Intermediate Hedonics

I wish they wouldn't call me “a hedonist”; it produces such a bad effect on the minds of people who don't know Greek.

- Walter Pater to Edmund Gosse

International Masturbation Month having just ended, we're well acquainted with the limitations of solitary pleasure. Among more social pleasures, bullying and torture often predominate. George W. Bush displays the lineaments of gratified desire more plainly than Allen Ginsberg even did, and I dislike him more as well.

So, no, hedonism is not enough. There's a reason humanity went to the effort of developing concepts like responsibility and shame. It's less a philosophical foundation than an empirical corrective.

Lingered over, sought out, often emphasizing what we'd do anyway, pleasure doesn't necessarily surprise us. Nevertheless, being above all else a signal, pleasure performs individuating and anti-systematic functions. It humanizes the humanist, puts the spring in Springfield, wakes the drowsy and dopes the knotted. Regular dosages are particularly recommended for guilt-ridden bible-thumping natural twisters such as, to take the example closest to hand, myself: in George Harrison's beautiful phrase, "a stuckup, up-tight, tight-assed asshole."

If my profile is at all typical of those whose life was saved by rock and roll, we deserve our poor reputation. Still, it's not like we'd be less creepy without our little inanimate friends. Hedonism is what's missing from Adorno's jeremiads, and he seems no more simpatico for its absence.

* * *

As Lawrence White has already commented, where there's pleasure, desire follows. And aesthetic desire, like all desires, can turn bad in a hurry: a regent who dungeons the prince. Of all the "there but for the grace of pleasure go I" monsters that torment my dreams, the collector may be the scariest, what with the full weight of corporate capitalism pushing aesthetes toward that reassuringly simple, communal, and self-destructive role. Again, close attention to what's attracting our attention is the best (or at least the cheapest) prophylactic I know.

For who is there who anything of some significance has apprehended but is conscious that that exterior splendour may be the surface of a downwardtending lutulent reality

For most people, the real is what cannot be argued with (it partakes of a transcendental authority); for me (and those who agree with me), the real is what cannot be avoided, what must be dealt with, what must be interrogated, acted on, argued with. (Again, it's synonymous with the political.)

- Samuel R. Delany

Pound's and Eliot's Ulysses is a depressing impoverished book by a quirkily upstart Irish-Catholic Zola. I don't know if they could've produced a plot summary, but it would've supported their view: This is the worst day of the protagonists' lives, and there's no reason to think next week or year will get any better.

Whereas my Ulysses has been a reliable pick-me-up Wonderworker for 25 years.

What the book does is much stranger than what the book tells.

As we learn more — bewilderingly more — details about the characters and their context, the text we know them by becomes more — bizarrely more — distant. This long dolly-zoom effects a vertginous ambiguity of scale. The clowns swell to heroic, archetypal, even divine proportions: Aristophanes on Olympus.

We lose all sense of perspective. We might even come to believe that there was some innate possibility for beauty and joy in the mere inescapability of human limits and plasticity of human vision. Almost like we wouldn't mind being one ourselves.

Near as Human, as Theodore Sturgeon almost might've said.

Like the best science fiction, a genre developing at the same time under similar pressures, Joyce's writing refuses either to evade the real or to take it as a given. Unlike science fiction, Joyce keeps his fire scrupulously within the confines of the whale.

Finnegans Wake would be the sneeze.

"Critique & Proposals" by Chandler Davis

By far the best available introduction to the nonmathematical work of Chandler Davis is Josh Lukin's interview with him in Paradoxa 18. Among many enticing but unavailable texts, it mentions an informal piece of argumentation from 1949. Hearing of my curiosity, Dr. Lukin very kindly lent me a copy. And, hearing of my interest in sharing the work, Professor Davis very kindly lent me permission to publish it online. I thank them both.

You'll have your own reasons to find it interesting. Here are a few of mine:

• From birth, science fiction has been defined (and bounded) by a community whose ambiguities of consumer, critic, and producer more resemble philosophical schools or high art movements than commercial publishing genres. Davis's post-war attempt at intervention exemplifies both the positive and negative aspects of participatory criticism.
• Between the communities of manuscript circulation and the communities of electronically transmitted text came the APA: the Amateur Press Associations, which reduced the cost of self-publication by centralized collation and mailing. A few APAs are still in operation; fewer have left much evidence of their passing. Here's an example of what we've lost and remake. (Visually, it reminds us just how awful life was before word processing software.)
• What was controversial in 1949 remained, in some large and powerful circles, controversial in the 1990s, when Davis's reasonable suggestions would be labeled "political correctness." The unpopular being lost to history, a worthy concern only becomes widely recognized once it's widely held, when it can be attacked for shallow trendiness. Davis's piece is a reminder that political change depends on more extended good will than mere trends sustain. To quote another section of the Paradoxa interview:

  Phil Klass was once talking to somebody about the Civil Rights Movement in the Sixties, and he said, "When I was a Freedom Rider in the early Fifties —" And they said, "You mean Sixties," and he said "Fifties." The Negro Congress had demonstrations, and everyone got the shit beaten out of them —I don't know if Phil ever got the shit beaten out of him — but they started ten years before the famous ones started, and some people were present at both.

  My sister had exactly the same conversation in a class she was taking as an older graduate student at the University of California in Berkeley. She said, "When I was arrested in a demonstration against discrimination in hiring in 1949—" They said, "You mean 1969"; she said, "I mean 1949."

• Literary critics have a tendency to confuse the concerns of science fiction with the concerns of Utopian or dystopian literature — understandable, given their background, but leading to some awful muddles. One of Davis's pivotal arguments beautifully shows the point at which the two touch and then diverge: the constructed world of science fiction, like the constructed world of the philosopher and the constructed society of the political activist, must (at least pretend to) be explicitly justifiable in a way that the quotidian backdrops of other genres and studies don't.
• And then there's Davis's unfortunate choice of L. Ron Hubbard as his case-in-point and its consequences, a portent that points in one direction toward contemporary Hollywood and in another direction toward FOX News and the magick of the talking point....

What I Learned from Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller by Jackie Wullschlager

1. I knew the fairy tales weren't Andersen's first publication. I'd somehow assumed, not really thinking about it, that he'd bummed along more clearly marked literary routes and got run off each by their rent-a-cops before being forced down this low-prestige path.

   He certainly started with a diet of humiliations. Crow for breakfast, crow for tea, crow for in-betweens. Maybe a few early worms in season, you know, while hunting crow.

   But in fact he didn't take the risk till he had something to lose. He waited till he had an internationally successful inspirational poem — anyone can be inspired, the real money's in inspiring—and an internationally successful mainstream inspirational novel before he started writing oblique colloquial self-defeating stories whose only excuse were they were for kids.

   And the critics disapproved right off. Waste of talent.

   "It is not meaningless convention that one does not put words together in print in the same disordered manner as one may do quite acceptably in oral speech."

   It's as if after winning the National Book Critics Circle Award Jonathan Lethem began scripting superhero comics. Or if after attaining some stability in academia, Samuel R. Delany started writing niche-market porn.

   The fucker had guts.

   "Of course I shan't enjoy the experience in this world."

2. Andersen had to meet Dickens; Dickens had to meet Andersen. In the newspapers, they were twin urchins of different dead mothers. Smile on their lips, tear in their eye, lectures in their circuit, and the kids love 'em.

   The meeting was excruciating. Much worse than Proust meets Joyce. Neither Proust nor Joyce were clingers.

   Andersen was a poet who wanted to be a dancer; Dickens was a pro who wanted to be a pro. Andersen was sentimental; Dickens deployed sentiment. A Dickens reading was scripted; an Andersen reading was the original recreated. Andersen was a drama queeen spaz; Dickens was a charming smoothie. Andersen didn't realize how annoying he'd been till Dickens stopped answering his letters.

   You know who Andersen really should've met in England, though? John Keats. Keats was nine years older, but they were equally enthused by an ideal of aesthetic community, and when they found it gated, they shared public abuse for their pretensions and developed similarly perverse attempts at guardedness.

   The only hitch would be that Keats died age 25, and Andersen hit his stride age 30. But if Keats had lived to hit his own stride, and then lived a decade or two more, I bet they would've gotten along real good.

Do you think that you could make it with Frankenstein?

A question at the end of one of Jeff VanderMeer's recent posts has been nagging at me -- "Do writers of experimental fiction need to prove they can tell a good story before they start experimenting?"

- Mumpsimus

Conclusions elude us. It could be there are none to be drawn without distortion.

1. The laws are ambiguous and the judges are prejudiced.

   Matthew Cheney and I both seek out the tang of the unexpected problem; we welcome obstacle. And so, faced with increased experimentation, we're likely to tilt our camera eye to make a narrative of progress where others may tilt a decline. Whenever Joyce published, he lost a former supporter. Gardner Dorzois, among others, regrets the "squandered promise" of Samuel R. Delany's maturity. And I'm sure there are some who wish M. John Harrison had never put Viriconium through its literary retcon.

2. Outside a historical context, terms like "craft", "good story", and "experimental" are little more than Whiggish fertilizer.

   Nothing I've read in the past few years can compare with the experimentation of Tom Jones or Wurthering Heights, but we don't see Mark Amerika giving them props. Me, I don't think Beckett ever again wrote anything as brain-droppingly new as Watt; I think of his last thiry years as laying down a very good groove and think of John Barth's later career as safe shtick. Make Barth as hard to find as Barbara Comyns or Bob Brown and I'll reconsider.

3. It's chancy to generalize about particularities.

   Was Orlando more or less experimental than To the Lighthouse? How about positioned between To the Lighthouse and The Waves?

   Flaubert started out with wildly uncontrolled blurts of fantasy. Were those stabs in the murk less or more experimental than Madame Bovary? Was Salammbo less experimental than The Temptation of St. Anthony? Bouvard & Pécuchet?

4. What seems blandly normal or tediously artificial to the reader may have been a coltish celebration of new skills for the author.

   If Melville chafed against the limitations of the autobiographical sea story while writing Typee, it doesn't show. The sincerity of Modernist poets' juvenilia is hardly its besetting problem.

5. In conscious transitions from "expected" to "peculiar", what matters may be the sheepskin, not the education.

   That is, the trigger is being granted permission to experiment, either from the publishing industry or oneself. If you write to make a living, there may not be much of a distinction. The Glass Key wouldn't have been Hammett's first publication, if only because he couldn't have afforded it.

   The most startling such transformation I've personally witnessed was at Clarion 1993, when a workshop member who'd slaved over unconvincing Analog filler realized that such an apprenticeship wasn't required, and suddenly began producing beautifully polished and balanced works of ambiguous speculation. (Like most good artists, he seems to have eventually decided that artmaking wasn't worth the effort, but that doesn't dim the thrill of witness.)

Affirmations

1. Why I Read Such Benign Books: The single Nietzsche passage I think of most often is the one in which he's listened to Bizet's Carmen twenty times through and become a better person each time.
2. Another reason: I believe Nietzsche's philosophical system was aphorism. Not his strategy, his system.
3. There's no Sally Rand Truth to find behind the fans and bubbles. Take "fan" and "bubble" away, and away goes "Sally Rand", just as removal of "brick" and "jail" vanishes "kat".
4. Before going to work, the aphorist pushes into long flopping shoes, and buttons, studs, ties, and cummberbunds into a monkey suit smelling of real monkey. The shoes expensively gleam and pinch; the suit is tailor-made. Still, the nature of the job is clear enough.
5. Reading Heidegger on Nietzsche is like watching a snowed-in prospector twirl boiled bootlaces on a fork and chew and chew and chew and swallow them. Directed by G. W. Pabst, starring Gibson Gowland.
6. Aphorists hate liberals for their earnest argument. Bible-thumpers hate liberals for their skepticism. But the enemy of the aphorist's enemy is not the aphorist's friend. The aphorist depends more directly on the existence of the comfortably tolerant than the bible-thumper depends on the existence of the heretic.
7. Those who admire aphorists judge a tree by the tenacity of its branches. Wherefore by their thorns ye shall know them.
8. I was too sickly to attend ag school, but I doubt you can sow fields with thorns.
9. An aphorism is a scenic rest stop between an unsupported argument and an undesired consequence. On day trips, we wage slaves make it to the state park and turn back.

Heathcliff, Come Home

I suppose many readers of The Valve eventually get around to The Yale Journal of Criticism on their own, but if un-lit blogs can point you to the New York Times front page, it must be OK for me to point you to "Petted Things" by Ivan Kreilkamp, starring the Brontë sisters as animal rights pioneers.

Kreilkamp's essay pleasingly draws from history, the authors themselves, and recent Derrida in the service of (to me) a novel, amusing, and evocative association of realism with anthropomorphism. The critic even shows good reason for having treated "the Brontës" as a group rather than as individual novelists.

Potential Disney adaptors of Jane Eyre should especially note the story of Clumsy, A Dog:

"Tell how he grows ugly in growing up;... Madam's disgust for him; the rebuffs he suffers.... Clumsy, for that is what she calls him now, banished to the yard; his degradation; detail his privations, the change in food and company."

Everyone else should especially note that Carol Emshwiller's Carmen Dog carries far more entertainment value than its equivalent in Lucas-movie-and-junk-food.

Afterthought: The Brontës as potential writers of noble-dog stories reminds me of one of my own favorite alternate-literary-history scenarios: What if, rather than giving up their shared fantasy worlds, the Brontë sisters had successfully brought their mature styles and concerns into Gondal and Angria, weirdly anticipating Joanna Russ's Alyx, M. John Harrison's ret-conning of Viriconium, Samuel R. Delany's Nevèrÿon...?

Pointless, I know, but at least it's a break from imagining the rest of Emma.

Occasioned

The use of the essay, for example, a kind expressing liberal interest at first, began with Humanism in the sixteenth century; and one of its forms, the miscellaneous familiar essay, ceased to be popular after the crisis of Humanism in the 1930s.

- Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature

At 9 PM on Saturday June 18, the Pacific Film Archive at UC Berkeley is showing a revisionist Western from 1972, Dirty Little Billy. All later muddy streets seem thin in comparison: puddled with New Age puke or John Ford horsepiss. Given its timing, a few of the Billy demythologizers may have benefited from personal experience of frontier communes.

Was the movie intended as history or satire? To some extent, whether you're mocking or creating is decided later, by who notices what and how they respond. Artmaking is largely about being distracted from your original purpose; sometimes you even wake up in a new neighborhood. If you want to explain Robert Browning's influence on Ezra Pound, you could start worse than with a Browning parody like "The Cock and The Bull":

I shoved the timber ope wi’ my omoplat;
And in vestibulo, i’ the lobby to-wit,
(Iacobi Facciolati’s rendering, sir,) ...

That's a recent addition to an ongoing retrospective of a Century of Imitation, along with Calverley's "Proverbial Philosophy":

A maiden’s heart is as champagne, ever aspiring and struggling upwards,
And it needed that its motions be checked by the silvered cork of Propriety:
He that can afford the price, his be the precious treasure,
Let him drink deeply of its sweetness, nor grumble if it tasteth of the cork.

Also Thomas Hood Jr.'s Poe, worthied by its expiring exclamation!, and Swinburne's "The Person of the House", which literalizes Victorian reticence as "That Only a Mother" later literalized pulp science fiction reticence and to similar effect, as well as another online copy of Swinburne's magnificent "Nephelidia".

In other serialization news, Paul Kerschen has just begun serializing a free translation of Franz Kafka's diaries, alongside the original German. And if you aren't already following the lifework of W. N. P. Barbellion, 1910 is the year his journal completes its transition from dissection of other species to vivisection of our own. As the few remaining years go by and he consults and reconsults his own archives, we'll see Barbellion develop a craving for precursors or peers. He'll read Portrait of an Artist and decide he and James Joyce have struck the same vein independently. Later still he'll excitedly decide he's just like Marie Bashkirtseff.... "Is there one who understands me?"

But once your isolating eccentricity does turn out to be a community, new issues arise. I believe Djuna Barnes said everything worth saying about surveys: "I am sorry but the list of questions does not interest me to answer. Nor have I that respect for the public." Yet since Mr. Waggish is a compatriot to whom I owe the deepest respect, if Mr. Waggish requests something, I must assume Mr. Waggish has good reason, and therefore:

Total number of books I've owned: I buy books because of not always having had access to a good library ("I will never go stupid again!"), but I winnow them because of moving fairly often in the past, but I still want to re-read more books each year so the collection does grow, and because I've lived in one place with access to a good library for a while I've been buying fewer books but unread bought books are piling up. So maybe four times the number of books I have now? Roughly. Within a factor of ten.
Last book I bought: It was a group. A translation of Heinrich von Kleist's Penthesilea, the new Hans Christian Andersen translation, Ron Silliman's Under Albany, and Justine Larbalestier's Magic or Madness.
Last book I read: This must mean what I'm in the midst of reading since the next query is the "Last book I finished"? Mostly right now Kinds of Literature by Alastair Fowler.

It's free of nonsense, and, for all its easy style, extremely concise: virtually every page of this library volume is mostly underlined, the table of contents bears a jot by each chapter title, and I found there a improvised torn-paper bookmark with the scrawled note "BUY WHOLE BOOK?" (It's out of print, of course.) Two-thirds of the way through and Fowler's heroic attempt to revive the form of the Anatomy became a worthwhile drama of its own.

In 1982, I would've argued against Fowler's low opinion of the works recovered by feminist critics, but, hey, by 2005, I bet he might argue against himself. I'm possibly more skeptical that something fixedly "literary" can be found in all the works that drift in or out of literature, but that disagreement means less in practice than I thought at first. I may know a bit more about contemporary American genres, but that's to be expected; Fowler is sensible with the parts he knows, and he has a far wider and more detailed grasp of literary history than my autodidacticism has managed. His biggest difficulty may be the usual academic one of distance from working artists. Genre doesn't just happen between books; it's also a way for the author to feel less lonely for a bit (before feeling betrayed). Publishing isn't just to make money; it's also to make contact (before getting an unlisted number).

Fowler's book was recommended to me by Wendy Walker. If Wendy Walker is a new name to you, for the love of god, drop that copy of Emma Brown and hie ya. I'd like to tell you how I came to get a book recommendation from Wendy Walker. I commuted daily between Nashua NH and Cambridge MA, and I read something about Samuel R. Delany appearing at some convention between, so I stopped there. Formal emphasis was placed on the most ambitious class of science fiction and fantasy, but participants also included small press publishers, readers of contemporary poetry, and listeners to contemporary music. Our conversations were intriguing enough to bring me back the next day. I kept in touch with some of the people I met that weekend, and one of them, Don Keller, kept suggesting I write down some of what I spun in conversation. I started doing so, and the practice eventually became habitual.

Wendy Walker's work is sui generis. But some genres are friendlier towards the sui than others. Her novel The Secret Service seemed to me one of the great books to be found in the 1990s, but who would find it? I browsed shelves randomly and was fortunate enough to live by shelves which included Sun & Moon Press, most of whose other contemporary authors were poets — poets I admired, but whom I knew to be a sadly insular group. I gave copies to friends, recommended it, and wrote about it. Independently, so did Henry Wessells and Elizabeth Willey. Walker's cult was small but fervent, and, fearing that neither the writer nor her publisher had any clue as to its existence, I dropped him a note to suggest that an audience awaited.

The note was passed along. In a few weeks, Wendy Walker will be attending that uniquely ambitious conference in Massachussetts. It's a small world.

Or a big sign.

Addenda

I'm very pleased to announce a new (and nomenclaturally significant) addition to our Bellona Times Repress: a short biography of Samuel R. Delany by his pseudonymous third-person researcher, K. Leslie Steiner. My thanks go to Josh Lukin for bringing the document to my attention, and to Delany for permission to post it.

Elsewhere, the never-out-of-style Lisa Maira brings news of cultural rebirth:

The web is cool again. The orginal Mr. Edible Starchy Tuber Head is back.

That eminent researcher, writer, and producer Chris Albertson handles intros for the Boy! What a Girl combo:

Cast includes musicians Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis (tenor sax), Beryl Booker (piano), John Collins (guitar), and John Simmons (bass).

A Generic Response

"It is worth adding a few notes about how early modern critics thought about genre. Most importantly, they defined many kinds at least partially by their forms, but their dominant tendency was to define kinds by their social functions."

- Matt Greenfield

That still sounds right. Genre is what we call it when function is perceived to delimit or prompt form. The difficulty is that functions vary over time while texts stay set.

Since literary scholars by definition have greater access to texts than to writers, editors, publishers, or audiences, some confusion is inevitable. I've heard academic responses to genre range from puzzled to puzzling to apalling. (English department head to Samuel R. Delany: "I don't read that science fiction shit.")

But the problems can be worked against. In a less moribund genre, the scholar can actually seek out its social context, at the risk of being absorbed.

Even in historic genres, it's possible to make a conscious effort to switch imaginative contexts. I'm guessing that's what Matt wants to do with his class. Along those lines, I liked Fowler's book more than I expected. Genre markers are (sometimes unintended) signals to a community. Spotting the markers isn't enough to tell us what they're doing there. Fowler seemed to get that.

A more recent good example is Richard A. McCabe's "Annotating Anonymity" in Ma(r)king the Text. Rather than just describing the archaisms and explanatory apparatus of The Shepheardes Calendar as pastoral conventions, McCabe shows how they took advantage of (and sometimes had to work against) the specific model of Servius's Virgil commentaries.

I'm now finishing Memory in Oral Traditions by David C. Rubin.1 (Thank you, forgotten person who recommended it to me.) Rubin explains certain generic conventions of epic, ballad, and counting-out rhymes as directly molded by the mechanisms of multi-generational verbal transmission, and backs it up with evidence.

On a more negative note, Franco Moretti's "Graphs" and "Trees" are strictly parasitic on texts which he keeps strictly at arm's length. Not what I'd call a healthy relationship. More successful 2 interdisciplinary materialist approaches go beyond the confines of the English department. And although the nora project limits itself to textual analysis, it's with the reasonable aim of noticing textual aspects missed by received opinion.

Books don't compete with each other in a closed bibliosphere. Popularity and genre are social, not strictly textual. They can only be understood by looking outside a text itself. And when you do so, I think you find something more like chaos theory than like biological evolution.

Nothing Personal, 4a

John Rastell reminds me that alienation and appropriation are near-synonyms:

Alienation, is as much to say, as to make a thing an other mans, to alter or put the possession of lande or other thinge from one man to another.

- An Exposition of Certaine Difficult and Obscure Wordes and Termes
of the Lawes of this Realme, 1579

Alice Notley reminds herself of one occasion and me of another.

(This is the middle stanza of five. I wish I felt comfortable quoting them all. They're nicely linked, and the end of the last one would strengthen the illusion that I know what I'm talking about. But the collection is readily available, and she's fucking lazy unskilled and deserves your money.)

Flaming while Rome fiddles

The hardest and most important lesson I learned early in online life was to walk away from a fight after I'd had my say. It's the interpersonal equivalent of "Just pay the five dollars, George."

Or maybe of "I been thrown outa sweller joints than this." No need to scrawl toilet stalls with the Troll of Sorrow so long as Mr. Waggish or Dr. Lukin remain willing to call me on BS. To use the elegant formula which first crystallized at age nineteen, "Why am I standing here arguing with this shmuck about Dhalgren when I could be back at college getting laid?"

Oh, I remain thin-skinned, quick-tempered, and gullible, and so I can still forget that lesson when anxious and exhausted, just like I might forget to use a knife and fork when I'm very hungry, except scarfing hurts less in the aftermath; yes, even if a cayenned finger wanders to my eye it pains me less. There's less collateral damage, for one thing.

As for needing to set the record straight, the record's advice is unambiguous: Forget it. If history teaches us anything, it's that historians will treat us like dirt. A subject who attempts to stage-manage his reputation is handled with special contempt by biographers. (Who then mail scathing corrections to the biography's bad reviews.) Stopping first is not an admission of defeat: it's an admission of maturity.

Personal

We wake from a dream to enter, clearly, a daydream.

- Nick Piombino, 1980, as reprinted In the American Tree

I balked a bit at that last, writing about something I don't particularly understand or want to research for the sake of readers who don't particularly care. I've never acted suave with a fake ID — I forget what my last name's supposed to be, all that.... So it's not by chance that I opened by asking you for correction and closed by advising you not to argue with a fool, or that mid-balk I went priggish over expertise, or that I began it around the anniversary of my resignation from the Valve.

Or that I've been thinking of Nick Piombino, who wrote discursive lyric prose decades before blogs provided a medium, who avoids fruitless debate, and who, I suspect, has sometimes been prompted towards more recognizably generic approaches.

Or that I've been reading his book, and noticing how easily this peculiar form moves between paper and browser, so that I can desire both the bound Eeksy-Peeksy and the re-clicked-through fait accompli with no hunger pangs, just a drowsy anticipation of surplus.

Or that I've been looking through my own notebooks, which, like Nick, I've mixed in promiscuously from the start, albeit without dates, not having noted them in the first place, and thinking I've prompted myself too far from those impulses, and it's time to renew promiscuity. How did Delany put it? "On the smell of old effort, new effort bloomed"?

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 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.

W. lived in a small ugly city whose night life was distinguished by the emptying of a nearby insane asylum. He prepared cuisine classique a few times a year but otherwise subsisted on fast food followed by scotch and a cigar. Once, when I'd been totting up the come-hithers and stay-thences of a mutual friend, W. told me, "Just fuck her." It remains the only time I've heard the word hissed.

My problem was lack of faith, W. told me in spring of 1991. I still thought I might find a way to be happier. I had not fully learned my place. We are miserable and meant to be, said W.

We stopped speaking after I moved to California. It was one of those close friendships which last only until someone does something.

Like that of Hester Lynch Thrale and Frances Burney: my fellow blitherer Thrale, raised as a child star and hoping to raise child stars, very much the little boy's dog sitting up and begging to divert a company, compulsively open and rawly needy, trapped in a world without Facebook —

— and Burney, a born writer: the "little dolt" of the family, slow to speak, slow to read, kept at home; flattened between the good-cop of her conniving father and bad-cop of her bristling stepmother; shy, prudish — refusing to open anything titled Les liaisons dangereuses, dropping Werther when she discerned its "evident tendency," shuddering at the touch of her disgraced stepsister — clueless and scarily observant:

He was frightened out of his Wits, at me, he said, lest he should do any thing improper! [...] This always much vexes me, but I know not how to conquer so unfair a prejudice, while I never can get sight of these folks, except through an opera-Glass!—In which way they most assiduously view me in return, whenever I am in Mrs. Fitzgerald's Box.

In 1781 Thrale predicted "we will be Friends these forty Years." In retrospect they look doomed from the start (but what doesn't?). Freed from a loveless marriage which had surrounded her with loveless children, facing the first mutual attraction of her life, Thrale very naturally threw herself in, even if poor Signor Piozzi might as well have been Mount Stromboli so far as friends, family, and press were concerned.

Burney's disapproval did more harm to herself than to its target. Hester Lynch Thrale had been her closest female friend and her first female mentor. Samuel Crisp, her emotional support since childhood, died the year before Mrs. Thrale's re-marriage; Samuel Johnson died five months after. Aside from an increasingly preoccupied sister, Burney was left only the ultra-respectable role model of her post-Cecilia acquaintance Mary Delany. Through her, and to the gratification of her father's snobbery, Burney was locked into the anti-intellectual isolation ward of George III's court for six years. When Burney made her own completely unsuitable marriage to a penniless Catholic, Mrs. Thrale was a decade in the past.

What interests me most about the story, though, isn't in the story. It's in the way the story's source material stays not-a-story. The living friendship was face-to-face; we can't share its excitement or comfort. But Thraliana and Burney's letters convey its death more vividly than any novel or biography could: a slog through hints, asides, petty annoyances and vehement pledges, apologies and ambiguous backchat and tiresome melodrama and well-meant betrayals and unexplained gaps, and a trailing train of increasingly relaxed wish-her-wells...

In the presence of a narrator, that sort of pacing would seem undisciplined and pointlessly arbitrary. Endurance tests like La maman et la putain come close, but the experience is best communicated through remnants of the process itself.

Realism : An Anthology

An appeal to an artwork's realism, its roots in reality, is an appeal not to its accuracy at registering facts but to the depth of its claim upon us. The claim is not, 'this is the real world', but rather, 'this is your world'.

- Josh Kortbein, josh blog

Career tip: flatter your readers by telling them they're "made of stories".

Some days I wake up sick to death of language.

As for fiction.

99.999999% of the "conversation" is rhetoric so bad you don't know whether to choke or laugh.

You look around in despair for some state that doesn't include the use of language.

"Made of stories." Bland, meaningless crap.

Noncommunicative actions, impossible to to turn into language & thus not subject to constant mild but slimy abuse. Where are they?

- M. John Harrison, Twitter

“Oh, I’ve said, ‘You can't describe it. You'd have to be there.’ But that’s my first wife telling her mother-in-law about the time we went to Persia. And that isn’t what I mean.”

Kid smiled back and wished he hadn’t.

It isn’t his moon I distrust so much, he thought, as it is that first wife in Persia.

- Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren

Assume the position

Assumption
by Percival Everett

Three police procedurals with a likably quirky and fallible protagonist — and a shocking twist you won't believe!!

Or, hell, you probably will. Even if you never heard of Oedipus and didn't cut your genre teeth on Trent's Last Case and never saw Dark Angel on the late-late show, thirty years of blockbusters have established the good-guy-who's-really-bad as a convention which no more needs justifying than, say, a Tom Cruise love interest. Mystery readers who've reviewed Assumption felt satisfyingly tricked. Of the two academic papers on the book, one accepts the revised characterization at face-value and the other doesn't even mention it (which is a neat trick in itself).

I believed it, too, but my "it" was something stranger in reviewerly terms, if more familiar in fleshy ones. I took the ending at its word rather than at its face value:

"This is the way is is, Warren, simply the way it fucking is. Sad, sad, sad, sad, sad. Shitty, shitty, bang, bang. Nothing makes sense and that's the only way that any of it can make sense. Here I am, the way I am, not making any sense. Blood in the water. Blood on my shirt."

Generically, Assumption is a story series with the sort of showy dismount favored by writers whose ambitions reach past the commercial district. Back in the day, each novella could've appeared separately in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine or Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, with the third generating plenty of hate mail. For me, the insinuations which came increasingly (and maybe too abruptly) thick and heavy didn't (and don't) feel like clues laid to prop a backwards-reading; instead, they detoured us to structural collapse: solution by dissolved form.

The distinction partly comes down to reality effect. "Innocent" passages of the final story are detailed, individualized, and localized. Whereas the "guilty" intrusions are vague, off-the-shelf stuff, thudding the same "BOMM! BOMM! BOMM!" soundtrack used by every thriller trailer of the past, well, thirty years. The kind of bullshit which comforts juries but no one else.

I'd also been softened up (or simply concussed) by earlier apparently-realistic wholeheartedly-affective formal experiments. For reasons outside the immediate reading experience, I often find myself turning to Dhalgren:

"But thinking that live streets and windows are plotting and conniving to make you into something you're not, that's crazy, isn't it?"

I'm not a poet.
I'm not a hero.
But sometimes I think these people will distort reality in any way to make me one. And sometimes I think reality will distort me any way to make me appear one — but that's insanity, isn't it? And I don't want to be crazy again.
I don't.

Most of all, my interpretive preference was swayed by hope for shared witness.

I sometimes hear shaming justified as punitive rehabilitation. A learning experience, so to speak, and I suppose it generally is, in one sense or another. It most often serves to exile (or confirm the pariahdom of) its target, strengthening the border between in-group and out-group, and confirming one's own claim to centrality. As evidence, those who consider themselves most securely in-group are notoriously shameless. Bullies (whether self-made or hammered-out) and their slaveys treat shame as weakness: the only thing that shames them is shame itself.

Censors are rarely fooled by the pretenses of the "cautionary tale"; they sense how easily the supposed warning becomes the irresistible script, a second-hand experience which your first-hand starts to grasp for.

BART: Wow. A drifter!

FUTURE BART: Lousy sheriff... Run me out of town... He's lost my vote...

BART: Cooool.

Shaming is a cautionary tale with an army and navy. Unless you have your own tribe to back you up, even if you're annoyed by the shamers' presumptions, you may later watch yourself act them out — or remember having acted them out. At my lowest ebb, I recall the sudden relief of not bothering to argue with the world or myself, just doing the expected thing and waiting for the movie to be over instead of stretching it out to tedious length. If going with the flow sent me over the falls, well, I guess that's where I was meant to be.

Everett's decent-but-no-genius deputy sheriff is a black man in an overwhelmingly white-and-armed community. Wherever he goes, he's viewed with suspicion; should external reminders of bigotry be momentarily lacking, he can fill the void with memories of his father's jeremiads. He's got a place in the sheriff's department; he feels at home in a trout stream; he has to watch what he says in front of his mother.... It's not a lot to fall back on.

None of which is meant to insist that the last story's Big Kill was "really" done by anyone other than the guy who confessed to it. I don't think Assumption is a realistic story of false memory. Instead, I think it's a story that realism can't tell: the incomprehension of "Did I do that? I couldn't have done that, could I?" "Did he do that? He couldn't have done that..." "Did we do that? ..." The "No, not again" sensation of turning on the news and seeing another house idol, another icon we took as proof that life could escape that particular script — Assumption freezes those final drowning moments of denial, the thing that catches in your throat even after you've begun to accept it as part of your throat....

Do I believe my own theory, as the man says? I'm not as certain of it as I am that, for example, Delany consciously embedded the funky clues that invalidate a Kid's-just-crazy interpretation of Dhalgren. The finales of both Erasure and Assumption felt rushed to me, which may betray readerly incompatibility. And in at least one interview, Everett seems to endorse the clever-clew-stringer take.

But I do feel a reasonable doubt, and the only menace I'd like to hang is the jury.

Down Home Music

Mojo Hand : An Orphic Tale by J. J. Phillips

1. "Eurydice's victims died of snake-bite, not herself." - Robert Graves

Protagonist "Eunice" is, as we can plainly see, an un-dry Eurydice. And love-object Blacksnake Brown is Orphic because he sets the stately oaks to boogie:

She went to the phonograph there and looked through the stack of records under it. Down at the bottom, dusty and scratched, she found an old 78 recording called “Bakershop Blues” by a man named Blacksnake Brown, accompanied by the Royal Sheiks. She lifted off the classical album, slipped on the 78, then turned the volume up. It started scratching its tune.

I want to know if your jelly roll’s fresh, or is it stale, I want to know if your jelly roll’s fresh, or is it stale? Well, woman, I’m going to buy me some jelly roll if I have got to go to jail.

Almost immediately she heard shouts and shrieks from the other room.

“. . . Oh, yeah, get to it. . . . Laura, woman, how long since your husband’s seen you jelly roll?”

“Gertrude, don’t you ask me questions like that. Eh, how long since your husband’s seen you?”

Eunice went back downstairs. Everyone had relaxed. Some women were unbuckling their stockings, others were loosening the belts around their waists. Someone had gotten out brandy and was pouring it into the teacups.

“Give some to the debs,” someone said, “show them what this society really is.”

Just as plainly, though, "Blacksnake" is a snake, with an attested bite. And for all l'amour fou on display, Eunice is only secondarily drawn to her Orpheusnake; first, last, and on the majority of pages in-between, she's after Thrace-Hades:

And even before that she had been drawn to the forbidden dream of those outside the game, for they had been judged and did not care to concern themselves with questioning any stated validity in the postulates. Playing with friends, running up and down the crazily tilted San Francisco streets, they would often wander into the few alleys between houses or stores down by the shipyards. [...] The old buildings were not of equal depth in back, nor were they joined to one another, and there were narrow dark passageways between the buildings. She would worm her way in and out of these, for they were usually empty, though occasionally as she would whip around a corner she would hear voices and would tiptoe up to watch two or three men crouched on the ground, each holding a sack of wine, and shooting dice. She would hide and watch them until the sun went down, marking their actions and words, then tramp home alone whispering to herself in a small voice thick with the sympathy of their wine, “Roll that big eight, sweet Daddy.”

This place which is also a community and a way of living — maybe a good name for that would be habitus? — although nowadays and hereabouts ussens tend to call it an identity. To switch mythological illustrations, what Odysseus craved wasn't retirement on a mountainous Mediterranean island, or reunion with his wife and child, both of whom he's prepared to skewer, but his identity as ruler of Ithaka.

What baits Eunice isn't so much the spell of music but the promise of capture and transportation. Brown's a thin, helpfully color-coded line who can reel her out of flailing air and into Carolina mud, a properly ordained authority to release her family curse (and deliver her into bondage) by way of ceremonial abjuration:

“We-ell, you being fayed and all, I doesn’t want to get in no trouble.”

The night was warm and easy, and it came from Eunice as easy as the night. “Man, I’m not fayed.”

He straightened up and squinted. “Well, what the hell. Is you jiving, woman, or what? You sure has me fooled if you isn’t.”

“You mean you dragged me out in the middle of the night into this alley just because you thought I was fayed? That’s the damndest thing I’ve ever heard.” But she knew it was not funny, neither for herself nor for him.

Blacksnake broke in on her thoughts. “Well, baby, if you says so, I believes you. But you sure doesn’t look like it, and you doesn’t even act like it, but you’s OK with me if you really is what you says you is. Here, get youself a good taste on this bottle.”

Eunice took the bottle and drank deeply, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

(In many more-or-less timeless ways, Mojo Hand is the first novel of a very young writer. On this point of faith, though, it's specifically an early Sixties novel: that the Real Folk Blues holds power to transmute us into Real Folk.)

Having passed customs inspection, Eunice considers her down-home away from home:

Until this night she had been outside of the cage, but now she had joined them forever.

About twenty-hours later, "the cage" materializes as a two-week stretch in the Wake County jail:

But soon she came to learn that it was easier here. Everything was decided. That gave her mind freedom to wander through intricate paths of frustration.

Jail isn't a detour; it's fully part of Eunice's destination, and afterward she's told "Well, you sure as shit is one of us now." But what sort of freedom is this?

Some people intuit a conflict between "free will" and "reasoned action." (Because reasons would be a cause and causality would be determinism? Because decisions are painful and willful freedom should come warm and easy?) Or, as Eunice reflects later, in a more combative state of mind:

Since her parents had built and waged life within their framework, in order to obvert it fully she, too, had to build or find a counterstructure and exist within it at all costs. The difference lay in that theirs was predicated on a pseudo-rationality whereas the rational was neither integral nor peripheral in hers; she did not consider it at all. To her the excesses of the heart had to be able to run rampant and find their own boundaries, exhausting themselves in plaguing hope.

When the pretensions of consciousness become unbearable, one option is to near-as-damn-it erase them: minimize choices; make decision mimic instinct; hand your reins to received stereotype and transient impulse. Lead the "simple" life of back-chat, rough teasing, subsistence wages, steady buzz, sudden passions, unfathomable conflicts, limitless boredom, and clumsy violence. A way of life accessible to the abject of all races and creeds in this great land, including my own.

All of which Phillips describes with appropriately loving and exasperated care, although she's forced to downshift into abstract poeticisms to traverse the equally essential social glue of sex.

It was completely effortless, with the songs on the jukebox marking time and the clicking pool balls countersounding it all until the sounds merged into one, becoming inaudible. Eunice felt the ease, the lack of rigidity, and relaxed. She would learn to live cautiously and underhandedly so that she might survive. She would learn to wrangle her way on and on to meet each moment, forgetting herself in the next and predestroyed by the certainty of the one to come.

3. "At the center, there is a perilous act" - Robin Blaser

In this pleasant fashion uncounted weeks pass. Long enough for a girl to become pregnant; long enough for whatever internal clock ended Brown's earlier affairs to signal an campaign of escalating abuse which reviewers called mysterious, although it sounded familiar enough to me.

Blacksnake was Eunice's visa into this country. What happens if the visa's revoked? If our primary goal is to stay put and passive, what can we do when stasis becomes untenable?

Shake it, baby, shake it.

Having escaped into this life, Eunice refuses to escape from it:

There was no sense, she knew, in going back to San Francisco, back home to bring a child into a world of people who were too much and only in awe of their own consciousness. They were as rigid and sterile as the buildings that towered above them.

She'll only accept oscillation within the parameters of her hard-won cage. This cul-de-sac expresses itself in three ways:

• In the storyline, Eunice retreats by train to Lake Charles, the place she'd just arrived from on the first page of the novel. (And then Eunice leaves Lake Charles and points towards Raleigh again.)
• In the storytelling, readers are slid into the longest flashback of the book, returning us to the temporal transit point to which Eunice returns in space.
• And knitting those two kinks together like scar tissue is a magical ritual.

It seems perfectly natural for the strictly-local efficacy of the occult to appear at a crisis of sustainability, scuffing novelistic realism in favor of keeping it real. The flashback, though, rips the sequence of time and place to more genuinely unsettling effect, and Phillips handles the operation with such disorienting understatement that this otherwise sympathetic reader sutured the sequence wrong-way-round in memory.

It's unsettling because we register the narrative device as both arbitrary and, more deeply, necessary. Being a self-made self-damned Eurydice, Eunice must look back at herself to secure permanent residence. But when the goal is loss of agency, how can action be taken to preserve it?

• If Phillips had kept the plot but told it straight, then at point B we'd see Eunice acting towards a definite purpose.
• If Phillips had rearranged the plot along the path imagined by the LA Times reviewer, Eunice would become a purposive agent at both points A and B.

Instead, we watch her sleepwalk through mysteriously scripted actions twice over.

4. "Black ghost is a picture, & the black ghost is a shadow too." - Lightnin' Hopkins

Immediately after you start reading Mojo Hand, and well before you watch Eunice Prideaux hauled to Wake County jail, you'll learn that J. J. Phillips preceded her there. If you're holding the paperback reissue, its behind-bars author photo will have informed you that both prisoners were light-skinned teenage girls.

If you've listened to much blues in your life, you'll likely know "Mojo Hand" as a signature number of Lightnin' Hopkins. If you've seen photos of Hopkins on any LPs, the figure of "Blacksnake Brown" will seem familiar as well.

Since comparisons have been made inevitable, contrasts are also in order.

Blacksnake Brown is clearly not the Lightnin' Hopkins who'd played Carnegie Hall, frequently visited Berkeley, and lived until 1982. Eunice is jailed for the crime of looking like a besmirched white woman in a black neighborhood at night; Phillips, on the other hand:

In 1962 I was selected to participate in a summer voter registration program in Raleigh, North Carolina, administered by the National Students Association (NSA). [...] Our group, led by Dorothy Dawson (Burlage), wasn't large and the project was active only for that summer; but during the short time that we were in Raleigh, we managed to register over 1,600 African Americans, which, along with other voter registration programs in the state, surely helped pave the way for Obama's 2008 victory in North Carolina. [...] On the spur of the moment I'd taken part in a CORE-sponsored sit-in at the local Howard Johnson's as part of their Freedom Highways program, which took place the year after the Freedom Rides. [...] Our conviction was of course a fait accompli. We were given the choice of paying a modest fine or serving 30 days hard labor in prison; but the objective was to serve the time as prisoners of conscience, and so we did. In deference to my gender, I was sent to the Wake Co. Jail.

[...] Thus began a totally captivating 30 days — an immersive intensive in which I got the kind of real-life education I could never have obtained otherwise.

This unexpectedly welcome "captivation" brings us back to Eunice, however, and thence to Eunice's own brush with voter registration programs:

“I don’t want to register.”

The boy shifted from one flat foot to another and scratched a festering pimple. “But ma’m, it’s important that you try and better your society. Can’t you see that?”

“No, I can’t.”

He paused a moment, and then proceeded. “Whatever your hesitation stems from, it is not good. It is necessary for us all to work together in obtaining the common goal of equality. It is not only equality in spirit; your living standards must be equal. Environment plays an important factor. You must realize also that it is not only your right but your duty to choose the people you wish to represent you in our government. If you do not vote you have no choice in determining how you will live.”

Eunice chuckled as she remembered Bertha back in the jail. She crinkled her eyes and laughed. “Well, sho is, ain’t it.”

In turn, that "festering pimple" suggests some animus drawn from outside the confines of the book. And in an interview immediately following the book's publication, its author came close to outright disavowal:

"I went to jail to see what it was like. I was in Raleigh on a voter registration drive. Somebody asked for restaurant sit-in volunteers sure to be arrested. I was not for or against the cause, I just wanted to go to jail." [...] Slender, with the long, straight hair, wearing the inevitable trousers, strumming the guitar, she also defies authority in her rush to individual freedom. She lives in steady rebellion against the comfortable — escapist? — atmosphere provided by her parents, both in professional fields and both successful. Her own backhouse, bedroom apartment, her transportation — a Yamaha and a huge, black, 5-year-old Cadillac; her calm acceptance of her right to live as she pleases are all a part of the pattern of the new 1966 young.

(For the record, yes, I'm grateful that no one is likely to find any interview I gave at age 22, or to publish any mug shot of me at age 18.)

Forty-three years later, J. J. Phillips positioned Mojo Hand in a broader context: three separate cross-country loops during an eventful three years which she entered as an nice upper-middle-class girl at an elite Los Angeles Catholic college and left as an expelled, furious, disillusioned, blues-performing fry-cook.

Which of these accounts should we believe? Well, all of them, of course. Here, what interests me more is their shared difference from the story of Eunice.

* * *

The older Phillips summarized Mojo Hand as "a story of one person’s journey from a non-racialized state to the racialized real world, as was happening to me."

As always, her words are carefully chosen. In the course of a sentence which asserts equivalence, she shifts from Eunice's singular, focused journey to something that "was happening to" young Phillips. More blatantly, she tips the balance by contrasting "a state" with "the real world."

Contrariwise, someone might describe my own wavering ascent towards Eunice's-and-Phillips's starting point as "one person's journey from a racialized state" (to wit, Missouri) "to the class-defined real world." I'm not that someone, though. Even at the age of Mojo Hand's writing, when my scabrous androgyny was demonstrably irredeemable, I understood that, should I live long enough, my equally glaring whiteness would bob me upwards like a blob of schmaltz. And indeed, although my patrons and superiors have been repeatedly nonplussed by my choices, none ever denied my right to make them.

Whereas, in America, some brave volunteer or another can always be found to remind you that you're black or female. And in the ordinary language of down-home philosophizin', if you can't escape it, it's real: truth can be argued but reality can only be acknowledged, ignored, or changed. Even if "race" is an unevidenced taxonomy and "racism" is a false ideology, "racism" and "a racialized world" remain real enough to kill — depending on time and place.

As does "class." And, like Phillips in Los Angeles, in San Francisco Eunice was born into a particularly privileged socio-economic class. Even if she'd stayed in San Francisco, she could've chosen to remove herself from that class, most likely temporarily, anticipating the "inevitable pattern of the new 1966 young." But merely by having the choice, she would have become in some sense, in some eyes, a fraud.

The Jim Crow South, however, offered any stray members of the striving class at most the choice of "passing," faudulent by definition. Thus, with the mere purchase of a train ticket, properly propertied individuals could reinvent themselves as powerless nonentities. What racialized Eunice and Phillips was travel to a place in which no non-racialized reality existed. What made that racialization lastingly, inescapably "real" was, for Eunice, a permanent change of residence. For Phillips, back in California, it was recognizing a racism which had previously stayed latent or unnoticed, and which continued to be denied in infuriatingly almost-plausible fashion.

5. "But I didn't know what kind of chariot gonna take me away from here." - Lightnin' Hopkins

Returning to the book's one encounter with progressive politics, after Eunice shuts the door on the pimpled young man, Blacksnake is bemused (not for the first time) by her volitional assumption of a cage in which others were born and bred:

“Oh, shit. Woman, I can’t vote. I been to the penitench. [...] Girl, you got some strange things turning ’round in that head of yours. Why did you come here anyway?”

“I don’t know. I just felt like it.”

Eunice sat down on the bed and scratched her head. It was useless to try and find the causes of her being here; she merely was and could never be sure whether it was a true act or a posture of defiance.

Odysseus traveled to reclaim his prior identity. How, though, would someone establish an identity?

By fiat, by fate. With that infallible sixth sense by which we know we were a princess dumped on a bunch of dwarfs, or the infant who was swapped out for a changeling, Eunice knows she's been denied her birthright. Or two birthrights, which Mojo Hand merges:

First, racialization; that is, membership in a race.

Second, the inalienable right and incorrigible drive to make irretrievable mistakes and trigger fatal disasters. In a word, maturity.

Never had she been forced to her knees to beg for the continuation of her existence, nor fight both God and the devil ripping at her soul; never had she been forced to fight to move in the intricate web of scuffle; never had she been forced to fight a woman for the right to a man, nor fought out love with a man. She had never fought for existence; now she would have to.

In well-ordered middle-class mid-century households, these are things parents protected children from, things children couldn't imagine their parents doing. Most of them are part of most adult lives, and once experienced, they're not likely to be forgotten. But depicting them comes easiest when they're assigned to disorderly elements, and a narrative's end is more attended than its torso.

In the novel's introductory parable, a girl who finds the sun (dropped by an old-fashioned Los Angeles pepper tree) is forced by her father to give it up. During her longest residence in Lightnin' Hopkins's Houston neighborhood, Phillips met similar interference: "I especially did not want to suffer the ultimate mortification of being ignominiously carted home by my parents, so I went back to L.A."

If Eunice had been dragged back to San Francisco, that anticlimax would be interpreted as an ironic deflation of a hard-won life. And so, in vengeance for her parents' deracination, Eunice is silently de-parented, and the book instead ends with her both adopting a new mother and waiting to become a new mother.

* * *

The United States between 1962 and 2009 incorporated a whole lot of habitussles, each with its own preferred ways to swing a story. Even as something is done (by us, to us, of us, the passive voice is the voice that rings real) — and certainly afterwards — we're spun round by potential justifications, motives, excuses, bars, blanks.... Whichever we choose, sho is, ain't it.

One year after 22-year-old J. J. Phillips saw Mojo Hand in print, 25-year-old Samuel R. Delany saw his own version of black Orpheus, A Fabulous, Formless Darkness, published as The Einstein Intersection. Neither fiction much resembles Ovid, and where Phillips mythologizes black community, Delany mythologizes queer difference. What the two writers shared was a reach for "mythology" as that which both describes and controls the actions of the mythological hero: a transcript which is a script; a fate justified as fulfillment of fate.

A story to make sense of senselessness and reward of repeated loss.

What Phillips suffered and enjoyed as an indirect, experimental process of frequently unwelcome discovery and retreat, confrontation and compromise, Eunice is able to consciously hunt as a coherent (if not rationally justifiable) destination. The mythic heroine's one necessary act of mythic agency was to decide to enter that story and, mythically, stay there ever after. The oaks rest in place, thoroughly rooted, frozen in their dance.

Lucky oaks.

Josh Lukin, August 18 1968 - July 25 2019

... a man of infinite patience and compassion, awesome learning, immense honesty, and almost grating humility, he represents to me the peak of what a scholar can be.

- from "Acknowledgments" in "A Literature of Suspicion: Critiques of 1950s Ideals in the American Roman Noir," a dissertation by Joshua Benjamin Lukin, 2003

Dick Macksey was the role model Josh mentioned most often to me, with H. Bruce Franklin a close second. I suppose what makes us think of someone as a "role model" or a "mentor" rather than simply "admirable" is validation-by-example of an ethos we would like to share once we've been assured that it's possible. And for those who succeed, descriptions of one's role model can conveniently be repurposed by others as a self-portrait.

Josh successfully lived as if the greatest of scholarly virtues, the primary impetus and guide which could not be sacrificed to convenience or time, was generosity. I'm told there are few higher-education jobs more draining than repeated first-year composition classes in an un-Ivied urban university, but year after year he gave his all to students. Almost half the longer pieces in his publications CV consist of interviews with non-canonical authors (and Josh Lukin was the Ernest Haller of interviewers). One of his two book credits comes from editing a collection of next-to-forgotten work from a writer better known as a mathematician; for the other, he edited a collection of essays about undercelebrated writings from an undercelebrated age. If he'd only labored over some first-time-into-English translations, he would have bullseyed every bullet point on the "Valuable Scholarly Work Which Will Not Advance Your Career" slide.

The virtue of "generosity" covers a wide and sometimes conflicting range, and its expressions are shaped by opportunity and need. (To put it more bluntly, Josh Lukin could not have reached into his shelves and handed anyone a first edition copy of Tristram Shandy — although he could and did provide a year's worth of very welcome Donald Westlake recommendations.) In Josh's scholarly home turf of American studies (most often non-mainstream fiction, most often mid-20th-century), his characteristic expression turned away from both a Hermeneutics of Suspicion directed at naive-yet-safely-canonical Literature and the quietist or martial celebration of received wisdom, to demonstrate a Hermeneutics of Recovery and Acknowledgment which let suspicious Literature handle the Suspicion.

More broadly, he worked (and played) to break through the gated solipsism of those who conform to the hegemony du jour and the solitary confinement of those whose experiences or very existence have been denied:

But the taking of sides is not always the point: some of [Chandler] Davis's stories and essays rely on poetic force to evoke the understanding that — to put it in propositional form — “This state of feeling, or sequence of feelings, is possible and even common.’ A criterion for artistry and for radicalism in such a tactic is whether the statement is necessary and unusual: the pedagogy of feeling to which we are subjected every day by the clichéd and conservative discourse around us does not need more literature to reinforce it. Andrea Hairston has written, “Repetition is meaning. What we hear endlessly, goes without saying—is learned.” We need the tools to unlearn it, or to find affirmation of what we rarely hear validated; but we aren’t blessed with authoritative guides or methods for determining where poetic truth appears, or what manifestations of poetically shared feeling “further our understanding of ourselves and our society.” We must fall back upon our own rational faculties and our own moral imagination, with curiosity and compassion fueling our drive to connect with others.

- "Afterword: Alternatives to Reverence" from It Walks in Beautry

What artists, educators, performers, and historians can do for such movements is establish connections and continuities. If the hegemonic discourse reproduces itself by telling people with dissenting ideas that they are ridiculous, unhip, criminal, isolated, or mad, then any indication that they might be reasonable, aware, just, sane, and possessed of views that are shared by other people or were validated in other eras can help to build courage and conviction. Documenting what happens when shame is used as a mode of social control, when men are limited to a small repertoire of stereotypical roles, and when class is conflated with personal worth, the Literature of Suspicion can tell a receptive reader that a life such as his has been noticed or that her own suspicions that the dominant order's claims are false have been shared.

- "A Literature of Suspicion: Critiques of 1950s Ideals in the American Roman Noir"

Although I will in the remainder of this essay speak of having recognized familiar experiences in literature, I actually tend to feel that the text has recognized me rather than the reverse. And in being so recognized, I get, paradoxically, assured that responding, or having responded, with shame (or indeed with other intense affects) to past or ongoing experiences may not in fact be shameful.

- "Science Fiction, Affect, and Crip Self-Invention — Or, How Philip K. Dick Made Me Disabled"

To my suggestion that Josh go public with his particularly acute critique of a then-trendy bit of poisonous rhetoric:

But right now, getting X *more* talked-about seems to me to be as desirable as a fistula (Asking Delany for his thoughts on the guy was a strategy for getting more Delanyan thinking into the world, not more reflections on X per se). You know me --I wunna call attention to as-yet insufficiently celebrated scholarship (among which I count Hoberek's book) or promote the creation of critical work that circumnavigates the Usual Cliches. Or, you know, get more sleep.

- correspondence, 2005

What's at stake here for me is that I would kind of like to say "These authors I have interviewed provide us with tools to rebut, or see through, or assert our dignity in the face of, or ignore, the toxic fantasies of X, Y, and Z" 'cause one is supposed to have a theory as to what theme holds one's work together. I hope my argument ends up having advantages beyond the fact that I know about irony. I'll have to engage Landy's "Nation of Bovarys," I guess; but surely we all see our own insufficiencies and plunge into bovarysm in order to escape the condemnation which, deep in our consciousness, we are the first and perhaps the only ones to make.

- correspondence, 2011

* * *

Present-day curators of American higher education in America set high value on "generosity" among the donor class but otherwise maybe not so much, and the freshly doctorated Josh Lukin duly became a contingent employee with a teaching load which discouraged extended research, writing, or publisher stalking. Chronically short on time, and showing caution appropriate to the academic precariat (as well as caution appropriate to the reader of Patricia Highsmith), Josh reduced his weblog to un-Waybackable ash long ago, and kept his Facebook account on lockdown more often than not. His latter-day academic publications include book reviews, reference-book entries, and a few historically-informed pedagogically-slanted close readings. All of them excellent jobs; all of them informative, convincing, and true to his own values. At least one of the reference entries has won an impressive citation list in its own right.

But such material requires some fading-into-the-background, and few hold much of Lukin's distinctive voice.

Most obviously (and understandably) missing are the puns. Josh perceived a world of whirling nimbuses of potential pun, where a quiver of displacement might at any moment discharge a cackling flash too loud and bright to ignore.

Then there was his affection for a mostly-vanished mode of mid-century secular American Jewishness; in one phone conversation with Josh, I would hear more Yiddish than from my year in Brooklyn. Like other drops from approved diction into "down home" idioms, it played a tutoyer role, and as such sometimes made a guest appearance in his interviews.

Most crucially, his academic publications muted the unique virtue of his wit, which somehow contrived to be engagingly genial even when furious or despairing. When he stung, he left a sting worth attending. You might gather some notion from his Chandler Davis afterword, and "Science Fiction, Affect, and Crip Self-Invention," and, less formally, from his Aqueduct Press self-bio. Although his dissertation is officially unpublished and (like virtually all contemporary literary-studies dissertations) modularized for easy cannibalization, and has in fact been partly cannibalized, it also coheres and builds, which makes me suspect that extended Lukin may be the best Lukin.

For that reason, I've kept close and frustrated track of the book-length projects he's mentioned over the years: a collection of his "interviews with feminist authors"; "Noir Recognitions, a study of identity in the 1950s novels of Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, and Philip Dick"; and, most intriguingly, "an unpublished draft of a memoir (Urgency: Growing Up with Crohn’s Disease)." Maybe someday, someday... well, a fan-boy can dream, can't he?

* * *

The Josh Lukin I knew was deeper, wider, and funnier than the academically-published Dr. Joshua B. Lukin, but still not quite Josh complet. I know from hearsay that he, like me, loved to eat, loved face-to-face conversation, and exhibited a disconcerting tendency to burst into song (myself in chants which echo Michael Hordern's, Josh [I imagine] in a Melchiorisch heldentenor accompanied by Segovian guitar). But residing 2800 miles apart and on very different career tracks, we (and Ann Keefer, his partner in all things) met only once in the flesh (being flesh, we of course immediately dined), and the late hours of our phone calls discouraged outbursts which might startle sleepy cats.

Still, it was Josh Lukin enough to fill a satisfying portion of my life. Long after the bulk of free-and-direct discourse retreated from the spooky public sphere into Mark'n'Jack's ClickLike Clubhouse, he continued to engage with an uncredentialed unknown non-academic who (true to form) could not conceivably advance anyone's career a whit. For sixteen years, through mutually inflicted bafflements, bruisings, and boosts, he was my most reliable correspondent, and for sixteen years he instigated my most extended and educational phone calls, punctuated by his signature placeholder, "What, can, I, say...," intoned with the delighted perplexity of a sated gourmet faced by another platter of amuse-bouches. Despite being given the advantage of a four-hour time difference, I'm such an early-rising geezer I sometimes found myself unable to even take notes during the last part of these calls, and wished I'd asked permission to record them for later listening.

(Timmi Duchamp maintained an even longer and closer epistolary/telephonic friendship. I wonder how many more of us are out there?)

Josh always suffered from greater or even-greater health problems, and they worsened this year, interfering not only with his work but with his and Ann's preparations to relocate. In mid-July he phoned to tell me that diagnostic progress had finally been made and a biopsy had been scheduled, and he figured I might be able to say something more than "We will keep you in our thoughts and prayers." I did so; he did so; we enjoyed ourselves but grew fatigued, as a sleepy old guy and a mortally ill guy will. Before we hung up I asked him to phone me again next week with the results of his biopsy, then thoughtlessly added, "We'll be thinking of you." I quickly apologized for violating our contract, at which he just as quickly chortled, "Like Oscar Wilde said, heh, the only thing worse than being thought about is not being thought about."

I didn't hear back from him the next week but wasn't surprised — no matter what course of treatment he was prescribed, he and Ann would also be busy with their move.

Early on Sunday morning, July 28, I saw an obituary for Richard Macksey in the Washington Post, and sent a short email to Josh expressing condolences and asking about the biopsy. Late on Sunday night, I realized it had been a while since I checked on Facebook inhabitants, briefly logged in, and found that Josh had died two nights before.

He would've mocked my sentimentality with relish (with mustard, even), but Josh meant the world to me — I know he did because the ground beneath me vanished when I read the news — and free-fall makes me clingy. I hope this Sondheim number is sardonic enough to pass muster (and the mustard) with his memory.

2. Picture Book

(or, Fun with Your New Manifold)

In this paper, I will picture
    I will illustrate a law.
Everybody likes to picture;
    No one wants to learn to draw.

Imagine that the graph-paper-covered room above is a warehouse (offsite storage for a museum or a library, say, or a barn) completely filled by some sort of object or another (archaeological artifacts; books; fodder), piled up and shoved back in some order that I'll leave vague for now.

And now imagine all the warehoused objects of some more specific sort (pseudo-red-figure painting; cyberpunk novels; mycotoxin-contaminated grains) hovering on or near that twisted and tugged tie-died sheet like mosquitoes attacking a net. Then (if we really wanted to) we might say to ourselves that the sheet represents the subcategory.

As to why anyone would really want to say such a thing — well, I'll get to that too. First, though, I should confess that the figure I've been pointing to is randomly chosen clip-art, and the reassuringly regular digits marked off along its edges have sweet fuck-all to do with what I've been asking you to imagine. I placed the image there as an arbitrary sample of an allegorical simplification (reduction to three Euclidean dimensions from an indefinitely expanding set of "real" dimensions, some of which are discrete and finite, others continuous and infinite, others difficult to describe at all) of an inexact metaphor for some concepts of interest to myself and Dr. Grietzer.

For both of us, what's imaged is the launch of a research program rather than a graphic summary of its conclusion.

I wonder to what degree doing mathematics is constructing a mental model for a mathematical object, comparing the properties of that model to the facts associated to the object and then trying to reconcile the model with the facts?

Jon Bannon at MathOverflow

Revisiting my randomly chosen absurdly oversimplified allegorical diagram, let's say our warehouse is full of digitized photographs and we're interested in those which contain smiling faces (whether lying or not). Where might they be found?

That depends on how the warehouse contents were originally sorted, or, equivalently, what the fictional coordinates marked off on those imaginary walls might be measuring.

Say left-to-right marks the brightness of the top-leftmost pixel of a photograph, back-to-front marks the color of the bottom-rightmost pixel, and floor-to-ceiling marks the original photograph's area in millimeters. Then the photos we want would probably look as if they were shoved into the warehouse at random.

Which doesn't necessarily mean that they'd look random in our imaginary diagram of the warehouse. If the warehouse contained only 3.5" x 4.25" Polaroids, then smiling-faces would be graphed as points in one satisfyingly compact little sphere. But we wouldn't have learned much, since all the uninteresting photographs would be there too.

And so my and Grietzer's "image" contains the implicit assumption that we can collect some dimensions which are germane to the subcategory of interest: some things other than the categorization itself which could (after a brisk massage) help distinguish the interesting objects from their neighbors. That assumption might be wrong. Given a warehouse of Polaroids and nothing else, there might simply be no distinguishable-or-distinguishing pattern for the immunization records (or criminal inclinations, or IQs) of those depicted no matter how many measurable dimensions we throw at the problem.

One must anyway admit that a question need not have answers, that it is not even bound to have any, since a great part of scientific activity consists, precisely, in seeking the good questions. Thus, the correspondence between planets and regular polyhedra, of which Kepler was so proud, is not even a wrong hypothesis, it is an absurd connection, which only deserves a shrug of the shoulders, a question that did not deserve to be posed, to be compared to speculations linking the length of a ship with the age of her captain. Transparency stumbles on the questioning as to the interest of questions, next on the difficulty to find the answers to the supposedly good problems. Indeed, answers are, mostly, partial: a half-answer accompanied with a new question. The relation question/answer thus becomes an endless dialogue, an explicitation process; it is in this process, which yields no definitive and totalising key, where the afterworld of appearances, i.e., knowledge, is to be found.

- The Blind Spot: Lectures on Logic by Jean-Yves Girard

Besides the dimensions tick-marked across the warehouse edges, both Grietzer's trained-autoencoder "image" and my self-generated "image" hide another dimension in plain sight: the dimension which measures if (or how much) a particular thingmabob matches the particular category of interest:

"This is a face. And this is a face. No, that's not a face. But this here is a face."

"Is this a face?"

"Sort of, I guess; it's a dog's face."

"Are these dog's faces?"

"No. Willie and Joe are dogfaces, but what they have are real faces."

If the question is "How close is that particular thing to what we mean by this name?", then what the manifold depicts is "What we mean by the name." And unless "What we mean by the name" is well and stably agreed upon, we can't expect to derive well and stably agreed upon results.

For categories like "Smiling Faces," that caveat is easily ignorable, albeit at the risk of it publicly biting you in the ass after you've trumpeted your success. But tribal and cultural labels (ethnicity, religion, nation, discipline, art, genre) are blatantly impermanent and localized. They appear post-facto, they vary by time and place, they pass away, and their applications are disputed throughout their existence.

"Nostalgic music," for example, is an easily explained category which can't be placed by sonic properties alone. The germane dimensions are observer-dependent: age and circumstances of the first encounter; extent of later encounters.... For American sports fans, "The Star-Spangled Banner" is unlikely to be nostalgic, whereas their high-school marching band's fight song might be.

Artistic genres, on the other hand, are socially negotiated but also socially contested, and their rival imaginary-manifolds will be involuted, trimmed, and extended (science fiction incorporating alternate history; romances incorporating the undead) until the genre becomes moribund.

Here was my initial random snatch of a computer-generated image:

And here is another piece of sample-allegorical clip art, grabbed from an introduction to autoencoding techniques in Python (and thank you, Jake VanderPlas):

Considered purely as suggestive fact-free allegory, the first figure has a more or less arbitrary look, like a satellite photo of a landscape generated and weathered by unpredictable forces, or a spectacularly unmade bed, or a smushed hunk of clay. "It is what it is," but could easily be something different. Contingent, it invites further contingency.

The second figure suggests a definite thing-in-itself, with its own integrity, crystallized or grown or manufactured, hidden by noise and then unearthed.

A picture is worth a thousand words, most of which disagree. My own "image" stands in for a baggy one-size-fits-all Emperor's-New-Clothes sort of allegory, a fluffy cloud bobbing in hot air.

Whereas the extended legend attached to Grietzer's chart points toward some more, well, pointable things — up here an intuited "vibe" or "feel" or "groove" shared by representatives of this set of artifacts — and down there some machine learning techniques whose usefulness largely depends on the extent to which distinctive latent features can be derived from the set. (Any random selection of UTF-8 transcriptions of European texts, for example, can support some sort of autoencoding, but the "latent features" will probably approximate an equally random list of suffixes, prefixes, and roots.)

Because criticism must articulate a system of differentials

- "Shall These Bones Live?" by Jerome J. McGann

If we (virtually) reach into the previous graph, take that enticingly physical-looking ribbon, give both ends a good yank, and flatten it out, we can read a TOP SEKRIT MESAJ:

What machine-learning usefully "learned" in this case wasn't so much an ability to spot new category matches in the original three-dimensional space, as it was something about the arrangement of matches across the derived two-dimensional manifold itself. (Our deft jerk, however, discarded the original graph's equally readable "S", and so perhaps we'd better keep the higher-dimensional affair around.)

More generally, where autoencoder compression might help human interpreters find latent features, manifold visualizations might help expose latent dimensions. VanderPlas's much-plundered page shows how arranging sample images of handwritten digits over their positions in the derived manifold calls out variations in slant, the choice of serif or sans-, and noisy bits we might want to correct somehow:

"Now, this in itself may not be useful for the task of classifying digits, but it does help us get an understanding of the data, and may give us ideas about how to move forward..."

Elsewhere on that page, a manifold arranges a rogue's gallery of faces to pivot from left-profile at the top through full-face to right-profile at the bottom.1

And elsewhere in Grietzer's verbal explorations of his "image":

[...] no less than it means a capacity to judge whether a set of objects or phenomena does or does not collectively possess a given style, to grasp a ‘style’ or ‘vibe’ should mean a capacity to judge the difference between two (style-conforming) objects in relation to its framework. Learning to sense a system, and learning to sense in relation to a system—learning to see a style, and learning to see in relation to a style—are, autoencoders or no autoencoders, more or less one and the same thing.

The SHELLO graph's origin page describes the effort of its unearthing:

The left-hand picture was generated by one algorithm for summarizing the distance between points; the right-hand picture was generated by a different algorithm.

As I established early in my research career via a series of rigorously fucked-up connect-the-dot trials by crayon, any fixed set of points can be plotted onto an unlimited choice of surfaces. How do we choose? Why should we choose?

For typical machine learning applications, we're after a submanifold that not only connects or closely neighbors our original dots, but will also encompass or approach previously uninspected points of the "same type" or "same border between types," so that new specimens can be classified, denoised, or generated.

But what if we don't want a typical machine learning application? If we aren't interested in improving the product recommendations Amazon shows to collectors of Kathy Acker, or in generating Trump re-election ads in the style of "Eumaeus" for Facebook? (I mean, I've already read books which manually approximate what Google's DeepDream would output if it had trained on Kathy Acker or Thomas Bernhard instead of dog faces, and I'm not sure they were worth the effort.) What if we don't actually expect to glance at a machine-quilted Scholar's Counterpane of modernist texts and see one axis of parataxis-to-cohesion crossed by another axis of working-class to upper-crust? In that case why shouldn't we rest content, be grateful for the nice tidy plateful of points we've been dished, and leave it at that? What do we think we're doing?

A possible answer is this: we are handling real things which can be studied as if they were ideas, "reproducible objects with mental properties." Each such object must be rigid enough to keep its shape in any context it might be used. At the same time, each such object must have a rich potential of making connections with other objects, and the connections between them may acquire the status of ideas as well.

"When any man pretends to mix in manifold activity or manifold enjoyment, he must also be enabled, as it were, to make his organs manifold, and independent of each other. [...] How difficult, though it seems so easy, is it to contemplate a noble disposition, a fine picture, simply in and for itself; to watch the music for the music's sake; to admire the actor in the actor; to take pleasure in a building for its own peculiar harmony and durability. Most men are wont to treat a work of art, though fixed and done, as if it were a piece of soft clay. The hard and polished marble is again to mould itself, the firm-walled edifice is to contract or to expand itself, according as their inclinations, sentiments, and whims may dictate: the picture is to be instructive, the play to make us better,— every thing is to do all. The reason is, that most men are themselves uninformed, they cannot give themselves and their being any certain shape; and thus they strive to take from other things their proper shape, that all they have to do with may be loose and wavering like themselves."

- Wilhelm Meister's apprenticeship and travels,
translated from the German of Goethe by Thomas Carlyle

Returning to Jake VanderPlas's SHELLO graphic:

Rather than silently translating that crudely material vehicle into mathematical objects consisting of naught but coordinates, let's take the definitely more-than-none pixels on the screen (or more-than-none inked areas on the page) at their graphic word, and reconsider those imaginary zero-dimensional points as bounded neighborhoods (or submanifolds) of their own, multi-dimensional spaces which maintain their own integrity. (If the sample data consists of books, or movies, or paintings, or, for that matter, human beings, this will, I hope, not seem counterintuitive.)

Then the manifold vectors which previously connected-the-dots now pierce-the-objects. If the categorical manifold changes shape, its intersecting vectors shift like a flashlight playing around the object's interior.

At which the categorizing submanifold stops being a destination place and starts to become an interpretative filter. We may decide to switch goals and gears, so that our so-to-speak job is no longer to tighten and stabilize the focus of an embedding submanifold, but instead to transform an exploratory submanifold. We might do so by adding or removing or re-weighting the data's input dimensions — the extent to which it justifies the divine right of kings, for example, or the correctness of its diction — or we might instead radically change our training-set of sample data — by adding, for example, a notoriously unsuccessful attempt at rollicking sea adventure to the canon of nineteenth-century American literature.

More particularly, I might do so. Not to establish a more solid representation of a canon, but to trace through a space, to cast a new (or at least new to me) light, to burn with, if not — god no — not a "diamond-like flame," possibly not even a disco-ball-like flame, at least a lava-lamp-like flame.

To stretch a point

When Bernhard Riemann introduced "manifoldness" into mathematics, he did so hoping to liberate physicists from Kantian constraints on the imaginable Real. Then, rather than presuming that the a priori notions of continuous and infinite Euclidean geometry always and necessarily described space-that-is-the-case, scientists could (and must) let their models be guided by physical observation. As one example, it might be that three-dimensional Euclidean models were only more-or-less-effective over relatively small distances, and that if scientists were able to zoom out enough, they'd find something more like the non-Euclidean surface of the Earth: curved and finite.

Turning from imaginary telescope to imaginary microscope, Riemann suggested that real-world space wasn't necessarily infinitely dividable; it might merely be parceled out in packets too small for us to notice. Which (he wrote) carries some interesting consequences:

In this respect there is a real distinction between mere extensive relations, and measure-relations; in so far as in the former, where the possible cases form a discrete manifoldness, the declarations of experience are indeed not quite certain, but still not inaccurate; while in the latter, where the possible cases form a continuous manifoldness, every determination from experience remains always inaccurate: be the probability ever so great that it is nearly exact. [...] Now it seems that the empirical notions on which the metrical determinations of space are founded, the notion of a solid body and of a ray of light, cease to be valid for the infinitely small. We are therefore quite at liberty to suppose that the metric relations of space in the infinitely small do not conform to the hypotheses of geometry; and we ought in fact to suppose it, if we can thereby obtain a simpler explanation of phenomena.

[...] in a discrete manifoldness, the ground of its metric relations is given in the notion of it, while in a continuous manifoldness, this ground must come from outside. Either therefore the reality which underlies space must form a discrete manifoldness, or we must seek the ground of its metric relations outside it, in binding forces which act upon it.

Closer to virtual-home, if for argument's sake (and certainly nothing else is at stake) we assume that all possible purely-textual works can be contained in sets of 1-to-4000 page volumes containing 32-bit Unicode characters, then the Universal Library is clearly finite. Too large to fit on my phone's SD card, maybe, but still of calculable size. And although it'll sadly lack Krazy Kat, Sherlock Jr., and Never Buy Texas from a Cowboy, there's nothing to stop our constructing a similarly finite Universal Spotify of 0-to-100-dB 1-to-64800-seconds 24-bit FLAC files, then moving on to a finite Universal Coffee-Table of art prints, and a finite Universal Movie Archive....

As Riemann wrote, and as the Universal Comedy Club independently discovered, if you want to find an element in a discrete manifold, you don't need to fuss with never-completely-accurate comparative measurements: you can just count off the elements and assign each an index number for precise future reference. But then you need some way to remember that Joke 847656 requires a Yiddish accent, and Joke 57 is not for mixed company, and Joke 766362254 might be too soon, too soon, and at some point it's easier to just try to re-tell a joke.

We assembled a loverly bunch of signifiers, and several data server farms of signified objects, but we bottlenecked on interpretants. Although our collection may be discrete and finite, since each reader will encounter different subsets of the collection in different orders at different times in the midst of different contexts, no Reading Experience will be repeated and the Conversation will remain, if not Infinite (unlikely, given the fragile set of conditions required for any Reading Experience to exist at all), then at least Interminable within reach of the Library. Of taking many books there is no end.

The Universal Library demonstrates that our sense of culture's infinite dimensionality, of an unbounded continuous manifold, must derive from something other than a (relatively) small number of artifactual points. Conversely, if we lean in more closely, those artifacts no longer look so pointy. When we actually open one of the volumes which seem so impressively solid on our shelves (organized as they are by binding size and color), we find hundreds of dark smears on yellowing paper, and then another big bunch of dark smears, and another, and another — where the hell did the book go?

Just as there's eventually some audio sampling rate at which a strictly finite digitization becomes humanly indistinguishable from an analog sound even if the human is Neil Young, it's possible that the apparent continuum of space-time comes in strictly indivisible packets. Since humanity (like other animals) remains incapable of holding all of those digital samples or all those space-time packets separately in mind, human experience will remain analog and continuous and simpler: we will read one extended book and hear one extended sound and see one extended object.

Again as pointed out by Riemann, once you've committed to the quantitative simplicity of continuity (one persistent physical thing with a heft and a surface texture, instead of umptygazillions of vectors of probabilities seeping and spraying every which where and when), you've also condemned yourself to imprecision. We're never gonna get it right.

Which is good. Rightness isn't what we've been built for; we'd never have time to get anything done. Giuseppe Longo straightforwardly founds our a priori (or so) ideas of the infinitely extensible horizon and the infinitely divisible continuum on mammalian forgetfulness and boredom, and I don't see why we'd need anything more hifalutin. Our cognitive limitations are effective adaptations to Real Life.

In turn we use those cognitive limitations as cognitive tools: they make movies move, make a novel out of graphical variations, make a song out of amplitude samples, and make a geometry out of give-or-take or just-plain-wrong measurements. And we then use those imprecisely derived exactitudes to construct new and occasionally useful imprecisions: a physics,1 a faith, a revised physics, a reformed faith....

On the considerably smaller scale of Grietzer and myself, our (apparently) graspable "image" takes the place of something which cannot be itself be fully articulated: an attractive ambient feeling which seems to be shared across a set of artworks, or a sheaf of possible connections between experiences-of-the-real and objects-in-the-world. We share an impulse to describe a neighborhood around or within each not-so-atomic atom.

Alternatively, we could steal a trick from Riemann's quanta and WAV's amplitude slices and try to make the invisible and/or imaginary manifold irresistibly apparent even without connectives. If we arrange our canonical samples closely enough and selectively enough, we don't necessary have to draw the lines or drape the sheet ourselves:

And this may be one spot where our preferred methodologies overlap. I'm clearly attached to collage and found-writing, both as consumer and as so-to-speak "producer". (I often feel I "produce" nothing else.)

As for Grietzer:

This relates to what I’m really excited about, which is undoing the distinction between ‘interpretation’ and ‘erotics’ (in the Sontag sense) or between ‘cognitive mapping’ and ‘listing’ (which Jameson is fixated on), or between mimesis on the one hand and curation, installation, and collage on the other. The fundamental drive is really to create a viewpoint where the ‘radically aesthetic’ — art as pure immanent form and artifice and so on — is also very, very epistemic.

- “‘Theory of Vibe’: A conversation with Peli Grietzer” by Brian Ng

Should we call such a move creation or interpretation or simple parasitism? That question is above my pay grade but I'm fairly comfortable with calling it a construction.

The question of motive remains. Even if we do manage to find some subset of the population who are able to see the ducky or horsie we've so carefully assembled, what would compel us to act out in such an eccentric manner? What's the parasite get out of it?

I'll attempt an answer in this saga's third volume, a thrilling tale of love, literacy, and mathematics. (For my neighbors' peace of mind I'll go light on love.)

But first an end-point.

In Parmenidea; or, The Compassion of the Bodhisattvas

Heaven and earth are equipped with a set of kiln-bellows and air-pipes. Once the mechanism starts moving, wherever the moving air reaches all is stirred. To the ignorant this is the acme of mechanical genius, but what do the pipes and bellows do? They remain void without collapsing. That is why they can move again and continue producing. And so ten thousand things are created, the manifold forms etched and carved between the heavens and the earth. Those who see the heavens and the earth producing fail to realize that their productivity depends on their emptiness.

- Su Che, quoted in Dao de jing: the book of the way, translation by Moss Roberts

There would be nothing whatsoever that was to be done, action would be uncommenced,
and the agent would not act, should emptiness be denied.

The world would be unproduced, unceased, and unchangeable,
it would be devoid of its manifold appearances, if there were intrinsic nature.

- Nāgārjuna’s Middle way: the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā,
translation by Mark Siderits and Shōryū Katsura

Like Belgium, the island of Parmenidea brings two nations into uneasy proximity: Aletheia (that's pronounced "Althea") and Doxia.

Aletheia, "Land of Abstractions," promises investors immortal, unchanging, unyielding, and singular Truth, by which, so far as I've been able to ascertain, is meant perpetual warfare. This is my own, my native land. However, the fatherland didn't conveniently border a plannedparenthoodland, and I've always gotten the impression that it would sort of prefer to see me dead. (I'm not saying that's necessarily bad, mind you; I'm just saying.)

Doxia, "World of Meat" (or, as Aletheians prefer to call it, "World of Hurt") promises only transient Reality (or, as Alethians prefer to call it, "the conventionally real").

My fellow Aletheians are correct (correctness is their business!) in accusing Doxia of a surfeit of suffering. They less frequently mention the liberality of our own pours. Doxia may not exactly be the land of milk and honey — that would be seismically unsound even by mundane standards — but it is the land with some occasional milk and honey. A taste: worse or better than none at all?

Down the road a piece, the roulette wheel at Pascal's Casino offers a choice between thirty-six slots (Jansenist, Lutheran, Sunni, Shi'ite, Zoroastrian, Shaktist, and so on and on and on, but let's stop at thirty-six), each of which promises eternal joy for you and eternal agony for the rest of the table if it pays off, and a final thirty-seventh (the green zero) which pays a teaspoon of honey and lifespan-limited suffering all round. It is, obvs, a matter of taste, but I'd feel like an ingrate if I placed my wager elsewhere.

Thus am I a traitor to my country as well as my class. Unfortunately, I retain too strong an accent to ever feel fully at home in Doxia, or be welcomed as a native. And so, in my touristic wannabe way, I approximate as best I can that happy land fur, fur away (yet as near as the kiss of a brick) with the one language I've been given.

But trying to directly communicate the space of all possible communications, the indefinitely-dimensional real continuum itself, is literally pointless. Instead of inducing synesthesia, we create a tsunami of noise: the medium becomes opaque, a wall. Reading Finnegans Wake aloud clarifies it only by forcing us to select a through line ("Oh, I see, this is really 'God Save the King'"), temporarily defocusing everything else into ambient atmosphere or chicken fat. The fish can't describe water but the fish can traverse it.

Why a "manifold" rather than "scattered points in a multidimensional space whose axes are chosen to draw them closer together"? Or a "named finite set of elements"?

My goal (like most worthwhile goals, only describable once you've decided you've reached it) was to replace (as best I could) the ugly choice between anguished conflict and pratfalling certainty by that "pleasant confusion which we know exists." In a pleasingly confusing paradox, that goal is as one with what Giuseppe Longo calls "knowledge construction" (which "will obviously replace, in mathematics and in natural science, the notion of 'ontological truth'") and Fernando Zalamea calls mathematic vision:

To those ends, we will adopt certain minimal epistemological guidelines, furnished in philosophy by Peirce's pragmatism, and in mathematics, by category theory.

A vision moderately congruent with the multiformity of the world should integrate at least three orders of approximations: a diagrammatic level (schematic and reticular) where the skeletons of the many correlations between phenomena are sketched out; a modal level (gradual and mixed) where the relational skeletons acquire the various 'hues' of time, place and interpretation; and a frontier level (continuous) where webs and mixtures are progressively combined. In this 'architecture' of vision, the levels are never fixed or completely determined; various contextual saturations (in Lautman's sense) articulate themselves here (since something mixed and saturated on a given level may be seen as skeletal and in the process of saturation in another, more complex context) and a dynamic frontier of knowledge reflects the undulating frontier of the world.

[...] One obvious obstruction is the impossibility of such a system's being stable and definitive, since no given perspective can capture all the rest. For, from a logical point of view, whenever a system observes itself (a necessary operation if it seeks to capture the 'whole' that includes it), it unleashes a self-referential dynamic that ceaselessly hierarchizes the universe. As such, a pragmatic architectonic of vision can only be asymptotic, in a very specific sense interlacing evolution, approximation and convergence, but without a possibly nonexistent limit. An 'internal' accumulation of neighborhoods can indicate an orientation without having to invoke an 'external' entity that would represent a supposed 'end point' - it has the power to orient ourselves within the relative without needing to have recourse to the absolute.

- Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics by Fernando Zalamea

Can these words be made flesh? These wooden bones of abstraction become a Real Live Boy? No, but they more closely approach that unbroachable phase shift with gesture, the sweep of articulation through space and time, miming the thick dimensionality of organic form through transforms and translations which, if nothing else, can proudly lay claim to mortality.

Contraction : 1973 – 1976

Thus further constraints need to be applied to attempt to separate useful information (to be retained) from noise (to be discarded). This will naturally translate to non-zero reconstruction error.

- "Stacked Denoising Autoencoders" by Pascal Vincent, Hugo Larochelle, Isabelle Lajoie, Yoshua Bengio, Pierre-Antoine Manzagol

Braymer C-4 High School offered no advanced placement classes and no foreign language instruction. (Although librarian Mary Margaret McAllister could've taught French, doing so would have forced the school to raise her salary.) The irresistibly caricaturable math teacher, Russell Clodfelter (affectionately called "Felter" after he forbade us to affectionately call him "Clod"), only rehashed what I'd already learned, but that was enough to fetch us yearly trophies from the state mathematics championship. (Yes, there was such a thing.) The English teacher's favorite works of literature were Mandingo and Gone with the Wind; most of the other teachers were far worse. Aside from one touch-typing course, formal education had come to an end and I was left to my own devices.

Devices were thin on the ground. The bulk of the school library was assembled at the turn of the century, as close to a heyday as Braymer ever got — Artemus Ward and William Dean Howells; Thomson, Cowper, Whittier, and Longfellow — although somehow one paperback of Leonard Cohen's pre-crooner verse had slunk in; I read the sauciest bits aloud to prove that Poetry Is Cool.

The nearest public library was in Chillicothe, population 9500, about forty minutes away, and I relied on my parents' occasional shopping trips to get there. They were usually willing to drop me off for an hour or more, though, the collection was surprisingly ambitious,1 and the person responsible, Ms. DesMarias, became a supportive friend, gifting me with castoffs and lending Finnegans Wake unstamped from a locked cabinet. (Because local book-burners relied on a list last updated in the 1930s, filth-monger James Joyce needed to be kept off shelves where Berger, Pynchon, and Updike were safe.)

My own collection lacked funding. The queue for a grocery store job was years long, and the only farm chore I could handle was slapstick comedy: set the hook in the bale and get yanked off the flatbed; set the hook in the bale and get yanked off the flatbed.... The year before it closed for good, I picked up some cash as a substitute projectionist at my uncle's and aunt's movie theater. (A kid with a tremor maintaining a carbon-arc projector was probably more suspenseful than anything on the screen.) Then I pitched a local history column to the Braymer Bee.2 None of these ventures brought in much.

Walks or cycling offered little escape, since the town was empty of scenery but rife with untrained, unleashed, unfenced dogs. If I wasn't in the back yard with our own unleashed and unfenced dogs, I could sit with Grandma next door while she read her stories (True Confessions) or watched her stories (General Hospital, Beverly Hillbillies, All My Children). On a weekend, I might play chess with a friend at his family farm. Or, and mostly, I could pace my basement bedroom.

In short (ha!) I'd been sentenced to four years in a minimum security prison. And as a prisoner I now had two duties:

1. To survive until I could get out.
2. To resist authority to the furthest extent compatible with my primary duty.

For the first time, then, my ambitions coincided with those of my classmates. Bullying dwindled from a minute-by-minute concern to an occasional issue in gym.

I'd tried to keep my musical tastes on the can't-wait-to-grow-up straight-and-narrow — classical, lounge, and show tunes — but Braymer wasn't reached by the necessary radio stations. No matter how I studied Conrad L. Osborne in Chillicothe discards, I couldn't listen to what I couldn't hear, and I needed to hear something other than my chorus of inner hecklers.

The early-1970s rock market welcomed cynicism, petulance, and gossip. Since satire was a traditionally mixed genre with wide allowances for crudity and sketchiness, I wisely advised myself that satirical top-of-the-pops entries made aesthetic sense even if the rest of it was philistine garbage.

After a few months, having already directed my geek gaze away from artifacts as pure virtuosic-thingies-in-a-vacuum and towards a shared outside, I widened it to include more of their implied worlds: jealous songs ethnographically sampled the alien workings and sales of jealousy, boastful songs demonstrated the alien workings of confidence, and so on.

As for having a good beat and being able (or at least eager) to dance to it, I'd always bobbed like a parrot to Gould's Bach and Toscanini's Beethoven, so no issues there.

Aside from any immediate and intermediate gains, the autodidactic approach I'd used — search for an unlocked window or easily jimmied door; enter; make yourself at home; start dropping in on the neighbors — was applicable to other new territories, even if, for political reasons or out of pure cussedness, I didn't always apply it.

And a few months later still, I found discursive models in the Meltzered/Bangsian school of rock-crit, which acknowledged — celebrated, even, in its morose or desperate way — the triune of historical context, tenacious artifact, and fleshly encounter: indissoluble in itself; remixable as fresh context.

While pacing through my third year of exile, I had what might be described as an original thought, the first of my life and the most rewarding:3

The time capsule of my high school library established that America's nineteenth-century canon as currently defined differed in almost every respect from the canon chosen by the nineteenth century itself.

And in my limited wandering through the realms of what I'll call for convenience "Modernism" and "1970s New York Times Book Review recommendations," I repeatedly felt a deflation of energy, of risk, of interest in the latter, a diagnosis that even its practitioners sometimes admitted.

Rather than contemporary literature having attained a unique and history-ending exhaustion, what if it was merely the latest in a long sequence of self-inflicted delusions of exhaustion? In the twentieth century, the nineteenth century canon had been sweetened by sources distrusted or inaccessible in their own time: failed or trivial genre exercises; self-published, barely published, or manuscript-only oddities. What would I find if I looked for their contemporary equivalents — not in search of "lively junk" or "mind candy," not with the condescension of Leslie Fiedler's nod to science fiction or Gilbert Seldes's nod to jazz, but instead by granting ambitious practitioners their self-awareness?

Would-be-vocational pride 4 suggested poetry as a starting point, but gathering a critical mass of publications smaller-pressed than APR was impossible from central Missouri. (In fact, I didn't find an opportunity until life placed me and disposable income within walking distance of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop.) Westerns, romances, spy thrillers, and porn were almost as daunting. It seemed more efficient to survey one of the genres I'd read in prepubescence — mysteries and science fiction — since I already had some idea (even if inadequate) of the lay of their lands, both were well represented in the Chillicothe library, and both were widely available in relatively affordable paperbacks.

From mysteries, I remembered a noticeable mid-career shift in my childhood favorite, Ellery Queen, towards — to overstate the case in the way of latter-day superhero comics — maturity, realism, complexity, and relevance.5 That didn't give much to go on, though, and it would be another year before I bought a battered copy of The Long Goodbye (from the same garage sale as a battered copy of The Golden Hits of Leslie Gore; that garage had good taste), and another decade before I first read Patricia Highsmith.

On the other hand, my junior-high transition from science fiction had carried over more than one intriguing oddity — Dangerous Visions and Fun With Your New Head, for example — and its anthologies were easy to find and easy to track leads from.

As it happened, the world science fiction convention was being held in Kansas City later that year. If I could arrange transport, that might make a nice follow-up to the summer session classes I'd gotten permission to take at Mizzou.

Timing was good in another way as well: for sf as well as film, broad distribution of experimental work crested in the mid-1970s, and both New Waves would soon meet breakwaters engineered, in part, by some other MidAmeriCon attendees.

Expansion : 1976 – 1977

When I and another dorm resident pilgrimaged to the Columbia Anarchist League that summer, we found it sharing quarters with a naked woman who avoided conversation and with a member (or possibly the entirety) of the local Communist Party, who jovially assured me that Come the Revolution my sort would be first in front of the firing squad.

I saw both their points, and still do.

This is intended to be the origin story of an "image," not a Pooteriad, a Real-Life Top Ten-Zillion, an Apologia Pro Vita Mea, or My Life & Loves. It concerns the development of a survival tactic rather than what I did while surviving. Accordingly I'll knapp the wantons down.

Even if I don't inappropriately-touch on sexual practices, though, I at least need to skirt them. As lawyers and reviewers used to say, they are "essential to the storyline."

When my first lover launched herself at me in reassuringly unambiguous (if inexplicable)1 fashion, I anticipated some sort of relief. But solo training hadn't prepared me for the immersive expanse of that relief: a hitherto unknown knowledge of acceptance, affection, and communication, both verbal and not; an anything-fits-anywhere! security as incontestably Real as a low-hanging ceiling or an unexpected step, and yet not painful. Love served as shelter and shield even from a distance: my final oral surgeries were far less nerve-wracking than earlier installments.

Most unexpectedly, love brought silence. Throughout my life, my skull's been occupied by a 24-hour-theater unspooling and respooling an ever-extended can't-stop-won't-stop shuffle play of blooper reels with commentary — every private or public shame, every slight whether deservedly received by me or unjustly given by me, every mild embarrassment or grievous crime or grevious mispronunciation — sometimes deafening, sometimes subsiding to tinnitus, but always, always ready to intrude. And for the first time, rather than drowning it out or yelling over it, I could walk away.

In my senior year, Braymer C-4 dropped even the pretense of education. Mr. Clodfelter tried to prepare me and a few other students for calculus, an effort which proved about as effective as Charlie Chaplin's pre-fight warm-up. Otherwise it was gym and four study halls. I read, or I chatted with Mary Margaret McAllister, or we mocked the white-supremacist propaganda sheet someone had subscribed the library to, or I wrote letters to my lover or to zines, or I searched for a college.

My slot for a grocery job had finally come up, providing some financial relief. Even so I could only afford two final-application fees for out-of-state schools. I winnowed the target list to Haverford (as a twofer with Bryn Mawr) and Vassar.

Vassar's alumna decided on a group interview and hosted an afternoon garden party of applicants, most of whom dressed in some indefinably alien fashion, kept their hands steady near the glassware, and (I later came to understand) attended private schools. I suppose she meant to learn which of us would be "a good match," who would best "fit in" at Vassar, and I suppose she did so.

The Haverford alumnus met me at a diner, and then drove us around the neighborhood to extend the conversation. Topics ranged widely, but included a compare-and-contrast between modes of feminist satire in Russ's Female Man and Delany's Triton.

In his congratulatory letter after acceptance, the alum hoped I'd be able to sustain my idealism. In turn I hope that good-hearted man never found out.

The summer of '77 was glorious: I'd escaped high school, I'd finalized financial aid for Haverford, and I attended summer sessions in my lover's home city, just a bike ride away from Planned Parenthood. A survey class which included Chekhov and Ibsen was particularly enjoyable, even when its teacher tried to guilt-trip me about intellectuals who deserted their homeland in its hour (or centuries) of need.

In contrast, I don't remember I and my lover worrying much about it. Her parents were academics, mine were military, and so the thought of extended separations was maybe less alien than it would've been to our neighbors. I hadn't yet read enough Burroughs to predict what symptoms might accompany abrupt cessation of a universal anodyne. And neither of us could have imagined the grotesque mash-up of Goodbye Columbus and The Rocky Horror Show at our relationship's terminus. We were far too clever to risk anything so humiliating.

The Philosopher's Calculus, or Stone : 1977 – 1980

Fear of the irrational undoubtedly feeds on our lack of knowledge, but above all on those points of omission, on a certain impatience that keeps us from penetrating to the heart of the operative by confusing learning with the talent for rapidly consuming an "informational content." But to learn is to prepare oneself to learn what one in some way already knows. and to put oneself into such a state where the connection between things reverberates in the connection of the mind. The operation is not at first given as an arrow that links a source to a target, but rather emerges in the places where variables become merged and get tangled up without being policed by parentheses.

- Figuring Space (Les enjeux du mobile) by Gilles Châtelet

Have I no weapon-word for thee — some message brief and fierce?
(Have I fought out and done indeed the battle?) Is there no shot left,
For all thy affectations, lisps, scorns, manifold silliness?
Nor for myself — my own rebellious self in thee?

- "To the Pending Year" by Walt Whitman

The next few years were the most intellectually transformative, emotionally mercurial, and socially toxic of my existence, which I suppose is only to be expected when an eighteen-year-old autodidact is removed from years of rural seclusion (but not the gentlemanly sort) and deposited in two of America's finest colleges and near one of America's largest cities.

In that despised and now inconceivable final phase of public support for education, financial aid flowed but first-gen student advising did not. Ten years after I graduated, I discovered that my fellow students considered collaborative reverse-engineering of textbook-and-chalkboard proofs as essential for mathematics as language drills were for French or German classes. If I'd known, maybe I wouldn't have squandered so many opportunities.

On the other hand, who am I kidding? I was a stubborn cuss, and my introduction to the mores of prep-schooled young men — the differences money made and the differences it didn't — had started me on the cynical foot, a stance reinforced when Haverford's presidency passed from two-fisted activist Jack Coleman to dispiriting English toad Robert Bocking Stevens. Told what could be gained from a study group, I'd have said, "Who wants to hang out with math majors? It's bad enough I have to hang out with myself."

As was, I envisioned "college" as that phase of life in which massive blunders incur relatively minor penalties, and I behaved accordingly.

The result was the Great Work advertised by my self-assigned Yeats-and-Joyce-centered curriculum (pursued alongside a full externally-assigned course load): mortared and pestled; flamed and boiled in shit; buried to ferment; seasoned to taste. The most practiced of my little loves once confided on our way out of bed that she'd described me to her mother, a research psychologist, as "probably psychotic," and what shocked me about that was the idea of anyone disclosing their own life to their own parents.

If only to warn young people against the dangers of unsupervised reading, I suppose I should mention the precipitant of my greatest tumble, after which I saw only a choice of downhill slides: an all-out unrequited amour fou, an experience never to be repeated and best avoided in the first place. It's not that the Tudor poets and Baudelaire and Dowson and Yeats and the Confessionals and so on made the idea sound exactly desirable; more, I think, that there are only so many times you can rehearse a part before you put on the show.

Let's keep the rest on ice; there's way too much here for one meal. As a placeholder, though, and because COVID-19 isolation's got me nervy, and because I'm sick to death of writing without any identifiable human beings other than "I" and "me," and most people skip Acknowledgments anyway so no harm done, I'd like to cite some names. Bless this bed that I lie on.

• The initial name's a bit misleading, since Hilda Rooney was 100% Cuban (Wagnerian parents; an Irish-American ex-husband). Her freshman seminar, on African-Christian syncretism in Latin American fiction, appealed to me as a sequel to my Missouri summer-session class on West African empires. In turn, she was intrigued by my and my father's long-ago daytrip to Haiti from Guantanamo. Sharing a tendency to get high on the fumes of X-treme negative capability, we quickly hit it off, and she became my closest friend among the faculty, hosting dinner (a heavenly goat stew) or inviting me to parties several times a year.

  After college, I disappointed her by ignoring the possibility of graduate school — she'd somehow imagined my monolingual sunstroked carcass conducting anthropological field studies — and we lost touch.

  A dozen years later, when web search engines began to appear, hers was the first name I entered. I've tried again every year since then and never found results outside one digitization of an old Haverford course catalog.

• After deciding (to my own surprise) not to accompany mathematics with orthodox analytic philosophy (a breakfast of Spam and watered-down Spam), I barreled to the opposite extreme: Historical Introduction to Philosophy as taught by Paul Desjardins, a Platonist Catholic pert near busting with eudaimonia, and so exemplary of Haverford's approach as to approach caricature. (This overview of the Philosophy department in 1976 includes a photo of Paul in rumpled action, and this comment at J. E. H. Smith's site describes his and Rosemarie's home, proof-by-existence of the Good Life.)

  I found his go-to examples of basic human impulses — rape; shitting in public — a bit alienating, and he didn't fuss much with inclusiveness: in the midst of a dithyramb honoring athletics, he took care to except weightlifting because "it makes the mind slower," while a blush raised on the one weightlifter in our class. (I felt sorry for the guy until later that year I heard him trying to take offense at a WASP joke.) And I believed Desjardins when he (and Gangadean afterwards) said it would've been helpful for me to meet the department's representative pessimist-skeptic, Tink Thompson.

  Still, yes, he did sort of change my life.

• M'sieu' Gérard Defaux gave the only grade, good or bad, I ever enjoyed receiving:

  A+ pour la beauté de tes idées
  C- pour la grammaire et le vocabulaire
  = B

  And his was the only class whose final exam led me to request a meeting. When I entered his office he seemed atypically grim, but brightened up considerable when I explained that I was there to request the source of the anti-poetical yet completely gorgeous prose translation exercise. (Answer: the opening of Madame Bovary.) He seemed sincere in regretting that I didn't continue French studies — « Gérard a toujours gardé pour les « gens curieux » — ces Ulysse inquiets et touche-à-tout condamnés par une certaine tradition chrétienne et par les livres de Rabelais lui-même — une sympathie profonde » — but one of my scholarships had a GPA requirement and mathematics represented risk enough.

• Across the long, noisy bottoming out of my sophomore year, my most reliably stable supports were Denbigh Hall neighbors Connie Coontz, Roz Cummins, and Sally Seggerman: all of them witty, sane, and generous to a fault. (I was the fault.)

  And I should add, I wasn't their main project, or even a special focal point! That's just how darn nice they all were.

  (My closest male friendship came to too gruesome an end to risk reconnection. Perhaps a shared ambition to mutter "Usurper" wasn't an ideal foundation on which to build.)

• Like Desjardins, logician-Aristotelian-Buddhist Ashok Gangadean was a legendarily inspiring teacher. Unlike Desjardins, Gangadean eventually (fifteen years after I was his student) began publishing, but he proved such a dreadful writer that I can't bear to give a link. Testimonials assure me he's still bringing enlightenment incarnate.

  This interview from 2000 may convey some of his charm and intelligence, and some of what he confirmed or encouraged in me, and where I was unable to follow.

• After sludging through the purgatorial semi-set concrete of calculus, I was rewarded with a series of classes taught by Dale Husemoller. Invariably arriving a variable number of minutes after official start time, Mr. Husemoller, more rumpled even than Desjardins, would stride directly from hallway to top-far-left blackboard and begin chalking a proof with the confidence of a quick-sketch artist gazing at a sitter, simultaneously translating into human speech with frequent exclamations of suspense or astonishment: "But look!" "Oh no!" "But that means!"

  Husemoller was far too distanced a personality (or I was far too mathematically unambitious) to support any illusion of friendship, but he so blatantly resided in mathematics, roaming a lushly self-sufficient world of comforts and novelties, that his willingness to exhibit material presence was in itself inspiring.

  It was my misfortune to take a leave of absence one year before Husemoller left for his own sabbatical, landing me with far too much of the worse-than-nothing Mr. T in my final years. But I understand: he had somewhere else to be.

Graduation : 1980 – 1982

No more education was possible for either man. Such as they were, they had got to stand the chances of the world they lived in; and when Adams started back to Cambridge to take up again the humble tasks of schoolmaster and editor he was harnessed to his cart. Education, systematic or accidental, had done its worst. Henceforth, he went on, submissive.

The Education of Henry Adams: a Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity

As my dropout year drew to its close, I took inventory:

• I'd been assaulted, home-invaded, threatened, and catcalled, but never raped, shot, stabbed, concussed, or fractured.
• I'd gone hungry for weeks and done some lasting damage to my innards, but never approached actual starvation.
• I'd taken too much of anything free and blacked out numerous times (it's hard to keep count when you're unconscious), but never stopped breathing or entered an extended coma, although I gather a "Street Hassle" discussion took place over my body after it met cocaine.
• I'd proffered my unprofitables widely and on too little pretext, but I hadn't contracted any (diagnosable) diseases or instigated any pregnancies, and I'd lost surprisingly few friends, considering.
• I'd lived with roaches, fleas, mice, freezing cold, steaming heat, and constant noise, but was never bitten by bedbugs or rats, and never lost access to water and power.
• I'd been hassled by cops — in Rizzo's Philadelphia, everyone was hassled but Rizzo — but never clubbed or jailed.
• I'd dressed unbecomingly, covered my arms with scratches, hammered my sconce, walked barefoot in the snow (so refreshing after the dog-shit-and-vomit stank of the locust tree fruits and the vinegar-and-smoldering-tire rot of my shoes), and generally made a spectacle of myself, but (forewarned by a tall stack of autobiographical poetry and prose) always fast-talked my way out of "seeking professional help."

This was as soft as a hardscrabble bohemian life was ever going to get. And I had not found the experience productive; it was not conducive to inspiration. All I'd achieved was that list of unpleasantries.

There was no way around it. Insofar as I had anything to offer existence (and we'll set that question aside for the nonce), I'd need a steady income.

Entry to the allegedly non-capitalist sanctuary of tenured Academe was barred by its Customs department: I considered grades and required classes cruel mockeries of education, and had resolved never to become a perpetrator.

Thanks to my tremor and lack of sustain, physical labor was out, as were (due to different uncorrectable flaws) most of the worthwhile jobs open to mouthy intellectuals. (Nowadays I guess I might find hire as the concern troll equivalent of an agent provocateur, but that sounds even less attractive than grifting throwaway money from a venture capitalist.)

I was rarely picked for retail positions, and when I won one, I'd be fired within the month. Having been cursed with a rubber, stage-ready face that exaggerates any fleeting emotion, I couldn't hide contempt and hostility well enough to keep any other sort of service job, either.

It would have to be some sort of clerical position, then, and I'd need a degree to paper over my too-evident defects. Petite bourgeoisie or bust!

And to obtain that degree, I'd need to clean up my act for the sake of the kiddies, stop flinging my Sad-Harpo-Marx seduction technique at all and sundry, buckle down more and under less.

But before and beyond all that, I needed then — as I needed later, as I need now — to invent some — "justification" is too presumptuous a word — some motivation which could be reconciled with my life as stubbornly lived: one which has always compulsively extracted, deformed, misapplied, modified, inverted, ripped, and generally not-left-the-fuck-alone abstract verbal models which then, in their own right, tend to go all Frankenstein's monster on my sorry ass.

Before the fiction grew threadbare, announcing myself as poet was meant to signal harmless redundancy. If asked to elaborate, I'd declare an ambition to be a minor poet — not a prophet, not a School-of-Me founder — with a job at the Post Office 1 and an apartment which could host friends. A downscale Eddie FitzGerald rather than a shitkickin' Al Tennyson.

Later, stripped of laurel and intimates, I sought guidance in others from that narrow intersection of people I admired and people I felt akin to: the exceptionists, the easily ignored; those who pursued eccentric interests or contributed to essential goals in oddly irrelevant ways; amusements or annoyances to more important names.

But I anticipate. Returning to 1980:

I'm only of use as a persuasively dissenting voice, but I must never be so persuasive as to dominate.2 If I couldn't talk I had nothing to contribute, but left unmuzzled I was a menace to the community. Well! A short leash, then, and a fenced yard for exercise. Try to avoid battlegrounds which might incur meaningful casualties. Reserve untrammeled discourse for nearest-and-dearests, preferably — as I decided not long afterward, post facto, based on new evidence, per SOP — preferably within the safe all-accepting bounds of a monogamous sexual relationship, where static build-ups and short circuits could be grounded by bed.

I didn't necessarily want to be worthless, but if that was the price of pointlessness, so be it.

The advent of this story's shaggy "Rosebud" dogsled, the "image", wasn't memorable. As previously admitted, it's been a cheap sturdy utilitarian thing for daily use, like my father's CPO mug, not a major purchase or knock-me-down Damascan reveal.

I re-entered college and lightened my course load.

With fewer sins to confess, there was less impetus to poeticize, and I diverted attention to my role as lyricist and lead vocalist in my friends' rock band. (I was lead vocalist because I had the least semblance of talent and the most brazen disregard for public humiliation. It was a very traditional rock band.)

Early in 1981 I wrote a song paying homage to my new lover. In honor of those of her friends and family who quite reasonably doubted my worth as boyfriend material, I also drew imagery from those exemplars of disappointing promise, Orson Welles and John Barth. That referential weave kept the lyrics memorable, and on long walks the happy yowl of its third verse still sometimes sets my pace:

After she hits the end of the funhouse or gets lost in the road,
The mirrors will be dusted and the ditches will be mowed.
Oh, but anything worthwhile must be empty, base, and vain!
Extremities are foolish. Even fools get paid.

Publishing the dissertation : 1989 – 2020

Eight years later the naysayers were proven right. In our last meeting, my newly-ex cheerfully remarked, "I feel like it's been years since I did my own thinking" (a hot roar flooded my ears) — that's not true! —
— how had I broken so much? —

Predictably enough, I fell apart — substance-abused, fecklessly self-harmed, shucked my duties, composed formal verse, rock-n-rolled all night (well, occasionally past midnight, anyway), re-entered social media (now including a new medium), made some friends, and received far more comfort than I gave.

But this new cycle of breakdown and crawl-from-the-wreckage didn't weaken my faith or smash the icon of my "image." It merely persuaded me to modify some expectations and some habits. (Massless sheets don't provide much warmth but they layer well.)

One of the latter modifications brought us together here today.

Hi. How are you?

‘The City of Penetrating Light’ by Thomas M. Disch

(Expanded from my contribution to ‘A Personal Anthology’,
with many thanks to Jonathan Gibbs for the opportunity)

“You don't use irony; you have irony.” - Thomas M. Disch

In a supposed age of irony Thomas M. Disch was the most skillful ironist I knew.

And very much an American ironist; to misquote Auden, “Mid-America hurt you into poetry.” Bible-thumping hypocrisy and willful ignorance remained favorite targets, and Disch never freed himself from the villainizing and feuding endemic to our homeland; their garbage-incinerator stench pervades his last writings.

Which doesn’t make him a regional artist. Nullity is a gift for the whole human family, and few wrap it as snappily as Disch at his best.1

His novels were always crafty and some are treasurable concepts.2 On Wings of Song and The Businessman, at least, are much more than that. But the ironist’s razor-edge dance can’t be sustained indefinitely, and although Disch was equally effective on either the sardonic or sentimental side of the blade, both modes are difficult for readers to enjoy unalloyed except in bursts. I think of him first as a writer of short stories, and when I think of late-twentieth-century short stories I think of him first.

Because its stories build on one another and share a location — 334 E. 11th St., currently home to the Tokyo Joe by Eco-nsignment Boutique — 334 is sometimes described as a novel. To me it seems no more or less one than Dubliners, and I prefer to describe it as Disch’s most consistent collection.3

If I wanted to sell you on Disch, I might also suggest (depending on your own proclivities) ‘The Squirrel Cage’, ‘Descending’, ‘The Asian Shore’ and its comic mirror ‘Understanding Human Behavior’, ‘Getting into Death’, or ‘Xmas’.

If I thought you shared my own proclivities I might risk ‘Slaves’, with the sentence that seems to me his apotheosis:

There were red balloons and blue balloons and yellow balloons and pink balloons and green balloons and orange balloons.

For something more straightforwardly satirical, there’s ‘Et in Arcardia Ego’ (a rude response to the Star Trek school of space exploration), ‘Displaying the Flag’, ‘Hard Work or, The Secrets of Success’, or ‘The Jocelin Shrager Story’. In a naïve and sentimental mode, ‘The Brave Little Toaster’ deserved its success.

If I wanted to select a personal Disch, though, that would be his short monologue ‘The City of Penetrating Light’,4 which latched onto me in a basement in small-town Missouri and hasn’t yet loosened its grip: visceral nostalgia for what’s never been experienced and never will be, a sensation which is to envy as sublimity is to fear.

The story was first published in Fun With Your New Head in 1968 and never reprinted. I’m grateful to Gregory Feeley and the Estate of Thomas M. Disch for allowing me to share it here.

Among writing about Disch, I’m particularly fond of John Crowley’s ‘The Gothic of Thomas M. Disch’ and ‘Worldmaker’, and John Sladek’s ‘Four Reasons for Reading Thomas M. Disch’:

The America Midwest is dull. The landscape is under endless intensive cultivation, the way a clinically dead person can be under endless intensive care — never allowed to die, but not exactly full of life, either.

Samuel R. Delany has been Disch’s most persistent champion, editing a collection of his work, devoting a volume of expansive exegesis to a single 334 story, and rarely missing a chance to mention his name.