tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-85244977706199502882024-03-18T22:47:50.002-04:00Marooned Off VestaEthan Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11207042480666924085noreply@blogger.comBlogger168125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8524497770619950288.post-78951009113634838432023-08-08T13:32:00.006-04:002023-08-08T17:10:39.021-04:00One of the more peculiar changes Bradbury made when he expanded his novella "The Fireman" into <em>Fahrenheit 451</em> was to have Montag choose Ecclesiastes as his book to preserve in memory rather than, as it originally was, Job. Most of the other alterations are readily explained either by a desire to increase the word count or by the need to soften (so as better to sell) the story's fascism when moving from the readership of the science fiction magazines to a broader audience, but this one is a bit more mysterious. I've long felt that Bradbury decided that Job was too on-the-nose, revealed too much of himself, his own view of himself as long-suffering, subject to unjustified and unfair punishment, and indeed he fully verifies this #take in the "Coda" he wrote for a 1979 reprint of the novel. I was actually a bit deflated when I read this Coda — and the 1982 Afterword that accompanies it in the Del Rey paperback I have — because in them he confirms point-by-point my interpretation of the novel as a Hitlerian rant against the uppity masses and their insistence on having some part to play in culture, to the point where there just is no point in even arguing an interpretation, so what's left for me to do? (Unless of course you wanted to argue that he fails to convey his now inarguably intended point, accidentally writing an anti-fascist pro-people novel, which I suppose you could do, and then I could have the satisfaction of arguing you were very wrong!) <br /> <br />
Anyway in this Coda Bradbury anecdotizes receiving a letter from a reader saying she enjoyed his work, but wouldn't it be better if it weren't so misogynistic?, and numerous letters saying wouldn't it be better if it weren't so racist? — "idiots", he calls these letter-writers, to be consigned "to the far reaches of hell". <em>These</em>, he says very straightforwardly and explicitly, are the book-burners he had in mind. (Yes, he says more, including some things which are not quite so loathsome, but this is how he chooses to <em>open</em>.) Which really should come as no surprise to anyone who's read either the novella or the novel, because the book-burner Beatty himself (or Leahy, in the novella; Irish either way, as opposed to "Guy Montag's" potpourri of <em>true</em> Europeanness) makes it very clear for whom he works: "the mass". (And it is enormously conspicuous that the then-extremely-recent Nazi book burnings come in for no mention, explicit or even veiled, at any point in either version: a literary equivalent of Holocaust denial.) <br /> <br />
But to return to Bradbury's Coda, <em>this</em> is the context in which he suddenly refers <em>to himself</em> as "Job II" (only the second, mind; apparently there have been no others in the meantime). So it would appear that my hunch that between the writing of the novella and the novel Bradbury decided that putting Job in the story was going too far, saying too much (a decision he'd go back on in his even-more-shameless dotage), was correct. Montag, like his writer Bradbury, "identifies" with Job as one made to suffer unjustly, set upon by misfortune and inane "comforters", all that rightly belongs to him cruelly taken away. <br /> <br />
But made to suffer — by whom? "God", when not taken literally by one who believes in Him with a capital H, is a tricky thing. Like everything in class society, it is a creation of class struggle, at any moment reflecting both the <em>current</em> disposition of class forces and the <em>history</em> of how they got there; in particular, and to simplify, it is the expropriation of the working classes' labor and creativity by the ruling classes: His tremendous power and knowledge is nothing but the strength and activity of the mass of the people (and, okay, that of the "natural world" as well), while His authority and demands for obeisance are the mystification of this power, its alienation from the masses by the ruling classes that claim it as their private property. <br /> <br />
<em>Very oddly</em> for someone who takes religion per se as seriously as he (who in his Coda also objects to the removal of God from the classroom), Bradbury seems to associate the God of Job exclusively with the masses and their allegedly unjust claims upon their betters. Because who does Job II say is hounding him? The masses. Against whom does Montag protest by reading? The masses, who in the world-turned-upside-down state of affairs in a horrific "dystopian" future — a future Bradbury sees prefigured in the immediately post-WWII world in which fascism appears to have been decisively defeated, <em>by</em> the masses — are, intolerably, in charge. <br /> <br />
But can it really be that a Bradbury would associate God exclusively with the villainy of the usurping masses? Surely not, and so we can see that he has after all <em>not</em> made my job as interpreter superfluous. He's still hiding something, obscuring something, confused about something. He's twisted himself up in untenable, contradictory knots. <br /> <br />
The Job of the Bible righteously protests against the injustice of, shockingly, <em>God himself</em> — a protest that is <em>resolved</em>, though its righteousness remains intact, by the revealed grandeur and superiority of God when He speaks to him from the whirlwind. There are of course many ways to interpret this, as the uncountable volumes of commentary the book has prompted over the two and a half millennia since some genius wrote it testify. And I highly doubt that Bradbury consciously understood how he himself chose to interpret it — but he did in fact choose an interpretation. <br /> <br />
Montag too (and through him Bradbury) "righteously" protests against the injustice of God, <em>in His aspect as the power of the working and oppressed masses</em>. And he maintains this righteousness right through to the end, whether of the novella or of the novel. But the protest <em>is</em> resolved, and in just the same way as Job's: by the revelation of the grandeur and superiority of God — only now <em>in His aspect as the ruling class</em>. And what does Bradbury put in the place of the voice from the whirlwind? None other than the ultimate manifestation of the ruling class's seemingly infinite power: The Bomb, the cleansing fire that will at last sweep away the decadence of the cities, that will first punish and then kill the women and the grotesquely mixed population*, that will put the world turned upside down right again by turning <em>it</em> upside down**, that will reduce all that filth of the masses to ash from which the phoenix that is the ruling class with its refinement and culture will one day rise again.*** The change from Job to the less revealing, more vaguely "appropriate" Ecclesiastes, we can see now, was, like so many other changes, also necessary, even if not consciously so, to tone down the novel's fascism — to make it more palatable to a broad readership less amenable to it than was its original limited audience, thus to be more effective in selling it. <br /> <br />
—————————————
<br /> <br />
* "Montag, falling flat, going down, saw or felt, or imagined he saw or felt the walls go dark in Millie's face, heard her screaming, because in the millionth part of time left, she saw her own face reflected there, in a mirror instead of a crystal ball, and it was such a wildly empty face, all by itself in the room, touching nothing, starved and eating of itself, that at last she recognized it as her own and looked quickly up at the ceiling as it and the entire structure of the hotel blasted down upon her, carrying her with a million pounds of brick, metal, plaster, and wood, to meet other people in the hives below, all on their quick way down to the cellar where the explosion rid itself of them in its own unreasonable way." <br /> <br />
** "He blinked once. And in that instant saw the city, instead of the bombs, in the air. They had displaced each other. For another of those impossible instants the city stood, rebuilt and unrecognizable, taller than it had ever hoped or strived to be, taller than man had built it, erected at last in grouts of shattered concrete and sparkles of torn metal into a mural hung like a reversed avalanche, a million colors, a million oddities, a door where a window should be, a top for a bottom, a side for a back, and then the city rolled over and fell down dead." <br /> <br />
*** " 'There was a silly damn bird called a phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burnt himself up. He must have been first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we're doing the same thing, over and over, but we've got one damn thing the phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we've done for a thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, someday we'll stop making the goddamn funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them.' "Ethan Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11207042480666924085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8524497770619950288.post-1098632501052806682023-06-19T14:13:00.004-04:002023-06-19T14:19:42.083-04:00 On February 22, 2022 I wrote in a notebook:
<blockquote>
Moretti, "Homo Palpitans" (<em>Signs</em>, p119): "The city dweller's life is dominated by a nightmare - a trifling one, to be sure - unknown to other human beings: the terror of 'missing something', and specifically of missing it because of 'getting there too late'." I think this helps clarify how the mobility of the city can turn (be turned) into its opposite: immobility, indecision, inaction, stasis, melancholia, "depression", lockdown - <em>always</em> 'missing it' (and maybe even there's nothing to miss - for <em>you</em>); <em>never</em> "getting there too late" because one never "goes there" (one is perhaps not <em>allowed</em> to go there) at all. <br/> <br/>
Later (footnote 11, p293): "to 'the <em>rapid</em> telescoping of changing images' one responds with <em>rapidity</em> - of the glance, but especially of life. Precisely because he knows that 'one life is not enough' to do and see everything he wants, the city dweller limits his expectations and makes a continuous and unconscious <em>selection</em> of them." Lockdown, broadly speaking, takes advantage of <em>one</em> of the "logical" conclusions.
</blockquote>
Other nightmares less trifling. New Orleans, East Palestine. Death squads policing your movements on New York subways, truck drivers killed to demolish whole portions of major highways. Depleted uranium now en route to the Ukraine. That other Palestine.
<p>
On October 7, 2021 I had written:
<blockquote>
If I were blogging I would start a post with "At the beginning of <em>10 Cloverfield Lane</em> the disaster has already occurred," with either "the disaster" or "already occurred" linking to something about Katrina, to then discuss Mary Elizabeth Winstead - the last gentrifier? - fleeing (for, the movie assures us, purely personal reasons) a New Orleans now devoid not only of black people, but people, period.
</blockquote>
And I remember now those shots at the beginning emphasizing that hers is the only car on the road, she the only person at the gas station. (Do we even see the worker, peering suspiciously out at her? Now I can't recall.) Why? At that point, because she's broken up with her boyfriend. Only later do the monsters arrive.
<p>
Today I've come to <em>Lamentations</em>, which in the King James Version begins:
<blockquote>
How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow!
</blockquote>Ethan Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11207042480666924085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8524497770619950288.post-21736059357920306062023-04-18T13:02:00.000-04:002023-04-18T13:02:29.949-04:00I have two large paintings on my wall that my brother did maybe twenty years ago now. The first is mainly white wash with a tinge of blue at the top, vast cloudy sky, with a little bit of forested mountain landscape at the bottom rising toward the left, with deliberate fake pareidolia effects in the trees - here a stylized christmas tree complete with star on top, there most of the word "help", the outline of a poodle, others - "really there" in the mass of painted trees but done in imitation of how a real mass of trees will look like things that aren't there. To the left, rising up from the mountain well over the treeline, is a catherine wheel, slightly smudged at the edge, possibly by accident but left uncorrected. To the right, behind the mountain, looms perhaps another mountain, but bare, dark gray, of an oddly regular dome shape - or perhaps, given the slight shading, a foreshortened cone. Very high up in the sky, close to the top of the canvas, center-left, misty with distance, is an airplane, possibly a fighter jet. Lower, about medium high, to the right, larger (closer?) is a UFO, a flying saucer.
<p>
The second painting, notably but not extremely larger, takes up the gray of the dome/cone and covers the canvas with it. It is in fact a "blowup" of a portion of the first painting revealing, as in a blowup of one of those famous UFO evidence photographs, a hitherto unseen second UFO hovering against the mysterious gray dome/cone. What represented a tree in the first painting's foreground is enlarged and, as we see the graininess in a blown-up detail of a photograph, the "tree" is seen now as a number of disjointed brushstrokes (themselves of course made up of brushstrokes). And in the texture of these blown-up brushstrokes are more hints at faked pareidolia, though less definable here - some figure eights or infinity signs? is that the word "Hi"? maybe the outline of a bird?
<p>
It's a witticism of course, a joke, a sort of juvenile (he was very young when he painted them after all) meta-ness, but/and so as to be a kind of commentary or at least call for commentary on evidence and belief and truth. I like having them on my walls because I go back and forth on whether I think they're deep or dumb, and whether I "agree" with them or find them offensive - especially considering I personally hold to be true many things my brother thinks are crazy "conspiracy theories" based on nothing more than blown-up brushstrokes and (perhaps, planted) pareidolia. But they're also a reminder, to think, in general. I also like having them because I like my brother even though he's annoying.Ethan Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11207042480666924085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8524497770619950288.post-376307737595603342023-01-06T12:59:00.000-05:002023-01-06T12:59:08.892-05:00third notes on reading, 2022Donald Francis Tovey:
<blockquote>
But the caution which seems so obvious to us was not noticed by his contemporary critics. We may leave out of account the oft-quoted fact that several Viennese musicians objected to his beginning his introduction with chords foreign to the key; such objectors were pedants miserably behind the culture not only of their own time but of the previous generation. They were the kind of pedants who are not even classicists, and whose grammatical knowledge is based upon no known language.
</blockquote>
Gustavo Gutierrez:
<blockquote>
The author is telling us in this way that a utilitarian religion lacks depth and authenticity; in addition, it has something satanic about it (this is the first appearance of the irony that the author handles so skillfully). The expectation of rewards that is at the heart of the doctrine of retribution vitiates the entire relationship and plays the demonic role of obstacle on the way to God.
</blockquote>
Nicholas Till:
<blockquote>
A fantastic hotch-potch of the sublime and the ridiculous, the spiritual and the popular, quasi-religious ritual and street comedy, formally <em>Die Zauberflöte</em> reflects the abandonment in much of Mozart's late music of the integrated complexity of classicism in favor of a sometimes almost childlike simplicity of expression, and (as in the Requiem), a juxtaposition of musical languages, with little apparent desire to achieve formal integration or homogeneity. Charles Rosen noted Mozart's renunciation of harmonic colour in <em>Die Zauberflöte</em>, and whereas in <em>Idomeneo</em> (an aria-based opera) twelve out of the fourteen arias employ sonata form, Mozart virtually dispensed with sonata form in <em>Die Zauberflöte</em>. If we consider <em>Le nozze di Figaro</em> to have represented the high point of Mozart's classical synthesis, an artistic expression of the last, supreme moment of social optimism within the Viennese Enlightenment, it is significant that after 1786 he wrote only two further works in the genre that best conveyed the classical ideal of integration: the piano concerto. <br /><br />
Theodor Adorno once described Beethoven's late style as a disintegration of the heroic bourgeois synthesis of individual and objective reality that Beethoven had achieved in his middle-period music; a reflection of the social and political polarization in post-Napoleonic Europe. In his late string quartets Beethoven abandons classical dialectic (in particular, sonata form) to represent a fragmented, objectified landscape lit by, but no longer integrated with, the artist's own subjectivity. 'Beethoven does not bring about a harmonious synthesis of these extremes. Rather, he tears them apart,' says Adorno. In Beethoven's late music the alienation of the individual from the real world is graphically conveyed in unrelated stylistic juxtapositions: baroque counterpoint alongside quasi-sonata forms, sublime serenity alongside rustic dances. Something similar seems to have happened in Mozart's late music, the effect not of intimations of mortality (as is so often sentimentally implied) but of the bleak social and political climate of his last years.
</blockquote>
T.J. Clark:
<blockquote>
It is above all <em>collectivity</em> that the popular exists to prevent.
</blockquote>
John Dos Passos
<blockquote>
today entails tomorrow
</blockquote>
Franco Moretti:
<blockquote>
Thus is dramatically realized the ideal of every restoration culture: to abolish the irreversibility of history and render the past everlasting. Social relations, no longer fraudulent and productive of uncontrollable events, are reformulated in a transparent and spatial - that is, static - form.
</blockquote>
Edmond Caldwell:
<blockquote>
For most of her life she had been invisible, and while she hadn't complained she could not say she had much liked it, either. Ungrateful girl! And thick-skulled too, her mother was right, but at last she had learned her lesson: it was best never to be seen at all, to be small and unimpressive and ignored, to go at all times and in all places unregarded and incognito, was the greatest of boons. To be unseen was to have a little ground under your feet - very little, it is true - but to be seen was a trapdoor. To be unseen was to have almost nothing inside that you could call your own, but to be noticed, to be caught in this searchlight, was to be . . . turned inside-out. She was being seen. And not just by any pair of eyes but by the eye in charge, the eye behind the eyes, not the eyes you're seen by but the eye that's your horizon, the condition not only of your visibility but of your very being.
</blockquote>
Job (King James Version):
<blockquote>
Oh that my words were now written! oh that they were printed in a book! <br/>
That they were graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock for ever!
</blockquote>
Antonio Gramsci:
<blockquote>
How the present is a <em>criticism</em> of the past, besides [and because of] "surpassing" it. But should the past be discarded for this reason? What should be discarded is that which the present has "intrinsically" criticized and that part of ourselves which corresponds to it. What does this mean? That we must have an exact consciousness of this real criticism and express it not only theoretically but <em>politically</em>. In other words, we must stick closer to the present, which we ourselves have helped create, while conscious of the past and its continuation (and revival).
</blockquote>
Denise Levertov:
<blockquote>
all history <br/>
burned out, down <br/>
to the sick bone <br/>
</blockquote>
Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman:
<blockquote>
The discovery that there are formally indemonstrable arithmetic truths does not mean that there are truths which are forever incapable of becoming known, or that a mystic intuition must replace cogent proof. It does mean that the resources of the human intellect have not been, and cannot be, fully formalized, and that new principles of demonstration forever await invention and discovery.
</blockquote>
Friedrich Engels:
<blockquote>
It is the old story. First of all one makes sensous things into abstractions and then one wants to know them through the senses, to see time and smell space. The empiricist becomes so steeped in the habit of empirical experience, that he believes that he is still in the field of sensuous experience when he is operating with abstractions. We know what an hour is, or a metre, but not what time and space are! As if time was anything other than just hours, and space anything but just cubic metres!
</blockquote>
Virgil (David Ferry):
<blockquote>
Here is a beautiful shepherd's staff, the one <br/> Antigenes often asked me for and was <br/> Refused, though then he deserved my love. The knots <br/> Are evenly spaced, the rings are brass, Menalcas.
</blockquote>
William Shakespeare:
<blockquote>
Though the seas threaten, they are merciful. <br/>
I have cursed them without cause.
</blockquote>
Patricia Highsmith:
<blockquote>
The window gave him nothing but his own image.
</blockquote>
Helen DeWitt:
<blockquote>
Eloise had written a book and been made to have discussions in which the phrase 'flesh out' was used of characters. She was just out of college. She had been reading Robbe-Grillet. She had recently seen <em>Dogville</em>. In a moment of weakness she had attached to four characters the sort of name that is affixed to a little primate at birth. Each was also provided with hair, eye, and skin colour, a wardrobe, some sort of plausible history. A favourite TV show. What with all these plausible names and histories, the characters went plausibly about their business like impostors in a witness protection programme.
</blockquote>
Søren Kierkegaard:
<blockquote>
Repetition and recollection are the same movement, only in opposite directions; for what is recollected has been, is repeated backwards, whereas repetition properly so called is recollected forwards.
</blockquote>
W.H. Auden:
<blockquote>
Mine the art which made the song <br/>
Sound ridiculous and wrong <br/>
</blockquote>
Marcel Proust:
<blockquote>
And at night they did not dine in the hotel, where, hidden springs of electricity flooding the great dining-room with light, it became as it were an immense and wonderful aquarium against whose glass wall the working population of Balbec, the fishermen and also the tradesmen's families, clustering invisibly in the outer darkness, pressed their faces to watch the luxurious life of its occupants gently floating upon the golden eddies within, a thing as extraordinary to the poor as the life of strange fishes or molluscs (an important social question, this: whether the glass wall will always protect the banquets of these weird and wonderful creatures, or whether the obscure folk who watch them hungrily out of the night will not break in some day to gather them from their aquarium and devour them).
</blockquote>Ethan Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11207042480666924085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8524497770619950288.post-24994987973709720072023-01-06T12:34:00.001-05:002023-01-06T12:34:25.720-05:002022 reading, the list1. Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle <br />
2. Seamus O'Mahony, Can Medicine Be Cured? The Corruption of a Profession <br />
3. Nicholas Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue and Beauty in Mozart's Operas <br />
4. T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers <br />
5. Nancy E. Bernhard, US Television News and Cold War Propaganda, 1947-1960 <br />
6. John Dos Passos, The 42nd Parallel <br />
7. John Dos Passos, 1919 <br />
8. John Dos Passos, The Big Money <br />
9. Donald Francis Tovey, Essays in Musical Analysis vol. 1: Symphonies 1 <br />
10. Oakley Hall, Warlock <br />
11. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (trans. Ralph Manheim) <br />
12. Honoré de Balzac, Pere Goriot (trans. E.K. Brown) <br />
13. Lily E. Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code <br />
14. Isaac Asimov, The Genetic Code <br />
15. J.O. Jeppson, The Second Experiment <br />
16. Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society <br />
17. Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn <br />
18. Franco Moretti, Signs Taken For Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms <br />
19. Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals (trans. Richard Aldington) <br />
20. Edmond Caldwell, Human Wishes/Enemy Combatant <br />
21. Job (KJV) <br />
22. Octavia E. Butler, Dawn <br />
23. Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner & Richard Alpert, The Psychedelic Experience: A manual based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead <br />
24. Octavia E. Butler, Adulthood Rites <br />
25. James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood <br />
26. Job (trans. Robert Alter) <br />
27. Kary Mullis, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field <br />
28. Clarice Lispector, First Stories <br />
29. Octavia E. Butler, Imago <br />
30. Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebook 1 (trans. Buttigieg) <br />
31. B.F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity <br />
32. Marcel Proust, Swann's Way <br />
33. Leonard Susskind, The Black Hole War: My Battle With Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics <br />
34. Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 <br />
35. Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Morning Star <br />
36. Denise Levertov, The Sorrow Dance <br />
37. Helena Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine volume II: Anthropogenesis <br />
38. T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land <br />
39. Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room! <br />
40. Thomas Pynchon, Vineland <br />
41. Isaac Asimov, Earth Is Room Enough <br />
42. Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler <br />
43. Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, Godel's Proof <br />
44. Adele Haverty Bealer, Interface: Connecting the Work of Gregory Bateson, Deleuze and Guattari, and Alain Badiou (master's thesis) <br />
45. KPD(ML), When and Why Socialism in the Soviet Union Failed <br />
46. C.G. Jung, Answer to Job <br />
47. Psalms (KJV) <br />
48. Iain M. Banks, Consider Phlebas <br />
49. Isaac Asimov, Robots and Empire <br />
50. Proverbs (KJV) <br />
51. Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove <br />
52. Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth <br />
53. Percival Everett, The Trees <br />
54. Dietrich Eckart, Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin: A Conversation Between Adolf Hitler and Me <br />
55. Barbara O'Brien, Operators and Things: The Inner Life of a Schizophrenic <br />
56. Bram Stoker, Dracula <br />
57. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species <br />
58. Astounding Science Fiction, April 1944 <br />
59. Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature <br />
60. Isaac Asimov, Earth: Our Crowded Spaceship <br />
61. Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives <br />
62. Ecclesiastes (KJV) <br />
63. Clarice Lispector, Family Ties <br />
64. William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job, introduction and commentary by S. Foster Damon <br />
65. Umberto Eco, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods <br />
66. Gustavo Gutierrez, On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent <br />
67. Samuel R. Delany, Nova <br />
68. Michael Cetewayo Tabor, Capitalism Plus Dope Equals Genocide <br />
69. Joseph Wicksteed, Blake's Vision of the Book of Job <br />
70. Virgil, Eclogues (trans. David Ferry) <br />
71. William Shakespeare, The Tempest <br />
72. Helen C. Scott, Shakespeare's Tempest and Capitalism: The Storm of History <br />
73. The Song of Solomon (KJV) <br />
74. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology <br />
75. Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train <br />
76. T. Mohr, Imperialism Today is Conspiracy Praxis <br />
77. Racine, Phaedra (trans. Robert Lowell) <br />
78. Helen DeWitt, Some Trick <br />
79. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (trans. Alastair Hannay) <br />
80. W.H. Auden, For the Time Being <br />
81. Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology (trans. Walter Lowrie) <br />
82. Friedrich Engels, ancillary material in MECW 25 (related to Anti-Duhring and Dialectics of Nature)<br />
83. Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way<br />
84. Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute 1984-2019, ed. David C. KrakauerEthan Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11207042480666924085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8524497770619950288.post-29064538775906499522023-01-04T10:36:00.002-05:002023-01-04T11:25:23.756-05:00second notes on reading, 2022Having established some grounding in Marxism - i.e., for the first time, in reality - I began over the past few years what I've been thinking of as a long-term project of research into what you might call "bad ideas of the 20th century", to learn what they have in common and toward what aims they point. This led me to a 19th century precursor, Helena Blavatsky, whose immensely tedious and immensely fascist <em>Secret Doctrine</em> I finally dispensed with in 2022. I've mentioned her <a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com/2022/12/on-may-9-2021-i-wrote-in-notebook.html">recently</a>. It was touching to learn that she, very generously if I don't say so myself, characterizes Semites as a branch of the noble Aryan family - albeit, of course, a considerably degenerate one.
<p>
Timothy Leary, Jung (on whom perhaps a bit more later) - Blavatskies of the 20th century, more or less, as in their different ways are the "information" theorists (again, perhaps more later) as well as the (as they say) literal Nazis I read last year, Carl Schmitt, Dietrich Eckart, Hitler himself. Not to attribute any great originary role to Madame B. (whose own work appears to be largely plagiarized and about whom it's an open question how much the Nazis cared); I'm not searching for some Secret Idea that drove it all. But the tremendous value of actually reading these people is that it enables you to recognize it when you see it again - and again - and again - same old, <a href="https://twitter.com/RedKahina/status/1609642075141640194">same old</a>. If you have read <em>Mein Kampf</em>, if you have read the almost impressively audaciously insane <em>Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin</em> or, as I had in 2021, <em>The Protocols of the Elders of Zion</em>, and if you have understood <em>how</em> they do what they do, their new versions - <em>most importantly</em> those in "left" garb - have no hope of working on you. Of course Marx helps a great deal.
<p>
One finding of this research project that perhaps won't (couldn't) amuse and interest anyone else as much as it did me had to do with <em>the</em> bad idea of the 20th century that is dearest and most repugnant to my heart. In an email I sent to Richard one year and one day ago today, after briefly parodying Hitler's style, I added:
<blockquote>
(I said "inwardly infinitely" because those are two of his favorite modifiers, infinite and inward - they'll often appear multiple times per page, sometimes multiple times per sentence, frequently in ways that don't seem to make any sense - which, that and other things stylistically remind me of, um, Golden Age scifi in general and most very specifically A.E. van Vogt - unlikely to have been direct stylistic influence since it was only translated into English in 1943, when the Golden Age was about to have run its course already; on the other hand so many scifi writers then were engineers, and engineers then could all read German; but seems most likely due to shared mindset and maybe shared type of influences - I wonder how similar the styles of German and American turn-of-the-20th popular literature were.)
</blockquote>
And I did read scifi in 2022. <em>The Second Experiment</em> by J.O. Jeppson (who is better known by the name she openly wrote under later, Janet Asimov) was everything I want in a certain type of scifi - "dumb, psychotic, and kind of great, and all three much more so than I was expecting", as I blurbed it to Richard in an email in March. Unexpectedly it featured Margulisian speciation via symbiosis as a plot point, as does, in sickeningly distorted form, Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis series - in which we are told, as indisputable fact, that human beings are intrinsically evil due to genetic original sin and must have the genes for Goodness raped into us by aliens if we are to avoid destroying ourselves. The more one reads of Butler the more one wonders where her much-ballyhooed lefty cred comes from (answer: marketing; racist overcompensation). As usual what she <em>does</em> with her fundamentally fascist concept is interesting and ambivalent, but no amount of fascinating development can undo the vileness at its heart: the series is a long, thoughtful, even occasionally moving answer to the idiotic and breathtakingly repellent question, "What if fascists were right about Human Nature, but it really could be fixed by eugenics?" (Which, to be sure, has a certain internal logic: after all, if fascists <em>were</em> right about human nature, eugenics <em>would</em> be the way to fix it.) Remarkably, too, the form this asserted inescapable evil of humanity takes is: "hierarchy" - never defined, this word, and one wishes to be able to sit down with Butler's ghost and ask it what she thought the word meant, because nearly everything we're given as telling <em>examples</em> of this nefarious inevitable human tendency toward hierarchy is <em>precisely resistance to the imposition of hierarchy</em> - which, back to the question of Butler's lefty cred, certainly explains why she's so beloved today of astroturfed social media influencers pretending to be radicals who routinely slander all genuine revolutionary black liberation movements and heroes, past and present, in precisely the same terms.
<p>
Bradbury (the execrable <em>Fahrenheit 451</em>) and Asimov (some of the later novels and much nonfiction) I read with a specific aim in mind, though in the case of Asimov there is also some pleasure in the reading. I will not talk about either of them now, for fear of never stopping; all I'll say about <em>451</em> for the moment is that may be the first-ever pro-nuclear-holocaust novel, a remarkable achievement for 1953 (or 1951, when the even more overtly nuke-em-all-cleansing-fire novella "The Fireman", later revised and expanded into the novel, appeared in <em>Galaxy</em>). Hopefully I will say what I have to say about them another time. Harry Harrison's <em>Make Room! Make Room!</em> is of course very famous as part of scifi's long ignoble history of propagandizing the alleged "overpopulation problem"; Delany's <em>Nova</em> I like.Ethan Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11207042480666924085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8524497770619950288.post-52636979155391766682022-12-31T12:04:00.000-05:002022-12-31T12:04:33.995-05:00first notes on reading, 2022In March of this year about to end I took <em>Swann's Way</em> down from the shelf, just to remind myself of how it feels, how it starts, or rather how it proceeds after the start which no one could forget, and to my surprise found myself re-reading it. By the end of the year I would have read through the end (the vicious, brutal end) of <em>The Guermantes Way</em>. The first time I read Proust, 2013-2015, I tried not to be but was constantly aware of myself as reading a Giant and Important work, undertaking a Task which it would be Heroic to Complete. This second time I'm just reading it - picking it up when I want to and reading it. Naturally this, no doubt along with the time that has passed in my own life, the things I have done and learned and thought about in that time, primary among them time itself, means that I am more feeling and understanding what these pages are doing, the way they behave towards and in time, and not only time, this time than I did the first.
<p>
Early on I sent this passage to my weather-obsessed father:
<blockquote>
But Bloch had displeased my family for other reasons. He had begun by irritating my father, who, seeing him come in with wet clothes, had asked him with keen interest:
<br><br>
"Why, M. Bloch, is there a change in the weather? Has it been raining? I can't understand it; the barometer was set fair."
<br><br>
Which drew from Bloch nothing more than: "Sir, I am absolutely incapable of telling you whether it has rained. I live so resolutely apart from physical contingencies that my senses no longer trouble to inform me of them."
<br><br>
"My poor boy," said my father after Bloch had gone, "your friend is out of his mind. Why, he couldn't even tell me what the weather was like. As if there could be anything more interesting! He's an imbecile."
</blockquote>
Reading it now, too, after having read so much Marx and Marxism, Soviet and revolutionary Chinese histories (that is to say, histories of peasant societies in rapid transformation), and most directly prior and relevant, TJ Clark, in his wonderful books about Manet and (read the year before) Courbet, talking about town and country in France in the second half of the 1800s, the sort of socio-geography of particularly Combray but all of the book's locations makes much more sense to me than they had before, which in turn makes things of the types that tend to be labeled "political" as well as things of the types that do not come much more clear.
<p>
It had been throughout the previous several years that I had read all that Marx and Marxism (and Soviet and Chinese histories), the previous several years that I had spent intensively reading all the Marx and Marxism and <em>Communist</em> histories that I had been taught my whole life there was no need to read, which changed everything. I've left very little written record of that period - scattered emails back and forth with Richard, who was doing much the same; a few notes in notebooks I never kept diligently - which is a shame because, in the absence of any Party which could reliably organize such education, I read things willy-nilly, in terribly wrong order (Lenin and Stalin are crucial but on the whole one really should not start with them! it really is better to have a solid grasp on dialectics - easy to attain! - before attempting to read <em>Capital!</em> - which I still haven't finished, incidentally), and it would be very interesting, if only to me, to be able to trace my misunderstandings as they slowly transformed into understanding.
<p>
Because of my having attained that grounding, or at least some degree thereof, and my having embarked on projects enabled by it, relatively little Marxism appears on my list of 2022 reading. There were the beautiful fragments of Gramsci and the elderly Engels, left unfinished in both cases because of death; there was the absolutely essential T. Mohr article <a href="https://magma-magazin.su/2022/09/t-mohr/imperialism-today-is-conspiracy-praxis/">Imperialism Today Is Conspiracy Praxis</a>. I had been longing for an article like the latter for years - as I had written to Richard on December 7, 2019:
<blockquote>
Train of thought off of this, development of imperialist finance capital over time, led me to think, my god, the first volume of <em>Capital</em> was in 1867, <em>Imperialism</em> was 1917, <em>Neo-Colonialism</em> was 1965. Essentially 50 years between each of them and we're now just over 50 years on from the Nkrumah. Just think about the <em>massive</em> changes in capitalism between each of them, that necessitated each of them. Obviously more is needed!! (And exists, though as far as I know not in anything like as condensed and singular a form.) It's not my main point to just rag on people but.... people still act like you can just read <em>Imperialism</em> and understand <em>today.</em> Obviously it helps but it's also obviously not going to be sufficient!! And then you get things like that (mostly very good) <a href="https://www.marxist.com/marxism-vs-queer-theory.htm">critique of queer theory</a> using Marx's analysis of capital in his time as if THAT doesn't need to be updated! Even as it explicitly criticizes dogmatism [but then, I add now, it was written by a Trot, so what do you expect]. I guess I don't actually have a real point but I was just struck by those roughly equal time gaps and it just really drove the point home to me that theory needs to be constantly renewed.
</blockquote>
T. Mohr's article is perhaps too brief and too much a scaffolding to qualify it as <em>the</em> successor to that line but it is a massive contribution and a necessary start.Ethan Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11207042480666924085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8524497770619950288.post-73523379822314312582022-12-22T11:17:00.000-05:002022-12-22T11:17:33.659-05:00On October 7, 2021, I wrote in a notebook: <p>
<blockquote>
I tried to find a Picasso online that's reproduced in b&w in Krauss's <em>Picasso Papers</em> (Daix 685), to see the colors, and <em>couldn't</em> - but everything's online! Presumably it's because the original is in a <em>private collection</em> - which, that (Private Collection) could be a title for my story about the scholar who thinks he's discovered a secret music - are there "private collections" of sheet music that <em>we've</em> never been allowed to hear, live or recorded? <br /> <br /> <br />
The opening measures of Brahms's 2nd serenade are beautiful, and <em>more</em> so when awkwardly plunked out on piano by two hands one of which is also trying to hold on to the Tovey book where they're reproduced in reduction (b&w?). <br /> <br />
Why is Brahms so heavy? It's <em>not</em> orchestration, not too large an orchestra, as I thought - Serenade #2 with its no violins proves that. And it's not any reluctance to be dynamically startling (After Beethoven as one says) because no amount of muddy performance can entirely mask Beethoven's lightness/litheness in comparison - i.e., refuse to recognize his sforzandi, his fp's, etc, and they still struggle through. So it's not that. <br /> <Br />
What is it? He just doesn't <em>move</em>. Tovey is no help - I thought maybe he'd explain <em>how</em> we're in a different world now from LvB, and maybe tell me why it's <em>good</em> - but no - unless it's his comment on Brahms's "extended paragraphs" that I don't really understand. <br /> <br />
Sometimes it's close, especially in the transition in and out of trios - ironically the <em>continuity</em> (of rhythm in the scherzo, of the ba DUH duh up-and-down figure in the quasi minuetto) helps him be lively in the <em>changes</em>.
</blockquote>
<p>
On the 19th of the same month I wrote: <p>
<blockquote>
The finale of Brahms's 2nd symphony <em>moves</em> - like Beethoven moves, made possible by being like Haydn - though now I find I don't respond to it as well as I thought I might. The scherzo is light and lovely.
</blockquote>
<p>
Two days later I anxiously added: <p>
<blockquote>
It's funny how I keep feeling a need to explain that my comments on Brahms don't mean I "don't like" him (though they are why I have a harder time with him, I think). In my own notebook! Of course it's possible I'll mis-remember my own experiences. Anyway I've come, quickly, to really love the 2nd symphony. <br /><br />
I guess this need to apologize, explain, disclaim, is why I'm not a Great Artiste!...?<br /><br /><br />
<em>Moby-Dick</em> p 319, on sharks eating from a whale carcass: "How, at such an apparently unassailable surface, they contrive to gouge out such symmetrical mouthfuls, remains a part of the universal problem of all things."
</blockquote>
<p>
On the 8th I had written:
<blockquote>
I still don't understand atonal music or Perle but I just sat down at the piano to play the opening chords of Berg's Lyric Suite as reproduced in ch. 5 of <em>The Listening Composer</em> and was struck by how much <em>sense</em> the sound made, then read on and saw "I immediately recognized that the first three chords unfold tetrachordal segments of a <strong>single statement of the circle of fifths"</strong> - I went back and painstakingly worked out that yes, it is in fact that - <em>overwhelmed</em> by a simple realization of <em>that's why it sounds like that.</em> <br /><br />
REMEMBER that Perle, the goofball, suspects (p. 51-52) that Rimsky-Korsakov taught Stravinsky the octatonic (whole-note) scale that he "discovered" - in <em>secret</em>, a secret Stravinsky <em>kept</em>. Very a la Hockney - remember in connection with "private collection".
</blockquote> <p>
Two days later I returned to the notebook and wrote: <p>
<blockquote>Kemp, <em>Seen|Unseen</em> p. 324: "this continuity of representational means disposes me to think that the 'conventions' of pictorial illusion work at a very deep level with the perceptual and cognitive structures we have acquired to make sense of what lies 'out there'. I recognize that they work better with appropriate cultural attuning, and will only arise as the result of particular sets of historical imperatives, but I do not think the basic mechanisms and visual potentialities are culturally constructed. <strong>There is a difference between cultural construction and cultural realization</strong>, and it is the later in which I believe." Relevant to tonality - but how and why exactly??
</blockquote> <p>
On September 25th I had written: <p>
<blockquote>
Beethoven is one of those miraculous figures like Marx, where given the progress(ion) of history it was inevitable that all these things would happen, get worked out, one way or another, eventually - but for it all to happen <em>at once</em>, in <em>one person??</em> <br /><br />
Nina Allan's tourbillon b/w Chris Marker on Vertigo... <br /><br />
Maelzel also made automated <em>instruments??</em>
</blockquote> <P>
On December 18 I would write: <p>
<blockquote>
Listening to Bruckner's 4th - first time, really, for me with him. All this emerging out of the haze. And I don't know what it's <em>for</em>, a problem that I only start having - slightly - with Brahms, and more and more after. I keep feeling that it's imploring/enjoining me to do <em>something</em>, I don't know what, but almost certainly something I don't want to do. (But do I only think this because I know how the Nazis loved him, later? Is that his fault, this music's fault? I tend to think probably?)
</blockquote> <p>
Nearly two weeks would pass before I would return to the notebook on the last day of 2021 and add: <p>
<blockquote>But Tovey's defense of Bruckner is interesting, even touching ("Listen to it... with the humility you would feel if you overheard a simple old soul talking to a child about sacred things") and it's true that listening to the 4th with his help I came close to liking it. Wand's, too, is better than Chailly's, I think. (Though maybe I should hear Chailly's again before saying that.) I don't think I could love it as I came to with Haydn and Brahms (heard all four of the symphonies today) but I'm at least willing to allow that maybe - maybe - Hitler is not entirely his fault.<br /><br />
(Later: yes, Wand is better than Chailly.)
</blockquote> <p>
On the 3rd of that month I had written:
<blockquote>Nicholas Till quotes Goethe: "If you wish to advance into the infinite, explore the finite in all directions." Must find source - he cites it obnoxiously to just a volume of the (German!) complete works.
</blockquote> <p>Ethan Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11207042480666924085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8524497770619950288.post-46879078896765461062022-12-15T14:48:00.003-05:002022-12-27T19:46:50.405-05:00On May 9, 2021, I wrote in a notebook: <p>
<blockquote>
Blavatsky, <em>Secret Doctrine</em>, vol. 1, p. 18 [and, I went on to discover, repeatedly throughout], uses photography as a metaphor to justify idealism - 1888. Almost as soon as this extremely material technology becomes available. That an "image" can be directly transformed into an "object" seems to <em>prove</em> that the real is a transformation of the ideal. <br /> <br />
cf. Hockney, <em>Secret Knowledge</em>, p. 16: "We were also experimenting with different combinations of mirrors and lenses to see if we could re-create the ways in which Renaissance artists may have used them. The projections we made delighted everyone who came to the studio, even those with a camera in their hands. The effects seemed amazing, because they were unelectronic. The images we projected were clear, in colour, and they moved. It became obvious that few people know much about optics, even photographers. In medieval Europe projected 'apparitions' would be regarded as magical; as I found out, people still think this today."
</blockquote>
<p>
Two days later I would note: "Per Hockney, in the 1400s, at least in the Netherlands, painters and mirror-makers were in the same guild." <br /> <br />
On July 26, 2019, I had emailed Richard telling him how I'd heard someone who seemed to have reason to know what they were talking about explaining that smartphone manufacturers, rather than pay to test the quality of the lenses they put on their cameras, instead use lenses that are likely (but not known) to be poorly made and then use elaborate software to compensate for the poor-quality image: when you "take a picture" the camera actually very rapidly takes a large number of pictures and then uses some algorithm to combine them into a best guess at what a camera with a decent lens would have produced.Ethan Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11207042480666924085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8524497770619950288.post-75697821948773957982022-12-08T15:00:00.002-05:002022-12-08T15:02:25.075-05:00The other day, almost three years later, I remembered I had wanted to read more of her so I looked her up at my public library and was surprised to see every copy of every book they have by her is checked out, and each with multiple holds. Oh, did she die?, I thought. On January 29, 2020, I wrote in a notebook:
<blockquote>
Annie Ernaux, <em>Exteriors</em> <br> <br>
Chronicle of the social by someone who has (unknowingly?) rejected the social? <br><br>
A trajectory from Steve's <a href="https://this-space.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-munro-doctrine.html">"Munro Doctrine"</a> to this to [what I thought while reading] Tove Jansson <em>Summer Book</em> - presuming to present the interiors of others is imperialism -> is a mistake -> is authorized by empathy and social relations. <br><br>
Author's preface, pp. 7-8: "I have done my best not to express or exploit the emotion that triggered each text. On the contrary, I have sought to describe reality as through the eyes of a photographer and to preserve the mystery and opacity of the lives I encountered. [...] In actual fact, I realize that I have put a lot of myself into these texts, far more than originally planned - memories and obsessions subconsciously dictating my choice of words and the scenes I wished to freeze. Moreover, I am sure that one can learn more about oneself by embracing the outside world than by taking refuge in the intimacy of a diary [...] It is other people - anonymous figures glimpsed in the subway or in waiting rooms - who revive our memory and reveal our true selves through the interest, the anger or the shame that they send rippling through us." <br><br>
1. Why is this "on the contrary"? (my own emotions/mystery and opacity of others) <br><br>
2. Why is it only about "myself" that one seeks to learn? <br><br>
3. Why do these "figures" remain "anonymous"? (because you've ruled out speaking to them from the beginning) <br><br>
But this is an accurate representation of the book - its attempt, its failure, its interest. Which, that last comes primarily from the failure - e.g. it's not the description of the girl with ribbon in her hair auditioning or even of the nervousness of the parents that interests but rather (p. 23) "It was an old-fashioned dream come true in the heart of the New Town, with the rituals and pomp of yesteryear's salons. But the parents were not speaking to one another; each family wanted their own child to be the best, to fulfill the hope that one day he or she would belong to the elite, of which tonight they had witnessed only the theatricality." <br><br>
On which point - she sees everything as a performance - people at the butchershop buying meat, people talking on the train, people begging (here she's correct) but also homeless man thoughtlessly exposing himself (insanely she thinks this is an expression of <em>power!</em>) - a symptom of isolation and of her class. Social life is a put-on, a fake. <br><br>
It's also baked in to her methodology, "preserving opacity" etc - back to Steve, it's easy to mistake this as respect for one's "objects" but it becomes clear that in effect it treats them as existing for <em>me</em> - to the extent they have their own reason for their behavior it's to put on a show <em>for me</em>. <br><br>
As with people so with objects - p. 78 "Our relationship to things is so moving" - It's an extreme commodity fetishism both in the true sense & how it can be misunderstood due to contemporary usage of "fetish" - e.g. of a fancy underwear store, pp. 85-86: "Wanting to have some of this beauty on one's skin is as legitimate as wanting to breathe fresh air." (Do I trust the choice of "legitimate" here or is it a dishonest stand-in for "natural"? What is the difference? At any rate it is not so much the applicability of a concept, "legitimacy" - of course it is legitimate to want to have beauty on one's skin - as the choice of comparison itself that strikes me.) <br><br>
For all the attention to class and to workers at work (though all [?] service workers) and even the presence in the book (even if by absence) of the producers of commodities - pp. 66-67 the black woman in a boubou "whom one suspects has come to the wrong store [or... the wrong book?], who doesn't realize she is out of place," or the now demolished housing for "the immigrant population of the sixties" (p. 83) - she treats commodities as an "opaque" part of the world, natural, not products of labor. <br><br>
p. 41 "In the newspaper <em>Libération</em>, the historian Jacques Le Goff remarked: 'The subway is quite a curiosity.' Would the people who commute every day feel the same way about the Collège de France? There is no way of knowing." As sarcasm it's a decent line, in the style of a dunk, but again: Why is there no way of knowing? Class, access to media, sure, of course; but also once again because <em>you've ruled out</em> talking to people. <br><br>
So ultimately though she's not treating people as commodities, she is essentially treating them the same way - opaque objects which function only in relation to <em>me</em>, and which are otherwise mute. Dramatic display of the fundamental problems with this type of approach!
</blockquote>
The first sentence of that last paragraph was obviously mangled somehow en route from brain to paper, but the point is as clear as it's going to be, I suppose.Ethan Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11207042480666924085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8524497770619950288.post-48638941179179097642022-12-06T15:56:00.005-05:002022-12-06T23:41:55.953-05:00On February 12, 2020, I wrote in a notebook:
<blockquote>
It's Wednesday now but some thoughts on the two concerts I went to Sunday- <p>
[Redacted so as not to be cruel to amateurs] was like a caricature of what someone who thinks classical concerts are boring would expect. They ran through crowd pleasers (Chopin something-or-other, Rachmaninoff Vocalise) with high-end amateur technical competence but absolutely <em>unengaging</em> - of course the saving grace of a crowd pleaser should be that it <em>pleases the crowd</em>, and of an amateur, passion (not to be overly etymological), but there was none of that here. (Well, the crowd might have been pleased, I don't know - classical audiences are always a little difficult for me but this one, I've never felt more estranged from an audience I was in before - they somehow gave off <em>malevolent</em> vibes... Which I'd say might have been just me, my mood, but the earlier crowd didn't feel that way... Maybe I just felt an interloper in what is after all an insular little club. Anyway.) <p>
And before that, a different kind of unengagement - "Cello Festival" at the RISD museum, which I left early to go to the other - saw two soloists. First did a very solid, respectable, and (yes) engaging run through the first Bach suite (another crowd pleaser), but the second, who was clearly a technically excellent <em>and</em> passionate cellist, played four contemporary works - one that was left off the program and I don't remember what it was, ägäische eisberge by Klaus Lang, Three High Places by John Luther Adams, and /hiə(r)/ by an "Inga" who was in the audience (I think a Brown student). The only of those composers I'd heard of before was Adams, and to be sure his was the most engaging of the set, but overall the impression left by all of them is what a cul de sac contemporary classical is in. I'm sure all of them had their reasons for moving through time the way they did, but they just came across as here's a sound... and here's a sound... and here's another sound. Or here's a thing cello can do, here's another... music as printer test page. <p>
It's this whole world of contemporary classical that has completely turned its back on engaging. Yes it has its audience but that's not what I mean - even for those who appreciate I feel like the experience is still of being lectured at, not spoken with. <p>
Engagement with <em>people</em> is what music should be, of course! But classical at least seems to have split into two worlds - refusing to engage, or engaging solely by means of banality. The only other tendency I'm aware of having any presence at all is minimalism (in all this I keep thinking about the other John Adams - the composer, not the president or the president - talking about being trained that tonality was an artificial structure that had run its course but eventually coming to the realization that tonality truly is a force of nature - which I read with relief! It gave me permission to feel the same way! You can <em>understand</em> a 12-tone series; you can <em>feel</em> tonality - which of course is not to say that it's the only feel-able system). But minimalism is its own cul de sac. <p>
What I'm struggling hazily to link in here - I think it's obvious but I'm not quite finding the place to make it obvious - is that of course the "people" this music has always primarily been created for are not "the people" at all (watching Gosford Park thinking about how all these successive ruling classes have had all this beautiful work created on their behalf when no one is more philistine and less capable of appreciating it) - actually take that out of parentheses because here's more - thinking of the ruling classes having this glorious music as a private entertainment they actually disdain (but can't do without) which at some point transitions to what I saw at [the concert described first] - their lower echelons, at least, sitting in ritual silence as they respectfully and tastelessly attend to musicians capable of hitting all the notes but incapable of actually <em>conveying</em> anything about (or of) this music to anyone. <p>
Of course maybe I just saw a bad concert. But what made me want to try to get these thoughts down (unsuccessfully) now days later is that I'm listening to Schnittke's first concerto grosso, and Wow! - Schnittke himself, as far as I can tell, was a grotesque anticommunist, your typical counterrevolutionary Artiste who loves then to whine about how oh even <em>my</em> Art has been commodified - well, whose fault is that? But for me his music sometimes seems to solve, or at least sidestep, the problem. This concerto grosso is not banal, and is nothing if not engaging! I had this giddy "<em>This</em> is how it can be done!" moment when it began. More soberly I realize a good deal of what creates that impression is how he recycles the past - "concerto grosso", after all, and that string quartet that quotes Orlando di Lasso and the big fugue of Beethoven - which does not bode well as a route out of any cul de sac... And yet. And yet!
</blockquote>
More recently, having totally forgotten Schnittke (how things vanish), I had the precise same experience with, look at that, John (non-Luther) Adams, Absolute Jest with all its Beethoven quotation, which suggests to me that, oh no, maybe it's just that I get a kick out of pastiche, collage? <p>
More recently I've found very inspiring on this - and smarter about class and its relation to music than I was in 2020 - the written words of Hans Werner Henze, whose music however I struggle to engage with. <p>
At any rate back in 2020 I was both onto something and perhaps not onto anything. Only about a month after these concerts the organization that put on the cello festival ceased to do live performances at all, along with everyone else. When they returned half-assedly they demanded performers and audiences hide their faces, and as far as I know to this day they still require "proof of vaccination" to attend their concerts, the few of them that they actually still put on, with them having permanently embraced the ditigal, to my knowledge ("as far as I know" and "to my knowledge" because when I wrote them to object to the mandatory pharmaceutical policy they silently removed me from their mailing list and the feeling is mutual). I don't know what the other group did or is doing now.Ethan Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11207042480666924085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8524497770619950288.post-86693636444888289632022-11-29T11:54:00.002-05:002022-11-29T11:54:27.164-05:00The question, of course, is whether to delete everything or go through it all and hand-repudiate each post individually. Probably I will do neither. The next question is whether I should post anything new.Ethan Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11207042480666924085noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8524497770619950288.post-18263826555355915512016-05-02T20:15:00.001-04:002016-05-02T21:22:05.422-04:00yet we are dogs neverthelessKafka did not write science fiction. He did not write speculative fiction. He did not write fantastic fiction, nor did he write fantasy, certainly not in the sense that people tend to mean these days. He did not write weird fiction, what he wrote is not The Weird. People — terrible, bad people — sometimes try to lump Kafka in with science fiction or speculative fiction or fantastic fiction or fantasy or weird fiction or The Weird. This is of course because terrible, bad people are often terribly, badly wrong.
<p>
It is in "Investigations of a Dog", I think, that Kafka, though he did not write science fiction, comes closest to writing science fiction. A-ha, you say, it's because here he writes about dogs who think and talk like humans do — an sfnal concept — and so surely by that logic a story about a man who wakes up one day transformed into an insect, or a story about a castle that does not exist in reality, or a story about a horse who becomes a lawyer: all of these are also sf! But no — I suggest that "Investigations of a Dog" is the closest Kafka — who did not write sf — comes to writing sf not because of the dogs <em>in</em> the story, but because of the dogs <em>out</em> of it. Kafka, who did not write science fiction, makes his closest approach to something recognizable as science fiction in five words in this story, five words that appear in the middle of a sentence in the middle of one of his famously long paragraphs. He writes:
<blockquote>
They appeared from somewhere, I inwardly greeted them as dogs, and although I was profoundly confused by the sounds that accompanied them, yet they were dogs nevertheless, dogs like you and me...
</blockquote>
(Or at least, this is how the Muirs translate him.)
<p>
<em>Dogs like you and me</em> — this invocation <em>and fictionalization</em> of <a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-fictional-writer-fictional-reader.html">the reader</a> — accusing the reader of being something they are not, something they <em>cannot</em> be, something closer to the work than is possible, in more ways than one — but at the same time it's <em>true</em>, it's <em>correct</em>, it is neither a lie nor, for the moment at least, a metaphor. If Kafka has anything in common with sf — which is not to say that he <em>is</em> sf — it's not that he calls the narrator a dog, it's that he calls the reader a dog.Ethan Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11207042480666924085noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8524497770619950288.post-37232332694325673182016-04-05T15:00:00.001-04:002016-04-05T15:12:55.803-04:00This / narrow sign between wallsI don't have any German, but I <em>do</em> have a bilingual edition of Paul Celan's selected poetry checked out from the library, and just now when I read, in "Anabasis", the lines that Michael Hamburger renders as
<blockquote>
re- <br />
leased, re- <br />
deemed, ours.
</blockquote>
my curious eye traveled across to the facing page and read, in whatever sense one can read a language one knows roughly how to pronounce but not how to decipher, the corresponding lines
<blockquote>
aus- <br />
gelöst, ein- <br />
gelöst, unser.
</blockquote>
and while I'm not saying anything new by saying that translation is a very peculiar thing, it's just a very peculiar thing that the way Hamburger renders the lines has the effect of making me feel the <em>re</em>ness of these words, and of making me think about why it is that to re-lease means <em>to release</em>, why to re-deem means <em>to redeem</em>, where Celan's lines — presumably — would have the effect of making one feel the <em>gelöst</em>ness of the words (neither of which (google suggests) possesses any <em>re</em>ness)... which, intriguingly, I suspect also would make one feel the changing prefixes with a similar kind of newness and focus as Hamburger's version lends to the <em>un</em>changing prefixes. (I would bet the German emphasizes the past tense of these verbs more as well, but I feel on even shakier ground there.)
<p>
These are, then, of course, as we all know already, different poems. The one in English strikes me as very fine, though (and as) it largely escapes me; I can't speak for the one in German.Ethan Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11207042480666924085noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8524497770619950288.post-83966281740937705652016-03-24T10:46:00.000-04:002016-03-24T10:46:35.819-04:00precisely in the way it manages such rivalryAs I write this I've just started reading Claudia Rankine's very popular <em>Citizen: An American Lyric</em>, a few days after re-reading her <em>Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric</em>, powerful poetry about death and its effects on life, that earlier one. I'm on page 9 of <em>Citizen: An American Lyric</em> (though by the time I post this, if I post this, I will have read to the end), and already I love it (if that's a word for it), already I've typed up two passages to hold on to, already I feel like I'm starting to get a sense of what it's doing (among other things, treating the mental correlation that causes "you" to understand that these things (mainly white) people say and do <em>are</em> instances of everyday casual racism — that they are A Type Of Thing — that they are directly connected to both the grinding and the more spectacular and devastating violences of white supremacist racism — treating this correlation as being in itself poetic), already I'm thinking about passages like
<blockquote>
An unsettled feeling keeps the body front and center. The wrong words enter your day like a bad egg in your mouth and puke runs down your blouse, a dampness drawing your stomach in toward your rib cage. When you look around only you remain. Your own disgust at what you smell, what you feel, doesn't bring you to your feet, not right away, because gathering energy has become its own task, needing its own argument. You are reminded of a conversation you had recently, comparing the merits of sentences constructed implicitly with "yes, and" rather than "yes, but." You and your friend decided that "yes, and" attested to a life with no turn-off, no alternative routes: you pull yourself to standing, soon enough the blouse is rinsed, it's another week, the blouse is beneath your sweater, against your skin, and you smell good.
</blockquote>
(where just a page or two earlier "you smell good" was part of a recollection (narration?) from childhood of something casually racist a schoolmate had said) and
<blockquote>
The rain this morning pours from the gutters and everywhere else it is lost in trees. You need your glasses to single out what you know is there because doubt is inexorable; you put on your glasses. The trees, their bark, their leaves, even the dead ones, are more vibrant wet. Yes, and it's raining. Each moment is like this -- before it can be known, categorized as similar to another thing and dismissed, it has to be seen. What did he just say? Did she really just say that? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth? The moment stinks. Still you want to stop looking at the trees. You want to walk out and stand among them. And as light as the rain seems, it still rains down on you.
</blockquote>
which take up two adjacent pages, in part via this note Anne Carson appends to her translation of Sappho's fragment 96, which I conveniently happen to have read and typed up yesterday:
<blockquote>
"rosyfingered": an adjective used habitually by Homer to designate the red look of Dawn. I think Sappho means to be startling, but I don't know <em>how</em> startling, when she moves the epithet to a nocturnal sky. Also startling is the fecundity of sea, field and memory which appears to flow from this uncanny moon and fill the nightworld of the poem -- swung from a thread of "as sometimes" in verse 7. Homer too liked to extend a simile this way, creating a parallel surface of such tangibility it rivals the main story for a minute. Homer is more concerned than Sappho to keep the borders of the two surfaces intact; epic arguably differs from lyric precisely in the way it manages such rivalry.
</blockquote>
which is not any kind of analysis (and certainly the remaining pages may make a fool of me), just a record of these early thoughts and this coincidence, the type of thing that maybe doesn't get recorded very often.Ethan Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11207042480666924085noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8524497770619950288.post-62608269810448935492016-03-03T10:45:00.000-05:002016-03-07T16:53:05.031-05:00One Way Out<p>Two hours on the bus took Hodos to work, where as usual he would remain for ten hours, nine and three-quarters of them paid. He depressed many keys that day, an untallied number but one no doubt approximately equaling that of any other day. We cannot know what was in his thoughts, but let us speculate: that he was aware, with that awareness which had been acute when he had first started the job but had dimmed progressively with each day he worked, that every key he depressed affected in some small way the movement of objects scattered throughout the world, throughout the solar system, and in some rare cases even elsewhere, further still. During his training, as he learned about the relevance of the speed of light to the keys he must depress, he had tried to engage his supervisor in a kind of low-level philosophical talk about other implications of that universal constant, but the supervisor had been uninterested or uncomprehending — at any rate had not responded in kind. Before long, it appears, Hodos himself grew similarly uninterested. Certain types of substances moved away from the Earth; certain others moved toward the Earth; both types, and others, moved between other locations without reference to the Earth, with the financially significant exception that their movement was governed, to some extent, by the Earth-bound keys Hodos and his coworkers depressed. Perhaps he wondered, less and less each day, what would happen if he refused to depress the keys, or even just one of them. But surely he knew even from the beginning that it would make little difference except, perhaps, to him, and this only negatively, as most likely he would simply be fired and replaced. We feel that we can report these thoughts with some degree of certainty, as there is nothing at all out of the ordinary about them. We must however recall that this report is sure to be incomplete, not least because of the change in his behavior that would be seen the following day, after the preparations of this evening. We begin with this day and not the evening, during which the first out-of-the-ordinary actions took place, in order to establish, however quickly and roughly, the norm from which the subsequent action departs. </p>
<p>Though there are many things we may feel are lacking in our lives, chief among the things we truly lack is necessity. The various having-tos with which we are meant to be satisfied in its place are, of course, simply not the same thing. Hodos took his lunch break and ate. After lunch he resumed depressing keys until it was time to leave; he then caught the bus. His lover was not to be at home that night or for the next several. We feel there is nothing to suggest that this had any psychological impact on what was to follow, and put forward instead the hypothesis that the forthcoming actions' coinciding with the temporary absence is nothing more than a matter of opportunity; after all it is easier to lay the ground for one's own death in solitude than in company, if at any rate that death is self-selected. On the way home Hodos got off the bus at a different stop than usual, as one result of which the bus missed a momentary clearing in the traffic. All the other passengers would have to wait; whether they were resigned to the fact was something only each one of them, individually, could know. Hodos, for his part, took advantage of the vehicles' paralysis to run across the street to his goal, a BigBox. Sliding doors open at mere presence, independent and certainly unaware of intention to enter, but it is their opening that makes entrance possible. After pacing the aisles for half an hour in what a perspicacious eyewitness might have described as a frustrated agitation caused perhaps by an inability to find what he was looking for mingled with an unwillingness or indeed an inability to ask for assistance, Hodos located and purchased two items that under ordinary circumstances would have been, considering his income, unimaginable extravagances. We shall see later on that an unusual freedom from the restraint imposed by limited resources will recur: a characteristic aspect of Hodos's final actions. On leaving the store he removed one of his purchases, an automatic, from its package and strapped the other, a robot still in its package, to it. This accomplished, he stepped into the automatic and programmed it with his home address; and as it must it lifted and carried him through the streets, weaving between the cars when possible, stopping and waiting when not. In summer the last of the day's sunlight is never so harsh and intrusive as it is in winter. Hodos did not exit the automatic until it stopped just outside of his home, whereupon he stepped out of it, opened the front door to the house, and allowed the automatic to float inside ahead of him. Inside, he unstrapped the robot, removed it from its packaging, and began depressing the keys that would accomplish the elaborate reprogramming required. He did not at any point consult the manual, which suggests that his preparations began some time before we have been able to establish: for there is nothing known in his history that would account for an expertise in unorthodox robot programming. No doubt some of the keys he had depressed during previous work days had called relevant information onto his screen, but the records of this, if they exist, have not been made available to us. All told the task took many hours, most of this time spent running simulations: it had, of course, to be right; and far into the night, finally it was. He had consequently little time for sleep. He ate a small breakfast and wrote a long note which we of course have not read — for some things should remain private; and he allowed the automatic to carry him back to work, the robot left behind, plugged in, charging. During the paid hours of his last day at work he depressed many keys, keys that, this time, mattered. His awareness, which would normally have been diffuse, of the consequences of these keys' depression, today was surely focused. One presumes that he found himself thinking of time, and of work. Though he might never have articulated it, perhaps his attitude toward the work day had always been that it may be a lot of time, but that it is only time — that all time passes and all things, even the work day, end. That, although the well-known phenomena associated with subjective experience might have caused the time at work to seem always to pass more slowly than time spent, for example, in solitude, or with his lover inside of him, nevertheless the time at work was less real, mattered less. This less-real time, however, would seem also more obviously spatial, physical; we propose that he felt himself always to be stepping through it, or perhaps up it, not climbing exactly, and not struggling precisely, but ascending as though on a flight of stairs, the resistance of gravity an unremarked obstacle, tiring but ordinary. Though little of this would have risen to the level of consciousness, at some points during that day he may have become aware that the passage of time felt no different than it did on any other day; if so, he must have wondered why this was. From time to time someone he worked with made a comment; he smiled or nodded or made a comment in return as appropriate. He ate on his lunch break and depressed more keys afterwards, keys determined now not by the needs of the company or the whim of his supervisor but by his own needs. These keys, when depressed in these particular combinations, communicated with relays in far-off places, places far-off enough that the communications, though composed of a frequency of light and traveling therefore at light's usual speed, nevertheless took humanly significant amounts of time to reach them, a result also of the multiple relays through which he had sent them bouncing. And though the messages never stopped moving at their enormous velocity we can without too much inaccuracy picture them as frozen, or trapped, awaiting the preordained moment at which they would be released to do their work. His preparations complete shortly before the ten hours were up, Hodos passed the remainder depressing keys that would from his employer's perspective seem more appropriate; then, at the usual time, he left. </p>
<p>The automatic, obeying the exigencies of its programming, flew, Hodos inside, only one moment of decision remaining to him, the rest belonging to languages more determinant than Sapir or Whorf ever dreamed and after that to nothing but natural law. The windows of automatics are set to opacity by default, and this Hodos never changed, though whether this was according to preference or indifference we cannot know. We do propose that he felt neither fear nor (conversely) happiness as he made the last of his decisions and opened the door to his house. In the end he had not trusted himself to do it and so the robot, following its programming, killed him as he stepped inside. We need not divert ourselves with macabre description of methods. It will suffice for our purposes to say that, once it confirmed that Hodos was indeed dead beyond the reach of any hypothetical medical attention, the robot lifted the body, the weight of which was well within its tolerances, and placed it back inside the automatic. The robot then climbed inside as well and depressed a number of keys, in response to which the automatic lifted and began to fly, maneuvering down the roads connecting the house with the main road, at which it stopped and waited for traffic to pass. The wait was not too long, as by now a fair amount of time had passed (how much we need not divert ourselves calculating) and the worst of the traffic had subsided. Individual trees exhibit a remarkable ability to grow seemingly healthy in the inclement environment provided by mere breaks in the pavement of cities, though no doubt the epoch in which such apparent health is possible is coming swiftly to an end. The automatic, true to its name, needed no further guidance, and the robot entered sleep mode, awaiting the moment when the irrevocable instructions it carried within would goad it back into wakefulness. By plotting its course against a zoning map we can determine that the automatic passed by buildings intended for both commercial and residential purposes, including many which had been constructed for the one purpose and later converted to the other. The motion described in the present paragraph continued for several hours, during which time the frequency with which the automatic encountered other vehicles decreased markedly. When the buildings grew sparse enough that the automatic's algorithms determined that to leave the road and approach its destination in a straight line, with some deviations, would not be inappropriate and would indeed be preferable in terms of the efficient uses of time and energy (the latter of which, though it had not any longer concerned Hodos, was a default consideration in the automatic's programming which he had had no reason to alter), the automatic left the road and flew its cargo through the abandoned wreck of the countryside, heading toward an airport serving not the city in which Hodos had lived and worked, but rather a different, neighboring city. </p>
<p>By now the light from the origin city had dimmed enough, and that of the destination city had not yet increased enough, that the sun's reflected light began to filter down from space to such an extent that the moon could have been observed by any system possessing both a visual apparatus roughly equivalent to the human average and an interest in making such observations. Were such a system present (and we cannot be certain that one was not, though neither the body, nor the robot, nor the automatic, were one such at that time, and while once animals capable of observing the moon had lived in that area, it is fruitless to speculate what they might have thought of it, for by this time they had all been dead many long years), it would have detected what Hodos, for example, would no doubt have called a full moon. Had the robot been active and recording impressions, it would have been more precise: for there exists, overlaid over the older everyday meaning of the phrase, an exact, scientific sense in which the moon is full only for that fraction of a second during which its waxing has completely ceased and its waning has yet to begin (indeed some would insist, with perhaps even greater exactitude, that one should not speak of the moon's phases at all, the concept being an essentially meaningless byproduct of the limited viewpoint from which humanity has historically observed the moon). There are many such relatively recent scientific senses of older, traditionally less precisely deployed words and phrases, and the overlaying of these meanings, sometimes to the point of their total replacement, is ever an ongoing process — one of many by which languages change over time. In such fashion did the "foot," once a rough but usually sufficient unit of measure varying from person to person, come to coexist and eventually be superseded by the "foot," whose dogmatic definition of "just this long and never any longer or shorter" was enforced by systematic structures to which adherence was not elective; that more recent invention, the meter, is generally thought of as meaning "the length of a meter stick" though a specialist will insist that its more accurate and therefore truer meaning is the distance that light travels in a vacuum in one 299,792,458th of a second, and though we may scoff at the apparent arbitrariness of this figure surely we have no right to do so at the authority of the specialist. The opposite trajectory, from more to less precise, also occurs, as exemplified by the many meanings of the word "aspiration," trace evidences of a time in which the metaphorical association of breathing with hoping was clearer — and consequently less metaphorical — to the ordinary user of language than it is to us today, an association which in turn once brought explicitly to light the connections, now all but inaccessible to us, between breath, life, the present moment, and that elusive conceptual construct called "the future." Research suggests that, although at that moment the moon would have been visible had anyone capable been looking for it, the stars by and large would not, which was of course a normative situation. Hodos, in fact, never saw the stars during his life. Once, long ago, the stars were the only objects seen regularly which exhibited repetitive circular motion, the cyclical paths they drew across the sky contrasting markedly with, for example, the generally linear, haphazard, and/or pumping movements of animal life. In the span of human existence this has changed drastically, first with the celebrated invention of the wheel, whose first spinnings must have wreaked inconceivable changes upon the minds of its earliest witnesses, who would surely have connected this motion with the slower and more inexorable spinning of the heavens above them; then much later with the aforementioned light pollution, which ultimately severed the experiential link between the two rotations. It was only after the inability regularly to see the stars became a quotidian, if not yet all-pervasive, aspect of human life that humanity began to launch objects, and sometimes itself, into space, in which all motion is parabolic or elliptical — conic sections aspiring to the cyclical. From this the notion suggests itself that the source of humanity's relatively new urge to travel to the stars may be not, as is often assumed, the merely practical fact of the technological ability to do so, but rather this severing of the visual link connecting humans to the experience of this sort of motion, and perhaps too the absence of the simple daily fact of the stars themselves. Such speculation, however, is irresponsible. The automatic that Hodos had purchased when still living obeyed his programming and conveyed his body, already beginning to be overtaken by the fungal and bacterial populations which once had lived mostly in harmony with those cells we are more comfortable thinking of as his, through the night air. Of this much we can be certain. The automatic encountered no other mechanical devices and no living creatures during this part of its voyage. This is not surprising; indeed, as it was traveling through that region still referred to as "the countryside," though the associations called up by the term have changed radically in recent decades, it would have been more surprising had the automatic encountered any activity whatsoever. To attempt to draw some picture-in-words of the silent progress of the automatic through the moon-lit ruin that had once been an ecosystem, a way of life for countless members of countless species, is tempting; but such would be pathos. The reader who so desires is welcome to it, but we, on whom the facts press, shall note only that what had been Hodos, though we are accustomed to think of it as dead flesh, was itself more thriving an ecosystem than the dead countryside through which it was carried. To conceive this as irony is to remain locked to the anthropocentric perspective; to avoid such conceptions, we shall carry on. The conveyance flew on; and though we too must carry on there is scarcely a thing to do now that is not some form of looking away. Were Hodos still alive, we could perhaps occupy ourselves with reconstructions of his thoughts and feelings; but he was not alive; even had we had some fantastical access to his consciousness when he was alive, he was no longer, and so if we are to busy ourselves with anyone's thoughts, they can only be our own. But we have had too much of them already. We ourselves are not experiencing this flight; as such we have the luxury to say "several hours later..." should we give in to such temptation. Feeling, however, that this is an irresponsible distortion, we have tried thus far to stay with the automatic through the duration of its flight. Such a thing is of course impossible, as evidenced by our many divergences into equally irresponsible speculation and pontification: these, too, a looking away. There is no way for anyone who was not there, ourselves included and consequently our readers as well, to know truly what this journey was. Indeed even for someone who was there — had anyone been there — such direct knowledge would only be available at the moment itself, and even then only in limited form. At any experiential spacetime coordinate off of the journey itself, knowledge of the journey is indirect at best. And who can say, too, what experience, what knowledge is, to an automatic? </p>
<p>The automatic, with its cargo of robot and body, flew on through a land in which nothing of any consequence could live. Struggling enclaves of plant life began to crop up, one here, one there, painstakingly maintained, through robotic intervention, by scientists whose methods, it is safe to say, will have only temporary success. The automatic came upon a road, the use of which its algorithms judged desirable. The road soon became a canyon passing between buildings: first shallow and spaced out, then taller and closer, then taller still: the automatic had entered the next city. Other vehicles began to be present on the roadways. The buildings, like those in the previous city, crowded in so close that there was no horizon to speak of; it would therefore be inappropriate to refer to sunrise, but the ambient light, scattered by molecule after molecule, began to increase and change in quality in ways not attributable solely to the artificial lighting of the city (more than capable of drowning out any other star, but not our own). It was still too early for the first major rush hour and so the other vehicles, though numerous, were at first only minor obstacles in the automatic's course; equally it was only a minor obstacle in the other vehicles' various courses, which we have not had occasion to research. The average height of the buildings peaked, plateaued, and began to decline again, as the airport, like most such, was located not in the heart of the city but some distance outside of it. In the course of a single sentence, perhaps, the automatic traversed this distance. It approached one of the commercial gates to the airport, presented its credentials to the sensor, and, once the latter raised the barrier, entered the airport grounds. It took its place at the rear — soon to become the middle — of a queue of various automatic conveyances awaiting a spot on the next ascending car. The robot within, in accordance with its programming, resumed functioning. The line, being wholly automated, moved at a rate describable for our purposes as quick, and soon the automatic arrived at the elevator door. The robot took the body into its grasp. The doors to the automatic and to the elevator both opened and the robot exited the former, traversed the distance between, and entered the latter. The now-cargoless automatic departed, to be found somewhere else entirely, much later, quite by accident. </p>
<p>Meanwhile the elevator car began its long ascent, and here we really must apologize, for at this point both the time and the space traversed by our narrative begin to expand exponentially, to a degree which we simply cannot recreate in the form of our story. The problem, as we shall see, will quickly become wholly insurmountable. The time spanned by the just over thirty-five hundred words which precede those which, we presume, you are now reading, is approximately fifty hours; the space, perhaps five hundred kilometers. The elevator car in which the robot and the body now rose would continue rising, first in a greatly inclined manner taking it also roughly southward and then, when the tributary cable joined the so-called Quito Ascender (more accurately the ascender operated under the jurisdiction of the Quito Elevator Authority), very nearly straight up, for over a hundred times that distance before reaching its apex; the time, too, must be scaled upward in similar proportion. But as you will notice if you skip to the end of this narrative (as perhaps you have already), much less remains than has passed. Would the story be told, there seems no way around this distortion; by calling the reader's attention to it, we hope in some small way to correct for the fault. And indeed in this paragraph we have already given most of the significant events of this portion of the journey: the robot was once more deactivated; the body continued to decay, though slowly (for the elevator car, as Hodos had planned when alive, was refrigerated); and meanwhile up and over landmass, water, landmass, water they rose until, some perhaps ten days later, they paused momentarily high above Ecuador Territory, the elevator car awaiting its turn to attach itself to the cable tethered to Chimborazo's flattened peak so as to continue the ascent to the artificial satellite in geostationary orbit, nearly 37,000 kilometers above the mountaintop. An opening in the ascent schedules allowed the car to hook itself onto the ascender and, detaching itself from the tributary, it began the final, much longer leg of its climb into orbit. The air around it was distinctly thinner than it had been at the beginning of the journey, and colder — altogether inhospitable to human life, which surely could not have lasted long if exposed at that elevation. This is however irrelevant, for no living human was so exposed, and the only death we shall encounter within this narrative has already occurred. In fact, our even mentioning the possibility is a clear symptom of the sickness diagnosed earlier in this paragraph. For what remains to say of this portion of the journey? The car ascended. The body's decay, though greatly arrested and not effecting during this period any changes detectable by any but the most sensitive of instruments, continued nevertheless. The robot remained deactivated. Time and space passed, the former lending some of its irrevocability to the latter. Eventually (a word indicating not, as its construction might suggest and as it in fact did at an earlier point in its history, an action occurring in the manner of an event — a redundant, yet somehow curiously suggestive notion — but rather a failure, on the part of whoever may have resort to it, to face the reality of time as it passes) the car reached its destination: the anchor satellite, referred to by the serial number 983AEQ 55197-39. The car hooked itself to this 983AEQ 55197-39 and unhooked itself from the cable, then stowed itself in one of the satellite's bays, awaiting processing. Almost a day passed. The Earth indulged in nearly a full rotation on its axis; people lived and died; species continued along their paths to extinction; and the body, decay still slowed, and the robot, still deactivated, awaited, with neither patience nor impatience, their turn. Many sentences would have to fill this space, were we to be faithful to the event.</p>
<p>But we are very close now; and perhaps we are right after all to leave behind us the strictures of time as humans merely experience it — for what is human time to a celestial body? And so we shall attempt to convey in one final paragraph what happened to the matter that had been Hodos, and what, we suggest, Hodos himself had been up to in ensuring that it would in fact happen to him although — in some senses precisely because — he was no longer he. Divergences now are a luxury we cannot afford; and time: time has slipped, finally, out of our control. The vessel Hodos's final labors had conjured forth arrived and parked itself within the satellite, in the same bay in which the car awaited it; and the robot, as programmed, awoke. It took the body into its manipulators, approached the doors of the car, and opened them, revealing the vessel simultaneously opening its own doors. The moment the robot was fully out of the car the latter withdrew from the bay and joined a swiftly-moving queue with other cars waiting to be filled with various cargoes and begin the descent back to Earth; though what cargo and destination this particular car took on, we may never know, as record-keeping in this decadent age is unreliable at best. The robot conveyed the body to the vessel, a small one with just enough room for one human-sized body and a great deal of compressed fuel, then withdrew and deposited itself in one of 983AEQ 55197-39's waste-processing facilities, from which only a small portion of its data log would, some time later, be retrieved. In the meantime, the vessel positioned itself on one of the pads on the exterior of the satellite. What is still sometimes called the "vacuum" of space, we now know, is a frothing effervescence of subatomic particles continually passing from potentiality to actuality and back again. When the time came, the vessel released its docking clamps, fired maneuvering thrusters until it was far enough from the satellite to engage its primary engine, and then, at precisely the moment Hodos had calculated, added its full burn to the momentum its orbit around the Earth already imparted. The course and speed of most interplanetary voyages is plotted according to a complex cost/benefit analysis factoring in the locations and movements of the various bodies in the solar system, the cost of fuel, and the cost of time, among other considerations; but as we have already noted, the uniquely final nature of Hodos's journey allowed him to escape many of these merely practical concerns; and he had planned things so that this early, vulgar stage of the journey would be over as quickly as possible; in a word, he had ordained that the vessel burn all its considerable fuel resources immediately, at the highest possible rate, propelling itself and its cargo at what would not have interested him to learn was a record-breaking rate of acceleration. The vessel escaped the Earth's gravity well and continued adding energy to its own orbit so as to break from the path the Earth traces around the sun and enter into a new parabolic course. By the time it exhausted its fuel it was irrevocably set upon a new trajectory; and here we have reached what we believe to have been Hodos's goal. The vessel crossed the orbit of Mars, which was at that moment quite elsewhere; it passed through the asteroid belt, coming near no object of consequence. By now, what had been Hodos was under the sway of no influence other than that of gravity. In its vessel, it traveled in an unfathomably long curve across the orbit of Jupiter, which planet was in fact rather nearby, close enough that the curve along which the vessel traveled bent considerably, as had been Hodos's plan. The eternal storm bands slid across the visible surface of that vast globe, engaged in no one knows what business; there is no reason to suspect that whatever lives under the icy crust of its startlingly hospitable moon Europa was in any sense aware of the vessel's passage, or, if these inhabitants are capable of such observation, that they regarded it with any particular feeling. We have, with the assistance of several experts, projected the course the vessel will be traversing; barring any unforeseen encounter with some object not on our charts — which, extensive as they may be, can never be complete — it appears that Jupiter and its moons were the last objects it will come close to in any foreseeable amount of time or distance. And though the body that had been Hodos and the vessel that carries it are still, these years later, quite firmly within our solar system — the experts assure us that they have not yet crossed the orbit of Saturn, which planet they will miss by a large margin — it is nevertheless appropriate to call it an interstellar object, one subject no longer to the everyday requirements of life, business, personal whim, but only to the higher order of gravity and the pure necessity it enforces. For as the vessel travels through the universe, it will do so not in some Earthly straight line, nor in some distracted zig-zagging from point to point, but rather in a great parabola, most noble of figures, wending its way according to the dictates only of that force which has given structure to the universe itself, bending here under the influence of a distant star, there under that of some globular cluster, elsewhere, far later still, should it make it so far (and we believe that it will), perhaps answering, in its magisterial way, only to the call of distant galaxies. Considered thus, we find, contrary to prevailing opinion, that there is no mystery to Hodos's final actions; and we feel that even now, were he still able to regret, he surely would regret only that in order truly to submit to the call of necessity, to eliminate the arbitrary, his death was required so soon; that were he still able, he would regret only that he could not have delayed the time of this death even just a little, that he could not have allowed himself to experience this wonder, if only for an hour, a day, a month, a year!</p>
<p><em>—North Providence <br />
December 2013 - March 2014</em>Ethan Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11207042480666924085noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8524497770619950288.post-8774264250076640072016-02-23T18:06:00.000-05:002016-02-23T22:09:26.872-05:00a year of reading short science fictionSo, I spent 2015 reading all of the short science fiction. Well, "reading all" — I looked at all the stories published in all of the free magazines I was aware of (though I ended up cutting some magazines when it became apparent that there was <em>no chance</em> of anything decent appearing in them, and I didn't look at, e.g., <em>Beneath Ceaseless Skies</em> or <em>Nightmare</em> because it's <em>extremely</em> rare for the things categorized as "fantasy" and "horror" to be of any interest to me), as well as in the subscription-only magazines I subscribed to (<em>Interzone</em> for most of the year, <em>F&SF</em> for some of it, <em>Asimov's</em> for all of it [except that for some reason I never got the December issue, which I'm sure was no great loss]). I didn't actually finish reading the vast majority of them; indeed, I ended up writing about almost every story I managed to get to the end of, because my goal was to write at least <em>something</em> about every story I liked <em>even a little bit</em>.
<p>
Why did I do this? God only knows. Because of some sickness I care about science fiction, though the state of the contemporary field works very hard at finding a cure.
<p>
What did I find? The field is garbage, almost exclusively. It is also enormous, exhausting, pointless. With some extremely rare exceptions, every word, every paragraph break, every thought, is routine and formulaic. With some extremely rare exceptions, there are no politics other than liberalism and fascism — to the extent that the two can be distinguished. With some extremely rare exceptions, what is unique to science fiction is wholly absent, and what is potentially good about other literatures is as well. With some extremely rare exceptions, the field is white, white, white, white, white; black writers, specifically, are almost wholly absent — and with some extremely rare exceptions, no one non-black seems to notice or care.
<p>
I was just on twitter for a regrettable half-second, and — despite my aggressive pruning of my TL to keep it relatively free of sf nonsense — even in that brief time I saw reactions to the recently-released, <em>entirely</em> uninspiring Nebula nominations that suggested it was fundamentally illegitimate to react to the list with a "meh" (admittedly the utterer of the specific "meh" in question was someone already much-loathed, for intermittently reasonable reasons), and that it is — I quote — "weird" to object to <em>bad literature</em> being nominated for a <em>literary award</em> if the writer of the bad literature is from a marginalized population. OK. (Meanwhile the liberals will swear up and down that the "puppies" — because when fascists give <em>themselves</em> a diminishing name, good liberals go along with it — are wrong when they say the liberals only care about identity, not quality. A field in which the literal actual for real fascists are even slightly closer to honest and correct than the closest thing to a "left" alternative is not a healthy field.)
<p>
When I started this project, I think I had the vague thought that maybe by highlighting <em>every</em> story I thought had anything decent going on in it, and explaining what I found that decency to be and why while also saying what reservations I had, that maybe people would start to think about what this writing is and does, and what it <em>could</em> be and do. (The liberals, for some reason I haven't been able to figure out, love to call the field — and whatever else they feel like annexing and sticking their imperial flag into — by Heinlein's preferred and frankly terrible term, "speculative fiction", but beyond their ineffectual and damagingly-formulated calls for "diversity" they seem entirely unwilling to speculate on what the field could be other than what it already is.) Whether this thought would be along my own suggested lines or not, I hoped to be able to at least contribute something. Turns out, though, that (with, again, some extremely rare exceptions) there is no interest in thought, only a "praise/attack" binary (and that belovedly meaningless middle ground, "I don't agree with everything but it's interesting," with no follow-on discussion). (Of course, anyone who <em>did</em> start to write with some thought would then have to somehow sneak that work by the horrible <em>editors</em> in this godforsaken wasteland...)
<p>
So for the most part, I regret spending a year of my damn life doing this. Yes, I read some things I'm glad to have read, and a few things that will stick with me as important, but looking over what I wrote about....well, many of them are merely "ok" against a background of terrible; many, I regret calling even some little attention to.
<p>
But anyway. <a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com/search/label/new%20short%20fiction">Here's the tag</a>; as far as I know everything in it between the January/February recommendations post and the post about M. Téllez's (legitimately excellent and not-coincidentally self-published) "About a Kid and a Woman" was originally published in 2015, with two exceptions: Sofia Samatar's "<a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com/2015/04/short-fiction-recommendations-march.html#sofiasamatar">A Brief History of Non-Duality Studies</a>", originally published a few years back in <em>Expanded Horizons</em>, and Ras Mashramani's "<a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com/2015/09/a-young-thug-confronts-his-own-future.html">A Young Thug Confronts His Own Future</a>", originally published in a Metropolarity zine in, I think, 2014. If you care about the Hugo Awards and haven't submitted your ballot (or whatever it's called) yet, consider that tag (with those exceptions) my recommendations post. (It's a shame about the exceptions, because those two stories are easily among the handful of actually-important stories I read all year.) And if I may be forgiven some link-lists, both in alphabetical order by writer's name:
<p>
My favorite stories of 2015, with links to my posts:
<ul>
<li>Jennifer Marie Brissett, "<a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com/2015/06/short-fiction-recommendations-may-2015.html#jennifermariebrissett">A Song for You</a>"
<li>L. Chan, "<a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com/2015/09/in-garden-with-little-eaters-by-l-chan.html">In the Garden with the Little Eaters</a>"
<li>Vajra Chandrasekera, "<a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com/2015/08/stick-pin-in-me-by-vajra-chandrasekera.html">Stick a Pin in Me</a>"
<li>Robin Wyatt Dunn, "<a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com/2015/08/dreamboat-by-robin-wyatt-dunn.html">Dreamboat</a>"
<li>Peter Milne Greiner, "<a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com/2015/08/tropical-premises-by-peter-milne-greiner.html">Tropical Premises</a>"
<li>Sierra July, "<a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com/2015/08/reverse-logic-by-sierra-july.html">Reverse Logic</a>"
<li>Sofia Samatar, "<a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-closest-thing-to-animals-by-sofia.html">The Closest Thing to Animals</a>"
<li>Kate Schapira, <a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com/2015/05/short-fiction-recommendations-april-2015.html#kateschapira">Alternate Histories</a> (all of them)
<li>William Squirrell, "<a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com/2015/05/short-fiction-recommendations-april-2015.html#williamsquirrell">Götterdämmerung</a>"
<li>Benjanun Sriduangkaew, "<a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com/2015/05/short-fiction-recommendations-april-2015.html#benjanunsriduangkaew">The Petals Abide</a>"
<li>M. Téllez (bka Eighteen), "<a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com/2016/02/about-kid-and-woman-by-m-tellez-bka.html">About a Kid and a Woman</a>"
</ul>
<p>
And my favorite of my posts about the stories (excluding the ones linked above):
<ul>
<li><a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com/2015/06/short-fiction-recommendations-may-2015.html#cyncbermudez">on Cyn C. Bermudez's "Dancing in the Right of Way"</a>
<li><a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-glad-hosts-by-rebecca-campbell.html">on Rebecca Campbell's "The Glad Hosts"</a>
<li><a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com/2015/08/oneness-triptych-by-james-patrick-kelly.html">on James Patrick Kelly's "Oneness: A Triptych</a>"
<li><a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com/2015/09/johnny-rev-by-rachel-pollack.html">on Rachel Pollack's "Johnny Rev"</a>
<li><a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-city-of-your-soul-by-robert-reed.html">on Robert Reed's "The City of Your Soul"</a>
<li><a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com/2015/09/tender-by-sofia-samatar.html">on Sofia Samatar's "Tender"</a>
<li><a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com/2015/07/short-fiction-recommendations-june-2015.html#priyasarukkaichabria">on Priya Sarukkai Chabria's "dance? he asked"</a>
</ul>
Ethan Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11207042480666924085noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8524497770619950288.post-63203015550731661682016-02-15T10:54:00.000-05:002016-02-15T15:54:43.431-05:00"About a Kid and a Woman" by M. Téllez (bka Eighteen)There are any number of particularities I could, even desperately want to, discuss. The ongoing tension and balance between so-called "standard" and "non-standard" Englishes (Chrome wants to tell me that "Englishes" is not a word), not simply reveling in alternate ways to say the same thing but insisting on the fact that these different ways <em>say different things</em>, an unstated insistence that <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KO_3Qgib6RQ">how they do it where they from</a> <em>matters</em>. The portrayal of people who have been changed by the coming and sort-of going of civilization: these people aren't just living in the woods, they're living in woods that very recently were a city; their home is not only a home but bears living resonances and traces of what it used to be, a church; and their lives cannot be a "return to nature" any more than, as Stanisław Lem points out, a robot's could be ("Why, it would mean turning into deposits of iron ore!" Lem writes, in one of his criticism's very rare good moments). The emotional honesty of the love story, and its intricate interweaving with the situation the characters are in, culminating in that astonishing final paragraph. Much more.
<p>
But though this all plays in to the wonder that is this story, to talk about it all in the ways I as yet know how to risks too much suggesting that what is to be praised is the writer's mastery over their material, their artful arrangement of the elements into an attractively moving whole. And although the mastery on display is considerable, what really amazes me here is not mastery-over but vulnerability-to: much like its narrator every element in this story is in <A href="http://www.cyborgmemoirs.com/left/2015/11/about-a-kid-and-a-woman/">a precarious state</a>, close to collapse or self-contradiction or suppression in the face of hegemonic certainties, always in danger of becoming disastrously unbalanced, always under threats both internal and external, intellectual and physical. But it does what it must: it remains aware, it balances, it finds strength — eventually — not in aggression and certainty but in openness (albeit an openness that knows it cannot be open to everything, that some things must be rejected, that it will often be difficult to figure out which things these are). And when it collapses — and collapse it does, collapse it must — it does so with a trust that does not cancel but coexists with, or incorporates, mistrust.
<p>
As must be apparent, I am not equal to the task of describing what it does: which is to be profoundly political while at the same time allowing itself merely <em>to be:</em> which is to be not the juxtaposition or the integration of opposites but the refusal of this kind of binary categorization in the first place, while at the same time presenting the <em>struggle</em>, the difficult and dangerous work, that this turn to a new kind of openness demands of those already damaged, already in pain, led by boundless knowledge to hopeful fear, fearful hope.Ethan Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11207042480666924085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8524497770619950288.post-16616797281536414792016-01-28T22:25:00.000-05:002016-01-28T22:39:21.565-05:00"Pillow-Talk of the Late Oneirocalypse" by Vajra Chandrasekera<a href="http://lackingtons.com/2016/01/20/pillow-talk-of-the-late-oneirocalypse-by-vajra-chandrasekera/">To begin</a> a story with "—not how it started nor how it ended," and then to go on from there, is perhaps to acknowledge that by beginning to write one begins to carve the world into pieces, the ones that will be written and the ones that will not — an acknowledgment without which writing is much more likely to work to make us forget that such carving has taken place. The last Chandrasekera story I <a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com/2015/08/stick-pin-in-me-by-vajra-chandrasekera.html">wrote about</a>, the superb "<a href="http://middle-planet.com/2015/08/05/chandrasekera">Stick a Pin in Me</a>", also concerned itself greatly with what will and will not be spoken, and who wants it that way and why; also like that other story "Pillow-Talk" takes the form of a rambling monologue — or, rather, a dialogue of which we only see one part, the interlocutor's contributions having been carved away. There is a joy to seeing a writer find a form perfectly suited to what they need to say, and watching these two remarkably different stories unfold is one such. (Which is not, of course, to say that Chandrasekera should only ever write carved-out monologues!)
<p>
A major difference here is that where the narrator of "Pin" was desperate, dying, to hold on, the narrator here is much more willing to let go of what they themself call "basal reality" — ambivalent, but willing. If the narrator is to be trusted, it is only one subjective year (it's different for everyone) after they reluctantly, or accidentally, followed most (or all?) of humanity through "the door in [their] dreams". If they are to be trusted, they feel pain at having been separated from their loved ones, from their context. If they are to be trusted, they are just as disoriented by the rapidly receding memory of a basal reality "which is actually quite an unfashionable thing to believe in now" as anyone else is. (I think, perhaps, we should trust them every bit as much as we should not; every word they say contradicts another, but all, somehow, are true to the same degree. This might mean that I believe the narrator is both what they say they are and the "evolved oneiric life-form" they describe as being a hypothetical other.) But despite, or at any rate in addition to, or <em>maybe</em> instead of, this inexperience, pain, and disorientation, they have reached an accommodation with mortdieu, the death of the "gods of order"; with an Earth that "moves so easily now, people are always breaking worlds in their enthusiasm"; with a self even less stable than our theoretically waking selves. It may be the only kind of accommodation possible — or, and, or, to make it seem so may be nothing more than brutal self-justification. Ethan Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11207042480666924085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8524497770619950288.post-25153980971322512132016-01-23T17:16:00.000-05:002016-01-23T17:16:13.180-05:00"I Am Winter" by Robin Wyatt DunnI don't know if they have this effect on everyone, but I have a great deal of difficulty resolving Dunn's stories into a sense of what-happened, of who-did-what-why. I don't say this to complain; some of the writing that's mattered most to me — <em>And Chaos Died</em>, say, or <em>The Passion Artist</em> — presents me with similar difficulty. Which is not to say that I think Dunn is on the level of a Russ or a Hawkes, but it might be to say that I only think he's not <em>yet</em>. I very much hope to see him keep writing.
<p>
In <a href="http://lackingtons.com/2016/01/20/i-am-winter-by-robin-wyatt-dunn/">this particular story</a> my difficulty has a great deal to do with the reticence of the narrator, who is perfectly willing to share intimate details of his life if they cross his fictional mind but who stays almost wholly silent about his reasons, or justifications, for the decisions he makes during the story. The same goes, in fact, on what I'd call a metatextual level if the word weren't so laden with obnoxious usage, for Dunn: take for example the narrator's self-chosen name, which is Zarathustra ("but you can call me Zee; if you will call me anything") — signaling, no doubt, any number of references that go over my head (I haven't read Nietzsche, though, unlike many grown adults on "the left" [or whatever], I'd like to) — "but it is only a word I picked out of an old book, because I liked the sound." Especially in combination with the earlier reference to "what little reading I've done" (you've only done a little reading and one of the books you read was <em>Thus Spake Zarathustra?</em>) I'm choosing to interpret this as a joke of sorts, though whether on Zee's part or only on Dunn's I can't say.
<p>
In the absence of explanation even antecedents become difficult to trace ("I remember the last time I tried this," Zee says, and I'm not <em>completely</em> sure what "this" is, even though I am witness to what he is doing). The clarity and simple motivations that a typically plot-based reading would ask us to look for — primarily: when, how, why, and to what extent do Zee's intentions toward the young thief he's hunting change (for that matter, what were they to begin with, <em>exactly</em>) — aren't here, to my reading (in writing this I keep having the nervous feeling that maybe the story is completely obvious and I'm just being dense), and in their absence the reader is free, not to come up with their own (though there is evidence that could be mustered, and I do have my own favored ideas) but to recognize that the whole literary construct of "motivation" is just that, a construct, seldom bearing much relation to the lives we live.
<p>
And it all takes place against a half-glimpsed context, the conquest (by unclear methods) of earth by alien "Benefactors" who have (for unclear reasons) removed the planet from its orbit, sending it on a journey (to unclear destinations, if any) during which it grows ever colder as the sun grows more distant, its atmosphere bleeding away, its population dwindling (though some "grow new 'lungs'" and make other adaptations — by what means and to whose ends is left ambiguous). The elucidation of all this could easily have been "the story" but it is not; and when the story ends, suddenly, with an almost van Vogtian shift in scale, it manages somehow to be both vertiginously irresolvable and cathartic in the least complacent sense of the term.Ethan Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11207042480666924085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8524497770619950288.post-59692619347465401362016-01-08T09:42:00.000-05:002016-01-08T09:42:09.714-05:00Books read 2015The third annual look at what I read in the past year. First a list — with links if I've written about the book, whether here, on my tumblr (if I wrote at least a little more than just "good!" or "terrible!"), or as part of the <em>Strange Horizons</em> book club — and afterward some commentary.
<p>
1. Rachel Pollack, <em>Unquenchable Fire</em> (re-read) <br />
2. Rachel Pollack, <em>Temporary Agency</em> (re-read) <br />
3. L. Timmel Duchamp, <em><a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.tumblr.com/post/107982310187/l-timmel-duchamp-alanya-to-alanya-book-one-of">Alanya to Alanya</a></em> (Marq'ssan cycle 1) <br />
4. Anne Carson, <em>Red Doc></em> <br />
5. <em>Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet</em>, issue 31 <br />
6. Clare Winger Harris, <em>Away from the Here and Now: Stories in Pseudo-Science</em> <br />
7. Helen DeWitt, <em>Lightning Rods</em> <br />
8. <em>Interzone</em> 255 (November-December 2014) <br />
9. <em>Asimov's Science Fiction</em> (February 2015) <br />
10. <em>Galaxy Science Fiction</em> (October 1950) <br />
11. Marcel Proust, <em>The Fugitive</em> (trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and D.J. Enright) <br />
12. Gertrude Stein, <em>Geography and Plays</em> <br />
13. Jennifer Marie Brissett, <em><a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.tumblr.com/post/110067209917/jennifer-marie-brissett-elysium-or-the-world">Elysium</a> Or, The World After</em> <br />
14. Stanisław Lem, <em>Microworlds</em> (ed. Franz Rottensteiner, trans. various) <br />
15. <em><a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.tumblr.com/post/110249568252/the-mammoth-book-of-sf-stories-by-women-ed-alex">The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women</a></em>, ed. Alex Dally MacFarlane <br />
16. Ellen Cushman, <em><a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.tumblr.com/post/110541574402/ellen-cushman-the-cherokee-syllabary-writing-the">The Cherokee Syllabary</a>: Writing the People's Perseverance</em> <br />
17. Valeria Luiselli, <em><a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.tumblr.com/post/110894949292/valeria-luiselli-sidewalks-trans-christina">Sidewalks</a></em> (trans. Christina MacSweeney) <br />
18. Octavia E. Butler, <em><a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.tumblr.com/post/111376488822/octavia-e-butler-patternmaster-cover-by-tim-and">Patternmaster</a></em> <br />
19. Lynn Margulis, <em>Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution</em> <br />
20. Vine Deloria, Jr., <em>Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto</em> <br />
21. Alan Garner, <em><a href="http://www.strangehorizons.com/2015/20150323/bookgarner-a.shtml">Red Shift</a></em> <br />
22. Alan Garner, <em>The Owl Service</em> <br />
23. Nisi Shawl, <em>Filter House</em> <br />
24. <em>Asimov's Science Fiction</em> (March 2015) <br />
25. <em>Interzone</em> 256 (January-February 2015) <br />
26. Marcel Proust, <em>Time Regained</em> (trans. Andreas Mayor, Terence Kilmartin, and D.J. Enright) <br />
27. Isaac Asimov, <em>Second Foundation</em> (re-read) <br />
28. Nina Allan, <em><a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.tumblr.com/post/115290536822/nina-allan-spin-cover-by-ben-baldwin-i-want-to">Spin</a></em> <br />
29. Nina Allan, <em><a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com/2015/04/beginnings-of-thoughts-on-nina-allans.html">The Race</a></em> (re-read) <br />
30. <em><a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.tumblr.com/post/116379365557/soviet-science-fiction-editor-uncredited">Soviet Science Fiction</a></em> (ed. uncredited, trans. Violet L. Dutt) <br />
31. Hilton Als, <em><a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.tumblr.com/post/116910859777/hilton-als-white-girls-its-hard-to-know-what-to">White Girls</a></em> <br />
32. Plato, <em>Parmenides</em> (trans. Benjamin Jowett) <br />
33. <em>Galaxy Science Fiction</em> (November 1950) <br />
34. Doris Vallejo, <em>The Boy Who Saved the Stars</em> (illustrated by Boris Vallejo) <br />
35. R.K. Narayan's rendering of <em>The Ramayana</em> <br />
36. Dung Kai-cheung, <em>Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City</em> (trans. Dung, Anders Hansson, and Bonnie S. McDougall) <br />
37. Arthur C. Clarke, <em><a href="http://www.strangehorizons.com/2015/20150622/2bookclarke-a.shtml">Rendezvous</a> with <a href="http://www.strangehorizons.com/2015/20150622/3bookclarke-a.shtml">Rama</a></em> (re-read) <br />
38. Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee, <em><a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com/2015/05/behind-scenes-of-rama-ii.html">Rama II</a></em> <br />
39. <em>Genesis</em> (KJV) <br />
40. <em>Interzone</em> 257 (March-April 2015) <br />
41. Eric Williams, <em><a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.tumblr.com/post/120018413097/eric-williams-capitalism-and-slavery-often-very">Capitalism and Slavery</a></em> <br />
42. <em><a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.tumblr.com/post/120611037072/gay-american-history-lesbians-gay-men-in-the">Gay American History</a>: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. - A Documentary History</em>, ed. Jonathan Ned Katz <br />
43. Rachel Pollack and David Vine, <em>Tyrant Oidipous: A New Translation of Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannus</em> <br />
44. Domenico Losurdo, <em>Liberalism: A Counter-History</em> <br />
45. <em>Asimov's Science Fiction</em> (April/May 2015) <br />
46. Kuzhali Manickavel, <em>Things We Found During the Autopsy</em> <br />
47. Frederik Pohl, <em><a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-cases-for-and-against-case-against.html">The Case Against Tomorrow</a></em> <br />
48. Julie Phillips, <em>James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon</em> <br />
49. <em>Asimov's Science Fiction</em> (June 2015) <br />
50. Craig Strete, <em>The Bleeding Man and <a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com/2015/05/after-way-of-his-own-kind.html">Other Science Fiction Stories</a></em> <br />
51. Marilynne Robinson, <em><a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com/2015/06/words-inside-copy-of-gilead.html">Gilead</a></em> <br />
52. Andrea Hairston, <em>Lonely Stardust: Two Plays, a Speech, and Eight Essays</em> <br />
53. Georges Bataille, <em>Prehistoric Painting: Lascaux or The Birth of Art</em> (trans. Austryn Wainhouse) <br />
54. Pier Paolo Pasolini, <em><a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.tumblr.com/post/124659261372/pier-paolo-pasolini-heretical-empiricism-trans">Heretical Empiricism</a></em> (trans. Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett) <br />
55. Edward E. Baptist, <em><a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.tumblr.com/post/125352351372/edward-e-baptist-the-half-has-never-been-told">The Half Has Never Been Told</a>: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism</em> <br />
56. <em>Asimov's Science Fiction</em> (July 2015) <br />
57. <em>Interzone</em> 258 (May-June 2015) <br />
58. Marilynne Robinson, <em><a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.tumblr.com/post/126385528167/marilynne-robinson-absence-of-mind-the">Absence of Mind</a>: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self</em> <br />
59. Octavia E. Butler, <em><a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.tumblr.com/post/127131980352/octavia-e-butler-mind-of-my-mind-cover-by-john">Mind of My Mind</a></em> <br />
60. <em>Fantasy & Science Fiction</em> (July-August 2015) <br />
61. <em>Exodus</em> (KJV) <br />
62. <em>Asimov's Science Fiction</em> (August 2015) <br />
63. Miguel de Beistegui, <em><a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.tumblr.com/post/129148934722/miguel-de-beistegui-proust-as-philosopher-the">Proust as Philosopher</a>: <a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.tumblr.com/post/129349250032/i-was-curious-if-you-could-talk-more-about-the">The Art of Metaphor</a></em> (trans. Dorothée Bonnigal Katz, with Simon Sparks and Beistegui) <br />
64. Samuel Beckett, <em>Molloy</em> (trans. Patrick Bowles and Beckett) <br />
65. Samuel R. Delany, <em>Equinox</em> <br />
66. <em>Asimov's Science Fiction</em> (September 2015) <br />
67. <em>Galaxy Science Fiction</em> (December 1950) <br />
68. Henry Dumas, <em>Ark of Bones and Other Stories</em> <br />
69. Kiini Ibura Salaam, <em><a href="http://www.strangehorizons.com/2015/20151221/2salaam-a.shtml">Ancient, Ancient</a></em> (re-read) <br />
70. Nancy Jane Moore, <em>The Weave</em> <br />
71. Walter Benjamin, <em>Illuminations</em> (trans. Harry Zohn) (re-read) <br />
72. <em>Leviticus</em> (KJV) <br />
73. <em>Interzone</em> 259 (July-August 2015) <br />
74. <em>Fantasy & Science Fiction</em> (September-October 2015) <br />
75. Samuel Beckett, <em>Malone Dies</em> (trans. Beckett) <br />
76. Gabriel Josipovici, <em>Hotel Andromeda</em> (re-read) <br />
77. Octavia E. Butler, <em><a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.tumblr.com/post/135709404012/octavia-e-butler-survivor-cover-by-bartholomew">Survivor</a></em> <br />
78. <em>Fantasy & Science Fiction</em> (November-December 2015) <br />
79. <em>Asimov's Science Fiction</em> (October-November 2015)
<p>
And commentary.
<p>
From the perspective of today at least, I want to say it felt like a scattered, vague, often routine year of reading. I suspect this has a lot to do with the massive quantities of <a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com/search/label/new%20short%20fiction">new short science fiction</a> I was reading, only a fraction of which shows up on this list because I arbitrarily and somewhat old-fashionedly only included the paper magazines I read as "books" here. (On the other hand it's not like I'm going to call an issue of, say, GigaNotoSaurus — i.e., one story, most of the time not one I read all the way through — "a book.") I plan to say more about My Year Of At Least Trying To Read All The Damn Stories in a forthcoming post (after I manage to write about the one 2015 story I have left to write about, which is beautiful and wonderful and hard to write about), but for now I'll just say that by the end of the year it was exhausting and felt obligatory and mechanical and awful, the occasional good (and much rarer great) story notwithstanding. In fact by the end of the year I was kind of feeling like <em>reading itself</em> was obligatory and mechanical, just something I did because what else was I going to do and at the same time something I had to force myself to do rather than the much more appealing options of sitting vacantly in front of the television or the computer. All those damn stories — and even just looking at this list, my god I read so many magazines — took their toll, I guess. Part of the end of the year too was taken up with reading for pre-arranged critical projects, one in particular (tba) deeply unpleasant; I don't want to <em>stop</em> participating in criticism beyond the self-directed, typically serendipitous rather than planned, bounds of this blog, but I think I need to reorient my approach to it.
<p>
Despite all that this list is full of books that moved and changed me. I finished Proust's great novel, delighted among other things to find that its final volume is full of pre-emptive <a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.tumblr.com/post/122855768862/before-very-long-i-was-able-to-show-a-few-sketches">demolitions</a> of superficial takes on Proust, then later read Miguel de Beistegui's extraordinary (albeit poorly translated) book about it — though calling it "a book about Proust" is misleading, especially in a climate which tends to think of literary criticism as secondary to the "real" work. Beistegui's book is a thrilling work of philosophy in its own right: it is both, as Steve Mitchelmore once <a href="https://twitter.com/Twitchelmore/status/494562295012683776">put it</a>, "a stunning study of what fiction might be other than representational" and an attack-from-within on Western concepts of rationality and linear time that have reigned supreme since at least Kant. Reading it was one of those wonderful experiences where you recognize, intimately, what you've felt all along without being able to articulate (or sometimes just plain without knowing it) while simultaneously being forced to reconsider everything you thought you knew, everything you thought you thought. A year that had Proust and Beistegui in it and nothing else would be a great year.
<p>
And Beckett! My god!
<p>
And Helen DeWitt!
<p>
I've begun reading the Bible, slooooowly, in the King James Version; I will admit I sometimes (often) find myself glazing over, but at other times it's a remarkable experience — the sort of expanding narrative of the books of the Torah, or the Pentateuch if you prefer (I have neither a traditional allegiance nor a firm knowledge) — the way it practically gallops through these grand events, slowly beginning to look more and more closely until we reach what strikes me as <em>the</em> central event, the giving of the law (which <em>is still narrative:</em> it is not merely a list of laws, it is the narration of the <em>event</em> that is God giving the law to Moses and through him the people), which takes up as much or more space than everything that has come before it combined — it's like nothing else I've read, though at times I find myself thinking of Beckett, or Bernhard ("And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto Aaron and unto his sons, saying, On this wise ye shall bless the children of Israel, saying unto them, The LORD bless thee, and keep thee," he said, I thought).
<p>
As with Beistegui, it was a <a href="http://this-space.blogspot.com/2015/01/book-of-forgotten-dreams.html">post</a> of Steve's that brought me, unexpected, to Georges Bataille's "highbrow coffee table book" on the paintings at Lascaux, which, shaped though it often is by his more, uh, questionable tendencies, is nonetheless beautiful and provocative, with a great deal to say about art, time, and wonder (and the photographs are why words like "exquisite" exist). Valeria Luiselli and Hilton Als, vastly different as they are, both demonstrate, in their affinity with and vast distance from the typical New Yorker-style, MFA-taught, read-aloud-on-NPR kind of "personal writing," what such writing <em>could be</em> if freed from these institutional requirements (and, admittedly, if written by people as brilliant as Als and Luiselli). As for Marilynne Robinson, after having read <em>Gilead</em> with a deep sense of gratitude, <em>Absence of Mind</em> was fascinating and troubling for the way its subtle and often necessary attack on scientism and related sins was yoked to, again, the politically and artistically compromised MFA world that she is, after all, as an instructor at Iowa, at the heart of; her horrifying two-part interview with Obama (the second part of which I managed to restrain myself from reading) was almost like the punchline to the joke that was my strange relationship with her work last year. For all that, though, I'm still glad of <em>Gilead</em> more than not, and am undecided whether I wish to explore further.
<p>
Politics! If I thought my departure from and disgust with liberalism was complete and total before I read Losurdo's book on the subject, well, it's damn well <em>complete and total</em> now. Speaking of that monstrous ideology, I read a pair of important books on its close relative (Losurdo calls it a "twin birth"), slavery: Eric Williams' study of <em>Capitalism and Slavery</em>, whose often dry (though just as often <a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.tumblr.com/post/121686427517/this-study-has-deliberately-subordinated-the">cutting</a>) take on the subject is nonetheless vital in showing how slavery shaped just about every aspect of the world that we live in to this very day — which is also a focus of Edward E. Baptist's much more....intimate? (sometimes in my opinion irresponsibly so) book, intertwining as it does a visceral accounting of the <em>experience</em> of slavery (so often missing from our received histories — one hears so often of things like "slave auctions" in contexts which encourage us not to think about what this might entail) with an in-depth economic analysis of just how it all worked, how it developed (and how very modern and dynamic it was, putting the lie to the "antiquated institution on its way out anyway" notion), and how it created, well, the modern world.
<p>
In science fiction (aside from all the new stories) I started but never returned to L. Timmel Duchamp's Marq'ssan Cycle, which I would like to get back to soon if I can; I began Octavia E. Butler's Patternist series, which so far I have vaguely mixed feelings about but am excited to continue; Jennifer Marie Brissett enraptured me with her richly disjunctive book; I renewed my love affair with Rachel Pollack; Nina Allan impressed me with her elusive, fragmentary glimpses of not-quite-future, not-quite-alternate worlds; I returned with joy and gratitude to Arthur C. Clarke's <em>Rendezvous with Rama</em>, perhaps the single most important novel in my life, lurking behind everything I ever write in any capacity (and discussing it with a group of brilliant people at <em>Strange Horizons</em> was sheer pleasure); and in their extremely different ways Clare Winger Harris, Craig Strete, Nisi Shawl, Kiini Ibura Salaam, and the wonderful old 1950's issues of <em>Galaxy</em> <a href="https://archive.org/details/galaxymagazine">available</a> at the Internet Archive all reminded me of <em>why</em> I'd wanted to be reading short science fiction in the first place.
<p>
Hopes for the year to come? As ever I'd like to read more poetry (Rankine, Rilke, and Ashbery come to mind as people I'm interested in exploring, and I've recently picked up the new Pasolini collection). I want to continue with Beckett. I'm tempted to re-read Proust already. More perversely, I'm also tempted to try to reacquire my Italian (never fluent to begin with, and never faced with dense intellectual work) with Losurdo's as yet untranslated (into English, that is) book on Stalin. More non-fiction: criticism, philosophy, politics, science, history, maybe even "theory". I'd like to give less of a shit about science fiction, though that's probably a vain hope, dammit. If I must keep up with "new" writing I want to read the books that don't get corporate attention; <a href="https://gumroad.com/jamieberrout">Jamie Berrout</a>, for one, looks exciting, and I have some <a href="http://metropolarity.net/">Metropolarity</a> books to finish and begin. Older works — I've heard a rumor that people have been writing for millennia — and more in translation. Fewer books, proportionally, by damned white people (by the most generous possible accounting a little less than a third of the books I read in 2015 that can be so counted were by writers of color, which when you factor back in the unbearable whiteness of contemporary short science fiction makes for an even sorrier state of affairs). And only, only things I fucking care about.Ethan Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11207042480666924085noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8524497770619950288.post-71825818703703009632016-01-02T13:28:00.000-05:002016-01-02T13:28:11.411-05:00"The City of Your Soul" by Robert ReedThe usual Robert Reed questions apply. Is the writing style provocative or precious? (Answer: yes.) Is this misogyny or just heterosexuality? (Answer: yes.) Has something occurred or has one posture merely followed another? (Answer: ...yes?) A city disappears, but then the disappearance disappears. Like the fake fakes that obsessed Philip K. Dick when he wasn't too busy being a shithead (he talked about sneaking in to Disneyland at night and swapping out the mechanical birds for real ones), a disappearing disappearance is a negation, a self-canceling-out, but at the same time not: it's a presence, a persistence, of a kind with no more than an infrathin separation from that of any other thing-that-exists. Questions of truth and mattering (as in, what matters? what does not?) take on more and more importance as they become more and more unanswerable, unless they're not important at all. People discuss it fruitlessly on the internet.Ethan Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11207042480666924085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8524497770619950288.post-25365706799609220842015-12-13T10:25:00.000-05:002015-12-13T10:25:44.011-05:00"Here Is My Thinking on a Situation That Affects Us All" by Rahul KanakiaThe cutesiness announced by the title is present and I wish it weren't, but so is the lightness — and it's the latter that moves me, because the "situation" here is death, or life, or existence. The rambling narrative of a spaceship that is (or was) the earth's core, its only purpose to travel billions of years to die and, with the matter-energy it brings, give "the creators" a few more decades of (we're told) blissful existence — but who first spends some time observing, with both enjoyment and sometimes a "cold aesthetic distaste," the dance (with missteps) of human life (the aside about the girl who says "Hellooooooo" then grows into a life of misery somehow redeemed from mawkishness by the ship's combination of attention and inattention [though it is also mawkish]), and becomes fond of a human it talks with about epistemology, consciousness, and telos:
<blockquote>
And when I ask him the basis for his statements, he speaks twice as fast and lays gibberish on top of gibberish. With Abhinath, it is not the words that matter. The words are meaningless. It is the way he says them. He speaks with such passion that he creates his own truth. In that, he is like the creators, and if I did not have their voice singing inside me, then perhaps I would be able to . . .
</blockquote>
— the story <a href="http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/here-is-my-thinking-on-a-situation-that-affects-us-all/">flits</a> from level to level, time scale to time scale, skimming the surface, touching what it touches only lightly, in so doing staying truer, despite its own missteps, to the depth and weight it pursues than many a self-serious treatise.Ethan Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11207042480666924085noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8524497770619950288.post-24637840922971283592015-11-11T12:13:00.000-05:002016-01-20T17:32:48.517-05:00"The Closest Thing to Animals" by Sofia SamatarAn artist who makes sculptures of extinct animals out of trash, "her genius: she understood that whales are made of milk." A drug whose users "feel a ghostly presence." A city quarantined under a tent, residents depressed not only by the diminished sunlight but by the "extra blackness" at night; the solution: artificial lights "sliding down in different colors, like glittery rain [...] They hadn't tried to mimic the stars: studies had suggested that would only make people feel worse." A woman who feels herself constantly betrayed and abandoned discovers others consider her the betrayer, the abandoner: "I'm made out of cardboard." One of her former friends writes a memoir of her illness in the quarantined city, putting everything in quotes: "Like I say we made 'sweaters' out of 'yarn.' We had 'milkshakes' in the 'park.'"
<p>
Where with the last Samatar story I <a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com/2015/09/tender-by-sofia-samatar.html">wrote about</a> I said its constellation of metaphors all pointed inwards, further and further into one another, here it's more that they all flow outwards from <a href="http://www.firesidefiction.com/issue27/chapter/the-closest-thing-to-animals/">a center that does not exist</a>, or at least is "difficult even to imagine," as the garbage artist writes. Without animals (the "closest thing" the title refers to is other people, "with their warm weight, their softness, and their smell"; the plague, "the lanugo," covers human bodies in fur before killing them), without family (tent orphans, tent widows, all these tent losses), without home (both the artist and the abandoning-abandoned narrator are Somali expatriates), there is no ground on which a center could rest, from which one could grow; there is only this flowing outward into an alienated and alienating sea of experiences, and different ways of relating to and feeling about it all — many of which the story presents to us without enabling us to judge, with its array of <a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com/2015/02/science-fiction-characters-and.html">"characters"</a> and its confused, unprivileged narrator.
<p>
"What's the point of experience if you can't turn it into something else, some sign?" the narrator asks. Miguel de Beistegui <a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.tumblr.com/post/129780254992/my-point-of-departure-then-consists-in">writes</a>, of reality, that "We always want it to be in its rightful place but that place is precisely where it's not, precisely where it's lacking. We would like it to be here, in front of us, in the flesh. But it’s in that very immediacy or fullness that it steals away and goes missing. Which doesn’t mean that it has in some way disappeared; rather, this absence or this lack is the key to its mystery, the secret of its functioning." As the story ends, the two Somali women, refusing mutual understanding and misunderstanding alike ("It was like peeling off skin and throwing it away"), wrap themselves up in a quilt depicting scenes from home — some explicitly violent, some not, few that could be called "happy" — and, "still falling, but more slowly," thus enfolded by "the brief lovely grotesque menagerie of our childhood" they go to sleep.Ethan Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11207042480666924085noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8524497770619950288.post-19725009210386030612015-11-02T12:50:00.000-05:002016-02-23T18:48:26.086-05:00"Under a Steel Sky" by James Mapes<p>Prison-as-metaphor feels significantly more tasteless in a story written today than in one written before the decisive rise of mass incarceration and the PIC; the concluding revelation is hackneyed and anything but revelatory (though to be fair it <em>is</em> one of those clichés that made "it's a cliché for a reason" a cliché). So what's <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160112062630/http://perihelionsf.com/1510/fiction_6.htm">good here</a>? What brings me to write this? Something that discussions of plot and character would never touch; something that <em>is</em> in part related to the notion this story allegorizes, that we all know without being told the rules of our own domination — that we all expend enormous amounts of energy keeping up with these rules, memorizing them, updating them, and always enforcing them — but which a description as literal (and politically reductive) as the one I just put between em-dashes does not quite touch. Something to do with the complex pirouette of bodies here (I can't find it now but Keguro Macharia recently tweeted something about the Marquis de Sade's choreography, that only with and after him does one find such attention to bodies-in-space, that this attention and this choreography are often <a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com/2013/04/being-boring.html">boring</a>), and the way their movements are never, not even for a moment, naturalized. Something to do with the pain and longing and loss that somehow infuses every moment of the story's language, despite its being the very definition of the phrase "workmanlike prose," as if there were something beyond or between the words on the screen. Something to do with <em>desire</em>, the desire shooting through the whole story for something <em>outside:</em> outside these rules — outside these movements — outside these walls — outside these metaphors — outside these clichés — outside these words — outside.Ethan Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11207042480666924085noreply@blogger.com0