My Bloomsday started on June 15th. Had a very good, calming, grounding Fuck with Beloved Wife (I write such provocatively “vulgar” things deliberately, as a child of the ’60s/’70s, to push back on all the awful Creeping Anti-Het Puritanism and ward off Bluenoses and also because I can, a state of affairs I still can’t quite take for granted) in the late morning on a temperate and overcast day. Whoever first said “Omne Animal Post Coitum Triste” was a liar. Here’s a pic of Beloved Wife in a dramatically-lit setting, early this year:
The light fleece of the high clouds kept the Sun from biting the post-conjugal flesh of our neck-backs and hands as we walked for a good hour and a half across town, looking for antique bottles. I’m looking for a very specific kind of antique bottle for some promo material I want to generate for the new musical project. We headed for a neighborhood known to be replete with antique shops and wove in and out of such shops and found not the proper old prototype for the image I have in mind. Beloved Wife was wearing tight jeans I might normally find sort of suburban-mom-at-Disneyland-in-the-early-1980s-ish in an affectionately critical way but suddenly I realized I enjoyed the display. Yes, I thought, we are Tourists and Berlin is Disneyland and we are Cozy-Smug Ma and Pa! Further we walked and came to West Berlin’s former downtown and came there upon a food truck from which the jovial Bavarian owner was selling little grilled steaks and I bought two to go and we ferried these home in their foil overcoats and they were delicious at home. You don’t need to wear a Boater to celebrate Bloomsday or suffer cuckoldry or beat off, even, surreptitiously, to the stolen glimpse of a lame Gerty’s aleph under cover of fireworks over the darkening beach! Neither am I claiming that one shouldn’t. Lit is about Life, great Lit is about the Angelanimal stuff and is warm and wet with jokes and holy smut and tales of good food, the smells of duelling scars, paper cuts, sneeze-induced hernias, loving a woman (or man) so much that only somehow managing to Fuck them ten times, simultaneously, with the Crowd of one’s many Selves at various Ages, with transcendent tenderness and worldly precision, could feel “enough”.
AMEN.
Further (randomly ordered) thoughts/ comments/ quips which events of this week triggered in me:
2.
Academe: the fuscous humidor in which word salads meet and reproduce.*
3.
Soon I will have to post mocking comments on FACEBOOT regarding all this UFO NONSENSE. You know the NONSENSE to which I refer, surely? For reasons known only to itself, our CONTROL MECHANISM now seems to want Hoi Polloi to believe we are being invaded (or Disneylanded) by Little Green Fucking Men in 1950s-type saucers! Convincing pictures pending. And soon I will find myself being “fact checked” on FACEBOOT about UFOs! And soon I will find myself in a little flamewar with some credulous soul, on the topic, and said soul will try to induce a mic-drop, against me, by writing:
” And I suppose you’re an expert UFOLOGIST, too?”
4.
Physicists: hear me out! What if “Universal Constants” are just local? Would that explain the Accounting Problem of Dark Matter?
5.
“Over-thinking” is the under-thinker’s favorite accusation.
6.
Hey, Genius! You can be yourself or lots of average people can like you. Pick one and live for it.
7.
The point of all of these “AI” parlor tricks is to shift how Duh Masses direct their perceptions, and expectations, of Authority. “AI” is the postmodern version of the Wizard of Oz. “Pay no attention to the humans behind the curtain,” to paraphrase that famous riff. When “AI” supposedly orders a village of “insurgents” to be drone-bombed, who will be held accountable?
They are preparing Duh Masses, psychologically, to accept this super-alibi, by ramping up the fear of “AI” “wiping us out”. “We must stop the development of ‘AI’ before it destroys us!” chirps one asset, after another, setting the stage for atrocities to come.
When “AI” drone-bombs the first village, there will be flurries of Op Ed “I told you so’s!” and many speeches from outraged Progressives and that will peak in a very short time and TFIC will chuckle and rub their hands together with anticipatory glee. They used to use politicians as scapegoats: messy and time-consuming (the processes featured laborious four, six and eight year cycles: look how long it took them to dismantle Antitrust protections under the old, politician-based, system: it started with Carter/Reagan and reached fruition with Bill Gates’ miraculous 21st century image change). Just wait until “AI” issues its first “apology” and “pledge to do better”!
That will be darker, and sillier, than anything Kafka ever wrote.
8.
Remember when we were precocious kids and (some) Public Intellectuals were sort of open to irony and not fragile and, yeah, they were hip enough, well-read enough, cosmopolitan enough, to pick up on or circulate sly jokes based on a wide range of semi-obscure cultural references? And such references featured heavily in the droll banter on the Dick Cavett show? And you, the precocious kid, who had stayed up late just to watch the Dick Cavett show, couldn’t wait to be a grown-up and participate… ?
Yeah, I know: those days are deader than my grandma’s first sexual experience. I keep forgetting! Or denying. Oh how I want there to be pockets of Smart, out there. An Organized Underground of Wit, bubbling in subterranean spaces while the drool-scented New Dark Age of sheer dumbfuckery ravages the stunned face of the World’s mentality.
BUT There must be a market for this old song, of mine, somewhere…
9.
from LETTERS TO A HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER-June 14, 2015
Dear J:
I suspect that cases of gender dysmorphia sky-rocketed when medical science convinced the credulous it had developed the technical ability to “correct” the condition cosmetically and that a further, greater spike in cases corresponds to the recent soc med glamorization of the procedure; if it’s a genuine disorder for more than one out of every ten million people, it’s a disorder that is spread by media. But what’s more American than longing, with every fibre of your being, to be what you aren’t? If there were a radical therapeutic technique for correcting poverty and/or anonymity, we could call the procedure a Demographic Reassignment Intervention. I can remember quite clearly, in the ’70s, when the TV miniseries “The Holocaust” was big and 30% of my college buddies suddenly wanted to be Jewish; they talked “Jewish”, Woody Allen was their sex symbol and they felt a total sense of grievance about not having been raised by a doting, gesticulating, “Jewish mother”. It was a fad, it passed (and, btw, my old friend, B., who actually *had* a Jewish mother, reported that she was as distracted and ambivalent a parent as any WASP could be). I can remember being an adolescent during Bruce Lee’s reign: we all (the boys) wanted to be Chinese! Luckily, nobody took us seriously and intervened with counselling and glossy brochures about reverse-Epicanthoplasty therapy, though Google leads us to the Q&A on a plastic surgeon’s website and we see this:
“I also loved this fold that most asians have. I think this fold is beautiful. I always wanted to have. I wouldn’t really look fake or something since I have olive skin and black hair and my other features wouldn’t look bad with it either. If you can do it, how much money will you do it for?”
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10.
If people were a little smarter they’d know how stupid they are and things would be much nicer.
Also, there’s this: The Sci Fi Prequel Paradox: the Tech seems to get Higher the earlier in the Narrative one goes.
PLUS: the following is from a film critic’s review of a movie for supposed GROWN-UPS :
“For James Gunn, the focus of the three Guardians films is empathy: “We start with this incredibly innocent little animal who will eventually become the character we know, a mean, bitter little raccoon. Throughout his journey, we witness him opening up to compassion.”
11.
*Oh Sweet Jesus I am such a chronic overestimator.
I spotted some IG posts by a Gay Iranian Radical Academic of some sort, who appears to be Berlin-based, and I wanted to comment on his stuff in the spirit of whatever. I swear to Baal: I assumed he was an ironic wit, initially. I was trying to be friendly in a wink-wink-one-smart-dick-to-another way.
No, the thick motherfucker meant his bullshit posts (he is doing that stale Camille Paglia, embrace-camp and Pop Crap to stay relevant, shit, from c. 2005, posting about such day-glo inclusive corn as Lady Gaga and singing Spice Girls hits between his deployment of terms like “CIS” and “Mansplaining”,” and thinking that makes him sort of with-it: I first assumed he was joking! I assumed he was satirizing stale old, bottom-feeding academics who attempt to brand such a tired schtick! I thought: hey, this is my kind of Ironic Gay Iranian Academic… ).
What is this guy up to, anyway? This guy I pissed off. What’s his angle?
The inadvertently-offensive comment I left on the Iranian Academic’s IG… which refers to a “documentary” that I invented, jokingly (supposedly about a sequel or replay or follow-up to the HEAVEN’S GATE event of ’95)… whooshed so savagely over this poor beard’s head that he accused me of “mansplaining” in my comment! He thinks I was serious! He thinks it really happened! He thinks the sequel event and its “documentary” I invented, out of thin air, is a thing that he so clearly has thorough knowledge of that it offends the fuck out of him that I “explained” it on his IG page:
What I (jokingly) wrote (in the guise of a character from one of my novels):
How he responded:
Fuck! I didn’t accept his friendship request!
Fuck.
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12.
I finally got around to writing a pointless obit for Martin Amis, a man who was famously created by Fucking and then died. It’s a quickie. I left it on Will Self’s FACEBOOT page. Strangely, Will hasn’t deigned to respond. Tell me this isn’t accurate!
“Amis lived fast, died young and left… erm… yeah. Years back, I started doing things like comparing Mart at 60 to Kingsley at 60 and wondering if anyone else was noting the Relativistic Effect as Mart started looking lots more père than fils. Why did Mart puff, and guzzle, himself to death with such homicidal avidity? The hubris of the ’90s fucked him up, I think; it did his head in: he thought he was becoming some cool new kind of American and it ripped his first marriage in two, over-inflated his artistic pretensions, and so on. At some point I think it must have hit him that his obsession… any guarantee of a place in “the pantheon”… was now just barely thinkable. All he had left, at the end, was the undisciplined overconsumption of his death-chemicals. When the Chickens of Clarity came home to roost he… ooops. Sorry. I’ve gone too far…
He wrote a few really good books! Will he be read in 100 years? Will anyone?”
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13.
Q: What’s the most popular entertainment, for Intellectuals, here in Plato’s Cave?
A: The Allegory of Plato’s Cave.
14.
Can’t remember where I left this comment:
“Endless permutation in search of the latest marketing gimmick is how Capitalism advances, not Art, you assholes.”
Nor this:
“Human kinks will invariably expand to fill the outline of available options.”
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15.
Lit students (they must have been young, they were discussing Lit with curiousity and passion) were discussing the “A Clockwork Orange 21st chapter controversy”. The “controversy” being that American editions of Anthony Burgess’ book left it at 20 chapters, the 21st chapter (the book’s epilogue) being the one where (an 18-year-old) Alex is a reformed family man repudiating the ultra-violent kicks of his youth. That ambiguity-(and mythos)-deflating epilogue was where Anthony Burgess (a composer of symphonies as well as novels) let his programmatic compulsions overpower his narrative savvy, in my opinion. To quote some other source on the matter:
My interest in the discussion was not so much Burgess’s final feelings regarding one version of the book versus the other (and all that spurious Frenchie “death of the author” stuff someone was trying to shoehorn into the discussion, although, admittedly, as Time progresses, it appears to me that the tendency of Authors to die approaches 100%); it was more to do with the new narrative hybrid genre the discussion was inadvertently acknowledging. I commented:
“I mean, I categorically reject that “death of the Author” mumbo jumbo; all the “A Clockwork Orange 21st chapter controversy” teaches us is either something about the subjectivity of the reading experience or that expecting objective “perfection,” from an Artwork, is unreasonable. It’s also interesting that another canonical text, which most people are familiar with, primarily through its adaptation to film, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” (aka Blade Runner), was also improved (as a narrative, if not as Art) by the film director adapting the novel. Sometimes, a good director can be like a really expensive editor working with a novelist to trim the fat, distill the themes and deliver more thrills. The collaborations generate a “new” (post-Lumiere Bros) genre, in a way: the book AND the film will often inhabit the same space, in many people’s minds, simultaneously. I wouldn’t say Kubrick “improved” Nabokov’s Lolita but I feel he strengthened Burgess’ ACO as a narrative and elevated it to the status of myth.”
In any case, it was James-Joyce-superfan-Burgess, himself, who came up with the last line, of the American edition: “I was cured, all right” . Some part of the Author’s mind must have known that that line was far stronger than the damp squib of the British edition’s epilogue. Strong enough, in fact, to kick off a minor religion.
THIS QUICKIE FEATURES AN ADDENDUM
I knew an obscure high priest of that religion, a man named Paul Browse, with a keen sense of humor, a sleek white head and pink-lensed glasses he wore day and night (he claimed this was owing to an eye condition: a nice little bit of self-mythologizing, maybe). I first met Paul in 1991, I think it was was, in the charmingly ramshackle digs of a now-Ex friend (where Ex-friend’s letter box was a free-standing tin box in the post-Apocalyptic stairwell: what former denizen of upper middle class Long Island, as Ex-friend was, could resist?). Paul, in his trademark black turtle neck and pink glasses and sleek bright head, was there with his beautiful younger Art School girlfriend Claudia. It impressed me, a year or two later, when Paul and Claudia came down with his-and-hers cases of eros-based Hepatitis! How JOYCEAN!
Anyway (and skipping the incredible evening that Paul, Ex-friend, and I spent, in the late-’90s, watching a bootlegged copy of Gummo and laughing so violently we all choked to death), Paul told tales of his boyhood, his droogy boyhood, swaggering around Sheffield and saying “Right right right” and “Clear as an unmuddy lake” and dreaming of “ultra violence,” the living Myth that Burgess, Kubrick and Maggie Thatcher worked, rather closely together, to make for Paul and his chums to inhabit.
Paul was a founding member of the iconic group CLOCK DVA (an ACO-derived name) and up there is an audio example (more, or less, commercial than my Issac Asimov song?) we can use to tie up the loose ends of this post, which has no other epilogue.
To Paul, and his former Art School Lover, when they were young!
Prost!
Chin chin!
And may your Molly bloom!
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16.
Happy Bloomsday!
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THE IMPERIALIST 