RETROFUTUROLOGY

How the Past Saw the Present // How the Present Sees the Future

Steam Piano image courtesy Adrian Agredo.

OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, January 28, 8 PM
ON VIEW: Friday, January 28 – Friday, March 5, 2011
HOURS: Thursdays & Fridays 3–6 PM, Saturdays & Sundays 12–6 PM

Observatory is pleased to announce our new exhibition, RETROFUTUROLOGY, a group show of visual art, curated by the Hollow Earth Society (Ethan Gould & Wythe Marschall, Founding Colonels).

Join us for the opening, Friday, January 28, at 8 PM.

About the show: To have an imagined future, you must simultaneously have an imagined present and an imagined past…

A DeLorean decked out in flashing lights and wires: A modest-budget promise that, yes, the technologies of our age can puncture the time barrier! Where to go? A rowdy 1950s? A steampunk 1890s?

Our visions of the future are nested. Our conception of time is hyperreal.

This is the process on which the present runs.

Come see contemporary art that investigates futures-past, futures-possible, and other nestings.

Featuring paintings, sculptures, and other works by many artists, including: Adrian Agredo, Tracey Atkinson, Emi Brady, Bunny M, Jon Burgerman, Chiezo, Devon Clapp, Jesse Corinella, Rachel Debuque, Derrick Dent, Matt Duffin, Ethan Gould, Andrea Hendrickson, Richard Herzog, Andy Hunter, Patti Jordan, John Lee, Haydex Li, Benjamin Mayock, Marianne McCarthy, Megan Murtha, George Pfau, Nick Raynolds, Matthew Robinson, Sean Star Wars, Tom Sarno, Rachel Schragis, Joelle Shallon, Greg Shelnutt, Niko Silvester, Melissa Stern, Lisa Temple-Cox, and Robin Treadwell.

RETROFUTUROLOGY
“How the Past Saw the Present // How the Present Sees the Future”

A group show of visual art at Observatory, Brooklyn,
curated by the Hollow Earth Society,
Ethan Gould & Wythe Marschall, Founding Colonels

The imagination (as a productive faculty of cognition) is a powerful agent for creating, as it were, a second nature out of the material supplied to it by actual nature.  —Kant

To have an imagined future, you must simultaneously have an imagined present and an imagined past.

A DeLorean decked out in flashing lights and complicated-looking wires: It’s a modest-budget promise that, yes, the technologies of our age—our new computer chips and LED lights and cars with doors that open upright like a space pod—can puncture the time barrier, with the right old-fashioned mad scientist at the steering wheel! Where to go? A rowdy 1950s, wherein a white kid can invent rock and roll? A steampunk 1800s? A future wherein the promises of kaleidoscopic, holographic advertising from the late 1980s come to fruition—a world with yet another layer of retrofuturist dreaming added onto the small-town diner…?

Our visions of the future are nested.

Our conception of time is hyperreal. In explaining the visual gimmicks of a single cultural artifact such as the Buggles’s “Video Killed The Radio Star,” we must refer to the heyday of radio; the future promised by television executives in synthesizer advertisements; science fiction pulp covers from the 1950s; the neon-on-black-and-white aesthetic of MTV in its early years, not to mention the gallery scene that birthed that aesthetic; 1950s diner-decor futurism; the late-1970s body-posturing and dystopic styling of Devo; Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, looking forward to 2026; the garb of mad scientists in movies from the 1940s;—and the sigh that comes with opening a magazine and seeing all of this, compressed down into an ad for sunglasses for hipsters.

Or not even for hipsters: The retrocamp fashion exemplified by an irritating blend of past and future has been recompressed and sold in shopping malls internationally. This isn’t marginal pulp—

This is the process on which the present runs.

You are invited to join us for a group show

The Hollow Earth Society seeks artists working in drawing, printmaking, and painting, and possibly sculpture and video/multimedia art (space is limited) for RETROFUTUROLOGY, a group show focused on past- and present-futures, to be up from January 29 to March 5, 2011, at Observatory. Submissions are due January 8, 2011.

How to submit:
Include all information listed below. Late or incomplete submissions will not be considered unless they are mind-staggeringly fantastic and presented with great humility.

1. Send us up to five images. Digital submissions will be accepted via email. Files must be in JPEG or PDF format. Please number your image files to correspond to your image list.
2. Send an image list. Double check that the numbers on your list correspond to the numbers in the names of your actual files.
3. In your list, include for each image: an image number, the work’s title, the date of work, the medium, and its size and price.
4. Along with the list, please include a brief description of each image.
5. Send a three-line bio, your contact information and an email address. You may also submit a résumé.
6. If you like, send an optional artist’s statement, no longer than 300 words.

THERE IS NO FEE TO ENTER.

Deadline: All email submissions must be received no later than January 8, 2011. (All accepted work should be physically received at Observatory no later than January 24, 2011.)

Return of submitted materials: Include a SASE and make sure there is sufficient postage, or pay for shipping and we will ship your work back to you. If work is two-dimensional, the Hollow Earth Society is more than happy to have it on file for future shows and keep it exhibited for sale on our website. The same 30% commission for art sold will apply.

Drop-Off: If you have been accepted into the show and are in the NYC area, you may wish to drop off your art at the gallery. Email us (gallery@hollowearthsociety.com) to schedule a date and time.

Pick-Up: Return of mailed artwork with return postage will begin on March 12, 2011.

Email submissions to:
gallery@hollowearthsociety.com

By post:
Observatory
543 Union Street
Brooklyn, NY 11215

To find out more, click here.

Anti-philosopher, literary critic, and erotica-obsessed overall word-genius Georges Bataille is a shadow-name, a name at the edges of theory. For every twenty references to a Derrida or a Foucault, there is but one to Bataille… I’m trying to read everything he wrote this year, and it’s going swimmingly. He immediately earns an Honourable Badge Of Merit.

Here a few early highlights:

In theory the body is a strictly subordinate element, which is of no consequence for itself—a utility of the same nature as canvas, iron, or lumber.

As one can see, I have placed the tool and the manufactured object on the same plane, the reason being that the tool is first of all a manufactured object and, conversely, a manufactured object is in a certain sense a tool.  The only means of freeing the manufactured object from the servility of the tool is art, understood as a true end.  But art itself does not as a rule prevent the object it embellishes from being used for this or that: a house, a table, or a garment are no less useful than a hammer.  Few indeed are the objects that have the virtue of serving no function in the cycle of useful activity.

—Theory of Religion.

These studies are the result of my attempt to extract the essence of literature.  Literature is either the essential or nothing.  I believe that the Evil—an acute form of Evil—which it expresses, has a sovereign value for us.  But this concept does not exclude morality: on the contrary, it demands a ‘hypermorality.’

Literature is communication.  Communication requires loyalty.  A rigorous morality results from complicity in the knowledge of Evil, which is the basis of intense communication.

—Literature and Evil.

The man, looking all Nosferatu-esque. Probably thinking about “unknowledge,” the sovereign, animality, his own particular take on Marx, or—far more likely—about sex. Another possibility, given the content of his books: eating eggs. Dude must have loved him some eggs in the morning…

Extra points for the creepy child-with-cane oil in the background!

The collective names for animals are rad. Perhaps approaching the same order of rad-ness are the terms for animals’ homes, which vary from the common pig pen to these jams, my favorites:

• Ants live in a formicary, or mound
• The badger digs a sett
• The mole, for some reason, gets a fortress
• Otters create a holt
• Rabbits, when not in the familiar “warren,” chillax in a cony-garth or cunicularium
• Raptors of all sorts build eyries
• Squirrels live in a drey
• And wasps spin out of mud and bug-bones their noble vespiary

The Latinate terms are bug-like, intricate; I enjoy saying them in my head, “FOR-me-caree,” “VESS-pee-airee.” But the Germanic terms, “DREY,” “HOLT,” really phonically capture the simple, often austere, often dangerous grace of the mammalian world. What is a “drey?” Common-sounding, unfamiliar word. And can we picture a “holt?” (Have we ever tried to?)

As with the collectives, I love that we have these terms at our disposal, and can only hope that the animals of the future (lithivores, trash monsters, cyber-cats, droid-dogs, meta-animals, nanobots, entirely digital animals, such as already exist on Neopets or in WoW) will be treated to rich-sounding homes, neudreys and techvespiaries.

A formicary, I think… Could be oats. I don’t usually eat oats. Esp. ant-y oats.

A few days ago, in an emailed edition of the New York Times, I found this précis of an article entitled “Court Hears of U.S. Unit Killing Afghan Civilians at Random“:

American soldiers consumed with drug use randomly chose Afghans to kill, according to testimony.

Gentle Reader, I beseech thee: Do we generally describe addicts as “consumed with drug use?” [Shakes head.]

Should we idiomatically place “use,” in its cameo as a noun, in a confusing prepositional phrase (”consumed with drug use,” as opposed to “consumed by” something actually consuming, such as drugs) that abuts a perhaps equally awkward pairing of adverb and verb (”randomly chose,” as opposed to the clearer and in this case titular “[killed] at random”)? [Shakes head emphatically.]

Of course, this syntactical tomfoolery only obscures the scandal of the article, which itself sinisterly obscures the scandal of the war. Reforming addicts will not end the conflict in Afghanistan; said more blatantly, asking ours soldiers to choose to kill humans not at random is the larger dilemma for our culture. [The inversion—randomness becomes the problem, not killing itself.]

And focusing on hashish as the great evil in this news story serves a double purpose for They Who Rule. They get to lambaste essentially consciousness-expanding drugs (ignoring hard drugs—coke, meth, heroin, &c.) even as they “investigate” and “rejuvenate” their (insane) “democratic” war-enterprise, (supposedly) reinjecting morality/control/the ideals of the Enlightenment into a failed war to control a failed state, a war that results in practices such as:

possessing dismembered body parts, including fingers and a skull, and collecting photographs of dead Afghans. Some images show soldiers posing with the dead. As many as 70 images are believed to be in evidence.

(What a great war-obscuring scandal! They’re even investigating a soldier named “Morlock!” As in the underground scientistic post-humans who herd and eat the eloi, the “good” posthumans, in The Time Machine! WTF!?)

And that’s not all… Widening our gyre: Questions of the war, its out-of-hand-ness, and how to “course correct” it are in fact merely larger obfuscations of the fact that the whole American Empire is moribund, as is all of late capitalism, at least in the enervated West, at least in the old-school sense of late capitalism as a deregulated Wild West backed up by a giant military. (Top Gun meets Tombstone meets Wall Street: The good guy wins, but the bad dude dresses better…)

This structural collapse is tied to military service in many ways. We have now before us a war in which few Americans die but many return with PTSD, leading to meltdowns and suicides. We have a war in which soldiers return to a broken economy. Something we all have to face, even as the wars sputter forward. How bout, sayeth the NYTimes Roger Cohen:

The share of national income held by the top 1 percent of American families has doubled in recent decades to 20 percent. That’s a huge shift.

WTF? A huge shift? Thanks, Rog, my sentiments exactamente. Mr. Cohen continues:

I spoke to Doug Severance, a Vietnam vet who’s a hotel employee in Aspen, Colorado. “When I moved here in 1984 we were all family,” he said. “Now either you arrive in a Lear Jet or you’re a servant.”

And you’re either killing at random or not (but still killing), or being killed. As Cohen points out, a return to the “animal spirit,” the coyote soul of America, what McCarthy identifies with the land itself, a nightmare carnival of Apaches dressed in tophats and bridal veils, masquerading from a long distance as drovers; and the dudes hunting them, masquerading as incarnate deaths, souls weighed in gold only (weighed down, heavier than the judging feather of Osiris, keeper of the dead, whose jackalheaded herald Yineppu guides you either to Elysium or the dead-eater, the crocopotamus who obliterates your soul).

Reading of soldiers on drugs, capitalism on war, and the 1% on their highest horse ever, I certainly do think of Cormac McCarthy’s iconic bad-asses and their Grail-less quest across this continent. What’s next? What should we want to have happen?

Personally, I want something that apparently will not happen and my no longer be conceivable—a return to dialogue and discourse and politics, as opposed to endless anxiety-inducing newscasts and simulation and fake scandals.

(Last night, a guy on the street said there’d be slaves again in five years, and I hope he’s wrong, wrong as hell, no masters, no slaves. But I also understand his worry: What are the 99% if not…?)

How do we re-privilege freedom over the simulation of freedom? (Every vote counts—though you don’t control the districting; you vote for who authorizes foreign wars—though they cave, when presented with faked evidence…)

I don’t know. But I think it’s worth trying, trying to imagine.

***

Update, 5 October: In today’s New York Times, in an article profiling Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, the accused ringleader of the consumed-with-drugs killers, we find this gem of support from his comrades:

Pfc. Adam W. Kelly, who is accused of assaulting Private Stoner along with several other soldiers, as well as possessing hashish, told investigators that he admired Sergeant Gibbs, as did others in their platoon, from senior officers to subordinates, and that he “displayed solid tactics.”

This corporate ambiguity, “solid tactics,” here has an automatically good and bad value: Gibbs was a good soldier, someone who understood military tactics, in the eyes of his subordinates and his bosses, but he also had his own “solid tactics” when it came to shooting innocent Afghans.

The equivocality (”saying both sides”) of the words “solid” and “tactics” is heartbreaking: We punish the soldier for being too good at killing, which is the job of the soldier; here, the structural madness of the enterprise bubbles up at the level of language, of defensive language, and is imprinted into the machine of journalism.

“Displayed” is also terrifying, in its dissimulation of killing: Gibbs did not “kill” anyone, here; he “displayed” the very “tactics” in which he was trained. This masking over of reality with corporate language is pervasive. At work, I do not “talk” to anyone “again,” but am asked to “circle back” or “regroup.” We also discuss tactics and strategies.

The language of business and the language of the military are incestuous and finally the same, Narcissus and his reflection. It is no surprise, at least to those of us obsessed with words and their (many) meanings, that capitalism and the industry of war reflect each other on many other levels, language being simply the most portable.

Read the review on The Outlet.

In this review:

• A quotation from Benjamin Franklin
• Brief review of Mishima’s powers as poet and logician
• Lust and death-lust* (*”Death Lust” = good band name, sans hyphen, perhaps sans the A in “death,” so making it “DETH LUST,” probably all caps)
• EVEN MORE

In this blog post:

• BONUS image of Mishima Yukio, looking like a pensive young genius:

Read the review on The Outlet.

The most terrifying aspect of The Murderess—Alexandros Papadiamantis’s famous psychological terror-fable—is the calm and lyrical nature of its prose. As others have said, Modern evil is rational: “Murder [or some other evil] simply must be committed; there is no other logical option [according to my limited human worldview]. Let me tell you why…”

The second-most terrifying aspect of the short, episodic book is its description of a bad-ass Greek sea-eagle:

…In the forest that crowned all the western slopes… there it was said that a sea-eagle had nested for three human generations… In its abandoned nest was found an entire museum of monstrous bones of sea-snakes, seals, dogfish and other marine monsters, which the huge, powerful bird, with its blue hooked beak and is vast cinder-coloured wings, had picked out of the seas…

WTF. Remind me not to mess with a bird that eats seals and sea-snakes. (Or, per the rest of the book, killer grandmamas…)

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.)

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.

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.

I love storms. I write about them sometimes, and recently I’ve been reading the innumerable horror stories of Rudyard Kipling*, whose loud, hot, ceaseless summer storms are as terrifying as ghosts.

Weather makes for fine and often surprising metaphor. Rain isn’t always sad**, and even being struck by lightning, as in Aira’s An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, isn’t always horrible, or its horror—the pain and scarring—has the potential (forgive my electrical pun) to make its victim all the more human.

My friend Stephen Aubrey (who edited Suspicious Anatomy) delves not only into what the weather can mean but also into the dangers of its interpretation in his acclaimed Dark Heart of Meteorology, which is soon going up for two more nights in New York.

If you haven’t seen Dark Heart, you should. And even if you caught the last run, I am assured by Mr. Aubrey that his play is now 50% different and 100% better***.

The relevant deetz:

June 21 & 28 • 8 p.m. • $10
Workshop Mainstage Theater • 312 W. 36th St. • 4th floor
Email assembly.theater@gmail.com for reservations

Directed by Jess Chayes • starring Richard Lovejoy
Produced by The Assembly**** & Theater of the Expendable

A précis:

Franklin Elijah White is traveling across the country on an increasingly quixotic and personal journey. Aided only by a slide projector and assorted meteorological equipment, he has a simple message: The weather is going to kill us all… Featuring a tour-de-force performance by Richard Lovejoy, The Dark Heart of Meteorology investigates the tensions between chaos and control and the intersection of the personal and the meteorological. [The Author adds—and the intersection of the romantic-ideal and the romantic-actual. Like the weather, love changes unpredictably and can set tall trees on fire...]

The show’s postcard, drawn by Suspicious Anatomy cocreator Ethan Gould:

Addenda:

*A storm of a different type hangs perpetually over Kipling’s oeuvre. But to hound the long-dead reporter for his Victorian chauvinism and occasional lack of spiritual generosity is only to miss out on so many truly lovely, harshly insightful stories—stories of spectral horses, clairvoyant Irish soldiers’ wives, midnight trips up sleepy, hundred-degree minarets, leper–temples, fated train rides, sociopathic kings, spent morphine needles, bedeviled hands of whist, and skin-tingling rains—rains that induce parasthesia, or “creepy causeless skin feeling” (thanks to my friend David for the definition of parasthesia)…

**Some are only happy when it rains. Some even choose to leave important items such as cakes out in the rain. Bizarre culinary practices aside, I love a good downpour, esp. when going to sleep.

***I made up the second number. But Mr. Aubrey did change the play significantly from its last run, and I’m an optimist.

****The Assembly = Stephen Aubrey, Edward Bauer, Ben Beckley, Jess Chayes, Nick Benacerraf and Emily Perkins.