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…
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Bad Nature, a novella about translating for Elvis in a Mexico City dive bars, is mesmerizing. Javier Marías is a force of compact, darkly humor. I wish I’d known about him earlier, and I wish I could read his work in Spanish.
Self-grievance aside, I’m happy Electric has both introduced me to Marías and offered to publish my thoughts on novellas, novella-writing, and novella-tasting on their blog. Channeling the spirits of Deleuze and Guattari, I approach a novella as a meditation on an incident (”What happened?”), a freeing-out-of short story which strays into philosophy while reining itself in enough to prevent a freezing-into novel.
My list of novellas and quasi-novellas is already too long to tear through before the summer’s out. My mood is, in a word, psychednessitude.
Potentially up next for the Outlet series: No Tomorrow (Point de lendemain; a long short story about sex, lies, innuendo, and levels of counter-innuendo), The Murderess (a brutal meditation on women, money, aging, and—naturally—murderizing), The Chrysalids (a post-apocalyptic American tale—perhaps too long to qualify, but too tempting to put down, now that I’ve started it—or really now that I’ve seen its future-primitive rainbow cover), and a “classic” classic by James.
In the mean time, pick up Marías (who is the king of Redonda) on the King (of whatever he was “the King” of). If so inspired, do a dance:
Why these massifications of mass? Cormac McCarthy’s epic and Melville’s—upon which McCarthy’s is founded—are both highly visual, detailed, colorful, painterly works. Their stories (the authorized versions) are clear, even if their meanings will be debated for as long as humans are around to debate.
Ah, but here’s the genius of translation. Translation is not repetition for another audience, not performance, but re-creation, re-playing God.
Look at A Humument by Tom Phillips. Phillips admits the book out of whose guts his own visual-poetic masterpiece is painstakingly stitched is trash. He does not translate Mallock’s A Human Document, because that translation would be worse than unmoving; it would be offensive to a modern audience. Instead, he uses the field of signs of A Human Document to create an ongoing series of paintings, to tell new stories, to comment on the original, the author thereof, and the era that produced them both.
Or… he translates the book out of the book: Translates it into the painting; then out of the painting and into the multimedia product-event. A Humument has been published four times; you can buy prints of it from Phillips’s website; the book continues to grow, existing outside of time.
(Which iteration is definitive? This is the happy problem of Leaves of Grass, the bible, and all those classic unfinished texts, from The Castle to those last revisions of À la recherche du temps perdu, from Nabokov’s final emission to the unfinishable, shifting rhizomes of the internet—Wikipedia and its shadows [Uncyclopedia], any forum, the Atlas Obscura, this site…)
Two works I’ve written about here before also merge the media of “book” (word, story, argument, linearity, sound, consciousness-as-lighting-upon, abstraction and forms and modules of thoughts) and “art” (color, moment, muteness, instant all-comprehensibility, the unconscious-as-perceiving-everything, figuration and line and negative space).
What is Codex Seraphinianus by Luigi Serafini? Is it a book of “art” (a joke on us), or a “real” fictional encyclopedia (self-coherent, non-rules-breaking, so “realistic” as far as alien encyclopediae go)? Has the content of the Codex been translated from the alien, or into it? Can you articulate the distinction?
Book From The Sky by Xu Bing provides a final and I think highly molecular example. Xu made, over four years, a mesmerizing set of fake Chinese pictograms. They are technically ”devoid of semantic content” but so suggestive of content that these “pictures” of words serve as pseudo-words a la Serafini’s squiggles in the Codex, but moreso. (The Sky-words are made from elements which are real; Serafini’s squiggles can be examined at a microscopic level, but they yield if anything less meaning.)
Again, has Xu translated a book out of the infinite/infinitely strange heavens? Or has he translated human words into a higher form? Is the book so mesmerizing, for Chinese readers and non-Chinese readers alike, because it suggests we humans can never mean anything (the original title was An Analyzed Reflection of the End of This Century), or because we make meaning from everything, because we translate and transmediate everything?
I think books inspire pictures and music automatically, and vice versa. As I write, Deltron fades into Devendra Banhart, and I am surrounded by the postcards whose meanings (semantic, semiotic) I have forgotten but whose figures and negative spaces and limits and patterns call out to me to write a story about a pair of leopards who trade their spots with the clouds and so doom great blotches of sahel-grass to deadly shade…
I may not agree with all of his reviews, but film critic A. O. Scott has some serious chops for metaphor, as illustrated in his take on Get Him to the Greek:
Mr. [Jonah] Hill, wide-eyed and anxious as ever, makes a fine visual and temperamental foil for Mr. [Russell] Brand. The two of them are like the Trylon and Perisphere of comedy. Mr. Brand, though hardly calm, is volatile in a cool, pseudo-self-aware, pointlessly articulate way, whereas Mr. Hill resembles one of those round cartoon bombs with a lighted fuse on top. He pleads, babbles, trembles, fulminates and—more than once—vomits, all with an expressiveness that is both alarming and strangely cute.
The Trylon and Perisphere are two of my favorite structures. Together, they served as the “Theme Center” of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Sayeth Wikipedia re: the Theme Center:
Connected to the 700 foot spire-shaped Trylon by what was at the time the world’s longest escalator, the Perisphere was a tremendous sphere, 180 feet in diameter. The sphere housed a diorama called “Democracity” which, in keeping with the fair’s theme “The World of Tomorrow,” depicted a utopian city-of-the-future. Democracity was viewed from above on a moving sidewalk, under movies displayed on the sides of the sphere. After exiting the Perisphere, visitors descended to ground level on the third element of the Theme Center, the Helicline, a 950-foot long spiral ramp that partially encircled the Perisphere.
Does that beat all, or does that not beat all? Good thing the world came together in 1939 and ushered in a long-lasting era of peace and democracy and wacky technological future-cities, instead of, oh I dunno, some of the worst crimes in history, a nuclear arms race, disco, &c.
But to return to Mr. Scott’s fabulous simile, yes, perhaps the rotund Mr. Hill is like the Perisphere, and the lanky-manic Mr. Brand much like the Trylon. My question is, who in Get Him to the Greek is Democracity? (Puffy?) And who the Helicline?
My further question is, why don’t we have no goddamn Trylon or Perisphere today? If Bloomberg wants a fourth term, he better get on the (peri)ball.
Naturally, I demand that—as we live not in boooring old Modernity but in POWERTHIRST-powered Fight Club- and Murakami Takashi-themed low-art/hi-art lofi wifi genetic-rhizomatic-iEverything Postmodernity—our new PostTrylon and PostPerisphere be more than meets the eye…
I have a love-hate relationship with genre. I love horror, but I find reading anything after Lovecraft tedious, unsurprising, mirthless, and generally not very horrific.
I love fantasy, but as a kid I got burned out on the culture, and now I loathe to pick up any book with hulking sword-brutes and large-chested elfin princesses on the cover.
I love science writing of all kinds, but most science fiction softer than Gibson is masturbatory hyper-Kurzweil-ism—which can be pretty scary stuff, full of utopias I would not want to live in.
I love comics, but they’re the most hit-and-miss medium I’ve ever explored; so unless a friend puts a comic in my hand, I sure ain’t buyin it. Overall, I’m sure there’s good stuff out there. I just don’t have time to sift around and find it.
That said, my heart has a special place for werewolves, undead sorcerers, cyborg-cities, and of course for spandex-clad bad-asses with unconscionably bizarre powers. So, though I know little about Green Lantern—though I have in fact never bought a Green Lantern comic in my life—I was delighted when my friend Eric sent me a link to this Wikipedia page outlining the many different color-based Lantern Corps, the synesthetic-Freudian heroes and villains of the comic-cosmos.
For those who know even less than me about this phenomenon: In the universe of DC Comics, there are various, variously colored “power rings,” each fueled by a different affect, each giving its wearer the ability to fly and do pretty much anything else she can think of, provided the ring is sufficiently charged with the appropriate emotion.
The good guys and bad guys have naturally organized themselves into ring-mafias, the primary iteration of which, the Green Lantern Corps, functions as cosmic police (and is sometimes cosmic corrupt, and presumably has a good cosmic retirement package).
Here’s the ring-roster:
Green – powered by will, originally susceptible to wooden objects. (!!! I know, Gentle Reader, I know: An ultimate weapon, powered by will = scary shades of the Reich. But apparently, these are the good guys. The green rings seek out strong-willed moralists, somehow. Personally, sounds like a recipe for disaster, letting a metal bauble invest a particular human with nigh-infinite power…) [Also, secret weakness = wood? Really?]
Yellow – powered by fear.
Orange – powered by avarice. (This corps is run by someone named “Larfleeze,” who looks like a flaming horse-skull guy. Highly awesome. I would work for that dude.)
Blue – powered by hope. (But these only work in conjunction with green rings, as hope requires will to affect change… at least, according to the Philosophy Department at DC.)
White – powered by ???. (The white ring is the most mysterious and may be the most powerful. In comics, as part of the constant recolonizing of the minds of our youth, black tends to be bad and white good. Here, interestingly, it seems the cool colors = good and the warm colors = bad, with white and black thrown purely in for chromatic balance.)
Given my longstanding interest in how different literatures use different colors, particularly red and blue, I now feel an obligation to read about the exploits of these Corps. Blue to me is not “hopeful,” per se, though red could certainly be “furious.” Orange as avarice strikes me as random, but there is something fearful about yellow. I’m intrigued.
That said, I can’t help but think of other possibilities for these emo heroes, who must crap forth certain affect in order to fly through the dark void, doing battle and looking muscular (except as imitated below). I imagine rings powered by minor affects (confusion over which line at Whole Foods is shortest; fear that a speck in your tea is a dead bug and not just a loose particle of tea; love-hate, the feeling of the frenemy; &c.). Rings powered by dream affects (lust for objects; total reversal of normal affects; lack of fear; fear of self). Rings powered by winks, by kisses, by jokes…
The possibilities are staggering, as are the color combinations. (The red-orange ring with the gray band, for instance, is powered by haughtiness tinged with lack of surprise.)
“Suburb” means “under-city,” in the shadow of the city—which in the Bronze and Iron Age meant a hill. The suburb was physically below the “real” city. It simulated the city, in the shadows. It was and remains a para-city, beside and structurally similar to, but at heart different from a real locus of social, legal, religious, and economic life.
To simulate a city, a suburb must have housing but not community, shopping but not market, praying but not spirituality… It must have the sign of the real without the thing itself.
James Howard Kunstler illustrates the problem of the suburb and the poorly designed urb in a TED talk that somehow manages to be fierce, technocratic, and progressive while never losing a humorous edge. The problems with American places—cookie-cutter homes, forgotten squares, dead malls, removed-from-the-street buildings, and isolation and waste that engender one another and prevent society rather than frame it—are so dire they elicit almost instant sad-laughter. The jokes write themselves.
[Btw, I found this talk via one of artist James Roper's many deeply engaging art-blogs. Roper has great taste in weird anatomic, sexy, psychedelic, Gothic, geometric optical matter, which is to say my kind of taste.]
Kunstler’s perhaps dangerously American-centric perspective aside, he rocks the house, offering a few solutions and noting that local living will offer or force many us to come up with more as the years march on and the hydrocarbons disappear—or appear oozingly all along the Louisiana shore, like some dread tide forecast in Revelation—whichever.
Yet for now architecture and urban planning are classical, representing spaces, streets, life, and other people as “out there,” beyond—whereas cities are naturally baroque, confusing places and bringing us together… Baroque cities go everywhere, do everything from interlinked hubs that expand up and out but fold back on themselves, never expanding without doubling purpose and quadrupling links; the baroque does not like to recognize borders, and does not start with a form, but with a content that is already too much for its form, so that the form must be refolded and repurposed (The Highline, Hagia Sophia and Topkapi), already greening (giving life to, giving commerce to) the steel and asphalt…
I would now like to complement Kunstler’s investigation of the real problems of real spaces with what I know—that being the parahelpful, the goodnaturedly impractical, and the just fucking fantastic.
Specifically, I’d like to suggest we tackle real physical problems always with one eye firmly pointed to baroque imaginary physical (and temporal) solutions. To speak in plain Amerkan: Today’s architects should be taking notes from Doctor Who.
Enter Live Journal. Yes, Gentle Reader, I too was shocked that LJ still exists and is still a hub of internet thought and counter-thought. I was also glad, for here I found, courtesy a tip from illustrator and intrepid co-author Ethan Gould, A Partial Map of Your TARDIS (Subject to Change).
What is a/the TARDIS, I at first wondered? Gould informed me it’s a time-travel phone booth-… thing, used by the Dr.s Who (there have been several?) to do… stuff. I admit, I don’t know the show.
But that doesn’t prevent me from enjoying the Map—a complex alternative geography, a topology of time, space, levels of self, relationships with other, and pun that both stuns the aesthete’s eye and pleases the futurtect’s brain, or strokes the synesthete’s eye and punches the protomodernist’s head—whichever.
As spaces and representations-of-spaces collapse—as more people buy iPhones and Droids and so enter a world made always-partially-virtual by virtue of a constant back-and-forth between eye, hand, Google, and physical reality—we will need both the type of solutions Kunstler offers (how to use the malls that pointlessly blister the skin of our nation, how to get ourselves out and happy and doin stuff, and not locked into suburban bedrooms playing Borderlands and crying into our two-liter diet Powerthirsts) as well as the type of imagination, freedom, and excitement regarding the notion of space that this Partial Map (partially) exemplifies.
What is space—what do we want from it—a cafeteria, a cathedral, a drive-in, a disco, a passport office, a warehouse…
Really, consider space. Consider this:
Almost half the Indian population, 563.7 million people, is hooked up to modern communications, while just 366 million have access to modern sanitation, according to a United Nations study.
The question of space is deceptively simple. If we knew what we wanted out of space—how closely we wanted to be in contact with other humans, with trees, with grizzlies, with toilets, &c.—perhaps we wouldn’t have made the millions of now-uninhabited suburban dreadnoughts that sail motionlessly across America like the scattered head of a ripe drywall dandelion. Perhaps cell service would not have trumped sanitation in emerging industrial powers.
The classical problem of taxonomizing (classifying, boxing) spaces—and creating more and more iterations of each class—has trumped the question of use of spaces, enjoyment of others. The neatly virtual-classical has tried to remake itself over and obscuring the messily real-baroque.
In suburban America, humans have boxed ourselves away from one another, creating Byzantine cities, castle-towns dying as suspicious barons ward off trade and innovation, unlinked by rail, unwelcoming, never-congealing, without history, and so without future.
We may never be able to build a time-defying/space-expanding machine like the TARDIS (which serves ants, by the way, in the cafeteria) or inhabit lands like those pictured in the Codex Seraphinianus. But I think it’s good to jump-shark over the preconceptions of our reality—which we have more control over than Brutalism and the plague of big-box stores would make us think—and of our era—which is always already transforming into the next, a werewolf caught between man and beast.
Imagining impossible, baroque (constantly merging-with) geographies lets us place our consciousnesses into weird towns without those towns having to exist first. We show ourselves possibilities and discard rigidity.
Producing the new reality—fixing the problem—is another skill and far beyond the scope of my rambling. Perhaps post-World War II design has been too caught up, however, in the problem-fixin and left too far behind the emergent chaos of older cities, not to mention the wonder of the unreal.
