p. 67. 3. Who also created a character, Orlando, who changed sex. 4. Who, in a letter to Lytton Strachey, called Ulysses "merely the scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy at Claridges." 4. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Chapter V. 5. Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions, Hodder and Stoughton, Toronto, 1989, p. 163. Books18115@blogcritics.org Sat, 31 Jul 2004 17:48:57 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/07/29/132809.php Sean ScottExistential entropy is the dominant theme of Steve Erickson's sixth book, a meditation on the persistence of memory, the disappearance of the real, and the no-man's-land between fact and imagination.With limber, hypnotic prose and vivid imagery, the nameless narrator leads us through a landscape of paranoia, sex, and decay. Though this no-man's-land takes the shape of L.A. early in the next century, the novel's axes are psychology and identity, not society and technology.One of the narrator's obsessions is what he calls the Cinema of Hysteria: "movies that make no sense at all -- and we understand them completely." Similarly, this tale seems plotless; but, as in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, the arbitrary oddities slowly coalesce into a haunting whole. Erickson has spun a cunning web -- less a book of laughter and forgetting than a seductive insomniac nightmare of hysteria and amnesia. Books18015@blogcritics.org Thu, 29 Jul 2004 13:28:09 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/07/28/073246.php Sean ScottIn one of his early stories, the great Argentine fabulist Jorge Luis Borges coined the phrase "algebra and fire" as a metaphor for the extremes of the mind: reason and passion, discipline and abandon. Nietzsche personified these polar principles as the gods Apollo and Dionysus; Freud wrote of the superego and the id. I propose another pair of names: Strunz and Farah.Unlike the others, guitarists Jorge Strunz and Ardeshir Farah form not a dichotomy but a synthesis, embodying the twin tendencies, both individually and as a duo. Strunz and Farah's playing is as fast and fiery as it gets -- rarely has the cliché "fretboard pyrotechnics" been so appropriate -- yet their sheer physical virtuosity always serves their exquisitely intelligent, mathematically precise melodic lines. World Beat? World Baroque is more like it, as the Latin rhythms and Middle Eastern flourishes -- Strunz was born in Costa Rica, Farah in Iran -- form the danceable background for intricately interwoven nylon-string riffs that are closer to Bach than to Jerry Garcia or Eddie Van Halen.But perhaps not so far from these rock icons. "Both Ardeshir and I had been playing a lot of electric guitar in the late '70s, and I wanted to get back to my roots, which were acoustic." Strunz says. Farah happened to see Strunz perform with his Latin/rock band Caldera. When Caldera broke up, Strunz looked for another guitarist. A mutual friend arranged a meeting. "We saw that there was a chemistry there that quickly develped into a guitar duo thing," Farah says."We both had the idea that acoustic guitar was going to be a more fruitful area of work for us," Strunz says. "It seemed like there was an aesthetic purity to two chairs and two guitars, for starters. It was very attractive."Purity, yes, but not purism. Accompanied by an international band, Strunz and Farah braid threads of European guitar, percussive rhythms, and jazz improvisation into a strong, beautiful tapestry -- "fusion" in the best sense of the word. Despite the disparate ingredients, the results are as pure as crystal and as bracing as a mountain stream.Though they are often pigeonholed with another high-energy acoustic guitar music, Strunz and Farah respectfully discourage the F-word: flamenco."There's a lot of misunderstanding about what flamenco might be, outside of its own culture, which is Spain," Strunz says. "Flamenco is a European, Spanish art form that was developed by the Gypsies and the Andalucian people.Rhythmically and technically, it's a super-complex form. We tell people we are not flamenco guitar players, or 'nouveau flamenco' guitar players, and neither are people who call themselves 'nouveau flamenco' guitar players, flamenco guitar players. They are simply taking advantage of a term that's easy to hang on a music that would be hard to describe otherwise. I can see the convenience of it, but that doesn't make the flamenco community very happy."Of Strunz And Farah's eight albums, the last two, Heat of the Sun and this year's Live were released on their own Selva label. "Everything bad you've heard about the music industry, it's happened to us," Strunz says. "We're both happy to say that it's been far more satisfying from the business side of things to do it this way."Strunz and Farah have worked together, as musicians and now business partners, for 17 years. While most rock bands could have formed and broken up many times over in that time, Strunz and Farah have been too busy making music to even question their longevity."I don't think we've had a moment to catch our breath," Strunz chuckles. "My wife said to me, we haven't taken a vacation in 17 years....The work itself is stimulating, gratifying, artistic, and there's plenty of it, so we're just following the river, the flow."Originally published in 1997. Music17946@blogcritics.org Wed, 28 Jul 2004 07:32:46 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/07/28/073009.php Sean ScottThe Tetherballs of Bougainville Mark Leyner's fifth book is many things -- a relentless yet loving pop-culture satire, a formal parody of various genres, a hot and infinitely dense sampling of exuberant, hypercaffeinated prose. Whatever else can be said, the book sure stands in a class by itself, blazing into virgin territory as the first tetherball novel ever.As Leyner summarized it at a recent reading at San Francisco Booksmith, the plot is simple enough: Our swaggering, leather-trousered, tetherball-obsessed13-year-old protagonist, who conveniently bears the name of his author, witnesses the failed execution of his father, gets it on with the female warden, and reads her his review of an imaginary movie.What makes this worth 240 pages are surprisingly traditional: structure and details. Leyner divided the story into the three most pervasive modes of writing today: the memoir, the screenplay, and the movie review. Leyner also fills in and filigrees the text with samples of such paraliterary modes as the video game, the advertising Q&A, signage copy ("Right lane must turn right"), art jargon, legalese, rock lyrics, etc.Watching Leyner's oeuvre evolve from the self-consciously "experimental" fragmentations of his first book, I Smell Esther Williams through the somewhat more linear narratives My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist and Et Tu, Babe (his first book to be dubbed a "novel") to the relatively conservative prose of Wild Kingdom, his monthly column for Esquire, one might jump to the conclusion that Leyner was losing his edge, growing up and getting boring. Not at all. Though Tetherballs is the most continuous and coherent of all his books, Leyner's newfound focus serves not to thwart his imaginary flights but to boost them higher, as water runs faster through a narrowed pipe. What infects much of his material with its truly outrageous hilarity is not how high his imagination soars, but the control he exercises -- how, just at the right moment, he can slam on the brakes and spin to a stop with a fillip of utter banality.Not that Leyner, for all his originality and brio, is entirely sui generis. In his verbal verve, absurd glee, and non-Euclidean sense of fictive space, Leyner can be placed in a sort of counter-tradition dating back at least to the drunken monk Rabelais, flourishing in the 18th century with Sterne and Diderot, thumbing its nose at Victorian sobriety with Lewis Carroll, and resurfacing in the 20th century in such different guises as Alfred Jarry. Raymond Queneau, S.J. Perelman, and mass-media avatars like the Marx Brothers, classic cartoons, music video and advertising.In keeping with his seeming self-appointment as a home-computer Homer singing Iliads of the Information Age, Leyner has peopled Tetherballs with cameos from the celebrated to the obscure; the ideal reader would need at least passing familiarity with Ralph Reed, Reese Witherspoon, Richard Speck, the Wu-Tang Clan, William T. Vollman, The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, Helena Bonham Carter, Morrissey, Stéphane Mallarmé, the Cirque de Soleil and Christine Todd Whitman, just to name a random few.Before you scream, "We didn't start the fire!", be warned that the names he drops accrete like tiny jellyfish that, together, form a living, pulsing organism. It's hard to say how much of this will keep -- within 15 years Tetherballs will probably need more footnotes than The Waste Land. But even if one doesn't catch all the names, the manic rush of images is sure to smooth over any rough passages. As teen Leyner writes in his fictive movie review, "although personally I found it easy to follow, it's so thoroughly larded with arcane jargon, biotech neologisms, and unexplicated acronyms as to be completely impenetrable to the average layperson."The thing is that for all the apparent obstacles Leyner throws in the reader's path, Tetherballs is indeed fast-moving, imminently accessible, and one of the funniest books you are likely to read. Books17940@blogcritics.org Wed, 28 Jul 2004 07:30:09 EDT