At least according to Beach House ’s phenomenal “Walk in the Park,” by Allen Cordell, on Vimeo:

Recently I saw Steve Asma talk about monsters; soonafter, my friend Steve Aubrey, editor of the Suspicious Anatomy, sent me the above wolfboy/zombie-esque bully video. I find the action of it mesmerizing. Perhaps all good stories end in sandwiches, metaphorical or otherwise…

In any event, fur and psychedelia are here to stay, as chimerical monsters and taxidermy and vampires and werewolves all make comebacks—and the truly monstrous (per Asma’s excellent On Monsters) recede into the cold and psychological, the realm of Arendt and To Catch a Predator.

In lighter news, the monstrous unconscious comes forward in art… and liquor. Behold! The truly chimerical—the not-alive/not-dead/not-human/not-beast—the zombierific—is now available as a seven-hundred-dollar craft beer with a button nose and a tuxedo:

Aww, thanks, BrewDog… a pet-koozie. I guess I have always wanted a stuffed dog to hold my hair of the dog*. (*There’s a “yo dawg” iteration in there somewhere, but I don’t have time to figure it out right now.)

More strange doubling…

What is X?

THIS IS HIP-HOP! from Airwave Ranger on Vimeo.

What is X?

(But really—we’ll GET you, you hovertrucker…)

The CIA has a page for kids (thanks to Chris T. for pointing this out) that hilariously misuses (or, should i say, “misuses”) quotation marks:

Welcome. We’re glad you’re here to learn more about the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA is an independent US government agency that provides national security “intelligence” to key US leaders so they can make important, informed decisions. CIA employees gather intelligence (or information) in a variety of ways, not just by “spying” like you see in the movies or on TV (though we do some of that, too).

Italicizing or bolding these words would have worked better… I think they think the quotation marks are “clarifying” because they “highlight” key spy “lingo.”

But given, oh, you know, critical US “intelligence” “failures”—9/11, Saddam’s not having WMDs after all, the Afghanis not welcoming us (surprise!) as liberators and bearers of heroic Freedom Fries, &c.—the marks come off as “ironic” and “mocking,” or rather “sadly hilaaarious.”

The creepiest rhetoric bon-mot here is the final admonition to the youth that yes, the CIA have real movie-quality spies, not no bullshit rent-a-spy fools in cheap tuxedos, but real laser-watch carrying badasses.

In fact, the Company’s brilliantest “intelligencers” may be right behind you, spying after all—watching you Google naughty pictures of Megan Fox and the Avatar pseudo-ladies…

Little wonder we can smuggle sensitive “intelligence” out of critical installations in Central Asia by pretending the classified info is a Lady Gaga album. Hilaaaaaaaaarious…

The spy urinal. (?) No idea. This is what came up when I Googled “spy Wikimedia” in hopes of getting an old, rights-expired photo of a Russian guy hatcheting an anarchist or something.

Read the review on The Outlet. Denon’s masterful long short story is translated by Lydia Davis and introduced by Peter Brooks, who hints at the mystery of the novella.

On my own ongoing investigation into the novella, for Electric Literature:

What makes a novella a novella, as opposed to a long short story or a short novel? Why does the novella seduce us, even though relatively few are published or taught? (You never hear, for example, “Mommy, I want to grow up to be a famous novella-ist!”) Deleuze and Guattari offer a few hypnotic thoughts on the subject, but even they abandon the question after only—and perhaps appropriately—half-contemplating it.

Towards a literary–psychological theory of the novella, writer and compulsive short-text reader Wythe Marschall offers a biweekly review of classic and contemporary works that may or may not fit your definition of the term.

By focusing on their playful relationship with theme—a constant seesaw between story and meditation, narrative-packed-into-a single moment and timeless “whoa” of profound human experience—Wythe hopes to pin down just what the novella does to its reader’s brain:

Can we situate “the novella effect” somewhere between the constrained, heightened consciousness of the short story and the taxonomizing–exhausting consciousness of the novel? Tune in every other week to find out—

Or, at least, to discover several novellas worth reading.

Thanks to Electric Literature, New Directions, NYRB Classics, and Melville House.

The man’s (invented) name was V.D., and he wrote about sex. Lulz.

Finishing up where I left off (literature-as-fractal, literature-as-rainbow), more on my survey of literature after the Enlightenment, the Fractal Rainbow:

Combining the ideas in the last two posts in this series—with attention to literature (artful verse; the continuum of texts figuratively documenting the human experience) and to the play of signs, myths, archetypes, and words—I end up with a theme for my class and a larger thesis to mull over and refine:

Literature is a fractal in form, in shape. It is made of feedback based on recursion. It evolves as it recurs, as it is iterated, as more of it is made. Literature evolves over time.

Literature has a fine structure, scaled arbitrarily. It can be analyzed at all levels: macro (genre or movement), meso (text), micro (sentence), and nano (sign). Each level is revealing. It is not enough to look only at the macro (as in a Wikipedia entry). It is not enough to look only at a text, to skim it.

It is not enough to dwell upon a few choice sentences. It is not enough to obsess over an image, a word choice, a myth recalled by an off-hand adjective. It is our job as critical readers to read at all levels—not all the time (that would be impossible), but as much as possible. This may require rereading, and it certainly helps conversation: You and I may have read the same text, but we may have understood it differently. We help each other as we combine levels.

Literature is too irregular to be easily described in traditional semiotic language. An epic such as Moby-Dick or Beloved is not just an advertisement, or a stop sign on the road. To talk about a literary text at all requires some level of appreciation of its otherness from other texts. If every text was literature, we wouldn’t still be reading Homer. We’d only read the Post. It is its irregularity—in literature’s case, its artfulness, its ability to affect human consciousness—that makes it both awesome (literally, fear-/religious love-inspiring) and difficult to pin down, at times.

This is not meant to diss the Post or comix or stop signs, BUT: Literature is the artful craft of verse, the manipulation of signs in a certain realm in which many big ideas—the whole of history and mythology and individual human consciousness and the stream of life that surrounds us and the abstract melting down of all of this, its reduction and manipulation and re-manipulation—construct a single text (and, because literature is a rainbow, that text is only one cell within the titanic body of literature).

Literature is self-similar, stochastically. A) What is similarity? Texts are not all the same. Duh. But they share similarities: They are non-arbitrary groups of signs. This sentence, for instance, did not come out of a monkey’s typewriter. Literature is also self-similar. We know it when we see it. We know why Moby-Dick is not the Post. It’s similar. But… not every literary text is the same. Moby-Dick is not the same as The Crying of Lot 49. Similar, generically, categorically. But different, specifically… (Literature is like the sign in this way.)

B) What is self-similarity? A literary text shows itself at each level of investigation to be itself. Moby-Dick is about whales, in summary; it’s also about whales, in every sentence. Self-similar. Many levels to view. Each level similar. Power through this self-similarity. Similar across the form: We recognize it as literature. Similar across itself: We recognize it as itself. But each level is distinct, each chapter is distinct. The literary text is a fractal. To the degree it is a fractal, it is literary.

To the degree it feels truly random (monkey typewriter nonsense), it is “bad” writing. To the degree its supra-claims (A NEWSPAPER OF IMPORT!) do not match its sentences, it is hypocrisy, popular or “genre” work, mere journalism. (It is, in any case, not literature, in the highest meaning of the word. Literature doesn’t have to be hoity-toity or exclusive. But it must have a definition we can at least kinda-sorta agree upon, as scholars, as writers, as critical readers.) The literary text must resemble itself, artfully, as a whole (an idea) and in each sentence.

C) “Stochastic” means “random,” but “stochastic” is a more musical term; it means “not-metered,” “non-metric;” it is therefore a less random way of saying “random.” Literature, verse, is a kind of music, after all; it is the metering of signs, trapped in language sounds, themselves trapped in squiggles on screen or on paper; literature, whether prose or verse poetry or unmetered poetry can be said to have a meter; that meter may of course be non-meter, but non-meter is still a kind of meter. (Prose has a relationship to meter.) All literature has meter. Very little literature, these days, outside rap lyrics, has “metrical” meter. Prose mostly has a stochastic meter.

D) So what is stochastic self-similarity? Literature does not consist, with a few exceptions, of the same exact words or sentences or even ideas repeated over and over again. Therefore, while it is self-similar at each level, it is self-similar in some other way than simple stamping, or copying and pasting. It is stochastically self-similar. Moby-Dick is not the same sentence about whales; it is delightfully new sentence after delightfully new sentence about whales set out in a non-arbitrary pattern.

Literature has a simple and/but recursive definition. We know it when we see it. But we sometimes have a hard time defining it or putting a name to it. We rely on jargon (”sign”); jargon is not universally intelligible. Yet literature is literature (a recursive definition): The problem is not in calling literature a spectrum of texts crafted artfully, but in doing so without resorting to language.

Literature has been with us since we first wrote down language; before that, proto-literature was with us in a different, oral form. We cannot imagine literature “from the outside;” our every phrase draws upon or alludes to or is shaped unconsciously by texts, and—especially in a world of text messaging, email, and the infinite superfast free flatness of the internet—we think textually. We are part of literature, living, and it is a part of us.

What the hell is this? It’s some literature, fools—deal with it. (Actually, I think this image relates to sign language, but I like it in general. Signs raining down, from the concavity of the umbrella. And those weird-ass smiley faces with double eyes… Already, a story is implied.)

That’s Jeff Vilencia’s first art house movie, made in 1992, courtesy Hugh Raffles (Insectopedia). Says Raffles of the whole intriguing philosophical quandary of squishing living things:

The Supreme Court decision of April 20, 2010, voiding HR 1887, the so-called “crush video law,” by an 8-1 majority, provoked an intense and immediate response, summarised in this article in The Huffington Post. Mary Tieffenbrunn wrote this piece in The News-Gazette.

What is unknown or is fragile is erotic. I can imagine a whole compendium of fragile-skinned, differently-insided squishables (and therefore objects-erotic). Sushi, meatball, eclair. And of course the the grape, the furry animal, the easy stand-in for the organ…

Gross, but who doesn’t love to squish stuff? Think of Burroughs’s exterminator tragic heroes… Roach-stamp, bubblewrap-pop, tomato-burst: These are the uneasy loves of some universal, unconscious imp with big feet. A new supervillain: SQUISHOR.

…Or Stimpy. Maybe we all are a little Stimpy in taste, somewhere in there…

The phone books are here! The phone books are here! Er, uh, I mean—the Suspicious Anatomy book launch is here! My first book! Check it:

Not since Galen’s De Elementis has been set in ink a single compendium of medicological knowledge so extensive & practicably useful as SUSPICIOUS ANATOMY Workbook No. 15: The Human Cranius. Having intrinsic value to all persons—piratical, mysterious, upright, or otherwise—The Human Cranius is a PEERLESS GEM of uncanny truth. If you are a living human, you should make frequent, unabashed forays into this field guide to your hideous secondary body—the cranius, an organ-matrix & carnival of fangs which is trying to destroy you even as you read this sentence…

From the genre-chainsawing minds of the Hollow Earth Society (Ethan Gould and, moi, Wythe Marschall) comes “the definitive guide to the horrifying world inside you”—finally available in lush, illustrated paperback!

In the tradition of John Hodgman, David Cronenberg, and H. P. Lovecraft, The Human Cranius explores an alternative anatomy at once mesmerizing and deeply unsettling. Gould and Marschall ask: What do we know about our own bodies? The answer: Very little…

In many ways, the art and human studies of modernity have given us the keys to our unconscious minds, but have left entirely to dry science (fixing plumbing, testing drugs) the workings of our bodies. What does it feel like to have guts? To face disease, age, mutation—in short, a self that is not only not whole but not even on its own side?

The SUSPICIOUS ANATOMY series seeks to address these physio–psychomological imbalances by producing, for your benefit, the entire unconscious of the body, the shadow-self, in words and elaborate images.

The official Human Cranius book launch, at Observatory Room in Brooklyn, will feature a lecture, medicological film snippets, and a live human dissection. Join us!

I think the idea here is to show you what the fonts look like laid out in newspaper headlines, &c. (And a truly lovely Q, no doubt.) But, as a potential buyer of type, I would be way more into reading the Dadaist poesy of the catalogue than ever ordering anything. Exhibits A through Zed, or approaching Zed, anyway:

That’s right, with OLD AMAZING TYPE, you can print stories about scandalous FRENCHMEN who cause MAIDEN SMILES—or tell the tales of FEARLESS YOUNG ROMANS hunting DELICIOUS ducks, with unconventionally fabricked backs…

Or go the Lovecraftian route and reveal the horrors of modernity—mechanized, occult practises; the stuff of hill-witches, complicated by disjointed phraseology and discontinuity (Lovecraft meets slam poetry meets Foucault meets W. C. Williams)—

Or just ogle NUMEROUS WOMEN—you can do that, too, with OLD AMAZING TYPE—

“Bird & club?” Whatever—you have so many options with OLD AMAZING TYPE! You can play a wacky instrument! Publish a book! Or tame a graceful beast and travel the open roads:

Or you could simply be amazed by the—

“Yo, girl—you brisk as hell…” I can hear the comeback of the saucy adjective already. (Or do I think “saucy” due to “brisket?”)

We will never know what these headlines meant to the printers who flipped past them daily. We no longer possess OLD AMAZING TYPE and so must invent its NEW SPECTACULAR equivalent, or else be satisfied with the cuttings above and their numerous physical cognates—rusted neon signs unfolding down to trash from the eaves of Gowanus warehouses and Williamsburg confectionary plants… phonography needles buried in the withered flanks of long-dead upscale haberdasher’s assistants who never could remember to look down before sitting on their settees after changing the record… curled playing cards, guides to whist… a list of copperplate fonts, its raw leather face cracking to reveal a red, card backing beneath, and some dead man’s ex libris looking down through the dark pages of the long-closed book, contemplating those NUMEROUS BRISK Dames and delicious mallards, their stockings, their stuffed livers…

Or, to say it another way: OLD AMAZING TYPE is amazing. I R inspired.

Picking up where I left off (literature-as-fractal), more on my survey of literature after the Enlightenment, the Fractal Rainbow:

What is a rainbow? To paraphrase Wikipedia:

A rainbow is an optical and meteorological phenomenon that causes a spectrum of light to appear in the sky when the Sun shines onto droplets of moisture in the Earth’s atmosphere. They take the form of a multicolored arc, with red on the outer part of the arch and violet on the inner section of the arch.

A rainbow spans a continuous spectrum of colours; the discrete bands are an artifact of human colour vision. The most commonly cited and remembered sequence, in English, is Newton’s sevenfold: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet, popularly memorized the mnemonic ROY G BIV.

Rainbows inspire metaphor. Wordsworth’s 1802 poem “My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold” begins:

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!

The Newtonian deconstruction of the rainbow is said to have provoked John Keats to lament in his 1820 poem “Lamia:”

Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—
Unweave a rainbow

In contrast to this, here’s Richard Dawkins talking about his book Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder:

My title is from Keats, who believed that Newton had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colours. Keats could hardly have been more wrong, and my aim is to guide all who are tempted by a similar view, towards the opposite conclusion. Science is, or ought to be, the inspiration for great poetry.

For my part, literature is a rainbow in composition, in content. Literature is a continuous spectrum of texts (non-arbitrary groups of signs). The discrete genres and movements within the spectrum are artifacts of human vision. Genre distinctions exist for us when we look for them. They are information we put into texts. Without us, the texts are simply texts.

The point here is: We read the texts. Reading is a verb. We compose texts by reading. Reading is not about taking information out. The information never leaves the text. You put your reading into the text, classifying it, applauding or despising it. You are in control.

But regardless of how you or I read at this moment, literature is out there, a continuous, ongoing emergence of complexity from the arbitrary world of signs—things we say, things we mean, pictures we draw, ideas we have, sounds, feelings.

These signs emerge, writer by writer, into texts that emerge, year by year and day by day, into broader bands whose total complexity is history, literature, science, language, our ability to think these thoughts, in English.

The point is: Literature is something big that we make, all the time, by reading and by writing.

Lamia, by Draper.

For the “World’s Longest Literary Remix,” I translated a portion of Horatio Alger’s Joe’s Luck: Always Wide Awake (p. 127-8) into the universe of Great Cthulhu—of Shub-Niggurath, and the fungoid crab-miners from Yuggoth (which we call “Pluto”), which crab-miners so indelicately iced poor Mr. Henry W. Akeley of the hills north of Brattleboro, VT—at least as far as “The Whisperer In Darkness” would have us believe…

Where Alger writes of bears, I confound said lumbering pickinick-basket loving mammals with/into Lovecraft’s shoggoths, which are surely some of his more signature (and more terrifying) beasts—great expandable pools of eyes, hyper-intelligent, driven insane by millions of years of servitude to other inhuman races, then by millennia of demi-torpor in the pits of Antarctica, or forgotten New England barns…

I can almost write that I’m not sure whether Alger’s libertarian vision for America or Lovecraft’s materialist/maltheist vision for the cosmos is the more terrifying—but Lovecraft, neurotic and evil as he was, always wins. There’s something in his fiction that is enduringly disturbing, no matter how often it’s tackled and lauded and dismissed and revived, the way Sappho is enduringly romantic, or A Tribe Called Quest enduringly playful–relaxing.

I just finished the masterful Against the World, Against Life by Michel Houellebecq (pron. “well-beck;” the linked PDF is an old draft, to give the uninitiated a taste; I strongly recommend buying the Believer edition), which should be read and reread by anyone interested in instilling fiction with terror, esp. that Lovecraftian ur-terror, gnostic madness, that matches, then entirely out-does the vicissitudes of real life.

(Houellebecq on the ethic of the master terror-teller: “Attack the story like a radiant suicide, utter the great NO to life without weakness; then you will see a magnificent cathedral, and your senses, vectors of unutterable derangement, will map out an integral delirium that will be lost in the unnameable architecture of time.”)

Props to the GalleyCat crew for organizing the remix.

A shoggoth, more cuddly than the stories would have us imagine, and with far fewer eyes…

Rap covers, more than rock covers, allow for the voice to take full prominence. The music is the same, pure karaoke. The orchestra is empty, and the great singer alone prevails. Or, in this case, the highly adaptive Mighty Mos Def brings his inexplicable magnetism—his jazzy nonchalance? his smiley-ness in the face of everything?—to the masked world of DOOM and Danger Mouse, two stars both less street and less pop than Def, but perhaps more engaging, at least for me.

DOOM raps the way Lovecraft writes: Both could give a fuck who’s paying attention. Both deny the real, without reason, without ideology, and proceed from there to construct a new, iller real—Sur-real. Imagination somehow frees these writers to face real terrors, to use the lingo of science to question our reliance on it, our devotion toward futurity in the face of an amazingly fucked up past.

Still, it’s nice to see Mos bring DOOM back to planet earth here. The silly mask, the faux-Asian smock, the unpracticed eliding of a few key DOOM throwaways (which elision only heightens the effect of the great couplets like “[caesura] Slip like Freudian, / you first and last step to playin yourself like accordion”)—all these only add to the mystery of the original.

DOOM, like Lovecraft, creates the basis of a new mythology within his medium, a new blend or mode of story, bravado, self-deprecation, Gothic body-signs (”This one he wrote in cold blood with a toothpick”), and scathing material objectivity about, well, the human predicament—doom.

Well-written as well as immaculately said…

This spring, I was asked to teach a survey of literature from 1800 to today at Brooklyn College, but I didn’t want to teach a survey class with a boring title (nothing with the words “vista,” “perspective,” “lens,” “examining,” “investigating,” “tradition,” &c.). I also wanted an arbitrary organizing mechanism, something simple and flexible.

So I settled on a title, the Fractal Rainbow—literature as fractal, recursive; literature as a continuous spectrum of voices, blending into new voices, organized by period and style but each individual, a thousand strokes of light on the back of an eyeball—and on color-in-the-text’s-title as guiding sine qua non.

I would teach, I thought, “The Black Cat” and White Jacket and Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West and The Bluest Eye and “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Maybe The Green Child (but it proved too dang difficult to procure copies of this under-loved Surreal novel).

All this grand literary painting left me with a problem, however. At some point I would have to define in more detail what I meant by “the fractal rainbow.” Sure, it sounds like a Dream Theater concert DVD, or an anime I wouldn’t want to watch. But I like it, in part for its flatly fantastic(al) sonic quality (”frac” and the long vowels of rain, dream vowels), in part because it presents a puzzle.

Each person encountering the phrase has to test it against what they think it may mean, arriving somewhere unexpected. The phrase itself has a fractal quality of depth-plumbing leading not to an answer, but to more depths to be plumbed.

In a few posts, I’ll outline some of my ideas about the intersections of fractals, rainbows, and fiction.

To start off, what is a fractal?

These videos tell the story sans words.

For words, I paraphrase Wikipedia:

A fractal is “a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is a reduced-size copy of the whole,” a property called self-similarity. Roots of mathematical interest in fractals can be traced back to the late 19th Century; however, the term “fractal” was coined by Benoît Mandelbrot in 1975 and was derived from the Latin fractus meaning “broken” or “fractured.” A mathematical fractal is based on an equation that undergoes iteration, a form of feedback based on recursion.

A fractal often has the following features:

• It has a fine structure at arbitrarily small scales: It can be analyzed at the macro, meso, and micro levels.
• It is too irregular to be easily described in traditional Euclidean geometric language.
• It is self-similar (at least approximately or stochastically).
• It has a simple and recursive definition.

>> More fractal video, the “Classic Newton.”

>> Fractal math.

Deleuze-heads out there can already guess at what I mean when I say that literature is fractal. Elements at the lowest levels reverberate or straightforwardly recur at the levels of consciousness and even at whole-text levels—via paratext, the marketing of the fiction, the criticism and controversies and biographies and hagiographies surrounding it.

Look at the whiteness of the whale: It’s discussed openly, consciously; it recurs in imagery again and again; it pallors everything over, at the word-level, with the paleness of death, so all blanks and snowblind positivisms in Moby-Dick and even retroactively in White Jacket become the wall, the wall Ahab or any gnostic must somehow strike through… the whoosh of waves, white birds’ wails, winging harpoons whanging into whaleflesh, song of wind, wide openness, the hypnotizing whiteness of the sun, which is blindness. The term and chromatic qualia and death-signifier recur differently at each level, as whole chapters, as running motifs, and then as sentences, thoughts, and then as unconscious bits.

It’s not enough to teach the meso-level story; the text should be shown to be truly fractal.