tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-56980592024-03-07T02:43:10.996-05:00 The Mumpsimusa blog archive (2003-2023)Matthew Cheneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07704529564308222004noreply@blogger.comBlogger2038125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-21562254215845246312023-08-18T07:30:00.005-04:002023-08-18T08:23:13.714-04:0020 Years of The Mumpsimus<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKOHgR2k__kgNps0bgwvKMuU5mUNnZUMS59C3wflyUE_WVDSHhF29j5sy2kWtcpZ36eSkFtJCpotUubO9oyja0tDswPtv34oRfvcISD_GjXOakdM952KozEd4OucOQECtjgyo7cuvYowtIen_KyAVe8qOV49F92mM6Fv7lZ52LHZDTdi2x8PKK/s1476/Mumpsimus%202003.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="386" data-original-width="1476" height="168" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKOHgR2k__kgNps0bgwvKMuU5mUNnZUMS59C3wflyUE_WVDSHhF29j5sy2kWtcpZ36eSkFtJCpotUubO9oyja0tDswPtv34oRfvcISD_GjXOakdM952KozEd4OucOQECtjgyo7cuvYowtIen_KyAVe8qOV49F92mM6Fv7lZ52LHZDTdi2x8PKK/w640-h168/Mumpsimus%202003.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p></p><div class="sc-1b0nc7s-0 fKpyuu" data-tag="post-content-collapse"><div class="sc-eldieg kDWGcc"><div aria-hidden="false" class="sc-kiIyQV grVyks"><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 fYcGch sc-rcywpx-0 hRKPxe" data-tag="post-content"><div class="sc-1ye87qi-0 cZNwdx"><p>On August 18, 2003, I clicked "publish" on the first post of The Mumpsimus blog. <a href="http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2003/08/mumpsimus-mump-si-mus-n.html">That very first post</a> was a simple definition of the word of the title. The next day, I wrote <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2003/08/whats-this-mad-universe.html">a statement of purpose</a>. And then kept going. (Thanks to the Web Archive, you can see what <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20031127194459/http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/">the original version</a> of the The Mumpsimus looked like.) All together, it's 2,074 posts and who knows how many millions of words.<br /></p>
<p>In 2013, I wrote <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/search/label/10%20years">a series of posts</a> looking back year by year at the blog's first decade. That's as thorough a chronicle of the origins as I can make, and since it was ten years closer to 2003 than we are now, it's probably more reliable than my ever-less-reliable memory.</p>
<p>Looking back at those lookings back, I'm pleased that in <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2013/08/a-decade-of-archives-10-2003.html">the post about 2003</a>, I highlighted my friendship with Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Jeff and Ann were up here for Readercon last month (Jeff was Guest of Honor) and we hung out together with Eric Schaller for a few days in Boston afterward. (It feels really odd to read that post and see it refer to the Southern Reach books as upcoming. They feel like they've always been there.) In the burst of things I posted on August 19, 2003, one was a <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2003/08/veniss-underground-by-jeff-vandermeer.html">review</a> of <i>Veniss Underground</i> (recently released in a 20th anniversary <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=LceGEAAAQBAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&dq=veniss%20underground&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false">edition</a>), and that little post started ... a lot.<br /></p><div class="DraftEditor-paragraphElement" data-block="true" data-editor="3o7g6" data-offset-key="27l0n-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="27l0n-0-0"><span data-offset-key="27l0n-0-0"><span data-text="true">Another decade has passed since I wrote the 10th anniversary reflections, and while I am tempted to complete the year-by-year exploration, I don't think that's the best way to go, because the blog changed a lot after 2013. At the end of the summing up post for the series, </span></span><a class="sc-afquy-0 kpuBjA" href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2013/08/ten-years.html"><span data-offset-key="27l0n-1-0"><span data-text="true">I wrote</span></span></a><span data-offset-key="27l0n-2-0"><span data-text="true">, "Tomorrow, I start in the Ph.D. in Literature program at the University of New Hampshire. It's a new path, a new experience."</span></span></div><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="27l0n-0-0"><span data-offset-key="27l0n-2-0"><span data-text="true"> </span></span></div></div><div class="DraftEditor-paragraphElement" data-block="true" data-editor="3o7g6" data-offset-key="89lnk-0-0"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="89lnk-0-0"><span data-offset-key="89lnk-0-0"><span data-text="true">I was ready for a change, and a change I got. The work of the PhD and then the work of academic life meant I had far less time than before to devote to The Mumpsimus. Sometimes, I regretted that, but mostly I did not. I could not have kept up the pace no matter what, as my mind and inclinations changed — blogging regularly is, for me at least, a young person's game. But I also grew suspicious of some of the habits and tendencies that arose from the work: the inclination to post a quick opinion on a topic, the inclination to keep up with publishing and media hype, the inclination to read quickly and write even more quickly. These are all tendencies exacerbated by the social media age. There are people who are skilled at forming opinions quickly, at writing and reading quickly, and I value their work, but it is not where my own talents lie. I need to think slowly, to consider and reconsider.</span></span></div></div><p>This may be one reason why the writing has gotten longer over time. As I gave up trying to keep up with all the newest and hottest stuff, I could spend two weeks or two months writing a single post and not care. That freedom was revelatory.</p>
<p>Thus, after 2013 there are far fewer posts than there were in the previous decade. Going through them year by year would not be especially enlightening. However, if you want to give it a try yourself, here are links to yearly archives for the last decade: <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2013/">2013</a>, <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2014/">2014</a>, <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2015/">2015</a>, <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2016/">2016</a>, <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2017/">2017</a>, <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2018/">2018</a>, <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2019/">2019</a>, <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2020/">2020</a>, <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2021/">2021</a>, <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2022/">2022</a>, <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2023/">2023</a>.<br /></p>
<p>What I will do here is offer 20 posts I still like, in chronological order and with brief commentary. (Well, 21. For reasons given at the end.) This is a sampling, a way to glimpse the whole scope of The Mumpsimus. It privileges the last decade, since the anniversary posts from 2013 cover the first quite well, but it does not exclude the whole 20 years. It's fun to be able to look across the span of two decades.</p>
<p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/87850743/4700d843820a453b94687ce6ec731a8f/eyJ3Ijo4MjAsIndlYnAiOjB9/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=GjtJngYjsxxoYew_RkMr7xJXkm6tXZdPYsKWxOz0D6A%3D" /></p>
<p><b>1. </b><a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2004/12/stone-animals-by-kelly-link.html"><b>"Stone Animals" by Kelly Link, December 2004</b></a><b> </b><br />
If there is a single short story that can represent what The Mumpsimus advocated for in the first decade, it is "Stone Animals". It's a strange story, certainly, but also a deeply evocative and haunting one. My goal was simply to give people a way of reading it, to help folks who might otherwise bounce off the story's wonders. More than anything else I wrote in the first year or two, I think this little post achieved that goal. (Recently, I wrote a patrons-only piece about that post <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/archive-dive-and-80680449">here</a>.)</p>
<p><b>2. </b><a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2007/11/affirmation-by-christopher-priest.html"><i><b>The Affirmation</b></i><b> by Christopher Priest, November 2007</b></a><br />
Since I had cause to mention Christopher Priest just a few days ago in <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/conquest-by-nina-87761757">a post</a> about Nina Allan's <i>Conquest</i>, it seems only right and proper to note this piece about Priest's novel <i>The Affirmation</i>. The only other time I think I've written about Christopher Priest was a 2005 <a href="https://www.sfsite.com/09a/gl207.htm">review</a> of <i>The Glamour</i> for SF Site. This surprises me, as I've read most of his books. I should write about him more often. But I remember how difficult it was to write about <i>The Affirmation</i> and what writing about it brought out of me — a friend even contacted me the moment after she read it to say she was worried about me, given what I'd written! I was fine, just deeply affected by the novel and seeking a way to write about it. I don't know how successful that post is as a piece of writing, but I still remember the struggle to express myself in it, and the blog existed to provide opportunity for such struggle (and its resolution), so it seems like a good piece to put in this list.</p>
<p><b>3. </b><a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2009/06/rick-bowes-on-stonewall-at-40.html"><b>Rick Bowes on Stonewall at 40, June 2009</b></a><b> </b><br />
This post is not by me, but rather by my friend Richard Bowes, who lived in New York City at the time of the Stonewall riots. I'm immensely proud to have published this short piece, which later became part of Rick's extraordinary book <a href="https://www.lethepressbooks.com/store/p101/Dust_Devil_on_a_Quiet_Street.html"><i>Dust Devil on a Quiet Street</i></a><i>, </i>one of my favorite books of the last 50 years.</p>
<p><b>4. </b><a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2009/07/gi-joe.html"><b>G.I. Joe, July 2009</b></a><br />
This is a pretty ordinary post, but I want to put it on this list because in its own small way it takes popular culture seriously while also having some fun. I wrote plenty of better, more substantial posts around the time of this one, but the blog in its first decade was about offhand ideas, fragments of experience, and quick explorations — that's what The Mumpsimus was really best at back then, and this post embodies that.</p>
<p><b>5. </b><a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2012/03/snowtown-murders.html"><i><b>The Snowtown Murders</b></i><b>, March 2012</b></a><br />
I've written a lot about film and horror (and horror films), but almost everything I've ever tried to say is at least implied in this post about one of the most disturbing, unsettling, and brilliant movies I've ever seen. I'm extremely desensitized to fictional film violence, but this movie continues to be one I hesitate to rewatch, despite how much I value it. It is a singular work of art. It is horrible.</p>
<p><b>6. </b><a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2014/03/samuel-r-delany-another-roundtable.html"><b>Samuel R. Delany: Another Roundtable, March 2014</b></a><b> </b><br />
Over the years, I've written more about Samuel R. Delany than about any other writer, I expect. This roundtable discussion, most of which I did not write, is one of the things I'm proudest to have published about the man and his work. (Not that I think it's perfect. I wish it wasn't all guys — we tried hard to get some women involved, but our necessarily pretty quick deadline didn't work for their schedules.) This was a work of activism. I wanted to fight against a prevailing view of Delany as a great science fiction writer who had somehow gone wrong.</p>
<p><b>7. </b><a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2015/06/a-little-life-by-hanya-yanagihara.html"><i><b>A Little Life</b></i><b> by Hanya Yanagihara, June 2015</b></a><b> </b><br />
My favorite novel of the last 25 years. Nowadays, it almost feels dangerous to offer praise of <i>A Little Life</i>, never mind make such a large statement, but I'm being honest. The book became an unlikely star of social media, a national bestseller, and naturally suffered backlash. It's become a favored stone for people to grind their axes against (see <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2022/01/trauma-plots.html">my critique</a> last year of Parul Sehgal's use of the book in her screed against "the trauma plot"). It's not a novel people feel neutral about. For me, it's a glorious gothic melodrama that uses the gothic and the melodrama for serious and overwhelmingly powerful purposes. (That great connoisseur of postmodern melodrama, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, I'm sure would have loved it.) I still don't know how Yanagihara achieved some of the effects she achieved on her pages. It's a book I am in awe of. Even if all right-thinking people hate it. So much the better!</p>
<p><b>8. </b><a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2017/01/element-of-style-for-age-of-blight.html"><b>Elements of Style for the Age of Blight, January 2017</b></a><b> </b><br />
An impressionistic exploration of what Kristine Ong Muslim's collection of brief stories <i>The Age of Blight</i> can teach us about how to write while living through the end of the world. This remains one of the most succinct statements I've made about the relationship between aesthetics and the anthropocene. It's the sort of oddball expression I cherish having a blog for — who else would have published this if I didn't do it myself? And yet I'm as proud of it as anything I've had published by professional outlets.</p>
<p><b>9. </b><a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2017/08/what-is-to-be-done-about-social-novel.html"><b>What Is To Be Done About the Social Novel?, August 2017</b></a><br />
This post, like many, is overlong and a bit rambly, but it raises points that remain important to my idea of what art can do and be. The length is mostly because it's an almost line-by-line argument with an article by Jonathan Dee in <i>Harper's</i>. As such, it serves in some ways as notes to myself toward an unwritten shorter essay about novels and their relationship to society.</p>
<p><b>10. </b><a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2018/11/ghosts-in-memory-of-elizabeth-webb.html"><b>Ghosts: In Memory of Elizabeth Webb Cheney, November 201</b><b>8</b></a><b> </b><br />
I've written a lot of obituaries and eulogies at The Mumpsimus. This is the most important one: for my mother.</p>
<p><b>11. </b><a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-mere-wife-by-maria-dahvana-headley.html"><i><b>The Mere Wife</b></i><b> by Maria Dahvana Headley, February 2019</b></a><br />
Maria is an old friend (from college years!) and a brilliant writer and I love this book. Saying "I love this book!" in public never gets old.</p>
<p><b>12. </b><a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2019/07/make-my-day-movie-culture-in-age-of.html"><i><b>Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan</b></i><b> by J. Hoberman, July 2019</b></a><br />
In the early 2010s, I spent a few years researching and drafting a book project on 1980s action movies and their relationship to the Reagan presidency. The project never came together, but it led to my short story "Where's the Rest of Me?" (included in my first collection, <a href="https://matthewcheney.net/books/blood-stories/"><i>Blood: Stories</i></a>). That story is a personal favorite, so I'm okay with that. I'd rather have a short story I am happy with than an academic book any day. But I was also able to draw on the research when I wrote this review of film critic J. Hoberman's book on the movies of the Reagan era, and I'm glad to have some of what I discovered preserved in this post.</p>
<p><b>13. </b><a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2020/03/a-wreath-of-roses-by-elizabeth-taylor.html"><i><b>A Wreath of Roses</b></i><b> by Elizabeth Taylor, March 2020</b></a><b> <br />
</b>A post about an unjustly neglected novel by an unjustly neglected writer, which is what I most love writing about at The Mumpsimus — but I share it here at least as much for the historical moment of the post's writing as for its topic. In the final paragraph, I note the COVID-19 pandemic. I'd forgotten that paragraph until now, and reading it gave me chills.</p>
<p><b>14. </b><a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2020/05/eight-hours-dont-make-day.html"><i><b>Eight Hours Don't Make a Day</b></i><b>, May 2020</b></a><b><br />
</b>Deeper into the pandemic. Fassbinder's great, warm, weird tv mini-series gave me tremendous comfort during those dark days. I said it was "perfect viewing for this moment, when we are living in fear of COVID-19 and are encouraged not to physically interact with other people for fear of spreading the virus or becoming ill ourselves. For me, at least, its honest warmth and humanity was comforting without feeling delusional or sentimental. It's quirky, even goofy, and yet deeply serious at its core, and often delightful — how often, after all, do we get a story where a subplot involves something like, for instance, the creation of an underground kindergarten?"</p>
<p><b>15. </b><a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2020/07/drifting.html"><b>Drifting, July 2020</b></a><b><br />
</b>I spent a lot of time in 2019 and 2020 reading the works of Kate Zambreno. Her books have had a significant effect on my writing and thinking. This is the most substantial piece, part of what at the time I thought might become a book-length series called <i>Asterisks</i>, and which sort of has. (The <i>Asterisks</i> manuscript is done, though it's not what I originally envisioned. More details in a patrons-only post <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/archive-dive-85533752">here</a>. Still not sure what I'm going to do with it.) This post engaged with Zambreno's novel <i>Drifts</i>, which I note was written before the pandemic but made for perfect pandemic reading. I value this post not only because it celebrates Zambreno's writing but because it also really digs into the experience of writing and living during difficult times, which has become something of a theme for my work since 2016 or so.</p>
<p><b>16. </b><a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2020/08/artificial-jungles.html"><b>Artificial Jungles, August 2020</b></a><b><br />
</b>A call for a queer, ridiculous aesthetics. This, too, was a symptom of the ongoing pandemic. As much as I was exhorting the world to explode the idea of the short story, I was also exhorting myself. It was a harder task I set than I realized at the time. The closest thing I've encountered recently that fits the aesthetic I called for in this post is the amazing <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27549751/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_3_tt_2_nm_6_q_taylor%2520mac"><i>Taylor Mac's 24-Decade History of Popular Music</i></a><i>.</i> (See it if you haven't! It is pure radical fairy joy and wisdom!)</p>
<p><b>17. </b><a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2020/12/paul-celan-at-100.html"><b>Paul Celan at 100</b></a><b><br />
</b>A celebration of my favorite 20th century poet and of Pierre Joris's astonishing translations of his work.</p>
<p><b>18. </b><a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/search/label/Revisitation"><b>The Revisitation Series, February-May 2021</b></a><b><br />
</b>This is cheating because it's a series of posts, but it's worth the cheat. In 2021, I set out to read all of the <i>Men on Men</i> anthologies of gay male short stories from the 1980s and 1990s. Ultimately, I could not finish (it was too depressing to keep thinking about how many writers we lost during the first era of the AIDS crisis), but I think I accomplished a lot with what I could get written. I never want to forget those difficult years, never want to forget the scale of loss.</p>
<p><b>19. </b><a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2021/10/unelevated-to-gallows-lords-of-salem.html"><b>Unelevated to the Gallows: </b><i><b>The Lords of Salem</b></i></a><b><br />
</b>People kept thinking I was joking or ironic or something when I said I think Rob Zombie's <i>The Lords of Salem</i> is one of the great horror movies. It's a movie I truly love. So I wrote this post to explain (at perhaps tedious length) exactly why and how. I know my taste is weird. If you think I'm wrong, just remember what the name of the blog means.</p>
<p><b>20. </b><a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2022/05/difficult-peace.html"><b>Difficult Peace, May 2022</b></a><b><br />
</b>I've written a bunch of times about guns and violence in America, and though I think some of the insights over the years hold up, I have always been dissatisfied with whatever I wrote. I'm dissatisfied with "Difficult Peace", too, but less than with other posts about guns and violence. I think this post digs a bit deeper, gets at some things I hadn't gotten at before, especially the idea of conflicting concepts of safety.</p>
<p><b>Coda: </b><a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2022/09/time-for-anxiety-pillar-of-salt-by.html"><b>Time for Anxiety: "Pillar of Salt" by Shirley Jackson, September 2022</b></a><b> <br />
</b>I don't want to leave you with "Difficult Peace"! Let's finish up with one of the original enthusiasms of The Mumpsimus: weird short stories. In this post, I explore one of the stories that has most affected me over my life, "Pillar of Salt", which I first read when pretty young, and which has stuck with me ever since. Shirley Jackson is in my personal pantheon of Greats, so it's appropriate that we finish up this little excursion with one of her best tales.</p>
<p>----------</p>
<p>I am tremendously grateful to you, the audience. I would not have written most of these blog posts if I didn't have a sense that maybe somebody out there — maybe just one person! — would want to read them. (I write fiction regardless of audience. Nonfiction is for an audience.) Thanks to The Mumpsimus, too, I've met all sorts of wonderful people and made some of the best friends of my life. It's been an astonishing experience.</p>
<p>I'm going to continue writing at <a href="https://www.patreon.com/matthew_cheney">my Patreon page</a>, but I've decided this is the end of The Mumpsimus. The Patreon will continue, with me writing as I feel like it about
whatever grabs my attention, but I'm not going to think of it as an
extension of The Mumpsimus anymore. Patreon is a different sort of
platform from Blogger, and I want to play around with it more (as time
allows) and without feeling tied to the past.</p>
<p>The Mumpsimus is — was — a blog. It's a blog that lasted 20 years. It's fine to put a cap on that. I've brought over the public Patreon posts that were Mumpsimussy, but this is the last one that will be cross-posted. I'm stopping all updating of the blog. It will suffer whatever the electronic fates have in store for it: linkrot, image death, digital anomalies. Impermanence cannot be resisted; sometimes it can even be beautiful. </p><p>I will continue to persist in mistaken expressions and practices, but not with The Mumpsimus.</p>If I may quote myself from <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2003/08/whats-this-mad-universe.html">the second Mumpsimus post</a>: "Who knows what will come of all this?"</div></div></div></div></div>Matthew Cheneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07704529564308222004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-68193771100650364552023-08-16T18:00:00.001-04:002023-08-17T21:27:38.141-04:00Conquest by Nina Allan<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsy2U_5zdq0JLgI0HBUY7vO6oXyHHDeMCGGP_PDFnc_MGUeFILl0WH6liPndd0M8G-ma9WQAmIj3qUAdB9RkJUlZdlr17wSkYZayz4Dcta55neNzn5AB0EMwcGJZ3DblEkencSh1uOI9wuqh4oPltCYbvNZYyzPFOyL6DofrbjBTxvqwnDgja2/s954/Conquest%20Cover.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="954" data-original-width="620" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsy2U_5zdq0JLgI0HBUY7vO6oXyHHDeMCGGP_PDFnc_MGUeFILl0WH6liPndd0M8G-ma9WQAmIj3qUAdB9RkJUlZdlr17wSkYZayz4Dcta55neNzn5AB0EMwcGJZ3DblEkencSh1uOI9wuqh4oPltCYbvNZYyzPFOyL6DofrbjBTxvqwnDgja2/w416-h640/Conquest%20Cover.webp" width="416" /></a></div><p>I happened to read a <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5721367785">brief review</a> of Nina Allan's new novel <em>Conquest</em> by Ian Mond, wherein he calls it "a story about alternative truth, misinformation and art" that "features essays on the work of Shane Carruth and Hans Werner Henze, a 1958 science fiction novella that proves central to Frank’s ideology, and an obsession with J.S. Bach" — and I immediately ordered it from <a href="https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Conquest-by-Nina-Allan/9781529420777">Blackwell's</a>, where it was available for a good price and free shipping to the US. (It seems only to be available in the UK edition so far.)</p><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 fYcGch sc-rcywpx-0 hRKPxe" data-tag="post-content"><div class="sc-1ye87qi-0 cZNwdx"><p>You had me at conspiracy theories and Bach.</p><p>What <em>Conquest</em> turns out to be is one of the most quietly devilish explorations of narrative uncertainty that I know, a book where the hermeneutical fireworks burst at such distance that it takes a while for the soundwaves to thunder toward us after the sky has blown up. It is quite an easy book to read, rarely feeling dense or leaden even when discussing obscure material, yet it enacts some of the insights of Douglas Hofstadter's famously difficult <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach"><em>Gödel, Escher, Bach</em></a>.</p><p>As Ian Mond says in his review, the plot is quite easy to summarize: a man named Frank (who, though it's never stated or discussed, displays behavior that would likely be on the autism spectrum) disappears after becoming obsessed with the idea of a secret alien invasion/war that he has learned about via conspiracy theory forums online. He travels to France to meet with people he's talked with online and his family does not hear from him again. His longtime girlfriend, Rachel, gets frustrated with the police's lack of interest and Frank's family's apparent resignation, so she hires a private detective, a former police officer named Robin. The primary narrative of the book is Robin's search for Frank.</p><p>In good sci-fi fashion, <em>Conquest</em> teases the possibility of the secret alien war story being true, but Allan is too smart to write a clichéd tables-turned sort of story. Even better, she doesn't really take things in a Philip K. Dick direction, knowing that PKD did his thing better than anybody else, and there's no need to compete with him in some sort of paranoid-SF Olympics.</p><p>(In fact, the best comparison I can make to what Allan ultimately accomplishes is one I hesitate to mention, though for reasons I didn't know of until after I'd read the book. Throughout, I kept thinking, "This is like a book by somebody who really understands the work of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Priest_(novelist)">Christopher Priest</a> and is both riffing on that and taking it in directions of her own." [From me, this is high praise.] But after reading the book, I wanted to know more about Nina Allan, so I researched her a bit and discovered ... she and Christopher Priest live together. Reader, my heart sank. I of course wish them well and hope they have a beautiful and fulfilling life together, but the simple fact of their relationship complicates one of the best comparisons I have for <em>Conquest</em> because it feels dangerous to link a novel by one person to the work of the person they live with. Still, Allan did <a href="https://thequietus.com/articles/25508-christopher-priest-an-american-story-review">review</a> Priest's 9/11 conspiracy novel <a href="https://locusmag.com/2018/11/paul-kincaid-reviews-an-american-story-by-christopher-priest/"><em>An American Story</em></a><em> </em>in 2018, and that book is the one I most immediately thought of, so comparison is not entirely out of bounds, but we must be very careful not to inadvertently reduce Allan's achievement when making the comparison. She has her own concerns and style, and she's an immensely skilled writer. I will simply say: If you like Christopher Priest's novels, you will probably like <em>Conquest</em>, as it delivers many similar pleasures and challenges.)</p><p>The straightforward plot is given weight and complexity through an evidence-box structure: we encounter various points of view, most of them through texts that Robin collects in her investigation. While most of the chapters are told from Robin's perspective, the first is an exception. It gives us Frank's thoughts as he sits in a café in Paris awaiting his contact and reflecting on the patterns that brought him to that particular spot. Patterns obsess Frank, and Allan makes this not only clear expositionally but something we experience via stylistic choices. Through a tightly-focused third-person point of view, we experience Frank's way of thinking, his care for certain details, and the rushing thoughts he sometimes has. The rush is most obviously represented with strategically-constructed run-on sentences, while the obsession with detail is present most visibly in his habitual inclusion of catalog information for recordings, including <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis"><em>Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis</em></a> (BWV) numbers for Bach's music. (If you haven't spent much time comparing Bach recordings, this may seem more obsessive than it really is. The BWV numbers are an efficient and sometimes essential way to sort through Bach's large body of work. Even the record label name and year that Frank thinks of when he thinks of recordings are useful information for classical records, since many artists re-record favorite pieces through the years.) Here's a particularly excited paragraph:</p><blockquote>What if Bach was his trigger his activation meme an attraction that had been implanted, like with his dad? Frank thought about this a lot worried about it sometimes but here were some things you couldn't know for sure which meant it was probably safer to pretend you hadn't noticed. Frank owned fourteen different recordings of the Goldberg Variations. His four favourites in ascending order were András Schiff (ECM 2002), Glenn Gould (Sony 1955), Angela Hewitt (Hyperion 1999), Peter Serkin (RCA 1965). Serkin would always be his favourite because it was the first recording he had heard. There was a limit to what you could do with pre-digital recordings but Frank didn't mind the bumps and crackles, they gave the sound depth. (pp. 2-3)</blockquote><p>This is a rich paragraph of character information. The punctuation, syntax, and subject matter are hardly avant-garde at this point (interior monologue and stream of consciousness are now more than 100 years old), but I don't think Allan's goal is to be avant-garde. I think she simply sought the most accurate and effective form to convey her character's way of perceiving the world.</p><p>Notice the list of recordings. Used judiciously, lists are a particularly efficient tool for character development, and here if you know something about the <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/148455347/goldberg-week">Goldberg Variations</a> you will intuit a lot about Frank. Of course he likes Gould — Frank is very much a Glenn Gould type (I say with no scorn, as I myself became passionate about Bach when I got entranced by Gould at an early age, and I still listen to his recordings regularly) — but fights will break out among Gouldians over the comparable virtues of the 1955 vs. the 1981 recordings, since they are significantly different. (But whatever you think, seek out the video from the 1981 sessions — just being able to see <a href="https://youtu.be/G7EEACEefH0?t=1073">Gould's hands fly across the keyboard</a> is thrilling.) Serkin's 1965 recording was his first, made when he was a teenager, and he would go on to play the pieces throughout his life and record them again more than once. I doubt anybody, including Serkin, would claim the 1965 recording as one of the best ever made of the Goldbergs, but it makes sense that it captured Frank's imagination. It's the work of a young man, hugely talented, and the son of one of the most famous pianists of the 20th century, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Serkin">Rudolf Serkin</a>, who himself recorded the Goldbergs c. 1928 on piano roll. The Hewitt also makes sense, as it's unimpeachable, something of a reference recording. (Kirk McElhearn's <a href="https://bach-cantatas.com/NonVocal/Klavier-Goldberg-Hewitt-Kirk.htm">review</a> for the Bach Cantatas Website is informative.) The Schiff is something of a surprise, and particularly revealing: I don't know of another recording of the Goldbergs where the musician sounds like they are having so much fun. Many Bach recordings can feel coldly precise, but while Schiff certainly has precision, there's nothing cold about it, and I can imagine even Bach haters smiling at this recording. The presence of the Schiff on this list shows us that while Frank is certainly interested in the patterns the music makes (the other choices testify to this), he is still able to hear and appreciate whimsy and joy within the music and, presumably, in life.</p><p>But then Frank is gone. The second chapter gives us Robin's POV, and we will not return to Frank's for the rest of the book. Interestingly, some of the stylistic features of the first chapter continue: dialogue remains without quotation marks and titles are not italicized when we would expect them to be. This will continue throughout the novel, with the only differences (that I noticed) being in some of the evidentiary material, where things are punctuated somewhat more conventionally (though not entirely: book and movie titles, for instance, never get italicized).</p><p>Allan is a clear and careful writer, so the typographical minimalism of <em>Conquest</em> does not increase confusion once we're used to it, and if anything the simple absence of run-on sentences and comma splices makes the rest of the book feel like a breeze after we've adjusted to Frank's more idiosyncratic chapter. But here we encounter one of the great questions the book poses to us as readers throughout: <em>what should we make of this</em>? Are these unconventionalities quirks of Nina Allan's own — a la <a href="https://www.openculture.com/2013/08/cormac-mccarthys-punctuation-rules.html">Cormac McCarthy</a> — and matters of personal writerly preference ... or do they have something to do with the meaning of the text itself? Is plain text trying to tell us something? Are we being encouraged in our own hermeneutical endeavors through the pages' lack of the helpful guidance we're used to?</p><p>And then there are all the details which we may, like the novel's characters, be impelled to drop into search engines so that we can dive into some rabbit holes. I am not going to tell you how long I searched for one particular album that I am pretty certain never existed in our world, but which is so plausible that even now I think I just might not have found the most complete discography...</p><p>Welcome to the land of <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=4EPiQINbp-8C&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q&f=false">paranoid reading</a>, a style particularly well suited to the subject matter of <em>Conquest</em>. By the end of the book, I was seriously torn between thinking the mispelling of <em>nunc dimittis</em> (with one less t) was somehow purposeful and not a typo. A bigger part of me suspects it was a typo (easy one to make, hard one to catch), but the paranoid reader in me remains suspicious.</p><p>What makes <em>Conquest</em> powerful is not the fact that it cleverly nudges us toward paranoia ourselves. That's a neat trick, but it's only a trick. Since Allan's work till now has been marketed as genre fiction, she knows that many of her readers arrive with some genre expectations, and she plays with those masterfully. She knows we expect the book is going to vindicate Frank as a misunderstood genius, suggest that the alien war is real, and gently (or not gently) throw contempt toward the normies who doubted. SF loves a story of a nerd vindicated. You never alienate your readership with a revenge of the nerds/triumph of the nerds story. I have a soft spot for them myself.</p><p>But now more than ever we live in a world where the nerds have had their revenge — it's called Silicon Valley. The nerds have done terrible, terrible things to our society and planet. Fans may be <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fans_are_slans">slans</a>, but fans are also Musks, Bezoses, and Zuckerbergs.</p><p><em>Conquest</em> manages authentically and movingly to both affirm Frank's efforts and to avoid the burden of our genre expectations, proposing that we are trapped in uncertainties but not without dignity and grace. The truth is and is not out there. I won't reveal the particular mechanisms here, because they are best encountered with innocence, but will say simply that Allan, like Bach, knows something of counterpoint and of fugal structures.</p><p>(I may be about to give something away, but it is worth noting, so you should skip this parenthetical if you don't want to know anything. A good preparation for reading <em>Conquest</em>, or a good follow-up to it, is the story of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hendy-Freegard">Robert Hendy-Freegard</a>, a story that has been chronicled in the documentary <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puppet_Master:_Hunting_the_Ultimate_Conman"><em>The Puppet Master</em></a> [note the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puppet_Masters">Heinleinian</a> title, with Heinlein's novel entirely resonant with the idea of the war in <em>Conquest</em>] and in the feature film <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9731386/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_7_nm_1_q_rogue%2520agent"><em>Rogue Agent</em></a>. While <a href="https://letterboxd.com/mcheney/film/rogue-agent/">I thought</a> the latter was something of a missed opportunity, its great virtue is James Norton's performance, which makes it clear how a determined and charismatic man can bedazzle smart people into a con that, explained to people outside it, sounds absurd.)</p><p>Many of the chapters provide Robin's point of view and carry us through her thinking about the case and her quest to find Frank. Her own life story is important, as she finds coincidences within her past that may or may not be meaningful. Her desire for meaning and explanation becomes something of an obsession of her own, and one with its own consequences. At the same time, the extent of the coincidences, if we believe them all, makes the book feel contrived — and that's entirely intentional, I'm sure. We <em>should</em> feel at some point that there is just one coincidence too far, as if Allan has mashed together a couple Dickens-novels worth of networks and revelations into a single character's life story. There is one brief moment where we are, in fact, encouraged to wonder if we're reading, in the Robin story, a novel-within-a-novel written by the character of Jeanne-Marie Vanderlien. Once it was suggested, I held onto that possibility until the end of the novel.</p><p>Late in the book (p. 229), Robin has descended deep into the mystery. She "wonders if this is what it feels like to be Frank Landau: the thrum of anxiety, the unfounded suspicions, the inescapable and constant feeling of being watched." This is true for us, the readers, as well. Though we get Frank's direct perspective only in the first chapter, the rest of the book really is about conditioning us to his way of thinking. At the same time, it does not simply leave us there, helpless against the world's infinitely strange loops. This is not a book of total relativism, not a book that says anything is true if you believe it to be so. Belief is important, certainly, as it shapes our behavior, and our behavior shapes the world, so even if someone has a verifiably false belief, it can have significant, sometime lethal, effects on the world (cf. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon">QAnon</a>). And that's primarily what <em>Conquest</em> is about, not the difficulty of truth or even the <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/horror-of-belief-75257331">horrors</a> of belief, but the effects of belief on believers and the people around them. We all believe things, but what do our beliefs lead us to do?</p><p>While our own age has certainly made the incommensurable realities of clashing beliefs become a daily problem, it is not a new or unfamiliar problem. One of Allan's characters declares:</p><blockquote>There are many who insist that conspiracy theories and alternative facts are a poisonous by-product of the internet age, a new and virulent form of mania born out of the proliferation of social media dnt eh indisciriminate dissemination of uninformed opinion. But if Stephen's story shows us anything, it is that our secret enthusiasm for esoteric knowledge and occult drama is as old as time. More than that, it proves the reasons for our need of such mythologies have not altered: disgust with the status quo, the fanatical, and sometimes violent conviction that a better life must be possible, that the world can be changed. (p. 259)</blockquote><p>That's from a world-weary and cynical character, so the anti-utopianism of it may or may not be to your taste, but the basic idea is sound: the history of humanity is a history of paranoia and conspiratorial thinking, a history that yearns for a better, more meaningful life and finds it in the coincidences and overlaps within the chaotic stew of existence.</p><p>And, of course, plenty of conspiracies <em>do</em> exist. That's not at issue. What's at issue is the fervor with which we want them to exist.</p><p>In addition to Robin's story, <em>Conquest</em> includes chapters of other people's texts: essays by some of the conspiracists and, at greatest length, a science fiction novella supposedly from 1958 (the year that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_1">Sputnik 1</a> fell to Earth).</p><p>It's this latter piece, which spans pages 88 to 148, and is titled <em>The Tower</em>, that I am most befuddled by. I understand why Allan has included the other material in the book, and I understand why she might have included excerpts from <em>The Tunnel</em>, which is an important text for Frank and everyone else who believes in the secret war, but why put so much of it in the book, and why place it where it is, quite early on? It's not a great read. I almost gave up on <em>Conquest</em> by the time I was to page 110 or so. The <em>Tunnel</em> chapter is not even a convincing simulacrum of a 1958 pulp novel — the diction is wrong, much too contemporary. There are certainly resonances in the chapter with other material in <em>Conquest</em>, but the effort of wading through <em>The Tunnel</em> does not seem to be rewarded with any great insight later.</p><p>As best I can guess, that's the point. <em>The Tunnel</em> is neither convincing nor especially resonant, and it's definitely not entertaining. (It's no Heinlein!) That <em>this</em> text should be the one that captures the conspiracists' imaginations to the point where they analyze every word of it is telling. If we had not had so much of it to read, we might have been tempted to think that what was left out was more compelling than it is.</p><p>Still, it's quite a choice to bog down <em>Conquest</em> with <em>The Tunnel</em>. And I don't know what to do with how unconvincing it is as a faux-1958 piece of writing. (Most obviously, the characters use swear words that would not have been allowed in most novels of the time, certainly not in paperback genre novels.) Should we think that it is, within the world of <em>Conquest</em>, a fake that has been taken for the real thing by the characters? And what, then, would that mean?</p><p>Here, again, we are trapped in the paranoia of reading. Unable to see a clear meaning, we make one up. We seek to impose meaning. We choose to believe something because hovering in ambiguity or ignorance is too unsettling, too annoying. (Who wants to read 60 pages for no reason?) <em>The Tunnel</em> is not quite a red herring, but it's overdetermined and overemphasized, even within the pages (literally) of <em>Conquest</em>.</p><p>As Robin looks through Frank's posts to an online message board, she wonders "why it is that most people are able to watch a film or read a book no matter how disturbing and never question the fact that it is simply a story, when there are others — often sensitive, vulnerable or imaginative people like Frank — who seem compelled to treat such stories as instalments in a secret narrative only they and their fellow initiates recognize the truth of" (p. 187).</p><p><em>Welcome</em>, Allan's book seems to say, <em>fellow initiates</em>.</p><p>This is not just about metafictional game playing or philosophical noodling. It <em>is</em> that, certainly, and it's part of the fun of the book, but the farther we get into the story, the more we have to consider the stakes. There are a lot of considerations, but one that most struck me was the use of Shane Carruth's film <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2084989/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1"><em>Upstream Color</em></a>.</p><p><em>Upstream Color</em> is a beautiful, strange, beguiling film. When I first watched it in 2013, <a href="https://letterboxd.com/mcheney/film/upstream-color/">I called it</a> "A flow of sound and light, a hypnotism." Shane Carruth is a phenomenally talented writer and director. He is also someone who has been charged with domestic violence and who seems to have had a longtime anger problem. (Fullest account is via the YouTube video <a href="https://youtu.be/L9CH1p7_oQQ">"The Downward Spiral of Shane Carruth"</a>; for most recent developments I'm aware of, see <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/shanecarruth/comments/ydpywg/shane_carruth_pleads_nc_to_one_count_of_domestic/">this Reddit post</a> noting that he was sentenced to 10 days in county jail, though I don't know the source of the Reddit info, so, appropriately for this conversation, it should be taken with a grain of salt. The other information about Carruth is public and widely reported.)</p><p>That Allan brings <em>Upstream Color</em> and Shane Carruth in to <em>Conquest</em> is a masterstroke, adding new resonances and challenges. What we make of those resonances and challenges is up to us. If we want to think about the difficulty of terrible people creating great art, we are free to do so, and free then to link it to the many other resonances and challenges of the novel. We may have no knowledge of the rather obscure film and its director and so choose to move on, which is also fine — the Carruth material is a tiny part of the whole, so you'll lose a little grace note, perhaps, but nothing especially consequential for your experience of the book. If we want to think about the ideas of <em>Upstream Color</em>, separate from the awfulness of Shane Carruth's behavior, we can do so. It all works, but what we choose to think about will affect at least a little bit of what we experience across the other pages of this novel.</p><p>What most surprised me by the end was how emotionally effective the final pages were. Halfway through the book, I began to doubt whether it was going to have anything but an intellectual payoff. I resigned myself to that — <em>this is a philosophical novel</em>, I thought, <em>and so I shouldn't expect it to have rich characterization; that's not the game it's playing</em>. To a large extent, that remained true throughout, even at the end. Mostly, the characterization is adequate to hold our interest, but that's about as far as it goes. Or so I thought. In the final pages I began to discover that Allan had set some boobytraps in my brain. From the information about Robin, Frank, and Rachel I had extrapolated enough to be able to care about these figures in the text as if they were actual people. Maybe not actual people I know well as friends or family members, as more character-focused novels might achieve, but well enough that I cared about their fates. They had become familiar acquaintances. I did not discover this, though, until the fates got complicated at the end of the book. I was quite surprised — pleasantly — to discover that I wanted things to turn out in a particular way for these images of people I had let Allan's words build in my imagination.</p><p>After reading the last sentence of the novel, I went back through <em>Conquest</em> in search of clues I'd missed, but also seeking more time with these characters I had grown fond of. I was reluctant to let it all end. Luckily, like a skilled work of contrapuntal music, <em>Conquest</em> is a book that benefits from revisiting; like a magic fractal it rewards entering at any moment and looking around, comparing part and whole, seeking new perspectives on its kaleidoscopic vision. I expect to continue to do so for a long time to come.</p></div></div>Matthew Cheneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07704529564308222004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-8056632091557580782023-08-08T15:30:00.000-04:002023-08-17T21:24:30.671-04:00Sinéad<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimO4rthAGMJMc4dKbSA6Rfh0tQuSlPMhJBzcZH3BdYEuD5OTDdi48gtn1nocFvv0otkN21r1bBLFL2rLz6SJUv4_-61LcRCbhpeeycI615FdhRevPPGpVa0uG0tatDP5xk6iJtfEgVFFmn5EhdW_BJWU7xujLEkh7ybFA9oDTto00qeAHQdIfb/s620/Idonotwantwhatihaventgot.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="620" data-original-width="620" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimO4rthAGMJMc4dKbSA6Rfh0tQuSlPMhJBzcZH3BdYEuD5OTDdi48gtn1nocFvv0otkN21r1bBLFL2rLz6SJUv4_-61LcRCbhpeeycI615FdhRevPPGpVa0uG0tatDP5xk6iJtfEgVFFmn5EhdW_BJWU7xujLEkh7ybFA9oDTto00qeAHQdIfb/w640-h640/Idonotwantwhatihaventgot.webp" width="640" /></a></div> <p></p><p>When music gets you, it goes deep. Schopenhauer <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hist-westphilmusic-since-1800/#RomaMetaMusiScho">believed</a> it's the only art that goes past the illusions of life and expresses — even exists at — the base level of reality itself. Anyone with a sensitivity to music knows that there is nothing else that so quickly mingles with emotions and memory. Which perhaps is why we experience such a wrenching ache at the death of any artist behind the music that remains most entangled with our emotions and memories.</p><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 fYcGch sc-rcywpx-0 hRKPxe" data-tag="post-content"><div class="sc-1ye87qi-0 cZNwdx"><p>I was surprised by the force of feeling that struck me when I heard the news of Sinéad O'Connor's death. I hadn't been playing her music all that often these days. I'd revisited it pretty significantly after watching the (excellent) documentary <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10196368"><em>Nothing Compares</em></a> a year or so ago, but that was only for about a week. Not like when I was in high school and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Do_Not_Want_What_I_Haven%27t_Got"><em>I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got</em></a> lived in my CD player.</p><p>Today, the hearse carrying the body of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin%C3%A9ad_O%27Connor">Shuhada' Sadaqat</a> made its way through the seaside town of Bray, Ireland to a private burial service. I don't write about her with her chosen name because my experience of her is not of that person but of the public figure who was Sinéad O'Connor. But I rarely have ever thought of her by last name as I would most other public figures and many other cherished musicians and artists. She was always just Sinéad.</p><p>That inability to think of her as anything but <em>Sinéad</em> signals the sense of intimacy her work inspired in so many people. Often, the use of only a first name for someone can feel disrespectful. I didn't know this person, never interacted with them, they never knew of my existence. There's a particular danger in a patriarchal society to referring to women only by their first name. It can be trivializing, infantilizing. That danger remains, but still — I remember lying on the floor of my bedroom, headphones on, listening to the a cappella title song of <em>I Do Not Want...</em> and feeling welcomed into something like a meditative experience, feeling that somehow I had been given a mantra, a path, a way forward. Millions of other people felt the same, I am sure. And how could we think of the voice that bestowed this gift in anything other than a familiar way? How could we think of this as coming from "O'Connor" — from anyone other than <em>Sinéad</em>? And so she always remained for me.</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/87387185/385abaca7bf94bfaa55fd326dcc227c3/e30%3D/1.PNG?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=hMCp0-3cUqdfUNDMQJ_6wu0L0FO4jIOCMMR-7E40APg%3D" /></p><p>Like so many people, I first noticed Sinéad O'Connor via the video for <a href="https://youtu.be/0-EF60neguk">"Nothing Compares 2 U"</a>. It was released in early 1990, so I would have been 14. I could watch MTV occasionally in the afternoons while my parents were at work. I remember first seeing her face — I thought I was looking at the most beautiful boy I had ever seen. Quickly enough, I realized this was a woman, and I was beguiled. The video was terrifying and enchanting to a kid whose feelings about gender and life and everything were already all over the place. Even now, it's a powerful piece of cinema. Her face is striking, but it's the melding of physical and musical performance that makes it so powerful. </p><p>One of the hallmarks of Sinéad's work for me is its ability to move from crystalline beauty to razor-edged fury in the space of a single note. In the video we see her astonishingly expressive face do the same. But without mugging — that's the important point. This is no Jim Carrey performance! In a tiny change of gaze, her entire mien shifts. It's breathtaking, transfixing.</p><p>And of course there was the hair. If you weren't alive in 1990, you may find it hard to believe how perplexing and shocking that shaved head was to so many people, especially heterosexual men. I loved her hair the moment I saw it, but reading <a href="http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/amanda-marcotte/107121/the-gospel-according-to-sinead-o-connor-she-was-right-all-along">Amanda Marcotte's tribute to Sinéad</a> I immediately remembered switching the channel away from the video if my father was in the room. Marcotte writes:</p><blockquote>I was 12 years old when "Nothing Compares 2 U" came out, and I had to pray the video would only show up on MTV when no father, stepfather or uncle was in the room. I just wanted to wallow in Sinéad's perfect, gorgeous song without hearing snide remarks about her (lack of) hair. </blockquote><p>The scorn that haircut caused was astonishing, and in retrospect I hardly believe my memories of it, but then I remember that the repulsion and visceral hatred my father's face displayed when he saw that video was the same I saw from him a little later when Hillary Clinton was on tv. Marcotte explains it in a way that sort of gets at that — "It was only years later that I realized what they were so mad about: They resented the implication that a woman has a right to exist for a reason other than pleasing a man." — but I think it was deeper, even more atavistic. It was, yes, about withholding a certain type of (hetero) male pleasure, but it was also something about power, vulnerability, beauty, and how they all mingle within a single person and a single song.</p><p>I did not buy many CDs in 1990 (they were hugely expensive!), but I got <em>I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got </em>on CD. Hearing the other songs was a revelation. The only comparable experience I'd had with music had been when I got <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracy_Chapman_(album)">Tracy Chapman's first album</a> (on tape) a year and a half or so earlier. I'd loved "Fast Car" — I even remember when I first heard it: sitting in a car with friends going up to summer camp, the song came on the radio, and I said something about liking "his voice" and one of my friends looked at me like I was the stupidest person who ever lived and said, "Tracy Chapman's a <em>girl</em>." (You might be noticing something about the singers I fell hard for when I was a kid...) Chapman's album was a mindblower for obvious reasons — beautiful music, but also ... well, you can imagine how little exposure I had as a young teenager in rural New Hampshire to the ideas in songs like "Talkin' 'bout a Revolution" and "Behind the Wall" and "Mountains o' Things" and — the whole album, really. It began an education.</p><p><em>I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got</em> continued that education. As a male-identified only child in a fairly remote place, I had little access to female experience or emotions, and Sinéad provided a view of existence otherwise inaccessible to me. </p><p>I didn't know what "Three Babies" was about, but the simple, ethereal, yet visceral way she sang it conveyed something far beyond the lyrics. (<em>The face of you ... the smell of you ... will always be with me.</em>) Then came "Emperor's New Clothes", a song that quickly became one of my favorites on the album, not only because of its great beat but because of its defiant stance. That stance welcomed me in — I was a nerdy kid in a world without much room for such beings, I was desperately trying to hold onto a vision of a way to escape, and lines like "I won't go anywhere nice for a while, all I want to do is just sit here and write it all down and rest for a while" spoke to me in the way that things perhaps only Speak To You when you're a teenager. But then to identify with the song, which I did, I also had to identify with the other lyrics: "I would return to nothing without you if I'm your girlfriend or not" and that astonishing chorus: "If I treated you mean, I really didn't mean to. But you know how it is. And how a pregnancy can change you..." I loved how Sinéad sang that last line, loved singing along and trying to match her pronunciation: <em>How a pragggnancy can change you</em>, which meant having to imagine my way, at least a little bit, into the emotional space of a pregnant woman. I read lots of science fiction back then, but little of it ever expanded my brain to the same extent as those simple lines of music.</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/87387185/fd27148422b94cc7bc528b88378a88da/eyJ3Ijo4MjAsIndlYnAiOjB9/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=2J4KdpHRochAlvMoyBHvlBxD3CffWHcfEoaZ2zJL_o4%3D" /></p><p>And then "Black Boys on Mopeds". I don't really know how to write about that song. It was a song I was deeply attracted to for its music and deeply frightened of for what it made me think about. I remember what it felt like, I have an intellectual understanding of my experience, but I'm so far away from my younger self now that it's hard to recapture the seismic force of that song on my understanding of the world. All I can really say here is the moment I heard of Sinéad's death, that song came into my head, and not just that song but a specific line: "If they hated me, they will hate you." That was the line that bonded us. That was when she first became <em>Sinéad</em> for me.</p><p>That song is also why I was always heartily on her side after the <em>Saturday Night Live</em> incident. I stayed up to watch it. Not really knowing any of the context, not being Catholic, I didn't really understand it in the moment, but I noticed all the condemnation of her, the jokes and the supposed outrage (were people <em>really</em> outraged or were they just indulging in the same feelings that caused them to scorn her when they saw her shaved head?). I don't think I am aggrandizing my past self when I remember that I only ever felt solidarity with her. "Black Boys on Mopeds" had prepared me. <em>These are dangerous days. To say what you feel is to dig your own grave.</em></p><p>The fall of 1990, I entered high school. I got cast in a play, <em>Crimes of the Heart</em>, where most of the other actors were senior women. Somehow or other, they found out I liked Sinéad's music. (None of my male friends did. Quite the opposite. Even to admit that you liked it felt like admitting to being a fag. I certainly wasn't going to do that!) One of them loaned me her tape of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lion_and_the_Cobra"><em>Lion and the Cobra</em></a> and said, "Listen to 'Troy'." "That's the great song," another said. "That's <em>the</em> song." I listened to the whole album, but I really didn't get it. The music felt more alien to me than the music on her second album. I especially didn't get "Troy". I had no frame of reference for any of it, musically or literarily or emotionally. But I remembered that this was something of a sacred song for my friends, friends who seemed immensely older and wiser than I was, more experienced with the world, and I kept coming back to that song (I'd copied their tape onto a blank tape of my own). The force of that song, its beautiful fury, scalded me when I first heard it, but eventually its beauties found their way into my ears, and its edges became my own.</p><p>I got Sinéad's other albums as they came out, up through <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith_and_Courage"><em>Faith and Courage</em></a> in 2000, then, like many people, lost track of her. I heard about some of her mental health challenges, some of her erratic behavior, but I always thought ... well, of course, she's Sinéad O'Connor. She's tremendously sensitive and the world has put her through the wringer again and again, why would we expect her to be other than she is? In some ways, I took her for granted. She had been so strong for so long, I just assumed she would always be able to bounce back. I didn't realize that I assumed she would always be there.</p><p>After watching <em>Nothing Compares</em>, I explored her later albums, and was pleased to discover that despite the ups and downs of her career and life, her music remained powerful, innovative, beautiful. There's nothing like her first two albums, those stunning eruptions of beauty and fire, but so what? Nobody could sustain the power of those albums and stay alive. Her voice remained unique.</p><p>This morning, I read <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/fans-bid-seaside-farewell-sinead-oconnor-with-songs-flags-flowers-2023-08-08/">a Reuters article</a> about the funeral procession through Bray. A comment from one of the onlookers got me: "She represented our transition from a very dark past into a hopeful future and I'm just here to say thanks for being with me along that journey, and for maybe putting words and expression on what I felt but didn't quite know how to say."</p><p>The outpouring of love for Sinéad in these days after her death has sometimes felt like something that came too late. Where were the famous people full of compassion when she was alive? There were some, certainly, but not enough, especially not when it really mattered, when it was really hard. Compassion is an affectation when you only save it for the people it's easy to feel compassion for.</p><p>Maybe we can learn from that, too. Maybe that's something she's been teaching us, something she will continue to teach us as we play her music, as we listen to recordings of her astonishing voice.</p><p>This beauty didn't come from someone who was always easy to understand, always easy to get along with, always easy to hold close to the heart. But she was alive, and she herself had tremendous generosity and compassion when she was able, because she knew how it felt to be a raw nervous system in a punishing world. She knew. It's why we loved her, why we listen to her, why we mourn her so deeply.</p><p>After Sinéad, I went on to find solace in the music and voices of Billie Holiday, Tori Amos, PJ Harvey, Patti Smith, and Ani DiFranco. Male musicians would be important in their own way, but when I think of the deepest musical connections I felt in my high school and college years, it's those women who come to mind, and they're the musicians I think of now as I think of her and all she gave to this world.</p><p>Go forth now, Sinéad, with our love. Be at peace. There is no other Troy for you to burn.</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/87387185/e78f4f7d505d4df39de5142aaa69b994/eyJ3Ijo4MjB9/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=tshSdQbldj_DS3d0OMyciXp9p4qSg1C-95DUu3fJBsE%3D" /></p><p><br /></p></div></div><a class="sc-rcywpx-6 crbBfh" data-tag="post-tag" href="https://www.patreon.com/matthew_cheney/posts?filters%5Btag%5D=The%20Mumpsimus"><p class="sc-ikJyIC LVabT" color="gray2"><br /></p></a>Matthew Cheneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07704529564308222004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-19486105225693296922023-08-04T20:00:00.001-04:002023-08-17T21:22:22.726-04:00Hilma af Klint: The Spirit of Abstraction<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAqHl0Wfesv7G3Ea1WMYj6K_ViYUGIi9anQedT9vgNb9Zj5rgeF-xQ8e-wD_2hHZBtzWlAbvNgaSe30LXzpx2r8th3vHDR9SotWsqrBKj2OwwK7SYrTlM5ZLHSuxe7DPUktMAOfYqWS91qyp7pSnnW60uojdPRgsL347I1kdfJ58X3YjO7cEn9/s930/Voss%20HaK.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="930" data-original-width="620" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAqHl0Wfesv7G3Ea1WMYj6K_ViYUGIi9anQedT9vgNb9Zj5rgeF-xQ8e-wD_2hHZBtzWlAbvNgaSe30LXzpx2r8th3vHDR9SotWsqrBKj2OwwK7SYrTlM5ZLHSuxe7DPUktMAOfYqWS91qyp7pSnnW60uojdPRgsL347I1kdfJ58X3YjO7cEn9/w426-h640/Voss%20HaK.webp" width="426" /></a></div><br /><p></p><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 fYcGch sc-rcywpx-0 hRKPxe" data-tag="post-content"><div class="sc-1ye87qi-0 cZNwdx"><blockquote>"To paint in earth's dull colours the forms clothed in the living light of other worlds is a hard and thankless task; so much the more gratitude is due to those who have attempted it. They needed coloured fire, and had only ground earths." </blockquote><blockquote>—Annie Besant, "Foreword", <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/16269/16269-h/16269-h.htm"><em>Thought-Forms</em></a> by Annie Besant & C.W. Leadbeater </blockquote><p>Julia Voss's <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo180517543.html">recent biography</a> of the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) is a revelatory study of a woman whose work was mostly unseen until the 1980s and not especially well known even fifteen years ago. </p><p>In 2013, Sweden's Moderna Museet put together <a href="https://www.modernamuseet.se/stockholm/en/exhibitions/hilma-af-klint-2013/">a large exhibition</a> which toured Europe. And then the Guggenheim Museum in New York opened a massive exhibit devoted to af Klint (<a href="https://www.guggenheim.org/exhibition/hilma-af-klint"><em>Paintings for the Future</em></a>)<em> </em>— it became their most popular show in history, with reports of visitors waiting in line for hours for the chance to see the work of an artist few had likely heard of before. In 2019, Halina Dyrschka directed an excellent documentary, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9760516/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_2_nm_1_q_hilma%2520af%2520klint%2520beyond"><em>Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint</em></a>, and then in 2022 Lasse Hallström released a slick and shallow biopic, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14620236/"><em>Hilma</em></a>. Within the space of about ten years, then, Hilma af Klint has gone from obscurity to serious study to popularity to Hollywood-style cliché.</p><p>There is still much to see, think about, and consider. Hilma af Klint will likely always remain something of a mystery, which is also part of her allure.</p><p>During her lifetime, af Klint had some exhibitions, especially of her realistic paintings, and sought out opportunities for more exhibitions, but the abstract and symbolic nature of her major works continually posed obstacles for a mainstream audience. To what extent this bothered her is difficult to say, because so much of what she created was done for reasons beyond artistic practice. She often showed a great confidence in herself because she did not see her work as simple self-expression. She saw it as spiritual communication. She seems to have come to believe that time was necessary for the world to catch up to what she wanted to communicate, that the messages she received from the realm beyond materiality were messages for the future. </p><p>"She did not doubt her work," Voss writes, "but she doubted her contemporaries, and so she made a decision." (The translation is by Anne Posten.) In 1932 she created a code (+X) to identify all of the works that must be saved for later: "All works which are to be opened twenty years after my death bear the above sign." She was smart to choose as her heir her nephew Erik. He stored everything and did as she instructed. </p><p>In 1966, Erik af Klint and his son Johan opened the boxes for the first time since the paintings, drawings, and notebooks had been put in storage after Hilma af Klint's death.</p><p>And thus the future began.</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/87077878/d1914e35ab1840c3a1ddacf968b78a65/eyJ3Ijo4MjB9/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=JZ0lMCe0E7sHHQiLfoyo5OJNfcQDggwaD9m6JJHON8c%3D" /></p><p>It's an astonishing trajectory, and we are lucky to have Voss's careful, thoughtful book to guide us through the temptations of hyperbole and kitsch, the petrifying force of simplified narratives, the urge to diminish the strangeness of the past. Within the short amount of time that the world has known anything about af Klint, myths and legends have already solidified around her, and Voss quietly pries at least a few of them free.</p><p>For instance, the story of af Klint's reception by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Steiner">Rudolf Steiner</a>, a man she idolized as a spiritual brother. It's a story Hallström's movie uses as a key point of conflict, heightening even the myth. The mythic story takes various forms, but the forms all revolve around the idea that Steiner was dismissive of af Klint's art; that he told her to pay more attention to her heart than her head and/or told her that it wasn't art if it was just the result of what spirit voices told her to do and/or he said her art would only be appreciated 50 years in the future; that his rejection crushed her. Like many legends, this one has elements of truth. Steiner does seem to have visited af Klint, and she certainly visited him in Dornach toward the end of his life. It seems clear from the bits of evidence that Voss has been able to uncover in various archives that Steiner preferred other artists to af Klint. Though it is reasonable to assume af Klint was disappointed that Steiner did not embrace her work more enthusiastically, there is no evidence she felt rejected by him. Voss states that "af Klint never wrote about being disappointed or that Steiner had suggested her paintings would only find an audience half a century later." The evidence that survives shows that Steiner understood the main ideas of af Klint's work when he saw it, but he didn't have much time — he was, as Voss points out, quite clearly in a hurry between appointments while visiting Stockholm, probably in January 1910 (there are no dates on the surviving notes of the visit). "The situation was probably less than ideal," Voss writes, since "af Klint had given up her studio at Hamngatan 9, so Steiner was confronted with an overwhelming multitude of works, presumably in a cramped space."</p><p>The uncertainty around this visit between af Klint and Steiner exemplifies a lot about her life and art. While her archive is huge — over 1,200 works of art and 26,000 pages of writings — there is very little personal information in it. For most of the events of her life, any statement we make about her feelings is speculative. There is documentary evidence for a lot of <em>what</em> happened in her life, but very little about her emotions or opinions. Nonetheless, from here in the future, we yearn to place a sense of her self into the story of her art — exactly what she sought to avoid.</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/87077878/f22809526e86449aa5131725b0236184/eyJ3Ijo4MjAsIndlYnAiOjB9/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=BW2EEiskv_P6mOSQpkfBxS59hozpXR9P1EkTi6mTCL4%3D" /></p><p>Voss does a nice job of not marginalizing, trivializing, or explaining away af Klint's spiritual beliefs; she also allows us to see af Klint as someone with serious scientific interests for whom spiritual experiences were often a type of research. From her late teens to the end of her life, af Klint felt herself in conversation with both the spirits of dead people and with ethereal beings who, she believed, offered her a vision of a world beyond materialism, a world where dualism was resolved, where genders were fluid and united, where energies like love provide sustaining, generative power. Her beliefs were real and meaningful to her, providing the primary justification for her art, and so must be treated with the seriousness with which the beliefs of artists who held more familiar or traditional philosophies and religions are treated. Voss does so. Much work still remains to be done, though, particularly by scholars with deep knowledge of Theosophy, the occult, and <a href="https://dasgoetheanum.com/en/hilma-interview-with-anne-weise/">especially</a> Anthroposophy. The implications and meaning of af Klint's interest first in Rosicrucianism, then Theosophy, and then Anthroposophy are many, and those implications and meanings are unlikely to be well presented by anyone without knowledge of the nuances of the beliefs. </p><p>I would be especially interested to see an analysis by someone with deep experience of Steiner's writings and Anthroposophy who could delineate to what extent af Klint's approach fits within or deviates from mainstream Anthroposophy. She does not seem to have considered herself to be an iconoclast — in 1943, rejecting an offer to have her work preserved by an organization associated with another faith, she responded that her outlook was that of an Anthroposophist, her work the work of an Anthroposophist. Voss quotes a letter from af Klint to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyra_Kleen">Tyra Kleen</a> in September that year: "Putting the work one day in the hands of people who do not have an Anthroposophical outlook might be problematic."</p><p>Just how problematic is clear from Hallström's movie. In <em>Hilma, </em>af Klint's spiritual experiences are presented first as trauma after her sister's Hermina's death at age 10 in 1880. (The cause is unknown, but Voss says it was most likely pneumonia.) Though certainly the death was a great loss for Hilma, and she kept her sister's memory alive for the rest of her life, Erik af Klint said his aunt told him her spiritual experiences went back to her childhood. At least from Voss's narrative of Hilma's life, she doesn't seem to have attached any particular change in beliefs or sense of the universe to Hermina's death. Indeed, by 1879, a year before the death, af Klint had met and begun working with the artist and spiritualist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_Valerius">Bertha Valerius</a>, and the oldest notebook in the af Klint archive documents (among other things) séances af Klint attended in 1879 where Valerius channeled voices of various beings: "the spirits that Vlaerius called during the séances," Voss writes, "came in friendship. They brought good news from the beyond: news of love, joy, and happiness."</p><p>Hallström's presentation of this sort of material ranges from embarrassing to embarrassed. Hermina is depicted in gauzy light, a visual cliché representing little more than stock sentimentality. The scenes of af Klint and her friends involved in spiritual activities are perfunctory, missing both the philosophical seriousness with which the actual people engaged in such work and the significant portion of their lives they devoted to it. In the film, the older Hilma seems to be little more than a disappointed old lady on the verge of dementia — a representation that is a real betrayal of the actual Hilma af Klint. The spiritual is simply not what interests Hallström, and so he misses the story of Hilma af Klint and her art.</p><p>(The only contemporary filmmaker I can think of who might be able to capture some of the spirit of Hilma af Klint cinematically is Terrence Malick. <a href="https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5921-the-tree-of-life-let-the-wind-speak"><em>The Tree of Life</em></a> has much more in common with Hilma af Klint than <em>Hilma</em> does.)</p><p>The story of her art is also a story of gender, and particularly of women. Af Klint's beliefs led her to embrace what we would now think of as gender fluidity, or the transcendence of gender. It was based on ideas going back to Plato's <em>Symposium</em>, a common reference point among progressive thinkers about sex and gender at the time (including Theosophists), but af Klint went a bit further than others. Like her contemporaries, she had a hard time thinking outside the dualistic roles of man/woman, writing of "womanman" and "manwoman", saying, "Many female costumes conceal a man. Many male costumes conceal the woman." This is not far from Blavatsky's own concept of androgynous deities and the androgynous origins of humans, ideas which recur regularly throughout <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Doctrine"><em>The Secret Doctrine</em></a>. But even as af Klint worked from concepts based in two human genders, she sought to escape the limits and strictures of gender altogether. Voss writes: "For her, the blurring of the boundaries between the sexes was the freest state of the soul. Not only that: she argued that the spirit strives toward such a state, following the law of completion, the longing for union that is characteristic of all living beings." </p><p>In the material world, af Klint's own sense of union seems to have been entirely with women. Something that Voss's biography makes clear and even Hallström's movie depicts fairly well is the extent to which af Klint created for herself a communal world of women. This goes beyond the fact that her two great loves were women (Anna Cassel and Thomasine Anderson). From her earliest spiritualist explorations until at least middle age, her social, spiritual, and artistic life centered around groups of women. She designed and built a studio in Munsö for the purpose not only of housing her paintings but also of offering a refuge and residency for research into plants, animals, and minerals. "Henceforth," she wrote, "our work is not separated from each other."</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/87077878/ee764f381a644e9daf7770b8354b50d6/eyJ3Ijo4MjB9/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=vKQaNuMgFTAxDxQBNagWFK9dAuG65eb4aO4bjEcJsN0%3D" /></p><p>Though she seems to have shown no yearning for marriage, it would not have been in her best interest even if she were so inclined: a Swedish law of 1870 granted women rights as legal adults and the right to a profession — but those rights disappeared with marriage. Sexism was baked into many supposedly scientific concepts, and the art world was often explicitly and prohibitively sexist. Experimenting in communities of women, af Klint discovered that all the various qualities of personality necessary for life and union were present, and the worst features of sexist society were held at bay. Men were often an obstacle and generally a hindrance during her life. She was better off without them. By her own choice, however, it would be a sensitive, thoughtful man (her nephew) who would deliver her work into the future.</p><p>She spent much of her life building community with women, but this is not to say that those communal experiences were always delightful for her or the people around her. Hilma af Klint was a confident woman who came to dominate all of the groups she chose to associate with, sometimes causing tensions. She had not just a strong will but a strong vision. At times, it was probably thrilling for her compatriots to surrender themselves to her extraordinary intuition and talents, but it must have been exasperating sometimes for the other women to be faced with Hilma declaring that they must follow her lead because that's what the spirits command.</p><p>Since her time with Bertha Valerius, af Klint had made notes, sketches, and drawings influenced by or under the command of spiritual forces, work that often took a geometric or abstract form. 1906 brought something new: the <em>Primordial Chaos</em> series, the first of the <em>Paintings for the Temple</em>. These were works that af Klint thought of as commissions from the mystic beings she and her group of seekers called the High Masters. The paintings from 1906-1908 were completed mediumistically, like large-scale versions of the automatic drawings she and her fellow believers had been practicing with for a while. The results were sometimes symbolic, often entirely abstract. Then in 1912, af Klint began the second group of <em>Paintings from the Temple</em>, beginning with the <em>US Series</em>, and now the spirits commanded her to take more control. In a notebook, she recorded them as saying, "It is hereby intended that you (H) be trained as a willing servant to work for one year on our idea starting roughly from today, not in a mediumistic manner but independently." (Quoted in the foreword to <a href="https://www.artbook.com/9789189069114.html"><em>Catalogue Raisonné Vol. 2: The Paintings for the Temple</em></a>.)</p><p>The question of abstract art has been a frequent and not especially illuminating one in discussions of Hilma af Klint's work. Because so much of popular and scholarly art history has been dominated by a male perspective, there is an understandable desire to push against the idea that abstract art began with men (Kandinsky, Mondrian, etc.). In an important way, it's absolutely true that abstraction wasn't "invented" by a male artist. Depending on how you want to define abstraction, it's easy enough to point to someone like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgiana_Houghton">Georgiana Houghton</a> (1814-1884) and dispense with the Men of Abstract Painting narrative. However, there are two complicating factors: first, the lack of influence of women artists in comparison to male artists because of the stubbornly patriarchal assumptions of the art world until very recently; second, the challenge of defining what abstraction means.</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/87077878/4c374c815423457e9615cff167dfc76f/e30%3D/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=smM9umeAeKIYETBgSE0MmGRoNJlcMJY3_lIwJgdvq2k%3D" /></p><p>Abstract art by women has only recently begun to be influential, either because it was dismissed by artists, critics, and collectors who clung to sexist assumptions, or because, in af Klint's case at least, it was unknown and literally inaccessible. (Often, in fact, the two go together: an artist is marginalized because of sexist assumptions, rendering their work invisible.) Once we move beyond the problem of assumptions that make some art valued and similar art not, the remaining questions of influence, of who got there first, of who did it best are all little more than parlor games, because with a broad concept like <em>abstract art</em>, a concept with numerous definitions and delineations, there can be no satisfying origin story.</p><p>More interesting to explore is the value of abstraction to artists — of what we might call the affordances of abstraction. What does abstraction allow that representation does not?</p><p>In the case of Houghton, af Klint, Kandinsky, and plenty of other artists, that question brings us back to spirituality. This was clear even from the beginning: in the 1870s, after a small exhibition of Georgiana Houghton's spiritualist paintings, Houghton's approach was interpreted as in line with Asian (particularly Buddhist) art by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Yule">Sir Henry Yule</a> and by Madame Blavatsky herself in <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/68705/pg68705-images.html#Footnote_895">a footnote</a> in <em>Isis Unveiled</em>, quoting Yule on Houghton's exhibit. For Julia Voss, the history of abstraction in art is a history of the spiritual in art, beginning "in 1857, when the English writer Camilla Dufour Crosland recorded her experiences with spiritual apparitions and furnished her <a href="https://www.weiserantiquarian.com/pages/books/55357/mrs-newton-crosland/light-in-the-valley-my-experiences-of-spiritualism?soldItem=true">book</a> [<em>Light in the Valley: My Experiences of Spiritualism</em>]<em> </em>with nonrepresentational illustrations and those by the artist <a href="https://www.collegeofpsychicstudies.co.uk/enlighten/medium-artist-anna-mary-howitt/">Anna Mary Howitt</a>." </p><p>What for lack of a better word we call abstraction was a necessary tool to provide a glimpse of the immaterial world. Voss writes: "The communications, revelations, or disclosures came from another dimension where the spirit had freed itself from matter, from objects and things. It was therefore no longer an issue of depicting something. If content determines form, abstraction is the natural mode of the spirit." One quibble with that description comes to mind: such art is "depicting something" — but the <em>something</em> is beyond the reach of straightforward representation. Functionally, such art is the equivalent of illustrations in a physics textbook's chapter on quantum mechanics.</p><p>Af Klint tends to be referred to as a mystic, and that's certainly not wrong, but this label diminishes the importance of science to her art. The overlaps between science and mysticism have been lost to an age that <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/myths-of-77662864">likes to think of itself as disenchanted</a>, but as Voss points out repeatedly, there was no contradiction in af Klint's mind between her spiritual and scientific investigations. (To his credit, Hallström depicts this from the beginning of his film.) This was an artist who painted whole series titled <em>Evolution</em> and <em>The Atom</em>. Her early work included numerous realistic <a href="https://www.lightformsartcenter.com/david-hilma-lecture">botanical</a> drawings. She and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Cassel">Anna Cassel</a> worked together at the turn of the century at the Veterinary Institute in Stockholm to create detailed anatomical drawings of animals, including the reproductive organs, which allowed them a type of biological knowledge generally unavailable to women at the time: "They studied," Voss writes, "the penises of stallions and learned how testicles were removed during castration. They drew the vaginas of mares and studied the reproductive process from fertilization to birth. They experienced the blood, mucus, and excretions of the animals. They learned about the methods and tools of medical research: heightened observation, illustrations, measurements, cross sections, models, highly specialized instruments." This experience would have noticeable effects on af Klint's later paintings.</p><p>For af Klint and many spiritualists, science was not separate from the occult. Voss quotes the Theosophist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Webster_Leadbeater">Charles Leadbeater</a> in 1902 on atomic discoveries: "Occult science has always taught that these so-called elements are not in the truest sense of the word elements at all; that what we call an atom of oxygen or hydrogen can under certain circumstances be broken up." With science providing so many discoveries of invisible phenomena and forces such as light waves and x-rays, it would be difficult at that time <em>not</em> to see science as a kind of confirmation of occult conceptions of the universe. A work Leadbeater wrote in collaboration with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Besant">Annie Besant</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Webster_Leadbeater"><em>Occult Chemistry</em></a>, is one that offers some visual clues to af Klint's art — graphs and illustrations in it have some commonalities with af Klint's paintings at the time. (Af Klint may not have read the book itself, but she was almost certainly familiar with preliminary versions and excerpts in periodicals. Other books by Besant and Leadbeater were in her library. <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/16269/16269-h/16269-h.htm"><em>Thought-Forms</em></a> is another Besant/Leadbeater text of likely significance for af Klint's art.)</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/87077878/e43937412f2442d4b449f458c37d1124/e30%3D/1.png?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=Q4XLr5zb4KGsxtAyvrzG6hwvGIWHbwya-ceoE5tTc8Q%3D" /></p><p>As work on the Munsö studio finished in 1917, af Klint laid out her vision for its purpose: "First I will attempt to understand the flowers of the earth; I will take the plants that grow on land as my starting point. Then, with the same care, I will study what lives in the waters of the earth. Then the blue ether with its myriad creatures will be the subject of my study, and finally I will penetrate the forest, exploring the silent mosses, the trees, and the many animals that inhabit the cool, dark undergrowth."</p><p>For all its mysteries and developments, the art of Hilma af Klint shows remarkable unity of vision. Voss sums up this vision well at the beginning of her book: "Her works, she believed, could help us leave behind everything that makes the world small and rigid: entrenched thought patterns and systems of order, categories of sex and class, materialism and capitalism, the binary view of an Orient and an Occident, and the distinction between art and life." The prevalence of series in her work shows this: no one moment or painting is enough to convey meaning. The flow of time, of experience, of perception, of the spiritual and material realms — this flow can only be represented through the multiplicity a series offers. Af Klint insisted that her abstract paintings be kept together because if we are to have any hope of understanding what she wanted us to understand, we must look beyond individual images.</p><p>As her archive continues to get attention from scholars and historians, it will be interesting to see what new insights can be gleaned about the progression of af Klint's style. The Guggenheim show that brought her such extraordinary attention was not a complete career retrospective but primarily a presentation of her major paintings from 1906 to 1920, with some work from earlier and later added for context. That selection makes sense and allowed the world to see the major series as she hoped they would. </p><p>(And — in one of the great and delightful weirdnesses of her life and post-life — the art was displayed in a white spiral building, which is what af Klint herself described as the temple at which her paintings ought to be shown. She tried to get such a temple built, but it proved impossible. Interestingly, the painter <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilla_von_Rebay">Hilla von Rebay</a>, who was Solomon R. Guggenheim's art advisor and the main instigator for the Guggenheim Museum, was well read in Theosophy and Anthroposophy, and even attended lectures given by Rudolf Steiner when she was a teenager. She described the museum she envisioned as "a temple of nonrepresentation and reverence". Hilma af Klint would have approved.) </p><p>However, the earlier and later paintings also have much to recommend them. The watercolors in particular are richly evocative, and important spiritually — the wet-on-wet painting technique she worked with from 1922 to her death was one advocated by Rudolf Steiner and the members of the Anthroposophical Society. Watercolor became her main technique for the last decades of her life, but she would sometimes return to oil. Voss reports that her final oil paintings were four she made in 1941, "all of women dressed as nuns."</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/87077878/62072e95ec1a4f38ab671626b4f14ad2/eyJ3Ijo4MjB9/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=rUwwDiPjp4Y5UtBiz21S2kfwunFilha7Co44FFf1WcM%3D" /></p><p>While the <em>Paintings for the Temple</em> are astonishing in their size, color, and energy, and the later watercolors evocatively ethereal, af Klint's work from around 1917 to 1920 shows another style, though with similar purposes as before and after. In various untitled series, af Klint's art became highly geometric. This was at a time when she decided to commit herself to Anthroposophy rather than Theosophy, apparently preferring Steiner's more Christian vision to that of the eclectic and Eastern-influenced occultists. At the same time, she was thinking about the variety of religious experiences in the world, seeking their overlaps as well as unique offerings, a search which led to the extraordinary <em>Series II</em> of 1920: eight images made with oil and graphite on canvas and with individual titles such as "The Current Standpoint of the Mahatmas", "The Jewish Standpoint at the Birth of Jesus", and "Buddha's Standpoint in Earthly Life". Most of these paintings are circles filled with varying amounts of black and white until the last two pictures, "The Teachings of Buddhism" and "The Christian Religion", which introduce purples and reds as well. There is a fierce and graphic minimalism to these paintings, a powerful stripping away of elements so that we must meditate on the few elements present, a focused mystery.</p><p>In the summer of 1928, af Klint traveled to London for the World Conference on Spiritual Science, a large Anthroposophical event where some of her paintings (likely ones from the <em>Paintings for the Temple</em> series) were displayed and where af Klint gave an address about her work. This was arranged by a Dutch friend af Klint had made when visiting the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goetheanum">Goetheanum</a> in Dornach, Switzerland, and whom she later visited in Amsterdam, a dancer and actress named Peggy Kloppers-Moltzer. (It was during that 1927 visit to Amsterdam that af Klint first mentioned Kandinsky's name in her notebooks: "Kandinsky, pure colors, planes," she wrote.) Kloppers-Moltzer was passionate about af Klint's paintings, but failed to find any support for an exhibition among Dutch Anthroposophists. After that failure, she and af Klint worked hard to convince the international conference to provide space for the paintings, and this time they succeeded. The paintings were shown at the Friends House on Euston Road. </p><p>Nothing is known of what af Klint said in her 1928 address in London. There are notes, however, for a lecture she gave in April 1937 in Stockholm to the Swedish Anthroposophical Society, where she talked about her work and its mysteriousness even to her. "She could not explain who the beings were who contacted her," Voss writes. "Not even Steiner, she told the rapt audience, had been able to help her — his advice had been for her to find the answer herself." She noted a difference between herself and Steiner, who had advocated for actively seeking knowledge beyond the earthly realm, while af Klint said, "My life comprises the understanding of how to <u>receive help</u>, and the <u>struggle</u> to make my own what I have already received. ... Every time I succeeded in executing one of my sketches, my understanding of man, animal, plant, mineral, yes, of creation in general, became clearer. I felt that I was freed, and raised above my more limited consciousness." Art was for her investigation, exploration, communication — she believed "that the way of a painter or musician makes it easier for us to come into contact with other souls." (All quotations from Voss p. 285.)</p><p>From these ideas and experiences we can get a sense of why af Klint did not seek out traditional exhibitions for her work even in the years when modernism had exerted enough of an influence on the public to make a positive reception more possible. She used her talent and skills to make art she could sell when she most needed to — veterinary illustrations, portraits, traditional landscapes. (The full extent of these works isn't entirely known because she sold them and they are now scattered through private collections.) She seems to have believed that it would have been monstrous to turn spiritual explorations and expressions into commodities. She tried to give the paintings to a good home, but even the Goetheanum rejected most of her donations. (While the paintings' uniqueness certainly worked against them, there were likely also practical considerations for the potential receivers of the donations — the major paintings are huge and there are a lot of them. Storage would be a challenge, and exhibition even more so.) Luckily, af Klint sensed that her nephew Erik would be a good caretaker of her life's work, and she was correct.</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/87077878/04a84cdc80484906ad1e9b8d2b1b573b/eyJ3Ijo4MjAsIndlYnAiOjB9/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=k39Zki1VGCFHKu9puH7nX0P6ZVDdhGQ6LyT2Qu_BQ8A%3D" /></p><p>Here we are now, the people of the future, able to see and, to some extent at least, appreciate this extraordinary artist. I wonder if Hilma af Klint would consider us any better than her contemporaries, however. After all, we are appreciating her work as art. We talk about the paintings' form and color, but I doubt many of the visitors to the Guggenheim or other exhibitions have seriously engaged with the work as communications from ethereal beings in a world beyond our own. (I certainly haven't! I don't for a minute believe in the persistence of individual consciousness after death, nor do I believe in angelic beings.) Perhaps, though, af Klint would not mind that most of us don't share her particular view of the world. Perhaps she would say that her art is not about conveying dogma, but about encouraging us to imagine beyond the material limits of the world, to consider our deep connections to each other, to animals, to the planet, to the universe. Regardless of the various religious and spiritual beliefs she held, that sense of connection was consistent throughout her life. I don't want to trivialize it in her art, don't want to turn her life's work into platitudes about peace, love, and harmony. There was a ferocity to Hilma af Klint, a stubbornness and confidence that comes through despite the deliberate absence of personal reflection in her archive. I have no doubt that she would be disappointed in this future of ceaseless violence, this world we have wrecked with our greed and shortsightedness, this era of material obscenity and spiritual impoverishment.</p><p>Which is why we so desperately need her work now. Most of us may not share her metaphysics, but we should have less trouble sharing her values. Her art offers us a way to reflect on those values, and to find their place in our own sense of life.</p><p>I can't help but think of another woman of determination and complex ideas, Virginia Woolf, who lived right around the corner from Friends House when af Klint showed her paintings and gave her lecture in 1928. Just the day before, Woolf had left London for Monk's House in East Sussex for the summer, having just finished correcting the proofs of <em>Orlando</em>, her gender-bending love letter to Vita Sackville-West. At Monk's House, Woolf and E.M. Forster would talk about Radclyffe Hall's lesbian novel <em>The Well of Loneliness</em>, which had recently been banned for obscenity. </p><p>I am consumed by a fantastical wish that Woolf and some of her friends might have stayed in London a few days longer, have made their way to the conference, and peeked in at af Klint's paintings. (<a href="https://lithub.com/home-is-a-living-sketchbook-inside-the-artistic-design-of-vanessa-bell-and-duncan-grant/">Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant</a> might especially have appreciated af Klint's sense of color and form.) None of the Bloomsbury folks shared af Klint's Anthroposophical beliefs, but they might have found some common ground in their shared idea of art as a way of coming into contact with other souls (if we don't define <em>souls</em> too religiously). That idea of contact seems to me a common theme of Woolf's fiction, which yearns so often for connection and unity, for bringing together the macro and micro, the world and the people.</p><p><em>The Waves</em> is, in its own way, a mystical novel. I wonder what af Klint would have made of it. (She didn't read English and as far as I know it wasn't translated into Swedish until 1953.) The sea was important to af Klint, whose family included many distinguished sailors, and so the title might have intrigued her. It is a novel of voices and visions, of death and life (of life in death, of death in life). It reads, at times, like a séance.</p><p>As with so much having to do with af Klint, we can only speculate.</p><p>Rather than anything from <em>The Waves</em>, to conclude our rambles here I must bring in Lily Briscoe, the painter in <em>To the Lighthouse</em> — indeed, I can think of no better conclusion than the novel's own final paragraph:</p><blockquote>Quickly, as if she were recalled by something over there, she turned to her canvas. There it was—her picture. Yes, with all its greens and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.</blockquote><blockquote><br /></blockquote><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/87077878/b943aabc0bd64f5db4173c4abb426c84/eyJ3ZWJwIjowfQ%3D%3D/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=nJ62Y9-gSVJ1_xF4XsBWg902S_ajVChHPZ9M3ObYTC8%3D" /></p><p><br /></p><p>-----</p><p>Images: all by Hilma af Klint except the photograph of the Guggenheim exhibit and the black and white diagram from <em>Occult Chemistry</em> by Besant & Leadbeater</p></div></div>Matthew Cheneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07704529564308222004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-4905168635550812802023-07-28T12:30:00.001-04:002023-08-17T21:20:12.977-04:00Against the Human<br /><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 fYcGch sc-rcywpx-0 hRKPxe" data-tag="post-content"><div class="sc-1ye87qi-0 cZNwdx"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKtJd-9fiVkMiQT4wC7oRN9cUXit7ZL3LNO_ZiqNm9e131pXYquVjda56_5SqO80OOuYnjRpz8a7pW248yYTQ5bFVEpKflWkSuoULxBfJ8yhzvyy04XlVWBUnJCudf5fgTxmH3FzOPi7qpASq984jOzDO3PGj15qBLzkLung5auIF9Ekgipicx/s3000/james-wheeler-9zXMb-E8pI0-unsplash.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2000" data-original-width="3000" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKtJd-9fiVkMiQT4wC7oRN9cUXit7ZL3LNO_ZiqNm9e131pXYquVjda56_5SqO80OOuYnjRpz8a7pW248yYTQ5bFVEpKflWkSuoULxBfJ8yhzvyy04XlVWBUnJCudf5fgTxmH3FzOPi7qpASq984jOzDO3PGj15qBLzkLung5auIF9Ekgipicx/w640-h426/james-wheeler-9zXMb-E8pI0-unsplash.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><blockquote>"Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here." —Cooper, <em>Interstellar</em></blockquote><blockquote><br /></blockquote><blockquote>"This is what I mean when I'm talkin' about time, and death, and futility." —Det. Rust Cohle, <em>True Detective</em> Season 1</blockquote><blockquote><br /></blockquote><blockquote>"Making kin and making kind ... stretch the imagination and can change the story." —Donna Haraway, <em>Staying with the Trouble</em></blockquote><p>In his brief book <a href="https://globalreports.columbia.edu/books/the-revolt-against-humanity/"><em>The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us</em></a><em>, </em>Adam Kirsch proposes that radical pessimism and fervent transhumanism are opposite poles of an anti-human spectrum: "The antihumanist future and the transhumanist future are opposites in most ways, except the most fundamental: they are worlds from which we have disappeared, and rightfully so."</p><p>Reading the book is like watching Matthew McConaughey's character of Detective Rust Cohle from <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2356777/episodes?season=1"><em>True Detective</em></a> speak for a while and then give over the stage to McConaughey's character from <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0816692/"><em>Interstellar</em></a>, Cooper. While the character of Cohle has been recognized as drawing from a history of pessimistic philosophy going back at least to Schopenhauer (and likely coming <a href="https://www.vox.com/2014/8/7/5975769/true-detective-a-work-of-plagiarism-a-guide">mostly via</a> Thomas Ligotti), there ought to be more attention to the ideology of Cooper. </p><p>I would not at all be surprised to learn that the billionaire class of techbros watches <em>Interstellar</em> religiously. It's not hard to imagine Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and various AI evangelists dreaming of themselves as Cooper, heading off into the eternal future, robot friends by their side, to save humanity by populating the galaxies with our sacred seed.</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/86579112/d86a1fd4f3e6456f9eac644f3e93497a/eyJ3Ijo4MjAsIndlYnAiOjB9/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=s0nwZmJq_oquIjzbRfnZsRMv_CLKeNdDmBRcqTRHNNs%3D" /></p><h3>Without Us</h3><p>Kirsch's book is something like an ambitious undergraduate essay, its research good enough to be frustrating in what it misses, its claims clever enough to hold interest if not water. This is at least as much a fault of the format as of Kirsch's work: the book is part of the Columbia Global Reports series, which is <a href="https://globalreports.columbia.edu/about/">described</a> as "works of original thinking and on-site reporting from all over the world, on a wide range of topics. Our books are short, but ambitious. They offer new ways of looking at and understanding the major issues of our time. Most readers are curious and busy. Our books are for them." I fear that curious, busy readers will think they have understood Kirsch's topics sufficiently by reading the book, rather than realizing that the book is only useful as a prod to more exploration. Kirsch offers a list of further reading, which is helpful, but it's mostly primary sources from advocates of one view or another rather than what I read Kirsch's book hoping it was: more objective, historicized explorations of the topics, even if from a particular commitment to either pessimism/antihumanism or techno-optimism/transhumanism — the topics are so fraught that I'm not sure anybody could be neutral about them, so the goal would be to present the ideas as honestly as possible, not warping the arguments to fit your opinion about them.</p><p>An example of a more thorough, semi-objective view might be the work of <a href="https://www.xriskology.com/mfhf">Emile P. Torres</a>, who is clearly not a fan of the techbro class and their dreams of digital rapture, but who seems to work hard to represent their positions with as much nuance as possible. What I most like about Torres's work is the way Torres brings in their own developing ideological commitments, and they aren't afraid <a href="https://www.truthdig.com/articles/does-agi-really-threaten-the-survival-of-the-species/">to say</a>, for instance, "Not that long ago, I found the arguments for why a 'misaligned' AGI would destroy us <a href="https://www.salon.com/2022/08/06/would-artificial-superintelligence-lead-to-the-end-of-life-on-earth-its-not-a-stupid-question/">somewhat convincing</a>, although I have recently <a href="https://twitter.com/xriskology/status/1673292627230306304">changed my tune</a>." That's a small instance, but Torres also has a background in tech philosophy that allows them to start from a place of sympathy to some of the urges of transhumanism that those of us who have always found the whole concept horrifying don't really have access to.</p><p>Actually, I've been thinking about all of this because I listened to <a href="https://truthout.org/audio/bizarre-and-dangerous-utopian-ideology-has-quietly-taken-hold-of-tech-world/">Torres on the Movement Memos podcast</a> discussing transhumanism, <a href="https://www.carnegiecouncil.org/media/article/long-termism-ethical-trojan-horse">longtermerism</a>, and the sci-fi delusions of the billionaires. I appreciated how the conversation delves into some of the details of the topic, but found it hard to listen to because I have such a visceral negative reaction to all the premises of the ideologies Torres explores. It reminded me of when I was working on a now-abandoned project on rightwing militarist ideologies of the 1980s; after reading a lot of issues of <em>Soldier of Fortune</em> magazine and the novel <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/these-fascist-diaries-keep-inspiring-white-power-groups-and-jan-6-rioters"><em>The Turner Diaries</em></a><em>,</em> I had to stop because I found the ideas I was having to analyze so hideous that my blood pressure was constantly rising and I was overwhelmed by a kind of fight-or-flight response to the material. (I don't feel fight-or-flight when reading about transhumanism, I just feel disgust.)</p><p>Shortly after listening to the podcast, I also watched Christopher Nolan's 2014 movie <em>Interstellar</em> for the first time. It was on a streaming site I subscribe to, and I was in the mood for a big dumb movie, so I figured why not. (I have a very conflicted relationship with Nolen's movies. I adore <em>The Prestige</em>, liked both <em>Following </em>and<em> Memento</em>, thought <em>Insomnia</em> was okay but not as good as the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insomnia_(1997_film)">original</a>, and against my own best judgment I actually enjoyed the first two Batman movies enough to watch them multiple times. I at least partially agree with every criticism of them and yet still can't help getting caught up in their spectacular nonsense. The third film I pretty much hated and have not revisited. <em>Inception</em> was annoying because there was a great movie buried in its premise and visuals but it was not even close to being a great movie. I have not seen <em>Dunkirk, Tenet,</em> or <em>Oppenheimer</em>.) I would have been put off by the fundamental ideology of <em>Intersteller</em> without having listened to Torres, but with that discussion fresh in my mind, inevitably <em>Interstellar</em> presented itself as preaching the gospel of transhumanism and longtermerism.</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/86579112/ec2baf15cafc4914b6699dfc2a19c197/eyJ3ZWJwIjowfQ%3D%3D/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=vdKXU4qNAQrHyMnOZpW5NaIvmHOfxiciarAhialNMaA%3D" /></p><p>I would not be surprised if either Christopher or (co-writer) Jonathan Nolan once read Stanley Schmidt's 1971 story "The Unreachable Stars", which posits a future where people have given up on scientific progress and forgotten that they ever made their way to outer space. I read the story as a child and have long remembered its ardent advocacy for an ethos of <em>ad astra</em>. (I don't remember any details, though, and don't have a copy at hand.) Mike Ashley describes it briefly at the beginning of the third volume of his history of SF magazines, <em>Gateway to Forever</em>, and <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=2qkmF8HvP_gC&lpg=PR1&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q&f=false">notes</a> that in the story the "belief that man had once travelled to the Moon is dismissed as legend", which also happens in <em>Interstellar</em>. In Schmidt's story, it is aliens who encourage the benighted humans to reach for the stars, but <em>Interstellar</em> goes even harder toward prohumanism, proposing that human descendants are in fact the time-bending force that is the savior of humanity.</p><p>The solipsism and arrogance of such a view is obscured by the propaganda effect of science fiction narratives generally, especially from the United States, where the white supremacist pioneer mythology finds its afterlife in space opera. Story after story tells of heroic people launching themselves through galaxies for the purpose of spreading the human race. The conceit is now so familiar as to be banal. Occasionally, another idea breaks through — there was Barry Malzberg's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Apollo"><em>Beyond Apollo</em></a><em>,</em> Joanna Russ's <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=NdNid3uKCnkC&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false"><em>We Who Are About To...</em></a>, and more recently the comparatively upbeat <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2015/09/aurora-by-kim-stanley-robinson.html"><em>Aurora</em></a> by Kim Stanley Robinson, as well as what seems to me the most accurate space movie, <a href="https://letterboxd.com/mcheney/film/aniara-2018/"><em>Aniara</em></a> — but for the most part space stories are ideologically where they were in the 1960s at the latest, tales of the fundamental goodness of human life and the need to preserve and extend it at all costs.</p><p>The ideology is arrogant, but it is more than the <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=SDxRDAAAQBAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false">arrogance of humanism</a> — it is the arrogance of <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10806-018-9711-1">anthropocentrism</a> (or what we might call human supremacist thinking). The anthropocentrism is obvious from the human-centered focus of such stories, but there's another telling feature common to such thinking: the absence of animals. Back in 2006, I wrote a column for <em>Strange Horizons</em> <a href="http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/columns/the-absence-of-animals/">with exactly that title</a>, inspired by the future presented in the TV show <em>Battlestar Galactica</em>. The ellision of other sentient Earthly beings seems to be an unconscious feature of a lot of space stories, making me think it is not just an oversight, but an unconscious wish. Anthropocentrism is not just arrogant, it is annihilationist.</p><p>Taking note of anthropocentrism reveals a flaw in Adam Kirsch's move to place antihumanist pessimism on the same spectrum as transhumanist optimism. I call transhumanism (and longtermerism and the whole <a href="https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-acronym-behind-our-wildest-ai-dreams-and-nightmares/">TESCREAL</a> bundle of bull) optimistic because of its hyperanthropocentrism: though cetainly it rues the limits of human intelligence and biology, its goal is to improve and propagate the humanistic base. It dreams of a bright posthumanist future. The most radical antihumanist pessimism yearns for the extinction of the human race; transhumanism yearns for the transcendence of the human race. As Kirsch says, this is a kind of negative view of the human of now. But the philosophies are fundamentally different in their attachments, which is why it's not clarifying for Kirsch to set them up in parallel.</p><p>"The attempt to imagine and embrace a world without us is the thread that connects" antihumanism and transhumanism, Kirsch states. In a narrow sense, this is true — but not usefully so. In linking them as "worlds from which we have disappeared", the word <em>disappeared</em> obfuscates. He's talking about two very different types of disappearing. One of these philosophies desires a universe in which humans have gone extinct, the other desires a universe in which humans have overcome their limitations and become a new form of intelligence/life. The antihumanist world is without us because we human beings no longer exist; the transhumanist world is without us because life has become super-us. In the transhumanist future, there is still a place for us, it's just not us as the bodies or intelligences we are now. The transhumanist future is one where the pure products of humanity continue to evolve. The antihumanist future sees <em>us</em> as the problem.</p><p>We can see how Kirsch is mistaken in identifying "the most fundamental" element of these two philosophies if we look at their moral/ethical implications for actual behavior.</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/86579112/b2987e9a5db14f309fa051ee14dfa34e/eyJ3ZWJwIjowfQ%3D%3D/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=Lb97Dk3GFPSuK6y39HfrPqPI7UmHs22lXAwWdaSE23o%3D" /></p><h3>Church of the Holy Human</h3><p>Transhumanism, as Torres points out in their essay on TANSCREAL, is explicitly a substitute for religion:</p><blockquote>Essentially, a bunch of 20th-century atheists concluded that their lives lacked the meaning, purpose and hope provided by traditional religion. In response to this realization, they invented a new, secular religion, in which “heaven” is something we create ourselves, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20020213221116/http://www.transhumanism.org/resources/faq.html#cult">in this world</a>. This new religion offered the promise of eternal life, just like Christianity, and has its own version of resurrection: those who don’t become immortal can have their bodies cryogenized by a company named Alcor, based in California, so they can be revived when the technological know-how becomes available.</blockquote><p>Transhumanism replaces the Ten Commandments with the command to develop technology that will allow the dream of escape: escape from the body, escape from society, escape from Earth.</p><p>As Douglas Rushkoff shows in his book <a href="https://www.teamhuman.fm/book"><em>Team Human</em></a>, the transhumanist vision is not just religious, but also hypercapitalist, which helps explain the billionaires' fondness for it. "The more we see the human being as a technology to be enhanced," Rushkoff <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=4Y5gDwAAQBAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PT56#v=onepage&q&f=false">writes</a>, "the greater the danger of applying this same market ethos to people, and extending our utility value at the expense of others. Life extension becomes the last-ditch attempt of the market to increase our available timeline as consumers — and consumers willing to spend anything for that extra few years of longevity." </p><p>Rushkoff makes the link between transhumanism and various New Age tendencies that commodify spirituality, bridging the cosmic and the capitalistic via individualism. New Age movements, he says, "stressed individual enlightenment over communal health. It was the same old personal salvation wine, only in California chardonnay bottles. The social justice agenda of the antiwar and civil rights movements was repackaged as the stridently individualistic self-help movement." Transhumanism is galaxy-brain Goop.</p><p>Obviously from the saccharine title of his book (and popular podcast), Rushkoff is more in the humanist than antihumanist camp. But not egregiously so. His call for more care of the commons, more attention to communal life and interbeing, is worth heeding. He is felled in the end, though, by his optimism — he asserts, with zero evidence, that the future is full of possibility. This sort of content-free naiveté is good for selling books (we all like to be told there's hope for the future), but it's hardly more helpful than an inspirational poster stuck to a wall.</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/86579112/d833a161a73a4e278266e85edb72bcf9/eyJ3ZWJwIjowfQ%3D%3D/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=GDCR6RRoez8QJ5YJEmyHXAEHjDqY0hFSih413DtqO-U%3D" /></p><h3>Ethics in Action</h3><p>I'm enough of a pragmatist to think that any belief ought to be judged by the behaviors it sanctions and encourages. (What kind of social control does it imply, what kind of police action?) In its contempt for actual living humans and the planet they are stuck on, transhumanism sanctions and encourages destruction. It offers no care for people, animals, or environments beyond their usefulness to the ultimate goal of getting off the planet, out of our bodies, and into immortality. It is rapaciousness masquerading as salvation.</p><p>In my experience, people tend to have a more visceral negative reaction to antihumanism than to transhumanism because antihumanism feels traitorous. Transhumanism may seem nutty or utopian or irresponsible, but at least it's based on the idea that our species ought to continue and thrive. This is what makes transhumanism so insidious, however.</p><p>The various TESCREAL ideas let rich and powerful people pretend they are doing good things for humanity when they are doing quite the opposite. Any one of the robber barons could right now begin to end child hunger on this planet. Today, each of the techbro billionaires decided not to do that, and they'll decide the same tomorrow. Instead, they pile their wealth toward superyachts and rocketships and robots. These self-absorbed men of mountainous egos do not want to help the living, they want to nurse their own messiah complex and indulge their every power fantasy. This is not new. This is the way of power. The eighteenth century French royalty living completely separate from a world of starving peasants was a similar escapist fantasy of the wealth-hoarding class, but today's bratty rulers are infected with sci-fi brainworms. Still, the impulse — the obsession — is to escape society, to flee from the huddled masses, the dirty proles, the normies. Jeet Heer, in a recent <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/society/billionaire-preppers-strangelove-sbf/">column</a> in <em>The Nation</em>, quotes historian Quinn Slobodian to describe the basic scene: "We live in a time, Slobdian observes, 'when billionaires dream of escaping the state, and the idea of the public is repellent.' This era is created by 'a decades-long effort to pierce holes in the social fabric, to opt out, secede, and defect from the collective.'"</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/86579112/5d592c4b95064880bb8be60fd8be6545/eyJ3Ijo4MjB9/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=4FvCCQlUSht9oo9AcC4WU7VnI4IT3_Y_Xv4Xl5jRW-I%3D" /></p><h3>Collective Antihumanism</h3><p>Unlike transhumanism, and whatever its failures of vision, antihumanism is not a philosophy that denies collectivity. It could, in fact, strengthen that impulse. We have to step back and define some core values before we can get to that, however.</p><p>Antihumanism can have various forms and motivations, but all its tendencies say: <em>We overvalue the human</em>. This may be via an antinatalism that concludes, <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/having-children-is-not-life-affirming-its-immoral">in the words of David Benatar</a>, "that all lives contain more bad than good, and that they are deprived of more good than they contain" (and therefore bringing new life into the world is unjustifiable because even the best life is one of suffering). Or it may be in a softer form that encourages us away from anthropocentrism and human supremacy. (In <a href="http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=1253">"Twenty-Two Theses on Nature"</a>, Steven Shaviro writes as his second thesis: "We must think Nature without any residual anthropocentrism: that is to say, without exempting ourselves from it, and also without remaking it in our own image. Human beings are part of Nature, but Nature is not human, and is not centered upon human beings or upon anything human." I am not proposing Shaviro as an antihumanist; his approach to anthropocentrism, though, is sharp, clear, and helpful.) I think of these as harder and softer antihumanism — antinatalism and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Human_Extinction_Movement">voluntary human extinction</a> are about as antihumanist as it's possible to get short of advocating for nuclear war to wipe us all out; ecocentrism is more properly thought of as anti-human-supremacism, but, for the moment at least, I think it can be helpful to keep it in mind as a variety of antihumanism, since its goal is to oppose the arrogance of humanism(s).</p><p>While Kirsch sees antihumanism and transhumanism as congruent because they are both negative about the human in the present, he does not give enough priority to the way their negativities derive from different analyses: antihumanism sees the human of now as plagued with suffering; transhumanism sees the human of now as inadequate. Antihumanism is pessimistic because it interprets the problem of the human as unsolveable — suffering is a condition of existence, therefore nonexistence is preferable. Transhumanism, on the other hand, is wildly optimistic about the future of the human. Because the analyses at the base of these philosophies are not at all the same, their prescriptions are not at all the same, particularly about what to do with the already-existing human.</p><p>For our thought experiment here, it's most honest if we analyze the ethical implications of hard antihumanism instead of soft. For that reason, I'll use antinatalism as the prompt, since even voluntary human extinction may be based on the premise that reproduction is okay in limited amounts (e.g. five thousand years ago, before humans conquered the planet). To test the ethics of antihumanism, let's not leave ourselves with any sort of friendly out, any wiggle room. Antinatalism says being is always worse than not-being.</p><p>If hard antihumanism is based in the conviction that nonexistence is always better than existence, then what behaviors follow from that conviction?</p><p>Not suicide. As many proponents of antihumanism have said, there is a vast difference between <em>not existing</em> and <em>becoming nonexistent</em>. While I expect most antinatalists are in favor of things like physician-assisted suicide, the philosophy's central question is about suffering, and suicide creates plenty of suffering, as anyone who has experienced the suicide of a friend or loved one can tell you. The problem, antinatalism says, is not so much <em>living</em> as it is <em>being born.</em></p><p>Thus the most obvious ethical command of antinatalism is: <em>don't reproduce</em>. To reproduce is to bring a suffering being into the world. The child may go on to have the most wonderful, happy, privileged life, but it will still suffer: it will get sick, it will feel grief, etc. To create a child is to create suffering.</p><p>Most arguments about antinatalism are about that fundamental imperative, since it's a defining core to the philosophy, but I'm much more interested in the other implications. (Cards on the table: While I have some sympathy for the basic logic of antinatalism, I think it is a completely useless logic and not worth spending any time arguing. People are not going to stop reproducing. If anything is wired into us as a species, it's the urge to procreate. We as individuals can and do decide for ourselves whether we think procreation is good or bad for whatever reason, but raising our individual conclusion to some sort of universal imperative is not useful. Doing so, in fact, can lead to authoritarianism of the worst sort.)</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/86579112/845c8a582619421694a3e1a28242154f/eyJ3ZWJwIjowfQ%3D%3D/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=X5cLCLO43wPEFaAwIa3ZaMvZq8uH2gDZ5XU8CD1At18%3D" /></p><h3>Compostism</h3><p>Where antihumanism becomes interesting to contemplate is in the ethical implications other than the imperative not to reproduce. Since antihumanism seems so negative, how can it be positive? And yet — separated from the single imperative not to reproduce, even hard antihumanism's propositions are similar to those of many religions.</p><p>The basic premise is: <em>suffering is bad</em>. Therefore, good behavior is behavior that reduces suffering. The ideal may be to avoid creating new suffering beings, but the ideal is (for all practical purposes) impossible, and any meaningful ethics must concern itself with the reality and not the ideal. Good behavior is behavior that reduces suffering here and now, not in some imagined future or alternate reality. </p><p>If we assume antihumanism to be anti-anthropocentric, then we get to something like the vow to compassion for all sentient beings that is fundamental to many forms of Buddhism. Christianity (which is quite human-supremacist, with humans having been made in the image of God) ascribes value to suffering, since suffering shows us the battle for our soul that leads to either eternal joy or eternal damnation (see, for instance, <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Job%202&version=KJV">Job</a> and <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Corinthians%201&version=KJV">Paul</a>). Yet Paul also <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Galatians%206&version=KJV">argues</a> that suffering ought to teach us compassion for each other: "Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ."</p><p>Even the best-known philosopher of pessimism, Schopenhauer, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=poU4OiQ8GLQC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA219#v=onepage&q&f=false">argues</a> (in <em>Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics</em>) that the basis of ethics is compassion, that the cardinal virtues are justice and loving kindness, and that moral action requires attending to the suffering of all sentient beings. The <em>Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy</em> <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer/#5.2">sums up</a> Schopenhauer's views nicely: "Among the precepts he respects are those prescribing that one treat others as kindly as one treats oneself, that one refrain from violence and take measures to reduce suffering in the world, that one avoid egoism and thoughts directed towards revenge, and that one cultivate a strong sense of compassion."</p><p>Antihumanism does not provide a set of commands in the way religions do — committed antihumanists could, I assume, argue with each other forever about how to identify and address suffering, how to prioritize behaviors, what is anthropocentric and what is not, etc. But even with big books full of commandments, religious believers do this, too. Some whole religions seem based on argument. It's the philosophical fun of belief in anything: arguing about what that belief means.</p><p>The ethics of antihumanism do not need to lead to brutal nihilism; indeed, if the antihumanism arises from a concern for suffering and a belief that humans ought not to be the center of everything, then those ethics should in fact lead <em>away</em> from brutal nihilism. This is what distinguishes antihumanism from the destructive, escapist fantasies of transhumanism. Antihumanism may not put The Human at the center of everything, and it may see human existence as a locus of suffering, but it still prioritizes compassion for actually existing humans, because actually existing humans suffer.</p><p><em>Antihumanism</em>, though, may be too negative a term. Other ways are possible. I recently read a provocative academic article from 2019: <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0263276419873710?casa_token=2XM098Pj14kAAAAA%3A6cxnO7_jlRfF9DJ9qHs_lOOTiDS3EumywImGd2RICWgLsj-EBr4VvK08uVCjR9pqjMKQhIVmbIQizg">"Posthuman Sustainability: An Ethos for our Anthropocenic Future"</a> by Olga Cielemęcka and Christine Daigle, which has a stirring conclusion:</p><blockquote>Diverse practices, including those performed by mothers protesting a forest cutting, coral reef scientists, city-dwellers creating bee corridors, land and river protectors, or people standing in solidarity with communities who suffer disproportionality from environmental degradation, debunk the individualistic, human-centric understanding of sustainability modeled on the economy of debt and inheritance. Instead, they already bring forth posthuman sustainability practices: oriented not towards a future conceived in a linear fashion but rather emerging from the entanglement of beings and the plurality of temporal dimensions of the past, present, and futures and its different scales: geological time, human time, and bees’ time are not the same. In it they recognize the non-heterogeneity of the future, and the violence that occurs whenever ‘our future’ becomes more important or worth protecting than that of some other being.</blockquote><p>Or there is Donna Haraway, who in <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=ZvDgDAAAQBAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PA1&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q&f=false"><em>Staying with the Trouble</em></a> proposes the seriously playful idea of being a <em>compostist</em> rather than a posthumanist: "Critters — human and not — become-with each other, compose and decompose each other, in every scale and register of time and stuff in sympoietic tangling, in ecological evolutionary developmental earthly worlding and unworlding." This is an ethics based in refuge and regeneration, of seeing not only what is salveable, but what deserves to be saved and strengthened. "Renewed generative flourishing," Haraway writes, "cannot grow from myths of immortality or failure to become-with the dead and the extinct." Transhumanism's fantasy of immortality denies us the beauty of becoming compost.</p><p>We can redeem the suffering of the born through the regenerative power of community and a vision of interbeing: of birth not as crime but as opportunity for compassion before death provides us the only good transcendence: from embodiment to dispersal back into the matter of the universe. I like the Mahayana Buddhist vision of bodhisattvas, people who choose to remain with the suffering until all the suffering is gone. What an honor! The privilege of birth is the privilege to be here for the suffering and to guide each other — and celebrate with each other, human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic. It's all related, all connected, all necessary if we are to help each other toward the best composting of our selves.</p><p>We may all be trapped in the prison of life, but that does not mean we ought to be terrible to our fellow prisoners. Quite the opposite. Because we recognize that existence is suffering, we must do what we can to help our fellow prisoners suffer less. Suffering cannot be eradicated, but it can certainly be lessened, and any morality must be measured by the extent to which it lessens the suffering of the living. The prison may even be little more than a state of our mind. We cannot know that alone, however. We need each other if we are to reach beyond the prison bars.</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/86579112/1c9e844df76448b281f9bea53ea6d326/eyJ3Ijo4MjAsIndlYnAiOjB9/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=mnUpw33QA5nTmS8dwHG5Cz2eCGXGf61P9lT73Hv1LX0%3D" /></p><h3>The Ego and Its Humanism</h3><p>Adam Kirsch's conclusions in <em>The Revolt Against Humanity</em> are unclear, partly because he too easily conflates antihumanism and transhumanism, partly because he does not recognize the fundamental call to compassion within antihumanism's ethics. He writes in his final chapter, for instance, "A government that adhered to antihumanist principles wouldn't subsidize large families, but reward citizens who have one child or none.... Reducing carbon emissions and preserving nonhuman habitats would take precedence over providing cheap fuel and housing." This implies that antihumanists would consider it good policy to punish families with multiple children, to let people freeze in the winter if they can't afford heating oil priced to reflect its environmental impact, and to let homeless people perish in the streets. That wouldn't be antihumanist, that would be cruel. There is no imperative toward cruelty within antihumanist philosophy.</p><p>Consider: Why do antihumanism and ecocentrism dance well together? Because ecocentrism says our humanist arrogance has led us to bring the biosphere to the point of destruction. Why is such destruction bad? One big reason is because a biosphere near the point of destruction is a system that creates immense suffering among all sentient beings. </p><p>Certainly, some environmentalists and ecocentrists are misanthropic and seem to delight in the idea of human misery. (Hello, Unabomber.) They may have a romantic attachment to the idea of Nature as a sublime force, of humans as having separated themselves from the natural chain of being, etc. Human life in that case is a cancer and ought to be destroyed. If it lacks a deep concern with suffering, that's an ideology dazzled by dreams of genocide.</p><p>Kirsch cannot see beyond the arrogance of his humanism. He seems to place himself in the camp of "traditional humanists, with their old-fashioned belief that the individual human being is the source of all value". This chains value to human ego. Everything beyond human ego is, in Kirsch's scheme, valueless. To find a truly nihilistic vision, we need look no further.</p><p>In its arrogance, Kirsch's "traditional humanism" is only different in degree from transhumanism. We might rename transhumanism as <em>hyperhumanism</em>.</p><p>And so we return to <em>Interstellar</em>. </p><p>Humanists and transhumanists both see the trajectory of <em>Interstellar's</em> plot as uplifting. All the film's elements (acting, filming, editing, music) push us to feel joy at Cooper's journey to join Brand (Anne Hathaway) on a desolate planet where they can restart the human project. Considered without the melodrama of the film's technique, Cooper and Brand's fate is not one even the crusty old misanthropist Rust Cohl would wish on anybody.</p><p>Only antihumanists see <em>Interstellar</em> for what it is: a horror story, a tale of endlessly prolonged suffering in a solipsistic quest for a future where humans alone continue into eternity. This is the future anthropocentrism — whether humanist or transhumanist — wants for us.</p><p>Other visions are possible. We must let go of ego, of loving our humanity against everything else. We must not reject our compost nature. </p><p>Let yourself become the soil from which a balm for suffering grows.</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/86579112/c590af06664d426eb3a62020df4c3ef1/eyJ3Ijo4MjB9/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=La23M3ZjWVEz2ifNwmVSCwfHwcnVGfmpWe3x1XHh_sU%3D" /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>-----</p><p>Images: 1. photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@souvenirpixels?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">James Wheeler</a> on <a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/9zXMb-E8pI0?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">Unsplash</a>; 2. <em>Interstellar</em>; 3. Kirsch's <em>Revolt Against Humanity</em>; 4. <em>True Detective</em>; 5. photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@mariopurisic?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">Mario Purisic</a> on <a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/jG1z5o7NCq4?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">Unsplash</a>; 6. Arthur Schopenhauer; 7. <em>Interstellar</em> (end); 8. photo by <a href="https://pixabay.com/users/12019-12019/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=1993649">David Mark</a> from <a href="https://pixabay.com//?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=1993649">Pixabay</a></p></div></div><br />Matthew Cheneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07704529564308222004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-36455684826702642022023-07-21T14:55:00.001-04:002023-08-17T21:16:16.121-04:00Notes on Sylvia Townsend Warner<br /><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 fYcGch sc-rcywpx-0 hRKPxe" data-tag="post-content"><div class="sc-1ye87qi-0 cZNwdx"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoV-1mauzkNW-ToUgPMk1JRExfYBnVH2ZgCXHy8XaVnI-K1vR8SRBshqmEU3c-w2QMiftMXP5iC6DmCmc-RSvTKs6vjNu-lWFY0l0k9tCCmlQm5RUOndDnmaSVyJTcIq2vNuWx2tltG0Ih_S3j6ML1jrI51mZPAot09C1CyeK-fe8tB_J-IZEZ/s620/STW.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="481" data-original-width="620" height="496" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoV-1mauzkNW-ToUgPMk1JRExfYBnVH2ZgCXHy8XaVnI-K1vR8SRBshqmEU3c-w2QMiftMXP5iC6DmCmc-RSvTKs6vjNu-lWFY0l0k9tCCmlQm5RUOndDnmaSVyJTcIq2vNuWx2tltG0Ih_S3j6ML1jrI51mZPAot09C1CyeK-fe8tB_J-IZEZ/w640-h496/STW.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><p>I began writing this while attending <a href="https://readercon.org/">Readercon</a> 32, an annual convention I've been attending for a while. (I hope to do an Archive Dive post about that soon.) Saturday morning, I went to a phenomenal panel discussion of Sylvia Townsend Warner as a fantasist. This was, in fact, a panel I proposed myself, though I did not notice it on the list when I signed up for panels, or I would have volunteered, so I was tremendously pleased to see it on the schedule — I had feared the topic was seen as too niche. I'm actually glad I missed the sign-up, because the panelists were all knowledgeable, thoughtful, and a joy to listen to. I really would have had nothing to add.</p><p>I will share a few of the insights from the panel discussion, but first want to provide a quick overview of why I think Warner is important and then some updates about the availability of Warner's books in the US and UK (with the demise of The Book Depository, I'm less certain of availability for other countries).</p><h3>Why Sylvia Townsend Warner Matters</h3><p>The notes on the panel will present some other people's ideas about why Sylvia Townsend Warner is a writer who deserves more attention, but I want to offer my own experience here — basically, what I would have said had I been on the panel.</p><p>I came to Warner late. Not until I was in grad school did I pay attention to her. I had heard of <em>Lolly Willowes</em> and <em>Kingdoms of Elfin</em>, but had not read either (mostly, I'm ashamed to admit, because of their titles. I assumed they would be cutesy or twee. O how wrong I was!). My PhD advisor had written about Warner in her own dissertation and <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=CSsjHDsucsAC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA84#v=onepage&q&f=false">book</a>, and she encouraged me to read, in particular, <em>Lolly Willowes, Mr. Fortune's Maggot,</em> and <em>Summer Will Show</em>. I did and fell in love. Here is a writer capable of astounding at every level: the sentence, the paragraph, the page, the concept, the images, the characters. Her prose is clear, sharp, usually light, often surprising. She has a wonderful sense of irony (which grew only more acerbic with age) and a brave eye for cruelty, but her sympathies are always, as she said, "with the hunted". Her ethical and political commitments were strong, but so were her aesthetic commitments. </p><p>After reading the novels my advisor recommended, I sought out everything else, and that eventually led to the short stories, where I discovered that Warner was one of the all-time most prolific contributors of short fiction to <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/sylvia-townsend-warner"><em>The New Yorker</em></a><em> — </em>about 150 stories from 1936 to <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1977/12/19/flora">"Flora"</a> in 1977, shortly before her death. A lot of the credit for keeping her at <em>The New Yorker</em> must go to her erstwhile advocate William Maxwell, whose letters with Warner were published in an illuminating and delightful book, <a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-element-of-lavishness-letters-of-sylvia-townsend-warner-and-william-maxwell-1938-1978-william-maxwell/18331696?ean=9781582432472"><em>The Element of Lavishness</em></a>. If Maxwell had not had as long a career at the magazine as he had, Warner likely would not have either. In <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/10/15/bookend/bookend.html">a tribute to Maxwell</a>, Daniel Menaker wrote:</p><blockquote>he loved the elf stories of Sylvia Townsend Warner and insisted that one after another be published in <em>The New Yorker</em>. They were antic and -- to the mind of many of us -- limited creations, and they ceased their <em>New Yorker</em> materializations the minute Maxwell retired from the magazine's staff in 1976. But he stuck by them until the end. In a letter in November 1999, responding to my teasing him about those pieces, he wrote, "Your inability to get any pleasure in Sylvia's Elfin stories has driven me back to the book. I read the first story last night and was beside myself with pleasure."</blockquote><p>Maxwell was right and Menaker wrong. Anybody who calls those stories "antic" has barely read them.</p><p>(Pause for a tangent: <em>The New Yorker</em> should publish an anthology of stories by women from its pages. The idea of "the <em>New Yorker</em> story" is a masculine idea, and that idea erases a tremendous and generally forgotten body of work by women in the magazine.)</p><p>As much as I like Warner's novels (even the <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2019/09/the-flint-anchor-by-sylvia-townsend.html">duller ones</a>), it is her short stories that I most cherish. She started out as a composer and musicologist, then became a poet, and these two vocations in many ways made her a perfect fit for short stories, which have more in common with music and poetry than with novels. In fact, once she gave up novels and focused primarily on stories (after 1954), the stories grow even more rewarding — some of her richest, most interesting work comes in the last 20 years of her life.</p><p>Warner matters to me because she is the full package, the real deal, the whole thing — a writer in various genres whose craft was precise and whose vision was unique.</p><p>I proposed a panel on her work to Readercon because I think it is worth considering Warner among those writers whose base is something akin to fantasy, even as they write primarily in realistic modes. I wasn't exactly sure where this idea might lead, or even if it could hold water, but I was pleased to see the panel run with it.</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/86160615/3374a16ccf4d4153b402efc73d288f4d/e30%3D/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=l6WgsWmJ61E-EGc2VbGmqySTY7ekAmZkCTjrRLqj-8U%3D" /></p><h3>Available Books</h3><p>In the US, Warner's best novels <a href="https://www.nyrb.com/collections/sylvia-townsend-warner">are available</a> in lovely editions from the New York Review of Books Classics series. All of her novels <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/26801/sylvia-townsend--warner">are available</a> in the UK from Penguin Classics, and American completists <a href="https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/search/author/Sylvia%20Townsend%20Warner">can order them and other UK editions with free shipping from Blackwells</a>.</p><p>What's most exciting to me is that more of Warner's short story collections are now available both in the UK and US thanks to <a href="https://www.faber.co.uk/author/sylvia-townsend-warner/">Faber</a> and to <a href="https://www.handheldpress.co.uk/?s=Sylvia+Townsend+Warner">Handheld Press</a>. Handheld seems to have full US distribution, so Americans can find their editions wherever they normally get books. The Faber editions are a little bit more of a mixed bag when it comes to availability. The wonderful <a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/winter-in-the-air-sylvia-townsend-warner/18576259?ean=9780571375462"><em>Winter in the Air</em></a> is widely available both as a paperback and as an ebook. The other Faber editions right now seem to be out of stock everywhere except Amazon, but they are definitely worth seeking out. (A few of Warner's collections remain out of print, but I've found them easy to obtain on the used market for surprisingly low prices.)</p><p>There's also a more obscure collection, which I only recently learned about and ordered from Blackwell's: <a href="https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/English-Climate-Wartime-Stories-by-Sylvia-Townsend-Warner/9781910263273"><em>English Climate: Wartime Stories</em></a>, published by Persphone Books in 2020. It arrived moments before I left for Readercon, so I haven't had a chance to read it over yet, but it collects quite a few stories that have been unavailable for a long time, and it's a nicely-produced edition.</p><p>For readers willing to delve into the world of used and rare books, I recommend seeking out the <a href="https://www.biblio.com/search.php?stage=1&author=sylvia+townsend+warner&title=selected+stories&isbn=&keyisbn=&publisher=&illustrator=&mindate=&maxdate=&minprice=&maxprice=&country=&format=&cond=&days_back=&order=priceasc&pageper=20&dist=50&zip=&quantity="><em>Selected Stories</em></a> edited by Susanna Pinney and William Maxwell. It's a good overview of her fiction and an excellent place to start. (I do wish someone like NYRB were able to publish a new selection of her stories. The Pinney/Maxwell selection is solid and a fine introduction, but a fresh selection would be nice to have. Even a simple reprinting of the Pinney/Maxwell would be an improvement over the current situation, though, where much still remains out of print.) For a real treat, seek out <a href="https://www.bookfinder.com/search/?full=on&ac=sl&st=sl&ref=bf_s2_a1_t1_1&qi=K24bveybvKsR7GnBb5PpFvtR9wk_1689477020_1:1:1"><em>With the Hunted</em></a>, a selection of Warner's nonfiction. It's so rare that prices tend to be quite high, but keep your eyes out — I eventually found one for $25 and snapped it up. It's not an essential Warner book for the casual reader, nor an especially good introduction to her work, but it's full of little gems.</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/86160615/0f57f2f575c14de997436bf853258001/e30%3D/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=RcOhbOGfWNHcUzAmOZItBEm0gNewfPubRVNaww8IEs8%3D" /></p><h3>Notes on "The Fantasy Fiction of Sylvia Townsend Warner"</h3><p>The panel was moderated by Robert Killheffer and the panelists were Gwynne Garfinkle, Greer Gilman, Sarah Smith, and Michael Swanwick. It was a strong mix of panelists because they each brought knowledge of the topic from a different point of view. Greer Gilman, for instance, wrote forewards to some of the Handheld Press editions of Warner's books; Michael Swanwick has long experience as an evangelist for Warner; other panelists were longtime readers.</p><p>If I remember correctly, I wrote all of what became the panel description except the last sentence:</p><blockquote>Sylvia Townsend Warner's first novel, <em>Lolly Willowes,</em> was the story of a witch, and her final book, <em>Kingdoms of Elfin,</em> collected linked fantasy stories originally published in <em>The New Yorker.</em> Though most of her work in between was realist fiction, fantasy often found its way in, particularly with <em>The Cat's Cradle-Book.</em> Let's discuss the fantasy aspects of Sylvia Townsend Warner's fiction.</blockquote><p>It is a longstanding, cherished tradition at Readercon to argue with panel descriptions, but I was pleased the panelists seemed to be delighted by this description. I was even more delighted that they jumped right in to the spirit of it. Greer Gilman began by recommending the story "A Spirit Rises" (originally in <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1961/07/08/a-spirit-rises"><em>The New Yorker</em></a>; reprinted in <a href="https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571276394-a-spirit-rises/">the collection</a> of the same title) as a story in a "realistic" setting that has a mythic undercurrent — it feels, Gilman said, a rather like stories of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlking">Erlking</a>.</p><p>Sarah Smith praises Warner as a master of small emotions, a pointillist, not a writer of grand expressions. She also praised what she sees as Warner's sense of wonder, which recognizes that just because an event is not good does not mean that it is not miraculous.</p><p>Michael Swanwick spoke of trying to convince people, particular genre writers, that the Elfin stories are worthwhile and running up against lots of resistance. The rest of the panel was surprised by this, but he said, in fact, many esteemed fantasy writers do not find anything of value in those stories. (This kind of response is reflected in <a href="http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/the-strange-horizons-book-club-kingdoms-of-elfin-by-sylvia-townsend-warner/">a roundtable discussion</a> of the book that <em>Strange Horizons</em> published a few years ago, where after some thoughtful and insightful discussion the participants were asked if they liked the book and would recommend it to other people and they struggled.) As Greer Gilman said on the panel, there is a coldness to the fairies — they are, she said, 19th century courtiers, "particles with charm and strangeness", but cold, distant. Swanwick noted that while the elfin have exterior lives, they don't really have any inner life, which makes them seem quite odd to modern readers — for instance, they do not expect emotionally satisfying marriages. They are, she proposed a bit later on the panel, very much like cats, and Warner was a great lover of cats. The difference is that elfins have a human-like form, and so we expect more human-like behavior, feelings, and responses from them. But they make sense as cats.</p><p>From the other end of Warner's career, there was <em>Lolly Willowes</em>, which Rob Killheffer noted is "about finding feeling" and Sarah Smith said is about a kind of liberation, with Laura (Lolly) Willowes recognizing that her life has been constrained and finding a way out of it. While one of Warner's most overtly perhaps-supernatural stories, it's important to note that the reality is ambiguous: either, Smith said, she goes mad or she discovers the supernatural world ... and it's implied that these may, in fact, be the same thing.</p><p>Greer Gilman pointed out that it's not that Laura is forced to become a "madwoman" in the woods, but that she discovers she can if she wants, and this itself is liberating. She has opened up possibilities for herself. She has choice. Rob Killheffer said that she escapes progressively, trying things out, and that she doesn't even decide to join (what seems to be a) sabbath of witches, since it reminds her too much of the balls she went to when young. Greer Gilman replied that Laura isn't looking for company, she's looking for independence — a wood of one's own.</p><p>Gilman also talked about a less-discussed Warner novel, <em>A True Heart</em> (1929), which seems straightforward enough in its basic realism, but draws quietly from Ovid. Warner was so well read in such a variety of things (classical literature, fairy lore, folklore, ballads) that it becomes the substrate of her imagination. She's not drawing primarily on a social realist tradition of fiction.</p><p>Sarah Smith offered that we ought to speak of Leonora Carrington when speaking of Warner, and this seems right to me. Warner was never really a surrealist to the extent that Carrington was, but they have similar wellsprings, as well as a certain similarity in their puckishness. Sarah also proposed that one of the things Warner does is position herself as a simple purveyor of gossip, though there is nothing simple about it. (This in particular with regard to <em>The Corner That Held Them</em>, one of her greatest novels, but not one with anything one might think of as a plot.</p><p>Rob Killheffer brought up <em>The Cat's Cradle Book</em>, which is mentioned in the panel description. While the elfin may be like cats, and the <em>Cat's Cradle</em> stories offer no consolations for life, there is, Rob proposed, still a warmth that is missing from <em>Kingdoms of Elfin</em>. There is, indeed, the panelists felt, a distance to the elfin stories, a cruelty — but multiple panelists pointed out that this is not a cruelty on Warner's part, as she is not, herself, ever cold or unkind, but rather she is all too aware of the cruelties the world inflicts on us.</p><p>And then the panel had to end, though it could certainly have continued for another hour easily.</p><p>Appropriately, the next panel I attended was devoted to the work of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Machen">Arthur Machen</a> — Sylvia Townsend Warner's uncle (by marriage).</p></div></div><br />Matthew Cheneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07704529564308222004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-78949636033389797682023-07-10T21:10:00.001-04:002023-08-17T21:12:02.045-04:00Eat Sleep Sit<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijGxCTZ0qfQFK91Gr9AgDcT1_5EHOX-CJed6FnKvRvdc5xoRaN6VjClokx1dnE3VJG-Yop7QUmillgPQbJEJuu1ISbxTyhiRibeZOvkrQIDtQ9oTOIk8j7MeGxIzPEvyS4SNJmKf_qGnzp1xQpg2AciscUw942-MQZhBlpEaApGCe-KufDxOEA/s893/Eat%20Sleep%20Sit%20cover.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="893" data-original-width="620" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijGxCTZ0qfQFK91Gr9AgDcT1_5EHOX-CJed6FnKvRvdc5xoRaN6VjClokx1dnE3VJG-Yop7QUmillgPQbJEJuu1ISbxTyhiRibeZOvkrQIDtQ9oTOIk8j7MeGxIzPEvyS4SNJmKf_qGnzp1xQpg2AciscUw942-MQZhBlpEaApGCe-KufDxOEA/w444-h640/Eat%20Sleep%20Sit%20cover.webp" width="444" /></a></div><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 fYcGch sc-rcywpx-0 hRKPxe" data-tag="post-content"><div class="sc-1ye87qi-0 cZNwdx"><p>Kaoru Nonomura's <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=nF4qDwAAQBAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false"><em>Eat Sleep Sit: My Year at Japan's Most Rigorous Zen Temple</em></a> (trans by Juliet Winters Carpenter) is, as far as I know, the most detailed look inside the practices of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eihei-ji">Eiheiji</a> temple, founded in the mid-13th century with the great <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C5%8Dgen">Dōgen</a> as abbot. Certainly, it is the most detailed description in English of daily life within Eiheiji.</p><p>I will read almost anything about monks and hermits, regardless of religion or inclination, if the focus is on the practicalities more than the dogmas. (An obsession with Henry David Thoreau when I was in high school was probably the first sign of this inclination.) My ideal life would certainly be that of a monk; alas, I have no ability to believe in any particular religion, never mind devote my life to faith. Is there a cloister for cheerful nihilists, a quiet scholastic place where I might sit and contemplate the meaninglessness of existence?</p><p>Many years ago, I met a former Trappist monk in Nicaragua, a man inspired, like many, by the writings of Thomas Merton. I talked with him at length, fascinated not by Christianity (which I find less than fascinating) but by imagining a rigorous life of contemplation and silence. He had given it up after five or so years, and I remember feeling both awe at his ability to have maintained silence for such a time and disappointment that he had returned to the world of noise and living. I knew I could never commit to such a life — not only because of the Christianity but because unending ritual isn't anything I can imagine sticking with — but I thought: <em>If I were such a person, and had gotten that far, what a shame to give it up!</em> This is silly, of course, and unfair, because the former monk was living a good life and doing great work among people of desperate need. But still...</p><p>That feeling returned as I finished reading <em>Eat Sleep Sit</em>. Buddhism (and Zen in particular) is far more congruent with my own view of the world than Christianity, but even the basic rituals and practices of everyday Zen are not anything I have wanted to commit to. (<a href="https://www.cemeterydance.com/extras/night-time-logic-matthew-cheney/">As I said</a> in my interview with Daniel Braum recently, literature is my religious practice.) </p><p>Nonetheless, I greatly admire people who can commit themselves, and so, at the end of the book, when Nonomura chooses to leave Eiheiji after his initial training finishes and he is free to go, I felt a terrible loss. Nonomura gives us such a detailed, careful, thoughtful view of life inside this special (terrifying; wondrous) place that to leave it after we have journeyed alongside him is wrenching for anyone who wishes they were less bound to the material realities and selfish attachments of common life.</p><h3>§</h3><h3><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/85788698/3ad3c3c7ed964e4086680a7c8b8bc1e4/eyJ3Ijo4MjB9/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=wjZAm-lxmWb_U3bWsUI5J5I_6JSKuYwZBkSQ7jNeeoY%3D" /></h3><blockquote>...the greatest, most important and most significant appearance that the world can show us is not someone who conquers the world, but rather someone who overcomes it; and this is, in fact, nothing other than the quiet, unnoticed life of someone who has achieved the cognition that leads him to renounce and negate the will to life that fills all things and drives and strives in all things.</blockquote><blockquote>—Schopenhauer, <em>The World as Will and Representation</em>, vol. 1, § 68<br />(trans. Norman, Welchman, & Janaway)</blockquote><p>I got interested in Eiheiji particularly after reading Peter Matthiessen's <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=dt1OEAAAQBAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false"><em>Nine-headed Dragon River: Zen Journals 1969–1982</em></a>, which includes an account of his brief visit to Eiheiji. (I went to Matthiessen's book looking for more information about the years covered in <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=BRRvDQAAQBAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false"><em>The Snow Leopard</em></a>, but it only includes material already available in that book, although some of the information about the earlier years is interesting. As is the way of things, what I most appreciated in <em>Nine-headed Dragon River</em> had little to do with why I picked up the book in the first place.) As Eiheiji, Matthiessen is told that Americans are rarely successful when training as monks there, since even the most devout American Zen practitioner is not up to the rigor of everyday life as a trainee monk at Eiheiji. I found this intriguing. Just what happens at Eiheiji to make it impossible for even devoutly Buddhist Americans to last there?</p><p><em>Eat Sleep Sit</em> answers that question clearly. Regular life at Eiheiji is austere and severe, but the first few weeks and months of training are flat-out brutal. The new monks are shouted at, slapped, kicked, and punched for the tiniest mistakes (sometimes without even having been told beforehand how to do some complicated ritual correctly). Sleep deprivation is constant, since the trainees must get up sometimes hours before everyone else and do chores or study. Meals are so small and infrequent that new monks are always hungry, and illness and hospitalization are not uncommon — indeed, it seems that <a href="https://www.webmd.com/brain/what-is-beriberi">beriberi</a> (thiamine deficiency) is used as a way to discipline new trainees: a diet primarily of carbohydrates will lead to it, and one of the only things new monks can get extra helpings of is rice. (The chapter titled "Hunger" in <em>Eat Sleep Sit</em> is truly harrowing.) <em>Go ahead, take that extra helping ... but know that it will, sooner or later, make you very sick.</em> Thus you learn self-control.</p><p>The ultimate purpose of such harsh training is not merely self-control, however — it is self-annihilation. It is impossible to dispense with the self intellectually. The self is an intellectual construct, and in many ways it <em>is</em> the intellect, at least for those of us who have lived our whole lives in societies devoted to individualism. We might read or listen to, say, <a href="https://tricycle.org/magazine/no-self-jay-l-garfield/">Jay Garfield on the Buddhist idea of no-self</a>, and we might try to wrap our heads around the concept, and we might ultimately agree with the basic principal, but this is just the self negotiating with itself. Without rigorous training, we're still trapped in self. Western cultures excel in mapping all roads out of the self right back to the self. Thich Nhat Hanh may have originally intended <em>The Miracle of Mindfulness</em> as a balm for Vietnamese monks facing terrible oppression (I've <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2022/05/difficult-peace.html">written</a> about this previously), but once the book found its way to the west it spawned ten thousand self-help groups. But the self does not need help! The self needs obliteration!</p><p>Untutored meditation is able sometimes to produce a fleeting sense of non-self, particularly if it is not meditation with a goal of eliciting a feeling of calm of comfort (which requires focus on the self). But <em>Eat Sleep Sit</em> shows that for people committed to actual annihilation of self, rigorous meditation (often physically painful) is but one tool, and the total work is astonishingly tough, like major surgery without anesthesia. By Nonomura's account, it works, but it's also clear why even devout American Buddhists are unlikely to follow such a rigorous path. Marines trained at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_Corps_Recruit_Depot_Parris_Island">Parris Island</a> would be unlikely to put up with some of what Eiheiji's trainees go through.</p><p>Nonomura shows that most of the trainees at Eiheiji did not arrive there out of a deep commitment to Zen. Instead, they needed the training so that they could meet family expectations. Many of his peers come from families that own a small temple, and if they are the eldest son then they will be expected to follow their father and become the next priest at that temple. Some have married into (or expect to marry into) families that do not have a son to take over the temple, and they become the next in line. (Japanese Sōto Zen is patriarchal. American Sōto Zen <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/for-full-inclusion-for-wo_b_772357">has tried to improve</a> in recent years.) They could study at other training temples that are not as rigorous as Eiheiji, but it would take longer. Surviving the brutalities of Eiheiji means a faster track to priesthood and greater prestige, because while there may be various paths, everyone knows Eiheiji's is the most difficult and demanding.</p><blockquote>There is a misapprehension that everyone who comes to Eiheiji has had a religious awakening and is embarking on the path of Buddhism in willing search of enlightenment, but this is emphatically not the case. Many are full of resentment at the burden laid on them. Hearts torn to pieces, they are forced to swallow their tears and scotch long-cherished dreams in order to come. Weighted down by the eager expectations of family and parishioners, seen off with flowery speeches of congratulation, they bid farewell to the freedom of their past lives and make their lonely way to the mountains of Fukui Prefecture. However much they might wish to run away, they have no other refuge. (32)</blockquote><p>Before reading the early chapters of <em>Eat Sleep Sit</em>, I had assumed anyone who went to Eiheiji did so out of a deep personal commitment to Zen. Reading that this is not necessarily so increased the pathos of the many chapters describing the training practices — it's difficult enough to imagine subjecting yourself to the rigors of Eiheiji training from a sense of philosophical or religious calling, but to go through it because you don't know what else to do and feel you have no other option in life is heartbreaking. (Which is, of course, me projecting my American individualism onto it all. But still...)</p><p>In <a href="https://cmoon.substack.com/p/long-lost-cousins">an interesting review</a> of <em>Eat Sleep Sit,</em> Christina Moon, a Zen priest living at Daihonzan Chozen-ji in Hawaiʻi, shares a conversation she had about the book with a Japanese student:</p><blockquote>"It's called <em>Eat Sleep Sit</em>," I said.</blockquote><blockquote>"Ha ha!" Her eruption of laughter took me wholly by surprise. "So," she quipped, "it's basically the Japanese version of <em>Eat Pray Love</em>!"</blockquote><blockquote>I was stunned and could not, for the life of me, understand what she was thinking.</blockquote><blockquote>"Umm, well, six of the guys have already been hospitalized, basically for starvation at this point," I countered.</blockquote><blockquote>"So it really IS the Japanese version of <em>Eat, Pray, Love</em>!" She laughed again, even harder.</blockquote><blockquote>It took me a while to get the joke. But, eventually, I understood that she was poking fun at the Japanese tendency to be somewhat cold and direct, as well as at Western attachments to self gratification and emotions. Indeed, both books are based on the premises of common, shared cultural understandings about what it means to find oneself. It's just that the Japanese or East Asian versions and the Western version differ starkly. Nonomura's maturation and self development emerges from his complete commitment to life at Eihei-ji, no matter its austerities or severity. <em>Eat Pray Love </em>is about a privileged white woman who jets around the developing world to find meaning (and, lest we forget, love!) while still awash in material wealth, indulgence, and privilege.</blockquote><p>It's a useful way to think about the difference between cultures, or at least between the ideal culture embodied by Eiheiji and the ideal culture embodied by stuff and self (and the stuff of self).</p><h3>§</h3><h3><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/85788698/f16bea1ab5d847a1bffcaf3b430efdb0/eyJ3Ijo4MjB9/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=UyGRcLcgFl0jjHx8AJdvLlt1A9DttexNF4ngmHt-Bb8%3D" /></h3><blockquote>Many people are misled by books, by names, by powers. After they've practiced for a while, they think they've realized the Tao. But they haven't. The Tao has no name. To follow the Tao is to return to nothingness.</blockquote><blockquote>—Ch'en Shih-chieh, abbot of Laomutien temple, in <em>Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits</em> by Bill Porter</blockquote><p>There is a tendency in many religious practices, including some versions of Buddhism, to proclaim that life is miraculous. This is one of the things I find annoying in religions, since if we define the miraculous as something beyond the ordinary, then life, at least on this planet, is the opposite of miraculous, and human life especially so. (Most people who are able to procreate do so. If the ability to reproduce is miraculous, then cancer is a miracle.) This recognition does not need to lead to a philosophy of misery and wanton cruelty. Rather, I see the whole idea of the miraculousness of life, and particularly of human life, as leading to terrible cruelties and inequities — our conviction that we are special (however we define "we") leads quite easily to inquisitions, reigns of terror, witch hunts, and genocides. (<em>My god is an awesome god! Your god sucks!) </em>Our conviction that human life is superior to other forms of life is one of the prime engines of the anthropocene.</p><p>I found it heartening, then, to read Nonomura's conclusion after his year at Eiheiji:</p><blockquote>The business of living is not in the least special. In a sense it all comes down to two things: eating and excreting. These activities are common to all life forms. Every creature on earth is born, through eating and excreting helps maintain the balance of the great chain of being, and dies. In the realm of nature, these activities are essential to the continuity of life, and they give value to each being’s life. People are no different. If human life has meaning, it lies above all in the essential fact of our physical existence in this world. This is what I strongly believe.</blockquote><blockquote>By contemplating life as it is, stripped of all extraneous added value, I found I could let go of a myriad of things that had been gnawing at my mind. Through the prosaic repetition of Eiheiji’s exacting daily routines for washing the face, eating, defecating, and sleeping, this is the answer that I felt in my bones: accept unconditionally the fact of your life and treasure each moment of each day.</blockquote><p>I would not be surprised if translator Juliet Winters Carpenter recognized that it only takes one letter to change the English title of this book to <em>Eat Sleep Shit,</em> and liked that possibility. Such vulgarity would be indecorous and undignified, but not inaccurate. Dōgen wrote at great length about how monks should attend to both urination and defecation, and <em>Eat Sleep Sit</em> includes a detailed chapter titled "Lavatory". </p><p>If we overcome the socially imposed politeness that casts discussion of bodily functions out of all conversation, we ought to be able to see that these bodily functions, common to all animals in one way or another, also replicate the basic functions of the closed system of the biosphere itself. If <em>miraculous</em> refers not to what is uncommon but rather to what is awe-inspiring and remarkable, then certainly the fact of our systems — from single cells to entire atmospheres — ingesting, converting, and expelling energy is miraculous.</p><p>It is important to note that though hunger is used as a pedagogical tool at Eiheiji, the Zen attitude toward food is not like that of, say, an ascetic Christian seeking to deny all pleasure. What may be Dōgen's single most famous text <a href="https://wwzc.org/dharma-text/tenzo-kyokun-instructions-tenzo">"Instructions for the Tenzo"</a> (aka "Instructions for the Cook") makes it very clear that food is absolutely central both to monastic life — where the <em>tenzo</em> (head cook) is a revered and authoritative member of the temple — and to Zen practice generally. Indeed, cooking (done right) <em>is</em> Zen practice to such an extent that at Eiheiji, cooks are exempted from other types of practice required of everyone else. </p><p>The danger of food, for Zen monks at least, is the temptation to cling to preference:</p><blockquote>If you only have wild grasses with which to make a broth, do not disdain them. If you have ingredients for a creamy soup do not be delighted. Where there is no attachment, there can be no aversion. [Alternately, Kotler & Tanahashi trans: "Where there is no discrimination, how can there be distaste?"] Do not be careless with poor ingredients and do not depend on fine ingredients to do your work for you but work with everything with the same sincerity. If you do not do so then it is like changing your behaviour according to the status of the person you meet; this is not how a student of the Way is.</blockquote><p>A White Wind Zen Community <a href="https://wwzc.org/dharma-text/tenzo-kyokun-instructions-tenzo#footnoteref76_yoex10k">footnote</a> for "Instructions for the Tenzo" offers an amusing quotation: "In the <em>Soei-shu</em> Katyayana says, 'The mouth of a monk is like a furnace. Just as a furnace burns both sandalwood and cow shit without distinction, our mouths should be the same, eating rich and plain food as food. We should use whatever we receive.'" </p><p>While I am drawn to the humility in this, I also wonder if we ought not pause over the powerful lesson in impermanence that eating offers us, and perhaps celebrate the lessons of pleasurable food. Once we have received the joy of a particularly nice bite, the taste fades and the food is destined for the toilet. This does not mean that the bite was bad or unimportant — but it also does not mean that we should forget where it all ends up.</p><p>(Speaking of food, I should note here that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Glassman">Bernie Glassman</a>, a founder of <a href="https://zenpeacemakers.org/about/">Zen Peacemakers</a>, published a book (co-written with Rick Fields) titled <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=u7xvDwAAQBAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PR3#v=onepage&q&f=false"><em>Instructions to the Cook: A Zen Master's Lessons in Living a Life that Matters</em></a>. Glassman used food for extraordinary purpose — he founded the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyston_Bakery">Greyston Bakery</a>, which provides cakes to high-end restaurants and brownies for Ben & Jerry's ice cream — and brings in millions of dollars a year to support social projects. Greyston's <a href="https://www.greyston.org/openhiringjobs/">open hiring</a> practices are a real inspiration.)</p><h3>§</h3><h3><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/85788698/3deee0e185914968aa823845709672c9/eyJ3Ijo4MjB9/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=ikYqyb-fsYXCtNxn3GKkUAJXf_5EYJeo9j2PWRK-rDE%3D" /></h3><blockquote>...possibly she said to herself, As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship ... as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellow-prisoners ... decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can.</blockquote><blockquote>—Virginia Woolf, <em>Mrs. Dalloway</em></blockquote><p>The English translation of <em>Eat Sleep Sit</em> includes two afterwords from the Japanese editions, one written five years after Nonomura left Eiheiji, one written five years after the book's publication (10 years after Eiheiji). The perspective Nonomora offers in those afterwords is fascinating. </p><p>In the first afterword, Nonomura lists the ways he was aware he had been changed by his year at Eiheiji:</p><blockquote>Now when a mosquito lands on me, I hesitate for a second before killing it.</blockquote><blockquote>I no longer eat more than necessary.</blockquote><blockquote>I no longer think about things more deeply than necessary.</blockquote><blockquote>I have become capable of tears. Once I told someone, “A man who can cry is a lucky man.” I never could, before. I used to think what a relief it must be to let yourself go and cry, but I just couldn’t. Now I can cry in great gulping sobs.</blockquote><blockquote>That’s about it, I think. Then again, I could be completely wrong.</blockquote><p>It's a quietly profound list. We might expect or even hope that it would be a list of bigger things: <em>I still sit zazen for hours a day, I donate all my spare income to charity, I work to end hunger and to promote world peace</em>. (And who knows, maybe he does all those things.)<em> </em>When I first read the list, I thought, "After all the pain you went through at Eiheiji ... this is what you got from it?!" But that was shortsighted of me. The first three items are examples of a significant thoughtfulness — <em>thoughtfulness</em> in the full sense of the word. Or perhaps, since (over)thinking is one of the things Zen practice works hard to rid you of, instead of thoughtfulness we might say reflectiveness. A word like that. (Language is always wrong.)</p><p>The fourth item is revealing and beautiful. The capacity for tears suggests so much. I don't even want to explicate it here, because its meaning ought to be held in each reader's mind like a koan, not a riddle to solve but an offering to contemplate.</p><p>And then: <em>I could be completely wrong</em>. This, of course, is the key to everything. That, too, I expect, is a legacy from Eiheiji.</p><p>What might we, who presumably are not aspiring Zen monks or even Zen practitioners, take — receive — from this book?</p><p>I expect I will return to <em>Eat Sleep Sit</em> many times, but in this reading of it, I first found the simple pleasure of delving deeply into a way of living that I was unfamiliar with. I love a good, detailed story of a way of work or (and) a way of life. Nonomura's book has it, probably to a greater degree of detail than many readers have patience for. But the writing is so clear that I expect readers find more in it to be interesting than they would if they were told the particular topics of individual chapters.</p><p>More than that, though, <em>Eat Sleep Sit</em> offers opportunities to ask ourselves, "What might I do in that situation and that place?" The stories Nonomura tells provoke the imagination. They bring us into a mode of philosophizing and self-knowledge that feels gentle even as it describes brutal or difficult moments. </p><p>Such reading, though beginning from a speculation about the self, does not need to reinforce the self. Instead, by imagining our way into unfamiliar, even alienating, experiences, we can speculate about the boundaries of our own yearnings and desires. I know I would not last a day of training at Eiheiji, but it was nonetheless illuminating to wonder what it would take for me to be the kind of person who <em>could</em> survive it — how much would I need to stretch beyond my current personality and physicality and knowledge to do that? Who might that person even be? And what does that say about my own sense of my possibility? Have I constructed an idea of my self that is constricting me (in fact, constricting me <em>to</em> me — binding me to the illusion of self).</p><p>Of course, now I am guilty of overthinking what should not be overthought. </p><p><em>I no longer think about things more deeply than necessary</em>, Nonomura said five years after leaving Eiheiji. A valuable lesson, indeed.</p><blockquote>"Venerable sir, why put yourself to the difficulty of working as a cook in your old age? Why not just do zazen and study the koan of the ancient masters?"</blockquote><blockquote>The tenzo laughed for a long time and then he said, "My foreign friend, it seems you don't really understand practice or the words of the ancients."</blockquote><blockquote>Hearing this elder monk's words I felt ashamed and surprised. I asked, "What is practice? What are words?"</blockquote><blockquote>The tenzo said, "Keep asking and penetrate this question and then you will be someone who understands."</blockquote><blockquote>But I didn't know what he was talking about and so the tenzo said, "If you don't understand then come and see me at Ayuwang shan some time. We'll talk about the meaning of words." Having said this, he stood up and said, "It'll be getting dark soon. I'd best hurry." And he left.</blockquote><blockquote>—Dōgen, "Instructions for the Tenzo"</blockquote><p><br /></p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/85788698/c5108c7e52c243078866939664d38dac/eyJ3Ijo4MjAsIndlYnAiOjB9/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=bW7Esxpws-uUqaffVtvWFSRrwPC72yUL9Pih6jUOqZY%3D" /></p><p>----------</p><p>All images via <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eihei-ji">Wikipedia</a> except the last, which is a <a href="https://redsamuraiii.tumblr.com/post/638656638602100736/ever-wonder-what-the-monks-really-do-from-the-time">screen capture</a> from a now-unavailable video via Red Samurai on Tumblr.</p></div></div>Matthew Cheneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07704529564308222004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-29896957843043550502023-07-01T08:00:00.002-04:002023-08-18T07:53:23.263-04:00Taylor Mac's 24-Decade History of Popular Music<div class="separator"><p style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"> <em> </em><em></em></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><em><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCCN8_aASdczwa3TCGOTMGlBm8mCsSN2bgKUP-xExJfCV0WJVbdLDTLx7Wh3StZrOJeZ-ifaEB-Zzqa5ncwNMSIP6TZeiG48okrSwAZZJYMBu1iLF8lFR0eazZamc-1N-sXuQW7B3ja8t5wIjopeW97TQZG5SQpN7Lf90OsO723ei0wCUa8CGL/s1095/Taylor%20Mac.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="717" data-original-width="1095" height="421" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCCN8_aASdczwa3TCGOTMGlBm8mCsSN2bgKUP-xExJfCV0WJVbdLDTLx7Wh3StZrOJeZ-ifaEB-Zzqa5ncwNMSIP6TZeiG48okrSwAZZJYMBu1iLF8lFR0eazZamc-1N-sXuQW7B3ja8t5wIjopeW97TQZG5SQpN7Lf90OsO723ei0wCUa8CGL/w640-h421/Taylor%20Mac.jpg" width="640" /></a></em></div><p></p></div><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 fYcGch sc-rcywpx-0 hRKPxe" data-tag="post-content"><div class="sc-1ye87qi-0 cZNwdx"><p><em><br /></em></p><blockquote><em>"I'm not really interested in this show being about history as much as I am interested in it being about all of us in this room have a lot of history on our backs and we're trying to figure out what to do with it." —Taylor Mac</em></blockquote><p></p><p>At noon on October 8, 2016, <a href="https://taylormac.org/">Taylor Mac</a> stepped on stage at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn and sang the first of 240 songs that would fill the space over the next 24 hours in one of the most astonishing works of performance art in American theatrical history. </p><p>Mac called the work a "radical faerie realness ritual sacrifce," with the event itself the ritual, the audience the sacrifice. Like much of what Mac says throughout, the statement is both absolutely earnest and aware that it's a funny and provocative thing to say. Mac's approach to personal pronouns is similar, because <a href="https://taylormac.org/#Bio">Mac's preferred personal pronoun is <em>judy</em></a>:</p><blockquote>A few people have claimed I use this pronoun as a joke. They are uninformed. It’s not a joke, which doesn’t mean it’s not funny. It’s a personalized pronoun for someone whose gender (professionally and personally) is constantly changing. My gender isn’t male or female or non-binary (which oddly creates a binary between people who are non-binary and people who are binary). My gender is “performer” (one day I’ll get it on the passport). It’s also an art piece. Imagine getting to have a pronoun that’s an art piece! I’m here to tell you, it’s as annoying to navigate as it is delicious. You too may change yourself.</blockquote><p>If you don't know the work of Taylor Mac, that statement is a fine glimpse: fun and funny, absolutely sincere, and determined to share the liberating wonders of queerness and art with the world. (To the <em>L.A. Times</em>, Mac <a href="https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-taylor-mac-los-angeles-20180314-story.html">said</a>, "I wanted a gender pronoun that is an art piece, that makes people pause and consider and laugh because everyone is so uptight about getting it right.")</p><p>Now, HBO has released <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27549751/?ref_=nm_flmg_t_1_dr">a 2-hour documentary</a> about the <em>24-Decade History of Popular Music</em> made by Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman, who previously made together <em>Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice</em>, <em>Paragraph 175, The Celluloid Closet, Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt</em>, and Epstein made <em>The Times of Harvey Milk</em>, which won the 1985 Oscar for Documentary Feature. </p><p>It is a 2-hour documentary, not a concert film — hardly any of the songs are presented complete, some of the footage is out of chronological order, and there are brief talking head sections throughout. Thus, what we see is well under 10% of the whole.</p><p>Do I wish there were something significantly longer and more of a concert film? Yes. Do I love this documentary? Yes. (See, it's not hard to be nonbinary!) I have so far watched it twice this week and will probably watch it again soon.</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/85391101/2e95550703144c60a7eba33e184c7314/eyJ3Ijo4MjAsIndlYnAiOjB9/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=ytBsl6u0xAZQPdmNvlI_iavmjbY-VoWbIfgCrI38Ouk%3D" /></p><p>The nonstop 24-hour version of Mac's show was an experience that cannot be replicated on a movie screen. The media are different. Even the various 6-hour segments that Mac performed for many years were different from the full 24. The challenge of performing for 6 hours is daunting; the challenge of performing for 24 hours would give even David Blaine a moment of pause. Similarly, while 6 hours is a lot to sit through, plenty of people do that when watching TV these days, and it's hardly unprecedented in the theatre. (Queer saint of the theatre David Greenspan <a href="https://www.timeout.com/newyork/theater/strange-interlude">performed</a> all of Eugene O'Neill's <em>Strange Interlude</em> himself for 6 hours!) The whole point of the 24-hour event was to create community, and I am not sure how community could be created through a film alone. Certainly, film events can create community — I know communities that have sprung up via various film festivals, for instance — but I can't think of a way that a film itself (or a book itself or a song itself or...) could create community. Theatre has that magical ability because theatre is itself an event.</p><p>What makes the documentary so special, though, is that it gives us glimpses of the unique community that formed during those 24 hours in Brooklyn in October 2016. Epstein and Friedman don't push it, don't make lots of big gestures to show us; they're better filmmakers than that. They let the magic be and let it present itself to us.</p><p>That's the wonder of this film. Not that it itself creates community, but that it shows us community being created during the show, helps us feel the importance and beauty of that community, and inspires us to seek the same for ourselves.</p><p>As much as it is about community, Mac's show is about queering. In an <a href="https://people.com/queer-performance-artist-taylor-mac-on-performing-for-24-hours-7553592?utm_campaign=peoplemagazine&utm_content=new&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_term=649b0f1479513d0001e0ff2f">interview</a> with Jack Smart at <em>People</em>, judy called it an invitation: </p><blockquote>Like, I'm not trying to make something that the mainstream is comfortable with. But I do wanna invite them into the discomfort or the curiosity of what we're doing. And so I'm never trying to bash them over the head, and I'm never trying to exclude them and pretend like we're cooler than they are, which we're not. I'm just trying to invite them into this different experience. And so it's all about invitation, invitation, invitation. That's what I hope the film will continue to do.</blockquote><p>From the opening, <em>The 24-Decade History of Popular Music</em> proposes that queering is a duty of all patriotic Americans. It begins with the classic "Yankee Doodle Dandy", but Mac explains that this song was originally a British song making fun of Americans for being effeminite sissies ("Which is really saying something, coming from the British!"). The colonial army won a battle and then, with some captured Brits, "we pointed our bayonets at them and made them sing 'Yankee Doodle Dandy' over and over and over again. And that's how it became an American song. Dandy revenge!"</p><p>The entire event that was the show revealed itself as a space for an important <em>what if</em>: What if the world were viewed with queerness at the center rather than the margins? This plays out in countless small ways throughout the film, as well as some deliberate ways, the most obvious being two moments, one funny and disconcerting and touching, the next profoundly moving.</p><p>During the 1950s segment, Mac invites straight men ages 18-30 to the stage. The 1950s are famously the decade of suburbia, when white people moved to the segregated suburbs. But they had a problem. They succeeded in keeping many different types of people out of their nice white neighborhoods, but, Mac says, "What they can't do is stop the white queer from being born amongst them. You thought you were safe in the suburbs and then your child is <em>ME!</em>" Thus arose narratives of contagion and conversion: the queer must be sought out, segregated, villified, de-sexed, destroyed because otherwise their terribly faggotry might spread into the pure products of suburban white patriarchal America. </p><p>Mac decides to take the conversion narrative as seriously as the wonderful early-'90s Lesbian Avengers slogan: <em>We recruit</em>.</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/85391101/ad344e447bec4f0a91896d5c85558cf7/eyJ3ZWJwIjowfQ%3D%3D/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=ZzwdzO4oV-MNFReyoJUGMo2-GlA2HfvAZipuGVraZRQ%3D" /></p><p>Once the straight men are on stage, Mac instructs them to imitate what judy does, leading to various amusing and lewd moments. Then judy chooses one of the men and instructs him try to get away from judy while judy sings the Elvis Presley hit <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_(Elvis_Presley_song)">"Don't"</a> ("When I feel like this and I want to kiss you, baby, don't say don't..."). (The straight guy is so good it's tempting to think he's a plant, but given that Mac is beloved in the theatre world, I bet a lot of the audience that night included folks with some theatre experience, and this was a guy who was both a good sport and someone with an inkling of how to do improv.) The effect is complex: Mac brings the straight fear of queer desire alive, rendering it real, while also (particularly via the choice of song) showing that what straight men who, for instance, invoke <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_panic_defense">the gay panic defense</a> actually fear is that gay guys will treat them the way they treat women. Funny as the scene on stage is, it's also disturbing because it's so terribly familiar in reverse. And if we remember Elvis singing that song, there's some perfect evidence.</p><p>The second moment in the film of queerness-as-norm arrives with Mac's version of Ted Nugent's vile 1975 song "Snakeskin Cowboys", the <a href="https://genius.com/Ted-nugent-snakeskin-cowboys-lyrics">lyrics</a> originally intended to make fun of guys who dress in a manner Nugent considers too feminine. It's basically an anthem for fag-bashing. And Mac does something beautiful with it. </p><p>Working with music director <a href="https://www.mattray.nyc/">Matt Ray</a>, judy turned Nugent's song into a slow dance for a queer prom. Mac instructed everyone in the audience to find someone of the same sex to dance with ("and if you're genderqueer you can dance with anybody"). They could be couples or threesomes (they're not creating, judy said, "a heteronormative narrative"), but they needed to do it and do it seriously, get beyond the internalized homophobia that makes them giggle at dancing slowly with someone of the same sex, perhaps a stranger, and just give in to the moment, make it real. The music is beautiful, tender, sweet. Nugent's hate gets detourned into the prom dance so many of the people in that audience were denied. Just as the insult <em>queer</em> got made into something of our own, and then released back into the world for anybody to use in a positive way, so is the terror embedded in "Snakeskin Cowboys" undone, and what results is magic.</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/85391101/ea11a34fff78440ab40e55b1524c64a7/eyJ3Ijo4MjAsIndlYnAiOjB9/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=sH17SujVTkF0U1Mny3uf0GayJ_YaMnlu8f0uvif3nOQ%3D" /></p><p>From early in the show, the <em>24-Decade History of Popular Music</em> wrestles with the paradox of beautiful music saying terrible things. In the film, this paradox first really gets addressed with an 1829 sea shanty adaptation of a minstrel song, "Coal Black Rose". It's early in the show, Mac's voice is in great form, the performance is gorgeous. It's compelling music. Just as the audience is about to applaud at the end, Mac stops them. This is not a song that should be applauded. The beauty of the music makes it easy to miss what the song is saying in lyrics like, "One more round then heave her dry/ Come on, Jack Tout, you're not that shy." </p><blockquote>The men on the boat are hoisting up a sail, and they're trying to build their community by hoisting up the sail together, with the idea that when they get the job done they can go into town and gang rape a slave, a woman who is enslaved. People love things that build communities, and they never want to get rid of anything that builds a community. But. Sometimes you have to acknowledge that the things that have built the community, the foundation for them is evil, and it's not serving you, and that you have to tear it down and start from scratch.</blockquote><p>Mac could have made fun of the song in the arrangement or performance, but judy is smarter than that. The music is arranged to encourage a positive reaction, to make us like the song, to find it beautiful and rousing. That's part of the power of music. The word <em>community</em> itself has a certain music to it, a certain emotional power, and it is to the credit of everyone involved in making the show that they recognize that <em>how</em> we create community matters. It is entirely possible to create community by bonding over the oppression and even destruction of other people. (Every military understands this.) Everyone involved with <em>The</em> <em>24-Decade History of Popular Music</em> wanted to create a truly positive, creative community, not a community of oppression.</p><p>But they also know that community is possible through the shared experience of being oppressed. The whole idea for the show originated in Taylor Mac's experience (in adolescence) of political events during the first AIDS crisis. It was the experience of seeing a community come together because they were being destroyed together.</p><p>Taylor Mac is a couple years older than me, and we both first arrived in New York in the same year, 1994. (We never met, alas, that I remember.) I entirely identified with what judy said late in the film: "Dating in the '90s was navigating whether you wanted to go on a date with someone who might not be here in another six months. Never having a moment where your sexuality is free. Kind of having a sense of what you may be missing, but always, always being afraid of sex."</p><p>This is why the kind of sex positivity Taylor Mac embodies in performance is so important. Gay men in the '80s and '90s tried to develop an ethos of absolute honesty about sex, without shame or stigma, and with as much of a sense of humor as possible, because it was literally a matter of life and death. That is not an easy ethos to practice, especially if you, like many of us, internalized plenty of homophobia, suffered oodles of self-hatred, and grew up terrified of your own desires. (I've written about my own experience in <a href="https://lithub.com/reading-and-writing-my-way-through-the-aids-crisis/">a 2016 piece</a> for LitHub.) That stuff warps the soul, and the only way through it is to practice openness and honesty, doing whatever you can do to banish the idea that physical pleasure should be spoken of with shame. It ain't easy. My single favorite performance of Mac's is actually about this — it's a 2007 performance of a song called "Practice", <a href="https://youtu.be/__IcwUzLN50">available on YouTube here</a>. It's funny, explicit, and then deeply moving. It also gets at some of the challenges and contradictions of our ethos when, speaking of judyself in third person, Mac sings: "Sometimes he thinks he'll never have a healthy lovelife because he has a problem talking about sex with his lovers ... even though he doesn't have a problem talking about sex in front of a hundred and forty strangers."</p><p>AIDS inevitably looms large over the show and the film. The disease and the politics around it provided Mac with his own first experience of queer community. Co-director <a href="https://niegelsmith.com/about/">Niegel Smith</a> speaks movingly about how much loss there was from HIV/AIDS and how deeply it affected the artistic community. They built this loss into the show by starting with 24 musicians on stage and sending one away each hour. After singing Suzanne Vega's 1992 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Makes_Noise">"Blood Makes Noise"</a>, Mac announces that they will now be losing their costumer <a href="https://www.instagram.com/machinedazzle/">Machine Dazzle</a>, an integral member of the team not only behind the scenes but on stage helping Mac in and out of the many astonishing costumes. "The audience has a bond to that queen," Mac says. "Every time you see one of those outfits, it's just pure delight. So when you think all that delight, all that artistry is going to be taken away ... for me, it's what it was like to come of age during the AIDS epidemic. Every incredible artist that you hoped would be a mentor, you know, passes..."</p><p>This leads to Mac's scorching performance of the great Pansy Division song "Denny" (which I recently <a href="https://largeheartedboy.com/2023/05/30/matthew-cheneys-playlist-for-his-story-collection-the-last-vanishing-man/">included</a> on my Largehearted Boy playlist for <em>Last Vanishing Man,</em> unaware that Mac put it in the show). It's one of the important songs of the AIDS era because it so vividly captures the anger, desperation, fatalism, and despair of that time. "Denny had a skull and crossbone smack in the middle of his forehead. He said, 'I want them to see what they done to me, Denny." Mac's voice is pretty hoarse by that point, making the performance less pretty than the original, but the harshness captures the emotion even more than the Pansy Division version.</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/85391101/abe31da401b148c2b72d869e9aa50dab/eyJ3ZWJwIjowfQ%3D%3D/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=a5N1wuPJuuaBFk9Eve_8Odsa_EFVT77JxTpd_oTneyM%3D" /></p><p>The last person to leave, before the final decade, is Matt Ray. It is a wrenching moment, even for us watching the movie at home. As musical director, he not only helped put it all together, he was up there conducting and playing instruments throughout. The exhaustion and love are palpable in the frame.</p><p>And then it's just Taylor Mac, alone — except not alone. The magic of the event is that the audience has been rejuvenated, liberated, empowered. Taylor Mac strums a ukelele and scratches out, in a voice that's been going for almost 24 hours continuously, a beautiful song of judy's own composition, "When All the Artists Leave or Die". </p><blockquote>Sleep well<br />Get up<br />Do it again<br />Day after day after day<br />Until the cockroaches are your only patrons<br />Even then<br />You can lie down<br />Or get up and play</blockquote><p>Mac gives the song to the audience to sing in the end, and a gentle, enlivened, inspired chorus echoes through the theatre: <em>You can lie down ... or get up and play...</em></p><p>It's gorgeous and moving. Epstein and Friedman allow it to settle, then they run Mac's invigorating performance of Patti Smith's "People Have the Power" (which you can see judy perform on the Colbert show <a href="https://youtu.be/joTwxlOEQVA">on YouTube here</a>) and then a really fun, upbeat rock version of "Turn, Turn, Turn".</p><p>For HBO to release this film now has been lifegiving. This week — on the last day of Pride month — the U.S. Supreme Court <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/06/30/303-creative-elenis-supreme-court-decision-lgbtq-rights/">declared</a> that discrimination against queers is legal. This while states like Florida and Texas pass one initiative after another against us, and particularly against trans people. The Department of Homeland Security, of all places, <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/threats-lgbtqia-community-intensifying-department-homeland-security/story?id=99338137">says</a> hate crimes against us are on the rise. No surprise. The rhetoric of the rightwing is all about how monstrous we are.</p><p>Only half an hour south of my house, neo-Nazis — <em>literal neo-Nazis</em> — <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/neo-nazis-disrupt-drag-story-hour-new-hampshire-rcna90259">disrupted and intimidated</a> a drag story hour at a queer-owned coffee shop. Now is the time we need to embrace Taylor Mac, Machine Dazzle, and everyone else involved with <em>The 24-Decade History of Popular Music</em> as exemplars of the messy, utopian possibilities of drag, of genderqueering, of historyqueering, of musicqueering. For all of us, straight and [whatever] alike. </p><p>Heteronormativity seeks to destroy everyone's freedom by confining us all, regardless of who we are or what we want, to a suffocatingly claustrophobic idea of what life can and must be.</p><p>We know better.</p><p>The great subversive power of work like <em>The 24-Decade History of Popular Music</em> is that it shows that life from the margins can be not only liberating but joyful, and the people who hate us seek to destroy our joy because they are incapable of opening themselves to its possibilities. We offer invitations; they insist on prohibitions.</p><p>Queer utopian theatricality shows that a world open and welcoming to all sorts of expression is a world of wonder. That community is possible in the best ways if we work at it. That imperfection is glorious. That we can make and remake ourselves, with love and honesty and maximal fabulousness.</p><p>These are difficult times, but we know how to live through difficult times. We know how to hold each other, scream with each other, love each other, laugh with each other. We know what to do.</p><p>You can lie down — or get up and play. </p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/85391101/df4d6b45124f40c886d9e95fb93950fb/eyJ3Ijo4MjB9/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=Y1CudeYI5RMzAKAKeCvAOnnaqUnL7OsyofzisqNFWFk%3D" /></p><p><br /><br /></p></div></div>Matthew Cheneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07704529564308222004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-3122426690409035162023-06-25T10:24:00.002-04:002023-08-18T07:19:23.282-04:00A Question of Influence<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiN4QSt-18qisJNih6bU-XEtodVjpor0WBr-cZDtgXsOc72pIs35RLzB-7Ds-uqLyrDWesDKVY4tWKb5DTE-pDiPrti48nEf6A1NrnVYfe6Jg5FWvvKRqL3Wa-vHo-fXtHvl4xeH8wHCW7oRQEPQfthy5eoPTAQoBRLhBEwKzw9XkUKX72xuW2N/s620/jordan-mcdonald-Bzd1qPySNvk-unsplash.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="413" data-original-width="620" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiN4QSt-18qisJNih6bU-XEtodVjpor0WBr-cZDtgXsOc72pIs35RLzB-7Ds-uqLyrDWesDKVY4tWKb5DTE-pDiPrti48nEf6A1NrnVYfe6Jg5FWvvKRqL3Wa-vHo-fXtHvl4xeH8wHCW7oRQEPQfthy5eoPTAQoBRLhBEwKzw9XkUKX72xuW2N/w640-h426/jordan-mcdonald-Bzd1qPySNvk-unsplash.webp" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>In recent publicity events for <a href="https://thirdmanrecords.com/collections/books/products/the-last-vanishing-man" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>The Last Vanishing Man</i></a>, I have struggled with the question of influence. It keeps coming up because people seem to perceive the stories in the book as having different structures and styles from what they are used to — not bad, just different. "Where did this come from?" is a natural question following any such response. My answers have all be unsatisfying to me. Not inaccurate, because I always try to speak truthfully, but there is something deeply unsatisfying in saying, for instance, that <a href="http://outlooksprings.com/stories/after-the-end-of-the-end-of-the-world/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">"After the End of the End of the World"</a> came into focus for me as I was reading the stories of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/mar/05/clarice-lispector-short-story-survey" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Clarice Lispector</a> and <a href="https://www.musicandliterature.org/reviews/2018/4/29/gerald-murnanes-stream-system-border-districts" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Gerald Murnane</a>. This answer is unsatisfying because it provides hardly any useful information. If you like my story, there's no guarantee you'll like Lispector's or Murnane's stories (or vice versa); nor is it likely that if you read those writers that you will write anything like my story (because you're not me). So the connection between my story and the work of other writers is mysterious, personal, ineffable, and fundamentally useless to anyone other than, at most, myself.</p><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 fYcGch sc-rcywpx-0 hRKPxe" data-tag="post-content"><p>I've taken to saying that I feel more obviously influenced by poetry, music, and film than by prose. This isn't entirely, or even mostly, true, but there is a truth to it. Certainly, you will learn as much about me as a writer from knowing the effect of Tori Amos's <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/boys-for-pele-78596560"><i>Boys for Pele</i></a> on me (or the poetry of Basho or the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder) than you will from any list of fiction writers I give. I have resorted to this answer because it makes the impossibility of the question more apparent, and perhaps leads to some interesting ways of thinking — you might actually have an interesting experience of the stories if you try to imagine the influence of Tori Amos, Basho, or Fassbinder on them, because that will cause you to stretch your own imagination. But still, much as I love to talk about influences (because it lets me talk about artists I appreciate, and I cherish few conversations as much as those), I am wary of giving too much power to such talk.</p><p>Speaking of influence: This week, the <i>New York Times</i> published a fascinating conversation with a pretty terrible headline: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/22/t-magazine/queer-postwar-books-plays-poems.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">"The 25 Most Influential Works of Postwar Queer Literature"</a>. The headline is terrible because 1.) it is demonstrably untrue that these are <i>the</i> most influential works of (English-language) postwar queer lit; and 2.) even the people involved don't make this claim.</p><p>Despite the inaccurate, clickbaiting headline, the conversation is great because it is a chat between a bunch of smart, well-informed queer lit luminaries about books they love. But as I said, it's not true that these are <i>the</i> most influential works of postwar queer lit — the listers deliberately avoided some of the works that more typically make such lists, particularly if those were were by white cigender men. So no Christopher Isherwood, no Gore Vidal, no Tennessee Williams. All undeniably influential, and arguably some of the most influential figures for the shaping of queer culture in the 20th century, but the kind of queer culture they represent feels a bit passé in a way that James Baldwin does not, even though it wasn't long ago that Baldwin's seemed to be the reputation that had faded most after his death. (Baldwin's reputation alone is a fascinating topic, one deserving more attention — he was unread and misread for a long time. Even now, amid a Baldwin renaissance, his last three novels deserve much more attention. I was glad Edmund White in the <i>Times</i> conversation brought up <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=MZVBDwAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>Just Above My Head</i></a>.) Then there's Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, neither of whom make the list, both of whom were immensely influential in all sorts of different ways, but Ginberg's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Ginsberg#Association_with_NAMBLA" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">association</a> with NAMBLA and Burroughs's drug addiction, (accidental) murder of his wife, and <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=x_x5kgD1ijAC&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PA14#v=onepage&q&f=false" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">male separatism/misogyny</a> render those two unappealing figures for an era that spurns artists who aren't good role models in life.</p><p>(The listers were also instructed not to choose any work by any participant in the conversation, which results in the glaring omission of Edmund White.)</p><p>Like many such lists, this one tends toward the present. Roxane Gay even makes the case, saying, "New work can be just as influential as older work, especially when it comes to queer work, where so many voices were overlooked for so long. It’s important to include contemporary voices." That's true for people writing right now — I think, for instance, <i>Detransition Baby </i>(which is on the list) and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_Queer" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>Gender Queer</i></a><i> </i>(which is not) are central to conversations about queerness and literature today — but it's not true if we're talking about <i>influential</i> as a general adjective, because then you would need to include the influence on previous generations of writers and readers. In that sense of the word, we see in this list the conspicuous absence of such writers as John Rechy, Rita Mae Brown, Andrew Holleran, Dorothy Allison, Armistead Maupin, etc. Similarly, on the drama side, a vast history of English-language theatre is unmentioned, whether <i>The Boys in the Band</i> and <i>Torch Song Trilogy </i>or more underground but undeniably influential work like the plays of <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2020/08/artificial-jungles.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Charles Ludlam</a> or <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2004/10/sarah-kane-and-theatre-of-evisceration.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Sarah Kane</a>.</p><p>The participants often sidestep the actual topic and instead discuss work that they think deserves to be better known. That's understandable, even noble — it's better to discuss what doesn't get enough attention rather than shine a spotlight on things that are already well lit. A list that lived up to the inaccurate headline of the <i>Times</i> article would actually be pretty boring, because it would be stuff most people already know about, little more than Queer Lit 101. The actual list is most interesting when it does what <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/apr/09/lgbtq-lost-classics-books-chosen-by-authors" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">an earlier list in <i>The Guardian</i></a> did: look for undersung work. There's plenty of it. Unless you're a real theatre junkie, you probably don't know about Taylor Mac, so it's exciting to see <i>Hir</i> on the list. And Essex Hemphill's <i>Ceremonies</i> has been out of print so long that most people now access it via pirated copies (thankfully, New Directions <a href="https://twitter.com/beedennison/status/1479220756257161224" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">will be bringing out</a> a collection of Hemphill's poetry sometime in the next year or so). <i>Ceremonies</i> is a fascinating, even unique, example of a book that is truly and deeply influential while also being criminally under-known.</p><p>It's hard to see a list and not want to make one of your own. So I'm going to end here by pretending that I was asked to join in this illustrious company. The instructions, as described by Kurt Soller, are to think through the queer literature that has "been the most influential in making and furthering queer culture?" Additionally,</p><blockquote>I’d asked everyone to nominate 10 or so works that we could discuss when we met, and we also exchanged some messages about the assignment’s parameters: We’d focus only on English-language literature (not in translation) that came out after the end of World War II, as queer life became less coded and began to flourish in the West, and we’d exclusively discuss novels, plays and poems (as opposed to, say, memoir or biography or other types of nonfiction — though this rule incited a whole debate within the debate). The writers also agreed not to select works by one another.</blockquote><p>Here is what I would have made for a list, were I to make it right now, off the top of my head, without any research or much reflection, just gut instinct:</p><ul><li><i>Giovanni's Room</i> by James Baldwin</li><li><i>Rubyfruit Jungle</i> by Rita Mae Brown</li><li><i>The Wild Boys</i> by William S. Burroughs</li><li><i>The Boys in the Band</i> by Mart Crowley</li><li><i>Dhalgren</i> by Samuel R. Delany</li><li><i>Stone Butch Blues</i> by Leslie Feinberg</li><li><i>The Fall of America</i> by Allen Ginsberg</li><li><i>A Single Man</i> by Christopher Isherwood</li><li><i>Coal</i> by Audre Lorde</li><li><i>City of Night</i> by John Rechy</li><li><i>Diving Into the Wreck</i> by Adrienne Rich</li><li><i>Suddenly Last Summer</i> by Tennessee Williams</li></ul><p>And thus I prove I can't do this exercise, because that's 12 titles and the only one from after the 1970s is <i>Stone Butch Blues</i>! But my deeply inadequate list shows some of what I'm trying to say here about the idea of what is influential. Stunningly incomplete as my list is, the titles on it — unlike the <i>Times</i> list — each seem to me inarguably to be among "the most influential in making and furthering queer culture". (Probably <i>Howl</i> is a better choice than <i>Fall of America</i>, but I chose the latter because it's dedicated to Walt Whitman, has poems written both before and after Stonewall, and includes "Please Master", a poem that still can shock.) What is arguable is whether the titles on my list <i>continue</i> to influence queer culture. At least a few of those titles do not seem to have much influence anymore. Which is fine and good. Cultures change, renew, regenerate.</p><p>Once again, I am stuck ruminating on whether influence actually matters. What are we asking when we ask about influences? The <i>Times</i> conversation, for all its interesting insights, doesn't (can't!) answer that because each participant brought a different interpretation of the task. My own interpretation stuck to the brief and ended up mired in history, while still flagrantly incomplete. Maybe such tasks are best completed by aiming toward their impossibility, as a lot of the <i>Times</i> participants did, not even attempting to be true to the letter of the law but rather to a spirit floating around it.</p><p>When asking about influence, we're asking: "How did you — we — someone — get to here?" Does influence answer such a question? Is a lineage an explanation? For some questions, sure. (My story was, indeed, influenced by Clarice Lispector and Gerald Murnane.) But "influence" rarely feels like it is addressing the questions that matter, because the questions that matter go beyond influence.</p><p>I'm an inveterate Foucauldian, so when thinking about writers and creativity and culture I tend to think in terms of <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/#ArchGene" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">archaeology and genealogy</a>, the systems that render certain concepts visible and useable at any one point in history (while, of course, rendering other concepts obscure, even invisible, and unable to be used). Rather than influence, might we ask about the systems that make particular works of art knowable, valued — even possible?</p><p>For instance, having done work on the composition of <i>Dhalgren</i>, I could list out a bunch of titles that were potential influences (conscious and unconscious) on Delany as he wrote that novel, but that would be significantly less illluminating than thinking about the book in relationship to gay male life in New York City and San Francisco in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in relationship to systems of publishing at that time, in relationship to pre- and post-Stonewall/Gay Liberation, in relationship to science fiction, in relationship to Delany's other works, etc. Similarly, rather than look at "the influence of <i>Dhalgren</i>", it would be more illuminating to chart the ways in which it has been read, cited, interpreted, and used over the decades since it was first published in 1975, the ways the book itself has at times seemed more an icon to be referred to than a text to be read. This would, in its own way, be a discussion of influence, but more material and historical than such discussions tend to be, and it would be as much interested in change as in continuity.</p><p><br /></p><p>-----</p><p>image by <a href="https://unsplash.com/fr/@jordanmcdonald?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Jordan McDonald</a> on <a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/Bzd1qPySNvk?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Unsplash</a></p></div>Matthew Cheneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07704529564308222004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-18456606877535182172023-06-19T10:22:00.002-04:002023-08-18T07:20:54.340-04:00The Eye of the Heron by Ursula K. Le Guin<p style="text-align: center;"><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfPHq1KcJ8Obou7GXz8-WcBpcolT8vdeW6AgdAbfr7-MY7PR2rOJtiLGm5rUscNqQ_D3jr7A5pWgfAAa1wFxelfAhBuTJ0ZwMYVAG7Kbod8R0GoMCpprxt8BUITosYKOt7cm8UNLkMmcw59RPxhRyuJVeGL_MH__4mg8b2HVoaDKxQgA6SEiLG/s951/Eye%20of%20the%20Heron%20cover.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="951" data-original-width="620" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfPHq1KcJ8Obou7GXz8-WcBpcolT8vdeW6AgdAbfr7-MY7PR2rOJtiLGm5rUscNqQ_D3jr7A5pWgfAAa1wFxelfAhBuTJ0ZwMYVAG7Kbod8R0GoMCpprxt8BUITosYKOt7cm8UNLkMmcw59RPxhRyuJVeGL_MH__4mg8b2HVoaDKxQgA6SEiLG/w418-h640/Eye%20of%20the%20Heron%20cover.webp" width="418" /></a></i></div><p></p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=j0cKqyjTpSUC&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>The Eye of the Heron</i></a> (1978) often gets lost in discussions of <a href="https://www.ursulakleguin.com/home/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Ursula K. Le Guin's</a> novels, for though it is a planetary science fiction story, it is not part of the Hainish cycle, thus unconnected to her most famous SF. The novel's separation from Le Guin's various series lends a sense that it is a minor work, but it is only so in the best sense: a variation on ideas treated more grandly elsewhere, a delving into a particular niche, a meditation on a single facet of an epic. As such, <i>The Eye of the Heron</i> is a triumph.</p><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 fYcGch sc-rcywpx-0 hRKPxe" data-tag="post-content"><p>(Note: The Library of America just <a href="https://loa.org/news-and-views/2155-forthcoming-spring-2024" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">announced</a> their Spring 2024 releases, and <i>Eye of the Heron</i> will be included in their seventh <a href="https://www.loa.org/books/writer/655-ursula-k-le-guin" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Le Guin</a> collection, this one devoted to the "stand-alone novels": <i>The Lathe of Heaven, The Eye of the Heron, The Beginning Place, Searoad,</i> and her final novel, <i>Lavinia</i>.)</p><p>Le Guin has <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eye_of_the_Heron#cite_note-1" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">spoken</a> of <i>Eye of the Heron</i> as a transitional work — the book in which she embraced writing a female protagonist instead of writing male leads, as she had done before. The transition is clearly true, but the shift was hardly a simple one of identification, because Le Guin's male-identified focal characters always provided her a useful path by which to explore questions of masculinity, gender, and power that remained consistent throughout her career, even as she struggled toward a conscious feminist awakening in the later 1970s. (Her 1992 <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=5G1XAgAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA110#v=onepage&q&f=false" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">reflection</a> on the 1975 <i>Khatru</i> Symposium on women in SF gives some sense of the profound and painful journey she was on at the time.) In <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/25746449" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">a review</a> of a book about Le Guin and "post-feminism", Sandra J. Lindow makes the important point that Le Guin's "early work cannot be considered masculinist" even if it is not overtly or obviously feminist: </p><blockquote>It is apparent that Le Guin's writing condemned women's oppression, advocated for gender equality, and was informed by feminist thought from the beginning. The androgyny described in <i>The Left Hand of Darkness</i> (1969) was certainly inspired by 1960s gender discussion. Ged, of the first Earthsea trilogy (1968-1972), becomes an arch mage but is primarily interested in finding his own emotional and spiritual balance and is willing to give up his power for the good of his world. Shevek of <i>The Dispossessed</i> (1974) is depressive, over-worked, and underweight. Never the massively muscular macho sort of male hero of the pulps, Shevek is a nerd who loves physics nearly as much as he loves his wife and children. Both heroes can be read, as Robin Roberts describes in <i>Gender and Science in Science Fiction</i> (1993), as "codedly feminine," where "an author explores a singularly feminine dilemma using a male character as a stand-in or cover" (Roberts 16). Shevek and Ged are driven by motives of preserving hearth and home and do so to the detriment of their own health and well-being. Most female readers historically have had little difficulty identifying with them.</blockquote><p>The presentation of gender ideas in <i>The Eye of the Heron</i> is actually quite simplistic in comparison to the story's other concepts, and aside from its importance as a transitional text for Le Guin, it is not a book to recommend to someone who is interested in SF and gender, as dozens of other stories by other writers (and even Le Guin herself) from the same era put gender more at the forefront. Though the novel (or, perhaps more accurately, novella) first appeared in Virginia Kidd's anthology <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennial_Women" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>Millennial Women</i></a> and there is a patriarchal society within <i>The Eye of the Heron</i>, its patriarchy is so stark as to feel almost cartoonish — <i>almost</i>, because unfortunately reality has its own cartoonish quality, and some societies on our planet today share all the assumptions of the book's patriarchs. That was even more true in 1978.</p><p>A more complex theme throughout the book is the implications and challenges of pacifism. This seems to have been Le Guin's motivating interest in the story. The basic plot makes this clear: <i>The Eye of the Heron</i> is the story of a planet named Victoria where two groups of people have been exiled from Earth: prisoners, the first group sent there, and some members of a pacifist group fleeing persecution, who left fifty years later. The descendants of the prisoners quickly found the pacifists useful, relegating them to farmlands six kilometers outside the city, and treating them like citizens of a company town. The pacifists have sent an exploratory team to seek new lands on the planet where they might expand their village, and the city-dwellers feel threatened by this, leading to confrontations and rebellions.</p><p>What's most interesting to me about <i>The Eye of the Heron</i> is the way it complicates its own schematic premise. Though Christian stories certainly <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/26812619" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">influenced</a> the book (as they should, since Tolstoy and Martin Luther King are among the great heroes of pacifist writing), the overall structure is the Taoism so <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/643185/lao-tzu-tao-te-ching-by-ursula-k-le-guin/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">central</a> to Le Guin's own worldview: the book establishes various dualisms (rural/urban, pacifist/violent, male/female, old/young) and then slowly undoes them. It's not that the dual elements do not exist and affect the characters' lives — they clearly do. They form oppositions, and that's the problem, because rather than see the elements as transient, temporary, and illusive, the characters cling to them, assuming essence and permance, then imbuing the elements and, worse, the oppositions with meaning and portent. When opposition and conflict are assumed, they become real.</p><p>That's the story of the first 3/4ths or so of the novel, and if that were the whole story, it would be an entertaining but relatively familiar and simplistic tale, not much different from, say, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress</i></a>. It is in the last quarter that the book becomes extraordinary and resonant.</p><p>The confrontations and rebellions reach a tragic climax, and it is in the aftermath of this climax that the characters must figure out how to continue without the certainties of their cherished assumptions. The protagonist, Luz (a traitor to her family in the city who has sought shelter with the pacifists in their village), is left without anything she can comfortably call home, any sense of purpose, anything she can even identify as her own. Ultimately, she chooses to journey into the wilderness. She and the group she travels with must seek a new place in which to build a life. Instead of the certainties of ideology and belief that ruled her choices before, she must attend to the everyday cares of survival, she must build her life anew in her own way, whatever it may be.</p><p>Le Guin's writing in the final, emotionally powerful chapter is some of the best in the book, as she takes the time to attend to the details of Luz's thoughts, perceptions, and physical existence. Gone are the predictable dialogues about force and morality, now we must attend to the things of the world:</p><blockquote>Nobody had made this wilderness, and there was no evil in it and no good; it simply was.</blockquote><blockquote>She drew a circle in the sandy dirt near her foot, making it as perfect as she could, using a thorny twig to draw it with. That was a world, or a self, or God, that circle, you could call it anything. Nothing else in the wilderness could think of a circle like that — she thought of the delicate gold ring around the compass glass. Because she was human, she had the mind and eyes and skillful hand to imagine the idea of a circle and to draw the idea. But any drop of water falling from a leaf into a pool or rain puddle could make a circle, a more perfect one, fleeting outward from the cneter, and if there were no boundary to the water the circle would fleet outward forever, fainter and fainter, forever larger. She could not do that, which any drop of water could do. Inside her circle what was there? Grains of sand, dust, a few tiny pebbles, a half-buried thorn, Andre's tired face, the sound of Southwind's voice, Sasha's eyes which were like Lev's eyes, the ache of her own shoulders where the pack straps pulled, and her fear. The circle could not keep out the fear. And the hand erased the circle, smoothing out the sand, leaving it as it had always been and would always be after they had gone on.</blockquote><p>The words and sentences are simple and clear, as they are through most of the book (the exceptions only a couple of <i>tour de force</i> moments of heightened emotion and confusion that move into something like interior monologue), but by this point we have arrived at a new maturity of vision. The progression of the book is from simple parable or allegory toward more complex narrative. Though the characters are of a range of ages, they are part of very young societies, and the story of <i>The Eye of the Heron</i> is less the story of any one character than it is of how communities make their way toward complexity.</p><p>Though <i>The Eye of the Heron</i> starts off seeming like a parable of the virtues of pacifism over violence, Le Guin is too smart to let it remain that. While she is certainly a writer of philosophical novels, and sometimes even lets herself sail toward the shoals of didacticism, she knows that <i>literature of ideas</i> is not synonymous with <i>literature of messages</i>. It's actually quite canny of her to make so much of <i>Eye of the Heron</i> seem to be stacking the deck in favor of the unbelieveably pacific villagers. If we stick with the story and give ourselves over to its apparent premises, we will be as shocked as the characters when the deck is thrown to the winds at the end of Chapter 9. This kind of shock is one of the great virtues of a well-told story, for it is the kind of shock that storytellers at least as far back as Aristotle have known can bring us toward recognition of truths greater than what we had assumed before.</p><p>The development of the story of <i>The Eye of the Heron</i> mirrors the development of people from toddlers toward adulthood. Starting out, we all need simple views of the world and of ourselves. There is no shame in that. We build ideas of reality based on what we know and can understand. The shame is in clinging to those views as if they are sufficient, as if they are not views but instead reality itself. Luz learns this through the course of the novel, and Le Guin's art is in helping us along on the journey — a journey that she herself was very much in the midst of as she wrote the book.</p></div>Matthew Cheneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07704529564308222004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-83149420959760131652023-06-05T10:21:00.002-04:002023-08-18T07:22:16.225-04:00An Ebook Appears, with Pride<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-8qF_kfGpSqM6f4-_KlYVScJypHmwyuXCTjHPWKaTSloG9b6tbUB9_VP2T41yQt0Q4aoIGhLWRms4_5K_w3_eEq_yO1_SDGXout__TRRt6dLQL2JKiTErQEKKHLTTljTUM0U1-W_iRcvcXZNpR5LMU61VFQ_KfktepkJ1QGFxxSUW5XH6zSZo/s620/LVM%20ebook%20available%20Pride.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="620" data-original-width="620" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-8qF_kfGpSqM6f4-_KlYVScJypHmwyuXCTjHPWKaTSloG9b6tbUB9_VP2T41yQt0Q4aoIGhLWRms4_5K_w3_eEq_yO1_SDGXout__TRRt6dLQL2JKiTErQEKKHLTTljTUM0U1-W_iRcvcXZNpR5LMU61VFQ_KfktepkJ1QGFxxSUW5XH6zSZo/w640-h640/LVM%20ebook%20available%20Pride.webp" width="640" /></a></div> <p></p><p>I'm thrilled that the ebook edition of <i>The Last Vanishing Man</i> is now available from the major ebook vendors: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0C2ZCZ393" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-last-vanishing-man-and-other-stories-matthew-cheney/1141986264?ean=9798986614540" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Barnes & Noble</a>, <a href="https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-last-vanishing-man-and-other-stories" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Kobo</a>, and probably some others I don't know about.</p><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 fYcGch sc-rcywpx-0 hRKPxe" data-tag="post-content"><p>For the announcement image we're using on social media, we added a rainbow in honor of Pride Month, one of the only times we're violating the austere palette of the book's design. But Pride's important right now, during a time of escaling attacks on LGBTQIA+ people and culture. <i>The Last Vanishing Man</i> is a queer book in just about every way — indeed, if any general genre accounts for it all, that genre is the Queer Weird (Queird?).</p><p>In the <a href="https://locusmag.com/2023/06/issue-749-table-of-contents-june-2023/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">latest issue</a> of <i>Locus</i>, Ian Mond offers a generous review of the collection and of my work generally. He notes that the book "depicts the melancholy of older gay men who were never able to fully express their affections" and "the loneliness and isolation of younger gay men in a post-AIDS world". Not easy stuff, of course, and not the rousing celebration of identity that Pride perhaps calls for, but I'm glad Mond notes the overall effect: "There is a genuine beauty in Cheney’s clear-eyed prose, which immerses you in his world, even if the subject matter is challenging." It's a heartening review because a lot of what I write could perhaps be seen as bleak for its own sake, but my goal is never to bum the reader out, but rather to seek whatever transcendence might be possible through confrontation with the darkness. To seek pride by heading toward the other side of shame and desperation.</p></div>Matthew Cheneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07704529564308222004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-30907310867452947642023-06-03T10:19:00.002-04:002023-08-18T07:23:29.901-04:00B-Sides and Rarities for a Playlist for a Book<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBo2huDL9AyRuyVzLBn68rPlFeuFmYH4_tpf00U5CAp7afzL6D_-occnCVqOJKKK1VoGbnTH_Lm3AeJtMM4slz3WQX0sWoc5cRPbxBU43O9BrDamPHoQTlFZ-83iKc88YlTi4aozXySwo8NWTJi6mX5ZTEzWyF6DHzKCrH-xri3noyewmORl5V/s621/LVM%20Playlist%20Image.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="621" data-original-width="620" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBo2huDL9AyRuyVzLBn68rPlFeuFmYH4_tpf00U5CAp7afzL6D_-occnCVqOJKKK1VoGbnTH_Lm3AeJtMM4slz3WQX0sWoc5cRPbxBU43O9BrDamPHoQTlFZ-83iKc88YlTi4aozXySwo8NWTJi6mX5ZTEzWyF6DHzKCrH-xri3noyewmORl5V/w638-h640/LVM%20Playlist%20Image.webp" width="638" /></a></div><br /><p></p><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 fYcGch sc-rcywpx-0 hRKPxe" data-tag="post-content"><p>David Gutowski's <a href="https://largeheartedboy.com/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Largehearted Boy website</a> is a longlasting (longplaying) wonder of literature and music. I have been lucky to be able to create a playlist of music to accompany both my first book, <a href="https://largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2016/07/book_notes_matt_39.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>Blood: Stories</i></a>, and my new collection, <a href="https://largeheartedboy.com/2023/05/30/matthew-cheneys-playlist-for-his-story-collection-the-last-vanishing-man/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>The Last Vanishing Man</i></a>. In both cases, I spent an inordinate amount of time creating versions of the playlists, listening to them, fiddling with them, adjusting and revising, shaping, tuning... </p><p>(Largehearted Boy uses Spotify for playlists, but I also created an Apple Music playlist, which is what I use myself. If that's your thing, <a href="https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/last-vanishing-man-playlist/pl.u-55D6ze5I81yb9b" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">here's a link to it</a>.)</p><p>I'm a relic of the mixtape generation, and I realized in putting together my first book that one of the attractions of story collections for me is that they function like literary mixtapes. This is based on something of a fantasy of control, however. Collections are actually more like CDs and streaming playlists, because you can easily skip around in a collection in a way you can't with a tape. That was part of what felt like the responsibility of creating a mixtape: you know the listener (often, if you're like me, yourself) can go forward and back, but there's no real way to skip around in a tape from the second track to the sixth and then to the fourth, etc. The fascination for me of the tape was its linearity, and I learned a lot about sequencing through the endless hours I spent trying to find just the right songs to pair together, just the right sounds to lead from one to another. A mixtape is something like a narrative (and in that sense maybe more like a novel than a story collection), and sometimes we want songs to blend right into each other, other times we want surprising and even disturbing juxtapositions.</p><p>In any case, I fiddled obsessively with both my Largehearted Boy playlists, so of course a lot got cut. I thought I would explore some of that here.</p><p>Creating the new playlist, I decided at the beginning to take a different approach from my <i>Blood</i> playlist, which assigned a song to each story in the book. That worked fine for that first collection, but one of the things I've tried to do with the new book is to create a cohesive reading experience, and I did not want to separate the stories out quite so much. They are grouped in the book into four sections, and that was more what I wanted to highlight.</p><p>That meant things got dropped that either repeated what other songs already achieved or were too specific to one story rather than any others. Here are some of those, with links to YouTube, just for fun...</p><p><img data-media-id="207298601" src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/84008330/c9eb04d3e850465caf9a1e725303ed17/eyJ3ZWJwIjowfQ%3D%3D/1.jpg?token-time=1689465600&token-hash=rmloruLD8VT-dSSPRh6kQ-LRE1t-nUX7izCximASFzU%3D" /></p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://youtu.be/Q9rYcUmBlPQ" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><b>"Cao Dai Blowout"</b></a><b> by The Mountain Goats<br /></b>This song about coming to terms with the ghost of a father is in many ways perfect for the first story in the book, "After the End of the End of the World". Almost too perfect, too on the nose, which is ultimately why I dropped it, though with a certain reluctance, since it's one of my favorite Mountain Goats songs, which is to say one of my favorite songs.</p><p><a href="https://youtu.be/C2q_FUOwfl4" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><b>"Gun Show at the Church"</b></a><b> by The Beat Farmers and </b><a href="https://youtu.be/OtAE-TBW0q4" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><b>"Gun"</b></a><b> by John Cale<br /></b>Obviously, I needed a song about guns. I went with NIN's "Big Man with a Gun" because its crudeness seems to me most appropriate for the intersections of masculinity and firearms. I tried to find a place for "Gun Show at the Church" because it gets at the absurdity of American gun culture so beautifully, but tonally it just didn't fit. Cale's extraordinary song "Gun" is a perfect fit for the story "A Suicide Gun" in its relentless beat toward oblivion and its refrain, "Once you've begun to think like a gun/ The days of the year have already gone..." but it was a bit too similar in force to "Big Man with a Gun" and I wanted the in-yer-face song to be front and center, so Cale's somewhat more poetic song had to be cut.</p><p><a href="https://youtu.be/_jjaiM71CtI" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><b>"Me and a Gun"</b></a><b> by Tori Amos<br /></b>As powerful a song as has ever been written about people and guns, and one I first heard not too long before I first heard "Big Man with a Gun". They are paired in my mind in many ways, showing two different, but equally horrific, sides of men with guns. The song's narrative, though, is too specific to the experience of a woman terrorized by a man to fit well with the narratives of my book, which are about different sorts of terror regarding men and guns.</p><p><a href="https://youtu.be/qv8Q_gftNEc" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><b>"The Hearts of Boston"</b></a><b> by Franz Nicolay<br /></b>Franz has been a supporter of <i>The Last Vanishing Man</i> from the beginning, and when I was putting the collection together I kept thinking of the chorus of this song: "Never trust a man without a horror story/ Eros, the rose and the sore..." (Which for a long time I heard as "Eros, the rose and its thorn" — also a good line, I think.) There had to be a Franz song on this playlist, but ultimately I went with "Players in Wheat and Wine", a song off his most recent solo album, <a href="https://franznicolay.bandcamp.com/album/new-river" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>New River</i></a>, which came out when <i>LVM</i> was making its way through the production process. I love <i>New River</i>, it's just one great song after another, but "Players in Wheat and Wine" captured my heart from its first notes. It's just one of those great feel-good songs for me, a song that fills me with a sense of expansion and transcendence. Sticking fast to my rule not to have more than one song by any artist on the playlist, I had to choose between Franz's songs, and I really wanted that transcendence at the end, so this is what I went with, but "Hearts of Boston" was hard to cut.</p><p><a href="https://youtu.be/7nnxP5dbi8U" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><b>"Toe Jam"</b></a><b> by The BPA (Fatboy Slim), David Byrne, and Dizzee Rascal</b><br />A happy, goofy song I just love. I first discovered it via Byrne's <i>American Utopia</i> when it was performed on <i>Saturday Night Live</i> in a particularly infectious version (in my memory — the video has since disappeared from the internet). The original studio recording is really light and fun, too, though, and tends to be the one I listen to, as I don't love the quality of the official <i>American Utopia</i> recording. In any case, as much as I wanted to find a place for such an upbeat, silly song, there just wasn't anywhere it fit in relation to <i>The Last Vanishing Man</i>, a book that is rarely upbeat or silly.</p><p><a href="https://youtu.be/v_6wGFW0zvA" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><b>"Look Backwards on Your Future, Look Forward to Your Past"</b></a><b> by Bonnie "Prince" Billy</b><br />The metaphysics and ethos of this song is pretty close to my own, and to one that fills the book. For a while, I had this song in the Third Movement, but as much as I like it, it finally seemed redundant with what was already there.</p><p><a href="https://youtu.be/py74Vbspc4M" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><b>"The Desperate Kingdom of Love"</b></a><b> by PJ Harvey</b><br />Tonally, this song could fit almost anywhere in the collection, and that was the problem. Thinking back on it now, I think it's kind of perfect for "At the Edge of the Forest", so perhaps could have gone into the third movement, but that became the fullest section, so had the most stuff cut from it. The end of the song is also quite good for the end of "After the End of the End of the World": "And at the end of this burning world/ You'll stand proud, face upheld/ And I'll follow you, into heaven or hell/ And I'll become as a girl" — but I had plenty else, and again it felt almost too accurate, too determining.</p><p><a href="https://youtu.be/tRfm9G6ZyeY" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><b>"Graveyard Love"</b></a><b> by Bertha Idaho</b><br />I have this on the compilation <a href="https://dust-digital.com/collections/cd/products/i-listen-to-the-wind-that-obliterates-my-traces" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>...I Listen to the Wind That Obliterates My Traces</i></a> from Dust to Digital, a marvelous book-and-CD set that Eric Schaller gave me some years ago. The whole compilation could be a kind of playlist for my book, and we might have used any of the photos from the accompanying text, too.</p><p><a href="https://archive.org/details/GILBERTSULLIVANPatience1951-NEWTRANSFER/09.AmIAloneAndUnobserved.mp3" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><b>"Am I Alone and Unobserved"</b></a><b> by Martyn Green</b><br />Gilbert & Sullivan is important to the characters in "Wild Longing", and for various reasons <i>Patience</i> is the operetta most applicable and the song "If You're Anxious for to Shine..." is the most applicable from that operetta. I can say with some authority that it is Martyn Green's 1951 recording of that song that the characters most loved, but I had to go with John Reed's somewhat less hammy version for the playlist because all the available online versions of Green singing it include the song that leads into it, "Am I Alone and Unobserved" — which is a wonderfully creepy sort of thing, but not what I wanted for the playlist. So it goes.</p><p><a href="https://youtu.be/frAEmhqdLFs" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><b>"We Will All Go Together When We Go"</b></a><b> by Tom Lehrer<br /></b>Long one of my own personal visions of utopia, since the problem of death is, to me, not the problem of death itself but of the suffering your death leaves behind. This song particularly fits "On the Government of the Living", but the counterpoint of the song's humor and uplift seemed too great for the story's solemnity.</p><p><a href="https://lustmord.bandcamp.com/album/the-dark-places-of-the-earth" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i><b>The Dark Places of the Earth</b></i></a><b> by Lustmord<br /></b>I could make an entire playlist just of ambient and drone music for <i>The Last Vanishing Man.</i> (See <a href="https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/dark-ambient/pl.u-zPyL1KLtZ47yzy" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">this playlist</a> I made of dark ambient stuff — this is what I most commonly listen to when writing, which may explain some things...) <a href="https://www.lustmord.com/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Lustmord</a> is one of my favorites in this mode, and <i>The Dark Places of the Earth</i> is a particular highlight — though see also <a href="https://lustmord.bandcamp.com/album/songs-of-gods-and-demons" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>Songs of Gods and Demons</i></a><i> </i>and <a href="https://lustmord.bandcamp.com/album/dark-matter" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>Dark Matter</i></a> and, well, everything. I ended up going with "Devolve" from their album <a href="https://lustmord.bandcamp.com/album/hobart" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>Hobart</i></a>, because it fit what I needed at that point in the playlist, but if any one group ought to create the soundtrack for the book, it's Lustmord.</p><p><a href="https://youtu.be/W6JZkTakMyk" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><b>"Anteludium"</b></a><b> by Luke Schneider</b><br />I adore Luke Schneider's album <a href="https://thirdmanrecords.com/collections/all-music/products/altar-of-harmony-standard-black-vinyl" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>Altar of Harmony</i></a> (it's astonishing on vinyl), but I wanted to be careful not to make the playlist an ad for Third Man Records, since that would feel a bit incestuous, and there are tons of Third Man releases that I would include if I were not well disciplined. So only "Magical Music Box" from Public Nuisance made it on, since it fit best.</p><p><a href="https://youtu.be/Tsux27kMwjc" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i><b>The Idea of North</b></i></a><b> by Glenn Gould<br /></b>I toyed with calling the collection <i>The Idea of North</i>. But it seemed too esoteric, because while the idea of north is, indeed, important throughout this book (and my work generally), <i>The Idea of North</i> itself is a fascinating radio documentary/soundscape by the great pianist Glenn Gould, and my idea of north is very much inflected by Gould's <i>Idea of North</i>. For a moment, I thought about putting the whole hour-long documentary on the playlist. But that seemed a little extreme, even for me...</p><p><a href="https://youtu.be/wNxHmDMRVD8" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><b>Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 17 in D Minor, Op. 31 No. 2 "Tempest": III. Allegretto</b></a><b> by Glenn Gould</b><br />There are dozens of Glenn Gould albums (never mind single tracks!) I could have chosen, since Gould's spirit is one that fits with a number of characters in this book. Of course, Gould is best known for Bach, and rightfully so, and you know how much Bach means to me (there are two Bach tracks in the actual playlist), but I adore the precise, rolling power of this particular Gould performance of Beethoven. It fit truly nowhere in the playlist, though I tried. For a moment, I also thought about starting the playlist with one of the fugues from Gould's recordings of <i>The Well Tempered Clavier</i> and then ending with one of the preludes (since I think the book begins more like Bach's fugues and ends more like the preludes), but the richness was too great and I could not choose.</p></div>Matthew Cheneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07704529564308222004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-47104175415330271872023-05-31T10:18:00.002-04:002023-08-18T07:24:21.003-04:00The Last Vanishing Man Appears<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEil4-lSJs-d609cSvqdWpLZuFq1T8tmTm965iQBfsyHgQhTYrKoDrueQQWmTzkhuB1avpwu7B0KYcEDUlEh8UKdJ8JPX88hWA-3WQu6yLs7nnsbuDo-Ln4ugEAvn9tn6GjqgVSVvbxJVOjfvUQ6r8nSlTSbD1-A2BK1uYveMk7TJfMz7FCx8X3Z/s620/LVM%20Book%20Launch%20NYC%20Powerhouse%202.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="620" data-original-width="620" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEil4-lSJs-d609cSvqdWpLZuFq1T8tmTm965iQBfsyHgQhTYrKoDrueQQWmTzkhuB1avpwu7B0KYcEDUlEh8UKdJ8JPX88hWA-3WQu6yLs7nnsbuDo-Ln4ugEAvn9tn6GjqgVSVvbxJVOjfvUQ6r8nSlTSbD1-A2BK1uYveMk7TJfMz7FCx8X3Z/w640-h640/LVM%20Book%20Launch%20NYC%20Powerhouse%202.webp" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>May was the month when <a href="https://thirdmanrecords.com/products/the-last-vanishing-man" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>The Last Vanishing Man</i></a> appeared in the world. Here's some stuff related to that, some places I've been and places I'm going...</p><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 fYcGch sc-rcywpx-0 hRKPxe" data-tag="post-content"><p>First, I will be in Brooklyn two weeks from tonight to read and converse with my friends <a href="https://franznicolay.com/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Franz Nicolay</a> and <a href="http://hannahtinti.com/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Hannah Tinti</a>. It's at the Powerhouse Arena on June 14 at 7pm. Tickets are required and available <a href="https://powerhousearena.com/events/book-launch-the-last-vanishing-man-by-matthew-cheney/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">at this link</a>, ranging in price from free general admission to buying a book.</p><p><a href="https://lithub.com/matthew-cheney-on-literary-misdirection-and-hiding-truth-in-fiction/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Jeff VanderMeer interviewed me for Literary Hub</a>. I was sure the pullquote would be, "I tend to gnaw at the same subject matter again and again until I chew off enough of myself to get out of the trap." But they went with other sentences.</p><p><a href="https://brooklynrail.org/2023/05/books/Matthew-Cheneys-The-Last-Vanishing-Man-And-Other-Stories" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Yvonne C. Garrett reviewed the book generously for <i>Brooklyn Rail</i>. </a> "Cheney’s new collection is less the 'horror!' that his publisher hypes and more a combination of wildly post-apocalyptic brutalism and deeply sympathetic studies of people—lost or irreparably harmed by modern life and the punishing ways masculinity is often shaped."</p><p><a href="https://www.cemeterydance.com/extras/night-time-logic-matthew-cheney/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Daniel Braum interviewed me for his Night Time Logic column at <i>Cemetery Dance</i>. </a>I think it's the longest interview I've ever done. We talk about ambiguity in stories, emotion, weirdness, magic, Robert Aickman...</p><p>The ebook version is ready and now making its way toward the purveyors of ebooks. I had a look at it yesterday and Third Man did a really nice job with it. If ebooks are your thing, go ahead and preorder it now and it will be available very soon!</p><p>Thanks to everyone who has supported the book. It's had a good entrance into the world, and I am grateful to everyone who has shared their enthusiasm for it.</p></div>Matthew Cheneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07704529564308222004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-14354431060584195632023-05-14T10:15:00.002-04:002023-08-18T07:26:41.779-04:00Sacrament by Clive Barker<p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2NTaxndsqpdzxaE-JYYiyCP0t3CPiLZbDt_AK2MfvBQuj9tt3uARsBJXFdzuc_r0Bo7X7E7jpcnxwcLfBpANW2Mv8zFPX2lLZdHZA_T8nG28BVzPV9BnfyHA1lE0iCQx1MhJKhlEXVV2ieG9bLzTjEJpoETKwveQcR-3MyVN5uRNArSYwVOIH/s1000/sacrament.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="620" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2NTaxndsqpdzxaE-JYYiyCP0t3CPiLZbDt_AK2MfvBQuj9tt3uARsBJXFdzuc_r0Bo7X7E7jpcnxwcLfBpANW2Mv8zFPX2lLZdHZA_T8nG28BVzPV9BnfyHA1lE0iCQx1MhJKhlEXVV2ieG9bLzTjEJpoETKwveQcR-3MyVN5uRNArSYwVOIH/w396-h640/sacrament.webp" width="396" /></a></div><br /><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 fYcGch sc-rcywpx-0 hRKPxe" data-tag="post-content"><blockquote>When God commanded this hand to write<br />In the studious hours of deep midnight<br />He told me the writing I wrote should prove<br />The Bane of all that on Earth I lovd<br />—William Blake, "The Grey Monk"</blockquote><p>Over the last month or two, I've started and stopped reading dozens of books, many of them clearly quite good, even excellent, but none of them able to hold my interest in amidst busy days of work, life, etc. And then I found myself reading a lot of Clive Barker for the first time in many years. (I don't seem to be alone — see <a href="https://www.weirdstudies.com/144">this excellent Weird Studies podcast episode</a> from last last month with Conner Habib discussing <em>The Hellbound Heart</em> and <em>Hellraiser</em>.) Barker's short stories and novels have captured my reading with their wild commitment to imagination and their seriousness of intent within popular forms.</p><p><em>Sacrament </em>is both a summation of the first 15 years or so of Barker's concerns and a departure from the overtly horrific and then phantasmagoric work. Some supernatural horror and some fantasy are certainly present in it, but it is a novel far more concerned with the ways of our actual world than of another.</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/82924905/edd61eae3571433eb852fceaabdcc485/eyJ3Ijo4MjAsIndlYnAiOjB9/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=C6cfAor4VeaqevZQmQd_xPhBo7mSl1ee85scji3__OQ%3D" /></p><h3>The Tyger</h3><p>When I was young, Clive Barker <em>was</em> Horror. I came of age as a reader just as he was becoming famous in the mid-1980s. When I started reading adult fiction, Stephen King was already well established (and culturally ubiquitous), but I remember the excitement of Clive Barker's arrival on the scene. I was too young to be allowed to buy <a href="https://www.fangoria.com/archives/wescraven-clivebarker-hitchcock/"><em>Fangoria</em> 51</a> in 1986 (my mother held out against my pleas for at least another year), but I'm sure I saw it on the newsstand and its cover question: "Clive Barker: Is He the Next Stephen King?" </p><p>I remember the beautiful mass market <a href="https://www.thisishorror.co.uk/tattered-tomes-volume-one-of-clive-barkers-the-books-of-blood-revisited/">paperbacks</a> of the<em> Books of Blood</em> when they appeared among the books sold at the grocery store — the store where soon enough I picked up the anthologies <a href="https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?197077"><em>Cutting Edge</em></a><em>,</em> <a href="https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?26636"><em>Prime Evil</em></a><em>,</em> and most importantly <a href="https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?24102"><em>Night Visions: The Hellbound Heart</em></a><em>.</em> (I hated grocery shopping and my mother bribed me with paperbacks or magazines — it was also on these runs that I got to buy issues of <a href="https://twilightzonevortex.blogspot.com/2018/05/night-cry-magazine-covers.html"><em>Night Cry</em></a>. I still hate grocery shopping and the store sells barely any books or magazines anymore.) My best friend in 8th grade got obsessed with <a href="https://www.clivebarker.info/damnatbarker.html"><em>The Damnation Game</em></a> and <a href="https://www.clivebarker.info/weavebarker.html"><em>Weaveworld</em></a><em>,</em> but I didn't read those until later, as I preferred short stories to novels generally. I remember some of the magazines I read touting Barker as the hottest thing in horror in the late '80s and early '90s. My uncle gave me the hardcover of <a href="https://www.clivebarker.info/imajicabarker.html"><em>Imajica</em></a> for my birthday or Christmas one year. Two of my father's favorite movies were <a href="https://www.clivebarker.info/hellraiser.html"><em>Hellraiser</em></a> and <a href="https://www.clivebarker.info/hellraiser2.html"><em>Hellraiser II</em></a><em>, </em>and eventually, once I was deemed ready, we watched the VHS tapes together.</p><p>I provide this background because until a few years ago I did not know Barker's 1996 novel <a href="https://www.clivebarker.info/sacramentbarker.html"><em>Sacrament</em></a> existed. And I find that both strange and interesting.</p><p>It's strange because in some ways this is the Clive Barker novel that feels most written for me — it is his first novel with a gay protagonist, its middle section is concerned with San Francisco during the AIDS era, it has something of an ecological interest, and its pantheistic idea of the universe is one I'm pretty comfortable with. At the time the book came out, I had just stopped my <a href="https://lithub.com/reading-and-writing-my-way-through-the-aids-crisis/">brief stint</a> as an activist with ACT UP and was strongly involved with environmental politics.</p><p>I must have noticed the new Barker novel in bookstores. I must have seen a review somewhere. And yet I have no memory of them.</p><p>Perhaps it's not surprising that I did not notice <em>Sacrament</em> when it came out. By 1996, I had lost interest in genre fiction generally and Barker in particular. I wanted him to be a horror writer, and after <a href="https://www.clivebarker.info/damnatbarker.html"><em>The Damnation Game</em></a> he was mostly a writer of very long fantasy novels that I didn't, at that time, have any interest in. If I saw <em>Sacrament</em> on a bookstore shelf, I probably thought it was a sequel to <a href="https://www.clivebarker.info/evervillebarker.html"><em>Everville</em></a>, a book I'd read a few pages of and set aside.</p><p>The danger of holding an idea of Barker as the boundary-breaking, transgressive Bad New Boy of Horror is that I did not want him to be anything else, and so I could not recognize any virtue in his other books, and his continued interest in fantasy more than horror seemed to me then to be a mistake. By 1996, I'd pretty much given up on him.</p><p>Which is maybe for the best. I don't think I would have gotten much from <em>Sacrament </em>back then. I would have found it meandering and dull. It is not really a young person's book. </p><p>No longer a young person, reading it now, I find it gripping and emotionally affecting.</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/82924905/dd6c468c647e433dbcb6e83bb4ee0887/eyJ3ZWJwIjowfQ%3D%3D/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=WBSAXEzQnK1tpgZmJynAl1fBkqK1Lm-3nUl0b1WD9k0%3D" /></p><h3>Songs of Experience</h3><p><em>Sacrament</em> is a novel of middle age. Barker was in his early 40s when he wrote it and his protagonist, Will Rabjohns, is about the same age. I'm a couple years beyond my early 40s now myself. I'm more than middle-aged now, because though it is biologically possible I could live to be twice my 47 years, if I do so, I will be very unhappy.</p><p><em>Sacrament</em> explores the gravitational power of childhood experience on later life. It also depicts the way life can feel unmoored or even becalmed when you realize youth is now a memory of a memory. In our forties, many of us lose parents and relatives and friends, our bodies become ever less reliable, and we may be decades into a career and realize we don't know why we're doing what we do. All of this is present in the novel.</p><p>It's important to remember that when <em>Sacrament</em> came out, big, bestselling novels did not have gay protagonists. While compassion for queer folks had certainly increased through the 1980s and early '90s, and queer culture was having something of a quasi-mainstream renaissance (the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Queer_Cinema">New Queer Cinema</a>! <a href="https://www.librarything.com/publisherseries/Stonewall+Inn+Editions">Stonewall Inn Editions!</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angels_in_America"><em>Angels in America</em></a>!), there was still a lot of anxiety in general American culture about Those People. It was all well and good to have gay protagonists in a novel that the publisher paid a small advance for and that was expected to sell maybe a few thousand copies, but in a book expected to be a bestseller? Ummmmmmmm, no. Barker has told <a href="https://www.clivebarker.info/sacramentbarker.html">the story</a> a few times of the response when his publisher realized this expensive writer was delivering just such a book. It was not a response of joy and celebration. But the book was published without censorship and landed on the bestseller lists for at least a little while.</p><p>The portrayal of San Francisco in the middle of <em>Sacrament</em> is some of its most vivid and energetic writing, with Barker's experience writing plays and screenplays showing itself in deftly drawn characters and scenes. He captures an important moment: the year or two before reliable treatment for HIV became available, a decade or so into the crisis. By that point, a lot of people had died. Everyone else was suffering, either from prolonged disease or prolonged fear or prolonged mourning or all of them together. The anger that had first fueled the AIDS movement had been tempered with bitterness and fatalism. It was a bleak time. The US had survived Reagan and Bush only to get the youthful neoliberalism of Bill Clinton hollowing out the last vestiges of the social safety net; Britain had survived Thatcher and then got shackled to John Major.</p><p>This was also the time of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_First!">Earth First!</a>, of the <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=giTwwvtIkdEC&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PA15#v=onepage&q&f=false">wise use movement</a>, of the <a href="https://www.npr.org/podcasts/906829608/timber-wars">timber wars</a> and battles over the Endangered Species Act. Barker gently rhymes these concerns with the AIDS crisis and homophobia. Will Rabjohns is a well-known wildlife photographer famous for his chronicles of dead and dying animals. His primary antagonist is a devilish being obsessed with killing the last of any species of animal. In the novel, critics interpret Will's photographs as commentary on the plague years, not knowing that his interest goes back to a disturbing childhood experience, long before AIDS arrived to kill off so many of his friends. Yet it's clear the critics aren't wrong. Will's photographs may have their origin in his special, supernatural experiences, but he is also undeniably a man living in a community that truly felt itself to be facing extinction. Late in the novel, a friend in England asks him to describe San Francisco:</p><blockquote>"I used to think it was paradise," [Will] said. "Of course, it's a different place from when I first arrived."</blockquote><blockquote>"Tell me," she said.</blockquote><blockquote>The prospect defeated him. "I wouldn't know where to begin."</blockquote><p>How can you sum up a city that went from the joy of gay liberation to the agony of mass disease and death? When Will says <em>of course</em> he gestures toward this — she should know, she should understand, the information is out there, does he really need to explain it? But he <em>does</em> need to explain it, because the way the disease wiped out whole communities was (and is) often not visible to people who were not members of those communities.</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/82924905/e135da23c5af4159ad5c8e8f4da818b5/eyJ3ZWJwIjowfQ%3D%3D/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=_Gf0Vr5ULofxBe9NRLrdjZChfeEk4b21pcF0KZ2dO34%3D" /></p><h3>Auguries of Innocence</h3><p>The link between the extinctions of animals and the disease and intolerance killing Will's friends, lovers, and neighbors goes beyond a simple thematic parallel. It is not really until the end that we clearly see how a metaphysical vision — a religious vision — unites all the disparate pieces of the book. While it mostly draws on Christian iconography and vocabulary, <em>Sacrament</em> is not ultimately a Christian novel, at least in any nonheretical way. Rather, it presents the universe more as it is found in many types of Daoism and Buddhism (also some of Spinoza's writings). It celebrates the completeness of the universe, the sense that the tiniest thing in existence is connected to, and even part of, everything else. Separation is ultimately an illusion. The only constant is change, and the denial of change is a kind of poison in the mind.</p><p>Within the world of the novel, the desire to wipe out rare animal species is also a desire to wipe out humans, to wipe out all life generally. The narration tells us that the species-killing antagonist, Jacob Steep, "wanted to see Creation dwindle, family by family, tribe by tribe, from the vast to the infinitesimal..." He is on this mission for complex reasons, and the reasons he tells himself may not be complete. He is seeking an identity, seeking to know what he long ago forgot: who he is and where he came from. He has settled on an annihilating mission because he thinks that if he silences the world he will then hear the voice of God. It's delusional and not especially convincing. We can see, through his actions and some of what we later learn, that he is quite literally broken, that his birth in this form was a kind of wound, an alienation from a self he needs but does not recognize. There's a little something of Plato's <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-friendship/"><em>Symposium</em></a> here (and <a href="https://youtu.be/_zU3U7E1Odc">"The Origin of Love"</a> from <em>Hedwig, </em>a show which was <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/gender-bender-an-oral-history-of-hedwig-and-the-angry-inch-185066/">being developed</a> at the time <em>Sacrament</em> was written and published). Jacob's fervent homophobia could be seen as a response to the pain of separation. Fearful rejection of same-sex desire is, in <em>Sacrament</em>, an ignorance of one's own possibilities, a rejection of natural unity, a fear of the universe's fundamental wholeness. It's not that everybody ought to be gay, but rather that it is murderous to deny the vast multiplicity of being and experience that adds up to the whole of reality. Nature is about efflorescence, not minimalism. </p><p>At the end of the novel, Will experiences a sublime vision of that efflorescence. It's a poetic and artistic vision, one present in the lines of Walt Whitman and William Blake, a vision that links art, imagination, perception, and nature. Blake's <a href="https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/07/14/william-blake-john-trusler-letter/">famous letter</a> to Dr. Trusler from August 1799 could have provided an epigraph: "The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportions; and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees."</p><p>Will is a photographer, someone who both creates and preserves sights. His style and subject matter are difficult for many viewers, and some of the reviews Barker creates for his protagonist aren't all that far from critiques of his own work, and of horror fiction generally. The fictive critics recognize Will's skill. "But why, they complained, did he have to be so relentlessly grim? Why did he have to seek out images that evoked despair and death when there was so much beauty in the natural world?" Some of Will's critics see him as doing nothing for what they perceive to be his cause: "The viewer gives up hope in the face of his reports. We watch the extinction with despairing hearts. Well, Mr. Rabjohns, we have dutifully despaired. What now?" (p. 120).</p><p>These complaints that Barker writes for his fictional photographer echo complaints familiar not only to anyone who reads horror fiction but also to anyone who reads about ecological crises. The person who points out how doomed we are gets scorned as insufficiently hopeful, a killjoy, a beast of bitterness.</p><p>The critics of Will's art do not recognize the pictures for what they are — sacraments. Will himself doesn't recognize this until late in the novel:</p><blockquote>Steep had the rage of some Judgmental Father in his eye, but the divinity Will had in him was no less a Lord, though He talked through the mouth of a fox and loved life more than Will had supposed life could be loved. A Lord who'd come before him in innumerable shapes over the years. Some pitiful, to be sure, some triumphant. A blind polar bear on a garbage heap; two children in painted masks; Patrick sleeping; Patrick smiling; Patrick speaking love. Camellias on a windowsill and the sky of Africa. His Lord was there, everywhere, inviting him to see the soul of things. (pp. 479-480)</blockquote><p>Will's pictures are disturbing, but they serve a purpose beyond simply evoking despair — they seek, in their own unsparing way, to use disquieting imagery to evoke (or invoke) wonder. <em>Wonder</em> isn't quite the right word, though, because the idea of "the Lord" here is an idea of wholeness within the unceasing flow of moments. We want to grasp the moments, want to cling to them, but that is impossible. Better to appreciate them for what they are: atoms of water in the river of existence.</p><p>To see wonder and glory only in beauty — or only in vast landscapes, or only in happy moments, or only in peaceful events — is to misperceive the whole. Even when lingering in the realms of the pleasant, seeing the whole requires recognition that beautiful images must be more complex than their beauty, that beauty is superficial, a choice of angle. Patrick, for instance, is a former boyfriend of Will's, and he is a man dying of AIDS, someone for whom Will feels great affection. Will also feels sorrow as he sees Patrick's health decline. "Patrick sleeping; Patrick smiling" are both moments of beauty, but they contain in them the pain of loss, as well: the loss of a partnered relationship that for one reason or another the two men couldn't sustain, despite their mutual love; the loss of Patrick's youth and health and life; the loss of vibrant communities to merciless disease.</p><p>Perhaps we could say that this is a vision of fractal metaphysics. Through connections of ecology and interbeing, each part contains the implication of the whole. To separate is necessary, because we experience the world as separate objects, moments, feelings, concepts ... but the separations are little more than useful illusions, strategies of sense against a reality that can never be perceived because it is so much more vast than we are. In fact, we ourselves are fractal pieces, momentary distinctions in the flow of the universe. Just as the universe beyond us is <a href="https://www.space.com/24073-how-big-is-the-universe.html">unimaginably immense</a>, so, too, are there tremendous universes at microscopic scale. Each of our bodies is a galaxy of microorganisms (cf. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastic_Voyage"><em>Fantastic Voyage</em></a>). No matter what scale we choose, we will see webs of Universe, or what <em>Sacrament</em> calls the Lord.</p><p>None of this is philosophically or theologically original — among other sources, you could trace parts of it to Heraclitus or Spinoza, Buddha or Lao Tzu, Theosophy or Deep Ecology. What's lovely in <em>Sacrament</em> is not original concepts but the way the narrative itself weaves elements together through connection and suggestion. The novel itself is a universe, both self-contained (the words on the pages, the pages in the book) and necessarily relying on the universe beyond its bounds (for the sense of words, for the references of imagery). Art, ecology, belief, extinction, queerness, violence, and creation all mingle through the book's story, offering no clear or definitive statement about any of those concepts but rather putting them into play together in a space of their own, producing resonances that we, reading, interpret into harmonies, meanings.</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/82924905/3e83f186d1924fd3aca213d0dfec3d90/eyJ3Ijo4MjAsIndlYnAiOjB9/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=ro5iCkXsaIabw5y7NiHqnqHBaNZQkVMaV9pvGQ9wgLk%3D" /></p><h3>The Sick Rose</h3><p>There is much in <em>Sacrament</em> about power, too. About how people become empowered or disempowered, how power corrupts, corrodes, reveals, deforms. This is how I think we can understand the most controversial scene in the book. </p><p>It is a scene that was denounced in a brief, anonymous <a href="https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v092n04_1997-04_Lenny_Silv3r/page/n26/mode/1up?view=theater">review</a> in <em>Fantasy & Science Fiction</em> when the novel was published, which, with stultifying narrowness of interpretation, states that since the book is not "about" child abuse, "a scene of a prurient nature involving a minor boy and a woman many years his senior" is a ruinous flaw in an otherwise excellent book. The obtuseness here is so obvious I'm not going to bother to analyze it, but the scene <em>does</em> have a gravitational force, it <em>is</em> deeply discomforting, and in today's censorious and puritanical publishing environment I'm pretty sure Barker would be pressured to remove it with even more force than he was pressured in the mid-'90s to straighten his gay protagonist. (It's amusing that the brief review in <em>F&SF</em> begins with an invocation of an idea from Samuel Delany. Delany's own novel <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=17vADwAAQBAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PT166#v=onepage&q&f=false"><em>The Mad Man</em></a><em>, </em>published shortly before Barker wrote <em>Sacrament</em>, would be an interesting text to consider alongside Barker's, and contains vastly more challenging sexual content than anything Barker has ever published. Around the same time, Delany's earlier pornographic novels <a href="https://www.pseudopodium.org/kokonino/dd3.html"><em>Hogg</em></a> and <a href="http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/night-and-day-the-place-of-equinox-in-samuel-r-delanys-oeuvre/"><em>Equinox</em></a> were either published for the first time [<em>Hogg</em>] or in a new edition [<em>Equinox</em>], and both contain disturbing, graphic depictions of all sorts of behavior that could be construed as child abuse in novels very much not about child abuse. <em>Hogg</em> remains the most repulsive and disturbing novel I have ever read.) The scene in question has repercussions for the child character throughout the rest of his life, so it would be inaccurate to say the events do not have consequence, though the type of consequence is perhaps difficult for <em>F&SF's</em> dismissive reviewer to admit. As many abuse survivors attest, one of the rippling torments of abuse may derive from the fact that feelings for the abuser may not be uncomplicatedly hostile. One of the great terrors abuse delivers is the way it corrodes trust, deforms love, and poisons desire. The depiction of what the creature known as Rosa does to the child Sherwood is ghastly, but it needs to be so, because we need to understand how and why the power she exerts ruins Sherwood's future. Later, as we see the adult Sherwood's tormented yearning, we understand it better than we would if Rosa's actions were presented as somehow less monstrous, and we understand something more about attraction to the monsters than we would otherwise.</p><p>It is too easy to say that we ought to align ourselves with monsters against the stultifying conformity of the ordinary, the mainstream, the common. Yes, sometimes what gets called monstrous is benign and ought to be accepted or even celebrated — but part of the attraction of the monstrous is its transgressive, ravaging qualities. And those qualities do not come without pain. At points in <em>Sacrament</em>, we learn to have a certain sympathy for Rosa, but she remains a dangerous and destructive monster, a creature of hungers born of grotesque circumstances. Her own incompleteness and brokenness make her destructive. The same is true for her partner, Jacob Steep. The damaged do damage. Their crimes are enormous. The novel makes this utterly clear. That is what allows its final section to be so powerful, for it is there that the story begins to bring the broken pieces and broken people together in the only thing that will solve the legacy of destruction: transcendence into the wholeness of the world.</p><p>In <a href="https://worldcat.org/title/155128735"><em>Clive Barker: The Dark Fantastic</em></a>, Douglas E. Winter quotes from a 1985 <em>Penthouse</em> interview Neil Gaiman conducted with Barker, who says that "the monsters and creatures, the dark side, need to be invited into the twilight so we can meet them. Horror fiction is a perpetual twilight where we can meet these things, <em>not</em> so we can send them back into the darkness saying, <em>I am cleansed and purged of you!</em> We are <em>not</em> purged of them, and it's not them or us. We should take them on board, they are part of ourselves" (p. 160). Barker's approach may have evolved some in the ten years between that statement and his writing of <em>Sacrament</em>, moving more toward dark fantasy and away from horror, but "they are part of ourselves" could be a credo for the novel, with the <em>they</em> including both monsters and the animals that human life so relentlessly destroys.</p><p>Jacob in particular seeks power so as to bend the world to his anger, frustration, bitterness, and self-image. Rosa is less vindictive and less driven, but power runs fiercely through her in the form of desire. She can hardly control it. Barker has always been a great poet of desire, someone who understands its beauty and terror. He is not afraid of the romantic parts of Romanticism, nor does he eschew earnestness. <em>Sacrament</em> seems to have great sympathy for the ways desire courses through Rosa, the ways it allows her destructive power while also fueling her determination to be something other than what Jacob is. </p><p>Throughout his work, Barker plays with the opposition of dark and light, which could lead us to see this as a foundational concept for his metaphysics, a basic dualism, Manichaeistic. The dark/light, good/evil duology is too simple, though, and Barker knows it. He enjoys playing with the binary but does so for deconstructive purposes, as <em>Sacrament</em> ultimately makes clear. Twilight is the place of communication, the fertile realm of creativity and eros, a dangerous place that is also a place of possibility. While we think of it as a visual phenomenon, twilight is also a time, a moment of suspended oppositions. A scene of blending, melding. A chronotope where distinctions get undone. A vantage from which to glimpse the eternal, infinite, and whole.</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/82924905/39adc0c61db84ab495fa5ad011276612/eyJ3ZWJwIjowfQ%3D%3D/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=I_iK-Wu953onXyEPWJy5tzc7ihIkWQBDA0ZkREbFDYg%3D" /></p><h3>Earth's Answer</h3><p>Finally, there is art. Caught up in the thematic and theological implications of this novel, I have neglected one of its most immediate virtues: its artfulness. Barker gained, early in his career, a reputation for luridness, even crudity and obviousness. This reputation was partly a result of the intensity of his vision, but also partly the side-effect of various statements he made in interviews in the '80s about wanting horror to be loud and unambiguous. They were the posturing statements of somebody pounding his stakes into the heart of a vampiric culture industry. With the movies based on his writing and the movies he himself directed, subtlety seemed hard to find. I have always had a love of <em>Hellraiser,</em> and have learned to cherish <em>NIghtbreed</em> and <em>Lord of Illusions</em>, but let us not delude ourselves into thinking there's anything subtle about any of them! Their camp and kitsch are key to an appreciation of what they achieve; best to see them as blockbuster manifestations of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Smith_(film_director)">Jack Smith's</a> <a href="https://youtu.be/vzZxoFbkkjM">aesthetics</a> than as works of nuanced cinema. (A whole monograph could be written on Jack Smith leading to Barker on one hand and <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2013/06/derek-jarman-and-memory-palace-of-life.html">Derek Jarman</a> on the other. But that's a topic for another day...)</p><p>Barker deserves more of a reputation as a skilled writer of prose. He can be prolix, no doubt, and none of his novels I've read would be worse off without some trimming, but the same can be said for hundreds of great works. Reading a novel is often about committing yourself to the experience of the extraneous. Letting patterns spread, stretch, lounge, and loll. The novel is the appropriate form for writers who are given to such tendencies. Novels ought to be allowed to be, <a href="https://hudsonreview.com/2015/10/baggy-monsters-and-tangled-tales/">contra</a> Henry James, "large loose baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary." Though I do love some novels that feel like they would fall apart if even one word were excised, I don't think that's the purpose we ought to celebrate the novel form for. We have short stories and lyric poetry for concision. We need novels to be allowed to meander and sprawl.</p><p>Barker's prose can take different forms and tones, and sometimes it's without much character, just there to serve up information and scenery. More often than not, though, there's often real evocative power, especially in the imagery. (He is, after all, a visual artist.) So much of what makes bestselling prose something to be ignored (or endured) more than celebrated remains absent in <em>Sacrament</em> and a lot of his other writing. Look, for instance, to the varying lengths of his paragraphs. You can't flip through the pages of <em>Sacrament</em> without noticing the frequency of substantial paragraphs, sometimes whole pages of a single one. Nowadays especially, but really throughout the last 100 years or longer, popular fiction has tended toward short, punchy paragraphs and short sentences. Small bits that can be munched by readers like popcorn. Popular fiction is designed less to be read than skimmed.</p><p>Barker's work allows and sometimes encourages skimming, but for the most part it asks to be read, sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph. It is a prose of accumulation. Here's a random paragraph of ordinary length from early in <em>Sacrament</em>:</p><blockquote>He did not go up the hill the following day to look for Jacob, nor indeed the day following that. He came home to such a firestorm of accusations — his mother in wracking tears, certain he was dead; his father, white with fury, just as certain he wasn't — that he dared not step over the threshold. Hugo wasn't a violent man. He prided himself on his reasonableness. But he made an exception in this case, and beat his son so hard — with a book, of all things — that he reduced them both to tears: Will's of pain, his father's of anguish that he'd lost so much control. (p. 75)</blockquote><p>The language is plain, but the sentence structures are not. Twenty words in the first sentence, twice that in the second, then six words, then forty. There's a rhythmic power to a paragraph of that variety, and the shortest sentence stands out, as it should, because it is one that casts ghostly echoes through the rest of the book: <em>Hugo wasn't a violent man</em>. The two longest sentences are broken up by parenthetical statements separated from the main sentence with dashes (the most violent punctuation mark, a slash across the page). Parentheticals suspend our reading. They pause both the sentence and us, while also providing more information. We hold the overall sense of the sentence in mind while also adding this element to it, and by the end of the sentence our job is to suture it all together. We are readers who are also assemblers. The last sentence brings us to a kind of finality with the explanation after the colon. This explanation serves as a separation. Without it, we could have seen the tears as one thing, equal, undivided. But the colon serves to split Will and his father. Their tears are not the same. Unity is broken.</p><p>Here's a short, more lyrical paragraph randomly chosen from later in the book:</p><blockquote>And in the midst of the blaze, images from the adventures of the day: a sky, a wall, Bethlynn; Drew clothed, Drew naked; the cat, the flowers, the bridge, all unreeling like a fragment of film tossed into the fire in his head, the throbbing white fire that lay at the end of everything. (p. 327)</blockquote><p>One-sentence paragraphs are common to popular fiction, but rarely are such one-sentence paragraphs so complex as this. Fifty-four words this time, but instead of violent dashes, we have a colon and semi-colons. The colon serves a common function, introducing a list, but the semi-colons are the most interesting punctuation here, working primarily as rhythmic notation. Read the sentence aloud and pause a little bit longer than you pause with the commas and you will see what Barker is doing here. Punctuation is also a tool for organization. It's why unpunctuated prose is so much harder to read than well-punctuated prose: our minds have to work harder to organize things. This sentence carefully groups things for us. It is a relatively long sentence, but not difficult to read or understand because it is so well put together. The sentence is interesting in its balance, too. The first half is mostly nouns. The second half unreels into simile and metaphor. The sentence begins with lots of concrete items, but its movement is toward abstraction. The abstraction feels earned and comprehensible because of all that leads up to it. The movement of the sentence is toward transcendence.</p><p>The pacing of <em>Sacrament</em> is also important to note. This is not a hard novel to read, it is often interesting and sometimes gripping, but as I read I kept feeling it asking me to slow down, to take time with its scenes and characters and images. It is not a book that reveals itself in a headlong rush. We must let ourselves build this novel in our mind rather than having it wash over us, or else we miss everything it offers. Though the mass market paperback is 600 pages of relatively small text, it is not crammed with incident. We could quickly summarize the events of, for instance, the last section (pp. 483-605), but the summary would be entirely wrong about everything that matters. That last section is a careful, slow assembly of all that has gone before. This is what allows the vision of unity, core to the novel's meaning, to resonate.</p><p>The last paragraph of <em>Sacrament</em> tells of a journey back into the world. The world is where we, the readers, end up when we close the book, but the gift the story gives to us is different from the gift it gives its characters. We accompanied them on their journey, but now their work is done. Our work begins, the work of continuing to imagine, to reflect, to meditate, to act. The characters at the end of <em>Sacrament</em> get the world, while we, closing the book, get a new vision of the world. That's the glory and wonder of art.</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/82924905/16438625a4644b36b2192d821de3fd65/eyJ3ZWJwIjowfQ%3D%3D/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=3XQ34hCzBreUfAn-fqiChwa2tFVPDyl7SYf9ltvdSJo%3D" /></p><p>-----</p><p>images by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Blake">William Blake</a></p></div>Matthew Cheneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07704529564308222004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-38360904359866864182023-05-02T10:14:00.002-04:002023-08-18T07:28:07.760-04:00The Day of The Last Vanishing Man<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEju_JqDO1X7Rr0guTV7n_XNzhvRgG6y5THsIO8Fgy7GnYPzK3kMdmnItgz4ILIEBMu1gzLuwIPiRt5TD1lzeU7FJv0KVyfhRYl4IJfpqFBak-MGheBEDwWWY3Zml7C2Dl0_afyTzvvEwXNbb8owKqzAstUE2k6vMzpWdTb_DIsnD0z-ZYOAFah0/s620/LVM%20publication%20square.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="620" data-original-width="620" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEju_JqDO1X7Rr0guTV7n_XNzhvRgG6y5THsIO8Fgy7GnYPzK3kMdmnItgz4ILIEBMu1gzLuwIPiRt5TD1lzeU7FJv0KVyfhRYl4IJfpqFBak-MGheBEDwWWY3Zml7C2Dl0_afyTzvvEwXNbb8owKqzAstUE2k6vMzpWdTb_DIsnD0z-ZYOAFah0/w640-h640/LVM%20publication%20square.webp" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>Today (May 2, 2023) is the official release date for <a href="https://www.thirdmanbooks.com/catalog/last-vanishing-man" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>The Last Vanishing Man and Other Stories</i></a>. Mostly, that just means it's now available from the online booksellers — it's been available from the publisher for a month and has been making its way into independent bookstores for a week or so. International distribution will be a little longer. Ebook, too. </p><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 fYcGch sc-rcywpx-0 hRKPxe" data-tag="post-content"><p>But still, we need one day to say, "The book is published!" — and today is that day.</p><p>I have some interviews in the pipeline (keep your eyes on <a href="https://lithub.com/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Lit Hub</a> and <a href="https://www.cemeterydance.com/extras/night-time-logic/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>Cemetery Dance</i></a>) as well as a <a href="https://largeheartedboy.com/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Largehearted Boy</a> playlist. Also, I will be doing an event at <a href="https://powerhousearena.com/events/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Powerhouse Arena</a> in Brooklyn on May 26 with a couple friends (details TBA).</p><p>I'll put some notes about the book below, but like a public radio or tv broadcaster, I must pause here to say that if you appreciate the book and/or me, the best thing you can do other than buying a copy is to rate it and leave a review on sites like <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Last-Vanishing-Man-Other-Stories/dp/B0B727R8N5/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=matthew+cheney+last+vanishing+man&qid=1683031451&sprefix=last+vanishing+man%2Caps%2C95&sr=8-1" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Amazon</a> and <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/121311647-the-last-vanishing-man-and-other-stories" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Goodreads</a>. Like so much else in life these days, publishing is beholden to algorithms, and the algorithms reward activity and engagement. That means that you can help books you like just by giving them a rating and writing, "Book. Has sentences. Yes." Even one-star ratings are more useful to a book (generally) than no reviews at all. (Of course, we writers hope you will give nothing but five-star ratings and long, considered reviews!)</p><p style="text-align: center;"><img data-media-id="201162663" height="179" src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/82392069/8db9f6d32e6a47fcab0546b6720f2418/eyJ3Ijo4MjB9/1.png?token-time=1689465600&token-hash=Jbx49dnvTcAZzr-1UrKVbptwgy72-cMtjdvQSVCvYcE%3D" width="593" /></p><p>My friend Eric Schaller (whose new collection <a href="https://www.lethepressbooks.com/store/p663/voiceofthestranger.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>Voice of the Stranger</i></a> you should check out) and I have one fundamental disagreement: Eric likes all the appendages of story notes, introductions, afterwords, etc. in collections and I dislike them quite strongly. (Eric mentions me in the story notes of <i>Voice of the Stranger,</i> knowing exactly what he's doing. And yes, though I completely disapprove of such things being in collections, nonetheless I read them all.) Many books I cherish are, I think, diminished by such filler. Nonetheless, I seem to be in a minority in believing this.</p><p>I am not about to write a bunch of story notes here. The stories are what they are and should be taken as such. However, I think I should talk about these stories' relationship to the idea of "horror". After all, Third Man is marketing this as <a href="https://thirdmanrecords.com/blogs/news/third-man-books-announces-first-horror-book" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">their first horror book</a>. Two of the stories, "Hunger" and "Patrimony", were published in horror/dark fantasy magazines (<i>Nightmare</i> and <i>Black Static</i>). A friend <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CqYORYasUYh/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">told me</a> that the first story, which I think of as a bit weird but not horrific, gave them nightmares. Other people have asked me, "Are there stories in the book that I can read even if I don't like horror stories?"</p><p>I will be curious to see what reviewers within the horror field make of the book, if it gets any reviews from horror afficionados. I expect (fear?) they will not see it as a collection of horror stories. Because in a strict sense, it's really not. Yet we didn't even market <a href="https://blacklawrencepress.com/books/blood-stories/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>Blood</i></a> as a horror collection and despite our attempts to get it read as litfic, it only got reviewed as horror or weird fiction, so ... [insert shrug here]. I would be perfectly happy to be seen as a horror writer or a writer of weird fiction. It's the genre I have the oldest and deepest attachment to. I have resisted in the past only because I do not want to disappoint readers who come expecting to be scared or grossed out. But my wonderful editor at Third Man, Chet Weise, who read the manuscript without knowing anything about it or about me, decided it's Horror (yes, capital H!) for interesting reasons that I have come around to embracing. The monsters are human, the horrors existential.</p><p>Here, then, on the book's official birthday, a guide to the horrors therein:</p><h3>How Is It Horror?</h3><p>"After the End of the End of the World": We live in apocalypse. I don't know a horror greater than this. The pain and suffering of living things is constant and it is exacerbated by the actions of the human species as we drive death into the biosphere. This story aims for something like transcendence, but that transcendence is based in trying to deal with the greatest horror imaginable.</p><p>"The Last Vanishing Man": A quiet, rueful story about deep histories, and the horror is in those histories, not the present time of any of the narrators. History is ghosts all the way down, and some of them are scary.</p><p>"Winnipesaukee Darling": This is probably the nicest, least horrifying story in the book. I am very fond of all of the characters, messy though they be. However, as with "Last Vanishing Man", there is horrifying history here.</p><p>"Killing Fairies": A story about what people do to each other, thus a horror story. For me, the greatest horror is the least supernatural here, and that is the roommate. But there is something of a metaphysical concept in the fairy creature that may or may not exist in the story, and that metaphysical concept proposes a universe of sadism.</p><p>"Hunger": As traditional a ghost story as I've ever written. Though I think it has a happy-ish ending, there's some ghostliness, death, and gore to get through before that.</p><p>"Mass": Our entanglements with other human beings can be horrifying. Like many of the stories in the book, this one is about what we do after the horrific events. How do we go forward, how do we live on?</p><p>"At the Edge of the Forest": Though there may be some ways to interpret this story as supernatural, its main concern is what happens to a character who has chosen to believe he lives in a horror story.</p><p>"Wild Longing": More horror in the past, more lives that could have been more free. More ghosts.</p><p>"A Suicide Gun": Though I hope this story is about many things, one of the reasons I wrote it was to explore the horror that is masculinity.</p><p>"The Ballad of Jimmy and Myra": A comedy at heart, this story almost didn't make it into the book because it is so ghastly. It is horrified not by its two main characters (who admittedly do terrible things) but by a culture that exploits weakness, trauma, and emotion.</p><p>"Patrimony": A story that calls out the horror of creating new life in a world of suffering.</p><p>"On the Government of the Living": More apocalypse, though farther along than in "After the End...". More children in a world of hurt. A Kafkaesque parable with a Foucauldian title.</p><p>"A Liberation": More slow apocalypse. I swear that when I wrote it I thought this was a sweet story. I keep forgetting it's full of corpses.</p><p>"The Box": A last kiss of death and resurrection.</p><p><img data-media-id="201163011" src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/82392069/8355f54f6e204e68a6cc944f4b7cc524/e30%3D/1.jpg?token-time=1689465600&token-hash=OJPJp2FpAARrK5vsjYwK6Qj1Ab89wUUy1VSbnMB3mSg%3D" /></p><p><br /><br /></p></div>Matthew Cheneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07704529564308222004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-92111860099497723752023-04-06T10:11:00.002-04:002023-08-18T07:29:20.683-04:00About That Life: Barry Lopez and the Art of Community<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiI3pu5HPAgUJJoDkbm1QpDis33qBwpcT9IuAwLU7Vu6GhcOw0tK03EjGeAEUrD664Kpe7TEh8-FDk1YU0fr3ZDhvkOACTUlW21v_KDQ3FrRXfqtZ1mfrEsN2ihnIaDMZfQcq2dxtGYrAHbC1gZcNY44rmsNwEvH1AU9y-Arn7TvUtzqMMTu_KP/s993/About%20That%20Life%20Cover.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="993" data-original-width="620" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiI3pu5HPAgUJJoDkbm1QpDis33qBwpcT9IuAwLU7Vu6GhcOw0tK03EjGeAEUrD664Kpe7TEh8-FDk1YU0fr3ZDhvkOACTUlW21v_KDQ3FrRXfqtZ1mfrEsN2ihnIaDMZfQcq2dxtGYrAHbC1gZcNY44rmsNwEvH1AU9y-Arn7TvUtzqMMTu_KP/w400-h640/About%20That%20Life%20Cover.webp" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>My new book <a href="https://punctumbooks.com/titles/about-that-life-barry-lopez-and-the-art-of-community/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>About That Life: Barry Lopez and the Art of Community</i></a> has now been published by Punctum Books as an Open Access work, which means there is a free PDF and the paperback is published at a reasonable price. The book's copyright is replaced by a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license, giving everyone the freedom to copy, share, and remix the work for noncommercial purposes. This summer, I'm going to play around with alternate forms myself (at the very least an ePub file for ebooks, but maybe also an illustrated website).</p><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 fYcGch sc-rcywpx-0 hRKPxe" data-tag="post-content"><p><i>About That Life</i> was not going to be a book. I began writing it moments after I learned of Barry Lopez's death on Christmas Day, 2020. Lopez had been my workshop leader at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in the summer of 2000, and he really changed my approach to life and especially to writing. I wanted to write a short article in his memory, and I especially wanted to share the writing exercises he had given us. One of those exercises led directly to my story <a href="https://matthewcheney.net/books/blood-stories/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">"Blood"</a> (which led to the movie <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6560672" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>Jill</i></a><i>, </i>currently making its way through festivals).</p><p>While I was beginning to write the article, I started pitching publishing outlets. Nobody was interested. They had Famous People to write about Lopez, so didn't need me. This was frustrating. Angering, even. I had something to say and nobody wanted to hear it! My frustration and anger kept me writing, and before I knew it the piece was longer than any of the places I might publish it would ever consider. (We live in a time when "longform" means 3,000 words.) I decided to lean in to the weird shape the piece was taking. <i>Seek to make your faults into virtues</i> is good writing advice. I explored beyond Lopez toward other things that had influenced my writing, my approach to art, and my feelings about life in a world of suffering. In a few months, I had about 20,000 words written.</p><p><img data-media-id="196701134" height="457" src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/81127688/144e49d23d3f43bbb13b465f941597c5/eyJ3Ijo4MjAsIndlYnAiOjB9/1.jpg?token-time=1689465600&token-hash=KWHqSQTtnJlOkhTQ0qxjuwpNduHWM4SZLttWZ3mGD8o%3D" width="691" /></p><p>Luckily, just then I saw a call from Punctum for manuscripts. It was one of their open reading periods. I wasn't sure of what I had written, so sent a bit of it to their email address to see if it was worth my sending it their way, and editor Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy got right back to me saying that on a quick glance it looked like something they'd be interested in, so I should send it when the reading period opened. I did, and Eileen said yes, let's publish this. I spent the summer revising, sent a finished manuscript, and then various family and health emergencies caused Eileen and Punctum's other editor, Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, to have to delay publication from last fall to now.</p><p>Actually, the delay ended up being a good thing, because a posthumous collection of Lopez's essays, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=oLhPEAAAQBAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World</i></a>, was published in the meantime, and a couple of essays in it were hugely helpful in clarifying some of what I wanted to say in my book. And once we were able to start the editing process, it was one of the best experiences I've ever had with editors.</p><p>Writers, if you want your text to be cared for with both enthusiasm and sharp insight, submit to Punctum. My manuscript was in pretty good shape when I sent the final in, but it was still a bit unformed, still suffering some of its birth pains, still gesturing awkwardly instead of eloquently — and Eileen's absolutely brilliant questions and laser-focused line editing helped me bring it to a level the submitted manuscript only hinted at. Then Vincent did multiple rounds of proofreading while he designed the book. (Just a couple days ago, he caught some tiny errors that had slipped by us all in the footnotes.) To have editors and publishers care so much and so generously about a book is truly a blessing.</p><p>At first, I was worried that having the delay push this book alongside the release of <i>The Last Vanishing Man and Other Stories</i> next month would be to its detriment. <i>LVM</i> is a trade book for a general audience, it has its own publicist, we're doing events ... and <i>About That Life</i> might get a little lost. But now I don't think so. Because on rereading the final copy, I realize that <i>About That Life</i> is a nonfiction companion to <i>LVM</i>, even something of a reader's guide for it. Lopez's work and ideas resonate throughout my stories — my favorite of Lopez's tales, "The Mappist", is directly alluded to in my own story "Mass", for instance, and the scholarly characters in "Mass" and other stories in the book are drawn less from my own experience as an academic than from Lopez's fiction (which draws from, among other sources, the scholars in Borges's stories). The careful, quiet tone of those stories is the sound of Lopez's voice resonating in my ears as I write.</p><p>But <i>About That Life</i> is about more than Barry Lopez. It is also about Chinese poetry and Korean pottery and Japanese imperialism and the ways and reasons we make things and the nature of living in a world of suffering... A lot. It's also something of a memoir. Certainly, it's the most sustained personal writing I've ever published. (So of course it has footnotes.)</p><p>The book is dedicated to my friends Rick, Beth, Pat, and Scott. Rick, Beth, Pat, and I all worked together over 20 years ago at a little boarding school, and the pressure-cooker existence of boarding school life made us fast friends. Rick was the pottery teacher, and everything I know about pottery I first learned from him. (I have no talent for making pottery myself, but I have an absolute passion for it and collect it seriously.) He first introduced me to the book <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=486Ye_1hdRAC&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>The Unknown Craftsman</i></a>, which plays an important role in <i>About That Life</i> (and <a href="https://blackbird.vcu.edu/v2n2/gallery/roth_r/slides/collecting19.htm" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">supplied</a> the cover image). Indeed, <i>The Unknown Craftsman</i> is a kind of character in my story, and one that has some twists and turns by the end.</p><p>Rick and Beth got married to each other. A little bit later, Pat left the boarding school and made her way back home to the Pacific Northwest, and there married Scott, whom she'd known for much of her life. I spent time at their ranch in Oregon, and loved it and them even as I mourned having them on the other side of the continent from me. Rick and Beth moved to New Mexico when I moved to New Jersey — we had all had enough of boarding school life and needed new adventures. I spent time out there with them as well. Rick, Pat, and I all lost parents within a few months of each other, and once we were through the worst of it, we met up in Tucson for a week. We discovered that since it was off season, renting a mansion was cheaper than getting hotel rooms, so that's what we did. It felt surreal and wonderful and healing. I took this photo of Pat's son Nate jumping into the outdoor pool:</p><p><img data-media-id="196699310" height="437" src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/81127688/d860217643d542388a0117f743105eef/eyJ3Ijo4MjAsIndlYnAiOjB9/1.JPG?token-time=1689465600&token-hash=M84C29Yhme0dkY_ZfybeD_fIIuYfWbZ9PWYgwXV9hLQ%3D" width="658" /></p><p>We all still talk regularly, and I see Rick and sometimes Beth and their son Alyosha when Rick comes back to New Hampshire for a big annual crafts fair. He's primarily <a href="https://elkinjewelers.com/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">a jeweler</a> now. I help him out in the booth, as it's a nice way to hang out, to be around artists, to talk about art. Even though I know very little about jewelry, it's easy for me to sell it because I legitimately think what Rick makes is beautiful and meaningful, and it's easier for someone who's not the artist to say that. Pat and Scott sold the ranch, moved to Washington, and now work with bees and in public schools. Among other things. Most of the kids are grown now. I'm the only one of us who isn't a grandparent.</p><p>The image of Barry Lopez I put above is one I have a print of. Rick sent it to me some years ago, having gotten it himself from the photographer, Robert Kaiser. (I hope Mr. Kaiser will forgive my appropriating it here. I try to avoid distributing copyrighted work without permission, but perhaps my purpose will justify it.) It was used as the image for Lopez's <a href="https://www.oregonlive.com/books/2020/12/barry-lopez-award-winning-and-influential-oregon-author-dies-at-75.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">obituary</a> in <i>The Oregonian. </i>It was strange to read Lopez's local obituary with an image that I was so familiar with, one that has sat in my home for some time, one that I feel real connection to, because it makes me think not only of Lopez but also of Rick. And Pat and Scott, our Oregonian friends. How strange, and how appropriate.</p><p><i>The art of community</i>. That's the book's subtitle. It has all sorts of meanings, all sorts of possibilities, and that's why I had to dedicate this particular book to some of my greatest friends, each one of them an artist in their own right and in their own way.</p><p>Given the book's Open Access status, I could link to the PDF here, but I would rather that you <a href="https://punctumbooks.com/titles/about-that-life-barry-lopez-and-the-art-of-community/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">click through</a> to Punctum's website at least, and maybe consider either buying the book or supporting Punctum with a subscription (I've had a Punctum subscription for years now, myself). Ask your local academic library to join Punctum's <a href="https://punctumbooks.com/supporting-library-membership-program/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">library program</a> if they can. They are doing heroic work trying to make the ecosystem of academic and quasi-academic publishing less awful, less exploitative, less elitist, more accessible.</p><blockquote>“If it weren’t for the ways we love each other,” Lopez told us, in words I wrote directly into my notebook, “we’d never write a word. You’ll never compromise your gifts by being attentive to other people, other things.”</blockquote><p><img data-media-id="196702540" height="533" src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/81127688/e00fde0425944890a72a5f70bf0bb9a4/eyJ3Ijo4MjB9/1.jpeg?token-time=1689465600&token-hash=Sw3v_lRipb9xmjIEBAfXskjEDMwretkkEMTwCAAUmCI%3D" width="710" /></p><p>image: Oregon, 2013, by me</p></div>Matthew Cheneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07704529564308222004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-28973229141418667402023-04-02T10:09:00.002-04:002023-08-18T07:30:46.502-04:00The Necessity of Nightmares<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqNRt9Zk-Ec-dbukLELOm8rGrlR1Uoinld3LrGSVJnGn37MH2DnU1Kyc1Ct55g8OAdvcLEi5uSMxg5rYhWOnWXuGNGzCE5pqaWVOk41o8dDcNVftf6-CqM3oyhqULe9hlfu3uPGfsbFpjdnaaerZYJ6_0_tIX_dtaGPmv-HYbs0e2a5O8qBQj7/s620/wolf-man-dream.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="490" data-original-width="620" height="506" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqNRt9Zk-Ec-dbukLELOm8rGrlR1Uoinld3LrGSVJnGn37MH2DnU1Kyc1Ct55g8OAdvcLEi5uSMxg5rYhWOnWXuGNGzCE5pqaWVOk41o8dDcNVftf6-CqM3oyhqULe9hlfu3uPGfsbFpjdnaaerZYJ6_0_tIX_dtaGPmv-HYbs0e2a5O8qBQj7/w640-h506/wolf-man-dream.webp" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p></p><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 fYcGch sc-rcywpx-0 hRKPxe" data-tag="post-content"><div class="sc-1ye87qi-0 cZNwdx"><p>I do not think of myself as a sadistic person. I have been, at heart, a pacifist from my teenage years. I was a strict vegetarian for 13 years because I did not want to benefit from the suffering of animals, and even now, an omnivore, I only occasionally eat meat. I have spent a lot of my professional academic career working <a href="https://finiteeyes.net/tag/cruelty/">against</a> the cruelty that often pops up in education. I believe that anger is a poison and kindness is the only sure guide to ethical behavior.</p><p>And yet ... I love it when readers of my stories tell me they were disturbed, unsettled, uncertain, discombobulated — and I <em>especially</em> love it when they say, "Your writing gave me nightmares."</p><p>For instance, a friend who picked up an advance copy of <a href="https://thirdmanrecords.com/collections/books/products/the-last-vanishing-man">my new story collection</a> at the AWP Conference texted me:</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/80822289/268b7efba41a48f8bfc804b156f934ff/eyJ3ZWJwIjowfQ%3D%3D/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=5vdDFYYJd0wxZ03FKc7DMsV657TCjYMjMSx6uBuA9Po%3D" /></p><p>Reader, I love this reaction.</p><p>Like laughter at comedy or arousal at pornography, a nightmare is an involuntary response. In their own ways, such responses are the ultimate praise for the work because they do not rely on critical judgment. There's nothing to argue with. You may think a joke is stupid, puerile, even indefensible ... but if it makes you laugh, it has, at a very base level, been successful. Similarly, you may think a story is badly conceived, badly written, fundamentally immoral ... but if it finds its way into your dreams, it has achieved something.</p><p>What, though, has it achieved? Aside from the sense of power that comes from momentarily nudging someone else's unconscious mind, does giving other people nightmares have any value?</p><p>After the end (or diffusion) of the <a href="https://drb.ie/articles/talk-about-a-revolution/">Theory Wars</a> in academic literary-critical study, new paradigms asserted themselves, including <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=1jRNDwAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q&f=false">trauma theory</a> and <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/25/affect-theory-and-the-new-age-of-anxiety">affect theory</a>, that moved away from the indeterminacy of language and toward the supremacy of feelings. In the last decade or so, mainstream culture has embraced what an ungenerous critic has called <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2022/01/trauma-plots.html">trauma plots</a>. I, too, feel that the term <em>trauma</em> has been used so much that it is more sound than meaning, but I also every day feel despair at the immense suffering of the world, the vast injustice of existence, the violence that suffuses our lives, the impending dooms staring us all down. I can easily believe that trauma is the most common experience of contemporary life. I would be suspicious were it not. What would it mean <em>not</em> to be traumatized? I can barely imagine.</p><p>Within this context, when living itself is a nightmare, what good comes from creating nightmares through art?</p><p>The topic is not a new one. There are countless essays and testimonials about why people are attracted to horrific art, including explorations of horror as therapy. That's not what I'm wondering about, though. I'm talking about nightmares <em>as</em> nightmares. Terrible dreams dreamt after reading or viewing a work of fiction. That experience is more precise and more intimate than a jump scare or a <em>frisson</em> of eeriness. It's someone else's imagination infecting your own.</p><p>The question of the value or even necessity of nightmares relies on what we understand dreams in general to be. And of course nobody knows for sure. I've read around in Freud's <em>Interpretation of Dreams</em>, an interesting book to read but not one that holds much truth I can see about dreaming. <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1474442220302751">A 2020 study</a> of dreams and nightmares in <em>The Lancet</em> mentions theories of the purpose of dreams and concludes that "no consensus on these theories has been achieved yet, given it is empirically challenging to test whether and what type of consequence dreaming mind has on waking mind and behaviour." <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763423000738?via%3Dihub">A new study</a> in <em>Neuroscience & Behavioral Reviews</em> of sleep and dreaming as functions of homeostasis dubs dreaming "relevant but evanescent". (The scientific literature tends to distinguish between <em>nightmares</em> as negative dream experiences that cause the dreamer to wake and <em>bad dreams</em> as negative dream experiences that do not cause the dreamer to wake. I am not distinguishing between these types of dreaming here.)</p><p>In general, and unscientifically, I think of dreams as the off-gas of thinking, perceiving, feeling: the mind clearing out patterns and associations in pursuit of balance and relevance. Spandrils of neuroactivity, mostly without deep meaning. </p><p>It seems reasonable to see nightmares as accumulations of anxieties and fears, but also as the metastasized residue of those anxieties and fears, homunculi of disquietude.</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/80822289/250c1f3a05eb45fbab5d1f1a4633ccf6/eyJ3ZWJwIjowfQ%3D%3D/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=niRUUsfgIpHrTU2ri8ECgaWs2rjyN7nfQi4gubQyVt8%3D" /></p><p>Because dream amnesia is common even in people who think they remember their dreams well (which the recent study linked above relates to the abrupt rise in cortisol upon waking), our knowledge of dreams is not a direct knowledge of the unfiltered dream but of our memory of that dream. Remembering and dreaming are different processes. The act of remembering itself makes selections and imposes forms on the dream material. We have no conscious, unmediated access to dream material — what we know of our dreams is deeply affected by the act of remembering, which itself is deeply affected by our assumptions, desires, and bodily states. (I'm not even touching here on the likely significant effect of the body, especially the nervous system, on dreaming.) </p><p>The equation <em>dream plus memory-of-dream</em> allows a certain portrait of the mind's processes if we ask questions such as, "What is my memory of my dream telling me about what I think is important here? What am I choosing to hold onto, and why?" Such questions (common enough to psychology, mindfulness practice, etc.) can begin a process of reflection that might be useful for self-exploration. Perhaps nightmares can be an impetus toward such healthy reflection.</p><p>In my experience, nightmares provided by a story offer a way of knowing ourselves and our world — and, paradoxically, a way of feeling better about existing in that world.</p><p>When the pandemic really started revealing its reach in March, April, and May 2020, I (like many people) had trouble reading, trouble writing, trouble doing much of anything. The perils of the world wouldn't let my attention rest. (There have been multiple <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8800372/">studies</a> of dreaming during the pandemic, which unsurprisingly show an increase in troubled sleep and nightmares.) Finally, I was able to do some reading by returning to a set of books that had, a few years before, really given me nightmares: David Peace's <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/DAN/red-riding-quartet">Red Riding Quartet</a>, particularly the last two novels, which are the most oneiric and apocalyptic.</p><p>I first encountered the novels after watching the excellent <a href="https://www.imdb.com/list/ls505706028/">trilogy of films</a> based on three of them. I love the films, and think they're some of the best literary adaptations of our time, but for all their horror, they've got nothing on the books when it comes to making nightmares, because the books are — as the late Mark Fisher <a href="https://www.frieze.com/article/red-riding-trilogy">said</a> — incantatory. Read one after the other, as I did both times I read the series, they have an astonishing accumulative power. The first novel, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=P4j3l1DW5cAC&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&dq=david%20peace&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false"><em>Nineteen Seventy-Four</em></a>, was Peace's first book, and as he has said in interviews, he hadn't really found himself as a writer yet, he was still exploring. This actually works well for the overall effect, because it's the most conventional book in a highly unconventional series, and to a certain extent it makes us lower our defenses. We think we know what we're in for. It's claustrophobic and bleak and bloody, but it's still recognizably a crime novel, and it wears the influence of James Ellroy openly. With <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=uoQiJa5tQ5gC&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false"><em>Nineteen Seventy-Seven</em></a>, Peace is clearly becoming something more than what he seemed in the first book. It's a book of fragments, whispers, screams. Narrative gets fractured in montage and barely returns from the breakage. By <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=6kyhvZQ9n9oC&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PT29#v=onepage&q&f=false"><em>NIneteen Eighty</em></a>, any pretense of conventionality is gone. The world is broken, the story is broken, the language is broken. With <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=LnvZCwAAQBAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PA3#v=onepage&q&f=false"><em>Nineteen Eighty-Three</em></a>, we're in the apocalypse, we're in hell. It's a challenge to hold characters, events, situations in mind. It's a challenge to keep going, to keep reading through it all. The brain strains. Maybe the best thing to do is stop. But the incantation continues.</p><p>The first time I read the books, I almost didn't make it through the third or to the fourth. I had to stop reading for a while because I was having persistent nightmares obviously caused by the novels. Not fun nightmares. Smothering, terrible dreams of dismemberment, torture, death. I paused for a bit, the nightmares stopped, I finished the third book somehow and moved on to the fourth and then the nightmares returned, even more vivid now, but less smothering, more open, a sense of worlds ending.</p><p>Though these were not by any means enjoyable nightmares, they had a certain thrill — I was thrilled that words on a page could be so vivid (so incantatory!) that they would do this to me. My mind had strained to make the material of the books hold together, and that effort poured into my sleeping mind's work. It was no surprise that I would need to flush this stuff out of my subconscious at night. Whatever else they may be, nightmares are the unconscious mind's attempt to cleanse itself of toxins.</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/80822289/57bd66ae10824ab1bf931a9047cf74fb/eyJ3ZWJwIjowfQ%3D%3D/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=LKJ2B4mY_NrUDdnooB2owgvPiUrmVQor-8QPH2Kk6qY%3D" /></p><p>Something in my mind had latched onto the imagery and rhythms of the Red Riding novels and films and needed to use those images and rhythms to scrub something (what, I still don't know) out of my brain. It did not feel good at the time. But soon after, I recognized that I was ... somehow lighter. Healthier. Able to feel more and differently. Less stressed out. Less anxious.</p><p>I think this is why I returned to both the films and books in the early months of the pandemic. Nothing else felt like it got my brain into the right space. Nothing else felt so grounding. It was as if I needed to tune my brain. The world was a horrorshow, and I needed to get on its wavelength to deal with it. It wasn't just the pandemic that was freaking me out — it was also the mass corruption in the government, the terrifying rise of rightwing authoritarianism, imminent threats of violence, the actuality of murder and death. Nothing captured this for me as well as the Red Riding books. They vibrated in the same way as the world we lived in, and helped me get myself tuned to that terrible reality. I had nightmares, but the nightmares were my brain doing the work it needed to do to get me through those days.</p><p>Sonic metaphors are what I reach for in trying to explain all this. For me, getting through the days and experiencing less anxiety and misery is not about having hope for the future (I have none); rather, mental health is, if nothing else, about trying to get my emotions in tune with the reality of this life, because for me anxiety and misery are produced not just by the objective fact of the world's awfulness but by my feelings — my emotional vibrations — being discordant with the underlying hum of reality. Mental illness, for me at least, is a kind of affective dissonance. To reduce that dissonance, I try to adjust my ideas of desire, I try to let go of expectations, I try to embrace present moments. And I seek out nightmares with which to modulate my inner sense of experience with all that lies beyond me.</p><p>Those are the sorts of nightmares I aspire to give readers. Nightmares that, in some ways, connect back to Aristotle's idea of tragedy as purgation. I don't aspire to write moral stories that will tell you how to live. I do not know how you should live. I do not know how I should live. I do not aspire to entertain. I like entertainment, need it, seek it out, but it's not what I got into writing to do. I aspire to write stories that might help us, the traumatized citizens of a corrupt and violent world, tune ourselves to the pitch of this existence so that we resonate more harmoniously — which is to say more productively, more healthily — with a reality that is itself a nightmare.</p><p>Why did my story (I'm assuming it was <a href="http://outlooksprings.com/stories/after-the-end-of-the-end-of-the-world/">"After the End of the End of the World"</a>, the first in the book) give my friend a nightmare of being eaten by a glacier? I filled the story with my own anxieties, frustrations, angers, and despairs about the state of existence. A recurring image in the story of melting glaciers serves a kind of metaphorical tension: warming hearts and a warming world. How to care about each other when the biosphere is dying? How to hold onto anything when everything soon enough gets lost and forgotten? Painful existential questions.</p><p>I wrote from the place of my own nightmares. A travel report from a land of hurt, but also a map toward something maybe like grace. I couldn't find a way toward that grace, though, without depicting the contour lines of fear and despair. The topography of my nightmares is there, but I hope the map, however sketchy it may be, also shows an opportunity for awakening.</p><p>So yes, while I do take a giddy (sadistic?) joy in learning that my work disturbs you, unsettles you, gives you nightmares ... my grandest, most grandiloquent hope is that the disturances, the unsettlements, the nightmares may be in service to helping us get through the truly horrific reality into which we were all born. </p><p>Certainly, those are the nightmares I want artists to give me, and I try to return the favor in kind.</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/80822289/ab04cd00d6644867b8263c236b812e55/eyJ3ZWJwIjowfQ%3D%3D/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=Xqtkfc7K-TMdX3SUzL1sASR1fq5Co8zRmlbqG3UQyuo%3D" /></p><p><br /></p><p>-----</p><p>images: 1. Sergei Pankejeff, <a href="https://www.freud.org.uk/education/resources/the-wolf-mans-dream/">The Wolf Man's Dream</a>; 2. text messages; 3. 19th C. <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Homunculus_Faust.jpg">engraving</a> of homunculus from Goethe's <em>Faust, Part 2</em>; 4. still from <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1259574"><em>Red Riding: The Year of Our Lord 1974</em></a>; 5. <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gekko_Emperor_Godaigo.jpg">print</a> of Emperor Go-Daigo, dreaming of ghosts at his palace in Kasagiyama, 1890</p></div></div>Matthew Cheneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07704529564308222004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-32258159683807815672023-03-19T10:07:00.003-04:002023-08-18T07:32:32.434-04:00Negative Waves<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9YC165tGoVGyauYhJin_U2p5gssle8fdixYE1lzOXI2f5ofc9KSdqeZOg26gTyjp1vDeYbpLcoGpBQ1cesa3xwyTA1NbIBRgF-38oVnAkhxpKpIcNicNlkLxC8edXyBHef_mxoV_bvcz5zFlB1R9zgIC1SHrlLLnS13nNr55ZVqGLguqe7yR2/s620/Negative%20Waves.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="620" data-original-width="620" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9YC165tGoVGyauYhJin_U2p5gssle8fdixYE1lzOXI2f5ofc9KSdqeZOg26gTyjp1vDeYbpLcoGpBQ1cesa3xwyTA1NbIBRgF-38oVnAkhxpKpIcNicNlkLxC8edXyBHef_mxoV_bvcz5zFlB1R9zgIC1SHrlLLnS13nNr55ZVqGLguqe7yR2/w640-h640/Negative%20Waves.webp" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>I haven't seen the movie <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065938/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>Kelly's Heroes</i></a> in ages, but what I most remember from it is something that became a running joke between my father and myself when I was a kid: Donald Sutherland's hippie-dippie character complaining about "negative waves". If something got too tense or critical, my father would deflect with a pretty good impression of Sutherland, saying something like, "Whoooooa, watch it with the negative waves, man!"</p><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 fYcGch sc-rcywpx-0 hRKPxe" data-tag="post-content"><p>Whenever I hear people complaining about reviewers (of books, movies, art, food, whatever) who are too negative, I can't help but hear Donald Sutherland's voice in my head. Negative waves, dude. Negative waves.</p><p>When I first started writing reviews, the question of negativity was unavoidable. After all, right around the time I started reviewing, the world of litchat was obsessed with the question of "snark". <a href="https://www.sfgate.com/magazine/article/THE-WAR-ON-SNARK-THE-BELIEVER-A-little-2602985.php" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>The Believer</i> was founded </a>to combat those negative waves. Dale Peck's <a href="https://www.salon.com/2002/07/24/peck_3/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">eviscerative style</a> got every pundit pontificating. Meanwhile, book blogs were suddenly becoming A Thing, with righteous denizens of newsprint denouncing the pixel-stained wretches toiling in their parents' basements. We all wanted to stake our claims, and we did, and it all got old fast, and so did we.</p><p>For years now, I've made it a principal not to get involved in any arguments about reviewing. It's not even a principal; it's just that I find the arguments predictable and tedious, because they're pretty much the same arguments people have had since <a href="https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2017/fall/feature/edgar-allan-poe%E2%80%99s-hatchet-jobs" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">the early 19th century</a> at the latest. In any case, I barely review much at all anymore; there are other amusements. </p><p>At the risk of being tedious, though, I've been thinking about the topic this week. Having just <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/from-awp-80175541">returned</a> from the AWP Conference, questions of writing and publishing are at the forefront of my mind. Additionally, I've got two books coming out very soon, and while one of them, <a href="https://punctumbooks.com/titles/about-that-life-barry-lopez-and-the-art-of-community/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>About That Life</i></a>, is unlikely to get reviewed much, if at all, since it's a quasi-academic book from an open access publisher, the publisher of the other, <a href="https://thirdmanrecords.com/collections/books/products/the-last-vanishing-man" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>The Last Vanishing Man</i></a><i>,</i> is actively trying to get the book reviewed in as many places and by as many people as possible. On the one hand, it's exciting to think of these books reaching readers; on the other, it's terrifying because it is inevitable that some readers won't like them, and who among us wants to have our work disliked?</p><p>The immediate prompt for this post, however, is <a href="https://biblioracle.substack.com/p/negative-criticism?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=72716&post_id=109204206&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">John Warner's thoughtful delving</a> into this most beaten of dead horses via his newsletter The Biblioracle Recommends. Unlike me, Warner is still on Twitter, so he continues to see the churn of pointless arguments. Thus, he noticed a new flare-up of "concerns" about reviewing. ("Stop the presses! Twitter has concerns!") While arguing for the usefulness of negative reviews, Warner offers a devastating <i>Kirkus</i> review of his novel <i>The Funny Man</i> that he persuasively argues probably doomed the book. Succinct, barbed words in a powerful publication read by publishers, agents, booksellers, and librarians (at least back then) was a death blow for a first novel by a little-known writer. It's a humbling story and lends credibility to Warner's argument.</p><p>I think Warner makes a bit of a category error, though — and it's an interesting one, which is really why I'm writing this. His prompt is movie reviews and actors complaining about those mean, mean reviewers who don't love the actor's deeply skilled work in $400 million of fanservice. Plus all the fans jumping in to say that any negative review is "unfair" or "biased". (My heart sinks for the future of the human intellect.) These are the same people who hate Martin Scorsese because he doesn't think superhero movies are the equal of <i>Citizen Kane</i>.</p><p>The situation for <i>books</i> and reviews now is much different from the situation for <i>movies</i> and reviews. Movies are a mass art, books are not, especially works of fiction. The bestselling novel of any year might sell 1 million copies. Colleen Hoover's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Starts_with_Us" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>It Starts with Us</i></a> was something of an anomaly, blowing everything else out of the water by selling 800,000 copies in pre-orders and first-day sales. (Most novels don't do even a tenth of that — heck, 1% of that — over the course of their entire time in print.) </p><p>Meanwhile, the top 10 movies of 2022 all <a href="https://www.the-numbers.com/market/2022/summary" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">sold</a> over 20 million tickets each in movie theatres. Movies get reviewed all over the place. Certainly, a review in a major outlet can have an effect on films that are not blockbusters, but it's rare that any one review can make or break even a small, arthouse movie. And reviews do pretty much nothing to big spectacles. That fact leads to one of the perverse complaints made by fans of big spectacles who mistake box office success for cinematic quality. All those reviewers and their negative waves, man! We're just trying to watch a big dumb action movie that's indistinguishable from every other big dumb action movie and somebody out there is harshin' on it, dude.</p><p>The situation is different for books, particularly fiction. Few serious book review outlets remain. (I'm still in mourning for <i>BookForum</i>, though grateful some of its <a href="https://www.bookforum.com/print/archive" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">archives</a> remain online.) Goodreads and TikTok dominate bookchat. One of the most depressing things at AWP last week was how common it was for people to talk about what they're doing to get book x, y, or z noticed on TikTok. Certainly, people talking about books in any way is a good thing, but quick consumer response to books is shallow discourse.</p><p>Like John Warner, I've suffered negative reviews and harsh criticism, though mostly for individual stories and essays rather than for books, since my books have, so far, been like most of what's published and gone generally unnoticed. While I will forever be grateful to Paul Di Filippo for <a href="https://locusmag.com/2016/05/paul-di-filippo-reviews-matthew-cheney/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">his <i>Locus</i> review</a> of my book <i>Blood: Stories</i>, the review I actually most cherish of that book was <a href="http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/blood-stories-by-matthew-cheney/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">a mixed one</a> by Redfern Jon Barrett for <i>Strange Horizons, </i>because even though Barrett wasn't much interested in the aesthetic of the later stories in the book, they identified what I hoped readers would notice across some of the other stories.</p><p>A story collection is, like an anthology, a dangerous target for any reviewer, especially if the book seeks some diversity of tone, subject matter, style, etc. In a mixed review I once, long ago, wrote of an anthology I said that the editor was likely the only person who could claim to be impressed by every story in the book, but in some ways that's true of every anthology and collection. "Not every reader will enjoy every story in this book," is perhaps the most banal thing you can say except, "This is a book written in words that form sentences." It's the nature of the beast and poses a real challenge for reviewers — a challenge I often failed myself when reviewing collections and anthologies, because to make the review itself interesting to read, it helps to have some contrast. And that's the problem with only trying to write positive reviews. Pure praise is incredibly difficult to forge into compelling reading!</p><p>Because it is so difficult for any one book to get reviewed at all, I generally lean toward thinking it's best for reviewers to ignore the stuff they don't like, at least if it's not by a Famous Writer who will receive lots of reviews and sales. What's the point of beating up on a book nobody's likely to read anyway? <i>Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus, Library Journal</i>, and the like have to — they try to review more than anybody else and really cover the mainstream publishing world — but the rest of us don't. Or, rather, we certainly ought to write negatively about books if there is a way to use the negative opinion toward a greater purpose. There needs to be some point other than just, "I don't like this book." Good for you, but hardly anybody's likely to read the book anyway, so why bother? Wouldn't your time be better spent drawing attention to books you think deserve it?</p><p>The purpose of negative reviews is, I think, to strengthen a literary discourse, not to help or hurt an individual book. The times when literary cultures have been vibrant and fertile have not been times of uniformity or positivity, they have been times of manifestoes and hyperbole, of people arguing late into the night about ethics and aesthetics, of communities building themselves in support of or opposition to now long-forgotten trends. Creative work needs the energy and passion of wanting to do things in a certain way and for a certain purpose as opposed to other ways and other purposes.</p><p>The problem is not negative reviews. The problem is a lack of reviews. The problem is the death of literary discourse, of thoughtful reflection, of historical knowledge, of careful attention to the text. We need all that to be more common if we are to have vibrant culture, but even more than all of that we need people talking about what they care about in what they read, how they care, why they care — praising to the skies and damning to hell. </p><p>John Warner quotes A.O. Scott: "A big part of any critic’s job is to be wrong…" But what is "wrong"? Something you will disagree with later? That's just human. The only <i>wrong</i> of reviewing is dishonesty. My feelings about books I praised or denounced 20 years ago have changed, as, I expect, have yours. That's not wrong, that's normal. The book we need today is not the book we needed a few months ago. I regret some reviews I have written — in one case, because I should not have agreed to the review at a moment when I didn't have the time or mental energy to express myself well about it (I don't think my evaluation of the book would have changed, but I do think my approach would have been different); in other cases because I overplayed my feelings and praised or condemned too strongly. But I don't regret the reviews where I honestly expressed an opinion I now have some difference with, books I don't love as I did when I reviewed them, books for which I now see virtue that previously was invisible to me.</p><p>Regardless of whether I agree with them now, I cherish my old reviews, because they preserve a different self in a different literary time and place, allowing a window into both the slice of culture I had a chance to be part of and the moment of being I happened to inhabit.</p><p>Alas, I risk repeating things I said almost 20 years ago. Unlike my opinions of various books and movies, my feeling that literature needs a robust culture of comment and argument remains the same as it was when I was young. In <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2005/02/clubbiness-hypocritical-and-otherwise.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">a February 2005 blog post</a> about all this, I ended by quoting Gary Sernovitz quoting Henry James, and it's as good an end now as it was then:</p><blockquote>"Art," Henry James wrote, "lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints; and there is a presumption that those times when no one has anything particular to say about it, and has no reason to give for practice or preference, though they may be times of honour, are not times of development--are times, possibly even, a little of dullness."</blockquote><p>Go ahead, dudes — surf those negative waves!</p></div>Matthew Cheneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07704529564308222004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-67034362760860046372023-03-17T10:05:00.002-04:002023-08-18T07:34:07.664-04:00From AWP<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjg45LQKPfq9swIzOxAYb2Rd7tZC10-6Qde_2QPc7QqUFBEy_gC88TNARBjgBcKwoP8LbOG1Ge_djvEbD1-2zavHN4CIFKhhZ15m5IhI2q5QnIJ-vdvCgZC-4Nfnwmi_3TsDwLmd56znnPKOhu1BA_YvQR1qT4NFq2tvJKjvePv-4ydDIG5QRXz/s847/AWP%20Books.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="847" data-original-width="620" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjg45LQKPfq9swIzOxAYb2Rd7tZC10-6Qde_2QPc7QqUFBEy_gC88TNARBjgBcKwoP8LbOG1Ge_djvEbD1-2zavHN4CIFKhhZ15m5IhI2q5QnIJ-vdvCgZC-4Nfnwmi_3TsDwLmd56znnPKOhu1BA_YvQR1qT4NFq2tvJKjvePv-4ydDIG5QRXz/w468-h640/AWP%20Books.webp" width="468" /></a></div> <p></p><p>I spent the last week in Seattle, Washington at the <a href="https://www.awpwriter.org/awp_conference/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference</a>, a conference I have been going to off and on for more than fifteen years now.</p><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 fYcGch sc-rcywpx-0 hRKPxe" data-tag="post-content"><p>AWP has provided some great memories for me. I first attended when the conference was in Austin, Texas. I had been invited onto a panel with Jeff VanderMeer, Kelly Link, Laird Hunt, and Brian Evenson. (Wonder what became of any of them?) We also did a reading and had dinner with Michael Moorcock. Is it any wonder I remember virtually nothing else about that conference? Then there was the New York City conference where I worked in the Book Fair trying to sell or give away copies of <i>Best American Fantasy</i> and <i>Weird Tales</i>, which was a really exciting experience at the time because AWP was even more of a big-L Literature conference back then, and anything with "fantasy" in the title (never mind "Weird Tales"!) was quite a shock for some people. Then there was the Boston conference where I got to be moderator/interviewer for a conversation between Samuel Delany and Kit Reed, a great honor. The last AWP I attended before this most recent one was in Los Angeles, and it sits bittersweet in my memory. I had the thrill of seeing <a href="https://matthewcheney.net/books/blood-stories/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">my first book</a> published and being promoted by the publisher, but that conference was also the last time I saw my friend Katherine Min in person before her death.</p><p>This AWP may end up the most memorable, however, because only a few hours after my plane landed in Seattle, I headed down to Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery to read from my very new book <a href="https://thirdmanrecords.com/collections/books/products/the-last-vanishing-man" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>The Last Vanishing Man and Other Stories</i></a><i>,</i> which was so hot off the press that I hadn't even seen a copy until my editor, Chet Weise, handed me one at the event. Originally, Maria Dahvana Headley was going to join me in reading, but Maria had a family emergency and had to cancel a week before. Then Jeff VanderMeer valiantly jumped in, booked a flight, and headed to Seattle — only to have to cancel two hours before we began because he was felled by a nasty fever. (He recovered later, but it was not a good time for him.) So I was left alone, with an audience of people who primarily wanted to see either Jeff or maybe Maria (if they hadn't gotten the news). I seem to be the Typhoid Mary of readings. Or maybe the universe just wanted me to celebrate the book alone. I was deeply looking forward to a conversation with Jeff, and my feelings on arrival at Fantagraphics were a mix of disappointment and abject terror. I imagined us announcing Jeff's inability to appear and then every member of the audience just walking out.</p><p>But it all went well. The audience was understanding, and very much concerned for Jeff's health. And they stayed! I read for probably too long (still figuring out how and what to read from this book), then Chet peppered me with questions that Jeff had sent along, plus some of his own. It was a fun conversation. The audience was amazingly generous, and then a bunch of folks bought books afterward. I have immense gratitude to all of those folks, because they made what could have been a dispiriting and even disastrous event into something really quite special. I will remember it for a long time to come.</p><p>I spent much of the next day wandering around the epic Book Fair, seeing friends, seeing presses whose work I like, investigating new presses and books I'd never heard of.</p><p><img data-media-id="193554834" height="532" src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/80175541/541a4aefee724ea8b2e26bca8e487ade/eyJ3Ijo4MjB9/1.JPG?token-time=1689465600&token-hash=zUg_3LIyYGnI-T9CORVFN1UCy7tCeRBCI1g9yFpNcu4%3D" width="709" /></p><p>It was a pleasure to run into friends at Black Lawrence Press, <i>One Story</i>, Clash Books, <i>Rain Taxi</i>, and elsewhere. There was also the fun of trying to get used to seeing my book among the others at Third Man's table. But I didn't have to get used to it long — by Saturday morning, all copies had sold.</p><p><img data-media-id="193555169" height="520" src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/80175541/7e9a624cfa634fccb043cf21de0ec16b/eyJ3Ijo4MjB9/1.JPG?token-time=1689465600&token-hash=8TTKHpN-NfQwU7YWdVAkH7MJsXo76tgwVDcorKGgi2E%3D" width="693" /></p><p>Saturday night, I met up with my New Hampshire friend <a href="https://lizahl.com/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Liz Ahl</a>, and her brother and brother-in-law, for a fine dinner at <a href="https://www.musangseattle.com/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Musang</a>. It was marvelous. But by the end of the night, I was exhausted. AWP has a way of doing that to you.</p><p>On Sunday, AWP was over and most of the crowd had left, so I took the opportunity to wander the city (including the Seattle Art Museum) and rest a bit. Then on Monday, I met up with Jess Flarity, a PhD student whose dissertation committee I'm on, who grew up in the area. We explored some wonderfully <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/Cpxr4oWr9ot/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">decaying old railroad cars</a>, stopped at the famous <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CpwG_MtrCfp/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">falls</a> below the Squamish Lodge & Spa in Snoqualmie, known to all <i>Twin Peaks</i> fans as The Great Northern. (We didn't head into Snoqualmie to see other <i>Twin Peaks</i> sites, but hopefully there will be a future time.) Then we made our way to <a href="https://holymountainbrewing.com/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Holy Mountain Brewing</a>, which a friend had recommended. And what an excellent recommendation it was! Not only is it named after the wonderful Jodorowsky movie, and not only is it the sort of place where they play Ghost Bath's <a href="https://ghostbath.bandcamp.com/album/moonlover" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>Moonlover</i></a> on vinyl (yes, they do!), but they also have extraordinarily good beer. Seattle is known for its breweries. They're as common as coffee shops. But Holy Mountain has got to be among the best, because I can't actually fathom how it could be better. (Jess and I did 6 ounce samples of a few beers and shared with each other so we could compare.) The Bottleworks XXIV, an imperial stout aged in bourbon barrels, was one of the most remarkable things I've ever eaten/drunk. I am sometimes skeptical of foodies' claims of complexity, of a sensory experience, but I am here to say that every sip of that beer was memorably complex. It was so rich I could not have drunk more than the little glass, even if I ignored the 13% alcohol content (yes, 13% for a beer!), but every moment with it was memorable. That particular beer was a special one for them, available in very small quantities, but their regular offerings are only a little less remarkable.</p><p>On Tuesday, I moved out of the hotel and to my friend Colleen Lindsay's apartment so that I could spend some quality time with her cats, including the famous Mugsy. Colleen and I bounced around for a bit, seeking out interesting shops and restaurants. And there was plenty of time to spend with cats.</p><p><img data-media-id="193557281" height="711" src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/80175541/4d322236b0fa4bb3a15b6fdef477f430/eyJ3Ijo4MjB9/1.JPG?token-time=1689465600&token-hash=z3u8bBFlndAGwODVJkSXJaCUYM5JP2dGHnWTSX2uoKw%3D" width="715" /></p><p>I made it home and discovered that though many of the towns around my house got huge amounts of snow during a nor'easter, my house only got a couple inches. Spring does seem to be on the way.</p><p>And now back to work, as this was our Spring Break, and Monday starts everything up again. There is much to do, but I remain grateful for the many friends who have brightened my days, and I look forward to the wonderful fun still to come.</p><p><br /></p><p>-----</p><p>Top image: The book haul — everything I bought or was given at AWP.</p></div>Matthew Cheneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07704529564308222004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-90687073914123341442023-02-27T10:03:00.002-05:002023-08-18T07:35:30.446-04:00Calm Weather and the Melancholy Tide<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeROCwXq9fe9FV8a5PpnxIzn7-7WRBb19DbHtK-h8zSAU9vyuz972NuLWuJTVNo_3a66y7YWSu5cCmxXS-cgsPGx5RZo5nOfyOORQdRNY8h6jjBWg7UTuEFTXCG7mjjvb3cAvXZws6asYbkVtCFWqrFSgMB0G2tkRlqNN58_zVqhDeP3opOC9F/s896/Medicine%20Melancholy.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="896" data-original-width="620" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeROCwXq9fe9FV8a5PpnxIzn7-7WRBb19DbHtK-h8zSAU9vyuz972NuLWuJTVNo_3a66y7YWSu5cCmxXS-cgsPGx5RZo5nOfyOORQdRNY8h6jjBWg7UTuEFTXCG7mjjvb3cAvXZws6asYbkVtCFWqrFSgMB0G2tkRlqNN58_zVqhDeP3opOC9F/w442-h640/Medicine%20Melancholy.webp" width="442" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>Recently, I got an inexpensive used copy of <a href="https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?52532" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>Twice Twenty-Two</i></a>, a 1966 book made up of Ray Bradbury's story collections <i>Golden Apples of the Sun</i> (1953) and <i>Medicine for Melancholy</i> (1956) — the collections on either side of <a href="https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?44797" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>The October Country</i></a> (1955). I've been revisiting Bradbury a bit over the last year or so. Though his stories were important to me when I was young, he's someone I hadn't read with any passion since childhood, thinking he was a writer whose childish spirit must not have much to say to me in adulthood. I was wrong.</p><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 fYcGch sc-rcywpx-0 hRKPxe" data-tag="post-content"><p>It may seem strange to say of someone who is so famous and beloved, but Bradbury is an easy writer to underestimate. We associate him with themes of childhood, with nostalgia, with sentimentality. And there is truth in those associations. But it was an essay by the wonderful horror writer Joel Lane (collected in <a href="http://tartaruspress.com/lane-this-spectacular-darkness.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>This Spectacular Darkness</i></a>) that sent me back to Bradbury and convinced me that Bradbury's obsessive theme is less childhood than loss. Loss is where the sense of nostalgia comes from, and it is the ache of loss that fills the nostalgia in Bradbury's best work with melancholy, not sentimentality. </p><p>The cruelty of adulthood is that the simplicity and innocence of childhood can't be returned to. Bradbury felt quite deeply the truth that even if your childhood wasn't particularly happy, it was a simpler and more innocent time of life, a time without adult responsibilities or regrets or ailments, a time when, at the very least, a future remains possible. One of the reasons why Bradbury's science fiction is so affecting — I find <i>The Martian Chronicles</i> almost unbearably sad — is his recognition that the experience of adulthood is the steady erosion of the personal future. On our worst days in particular, that innocence, simplicity, and sense of possibility taunt us with their absence. It is not childhood itself that is at the core of Bradbury's work (though it is of course frequently present); rather, it is the death of childhood that fuels the engines of its meaning.</p><p><i>Melancholy</i> is an important word for Bradbury's world, the most common sensation in his best stories. Yet, there is also often wonder. <i>A Medicine for Melancholy</i> is subtitled "Stories of Wonder and Delight". For me, the word <i>delight</i> clangs there. It's too twee. Bradbury certainly had his twee moments, but it's the fusion of melancholy and wonder that makes his work resonate even today.</p><p>What I want to talk about here is the first story in the book, "In a Season of Calm Weather", first published in <i>Playboy</i> in 1956. I had read it before, but didn't realize it, because I read it in <a href="https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?48012" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>The Stories of Ray Bradbury</i></a>, a library book I checked out numerous times when I was young, where it is titled "The Picasso Summer". That was the title of <a href="https://cinebeats.wordpress.com/2019/02/08/a-tale-of-two-films-the-picasso-summer-1969/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">an ill-fated movie</a> starring Albert Finney, loosely based on the story, and for which Bradbury wrote the script. Despite the title change, the stories' texts in the two books are the same. I like "In a Season of Calm Weather" more than "The Picasso Summer", for a variety of reasons, so that's what I'll refer to it as.</p><p>The story is short and simple. It is not science fiction, horror, or fantasy, unless we insist that a made-up story in which a famous artist appears as a character is a fantasy. I just call that fiction.</p><p>In the story, a husband and wife, George and Alice Smith (note how common, how generic are the names!) travel from the US to southwestern France and bask in the sun. George adores Picasso's art and is excited by a rumor that the famous man himself is in town. One afternoon, as he is wandering along a deserted beach, George sees a man drawing in the sand with a stick. He's having a great time, just drawing away like a child. Of course, it's Picasso. George and Picasso acknowledge each other, Picasso draws a bit more, then leaves. George walks up and down looking at the drawings until it's too dark to see them anymore. At dinner, Alice asks him if anything interesting happened during his walk. He says no. He's distracted. He's listening. He asks Alice if she hears it. Hears what? The tide coming in.</p><p>It's a perfect little story in its own way, and there's lots we could talk about — how, for instance, the story is quite matter-of-fact until it comes time to describe the drawings, where Bradbury's language then soars, not in a cubistic way, not trying to imitate in words Picasso's style, but in way that is lyrically excessive, like an orchestra surging, a great swell of passion and (yes!) delight. It's a lyricism that recognizes the impossibility of capturing the reverie of art in words. The mystery of the sublime.</p><blockquote>Everything whirled and poised in its own wind and gravity. Now wine was being crushed under the grape-blooded feet of dancing vintners' daughters, now steaming seas gave birth to coin-sheathed monsters while flowered kites strewed scent on blowing clouds ... now ... now ... now...</blockquote><p>I don't really know how to imagine "coin-sheathed monsters" or what kites strewing scent on clouds would look like, and we might be tempted to say this is a failure of Bradbury's prose, a tinkly-winkly lyricism more kitsch than art, inappropriate to Picasso, but I think this misses something important: the story is not an objective report of Picasso's art, it is a story of an ordinary American's love of that art. "In a Season of Calm Weather" is not about Picasso; it's about George. It is George's sensibility that is expressed through these words, and I have no trouble feeling my way into George's extraordinary experience through them.</p><p>What most impresses and moves me in this story is the way Bradbury uses the structure of a conventional horror story, or of an O. Henry-type twist ending story, for more meaningful purpose. A superficial reading would see this as something akin to a <i>Twilight Zone</i> episode — the last shot could be a pan from George's face out to the waves as we see and hear the water coming in, dooming the art, and then dramatic music rises.</p><p>For me, the ending is more resonant than that. Bradbury didn't necessarily need the final scene. We know what happens to things drawn in the sand on beaches. But the ending is a powerful coda because it brings us into George's savoring of the moment, and thus it celebrates the ultimate ephemerality of art — the ultimate ephemerality of all pleasure. </p><p>The last line of the story is: "'Just the tide,' he said after a while, sitting there, his eyes still shut. 'Just the tide coming in.'" Importantly, George does not see the tide, he hears it in the distance. There is an action behind this dialogue, implied but not stated: George is imagining the drawings by the artist whose work so moves him, making them real in his mind, and also imagining the water erasing them. In that moment, the art becomes not Picasso's, but his. The drawings live in his mind, as they will live in his memory. He savors this very private moment. He and Picasso are the only ones who saw the drawings, and when they both have died or lost their memories, those drawings will go away as if they never existed at all.</p><p>Here we have melancholy, but it is tinged with a sense of wonder and terror at the power of the ocean, the power of time, the way all that we have ever felt or known or valued will slip away. One does not own art, or anything, forever; one can only possess them for a little while. There are no eternal legacies, only some things that erode less quickly than others. </p><p>There is, inevitably, a feeling of melancholy to that realization, and Bradbury preserves it beautifully in this story, but there is also within the story a call to different priorities. Too often, we value things like art because of a sense that they will last beyond us, but that is a terrible criterion. Not only is the future unknowable, the future is always a fantasy. It never arrives. By the time we get to the future, it's become the present, and within a blink the present is the past. And then we're dead. </p><p>The tide is here, now, always, washing us away.</p><p>What "In a Season of Calm Weather" gives us is the experience of both George and Picasso's joys. Those joys are different from each other. For George, it is the pleasure of observing magic, the pleasure of a private show, the pleasure of art. The ephemerality is key to the pleasure. George must savor the moment because he knows there is nothing that can be possessed except in memory, and memory itself is flawed and hazy and eventually dim. George must live in the present at that moment if he is to know the full marvel.</p><p>For Picasso, the joy is in creation. It is the childish joy, the joy of making drawings in the sand, drawings nobody is likely to see, no art critics will praise or condemn, no billionaires will add to their Xanadu vaults. The purest art-making, the freest, the oldest and most wonderful. Art made in sand with full knowledge that the tide is due at dusk.</p><p>Calming weather.</p><p>Let the tide come in.</p><br /></div>Matthew Cheneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07704529564308222004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-69063441532399918762023-02-12T10:01:00.002-05:002023-08-18T07:36:41.931-04:00Boys for Pele<p style="text-align: left;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic_VnLazFJLg6WETM7KmeDpodD2ZmgduJUGWngbVbQDoTl9h1agsFIO-fYiBSftZFdhYnvenaixmA_vRIMFFVoPnJ3MON0XxN86-uzvK6nxeLB3vBmWmA-SALCnqsvpwyrvi8wM8B8g1wcuyToyX1mbh_8O8riKdQ_Az-1OjPgHAFRCcI0WlOe/s848/Gentry%20Boys%20Pele.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="848" data-original-width="620" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic_VnLazFJLg6WETM7KmeDpodD2ZmgduJUGWngbVbQDoTl9h1agsFIO-fYiBSftZFdhYnvenaixmA_vRIMFFVoPnJ3MON0XxN86-uzvK6nxeLB3vBmWmA-SALCnqsvpwyrvi8wM8B8g1wcuyToyX1mbh_8O8riKdQ_Az-1OjPgHAFRCcI0WlOe/w468-h640/Gentry%20Boys%20Pele.webp" width="468" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: left;">It was a relatively <a href="https://www.wunderground.com/history/weekly/us/ny/new-york-city/KLGA/date/1996-1-22" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>warm</u></a> January in New York City in 1996 when Tori Amos released her third solo album, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boys_for_Pele" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Boys for Pele</i></u></a>, which I bought on CD that week at Tower Records on Broadway. I don’t remember the day, but I do remember the big, lighted poster of the album’s cover displayed in the window of the store: Tori Amos with muddy legs, sitting in a rocking chair on what looks like a farmhouse porch, a hunting rifle in her hands, a dead rooster hanging to her side from the roof. I remember, too, the disorienting, invigorating shock of hearing “Blood Roses”, “Father Lucifer”, and “Professional Widow” for the first time.</p><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 fYcGch sc-rcywpx-0 hRKPxe" data-tag="post-content"><p>The music with which we feel our way through adolescence and early adulthood is often the music that ends up haunting the rest of our lives. My memory glues each of Tori Amos’s first three albums to specific, deeply meaningful moments of life and growth. The other albums for which I have such specific memories — memories of place and event, but even more so memories of sensation — are few, and mostly from the same time as this album: age 14 to 22 or so.</p><p>Part of the <a href="https://333sound.com/33-13-series/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>33⅓ series</u></a> of short monographs on individual albums, Amy Gentry’s <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/tori-amoss-boys-for-pele-9781501321313/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Boys for Pele</i></u></a> explores Amos’s richest, most ambitious, and perhaps most alienating work with the sensitivity of someone who has lived with it for as long as I have. This is necessary, and I didn’t realize quite how necessary until I read Gentry’s chronicle of the album’s reception and continued reputation.</p><p>Let’s go back. I first encountered Amos’s music when I was in high school and <i>Little Earthquakes</i> came out, but it wasn’t through that album that I was introduced to her. One of my friends had heard her cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on a Vermont radio station he was able to pick up from his mountainside house in New Hampshire. Nirvana’s <i>Nevermind</i> was not yet a sacred album to us (it would become so); instead, it was an album we were attracted to and repelled by. It’s hard for me to remember this now, but once upon a time I found it difficult to understand any of what Kurt Cobain sang in that most famous song. (Weird Al based his masterful parody “Smells Like Nirvana” on just this problem.) My friend taped Tori Amos’s version off the radio and I remember sitting in my car with him in the parking lot of our school and listening to it — I remember the revelation of hearing those opening lines clearly for the first time: <i>Load up on guns, bring your friends</i>… This is hard to comprehend now simply because both versions of the song are so familiar to me that listening to Cobain sing, he sounds only a little less clear in his enunciation than Amos. Lots of Nirvana fans <i>hated</i> Tori Amos’s version of the song because it seemed to them to reduce its grunge angst to whispery, ethereal softness, but this is something my friend and I loved about it, and to our credit at that terribly judgmental age, we were able to let the two versions increase our appreciation of each other.</p><p>And that appreciation increased our curiosity about Amos. On a trip to Boston, I picked up the <i>Crucify</i> EP with “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on it and from that first heard “Winter”, a song I fell in love with. (I liked “Crucify”, but I <i>loved</i> “Winter”.) That sent me to the local record store, where I got a tape of <i>Little Earthquakes</i>, and really never looked back — the effect of first hearing “Silent All These Years”, “Precious Things”, and “Me and a Gun” was seismic, though I could not, at that time, have told you why.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><img data-media-id="188567166" src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/78596560/720e61cd36b3446e9aeb0367aad56c45/eyJ3ZWJwIjowfQ%3D%3D/1.jpg?token-time=1689465600&token-hash=ddodkM5woC_t1PobgaK12J65DeR5LYw3DZunK6Tw5N4%3D" /></p><p>Friends gave me her second album, <i>Under the Pink,</i> as a gift after I directed a play at our school. It was presented at the cast party. I remember feeling excitement and gratitude (it was a CD, something I could rarely afford to buy myself) but more than anything I remember an overwhelming sense of embarrassment and fear. I had rarely felt so publicly queer. “They know,” I remember thinking. “Only <i>someone like me</i> could love a Tori Amos album.” Despite having been introduced to Amos’s work by my straight male friend who liked “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, I knew my passion for her work was suspect. But this was only semi-conscious. It wasn’t until I got to college at NYU and went to a meeting of the Tisch School of the Arts gay club, where one of the guys was wearing a Tori Amos t-shirt and other guys were talking to him about it, comparing Tori concerts they’d been to, that I suddenly understood my inchoate feelings of embarrassment on being given <i>Under the Pink</i> originated from a semi-conscious perception that straight guys, masculine guys, <i>real</i> guys don’t become passionate fans of Tori Amos. (Of course, that’s a generality, and there are some straight guys who are fans, but they are a minority of the fanbase.)</p><p>Some of the most perceptive passages in Amy Gentry’s book explore exactly the dynamic that led me to be embarrassed by my queer passion. </p><p>With an insight that is so powerful it could stand to be developed more fully, Gentry proposes that the emotion of disgust is at the center of negative reactions to both <i>Boys for Pele</i> and Amos’s persona generally, and that this disgust affects critical response, warps perception, and reveals some pretty deep-seated misogyny, including in female listeners. </p><p>Gentry starts with herself. She’s a few years younger than me and was in high school when the album came out. She wrote a review of it for her school paper, a review she says her teenage self felt compelled to write after a single listen. She wrote a deeply negative review, one of those reviews that says far more about the reviewer than the object reviewed. It was as if she needed to push the album away, as if something in it cast a dangerous spell she — a fairly traditional, Christian girl at the time — needed to keep abject. She explores these feelings (which changed over the next few months as the album refused to let her go) with sensitivity, and the evidence provided by her younger self’s text proves useful in exploring other, more professional responses to the album.</p><p><i>Boys for Pele</i> is not an album that lets you feel neutral. Amos wrote it after the breakup of a long relationship, and it is an album filled with fury and hurt. She had been in the music business long enough at that point to have suffered many of its worst qualities, most of them embodied by men. The Pele of the title is the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pele_(deity)" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Hawaiian goddess</a> of fire and volcanoes. The songs are full of damaging men and injured women seeking release. It's an album of spirit and history, deeply personal but also reaching broadly outward with complex references to popular culture, global religion, fairy tales, dreams, and every imaginable power relationship. The songs are fragmented, fractured, shattered in their sounds and visions. Even the imagery in the liner notes is among Amos's most caustic and apocalyptic: not just the cover image of her and a gun (and a dead cock), but the images inside of burning pianos and of a piglet suckling at her breast. It's an album that loves men and hates men, and that is what first endeared me to it.</p><p><img data-media-id="188567373" src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/78596560/6a64d9b0454a45bd8ec50cbcbb4ecc35/eyJ3ZWJwIjowfQ%3D%3D/1.jpg?token-time=1689465600&token-hash=qwq-3RYv3yfhfdegN7VSTz9QjEWQTQUcffOfCcHF1EQ%3D" /></p><p>I was among the few who cherished the album right away, at least if the reviews are to believed. (It remains her fastest-selling album, however, flying up the charts quickly, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boys_for_Pele#Commercial_performance" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">remaining</a> on the <i>Billboard</i> charts for 29 weeks.) The fact is, <i>Boys for Pele</i> got decidedly mixed reviews when it came out, and the reviews are telling: the male reviewers, even sometimes the ones who liked the album, resorted to casual misogyny again and again; the female reviewers were some of the most cutting in their negative remarks, as Gentry chronicles:</p><blockquote>“Seriously self-indulgent,” scoffed the <i>LA Times</i>. “Frustratingly opaque,” said the <i>Boston Phoenix</i>. Writing for the <i>San Jose Metro</i>, Gina Arnold called it “too internal and obscure to be meaningful to anyone who isn’t actually Tori Amos” and predicted that most of the listening public would dismiss it as “the rantings of an irrational witchypoo.” These were generous compared to the <i>Louisville Courier</i> reviewer, who compared it to “the unedited diary of a precocious, pretentious teenager,” and the <i>Edmonton Sun</i> reviewer, who called it “a nauseating melange of morose piano noodlings, cryptic lesbian overtones, and unbearable overemoting.” Worst of all, <i>Rolling Stone</i>, which had positively reviewed <i>Little Earthquakes</i> and <i>Under the Pink</i>, gave it two stars; Evelyn McDonnell all but panned the album, calling out Amos’s “mushy-headed New Age feministspeak” and ending one paragraph, “I suggest she immerse herself in Babes in Toyland.”</blockquote><p>Gentry notes that female reviewers tended to complain that Amos didn’t rage hard enough, while male reviewers tended to respond like Roger Catlin of the <i>Hartford Courant</i>, who said, “If she wants to truly connect, she needs to calm down, take a drink of water, and make a bit more sense.”</p><p>The question of sense and <i>Boys for Pele</i> is an important one, and Gentry is generally good on it, though I don’t think she quite goes far enough in exploring the ways that sense works (and works by not working) in Amos’s songs. What Gentry is devastatingly good at is showing just how lazy were the reviewers who insisted Amos’s lyrics are nothing but nonsense — Gentry doesn’t have to work hard to show that the major songs on the album are at least generally comprehensible. I was also pleased to see her bring up critics’ responses to male lyricists who tend toward the gnomic, starting with her high school self: “I joined the chorus of moral outrage, contempt, and disgust, indignant that Amos thought she could ‘get away with slapping the label of “avant-garde” on low quality gibberish’ — even as I would have fought to the death anyone who used the word ‘gibberish’ to describe, for example, R.E.M. lyrics.” She follows this with an important point about how for some critics, a lyricist’s obscurity can lead to a feminization: “When critics tire of trying to deal intelligently with the difficult music or lyrics of [Elvis] Costello or [Michael] Stipe or [Bob] Dylan, these men may be depicted as effete, pale, limp, impotent — feminized by typically ablist language that equates masculinity with health and vigor — or, in the language of class betrayal, overly intellectual, out of touch.” With women, she notes, it’s a bit different, because their obscurity is not just feminine and pretentious, it’s also <i>stupid</i>. Or, in a word often applied to Amos, <i>flaky</i>. (“Never was a cornflake girl,” she sang on <i>Under the Pink</i>, and hostile critics delighted in disagreeing.)</p><p>Gentry analyzes these tendencies well, but she implies something I would have brought more to the foreground of the conversation: the utter laziness these critics displayed when they approached <i>Boys for Pele</i>. Amos’s imagery is based on association and dream-like juxtaposition, and as such it is comfortably part of many of the most interesting artistic movements of the 20th century, from surrealism to Beat poetry. Her lyrics live in a realm similar to that of Stevie Smith and Frank O'Hara. Musically, Amos's songs are no more alien than jazz or psychedelic rock or anything other than the most mainstream love songs on the Billboard Top 40.</p><p>One of the things Gentry brings attention to is how much Tori Amos improvises. Such songs as "Marianne", "Not the Red Baron", "Agent Orange", and others were improvised during soundchecks as they recorded. This is a longstanding practice going back to Amos's childhood, when she lost her music scholarship to the Peabody Institute for not sight reading enough and for improvising too much. There's much more to explore with Amos's impressive ability to improvise, because that ability allows her an intuitive way to write songs directly from her subconscious. One of the powers of <i>Boys for Pele</i> is that it often feels like a scream from the Id. Her songs' connection to only partially conscious ideas, images, and language is a real strength, and not something as easily available to more deliberate, calculating artists.</p><p>Beyond the basic laziness of the reviewers, Gentry is also good on a particular quality of Amos’s work that really bothers people: its relation to preciousness and cuteness. She writes:</p><blockquote>“Precious” is a word that means a lot to Tori Amos fans; not only is “Precious Things” a beloved <i>Little Earthquakes</i> track, but the briefest scan of Amos’s song titles shows a preponderance of related diminutive words (“sweet”, “little”, “pretty”, “sorta”, “twinkle”); small and vulnerable creatures (“frog”, “butterfly”, “firefly”, “dove”); words associated with stereotypical girlishness (“frock”, “fairytale”, “parasol”, “daisy”, “roses”, “petals”); and, of course, the word “girl” itself. The album titles replicate this trend: <i>Little Earthquakes, Under the Pink, From the Choirgirl Hotel, Strange Little Girls, </i>and <i>American Doll Posse</i> all contain diminutive and stereotypically girlish language. And that’s only the titles. The songs are chockablock with ice cream and pigtails, posies and hosies and horsies and all manner of fairy-tale nonsense.</blockquote><p>Even Gentry doesn’t quite know what to make of this, bringing in Sianne Ngai’s <a href="https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/444516" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>“The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde”</u></a> and the riot grrrl <a href="https://journal.media-culture.org.au/mcjournal/article/view/2196" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>use</u></a> of <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/pink-globalization" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>Hello Kitty</u></a>. Gentry, though, seems to me to miss something the negative critics of Amos and cuteness more profoundly miss. While I do think Amos has sometimes, on other albums, drifted into realms of twee, generally — and on <i>Boys from Pele</i> especially — the cuteness isn’t <i>actually</i> cute. It’s a cuteness broken, sullied, flayed, fragmented. It is a cuteness of hazy memory, of poisoned nostalgia, of broken-hearted yearning. It’s the cuteness of dead innocence. </p><p>Gentry notes that “Blood Roses” is like a horror movie, and you could say the same thing for the whole album in some ways; the cuteness here is the same as in, say, <a href="https://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/alice-sweet-alice-blu-ray-review/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Alice, Sweet Alice</i></u></a>.</p><p><img data-media-id="188567981" src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/78596560/1cf8a4b788214d22859beacabc92f690/e30%3D/1.png?token-time=1689465600&token-hash=9jE40DZyeIdjgrYvDqBP4VsYvDGbVbMkOy32YWMsaC8%3D" /></p><p>It is something of a fool’s errand to try to write a short book about <i>Boys from Pele</i>, because the album is bottomless, its implications infinite, depending on the listener’s situation, mood, desires. It’s an <i>exhausting</i> album. It certainly exhausts Gentry. While she is good on the album’s reception and its first few songs, she more or less gives up on the second half. (Oddly, she doesn't even seem to realize that "Not the Red Baron" — a song she dismisses, perplexed — is drawing at least as much on <i>Peanuts</i> as World War I.) The later chapters of the book feel sketchy in comparison to the earlier ones, even defeated. Most disappointingly, a chapter on Amos and race is perfunctory, confused, unsatisfying. </p><p>Gentry is a novelist as well as an academic, and it’s unfortunate that she isn’t able to explore Amos as an imaginative artist more fully, which would have helped a lot with discussions of Amos’s attraction to personas and her use of racial imagery. I find Amos’s approach to character, persona, and identification fascinating and powerful. Her approach, including her improvisions, is akin to channelling, making her songs both expressions of her own point of view and of a point of view she conjures from imagination. As Gentry importantly notes regarding "Me and a Gun", Amos's songs are not documentary accounts of her life, not diary entries set to music, but something both deeply personal and deeply imagined. It's the imagining that ought to be better celebrated, though that is a difficult thing in a culture that prefers autofiction to fiction, a world suspicious of both imagination and identification. Because her topics tend to be personal ones, Amos’s imagination is too often underappreciated.</p><p>It’s this sense of imaginative identification that leads me to think of Amos’s work as queer. Or, rather, as work that queers. She is a heterosexual, cisgender woman who has made something of a specialty of inhabiting male songs and tropes. Her 2001 album <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Little_Girls" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>Strange Little Girls</i> </a> sums up an important tendency in her career at that point: she took songs by men and turned them into Tori Amos songs. Like all her covers, these songs are experiments, and so <i>Strange Little Girls</i> is her least consistent album to that point in its quality, but its effect is powerful when the experiments really work, most notably in her quiet, terrifying take on Eminem’s “‘97 Bonnie and Clyde”. Ending the album with Joe Jackson’s “Real Men” was quite telling — not only is it an exploration of the toxicity of masculinity, but it makes the last lyric of the album, “Now and then we wonder who the real men are.”</p><p>The queerness of <i>Boys for Pele</i> is present in a few lines which to me in 1996 were among the most important on the album, resonating with such recent favorites of mine from the previous year as R.E.M.’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crush_with_Eyeliner" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>“Crush with Eyeliner”</u></a> and David Bowie’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallo_Spaceboy" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>“Hallo Spaceboy”</u></a> (“Do you like girls or boys? / It's confusing these days”). On “Blood Roses” there’s “You think I’m a queer / I think you’re a queer / said I think you’re a queer / I think you’re a queer” and then on the sublime “Hey Jupiter”: “Hey Jupiter, nothing’s been the same / So are you gay, are you blue? / Thought we both could use a friend to run to / And I thought / you wouldn’t have to keep / with me / hiding”. In her book, Gentry quotes a gay male Amos fan telling the story of hearing that song live: “I cried and I cried and I cried because she was thirty feet away from me and she knew that there was a fifteen year old boy in the audience coming to terms with being gay (and being blue, struggling with depression) and she sang that song directly to me and it was one of the greatest moments in my entire life.”</p><p>“Hey Jupiter” is a song that particularly resonates for Amos’s fans, and that resonance raises the question of all that can’t be described in the rational terms of an analytic, critical work like Gentry’s. (This is no slight against her; indeed, her use of anecdotes about her own response and those of other people to the album mitigates it to some extent.) Music at its best is something like magic. We can say all sorts of things about it, but ultimately it escapes description and analysis; its meaning and value live in experience. This is perhaps why I’ve never much worried about whether Amos’s lyrics “make sense”. That seems to be the least important part of music to me. Until I read Gentry’s book, I didn’t know the “meaning” of half these songs I’ve been listening to since 1996, because I had never bothered with even the basic narrative the songs themselves offer. Rather, it was individual lyric lines and moments of melody and dissonance that spoke to me, held me. The feeling of ache and beauty that “Putting the Damage On” never fails to fill me with at the end of the album has nothing to do with the words, and yet also it <i>does</i>, because the music and voice together infuse those words with a meaning that sits galaxies away from a dictionary.</p><p>Returning to <i>Boys for Pele</i> now, I see just how directly it has influenced my own writing. The most direct influence is on my story <a href="https://matthewcheney.net/books/blood-stories/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>“Blood”</u></a>. That old story’s been on my mind because I’m going to be talking to a fiction-writing class about it this coming week. People often ask why I chose to tell the story from a young girl’s point of view, and listening to <i>Boys from Pele</i> again now, I remember that I had some of the lyrics from “Caught a Lite Sneeze” in mind as I was considering how to structure the story: “Boys on my left side / boys on my right side / boys in the middle / and you're not here” — it has nothing to do with the story the song tells, but with those words I imagined Jill with her brothers and father all around her, her mother gone. Similarly, I thought of the father in the story as “Father Lucifer”. And the song “Marianne” captures a lot of the mood of the story overall for me in its wistfulness and melancholy. Jill to me was very much the “quickest girl in the frying pan”.</p><p>It’s the cover image that most haunts “Blood”, though. I had completely forgotten this, but the image of the father in the story sitting in a chair with a gun was inspired directly by the album cover. My original sense of the story’s movement was that it would be the tale of the father in that chair being replaced by Jill as an adult. The story ended up following a different trajectory (more like “Marianne”), but that was the image from which I began.</p><p>Strange, the music that haunts us. Amy Gentry does a good job of showing why <i>Boys for Pele</i> is important, why Tori Amos matters. It’s a short book, though, and there are still worlds left to explore in the album, an album that can’t be reduced to words.</p><p><img data-media-id="188568147" src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/78596560/6698e5362aef4f66b35b5efa307817f1/eyJ3Ijo4MjAsIndlYnAiOjB9/1.jpg?token-time=1689465600&token-hash=SpsOqWxSpMOdm8sjU0fwAmnnfj3N7iLzAQ25-P4LVMk%3D" /></p><p><br /><br /></p></div>Matthew Cheneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07704529564308222004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-50905563964542245152023-01-24T09:59:00.002-05:002023-08-18T07:38:28.111-04:00Myths of Disenchantment<div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 fYcGch sc-rcywpx-0 hRKPxe" data-tag="post-content"><div class="sc-1ye87qi-0 cZNwdx"><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhp0ivbQ1kCvtXpL5FaGxu-qF9KPOsFRKh2KjgGztnB2mZGeBPZUHe8dk4-F6ZDsSKh2p0n9kGBGownvAGUROj3uQvdOSO-qRpMczCwkb9jKLkBHYGn68B3U0Jx1ldvThA3Zojp-5Lf6Ya2ThacR88bxeuFxLNH4qN0xN4TcOnaKoSSsskUKUEA/s930/myth_of_disenchantment_cover%20web.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="930" data-original-width="620" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhp0ivbQ1kCvtXpL5FaGxu-qF9KPOsFRKh2KjgGztnB2mZGeBPZUHe8dk4-F6ZDsSKh2p0n9kGBGownvAGUROj3uQvdOSO-qRpMczCwkb9jKLkBHYGn68B3U0Jx1ldvThA3Zojp-5Lf6Ya2ThacR88bxeuFxLNH4qN0xN4TcOnaKoSSsskUKUEA/w426-h640/myth_of_disenchantment_cover%20web.webp" width="426" /></a></div> <p></p><p>You know the story: once upon a time, the world was full of magic, then the Enlightenment and Darwin banished superstition, and though there was much scientific progress, the world no longer had a sense of wonder and mystery — the world had become modern and disenchanted.</p><p>A moment’s reflection on history and culture will poke holes in this story, but it continues to hold power as a belief (particularly for people in North America and Europe) about who we are and how we got to here and now. Every idea of Modernity as a social and historical concept relies on the idea of the disenchanted modern against the enchanted primitive. (My own book on modernism explores the idea of <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=17vADwAAQBAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PT28#v=onepage&q&f=false"><u>crisis</u></a>, and certainly enchantment/disenchantment fits into that topic.) Arguments about disenchantment tend to be about its extent and its positive and/or negative effects. The idea of disenchantment holds appeal because it fits so easily alongside other ideas that structure stories of where we are going and where we have been — not least of which is the imperial story of the powerful, rational West that brings its enlightened knowledge to the benighted peoples of the world. But the idea is appealing even to anti-imperialists, an idea of rationalism, of sober thinking, of evidence-based practices, of progress.</p><p>In 1991, Christopher Lasch was able to <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=UoldAqb04uMC&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PA13#v=onepage&q&f=false"><u>begin</u></a> his book <em>The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics</em> by asking, “How does it happen that serious people continue to believe in progress, in the face of massive evidence that might be expected to refute the idea of progress once and for all?” Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm’s* 2017 book <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=j5UtDwAAQBAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false"><u><em>The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences</em></u></a> implies a similar question, one that could simply replace the word “progress” in Lasch’s question with “disenchantment”. (This is no coincidence. Ideas of disenchantment often accompany ideas of progress, and vice versa.) Or, as Storm himself <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=j5UtDwAAQBAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PA3#v=onepage&q&f=false"><u>says</u></a>, alluding to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Have_Never_Been_Modern"><u><em>We Have Never Been Modern</em></u></a>, “I will argue à la Bruno Latour that we have never been disenchanted.”</p><p>Storm is not the first writer to say that the case for disenchantment has been overstated — virtually everyone who makes the case for disenchantment must admit that it is incomplete — but his argument has more complexity than many others because he is able to draw from a range of ideas, archives, and references most other writers do not. He is a professor in the Department of Religion and chair of Science & Technology Studies <a href="https://religion.williams.edu/faculty/jason-josephson/"><u>at Williams College</u></a>. <em>The Myth of Disenchantment</em> is his second book; his first was <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo13657764.html"><u><em>The Invention of Religion in Japan</em></u></a>. His Williams bio says he “has held visiting positions at Princeton University, École Française d’Extrême-Orient in France and Ruhr-Universität and Universität Leipzig in Germany.” He has an interest in and knowledge of queer studies and postcolonial studies, as well as personal experience with Buddhism. <em>The Myth of Disenchantment</em> draws on work in a number of European archives alongside significant knowledge of the history and details of European esotericism. The preface to the book begins, “This monograph was born at <em>Harizanmai</em>, ‘Absorption in Needles,’ a Tantric Buddhist tattoo parlor in Kyoto” and later states that “this manuscript has been significantly trimmed from its initial draft. Rough chapters on French social theory, American philosophy, Japanese accounts of Western esotericism, and German Monist Leagues were cut as orthogonal to the main narrative.” Storm himself made translations in the book from Danish, French, German, Japanese, Latin, Polish, Spanish, and Swedish.</p><p>This impressively — intimidatingly! — wide range of knowledge allows Storm to bring ideas together than most other scholars are unaware of, moving from the French <em>philosophes</em> to Schiller to James Frazer to Aleister Crowley to Max Weber to Ludwig Klages to Walter Benjamin with ease. (Personally, I could have done with less Schiller if it would have allowed him to keep the chapter on Japanese perceptions of Western esotericism, but I understand why he chose otherwise, and it does make sense for the book’s unity … but still…) What’s most important for this book is Storm’s expertise in comparative religion and his interest in esotericism, because those areas of knowledge allow him to propose a unique approach to the question of disenchantment, moving beyond Frazer’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Bough"><u>separation</u></a> of magic, religion, and science to see the function of the idea of superstition as a shared force for constituting ideas of both religion and science. First, religion gained hegemonic force by opposing itself to anything religious leaders dubbed “superstition”; later, science performed the same move. “It is no coincidence,” Storm writes, “that the previous legacies of superstition — divination, magic, myth, and spirits — continued to be the foil of even scientific tracts that provided new rationales for old targets.” This notion allows Storm to question the idea of a chasmic break between enchantment (magic, religion) and disenchantment (rationalism, science) because even if disenchantment were more real and less mythic, the concept of superstition, shared between religion and science, serves as a continuity. If there is disenchantment, then it is not a break between irreconcilable paradigms, but a changing of the guards between one governing authority and another regarding superstition.</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/77662864/137056a90aad4034b3baf2c2241a4b7e/eyJ3ZWJwIjowfQ%3D%3D/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=UpeZqAWLLbMm4p6mD4BPzLUuNkW_GdMw_-gvcOpiXI8%3D" /></p><p>But disenchantment is mythic because there is no clear historical break. The most popular idea of a break between enchantment and disenchantment is the Enlightenment, but Storm’s views align with the last few decades of Enlightenment studies that question the notion of the Enlightenment being a time of dominant rationalism. As Henry Martyn Lloyd has <a href="https://aeon.co/ideas/why-the-enlightenment-was-not-the-age-of-reason"><u>written</u></a>, “to say that the Enlightenment was a movement of rationalism against passion, of science against superstition, of progressive politics against conservative tribalism is to be deeply mistaken. These claims don’t reflect the rich texture of the Enlightenment itself…” Similarly, Jeffrey D. Burson, in <a href="https://quod.lib.umich.edu/w/wsfh/0642292.0047.001/--process-contingency-and-cultural-entanglement-toward-a-post?rgn=main;view=fulltext"><u>an overview</u></a> of Enlightenment scholarship, offered a key question about that period: “if [as scholarship shows] religious Enlightenments could give birth to both pro- and anti-Enlightenment outcomes, what does one make of the supposedly sacrosanct correlation of ‘secularization’ or ‘modernization’ with the impact of the Enlightenment?”</p><p>The other break between enchantment/disenchantment that is often cited (or assumed) is that of late 19th century/early 20th century Modernity. It’s the discovery of x-rays and quantum physics, the spread of secularism and amoral rationalism, the decline of religious institutions. This is the era that gives us <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/weber/#KnowImpeCont"><u>Weber’s</u></a> famous idea of disenchantment.</p><p>Storm did research in Weber’s archives, bringing interesting background to the exploration of enchantment and disenchantment, but I don’t want to get into the weeds of all that. First, I am not a scholar of Weber, nor am I a philosopher or sociologist, so the argument about whether disenchantment is a myth is intellectually interesting to follow, but not something about which I feel much passion or hold any expertise. (I pointedly avoided the question of Modernity in my book, focusing instead on a narrow idea of Modernism. Interestingly, a key concept of my book, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=17vADwAAQBAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PT25#v=onepage&q&f=false"><u><em>metamodernism</em></u></a>, is the title of Storm’s <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo90478773.html"><u>latest book</u></a>, though he uses it for very different purposes. I hope to write about that book in the coming months.)</p><p>What interests me in <em>The Myth of Disenchantment</em> is all it has to say about disciplinary desires and what intellectual history ignores, sidesteps, is oblivious to, erases.</p><p>After I read the introduction to <em>The Myth of Disenchantment</em> a year or so ago, I put the book aside, filled with curiosity and inspiration about my beloved world of literary and artistic modernism, especially in the early 20th century. It was around this time that I had become fascinated by Hilma af Klint after watching the documentary <a href="https://kinolorber.com/product/beyond-the-visible-hilma-af-klint-blu-ray"><u><em>Beyond the Visible: The Art of Hilma af Klint</em></u></a> and began to think about the various implications of spiritualism and mysticism for modernism — <a href="https://www.openculture.com/2016/10/aleister-crowley-william-butler-yeats-get-into-an-occult-battle.html"><u>Yeats and the Golden Dawn</u></a>, or the many writers and artists interested in Theosophy and Anthroposophy. I read Alex Owens’ wonderful book <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo3629191.html"><u><em>The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern</em></u></a> and got a bit frustrated with myself for not seeing a bunch of connections before that are right there out in the open. Eventually, I returned to <em>The Myth of Disenchantment</em> and discovered that seeing the connections we ought to notice but don’t is something Storm’s book explores with great insight. Regardless of whether we agree with his thesis about disenchantment, I think it’s easy to agree that the idea of the disenchanted modern has had a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_%26_the_City"><u><em>City and the City</em></u></a> effect, rendering invisible what is all around us, turning rationalism and scientism into weapons of occultation.</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/77662864/4391846aa5d94e7da92e5a19eff99ffa/e30%3D/1.png?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=vK1Bl5-AAApYx4yDrXNPoq0ThkFS-Ig6YsI3cPI6gZA%3D" /></p><p>Storm doesn’t belabor the point, but he shows how the invisibility of the irrational, paranormal, and occult within conceptions of modernism and modernity is a disciplinary choice with disciplinary effects. If anything has been disenchanted, it is academia. Or, to put it another way, if the myth of disenchantment holds totalizing power anywhere, it is in our ivy-covered halls. It is not that those of us who work in universities are any less superstitious than people elsewhere. Drawing on various studies (especially the eye-opening book <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=enBGDgAAQBAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PP3#v=onepage&q&f=false"><u><em>Paranormal America</em></u></a>), Storm shows that while education does reduce belief in some types of paranormality and occultism, there is a correlation between more education and a stronger likelihood that a person believes in psychics and/or ghosts, and that self-identified witches and magicians (of the actual-magick kind, not admitted prestidigitators and illusionists) are more likely to be college graduates than not. The discourse of academia is one that is fiercely disenchanted.</p><p>Myself, I think the disenchantment of academia is a good thing. I like empiricism in scholarship. However, in the field of literary study at least, we have often been so empirical, so committed to rationalism, that we have neglected to look at our subjects’ nonrational beliefs with the seriousness they deserve — for fear that someone might think we share those beliefs, which would remove us from the disenchanted realm of scholarship. In my essay on <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/horror-of-belief-75257331"><u>“The Horror of Belief”</u></a>, I wrote about Caitlin R. Kiernan’s story “Houses Under the Sea” and its portrait of an accomplished scientist who becomes a believer in paranormality, destroying her career; a portrait that feels realistic. (Although, who knows. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Crispin_Miller"><u>Mark Crispin Miller</u></a> continues to have a job at NYU, despite being a raving whackdoodle. Miller, though, like QAnon delusionists, dresses his murderous ideas in the rationalist garb of conspiracy theories. There is much to say about conspiracy theories as a kind of metastasized rationalism, or as the enchantment of disenchantment, but that will need to wait for another time.)</p><p>If we were to take irrational beliefs seriously as beliefs — regardless of our own personal ideas of how the universe works — we would be led to see figures like Madame Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley as having the kind of cultural and intellectual effect on the world that academics have long claimed for Marx and Freud. The comparison seems to me a productive one, too, in that we do not have to be die-hard Marxists to explore and understand the effect of Marx on, for instance, American fiction in the 20th century. Nor do we need to accept the idea of the Oedipus Complex to recognize how powerful a concept it is for mid-20th century writers. But we must not fall into the trap, either, of righteous disavowal. You are not going to understand literature and culture that has been influenced by Marx and Freud, never mind the attractions and affordances of Marxist ideology or Freudian psychology themselves, if every time you encounter a writer for whom Marx or Freud was important you immediately start to look for how they — the writer, Marx, or Freud — was wrong, wrong, wrong. Similarly, given how many artists and writers were at one point or another interested in Theosophy, what do we gain by focusing our energies on proving Madame Blavatsky to have been a charlatan instead of on exploring the meaning Theosophy provided for its adherents, as we would for any religious or political belief?</p><p>Nonetheless, until recently if you were to tell colleagues you intended to explore the Theosophical resonances within the work of Writer X or Artist Y, you would likely have had a hard time getting anyone to take you seriously, because no matter how much Writer X or Artist Y might have been Theosophical, to raise the subject was to bring in the spectre of superstition, and superstition (the opposite of both religion and science) is unserious.</p><p>What <em>The Myth of Disenchantment</em> shows is the disciplinary work that the myth does. Disciplines require border controls, and the concept of superstition has remained a powerful enforcer within disciplines that otherwise might start blending into each other in ways that would be intellectually productive but not welcome by people who benefit from the rewards of closed systems. This is not to argue for an undifferentiated mass of knowledge, but rather to say that while there are good reasons to take care of differences between disciplines in objects of study, methodologies, and epistemologies … sometimes, now and then, here and there, perhaps we are not attending to those differences but rather are clinging to familiar assumptions about our objects of study, comfortable moves in our methodologies, and rickety supports for our theories of knowledge.</p><p>That’s all well and good (useful! unsettling! provocative!) but for me the greatest effect of Storm’s book had little to do with the myth of disenchantment itself. The connections I was inspired to notice within my own field of modernist studies spread out in every direction. I began to think about the <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=O2rnDwAAQBAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PP9#v=onepage&q&f=false"><u>ways</u></a> spiritualism and feminism were <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=BVdcXjncudAC&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PP6#v=onepage&q&f=false"><u>linked</u></a> (an idea I think I first encountered in Barbara Goldsmith’s magnificent book <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=FAPg5QVvisoC&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false"><u><em>Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull</em></u></a>, which I read quite a while ago and really ought to revisit; my memory is that it is a book of richly detailed, compelling stories and ideas I chewed on for a long time, but I have lost the fine grains to the erosions of time). I thought about Shirley Jackson’s <a href="https://ruthfranklin.tumblr.com/post/148993917689/shirley-jacksons-tarot-cards-she-favored-the"><u>tarot cards</u></a> and Sylvia Plath’s <a href="https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2021/your-own-sylvia-sylvia-plaths-letters-to-ted-hughes-and-other-items-property-of-frieda-hughes/tarot-de-marseille-deck-of-cards-owned-by-sylvia"><u>tarot cards</u></a> (Plath’s having recently astounded auction-watchers by <a href="https://lithub.com/sylvia-plaths-tarot-deck-just-sold-for-200000/"><u>selling</u></a> for $200,000), both of them the classic Marseilles deck from B.P. Grimaud, though there’s plenty of evidence in their writings that Jackson and Plath also both knew the Rider-Waite-Smith <a href="https://www.riderwaitesmith.com/all-categories/"><u>deck</u></a>. I considered how science, philosophy, and religion so often mingled and intermingled, sometimes comfortably and sometimes not, but how they never could quite quit each other.</p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/77662864/917ca4be6f1f40e0b40935759cc5ee15/e30%3D/1.png?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=QrIRnCRApsxWzeA3SHFXUVq3HnmKbPv5PQcnFoTbyOc%3D" /></p><p>One factoid after another in Storm’s book spun my imagination: Kurt Gödel filled notebooks with “research into demonology”; Freud considered telepathy a “fact”; Benjamin Lee Whorf (of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity"><u>Whorf-Sapir hypothesis</u></a>) was a practicing Theosophist; right around the time he was coming up with his ideas of enchantment and disenchantment, Max Weber spent time at a Swiss community that Storm calls “an early prototype for a hippie commune, full of nature people (<em>Naturmenschen</em>), and complete with nudity, free love, and vegetarianism” (275) where many people were interested in Asian religions and philosophies, as well as various forms of occultism.</p><p>Storm has great fun showing just how deeply enchanted the study of the world may be. For instance, he proposes that many of the greatest minds in critical theory of the 20th century drew from occult themes and thinkers, pointing to</p><blockquote>Ferdinand de Saussure’s attendance at spiritualist <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=f3S2FaquumUC&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PA64#v=onepage&q&f=false"><u>séances</u></a> and <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=Zu6xCK_EFlcC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA521#v=onepage&q&f=false"><u>writing</u></a> about theosophy in the very moment he was giving his famous lectures. Gilles Deleuze’s first publication, which was the introduction to <a href="https://culturemachine.net/interzone/somnambulist-and-the-hermaphrodite-kerslake/"><u>a work of occult magic</u></a>. Giorgio Agamben’s <a href="https://sites.williams.edu/cthorne/articles/on-agambens-signatures/"><u>interest</u></a> in Paracelsus as a solution to the semiotic rupture. Peter Sloterdijk’s <a href="https://www.oshonews.com/2014/12/23/peter-sloterdijk/"><u>investment</u></a> in Osho as a spiritual and philosophical precursor. Roy Bhaskar’s <a href="http://www.criticalrealism.com/archive/gmac_abtf.html"><u>debt</u></a> to theosophy. Luce Irigaray’s <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Between_East_and_West.html?id=7EIg6GtKXXUC"><u>interest</u></a> in yoga and mysticism. Even Derrida expressed an interest in <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=xtJRAQAAIAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&dq=royle%20telepathy%20literature&pg=PA9#v=onepage&q&f=false"><u>telepathy</u></a> and attempted to ally the <em>pharmakeus</em> (magician), writing, and magic against speech and logos. Not to mention thinkers like <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo3638785.html"><u>Michel de Certeau</u></a> and <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=5jenDwAAQBAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PA5#v=onepage&q&f=false"><u>Ernst Bloch</u></a>, whose connections to mysticism are well known. I could go on. (238)</blockquote><p>Some of these were just passing moments in these thinkers’ lives — for instance, Deleuze was in his early 20s when he wrote his article; he later disavowed it — but the trace is in some ways even more important than if all of these figures were initiated members of the Ordo Templii Orientis. The language and general concepts of spiritualism, occultism, and paranormality suffuse so many cultures that disenchantment may not simply be difficult but utterly impossible. Enchantment adheres to so many concepts and expressions that disenchantment can never be completed.</p><p>Storm is also good on the impossibility of aligning either enchantment or disenchantment with one political tendency or another. Too many people have cherry-picked their way to saying that occultism or rationalism leads to Nazism, that belief in ghosts is conservative or liberal, that materialism or esotericism is the hallmark of utopian or dystopian belief. It’s all just a variety of “My god is an awesome god!” and has just as much intellectual value as that bumpersticker. Storm knows what matters: “Power — both liberating and dominating, <em>potentia</em> and <em>potestas</em> — can be actualized by way of enchantment or disenchantment. Ideologies cloak themselves in both.” He also knows that ideologies and beliefs are impure, that most people do not favor disenchantment or enchantment, but rather both and neither. “Magic and secularism are not opposites. Even disenchantment and enchantment can be found in the same text” (315). Storm is being a good deconstructionist here (and a good Buddhist), undoing the assumed binary, suspending the terms, revealing interconnected reality.</p><p>There is no need to re-enchant a world that was never disenchanted in the first place. But it’s not (just) that Storm shows we were never disenchanted; rather, he reveals disenchantment and enchantment less to be realities than they are desires. We yearn for one against the other, both opposed and alongside, but in different moments, in different ways, in different contexts. The why and how of this yearning is not his core subject, so Storm does not delve deeply into it. It’s not the sort of thing anyone could easily delve into, anyway, at least not with most of the tools of academic analysis. The dance of our enchanted-disenchanted desires requires art and intuition, stories and dreams. It is a dance that dissipates in analysis but invigorates in impression. There is much that rational, empirical analysis can show us, but it can’t show us the<br /><br />lineaments of gratified and ungratified desire, nor how to escape desire into enlightenment.</p><p>For that, we need myth.</p><p><br /></p><p><img src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/77662864/605153bf575242caa872e1b499fd531a/eyJ3Ijo4MjB9/1.jpg?token-time=1693612800&token-hash=e2L9Uy9R5qXTXcAjnD9rYfwydi7os3BS-hNqw2Swp04%3D" /></p><p><br /></p><p>---------------------</p><p>*I am using the byline on Storm’s most recent book and I am referring to him by his last name only (as opposed to “Josephson Storm”), as per his bio page at Williams.</p></div></div>Matthew Cheneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07704529564308222004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-35073790592936610722023-01-06T09:56:00.008-05:002023-08-18T07:40:50.789-04:00For Barry Lopez on His 78th Birthday<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEiMUHWEydHti6-j2Wnr2frN8P_NwudWOw0euvQSBtxobsBUq2WiKS-A7VoHafnneds6NfEm2YB_m2wuD56eKkPAVhi-VSy3x5SLZE-XFba6Pg4IpcG-uYzord0S8ZwEMX2xB8b9tBhnfi0SgGeXi7r_coliL8P1IAHdvJRAJyr-Ly2xA6cIIr/s620/Barry%20Lopez%20by%20Robert%20Kaiser.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="411" data-original-width="620" height="424" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEiMUHWEydHti6-j2Wnr2frN8P_NwudWOw0euvQSBtxobsBUq2WiKS-A7VoHafnneds6NfEm2YB_m2wuD56eKkPAVhi-VSy3x5SLZE-XFba6Pg4IpcG-uYzord0S8ZwEMX2xB8b9tBhnfi0SgGeXi7r_coliL8P1IAHdvJRAJyr-Ly2xA6cIIr/w640-h424/Barry%20Lopez%20by%20Robert%20Kaiser.webp" width="640" /></a></div><p> </p><blockquote>"Barry was not one to invest in answers. It was the questions that pulsed in his body and propelled him forward no matter where he traveled in the world." <br /><a href="https://granta.com/fire-and-ice-debra-gwartney/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">—Debra Gwartney, "Fire and Ice"</a> <br /></blockquote><p>Barry Lopez died on December 25, 2020, shortly before January 6, 2021, which would have been his 76th birthday. Of course, that date two years now lives in infamy, a day of insurrection in the United States.</p><p>Within the next few months, a little book I wrote in the wake of that day will be published: <a href="https://punctumbooks.com/titles/about-that-life-barry-lopez-and-the-art-of-community/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>About That Life: Barry Lopez and the Art of Community</i></a>. (It was originally scheduled to come out this past fall, but the publisher got a little backed up.) It will be published as an open-access book with a Creative Commons License by Punctum Books, so the PDF will be freely available and the paperback will be as affordable as possible. I will have more to say about the book when it is released.</p><p>I want to note Lopez's birthday today, however. Of the people I have met in my life, he was among the most important influences on how I see the world. He was the leader for a workshop I participated in at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in the summer of 2000, and though I did not see him again after that summer, his presence left a deep impression on my psyche. </p><p>Lopez is most famous for his nonfiction, and that fame is justified. <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=vN1Arh30RMwC&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>Of Wolves and Men</i></a>, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=Y-WxJYMD5HsC&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>Arctic Dreams</i></a>, and <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=AGNjDwAAQBAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PT6#v=onepage&q&f=false" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>Horizon</i></a> are monumental works. I've always been something of a miniaturist and minimalist in my tastes, so as much as I respect those books, it is his individual essays and his short fiction that I most cherish. Indeed, the book that made me forever a Lopez fan was one that was assigned in high school by an ecology teacher my senior year, a little essay packaged as a book, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=15JbqyDJWbkC&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>The Rediscovery of North America</i></a>. (Word for word, few books have had as deep an effect on my life.) At Bread Loaf, I asked why the essay had been published as a book of its own. He said (if I remember correctly) that it was his editor's idea, and at first he thought it was nuts. How could you even <i>make</i> a book from such a short essay? But then after it was published he saw the effect it had on readers and he realized his editor had been right — the essay is so compressed, so rich with implication, that it would have been lost if included in one of Lopez's collections. It needed to be in the form of a book for it to realize the power inherent in its words. I've held onto that idea for a long time. A book is not about length; a book is about finding the best physical form for the ideas, images, and language between the covers.</p><p>Too few people read and appreciate Lopez's short fiction. In terms of quality, he was a more inconsistent writer of fiction than nonfiction — he published some stories that are, I think, pretty weak. I sympathize with that, having done the same (and having written far more that are weaker than anything I've published). Fiction is only consistently high quality if the writer is either some sort of rare genius or, more often, if the writer sticks to forms and topics that they have been successful with in the past. Lopez didn't do this. He ranged widely. His early short stories (in <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=ytQZ0Oh_CLEC&lpg=PP1&pg=PT3#v=onepage&q&f=false" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>Desert Notes</i> and <i>River Notes</i></a>) are mostly sketches, brief moments, maybe prose poems. <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=mUbiy7voQRQC&lpg=PP1&pg=PT4#v=onepage&q&f=false" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>Winter Count</i></a> mixes those sorts of stories with more developed ones: we see the writer becoming a storyteller. <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=9sjG6P9sH2AC&lpg=PP1&pg=PT4#v=onepage&q&f=false" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>Field Notes</i></a> is the work of a writer really in command of his talent. His next collection, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=YLgY_OX7-bsC&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>Light Action in the Caribbean</i></a>, is a development and a departure from what came before. It is his most inconsistent book in terms of the quality of the stories, with his greatest highs and lowest lows, but it is thrilling because it is the work of someone who is stretching, experimenting — he challenges himself to go beyond the vision and style of all his earlier work, and he titles the book after his most angry and violent story, a story few people would have guessed he would write. (And he ends the book with "The Mappist", for me his greatest single work of fiction, one of the great short stories of American literature.) Then came <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=otmbFMO_QPEC&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>Resistance</i></a>, a sort of novel in stories (but not quite a novel, not quite stories), a new approach again, melding a nonfictional voice with fictional content, strange and fragmentary, a book of glimpses and hints and voices.</p><p>Seek out these smaller works. But be patient with them. They do not yield their wonders immediately. They ask you to sit, to meditate. You must not read these things quickly. They were not made for TikTok.</p><p>Barry Lopez is dead. Today is his birthday. The first birthday after his death was an insurrection in Washington, D.C. With these facts in mind, I can only think to quote Lopez himself, from the end of the first essay in a posthumous collection, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=oLhPEAAAQBAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&dq=barry%20lopez&pg=PA5#v=onepage&q&f=false" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World</i></a><i>,</i> an essay titled <a href="https://www.kyotojournal.org/nature/six-thousand-lessons/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">"Six Thousand Lessons"</a>: </p><blockquote>I began with an intuition, that the world was, from place to place and from culture to culture, far more different than I had been led to believe. Later, I began to understand that to ignore these differences was not simply insensitive but unjust and perilous. To ignore the differences does not make things better. It creates isolation, pain, fury, despair. Finally, I came to see something profound. Long-term, healthy patterns of social organization, among all social life forms, it seemed to me, hinged on work that maintained the integrity of the community while at the same time granting autonomy to its individuals. What made a society beautiful and memorable was some combination of autonomy and deference that, together, minimized strife.</blockquote><blockquote>It is now my understanding that diversity is not, as I had once thought, a characteristic of life. It is, instead, a condition necessary for life. To eliminate diversity would be like eliminating carbon and expecting life to go on. This, I believe, is why even a passing acquaintance with endangered languages or endangered species or endangered cultural traditions brings with it so much anxiety, so much sadness. We know in our tissues that the fewer the differences we encounter in our travels, the more widespread the kingdom of death has become.</blockquote><p><br /></p><p>------------</p>image: portrait of Barry Lopez by Robert Kaiser, 1997, via <a href="https://www.oregonlive.com/books/2020/12/barry-lopez-award-winning-and-influential-oregon-author-dies-at-75.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>The Oregonian</i></a><br />Matthew Cheneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07704529564308222004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-90134142296848569152023-01-01T09:54:00.002-05:002023-08-18T07:41:54.967-04:002022: Looking Backward<p> </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn3w0PGGRUDLYleq1aH8P0j5o_eJnX--RmIzmbGuUs2fo9TL7Zf2-pCcTY6P7pt1PvADW5-TJCc3yLv4bOaC3VyvubnjHQsbH-8E3I137i3DL_lYpjYbMjaeyv7HIJkO60Jur885diH7KgytyGPEN8pgd-iY_lTLGjKFZ3LkYrH4oWgUfy5gvX/s620/Cellar%20Stories%20anti%20optimism%20web.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="420" data-original-width="620" height="434" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn3w0PGGRUDLYleq1aH8P0j5o_eJnX--RmIzmbGuUs2fo9TL7Zf2-pCcTY6P7pt1PvADW5-TJCc3yLv4bOaC3VyvubnjHQsbH-8E3I137i3DL_lYpjYbMjaeyv7HIJkO60Jur885diH7KgytyGPEN8pgd-iY_lTLGjKFZ3LkYrH4oWgUfy5gvX/w640-h434/Cellar%20Stories%20anti%20optimism%20web.webp" width="640" /></a></div><br />Another year gone. To this one, I am not quite so ready to say, “Good riddance!” as I was some other recent years, but I also have no great reason to want to hold on to 2022. I expect it is a year that will grow less and less defined in memory, its borders bleeding backwards and forwards, until it becomes <i>the early 2020s</i> and then <i>sometime in the 2020s</i>…<p></p><p>When writing the recent <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/archive-dive-end-76250723"><u>Archive Dive</u></a> post about past year-end summaries, I discovered I had not done one for 2021 … and I missed it. I regretted the handful of years I had not done any sort of summary, even just a basic list of favorite books. Not wanting to miss another year, I started taking notes for this one, and kept taking notes whenever anything occurred to me. So even though I'm sure there are plenty of items I've forgotten, it all get pretty long. </p><p>But the whole point of having a blog/newsletter/thing is to not be limited by the soundbite culture of social media, so I am going to glory in the opportunity to just go on and on and on here about stuff I enjoy—</p><h3>The Self</h3><p>2022 will probably remain for me defined by some deaths (my grandmother at age 100; <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2022/07/geoffrey-h-goodwin-1971-2022.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Geoffrey Goodwin</a>; <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2021/12/stephen-sondheim-1930-2021.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Stephen Sondheim)</a> and, more happily, by my selling my book <a href="https://matthewcheney.net/the-last-vanishing-man-and-other-stories/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>The Last Vanishing Man and Other Stories</i></a> to Third Man Books. (2023 will be more notable: that will be the year I — much to my own astonishment — have two books released, <a href="https://matthewcheney.net/books/about-that-life-barry-lopez-and-the-art-of-community/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>About That Life: Barry Lopez and the Art of Community</i></a> and <i>The Last Vanishing Man</i>. The former was originally scheduled for this fall from Punctum Books, but got delayed to early 2023. <i>Last Vanishing Man</i> is due out in spring, if the various gods of supply chains look kindly on it.) 2022 will also remain for me the year I finally stopped fighting with Blogger’s ever more antiquated system and made The Mumpsimus into this Patreon newsletter/thing.</p><p>2022 was, in fact, a pretty good year for me writing-wise, though you would not know it from my general lack of publications. My one notable publication this year was a chapter in <a href="https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/T/The-LGBTQ-Comics-Studies-Reader" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>The LGBTQ Comics Studies Reader</i></a> about the great Howard Cruse. Fiction-wise, though, nothing got released except by me: on January 1 I put the story <a href="https://matthewcheney.net/at-the-edge-of-the-forest/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">"At the Edge of the Forest"</a> up on my website. (More on that at <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2022/01/a-story-at-edge-of-forest.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">this</a> Mumpsimus post.) In addition to doing some new work for the upcoming collection, I also wrote a couple stories that will be coming out next year (more info on that later). </p><p>It was a frustrating year in terms of nonfiction. Generally, nonfiction has been easier for me to sell than fiction, but this year, for the first time in almost 20 years, I could not get anyone to publish any reviews or essays I wrote. Not that I wrote a lot, but two in particular, which I later published on The Mumpsimus, seemed worthwhile to me: <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2022/09/to-lowest-hell-with-america-on-james.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>“To the Lowest Hell with America: On James Purdy”</u></a> and <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2022/10/normality-is-monstrous-on-it-came-from.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>“Normality Is Monstrous: On </u><u><i>It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror</i></u><u>”</u></a>. The world of literary conversation via book review publications is pretty well <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/bookforum-and-a-bleak-year-for-literary-magazines" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>moribund</u></a>, the few venues left tend to be overwhelmed and under-read, it’s something of a miracle even get a response to a query … so I think my days of trying to peddle reviews are over. I have zero taste for it anymore, and if I want to say things about new (or old) books, I can do it just fine here.</p><p>Also on The Mumpsimus, I published some essay-ish posts that perhaps are worth remembering:</p><ul><li>A three part discussion with Richard Scott Larson about queerness and autofiction: <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2022/01/whats-queer-about-autofiction-part-1.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>Part 1</u></a>, <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2022/01/whats-queer-about-autofiction-part-2.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>Part 2</u></a>, <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2022/01/whats-queer-about-autofiction-part-3.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>Part 3</u></a> (January)</li><li><a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2022/01/trauma-plots.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>Trauma Plots</u></a> (January)</li><li><a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2022/03/the-folk-horror-moment.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>The Folk Horror Moment </u></a>(March)</li><li><a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2022/05/difficult-peace.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>Difficult Peace</u></a> (May)</li><li><a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2022/09/time-for-anxiety-pillar-of-salt-by.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>Time for Anxiety: “Pillar of Salt” by Shirley Jackson</u></a> (September)</li></ul><p>The best and biggest nonfiction I published this year, though, was one I (again) published myself, though in this case I hadn’t tried anywhere else, because I knew it was too long and weird for any publisher to bother with it: <a href="https://matthewcheney.net/the-rats-in-our-walls/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>“The Rats in Our Walls”</u></a>, an obsessive investigation into H.P. Lovecraft, eugenics, the early conservation movement, rightwing ideology, etc. I think it’s easily one of the best essays I’ve ever written, but I recognize that I may be the only person who thinks that.</p><p>In the rest of this post here, I simply want to record what I can remember of the highlights of my reading, viewing, and listening for the year. This is as much for myself as anybody else, a chronicle of time passing, a brief pause to make the ephemeral less so.</p><p><img data-media-id="182475015" src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/76641813/dcf3b3729dd5425ca8d3012987d933a5/eyJ3Ijo4MjB9/1.jpg?token-time=1689465600&token-hash=0m3o1OfGBd2IA27IzHjp_KhuIl5BiVONTG_t8Or2Z3w%3D" /></p><h3>Reading</h3><p>From January to May, I read mostly things by, about, or related to H.P. Lovecraft, Madison Grant, eugenics, conservation, etc. — all the stuff that went into “The Rats in Our Walls”, and plenty of stuff that didn’t.</p><p>It was the pandemic that sent me wholeheartedly to Lovecraft. I have read him off and on my whole life (fell in love with the Michael Whelan covers to the old Del Rey paperbacks when I was a kid), had something of a love-hate relationship with him in early adulthood, nonetheless kept accumulating Lovecraft books over the years (even in one of my more Lovecraft-hating moods, I was not about to let a good deal on, for instance, a complete set of the <i>Selected Letters</i> go to waste!), and then began to find my way more consistently back into HPL via Paul LaFarge’s extraordinary 2017 novel <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-night-ocean-by-paul-la-farge.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>The Night Ocean</i></u></a>, a book which arrived at just about the height of my HPL hatred, and which I have now read a couple times and am getting ready to read again. (The gift La Farge’s novel gave me was the ability to think of Lovecraft through <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._H._Barlow" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>Robert Barlow’s</u></a> eyes.) And then in the early days of the pandemic, Lovecraft, for whatever reason, kept haunting me.</p><p>For “The Rats in Our Walls”, I tackled Lovecraft’s <a href="https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/letters/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">letters</a> beyond the 5-volume Arkham <i>Selected</i> and the only other collection I’d read, <a href="https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/sources/off.aspx" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>O Fortunate Floridian: H.P. Lovecraft’s Letters to R.H. Barlow</i></u></a>. Hippocampus Press has done a great service by publishing <a href="https://www.hippocampuspress.com/h.p-lovecraft/collected-letters?zenid=i6kd3u536sn813iv62agjof8b6" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>Lovecraft’s collected letters</u></a>, a truly heroic task of scholarship by S. T. Joshi, David E. Schultz, and others — Lovecraft wrote literally millions of words of correspondence. The most revealing volume, both for my purposes in the essay and more generally, is the volume of <a href="https://www.hippocampuspress.com/h.p-lovecraft/collected-letters/letters-to-james-f.-morton-by-h.-p.-lovecraft" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Letters to James F. Morton</i></u></a>. A Harvard grad with eclectic interests, Morton worked as the curator of the Paterson Museum in New Jersey. He was a man of progressive social and political opinions, in stark contrast to Lovecraft, which is what makes the correspondence so illuminating. Lovecraft really liked and respected Morton, and he works hard to try to make Morton agree with his white supremacist vision … but ultimately, Morton has more of an effect on Lovecraft’s view of the world than Lovecraft does on Morton’s, at least regarding things like heredity, race, and economics. For a while, Lovecraft comes across as utterly unhinged in his determination to hold onto ideas that it seems even he began to realize were absurd and hateful. While other collections of Lovecraft’s letters are full of interesting material, this collection has something a screenwriter might call a character arc. We really get to see Lovecraft growing and changing.</p><p>During the summer of 2022, I read some novels that didn’t do a lot for me, so I’m not going to mention them here, because it was probably more my own mood swings and distractions than it was anything to do with the books. I was in the midst of edits on <i>The Last Vanishing Man</i> and that close work on my own fiction definitely skewed my ability to see what other people were up to.</p><p>I also read a bunch of stuff to do with occultism, the paranormal, and cults, since I would really like my next story collection to be one full of ghosts and weirdness. (People keep claiming I’m a horror writer, so I figure I ought to write one collection of horror/ghost stories so I don’t feel like such a poser!) I reread <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674012448" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>The Secret Life of Puppets</i></u></a> by Victoria Nelson, which I first read years ago, and though I liked it back then I don’t think I really understood much of it. Now, coming to it from having recently read <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=j5UtDwAAQBAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>The Myth of Disenchantment</i></u></a> by <a href="https://religion.williams.edu/faculty/jason-josephson/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm</u></a> — a magnificent book, one that really affected my view of modernity and belief — and some other studies of similar topics, I was much better prepared to understand the ground from which Nelson launched her analysis. <i>The Secret Life of Puppets</i> is a beautiful book, rich with implications I continue to think about.</p><p>The best occult book I read this year was one that arrived at the end: <a href="https://www.bookfinder.com/search/?isbn=9788417975999&st=xl&ac=qr" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>The Tarot of Leonora Carrington</i></u></a>, a large art book rich with Carrington’s illustrations for the major arcana and also her other artwork. This is an expansion of an earlier edition that went out of print soon after it was published, and it’s very much worth getting ahold of if you have any interest in Carrington’s work.</p><p>Perhaps the weirdest book I read, though, was <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=s0W3_Qs8uw8C&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Dead Names: The Secret History of The Necronomicon</i></u></a> by “Simon”. The book’s a mess, but would we really want it any other way? It’s like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illuminatus!_Trilogy" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i>The Illuminatus! Trilogy</i></a> written by James Ellroy, though that actually makes it sound more energetically nutty than it is. But I really enjoyed reading it. If I were ever to teach a workshop on writing horror fiction, I would be tempted to assign this book because in the way it presents an almost-rational, conspiratorial, occultist view of the history of the second half of the 20th century it is so much better than most stuff that’s actually marketed as horror/thriller fiction. I could totally accept that the writer of this book thinks it’s all true. That’s rarely the case with narrators in horror fiction — often, they seem too deliberate to me, too crafted. What makes <i>Dead Names</i> work is that the tone is so matter-of-fact. It stays close to known reality and never really pushes hard to sell its paranoid vision, making it something of a trashy, muddled masterpiece. The repetitiveness, odd gaps, confusions of chronology, etc. are not so big as to be distractions — instead, they aid the verisimilitude. Reality is messy. Memory is untrustworthy. Ragged narratives are much more realistic than fine-tuned ones. All good lessons for anybody trying to write weird stuff convincingly. (Additionally, regardless of how much of this book is true, it presents a sometimes vivid portrait of the occult scene in NYC around the 1970s, a wonderful milieu.)</p><p>A fine companion to <i>Dead Names</i> would be Jarrett Kobeck’s two books on the Zodiac killer, which I wrote about a bit in <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/temptations-of-73639670"><u>my post on Jeffrey Dahmer</u></a> and the Netflix <i>Dahmer</i> TV show. Kobeck’s books are obsessive and detailed, but the second, <a href="https://www.bookdepository.com/How-Find-Zodiac-Jarett-Kobek/9781737842804?ref=grid-view&qid=1672516807876&sr=1-7" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>How to find Zodiac</i></u></a>, is especially good in all it has to say about — of all things — fanzine culture. For anyone interested in science fiction fandom, subcultures, California in the ‘70s, and serial murder, these two books are catnip. And maybe also a solution to the Zodiac killings.</p><p>Of all the books I read this year, the one I would want the most people to read, however, is <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/3785-abolition-geography" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation</i></u></a> by Ruth Wilson Gilmore. It collects more than 30 years of essays by Gilmore about racism, mass incarceration, and geography, but what’s most important is that it helps us think our way beyond current crises, helping us imagine a way forward instead of continuing in the same destructive manner. It’s the most challenging and invigorating book I read this year.</p><p>I read a bunch of short stories and a handful of collections, few of which are coming to mind right now, which is embarrassing, but also a reminder that I should keep a better record of the stories I read. Craig Gidney’s <a href="https://underlandpress.gumroad.com/l/nectar" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Nectar of Nightmares</i></u></a> comes immediately to mind because <a href="http://revelatormagazine.com/fiction/black-winged-roses/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>one of the stories</u></a> in it originally appeared at <i>The Revelator (</i>which Eric Schaller and I edited,) I <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2022/06/a-conversation-with-craig-laurance.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>interviewed</u></a> Craig for The Mumpsimus, and I got to see him again after much too long at Necronomicon in Providence in August. Additionally, my friend Robin McLean published a fierce collection of stories, <a href="https://www.robinmclean.net/_________________________________________________________________________get_em_y_.htm" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Get ‘Em Young, Treat ‘Em Tough, Tell ‘Em Nothing</i></u></a><i>,</i> that got serious attention all over the place, as it deserved. I also <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2022/10/a-conversation-with-robin-mclean.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>interviewed</u></a> Robin this year. </p><p>Richard Butner is also a friend, and so I can’t say I’m impartial, but I thought his collection from Small Beer Press, <a href="https://smallbeerpress.com/books/2022/03/22/the-adventurists/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>The Adventurists</i></u></a>, was one of the publishing events of the year. It ought to get way more attention than it has gotten so far. That could be said for a lot of books, I know, but this one really rewards your time. Gary K. Wolfe in <i>Locus</i> called the stories “wonderfully insidious” — who wouldn’t want to read wonderfully insidious fiction?!</p><p>It was a good year for poetry books. The ones I was able to spend real time with, and fully enjoyed, were <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520385580/basho" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Bashō: The Complete Haiku</i></u></a> translated by Andrew Fitzsimmons, Dōgen’s <a href="https://wisdomexperience.org/product/dogens-shobogenzo-zuimonki/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Shōbōgenzō Zuimonki with the Waka Poetry</i></u><i> </i></a>translated by Shohaku Okumura (not to be confused with the monumental <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=K71vDwAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Treasury of the True Dharma Eye</i></u></a>), and <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=mUOMEAAAQBAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Late Summer Ode</i></u></a> by Olena Kalytiak Davis. All highly worthwhile. </p><p>The Bashō is particularly interesting in giving a decided queer interpretation to the poems, though without, as far as I can tell, distorting them. Fitzsimmons addresses this well in his introduction. It pairs well with Jane Reichhold’s <a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/basho-the-complete-haiku-matsuo-basho/624679" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>edition</u></a> of Bashō’s haiku, though I do think it’s important to also read something like Sam Hamill’s translation of <a href="https://www.shambhala.com/narrow-road-to-the-interior-1077.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Narrow Road to the Interior and Other Writings</i></u></a> to get a sense of the haiku within their context. The Dōgen is not solely a poetry collection, and perhaps not even most interesting as a poetry collection — the <i>Shōbōgenzō Zuimonki</i> collects brief, accessible lectures on Zen topics, and Dōgen was not as great a poet as he was a Zen teacher, but nonetheless it’s nice to have the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waka_%28poetry%29" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>waka</u></a> poetry collected so well together, with significant contextual materials. Olena Kalytiak Davis is one of my favorite living poets, a writer with a unique sense of rhythm and language that can turn quickly from fun and funny to serious and hard-hitting, then back again. She’s like the love child of Stevie Smith and Frank O’Hara. I adore her work.</p><p>I also read around in <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=ZiSIEAAAQBAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems</i></u></a> by Dionne Brand, but it needed more attention and brain power than I was able to give it at the time, so it is a book I will return to.</p><p>Finally, I spent a lot of the fall reading the work of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caitl%C3%ADn_R._Kiernan" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>Caitlín R. Kiernan</u></a>, a writer I have long respected but I never quite caught the fever of her writing before. In July, I learned of the death of my friend Geoffrey H. Goodwin, and Geoffrey was a passionate fan of Kiernan’s writing. He got to know her and did some proofreading, etc. work on some of her books, and he contributed interviews to her <i>Sirenia Digest</i> — all of which I know gave him great joy — before the devastating car crash of 2014 that turned the rest of his life into one painful calamity after another. Missing Geoffrey, I picked up <a href="https://tachyonpublications.com/product/the-very-best-of-caitlin-r-kiernan/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan</i></u></a> and started reading, and it was like Geoffrey was there just behind me saying, “Isn’t it great?” Yes, yes, now I saw. Having spent so much of the early part of the year with Lovecraft, the story “Houses Under the Sea” particularly got me, with its Lovecraftiness and its occultist/paranormal scholar and all that jazz, pure melancholic bliss mainlined into the weird centers of the nervous system. I read and read and read. I picked up a novel I had bounced off of a couple times before, <a href="https://www.tor.com/2010/04/30/queering-sff-review-the-red-tree-by-caitlin-kiernan/comment-page-1/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>The Red Tree</i></u></a>, and basically put everything else aside in my life until I had finished it, because suddenly it was everything I needed. I finished the year reading virtually nothing but Kiernan. Sometimes the writing you need finds you when you need it.</p><p><img data-media-id="182475368" src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/76641813/4e9b5a1ad2c94aad9df26a800e82f6ab/eyJ3ZWJwIjowfQ%3D%3D/1.jpg?token-time=1689465600&token-hash=crXOCfbfkJQ2MuquoKeIL3aBGCnpMYYhcyakP66v05M%3D" /></p><h3>Viewing</h3><p><i><b>Movies</b></i></p><p>A lot of my viewing can be seen via <a href="https://letterboxd.com/mcheney/films/diary/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>my Letterboxd page</u></a>, which I more or less keep updated, though the “reviews” I write there are mostly quick notes to jog my own memory if I need to go back and see what I thought of the film (I don’t really have an audience on Letterboxd other than myself); the list is most complete for horror movies because I keep thinking I’m going to write a book about horror, abjection, revulsion, and vileness and since so many horror movies are similar the only way I can keep track of them is via Letterboxd; I don’t write about TV shows on Letterboxd, and especially during the school year a lot of my viewing is just TV, since it’s easier to watch an hour of an episodic narrative with dinner than to commit to a feature film.</p><p>With those caveats noted, here are the movies that most excited me this year, with links to anything I happened to write about them, if I did…</p><p>Favorite films new to me in 2022 (with date of release [as listed on Letterboxd] if not 2022):</p><ul><li><a href="https://letterboxd.com/mcheney/film/the-banshees-of-inisherin/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>The Banshees of Inisherin</i></u></a></li><li><i>The Big Racket</i> (1976)</li><li><a href="https://letterboxd.com/mcheney/film/butcher-baker-nightmare-maker/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker</i></u></a> (1981)</li><li><a href="https://letterboxd.com/mcheney/film/confess-fletch/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Confess, Fletch</i></u></a></li><li><a href="https://letterboxd.com/mcheney/film/crimes-of-the-future-2022/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Crimes of the Future</i></u></a></li><li><i>Deep Red</i> (1975)</li><li><i>Don’t Torture a Duckling</i> (1972)</li><li><a href="https://letterboxd.com/mcheney/film/the-8-diagram-pole-fighter/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter</i></u> </a>(1984)</li><li><a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2022/03/gastronomic-gorefests-fresh-and-feast.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>The Feast</i></u></a> (2021)</li><li><a href="https://letterboxd.com/mcheney/film/the-french-dispatch/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>The French Dispatch</i></u></a> (2021)</li><li><a href="https://letterboxd.com/mcheney/film/in-the-earth/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>In the Earth</i></u></a> (2021)</li><li><a href="https://letterboxd.com/mcheney/film/lady-macbeth/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Lady Macbeth</i></u></a> (2016)</li><li><i>Nitram</i> (2021)</li><li><a href="https://letterboxd.com/mcheney/film/one-missed-call/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>One Missed Call</i></u><u> </u></a>(2003)</li><li><a href="https://letterboxd.com/mcheney/film/prey-2022/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Prey</i></u></a></li><li><a href="https://letterboxd.com/mcheney/film/the-sadness-2021/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>The Sadness</i></u></a> (2021)</li><li><a href="https://letterboxd.com/mcheney/film/tar-2022/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Tár</i></u></a></li><li><i>Tigers Are Not Afraid</i> (2017)</li><li><a href="https://letterboxd.com/mcheney/film/times-square/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Times Square</i></u></a> (1980)</li><li><a href="https://letterboxd.com/mcheney/film/the-torture-chamber-of-dr-sadism/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism</i></u><u> </u></a>(1967)</li><li><a href="https://letterboxd.com/mcheney/film/were-all-going-to-the-worlds-fair/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>We’re All Going to the World’s Fair</i></u></a></li><li><a href="https://letterboxd.com/mcheney/film/a-wounded-fawn/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>A Wounded Fawn</i></u></a></li><li><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/you-wont-be-2022-74053298"><u><i>You Won’t Be Alone</i></u></a></li></ul><p>I revisited a bunch of films, too, and of those the most revelatory in terms of really making me appreciate the films more deeply were <a href="https://letterboxd.com/mcheney/film/fahrenheit-451/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Fahrenheit 451</i></u></a><i> </i>(1966) and <a href="https://letterboxd.com/mcheney/film/the-killing-of-a-chinese-bookie/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>The Killing of a Chinese Bookie</i></u></a>. The first, I had not given a lot of thought to, despite having seen it a few times, because I very much love a number of Francois Truffaut’s films, and this one just didn’t feel to me like a Truffaut film so much as Truffaut’s attempt to make something popular. I suppose that in this era when rightwingers are really and truly burning books, the story hit harder. I also really <i>watched</i> the movie this time, and saw where Truffaut’s real achievement seems to lie in this particular film — as I wrote on Letterboxd: “So much of what we know about this place and time comes not from any dialogue or drama but from what it feels like to observe these people and situations. Moments verge on feeling Tarkovskian. It's not exactly satisfying, but it shouldn't be. We are left wanting to escape this quaaludeland as much as Montag is, and the beauty and energy of the final moments among the book people are powerful not just because of what they portray but because these scenes feel like a release from the stultifying world that Montag is now an exile from.”</p><p><i>Killing of a Chinese Bookie</i> is a personal favorite because it was the first movie created by John Cassavetes that I ever really connected with. His earlier films were just too jazzy for me to find a way in early on, but I still remember seeing <i>Chinese Bookie</i> in a grubby theatre somewhere in Manhattan when I was in college, knowing nothing about it, and feeling like I’d entered an entirely new world. To this day, it’s a movie I can put on and in 5 minutes I’m back in that world. This time, though, what I saw was just how visually interesting it is, despite what a lot of critics say. It’s a perfect match of visual style to subject matter and mood. I’ve always loved that about it, but this time I had recently read some critics’ dismissals of the film — it’s what sent me back to it, because what they said was so different from what I remembered. I came away from the viewing with a feeling of needing to storm some barricades and shake some fussy old men by the lapels and yell, “Use your eyes!”</p><p>A few extra comments on some of the other films mentioned above:</p><ul><li><i>Don’t Torture a Duckling</i>: I am not a great appreciator of Italian <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giallo" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>gialli</u></a>, and I know people who <i>are</i> appreciators of gialli who don’t much care for this film, or who prefer others by Fulci’s to it, but I’ve actually seen most of Fulci’s best-known films and this is the only one I really hold on to. It bring a sometimes vulgar style to topics that can be talked about in far more elevated or self-consciously serious tones — belief, prejudice, mass hysteria, power, madness — and the style feels cleansing, revelatory: what are at heart vulgar behaviors ought to be expressed as such. The movie is a bit like Brunello Rondi’s extraordinary <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2022/03/the-folk-horror-moment.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Il Demonio</i></u></a>, but a bit less focused, a bit more … well, a bit more <i>Fulci</i>. I don’t really know how to describe it. Which perhaps is why it continues to fascinate me.</li><li><i>Nitram</i> I want to write about as part of a trilogy of films by Justin Kurzel (director) and Shaun Grant (writer) that I am fascinated by, with the other two being <i>Snowtown</i> and <i>The True History of the Kelly Gang</i>. <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2012/03/snowtown-murders.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Snowtown</i></u></a> is the masterpiece, one of the most powerful and unsettling films I’ve ever seen. <a href="https://letterboxd.com/mcheney/film/true-history-of-the-kelly-gang/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>True History</i></u></a> isn’t as focused and powerful, but it’s a fever dream of an epic, and continues Kurzel and Grant’s exploration of violence and gender in really interesting ways. <i>Nitram</i> is more like <i>Snowtown</i> in structure, but brings a focus to <i>True History of the Kelly Gang’s</i> exploration of the ways the world wounds and then gets wounded.</li><li><i>Tár</i> may be the most critically divisive movie of the year — I saw multiple feature articles and podcast episodes pitting one movie critic against another on the film. That alone makes me happy, since it seems a sign of a healthy culture if we can have movies that incite strong, opposing passions in people. I’m on the side of the appreciators, at least tentatively — I’ve only seen <i>Tár</i> once, and it’s a movie that screams to be watched carefully multiple times. I got the strong impression that despite some of its scenes, this is <i>not</i> a movie offering any useful comment on the shallow zombie topic of “cancel culture”, though plenty of people (particularly ones who hate the film) think it is trying to be so. (This could be completely contradicted by statements from the filmmakers, but I have read nothing they have said because I don’t want their ideas to affect my own before I get a chance to see the movie again.) Instead, I see it as using whatever hotbutton topic was available to create a kind of distraction within the film. The whole thing is a magic act and a ghost story. It is rich with misdirection. This is what I loved about it.</li><li>This was a pretty good year for final scenes. Both <i>Tár</i> and <i>A Wounded Fawn</i> stunned me with their last shots. (What I liked most about <i>A Wounded Fawn</i> is that it is one of those rare horror movies that follows through to the very end with the logic of its consequences and does not impose a cheap and obvious moral or handwave with a bunch of cop-out ambiguity.)</li><li><i>Confess, Fletch</i> is just pure joy. I felt about it what a lot of people seem to feel about <i>The Glass Onion</i>, a film that for me was fine but a bit of a dud. <i>Confess, Fletch</i> I just flat-out enjoyed pretty much every minute. It’s a new favorite feel-good movie. (So is <i>Times Square</i>, which I saw very recently with some friends. Pure joy!)</li></ul><p><i><b>TV</b></i></p><p>A lot of TV disappointed me this year. Or, if not disappointed exactly, just fell flat. There’s so much overlong, mediocre stuff out there now because of the all-consuming command for content. I was most disappointed by <i>1899</i> on Netflix, because I love love loved the creators’ previous show, <i>Dark</i>, a show I have watched now multiple times. But <i>1899</i> is just a pointless bore, clumsy and obvious, hamhandedly portentous, and the ending of the first season pretty much ensures I will not watch anything more of it. It is a giant waste of talent and money.</p><p>Perhaps the best show I saw, though I had mixed feelings about parts of it, was <i>Dahmer — Monster</i> on Netflix, which <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/temptations-of-73639670"><u>I wrote about at length here</u></a>, so won’t say more about now. Certainly, episodes 6, 7, and 8 were just about the best TV I saw in 2022.</p><p>On Amazon, I adored <i>Reacher</i>. I love the Lee Child books, and the show does a nice job with the character and story. The show is not a great contribution to world culture, it has few (if any) morally or socially redeeming qualities, and I watched the whole season twice. No TV show I saw in 2022 even came close to being as much fun.</p><p>Actually, on Netflix, <i>The Lincoln Lawyer</i> was fun. I remember virtually nothing about it except that it passed the time without too many longeuers. It lacked the pure pizzazz of <i>Reacher</i>, but it’s a different beast, and I hope there’s another season. Also on Netflix: <i>Archive 81</i> had a lot of good moments, even if it didn’t add up to much. <i>The Andy Warhol Diaries</i> was far more captivating than I expected.</p><p>I subscribed to HBO for long enough to catch the third (and presumably final) season of <i>His Dark Materials</i>, the first two seasons of which I enjoyed. As adaptations go, it’s not bad, though it does in some ways tame the weirdnesses and sharp edges of Philip Pullman’s books to make them fit a contemporary idea of mainstream narrative and character development. There’s nothing innovative about the series, nothing especially original, except perhaps the beautiful way they melded puppets and CGI to depict the animals. That’s a highlight of the series for me — the daemons are characters we can care about, and the armoured bear Iorek Byrnison is just about my favorite character in the whole series. In some ways, the show’s competent-but-not-innovative approach is its greatest strength. The casting is excellent, once it gets going the story moves along well, and some of the imagery is gorgeous. It’s not the books, by any means, but it’s not bad … and not bad was all I needed from it.</p><p>While I had the HBO subscription, I also watched <i>The Outsider</i>, a Stephen King adaptation from 2020 that was surprisingly good. (<i>Surprising</i> because I hadn’t heard much about it and because any erstwhile watcher of King adaptations knows that there’s a heckuvalotmore godawful dreck than shining stars.) I have not yet read the novel it’s based on, but clearly the match of Richard Price (who wrote most of the episodes and was a driving force behind the series) and King is a good one. Price’s tougher sensibility is a nice pairing with King’s basic sentimentality, and <i>The Outsider</i> is one of the few King adaptations that has a real sense of tragedy to it. (The adaptations of <i>It</i> try, but the original TV movie, fun as Tim Curry is, is pretty weak; the two feature film adaptations are almost everything I hate in contemporary prestige horror.) The casting is excellent, and if I hadn’t been familiar with Ben Mendelsohn and Paddy Considine before, I would have been shocked that they’re not Americans; similarly, until I looked up Cynthia Erivo (thinking, “Where have I seen her before?” and then, “Oh, of course: <i>Widows</i> and <i>Harriet</i>!”), I had no idea she’s English. There’s something about non-American actors playing these characters that gives them a depth only a few American actors could reach. But all the performances are great, and actors like Mare Winningham gives roles that don’t have a lot of space on the paper of a script a tremendous gravity and sense of roundedness.</p><p>I did a month or so of AMC+ when they were offering it cheap and watched <i>Interview with the Vampire</i>, which was not as bad as I expected it would be. The leads were suitably nice to look at, and there was some neat stuff in it all. It was pleasantly diverting.</p><p>I subscribed to BritBox for a month to see season 7 of <i>Shetland</i>. This is the final season with Douglas Henshall as DI Jimmy Perez, but the show will (reportedly) go on, which will be tough — though I like the show overall, it’s Henshall who makes it a favorite. (Just the way he says the word <i>murder</i> I could listen to every day!) The best season by far was the third, which <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2017/07/shetland-attending-to-consequences-of.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>I wrote about</u></a> back in 2017. This most recent season does a nice job of wrapping things up for the show we know; what it will be in the future … I’m curious to find out, but my heart will probably always be with Douglas Henshall.</p><p>Among the best TV I saw in 2022 was 10 minutes of <i>Penn & Teller Fool Us</i>, a show I enjoy because of a longstanding obsession with magic, particularly sleight of hand. Dani DaOrtiz’s <a href="https://youtu.be/5_KcQt0z-eE" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>performance</u></a> on the most recent series is already legendary. I am a sucker for the Spanish style of chaotic magic, and Dani DaOrtiz now rivals his teacher <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Tamariz" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>Juan Tamariz</u></a>, who many magicians will tell you is the best in the world. I know most of what DaOrtiz did on <i>Fool Us</i> — he’s using principles he has developed and shared over the last decade, at least — and honestly that makes it even more impressive, because he does it so damn well it’s <i>still</i> enough to make me believe it’s real magic! Chris Ramsay’s <a href="https://youtu.be/tQj3gUvvHHY" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>reaction video</u></a> is a useful one if you want to know why this performance is so mindblowing to people who know what DaOrtiz is doing. Ramsay makes the point that DaOrtiz is taking risks, and that’s absolutely true. They’re the risks a great improv performer takes. And that’s part of what makes him so great — he not only has astonishing skills of sleight of hand, misdirection, and such, but he is also really nimble at improvising which routine he’s going to move to once he sees where the risks take him. It’s the magic equivalent of watching Michelangelo paint.</p><p>The last TV show I watched in 2022 was an episode of <i>Columbo</i> (season 3, ep. 3, “Candidate for Crime”), which I enjoyed on New Year’s Eve. Still some of the best TV ever made.</p><p><img data-media-id="182476187" src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/76641813/40391866f5314c33bdd1f5837078a951/eyJ3ZWJwIjowfQ%3D%3D/1.jpg?token-time=1689465600&token-hash=0FG3V9zpShpqJ0PhNbhj-V0vZeme12WRHoBzftDB5xc%3D" /></p><h3>Listening</h3><p><i><b>Podcasts</b></i></p><p>I used to avoid podcasts, but, again, the pandemic has changed everything. During lockdown, they became something of a lifeline for me. And then I kept listening, though not with anything like the regularity I did in the spring of 2020. </p><p>I’ve kept, though, something of a tradition of listening to a podcast episode or two every Sunday morning. I think this feels comforting because when I was a kid, a family ritual was to watch the <i>CBS Sunday Morning</i> show (with my beloved <a href="https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2008/11/john-leonard-1939-2008.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>John Leonard</u></a> as a book and media critic) and podcasts fill that space of cultural conversation in some way. It’s also nice to not always have to be looking at a screen.</p><p>Here are the podcasts I listened to at least occasionally in 2022:</p><p><a href="https://connerhabib.com/against-everyone/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Against Everyone with Conner Habib</i></u></a><i>:</i> So genially bonkers, I can’t resist it. But thoughtful and humane, too. And literate! In amidst a bunch of woo-wooers, there are other folks like horror writers (Habib published his first novel, <a href="https://connerhabib.com/hawkmountain/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Hawk Mountain</i></u></a>, this year, with endorsements from Kelly Link, Brian Evenson, Paul Tremblay, etc.). I subscribed on Patreon for a while, then stopped because there was too much about Christianity and I couldn’t stand it, but I think it’s past the Xtian stuff now, so I may go back. It’s such a fun and engaging show if, like me, you’re interested in the various ways people understand the world.</p><p><a href="https://badgayspod.com/about" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Bad Gays</i></u></a>: So good.</p><p><a href="https://www.conspirituality.net/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Conspirituality</i></u></a>: A good counter to the more credulous stuff I sometimes listen to, <i>Conspirituality</i> is a thoughtful, sober exploration of how “spiritual” and “alternative” can often just mean “grift” and “exploitation”. I would pay money to hear a sustained conversation between the hosts of <i>Conspirituality</i> and the hosts of <i>Weird Studies</i>, because they have a lot in common in their approach to their work, but both shows also occasionally fall into a trap of creating straw people to argue against philosophically. (This is generally less true for <i>Conspirituality</i> than<i> Weird Studies</i>, I think; the <i>Weird Studies</i> guys have a particular defensiveness about “skeptics” — understandable, since professional skeptics are about as thoughtful and appealing as professional atheists [the two often overlap], but there are plenty of thoughtful skeptics with nuanced views, as <i>Conspirituality</i> demonstrates.)</p><p><a href="https://www.weirdstudies.com/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Weird Studies</i></u></a>: I’m putting this here out of alphabetical order because it is such a great pairing with <i>Conspirituality</i>. As annoyed as I can get sometimes with the hosts, it’s a friendly annoyance. Their choice of topics is engaging, their discussions generally informed and thoughtful. And we all need more deliberate weirdness in our lives to combat the general weirdness of living in these awful times.</p><p><a href="https://the-ezra-klein-show.simplecast.com/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>The Ezra Klein Show</i></u></a>: I know, Ezra Klein is sort of the human embodiment of bland liberalism, and he’s sponsored by the terminally both-sides-addicted <a href="https://www.cjr.org/the_profile/nyt-pitchbot.php" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>NY Times</i></u></a>, but Klein’s a good conversationalist and gets some excellent guests. I can’t help it, I like the guy.</p><p><a href="https://www.fnfpodcast.net/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Fiction/Non/Fiction</i></u></a>: From LitHub, with a really good collection of guests (mostly from the mainstream lit’ry world).</p><p><a href="https://anchor.fm/hermitix" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Hermitix</i></u></a>: Really interesting choices of topics and guests, with thoughtful and probing discussion, mostly from a perspective of philosophy and of religious studies. My recent post on <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/horror-of-belief-75257331"><u>“The Horror of Belief”</u></a> was at least partially inspired by episodes from this show.</p><p><a href="https://podtail.com/podcast/horror-vanguard/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Horror Vanguard</i></u></a>: Smart discussion of horror (mostly movies/tv). I sometimes get frustrated with the ideological, academic lens here, as it can sound a bit too much like grad students working hard to sound smart in a seminar, and I don’t share all of the hosts’ aesthetic proclivities, but that actually is what makes it interesting — it’s good to hear stuff I don’t appreciate get appreciated and stuff I do appreciate get questioned. I have definitely warmed to this podcast over the last year, and some of their recent episodes are some of the most compelling.</p><p><a href="https://is-it-rolling-bob-talking-dylan.simplecast.com/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Is It Rolling, Bob? Talking Dylan</i></u></a>: I love Bob Dylan and this is a podcast all about talking to a wide range of interesting people about Bob Dylan. Go to it now, it calls you, you can’t refuse — let it roll like a stone!</p><p><a href="https://know-your-enemy-1682b684.simplecast.com/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Know Your Enemy</i></u></a><i>:</i> My favorite political/social podcast. It’s devoted to exploring the history of rightwing politics from a generally leftist perspective (it’s sponsored by <i>Dissent</i>). The hosts are nerdy historians. They get great guests, including some (not-foaming-at-the-mouth) conservatives.</p><p><a href="https://www.gibsonsbookstore.com/laydown-podcast" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>The Laydown</i></u></a>: A podcast from the local indie bookstore! I adore <a href="https://www.gibsonsbookstore.com/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>Gibson’s Bookstore</u></a> and their smart and engaged booksellers. It is a tremendous blessing in rural New Hampshire to have a truly excellent independent bookstore here.</p><p><a href="https://newbooksnetwork.com/category/politics-society/critical-theory/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>New Books Podcast: Critical Theory</i></u></a>: The quality of the various podcast series in the New Books Network varies, but I have found myself returning more and more to the Critical Theory series, partly because it’s rare to hear even vaguely in-depth discussions with people who publish scholarly books with academic presses, but also because the choice of books and guests is compelling. There’s more I want to listen to than I have time to listen to.</p><p><a href="https://www.theouterdark.org/outer-dark-podcast" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>The Outer Dark</i></u></a>: From the wonderful Anya Martin and Scott Nicolay via <a href="https://www.thisishorror.co.uk/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>This Is Horror</u></a> (which has its own quite interesting <a href="https://www.thisishorror.co.uk/category/podcast/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>podcast</u></a>), <i>The Outer Dark</i> often offers recordings of discussions and readings from conventions, allowing people who weren’t able to attend to hear some of the most current work in the fields of horror and weirdness. If you want to get a sense of the vanguard of weird fiction, this is the podcast to check out.</p><p><a href="https://shwep.net/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>The Secret History of Western Esotericism</i></u></a>: When I discovered this podcast a year or so ago, it blew my mind how rich, detailed, and strange was the history discussed here. This isn’t people who’ve read a book or two and think 19th century ideas of Egypt as a magical wonderland are actually true; this is scholarly discussion of complex texts and contexts in ancient history. Just listen to <a href="https://shwep.net/podcast/charles-haberl-on-the-mandaeans/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>the recent episode on the Mandæans</u></a>. If you aren’t already a Classicist and so have a better grounding than I in the wealth of material that rarely gets discussed in mainstream culture, you are likely to feel, after listening to a few episodes of this show, that your view of human history was woefully narrow. Be sure to check out <a href="https://shwep.net/oddcast/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>the Oddcast</u></a>, too.</p><p><a href="https://teachinginhighered.com/episodes/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Teaching in Higher Ed</i></u></a>: Obviously, I have professional reasons for listening to this, and also personal, since I was once <a href="https://teachinginhighered.com/podcast/toward-cruelty-free-syllabi/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>a guest</u></a> on it. But this is a podcast I come back to because host Bonni Stachowiak has such a great ability to bring a broad group of people together, giving us a wonderful range of ideas but still holding on to a basic set of values about teaching and about higher education. Great stuff.</p><p><a href="https://tricycle.org/podcast/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Tricycle Talks</i></u></a><i>: </i>From the Buddhist magazine <i>Tricycle</i>, this podcast series is wonderfully diverse and has a particular bent in favor of writers who may or may not be practicing Buddhists themselves — recently, for instance, they have conversations with <a href="https://tricycle.org/podcast/sandra-cisneros/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>Sandra Cisneros</u></a>, <a href="https://tricycle.org/podcast/ben-okri/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>Ben Okri</u></a>, <a href="https://tricycle.org/podcast/marie-myung-ok-lee/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>Marie Myung-Ok Lee</u></a>, and <a href="https://tricycle.org/podcast/sarah-ruhl-smile/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>Sarah Ruhl</u></a>. If you listen to only one, listen to Ocean Vuong in the conversation titled <a href="https://tricycle.org/podcast/ocean-vuong/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>“Getting Close to the Terror”</u></a>.</p><p><a href="https://www.popsci.com/category/weirdest-thing-i-learned-this-week/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week</i></u></a>: From <i>Popular Science</i>, a podcast that lives up to its name.</p><p><a href="https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-podcast/why-is-this-happening-chris-hayes" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Why Is This Happening? With Chris Hayes</i></u></a>: MSNBC is mostly awful, but I’ve liked Chris Hayes since back in the times when he was writing for <i>The Nation</i> and not yet a media personality. Unlike pretty much everybody else on MSNBC, he seems to have held on to some of his original integrity without getting too brain damaged by the culture of soundbites and BREAKING NEWS!!!!. And Hayes on this podcast has time to really talk with people — and he gets interesting people, like <a href="https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-podcast/why-is-this-happening/breaking-down-what-communist-manifesto-means-today-china-mi-ville-n1301798" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>China Miéville</u></a>.</p><p><a href="https://zenstudiespodcast.com/episodes/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Zen Studies</i></u></a>: I’m not a Zen practitioner, but I like Zen practitioners and find their worldview basically congruent with my own. And Buddhism is the religion that most interests me. This podcast from a Soto Zen priest is friendly, accessible, and thoughtful; it has depth without being so detailed that nonpractitioners are left out.</p><p><img data-media-id="182476254" src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/76641813/c11cf120a60b48bd98ceb8cd8e8aa0bf/eyJ3Ijo4MjAsIndlYnAiOjB9/1.jpg?token-time=1689465600&token-hash=pWpmXs-ACLc7hYsfF-PRX7v-M8sCDObwMOHRdpwInjM%3D" /></p><p><i><b>Music</b></i></p><p>I don’t often write about music because I prefer to keep music a realm of personal appreciation. So I don’t have a lot to say, but will point to a few things I particularly enjoyed this year.</p><p><a href="https://franznicolay.com/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>Franz Nicolay</u></a> released a new album, his best solo album yet, I think, <a href="https://franznicolay.bandcamp.com/album/new-river" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>New River</i></u></a>. Franz and I grew up together in the wilds of New Hampshire, then both headed off to New York. He stayed out there in the world, I ended up back in the land of sticks and granite. He’s always been amazing, eclectic, daring, and down to earth — and the new album is all of that. If you’re not familiar with his music, listen to the song “Players in Wheat and Wine”. (If it doesn’t get you tapping your foot or somehow otherwise moving your body, you might be dead.)</p><p>One of my favorite bands, The Mountain Goats, released a new album, <a href="https://www.mountain-goats.com/discography/dark-in-here-46kkf" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Bleed Out</i></u></a>. I love it so much I bought the limited edition vinyl. Splatter vinyl, baby!</p><p>Since it came out, I’ve been playing Big Thief’s newest album, <a href="https://bigthief.bandcamp.com/album/dragon-new-warm-mountain-i-believe-in-you" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You</i></u></a>, a lot, particularly the songs “Change” and “Simulation Swarm”.</p><p>This year, I discovered the work of <a href="https://jakeblount.com/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>Jake Blount</u></a> a few months before his album <i>The New Faith</i> came out. He describes it as an “Afrofuturist concept album”. It’s wonderful, as is all of his work, which mixes deep traditions of folk music with great imagination, scholarship, and social commitment. If folk music has a future, he is at the forefront of it.</p><p>The great <a href="https://johnmoreland.net/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>John Moreland</u></a> also released a new album, <a href="https://johnmoreland.bandcamp.com/album/birds-in-the-ceiling" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Birds in the Ceiling</i></u></a>. It’s a step forward even more than his previous album in terms of production, but it’s still that great John Moreland storytelling and melancholy.</p><p>Ani DiFranco released a remastered 25th anniversary edition of <a href="https://www.righteousbabe.com/products/living-in-clip-25th-anniversary-reissue" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Living in Clip</i></u></a>, her brilliant live album. This was the first Ani album I ever owned and it sounds amazing on vinyl (not all live albums do). I saw her in concert toward the end of the year and she remains one of the most powerful and dynamic performers I’ve ever seen.</p><p>Pink Floyd finally released the 2018 remaster of their 1977 album <i>Animals</i>, which had been held up for the most Pink Floyd of reasons: Roger Waters and David Gilmour couldn’t agree on the liner notes. Die-hard traditionalists will not like the remix, but I think it solves some of the problems of the original recording. It’s a clearer and a little bit warmer sound.</p><p>I will admit I paid a bit more attention to <a href="https://thirdmanrecords.com/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>Third Man Records</u></a> this year than usual, since my collection is coming out next year from Third Man Books, but I’ve long kept an eye on them, since they do interesting stuff. (There's a reason I submitted the book to Third Man in the first place.) It was a big year for Third Man’s founder, Jack White, who released two records: <a href="https://thirdmanrecords.com/collections/new-arrivals/products/fear-of-the-dawn" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Fear of the Dawn</i></u></a>, a blistering (and often experimental) loud rock album and <a href="https://thirdmanrecords.com/collections/new-arrivals/products/entering-heaven-alive" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Entering Heaven Alive</i></u></a>, a gorgeous and more acoustic/traditional album. Both have much to recommend them, but your mileage will very much depend on whether you prefer the louder and weirder or the softer and more melodic. While there are individual songs on <i>Fear</i> I really love, <i>Entering Heaven Alive</i> is the one I most embrace as an album (I’m old; don’t do as well with the loud stuff as I used to!), and that’s the one I picked up on vinyl — it’s a stunner in that format.</p><p>But Third Man is a lot more than Jack White. The big revelation for me from this year was The Paranoyds’ <a href="https://thirdmanrecords.com/collections/new-arrivals/products/talk-talk-talk" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Talk Talk Talk</i></u></a>, which is a mix of pop, post-punk, and riot-grrrlishness. And Luke Schneider’s <a href="https://thirdmanrecords.com/products/altar-of-harmony-standard-black-vinyl" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Altar of Harmony</i></u></a> is a few years old now, but is lovely and I’ve probably played it more than anything else from Third Man this year. They describe it as southern new age steel guitar, which I guess is as good a description as possible, but you just kind of have to give it a listen and let it enfold you in its world.</p><p>Though now its current release is 10 years old, Dust to Digital’s <a href="https://dusttodigital.bandcamp.com/album/drop-on-down-in-florida-field-recordings-of-african-american-traditional-music-1977-1980" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Drop on Down in Florida: Field Recordings of African-American Music 1977-1980</i></u></a> is something I only started listening to this year, and it’s really marvelous. Field recordings can sometimes feel more like something to appreciate than really enjoy musically, but these are wonderfully produced and powerful. Astonishing stuff, and a nice reminder that Florida is more than political nightmare, Disney, and Florida Man.</p><p>John Luther Adams released a new recording, <a href="https://johnlutheradams-coldblue.bandcamp.com/album/houses-of-the-wind" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Houses of the Wind</i></u></a>, music strange and Arctic (literally: it’s built from recordings Adams originally made there in 1989). It’s like listening to singing bowls as they freeze to death. But beautiful!</p><p>This year I also discovered Derek Bermel’s <a href="https://www.naxos.com/FeaturePages/Details/?id=Derek_Bermel_Intonations" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Intonations</i></u></a>, a wondrously wide-ranging album of instrumental music. He draws from all sorts of traditions and inspirations, and the result is wildly unpredictable and fascinating.</p><p>It’s from 2017, and I’ve known it more or less since then, but this year I listened to the Danish String Quartet’s <a href="https://ecmrecords.bandcamp.com/album/last-leaf-1?from=footer-cc-a2183821959" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Last Leaf</i></u></a> a lot. A lot. There’s something about it that feels to me like music for coming out of a pandemic. (Their <a href="https://danishstringquartet.bandcamp.com/album/wood-works" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Wood Works</i></u></a> also an old favorite.) (And not that we’re actually out of the pandemic. We’re just more indifferent to sickness and death. There’s something of that beneath the friendly surface of this music.)</p><p>2022 was, as all the pandemic years have been, one in which I listened to more ambient and drone than I ever had before. It’s becoming something of an addiction. One recent favorite is the Kenyan <a href="https://kmru.bandcamp.com/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>KMRU</u></a>. (I adore Kenya, so am naturally inclined to like anything Kenyan, but KMRU is very much worthwhile for anyone who is interested in ambient and electronic music, sound art, etc.) <a href="https://pitchfork.com/features/rising/meet-kmru-the-ambient-musician-with-his-ear-to-the-world/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>Here’s a good piece from </u><u><i>Pitchfork</i></u></a> last year about Joseph Kamaru/KRMU.</p><p>I also spent a lot of time with Clint Mansell’s score for <a href="https://invada.bandcamp.com/album/in-the-earth-original-music" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>In the Earth</i></u></a> on repeat. And <a href="https://kammarheit.bandcamp.com/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>Kammarheit</u></a>. Lots of Kammarheit. (It was that kind of year, I guess. But then, since 2020, they’ve all been that kind of year.)</p><p>Finally, I haven’t had much chance yet to really listen to the new Advisory Circle album from <a href="https://www.ghostbox.co.uk/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>Ghost Box</u></a>, <a href="https://ghostbox.greedbag.com/buy/full-circle-129/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>Full Circle</i></u></a>, but from quick snatches of listen here and there, I know it’s got that very Ghost Boxy feeling, half future and half 1972, half parody and half very serious instrumental electronica. Ghost Box is one of the most interesting music labels I know, with such a clearly defined sound and vision that it’s hard to believe they can still exist in a capitalist system that seems day by day more structured to wipe out everything odd and ungainly.</p><p>And now, onwards to 2023!</p><p><img data-media-id="182476334" src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/76641813/44d94a0fe67b482a80d82491b644fcb8/eyJ3Ijo4MjB9/1.jpg?token-time=1689465600&token-hash=jeaH4mu6JtMaOz2yTaeZkftuXMHzgsEKQYdiD8NMCcE%3D" /></p><p>-------------</p><p>Images: Top: Cellar Stories bookstore, August 2022 by Matthew Cheney. Wilderness photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@bananablackcat?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Svetlana Gumerova</a> via <a href="https://unsplash.com/s/photos/lichen?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Unsplash</a>. Georg Bartisch’s Ophthalmodouleia (1583) via <a href="https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/georg-bartisch-s-ophthalmodouleia-1583" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Public Domain Review.</a> Bottom: Wood bark, January 2022 by Matthew Cheney.</p>Matthew Cheneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07704529564308222004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-23289019698959691272022-12-17T09:51:00.003-05:002023-08-18T07:43:26.204-04:00Almost Everything: The Auctioneer by Joan Samson (1975)<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtCDvKYKvsDTb3l1pOCDaFT045jnQbVV9nlSR3JRHRi3WpAW_sBbN3Hitz7p3DE7F-hmzBgyyVZt2h-Y0z7EHZhefo1Dr9Rdf3WXstO7UZukxHQFNMVoBCDY-fWGB611ahA5R0k4TUwSguBkldrqP5XZJqR5mkGsjDKDc9Dy6_1kGyL3jeOc9T/s1049/Auctioneer%20Samson.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1049" data-original-width="620" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtCDvKYKvsDTb3l1pOCDaFT045jnQbVV9nlSR3JRHRi3WpAW_sBbN3Hitz7p3DE7F-hmzBgyyVZt2h-Y0z7EHZhefo1Dr9Rdf3WXstO7UZukxHQFNMVoBCDY-fWGB611ahA5R0k4TUwSguBkldrqP5XZJqR5mkGsjDKDc9Dy6_1kGyL3jeOc9T/w378-h640/Auctioneer%20Samson.webp" width="378" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>If I were preparing to teach a course in fiction writing (something I haven’t done for a few years now), I would be tempted to assign <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Samson" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Joan Samson’s</a> 1975 novel <i>The Auctioneer</i>, because it is both not a bad book and also a book with some specific flaws that prevent it from being a great book. These are the most instructive texts.</p><p>I started reading <i>The Auctioneer</i> with great hopes. For one thing, it is set in central New Hampshire, where I live, a place often ignored by fiction writers. (You might be surprised how few notable works of fiction are set in rural New Hampshire, a place that has attracted plenty of writers to visit or live, but fewer to write about.) It has the reputation of being a lost classic, a book that got good reviews in hardcover, sold about a million copies in paperback, got optioned by Hollywood, and then disappeared, probably because its writer died tragically young of brain cancer, and so a promising career became a single pretty good book. In recent years, it has gained some attention and is <a href="https://www.valancourtbooks.com/the-auctioneer-1975.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>back in print via Valancourt Books</u></a>, who do important work resurrecting otherwise unavailable fiction. (Previously, there was a <a href="https://www.centipedepress.com/horror/auctioneer.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>limited edition hardcover</u></a> from Centipede Press as well. It has a reputation for being a horror novel, but that's just marketing; at most, as popular fiction labels go, it's a thriller. But not really that, either.)</p><p>By the middle of <i>The Auctioneer</i>, I realized this was not quite the masterpiece its reputation suggests. It truly is a tragedy for readers that Samson died so young, because it’s obvious that she had a lot of talent and that talent could have led to significant writing. <i>The Auctioneer</i> is so close to being better than it is that I found myself sometimes infuriated while reading it — one more good pass with the aid of an editor could have bumped the book into true classic status.</p><p>The story is a simple one, and that simplicity is unquestionably a strength but also a source for many of the weaknesses. A mysterious auctioneer, Perly Dunsmore, arrives to a rural farming community in New Hampshire and begins holding auctions to raise money for the police department. He gathers items from the local people and sells them to folks from out of town. Soon, there are new police cruisers and new deputies. These deputies help Perly gather items, and the weekly collections become less and less voluntary. Eventually, it becomes clear that Perly has grand ideas for the development of the town, and those ideas do not involve the people who already live there. We see all of this through the eyes of John Moore and his family: his elderly mother, his wife Mim, and his four-year-old daughter Hildie. They have a small farm on the outskirts of town, on land that’s been in the Moore family for many generations. Bit by bit, the family lose everything they have, until eventually John takes things into his own hands. (Sort of.) In the end, much is destroyed but order is restored.</p><p>There really isn’t much more to the story than that, but the book is not small — about 80,000 words, I’d guess (300 pages in the Avon paperback from 1977). At half that length, it would have still be able to do what it does; many pages and incidents feel drawn out or unnecessary to me (but I am a person who thinks most novels are too long; a person, in fact, who thinks most movies ought to lose half an hour and most TV series could stand to shed a few episodes per season. It is no wonder I prefer short stories!). The narrative slowly peels away all the material elements of the Moores’ lives, and we see their house and circumstances stripped down bit by excruciating bit. This is excellent for verisimilitude: though the premise might seem shaky if you stop and think about it, the takeover of the town proceeds in little steps that individually feel reasonable.</p><p>This slow erosion of reason makes the story work especially well as a parable of fascism. The little bits of life we give up for promises of prosperity and safety accumulate into a maelstrom of conflict and oppression. Having lived through the absurdities of the contemporary political and social landscape, it’s not hard to see the events of <i>The Auctioneer</i> as realistic. The problem is that the trajectory of the first half or even two thirds of the novel is unsurprising. Once the reader understands the premise, all we get to do is watch the pieces fall into place. In a novel that relied less on plot than <i>The Auctioneer</i> does, this would be less of a problem, but we don’t have a lot else to latch on to.</p><p>The book’s biggest failure is its characters. Other than John Moore, all of the characters are pretty simple, and most are stereotypes and caricatures. John’s mother is a tough old Yankee, as familiar a type as there is for the region. His wife has some spunk but doesn’t do much with it. His daughter is what most children in thrillers and horror stories are: bait for the reader’s sympathies. The townspeople are little more than names. And Perly Dunsmore, who ought to be a grand villain, is more a cipher; he’s a detestable force for destruction, but isn’t imagined in enough detail to be either compelling or frightening.</p><p>All of those weaknesses are common to many works of mediocre popular fiction. It is other weaknesses that make the book worth analyzing.</p><p><img data-media-id="180553468" height="669" src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/76038467/19b127bc165c4565b4f4bc3303185b02/eyJ3Ijo4MjB9/1.jpg?token-time=1689465600&token-hash=wMz-dgx4-WYPThh3TEoszqreU-jSIiWcTyre8vU5Kcg%3D" width="418" /></p><p>First and in many ways foremost, the protagonist is a problem. John Moore never really succeeds at doing anything. He is infuriatingly ineffective from start to finish. This is an interesting choice, even if ultimately I thought it fatally weakened the book. Like John’s mother and wife, we can’t help but want him to <i>do something</i>. Thematically, this is interesting: a proud New England farmer who can’t live up to the stereotypical male ideal of action. The thing that drives so many mediocre white guys nuts: their ineffectiveness. That’s good stuff, but it kills a plot unless it is balanced with other elements because it is tedious to read about somebody who dithers, hems and haws, broods. Hamlet the character is insufferable; <i>Hamlet</i> the play is immortal because its other characters, its situations, and more than anything else its language are all fascinating, compelling, bursting with energy and surprise.</p><p>Anton Chekhov provides another good comparison. Chekhov’s first successful full-length play, <i>Ivanov</i>, has its moments but is not very good overall. (It’s better than his first, <i>Platonov</i>, but that’s not saying much.) Chekhov, like many Russians of his era, was fascinated by the figure of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfluous_man" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>“superfluous man”</u></a>, a figure that in works of fiction and drama, despite the writers’ best attempts, often became the boring and ineffective man, sapping the energy from narrative. Eventually, Chekhov’s genius led him to see that for such a figure to be compelling, it must be surrounded by other figures of different types in a network of situations, actions, and dramatic moments. <i>Uncle Vanya</i> is a vivid example. Vanya as a character is pathetic and fails at pretty much everything. A story with him as the primary source of focus and action would be awful. The beauty and power of the play comes from the web of relationships among the characters, sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, often somewhere in between. The energetic structure of the play’s relationships carries us around the black hole of energy that is Vanya, allowing him to be all that he is without the play sinking to his level. This, paradoxically perhaps, raises Vanya in our eyes. We are able to see him and even sympathize. By the end of a good production of the play, the audience is filled with emotion — the play is a masterpiece because it uses its tremendously flawed characters to help us reflect on their (and our) common humanity.</p><p>It is no criticism of Joan Samson to say she wasn’t the writer Chekhov was. But the failure of her conception of John Moore within the novel becomes starkly clear when held up against the bright light of obvious masterpieces like <i>Uncle Vanya</i> and <i>Hamlet</i>. John Moore has to carry too much of the novel’s weight, and our reading isn’t often enlivened by energy from other characters, from language, or from ideas.</p><p>In “Digging the Subterranean”, a revelatory chapter of his book <i>The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot</i>, Charles Baxter describes what he calls “congested subtext”: “a complex set of desires and fears that can’t be efficiently described, a pile-up of emotions that resists easy articulation”. John Moore in <i>The Auctioneer</i> almost has enough subtext congested in his character to be compelling, but he’s ultimately just too simple. Baxter also points out that in a serious story (as opposed to a comic story), an obsessive character generally should not be the primary focus; such stories are most effective when the obsessive, maniacal character is observed by a more stable character such as Ishmael in <i>Moby Dick</i> or Nick in <i>The Great Gatsby</i>. Unless the point of the story is to put us in the mind of the obsessive (e.g. Ramsey Campbell’s <a href="https://www.tor.com/2015/03/27/evil-eighties-horror-ramsey-campbell-face-must-die/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u><i>The Face That Must Die</i></u></a>), we as readers need some distance for the sake of analysis. This isn’t exactly the problem for John Moore as a protagonist in <i>The Auctioneer</i>, but it signals the problem: John is a basically stable character without an obsessive/maniacal character to observe. Perly Dinsmore certainly <i>could</i> have been a focus, but that’s not how Samson chose to write her novel. Perly is mostly off stage. We see his effect more than his actions, and the times we do see his actions, they aren’t so much actions as speeches (and usually overlong ones, at that).</p><p>Had I been Samson’s editor, I might have challenged her to rewrite the novel, or at least major sections of it, from John’s wife’s point of view. Mim is a mostly undeveloped character, and yet she is more interesting than her husband. She is taken in by Perly’s charms and promises in the beginning, and ends up feeling guilty because of it. That’s an interesting trajectory, far more so than John’s stoic ineffectuality, which hardly changes from beginning to end. The scenes primarily from Mim’s point of view are some of the most engaging in the novel; unlike her husband, she is an active character with hints of depth to her personality.</p><p>(Thinking about this, I remembered the recent remake of the movie <i>Candyman</i>. Like <i>The Auctioneer</i>, the new <i>Candyman</i> isn’t bad, but it is kept from being a lot better because of <a href="https://letterboxd.com/mcheney/film/candyman-2021/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>what seems to me</u></a> a mistaken choice for point of view. The movie’s story is really that of Brianna [Teyonah Parris], not that of Anthony, her boyfriend — and yet until the final scene, the movie is set up as if it is Anthony’s story, and so a lot of emotional resonance gets drained away.)</p><p>Because the characters mostly fall flat, <i>The Auctioneer’s</i> thematic exploration of power, money, and corruption fizzles. All the pieces were in place, but they never quite catch fire. To seize the reader’s imagination, the sorts of ideas and concepts we gesture toward with the inadequate word “theme” must be placed with care, integrated into the structure and substance of the whole. Samson almost gets there with the figure of Perly as an autocrat, but needed more attention to the details of his characterization — for instance, she barely returns to a fertile situation she set up where Perly takes over the town’s church and makes himself the preacher. The church is important to a memorable later scene, but the earlier information about Perly and the church isn’t connected enough to feel built upon. His relationship to the church would have been a particularly rich vein to draw on, summoning everything from ideas of New England witch trials to <i>Elmer Gantry</i>. If <i>The Auctioneer</i> were really an exploration of power, as it could have been, we would see a more careful delineation of how Perly’s control of the police, then the church, then the economic forces in the town led to something like an apocalypse. The book still offers a shadow of that, but our attention is always drawn away, the analysis of power in the novel always sketchy.</p><p><img data-media-id="180554494" src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/76038467/e10a69a930d244008a65575aa42199bf/eyJ3ZWJwIjowfQ%3D%3D/1.jpeg?token-time=1689465600&token-hash=bY1lP5ti90s3FDt9zL8RMLc5mawMV7LauxYnfJprbNo%3D" /></p><p>Or consider the ways the book could have been — and in some ways actually is — a sharp dramatization of what we now call <a href="https://www.theindigenousfoundation.org/articles/what-is-settler-colonialism" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>settler colonialism</u></a>. In New England, the colonial past is always present, celebrated via historical markers, holiday parades, and tourist attractions. The setting of <i>The Auctioneer</i> is a fitting one for exploring ideas of land and property, because this is a place where families have lived a long time on land appropriated by ancestors called pilgrims and pioneers. A thematic concept that is well developed through the book is John Moore’s attachment to “the land”, his sense that the property he lives on and inherited from his parents is the source of his identity and of his past and future success. The land John Moore lives on has been owned by his family for generations — but the question they never really ask themselves is what was the land before they claimed possession of it?</p><p>Perly is grotesque in his sense of entitlement and power, but the rhetoric he uses to encourage wealthy people to invest in his development projects is hardly new to him: “Until you’ve pioneered on a piece of land of your own,” he says, “you don’t know what life is. You don’t know the rush of sap in the veins that comes of having roots. You don’t know the sense of power that comes from making your own mark. … Until you’ve taken up an ax and bent your back to marking the wilderness with your own name and labor, you don’t know what it feels like to be a man.” The Moores and Perly agree on this. And what Perly does to the Moores is not so different from what the Moores’ ancestors did a few centuries before to the indigenous people they met. Indeed, though John Moore thinks Perly is destroying the town’s traditions and history, in many ways Perly Dunsmore is the person most faithful to the longer history of the place.</p><p>Toward the end of the novel, a bulldozer arrives to clear some of the Moore’s land, land they have not ceded, land they still claim for themselves. Trying to argue with the bulldozer driver, who has been sent out to do his work by all the recognized authorities in town, Mim can only argue that the land is theirs. “Sorry you feel that way,” the man replies. It’s one of the most effective moments in the novel because it so clearly demonstrates a truth: rights and claims mean nothing without power to enforce them. Feelings don’t stop bulldozers.</p><p>There is a more predictable, clunky, but nonetheless effective moment where John learns this. He naively thinks he can call up the governor of the state and have him intervene. He gets routed to various secretaries of departments, and eventually back to the police. Nobody can help him. He has no authority on his side but, more witheringly, his lack of power makes his claims sound nonsensical to anyone who hears them. Power possesses and shapes its own reason; the less power you have, the less you can participate in — or even be seen by — the realms power shapes. This is the strongest thematic achievement of the book.</p><p>(The theme feels of a piece with the book’s zeitgeist. Especially toward the end of the story, I kept thinking of David Morrell’s 1972 novel <i>First Blood</i>, and to some extent the Sylvester Stallone movie made of it in 1982.)</p><p>Samson’s real strength as a writer was her attention to landscape and setting. The little town of Harlowe is more vivid than any of the characters. Samson excelled at bringing alive in our minds the everyday life of a small farm, the changes of seasons, the feeling of wandering through a pasture or walking through the woods. Few novels have captured this particular landscape of New Hampshire as well.</p><p>Which returns us to the melancholy fact of Samson’s early death, the loss not only to her friends and family, which is the greatest loss, but also to American literature, because despite its flaws (ones common enough to first novels, and many far-from-first novels), <i>The Auctioneer</i> is compelling, and it brings life and vision to a place that is still surprisingly under-represented in the landscape of fiction.</p><p><img data-media-id="180555393" height="432" src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/76038467/2b0b441962d443488cce69fca544f24c/eyJ3ZWJwIjowfQ%3D%3D/1.jpg?token-time=1689465600&token-hash=IiaVy4Q5PUSR0A2nX0z20SCgUTN7l1SF3dkZOGeptbI%3D" width="685" /></p>Matthew Cheneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07704529564308222004noreply@blogger.com