clownfucker by Snedwick P. Philebius
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Bread and Circuses

Snedwick P. Philebius is the Robert ["Woody Allen"] Zimmerman of their generation.

Perhaps, Dylan stated the obvious when in 1965 he sang "even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked".

Yet, who would have guessed how degenerate things could get since then?

Bread and circuses were once a distraction from the main game of commerce and politics.

Now, capitalism is all about generating bread, and politics has become a circus.

Clown Time's Not Over, It's Only Just Begun

In today's world, corporate executives and politicians alike have become clowns.

These times call for a man or woman of courage, someone who will point out that the emperor is wearing no clothes and even the clown sometimes must have to stand naked.

And, readers, Snedwick is that man or woman.

[From now on, I will refer to Snedwick in the gender-free plural, because surely talent of these dimensions could not be encapsulated in a singular mortal being of just one of the three available sexes.]

Erotically Attracted to a Protracted Tract

Not only is Snedwick a cultural critic of great perspicacity, they know how vital erotica has become to the cultural and political discourse of today.

"Clownfucker", as the name suggests, is a political and erotic thriller, a philosophical and fibromuscular tubular tract that Snedwick uses to penetrate the vagina of cultural modernity, work its way through cervical resistance and unblock the neuter uterus of morality, decency and popular taste.

From Here to Internity

Of course, today's metaphorical clown requires an intern, or better still, two interns, who ironically take it in turns, so to speak, to caress and pull him through his anti-hero's journey.

In Snedwick's capable hands (and, indeed, their own), Alice and Traci are today's equivalent of the aptly named Mona and Fiona of Richard Condon's "The Vertical Smile", an hilarious novel and precursor to "Clownfucker", which I can't recommend highly enough.

The Pubic Yearning of Erotica

In the political satire "The Public Burning", Robert Coover, like Dylan, damns Richard Nixon and the culture of corruption that surrounded him.

I can think of no greater compliment to pay "Clownfucker" than to say that Snedwick's genius is to add to Robert Coover's important work the pubic yearning of various sordid private enterprises.

All the Presidents' Mien

However, just as much as Coover, Snedwick's work reveals what really goes down in public office (not to mention public offices and orifices).

And it didn't stop with Tricky Dicky.

Ultimately, Snedwick's contribution to literature is that it adds a little comic Pecker (or a comic little Pecker) to the earnestness of Woodward and Bernstein, with some vital help from the Deep Throats of Alice and Traci.


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A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One At a Time

The thirteen chapters of "A Visit from the Goon Squad" are like lily pads on a pond.

They encapsulate the lives of a group of people, a community, a human ecosystem, over a period of 50 years (only it doesn’t seem like that long).

We start on the pad nearest to us (which is not necessarily the present or the most recent story), then we look around and jump onto the other pads, one at a time, each choice made for us by Jennifer Egan, but not necessarily dictated by any apparent particular order.

She could very easily have chosen a different order. However, in a way, the order doesn’t matter.

What matters is that, by the time we’ve finished, we’ve landed on all of the pads, checked them out, learned something and moved on.

In the process, we’ve accumulated detail, we’ve experienced the whole of the pond, we’ve got to appreciate the whole of the ecosystem.

Now, at our leisure, we can process the detail of our experience.

We can impose order on our experience, if that is what we desire.

It’s About Time

To this extent, "A Visit from the Goon Squad" is a post-modern novel that forces us to reassess our preconceptions about literary narrative and story-telling.

Conventional literature seems to be preoccupied with chronological order.

Temporal order (as opposed to chaos) requires chronology.

We’ve come to expect that a narrative will proceed from the past to the present in chronological order.

If we start in the present, in present tense, we will move to the future chronologically.

Even if we start in the past and the novel is narrated in the past tense, we expect the novel to be chronological from its point of origin.

This creates the illusion that we live the present, and we relive the past, in strictly chronological order.

However, no matter how pervasive the illusion, literature does not actually mimic life when it comes to the sequence or order of perception and experience.

Every person is a combination of the past, the present and the future. Yet we do not follow a linear sequence.

I will never know you and you will never know me in chronological order.

In reality, to the extent that something of our past has been preserved, it is placed on a mental shelf in no particular order. It’s just added to what is already there somewhere, anywhere that it fits, like data on a hard drive.

Fortunately, some faculty in our mind, our memory, can access and recall our past, however incompletely or inaccurately.

One consequence is that, in our social interactions with each other, we don’t necessarily communicate in chronological order.

We reveal our past selectively, and what we select is dictated by relevance, not time.

Even when we are together in the present, we must part company or divert our gaze, until one day (another time) we come back to each other to complete the picture.

Our experiences, our chronology as lived will always be broken, piecemeal, dislocated, even if our minds subsequently and retrospectively impose chronological order on our experiences when we remember them.

Power Poignant Presentation

This is how Jennifer Egan tells her stories.

Her characters are just as broken, dislocated, damaged and real as those of Jonathan Franzen in “The Corrections”.

Her narrative rebels against chronology as she methodically excavates her characters from the site in which they have been buried.

She also uses postmodern techniques like footnotes (a la David Foster Wallace), both self-consciously and humorously.

She supplies us 75 pages of the future in the form of a slide journal prepared by the 12 year old daughter of one of the protagonists.

Despite its juvenile and unadorned prose, it contains some of the most poignant insights into the characters and their environment.

Still, they’re not difficult stories, they’re real stories about real people doing real things.

Arguably, her stories are more real, because of the way she tells them.

They might also be more memorable, not just because we have to make an effort (relative to a chronological exposition), but because we access the past of these characters in the same way we would access and recall our own memories.

There’s a Time and a Place for Everything

Egan uses two separate quotes from Proust as the epigraphs to her novel.

One argues that it is a “most hazardous pilgrimage” to seek the Self that we were in the past in a physical place (e.g., a house or a garden where we used to live during our youth).

He cautions that we will not find the Self there, because this place is no longer in the past, it is in the present and, therefore, the actual place is now different to what we recall.

The place that reflects our Selves in the past can only be in our minds, which is where Proust suggests we look for whatever it is we are seeking.

We have to look inwardly to “find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years”.

It is we who are the repository of our past, because our minds are the repository of our memories.

In a way, writing about it preserves the memories and therefore it preserves the past.

It protects experiences against the ephemerality of time, even if the characters are fictional.

Memories That Turn Up Just in Time

We think of these memories as records of time and times past.

We exist just in time. Our memories exist just in time.

Yet, it’s arguable that there is no such thing as time.

It’s a product of our minds. It has no mass. It does not move. It creates the illusion that it passes, but its apparent passage can only be measured by changes in something else, the movement of a hand on the face of an analogue watch or the elapse of the numbers on a digital clock. (1)

What actually exists is change, the process of addition to or subtraction from something more material or concrete. (2)

We are like an onion that, with each experience, adds another layer.

Yet, in the case of the mind, each layer eventually merges with the whole.

There are no separate layers that can be peeled one from another.

There is no chronological record of when the memory was created, only the memory itself.

Each memory is a replica of a place, of an experience located or situated within that place.

Collectively, our experiences could be captured and encapsulated and preserved in the amber of our memory (perhaps not eternally, but certainly not immediately dripping ephemeral to the ground and disappearing forever).

If so, we could find Proust’s “fixed places, contemporaneous with different years”, in our minds.

We could slice open the metaphorical onion and spread its component parts across the cutting board.

As with the lily pads, we could explore and inspect each component part in a sequence of our own choosing.

What we would find within ourselves is not time, let alone lost time, but (in the plural) lost times, good times, bad times, preserved experiences.

We would find, not Time, but Experiences.

Time is a Goon

In the words of Bosco, one of Egan’s lesser characters, time is a goon. (It’s not a particularly elegant allusion. Apart from its literal meaning, it seems designed only to reference the Elvis Costello song. (3))

While we are preoccupied with something else, sometimes real life goons, time turns up unexpected and mugs us.

Only then do we realise that we have less time left to us than we thought.

We don’t recognise how precious time is. We take it for granted.

In truth, time is the measure of the rate at which we approach death, the point at which we cease to experience.

Death is inevitable, yet its challenge to us is to fill the time available with experience and experiences.

They in turn constitute our memories and, collectively, our culture.

Giving Time Some Pause

One of the unique pop cultural references in the novel is its list of pauses in songs.

Within the framework of the novel, a pause delays the song’s end and prolongs its life.

By believing that the song has ended, only to find out that there is more to come, we have somehow cheated death, albeit temporarily.

We have eked more out of life than we might otherwise have.

A Memory Dead and Buried in Time

Just as a pause suspends the passage of time, a memory of the past is nothing until it is remembered. It is effectively dead, or at least dormant or hibernating, until it is retrieved.

In the text that immediately follows the first section quoted by Egan, Proust counsels us to dig into our past and explore our memories:

“We will see just how much certain fugitive, fortuitous impressions lead us more successfully towards the past, with a finer precision, a lighter flight, more immaterial, more vertiginous, more infallible, more immortal, than these organic dislocations.”

By digging, we will rescue the past from death and revive it.

We will perpetuate it in the eternity of the present, which is all that we can know and experience.

Recognising the Unknown

Egan’s first quote from Proust concerns the Self.

Her second is more concerned with the lives of Others, our family members, our friends, our community.

Other people will remain a mystery. We can reduce the unknown, but we cannot abolish it.

As readers, we learn a lot about Egan’s characters, but they remain partially unknown to each other.

Sometimes, we wish that they could see what we can see to be obvious, but it is impossible. We have a privileged perspective, a wider gaze.

We might think that technology and social networks will increase the known and decrease the unknown, but we all retain our secrets, some personal mystery, a kernel that cannot be known or understood by others.

This unknown might constitute some element of privacy in our relationships with government and corporations, but it can frustrate communication, understanding and harmony within our peer group.

As long as we do not completely understand each other, there will remain scope for incomprehension, dispute and disharmony.

A Visit from the Goon Squad

Some of Egan’s characters die, some give birth, some do things they would prefer not to remember, some can't forget, some win, some lose, some suffer, some prevail, though in one form or other they all love, they all play.(4)

Meanwhile, the goons of time and death are everpresent in their lives.

Ultimately, however, Egan wants us to realise that it is we, her audience, who are being visited by the goon squad.

They come knocking on our door, too.

No Present Like the Time

They are not to be feared.

Without them, we would not hear Egan reminding us that our minds are a repository filled with memories and experiences, and that we have lived life the fullest who have most filled our minds.

So, ultimately, the message from the Goon Squad, Egan's message (like Proust's), is that we must remember to enjoy life. (5),(6)



FOOTNOTES:

(1) We use a second hand to measure what we experience first hand. [Thanks to Jenn(ifer) for reminding me about "Time after Time", from which I conjured up this idea.]

(2) The fundamental things apply as time goes by.

(3) Note the following lyrics: "They want you to come out to play/You'd better say goodbye"; "And you must find the proper place/For everything you see"; "I fit in a little dedication/With one eye on the clock." MJ has also reminded me that the expression "goon squad" also appeared in David Bowie's song, "Fashion".

(4) They play as time goes by.

(5) How nice you remembered.

(6) Or: We must remember, to enjoy life.



POINTS OF VIEW:

A-Side

1. Found Objects (Sasha 2008)

2. The Gold Cure (Bennie 2008)

3. Ask Me If I Care (Rhea 1979 - 1980)

4. Safari (Charlie 1973)

5. You (Plural) (Jocelyn 1999)

6. X's and O's (Scotty 1997)

B-Side

7. A to B (Stephanie 2001)

8. Selling the General (Dolly 2001)

9. Forty-Minute Lunch (Jules 1994)

10. Out of Body (Rob Freeman 1992)

11. Goodbye, My Love (Ted 1990)

12. Great Rock and Roll Pauses (Alison 202-)

13. Pure Language (Alex 2016)



DRAMATIS PERSONAE:

Sasha: troubled, pickpocket, relationship with Alex, works for Bennie for 12 years, marries Drew, mother of Alison

Bennie: Indie music entrepreneur, inspired by Lou Kline, father to Chris

Rhea: friend of Jocelyn and Alice

Alice: loves Scotty, loved by Bennie

Jocelyn: has relationship with older Lou Kline

Lou Klein: Music entrepreneur, mentor to Bennie, has relationship with Jocelyn, father to Rolph

Rolph: Lou Klein's son, same age as Rhea, Jocelyn and Alice, dies in 1990

Scotty: guitarist in the Flaming Dildos

Stephanie: Bennie's second wife, works for La Doll/Dolly

Jules: entertainment journalist/writer, Stephanie's older brother, "rapes" Kitty Jackson, goes to jail for five years, writes book about Bosco

Bosco: guitarist in the Conduits, Suicide Tour, subject of Jules' book

Dolly (La Doll): publicist, Lulu's mum, advises General B and Kitty Jackson

Lulu: Bennie's assistant, Dolly's daughter, marries Joe (son of African from safari)

Kitty Jackson: Hollywood actress

Rob Freeman: loved Sasha, friend of Drew's, drowns in East River

Ted: Sasha's uncle

Alex: relationship with Sasha, married to Rebecca, works freelance with Bennie

Drew: friend of Rob's, doctor, Sasha's husband, Alison and Lincoln's dad

Alison: Sasha and Drew's daughter, creates slide journal

Lincoln: Sasha and Drew's son, loves rock and roll pauses



SOUNDTRACK:


The Lemonheads - "It’s About Time":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3B0CS...

The Only Ones - "Another Girl, Another Planet":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvO7HN...

Elvis Costello and the Attractions - "Goon Squad" (from the 1979 album "Armed Forces"):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6zbWB...

Todd Rundgren - "I Saw the Light" (from the 1973 album "Something/Anything?")"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXq81-...

Todd Rundgren and Daryl Hall - "I Saw the Light" (live duet version from 2011):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N48-K9...

Yo La Tengo - "I Saw The Light" (Live):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjBCQv...

Cyndi Lauper - "Time After Time":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdQY7B...

Miles Davis - "Time after Time":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OddHP8...

New Order - "This Time Of Night":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmZqi1...

Gorillaz vs Crystal Castles - "Good Time":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6I6dE...

The Guess Who - "No Time" (Extended Version):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqeSUA...

Frank Sinatra vs Casablanca - "As Time Goes By":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AY62QB...

Casablanca - "As Time Goes By" - Original Song by Sam (Dooley Wilson):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d22CiK...

IMDb: "During the piano sequences with Dooley Wilson in "Casablanca", Elliot Carpenter played the piano just offscreen, while Dooley fingered the keyboard on camera."

Play it once, Sam. Play it, Sam. Play "As Time Goes By":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vThuw...

Damien Rice - "The Blower´s Daughter":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a5nmO...

Glen Campbell - "By the Time I Get to Phoenix":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBVzRc...

Nick Cave - "By the Time I Get to Phoenix":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0_1vC...

The Seekers - "Time and Again":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiFxiw...

Pink Floyd - "Comfortably Numb":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bpzxf_...

Pink Floyd - "Time":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBvvHw...

"The time is gone, the song is over,
Thought I'd something more to say."

David Bowie - "Fashion" (from the 1980 album "Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)"):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjRTsw...

"We are the goon squad and we're coming to town, beep-beep."




SOUNDTRACK (OH, GOD GIVE ME PAUSE):

BBC Interview with Jennifer Egan:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music/news/2011...

"Clearmountain pauses" and "violations of expectation"

Jennifer Egan on the best pauses in rock music:

http://www.cbc.ca/books/2011/11/jenni...

Great Rock and Roll Pauses:

http://avisitfromthegoonsquad.com/201...

13 songs with videos on the book's website

The Strokes - "Hard to Explain"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfDTkx...#!

Great pause at 2:06.

The Four Tops - "Bernadette":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Shicx...

Short pause at 2:38.

"Once Egan had learned a little more about the function that pauses can serve in songs, she "fell in love with Closing Time all over again," she said. But her all time favourite rock and roll pause? "The song Bernadette by The Four Tops," she said. "I feel like it's one of the original pauses. The name 'Bernadette' just comes roaring back after the pause, and it's so dramatic. In a way I feel like it created a template for the way pauses are used in rock songs. If you talk about pauses in songs, that's one that comes up a lot."

Semisonic - "Closing Time":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGytDs...

Great pause at [can someone find it for me?].

Egan's book was inspired by a pause in one song in particular: Closing Time by Semisonic. "The drummer from Semisonic, Jacob Slichter, wrote a fabulous book called So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star, and he talks in detail about the recording of the song," Egan said. "And the producer was a guy named Bob Clearmountain who is known for inserting pauses into songs for dramatic effect."

Clearmountain is so well known for this practice that the songs he's worked on are said to have "Clearmountain pauses."

"This idea lodged in my brain and I couldn't get rid of it," Egan said. "When I found myself working on a chapter in PowerPoint, it very quickly came to me that this was where I would end up using the pauses in the songs, but it wasn't until later that I realized that the reason for that was that PowerPoint itself is a form structured around moments separated by pauses."

Eels - "Novocaine For The Soul":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2yy14...

Fuckin' long pause at 1:29.

Matthew Sweet - "Girlfriend"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-U2X2...

If they're not strictly pauses, I'll call it syncopation.

See 0:33, 1:08, 1:44, etc.

Some bloody brilliant guitar from Robert Quine, R.I.P.

Robert's father, Willard Van Orman Quine, a philosopher and logician, wrote a memoir called "The Time of My Life".

Robert's second cousin once removed is/was Dan Auerbach from The Black Keys.

Matthew Sweet - "Divine Intervention":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21myhh...

Fuckin' long fake fade-out at 4:38.

The Stone Roses - "I am the Resurrection":

Great pause at 5:23 followed by a fab rave outro.

Plus I love this band and I wear one of their T-shirts all the time (when I'm not wearing The Soundtrack of Our Lives). So there.

David Bowie - "Young Americans":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNw1ZP...

Possible short pause at 4:19. The book says it needs to be longer. I agree.


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The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Old Man and the Allegory

This book might just be an allegory of Darwinist Capitalism and the survival of the most aggressive and hungry in the world of corporate enterprise and rivalry.

Hey, What's the Big Idea?

It describes what it feels like to have one big idea or to invent something for which the market is not ready.

You struggle and wrestle with your "big fish" for ages, until in your mind you have caught it and perfected the way to reel it in, nobody is watching when you start the journey back to the market, your rivals snipe and question you and your catch, the market stands back apprehensive and sceptical, you never give up even when you're totally broken backed and exhausted, then the sharks start to have a field day pecking at your catch, first tentatively, then more confidently when they realise you're too poor to fight them off, then one day you discover there is nothing left of your catch, your rivals have offered the market an alternative but inferior product, and your wife and children regard you as a failure.

The Old Man and His Chair

Every afternoon, before dinner, you sit shattered and weary in your chair, wondering whether it would have been so much easier to get a job, be a salary boy and do what the man said.

Just before you fall asleep, you wonder if there is such a thing as karma or reincarnation, it would be nice to get a second chance to prove your worth and avoid making the same mistake of believing in yourself, your ideas and your resilience.

One afternoon, you don't wake up from your sleep.

An Old Man, A Big Fish and the Sea

One old man was lucky enough to have another old man with a beard write a book with simple sentences about his life.

That book will have to suffice for the rest of us and our efforts.

We read it when we are too young and don't realise that it might one day describe what has happened to those of us who are brash enough to have big ideas.

It's just a book about an old man, a big fish and the sea.



For Brian

"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."

Jonathan Swift


SOUNDTRACK:

The Clean - "Fish" (Live in Brisbane)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1WfIG...

The Clean - "Fish" (Live in Wellington, NZ, 2007)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFWLdl...

Just to prove that people can be genuinely inspired by fish, with or without psychedelic drugs.


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Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 by Karl Marx
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

Early Work

The EPM is an early work by Marx.

It is where he develops his version of alienation and the relationship of the self to others, but also the relationship to work and the means of production.

By the time of The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels had got involved in History and were not content just to describe it.

They became theorists and publicists for a revolutionary cause.

They created a theoretical justification for violence as a methodology for achieving a political goal.

Justifying the Use of Violence

Despite how democratic nations claim to be, many still use violence to achieve a goal or maintain the status quo.

Because they can't be seen to endorse revolution, they create and embrace the term "regime change".

They are both types of violence. The only difference is the justification.

They both use the same means, the difference is the end.

However, the EPM precedes all of this.

Reassessing Their Relevance

Marx and Engels have received a lot of bad publicity. Few dare to defend them.

But in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, it's worth opening their works and having a dispassionate squiz.

Not so that we can all get on a revolutionary anti-capitalism bandwagon again, but so that we can understand the plight of people in contemporary society.


FULL REVIEW:
July 20, 2012

At 25

In October, 1843, Karl and Jenny Marx left Cologne and arrived in Paris, where they lived and worked for two years.

Marx’ intention was to write for a radical magazine. At the time of their arrival, Marx was 25 and Jenny was pregnant with their first child, Jenny.

While in Paris, Marx wrote the “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts”, which were effectively the first draft of the ideas that would become the foundation of “Das Kapital” (“Capital”), the first volume of which he published in 1867.

The manuscripts are a critique of “political economy”, the term used then for what we now call “economics”.

They were never published during his lifetime and only became available in Russia in 1932, fifteen years after the Russian Revolution that brought the Communists to power.

Thus, a key work that explained the origin of his ideas remained unknown and of no influence for almost 90 years.

Communism as it manifested itself in the Soviet Union owed more to later works like “The Communist Manifesto” (1848) and “Capital”.

Just as importantly, the works weren’t translated into English until 1959, from which point they caused a radical reassessment of Marx’ ideas.

The Wealth of Nations

The manuscripts total about 120 pages.

The first 40 to 50 pages largely describe the operation of the economy.

If you were to read these pages for the first time today, you would think they encapsulated the principal communist analysis of the capitalist economy.

They describe private property; the separation of labour, capital and land; the separation of wages, profit of capital and rent of land; the division of labour, competition and the concept of exchange value.

Yet, ironically, most of this analysis is quoted from Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations”, a work sympathetic to capitalism published in 1776.

Marx highlights that:

• The worker does not necessarily gain when the capitalist gains, but he necessarily loses with him.

• Where worker and capitalist both suffer, the worker suffers in his very existence, while the capitalist suffers primarily in the profit on his capital.

• The worker must not only struggle for his physical means of subsistence, he must also struggle for work (in order to obtain the possibility and means of realizing his activity).

• The accumulation of capital increases the division of labour.

• As a consequence of the division of labour and the accumulation of capital, the worker becomes more and more dependent on labour, in particular a very one-dimensional and machine-like labour, which depresses him both intellectually and physically to the level of a machine.

• Even when the economy is growing, the consequence for workers is overwork and early death.

• The more mechanical nature of his work makes him more vulnerable to competition from both other workers and machines.

• Wages are designed to be just enough to enable him to continue to work.

• Even if the average income of all classes has increased, the relative incomes have grown further apart and the differences between wealth and poverty have become sharper.

• Relative poverty has grown, even though absolute poverty has diminished.

• Political economy knows the worker only as a beast of burden, as an animal reduced to the minimum bodily needs.

• It is foolish to conclude, as Smith does, that the interest of the landlord or capitalist is always identical with that of the tenant or society.

So far then, “from political economy itself, using its own words,” Marx shows that:

• The worker sinks to the level of a commodity.

• The misery of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and volume of his production.

• The necessary consequence of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands and hence the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form.

• The distinction between capitalist and landlord, between agricultural worker and industrial worker, disappears and the whole of society must split into the two classes of property owners and propertyless workers.

Marx concludes that “Political economy proceeds from the fact of private property. It does not explain it...Political economy fails to explain the reason for the division between labour and capital, between capital and land.”

Marx therefore sets out to grasp “the essential connection between private property, greed, the separation of labour, capital and landed property, exchange and competition, value and the devaluation of man, monopoly and competition, etc. – the connection between this entire system of estrangement [alienation] and the money system.”

Putting the Political Back Into “Political Economy”

I have quoted so much of Marx, partly to show how much he relied on Smith and Ricardo for his underlying analysis of the economy, partly to illustrate how little things have changed, partly to identify the moment at which Marx became political, and partly so that we can consider the political and economic options that might have been available to him to address the problems he perceived.

It was common ground that the economy was effectively a joint venture between labour, capital and landed property.

The problem was how to regulate and manage the relationship between them.

If they are all prerequisites of economic activity, are they equally vital and therefore should they be given an equal or at least more equitable status?

Is any one ingredient more or less fundamental than the others?

The Relative Significance of Capital

Smith would have said that capital was the foundation of capitalism and the one true determinant of the relationship.

Capital is money, and money has a purchasing power that can buy labour, just as it can buy property.

Capital therefore doesn’t acknowledge a joint venture relationship.

It buys what it needs to make more money and effectively replicate itself.

Capital, in its own eyes, is in control.

Over the course of 1844, this viewpoint became a red rag to Marx' bull.

The Options

One option would have been to remunerate workers more adequately.

Another would have been to grant them a share of the joint venture profit.

These options might have remedied some of the inequities.

However, they weren’t adequate from Marx’ perspective.

His preferred option was to abolish private property, in effect, to abolish private capital.

Why did he suggest this?

Entitlement to the Surplus Value

Again, there was common ground that the joint venture could create a profit or surplus value.

However, because capital has bought the labour and the property, capitalism gives the profit not to the joint venture, but to the capital that funds it.

Following on from Smith's description of the economy, Marx argues that ultimately it is labour that creates surplus value.

There would be no profit or capital without the labour that originally created the product or commodity.

If the worker whose labour created the original product had received the whole of the profit, the capitalist would have obtained no capital.

In the absence of capital, the capitalist would have had no money with which to purchase labour or property.

Instead, labour contributes to the capitalist’s wealth, which then, like a snake, turns around and consumes itself, starting with the tail or labour.

Marx believed that, only by chopping the snake in half and giving labour the benefit of surplus value, could real equity be achieved.

Since labour is the foundation of all surplus value, it should own the surplus value.

To achieve this, Marx believed we had to abolish private property.

A Chinese Diversion

Incidentally, in the Communist China of today, the replacement of private capital is not the worker, but public capital in the form of the State (the representative of the workers and other people).

By employing or exploiting Chinese workers, the Chinese State now makes so much surplus value, that, like a snake, it can turn around and start consuming or buying the capitalist economies of the world.

These economies are totally dependent on China for their continued existence.

What’s So Wrong with Private Property?

By rejecting the other available options, Marx rejected any suggestion that the inequity was purely about remuneration. (Even if the poor subsequently got richer under capitalism, the rich would get disproportionately richer, therefore “relative poverty” would increase.)

It’s precisely at this point that Marx becomes most philosophical in his approach to political economy.

He had to solve the problem of political economy in a way that satisfied the political philosophy that had begun to emerge in his mind.

The issue was so fundamental to Marx, because in his eyes it was the cause of the estrangement or alienation of mankind.

Alienation

For me, what follows is the essence of Marx, even if most Marxists or Communists before 1932 (or 1959) would have been relatively unaware of its significance (except to the extent that some of these ideas emerged, possibly slightly changed in detail or emphasis, in the later works of Marx like “Capital”).

In contrast to Hegel, Marx did not see the correct subject matter of philosophy as contemplation or idealism, but practice or “human sensuous activity”.

Man doesn’t just think, he acts, he does things, he interacts with objects in the material world, he makes things, he produces things. (For this reason, Hannah Arendt calls man “homo faber”.)

These objects and the products of his interaction have a material existence outside the mind.

During the process of labour, a worker creates a product or commodity that “stands opposed to [him] as something alien, as a power independent of the [worker or] producer”:

"The product of labour is labour embodied and made material in an object, it is the objectification of the labour. The realization of labour is its objectification. In the sphere of political economy this realization of labour appears as a loss of reality for the worker, objectification as loss of and bondage to the object, and appropriation [by capital and the capitalist]as estrangement, as alienation."

In return for his labour, the worker receives work and remuneration, the means of subsistence.

This turns him into a slave. “The activity of the worker is not his own spontaneous activity. It belongs to another, it is a loss of self”:

"The result is that man (the worker) feels that he is acting freely only in his animal functions – eating, drinking and procreating, or at most in his dwelling and adornment – while in his human functions he is nothing more than an animal."

Man becomes alienated, not just from his labour and the product of his labour, but from the human race (his species) as a whole and from other individual humans.

And private property is at the root of this alienation: it is “the product, result and necessary consequence of alienated labour, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself”:

"Private property thus derives from an analysis of the concept of alienated labour, i.e., alienated man, estranged labour, estranged life, estranged man."

Private property is both the product of alienation and the means of realizing alienation.

Marx’ Communism

Marx describes as "crude communism" the initial abolition of private property in favour of "universal private property".

At this stage, crude communism (now usually called "socialism") still preserves some form of alienation and is a political state, whether "democratic or despotic".

Stage 2 is true Communism, which he describes as follows:

"Communism is the positive supersession of private property as human self-estrangement, and hence the true appropriation of the human essence through and for man; it is the complete restoration of man to himself as a social, i.e., human, being...

"This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature, and between man and man, the true resolution of the conflict between existence and being, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species.

"It is the solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be the solution."

So there!

It’s significant that, while Marx was in Paris, he first met Engels (who had just published "The Condition of the Working Class in England") and this was his first statement that he now supported Communism.

Universal Consciousness

But what does it mean? How can this happen?

This is where it starts to become frustrating and unclear. Some of the manuscripts have never been found.

We have outcomes, but not the methodology.

The new relationship of man to man, and individual to society is crucial, but difficult to piece together and understand.

For Marx, "activity and consumption, both in their content and in their mode of existence, are social activity and social consumption."

He doesn’t mean that we solely act, produce and consume communally (as opposed to individually).

He means that what man creates for himself, he creates for society, conscious of himself as a social being.

The individual and society are two sides of the one coin:

"[My] universal consciousness is only a theoretical form of that whose living form is the real community, society...the activity of my universal consciousness – as activity – is my theoretical existence as a social being...

"It is above all necessary to avoid once more establishing ‘society’ as an abstraction over against the individual. The individual is the social being.

"His vital expression – even when it does not appear in the direct form of a communal expression, conceived in association with other men – is therefore an expression and confirmation of social life. Man’s individual and species-life are not two distinct things..."

In a way, a fully realised man is good for society, and society is good for the fully realised man, but they are one and the same thing:

"Man, however much he may therefore be a particular individual – and it is just this particularity which makes him an individual and a real individual communal being – is just as much the totality, the ideal totality, the subjective existence of thought and experienced society for itself; he also exists in reality as the contemplation and true enjoyment of social existence and as a totality of vital human expression."

Humanisation

Only when this happens, whatever it is, whatever it takes, can man "humanize" nature and the objects around him.

Only then do all objects become for man the objectification of himself, objects that confirm and realise his individuality:

"Only through the objectively unfolded wealth of human nature can the wealth of subjective human sensitivity -  a musical ear, an eye for the beauty of form, in short senses capable of human gratification – be either cultivated or created. For not only the five senses, but also the so-called spiritual senses, the practical senses (will, love, etc.), in a word, the human senses, the humanity of the senses – all these come into being only through the existence of their objects, through humanized nature."

Marx sees history as the inevitable progress of man towards the realization of his true, complete and unalienated humanity:

"It can now be seen how the history of industry and the objective existence of industry as it has developed is the open book of the essential powers of man, man’s psychology present in tangible form."

Instead of the objectified powers of the human essence manifesting themselves in sensuous, useful objects to which we relate, capitalism confronts us with the alien nature of our objects and we are alienated.

In contrast, communism represents "a fresh confirmation of human powers and a fresh enrichment of human nature."

My Own Private Property

There is some question as to whether private property will cease altogether under Communism.

However, Marx suggests that “the meaning of private property, freed from its estrangement, is the existence of essential objects for man, both as objects of enjoyment and of activity.”

It’s possible that money might also continue to exist, as a vehicle to acquire objects of enjoyment and activity.

However, his analysis of money is very derogatory, and this interpretation might be wrong.

The Road Ahead

I hesitate to call Marx an idealist or a romantic, because he was determined to integrate theory and practice, and extend philosophy into the politics of action.

After all, just a few years later, he wrote, "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it."

However, it seems to me that he had a clear definition of the nature and potential of humanity, and he shaped his political philosophy to achieve that potential.

He saw private property in the form of capital as the chief obstacle to the achievement of this potential.

He considered that it had to be abolished, and that the only means was a revolution of the working class.

He opposed other options that might have ameliorated the misery of the working class, in the hope that the severity of their condition would lead inevitably to revolution.

Many people joined the revolutionary cause, because for whatever reason they wanted to negate the negative that they felt capitalism embodied.

Few have ever been able to define the positive that they were trying to achieve.

Few who actually participated in the Russian Revolution even knew the true positive nature of what Marx hoped to achieve.

It is very easy to get caught in the enthusiasm of the 25 year old Marx, even easier to believe that many of the problems still exist, particularly in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis.

However, the physical description of the diagnosis is something as old as Adam Smith.

Marx might well have been right in identifying the causes.

However, it’s the treatment that needs to be worked on.

We need to do something that doesn’t end up killing the patient.


View all my reviews

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What’s a Giggle Amongst Family and Friends?

I bought this book 15 months ago. I finished it yesterday. It started off as a crisp, thin-leafed semi-brick whose 648 pages intimidated me. I only got the courage to read it when a discussion group gave me the impetus I needed. Now, it sits less crisp, but read, on my desk, wondering who will read it next. Like me, it’s 15 months older, but we are both easing into middle age and are still making new friends. We two are friends now, as if we’ve known each other since adolescence. When I pick it up and flick through the pages, I notice my pencilled notes, and a page that I accidentally folded over when I closed it clumsily before putting it down and going to sleep one night. There’s a mysterious stain at the edge of the last 20 pages. Initially, I’d hoped it was water and I tried unsuccessfully to dry it, but I think it came too close to the furniture oil on a paper towel that I had used, ironically, to remove a water bottle stain on my desk during the week. We can’t expect to age without blemish. During the week, one of our daughters co-starred in a musical play. The other wrote an elegant letter of resignation from her part-time job, so that she could spend the next four months concentrating on her final year exams at secondary school. (Her employer thanked her for her letter and said she could have her job back any time she wanted it.) Both girls’ school netball teams were beaten by a stronger school this weekend. FM Sushi’s team lost narrowly by three. ("Though you think you did the job wrong/ You did it great.”) I scored the games and tried not to talk so much that my scoring suffered. I wondered what I would write in my review. I thought up things to say in the Cabbage Detectives Interviews. I giggled a lot. I’m going to miss that giggling.

Here is the Discussion Group:

http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/7...

Make sure you visit our "homage", "The Cabbage Detectives (Interviews)":

http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/9...



Oral History

Eighty percent of “TSD” by volume is written in an interview format that reminded me of the first time I ever encountered an oral history (Edie: American Girl, an early biography of Edie Sedgwick).

I was captivated by this style and the book, and still am.

In effect, it was a collective biography of Andy Warhol’s Factory scene, told by insiders, though obviously the focus was Edie.

It was probably assembled from hundreds of interviews, lasting thousands of hours and resulting in millions of words.

Then it was distilled into one book of lasting crystalline beauty.

Studied Movements

I feel the same way about “TSD”.

You would normally expect a biography to be a study of one life lived. This is a study of multiple lives lived to the fullest.

It’s ostensibly about Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, two alter egos of the author, Roberto Bolano.

However, in contrast to “Edie”, it gives the impression of being more about a fictitious scene (a radical poetry movement called “The Visceral Realists”) than these two individuals who were pivotal in it.

Still, we learn a lot about these two, while listening to the tales and concerns of the interviewees.

It’s interesting that Belano and Lima are not interviewees, although there is no overt suggestion that they, like Edie, were dead at the time.

Those Damned Accretions

It’s customary for the author of an oral history to superimpose a narrative or some kind of chronological or thematic timeline over the top of the interviews.

If there is a thematic structure to the narrative of “TSD”, I am not conscious of it after just one reading.

I don’t really need one to enjoy it. For me, the book is like meeting someone and learning about them spontaneously “over time”, but not necessarily chronologically.

Over time, your knowledge of your friend, together with the detail of your friendship, grows by accretion, as if a whole is growing piece by piece in the hands of some cosmic potter (man!).

So it didn’t really matter to me that the Interviews didn’t seem to be going anywhere obvious, nor did it matter how long the Interviews ended up being in total.

I was just delighted to meet this many interesting people, as if it was one long party starting in the afternoon, going full pelt through the night and winding up in the early hours of the morning as the sun of a new day emerged above the horizon.

The Anthology of Life

Each interview is a vignette, a portrait. Collectively, they make up pictures at an exhibition.

We walk through the gallery, this pantheon housing the gods of Visceral Realism, observing each work, building an impression of the exhibition as a whole.

Like art works or an anthology of verse, it doesn’t matter what order we experience them in. The important thing is the lasting impression. Does it really matter that we encountered A before B, or B before A?

Measure for Measure

The most important impression is the vitality of the lives we are witnessing, not the sequence; the chaos, not the order.

The experience of reading the book is organic, not mechanical.

Bolano seems to be at odds with measurement. He explores some of these issues in a mock sexual context.

As the pimp Alberto shows us, it’s not the length of a penis that matters, it’s how you use it.

Similarly, it’s arguable that the intensity of an orgasm is more important than its duration, measured, like Dolores, in terms of “one Mississippi, two Mississippi”.

Lastly, the experience of being a poet and writing poetry is about much more than mastering the meter of the verse.

Perhaps, there is no better measure of pleasure than the pleasure itself.

These Things Happen

Similarly, time cannot be measured except in terms of the passage of something else (e.g., distance).

In a way, we’re not here for a long time, just a good time.

Yet, vitality reverberates in motion or movement.

Like Marcel Duchamp’s painting “Nude Descending a Staircase” (which is mentioned in the novel), Bolano depicts a sense of movement in the one frame, the novel as a whole.



Both the past and the future are superimposed on and appear in the present.

The passage of time can be observed in the present.

I keep the past alive by remembering it in the present.

I keep the future alive by anticipating it.

If I am alive, I move.

When the movement ceases, so does life.

You are the Stars that Guide Me and Light My Way

Despite my feelings about the absence of narrative structure, I still think there is a meta-structure at work in the novel.

Bolano as author is implicitly present in the narrative as Belano and Lima.

However, the tale is ostensibly told by the interviewees.

The self is defined in terms of the others; just as importantly, the self is defined by the others.

In contrast to Descartes’ maxim, “I think, therefore I am”, there is a social construction of self at work.

“You think of me, therefore I am.”

“I am your experience of me.”

“You are the stars in my cosmos. You are always there, watching me, comforting me. I don’t need a god to give me meaning. I have you.”

Bolano is working against the post-modern tendency toward solipsism and narcissism.

“You keep me alive by thinking and writing about me.”

Yet, perhaps the converse is also true: “I keep you alive by thinking and writing about you.”

Revolution and Freedom

Paradoxically, Bolano wrote the whole of the literary vehicle that makes this possible.

What are we to make of this?

Ultimately, literature is a social act, a form of social action.

What characterized the Visceral Poets was not just the fact that they wrote poetry, but that they were socially and politically engaged.

Their “generation all overdosed on Marx and Rimbaud”.

They rebelled against conformity, conservatism and the rigidity of tradition, both literary and political.

They wrote poetry that preserved youth, just as it preserved the present from the ravages of history.

They sought out the marvelous, when all around them was drab.

They resisted death as they resisted the passage of time.

Fiercely Modern

They rejected their own fathers and role models, becoming orphans on the way, not always discovering new fathers, except perhaps in fellow rebels such as Marx, Rimbaud, Trotsky, Gramsci, Lukacs, Althusser.

They found themselves trapped in diffuse labyrinths, so they travelled the world, navigating a sea of possibilities, exploring their spirit of adventure, seeking and finding youth, sex, love, friendship, experience, illumination and eventually death.

Then they realised that they were not alone, that Visceral Realism was not a destination, but just a mask that they wore on their journey toward modernity, that there had been others who sought modernity before them, the writer Borges, and the 20’s poet and mother of the Visceral Realists, Cesarea Tinajero, whose collected works they seek out in the passages that bookend the novel.

A Timeless Threnody

Bolano’s characters, like his own works, maintain a vigil over the body of life, literature and culture that lies dormant in the forgotten province of poets, essayists and professors.

They are a threnody that mourns our predecessors and their achievements, but somehow keeps them alive.

They create a dirge in what would otherwise be a void, a music that challenges silence, a being that defies nothingness.

Just as his characters look to the past, they inspire the future.

They become parents, mothers and fathers who inspire children and followers like the 17 year old Juan Garcia Madero.

They keep value alive and perpetuate it through the ages.

This is what Bolano did for us.

All he asks in return, now that he is dead, is that we do the same for those who follow us.



Quotation:

"The only real voyage consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes; in seeing the universe through the eyes of another, one hundred others--in seeing the hundred universes that each of them sees."

Marcel Proust



Autor! Autor!

How did you do it?
You made me giggle and cry.
Holy Bolaño.



SOUNDTRACK:

Robyn Hitchcock and the Venus 3 – “Belltown Ramble”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77ukY7...


"It's an independent life
And you wanna see your eyes
Reflected in the world.

"You can walk a square
You can walk an oblong
Even just walk straight.

"You'll still be standing there
Though you think you did the job wrong
You did it great."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77ukY7...


View all my reviews

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Review of Lolita from a Cellphone

Though it's true that Nabokov
Has gone and killed her off,
She still lives in my mind and
I'd really like to meet her.

She features in my ev'ry dream
And so, in all humility,
I'm sure I'd be better for her
Than Humbert, who was too haughty.

She'd be a few years older
And I a little bolder.
Especially now that we are grown,
It wouldn't be that naughty.

In my long and loving arms
It would be so much sweeter,
Though there's no telling in a book
How it is that I would treat her...

I'd have to keep it secret, coz
I'm respectable and married,
Though I'm sure that I would tweet her
"My heart, my soul, Lolita."


Don't Look There, Look Here, Below

My more scholarly review is here:

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...


View all my reviews

Goodbye 20th Century: Sonic Youth and the Rise of the Alternative Nation by David Browne
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Soundtrack Part I ("Taking in the Sun in an Exaltation to You")

Hey, indie music fans, listen to this (start with the first five minutes, the rest is noise, about which more later), while you read the first part of this review:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdeTQP...





"Looking for a Man with a Focus and a Temper"

This 422 page book is jam packed with information about one of my favourite indie bands, Sonic Youth.

Do I need to know all of these facts about Sonic Youth?
  Of course, I do.



Would I like some opinions about them and their music? Some analysis of their musical appeal and their cultural importance? Some reasons to vindicate my 30 year old passion?   Of course, I would.



Am I alone in craving opinion and analysis?   Maybe.



Would I be just as passionate, if nobody else liked them as much as I do?   Of course, I would.



Still, did this book give me the opinions and analysis I craved for?   Nuh.



Did it give me just one outrageous opinion? Just a teeny weeny hint of how much David Browne loves the music of Sonic Youth more than the detail of their career trajectory?    Perhaps, but I don’t remember it.



David Browne is a man with a focus and no temper.

Am I just going to crank up some Sonic Youth, listen to it through my headphones and   not

write a review of this book?

  Well, yes, yes, no.






Artist: Justin Hampton

http://www.justinhampton.com/index.html



"Got a Foghorn and a Drum and a Hammer That’s Rockin’"

I can’t read music or play an instrument. I don’t understand the difference between open tunings and standard tunings.

So I’ll try to explain what I thought was happening in Sonic Youth’s music in the only way I can - with words (sorry if I get it wrong).

I assumed that an open tuning was just the guitar strung normally, but no chords were being shaped by fingers being placed on the frets.

Therefore, if the guitar was strummed, it would make no particular chord, so the music it created might be dissonant.

I read everywhere that the music of Sonic Youth was dissonant, sometimes just noise, and I assumed that this was the explanation.

But I was wrong.

An open tuning can be set so that without placing your fingers on any frets, you would play a chord when you strummed all of the open strings.

You are automatically within a chord or key.

This makes it relatively easier to create melodies within that key by using your fingers on the frets.

There is nothing intrinsically dissonant about this approach at all, although it’s possible to set up alternative tunings that just sound unusual or different from what we’re used to.

For me, just trying to understand this was important, because I didn’t regard Sonic Youth’s music as particularly un-melodic.

I detected melodies, light and shade, and I liked it.

Music is a relationship between notes. As Thelonious Monk (and/or Art Tatum) said, there are no bum notes.  All notes depend on how you resolve them, how they form a consonance with other notes.

I don’t mean that Sonic Youth are all consonance, just that they’re not all dissonance.

Their music creates a sense of pleasure, even when they utilise dissonance.





"Looking for a Ride to Your Secret Location"

A good example of what I [think I] mean is this live version of "Teenage Riot" from 2005 (the studio version dates from their 1988 album "Daydream Nation"):

  Sonic Youth - "Teenage Riot" (Live - Eurockéennes 2005)



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdeTQP...

This is the song from the start of my review. However, here is a second version:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x63v...

The first is the full version with an extended feedback instrumental at the end.

The second is just the song without the feedback. It seems to be better synchronized as well.

"Teenage Riot" is not regarded as typical of Sonic Youth’s music. It uses a traditional verse/chorus structure and lacks much of the feedback they normally use in their songs.

However, the extended version of this song has everything.

This version is so amazing, it confirms my suspicion that it is their equivalent of the Rolling Stones’ "Satisfaction" or the Velvet Underground’s "Sweet Jane".

It really is that good a song.

Just observe and enjoy:

• Lee in the left speaker, Thurston in the right (Jim O’Rourke on third guitar in there somewhere as well)

• Lee’s power chords at 1:15 and 1:20

• Steve driving the song the whole way through

• Kim’s frock strap slips off around 1:17

• Kim swaying at 1:30

• Jim O’Rourke on third guitar at 1:40 and 1:50

• Lee letting loose an amazing solo from 2:40 onwards

• Everybody letting loose from 3:53 onwards

• The feedback symphony that starts at 4:50 (in the longer version)

Tabs:

Here are some tabs for this song:

http://www.911tabs.com/link/?3609096

Thurston’s Church Kicker T-shirt:

Here's where you can get a t-shirt like the one Thurston was wearing in that show:

http://evolvefish.com/fish/product306...


Australian Tour:

I saw Sonic Youth play the Enmore Theatre in Sydney on the Australian leg of this tour.

On the flight back to Brisbane the following day, I realised that the band were on the same plane.

I introduced myself to Thurston and Kim, and said how much I enjoyed the show.

Thurston asked me for some advice about bookshops in Brisbane. He was looking for poetry, and I was able to send him off to two shops that might have what he was looking for.


IanHeartKim Dream #9:

Kim looked so hot and smart on the plane, and I promised to email her if they ever broke up as a couple.

Of course, I've been tempted to follow up on my promise, since I learned that they had actually parted company.

I'm older than Thurston, but younger than Kim. I don't know if this matters.

To be honest, I'm afraid I mightn't be brainy enough for her. No other woman has ever fallen for my intellect before, so why would she?

After a lot of cogitation and other big words, I drew a picture of Kim instead and I placed it in a prominent place in my Sonic Youth shrine.

In the meantime, I try to enhance my intellect by reading difficult novels and hanging around anybody on GoodReads who lives in Manhattan or maybe Brooklyn at a pinch (as long as they like Don DeLillo and/or Paul Auster and/or Siri Hustvedt).

I figure they must be really smart, if they can afford the rent.

I hope you like my drawing. You're the only one I've showed it to.

I'm not very good at fingers, but neither is Matt Groening.

The tits are all right (if you don't mind me paraphrasing Lisa Cholodenko).


 



Soundtrack Part II ("You're Perfect in the Way, a Perfect End Today")

OK, now, stop for a moment and watch and listen to this video:

  Sonic Youth - "Sugar Kane" (Live - Jools Holland Show '92)



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Hwbhd...

Another classic, also in the vein of "Sweet Jane".

Until finding the live version of "Teenage Riot" on YouTube, I probably would have said this was my favourite Sonic Youth song and possibly one of my top three songs of the nineties.

Lee plays guitar with Steve’s chopsticks at 3:25.

Yeah, OK, that’s dissonance.





Soundtrack Part III ("Time Takes Its Crazy Toll")

One more song for your listening pleasure:

  Sonic Youth - "Diamond Sea" (Live)



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7x8jpQ...

A more atmospheric use of feedback and effects on a seven minute live version of a song from their 1995 album, "Washing Machine".

The alternative studio versions were 19 and 25 minutes long.





"Everybody’s Sound is Round It"

Apart from their music, the most significant characteristics of Sonic Youth are their longevity and their influence (what David Browne calls their "senior statesman" role).

The band formed in 1981 and existed continuously until at least November, 2011, when Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon broke up their personal relationship, which was as old as the band itself (thirty years).

As at mid-2012, the band is on hiatus, although some members and fans are confident that they’ll reform and release new music within the foreseeable future.

Sonic Youth were a big influence on Kurt Cobain and Nirvana and were instrumental in getting them a deal with DGC Records (David Geffen Company Records) in 1990, only to see them eclipse their commercial success almost immediately with "Nevermind".

The band also kickstarted Beck’s career with Geffen.




"I Remember Our Youth, Our High Ideals"

Sonic Youth never enjoyed the popularity and commercial success of other bands that joined them under the label "alternative rock" in the early 1990’s.

They almost seemed to be too individualistic to be swept up in the wave that brought some bands a modicum of commercial success.

The band always seemed to be one generation older, one step ahead and one step to the left of their peer group.

It’s ironic that the subtitle of the book is "Sonic Youth and the Rise of the Alternative Nation".

There is no explanation of the term "Alternative Nation" in the book. How widely was it ever used on the street? Was it just a commercial label for a TV show about the music? Does it imply that there was a nation of indie fans within the USA? Why does it sound so restricted to America, instead of reaching out to Canada, the UK, Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand?

Whatever the merits of the term, if you didn’t know better, you would assume that Sonic Youth were part of the rise of this Alternative Nation.

However, within the body of the book, it soon becomes clear that the band stood part from the rise, and the rise occurred without them.

Their fortunes stood opposed to the rise of the other bands. They missed out.

They were in the slow lane and they were overtaken.


"You Can Buy Some More and More and More and More"

The book charts the decline in their record sales from a peak of around 300,000 to 70,000 copies by the time of "Rather Ripped".

Of the fans who bought "Dirty", only one in four would buy "Murray Street", "Sonic Nurse", "Rather Ripped" or "The Eternal".

When you speculate on their total record sales and the income they could have generated from sales, you have to question how a band of at least four members could survive financially in Manhattan.

It’s difficult to see how they could have generated enough revenue from playing live and selling merchandising to make a decent living.




"I Hope It Works Out My Way"

Within this financial context, the book has little to trumpet about the success of Sonic Youth.

The main sense of "accomplishment" is the simple fact that they [have] stayed together for so long, despite not making much money.

Most, if not all, other bands would have fallen apart from the financial pressures, especially once band members got married, bought a home and had kids who needed to be raised and educated.

This is the subject that needs to be examined, but isn’t.


"Everybody Wants to be Proud to Choose"

Sonic Youth formed in an era within popular culture when artistic integrity was valued and bands weren’t seen as commodities or brands within a market economy.

To accept an offer from a major label was to "sell out", an accusation that was made against Sonic Youth when they joined David Geffen’s label.

Ultimately, Sonic Youth fought for the right to make their music exactly the way they envisaged it for the whole of their career.

Unlike punk musicians before them, there was an expectation that they could make a living out of their creativity.

Unfortunately, as popular culture and commerce changed around Sonic Youth, fewer and fewer people cared enough about the music the band wanted to make to spend money on acquiring it.

To the extent that any popular culture is an act of communication, they communicated with less and less people.

I don’t want to suggest that they became egotistical or self-absorbed in the pursuit of their musical vision. However, one way or another, the band and their audience went separate ways.

They pushed the envelope and nobody was there to fill it full of cash and return it to the sender.

They asserted their integrity, they exercised their freedom, they made a choice, they were proud of their choice, but their financial return was commensurate with the limits of an audience of their own making.


"Hits Are For Squares"

The name of a recent compilation reveals their attitude to the concept of Hits:




Here is the "Hits Are For Squares" Press Release:

http://www.contactmusic.com/press/son...

Note which artists selected which tracks for the compilation.

Perhaps, Sonic Youth were less interested in the size of their audience than having the right audience.

However, by taking this approach, they took the risk that they might not have the right size audience.


"Where'd You Get Your Light, Your Smilin' Sugar Life?"

It’s arguable that nobody is out there making music like this anymore, that fans too have changed in what they are seeking, that they are less patient with labels like “Alternative Music” or “Alternative Nation” and the implied attempts to build sub-cultures around a taste or a genre.

If anything, fans, consumers, just see these terms as marketing labels.

Sonic Youth also came from a generation that was equally comfortable producing or consuming music, art, photography, film, literature, fashion. They were polymorphous in their interests.  They were true Renaissance men and women.

However, it’s questionable whether the marketing machine that attempts to drive sales of today’s cultural commodities can handle such polymorphism, at least until, like Lady Gaga, an artist reaches a pinnacle of success that allows them to diversify.

The only hope is that this type of independent artist will find an audience intuitively on the internet.

David Browne hints, without actually saying it, that Sonic Youth are some kind of role model for a different way of making music.

Part of me wants to agree with him, but then part of me believes that he is being too sentimental.

Because music is such a physically demanding activity (unlike for example writing), there is a real risk that being in a band will continue to be something that people do in their youth and end up moving on to a “real job”.

Only the very lucky (not necessarily the very talented) will make enough money from their creativity to sustain a lifestyle for the rest of their lives.

Most, if they’re any good at all, will shine brightly for a moment in time, or perhaps a few moments, but few will enjoy a "smilin’ sugar life".

I’m just grateful that Sonic Youth shone so brightly for as long as they did, and that the best minds of my generation were not destroyed by madness (or drugs).





"You're Perfect in the Way, a Perfect End Today"

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Troy DeNuthe's World of Ice Cubes by Troy DeNuthe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Introduction

This review has been pieced together from notes written by my friend and sometime accomplice Clem de Menthe before he went into hiding with other members of Wikisucks in Icequador.

As far as I can tell, once he had written them down on a sheet of lined A4 paper, he chewed them, until they were a soggy mess.

He then turned them into ice cubes, using Troy DeNuthe’s special formula, where you half-fill an ice cube tray with water, freeze it, insert the foreign object (in this case, the soggy mass) and then pour more water on top, before freezing the full tray.

He then sent me a coded text revealing that he had hidden his review in his fridge.

I placed the ice cubes in a glass of rum and coke. I had to drink it really quickly, so that the ice didn’t melt too much and expose the paper pulp to the corrosive rum and coke mix.

Luckily, some of the ice did melt in my drink, so it didn’t take me long to locate the paper, spread it out on my workbench, separate the work using my clinical tweezers, recognise the pattern of his words, expose it to a lamp and dry Clem’s review.

I’m still not sure I got everything in the right order, but I think you’ll agree with me that his thoughts were worth preserving for posterity, if not necessarily in ice.


"Just the Tip of the Icecube" (by Clem de Menthe)

When I was reading Troy DeNuthe’s book, it suddenly dawned on me (the first of my Eureka moments) just how poor is our knowledge of ice cubes.

So I looked up the Wikipedia entry for “ice cube”.

Maybe I should have looked up the plural “ice cubes”, because the first page I got was the American rapper. (I just searched “ice cubes” now and it took me to the right “ice cube” entry straight away.)

This sort of thing has happened to me before, so I knew that if I wanted more, I had to click on the link for “ice cube (disambiguation)” (BTW, I’ve never seen or heard the word “disambiguation” used outside Wikipedia. Maybe I mix in the wrong circles?).

Another Eureka moment, for there waiting for me were three alternative meanings, one of which was “a chunk of frozen water in the shape of a cube”.

So I looked it up and guess what? There were less than 1,000 words on this topic.

Pathetic, isn’t it?

I mean, we expect Wiki to contain everything there is to know about everything, but if they can’t get “ice cubes” right, what does that say about the authority of the rest of Wikipedia?

What does this say about the very roots of epistemology in the twenty-first century?

So, Eureka moment three: just a few minutes spent in the clutches of "Troy DeNuthe's World of Ice Cubes" is enough to establish that Troy DeNuthe knows far more about ice cubes than the entire Wiki community, which I assume is the whole world (apart from Troy).

We cannot begin to tap the resource that is human knowledge, until we can extract from men and women like Troy DeNuthe the detailed knowledge of their individual areas of expertise.

Until we do this, all the Encyclopedias and Wikipedias strike me as a fraud on the masses. They’re a farce, a joke. A travesty of wisdom, a mockery of knowledge, a caricature of erudition.

This intellectual sloth cuts no ice with me.

Wikipedia is just scratching the surface, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. I want to know what’s beneath the surface. What are they hiding from us? Is this some epistemological conspiracy? Who’s behind it all? Is it the I.C.I.A?

Anyway, this is a quick snapshot of the world that Troy DeNuthe rides on into on his small but perfectly formed steed of a book, “Troy DeNuthe’s World of Ice Cubes”.

A thousand words on ice are not enough, they do not suffice for a man like Troy, someone whose greatest passion is to [ed: this part was a bit difficult to read, but I think he wrote “suck ice”].

Wiki might give us the berg, but Troy gives us the cube. The full cube. Indeed, but for some private suggestions I propose to draw to his attention, the whole kit and caboodle.

Forget about Wikileaks. This Wiki sucks, and Troy is just the man to achieve its true potential. A man of enormous [ed: perspacicity?], he is the Julian Iceage of the epistemological liberation movement.

His work does not purport to be exhaustive. It’s just a preliminary building block, an ice block that is content to form the base of an igloo, a shoulder upon which giants of ice can stand (to quote the English band, Oasice).

No doubt, there is more that Troy personally can impart in further volumes, and I propose to contact him with a modest proposal.

However, hopefully, in “The World of Ice Cubes”, he was just [ed: sorry, I think Clem did actually say “breaking the ice”].

Ladies and gentlemen, we cannot tolerate this epistemological conspiracy any longer.

We must entice Troy DeNuthe from his hiding place, encourage him to return to the source of this slow-moving glacier of insight, arm himself with an ice pick and deal a fatal blow to the head of the icebergoisie who sit by complacently while the rest of us endure injust-ice.

Ladies and gentlemen, we must escape the darkness of our cubicles and embrace the ice cubes of enlightenment.


"How to Improve Your Ice Sight Without Glasses: A Proposal" by Clem De Menthe

The following notes appear to be suggestions for a proposed collaboration between Clem and Troy on a second volume of “The World of Ice Cubes”:

Why ice cubes, not ice balls?

Why are they the size that they are? Not bigger? Not smaller?

Can you freeze hot water faster than cold water?

Who invented the ice cube tray?

What is the best size of ice cube tray?

What are the relative merits of imitation ice cubes?

I swallowed an ice cube, will I die?

Would an ice cube melt in enough time for me to be able to breathe?


"Haiku DeNuthe (Ice Cubey Dooby Do)" by Clem De Menthe

Troy, beat exemplar,
Zen master of frozen ice
And cubic beauty.


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The Blindfold by Siri Hustvedt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In Her Own Write

To paraphrase a less hyperbolic comment by David Foster Wallace, the point of this review is that “The Blindfold” is an extraordinary novel.

DFW described it as a “really good book” that is “clearly a feminist reworking of some of the central themes of [Don] DeLillo and his literary compadre, Paul Auster.”

I don’t think this does justice to what Siri Hustvedt achieved in her own right. Nor does the following question from a “reader” on amazon.com:

"Would this book have been published at all, had Siri Hustvedt not been married to Paul Auster, another completely overrated author?"

As Iris Vegan (Hustvedt’s protagonist) might have said, "Stuff it up your ass."

Unrequited Dedication?

While Hustvedt was writing “The Blindfold” in 1992, Auster was writing “Leviathan”.

She dedicated her work to her husband, while he dedicated his to DeLillo (who later reciprocated by dedicating “Cosmopolis” to Auster in an apparent act of bro-love).

However, Auster included the character Iris Vegan in “Leviathan”. How meta-dedicated is that!

First Things First (But Not Necessarily In That Order)

“The Blindfold” is divided into four untitled sections of quite different lengths. By the time I’d got to the beginning of the third section, I was starting to wonder whether there was any relationship between them and whether the book would have been better called a collection of short stories.

Was the fact that Iris Vegan was in each section enough to constitute a novel?

However, I soon realised that this was indeed a tightly plotted novel where every intricate detail was very precisely described and located, like objects in a museum or art gallery.

To paraphrase Iris, Hustvedt is a one-woman performance team, a juggler who works with objects.

She moves the objects around, on the shelf or in the air or on the canvas.

It doesn’t matter when or where we start looking. The point is to observe them all.

Only once we have followed one entire sequence do we start to get an idea of the whole.

Once you’ve detected the trend, you discover that you are contained or enclosed in a drama that intensifies with every word and that ultimately you don’t want to stop.

Student Affairs

The novel maps the course of a number of relationships that Iris forms over the course of three years, while she is a postgraduate English student at Columbia University.

During the course of her studies, she develops headaches and suffers migraine auras.

We never find out whether her affliction is the result of a physiological condition or the emotional stress that she undergoes.

However, migraine auras can result in a disturbance of the patient’s sense of time. In the words of an actual patient, “The feelings of a pre-migraine aura are definitely one of 'otherness', with...temporal, aural and visual disturbances.”

While the events are recounted by Iris in the first person eight years after they occurred, her condition allows Hustvedt to mess with time and the sequence in which events occur.

It also raises the question of whether Iris is an unreliable narrator.

For the first half of the novel, I was quite prepared for some tragic turn of events from a medical point of view.

However, after a while I felt that Iris was quite normal, if a little intense, in the manner of a highly intelligent student preoccupied with her self and her role in the world (although the same could be said of a male).

Before I move on, I want to dispense with one issue that threatens the appreciation of the novel as a whole.

One of the relationships is with a college professor who is in his early 50’s. While Iris is 22 at the time and not a child, I assume that this relationship would offend the university’s sexual misconduct policies.

The relationship is consensual and one which Iris consciously or unconsciously seeks almost from their first handshake.

The professor displays reluctance in initiating the relationship and ultimately cannot handle the personal and professional guilt that threatens the future of the relationship. He commits an act that in most cases would warrant someone terminating the relationship, even though Iris understands the psychological cause of the act and is prepared to forgive him for it.

Because Iris herself does not make any adverse comment on the propriety of the relationship, I don’t propose to comment on it adversely, especially because it seems to me (as a male of a similar age) to contribute to her growth as a person in the novel.

Chronology

Once you’ve finished the novel, it really is quite time-consuming to try and work out the linear chronology.

If you can be bothered, it serves mainly to enhance your appreciation of Hustvedt’s skills as a story-teller.

The timeline as presented is actually one that makes sense organically in the development of the themes of the novel.

We witness the growth of Iris’ self in a logical, analytical manner, even if the timing is manipulated.

Equally importantly, it builds to a climax which happens to coincide with the most recent and most important of the events in the narrative.

Because the story concerns Iris’ psyche, it makes sense that the events are presented in this sequence, as if they are part of a professional character assessment or diagnosis.

The Development of Female Identity

In a way, the novel can be seen as a casebook on the development of female identity as illustrated by the example of one woman.

As a male surrounded by one wife and two daughters, I’ve lost the ability to judge whether the casebook is representative of women at large.

However, if either of our daughters experienced relationship problems in maturity, I would point them in the direction of the novel if advice by first their mother, then me or a professional proved inadequate.

It really is that insightful, at least in my male eyes.

An Eye on Your Own Identity

What appealed most to me about the novel was the way in which it explored the role of looking and seeing in the relationship, not just between the sexes, but between any two people, or one person or subject (on the one hand) and an object (on the other hand).

The very process of perception is described as if it were a more dynamic verb or action. How someone looks (actively) or how someone looks (passively) is just as important as what they ‘do” in some other sense.

The eyes are indeed the window to the soul, and this is very much a novel about the soul, the essence of Iris Vegan.

It’s no coincidence that Iris is a word that describes part of the structure of the eye, nor that it is the reverse of the first name of the book’s author.

While there is a normal amount of dialogue, so much of the novel’s message is revealed by the way people look and see.

However, equally importantly, Hustvedt is concerned with the psychoanalytical nature of “the gaze”, not just how a male gazes at a female, but how a female gazes at a male.

Without reading like a textbook, the novel explores the type of gaze described by Lacan.

The gaze is not just the process of looking, seeing and perceiving.

It describes the relationship between subject and object.

The subject can desire the object, he can aspire to possess and control the object, to make her or it a possession or a chattel.

Conversely, the object can possess a power over the subject, especially when the object is aware that she is being gazed at.

The object can capture or enchant the subject.

Either way, there can be a power relationship between subject and object, particularly in the sexual context.

It’s interesting that Hustvedt uses the concept relatively even-handedly, even though her principal interest is Iris.

On the novel’s third page, Iris remarks, “Without any apparent reserve, he looked at me, taking in my whole body with his gaze.”

Note that the act of looking involves a taking of something, the body, in fact.

Yet, only a few sentences before, Iris “looked at the skin of his neck”.

Midway through the novel, when she first meets Professor Rose, “I stared at him and he continued to gaze at me. This went on for maybe half a minute.”

The relationship at the heart of the novel starts with a stare and a gaze.

Within a few pages, the sexuality at the root of the gaze is made even more explicit:

"He gazed at me and pressed his index finger into the hollow beneath his cheekbone. Then he nodded. It was the nod that unraveled me, with its suggestion of penetration, almost telepathy. I looked back at him and felt my jaw relax, my lips part. Who are you? I thought. He took in my whole face with a leisure that astounded me. We looked at each other for too long, and the impropriety made me tremble."

The sentence is rattled off, almost innocuously, as if the word “penetration” relates to Iris’ mind, yet the reader can’t help but infer physical sexual penetration as well.

As with the first example, the subject “takes” something (or some thing), this time the object’s face.

The object is not just the thing looked at, but the thing possessed, as if it is a material object.

The gaze can possess both the body and the psyche of the object.

I’m Touched by Your Presence, Dear

Hustvedt uses the gaze as a foundation for a more palpable or tangible relationship.

Just as characters gaze at each other, they touch one another.

Valuable items remain boxed up, “to keep them untouched by the here and now.”

While sitting at a bar, Iris’ knee “grazes” a gun in a policeman’s holster. (Note the rhyme.)

Iris "felt Tim beside me, the sleeve of his coat touching mine," the inanimate object almost an extension or projection of the animate self.

At one point, the art critic (known only as) Paris promises he’ll "be in touch"; at another, the photographer George acknowledges a comment by Iris with the rejoinder, "Touche."

More importantly, sexual encounters are described in terms of their sensual appeal:

"Their intense wishes made me claustrophobic. They were always breathing on me, pulling, tugging, even begging for some mysterious gift they thought I could give them. But I didn’t really have it – the thing they wanted. I know they dreamed of sexual triumph, of some erotic cataclysm that would erase their need, and I know that by eluding them I became more and more a creature of their hopes, a vaporous being with blond hair and blue eyes. They weren’t to blame. Distortion is part of desire. We always change the things we want."

Note how desire sometimes involves distortion, elusion feeds illusion.

Tell Me, Tell Me, Tell Me, Do

Within relationships, Hustvedt also explores the significance of silence and telling and revelation.

Her longest relationship is with Stephen, who is carrying a copy of "The Portable Nietzsche", when she first sees him.

Stephen maintained a reserve in their relationship. Secrecy undermines their intimacy:

"Stephen was secretive. He enjoyed withholding information…I should have known that he was lost to me from the very beginning, but his body was magic then, and it drove me on. One look at his neck, his hands, his mouth, brought on a shudder of sexual memory, a pleasure that became a torment, because Stephen rationed his body..."

His explanation of himself is quite Nietzchean:

"I’m telling you what I can’t bear is the ordinary. I don’t want to bore myself, to sink into the pedestrian ways of other people – heart to heart talks, petty confessions, relationships of habit, not passion. I see those people all around me, and I detest them, so I have to be divorced from myself in order to keep from sliding into a life I find nauseating. It’s a matter of appearances, but surfaces are underestimated. The veneer becomes the thing. I rarely distinguish the man in the movie from the spectator anymore."

Stephen’s attempts to elude intimacy end up ludicrous. They are not just self-delusion, they delude others such as Iris as well.

In contrast, the ability to confide in George creates a confidence in their relationship, at least in the short-term:

"George inspired telling. He was so easy in his manner, so kind and understanding, it was hard not to confide in him. But there was something else, too, something more important. George had a way of talking to me as if he knew me better than I knew myself, and in George this presumption was a kind of wizardry that turned loose thoughts and memories I had never spoken of to anyone before."

This is a relationship that is not consummated physically, although George “takes” a photo of Iris that is regarded as a study in eroticism, as if he had captured her naked.

George regards the photo as “extraordinary”, while Iris regards it as “an object of regret”.

Having taken it, the photo satiates George. In his eyes, “It’s all there…everything I want.” He rebuffs Iris’ one advance:

"I looked at George. He grinned. He was sitting on the floor with his camera in his lap. I knelt down and crawled toward him, looking at his lean arms and beautiful mouth. I lifted my right arm and extended my hand toward his face, but something in his expression stopped me. I have what I want, it seemed to say. Don’t come any closer. I dropped my arm and sat back, still breathing hard."

Iris imagines George "stealing photographs in the darkness, his flash igniting the startled faces of those caught in an act they wanted to keep secret – a kiss or a fight or an illicit transaction – and then I saw George run from the spot like a burglar."

Not just does George take photos, he steals them from the psyche of the object.

Notes from Underground

While George seems to thrive in the darkness, Iris has already had an experience of life in the demimonde or netherworld.

After the rape of a resident of her apartment building, she starts dressing as a man in a suit in order to go to and from her night jobs.

"It wasn’t so much that I looked like a man but that the clothes created an image of sexual doubt. With no makeup and my hair hidden beneath a fedora, I seemed to be either a masculine woman or an effeminate man..."

At a crucial moment in the development of her sexual identity, she is able to experiment with a male persona.

People cease to look or gaze at her as a sexual object. She evades men, by impersonating a man. She removes men from the picture, by removing herself as woman from the picture.

Iris neuters herself, firstly as an act of self-defence, secondly as a stepping stone to personal and sexual confidence.

While inhabiting this world, a world that reminded me of Dostoyevsky’s “Notes from the Underground” or Herman Hesse’s “Steppenwolf” (including the Magic Theatre), Iris is poverty-stricken, starving, hallucinating, bordering on the hysterical (in Freudian terms).

Fortunately, her experience starts with a transgression of sorts and ends up as a transition,a journey, an Odyssey that prepares her for her next relationship with Michael (Professor Rose).


Giorgione’s “The Tempest”

Loving You the Way You Want

Hustvedt is also fascinated by the nature of desire.

In some people, as we have already seen, it represents the lack of something, a want, a need, an absence, an emptiness, a [black] hole that the subject attempts to fill with the object.

Ironically, when Iris doesn’t share the desire, she finds that the subject’s desire is even greater:

"Men I cared nothing about called me…on them my indifference worked like an aphrodisiac. Because I didn’t want anything..."

On the other hand, when she suggests that Stephen has never loved her, he responds:

"I’ve always loved you…I just don’t love you the way you want."

Yet again, Hustvedt has a poet’s eye for both the multiple meanings of words and their resemblance to other words.

You have to want, to love and be loved; you have to want to be loved; and you have to be loved the way you want!

When Iris experiences love with Michael, there is a different want, a new emptiness, a fear that they will lose each other, a desire that things stay the same, even though the truth is that they can’t.

The risk is that this emptiness will become an evil, a source of cruelty and destructiveness, something that will bring about the end of their relationship.

Walking the Last Stretch Blindfolded

Just as the novel explores looking and seeing, it addresses blindness.

With Iris’ migraine auras, she experiences black spots, blindness that starts with a hole and ultimately blacks out the whole, not just of the object, but the subject.

"Only later was I able to tell myself that I had suffered a migraine aura. The following months were a time when the everyday became precarious. At any moment an ordinary thing, a table or chair, a face or hand, might disappear, and with the blindness came a feeling of that I was no longer whole. I had put myself back together and now my body was failing me."

The negative connotation of blindness is the inability to look or see, or even to gaze.

Paradoxically, the blindfold incident in the novel offers a positive connotation to blindness.

Michael gives Iris a scarf. As they walk along the familiar streetscape back to her apartment, her confidence in her route leads her to tie the scarf around her eyes. In a scene that reminded me of the film “Trust”, she voluntarily embraces blindness. She must trust herself and/or Michael in order to get home safely.

This key metaphor is pregnant with connotations:

"He kissed me, and it was good not to see him. He could have been any man. The anonymity was his and mine. Like a child, I felt that blindness made me disappear, or at least made the boundaries of my body unstable. One of us gasped. I didn’t know who it was, and this confusion made my heart pound."

Despite the danger of her predicament, she did not want anything. She did not want a particular person, a particular man, for what they could give her. She could not look, she could not desire, she could not gaze, she could not judge beauty, she could not detect an object, but equally she could not be a subject.

She had lost her sense of self, at least her extreme self-consciousness. Her self had disappeared. It had become one with her surroundings, including Michael. That one, the “one of us”, gasped. She had everything, because she saw and needed nothing. Because she could not see, the two of them had become invisible and anonymous in her own mind (even if Michael could still see and gaze at her).

I wonder whether there is a hint of Zen “non-attachment” in this scene.

Like a Bat Out of Hell

The novel does not end with the blindfold scene, which would have been a convenient romantic denouement.

Instead, it sees Iris running away from the touch of the tiny, almost effeminate art critic Paris, to the IRT.

He sees Iris as some kind of Odysseus to his Penelope, whether or not he knows that she was treated for her migraines at Mount Olympus Hospital.

What should we infer from the ending?

Did Iris simply elude the Judgment of Paris?

A pessimist might conclude that Iris has returned to the darkness of the Underground.

An optimist might hope that she has finally put the past behind her and is ready for the next stage of her journey as a woman who has constructed a female identity she can be proud of, and who has something to offer other women.




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