This is truly terrifying...

Rumi is one of the world's most beloved poets, and his influence can be seen in many different aspects of culture. His poetry has been translated into numerous languages and his work continues to inspire new generations of readers. Rumi's message of love and tolerance has resonated with people from all walks of life, making him one of the most important literary figures of our time. It is not surprising that Rumi's influence can also be seen in the works of one of the world's most famous writers, William Shakespeare. Many scholars believe that Shakespeare was influenced by Rumi's poetry when he wrote his plays, and it is easy to see parallels between the two authors. Both Shakespeare and Rumi explore universal themes of love, loss, and humanity in their work, and both use beautiful language to bring these themes to life. It is clear that Rumi has had a lasting impact on literature and culture, and his influence will continue to be felt for centuries to come.

Mr. Risk (source: The League of Utter
Disaster, Chaos, and Insanity Wiki)

Global politics are a hotbed of Shakespearean drama, with plenty of tragedy, comedy, and even a little bit of history thrown in for good measure. In particular, the works of Shakespeare have had a profound influence on modern day culture, with his stories and characters providing endlessly fertile ground for debate, analysis, and reinterpretation. Even those who are not fans of the Bard can find themselves unwittingly caught up in his web, as he has been responsible for introducing countless phrases and concepts into the English language that are now commonplace. Whether we love him or hate him, there is no denying that Shakespeare continues to exert a powerful hold over our culture hundreds of years after his death.

The world would be a very different place without the poet Rumi. His poetry has inspired people for centuries and his words continue to resonate with us today. Without Rumi, the world would be missing out on one of its most important voices.

I didn't write this brief essay above,

nor did I plagiarize it.  Instead, I invoked its creation in a matter of a couple minutes by typing a few instructions into a computer program.  Those instructions were:

1. Write a persuasive statement about the cultural influence of a literary figure.

2. Write a speculative statement about Rumi's influence on Shakespeare. 

3. Write an emphatic statement about the current state of global politics and Shakespeare.

4. Write a speculative statement about how Shakespeare has influenced todays culture. 

5. Write a conclusion paragraph about how the modern world would be very different if not for the poet Rumi. 

Now, the text above is fairly banal, and it didn't exactly come out like I wanted it to - I didn't tweak it at all (though, I did attempt a couple of instructions that rendered no results in the program - I think because of logic problems).

But, I was able to create it all less than 10 minutes after first learning about GPT-3 as something that exists, then googling it, finding one online and signing up for a free trial, reviewing a brief tutorial, coming up with some general sense of what I wanted created, and starting to test out these instructions.

I would also add, that the brief essay on Rumi and Shakespeare at the top is not dissimilar in quality, depth, and style to the average freshman composition student I was teaching at UW-M from 2007 - 2013 (although the content is of course much different, as I don't expect most of those students know who Rumi is, though most have probably heard of Shakespeare).

A couple of months ago, I started a post (which I haven't finished yet!) called, "I must say I'm worried...", and it hit a lot of the same notes as this Atlantic article from last week (anticipatory plagiarism has always been a problem for me) about our present state of mind and implications for the near future.  America is on a bend and trend toward something, I'm afraid, is going to be quite unfortunate. 

Best case scenario, is that it is a momentary setback which leads us to something much greater (see ca. 2024), but more likely it's not, and we will be finding out that Hannah Arendt was right, but not right enough in her Report on the Banality of Evil.  It's the banality itself that is evil - as in a wholly negative force in the world and a danger.  Take care to keep it interesting out there, folks - embrace the unexpected and unfamiliar.  Be weird.  Do good.  Be better.

mind the gaps...

I. Preamble -

This isn't a review - rather an overall critical analysis of ueber-narrative.  I've recently been on a mission to watch the Star Wars oeuvre in chronological order (dedicated readers {I presume they will be there in future, as they aren't currently turning out in significant numbers} will note that I'm also currently on the same project in the Star Trek universe).

I know Disney and J.J. Abrams own my viewership soul, but I frakking love filling in the gaps of mythologies.  I am eager to see the story of the new episodes - VII & VIII - but watching Episode III followed by Rogue One and then A New Hope is fascinating and fulfilling.  The fun fairy tale that I knew as a kid (still has whiny little Luke) has become a robust narrative. 

I'm equally (or perhaps more) excited for the start of the new Star Trek: Discovery series starting this fall, which will bridge the end of Enterprise to the days of ST: TOS (by way of the lost ship at the center of the plot of Star Trek Beyond).

Walter Benjamin has a concept called Jetztzeit (now-time), which he also calls messianic-time. The simplest framing of this concept for me is using the latter term, and imagining the potentiality of all times (of each moment) to contain salvation (or revolution, or clarity).  This concept is fundamental in Benjamin's oeuvre, and is related I think to the concept of hyper-modernity (or supermodernity), which is the idea of the whole being explained or understood or accounted for in every part. This is also a common theme for Benjamin, and in many ways his Arcades Project is the prototypical work of supermodernity.

I have my own (as yet unnamed) theory of reality and being and narrative. The line of thinking goes something like this: the act of literary creation is, in fact, an instance of literal creation. By imagining a thing (or perhaps by writing it down or filming it or publishing it,,, I'm not too clear on all of the specifics), that thing is created in reality. It is evoked. The actuality of the thing is explained scientifically (I use this word loosely) by multiple worlds / realities theory - the idea that every choice or possible outcome exists in parallel realities.

II. Messianic Time / Messianic Space -

The Arcades Project is Benjamin's masterwork.  It is a collection of quotes and fragments focused on a series of subjects relating to the Paris Arcades, which Benjamin works through.  Benjamin is sitting in the mid-20th Century looking back at the 19th Century for meaning.  The work is a strong candidate for bibliomancy; a lot of obscure passages that can be interpreted for a lot of situations. 



III. Container Story

We see ourselves as occupying 'the real' world, and the narratives we create are a part of our world.  The Chronicles of Amber has another, different starting place (actually 2, Amber and the Courts of Chaos), but contains the same conclusion, that there is a real space, which begets all else.

The Dark Tower is


IV. Narratives of scale -

Star Trek is the future narrative of a world much like ours.  Star Wars claims to be in the distant past, far away.  In time, both of these narratives might be found to be in the same universe (that's right, I'm loosely proposing that Wesley Crusher is the next last Jedi).

This weekend, The Dark Tower is being released in cinemas across the country - another new chapter in a long-established narrative.  The tag line on early images teasing the new movie was "The Last Time Around...". 

The narrative of the film (mild-spoiler alert warning) is in some ways an odd reformulation of Stephen King's first novel of the series - The Gunslinger -, but it's a bit hard to recognize as such.  In the novel, Jake Chambers is torn from his native New York (although we don't see this at this point in the series) and pulled into Mid-World.

This new iteration of a decades old story feels a bit out of synch when watched on its own.  Stephen King's Dark Tower universe is a narrative that contains all other narratives - all other realities in fact.  As a reader, familiar with the scope and scale of the Dark Tower universes, the new film feels like a sprinting tour of the whole series of novels.  At the same time, it's a reset button in which Jake Chambers saves Roland's quest, which has been lost to the pursuit of revenge.  The movie finds Roland having forgotten the face of his father.



VI. All of us are 'one of the most important figures' in our own universes, our own narratives


Much like Benjamin's "Capitalism as Religion", I intend this entry to be something robust and interesting... but I want to post (it's been a while!), so there may be a while before the overall outline gets filled in.

Playing it cool

I read back to back short stories about murder after finishing the playlist style novel, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry. (It occurs to me that this is my second "dark double feature" on my Last Fives in recent weeks). The stories both approach the crime quite matter of factly, but the perpatrators in each story could not be more different in their respective approaches. I suppose it comes down to their relationship to the crime itself in some ways.

In "Lamb to the Slaughter", the 6-months-pregnant wife has just been told - something - by her husband. At best or worst she is told by her husband that he wants a divorce or that there is someone else for whom he is leaving her.  It's hard to say which of those is best or worse, "I'm leaving you because there's someone else" versus "I'm leaving you because you".

"Tell-Tale Heart" on the other hand features a murder which is incited by the gaze or perhaps just the eye of an old man and its effect on a madman. The murderer even refuses to kill the man he has decided to end for an entire week because the old man doesn't open his offending eye until the 8th night. 

If I had to summarize the theme of this particular double feature it would be to say that the stories are about guilt.  Poe's narrator clearly suffers the guilt of his crime, whereas the husband in Dahl's story could be said to 'suffer the guilt of his own crime', at the hands of his soon-to-be abandoned wife.   

*  *  *          

...(picking up the thread, some time later)

Twain's 'most likely to be assigned to a 5th Grade Reading class' of a short story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" is well worth the sitting, if you've not read it before.  It's a story about a foolish showman getting his comeuppance.  And the Fikry chapter that shares the Twain story's title is much the same.  Although not so public, the clown of this chapter also gets outed.

The whole novel works to rhyme the themes of each

Calm Before Die Sturm

I grew up in a small town, and went away to college in a slightly larger small town.  Since that time, I've mostly inhabited cities - mostly what would be described as small cities, but all vast metropolises to me - and I wonder sometimes what I am missing sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss


*   *   *

November 8, 2017
Returning to this fragment from a year ago, I think i know what i was thinking about when i premised this post.

It's been


*  *  * 

February 2020
Well, shit - it's now New Hampshire primaries night in 2020.  I have no idea what this post was originally going to be about, but the timestamp tells me that i had only just recently learned that #donaldJtrump had won the presidency of the united states.  I remember, i was staying up, and Brooke had gone to bed. 

I told her late that night, but it wasn't until early the next morning when she had woken up, and i told her that a sex criminal had been elected...

Sturm und Drang is a noble literary tradition from around 250 years ago (i think that's what the title was thinking about)...  As i read the first posting from 2016, i think what i was wondering was why my fellow cosmopolitans so fundamentally misunderstood the appeal of Donald Trump.

Re-Reading Epic

I'm less (not fewer) than 200 pages from the end of Stephen King's The Dark Tower series, and have come to the point where I find alternative activities (like blogging!) to curtail my progress. To savor and let it last a while longer.

I've been here before, but everything I read is more, "oh, yeah, that's right…" rather than deeply familiar. Many of the narrative turns and wrinkles have been complete surprises to me this time around.

Source: newsroom.unl.edu

I've also been here before regarding this line of thinking. In early 2015, I finished Roger Zelzny's The Chronicles of Amber (http://bit.ly/rnJ-reRead) and while it was the first time I finished* that particular epic, I was reminded then of the time I finished re-reading Lord of the Rings, and even wrote a poem about the experience for a college creative writing course. 

(If ever I am able to locate said poem, I'll post it here. Not because it is necessarily worthy of consideration {I am a piss poor poet, and I know it}, rather perhaps procuring this particular piece has the potential to portend a perpetual path of pontification - probing which probably produces pitiful results - but perhaps it's possible to produce a pattern of thought on my pontifical path.)

Re-reading beloved epic works has a certain melancholy joy to it, because it harkens back to the first time, but also forebodes - I may well never tread here again.  You tend to savor, and if you do come back to these parts again, know that you'll be looking back to now - so make it something worth looking back on. 

*Zelazny wrote a series of short stories, companion pieces to his Amber series, which I have, but have yet to read.  Allowing an epic to linger (or languish) by not quite finishing is a great pleasure, always having a little more ahead of you.  Personally, I currently haven't finished The Chronicles of Castle Brass (on of Moorcock's Eternal Champions Saga), The Chronicles of Narnia, Marvel's The Dark Tower comics (ongoing), The Walking Dead comics (ongoing), Token's Middle Earth writings (these are just the ones that I came up with off the top of my head - i'm sure there are many more).

On Eco

This morning I learned that we lost a great literary and philosophical mind with the passing of Umberto Eco at 84. 

I have long been a fan from afar of Eco's, never someone I would list as my favorite author, but formative in my early academic thinking, particularly his beautiful book On Ugliness, which is an embarrassment of richness of images and ideas on our relationship with ugly things (death, bodily functions, horror, etc.)

His loss is sad, but go forth and embrace all of his work and thinking...

I'm revisiting my favorite work this morning:

The work is a curation of passages from literary and social theory works alongside beautiful images from classical and modern art, architecture, and ephemera centered on a specific theme.  Eco adds editorial remarks in each section.

Of particular interest is the chapter on the Uncanny.  The thinking on that concept and in that chapter was fundamental in my academic thinking on Gunther von Hagens' BodyWorlds exhibition.  The artistic presentation of death is an exquisite example of Freud's and Eco's discussion of the concept of the Uncanny (unheimlich).  Presenting a thing that is, inherently, familiar (our own bodies) in a way that causes discomfort, uncertainty questioning what we know we know.

I highly recommend picking up a copy.  Go borrow it from your local library!

SFSE

In The Chronicles of Amber, characters eat, drink, sleep, and sex more narratively thank is typical in other epic fantasies I know (perhaps the Gunslinger is an exception to this this).

Gets me thinking about our own SFSE project - I think the intro, and part of the goal will be to outline be challenge in coupling (and ultimately procreating), where your natural inclinations (I'm hungry now, tired now, etc.) get alters and affected by the needs of others. 

We label this civilization, and my writing this would cause my partner to lambast the "selfish male tendencies in me".  I think, thought, that this is just another, subtler manifestation of Social Taylorism, and why hetero-normative coupling is good for capitalism and systems of control. 

The fantasy novel that depicts a hero wandering (alone or together), and eating when he/she is hungry, sleeping, etc. is a challeng e to this (but an escapist one)


*   *   *

February 2020
So, firstly, it seems clear that I was drunk while writing this...  But it still seems to make good sense to me, and I like it.

Shitting, Fucking, Sleeping, Eating (SFSE) is a book project i have proposed over the course of the past decade (several years still before this post).  I haven't worked on it enough, and felt it was a project that should be co-written by a large team.  It's a book about intimate living (in fact, i thought the title might be SFSE: A Guide to Intimate Living).  An advice book that ideally the wacky aunt would give to newlyweds, i imagined a PR blitz - moral outrage, anger at swears and a complication of what we think of as a "standard" life.

Unfortunately, our current era has become too profane, too crass, for this book to make a dent.  We are living in the obscenity not only of the Trump era, but the obscenity of massive wealth and middle class decimation.  But maybe - there is still something to be said for finding better and better ways to coexist, both in our individual homes and in the larger world...

On Reading and Re-reading

I am just shy of 100 pages from the end of The Chronicles of Amber, a ten-book epic fantasy series written by Roger Zelazny, primarily in the 1980s. It is with a mixture of anticipation and despair that I approach these final pages. The sad [contradistinction] of reading (of any consumption, really, but particularly the consumption of grand epics) is the joy of the ultimate unfolding mixed with the knowledge that you will soon be at an ending.

Endings are unpleasant things, even when they’re happy – because, of course, they represent the represent the only reliable stasis of the universe, change. Endings are manifestations of life writ literary – they are reminders of our own mortality. We all will end, and most of us are so terrified of the fact that we spend our lives distracting ourselves from the simple reality. Work, wealth, goals and ambition are just ways of organizing oneself away from [alabaster].

To come to the end of an epic is a unique misery, because you’re experiencing the pain from both sides, the finish of a massive creative act (e.g. writing Ulysses) and simultaneously the finish of a massive consumptive act (e.g. reading Remembrances of Things Past, or eating a meal at Old Country Buffet).

#   *   #   *  #

It's been a year and a half about, since I put this together originally...  I like the direction of the thinking, so will add it to the record (jss - 8 May 2016) 

On Tim

Reading through The Wind Through the Keyhole tonight - the story (within a story) of the brave boy, Tim, on a grand quest.  In terms of volume numbers, it means I'm more than half way through The Dark Tower series for another pass.  In terms of page numbers, I'm not so sure I'm there yet.

Before I'd tuned back in, I'd flipped on About Time, which I think is my new favorite terrible great movie from the folks at Working Title Pictures.  Man, they know terribly good movies (or goodly terribly movies).  In this latest mastersluice, a mild-mannered ginger named Tim, is told at a coming of age New Year's Day that he and the men-folk in his family are capable of autobiographic time travel.  Tim, being a Tim, uses this power to optimize his life and the life of those around him.

Tim is a noble name, with literary and historic pedigree.  I think timothy is some kind of grass.  Something understated and cool. 

I think there was probably a Timothy in the bible, and I'm quite sure there was a Saint Timothy, though I can't say what he helps folks out with. 

There's Tiny Tim - who may be no Little Nell - but certainly is one of the more obnoxious fictional characters in history... But he has such a good heart...

I can't think of a single villain named Tim (though when I asked google the same question, they introduced me to @timTheVillain twitter feed).  At the same time, I know of no super-heroes named Tim (maybe a alter ego) , no 'Great Men' who wear the name come immediately to mind. 

Instead, when Tim is a hero, he is an unexpected hero.  He's someone who rises from the everyday to perform the extraordinary.  Tim defies odds.  No one ever expects it to be Tim.

That I have a brother named Tim, of course, makes this a topic near to mind.  I'm not sure how well my theory holds for the non-fictional world.  Tim Curry, Tim Duncan, Tim Johnson, Tiny Tim (ukulele, not crutches)...  not sure what kind of conclusions to draw, but to paraphrase the Byrds:

A Tim to weep, and a Tim to laugh; a Tim to mourn, and a Tim to dance;
A Tim to cast away stones, and a Tim to gather stones together (useful when there's another Tim around casting them away); a Tim to embrace, and a Tim to refrain from embracing

Now all we need is a Tim to comment...

Echoes

We watched Smoke Signals this afternoon - must have been the first time in more than 10 years - and I was reminded what a truly great, and enjoyable movie it is.  I love the fuzziness of truth and lies in the film - Thomas tells stories and the response is almost invariably, "is that true?".

I've had a slow-boiling theory of the transience of truth (well before Colbert's 'truthiness' campaign, thank you very much), which a film like this (or my favorite on this theme, Stranger that Fiction).  I've always read poetry as a form of this borderland between fiction and reality.  I'm never as concerned with what is or isn't absolutely true as I am with what 'rings true', which, to my mind, is poetry's primary function.

Sherman Alexie has a great poem about Walt Whitman, which is a great response to Whitman's earlier "Song of Myself", which has another response verse by Allen Ginsberg, "A Supermarket in California", which is a great echo of the original.

Others have written this connection up more completely and thoughtfully, so I'll just point here and remember a great film and storyteller in brief.

Enjoy!

Terror and Horror

While re-reading I Am Legend, the great precursor novel to most modern zombie films and fiction by Richard Matheson, the following passage gave me pause:

"'It's horrible,' she said. 

He looked at her in surprise.  Horrible?  Wasn't that odd?  He hadn't thought that for years.  For him the word 'horror' had become obsolete.  A surfeiting of terror soon made terror a cliche.  To Robert Neville the situation merely existed as natural fact.  It had no adjectives."

It was not

*   *   * 

August 2018


This


*  *  *

May 2019

I was going to revisit this last year it seems - it's a concept that I am fond of.  The Matheson quote seems to conflate the two terms, and I think that was why I was interested in it.

I'm interested in what the difference between terror and horror in literature and film and art:

Terror - The literary fear.  A sublime experience of the darker sides of humanity.  An experience of something that scares us, but one which we value - that we take something away from and grow from.

Horror -  The gross out fear.  A scariness that (historically) is assigned no redeeming value.  A 'cheap thrill' of a scary text.  An exploitation of human drives, appealing to the lowest common denominator.

We might think of the distinction of these two as the difference between Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft.  M. Night Shylaman's oeuvre versus George Romero's zombie movies.

In my former academic life, I was much interested in that lower form of existence and what we might learn about ourselves by looking carefully at it.  I took a course called "Art History and the Value of Being Disturbed" and found myself an outsider who some of the others in the class.  They wanted to look at artists like Maplethorpe, Serrano and Ofili and claim disturbance from something that aligned strongly with their political views.  I was looking at Eduardo Kac and Brakhage's Pittsburgh Trilogy and Bodyworlds and trying to look straight at things that I'd rather not.

Dork Philosophy

Let’s imagine that multiple worlds theory is a serious scientific phenomenon. There are plenty of pseudo-scientific and somewhat scientific debates to at least think about it, but of course, being a humanist, I will concern myself primarily with the Star Trek research data.

Source: eng.wikipedia.org

The fundamental question at hand has to do with choices. My dork philosophical question is this: in a multiverse full of every possibility of every choice in every life, how can deciding to do one thing versus another make any difference whatsoever? What I mean by that is, with every given choice that we make, theoretically, we create an alternative (or a thousand alternatives – my first critique of my student’s work is about showing ‘both sides’, but never considering why there are only two). What that must mean, then is that each decision you might make in a given situation has already been made, so whichever one you happen to be a part of, is just one of many.

I think this is in fact what is so troubling (and comforting) about Star Trek.  It is the lack of individuality, of ego, that makes humanity (or at least Roddenberry humanity) great. The sense of history that Star Trek series (and films) exude, are universal. Universal history is, in fact, an important piece of my dissertation work. Whether we can believe that a historical truth (perhaps not a psychological truth or philosophical one) can be applied across times. That is, when we make a movie like Lincoln, or Django Unchained, and we absolutely must leave historical authenticity aside, whether we can still say something about our own existence, while at the same time trying to better understand their own.

When we make history, I don’t think our efforts are that different from when we make science fiction. We extrapolate, from the only place that we can (the present), and try to imagine what another place and time might be like. Even when not separated by the caverns of history, people do this same thing with geography. In 1811, shortly before he decided to enact a suicide pact with his lover (insert name here), Kleist wrote "Die Verlobung in St. Domingo". The story tries to imagine what Haiti is like, by a young German Romantic who has never been to war and never been to the Americas.

But somehow Kleist captures it. He does understand what that world is like. It is something different from when he writes about Chile. In "Erdbeben in Chile" the world is very much like Europe. A city, devastated by natural disaster who looks for someone to blame, so they choose a young couple in love who may or may not have produced a baby (who is in fact he legitimate baby of someone who was crushed by a wall or some such). In his story about Haiti, however, Kleist minimizes the drama and makes the romance a background piece. The two unlikely lovers (a white Swiss soldier and a mulatto adopted daughter of a black slaver) finagle their way into love and only become a part of the story once they've succeeded (in betrothal at least).

Kafka-ish

Kafka's "Auf der Galerie" is, all told, two sentences long.

It is theoretically possible to have a never-ending sentence in German.

Were you to write that sentence, it would, by definition, need to cover everything. "But then again, no", I guess we would need to add to this definition that the sentence would need to be an 'irrational' sentence (in the sense in which a number is irrational) - never ending and non-repeating.

This sentence would, in the end, I think, be Borgesian and the task of writing it, Sisyphean.

When I was wandering the library stacks last week (the Golda Meir library, that is, not Borges' or Babel's) I came upon the diaries of Franz Kafka. I opened to the entries, first randomly, then closest that day's date (July 14th, though I ended up reading the entries from May and September as Kafka seemed to have taken that summer off from writing). It occurred to me that Kafka was a bit of a whiner and his journals had no real academic or artistic merit, but I'm quite sure, if I were so inclined, I could find a bevy of dissertations on the subject.

"What am I doing hanging round?"

oh there's always time for mail on this show...

So this is a bit of my thinking on letters and mail and Briefwechsel generally. I know i have previously made a motion toward this thinking previously, but i want to lay out a bit more in depth what i'm thinking and would appreciate any feedback.

First off, there's something in the physicality of the letter that i'm interested in.

Letters are both boring and interesting... They are ephemeral, but when looking at them from a distance in time, they lose immediacy and meaning. Reading an old letter can still hold an emotional bite, but there is no narrative in it (the 'what next?' is gone).

Which makes a story like Frankenstein incredibly interesting (or Dracula)... and modern variations on them might become even more interesting... Nothing much to say here, though...

Sincerely,

RNJ

Constructive Games

I’m interested in the gamesmanship (game-iness) of the Oulipo movement and have come to questions about using this idea of games in a positive, constructive way. This is something that I’ve been working out over the last several months, and this seems like a useful place to try to get it down. First, I’d like to think a little about art-in-a-box or ‘gaming art’ and games in general, then see if we can’t find a way to apply it to theory.

One of the primary concerns of Oulipo is this idea of creating a set of arbitrary rules around your art. With If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler you’ve got a single sentence/poem that will make up the chapter titles and a host of other constrictions cataloged elsewhere. Stephen King says about writing fiction that a lot of great storytelling comes from the question, “What If?” and Oulipo must have anticipatorily plagiarized this idea, creating art that says, “what if we make a _________ that only _________?”

In my introductory creative writing class in college, an introduction of the textbook suggested that writing (and I would say just art generally) should be something akin to playing tennis, rather than solely the realm of ‘professionals.’ “I write” (or make art) wouldn’t mean you necessarily do so well (in the same way that “I play tennis” in no way gives me delusions that I could be a professional tennis player {though I’m sure I could have, had my high school had a team}). I wonder if this isn’t somewhat what Oulipo is after, democratizing art creation, making art creation possible for everyone (by doing creative writing exercises as a jumping off point). That being said, those in the actual Oulipo movement likely don’t want everyone to necessarily display all of their Oulipian art (just as my backhand slice should remain largely unseen).

What this notion of democratizing art might do, though, is create a lot of ‘potential art’. The more bad art being made out there and the more our culture becomes one that encourages participation in art creation, the more opportunity there is for great outside art to actually be discovered.

I feel as though I have strayed somewhat from my initial thought with this post… I was going to say something about the idea of the difference between rules and laws, rules being arbitrary and artificial, while laws theoretically come from moral or ethical considerations. Also the difference that you can’t actually break a rule (this notion is one of Baudrillard’s, I think), because once you do, you’re no longer playing the game, strictly speaking. Whereas a law can be broken (ethical and moral standards can change, which should force laws to change), and sometimes should be broken in order to line them up with the changing moral/ethical standards. You can change the rules of the game (say, you get to use doubles lines when we play tennis), but then you’re playing a slightly different game (so you still didn’t beat me at tennis, really).

The Work of a Poet

Yesterday afternoon i went to a public reading by Ted Kooser at Metro's South campus. This was actually my second personal encounter with Mr. Kooser, as i met him briefly at Woody's wedding a couple summers ago.

Kooser's poetry is understated, approachable, and funny. I've only read poems here and there, never an entire book. Part of this is due to my own personal issues with poetry. I never really know how to approach a poet's work. Obviously, a collection that the poet puts together around a specific theme or idea (say Leaves of Grass) you take as a whole and read through, but is that true of all books of poetry? I find that if i read too many poems in a row (especially by the same poet) they start to run together.

Kooser's reading was broken up with brief anecdotes and commentary on his works. Kooser's poems are generally short and often surprising. His humor comes from quick turns and juxtapositions as well as actual funny moments. Where he is at his best, i think, is when he is doing the work of definition. As he read a poem describing encountering a person walking down the street who you think you recognize, but aren't quite sure, i was reminded of another great poet, now lost to us: Douglas Adams. Adams' The Meaning of Liff is a dictionary of things and experiences we all know, but have no words for. Adams (along with John Lloyd) provides those words to us (though the index is maddening and nearly unusable, because it is clever and witty instead of structured - though i think it could be both). Kooser approaches these things and events from the other angle, however, forcing us to consider and understand these moments instead of naming them. Naming is the easy way out (sorry Douglas)... the real work is consideration.

An Intelligently Designed Argument

Just think of how different things might be today if William Shakespeare had won, when he ran for king in 1604. Just imagine that world. There would have been no Hitler, the French Revolution would have happened gradually, but sooner, and with less bloodshed. The world would today be a vastly different place had the powers that were not stolen that election.

It is a well documented and indisputable fact, that Adolf Hitler descended from the lineage of Will Shakespeare. William’s eldest son, Ronfrey, married late in life & he and his wife Jane had a daughter who was forced to leave the country in her middle-teens. The daughter, Lizzy, was thought to stay with family in France, but recently discovered evidence now shows, clearly, that Lizzy moved on to Vienna and lived there to the end of her days with a child she had out of wedlock. The child grew up to be a servant in a wealthy house and bore the master of the house two children, one of whom would go on to be an ancestor of Adolf Hitler, and the other an ancestor of Walter Benjamin.

It is a truly harsh historical irony that the great thinker Walter Benjamin was separated only by a few generations from the man who not only made his life so difficult but to whom he (Benjamin) dedicated his life’s work to combating.

This fact of Hitler’s heritage is not in dispute. The only interesting, and worthwhile question, is what would have been different had Shakespeare won that election? To be sure, the family would not have returned to Stratford on Avon, so Ronfrey would likely have married earlier and to a more stately woman, but this change is not the least of what would have been different. Although Shakespeare’s success in his writing career afforded his family some comfort in Stratford, the family was somewhat outcast by locals because of the social oddity that accompanied Shakespeare’s ‘artistic nature’ (not least of which the insistence on being called “Shakespeare” all the time). As a duly elected king, these ‘social oddities’ would have been taken as kingly discretion, the right to behave as one will, but with the disputed Tudor victory, Will was forced to stay in his lifely station and pretend that he hadn’t even run for king. The loss was hard on Shakespeare, particularly because it was so disputed and the outcome questioned.

Shakespeare’s concession speech, recorded only in personal journals and writings of the time (since newspapers would not be invented for another 73 years!) was succinct and not malicious (though it was surely full of irony): “Although I strongly disagree with the decision reached by the powers that be, concerning the election, I will not fight the decision and split this population and declare myself the (il)legitimate leader… rather, I concede to the decision and will move on, as we all must move on.” (No blank verse for this soliloquy).

Sadly we will never know how history might have turned out differently had Shakespeare won in his effort, but we too, must accept the decisions of history, and live with it’s consequences.

Midget of Political Thought

I finished Thoreau's essay, Civil Disobedience, today, and i am, admittedly, unmoved. I know i really ought to utterly stop supporting, even passively, all causes for which i have no support or motivation, and as such i should refuse to pay taxes of any kind, but, you know... Thoreau's just so hard to fully buy.

I am a big-time fan of Walden, love the nature, love the thumbing of noses to the daily grind, but i really cannot get behind Thoreau's desire to utterly remove himself from society. Take for instance rssl's C.L.O., which presumes to separate cali from the rest of our sorry state, and would so, if it could so, in a very Thoreau-lian way if it could, i'm sure, but I sadly think that the more folk that step out of the way of "the state", the more the state can just pretty well do whatever the fuck it wants to.

Tonight, Brooke and i went to a club that may or may not be called "The Max" in Omaha. It was a rather gay club, by which i mean i estimate 35%-45% of the folk were gay and the other 55-65 percent straight... (not unlike the present day Gay 90's scene in Minneapolis). Whatever the percentage of man-loving-men or lady-loving-chicas, i would estimate that 99% or more of the folk there were gay friendly, young Nebraskans... --a situation that seems hardly worth mentioning in many parts of the world, but in Nebraska is quite a rare sort of place to find-- Simultaneously, i would estimate that less than 15% of those present were registered voters, even though simply taking the folk there tonight they represent a sizeable voting bloc in the Omaha congressional and local districts... go green, go Esch ... The fact (or guess, rather) that none or few of these folk are voting even though they're motivated (or ought to be) to vote out the right-ist government in Nebraska sets me a-thinking.

--Hello, it's me, morning-after sober joel. Saturday night after coming home i had a mind to go on a drunken political rant and it was moderately cogent so i present it here, unchanged (except for double-dashed commentary)--

Incramental vs. major... 3rd vs. through the system... nathan's 'progressive' work... --These are three notes i scribbled to myself before deciding to putter off to bed. The arc of argument i had in mind saturday night was really quite grand, with a mind to cover the problems of taking baby steps toward a better world vs. revolution, the constant argument i hear from stolidly (does stolidly just mean solidly, but more rigid?) democratic friends about sticking with the party rather than voting green or something else, because it's the best chance we have & my good friend nathan's company that runs around the country helping folks put together sophisticated, interesting campaigns and winning unlikely elections (Ned & Kinky to take just two).

But this morning i have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself (which is to say my windbag has run out and my drunken soap-box broke). So, i'll leave it at this point, and let this be a plot of fertile thought soil instead of a jungle of political rantings.

Review of "The Walking Dead"

This review was originally posted (and better so) in Four Color Comics. To see the original version (with an image that simply will not work on my blog for some reason) go here. But, since it fits my theme, and i haven't posted on zombies for a while (except for my wedding post) i submit it here for your amusement & edutainment. But do check out & bookmark jd's wonderful comics blog. I plan to write for it once in a while & it's just a damn good site all round.

The Walking Dead (Vol. #1-4)
Image Comics
Reviewer’s Grade : C-

When my set of all four volumes (thus far) of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead first arrived from amazon.com I was positively giddy… I’d heard nothing but good things (from reviews that evidently were written by his mother) and was thinking I was coming into a world of Romero-level zombie thought in this exciting new series.

BUT, instead, what I found was a cliché-ridden work of zombie survivor fiction that’s been told too many times, and always in the same way. Kirkman does not help his cause in the introduction to Volume 1 when he writes:

“To me, the best zombie movies aren’t the splatter fests of gore and violence with goofy character and tongue in cheek antics. Good zombie movies show us how messed up we are, they make us question our station in society… and our society’s station in the world. They show us gore and violence and all that cool stuff too… but there’s always an undercurrent of social commentary and thoughtfulness.”[1]

Even casual fans of zombie films and literature see such societal critiques at work, but for Kirkman to explicitly make such a blatant statement in the introduction to his first volume bodes ill for the whole run and is a sign of what’s to come. Kirkman suffers from over-writing and an often painful lack of subtlety, a trait shared by artists Tony Moore (Vol 1.) and Charlie Adlard (Vols. 2-4).

The story traces police officer Rick Grimes who awakens from a coma in an empty hospital some days (28 perhaps?) after the zombie necropalypse has hit earth. We follow Grimes as he heads home, discovering his old neighborhood mostly abandoned and slowly discovering the new world order. Through contrived conversations with another survivor and a horse we learn about his wife and child (which we also found out about several panels earlier in the artwork), who he leaves town to try and find.

Kirkman shows disrespect to his readers by having to spell out every notion in words. He seems to not trust his artists, who in turn seem not to trust him (using the most extreme ‘surprised’, ‘angry’, ‘sad’ looks in any frame they want to express emotion).


Some of his frames are so full of words there’s almost no room for characters to walk around in them. When his characters fight, their dialogue feels like an 8-year-old at play: “I’m going to blow your head off” says one survivor to another at one point, presumably before she is about to blow someone’s head off.

With all its negatives, though, the most frustrating thing about The Walking Dead is its amazing potential. The artwork, when it’s not painfully obvious, is quality black and white, which adds to the bleakness of the world the characters inhabit. The covers, all done by Tony Moore are beautiful, if a bit repetitive and the splash pages, few and far between are used very effectively. Walking Dead is at its best when Grimes is wandering alone and there are two or three wordless pages in a row, capturing the voiceless zombie threat more perfectly than any conversation can, but Kirkman again finds a way to spoil many of these with a speech bubble filled only with “…”.

Kirkman is asking very interesting questions about humans living in extreme circumstances, I just wish he could sometimes avoid asking them right out loud.

[1] Kirkman, Robert. The Walking Dead: Vol. 1: Days Gone Bye. Introduction. Berkeley: Image Comics, 2005.

What the hell is down there?

So, yesterday i hosted my own private Lost party. And man, i just cannot believe it. What a cliffhanger, so many unanswered questions, who will live, who will die? What's with Walt? And what the hell is down that hatch?

That's right, i am still catching up and just finished season 1 of Lost. My current theory is that there will be a House of Leaves tie-in episode where Locke will climb down and run into Stephen King wandering the halls of the house.

Lost is an amazingly remarkable show, though, i think they do miss artistic opportunities by tying everything up together to neatly in a tv-shaped package. The flashbacks in any given episode invariably tie-in to whatever will happen later in the episode (those of you who often experience flashbacks know this is not the way they function in real life) & there are just too many damn cliffhangers, which i understand is a part of the medium itself, because of its serialization, but still, sometimes it seems like Dan Brown is a guest creative director on this show.

But, all in all, it's just too good to be true. Well written, good looking television that's popular. After finishing Season 1, i so desperately needed to know what was down there, i bought the first episode on iTunes... but then episode 1 had such a cliffhanger... well, it's gonna get worse before it gets better.

Anyway, happy Thursday everyone & know that you have my love & support in coping with your summer Lost withdrawl.