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.

Are discussed vividly and concisely today in the New York Times. I suggest you indulge (both by reading the article and eating something spicy). The highlights, for me:

“Humans and only humans get to enjoy events that are innately negative, that produce emotions or feelings that we are programmed to avoid when we come to realize that they are actually not threats,” [Dr. Paul Rozin] said. “Mind over body. My body thinks I’m in trouble, but I know I’m not.”

…As Paul Bloom, a Yale psychologist, puts it, “Philosophers have often looked for the defining feature of humans — language, rationality, culture and so on. I’d stick with this: Man is the only animal that likes Tabasco sauce.”

• Inception, 2010
• Paprika, 2006
• Vanilla Sky, 2001
• Waking Life, 2001
• Abre los ojos (Open Your Eyes), 1997

Five points, five elements, five fingers, rubbing the tired eyes back to reality…

There are so many more dream movies, of course. 8 ½ is a personal favorite, if more a flashbacky/daydreamy movie than a dreamy movie pur sang. The movie is, overall, a beautiful way to send someone into that dreamlike state, the demi-torpor of the child-whose-attention-has-been-captured, the lover affixed to the beloved’s inscrutable, lovely eyes.

Here I would be remiss not to mention the dream literature (De Quincey, Kafka’s journals) that has inspired so many of these dreaming–am–I–dreaming? acts of cinephrenia, in which we descend continually through layers of the dream, searching for that paradoxical oneiromancy that will, oroboros, cast us back up from the dream, into that waking dream, consciousness. (In Inception, this dream-extinguishing is called the Kick.)

Frankly, looking back at recent dream-cinema, I’m surprised they still haven’t made/fucked up a Sandman movie yet…

Tigers, sexuality, and massive plants—yep, that sounds about right. Here we have The Dream by Henri Rousseau…

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:

Conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat contorts words and settles for ignorant proto-definitions, preferring to fall back upon easy “truths” (”America is inclusive;” “America is a Christian nation”) rather than tackle a world that is both complex and, moreover, rigorously ambiguous (America can be both inclusive and exclusive; it is especially inclusive if you are already in the pecuniary–white–male–&c. majority; America is partly Christian, and Christians have a disproportionately loud public voice, compared to, say, American Hindus, Muslims, or Sikhs).

This week Douthat takes the cake today, however, by weighing in on the debate over the new mosque that will be built near Ground Zero. Douthat sticks his foot so far down his mouth, his Pumas will permanently reek of juice d’digestif.

In his latest masterpiece, Douthat defines America dichotomously: Ours, he says, is a nation with two major components, often (apparently) at odds:

1. The Constitution, which he interprets more or less sanely as our best hope of protection against men such as himself
2. “American culture,” which he defines as “Christian”—in fact, Protestant—and English-speaking

So far, so wrong. But nothing new here.

Where Douthat goes off the deepest end is in his judgment that, in some cases, so-called “American culture” should triumph over the Constitution.

He says, for example, that the “second America” (”American culture,” in his jargon—why he numerically delineates his “Americas” is beyond me) should “press for something more from Muslim Americans than simple protestations of good faith…”

Good faith that… what?

That their mosque is not, gasp!, secretly a C.O.B.R.A. headquarters, brimming with red-lasering Islamo-Fascist bad dudes?

My mind is blown, every time I read a request like this one. “Minority: Defend my unfounded attack on your place of worship! Defend yourself from my accusation that you are malingering against me!” It’s not just unfair, it’s sadly hilarious.

How can Muslim Americans hope to appease the Douthats of their nation? They frankly can’t. They cannot participate in fully one half of America, by Douthat’s definition, and why should they want to? If anything, it is this exclusionary rhetoric that drives “moderate Muslims” to identify more with repressed Muslim populations outside the United States than with “real Americans” like Douthat.

After requesting that Muslim Americans explain and comport themselves better, going forward, Douthat hits absolute logical rock-bottom. And he must have been proud to do so. I can just picture Douthat fist-pumping victoriously after putting the polishes on his conclusion—namely that, “while the ideals of the first America protect the e pluribus, it’s the demands the second America makes of new arrivals that help create the unum.”

On first-read, this is just so much fluff. The majority must protect minorities, but those minorities must not piss of the majority. French-style democracy. Okay, I get it. I don’t like it; it’s un-friggin-American—but I get it.

But read this conclusive sentence again, this time plugging in Douthat’s own terms:

“While the ideals of [the Constitution] protect the e pluribus, it’s the demands [that Christian, Protestant, anglophone American culture] makes of new arrivals that help create the unum.”

What—really, dog? Really?

So, the Native Americans just fucked up, huh? Their bad? And the African peoples who were brought to America against their will? They should have just… gone with the flow? They should have gone to church, learned to enjoy Ethan Frome like the rest of us good Calvinists? You’re kidding me, right?

This is acceptable to you, conservatives? And, liberals, why is this dude writing in the Times?

America is not a “Christian nation,” and Christians cannot demand that Muslims wear a special star or pay a special non-Christian tax—or change their building plans because the “second America” have somehow reserved all of downtown Manhattan as a memorial.

President Obama and Mayor Bloomberg were right to defend the rights of Muslim Americans in New York City. Douthat should offer a redaction of his thinly veiled bigotry.

Calvin said, “There is not one little blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make men rejoice.” He would probably not have approved of the new mosque, but still. Good looks on that blade of grass thing.

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…)

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…