Suns of the sleepless! melancholy stars!

The visual may be applied as cold compresses against verbal fever. I announced that discovery at age eight to my closest friend, the Navy wife with whom I used to debate the validity of UFOs and Edgar Cayce (I took con), like so: "I can concentrate myself to sleep!", by which I meant closely attending the phosphenes which stir and subside behind closed lids in a dark room.

Like most breakthroughs, it was actually a rediscovery — one made that year by many of my elders, that it's easy to nod off while meditating — just as thirteen years later in the yoga class I took for a phys-ed requirement I rediscovered the more disconcerting gusher of hallucinations which my teacher called "opening your third eye" and forty years later I rediscovered nodding off while watching TV after 9 PM.

But I never found anything that could be applied as ice baths.

Ba-lue OX Ba-lues-are : A Hug and a Kiss

Over decades sex dreams wore a groove. I meet a woman informally, we converse, we attract, we caress and so forth to some varying extent and without much distinguishing the older and newer senses of making love. There's no chase, no transgression; I remember no signature prop or ritual or type beyond the unproblematic binary. Only a pleasant confusion of look, touch, talk, pheromones, and specificities.

X-treme vanilla, a view of Insipidity Peak. But as obdurate as any other perversion, and maybe a bit crueler than some.

Ba-lue Mun-deii Ba-lues-Are : A Hug and a Kiss

Popular music was invented to corrupt God-, Stalin-, or Mao-fearing youth, and its guileful victories were legion: "jazz" and "rock'n'roll" themselves; vipers and kicking the gong and "Tea for Two"; "Sixty Minute Man", "Back Door Man", and "I Sold My Heart to the Junkman"; "YMCA" and "In the Navy" and "Wreck of the Old 97".

Today we mourn its saddest defeat: "Poon-Tang!" by The Treniers.

If on a springtime's blog a blatherer...

I've been thinking about two types of metafiction, or at least metafictional moments: the type we're all too familiar with in recent years, where the metafiction is the point, and the (what to call it?) target fiction is in its service, and another more common, more exhilarating type (as I have come to think), where metafictional moments are actually in service of the story itself....

- balaustion

As Balaustion's examples suggest, there is a history, a lifespan, to apparently unmediated narrative or lyric. Thackerey and Trollope notoriously lack that goal, Byron (and then Pushkin) contested its triumph, and by the time we reach Bouvard & Pécuchet and Huysmans it's devouring itself. The perplexing disruptions of Ulysses simmered down into a signature sauce for Beckett and O'Brien, and then dessicated into spice jars for postmodern fabulism and swingin'-sixties movies. If Nabokov is a chess problem and Perec is a jigsaw puzzle, John Barth and Robert Coover are search-a-word.

Even more specifically, the desire for unmediated narrative is linked to genre — Mark Twain and William Dean Howells were contemporaries, after all — and therefore self-congratulatory metafictionality is also linked to genre. When, back in 1976 or so, I sought goods fresher than those provisioned by the oxymoronic experimental mainstream, I found them labeled as science fiction or fantasy. And they included a generally more relaxed use of metafictionality. Not Dick, of course; Dick is Barth haloed by sweat-drops. But Disch and Russ in the 1970s, and then in the 1980s and so on M. John Harrison and Fowler and Emshwiller and Womack and so on.

What I really wanted to blather about, though, was a rare third type of metafiction, neither the recircling of an already-overworked puzzle, nor the matter-of-fact surfacing of one discursive mode in a cove of splishy-splashy discourse, but instead doing something — an emotionally engaged and affectively effective metafictionality. I likely first encountered that possibility in Warner's Bros. cartoons and Hans Christian Andersen. But a lot of Updike passed under the bridge before I reached Delany's Dhalgren: a unique three-decker in which every tool of realistic fiction attempts to portray structuralism from within. It's like Zola as Fabulist, or Sergei Bondarchuk's seven-hour adaptation of an original story by Frank Tashlin. And about fifteen years later, Crowley's Engine Summer delivered a similarly visceral charge by embodying romantic loss in a closed roman.

ATTN: Mark Yudof, Jean Quan, & most especially Brian Moynihan

Destination Nowhere

Although I love the Internet more than any technosociological shift this side of antisepsis, I'm appalled that, nineteen years into the web, library executives continue to swap out book collections, with their paradigmatically long shelf life, in favor of expensive and quickly obsolescent computers so that people who walk into the building can find only exactly what they could find anywhere else on the planet.

But then I also thought it was crazy when the Metropolitan and MOMA replaced their paintings and sculptures with Philco Tandem Predictas, so what do I know?

"I Told You You Were Sick"

Peter Novick wrote three big books. The first historicized France's attempt to rub Vichy out into national unity, and impressed the French. The second historicized pretensions to historical objectivity, and impressed historians (and the odd free-range scholar). The third historicized the Holocaust's centrality in American Jewish identity, and impressed our paper of record, whose obituary gives That Noble Dream one mopping-up paragraph, mentions The Resistance Versus Vichy not at all, and devotes its remaining fifteen paragraphs of career survey to The Holocaust in American Life.

For All Intensive Purposes

... participants were instructed to move a line on the computer screen by use of a phony brain-computer interface. Line movements were actually controlled by computer program. Demonstrating the illusion to intend, participants reported more intentions to move the line when it moved frequently than when it moved infrequently. Consistent with ideomotor theory, the finding illuminates the intimate liaisons among ideomotor processing, the sense of agency, and action production.

- "Mind control? Creating illusory intentions through a phony brain-computer interface",
Margaret T. Lynn, Christopher C. Berger, Travis A. Riddle, & Ezequiel Morsella,
Consciousness and Cognition 19.4 (2010)

Although the authors dutifully list objections, they missed the most likely of alternative hypotheses: the intimate (dangerous, even) liaison between vagueness of agency and suggestion of agency.

With the obvious exception of latter-day Tom Cruise,1 human beings are not reliably driven by will power. Occasionally we notice that, or are forced to notice, and it bothers us; we invent "needing some down time," or divine intervention, or demonic temptation. We're so uncertain of our own minds that we'll even pay to be told them; we'll pay clairvoyants, we'll pay for bio-feedback, we'll pay for pop psychology texts and pro psychology analyses.

And perhaps the easiest way to retroactively determine intent is by results. The football team who lost "didn't want it enough." Wish hard enough and your dream will come true; ipso facto, should dream come true, wish was suitably firm.

I understand the experimenters' dilemma. If they'd made the task more involving — a first-person shooter, say, against an army of ravening Tom Cruises — subjects would have inundated them with reports that their shit was broken. But by choosing so bland and pointless a task, as bland and pointless as a day-job, they transformed their magically mind-controlled machine into a magical mind-monitor: "Did I mean to do that? Since only my intention could move the line, then by definition, yes, I must have meant to do that."

"Bottom to everything"

I'm relieved to see that John has finally put the lame one-eyed nag out of its misery. Wonderfully, perfectly, the last Valve comment I will ever receive is the following, entered July 2 2011 for a post from August 2005:

"This review is like a bad English paper."

A note on Eric Rohmer's "Comédies et Proverbes"

There are fourteen of these light and pleasant proverb-comedies in the volume. As their editor states, they were played in Parisian social circles fifty years ago, the idea being to guess the proverb from the stage representation and from the language of the actors.

- W. S. E., "Longfellow's First Volumes", The Literary World, Nov. 18, 1882

A dramatic proverb is a playlet, usually comic, intended to be performed in private homes, that illustrates a well-known proverb without using that proverb in the text.... it became enormously popular during the last third of the eighteenth century, and it achieved recognition as a serious literary form in the nineteenth century, thanks to the genius of Musset.

- Perry Gethner, "Catherine Durand: Proverbes dramatiques (1699)",
Writings by Pre-Revolutionary French Women: Volume 2

What Else Frank Harris Did Not Say

As we shook hands, her eyes widened, her lips twitched, her skin flushed, her breath shortened, her pupils dilated, her palm moistened, her knee jerked, her hair curled, and a long flutter through her frame left her dangling like a desecrated flag. She was just my type.

* * *

I played her like a violin. I've never learned how to play the violin, and so it was all pretty embarrassing.

* * *

"Mr. Harris," she acclaimed, "you have quite spoiled me for other men."

"That would be the herpes," I assented.

Lazybones (1925)

This film is the world, really, in an hour and a half, in eighty minutes, it shows us the world. And manages the job without donkey torture.

In most other ways, though, Borzage's titular saint anticipates Bresson's: patient, gentle, a bit obtuse, stubborn, and above all passive. What makes the difference isn't so much the leading man's species as the filmmaker's spirit. For all the catharsis he provides, Borzage is not in the least tragic. His waterworks run at full capacity in happy endings, and even in his unhappiest endings — which can be very unhappy — suffering's redeemed by a gain so vast that its loss still counts as treasure.

Lazybones, in particular, keeps to the cornball comic mode as closely as it can while circumventing a suicide attempt, casual cruelties, meticulous soul-crushing deceit, and the Great War. At least one writer associates that circuit with 1930s generic mélanges like Borzage's screwball-thriller-disaster-romance History Is Made at Night, but the tone isn't that much darker than the Americana of Will Rogers, or, later, The Strawberry Blonde and Meet Me in St. Louis, even if its final import seems more global.

Lacking the body-and-soul lust that propels Borzage's other transcendences, what power propels this one?

Not the characters or incidents or hoary gags of the script, certainly; types and tableaux wheeled atop and off the stage, they could have been drawn as stick figures, almost, in their unadorned familiarity.

The performers are wonderful, but never this wonderful with any other director. Dithering Zasu Pitts? Cowboy Buck Jones? (But then Borzage himself began as a movie cowboy.) Even the five-year-old engages us.

The conceptual audacity of centering a movie on a good, decent man has something to do it, but Borzage made other conceptually audacious movies — kids invent fascism; Jesus harrows a prison break — which never fully send us.

What makes Lazybones effective, for those affected by it, is all of the above: the unfussy performances, the drifty protagonist, and the parabolic simplicity they enable. Lacking the prefab Hollywood structure of goal and conflict and resolution, the film marks time by what marks it most forcefully in life: the growth of a child.

Kit

... and Kit

The only parental role accessible by Steve Tuttle is that of peer: a patient, gentle, and slightly obtuse peer.

... and Kit

Understandably, if disturbingly, the pose deceives him more than her. There are reasonable limits to a child's playacting; to an adult's, none.

... and Kit

"Rip van Winkle" is mentioned in dialog only as an example of extreme age, but in retrospect the film embodies the sense of the tale itself, in its hero's life-long doze and occasional perplexing rouses, and in an audience who blinks across three decades into the sort of moments we recognize even at the time as memorable, instantly nostalgic or rueful or both. Moments which reduce us to points on a trite plotline. The moments we recognize we'll be left with.

Our Democratic Heritage

"'A Sacrifice on the Altar of Slavery':
Doughface Politics and Black Disenfranchisement in Pennsylvania, 1837-1838"
by Nicholas Wood, Journal of the Early Republic, 31.1, 2011

(in honor of MLK-EMI-Sony and Intellectual Rentier Day,
another thing behind the distributor paywall)

I knew that who's-the-real-victimizing, delusional Father Fundamentalism, and selective application of State Rights all had deep roots. But I didn't until now appreciate how much Northern Jim Crow also owed to triangulation and too-big-to-failure.

Democrat John J. M'Cahen admitted that free blacks were "civilized creatures, possessed of the same faculties, and capable of forming the same impressions as the whites." Nonetheless, "the peace, happiness, and prosperity of a community, sometimes depended on the adoption of measures, which bore somewhat harder on one portion of the people than on the other." Similarly, Charles Brown — who had previously described the happy slaves in Virginia — acknowledged that he "knew negroes living in the county of Philadelphia, who were fully as competent to exercise the right of voting as any man in the city or county of Philadelphia." Still, like M'Cahen, Brown supported disfranchisement. And although Brown denied that his actions were done purely to please the South, he equated black suffrage with abolitionism and disunion. The proponents of black suffrage "would have us put ourselves in an attitude of defiance to the southern states, instead of doing all that lay in our power to quiet the apprehensions and alarm which the mad schemes and conduct of northern abolitionists had created among them!" However, Brown trusted his fellow delegates would choose correctly "if the right of the negroes to vote was to be put in the scale against the union of these states."

We regret any inconvenience.

Rosemund Tuve to William Empson, Valentine's Day 1953:

Obviously I've not been writing an 'answer' to that article you enclosed, in any usual sense. About the practical matter you mentioned... 'saying this had led to my altering my remarks' — I don't imagine you'll want to alter them much of any. It's too hard to alter things. I'm so much more pleased that you'll take a stand on 'the reader ought to try to make out what the author...' (etc. p. 4, all of that sentence) than I am unpleased by what touches me, that that's worth the rest whether just or not, given present critical assumptions in many quarters. (Often unadmitted; just practised). I find that I don't care a hang (so I don't rootle them out here and argue) whether you say dreadful things about me that I don't think true, and so far as I can tell this is because you go at the poetry so hard. I would normally think we'd 'both look rather more sensible' if you took out some of the arguments From Character of Author; I believe they'll cause mirth to those who know me. Sometimes I laugh too. I'm just not the kind you envisage. Anyhow I can't seem to get angry about any of it, neither in 1950 or now. Maybe that's the kind of complacent you say the book is. Did you in your heart (or wherever you think these incautious things) think that? Then either long-practiced suspending judgement ruins the capacity of words to carry the tone of voice, or I'm George Herbert's greatest failure in that lesson, or it's you, and you're angrier than I think. You write excessive, but I don't think you are.

If we ever meet, which wouldn't be so odd, I'll find out. When you come to America again, stop in New London. It's no jump from N.Y., the Thames is handsome here, we'd get whomever you picked down from Yale, the whisky is good enough and the conversation provocative. Or serene; as you choose.