PRAYER
I would like to be the Mr. T of genuflection.
Like Lightning McQueen (in the film Cars) I would like to end every prayer with the word, Ka-Chow!
In actual practice I find it tough going, and have always found it tough going. It's easier to just say the Lord's Prayer since it's already been laid out by Jesus as the way to do a prayer if you are feeling lost about how to do it.
"Ask & it shall be given."
Can I just ask for a small pension and a MacArthur?
Can I ask for two movies do be made of my novel, Temping?
"Do pour over me the money, Jesus
For my children to sow
Into financial independence..."
Like, isn't that a little selfish? When you pray must you use stylish words, and seek peace for the poor of Haiti who live in open sewers, or do you just skip that part, and ask for a perfect piece of chocolate to materialize in your hand after you've opened your eyes.
I want my own children to have warm coats and not to suffer insults at school. I want the proletariat to function, but also for the bourgeoisie to function. Crackpotted Pols and the Solzhenitsyns they create in their wake versus literate hegemony under capitalism straining against the atavistic urge to become carpenter ants and raise some fowl to the rank of ReichMinister determining everything for everyone while thumping the intelligentsia with Das Kapital.
Lord, save us from the Laestrygonians of the left and right.
Help Lutheran Surrealism to find the way (not to the Gulag, please) but rather to our sense of humor while we await your reentry into the collective mindset.
Keep the laws intact and guide our leaders to live within them.
Help us with the Cyclopsean leftists.
I am a house cat who sits in your lap affectionately,
& licks his lips after Friskies.
I am petrified when you are absent.
Sinatra could sing of your cool elegance,
I stutter.
Help me to fall asleep when my head hits the pillow
Without having to take Tylenol PM.
Help me to remain asleep until morning instead of waking up with Satan on my chest like a mountain lion.
Help me lose 15 pounds before summer.
I love you forever even when I barely understand your Name.
Satan is Kaos.
Preserve the order of the laws, and make our criminals act right.
Teach us the difference between communism & capitalism and tell us why the unmediated sexual relationship is a practical failure that cannot long endure the utter lack of your holy sanction in marriage so that people like Anna Nicole Smith can understand.
Help me to understand the Ten commandments and the precise dilemma of the corniness that some feel about them, so that I can make them REAL. When the dramatic becomes corny, the paradox of success turns to mush in my mouth, and authenticity at its apex turns to its opposite, and the armies that I could otherwise assemble leave in hosts. Lord, I genuflect but have no understanding of your ways, or what I should do about love, or why it doesn't seem to square with the mechanical repetition of the orgasm. What is Marriage and why is the discussion of the Simulacrum in Klossowski so unclear in terms of the image as opposed to the Platonic essence: the authentic orgasm as opposed to the true love which finds itself not only in repetition but also in the adoration of the beloved? May I expose this prayer to the public? How can I authenticate authenticity? If veracity is lacking, is there not a circular logic in chasing an audience for an immortal death knell that is reproducible as well as unique?
Van Gogh suffered for this contortion of truth and his work was not mechanical and yet is constantly reproduced and thus has an aura, as photography does not, and yet now with every student owning a copy of his crazy fields with crows, and Ginsberg dancing is in the bathroom mirror of every poseur, and the Romantic pose is owned by every young capitalist, what would it be to lose one's authentic feelings and fall instead into the pose of the genuflection while simultaneously aware that it is marketing that permits this collapse inside the notion of piety as poetry? To make oneself "lovable" as you have done (and yet you suffered an unrequited love before the Pharisees who called you false messiah): I can only ask: can a pose be authentic? Can a prayer be authentic? Isn't every prayer already a form of prostitution and only absolute silence to be permitted?
Every success is our undoing, every failure a success. Can failure be an autotelic activity? If so, what about love? And what is it that you want me to know about love?
Amen.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
FLINCH
I flinch when I look at the paintings of Georges Rouault. There are other things I can't stand: the prose style of Stephen King, black velvet painting, people who ring the bell for the Salvation Army at Christmas. I can't look. I can't look either at the writings of Richard Dawkins, or writings of the Unabomber. I can't stand it when people are convinced of their viewpoint and there is nothing left for scepticism, for the admission that the mind is tricky, and that tomorrow morning we will change our mind. I always smell sulphur when I hear of someone who is convicted of their path in life to the extent that there isn't some little room for fraudulence and trickery especially as it might be perpetrated on oneself. I prefer the false valor of Falstaff, the retreat into coziness of Billy Collins, the sense of a house cat who sleeps with one eye open. Is this a fault? When I look at the paintings of Georges Rouault: I flinch. I flinch also at Van Gogh, at Monet, and even at Orhan Pamuk. King Lear in the final scene holding his dear daughter dead and calling her My Poor Fool. I flinch. At bottom, life is desperate, but I would prefer to keep it light. Rouault looks right at it, and I must turn away. His vision is mortifying.
http://www.writedesignonline.com/history-culture/346.jpg
I flinch when I look at the paintings of Georges Rouault. There are other things I can't stand: the prose style of Stephen King, black velvet painting, people who ring the bell for the Salvation Army at Christmas. I can't look. I can't look either at the writings of Richard Dawkins, or writings of the Unabomber. I can't stand it when people are convinced of their viewpoint and there is nothing left for scepticism, for the admission that the mind is tricky, and that tomorrow morning we will change our mind. I always smell sulphur when I hear of someone who is convicted of their path in life to the extent that there isn't some little room for fraudulence and trickery especially as it might be perpetrated on oneself. I prefer the false valor of Falstaff, the retreat into coziness of Billy Collins, the sense of a house cat who sleeps with one eye open. Is this a fault? When I look at the paintings of Georges Rouault: I flinch. I flinch also at Van Gogh, at Monet, and even at Orhan Pamuk. King Lear in the final scene holding his dear daughter dead and calling her My Poor Fool. I flinch. At bottom, life is desperate, but I would prefer to keep it light. Rouault looks right at it, and I must turn away. His vision is mortifying.
http://www.writedesignonline.com/history-culture/346.jpg
Sunday, February 25, 2007
We have a week off for some kind of vacation now. While cleaning my desk, I came across a book entitled Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, by a Christian art theorist named H.R. Rookmaaker. I had ordered a used copy through Amazon.com a few months ago but it was buried under the inundation of that time. Yesterday I had a couple of hours and read it through.
Rookmaaker was a noted jazz critic in Holland in the sixties and early seventies and was the Chair of Art History at the Free University of Amsterdam before he died in 1977 at the age of 55. The book is a quick pleasant read -- although he opens with a painter named Duccio, and continues through the Reformation, and only when he reaches surrealism do I start to feel that I know well all the artists he is discussing. He writes of surrealism:
"They were against nation, God and reason -- particularly the latter. They were against personality, conscience, beauty as an aim, talent, artistry, even the very will to live. Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung were their spiritual leaders, along with men like the Marquis de Sade, Lautreamont, Rimbaud, Apollinaire. They had an interest in long-forgotten mysticisms, gnosticism, the primitive -- the primordial as they called it... This was a truly anarchist movement. It sought complete freedom. Those involved were never able to work together with the Communists, even if some efforts were made to bring the two revolutionary streams together..." (144).
Rookmaaker spens many pages going over the career of Picasso and looks carefully at his depictions of The Women of Avignon, pointing out that the six women were to be found in a brothel in Barcelona on Avignon street. Their lack of a personality was supposedly in reference to the emptiness in terms of personality of African art as seen on pottery and sculpture from sub-Saharan Africa. Rookmaaker contrasts this with the Christian art of Rouault, and asks whether Picasso is the man of our time, or whether other directions could still be taken. "[Rouault] in his younger years was influenced by a movement within the Roman Catholic Church that looked to more sincerity, more real faith, less traditional forms, to what we have come to call in our century authenticity. This movement, as is natural for such a Christian endeavor, was very critical of its period. So Rouault began to paint judges, prostitutes, upper-class people and so on in a rather aggressive way. He is a contemporary of the fauves and the cubists, but he is different. His prostitutes are not amoral beings, symbolizing the end of morality as such; they are symbols for prostitution, for cheap love for sale, for the depravity of his time..." (157).
Rookmaaker goes on to point out that "Rouault has shown what it means to believe in God and to love man in this age. And we must be thankful. Why did many Christians miss it? And where is the Protestant counterpart of Rouault? Most Protestants still worked along traditional lines, either Victorian or impressionistic or following a sweetly symbolistic line" (157).
This book is simple and yet profound and opens many new avenues. He argues that Christian artists can not fake simplicity, nor should they. They have to be honest to their own experience.
What this means remains to be worked out by each individual. I like this book. I recommend it to others who are searching for a way out of or into ... a Protestant art worthy of the name.
Rookmaaker was a noted jazz critic in Holland in the sixties and early seventies and was the Chair of Art History at the Free University of Amsterdam before he died in 1977 at the age of 55. The book is a quick pleasant read -- although he opens with a painter named Duccio, and continues through the Reformation, and only when he reaches surrealism do I start to feel that I know well all the artists he is discussing. He writes of surrealism:
"They were against nation, God and reason -- particularly the latter. They were against personality, conscience, beauty as an aim, talent, artistry, even the very will to live. Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung were their spiritual leaders, along with men like the Marquis de Sade, Lautreamont, Rimbaud, Apollinaire. They had an interest in long-forgotten mysticisms, gnosticism, the primitive -- the primordial as they called it... This was a truly anarchist movement. It sought complete freedom. Those involved were never able to work together with the Communists, even if some efforts were made to bring the two revolutionary streams together..." (144).
Rookmaaker spens many pages going over the career of Picasso and looks carefully at his depictions of The Women of Avignon, pointing out that the six women were to be found in a brothel in Barcelona on Avignon street. Their lack of a personality was supposedly in reference to the emptiness in terms of personality of African art as seen on pottery and sculpture from sub-Saharan Africa. Rookmaaker contrasts this with the Christian art of Rouault, and asks whether Picasso is the man of our time, or whether other directions could still be taken. "[Rouault] in his younger years was influenced by a movement within the Roman Catholic Church that looked to more sincerity, more real faith, less traditional forms, to what we have come to call in our century authenticity. This movement, as is natural for such a Christian endeavor, was very critical of its period. So Rouault began to paint judges, prostitutes, upper-class people and so on in a rather aggressive way. He is a contemporary of the fauves and the cubists, but he is different. His prostitutes are not amoral beings, symbolizing the end of morality as such; they are symbols for prostitution, for cheap love for sale, for the depravity of his time..." (157).
Rookmaaker goes on to point out that "Rouault has shown what it means to believe in God and to love man in this age. And we must be thankful. Why did many Christians miss it? And where is the Protestant counterpart of Rouault? Most Protestants still worked along traditional lines, either Victorian or impressionistic or following a sweetly symbolistic line" (157).
This book is simple and yet profound and opens many new avenues. He argues that Christian artists can not fake simplicity, nor should they. They have to be honest to their own experience.
What this means remains to be worked out by each individual. I like this book. I recommend it to others who are searching for a way out of or into ... a Protestant art worthy of the name.
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
My dreams are so horrible that they are funny.
Last night for instance I dreamed that I was at a job interview at a prestigious university. But it looked like a CVS Pharmacy. It was cluttered with hair-care products and window-washing paraphernalia and bags of dog and cat food and soda bottles. I kept thinking to myself: so this is what a prestigious university looks like.
I sat at a lunch counter on a rotating stool. Above me were various courses that were offered: Hoagie, $1.99, with tomato, add .50.
Sitting on either side of me were rather non-descript young women with whom I was competing for the job. They both had fishnet shawls wrapped around them and looked neat, with their hair and nails done. I was dressed in a crumpled outfit. We had been asked by a man resembling Tony Perkins in Psycho what kind of university we would prefer to work at. We were to write down our preferences on a marbled notebook from the Mead Composition co. that lay open before us.
The other two went right to work. I continued to study the various prices of the different courses and to marvel at the sheer accumulation of products around me. I didn't know what to write.
Finally Tony Perkins came back and looked at the entries in our books. Perkins (in a tight gray suit the way I had once seen him on Broadway in the play Equus) nodded to the young woman to my right. A giant pink worm then shot out of the ceiling and ate her whole, and she was sucked screaming into what i presumed was her new job. The worm had been about six feet in diameter and had long curved teeth and a seemingly endless interior. I was not exactly jealous that she had gotten the job that she had gotten. I wasn't sure that I should want that particular job, but I did wonder why I was never chosen.
The other woman and I walked out, disappointed because we didn't get the job. We were walking by an industrial loading platform when wham! The giant pink worm reappeared. To protect myself I grabbed a bottle of hairspray off the loading platform and began to spray it at the giant worm. I suddenly realized I was not outside of the CVS Pharmacy/university but inside an enormous industrial warehouse full of cocaine laboratories. I had somehow gotten a job working inside of a cocaine laboratory, and was now pushing a cart full of the cartel's products like one of the peons in the film New Jack City.
Around me were extremely tiny women in the dirty snow of Cleveland Ohio practicing pirouettes on ice skates. They had banners around their chests which read, "Miss Bohemia." These women apparently didn't have to work for a living, and had escaped by executing these pirouettes in the snow.
A rap song was playing in the background, which was titled, "Canon fodder/that's what you are/Canon fodder/ for the daughter of the hotter/man." The music was good. The lead singer was Smoky Robinson, but there was someone behind the music scratching a needle across a record.
I had something hanging around my neck. It was the Cross.
NB: I think I had this dream because Carl Sachs said he was on the job market. Are universities the equivalent of 5 and dime stores? How are universities now part of the marketing structure? I had only a few moments to think about these things after I woke up because I had to run and teach a class on John Irving's book The World According to Garp. But I was very glad to wake up. I almost nearly always am glad to wake up from dreams. I'm never scared in them. It's more like a feeling that I am lost, but no one knows this except me. People often ask me for directions, ironically, even though I have no idea where I am. I give directions, too. However, I don't know how I got where I am, and have only a distant sense of where I need to be. It's a vaguely urgent sense.
Last night for instance I dreamed that I was at a job interview at a prestigious university. But it looked like a CVS Pharmacy. It was cluttered with hair-care products and window-washing paraphernalia and bags of dog and cat food and soda bottles. I kept thinking to myself: so this is what a prestigious university looks like.
I sat at a lunch counter on a rotating stool. Above me were various courses that were offered: Hoagie, $1.99, with tomato, add .50.
Sitting on either side of me were rather non-descript young women with whom I was competing for the job. They both had fishnet shawls wrapped around them and looked neat, with their hair and nails done. I was dressed in a crumpled outfit. We had been asked by a man resembling Tony Perkins in Psycho what kind of university we would prefer to work at. We were to write down our preferences on a marbled notebook from the Mead Composition co. that lay open before us.
The other two went right to work. I continued to study the various prices of the different courses and to marvel at the sheer accumulation of products around me. I didn't know what to write.
Finally Tony Perkins came back and looked at the entries in our books. Perkins (in a tight gray suit the way I had once seen him on Broadway in the play Equus) nodded to the young woman to my right. A giant pink worm then shot out of the ceiling and ate her whole, and she was sucked screaming into what i presumed was her new job. The worm had been about six feet in diameter and had long curved teeth and a seemingly endless interior. I was not exactly jealous that she had gotten the job that she had gotten. I wasn't sure that I should want that particular job, but I did wonder why I was never chosen.
The other woman and I walked out, disappointed because we didn't get the job. We were walking by an industrial loading platform when wham! The giant pink worm reappeared. To protect myself I grabbed a bottle of hairspray off the loading platform and began to spray it at the giant worm. I suddenly realized I was not outside of the CVS Pharmacy/university but inside an enormous industrial warehouse full of cocaine laboratories. I had somehow gotten a job working inside of a cocaine laboratory, and was now pushing a cart full of the cartel's products like one of the peons in the film New Jack City.
Around me were extremely tiny women in the dirty snow of Cleveland Ohio practicing pirouettes on ice skates. They had banners around their chests which read, "Miss Bohemia." These women apparently didn't have to work for a living, and had escaped by executing these pirouettes in the snow.
A rap song was playing in the background, which was titled, "Canon fodder/that's what you are/Canon fodder/ for the daughter of the hotter/man." The music was good. The lead singer was Smoky Robinson, but there was someone behind the music scratching a needle across a record.
I had something hanging around my neck. It was the Cross.
NB: I think I had this dream because Carl Sachs said he was on the job market. Are universities the equivalent of 5 and dime stores? How are universities now part of the marketing structure? I had only a few moments to think about these things after I woke up because I had to run and teach a class on John Irving's book The World According to Garp. But I was very glad to wake up. I almost nearly always am glad to wake up from dreams. I'm never scared in them. It's more like a feeling that I am lost, but no one knows this except me. People often ask me for directions, ironically, even though I have no idea where I am. I give directions, too. However, I don't know how I got where I am, and have only a distant sense of where I need to be. It's a vaguely urgent sense.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Quality or Equality?
These terms come to mind now and then. Since the rise of communism in English departments the notion of equality has also risen. All cultures are equal. All texts are equal. All people are equal. Every moment is equal. Every poet is equal.
But some are more equal than others, as it was put in 1984.
And so Shakespeare is still taught more often than other writers. But now we attack him for his racism, his classism, his sexism.
What is quality in art?
I want to attempt to revive the notion of quality in poetry. A great poem is one that we not only remember but which is remembered by almost everyone "with taste" who reads it. Robert Frost wrote a few of these. Williams wrote a few less. Charles Olson didn't write any. Berryman didn't write any. T.S. Eliot wrote a few. Pound wrote a few.
Allen Ginsberg didn't write any. Ferlinghetti didn't write any. Gregory Corso wrote at least two: "Marriage," and "Bomb," (curiously he wrote them in the same week).
Corso used to talk at Naropa Institute about the "top shot" of a poet. Corso was very definitely a snob in the poetic sense. He ranked poems, and poets. His exact criteria were never clear. Probably if you went through his poetry you could assemble his remarks on other poets and make it into an ars poetica.
None of the Language poets -- throughout all of their work -- have a single "top shot" that has made its way throughout the poetry world. The same could be said to be true of all of the feminist poets of the last hundred years. No Marxist poet has managed this.
In the art world Greenberg talked about "significant form," as a criterion, as late as the 1960s. Is that what holds a reader's attention and keeps bringing it back to the delight of a work? St. Thomas wrote of the "complexity and coherence" of a work which kept bringing the reader's mind back.
The incoherence of most of the surrealists counts them out on those terms. Breton's poems are complex, but they are almost completely incoherent. Soupault's poems have a lot of coherence, but not much complexity. But I still think they are better than Breton's.
Nietzsche spoke of art work according to its "intensity." He argued that the flame behind the paintings of each work at the Louvre could be measured.
Against "significant form," then, we have the intensity.
Luther argued that simple clarity was what was sought in church art. But is it enough without intensity?
Communists waive the entire notion of quality in art, as they waive it when evaluating peoples, or evaluating anything, including toilet paper. (I once used communist toilet paper when I was in East Germany in the early 1980s, and this told me everything I needed to know about communism, and its bizarre lack of quality.)
Quality and taste: forbidden terms. Bourgeois terms, no doubt. But to my mind, it's Charmin any day, any night. The cost is no doubt greater. But the quality can't be beat. In capitalist societies you get what you pay for, is the standard term. Standards are lowered by the communists. Standards are dismantled. Standards of hygiene, standards of traditions, standards of toilet paper, standards of poetry.
The standard is a flag. To raise high the flag of rough toilet paper, is the communist cri de coeur.
To lower national boundaries so that just any bum can live in America is the communist cri de coeur.
To destroy the canon so that just anything can be taught is the communist cri de coeur.
Lutheran Surrealism may have bad taste. In fact, we often revel in it. But we still do believe in taste, and judgement.
For us, it's Corso rather than Ginsberg. And Charmin, rather than East German proletarian asswipe.
Cars, food, hotels, countries, dogs. Everything is judged. But increasingly, the arts, taken over by the levellers, are without any kind of judgement. Lutheran Surrealism is busily building a new aesthetics, and claiming universality for our judgements. I remember Corso with pleasure. I do not remember Ginsberg or Burroughs or Bukowski. Is it enough? No, but it's a beginning.
Now I have to analyze why, and convince the patrician proles.
These terms come to mind now and then. Since the rise of communism in English departments the notion of equality has also risen. All cultures are equal. All texts are equal. All people are equal. Every moment is equal. Every poet is equal.
But some are more equal than others, as it was put in 1984.
And so Shakespeare is still taught more often than other writers. But now we attack him for his racism, his classism, his sexism.
What is quality in art?
I want to attempt to revive the notion of quality in poetry. A great poem is one that we not only remember but which is remembered by almost everyone "with taste" who reads it. Robert Frost wrote a few of these. Williams wrote a few less. Charles Olson didn't write any. Berryman didn't write any. T.S. Eliot wrote a few. Pound wrote a few.
Allen Ginsberg didn't write any. Ferlinghetti didn't write any. Gregory Corso wrote at least two: "Marriage," and "Bomb," (curiously he wrote them in the same week).
Corso used to talk at Naropa Institute about the "top shot" of a poet. Corso was very definitely a snob in the poetic sense. He ranked poems, and poets. His exact criteria were never clear. Probably if you went through his poetry you could assemble his remarks on other poets and make it into an ars poetica.
None of the Language poets -- throughout all of their work -- have a single "top shot" that has made its way throughout the poetry world. The same could be said to be true of all of the feminist poets of the last hundred years. No Marxist poet has managed this.
In the art world Greenberg talked about "significant form," as a criterion, as late as the 1960s. Is that what holds a reader's attention and keeps bringing it back to the delight of a work? St. Thomas wrote of the "complexity and coherence" of a work which kept bringing the reader's mind back.
The incoherence of most of the surrealists counts them out on those terms. Breton's poems are complex, but they are almost completely incoherent. Soupault's poems have a lot of coherence, but not much complexity. But I still think they are better than Breton's.
Nietzsche spoke of art work according to its "intensity." He argued that the flame behind the paintings of each work at the Louvre could be measured.
Against "significant form," then, we have the intensity.
Luther argued that simple clarity was what was sought in church art. But is it enough without intensity?
Communists waive the entire notion of quality in art, as they waive it when evaluating peoples, or evaluating anything, including toilet paper. (I once used communist toilet paper when I was in East Germany in the early 1980s, and this told me everything I needed to know about communism, and its bizarre lack of quality.)
Quality and taste: forbidden terms. Bourgeois terms, no doubt. But to my mind, it's Charmin any day, any night. The cost is no doubt greater. But the quality can't be beat. In capitalist societies you get what you pay for, is the standard term. Standards are lowered by the communists. Standards are dismantled. Standards of hygiene, standards of traditions, standards of toilet paper, standards of poetry.
The standard is a flag. To raise high the flag of rough toilet paper, is the communist cri de coeur.
To lower national boundaries so that just any bum can live in America is the communist cri de coeur.
To destroy the canon so that just anything can be taught is the communist cri de coeur.
Lutheran Surrealism may have bad taste. In fact, we often revel in it. But we still do believe in taste, and judgement.
For us, it's Corso rather than Ginsberg. And Charmin, rather than East German proletarian asswipe.
Cars, food, hotels, countries, dogs. Everything is judged. But increasingly, the arts, taken over by the levellers, are without any kind of judgement. Lutheran Surrealism is busily building a new aesthetics, and claiming universality for our judgements. I remember Corso with pleasure. I do not remember Ginsberg or Burroughs or Bukowski. Is it enough? No, but it's a beginning.
Now I have to analyze why, and convince the patrician proles.
Saturday, February 17, 2007
WHAT IS AVANT-GARDE CULTURE?
It's largely a culture of males who were unable to bond with their mothers, and females who were unable to bond with their fathers.
This is striking. When I go through the major Beats, that thesis fits. Allen Ginsberg's mother was insane (literally). She attempted to molest him. William Burroughs appeared to hate his entire family. Jack Kerouac's angry dysfunctional family is at the center of Tom Clark's biography. Charles Olson appeared to hate his own family, too, in Tom Clark's biography. Gregory Corso's mother left him in a basket on the steps of the Catholic church when he was six months old. He never saw her again until he was on his own deathbed. It was thought that she had gone back to Italy, but in fact she had been in New Jersey running a restaurant.
Among the surrealists this was also the case: Philippe Soupault's father died when Philippe was seven, and he never connected with his mother. His mother was a beautiful but cold woman who preferred high society to family life. Andre Breton couldn't stand his mother. She was a violent Catholic who boxed his ears into his 20s.
I wasn't surprised to read in Keith Abbott's biography of Richard Brautigan that Brautigan had been left for three years in infancy in the care of a motel cook in Montana. He never bonded with his mother and after the age of 15 when he ran away he never saw her again.
I imagine that if a thorough study of the avant-garde were to be done, this would be the rule rather than the exception. Whereas most people connect with their families and with a single spouse, the avant-garde doesn't. They are bizarrely disconnected from their families and later in life they turn to either total celibacy or else promiscuity. In either case, they are not connecting with other people on all cylinders.
Wherever you find a bizarre surrealist, you find this same feature. Salvador Dali spit in his mother's face before he left her house never to see her again. His sexual life was equally bizarre. Although he was technically married he apparently never consummated the marriage with Gala.
The strange alienation in effect in avant-garde works is therefore a kind of symptom of something broken inside the artist. The hilarious effect of estrangement is actually a sign of a broken heart.
In more familiar works by artists such as Norman Rockwell would we find this constellation to be true? I imagine that with more orthodox artists there is a more orthodox family affiliation.
In the oddness of Anna Nicole Smith we see a similar situation of the avant-garde: a woman seemingly unable to attach to men, and who turns this into a hilarious amusement. But inside is someone aching to be normal. Normalcy is light years away.
When I go to church I find people on the other hand who are normal. They are attached to their families, and attached to their God. It's seemingly the most surrealist realization that ordinary life, that orthodoxy, attachment to family, love, is in some way the lot of most. For the surrealist, there is something else again entirely: disconnection. For the anarchists, too, we find a similar situation. Mikhail Bakunin, for instance, was never able to consummate a single relationship. He lived for politics.
For the Lutheran surrealist, there is someone who's stuck between two radio stations, unable completely to dial in either the one or the other. I can get either one for some time, but can't seem to be either a surrealist or a Lutheran. And so I am a Lutheran surrealist. I like surrealist humor. I like Lutheran piety. I have often asked myself whether a pious humor is possible. Is it possible that I am attached ENOUGH to my mother and father (I talk to them every week and look forward to seeing them) so that I can eventually become entirely orthodox?
I never feel comfortable in any group. And yet I also feel comfortable in any group.
It's largely a culture of males who were unable to bond with their mothers, and females who were unable to bond with their fathers.
This is striking. When I go through the major Beats, that thesis fits. Allen Ginsberg's mother was insane (literally). She attempted to molest him. William Burroughs appeared to hate his entire family. Jack Kerouac's angry dysfunctional family is at the center of Tom Clark's biography. Charles Olson appeared to hate his own family, too, in Tom Clark's biography. Gregory Corso's mother left him in a basket on the steps of the Catholic church when he was six months old. He never saw her again until he was on his own deathbed. It was thought that she had gone back to Italy, but in fact she had been in New Jersey running a restaurant.
Among the surrealists this was also the case: Philippe Soupault's father died when Philippe was seven, and he never connected with his mother. His mother was a beautiful but cold woman who preferred high society to family life. Andre Breton couldn't stand his mother. She was a violent Catholic who boxed his ears into his 20s.
I wasn't surprised to read in Keith Abbott's biography of Richard Brautigan that Brautigan had been left for three years in infancy in the care of a motel cook in Montana. He never bonded with his mother and after the age of 15 when he ran away he never saw her again.
I imagine that if a thorough study of the avant-garde were to be done, this would be the rule rather than the exception. Whereas most people connect with their families and with a single spouse, the avant-garde doesn't. They are bizarrely disconnected from their families and later in life they turn to either total celibacy or else promiscuity. In either case, they are not connecting with other people on all cylinders.
Wherever you find a bizarre surrealist, you find this same feature. Salvador Dali spit in his mother's face before he left her house never to see her again. His sexual life was equally bizarre. Although he was technically married he apparently never consummated the marriage with Gala.
The strange alienation in effect in avant-garde works is therefore a kind of symptom of something broken inside the artist. The hilarious effect of estrangement is actually a sign of a broken heart.
In more familiar works by artists such as Norman Rockwell would we find this constellation to be true? I imagine that with more orthodox artists there is a more orthodox family affiliation.
In the oddness of Anna Nicole Smith we see a similar situation of the avant-garde: a woman seemingly unable to attach to men, and who turns this into a hilarious amusement. But inside is someone aching to be normal. Normalcy is light years away.
When I go to church I find people on the other hand who are normal. They are attached to their families, and attached to their God. It's seemingly the most surrealist realization that ordinary life, that orthodoxy, attachment to family, love, is in some way the lot of most. For the surrealist, there is something else again entirely: disconnection. For the anarchists, too, we find a similar situation. Mikhail Bakunin, for instance, was never able to consummate a single relationship. He lived for politics.
For the Lutheran surrealist, there is someone who's stuck between two radio stations, unable completely to dial in either the one or the other. I can get either one for some time, but can't seem to be either a surrealist or a Lutheran. And so I am a Lutheran surrealist. I like surrealist humor. I like Lutheran piety. I have often asked myself whether a pious humor is possible. Is it possible that I am attached ENOUGH to my mother and father (I talk to them every week and look forward to seeing them) so that I can eventually become entirely orthodox?
I never feel comfortable in any group. And yet I also feel comfortable in any group.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
TODAY
Julian said:
Gordon is naughty
But James is not
And Thomas is not.
(NB: The Thomas the Tank Engine series is a remarkable collection of books by a British reverend. They were first published in the 1920s and 1930s. The books have a weird moral sense and yet they have too a kind of energetic vision of a society of trains and their squabbles that is based on a now-vanished world. I have a complete collection of these books and read them every night to my children. The children love them, and are getting a great deal of their moral bearings from the books. Thomas the Tank Engine is "cheeky," in fact, but he's rarely actually naughty. So Julian is right.)
Julian said:
Gordon is naughty
But James is not
And Thomas is not.
(NB: The Thomas the Tank Engine series is a remarkable collection of books by a British reverend. They were first published in the 1920s and 1930s. The books have a weird moral sense and yet they have too a kind of energetic vision of a society of trains and their squabbles that is based on a now-vanished world. I have a complete collection of these books and read them every night to my children. The children love them, and are getting a great deal of their moral bearings from the books. Thomas the Tank Engine is "cheeky," in fact, but he's rarely actually naughty. So Julian is right.)
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
ANNA NICOLE SMITH 1967-2007 R.I.P.
When ANS first swam into my ken as debutante who had married an 89-year old plutocrat it occurred to me that she had followed the absurd logic of many feminists who've given up on the notion that marriage is about companionship or friendship and instead have decided that "Diamonds are a girl's best friend."
I don't blame her. Men fired the first shot.
Freud posited a libido that sought freedom from the superego and the surrealists sought ways to enact this problematic prescription through drug use and the use of prostitutes outside the marriage contract. The notion of the woman as vehicle for the libido followed with women charging for the ride.
By the time of the 1960s Herbert Marcuse, Beat poets, rock musicians and Hollywood crested in anthems such as "Can't Get No Satisfaction," and snowballed in the orgies of the Situationists and the Manson Family. The pill and the relative absence of sexual diseases permitted a temporary absence of medical Hygiene.
Today many are engaged in an endless pile-up of serial marriages where children from former marriages are housed together while swingers are depicted in John Irving's perennially bestselling novel The World According to Garp as nearly normal (20% of married America swings according to Wikipedia). What are women to think?
Enter Anna Nicole Smith. If sexual consummation is a commodity sold by strippers, whores, and starlets to the highest bidder, then she who correctly sees herself as a mode of production will ask the highest price. Anna Nicole Smith purportedly received approximately 80 million of her inheritance from the plutocrat while the rest remains in escrow.
The alienation from one's body and the products of one's productivity is a problem outlined by Marxists. The American Dream posits the pursuit of happiness, and many of us accept that alienation during the work hours is part of that pursuit. Roadkill such as Anna Nicole Smith is part of the hazard of doing business in America: where there is a total lack of trust in anything but the orgasm, the cost of doing business is too high. Freud posits the orgasm as the greatest value. We argue instead that we must render unto God that which is God's. The marriage contract must remain a contract with God.
Turning the marriage contract into lucre is not part of the Christian ideal. Marriage is the very center of the solidaristic Christian society in which the norm is one of a sharing between man and woman such that they become "one flesh" in the words of St. Paul. Marriage is a bridge out of the animal realm of lust. It is a bridge that links humanity to heaven, allowing for the development of trust, and the development of private languages of intimacy.
Anna Nicole Smith sold that trust (or so it seems). We don't blame her. She used her economic sense, and her economic sense told her to sell her birthright to a plutocrat. Huge numbers have come to similar conclusions.
Love is not something that can be bought with money. The love that Christ offered to the world -- Luther said -- could not be purchased. It was given freely to those who believed.
Anna Nicole Smith is the whore of Babylon but she is also the girl next door. She has come to a conclusion that many American women have arrived at before and will arrive at hence: the marriage contract, like government and church, are corrupt enterprises that should be dealt with disrespectfully.
Solidaristic companionship is therefore shunned for an atomism based on private consumption. The upshot is a sense that to bask in the companionship of loved ones is to put your head into a croc's mouth. Secular culture leads to this absurd but completely logical conclusion.
Against this viewpoint Lutheran Surrealists posit that using another's body in the way that strippers and prostitutes are used cannot lead to friendship. The liberty of the libido preached by Freudians which eventuated in the surrealist and Situationist orgy leads to a poverty beyond that which can be counted in negative gold bars. Friendship must be free, or it is not friendship.
Tomorrow is St. Valentine's Day. We posit that it is only the heart that can make us content. It is possible that a life spent in pursuit of gold bars rather than love is a life spent in pursuit of the nothingness that can only turn out to be a nightmare. But even if money is truly all there is, it is not worth the pursuit. If God does exist, then faith in Him will naturally turn us toward faith not only in our own soul, but in that of our Other, our Valentine. Children are the natural result of this faith, and they are in turn the highest happiness.
Anna Nicole Smith did not have anyone to whom she could pray. Lutheran Surrealists pray to God that the Good News as preached in the Bible will lead us out of the chaos that Satan has introduced into marriage, and that we can find instead a real happiness by remaining within the laws even though the entire secular culture is calling out to us like sirens that we might smash into rocks instead of returning to Penelope. Happiness in the Garden of Eden was founded in the marriage of Adam & Eve. Through our own marriages, we can rediscover that superlapsarian community that the cynical have denigrated in favor of idle gold bars.
All around us is Rome in all its barbarity and cynicism in which the marriage contract is species to be spent in the Circus Maximus. Idols surround us, but we must shun them, even though it is so hard to do so. When in Rome, we must do as the early Christians did. We have to hide our love in the churchly catacombs of the heart, and leave the bars of silver to Judas. I pray for a return of the marriage bond between men and women after the sexual revolution of the 1960s. I pray that my great-grandchildren will know the surrealist love that is minted in faith, and that the gold of King Midas is cast aside for the gold of the human hearth in marriage.
When ANS first swam into my ken as debutante who had married an 89-year old plutocrat it occurred to me that she had followed the absurd logic of many feminists who've given up on the notion that marriage is about companionship or friendship and instead have decided that "Diamonds are a girl's best friend."
I don't blame her. Men fired the first shot.
Freud posited a libido that sought freedom from the superego and the surrealists sought ways to enact this problematic prescription through drug use and the use of prostitutes outside the marriage contract. The notion of the woman as vehicle for the libido followed with women charging for the ride.
By the time of the 1960s Herbert Marcuse, Beat poets, rock musicians and Hollywood crested in anthems such as "Can't Get No Satisfaction," and snowballed in the orgies of the Situationists and the Manson Family. The pill and the relative absence of sexual diseases permitted a temporary absence of medical Hygiene.
Today many are engaged in an endless pile-up of serial marriages where children from former marriages are housed together while swingers are depicted in John Irving's perennially bestselling novel The World According to Garp as nearly normal (20% of married America swings according to Wikipedia). What are women to think?
Enter Anna Nicole Smith. If sexual consummation is a commodity sold by strippers, whores, and starlets to the highest bidder, then she who correctly sees herself as a mode of production will ask the highest price. Anna Nicole Smith purportedly received approximately 80 million of her inheritance from the plutocrat while the rest remains in escrow.
The alienation from one's body and the products of one's productivity is a problem outlined by Marxists. The American Dream posits the pursuit of happiness, and many of us accept that alienation during the work hours is part of that pursuit. Roadkill such as Anna Nicole Smith is part of the hazard of doing business in America: where there is a total lack of trust in anything but the orgasm, the cost of doing business is too high. Freud posits the orgasm as the greatest value. We argue instead that we must render unto God that which is God's. The marriage contract must remain a contract with God.
Turning the marriage contract into lucre is not part of the Christian ideal. Marriage is the very center of the solidaristic Christian society in which the norm is one of a sharing between man and woman such that they become "one flesh" in the words of St. Paul. Marriage is a bridge out of the animal realm of lust. It is a bridge that links humanity to heaven, allowing for the development of trust, and the development of private languages of intimacy.
Anna Nicole Smith sold that trust (or so it seems). We don't blame her. She used her economic sense, and her economic sense told her to sell her birthright to a plutocrat. Huge numbers have come to similar conclusions.
Love is not something that can be bought with money. The love that Christ offered to the world -- Luther said -- could not be purchased. It was given freely to those who believed.
Anna Nicole Smith is the whore of Babylon but she is also the girl next door. She has come to a conclusion that many American women have arrived at before and will arrive at hence: the marriage contract, like government and church, are corrupt enterprises that should be dealt with disrespectfully.
Solidaristic companionship is therefore shunned for an atomism based on private consumption. The upshot is a sense that to bask in the companionship of loved ones is to put your head into a croc's mouth. Secular culture leads to this absurd but completely logical conclusion.
Against this viewpoint Lutheran Surrealists posit that using another's body in the way that strippers and prostitutes are used cannot lead to friendship. The liberty of the libido preached by Freudians which eventuated in the surrealist and Situationist orgy leads to a poverty beyond that which can be counted in negative gold bars. Friendship must be free, or it is not friendship.
Tomorrow is St. Valentine's Day. We posit that it is only the heart that can make us content. It is possible that a life spent in pursuit of gold bars rather than love is a life spent in pursuit of the nothingness that can only turn out to be a nightmare. But even if money is truly all there is, it is not worth the pursuit. If God does exist, then faith in Him will naturally turn us toward faith not only in our own soul, but in that of our Other, our Valentine. Children are the natural result of this faith, and they are in turn the highest happiness.
Anna Nicole Smith did not have anyone to whom she could pray. Lutheran Surrealists pray to God that the Good News as preached in the Bible will lead us out of the chaos that Satan has introduced into marriage, and that we can find instead a real happiness by remaining within the laws even though the entire secular culture is calling out to us like sirens that we might smash into rocks instead of returning to Penelope. Happiness in the Garden of Eden was founded in the marriage of Adam & Eve. Through our own marriages, we can rediscover that superlapsarian community that the cynical have denigrated in favor of idle gold bars.
All around us is Rome in all its barbarity and cynicism in which the marriage contract is species to be spent in the Circus Maximus. Idols surround us, but we must shun them, even though it is so hard to do so. When in Rome, we must do as the early Christians did. We have to hide our love in the churchly catacombs of the heart, and leave the bars of silver to Judas. I pray for a return of the marriage bond between men and women after the sexual revolution of the 1960s. I pray that my great-grandchildren will know the surrealist love that is minted in faith, and that the gold of King Midas is cast aside for the gold of the human hearth in marriage.
Monday, February 12, 2007
Saturday, February 10, 2007
One of the things that's fascinated me over the last two years has been a psychological type indicator called the Enneagram. It's a nine-pointed circle with a triangle inside. Apparently it was invented by the Sufis and then brought to light through the Gurdjieff movement. Gurdjieff was a Greek-Armenian Turk who was raised in the city of Kars, but left to go first to St. Petersburg just before the Russian Revolution in 1917. He then trekked with his band of mystics through the Caucasus mountains and escaped to Paris where he lived out the rest of his life until the late 1940s. Some of the surrealists were interested in him. Breton's interest was slight, but Rene Daumal and some others (perhaps even Soupault) were interested in his ideas. The most interesting of these ideas is that everything in life can be placed on the enneagram in order for it to be better understood.
The enneagram has many potential uses. But the way in which it is being used in America at present is as a type indicator. There are nine basic types from one through nine. The system is being used by the CIA to understand malefactors. It's used by the FBI to track serial killers. It's used by business to increase productivity among employees and to understand group dynamics.
Here's the best free test:
http://www.eclecticenergies.com/enneagram/test.php
The enneagram has many potential uses. But the way in which it is being used in America at present is as a type indicator. There are nine basic types from one through nine. The system is being used by the CIA to understand malefactors. It's used by the FBI to track serial killers. It's used by business to increase productivity among employees and to understand group dynamics.
Here's the best free test:
http://www.eclecticenergies.com/enneagram/test.php
Thursday, February 08, 2007
I'm running behind right now. I have a stack of 50 student papers on my desk. I'm trying to place a review. I had to try to get a couple more reviews for my academic book on Codrescu so was busy trying to find youthful Romanians who might be interested. Then in the middle of this a big Hollywood Agent called and said my book Temping is fantastic and she wants to represent it. She is obviously a genius since she saw the genius in my book (ahem!) and now I'm dreaming of stars to play Milhouse: Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler, Will Farrell, and so many others!
It seems that nothing happens for the longest time. You sit in your office and tap your Ming fingernails awaiting the Second Coming or the Rapture, and life just goes on and on. Then, a Hollywood Agent calls, and bingo. It's not exactly the Second Coming, but it might mean a little nest egg for the children.
It seems that nothing happens for the longest time. You sit in your office and tap your Ming fingernails awaiting the Second Coming or the Rapture, and life just goes on and on. Then, a Hollywood Agent calls, and bingo. It's not exactly the Second Coming, but it might mean a little nest egg for the children.
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Monday, February 05, 2007
"Be realistic: demand the impossible." -- Situationist slogan of May 1968
Although we have the ability to apprehend the infinite, we cannot comprehend it. Or if we can comprehend it, we can't embody it. To demand the impossible (from whom?) is to set up the basis of the utopian dystopia in which we are never satisified. The Situationists represent to me the apotheosis of the scream. Placing endless demands on the economy (Marx), when the economy is by its very nature (by Nature) closed and circumspect, creates a Situation in which the animal portion of our existence (somewhere between 51% and 98%) has placed on it a demand by our spiritual aspect (2% to 49%) that cannot be fulfilled.
When an impossible order is placed, it cannot be fulfilled.
How to rewrite the hilariously pithy slogan of the Situationists? "Defy the Impossibilists: Be Realistic!"
The disjunction betweeen what's possible and what's surreal and impossible is part of what makes the incongruity between the two conducive to laughter. But to reverse the equation such that we recognize that our minds are infinite (as Lutheran Kurt Godel emphasizes) but that our bodily nature has placed us into an economy of the finite, is part of the Lutheran two-kingdom's theory that I have wanted to insert into contemporary theory (without success).
I have not yet written this off as a lost cause. Lutheran Surrealism is not yet a lost cause, any more than the Christianity from which it derives is yet a lost cause. Three years ago I would open the computer and get two to three hits on the hit counter. All of them were me checking to see if there were any hits. Today I receive about 40-60 hits per day. While I'm nowhere near the hit count of Broob or Althouse or Silliman, I also like to think that my position is somewhat more difficult to attract discussants for -- as it requires something that IS almost always already lost: an ability to think that the avant-garde realm of art, and the avant-garde of Christ, are not truly opposites, as almost everyone seems to think, but in fact the same thing.
The notion that the infinite economy of heaven can be inserted into the finite economy of earth is explosively laughable. This is part of why we laugh at the Situationist slogan. What's problematic however is that the generation of May 1968 didn't laugh. They took a dour and pious gravity toward what should have remained levity. Lutheran surrealist thought aims to bring laughter back into the polis, by making a clear division of what's possible and impossible.
Although we have the ability to apprehend the infinite, we cannot comprehend it. Or if we can comprehend it, we can't embody it. To demand the impossible (from whom?) is to set up the basis of the utopian dystopia in which we are never satisified. The Situationists represent to me the apotheosis of the scream. Placing endless demands on the economy (Marx), when the economy is by its very nature (by Nature) closed and circumspect, creates a Situation in which the animal portion of our existence (somewhere between 51% and 98%) has placed on it a demand by our spiritual aspect (2% to 49%) that cannot be fulfilled.
When an impossible order is placed, it cannot be fulfilled.
How to rewrite the hilariously pithy slogan of the Situationists? "Defy the Impossibilists: Be Realistic!"
The disjunction betweeen what's possible and what's surreal and impossible is part of what makes the incongruity between the two conducive to laughter. But to reverse the equation such that we recognize that our minds are infinite (as Lutheran Kurt Godel emphasizes) but that our bodily nature has placed us into an economy of the finite, is part of the Lutheran two-kingdom's theory that I have wanted to insert into contemporary theory (without success).
I have not yet written this off as a lost cause. Lutheran Surrealism is not yet a lost cause, any more than the Christianity from which it derives is yet a lost cause. Three years ago I would open the computer and get two to three hits on the hit counter. All of them were me checking to see if there were any hits. Today I receive about 40-60 hits per day. While I'm nowhere near the hit count of Broob or Althouse or Silliman, I also like to think that my position is somewhat more difficult to attract discussants for -- as it requires something that IS almost always already lost: an ability to think that the avant-garde realm of art, and the avant-garde of Christ, are not truly opposites, as almost everyone seems to think, but in fact the same thing.
The notion that the infinite economy of heaven can be inserted into the finite economy of earth is explosively laughable. This is part of why we laugh at the Situationist slogan. What's problematic however is that the generation of May 1968 didn't laugh. They took a dour and pious gravity toward what should have remained levity. Lutheran surrealist thought aims to bring laughter back into the polis, by making a clear division of what's possible and impossible.
Saturday, February 03, 2007
We tried to go sledding on the back hill today, but for some reason the powdery snow didn't allow the sled to go. It just sat there. Generally the back hill is responsible for good sledding.
I tried to write a review. That went better. It flew into a rough version of what I wished.
I shoveled the driveway.
Riikka baked bread. It was excellent.
The kids are all picking at each other, and once in a while one of them screams.
They've all developed taboos. You can't call me this, and so everyone calls them that. You can't stop on this crack, so everyone goes and steps on the crack.
The baby ate all her cereal. She's learned to open her mouth wide after each bite.
I tried to write a review. That went better. It flew into a rough version of what I wished.
I shoveled the driveway.
Riikka baked bread. It was excellent.
The kids are all picking at each other, and once in a while one of them screams.
They've all developed taboos. You can't call me this, and so everyone calls them that. You can't stop on this crack, so everyone goes and steps on the crack.
The baby ate all her cereal. She's learned to open her mouth wide after each bite.
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