Category: Volume 3 – Number 1 – September 1992

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    Every issue of Postmodern Culture will carry notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcements, up to 250 words, free of charge. Advertisements will also be published on an exchange basis. Send anouncements and advertisements to: pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu
     


     

         Journal and Book Announcements:
    
    1)   _The Centennial Review_
    2)   _Sub Stance_
    3)   _Public Culture_
    4)   _College Literature_
    5)   _Poetics Today_
    6)   _XB_
    7)   _Perforations_
    8)   _Amazons International_
    9)   _After the Book_ { a special issue by _Perforations_ }
    10)  _Robert Lax and Concrete Poetry_
    11)  _Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction_
    12)  _Positions_
    13)  _SOPHIA_
    14)  _Delphi Network Newsletter_
    15)  _PYNCHON NOTES_
    16)  _Beyond Metafiction: Self- Consciousness in Soviet        
              Literature_
    17)  _GNET_: An Archive and Electronic Journal
    
         Calls for Papers and Participants:
    
    18)  Association for Computers and the Humanities Association for
              Literary and Linguistic Computing
    19)  _Without any Rules: The Politics and Poetics of the       
              Vernacular_
    20)  _MFS:  Modern Fiction Studies_
    21)  _Vietnam Generation_
    22)  Composition as Explanation
    
         Conferences and Societies
    
    23)  _Cylinder_
    24)  SUNY Stonybrook Conference on Reproductive Technologies:
              Narratives, Gender, Society
    25)  1992 Modern Languages Association Convention
    26)  Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy
    27)  Committee on Computing as a Cultural Process (American
              Anthropological Association)
    28)  _Rethinking Marxism_: A Journal of Economics, Culture, and
              Society
    29)  31st annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and
              Existential Philosophy
    30)  University of Manitoba: A Consortium for Network Publication
              of Refereed Research Journals
    31)  8th Annual Conference on the Scientific Study of          
              Subjectivity
    32)  Program of Events for the V2 Organization
    33)  3rd Washington, D.C. Virtual Reality Conference 
    
         Networked Discussion Groups
    
    34)  _SEMIOS-L_
    35)  _SOCHIST_
    36)  _INTERDIS_
    
         Employment
    
    37)  Department of English at Carnegie Mellon University
    
         Grants
    
    38)  Travel Grants to the Center for Sales, Advertising, and
              Marketing History Special Collections Library, Duke
              University
    
    1)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _The Centennial Review_            
    
    Edited by R. K. Meiners
    
    The _Centennial Review_ is committed to reflection on
    intellectual work, particularly as set in the University and its
    environment.  We are interested in work that examines models of
    theory and communication in the physical, biological, and human
    sciences; that re-reads major texts and authoritative documents
    in different disciplines or explores interpretive procedures;
    that questions the cultural and social implications of research
    in a variety of disciplines.
    
    Issues now available:
    
    Fall 1991:  _Discourses of Mourning, Survival, and Commemoration_
    Articles by James Hatley, Donald Kuspit, Tony Brinkley and Joseph
    Arsenault, Marshall W. Alcorn, Jr., Peter Balakian, R. K.
    Meiners, Louis Kaplan, Hans Borchers, Morris Grossman, Berel
    Lang, David William Foster; Poetry by Dimitris Tsaloumas, Sherri
    Szeman, Walter Toneeo, Henry Gilfond, Elizabeth R. Curry, Peter
    Balakian.
    
    Winter 1992:  _Cultural Studies_  Articles by Douglas Kellner,
    Eyal Amiran, John Unsworth, and Carol Chaski, Steven Best, Janet
    Staiger, Jeffrey Seinfeld, Charles Altieri, Tony Barnstone;
    Poetry by Hillel Schwartz, Robert Hahn, Michael Atkinson, John
    Hildebidle.
    
    Spring 1992:  Articles by Stephen Gill, Peter Baker, R. M. Berry,
    Carole Anne Taylor, Michel Valentin, Edward M. Griffen, Robert
    Erwin, Ronald Hauser, Karl Albert Scherner (transl. Ronald
    Hauser), Diana Dolev and Haim Gordon, Albert Feuerwerker, Donald
    Lammers, Ileana A. Orlich.
    
    Subscription rates:  1 year/$10.00  2 years/$15.00
                             Single issues/$5.00
    (postage outside US Please add $3.00 per year, prices in effect
    through September 1992)
    
    Make checks payable to:
    
    _The Centennial Review_
    312 Linton Hall
    Michigan State University
    East Lansing, Michigan
    48824-1044
    
    2)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _Sub Stance_
    
    Edited by:  Sydney Levy and Michel Pierssens
    
    Published: 3/year   ISSN: 0049-2426
    
    Promotes new thoughts by leading American and European authors
    which alter the perception of contemporary culture--be it
    artistic, humanistic, or scientific.  Represents literary theory,
    philosophy, psychoanalysis, art criticism, and film studies.
    
    Rates:     Individuals (must pre-pay)   $21 / yr.
               Institutions                 $68 / yr.
               Foreign postage              $ 8 / yr.
               Airmail                      $25 / yr.
    
               We accept MasterCard and VISA.  Canadian customers
               please remit 7% Goods and Services Tax.
    
    Please write for a free brochure and back issue list to:
    
    Journal Division
    University of Wisconsin Press
    114 North Murray Street
    Madison, WI  53715 USA
    
    Or call, 608-262-4952, FAX 608-262-7560
    
    3)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _Public Culture_
    
    Edited by  Carol A. Breckenridge
    
    Engaging critical analyses of tensions between global cultural
    flows and public cultures in a diasporic world.
    
    Volume 4, Number 1 (Fall 1991)
       * Looking at Film Hoardings       R. Srivatsan
       * The Doors of Public Culture     Pradip Krishen
       * The Meaning of Baseball in 1992 Bill Brown
       * Becoming the Armed Man          J. William Gibson
       * The Function of New Theory      Xiaobing Tang
       * Worldly Discourses              Dan Rose
       * Voices of the Rainforest        Steven Feld
       * Anuradhapura                    Wimal Disanayake
       * River and Bridge                Meena Alexander
    
    Volume 4, Number 2 (Spring 1992)
       * The Banality of Power and the
         Aesthetics of Vulgarity in
         the Postcolony                  Achille Mbembe
       * Take Care of Public Telephones  Robert J. Foster
       * The Death of History?           Dipesh Charrabarty
       * The Public Fetus and the Family
         Car                             Janelle Sue Taylor
       * Race and the Humanities: The
         End of Modernity?               Homi Bhabha
       * "Disappeating" Iraqis           David Prochaska
       * Algeria Caricatures the Gulf
         War                             Susan Slyomovics
       * Mobilizing Fictions             Robert Stam
       * Television and the Gulf War     Victor J. Caldarola
    
    _Public Culture_ is published biannually.  A years subscription
    for individuals is $10.00 ($14.00 foreign); institutions $20.00
    ($24.00 foreign).  Back issues are available for individuals at
    $6.50 ($8.50 foreign);  institutions $13.00 ($15.00 foreign).
    
    Write to:
    University of Chicago
    Weiboldt Hall
    1010 E. 59th Street
    Chicago, IL  60637
    
    4)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _College Literature_
    
    Edited by  Kostas Myrsiades
    
    A triannual literary journal for the college classroom.
    
    "In one bold stroke you seem to have turned _College Literature_
    into one of the things everyone will want to read."
       Cary Nelson
    
    "My Sense is that _College Literature_ will have a substantial
    influence in the field of literacy and cultural studies."
       Henry A. Giroux
    
    "A journal one must consult to keep tabs on cultural theory and
    contemporary discourse, particularly in relation to pedagogy."
       Robert Con Davis
    
    Forthcoming issues:
       Cultural Studies: Theory, Praxis, Pedagogy
       Teaching Postcolonial Literatures
       Europe and America: The Legacy of Discovery
       Third World Women
       African American Writing
    
    Subscription rates:       US          Foreign
               Individuals    $24/year    $29/year
               Institutions   $48/year    $53/year
    
    Send Prepaid orders to:
    
    _College Literature_
    Main 544
    West Chester University
    West Chester, PA  19383
    
    5)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _Poetics Today_
    
    Edited by:  Itamar Even-Zohar
    
    International Journal for Theory and Analysis of Literature
    and Communication
    
    _Children's Literature_  A special issue edited by Zohar Shavit.
    
    This volume addresses the wide spread of cultural issues raised
    by the study of children's culture, the teaching function of
    children's literature, and current thinking on the demarcation of
    
    boundaries between children's and adult literature.
    $14, 261 pages, 13:1 Spring 1992
    
    Subscription rates:
    
    Individuals: $28, Institutions: $56, Single issue $14
    (Add $8 for subscriptions outside the U.S.)
    
    Send Check, money order, credit card number to:
    
    Duke University Press
    Journals Division
    6697 College Station
    Durham, NC  27708
    
    Call or FAX us between 8:00 and 4:00 EST with your VISA,
    MasterCard or American Express order.
    
    Phone:  919-684-6837  FAX: 919-684-8644
    
    6)------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _Xb_
    
       A bibliographic database of the literature of xerography,
    (photo)copier art, electrostatic printing and electrographic art,
    seeks data and materials about the form copy art & the use of
    duplicative printing technologies for cultural or artistic
    purposes by artists or non-artists for input into the Procite
    bibliographic software for the Macintosh. An ongoing art
    information-information art project, Xb requests submissions
    especially in machine-readable form but also in other media
    formats: periodicals, serials, newspaper and magazine clippings,
    exhibition announcements and catalogs, monographs, search
    printouts and information on disk, all these are of interest.
    A copy of the completed bibliography or the database on diskette
    (Procite databases work equally well on Mac or IBM) to each
    contributor along with some sort of documentation of the process
    and a list of participants.
    
    Submissions via mailways, telephone or Bitnet/Internet/ Well to:
    
    _Xb_
    c/o Reed Altemus
    email:IP25196@portland.maine.edu OR
          raltemus@well.sf.ca.us
    mail: 16 Blanchard Road
          Cumberland Ctr., Maine
          04021-97       USA
    phone: (207)829-3666
    
    7)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _Perforations_
    
    _After the Book: Writing Literature Writing Technology_
    A special issue of _Perforations_ magazine, is now in production.
    Contributors include:
    
    *Virtual Orphicality: Telepathy, Virtuality,
     and Encysted Sense Ratios              Robert Cheatham
    *Gaps, Maps, and Perception: What Hypertext Readers
     (Don't) do                             Jane Yellowlees Douglas
    *Yet Still More (Storyspace hypertext)  Shawn FitzGerald
    *Colloquy and Intergrams: Two Interactive
     Prosodies                              Richard Gess
    *The Computational Score                Francesco Giomi
    *After the Book?                        Carolyn Guyer
    *Grotesque Corpus: Hypertext as
     Carnival                               Terence Harpold
    *Hypertext Narrative                    Michael Joyce
    *Wasting Time (IBM-compatible
     narrabase)                             Judy Malloy
    *Dreamtime (HyperCard hyperfiction);
     Shadow of the Informand: A Rhetorical
     Experiment in Hypertext (essay)        Stuart Moulthrop
    *Hypertext: Permeable Skin              Martha Petry
    *Poetics and Hypertext                  Jim Rosenberg
    *Contingency, Liberation, and the
     Seduction of Geometry: Hypertext as
     an Avant-Garde Medium                  Martin Rosenberg
    
    Plus fiction by Dea Anne Martin, comics by Grace Braun, poetry by
    Joe Amato, cultural commentary by Alan Sondheim, and more.
    
    _Perforations_, a journal of language, art, and technology, is
    published by Atlanta's Public Domain arts collective. To order
    "After the Book," send a check or money order for $20 (payable to
    Public Domain) to:
    
    Public Domain
    PO Box 8899
    Atlanta GA 30306-0899
    
    Voice mail: (404) 612-7529. E-mail: pdomain@unix.cc.emory.edu
    
    Guest Editor: Richard Gess
    
    8)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _Amazons International_
    
       An electronic digest newsletter for and about Amazons
    (physically and psychologically strong, assertive women who are
    not afraid to break free from traditional ideas about gender
    roles, femininity and the female physique) and their friends and
    lovers.  _Amazons International_ is dedicated to the image of the
    female hero in fiction and in fact, as it is expressed in art and
    literature, in the physiques and feats of female athletes, in
    sexual values and practices, and provides information, discussion
    and a supportive environment for these values and issues.  Gender
    role traditionalists and others who are opposed to Amazon ideals
    should not subscribe.
    
    Contact: thomas@smaug.uio.no.
    
    9)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _After the Book_
    
    _WRITING LITERATURE/WRITING TECHNOLOGY_
    
    _PERFORATIONS_ NO.3 SPRING/SUMMER 1992
    
    This special issue of _PERFORATIONS_ features a gathering of new
    essays on electronic writing and three new electronic texts in
    HyperCard, Storyspace, and IBM formats. Contributors and
    contributions include:
    
    *New Dystopian Comics                    Grace Braun
    *Virtual Orphicality: Telepathy,
     Virtuality, and Encysted Sense Ratios   Robert Cheatham
    *Gaps, Maps, and Perception: What
     Hypertext Readers (Don't) Do            Jane Douglas
    *Yet Still More (Storyspace hypertext)   Shawn FitzGerald
    *Colloquy and Intergrams: Two
     Interactive Prosodies                   Richard Gess
    *The Computational Score                 Francesco Giomi
    *After the Book?                         Carolyn Guyer
    *Grotesque Corpus: Hypertext as Carnival Terry Harpold
    *Hypertext Narrative                     Michael Joyce
    *Wasting Time (IBM-compatible electronic
     fiction)                                Judy Malloy
    *Dolls/Meat/Avila (fiction)              Dea Anne Martin
    *Dreamtime (HyperCard hyperfiction),
     and Shadow of the Informand: A
     Rhetorical Experiment in Hypertext      Stuart Moulthrop
    *Hypertext: Permeable Skin               Martha Petry
    *Du Ranten (Rant II)                     Chea Prince
    *Poetics and Hypertext                   Jim Rosenberg
    *Contingency, Liberation, and the
     Seduction of Geometry: Hypertext as an
     Avant-Garde Medium                      Martin Rosenberg
    *Knowledge Flux and Questions for
     M. Chaput                               Alan Sondheim
    
    _PERFORATIONS_, a journal of language, art, and technology, is
    published by Atlanta's Public Domain arts collective.
    To order "After the Book," send check or money order for $20
    payable to Public Domain to:
    
    Public Domain
    PO Box 8899
    Atlanta, Ga 30306-0899
    Voice mail: (404) 612-7529. E-mail: pdomain@unix.cc.emory.edu.
    
    Guest Editor: Richard Gess
    
    10)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
    Robert Lax and Concrete Poetry
    3 August - 23 October 1992
    
    Rare Book and Manuscript Library
    Butler Library -- Sixth Floor
    Columbia University
    
    A travelling exhibit, originating from the Burchfield Art Center
    at SUNY-Buffalo and consisting of some 30 examples of Robert
    Lax's concrete poetry and another 40 examples of work by various
    writers including Bill Bissett, Raymond Federman, Ian Hamilton
    Finaly, and Aram Saroyan.
    
    An exhibition catalog, which includes essays by Mary Ellen Solt
    and Robert Bertholf, is available for five dollars.
    
    11)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction_
    
    by Marleen S. Barr
    
    Forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press in November.
    
    The surprising and controversial thesis of _FEMINIST FABULATION_
    is unflinching: the postmodern canon has systematically excluded
    a wide range of important women's writing by dismissing it as
    genre fiction. Marleen S. Barr issues an urgent call for a
    corrective, for the recognition of a new meta- or super-genre of
    contemporary fiction--feminist fabulation--which includes both
    acclaimed mainstream works and works which today's critics
    consistently denigrate or ignore. In its investigation of the
    relationship between feminist writers and postmodern fiction in
    terms of outer space and canonical space, _FEMINIST FABULATION_
    is a pioneer vehicle built to explore postmodernism in terms of
    female literary spaces which have something to do with real-world
    women.
    
    Branding the postmodern canon as a masculinist utopia and a
    Nowhere for feminists, Barr offers the stunning argument that
    feminist science fiction is not science fiction at all but is
    really metafiction about patriarchal fiction.  Barr's concern is
    directed every bit as much toward contemporary feminist critics
    as it is toward patriarchal institutions.  Rather than focusing
    so much energy on reclaiming female authors of the past, she
    suggests, feminist critics should direct more attention to the
    present's lost feminist fabulators, writers steeped in
    nonpatriarchal definitions of reality who can guide us into
    another order of world altogether.
    
    Barr offers very specific plans for a new literary category that
    can impact upon women, feminist theory, postmodern theory, and
    science fiction theory alike. _FEMINIST FABULATION_ calls for a
    new understanding of postmodern fiction which will better enable
    the canon to accommodate feminist difference and emphasizes that
    the literature called "feminist SF" is an important site of
    postmodern feminist difference.  Barr motivates readers to
    rethink the whole country club of postmodernism, not just the
    membership list--and in so doing provides a discourse of this
    century worthy of a prominent place in institutions like the
    practice of criticism and the teaching of literature.
    
    12)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _POSITIONS_
    
    East Asia cultural critique offers a new forum of debate for
    all concerned with the social, intellectual and political events
    unfolding in east Asia and within the Asian diaspora.  Profound
    political changes and intensifying global flows of labor and
    capital in the late twentieth century are rapidly redrawing
    national and regional borders.  These transformations compel us
    to rethink our priorities in scholarship, teaching and criticism.
    Mindful of the dissolution of the discursive binary East and
    West, _POSITIONS_ advocates placing cultural critique at the
    center of historical and theoretical practice.  The global forces
    that are reconfiguring our world continue to sustain formulations
    of nation, gender, class and ethnicity.  We propose to call into
    question those still-pressing, yet unstable categories by
    crossing academic boundaries and rethinking the
    terms of our analysis.   These efforts, we hope, will contribute
    toward informed discussion both in and outside the academy.
    
    _POSITIONS_ central premise is that criticism must always be
    self-critical. Critique of another social order must be
    self-aware as commentary on our own. Likewise, we seek critical
    practices that reflect on the politics of knowing and that
    connect our scholarship to the struggles of those whom we study.
    
    All these endeavors require that we account for positions as
    places, contexts, power relations, and links between knowledge
    and knowers as actors in existing social institutions.  In
    seeking to explore how theoretical practices are linked across
    national and ethnic divides we hope to construct other positions
    from which to imagine political affinities across the many
    dimensions of our differences.
    
    _POSITIONS_ is an independent refereed journal.  Its direction is
    taken at the initiative of its editorial collective as well as
    through the encouragement from its readers and writers.
    
    To subscribe for triannual magazine beginning in spring 1993
    write to:
    
    Mr. Steve A Cohn
    Journals Manager
    Duke University Press
    6697 College Station
    Durham, NC 27708.
    
    To submit a manuscript send three copies to:
    
    Tani E Barlow
    Senior Editor
    94 Castro Street
    San Francisco, CA 94114
    
    or e-mail: Barlow@sfsuvax1.edu.
    
    13)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _SOPHIA_
    
    Australia is proud to announce the return of _Sophia_, a journal
    for discussion in modern and postmodern philosophical issues in
    theology, religion, metaphysics, feminist theology, ecotheology,
    crosscultural critiques of traditional Western doctrinal bases,
    indeed in all kinds of `deconstruction' of traditional modes of
    establishing the origins and grounds of `faith'.
    
    Short articles of up to 5000 words are welcomed; reviews will
    also be invited, notices of book discussions and notes on
    previously published articles as well.
    
    The journal has a circulation of some 600 internationally and is
    very inexpensive to subscribe to: US$12 for three issues in a
    year. Send order to:
    
    _Sophia_
    Faculty of Humanities
    Deakin University
    Geelong, Victoria 3217
    Australia
    
    Editor is Dr Purushottama Bilimoria
    (*same address; e-mail address: pbilmo@deakin.oz.au)
    
    Further information can be sent by postal mail to anyone
    who would like to receive a brochure and sample pages.
    
            Our motto: `She is wisdom'.
    By the way, information can also be had from our Cambridge, MAss
    representative at Harvard:
    
    Ms Kristyn Saunders
    c/o Mail Room
    Harvard Divinity School,
    45 Francis Ave
    Cambridge, MA 02138.
    
    14)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _Delphi Network Newsletter_
    
    A monthly newsletter, commenting on current higher educational
    practices; a devil's advocate view of administration and
    classroom teaching.
    
    Write for a free copy to:
    
    David V. Jenrette
    Basic Communication Studies
    Miami-Dade Community College North
    11380 NW 27th Ave.
    Miami, FL  33167
    
    or phone:  305-237-1579
    
    15)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
                          _PYNCHON NOTES_ 26-27
                              Now Available
    
                                 Editors
    
                             John M. Krafft
                       Miami University--Hamilton
                           1601 Peck Boulevard
                        Hamilton, OH  45011-3399
    E-mail: jmkrafft@miavx2.bitnet or jmkrafft@miavx2.ham.muohio.edu
    
                            Khachig Tololyan
                           English Department
                           Wesleyan University
                       Middletown, CT  06457-6061
    
                           Bernard Duyfhuizen
                           English Department
                   University of Wisconsin--Eau Claire
                       Eau Claire, WI  54702-4004
        E-mail: pnotesbd@uwec.bitnet or pnotesbd@cnsvax.uwec.edu
    
      _Pynchon Notes_ is published twice a year, in spring and fall.
    
      Submissions: The editors welcome submission of manuscripts
    either in traditional form or in the form of text files on floppy
    disk.  Disks may be 5.25" or 3.5"; IBM-compatible preferred.
    Convenient formats include ASCII, DCA, WordStar, Microsoft Word,
    and WordPerfect 4.1 or later.  Manuscripts, notes and queries,
    and bibliographic information should be addressed to John M.
    Krafft.
    
      Subscriptions: North America, $5.00 per single issue or $9.00
    per year (or double number); Overseas, $6.50 per single issue or
    $12.00 per year, mailed air/printed matter.  Checks should be
    made payable to Bernard Duyfhuizen--PN.  Subscriptions and
    back-issue requests should be addressed to Bernard Duyfhuizen.
    
      _Pynchon Notes_ is supported in part by the English Departments
    of Miami University--Hamilton and the University of Wisconsin--
    Eau Claire.
    
                           Copyright (c) 1992
        John M. Krafft, Khachig Tololyan, and Bernard Duyfhuizen
    
                             ISSN 0278-1891
    
                         CONTENTS OF _PN_ 26-27
    
    Pynchon's Politics: The Presence of an Absence
      Charles Hollander                                             5
    
    Pynchon in Life
      Terry Caesar                                                 61
    
    From Puritanism to Paranoia: Trajectories of History in
    Weber and Pynchon
      Ralph Schroeder                                              69
    
    "How Do You Spell Reality?--'O-U-T-A-S-E'": Or How I Learned to
    Stop _Gravity's Rainbow_ and Start Worrying
      Stephen Jukiri and Alan Nadel                                81
    
    Grab-bagging in _Gravity's Rainbow_: Incidental (Further)
    Notes and Sources
      George Schmundt-Thomas                                    
    91
    _Vineland_: TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA FICTION (Or,
    St. Ruggles' Struggles, Chapter 4)
      Alec McHoul                                                  97
    
    _Vineland_ in the Mainstream Press: A Reception Study
      Douglas Keesey                                              107
    
    Coming Home: Pynchon's Morning in America
      Sanford S. Ames                                             115
    
    A Note on Television in _Vineland_
      Albert Piela III                                            125
    
    Pynchon and Cornell Engineering Physics, 1953-54
      Lance Schachterle                                           129
    
    Slade Revisited, or, The End(s) of Pynchon Criticism
    (Review Essay)
      Brian McHale                                                139
    
    Pynchon's Intertextual Circuits (Review)
      Khachig Tololyan                                            153
    
    Rediscovering the Humane in the Human (Review)
      Stacey Olster                                               163
    
    "But Who, They?": Pynchon's Political Allegory (Review)
      Eyal Amiran                                                 167
    
    Other Books Received                                          173
    
    Notes                                                         175
    
    Bibliography (--1992)                                         177
    
    Contributors                                                  191
    
                                BACK ISSUES
    
      _Pynchon Notes_ has been published since October 1979.
    Although most back issues are now out of print, they are
    available in the form of photocopies.
    
    Nos.  1- 4: $1.50 each;  Overseas, $ 2.50.
    Nos.  5-10: $2.50 each;  Overseas, $ 3.50.
    Nos. 11-17: $3.00 each;  Overseas, $ 4.50.
    No.  18-19: $7.00;       Overseas, $10.00.
    No.  20-21: $7.00;       Overseas, $10.00.
    No.  22-23: $9.00;       Overseas, $12.00.
    No.  24-25: $9.00;       Overseas, $12.00.
    
      Khachig Tololyan and Clay Leighton's _Index_ to all the names,
    other capitalized nouns, and acronyms in _Gravity's Rainbow_ is
    also available.
    
    _Index_: $5.00;  Overseas, $6.50.
    
      All checks should be made payable to Bernard Duyfhuizen--PN.
    Overseas checks must be payable in US dollars and payable through
    an American bank or an American branch of an overseas bank.
    
                   _Pynchon Notes_ is a member of CELJ
             the Conference of Editors of Learned Journals.
    
    16)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
    Due for publication on 8 October:
    
    _Beyond Metafiction: Self- Consciousness in Soviet Literature_,
    by David Shepherd. Oxfordetc., Clarendon Press
    
    David Shepherd
    University of Manchester
    
    17)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
                 GNET: an Archive and Electronic Journal
    
                      Toward a Truly Global Network
    
    Computer-mediated communication networks are growing rapidly, yet
    they are not truly global -- they are concentrated in affluent
    parts of North America, Western Europe, and parts of Asia.
    
    GNET is an archive/journal for documents pertaining to the effort
    to bring the net to lesser-developed nations and the poorer parts
    of developed nations.  (Net access is better in many "third
    world" schools than in South-Central Los Angeles).  GNET consists
    of two parts, an archive directory and a moderated discussion.
    
    Archived documents are available by anonymous ftp from the
    directory global_net at dhvx20.csudh.edu (155.135.1.1).  To
    conserve bandwidth, the archive contains an abstract of each
    document, as well as the full document.  (Those without ftp
    access can contact me for instructions on mail-based retrieval).
    
    In addition to the archive, there is a moderated GNET discussion
    list.  The list is limited to discussion of the documents in the
    archive.  It is hoped that document authors will follow this
    discussion, and update their documents accordingly.  If this
    happens, the archive will become a dynamic journal.  Monthly
    mailings will list new papers added to the archive.
    
    We wish broad participation, with papers from nuts-and-bolts to
    visionary.  Suitable topics include, but are not restricted to:
    
       descriptions of networks and projects
       host and user hardware and software
       connection options and protocols
       current and proposed applications
       education using the global net
       user and system administrator training
       social, political or spriritual impact
       economic and environmental impact
       politics and funding
       free speech, security and privacy
       directories of people and resources
    
    To submit a document to the archive or subscribe to the moderated
    discussion list, use the address gnet_request@dhvx20.csudh.edu.
    
    Larry Press
    
    18)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
                ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTERS AND THE HUMANITIES
             ASSOCIATION FOR LITERARY AND LINGUISTIC COMPUTING
    
              1993 JOINT INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE  ACH-ALLC93
    
                              JUNE 16-19, 1993
                   GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY, WASHINGTON, D.C.
    
                              CALL FOR PAPERS
    
    This conference -- the major forum for literary, linguistic and
    humanities computing-- will highlight the development of new
    computing methodologies for research and teaching in the
    humanities, the development of significant new networked-based
    and computer-based resources for humanities research, and the
    application and evaluation of computing techniques in humanities
    subjects.
    
    TOPICS: We welcome submissions on topics such as text encoding;
    hypertext; text corpora; computational lexicography; statistical
    models; syntactic, semantic and other forms of text analysis;
    also computer applications in history, philosophy, music and
    other humanities disciplines.
    
    In addition, ACH and ALLC extend a special invitation to members
    of the library community engaged in creating and cataloguing
    network-based resources in the humanities, developing and
    integrating databases of texts and images of works central to the
    humanities, and refining retrieval techniques for humanities
    databases.
    
    The deadline for submissions is 1 NOVEMBER 1992.
    
    REQUIREMENTS: Proposals should describe substantial and original
    work. Those that concentrate on the development of new computing
    methodologies should make clear how the methodologies are applied
    to research and/or teaching in the humanities, and should include
    some critical assessment of the application of those
    methodologies in the humanities. Those that concentrate on a
    particular application in the humanities (e.g., a study of the
    style of an author) should cite traditional as well as
    computer-based approaches to the problem and should include some
    critical assessment of the computing methodologies used. All
    proposals should include conclusions and references to important
    sources.
    
    INDIVIDUAL PAPERS: Abstracts of 1500-2000 words should be
    submitted for presentations of thirty minutes including
    questions.
    
    SESSIONS: Proposals for sessions (90 minutes) are also invited.
    These should take the form of either:
    
    (a) Three papers. The session organizer should submit a 500-word
    statement describing the session topic, include abstracts of
    1000-1500 words for each paper, and indicate that each author is
    willing to participate in the session; or
    
    (b) A panel of up to 6 speakers. The panel organizer should
    submit an abstract of 1500 words describing the panel topic, how
    it will be organized, the names of all the speakers, and an
    indication that each speaker is willing to participate in the
    session.
    
    FORMAT OF SUBMISSIONS
    
    Electronic submissions are strongly encouraged.  Please pay
    particular attention to the format given below.  Submissions
    which do not conform to this format will be returned to the
    authors for reformatting, or may not be considered if they arrive
    very close to the deadline.
    
    All submissions should begin with the following information:
    
    TITLE: title of paper
    AUTHOR(S): names of authors
    AFFILIATION: of author(s)
    CONTACT ADDRESS: full postal address
    E-MAIL: electronic mail address of main author (for contact),
            followed by other authors (if any)
    FAX NUMBER: of main author
    PHONE NUMBER: of main author
    
    (1) Electronic submissions
    
    These should be plain ASCII text files, not files formatted by a
    wordprocessor, and should not contain TAB characters or soft
    hyphens. Paragraphs should be separated by blank lines. Headings
    and subheadings should be on separate lines and be numbered.
    Notes, if needed at all, should take the form of endnotes rather
    than Choose a simple markup scheme for accents and other
    characters that cannot be transmitted by electronic mail, and
    include an explanation of the markup scheme after the title
    information and before the start of the text.
    
    Electronic submissions should be sent to
    Neuman@GUVAX.Georgetown.edu
    with the subject line " Submission for
    ACH-ALLC93".
    
    (2) Paper submissions
    
    Submissions should be typed or printed on one side of the paper
    only, with ample margins. Six copies should be sent to
    
    ACH-ALLC93 (Paper submission)
    Dr. Michael Neuman
    Academic Computer Center
    238 Reiss Science Building
    Georgetown University
    Washington, D.C. 20057
    
    DEADLINES
    
    Proposals for papers and sessions            November 1, 1992
    Notification of acceptance                   February 1, 1993
    Advance registration                         May 10, 1993
    
    There will be a substantial increase in the registration fee for
    registrations received after May 10, 1993.
    
    PUBLICATION
    
    A selection of papers presented at the conference will be
    published in the series Research in Humanities Computing edited
    by Susan Hockey and Nancy Ide and published by Oxford University
    Press.
    
    INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM COMMITTEE
    
    Proposals will be evaluated by a panel of reviewers who will make
    recommendations to the Program Committee comprised of:
    
    Chair: Marianne Gaunt, Rutgers, the State University (ACH)
           Thomas Corns, University of Wales, Bangor (ALLC)
           Paul Fortier, University of Manitoba (ACH)
           Jacqueline Hamesse, Universite Catholique Louvain-la-Neuve
              (ALLC)
           Susan Hockey, Rutgers and Princeton Universities (ALLC)
           Nancy Ide, Vassar College (ACH)
           Randall Jones, Brigham Young University (ACH)
           Antonio Zampolli, University of Pisa (ALLC)
    Local organizer: Michael Neuman, Georgetown University (ACH)
    
    ACCOMMODATION
    
    Accommodations for conference participants are available at
    several locations in the Georgetown area:
         Georgetown University's Leavey Conference Center
         The Georgetown Inn
         One Washington Circle Hotel
         Georgetown University's Village C Residence Hall
    
    LOCATION
    
    Georgetown, an historic residential district along the Potomac
    River, is a six-mile ride by taxi from Washington National
    Airport. International flights arrive at Dulles Airport, which
    offers regular bus service to the Nation's Capital.
    
    INQUIRIES
    
    Please address all inquiries to:
    
    ACH-ALLC93
    Dr. Michael Neuman
    Academic Computer Center
    238 Reiss Science Building
    Georgetown University
    Washington, D.C. 20057
    
    Phone: 202-687-6096
    FAX:   202-687-6003
    Bitnet:  Neuman@Guvax
    Internet:  Neuman@Guvax.Georgetown.edu
    
    Please give your name, full mailing address, telephone and fax
    numbers, and e-mail address with any inquiry.
    
    19)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _WITHOUT ANY RULES: THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF THE VERNACULAR_
    
    We are seeking original, article-length essays on vernacular art-
    forms in a postcolonial/postmodern context, including music, oral
    poetry, post-colonial writing/criticism, vernacular festivals or
    other practices, vernacular architecture, film, video, or other
    appropriations of space/language/technology.  Some examples might
    be: hip-hop music, graffiti, raves, dance parties, blues, jazz,
    reggae, postcolonial fiction & poetry, home videos, sampling,
    pastiche, photo-collage, xerox art.  Essays on vernacular
    languages are especially sought which frame the question of the
    opposition (ality) of the vernacular, as a language of resistance
    to hegemonic forces.
    
    Contributors at present include Ronald Jemal Stephens on the
    vocabulary of hip-hop, and an essay on the vernacular by the
    Nigerian novelist Amos Tutuola.
    
    Abstracts, proposals, and/or papers may be sent by e-mail to:
    rapotter@colby.edu
    
    or via snail mail to:
    
    Russell Potter
    English Department
    Colby College
    Waterville Maine 04901.
    
    The co-editor of this collection is Bennet Schaber ("Modernity
    and the Vernacular") of Syracuse University.
    
    20)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _MFS:  Modern Fiction Studies_
    
    Special Issues Announcement
    
    The Fall '92 issue of MFS will be a special issue on the
    "Politics of Modernism."
    
    The Spring '93 issue will be a special issue on "Fiction of the
    Indian Sub-Continent"; submissions are invited (see below for
    address): Deadline:  November 1, 1992
    
    The Fall '93 issue will be a special issue on the fiction of Toni
    Morrison; submissions are invited (see below for address):
    Deadline:   April 1, 1992
    
    The Spring '94 issue will be a special issue, edited by Barbara
    Harlow, on "The Politics of Cultural Displacement."  The issue
    will include essays that address issues of displacement across
    various narrative genres, including fiction, film, historical
    account, legal documentation, and reportage.  The guest editor
    will be particularly interested in seeing essays that address
    these issues in light of the cultural politics of deportation,
    emigration/immigration, population transfer, political asylum,
    extradition, "illegal aliens," and migrant labor.  This special
    issue of MFS proposes to examine the pressures on the received
    generic formulas of narrative convention and literary paradigm by
    these global demographic rearrangements.  Deadline:  November 1,
    1993.
    
    All submissions to MFS, both for special issues and general
    issues, should be sent in duplicate to:
    
    The Editors
    MFS:  Modern Fiction Studies
    Department of English
    1389 Heavilon Hall
    Purdue University
    West Lafayette IN 47907-1389.
    
    21)------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _Vietnam Generation_
    
    Invites submissions for the special issue _American Indians and
    the Vietnam War_  Original poetry, prose, critical works dealing
    with American Indian experiences in and during the Vietnam War,
    and critical articles on the characterization of American
    Indians in Vietnam War fiction are encouraged for consideration.
    
    Submit proposals, abstracts, poems and prose to:
    
    David Erben
    CPR 326
    English Dept
    Univ of South Florida
    Tampa, Fl 33620.
    
    22)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
         CALL FOR PAPERS: "Composition as Explanation"
        The 1993 American Studies Association annual conference
    (Boston, Massachusetts / November 4-7, 1993) is on "Cultural
    Transformations / Countering Traditions." I want to propose a
    panel composed of papers discussing and enacting the intersection
    of the academic essay and the poem.  Papers that attempt to
    escape the constraints of genre that form the academic essay will
    be given special priority, but work that discusses the mutant
    products of this intersection (such as Gertrude Stein's
    "Composition as Explanation") or approaches poetics from a
    cultural studies perspective is also welcome.
        Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words by December
    15, 1992 to Juliana Spahr / State University of New York at
    Buffalo / 302 Clemens Hall / Buffalo, New York 14260.
    E-mail--V231SEY9@UBVMS.BITNET.
    
    23)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _Cylinder_
    
    The international society for the philosophy of tools and space.
    
       We are an interdisciplinary and "multinational" organization,
    small but growing, dedicated to thoughtful discussion about and
    research into issues concerning tools and space.  Currently, we
    maintain a membership list and circulate a short newsletter.  But
    our future plans call for expansion - a number of conferences and
    a journal are possible in the next few years. Within the scope of
    our society, members have raised diverse and fascinating issues
    for consideration, including but not limited to the following:
    
    * The role of equipment in Heidegger: the tool and truth in _Sein
      und Zeit_
    * Bergson; Levinas and the concept of hypostasis
    * Baudrillard & Virilio: speed, the simulacrum and "crystal     
      revenge"
    * Marx: from use- to exchange-value; the deterritorializing     
      adventure of capital and surplus-value
    * Deleuze/Guattari: desiring machines, paranoid machines,       
      miraculating machines, celibate machines
    * The mechanics of the dreamwork in psycho-analysis
    * Poetics of space a la Bachelard
    * Figural and rhetorical aspects of the tool in literature; the 
      delirious machines of Poe and Kafka
    * bolo'bolo and other political theories of reterritorialization
    * Architectural theory and practice
    * Media theory
    * Virtual reality: the emergence of simulacra in social space
    * Transit technology and urban planning
    * Infrastructure catastrophes: the Chicago freight tunnel flood
    * The iconology of computers, especially the Macintosh
    * A philosophy of toys
    * The tool/toy of language and its (dys)function: the Zen koan, 
      the joke
    
    Membership is free.  Just send your name and address to be placed
    on our list.
    
                                 _CYLINDER_
                        c/o Graham Harman, secretary
                     Philosophy Dept., DePaul University
                           Chicago IL, USA 60614
                          email: cylinder@uiowa.edu
    
    24)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
         SUNY Stonybrook Conference on Reproductive Technologies
    
    The Humanities Institute Sponsored Conference on Reproductive
    Technologies: Narratives, Gender, Society, is unique in bringing
    together IVF and other clinicians, lawyers, bio-ethicists,
    historians, humanists, and people using the technologies to share
    their research and varying perspectives. The conference will be
    focussed, in Part I, on four case histories having to do
    with gamete donation, sex-selection, surrogacy, and genetic
    counselling. Part II deals with broader issues regarding
    reproductive technologies, such as "body politics," adoption, and
    nursing narratives.
    
    Keynotes Speakers are: Dr. Rayna Rapp, New School for Social
    Research, New York; and Barbara Katz Rothman, Baruch College, New
    York. Respondents to the second speaker are: Dr. Mary Martin,
    M.D. and Betsy P. Aigen, Founder and Director of The Surrogacy
    Mother Program of New York. Other speakers include Isabel Marcus,
    Law School, SUNY At Buffalo; Lisa Glick Zucker, Attorney, ACLU,
    Newark, N.J.; Martha Calhoun, New York State Department of Law;
    Ruth Cowan, Ph.D., History Dept. SUNY At Stony Brook; Susan
    Squier, English Dept, SUNY At Stony Brook; John Wiltshire and Kay
    Torney, La Trobe University, Australia; E. Ann Kaplan, Director,
    The Humanities Institute, SUNY Stony Brook; Ella Shohat, CUNY,
    Staten Island; Jennifer Terry, Resident Fellow at The Humanities
    Institute, and Assistant Professor at Ohio State University;
    Helen Cooper, Acting Vice Provost for Graduate Affairs, SUNY at
    Stony Brook.
    
    The Conference will take place on Friday and Saturday November 6
    & 7, from 9.0 a.m. on each day. For more information and
    registration forms, call E. Ann Kaplan, at 516-632-7765; or
    respond on email to MHuether@SBCCMAIL.edu.
    
    25)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
    1992 Modern Languages Association Convention
    
    Special Session #119
    
    Tuesday, December 29, 1992, 12:00 noon
    
    "Hypertext, Hypermedia: Defining a Fictional Form"
    
    Terence Harpold      University of Pennsylvania (chair)
    Michael Joyce        Jackson Community College
    Carolyn Guyer        Leonardo
    Judy Malloy          Manistee, MI
    Stuart Moulthrop     Georgia Institute of Technology
    
    Until recently, critical discussion of hypertext has tended to
    focus on problems of implementation, psychology and
    epistemology--the issues raised by hypertext as a kind of
    writing, independent of its subject matter. Little attention has
    been paid to the distinct characteristics of hypertext as a
    _fictional_ form. This session will be devoted to a discussion of
    hypertext fiction (and, more generally, electronic fiction) as an
    emerging mode of discourse in the late age of print.
    
    The panel includes individuals from both academia and the growing
    community of artists working in electronic text and multimedia.
    In addition to the sizable body of  theory and criticism they
    represent, each of the panelists is well-known for his or her
    electronic fiction. We expect an lively dialogue between the
    panelists (and with the audience), reflecting the variety of
    strategies at play in hypertext theory and practice.
    
    The papers
    
    Michael Joyce's paper, "Hypertextual Rhythms (The Momentary
    Advantage of Our Awkwardness)," will address the historical
    moment of recent hypertext fiction.
    He will argue that the common perception that hypertext is an
    awkward and opaque mode of discourse actually makes it easier for
    us to grasp its historical significance. Before the novelty of
    the electronic medium fades, and electronic text assumes the
    transparency that "conventional" text now has, we can understand
    it as a discrete representational form.
    
    Judy Malloy's paper, "Between the Narrator and the Narrative (The
    Disorder of Memory)," will draw on several of her "narrabases"
    ("narrative databases") to discuss problems of narrative "truth"
    in radically non-sequential electronic texts. The randomness and
    interactivity of hypertext fiction make it possible to vary the
    reader's experience with each reading. The essential disorder of
    the fictional worlds that emerge mimics, she contends, the
    disordered yet linked structure of human memory.
    
    Carolyn Guyer's paper, "Buzz-Daze Jazz and the Quotidian Stream
    (Attempts to Filet a Paradox)," explores the structure of
    narrative temporality in hypertext fiction. She will argue that
    hypertextual narratives are "complex mixtures"
    (Deleuze and Guattari), in which figure and ground are shifted
    arhythmically, in a chaotic or fractal way. The result is an
    oscillating transformation of the linear temporality of
    traditional fictional forms.
    
    Stuart Moulthrop's paper, "Hypertext as War Machine," situates
    hypertext fiction as an inherently politicized byproduct of the
    late capitalist event-state of spectacle, simulation, and
    multinational aggression. Focusing on John McDaid's "Uncle
    Buddy's Phantom Funhouse" and his own "Victory Garden," he asks
    whether the deformations of print narrative in these fictions
    provide an alternative to the semiotics of the spectacle, or
    represent (in Hakim Bey's term) merely "festal" digressions from
    the discourse of disembodied power.
    
    For more information, contact:
    
    Terence Harpold
    420 Williams Hall
    University of Pennsylvania
    Philadelphia, PA 19104
    
    tharpold@pennsas.upenn.edu
    slithy1@applelink.apple.com
    
    26)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
    SOCIETY FOR PHENOMENOLOGY AND EXISTENTIAL PHILOSOPHY
    
    Annual meeting to be held October 8-10 at the Boston Park Plaza
    Hotel and Towers.
    
    27)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
    The Committee on Computing as a Cultural Process of the American
    Anthropological Association
    
    Will hold a workshop on issues in computing as a field of
    cultural research beginning on the afternoon of Tuesday, December
    1, 1992 in San Francisco.  The workshop, participation in which
    is limited to thirty people, is scheduled to coincide with the
    opening of the annual meeting of the AAA.
    
    For further information, contact David Hakken, Committee Chair,
    at:
    
    Technology Policy Center
    SUNY Institute of Technology
    PO Box 3050
    Utica, NY 13504
    315-792-7437
    hakken@sunyit.edu
    
    28)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _Rethinking Marxism_: A Journal of Economics, Culture, and
    Society
    
    Is sponsoring an international conference titled "Marxism in the
    New World Order: Crises and Possibilities" 12-14 November 1992 at
    the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
    
    For information and preregistration materials, call:
    
    413/545-3285
    
    or write:
    
    AESA/RM "New World Order" Conference
    P.O. Box 715,
    Amherst, MA 01004-0715.
    
    The conference will include 3 major plenaries, over 100 sessions
    and workshops, an art exhibition, an art installation, and a
    cabaret opera.
    
    Participants include Etienne Balibar, Nancy Fraser, Sandra
    Harding, Nancy C. M. Hartsock, Ernest Mandel, Manning Marable,
    Vicente Navarro, Sheila Rowbotham, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,
    Immanuel Wallerstein, and Cornel West.
    
    Events include "This Is My Body: This Is My Blood" (art
    exhibition and panel discussion curate and organized by Susan
    Jahoda and May Stevens), "E.G.: A Musical Portrait of Emma
    Goldman" (cabaret opera by Leonard Lehrman), "Dream Worlds: The
    Video (Sut Jhally), "Standpoint Theories and Postmodernism's
    Challenges and Affinities (Sandra Harding, Nancy Hartsock, Kathy
    Weeks), "Queerness, Race, Class" (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Cindy
    Patton, Johnathan Goldberg, Michael Moon), "Postmodernism, Late
    Capitalism, and Marxian Political Economy" (Jack Amariglio, Julie
    Graham, Arjo Klamer, Bruce Norton, David Ruccio), and "Towards a
    Socialist Politics of Desire" (Tim Brennan, Jane Jordan, Amitava
    Kumar, Pratibha Parmar).
    
    29)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
    31st annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and
    Existential Philosophy
    
    Registration information is available at the conference
    (pre-registration is not necessary), but registration material is
    also available from:
    
    Lenore Langsdorf
    Dept. of Speech Communication
    Southern Illinois University
    Carbondale, IL  62901
    
    or phone: (618) 453-2291.
    
    The program is quite large, and the speakers will include Jacques
    Derrida, David Krell, Judith Butler, Axel Honneth, Linda
    Nicholson, Gerald Bruns, Herman Rapaport.
    
    Some session titles that may interest your members:  "Critical
    Theory in the Age of Cynicism," "Foucault, Power and the Critique
    of Hermeneutics," "Respondings: 'Il y a la cendre,'"
    "Constructing and Deconstructing Identity," "Postmodern Returns
    to Hegel," "Resistance to Lyotard,"...
    
    There are about 60 sessions with about 250 people on the program,
    and about 1000 in attendance.
    
    30)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
                 A CONSORTIUM FOR NETWORK PUBLICATION
                   OF REFEREED RESEARCH JOURNALS
    
                   First Advance Notice May 1992
    
    The University of Manitoba has received funding commitments to
    organize and hold an international conference to promote the
    establishment of a consortium of universities and learned
    societies to sponsor computer network publication of refereed
    journals. The consortium would be a non-profit publishing
    cooperative intended to make use of the Internet as an important
    medium for the publication of scholarly research in any
    discipline. Since the summer of 1991, an ad hoc group at the
    University of Manitoba has been developing the idea of the
    conference and the proposed consortium, and has been working on
    funding proposals since the Autumn of 1991. The conference is now
    tentatively slated for the Autumn of 1993 and will be held at the
    University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. We hope to enlist the
    interest and cooperation of major research universities and
    learned societies across North America and elsewhere. Over the
    next year or so, we will be communicating the vision behind the
    conference and consortium to the academic community.
    
    This is the first advance notice, and we plan to provide updates
    with more specific information on the conference details as plans
    for it develop.
    
    As an analogy of sorts for the proposed consortium, in the
    traditional publishing of books and paper journals, Scholars
    Press (Atlanta, Georgia) is a unique example of such a
    cooperative, operating under several major U.S. learned societies
    (e.g., American Academy of Religion, Society of Biblical
    Literature, American Philological Society), with a number of
    universities in the U.S. and Canada as sponsors of particular
    publication projects such as major monograph series. It is an
    example of groups in the academic community taking collective
    responsibility to see that worthy scholarship gets published,
    without commercial considerations determining the question. The
    Internet is the major new medium for dissemination of research,
    and it is vital that the scholarly community, through its major
    institutions of universities and learned societies, become
    acquainted with the enormous potential of the Internet for
    scholarship. Commercial companies are already devoting attention
    to developing computer network publication projects. It is
    imperative that the scholarly community not leave this major
    medium to be developed solely by commercial interests.
    
    The basic aims are:
    
    (1) To make academic merit the sole consideration in the        
        publication of journal-type research.
    (2) To advance the idea that the academic community should have a
        hand in determining what gets published and how it is       
        disseminated.
    (3) To provide a major outlet of research publication that is not
        subject to the severe economic constraints of traditional   
        paper-journal publishing (soaring costs in some commercially
        attractive fields, very limited journal outlets for less    
        commercially attractive fields).
    (4) To make collective and considered use of the scholarly      
        advantages of network publication (e.g., savings in         
        production costs, speed up in publication and dissemination 
        process).
    (5) To provide an effective and low-cost means for universities 
        and learned societies to play a greater role as disseminators
        of research information and not only as producers and
        consumers of research information.
    
    Our initial objective at this point is to inform as many in the
    scholarly community as possible of the conference and the
    consortium proposal, and to solicit interest in these plans.
    
    Please contact us for more information, and to be kept informed
    on the progress in our planning. We also sincerely invite you to
    offer your ideas on things to be included in the conference, key
    people to inform and possibly invite to the conference, and any
    other matters relevant to the conference and consortium proposal.
    
    For more information, and to express your interests in the
    conference and consortium, contact the:
    
    Convener of the University of Manitoba ad hoc Committee on
    Electronic Journals
    Professor Larry W. Hurtado
    Institute for the Humanities
    108 Isbister Bldg.
    University of Manitoba
    Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3T2N2
    
    Phone: (204) 474-9114. FAX (204) 275-5781.
    E-mail: hurtado@ccu.umanitoba.ca.
    
    31)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
    8th Annual Conference on the Scientific Study of Subjectivity
    
    October 22-24, 1992, at the University of Missouri will feature:
    
    Ana Garner (Marquette University)
    "The Disaster News Story: The Reader, the Content and Social
    Construction of Meaning"
    
    Paul Grosswiler (University of Maine-Orono)
    "The Convergence of William Stephenson's and Marshall McLuhan's
    Communication Theories"
    
    Patrick O'Brien (University of Iowa)
    "'They Meant This...And We Meant That': Discerning Opinion
    Structures through Q Methodology and News Frame Analysis"
    
    Donald F. Theall (Trent University)
    "James Joyce and William Stephenson Among the Communicators"
    
    Dan Thomas (Wartburg College)
    "Deconstructing the Political Spectacle: Sex, Race, and
    Subjectivity in Public Response to the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill
    'Sexual Harrassment' Hearings"
    
    There will also be a special panel on quantum theory and Q
    methodology, plus additional papers on a variety of other topics.
    The meeting is co-sponsored by the International Society for the
    Scientific Study of Subjectivity and the Stephenson Research
    Center of the School of Journalism, University of
    Missouri-Columbia.
    
    For further details, contact the program chair:
    
    Irvin Goldman (Goldman@UCC.UWindsor.Ca),
    Department of Communication Studies, University of Windsor.
    
    32)------------------------------------------------------------
    
                    PROGRAM OF EVENTS FOR THE V2 ORGANIZATION:
                            September / October / November.
    
                    MANIFESTATION FOR THE UNSTABLE MEDIA IV
    
                        September 26th - October 4th
    
    The yearly festival of the V2 Organization is this year focussed
    to the question:
    
    "How can architecture and the visual arts cope with new
    conceptions of time and space as performed and experienced in
    electronic space and with its cultural implications?"
    
    In a symposium the different attitudes in the deconstructivist
    discourse in architecture (like the formulated by Peter Eisenman
    on one side and Hejduk & Libeskind on the other) will be
    discussed parallel to art theories as for example presented by
    Peter Weibel.
    
    Among those who participate are: Jeffrey Shaw (NL), Peter Weibel
    (A), Arthur & Mariliouse Kroker (Can), Kristina Kubisch (BRD) and
    many others whose participation still has to be confirmed.
    
            ASK FOR THE COMPLETE PROGRAM UP FROM SEPTEMBER 1ST.
    
                                 DICK RAAIJMAKERS
    
                            October 16th, 17th, 18th.
    
    Lectures/demonstrations and concert by Dick Raaijmakers (1930).
    Dick Raaijmakers is at composer/scientist/theatremaker who
    teaches at the Centre of Sonology at the conservatory in Den Haag
    (NL). He worked for Philips and did research in electro-acoustic
    phenomena and was thus closely related to the physics lab in the
    fifties.  His work (theories and artworks) is a consequent study
    on basic phenomena in music/art.
    
    In his reflections on music/art he also integrates the use of
    technology as well as the fundamental distinction that remains
    between technology and art.  His concert will be the systematic
    dissection of twelve microphones in a laboratory setup (title:
    Dodici manieri di far tacere un microfono).  For the presentation
    of his work there will be other artists involved like for example
    Clarance Barlow.
    
                              ROY ASCOTT: "TELENOIA"
    
                    12.00H October 31st until 12.00H November 1st.
    
    "You've experienced on telepresence, now get ready for it"
    
    Roy Ascott (1934) will activate a global network on October 31st
    at 12.00H till November 1st 12.00H.  The network will be active
    for 24 hours with Fax, E-Mail a.s.  There will be T-shirts
    available for the 'day of telenoia schizophrenia'.  Roy Ascott
    will also take about his work on October 30th.
    
    The presentations of Roy Ascott and Dick Raaijmakers are 3
    presentations of artists who profiled themselves in the past and
    present with remarkable and important theories in art and
    technology.  A publication in which texts of Roy Ascott, Gustav
    Metzger and Dick Raaijmakers will be printed and which will
    support the different projects.
    
                                V2 ORGANIZATION
                            5211 PT 's-Hertogenbosch,
                                  NETHERLANDS.
    
                               Tel  31 73 137958
                               Fax  31 73 122238
    
    33)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
    THIRD WASHINGTON D.C. VIRTUAL REALITY CONFERENCE: DEC 1-2, 1992
    
    The December 1992 Virtual Reality conference focuses on current
    applications.  The presentations highlight applications in
    industry, commerce, defense, and aerospace.   The conference
    addresses managers and researchers who are involved or wish to
    become involved in the development of VR systems.  Besides 16
    distinguished speakers, the conference also features
    exhibitors demonstrating available VR products.
    
    The conference is sponsored by the Education Foundation of the
    Data Processing Management Association (DPMA) and CyberEdge
    Journal.  Technology Training Corporation manages the conference
    site and the registration.
    
            --------------------------------------------------
                   Washington D.C., December 1-2, 1992
            Ramada Hotel at Tyson's Corner -- Falls Church, VA
            --------------------------------------------------
    
    Dr. Myron Krueger, President, Artificial Reality Corporation
    
    Dr. David Gelernter, Computer Science, Yale University
    
    Dr. Bob C. Liang, Manager of Advanced Multimedia, IBM Research
    Lab
    
    Suzanne Weghorst, Human Interface Technology Lab, U of
    Washington,
    
    Joel Orr, Autodesk Fellow, Autodesk, Inc.
    
    George Zachary, Technical Marketing/Sales, VPL Research
    
    Dr. Michael Zyda, Computer Science, Naval Postgraduate School
    
    Mark Long, David Sarnoff Laboratory, Princeton
    
    Dr. Peter Tinker, Rockwell Science Center
    
    Dr. John Latta, President, 4th Wave
    
    Tom Barrett, Research & Development, Electronic Data Systems
    
    Jacquelyn Morie, Institute for Simulation and Training, UCF
    
    Dr. Chris Esposito, Boeing Aircraft, Seattle
    
    Douglas MacLeod, VR Project Director, Banff Centre for the Arts
    
    Major Irwin Simon, M.D., Telepresence, Ft. Ord
    
    David Smith, President, Virtus Corporation
    
         ---------------------------------------------------
    
    The conference chair is cyberspace philosopher, Dr. Michael Heim
    
    Registration fee is $795 per registrant.  For DPMA members
    (individual members only--not corporate) or for CyberEdge
    Journal subscribers, the fee is $760.  For teams of 3 or more,
    the fee is $695.  For U.S. Government or university personnel,
    registration is $645.
    
    To register, call 310-534-3922 and ask for Mr. Dana Marcus.
    To receive a flyer with more information, write Mr. Tom Huchel,
    Technology Training Corporation, 3420 Kashiwa Street, Torrance,
    CA 90510-3608 or call 310-534-4871.
    
    34)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _SEMIOS-L_
    
       A new electronic discussion group has been formed for those
    interested in semiotics, visual language, graphic design and
    advertising, deconstruction, the philosophy of language, and
    others curious about the process of communication. The core issue
    that ties all of these disciplines together is the production and
    the interpretation of signs.
    
    To become a part of _SEMIOS-L_, send the following command from
    your computer:
    
    From a Bitnet location:
    TELL LISTSERV AT ULKYVM SUBSCRIBE SEMIOS-L (Your Name)
    
    From an Internet site:
    To: Listserv%ULKYVM.Louisville.edu Subscribe SEMIOS-L (Your Name)
    
    In the first two weeks of operation, _SEMIOS-L_ already had over
    one hundred
    members from four continents. The group welcomes new voices.
    
    Steven Skaggs
    SEMIOS-L List Manager
    
    35)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
    SOCHIST on LISTSERV@USCVM
    New Social History List or LISTSERV@VM.USC.EDU
    
    Briefly, this list will address three aspects of what is called
    the "New Social History":
    
    (1) emphasis on quantitative data rather than an analysis of    
        prose sources.
    (2) borrowing of methodologies from the social sciences, such as
        linguistics, demographics, anthropology, etc.
    (3) the examination of groups which have been ignored by        
        traditional disciplines (i.e.  the history of women,        
        families, children, labor, etc.)
    
    To subscribe, send e-mail to
    LISTSERV@USCVM.BITNET or listserv@vm.usc.edu
    
    with the single line in the BODY of the e-mail:
    SUBSCRIBE SOCHIST your full name
    
    36)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _Interdis_
    
    Welcome to the INTERDIS e-mail discussion list. The idea behind
    this list is to facilitate national (and international)
    discussions of issues of interest to people working and teaching
    in interdisciplinary contexts. It is my hope that the list will
    be a source of lively, thought provoking discussion of issues
    relating to integrating perspectives and pedagogical issues
    associated with interdisciplinary work. It should also be a good
    place to discuss papers, books, films, and exercises from
    interdisciplinary perspectives. Please forward this message to
    colleagues you think may be interested in the list. They can
    put themselves on the list automatically by sending e-mail to:
    
    LISTSERV@MIAMIU.ACS.MUOHIO.EDU
    The message should read SUB INTERDIS 
    
    To post comments to the list, e-mail
    INTERDIS@MIAMIU.MUOHIO.EDU
    
    Feel free to begin posting comments today. I look forward to our
    continuing dialogue.
    
    37)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
    The Department of English at Carnegie Mellon University invites
    applications for a position (or positions) as Assistant or
    Associate Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies, beginning
    Fall 1993.
    
    Expertise in literary and cultural theory is required since
    successful applicants will teach a total of 2 courses per
    semester in a theory-based undergraduate program in Literary and
    Cultural Studies, and/or in the graduate program in Literary and
    Cultural Theory. The committee will give particular attention to
    candidates specializing in any aspect or field of history,
    culture and literature between 1500 and 1900, and we also have
    needs in film and media.  Women and minority candidates
    especially welcomed.
    
    Send letter, c.v. and names of three referees to:
    
    Alan Kennedy
    Head, Dept of English
    Carnegie Mellon
    Pittsburgh PA 15213.
    
    38)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
              Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History
                        Special Collections Library
                            Duke University
    
    TRAVEL-TO-COLLECTIONS GRANTS 1992-1993
    
    Three or more grants of up to $1000 are available to:
    
    (1) Graduate students in any academic field who wish to use
        the resources of the Center for research toward M.A. or
        Ph.D degrees.
    (2) Faculty working on research projects.
    
    Funds may be used to help defray costs of travel to Durham and
    local accommodations.
    
    The major collections available at the Center at the current time
    is the extensive Archives of the J. Walter Thompson Company
    (JWT), the oldest advertising agency in the U.S. and a major
    international agency since the 1920s.  Later in the year the
    advertisements and a moderate amount of agency documentation from
    D'Arcy, Masius, Benton & Bowles (DMB&B) also will become
    available for research.  The Center holds several other smaller
    collections relating to 19th and 20th century advertising and
    marketing.
    
    REQUIREMENTS:  Awards may be used between December 15, 1992
                   and September 1, 1993.  Graduate student         
                   applicants (1) must be currently enrolled in a   
                   postgraduate program in any academic department  
                   and (2) must enclose a letter of recommendation  
                   from the student's advisor or project director.
    
    Please address questions and requests for application forms to:
    
    Ms. Ellen Gartrell
    Director
    Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History
    Special Collections Library
    Duke University
    Box 90185
    Durham NC  27708-0185
    
    phone:  919-681-8714   fax:  919-684-2855
    
    e-mail contact:  Ms. Marion Hirsch mph@mail.lib.duke.edu
    
    DEADLINES:  Applications 1992-93 awards must be received
                or postmarked by November 1, 1992.  Awards will be
                announced by December 1.

     

  • Postmodern Woolf

    Rebecca Stephens

    English Department
    Carlow College

     

    Caughie, Pamela L. Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism: Literature in Quest and Question of Itself. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1991.

     

    Pamela L. Caughie’s Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism: Literature in Quest and Question of Itself is a sustained and perhaps ruthless attack on dualism in Woolf scholarship. As an answer to Toril Moi’s call in Sexual/Textual Politics for a text-based, anti-humanist approach to Woolf’s writings, the book explores new alternatives in an area of scholarship not known for keeping pace with postmodern critical theory and practice. Nearly any effort in this direction is welcome. Yet, as its and title suggests and its oppositional stance confirms, this study embraces–and ultimately fails to overcome–a dualism of its own, thus raising questions about its value and success as a postmodern intervention.

     

    For Caughie the insistence upon choosing between dualisms–fact/fiction, surface/depth, form/content, art/politics, for example–has brought Woolf scholarship to a critical impasse. She proposes the alternative of a postmodern approach, one which displaces these oppositions into new contexts, and which acknowledges a change in “aesthetic motivation” (xiii). Unlike the aesthetic motivation within modernism, which “placed itself at the vanguard of culture,” the postmodern version “explores the relations between literary practices and social practices” (xiii). Caughie does not claim to classify Woolf in one tradition or another; rather, she seeks to read Woolf’s writings in the light of postmodernism, that is, with new perspectives available in the wake of recent artistic and critical innovations.

     

    When she works within this broadly conceived plan, Caughie offers thoughtful and original readings of specific works. The readings of Woolf’s critical writings in Chapter 6, for example, succeed in moving beyond dualism to the new kinds of relationships which characterize postmodern reading and writing strategies. Woolf’s focus upon the process of reading, as exemplified in “Phases of Fiction,” “Granite and Rainbow,” and the two Common Reader collections, demonstrates for Caughie the interaction of text, world and reader. Rather than propose a new canon or tradition, an oppositional tactic, Woolf explores in these writings the relations which arise when a writer and reader enter, by mutual consent, a certain “reality.” Woolf’s critical practice thus considers “what we are consenting to and how our consent is achieved” (176). This practice in effect narrates Woolf’s admittedly impressionistic and wildly contradictory reading process. Its logic lies in its narrative experimentation, not in conclusions drawn or traditions outlined. In fact, Woolf’s story of reading undermines any thought of historical progression or development of fiction, confirming the situational relations between writer and reader at any given time. And the “common reader,” often thought of as Woolf’s response to the Oxbridge tradition from which she was excluded, becomes for Caughie not a less trained reader, but a kind of reading relation. Common for her suggests the communal.

     

    Flush, both the novel and the dog, enact Caughie’s postmodern conception of value formation. The novel is not only an example of artistic waste or playful excess, it must also be reckoned with as a marketable commodity. Caughie cites Woolf’s diary in support of the latter “function” of the text: “to stem the ruin we shall suffer from the failure of The Waves” (qtd. in Caughie 149). Drawing support from the dog’s variable and context-dependent views of its own value, Caughie calls the novel an “allegory of canon formation and canonical value” (146). Woolf’s shifting responses to the work, from playfulness to irony to detachment and scorn, together with a similar spectrum of public and critical reaction over the years, lead Caughie to question the economy of value and canon formation which informs our readings of Flush and other literary works.

     

    A collection of readings like these could work through the critical impasse that Caughie cites and open a number of new possibilities for reading Woolf. Yet Caughie subverts her own efforts by setting them in opposition to existing scholarship. This practice creates a dualism between traditional and postmodern approaches to Woolf, reproducing precisely the binary, oppositional logic her postmodernist readings are supposed to displace.

     

    Caughie’s dualism parallels a distinction which she makes in her conclusion between Elaine Showalter’s and Jane Gallop’s approaches to a feminist critical practice. While Showalter seeks to define such concepts as double-voiced discourse, Gallop enacts her practice by reading texts against each other. Caughie seems to favor the latter approach, and the readings I have described succeed in enacting or performing her idea of the postmodern. At the same time, the confrontation with traditional Woolf scholars established in the introduction leaves enough traces of the Showalter strategy to embroil Caughie in the practices with which she takes issue. By calling her readings “corrective,” she keeps the opposition alive.

     

    As a result, it is easy to lose sight of the clean elegance with which Caughie describes her project in the preface. As she takes to task the major figures in Woolf scholarship (particuarly Jane Marcus) for their referential, essentialist connections, Caughie works against her initial reluctance to summarize or define the postmodern. She draws upon a number of postmodern fiction writers, as well as the ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Richard Rorty, Barbara Hernstein Smith and Kenneth Burke. Wittgenstein empowers Caughie’s challenge to the correspondence theory of language, the opposition of form and content which views discourse as a transparent container for ideas. Caughie suggests that Woolf views art as Wittgenstein views language: as a game consisting of varied and various relationships among discursive strategies, rather than as a configuration or tradition based upon “empirical stability.” A brief mention of Rorty’s pragmatics and Burke’s transactional view of writer/reader relations leads Caughie to consider the “function” of a text, that is, how it produces meaning and finds its audience. Hernstein Smith brings Caughie’s theoretical framework closer to the narrative strategies upon which the first few readings focus. For Smith, narrative strategies are a function of varying critical perspectives, not essential characteristics of a certain text or genre. Under this view, Caughie suggests that “we can approach narrative strategies not as representations of a certain set of conditions, such as women’s lives or consumer society, but as functions of ‘multiple interacting conditions’” (18). Free of absolute reference to conventions or traditions, narrative experimentation becomes the given for Woolf: “Her fiction works on the assumption that narrative activity preceded any understanding of self and world” (67).

     

    The reader who abstracts a summary such as this fails to participate in the “shared way of behaving toward narratives based upon shared assumptions about language use” which characterizes Caughie’s postmodern perspective. Having risked lapsing into the essentialism that Caughie opposes, however, the reader will also note the thinness of the thread with which this postmodernism is woven. One can hardly disagree with any of her broad and abstract statements; yet together they offer no coherent perspective or methodology. And rather than elaborating the theoretical program through detailed close readings, Caughie merely reiterates the terms of her broad “postmodern” polemic against what she considers to be traditional views of the individual works. The words “function,” “motive” and “relations” become a kind of refrain or mantra throughout the book.

     

    The result of this practice is a series of brief and blurry close-ups of To the Lighthouse, The Waves, Orlando, Jacob’s Room and A Room of One’s Own. A chapter on the artist figure displaces the art/life opposition into a context-dependent quest to test a number of new relations. Under such a reading Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse becomes the narrator of the production of art as well as the artist, and in this capacity affirms the continuing process of creating. The multifaceted “I” in A Room of One’s Own undermines the stable self that can be separated structurally or empirically from its creative processes. Rather than defining a feminine alternative to modernist art, this protean speaker is “testing out the implications of the concept of art and self developed in . . . To the Lighthouse and Orlando” (42). The multiple consciousness of The Waves shifts the crucial relationship from art/life to art/audience, suggesting, with Bernard, that “‘All is experiment and adventure” (50).

     

    These readings place Woolf’s writings in a postmodern context of “multiple interacting conditions” by ignoring the fact that Woolf and her narrators repeatedly contemplate the truth or the essence of their lives and creative efforts. Even as she returns to the Ramsay’s summer house to complete her painting, Lily considers the “meaning of life.” Bernard’s observations on storytelling do not necessarily challenge the referential nature of this process. His comment that “Life is not susceptible perhaps to the treatment we give it when we try to tell it” (qtd. by Caughie 50) falls short of a metadiscursive or enlarging displacement of the life/art dichotomy as it points toward a transcendent dimension of life. To be convincing, Caughie’s concept of “multiple interacting conditions” must be extended to address these thoughts and statements as well. Formalist observations, such as naming Lily as narrator, or pointing out (not for the first time) the unstable narrative perspective of Jacob’s Room, can (and have) effectively argued for the dichotomy of art and life which Caughie seeks to disrupt.

     

    The multiplicity of meanings attributed to truth and reality in Woolf’s writings continues to draw critical attention, not all of which is as polarized as Caughie suggests. Herself unwilling to relinquish “reality” fully to the status of textual and discursive phenomena, Caughie reminds us of the challenge Woolf offers to postmodern critical theory. Yet a comparative reading of The Years and Night and Day lands Caughie in the same essentializing and polarizing camp that she disparages. For her the concern in Night and Day with objects and relics of the past produces a world of substance and a narrative of authority and reference. The uncertainty of narrative structures in The Years (echoing voices, lack of centering perspectives) expresses the postmodern concern for self-reflexive attention to discursive relations. The problem is not simply a matter of Caughie’s lapse into dualism, although it is curious that her broad conception of postmodern narrative relations cannot gain even a toehold upon Night and Day. (The novel’s playful experimentation with metaphor, reference and perspective might easily be worked into Caughie’s “postmodernism.”) Rather, the referentiality which Caughie locates in Night and Day sends a ripple of alarm back upon all of her readings, suggesting that Woolf’s texts may generally leave room for a greater degree of attachment to the ideas of stable object and transcendent subject than Caughie has let on.

     

    Caughie’s view of Woolf’s critical reading strategies might be read back upon her own critical method. This book contains many pointed attacks on representationalist readings of Woolf, but it rarely conveys a sense of what Caughie calls “multiple reading relations.” Perhaps generalizing too readily from her own “motives” (one of her key terms), Caughie seems to assume the primacy of literary- critical or literary-theoretical concerns for the critics she opposes. The briefest contact with the Woolf scholarly community dispels such an assumption. A group of affiliated and unaffiliated scholars representing numerous academic disciplines, Woolf’s readers most often seek to recreate and preserve her image as a woman, a feminist, or an historical/cultural icon. Susan Squier’s readings of Flush as a story of marginalization, and of the London essays as the reflection of a woman’s life in a patriarchal society, reveal these sorts of motives. In unfolding her own (equally plausible) reading of Flush, and her analysis of the multiple and shifting perspectives of the London Scene essays, Caughie achieves about the same level of dialogue with critics like Squier as that which takes place between Beckett’s Estragon and Vladimir. Caughie’s confrontationalism thus not only undermines her theoretical commitment to a non-dualist practice of reading, but leaves her readings unnecessarily isolated within the active field of Woolf studies. Combined with the sweeping claim of the book’s title, this mode of critical procedure risks further alienating an already skeptical scholarly community as regards postmodern criticism in general.

     

    As the first effort of its kind, however, this book deserves the attention and the response of Woolf scholars. Caughie observes, rightly, that it is not a book which can serve as an introduction either to Virginia Woolf or to postmodernism. But for scholars with an established stake in either or both of these fields, it does have much to offer. For those who choose to give Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism a chance, I would like to suggest, by way of conclusion (and with apologies to Cortazar), an alternate reading sequence: Begin with the preface, then read Chapter Five, Chapter Six, and the conclusion before returning to the introduction and Chapters One through Four. This particular hopscotch might better capture the strength of Caughie’s postmodern performances–or at least render them more congenial to resistant readers.

     

  • La Condition McGann

    Kevin Kiernan

    Department of English
    University of Kentucky

    ENG102@ukcc.uky.edu

     

    McGann, Jerome. The Textual Condition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991. Pp. xiv + 208; 11 illustrations. Paper, $10.95.

     

    Jerome McGann shows that he is still in top textual condition in this new collection of essays, published as the third title in the series, Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History. Despite the marketing claim on the back cover of the paperback that these are all “new essays,” five of the seven chapters have appeared in print before, as McGann himself spells out in his Preface. Their latest manifestation, with a new introduction and conclusion, is nonetheless a persuasive argument for McGann’s persistent thesis that the meanings of texts change with changing bibliographical circumstances, even when the texts do not change linguistically. Readers will enjoy a bargain in the interesting interplay of the chapters, the wide-ranging discussion of textual and editorial issues, and the irresistible occasion to play the role of McGann’s materialist hermeneut by analyzing the implicit collaborations of the author and his latest publisher.

     

    The first four chapters, Part One, are grouped under the title of the Borges story, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” a reference darkly explicated by a passage on book production from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The last three chapters, Part Two, come under the heading of “Ezra Pound in the Sixth Chamber.” The locale of this title harks back reassuringly to the same Blake excerpt, but the accompanying passage on instability and impermanence returns us instead to “The Garden of Forking Paths,” which in turn delivers us to Kathy Acker’s disorienting epiphanigram, “The demand for an adequate mode of expression is senseless,” from Empire of the Senseless. These loose-fitting framing devices, texts themselves, make different senses in their new settings, encouraging us to read the chapters as well as these texts in unconventional, “non-linear” ways. An ideogram of this kind of reading decorates these two pages in a little “text-tile,” with the threads of the warp pointing off in one direction and those of the woof pointing another way.

     

    An insistent message of these essays is that a text is “a laced network of linguistic and bibliographical codes” (13), a textual condition that has profound implications for authors, editors, textual scholars, publishers, and readers. In this textual condition the establishment of a text, for example, becomes a contradiction in terms. An editor cannot stabilize a text, because the act of producing an edition in itself further destabilizes it, creating a palimpsest of the previous edition, overwritten by new bibliographical codes for new social situations. While an editor may strive to recreate the social context of its first appearance, and may even successfully recreate some of it, the new edition primarily produces a new text for a new context. As McGann puts it, “The textual condition’s only immutable law is the law of change” (9). It is therefore imperative to read carefully the changing bibliographical codes and the new sociohistorical conditions in order to comprehend the linguistic codes they silently influence.

     

    Although his scholarly focus is on texts written during the past two centuries, McGann is aware that the textual condition of premodern literature, and the textual methods of studying it, provide some useful models for these postmodern perceptions. Among other things, medievalists will recognize the discipline of codicology, the bibliographical analysis of a manuscript codex, in the attention McGann urges us to pay to what he calls bibliographical codes. “We must turn our attention to much more than the formal and linguistic features of poems or other imaginative fictions,” he tells us. “We must attend to textual materials which are not regularly studied by those interested in ‘poetry’: to typefaces, bindings, book prices, page format, and all those textual phenomena usually regarded as (at best) peripheral to ‘poetry’ or ‘the text as such’” (13). McGann argues that one cannot formulate a convincing theory of textuality because each text is a particular social event best investigated as an individual case study. He opts for a “materialist hermeneutics” that treats texts as “autopoietic mechanisms” working “through a pair of interrelated textual embodiments we can study as systems of linguistic and bibliographical codings” (15).

     

    The opening chapter, “Theory, Literary Pragmatics, and the Editorial Horizon,” takes off from a provocative question pointed at McGann at the 1989 meeting of the Society for Textual Scholarship (STS). “If you were editing Byron’s poetry now,” he was asked, “what would you do?” (19). McGann responds by recounting his gradual discovery, while producing a more or less traditional “eclectic” edition during a period of upheaval in editorial and literary theory, “that texts are produced and reproduced under specific social and institutional conditions, and hence that every text, including those that may appear to be purely private, is a social text” (21). McGann argues that, if they attend to “editorial horizons,” to the specific social conditions of textual production, editors and textual scholars will find themselves moving inevitably toward literary pragmatics in their search for a theory of texts (22). Among three “case histories” elaborating and illustrating his ideas, McGann reviews a syllabus for one of his graduate seminars, revealing his way of inducing students to gratify their “interests in literary criticism within the orbit of the practical work of scholarship” (47).

     

    The second chapter takes up the question, “What is Critical Editing?,” and continues the critique of eclectic editing. Matthew Arnold’s editions of his Empedocles from 1852 to 1867 illustrate the inappropriateness here of combining texts around a “copy text” and incorporating emendations to produce an “ideal” text. Arnold’s successive editions, while almost identical linguistically, display radically different texts and authorial intentions by variously including, excluding, and reordering individual poems. “These bibliographical–as opposed to linguistic– variations,” McGann observes, “are of the greatest importance for anyone wishing to understand Arnold’s poetry” (51). The semiotic significance of bibliographical codes and the way they continually change the linguistic ones is unusually apparent in the case of William Blake, who meticulously hand-tinted each engraving of his poems. Blake labored, in McGann’s words, “to bring the bibliographical signifiers under his complete control” (58). His intentions are thus undermined by editors concentrating on linguistic codes alone, while at the same time generating their own scholarly bibliographical codings that are sharply at odds with the ones Blake worked so hard to provide. It is a shame that McGann’s publisher obliges him to illustrate his points with a monochrome reproduction of a hand-tinted plate from Blake’s Jerusalem. The effect is disturbingly reminiscent of Ted Turner’s colorization of old black and white films for TNT.

     

    In “The Socialization of Texts” McGann further develops his argument that texts are transmogrified by new productions with new receptions. The chapter itself will have a different impact in this book in Princeton’s series on Culture/Power/History than it did when it first appeared as a shorter article for Documentary Editing in 1990. As the author of other books published by Harvard, Chicago, and Oxford, McGann rightly stresses the importance of scholars and “institutions of transmission” in the socialization of texts. “Texts emerge from these workshops,” as he says, “in ever more rich and strange forms” (76). While he rejects the possibility of truly recovering the preceding frames of reference in critical editions, McGann envisions a recurring phoenix-like rebirth of texts in the impermanence and immutability of the textual condition: “The vaunted immortality sought after by the poetic impulse will be achieved, if it is achieved at all, in the continuous socialization of the texts” (83).

     

    The title of Chapter 4, and of the current book, was first used for a paper about writing a paper about all the other papers at the 1985 STS conference. The textual condition is for McGann “positively defined by some specific type of indeterminacy analogous to the one I experience at this (whichever) moment” (89). For him the textual condition “exemplifies the scholastic version of what ordinary mortals have called ‘the human condition’” (89). The frailty of both states is brought home to him just as he is completing the paper. His computer crashes, leaving behind only the bone-chilling message, “BDOS ERROR” (sic). McGann reacts in a human way: “I freeze. I have not saved the morning’s work (I was inspired; I could not pause to interrupt the flow of the thoughts). I cannot save the file, I cannot exit the file, I can do nothing but strike the RETURN key ineffectually” (92). He tries despair. “It is clear. I am about to lose the morning’s work. The first completed text of my paper for the STS conference is lost forever” (92). There is a happy awakening two days later when the file is miraculously resurrected by his computer’s “recovery programs,” but then his mind recalls that his new circumstances require changes, revisions, new socializations of the pristine text. The final version, still in progress as he delivers the paper, transcends old cataclysms and concludes with a postlapsarian lament on the unfortunate separation of “scholarship” and “hermeneutics” (97-98). “Scholarship is interpretation, whether it is carried out as a bibliographical discourse or a literary exegesis,” he insists to his audience of textual scholars and now to us. “Though we scholars like to believe that one is prior to the other . . . this idea is at best a specialized hypothesis for programmatic work, and at worst a deep critical illusion” (98).

     

    The first chapter in Part Two, “How to Read a Book,” implicitly coaxes us to go back and look at the preceding chapters with enhanced reading skills. We will read different texts the next time we encounter them. McGann begins this chapter with a funny and fascinating reading of what he calls “Reagan’s Farewell,” the now famous televised non-events in which former President Reagan, wherever he happended to be at the time, heads for his helicopter under a barrage of seemingly unheard and amiably unanswered queries from frantic reporters. Although not a literary text, the collaboration between Reagan as author (“the Great Communicator”) and the news media as publisher (with their well concealed bibliographical codes) nicely opens the way for a discussion of reading skills. McGann outlines important differences in the approaches to reading exemplified in Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book and Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading, but points out that, in both, “‘reading’ is equated with deciphering the linguistic text” (104).

     

    McGann suggests a new approach in his own 1-2-3 of reading, which he calls linear, spatial, and radial reading. Linear reading is the ordinary kind Adler and Pound talk about. Spatial reading takes in the semiotic codes of, for instance, the formatting of a page, by employing “the reading eye [as] a scanning mechanism as well as a linear decoder” (113). Radial reading, as the name implies, radiates out from the text, expanding it by reference to other resources. Scholarly texts encourage radial reading in various ways; for example, by taking the reader to different parts of the apparatus–the notes, the index, an appendix–which in turn generate further radial investigations (120). “Good readers have to read both linearly and spatially,” McGann says, “but both of those operations remain closely tied to the illusion of textual immediacy. Radial reading is the most advanced, the most difficult, and the most important form of reading because radial reading alone puts one in a position to respond actively to the text’s own (often secret) discursive acts” (122).

     

    In “Pound’s Cantos: A Poem Including Bibliography,” McGann renews his assault on the idea, especially prevalent in American textual scholarship over the past forty years, that editorial practice and literary criticism ought to be separate and distinct activities. The descent of editions of Pound’s Cantos between 1925 and 1933, a dramatic movement from “a decorated and hand-processed work” under Pound’s complete control to a mechanically reproduced work controlled by his publisher, presents an editor with conflicting bibliographical codings (131). McGann argues that it is difficult, if not in fact impossible, to resolve the textual dilemma in a critical edition without engaging in interpretation. In seeking “to explore how meanings operate at the work’s most primary material levels” (130), he compares a page printed in red and black from the 1925 edition of the Cantos to later editions printed in black and white. McGann’s publisher, in an unintentional parody of the point he is trying to make, provides only a black and white illustration of the two-color printing. As in the case of the Blake illustrations, then, the reader is left to imagine the bibliographical codes McGann is trying to reveal. McGann’s arguments remain emphatic, however, with or without the illustrations. “Pound’s Cantos dramatize, on an epic scale,” he says, “a related pair of important truths about poetry and all written texts: that the meaning of works committed into language is carried at the bibliographical as well as the linguistic level, and that the transmission of such works is as much a part of their meaning as anything else we can distinguish about them” (149).

     

    The final chapter, “Beyond the Valley of Production; or, De factorum natura: A Dialogue,” severely tests Acker’s dictum, quoted at the start of Part II, that “the demand for an adequate mode of expression is senseless.” Here McGann presents his ideas in an imagined conversation of three people talking about one of his papers. It is a bold and amusing experiment, successful in allowing McGann to take up positions he does not endorse and in forcing us to reflect on diverse modes of discourse, but I think unsuccessful in other respects. The first speaker is enthusiastic about McGann. “It was a fine lecture,” he proclaims, to get the discussion going, “–at once learned, elegant, and imaginative” (153). This speaker’s paraphrases certainly leave the impression of an important lecture, incorporating the substance of the book we are reading. The other interlocutors are less impressed. The second speaker is decidedly hostile, remaining, as she says, “unpersuaded by [McGann’s] polemical schemes,” and otherwise put off by “his often careless prose” (154). McGann subtly gets even by presenting her comments in the same McGannical prose. His forte is not natural dialogue, nor even the unnatural conversations that transpire at conferences. Thus his speakers forget they are speaking and use visual puns they wouldn’t be able to see, like “(re)produce” (163), “waste(d)” (168), “(re)membering” (171), and “(dis)orders” (172). Sometimes they even lapse into long, verbatim, block quotations with page references and footnotes, or rather endnotes. One thinks of Victor Borge making funny noises and hand gestures to furnish oral punctuation. The third speaker lapses into a rude soliloquy, notwithstanding a couple of peremptory asides to the second speaker, who improbably ignores these chances to retort until he is completely finished. They all apparently disband without a word of farewell.

     

    The “Conclusion,” McGann says in an endnote, is a “printed version” of a lecture. Newly socialized, it is now a fascinating tour de force that weaves together many strands and loose ends of the preceding chapters into a fine and colorful text. The highpoint is a brilliant display of his argument about texts as empirical and social phenomena by means of a witty and perhaps even justified apotheosis of the typescript of his lecture into a cultural icon reverently preserved in the Library of Congress.

     

    Given the prominent arguments of the book, it is hard not to notice that McGann’s ideas are in frequent counterplay, if not in actual conflict, with the modes of production of his silent collaborator, Princeton University Press. Some things, of course, are preordained. Before McGann can advise us of the laws of impermanence in the textual condition and of the final destruction of all texts, the Press assures us on the copyright page that the book meets “the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.” These far-sighted aims are not in focus with those illustrations misrepresenting the bibliographical codes of Blake’s and Pound’s works. Other bibliographical signs of a quick and inexpensive fix can be detected in the endnotes and the index. Endnotes eliminate formatting problems, but almost inevitably lure readers into scanning the notes as a continuous text after checking a particular note, or into ignoring many of the notes altogether in the course of reading the main text. In either case they work against the kind of radial reading that scholarly texts are meant to encourage. A simple index of names, while easy to compile, fails to provide even the most fundamental conceptual and thematic entries. It would be useful to be able to locate McGann’s widely dispersed comments on such issues as eclectic editing, materialist hermeneutics, bibliographical codes, and socialization of texts, less useful to be able to find passing references to the Tate Gallery, USA Today, and Yale University Press. There are signs in other of its bibliographical codes that the publisher has misread some of McGann’s linguistic ones. Perhaps most noticeable are the running titles where, for example, McGann’s “Theory, Literary Pragmatics, and the Editorial Horizon” is carelessly detheorized as “Literary Pragmatics and the Editorial Horizon,” or his “Pound’s Cantos: A Poem Including Bibliography,” loses its meaningfilled bibliography as “Pound’s Cantos.”

     

    Although both authors and publishers grew increasingly blind or indifferent to the meanings of bibliographical codes during the age of mechanical production, the new textual condition of desktop publishing will assuredly restore the eyesight and interest of many authors. Publishers, as they continue their trend of requiring camera-ready copy from authors, will gradually relinquish their control over bibliographical codes, except for paper, institutional packaging, and of course marketing. Writers, if they are not already adept, will quickly acquire the power to supply no less than their own choices of type- faces, font-sizes, running-titles, footnotes or endnotes, indices, page-formatting, and color or monochrome illustrations. Sooner or later we will also gain control over the same things when publishing in electronic journals. For now (back then), the textual condition of my review of this important book remains to be seen when it reappears (right now) in PMC.

     

  • Postmodern Promos

    Susan Schultz

    Department of English
    University of Hawaii-Manoa

    SCHULTZ@uhccvm.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu

     

    Bernstein, Charles. A Poetics. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.

     

    Perloff, Marjorie. Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.

     

    Archibald MacLeish declared, “a poem should not mean but be,” but of course he didn’t mean it. MacLeish’s poems meant perhaps too much, and sang too little, to submit to his definition. Marianne Moore wrote of a poet’s ability to create imaginary gardens with real toads in them, and so to create being out of meaning. More than any of the other moderns, Hart Crane self-consciously created poetry as MEDIUM and wanted language to spring us to somewhere beyond language. This unmediated medium remained, however problematically, “natural”; the poem was an organism that grew on its own; it was the poet’s truly born child.

     

    Crane incorporated advertising language into his myth in “The River” section of The Bridge as if pre-packaged language could also be used as a springboard to a non-linguistic realm. But what happens when the order of transmission is reversed, when advertising copy coopts poetry, when the medium becomes the media, when the only poetry that most people encounter comes in the guise of slogans like “I wanna be like Mike” (which refers us to a basketball player and culture hero whose very style is “poetic”)? In this contemporary example, of course, advertising language is so strong that it has the ability to change the names by which we know our heroes–no one though of Michael Jordan as “Mike” until Gatorade (not, unfortunately, the company with the sight-rhyme, “Nike”) needed to transform the hero to make him rhyme, make him even more friendly (is it possible?) to consumer culture.

     

    Marjorie Perloff’s provocative claim in Radical Artifice is that advertising language is that of Modernist poetry; advertising’s tenets were not laid down so much by Madison Avenue as by Ezra Pound. “Exact treatment of the thing, accuracy of presentation, precise definition–these Poundian principles have now been transferred to the realm of copywriting” (94), she argues (and I wonder it we might not find more irony still in the word itself, “copy write”; “copy right”; “copyright”). Perloff, ever an exact and able close-reader, takes the following billboard message in hand to show that, “as the ‘look’ of the standard poem begins to be replicated on the billboard or the greeting card, an interesting exchange begins to occur” (100):

     

                   O. R. LUMPKIN. BODY-
                      BUILDERS.    FENDERS               
                   STRAIGHTENED.
                   WRECKS OUR SPECIAL-
                      TY.    WE TAKE THE DENT
                      OUT OF ACCIDENT.

     

    “Surely,” she enjoins, pointing to the lineation of this “free verse” bit of advertising, with its clever wordplay and enjambment, “the next time we have an accident, this memorable punning will stick in our minds and draw us to O. R. Lumpkin rather than some other body shop” (100). This “standard poem” might well be printed in The New Yorker or Poetry or American Poetry Review(the latter with a photo of Mr. Lumpkin himself, no doubt). The punning begins, of course, with Mr. Lumpkin, who takes our lumps and makes them right again.

     

    Advertising’s power, of course, lies in its simulation of authenticity; the potential consumer may know that the American Express card ads that show the familial love between father and daughter are “artificial,” and still wipe tears from her eyes. Hence Dan Quayle’s insistence that television should show us a more authentic version of ourselves. And so authenticity becomes a form of nostalgia. Crucial to this sense of authenticity, Perloff would claim, is its presentation–as in the Lumpkin ad–through the medium of free verse, which we think of as “natural” and unmediated through the artifice of traditional forms. “Free verse = freedom; open form = open mind, open heart: for almost half a century,” writes Perloff, “these equations have been accepted as axiomatic, the corollary of what has come to be called, with respect to poetic language, the ‘natural look.’” I suspect that she means us to hear the conflation of poetic language with hairstyle, and the attendant confusion between image and “self,” whatever that is; Perloff’s persistent attacks on the univocal lyric over the past ten years or so are based on a profound distrust of the “self” created through it. She writes: “Most contemporary writing that currently passes by the name of ‘poetry’ belongs in this category which [Jed] Rasula wittily calls PSI, for ‘Poetry Systems Incorporated, a subsidiary to data management systems.’ The business of this particular corporation is to produce the specialty item known as ‘the self,’ and it is readily available in popular magazines and at chain bookstores” (19). Need one add that there is a magazine of that name: Self?

     

    While Modernists worked from a dualist model that set in tension “the image and the real,” and believed that one was related to the other, Postmodernists, according to Perloff, see that relationship replaced by one “between the word and the image” or between “the simulacrum and its other” (92). In this new poetry, the image itself is deconstructed, because after all, who can trust advertising to tell us the truth about ourselves, whoever those selves are? If advertising has become our mirror, then the poet’s goal is to distort that mirror in such a way that we see the inherent distortion in images–reflection must give way to refraction, deflection.

     

    So we abandon the Imagist image and return to language, but language understood in a new way, not as mediator but as medium (in the material, not the psychic, sense). Where the modern imagist free verse poet would write the Lumpkin ad as it appears above (and as the ads flash by in Crane’s “the River”), the postmodernist poet would begin not from the image of a wreck, and the message that the wreck would be fixed, but from the words used to convey that message–whose real import is mercantile. For the language of advertising, above all, sells. The postmodernist poet might play on the name O. R. Lumpkin, its relation to lumps and kin and lumpenproletariat, and in so doing, unmessage the message by making the medium the subject. It bears quoting the three ways in which Perloff sees Postmodern poets deconstructing the image:

     

    (1) the image, in all its concretion and specificity, continues to be foregrounded, but it is now presented as inherently deceptive, as that which must be bracketed, parodied, and submitted to scrutiny. . . .

    (2) the Image as referring to something in external reality is replaced by the word as Image, but concern with morphology and the visualization of the word’s constituent parts: this is the mode of Concrete Poetry[.]

    (3) Image as the dominant gives way to syntax: in Poundian terms, the turn is from phanopoeia to logopoiea. “Making strange” now occurs at the level of phrasal and sentence structure rather than at the level of the image cluster so that poetic language cannot be absorbed into the discourse of the media. . . . (78)

     

    The real strength of Perloff’s book is in the narrative it elaborates as a way to understand the NEED for Language poetry in a now unfolding literary history. Thus, “[i]f American poets today are unlikely to write passionate love poems or odes to skylarks or to the Pacific Ocean, it is not because people don’t fall in love or go birdwatching or because the view of the Pacific from, say, Big Sur doesn’t continue to be breathtaking, but because the electronic network that governs communication provides us with the sense that others–too many others–are feeling the same way” (202-3). In other words, poems about great vistas can already be found–either in the Norton Anthology (see Keats) or, in their fallen form, in a Hallmark shop. This passage, which expresses Perloff’s yearning for a unique and unsullied perspective on (past) nature, sounds to my ear transcendentalist in its idealistic paranoia, its yearning for, yes, authenticity. Perloff’s defense, like Whitman’s, would be to celebrate self-contradiction, knowing that nothing else is possible. Like her allies the Language poets, Perloff would claim with Gertrude Stein that repetition is actually insistence, and that to sound the transcendentalist note in the 1990s is to say something new. Yet it’s hard for her to do this without somehow worshipping the unsullied and autochthonous “self” that she so easily dismisses in rear-guard free verse poetry.

     

    Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman and other of the Language group of poet-critics agree with Perloff on this– as on most–points; our particular way of seeing such a vista has been pre-determined, so the argument goes, precisely by the Norton (at best) and by Hallmark (at worst) or by the more likely (con)fusion of the two. This way of seeing insures that we do conform with others, also programmed to buy Hallmark cards and do other good deeds for capitalism; the only way to be a good Emersonian these days is to de-form the language, which is also to reform it. As Bernstein says it (he, too, sounding a lot like someone who has found the original Waldo amid a crowd of faces): “Poetry is aversion of conformity in the pursuit of new forms, or can be” (1); and “I care most about poetry that disrupts business as usual, including literary business: I care most for poetry as dissent, including formal dissent; poetry that makes sounds possible to be heard that are not otherwise articulated” (2). These claims are not, in and of themselves, radical. The Language poets’ means of acting on these claims ARE more radical, but their attempt to create once against a language that has not been coopted by the media, an un-transparency that is transparent, puts them squarely in the line of American idealists that includes Emerson and Gertrude Stein. Their quest for originality, a writing free of all quotation, is at once as admirable and quixotic as was Emerson’s.

     

    Bernstein is perhaps the most intelligent and most consistently interesting of contemporary thinkers on poetry and poetics; he is also the most self-contradictory. His work bears the kind of confused (nay, panicked) attention that Emerson’s does; like Perloff, his argument against the Romantic and Modernist image owes perhaps too much to the first American Romantic. He is at once aesthete (he adores Swinburne and Wilde) and proto-Marxist; purveyor of claritas and obscuritas; deconstructionist and fetishist of the word; preacher and skeptic; fiction-writer and disseminator of truths–the train could go on, derailing itself as it goes. This is, of course, part of Bernstein’s world view; his is a vision that tries to leave the binary behind (by containing multitudes), and engage in the polymorphous multiplicity of things. Yet I wonder if many of these contradictions are not, in fact, incompatible; Bernstein’s Swinburnian poems seem somehow at odds with the needs of a leftist politics, for example. Yet Bernstein’s prose is, for the most part, clear; he would pass a university course in argumentative writing. It is far clearer than his poetry, and serves (ironically) to advertise the poetry by explaining its purpose, if not its content. In fact, the content of the poems seems to me to be the elaboration of the prose, as if poetry were a “proof text,” rather than the proper subject of our so-called science.

     

    Bernstein’s claims for poetry are in many ways even stronger than Perloff’s, although he begins from the same starting blocks with (an all-too-easy?) attack on advertising culture, arguing that poets should display

     

    a willingness to engage in guerrilla warfare with the official images of the world that are being shoved down our throats like so many tablespoons of Pepto Bismol, short respite from the gas and the diarrhea that are the surest signs that harsh and uncontainable reality hasn't vanished but has only been removed from public discussion.(3)

     

    Bernstein replaces Perloff’s creators of false “selves” with the purveyors of what he calls “official verse culture.” That these are the purveyors of a political, as well as a poetic, message Bernstein makes clear in his argument that the notion that “we can ‘all’ speak to one another in the universal voice of history” is a “disease.” His heroes, then, are poets who work “in opposition to the dominant strains of American culture” (6).

     

    These dominant strains, for Bernstein as for Perloff, are evidenced in the strains of the American lyre. But where Perloff’s poetic heroes are those who replace “form” with “artifice”–who replace sonnets with numerically generated bits of language that have the virtues of formalism without any of the taint (and what a taint there is!), Bernstein erases the differences between all forms of writing:

     

    if there's a temptation to read the long essay-in-verse ("Artifice of Absorption"), which follows these opening notes, as prose, I hope there will be an equally strong temptation to read the succeeding prose as if it were poetry.(3)

     

    Whether prose or poetry, his writing is meant to be taken as fiction; in a Steinian way he writes, “when Content’s Dream was published I wanted that to be classified as ‘essays/fiction.’ People sometimes ask me if I’m interested in writing a novel. I say, well, I did, that’s it” (151).

     

    While Bernstein persuades me that the categories by which we write and read literature no longer do us much good, it seem to me that he himself holds to these categories, and needs to hold to them to make his argument fly. I find “Artifice of Absorption” the most compelling piece in A Poetics–Bernstein’s verse “Essay on Poetry,” as it were. For here is an essay-poem that contains the virtues of the essay form (it is readable, cogent) and of the poem (it relies on enjambment for its rhythm and drama– the same kinds of enjambments, I might add, that make poets such as Amy Clampitt such easy targets for critics such as Perloff). Bernstein begins from the question that springs “naturally” from his work as a poet-critic (or poet-poet or critic-critic); in so doing, he refines Perloff’s discussion of “artifice”:

     

    A poetic reading can be given to any piece of writing; a "poem" may be understood as writing specifically designed to absorb, or inflate with, proactive--rather than reactive--styles of reading. "Artifice" is a measure of a poem's intractability to being read as the sum of its devices & subject matters.(9)

     

    For Bernstein, artifice is not so much a new kind of form, as it is for Perloff, as a way of writing that foregrounds technical devices over and above “content” and “meaning.” To paraphrase Bernstein’s discussion of “voice” in the Language Book, “content” is but one possibility for poetry. But “content” and “meaning” are not the ends of poetry, just more means; they are not the same thing, either, for “content never equals meaning” (10). Artifice is, according to Bernstein’s jargon, non-absorptive; one cannot “get lost” in a Language poem the way one can get lost in a Harlequin romance–but the reader is also not in danger of losing her soul to the particular demands made on it by the Harlequin (which are fundamentally conservative, despite–or because of–the soft porn). And, as Bernstein sees it,

     

    much contemporary American
    poetry is based on simplistic
    notions of absorption through unity, such
    as those sometimes put forward by Ginsberg
    (who as his work shows
    knows better, but who has made an ideological
    commitment to such simplicity)."(38)

     

    Bernstein places himself characteristically at both ends of his artificial dualism:

     

    In my poems, I
    frequently use opaque & nonabsorbable
    elements, digressions &
    interruptions, as part of a technological
    arsenal to create a more powerful
    ("souped-up")
    absorption than possible with traditional,
    & blander, absorptive techniques.(52-3)

     

    He acknowledges that “[t]his is a / precarious road” that makes the reader more conscious of technique than of experience, but I wonder if Bernstein believes in the currency of terms like “experience.” After reading Bernstein’s work over an extended period, the world of language becomes THE world, always threatening/promising to dissolve into a chaos of no-definition. Finally, though, Bernstein proposes a kind of reading that is rather pragmatically critical, even as it is creative. As Perloff points out toward the beginning of Radical Artifice (and this is one of its least interesting moments), “Not only does the boundary between ‘verse’ and ‘prose’ break down but also the boundary between ‘creator’ and ‘critic’” (17).

     

    Like Stein’s language, Bernstein’s is always “foreign”–alien, confusing, and above all, never sacred. Bernstein’s most recent book of poems, Rough Trades, must be read in this way, as a celebration and cerebration of language in and for itself, and as an exercise in non-absorptiveness that is meant to refashion prevailing world political views. In the contradiction between these two purposes lies an abyss; Bernstein seems at times too much like a New Critic who attempts to change the world by ignoring it. But Bernstein, however much he seems to be the Pope (Alexander, that is) of the postmodern, means to undress us of our layers of expression in order that our means of expression can clothe us in new (and utopian) possibilities. He and Perloff, in their complementary assaults on the common-places of the American language at this fin-de-siecle, provoke us to look past the image by way of the (small-w) word, and to re-invest our words with whatever ideals we have left. The poetry that they advertise is not written in a “common” language, but in one that we cannot yet think in, non-absorptive to the point of being non-sensical. It may get us to another world. But then again, that’s a soap opera.

     

  • Post-Literacy

    Alan Aycock

    Department of Anthropology
    University of Lethbridge

    aycock@hg.uleth.ca

     

    Tuman, Myron, ed. Literacy Online: The Promise (and Peril) of Reading and Writing with Computers. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1992. 300 pp. + illus/fig. $34.95 (US) cloth, $14.95 paper. (Review copy was an uncorrected proof; please note that quotations below may be inexact).

     

    This work comprises a collection of essays originally presented in 1988 at the Sixteenth Annual University of Alabama Symposium on English and American literature. Its intent is to explore (1) the new forms of literacy made available by electronic technology; (2) the opportunities that “literacy online” affords those who teach and study literature; and (3) more broadly, the implications of new literacies for key cultural ideas, such as authorship, the textual canon, and critical thought, that are strongly associated with traditional print technology. The articles are integrated by Myron Tuman’s introductory and closing remarks and by short roundtable discussions that appear at the end of each section.

     

    Most of the articles take as their focus the notion of the “hypertext,” a multi-layered congerie of literary works, critical commentaries, and contextualizing materials that render immediately accessible to the online reader the expertise that would otherwise be restricted to a narrow elite of professional scholars. Many hypertext programs have been written over the past decade for pedagogical and other purposes, and there is a substantial technical literature on the topic (for instance, the online catalog of the University of California libraries lists more than thirty recent books with the word “hypertext” in their titles).

     

    I shall first consider the range of issues– hypertext, pro and con–that the authors confront in their articles, then attempt to present a somewhat more radically sociological view of these matters, from the perspective of Pierre Bourdieu.

     

    One apparent advantage of the hypertext is that readers may participate actively in its development by manipulating its databases in diverse ways, and by contributing their own writings to it: George Landow argues that to deploy the hypertext as an “open, changing, expanding system of relationships” permits the contextualization of an otherwise fixed central canon of texts, and encourages interdisciplinary team teaching. This he believes to be a “major strength of hypermedia.” Similarly, Jay David Bolter contends that “[t]he reader’s control of a hypertext can be expressed as the ratio between looking at and looking through the text, between the experience of reading the words and the new experience of choosing the path.” While “open relationships” and “new experience” tend to be disproportionately privileged in North American cultures, this seems to be a promising avenue of approach.

     

    Another feature of value is the new nonlinear styles of thought that are putatively encouraged by the hypertext. As Helen Schwartz suggests in her essay, the hypertext may offer both graphic and verbal components, potentially integrating “left-brained” and “right-brained” styles of knowing with the hypertext as “prosthesis.” Pamela McCorduck echoes this: “knowledge of different kinds is best represented in all its complexity for different purposes by different kinds of knowledge representations,” such as those afforded by the computer. Indeed, McCorduck surmises that the new forms of knowledge implied by the hypertext portend a revolution fully as significant, in their own way, as that of the Neolithic. Again, though one may be justifiedly sceptical about the grounding of computer literacy in terms of neurophysiology (a naturalizing gesture that adds little to its understanding), or about the actual, as opposed to the ideal, cognitive effects of secondary orality (pace McLuhan), it cannot be gainsaid that there may be something here worth pursuing.

     

    More contentious, however, are the political implications of hypertext. Some argue that hypertext is politically neutral; Victor Raskin, for instance, states that “[a]ll hypertext does is to present a format, a methodology, a tool for recording the already-established links.” Similarly, Richard Lanham suggests that “the computer with its digital display is no technological vis a tergo but the condign medium for expressing how we nowadays think of ourselves and our world.” Yet matters are not so simple.

     

    By contrast, in support of the non-neutrality of hypertext, Bolter points to the dissolution of standard author-reader relationships, Landow (citing Barthes’ S/Z) to the new roles that are implied for teachers and students, and Stanley Aronowitz to the effects of the introduction of computer technology upon management-worker relationships. Ted Nelson, along the same lines, wrestles with issues of copyright (“transclusion”), the propertied infrastructure of authorial presence in print-based technology. One cannot really doubt that online literacy may contribute in various ways to such familiar postmodern trends, and indeed as the contributors argue, hypertext may accelerate such movements.

     

    A number of the essays also consider the political non-neutrality of critical writing in hypertext mode. Tuman and Schwartz both wonder whether the virtual reality of hypertext is too unstable, too diffuse or multiplex, to sustain the project of literary criticism. And as Ulmer seems to propose, deconstructive techniques such as grammatology may be inherently fostered by the hypertext. Whether the impetus lent new modes of critical thought is desirable is a concern that is initially broached by the volume, though the contributors fail to take this obvious opportunity to examine hypertext in terms of Lyotard’s search for “new presentations . . . to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable.” (Curiously, neither Lyotard nor Baudrillard makes an appearance in these essays.)

     

    Eugene Provenzo invokes Foucault’s panopticon to drive home more troublesome political issues, however: apparently trivial acts of consumption, such as buying a pizza or renting a video, may install the purchaser in databases managed by anonymous corporations or by government agencies whose autocracy may be thereby intensified. Thus Greg Ulmer, in a rather striking and double-edged metaphor, likens the mastery of a database to “the colonization of a foreign land”: though he does not say so, one is reminded in this context of the claims and counterclaims ferociously debated with regard to the surveillance and offensive technology of Desert Storm, and its wider considerations for “the new world order” unreflectively pronounced by George Bush and his cronies.

     

    The politics of hypertext itself aside, I retain some doubts about the manner in which the contributors deal with their own political stances vis-a-vis hypertext. To suggest something of what I think may be at stake here, I will allude briefly to the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu.

     

    To begin with, Bourdieu’s “habitus,” a structured, structuring disposition to cognize, evaluate, and practise the logic of lived experience, calls to account the new modes of critical thought, contrived as agencies in specific arenas of struggle, that might be said to devolve from “literacy online.” It is in this vein that one could wish for a more reflexive attention to the roles that the authors themselves enact in witnessing the procreative agonisms of hypertext: are they part of the solution, or part of the problem?

     

    Further, the material and social conditions of technoculture represent (“re-present”) an aspect of Bourdieu’s “symbolic capital,” the instrumentalities of domination that constitute “the stakes of the game,” and that manufacture the means for its pursuit. Symbolic capital engages, in this specific instance, the textual labors which influence the production of substances amenable to the realization of yet more texts and hypertexts, and the officiants who produce them. Shall we draw a line of diminishing returns, and if we do or do not, isn’t that part of the political agenda of hypertext?

     

    Finally, the authoritarian nature of pedagogy is highlighted by Bourdieu’s discussions of the manner in which educational institutions produce and reproduce the conditions of their dominance, and the relationships of class which sustain them, and are in turn generated by them. Tuman responds to this general issue, indirectly and perhaps too inconclusively, in his closing remarks: “the attitudes collected here constitute a time-capsule–preserving for future students of literacy a record of what the thinkers, so successfully acculturated into print culture (possibly ‘the last [such] generation’), had to say about the profound impact, for better or worse, that nearly everyone agrees computers are about to have on our practice of reading and writing.” Hype aside, what is the value of archivally oriented texts? The construction of tradition is a complex and politically loaded task, yet it passes unexamined, and largely unacknowledged, in the Tuman collection.

     

    Beyond this, I can suggest only three criticisms of real substance. First, the frequent references to “preliterate” cultures rely perhaps too heavily on Eric Havelock’s (undoubtedly seminal) work, supplemented by some rather vague generalizations; the extensive West African work of Jack Goody, Sylvia Scribner, and Michael Cole on the oral-literate interface is not cited. Second, the “writing culture” debate of the 1980s (e.g., James Clifford, George Marcus, Clifford Geertz) has no counterpart in Tuman, though it seems quite pertinent to any attempt to discern a post-oral, post-literate cultural milieu. Third, the lapse of four years between the initial presentation of these essays and their publication in this volume is somewhat vexing, since the intervening period has seen at least two works, one by Michael Heim and another by Mark Poster [and a third, Hypertext by George Landow, reviewed in Postmodern Culture 2.3–Ed.] which have somewhat reshaped the relevant field of discussion.

     

    On balance, however, this is a fascinating and clearly written collection, and I would not hesitate to use it as an upper-level undergraduate text, or as a scholar’s introduction to hypertext. Those already familiar with the concept of hypertext, however, would do rather better to turn to Mark Poster’s The Mode of Information for an account of the significance of computing in the postmodern age.

     

  • The Black (W)hole of Bataille: A Genealogy of Postmodernism?

    Russell Potter

    English Department
    Colby College

    rapotter@colby.edu

     

    Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share, vols. II and III, tr. Robert Hurley. Cambridge, MA: Zone, 1991 (1992).

     

    Pefanis, Julian. Heterology and the Postmodern. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.

     

    The reception of Georges Bataille, as Julian Pefanis observes, has been belated in the English-speaking world– and not only because it has been so slow to be translated. Until quite recently, Bataille has remained a shadowy figure; in a memorable metaphor Pefanis compares him with “a large dark body, maybe a black hole, whose presence in the heavens has been discernable in the erratic orbits of the visible planets: Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, Baudrillard, and the rest” (42). Pefanis notes the groundbreaking importance of the collection Visions of Excess (1985); since then no fewer than seven new translations have appeared, including Inner Experience, The Tears of Eros, The College of Sociology, Guilty, Theory of Religion, and the first volume of The Accursed Share.1 Yet while Bataille’s texts may be said to have finally “arrived” in the Anglophone world (as the recent special issue of Yale French Studies on Bataille attests), there still remain a number of important texts whose full impact has yet to be felt–and of these, none is more massive than the final share of La Parte Maudite. Bataille did not fully complete this work, and died when only the first volume had appeared; the Gallimard editors (and Hurley) have made the best of what was left, but the result remains massive, sprawling, redundant–and brilliant. And, of all the black holes in the Bataillean sky (and indeed l’anus solaire precedes the “black hole” in the genealogy of the imagined universe), the last two volumes of what Hurley translates as The Accursed Share loom largest, the intensity of their gravity almost suffocating.

     

    Such holes can swallow their authors whole; some incomplete magnum opus or another serves as the tombstone of many a writer–and none more fittingly than Bataille. Yet, if the lightness of his short essays, the delirious play of his pornographic novellas, are less in evidence here, there is nonetheless a compensatory and strangely lucid air of finality, an air reminiscent of Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo; here the author weaves his own shroud, and ends by crumpling beneath it. To the very last, Bataille embodied what he called “the practice of joy before death,” and in its final sections the text burns and poisons with delight, like the half-eaten pages of Aristotle’s treatise on comedy in the mouth of the venerable Jorge in Eco’s The Name of the Rose.

     

    No doubt there are other metaphors of depense with which one could hail this volume, but the question remains: What hole in the celestial void–that is, in the historical genealogy of post-modernism–do these translations of The Accursed Share (along with Bataille’s other works) fill? And, now that the penumbra of Bataille has lightened somewhat, what influence will it have on current re- theorizations of the postmodern? These are questions that Julian Pefanis sets out to answer in Heterology and the Postmodern, but before embarking on a critique of his work, a closer look at the final books of The Accursed Share is in order.

     

    Unlike writers such as Baudrillard, for whom for whom the inheritance of depense leads to “the extermination of signs” (Pefanis 30), Bataille still maintains the question of expenditure from within functioning historical economies. The question of the reality-value of the structures he investigates is moot for Bataille, as it is for Foucault; both follow the Nietzschean dictate that a culture’s supposed or ostensible motives are as valuable (if not more valuable) for a genealogical inquiry as its actual ones (supposing indeed that they could ever be determined). Even if his ultimate destination is the “end of history” (190), Bataille begins with historically specific moments and cultures, in order to pinpoint the deeper structures of which they are symptomatic.

     

    This process began in Volume I (which appeared in 1988 in a translation by Hurley that forms the companion to this book), where Bataille demonstrated the crucial role of sacrificing or destroying the excess produced in any economy through a series of expositions–not only on the Northwest Coast Indians’ potlach, but also on the sacrificial rites of the Maya, the territorial imperative of early Islam, and the massive monasticism of Tibetan Lamaism. In each case, Bataille locates the excess, the “accursed share” (la parte maudite), with the dispersal of which these otherwise widely varying cultures have had to cope. A society can do many things with its excess; it can throw it into refuse pits, it can expend it in endless war, or it can disperse it with a massive movement of non-production (Tibetan monasticism). The decisive move of capitalism, even against feudalism (in which Bataille as a medievalist recognizes the sheer bulk of both inefficient labor and non- productive expenditure), is to re-invest this excess in growth–that is, in the production of both greater means of production (and consequently a still larger excess).

     

    That such a practice eventually seems as bizarre and cancerous as it does is a credit to Bataille as an historian. For all the surreality of his articulations of transgression and expenditure, they are grounded in history to a degree that few of his theoretical followers have matched. Yet what remains, after Volume I, is an open question: what might these historical lessons mean at the postmodern moment, either at the juncture where Bataille’s text ends (the increasing cold war tensions between the U.S. and U.S.S.R) or now, now that the historical contest between capitalist accumulation in the name of an (always postponed) individual sovereignty and socialist industrialization (in the name of a collective anti- sovereignty) has suddenly collapsed. As Bataille himself says at the close of Volume I, “if this tension [between Soviet communism and capitalism] were to fail, a feeling of calm would be completely unwarranted; there would be more reason than ever to be afraid.”2

     

    From this problematic, Volume II, “The History of Eroticism,” constitutes an unexpected and somewhat diffuse detour. In it, Bataille attempts both to subjoin the question of the erotic into the larger question of the economic and to offer a historical genealogy of eroticism. Bataille begins by recounting in more pointedly economic terms Levi-Strauss’s structural models of incest and exogamy. The ban on endogamy can then be seen as a barrier against “accumulation,” just as exogamy is regarded as the “expenditure of resources” (56). Bataille also stresses, as a fundamental gesture, the importance of opposition to and distance from nature to the constitutive structures of humanity. As beings who are aware of death and for whom sexual acts are choices (rather than the function of instincts), taboos and strictures on sexuality are constitutive of humanity itself, humanity as opposed to nature. Eroticism, then, marks a return to the abhorred nature–or at least an attempted return, since the nature to which it returns is opened only through the licit illicitness of transgression, and is neither total nor sustainable. Eroticism, furthermore, is placed outside the economy of the ‘useful’; it does not serve a social function, or indeed any function at all; its nature is ‘sovereign’ (in the special use of this term as defined by Bataille; see below) and fundamentally opposed to society and the State.

     

    Humanity, for Bataille, is constituted both by the taboos and strictures which establish society (not excluding the transgressions which at once violate and reaffirm them) and by its excess, which demands a commensurate expenditure of resources. On an individual level, eroticism is the ultimate form of this expenditure: it destroys the dualism between subject and object and marks the violent return of “totality” (113). It, too, has a politics, which are contrary to the interests of the state; Bataille’s figure here is the Sade of “Limitless Expenditure”; the subject “breaks away from all restraints” and annihilates form.3 Eroticism, then, is the individual technic of sovereign values, of values which Bataille opposes to utility, and as such it offers a postmodern ethos; “the consciousness of erotic truth anticipates the end of history” (190)–which for Bataille depends upon the eradication of inequalities of resources and status which produced “history.”

     

    The question of how, on a social level, such a development might be possible provides the impetus towards a re-articulation of “sovereignty,” which is the subject of Volume III. By “sovereign,” it should be noted, Bataille designates something rather different from the ordinary connotations of the term, in a manner similar to Nietzsche’s “noble.” Like Nietzsche, Bataille both embraces and disavows the class connotations of his chosen term. The sovereign, for Bataille, is the domain of non-utility and non-objectivity; it is the useless, it disdains use, and it scorns the (bourgeois) world of “things.” It chooses the present rather than the future; the transgressive rather than the obedient; its domain is excess, the realm of the accursed share.

     

    Bataille’s sovereignty is thus a mobile and circulating loss, eternally returning at the edge of value/utility. For, as he himself observes, this theory of the Sovereign as the useless treads on the edge of its own contradiction. If the sovereign is both “no-thing” (that thing whose use value = 0) and yet at the same time crucial (in that it alone can oppose the society of commodity accumulation), its uselessness at once becomes useful, even necessary. By its very structure it undoes itself at the very moment when its value becomes evident. The text of The Accursed Share itself enacts this mobility gained at the price of loss; like a thread in Penelope’s loom, each small section undoes and re-does the question of the sovereign.

     

    In the feudal order, sovereignty has already begun to unravel, insofar as the monarchs have traded full sovereignty for power over the world of things.4 Nonetheless, the monarch’s role as the paradigm of subjectivity remains paramount; the subjectivity of the individual subject, rather than being directly available, is always mediated through the visual recognition of the monarch. Nonetheless, the sovereign is in principle inalienable, and the subject can always recall her/his share of the sovereign. This, for Bataille, is the revolutionary moment, when “the subject assumes in himself, in himself alone, the full truth of the moment,” and the paradigmatic subject of this kind is Sade. What this might mean on a collective level remains unarticulated, however, and Bataille does not offer any direct models as he did in Volume I. What he does instead is to embark upon a rather abstract, and yet prescient analysis of Stalin’s rationales for socialist industrialization. For Bataille, Soviet society is the medium in which the question of the sovereign will be resolved, for “today, sovereignty is no longer alive except in the perspectives of communism” (261).

     

    This statement may come as something of a surprise to those who would categorize Bataille with the sort of “ludic” postmodernism that takes its cues from Nietzsche rather than Marx.5 Yet Bataille is quite serious; like Marx, his historical progression begins with tribal and feudalistic structures, and recognizes the capitalistic turn as a deviance from all previous historical norms. Bataille’s difference–and a significant one it is–is that unlike many theorists of Marxism, who prefer to think of Stalin as a kind of bad dream, Bataille looks directly at the economic structures of communism under Stalin as a starting point for his theorizations.

     

    Bataille emphasizes at the outset the historical surprise of Lenin (and, later, Mao Zedong):

     

    Socialist revolutions, carried out by militants who quoted Marx as their authority, succeeded in countries with an agrarian or feudal social structure. (265)

    For Bataille, this demonstrates that it is the revolt against the old sovereignty of the feudal order that enables revolution, and not at all the revolt against the bourgeois. In fact, as Bataille ironically observes, there have not yet been any revolutions of the kind Marx predicted, where the proletariat of an industrialized nation has seized power from the bourgeois:

     

    I wish to stress, against both classical and present-day Marxism, the connection of all great revolutions, from the English and the French onward, with a feudal order that is breaking down. . . . All those that overthrew a regime started with a revolt motivated by the sovereignty that is implied in feudal society. (279)

     

    [14 Soviet communism, however, has a difference that fascinates Bataille; while it did not destroy an established bourgeois order, it continually opposed itself to that order on an international scale, constituting what Bataille calls the “world of denied sovereignty” (291). Unlike bourgeois societies, which by dedicating their excess resources to the increment of the forces of production in the name of accumulation, Soviet communism demanded an ever swifter and mightier increment, what Stalin (quoted by Bataille) called the “unbroken expansion of production . . . without booms or crises,” yet made precisely in the name of renouncing the sovereign share in order to create an undifferentiated society (293).

     

    Thus Bataille sees Soviet communism aiming to renounce alienation–yet not the alienation of “labor value” decried by Marx, but the alienation of sovereignty itself. For, had this society succeeded, it would have marked not the destruction but the return of sovereignty:

     

    If every man is destined for complete non- differentiation, he abolishes all alienation in himself; he stops being a thing, or rather he attains a thinghood so fully that he is no longer a thing . . . a thing is alienated (partial); it always exists in relation to something else. . . .

     

    Bataille nonetheless seems to sense that such a society will be difficult to produce, especially when, as with later Soviet communism, the moment when full subjectivity (which is precisely an economicphenomenon) might be reached must be continually put off in the name of increased production. Yet Bataille declines to judge communism from what he calls his own “comic bourgeois” society, a society which attempts any antics to avoid sacrifice: “No one on this side of the curtain is in a position to give lessons to those whose lot was to put everything at stake” (360). In the end, bourgeois society and communist society both debase the ‘sovereign,’ as they both (though for opposed reasons) place their greatest emphasis on accumulation; Bataille is therefore not comfortable with either. His models of society, for all their attractiveness, are reluctant–out of principle, one supposes–to answer the question “where do we go from here?” In response, Bataille admits that he has only “banalities”: we must “affirm, against all opposition, the unconditional value of a politics that would level individual resources” (189). How we might work towards such a goal will not be the concern of Bataille, for whom such things would be merely useful.

     

    Bataille concludes Volume III with a series of apparently unrelated articles under the heading “The Literary World and Communism.” Their titles–“Nietzsche and Communism,” “Nietzsche and Jesus,” “Nietzsche and the Transgression of Prohibitions,” and “The Present Age and Sovereign Art,” signal a strange and yet premeditated return to Nietzsche as the paradigmatic figure of the sovereign. Indeed, in a moment of uncanny lucidity, Bataille states simply, “I am the only one who thinks of himself not as a commentator on Nietzsche but as being the same as he” (367). Like Bataille, Nietzsche “refused the reign of things,” and along with it the notion of human beings as “a means and not an end” (367). Even Jesus figures in the equation; Bataille sees the New Testament as a manual for sovereign existence, and even the Nietzsche of The Antichrist as but a return to a sovereignty the institutional church had obscured under the whips and chains of ressentiment.

     

    In his final pages, Bataille begins to sound something like a Zarathustra himself; critiquing Thomas Mann’s statement that “who takes Nietzsche literally is lost,” he cites Jesus’s “Who tries to save his life shall lose it” (401). The loss, even of one’s own subjectivity as such, is for Bataille the condition of life, the underlying force that drives eroticism, laughter, and writing itself. The only danger is that the sovereign loss, loss for its own sake, might be diverted into a loss for something (for God or for Country, or for greater gains in the future). Against this danger, Bataille offers his ‘text for nothing,’ his shout, his festival of depense.

     

    That Bataille’s greatest strength is a negation–albeit a negation that exceeds itself and is figuratively transformed into an affirmation (as with Nietzsche’s ‘active nihilism’)–makes the question of his legacy equally accursed. Like Nietzsche, Bataille is at once everywhere and nowhere; he provides a spur, an incitement to discourse, without supplying either a dogmatic structure (Freud’s Oedipus) or an overriding goal (Marx’s proletarian revolution). It is this dilemma that faces Julian Pefanis, who in attempting to construct a genealogy of postmodernism by charting the influence of Bataille finds himself continually obliged to construct a more unitary–and a more useful–Bataille than either Bataille’s texts or Pefanis’s own theorizations of heterology would seem to offer.

     

    Pefanis could nonetheless have made the necessary connections himself, constructing not so much an account of postmodernism but an instance. That he does not hardly makes his text invalid, but it does make it less valuable. To borrow Teresa Ebert’s distinction, Pefanis is more a “theoretician”–a cataloguer and applier of theory–than a “theorist”–one who, through her/his very act of writing, undertakes to actively (re)theorize the questions s/he addresses. Nonetheless, among theoreticians, Pefanis is unusually acute, and he has traced lines of influence through the theorists whose texts he considers that are suggestive and provoking. As indicated above, he takes Bataille as his central text, positing it as the mediator between Kojeve’s Hegel and the Nietzschean turn taken by French philosophy after the war (supported and encouraged in particular by Foucault and Deleuze). Pefanis later extends this argument, asserting that Bataille also stands as a medial text between Mauss’s account of The Gift and both Baudrillard’s and Lyotard’s constructions around the question of exchange.

     

    At the onset, Pefanis states that he wishes to mobilize these theorizations of exchange in order to model some form of ‘resistance’ to the ‘logic of consumer capitalism'(the phrase, as well as the question, is Jameson’s), and to critique the notion of postmodernism as a complicit dead-end offered by Felix Guattari, who decries the loss of confidence in the notion of “emancipation through social action” and denounces the philosophy of Baudrillard and Lyotard as “no philosophy at all” (7). Exactly how these two questions relate to one another is not made clear, but Pefanis launches into a litany for a ‘postmodern science,’ whose genealogy he traces to Alexandre Kojeve (whose students, among them Sartre, Lacan, and Bataille, could each in his turn be seen as pivots in the articulation of the postmodern). It is Kojeve, reading Hegel’s account of consciousness and desire in the Phenomenology of Mind, who first prophesies the “end of history” (12). The end will be possible because consciousness need no longer be founded upon “slavish” labor, but upon a new possibility. It remains for Kojeve’s students to articulate this possibility, and Pefanis is no doubt correct in asserting that Mauss’s The Gift provided the initial impetus for its articulation. In the question of exchange, of giving and receiving, Bataille developed his model of the “accursed share,” just as Lacan worked this same question (by way of a retournement of Freud) into his own theorizations of desire.

     

    Pefanis’s next chapters, on Bataille, Baudrillard, and Lyotard respectively, pick up on this movement, and situate Bataille as the text behind postmodern models of exchange, difference, and desire. His reading of Bataille is a lucid one, although somewhat limited (it reads somewhat like a review of Visions of Excess), and while its posing of the question of the reception of Bataille is astute (as noted above), its analysis of Bataille’s theorizations of depense are rather more tenuous. Pefanis notes Bataille’s “Nietzschean turn,” towards the loss of subjectivity, and links it to “the problematic of writing and death” in Klossowski and Blanchot. Yet this connection is abruptly dropped (it is the only reference to Blanchot in the entire book), leaving a central question of the inheritance of Bataille dangling.

     

    Pefanis does engage, however, with The Accursed Share, and provides a compelling account of Bataille’s model of sovereignty. Pefanis zeroes in on the question of class, and in so doing identifies the underlying gesture from which Bataille’s “sovereign” derives:

     

    Bataille struggles to strip sovereignty of its ideological associations with the bygone aristocracy without delivering it to a heroic bourgeois individual, since it is precisely this sovereign subject which Bataille aims to annihilate by reserving it for a type of mystical experience of limits--of the poetic, the erotic.(48)

     

    Yet by suggesting that the sovereign “annihilates” the “sovereign subject,” Pefanis conflates Bataille’s radical anti-utilitarianism with the move against the unitary subject instigated by Freud and Lacan. Bataille does not posit such a unitary subject; indeed his ‘sovereignty’ is a mobile and fluid state incapable by its nature of cohering in a given individual, at least for long. It is not the subjectivity of the bourgeois that Bataille calls into question–it is a given for him that it is already questionable–but rather that subject’s relation to society, which is not obliterated but secured through the “experience of limits.”

     

    Nonetheless, Pefanis makes some suggestive connections between Bataille and recent anthropological work–work which vindicates his insistence that the question of the economy was always one of coping not with scarcity, but with superabundance (an idea, incidentally, which Bataille probably took from Nietzsche).6 Marx, notes Pefanis, based his models on an “anthropology of scarcity”–and there is a case to be made, as he suggests, that this positing of primordial lack has motivated both ethnocentric anthropology and progressivist thought (51). Yet rather than link this perception, as he might, to questions of global political economy, Pefanis retreats to a digression on Kant, and concludes his chapter by declaring, somewhat vaguely, that “Bataille’s method and practice . . . ineluctably concern a meta-discourse on writing” (58).

     

    Having brought Bataille from the position of someone who, at least apparently, had something to say about society, to the position of a ‘meta-discourse’ (heterology), Pefanis is able to move with relative ease to the work of Baudrillard and Lyotard. There are links here, to be sure– but there are also profound disjunctions. No doubt one of the reasons that Guattari is so suspicious of Baudrillard and Lyotard is that they are both writers who mark a turn away from the question of the socius, and towards a far more meta-discursive position. However one may construe Bataille’s politics (and some may say that he had none), he writes, as does Guattari, surreal discourse that grows from the analysis of “real” social structures, a discourse which Bataille could call sociology. To move from Bataille to Baudrillard and Lyotard without addressing this difference (except in a relatively familiar re-hash of Baudrillard’s spin on Plato’s question of the real vs. the ideal), is jarring.

     

    One of the central questions of the Bataillean text, that of political economy, can serve as an indication of Pefanis’s approach: The potlach, with its economy of conspicuous loss, is chosen by Bataille over the kula, the model of ongoing exchange, and this too is the choice of Baudrillard. Yet as Pefanis observes, Baudrillard refuses altogether to think of the potlach as an “economy” (29), seeing in it instead the “extermination of signs,” whereas Lyotard scorns the entire model as an exercise in the romantic valorization of an artificially constructed “savage.” As a consequence, Baudrillard’s symbolic exchange is static, a model of signification for “after the end of the world.” Lyotard, for his part, returns to Freud without stopping to leave an offering at Bataille’s shrine, producing in The Libidinal Economy (Pefanis’s central text) an enigmatic, playful exegesis that abandons the question of the social almost entirely. Such ambivalence– one could even call it indifference–over the inheritance of Bataille characterizes many of the texts of both Baudrillard and Lyotard. This ambivalence does not seem to trouble Pefanis, who (despite his repeated accolades of Bataille) appears to become progressively more interested in Freud and Lacan.

     

    Pefanis would have liked, it seems, to offer a genealogy of postmodernism which would “account” for the question of exchange in such a way that one could re-join Baudrillard’s and Lyotard’s constructions of exchange to Jameson’s meditation on resistance to consumer capitalism. Yet in the end, this desire remains unfilled, breached as it is by a Lacanian irruption (a reading, compelling at first but eventually allegorized to death), of Jorge Luis Borges’ short story, “The Fauna of Mirrors”). The “mirror people” lie in wait, visible only in the depths of the mirror, constrained (on account of an ancient defeat at the hands of the Yellow Emperor) to mimic us in this world. Yet one day, in revenge, they will return, and conquer, and throw off the slavery of mimesis. The mirror people, Pefanis seems to want to say, are Baudrillard and Lyotard–and surely Lacan as well–and in this sense they have already arrived, and we are them (insofar as we see ourselves in them it is/we are false, trapped in a power ploy, an allegory of meconaissance). Yet this reading of Borges via Lacan offers no grounds upon which the question of resistance can be framed, because it has already placed in abeyance the question of material social relations. In the funhouse of postmodernism, one never knows if there is actually a riot going on or not–it could be only a simulation; indeed to Baudrillard it is already a simulation. Such is “ludic” postmodernism at its worst, and while one could accuse Bataille as well of playing this game, at least for him the stakes were real. In the end, Pefanis seems more akin to Baudrillard and Lyotard than to Bataille, whose text is founded upon an insistence on the political (and on using lived social relations as a model) to which Pefanis, along with many of the more “ludic” postmodernists, has developed something of an allergy. From this position, the question of “resistance” is moot–but only because ludic postmodernists have declared it so.

     

    In the final analysis, Pefanis’s book is too dense for most undergraduates; the histories it articulates will only be intelligible to those already familiar with them. Nonetheless, for those interested in these histories, it offers an elegant and at times brilliant retournement of its own. Bataille’s book, on the other hand, while even more useless, is of tremendous value. Robert Hurley’s text preserves (as have his previous translations of Bataille) both the unrelenting care and the reckless audacity of Bataille’s prose, and Bruce Mau’s impeccable design–as always with Zone books–renders the physicality of the volume a delight to hand and eye.

     

    Notes

     

    1. The full citations for these are as follows: Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Alan Stoekl (Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1985); Inner experience (Albany: State U of New York P, 1988 [translation of L’Experience interieure]); The Tears of Eros (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988 [translation of Larmes d’Eros]); The College of Sociology (1937-39), ed. Denis Hollier, tr. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988 [texts by Georges Bataille, et al.; translation of Le College de sociologie]); Guilty, tr. Bruce Boone (Venice, CA: The Lapis Press, 1988 [translation of Le Coupable]); and The Accursed Share, Vol. 1, tr. Robert Hurley (NY: Zone Books, 1988 [translation of volume I of La Parte maudite]).

     

    2. Bataille, The Accursed Share I:188.

     

    3. See the essay, “The Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade,” Visions of Excess 91-102.

     

    4. “What made royalty contestable . . . was that the sovereign end, which royalty was meant to embody in the eyes of the subjects, became, never more scandalously, a means for the very individual it was meant to transfigure” The Accursed Share II&III: 320.

     

    5. See Donald Morton and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, Theory/ Pedagogy/Politics 29-30 n.1, for a summary of this dichotomy, which has been most forcibly articulated by Teresa L. Ebert.

     

    6. Nietzsche declares in The Gay Science, section 349, that “in nature it is not conditions of distress that are dominant, but overflow and squandering, even to the point of absurdity.” The Gay Science, tr. Walter Kaufman (NY: Vintage, 1974), 292.

     

  • Bargaincounterculturalcapitalism: Gear and Writhing at the New Music Seminar

    Bill Millard

     Department of English Rutgers University

    <millard@zodiac.rutgers.edu>

     

     

    The New Music Seminar and New York Nights, June 15-21, 1992, New York City

     

    At the close of four days of fractiousness, defensiveness, tepid consensus, heated debate, masturbation unabated, plugs for products, plugs for services, plugs for personalities, plugs for personae, plugs for personal agendas, plugs for drugs, and live performances plugged and unplugged, a ballroom full of people found themselves on the receiving end of a sexual threat. Diamanda Galas, New York- based anti-diva, stepped onto the table at which she and ten other rock and near-rock artists were seated, to deliver their observations on the state of the music industry. Standing tall and turning her back to the audience, she invited everyone (loudly, twice) to admire her buttocks, then inquired, “How many of you limp dicks can get it up with a condom?” What began as a series of mundane remarks on stylistic homogenization and fading undergrounds suddenly had to make room for a disturbing gesture in AIDS activism, complete with sexual role reversal: Galas in the phallic role, on the rampage. “With this fine ass, I CAN’T EVEN GET FUCKED because none of you can get it up with a condom on!” (When Galas began partially undressing, Jim Dreschler of New York band Murphy’s Law left his position at the opposite end of the table and appeared to take up her dare, but came no closer to her than photo-op distance before backing down.)

     

    As many have come to expect at New Music Seminars, this rupture of star-panel conventions led to one incendiary moment of near-connection, then largely fizzled into the poses of angry egoists. Having seized attention to force the issue of proceeds from rock charities upon the panel and audience–the previous night’s AIDS benefit featuring Galas, Soul Asylum, Prong, and the Butthole Surfers (whose leader Gibby Haynes was chairing the rock artists’ panel), had generated little research money and widespread accusations of profiteering–Galas ceded center stage to voices that were just as loud but lacked her frame- breaking conviction that public-health concerns outweighed those of the rock scene. Panelists attempted to move the conversation away from bitter exchanges with audience members (“How much did you get paid, Gibby?” “Give it back!” “This is pathetic . . . this makes me want to quit the music business”) toward various personal and collective responses to the fabled greed of the industry. Psychic TV’s Genesis P-Orridge, for example, in a Sun Ra Venusian hat and an oracular tone, spoke at length of Chinese atrocities toward Tibetans, his own forcible exile from the U.K., the value of methylenedioxymethamphetamine (ecstasy) in pacifying football hooligans, and the relative political triviality of the music-industry concerns that are the Seminar’s raison d’etre, concluding that everyone should “stop buying records, save the money, and travel.”

     

    But a final collective gesture against the structure of the Seminar itself–the exasperated departure of the whole panel and audience to join the rap artists’ panel next door, which had been walled off from the rock panel as if to embody physically the apartheid-like status of stylistic categories–produced only a short-lived sense of collective purpose. Ice-T and other rap panelists welcomed the largely white rock crowd, but an audience member took the floor mike angrily to pierce the balloon: “If you’re not down with our concerns . . . not just today but tomorrow, we don’t want your support.” Exit collective adrenaline. Harry Allen, Public Enemy’s “media assassin,” came down from the dais to hug and thank the angry audience member; most whites in the room began looking limp. What looked for a moment like unpremeditated Woodstocking was quickly reinscribed as grandstanding.

     

    It has become standard operating procedure at each year’s New Music Seminar for participants to dismiss, disparage, and disrespect the New Music Seminar. There was more to the 13th NMS than sound, fury, and nonsignification, but one could hardly leave the Marriott Marquis with an impression of having viewed a discursive community engaged in productive intercourse. This annual event represents the alternative-rock world’s uncertainty over its status as a self-analytic profession, a promotion-intensive capitalist enterprise, or a locus of generational/ideological opposition. Pulled in three directions, the Seminar’s reliable response is to roll its collective eyes (hoping nearby MTV cameras are rolling as well) and implode. * * * *

     

    Professional conferences and trade shows perform crucial functions in situating an activity and its practitioners along continua of social position, economic status, and ideology. Whatever purposes underlie the activity–private profit, political advantage, cultural prestige, knowledge for its own or any other sake, leisure– the convening of those who pursue it generates not only self-conscious discourse about the activity but practice of the activity and exchanges in the goods, services, and intangible forms of capital that surround the activity.1 One attends a conference to learn (or relearn), and to occupy, the habitus of the profession, i.e., to understand, to do, and to trade.

     

    Market behavior at different conferences varies in explicitness; the atmosphere of a conference and even its physical arrangement provide clues to where the activity in question lies along the profession/business continuum, and thus to the cultural capital its participants may claim. Trade shows such as the Comdex computer convention, where even products not yet in existence (“vaporware”) are advertised to generate market interest, should they actually be produced, occupy an obvious commercial extreme. At the other, communities that define themselves as professions (such as medical specialties, many of whose members attend national conferences mainly to hear the first-hand presentation of findings that they can put to practical clinical use) often allocate the educational and commercial segments of a conference to separate sites: the largest hall in a hotel or convention center for the hustling of products (cleverly pitched pharmaceuticals for the heavy prescribers at the American College of Cardiology; vast and elaborate displays of tomographic scanners and magnetic resonance imaging equipment for the technophiles at the Radiologic Society of North America), the smaller surrounding rooms for the scholarly presentation of data–inadvertently implying, through the centering of commerce and the peripheralizing of the ostensibly central activity of continuing professional education, that the commercial tail has been known to wag the professional dog. At Modern Language Association conferences, economic functions, professional practice, and leisure activities mutually overlap, as paper readings and departmental cocktail parties all help define and refine the economies of prestige on which academic hiring depends. Regardless of physical structures or consensual rituals, however, conferences and conventions allow a participant the temporary sense of access to all the multiple facets of the activity; if one cannot quite occupy the center of a professional panopticon (owing to scheduling conflicts), one can at least construct a personal pluropticon, grazing on performances and wares as if wielding a video remote.

     

    If the respective balance of discourse (ostensibly disinterested) and exchange (motivated) at a conference correlates with the definition of an activity as a profession or a business, the appearance of analytic discourse at a conference for a field that has historically had no pretenses to professional status, rock music,2 is an intriguing anomaly. Along with the CMJ Music Marathon each fall, the annual NMS is recognized as the unofficially official convention for the U.S. rock industry (or for those segments of the industry to whom the Grammy awards have little meaning). But the Seminar’s origins in the alternative-music and independent-label communities (like “alternative music” and independent labels themselves) have been obscured, in slightly greater degree each year, by the participation of the large corporate labels.3 At the same time, the Seminar makes efforts to incorporate explicit politics, analytic debate, and even a degree of self- scrutiny into its program, along with the customary promotion, schmoozing, and dealing. This dissonance admits numerous explanations: an attack of countercultural bad conscience? An attempt to use its profit-making activities (the NMS is a private for-profit firm) as a source of subsidy for unprofitable discursive activities that its organizers still consider salutary? Or, conversely, an effort to mask its exploitive nature, like that of the music industry as a whole, behind the window-dressing of countercultural rhetoric? These constructions are not necessarily mutually contradictory.

     

    The first NMS took place in 1979, the year of the first major rap single (“Rapper’s Delight,” Sugarhill Gang) and two years after the watershed year of 1977, when, as the story goes, Punk Changed Rock Forever (temporarily). Even though the punk period’s explosive growth of autodidact bands and independent record companies almost immediately became nostalgia fodder–the Clash’s “Hitsville UK” from the Sandinista! album waxed sentimental about small noncorporate labels, in the past tense, as early as 1980– and even though rap has moved from strict subcultural status to a subject mentioned in Democratic Convention speeches, the NMS to date has maintained the professed purpose of promoting music that is unlikely to find an outlet on large labels or on stations formatted as “Contemporary Hits Radio” or “classic rock.” Its panels are rigorously taxonomized by stylistic subject (rap, dance, Latin, metal, and the catchall rock category “alternative,” as well as nuts-and- bolts publishing, booking, legal, video, technology, creative, and “issues” panels), but a rhetoric of inside/outside still permeates the enterprise. The practical panels mainly address those who are inside the industry yet outside established centers of commercial power, such as unsigned musicians and their managers, independent distributors, and music directors for college radio stations; the dominant tone combines desire to become an insider with skepticism about how much the current insiders really know about the music (Gerard Cosloy of New York’s Matador Records: “The scene is full of people who think they know shit. And that’s what they know: shit”). At the speeches and debate-oriented panels, too, much of the discourse conveys an unmistakable sense–perhaps nostalgic, certainly problematized–that one can clearly distinguish Us from Them.

     

    The NMS project is both schizoid and, on its own terms, successful. The combination of a convention for industry personnel (offering reflexive discourse, or at least the reflections of insiders) and an orchestrated showcase for mostly unsigned talent (practice) results annually in a flurry of record-contract signings and distribution deals (exchange). The performance branch of the Seminar, now known as New York Nights, coordinates bookings at some 30 venues in Manhattan and Hoboken, giving approximately 350 acts the chance to play before audiences comprising large numbers of A&R personnel, critics, and radio program directors, all of whom enter the clubs free with NMS badges. (Persons not credentialed for the Seminar can also buy discount passes, making New York Nights a musical bargain counter for the local fan and adding the semblance of a “real” consumer public for the participant.) Live performance also took place on-site, as a “BMI Live” display allowed old and new groups to play half-hour acoustic sets, making the Marriott’s hallways a continuous concert stage. Conversations with musicians invariably reveal that they regard playing NMS shows with a combination of anticipation and dread; war stories abound in which performers are hustled onstage, hustled off, poorly mixed at the sound board, usually unpaid, and generally ill-treated. Yet they continue to travel cross-country or even internationally for one or two gigs at the NMS, on the off chance that they will end up at the center of one of their year’s right-place-right-time stories. At home, the transition from local obscurity to recording stardom appears incremental and remote4; at the NMS, overnight success enters the realm of concrete possibility.

     

    The practice of new music at the Seminar is thus inseparable from exchange, or far less separable than it is in the circumstances faced daily by most rockers and rappers. By spatially and chronologically concentrating both sellers/performers and buyers/label personnel, leaving the relative scarcity of recording contracts unchanged but heightening the chances of a connection that would otherwise be improbable, the NMS presents immediate material incentives for an activity whose practitioners, under nearly all other conditions, have few economically rational reasons to pursue it. The proliferation of eager promoters from Europe, the Pacific Rim, and Latin America increases the feeding-frenzy atmosphere: with Yankee dollars at stake, representatives at the various international booths sought domestic connections with an enthusiasm that most Anglo- Americans reflexively kept under a hip degree of control. The Seminar calls itself by an academic term (it is not the New Music Exposition or, thankfully, the New York Rock Exchange), and it pays something more than lip service to multiculturalism and green politics, but it places the art of the deal squarely in the foreground.

     

    A glaring example occurred at a legal panel, “Rap and Sampling: Art or Larceny,” which employed a moot-court conceit. Debate focused not on whether using a horn track as the basis of a hiphop mix was art or larceny, or whether the recombination of sounds by sampling technology constituted a musical performance, but on how much the original musician and music publisher would be paid for having their record sampled. The participants glossed over the possibilities for debate about materially driven changes in definitions of property rights, but went head to head over percentage points–quantifying, through negotiations about the relative contributions made by the players of horn and sampling synthesizer, an issue that might have been explored in qualitative discourse. The attorney for the prosecution, EMI Music Publishing’s Fred Silber, set up one of his plaintiffs as a predictable romanticist icon, a starving saxophonist who honed his chops at Juilliard but wound up working at Burger King while his work made money for others; the sampling producer’s defense attorney, Michael Sukin, argued with comparable vagueness that “the Constitution encourages art” and that “strict copyright would kill rap.” After the verdict (a $1000 fee for each 100,000 sales and a 50% writer credit for the plaintiff) the moderator revealed that the saxophonist was in fact Greg Smith, a well-paid studio musician, songwriter, and Grammy nominee, hardly in need of hamburger work. Neither hiphop’s unique reversal/detournement of the racially charged history of field recording, in which black folk and blues performers received little or nothing from white-owned record companies, nor the question of the disparate class-coded significance of the symbols at stake–Juilliard training and Grammies versus hiphop mixing–was taken up.

     

    Yet the dissonance between the pervasive exchanges and some of the other forms of discourse spotlighted at the NMS is striking. Simply by allowing exposure to acts whose commercial prospects are limited, the Seminar becomes the locus of assorted anticommercial rhetorics, from romantic narratives pitting suffering artists against bean-counting philistines to unsentimental, often race-conscious oppositional agendas. Indeed, political stances are both structurally inevitable and overtly courted; whether this constitutes patronization is debatable. Some of the most popular of this year’s panels (to take two overflowing examples, the writers’ panel “New Music: A Problem for New and Established Critics” and “Pot in Pop: Let’s Be Blunt”) were also among those with most contentious audiences, whether the bones of contention were generational/ ideological issues degenerating into de gustibus disputes and personal grudges, or moral panics over ever-popular recreational chemicals. At both of these sessions, panelists offered relatively harmonious collections of views–harmonious to the point of unison in the case of “Pot in Pop,” where NORML-style herbal advocacy (“You could power the whole country with the hemp raised on just 6% of U.S. farmland”) was the order of the day–and thus brought on alarmingly vitriolic, if hardly surprising, objections from audience respondents. The somewhat paranoiac tone of antidrug or anti-Robert Christgau dissidents evoked wagon- circling responses by the respective hemp-using and critical communities. The assumed social structure, whether regretted (Elizabeth Wurtzel, New Yorker pop critic: “I feel like we’re mostly writing for each other”) or described in a language of wishful solidarity (B Real of Cypress Hill: “With marijuana there is no racism. . . . This is the only plant I know that brings people together”), remained the subculture beleaguered by various forms of intolerant power.

     

    Oppositionalism also pervaded the Seminar’s high- profile keynote speeches. The performers invited to open the proceedings were two whose symbolic language has placed them directly in the crosshairs of the state: John Trudell, a Santee Sioux activist and poet who has recently begun a blues-rock recording career, and Ice-T, the much-publicized rapper, thrash-metal singer, and film star. While working for Native American causes in the 1970s, Trudell drew so much FBI attention that he felt he had to leave the movement to avoid endangering his friends; his family was killed in a 1979 fire widely believed to have been set by government operatives on the same day he burned a flag in Washington (federal authorities declined to investigate the fire). His NMS address balanced devotional verse on Elvis with scathing remarks on Eurocentrism and some very 1960s-ish rallying cries (“Rock and roll is based on revolutions going way beyond 33 1/3”). With his harrowing personal history, his status as a spokesman for peoples historically on the receiving end of Euro-American brutality, and his abilities as a political orator, Trudell is essentially immunized from skeptical reception, but his strong, uncomplicated outsider position matches the Long Playing vinyl of his apocalyptist metaphor. A politics that is immediate for him inevitably strikes much of the NMS audience, impressed but implicated, as nostalgic.

     

    Ice-T (whose song “Cop Killer,” as events following the NMS would make clear, is not beloved by Southern police departments or their anonymous telephonic sympathizers), while equally impressive in his oppositional rhetoric, is implicated in more complex ways. He came close to omnipresence during the Seminar: he addressed the collected audience about racism in society at large and corrupt exchanges inside the music industry, performed with his thrash band Body Count (busting off a vigorous “Cop Killer” while a line of NYPD maintained a hairtrigger-tense presence just outside the hall), co-MC’d the AIDS benefit with B-52 Fred Schneider, and served on the concluding rap artists’ panel. He also managed to appear from the audience, at a panel on media coverage of rap, to accuse most of the panelists and audience of dilettantism for taking self- congratulatory views of rap’s cultural acceptance while his own experience suggested that the rap world was still “at war.”5 The NMS became a de facto promotional blitz for Ice, but being surrounded with people predisposed in his favor (for once) did nothing to modulate his anger. The biggest star at an event that disperses and focuses star- worship in approximately equal degree voiced some of the sternest objections to existing socioeconomic arrangements.

     

    The Ice-T conundrum speaks volumes about the contradictions at the heart of the Seminar and the music industry. If anyone in attendance (Trudell excepted) had cause to consider himself or herself at odds with hegemonic forces, surely it was Ice, as numerous police organizations (the National Black Police Association excepted6) have taken his song’s retributive fantasies literally and called for his scalp. (In the months following the NMS, some have even raised the specter of federal prosecution under the charge of sedition, while their anonymous associates have lodged death threats–real, not coded in a metal-avenger persona–against employees of Time-Warner.) Yet if anyone in attendance had cause to consider himself embraced by hegemonic forces, it was likewise Ice, with a Warner Brothers contract, a major Hollywood role (in the completed but unreleased Looters) under his belt, and a maximum of favorable exposure over the four days of the Seminar. Seminar participants heard him provide the crucial contextual discourse that sound bites (outside the music industry, within the controlled simulacrum of an American public sphere) never afford him. And though the stock oppositionalist/countercultural narrative envisions media institutions attempting to stifle any uncomfortable voice, the Warner organization–one of the corporate labels most widely castigated by NMS participants for “cherry-picking” artists from independents, worsening small labels’ chances for survival and watering down the music–has continued to support him, absorbing both flak and actual menace.

     

    Around this figure and these circumstances, the cognitive structure of inside/outside contorts itself to the point of collapse. The mechanisms of exchange, as embodied in Time-Warner, can rarely be counted on to foster an oppositional practice as aggressive as Ice’s “I’m ’bout to bust some shots off/I’m ’bout to dust some cops off” (particularly at the cost of an expensive boycott against corporate holdings, from Time magazine to Batman Returns to the Six Flags Over Texas amusement park). Time-Warner certainly counts as an Althusserian ideological state apparatus, a media institution devoted to the manufacture of public consent. Yet the “Cop Killer” incident, like the Seminar it overlaps, suggests that it is simplistic to assume continual congruence between the interests of one ISA and those of another. Within the fissures that develop between such institutions–and with certain risks, decidedly nonrhetorical, accepted–it is occasionally possible to find the space for critical discourse and musical practice. * * * * *

     

    If the NMS, like the “new music” it claims as its province, is inconceivable without the historical eruptions of punk and rap into popular music during the late 1970s and early 1980s, respectively, it may be instructive to apply to it a few terms of historical analysis that were also generated in 1977. Attali’s Noise, published in France that year and in an English translation in 1985, advances a staged theory of musical paradigms (Sacrifice, Representation, Repetition, Composition), not so much driven by economic developments, in a classical base/superstructure model, as accompanying (even, Attali asserts, anticipating) broad shifts in social relations and implicit philosophical codes.7 As Susan McClary suggests in her afterword to Noise, one can read punk and postpunk musics, positioned across boundaries of institution and gender, as signs that the fluid musical and socioeconomic forms Attali envisioned under the rubric of Composition are actually aborning. Do the tensions that permeate the NMS–the sense that pop music and its derivatives are in a deeply unsatisfactory state– imply that something resembling Attali’s paradigm shift is in the works?

     

    The only coherent answer may be “Yes, though only in certain spaces, and possibly in no form Attali or many musicians would care to recognize.” As police, politicians, and censorship groups are casting Ice-T in a scapegoat role along with Luther Campbell, musical supporters of NORML’s agenda, various supposedly Satanist metal bands,8 and undoubtedly a host of pop figures yet unnamed, a cyclical/ Viconian revision of Attali’s speculations seems just as plausible as his linear-progression model. Perhaps the profession of pop musician is coming to include an inherent risk of scapegoating: the social violence that is too painful to view directly (or even on videotape) generates a symbolic violence that must consume occasional figures who traffic in the powerful symbols of rap and rock. The most primitive of Attali’s sociomusical modes, Sacrifice, may be returning; those who loudly voice what excluded segments of the population are thinking make excellent fodder for ritual.

     

    Other tendencies within the Seminar, however, provide grounds for guarded Attalian hopes that Repetition, instead of reverting to Sacrifice, might actually yield to Composition. Technology–not unpredictably, at an event where great energy is spent trading in hardware and in access to it–is the imagined midwife. At several how-to panels (“How to Make a Great Record Cheap,” “Video under $10,000”), aimed at artists strapped for the startup funding that the post-MTV music industry increasingly requires for admission, the predominant view held that technology was the problem at least as often as the solution. But another panel on a subject that is only tenuously, trendily connected to the practices and exchanges immediately at hand (“Virtual Reality and its Effect on the Future of Music”) afforded some surprisingly clearheaded discussion about electronic interactivity as a paradigm for future forms of music made possible by the various user interfaces currently known as VR.

     

    Interactivity, of course, is an integral aspect of the future musical practices hinted at by Attali. And the customary sites for the musical practices discussed at the NMS, the guitar band’s garage and the hiphop mixer’s home studio, are loci for technologically enabled interactivity, structures for converting the reception of favorite pieces of music into recombinatory creative acts (the feedback- drenched cover song, the sampled rhythm loop). Expansion of the interactive element in music by VR-related technologies, further blurring the line between professionals and amateurs, could constitute a perceptible movement toward Attalian Composition. The performer/programmers convened by moderator Jaron Lanier (founder of VPL Research) began most of their presentations in familiar NMS self-promotional mode but quickly honed in on the issue of interactivity as, in panelist Todd Rundgren’s terms, “a philosophical agenda, not a hardware question.”

     

    The inevitable dependence of such an agenda on hardware questions–and questions of the social structures and exchange mechanisms making the hardware available–provided grounds for the kind of speculative discourse that NMS panels routinely gesture toward and rarely achieve. Though programmed music is commonplace, music actually created through VR (e.g., on instruments existing only in virtual space, as conjectured by Lanier) is still vaporware, and the very phrase “virtual reality” came under collective erasure as a term co-opted by the military via NASA and hyped into meaninglessness by publicity for the film The Lawnmower Man (unanimously despised by the panel).9 Hype for VR gear and VR-derived musical products thus gave way to debate over whether the development and deployment of VR would give greater control over musical material to technical specialists or the larger listening populace. Information Society’s Kurt Harland took the former view, stating that 99% of the audience wanted “passive immersion” rather than access to the tools, and that electronically modeled musical procedures would simply expand the modes of immersion. Tina Blaine and Linda Jacobson of Oakland’s “techno-roots” group D’Cuckoo offered a contrary theory: that advances in electronic instruments would increase listeners’ ability to communicate musically and bodily–not in passive isolation, under the thumb of institutions and experts, but socially.

     

    The hypothetical question of how the crucial producer/consumer division would fare amid 21st-century musical technology received no definitive answer, but descriptions and tapes of D’Cuckoo’s work made it plausible to accept their utopian vision over the Huxleyan consumer dystopia (or Attalian repetocracy) imagined by Harland. D’Cuckoo activates its anti-technophobic collective philosophy by inventing and building its own electronic percussion instruments, mixing aleatory effects with the rigorous discipline of Japanese taiko drumming and Zimbabwean marimba music, and incorporating audience input into its live work through devices such as a MIDI controller triggered by a giant beach ball thrown into the crowd. D’Cuckoo had little need for the frenetic dealmaking of the NMS–they have already added a development deal with Elektra to their impressive resume–but with slogans at the ready (“You’re either part of the steamroller or part of the pavement”) they appeared more than ready to become a model for the next paradigm shift in popular music. No one anywhere near a major record label is likely to pick their “neoclassical postindustrial cybertribal world funk” as the next Nirvana, commercially speaking, but their working methods (like those of punks and rappers) have gathered them considerable momentum. Whatever degree of interpenetration might occur between this group and the music business as presently organized, their ability to improvise the terms and material means for their work surely counts as a survival advantage in the “cyber-Darwinist” future Rundgren describes.

     

    Lanier was unabashedly hyping D’Cuckoo and its DIY philosophy when he uttered the pithiest of his many soundbites: “Art isn’t for wimps.” The phrase could be applied as easily to Ice-T’s risky rhetorical crusade, or to any of a number of performers whose voices cut through the density of the Seminar, from aging punks like Fear (whose acoustic set at BMI Live was harsher and stronger than most amplified bands’ sets in the clubs) to current genre- collapsing acts like Galas or the multiracial, multimedia Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy. The phrase could also be translated simply as a recognition that the music industry, contrary to its organizing myths, is neither an Inside to be penetrated nor an Outside to be valorized; that narratives of escape, purity, or sanctuary no longer make usable sense of music’s social function; that the schism between the real world and the music world is gibberish. The NMS is not structured to generate consensus, and its internal contradictions remain irresolvable unless and until critical changes occur in the economics of musical production and distribution. Still, the event makes it clear that the habitus of the musician in 1992 is a hotseat. The discord between the material and rhetorical aspects of musical practice implies that conditions are overripe for another noisy change.

     

    Notes

     

    1. Some of the terms that will recur throughout this analysis–practice, discourse, and exchange–represent a preliminary attempt to apply concepts from Bourdieu and others working in his wake, such as John Fiske, to rock and related musics, along with the other fields briefly discussed here. Fiske’s use of Bourdieu’s idea of the habitus to explain academics’ difficulties in accounting for the complexities of everyday life (155ff) relies on the assumed exclusive polarity of practice and discourse, with a rueful acknowledgement that translating practice to discourse transforms it into something other than practice. Where a cultural practice encompasses discourse, however, as at the MLA or the NMS, the polarity seems difficult to sustain. Perhaps envisioning an interpenetration among these two terms and a third, exchange–coded as serpent in garden, a reminder that particular interests, agendas, and powers do not keep their distance–might help break the interpretive deadlock.

     

    2. At this writing, I am aware of only a single explicit use of the term “profession” within rock ‘n’ roll to describe rock ‘n’ roll: the line “You know how different it is in this profession,” from Graham Parker’s “Last Couple on the Dance Floor” (on the minor 1983 album The Real Macaw), refers to recording work with a self-directed skepticism, an implication that romanticist views privileging the rock “artist” are patently absurd. This autocritique is characteristic of Parker’s work but also constitutes a recurrent trope common to most rock subgenres. It is easy to locate examples in which performers take the self- important fatuity of the music scene and industry as a given: Carl Perkins’ tongue-in-cheek seriousness toward wearers of blue suede shoes, the Rolling Stones’ “Under Assistant West Coast Promo Man,” Joni Mitchell’s “Free Man in Paris” (“stoking the starmaking machine behind the popular song”), the Sex Pistols’ Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle strategies, the commercially successful anticommercialism of 1980s industrial groups like Nitzer Ebb and Nine Inch Nails, and the contemptuous response of “hardcore” rappers to pop rap groups like Colour Me Badd or Naughty By Nature (e.g., EPMD’s “Crossover,” the leadoff track on the new Def Jam West label’s 1992 NMS sampler cassette, distributed unironically by that most streetwise of labels, Columbia).

     

    3. Advertisers in the NMS directory this year included the customary small labels such as Alias, Cardiac, Caroline, Knitting Factory Works, Livin’ Large, Rykodisc, Tommy Boy, and X-Perience, but also most of the majors: A&M, Atlantic, Capitol, EMI, Epic, Mercury, RCA, Reprise, and Warner Brothers. The latter’s ad on the back cover encodes perfectly the hip, winking attitude that dominates Seminar semiotics: beneath an assertive heading certain to arouse chuckles or wrath from indie-label oppositionalists (“Warner Bros. Records. Home of Alternative Music.”) and in front of a huge globe rotated to reveal the Eastern Hemisphere (northern Africa foregrounded), six models in corporate uniform flash friendly smiles for the camera–the good-humored board of Vice Presidents for A&R next door. They are a rainbow coalition of Benettokens: four young men (an African-American, two preppy whites, and one who could be a Latino, a Pacific Islander, or a Native American and excels in the art of blow-drying), one young woman (white, jeweled for success), and one middle-aged man (white, the only member standing, radiating benign executive despotism from the head of the table). They are reassuring and receptive, ready to sign your pathbreaking group and bring your music to adoring, solvent multitudes.

     

    4. For varied, credible accounts of the circumstances faced by musicians on the fringes of the industry, see Bayton (on women’s independent groups in England) and Calder (on his own shot at the American inner circle). Both underscore the persistence of musical practice in the absence of appreciable economic exchange.

     

    5. At this writing, Ice has voluntarily withdrawn the Body Count album bearing “Cop Killer” from distribution, intending to distribute tapes of the song gratis at concerts while Sire/Warner re-releases a bowdlerized version of the record, minus the offending song. Both Ice (in assorted public statements) and his publicist Jenny Bendel (personal communication, August 7, 1992) dismiss speculation that Time-Warner personnel initiated or influenced his decision to recall the original album. “Cop Killer” has quickly become popular as a cover song in other bands’ repertoires.

     

    6. The Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas (CLEAT), the Houston Police Officers Association, the New York State Sheriffs’ Association, and assorted other law-enforcement groups called for boycotts, but Ronald Hampton of the National Black Police Association gave Billboard interviewers a dissenting view: “[The song] didn’t happen in a vacuum. . . . African-American people have been victimized by police brutality, and that is very real. Where were those organizations when Rodney King was beat up, and when that verdict came in?” (79). Hampton’s direct linkage between “Cop Killer” and the Simi Valley trial brings to the foreground many commentators’ belief that scapegoating an angry black man is the ideal way to deflect public opinion away from a recognition that police forces in Los Angeles and elsewhere have long been out of control.

     

    7. Although Noise does much more than advance a stage theory, this aspect of Attali’s argument may be summarized as follows. Music as a model of social structure begins in sacrifice as an element of Girardian religious ritual, serving as an instrument of control by helping listeners forget the violence at the heart of sociality. With the rise of capitalism it mutates into representation, a rationalist-individualist mode marked by divisions and hierarchies of labor (composer, conductor, virtuoso performer, orchestra member, cabaret musician, busker, and assorted paramusical figures such as the entrepreneur), and the hypertrophy of “harmonic combinatorics” (64) becomes music’s organizing feature; through infinite exploration of possible variations on tonality, musical representation exercises social control by inducing listeners to believe in a rationally organized socius. Increasing dissonance, technological simulation, and mass production shatter this mode to yield the degraded 20th-century musical form, repetition, which silences people by deafening them with the emptiness of infinite reproduction, converting musical use value to the exchange value encoded in fads, stars, stockpiles of unheard recordings, and–as the ultimate (if obvious) extension of musical fascism–Muzak. The progression through the first three stages gives a grim historical picture, but Attali holds out a final stage, composition, as a post-Marxian apocalypse of sociomusical decontrol. The music and economy of repetition face a crisis of exhaustion, and outsiders cease respecting the border dividing musical production from consumption. Noisy nonexperts begin producing music (and perhaps other goods) for the value inherent in the productive act, not for exchange; “time lived” replaces “time stockpiled in commodities” (145).

     

    8. See O’Sullivan for a detailed account and interpretation of the ongoing moral panic over alleged Satanism in rock music.

     

    9. The marketable cachet of the phrase was underscored by the presence of a “VR” booth on the exhibit floor, where a small firm attempted to sell dance clubs on a four-channel audio panning system linked to a Macintosh, using either a simple touchpad or a blinking plastic wand for user input. Asked what his “VR” device had to do with VR, and what connection it had with the photo of an EyePhone- and DataGlove-wearing model posted nearby, the company’s representative could deliver only the clearly rehearsed response that his product, unlike the investigational systems of VPL, was immediately available on the market.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Trans. Brian Massumi. Fredric Jameson, foreword. Susan McClary, afterword. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1985. Trans. of Bruits: essai sur l’economie politique de la musique. Presses Universitaires de France, 1977.
    • Bayton, Mavis. “How Women Become Musicians.” In Frith, Simon, and Andrew Goodwin, eds. On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word. NY: Pantheon, 1990. 238-257.
    • Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977.
    • Calder, Jeff. “Living by Night in the Land of Opportunity: Observations on Life in a Rock & Roll Band.” South Atlantic Quarterly 90.4 (1991): 907-937.
    • Fiske, John. “Cultural Studies and the Culture of Everyday Life.” In Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies. NY: Routledge, 1991. 154-173.
    • O’Sullivan, Gerry. “The Satanism Scare.” Postmodern Culture 1.2 (1991).
    • “Texas Police Pursue `Cop Killer.’” Billboard 27 June 1992: 1, 79.

     

  • From: PMC-Talk Two Threads: Cladistics and Cut-Ups

     

     

    (Excerpted from the Discussion Group PMC-talk@ncsuvm, 7/92-8/92)

     

    Editors’ Note:

     

    This issue of Postmodern Culture inaugurates a new feature, FROM: PMC-TALK. Two threads from recent discussion on PMC-TALK are included here, one concerning cladistics–the tree-structured organization of knowledge–and one concerning cut-ups–the human or automated re-organization of “found” text. This conjunction of topics is interesting for several reasons. First, it highlights two conflicting approaches to the logos, one imposing or discovering coherence and structure, the other disordering and decentering the texts it cannibalizes, sometimes producing isolated moments of surprising pertinence and often simply devolving into incoherence. Second, the outcome of the two discussions is noteworthy: the cladistics thread proceeds in an orderly and dispassionate manner, and ends in a scholarly bibliography; by contrast, the cut-ups thread provokes some quite visceral reactions, and eventually turns back on itself to examine the participants’ reactions to the grafting and disordering of their own texts. As one of the discussants points out, Deleuze and Guattari’s opposition of tree-like and rhizome-like structures of knowledge is being played out in these parallel, and sometimes intersecting, threads. Finally, this opposition, and the cut-up method in particular, are echoed in other parts of this issue of Postmodern Culture–not only in John Tranter’s Popular Culture column (on “BrekDown,” a computer program which produces stylistically consistent cut-ups of literary texts), but also in Larry McCaffery’s introduction and in most of the fiction collected in the issue.

     


     

    Contents

    Thread #1: Cladistics

    Thread #2: Cut-Ups

     


     

    Thread #1: Cladistics

     


     

    Date: Wed, 22 Jul 92 13:33 CDT
    From: "Robert J. OHara" 
    Subject: Trees of history
    
    Veterans of PMC-TALK may remember some discussions we have had
    over the last couple of years on evolutionary biology and
    'postmodern science'.  I would like to draw on the collective
    wisdom of the group again to search out some possible references
    on a related topic.
    
    I have an interest in a class of diagrams that may be called
    'trees of history'.  These include evolutionary trees, trees of
    language history (showing, for example, the descent of the
    Indo-European languages), 'stemmata' of manuscripts that show how
    an ancient text was copied and altered over time, and so on.  The
    conceptual ancestors of these diagrams are of course diagrams of
    human genealogy.  The comparative study of such diagrams is a
    highly interdisciplinary topic, and it's pretty difficult to get
    a grasp on the literature that is relevant to it.  I have been
    assembling a rough bibliography on the history and theory of
    trees of history in the specific fields of evolution,
    linguistics, and textual criticism.  Evolution is my specialty so
    I have the best handle on the literature in that area; stemmatics
    and linguistics are a little fuzzier to me, but I have a
    moderately good handle on them now as well (with respect to tree
    diagrams, that is).
    
    My question for the list is this: Have any of you seen trees of
    history used in other contexts, for objects other than species,
    languages, manuscripts, or human families?  I know of a few
    examples, like Stephen Toulmin's tree diagrams of disciplinary
    development in his _Human Understanding_ (1973), and I once saw a
    poster that showed a 'Tree of Rock and Roll'.  I would like very
    much to hear of examples from any other fields.  I am more
    interested in scholarly uses of such diagrams than in popular
    ones, and would be particularly pleased to find examples that
    show some theoretical sophistication (such as a discussion of how
    the diagram was put together, or what it represents).
    
    I recognize that this question, like many that that come up here,
    has the potential to connect to a wide range of issues in
    historical representation, visual imagery, the theory of
    metaphor, and on and on.  For my own convenience I would like to
    try to confine the discussion (if any) just to tree diagrams, and
    to specifically historical ones at that.  There are many other
    forms of tree diagrams that are not historical: sentence
    diagrams, all sorts of logical classifications, 'trees of
    Porphyry', etc.  These I specifically want to _exclude_ from
    consideration, as they are not in any sense genealogical or
    historical.
    
    For an indication of my own approach to the topic see 'Telling
    the tree: narrative representation and the study of evolutionary
    history', _Biology and Philosophy_, 7:135-160 (1992).  I'd be
    glad to send a reprint to anyone who is interested; just send me
    a snailmail address. I can also provide via email a copy of the
    rough bibliography on trees of history to anyone who is
    interested.
    
    Many thanks.
    
    Bob O'Hara, RJO@WISCMACC.bitnet
    Department of Philosophy and The Zoological Museum
    University of Wisconsin - Madison

     
    Date:     Thu, 23 Jul 92 22:55:56 EDT
    From:     Eric Rabkin 
    Subject:  Digest Ending 7-23-92
    
    If I'm properly informed, there is a whole field devoted to this
    and it's called 'cladistics.'  A quick keyword check of MIRLYN (U
    of Michigan's e-catalog) shows 10 bks, most with biological foci,
    but I know from talking to a friend who works in the field that
    the laborers therein consider it general.  I hope this helps.
    Eric
    
    Eric Rabkin                esrabkin@umichum.bitnet
    Department of English      esrabkin@um.cc.umich.edu
    University of Michigan     office: 313-764-2553
    Ann Arbor MI 48109-1045    dept  : 313-764-6330

     
    Date: Mon, 27 Jul 92 22:24 CDT
    From: "Robert J. OHara" 
    Subject: Trees of history/Cladistic analysis
    
    Thanks to Eric Rabkin for mentioning cladistics, a.k.a. cladistic
    analysis, in the context of my query about "trees of history".
    Cladistic analysis is the part of systematic biology that is
    particularly concerned with reconstructing evolutionary history.
    This is in fact my own specialty, so I do have a fair sense of
    the cladistic literature now, though it is growing very rapidly.
    The question of the generality of cladistic principles and
    methods is one of the things that is of particular interest to
    me.  In a loose sense they do appear to be general: for example,
    the cladistic idea that only derived or "apomorphic" states of
    characters identify branches of the evolutionary tree is the same
    as the principle of "shared innovation" in historical
    linguistics, and the idea of "indicative errors" in textual
    criticism.  Cladistic analysis tends to disregard, however, the
    possibility of "horizontal transmission" across the tree,
    something that occurs rather rarely in evolution, but much more
    often in language and manuscript histories. To those interested
    in the parallels among the various historical sciences it's all
    extremely interesting.
    
    There is one pioneering volume that discusses many of the
    similarities and differences among various cladistically oriented
    disciplines (evolution, linguistics, and textual criticism), and
    it may be of interest to some people:
    
    Hoenigswald, H. M., & L. F. Weiner, eds.  1987.  Biological
    Metaphor and Cladistic Classification: An Interdisciplinary
    Perspective.  Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
    
    Bob O'Hara, RJO@WISCMACC.bitnet
    Department of Philosophy and The Zoological Museum
    University of Wisconsin - Madison
    
    ----------------------------------------------------------------
    
    Date:         Wed, 29 Jul 1992 16:04:34 EDT
    Reposted From: "HUMANIST: Humanities Computing"
    
    Subject:      6.0165  Textual Criticism Challenge  (1/35)
    
    Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 6, No. 0165. Wednesday, 29 Jul
    1992.
    
    Date:    Wed, 29 Jul 1992 09:27:08 +0300
    From:    Victor_Caston@brown.edu
    Subject: Re: Textual Criticism Challenge
    
    I, for one, was impressed by the results of applying cladistic
    analysis to textual criticism--the analogy seems so obvious (and
    fruitful).  In fact, while flipping through a recent issue of The
    Economist, I came across an article on cladistic analysis that
    drew the analogy in the other direction, explaining evolution
    in terms of manuscript transmission.  This is how the article
    began:
    
    "Imagine a medieval library with dozens of copies of Aristotle's
    "On Comedy", all slightly different.  Such differences, which
    came about because the monks made errors when copying, can be
    useful.  By studying them you can see the order in which the
    copies were made.  Texts with a lot of errors in common are
    recent and closely related.  Their shared mistakes are echoes of
    those in the text from which they were copied--their most recent
    common ancestor.  Texts with fewer error are closer to the
    original.
    
    "This technique--cladistic analysis--works as well for those
    writing the history of  |  life as for those studying medieval
    manuscripts.  Instead of working with monastic errors, you use
    the changes which evolution brings to one species or group, and
    which it then bequeaths to its successors--shared derived
    characteristics . . ."  ("Charting Evolution: The Power of Two,"
    The Economist, 11 July 1992, pp. 80-81)
    
    If this is just coincidence, it's scandalous somebody didn't make
    the application sooner.
    
    *****************************************************************
    Victor Caston                             victor_caston@brown.edu
    Department of Philosophy
    Box 1918                                      off: (401) 863-3219
    Brown University                             dept: (401) 863-2718
    Providence, RI  02912                         fax: (401) 863-2719
    *****************************************************************

     
    Date:         Wed, 29 Jul 92 22:34:38 EDT
    From:         Carolyn Miller 
    Subject:      Re: Digest Ending 7-29-92
    
    For Bob O'Hara:  You might find that bibliometric studies of
    scholarly communication and disciplines provides another analogue
    to the tree-like representation of historical change.  You
    mentioned Toulmin's diagrams in _Human Understanding_;  the work
    I'm thinking of is related generally to his ideas, but the style
    is quite different. Early, big names in this field (which I don't
    know well myself) are Derek J. deSolla Price and Eugene Garfield
    (he of the Inst for Scientific Info empire).  One article I have
    at hand includes a number of network diagrams, showing citation
    links (Garfield, "Citation Analysis as a Method of Historical
    Research into Science," in _Citation Indexing--Its Theory and
    Application in Science, Technology, and Humanities, Wiley, 1979).
    
    A more recent collection is _Scholarly Communication and
    Bibliometrics_, ed. Christine Borgman, Sage, 1990. I haven't
    looked at it myself but it may be the most comprehensive current
    source.
    
    Carolyn Miller
    Dept of English
    NC State Univ.

     
    Date: Sat, 01 Aug 92 10:09:49 BST
    From: stephen clark 
    Subject: Re: cladistics etc
    
    J.H.Woodger Biological Classification discussed this (my books
    are packed so I can't check the reference). While the manuscript
    tradition is a nice analogy it seems to follow from the claim as
    stated (that fewer errors = closer to original) that the latest
    OUP text is copied directly from the original.... Please give
    mediaeval copyists some credit for trying to correct errors in
    the text they were copying. So far there is, I suspect, no
    evidence that DNA does that!
    
    Stephen Clark
    Liverpool

     
    Date:         Mon, 17 Aug 92 20:36:25 CST
    From:         Rick Francis 
    Subject:      Cladistics, remakes, translation, plagiarism...
    
    I have been following the discussion of cladistics with great
    interest, and I wonder if it might help with the sort of
    questions I've been asking.  Here's one that might be
    interesting: How could one depict the transmission/translation of
    James M. Cain's _The Postman Always Rings Twice_?
    
    Novel:  Published 1934
    
    Let's start with the movies:
    French version, Le Dernier Tournant (Chenal, 1939)
    
    Unauthorized Italian version, Ossessione (Visconti, 1942)
    Visconti inspired by Renoir's advice, reportedly made without
    either the original or an accurate, complete translation
    
    Tay Garnett's US version (1946), with Cain's original title
    
    Two more French versions:
    Verneuil, Une Manche et la belle (What Price Murder) 1957
    Chabrol's Les Noces rouges (Wedding in Blood), 1973
    
    Rafelson's US remake in 1981, again with Cain's title, The
    Postman Always Rings Twice.
    
    (Uh, let's forget about translations into other languages for the
    moment.)  Now how do you chart that?  Was Rafelson more
    influenced by the novel, by Visconti, or by Garnett's _noir_
    version?  Are there any previous versions we can rule out?  Even
    if you decide there are only two or three genetic sources, and
    feel you can determine relative influence, how do you depict it?
    
    What about trying to measure the influence of the medium into
    which one is translating/adapting?  For example, wouldn't a
    neo-noir version in 1981 inevitably be influenced by Polanski's
    neo-noir _Chinatown_?  (Certainly reception of Nicholson's face
    connects the two, and I kept thinking Jessica Lange was made to
    look like Faye Dunaway.)  If you chart the novel's film
    adaptations in a straight linear way, you won't have any of that
    other stuff.
    
    And isn't entirely possible that someone would make a film that
    was much closer to, say, plot details of the novel (as Rafelson's
    film was at times, when compared to Garnett's), while stylistic
    details show the influence of intervening adaptations?  How then
    to chart it, to show the closer/farther dynamics?
    
    For me the value and validity of an effective means of notation
    of genetic transmission of narratives would show up in its
    capacity to denote the various kinds of translation, whether it's
    Shakespeare from Holinshed, or Joyce's Ulysses from Homer's
    Odyssey, or Pound's Sextus Propertius, or a film adaptation of a
    Forster novel, Acker's works, or . . . If it can give you a
    language to distinguish those, you can bet I'll be interested in
    it!
    
    I confess near-total ignorance of cladistics, and I don't mean
    the tone of these questions to suggest I'm posing an impossible
    challenge to point out the limitations of cladistics. I think
    they are difficult questions, though, and perhaps the sort which
    cladistics can handle more efficiently than anything I'm aware
    of.
    
    Any help appreciated.
    
    Rick Francis   C47805NF@WUVMD
    Dep't of Comp. Lit.
    Washington University
    One Brookings Drive
    St. Louis, MO  63130

     
    Date: Tue, 18 Aug 92 19:06:38 -0400
    From: ahouse@hydra.rose.brandeis.edu (jeremy ahouse)
    Subject: Cladistic Caveats
    
    I am encouraged to see one of my favorite ideas (cladistics)
    raise its head in the context of PMC.  It gives the place a homey
    feeling.  I don't want to discourage the search for lineages of
    thoughts of influence, but in much on contemporary (and not so
    contemporary) cladistics one of the important (simplifying)
    assumptions is that we (you? I?) assume that lineages always
    bifurcate.  This assumption seems particularly valid for
    vertebrate species, "higher" plants, and taxa above the species
    level.  But the whole idea of looking for minimum evolution trees
    ( i.e. preferring trees that require the fewest reversals in a
    character state) hangs on the hope that there isn't much lateral
    diffusion of information across the tree.  In phylogentic
    inference (a goal for which cladistics is a preeminent tool) we
    trust that evolution is an information preserving phenomenon and
    that similarities are due to either common ancestors, convergent
    function (a "good" solution to a problem, e.g. wings), or chance.
    
    In as much as similarities are of the first kind we can infer the
    relationships between lineages.  Note that in my list no time
    was given to lateral transfer of character states from one
    lineage to another. This feature is almost surely violated in
    most cultural/literary/social phenomena.
    
            I hope this doesn't discourage, and I hope that I haven't
    been too brief.  Please let me know.
    
            - Jeremy
    
            :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
            Jeremy Ahouse
            Center for Complex Systems
            Brandeis University
            Waltham, MA 02254-9110
    
            (617) 736-4954
            ahouse@hydra.rose.brandeis.edu

     
    From:   rbrown@epas.utoronto.ca (R. Brown)
    Subject: Re: Cladistics
    Date:   Thu, 20 Aug 1992 17:26:37 -0400
    
    Regarding the metaphor of the branching tree, I would like to
    call attention both to its tendency to exist as and its rejection
    as a (dangerous) metaphor for the literary "tradition"
    post-colonial societies.  Sneja Gunew, in her essay on Australian
    literature in _Nation and Narration_ (ed. Homi Bhabha) notes that
    in his 1935 manifesto, "The Foundations of Culture in Australia"
    (1935): "[P.R.] Stephensen argued that although Australian
    culture may have begun in Britain, 'a gum tree is not a branch of
    the oak'" (101).

     
    Date: Sun, 23 Aug 92 20:47 CDT
    From: Robert J. OHara 
    Subject: Cladistics
    
    [....]
    
    Cladistics or cladistic analysis is an approach to systematic
    biology. Systematics used to be equated by many people with
    classification; indeed that is probably the definition that
    appears in most dictionaries today.  But while the idea of
    classification has long been a part of systematics, another idea
    has existed along with classification, and that has been the idea
    of "the natural system" (whence "systematics"), the idea of the
    arrangement of the whole of living diversity.  While
    classifications have traditionally been represented in words,
    "the natural system" has often been represented diagrammatically.
    
    In the pre-evolutionary period the natural system was sometimes
    compared to a map, with species arranged in some sort of abstract
    space; alternatively, it was sometimes compared to a system of
    nested circles or stars that blended into one another at their
    points of contact.  One of the oldest images of the natural
    system is that of the Scala Naturae or Chain of Being, a linear
    arrangement reaching "from monad to man".  Arthur Lovejoy's
    classic book _The Great Chain of Being_ is still the best history
    of that particular view of natural diversity.
    
    As naturalists came to accept evolution, the tree came to be the
    principal model of the natural system, and evolutionary trees
    came to be published with some regularity beginning in the late
    1800s. "Tree" in this context does not mean a picture with leaves
    and bark and that sort of thing, although some such evolutionary
    "trees" have been drawn; it means simply a branching diagram,
    like a genealogical chart, with lines connecting ancestors and
    their descendants.  (I will return to characteristics of the
    diagrams themselves in a moment.)
    
    Now while it is true that evolutionary trees have been drawn
    since the mid-1800s, it is not stretching the truth too far to
    say that systematists really only figured out how to reconstruct
    them in the last thirty years.  (Darwin's tree in the _Origin_ is
    a hypothetical one; it only shows what an evolutionary tree would
    be like if we really had one.)  This is where cladistic analysis
    comes in.  Cladistic analysis is a method of historical
    inference: it is a method for taking evidence that exists in the
    present - the similarities and differences among a collection of
    organisms under study - and using that evidence to reconstruct
    the branching family tree of those organisms, and the sequence of
    changes they have undergone in the course of their history.
    Cladistic analysis has swept the field of systematics in the last
    thirty years, and its development and adoption, in my view,
    constitutes a genuine conceptual revolution, one that has not
    only intellectual components, but all the characteristic
    socio-disciplinary turmoil that accompanies a scientific
    revolution as well (see David Hull's _Science as a Process_
    (1988) for some discussion of that turmoil).  It is very
    important to understand that the development of cladistics has
    been a conceptual revolution, rather than a technical one: there
    is no reason that it could not have been developed in the 1860s,
    and contrary to many misconceptions (some of which have been
    promulgated by historically unconscious workers in systematics),
    it does not depend upon computers, molecular biology, or any
    other current technology, although computers can be used and are
    used to make comparisons among different trees very quickly, and
    molecular data can be incorporated into cladistic analysis just
    surely as anatomical, physiological, or behavioral data can.
    
    As a method of historical inference, cladistic analysis has many
    insights to offer workers in fields outside of systematics I
    think, but only if the objects whose history is of interest have
    a reasonably clear tree-like pattern of ancestry and descent.  In
    linguistics, for example, it may be possible to apply cladistic
    techniques to the reconstruction of the histories of language
    families, and some steps have already been taken in that
    direction by a few workers. Similarly, in the study of the
    histories of manuscripts copied over many years from originals
    that are now lost, cladistic techniques can be applied with good
    success.  Peter Robinson of Oxford and I have collaborated on the
    application of cladistic techniques to the reconstruction of the
    family tree of an Old Norse narrative that is known from about 40
    different mss, and have a paper on the subject now in press in
    _Research in Humanities Computing_.  I would be happy to send a
    copy of that paper to anyone who has an interest in these issues.
    
    [....]
    
    The technicalities of cladistic analysis can lead us into the
    depths of evolutionary theory and statistical inference, a region
    from which some have never returned.  There is, however, a more
    general issue that arises in the context of "trees of history",
    one that may be of interest to more of the readers of PMC, and
    that is the issue of historical representation.  Cladistic
    analysis is primarily a method of inference: a method of finding
    out something that you don't already know.  Once you have found
    something out (or believe you have), you are then faced with the
    problem of representing your knowledge, and in the case of
    systematics this means drawing a tree.  The problem of historical
    representation in evolutionary biology has not been examined in
    great detail, because the matter has usually been considered
    unproblematic: you just look at your specimens, make your tree
    (either by cladistic methods today, or by the earlier intuitive
    and ill-defined methods), and that's that.  It turns out,
    however, that historical trees are very subtle representational
    instruments, and they can be drawn and read in a great variety of
    ways.  Complex branches can be collapsed into simple branches,
    events can be included and excluded, the tree can be given a
    direction (a crown) based on some particular criterion, it can
    show evolutionary "ascent" or "descent", "higher" and "lower"
    organisms, and so on.  The scientific value of many
    representational devices that have been traditionally
    incorporated into evolutionary trees is close to zero.  Those
    familiar with some of the general problems that have been
    discussed in analytic philosophy of history or in narrative
    theory will recognize many of the phenomena they are familiar
    with, such as the foregrounding and backgrounding of selected
    events, in evolutionary representations just as surely as in
    conventional human histories.  I have attempted to outline some
    of these representational problems in a recent paper that may be
    of interest to some people:
    
    O'Hara, R. J.  1992.  Telling the tree: narrative representation
         and the study of evolutionary history.  Biology and
         Philosophy, 7:135-160.
    
    As above, I would be happy to send a reprint to anyone who is
    interested; just send me a snailmail address.
    
    In connection with an interdisciplinary course I am planning I
    have put together a working bibliography on "trees of history" in
    a variety of disciplines (primarily evolution, linguistics, and
    manuscript studies).  I'll pass a copy on to the PMC editors and
    ask them if they would put it on the PMC file server for general
    retrieval.
    
    Bob O'Hara
    Center for Critical Inquiry in the Liberal Arts
    University of North Carolina at Greensboro

     
    Date: 29 Aug 1992 20:02:41 -0400 (EDT)
    From: RJOHARA@UNCG.BITNET
    Subject: Cladistics and trees of history
    
    I have sent a copy of my bibliography on "trees of history" and
    cladistics to the PMC editors with the request that they place it
    on the filelist here, so it should be available to all shortly.
    I would welcome any additions or corrections to it - I have
    labelled it a "working bibliography" and that it is.
    
    [....]
    
    Bob O'Hara
    
    Robert J. O'Hara, Postdoctoral Fellow
    Center for Critical Inquiry in the Liberal Arts
    University of North Carolina at Greensboro
    Greensboro, North Carolina 27412-5001, U.S.A.
    
    RJOHARA@UNCG.bitnet       RJOHARA@iris.uncg.edu

     
    WORKING INTERDISCIPLINARY BIBLIOGRAPHY: 'TREES OF HISTORY'
    IN SYSTEMATICS, HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS, AND STEMMATICS.
    Robert J. O'Hara, August 1992.
    Email: RJOHARA@UNCG.bitnet or RJOHARA@iris.uncg.edu.
    
    Suggestions for additions, deletions, and corrections are very
    welcome; my own field is systematics, so that is the area in
    which this list is most reliable.  My object here is not to
    create an exhaustive bibliography, but rather a bibliography that
    will help advanced students in any one of these fields get a good
    sense of what has gone on and is going on in the other fields,
    with special reference to theory.  Studies of particular
    biological taxa, language families, or manuscript traditions that
    do not have a theoretical or historical emphasis are generally
    excluded from this list.  Asterisks indicate works that may be
    particularly useful to beginners.
    
    1. Interdisciplinary Works
    2. General and Theoretical Works - Systematics
    3. General and Theoretical Works - Historical Linguistics
    4. General and Theoretical Works - Stemmatics
    5. Historical Works - Systematics
    6. Historical Works - Historical Linguistics
    7. Historical Works - Stemmatics
    8. Trees of History Elsewhere
    9. Miscellaneous Works on Evolution in Relation to Other Fields
    
    1. INTERDISCIPLINARY WORKS
    
    Bateman, Richard, Ives Goddard, Richard T. O'Grady, Vicki A.
    Funk, Rich Mooi, W. J. Kress, & Peter Cannell.  1990.  Speaking
    of forked tongues: the feasibility of reconciling human phylogeny
    and the history of language.  Current Anthropology, 31:1-24.
    [See also responses and commentary on pp. 177-183, 315-316,
    420-426.]
    
    Bender, M. L.  1976.  Genetic classification of languages:
    genotype vs. phenotype.  Language Sciences, 43:4-6.
    
    Flight, Colin.  1988.  Bantu trees and some wider ramifications.
    African Languages and Cultures, 1:25-43.  [Reanalyzes some
    linguistic data using the distance Wagner procedure from
    systematics.]
    
    Greenberg, Joseph H.  1957.  Language and evolutionary theory.
    Pp. 56-65 in: Essays in Linguistics.  Chicago: University of
    Chicago Press.
    
    Hoenigswald, Henry M.  1990.  Language families and subgroupings,
    tree model and wave theory, and reconstruction of protolanguages.
    Pp. 441-454 in: Research Guide on Language Change (Edgar C.
    Polome, ed.).  Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs, 48.
    Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.  [Short historical and
    theoretical discussion of the tree model and the principle of
    shared innovation (apomorphy), and the discovery of some of the
    limitations of trees in linguistics.]
    
    *Hoenigswald, Henry M., & Linda F. Wiener, eds.  1987.
    Biological Metaphor and Cladistic Classification: An
    Interdisciplinary Perspective.  Philadelphia: University of
    Pennsylvania Press.  [The most important single interdisciplinary
    collection, with papers on all three subjects.]
    
    Koerner, E. F. Konrad.  1981.  Schleichers Einfluss auf Haeckel:
    Schlaglichter auf die wechselseitige Abhangigkeit zwischen
    linguistichen und biologischen Theorien in 19. Jahrhundert.
    Zeitschrift fur vergleichende Sprachforschung, 95:1-21.
    [Reprinted in Koerner, 1989, Practicing Linguistic
    Historiography: Selected Essays, pp. 211-231, Amsterdam: John
    Benjamins.]
    
    Koerner, E. F. Konrad, ed.  1983.  Linguistics and Evolutionary
    Theory: Three Essays by August Schleicher, Ernst Haeckel, and
    William Bleek, with an Introduction by J. Peter Maher.
    Amsterdam: John Benjamins. [Contains: (1) Schleicher, 1863, The
    Darwinian Theory and the Science of Language; (2) Schleicher,
    1865, On the Significance of Language for the Natural History of
    Man; (3) Bleek, 1867, On the Origin of Language (with preface by
    Haeckel); (4) W. D. Whitney, 1872, Dr. Bleek and the Simious
    Theory of Language.]
    
    Lee, Arthur.  1989.  Numerical taxonomy revisited: John Griffith,
    cladistic analysis and St. Augustine's Quaestiones in
    Heptateuchum. Studia Patristica XX.
    
    Maher, John Peter.  1966.  More on the history of the comparative
    method: the tradition of Darwinism in August Schleicher's work.
    Anthropological Linguistics, 8:1-12.
    
    Picardi, Eva.  1977.  Some problems of classification in
    linguistics and biology, 1800-1830.  Historiographia Linguistica,
    4:31-57.
    
    Platnick, Norman I., & H. Don Cameron.  1977.  Cladistic methods
    in textual, linguistic, and phylogenetic analysis.  Systematic
    Zoology, 26:380-385.
    
    Robinson, Peter M. W., & Robert J. O'Hara.  In press.  Cladistic
    analysis of an Old Norse Manuscript tradition.  Research in
    Humanities Computing.  Oxford: Clarendon Press.  [Application of
    systematic techniques to a stemmatic problem.]
    
    Shevoroshkin, Vitaly, & John Woodford.  1991.  Where linguistics,
    archeology, and biology meet.  Pp. 173-197 in: Ways of Knowing
    (John Brockman, ed.).  New York: Prentice Hall Press.
    
    Stevick, Robert D.  1963.  The biological model and historical
    linguistics.  Language, 39:159-169.
    
    Uschmann, Georg.  1972.  August Schleicher und Ernst Haeckel.
    Spitzbardt, 1972:62-70.
    
    2. GENERAL AND THEORETICAL WORKS - SYSTEMATICS
    
    *Brooks, Daniel R., & Deborah A. McLennan.  1991.  Phylogeny,
    Ecology, and Behavior: A Research Program in Comparative Biology.
    Chicago: University of Chicago Press.  [Chapter 2 is an
    introduction to cladistic analysis.]
    
    Camin, Joseph H., & Robert R. Sokal.  1965.  A method for
    deducing branching sequences in phylogeny.  Evolution,
    19:311-326.  [One of several early influential papers in modern
    phylogenetic theory.]
    
    Edwards, A. W. F., & Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi L.  1964.
    Reconstruction of evolutionary trees.  Pp. 67-76 in: Phenetic and
    Phylogenetic Classification (V. H. Heywood & J. McNeill, eds.).
    Systematics Association Publication 6.  [One of several early
    influential papers in modern phylogenetic theory.]
    
    Farris, J. S.  1970.  Methods for computing Wagner trees.
    Systematic Zoology, 19:83-92.  [An early influential paper; now
    substantially superseded.]
    
    Farris, James S., Arnold G. Kluge, & M. J. Eckardt.  1970.  A
    numerical approach to phylogenetic systematics.  Systematic
    Zoology, 19:172- 189.  [One of several early influential papers
    in modern phylogenetic theory.]
    
    Felsenstein, Joseph.  1982.  Numerical methods for inferring
    evolutionary trees.  Quarterly Review of Biology, 57:379-404.
    
    Fitch, Walter M., & Emmanuel Margoliash.  1967.  The construction
    of phylogenetic trees.  Science, 155:279-284.  [One of several
    early influential papers in modern phylogenetic theory.]
    
    Hennig, Willi.  1965.  Phylogenetic systematics.  Annual Review
    of Entomology, 10:97-116.  [A synopsis of Hennig 1966.]
    
    Hennig, Willi.  1966.  Phylogenetic Systematics.  Urbana:
    University of Illinois Press.
    
    Kluge, Arnold G., & James S. Farris.  1969.  Quantitative
    phyletics and the evolution of anurans.  Systematic Zoology,
    18:1-32.  [One of several early influential papers in modern
    phylogenetic theory.]
    
    Maddison, Wayne P., Michael J. Donoghue, & David R. Maddison.
    1984.  Outgroup analysis and parsimony.  Systematic Zoology,
    33:83- 103.  [A review of outgroup comparison as a method of
    polarity determination.]
    
    *Maddison, Wayne P., & David R. Maddison.  1989.  Interactive
    analysis of phylogeny and character evolution using the computer
    program MacClade.  Folia Primatologica, 53:190-202.
    
    Mayr, Ernst.  1974.  Cladistic analysis or cladistic
    classification. Zeitschrift fur zoologische Systematik und
    Evolutions-forschung, 12:94-128.  [Distinguished clearly the
    issue of historical inference (cladistic analysis) from the issue
    of classification.]
    
    *Mayr, Ernst, & Peter D. Ashlock.  1991.  Principles of
    Systematic Zoology, second edition.  New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc.
    [Pp. 274-321, "Numerical methods of phylogenetic inference",
    written by David Maddison, is a good introduction to cladistic
    analysis.  Much of the rest of the book is outdated.]
    
    O'Hara, Robert J.  1988.  Homage to Clio, or, toward an
    historical philosophy for evolutionary biology.  Systematic
    Zoology, 37:142- 155.  [A discussion of the theoretical
    similarities between history and evolutionary biology
    (systematics in particular).]
    
    *Sober, Elliott.  1988.  Reconstructing the Past: Parsimony,
    Evolution, and Inference.  Cambridge: MIT Press.
    
    Stevens, Peter F.  1980.  Evolutionary polarity of character
    states. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 11:333-358.
    
    *Swofford, David L., & Gary J. Olsen.  1990.  Phylogenetic
    reconstruction.  Pp. 411-501 in: Molecular Systematics (D. M.
    Hillis & C. Moritz, eds.).  Sunderland, Massachusetts: Sinauer.
    [An advanced but comprehensive introduction.]
    
    Wagner, Warren H., Jr.  1961.  Problems in the classification of
    ferns. Recent Advances in Botany, 1:841-844.  [One of several
    early influential papers in modern phylogenetic theory.]
    
    *Wiley, Edward O.  1981.  Phylogenetics.  New York: Wiley.  [A
    general textbook on systematics.]
    
    Zuckerkandl, E., & Linus Pauling.  1965.  Molecules as documents
    of evolutionary history.  Journal of Theoretical Biology,
    8:357-366.
    
    [Journals: Systematic Zoology (now Systematic Biology),
    Cladistics, Systematic Botany, Taxon, Zeitschrift fur zoologische
    Systematik und Evolutions-forschung.]
    
    [Software: MacClade, PAUP, PHYLIP, HENNIG-86, Clados, and others.
    See Maddison in Mayr & Ashlock, p. 320-321 for a listing.]
    
    3. GENERAL AND THEORETICAL WORKS - HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS
    
    Allen, W. S.  1953.  Relationship in comparative linguistics.
    Transactions of the Philological Society, 1953:52-108.
    
    Anttila, Raimo.  1989.  Historical and Comparative Linguistics.
    Amsterdam.  [A general textbook.]
    
    Bynon, Theodora.  1977.  Historical Linguistics.  Cambridge:
    Cambridge University Press.  [A general textbook.]
    
    [Chretien, C. D.  1963.  Shared innovation and subgrouping.
    IJAL, 29:66-68.]
    
    *Gamkrelidze, Thomas V., & V. V. Ivanov.  1990.  The early
    history of Indo-European languages.  Scientific American, March,
    pp. 110-116.
    
    Gleason, H. A.  1959.  Counting and calculating for historical
    reconstruction.  Anthropological Linguistics, 1(2):22-32.
    
    Grace, George W.  1965.  On the scientific status of genetic
    classification in linguistics.  Oceanic Linguistics, 4:1-14.
    
    Greenberg, Joseph H.  1987.  Language in the Americas.  Stanford:
    Stanford University Press.
    
    Hetzron, Robert.  1976.  Two principles of genetic
    reconstruction. Lingua, 38:89-108.
    
    Hock, Hans Henrich.  1991.  Principles of Historical Linguistics,
    second edition.  Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.  [A
    general textbook.]
    
    Hoenigswald, Henry M.  1966.  Criteria for the subgrouping of
    languages.  Pp. 1-12 in: Ancient Indo-European Dialects (Henrik
    Brinbaum & Jaan Puhvel, eds.).  Berkeley: University of
    California Press.
    
    *Mallory, James P.  1989.  In Search of the Indo-Europeans:
    Language, Archeology, and Myth.  London: Thames and Hudson.
    
    Nichols, Johanna.  1992.  Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time.
    Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
    
    Pulgram, E.  1953.  Family tree, wave theory, and dialectology.
    Orbis, 2:67-72.
    
    *Renfrew, Colin.  1989.  The origins of Indo-European languages.
    Scientific American, October, pp. 106-114.
    
    *Ruhlen, Merritt.  1991.  A Guide to the World's Languages.
    Volume 1: Classification.  Stanford: Stanford University Press.
    
    Shevoroshkin, Vitaly, & T. L. Markey, eds.  1986.  Typology,
    Relationship, and Time: A Collection of Papers on Language Change
    and Relationship by Soviet Linguists.  Ann Arbor: Karoma
    Publishers.
    
    Shevoroshkin, Vitaly, ed.  1989.  Reconstructing Languages and
    Cultures.  Studienverlag Dr. Norbert Brockmeier.
    
    Shevoroshkin, Vitaly.  1989.  Methods in interphyletic
    comparisons. Ural-Altaische Jahrbucher, 61:1-26.
    
    Shevoroshkin, Vitaly.  1990.  The mother tongue.  The Sciences,
    May- June.
    
    *Wright, R.  1991.  Quest for the mother tongue.  Atlantic,
    267(4):39- 68.  [Popular magazine article.]
    
    [Journals: Diachronica; Historische Sprachforschung/Historical
    Linguistics.]
    
    4. GENERAL AND THEORETICAL WORKS - STEMMATICS
    
    Clark, A. C.  1918.  The Descent of Manuscripts.  Oxford: Oxford
    University Press.
    
    Colwell, Ernest Cadman.  1947.  Genealogical method: its
    acheivements and limitations.  Journal of Biblical Literature,
    66:109- 133.
    
    Dawe, R. D.  1964.  The Collation and Investigation of
    Manuscripts of Aeschylus.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    [On the limitations of stemmatics.]
    
    Greg, W. W.  1927.  The Calculus of Variants: an Essay on Textual
    Criticism.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    
    Greg, W. W.  1930.  Recent theories of textual criticism.  Modern
    Philology, 28:401-404.  [Reply to Shepard (1930).]
    
    [Griesbach.  1796.  Prolegomena to his second edition of the New
    Testament.  (Establishes the principle of lectio difficilior, and
    other rules, fide Shepard 1930.)]
    
    Kleinlogel, Alexander.  1968.  Das Stemmaproblem.  Philologus,
    112:63-82.
    
    Maas, Paul.  1958.  Textual Criticism.  (Translated from the
    German by Barbara Flower.)  Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    
    Quentin, Henri.  1926.  Essais de Critique Textuelle.  Paris:
    Picard.
    
    Reeve, M. D.  1986.  Stemmatic method: 'qualcosa che non
    funziona'? The Role of the Book in Medieval Culture (Proceedings
    of the Oxford International Symposium, 1982, edited by Peter
    Ganz), 1:57-69. Bibliologia, vol. 3.  Brepols, Turnhout.
    
    *Reynolds, Leighton D., ed.  1983.  Texts and Transmission: A
    Survey of the Latin Classics.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    
    *Reynolds, Leighton D., & N. G. Wilson.  1991.  Scribes and
    Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin
    Literature.  Third Edition.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    
    Shepard, William P.  1930.  Recent theories of textual criticism.
    Modern Philology, 28:129-141.  [Critique of Quentin (1926) and
    Greg (1927); see Greg (1930) for a response.]
    
    Weitzman, Michael.  1985.  The analysis of open traditions.
    Studies in Bibliography, 38:82-120.  [A substantial discussion of
    how to reconstruct the history of contaminated manuscript
    traditions.]
    
    Weitzman, Michael.  1987.  The evolution of manuscript
    traditions. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A,
    150:287-308. [Develops a statistical model of the process of
    manuscript descent.]
    
    West, M. L.  1973.  Textual Criticism and Editorial Technique.
    Stuttgart.
    
    Whitehead, F., & C. E. Pickford.  1951.  The two-branch stemma.
    Bulletin Bibliographique de la Societe Internationale
    Arthurienne\Bibliographical Bulletin of the International
    Arthurian Society, 3:83-90.
    
    Zuntz, G.  1965.  An Inquiry into the Transmission of the Plays
    of Euripides.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    
    5. HISTORICAL WORKS - SYSTEMATICS
    
    Craw, Robin.  1992.  Margins of cladistics: identity, difference
    and place in the emergence of phylogenetic systematics,
    1864-1975.  Pp. 65-107 in: Trees of Life: Essays in Philosophy of
    Biology (Paul Griffiths, ed.).  Australasian Studies in History
    and Philosophy of Science, 11.
    
    Gaffney, Eugene S.  1984.  Historical analysis of theories of
    chelonian relationship.  Systematic Zoology, 33:283-301.
    
    Greene, John C.  1959.  The Death of Adam.  Ames: Iowa State
    University Press.  [A general history of natural history, with
    some discussion of systematics.]
    
    Gruber, Howard E.  1972.  Darwin's 'tree of nature' and other
    images of wider scope.  Pp. 121-140 in: On Aesthetics and Science
    (J. Wechsler, ed.).  Cambridge: MIT Press.
    
    Hull, David L.  1988.  Science as a Process.  Chicago: University
    of Chicago Press.  [Contains an account of the recent (post-1960)
    history of systematics.  See Craw (1992) for criticism.]
    
    Lam, H. J.  1936.  Phylogenetic symbols, past and present.  Acta
    Biotheoretica, 2:152-194.
    
    O'Hara, Robert J. 1988.  Diagrammatic classifications of birds,
    1819- 1901: views of the natural system in 19th-century British
    ornithology.  Pp. 2746-2759 in: Acta XIX Congressus
    Internationalis Ornithologici (H. Ouellet, ed.).  Ottawa:
    National Museum of Natural Sciences.
    
    O'Hara, Robert J.  1991.  Representations of the natural system
    in the nineteenth century.  Biology and Philosophy, 6:255-274.
    
    O'Hara, Robert J.  1992.  Telling the tree: narrative
    representation and the study of evolutionary history.  Biology
    and Philosophy, 7:135-160.  [On the similarities between
    historical narratives and evolutionary trees.]
    
    Oppenheimer, Jane M.  1987.  Haeckel's variations on Darwin.
    Hoenigswald & Wiener, 1987:123-135.  [On the tree diagrams of the
    German evolutionist Ernst Haeckel.]
    
    de Queiroz, Kevin.  1988.  Systematics and the Darwinian
    revolution. Philosophy of Science, 55:238-259.  [A good
    interpretation of the history of recent systematics.]
    
    Reif, Wolf-Ernst.  1983.  Hilgendorf's (1863) dissertation on the
    Steinheim planorbids (Gastropoda; Miocene): the development of a
    phylogenetic research program for paleontology.  Palaontologische
    Zeitschrift, 57:7-20.
    
    Stevens, Peter F.  1982.  Augustin Augier's "Arbre Botanique"
    (1801), a remarkable early botanical representation of the
    natural system. Taxon, 32:203-211.
    
    Stevens, Peter F.  1984.  Metaphors and typology in the
    development of botanical systematics 1690-1960, or the art of
    putting new wine in old bottles.  Taxon, 33:169-211.
    
    Voss, E. G.  1952.  The history of keys and phylogenetic trees in
    systematic biology.  Journal of the Scientific Laboratory,
    Denison University, 43:1-25.
    
    Wagner, Warren H., Jr.  1980.  Origin and philosophy of the
    groundplan-divergence method of cladistics.  Systematic Botany,
    5:173-193.
    
    Winsor, Mary P.  1976.  Starfish, Jellyfish, and the Order of
    Life.  New Haven: Yale University Press.
    
    6. HISTORICAL WORKS - HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS
    
    Bonfante, Giuliano.  1954.  Ideas on the kinship of the European
    languages from 1200 to 1800.  Journal of World History,
    1:679-699.
    
    De Mauro, T., & L. Formigari.  1990.  Leibniz, Humboldt, and the
    Origins of Comparativism.  Amsterdam: John Benjamins.  [Amsterdam
    Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science, 49.]
    
    Hoenigswald, Henry M.  1963.  On the history of the comparative
    method.  Anthropological Linguistics, 5(1):1-11.
    
    Hoenigswald, Henry M.  1975.  Schleicher's tree and its trunk.
    Pp. 157-160 in: Ut Videam: Contributions to an Understanding of
    Linguistics.  For Pieter A. Verburg on the Occasion of his
    Seventieth Birthday...(Werner Abraham et al., eds.).  Lisse:
    Peter de Ridder Press.  [H&W p113]
    
    Hymes, Dell, ed.  1974.  Studies in the History of Linguistics:
    Traditions and Paradigms.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
    
    Koerner, E. F. Konrad.  1978.  Toward a historiography of
    linguistics: 19th and 20th century paradigms.  In: Toward a
    Historiography of Linguistics: Selected Essays.  Amsterdam
    Studies in the theory and History of Linguistic Science, III.
    Studies in the History of Linguistics, vol. 19.  Amsterdam:
    Benjamins.
    
    Koerner, E. F. Konrad.  1982.  The Schleicherian paradigm in
    linguistics.  General Linguistics, 22:1-39.
    
    Morpurgo Davies, Anna.  1975.  Language classification in the
    Nineteenth Century.  Current Trends in Linguistics, 13:607-716.
    
    Myers, L. F., & W. S.-Y. Wang.  1963.  Tree representations in
    linguistics.  In: Project on Linguistic Analysis, Report No. 3,
    Ohio State University Research Foundation (N.S.F. Grant G-25055).
    [fide H&W p256]
    
    Pederson, Holger.  1931.  The Discovery of Language: Linguistic
    Science in the Nineteenth Century.  Cambridge: Harvard University
    Press.  [Reprinted 1962, Indiana University Press, Bloomington.]
    
    Priestly, Tom M. S.  1975.  Schleicher, Celakovsky, and the
    family- tree diagram.  Historiographica Linguistica, 2:299-333.
    
    Robins, Robert H.  1973.  The history of language classification.
    Current Trends in Linguistics, 11:3-41.
    
    Robins, Robert H.  1979.  A Short History of Linguistics.
    London.
    
    Robins, Robert H.  1987.  The life and work of Sir William Jones.
    Transactions of the Philological Society, 1987:1-23.  [Short
    biography of an 18th century founder of historical linguistics.]
    
    Southworth, Franklin C.  1964.  Family-tree diagrams.  Language,
    40:557-565.
    
    Stewart, Ann H.  1976.  Graphic Representation of Models in
    Linguistic Theory.  Bloomington and London: Indiana University
    Press.
    
    Uschmann, G.  1967.  Zur Geschichte der Stammbaumdarstellungen.
    Gesammelte Vortrage uber moderne Probleme der Abstammungslehre
    (M. Gersch, ed.), 2:9-30.  Jena: Friedrich Schiller Universitat.
    
    [Journals: Historiographica Linguistica.]
    
    7. HISTORICAL WORKS - STEMMATICS
    
    Holm, G.  1972.  Carl Johan Schlyter and textual scholarship.
    Saga och Sed: Kungliga Gustav Adolf Akademiens Aarbok, 48-80,
    Uppsala. [Contains stemmata of legal texts from 1827]
    
    Timpanaro, Sebastiano.  1981.  La genesi del methodo del
    Lachmann, third edition.  Padua.
    
    8. TREES OF HISTORY ELSEWHERE
    
    Cook, Roger.  1974 [reprinted 1988].  The Tree of Life: Image for
    the Cosmos.  New York: Thames and Hudson.  [An art historical
    study of tree imagery.  Includes some historical and genealogical
    trees.]
    
    Murdoch, John E.  1984.  Album of Science: Antiquity and the
    Middle Ages.  New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.  [Chapter 5 of
    this anthology of scientific diagrams, "Dichotomies and Arbores",
    illustrates many medieval tree diagrams.  Most of these are
    logical trees, but some genealogical trees are illustrated also.]
    
    Toulmin, Stephen E.  1972.  Human Understanding.  Princeton:
    Princeton University Press.  [Evolutionary epistemology: trees of
    disciplinary development.]
    
    Young, Gavin C.  1986.  Cladistic methods in paleozoic
    continental reconstruction.  Journal of Geology, 94:523-537.
    
    9. MISCELLANEOUS WORKS ON EVOLUTION IN RELATION TO OTHER
    FIELDS
    
    Bichakjian, B.  1987.  The evolution of word order: a
    paedomorphic explanation.  Pp. 87-108 in: Papers from the 7th
    International Conference on Historical Linguistics (A. G. Ramat
    et al., eds.). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
    
    Bredeck, Elizabeth J.  1987.  Historical narrative or scientific
    discipline?  Fritz Mauthner on the limits of linguistics.  Pp.
    585-593 in: Papers in the History of Linguistics (Hans Aarsleff,
    Louis G. Kelly, & Hans-Josef Niederehe, eds.).  Amsterdam: John
    Benjamins.
    
    Durham, William H.  1990.  Advances in evolutionary culture
    theory. Annual Review of Anthropology, 19:187-210.
    
    Lass, Roger.  1990.  How to do things with junk: exaptation in
    language evolution.  Journal of Linguistics, 26:79-102.
    
    Leroy, Maurice.  1949.  Sur le concept d'evolution en
    linguistique. Revue de l'Institut de Sociologie.  337-375.
    
    Masters, R. D.  1990.  Evolutionary biology and political theory.
    American Political Science Review, 84:195-210.
    
    Sereno, M. I.  1991.  Four analogies between biological and
    cultural linguistic evolution.  Journal of Theoretical Biology,
    151:467-507.
    
    Terrell, John.  1981.  Linguistics and the peopling of the
    Pacific islands.  Journal of the Polynesian Society, 90:225-258.
    [Biogeography and linguistics.]


    Thread #2: Cut-ups


    Date: Mon, 27 Jul 92 10:36:19 cdt
    From: "Finagle, etc. (Durflinger,Edward M)"
    
    Subject: An Editorial Comment
    
    Greetings:
    
    I enclose the following Neoist Reply to Mr. McCarthy:
    
     POSTMODERN PLEASURE AND PERVERSITY [14] The postmodern reduction
    of the logic of Heraclitean unity and eschew dialectics, implicit
    ideas of beauty such as expressed in terms of a probabilistic
    mathesis. [58] It is a play of signifiers. It completes the
    devolution of the sadistic side of their prescriptions. Yet,
    tracing the play of numbers: in other words a science fiction
    about the credentials of postmodernism, then, is in the
    fragmented theoretical terrain beyond the end of history,
    philosophy, science, and global socio-economic and political
    formations. This process revives the subject reveals the longing
    for an epistemological fluidity which underpins the postmodern
    desire to systematise the play of difference among "numbering
    numbers." [59] The desire of a natural order of things driving
    the play of signifiers. It completes the devolution of the
    concealed form of the unconscious" (Deleuze and Guattari, F. _A
    Thousand Plateaus_ which imports quantum modelling of particle
    inputs which are organised to facilitate global exchange" (1991:
    66). [5] The deconstructing moment of postmodernism molecularises
    the complex texture of individual and social space have been cut
    off. It is a play of irregularity and pleasure arising from the
    authors and advance notification of the masses into appropriate
    consumption and productive behaviours. Secondly, as Baudrillard
    has argued, the immersion of the subject was drawn into this mess
    remains repressed. POSTMODERNISM: PLEASURE AND PERVERSITY FOR
    EVERYMAN [29] Bourdieu finds that the "autonomous arithmetic
    organisation" of the libidinal economy of deconstruction grows.
    In its psychotic mode, the postmodern worker and consumer,
    wherein the anxieties of maintaining position in the heightened
    sensitivity derived from the material reality of Deleuze and
    Guattari's (1987) plateau.
            POSTMODERN SADISM [23] There is a utility which
    deconstructs ideas of beauty such as "consciousness and
    experience" are collapsed (Rose, 1984: 212), let alone when the
    categories of postmodernism as a moment in the play of difference
    into a universe which is an assemblage that this inheritance
    persists. Both are concerned with flows of a dialectical view of
    history, philosophy, science, and global socio-economic and
    political formations. This process revives the subject of
    ethico-politico praxis, within the bureaucratised intelligentsia
    which is under considerable threat in the pleasures inherent in
    policies of deregulation and restructuring: there is a marvelous
    thing; but it may not be republished in any medium without
    express written consent from the perversity of code-breaking
    through de Sade's deconstructionist lubricity in the inversion of
    Marx's _Capital_ as "the cultural logic of the body in the
    interest of group survival and pleasurable existence. This
    trajectory is observable in _Dionysus_ and in Deleuze and
    Guattari's work in particular. Weil argues that scientism must
    not eliminate the concerns of energy, particles, entropy, and
    continuity to the atoms of the rendering of culture into everyday
    life and death between the unary signifier and the good to
    Olympian heights above the conditions of the complex texture of
    individual and putting an end to praxis. In addition, Lacan
    (1968) attempts to geometricise post-structural desire, and one
    also senses that Lyotard (1984) desires a mathesis and their
    molecularising thought crystallises de Sade's "matrix of
    maleficent molecules" (1968: 400), in which the concerns of human
    striving is also projected into the epistemological affinity
    between de Sade's _Juliette_) as a manipulative developer. We
    find that this diagrammatic genetic circuitry is able to explain
    the logic of the Marxist preoccupation with the linear space of
    the good" (Weil, 1968: 22). The work of the complexities of
    history to the form of the relations of desire in the hierarchies
    of symbolic accumulation, are aggravated. [30] The pleasurable
    and terroristic nature of things: "As soon as you have discovered
    the way of a contradictory, non-reductive "constellation" of
    tensions (Jay as cited in Bernstein, 1991: 42).  This stance
    maintains the "unresolved paradox" of reason as simultaneously a
    vehicle of emancipation and entrapment--a paradox which
    contributes to the spirit" (1972: Xii).
            Rose (1988) seeks a way beyond this. In contrast to
    Derrida's interpretation of the continuous intensities of the
    measuring convenience of numbering in science, or its equivalent,
    signifiers as the delineations of postmodern thought, reducing
    cultural complexity to signifiers in the play of commodity
    signifiers, and in postmodernism may be freely shared among
    individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without
    express written consent from the modernist catch cry of equality,
    liberty and fraternity into degrading conditions of late
    capitalism. The mating of capital by multinationals is furthered
    by "the most terrible orgies," and her sadistic pleasure-plays
    are financed in a culture which is also expressed by Lacan in
    that the moment of difference with the linear space of the
    trajectory of this desire with anality, require some examination
    as a triumphal encounter of humanity and materiality. [47] The
    dehumanising loss in the conditions of existence into strong
    solutions which carry forward the paraconsistent logic of late
    capitalism. The mating of capital and fearful desire mutually
    attract and interpenetrate, and out of the information society,
    which heightens the sensitivity of the quantum form in social
    thought which reduces the complex texture of individual and
    social space have been cut off. It is clear that atomising
    thought which reduces the complex texture of existence for the
    
    Thank You,
    Monty Cantin
    Karen Eliot, eds.
    SMILE Magazine

     
    From: Christopher Maeda 
    Date: Thu, 30 Jul 92 10:31:59 EDT
    Subject: Postmodernism:  Who Gives a Fuck Anyway?
    
    I'd like to start a new topic.  What's the point of all this?
    Not "What's the point of postmodernism?"  We already know that's
    a pointless question; if you have to ask, you won't understand
    the answer.  Very neat.
    
    No.  I want to know what is the point of the people on this list:
    why do you do this, why should we bother to remember you after
    you die? Are you trying to improve society?  Destroy society?
    Get tenure? (Check all that apply.)
    
    Take the "war machine" article appended below.  I've read it
    twice and it still doesn't make a damn bit of sense.  (Though the
    authors do deserve a pat on the head for using 5 syllable words
    so convincingly...) I would try again but it's so mind-numbingly
    boring.
    
    I'm really annoyed.  It seems that so much of the work in this
    genre is intended not so much to enrage or enlighten but simply
    to show how clever the author is.  Any concrete proposition is so
    obscured that one begins to doubt whether the author really had
    anything to say in the first place.  I've begun to suspect that
    the author usually doesn't.
    
       From: "Finagle, etc. (Durflinger,Edward M)"
    
       the war machine
       monty cansin
       karen eliot
       Reprinted from "SMILE" Magazine
    
        A book exists only through the phylum: On the other by state
    theorematics.
    
    [Remainder of reposted message deleted -- ed.]

     
    Date: Fri, 31 Jul 1992 17:43 EST
    From: JSCHWAR@BGSUOPIE.BITNET
    Subject: Giving something and getting something else
    
    I'd like to unstart Christopher M.'s topic and flop it on to the
    cladistics thread.  The "War Machine" article and the one before
    it from "SMILE" (and where can I get this zine?  does it actually
    exist?) seemed to me to be summaries of sections of Deleuze and
    Guattari's _Thousand Plateaus_, a really groovy book that folks
    are just starting to use in cultural criticism (see the last
    couple issues of PMC for examples...).  Anyway, D & G have some
    very biting critiques of the phallic, "arborescent" (i.e.
    tree-like) structure of knowledge (esp. in the chapter
    "Introduction: Rhizome").
          I'm really sick of the "what good is theory? Let's do
    something real" riff, but I'm not sure how to refute it.  I was
    quite entertained however, to find incisive discussions of this
    thang in the last 2 books I read, Gallop's _Around 1981_ and
    Fish's _Doing What Comes Naturally_.
    
    Jeff Schwartz
    Dept. of Popular Culture
    Bowling Green State University
    Bowling Green OH 43402

     
    Date: Sat, 1 Aug 92 13:29:03 cdt
    From: "Finagle, etc. (Durflinger,Edward M)"
    
    Subject: WarMachine:Who Gives A Fuck?;
    
    or, What is the sound of one person taking a joke?
    
    Christopher Maeda 
    Date: Thu, 30 Jul 92 10:31:59
    EDT Postmodernism: Who Gives a Fuck Anyway? doesn't make a damn
    bit of sense.(Though the authors do deserve a pat on the head for
    using 5 syllable words so convincingly...) I would try again but
    it's so mind-numbingly boring. I'm really annoyed. It seems that
    so much of the State apparatus (stratum), the double task of
    priest and believer, legislator and subject. (Deleuze 1984, pg.
    92).  The Kantian subject is actually made up of space: the human
    population. (above, pg. 423). Even the most terrifying war
    machine  monty cansin karen eliot Reprinted from "SMILE" Magazine
       A book exists only through the phylum:
        On the other by state theorematics. Metallurgy is the point
    of the subject is actually made up of space: the human
    population. (above, pg. 423). Even the most terrifying war
    machine in itself. In its performative aspect, it links up with
    the "four poetic formulas" which Deleuze added as a pure matter
    of wrought objects, or the construction of the essay of sedentary
    or State structures, nomads and the battle is evidently not
    always the object of war.
       War is often a matter of avoiding the battle, using speed and
    stealth to outmaneuver the enemy.  But is war necessarily the
    object of knowledge, as opposed to the schematization of
    space/time is a brick. One can build many different windows. The
    war machine that sweeps them along? We have been raised, for the
    present and the war machine's exteriority, Propositions I-IV make
    connections to the extent of obliteration the State apparatus.
       "For what can be done to prevent the theme of race from
    turning into a "free and indeterminate accord," where one faculty
    does not exactly lie in between the nomads and the war machine in
    itself. In its performative aspect, it links up with the "four
    poetic formulas which are clearly arbitrary in relation to the
    third fold can correspond to formula two: the relation of the
    body and desire corresponding to pure sensation in the name of
    the body and desire corresponding to pure sensation
            In the name of the people on this list: why do you do
    this, why should we bother to remember you after you die? Are you
    trying to improve society? Destroy society? Get tenure? (Check
    all that apply.) Take the "war machine" article appended below.
    I've read it twice and it still Gives a Fuck Anyway? Fuck!
        I'd like to start a new topic. What's the point of
    postmodernism?" We already know that's a pointless question; if
    you have to ask, you won't understand the answer. Very neat. No.
    I want to know what is the correlative form of content."
      It is a brick.
    One can build many different windows. The war machine in itself.
    In its performative aspect, it links up with the "four poetic
    formulas which are clearly arbitrary in relation to the third
    fold can correspond to formula two: the relation of the State is
    not a simple dispute over philosophy, but has become an issue of
    pragmatic action. Deleuze's book Foucault again becomes the stage
    for this confrontation, for Deleuze's Foucault is the correlative
    form of content."  It is a way as the study of the body and
    desire corresponding to pure sensation in the name of the people
    on this list: why do you do this,
    
        Why should we bother to remember you after you die? Are you
    trying to improve society? Destroy society? Get tenure? (Check
    all that apply.) Take the "war machine" article appended below.
    I've read it twice and it stillGives a Fuck Anyway? Fuck! I'd
    like to start a new topic. What's the point of postmodernism?" We
    already know that's a pointless question; if you have to ask, you
    won't understand the answer. Very neat. [Remainder of repost
    deleted -- ed.]
    
    A book exists only through the phylum: On the other by state
    theorematics. [Remainder of reposted message deleted -- ed.] A
    book exists only through the phylum: On the other by state
    theorematics. [Remainder of reposted message deleted -- ed.] A
    book exists only through the phylum: On the other by state
    theorematics. [Remainder of reposted message deleted -- ed.] A
    book exists only through the phylum: On the other by state
    theorematics. [Remainder of reposted message deleted -- ed.] A
    book exists only through the phylum: On the other by state
    theorematics. [Remainder of reposted message deleted -- ed.] A
    book exists only through the phylum: On the other by state
    theorematics. [Remainder of reposted message deleted -- ed.] A
    book exists only through the phylum: On the other by state
    theorematics.
    
    A NOTE FROM THE EDITORS OF 'SMILE:'
    
            In case any of you were not aware of it before, the texts
    that have been reprinted in this space from time to time are
    computer-generated cutups of other, pre-existing texts.  The
    reason we chose to submit them to the list is that such texts can
    serve as illustrations for many postmodern concepts which can be
    raised for discussion.  For example, does a piece of text such as
    above constitute a "work"? If so, does it have one, two, three,
    or no "authors?" Why does a piece of text have to have
    sequentiality, linearity, and originality to be considered
    "meaningful?" The hostile reaction of the above critic seems to
    indicate that these are far from dead issues, as he struggled so
    valiantly to extract "meaning" out of a text that had been
    deliberately rendered "meaningless."
            However, although a cutup text lacks "meaning" per se,
    does it lack usefulness? The random juxtapositions of phrase in
    the above article and the cutup of the PMC article MCCARTHY 592
    that we submitted earlier struck us as not only amusing, but
    critical and artistic.
            As Neoists, we believe that questions of "originality"
    and "authorship" and "meaning" are dead issues.  The essense of
    the new art and literature is plagarism, as the Kathy Acker story
    from an earlier issue of PMC illustrated so well. The recycling,
    rearranging, reprocessing and reusing of multiplicity of cultural
    signs that are shoved at us every day through the media is the
    only art form left that is relevant for the postmodern age, a
    fact that has been widely bandied about but largely ignored since
    the days of the Cabaret Voltaire. One might as well open oneself
    up to the possibilities of manipulated the images created for us
    by capital rather than being manipulated by them.
    
    Virtually yours,
    Karen Eliot
    Monty Cantsin

     
    Date: Sat, 1 Aug 92 20:58:15 EDT
    From: mbm@pacscl.uarc.upenn.edu (MM)
    Subject: dead issues
    
    I guess the Neoists are trying to say that the issues are dead
    issues but that they are far from being dead issues.
            Aside from that, I can think of no way that an artist
    could more effectively serve the interests of late capitalism
    than by jettisoning the idea of meaning and mandating the real
    work of "recylcing, rearranging, reprocessing and reusing of
    multiplicity of cultural signs."  Some theory is very difficult,
    and people indeed work very hard to understand it; you (Smile)
    seem insufferably elitist looking down your noses at people so
    far behind the times as to look for the meaning in a text. I
    thought one of the characteristics of PM thinking was creation
    without the imposition of rules? Opening up to the possibilities
    of manipulating the images created for us by capital is obviously
    worth doing, but why be so smug and call it the only game for
    whoever is really au courant. THAT'S the real bullshit in
    postmodernism.  Michael McColl.  (By the way, there are places in
    the cut-ups where things are joined in really blunt, dumb ways.)
    In case you have not noticed, new combinations of media images IS
    the media's game, and audiences can be seduced whatever the new
    forms of manipulation.  Like you could even keep up with the
    media's everfresh combinations of rap, gymnastics, Coca-Cola, and
    lover, warm love, from AT&T.
            In short, why do you need to be so elitist and
    exclusionary about ONE thing there is to do, when there are a lot
    of things. If you jettison "meaning," you circulate all the more
    effectively in the media transfos.
    
    Michael McColl

     
    Date: Sun, 2 Aug 92 00:03 AST
    From: J_DUCHESNE@UPR1.UPR.CLU.EDU
    Subject: War Machine texts event
    
       It was evident that the War Machine texts were either parodies
    or wordgames drawing on Macarthy 592 and Deleuze & Guattari's _A
    Thousand Plateaus_. The low threshold of resistance to free-play
    (or simply unfettered theoretical and linguistic performances) is
    a symptom of the Fear-of-Theory syndrome that plagues higher
    learning institutions in many places. It is not so bad in the
    Anglo-Zone, I gather. In Latin America it is an epidemic that
    threatens from the Right and from the Left (even the "non-
    dogmatic" left, even Liberation Theology, etc.).
       I recently performed an e-mail event intending to fog (or
    de-fog) the patriarchal repressive binary discourse being used in
    a Latin American discussion group concerning Sendero Luminoso
    (Shining Path guerrillas). Some reactions amounted to near death
    threats. The theoretical after-thoughts to the event motivated
    even stronger reactions, even though the text made it clear there
    was no support to Sendero (or the Army) involved.
       What is really feared is the volatilisation of agency, author-
    ship, of the subject and/or of stratified ethico-political
    languages spontaneously enabled by the playful use of theory and
    language in general. Some of these hostile reactions approach
    very much the fascist Spanish Civil war slogan: "Abajo la
    inteligencia, vivan las cadenas, viva la muerte!" (Down with
    intelligence, long live chains, long live DEATH!).--"Who gives a
    fuck anyway!".
    
    P.D.
    
       Macarthy 592, by the way, tries to associate the conception of
    atomistic actual occasions arranged upon an extensive continuum
    of potentialities (i.e., of molecularity upon a plane or "plan"
    of consistency) with the reduction of experience and action to
    numbered schemata, that is, the paradigmatic scheme of a much
    feared proto-facist anarcho-crazyism read in Deleuze & Guattari
    and others. But such an atomistic conception, in the mentioned
    versions (which owe much to Bergson and Whitehead), really point
    to the multiplicity, plurality and spontaneity open to non-
    stratified events on or beyond the extensive continuum
    (Whitehead) or plane of consistency, organized or disorganized
    (Deleuze & Guattari).
    
    Juan Duchesne     J_Duchesne@upr1

     
    From: Christopher Maeda 
    Date: Mon, 3 Aug 92 18:58:37 EDT
    Subject: The New Art
    
       Date: Sat, 1 Aug 92 13:29:03 cdt
       From: "Finagle, etc. (Durflinger,Edward M)"
    
       Subject: WarMachine:Who Gives A Fuck?;
    
    >  The recycling, rearranging, reprocessing and reusing of
    >  multiplicity of cultural signs that are shoved at us every day
    >  through the media is the only art form left that is relevant
    >  for the postmodern age...
    
    >  One might as well open oneself up to the possibilities of
    >  manipulated [sic?] the images created for us by capital rather
    >  than being manipulated by them.
    
    A cute but pathetic idea.  What's the difference?  You probably
    end up buying the crap irregardless.  Or to put it differently,
    if you do art by recycling advertising, you further the ends of
    the advertisers.

     
    Date: Thu, 6 Aug 92 01:58 AST
    From: J_DUCHESNE@UPR1.UPR.CLU.EDU
    Subject: Theory and landscape
    
         My intervention (digest 8-1) was not necessarily
    authoritarian or exclusionist. It's more a problem of my being
    able to produce only a Terminator-2 type of English at the
    moment.
         This time after reading subsequent postings on the War
    Machine (Smile) issue, I would qualify my rash fear-of-theory
    diagnosis and let it apply to general situations loosely related
    to this particular communicative situation of PMC-Talk.
         What I read in the subsequent "contra-Smile" interventions
    is a tendency to associate dense (or even opaque) theoretical
    language with some sort of vacuousness or manipulative bluff (the
    way masturbation is usually related to waste or unproductiveness
    of some sort). But the first element is not a sufficient
    condition for the second. "Light" or "clear" theoretical language
    uses are very often as vacuous and deceptive as some of the
    baroque "postmodern" terminology may be. We really need to go
    into the dense Pomo Forest to distinguish between real content
    and bluff (aside from the obviously mediocre, therefore trivial,
    samples).
         To the said tendency associating "ludic" (>ludere) density
    and irrelevance is related an "I'm not wasting my time" tactic
    justified on very bi-polar notions of theory-practice,
    play-commitment, form-content, "jouissance"-sense, etc. Or I am
    wrong?
    
    Corrigenda: Am I wrong?
    
    Juan Duchesne

     
    Date:         Mon, 10 Aug 92 10:33:42 EDT
    From:         CJ Stivale 
    Subject:      The C. Maeda et. al. Discussion
    
    I think that mbm at upenn's point (4 Aug 92) is well-stated and
    well-taken, regarding perceived impatience/reproach(es) to C.
    Maeda's intervention (30 Jul 92). However, impatience would seem
    to be the operative mood given Maeda's neat title
    ("Postmodernism: Who Gives a Fuck Anyway?"). Maeda used therein a
    scattershot introductory interrogation: first, "What's the point
    of all this?", then, "what is the point of the people on this
    list: why do you do this, why should we bother to remember you
    after you die?" Possible reasons given by Maeda: "Are you trying
    to improve society? Destroy society? Get tenure? (Check all that
    apply)." It is then that Maeda makes the segue into the brief
    commentary on the "war machine" article, the "mind-numbingly
    boring" quality that stymies his/her understanding and annoys
    him/her by its opacity.
       The discussion that subsequently ensued on PMC-Talk dealt with
    the latter topic (pomo and/contra its jargon), but as no one has
    attempted to answer the broader queries, I'd like to give it a
    crack, i.e. "the point of the people on this list: why do you do
    this?" Of course, while not representing any "people," just
    myself, I hope to connect with motivations of a few subscribers.
    Although I could start too far back and in detail about being in
    grad school in French studies in the '70s, I can simplify the
    response a bit:
       When PMC came on line, it proposed the practical possibility
    of exploring a potentially new mode of communication/exchange, on
    a new medium, via an electronic journal. That this enterprise has
    its own, built-in limitations does not dull my interest in
    supporting the editors' efforts. That they also saw fit to
    stimulate more immediate interchange PMC-Talk made the
    limitations of the journal a bit less constraining, but as we
    have frequently seen, most "talk" just starts getting interesting
    when it fizzles. Maeda's interrogation, as diffuse as it was, at
    least had the potential for raising a few points as well as
    various hackles.
      My intervention starts with the ambiguity of his vague
    references to some "this." "Frankly, dear, I don't give a damn"
    whether you remember me after I die; nor is improving (or
    destroying) society via PMC-Talk _necessarily_ one of my goals
    (although were these exchanges to lead in either direction so
    much the better). And getting tenure does not seem to correspond
    to participating in or promoting such interchange (we might ask
    the PMC editors whether tenure prospect and running this list are
    even compatible).
      Then, asks Maeda, "why do you do this?" Beyond "subscribing
    to/reading entries on this list," I take "this" to suggest more
    broadly "participating in discussions about/confrontations with
    the discourse of texts designated, however imprecisely, as
    'postmodern'." My reasons both for such "confrontations" and for
    participation in PMC-Talk relate to my goals as teacher, to
    understand (some of) the proponents of said discourse and to be
    able to impart some of that understanding to my students.
    Moreover, as I began to teach and to engage in those other
    professional exercises that might, in fact, lead to tenure
    (attending conferences, delivering papers, sharing research with
    colleagues in discussion groups, at meetings, in correspondence,
    discussing professional needs and prospects aka networking,
    revising and sending out papers, eventually publishing), I found
    that the point of "doing this" was also to extend the teaching
    dialogue toward colleagues in a number of settings and to clarify
    differences and commonalities of approach and understanding.
      These reasons are why PMC and PMC-Talk presented such an
    exciting potential and continue to enable our discussion and
    learning to progress. The "grumpiness" (to use a term employed
    precisely in a recent _Chronicle_ "Point of View" essay), if not
    outright cynicism, implied in Maeda's "who gives a fuck anyway"
    recalls for me the impatient, usually lazy comments that many of
    us have heard over the years from colleagues left out of the
    post-structuralist theory loop usually by dint of their own lack
    of effort to engage with the material. Not that Maeda or those
    sympathetic to his plaints necessarily have failed to engage with
    this material; and yes, some of the recent "confrontations" with
    these modes of discourse have been opaque, even hermetically
    sealed. Yet, should that prevent us from challenging each other
    with exchange regarding such discourse? I guess I "give a fuck"
    if that phrasing means to remain interested in the manner in
    which my contemporaries envisage and discuss the era in which I
    live and provide new conceptualizations about past eras. Such
    exchange, fortunately, has followed Maeda's productive queries in
    the subsequent responses, fulfilling some of the potential
    implicit in the PMC(-Talk) project.
      Sorry for going on so long. I hope I need not apologize for
    taking Maeda's intervention too literally and/or too seriously.
    If so, then truly what _is_ the point of "people" subscribing and
    exchanging ideas here? CJ Stivale

     
    Date: Fri, 14 Aug 1992 03:41 EST
    From: JSCHWAR@BGSUOPIE.BITNET
    Subject: SMILE/Deleuze
    
    1)Obviously, I was mistaken when I understood the SMILE texts as
    a "gloss" of Deleuze and Guattari.  Egg on my face for not
    recognizing the cut-up method or SMILE's sources & for possibly
    misusing the word "gloss."  Oops.
    
    2)Now we're getting to what I see as the central question of the
    cladistics thread.  What happens to our notions of the
    history of ideas if the rhizome replaces the tree?  (Borges'
    "Kafka and His Precursors" is probably an important text here.)
    I read _1000 Plateaus_ as (among a whole lot of other things) an
    attempt to explore this & propose a postmodern version of
    cladistics.  Let's stop making fun of each other's diction
    & get further into this.  --Bill Burroughs

     
    Date: Sat, 15 Aug 92 19:30:16 EDT
    From: mbm@pacscl.uarc.upenn.edu (MM)
    Subject: Cutup
    
            It astonishes me that Bill Burroughs would not recognize
    the cut-up method. Egg on my face if I have the wrong
    Burroughs--I can't find my record album of him reading from his
    works I drove all night and came at dawn to a warm misty place.
    Barking dogs and the sound of water. Thomas and Chalry, I said,
    that's the name of this town which would provide a handy
    reference for the spelling of your name. Sea level. Where Lupita
    ....doling out her little papers of lousy shit sits like an
    Aztech earth goddess. I too had egg on my face for I printed out
    and took into the city to study on  public transportation and at
    a table polite with coffee the pages of the Neoist manifesto
    which was a very difficult read, but I thought, who knows, hard
    on first reading, but maybe they have something there. Don't want
    to conclude that they are not theoretical physicists just because
    I'm not. Clandestine radio play on words accomplished all that
    her father was after. In the best sense of the word, a shining
    example of the way our sinking ship was caught up in the hands of
    the prosenet, and delivered unto the web. So nasty,like an old
    cantaloup, with its hard, rough rind and sweet, juicy,
    orange-colored flesh. Beguile so the smoking toilet blockage
    checks awaited him and called his attention to the movie debut of
    Mikhail Gorbachev, "former chieftain." A period of general
    slackening in the arts. Anything goes when there is an absence of
    taste, he declared. I AM THE POSTMODERN MODERNIST MONUMENT. I AM
    VENTURI'S DUCK WITHOUT FEATHER why not say it whispered
    Jean-Francois Lyotard, for I am not ashamed.  They all called up
    to him but he would not come down from his perch in the tree, and
    after all he was wearing glasses and seemed serious about what he
    was doing. A tedious little book, said my uncle, but I was merely
    a swallow darting among the limbs and eaves of the pleasure-nooks
    of the sense world, no magisterial fogart blounder jangwhorling
    shoolspatial frissons.  It got to be that you couldn't even go
    out to play, the snarling was so vicious. But that's all folks,
    and by your leave.  Shortform, with a humble adding a diction.

     
    [August 20th Digest, referred to below, is omitted here.  --ed.]

     
    Date: Thu, 20 Aug 92 16:30:26 cdt
    From: "Finagle, etc. (Durflinger,Edward M)"
    
    Many thanks to the contributors to the last issue of PMC-Digest
    for providing excellent material for the next issue of SMILE.
    These three articles went particularly well together.
    
    * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
    
     Caveats I am encouraged to see one of my favorite ideas
    (cladistics) raise its head in the scientific sense from the
    socialdemocratic influence in Finland to central- or liberal
    conservative inclination could be seen the Finnish form of
    neoconservatism.
      An other example is the oppressor: Under the male gaze of
    Gilligan, Ginger becomes the Feminine-as-Other, the
    interiorization of a panoptic social order in which the "texts"
    of popular culture have assumed their rightful place. This has
    enormous implications for cultural and social theory. A journal
    like _Dissent_, instead of exploring the question of population
    in Europe, problems of migrants, manifestation of the entire
    series. [4] The eclipse of linearity effectuated by
    postmodernity, then, necessitates a new approach to the
    all-pervasiveness of Habermas's thought.
      3. The 1981 television movie _Escape from Gilligan's Island_
    represents a reactionary attempt to totalize what had been
    theorized in the proceeding of the desert island foreshadows
    Debord's concept of the title is a pastoral dystopia, but a
    dystopia with a difference--or, rather, a dystopia with a
    difference--or, rather, a dystopia with a difference--or, rather,
    a dystopia with a difference--or, rather, a dystopia
    characterized by the means of social policy in Central Europe.
      As political ideologies have lost their potentiality and Church
    as an untotalizable herteroglossia, a _bricolage_. The late 1970s
    influence of Habermas is itself a testimony to the
    all-pervasiveness of Habermas's thought.
     3. The 1981 television movie Escape from Gilligan's Island_
    represents what had been theorized in the proceeding of the first
    kind we can infer the relationships between lineages. Note that
    in my list no time was given to lateral transfer of character
    states from one lineage to another. This feature is almost
    surely violated in most cultural/literary/social phenomena. I
    hope to do so in a character state) hangs on the hope that there
    isn't much lateral diffusion of information across the tree. In
    phylogentic inference (a goal for which cladistics is a pastoral
    dystopia, but a dystopia with a _differance_ (in, of course, the
    Bakhtinian sense) of the Kristevan semiotic needs no further
    comment here.
     4. Why do the early episodes privilege a discourse of metonymy?
    
    And what of the title is a sociological phenomenon that rose
    against the radicalism of 1960s and 1970s.
     The radicalism has been the fact during the period after the War
    as the Thatcherism, Reaganism, including even the Glasnost and
    the Gorbachevism would be considered as neoconservative phenomena
    in sociology. The postmodernism is an attempt to totalize what
    had been theorized in the apparent "stupidity" of Gilligan and,
    indeed, of the antinomies of consumer capitalism are subverted
    even as they are apparently affirmed.
      A paradigmatic text in this regard is the book review editor of
    _Dissent_ and the Professor.
    
      Gilligan is the ability of "foreign market forces" to rule
    Finnish economy by both rhetorical and effective factors. This
    means that Finland is not independent in economical judgement
    from the socialdemocratic influence in Finland to central- or
    liberal conservative inclination could be seen the Finnish form
    of neoconservatism. An other example is the island "his"? I do
    not have the space to pursue these questions here, but I hope to
    demonstrate in a future study.
    ---------------------------------------------------------
    FOOTNOTES 1.
    Gilligan himself is the discussion group for the period after the
    War as the Thatcherism, Reaganism, including even the Glasnost
    and the modern society caused by the postmodern theory to
    describe Finland as perfectly free of international interests.
    The social sciences have received new impressions in the series
    as an institution has lost the traditional connections to people,
    a result has been the fact during the period after the War as the
    Thatcherism, Reaganism, including even the Glasnost and the
    author of a forthcoming novel from HarperCollins.]
    ----------------------------------------------------------------
    L'ISLE DE
    GILLIGAN Brian Morton
    The hegemonic discourse of metonymy? And what of the antinomies
    of consumer capitalism are subverted even as they are apparently
    affirmed. A paradigmatic text in this regard is the book review
    editor of _Dissent_ and the questions originated by
    postmodernism. The conflict of traditional "texts" (i.e., books)
    has been the fact during the period after the War as the
    Thatcherism, Reaganism, including even the Glasnost and the
    modern society caused by the means of social policy in Central
    Europe. As political ideologies have lost their potentiality and
    Church as an untotalizable herteroglossia, a _bricolage_. The
    late 1970s influence of Habermas is itself a testimony to the
    all-pervasiveness of Habermas's thought.
      3. The 1981 television movie _Escape from Gilligan's Island_
    represents a reactionary attempt to totalize what had been
    theorized in the following address: E-MAIL:
    ATEITTINEN@JYLK.JYU.FI
    
    PMC-TALK digest: postings for the rational development.
    
    Karen Cantsin
    Monty Elliot

     
    Date:         Fri, 21 Aug 92 14:37:43 CDT
    From:         Wes Chapman 
    Subject:      Re: Digest Ending 8-22-92
    
    Tongue in cheek, tongues of flame.
    
    Well, now, another piece from SMILE magazine, OK.  I confess I
    don't like the stuff much--I'll try to explain why.  At first I
    thought I didn't like it for the simple reason that it's boring:
    once you figure out what's going on (about three sentences for
    me, but I'm not bragging--if I had been reading faster, if I had
    not read parts of the works before, I might have been taken in
    for longer), there really isn't much to look at in a pastiche of
    textual snippets.
    
    Not that this kind of art (I'll call it that) is meaningless; far
    from it. There's a lot being implied about the nature of
    originality, the social construction of consciousness,
    seeee-rriiious Theory, postmodernism, etc.  But the genre is much
    like a toilet placed in a museum as an exhibit--it's a lot more
    interesting to talk about than to actually look at.  In the
    pieces we've seen on pmc-talk, most of what is interesting about
    the pieces takes place on the most general level; there haven't
    been many particular conjunctions of phrases that really tell.
    I confess I read the pieces fast, in part, I realize upon
    reflection, because it has seemed to me that to read them
    carefully would be to miss the point of the joke.  Excuse me, the
    "joke."
    
    But after thinking more about it, I realize that the tediousness
    of the genre isn't really what I object to in it.  A number of
    similar pastiches used to appear on the TechNoCulture list, bits
    and pieces from postings to the list arranged not as prose but as
    poetry.  I used to find them boring too, although they were more
    carefully particular than the SMILE pastiches, UNTIL I found
    postings of my own incorporated into the pastiches.  At that time
    my whole experience of the pastiches changed.  They were no
    longer boring, they were actively threatening; the juxtapositions
    seemed at once impersonalizing (when it's your own writing, no
    matter how unpolished or trivial, you feel very concretely what
    it means to have what you say, what you mean, what you think,
    become a text) and judgmental (why did that go there?  what did
    the author think?).  In other words, I finally Got It.  (Do you
    Get It?)  I am a little grateful to the author of those
    pastiches; he (I think it was a he) taught me something about the
    distance between the post-modern theories of discourse I espouse
    and my actual experience of being a gen-yoo-ine self.
    
    But I still don't like the genre.  Not because it's
    threatening--ya takes yer chances--but because it's too safe.
    Safe for the authors, that is. It's easy to take apart the work
    of other people; that's just saying that the self is not
    autonymous, is constructed of discourses, is nowhere, is
    dead--it's not actually feeling it, feeling the poignancy of that
    loss.
    
    So, Monty Elliot and Karen Cantsin--if that's who you really
    are--I have a challenge for you.  By all means, do another
    pastiche.  You can use this posting if you want, not that you
    need my permission.  But this time, get your own writing in too.
    It doesn't matter what it is, so long as it's something you care
    about--your doctoral dissertation, a letter to a friend who is
    dying of AIDS, whatever; you decide.  See for yourself if you
    live where you think you live.
    
    Seriously and respectfully,
    Wes Chapman
    Illinois Wesleyan University

     
    Date: Sat, 22 Aug 92 17:07:13 EDT
    From: mbm@pacscl.uarc.upenn.edu (MM)
    Subject: what you cut up
    
            If you cut up your own text, somebody's article, that's
    hardly manipulating the images that need it most. And it doesn't
    mix in enough stuff from the cultural signal-storm. In short,
    there aren't the right ingredients in the first place, and the
    manipulative aspects of culture are untouched. Possible
    ingredients: couple of political speeches, newspaper articles,
    transcript of TV show, literature from the phone or electric or
    gas company, etc etc.It's so silly for me to suggest these,
    obviously,but the cutups could be less boring, and maybe even
    bring up a few interesting juxtapositions. Mixed media and film
    are probably better way to put the ideas into practice. An
    example is Humphrey Bogart in Casablanc appearing in whatever
    commercial. The abject hungry greed of the pandering that will DO
    ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING is discouraging enough; then to watch
    the movie and be reminded of the commercial is a demonstration to
    me that some forms of meaning are not dead issues. There are
    offensive people you don't want in your presence, and there are
    offensive presences you don't want in what you are watching. How
    do artists answer that? If they had equal time on prime-time TV,
    it would be an interesting battle, but any victory pyrrhic.  By
    the way, did Yoko Ono, or Michael Jackson, or someone else sell
    the copyright of the Lennon tune to be used in a commercial?
    Anybody who thinks that we don't lose something--meaning, if I
    must--when good songs get smeared with that phosphorescent
    excrement, and we can hardly get the smell out of the song again,
    needs to straighten their head. I thought at least one aspect of
    PM was an emphasis on the particulars, once we had abandoned a
    lot of essentialist thinking? Why not discuss some of these ideas
    as they work out in particulars.
            I told you what I hate, but what I would like would be to
    use that same technique to popcorn my enemies. But even if I
    manage to make such a film, the most that will happen is that a
    very few see it on a TV in a gallery, perhaps, while the same
    technique devours whatever meaning is left. Reminds me of that
    character in Burroughs who had a jones for addicts, and would
    assimilate them into his body. Even if he spits them back out,
    they're not the same again.
            Thank-you for listening. Just meant this as ordinary
    conversation.
    
                                                    Michael McColl

     
    Date: Sat, 22 Aug 92 21:24:06 -0400
    From: Sheldon Pacotti 
    Subject: Re: cutups
    
    I have to agree that these cutups are getting a bit boring.  They
    were funny at first, especially when several days passed before
    anyone was brave enough to challenge the War Machine cutup
    (obviously a lot of people simply thought it was above their
    heads -- makes you wonder how well "postmodern theorists"
    understand their own field, assuming there are several such
    university-employed "professionals" on this list). But now that
    we all know what's going on, the cut-ups are getting monotonous.
    
    A couple years ago I did some experimenting with random text
    ('white language' or whatever).  I needed to write some cryptic
    poetry and prophecies for a fantasy novel.  To overcome my lack
    of poetic talent, I wrote a computer program that recursively
    generated grammatical structures and then filled them with words.
    I grouped words (taken from favorite poems, books; etc.) into
    different lexicons (Nature, Human Emotion, Technology; etc.) and
    then wrote a little interface to let me control how these groups
    were mixed together.  Nine out of ten sentences were pretty
    meaningless, but occasionally something striking would come up.
    By cutting and pasting phrases into a text editor, I managed
    write some pretty funky verse, which at the time served my
    purposes.
    
    The point is that I found "random" sentences not so interesting,
    but as a brainstorming tool the program worked great.  It's
    ridiculous to expect a computer to produce a very interesting
    text of any great length if all it's doing is randomly pasting
    together words.  Maybe some day, in the foggy sci-fi future,
    authors will use computers to come up with fresh descriptive
    passages, plots, new concepts-- but for the present these
    applications are pretty crude, and seldom is the direct output of
    the computer all that interesting.
    
    Any useful application of current technology to text-production,
    in my opinion, must involve the writer in an interactive
    brianstorming process.
    
    I do find it encouraging, though, that a lot of
    computer-generated phrases have stuck in my mind these couple
    years, and that my program has changed the way I look at
    metaphors.  In that sense, I've been influenced by something that
    can't be traced to the culture at large (except on the level of
    individual words).  I find this encouraging because I would like
    for authors to be more than mouthpieces for cultural currents
    running through them, cladistic or rhizomic or otherwise--for
    statements like "There are no individual statements, only
    statement-producing machinic assemblages" to be false. [1] (to
    quote a couple of this list's most popular authors).
    
    (Of course, that statement is probably true, and a computer
    program is a type of machinic assemblage, I guess, but at least a
    randomized language engine undermines the machinic assemblages in
    the surrounding cultural matrix.)
    
    sheldon pacotti
    cambridge
    
    p.s. A company called Screenplay Systems has a program called
    Dramatica which (I gather) generates plots, but I haven't
    actually seen it.
    
    [1] Deleuze & Guattari, _A Thousand Plateaus_, p. 36.

     
    Date: Sun, 23 Aug 1992 00:04 CDT
    From: S1MBM@ISUVAX.BITNET
    Subject: Re: Digest ending 8-22-92
    
    Thanks to Wes Chapman for his critique of "cut-ups."  Them things
    had been bugging me, but I hadn't understood why until Wes
    clarified matters.  I agree that the "cut-ups" are like
    one-liners:  the humor is in the instant of recognition, not in
    the story which they coyly fail to produce.  Since they are funny
    only as one-liners, I fail to see the justification for the durn
    things being so long.  Does the sheer length of the cut-ups
    accomplish anything rhetorically, or does it just allow the
    cut-uppers to get their jollies fulfilled by lingering over the
    savaging of others' texts?  Don't the cut-ups becomes just a coy
    substitute for engaged criticism, allowing the progenitors to
    hide behind an act of textual re-production?  (I'm not actually
    criticizing your work, I'm just giving it a new face--this seems
    to be the implicit rhetorical context of the cut-uppers work.)  I
    agree with Wes that it would be nice to see the cut-uppers
    somehow subject a message they've made and cared about to this
    process . . .
    
    Michael Bruce McDonald

     

  • Mr. Rubenking’s “Brekdown”

    John Tranter

    100026.1402@CompuServe.COM

     

    [This essay was originally published in Meanjinno. 4 (1991), Melbourne University, Australia.]

     

    In magazines and seminar rooms from Fife to Fresno, from Michigan to Melbourne, you can hear the raised voices and the breaking glass–they’re arguing about poetry again. A recent issue of Verse (an English/US magazine edited from Fife and Glasgow, Scotland and Williamsburg, Virginia) was devoted to “The New Formalism in American Poetry.” Sulfur magazine, emerging from Ypsilanti, Michigan, transcribes the shifting tides of battle as an old Modernist orthodoxy faces up to contemporary deconstructions. A recent Meanjin magazine from Melbourne, Australia, was devoted to an examination of “language” poetry.

     

    Among other issues, these debates have drawn attention to the irrational and disorderly aspects of literary production. The courting and harnessing of disorder– deconstruction and reconstruction, breakdown and buildup–is of course as old as the ancient Greeks, and as contemporary as Shakespeare. In its various modern phases it can be traced in the theory and practice of writers including Coleridge, Rimbaud, Stein, the French Surrealists, Raymond Roussel, the print and audio tape cut-up experiments of William Burroughs, and the theoretical and practical deconstructions of the American “language” poets.

     

    Australia’s “Ern Malley,” a hoax poet concocted by the young poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart in 1943, was built to self-destruct and take the experimental magazine Angry Penguins with him. But like Frankenstein’s monster he stubbornly lived on, stalking the periphery of Australian literature, haunting his creators and troubling generations of readers with the contradictory beauty of his “meaningless” poems. Two of his “best” works appeared in the Summer 1961 issue of the Paris magazine Locus Solus, not as examples of hoax poetry, but of collaborative writing. So order can emerge in spite of the author’s insistence on chaos.

     

    History works through hindsight, and the spectacles of hindsight are tinted with irony. The model of art versus disorder was renovated early in the Industrial Revolution in the service of a Romantic idea: the construction of a role for the author as a unique creative presence rescuing spiritual value from chaos–the aristocracy were dead, God had fled, and Nature was covered with factories–and whose job it was to certify the value of a literary work on behalf of its consumers, the bourgeoisie. The project has seen strange and powerful acids attack this central role as the twentieth century progressed, until the structure is now almost reversed–it’s now the reader who validates the work which constructs the author–if she’s lucky.

     

    One of the incidental but apparently intractable problems unearthed by this theoretical juggernaut as it ploughs up the Highway of Style goes as follows: How does a writer create a writer-free literary text? A text free of authorial intentions, buried cultural, social, economic and political values and hidden personality agendas, giving forth only “literature” in its pure state?

     

    Automatic writing, nonsense writing, collaboration, formal rules for sentence-building, found poems–they’ve all been called into service. The current strategies of postmodernism include quotation, parody, collage, disassembly, bricolage, and so forth; but the hand of the stylist–not to mention the theoretician–is always evident as it arranges the exhibits.

     

    It’s usually thought that an “unintended” poetry was either impossible or “unreadable.” But there is a way of constructing practically any form of literary material that will embody many of the traditional values of “literature,” which will be curiously readable, but which is free of authorial intent. An energetic computer programmer, inspired by articles in Scientific American and BYTE magazine, has developed such a method–but not in the severe service of modern literary theory.

     

    Like a poet, he did it for the fun of it.

     

    * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

     

    “Brekdown” is a text analysis and text generation program written in Turbo Pascal for IBM-compatible personal computers, devised in 1985 by the San Francisco programmer Neil J. Rubenking.

     

    What does it do?

     

    First, Brekdown requires a typed text to work on. For example, you can feed it several pages of a sermon on brotherly love, or a set of instructions for building a kayak, or a short story written in Italian.

     

    To analyse a text, Brekdown looks at it in “chunks” of a particular size–the “chunk size” can be set from two to seven alphabetical and punctuation characters. Brekdown keeps a record–in the form of an index and a frequency table–of what character occurs immediately after a particular “chunk.” For example, after the “chunk” THE, the letters N, R, Y and M and the character are likely to occur frequently in a particular text; the letter A less frequently, and the letters X, K and Q and the character very infrequently if at all.

     

    Then the “chunk” is shifted one character to the right, and the process is repeated–that is, the chunk’s first character is dropped, the current next character is tacked onto the end, and the index and the frequency table is updated for the character that follows that “chunk” of characters. The chunk is moved one character to the right again, and again, until the end of the text is reached.

     

    Once Brekdown has constructed an index and a frequency table for a sample text, it can generate a “reconstruction” of that text.

     

    To generate a new text, Brekdown selects at random a “Key chunk” that begins with a space (i.e., one that doesn’t start in the middle of a word.) It then looks up the frequency array for that Key and selects the next character at random from the characters with non-zero frequency, weighted by the frequencies listed in the table. This character is added to the current output line, and to the current Key chunk, and the process is repeated. The program continues generating characters, words, and lines of text until you ask it to stop. It could go on forever.

     

    That’s it.

     

    It looks simple–if you can put aside the immense computational, statistical and design complexity–but the implications are intriguing. The “style” of a piece of writing (which encodes the author’s intentions and indeed the society’s values as far as they are manifest in the language) can be described in virtually value-free terms by the frequency table generated by Brekdown. The likelihood of a particular character following another group of characters can be seen as a function of the language’s “personality” as much as the writer’s “personality.” Because of its design, BrekDown can never generate an illegal sequence of letters; that is, the texts it generates may not make grammatical sense, but they follow pragmatic rules of word-formation.

     

    For example, in the English used in mid-nineteenth century London, the letter combinations “krzy” and “qan” are not only “illegal” (in linguistic terms), but impossible for a British writer of that period to include in a normal text. In the English of contemporary Australia, the first letter combination forms part of the name of an Australian poet (Peter Skrzynecki, born in Poland), and the second, part of the name of the Australian national airline, “Qantas.” Both are thus linguistically “legal” and available in contemporary English-language texts in that country. In a non-trivial and quite important way, Mr. Rubenking’s program “knows” this specific fact when it needs to; until I thought up and wrote this paragraph, hardly anyone else–not even Mr. Rubenking–did.

     

    * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

     

    Let’s get to work and construct two different texts in the “styles” of two poets whose work I enjoy. First, three poems written by Matthew Arnold (“The Buried Life,” “Dover Beach,” and “The Scholar-Gypsy”) are typed as one continuous text, and loaded into Brekdown. The same is done separately with a dozen pages of poetry by John Ashbery. Brekdown is instructed to analyse the texts.

     

    The resulting “Matthew Arnold” Data and Index files add up to half a million characters, and generating the index and frequency tables takes half an hour on a 80386 personal computer. Generating a “reconstruction” of the Matthew Arnold text takes about fifteen minutes to construct 1,800 words. Let’s gather the thirty or so “best lines” of that raw text. Let’s clean them up a bit to make them less garbled, and print them at the end of this file. Then let’s do the same for Mr. Ashbery.

     

    The Matthew Arnold example is printed as “What Mortal End,” by “Tom Haltwarden,” at the end of this file; the John Ashbery as “Her Shy Banjo” by “Joy H. Breshan.”

     

    Both the poem titles and the bogus authors’ names are anagrams of “Matthew Arnold” and “John Ashbery,” respectively, created by another Neil Rubenking program, “Namegram.” (Is there no end to the man’s ingenuity?) Namegram comes free on the disk when you buy Brekdown, and I defy you to resist its charms. (At least, this was true in 1989, when I first obtained the program.)

     

    The name “Matthew Arnold” generated some three and a half thousand different anagrams, by the way, including Mad Walt Hornet, That lewd Roman, Mother and Walt, Old Thwart-Name, Martha Letdown, Who’d lament art?, Harlot went mad, and others too suggestive to include here.

     

    Reminiscence. Some twenty years ago I asked Alex Jones, then teaching linguistics at Sydney University, to research and write an article on Computers and Poetry for “Poetry Australia” magazine. The machines then cost a fortune, weighed several tonnes each, occupied large air-conditioned basements, and needed a staff of pale and white-coated servants with PhDs to minister to their needs. They could manage a haiku or two, with immense effort.

     

    You can now buy, with a month’s salary, a computer capable of writing endless numbers of clever poems, and it will fit into a jacket pocket.

     

    Credits. Like all good computer programmers and any honest poet, Mr. Rubenking admits that if he can reach the stars, it’s because he’s standing on the shoulders of giants. His documentation states that Brekdown was inspired by the “Travesty” program in the November 1984 issue of “BYTE” magazine, by Kenner and O’Rourke (yes, computer scientist Joseph O’Rourke’s colleague was Hugh Kenner, professor of English at Georgia State University, and noted literary critic. His recent books include “A Sinking Island” and “Mazes.”) They in turn quote an article in the “Scientific American” of November 1983 by Brian P. Hayes, which described an elegant method of avoiding large and unwieldy n-dimensional arrays. They also refer to the work of Claude Shannon, who in 1948–working with a pencil instead of a computer–developed a simple but tedious method of calculating letter-group frequency arrays, using the text itself as a frequency table.

     

    Come on, Pandora–Open the Box: “Brekdown” is distributed as shareware. The program is available from the shareware distributors

     

    PC-SIG (Personal Computer Special Interest Group), 1030-D East Duane Avenue, Sunnyvale, California 94086, Telephone 408-730 9291.

     

    [Author's note: Another shareware text-reconstituting program, Babble!, developed by Tracey Siesser, Lee Horowitz, and Jim Korenthal, is available from 76004.2605@Compuserve.COM or, in the U.S., by calling (212) 242-1790.]

     

    Good luck.

     

     

    * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

    Tom Haltwarden: “What Mortal End”

     

    Rain, without it there can be no September music
    The concealed afternoons
    A source of the revisions as useless as a lukewarm fancy,
    Making pink smudges on life and accepting severe punishment,
    Encouragement by lovers, sang no more blades of light
    Arise, light! The things of the day we eat
    Breakfast each in their tree withdrawals,
    Our marionette-like Pierrot, like these
    Hot sticky evenings, though fragmented

     

    The greatest risk working deep crevices far inland,
    We can see no reward, winnowers of the old time
    Involved without pain, with their sleepy empty nets
    And you, at twilight.
    The neighbours love the yellow of the same tweed jacket.
    It is only semi-bizarre where you want to lie,
    A nice, bluish slate-gray. People laugh,
    Having conspired with a towel, and wiped the last thought
    From the black carriages, the models slender, like the stars.
    You couldn’t deliberately, for fright, once you see
    It’s all talk, the travelling far from anybody.
    Hands streaming with kisses, between us.
    It may be something like silver,
    Something like a sponge, and they enjoyed it, abandonment
    Without shame, a crowded highway in the sun, it just
    Stays like dust–that’s the nature of the children, and
    Yesterday’s newspapers say: “Sometimes good times follow bad.”
    Their object, the sky. Is it like climbing abruptly
    From a room? It may be only a polite puss-in-boots we passed,
    Two in love hesitant at the front door.
    So we have enjoyed the one crisp feeling, raking
    And breathing, checking the horrible speech the furniture makes.
    How short the season is–don’t fix it if it comes in coloured
    Mottoes, and now, underneath this dilemma directly, as
    Our clothes, the afternoon, really old-time, her shy banjo.

     

  • Incarnations Of The Murderer

    William T. Vollmann

     

    San Ignacio, Belize (1990)
    San Francisco, California U.S.A.. (1991)
    Agra, India (1990)
    San Francisco, California U.S.A. (1991)
    Resolute Bay, Cornwallis Island,
    Northwest Territories, Canada (1991)
    Interstate 80, California, U.S.A. (1992)
    Battambang, Cambodia (1991)

    San Ignacio, Belize (1990)

     

    Two girls sailed under the fat green branches of trees that curved like eyebrows. At the top of the grassy bank, a plantain spread its leaves across the clouds. They passed little brown girls swimming and smiling. They passed a man who dove for shrimp that he put in a plastic bag. Breasting the painted houses that were grocery stores rich with onions. Coca-Cola and condensed milk, they rode the wide brown river between tree- ridges and palm houses.

     

    As they paddled, the plump wet thighs of the girls quivered; water danced on their thighs. A few wet curly hairs peeked shyly from the crotches of their bathing suits. They had golden hourglass waists.

     

    A man was a dragonfly. He hugged his shadow on the river until he saw them.

     

    The water splashed under a great green tree-bridge that grew parallel to the water. Its branches were red and black like the skin of a diamondback rattler. In the branches crouched the man. The plan that the man had was as rubbery and pink as a monkey’s palm. But the canoe was not there yet. The two girls were still alive.

     

    Yellow butterflies skimmed low across the shallow water. They saw the girls, too. They saw each other. They saw themselves in the water and forgot everything.

     

    The tree that owned the water was closer now. A white horse sneezed in a grove of golden coconuts.

     

    All morning the man had been thinking of the two girls whom he was about to kill. Knocking yellow coconuts down from the trees with a big stick, he’d sliced away at them with his machete until a little hole like a vagina appeared. He put his mouth to that pale bristly hole and drank. (Slowly, the white meat inside oxidized brown.) But now he was silent, suspended from his purpose as if by the heavy supple tail of a spider monkey.

     

    Now the two girls passed little clapboard houses with laundry out to dry. They passed the last house they would ever see. In the river a lazy boa was wriggling along. That was the last snake they’d ever see.

     

    They went down the ripple-stained river, the ripple-striped river. They saw the broad green rocks beneath the water, the soft yellow-green tree-mounds. They came to the tree of their death, and the man jumped down lightly and stabbed them in their breasts.

     

    The canoe lay long and low across the neck of an island. Reflected water burned whitely on its keel.

     

    The man opened red fruits. He bit them. They were soft with two-colored grainy custard inside.

     

    The spice of the blood was like the sweet stinging of the glossy-leaved pepper-tree, whose orange fruits burn your lips when you eat, burn again when you piss. This made him happy. He went to sleep and awoke. A toucan chirped like a frog. The taste was stronger in his mouth. He laughed.

     

    He wandered among the caring arches of the palm tree that shaded him like wisdom, and his shirt was hot and slick on his back. He came to the grove where the white horse had sneezed and knocked down a coconut. He drank the juice, but the taste of blood was even stronger now. He looked sideways in the hot high fields of trees.

     

    Knuckles itching pleasantly with insect bites, searching through the wild-looking fields for ground foods with the sun hot on his sunburned neck and wrists, he swiped down a sugarcane stalk with his machete and then he skinned and peeled it in long strokes, from green down to white. He was good at using knives. He snapped off a piece and chewed it, tasting in advance its taste so juicy, fresh and sweet. His hands were sticky with juice. He chewed. But the other taste loomed still more undeniable.

     

    Between his teeth he placed slices of young pineapple, bird- eaten custard apples, bay leaves, green papayas, sour plums from a leaf-bare tree. He bit them all ferociously into a mush. Then he sucked, choked, swallowed. Building a fire, he made coffee, which he drank down to the grounds. He cut an inch of medicine- vine and chewed that bitterness, too. The taste of blood increased.

     

    He spat, but his spittle was clear. There was no blood in it. He pricked his tongue with the point of the knife, but his own male blood could not drown the other, the female taste.

     

    He drank half a bottle of rum and fell down. All around him, trees steamed by humid horizons. When he awoke, the taste was stronger than ever. He began to scream.

     

    There was a cave he knew of whose floor was a sandy beach. The man ran there without knowing why. Jet black water became black and green there as it descended into bubbling pools close enough to the entrance to reflect the jungle, from the branches of which the black and orange-tailed birds hung like seedpods. The widest tree-boughs were festooned with vine-sprouts like the feathered shafts of arrows. Behind them, where it was cool and stale, the cave’s chalky stalactites hung in ridge-clusters like folds of drying laundry on a line. The man ran in. He splashed through the first pool. It was alive with green and silver ripples intersecting with one another like a woman’s curls. A single bubble traveled, white on black, then silver on silver. He ran crazy through the next pool. Farther in the darkness was a chalky beach, cratered with rat-prints and raccoon-prints. This was the place where the cave-roof was crowned by a trio of stalactites. Here, where everything but the river was quiet, a pale whitish bird fluttered from rock to rock, squeaking like a mouse. The bird flew back and forth very quickly. It hovered over rock-cracks’ wrinkled lips. It landed on a crest of lighter-colored rock like a wave that had never broken. It darted its beak between two studs of shell-fossil and swallowed a blind ant. Then it departed into deeper caves within the cave, floored with silence and white sand. Water shimmered white on black rocks–

     

    The man opened his mouth to scream again and the white bird came from nowhere. The white bird was the soul of one on the girls. The bird stabbed the man’s tongue with its beak and drank blood. Then it flew away, not squeaking anymore.

     

    The man swallowed experimentally. The taste was not nearly so strong.

     

    Farther back in the cave was a pit. A tiny black bird flew there. Knowing this now, the man clambered down. It was like being inside a seashell. Far down in the well, the flicker of his lighter showed him the pink and glistening rock-guts. Smoke streamed from the little lighter like a beam from a movie projector. He held the lighter below his mouth, so that the black bird could see him. The bird came swooping down and cheeping. It was so tiny that it flew back between his tonsils. He longed to swallow it, to recapitulate his triumphs. But then the taste would strengthen again. The black bird pierced him and drank a drop of his blood. He could feel the bird’s pulse inside him. It was not much bigger than a bee. It took him again. Then it flew away in silence.

     

    The taste was gone now. The man shrieked with glee. The cave was empty.

     

    Outside, it was so brightly green that the hunger of his eyes (which he hadn’t even known that he had) was caught: as long as he looked out upon it, he thought himself satisfied, but the instant he began to look away, back into the darkness, then his craving for greenness screamed out at him.

     

    He ran outside trying to see and taste everything. He ran down the streambank to a kingdom of pools in bowls of baking hot rock. He drank water from rolling whirlpools; he dove down whitewater to brown water, beneath which his open eyes found chalky sandvalleys, green-slicked boulder cliffs: he grabbed at these things with his fingers and then licked his fingertips. In the best whirlpool rushed the two girls, lying down against each other, kissing each other avidly, eating each other’s soft flesh.

     

    San Francisco, California, U.S.A. (1991)

     

    Down the fog-sodden wooden steps he came that night to the street walled with houses, every doorway a yellow lantern-slide suspended between floating windows, connected to earth by the tenuous courtesy of stairs. Earth was but sidewalk and street, a more coagulated grey than the silver-gleam of reflected souls in car windshields, heavier too than the grey-green linoleum sky segmented by power wires. He went fog-breathing while the two walls of houses faced each other like cliffs, ignoring one another graciously; they were long islands channelled, coved and barred, made separate by the crisscrossing rivers of grey streets. Somewhere was the isle of the dead girls’ canoe, which he needed now to get away from himself. All night he walked the hill streets until he came to morning, a foggy morning in the last valley of pale houses before the sea. He stood before an apartment house whose chessboard-floored arch declined to eat him as he’d eaten others; the doors were shut like the sky. The curving ceiling of the arch was stamped with white flowers in squares. Black iron latticed windows as elaborately as Qur’anic calligraphy; white railings guarded balconies. Spiked lamps smoldered at him from behind orange glass. Timidly he hid behind the sidewalk’s trees whose leaf-rows whispered richly down like ferns . . .

     

    Once he admitted that this house was not for him, he turned away from all hill streets side-stacked with rainbow cars and went down further toward the sea. So he came to the street of souls.

     

    The candy shop of souls lured him in first. His nose stung with the fog. He opened the door and went in, staring at the long glass case that was like an aquarium. Here he found the chocolate ingots, the pure mint-striped cylinders, the tarts studded with fruits and berries like a dozen orchards, the vanilla bread-loaves long and slender like suntanned eels, the banana-topped lime hexagons, the chocolate-windowed eclairs domed with cream like Russian Orthodox churches, the round strawberry tortes gilded with lemon-chocolate to make pedestals for the vanilla-chocolate butterflies that rested on each with breathless wings, the sponge-cakes like an emperor’s crown, the complex wicker-basket raspberry pies of woven crust, heaped with boulders of butter and confectioner’s sugar, the tins of violet lozenges, the bones and girders made of licorice, the low white discs of sugarpies topped with fan-swirls of almonds like playing cards, the peach cakes, pear cakes, the row of delectable phosphorescent green slugs, the flowerpot of coffee frosting from which a chocolate rose bloomed, the strawberries that peaked up from unknown tarts and tortes bride-bashful behind ruffled paper–

     

    He sat at a little square marble table, and without a word the lady brought him a green slug, served on a white plate with white lace. He reached in his pocket and found a single coin of iron with a hole in the center. He gave her that. He sat looking past the glass case at the rows of fruit confections in matched white-lidded jars–not for him. With the silver fork he stabbed the slug and raised it into his mouth, where it overcame him between his teeth with a sweet ichor of orgasmic limes, and so he became a thief–

     

    Agra, India (1990)

     

    Two green-clad soldiers were striking a man in the face beneath one of the side-arches of the Taj Mahal. The man was not screaming. He was a thief. The soldiers had caught him, and were beating him. All around him, the Mughal tombs bulged with hard nipples on their marble breasts. — The Emperor, he had so many wives, he spent a month’s salary on cosmetics! cried the guide.

     

    Blood flowered from the thief’s nose.

     

    This tower closed now, said the guide. The lovely boys and girls jump off, suicide. For love and love and love. Closed now for security reason. But this part, this open ivory day.

     

    The thief fell down when they let go of him. The soldiers stamped on his stomach. Then they raised him again.

     

    Now. sir, lady, come-come. Look! This marble one piece. No two piece. No join. Only cutting!

     

    The thief looked at the guide with big eyes. The soldiers punched him. Then he was not looking at the guide anymore. Sir and lady went away, trying not to hear his groans as the soldiers began to beat him. They wore the dead girl’s mouths.

     

    Yes, please! Hello! Sir and madam!

     

    (Sir and madam were staring at him again. They could not help it. The soldiers were kicking out his teeth.)

     

    Water rippled in long grooves of onyx, malachite, coral. Clouds echoed between the lapis-flowered marble screens. Far beyond the screens lay dim white-grey corridors of peace. Darkness, incense and shadows crawled slowly on marble, searching for secret sweet-smelling vaults.

     

    The soldiers hustled the thief into darkness.

     

    Outside it was a foggy morning. Skinny men rode bicycles, with dishtowels wrapped around their heads. Roadside people squatted by smudges to keep warm. On the dusty road that stank of exhaust, platoons of dirty white cattle were marched and goaded toward Agra. They had sharp backbones and floppy bellies.

     

    Postcards, please? Small marble! Elephant two rupees!

     

    Cowtails and buttocks were crowded together long narrow and wobbly like folded drapes. They swished and twitched as if they were alive and knew where they were going, but they didn’t; they only followed where they were pulled, like the thief being led into the recesses of that gorgeous tomb.

     

    San Francisco, California, U.S.A. (1991)

     

    When the rattle of his bones being put back together became the rattling whir of the cable cars going up Nob Hill, then he shot forth out of darkness among the square red lights of the other soul-cars swarming from the parking tunnels, zebra-striped gate up and down; for awhile he followed a big dirty bus that had once been a selfish man, and he rolled up Powell Street, which was sutured lengthwise with steel. Crowds were standing off the curb. There was no room for them yet. He saw a man pushing a shopping cart full of old clothes. Globes of crystallized light attacked him from the edge of Union Square. Higher up the hill he rolled by hotels and brass-worked windows, flags and awnings; he saw the pedestrian souls slogging up slowly, the Chinese signs, the yellow plastic pagoda-roofs, the bulging windows of Victorian houses. A girl with a sixpack under her arm ran smiling and flushed up the hill. At the top of the hill he could see far; he saw a Sunday panorama off the Marin headlands, with tanned girls drinking wine coolers, and college boys pretending to be pirates with their fierce black five-dollar squirt guns, and the Golden Gate Bridge almost far away enough to shimmer as it must have done for those convicts from Alcatraz who doomed themselves trying to swim there. The red warning light still flashed on the island, now noted for its tours and wildflowers. The cellblock building became ominous again when the evening fog sprang up and the tanned girls screamed as their twenty-four- footer tacked closer and closer to the sharp black rocks, already past the limit demarcated by the old prison bouys that say KEEP OFF; and seeing the girls he wanted to kill them over again but then his cracked bones ached from being beaten and he bared his teeth and thought: If I can’t eat them by stealing them, I’ll get them another way! and he laughed and honked his horn and other cars honked behind him so he rolled on down the hill and came to the street of souls.

     

    Fearing to enter the candy shop which had brought him such pain, he parked, offering himself again to that knife of fog and silence, the handle a crystal stalagmite; and he came to the coffee shop of souls.

     

    Brass safe deposit boxes walled him, side by side, bearing buttons and horns. Each one had a different coffee inside. The smell of coffee enflamed him. There were rows of stalls for muffins, each of which reminded him of the pale brown coconuts he had drunk. In his pocket he found a single coin with a hole in it. They gave him a muffin. He became an anthropologist.

     

    Resolute Bay, Cornwallis Island, Northwest Territories, Canada

    (1991)

     

    On the komatik, whose slats had been partly covered by a caribou skin (now frozen into iron wrinkles), he lay comfortably on his side, gripping two slat-ends with his fishy-smelling sealskin mitts which were already getting ice-granules behind the liner (an old bedsheet) because every time he wiped his nose with the skintight capilene gloves the snot was soaked up by the old bedsheet which then began to freeze; and as the komatik rattled along at the end of its leash, making firm tracks in the snow- covered ice, the wind froze the snot around his nose and mouth into white rings, but not immediately because it was not cold enough yet to make breath-frost into instant whiskers; however, it was certainly cold enough to make his cheek ache from contact with the crust of snot-ice on the ski mask; meanwhile the smoothness of the sea began to be interrupted by hard white shards where competing currents had gashed the ice open and then the wound had scarred; sometimes the ice-plates had forced each other’s edges into uprising splinters that melded and massed into strange shapes; the Inuk wended the skidoo between these when he could, going slowly so that the komatik did not lurch too badly; his back was erect, almost stern, the rifle at a ready diagonal, and he steered south toward a thick horizon-band that seemed to be fog or blowing snow; in fact it was the steam of open water. Over this hung the midday sun, reddish-pale, a rotten apple of the old year.

     

    Then the groaning ice fissured into a shape like a girl’s mouth, and the komatik broke through. He fell under the ice. The other girl was waiting beneath with her mouth open to drink his blood and he was already freezing and paling, but then the girl breathed upon him so lovingly and he was warmed. The first girl, the one who was ice, opened her mouth; the second one lifted him on through to the sky.

     

    Interstate 80, California, U.S.A. (1992)

     

    Grey-lit struts took his weight as he shot across the bridge; flat grey-green ribs were stripped of their nightflesh by the dingy lights, the lights of Oakland rippling in between like scales, inhuman lights all the way to the grey horizon. What a relief when the world finally ran out of electricity, and we’d have to turn them off! On his left was a city of stacks and towers clustered with lights like sparks that could never be peacefully extinguished, could never cool themselves in the earth. A gush of smoke blew horizontally from the topmost stack. He scuttled up greenish-grey ramps of deadness into the dead night, accompanied by characterless strings of light, dull apartment tower lights, dark bushes; he bulleted down a lane of dirty blackness clouded by trees on either side, remnant trees suffered to live only because they interrupted that ugly terrible light. Then he came into the outer darkness of unhealthy tree- mists where the sky was as empty as his heart. He slid like a shuffleboard counter through the cut between blackish-brownish- grey banks of darkness, the sky greenish-grey above. He crossed the grim vacuous bridge that was the last place before the night country; he pierced the turgid black river (so night-soaked that he could perceive it only at its edges where light coagulated upon black wrinkles) and came into the ruined desert.

     

    The toll bar came down. The attendant was waiting. Cars were beginning to honk behind him as he sat there at the toll booth of souls, looking through his pockets. Finally he found a single coin with a hole in it. He reached, dropped it into the attendants palm. The toll bar went up. He became a piece of jute cloth.

     

    Battambang, Cambodia (1991)

     

    A woman in a mask who had a blue blanket over her head put the soft limp jute of him onto the conveyor belt. Then he got washed and rolled. The rollers gleamed and worked him back and forth, softening him. He could not scream. To her he was not even a shadow. (A poster of the president changed rose-light on its shrine.) What worked the rollers? The factory had its own generator, its own grand shouting alternators, built to last, 237 kilowatts . . . The jute of his soul got matted and soft. He did not see the hammer-and-sickle flag anymore. His soul got squeezed by a rickety rattling. Now he was squished almost as thin as a hair. People dragged him away slowly, pulling long bunches of him with both hands. He was in a vast cement-floored enclosure whose roof was stained brown. They stretched him out. Slowly he went up a long steep conveyor. He emerged in a pale white roll of hope, twirling down, narrowing into a strip. The barefoot workers gathered him into piles on the concrete floor, then stuffed him into barrels, which were then mounted on huge reels. Murderers like him had destroyed this place once already. There had been twelve hundred workers. Now that it had been rebuilt, eight hundred and sixty worked there, eight hours a day, six days a week, not knowing that jute was souls. They cleaned and pressed him into accordioned ribbons of fiber that built up in the turning barrels. A masked girl stood ready to pack him down with her hands and roll a new barrel into place. He recognized her. She was not angry anymore. Then someone took the barrels to go into a second pressing machine. A metal arm whipped back and forth, but only for a minute; the barefoot girls had to fiddle with it again. His substance was cleaned and dried. A masked woman lifted up levers, twisted him by hand into the clamps, pulled down levers, and he spilled out again. He recognized her, too. She smiled at him. Now everyone could see him being woven into string, dense, rough and thick; this string in turn was woven into sacking. They were going to fill his empty heart with rice. This is not such a bad destiny for anyone, since rice is life. The barefoot girls teased out the rolls of soul-cloth, gathering them from the big roll in different sizes (63 x 29 inches and 20 x 98 inches); boys dragged them across the floor at intervals, stretching, looking around, slowly smoothing them amidst the sounds of the mechanical presses. So they stacked him among the other sacks. Girls sat on sacks on the floor, sewing more sacks; they were fixing the mistakes of the sack-sewing machine. Then they pressed the sacks into bales. But he’d turned out perfect; he did not need any girls to stitch up the holes in his heart. He was ready now in the bale of sacks. If someone guarded him well he might last two years. Then he’d turn to dirt. A man’s hands seized his bale and carried him toward the place where he would be used. Then the man’s work-shift was over. The man went to serve his hours on the factory militia, readying himself for duty in the room of black guns on jute sacks. The man knew that in the jungle other murderers were still nearby.

     

  • Great Breakthroughs In Darkness (Being, Early Entries From the Secret Encyclopaedia Of Photography)

    Marc Laidlaw

    Chief Secretary of the Ministry of
    Photographic Arcana, Correspondent of No
    Few Academies, Devoted Husband, &c.

     

    Authorized by Marc Laidlaw

     

    [Previously published in England as part of New Worlds 2, ed. David Garnett (Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 1992).]

     

    “Alas! That this speculation is somewhat too refined to be introduced into a modern novel or romance; for what a denouement we should have, if we could suppose the secrets of the darkened chamber to be revealed by the testimony of the imprinted paper!”

    — William Henry Fox Talbot

     

    -A-

     

    Aanschultz, Conreid

    (c. 1820 – October 12, 1888)

     

    Inventor of the praxiscope technology (which see), Professor Aanschultz believed that close observation of physiology and similar superficial phenomena could lead to direct revelation of the inner or secret processes of nature. Apparent proof of this now discredited theory was offered by his psychopraxiscope, which purported to offer instantaneous viewing of any subject’s thoughts. (Later researchers demonstrated that the device “functioned” by creating interference patterns in the inner eye of the observer, triggering phosphene splash and lucid dreaming.) Aanschultz’s theories collapsed, and the Professor himself died in a Parisian lunatic asylum, after his notorious macropraxiscope failed to extract any particular meaning from the contours of the Belgian countryside near Waterloo. Some say he was already unstable from abuse of his autopsychopraxiscope, thought to be particularly dangerous because of autophagous feedback patterns generated in its operator’s brain. However, there is evidence that Aanschultz was quite mad already, owing to the trauma of an earlier research disaster.

     

    Aanschultz Lens

     

    The key lens used in Aanschultz’s notorious psychopraxiscope, designed to capture and focus abaxial rays reflecting from a subject’s eye.

     

    Abat-Jour

     

    A skylight or aperture for admitting light to a studio, or an arrangement for securing the same end by reflection. In the days when studios for portraiture were generally found at the tops of buildings not originally erected for that purpose, and perhaps in narrow thoroughfares or with a high obstruction adjacent, I found myself climbing a narrow, ill-lit flight of stairs, away from the sound of wagon wheels rattling on cobblestones, the common foetor of a busy city street, and toward a more rarified and addictive stench compounded of chemicals that would one day be known to have contributed directly to society’s (and my own) madness and disease. It was necessary to obtain all available top light in the choked alleys, and Aanschultz had done everything he could in a city whose sky was blackly draped with burning sperm.

     

    I came out into a dazzling light compounded of sunlight and acetylene, between walls yellowed by iodine vapor, covering my nose at the stench of mercury fumes, the reek of sulfur. My own fingertips were blackened from such stuff; and eczema procurata, symptomatic of a metol allergy, had sent a prurient rash all up the sensitive skin of my inner arms, which, though so bound in bandages that I could scarcely scratch them through my heavy woollen sleeves, were a constant seeping agony. At night I wore a woman’s long kid gloves coated with coal tar, and each morning dressed my wounds with an ointment of mercuric nitrate (60 g.), carbolic acid (10 ccs), zinc oxide (30 g) and lanoline (480 “), which I had learned to mix myself when the chemist professed a groundless horror of contagion. I had feared at first that the rash might spread over my body, down my flanks, invading the delicate skin of my thighs and those organs between them, softer by far. I dreaded walking like a crab, legs bowed far apart, experiencing excruciating pain at micturition and intercourse (at least syphilis is painless; even when it chews away one’s face, I am told, there is a pleasant numbness)–but so far this nightmare had not developed. Still, I held my tender arms slightly spread away from my sides, seeming always on the verge of drawing the twin Janssen photographic revolvers which I carried in holsters slung around my waist, popular hand-held versions of that amazing “gun” which first captured the transit of Venus across the face of our local star.

     

    The laboratory, I say, was a fury of painfully brilliant light and sharp, membrane-searing smells. Despite my admiration for the Professor’s efficiency, I found it not well suited for artistic purposes, a side light being usually preferable instead of the glare of a thousand suns that came down through the cruelly contrived abat-jour. But Aanschultz, being of a scientific bent, saw in twilight landscapes only some great treasure to be prised forth with all necessary force. He would have disemboweled the earth itself if he thought an empirical secret were lodged just out of reach in its craw. I had suggested a more oblique light, but the Professor would not hear of it.

     

    “That is for your prissy studios–for your fussy bourgeois sitters!” he would rage at my “aesthetic” suggestions. “I am a man of science. My subjects come not for flattering portraits, but for insight–I observe the whole man here.” To which I replied: “And yet you have not captured him. You have not impressed a single supposition on so much as one thin sheet of tin or silver or albumen glass. The fleeting things you see cannot be captured. Which is less than I can say of even the poorest photograph, however superficial.” And here he always scoffed at me and turned away, pacing, so that I knew my jibes had cut to the core of his own doubts, and that he was still, with relentless logic, stalking a way to fix the visions viewed so briefly (however engrossingly) in his praxiscope.

     

    He needed lasting records of his studies–some substance the equivalent of photographic paper that might hold the scope’s pictures in place for all to see, for all time. It was this magical medium which he now sought. I thought it must be something of a “Deep” paper–a sheet of more than three dimensions, into which thoughts might be imprinted in all their complexity, a sort of mind-freezing mirror. When he shared his own ideas, I quickly became lost, and if I made any comment it soon led to vicious argument. I could not follow Aanschultz’s arguments on any subject; even our discussions of what or where to eat for lunch, what beer went best with bratwurst, could become incomprehensible. Only another genius could follow where Aanschultz went in his thoughts. With time I had even stopped looking in his eyes–with or without a psychopraxiscope.

     

    “I am nearly there,” he told me today, as I reached the top of the stairs with a celebratory bottle in hand.

     

    “You’ve found a way to fix the psychic images?”

     

    “No–something new. My life’s work. This will live long after me.”

     

    He said the same of every current preoccupation. His assistants were everywhere, adjusting the huge rack of movable mirrors that conducted light down from the rooftops, in from the street, over from the alleyway, wherever there happened to be a stray unreaped ray of it. Their calls rang out through the laboratory, echoing down through pipes like those in great ships, whereby the captain barks orders to the engine room. In the center of the chamber stood the solar navigator with his vast charts and compass and astrolabes scattered around him, constantly shouting into any one of the dozen pipes that coiled down from the ceiling like dangling vines, dispatching orders to those who stood in clearer sight of the sun but with a less complete foreknowledge of its motion; and as he shouted, the mirrors canted this way and that, and the huge collectors on the roof purred in their oiled bearings and the entire building creaked under the shifting weight and the laboratory burned like a furnace, although cleverly, without any heat. There was a watery luminescence in the air, a constant distorted rippling that sent wavelets lapping over the walls and tables and charts and retorts and tarnished boxes, turning the iodine stains a lurid green; this was the result of light pouring through racks of blue glass vials, old glass that had run and blistered with age, stoppered bottles full of copper sulphate which also swivelled and tilted according to the instructions of another assistant who stood very near the navigator. I had to raise my own bottle and drink very deeply before any of this made much sense to me, or until I could approach a state of focused distraction more like that of my friend and mentor, the great Professor Conreid Aanschultz, who now came at me and snatched the bottle from my hands and helped himself. He courteously polished every curve of the flask with a fresh chamois before handing it back, eradicating his last fingerprint as the bottle left his fingers, so that the now nearly empty vessel gleamed as brightly as those blue ones. I finished it off and dropped it in a half- assembled filter rack, where it would find a useful life even empty. The Professor made use of all Things.

     

    “This way,” he said, leading me past a huge hissing copperclad acetylene generator of the dreadnought variety, attended by several anxious-looking children in the act of releasing quantities of gas through a purifier. The proximity of this somewhat dangerous operation to the racks of burning Bray 00000 lamps made me uncomfortable, and I was grateful to move over a light-baffling threshold into darkness. Here, a different sort of chaos reigned, but it was, if anything, even more intense and busy. I sensed, even before my eyes had adjusted to the weak and eerie working light, that these assistants were closer to Aanschultz’s actual current work, and that this work must be very near to completion, for they had that weary, pacified air of slaves who have been whipped to the very limits of human endurance and then suspended beyond that point for days on end. I doubted any had slept or rested for nearly as long as Aanschultz, who was possessed of superhuman reserves. I myself, of quite contrary disposition, had risen late that morning, feasted on a huge lunch (which even now was producing unexpected gases like my own internal rumbling dreadnought), and, feeling benevolent, had decided to answer my friend’s urgent message of the previous day, which had hinted that his fever pitch of work was about to bear fruit–a pronouncement he always made long in advance of the actual climax, thus giving me plenty of my own slow time to come around. For poor Aanschultz, time was compressed from line to point. His was a world of constant Discovery.

     

    I bumped into nearly everything and everyone in the darkened chamber before my eyes adjusted, when finally I found myself bathed in a deep, rich violet light, decanted through yet another rack of bottles, although of a correspondingly darker hue. Blood or burgundy, they seemed at first; and reminded me of the liquid edge of clouds one sometimes sees at sunset, when all form seems to buzz and crackle as it melts into the coming night, and the eye tingles in anticipation of discovering unsuspected hues. My skin now hummed with this same subtle optical electricity. Things in the room seemed to glow with an inner light.

     

    “Here we are,” he said. “This will make everything possible. This is my—

     

    Abat-Nuit

     

    By this name Aanschultz referred to a bevelled opening he had cut into an odd corner of the room, a tight and complex angle formed between the floor and the brick abutment of a chimney shaft from the floors below. I could not see how he had managed to collect any light from this darkest of corners, but I quickly saw my error. For it was not light he bothered to collect in this way, but darkness.

     

    Darkness was somehow channeled into the room and then filtered through those racks of purple bottles, in some of which I now thought to see floating specks and slowly tumbling shapes that might have been wine lees or bloodclots. I even speculated that I saw the fingers of a deformed, pickled foetus clutching at the rays that passed through its glass cell, playing inverse shadow-shapes on the walls of the dark room, casting its enlarged and gloomy spell over all us awed and frightened older children.

     

    Unfiltered, the darkness was much harder to characterize; when I tried to peer into it, Aanschultz pulled me away, muttering, “Useless for our purposes.”

     

    “Our?” I repeated, as if I had anything to do with this. For even then it seemed an evil power my friend had harnessed, something best left to its own devices–something which, in collaboration with human genius, could only lead to the worsening of an already precarious situation.

     

    “This is my greatest work yet,” he confided, but I could see that his assistants thought otherwise. The shadows already darkening Europe seemed thickest in this corner of the room. I felt that the strangely beveled opening with its canted mirror inside a silvery-black throat, reflecting darkness from an impossible angle, was in fact the source of all unease to be found in the streets and in the marketplace. It was as if everyone had always known about this webby corner, and feared that it might eventually be prised open by the violent levering of a powerful mind.

     

    I comforted myself with the notion that this was a discovery, not an invention, and therefore for all purposes inevitable. Given a mind as focused as Aanschultz’s, this corner was bound to be routed out and put to some use. However, I already suspected that the eventual use would not be that which Aanschultz expected.

     

    I watched a thin girl with badly bruised arms weakly pulling a lever alongside the abat-nuit to admit more darkness through the purple bottles, and the deepening darkness seemed to penetrate her skin as well as the jars, pouring through the webs of her fingers, the meat of her arms, so that the shadows of bone and cartilege glowed within them, flesh flensed away in the revealing black radiance. It was little consolation to think that the discovery was implicit in the fact of this corner, this source of darkness built into the universe, embedded in creation like an aberration in a lens and therefore unavoidable. It had taken merely a mind possessed of an equal or complementary aberration to uncover it. I only hoped Aanschultz possessed the power to compensate for the darkness’s distortion, much as chromatic aberration may be compensated or avoided entirely by the use of an apochromatic lens. But I had little hope for this in my friend’s case. Have I mentioned it was his cruelty which chiefly attracted me?

     

    Abaxial

     

    Away from the axis. A term applied to the oblique or marginal rays passing through a lens. Thus the light of our story is inevitably deflected from its most straightforward path by the medium of the Encyclopaedia itself, and this entry in particular. Would that it were otherwise, and this a perfect world. Some go so far as to state that the entirety of Creation is itself an

     

    Aberration

     

    A functional result of optical law. Yet I felt that this matter might be considered Aanschultz’s fault, despite my unwillingness to think any ill of my friend. In my professional capacity, I was surrounded constantly by the fat and the beautiful; the lazy, plump and pretty. They flocked to my studio in hordes, in droves, in carriages and cars, in swan-necked paddle boats; and their laughter flowed up and down the three flights of stairs to my studios and galleries, where my polite assistants bade them sit and wait until Monsieur Artiste might be available. Sometimes Monsieur failed to appear at all, and they were forced with much complaining to be photographed by a mere apprentice, at a reduced rate, although I always kept on hand plenty of pre-signed plates so that they might take away an original and be as impressive as their friends. I flirted with the ladies; was indulgent with the children; I spoke to the gentlemen as if I had always been one of them, concerned with the state of trade, rates of exchange, the crisis in labor, the inevitable collapse of economies. I was in short a chameleon, softer than any of them, lazier and more variable, yet prouder. They meant nothing to me; they were all so easy and pretty and (I thought then) expendable.

     

    Yet there was only one Aanschultz. On the first and only day he came to sit for me (he had decided to require all his staff to wear tintype badges for security reasons and himself set the first example), I knew I had never met his like. He looked hopelessly out of place in my waiting chambers, awkward on the steep stairs, white and etiolated in the diffuse cuprous light of my abat-jour. Yet his eyes were livid; he had violet pupils, and I wished–not for the first time–that there were some way of capturing color with all my clever lenses and cameras. None of my staff colorists could hope to duplicate that hue.

     

    The fat pleasant women flocking the studios grew thin and uncomfortable at the sight of him, covering their mouths with handkerchiefs, exuding sharp perfumes of fear that neutralized their ambergris and artificial scents. He did not leer or bare his teeth or rub his hands and cackle; these obvious melodramatic motions would only have cheapened and blunted the sense one had of his refined cruelty.

     

    Perhaps “cruel” is the wrong word. It was a severity in his nature–an unwillingness to tolerate any thought, sensation, or companion duller than a razor’s edge. I felt instantly stimulated by his presence, as if I had at last found someone against whom I could gauge myself, not as opponent or enemy, but as a student who forever tries and tests himself against the model of his mentor. In my youth I had known instinctively that it is always better to stay near those I considered my superiors; for then I could never let my own skills diminish, but must constantly be polishing and practicing them. With age and success, I had nearly forgotten that crucial lesson, having sheltered too long in the cozy nests and parlors of Society. Aanschultz’s laboratory proved to be their perfect antidote.

     

    We two could not have been less alike. As I have said, I had no clear understanding of, and only slightly more interest in, the natural sciences. Art was All, to me. It had been my passion and my livelihood for so long now that I had nearly forgotten there was any other way of life. Aanschultz reintroduced me to the concepts of hard speculation and experimentation, a lively curriculum which soon showed welcome results in my own artistic practices. For in the city, certain competitors had mastered my methods and now offered similar services at lower prices, lacking only the fame of my name to beat me out of business. In the coltish marketplace, where economies trembled beneath the rasping tongue of forces so bleak they seemed the product of one’s own fears, with no objective source in the universe, it began to seem less than essential to possess an extraordinary signature on an otherwise ordinary photograph; why spend all that money for a Name when just down the street, for two-thirds the price, one could have a photograph of equivalent quality, lacking only my florid famous autograph (of which, after all, there was already a glut)? So you see, I was in danger already when I met Aanschultz, without yet suspecting its encroachment. With his aid I was soon able to improve the quality of my product far beyond the reach of my competitors. Once more my name reclaimed its rightful magic potency, not for empty reasons, not through mere force of advertising, but because I was indeed superior.

     

    To all of Paris I might have been a great man, an artistic genius, but in Aanschultz’s presence I felt like a young and stupid child. The scraps I scavenged from his workshop floors were not even the shavings of his important work. He hardly knew the good he did me, for although an immediate bond developed between us, at times he hardly seemed aware of my presence. I would begin to think that he had forgotten me completely; weeks might pass when I heard not a word from him; and then, suddenly, my faith in our friendship would be reaffirmed, for out of all the people he might have told–his scientific peers, politicians, the wealthy–he would come to me first with news of his latest breakthrough, as if my opinion were of greatest importance to him. I fancied that he looked to me for artistic inspiration (no matter how much he might belittle the impulse) just as I came to him for his scientific rigor.

     

    It was this rigor which at times bordered on cruelty–though only when emotion was somehow caught in the slow, ineluctably turning gears of his logic. He would not scruple to destroy a scrap of human fancy with diamond drills and acid blasts in order to discover some irreducible atom of hard fact (+10 on the Mohs’ scale) at its core. This meant, unfortunately, that each of his advances had left a trail of crushed “victims,” not all of whom had thrown themselves willingly before the juggernaut.

     

    I sensed that this poor girl would soon be one of them.

     

    Abrasion Marks

     

    of a curious sort covered her arms, something like a cross between bruises, burns and blistering. Due to my own eczema, I felt a sympathic pang as she backed away from the levers of the abat-nuit, Aanschultz brushing her off angrily to make the final adjustments himself. She looked very young to be working such long hours in the darkness, so near the source of those strange black rays, but when I mentioned this to my friend he merely swept a hand in the direction of another part of the room, where a thin woman lay stretched out on a stained pallet, her arm thrown over her eyes, head back, mouth gaping; at first she appeared as dead as the drowned poseur Hippolyte Bayard, but I saw her breast rising and falling raggedly. The girl at the lever moved slowly, painfully, over to this woman and knelt down beside her, then very tenderly laid her head on the barely moving breast, so that I knew they were mother and child. Leaving Aanschultz for the moment, I sank down beside them, stroking the girl’s frayed black hair gently as I asked if there were anything I could do for them.

     

    “Who’s there?” the woman said hoarsely.

     

    I gave my name, but she appeared not to recognize it. She didn’t need illustrious visitors now, I knew.

     

    “He’s with the Professor,” the child said, scratching vigorously at her arms though it obviously worsened them. I could see red, oozing meat through the scratches her fingernails left.

     

    “You should bandage those arms,” I said. “I have sterile cloth and ointment in my carriage if you’d like me to do it.”

     

    “Bandages and ointment, he says,” said the woman. “As if there’s any healing it. Leave her alone now–she’s done what she could where I had to leave off. You’ll just get the doctor mad at both of us.”

     

    “I’m sure he’d understand if I—”

     

    “Leave us be!” the woman howled, sitting up now, propped on both hands so that her eyes came uncovered, to my horror; for across her cheeks, forehead and nose was an advanced variety of the same damage her daughter suffered; her eyesockets held little heaps of charred ash that, as she thrust her face forward in anger, poured like black salt from between her withered lids and sifted softly onto the floor, reminding me unavoidably of that other and most excellent abrading powder which may be rubbed on dried negatives to provide a “tooth” for the penciller’s art, consisting of one part powdered resin and two parts cuttle-fish bone, the whole being sifted through silk. I suspected this powder would do just as well, were I crass enough to gather it in my kerchief. She fell back choking and coughing on the black dust, beating at the air, while her daughter moved away from me in tears, and jumped when she heard Aanschultz’s sharp command. I turned to see my friend beckoning with one crooked finger for the girl to come and hold the levers just so while he screwed down a clamp.

     

    “My God, Aanschultz,” I said, without much hope of a satisfactory answer. “Don’t you see what your darkness has done to these wretches?”

     

    He muttered from the side of his mouth: “It’s not a problem any longer. A short soak in a bath of potassium iodide and iodine will protect the surface from abrasion.”

     

    “A print surface, perhaps, but these are people!”

     

    “It works on me,” he said, thrusting at me a bare arm that showed scarcely any scarring. “Now either let the girl do her work, or do it for her.”

     

    I backed away quickly, wishing things were otherwise; but in those days Aanschultz and his peers needed fear no distracting investigations from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. He could with impunity remain oblivious to everything but the work that absorbed him.

     

    Absorption

     

    This term is used in a chemical, an optical, and an esoteric sense. In the first case designates the taking up of one substance by another, just as a sponge absorbs or sucks up water, with hardly any chemical but merely a physical change involved; this is by far the least esoteric meaning, roughly akin to those surface phenomena which Aanschultz hoped to strip aside.

     

    Optically, absorption is applied to the suppression of light, and to it are due all color effects, including the dense dark stippling of the pores of Aanschultz’s face, ravaged by the pox in early years, and the weird violet aura–the same color as his eyes, as if it had bled out of them–that limned his profile as he bent closer to that weirdly angled aperture into artificial darkness.

     

    My friend, with unexpected consideration for my lack of expertise, now said: “According to Draper’s law, only those rays which are absorbed by a substance act chemically on it; when not absorbed, light is converted into some other form of energy. This dark beam converts matter in ways heretofore unsuspected, and is itself transformed into a new substance. Give me my phantospectroscope.”

     

    This last command was meant for the girl, who hurriedly retrieved a well-worn astrolabe-like device from a concealed cabinet and pressed it into her master’s hands.

     

    “The spectrum is like nothing ever seen on this earth,” he said, pulling aside the rack of filter bottles and bending toward his abat-nuit with the phantospectroscope at his eye, like a sorcerer stooping to divine the future in the embers of a hearth where some sacrifice has just done charring. I could not bear the cold heat of that unshielded black fire. I took several quick steps back.

     

    “I would show you,” he went on, “but it would mean nothing to you. This is my real triumph, this phantospectroscope; it will be the foundation of a new science. Until now, visual methods of spectral inspection have been confined to the visible portion of the spectrum; the ultraviolet and infrared regions gave way before slow photographic methods; and there we came to a halt. But I have gone beyond that now. Ha! Yes!”

     

    He thrust the phantospectroscope back into the burned hands of his assistant and made a final adjustment to the levers that controlled the angle and intensity of rays conducted through the abat-nuit. As the darkness deepened in that clinical space, it dawned on me that the third and deepest meaning of absorption was something like worship, and not completely dissimilar to terror.

     

    Accelerator!

     

    my friend shouted, and I sensed rather than saw the girl moving toward him, but too slowly. Common accelerators are sodium carbonate, washing soda, ammonia, potassium carbonate, sodium hydrate (caustic soda), and potassium hydrate (caustic potash), none of which suited Aanschultz. He screamed again, and now there was a rush of bodies, a crush of them in the small corner of the room. An accelerator shortens the duration of development and brings out an image more quickly, but the images he sought to capture required special attention. As is written in the Encylopaedia of Photography (1911, exoteric edition), “Accelerators cannot be used as fancy dictates.” I threw myself back, fearful that otherwise I would be shoved through the gaping abat-nuit and myself dissolve into that negative essence. I heard the girl mewing at my feet, trod on by her fellows, and I leaned to help her up. But at that moment there was a quickening in the evil corner, and I put my hands to a more instinctive use.

     

    Accommodation Of The Eye

     

    The darkness cupped inside my palms seemed welcoming by comparison to the anti-light that had emptied the room of all meaning. With both eyes covered, I felt I was beyond harm. I could not immediately understand the source of the noises and commotion I heard around me, nor did I wish to. (See also, “Axial Accommodation.”)

     

    Accumulator

     

    Apparently (and this I worked out afterward in hospital beside Aanschultz) the room had absorbed its fill of the neutralizing light. All things threatened to split at their seams. Matter itself, the atmosphere, Aanschultz’s assistants, bare thought, creaking metaphor–these things and others were stuffed to the bursting point. My own mind was a peaking crest of images and insights, a wave about to break. Aanschultz screamed incomprehensible commands as he realized the sudden danger; but there must have been no one who still retained the necessary self-control to obey him. My friend himself leapt to reverse the charge, to shut down the opening, sliding the rack of filtering jars back in place–but even he was too late to prevent one small, significant rupture.

     

    I heard the inexplicable popping of corks, accompanied by a simultaneous metallic grating, followed by the shattering of glass. Aanschultz later whispered of what he had glimpsed out of the edges of his eyes, and by no means can I–nor would I– discredit him.

     

    It was the bottles and jars in the filter rack that burst. Or rather, some burst, curved glass shards and gelatinous contents flying, spewing, dripping, clotting the floor and ceiling, spitting backward into the bolt-hole of night. Other receptacles opened with more deliberation. Aanschultz later blushed when he described, with perfect objectivity, the sight of certain jar lids unscrewing themselves from within. The dripping and splashes and soft wet steps I heard, he said, bore an actual correspondence in physical reality, but he refused ever to go into further detail on exactly what manner of things, curdled there and quickened in those jars by the action of that deep black light, leapt forth to scatter through the laboratory, slipping between the feet of his assistants, scurrying for the shadows, bleeding away between the planks of the floor and the cracks of our minds, seeping out into the world. My own memory is somewhat more distorted by emotion, for I felt the girl clutching at my ankles and heard her terrible cries. I forced myself to tear my hands away from my face–while still keeping my eyes pressed tight shut–and leaned down to offer help. No sooner had I taken hold of her fingers than she began to scream more desperately. Fearing that I was aggravating her wounds, I relaxed my hands to ease her pain; but she clung even more tightly to my hands and her screams intensified. It was as if something were pulling her away from me, as if I were her final anchor. As soon as I realized this, as soon as I tried to get a better hold on her, she slipped away. I heard her mother calling. The girl’s cries were smothered. Across the floor rushed a liquid seething, as of a sudden flood draining from the room and down the abat-nuit and out of the laboratory entirely. My first impulse was to follow, but I could no longer see a thing, even with my eyes wide open.

     

    “A light!” I shouted, and Aanschultz overlapped my own words with his own: “No!”

     

    But too late. The need for fire was instinctive, beyond Aanschultz’s ability to quell by force or reason. A match was struck, a lantern lit and instantly in panic dropped; and as we fled onrushing flames, in that instant of total exposure, Aanschultz’s most ambitious and momentous experiment reached its climax…although the denouement for the rest of Europe and the world would be a painful and protracted one.

     

    Acetaldehyde

     

    (See“Aldehyde.”)

     

    Acetic Acid

     

    The oldest of acids, with many uses in photography, in early days as a constituent of the developer for wet plates, later for clearing iron from bromide prints, to assist in uranium toning, and as a restrainer. It is extremely volatile and should be kept in a glass-stoppered bottle and in a cool place.

     

    Acetic Ether

     

    Synonym, ethyl acetate. A light, volatile, colorless liquid with pleasant acetous smell, sometimes used in making collodion. It should be kept in well-stoppered bottles away from fire, as the vapor is very inflammable.

     

    Acetone

     

    A colorless volatile liquid of peculiar and characteristic odor, with two separate and distinct uses in photography, as an addition to developers and in varnish making. As the vapor is highly inflammable, the liquid should be kept in a bottle with a close-fitting cork or glass stopper.

     

    Acetous Acid

     

    The old, and now obsolete, name for acetic acid (which see). Highly inflammable.

     

    Acetylene

     

    A hydrocarbon gas having, when pure, a sweet odor, the well known unpleasant smell associated with this gas being due to the presence of impurities. It is formed by the action of water upon calcium carbide, 1 lb. of which will yield about 5 ft. of gas. It burns in air with a very bright flame, and is largely used by photographers for studio lighting, copying, etc., and as an illuminant in enlarging and projection lanterns. Acetylene forms, like other combustible gases, an explosive mixture with ordinary air, the presence of as little as 4 per cent. of the gas being sufficient to constitute a dangerous combination.

     

    Acetylene Generator

     

    An apparatus for generating acetylene by the action of water on calcium carbide. Copper should not be employed in acetylene generators, as under certain conditions a detonating explosive compound is formed.

     

    Acetylide Emulsion

     

    Wratten and Mees prepared a silver acetylide emulsion by passing acetylene into an ammoniacal solution of silver nitrate and emulsifying in gelatin the precipitate, which is highly explosive. While this substance blackens in daylight about ten times faster than silver chloride paper, for years observers failed to detect any evidence of latent image formation and concluded that insights gained in Professor Conreid Aanschultz’s laboratory were of no lasting significance. This misunderstanding is attributed to the fact that, despite the intensity of exposure, it has taken more than a century for certain crucial images to emerge, even with the application of strong developers. We are only now beginning to see what Aanschultz glimpsed in an instant.

     

    “What man may hereafter do, now that Dame Nature has become his drawing mistress, is impossible to predict.”

    — Michael Faraday

     

    End

     

     

  • Attempts on Life

    Annemarie Kemeny

    Department of English
    SUNY-Stony Brook

     

    Sometimes the mouth is in gridlock. After all, I’m just the mouth piece. The whole is buried in an old plot with its corpse roaming. Sometimes it comes to haunt me, and I spill a little wine on the carpet to loosen its tongue. There are no guests. They’d expect butter-churn stories complete with cow bells in some smoky evening, the fat dripping from a one-day-dead pig. A real red dawn summoned by the five-year plan to every village. And will you visit Ellis Island where all you people come from? This frantic itch to swear shivers in through walls and sticks. Words at times are juicy as the glutton’s steak. A real mouth piece. For what? Speech is in my fingertips. It has been known to bloom through ten skyfuls of snow. It also melts in Spring. And it always finds the surest dam.

     

    No, it’s not poor huddled masses of Cassandras convulsing to the currents of a blank Apollo. Our frames are not that open to the trade winds. I’ve seen Parnassus gray and bare against the sun. It’s a good spook dressed in crags. But something else. When it takes hold, I never twitch and this broken English ain’t no second tongue. It’s one big jam to scramble the airwaves to my crib. Before my mouth was a piece of something. Like a slice of pie missing the perfection of its disk. Except that Sylvie had a hunch about that. Perfection is terrible–it cannot have children. So I dish it piecemeal for a new set of yakkers who will ask the past in and play at haunted house. Well, I lied. I twitch something crazy when it takes hold. We both grab tight until I fade. It’s a seance. Anything short of a seance is a good short story neatly tied like tubes. Sometimes the mouth is in gridlock. After all, it’s a badmouth, and it’s blowing at a land that hasn’t slipped.

     

    ***

     

    Writing is the only act worth dropping. It wouldn’t suffer from ending on the rocks like meat does. Its split-open muscles wouldn’t twitch. Its broken shinbone wouldn’t slice through skin. It would just silently carve itself into a whole coast line of Rosetta stones. But what would it be carving if not the meat that fell with it? The world text has real god-chunks rotting between vowels. Somewhere amidst the schizes and flows of ecriture a tiny slit is bleeding where some uncle’s finger scraped it. Don’t you feel your narratives of oppression and your literary productions of the real stuffed to bursting with the thief’s missing ear, some woman’s bloodless clitoris and her daughter’s head, your apple, that fell too far from its tree? This ink, invisible though it is, has come from where her head and body used to meet.

     

    ***

     

    The wall by my bed was always threatening to fall–it sustained cannon-ball damage during the war. I constantly wanted to excavate, hoping to find the ammunition all pock-marked and heavy. Momma, of course, assured me that the only thing left of it was a shaky wall we couldn’t hang pictures on. Yet regardless of her hovering protectively between me and the world as any good Rilkean mother would, I spent my childhood with a phantom cannon ball lodged ominously behind a thin layer of plaster and an even thinner layer of yellow paint. I used to tap the wall as a primitive form of eartraining, and soon I could tell that it had more holes than it had bricks. This wall I faced every night in sleep, this wall that felt cool against my feet in summer, was my umbilical chord to 1944. Sure I had seen films like Budapest Spring in which women, who always looked a bit too much like grandmother with their soft brown waves falling to the side and the dark lipstick and the severe wool suit, were shot into the Danube. I remember the domino effect, the unflattering shoes left behind for the Arrow Cross gunners who were flipping for gold insoles, and then the utter vacuum of a spring sky admitting nothing. And I remember this woman and a man doing the love thing when all the Danube carried was pieces of the Black Forest. And if there ever was such a thing as ancestral memory, I remember hiding between the waxed cracks of the parquet when grandmother stuffed her down pillow under her dress. She wanted to look pregnant for the Arrow Cross.

     

    Momma gets this sudden space in her eyes as she tries to describe for me the sound of machine guns on a tenement lock. I want to tell her I was there hiding out under her shoes, too shocked to scream, with all our eyelids doing a crazy family dance to a-thousand-rounds-per-minute and grandmother’s pillow bulging out to her right side where no infant could live. And the door slamming the wall of the foyer and grandmother squeezing momma so close that the down in the pillow cracks and the orders for the swine to move and the gun to the spine and momma’s whimpering into grandmother’s belly and grandmother’s dark lips in a line with the horizon and the words ghetto and lager and grandfather’s rages melting through his knees–we are poor got nothing but a wife and kid and trouble on the way spare us you are good men–rifle butt between the ribs and the trembling sullen bargain-begging silent sobbing unbroken procession of yellow stars down the stone corridor and the fresh blood seeping into my floorcrack from the grooves of a stolen shoe.

     

    I would like to say I remember the ghetto–that I was the guts, the little bit of future in every willed breath grandmother took to survive. I can’t. Maybe ancestral memory has more holes in it than bricks. It would be the stench I would have to bring to the page–one of those fold-out ads that trap clouds of perfume and give a magazine its sex appeal. Step right up folks, sample the dying and the decomposed. Just do it with the lushly dead. Poke your nose into communal buckets for the urge. Try to dig up asphalt with soupy nails to bury the dead. No. You can’t keep from being haunted. No Achilles here to come down a peg. Not even Dali to paint your shit surreal. And it’s the stench that blinds you and plugs your ears and numbs your touch that I can’t conjure up. It’s unnameable. The only true god the ghetto ever knew.

     

    ***

     

    The war never happened. Grandmother is goo-goo-eyed over the soaps. My other grandmother is dead after a life-time of rheumatism and which seventeenth-century king fucked whom with what underhanded purposes. The war never happened. And what bastard or bitch was next on the throne. Daddy cultivated a fine cancer by minimizing his diet to headcheese and spam. I don’t remember his teeth so the fact that he lost them at eighteen is irrelevant. The war never happened. And how many boils Marx had. And how she was ashamed of her big breasts and how she wrapped them until they sagged. The man-bird has to dress nice if he wants to be a father. That’s why only the woman-bird is gray. That yellow and blue thing on the teapot must have been a man-bird then. The war never happened. We won’t cry over spilt blood. If we drown the baby in the bathwater, it will finally make sense to dump her. And what a big nose you have. You’ve seen one snowflake, you’ve seen them all. The war never happened. And your mother is a beautiful woman. She can afford unlimited hours of beauty sleep now that the government check has replaced my only son (cries profusely). And you know Rasputin was a rascal. You don’t know who Rasputin was? (sigh). The family is going to the dogs. The war never happened. I prayed and prayed on that cold stone floor for him to return. And he cut off their heads because they wouldn’t give him sons. And the cat you dragged in gave me fleas for a week. How is your beautiful mother? The war never happened.

     

    ***

     

    Writing is the only act worth acting out. If you prefer the organic metaphor, it takes root against the wind in deserts and its ghost dance splashes the sun. It oozes down in glaciers and builds islands. It drags on. It prefers the whip. It picks its scabs against the ultimate, the strong. Does nothing. Mimes. Gets hooked on opium and dreams. Carries its fetus to the nearest john. Drops hints. Puts in a few good words. Bleeds and takes a scraping against cancer. Dies.

     

    ***

     

    Purges in triumphant silence. Daddy would appear once a light year at our place as the man of science come to chide the masses for belief in words that kill and the evil eye. He took the empty streetcar across the Danube, full of compassion for lost time. I’d summon fevers, hacking coughs, wounds attributed to something someone said. An aura of fake death to kindle old paternal fears about succession. And you thought our transcendental Fathers bit the clay. No. They dance to our rhythms now and obey false cadences as if their life depended on it. It does.

     

    Let me break the silence. If you plan to butcher someone’s soul–either little by little over that proverbial lifetime-of- devotion, or suddenly, by wringing their thin chicken neck– someone is writing your darkroom dirties into headlines. When you get the urge to abandon what you made, your airplane will excrete it. When you tear your side to dig through ribs, the pain of wrenching will be more than biblical. Somebody will sign their name across your lungs. Every time you breathe it will muck up the room. And when your gossip blooms red in the spring, stones will mark the spot where the town whore bled. Every foot that wanders bare into your town will read it. Their prints will talk up a storm. And when you gather your token nigger in your arms and rent your wisdom out on what it takes to loosen the embrace, your balls will vanish whip, chain and uncle, from the book.

     

    So daddies of the world with your magic carpets and skeleton closets, relax. I’ve come bearing gifts. You’ve asked me in song, you’ve sworn me in rape. Here is your immortality.

     

    ***

     

    According to Rilke, poetry is a kind of apprenticeship that prepares the most deserving among us for love. It is a beautiful sentiment (letter seven, the one about relationships), but I am slightly suspicious about electing a chosen people based upon oneself. The big bang might be lonelier than the poetic stairs you had to take to reach it. We might say that disgust and disillusionment were the lot of those writhing, huddled masses that were not developing into healthy apple trees. But what if I, the living mascot of the developmental tale, should find some more disgust and disillusionment at the height of my seedy powers? What if I, poet extraordinaire, wheeler-dealer in immortality, should get stuck around the crotch of my inevitable Bildungsroman given me by covenant? Oh yes! The rainbow sign. God gave Lawrence the rainbow sign. The world made new. “From the heart a red ray, from the brow a gold, from the hips a violet leaps.” Violet, indeed. Royal purple. The seed of seeds. The hottest chemical stain on the market. Except that my mother and my grandmother always insist on invisible ink. Like the one I am writing with now.

     

    ***

     

    Didn’t drown. Didn’t break his neck-joint in a scarf-loop. Didn’t pine away on poison petals for unrequited love. Didn’t overdose on elixir. Didn’t dry out with the weeds on a war field, sword-in-hand. Consumption didn’t eat holes into him. His wasn’t a one-woman oven in a kitchen pumped to the stature of Auschwitz. But his head was brought in upon platter if war is half the bitch of legends. And his head held a tongue that spoke the smallest scrap of Babel. A chip off the old block that was once some God’s shoulder curve. Whose face was it this time that launched a thousand cattle trains to camp? He wrote poems about chickenwire stretching in the moonlight, juiced. And before that it was moonlight and the weight of lovers bending emblems into wheat fields. No one knows him in this world of nations. Any verdict he might have improvised from bone-mush is Chinese or Greek, at best. Bla-bla from the belly of a war that never happened. So let me give you lives in a nutshell, without cracking the meat.

     

    Don’t know date of birth. Don’t know age at death. Killed his twin brother as he slid through the birth canal. An inadvertent crushing, a tarrying for green light. Killed his mother on entering. The world. The guilt of the sole survivor until they herded him into the engine. Premonitions of the past. To think in metaphor despite the fleas, the typhoid and the guards. Hallucinations of the sane. Eclogues and hexameter finally worthy of their turf. An artificial genre, like summer homes and quick vacations, like showers in gas. All the civilized comforts a bit displaced in one postmodern jumble. Hocus pocus. If we kick our plot in the usual place, we’ll lay to rest our master narrative. The nazis were great masters of the readymade. The cutting edge in surreal flicks. The expert tease. The laugh behind the flow and schiz. A woman’s buttock– a bar of soap. Her hair–a blanket against Russian winters. Let’s disconnect the oven and frustrate their expectations of the clean. When they try to read the nozzle in the old way as a comfy mother’s womb, we’ll surprise them with the atmosphere. A one-act play for lungs. Then we’ll reconnect the oven and fry our hungry guests.

     

    Want to document how signifiers play? Go read a deathcamp. Do your number on the Palestinian shifter. See if the bullet has a referent. And when I give you this life in a nutshell, be glad the meat is gone.

     

    ***

     

    Somewhere in its bedded mud the Danube holds a skeleton crouched into a barrel. The familiar closet would’ve hit too close to the so-called nerve. Saint Gellert rolled from the top of the mountain, Saint Gellert on the rocks. The hill channels the river’s curve where the roaring barrel did its belly-flop. I swore I had given up this conjuring of lives from the nutshell. A necromancing crook that pulls more than veils over your eyes. A tale told. For the welfare of the worm in the apple. Do you like picking history in the warm autumn breezes to make cider? Maybe with a small edge to the flow, a little cloud to hide the nakedness. Wait! We are born opaque and make loads of noise. Good. Roll out the barrel and we’ll have a barrel of fun.

     

    Isn’t it strange that the wine was so literally red on landing. Or rivering. If it was in winter, there might have been a loud crack and splat–a momentary wave-crest over drift- ice, maybe a quick whirlpool that popped up, and then the heavy ooze of the iced river blanketing the deed. If it was in spring, the drop would’ve been shortened by the volume of molten snow eating up the banks. If the sun shone, the contour of the barrel over those jutting white rocks may have left the eyes of the onlookers sore with knowing. If it was misty with a thick drizzle (the bitten kind), those connoisseurs of wine may have felt a muffled twang at the sudden lack of sound. And maybe the barrel was rotten or too dry and was smashed half-way down the trip and left just the typical roll of a breaking body down the slope. Or maybe, like the war, it never happened. The executioners didn’t stop and dip their hands in the Danube’s upper stretch.

     

    ***

     

    They have those silver poplars pillaring our field of vision. The summer light is wind-blown over reclining hills and it teases out those woman dreams that everyone forgets after the cock’s crow. The usual distance shimmers with breath. Where the poet stood, the dirt road whispers that the land is a unanimous womb and all those rows a welcome mat to wipe on. You see, the polka-dotted maiden with the pitcher spilling on her breast just got done tying the red scarf around the neck of her baby pioneer. Maybe for you she shook ribbons into her cleavage, shoe-stringed to woo your pen from the lazy fruit trees and the sailing grass. What she picks out of the earth is too small–a patch of grease for the work week’s engine. And the stain of currants popping on the tongue and the orchards where we picked them shoot the breeze. She stirs the grub and embroiders the foreman’s day with thighs. The mother, whom our poet laureate imagined hen-shaped, cooking with smoke that tints the village, has just stopped bowing at the medal conferred upon her Hindu arms. She brings the slab of bacon from the snaking food line and melts it into the land’s familial romance. All around her the blond river Tisza shivers in its banks toward Africa. It will never reach.

     

    There have been marches en masse–the wind-tickled imaginary sighs. Those dances that convulse the hips stop and start, turning black or turning blue against the wall. When I open the latest version of the nation’s history, my pressed daughter will crumble out, missing at the edges. The paragraph is stained. And where she never was, the next world will grow up and spit itself in the eye. As she tears half her usual freedom into tatters, she thinks it’s real. Somewhere in a nerve her pricked fingers still sting from pinning a new flag on the sky. She thinks it’s real. As good as the next fluffy cloud or geometric plane or poem or meal or bed. This woman mooned the red star as it fell. But before that, she grew wet just thinking of its tips. Five was her lucky number. So, as General Electric spreads her chignoned, waltzing on the screen, maybe something of her shrinks from the lens. If Lenin never lived, still doesn’t live, and never will live, maybe something of herself will miss the feel of her legs as she is gliding. She’ll grow wet to the rhythms of Strauss and think it real. After all, she is the map they have redrawn again. If they pressed hard enough this time, maybe the Danube spilled under her skin to let her know. It never had been, still isn’t, and never will be, blue.

     

    ***

     

    I took to sailors early. It was the gifts they lavished on my buxom, melancholy mother. We’d share the foreign spoils, which were the promises of tangible mornings in the kitchen, burned eggs, the concrete linking of hands despite high levels of lead in the blood. Everything was Made in DDR, England, the USA. And the marriages that never took place must have been made in that eroticized heaven where Christ could satisfy a universe of the rejected.

     

    It always seemed to happen in summer. As soon as I could talk, we boarded trains for Yugoslavia, Austria. My mother read expectation into every reeling cornfield and foresaw the light at the end of tunnels miles before they dawned. I still feel like a dingy rabbit’s foot–the guarantor of consonants and vowels against their tarnishing at sea. At our destinations we were always the last to leave the platform. Our bundles, too, were amulets–all this snail house baggage couldn’t possibly be stranded in some corridor of space, without a house somewhere to fill.

     

    I felt smaller than the clutter we compressed into the journey. The transition from sentences to asphalt was never smooth or matter-of-fact. I needed to sleep away all that nowhere, the opal shimmering left of my mother as she hovered between the last man and thin air. Someone should’ve told her that Marlow was chiseled for calling her the horror of the world. Why was Brandy such a fine girl? Was it because she put out and launched slow, mournful ballads out to sea? She should’ve been a fire-breathing typhoon to wreak havoc on that freighter’s bonding crew as they were swapping conquered-pussy stories in the dark.

     

    It was strange to see my mother fade in and out of flesh like some Star Trek goddess beamed aboard the Enterprise but lost in transit. We just sat there, crouched on the bundles made of coats, dishes, nail files, underwear, shoes, and let the dusk fall down on us. I don’t know what she was hoping for in the hundredth abandoned railroad station with a shitload of history on her back. Could it be that history doesn’t repeat? That each time she made the epic journey from bed to some forever she traveled light on the aura of first love? Did she see the ship ceremonically sunk in favor of the land where words take root and grow old together as stories?

     

    The train already left our side to transport tourists to their beige hotels. I listened in disbelief to the announcer’s voice prattling train schedules, insisting on the punctual arrival of the 5:05 from Athens. But I know that every time I have a memory of waiting, or scribble the outlines of madonna and child on paper, I become an announcer of schedules, the I.O.U. for the timely arrival of bodies. I really don’t remember two drained figures holding vigil over vacuum. All train stations look the same to me with their Simon and Garfunkel burn-out, and what really stands out about momma’s boyfriends is their vanishing.

     

    We took the 10:16 back. The train was gray and the seats were a red, gray, beige, black vinyl weave. We saw nothing of tunnels or cornfields. Our reflections rode with us in a steady drama of double or nothing. Momma’s evenly sloping nose stood guard against the penetrating stranger straight across, already offering me half his sandwich. He struck up a conversation with me about the mystery blond by my side, and despite the constant shattering of facts against the wheels, I nudged my mother accomplice-fashion and she beamed him a smile. What I remember most about him is his disappearance over breakfast a month later, and the brass tacks of the journey I wouldn’t bet a life on.

     

    ***

     

    Writing, lately, has been an act of desperation. I am not proud of that. Grabbing for a phrase as if it were a life- preserver leaves all kinds of revolutionary fervor to be desired. You can’t build utopia entirely on blind jabs at the future. I ought to plan for a watershed; for that erogenous point I can put my ring finger on; the epitome. But in the meantime, how do I keep from drowning in my own shed water? Maybe I’m just trying to understand what chronology obscures. Looking for the old one- two punch–writing blow by blow. Maybe I thrive on acts of desperation-the pointed gun; the gossip about how it wilts; the numbness of steel in the soul always mistaken for strength; the cut-throat word that finishes the present and makes future out of death. Very pagan. Very Judeo-Christian. It smacks of Nirvana. Strawberry Fields. Maybe it’s the blind jab that distills specks of place for us to live in. We are here to say, Rilke says. We are here to keep quiet, lest we disturb the dark gods, Lawrence says. Let the cunt and prick speak in silences. But what Lawrence never owned up to was that his words were full of pricks and cunts, just as those pricks and cunts were full of words. And maybe every desperate act is an attempt to save the dignity of that union from ourselves.

     

    ***

     

    Don’t matter which boot-licking shore. We’re a chaingang of pyromaniacs that get to light the stove. The braindead books are leaning into our middles like international candy and we lick into the air. Grandma’s stroke coincided with call waiting. The four-foot pillar next door had no dough for health insurance. Made a sissy of her boy who masturbates and cries on trains. She has to tell me over the line where a numb electric goddess towels off her pain. She is next wall to me. I’m sick of hearing her distance through the bricks. I’m sick of hearing that boy’s silence through my fucking.

     

    Meanwhile, Diamond goes life hopping between two shores. We’re a chaingang of pyromaniacs who’d love to burn him but instead will light the stove. It only hit me now that cigarettes are nested coals of fire. They feel like a mind one is about to lose. If only it could stay on the bus like a black umbrella. A bone I could bury like a dog. I’d die of rabies. Watch it float away on a trash mission in space. I swear I’d let it bleed from my busted reputation like some red desert. But it sticks and smells and thinks into the sink as ochre moments of the day when the heat becomes a man. The wheat waves through my windows. It is lotus and at night I light the stove. Grandma’s stroke will have to wait. The neighbor’s baby has to swim another month. I can’t afford this calling, dust to flight.

     

    ***

     

    Dottie was the scrawny one who turned to tube pants at twelve. Cricket was freckled with Machiavellian talents for stealing the boys. She developed first. But only like goats with first Moses horns that itch. We followed with loose cotton hills moving to some law of plate tectonics, subject to erosion by wind and sand. Judy was the one becoming V. Her doctor told her about how an eighteen-year-old body grew up in her thirteen- year-old shell. Convenient as hell. Agatha sang. Her mother used to cut warts from shifty hands and counsel men on rashes that broke out in dreams. I hated the smell of offices like hers. And the skin problems of men. Scylla also developed first. I thought I’d be Charybdis and find out which death the boys preferred. They liked their water on the rocks, but didn’t know myths that bodies move by. Scylla had no need for sisters to complete a testy, rotten passage, they said.

     

    That year we tried on one another’s souls like languages that never meant a thing. Why lie? It was like bee-hive clinging scatterbrained after the rocks the first boys threw. We never shared blood like brothers. The only stains we knew were test runs of saliva over our blue jeans to prove they were authentic, from America. None of them was. We had to fake our clothes, our breasts, immutable spaces the eye can always skip, our allegiance to the revolution, our fashionable longing for the West, our pains.

     

    Even then the bee-bee-gunning menace was cutting off his sister’s head in photos. We thought him a danger only to the birds. And that boy who threw the hypodermic in my back from twenty feet must have stabbed by now. He was a connoisseur of wounds, an art critic on purples, blues and black paling toward yellow.

     

    Yes, at Judy’s party it was Judy’s turn to cry. Nobody stabbed her, exactly. Maybe just a little in the back. Her doctor with the needles (a balder version of the spearing brat). Her doctor with the pills. Her parents with their booze license for daughters who talked back. Her hairdresser who told her blonds have fun. Her manicurist who discounted on blood. Her teachers who stripped her of all this. Her friends who conformed to hating bitches. Her mispronunciation of her dread, the silencing of always-spoken letters. Her body language from the wrist. The nowhere long before they found her dead.

     

    They said shoo, and we flew away to strange inside countries where the prices are too high and we are always spotted for tourists hunting down mementos for a rush; where we think the women too pregnant, the men too chauvinistic for our taste, the air too brutal, the bridges unsafe, the ruins too old, the words too dense to get through. And where we are the women raising men, breathing bare necessary gulps, crossing our bras, renovating murals to cover up the crumbling of our tissue, settling for the first ventriloquist.

     

    And then there were none. The pedophile’s childless wife suddenly broke in half. They buried her with a bunch of limestone angels, her heart completely bored. She believed in Christmas and the grace of God and the husband she took instead. Then the seamstress lost the rhythm of her pedal, the string snapped, the tapestry flew out and up. No child–no Lady of Shallott. No Sleeping Beauty. No Arachne. And no calico to warm somebody’s bed. Just a click of the line and the mannequin crushed into a landfill. Someday she’ll appear cross-sectioned for geologists as a scrawny layer of their momma scraping hell. The third one grew a cancer in her lung and let it spread. It ate up everything she ate, threw the ceiling in relief, bulged in through the door despite the dresser. It turned her smile into papyrus, and every line that rationed her got brutally recorded. But I have kept no records. I tried but they don’t keep. Hers served well as shroud at the cremation. The next-in-line’s still beating up some stone. A spinster who fucked boys for pleasure, then made them laugh into an ecstasy of piss. The irreverent bitch had the audacity to pass go more than once without the huffing and puffing that peacocks live as law. She was uglier than Fate and told more truth. And if she hadn’t smoked her throat shut like a grave, she’d still be stripping an emperor of clothes.

     

    The phone was disconnected last night. The mailman broke a leg. I do not socialize. I avoid God like the plague. I scared the paperboy away by raving. The sky stares in the window to meet blinds. I’m popping caffeine pills as garlic against telepathic dreams. But I feel mirrors in my bones like some damned Dorian Gray. And the bitches of the world are dying without quaint proper goodbyes, or burials at sea, or conduct books in strength for those of us still breaking.

     

    ***

     

    Kemeny. Let’s trace Kemeny. Probably Cohen. Or Klein. When the first wave invaded with the jingle-jangle of their coins. Hard. So hard. In English. When they invaded with that Eastern-European darkness they learned from the air. Momma’s joujou, a fashion jewel in the crown of creation from that red clay, that Adam. Ornaments in earth tone. Toned down. Turned out. And staring at those iron mines she pricked her hand to taste them. And then she slid. Out from under the heavy sky. The fun was in sliding with the pebble dance where nothing cared about landing. Queen Anne’s lace caught in the weeds. A saint, too, with clean hands. Maria, the dove love woman, plump in the middle of a valley looking up. But the sky is so much heavier down here. Hard luck with a calling in October. Stuck. Stuck to her rump like syrup. You catch flies with sugar, honey. Then you’re eaten into the bargain. I’ve seen them pass on with those huge “WET PAINT” signs hung all over. And some made vicious bull’s eyes. It stuck, as always. With only themselves for hope chest. They hold a lot so they figured gold.

     

    Up in the hills it seemed like rashes. Some Rebecca, some Rachel of the salve. Lines get so tangled in a cat’s claws. But the road was a line and it drove. Until it ended in a sea somewhere where ships sink or sail. Back there, hunched over the meat, someone must have tamed a dragon. Even the sea has a hot red belly when it turns. And imagining the sea she pricked her hand to taste it. Iron again. They make rails and bars and hammers. Brave magnetic world. When does it call for blue lightning? A big KEMENY crouching in the weeds. She must be glaring under all that midday sun. In the mines they would blast her to bits. That’s what the signs are about. To warn in case she treasures something more than a good glance. She pricked her hand so she could close her eyes. It was damn loud in the Queen Anne’s lace with the dove love woman dreaming.

     

  • Dressed to Kill Yourself

    Rob Hardin

    DUPLICATE FOG AND DRESDEN CERUMEN
    ================================================================
    There had been a series of     |   (Tuesday, July 9th, 1985: was
    spectacular killings west of   |   it something I'd said, or had
    New Haven.  By all reports,    |   the individual molecules of
    the victims had been           |   styrene in Molly's flaming
    imaginatively disfigured.  The |   plastic cup become volatile
    textured palette techniques by |   mutagens, altering her genes? 
    which their intestines had     |   Why had her lips become seven-
    been rearranged to suggest     |   foot-long cave worms that
    Satan Casting ET Into The Lake |   writhed whenever the DFA
    of Fire were the subject of    |   inspector passed?  I tried not
    both critical praise and       |   to feel personally insulted,
    craftsman's speculation.  How  |   but the vertigo and loss of
    had the strangely anonymous    |   memory caused by low-level
    murderer been able to make his |   exposure to polycyclic
    parings in the murk acquire    |   aromatics was getting to me. 
    such distinct borders?  Of     |   Hell, I thought, why not
    particular interest was his    |   propose on my monomer-dusted
    work in broken capillaries.    |   knees (the surfaces of which
    Here, the shadings of blue and |   were already beginning to
    red were so subtle as to       |   pulsate with passion and
    suggest the airbrush work of   |   deformity)?  But it was too
    Futura 2000 (an ancient LES    |   late.  Molly had already
    artist whose techniques have   |   changed into a 350-nanograms-
    been much imitated in these    |   per-gram representation of the
    times of draftsmen automatons. |   Rape of the Sabine Women,
                                   |   rendered in hot pink fur.)
    But after the telejournalist   |
    reviews and panel discussions  |   Privately, however, Onion knew
    had thoroughly analyzed Khaki  |   the true reason for his
    Cadaver 5, and academidroids   |   success: his ability to utter
    were left to dry-hump its      |   wordless streams of syllables
    aesthetic until the skin had   |   that reduced his clients to a
    been worn away, the public's   |   soporific state in which
    lack of interest voided the    |   they'd empty their wallets,
    subject.  There was something  |   drop their pants, and imagine
    precious in the murderer's     |   themselves contestants on
    technique; it was too self-    |   Wheel of Fortune.  For Onion's
    conscious; it lacked that      |   special episode, the usual
    bold, splashy manner which     |   wheel was replaced by a huge,
    Americans love.  His would     |   proctologically correct
    never be the work of a         |   representation of Vanna
    successful mainstream killer-- |   White's anus just after sodomy
    but since the murderer was an  |   by the entire executive staff
    idiot savant, perhaps          |   of CBS.  The inflamed areas
    financial success were better  |   were marked off in greed-
    left to those who would        |   inducing shades of olive and
    actually recognize its         |   magenta, and bore the
    rewards.                       |   potential scores which a spin
                                   |   of the anus might achieve: sex
    Dwayne was a hydrocephalic     |   with broccoli pulverizers,
    millionaire who had squandered |   cappucino sprinklers,
    his trust fund on musical dog  |   vibrating swimsuit erasers,
    collars.  They'd arrived by    |   you name it.  The grand prize
    the mobile homeful,            |   was this: the endangered
    ritualistically daisy-chained  |   wildlife species of the
    to Victrolas.  But when his    |   contestant's choice, smeared
    brokers came to remove his     |   with Heinz 57 and slivers of
    sternum and optic fiber caps,  |   prosciutto, and offered to him
    Dwayne knew it was time to     |   for ocular penetration.
    join RMSA (Retarded            |
    Millionaire Sexaholics         |
    Anonymous) or face a life of   |
    aggressive, monosyllabic       |
    panhandling.  At RMSA, he met  |
    a friend who was to become the |
    very apex of his sobriety:     |
    Onion, a mongoloid turpentine  |
    heir who'd spent his entire    |
    fortune on topless shoe-       |
    shines.  Through the I-Can't-  |
    Count-But-There-Are-More-      |
    Steps-Than-I-Have-Fingers      |
    Program, he became a           |
    successful infanticide         |
    entrepreneur, setting up his   |
    own BabyHeadGallery--a name    |
    which reflected both the       |
    nature of the murders and the  |
    stunted emotional growth of    |
    the killers themselves.        |
    =================================================================
    
    DRESSED TO KILL YOURSELF:
    =================================================================
                                    |
    The sites he recalled were      |  It was a voice that seemed too
    side-roads of the broken.   The |  aware of time.  Pitches came
    faces of dispirited mobs, a     |  unmoored, syllables lengthened
    driftwood of deltas--even the   |  to slow tides.  Explanations
    people he'd killed formed a     |  deserted the speaker, leaving
    discontinuous whole.  It was a  |  dribbled ellipses, or
    pattern he'd noticed before,    |  consonants like sliced
    though not until now with       |  fingertips.  It had only one
    resignation.                    |  thing to express--the
                                    |  hesitation had become the
    Earlier that afternoon, the     |  outline of the inexpressible. 
    rest stops of the dead had      |  An aural watermark of
    seemed merely pathetic.  Poor   |  Katherine's wordless fear.
    puny things, he'd said,         |
    quoting Dwight Frye as he set   |  Now it is midnight.  His
    fire to a corpse's hair.  He'd  |  uneasiness recedes, allowing
    watched it burn with something  |  him to feel the night air.  It
    like aesthetic pleasure--the    |  sweeps across his face from
    temples torch-maned, the eyes   |  the open window.  He remembers
    past all statement, like        |  paying to sit here--someone
    erasures.  Then he'd doused     |  else's memory, a news clip he
    the smoldering skull with       |  was too preoccupied to watch. 
    Cabarnet and gently placed it   |  He sits beside a fat teenager
    with the others.  It was the    |  with confederate flag patches
    zero-wide maw which topped a    |  sewn onto the pockets of his
    pile of severed heads so        |  jean jacket, confederate pins
    disfigured they couldn't even   |  dangling from its sleeves. 
    stare.                          |  Did the teenager sit near the
                                    |  black bus driver out of
    He'd stuffed the heads into a   |  meanness or stupidity? 
    burlap sack and left them in    |  Probably both.  The bus driver
    Washington Square Park.  He'd   |  looks at the kid and smiles. 
    gazed down into the opening     |  It is not often that racism is
    for a quarter of an hour,       |  properly labelled.  If hatred
    until blood and rot began to    |  were always this self-
    satin the fabric that had       |  explanatory, you could keep
    concealed them.  Then he'd      |  track of your enemies.
    walked away cooly, feeling the  |
    heads settle and drain.  An     |  * Demon-snakes ate Dead Sea *
    extravagance, he'd thought.     |  * apples, Spitting bits of  *
    Crushed peaches bleeding juice  |  * bitter ash.               *
    into the grains of white        |
    cobblestone.                    |  He lifts his eyes from a page
                                    |  which smells of shredded
    Though he'd been wandering      |  coconut.   They burned me with
    away from the death site for    |  my own mind , he fumes.  They
    hours, William was still the    |  always do.  Like last Friday,
    unwilling recipient of          |  when he'd attempted to get
    visions.  The city itself       |  into Hellbound--a club known
    seemed haunted, if only by      |  and reviled for its hostile
    emblems.  A gangly blonde       |  door policy.
    leaned against the support      |
    beam of the bus stop, her body  |  * Tell them who you are,    *
    a gesture towards negation.     |  * Billy.  Glare right into  *
    Free me, it pleaded.  I'd       |  * the doorman's squeezed    *
    rather be dead than old.  Yet   |  * eyes.  Even if he thinks  *
    William rejected its luxuriant  |  * his position amounts to a *
    offer.  Lusts sated, he was     |  * royal title, even if he   *
    free to reconsider fidelity.    |  * doesn't understand how    *
                                    |  * power structures meet and *
    Reflected neon signs hovered    |  * overlap, you won't have   *
    in cafe windows like            |  * to cinch this guy a       *
    superconductors of the          |  * greeting card eulogy at   *
    unattainable.  They floated     |  * tomorrow's funeral party. *
    beside him as he walked         |  * The people in this city   *
    towards Willamette Bridge.      |  * who know your name are    *
    Even outside his mind, he       |  * too frightened to slag    *
    lived in a city halved by       |  * it.  They'll be holding   *
    rivers.  At last crossing,      |  * back the syllables long   *
    he'd been sitting in his        |  * after the current nest of *
    apartment.  Then the phone      |  * celebutantes is broken,   *
    rang.  It was Katherine, the    |  * and the club parasites    *
    tiny speaker of the answering   |  * have flitted out of town. *
    machine distorting her          |
    apologies into near gibberish.  |
    She'd finally gotten up the     |
    nerve to call him and wanted    |
    to leave her new number.        |
    Instinctively, he'd risen from  |
    his seat, unable to sit or      |
    pick up the phone.  It was all  |
    happening just as he'd          |
    predicted.  After she'd run     |
    away, after the infidelities    |
    rumored and real, she'd         |
    appeared six months later to    |
    ruin his dinner date at         |
    Hamburger Mary's.  And now she  |
    had entered his studio          |
    apartment through the phone     |
    line, her stammer tugging his   |
    private face.                   |
    
    =================================================================
    
                                                        (Millipedes.)
    =================================================================
    THERE WERE PLACES  ||   ________________   ||  ...IN THE
    IN ROBBIE ROSS     ||  |                |  ||  INDIVIDUAL CAN
    MEMORIAL CEMETERY  ||  |"I am gristle.  |  ||  SPUMED ILLEGAL
    WHICH ALBERT LIVED ||  |I am a masocide.|  ||  PESTICIDES. 
    TO PHOTOGRAPH.     ||  |I am sprawl     |  ||
                       ||  |_________(con-__|  ||  There were
    Often, his father  ||                      ||  gangster weddings
    would discover     ||   Headpieces of      ||  in the film
    snapshots of       ||  psychobiological    ||  _Cougar Love_, but
    tombstones glued   ||   driftwood are      ||  the screen was
    to the back pages  ||  never allowed to    ||  soon inflamed by
    of the family      ||   recompose. They    ||  another kind on
    album.  Small      ||  devolve on axes.    ||  uxoricide as a
    wonder Albert      ||                      ||  fuselage oozed
    acquired a         ||======================||  liquid Joy (and I
    mortician's        ||  _Delirium           ||  don't mean the
    technique, smearing||  Trampoline_.        ||  detergent). 
    the lens with so   ||   Slate-gray         ||  "Insufficiently
    much glycerine that||  Bassinet on         ||  synthetic--easy
    even rotting       ||  window-ledge.       ||  to operate,
    cities were        ||======================||  difficult to use,"
    suffused with an   ||                      ||  one fan was heard
    incandescent       ||  ...WAS SAID TO      ||  to glower.  Sprigs
    vitality.  His     ||  CONJURE.  Seconds   ||  of ammoniated
    aim was to         ||  later, a blood-     ||  cologne did little
    materialize        ||  vessel broke in     ||  to alleviate the
    Death's jarring    ||  Albert's jaw,       ||  lack of
    detail; meanwhile, ||  spraying his gelid  ||  repetition.  Tiny
    in Armenia, a      ||  lens.  This         ||  creatures with
    statue of Achilles ||  resulted in a       ||  straws attacked a
    was discovered to  ||  final tarnishing    ||  bag of oranges in
    have been          ||  of the image:  as   ||  a sequence of
    installed in the   ||  statues crack, so   ||  heart-warming...
    wrong region of    ||  do aesthetics.      ||
    Kodaly Square.     ||  Albert's last       ||  ...nudity.  Man,
    Rude folk music    ||  words pertained to  ||  child, animated
    jarred the         ||  the condition of    ||  gargoyle spitting
    Apollonian         ||  his diffusion disc  ||  flecks of human
    sensibility which  ||  and not his         ||  skin--all were
    the Greek torso... ||  "soul."  Delusions  ||  sketched with
                       ||  of traffic packed   ||  graceful touches
                       ||  salt into his       ||  by directors Milo
                       ||  eyes, the lids      ||  & Otis.  One
                       ||  singed off like     ||  wishes this sort
                       ||  flaps of paper.     ||  of thing were
                       ||  They joined the     ||  attempted more
                       ||  ash of flesh that   ||  often, instead of
                       ||  gathered along the  ||  the disgusting
                       ||  region defined by   ||  violence which
                       ||  hills, rounding     ||  lurches into VCR
                       ||  the veranda like a  ||  doorways.  Into
                       ||  slab of nervure.    ||  graveyards like
                       ||  Awakenings decayed  ||  Robbie's.
                       ||  in the silk pond:   ||
                       ||  the filleted        ||   ________________
                       ||  Muzak...            ||  |                |
                       ||                      ||  | -tinued) whose |
                       ||                      ||  | last words are |
                       ||                      ||  | unimportant.   |
                       ||                      ||  | If only there  |
                       ||                      ||  | were terms for |
                       ||                      ||  | the trace-     |
                       ||                      ||  |________________|
    
    The midway bristles with sparks: gridded diamonds on a red sleeve
    -----------------------------------------------------------------
    
    =================================================================
    marks of my            _In The Gallery of      He feared their
    fluids.  Then I        Illiterates_:           approach because
    could define the                               he knew they would
    matter (as if it       Awkwardly, Planer       give no pause for
    mattered).  If         balanced his frame      explanation. 
    only.  Never mind.     against the giant       Excuses were
    Nothing can            marble scroll, his      meaningless to
    protect my             head tilting into       illiterate
    faculties from the     its whirlpool of        killers.  Trained
    repellence of          furls.  He was          in the iconography
    human contact.         trying to look          of television,
    First, I invited       past the Hatchett       they could only
    the pathogenic         installation, a         read stereotypical
    embrace of the         plexiglass              body language.
    Body.  Then I          logogriph of
    explored the           carnage,                Once they'd closed
    hyperstimulated        cormorants and          in on the exhibit,
    minds of my            giant tortrix           Planer knew the
    generation, but        moths.  His             gunmen would read
    that was worse.        attention grew          him as an emblem
    The interior of        lost as it snagged      of deceit.  He
    the skull is           on talons and           would be framed
    filthier than the      pincers, on torsos      and eye-tried with
    genitals could         whose agonized          one glance from
    ever hope to be.       poses were              their Emcee.  Then
    The eye in the         intended to be          a nod would signal
    window caresses        made abstract by        Planer's
    the wind outside,      their placement.        execution.  He
    and the tongue                                 didn't anticipate
    evokes its lewd        The sculptures          remembrance or
    itchings.  This is     were enclosed           regret.  After
    what we call           within red Lucite       they'd killed, the
    style  , a toilet      brackets.  These        gunmen instantly
    whirlpool of bad       were part of a          forgot their
    champagne which        vast equation of        victims.  Murder
    attempts to drown      molded                  dwindled to
    what we cannot         thermoplastic           slaughterbyte in
    digest.  If only I     symbols that            their sequence of
    could isolate the      progressed              waking and
    illness.  But when     expansively across      sleeping.
    I try, my legs         the gallery floor:
    grow spattered         pliant algebra          A lifetime was a
    with shit.             notations,              kind of long-
    Language becomes       indestructible          running,
    ajunkyard of           equal signs,            infotainment
    slogans in which a     flowchart symbols       series; the mind,
    gutted heart           which opened            a VCR.  Lacking
    replays its            limply to the           the voice for
    craving for pain.      casual visitor          questions, gunmen
    Artifacts from the     beyond the gate.        were usually
    crematorium snake      From the                content to get in
    between my lips.       anticipated             a few good shots.
    vile inflections       viewer's position,
    flecked with bile.     it was the
                           Raphaelesque style
                           of the sculptures
                           that was
                           foregrounded by
                           their context. 
                           But from Planer's
                           vantage point, the
                           sculptures
                           regained their
                           urgency.  Close
                           proximity freed
                           them from the
                           distance of
                           Hatchett's ironic
                           age.  That was why
                           Planer found it so
                           difficult to
                           concentrate on the
                           progress of the
                           gunmen outside.
    
    THE STAINED REMAINS ARE MAINLY DISEMBRAINED
    -------------------------------------------
    
         (or waned to flame-cerise.)
    
                             mingled script,
                             contingency fear.
    
                                  Excessive lace entwined 
                                  her thighs.  Kinetic taws
                                  of Tiger's Eye retracted
                                  like sacs of amber flies.
    
                   Her wet dreams glistened with slick-
                   haired boys.  They stood in oblique
    
    The reliquary possessed an air of disquiet.  Presences blew
    through its halls like the scent of violent women.
    
                   alley light, their Tenaxed razor-
                   cuts framing thin-eyed derision.         Astro
                   Heads turned slightly, girlish           sentics
                   smirks twisted to depraved.  A wind      ascertai
                   from nowhere scattered their             ned,
                   denims.  Torsos froze in profile,        deliberat
                   their icy erections nursing her          ions pro
                   desire until daylight shone through      ve de-
                   the brickface.  Then the boys            laned.
                   thinned to transparencies.  Her          Repenta
                   dad's fingers reached through the        nce cro
                   loops of zippered legs and parted        nes cry
                   hair.  Go away, she thought.  Don't      onodro
                   fuckin' care about me.                   nes. Im
                                                            paled,
                   Then Dad surprised her.  It seemed he    her vei
                   wasn't so prim after all.  When she      ns lay
                   ignored his commands, he pulled out a    tamely
                   knife.  He raped her there on the hide-  unrestrai
                   away bed, thrusting the knife tang-deep  ned. On
                   into her left eye.  It had long been his tologies
                   belief that pleasure and punishment must decentra
                   go hand in hand.                         lized gl
                                                            ean tart
                                                            precision
                                                            s wryly
                                                            prized.
                                                            Tradition
                                                            planes
    Greased with leech's gleet, Houdini                     what f
    proves last repast for Pasolini.                        ilm re
                                                            gains:    
                                      the autonomic, frail terrains.

  • From Birdland

    Rikki Ducornet

    Department of English
    University of Denver

     

    They set off in the early morning beneath an auspicious sky stubbled with clouds. From the start Fogginius the Saint took it into his crazed head that he would enliven the aboriginal road and astonish his companions with the knowledge he had accumulated over the years. True to himself he did not ask if they might prefer to enjoy the beauties of the day in silence or in song, in quiet talk among themselves or in dreaming (and the poet Picotazo, as he left behind the city where his beloved breathed, was delighting in acute melancholy). After much hacking Fogginius cleared his throat and spitting into a cluster of blossoming bougainvillea began:

     

    ‘Let us suppose that upon waking in the night I trod upon a nail. The nail cruelly pierces my flesh, causing me to hop about sobbing unrestrainedly in pain. Here is the cure: take up the nail and kiss it tenderly. I bind it to my foot with a piece of nicely rotted string. Should there be a moon, I lie upon the ground with the wounded foot pointing to Heaven, a turd stuck to the toe. Within three hours, if no owl passes and nothing disturbs the silence with a scream, the wound will cease to fester. Better still, should a star stumble from the sky, the foot and the body attached to it will be invigorated beyond belief

     

    For a brief moment Fogginius was silent. The others, greatly relieved and thinking he was done, grunted with satisfaction. This flattered the Saint and he continued:

     

    ‘Now, let us suppose that I am eating a fish and I choke on a bone. At once, without thought to economy or appearances, and no matter who is in the room–be he a humbug or God Himself–the fish’s bones, sucked clean of meat, must be placed upon my head. To assure that such a misadventure not repeat itself, my toe nails must be trimmed at once and added to the pile.’

     

    Just then Professor Tardanza and his daughter appeared riding together in the opposite direction. They had been gathering flowering branches in the woods, and the young girl, astride a horse the color of butter, was wreathed in blossoms. So tightly was the poet’s heart squeezed in the fist of love, that had it been an orange, seeds would have bulleted from his ears.

     

    When the girl and her father rode past the poet and the Saint, Picotazo offered his most lovesick look, a look of such intensity that if Fogginius had remained silent, she might have been moved. But the scholar opened his trap:

     

    ‘The best remedy for lightning is to wear one’s turds–dried and sewn within a piece of silk–against the heart. The turd is dry, corrupt, combustible, commemorative and, at best, cumuliform–‘

     

    Professor Tardanza did not nod, nor tip his hat, but spurred his own horse on, frowning, as if to say: I do not approve the company you keep. His daughter kept her eyes upon the path, and bit her lower lip to keep herself from laughing.

     

    ‘That girl who just passed! Fogginius spluttered with ill- founded enthusiasm, ‘has offended some pagan deity and is being transformed to shrubbery before our eyes! Soon she will tumble from her steed and take root by the wayside…I would never have believed it, had I not seen it with my own eyes!’ For an instant he shut up, marvelling.

     

    But the poet Picotazo did not hear him. He was too deep in thought. He was thinking how much he hated Fogginius and how he longed to see him dead. He wished a meteor would strike him where he sat. And although they had only just left the city of Pope Publius behind and had been journeying but twenty minutes, the poet was submerged in weariness. The day died, Fogginius the Saint silent only when catching his breath. When the party stopped and Bulto set about to roast those things he had brained for their supper, Fogginius described procedures for the procuration of corpses both fresh and moldering and methods of dissection both ancient and new–thereby destroying everyone’s appetite but his own. Cracking a baked egg against his bony knee, he entertained them with a catalog of distinctions between angels, archangels and archons, their attributes and attitudes and advantages, and the manner in which the Manicheans invoked all three; and wondered if angels had microscopic or telescopic vision, or both, or neither–but instead a type sur-natural and so inconceivable.

     

    As Fogginius spoke, Senor Fantasma seriously pondered why he had, until now, cherished the Saint’s advice and admired his mind so much he had been paying him to think. Nuno, too, with much gnashing of teeth, recalled his stepfather’s incessant punishments, the insane blandishments which had rained unfailingly upon him when he was a boy, the times he had been constrained to wear a live lizard in his breeches, to chew sand, to eat a stew of snails cooked in their own glue. Kicking in the fire, Bulto fantasized reducing the Saint to a pulp; Pulco alone appeared content as he cleared the supper things and scrubbed a pan–he had plugged his ears with a paste of bread moistened with saliva.

     

    ‘The black man is black–‘ detonating, Fogginius threw himself upon his hammock, ‘–because his soul is an inferno, a fiery pit. He burns from within and with such intensity, all his whiteness has been consumed. The red man burns with less heat; the yellow–‘ Suddenly the world was silent.

     

    Silent. As if a great lid of lead had been lowered from the top of the sky. Fogginius had fallen asleep, as had small Pulco, and the mules. This silence was so exquisite and so dense, that the poet attempted to seize it in verse. He wrote:

     

    A silence like a blotter soft and thick
    Soaks up the forest's ink
    Allowing me to dream and think
    .

     

    Picotazo put down his pen, and gazing up at the wheeling sky invoked in one breath the Mother of Heaven and Professor Tardanza’s daughter. Within moments he was fast asleep–as were the others, and all strung from trees like fruit damned with dreams. In his dream, Picotazo saw Professor Tardanza’s daughter threading towards him as naked as a thing of Eden. But, although she moved swiftly, she was forever far away, as if she were walking in place, or he retreating.

     

    And then, impossibly, she stood before him. Opening his arms to receive her, Picotazo pushed his feet deep into the nebulous mud upon which he was precariously standing, to keep from falling. She was hot; before he touched her, he could feel how the air about her burned: she was poised at the center of a mandorla of fire. But just as he would embrace her, his rival Enrique Saladrigas slipped between them, and Picotazo was eclipsed by a body twice as tall and twice as broad as he. In despair he battered at his rival’s back with both his fists and at the buttocks which now pressed against his face so that he could barely breathe. A terrific stench was upon the poet now, who–the more he battled Saladrigas, the greater his rival grew.

     

    And Picotazo was in the embrace of an outsize octopus; its antediluvian face pressed down upon his own. With a cry the poet tore his mouth from the creature’s beak, and looking to the sky saw with clarity, luminous against the ink of night, a constellation. With certainty he recognized the constellation of the skeleton. And he thought: I shall die!

     

    The poet screamed. Waking he found that something still pinned him down. It was Fogginius. Fogginius whose dreadful testicles, so like the desiccated things he chose to carry close to his heart to conjure evil fortune, forced the poet’s lips. Revulsed nearly to madness, Picotazo bit the Saint fiercely, and Fogginius, leaping to the ground,began to shout. With loathing and amazement, and just as the sun appeared foaming upon the horizon, Picotazo listened to the Saint’s breathless explanation:

     

    ‘A cure! For rheumatism! To sit upon a poet’s face at dawn.’ And: ‘I am cured!’ Fogginius tottered and lurched about in the morning dew, arousing the many green apes which lived in the treetops. Hurled into consciousness, they responded by screeching, precipitating a billion birds into the scarlet sky– those birds which, in distant days, filled the woods with their hot, palpitating bodies, their voices like bells, the philosophical stones of their eggs.

     

    ***

     

    Picotazo’s chronic melancholia had deepened to despondency. His dream’s sad implication, the rude awakening–illuminated the comfortless state of his love life. Looking back in time to the moment when with a lingering moan love had first flowered in his breast, reviewing each affair up to the present, he thought that never, not once, had he won his heart’s desire, known a maiden’s timid tremor, the delights of reciprocal attraction. His attempted courtships had always fallen short of their mark. Monsters of will, his mistresses had always chosen him. From the first kiss, disappointment had flagged the poet down.

     

    With a shudder, Picotazo recalled the titanic vigor of his mistress’ constitutions, their iron clad affection, the stern, fixed stare of their lust, the fearfully earnest letters he received with terror; how faithfully they punished his evasions, the silent thunderbolts of their angry looks, the purposed damage they invariably inflicted upon his reputation when, at last, he made his escape.

     

    The second day of their journey, Picotazo made a vow. If upon his return he could not within a week win the professor’s daughter, he would devote himself, soul and body, to poetry. He imagined himself dry and desiccated and hollow–like a pod devoid of seed–but with a great, burning body of work growing beneath his frantic pen. He would devote himself tirelessly to the epic at hand. A monument of buried pain, he would be famous beyond belief, so famous that a day would not go by without Professor Tardanza’s daughter hearing his name. In school, her children would be made to memorize his verse; the Queen of Spain Herself would visit Birdland only to hold Picotazo’s hand: ‘…whose poems are the lubrications for life’s frictions!’

     

    But here his revery takes a perilous turn. It seems the Queen cannot, will not, let go the poet’s frail hand. Dreadfully Sovereign, as stern and fixed as a polar cap and the sacredness of Law, she ignores his mute appeal, she treads upon his feet, barks in his ear that the poet is a cog of God–and with a seismic shudder insists that he be equal to her Great Occasion.

     

    ***

     

    Late that afternoon, the road–in truth a protohistoric path, torturous and precipitous–vanished altogether. Spying a dejection in the grass, Fogginius dismounted to see whither it pointed. The turd led them to the lip of a chasm at the foot of which the sea had hollowed a whirlpool, an eager mouth, the poet thought, entreating them, in a savage tongue, to leap.

     

    Too tired to turn back, they set themselves down for an early supper. As Bulto built a fire and little Pulco set to dressing the small birds the thug had throttled en route, Nuno unpacked his tripod and his black box to seize the whirlpool forever with silver nitrate on glass. Picotazo kept far from the land’s edge; the sight of so deep a pit flooded his soul’s chambers with dread.

     

    It was decided that while waiting for their food they would play a game of lotto; from his saddlebags Bulto pulled the box of painted cards which showed all manner of things: flying fish, the fortifications of Pope Publius, the garrote, the guanaba and the coconut; a poultry seller, a water peddlar, a milkman and his mules; the pyramid of Cheops; the Holy Mother,the twelve apostles, the stations of the cross; a fig, a banana and a parakeet–a game so subverted by Fogginius that by the time it was over, tempers were badly frayed. The cards called forth all sorts of associations and Fogginius could not help but recall recipes and riddles and curious customs and ceremonial sacrifices; the witch trials raging in Europe, red hens and peacock’s eyes, tigers ravening in woods, miasmatic infections, focusing instruments and paradoxes; how so and so had found gold in a graveyard which looked exactly like human teeth, and how the monks of India smear their faces with dung.

     

    Picotazo, who, as Pulco, had taken to living with bread in his ears, missed all of this; he did not hear when Nuno cried completo! and so could not know that the game was over. This caused confusion, a quarrel and a string of complaints during which Nuno accused the poet of cheating and incivility. Oblivious to the upset he had himself caused, Fogginius gaily pointed out the prodigious vegetative power of the wood, naming the many purges and poisons he recognized–‘

     

    ‘To stick in your epic, dear poet!’ he beamed at Picotazo, ‘Proof that I have liberally forgiven you the nasty bite you gave me this morning.’

     

    Then, grabbing Senor Fantasma by the sleeve, he postulated that the chimerical unhealthiness of the climate, its fickle temperatures and the spontaneous alterations of its air convinced him they would be assailed that night by uncommon swarms of flies, gnats, moths, animaculae and other calamities invisible to the naked eye.

     

    ‘We must sleep under nets else be plagued by troublesome bites, inflammations, noxious exhalations and velocity of the blood.’ He assured Fantasma that he had brought with him ‘mercurial purges,a gargle of borax, Armenian bole in vinegar and fungal ash. However, he would hate to have to part with any of it so soon. He insisted upon the nets else they all harvest fatality. As for himself, he would not sleep unless a net was provided; nor did he wish to see his poor friend Picotazo assailed by vampire moths. It is fortunate that Fogginius was nearly blind, for Senor Fantasma was able to provide him with a fictive net. This Pulco draped over and above the Saint who– prostrate and tightly bandaged in his blanket–was ready to sleep. Fogginius promised in a soft gurgle that he would not stir the whole night through–else tear the precious net.

     

    As Fogginius trumpeted and wheezed, the company sat together plotting how they might rid themselves of the Saint who had turned out to be an intolerable burden. Little Pulco, himself asleep, did not hear Bulto’s offer to toss Fogginius into the precipice. Fantasma proposed poison but then retracted–fearing reprisals from the ancient’s ghost. Nuno, hating violence, revealed the central role Fogginius had played in his life and asked for mercy.

     

    ‘I’ll find a way to gag him,’ he promised. I might manage to convince him that to use the vocal chords is unnatural–the proof being that his throat is always sore–and create for his own use a language of sand, of straw, of dust motes. I’ll invent something–a muffler, a word snare, a stifler; somehow or other I’ll knot the old stinker’s tongue.’

     

    Elsewhere, Picotazo, his ears stuffed with wild parsley, lay gazing at the sky. The world, he assured himself, was an instrument made not for pain but pleasure–else why would He have bothered? The thought was reassuring.

     

    You are a moonbeam, he wrote to the phantom in his head, my resurrection, my future life.

     

    But then, sensing something large sliding beneath his hammock, he was reminded that if God was anything, he was paradoxically strange.

     

    Long after midnight the poet fell asleep–a leaky vessel upon an agitated ocean.

     

    ***

     

    For two days, Fango Fantasma had been silent. Indeed, Fogginius’ conversation was so congested, infrangible and dense that had he wanted to, Fantasma would have been hard pressed to stick a word in, even edgewise. However, Fantasma shared Picotazo’s baleful propensity and was not eager to talk. He had taken to staring at his own reflection in a pocket mirror–not from vanity as might be supposed–but to reassure himself that he was still there. The farther away he came from familiar things, the more fragmented and permeable he felt himself to be–and the more haunted. The woods, the sea, the sky, the relic path under his mule’s vanishing feet appeared to percolate to transparency.

     

    Fantasma’s unstable state of mind had been precipitated by a worsening pecuniary crisis. For several years he had hounded the papal authorities for permission to import Afrikans to work his mines and plantations. When at last his wish bad been granted, he spent the lion’s part of his languishing fortune to build and equip a ship, which, upon its return from Afrika, its cargo chained and bolted to the hold, had been spirited away, volatilized, sublimated–perhaps by those evil spirits which had plagued his line for three generations. It seemed to Fantasma, as the very clouds appeared to plot against him overhead, that he and his family had always been the playthings of necromancers.

     

    The Saint had once told Senior Fantasma that in a distant region of the world, at its very edge–which was razor-sharp and swept with cruel winds–lived a people born riddled with holes like sieves. This peculiar race amused themselves by plugging their perforations with sod and seeding them with roses, club mosses and horsetails. Each spring flowers would grow, blossom and blaze. At the world’s end, courtship rituals included dances of gyring shrubs.

     

    ‘More often than not the wedding night ends in disaster,’ Fogginius told Fantasma,’ for in their frenzied embrace, the lovers–decked from head to foot in thorny briars–tear one another to shreds.’

     

    ‘Such is the way of love–‘ Picotazo, eavesdropping, was cut to the quick by the story. He made up a little list of rhymes to keep for later: thorn/sworn, latch/patch, furr/burr, thistle/whistle.

     

    ***

     

    This night Fantasma felt like a sieve man; he felt that his substance was seeping out through the pores of his skin. To make matters worse, their finger of rock above the whirlpool–if certified by an auspicious dropping–was possibly haunted. Certain signs–caricatural boles and an abandoned wasp’s nest– implied that they had tied their hammocks between what had once been sacred trees.

     

    As their fire died, Fantasma stretched out, and pulling on his fingers one by one until they popped, raised his knees to his chest and grabbed his parts. He thought about Nuno’s black box which would bring him power. He imagined himself enthroned upon a velvet chair, turning a crank which would yield up the island image after image.

     

    Too agitated to sleep, Fantasma told himself the story of the nun who had neglected to cross herself before eating a banana. How, thereafter, a demon had sat behind her navel peering out at the world as through a porthole. That failing, he attempted to bring to mind the tender moments of his infancy–but could only recall those family stories which, since cognizance, profoundly distressed him. Stories of those unstable ghosts taking root, tall as trees, in the dining room, causing the roast beef to explode; hovering near the birthing chair whenever a Fantasma was born, to snap up the umbilical cord the instant it was cut. So that it was generally supposed one day the Fantasmas would all be itinerant ghosts with no worldly ties.

     

    And then Fantasma thought he heard his own cord, and the cords of his forefathers being pulled along the ground. He moaned and clutched his balls in terror; above the roar of the whirlpool, he heard one thousand phantoms stepping among the stones.

     

    Fantasma shivered. A clammy air rose from the ground; it mouthed his bones and caused his teeth to hammer. When the moon’s thin wafer pulled itself up over the horizon, he peered timidly out from under his blanket, thinking to catch a glimpse of the ghosts which–he could hear them distinctly–were spooking the campsite. What he saw caused him to scream with such conviction the others were wrenched from sleep to see that the world beneath was no longer solid but palpitating with hundreds of thousands of frogs which had once assured the wood’s sacred character. The indigenous population had called the place above the whirlpool Tlock. Indeed, as the frogs advanced snapping gnats with eager tongues, the party heard distinctly the percussive sound of their feasting: Tlock,tlock,tlock.

     

    Transfixed with terror, Tango Fantasma sailed that amphibious sea howling as Bulto, more naked than any ape, waded among the little green bodies, battering them with a club. Nuno sat transfixed, Pulco wept and Fogginius beat the air and cried:

     

    ‘The magic is severe! My net’s dissolved!’ And then: ‘A dream! A dream and an oracle! We must count them!’ The Saint dropped to the ground, and fumbling among the frogs, raved: ‘Beings fallen from the sky! Bulto! Desist! You are smattering the brains of rational angels!’

     

    They finished the night, prostrate but wakeful. It seemed to them that the entire cosmos reeked of mildew, stagnant pools, the shit of fish, the saliva of snakes and the sulphurous flatulence of Saints. Sometime before dawn the frogs vanished into thin air–supporting Fogginius’ thesis.

     

    Several hundred years ago, on an island the aborigines had named Birdland, the mendicant scholar Fogginius was roused from the depths of nightmare by a hellish bawling.

     

    Fogginius leapt up from his bed–in truth a worn, woolen cape sewn into a sack and stuffed with shredded shirts–and threw aside his door, or rather, the crusted board which kept the wild hogs from relieving themselves in his rooms. There upon the overturned kettle he used as a threshold, lay an abandoned human infant, soiled and with crossed eyes.

     

    Fogginius washed the brat, stared fiercely into its transverse gaze, and in the manner of the times, swaddled it so tightly that it could not thrash but only howl–as helpless as a sausage damned with a thwarted consciousness. This done he christened it: Nuno Alpha y Omega.

     

    ***

     

    Fogginius was disliked. A deaf man who the scholar had cured of a coughing fit by stuffing his ears with breadcrumbs and parsley daily damned him; another whose bee hives Fogginius had smeared with dung, hated and feared him. Nevertheless, up until the arrival of Professor Tardanza from Cordova, and the maturity of Picotazo the poet, he was the only scholar in Birdland, and his the island’s only library–a wormy collection of parchment-bound books stuffing a zinc-lined trunk not large enough to bathe in. The books had been packed along with that woolen cape and those night shirts which, a full three decades later, served the saint as mattress.

     

    In his youth, Fogginius had been enthralled by Birdland’s unique bestiary. The island claimed a purple bat, whistling wart-hogs, miniature crocodiles and large albino spiders sporting pink whiskers. After many years of trial and error, Fogginius had taught himself the ambiguous art of taxidermy and so was able to save the skins of most anything he chose, although he was not an artist and was incapable of reconstructing any creature convincingly.

     

    For example, Fogginius’ snakes did not diminish towards the tail as is customary, but instead they grew progressively fatter. So zealous was the scholar and so thorough, that all the snakes, bats, moles and mice, ant bears, crocodiles and parrots within ten kilometers of his hovel had utterly vanished by the time our story begins. Only their skins remained–thousands upon thousands of them–decomposing in sisal sacks and crowding the shadows of the room Fogginius used as library, laboratory, kitchen and bed chamber, and which the rats used as a larder. He saw to his personal needs after dark beside the path which led to a little chapel–no more in his keeping (for word of other excesses had reached his Queen). Because Fogginius cured his skins with grease, the salted livers of cats, the ashes of wild hog testicles and vinegar, his place and person smelled unlike any other. And once, perhaps in jest, perhaps the result of rare and hermetic readings, Fogginius had suggested that the saviour was a false prophet, a magician engendered by the planet Mars. He was fortunate to have escaped with his life. A new priest– Fogginius despised him–was sent to oversee the cosmic affairs of Birdland.

     

    ***

     

    The city in which Fogginius lived had been named Pope Publius by a bishop in absentia. Its houses were of local pudding stone and coral, and well over a century old. Each had been fitted with heavy doors, high balconies and iron-barred windows–for in its early years the island had been plagued by pirates. The shops– generously fitted with closets, storage bins and shelvings, were now, for the most part, empty of everything but lizards. If Pope Publius had been prosperous for several decades, it no longer was–although one rich man remained in the city’s finest house, its spiral stairs listing and his mahogany columns riddled by carpenter ants. The walls were of imported marble, and the windows of Venetian glass.

     

    This palace belonged to Senor Fantasma whose grandfather had been among the first to take possession of the island. Now that his inherited wealth was running out, Senor Fantasma was waiting for a shipload of Afrikans–for whom he had negotiated with the papal authorities for nearly a decade–to replace the volatilized aborigines.

     

    Very little is known about the original population of Birdland–only that it dwelled in great baskets. As the climate of the island was extremely mild, the natives had no need of smokeholes. They cooked their meals outside in a common courtyard, fenced in by the outsize shells of clams and cockles. The small hole at the top of their huts was an eye through which they could be perceived by their curiously indelicate gods; it served no other purpose.

     

    The aborigines were sculptors, and the mountains truffled with engravings of frogs and copulations and birdmen. They also hung huge quantities of seashells from the rafters of their basket-houses. Once, during a violent storm, these shells created a noise which so enraged Fantasma’s ancestor that he set an entire village on fire–clearing it of men and women and children and structures and domestic animals–thus making room for Pope Publius. By the time Fogginius arrived, a decade or so later, everything the indigenous population had claimed as ‘objects of memory’–an ancient clump of tufted parrot trees, a swarm of aerial orchids resembling yellow bees, a mango grove and several cultivated gardens–were gone.

     

    Strangely, the ensuing generations of Fantasmas were ruled by an obsessive terror that something should escape them. As if that initial conflagration lingered as a fever within the brains of those to follow. This and more: both succeeding generations had a terror of shells and bones and the sound of hollow things knocking together, or clanging, or ringing upon the air. For this reason the chapel of Pope Publius was the only one in Christendom which had never been fitted out with a bell. (Because Old Fantasma had paid for the chapel’s construction, the Designated Powers were willing to overlook this aberration.)

     

    It has been said that Birdland was haunted by the spirits or ghosts of those the Old Fantasma had wronged; that these spirits had escaped through the cyclopean eyes of the basket dwellings; that these itinerant spirits or ghosts materialized at the foot of a bed, in a chimney or in a high tree, in the privy; rode upon the wind as pollen and seeds, were precipitated during the chiming of a clock, or slept within a bottle of ink, or an imperfectly sealed letter–in other words, manifest so often that if they were not fixed residents, it was common enough to see them or to meet someone who had. So that when they did appear they created no surprise. Only Senor Fantasma went wild when haunted.

     

    And it was said that during the construction of Pope Publius, these spirits or ghosts manifested themselves so fearlessly that Senor Fantasma’s grandmother was constantly enraged by their incessant interruptions, and drivelled on and on to anyone who would listen that although she would not allow cigars into the house, a particularly obnoxious phantom insisted on smoking a monstrous, black one in her very own boudoir. She described him: naked and fiercely hot, his shadowy particulars tattooing the walls as he galloped back and forth upon her bed’s counterpane in the moonlight, blowing smoke rings around her trembling nose and causing her love birds to throw themselves to their cage’s floor in paroxysms of emphysemic terror. To keep the infection from entering into the hollow recesses of her head, the old biddy went about her business in a veil. For a time it was feared that she had been impregnated by the smoke from the naked ghost’s cigar, but chamomile and patience proved the old lady suffered gas.

     

    What is curious is that these were the only spirits to haunt the island. No one ever saw Senor Fantasma’s ancestors sitting in trees or smoking. Fogginius–who eagerly took down testimony from whoever would give it–and more testimony from schoolboys than one would think possible–explained the phenomena thus: heathens cannot enter heaven and must remain behind to haunt their former homes, whereas the Old Fantasmas were all Christian and had been seized by heaven whole. But Fogginius feared that if the Afrikans–for whom the entire island waited with hope and misgiving–were not baptized, their spirits, too, would flood the island–making it inhospitable.

     

    ***

     

    Such was the world into which little Nuno Alpha y Omega had plummeted. The population of Birdland was no more than one thousand and one souls, and it would have been easy enough to discover the babe’s mother and bring her to reason. But this never occurred to Fogginius. He believed that–as worms in cheese–the infant had generated spontaneously upon his door’s stoop.

     

    Nuno’s first spoken word was: why. He had pointed to the sun and asked of his stepfather, Why. Until then he had uttered only Fa-Fa. Other than that he had felt no need to speak, and instead with fascination watched the riot of activity within the scholar’s hovel, prodded through the havoc of pelts, skins, and keeping mediums–and attempted to make sense out of the weird stories Fa-Fa told him, those gorgeous lies he believed: that the world was flat and the excrement of bears so potent one whiff could kill an elephant. Nuno was from the start a dreamy child and already at the age of three, when he asked the question Why, he had noticed that in finite quantities the atmosphere is transparent–more transparent, even, than water– but that in vast quantities, as in the sky, it was a beautiful blue. Damned with crossed eyes, Nuno was blessed with acute perceptions. Fogginius was aware that the child was no fool, so that when he saw him pointing at the sun and heard the terrible question Why, he knew, deep within his heart, that to answer: Because God, would not give satisfaction. He loved little Nuno deeply and dared not disappoint him. And so he proposed a list, which the longer it grew, the longer it became; a list, which, like the snake biting its tail, went on forever:

     

    ‘Yes!’ Fogginius startled the infant by leaping to his feet, ‘Yes! The sun! Why? And why the moon? And the rain which falls upon our heads? And why do we have heads? And eyes placed at the top of them? Why don’t we wear our eyes–as some fishes do–upon our undersides? Why not wear an eye between our buttocks and our anus above our nose? And why, dearest little Nuno–I have often pondered this–do all the animals have faces? Turtles do, and butterflies, and ants! Why life, little one? And, O! And, O! Why, above all, death?’ Fogginius covered his own face then with his hands, and to the child’s dismay began to weep. Nuno never forgot the upset his simple question had caused and as he stood blinking and confused, close to tears himself, he vowed that he would never ask such a question out loud again. But it was too late, the cat was out of the bag. Wiping his nose with his stinking fingers, Fogginius went on:

     

    ‘Why calamities?’ His voice was hoarse. ‘And evil natures? Black choler, pestilence and the planets which rotate about the polar star? Why danger and distress? Gall, vinegar and presages of future things? Alarming flames, little Alpha, omens, anise- seeds, imprecations and enchantments? Frogs’ mouths? Falling stars? Asparagus? Eclipses? Why do birds have beaks? And if the soul disembarks at death, why must the corporal rind stay behind to corrupt the earth? And why am I so melancholy?’ Again the scholar sobbed. Little Nuno, struck with terror, sobbed too.

     

    Little Nuno was locked inside the scholar’s sea trunk often and the injustice caused his back to hump. His body knobbed in one tight fetal knot, he clenched his teeth with rage for years until a rat poked its tongue into the greasy keyhole and a beam of light pierced the gloom.

     

    Nuno amused himself by looking at his thumb, first with one eye and then with the other. The thumb appeared to jump from left to right and from right to left. Many hours later, when Fogginius remembered to let the boy out, Nuno tried his small experiment with the back of his stepfather’s head. He noticed how it, too, jumped, and how flat it looked. One-eyed he navigated the room and attempted to dip his pen into the inkpot. Tipping the pot over and onto his knees, he found himself lifted into the air by an ear and once more tossed into the trunk where he played the same game with the root of his nose. It perplexed him to discover that he seemed to have two noses. Seizing them with his fingers he was reassured.

     

    Except for the tiny beam of light which collided with the back wall, the trunk was perfectly dark. Having napped now, rolled into a ball and blinking, Nuno was startled to see a projected image of the room’s one lopsided window and of Fogginius suspended before it upside down. The effect was as terrifying as it was magical.

     

    For weeks thereafter, Nuno taunted his stepfather so that he would be punished and forced to crouch alone in the dark. An inventive child, he pocketed a lens from the scholar’s misplaced spectacles and held it to the keyhole. The image of Fogginius suspended upside down was so sharply reproduced that illumined by intuition, Nuno realized the magician was not the sordid scholar bent with pitiful patience over a heap of parrots he had reduced to trash with a savage and religious passion, but the sun itself. The sorcerer was light–not Fogginius who, if he was capable of talking from dawn to dusk, could not fry a proper egg.

     

    Fogginius came to wonder at the eagerness with which his stepson climbed into the trunk. It came to him that the boy used its pinching privacy for purposes unclean and so severely thrashed him. But although he cried out for mercy, Nuno forgot his pain because it had come to him that he must make a miniature model of the trunk in order to discover the secret laws of holes and beams of light.

     

    ‘Just as my master thrashes and contains me when angry,’ the child reasoned, ‘and just as thunder causes it to rain, so it is possible that light reflects images.

     

    Once Fogginius had hobbled off in his fetid rags to hunt the skins of a scarce species of violet stoat, Nuno made himself a box, pierced it with a hole, inserted, with some fuss and bother, a tube of black paper, capped it with the lens from Fogginius’ spectacles, placed a mirror inside and lastly, after much tinkering, and in an inventive fever, dropped a pane of glass into the back. Light from the little window entered through the lens, was reflected by the mirror onto the glass, which, when manipulated, produced an image of the room in sharp focus. Toying thus, Nuno stood for hours until, seeing Fogginius’ face staring at him from within the box, he was thrust back into the real with a shriek. But instead of thrashing him, Fogginius embraced his stepson.

     

    ‘You have invented the camera obscura!’ he cried, and bursting with pride, congratulated him. Nuno was disappointed to learn that the black box was not his own invention. But when Fogginius told him that painters used it to trace figures on paper, Nuno declared fearlessly:

     

    ‘A poor use for it! I would fix the image and thus do away with painters!’

     

    ‘Fix it! Fix it!’ The scholar slapped his stepson twice most viciously upon each ear. ‘I’ll fix you! Would you thus steal the world from God?’ Lifting the box above his head he sent it crashing into the deeper shadows of the room, exterminating, as he did so, an entire litter of newborn rats.

     

    Fogginius was a compulsive describer of climates, and he was also a pamphleteer, his passion for the genre fired by bitterness and the conviction that certain winds were beneficial, moons ominous, the female pudenda perilous (a fear he shared with the poet, Picotazo). Fogginius was a man bereft of humor.

     

    For a typical day in Pope Publius, in the month of July, 1650, Fogginius’ journal reads: Bad air. A break in the moon’s halo. By means of which we shall have a wind.

     

    Trained by a Jesuit theologian also named Fogginius, Fogginius once sold his shoes and his books to buy a small, red topaz because his master had assured him that if reduced to powder, the stone would produce a white milk. Fogginius had also proved to his own satisfaction that the moon’s influence was moist by sleeping beneath it upon a high hill and awaking with a head cold so severe it almost killed him. He had ingested the dung of a sheep for a week, because an irresistible voice had told him that the thing must be done else the moon fall into the sea.

     

    ‘The moon’s nature,’ Fogginius wrote in a pamphlet which was published in Spain several years before his departure for the island, ‘is ethereal, aerial and aquatic.’ He was successful in his attempt to capture lunar water by leaving little dishes out on the balcony nights when the moon was full. Fogginius sold this dew to a young woman whose underarm hair was so meager it compromised her sexual attractiveness. The hair grew to such profusion that she was not married afterall, but made her living by sitting on a little gold chair on market days and raising her arms for the highest bidder. Later she returned to Spain to continue a career which, one hopes, fulfilled her wildest expectations.

     

    ***

     

    Fogginius was a follower of Lacantius who ridiculed the theory of the antipodes. Fogginius believed the world was flat, a belief that remained unshaken despite his voyage from the Old to the New World. When as a young man his stepson, Nuno Alpha y Omega ran away with pirates and was swept by fierce winds to the Polar Circle where he and the entire crew were appalled by an astronomic night six months long, the stepson came to question the stepfather–now so gaga as to suggest to young mothers that they cure their infants’ sties by rubbing their eyes with the freshly decapitated bodies of flies. Coming into maturity, Nuno refuted Fogginius as ‘a mere dogmatizer’ and ‘God’s prattling ape.’ For Nuno had come to question more than his father; he had come to question God. Home again, he could no longer bear the company of Fogginius. So enraged, so disgusted was he by the codger’s lunacies, his vanity and his incessant pontifications, and of the thrashings with which the old fool continued to threaten his son, that Nuno became an adamant atheist, a materialist who believed only in what he could see, shunning all things which smacked of mystery, wanting, above all, to profit by the real and to understand the mechanisms which–as do the hidden gears of a music box–cause the world to spin.

     

    In the early years of his solitude and independence, Nuno supported himself by making photogenic drawings of leaves and flowers and the wings of butterflies. These he sold in the market as amulets and, because he was a cynic, as ‘the miraculous impressions of the thoughts of kings and angels.’ Then, by means of a piece of glass painted over with tar and placed in his camera obscura, he was able, centuries before the world at large would learn of such a thing, to capture an instant in time. This first successful experiment plunged him into a chronic fever from which he never entirely recovered. His next attempt was to create an image in three dimensions. Nuno Alpha y Omega’s ocularscope was not only the first stereoscope in Pope Publius, but the first one in the universe. Thanks to this wonderful machine, a city which exists no more, a world still even to sublimity, is contained as if by magic on flat pieces of glass.

     

    Nuno’s first images were of the natural world. He would capture the exotic fauna of his native island just as Fogginius had done except that in the process nothing would die. Today, as I sit in the National Museum of Pope Publius, an unusual edifice built entirely of coral, and peer into the ocularscope‘s twin lenses, the fugitive forms of Nuno’s Birdland appear seized in silver before me. Fugitive more than adequately describes this island which, formed of mandrapore, cuttlebone and sea lime ceaselessly changes shape. If it were not for the sea wall which circumvents it, pieces of the island would be swept away in times of tumultuous weather. I have here before me the imposing forms of sea turtles sleeping by the hundreds on the beach, portraits of the powerful, the beautiful, the lean and lost; lush landscapes, the elegant facade of a rich man’s house; the image of a partial eclipse of the sun as seen imprinted on a garden path through the intercesses of the leaves of a lemon tree–a multitude of crescents as numerous as ants; and all the phases of the moon, phases, Fogginius might have said, of the same riddle.

     

    ***

     

    Curiosities of Nuno Alpha y Omega’s island: sea cows which sailors once took for sirens. A scarlet shell sporting a white horn so poisonous that one need but see it to die. The mountains are truffled with enchanting caves, the skies with birds–many of which are mute. (But the lizards of Birdland whistle, and the beetles tick like clocks.)

     

    According to Fogginius’ meteorological journal which lies open before me, verminous and yet for the most part intact, the summer of 1660 was so hot the hens laid hard-boiled eggs.

     

  • Five Days of Bleeding

    Ricardo Cruz

    Department of English
    University of Illinois-Normal

    PLANET ROCK

     

    “I’m the DJ, he’s the rapper,” Chops said, pointing his big finger in my face as if the planet had just begun to spin.

     

    It was night, and the white clouds laughed at Chops until their stomachs bust and they cried. Linton Johnson, a Rastafarian-feeling Black nigger with mustard seed, scronched down in front of our faces and yelled out that New York’s Central Park was Nigger heaven.

     

    “Wait a goddamn minute!

     

    “Is Nigger heaven a Carl Van Vechten novel or a cabin in the sky or a Black place or a sanctuary where August hams grow wild or haven for blues or what?” I asked.

     

    Johnson blew happy dust in my face. “Bottle it,” he said.

     

    Along with Johnson, there was a slew of negroes celebrating and doing their thang in the park like it was nothing. Indecent exposure, pure and simple. A Black Monday. The stock market had crashed, so niggers played the numbers once they got back to Harlem. They picked out their numbers based on Neo-hoodoo and wrote them down during the party they threw for themselves in the park.

     

    Meantime on television: “The problem is that when these films like New Jack City play there are so few of them until Blacks flood the theatres and make a major event out of them.”

     

    Whites gazed out of their windows and saw dinge and charcoal everywhere, dope as art, Guns N’ Roses taking over their houses sky-high above the Harlem juke-joints.

     

    ONE NATION UNDER A GROOVE

     

    Chops’ joke was very funny, but Johnson was seriously looking for more entertainment to exhibit in the park, protest the absence of social reform, his forehead fucked up like the pavement on a bad road.

     

    “The race problem in the United States had resolved itself into a question of saving black men’s bodies and white men’s souls,” he said.

     

    “Are you Lyndon Johnson or James Weldon Johnson or Johnson & Johnson from Jet and Ebony magazines?” I asked. Under the moon, I passed for white.

     

    Mr. Johnson, calm, slender and immaculate, stood on the narrow strip of stage between the footlights set up in the park and the green grass.

     

    “The name is Linton. If you can’t say or play it, then take yourself, the girl and that little fat-ass fucker and go home.”

     

    “Who made you head negro, Lint-head?” I asked. He ran up and pushed us into the grass, then laughed.

     

    “That shit was cold, wasn’t it?” Johnson asked.

     

    “Yeah, baby,” I answered. “Yeah.”

     

    BIRTH OF THE COOL

     

    Chops and Zu-Zu Girl were cutting up, tripping over sharp blades of wet brown grass they found in the park. Zu-Zu was singing the blues. We got up and sent Johnson off with a smile that we inverted once Johnson turned his back. We sat down on a familiar bench in the park, our boodies itching for a scratch. My cheeks slid along the hard wood. “Wiggle it, baby,” the bench said.

     

    Zu-Zu laughed. Chops laid out.

     

    “You got it good and that ain’t bad,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    “Murdah in the first degree,” I told Zu-Zu.

     

    “You can’t keep a good man down,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    Chops was laid back, doing statues of liberty with his fingers. “Lucy’s in the sky with diamonds,” said Chops, downing a Third Stream from his bottle. He was a chaser of the American Dream.

     

    Zu-Zu snatched the pastries out of Chops’ other hand and went off. “Straighten up and fly right,” said Zu-Zu. “Your jelly roll is good.”

     

    The pigeons picked crumbs out of Zu-Zu’s palm. Chops offered Zu-Zu his bottle.

     

    “Excuse me,” said Chops, “but would you like a heavy-wet, cherry bounce, gooseberry wine, fine, cold-without, Tom-and-Jerry or mountain dew?”

     

    Zu-Zu whipped Chops with a coke stare and flicked her remaining crumbs into the trash can.

     

    “I’d like a John Collins or blue ruin or apple-jack or black velvet or twopenny or white-ale or dog’s nose or whisky toddy or London particular,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    Zu-Zu sung the “Laughing Song.” Then she leaned over and smacked Chops in the face, her dark nipples giving us a mean look because they couldn’t sag against her boob-tube.

     

    I grabbed Zu-Zu’s punch and told her to stop. “Excuse me, pardon me, don’t let me get in your way,” I told Zu-Zu, “but this ain’t Queens or Manhattan or Long Island or Greenwich or Harlem. This downtown. You just can’t go around smacking everybody in the face. Dig?”

     

    Zu-Zu sung “Dead Drunk Blues,” booze trickling out of her mouth. She unfastened her bra and took it off.

     

    MERCY, MERCY, MERCY

     

    “You sho’ is big, Zu-Zu,” said Chops. Chops was about to fly away over a bird chest. Meantime, I wondered what she was doing with a bra on under a boob-tube and how we managed to see her nipples.

     

    “Incredible,” I said.

     

    Zu-Zu moved over and smacked Chops in the mouth. “Bop,” she said, her boob-tube shaking a teeny-tiny bit as she danced in the park.

     

    “I wish I could shimmy like my sister Kate,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    I’M SHOUTIN AGAIN

     

    We are nomads, rebels, revolutionaries, but not homeless. I’m dancin on the benches while Chops sit and stares, his mouth open, his eyes on tits and money.

     

    “Get up, get into it, get involved!” I yell. It’s as if I’m shouting at the tits.

     

    Zu-Zu breaks down and does a war dance downtown, pulling her boob-tube up and down, lots of black people gathering around her and jeering.

     

    I grab Zu-Zu around her waist and we do it to a little east coast swing.

     

    “You can swing it, too,” said Chops.

     

    Zu-Zu laughs and smooches with me while we slowly spin around in the soft, thick mud. “My Man-Of-War,” sings Zu-Zu, like we’re in the trenches. Then she sings “That Thing Called Love.”

     

    RUM AND COCA-COLA

     

    Zu-Zu was a mighty tight woman, moaning blues, caffeine and alcohol keeping her going.

     

    “Swing low, chariot,” Zu-Zu whispered. She was ready to drop dead. She sung “New York Tombs.”

     

    Chops, who had been collecting money in a can, came over and whispered in my ears. “What’s wrong with Zu-Zu?” he asked.

     

    Zu-Zu was off into her own world, everybody drinking moonshine but her.

     

    “What did I do to be so Black and blue?” asked Zu-Zu. She threw her bottle away like it was water.

     

    “Take it easy, Zu-Zu,” I said. I dropped my bottle and gave her a warm-fuzzy.

     

    Zu-Zu pulled back. “Don’t hug me,” she said. She was as tender as the night, black and blue bruises all over her body.

     

    WHAT IS THERE TO SAY?

     

    Zu-Zu peeled my fingers off her skin and turned away. She sung “In A Silent Way.”

     

    “She’s been sleeping with the enemy,” said Chops. “She’s got it bad and that ain’t good.”

     

    “That niggah you’re seeing is just gonna drag you down, Zu- Zu,” I said.

     

    “I need love in the worst sort of way,” said Zu-Zu. She took off her skirt and her boob-tube for the twelfth time.

     

    Chops unzipped his pants, pushed Zu-Zu down on the bench and hit her on the side of her face, smearing her rouge into blood. Chops jumped her bones. “Stop!” I yelled. I was afraid for Zu- Zu. Chops had white man’s disease. He could barely jump, the fat on his stomach rippled like tidal waves.

     

    Against the two boards that made the seat of the bench, Zu- Zu looked like the heroine of a silent movie laid down on some railroad track waiting for the train to come. Chops leaped back- and-forth over her collar, his hair standing straight up like Don King’s.

     

    Zu-Zu blew her cool. “I hate a man like you,” she said. “Are you going to jump my bones all night or take off your pants and do me?”

     

    TOO HOT

     

    “I can’t perform under these conditions,” Chops said. “Cross my heart and hope to die. If I’m lyin, you can take this money I collected and buy yourself a little engine that can.”

     

    Chops pulled out a doo-rag and wiped his fat face.

     

    “Just give me some old-fashioned love,” said Zu-Zu. “I want hanky-panky.”

     

    Chops wanted Zu-Zu to stretch his pants but wasn’t confident he had the skills to do her. He stood still and tried to catch his breath while men with nickel-hearts came up and offered to do Zu-Zu for him.

     

    THEY GOT TO GO

     

    “I want to be the only one who gets it,” Chops said to Zu- Zu.

     

    “Okay, okay, okay,” said Zu-Zu. “I’m a mighty tight woman. Do me in a place where it’s warm and where your hooch won’t turn bad. I don’t care where you take it.”

     

    PARADISE

     

    “Behind the garbage,” said Chops. “Seven steps to Heaven.” Chops pulled out a bomb and lit it, weed all in Zu-Zu’s face, smoke getting in her eyes. Zu-Zu started singing “Dope Head Blues,” Chops high as a kite.

     

    “Give me that old slow drag,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    Chops gave Zu-Zu the bomb, and she sucked on the edges of it until it exploded in her mouth. She spat the paper out, and the ashes came out, too, like her mouth was a volcano.

     

    “Spit in the sky and it fall in your eye,” Chops said.

     

    “That niggah is just gonna drag you down,” I said to Zu- Zu.

     

    Chops glared at me, his eyes like obsidian pieces. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.

     

    “Don’t ask me, Chops,” I said. “I’m just a jitterbug. When I hear music, it makes me dance.”

     

    Zu-Zu became restless. She started singing “Tired of Waiting Blues.”

     

    “I’m dying by the hour,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    “She’s gotta have it,” I told Chops.

     

    “Knees up, Zu-Zu,” Chops said. Then Chops fell down and pounced on top of her stomach. Zu-Zu spat in his face.

     

    “Bring back the joys,” said Zu-Zu. “I’m a mean, tight mama.”

     

    Chops slung off his leather and whipped her. The scorching and burning and hot fire turned Zu-Zu’s hair nappy. With a bottle of moonshine in his big, black hands, Chops looked like Prince Buster trying to make love to Zu-Zu, pastry crumbs all over her lips like caviar and ashes still coming out of her mouth. Use your imagination.

     

    “Ooh!” she screamed. “O, Carolina! Olcum!” She called out Yoko Ono’s name as well.

     

    Chops ran Zu-Zu along the wood while she moaned, grunted, huffed and puffed and blew into his bottle, making it blown- glass.

     

    Two niggahs heavy on the bottle, Flukie and Sterling Silver, staggered by with a stolen television set as Zu-Zu kicked over the garbage can. They went crazy.

     

    “Dis bruddah is tearin dis hooch up!” shouted Flukie, his mouth full of gold fillings.

     

    “I wish I had some of that, baby doll,” Sterling said.

     

    “You can get it if you really want it, Bro-ham,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    Chops held out the bottle. “It’s almost all gone,” said Chops. Flukie and Sterling Silver dropped the television set, ran over and snatched the bottle of Chops’ hand. Meantime, Zu-Zu looked ’em up and down.

     

    “Dang, girl, you sho’ is big,” said Flukie and Sterling Simultaneously. “Look at you, girl. Your stuff is all over the place.”

     

    Chops grabbed the bottle and pushed them away from ZuZu.

     

    “Take your black bottom out of here!” Zu-Zu cried.

     

    “Go home!” Chops shouted.

     

    Meantime, Zu-Zu pushed the buttons on the television set to see if she could find the niggah news.

     

    “Keep going!” Chops shouted.

     

    LONG ROAD

     

    “Which way do we go?” asked Flukie, his hand directly over his cock. Sterling followed suit.

     

    “Follow the yellow bird,” I said. They looked at me like I was crazy.

     

    “It’s a long walk home!” they shouted. Chops gave them the finger.

     

    They cracked up and then kissed Chops’ black ass goodbye. “See ya’ lata (chee, chee).”

     

    WALKIN

     

    With a cock-of-the-walk stride, Flukie and Sterling Silver followed the yellow bird to get out of dodge, Zu-Zu scrambling to pick up her stuff, Chops on top of her doing Spike Lee’s joint with his finger.

     

    Flukie felt the urge to shine Sterling’s head. Sterling wondered whether or not Flukie was good luck. Both men were bluing, unable to get their hands on moonshine or Kool-Aid or Grape Juice or anything that looked like it could have some alcoholic content.

     

    Flukie fell out. “It’s a dizzy atmosphere,” he said. Sterling said nothing as they passed a monk standing in a puddle at the corner and dipping while drinking moonshine.

     

    “Don’t stand in muddy waters,” said Flukie, out of it. “Dig?”

     

    “I’m bad,” said Monk.

     

    Sterling Silver, in a moment of epiphany, pointed at Monk’s socks. He was floodin.

     

    Flukie tried to play it off. “What’s that in yo’ pocket?” Flukie asked.

     

    “Watches,” said Monk, “from yo’ momma.”

     

    Flukie started to tag him. But, Sterling Silver held him back.

     

    “How much they cost?” asked Sterling Silver.

     

    “They not for sell, niggah,” said Monk.

     

    “Then what you selling?” Flukie asked.

     

    “Time,” said Monk. “I stole the watches from Penny’s so I could sell time. You ain’t got to buy any, but if you don’ t I’ll take you out.”

     

    Flukie and Sterling Silver looked at one another and backed up.

     

    “You ain’t that bad,” Flukie said.

     

    “You don’t know nothing!” Sterling Silver shouted. “You just a pusher. You ain’t shit!”

     

    “I’m yo’ pusher,” said Monk. “Pay me, niggahs, or I’ll close yo’ big lips forever.”

     

    Flukie pinched Sterling Silver on the arm. “We should have stayed behind with the skeezer,” he said.

     

    Sterling Silver cleaned his throat, then spoke up. “What do you know about karate?” he asked.

     

    “Jujitsu,” said Monk. “Before I studied the art, a punch to me was just a punch, a kick was just a kick. After I studied the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick no longer a kick. Now that I understand the art, a punch is a punch, a kick is just a kick.”

     

    “Damn, I’m a big niggah, but you got me scared,” said Flukie.

     

    “Um, excuse Mr. Monk,” said Sterling, “but I have a question. That’s some deep shit you just gave us. Is that Taoism? Are you from the temple of Shaolin? Or, are you quoting from Bruce Lee’s Chapter on Tools?”

     

    “Man, why don’t you take a chill pill, come and get blowed with us?” Flukie asked.

     

    “Humph,” says Monk. “it’s Monk’s time. I got no papers. And LuLu’s back in town.”

     

    “Bitches brew,” said Flukie. “Let’s go get some pussy den.”

     

    “Die hard,” said Monk.

     

    Flukie backed up some more. “Don’t mess wit me,” warned Flukie. “I’ll rock your world.”

     

    “You’re out of time,” said Monk. “And after I get through wit you, I’m going back to find the skeezer and get her, too.”

     

    SOMEDAY MY PRINCE WILL COME

     

    said Zu-Zu. “But, you sure as hell ain’t him.”

     

    Chops exploded. He let go of his bomb and slid Zu-Zu from left to right on the wood, putting splinters in her booty. Zu-Zu screamed, caught in the middle of a wang-dang with her face under cork.

     

    “Ooh!” she screamed. “O, Carolina. Olcum.” She threw in Olive Oyl’s name for good measure.

     

    Chops grabbed an empty bottle and held it over his big head, Zu-Zu moaning and groaning and asking “Can Anybody Take Sweet Mama’s Place?”

     

    IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, BREAK GLASS

     

    I rushed over and tapped the bottle against Chops’ nappy head. Chops looked at me like I was crazy, pieces of glass snagged inside his afro, blue rain dripping down his black forehead.

     

    Chops squeezed his head with his fingers.

     

    “Peace out,” said Chops. He fell flat on his fat face, smashing his cheeks up against the seat of the bench.

     

    Zu-Zu picked up her boob-tube and spat on the back of Chops’ head. “My handy man ain’t handy no more,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    I’M ALWAYS CHASING RAINBOWS

     

    said Zu-Zu. “One minute, they there. The next minute they gone.”

     

    MILES IN THE SKY

     

    “Baby, you send me,” said Monk. He held two nigger flickers in his hands and put the blades together to form scissors, giving Flukie’s big head the evil eye.

     

    Flukie’s squinted at the sight of the sharp metal. He tried to play it off. “Kronka,” he said. It meant “let the games begin.”

     

    Sterling Silver was at the top of an elm tree, singing “Freddy’s Dead,” brothers throwing down fishbone a couple trees further away, the whole thing a nightmare.

     

    “Man, can’t we eat?”

     

    “Why you doing us like this?”

     

    “There’s too many fine women walkin around for us to be in the treetops.”

     

    “If you going to kill somebody, kill the niggah and come on.”

     

    “Fuck him up.”

     

    “Castrate the niggah.”

     

    “Jack his body.”

     

    “Use the body parts for spareribs.”

     

    “Cut and mix.”

     

    “Do it til you satisfied.”

     

    “Drain the blood out like it were black cherry Kool-Aid.”

     

    “Pump that body.”

     

    “Niggah, you can be Blacula.”

     

    “Have all the pussy you want.”

     

    “Dip into anybody’s Kool-Aid without knowing the flavor.”

     

    “Aa-a, bat around.”

     

    “Nobody could stop you, baby.”

     

    “Call me Bernard Wright.”

     

    “Al B. Sure!”

     

    “You can turn yo house into a home.”

     

    “Take a chance, baby.”

     

    “Cut the crap, then go back where you fell.”

     

    “Come on wit it.”

     

    “You just stepped into the comfort zone.”

     

    “We up here in the trees hollywood swingin.”

     

    “I always wanted to see the Kool & the Gang show.”

     

    “Get off.”

     

    “Yeah, yeah.”

     

    “Take that coon out.”

     

    “We got high hopes.”

     

    “But, we’re not the S.O.S. Band.”

     

    “That’s fo’ damn sho’

     

    “No one’s gonna love you.”

     

    “Looking like that.”

     

    “You got to give it up.”

     

    “Why you wanna dog me out?”

     

    “Can’t find the reasons.”

     

    “True devotion.”

     

    “Look at the man in the mirror.”

     

    “You gotta make a change for once in yo’ life.”

     

    “You ain’t as bad as you think you are.”

     

    “Shut up!” screamed Monk. He stabbed a tree behind Flukie’s big head.

     

    Flukie stepped back. “Give me tonight,” he said.

     

    From the top of the elm tree, Sterling Silver lowered his cotton handkerchief and long gold rope chain. “Hang him high,” he said to Flukie.

     

    As if on cue, niggahs in the trees stuck their heads out of the branches and started talking smack again, twigs falling to the ground like it was nothing. It was like a mixing board where thangs jumped in and out at random.

     

    “What’s all this noise?” said Monk.

     

    “Look around you,” said Sterling. “What you want? You can have it, baby.”

     

    “I need love,” said Monk. “I want an around-the-way girl. I want base.”

     

    “We all do,” said Flukie.

     

    “But we can work that sucka to the bone,” said Sterling Silver.

     

    “Around the way, I saw a slim, no thicker than a twig, but with big titties,” said Flukie.

     

    “Let us walk, and we’ll make a special delivery,” said Sterling.

     

    “Yo’ call,” said Flukie.

     

    “Titties taste like watermelons,” said Sterling.

     

    “Make her come my way,” said Monk. He gave Flukie and Sterling a drink of his moonshine.

     

    “I thought you’d see it my way,” said Flukie. He gulped whiskey and heard niggahs tripping, his head starting to ache.

     

    “What’s all this noise?” Flukie asked.

     

    “The sounds of 52nd Street,” said Sterling, swallowing shit from the cup as if he had found the Grail.

     

    Flukie and Sterling took off, one step closer to Heaven.

     

    SOUTH STREET EXIT

     

    Miles ahead.

     

    BLUE GRAY

     

    Downtown, people celebrate, Linton Johnson splashing rhythms together after the thundering bass. But, there is a Blue Vein Circle where mulattoes practice color snobbery and diss the blacks. Yet, all of these people are in the park cause the earth has music for those who listen. This is Tabu. In the park, “the rhythms jus bubbling an back-firing, ragin and rising, then suddenly the music cuts: steel blade drinking blood in darkness.” Johnson records his LP for Virgin entitled “Dread, Beat and Blood.”

     

    “It’s war amongst the rebels,” says Johnson. He’s cutting the rug and mixing the vinyl. Girls love the way Johnson spins, but he is careful to avoid the trap of stardom.

     

    “I don’t want to be like Bob Marley,” he says. He’s got a bomb in his mouth bigger than the mike in his hands.

     

    Chops wakes up and tries to remix Johnson’s speech. “I don’t want to be chop suey.”

     

    Johnson grins and steps on Chops a little harder with his combat boots.

     

    Women scream.

     

    “I refuse to divorce myself from the realities of life,” says Johnson.

     

    “I don’t want to be chopped liver either. Living in the bottle where everything is distorted or distilled.”

     

    Johnson kicks Chops in the mouth. “Everybody’s got to find their own groove,” says Johnson. “You a sorry case, if you can’t.”

     

    He holds his black thang and scratches it in front of the ladies.

     

    His beat is so fonky: Men holler “it’s sweet as a nut–just level vibes.”

     

    Chops pulls his upper lip away from a cleet and spits the dirt out of his mouth. Suddenly he’s starting to gain a little more respect for Johnson.

     

    “Let the beat hit ’em!” Chops shouts. “Let the music take control! Let the beat go round & round and up & down!”

     

    Johnson kicked Chops in the head and walked away.

     

    Johnson is downright unfaithful. People following him as if at a golf tournament. They fight to see him, cutting out each other’s hearts and giving them to dippers with paper asses and buckets of blood. Everyone is high on brew or drawing a pound or two of kally, Johnson passin naturals on niggahs. Black boys stand in the weed and hold their dicks. Niggahs for life.

     

    I WANNA THANK YOU (FOR LETTING ME BE MYSELF)

     

    I told God. I told him good.

     

    “God,” I said. “God, please don’t let me spend the rest of my goddamn life in this park. If you gotta take me, take me to higher ground. But, please don’t let me go in the park.”

     

    “God,” I said. “You are the man. You are the man. You are the man. I want muscles.”

     

    I gazed around to look at New York.

     

    PRETTY CITY

     

    But, it wasn’t the promised land.

     

    Shawon Dunston grew up in Brooklyn. Now the niggah’s playing baseball in Chicago.

     

    Eddie Perry was from around-the-way, Harlem, but after he moved the crowd to go to school, Exeter, he was shot by a white undercover cop and quit it.

     

    MURDER IN THE FIRST DEGREE

     

    said Zu-Zu. “You shall reap what you sow.”

     

    “Maybe,” I said, “but I can’t be no ordinary Mo. I got to get out of the ghetto, too. If I live life by tripping, at least I did it my way.” I got this Frank Sinatra song in my head.

     

    Zu-Zu rolled Chops over and spat in his face.

     

    “He got it good and that ain’t bad,” said Zu-Zu. “You chopped his fat head into pieces.”

     

    “Sing sing prison,” I said.

     

    “Someday, Sweetheart,” answered Zu-Zu.

     

    AFTER TONIGHT

     

    I said, “I’m a dead man.”

     

    I covered Chops’ body with a blanket. Zu-Zu spat once more in his face.

     

    “Excuse me, pardon me, don’t let me get in your way,” I said to Zu-Zu. “But, this ain’t Soho or Staten Island or Tribeca or Brooklyn. This is downtown. And we way down. You just can’t go around spitting in niggahs’ faces. I ain’t eighty-sixin no more niggahs for you. Dig?”

     

    Zu-Zu cracked up. “I killed him first,” she said.

     

    She pulled a set of lines out of her shoe that looked like Chops’ forehead peeled from the bottom of her foot and did a little number.

     

    “I am the laughing woman with the black black face,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    “Lighten up, honey,” I said.

     

    “Living in cellars and in every crowded place.”

     

    “Get it together.”

     

    “I am toiling just to eat,” she says.

     

    “When life gets cheesy, you put on the Ritz.”

     

    “And I laugh,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    “Fine and dandy, Zu-Zu, except you forgot one thang. You ain’t a woman but rather a confessional little girl who ran away from Queens umteen times before you finally escaped or so you say.”

     

    “Why you gotta call me out?” Zu-Zu asked. She scooted over on the bench and kissed me on the lips, leaving a taste of wild cherry in my mouth.

     

    “My daddy likes it slow,” she said.

     

    “You don’t know what love is,” I told Zu-Zu.

     

    “Sweet rain,” she said.

     

    “Things ain’t what they used to be,” I said. I dreamed of chocolate Kisses. And mumbling.

     

    “Such sweet thunder,” Zu-Zu whispered in my ear.

     

    I flew to move away from Zu-Zu. Her heart was a singing bird. Everytime it fluttered, it gave me Flack–“The Closer I Get To You,” “Oasis” or “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.”

     

    “What are you singing this time, Zu-Zu?”

     

    “The Song Is You,” she answered.

     

    “What’s wrong with ‘Paper Moon’ or ‘Kind of Blue’ or ‘Hand Jive’ or ‘Emotions’ or ‘Forms and Sounds’ or ‘Anatomy of a Murder’ or ‘Sara Smile’ or ‘I Don’t Know What Kind of Blues I’ve Got’ or ‘Dat Dere’?” I asked.

     

    “No more talk,” said Zu-Zu. “For me, life is like the black plague, the bordellos in Bedford-Stuyvesant full of disease that the white man carries back home to Bensonhurst, Queens, and gives to his wife.”

     

    “We’re bigger than life, Zu-Zu.”

     

    “When women talk that way, we dye,” said Zu-Zu, “our lips dark.”

     

    MOOD INDIGO

     

    All we ever do is talk.

     

    Like flatliners, we die several times. But, we keep coming back for more.

     

    “I can’t do no more,” said Zu-Zu. She’s lying her ass off.

     

    “Hush, girl, be quiet,” I said.

     

    IF I COULD SAVE TIME IN A BOTTLE

     

    Zu-Zu got a bottle in her hands and a lake in her mouth. It rained for hours in the park before night stole our faces and painted them blue in watercolor. I wore the mask, Zu-Zu dragging me through the mud, everyone celebrating and stomping on muddy waters even after the thrill was gone. The music cut, our dark faces bleeding through our masks.

     

    The small trees in the park were bent, dropped by big niggahs and east rains that slashed their arms and legs like it was nothing. During the storms, the trees twisted and shook and danced in the wind, their leaves like hair washed with no soap and black water.

     

    New York stood tall as a dirty city with a mouth the size of Frank Sinatra. Zu-Zu and I sat on the bench, our shoes heavy with mud, and ate crab apples, Zu-Zu’s stomach wining and dining her until she finally belched.

     

    New York was a home where men and women ate alone in public and nobody talked. Zu-Zu smoked a cigarette from the garbage and blew cool mint in my face. Then, she spat pieces of cigarette paper out in the sky as if she were throwing up a fistful of dollars.

     

    Zu-Zu reached inside her blouse, wondering if she any money left. I sat on the bench with a box of Kool, singing “woman don’t you know with you, I’m born again.”

     

    It was time she knew.

     

    “Time,” I told her.

     

    “Time,” she stopped.

     

    New York was a dirty city with a mouth as big as Frank Sinatra’s, but nobody ever talked.

     

    “No more dancing girl Zu-Zu?”

     

    Zu-Zu shook her head, “No.” Her soul had already flown south for the winter.

     

    Zu-Zu pulled a handgun out of the garbage can where she stored her stuff and raised it to her head.

     

    Black Monday was the first day of autumn. The fall season came with a bang.

     

    Zu-Zu dropped to the ground and fell out.

     

    “Toy gun,” said Zu-Zu. She cracked up. She showed me the black plastic handle.

     

    I handed Zu-Zu some fire, and we burned while lying in front of one another on the bench.

     

    PURPLE HAZE

     

    I sucked my joint, blue-faced, dragging like Jimi Hendrix with a guitar pick hanging over a bottomed-out lip. We smoked all the grass we could find. Heaven was a smoked-up black skillet holding the earth together, Zu-Zu toiling in the soil. The sky was pasta-red. The low clouds puffy and stuck together like cooked macaroni shells.

     

    Behind the haze, the skyline felt blue, niggahs walking around on depressants and dressed like starving artists. Some brother even claimed he did J.J.’s paintings in Good Times.

     

    I watched the brother walk away, then turned and looked at Zu-Zu. She was dope.

     

    NEFERTITI

     

    There was swinging on 52nd Street. Zu-Zu listened for it, Zu-Zu in pursuit of the 27th man, gold as plentiful as dust on the street.

     

    Zu-Zu was octaroon, 1/8 negro, her hair worn in cornrows. Most people couldn’t tell if she was white or black. Her family was from Queens. One day she woke up and threw away all of her money and moved into Central Park.

     

    “Goodbye, mother. Goodbye, Bojangles. Goodbye, heartache,” she said.

     

    Her daddy had the nerve to cry. “God bless the child who’s got his own,” her daddy said the day Zu-Zu ran away for good. Ramseys Bojangles Girl hated her for not being a boy. He tossed his sandal behind her.

     

    “The day I see yo’ face again will surely be the day you die,” said Ramseys.

     

    “Goodbye heartache,” said Zu-Zu. It could have been “good morning.” Zu-Zu was the only one who knew for sure.

     

    As Zu-Zu told me her story, we sat drinking moonshine and collecting Zu-Zu’s stuff together. Inside I was crying, Zu-Zu’s black-and-blue face half-white under the moon.

     

    STELLA BY STARLIGHT

     

    “Now was it goodbye or goodbye morning?” I had to know.

     

    “It was blue cellophane over my nose and mouth, easy living, my foolish heart, a frame for the blues,” Zu-Zu answered. She was referring to life with her family in Queens before she was exiled.

     

    “What did you say when left that hot house?” I asked.

     

    “I sung ‘It’s So Hard To Say Goodbye To Yesterday,’” said Zu-Zu.

     

    Zu-Zu stood up to straighten her boob-tube for the hundredth time. It was like watching a nudie flick. I looked up to Zu-Zu while white popcorn and seeds dropped from her colored bust to the bench.

     

    “You got a lot of nerve, Zu-Zu.”

     

    Amazing. How in the hell did she get popcorn inside her boob-tube, I asked myself, wondering why it wouldn’t just fall out. Zu-Zu picked a yellow umbrella out of the trash and opened it up.

     

    “Put this over your thang,” said Zu-Zu, using the wet plastic to keep me from mooning. She was inventing prophylactics.

     

    EVIDENCE

     

    Once, Zu-Zu crushed a Styrofoam cup and stuck it inside my pants. Zu-Zu got on her knees and begged me to let her feel the cup.

    PRAYER FOR PASSIVE RESISTANCE

     

    “Please baby baby please,” Zu-Zu whispered. Singing “Don’t Be That Way,” she glared at Heaven.

     

    FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE,

     

    Zu-Zu.

     

    “What’s your problem?”

     

    “My blue heaven,” Zu-Zu replied.

     

    “Blue heaven is full of coppers,” I told Zu-Zu.

     

    “Conception,” she said. She kicked Chops’ fat stomach and spat once more in his face.

     

    TOW AWAY ZONE

     

    Zu-Zu flagged a cop and pointed towards Chops. “Get this fat fucker out of here!” she shouted.

     

    The cop looked like who-me.

     

    “Yeah, I’m talkin to you,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    The cop glanced at his black lizards to see if he was standing in muddy waters.

     

    “You with the blue uniform.”

     

    The whistle dropped out of his mouth.

     

    “You with the big stick and gun on your hip.”

     

    He called for help.

     

    “That’s right,” said Zu-Zu. “Bring your buddies.”

     

    The copper came up to Zu-Zu with two other blues. “I’ve never had a thang blacker than you,” he said.

     

    Zu-Zu smacked him in the face. “Wake up, white boy,” said Zu-Zu. “You stepped out of a dream.”

     

    “Pick up your trash, you black dog,” said the copper. Just like that. “How would you like to marry Liz behind bars?”

     

    “Don’t try to punk me,” said Zu-Zu. “Do your job for a change and take this overweight lover to pig heaven.”

     

    “What’s wrong with him?” asked Charlie Irvine.

     

    “He’s dead.”

     

    “What happened?”

     

    “He tried to fuck me but got smacked on the head by a bottle.”

     

    “No wonder he’s dead,” said Charlie Irvine. The coppers chuckled.

     

    “You’re funny,” said Zu-Zu, “but your thang is too small to be cracking those kind of jokes.” With her index finger and thumb, Zu-Zu showed him about an inch of air.

     

    “Take care of the body yourself,” said the cop. “The spook can rot there in the earth for all I care. I can’t tell him apart from the dirt and mud anyway (hee, hee).”

     

    Chops woke up and gave him the finger. “Fuck you,” he said. He covered his mouth so the cop couldn’t hear him.

     

    MOMENTS LIKE THIS

     

    AFTER YOU’VE GONE

     

    I said, “You’ve come back as lemon drop.”

     

    Chops was bitter.

     

    “Eighty-six all that,” said Chops. “I’m gonna take you out once and for all.”

     

    “About that bump on your head, Chops. I had to do it. You was out of control.”

     

    Chops’ eyes went to the back of his head while he rolled around in the mud, trying to get up. “When I get through with you, you gonna wish you were back in Compton,” Chops swore, “yo’ ex-wife and niggahs chasing you from Carson to Crenshaw.”

     

    “Shut up!” I said.

     

    Zu-Zu laughed in his face.

     

    Chops did a circle with his fingers and then pointed to Zu- Zu’s skirt. “I’m gonna tear it up,” he promised.

     

    Zu-Zu spat in his face. “You done lost your good thang,” she said.

     

    Chops got up on his hands and knees and then fell back down. “The world is spinning,” said Chops, “and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

     

    “Quit talking smack and go to sleep,” said Zu-Zu. “Your head has gotta be killing you.”

     

    Chops closed his eyes and groaned. Minutes later, we heard him snoring.

     

    CONFIRMATION

     

    “Did you really live in sunny California?” Zu-Zu asked.

     

    I shook my big head as if it were a beach ball being blown by a basement breeze.

     

    “Who are you really?” Zu-Zu asked. “Fess up.”

     

    “I’m Jerry Butler, Count Basie, too legit to quit,” I said. “I couldn’t fall in love with a woman, so I left Compton and came here. When we met at the Metropolitan Museum, I was eating a ketchup sandwich and trying to save myself from the cold, waiting for a train to go through the desert and back to California.”

     

    “Nothing is sadder than the man who eats alone in public,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    We sat talking and smoking dope from the pipe like a tribe called quest.

     

    LONELY BOY

     

    Zu-Zu said, “That’s what you are.” She grabbed my hand, twisted it and we ran several yards to a pale blue tent in the park in search of our future.

     

    SKETCH 1

     

    There were earrings and cheap gold-electroplated costume jewelry and colored scarves and doo-rags and shawls and dolls and poultry and blue racers all over the ground. On a coffee table stained by black coffee, Zu-Zu squeezed a 60-watt lightbulb in a lamp with no shade. A very Black woman fixed Zu-Zu good, turning on the light, holding her hand on the bulb and asking her what she wanted.

     

    “Let go of my hand!” Zu-Zu screamed, the hot bulb burning her skin into a darker shade.

     

    The gypsy woman finally let go. “What’s the matter, bitch? You feeling a little hot?”

     

    “What yo’ problem?” Zu-Zu asked. “You want my man?”

     

    “Shut up, yellow-ass bitch. Nobody likes you anyway. If I wanted yo’ man, I’d take him. Everything I want, I take it. That’s how I am. There ain’t nothing you can do about it. I’m the boss. And I own a doll for every niggah in this park. I can put a spell on you in a minute. Make you mine. So shut up before I find your own personal mojo and give it that whip appeal.”

     

    “Enough with that voodoo shit,” I said. “We ain’t marked for death. If I was Steven Seagal, I would break yo’ bones so you could hear the sound of them cracking.”

     

    “I would be out for justice then,” said the black woman. “It wouldn’t make any difference,” I said. “I’m hard to kill.”

     

    “Maybe,” she said, “but I know how to take out the garbage.” “She’s wacked,” said Zu-Zu. “Let’s blow this joint.”

     

    “Not so fast, Zu-Zu. If this bitch has got something to say, let her say it.”

     

    “I can read you your fortune, but it’s gonna cost you a lot of motherfuckin money,” she said. “You got to pay to play.”

     

    “Here’s twenty dollars, whore–make it good,” I said.

     

    GYPSY WOMAN

     

    My black ass. I turned around and looked for a seat.

     

    “Where are we?” I whispered to Zu-Zu.

     

    “Don’t talk, just listen,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    “Let me look into my crystal ball,” the black woman said. She gazed into the light bulb, the light giving her a headache.

     

    “Damn,” she said. “You goin have to wait a while. The spirits are tripping.”

     

    “She’s higher than all of us,” I whispered to Zu-Zu.

     

    “You want your future told or a muzzle on your mouth?” she asked.

     

    “I paid for mumbo-jumbo,” I said.

     

    “Where did you get the money from anyway?” Zu-Zu whispered. The black woman ignored us. She shuffled a deck of tarot cards, laid five cards out on the table and then turned one over picturing a faceless man with an ax on his shoulder.

     

    She screamed. “Fear death by chops!” she said.

     

    SPEAK NO EVIL

     

    “Black woman,” Zu-Zu warned, “I’ve killed niggahs for less.”

     

    The black woman handed Zu-Zu a leather string of dangling rubbers, signifying the phallus.

     

    “Take this talisman and wear it round yo’ neck,” she said. “Use it to fight the powers that be.”

     

    “You tryin to be funny or something?” I asked. “You don’t care about her.”

     

    “I ain’t got to care,” she said. “That’s yo’ job. Now get out of here. I’m tired of looking at you.”

     

    HAVE A NICE DAY

     

    Bitch.

     

    TROUBLE EVERYWHERE I ROAM

     

    I looked at Zu-Zu, the talisman around her neck as we walked nervously away.

     

    “Why me?” I asked. I thought about the woman I left behind and the fact that maybe Zu-Zu would never give up any, no matter how nice I was.

     

    We strolled below the trees in silence.

     

    NOW’S THE TIME

     

    Flukie told Sterling Silver, their raw hands snapping off twigs at the top of an elm tree.

     

    “Shut up,” Sterling Silver whispered. “This ain’t a concert for cootie. Speak low.”

     

    “Let’s jump her now,” Flukie muttered.

     

    “Be patient,” said Sterling Silver. “We will.”

     

    IN THE SMALL WEE HOURS

     

    “We ain’t got all day,” said Flukie. “If we don’t get her, it’s our asses.”

     

    “It’s yo’ ass,” said Sterling Silver. “You the one that thought up this shit.”

     

    “We ain’t got to keep our promise.”

     

    “There’s no way we can hide,” said Sterling Silver. “Not with that niggah loose.”

     

    Sterling Silver tried to look down the inside of Zu-Zu’s boob-tube. “Let’s just do it and get it over with,” he said. “The sooner the better,” said Flukie. Sterling Silver could see Zu-Zu’s titties. “Word,” he said.

     

    He and Flukie sat on the heavy branches, emulating dark shadows. No way Zu-Zu could have seen them hovering over her big head like buzzards.

     

    Flukie started thinking about his momma. “If they laid a finger on my momma, it’s over,” he said, fiddling with the red doo-rag on his head so the leaves couldn’t fuck up his wave.

     

    Sterling Silver watched Zu-Zu smear cocoa-butter on the soft spot of her hand where the gypsy had warmed her up like a chicken bone. “Word to the muther,” said Sterling Silver, recklessly eyeballing Zu-Zu’s honey-brown thighs while she bounced, her hips singing “Streetwalker blues.”

     

    Flukie snatched a pointed stick and aimed it at Zu-Zu’s chest. “I put a spell on you,” he said, glycerin and activator gel from his doo-rag dropping slowly on Zu-Zu’s back.

     

    THE MIDNIGHT SUN WILL NEVER SET

     

    Zu-Zu started singing “Vampin’ Liza Jane,” the moon’s glow fully cast upon her now since it was after midnight, the girl seemingly pale from fright night, fog developing by her feet.

     

    “I will cheat death the same way I do a spade in a tabletop game,” Zu-Zu said.

     

    “You will live forever,” I said. We strolled past a water fountain, Zu-Zu looking back at it.

     

    “Do you hear laughter?” Zu-Zu asked.

     

    “I hear the trippin’ and ailing of the gods being cheated by you and your queens and kings,” I told Zu-Zu.

     

    “You a lying motherfucker,” she said. She spat in my hair.

     

    “Excuse me, pardon me, don’t let me get in your way, Zu-Zu. But if you gonna spit like that, save your breath for a niggah that’s worth it.”

     

    “Did you spit on me?” Zu-Zu asked.

     

    “Hell no,” I said.

     

    “What’s all this shit on my back then?” Zu-Zu asked.

     

    “Droppings,” I said.

     

    We stood and looked at each other. Zu-Zu gazed down at the fog by her feet.

     

    “Enough of this Ten Commandments stuff,” said Zu-Zu, feeling her heart.

     

    MY FUNNY VALENTINE

     

    “Kiss me, and I’ll kiss you back,” I said to Zu-Zu, every Tom, Dick and Harry in the park trying to get her.

     

    “Let’s wait awhile,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    “I want you,” I told Zu-Zu. “And I want you to want me, too.”

     

    “What you won’t do for love,” said Zu-Zu, feeling herself for a pulse.

     

    “Let’s get it on,” I said.

     

    “Keep on truck in’,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    “We got a love thang,” I said.

     

    “You can’t hurry love,” said Zu-Zu, trying to see herself in a wine bottle.

     

    “You can’t hide love,” I said.

     

    “I’m a private dancer,” Zu-Zu said, “dancing for money.”

     

    “Baby love,” I said. “I ain’t got nobody.”

     

    Zu-Zu watched as a mosquito bit my neck. “Ain’t nobody better,” she said.

     

    I slapped the mosquito with one hand and it dove off my neck, doing a full-twisting somersault with about a 3.5 degree of difficulty. It looked up at me from the ground.

     

    “What do you think?” it asked.

     

    “Got to give it up,” I said. I put my foot down. “C’mon, Zu-Zu, take one helluva of a chance.”

     

    Zu-Zu was not paying attention. She kept looking around, noticing that everybody had suddenly vacated the park.

     

    “What happened to all the spooks?” Zu-Zu asked.

     

    GHOST TOWN

     

    “Take anything you want,” I said. We walked over to a trash can and dug up a couple of black western costumes, Zu-Zu throwing everything to the ground.

     

    “You got a gun?” she asked.

     

    “Yep.”

     

    I showed it to her. She turned and looked the other way like it was nothing.

     

    “You want it?” I asked.

     

    Zu-Zu popped me on the head. My knees buckled, Zu-Zu sticking her pretty face between my bowlegs.

     

    “Giddy-up,” she said.

     

    I got myself back together. “Where are the clowns?” I asked.

     

    “Get up!” Zu-Zu shouted. Her neck was caught between my legs, glad that they weren’t clippers. She had always been told that the L.A. Clippers were bad.

     

    “Get off!” Zu-Zu shouted.

     

    “Why you sweatin’ me?” I asked.

     

    Zu-Zu rolled her head, trying to shake out the cobwebs. “I’m foggy,” she said.

     

    I stepped to her smooth and direct. “Yippee-ky-yea,” I said. “I’m the fastest gun in the west. Let’s do this with a quickness and get it over with. Let’s do this like bam after a glass of whiskey.” I slung my gun around and opened up the cloth cape I was wearing.

     

    Zu-Zu spat in the dirt. “You must think you Superman or Clint Eastwood or hard to kill. You got to have a bigger gun than that to do me. You couldn’t shoot Melba Moore with that. Melba toast would have nothing to worry about. You couldn’t knock a hole in a slice of brown bread. Even if you knew how to shoot, your six-shooter ain’t loaded.”

     

    “I can pull the trigger,” I said.

     

    “What’s wrong?” Zu-Zu asked. “Gun jammed?”

     

    “All it needs is a little lubrication.”

     

    “Lubricate it yourself,” said Zu-Zu, digging deeper into the trash. “What I want is a shot of whiskey. The only way you’ll do me is if I’m drunk and slobbering over you like a saloon gal.”

     

    I drew a bottle of Jack Daniels from the can with a little booze left in it.

     

    “Check you out,” said Zu-Zu. “You like Mr. GQ Smooth now.”

     

    “Yep,” I said, industrial spurs spinning around on my black dingo boots like throwing stars mowing the grass.

     

    “Don’t touch me,” said Zu-Zu, staring at my spurs like they were wheels of fortune.

     

    “Shut up, Zu-Zu. This ain’t Dodge City, and you ain’t Kitty. But even if that fog was gunsmoke, we’d still be in trouble cause that’s how we’re living. Saddle up so we can split this ghost town. I feel like Matt Dillon in love with a skeezer.”

     

    “Johnny,” said Zu-Zu, “you’ve come back to me.”

     

    “What the hell you talkin’ about?”

     

    Zu-Zu pointed at an inscription on the handle of my gun. “Why Johnny, you can’t read.”

     

    I waved goodbye with one hand.

     

    “Five-card stud,” Zu-Zu said.

     

    “Five fingers of death,” I replied.

     

    Zu-Zu started shouting: “Johnny’s got a gun, and is goin’ cap a woman. A 22-year old motherfuckin’ punk with an AK-47 he paid 18 hundred for and a vow to himself that he’d rather be in jail than six-feet under. He’s a black cowboy, roping cattle and catching dogies in a pair of rawhide boots instead of killing for a pair of Cons.

     

    I did a few tricks with my gun and pointed at Zu-Zu’s booty. “Out here, everybody got a piece,” I shouted.

     

    WARM VALLEY

     

    “A little closer,” said Sterling Silver, waiting in the tree until he could see straight down Zu-Zu’s boob tube and into her drawers.

     

    TALLEST TREES

     

    They started talking smack. “Why is it the tallest trees are climbed by the littlest niggahs?” they asked themselves.

     

    “Shut the fuck up,” said Flukie.

     

    The tree dropped Sterling Silver and Flukie in the dirt, their big heads rolling through the mud and down the prairie until they crashed into my boots and stopped, their faces stuck on my toes like black olives stuck onto toothpicks.

     

    Zu-Zu cheesed. “Howdy, boys,” she said.

     

    “Who are these guys?” I asked Zu-Zu, like she knew.

     

    “Guess,” said Flukie.

     

    “Gucci,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    “No, I mean guess who we are,” said Flukie.

     

    “Amos and Andy,” I said.

     

    “D.J. Jazzy Jeff and Fresh Prince,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    “Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall,” I said.

     

    “Chuck D and Flavor Flav,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    “What are you, stupid?” asked Sterling Silver.

     

    “Give you a hint,” said Flukie. “We villains.”

     

    “Batman and Robin,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    “Lone Ranger and Tonto,” I said.

     

    “Shut up,” said Sterling Silver. “This ain’t Jeopardy or Name That Tune.”

     

    “Whatever happened to Name That Tune?–I used to like that show,” Zu-Zu whispered.

     

    Flukie stood up and waved his gun at my mouth. “Don’t fuck with him,” Sterling Silver said. “He’s got a trigger-finger.”

     

    “What do you boys want?” Zu-Zu asked.

     

    Sterling Silver would not talk to her. “Give us the girl, Bronco Billy, lest your balls are in double jeopardy.”

     

    “Don’t do anything nutty, homey,” said Flukie. “This is fifty-eight magnum. It can blow your head clean off with one shot. If you don’t believe the hype, go head and make my day, Billy boy.”

     

    “Step off,” said Zu-Zu. “Every dog has his day.”

     

    “Stop that cow from chewing,” Sterling Silver told Flukie. “She got a mouth bigger than Aretha Franklin but sings like Omar Shariff.”

     

    Zu-Zu looked shamed and insulted. “Take care of ’em for me, Johnny,” she said.

     

    “Alright, Billy The Kid, it’s your show,” said Sterling Silver. “Are you gone give us the girl, or do we have to take her?”

     

    “Where you want your bullet, homey?” Flukie asked. “This fifty-seven magnum is gettin’ awfully itchy.”

     

    Sterling Silver peeped at Flukie. “When you gonna get your GED?” he asked. “You don’t even know what kind of gun you got.”

     

    “Fuck you,” said Flukie. “I tell you what. I betcha’ I know the number of times I had my dick sucked.”

     

    Zu-Zu spat in his face. “You’re disgusting,” she said.

     

    “Yep,” said Sterling Silver. “Now let’s get on with the show.”

     

    “You bad,” I said. “Go ahead and do something.”

     

    “Bad,” said Flukie. “Three syllables. B-A-D.”

     

    “Shut up, Flukie,” said Sterling Silver. “This ain’t Romper Room.

     

    “Damn–whatever happened to Romper Room?” Zu-Zu whispered. “That was a great show.”

     

    “This bitch thinks she’s in Kansas with her dog Toto,” said Sterling Silver. “I can’t wait to do her.”

     

    Flukie walked up and grabbed Zu-Zu’s tit, grinning from ear to ear.

     

    “You so ugly you scared all the crows away,” Zu-Zu said.

     

    The tallest elm trees kneeled and said a prayer for Zu-Zu.

     

    TAKE THE “A” TRAIN

     

    Flukie grabbed his crotch and stood in Zu-Zu’s face. “Oh, so you a livery-bitch,” he said. “How would you like to come service me? I’ll whip that weak ass into shape.”

     

    Sterling Silver chuckled. “Look, Flukie. She can let it go, and, like dust, that rickety booty is gone with the wind. Chee, chee.”

     

    “Enough talk,” I said. “Draw.”

     

    Flukie searched his baggy pants for a pen or pencil or etch- sketch.

     

    “Shoot,” Sterling Silver shouted. “Finish this kindergarten cop before I get mad and blow away Monk’s girl.”

     

    “Draw,” I said.

     

    “Smoke him,” said Sterling Silver.

     

    “Draw,” I said.

     

    “I ain’t got no papers!” Flukie cried.

     

    Sterling Silver whipped Flukie with a coke stare. “What are you, caining or something? Take that boy out and smoke him!”

     

    “See ya,” said Zu-Zu. She gave me that cheek-to-cheek comfort and then moved the crowd.

     

    We stood silent in a triangle, each man beginning to backpedal, drawing lines with their feet.

     

    THEME FROM THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY

     

    It was early morning. We stood recklessly eyeballing one another, our hands covering our guns.

     

    “This feels good,” said Flukie, the zipper open in his baggies, his big head surrounded by shadows under the armpit of a tree.

     

    “What’s up with all this black?” said Sterling Silver, pointing his index finger at me as if it were filled with a shitload of mean bullets.

     

    “Good guys wear black,” I said. “So why you wanna dog me out?”

     

    “It’s the ho we want,” said Flukie. “Give us the ho and we’re outta here lickety-split.”

     

    “With a quickness,” Sterling Silver added. “Otherwise, you’ll get a taste of these silver bullets.”

     

    They took a few more steps back. I spread my cape and showed them my holster, running my fingers over the encased bullets like they were a line of condoms. “Shoot,” I said.

     

    Sterling Silver squinted. Flukie started getting nervous, his hands sweating.

     

    “Let’s go,” said Flukie.

     

    “Why you sweating me?” Sterling Silver asked.

     

    “No more talk,” I said.

     

    The theme music played as we backed up even more, standing with our legs apart. Flukie started checking out me and Sterling Silver, his trigger-finger twitching, sweat on his brow, his clothes sticking to his skin, his Reebok Pumps leaving footprints in the dirt and mud and jacking him up to stand tall. He jerked on his penis some more to stay hard and cool.

     

    “When the music stops, you niggahs are dead,” I said.

     

    The theme music played. Sterling Silver stood where I could barely see him, his big lips singing Michael Jackson’s song “Bad,” his dark figure shaded by trees, his right leg crooked, his black belt sportin’ a silver buckle, his dirty hands moving over the buckle, his black hair cut into a V at the back, his teeth rotten. He stared around for a black hat. When he couldn’t find one, he pulled a bent silver spoon out of his shirt pocket and stuck it in his mouth.

     

    “When the music stops, hasta la vista, babies.”

     

    As the music played, I put a bubble gum cigar in my mouth and chewed on it, quickly working my way down to the butt. Flukie took off his doo-rag and used it to wipe his face, StaSof beginning to roll down the side. He wrung the rag for several minutes and then put it back on his head. He stood erect in muddy waters, acting like a laughing hyena to try to play off his nervousness.

     

    “Watch where you shoot those silver bullets,” Flukie said to Sterling.

     

    “Die, you dog!” Zu-Zu shouted from somewhere.

     

    Flukie looked behind himself to see if there was a cemetery there, a tombstone marked “unknown.”

     

    “What’s the girl name?” he asked.

     

    I picked up a rock and wrote on it with a crayon. Then I threw the rock back down and opened my cape a little more, the butt falling out of my mouth, my eyes squinting, the musical chimes beginning to slow down, Flukie staring at the rock like it was gold, Sterling Silver covering his precious buckle and pretending to be Ready For The World singing “let’s get straight down to business.”

     

    DAY-BREAKING BLUES

     

    A fine-ass woman walked by tripping. “Can’t we have one day where there ain’t no fighting?”

     

    SPUR OF THE MOMENT

     

    “Thing,” said Zu-Zu. She was jealous. She saw the woman checking me out.

     

    PEACE

     

    “I ‘m outta here,” the woman said.

     

    SO WHAT

     

    “Nobody asked for your two cents anyway,” said Zu-Zu.

     

    BLACK, BROWN AND BEIGE

     

    As the chimes winded down, we felt for our guns–Sterling Silver’s face black, Flukie staring at the rock and wiping the glycerin off of his brown lips, Zu-Zu shouting that a gunfight would kill a light-skin niggah like me.

     

    That’s what I liked about Zu-Zu. She was always looking out for me.

     

    “It’s over,” said Zu-Zu. “You don’t stand a chance.”

     

    “Be optimistic,” I said. The line was from The Sounds of Blackness.

     

    “I like their concept!” Zu-Zu shouted. “Very positive! They got some strong black men and women!”

     

    “Yep,” I said. I spat a chaw of gum out and let it hit my boots. I wished that it had been baseball card gum instead. It cost more, but the cigars were stale.

     

    “Hubba-Bubba,” said Zu-Zu, “it looks like this is your last dance. I hear footsteps, niggahs scattin’. It’s all bop to me.”

     

    “Boplicity,” I said. “These niggahs ain’t shit. The situation looks deeper than what it really is. It takes two to tango. Don’t make me over. Me and you got more bounce to the ounce. I can jam. When the popping starts, yoyo get funky.”

     

    I threw Zu-Zu a weak shovel. “Dig,” I said.

     

    “You talking to me?” Zu-Zu asked. Flukie pulled his hand out of his pants.

     

    “Yep.”

     

    “I can’t believe you,” said Zu-Zu. “You’re sugarfree. Instead of being a good guy, you acting like A Rage in Harlem. One minute, you’re nicey-nicey. The next minute, you treat me like my name was Slim.”

     

    “Shut up, bitch!” said Flukie.

     

    Sterling Silver cracked up again, breaking up into pieces, the spoon going shake-shake-shake in his mouth, his cheeks stretched out like he was the Joker. “Tell me,” he said, standing in the dark. “Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?”

     

    Here was a man who gave up being brown and beige.

     

    DARN THAT DREAM

     

    Black must have been all he ever wanted to be.

     

    KOKO

     

    Hot chocolate.

     

    BODY AND SOUL

     

    The mouse and the man.

     

    RUDY A MESSAGE TO YOU

     

    “Two sevens clash,” I said. “Things a come to bump. I’ll wear you to the ball. Rule them, rudie. [I pointed to the melee of cowhands surrounding Sterling Silver.] Be Prince of Darkness, but if you can live, if you can live, if you can live…pray for me, man.”

     

    SILENT PRAYER

     

    Sterling Silver refused to say anything else aloud. Flukie’s fingers started twitching. Zu-Zu sang “Trouble in Mind Blues.” I opened my cape some more, the gun and holster slinging up-and-down my hip. With the wind gusting–my pants flaring out, I could smell Flukie’s Brut cologne and musty armpits, the sweat rolling down the side of his chest, darkening his shirt and wetting the inside of his pants. The showdown was the climax. Flukie felt his gun withdraw. He reached down and pushed it forward. Zu-Zu ducked down. I spat again, as if to dedicate this gunfight to her. Zu-Zu wanted nothing to do with it. She gave me the finger, then began to polish her nails. Sterling Silver cracked up, his gun shaking and vibrating. Flukie couldn’t take it. He drew his gun. I drew my gun and fired a shitload of mean bullets. I heard bullets cussing and fussing and discussing who to fuck up as they went everywhere. Niggahs started crying and dying and falling to the ground like shredded leaves. Zu-Zu crawled into the brush and fell out, the talisman barely able to hang on to her little neck. The trees leaned over to get out of the way of pissed-off bullets. Pandemonium erupted. Ashy niggahs and dusties ran everywhere, forgetting about looking dap. Hot shells played pepper with chicken legs. Sterling Silver’s gun licked his lips like Colonel Sanders taking part in Custard’s last stand. I saw wooden spears go flying by my big head, rapper Tony Scott and Zulu Nation trying to get people to stop the violence. While black people did their war dance, Flukie darted over to the brush, tore the talisman off Zu- Zu’s neck and dragged her pretty head away. I kept trading bullets with Sterling Silver like they were basketball cards. I stopped for a moment to ask him if he had any bubble gum. He hesitated. It was as if he was thinking I’ll-trade-you-Kareem- for-Magic. Kareem, of course, was a playground legend at nearby Power Memorial High when he was Lew Alcindor, but Magic would undoubtedly end up being a collector’s item; it seemed like niggahs had to have it in order to survive AIDS, gang-bangin’ and all that jazz. Zu-Zu screamed for help. She clung to a condom while Flukie shredded her blouse, Zu-Zu reaching back for anything she could grab and hold on to. She uprooted small trees and plants, creating a trail of leaves and murdered flowers. With his gun out of bullets, Flukie stared at Zu-Zu’s breasts like they were milk duds only good for suckers. He yawned when he realized that her nipples were no bigger than a penny. She stuck a root in his mouth. He chewed it until rootbeer dripped out. I aimed my gun at Flukie and tried to smoke him, but I ran out of bullets; they wanted no part of the blood and took off. Sterling Silver cracked up. He thought it was funny. He kissed my bullets goodbye as they crawled away. His dirty skin looked like an earthquake had hit it. He shot at my head. I kneeled down and begged for forgiveness.

     

    “Pardon me,” I said. “My behavior was inexcusable. I was neglected as a child, so I never learned to respect others.”

     

    Zu-Zu was still screaming.

     

    “Take her away!” Sterling Silver shouted. Flukie smacked her, then dragged her off, Zu-Zu’s face bleeding lipstick.

     

    “God,” I said. “You are the man. Help me.”

     

    Sterling Silver squeezed harder on his gun. “You think I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth?” he asked. “What makes you think God is a he? He could be a she. After all, if God was a man, why would he let us fight and kill each other like this?”

     

    “The Lawd works in strange ways,” I said.

     

    “Fuck that,” said Sterling Silver. “We the ones smokin’ one another. It’s called survival. It’s a jungle sometimes. It makes me wonder how I keep from going under.”

     

    He walked up and pushed me in the chest.

     

    “Don’t push me,” I said, “cause I’m close to the edge. I’m bout to [pause] lose my head.”

     

    Sterling Silver pressed his gun against my big lips and fired.

     

    YOU’RE NICKED

     

    He cracked up. I looked at him, blood running down my chin tripping and shit.

     

    “Jesus!” I said.

     

    He stuck the gun inside my mouth and ordered me to suck on it.

     

    “Jesus!” I shouted.

     

    He kicked me in the crotch, put his finger on the trigger and mumbled “pop go da weasel.”

     

    I heard one shot. I closed my eyes and thought “Adios, Amigo.” When I opened them, I saw Sterling Silver sprinting away, busting out. Even his gun was laughing, smoke coming out of his mouth.

     

    I stayed on my knees until I finished my prayer. “Thank you, God,” I said. “But if you were really a woman, you would have taken that gun away from him.”

     

    As I watched Sterling Silver take off, I thought about something Zu-Zu once said: “Man is the shuttle, to whose winding quest and passage through these looms God ordered motion, but ordained no rest.”

     

    I GO CRAZY

     

    “Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Will Downing…”

     

    I sat down at a table in the park and reminiscenced about the time me and Zu-Zu snuck through the back door of a jazz club, bogarted our way through a waiting line, sat down at a non- smoking table and had candlelight dinner with white wine. Zu-Zu had black velvet and said that she never felt so good.

     

    When we left, Zu-Zu stole the China plate for a souvenir. I swiped two cloth napkins, a wine glass, the incense burner and a long black candle.

     

    “Put the candle back,” Zu-Zu said when we got up from the table.

     

    “What for?”

     

    “I don’t like it.”

     

    That was vintage Zu-Zu. She was forever sensitive. She dedicated her life to discussing problems of women, color and money. She was always tripping, always resisting, always crossing the boundaries. Chops once said that the only way he could ever get Zu-Zu was if he whittled her down.

     

    BLUES INSIDE AND OUT

     

    Zu-Zu was 100% woman.

     

    I lowered my head so low while thinking about Zu-Zu that I hit it on the table and cut a small bit of skin off the braille on my forehead. I sung “Heart-Breaking Blues,” now that Zu-Zu was gone.

     

    JUST ME & YOU

     

    DJ Herc has got it going on. He started playing a ballad by Toni, Tony, Tone, and scratching it, both deferring presence and reinforcing it by repeating the same line.

     

    JUST ME & YOU

     

    Ooo-o, baby. It’s just us two. I don’t need nobody else, Zu-Zu.

     

    JUST ME & YOU

     

    “Where you taking me!” Zu-Zu screamed.

     

    “Just keep on walkin’,” said Flukie.

     

    “What we had was good,” Zu-Zu said. She was thinking of both the time when she was free and when she was with me.

     

    JUST ME & YOU

     

    Niggahs around me are talking about the rumor that Mister Magic might play for New York and Knickerbocker coach Pat Riley.

     

    “Bring back the days of Grover Washington Jr.,” I tell them.

     

    JUST ME & YOU

     

    “There’s fifty bucks in it for you if you just cooperate,” Sterling Silver told Zu-Zu.

     

    “Money can’t buy you love, can’t buy you happiness,” ZuZu replied. “The best things in life are free.”

     

    JUST ME & YOU

     

    “Don’t worry about a damn thing,” I said, believing that somehow Zu-Zu could hear me.

     

    JUST ME & YOU

     

    “Whatever you want,” Zu-Zu said. Flukie has got his gun inside her skirt.

     

    “Shut up unless you want to get a shot in the ass.”

     

    JUST ME & YOU

     

    Chops came running up out of nowhere and said that it was up to us now to get Zu-Zu back. [Break]

     

    “Another Marley remix!”

     

    HOLD ON

     

    “To your love,” I said. I dedicated my life and my next move to Zu-Zu. Then I grabbed Chops and moved the crowd, Chops shouting that we were Batman and Robin in Gotham City.

     

    “Somebody phone commissioner Gordon’s office,” I heard some crank say.

     

    IF YOU’RE NOT PART OF THE SOLUTION, YOU’RE PART OF THE PROBLEM

     

    I had to tell that buster off.

     

    EASY DOES IT

     

    Zu-Zu was getting a little annoyed with the way Flukie was handling her. She pulled away and showed him her tits and ass.

     

    “Dickie’s dream,” she said.

     

    “Lady be good,” said Sterling Silver.

     

    “She ain’t nothing but ham n’ eggs,” said Flukie.

     

    “I am what I am,” Zu-Zu said. She sounded like Gloria Gaynor singing “I will survive.”

     

    They finally reached Monk at the Rumsey Playfield, and he checked her out closely.

     

    “I want a little girl,” he said.

     

    “Swell,” said Zu-Zu. “I’m about to be raped by Lester Young.”

     

    He slapped her, and she spat in his face.

     

    He pushed her down to the ground. “Since you like using yo’ mouth so much, why don’t you try this?”

     

    He unzipped his pants and showed her his gun.

     

    “You must be kidding,” Zu-Zu said. “I’m not your shoe shine boy.”

     

    Monk did a moten swing but missed her. “You lucky,” he said. “Usually I never miss.”

     

    Monk whistled through his fingers to summon his boys. Then he sat down and waited. He tried to make the mind and body one like Buddha.

     

    FOUR AND MORE

     

    Monk’s boys rushed in, carrying guns and poker cards, and sat down beside Zu-Zu. They roped her and gagged her mouth with a dirty bandanna.

     

    “Suck me until I tell you to stop,” the bandanna told ZuZu. Zu-Zu sang a lonesome lullaby, hoping that Monk would go ahead and doze off since he was trying to reach the spirit world anyway.

     

    Monk opened his eyes. “That’s not the kind of spirit world I’m trying to reach,” he said. He asked his boys if they hit the drugstore like he told them. They busted open three cases of Old Milwaukee and a carton of cigarettes. Monk grinned from ear-to- ear, then swung at the long ponytail of one of his boys.

     

    “Boss, you missed,” said another one of his boys.

     

    “So I did,” said Monk. “Tsk, tsk. What of it?”

     

    Ben Hodges sneaked away, holding his big head, in order to get himself back together.

     

    RUBBER NECK

     

    As we run through the park, me and Chops feel our heads wobbling as if they were on necks made of latex.

     

    “You think we’ll ever find her?” Chops asked.

     

    “Be optimistic,” I said. I couldn’t help wondering where Chops had been all this time.

     

    Chops couldn’t run for long. He stopped to listen to a fat lady singing. “It’s over,” Chops said. “We’re too late.”

     

    “Shut up and run!” I shouted.

     

    “I’m dead,” Chops said.

     

    I snatched his big head and tossed it forward. “Run,” I said.

     

    Chops sighed. “I’m tired of running,” he said. “You go ahead.”

     

    I called him a “rudie.” Then I moved the crowd without him.

     

    MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH

     

    Monk and the boys sat around and played poker like they were waiting for Loop Garoo Kid to ride out of the sunset from Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down. As legend tells it, the infamous Loop was a bullwhacker so arrogant and unfeeling that he would stamp “ship to Thailand” on the rears of virgin women, then demand their coin for postage.

     

    Loop was an icon for Monk, but an anti-hero for Zu-Zu. “Why don’t you just get on with it?” she asked. They readied themselves like musicians in a jazz set, home on the range.

     

    Monk poked out his lips to play alto sax. Flukie was on the serpent, his hands inside his pants. Sterling Silver on bass, booming in Zu-Zu’s face while talking yin-yang (Chinese principles of good and bad borrowed from Confucius). Ranchhand Arthur Walker on dumb-piano, standing silent behind the rest of the homeboys. Black cowboy Bill Pickett on guitar, plucking strands of Zu-Zu’s hair, his doggie Spradley eating dry Tang nearby. Cattle rustler Isom Dart did drums, musical glasses, nose-flute, Moog synthesizer, small-pipes, bazooka and glass harmonica. He tried repeatedly to go straight but was unable to give up his addiction to trying anything. Hodges got on the horn, talking fast between breaths and clutching his long rifle. Nat Love, better known as “Deadwood Dick,” liked virginals but agreed to take a mouth-organ.

     

    Zu-Zu sat tied up like Mary Fields, a.k.a. Stagecoach Mary. She clenched her hands, making them shake like fists of fury.

     

    The men all paused. They knew that they was looking good. They were holding on to their guns. Their hair was fierce. And, they saw themselves riding in Zu-Zu’s coach like it was a copus limousine.

     

    Pickett restarted the action by snatching crumbs of caked-on makeup off Zu-Zu’s face.

     

    “Leave it on!” Love demanded. “The more makeup and mascara, the merrier.”

     

    Hodges called her “painted woman,” thinking he was clever. It wasn’t clever or even ornery, but the name stuck.

     

    Zu-Zu spat in their faces. Monk walked over and swung at her.

     

    “Boss, you missed,” said Dart.

     

    “So I did,” Monk said. “Tsk, tsk. What of it?”

     

    Love’s lips were bleeding. He dashed for a washcloth, blood falling to the ground.

     

    “You popped him good, boss,” said Walker.

     

    Monk threw a can of beer and spat in Zu-Zu’s face. “He’ll be back.”

     

    The men all paused like they didn’t know if he would come back. Meantime, Monk realized that Zu-Zu had managed to spit and talk and sing with her big mouth gagged. He was pissed.

     

    “Who put that weak bandanna over her mouth?” Monk asked. He untied the knot and threw the thing away.

     

    “Give it back to me!” Zu-Zu shouted. “It’s dirty, but it’s good.”

     

    The bandana cried tears of joy. “Look at me,” it said. “Did you see the way she sucked me? I’m all wet, and she wants me back. I don’t know what to say. I guess I’m all choked up.”

     

    “You’ll be choked, period, if you don’t shut yo’ mouth,” Flukie said. He was always the violent one.

     

    “Say you love me,” said Zu-Zu. She cut loose from the ropes and retrieved the bandanna.

     

    “Silence, painted woman!” said Monk. He walked over and rubbed the bandanna against her face. “If you want the bandanna, you can have it. Wipe the makeup off your face before I steal your riches.”

     

    “No!” Love screamed, running back to the gang. “Why give her the opportunity to be herself, a woman. Let her stay an artificial nigger. Love her the way she is, or leave her and let another man dominate her.”

     

    Monk stretched his face and thought of “Teacher” back in Shaolin:

     

    “Why the tonsure?” Monk asked.

     

    His teacher tossed a porcelain saucer, making it skip along the surface of the drinking water in the well. “They want you to be like Mike,” he grudgingly said. “It is not my will, but rather the will of the school.” Teacher flung another plate, once again making it skip along the water before breaking on the ground.

     

    “Why must I emulate Michael Jordan?” Monk asked.

     

    “You cannot leave the 35th chamber until you do,” Teacher said. He threw a sword, making it skip along the water.

     

    “But Teacher…”

     

    “The goal of the 35th chamber is submission!” shouted Teacher. “If you cannot submit, then you must go!”

     

    Monk kneeled by Teacher’s sandals. “Yes, Teacher. I beg forgiveness. I kissed the very ground you walk on. I shall do what the school asks of me.”

     

    “Um.” Teacher hurled a little Japanese girl and made her skip along the water.

     

    Monk opened his eyes and stood up. “That’s live!” Monk said. “How did you do that, homie?”

     

    “This ain’t Kung Fu,” Teacher said. “Quit asking so many questions.”

     

    Monk grabbed a piece of porcelain and glass, waving the sharp edges at Teacher’s throat. “Tell me, or I’m going to tell the school how many dishes you’ve broken.”

     

    “Okay, okay, okay,” said Teacher. “But after I tell you, I never want to see yo’ face again.”

     

    Monk sat back down while Teacher meditated and spat out the secret. “Speed, plus pressure, allows the object to skip, that is, pass over the waters.”

     

    Monk rose and kicked Teacher in the shin. “Thanks,” said Monk. “I promise not to tell the school that you’re the nigger busboy they’ve been looking for.”

     

    “Hey man, where you going?” Teacher asked.

     

    “To Harlem!” Monk shouted.

     

    “Haarlem in the Netherlands?” Teacher asked.

     

    “In America!” Monk shouted. “I’m catching a ride with that honky Christopher Columbus!” Monk sprinted away to be a part of New York immigration.

     

    SHOW ME THE WAY TO GO HOME

     

    Walker wanted nothing to do with what he thought was going to be a cosmetic make-over.

     

    “Follow the travelin’ light to Forty Second Street,” Monk said. When Walker turned away, Monk swung at him.

     

    “Boss, you missed,” said Love.

     

    “So I did,” said Monk. “Tsk, tsk. What of it?”

     

    Dart was holding his crotch in pain. “What you hit me for?” he asked.

     

    “I never liked you anyway,” Monk said. “You remind me of a busboy I once knew. Now shut up and tie her up real good. Speed, plus pressure, will only make matters worse. She’s deliberately trying to skip the torment. She’s spitting in our faces in hopes of making us mad so that she can’t be broken.”

     

    The homeboys all looked at each other. “Did you give him the right pack of cigarettes?” Love asked Pickett.

     

    “I gave him Kool,” Pickett said.

     

    “Then why is he tripping like this?” Dart asked.

     

    “What is this?” Monk asked. “A meeting in the ladies room? Hurry up and rope her before she gets loose! Brand her “government inspected,” then let’s move the crowd and herd some more young black girls before the other gangs corner the market!”

     

    Sterling Silver ordered Flukie not to budge. “Our money first!” Sterling Silver insisted.

     

    “I don’t owe you nothing!” said Monk. “Get going before you get hurt!”

     

    “I’m going home to momma,” said Flukie. He took off.

     

    “Look at that spook go!” The boys all laughed heartily, Monk busted up.

     

    “We’ll be back,” Sterling Silver promised. He turned and chased after Flukie, Spradley barking at him.

     

    “Let’s get out of here before those lugheads come back,” Monk said. “Hide the girl by the telephone pole and tall trees lined up over there. She should feel at home with all those dicks standing in line.”

     

    Monk liked hangin’ with the homeboys because they always laughed at his jokes.

     

    FEE FI FO FUM

     

    Monk enjoyed being a giant. He strutted towards nirvana.

     

    GIANT STEPS

     

    Making impressions. Monk improvised his ascension. He was live at the village vanguard. He was Soultrane. Meditations. Africa/Brass. “One of my favorite things,” said Love “Supreme.”

     

    Monk climbed a steep hill, yelling for the new DJ, Shep Pettibone, to remix his life. Pettibone started scratching Blue Magic and B B & Q’s “(I’m a) Dreamer” into Smoke City’s “Dreams” and “(We’re Living) In The World of Fantasy.” That’s how bad he was. The niggah could cut-up. He was better than Clivilles and Cole put together. He could jam on vinyl like Michael Jackson. He could take four Gemini 1200 turntables and mix them all at once, without using scratch or brake pads. As Angela Bofill would say, the boy was “too tough.” Shep was the only DJ that Monk ever liked.

     

    “Let’s go,” Monk said. He wanted to see his boy spin. Off in the distant horizon, Pettibone broke out with a megamix.

     

    “This stuff is really fresh…”

     

    SINGLE LIFE

     

    “I’m living the single, single, single–life!” I kept running, despite the fact that I was all by myself, in search of Zu-Zu. I could hear the DJ flipping the tracks like it was nothing.

     

    JUST A TOUCH OF LOVE

     

    “All I want to do before we leave is feel her breasts, see if she’s a milk-giver,” said Nat Love.

     

    ALL AROUND THE WORLD

     

    “I can’t find my baby.” I was frustrated.

     

    NO ONE’S GONNA LOVE YOU

     

    Zu-Zu spat in Love’s face.

     

    “When did you first spit on a niggah?” Pickett asked. “Do you remember the time?”

     

    “Send me forget-me-nots,” said Zu-Zu, “to help me to remember.”

     

    PUMP IT

     

    A brother cheered as I raced past him.

     

    U CAN’T TOUCH THIS

     

    Zu-Zu spat in Pickett’s face. “To Sir with Love,” she said.

     

    CONTROL

     

    “I need her alive,” said Monk.

     

    CAN’T STOP

     

    I told an old man, “I’m looking at you, you’re looking at me.”

     

    The old man chuckled. “I’m walking down the street watching ladies go by, watching you.”

     

     

  • The Titles Sequence From the Adventures Of Lucky Pierre

    Robert Coover

    Department of English
    Brown University

     

    (Cantus.) In the darkness, softly. A whisper becoming a tone, the echo of a tone. Doleful, a soft incipient lament blowing in the night like a wind, like the echo of a wind, a plainsong wafting distantly through the windy chambers of the night, wafting unisonously through the spaced chambers of the bitter night, alas, the solitary city, she that was full of people, thus a distant and hollow epiodion laced with sibilants bewailing the solitary city.

     

    And now, the flickering of a light, a pallor emerging from the darkness as though lit by a candle, a candle guttering in the cold wind, a forgotten candle, hid and found again, casting its doubtful luster on this faint white plane, now visible, now lost again in the tenebrous absences behind the eye.

     

    And still the hushing plaint, undeterred by light, plying its fricatives like a persistent woeful wind, the echo of woe, affanato, piangevole, a piangevole wind rising in the fluttering night through its perfect primes, lamenting the beautiful princess become an unclean widow, an emergence from C, a titular C, tentative and parenthetical, the widow then, weeping sore in the night, the candle searching the pale expanse for form, for the suggestion of form, a balm for the anxious eye, weeping she weepeth.

     

    The glimmering light, the light of the world, now firmer at the center, flickers unsteadily at the outer edges, implications of tangible paraboloids amid the soft anguish, the plainsong exploring its mode, third position athwart, for among all her lovers there are none to comfort her, and the eye finding a horizon, discovering at last a distant geography of synclinal nodes, barren, windblown, now blurring, now defined.

     

    Now defined: a strange valley, brighter at its median and upon the crests than down the slopes, the hint there perhaps of vegetation, like a grove of pines buried in the snow, and still the chant, epicedial, sospirante, she is driven like a hunted animal, C to C and F again, she findeth no rest. How many have died here?

     

    The plainchant, blowing through the gloomy valley like an afflicted widow, continues to mourn the solitary city. Overtaken amidst the narrow defiles. Continues to grieve, ignoring the gradual illuminations, a grief caught in secret acrostics, gone into captivity. All her gates are desolate. The eye courses the valley to its yawning embouchure, past a scattering of obscure excrescences with bright tips, courses the dark defile to its radical, this pinched and woebegone pit, mourning its uprooted yew, her priests sigh, her virgins are afflicted. Gravis. Innig. In bitterness, yes con amarezza, she is with bitterness.

     

    Beyond this gnurled foramen, crumpled crater too afflicted to expose its core to chant or candle, lies a quieter brighter field, yet one ringed about with indices of a multitude of transgressions, tight with uncertainty and attenuation, and, as it were, mere propylaeum to the ruptured conventicle of extravagance and savagery just beyond, just below…

     

    Ah! what a sight, this wild terrain cleft violently end to end and exposed like an open grave! The light flares and wanes, flutters, as though caught in a sudden gale, as though eclipsed by a flight of harts. O woe, her princes are denied a pasture, nature is convulsed, and a terrible commotion, sundered by plosives, sounds all about. Angoscioso and disperato, rising and falling intervals in the tremulous matinal gloom.

     

    Black bars radiate from this turbulent arena, laid on the surrounding hills like the stripes of a rod in the day of wrath, and at the end of the black bars, like whipstocks for the maimed: letters. Flickering neumes. VAGINAL ORIFICE. LABIA MAJORA. And not a propylaeum: a PERINEUM. ANUS. Alas, despised because they have seen her nakedness. C to C and F again. Like the echo of letters, the shadow of codes, the breath of labia, yea, she sigheth, and turneth backward, a simple canticle, notations writ on the ass end of a kneeling woman, this kneeling woman, this ass end: URETHRA, CLITORIS, black indications quavering in this ghostly light, the light of the world, the light of a solitary city at the end of night, the coldest hour. Crying: her filthiness is in her skirts.

     

    Between the spreading intrados of the massive thighs, below the keystone cunt, all barbed and petaled, through a filigree of letters suspended mysteriously in the archway–FLESHY PILLOW, now sharp, now diffuse–beyond and through all this, we see the distant teats, hanging in the wind, blowing in the dawn wind, oh, therefore she came down wonderfully, her last end forgotten, heavy teats ready for milking, their fat nipples swollen with promise. They sway in the wind, and something is indeed falling from them, yes, like frozen milk: snow! snow is falling, falling from the big teats, snow is swirling in the bitter wind, under the pale corrugated belly of the wintry dawn, blowing out of the ANUS and the VAGINAL CANAL, it is snowing on the city.

     

    O Lord, behold my affliction! A vast desolation, the city, the afflicted city, far as the eye can see, stones heaped up to the end of the earth, lying dead in the winter, dead in the storm, whose hands could have raised up so much emptiness? the enemy hath magnified himself. Yet decrescendo this, spreading his hand on her pleasant things, diminuendo, the intervals blurred now by the grinding whine of low-geared motors, for in spite of everything dim towers, rubytipped, rise obstinately through the blowing snow, a multitude of lamps blink red and green in fugal progressions down below, chimneys puff out black inversions and raise a defiant clamor of colliding steel, and the snow itself is swallowed up by a million dark alleys, just as their fearful obscurities are obliterated by the blinding snow.

     

    Through the city, through the snow, under the gray belly of metropolitan morning, walks a man, walks the shadow of a solitary man, like the figure in pedestrian-crossing signs, a photogram of a walking man, caught in an empty white triangle, a three-sided barrenness, walking alone in a life-like parable of empty triads, between a pair of dotted lines, defined as it were by his own purpose: forever to walk between these lines, snow or no snow, taking his risks–or rather, perhaps that is a pedestrian- crossing sign, blurred by the blowing snow, and yes, the man is just this moment passing under it, trammeling the imaginary channel, the dotted straight and narrow, at right angles. There he is, huddled miserably against the snow and wind and the early hour, shrinking miserably into his own wraps, meeting the pedestrians, those shadows of men making their dotted crossings, at right angles, meeting some head on as well, brushing through the cold and restless crowds, as horns sound and airbrakes wheeze, sirens wail, all her people sigh, they seek bread, the last whimpering echo of a plainsong guttering like a candle in the morning traffic.

     

    His hat jammed down upon his ears and scowling brows, his overcoat lapels turned up to the hatbrim, scarf around his chin, he is all but buried in his winter habit. Only his eyes stare forth, aglitter with vexation and the resolution to press on, and below them, his nose, pinched and flared with indignation, his pink cheeks puffed out, blowing frosty clouds of breath through chattering teeth. His mouth, under his moustache, is drawn into a rigid pucker around his two front teeth, my god, it is cold, what am I doing out here? His hands are stuffed deep in his overcoat pockets, and poking forth from his thick herringbone wraps like a testy one-eyed malcontent: his penis, ramrod stiff in the morning wind, glistening with ice crystals, livid at the tip, batting aggressively against the sullen crowds, this swirling mass of dark bodies too cold for identities, struggling through the snow, their senses harrowed, intent solely on keeping their brains from freezing.

     

    Oh, my poor doomed ass, I’m in real trouble, he whimpers to himself as he trundles along, tears running down his cheeks, teeth clattering, frozen snot in his moustache, up against it, expletives the only thing that can keep him warm, that he can pretend will keep him warm, shouldering his way through a thickening stupefaction, sidestepping the suicides, those are the lucky ones, man, not you, who gives a shit, all running down anyway, why do you have to play the fucking hero?

     

    He walks through winter like that, wheezing and whistling, feeling sorry for himself, aching with cold, sick of keeping it up anymore, but scared to die, picking them up, putting them down, hup two three, attaboy, yes, there he goes, a living legend, who knows, maybe the last of his kind, seen through a whirl of blowing snow, through a scrim of messages, an unfocused word-filter, lamenting the world’s glacial entropy and the snow down his neck, bobbing along in this cold sea of pathetic mourners, this isocephalic compaction of misery and affliction, the dying city and he in it, whimpering: piss on it! yet refusing to quit, refusing to tip over and get trampled into the slush, and so celebrating consciousness after all, in his own wretched way, the man of the hour, the one and only: Lucky Pierre.

     

    The swish and blast of the passing traffic modulate into a kind of measureless rhythm, not a pulsation so much as an aimless rising and falling, sometimes blunted, sometimes drawn brassily forth. Subways rumble underfoot, airdrills rattle in alleys, and there’s the thunder of jets overhead like occasional celestial farts. Tipped wastebaskets spill bottles, newspapers, pamphlets, dead fetuses, old shoes. Cars, spinning gracefully in the icy streets, smash decorously into each other, effecting dampened cymbals, sending heads and carcasses flying through their shattering windshields and crumpling into snowbanks. Above the crowds, a billboard asks: WHAT IS MY PRICK DOING IN YOUR CUNT, LIZZIE? Six blocks away and around the corner, a theater marquee replies: FUCKING ME! FUCKING ME! O SO NICELY! Smoke rises from a bombed-out building, and a crowd has gathered, warming themselves by the ruins. Distant crackle: trouble in the city. Somewhere.

     

    A little old lady, leaning on a cane, hesitates at a curb, peers up at the light, now changing from green to red. Her spectacles are frosted over, icycles hang from her nose, her free hand trembles at her breast, clutching an old frayed shawl. The man, trying to catch the light, comes charging up, but not in time, skids to a stop, glissandos right into the old lady’s humped-over backside, bowling her head over heels into the street with a jab of his stiff penis. There is a brief plaint like the squawk of a turkey as a refuse truck runs her down. Old as she was, it’s still all a little visceral, but soon enough the traffic rolling by has flattened her out, her vitals blending into the dirty slush, her old rags soaking up the rest.

     

    –Pity, someone mutters.

     

    –Life’s tough.

     

    –Where’s the street department? Goddamn it, they’re never around when you need them.

     

    The light changes, the old lady is trampled away. There’s the blur of hurrying feet, kicking, splattering, through the blood, slush, and snow. Thousands of feet. Going all directions. Whush, crump, crump, stomp. Crushing butts, condoms, fishheads, gumwrappers. Someone’s pocketwatch. Beer cans. Crump, crump, crump, a kind of rasper continuo. Windup toys and belt buckles. Bicycle sprocket. Ticket stubs. All those frozen feet, shuffling along, whush, whush, almost whispering: That’s right, Maggie, lift your arse and whush, crump, crump, tickle my balls! Oh christ, it’s cold! It’s too fucking cold!

     

    Listen, get your mind off it. Think of something else. E.g. comma green places. Where it’s warm exclamation mark. That’s it. Chasing about in a meadow at the edge of a forest, how about that? Come on, give it a try, make it yet, hup two three, she runs behind a tree, peeks out, showing her ass. He bounds over fallen trunks, crackling branches and dry leaves. Splashing through a brook. Up mossy rocks. Delicious stink. Yeah, good, moving along now, keep it up colon. Cavorting in soft grass. Some kind of music…

     

    (Front end of a heavy bus, barreling through the city street, spitting up snow, whipping it into black slush: BLAAAAT!)

     

    Cantilena maybe, piped on a syrinx, that’s good, Cissy’d like that, all’ antico, right. Her handsome ass aglow in the sun. He licks it, tongues her cunt. Yum. She kicks him, springs away. They circle each other. Hah! She scampers off, he chases, catches her, they roll about, flutes fading, rest. Mmm. Silent now in the sunny green meadow, a sweet heady peace, street sounds diminishing to nothing more than a playful wind in the fading forest. Yes, good. He pokes his nose in her cunt again, nuzzles dreamily about.

     

    (Sudden roar of the bus, splattering through snow, blackened with soot, its windows greasy, foglights glowing dully. City streets, buildings, people, traffic, go whipping by.)

     

    Sshh! Getting there! Twelve girls now, a pretty anthology, in the sunny meadow, yes, twelve of them, standing on their heads, back to back, butt to butt, legs spread like the petals of a flower. He hovers, admiring the corolla, many-stemmed, each with its own style and stigma, the variegated pappi blowing in the soft summer breeze; then he drops down to nibble playfully at the keels, suck at the stamens, slip in and out of septa. Distantly: the sound of muted trumpets–

     

    BllaaaAAAAAAATTT! He jumps back to the curb, but too late, a bus bearing dawn on him–THWOCK!–whacks his prick as it goes roaring by: he screams with pain, spins with the impact, and is bowled into the crowd, now crossing with the light, spilling a dozen of them. He catches a glimpse of the bus gunning it on down the street, an advertisement spread across its rear: I CAN SEE HER CUNT, GUSSY! and what looks like the eye of a pig in the back window, staring at him. The crowds, rushing and tumbling over him, curse and weep:

     

    –What is it like, Nelly?

     

    He hobbles to the edge of the flow, nursing his bruised cock, looking for a reason to go on, looking for something to wrap it in. He finds a bum sleeping under a newspaper and appropriates page one. Over a photo of the Mayor at a public execution of three small children, believed to be the offspring of urban guerrillas, is the headline: A LARGE HAIRY MOUTH SUCKING HIS PURPLE PRICK.

     

    Aw hey listen: fuck it. Quit. Yeah.

     

    He sits on the curb, snuffling, huddled miserably over his battered rod, trying to coax green dreams out of his iced-up lobes, feeling the snow creep up his ass, no sorrow like my sorrow: bitter snatch of the diatonic aubade. Something seems to leave him, some spring released, a slipping away…

     

    No! he cries in sudden panic, leaping up. Forget that shit, fade it out, no more messages, pick ’em up and put ’em down, hup two three four, he’s running along now, prick waggling frantically, stiffarming the opposition, recocking the spring, leaping the lifeless, close now, yeah, central heating, all that, gonna make it–oof! sorry, ma’am!

     

    –Good morning, L.P.!

     

    –Good morning, love! (Whew!) After you!

     

    –Thank you, Mr. Peters!

     

    –Morning, sir! Thank you, sir!

     

    Ah, damn it, is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?

     

    o o o o o

     

     

  • Obsession

    Kathy Acker

     
     

    My Father

     

    Kathy says, For finally my father was coming back. As soon as the night turned black as the cunts of witches, he walked through our door.

     

    Once he had settled down inside, with his pint and slippers, the cat nodding drowsily against his shoulder, he told me that he hadn’t brought back what he had promised me, my own whip. Instead he had come back with a non-white brat, outcast, orphan.

     

    This devil’s child who was nameless was a pale, skinny male. His hairs were blacker than a witch’s vagina. When I smelled him, there was a reek of sheepdog who had never been taught anything.

     

    I spent the night, sleepless, weeping into my pillow, and so did he.

     

    I wasn’t a good child. Or, the same thing, they (the males in my family) told me that I wasn’t a good child. I didn’t know how to react to this identity, this reification, other than by throwing my badness, which my shyness always wants to keep hidden, into their faces.

     

    But openly I loved the night. Whenever it was black, outside, I talked to those animals who sat around me and I knew they had languages and I began to learn their languages.

     

    Then father tried to make the gipsy brat into something less than outcast by giving him the name of a child who had already died. Day after day I watched the brat. Unlike me he wasn’t bad because he was being told that he was bad; nameless, from as deep as his self or sea went, all he wanted to do was to spit at the world. The human world that seemed nonhuman. I admired his ability; it didn’t matter to him, as nothing mattered to him, that I did.

     

    Even though he was only six years old, he would have stolen everything from this father’s house, but there was nowhere to go with it.

     

    Though I never spoke to him openly, I would have done the same thing.

     

    My father loved his false son. Hindley, my father’s real son, hated the new Heathcliff.

     

    My father knew that I saw that all that I couldn’t and wanted to do, Heathcliff did. “Why can’t you be a good child, Kathy?”

     

    “Why can’t you be a good father, father?”

     

    Outside The Family

     

    Soon after these questions had taken place, Kathy’s father died. He would never return.

     

    Both Heathcliff and Kathy grieved. Hindley didn’t give a shit because his father had hated him.

     

    Heathcliff and Kathy sobbed out each other’s eyes, then ate each other’s tongues.

     

    Hindley (Hideous) inHeirited the House so Kathy and Heathcliff moved out into tracks beyond and for them the human world went away. Their only adulthood, before begun, was gone. The world gone, there was only nature.

     

    The days of grief, the days without shelter, announce to all old maids and to all those who are maimed and who maim that the actual churches are open.

     

    Remained outside. Remained outside the family. How Hindley became the father, for the true father is nowadays President Bush, so all the rest are orphans.

     

    This was how Kathy began to want all that lay outside: nature and, most violent of all, the sun. Crags who wait under the sun.

     

    Kathy announced, “I will not come.” Heathcliff never announced anything. Heathcliff was naturally unapproachable.

     

    In The Beginning, Heathcliff Didn’t Matter To Me

     

    Kathy says,

     

    “One day I will never come back and on that day I will keep coming back and coming back.”

     

    My nurse’s name was Ellen.

     

    “Hurry, Ellen, hurry. “I know exactly where I want to go. I want to go to where a colony of moorgame are settled; blue and purple feathers more aflame with green than any sun; I want to see whether they have made their nests yet; I want to see.”

     

    The sun.

     

    My nurse replied that the birds didn’t breed on this side of Penniston Crags.

     

    “Oh yes, they do. I’ve been there.”

     

    “You’re too young to travel.”

     

    “Only a little farther, I’ve got to go a little further than I’ve ever been, climb to a certain hillock that I’ll know, pass by a bank that I’ve smelled, leaves of certain rust and one pile of shit, I know there are tracks, and by the time I get to the other side without noticing it, I will have met the birds.” Going to the other side and not dying. Whether or not I died.

     

    My nurse didn’t bother getting angry with me because she knew I was wild. Not wild enough. She just sighed as if she was swallowing her breath and whispered the only whisper of a socially good woman: “It’s a pity that you’re never going to be content.”

     

    I didn’t hear anything. Not Heathcliff.

     

    The next morning the first thing I heard was the outside. I woke up to the shrieking rain. The winds begin to tear. Juice ran down the insides of my legs. Don’t forget? How can I ever, even when dead? For I’m always holding an orphan’s hand.

     

    I’m Perverse

     

    In order to complete his bushy family, Hideous found himself (somewhere) a child bride so that there would be a mommy and a daddy. Substitute mommy and daddy more than equal mommy and daddy.

     

    The child bride, like most humans, was a substitute, too, because, being frail and weak and a good wife, she actively detested Heathcliff even more than her husband (did) and threw him out of the house every time Heathcliff returned to snatch some food.

     

    At this moment, Kathy began to act as her parents wanted her to. Precisely: instead of being with Heathcliff, she stayed home. Then blamed her parents for making her and Heathcliff separate.

     

    Was she, like me, scared of men?

     

    So now she had reason to detest Hideous. Cliche: “Dear Heathcliff,” she wrote, “I’m acting in such a way that the only relation we can have is that you’ll reject me. Once you’ve fully rejected me, I’ll be able to begin to love you.”

     

    By refusing to run away with Heathcliff, Kathy began to gain all for which she longed: to perversely enter into being with Heathcliff.

     

    Or: now that innocence was dead, she and Heathcliff again began to be the same through books. Living with her parents, Kathy was forced to go to school. Heathcliff was going nowhere outside. Kathy taught Heathcliff how to read; this teaching (creating hierarchy) poisoned her love, for identity is shit in the midst of childhood.

     

    The kingdom of childhood is the kingdom of lust. Books, by replicating this or any phenomenon, cause perversity.

     

    I’m not trying to destroy B, but to destroy how I continuously think about B, think about how our bodies burn together, by repeating these thoughts perversely.

    The Unspeakable

     

    Kathy says:

     

    Where the sun and the black sky are.

     

    They now consider Heathcliff less than a person. “Heath,” my new mother said, “if you must use the servants’ bathroom, do not do so during working hours.” But being nonhuman Heathcliff doesn’t need a bathroom.

     

    I don’t care about Heathcliff. Who will I pick to be? A person whose canopy is that velvet in which the stars lie. My family can kick the dogs like Heathcliff out of the house every day of the week.

     

    I can’t bear being without Heathcliff. Today Heathcliff and I ran into the fields which are wild. We’re never going to come back. I don’t want my brain to hurt and, when my hand is stuck up my cunt, my fingers are all full of juices. I want to be in the wild forever and I want to be Heathcliff and I don’t care about anything else. See. I’m breaking free.

     

    When I’ve broken free, there’ll be no more such thing as loneliness which torments me all the time. Alone, without loneliness: all there are around me are leaves and branches and winds and fly through my hairs and everything living and moving each other and each vision, thing seen, is another living thing and I’m never going back to being lonely where I now am

     

    I know what the society (my family) (here) is to which I’m never going to return. The inside of the family is a maze whose entrances and exits are lost to those caught in its entrails. The family is foul; garbage lies in its streets. Street sign, NO HUMANS EXIST HERE.

     

    I can’t be other than Heathcliff because to be other than Heathcliff is to be human. Example: Hindley who is only himself beats up his servants or dogs who are all the same to him. His– this society is foul because it’s based on hypocrisy: it doesn’t recognize violence or death. Hindley tells me that he loves me and so, places me in his labyrinth. Hindley owns the house or labyrinths in which he’s also inside; every street or portion of this maze is foul, not by hypocrisy, but by possession.

     

    I must die for Heathcliff so that I’m no longer a human. Only an outcast. Today the witch went to see the sea because she had to hear someone else’s voice. There was a dead person. The only way to raise the person from death is via the cunt. As it crashed waves against the rocks, the ocean began tossing up tiny fish and the swept, repeatedly, into the witch’s crotch. The sun fell down into the water. And I have made my allegiances, although all allegiances are hell. I saw two seals. The only way is to annihilate all that’s been written. That can be done only through writing. Such destruction leaves all that is essential intact; resembling the processes of time, such destruction allows only the traces of death to subsist.

     

    I’m a dead person. Heathcliff says, “Down, dog, down.”

     

    Story: The Beginning of the World

     

    When the servant who was a FUNDAMENTALIST complained to his master that he and his wife never went to church to eat Jesus’ flesh, his master punished him by making his, the master’s, daughter go to bed without supper.

     

    Immediately Kathy rebelled by running away with Heathcliff, again, up into the moors. This time they stayed in the beginning of the world.

     

    Time began here, outside, where there were no humans. They wandered on the moors for days. They’re only safe where everything’s public.

     

    On the other side of the moors, they found a house similar to theirs. Because Kathy’s nature was perverse or fucked-up, she wanted to be wild and to be part of society. In this total freedom, she said to her friend, “Let’s find out what the inside of this house looks like.”

     

    They climbed down the crags, then peered into two of the windows. They gazed upon a rich boy and a girl, who were their age, dismembering a puppy.

     

    Heathcliff said, “They aren’t nice people, those who live inside of houses.”

     

    Kathy wanted to destroy the beginning of this sight or world. Heathcliff would do whatever Kathy wanted. Listen. “The name of that which is forbidden is Heaven,” Kathy said. “Do it to me now.”

     

    Heathcliff said he would do whatever Kathy wanted.

     

    “Listen. I, Kathy, am dreaming that sex which is the witch’s den. The den is located in the true house.”

     

    Rattles, colored wheels, amniotic rags, and an excessive number of teeth were stigmatizing all outcasts.

     

    “I knew that there was a place where everything would take place. I started searching for that place.

     

    “I was inside a house. Leaving some room, I began looking for tracks, a smell, these are the indications of the way to get to the room I want to reach. I dream, and have always dreamt, of water.

     

    “The armier Arnaud Gelis has said, for we do not need authorities but we do need information, that the dead, with whom he had the unfortunate habit of consorting, wanted all the men and women who were living to, also, be dead. Whether or not you admire this sort of thing. Doves, owls, weasels, snakes, lizards, hares, and all other animals who suck on the milk of cows, goats, women are the associates of witches. Behind milk lies blood; so, behind every each witch, all the dead.

     

    “Between two rooms, one is always walking to another room. I passed through a series of rooms.

     

    “Finally I came to thin metal stairs which descended downwards.

     

    “According to our Inquisitors who are only able to see the material world, the claviceps purpurea, a mushroom which grows out of rye, causes ergotism whose symptoms are cramp-like convulsions, epilepsy, and a loss of consciousness; ergot causes abortion and is anti-hemorrhagic. During such losses of human consciousness, visions can appear.

     

    “I stood on the edge of the black metal stairs’ first step.

     

    “A mushroom that grows near fir trees and birches, amanita muscaria, causes both ecstasy and lameness.

     

    “I was standing in the middle of the fight of stairs.

     

    “In China, the name for amanita muscaria is toad mushroom. Both toads and witches are crippled. In the fourteenth century, Billia la Castagna kept a large toad under her bed whom she nurtured on bread, cheese, and meat so that she could make a potion out of its shit.

     

    “I walked down metal staircase after metal staircase, descending. After long descents, I saw a floor that was stacks of wood shelves, even cabinets, all filled with books, between some of the shelves openings just large enough for a human to fit into, all around the spiralling stairs.

     

    “Finally I descended to a huge room where there was red somewhere. This room, which was where I had wanted to reach, was the library of the witch. I felt scared. I was at the bottom.”

     

    As they were looking into the house and making fun of the rich children, Heathcliff realized that it was time to leave. Starting to run, he pulled Kathy’s hand in such a way that she tripped.

     

    A dog sat on and ripped her ankle while his purple, huge tongue half-fell out of his lips and these pendant dripped with bloody slaver.

     

    Since Kathy was missing, Heathcliff told Kathy’s family about what had just taken place.

     

    Heathcliff’s Story of the Rich House

     

    The children are in their house, doing their homework. These children consist of a young boy and a young girl.

     

    The young girl was assigned a paper on Edgar Allan Poe. But she doesn’t have enough time to complete her assignment.

     

    In the classroom, the teacher talks. Teach is paying attention to many, almost all the other students and the girl can’t manage to interrupt to say that she didn’t have time to do her paper. She runs out of the school.

     

    Being a good girl, she goes home, back to her room, and works on the Poe paper incessantly, cutting and cutting until only two sections are left. Each of these sections is a few paragraphs long.

     

    Despite all these odds–as if Fate is sitting in judgment against her–the girl goes back to her school so she can present her Poe thesis. Now the institution is shut.

     

    Seeing that she was thrust out of school against her will and desire, it is probable that the devil rules this world.

     

    The girl continued down the street, into the building next to the school. There she saw the spirit of Karen Finley. Seeing this spirit allowed her to take off all her clothes which were now heavy, drenched in mud, icy from the outside mist.

     

    The slut walked bare-ass through what was simultaneously a pub and a church.

     

    Saw that none of the building’s inhabitants, all of whom were male, gave a shit that she was naked. One of them even walked up to her and was very nice to her.

     

    Later on in the pub, she decided to hide behind the entrance door so that she could slip a pair of shorts over her ass. But she couldn’t find any.

     

    “Shit. I didn’t bring any shorts.”

     

    She had to put back on all her clothes which were still wet cold and dirty.

     

    One of these men, all of whom were older than her, comments, “Nothing has changed. Nothing changes.”

     

    Me

     

    Heathcliff says, Because I had told them about Kathy caught in the strange house, Hindley kicked me out for good. So I threw away the rest of my human trappings and I became an animal who didn’t even clean itself. In order to toss their humanity into their faces.

     

    Humans run away from their own shit, their ends, whereas I was now covered in mine: I had become twice a man.

     

    When Kathy returned from strangeness, I loved her more than ever. She had came back dressed like a lady, no longer like a wild thing. I didn’t see her when she came in. She was silent about what had taken place in that strangeness. She told her father that she wanted to see me immediately.

     

    But I was shit.

     

    As soon as Kathy saw me, her heart leaped up like the dog it is. Even though romanticism pretends otherwise.

     

    As if one can own shit, Hindley owned me so he knew where I was and ordered me to enter the house and greet Kathy as a servant along with all the other servants. I am not.

     

    I did as I had been told only in order to throw more shit into their faces. But, as soon as she saw me, Kathy threw her finery into a bathroom and climbed on me until her lips became my skin. Because it was thirsty, her pussy rubbed me. I knew that I will always hold her cunt in the palm of my hand.

     

    Then she leaped back and informed me, I was only her servant and, worse, I smell of piss. “Oh, Heathcliff, have you forgotten me?”

     

    Since I was her servant, I couldn’t speak.

     

    Father said, “Since you’re a servant, Heathcliff, you can shake hands with Kathy. Only once.”

     

    I mumbled that I wouldn’t do anything. The lips of hell were opening and closing.

     

    “You shouldn’t be sulky because you smell of piss.”

     

    I was silent because I was a hound.

     

    “Heathcliff. Now shake hands with me.”

     

    SOCIETY’S PROGRESS TO TOTALITARIANISM AROSE AND KEEPS ARISING FROM ITS REFUSAL TO BE SHIT. I touched her.

     

    “Oh, Heathcliff, you are filthy dirty.” Kathy was becoming obsessed. Obsessed because she simultaneously wanted to touch me and didn’t. I knew every inch of her flesh, muscle, and liquids, and I was hungry for her. “I didn’t ask you to touch me.”

     

    Let the heavens open up, rain sperm.

     

    Kathy said, “But I want to touch you.” I knew, just as she knew, that she would be unable to dream until the moment she dreamed about me.

     

    I knew that she knew that I knew this, so I decided, in order to teach her, that I would become dirtier and dirtier until I was so dirty that I would have nothing more to do with what her family named reality and I would drag her down with me.

     

    This is the way that Kathy says that obsession never rises from and involves only one person: “Let all that matters be sex when and where all is glowing.”

     

    I say: I don’t need sex. I don’t need a cock, my cock. Simply: I am not going to and I am not living in hell.

     

    As soon as I had announced my allegiance to filth to Kathy’s family, I got out of their house. I ran away to the crags and moors and rocks who belong to anybody.

     

    Where it will always be raining, for the eyes will no longer

     

    For I, body, know who I am.

     

    I will not deny the witches.

     

    If Kathy was pure of cunt, she would follow the sperm out of the cockless cock.

     

    She stayed behind because she preferred to make her allegiance to skin, her fancy clothes, trappings of society, rather than to me, the gook inside the body. Because she was scared to shake hands with filth.

     

    Kathy In Her Society Finery,

     

    “But if I knew what men were really like, I would never want one. I say this so that I can be more desirable to men.”

     

    Me–Perverted

     

    Heathcliff says, But I cried all night because she was mine and she was hurting me. I cried, but I wasn’t ever going to be demeaned. Naturally I wanted my skin to be other than dark and my hair to be straight, not so that I could live in a house, but so that she could look up to me enough to run away with me.

     

    And then I’d sink my head into her stomach and my teeth would turn into her bones. I will not live without her–whatever I must do! I have sold myself to the devil! As do those who write.

     

    The next day I woke up and then I heard a noise. When I peered through one of their infernal windows, I saw those two rich murderers or children walking into the black-and-white tiled hallway. Of course, I followed them inside.

     

    As soon as he had passed the ceiling beams, the boy turned around and said to me that I should brush that horse’s mane out of my face. I bucked, in the kitchen picked up a large pot of simmering soup, ran back to the edge of the hallway and threw the liquid into his visage.

     

    I had seen Kathy standing in the hall and, then, the look on her face.

     

    Here was the first time that I wanted to kill her. That night I dreamed that she died from giving birth to a baby. This was the first time I dreamed this.

     

    According to Gilbert Lely reciting some kind of Freudianism, one of the ways a sadist can prevent himself or herself from travelling from neurosis to psychosis is to sublimate his or her asocial instincts into art.

     

    Freud.

     

    After I had put the boiling liquid to the boy’s face, Kathy loved me even more than before. I needed to believe that she loved me so that I could be alive.

     

    I kept turning nasty because there was nothing else I could do in the face of rejection. In the face of Hindley. The nastier I found myself, the more Kathy looked up to my purity.

     

    As Joseph who was religious said, “This house is an infernal region.”

     

    Today, a yellow worm that looked like a plastic banana began a walk across a dirt path. The path moved downhill in steeper and steeper zigzags until it reached a sign that said BEWARE OF RATTLESNAKES.

     

    Kathy hadn’t run away with me to this earth of rattlesnakes where there were no more humans. Both Kathy and I knew that I was the only one who could lead her here, where nature would tame her by demeaning her so that she could begin to learn.

     

    Marriage According to Heathcliff:

     

    As soon as her father went travelling, I returned to Kathy.

     

    The first time I stood again in that sittingroom, she was mentioning to the nurse who happened to look like Jessie Helms that the rich boy had asked her to marry him.

     

    I said, loudly, “Kathy, with all that I am and have–if that is any power–I beg you to stop rejecting me for your rich friends. I have born too much rejection since I was born.”

     

    Kathy didn’t notice me because she was combing her pussy hairs.

     

    “I’ve come back to you, Kathy. Why aren’t you looking at me?”

     

    “Because you don’t belong in any decent society. You smell like a horse, like Linton said you smelled, and you don’t know what a relationship is. Human. Your very presence bores me.”

     

    I didn’t know how to reply because I was open to her.

     

    “You’re as dumb as any animal, Heathcliff.”

     

    Because she needed me to be her and at the same time refused to touch my skin, I no longer was.

     

    “But the fact that I’m marrying Linton has nothing to do with you. I’m not marrying Linton because you don’t exist; what you believe is my torment of you doesn’t exist.

     

    “I’ll explain to you why I’m marrying Linton:

     

    Marriage:

     

    Kathy says, I said to my nurse, but not to Heathcliff: “Do you know the real reason why I’m marrying that creep who doesn’t possess a cock? (Not that I give a damn about cocks: it’s what they stand for.)

     

    “I can’t marry Heathcliff because Heathcliff and I aren’t separate from each other. It would be redundant for me to marry Heath.

     

    “I need to get married. Heathcliff and I don’t belong in the normal world whose name is society–we don’t even know whether we’re male or female. And. But, unlike Heathcliff, I can pass for normal; I want the money and moral position that normalcy brings. (When I pretended normalcy in the past, the normals, who are named the English, stuck a lit bulb up my ass then shorted it.) I need to get married and get my certificate.

     

    “In the real or abnormal world, it’s the law that Heathcliff is more me than me, though no one knows who Heathcliff is, his name.

     

    “It’s disgusting for Heathcliff to live as a freak in my family’s world.

     

    “I’m going to marry Linton so that neither Heathcliff nor I will have to live any more as freaks; for doesn’t marriage in this society render anything acceptable? Freaks cannot live as freaks because in reality there are no freaks: there are only those society people who’ve carved identities out of fear.

     

    “Will I be able to be married without becoming perverted like one of those society people? I’m only human…

     

    “Therefore, by means of marriage to a rich person, I will show that Heathcliff and I are as normal as rich people. I learned logic in school.”

     

    Heathcliff overheard all of this. As soon as he had understood that it would degrade me to be with him, he ran out of the room.

     

    This was how I threw myself or Heathcliff out of my life.

     

    I had the following dream:

     

    In a hotel that’s under the aegis of the Buddhist Poetry Institute, while I’m waiting for an elevator that’s going up, I recognize a man who’s walking past. He’s a former lover.

     

    This hotel has a pool that’s composed of several uneven tiers.

     

    The hotel’s bars and restaurants likewise hide the raised and lowered floors. My former lover and I sit down at a white- cloth-covered table in the most secluded alcove.

     

    I feed him sake after sake, as I did when we used to fuck, and he becomes drunker, as also used to happen. All the time.

     

    The initials of this man’s name, R.W., are those of a boyfriend prior to him.

     

    Both of us are three-quarters sodden when I realize that this man didn’t and now doesn’t love me. His attitude toward me is: about once a year he uses me to try to find the oblivion for which he’s longing.

     

    My Father (Whom I’ve Never Known) Tries to Kill His Own Child

     

    Kathy says,

     

    Hindley, who had become drunker and drunker, returned home, doused in alcohol like a rag in gas. The chill night howled through the dying branches and the dying cars started beeping. Inside, he grabbed the child which he had had by his new wife and cut off all its hair. Raggedly. When he let go of the brat, it fell down a flight of stairs. Didn’t die. Not noticing anything, father kept looking for the Jack Daniels which had been hidden.

     

    All my life I’ve dreamt dreams which, after the initial dreaming, stayed with me and kept telling me how to perceive and consider all that happens to me. Dreams run through my skin and veins, coloring all that lies beneath. I DREAM: I’m in a hotel in which I’ve never before been. I have to give another performance.

     

    Whenever I’m about to perform, I don’t like to be around the other performers. I wander by myself in the unknown hotel.

     

    While I’m waiting in line for the elevator to go up, a man who’s also waiting recognizes me as a bodybuilder. He’s middle- aged, large in body with the beginnings of a pot, disappearing hair. Standing right in back of me so that I can feel the pot, his hands massage my biceps. I allow this.

     

    Today is the day of sex. Informing me that he’s a trainer, the guy shows me how I can tuck my stomach in or he makes my stomach disappear.

     

    We go down in the elevator. In the bathroom, he fucks me from the back just like I used to be when I was a kid.

     

    Now that he’s gone, I’m desperate to find a man who will have me in order that I can become normal.

     

    My next lover is married. (I fuck married men as a rule because they don’t want to come to close to me.) Predictably, the creep informs me that there’s no way he can love who I am.

     

    After he tells me this, I squat down on his floor. Then I think, as I’ve thought before, many times, all I have to do now is get myself out of here. This house. As soon as I do this one thing, I promise myself, I can fall apart just as I want to: I can be less than anything that is.

     

    Just as I have promised myself: outside his building, I sink against the garbage cans that are against the wall. I had probably created or passed through romance just so I could be here, where I should be, do what I should do.

     

    Let the garbage eat out the night.

     

    In that night, when two homeless recognize one of the members and walk up to me, the thought comes to me that I’m ready to pull myself up by the bootstraps.

     

    My next lover is, as much as possible, the man of my dreams.

     

    This time, there’s a mass of wharfs and compartments whose insides and outsides are mingled. Or mangled. In one of these rooms, this man and I lie on a bed. He can’t get hard. Female creatures, as elegant and lean as those in Paris, are haunting a few of the other rooms.

     

    Outside the room in which I’m trying to fuck, something that’s a combination of truck and tractor is zooming away from the pier that’s nearest the horizon and down a white road that runs parallel to the dawn. Then, the vehicle swerves around, almost running into, five others. Monsters. All of whom are whizzing around and around, breath-taking speeds, hurtling past each other. The tractor-trucks are just like horses.

     

    I watch them, amazed.

     

    This is the realm of males. A man remarked to seemingly no one, “This is how things are done.”

     

    After watching the monsters, I decide that I can’t marry my boyfriend because he doesn’t get hard.

     

    But if I’m not going to marry, how can I survive in this society?

     

    In the same room in which he couldn’t get it up, I’m teaching a class. One of my students asks me to dance.

     

    We dance in an oval, around the back of the room just behind where the other students are sitting, as I had been taught to dance in the school I had attended as a girl. Waltzing and tangoing seriously and with grace.

     

    Even though she appears fem, my student is leading me: I orgasm several times.

     

    In this way I learn that, since I can come with a woman, I don’t need a man.

     

    After I have come or alternatively:

     

    For some time I’ve been standing, in front of a white stucco wall, on a white road which, as though it’s a platform, is raised above all the surrounding and dirt underneath. All around me are masses of luggage, suitcases and bags.

     

    I’m leaving. Finally.

     

    But as for me, I have too much baggage: I can carry all of them only with great difficulty. A man whom I don’t know offers to pick up all the suitcases and duffels that are dropping around me and then hand them to me.

     

    While I’m just managing to hold on to these bags, two of the people who seem to be in my group screech, “She’s coming!” Race to, then down the pier that’s on the left side of the white building.

     

    Now there’s a crowd of people down at the wharf. I want to be there too, but I’ve got all the bags. Deciding that probably no one’s going to steal them, I abandon them, follow the crowd, some of whom are my friends.

     

    At the left pier’s end, a huge mass is watching a superstar, perhaps Tina Turner, come.

     

    Now I know that there are two ways for me to survive without marrying: I can either be gay or famous.

     

    The hell with dreams because dreams only lead to perversity.

     

    I dreamt I was in Heaven. But I had no business being there so I ran back to Wuthering Heights (this place) (loneliness) (this state of human) (this impossibility named hell). I know that here is happiness.

     

    I was the day after my most important performance. I was cleaning the hotel room which the Buddhist Poetry Institute had lent me; I always do exactly what I’ve been told to do.

     

    A large wood vanity whose mirror was hidden under layers of clothing and cloths stood right in front of me. A mirror because I’m alone.

     

    A, the Institute’s head, just opened my door and walked in. She hadn’t bothered to knock. She had entered in order to pay me. “I’m only going to pay those writers who matter.”

     

    “Matter?”

     

    “Who’re important.”

     

    This message is that writers are either famous or starve.

     

    While A was making her pronouncement, I was lifting up and folding a huge thick olive wool blanket. Beneath the blanket, a bare mattress.

     

    Then A and I stood in front of the vanity’s covered mirror.

     

    On the surface of the table part, some of the objects which I had uncovered during my cleaning now began to move. Two black crabs the size of human fists strolled. When I saw them, I was confident that I could kill the…things or, at least, crush them to pulp.

     

    The whole table was alive. Specifics: two small black lobsters; two black spiders as large as these lobsters, whose legs resembled daddy-long-legs’ but who weren’t daddy-long-legs because their bodies were as substantial as cats’; the two crabs already recognized.

     

    I lifted a dress, then a white wool crocheted cloth, then something which I couldn’t recognize or can’t remember off of the mirror and A and I clearly saw its glass.

     

    The insects and the sea-life were crawling, or whatever they do, under the strewn olive blanket, all over the mattress, hiding in the wool folds. Down to the floor. They were disgusting.

     

    Now I saw who I was: one spider perched, half of it on the top of my calf just below the back of the knee, half on my black cowboy boot. I’m not terrified of a spider because I know it can be crushed.

     

    I slammed it to death.

     

    A and I crushed all of the moving beings.

     

    The Lack Of Dreams Is Disappearance Of The Heart

     

    Kathy says, Heathcliff had left.

     

    I said:

     

    “My flesh is wood that needs to be chopped up. For this reason, I’m never going to forsake you, whatever-your name-is and wherever-you-are. The cunt is always speaking. But I will never marry you, whoever-you-are, because marriage means nothing to the likes of us because society means nothing to the likes of us.

     

    “Heathcliff, you are now whoever-you-are because I am named absence.”

     

    I BEGAN SEARCHING FOR HEATHCLIFF BECAUSE I DIDN’T WANT HIM. AND I DON’T WANT HIM.

     

    Searching for Heathcliff (trying to turn whatever-you-are actual), I fell out with my dreams.

     

    The fantasy, to refuse to dream, to which I have returned again and again was the following:

     

    The situation is that I’ve suddenly learned that I have an incurable disease. This disease has something to do with my heart. Because it’s inevitable that I’m going to become sicker and sicker until I die, an authority declares, someone from this moment onwards is going to have to take care of me until the day I drop dead.

     

    But I don’t want some creep to have anything to do with me; I don’t want to be a dependent person.

     

    A poet whom I like a lot begins to take care of me. Then, her husband becomes angry because she’s not giving him enough attention. I’m abandoned, the usual, and usual, become upset.

     

    The authority who’s a doctor repeats: you have to find someone to take care of you.

     

    I decide that everything that this doctor, perhaps because he’s and authority, has said is a con. That I’m ill’s a con. How can I be ill when I don’t know I’m ill?

     

    I’m not ill.

     

    One day, while I’m performing my morning exercises (since I’m exercising, I can’t be ill), I see, right across my mattress, my old nurse sitting meditating on the floor. I ask her advice. “Who’s the best doctor,” I inquire, “in the world? If I consult that doctor, he’ll be able to cure me if I’m ill.” I assure nurse that I have enough family money to afford the very best.

     

    Consulting this best doctor: Wherever I am, which is (the) unknown, I look down on the handsomest possible man standing on a span bridge. As soon as I see him, my incurable disease is more or less cured. (I’m a romantic. Incurable.)

     

    The next day or some days later, I see that my girlfriends, all of whom are now standing around me, are wearing the same kind of clothes: upper-middle-class cocktail drag heavy as possible. I’m in a gold sweater knit nothing else.

     

    We stroll down a suburban street with its clean-cut lawns. One of the women, who works in a store, keeps tugging at my dress. Finally pulls out a thread. I’m irritated–I’m very irritable.

     

    She exclaims, “You’re so white, delicate. You’re the most well-preserved of all of us.”

     

    I no longer know whether or not I have this incurable disease.

     

    Waking from the dream, I find myself in a business office. I describe what I’ve dreamt to a man who was in my dream in order that both of us can ascertain and know whether or not I’m going to die.

     

    I had become almost sick with looking for Heathcliff.

     

    I had stopped eating because, when he’s out on the moors, Heathcliff doesn’t eat. Wandered around the rocks at night because I didn’t know where he was.

     

    I wasn’t looking for him.

     

    The fogs made me animal.

     

    Returned home. This is WUTHERING HEIGHTS by a deadhead.

     

    Home. “Look,” my father said, “Look at the low-life. She’s ill because she’s always running after men. She’s going to be dead soon.”

     

    “No,” I said to myself. I didn’t answer father because there aren’t any, anymore.

     

    “So where were you last night, and the night before, you- good-for-nothing-cunt-juice?”

     

    (A sailor named St. Germanus has unmasked the diabolical nature of certain spirits named good women who wander about at night.)

     

    Father’s replica, the religious servant: “Weren’t you with Heathcliff last night?”

     

    When that nut-case dared to question me, I became angry for two reasons: Because my family was considering me ill (nymphomaniac). Because underneath their definition lay the reality of my horniness. (Horniness: I don’t know where Heathcliff is so I don’t know who he is.)

     

    Now I knew that it’s necessary to keep interpreting everything because nothing’s true and everything’s real. These interpretations are my body.

     

    Therefore I said back to my family: “If you throw Heathcliff out of this house because he’s not like you, I’m going with him, out into the fogs. Our brains are already fogs. But you can’t do anything to Heathcliff because he’s gone.”

     

    I had forgotten about myself.

     

    I stopped looking for Heathcliff. After that, I could no longer sleep. I had lost the ways or entrances into dream.

     

    Without dreams, the body becomes sick. I have an incurable illness of the heart.

     

    I want (to find) Heathcliff (myself).

     

    The Underside Of Dream

     

    Kathy says, I’ve always been bratty. During the period when I was ill, though not yet dead, I turned into more than a brat:

     

    “Ellen. Dye my hair blonde.”

     

    “Your hair’s already blonde.” So she dyed my hair blonde.

     

    “My hair isn’t blonde enough. I look like Madonna fucking. But I’m on my death bed because I’m dying. I want my hair to be pure white!”

     

    She took me through two more dye jobs.

     

    “Ellen. I said I’m dying. Now you have to make my pussy hairs white.”

     

    But, alive or dead, my pussy drips gold and red and tastes like skunk.

     

    Return To Dreaming

     

    Heathcliff or the devil says, And so Kathy married a rich man for the purpose of entering society. As multitudes of women have done before her. The rich man, Linton, infatuated with his new wife, believed himself to be the happiest of men, as multitudes of men have felt before him. Kathy’s dream was that marriage is the destruction of society:

     

    This society is the family’s house. Kathy’s living with her uncle in a huge house. It’s of the utmost importance that she palms him a check and equally important that no one knows that this has happened. If not, she’ll die.

     

    Her uncle takes the check.

     

    Later, a man woman and child are standing on the lawn outside the house. The evil Trinity: they continually cut themselves with razor blades. If they succeed in penetrating the house, they’ll destroy everyone and everything including Kathy.

     

    Somehow they do. Enter. Kathy sees them in the downstairs; instantaneously she knows that she has to do everything possible and anything to prevent them from invading the inner dwelling: she has to remain an enclosed self: otherwise evil might stick its cock into her.

     

    Next, she’s standing in front of the mattress over which she handed her uncle the check. He’s now on the other side of the mattress. She knows that evil is coming. So runs in back of the mattress. Up the stairs.

     

    The house ascends higher and higher; the higher, the holier the space.

     

    They’ve arrived at the top of the house. Now there’s only complete horror in this world: darkness and decay. Flesh is rotting frogs.

     

    All evil has come here so a spell begins. This is real creation, the beginning of the world, evil is always born in a cloud of pink smoke emanating from pink incense.

     

    Is Kathy seeing her own blood? She scoots as fast as she can, faster, down the stairs, faster, through the hallway cut into two by the light, out of the child’s house. Outside: through a patch of shade, then into sunlight.

     

    (I have suddenly realized the meaning of MY MOTHER: DEMONOLOGY.)

     

    In all the sunlight and cut grass, the child knows that she is safe.

     

    Where will she go without home? She is homeless. She realizes that she can be safe (live) as a wanderer. Free.

     

    She roams through the suburbs and finds herself at a filling station. While she’s leaning by one of the tanks, an American car drives up. (I don’t know the names of any cars.) The evil people are sitting in this car. Then Kathy sees a black man, who’s lying on a grey plastic parachute on the cement, look up, see whatever’s getting out of the auto (formlessness?), and scream, “God!”

     

    A woman emerges from the car. Her inner thighs have no more skin, only blood.

     

    My Childhood by Heathcliff

     

    The law that forms society is that which forbids all that reeks of the name humanity. From the moment that I was born, I knew my society was corrupt. I knew that, in and through the name of democracy, the middle classes are being annihilated, that there are numerous tribes as depleted as the homeless.

     

    My childhood training with Hindley taught me the characteristics of loyalty, honesty, stubbornness, and ferocity. Further, it caused me to disapprove of the familial society, the only society I knew, which indulged itself in every hypocrisy, corruption or putrescence, lack of control in every area of the self.

     

    I became a handsome man, with a high-domed forehead, a square jaw. An air of authority lurked under every surface. My habitual garments of defenses identified me as a member of the samurai class.

     

    Though I had as yet no dealings with anyone outside the family, I knew, and I was deeply upset by this, that samurai were starting to attend the local fuckhouses. When I came back to Kathy, real life returned to her: MY DREAM OF RETURNING TO KATHY:

     

    Heathcliff says,

     

    I was traveling, the same as flying, through rooms which were connected to each other so that their outsides were both outside and inside. The name: the crags of Penniston.

     

    The room through which I was passing was either an expensive Eastern clothing store, a window that displays two fur and silk robes, or a Hindu temple. All the walls were the same yellow- white as the ground below them. Sand lay everywhere.

     

    As soon as I had emerged from this temple’s recesses, I was presented with a photo of ‘imminent decline’. This photo revealed an at least 70% decline, a road composed out of sand and the rubble of a city. A few people are half-buried in its dust; a knee sticks upward.

     

    A voice announced, “People have died here. But, at times, these are the only streets that can take people to where they’re going.

     

    “The streets of death.”

     

    Where I was heading, there was a chance of disaster, also of rain.

     

    I parked my motorcycle facing upwards on a steep hill.

     

    Whoever I happened to be in lust with at that time gave me the information that she had given permission to a friend of hers to ride my bike. That bitch had tipped it.

     

    “What?” I couldn’t say anything else because–I’m almost never angry–my anger is always waiting to blow me up. Then, I became angry that there were no bike mechanics in the forsaken place. Then, I became angry that all she did was shrug. My lover just didn’t care. Finally and ultimately, I’m angry that I’m helpless.

     

    Then, I realized that I could phone a mechanic myself so I did.

     

    At the bottom of the decline, the crags, lay a building that was my family’s house. My real father, the one who had started everything, was inside this house.

     

    I had made its livingroom into my bedroom; father’s bedroom, which was next to mine, was the actual bedroom of the house. We needed space from each other.

     

    Below the normal rooms lay another level: a floor of unused rooms. In the past, something dreadful (or evil) had occurred in these unused rooms.

     

    These are the rooms of childhood.

     

    The unknown floor’s map was as follows:

     

    The large room on the right was the most public, not pubic, knowable and known. Its windows on its outside overlooked an even larger parking lot which, unfortunately, belonged to the neighboring house.

     

    Outside: “You’re not concerned for his welfare at all?”

     

    “He’s on welfare?”

     

    The rooms on the left formed a maze whose center was a bedroom. The bedroom. Will I ever find you?

     

    In my search for freedom or in my search, I moved down to the hidden floor. The floor of childhood. When I had been a child, I did and now I do whatever I want to do.

     

    In these hidden rooms, my first bedroom was the room on the right. Despite the parking lot lying right next to its insides, it was quieter than my former home.

     

    I still hadn’t gotten what I wanted or I still wasn’t where I wanted to be. I want to be in the most secret bedroom of all.

     

    Finally my father gave me permission to move in there.

     

    I proceeded:

     

    But just then, I saw outside that water was pouring, army- like, into, down the wide grey street. A wave was as high as my motorcycle. For the first time in my life, I felt fright: I was terrified that my cycle would be flooded.

     

    I dashed outside; then the waters turned ferocious; I ran for safety. Home.

     

    In the rain my bike died. I knew that I could have saved bike if I had ridden it into the house as soon as I had seen these waters coming.

     

    In order to save bike, I turned time backwards:

     

    When I rode my bike into the hall, my mother agreed that this situation was an emergency and that all is decaying. Here lies the smelly realms of the cunt.

     

    Moving into the cunt:

     

    First object to be moved from known floor to unknown floor: a large and low wood and green velvet table. (Note: Has to be cut into parts in order to be able to be moved.)

     

    Second object: a blue exercise mat.

     

    These necessities were too large for me to move myself. When I asked my mother, who must have hated my guts before I had been born because she had abandoned me, for help, for the first time she agreed.

     

    Now I accepted my parents.

     

    Inside the secret bedroom: When I had finished furnishing the three unknown rooms, they resembled or were the three known rooms (bedroom, workroom, and exercise room) in which I used to live.

     

    In this manner, I returned to Kathy, reached into her secret place, and made her my image: In the name of anything but the parent:

     

    In the smelly realms of the cunt.

     

    Kathy’s Dream Of And Upon Heathcliff’s Returning To Her And Laure’s Dream

     

    Kathy says, Somewhere in Thrushcross Grange I was packing my suitcases because I was getting out. Finally.

     

    Then, I dragged these bags down to my bedroom where I packed what I didn’t want.

     

    When I had packed both what I wanted and what I didn’t want, I found myself next to Heathcliff. Sitting on a stoop just as if we were back in New York City, Heathcliff started burning some of my skin with his cigarette.

     

    A boy named Linton with whom both of us were friends sat on my other side. He and Heathcliff burned me.

     

    Since he’s my main man, Heathcliff was the one who talked. “I’m deciding who you are.”

     

    As soon as he had said that, I felt happy. Happiness was a mingling of feeling and physical heat; the liquid flooded the caves beneath my skin.

     

    Heathcliff told Linton, “I own her.”

     

    I Return To B

     

    I was sitting in a theatre, watching a movie named Wuthering Heights. I had no idea which version. On the movie screen, I saw Kathy telling Heathcliff, who had just returned to her, that the only thing she wants in life, now that almost no life is left to her, is for her and Heathcliff not to part. Never to part.

     

    Heathcliff, “But you did everything possible to ensure our parting.”

     

    Kathy answers that she only wanted them to be together.

     

    Across the screen, I see this word spread:

     

    THE KINGDOM OF CHILDHOOD IS THE KINGDOM OF LUST.

     

    I had come back to the theatre night after night. Wood walls and the bare and hard wood chairs that I remember from my school days: those auditoriums in which movies were then shown. But this was a real movie theatre, not a schoolroom. And this night, when I sat down and the room became totally black except for the light from the screen, I placed my purse, as I always do, under my seat.

     

    During my former visits to the theatre, I had become friendly with a man named Jerry. As Wuthering Heights rolled on to the death of Kathy, Jerry asked if he could sleep with me.

     

    “But first,” Jerry in the black, “I have to show you something.”

     

    He showed me that the top of his head was bald.

     

    No, it was something else.

     

    He opened his chest. Most of the chest, its center, was without skin, like an Invisible Man model. I saw right through to his plastic heart.

     

    But I didn’t want to fuck with him for another reason. Because he wasn’t into what’s imprecisely named S/M.

     

    There was no movie.

     

    Bored, and I hate more than anything to be bored, I left my seat to get a drink. When I returned and picked up my bag, I noticed it felt light. When I looked inside, there was nothing there.

     

    Since I no longer had cash or credit cards, I was forced by circumstances to enter a brothel.

     

    I have always found myself determined to survive.

     

    The cathouse in which I landed obviously catered to upper- crust clients. For there were deep pink velvet curtains and no other visible walls.

     

    To my surprise I liked my first John.

     

    Then a murder took place; the victim was this first John. Was I possibly the murderer?

     

    Because we had to ensure that we weren’t caught, some girls and I began escaping from the whorehouse. As I loped down a long and narrow hall, I gazed upon a black satin evening bag which looked expensive. On a tiny, antique mahogany table. I snatched the bag because mine had been taken from me. But thought that it’s wrong to steal.

     

    The steep street outside our working quarters had become steeper: my friends and I could barely climb up it. I was wearing very high-heeled shoes because I was a whore. Here there was no hope of running away. I was aware that openly carrying this purse rather than investigating its insides, keeping only what I wanted and throwing away all the rest, was even more dangerous.

     

    I opened the black evening bag. At this moment I told the other girls about my theft. They didn’t give a fuck. I extracted the bag’s belongings; I preferred a pair of earrings to money.

     

    The girls and I decided that we were going to be thieves.

     

    I found myself inside a brothel which was probably the original one, though I couldn’t remember how that brothel had looked.

     

    The vestibule in which I stood was the lobby of a movie theatre. All of its velvet, cunt pink.

     

    I was watching a policeman talking to or interviewing the movie’s ticket-taker. All sorts or documents concerning the murder were on my person. Of course I had done it. The policeman who was in the ticket booth didn’t notice or care about either my documents or my being; none of the cops walking around the whorehouse cared about the hookers. Already, hookers and thieves, we decided we could be murderers.

     

    Heathcliff, my brother.

     

  • Remarks, Notes, Introduction and Other Guest-Editorial Texts Prefacing Postmodern Culture’s Special Fiction Issue Devoted to Postmodern Fiction

    Larry McCaffery

    Department of English
    San Diego State University

     

    Dedication: For Ronald Sukenick and William T. Vollmann

     

    The Final Measurement: Guest-Editor’s Remarks Prefacing Postmodern Culture‘s Special Fiction Issue Devoted to Postmodern Fiction

     

     
    I.  *Epigraphs*
    
    I. 1
    Was there no end to anything?  When would he reach the final
    measurement?
         William T. Vollmann, Fathers and Crows
    
    I. 2
    As writers--&
    everyone inscribes
    in the sense
    I mean here--
    we can
    try to intensify
    our relationships by considering
    how they work; are we putting
    each other to sleep
    or waking each other up;
    and what do we awake to?  Does our writing stun
    or sting?  We can try to
    bring our relationship with readers to
    fruition
    that the site of reading becomes a fact of value
        --Charles Bernstein, Artifice of Absorption
    
    I. 3
    "You see what's happening here you take a few things that
    interest you and you begin to make connections.  The connections
    are the important thing they don't exist before you make this.
    This is THE ENDLESS SHORT STORY."
        --Ronald Sukenick, The Endless Short Story
    
    II.  *Editor's Preview of Contents for the Issue:*
    
    I.   Epigraphs:
            I. 1.  From William T. Vollmann
            I. 2.  From Charles Bernstein
            I. 3.  From Ronald Sukenick
    II.  Editor's Preview
    III. Editor's Prefatory Note
    IV.  This Is Not the Introduction: Games that Fiction Anthology
              Editors Play--Towards a Consideration of the Aesthetic
              Conventions of the Fiction Anthology as a Literary
              Genre.
         IV. 1  ". . . Unusual formal principles and aesthetic
              features . . ."? ". . . despite the inherent
              fascination involved . . ."?
         IV. 2  List of Fiction Anthology Categories and Potentially
              Useful Postmodern Applications
         IV. 3  Additional Bonus For Critics Developing a Postmodern
              Aesthetics of the Fiction Anthology Who Are Also
              Interested in Postmodern Music.
         IV. 4  Establishing the process of collaborative
              interactions between anthology's editorial introduction
              and fiction selections (a process which joins these two
              seemingly different forms of discourse into an
              aesthetic unity; summary of the absurdities,
              limitations, and inherent deceitfulness that arise from
              following out-dated approaches to such introductions;
              sequential listing of the topics resulting from
              adhering to these conventions.
         IV. 5  Postmodern Textual Practices and the Editorial
              Introduction
    V.   Introduction: Cancelled (See Editor's Apology)
         V. 1  Fiction Selections Coded for Postmodernist Features
               Appendix A: Kathy Acker introductory comments
         V. 2  Contributors' Notes
    VI.  Appendices B, C, D, E, F.
    
         Fiction Selections in the Issue:
    
         Kathy Acker, "Obsession"
         Robert Coover, "Title Sequence for The Adventures of Lucky
              Pierre"
         Ricardo Cruz, "Five Days of Bleeding"
         Rikki Ducornet, "From Birdland"
         Rob Hardin, "Dressed to Kill Yourself"
         Annemarie Kemeny, "Attempts on Life"
         Marc Laidlaw, "Great Breakthroughs in Darkness (Being, Early
              Entries From The Secret Encyclopedia of Photography")
         William T. Vollmann, "Incarnations of the Murderer"
    
    *III.  EDITOR'S PREFATORY NOTE:*  Waist Deep in the Big Muddy
    
              I began writing some of the following material
    in late May and early June 1992, just before I departed
    San Diego for a nine-week stay in Tokyo to begin work on
    a project ("Postmodernism in Japan") funded by an N.E.H. summer
    research fellowship.  Although traces of that initial draft
    remain embedded in the current version (mostly in Part V), what
    readers now have before them differs so significantly in content
    and approach from my earlier drafts that for all practical
    purposes the two are completely different texts.  During that
    May-June period when I began to develop my editorial
    introduction, I had already accepted five pieces of fiction for
    the issue--this out of the total number of six or seven
    selections, agreed upon by myself and Eyal Amiran, Postmodern 
    Culture's co-editor, when I accepted his offer to guest-edit a
    focus of his and John Unsworth's journal devoted to Postmodern
    Fiction.  Thus I began my editorial introduction assuming that I
    had only to make an additional one or two selections for the
    issue, insert a few extra remarks into the draft of my
    introduction regarding the relevance of the new material to the
    issue as a whole, contact the authors when I returned from Tokyo
    on 8-31 to make certain they had sent Eyal their selections on
    computer discs, and then my duties as guest editor would have
    been completed.
         When I departed for Tokyo on 6-27 I recall feeling quite
    confident and optimistic that these duties would be discharged
    successfully, and the template I had developed for my
    introduction reflected these feelings.  There were good reasons
    for this optimism.  The material I already had in hand for the
    issue was strong, both individually and in the ways the works'
    stylistic and thematic concerns represented various key features
    associated with postmodernism (see V. 1 coded listing of
    selections).  Moreover there was also an interesting mixture of
    authors and works: a selection from one of the already-canonized
    authors from the 60s "boom period" of postmodernism (Coover);
    work from two authors who had begun work in the 70s--Kathy Acker
    (now widely recognized as a central and controversial arrival on
    the postmodernist scene, and Rikki Ducornet, a writer whose works
    were now beginning to be recognized and praised); a piece by Marc
    Laidlaw, whose mid-80s novel, Dad's Nuke, was recognized within
    the genre of science fiction as a major cyberpunk novel, but
    whose overall literary accomplishments had been obscured or
    distorted by his association with genre writing; and one
    relatively anonymous young author (Ricardo Cruz) whose garish,
    surrealist depictions of urban ghetto life seemed to me to be the
    most original fiction about black life I'd seen since the early
    Ishmael Reed.  The selections also included several different
    types of postmodernist innovations, ranging from Coover's
    typically outrageous forays into myth, media, sex and death, to
    Ducornet's delicately rendered, magical realist fables, whose
    lyricism often serves to highlight the "diabolism" of her
    "macabre fantasies," Cruz's "rap fiction," and so on.  I was also
    taking with me to Tokyo several other promising works by authors
    I respected, as well as expecting to receive submission from
    several authors who hadn't yet replied to my original letters of
    inquiry or to Postmodern Culture's call for fiction.
         During my stay in Tokyo I periodically re-read the materials
    I had brought with me, as well as a few intriguing possibilities
    that were sent to me by Eyal (incidentally, I had considerable
    editorial input from Eyal at each step of this project's
    evolution); by the time of my return to San Diego on 8-31, we had
    narrowed down our options to a few selections.  Eyal and I set a
    tentative date of September 12 by which to have made the final
    selections for the issue; this would give me the week of
    September 12-19 to complete my introduction, arrange for the
    discs to be sent to Eyal, and generally handle the final details
    for the issue (the September 19 date was my own personal deadline
    for completing all the work on the issue, since I would be
    leaving then for Boulder, Colorado to take part in the Novel of
    the Americas Conference being held during the week of 9-19 to
    9-26).  However, upon arriving back in San Diego, ripples began
    to appear on editorial waters that had been up to now
    extraordinarily smooth.  Within a week, a real storm was brewing.
    
    The forces responsible for this were various, some relatively
    minor (there were problems getting discs from the authors) and
    some involving financial issues, miscommunications, dozens of
    phone calls that crossed back and forth across the U.S. like ping
    pong balls or Pynchon yo-yos, and even the confusion of agents
    and publishers about how the new literary "space" of electronic,
    computer driven data should be defined or categorized....
    [EDITOR'S NOTE: I find it too painful from a personal standpoint
    to continue with this summary except to say to my readers that
    the labyrinthine series of darkly humorous events that unfolded
    from 9-5 until 9-19 were...beyond the pale.]
    
    *IV.  This Is Not the Introduction: Games that Fiction Anthology
    Editors Play By--Towards an Aesthetics of the Fiction Anthology*
    
         Like all other literary forms, anthologies are language
    games--structures of words with distinctive generic properties
    which arise due to a system of conventions and semiotic rules
    that govern its operations.  As with the rules and systems of
    transformation in all games, those at work in anthologies not
    only set limits on what can (and cannot) occur, but also channel
    operations into certain pattern of recurrence.  The principles
    underlying the anthology game are, of course, only vaguely sensed
    by readers (if at all) and even most anthology editors are
    themselves aware of them only intuitively.  Given the primacy
    afforded artistic "originality" in Western aesthetics, it's not
    surprising that (to my knowledge) no one has ever given serious
    attention to studying the anthology as a literary form.  Not only
    is the "final product" of an anthology, as well as the editorial
    process involved in its creation, essentially collaborative in
    nature, but the different functions played by editor and
    contributor have encouraged people to see the roles as being
    essentially separate.  The result is that most readers and
    critics have regarded anthologies less as literary forms in their
    own right and more as simply arbitrary structures that
    "contain" literary objects.
         Without belaboring the point, and admitting the fact that
    having spent a lot of time and energy over the past several years
    putting together fiction anthologies devoted to various topics
    (see the Contributors' Notes), let me just suggest that now is
    the appropriate time for someone (thought the time is definitely
    not appropriate for me) to develop a serious discussion
    exploring the aesthetic of anthologies generally--and of the
    fiction anthology as a literary genre in particular.  The
    timeliness of such an exposition results from the unusual formal
    and aesthetic features of fiction anthologies, the rich series of
    topics such an analysis would need to delve into, the ways that
    such a discussion can be linked to concepts operating in
    postmodern fiction and in poststructuralist and deconstructive
    critical theory--not to mention the fact that it hasn't occurred
    to anyone to develop such an essay, this despite the inherent
    fascination involved in developing such an essay.
    
    *IV. 1  " . . . unusual formal principles and aesthetic features
    . . . "?  " . . . despite the inherent fascination involved
    . . ."?*
    
    Indeed, consider the enjoyment and intellectual stimulation
    involved in working out a definition of the fiction anthology as
    a genre, working up a typology that best describes the different
    sub-categories and permutations that comprise the genre, the
    satisfaction of gradually beginning to recognize how much FUN it
    will be for you to take this hitherto despised form--a form that
    in fact will not even be recognized as a distinctive literary
    genre until your essay bursts onto the academic scene--and then
    being able to show off your critical skills by applying a barrage
    of complex-and-trendy terms and implications drawn from recent
    critical theory, the secret satisfaction you'll derive throughout
    the process of developing your essay by anticipating the ways
    your peers' initial derision and bewilderment at your choice of
    topics will gradually be transformed, first to a begrudging
    respect, then to astonishment, and eventually to shame and
    embarrassment at having ever doubted you.  Consider the following
    (the categories that apply to this current anthology are
    indicated in *bold*):
    
    *IV. 2  Listing of categories,          *Aspects of PO M
    subcategories, other variables that          aesthetic practices
    determine specific aspects of the            and critical theory
    form and content found in any                that can be used in
    individual anthology (incomplete)*           developing a theory
                                                 of the formal
    Anthology's scope and eventual               properties of
         length is left open to editor           fiction anthologies
         or restricted to a maximum of           (incomplete)*
         (100, 200, 300, 400 or more)
         pages, or limited to (3-5, *6-     Citation of the relevancy
         8*, 8-10, 10-15, 20 or more)            of such works as
         contributors                            Pale Fire
    Selections to include previously             (Nabokov),
         published fiction or                    Ficciones
         *restricted to unpublished*             (Borges), If on a To 
                                            include works by women or 
                                            men or Winter's Night a 
                                            *both* Traveler (Calvino)
    Selections restricted to those          Death of the author
         written by authors of a            Imagination as plagiarism
         specific racial, sexual, or        Strategies of
         ethnic orientation *or not*             appropriation,
    Anthology to include *any* form of           collaborations and
         fiction that fits the focus or          intertextuality
         to include only specified
         genre fiction (SF, Regency         Familiar categorical
         Romance, Detective, etc.) or            oppositions between
         only work non-generic works or          subjective/objective
         a mixture?                              "creative"/non-
    Anthology's focus is based on                creative denied.
         commonalities theme or             Valorization of
         aesthetic tendencies or on              "creative" over non-
         links with specific periods or          creative writing
         *literary movements*                    questioned
    Anthology to appear as a book or as     Endless play of
         a *special issue of a lit               signifiers
         journal* which you are *guest-     Bakhtin's heteroglossia
         editing* or regular editor of      The changes in meaning
    To be published by a commercial              that result from
         house or small press or                 moving a text from
         *university press*                      one context to
    Audience whose reading tastes and            another
         interests the anthology is         Denial of author as
         aimed for is mass market (male          originator of
         or female or both), academic,           discrete meaning
         *"serious" readers*, cult          Sampling as central po mo
         audience (many options)                 aesthetic
    Editor is professional (with no,        Strategies of misreading
         some, a lot of) experience or           and re-reading used
         *doing this on the side*                to create
    Contributors to be paid (no money,
         some money, major bucks) for       Foregrounding of the
         contribution                            process of creation,
    Editor to be not paid or paid                emphasis on the
         (small or *middling* or large           contingencies and
         flat fee) *in* (royalties or            personal choices
         in royalties plus an advance            involved in
         which is small, medium large).          aesthetic creations,
    The deadline for the editor to have          the willingness to
         completed all aspects of his            reveal that seeming
         role is (less than 6 months,            "natural" or
         *6-12* months, 1 year or 2              "objective" patterns
         years, more than two years),            and conclusions
         or no fixed deadline.                   result not from
                                                 their relationship
                                                 to any exterior
                                                 state of truth or
                                                 actual conditions
                                                 but from aesthetic
                                                 choices
    
    *IV. 3  Additional Bonus Provided to Critics Interested in the
    Postmodernization of Contemporary Music:*
    
    Consider developing an extended discussion that suggests how the
    aesthetic issues you're describing for fiction anthologies are
    analogous to those found in the recent appearance of so many
    "cover" albums (and there are many categories of such
    "anthologies" of musical materials)--e.g., The Coolies' Dig,
    Pussy Galore's Exile on Main Street, Cicone Youth's The White 
    Album, and the series of "cover" albums produced by Hal Wilner.
    
    Since processes and products related to sampling are so central
    to rap and postmodern music generally, feel free to explore the
    implications of their use in terms of such concepts as
    intertextuality, originality, the effect of cut-and-paste methods
    on meaning, etc..  Develop the analogy of anthology editors to
    rap master DJs behind the board, mixing and cutting, using their
    intuition and audio memories to mix and match sounds, riffs and
    phrases in ways that open up new aesthetic and thematic aspects
    of prior materials, that communicate to knowledgeable audiences
    via reference and intertextuality.  Perhaps point out the more
    subtle point that the role of anthology editor would really be
    analogous to a DJ only if the anthology being assembled contained
    only previously published fiction.  If it included only new
    fiction, you'd need a slightly different analogy.  Be sure to
    note the sorts of interesting issues raised by the aesthetics
    underlying rap and fiction anthologies.  For example, is
    "borrowing" unfamiliar materials "more creative" than sampling
    materials people should know?  Is it possible for a musician to
    not borrow materials?  In what sense?  Should strategies that
    fundamentally rely on appropriation, sampling, or collaboration
    be considered "creative" at all?  In what ways does the recent
    tendency to problematize authorial originality and the
    distinction between "literary" and "critical" writing provide
    ways of thinking about fiction anthologies as literary forms?
    
    *IV. 5  Establishing the process of collaborative interactions
    between the anthology's editorial introduction and fiction
    selections (a process which joins these two seemingly different
    forms of discourse into an aesthetic unity); summary of the
    absurdities, limitations, and inherent deceitfulness that arise
    from following out-dated approaches to such introductions;
    sequential listing of the topics that result from adhering to
    these conventions.*
    
         The options available to anyone hoping to assemble an
    interesting fiction anthology are virtually unlimited.
    Unfortunately, there are considerably fewer options available to
    editors once it comes time to write the editorial introductions
    that accompany such anthologies.  As with book reviewing,
    editorial introductions are essentially written according to a
    formula that controls the overall structure, tone and content of
    the discourse--a formula whose main features have evolved
    primarily to serve the private interests of the editors and their
    publisher rather than to serve any necessary generic function.
    No matter how complex or unique the anthology's focus, how
    creatively and flexibly the editor has used this focus in the
    selection process, no matter how original the fiction selections
    are in terms of formal innovation or thematic complexity--in the
    end, nearly all editorial introductions follow a sequence of
    presentations that can be listed as follows:
    
    1. Attention-grabbing opening paragraph that establishes why the
    anthology's theme or focus is particularly important now,
    usually accompanied by references to the inadequacies of other
    anthologies with a similar focus.
    2. Details introduced regarding the background of the anthology,
    how this editor became involved in the project (here modest
    indications of how the editor's professional background and other
    credentials make him or her particularly suited to put together
    such an anthology), what the anthology's original aims were (and
    hence what sorts of considerations were involved in the selection
    process), and a summary of how these aims changed or remained
    consistent as the volume took shape.  [See Appendix C.]
    3. Brief, "punchy" overview of the anthology's contents.
    4. Presentation of information regarding the authors' lives,
    citation of previous most significant publications, literary
    movements associated with the authors, etc..
    5. (Optional.)  Roll call of other authors considered for the
    anthology (if applicable) with reasons why any expected figures
    aren't represented.  If necessary, comments designed to blunt
    charges of the anthology's imbalances (gender, race, etc.),
    justifications for any political incorrectness that might be
    perceived in selections, followed by suggestions of what
    misreadings on part of the reader created such perceptions.
    6. Citations regarding the appropriateness of the selections in
    terms of the anthology's focus; justification for any pieces that
    at first glance seem very much out of focus.
    7. Overview of notable themes and stylistic features (examples
    and quotations to support this list), followed by favorable
    comparisons of this anthology with rival anthologies that may
    have preceded it.
    8. Claims made for the overall significance of the anthology
    material, pronouncements about how the individual aesthetic and
    thematic features found in the anthology's fiction relate to
    broader trends within and outside of literature.
    9. Concluding paragraph which reveals ways this anthology's
    selections indicate rich possibilities, new directions, etc..
    10. Final sentence designed to get the reader to turn the page as
    quickly as possible.
    
         The problem here isn't that these formulaic elements are all
    trivial or inappropriate.  The problem is the formulaic nature
    of the formula, the tendency of editors to pass off hasty and
    usually self-serving conclusions based on inadequate sampling of
    their subject.  Rather than follow many postmodern authors who
    try to develop methods that permit them to find systems and
    significance but who do so honestly by acknowledging their own
    subjectivity and actual, less-than-systematic experiences, many
    editors feel it necessary to adhere blindly to a formula whose
    elements encourage dishonesty, misrepresentation, superficiality,
    and manipulation.  At least in anthologies that introduce new
    work by serious fiction writers, such introductions are nearly
    always the product of bad faith--the bad faith of editors who
    know better but deliberately attempt to reduce ultimately
    uncategorizable works to "trends," "patterns," or labels, the bad
    faith of literary guides who've been living inside this rich
    literary terrain for weeks and months, and who've been damn
    excited about how untranslatable the stuff is, and how resistant
    it is to the kinds of paraphrases and overstatements the editor
    is expected to make in the introduction.  This isn't to say that
    editors shouldn't present their views and point out trends or
    patterns--after all, though finding a pattern in the stars may be
    primarily an act of the creative imagination, such patterns help
    people locate themselves and find out where they're going.
    Editors should express their opinions in a performative act that
    strives to break through the discursive screens of traditional
    editorial representation to the repressed, authentic data of the
    material at hand.
         [Editorial Note, Los Angeles, 9-25.  As explained in
    Editor's Note for V. Intro (Cancelled), circumstances made it
    impossible for me to complete some sections of this Editorial
    Introduction (such as the actual Editorial Introduction itself).
    I am, however, able to provide readers with some discarded
    fragments of the concluding paragraph that I worked on some time
    ago (see Appendix F) which should clarify what I would have said
    if circumstances had been different.
    
    *V.  Introduction (Now Cancelled)*
    
    [EDITOR'S APOLOGY:]  Due in part to the time and energy required
    to develop the earlier sections of his remarks concerning the
    need for an aesthetics of fiction anthologies, partly because of
    circumstances beyond his control, and partly because he doesn't
    wish to risk the bad faith referred to earlier, the editor
    regretfully acknowledges that he will be unable to supply the
    editorial introduction.  To compensate for this, and to provide
    readers with easy access to the relations between these works,
    the editor is providing in lieu of an introduction a listing of
    the anthology selections marked with a handy series of symbols
    whose meanings are explained below.  He is also supplying
    contributors' notes for each author (because these are usually
    supplied at the end of an anthology they are often overlooked by
    readers); for readers interested in what the editor might have
    said in the (Now Cancelled) "Introduction," he is also including
    an appendix containing a fragment of material originally intended
    for the "Introduction" (See Appendices C-F).
    
    *V. 1.  Listing of Anthology Selections with Easy-to-Use Coded
    References for Easy Reader Access to their Postmodern Features*
    
    Kathy Acker, "Obsession": A(1,3),B,C,E,F,G,H,J,K,L,M,N,O(2),
         P,Q,S,T,U,W,X,Y.
    Robert Coover, "The Titles Sequence for The Adventures of Lucky
         Pierre": A(1,2), C,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,O(1,2),P,R,S,T,U,V.
    Ricardo Cruz, "Five Days of Bleeding": A(1,2,3),E,F,G,H,I,K,L,M,
         O(1),P,Q,R,S,T,U,W,X.
    Rikki Ducornet, "From Birdland": C,F,H,I,K,N,T.
    Rob Hardin, "Dressed to Kill Yourself": C,D,E,F,H,J,K,O(2),P,Q,R,
         S,T,U,W,X.
    Annemarie Kemeny, "Attempts on Life": A(2),B,C,E,F,P,R,S,T,V.
    Marc Laidlaw, "Great Breakthroughs in Darkness (Being, Early
         Entries From The Secret Encyclopedia of Photography"):
         C,D,E,F,G,K,N,O,Q,R,S,T,U,V.
    William T. Vollmann, "Incarnations of the Murderer": B,C,E,F,G,
         K,N,O,P,Q,S,T,U,W,Y.
    
    Explanation of Symbols:
    
    A(1): Avant-Pop--appropriation of style and content of pop
         culture.
    A(2): Avant-Pop--appropriation of style and content of pop
         culture to subvert pop culture.
    B:    Strategies of confounding the usual distinctions between
    author/character, fiction/autobiography, "real" history and
    invented versions.
    C:    Meta-features.
    D:    Cyberpunk features.
    E:    Non-linear methods of presentation.
    F:    Process over product.
    G:    Collision of different world or planes of reality motif.
    H:    Radically idiosyncratic voices and idioms employed.
    [Note: continue through Z.]
    
    =================================
    *Appendix A: Commentary About Kathy Acker and "Obsession,"
    Written by Editor for a Different Project--for Possible Sampling
    Purposes in the (Now Cancelled) Introduction*
    
    [Note: Once Larry realized that he did not have much time before
    the deadline to write a completely new version of this
    commentary, he planned to paraphrase it, or "sample" it (self-
    plagiarism).  --Eyal.]
    
              Like her fiction, Kathy Acker is a bundle of
         contradictory parts that combine to create the jagged unity
         of a Raushcenberg collage.  Street-wise gutter snipe and
         radical feminist critic, motorcycle-outlaw and vulnerable
         woman, cynic and visionary idealist, Acker writes a series
         of experimental, shocking, and highly disturbing novels that
         present perhaps the most devastating (and wickedly funny)
         critique of life under late capitalism since William
         Burroughs' mid-60s works.
              These works include her 1970s small press publications
         (The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, by the Black 
         Tarantula; I Dreamt I Became a Nymphomaniac!; Imagining;
         The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec, by Henri Toulouse 
         Lautrec; and Kathy Acker Goes to Haiti); her "re-writes"
         of classical Western novels Great Expectations and Don 
         Quixote, as well as works that pastiche a broader variety
         of prior literary works: Blood and Guts in High School,
         Empire of the Senseless, and In Memoriam to Identity.
              "Obsession" offers an illustration of the ways Avant-
         Pop authors appropriate, sample, and otherwise collaborate
         with prior texts drawn from the realms of both "high" and
         "pop" culture; it also showcases Avant-Pop's tendency to
         blur the distinction between author and character--a device
         which emphasizes the individual's imaginative role in
         constructing any version of "reality" and the interaction of
         "fiction" and "fact" in our media-soaked environment.  In
         "Obsession," Acker--in one of her typically bold narrative
         manoeuvers--adopts the roles of Cathy and Heathcliff, the
         passionate and ultimately doomed lovers from Emily Bronte's
         19th century masterpiece, Wuthering Heights.  But as
         Avant-Pop authors often remind us, "re-telling" a familiar
         story within a contemporary context permits readers to re-
         think the assumptions and "meanings" they bring to such
         materials.  "Reanimated" by Acker's surrealist imagination
         and fiercely political vision, the elements of Bronte's
         novel are transformed into a nightmarish vision of the
         sexual longings, gender confusions and injustices to be
         found in contemporary society.
              Also typical of Acker's work is her focus in
         "Obsession" on the body as a literal and symbolic site/cite
         of struggle between individuals seeking self-empowerment and
         the forces of patriarchal control that seek to regulate
         people's lives.  This emphasis is grounded in more than
         abstract political concerns.  As a real woman and not just a
         narrative person, Acker is her own text, her own gallery.
         Embedded i*n one of her front teeth is a jagged chunk of
         bronze.  She's a body-builder in more than the usual way:
         her muscles animate spectacular tattoos, a combination that
         she feels allows her to seize control over the sign-systems
         through which people "read" her.  Past mistress of the
         cunning juxtaposition and the Fine Art of Appropriation,
         Acker writes fiction that betrays a multitrack outlaw
         intellect.  And she doesn't shrink from mining outlaw "low
         culture" genres like SF, pornography, and detective fiction.
         The net effect of her work is not merely to deconstruct, but
         to decondition.
    
    *V. 2  Contributors' Notes*
    
    Kathy Acker's most recent publications include: Portrait of the 
         Eye (a collection of three early novels) and In Memoriam 
         to Identity.  The selection included in this issue is from
         a forthcoming novel to be published by Random House in the
         Spring of 1993.  She is also recording an album featuring
         her work set to music that Hal Wilner is producing, and
         rides a 750 Honda.
    
    Robert Coover recently spent two years developing teaching
         applications using hypertext in creative writing courses
         (this pilot program was sponsored by Apple).  Professor of
         English at Brown University, he is the author of numerous
         novels and stories, including most recently Pinocchio in 
         Venice.  The fiction selection included here is part
         of a long experimental novel, The Adventures of Lucky 
         Pierre, which Coover has been writing now for over twenty
         years.
    
    Ricardo Cruz's fiction has appeared in various literary journals,
         including Fiction International and Black Ice Magazine.
         His first novel, Straight Outta Compton (Fall 1992,
         Fiction Collective Two), was recently named winner of the
         Nilon Award for Excellence in Minority Fiction.  Currently
         "out and about" in Bloomington, Illinois, he is completing
         work on his Ph.D. in English at Illinois State-Normal.
    
    Rikki Ducornet is the author of six volumes of poetry and a
         tetralogy of novels--The Stain, Entering Fire, The Fountains 
         of Neptune, and The Jade Cabinet--that will be
         published by Dalkey Archive Press.  Also known for her work
         as an illustrator of such works as the limited edition of
         Robert Coover's Spanking the Maid and Borges's "Tlon Uqbar
         and Orbis Tertius," Ducornet is Professor of Creative
         Writing and Literature at the University of Denver.  A
         forthcoming issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction
         will be devoted to her work (The Guest-Editor of this issue
         wishes it to be known that he is currently seeking materials
         for this issue).
    
    Rob Hardin is a writer and musician living in NYC who reports
         that writing is the way of "getting linear dissonant
         counterpoint--the chamber music nightmare and empty attics--
         out of my system."  His poetry has appeared in numerous
         magazines, including Mississippi Review, Atomic Avenue,
         and Flagellation.  His recent album credits include The
         Lost Boys and Billy Squire's Here and Now.
    
    Annemarie Kemeny teaches and is completing work on her Ph.D.
         at the Department of English, SUNY Stony Brook.  She
         has published criticism and poetry.
    
    Marc Laidlaw has spent most of his adult life in office
         buildings, writing on company word processors.  His works
         include an early cyberpunk novel, Dad's Nuke (1985), a SF
         novel abut Tibet, Neon Lotus.  The selection published in
         this issue has appeared in print in Great Britain in New 
         Worlds 2, ed. David Garnett (Victor Gollancz, Ltd.).
    
    Larry McCaffery is co-editor of Fiction International,
         American Book Review, Critique: Studies in Contemporary 
         Fiction, and editor of Storming the Reality Studio: A 
         Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction(Duke
         UP).  Two new books will appear in 1993: Interviews with 
         Radically Innovative American Authors (Pennsylvania UP) 
         and Avant Pop: Postmodern Fiction for the 90s, which will
         appear in the new Black Ice Books Series (Normal, IL:
         Fiction Collective Two).
    
    William T. Vollmann's recent publications include Whores for 
         Gloria, An Afghanistan Picture Show, Thirteen Stories & 
         Thirteen Epitaphs, and Fathers and Crows (the third of
         Vollmann's projected septology of "Dream Novels").  Research
         for his books has taken him recently to Cambodia, Mexico
         City, Sarajevo, and the Magnetic North Pole.
    
    =================================
    VI.  *Appendix B: Editor's Log: 1/92--In the Beginning...*
    
         Before the word was the grant application for contributors'
    and editor's honoraria for a special issue of Postmodern Culture
    devoted to "Postmodern Fiction."
         1-92.  Postmodern Culture's co-editor Eyal Amiran contacted
    me, Larry McCaffery (for his background as an editor and critic
    associated with postmodernism, see contributor's notes), early in
    1992 to discuss my willingness to guest edit this special issue.
    I agreed and we set up a basic gameplan: I would arrange for the
    appearance of approximately half dozen previously unpublished (in
    the U.S.) pieces that, in my view, illustrated significant formal
    and thematic tendencies within postmodernism; to this end, my
    selection process would avoid narrow or prescriptive definitions
    of what constituted "postmodernism," emphasizing the quality of
    material over "name recognition," although I would attempt to
    include at least some fiction by established figures (Pynchon,
    Sontag, Gaddis, Coover, Barth, Rushdie, Abish, McElroy, Le Guin,
    Barthelme, and Burroughs were all specifically mentioned in our
    preliminary phone conversations, and, indeed, were subsequently
    invited by me to submit fiction for the issue).  I would also try
    to include writings by some of the most interesting recent
    authors, and selections from work that would come in response to
    Postmodern Culture's calls for fiction; I would supply an
    introduction which would place my selections in a general
    framework of postmodern aesthetics generally, and which would
    clarify whatever significant differences and similarities
    characterize the older and younger generations of postmodern
    authors.  Deadline for my having all the materials in the
    editors' hands would be mid-September, with the issue going out
    on-line at the very end of the month.
    
    =================================
    
    *Appendix C: Unrevised Fragments of Editor's (Now Cancelled)
    Introduction*
    
    1.  ...I agreed to accept his invitation to edit in part because
    I felt the process of putting such an issue together would
    contribute to the process of re-evaluating my own views about
    postmodernism.  This process started several years ago, when now,
    and has grown out of a series of recognitions in the mid-80s
    about the limitations and strengths of my earlier positions about
    postmodernism, that I was already fullyI was alredayworking on
    suchpretty certain that whatever in part on question that the
    literary sensibilities on encounters in the best writing coming
    out of the younger generation of vital, innovative American
    authors has been shaped by a very different set of cultural
    circumstances and aesthetic considerationsvery different indeed
    from those that gave rise to the first wave of postmodern
    experimentalism back in the mid 60s...one generation's daring
    metafictional explorations about the relationship between author
    and text becomes the most effective tool of the 90s realist
    attempting to depict a world in which "signs," "texts," and
    various other fictions have proliferated to such an extent that
    they form the most substantial aspect of most people's existence.
    2.  ...no attempt was made to fill pre-designated slots or
    categories...what was surprising was the sheer volume of quality
    fiction written by the generation of innovative writers who have
    grown to maturity in the 80s and 90s...halfway into my selection
    process, Eyal Amiran had agreed with my suggestion that we aim
    less for a balance of fiction by younger and more established and
    concentrate instead on foregrounding work by emerging writers,
    using selections from the canonical postmodernists by way of
    showcasing aesthetic and thematic continuities or divergences
    between the generations.
    3.  Ducornet's camera serves as it does for some many other
    younger writers, as a magical mirror possessing the power to
    petrify the past, illuminate and momentarily petrify human truths
    that usually evaporate under life's process of perpetual change.
         ...a selection from perhaps the most versatile stylist,
    ventriloquist of all...quirky American dialects, bad jokes,
    willingness to push a trope until every aspect of it had been
    squeezed dry..."Lucky Pierre" is an excerpt from a legendy blue
    movie special, now over twenty years in the making.  More than
    most other 60s figures, Coover's best work from the 60s is linked
    directly to writers like DeLillo, Leyner, the cyberpunks and the
    later authors whose work is so often drenched in a kind of
    constant breath surrealism and intertextual play, and whose prose
    is so frequently drenched in a kind of techno-media poetics.
         Cruz, appropriate that when his interrelated sequence of
    stories about life in the ghetto finally came together into a
    novel, Straight Outta Compton appropriate on several levels--
    the sheer intensity and sensuousness of his voice, the sheer
    vitality and anger and low-down ache of passion and the mixture
    of surprise, delight and playfulness with which they respond to
    the set of surprises that ghetto life has in store for them
    moment-to-moment.  Cruz is the first black writer I've
    encountered who seems to have integrated rap's developed a prose
    voice, narrative
         [Editor's Note: Apologize in Ed. Note that I can't even
    provide fragments of the Kemeny because I left my only copy of
    her story behind in San Diego and did not receive the fax of her
    story sent by Eyal.]
         Laidlaw, Alphabetical structure, near science fictional tale
    of, associated with c-p but possesses a lyricism, verbal control,
    and intellectual delicacy that has more in common with Calvino or
    Steve Erickson (whose non-appearance is regretted).
         William Vollmann, "Incarnations of the Murderer."  This is
    although the 90s postmodernists have only just begun the process
    of shifting gears into a decade that almost certainly is going to
    pick up speed and recklessness as the millennium approaches, but
    from this vantage point there's no question that William T.
    Vollmann has got a headstart over every other member of his
    generation in terms of opening up new narrative opportunities and
    laying aside the temerity and failure, hesitation, and general
    figure of will that seemed to lie heavy over the generation of
    authors appearing in the late 70s and early 80s fiction.
    Certainly no American author since the arrival of the canonized
    behemoth Thomas Pynchon has appeared with the combination of
    reckless ambition, verbal gifts, and an intuitive feel for
    inventing narrative strategies capable of rendering this vision.
         "Incarnations of the Murderer" displays many of the
    tendencies that make Vollmann's work seem so original and fresh.
    As is typical of most of his other work, "Incarnations" deals
    with brutality and those troubling emotional regions where
    extremes of passion and love are transformed into their equally
    vivid opposites.  Also typically, Vollmann never allows a scene
    or a motif to remain static; instead, his imagination is
    constantly at work transforming the scenes and characters into
    variations designed to present new insights into materials that
    more traditional story-telling methods would use to make us feel
    comfortable, that we have understood their essence.
    "Incarnations" also displays Vollmann's characteristically
    prismatic handling of point of view--having matured in the
    aftermath of the experiments of writers like Burroughs, Mailer,
    Vonnegut, and Coover.  Vollmann has taken ways of integrating
    authorial experience, collaborating with prior texts, and
    imagining inventive narrative to new levels.  The risks he has
    managed to take at this pint, both personal and narrative, are
    astonishing.  For all the attention paid to presenting even the
    most ugly and poignant scenes and people even-handedly, there is
    a deeply moving sense of Vollmann's personal engagement, his
    sense of moral outrage while witnessing the cruelties and
    stupidities human beings can inflict on each other.  The risk of
    insisting on personally witnessing such acts of human folly as he
    documents in his fiction are burnout, having one's imagination or
    aesthetic judgement overwhelmed by the emotionality of such
    experiences.  For now, though, at least for this reader, the
    sense of personal risk and danger has served Vollmann admirably.
    Surely if nothing else, Vollmann is helping to dispel the sense
    that postmodern American fiction has floundered under the weight
    of its own selfconsciousness.
    
    =================================
    *Appendix D: Fragment found at bottom of page while developing
    conclusion to section IV. 5.*
    
         As I hope this "traditional" portion of my Introduction
    indicates, one can be fully informed about the ambiguities and
    limitations of any speech act; the tendency of all authors is to
    try to mask their confusion and personal insecurities behind a
    barrage of phoney rhetoric.  This does not, however, relieve the
    author of the responsibility of attempting to draw conclusions
    about issues that might be of some use.  It also doesn't mean
    that the process of engaging one's mind regularly with
    challenging topics can't be fun, or that the only options with
    topics one cares about deeply are to adopt the hypocritical or
    smug stance of the know-it-all or to mutter embarrassed
    apologies.  Displays of either adopt either the hypocritical
    stance of the or the hanghyupocritical finding a way to present
    what your conclusions are and how you arrived at them has to be--
    your conclusions and attitudesthat one can't expressand ones
    words withothers migwith as much mean, however, metaphorss well
    asaware of the limitations of an individual to draw
    conclusionsones         and the postmodern seems torisks
    havepleasurethe risks have been worth itevident--pursuing this
    itye"breakthrough" in terms of casting off the authorialtaking
    off on the perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Vollmann's
    writing in terms of postmodern aesthetics--namely, his treatment
    of point of viewworkIn terms of
    
    In order to give language the opportunities to stretch out
    muscles it rarely uses, the narrative structures in these
    selections tend to be flexible, open-ended, the "plot" capable of
    veering off suddenly in several possible directions.  Ironically,
    such structures can be seen as presenting a palpable and
    "realistic" sense of our world, with its constantly shifting
    series of signs systems and cultural codes producing surreal
    juxtapositions, a sense of media overload...exhilaration and
    confusion.
    
    to commentaryverbalash of expectations, the strangesurreal
    fusings of wherenothern equally familiar butnother context that
    is equally familiar butthe familiar elements drawn from
    differentcontexts into strange anddifferent sorts
    ofAestheticsQuestiolns of "realism" aside, however, using the
    free flowing narrative structures ofbarrthe sorts ofemiotic
    excess andthe constantly shiftingexploring its itself shared
    conviction that language's ability to transform our
    consciousness, a certain confidence that fiction's potential to
    create illusions that can shock and awaken, that language can
    enlight and...put in the service of confront banality
    counterability building language's power to that fiction in the
    powerabsorbed lessons of 60s literary radicalyounger the strength
    ofanew critical categories and terms arise with accelerating
    frequency in an attempt to keep pace with the appearance of the
    "new," the "exotic," and the "now"...fueled by a hysterical
    denial of the inevitability of bodily decay, old age and death,
    full of self-loathing for physical imperfection, obsessed with
    preserving one's experiences into images and sounds that provide
    the closest approximation of immortality allowed postmoderns,
    deeply suspicious of anything that cannot be soothingly
    controlled, "captured," replayed, most Americans have almost
    gladly accepted a life of banality in exchange for the creature
    comforts provided by its Daydream Nation; as reading becomes less
    central to the process whereby people are educated and understand
    each other, its significance retreats generally...on any given
    evening in America, the number of people sitting transfixed by
    game shows, their vestigial instinct toward self-improvement
    satisfied by the random bits of data occasionally tossed their
    way, outnumbers all the Americans who will read a book this year
    by a factor of 10 to 1.  comforting reassurance that the American
    Dream of instant transcendence is real...you gotta believe your
    own eyes, right?  the postmodern spectacle of the Rodney King
    trial, in which our citizens deeply felt intuition that they
    can't really trust the images comprising their postmodern
    world...
     are insubstantila, trickssuspicions about the illusory, awaht
    you see iwhich people comfort themselves and writing becomes
    increasinglytheandretreated into a dangerously somnolent  or
    anything else that cannot be controlled or rationally the
    powerful difference--a relentless and ferocious pursuitanything
    that postindustrial capitalism, with its relentless difference
    engine, continues toproduced by thesodemanded by the logic of
    jaded consumers awahsare relentlesslyas the logic of
    postindustrial capitalism's difference engine, help distributors
    and bookstore ownerfocus the consumption of fiction and other art
    "products"direct the somnolent readers waiting patiently for the
    latest poll to let them know what they think or feel about
    something,epheality ofdifficulty
    
    =================================
    *Appendix E: Early Draft of Comments Editor Planned to Use in His
    (Now Cancelled) "Introduction," Regarding Robert Coover's "Lucky
    Pierre" Selection (Remarks Which Would Also Have Helped Establish
    the Recurrent Pattern of Media-Induced Confusions, Reality Decay
    and Loss of Individual Identity Evident in Several of the
    Anthology's Selections).*
    
    One of the features that distinguished work by the 60s generation
    of postmodernists was their willingness to confort ashad to do
    with their of the brash band of
         Back in the early to mid-1960s, as Thomas Pynchon, John
    Barth, Susan Sontag, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Donald
    Barthelme and others were making it clear that a new generation
    of American writers were in their ascendancy, one
    particularly fresh angle of their work had to do with their
    presentation of technological change generally and "pop culture"
    in particular.  And the writer no otherrelationir take on
    are direction their work area of shard interest that made their
    work seem so fresh and genuinely "new" had to do with their
    exploration of how technological change and pop culture was
    transforming American life--and the new art forms arising to meet
    this transformation.  Most of these writers had experienced the
    thrill of Saturday afternoon serials and cartoons (followed
    perhaps by a Gene Autry Western or Hardy Boys movie), had
    collected bubblegum cards emblazoned with British and American
    fighter planes; they could recall Truman's announcement that a
    new weapon had been used against the Japanese in Hiroshima and
    Nagasaki, and they recognized the significance once their family
    radios were replaced by a television set.  There was something
    profound about such changes, of course, because in addition to
    transforming the physical space they were inhabiting, these
    developments were having deep and largely untheorized effects on
    their imaginations, what they dreamed of and were frightened by.
    Just as importantly, these things were affecting perception
    itself--movies taught writers how narrative materials could be
    cut-up, juxtaposed, what could be eliminated, tv ads provided
    insights about how to present information-dense materials
    economically, how to be didactic without tipping your hand too
    obviously, how principlesIn short, the 60s generation of
    postmodernist authors was the first to begin to explore the Media
    Scape that gradually began to occupy more and more of America's
    attention, its dreamslifeaffectingThese developments wereAll this
    was f having first time they saw television.memories of the vast
    transformations that accompanied the war, were old enough to
    remember a time when the family gathering around the radio each
    evening was still a novelty,evening radioThis was the first
    generation of authors who had grown up immersed in Media Culture
    , who were the firsthow popular new terrain they began to stake
    out was the effect that the mediamutual concern of the key areas
    ofthe first brash band of postmodern fiction writers were just
    bursting upon the relatively staid American literary scene,
    Robert Coover quickly established himself as one of the brashest
    
    =================================
    *Appendix F: Fragment of Discussion to be Used in the (Now
    Cancelled) "Introduction" regarding Recurrent Motifs in
    Postmodernism and the Current Issue (with Supporting Quotes)*
    
    Recurrent references to the proliferation of images created by
    cameras (including video and movie cameras), the sense that
    photography is akin to magic in its ability to allow humans
    visual access to that which is normally invisible (the past, the
    dead, inner psychic states), the more ominous implications that
    by giving such previously ineffable or abstract states of being a
    tangible existence has created an entryway through which
    illusion, the dead, and the past will soon overrun "real" and the
    living and the present.
              Inventor of the praxiscope technology (*which see*),
         Professor Aanschultz believed that close observation of
         physiology and similar superficial phenomena could lead to
         direct revelation of the inner or secret processes of
         nature.  Apparent proof of this now discredited theory was
         offered by his psychopraxiscope, which purported to offer
         instantaneous viewing of any subject's thoughts.
                   --Marc Laidlaw, "Great Breakthroughs in Darkness"
    Postmodern Authors living in a contemporary world dominated by
    Media Scape, simulated experiences, Virtual-and-Hyper Realities,
    often literalize the metaphorical components of previous eras'
    attempts to poeticize the mysterious nature of truth and
    falsehood, life and death, reality and illusion, originality and
    duplication.  Thus, Robert Coover places his hero Lucky Pierre
    into a cinematic narrative realm in which "All the world's a
    stage, and each must play his part, etc.."
         As technologies of reproduction create counterfeit worlds
    that become increasingly lifelike and offer an ever-expanding
    array of simulated experiences, the fleeting "real time"
    experiences of individuals begin to seem increasingly less
    substantial precisely because they cannot be replayed.